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The Ukrainian Business Initiative (UBI) supports drafting new Constitution of Ukraine and creating a new economic model of the state, the UBI co-founder MP Serhiy Taruta has said.

UBI advocates the creation of a new public agreement. The civil sector should undertake this responsibility. We need to fully redo the Constitution, he said in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

The lawmaker said that powers of authorities should be transferred to regions as wider as possible as part of the Constitutional changes.

We need a parliamentary republic, two chambers of parliament. The government should be small, and functions are transferred to the regions, he said.

He also said that the Constitution should be prepared and passed under a new procedure. He recalled that relevant bill on the procedure for drafting the Constitution of Ukraine has been registered in parliament.

The second task is the new economic model that would cover the period of 10 years. I think that in 10 days UBI will publish the economic doctrine, he said.
Donald J. Trumps campaign schedule is being driven by his fund-raising needs, prompting him to appear in heavily Republican states like Georgia and Texas and diverting his attention from battlegrounds where Hillary Clinton is spending her time.

Mr. Trumps aides, scrambling to raise money to compete against Mrs. Clintons cash juggernaut and extensive donor network, have scheduled fund-raisers in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Texas this week. The private events for donors were often scheduled first, followed by his campaign rallies, according to two people involved in Mr. Trumps fund-raising who insisted on anonymity.

Even some of Mr. Trumps appearances in battleground states have been tied to fund-raisers: A New Hampshire rally on Monday night was planned in conjunction with a fund-raiser in Boston, but both events were canceled after the deadly shooting in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday.

Mr. Trump has informed people raising money for his campaign that he is not interested in traveling to states for donor events unless there is a rally scheduled as well, according to the people involved. Those rallies have often garnered Mr. Trump national cable news coverage, the type of news media attention that fueled his primary campaign.
Among the many peculiarities of the 2016 election, this one ranks high: The presumptive Republican nominee has signaled that he would spend more, and make the deficit larger, than President Obama.

You read that correctly.

Republicans have devoted years to attacking Mr. Obama as a debt-expanding spendthrift, even as the deficit has declined by more than two-thirds as a share of the economy since 2009. Yet primary voters sidetracked those concerns in backing Donald J. Trump as their candidate to succeed him.

The combined effect that Mr. Trumps spending and tax-cut commitments would have on the size of government and the volume of red ink confounds veterans of Republican policy debates.

There is no way, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to President George W. Bush, to describe him as a fiscal conservative.
Donald J. Trump has slipped markedly in polls against Hillary Clinton amid a cascading series of self-inflicted controversies, culminating with his heated call after last weekends massacre in Florida for a crackdown on Muslim immigration and for stricter scrutiny of Muslim communities in the United States.

Pollsters caution that it is too soon to know the precise impact of Mr. Trumps response to the attack in Orlando, Fla., in which a gunman declaring allegiance to the Islamic State killed dozens in a gay nightclub.

But Mr. Trump has plainly faltered in his attempts to seize the upper hand over Mrs. Clinton at the start of the general election campaign. His fiery speeches targeting Muslims have discomfited Republican Party leaders in Washington, only days after elected officials in both parties chastised him for his denunciations of an Indiana-born federal judge for his Mexican heritage.

Batting aside criticism from Democrats and other Republicans, including Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Trump has repeatedly since Monday offered a slashing critique of Muslims, including American citizens. He has argued, without evidence, that many Muslim communities in the United States had advance knowledge of terrorist attacks and declined to report them.
ORLANDO, Fla.  It was a wrenching ritual that has become all too familiar for President Obama.

One by one on Thursday, inside an arena in downtown Orlando where friends and relatives of the victims of the nations deadliest mass shooting had congregated, Mr. Obama embraced mourners sick with loss. He told them that the nation stood with them and that his own heart was broken, offering words of comfort for a tragedy that he confessed he could not fathom.

Their grief is beyond description, Mr. Obama said after a two-hour meeting with the mourners. Through their pain and through their tears, they told us about the joy that their loved ones had brought to their lives.

Behind closed doors, Mr. Obama told the grieving that it was the 15th time during his seven-and-a-half-year tenure that he had had to offer these sorts of condolences after a shooting, according to those who attended.

There were times when he choked up, said Angelica Jones, a performer at the Pulse nightclub, where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 on Sunday. And its a hard thing to do when youve got mothers crying out. He was up to it.
As a conservative Republican leader in Utah, Spencer Cox may be an unlikely luminary for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

But the lieutenant governors speech at a candlelight vigil in Salt Lake City for the Orlando shooting victims has been widely shared on social media, and he said in an interview Thursday that the response has been uniformly positive  including from fellow conservative Republicans.

Im hopeful, if nothing else, I can give some cover for other politicians who feel things but dont say them for whatever reason, Mr. Cox, 40, said.
He had never been on a boat before. He could not even swim.

Mr. Thiam tried to make a living for his family in their home village after his brother died. His small farm  the only option he had for work there  was already struggling. Then a few cows finished off the patch of corn he had managed to coax out of the soil.

So he came to Dakar from his village nearly 400 miles away to look for work. He and more than a dozen other men now live in a concrete house in Parcelles Assainies Unite 8, a development on the outskirts of Dakar created in the 1970s to shelter the poor. The rooms consist of nothing but straw mats crammed together to fit as many people as possible.

Across Africa, the treacherous journey to Europe often begins in houses like this one  a halfway house, of sorts, an in-between spot for men who have left their families to look for work but are not yet desperate enough to cross the sea. The men cram five or more to a room, everyone scraping by with odd jobs, if they are lucky, in places with some of the highest unemployment rates on the planet.

One by one, the men peel away to try their luck getting to Europe.

Amadou Konte, 26, has been hunting for work in Dakar for weeks, living hand-to-mouth. He has never been on a boat and cannot swim, either, but he is certain if he can make it to Italy, an uncle living there will help him find a job.

Like the other men, Mr. Konte has a sense of fatalism about what he knows to be a dangerous journey.

If youre going to die, youre going to die, he said.

The situation is replicated in house after house throughout the neighborhood, the city and the entire region. What few good jobs there are go to those with an education.
NAIROBI, Kenya  Human rights groups expressed outrage on Thursday over a Kenyan courts decision to uphold mandatory anal examinations of men who are suspected of being gay.

In Kenya, a colonial-era law prohibiting carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature is widely understood to prohibit anal sex or sex between men. On Thursday, a court in Mombasa denied a petition to overturn the governments practice of subjecting men to forced anal exams.

While human rights groups criticized the exams as abusive and medically worthless, government officials argued that they were a useful way to tell if a man was gay.

This ruling is a devastating precedent that has now heightened the risk and fear of similar anal testing on many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer persons in Kenya, said Eric Gitari, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a Kenyan advocacy group.
HONG KONG  For a childrens choral group, it was a big stage: singing the national anthem at the inauguration of President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan last month. But it came with a cost. The Puzangalan Choir had been scheduled to perform in Guangdong Province in southern China in July, but the organizers of that event canceled the invitation, according to the official Central News Agency of Taiwan.

Tsai Yi-fang, the choirs executive officer, said the organizers of the Guangdong concert said that the choir had become too sensitive after the performance, on May 20, in Taipei, the newspaper The Liberty Times reported. The students are members of the Paiwan, an indigenous group from southern Taiwan. They performed an adaptation of the national anthem of the Republic of China, Taiwans official name, that included elements of traditional Paiwan song.

Singing the national anthem at the presidential inauguration was a great honor for us, so we decided to go ahead with it, although someone had warned us of the possible consequences, Wu Sheng-ying, the choirs musical director, told the Central News Agency.
HONG KONG  Blindfolded and handcuffed, the bookseller was abducted from Hong Kongs border with mainland China and taken to a cell, where he would spend five months in solitary confinement, watched 24 hours a day by a battery of Chinese guards.

Even the simple act of brushing his teeth was monitored by minders, who tied a string to his toothbrush for fear he might try to use it to harm himself. They wanted him to identify anonymous authors and turn over data on customers.

I couldnt call my family, the man, Lam Wing-kee, said on Thursday. I could only look up to the sky, all alone.

Months after he and four other booksellers disappeared from Hong Kong and Thailand, prompting international concern over what critics called a brazen act of extralegal abduction, Mr. Lam stood before a bank of television cameras in Hong Kong and revealed the harrowing details of his time in detention.
Russia asks for more time to reply to Ukraine's objections to Eurobonds for $3 bln

The Law Debenture Trust Corporation Plc, which is representing the interests of Russia in the lawsuit on Ukraine's default on Russian Eurobonds for $3 billion, has asked for more time to prepare and issue a response to Ukraine's objections.

The Ukrainian Finance Ministry's website reported on Thursday that Kyiv gave its agreement and is expecting a reply from the litigant before July 15.
Periodically, a car will drive up and one of the women will get in. The prostitutes, called central bankers because of where they gather, walk the street without fear of arrest. Unlike in Manila and most of the Philippines, here there are no pimps present, and the women are not darting from the police.

The police dont bother them, says Jigs Aponte, 24, who works at the gas station near the bank. Sometimes the health department comes by and checks them, but there are no problems around here.

Although forced prostitution and trafficking in women are illegal nationwide, prostitution in Davao City is considered a health issue for the women involved, not a police matter.

We have a city ordinance that they should have a health card, but prostitution is not considered a crime by the woman, said Andrea dela Cerna, a police spokeswoman.

Across town, in the crowded Bankerohan public market, a fetid canal full of sewage runs through the area where vendors sell fruit, vegetables and meat. At a makeshift construction site, concrete pipes will be used to cover the open canal and keep the area from flooding.

Rthe Origines, 21, who sells rice in the market, said that the construction was a nuisance but that the project would be completed within six months.

Mayor says it will be done by then, so it will be done, Ms. Origines said, exhibiting confidence in a public works project, a rare sentiment in the Philippines, where deteriorating infrastructure is the norm.

Her optimism extended to Mr. Dutertes crime-fighting agenda, which he has said will be bloody.

Hes only going to go after the killers and the drug dealers, Ms. Origines said with a smile. Dont be afraid.
But we forget that Shakespeare emerged from the tradition of courtly love that emerged from the Continent and perhaps the Arab world, he said, and that Magna Carta was a Latin document immediately translated into the vernacular, which was French, and signed by a French king under pressure from mostly French barons who didnt include most people, who were Anglo-Saxon.

At the same time, Mr. Tugendhat said, globalization has prompted questions among the English like: Who are we, and are we less of ourselves than we used to be?

Clare Foges, a former speechwriter for Mr. Cameron, described the Conservative dilemma this way: There is the strong element in the Tory character that is sensible, utilitarian, financially pragmatic, and there is the part that thinks to the strains of Elgar and stirs at the words destiny, democracy and nation. 

Thats the dilemma of England, too: How much economic damage are voters willing to risk for the ability to feel fully sovereign and in control of immigration?

Essex clearly wants out, and so do the most recent legislators, Mr. Spink and Ms. Harris. But both think that despite the tide of opinion in Essex, Mr. Cameron and other proponents of staying in Europe will eke out a victory. Ms. Harris laughed and said, Cameron always wins.

Until, of course, he doesnt.
In a telephone interview, Sanjeev Kumar, an employee at the Kwik Save store near the library where Ms. Cox met with constituents, said he saw her lying on the ground after her attacker fled.

She was lying on the floor and two girls were helping her, Mr. Kumar said. She was bleeding from the mouth and nose  the ambulance was on its way. She couldnt talk, or move, or do anything. It looked serious.

Mr. Kumar said the attack was the sort of event that never, never happened here.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mr. Mair sent about $620 to the National Alliance for items from its publishing imprint, National Vanguard Books, including works that instructed readers on the chemistry of powder and explosives. Also purchased was a copy of Ich Kampfe, a book published by the Nazi Party in the early 1940s.

Heidi Beirich, the director of the centers Intelligence Project, which tracks and produces reports on extremist groups, said in an interview that it had found the invoices in a database of records it maintains.

When Mr. Mairs name surfaced on Thursday, Ms. Beirich said, the Intelligence Project matched it with invoices in its possession. She said those records were authentic because they had been leaked by members of the National Alliance. Further, she said, she was confident the records were linked to Mr. Mair because the address on the invoices matched his home address.
James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who has written about how NATO could use offensive cyberweapons, said there was a huge reluctance to share capabilities. The United States and Britain say little about their offensive cyberweapon abilities, even to their NATO allies.

The Russians get that, Mr. Lewis said. And they know that there is lots they can do without triggering any response.

In part, that is because the Russians are experts at hiding their tracks. Almost all of the studies of the Ukraine power grid attack in late 2015  both unclassified and classified  have pointed to hackers in Russia. But American intelligence officials say they have never been able to track the blackout, which affected 225,000 Ukrainians, directly to Mr. Putins government, and probably never will.

Instead, American officials are giving cyberutility firms and cybersecurity groups around the United States confidential presentations of an analysis of what happened to the Ukrainian utilities, as a warning of what could occur on home soil.

At United States Cyber Command, which has expanded rapidly since the United States carried out cyberattacks against Iran in 2010, Russias networks are a regular target of surveillance. By next year, Cyber Command will have more than 130 teams fully in operation around the world, integrated into Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force units, in addition to teams that work alongside the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md.

It has built up a vast early warning network, placing tens of thousands of implants  sensors that can also be used to insert malware  into networks around the world. But NATO is only beginning to explore what it delicately calls active defense, and says it is not focused on offensive cyberweapons.

The Russians have no such compunctions. But it is unclear what Russian hackers hope to achieve here in the Baltics, other than to make the point, as they did in 2007 when they brought Estonia to an electronic halt, that they can get into any system, anytime.
Still, the movement has not lost its bite, and continues to denounce the political and institutional classes and to demand their renewal with a new generation unsoiled by what it views as the countrys corrupt establishment.

In the two houses of Parliament, where it holds 126 of 945 seats, the movement has ceaselessly censured government policies and produced numerous, though often ignored, bills to push its agenda. That includes a referendum on the euro, a guaranteed income for all, environmental sustainability and free access to the internet for Italian citizens.

The movement has elected mayors in 15 cities, including Parma and Livorno, receiving mixed reviews. A Five Star Movement mayoral candidate is in a runoff election in Turin, but Rome is the main prize, a steppingstone to a direct challenge to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Like other candidates, Ms. Raggi has peppered her pledges about local administration with hints of the movements broader vision for the country. She attributes her success so far to years of grass-roots campaigning and political activism.

But her good showing was also undoubtedly helped by back-to-back political disappointments and unfulfilled promises, first with the center-right government of Mayor Gianni Alemanno, now standing trial for corruption, then with the center-left government of Ignazio Marino, who resigned after two years under the shadow of fiscal improprieties. Rome has been run by a commissioner since November.

Both the left and right have been tainted by the Mafia Capitale scandal, in which a de facto criminal organization infiltrated various aspects of Romes municipal services.

Born and raised in Rome where she studied law, Ms. Raggi works as a civil lawyer in a Rome studio and lives in a suburban area with her son, Matteo. Her political activity dates from 2011, just after his birth, when she understood that she couldnt sit back any longer and just watch, she said in the interview.
BRUSSELS  NATO is discussing how to step up its response to the European migrant crisis by expanding its presence in the Mediterranean region, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this week.

But the proposals, discussed during a meeting of the alliances defense ministers, are being questioned by Turkey, which says limited resources would be better used to protect member nations from more traditional threats like Russia. Turkey is also pressing for an end to the limited effort by the alliance to combat the smuggling of migrants in the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece.

The confusion and division are emblematic of NATOs inability so far to deal comprehensively with threats washing up on its southern tier: terrorism, radical Islam, anarchy in North Africa and uncontrolled migration.

After two decades in which its relevance has been questioned, the alliance has found new life in an old mission: deterring Russia. But debating what to do in the south has exposed some of the old schisms and anxieties about the extent to which an American-dominated alliance should openly engage in parts of the world that European nations once ruled and have traditionally managed.
CAIRO  The cockpit voice recorder from the EgyptAir flight that crashed in the Mediterranean last month has been recovered, according to a statement Thursday by Egyptian investigators.

The recovery of the so-called black box came a day after the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee announced that searchers had found wreckage from the doomed Flight 804 scattered along the seabed. The French Bureau of Investigations and Analyses at the civil aviation authority confirmed that the cockpit voice recorder had been found.

All 66 people aboard the Airbus A320 jetliner bound for Cairo from Paris were killed in the still-unexplained crash on May 19, as the plane was near the end of its trip, in Egyptian airspace.

The investigation committee said in a statement that the cockpit voice recorder had been found in a damaged state. A team aboard the search vessel John Lethbridge, owned by Deep Ocean Search, was able to recover parts of the recorder, including its memory card.
GENEVA  Islamic State forces have committed genocide and other war crimes in a continuing effort to exterminate the Yazidi religious minority in Syria and Iraq, United Nations investigators said on Thursday, urging stronger international action to halt the killing and to prosecute the terrorist group.

The investigators detailed mass killings of Yazidi men and boys who refused to convert to Islam, saying they were shot in the head or their throats were slit, often in front of their families, littering roadsides with corpses. Dozens of mass graves have been uncovered in areas recaptured from Islamic State and are being investigated.

The investigators have produced 11 reports documenting wide-ranging crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by many parties to the five-year-old civil war in Syria, but in a report released on Thursday, they invoked the crime of genocide. They based their findings on actions taken by the Islamic State since August 2014 against 400,000 members of the Yazidi community, followers of a centuries-old religion drawing on many faiths.

Genocide has occurred and is ongoing, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, chairman of the panel, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, said in a statement.
JERUSALEM  The commander of an Israeli soldier who fatally shot an already-wounded Palestinian attacker in Hebron testified in court on Thursday that the Palestinian had posed no danger to anyone in the moments before he was killed, and that there was no justification for firing.

The company commander, Maj. Tom Naaman, said he did not feel any danger from him when he stood near the Palestinian man lying on the ground. No one brought to my attention that the terrorist endangered anything, Major Naaman said in court, according to the Israeli website Ynet. There was no such claim.

Major Naaman testified that, afterward, he had asked the soldier, Sgt. Elor Azaria, who had authorized him to shoot the wounded man in the head. He said the sergeant replied, The terrorist was alive, and he has to die.

Sergeant Azaria is being tried in a military court in Jaffa on a charge of manslaughter in connection with the death of the Palestinian, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, on March 24. He has pleaded not guilty.
It was nearly 18 months ago, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, when a reporter for National Public Radio, Mara Liasson, observed at a White House press briefing that President Obama and his aides had bent over backwards to avoid using the phrase radical Islam. The press secretary, Josh Earnest, said this was because these terrorists are individuals who would like to cloak themselves in the veil of a particular religion, opening a debate over the phrase that has taken on new rancor amid the massacre in Orlando.

In his remarks today, President Obama disgracefully refused to even say the words Radical Islam,  Donald J. Trump said in a statement within hours of when Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub and invoked the Islamic State in a 911 call. For that reason alone, he should step down.

The next day, Mr. Obama called the focus on phrasing a political distraction.

What exactly would using this label accomplish? the president asked. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.

What does radical Islam even mean and why has it become so controversial? Is this argument just semantics, or does it go deeper?
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) intends to provide Ukraine with the additional $142 million for holding reforms in the energy sector, the judicial system and the decentralization reform.

"USAID plans to provide assistance totaling $142 million to Ukraine for the energy sector, decentralization and judicial reform," the Ukrainian government's press service reported referring to the statement USAID Administrator Gayle Smith made during a meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman.

A total of $70 million will be allocated for the reform of the Ukrainian energy sector, $50 million to support the decentralization and $22 million for the judicial reform.

USAID also expressed interest in supporting the newly established Ministry of Ukraine for the Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons. According to Smith, these funds are part of the financial support for the reform package, which was previously announced by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

Groysman stressed the importance of extending cooperation with USAID and thanked the agency for its support.
Nevertheless, he is trying to choreograph a ballet. In his I Want You to Want Me, which opens at the Kitchen on June 30 as part of the American Dance Institute  he described it as a horror play and goth ballet  the costumes are by Mr. Bartelme, who is also a cast member. His presence as a dancer in the studio has influenced Mr. Ferver to push himself choreographically as he works in the ballet vernacular.

Theres a solo for Reid in the beginning of the piece, Mr. Ferver said. I gave him some ballet steps, and he did them and then he said: Its too easy. Youre better than this. You have to think of something better. I love that.

Mr. Bartelme grew up in SoHo as a New York music kid. He said it gradually dawned on him that he didnt relate to the theatrical elements of singing and embodying a character. As a voice student in high school at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan  he first met Mr. Ferver there  he enrolled in a class called General Dance. It was a gym credit, and it was only 45 minutes, and it was my favorite period of the day, he said. I kept taking it over and over until there was a point at which I was like, I am very good at this.

Long and lean with flexibility and line, Mr. Bartelme has a natural facility for ballet. He attended SUNY Purchase College briefly but soon realized: If youre going to be a ballet dancer, you go be a ballet dancer.

He was accepted into the School of American Ballet at 18 but opted for the school at Pacific Northwest Ballet, where he was in its professional training program before joining BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio, and then the Alberta Ballet in Calgary. After returning to New York, he danced with Shen Wei Dance Arts for two years. His transition to design came through his love of making things, namely Halloween costumes  Mr. Ferver recalled the time Mr. Bartelme went as a pregnant male sea horse  rather than a fascination with fashion.
And your favorite play.

From my limited experience as a playwright Ive learned that writing a good play is much harder than writing a novel. You can easily name 30 outstanding novelists of the 20th century, but its hard to find 30 modern playwrights of equivalent quality. The greatest of them all was Chekhov, whose plays are still featured in the repertoire of theater companies around the world. Of his four wonderful plays Ill choose as my favorite Uncle Vanya, which Ive seen performed in many productions, and each time I am in awe of Chekhovs ability to create a raging drama within an elegant, intimate family setting.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

What moves me in literature is the interconnection of themes and events. Our lives are a flow of events, and its difficult to organize them into a narrative of beginning, middle and end, with a satisfying resolution of all the conflicts in the story. Good literature overcomes the randomness of life by imposing a form that creates meaning from the rushing stream of chaos, making symbolic connections among the various events. For example, when Tolstoys Anna Karenina throws herself on the railroad tracks, we recall that her first encounter with Vronsky took place in a train station, when he came to welcome his mother. His relationship with his mother, which aroused Vronskys love for her traveling companion, Anna  a married woman and mother  is what in the end destroys that love, culminating with the suicide. The ability of literature to weave long, symbolic threads through a story enables us to see the flow of our lives from a more meaningful perspective.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

Im fascinated by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The student who gives himself permission to murder an old woman moneylender because he believes he is a superior person who can do what is forbidden to others. In the course of Dostoyevskys magnificent novel he undergoes a deep moral and ideological change, which leads him in the end to confess to the crime of his own free will. The novel has aspects of detective fiction but is ultimately a work of profound morality.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

When I see how much time my grandchildren spend in front of the television Im glad I grew up in a period when electronic media were minimal. I read books, visualized the characters, laughed and cried with them. I particularly remember my excitement with two very different books that I read as a child in Hebrew translation. Each in its way shaped my literary world and instilled the urge to do my own writing: Cuore (Heart), by the Italian author Edmondo De Amicis, a book filled with feeling and moral values; and The Willoughby Captains, by Talbot Baines Reed, an amusing account of boarding-school life that taught me the importance of wit and humor in literature.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

Sefer HaMaasim (The Book of Deeds), by the Hebrew author S. Y. Agnon. He died in 1970, but his influence on Israeli literature continues to grow. This book is a collection of short stories with a surrealistic, grotesque flavor reminiscent of Kafka, even though Agnon claimed he never actually read Kafka but only heard about him from his wife, who was a big fan of the Czech-Jewish writer who died so young.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? The Israeli prime minister?

David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of the state of Israel, was a great lover of books, but preferred reading philosophy and history rather than fiction. His disciple Shimon Peres is a lover of literature and is very friendly with authors and poets. Israels current president, Reuven Rivlin, whom Ive known since our days together in a youth movement, is also a big reader who responds to books with warmth and intelligence. I know nothing about the reading habits of Benjamin Netanyahu. No interesting references from his reading appear in his speeches. But if I were to recommend that the prime minister read one book, it would be A Savage War of Peace, by Alistair Horne, about the French colonial war in Algeria, a terrible war with aspects that parallel the conflict he persists in continuing with the Palestinians.

What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?

I read somewhere that Faulkners literary breakthrough in The Sound and the Fury was analogous to the breakthrough of Beethovens Eroica in the world of symphonic music. If I were to meet Faulkner in the world to come I would ask him if he didnt fear losing his readers by beginning his novel with a jumbled stream-of-consciousness monologue by Benjy, a man of 33 with the mentality of a child, telling us the story of his family. This remarkable literary feat trusts the reader to use his imagination to fill the gaps presented by the author.
When Scott and Missy Tannen were putting the final touches on their home renovation in Summit, N.J., a few years ago, they embarked on a seemingly pedestrian chore: choosing sheets for their new king bed.

Ms. Tannen set off to the mall in search of quality bedding but quickly fell down a rabbit hole. Where were the sheets made? Were the cotton farmers well compensated? Were the factory workers well treated?

With consumers increasingly concerned about such matters, Ms. Tannen expected sales associates at stores like Bloomingdales and Bed Bath & Beyond to be fluent in answering such queries. Instead, she said, When we started looking for information at the retail level, we realized that no one knew what they were talking about.

Nearly five years later, the Tannens quest for answers has made them unlikely entrepreneurs in the luxury bedding industry. They are partners in a three-year-old company, Boll & Branch, that they say is on track to sell $40 million worth of sheets and towels this year and is profitable.
Over the weekend that ended with Hamilton winning 11 Tony Awards, Lin-Manuel Miranda and his family stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, a luxury hotel near Columbus Circle.

Mr. Miranda and his wife, Vanessa Nadal-Miranda, were staying on the 46th floor, while his mother and father were on the 47th. The day of the awards ceremony, a Sunday, began with the playwright and his father, Luis A. Miranda Jr., having a room-service breakfast at 6:15.

Later that morning, the creator and star of Hamilton, along with fellow cast members, rehearsed for the awards ceremony at the Beacon Theater, about 15 blocks north of the hotel. During downtime, as the first grim reports out of Orlando, Fla., were circulating, Mr. Miranda took out his phone and began to tap out the sonnet he would read aloud that night while accepting the Tony for best score. In 14 lines he paid tribute to his wife, his son and the victims of the massacre.

Back at the Mandarin Oriental before curtain time, he realized he would need a printout of the verse he had written. He called the suite where his father was staying and asked him if he wouldnt mind taking care of it. Luis, 61, said yes, and traveled down a flight, where his son handed him a thumb drive. Lin-Manuel had one stipulation: He said, Can you please not read it? Luis said, recounting the night by phone from the office where he works as a political consultant.
Baba came to Brooklyn, living alongside Scandinavians in Sunset Park. There were more Slovaks in Astoria, and among the Polish families of Greenpoint, and clustered with the Germans in Yorktown, communities as old as the 1880s. But if New York is actually a galaxy of tiny cities, in 1969, Sunset Park was out of those orbits. Some of Hlinkas in-laws lived nearby, though, and a few Slovak friends. Still, Grandma cried a lot in the early days, Fabiankovic said. Baba mentioned that she couldnt find the sheeps cheese for her pierogies. A friend took her to the grocery store and pressed a pack of American singles in her hand.

After the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Fabiankovic remembers, Slovak families began moving to her neighborhood and nearby Bay Ridge. It was great, she says. I got to experience my culture head-on, get smacked in the face with it. They all went to the same church, shopped at Polish markets for almost-tastes of home, made pierogies, sang and danced. But over time, those families moved away.

Fabiankovic, who has lived her whole life in Sunset Park, used to make pierogies with her Baba as a little girl, using Play-Doh and a gumball as the filling, but is also at home around won tons, pot stickers and shiu mai. For as long as she can remember, her neighborhood has been Brooklyns Chinatown, as Chinese immigrants started arriving in the 80s. I asked whether her community ever felt any tension, being suddenly surrounded by such a different culture, but her grandfather replied from the couch: Hes always felt a connection to the Mexicans, the Chinese, to the immigrants theyve seen move into their neighborhood; he feels as if he understands how they came here and are trying to figure out their lives. Theres a word in Slovak: susid, Fabiankovic said. It means neighbor, but where they grew up, your neighbor is your family, so I think they brought that feeling with them. My dad cooks lo mein at home.
A nerve had been struck. He went into a rant about an Airbnb owner whod shown us her two horses, explaining how lonely the older one had been before shed gotten it a friend.

The horse was standing out there in the pasture alone, it was so depressed, he said.

Horses have stood in pastures alone for centuries. Its what theyre supposed to do, theyre horses. You know what I love about this place? For miles around there are farms with horses standing alone in pastures, and I do not have to hear one word.

I was amazed.

I thought you liked that place, I said. That woman was great. I loved that woman.

Her bedroom was right across from us, he said.

Horrible, right? To have doubts at this point in our relationship. Im sure its me, not them, because the people I have met through Airbnb have been terrific. There were the owners of an Airbnb outside Troy, N.Y., who took me to dinner and gave me a tour of the city. There was the host in the Maryland countryside who was so concerned that I would get lost on my way to a medical appointment she led me there in her car.

But you cant help your feelings, as the therapists used to say when we had hopes they could fix us, and these dreadful ones about Airbnb have been begun popping up:

Boy, its depressing hearing how the taxes are killing him and hes not sure he can carry this place.
This is what good directors do, isnt it  persuade you to consider a work in a way you hadnt before? Id need more convincing to buy the bit about true love between Kate and her Petruchio, but the undesirability argument is intriguing.

Image Its good that we show it, and talk about it. A loudmouth woman with a strong opinion is still considered a shrew in our society, the director Julie Taymor said. Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

My own position is this, though: I have always hated The Taming of the Shrew.

Of all of Shakespeares plays, its the only one that upsets me just to think about, and Ive been thinking about it a lot ever since I saw Phyllida Lloyds current all-female production, which continues through June 26 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

Shrew is supposed to be a comedy. The ending, which finds Kate docile at last, is meant to be winsome. But when she gives her final speech, reminding women of their duty to their husbands  to be pretty, grateful and, above all, obedient  it always makes me feel sick. It always makes me cry.

Whatever Ive hoped walking into a theater, I inevitably despair of the play by the end of that speech, right at its most toxic line. Kate, newly wed to Petruchio, exhorts the other wives to place your hands below your husbands foot, in submission.

I know: Its not like Im alone in my unease. Open your program at the Delacorte, and youll find a prominent note from the Public Theaters artistic director, Oskar Eustis. Shakespeare in the Park has done Shrew in the past  Meryl Streep played Kate opposite Raul Julia as Petruchio in 1978, and Tracey Ullman teamed with Morgan Freeman in 1990  but not on Mr. Eustiss watch.
At District Saigon in Astoria, Queens, there is always a pot of pho broth making a low quarrel on the stove, with eddies of marrow from sunken bones. The broth has to hit the eight-hour mark before Lam Lien, the chef, will even consider serving it.

The recipe is his mothers, described on the menu as secret, although the ingredients are traditional: onions, shallots and ginger charred until they evoke volcanic artifacts; spices that blur fragrance and flavor, among them cinnamon, cloves, fennel, star anise, cardamom and coriander; and, once the broth is strained, final anointments of fish sauce and yellow rock sugar, shattered with a hammer.

The secret  according to his son, Michael, who cooks alongside him  is the balance. What arrives at the table is a finely tempered bowl of soup clear but lush on the tongue, with no one flavor lording above the others.

The baseline pho comes with round steak and Angus brisket, poached and cut into tissue-thin strips that shimmy when lifted and practically dissolve on the tongue. If you like, they will add skinny laces of tripe, which yield peaceably to the teeth, and knobs of gelatinous tendon, which do not. The broth is good, delicate and substantial at once, profound without belligerence.
The Board of Directors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will consider the further cooperation with Ukraine under the EFF program in July after the country meets the pre-conditions, the Fund's spokesman, Gerry Rice, has said.

"When can we expect the board to discuss that? We expect the Board to consider that in July, following the implementation of actions to entrench fiscal and financial stability," he said during a traditional press briefing in Washington on Thursday.

In addition, Rice said that the finance minister of Ukraine met with representatives of the IMF in Washington on June 15.

Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk met with representatives of the Fund to discuss the recent developments, as well as other issues that need to be addressed before consideration by the Board of the second review of the cooperation program with the IMF, the representative said.
The chart above details nearly all the ways group play could end for England. Each cell in the chart above represents the outcome of two games. Green cells mean that England will advance to the next round of the tournament. Yellow cells indicate a third-place finish, which, for four of the six teams, will be enough to advance. Pink cells are bad news: they represent outcomes that eliminate England.
Republic of Irelands

scenarios 1st pl. 2nd 3rd Out

Ireland enters its last match in last place but with a real path to the Round of 16. It must defeat Italy on Wednesday. If it does, it will finish in second or third place, depending on the result of the Sweden-Belgium game. If it ends in third place with four points, its almost certain to qualify for the Round of 16. A silver lining for Ireland: Its opponent, Italy, has already clinched first place in Group E and may have incentive to rest some players.
Even before the shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people were already the most likely targets of hate crimes in America, according to an analysis of data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Hate crimes per one million adults 2005 2014 50 100 150 50 100 L.G.B.T. Jewish Muslim Black Asian Hispanic White Jewish L.G.B.T. Black Muslim Hispanic Asian White Hate crimes per one million adults 2005 2014 50 100 150 50 100 Jewish L.G.B.T. Black Muslim Hispanic Asian White L.G.B.T. Jewish Muslim Black Asian Hispanic White Hate crimes per one million adults 2005 2014 50 100 150 50 100 Jewish L.G.B.T. Black Muslim Hispanic Asian White L.G.B.T. Jewish Muslim Black Asian Hispanic White Sources: Federal Bureau of Investigation; socialexplorer.com; Census Bureau; Pew Research Center; Williams Institute

L.G.B.T. people are twice as likely to be targeted as African-Americans, and the rate of hate crimes against them has surpassed that of crimes against Jews.

Politicians have been divided on how to define the Orlando tragedy. President Obama called it both an act of terror and an act of hate. But some Republican officials have refused to acknowledge that it could be considered a hate crime.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has omitted any mention of gays when talking about the massacre, and Representative Pete Sessions of Texas has said the site of the shooting was not a gay club.

According to a CBS News poll released on Wednesday, however, most Americans call the attack both a hate crime and terrorism. And the nightclub, Pulse, on its Twitter account, billed itself as Orlandos premier gay ultra lounge, nightclub and bar.

The Orlando attack was ... Republicans Total Democrats 14 22 8 Mostly terrorism Mostly hate crime Both 25 10 37 53 65 57 The Orlando attack was... Republicans Total Democrats Mostly terrorism Mostly hate crime Both 22 8 14 37 25 10 65 53 57 The Orlando attack was... Total Reps. Dems. 8 Mostly terrorism Mostly hate crime Both 22 14 37 10 25 57 53 65 Source: CBS News poll conducted June 13-14, 2016, among a random sample of 1,001 adults nationwide.

As the Country Becomes More Accepting, Some Become More Radical

Nearly a fifth of the 5,462 so-called single-bias hate crimes reported to the F.B.I. in 2014 were because of the targets sexual orientation, or, in some cases, their perceived orientation.

Ironically, part of the reason for violence against L.G.B.T. people might have to do with a more accepting attitude toward gays and lesbians in recent decades, say people who study hate crimes.

As the majority of society becomes more tolerant of L.G.B.T. people, some of those who are opposed to them become more radical, said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The flip side of marriage equality is that people who strongly oppose it find the shifting culture extremely disturbing, said Gregory M. Herek, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert on anti-gay violence.

They may feel that the way they see the world is threatened, which motivates them to strike out in some way, and for some people, that way could be in violent attacks, Mr. Herek said.

Last summer, less than two months after the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, a New York City man was arrested and charged with a hate crime for attacking Larry and Daniel Lennox-Choate, the first gay couple to be married at West Point Military Academy.

Larry Lennox-Choate, left, and Daniel Lennox-Choate at their wedding in 2013, two years before being attacked. Jill Knight/Associated Press

A few months later in Palm Springs, Calif., a gay married couple, George and Chris Zander, who were also L.G.B.T. leaders in their community, were assaulted outside a local nightclub. Palm Springs officials said they believed it was the second crime there that year that targeted L.G.B.T. people.

In March of this year, Elliot Morales was convicted of murder as a hate crime for killing Mark Carson, a gay black man, in Manhattan three years earlier. Mr. Morales had shouted anti-gay slurs at Mr. Carson and his companion before shooting him.

This week, just days after the Orlando shooting, a judge sentenced Mr. Morales to 40 years to life in prison.

A memorial for Mark Carson, who was murdered in a hate crime. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

For Many Reasons, Hate Crimes Are Underreported

Finding accurate statistics about hate crimes targeting L.G.B.T. people is challenging, in part, because victims  fearful of outing themselves to family members or employers  might choose not to report an attack, Mr. Herek said.

A recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that most crimes are not reported to the police, and those that are reported are frequently not classified as hate crimes by local jurisdictions.

A recent investigation by The Associated Press found that thousands of city police and county sheriffs departments had not filed a single hate crime report to the F.B.I. between 2009 and 2014.

Larger cities or cities with a more visible L.G.B.T. community are more likely to have procedures and training in place to detect and reduce hate crimes.

For example, in 2014 only one hate crime was reported for the entire state of Mississippi. In Connecticut, where L.G.B.T. people are arguably more visible and influential, 23 hate crimes based on sexual orientation were reported, Mr. Herek said.

Minority Transgender Women Are Frequent Targets

A look at four years of homicides of L.G.B.T. people catalogued by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs shows that the vast majority of those who were killed were black or Hispanic transgender people.

L.G.B.T. homicides by race and sexuality 2012-2015 8 39 11 11 19 Black transgender women Black gay men White gay men Latino transgender women Other L.G.B.T. homicides by race and sexuality 2012-2015 39 11 11 8 19 Black transgender women Black gay men White gay men Latino transgender women Other L.G.B.T. homicides by race and sexuality 2012-2015 11 11 8 8 39 Black transgender women Black gay men White gay men Latino transgender women Other

L.G.B.T. homicides by type of attacks 2012-2015 13 47 15 13 Shooting Stabbing Beating Other L.G.B.T. homicides by type of attacks 2012-2015 13 47 15 13 Shooting Stabbing Beating Other L.G.B.T. homicides by type of attacks 2012-2015 13 13 15 47 Shooting Stabbing attacks Beating Other Source: National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs

The group collects data on violence against L.G.B.T. people in 12 states, and is considered one of the most authoritative sources of such data.

It recorded 88 homicides of L.G.B.T. people from 2012 to 2015. The data offers insight into the victims of extreme violence, but the total number L.G.B.T. homicides is most likely much higher since the group is not able to collect data nationwide.

Among those killed last year was India Clarke, a black transgender woman who was beaten and shot in July in Tampa, Florida. Keith Gaillard, the man charged in her murder, was also accused of killing a man believed to be gay less than a week later.

Family and friends at a vigil to mourn the death of India Clarke. Octavio Jones/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Wire

A separate report by the Human Rights Campaign said that more transgender people were killed in 2015 than during any other year on record.

At a time when transgender people are gaining visibility, transgender women of color are facing an epidemic of violence that occurs at the intersections of racism, sexism and transphobia  issues that advocates can no longer afford to address separately, Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in the report.

There is a long history, particularly in the transgender community, of not being treated with respect by law enforcement, social service agencies and the legal system, said Roger Coggan, director of legal services at the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. Center.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has signed a request to the Verkhovna Rada to arrest MP Oleksandr Onyschenko, a member of the People's Will parliamentary group.

"Under Part 2 of Article 80 of the Constiuttion of Ukraine, Part 1 of Article 27 of the law on the status of Ukrainian members of parliament, Part 2 of Article 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine, Article 218 of the law on the regulations of Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada I am sending a request to give consent to bring to criminal penalties, detain and arrest MP Oleksandr Onyschenko," Lutsenko said in a copy of the petition posted on his Facebook page early morning on Thursday.

A document on 86 pages is attached to the petition.

Anti-corruption prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky said on Wednesday that he has prepared and handed over materials to Lutsenko for the arrest of Onyschenko.

He said that the request to the Rada for consent is based on a criminal investigation into wrongdoing involving natural gas obtained jointly with PJSC Ukrgazvydobuvannia.
Online tool for teacher aides welcomed

A collaboration between NZEI Te Riu Roa and the Ministry of Education has produced the first online guide to help schools make the best use of teacher aides.NZEI believes educators will welcome the tool, but is concerned that there is no release time funding to allow teacher aides and other key staff to access it.Karori West School principal Janice Shramka is a member of the NZEI Principals Council and is worried that already low-paid TAs will be required to go through it in their own time.TAs get no release time at school  they are hands-on 100 per cent of the time and schools are already hard-pressed to pay them for the hours they work, she said.The Minister of Educations own media release praised the impact teacher aides have, when they are supported in their work. I would love to see that sentiment given some legs by including funding for every school to allow their TAs some paid professional development time to use this excellent tool, said Ms Shramka.
The decision of Kyiv's Holosiyivsky district court to arrest $3 billion of the loan to the Russian Federation taken in December 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych was Ukrainian president and to prohibit public agencies from making any payments under the loan has come into force, MP from Batkivschyna Party Andriy Senchenko has said.

According to a posting on the official website of the party, the court received official confirmations that Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers, Finance Ministry, the State Treasury and the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) received the court decision.

"$3 billion of the Russian credit was arrested by court thanks to the legal and organization support of Sila Prava team [Senchenko is chairman of the team] which has been helping people who are victims of the Russian aggression to protect their rights in courts," says the report.

As reported, Kyiv's Holosiyivsky district court on May 30 banned law-enforcement agencies from paying $3 billion of the credit to the Russian Federation taken in December 2013.

Judge Mykola Shkyrai satisfied the application for securing the claim of a representative of Sila Prava and acting head of Luhansk Regional Administration in May through September 2014 Iryna Verhina against Russia. Verhina demanded compensation for her moral and material losses caused by Russia's military aggression against Ukraine and occupation of a part of the territory of Luhansk region by Russia.

"The court adjudicated arrest claims under the trust agreement signed on December 24, 2013 by Ukraine and he Law Debenture Trust Corporation Plc and bans persons from taking legal steps to change or terminate these claims, or to transferring them to other legal bodies," the court said.
A new digital system unveiled by Oklahoma government police is just the latest example of civil asset forfeiture laws encouraging cops to become the robbers theyre supposed to be catching.

Since May, the Oklahoma State Highway Patrol has been deploying Electronic Recovery and Access to Data systems. ERADs allow highway patrolmen to use civil asset forfeiture laws to seize individuals assets stored in bank accounts or on prepaid debit cards at the press of a button.

Civil asset forfeiture is a legal process by which government law enforcement agents seize private property, including money, believed to have been used in the commission of a crime, even if no criminal conviction has occurred.

Before the 1980s, when there was a brief tough-on-crime fad, civil asset forfeiture was relatively obscure. In 1984, Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, permitting local and national law enforcement agencies to share the rewards of seized assets and cash with one another. Between the laws passage and 1993, a total of $3 billion in cash and property flowed through the nationalized Asset Forfeiture Program to local and national law enforcement agencies.

Instead of using civil asset forfeiture as it was originally intended, police in many jurisdictions have used civil asset forfeiture to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers.

Studying asset forfeiture rates and law enforcement budgets from government datasets across five states, Harvard School of Public Health professor Katherine Baicker and UC Irvine associate economics professor Mireille Jacobson uncovered an interesting link between asset forfeiture rates and local government budgets. When government police carry out more asset forfeitures, Baicker and Jacobson found, local lawmakers reduce spending on law enforcement, treating the proceeds from law enforcement actions as revenue. In turn, asset forfeiture rates increase, because government police begin treating forfeiture as a fundraising activity.

Baicker and Jacobson write that just as a living thing responds to stimuli, government agencies, such as police departments and county commissioner boards, respond to incentives in complex, interconnected ways.

Counties and police respond to incentives driven by seizures laws in a sophisticated way that depends both on the reaction of the other party and on the fiscal circumstances that affect their marginal utility of the funds, Baicker and Jacobson write. We find that local governments do indeed capture a significant fraction of the seizures that police make by reducing their other allocations to policing, undermining the statutory incentive created by state seizure laws. They are more likely to do so in times of fiscal distress.

To guard against this unfair and immoral form of taxation, states must reform their laws to require a criminal conviction before private property can be seized and to require that asset forfeiture proceeds be deposited into the general fund, not funneled directly to law enforcement budgets.

Civil asset forfeiture creates too many perverse economic incentives. However well-intentioned the idea may be, the practice of civil asset forfeiture has been corrupted and now infringes on Americans right to be free from harassment by money-hungry agents of the government.

The U.S. governments law enforcement agencies are supposed to be the cops  not the robbers  and it needs to stop now.

Jesse Hathaway (jhathaway@heartland.org) is a research fellow with The Heartland Institute.
The hostess sees me peeking through the window, so she opens the front door. May I help you?

Two for dinner? I ask. I can see that almost every seat in the restaurant is already taken.

Just a moment, she says. She walks across the very small room to whisper something to the chef. He shakes his head from side to side.

She returns with an apology written on her face. Im sorry. We are full tonight, she says.

It would be easy to overlook Sushi Hana re, as I did for months. Opened last September, the restaurant is hidden behind The Lab in a corrugated tin building that appears to be nothing more than a storage shed. I leave hungry and curious.

I call the next morning to ask about a reservation the following day. Someone I presume is the chef answers the phone. He sounds distracted but cordial, as if he might be filleting a fish as we speak.

He tells me he can squeeze me in at 6 p.m. but Ill have to leave by 8 because the restaurant is full already and he really shouldnt be adding anyone else. Will you be OK with that? he asks, apologetically. I get the sense he wishes he hadnt answered the phone.

When I arrive, the dining room is empty. Hana re is tiny, merely 10 seats at a sushi counter plus two tables off to one side, which apparently are used only when someone prefers, for whatever reason, not to sit at the counter. The capacity remains capped at 10 diners at a time.

The sushi counter is a remnant of the former Zipango, whose owner later divided the space into two separate restaurants. The larger portion of the building is now a trendy poke bar, the yang to Hana res yin.

The chef is Atsushi Yokoyama, who actually helped open Zipango years earlier before leaving to work at Bluefin in Crystal Cove, eventually launching his own catering business. He returned to his old stomping grounds last year to helm Hana re.

For the first hour, we have the chef and two hostesses undivided attention. The menu is short: a handful of seasonally available sushi and sashimi, plus a few cooked luxuries like foie gras, lobster miso soup and Japanese A5 Miyazaki beef.

The menu is prefaced with three boldfaced options for omakase: sushi for $58, the Hana re omakase for $95, or a chefs omakase, with a market price that starts at $140.

I inquire about the latter. Sorry. Theres not enough time tonight for the chefs omakase, Yokoyama says. Is the Hana re omakase OK?

The omakase begins like a traditional kaiseki, with something cold and slippery. Its a chilled soup, a slightly viscous broth made from squash. At the center of this cold slurry is a nub of steamed shrimp topped with caviar and a single leaf the size of a clover.

The chef watches as we take our first bites. He nods gracefully, smiles, then sets about crafting the next course: a trio of corn custard with snow crab and baby okra, a steamed Japanese conch in its knobby shell, and a lump of octopus sashimi layered with purple shiso and a dollop of Parmesan foam.

Next comes tuna, lightly seared. This is quickly followed by Japanese snapper steamed in dashi broth with shimeji mushrooms. The skin of the fish is vivid pink. The flesh underneath, snowy white. The delicate aroma is held captive by a tight-fitting lid until it is released directly under our noses.

The meal progresses quickly while were still the only ones in the restaurant: roasted duck with Japanese sweet potato, followed by a series of sushi that includes sea trout, gizzard shad, ten nen aji, shima aji and tachiuo.

This is the first time Ive seen tachiuo anywhere other than Shunka. It is a fish with a spectacularly menacing face, a surreal, serpent-like creature with big, gnarly monster teeth. Melted to a crisp with the brutal flame of a hand-held torch, the taut white flesh takes on a deeply smoky character vaguely reminiscent of toasted marshmallows.

Halfway through our nigiri, the dining counter suddenly fills up with four other couples, at which point I expect the chef to start rushing.

Instead, the opposite happens. He becomes the embodiment of Zen as he assembles several plates at once, no two couples menus being exactly the same, all the while a constant smile on his lips. The two hostesses gracefully manage the flow, answering the door, offering sake, removing dirty plates, wiping the counter after even the tiniest spilled droplet of soy sauce.

That first meal ends with tamago, a sweet egg omelet. As he did with our first course, the chef pauses what hes doing, for a split second, to observe.

The tamago is sweeter, creamier, silkier than any Ive ever tasted. Its more like cheesecake than an omelet  and I love it.

The chef smiles when he sees our reaction.

Ive since been back for the lengthier menu. I dare not give too much away by detailing every little surprise. Just make sure to ask for the foie gras and the Miyazaki beef, which arent included automatically. And, if its still in season, you will want to experience the tori gai, a giant cockle clam from Hokkaido that is delightfully chewy, almost elastic, yet somehow slightly crunchy at the same time. Youll want to call ahead, for sure.

This is without question the most graceful omakase experience in Orange County. It is a restaurant meant for enthusiasts. It is expensive. They dont make spicy tuna rolls here. They dont serve boiled edamame. You come to appreciate nuance and subtlety. That said, Hana re does not rise to the ethereal level of, say, Urasawa in Beverly Hills or Masa in New York, but it is very good indeed.

There is simply no other restaurant in O.C. that reminds me of dining in Japan as much as this place does.

Contact the writer: bajohnson@ocregister.com or Instagram @bradajohnson
With new regulations in place, San Clemente this week ended a moratorium that the City Council enacted last July to slow the opening of new sober-living homes and large treatment facilities in town.

On a 5-0 vote Monday night, council members repealed the moratorium, even as a parade of residents appeared at the podium, describing how rehab homes are disrupting their lives.

Council members replied that during the moratorium, the city adopted rules and standards for short-term rentals, boarding houses, hotels and transitory lodging  regardless of whether the people occupying them are vacationers, boarders or recovering addicts.

While state law preempts the city from being able to say yes or no to some types of facilities, the city established a discretionary permit for boarding houses, limiting them to higher-density zones and requiring at least 300-foot separation between them. The city now requires large treatment centers to be in a designated commercial part of town.

Neighbors who experience problems now can call code enforcement 24 hours a day at 949-366-4705 and a streamlined code enforcement process will try to correct issues. The city now can charge a homeowner a fee for repeat nuisance calls.

Together, these codes address the nuisances and issues that we identified early on in the moratorium, City Planner Jim Pechous said.

Other cities in Orange County are likewise trying to regulate rehab homes, constrained by state and federal housing laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We looked at what was appropriate for San Clemente, what the state and federal regulations we need to work within, and we crafted something for us, Associate City Planner Adam Atamian said. We looked at other cities. We werent really doing anything that was in response to or in concert with another city.

San Clemente, seeing a proliferation of vacation rentals and recovery homes in residential neighborhoods, was looking at ways to regulate each, Atamian said, and in the end the city crafted rules that could apply to a broad range of rentals. What we did is identify how properties are used, not singling out particular users, Atamian said.

We finally have a toolbox, Councilman Tim Brown said. Now that weve developed this toolbox, we cant keep the moratorium in place. Thats why we had the moratorium, to develop the toolbox.

The nuisance fee is $50 if a code enforcement officer investigates the call or $115 if a sheriffs deputy is called to the address. Its based on staffing costs and the time it typically takes to respond to a call and investigate it, officials said. The fee applies only if a citation is issued.

Barbara Ortiz, one of several residents who appealed for relief, told the council there five sober-livng homes near her home and one of them had three overdose incidents in one night. She and other speakers complained of loud music, swearing, concentrated cigarette smoke, crime, parents being afraid to let their children out on the street, public urination and nudity.

I would love to have them have a very nice place to live, Ortiz said, but in a residential community where there are children up and down the street, where we have valuables in our homes?

Its a liability for all of us, resident Dolores Padgett said.

Council members said they have done what they can legally, and they ask residents to call the 24-hour city hotline as the city continues to send out code enforcers and document problem locations. Mondays City Council closed-session agenda listed more than a half-dozen lawsuits the city has filed over code issues.

Contact the writer: fswegles@ocregister.com or 949-492-5127
The main issue addressed in the meetings between the subgroups of the trilateral contact group on the settlement of the situation in Donbas in Minsk, on Wednesday, was security in the conflict zone, Iryna Gerashchenko, first deputy speaker of Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and Kyiv's representative in the humanitarian subgroup of the contact group, said.

"The key issue for all groups was security. Ukraine demands the halting of attacks, ceasefire observance, the creation of a special security zone near checkpoints. It's unacceptable: the increase of attacks, the number of wounded and killed people. Without the ceasefire regime, it is impossible to make headway on all other issues," Gerashchenko said on Facebook on Wednesday after the subgroup meeting.

She said that military action destroys the infrastructure, which was rebuilt thanks to the Minsk process. "Specifically, we are talking about the Mykytivka-Mayorsk railways and other infrastructure facilities," she said.

Gerashchenko said these issues, along with the water supply and railway issues, were the key issues addressed in the meeting of the economic subgroup.
Colorful dragons pranced around as the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim joined in the celebration of Thursdays grand opening of Shanghai Disneyland.

The one-day celebration took place on the Hollywood Backlot stage at Disney California Adventure. Videos of the opening ceremony, and opening night concert were shown on large screens around the stage among the live shows.

Visitors could have their photos taken with characters Mulan and Mushu from the Disney animated film Mulan. Children had a special area where they could color or draw the characters from the Disney animated film, Mulan.

At the nearby snack stand, visitors could also buy pork bao, chicken pot stickers and almond cookies.

As part of the celebration, visitors entering either Disneyland or Disney California Adventure received special commemorative buttons.

Friday, a new film, Soarin Around the World, that premiered as Soarin Over the Horizon in Shanghai on Thursday, will premiere at Disney California Adventure. it takes the place of Soarin Over California, which had its last showing Wednesday.

Contact the writer: meades@ocregister.com
Beyond sit, stay and walk, the average dog can understand more than 165 words, and as technology advances and animal research improves, humans and pets may soon be able to communicate even more fluently.

Around the globe, scientists and researchers are working to bridge the divide between animal and human communication. At North Carolina State University, an engineering team is developing a smart harness for dogs that uses vibrations to send commands. A researcher at Georgia Tech designed computerized vests for service dogs that release audio messages when its mechanical levers are pulled. For example, if the dogs owner has a seizure, the dog could use the vest to ask a passer-by for help.

In some clinical trials in the United Kingdom, dogs were able to successfully detect cancer and other illnesses in humans.

In Cambodia, rats are being used to sniff out landmines and proving to be more effective than metal detectors.

Some animals, like cats, also develop a specific language with their owners. A 2003 study by Cornell researchers found that cats use different meows to elicit certain responses from their owners. The study also revealed that cats only meow to humans, not to each other.

We may communicate with our pets more than were aware of, with our body biochemistry, facial expression and even our bodys posture, said O.C. veterinary behaviorist Stefanie Schwartz.

As many animal lovers know, pets can identify when their owners are upset, happy or playful. According to Schwartz, owners can learn the same trick by simply paying attention.

One very interesting behavior (in) dogs is tail wagging, said Irith Trietsch Bloom, owner of The Sophisticated Dog pet training in Los Angeles.

She says dogs often wag their tails to express happiness but sometimes a wag means the dog is agitated, afraid or aggressive, so its important to look at the whole dog, not only the tail.

If just the tip of your cats tail is moving, shes probably interested in something happening nearby, Bloom said. If your cats entire tail is swishing around rapidly, she may be agitated or angry.

Understanding how to soothe an anxious animal starts with identifying the problem.

If your dog is stressed, he may yawn when hes not tired, lick his lips when theres no food present and refuse eye contact, said Certified Professional Dog Trainer Kate Connell, owner of Calmer Canines in Costa Mesa.

Just as with dogs, you need to look at your cats body language in context, Bloom said. If your cats fur is bristling and his body is arched, hes probably feeling agitated no matter what his ears and tail are doing.

According to Connell, many canine stress signals are normal behaviors in an abnormal context, such as itching and scratching when there are no fleas or allergies. Stress releases histamines, which makes the dog itchy, she said.

A dog lying on his back, showing you his belly, may mean one of two things, Connell said. He may be nervous and behaving submissively toward a perceived threat, especially if he lies very still, avoids eye contact and/or urinates. Or he may be feeling safe and willing to expose his vulnerable belly, especially if he wiggles himself and wags his tail.

Watch and learn, sit back and observe your pets behaviors, Schwartz said. There are behaviors typical of species, but everyone is an individual, too.
With high temperatures headed for Orange County this weekend, health officials on Wednesday reminded residents to take measures to avoid heat-related illness.

The National Weather Service has forecast inland temperatures of up to 100 degrees Sunday and as high as 104 Monday.

To prevent heat exhaustion or heat stroke, the Health Care Agency recommends the following:

 Drink plenty of water.

 Stay out of the sun if possible. Otherwise, wear a wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen.

 Avoid strenuous activities when outdoors.

 If your home is not air-conditioned, visit public places such as malls and libraries to stay cool.

 Never leave children, the elderly or pets unattended in vehicles.

 Make sure members of high-risk groups are staying cool, including seniors who live alone, people with heart or lung disease and young children.

Symptoms of heat exhaustion include heavy sweating, muscle cramps, weakness, headache, nausea or vomiting and dizziness.

Symptoms of heat stroke include: extremely high body temperature; unconsciousness; confusion; hot and dry skin, without sweating; a rapid, strong pulse; and a throbbing headache. If symptoms occur, immediately call for medical assistance. Move the person to shade and begin cooling the body with water.

Contact the writer: cperkes@ocregister.com 714-796-3686
SANTA ANA  A Santa Ana grand jury has indicted nine people accused of planning and carrying out a series of smash-and-grab jewelry store robberies across Southern California, federal authorities announced Thursday.

Federal prosecutors say six men planned and organized at least 10 brazen robberies in Mission Viejo, Canoga Park, Century City, Woodland Hills, Thousand Oaks, West Hollywood, Torrance, Malibu and Santa Monica. Three others took part in at least some of the thefts, the officials said.

Four were arrested Thursday morning, joining three already in custody. Officials say they are still searching for two men.

The 13-count indictment alleges that the robbery crew stole watches and other jewelry estimated at $6 million between August and April. During one heist in a Century City mall, a robber is suspected of firing a rifle shot at a security guard.

Prosecutors say the leaders of the crew recruited financially desperate young men, promising them a large sum of money if they carried out the smash-and-grab robberies. However, authorities allege, the recruits ultimately received far less than promised.

The jewelry stores, which included Frederic H. Rubel Jewelers in the Shops at Mission Viejo, were chosen for their expensive watches with such brands as Rolex, Audemar Piguet and TAG Heuer, according to federal officials.

The organizers of this ring carefully planned and executed a series of daylight robberies that terrified and endangered store employees and bystanders, U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker wrote in a statement. The indictment and arrests today demonstrate that ringleaders cannot escape prosecution by sending lower-level participants in to commit the crimes on their behalf.

Authorities identified Darrell Dent, 39, of Inglewood as the alleged leader of the crew, and Keith Walton, 45, of Los Angeles as a key figure in the ring. They also named Robert Johnson, 27, of Inglewood, Stanley Ford, 47, of Los Angeles, Justin Henning, 28, of Inglewood, Evan Scott, 27, of Inglewood, Kenneth Paul, 21, of Los Angeles, Jameson Laforest, 24, of Inglewood and Marshawn Marshall, 18, of Inglewood as being involved in the planning or in the actual robberies.

Of those, Marshall is the only suspect alleged to have taken part directly in the Mission Viejo robbery, in which four masked men, at least one armed, ordered employees to the ground, broke open a display case with a sledgehammer and rifled through the cases for jewelry as patrons fled.

Also arrested after the Mission Viejo robbery, but not listed in the federal indictment, were Levon Michael Tippit, 23, of Inglewood, and Devan Devell Howard, 18, of Los Angeles. The fourth suspect was not named.

County prosecutors previously alleged that while fleeing the robbery, the men threw a bag of stolen items, which included a tracking device, onto the northbound I-405. Witnesses called police, leading to the arrests.

Contact the writer: semery@ocregister.com
A six-month sentence for rape is outrageous, but the effort to recall the judge who imposed it is misguided. The remedy for wrong judicial decisions is to have them overturned on appeal. Judicial independence is imperiled when judges are subjected to recall efforts for their rulings, even their clearly erroneous ones.

Brock Turner, a student at Stanford University, was convicted in March of raping an unconscious woman. Two men intervened and held Turner until police arrived. The victim, whose blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit, was found partially clothed with blood on the backs of her hands and abrasions, lacerations and dirt in [her] genitalia. Turner, 20, was convicted.

California law allows a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison for Turners crimes. The prosecutor requested a six-year sentence, while the probation department recommended a sentence of six months to one year in jail. Judge Aaron Persky imposed a sentence of six months imprisonment, followed by three years of probation. Judge Persky said a long prison sentence would have a severe impact on the 20-year-old who had no prior criminal record and who would not be a danger to anyone after release.

I share the outrage at the sentence. It is a grossly inadequate punishment for Turner and sends exactly the wrong message about the seriousness with which the legal system takes a crime that has forever altered the victims life.

A campaign has begun to have Judge Persky recalled. It is estimated that over a million people have already signed an online petition for the judges recall.

Although I agree with the anger at Judge Perskys sentence, I strongly oppose the recall effort. A judge should be subjected to recall only for illegal or unethical conduct. Judge Persky made a terrible error, but he did nothing illegal or unethical. Subjecting a judge to recall for unpopular decisions is a serious threat to judicial independence.

Judges must be able to decide cases according to their best view of the law and facts. Judges should not issue rulings out of fear that they will be subjected to recall if their decisions upset the voters. This time it is for a judge who was far too lenient in imposing a sentence on a rapist, but next time it can be for a judge who excludes evidence in a high profile case because the police violated the Fourth Amendment or for a judge who orders a school to be desegregated and outrages the voters.

With regard to criminal sentences, it is striking that there is never an effort to remove a judge for imposing an outrageously long sentence. I have represented a criminal defendant who received a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for 50 years for stealing $153 worth of videotapes and another who received a sentence of 25 years to life in prison for stealing an umbrella and two bottles of liquor worth $49 on a cold rainy night. Efforts to recall judges for light sentences encourage judges to impose maximum penalties out of fear that anything else could cost them their jobs.

Judicial independence is crucial to upholding the rule of law and history shows that it is lost when judges fear removal for their unpopular decisions. This is not a new realization. One of the grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence was how the king of England effectively controlled the judiciary by removing judges. As conservative lawyer Ted Olson explained: [I]n this country we accept the decisions of judges, even when we disagree on the merits, because the process itself is vastly more important than any individual decision  .[A]bsent lawlessness or corruption in the judiciary, which is astonishingly rare in this country, impeaching judges who render decisions we do not like is not the answer.

There is a remedy for Judge Perskys misguided sentence: the prosecutor should appeal. A California Court of Appeal can overturn a sentence if it finds that it was an abuse of discretion. A sentence of six months in prison for rape is an abuse of discretion. But the answer is not to remove a judge from the bench because we dislike the sentence. We all need judges to decide cases without fear that an unpopular decision will cost them their jobs.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law.
SACRAMENTO  Lawmakers voiced disapproval Wednesday over a likely November ballot question of whether to end their process of last-minute bill changes and undo a longstanding rule that gives legislators control over who can film them at work.

A wealthy Republican donor, Charles Munger, Jr. and a former lawmaker have submitted signatures for an initiative that would require lawmakers to publish all bills for at least 3 days before the full Senate or Assembly could vote on them. Their initiative, touted as an overdue requirement for legislative transparency, has hit a nerve with lawmakers in the Democratically controlled statehouse who are advancing their own, weaker version of the measure.

Former Assembly Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee, who submitted the initiative with Munger, said one of the more frustrating parts of being a lawmaker was to be asked to vote on bills written and distributed just hours earlier.

You have no choice but to vote whats in front of you without the information necessary, Blakeslee said at a joint committee hearing Thursday. That is the gut-and-amend process that we want to put an end to once and for all.

The proposed initiative would also require the Legislature to publish all committee and floor proceedings online within 24 hours and keep them online in a downloadable format for at least 20 years.

Currently, Blakeslee said, about half of hearings can be streamed online.

Anyone would be allowed to record and broadcast public meetings. People are currently allowed to watch lawmakers doing business in person, but members of the public can only record them if legislative leadership approves ahead of time.

Journalists can record and broadcast hearings with prior approval.

Lawmakers said the measure would jeopardize their ability to meet deadlines and criticized its funding mechanism, which would require the Legislature to pay for its own transparency equipment and staff.

The state Legislative Analysts Office estimates the cost would be about $1 million to $2 million initially then $1 million annually.

Assemblyman Ken Cooley, D-Rancho Cordova, said deadline crunches could not be suspended to accommodate a three-day wait period.

Cooley said the courts and governors office should share the cost of cameras, data storage and staff time because transparency is in the interest of all three branches of government.

To go in and say this is uniquely a legislative expense is anomalous, Cooley said.

Neither the ballot measure nor the legislative counterpart is certain to appear on the November ballot. But the secretary of state is expected to find the required 585,000 valid signatures among the 1 million signatures submitted last month; legislators face a June 30 deadline to approve their alternative.

Munger and Blakeslee asked lawmakers why their own measure was necessary, noting that it would likely be confusing to voters.

Is there an idea you have right now that is so good that you want to have a possible head-to-head battle on the ballot with all of transparency on the line? Munger said.
ORLANDO, Fla.  The gunman who went on a rampage at a gay nightclub early Sunday told police he would strap explosives to four hostages and strategically place them in the corners of the building, Orlandos mayor said Wednesday, shedding some light on the decision to send a SWAT team into the building as well as the delay in removing the dead.

Over the course of several hours after Omar Mateen attacked the Pulse nightclub and took hostages, he told police negotiators that he planned to strap bombs to four people, Mayor Buddy Dyer of Orlando said. In phone calls and text messages to 911 operators, friends and family members, people trapped inside the club, who heard statements the killer was making, also warned of explosives.

We had independent verification of that, Dyer said. We had a lot of information from the inside, and they independently were saying yes, the bomber is about to put on an explosive vest.

Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Mateen used an assault weapon and a handgun in the attack.

Dyer confirmed reports that Mateen, 29, had been driving around that night visiting locations, apparently casing potential targets for a massacre.

But on Wednesday, Ronald Hopper, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBIs Tampa office, said investigators believed that Pulse was the gunmans sole intended target.

Hopper would not say whether Mateen actually had any explosives.

Investigators have been looking into whether the gunmans wife, Noor Zahi Salman, knew in advance what her husband had planned, and they were scouring his computer use.

Salman has told FBI investigators that she tried to talk her husband out of some kind of attack, according to senior law enforcement officials. But she also told them that she had gone with him to buy ammunition, and that she had once driven him to Pulse, they said.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, officials would not discuss the possibility that she or anyone else would face criminal charges.

John Mina, the city police chief, has said that after a three-hour standoff Sunday morning, law enforcement officials made the decision to storm the club using explosives and an armored vehicle because they had reason to believe they were facing an imminent loss of life, but he did not elaborate.

Mateen also apparently made a series of Facebook posts before and during his attack, raging against the filthy ways of the west and blaming the U.S. for the deaths of innocent women and children, according to a Senate committee letter released Wednesday.

The killer searched for Pulse Orlando and Shooting online on the morning of the carnage Sunday and said on Facebook, America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state, according to the letter.

The messages were detailed in a letter from the Senate Homeland Security Committee to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to produce information on Mateens online activity and to provide a briefing to the panel.

Survivors of the siege have said that Mateen, who died in a shootout with police, talked of accomplices as well as bombs  snipers who he said were prepared to gun down people.

When the shooter was killed you could see a battery pack right next to him, which would indicate to us that theres a detonator of some sort, Dyer said. There was also a bag near his body, so you would logically lead to the conclusion that the bag contained explosives.
Theres a flash of brown as the tiny, endangered mouse scurries across the sandy, brushy hillside above Laguna Beach and crouches frozen under a shrub.

As the sun dips behind the ocean far below, the mouse slowly blinks a wet, beady, black eye, twitches its nose and gingerly crawls under the cover of the foliage. Its head seems to make up half its 2-inch body, which weighs the same as three pennies.

This Pacific pocket mouse is a small and stealthy pioneer. It is among 50 released this week into the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park as part of a yearslong effort to bring the smallest mouse in North America back to a coastal highlands where it once thrived but hasnt been seen in decades.

Generations of development  subdivisions, shopping malls and even century-old cattle ranches and farms  pushed the mouse to the edge of extinction. But in recent years, human intervention in the form of a 4-year-old captive breeding program at the San Diego Zoo has pulled it back from the brink.

The release of the mouse delivers on the promise of a 20-year-old Orange County habitat conservation plan that eased development restrictions in certain sections of rare coastal sage scrub in exchange for habitat protections in other areas. The effort faced criticism from die-hard environmentalists but became a model for large conservation projects statewide.

Instead of everybody fighting, you agree on where youre going to develop and where youre going to preserve, and then concentrate on those really rich areas to keep viable and sustainable, said Barbara Norton, OC Parks supervising park ranger for Laguna Coast.

If such large conservation areas arent secured, researchers say, only small, scattered habitats tend to be preserved. Those might meet the letter of the legal requirement to avoid harming endangered species, but they often cant support complex and intricately linked ecosystems of animals and plants on which those endangered species depend for their survival.

You really need to conserve large expanses of open space to preserve ecological processes, said Will Miller, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist for Orange County. The large land reserves allowed this reintroduction of the pocket mouse to happen.

Thought to be extinct in the 1980s, the Pacific pocket mouse was rediscovered in 1993 by the developer of the Strand at the Dana Point Headlands. It was added to the federal endangered species list the following year as part of an emergency ruling. The Dana Point mouse population was preserved, and subsequent surveys found two other groups at Camp Pendleton. The populations cant intermix.

No other colonies remain across the mouses historic range from the El Segundo dunes near LAX to the Mexican border. That range, within 4 miles of the coast, also happens to be one of the most heavily developed regions of the country.

Another species, humans, are also very fond of the habitat within a few miles of the Southern California coast, said Michael Long, the endangered species chief for the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlifes Southwest region. Its urban development over the past many decades that has brought the mouse to near extinction.

The scientists are aiming to add seven groups of mice at other Southern California locations, which would bring the total to 10. The first three groups, including the one released this week, will begin with captive-bred mice, and the other four will be created by relocating wild mice. The latter method is far cheaper and more effective but couldnt be pursued initially because the mice population was so precarious.

The re-established coastal populations should grow quickly because the mice breed like, well, mice. They mature enough to mate in 41 days and typically give birth 23 days after mating. That means a generation of mice can be born and subsequently produce a new generation in a single, May-to-September breeding season. They live as long as eight years in captivity, but a much shorter time in the wild.

The little mouse plays an outsize role in the ecosystem, according to scientists. Its burrows hydrate the soil and help plants grow, but more important, the mice eat seeds and disperse them.

When theyre able to disperse seeds from different plants around, youre going to get more variety of species, a more healthy ecosystem, said Nancy Frost, a senior environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Different types of mice forage for different seeds at different times of day, or from different locations.

In Arizona, a researcher studied the effect of removing kangaroo rats, and within five to seven years the patch of desert plain had transitioned to a desert grassland. By distributing certain kinds of seeds, the kangaroo rat engineered an ecosystem that other species had depended on.

Scientists dont know whether the Pacific pocket mouses reintroduction could similarly shift the coastal sage scrub ecosystem. That will take years of study.

The effort to re-establish a robust pocket mouse population began four years ago, when scientists at the San Diego Zoo started collecting 30 wild mice for a captive breeding program.

Biologists identified seven possible release sites with the right type of sandy loam soil and vegetation cover. Among other things, they sought areas away from homeowners  and their cats  as well as power poles and artificial light, which make hunting easier for predators.

The mice released this week were trained to avoid predators using a swooping taxidermy barn owl and live snakes behind plexiglass. Microchips the size of a pen point were inserted near the base of each mouses tail to track and study them post-release, in landscape equipped with a series of survival aides, such as a fence around the 1-acre site to keep out coyotes.

The scientists also installed motion sensor cameras and buried bowl-size sturdy cardboard burrows underneath mesh small wire cages.

Ive literally taken 20 years to design these. Modify and fix them. Modify and fix them, said Debra Shier, associate director of applied animal ecology at the zoo.

The four years of effort culminated Monday night, with the mice released as a cold breeze blew in off the ocean.

The conservation team gathered for a final briefing. Ive been watching them every night. We get images on the remote cameras, Shier said. Theyre moving their soil around. Theyre taking their seeds down.

Seven biologists moved cage to cage, tugging duct-taped caps off the cardboard tunnels leading to the burrows. They lifted the cages and shook out billowy waves of mouse-scented dirt.

Because the mice are shy, nocturnal and well-camouflaged by their gray-beige coats, no one expected to actually see one.

But then the pioneering pocket mouse dashed out of a burrow, the first to return to this wilderness, male No.117. Look, look! cried Samantha Leivers, a researcher with the zoos mouse program, hyperventilating rapidly and calling for her colleague, Debra, Debra, Debra, Debra, Debra, Debra!

A taut ripple of excitement pulsed across the field. Theres one thats loose; be very careful, said Shier.

No one tread on him, Leivers said.

Contact the writer: aorlowski@ocregister.com Twitter: @aaronorlowski
BRUSSELS  U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has told NATO allies America will take a new look at its plans to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year, a British official says, a fresh indication that U.S. involvement in the country is not waning in the final months of Barack Obamas presidency.

British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Wednesday that Carter told us the troop numbers and the dispositions are being looked at again.

The American reassurance to NATO allies comes on the heels of Obamas decision last week to give the military wider latitude to support Afghan forces against the Taliban, both in the air and on the ground.

Far from ending the two wars he inherited from the Bush administration, Obama is wrestling with an expanded set of conflicts as his presidency nears an end, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, with no end in sight. In Afghanistan, a Taliban resurgence has upset Washingtons exit strategy, which called for troop reductions from 9,800 to 5,500 by the end of 2016.

But Carter told reporters that Obama has indicated his willingness to re-examine force levels based on the intensified fight against the Taliban and Carter expects Obama to do that as the year goes on.

Carters comments came as NATO allies agreed to extend their Afghanistan training mission and keep troops in all four sections of the country in 2017.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the allies will have what we call a flexible regional approach, meaning that we will continue to be of course in Kabul but also out in the different regions.

The alliance also is now working on the final decisions for our exact force numbers into 2017. So thats something we will decide later on this year, Stoltenberg said.

The U.S. troop-cutting plan is facing renewed scrutiny in light of the Talibans resurgence. Former U.S. commanders have urged Obama to keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan into next year.

NATOs decision to maintain a regional presence essentially shelves earlier plans to consolidate forces in and around Kabul, the national capital, next year. NATO will retain its hub-and-spoke system, which has headquarters in Kabul and Bagram, German troops working with Afghan forces in the north, Italian troops doing the same in the west, and U.S. forces in the southern region around Kandahar and in the east in Jalalabad.

A senior NATO diplomat said officials believe NATO will get commitments for the $5 billion needed to fund the current number of Afghan security forces through 2020. The diplomat was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Asked about the plans, Fallon told reporters, Nobody wants to see all the spokes collapse. I think were all aware of the fragility of the Afghan forces. Theyre fighting hard, but taking very heavy casualties.

He also said that Britain will maintain its funding of the Afghan advisory mission at nearly $100 million a year through 2020.

The moves cement NATOs commitment to the training and advising mission in Afghanistan as the conflict drags on. They follow Obamas announcement of expanded U.S. military authority to support the Afghan forces.

The U.S. is now free to conduct airstrikes against the Taliban when needed in critical operations, and American troops can accompany and advise Afghan conventional forces on the ground, much as they have with Afghan commandos.

Afghan forces are struggling against the stubborn Taliban, who have made gains this year, particularly in the south. Islamic State fighters also have tried to gain a foothold in the country.

While there have been no changes yet to the decision on reducing troop levels, Obama has shown a willingness in the past to adjust troop cuts when conditions call for it. As the fighting season rages on, now is an assessment period, the NATO diplomat said, adding that keeping the four regions open will provide greater flexibility in future decisions.

So far, the diplomat said, the U.S. has not asked other allies to increase their troop commitments to make up for any U.S. reduction.
Soon after launching the dynamic coastal restaurants Driftwood Kitchen and The Deck in Laguna Beach, operators Rainer Schwarz and John Nye began scouting for their next culinary challenge.

They were tempted by a snazzy location in downtown Los Angeles, which is undergoing a major food and real estate renaissance. But, ultimately, the veteran restaurant operators decided to stick close to home with a new concept, Hendrix, in Laguna Niguel.

The upscale Hendrix is replacing the closed Freds Mexican Cafe at Ocean Ranch Village, the duo told the Register in an exclusive interview last week. Hendrix, a play on Hendricks Gin, aims to be an all-occasion hangout for locals looking for honest flavors, craft beer and cocktails.

Were not a concept floating around looking for a spot; were a restaurant trying to fit into a neighborhood, Nye said during an interview at Driftwood in Laguna Beach.

After an extensive redesign of the Freds space, Hendrix is expected to open in early 2017. When it debuts, it will join a handful of chef-driven eateries entering deep South County  from Ironwood in Laguna Hills to Two Left Forks and Craft House, both in Dana Point.

Its a really good coming of age for Dana Point, Nye said.

I used to live in Capo Beach and used to circle and circle and have nowhere to eat.

That was years ago when South County developers looked for cookie cutter restaurant chains to complement retail-focused malls. Over the past five to 10 years, Nye and Schwarz have seen the foodie culture shift in Southern California  especially Orange County.

People know food and wine better, said the Austrian-born Schwarz, who has worked for high-profile chefs Tim Goodell and Joachim Splichal.

Schwarz and Nye have worked side by side for several years  with Schwarz heading the kitchen and Nye managing the front of the house.

They launched the Robert Mondavi-branded bistro at Disneyland California Adventure 15 years ago. They also paired up when Goodell developed 25 Degrees and Public Kitchen & Bar at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

Ready to branch out on their own, they partnered with developer Colby Durnin in 2013 to form Sentinel Restaurant and Hospitality Group.

That year, Westport Capital Partners tapped the rookie hospitality company to revive The Deck and rebrand The Beach House to Driftwood Kitchen. Both Laguna Beach venues had sweeping ocean views, but the menus and infrastructure didnt match the premium settings.

Today, the transformed coastal restaurants have earned a following from both tourists and locals. On weekends, the wait at the more refined Driftwood can be up to 90 minutes; The Deck, where the motto is no shirt, no shoes, no problem, offers a more casual waterfront experience.

At Hendrix, theyre tackling a space  nearly 9,000 square feet  thats equal in size to both Driftwood and The Deck combined.

The larger venue is allowing them to play.

They plan to have a retail wine shop and exhibition cooking space.

Similar to Cucina Enotecas in Irvine and Newport Beach, Hendrixs wine shop will be stocked with various labels that diners can choose to drink at the table, or for takeout.

Why not order at the table?

The wine store allows diners to browse labels at their leisure instead of making a decision under pressure at the table. It also beats using an iPad  a trend Nye does not embrace.

I want the bottles in front of people. I want people to walk the virtual wine list and see a bottle and embrace it, Nye said.

The price will be the same whether you order a bottle at the counter or as part of table service. (Note: If you order to go, the bottle will be less expensive because it will be sold minus the corkage fee.)

The massive makeover of the 180-seat restaurant includes creating an indoor-outdoor space near the patio. The idea is to make better use of the ocean-facing section. The main dining room will be chic, outfitted with midcentury modern furnishings and a large bar.

Itll look like a brand new building by the time were done with it, Nye said.

Schwarz said the menu of shareable plates and entrees will specialize in fire-grilled and rotisserie-cooked meats.

Some of the dishes include fried Brussels sprout chips with marcona almonds and lemon confit, smoked salmon latkes with apple sour cream, rotisserie Porcetta with roasted potatoes, and pan-seared lemon sole with fava bean ragu and olive relish.

Near the wine counter, an enclosed rotisserie exhibition station will showcase meats such as Jidori chicken and lamb cooking on a spit over an open fire. In the kitchen, other dishes will be grilled over coals.

Many of the plates will be designed to share.

Nothing too crazy. Kind of like American tapas, Schwarz said.

Hendrix will be at 32431 Golden Lantern in Laguna Niguel.

Contact the writer: nluna@ocregister.com
Ukraine has demanded the release of the captives in Donbas and the Ukrainians convicted in Russia during the meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group's subgroup on humanitarian issues, Darka Olifer, press secretary of Ukrainian representative to the Group, Second Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, said.

Kyiv demanded to release " those who are in the territory of CADLR [certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions], and equally those who are detained in Russia", Olifer wrote on Facebook on Wednesday evening.

"Yesterday, we once again handed the lists of people to be released in the '25 for 50' format. The Ukrainian side demands that CADLR representatives give the precise details of our people's location since this is the key problem in the process of people's release," Olifer said.

In addition, Ukraine has brought the initiative to organize a special day in the Kyiv-held part of Donbas, when mothers and wives could see their families in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. "Such visits can happen under the aegis of the International Committee of the Red Cross," Olifer said.

"The issue of the illegally detained persons is the utmost sensitive and complicated one, but we will continue this work and insist that people should be able to return to their homes," Olifer remarked.

Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada First Deputy Chairperson Iryna Gerashchenko spoke at the humanitarian subgroup meeting to propose the initiative to invite professionals from the Joint Center for Control and Coordination JCCC to join the search for people gone missing in Donbas. Heraschenko wrote about it in her Facebook on Wednesday.

She also proposed to organize visits to see relatives in prisons. When referring to the idea, Heraschenko said that the initiative was given a hostile reception by representatives of the self-proclaimed republics. "They give no access to their prisons either to the Red Cross or the UN, or relatives of the hostages. On the other hand, the Ukrainian side is ready to facilitate, as an act of humanism, such visits for the relatives of those who are in prison for committing crimes," Heraschenko wrote.
ORLANDO, Fla.  Embracing grieving Orlando families and appealing anew for national action, President Barack Obama said Thursday that a threat to all Americans security was a strong reason to tighten U.S. gun laws. Counterterror campaigns overseas, he said, can never prevent all lone wolf attacks like the one that killed 49 people in Orlando.

Speaking at a makeshift memorial to the victims, Obama said the massacre at a gay nightclub was evidence that different steps are needed to limit the damage a deranged person set on committing violence can do. He cheered on Democrats push for new gun control measures, including a ban on assault weapons and stricter background checks.

Although he showed little hope the measures would find much support among most opponents, Obama seemed to be aiming for other lawmakers, perhaps Republicans eager to get behind counterterror campaigns but steadfastly opposed to gun restrictions.

Obama arrived as Orlando began the next stage of its grief  funerals all over town. A visitation for one victim, Javier Jorge-Reyes, on Wednesday night turned out a crowd of friends, family, drag queens and motorcyclists to pay their respects.

Were just here to spread love and joy and try to put an end to all the hate, said Ezekiel Davis, or, as hes known to some, Sister Anesthesia Beaverhausen.

Obama could not miss other signs of a community coming together in tragedy. Hundreds of people gathered in 95-degree heat outside the Amway Center stadium where he met with families.

Orlandos calls for solidarity stood in contrast to the sharp-edged political debate in Washington and on the presidential campaign trail that continued during Obamas visit.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican and frequent Obama critic, accused the president of being directly responsible for the shooting because, he said, the president had allowed the growth of the Islamic State group on his watch. McCain quickly walked back those comments with a written statement saying he had misspoken and was referring to Obamas national security decisions, not the president himself.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, had made calls during the attack saying he was an Islamic State supporter. But CIA Director John Brennan said Thursday that the agency has found no connection between the gunman and any foreign terrorist organization.

In Orlando, Obama noted the need for strong efforts to fight terrorists before they can get to America, but he said thats not enough.

We can reduce the impact of a terrorist attack if were smart, he said, a reference to a ban on assault-type weapons that can kill dozens of people in moments. Mateen had such a weapon, an AR-15 rifle.

Obama made his remarks in downtown Orlando during an afternoon visit to express his condolences. He spent roughly two hours talking privately with victims families and survivors of the attack.

Our hearts are broken, too, he said.
ORLANDO, Fla.  Hes coming, just as he did 17 days after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, which left 14 dead. Hes coming, just as he did two days after 12 were killed in Aurora, Colo. Hes coming, just as he did two days after 27 were killed in Newtown, Conn. Hes coming, just as he did eight days after the mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., that left nine dead.

President Barack Obama is coming to Orlando today, where this muggy, diverse, small-big Florida city now joins the swelling ranks of mourning municipalities marked by mass murder.

Jennifer Foster, a film producer and director in the city, said it was important to the community and to show solidarity. He will be welcomed, Foster said. His coming shows hes standing with us.

Foster met Obama in 2012 at a Florida campaign rally, and he took his picture with her and Fosters spouse, Mary Anne Metaxas. She kept that picture on her desk to remember that moment. But now she draws on that memory for the current moment.

I remember he held us tight as the picture was taken, she said. It meant so much.

The president will arrive here midmorning to spend time with victims and loved ones. If he travels down Orange Avenue to the corner of Miller Street at Orlando Regional Medical Center, he will see dozens of flowers and balloons left by people touched by the tragedy that claimed 49 lives before the gunman was taken down by police early Sunday.

If Obama works his way through the city, he will see a Subway sandwich shop just minutes from Pulse nightclub  where the shooting occurred  with its marquee that reads Pray for Orlando. If his motorcade works its way down some of the citys smaller, bumpy, red brick roads, he will see gay pride flags on lampposts. If he goes past the Amway Center, where the Orlando Magic play, hell see the electronic board that has read for the past few days, In memory of our neighbors who have tragically been taken from us.

There will be flags at half-staff at the Amway Center, where the LGBT community has gathered for days to deliver food to victims families, mental health counselors, law enforcement and even media.

The scenes have been replayed before  not long ago  in another American city.

In San Bernardino, SB Strong went up on electronic billboards and was emblazoned on T-shirts, becoming a rallying cry.

San Bernardino Mayor Carey Davis said the city is still marked by the Dec. 2 shooting, when 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik opened fire in the Inland Regional Center.

More than six months later, he alludes to SB Strong while praising the way the city came together in the midst of tragedy.

In Aurora, there were vigils. Flowers, candles and homemade signs were left near the movie theater. After that shooting  during the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises  actor Christian Bale visited the victims who survived.

Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said having Obama come to his city near Denver was deeply meaningful.

I was glad he came. He had left it all up to us. He didnt want to be a distraction, and I thought it would be for him to be here, Hogan said. Him coming here meant a lot to the victims, but it also elevated the national focus on the event.

Hogan said the Orlando shooting rattled him and said those affected in Orlando can expect it to linger for a long time.

Newtowns First Selectman Pat Llodra agreed.

She said she was battling a sleepless night when she got up to get a glass of water and turned on the news before sunrise and saw the early reports from the Orlando shooting. It took her back to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown. I cried. I got angry, she said. I thought, Not again.

Llodra said she attended every funeral for the slain students and faculty at Sandy Hook. When asked how difficult that was, she was silent for a few moments.

Very, she said.

She said since the 2012 mass shooting, she has taken it upon herself to contact the mayor of each city that has experienced a mass shooting. Theyve become so frequent that she has developed a template on how to do it.

First, she said, she follows the events in the news. Then she reaches out to clergy involved in the tragedy. Then she reaches out to the elected officials.

I never thought this would be part of my job description, she said. Each time it happens, I think, Surely this will be the last one.

Except its not.

Roseburg, Ore. Isla Vista. Santa Monica College. Colorado Springs.

Now Orlando.

Foster said she believes the city has shown strength in the face of the tragedy. She said the community is drawing strength from the love and compassion being displayed every day. She said Orlando wont be defined by the shooting.

Hogan remembers saying the same things.

Its going to take years for Aurora to get past this, Hogan said. The positive side of me says, Well get better, and then  he paused  Orlando happens.

The Aurora mayor said the shock and pain never fully go away. But, he said, Orlando should know its not alone and that it has the support of the nation. He knows. He has been there.

Be strong, he said. Just love each other.

Staff writer Ryan Hagen contributed to this report.
SANTA ANA  Twenty faith leaders walked into a bar.

It was Wednesday night at Velvet Lounge, a gay bar in Santa Ana and one of just a handful in Orange County. And projected on the walls, over rainbow lights, was, Lets Do Better.

The bar is our church, said the Rev. Bobbi Becker of InSpirit Center for Spiritual Living in Mission Viejo.

When we were talking about doing a vigil, most of them are being done in churches, said Becker, who is lesbian. This is our sanctuary. We are here to affirm that this was (LGBT) peoples first church.

Members of Kaleidoscope OC, an alliance of 56 Orange County faith leaders supporting the LGBT community, gathered at the club on Fourth Street because it was the most sensible place to hold a candlelight vigil for the fallen in the Orlando massacre, Becker said.

The faith leaders were joined by several dozen people from the LGBT community and others.

On stage, where a DJ or band typically blasts music and drag queen dancers perform, A.J. Blackwood, chair of the Progressive Interfaith Alliance, gave a blessing.

As we move forward, I ask the universe, may nothing evil cross this door, Blackwood read from a prayer book.

Beside him stood Zach Moos, owner of the lounge. Approached by Kaleidoscope OC to hold the vigil, Moos said, I couldnt be more overjoyed to do this.

Moos husband, whom he married two summers ago, sat nearby.

I couldnt be more overjoyed to do this, Moos said.

This is what is so surreal, to have come so far, but we get reminders, Moos said. This weekend was the absolute worst reminder of how much hate and misunderstanding there was for us.

Cantor David Reinwald of Temple Beth Sholom, a reformed congregation of Judaism in Santa Ana, said he spent his early 20s as a gay man going to gay clubs.

A candle was lit as the name of each victim and their age was uttered. People used their candles to light those of people sitting next to them, stood and spoke their own prayers all at once.

Wednesday night was the first time Sandy Moore, a founding minister of the InSpirit Center, ever walked into a gay bar.

InSpirit is open and affirming to LGBT people, Moore, 65, said, but it was time to bring the ministry out of the church and into the community.

It wasnt what Moore  who is straight  was used to, but it was the most loving, comfortable experience, she said.

Im a USC sorority girl, so this is not my tradition, but it is now. We have to break down the old paradigms, she said. My heart is full.




Donald Trumps response to the Orlando shooters action asserted that the killer was here because of the Obama administrations weak immigration policy. He would temporarily ban people entering the U.S. from countries that have a history of terrorism against America  and our allies.

The killer was born in New York around 1987. At that time we were supporting the Afghanistan mujahideen resistance against the Soviet invasion and government forces. President Ronald Reagan met with the jihadist leaders and promised, then delivered, support from the CIA.

Trump also implied on Fox News that President Barack Obama may really be a Muslim terrorist sympathizer, i.e. Who knows? Trump is not too knowledgeable about international politics, but he is smart and quick with his sarcastic retorts. So is Don Rickles, but the comedian is not looking to gain such incredible power. I am now concerned there may be psychological issues with this presidential candidate. Who really knows?

Roger Iles

Rancho Santa Margarita

  

Re: Unity, not division, needed after Orlando [Opinion, June 15]: Your editorial was a regurgitation of known and trite facts. We know radical zealots become terrorists. ISIS, Islamic State of Iraq (and Syria) or Daesh, are fundamentalist followers of doctrines in complete conflict with the principles of the Judeo-Christian foundations of America. Instead of repeating the knowns and throwing a stone, give us the five most important impactful suggestions to deter or eliminate zealots and radicals destruction of our democratic American culture. Americans need frank dialogue of causes, solutions to tragedy, not talking points. We are all together in this fight. Unity seldom starts with disparaging parts of our concerned team  political leaders. Lets start with the Register.

Bryan Murphy

Irvine

  

This country has never been more in need of a leader than at this moment in our history. Instead, we have politicians spouting the usual rhetoric and proposing knee-jerk resolutions.

Obama refuses to admit that Islamic jihadists are the problem, Hillary spouts her usual nonsense and Trump wants to ban all Muslims. Really? Are politicians fed a stupid pill not available to the rest of us?

Sandra Stubban

Stanton
One of the first things we learned about Omar Mateen, the gunman in the nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla., was that his ex-wife said he had beaten her severely until she left him in 2009.

If it sounds familiar that a gunman in a mass shooting would have a history of domestic violence, it should.

In February, Cedric Ford shot 17 people at his Kansas workplace, killing three, only 90 minutes after being served with a restraining order against his ex-girlfriend, who said he had abused her. And Man Haron Monis, who carried out a 17-hour siege at a cafe in Sydney, Australia, in 2014, in which two people were killed and four were wounded, had terrorized his ex-wife. He had threatened to harm her if she left him, and was eventually charged with organizing her brutal murder.

When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed FBI data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, it found that 57 percent of the cases included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims  and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence.

Social scientists have not settled on an explanation for this correlation, but their research reveals striking parallels between what drives the two phenomena.

There are, of course, a tangle of factors behind every murder, especially terrorism inspired by foreign groups. But research on domestic violence hints at a question that often surrounds seemingly inexplicable events like Mateens massacre of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub  what drives individuals to commit such mass attacks?  and sheds light on the psychology of violence.

Intimate Terrorism, International Terrorism

Domestic violence often follows a pattern in which an abuser seeks to control every aspect of a victims life. The scope and intent of this are hinted at in one name experts use for it: intimate terrorism.

The perpetrator is engaging in a general pattern of control over the victim  her finances, her social contacts, the clothes she wears, said Deborah Epstein, who runs Georgetown University Law Centers domestic violence clinic.

Violence is the perpetrators means of enforcing that control  and of punishing any attempts to break it.

Mateens brief marriage to Sitora Yusufiy seems to fit this model. She has said that he forced her to hand over her paychecks to him, forbade her to leave the house except to go to work, and prevented her from contacting her parents. Even small perceived infractions were met with a violent response.

He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasnt finished or something like that, Yusufiy told The Washington Post.

Take this dynamic of coercive violence to intimidate and control to its most horrible extreme, and it looks an awful lot like how the Islamic State treats women in its self-proclaimed caliphate. As my Times colleague Rukmini Callimachi has reported, the group has created a vast infrastructure of rape and slavery in which women are held captive and bought and sold by its fighters. It is intimate violence on an industrial scale.

Domestic violence, experts say, is also often a way for male abusers to impose their view of traditional gender roles. Epstein said such traditions in the United States were rooted in the idea of men having control over women.

Thats our culture: Its all about men controlling women in their lives, she said. Intimate terrorism stems from that desire to control.

This bears striking similarities to how the Islamic State presents its treatment of women as a recruiting tool, promising young men abroad  particularly in Europe  that its caliphate will allow them to restore supposedly traditional gender norms of male dominance. This dominance is exercised in part through violence including systemic rape and the threat of rape. The group often presents this violence as a means to measure and protect mens honor.

It seems natural, then, that the Islamic State might appeal to men who desire that sort of control over the women in their lives, separate from any ideological draw  the kind of men who might have domestic violence in their past.

Nimmi Gowrinathan, a visiting professor at the City College of New York who studies womens roles in insurgent and terrorist conflicts, said that restrictive norms about gender and sexuality could be a pull factor for terrorist organizations  but that people who are drawn to them are also often pushed by their own pre-existing attitudes or desires.

Personal Grievances, Global Grievances

Terrorist attacks and mass shootings garner attention and frighten the public much more than episodes of domestic violence. But domestic violence has a much higher death toll in the United States.

According to the Violence Policy Center, 895 women in the United States were murdered by their current or former intimate partners in 2013 (and this does not include those killed amid mass shootings). That single-year tally is more than nine times the 92 people the New American Foundation has counted as killed in jihadi attacks on U.S. soil in the past decade.

But there are striking parallels between the intimate terrorism of domestic violence and the mass terrorism perpetrated by lone-wolf attackers like Mateen. Both, at their most basic level, are attempts to provoke fear and assert control.

Domestic violence, experts say, often occurs when an abuser concludes that violence is the best tool to solve his or her grievances. That might mean a husband who perceives his wifes failure to do the laundry as a challenge to his rightful authority, leading him to try to reimpose his will through violence.

Clark McCauley, a professor at Bryn Mawr College who studies the psychology of mass violence and terrorism, said he was not aware of research finding a causal relationship between domestic violence and terrorism. But he has found that a characteristic common to mass killers is a sense of grievance: a belief that someone, somewhere, had wronged them in a way that merited a violent response.

Gender Norms, Gender Panic

A domestic abusers desire to impose, by force, supposed traditional gender roles also sometimes includes sexuality. Such abusers, experts say, may see homosexuality as a threat to their masculinity.

There is an idea that what it means to be masculine is to be vigilant of your sexuality, and hypervigilant towards keeping anyone from perceiving you as gay, said Gillian Chadwick, a fellow at Georgetown University Law Center.

Intimate terrorism, in that sense, rests on a broader spectrum of violence meant to preserve the traditional dominance of heterosexual men, and coerce those who are perceived as threatening that order. That spectrum, at the extreme end, includes mass shootings.

This connection makes it somewhat easier to understand an apparent contradiction: that Mateen targeted a gay nightclub and that his father and ex-wife have said he had a history of homophobic remarks, but that he also had been seen visiting Pulse, the gay nightclub he targeted, and, according to some news reports, used a gay dating app.

Could Mateen have been trying to use violence to reimpose rules about gender and sexuality that he himself was troubled about violating? If so, he would not be the first.

Chadwick said there was an entire category of legal argument, called gay panic and trans panic claims, in which defendants say that they turned to violence because they were so upset about being perceived as gay, or about discovering they were attracted to a transgender person.

Gowrinathan, who studies gender and terrorism, warned against making assumptions based on Mateens having been a Muslim raised by Afghan immigrants to the United States, saying that domestic violence and homophobia are prevalent across cultures.

He is the outcome of the United States political culture, not the Islamic States, she said.

Epstein of Georgetown agreed. People in the U.S. throw acid in the faces of their wives who have betrayed them, she said. Anything you could find overseas happens here, too.
Red meat hardly seems like the perfect ingredient for delicious chocolate, but a New Zealand-based food scientist is willing to bet that his high-protein, 50% beef chocolate recipe is going to be a hit.

Mustafa Farouk, Senior Food Technologist at Ag Research has partnered with Auckland boutique chocolate maker Devonport Chocolates to bring meat chocolate to the masses. The quirky idea of combining the two very different ingredients came to Dr. Farouk one day, while looking at ways of adding value to beef and pondering ways the staple food might be consumed in the future. Mixing beef and chocolate seemed like the perfect way for people to get proteins and other nutrients in meat, because chocolate is such a popular dessert.

So Farouk took a very lean cut from the hind quarter of a Waikato-raised bovine, turned into what he calls chocolate butter, which I assume is a sort of fine paste, and handed it over to Devonport Chocolates to use in their confectionery. The resulting combination reportedly has a consistency similar to a Turkish delight, and while the food scientist admits you can tell that its not regular chocolate, the taste of meat is almost impossible to pick up. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Farouk described the taste of beef chocolate as wonderful, adding that although people are initially put off by the unique dessert when they here it is 50% beef, once they bite into it and taste the rich chocolate flavor, most agree that it is excellent.

Photo: MARK TAYLOR/FAIRFAX NZ

We knew we could turn meat into different forms, but whether we could actually fool people by making it look like chocolate is what we didnt know, Dr. Farouk said. When you try it now, you dont know what youre eating. He adds that its very easy to change the texture of beef chocolate from very smooth to a dessert that has some body, fiber to it, but from whatever feedback they have released so far, the smooth one is tastier.

Beef chocolate started out as a crazy experiment, but its creator now wants to make it commercially viable. Devonport are very excited about it and its highly likely that well partner with them and try to get it into the market, he told Stuff.co.nz. And once people realise the advantages of having this, Im sure it will take off. The meat required to make this bizarre treat would cost an estimated $17 a kilogram, and turned into chocolates, it would retail at $2.50 a cube.

Photo: video caption

And this is only the beginning, as Farouk is now experimenting with lamb and venison, to see if theyll work as well as beef. In the past, the AfResearch scientist also created beef ice-cream, a dairy-free dessert he says was very tasty.

via New Zealand Herald
On Tuesday, members of an Indian right-wing group in New Delhi held a bizarre party in honor of US Republican party candidate Donald Trumps birthday.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is really popular among members of the Hindu Sena group, in India. So much so that on Tuesday, June 14th, many of them got together at one of Delhis most famous landmarks to celebrate his birthday. There was cake, balloons, birthday hats and even a life-size cardboard cutout of the American businessman. Everyone cheered, laughed and even tried giving cardboard Trump a slice of the colorful cake. The Indian press called the birthday bash one of the most hilarious events in recent history.

Photo: Twitter

He is our hero. We follow every occasion related to him, said Vishu Gupta, acting president of Hindu Sena. The obscure right-wing Indian group claims they honor Donald Trump for his firm anti-terror rhetoric, including his controversial proposal to temporarily ban Muslim non-citizens from entering the United States, and often refer to him as the savior of humanity or the messiah against Islamic terror.

Photo: Hindu Sena

Prior to the birthday party, Hindu Sena members handed out colorful invitations to the event around New Delhi, which mainly attracted the attention of local media. On the day Trump turned 70, Gupta and his colleagues told reporters that they consider him their hero and asked him to fulfill his promise to ride the world of Islamic terrorism. They then proceeded to cut the three-tiered cake, pop balloons, and of course, sing The Donald Happy Birthday. It was very special.

Photo: Twitter

This wasnt the first time the little-known group publicly showed their support for Donald Trump. Last month, they organized a havan (traditional prayer) asking the Hindu gods for Trumps success in the U.S. Presidential elections. Surrounded by statues of Hindu deities, members of Hindu Sena lit a ritualistic fire, chanted Sanskrit prayers and threw various offering into the fire.

Photo: Hindu Sena

Despite being mocked for their efforts, Trumps Indian super fans remain undeterred and plan to organise similar events in the future including a rally outside the American embassy in New Delhi and the JNU campus, after the new academic year begins.

No word on how Donald Trump reacted to news of his birthday celebration in India, but of I were to guess, he probably said it was the best party, with the best cake, organized by the best supporters. Some Trump steaks and Trump water would have been nice, though

Sources: Indian Express, Daily O
Millennials exhibit particularly low levels of attachment to brands, according to a new report by opinion poll giant Gallup that sought to uncover and analyze the habits of Americans born between 1980 and 1996.

Only one in four Millennials  25 percent  express an emotional or psychological attachment to a brand, product or company, according to Gallups report, How Millennials Want to Work and Live. By contrast, older generations such as Generation X and Baby Boomers exhibit higher levels of brand advocacy, gauging 28 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

Millennials lack of brand enthusiasm appears pervasive across industries. Only 31 percent of Millennial consumers expressed engagement with the banking sector, for example, and when it comes to hospitality, only 20 percent admitted an affinity for this industry. Only 12 percent expressed engagement with airline companies.

Not only do Millennial consumers appear to lack emotional and psychological attachment to brands, theyre also more likely than any other generation to exhibit outright antipathy toward them. The study found, for example, that 46 percent of Millennials expressed disengagement with the airline industry, and 27 percent expressed active disengagement with the insurance industry.

Spending among Millennials accounts for 28 percent of all daily, per-person consumer spending in the U.S., according to Gallup. While spending has declined among all Americans since 2008, with Millennials that downturn has been especially precipitous, as members of this generation spend an average amount of $13 less per day than those who belonged to the same age group in 2008. Strangely enough, the Gallup study also found that Millennials are 13 percent more likely to make impulse purchases than other generations.

Millennials have long been characterized as a generation seeking purpose over a paycheck. Perhaps as a result of this ethos, the Gallup report suggests that Millennials could be the generation least likely to experience fulfillment in the workforce. Only 29 percent of Millennials said they consider themselves emotionally or behaviorally connected with their jobs, 55 percent expressed indifference to them and 16 percent characterized an active disengagement  in other words, a dislike  toward the company or organization with whom they are employed. A majority  60 percent  said they are open to new job opportunities, and 21 percent reported changing jobs within the last year.

A Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data shows that Millennials, currently about 70 million strong in the U.S., recently surpassed GenXers as the most represented demographic in the U.S. workforce, and now represent about a third of all U.S. workers.

It comes as no surprise that Millennials are the most wired generation: nearly three-quarters  71 percent  say they get their news via the Internet, and around the same number  seven in 10  admitted using the Internet to compare product prices. A vast majority  85 percent  say they now access the Internet via mobile devices, and an overwhelming 93 percent say they use social media to connect with others.

Millennials penchant for digital interaction implies that members of this generation are more likely to exhibit engagement when a product or service provides digital offerings. Indeed, 84 percent of Millennials surveyed said their relationship with their bank is primarily digital, far higher than any other generation polled.

It also suggests that because Millennials rely on more channels than other generations when engaging with brands, a greater likelihood exists that they could have a disappointing experience along the way.

Reporting on the studys key findings, Gallup editor and writer Amy Adkins concludes that the greatest challenge for businesses seeking to engage Millennial customers is to deliver the convenience of multiple channels while maintaining a consistently positive experience across every channel.

An abridged version of the 150-page The How Millennials Want to Work and Live report can be found here.
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Ukrainian army positions came under 37 attacks in Donbas in the past 24 hours, the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) press center wrote on Facebook on Thursday morning.

In the Mariupol sector, Ukrainian positions were attacked with large-caliber machineguns and various types of grenade launchers in Maryinka, Krasnohorivka, Novotroitske, Taramchuk and Talakivka, while troops stationed near Berezove were bombarded by a ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft gun, the report said.

Ukrainian strongholds near Novotroitske and Berezove were attacked with 120mm mortars from the southwestern outskirts of Dokuchayevsk at 10 p.m., the press center said.

Fourteen attacks on Ukrainian strongholds were observed in the Donetsk sector. Large-caliber machineguns and various types of grenade launchers shelled Ukrainian strongholds near Troitske, Avdiyivka, Novhorodske and Zaitseve. Infantry combat vehicles and heavy mortars were engaged in shelling incidents near Luhanske. Snipers were active in the same area.

Grenade launchers fired on Ukrainian positions near Novozvanivka in the Luhansk region.
An international police mission should be deployed to Donbas before local elections and stay there in the post-election period, Ukrainian representative to the humanitarian subgroup of the Contact Group for Ukraine Iryna Gerashchenko said.

"The hitherto private debates suggesting that the mission should be deployed for the ballot day only are inadmissible. It would not be a mission in that case. It should be stationed before the elections, during the elections and in the post-election stabilization period so that the conflict is resolved," Gerashchenko said at a press briefing in Kyiv.

She also insists on a clear definition of the 'police mission' notion by each side.

According to Gerashchenko, the Donbas conflict has been escalating over the past month.

"Alas, we have been witnessing escalation of this conflict; actually, the militants have waged real hostilities on Ukraine," she said.

According to Kyiv, the militia has fired about 3,400 shells on Ukrainian troops and populated localities since the beginning of June.
CHARTER OAK, Iowa - Cynthia Meseck Lauritsens great-grandparents, Heinrich and Henrietta Meseck, settled in the Charter Oak area in 1878, 13 years before Charter Oak was incorporated in the State of Iowa.

As Charter Oaks 125th anniversary celebration approached, Lauritsen decided to organize a reunion for her fathers side of the family.

Weve been around longer than Charter Oak has been around and I thought that was reason enough to celebrate family, Lauritsen said.

Heinrich and Henrietta had 12 children, though several died at birth or at an early age, she said.

Lauritsen, of Fremont, sent letters to members of the families of Heinrich and Henrietta Mesecks four sons this past Christmas, she said.

I let their families know we were going to try to do something for the 125th anniversary of Charter Oak and the response was more than overwhelming, she said.

Around 100 members of the families of August, Gustav and Theodore Meseck will attend the Charter Oak Quasquicentennial this weekend.

Theodore was Lauritsens grandfather.

The Charter Oak quasquicentennial will begin with an opening ceremony at the Memorial Walkway along Highway 141 at 3:30 p.m. on Friday.

The parade starts at 11 a.m. on Saturday.

Classic tractors will pull four flatbed trailers and a gooseneck trailer carrying the Meseck family in the Charter Oak anniversary celebration parade on Saturday, Lauritsen said.

A 1979 Trans Am, a 1923 Ford Model T pickup and more tractors will be with the group.

Lauritsen also had special T-shirts made for the event. Each family group will have its own color shirt. Theodores family will wear red, Augusts family will wear blue and Gustavs family will wear turquoise.

I ordered 80 T-shirts for Augusts family, 60 T-shirts for Theodores family and then 35 T-shirts for Gustavs family, Lauritsen said.

When she came up with the idea for the family reunion, she thought she might be able to get quite a few cousins in the parade.

Needless to say there are a lot of cousins, she said. I thought if I could get 40 or 50 cousins in the parade that would be really great, but I never anticipated ordering almost 180 T-shirts.

She said she had delivered a total of 179 T-shirts to people interested in participating.

I dont know that theyll all be in the parade, but I know for sure we have close to 100, Lauritsen said. Right now Im trying to make sure I know how many are coming so we have enough vehicles.

Meseck family members will travel from Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, California, Arizona, Nebraska and Iowa to attend, she said. The family will get together in Charter Oak following the parade.

We havent met some of the cousins, which makes it even more exciting, Lauritsen said. Well have a gathering time in Charter Oak after the parade just to visit and there will be cookies.
A boy bounced playfully on a mother's foot.

Another boy hugged his father as the man cradled his child, perhaps more tightly today than before.

Dozens more people than usual attended Thursday's scheduled Mass at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Elkhorn to pray and grieve for the family of 2-year-old Lane Graves, who was killed Tuesday night when an alligator dragged him into a lake at a Disney World resort in Orlando.

The boy's body was recovered Wednesday afternoon.

Matt and Melissa Graves had arrived in Orlando Sunday night for a family vacation, along with Lane and their 4-year-old daughter Ella.

About 150 people attended the somber 8:30 a.m. Mass on Thursday. Roughly half stayed for the rosary dedicated to the Graves family.

The Rev. Gary Ostrander told the gathering that prayer is the best way to offer support for the family as they move forward with the child's funeral.

Ostrander said he had received an email from a man in California, wanting to help.

"I'll tell him, pray," Ostrander said.

Many of those in attendnace hugged each other and wiped tears away.

Friends of the family declined to comment.

After the Hail Mary prayer, Ostrander thanked the congregation.

"Step into that circle of sorrow with the family," he said.
No Ukrainian servicemen were killed but two suffered injuries in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) zone in Donbas in the past 24 hours, Ukrainian Presidential Administration spokesman Oleksandr Motuzianyk said.

"No Ukrainian servicemen were killed in the hostilities over the past day, but two suffered injuries," Motuzianyk said at a press briefing in Kyiv on Thursday.
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Fire breaks out at Tata Nano's vendor park in Gujarat

Ahmedabad

oi-Shalini

Ahmedabad, June 16: A major fire broke out on Thursday (June 16) afternoon at Tata Nano's vendor park in Sanand,Gujarat.

According to reports, the incident took place in plant's food supply unit at around 2.30 pm and there were no casualities reported till now.35 km away, with clouds of smoke billowing from the premises.

Atleast 12 fire tenders arrived at the spot to douse the flame and cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained.This is the second fire to have broken out in an automotive manufacturing unit.

Officials confirmed and said that "till now no such casualities reported."

Fire breaks out at Tata Nano's vendor park Sanand (Gujarat), fire tenders douse the flames pic.twitter.com/JL6whQwbju  ANI (@ANI_news) June 16, 2016

OneIndia News
Meeting between Dalai Lama and Barack Obama leaves China insecure

Feature

oi-Pallavi Sengupta

Barack Obama and Dalai Lama have met, despite China's threats of damaging relations with the former. Incidentally, more than a threat, it shows the jittery grounds on which China is standing..insecured and scared of losing Tibet.

It is not known whether th emeeting was strategically placed during heightened tensions between United States and China over Beijing's aggressive persuit of territorial claims in East Asia.

However, Barack Obama's small gesture of meeting the great preacher in the White HOuse residence may have sent out a message of personal interest and nothing political. Obama's fourth meeting with the Dalai Lama in the White House, this meeting had no political obligations. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that Obama thanked Dalai Lama for his condolences for the victims of the Orlando club.

Clearing the White House's stance of considering Tibet a part of China, the spokesperson said that the idea has not changed. He also emphasized that Obama spoke particularly of his "warm personal feelings" for the Dalai Lama, appreciation of his teachings and belief ".

It was a mere meeting China, Tibet does not want independence

Though the Dalai Lama said that they discussed about the present situation in Tibet, there was no discussion on Independence since being a part of China was Tibet's interest, given the fact that "China provided full right of preservation of our own culture, or rich Buddhist knowledge, knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, these things."

[Read: Not seeking independence of Tibet: Dalai Lama]

On an optimistic note, Lama also said that the Chinese President Xi Jinping had praised Buddhism and said that it was an important part of the Chinese culture. He said," So this is something new, for a leader of a Communist party, you see, mentioning some positive things about leader of Buddhism, wonderful."

China's idea of 'dangerous' Dalai Lama

China's internal ministry said that the growing closeness between US and Tibet may hamper the relationship between the US and China as the latter considers Dalai Lama as a "dangerous" separatist. Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said that the meeting would encourage "separatist forces". China insisted that a meeting with a Tibetan representative was a breach of trust.

[Read: China lodges representation with US over Obama-Dalai Lama meeting ]

China's official news agency said, "Supporting Tibet's independence is a clear interference in China's internal affairs and is in gross violation of the norms of international relations. Playing the 'Tibet card' shows the US government is overdrawing its political credit and international prestige."

The reason behind the insecurity dates back to the Dalai Lama's last meeting with Barack Obama where he urged for unconditional support from the US for Tibet's independence.

The big fight over the Western Pacific

Japan and the United States rue that China is aggressively infuencing the Western Pacific front with submarines and surface vessels in order to push territorial claims in the neighbouring South China Sea, also expanding and building on islands.

[Read: Obama meets Dalai Lama at White House ]

China argues that this was in response of the military patrols close to the islands, which US considers to be a move to protect freedom of navigation.

The tension is sustained even with the "one-China" policy. Beijing warns Washington to stick to itahead of Teipei President's arrival. A US State Department spokeswoman, Anna Richey-Allen said, "There is no change to the US 'One-China' policy. Tsai would be greeted as a courtesy in Miami and Los Angeles by officials of the American Institute in Taiwan, a de facto embassy that handles US relations with Taiwan."

China's attitude toward its neighbors and toward the Western power sometimes speak of a rattling foundation that is built on uncertainty and isolation. Is communism paying China back?

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 14:27 [IST]
1984 anti-Sikh riots: SC grants 4-week parole to Balwan Khokhar to perform his father's last rites

Justice Muralidhar, the judge who sentenced Sajjan Kumar to life in Sikh riots case

1984 riots: AAP for probe against Kamal Nath

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

New Delhi, June 16: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday demanded a probe against Congress leader Kamal Nath over his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Addressing the media, AAP leader H.S. Phoolka said Kamal Nath himself had admitted in his affidavit that he was present at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj in the heart of Delhi when a mob attacked it and killed two Sikhs.

"Kamal Nath is responsible for this and police should ask him who were the people who had assembled unlawfully. He was the leader and controlling them," Phoolka said.

"Kamal Nath still hasn't been questioned over this. This is a mockery of the law."

The Aam Aadmi Party also questioned the links of other Congress leaders with the riots that followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

The violence left over 3,000 Sikhs dead, almost all of them in Delhi.

AAP MLA Jarnail Singh wanted to know why Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was still with the Congress if, as party leader Amarinder Singh says, that he was one of the accused in the riots.

"Why is Jagdish Tytler a member of CWC? The Congress will have to give clarification for this as well. Removing Kamal Nath from general-secretary's post will not be the end of this matter," Jarnail Singh said.

Kamal Nath was on Wednesday relieved from the post of the general secretary in-charge of the upcoming elections in Punjab after he made a request to party president Sonia Gandhi.

AAP leader Dilip Pandey said the Congress had to act on Kamal Nath due to constant pressure.

IANS
Here is how much salary hike you can expect this year

Salaries of Air India employees to be restored in phases from April

New Wage Code 2022: Your in-hand salary, PF to leaves, here's what will come into effect from July 1

Salaries in India likely to increase by 10.4%: Here is why

Seventh Pay Commission: Govt staff to get six months arrears in one installment; likely in October

India

oi-Mukul Kumar Mishra

New Delhi, June 16: This news will give central government employees another reason to celebrate. Reportedly, Government staff will get their six months arrears in one installment in the month of October.

Seventh Pay Commission: Good News! Govt staff likely to get 30% more 'increment' than recommended

It is being said that Government will implement Seventh Pay Commission most likely from July. Employees will get increased payout in their July salary and it will be credited in their account on August 1.

Latest media reports say that six months arrears from January to July will be handed over just ahead of the Dusshera festival in October.

An official working on the implementation of 7th CPC was quoted as saying, "Central government employees could get the revised pay and allowances from their August salaries and arrears are to be paid ahead of festival season in one installment".

7th Pay Commission decoded: Know all about salary increment, past pay commissions

It is being said that P K Sinha headed Empowered Committee of Secretaries held a meeting on Tuesday. Reportedly, secy panel in its final report has recommended 30 per cent more than what was proposed by the pay panel in its November report.

AK Mathur led 7th pay panel had proposed a minimum monthly basic salary of Rs. 18,000 and maximum Rs. 2,50,000 for the central government staff. With 30 per cent more, the minimum will become 23,400 and maximum at Rs. 3,25,000.

Sources say that government will go by the recommendations of Secretaries panel as later has taken into account concerns of all stakeholders including employees' unions and trade Unions.

OneIndia News
Fact Check: Snake coiling itself around Army sniper is from Indonesia, not India

Diwali means \"end of terror\": PM Modi tells soliders in Kargil, takes a swipe at Pak

Army chief pays tribute to slain soldier Ajay Choudhry in Delhi

India

oi-Shalini

Srinagar, June 16: Mortal remains of slain Ajay Singh Chowdhary was brought to New Delhi on Thursday, (June 16) from Srinagar.

24-year-old Ajay who was martyred during an encounter against unidentified militants on Wednesday (June 15) at the Machil sector in North Kashmir's frontier Kupwara district. However, unidentified militants were also been killed during ongoing gunfire. Five soldiers were also injured during the enounter.

The slain soldier, identified as Ajay Singh Choudhary of Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, would have turned 25-year-old on July 25 and he is survived by his wife.

Ajay was given farewell with full military honours.

Army Chief General Dalbir Singh Suhag also pays tribute to slain Ajay Choudhry who died for motherland.

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 Legislative session from June 29

India

oi-PTI

Patna, Jun 16 Bihar cabinet today proposed session of two Houses of the state Legislature from June 29 to July 4.

This proposal was approved at a meeting of state cabinet presided over by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

The state cabinet gave its nod to 42 agendas of various departments.

The cabinet okayed a proposal of the Labour department to raise the amount given for rehabilitation of a freed child labour and parents to Rs 3,000 from present Rs 1,900.

The money is provided for arrangement of ratio, clothes, medicines and food of rescued child labour and parents.

The cabinet took a stringent approach towards erring officials and approved a proposal of state Health department to dismiss Health officer of Primary Health centre, Ramgarh in Kaimur district Arvind Kumar Sinha for unauthorised leave for more than five years since 2000.

Funds were approved for many schemes under seven resolves of the Chief Minister.

PTI
Prosecutions story may be attractive but should be backed by evidence

Creating communal trouble to establishing Caliphate: A pattern noticed in Gujarat

India

oi-Vicky

Ahmedabad, June 16: There has been an increase in the number of social media sites which are pro-ISIS and investigations have shown that a majority of them were set up in Gujarat.

In some of the pages, there was a message calling on the youth to set up a Caliphate in Gujarat.This comes close on the heels of the Gujarat police busting a Dawood Ibrahim led module which had murdered two Hindu leaders in Bharuch with an intention of creating communal tension in the state.

Officials say that there has been a surge in activity by elements who want to provoke sentiments and cause communal tension in the state. At least 20 such accounts have been created in Gujarat which post pro ISIS material, officials informed OneIndia.

A pattern

The IB suspects that there is a pattern to it. Earlier on it was found that a module from Maharashtra was very active.

The IB says that the ISIS fan boys in India are not trying to inter connect with each other. Instead they are getting together in a particular state and forming groups.

In one of the pages it was stated that the Caliphate must be established in Gujarat. It appears as though these persons are raking up issues in the state and create a communally sensitive atmosphere.

Some of the messages are in Urdu while there is a lot of literature found in Arabic as well.

Apart from Gujarat some amount of activity has been found in Madhya Pradesh as well. There has already been an attempt to set up a module in the state.

However that was busted. Now it has been found that a bunch of youth have come together and opened up social media accounts. None have been attempting to leave the country.

They are just spreading the propaganda and trying to attract more youth into their fold the officer said.

The officer also says that the number of youth trying to leave the country for Iraq and Syria has come down considerably.

However what we have now been noticing is a surge in the number of social media accounts with a bid to spread propaganda. The IB official says that they have intimated the providers to take down these sites.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 17:24 [IST]
HAL's HTT-40 set for official flight in front of Manohar Parrikar

News

oi-Oneindia

By Oneindia

Bengaluru, June 16: Two weeks after its maiden flight, the Hindustan Turbo Trainer (HTT-40), from the hangars of Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), will make an official sortie on Friday.

According to HAL officials, the HTT-40, a Basic Trainer Aircraft (BTA) will have its 'official flight' from Old Airport with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in attendance.

The project is currently funded by HAL using their internal resources of Rs 350 crore. HAL proposes to make three prototypes of HTT-40 in addition to building two static test specimens.

The Company hopes that the IAF would place an order of a minimum 70 BTAs for basic training at Air Force Academy in Dundigal. HAL also has plans to weaponise the plane, extending its role beyond training.

HAL says the programme aims to achieve its operational clearance by 2018. The Company says the work has started on the stall and spin tests campaign in order to meet the project timelines.

As reported by OneIndia earlier, the HTT-40 had a very rough take-off with the IAF making their unhappiness over HAL's new venture. HAL's poor delivery schedules coupled with its failure to deliver the much-hyped Intermediate Jet Trainers (IJT) had pushed the IAF on the back foot. In the meantime, the IAF procured the Pilatus for training their pilots.

HAL's fortunes changed with new government's aggressive Make in India stand and Parrikar's backing of the HTT-40 project.

"We are happy with the kind of support the HAL management is giving us. Majority of members are youngsters in this project and we have accepted the challenges being presented to us. We are also receiving an unprecedented from the certifying agencies so far in this programme. The harmony is good and that's what is driving the project faster," says an HAL official.

PLANE FACTS

* Detailed design launched in August 2013

* Detailed design phase completed in May 2015

* First prototype flew in 12 months after design phase completed

* IAF may procure 72 HTT-40s

* Can be expanded in a weaponised version

* Over 80 percent indigenous content

* 75 systems out of 90 sourced from local players and HAL Divisions

By OneIndia Defence Bureau
Ishrat files: Committee does not name anyone, recommends action against none

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, June 16: The one man committee which probed the missing papers relating to the Ishrat Jahan case has not recommended punitive action against anyone.

The report which only mentions the date the papers went missing has also not named anyone in the report that was submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday.The report states that the papers went missing or may have been removed intentionally or unintentionally between September 18 and 28 2009.

The one man committee had managed to trace one of the papers recently. The document had been found with the help of technical experts. The one man committee was headed by Additional Secretary in the Home Ministry B K Prasad.



Missing since 2009:

The report states that the papers had gone missing while they were being sent from the home minister's office to the joint secretary in 2009. The 52 page report also mentions that it had examined 11 officers both retired and serving.

Ishrat files went missing or were replaced between Sep 18 and 28 2009: Report

The report also states that one file had been found. The file that has been found is the letter written by the former home secretary, G K Pillai to the then Attorney General (AG) of India.

The other files include the letters sent by Pillai to the AG, the draft affidavit vetted by the AG and also the amended draft by P Chidambaram. .

There were exchange of notes between the home secretary and the home ministry on this issue. Pillai had on September 23 2009 sent a note to P Chidambaram with regard to the filing of the second affidavit.

A day later Chidambaram responds to the note stating, As amended, please show clear copy before it is sent to court.

The charge against the former home minister is that he had not consulted with other officials before making changes.

To Chidambaram's note, Pillai writes back stating that, Clear copy shown to home minister. Please take further action and letters may be sent to law secretary and attorney general for information.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 9:46 [IST]
A number of people's deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine have asked the Constitutional Court of Ukraine to rule unconstitutional the parliament resolution about Dnipropetrovsk renaming, the press service of the Constitutional Court said on Thursday.

"On June 15 the Constitutional Court of Ukraine received a constitutional presentation of 48 deputies on the compliance with the Constitution of Ukraine (constitutionality) of the Verkhovna Rada resolution about renaming the city of Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipropetrovsk region) in connection with the violation of the procedure established by the Constitution of Ukraine for its consideration and adoption," the court statement says.

According to the press service, in accordance with the rules of the Constitutional Court the deputies' presentation was sent to the court's registry for studying.

The constitutional query, whose text is posted on the website of the Constitutional Court, states that the constitutional proceedings will involve the authors of the query  members of the Opposition Bloc faction Dmytro Shpenov, Vasyl Nimchenko and Dmytro Kolesnikov.

According to the authors, the Verkhovna Rada violated the deadlines for passing resolutions of such kind. The author of the query also points out that the procedure of voting of people's deputies was violated.

The document notes that the city's renaming without amending the Constitution is a violation of the Basic Law. In addition, the authors of the constitutional query believe that the will of the local community was ignored.

"While passing the resolution of the Verkhovna Rada on renaming the city of Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipropetrovsk region), Articles 5, 6, 8, 11, 19, 38, 83, 84, 133 of the Constitution of Ukraine were violated," the authors of presentation said.

As reported, on May 15, 2015 Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko signed the so called law on decommunization: 'On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) regimes and prohibition of propaganda of their symbols'. This law prohibits the Soviet and Nazi symbols, including the geographical names.

Non-affiliated MP Andriy Denysenko registered in the Verkhovna Rada a draft resolution No. 3864 to rename the city of Dnipropetrovsk into Dnipro to execute the decommunization law.

On February 15, 2016 the Verkhovna Rada Committee on State Building, Regional Policy and Local Self-Government supported the initiative to rename the city of Dnipropetrovsk into Dnipro to execute the decommunization law.

On May 19 247 people's deputies voted to rename the city of Dnipropetrovsk into Dnipro pursuant to the law on decommunization.
Jharkhand: Driver of CM's press advisor abducted, released

India

oi-PTI

Ranchi, Jun 16: The driver of Yogesh Kislay, Press Advisor to Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das, was abducted by unidentified persons from Ashok Nagar area here before they let him off near Jamshedpur after taking away the car, police said.

The driver, Jitendra Kumar Mahto, told police that the abductors last night intercepted him at Ashok Nagar, beat him up and took him away before leaving him near Ghaghra bridge near the steel town and took away his car and mobile handset.

In the FIR registered with the Argora police station, the driver said the abductors had told him that he was being kidnapped as they had asked for an extortion of Rs one crore from Kislay, which he had not given. Kislay, however, told the police that nobody had demanded money from him.

PTI
Man booked for rape of 12-year-old after video of injured girl surfaces on internet

Jisha murder case: Forensic report confirms Assamese youth as murderer

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Kochi/Aluva (Kerala), June 16: Signalling a breakthrough in the Jisha murder case, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan announced on Thursday that "the suspect" -- an Assamese youth -- in the murder of the woman law student is in police custody while police said some forensic and other evidence have shown his involvement.

The prime accused in the crime, according to police, is 23-year-old Amiyur ul Islam, who was picked from Tamil Nadu near the Palakkad border two days back.

"This is certainly going to be a feather in the cap of the police probe team," Vijayan told reporters in Kochi about the investigation into the late April rape and brutal murder of the 27-year-old Dalit woman in Ernakulam district. [Jisha rape and murder case: Main suspect in police custody]

Additional Director General of Police B. Sandhya, who is heading the new probe team, told reporters in Aluva that things are very positive in the probe.

Islam was picked up by police two days back and Sandhya led his questioning at Thrissur. On Thursday evening he was brought to Aluva where all the top police officers, including Sandhya, were present.

According to police, two vital clues turned out to be the clinching evidence for nailing the perpetrator -- the footwear which was left near Jisha's home and a photo of Islam and Jisha taken at a local studio near her house.

The footwear shop owner and the studio owner identified the youth even as police concluded, from the evidence, that the crime was committed by someone who knew Jisha.

Islam had taken part in the construction of Jisha's home and they were in touch and had some verbal duel over the construction.

According to the information, the Assamese youth had come to her home in the morning of April 28 and they had a fight. He came again in the afternoon when he was drunk and committed the crime.

Police zeroed in on Islam after his DNA samples, checked against saliva and blood samples found on Jisha's body, matched when the results came in Thursday.

Director General of Police Loknath Behra, who is in Mumbai, told reporters there that things are all going well in the case and expressed happiness in the chief minister's praise of the police force.

Jisha was found dead on April 28 at her home in Perumbavoor in Ernakulam by her mother Rajeshwari, who works as a casual labourer. Her body bore injuries in a way that gave rise to suspicions that she was raped before being killed.

The murder attracted national headlines and became a cause celebre in Kerala's election season. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) said it reflected the slide in law and order that the ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) had allowed, and promised to book the culprits within hours, if elected to power.

The LDF government, which assumed office on May 25, changed the entire team probing the case and replaced Director General of Police (DGP) T.P. Senkumar with Behra.

IANS
New Aviation policy: Here is all you need to know about it

India

oi-Jagriti

New Delhi, June 16: The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given its approval for the Civil Aviation Policy. This is the first time since independence that an integrated Civil Aviation Policy has been brought out by the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

Highlights

The new aviation policy aims to make India 3rd largest civil aviation market by 2022 from current 9th position

Domestic ticketing to grow from present 8 crore to 30 crore by 2022

Airports having scheduled commercial flights to increase from 77 in 2016 to 127 by 2019

Cargo volumes to increase by 4 times to 10 million tonnes by 2027

The policy enables Indians to fly at Rs.2,500 per hour under Regional Connectivity Scheme at unserved airports

Requirement of 5 years of domestic flying for starting international operations removed

Flexible and liberalized 'open skies' and 'code share' agreements

Incentives to MRO sector to develop as hub for South Asia

Ensuring availability of quality certified 3.3 lakh skilled personnel by 2025

Development of green-field airports and heliports

Enhancing ease of doing business through deregulation, simplified procedures and e-governance

Promoting 'Make In India' in Civil Aviation Sector

Areas covered in the Policy:

Regional connectivity

Safety

Air Transport Operations

Route Dispersal Guidelines

5/20 Requirement for International Operations

Bilateral traffic rights

Code-share agreements

Fiscal Support

Airports developed by State Govt, Private sector or in PPP mode

Airports Authority of India

Air Navigation Services

Aviation security, Immigration and Customs

Helicopters

Charters

Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul

Ground handling

Air-cargo

Aeronautical 'Make in India'

Aviation education and skill development

Sustainable aviation

Miscellaneous

Essential Services Maintenance Act, 1968

Salient features of the Policy

OneIndia News
No space in CSIR for atheist research fellow aspirants?

India

oi-Shreyas

Bengaluru/Mangaluru, June 16: "I ........... do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to India and to the Constitution of India established and that I will loyally carry out the duties. So help me God," reads 'oath of allegiance' of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for Research Fellows.

For acceptance of fellowship in CSIR it is mandate for the candidates to seek help from the almighty (God) through signing. This has irked rationalists forcing to ask what makes the CSIR to compel the candidates to sign such 'obnoxious' statements in the form of Undertaking by a Research Fellow/ Associate on Acceptance of the Award of Research Fellowship/ Associateship.

The CSIR's these words printed in the category of undertaking by a research fellow while applying for the fellowship stands in gross violation of Article 51 A(h) of the Indian Constitution (to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform) says Narendra Nayak, President, Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations.

Narendra Nayak speaking to OneIndia asked what non-existent entity 'God' is doing the form. "Has CSIR launched a research project for the next millennium to establish the existence of God element on the planet, asked Nayak.

Nayak further quipped questioning the CSIR, "but, we do not know which is the god they are talking about whether it is the millions of those of the Hindu pantheon, or the patriarchal Abrahamaic bearded figure sitting on a mountain or the god of the aborigines which may vary from tribe to tribe."

Nayak wonders as to how atheists (no-believers) be accommodated to CSIR fellowship programs. There are a few fellowship aspirants who are non-believers of god and refuse to sign such idiotic requirements. He also pointed that what Jains and Buddhists should do since they also have no belief on such powers.

Nayak demanded immediate withdrawal of this statement. Nayak said "CSIR should withdraw such ridiculous statement from the form. Besides he has written an open letter to Girish Sahni, DG, CSIR.

Open Letter by rationalist Narendra Nayak to Girish

While I (Narendra Nayak) have no objection to the contents of the oath except for the last sentence which asks for a non existent entity to help the person who signs it. While I have no objection to any one's personal beliefs I do wonder what this entity has to do with research.

Since you are a protein chemist and being a biochemist myself I would like to you to clarify as to whether this entity determines the primary, secondary, tertiary levels of structural organisation of proteins? The Quaternary level? or post translational modifications? Whether at the level of replication of DNA? Transcription of RNA from DNA? If so who causes mutations and the problems occurring thereafter?

In a country where a citizen has the right of belief (which also includes the right not to believe) how can you compel research fellows to sign an undertaking as to seek the aid of an entity whose existence has not been proved to help the signatory?

I do hope that this obnoxious clause will be removed from the application form of an organisation which is supposed to research in the scientific field.

On behalf of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations I strongly protest this attempt to bring religion into research. It does not matter whether it is one or the other but bringing an entity like "god" into an undertaking is a step in that direction.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 17:01 [IST]
Pathankot: This is how Pakistan will shoot down India's probe point by point

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, June 16: Today a news report from Pakistan stated that the person who gave instructions to the terrorists who attacked Pathankot had fled.

While quoting sources in the investigating agency in Pakistan, the report further notes that Maulana Masood Azhar the head of the Jaish-e-Mohammad had said that this person had left the outfit sometime back and he had disowned him.

This is quite a set back since what Pakistan is trying to indicate is that the man who gave instructions is not traceable and also Maulana Masood Azhar has nothing to do with the attack. India would have expected this because the fact is that since day one, Pakistan was not happy with the evidence.

Ever since the Joint Investigation Team from Pakistan visited India and returned, there has been mud slinging in the press about how unconvincing India's evidence is. However the fact is that there is very little India can do since the attack was not launched from here.

It was from Pakistan and all the major players are housed there.

How Pakistan will shoot down India's claim:

Revealing to the Pakistan media that the man who gave instructions has fled is just one step taken by Pakistan to slow down the probe. Further stating that Masood Azhar had disowned him is a way of absolving the man's organisation of the charge.

There have been deliberations all along regarding this attack and also the investigations surrounding it. First and foremost, the Pakistan's JIT says that calls made from Pakistan alone cannot be a basis of proof. Pakistan has said anyone can make that call.

The terrorists are said to have made a call to their handler in Pakistan. The Pakistan investigating agency feels that anyone can call a Jaish-e-Mohammad number and there is no evidence to show it was the terrorists who made that phone call.

The JIT has already rejected the claim by the NIA that it was Nasir a terrorist who called his mother. How has the NIA ascertained that Nasir had indeed gone from Pakistan to India is another point that the JIT posed. Further the NIA had not told the JIT exactly from where the terrorists had entered is yet again another contention.

Intelligence Bureau officials say that with Pakistan probing terror is more often than not a wasted exercise. They from day one had made up their mind to shoot down the investigations conducted in India point by point.

It is clear that they are trying to shift the blame away from the Jaish-e-Mohammad and make it appear as though India had fabricated the entire case, the officer also noted.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 17:22 [IST]
Ram Vriksha Yadav's right hand man Chandan Bose arrested

India

oi-PTI

Mathura(UP), June 16: Chandan Bose, the right hand man of Ram Vriksha Yadav, leader of encroachers of Jawahar Bag, carrying a reward of Rs 5,000 on this head has been arrested from Basti district where he was hiding, police said on Wednesday, June 15.

"On the basis of information gathered from different points, with inputs from surveillance his location was established in Basti.

[Is Mathura mastermind Ramvriksh Yadav still alive?]

"He was hiding in his father in laws residence at Katholia village with his wife Poonam and was planning to flee Nepal. In order to foil his plan SP Basti was informed about the facts and we finally got him nabbed along with his wife," SSP Mathura Babloo Kumar said today.

Bose was wanted in 14 cases and had link with Naxalites. He is not only sharp shooter but master trainer of encroachers of Jawahar Bag.

"Police team lead by one of the senior investigating officer has been sent to Basti to bring Chandan Bose and his wife in Mathura," the SSP said.

Twenty nine people including two police officers were killed in clashes between encroachers of Jawahar Bagh and the police.

PTI
Two arrested for firing at a person in north Delhi

Chhath Puja fasting rules: What one must keep in mind during the 4-day festival

Seventh Pay Commission: Paramilitary chiefs meet home minister Rajnath Singh

India

oi-Jagriti

New Delhi, Jun 16: A number of paramilitary chiefs held meeting with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to discuss the issues related to Seventh Pay Commission.

The delegation presented their proposals and demands vis-a-vis the forthcoming implementations of the 7th Pay Commission.

Five Directors General (DGs), including Krishna Chaudhary (ITBP), K Durga Prasad (CRPF), Archana Ramasundaram (SSB), Surender Singh (CISF) and O P Singh (NDRF), met the Minister at his office in South Block here and presented a memorandum to him on Wednesday.

The government in January had set up a high-powered panel headed by Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha to process the recommendations of the 7th Pay Commission which will have a bearing on the remuneration of 47 lakh central government employees and 52 lakh pensioners.

Seventh Pay Commission: Central Govt employees likely to get 'increased payout', Arrears by Aug 1

The Empowered Committee of Secretaries will function as a Screening Committee to process the recommendations with regard to all relevant factors of the Commission in an expeditious detailed and holistic fashion.

OneIndia News

(With inputs from PTI)

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 10:14 [IST]
Hurry! Best time to buy a house for yourself at biggest home fest in the city

Teesta Setalvad's NGO's licence cancelled by Home Ministry

India

oi-Vicky

New Delhi, June 16: The home ministry has cancelled the licence of Teesta Setalvad's NGO, Sabrang Trust. With this order the NGO will not be entitled to receive foreign donations. The decision was taken under the provisions of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA).

The Home Ministry had on September 9 suspended the licence of the trust. Further the ministry had sought for a reply on the same.

The ministry however found the reply inadequate. It was found that the NGO had committed a violation under Section 8(1) of the FCRA.

The allegation against the trust was that it had transferred Rs 50 lakh to an entity called Sabrang Communication & Publishing Private Ltd in which Teesta and her husband Javed Anand as directors. It was said that this was used for personal gain.Further utilising foreign funds in media is also barred.

The process to cancel the licence had commenced in the month of March itself. The response given by Teesta was not convincing. While questioning the decision to suspend the licence, the trust said that it was not in a position to explain all the donations made to it.

The Home Ministry had said that in 2010-11 and 2011-12, Sabrang had spent between 55% and 65% of foreign funds it received for administrative expenses.

As per the FCRA rules if an NGO's administrative expenses exceed 50% of total foreign donations it would need the approval of the Home Ministry.

OneIndia News
Fact Check: Did Trump thank Musk for welcoming him back to Twitter

I'll meet N Korea's Kim Jong-un in US, says Donald Trump

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Washington, June 16: Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would invite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the US, but not for an official state dinner.

The business mogul made the remark on Wednesday when he mocked his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton for her criticism of Trump's willingness to speak with Kim, calling the former secretary of state a "rank amateur", Politico reported.

Barack Obama more angry at me than Orlando shooter, says Donald Trump

"She's been doing it forever and she still doesn't get it," Trump told supporters at a rally in Atlanta.

"What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? It's called opening a dialogue. It's opening a dialogue."

Trump, however, speculated that the meeting probably would never happen.

"But there's nothing -- I wouldn't go there," he said.

IANS
India's entry into NSG will break India-Pakistan nuclear balance: Chinese media

International

oi-PTI

Beijing, Jun 16: Acknowledging that India is "inching closer" to get membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Chinese official media today said if New Delhi is admitted into the elite grouping, "nuclear balance" between India and Pakistan will be broken.

Stating that India's entry into Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", an article in the state-run 'Global Times' however said China could support India's inclusion in the 48 member nuclear club if it "played by rules".

Written by Fu Xiaoqiang research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the article a second in as many days by the same daily highlights China's strident and vocal opposition to India's entry into NSG and concerns that its all weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'."

"New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month," the article said mentioning for the first time India's progress in getting support from Mexico and Switzerland.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article titled "Beijing could support India's NSG accession path if it plays by rules".

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," it said.

"As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region," it said.

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

"It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office," it said.

The US recognised New Delhi as a "major defence partner" during Modi's recent visit, meaning that the White House has given India the treatment as a US military ally, it said.

The article said that over the years, the US has been "bending the rules" to back India's nuclear projects. "Against the backdrop of Washington's accelerated pace of promoting its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, it will be highly likely to keep supporting New Delhi's nuclear ambitions, in order to make it a stronger power to contain China," it said.

The attitude of the US has had and will undoubtedly have an impact on some other nations. For those countries which also wish to put a finger in the pie of India's market, many of them begin to back India's NSG membership, or at least not oppose it, the article said in apparent reference to majority of the countries in the NSG supporting India's entry.

"However, as a country that has signed neither the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG," it said.

"That's why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to India's membership," it said.

The article made no mention of problems faced by Pakistan in getting into the NSG due to its past record of proliferating the nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, where as India is seeking entry into group based on clean non-proliferation record.

"As a crucial defender of the international system against nuclear proliferation, China does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules," the article said without referring to Beijing's own nuclear power cooperation with Islamabad in supplying a number of nuclear reactors, including two 1100 mw reactors currently under construction in Karachi.

"For those countries that are developing nuclear technology without the acceptance of the international community, perhaps counting them into the non-proliferation mechanism will better safeguard nuclear security," it said.

But at the same the article said China backs India's entry if a fair and just principle is worked out through consensus.

"Yet before that, a fair and just principle must be made through common consensus of all current members of the NSG, rather than the US and India's reckless pushing at the cost of rule-breaking".

"So far, all NSG members have signed the NPT. So the question is, if any non-signatory of the treaty wants to join the group, under what condition can it be accepted? If such a standard is to be made one day, then it will be possible for both India and Pakistan to become part of the group," it said.

"Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organisation," it said.

"As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhi's path toward the club," it said.

PTI
The Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has adopted an appeal to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to publish a tomos over the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The appeal gained the support of 245 parliamentarians with the required minimum of 226 votes.

The Verkhovna Rada calls on Patriarch Bartholomew to invalidate the act of 1686 according to which the Kyiv metropolitan was allegedly "in violation of canons" attached to the Moscow Patriarchate.

"The Ukrainian parliament calls on the ecumenical patriarch to take an active part in overcoming the consequences of the church schism through convening under the aegis of the ecumenical patriarch a pan-Ukrainian unification council that would solve all disputes and unify Ukrainian Orthodox churches," the appeal reads.

It is expected that the Greek island of Crete will soon host a forum that was initially conceived as the Pan-Orthodox Council; however, its status is in question over the refusal of a number of churches to take part in it.
Massive trade deficit of US with India, China, Mexico: Trump

International

oi-PTI

Washington, Jun 16: The US has a "massive" trade deficit with countries like India, China and Mexico, presumptive presidential nominee of Republican party Donald Trump said on Wednesday, alleging that practically every country in the world who do business with the US tries to "rip it off".

"People are tired. They want to have strength. They don't want to have trade deals where China has got a trade deficit, of USD 505 billion a year; where we have trade deficits, massive trade deficits with Mexico, with Japan, with Vietnam, with India, with everybody, folks, with everybody," Trump told a crowded election rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

Barack Obama more angry at me than Orlando shooter, says Donald Trump

"I mean, practically every country in the world when they do business with the US, it's called let's rip them off. It's like we're all the big, bad dummies. Those days are over if I win. Those days are over. They're over," Trump said.

The Republican presidential nominee continued with his campaign against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. "If you look at what Hillary Clinton has done with women, No 1 from certain countries, her foundation has taken millions, tens of millions of dollars from countries that want to enslave women," he alleged.

"As far as the gay community, they kill gays. And she's taking money in. And now, she wants to allow them to come into our country, pretty much un-vetted, because every law enforcement person that I've spoken to and that you watch and that you read is saying it's very hard, if not impossible, to check out people. There's just no papers. There are no papers," he said.

The migration, he said, is a horrible thing to watch. "I have a heart as big as anybody else. We have to build safe zones over there. And we have to take care of people. Let's build safe zones, but build them over there. Build them in Syria. Build them in places over there, he said.

Trump reiterated his call for temporary ban of entry of Muslims into the US. "We have to stop on a temporary basis, at least, but we have to stop people from pouring into our country. We have to stop it until we find out what the hell is going on.

And we can do that, but we have to have people come in that cherish us, that love us, that want to love us, that want to do things, that don't want to destroy us, that don't want to go to a club where you have innocent people and where you had no guns on the other side," he said.

PTI
Donald Trump does it again, says 'US must consider racial profiling'

Orlando: While Omar Mateen killed 49, Imran Yousuf saved 70 lives

International

oi-Shubham Ghosh

Washington, June 16: While the world is talking about Omar Mateen, a US citizen of Afghan descent who massacred 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12 (Sunday), has equal focus been given on Imran Yousuf, a 24-year-old ex-Marine who worked as a bouncer in the ill-fated Pulse nightclub and saved as many as 70 lives?

[Click here for more stories on Orlando killing of June 2016]

Speaking to CBS News during an emotional interview, Yousuf regreted that he could not save more lives. "...there are a lot of people dead," he said.

Yousuf, who likely had walked past the killer as he did the rounds, identified the imminent danger as soon as the first gunshot was fired.

"The initial one was three or four (shots)," he said adding: "That was a shock. Three of four shots go off and you could tell it was a high calibre.

Imran Yousuf, a former Marine and a bouncer at Pulse, unlatched a door and saved dozens of lives. https://t.co/sqnlZ81fAV  Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) June 14, 2016

Yousuf said the panic-stricken people rushed to the back hallway but the idea to open the locked door leading into the streets did nort dawn on anybody. He shouted at them to unlock the door but none could do the job.

Yousuf then himself jumped over to open the door and let people run for cover. He said around 60-70 people were in the corridor, looking for an escape route and he succeeded in letting them survive the night of terror.

Yousuf then returned to help the injured reach hospital.

The man had worked as an engineer equipment electrical systems technician in the Marine Corps for nearly six years, according to military sources. He was then deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. He left the service in May, after attaining the rsergeant rank.

Oneindia News
No comment on Pranab Mukherjee book before reading it: Former Union Minister

Pranab Mukherjee addresses Joint Session Parliament of Namibia

International

oi-Lisa

Addressing the Joint Session Parliament of Namibia today, President Pranab Mukherjee, who is first Indian Head of State to visit the country since 1995, said India would also be happy to partner with Namibia in the implementation of "Vision 2030" through inclusive development and capacity building.

India today offered "any assistance" that Namibia may require in improving its socio-economic objectives enshrined in "Harambee Prosperity Plan" floated by its present government.

#PresidentMukherjee addressing joint session of the Namibian Parliament today pic.twitter.com/UNGHgSx56s  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 16, 2016

"Both our nations seek to address complex governance issues in our own ways. But it will be through empowerment of the disempowered - and by ensuring that in the 'Harambee house', no section is excluded, that we will succeed," he said.

Recalling strong ties between Namibia and India, Mukherjee said his visit takes place at a time of excellent bilateral relations between the two countries.

Our two nations are bound by our common experience of colonial rule and the struggle of our people for freedom #PresidentMukherjee  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 16, 2016

"India believed that her own independence was incomplete so long as her brethren in Africa continued to suffer oppression by foreign masters. India was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leaders and people of Namibia in their liberation struggle," he said.

India was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leaders and people of Namibia in their liberation struggle #PresidentMukherjee  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 16, 2016

Mukherjee said India-Namibia relationship has been built on the firm foundation of mutual trust and understanding.

"Our two nations are bound by our common experience of colonial rule and the struggle of our people for freedom," he said.

The President said the first-ever SWAPO (South-West Africa People's Organisation) Embassy abroad was established in New Delhi in 1986 and it was this move by India that started the chain of diplomatic recognition by other countries and the inevitability of Namibia's independence.

India was among the first nations to raise the question of Namibian independence in the UN #PresidentMukherjee  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 16, 2016

"We appreciate the vision of President (Hage) Geingob in introducing the 'Harambee Prosperity Plan'.

We appreciate the vision of President Geingob in introducing the 'Harambee Prosperity Plan' #PresidentMukherjee  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 16, 2016

India stands ready to extend any assistance that Namibia may require for achieving the 'Harambee Prosperity Plan's socio-economic objectives. India would also be happy to partner with Namibia in the implementation of 'Vision 2030' through inclusive development and capacity building," he said.

India looks forward to more students & officials from Namibia coming to India, availing scholarships & training progs. #PresidentMukherjee  President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) June 16, 2016

The President said founding President and Father of the Namibian Nation, Sam Nujoma, and a respected Leader of the SWAPO Party is greatly admired in India as a world leader and friend of the Indians "India had conferred upon him the prestigious Indira Gandhi Peace Prize for Disarmament and Development for the year 1990 in recognition of his outstanding contribution in leading the people of Namibia to freedom," he said.

With PTI inputs
Chhath Puja fasting rules: What one must keep in mind during the 4-day festival

President Pranab Mukherjee arrives in Namibia, uranium supply may dominate talks

International

oi-PTI

Windhoek, Jun 16: President Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday arrived in Namibia for a two-day state visit during which key negotiations on Uranium supply for civil nuclear use will take place besides other bilateral issues.

Namibia despite being one of the largest producer of Uranium and having a treaty with India for peaceful use of nukes does not supply the fuel to India because of Palindaba treaty among African Union countries which bars export of the element to non-NPT signatories.

"Regarding uranium, there is a proposal which has been pending at their end basically because of African Union decisions. Whether we can move them along, in terms of becoming a supplier of uranium for us that is one of the key objectives that we have there," Secretary (Economic Relations) Amar Sinha had said.

The treaty signed in 2009 with India sets the framework for long term supply of uranium but it is pending ratification by Namibian Parliament.

"Namibia as you know is the fourth largest producer of uranium, but they have an African Union Agreement which sort of impedes the implementation of agreement. Namibia has not been able to break that unity, the binding commitment that they took, it's called the Pelindaba Treaty," Sinha had said.

During talks, India might raise the issue of uranium supply impressing upon Namibia.

"And the fact is because this MoU which we thought will kick in quickly has not happened and we have had been looking in signing agreements with other countries like Kazakhstan, Australia and few others. So eventually if we actually meet our requirements from non-Namibian sources, it will be a loss for the Namibian industry," he said.

The strength of Namibian economy is mineral with mining sector which contributes around 11 per cent to the GDP and it fetches 50 per cent of their foreign exchange earnings making them highly dependent on that.

Another material in abundance is diamond but the mining works through long-term contracts, monopolies and cartels so despite being largest users of diamonds, it does not reaches Indian shores directly from Namibia.

"We are one of the largest users of the diamonds in terms of the polishing and finishing but it doesn't comes directly to us and I don't think there is possibility right now because they have a long term commitment with DeBeers. Indian diamond merchants based outside in Antwerp source it from DeBeers and then it gets shipped to India," he said.

India will offer assistance to Namibia in setting up Mining Engineering trading set up.

Four MoUs will be signed during the trip which include Deputation of Indian Army for training purposes to Namibian Defence Forces, Centre of Excellence in Information Technology.

"Then there will be a MoU between Namibian Institute of Public Administration and Management and our own IIM Ahmedabad and also between their Public Administration and our Lal Bahadur Shashtri Academy which trains civil servants because they are focused on developing their own capacities," he said.

Mukherhjee's visit which is the third and final leg of his three-nation tour is first by an Indian Head of State to Namibia in the last 21 years.

"Here in Namibia, the last visit of Head of State was made 21 years ago in 1995 and then Prime Minister (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee had visited in 1998. At that time legendary Sam Nujoma used to head Namibia and he was particularly beholden to India and was a very close friend to India politically," he said.

The visit of Mukherjee is also seen as "renewing political contact" with Namibia which has emerged as a country where democracy has firmed its roots, he added.

Besides crucial talks with President Hage G Geingob, Mukherjee will also address Namibian Parliament, besides visiting Independence Memorial Museum, Heroes Acre Memorial, addressing students and faculty of Namibia Institute of Science and Technology, a visit to Okapuka ranch and addressing Indian community.

PTI
NIA officer's murder case on a verge of breakthrough

Lucknow

oi-Vicky

Lucknow, June 16: The Uttar Pradesh police are on the verge of cracking the murder case of NIA officer Tenzil Ahmed. With the arrest of Atiullah, the police are on the verge of nabbing the prime accused Muneer.

On June 9 the police had zeroed in on the locations of Muneer and they say now it is just a matter of time before he too is nabbed.The UP police are currently questioning Atiuallah to get a better understanding of Muneer's gang.

However the police say that they have not yet found any link between Atiuallah and the murder of the NIA officer. During the course of the interrogation, Atiuallah has told the police that Muneer had visited him in March, the same month that the officer was murdered.

Atiuallah had been on the run since 2015 September ever since the murder of a student of the Aligarh Muslim University. After that the duo had not interacted much barring one meeting in Nepal.

However according to Atiuallah, he had visited Muneer once again in the month of March. The police had last week zeroed in on Muneer's location and suggested that he may be in the Ghaziabad area.

Munir has been termed as the main accused in the case. There are a few motives that the police had attributed to this murder. While one angle was a property dispute, the other was personal rivalry. It may be recalled some members of Tenzil Ahmed's family too had been arrested earlier.

The police learnt that Munir had nurtured a grudge against the officer. Munir a resident of Bijnor was accused of murder. The NIA officer is said to have passed on information regarding his location to the UP police which forced him to flee the place and take shelter in Old Delhi.

During the probe the police also learnt that one of the officer's relatives Rehan too nurtured a grudge. He had told the police that he was humiliated by the officer. He said that he had taken the help of Munir to murder the officer. Munir was riding pillion and shot the officer.

The police after a chase of nearly two months have finally managed to track the location of Munir. He has been cornered in the Ghaziabad area, police officials say. It is just a matter of time before he is arrested, Superintendent of Police, Umesh Shrivastava informed.

OneIndia News

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Story first published: Thursday, June 16, 2016, 8:38 [IST]
Chhath Puja fasting rules: What one must keep in mind during the 4-day festival

AAP sacks Alka Lamba as party spokesperson for two months

New Delhi

oi-Sandra Marina Fernandes

New Delhi, June 16: Two days after Delhi Transport Minister Gopal Rai resigned from his post citing health reasons, AAP on Thursday suspended Alka Lamba as the party spokesperson for two months.

Though there has been no official confirmation as to why Lamba was suspended, news reports suggest that she was suspended after she admitted that Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal asked Rai to step down.

Refusal of assent to 'office of profit' bill purely political: AAP

According to reports, it is said that the party believes that Lamba deviated from party line as she told reporters that Rai had been relieved as the Delhi Transport minister.

Lamba had made the comments outside the Anti-Corruption Branch's (ACB's) office, where she had gone to extend support to Rai.

While AAP said that Rai was resigning due to health reasons, Lamba said that chief minister Arvind Kejriwal wanted to ensure a fair probe into the corruption charges against Rai and hence asked him to step down.

Meanwhile, Rai had earlier said that he was ready to go to jail if corruption charges made against him were proved.

OneIndia News
Kerala CM accuses Gov of 'acting as RSS tool' on his order to VCs to resign

Jisha rape and murder case: Main suspect in police custody

Thiruvananthapuram

oi-Sandra Marina Fernandes

Thiruvananthapuram, June 16: In a major breakthrough in the Jisha rape and murder case, police officials have allegedly arrested the main suspect in the case.

According to news reports, the suspect was caught by police officials two days back. The suspect is said to have confessed to his crime later. He was caught at the Palakkad border and is now being questioned by police officials.

Dalit woman murder: Kerala police secure CCTV footage

Police officials however, are waiting for DNA results of the suspect to check whether they match the saliva and blood samples found on the victim's body before making any official confirmation on his arrest.

The suspect is a migrant worker from Assam.

Meanwhile, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday said: "One suspect has been taken into police custody in connection with the Kerala student rape and murder case." ""This is certainly going to be a feather in the cap of the police probe team," Vijayan told reporters.

The case gained national spotlight after several criticised the officials for not making a headway into the investigation. Vijayan, who came to power recently, assured a fast investigation and trial in the case.

The incident also threw light on the law and order situation and the safety of women in the state. The victim, who was a law student, lived with her mother. On 28 April, she was allegedly raped before being murdered in her home.

OneIndia News
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Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to kick off a new round of diplomatic trips to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan on Friday. Political heavyweights and experts on international relations between the four countries have high expectations for these upcoming visits. During his stay in Uzbekistan, Xi will also attend the two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Tashkent.

Serbia, the first Central and Eastern European state to establish a strategic partnership with China, has been scheduled as Xis first stop. With increasing political trust and collaboration between the two nations, Sino-Serbian ties look set for further development.

Hailing Xis visit as historic, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said that the tour will send an important message to the world that China attaches great importance to its friendship with Serbia. Last September, the Serbian president attended Chinas V-Day military commemoration parade.

Poland is also looking forward to Xis visit.

Gaining Chinas support and developing relations with China will surely open another door for Polands foreign affairs, said Professor Waldemar J .Dziak, head of the Asian and Pacific Department of the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Zdzislaw Goralczyk, honorary president of the Polish-Chinese Friendship Association, told the Peoples Daily that he was very excited upon learning of Xis forthcoming trip to Poland.

It will open a new chapter in Poland-China ties. Perpetual friendship between the peoples of Poland and China is a long-standing aspiration of mine, he noted.

Uzbekistan, a country along the ancient Silk Road, will be Xis third stop on his Eurasian trip. After upgrading their relations to a strategic partnership in 2012, China and Uzbekistan have witnessed a great leap forward in bilateral relations.

Davolone, a worker on the Qamchiq tunnel project, which is a part of the Angren-Pap Railway Tunnel Project contracted by the China Railway Tunnel Group, said that Xis visit is sure to usher in more cooperation between the two countries in various areas.

I hope I can continue to work with my Chinese friends to build my hometown into a better place, he told the Peoples Daily.

With this year marking the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Agreement on Strengthening Confidence in Military Areas in Border Regions by the Shanghai Five nations, the SCO Summit has been seen as serving as a link between past and future.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov said he looks forward to President Xis appearance at the SCO summit and that Uzbekistan stands ready to make new progress together with China.
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Huffington Post 16 Mar 2022

Nazanin is at the airport in Tehran," a British lawmaker said. The grueling ordeal for the British-Iranian mother began in 2016.
New Zealand Herald 06 Aug 2022

Covid-19 has been directly responsible for one in seven recent deaths  and has already claimed five times as many lives as those..
With the launch of a new surveillance system, the school has seen a much more positive atmosphere and almost no students use their cellphones, sleep or whisper in class any longer. This is the remarkable result achieved by Wuchang University of Technology ever since a monitoring system was put into use starting in March2015.

The surveillance system cost Wuchang University of Technology, in central China's Hubei province, over 6 million yuan. It covers the whole campus including every classroom, lab and even the dormitories. The high-definition videos make the real-time situation occurring in every class room very clear: if teachers give lessons while sitting or just repeat what the book says, and whether students are late or leave early, are using smart phones or sleep, it will all be captured in detail by this system.

Teachers and students will be punished or criticized if they are found guilty of such disciplinary-violating situations. More than 100 faculty members have been arranged to check the surveillance videos in turn.

"It helps for classroom management, to strictly ensure the quality of each lesson and it puts pressure on students to develop good study habits", said Sun Yi, quality mentor of the business school at the university.

"We can know about the students in class via the videos, if they violate disciplinary measures, we will talk with them and help them to study better", added Sun.

Since the launch of the move during the past more than one year, the classroom discipline has improved significantly and a more positive atmosphere of learning has been created. There are almost no students sleeping and using cellphones any longer, according to Yu Chengqing, a professor at the university.

From not be willing to adapt to gradually accepting it, Yan Yue, a student of the university said," in the beginning, we felt a little uncomfortable, but found it was helpful to our studies. The classroom discipline is better now and enthusiasm for learning has also improved."

But there are also students that hold different views. A student, surnamed Huang, has reported to the school that the cameras in the dormitories have made female students feel awkward. Another student, surnamed Zhang, believed that the winter is slightly better, in summer, they wear less and it is very easy to get pictured partially nude thus causing accidental exposures, the Chutian Metropolis Daily reports.
Yazidis or Yezidis are a Kurmanji-speaking endogamous minority group who are indigenous to Kurdistan, a geographical region in Western Asia that includes parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The majority of Yazidis remaining in the Middle East today live in Iraq, primarily in the governorates of Nineveh and Duhok. There is a disagreement among scholars and in Yazidi circles on whether the Yazidi people are a distinct ethnoreligious group or a religious sub-group of the Kurds, an Iranic ethnic group. Yazidism is the ethnic religion of the Yazidi people and is monotheistic in nature, having roots in a pre-Zoroastrian Iranic faith.
GVC Holdings Approved to Operate Online Gambling in New Jersey

Published June 16, 2016 by Elana K

GVC Holdings announces approval from the DGE - the company will be allowed to operate their online gambling site as the new owner of bwin.party, along with partners Borgata and PartyPoker.

Up until this week, GVC Holdings, a British company that acquired online gambling operator bwin.party in February of this year, was unsure whether it would be allowed to offer licensed online gambling in New Jersey. On Monday, the company announced that they received the verdict from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) - and the answer is yes. GVC Holdings will be allowed to operate their online gambling site as the new owner of bwin.party, along with partners Borgata and PartyPoker.

In a press release, GVC quoted the DGE as saying, GVC and its individual qualifiers possess the requisite good character, honesty and integrity should it file for a transactional waiver in the state. (The transactional waiver itself was also deemed unnecessary, which means that GVC Holdings can operate in New Jersey unfettered.)

GVC Sheds Light on New Jerseys Grey Market Stance

The question of approving GVC Holdings was a not a simple one, and it was exacerbated when GVC announced that its partner, PartyPoker, would re-enter 21 gray markets which it had exited two years ago. The company had originally exited these markets in an effort to secure licensing from New Jersey, but it appears that GVC does not have the same concerns that bwin.party had.

When GVC announced that PartyPoker would be re-entering these markets April, the DGE issued an advisory bulletin clarifying their stance on black and grey markets. If a company operates in a black market, the DGE will not consider it for licensing in New Jersey. If a company operates in a gray market, murkier territory, the DGE will consider it but make rulings based on each individual case.

In the case of GVC Holdings, the DGE decided to allow it.

Shaky and New Relationships

There were reports in the winter that Borgata was considering breaking ties with GVC, as it prepared to enter a relationship with Game Account Network (GAN) to offer real-money gaming in New Jersey. However, it seems that this was only a backup plan in case GVC licensure wasnt approved. Now there are two things that seem to be cementing the Borgata-GVC relationship: The DGEs approval, and MGMs new majority ownership of the Borgata, which will be finalized later this year.

Now there are two things that seem to be cementing the Borgata-GVC relationship: The DGEs approval, and MGMs new majority ownership of the Borgata, which will be finalized later this year.

As of now, Borgata has been the leader in online casino revenue for New Jersey, and the hopes are that with GVC and MGM now at the helm, these numbers will only continue to soar.




As the news background and introduction to my own reflections:



ELECTION JUSTICE ON CALIFORNIA PRIMARY: 'EARLY VOTER EXIT POLL YIELDS 23% DISCREPANCY WITH L.A. VOTE-BY-MAIL TOTALS'

From DAWN PAPPLE's excellent article in the Inquisitor June 14:

Election Justice USA affirmed that a Capitol Weekly early-voter exit poll conducted across the state of California yielded a 23 percent discrepancy in Los Angeles vote-by-mail ballots compared to the actual results.

During the polling of the early round of mail-in voters, Hillary Clinton had a lead over Bernie Sanders in the Los Angeles area that was less than 10 percent.

Election Justice USA, a voter advocacy non-profit organization, says that the discrepancy is enough to demand a hand audit of the early mail-in ballots.

"The discrepancy cannot be easily explained by demographic factors: the results of the Capitol Weekly exit poll were weighted by age and race. Moreover, the exit poll had 21,000 respondents and was praised by mainstream elections journalists.

While no exit poll can prove fraud, a significant exit polling discrepancy such as this constitutes cause for alarm, and certainly one of this magnitude. It's also sufficient cause for immediate action: voters should bring pressure to bear on officials and demand an expanded hand audit."

"The results of the online exit poll show Hillary leading in absentee votes by 10 points. This does not predict that she is going to win by that margin, but it gives us a sense of the current state of the race based on ballots already cast, and the starting point for each campaign as polls open at 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning."

The exit poll did not account for mail-in ballots that were sent in during the week preceding the election, nor the vote-by-mail ballots that were hand-delivered to polling locations. The results were screened to include non-partisan voters who obtained a Democratic presidential ballot, according to Capitol Weekly. California voters who were registered as "No Party Preference" were required to obtain Democratic cross-over ballots in order to vote in the Democratic primary.

The cross-over ballot requirement is also at the heart of an upcoming lawsuit, according to an earlier report by the Inquisitr, which says that civil rights attorney Bill Simpich claims that incomplete and incorrect instructions were sent to No Party Preference voters. According to Simpich, instructions on obtaining cross-over ballots were not "made clear in the instructions sent.

According to Trust Vote, an election integrity lawsuit has been delayed, because of the organization officials' "desire to include election data from California."

"In other eleven states besides California, there has been noted a significant difference between the Edison Research exit polls and the electronic vote totals presented on the morning after the primaries. These differences show votes appear to be shifted from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. The chances of this kind of shift happening are considered to be statistically impossible between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in these eleven states."

>>>>

From Stephen Fox: I have been politically active since I was 12. The first election I participated in saw me hanging literature for JFK on doors in a University town in semi-rural Illinois, so my political memories as a participant go back 58 years, and even further, to 1953, when I met Eleanor Roosevelt as a 5 year old.

I worked on Capitol Hill as a volunteer Gandhian Lobbyist in the mid 70's, and then had a snowball-in-hell campaign for the US Senate here in New Mexico in 1977-8. I lost at the state convention to the NM Attorney General, who then lost to the Republican incumbent, but I gained so much in knowledge, in self-confidence, and in political connections.

But now, I have to sadly put into words what we have all come to recognize, that 2016 saw by far the crookedest elections I have ever witnessed or even imagined. What discourages me most is that the #1 victim of these dirty tricks, Bernie Sanders, and his top staff, are not thus far screaming indignantly about all of this daily.

Those hanging chads were a form of manipulation and cheating. We turned the other cheek, we looked the other way, and we ignored Mr. Diebold with his voting machine company being the head of Ohio for Bush, as if that somehow were acceptable. However, with the Bush Daddy I's appointees on the Supreme Court, Bush II's cheating was in the long run accepted by most Americans as "fair and square."

But 2016? This one tears my heart out, because no matter what we seem to do, it falls short, unable to challenge that one lie here, that one manipulation there, all of which adds up to a grotesque perversion of the final spasms of American Democracy.

The hijacked primary in NY, the guilty ladies at the BoE not even yet indicted for those voter purges, not even questioned once by anyone from the once venerable Associated Press, and, further, absolute silence from the officials, like the Attorney General of New York and the United States Attorney from the Southern District of New York, both of whom should have started demanding days after the hijacked primary that it be done over again, even before we started asking them to do so by petition and by letter; even with the evidence going right up to causal circumstances by Hillary's friend, Congresswoman Nita Lowey, and we can only quietly wonder whether the Congresswoman and her realtor daughter have been questioned by the FBI or any law enforcement officials as to the rat-infested brownstone the realtor daughter sold in 2014 at jacked up prices for the prime purger at the NYC Board of Elections, which was so weird that even the Wall Street Journal ran an article about it!





(please read Netra Halperin's OEN article and her interview on this; she is a Bernie Delegate from Hawaii. Also, Florida's Alison Landes superb letter to United States Attorney Preet Bharara, and her article about the 2016 Election being a deja vu of the 2000 Election, all 4 articles here at OEN)

All of this election mayhem and lots lots more were all topped off by the crowning insult to Democracy, in the form of the Associated Press coronation of Bernie's flawed opponent two days before California: those are the two most egregious fatal blows to Democracy. (Did you know that both Reuters and Associated Press are owned by the Rothschild's?)

We are not even beginning here to start any discussion of the DNC and its top officials have done to impede Bernie.

It would take an army of forensic experts to catch all of the vote flipping that went on in this election, and we don't have another army to help Bernie.

We ARE the army, and we have access to all of the courts (courts of law, courts of Wall Street stock prices, and courts of public opinion), but without the candidate himself calling "FOUL," what good is our army of volunteers, even with the courts? The best voices and most insightful contributors are in the Facebook jail half the time, more in my case (2/3 of the time since I became into this campaign 4 months ago!)

I am indeed a die hard, and not giving up at all, but, damn, it gets discouraging sometimes. I put out the word to write to this precisely appropriate official or that, because of their statutory responsibilities; thousands read it, dozens write and ask for "talking points," "bullets," or a "template" letter, which I always declined to provide, instead, telling them to reread what they were sent; and maybe twenty actually write, and then the official answers none of the correspondents. So it goes....

Will Bernie and his tribe have the guts to file complaints in every appropriate court about the unprecedented fraud, flipping, purging, and God knows what other new dirty tricks of election rigging will become clear? Watch his live online video message Thursday night (tomorrow) at 8:30 EST. You have to RSVP.

A very wise 89 year old friend of mine, Maurice Webster, author of one great article at OEN on Trump's Demagoguery and of the forthcoming book, Machiavelli for the 21st Century, reminded me this morning of Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate for President. Thomas' goal was the implementation of his platform, and when FDR adopted his platform and turned it into what accept as normal government, Norman Thomas declared that therefore, he was done, and that his purpose had been fulfilled.

That is a new way of looking at Bernie's views and precepts, whereas before I had always considered platform discussions just another kind of consolation prize, a booby prize for the candidate who is told "We stole your White House from you, and now you can feel better about us stealing your ideas, so your supporters will support us."

I certainly do not imply that Bernie could and should keep running, but that of course would be an excellent idea, if either other candidates gets the White House. He might decide to do so, if he does have to return to the Senate as the most powerful and most respected US Senator, which I am not willing to yet concede as something that has to happen.

Several private citizens' group have taken on the exhausting job of cataloging and documenting ALL of the fraud. Election Justice USA's suits are there and intact, and now, they should step it up and ask for the relief to be granted: the courts ordering at least ten primaries to be done over. That might shake loose a few super delegates if it took place soon....

As I recall, there has been at least one occasion in American History when there have been two conventions, for a variety of reasons. This could happen and would just about have to happen in 2016, for reasons that may be yet revealed by the FBI, to start with.

From an article by Drew DeSilver, published by the Pew Charitable Trust:

"We looked at all 60 Democratic and Republican nominating conventions from 1868 to 1984, the last time a convention presented even a glimmer of uncertainty. Over that time, 18 candidates (eight Republicans and 10 Democrats) were nominated on multiple ballots; of those, only seven were elected president (and four of them were running against another multiple-ballot nominee, so one of them had to win).

All told, of the 22 presidential elections held between 1868 and 1952 -- the last multiple-ballot nomination to date, of Adlai Stevenson as the Democratic standard-bearer -- 14 featured at least one major-party nominee who'd won on multiple ballots. These often were referred to as 'brokered conventions,' a term we're avoiding here because of its connotations of shady backroom deals."

>>>>

One extraordinarily dirty and complex election was 1824, from History.com, and this may sound familiar. Remember that military hero and hawk Andrew Jackson went on to win the election, then commit all kinds of atrocities, the worst of which I believe to be the forced evacuation of the Cherokees, making them march to Oklahoma in the winter, the Trail of Tears, the only time in American History that a President has defied his own Supreme Court....

John Quincy Adams vs. Henry Clay vs. Andrew Jackson vs. William Crawford

"The Republican party broke apart in the 1824 election. A large majority of the states now chose electors by popular vote, and the people's vote was considered sufficiently important to record. The nomination of candidates by congressional caucus was discredited. Groups in each state nominated candidates for the presidency, resulting in a multiplicity of favorite-son candidacies. By the fall of 1824 four candidates remained in the running. William Crawford of Georgia, the secretary of the treasury, had been the early front-runner, but severe illness hampered his candidacy. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts had a brilliant record of government service, but his Federalist background, his cosmopolitanism, and his cold New England manner cost him support outside his own region. Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who owed his popularity to his 1815 victory over the British at the Battle ofNew Orleans, were the other candidates. With four candidates, none received a majority. Jackson received 99 electoral votes with 152,901 popular votes (42.34 percent); Adams, 84 electoral votes with 114,023 popular votes (31.57 percent); Crawford, 41 electoral votes and 47,217 popular votes (13.08 percent); and Clay, 37 electoral votes and 46,979 popular votes (13.01 percent). The choice of president therefore fell to the House of Representatives. Many politicians assumed that House Speaker Henry Clay had the power to choose the next president but not to elect himself. Clay threw his support to Adams, who was then elected. When Adams subsequently named Clay secretary of state, the Jacksonians charged that the two men had made a "corrupt bargain."

What does all of this imply and what is it leading to? Since we are not privy to what Bernie and his opponent discussed Tuesday night, and the campaign staff doesn't communicate back to most of his strongest supporters, as far as I can see, we will just have to wait and see.

For sure, the convention will be astonishing. Rather than crack heads in the street, there should be an alternate convention, or at least some kind of other venue, for the protesters locked out of the big convention, to get in off the streets and talk with each other. Let's call it RESHAPING THE NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

Make no mistake on this last point: by supporting Bernie Sanders and his ideals, you are part of history and part of the long overdue solutions, not part of the Neocon problems and the corporate manipulations. Wall Street may be happy with both front running candidates who have or almost have secured the nominations, but the people are not happy. That cannot last, with so many angry people who have been lied to so many times.

>>>>

Thanks so much to every one of you who read my recent article here at OEN on the uncounted votes in the California Primary. I have never before had 16,000 readers in 56 hours for one of my articles, and that largely derived from Facebook users posting it all over the Bernie Groups, something I can't do, because of posting that article about how to avoid violence at the Philadelphia Convention, I am still in Facebook Jail and thus restricted from posting to any groups, not even the one I started with about 1900 members now, called Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Win! which I welcome the reader to join.
Article originally published in The Post and Courier



By Robert Weiner and Ben Lasky

Friday, June 17 marks the one-year anniversary of the shootings and murders of nine victims at Emanuel AME Church.



While the Confederate flag has been taken down throughout South Carolina, mass shootings haven't stopped, as the June 12 horrific mass killing of 49 in Orlando shows once again. Guns and assault weapons aren't any harder to buy. The flags are lowered, but guns are still raised.



Though he lost the Republican presidential nomination, Ted Cruz was right when he said that the 2016 election is important to the future of the Supreme Court and the Second Amendment. On Feb. 14, Cruz appeared on "Meet the Press" and said, "We are one justice away from the Second Amendment being written out of the Constitution altogether."

Cruz, a constitutional lawyer, knows that the Supreme Court can't simply get rid of an amendment. However, it can interpret it, and the one justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia could cause more murders, or slow down the carnage.

Both D.C. v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) were 5-4 decisions, with one of the five being Scalia. One judge has the ability to turn them both over and prevent thousands of deaths.

Every year, 33,000 people die by guns in the U.S., partially because of the then-majority's decision to ignore a modifying phrase in the Second Amendment of the Constitution. When is the last time anyone heard the modifier, "in forming a militia" when Second Amendment defenders talk about their "right" to own a firearm? They're wrong. If part of the National Guard, sure, someone must have a gun. However, where is it stated that everyone has the right to own a gun?

In his opinion representing the four dissenters in McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, "In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense. There has been, and is, no consensus that the right is, or was, 'fundamental.' "

Amazingly, the Supreme Court justices' majority of one followed a special interest National Rifle Association-leadership position, whereas polling consistently shows that 80 to 90 percent of Americans support reforms such as increased background checks. According to a 2012 poll by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, even among the NRA, 74 percent of its members support background checks on gun transactions.

After the Charleston shooting, South Carolina's revered Rep. James Clyburn, the assistant House Democratic leader, announced the introduction of the Background Check Completion Act, which would close a loophole that allowed the alleged shooter to purchase a firearm.

"Tragically, the Charleston shooter was allowed to purchase a gun even though the FBI had not completed his background check. My bill is a commonsense fix to our nation's gun laws, and I call on my colleagues in Congress to move it immediately towards passage," Clyburn said.

Unsurprisingly in the GOP House, the bill is languishing.

Many will tell you that the problem isn't guns, but mental illness as a decoy against doing anything about guns. However, a May 19 Washington Post article finds that "Most mass shooters aren't mentally ill." Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, found that only two out of every 10 mass killers are likely to be helped by the mental health system. The other eight suffer from various personality disorders that would not be helped.

When nine people at Emanuel AME were shot, it was for no other reason than the color of their skin. According to survivors, the shooter said, "I have to do it. You are raping our women and taking over our country. And you have to go."

Many believed that the Confederate flag represented that racism, and it was the right move to remove it from the Statehouse grounds in Columbia in July 2015. However, as we mark the anniversary of the shooting, removing the flag was only symbolic. Had their attacker not been armed with a gun, those who attended the Bible study that night probably would have survived. The sole purpose of a gun is to maim and kill quickly. How could Charleston -- and Newtown, Columbine, Virginia Tech -- San Bernardino and now Orlando -- not motivate action?

Florida Gov. Rick Scott said Sunday that "now is not the time" to debate ease of gun ownership.

That would be never, if the NRA leadership has its way again.

The best commemoration of the sad anniversary of the souls murdered at Emanuel AME Church would be to pass congressional legislation like Clyburn's -- and to act on Cruz' warning of what one new Supreme Court Justice could change but by finding one who properly reads the Second Amendment.
As with becoming a whistleblower or an activist or an artist there must be numerous reasons why any individual becomes a terrorist -- whether military, contract, or independent. Various irrational hatreds and fears (and promises of paradise after death) and the ready availability of weaponry certainly play roles.

But did you know that every single foreign terrorist in the United States in recent decades, plus domestic terrorists claiming foreign motivations, plus numerous poor suckers set up and stung by the FBI, plus every foreign terrorist organization that has claimed or been blamed for attempted or successful anti-U.S. terrorism have all claimed the same motivation? I'm not aware of a single exception.

If one of them claimed to be motivated by the needs of Martians, we might set that aside as crazy. If every single one of them claimed to be acting on behalf of Martians, we would at least get curious about why they said that, even if we doubted Martians' existence. But every single one of them says something much more believable. And yet what they say seems to be a secret despite being readily available information.

Typically, this information is reported toward the end of articles with unrelated headlines, such as the Washington Post's article on Wednesday headlined "Orlando shooter posted messages on Facebook pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS and vowing more attacks." One has to read the article to discover why he would have pledged his allegiance to ISIS. Then one finds these quotations of what he wrote or said:

"America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state."

"You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes . . . now taste the Islamic state vengeance."

"Mateen claimed he carried out the attack because he wanted 'Americans to stop bombing his country.' While Mateen's parents are from Afghanistan, he was born in the United States. Another witness said Wednesday that Mateen said, 'America needs to stop bombing ISIS in Syria.'"

There's a video on CNN of a survivor. The accompanying headline tells you nothing. But if you watch the video, you hear her say that she and other survivors listened to the killer call 911 and tell them that "the reason why he was doing this was he wants America to stop bombing his country." She also says that he asked if there were any black people present, and then told them "I don't have any problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough."

So this, like every other such act, was a deranged and indefensible commission of mass murder driven by resentment of U.S. bombing, and by some sort of belief in the larger cosmic justice to be found in killing the right type of people as revenge against that bombing. (Just as Americans defend bombing people in Afghanistan who've never even heard of the crimes of September 11, 2001, because of those crimes.)

National Public Radio, like the rest of U.S. society, holds such a strong belief in the importance of not knowing this, that it falsely reported the other day that, following a terrorist bombing in Spain, the people of Spain elected a rightwing government. In fact, the people of Spain became aware that the bombing was blowback for participation in a U.S. war; they elected a leftist government; and Spain pulled out of Iraq. And there was not another bombing in Spain.

While this latest terrorist's country was the United States, his comments may have referred to Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq or Pakistan or Yemen or Libya or Somalia, all countries that the United States is heavily bombing. This is confusing to Americans who imagine those wars are over or have no idea they were even begun.

Should we counter every kind of bigotry? Should we watch out for signs of the next killing spree and try to prevent it? Of course. But there are two much more effective steps that could be taken: (1) get rid of all the guns; (2) stop bombing people around the world.

If it pleases your desire to hate ISIS, bear this in mind: While the Orlando killer said the bombing of ISIS must stop, that is the very last thing ISIS wants. By being bombed it develops the power to motivate more killers. ISIS lives off the same thing the bomb manufacturers live off, the same thing the NRA lives off, the same thing major media outlets live off: the reliable expectation that the United States will try to solve every problem by just doing more of what created the problem in the first place.
Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121

"We're at a paradigm-shift moment in history, where we will look back at it and realize that a particular model of how we govern our affairs together became outdated. Kall's book Bottom-Up offers great alternatives and solutions that are not found in conventional governing models."



Carne Ross , is a former British diplomat, a strategy coordinator for the UN, and author of the book, The Leaderless Revolution.
The Arab/Moslem murderers are terrorizing us in multiple ways. No place seems to be safe from their reach. Our efforts to stop their attacks are failing. Heightened security measures and greater control over weapon purchases by suspected terrorists represent, at best, only partial answers.



Many theories were advanced to provide the basis and motivations for such attacks. One theory says that Moslems/Arabs hate our freedoms and our way of life. This is laughable. If I don't like your freedom or way of life, I may hate you but will not give my life to kill you and your family. Another theory is that the Islamic State is planning to destroy the United States and the West and replace those governments with an Islamic caliphate where Islam and Sharia rule. This is just as crazy. These people hardly have enough military strength to keep about thirty thousand people under control.

It is relatively easy to see what makes the Moslem/Arabs angry with the West in the general and the United States in particular. No body can give me a real reason why we are bombing the hell out of the Middle East these days. Every single day we are killing hundreds, if not thousands, of Moslems/Arabs though incessant bombing runs, drones or direct combat. Those we kill are people just like us. They have families, they have children and they have feelings. In Iraq alone, we have murdered over half a million Iraqis. The death toll in Syria is over 300,000 and climbing. Why are we doing this killing? Is it to limit the expansion of the Islamic State into Wisconsin or California? In reality, why do we care if the Islamic state controls more territory in Syria or Iraq?

Is our involvement designed to protect the Assad regime in Syria or the Al-Abadi regime in Iraq? Are we protecting the monarchies in Saudi Arabia or Jordan? Are we saving Israel? Whether or not we approve of the systems of government in the Middle East, it is not up to us to replace or defend them. It is up to the Moslem/Arabs to rule themselves. We need to save our energies and use them to solve our own serious problems that are more threatening to our democracy and future. We need to give more attention to our decaying infrastructure and find solutions to our growing wealth inequality that is decimating our economy. Let the Moslems/Arabs deal with their own problems.

Our interference in the Middle East does not help anybody. Our war in Iraq was a total disaster no matter what angle you use to look at it. Our role in Libya was a clear failure. We did not make the situation in Syria any better. The only thing that we did successfully is that we ensured that the masses of Moslems and Arabs in the Middle East have good reason to hate us and find ways to exact some revenge on us. Those of us of Islamic or Arabic roots always feel the pain and rage when we hear of our relatives and close friends being killed in aircraft or drone attacks in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan"etc. Mateen who committed the Orlando massacre said in his telephone call to 911: "the reason why he was doing this is because he wants America to stop bombing his country." This demonstrates that his primary motive for his terror attack was retaliation for the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan, where over 100,000 have been killed since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

If the Moslems/Arabs still living in the Middle East were to hold vigils for those killed by the West, it will be at least far larger that the one being held in Orlando for the killing of 50 people or in France for the murder of 150 French. Comparatively, Moslem vigils would involve the entire Moslem world of 1.6 billion people.

Perhaps we should reconsider what we are doing in the Middles East. We cannot get away with murder. Those Moslems are people just like us. They have feelings, families, children, hopes and desires. If we continue to kill them, we should expect revenge. Their revenge may not come in the form of drone attacks or aircraft bombing of Washington, Paris or London, but in the form of terrorist attacks here at home in Orlando or some other town. I often wonder who the real terrorists are: those who kill in the hundreds or those who kill in the hundreds of thousands?
VNC to integrate Collabora Online in VNClagoon

VNC

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Zug/Berlin  June 16, 2016  Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, and VNC - Virtual Network Consult, a leading vendor of Open Source based business software join forces to incorporate Collabora Online 1.0 into their product suite VNClagoon.VNClagoon is an integrated business framework consisting of highly flexible components and open interfaces that can be operated in any environment. VNClagoon covers all aspects of a modern, powerful private Cloud application environment  from back end and server infrastructure, to customizable applications, middleware components and a beautiful user interface running on any device. VNClagoon includes Email & Groupware, Social Media & Collaboration, Portals, Unified Communication, Project Management and many more functionalities. With the addition of customized Collabora Online, VNClagoon will include an online office suite, which allows its users to view office documents online, create new content and work collaboratively from any place at any time.VNClagoon is an extrodinarily rich and complete Open Source solution for the Enterprise., said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. Were delighted to partner with VNC, and to integrate with their stack. There is no doubt that VNC will fulfill the needs of business users in key markets with their new product.Collabora Online is an essential building block for VNClagoon., said Bernd Rodler, VNC Chairman of the Board. Our business clients demand powerful online office suite functionality and we believe that Collabora Online is the best solution.If you are interested in receiving pre-release information, please contact pr@vnc.biz or sales@collaboraoffice.com.About VNCVNC - Virtual Network Consult is a leading developer of open source based business software, a business cloud integrator and a specialist in commercial open source solutions. VNC provides services to organizations and businesses of all sizes - from small and medium businesses to globally operating corporations. Our services range from platform data center solutions to complex business applications  mobile and suited to the needs of each client. For more information, visitandAbout Collabora Productivity:Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visitor follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.VNC - Virtual Network Consult AGPoststrasse 246301 ZugSwitzerlandAndrea Woerrlein+41 41 7275200pr@vnc.biz
New Yorker Electronics and Mallory Sonalert Partner to Deliver Sound Options with Two New Audio/LED Indicator Series

Mallory Sonalerts ZT Series Audible Alarms and JT Series Stack Lighting

NORTHVALE, NEW JERSEY  Mallory Sonalert and franchise distributor New Yorker Electronics are delivering two innovative, new indicator series with both sound and LED light capabilities. The first is Mallory Sonalerts ZT Series, the first to combine a loud audio alert with an LED in a small industrial package. The second is Mallory Sonalerts new Stack Light JT Series with the unique triangle shape, available with or without sound.Audio Products - ZT Series of Audible AlarmsThe Mallory Sonalert ZT Series is the first industrial grade sound indicator to combine a loud warning sound with a colorful LED light in a small 22mm panel mount package. Another industry first, the new ZT Series offers the ability to choose a timing option -- which means that when power is applied to the ZT indicator, both the alarm and light will be activated for either 15 or 30 seconds. The audible alarm will then silence while the LED continues flashing until power is removed. This unique option lets the operator continue to address the alarm condition without the distracting audible sound.The series is available in 28VDC, 28VAC/DC and 120VAC voltage ranges with display indicators available in red, green, yellow and blue. Many sound variety options are also available.Combining the audible alarm and LED into the same small 22mm package saves space and reduces installation time. More importantly, operator and machine safety are improved when using a dual indication (sound with light) approach.Features & Benefits: Combines audible and visual alerts in one small device Warning Signal  85dB to 95dB at 2 feet Voltage ranges of 28VDC, 28VAC/DC and 120VAC Address the alarm condition without the distracting audible soundApplications: Industrial Controls Transportation MedicalOptoelectronics - JT Stack Light SeriesMallory Sonalert has also introduced a new stack light series, available both with and without sound. The optional sound element in these models is a vast improvement from previously available market devices. Mallory Sonalert is the first manufacturer to offer a sound frequency of 2000Hz -- which is preferred over 3000Hz and higher frequencies used in other products. Each JT Series stack light is equipped with four sounds, including continuous, medium pulse (5pps), plus two new unique sounds (a slow double pulse and a continuous tone for five seconds followed by a short pulse tone every one second).Stack lights in this series feature state-of-the-art brilliant LED colors in red, yellow, green, blue and clear. They have ultra-low current draw (40mA max) and are cUL approved with a NEMA 4X waterproof rating. Operators can choose from two power options (24Vac/dc or 120Vac), with or without sound, and can select either pole or direct mounting.Features & Benefits: Unique triangle shape State-of-the-art LED lighting 2000Hz sound frequency 6 Sounds per stack light including 2 new sounds Direct or pole mounting 24VAC/DC or 120VAC 1- to 5-color stacks available Ultra-low current draw cUL pending; NEMA 4X; IP-66 pendingApplications: Indoor Industrial ControlNew Yorker Electronics is a franchise distributor for Mallory Sonalert and supplies all its products and components.New Yorker Electronics is a certified franchised distributor of electronic components, well known for its full product lines, large inventories and competitive pricing since 1948. New Yorker Electronics is an AS9210 and ISO 9001:2008 certified source of capacitors, resistors, semi-conductors, connectors, filters, inductors and more, and operates entirely at heightened military and aerospace performance levels. It also functions in strict accordance with AS5553 and AS6496 standards  verifying that it has implemented industry standards into everyday practices to thwart the proliferation of counterfeit parts. It is a member of ECIA (Electronics Component Industry Association) and of ERAI (Electronic Resellers Association International).209 Industrial Parkway, Northvale, New Jersey 07647 mpappas@newyorkerelectronics.com 201-750-1171
Dental Services Global Market Briefing Released By The Business Research Company

http://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/our-research/healthcare/dental-services-global-market-briefing-2016/

Dental Services Global Market Briefing provides strategists, marketers and senior management with the critical information they need to assess the global Dental Services sector.Dentists are health practitioners who operate private or group practices in their own premises or in other facilities such as hospitals or health maintenance organization (HMO) medical centers. They provide dental preventive, cosmetic maintenance and/or emergency care. They might also specialize in a single field of dentistry.The Dental Services industry comprises establishments of licensed health practitioners having the degree of D.M.D.  Doctor of Dental Medicine, D.D.S.  Doctor of Dental Surgery, or D.D.Sc.  Doctor of Dental Science.The segments in the Dental Services market are general dentistry, oral and maxillofacial surgery, endodontics, orthodontics, paediatric dentistry, periodontics, oral pathology, and dental public health.Dental Service Organizations(DSOs)-The dental services industry is experiencing a change in its delivery model through dental support organizations giving rise to corporate or group practices. The DSOs are facilitating more in-house treatments such as orthodontics, endodonticand oral maxillofacial surgery instead of being referred to a separate specialist. Group practices also provide better funding for infrastructure, equipment and expenses associated with hiring specialistsPreference For Ceramics There has been a shift from metal-based restorations towards ceramics. That change has meant both better aesthetics and performance. The change has been supported by improved imaging and material cutting techniques using CAD/CAM and laser processesDescription Dental Services Global Market Briefing Report from the Business Research Company covers market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional breakdowns, competitive landscape, market shares, trends and strategies for this market. The market characteristics section of the report defines and explains the market. The market size section gives the dental services market revenues, covering both the historic growth of the market and forecasting the future. Drivers and restraints looks at the external factors supporting and controlling the growth of the market. Market segmentations break down the key sub sectors which make up the market. The regional breakdowns section gives the size of the market geographically. Competitive landscape gives a description of the competitive nature of the market, market shares, and a description of the leading companies. Key financial deals which have shaped the market in the last three years are identified. The trends and strategies section highlights the likely future developments in the dental services market and suggests approaches.Reasons to Purchase Get up to date information available on the dental services market globally. Identify growth segments and opportunities. Facilitate decision making on the basis of historic and forecast data and understand the drivers and restraints on the market. Develop strategies based on likely future developments. Gain a global perspective on the development of the market.ScopeMarkets Covered: Dental ServicesCompanies Mentioned: National Health Service, Integrated Dental Holdings (IDH), and Aspen Dental.Geographic scope: Americas, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Oceania.Time series: Five years historic and forecast.Data: Market value in $ billions.Data segmentations: Regional breakdowns, market share of competitors, key sub segments.Sourcing and Referencing: Data and analysis throughout the report is sourced using end notes.Table of Contents Dental Services Market Characteristics 3 Dental Services Market Historic Growth 5 Drivers of the Market 5 Restraints on the Market 6 Dental Services Market Forecast 7 Drivers of the Market 7 Restraints on the Market 8 Dental Services Market Geography Split 9 Dental Services Market Competitors 10 National Health Service 10 Integrated Dental Holdings (IDH) 10 Aspen Dental 11 Dental Services Market Key Mergers and Acquisitions 12 Dental Services Market Trends and Strategies 13 Abbreviations 14 Currencies 14 The Business Research Company 14List of TablesTable 1: Global Dental Services, Historic Market Size, 2011  2015, $ Billion 5Table 2: Global Dental Services Forecast Market Size, 2015  2019 , $ Billion 7Table 3: Global Dental Services , Split By Region, 2015, $ Billion 9Table of FiguresFigure 1: Global Dental Services Historic Market Size,2011-2015, $ Billion 5Figure 2: Global Dental Services Forecast Market Size,2015  2019, $ Billion 7Figure 3: Global Dental Services Market, Split By Region, 2015, $ Billion 9Buy Now Dental Services Global Market Briefing is a detailed report giving a unique insight into this market. The report is priced at $1000 for an individual user. To use across your office the price is $1500 and $2000 if you wish to use across a multinational company. Clients are able to input on the design of the report and highlight points of special interest.About The Business Research CompanyVisit TheBusinessResearchCompany.com, mail info@tbrc.info or call +447443439350 or +918897263534 or +919160996838 for more information on this and many other titles.The Business Research Company is a market research and intelligence company which excels in company, market and consumer research.It has research professionals at its offices in the UK, India and the US as well a network of trained researchers globally. It has specialist consultants in a wide range of industries including manufacturing, healthcare, chemicals and technology.The Business Research Company's management have more than 20 years of varied business research experience. They have delivered hundreds of research projects to the senior management of some of the world's largest organizations.The Business Research Company,Horizon Avenue,8-2-603/b/s/1/2Road Number 10Banjara HillsHyderabad (India)+91 8897263534
The University of Stuttgart has fallen under wide criticism among Chinese students in Germany after the university rector allegedly denounced the excessively large Chinese community on campus as a thorn in the side.

Chinese students at the university began to feel bitter about their rector after local media outlet Stuttgarter Zeitung ran an article titled in translation as University rector criticizes large proportion of foreigner [students] on June 10.

The university rector, professor Wolfram Ressel, said in the article that the 1,300 Chinese students are part of the growing population of foreign students on campus which has about 28,000 people in total and the Chinese is the largest community.

Ressel pointed out how Chinese students, many of whom have poorer language abilities, tend to stay together and seldom attend campus activities. He also said in the interview that the Chinese students often use the kitchens to cook for themselves without cleaning up later, hence giving rise to conflicts.

We hope that Stuttgart could get sincere and outstanding foreigners  we generally wish to attract the best minds, Ressel was quoted as saying.

In addition, many students expressed their disagreement especially against one sentence in the abstract, which said Chinese students especially, are a thorn in the eye to him. The unfriendly wording quickly drew much attention and some recent translated articles in Chinese related to the incident simply wrote it as a direct quotation from the rector, adding more fuel to the fire.

Even if it is a slip of the tongue of the rector, it has reflected some Germans prejudice against Chinese, a Chinese student at the university, who requested anonymity, told Peoples Daily Online.

The VCWSS, a local organization for Chinese students and scholars, on Wednesday said on its official WeChat account that it has contacted the university rector through email and telephone and a meeting will be held to dismiss possible misunderstanding.

Officials with the Chinese Consulate-General in Frankfurt also expressed serious concerns, and have contacted the universitys international office, said the VCWSS, while calling for overseas students to stay rational and objective.

On the other hand, some also admitted the problems raised by the rector, as some Chinese students new to the Western lifestyle are yet to adapt themselves to their new life, said an article published on Tuesday on the WeChat account of abcdv.net, one of the largest online forum for Chinese nationals in Germany.

It also noted that it is a case of cultural clash when Chinese students are deemed as reluctant to join new groups, while expressing hope that overseas students can gradually learn to openly express themselves so that others will not see Chinese as dorks who only smile in front of others.
KYC2020 adds Politically Exposed Person (PEP) from over 198 Countries

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Chicago, IL  June 15, 2016 - KYC2020 (kyc2020.com), the single source for comprehensive Know Your Customer (KYC) & Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance regimes, today announced support for screening Politically Exposed Person (PEP) from over 198 Countries to its services platform and screening engine. KYC2020s target customers include companies required by regulations to screen all customers under an AML regime such as MTO/MSBs, Real Estate, FX dealers, and Banks, to name a few. Not only do they require affordability, but they also demand a single point of screening that is comprehensive. With the addition of PEP lists to our existing screening capabilities that include Sanction, Criminal, and Terrorist lists, we are able to deliver a more complete solution, stated Joseph Iuso, CEO.The Federal level PEP lists have been gathered from the CIA, Canada, United States, Australia, Mexico, United Kingdom, and the European Union. By Q4, 2016, KYC2020 will be matching up the 198 countries on the CIA list to provide more specific data that is currently only available with each country specific list, followed by state/provincial level lists. It is anticipated by KYC2020 that there will be well over 200,000 persons on the list once the process is complete.Other Key Features of KYC2020 include, Individual or Batch based searches, Custom Private Lists, a database of over 220 Criminal, Sanction, Terrorist and PEP Lists, Downloadable PDF Reports, ability to qualify/score search results, and Daily checking/updating of all lists.Since its inception in 2014, KYC2020 has been focused on providing a low cost, easy to use, alternative to small and medium size businesses who require KYC Criminal, Sanction, Terrorist and PEP list screening.About KYC2020 LLC.KYC2020 LLC. () is the single source for comprehensive Criminal, Sanction, Terrorist, and PEP information for Know Your Customer (KYC) & Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance regimes. By leveraging the KYC2020 suite of tools, organizations can reduce risk, improve productivity, increase profitability and grow their business. KYC2020 LLC. is head-quartered in Chicago, Illinois with locations in Canada, and India. For more information, please visit:or email sales@kyc2020.comContact:To learn more please contact:KYC2020, LLC211 West Wacker Dr. Suite #1010Chicago, Illinois 60606Web:Email: sales@kyc2020.com
Quanmax MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 OPS-module-pluggable Multi-touch Bezel-free Flat Panel Monitor: Benefit You with Advantages of Both Panel PC and OPS Module

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OPS (Open Pluggable Specification) is a standard created and issued by Intel to help digital signage operators to easily, quickly and widely deploy rich media content in a cost-effective manner through the standardized interchangeable mechanical interface between digital signage displays and media players.Based on this design concept of standardization and interchangeability mentioned above, Quanmax launches an innovative 15"/17"/19" OPS-module-pluggable Multi-touch Bezel-free Flat Panel Monitor, named MoniQ-1500/1700/1900, and attempts introducing OPS design to more applications other than digital signage.First of all, MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 is an industrial LCD display monitor combining the most popular features at present for touch monitor, including 10-point PCT multi-touch function, scratch-resistant glass screen, contamination-resistant bezel-free flat panel and spray-resistant front panel. Secondly, it transforms itself into a panel PC when being plugged with an OPS module.What can MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 benefit with?Easy to maintainGenerally, breakdowns / failures may occur more frequently in the system itself than in the monitor. Imagine this situation: if the system unit could be easily drawn out from the whole panel PC, how great it is to only send back a small light unit to the supplier for maintenance! It can simplify logistics process and save a lot of delivery cost. Now, MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 provides such a solution to address this demand. Just remove the failed OPS module and sent it back to the supplier for maintenance. Of course, users can insert a backup OPS module or their supplier provide a temporary substitute to minimize the downtime of the whole panel PC.Easy to upgradeAs computing technology continues to advance, system upgrade is inevitable in each several years in order to fulfill requirements for higher performance and more applications. However, it is really a waste to replace a whole panel PC with a new one since the technical evolution of display is comparatively slower. MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 leverages the interchangeability design concept based on OPS standardized interface and allows users to easily upgrade the panel PC in an more economic manner. Users needn't discard a whole panel PC. Just plug a new higher-performance OPS module into MoniQ and the panel PC is then upgraded to the performance level desired.Space savingMoniQ-1500/1700/1900 is not only a monitor but also a panel PC. That is, the screen can be switched by selecting signal resource in OSD menu to display different images / videos input from both OPS module inserted in it and at maximum three external system computers via three built-in video input ports: VGA, DVI-D and HDMI. In practice, for example on factory floor or a workshop floor, MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 can help reduce infrastructure costs by minimizing monitor allocation and release more space in the working area.With all features of both industrial panel PC and OPS module mentioned above, Quanmax recommends MoniQ-1500/1700/1900 OPS-module-pluggable monitor as an alternative solution to panel PC when it is equipped with an appropriate OPS module. Being IP65 sealed from front side, it is suitable to harsh industrial environments without fear of ingress of water and dust. In addition, Quanmax offers a variety of OPS modules based on Intel Bay Trail, Haswell, Broadwell and latest Skylake platforms, to fulfill different performance requirements depending upon applications.More information about MoniQ, please visitFounded in 1999, Quanmax is committed to supply high-quality embedded computing products and solutions to help its clients develop a variety of computer-aided facilities for individual users and business firms in all industries including but not limited to Digital Signage, KIOSK, Gaming, Factory Automation, Machine Automation, Building Automation, Transportation & Logistics, Medical System and Telecom.Quanmax Inc.5F, No. 415, Ti-Ding Blvd., Sec. 2, Neihu District, Taipei, Taiwan 11493Tel: 886-2-27992789Fax: 886-2-27997399Email: sales@quanmax.comWebsite:
Food Preservatives Market to be worth US$2.56 bn by 2020 owing to Rising Demand for Convenience Food

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Transparency Market Research (TMR) has announced the addition of a new market study on the food preservatives market. The report is titled Food Preservatives Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2014 - 2020. According to the report, the global food preservatives market is expected to grow from US$2.0 bn in 2013 and is projected to reach a valuation of US$2.56 bn by 2020, expanding at a CAGR of 3.50% between 2014 and 2021.View exclusive Global strategic Business report :Food preservatives are added to food products to prevent microbial growth and spoilage of food. Food preservatives help in extending the shelf life of food and are thus used in the packaged and processed foods industry. Given the high demand for packaged food, convenience food or ready-to-eat meals, the global food preservatives market is expected to witness steady growth in the coming years.The global food preservatives market is driven by the growing concern over food safety. The rising incidences of disease outbreaks and food poisoning are fueling the demand for preservatives. The rising trend of natural food preservatives is expected to drive the market in the coming years. On the other hand, the difficulty in working with natural preservatives and the interventions and regulations by the government will threaten the global food preservatives market.The global food preservatives market is segmented on the basis of type, function, application, and geography. On the basis of type, the market is segmented into natural and synthetic preservatives. While synthetic preservatives are currently in demand, the trend will change soon as focus shifts to natural ingredients. The natural preservatives segment will witness a rise as manufacturers are increasingly focusing their research and development activities on natural preservatives. Another trend of mixing different preservatives to reduce cost is expected to drive the global food preservatives market.On the basis of application, the market is segmented into beverage, bakery products, dairy and milk products, meat, poultry, and sea food products, and others. Of these, preservatives are used extensively in beverages, bakery, dairy products, and meat and poultry products across the globe to resolve quality issues in the food industry.By geography, the global food preservatives market is segmented into Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and the Rest of the World. Of these, North America dominated the food preservatives market in 2013, followed by Asia Pacific. The demand for food preservatives in Asia Pacific is high due to a rise in demand from countries such as China, Australia, and South Korea. The North America food preservatives market is expected to rise from US$729.8 mn in 2013 to US$921.6 mn by 2020. TMR analysts suggest that the demand for food preservatives will be particularly high in the Rest of the World.The report profiles some of the key players in the global food preservatives market for the purpose of study. The companies included are BASF SE, Cargill Incorporated, Celanese Corporation, Chr. Hansen A/s, Corbion N.V., Kerry Group, The Archer Daniels Midland Company, and Du Pont.The global food preservatives market has been segmented as follows:ProductNatural PreservativesSynthetic PreservativesFunctionAntimicrobialAntioxidantsApplicationDairy and milk productsMeat, poultry and sea food productsBakery productsBeverages productsOther productsGeographyNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificRoWAbout UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactMr.Sudip S90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
3D Concrete Printing Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024

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Global 3D Concrete Printing Market: Overview3D concrete printing is a technologically advanced and innovative method used for constructing predesigned building components with the help of 3D concrete printers. The technology holds the promise of substantially optimizing the construction industry in terms of construction cost, time, error reduction, flexibility in design, and environmental impact. Past experiments have successfully acknowledged the technologys expertise on all these fronts and the technology is being steadily adopted on a larger scale around the globe. The field of 3D concrete printing is receiving increased focus from construction companies across the globe. These companies mainly focus on experimenting with different concrete mixes and printing machines to bring about further developments in this construction technique.With construction companies making continuous efforts to bring 3D concrete printing in mainstream construction, the global 3D concrete printing market is projected to gather significant momentum in the next few years. The report provides a 360-degree overview of the market, covering crucial market-related details about the key elements and segments of the market. The report examines the impact of the major growth drivers, challenges, and trends on the markets future growth prospects, underlining both the most lucrative and the most unprofitable investment areas.Interpret a Competitive outlook Analysis Report with free PDF Brochure:Global 3D Concrete Printing Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe rate at which construction companies, researchers, and technologists are coming together in the development of 3D concrete printing techniques is commendable. A variety of concrete mixes, such as shotcrete, ready-mix concrete, limecrete, precast and stamped concrete, and high-density concrete, are already in the market and many more effective mixes are being introduced at a steady pace. Construction companies are increasingly utilizing the technique to formulate building elements such as panels, lintels, roofs, floors, walls, and pavement slabs.The market is expected to receive a healthy boost from developing regions such as Asia Pacific and some parts of Latin America in the near future. The construction sector in these regions is projected to lead to an increased demand for cost-effective building elements fabricated through 3D concrete printing techniques to complement the several new infrastructure development and building construction projects.Global 3D Concrete Printing Market: Region-wise OutlookThe report examines the global 3D concrete printing market from a geographical standpoint and segments it into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Rest of the World. The market for 3D concrete printing in Asia Pacific is currently the fastest-growing regional market, primarily owing to the rising disposable incomes and rising population in the region, which have led to a major rise in new construction projects in the past years. China exhibits attractive opportunities for the Asia Pacific 3D concrete printing market. The growth witnessed by the market in China is due to the presence of some prominent innovators in the country, government backing, rising awareness regarding the benefits of 3D printing techniques, and an expanding set of applications.Global 3D Concrete Printing Market: Competitive LandscapeSeveral construction companies are actively experimenting with a variety of 3D printing techniques and more will do so over the forecast period. The Chinese company WinSun constructed 10 houses using 3D concrete printing in under 24 hours recently. The Dutch company Universe Architecture has designed the worlds largest 3D printer that uses sand as a binder for creating a stone-like material.Over the forecast period, many more companies will utilize 3D concrete printing technologies in a variety of construction activities. The market does not have many companies at present and thus products are limited in variety as well. Hence it faces the issue of lack of standardization. However, as more companies venture in the 3D concrete printing arena, products will become more standardized, sophisticated, and even more cost competitive. Some of the major companies currently operating in the global 3D concrete printing market are WinSun Global, Universe Architecture, Skanska, DUS Architects, Sika, Carilliom Plc., Fosters + Partners, and LafargeHolcim.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactMr. Sudip. STransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Global Child Day Care Service Market Growing Continuously: Market Size, Trends Opportunities (2014-2019)

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MarketReserchReports.biz has recently announced the addition of a market study "Global Child Day Care Service Market: Trends And Opportunities (2014-2019), is a comparative analysis of the global market for Pharmaceutical research.View Full Report:The report titled Global Child Day Care Services Market: Trends and Opportunities (2014-2019) analyzes the potential opportunities and significant trends in the global child day care service industry. The report provides detailed analysis of the global child day care service market including the country analysis of the U.S., Japan, India and Australia. It also provides specific data about the different types of child care services and large local players in the U.S., Japan, India and Australia child day care service market.In depth analysis of key market growth drivers and challenges and the major observable trends in the global child day care service market are also evaluated in the report. Leading companies operating in the global child day care service market, namely G8 Education, Bright Horizons Family Solutions and JP Holdings, have been profiled with their respective business strategies and financial overview. The growth of the market has been projected taking into consideration various aspects like previous growth patterns, the current trends, the growth drivers and challenges prevailing in the child day care service market.Country CoverageUnited StatesJapanIndiaAustraliaTo Get The Sample Copy Of This Report:Company CoverageBright Horizons Family SolutionsG8 EducationJP HoldingsExecutive SummaryChild day care services are becoming a necessary expense for working parents. Over the past five years, revenue has continued to grow despite of recession, driven mostly by increasing birth rates, increase in workforce requirements and increasing women workforce. The child daycare services industry revenue is expected to increase in the long run due to increase in number of parents returning to the workforce after recession, higher female workforce participation, increase in dual income households, growth of the disposable income and increasing focus on early education and child development.The employers are also adding the child daycare facilities to their employee benefit package to attract the talented employees and also to retain the existing employee. This employer sponsored provider market is very attractive and profitable and the large players are including this segment in their business mix to gain revenues.In the few past years, the number of companies offering child day care services has grown globally, due to rising demand for child day care services and the industrys low barriers to entry. Increasing mergers and acquisitions among major players have led to a gradual shift toward large establishments. This acquisition trend has temporarily slowed as a result of the slow economic recovery. However, companies such as Bright Horizons Family Solutions, Goodstart Early Learning, JP Holdings and G8 Education are expected to expand their global presence quickly over the next few years.Marketresearchreports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. Marketresearchreports.biz services are especially designed to save time and money of our clients.State Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United States
Global PET Foam Market Size, Shares up to 2020

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(Polyethylene terephthalate) PET foams possess different mechanical properties and high temperature dimensional stability. It is used in different application areas such as packaging, thermal insulating, wind energy, marine, transportation and building and construction applications. It is widely used as lightweight recyclable thermoplast. PET foam fallows great number of possibilities as a core material. The well-known core materials in the industry are SAN, PVC, and PMI foams, also honeycombs and balsa. PET foam is lightweight, flexible, offers a great compressive strength and is temperature resistant.Browse Full ReportPolyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Foam Market is mainly driven by increasing demand for the penetration from various end applications like marine and wind energy application. The rising demand across various application sectors such as transportation, marine, packaging, and building & construction. The Asia-Pacific region is the fastest-growing segment of the PET foam market. One of the major influencing factors for the growth of the global PET foam market is the upsurge in sales of end products owing to the increasing demand and spending by the growing population in the emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil among others. In addition, the volatile growth of the wind energy segment is in turn to improve the growth of the PET foam market as PET foams fulfill the wind energys demand for strength, low cost and light weight.The report segments the global PET foam market, on the basis of PET foam grade into low-density foam and high-density foam. Based on application the market is segmented as wind energy, transportation, marine, packaging, building and construction and others. Marin and wind energy application is the leading applications of the PET foam market. The packaging, marine, building and construction applications are expected to be the growing application segment of PET foam. PET foams are also used in industrial applications such as sandwich panels, special food trolleys, advertising panels, air containers and others.Get Request SampleIn order to give the users of this report a comprehensive view on the PET foam market, we have included a detailed value chain analysis. To understand the competitive landscape in the market, an analysis of Porters Five Forces model for the PET foam market has also been included. The study encompasses a market attractiveness analysis, wherein application segments are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate and general attractiveness.The study provides the comprehensive perspective on the PET foam market growth, throughout the forecast period in terms of volume (in Tons) and revenue (in USD Million), across different region including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa with its further bifurcation into major countries including U.S. Germany, France, UK, China, Japan, India and Brazil. Out of all the regional segments of the global market, Asia Pacific and North America will hold the dominant share in the overall PET foam market across the globe. This dominance is majorly witnessed due to the increasing demand for pet foam in its application segment.Some of the key player operative in global PET foam market includes BASF SE, Changzhou Tiansheng New Materials Co. Ltd., Armacell International S.A., Sekisui Plastics, DIAB Group, 3A Composites, Gurit Holding, Petro Polymer Shargh and Carbon-Core Corp.Get Illustrative Sample before buying:This report segments the global PET foam market as follows:Global PET Foam Market: Foam Grade Segment Analysis Low-Density Foam High-Density FoamGlobal PET Foam Market: Application Segment Analysis Traction Locomotive Smart Grid Electric Vehicle Charging OtherGlobal PET Foam Market: Regional Segment Analysis North Americao U.S. Europeo UKo Franceo Germany Asia-Pacifico Chinao Japano India Latin Americao Brazil Middle East & AfricaSyndicate Market 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 Syndicate Market 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 US3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach,Florida 33442,USATel: +1-386-310-3803GMT FREETel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651 FREEWeb:Email: sales@syndicatemarketresearch.com
Global Enterprise Mobility Management Market Size, Share, Trends, Growth and Forecast 2015 - 2021 - Acute Market Reports

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The global enterprise mobility management market is generating revenue of $1.5 billion in 2014 and is expected to grow at 35% CAGR during 2015-2021. The enterprise mobility management is segmented on the basis of solutions which include mobile device management, mobile content management, mobile application management and other applications. Mobile content management is expected to be the fastest growing stream during the forecasted period due to increasing demand for managing big data. Emergence of cloud computing creates significant opportunities before the enterprise mobility management market. The enterprise mobility management market is dominated by some major companies such as AirWatch (VMWare), Good Technology, BlackBerry, MobileIron, Citrix Systems, SAP, and IBM. Almost 60% of the market is captured by these firms.Browse Full Report Visit -The enterprise mobility management market is majorly driven by the growing number of mobile phone users within the organization. With the concept of Bring Your Own Device or BYOD consumerization of IT has emerged as significant trend driving the market. Also, the major buying criteria for EMM system are security and compliance. As people are using their own devices for accessing enterprise data, preventing data loss and data breach is the key concern for the Enterprise mobile management companies. Organizations are focusing on building multiplatform solutions to support multiple devices within the same network. Although, enterprise mobility is transforming the way business operates, security is the key concern in the adoption of enterprise mobility. BYOD has brought many benefits from cost savings to productivity gains, security and compliance is the major challenge before the enterprise mobility management market.The report segmented enterprise mobility management market on the basis of solutions, services, applications and region. The country level analysis of each geographical region is the USP of our report. The analysis of the report is based on various parameters such as Adoption rate of BYOD concept among enterprise, Number of mobile workers globally, growing development of mobile apps in organizations internally and so on. The data is collected through primary and secondary research. The report provides detailed analysis of key market players and their strategies.Companies profiled1 IBM (International Business Machines Corporation)2 Microsoft Corporation3 Mobile Iron4 Symantec Corporation5 Vmware, Inc (Airwatch )6 Amtel Inc7 Citrix Systems Inc8 Good Technology9 SAP10 SotiThis Acute Market Reports covers1. Historical data2. Revenue forecasts, growth rates and CAGR upto 20213. Industry Analysis4. Competitive Analysis5. Key geographic growth data6. In-depth profiling of companies1. Executive summary1.1. Market estimation methodology2. Market overview2.1. Market definition & scope2.2. Key findings2.3. Parametric analysis2.3.1. Adoption rate of BYOD concept among enterprise2.3.2. Number of mobile workers globally2.3.3. Growing development of mobile apps in organizations internally2.4. Key market insights2.4.1. Top 3 emerging countries2.4.2. Top enterprise mobility solutions adopted in business2.4.3. Top 3 emerging applications2.4.4. Winning strategy of the market2.4.5. Key strategy for adoption of mobility solutions by enterprise2.5. Porters five forces analysis2.5.1. Threat from existing rivalries2.5.2. Threat from new entrantsAbout - Acute Market Reports :Acute Market Reports is the most sufficient collection of market intelligence services online. It is your only source that can fulfill all your market research requirements.We provide online reports from over 100 best publishers and upgrade our collection regularly to offer you direct online access to the worlds most comprehensive and recent database with expert perceptions on worldwide industries, products, establishments and trends.Our team consists of highly motivated market research professionals and they are accountable for creating the groundbreaking technology that we utilize in our search engine operations to easily recognize the most current market research reports online.Contact Us :Chris PaulACUTE MARKET REPORTSOffice No 101, 1st Floor ,Aditi Mall, Baner,Pune, MH, 411045IndiaToll Free(US/CANADA): +1-855-455-8662India: +91 7755981103Email : sales@acutemarketreports.comWebsite :
Clot Management Devices Market - Newer Approaches to Clot Management Receiving Greater Acceptance Worldwide

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According to an article published in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, the awareness about venous thromboembolism (VTE) remains alarmingly low. What makes this scenario more concerning is that nearly 10 million VTE cases are estimated to occur every year across the world making this condition among the leading causes of disability worldwide. The International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis, Inc. states that while the United States reports anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 deaths resulting from VTE every year, this number is as high as 544,000 in Europe. A blood clot is several times more dangerous when it breaks away from the blood vessel wall (where it may have formed) and travels to the heart or lungs, creating a fatal blockage.Research Brochure Download:However, it is now widely believed that VTE-related hospital death is preventable, as the majority of VTE cases occur during or just after hospitalization. Medical experts are stressing on the use of the right clot management devices and therapeutics so that concerns about VTE as a public health problem can be alleviated. This realization has helped created appreciable demand for clot management devices across the world.As awareness about deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism rises, it is expected that more people will also become aware about VTE as a condition that could prove fatal if not addressed in time.Moreover, with approvals for self-monitoring devices coming in a faster rate than before, the global market for clot management devices will gain traction and stay firmly on the growth path in the coming years. In this report, this market is discussed at length and estimates are provided for the best-selling clot management devices. The overall revenue that clot management devices will generate worldwide by 2024 is also projected in the report.Newer approaches to clot management are now receiving greater acceptance among the medical community. This is expected to create a favorable environment for the growth of the global clot management devices market. The demand for effective clot management devices is also increasing because patients are wary of the many risks and discomforts associated with open-heart surgery and other highly invasive procedures. The demand for clot management devices will also rise with many medical surgeons now recommending percutaneous devices as an alternative to open surgeries.Despite the conditions currently indicating a positive outlook for the global clot management devices market, a gap between the demand and supply of trained physicians in many parts of the world will act against the markets growth. Moreover, reimbursement policies are not well-defined in many developing countries, which could also hamper the growth of the global clot management devices market.The global market for clot management devices can be broadly segmented on the basis of end users and the type of device used. By device type, the market can be segmented into: Embelectomy balloon catheters, neurovascular embelectomy devices, catheter-directed thrombolysis (CDT) devices, percutaneous thrombectomy devices, and inferior vena cava filters (IVCF).Browse Report:The demand for percutaneous thrombectomy devices has been rising at a healthy rate over the last few years. It is expected that several new research initiatives exploring new types of percutaneous thrombectomy devices will be reported through the reports forecast period. By end use, the key segments of the clot management devices market are hospitals and diagnostic centers.From the geographical standpoint, the global clot management devices market can be split into: North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Rest of the World. The United States is projected to remain at the forefront as far as innovation in clot management devices is concerned. Neurovascular embelectomy devices are expected to give the clot management devices market in the U.S. a further upward thrust.Transparency 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:
OSS/BSS Market Being Reshaped with Emergence of Convergent Billing Systems, to Post 12.7% CAGR from 2014a2020 As companies pump investments into customer service platforms, OSS/BSS will lay claim to a sizeable chunk of these investments, helping the global OSS/BSS market to be worth US$ 49.78 billion by 2020. This is one of the key findings of Transparency Market Researchs report titled OSS/BSS Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2014 - 2020. According to the reports estimates, the global operations support systems (OSS) and business support system (BSS) market will report a 12.7% CAGR from 2014 to 2020 as it grows from its 2013 valuation of US$ 21.86 billion. Today, the line between OSS and BSS solutions has blurred, thanks to companies offering both services with several overlapping features.



This has occurred because of the high degree of competition that prevails among market players - not just at the global level but also in regional OSS/BSS markets. Companies that boast a stronghold over revenues are: Amdocs, IBM, Alcatel Lucent, Tata Consultancy Services, Oracle Corporation, Accenture Plc, and others.An upward rise in the adoption of convergent billing systems and a pressing need for better customer care channels will help the global OSS/BSS market achieve unprecedented growth over the next five years. But, concerns that will need to be ironed out relate to the integration of new OSS/BSS solutions with existing customer care systems; this aspect could create impediments in the markets growth strategy. At the same time, an overall expansion of the global telecommunications sector will augur well for the global OSS/BSS solutions market.



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The report segments the global OSS/BSS market by process type into: OSS and BSS. The former is further segmented into network design, service fulfilment, network monitoring, and service assurance. According to the reports findings, the majority of the demand in the OSS market was for service fulfillment and service assurance solutions in 2013. The majority of this demand came from North America and Europe. The report further states the regions sway over the two segments will continue over the remainder of the forecast period.



Likewise, the BSS market is split into the following segments for the purpose of this study: Product management, customer management, order management and revenue management. The growth of the BSS market is projected to be strong in the coming years, with a steep demand for revenue management solutions and customer management services. However, in the long run, revenue management solutions will witness sustained demand globally with the decreasing ARPU and customers switching rapidly between communication services providers. We expect the CAGR of the revenue management BSS solutions market to be 14.3% between 2014 and 2020, says a TMR analyst.



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Furthermore, the global OSS/BSS market is segmented on the basis of geographical regions into: Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and Rest of the World. While North America led the global market in 2013 Europe followed in second place. Going forward, the massive investments being channelized into emerging countries for the establishment of a strong communications network infrastructure will give the OSS/BSS market in APAC and RoW a lift.



Global OSS/BSS Market, by Process Type



OSS



Network Design

Network Monitoring

Service Fulfillment

Service Assurance



BSS



Customer Management

Revenue Management

Product Management

Order Management



Global OSS/BSS Market, by Geography

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific

Rest of the World



Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global 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. TMRs 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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The Shennongjia National Park pilot program has been officially approved, the Information Office of Hubei Provincial Government held a press conference announced on June 15, 2016.

In addition, the result of Shennongjias application for World Natural Heritage area will be released next month at the 40th World Heritage Conference.

Shennongjia is located in northwestern Hubei province. The region's forest coverage rate is over 90 percent, and nature reserve forest coverage is up to 96 percent.

National Park network was created by the United States 100 years ago to protect natural resources, which now has become a globally recognized model.
Nylon copolymer Market Forecast- Industry to Grow high by 2019

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Industry InsightsThe organic chemical industry has rapidly evolved over the recent decade. The market provides raw materials to a range of end-use industries, such as plastic, paint and adhesive manufacturing. Increased consumer consumption and a rising export in Nylon copolymer is expected to boost the market growth across various regions. Organic chemicals are mainly produced from petroleum and natural gas routes. However, recent volatility in the cost of petroleum & natural gas along with continuous declining gas reserves has led industry players to look for alternative feedstock such as coal, biomass, and coal bed. Manufactures explore new applications and incorporate technological advancements in the manufacturing processes to boost the market growth.Rapid industrialization, fast growing chemical industry in the emerging regions such as China, India, and Brazil, would create abundant growth opportunities in the Nylon copolymermarket. Furthermore, growing financial prosperity across the globe and rising discretionary income levels across emerging economies offer promising growth prospects along the forecast period.Enquire About Report At:Strategic Insights:Producers and manufacturers focus on research and development activities to find alternatives methods of production to address the volatility in market prices. Chemical companies have set up manufacturing plants in regions with cheap availability of raw materials and easy access to cheap labor. This leads to operational efficiency and maximizing their revenue across various segments. In addition, market players collaborate with indigenous distributors to achieve economies of scale and augment their market share and size. Furthermore, the increased adoption of bio-based end-products would lead to more innovations in organic chemicals market and open new growth opportunities for the investors in the market.Key Takeaways The report offers a comprehensive overview of the key dynamics by covering market definition & scope, product classifications & specifications, manufacturing technology, and recent technological advancements in theNylon copolymer market . The study offers a detailed account of raw materials used for various chemical process industries, upstream analysis, and profile of downstream clients, supply chain overview, and competitive landscape scenario. The report segments the Nylon copolymer market on the basis of types, applications and regions. The report offers detailed insights into market estimations on various segments and factors affecting the market dynamics are highlighted. Insights into revenue share and profit margin of prominent companies along the historical period and forecast period are provided in the study. The study provides offers detailed profile of key manufacturers & vendors along with the strategies adopted by them to expand their presence.Key benefits The report offers an overview of the Nylon copolymer market status by extensively covering supply and demand for various downstream products, forecast on revenue margin by value and volume across major regions during 2009-2019. A detailed segmental analysis is done to determine the largest revenue generating segment across various countries. The report takes a closer look at the regulatory framework and favorable government initiatives to boost the growth of the market. The analysis evaluates the various factors through SWOT analysis of key vendors. Prominent strategies adopted by key market players involved in the production of Nylon copolymer are covered in detail which will help the stakeholders and producers to gain an in-depth understanding of the market. A detailed account of current and emerging technologies for the production, distribution, and end use of Nylon copolymer are offered in the analysis. Production share of major manufacturers help to understand the investment trends in the industry. A critical examinations of various government regulations on energy and environmental concerns are offered in the report.GeographyThe report covers the major regions such as the U.S., E.U., North America, and Asia-Pacific with a focus on China. The strategies adopted by market players in China that will help to expand their presence across international markets are offered. Governments in emerging nations offer fiscal incentives to modernize the manufacturing technologies. Recent initiatives by market players in developing nations have led to favorable trends in investment in the growth of Nylon copolymerindustry.Get Free Sample Copy Of Report At:Contact Us:James Jorden5320 SW Macadam Avenue,Suite 100,Portland, OR 97239,United States.Direct: +1-971-202-1575Toll Free: +1-800-910-6452Hong Kong Office : 852-301-84916Fax: +1 (855) 550-5975Web:Email:help@profresearchreports.comProf Research Report is a high end market research & consulting firm that offers current and future market intelligence across 30 industrial verticals such as energy, new materials, transportation, daily consumer goods, chemicals, etc through is quality database. Prof Research Report has successfully utilized technology to manage complex and massive market related database, which offers research reports of high analytical value.5320 SW Macadam Avenue, Suite 100, Portland
Richard Wolf presents its profile at the 24th International Congress of the E.A.E.S in Amsterdam

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(Knittlingen, 16 June 2016) The manufacturer of technical medical products Richard Wolf presents its ERAGON laparoscopic instrument generation at the European Congress of the European Association of Endoscopic Surgery in Amsterdam.Particularly in contemporary medicine, the importance of efficient processes is steadily increasing on account of the rising pressure created by spiraling costs in hospitals. Precisely at this point, Richard Wolf is making an impact with the ERAGON toolbox solution. The universal compatibility of ERAGON has the key advantage that laparoscopic trays can be configured individually and on an interdisiplinary basis at the same time.This enables optimized, uniformly constructed trays to be used in a number of departments working with laparoscopic instruments. Workflows in the operating room can be structured in a more efficient way. Interdepartmental theatre staff can always work with the same instrument set and this provides them with perfect conditions. When the tray is configured appropriately, surgeons can adopt a flexible approach to their patients and still select the suitable instrument diameter immediately before the intervention. A change from one instrument diameter to another is now possible during a procedure depending on the course of the operation.Beyond the operating theatre, the central sterile services department also benefits from this concept. Trays designed with the same configuration facilitate fast and safe throughput. Furthermore, virtually all the components of the tray can be sourced from Richard Wolf  this means one contact partner for all laparoscopy trays, with optimum ergonomic characteristics and premium material quality.The medical technology company has posted a OnePage on this topic online. All information on the ERAGON toolbox solution is summarized under. Comprehensive video material on products and interviews with surgeons and operating-room personnel are available online or directly at the congress booth from Richard Wolf.Other highlights displayed at the Richard Wolf booth are the mobile solution for operating room integration with core nova and a presentation of the new PANOVIEW ULTRA telescope generation for high-resolution image quality.Richard Wolf GmbH is a mid-sized company manufacturing medical instruments. It employs a workforce of more than 1,500 employees and maintains a global network of fourteen subsidiaries and 130 foreign representatives. The company develops, manufactures and markets a large range of products for endoscopy and extracorporeal shock wave treatment in human medicine. Integrated Operating Room Systems complete the product portfolio.Press contact:Richard Wolf GmbHPress OfficePforzheimer Strae 3275438 KnittlingenTel. +49 7043 35-1102pressestelle@richard-wolf.com
Point Of Care Testing Market projected to Reach US$ 38 Billion by 2022 Globally

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Point of care (POC) technologies are rapidly becoming part of the revolution of the healthcare landscape. With evolving hightech innovations in healthcare, including smartphone apps, biosensors, labona chip, and wearable devicesall of which offer a closer connection to the patient. The dynamic of point ofcare testing (POCT) is to bring testing closer to the patient and results conveniently and quickly to the provider to expedite diagnosis and subsequent treatment. POCT allows for faster clinical decisions in hospitals, physicians offices, ambulances, patient homes, and in the field.The global point of care testing market is projected to reach US$ 38 Billion by 2022, at a CAGR of XX% from 2016 to 2022. The global market is mainly driven by increasing prevalence of infectious diseases in developing countries, the rising incidences of lifestyle diseases such as cardiac diseases and diabetes, the rising usage of homebased POC devices, and technological advancements with regard to development of advanced, faster, and easy touse devices are stimulating the demand for POCT.This report titled Point of Care Testing  Global Analysis & Market Forecasts provides a comprehensive analysis of the emerging point of care tests market segments, including their dynamics, size, growth, regulatory requirements, technological trends, competitive landscape, and emerging opportunities for instrument and consumable suppliers. This report also provides market landscape and market share information in the point of care testing market. The report brings together major merger & acquisition, distribution agreement, licensing deals and collaboration deals information in point of care testing market. The report also entails major drivers and challenges of point of care testing market.The following 13 segments of the point of care testing market are detailed with market size and six year forecast.Blood Glucose TestingCardiac Markers TestingLipid Panel/Cholesterol TestingBlood Coagulation TestingInfectious Disease TestingUrinalysis TestingDrug of Abuse TestingPregnancy & Fertility TestingCancer Markers TestingCritical Care TestingHbA1C TestingClinical Chemistry TestingBilirubin TestingDownload Sample Copy of this Report atThis report also gives access to significant data such as:Market Growth Drivers in the Point of Care Testing MarketChallenges in the Point of Care Testing MarketCurrent Market TrendsMarket Forecasting for the Coming YearsMerger & Acquisitions between major companiesDistribution AgreementLicensing DealsCollaboration DealsBrowse Latest Industry Press ReleaseMarketResearchReports.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.State Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Worldwide Patient Monitoring Equipment Market Shares, Strategies and Forecasts Research Report 2016 to 2022

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Patient Monitoring Equipment: Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2016 to 2022" to its huge collection of research reports.The 2016 study has 615 pages, 365 tables and figures. Worldwide Patient Monitoring markets are poised to achieve significant growth as a resurgence in tracking vital signs extends from the intensive care unit ICU and emergency department to all areas of the hospital, to patient transport venues, and to home outpatient treatment locations.The patient monitoring platform is modular, integrating various components. Modular systems are developed in the context of consideration of probable specifications for the interaction of system components. Patient Monitoring systems are making a market resurgence because smaller, lighter, wireless units are less costly and more valuable in the context of treatment evaluations and recommendations. People who have cardiac or respiratory difficulty have more treatment options, making more extensive patient monitoring useful.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Designs take into consideration users with mild, moderate, and severe chronic disease condition restrictions. Users come from chronic disease groups and older age groups.The core of a patient monitoring platform is an integration of separate vital signs detection sensors that form a system that supports adapting to numerous clinical requirements. Modules implement ways to determine patient condition. Market driving forces for multi-parameter and specialized vital signs patient monitors relate to more societal willingness to pay for vigilance, an increase in vigilance of sick people at risk. Cardiac and respiratory symptoms are measured as vital sign shifts by patient monitors.Symptoms are represented by shifts in vital sign monitoring that measures disease conditions impacted deterioration of patient well-being. The monitoring is frequently done in conjunction with blood work.There is a lot of complexity in determining the meaning of the patient monitor vital signs measurements. Shortness of breath is a common symptom of cardiac disease. It is frequently misdiagnosed as a respiratory symptom or ignored by patients and is not even considered a symptom.Vital signs monitoring is a way to get a window into patient condition that can provide alerts when a small change signals a possible shift in patient condition. Hospital cardiac patient monitoring technology is a vital aid in providing treatment for severely ill patients.Browse Detail Report With TOC @Alerts can be used to take action before a patient gets even more seriously ill. Hospital and outpatient cardiac patient monitoring can detect arrhythmias and get people to treatment faster before it is too late to correct heart failure. Early detection of a problem in the home is a way to avoid a hospital stay. Appropriate treatment of chronic conditions is difficult and is essential to helping people protect quality of life after recovery from a serious illness.Revitalization of patient monitor markets is occurring because units are smaller, less costly, and more useful across a variety of venues. Patient monitoring is moving toward the ability to help with wellness and to participate in the wearables markets. As people shift resource toward medical treatment, patient monitoring equipment becomes a priority.Lifestyle is supported by patient monitoring products that support earlier detection of disease conditions. Increasing market share has been achieved by providing value to the clinicians. The technical expertise of the sales force, the effectiveness of the distribution system, the strength of the dealers, and the availability of prompt and reliable service for products when addressed are able to help patient monitor vendors achieve competitive advantage.Patient monitor markets at $11 billion in 2015 are anticipated to reach $26.2 billion by 2022. Strong growth is predicated on the increasing reliance on multi-parameter patient monitors in every bed of the hospital, in multiple areas of specialized clinics, and in many rehab centers.Market growth occurs with the expansion of multi-parameter patient monitors connected to a central station beyond the intensive care unit to all floors of a hospital. Clinical care depends on monitoring. Vital signs monitors transmit data wirelessly directly to the electronic patient record, generating alerts if data is outside preset parameters. Patient monitors are expanding the use base in the hospital and expanding use in rehab centers, clinical settings, and home.Companies ProfiledMarket LeadersPhilipsGeneral Electric (GE)DragerNihon KohdenFukuda DenshiHill-Rom / Welch AllynMindray MedicalOSI / SpacelabsViterionMaquetPenlonCriticare SystemsMedtronicBiotronicCare InnovationsSoteraMortara InstrumentMake an Enquiry of this report @Market ParticipantsAbbott LabsAlten Calsoft LabsAMD Global TelemedicineAmerican TelecareBoston ScientificBPL Group / PenlonCardiocomCardioNetCare InnovationsCriticare TechnologieseCaringGetinge Group / MaquetGuangdong Biolight Meditech Co.,Ltd.HealthSenseHoneywellInfiniumLifeWatchMedtronicNSD / ViterionOpto CircuitsBPL Group / PenlonQualcomm IncorporatedRocheSchillerSotera WirelessSmiths MedicalSt. Jude MedicalVitaphoneKey TopicsPatient Monitoring SystemsMonitoring Market Driving ForcesHospital Cardiac MonitoringVital Signs MonitorsMonitoring Modular systemsTransforming Health Care LandscapeMulti-Parameter Patient MonitorWireless Patient MonitoringHospital Cardiac Patient MonitoringVital SignsWrist MonitorsPulse Oximeter MonitorsTelemedicinePulse Wave Transit Time PWTTRemote Patient MonitoringAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Global IoT Security Market Will Grow At A CAGR Of 54.93% Over The Period 2014-2019

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global IoT Security Market 2015-2019" to its huge collection of research reports.IoT involve the communication of multiple devices within a network, which enables data transmission between smart devices such as thermostats and sensors that are further connected to mobile devices. In IoT, embedded software, hardware devices, communication services, and IT services are interconnected, which helps in remote monitoring and managing of numerous interconnected devices efficiently. IoT plays a major role in smart homes, smart shopping, smart transportation, and smart healthcare.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @With an increase in the number of 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, threat to data has increased. Increase in sophisticated and complex threats and hacking activities are expected to affect IoT security. IoT security solutions comprise hardware, software products, and managed security services that are used to monitor, detect, and prevent unauthorized access, misuse, or malfunction, or to disable/destroy a computer network. This provides end-users with a secure platform that will help them perform critical tasks.Technavio's analysts forecast the global IoT security market to grow at a CAGR of 54.93% over the period 2014-2019.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global IoT security market for the period 2015-2019. To calculate the market size, the revenue generated from the sales of IoT security software solutions used for network security and management is considered.The report does not include individual device security revenue for market estimation.Browse Detail Report With TOC @The global IoT security market is segmented on the basis of the following:Geography: Americas, EMEA, and APACEnd-user: utilities, automotive, healthcare, and othersNew report, Global IoT Security Market 2015-2019, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the Americas, APAC, and EMEA; it also covers the market landscape and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key regionsAmericasAPACEMEAKey vendorsCisco SystemsInfineon TechnologiesIntelSiemensWurldtechOther prominent vendorsAlcatel-LucentAxeda Machine CloudBroadcomCheckpoint TechnologiesDigi InternationalEricssonEurotechFortinetGemaltoIBMILS TechnologyKore WirelessNetComm WirelessNumerexPalo Alto NetworksRockwell automationSecure CrossingSierra WirelessSophosSystech SolutionsTofinoVentus WirelessMarket driverNeed for regulatory compliancesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeHigh implementation costsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendEmergence of smart citiesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2019 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving this market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in this market space?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Membranes Market worth 32.14 Billion USD by 2020

Membranes Market, Reverse osmosis Membranes Market, Microfiltration Membrane Market, Ultrafiltration Membranes Market, Nanofiltrat

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The report Membranes Market by Type (Polymeric membranes, Ceramic membranes, and others), by Technology (MF, RO, UF, Pervaporation, Gas Separation, Dialysis, NF, and Others), by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East & Africa, and Latin America), and by Application - Global Forecast to 2020, defines and segments the global membranes market with an analysis and forecast by value.Browse 120 market data Tables and 58 Figures spread through 236 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Membranes Market - Global Forecast to 2020"Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.The global membranes market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.47% from 2015 to reach a value of USD 32.14 Billion by 2020.Asia-Pacific and North America are the key markets for membranes, whereas the developing economies such as the Middle East & Africa (MEA) and Latin America (LATAM) are projected to witness high growth rates between 2015 and 2020.The global membranes market is dominated by Asia-Pacific and North America, accounting for the largest market share in 2014. Within North America, the U.S. was observed to be the largest consumer of membranes. This market is mainly driven by water & wastewater treatment, pharmaceuticals & medical uses, food & beverages, and chemical processing sectors. The growing pharmaceutical and industrial development in North America and Asia-Pacific are driving the growth of this market.MEA region is expected to register the highest growth rates for the membranes market due to the high demand for the desalination and wastewater treatment units in the region. MEA is followed by LATAM in terms of growth rate. Overall, the markets growth is driven by the growing need for water & wastewater treatment activities. The MEA region will continue to be supported by the demand for fresh water through desalination projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and U.A.E., thus driving the membranes market in these regions.Water & wastewater treatment, pharmaceuticals & medical uses, and food & beverages are the topmost segments in terms of market share, whereas the industrial gas processing segment is projected to witness the highest growth rate.While the water & wastewater treatment and pharmaceuticals & medical segments account for maximum share in the membranes market with approximately 62% share in 2014, maximum growth is projected from industrial gas processing and others segments in the near future. The increasing use of membranes in the oil & gas sector for gas processing, hydrogen production, carbon dioxide removal from natural gas streams, and so on are projected to drive the growth in the membranes market from 2015 to 2020. Also, the demand for membranes is projected to increase in the future with the growth of the emerging economies further strengthening the market.New product/technological launches is the key strategy adopted by the market players in order to strengthen their existing market position.Request for Sample PDF:The key strategy adopted by the market players was product enhancements between 2010 and 2015. The strategy helped the wastewater treatment segment along with gas industry players on a large scale. The continuous advancements in the product helped companies to treat and handle different types of water compositions. For example, recently, GE announced a new nanofiltration membrane system to remove seawater sulfate (SWS) from injection water for offshore oil production.Other than product enhancements, capacity expansions were done by the companies to cater to growing demands for membranes in various industries across the globe. Some major acquisitions also took place in 2015 that helped the companies to enhance their membranes business globally. For example, Asahi Kasei Corp. (Japan) acquired Polypores (U.S.) unit that makes microporous membranes for rechargeable batteries.Also, 3M made the biggest acquisition in the last eight years by acquiring Polypores Separations Media business from Polypore International Inc.About MarketsandMarketsMarketsandMarkets is the worlds 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&Ms flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository.Contact:Mr. RohanMarkets and MarketsUNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZMagarpatta city, HadapsarPune, Maharashtra 411013, India.Tel: +1-888-600-6441Email: sales@marketsandmarkets.comVisit MarketsandMarkets Blog @Visit MarketsandMarkets @MarketsandMarkets is the worlds 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.Markets and MarketsUNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZMagarpatta city, HadapsarPune, Maharashtra 411013, India.
Multi Protocol Labeled Switching (MPLS) Internet Protocol (IP) Virtual Private Network (VPN) Services Market Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2023

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Multi protocol labeled switching (MPLS) is the mechanism used in high performance telecommunication networks and is considered to be highly scalable data transferring method from one network node to the other. It belongs to the packet switched networks family where the data is in the form of packets that are to be transferred. Each data packet is assigned with a particular label which alone influences the packet routing or forwarding decisions without any detailed examination of the packets. The MPLS service provider network uses high capacity routers along with the MPLS edge routers that send as well as receive data from the routers placed at individual locations. The virtual private network (VPN) is a secured network that connects remote users or sites with businesss private network through virtual connections routed through internet. It is designed to provide a secured, encrypted path through which data is transmitted between the remote user and the company network.The MPLS VPN service are set of methods that deliver an efficient, scalable and reliable method of connecting sites together in multiple locations and countries to provide fully managed WAN capability. It is a common platform where a large number of services such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), multimedia, videoconferencing, voice over IP (VoIP), etc, are provided. The MPLS technology significantly reduces the need of data link layer technology such as frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and Ethernet. The data link layer technology is significantly complex and expensive in nature as compared to MPLS VPN technology which enables companies to have a direct connection with the geographical sites without purchasing any physical circuits for it.Get More Information :The MPLS IP VPN services are provided in two ways which are Layer 3 MPLS VPN and Layer 2 MPLS VPN. IT departments in major institutions including government offices and banks need to control the networking as well as routing decisions in order to manage the security issues, use Layer 2 VPN services. IT departments of organizations which outsource their routing and networking decisions usually choose Layer 3 VPN services. One of the major factors driving the growth of MPLS IP VPN services market is the incorporation of these networks by several enterprises in order to benefit themselves by high performance and cost minimization.The maturity of the VPN market in recent years has also significantly led the enterprises to adopt the MPLS IP VPN services, further driving the growth of this market. Another important driving factor is the decline of the ATM/relay market due to its complexity and expensive nature which buoyed the growth of MPLS IP VPN market. MPLS IP VPN services have the capability of providing scalable bandwidth and can combine the voice, data and video from multiple platforms to a single platform encouraging adoption of MPLS IP VPN services, hence, leading to potential market growth. The technology considerably meets the increasing traffic requirements where extra capacity is required. As MPLS provides quality of service (QoS), a major requirement for video conferencing, VoIP, etc, it is further considered a good opportunity for market growth in the coming years.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.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Batoi Hosts Seminar on Leveraging the Cloud Better in Association with Microsoft and UCCI.

Batoi hosted a seminar "Leveraging the Cloud Better" in collaboration with Microsoft and UCCI in Bhubaneswar on May 28, 2016.Organizations are often looking for new and better ways of doing things. The advent of cloud computing has provided organizations with an opportunity to leverage the cloud for better IT productivity, agility and competitive advantage via infrastructure-free IT. However, there is always a debate while using cloud driven implementation at IT in an enterprise. Many times the best practice guidelines are long and cumbersome, while in other cases cost factor and general hype associated with cloud computing force the choice.The seminar was hosted to explain enterprises how cloud solutions in various aspects can help enhance corporate competitiveness. The attendees were delved into how potential cloud solutions are to change the way they work.Most businesses know they need the cloud, but just don't know why or how. The session "Leveraging the Cloud Better" by Batoi's Founder Director & CEO, Mr. Ashwini Rath, was aimed to bring clarity and demonstrate how businesses can work in the future. Through the talk Mr. Rath tried to demystify cloud adoption and how to leverage its power better.Further the seminar witnessed a talk on "Cloud Adoption for SMBs". The session was undertaken by Ms. Nalini Singh, Cloud Business Lead, North & East India SMB.When asked about Batoi, Mr. Ashwini Rath, said, "Whether you want industrial automation in your factory or simply manage your office workflows or to succeed your business online, you can rely on Batoi"."With Office 365, you can co-author your techno-commercial proposal for the next tender. You can do video-conferencing with your staff members, customers and prospects without having to own expensive and highly depreciable tools", Mr. Rath added.Speaking at the event, Ms. Nalini Singh said, "At Microsoft, we are focused on empowering SMBs to use the cloud to drive innovation, agility and enable new ways to work. We see seminars like these critical to increasing awareness and knowledge capacity to propel this growth. Together with Batoi, we are bringing new levels of integration between our products that provide businesses with access to the latest cloud innovation that can further enhance their growth.""Businesses today are looking for the most advanced technologies and with Office 365, we are confident that we have the experience and resources to enhance collaboration and productivity for businesses of all sizes", said Mr. Gunjan Dutta of Microsoft while responding to questions from delegates.More than 70 delegates from different industry verticals participated in the seminar.About Batoi Systems Private LimitedBatoi makes your business automation and data visualization easier. Batoi enables you to understand, manage and grow your business using IT. Batoi provides software applications, tools and services for ERP, CRM, Content Management and Knowledge Management.Batoi's enterprise application platform uses open source technologies. This helps Batoi products have rapid organic evolution. It also lowers the effective cost for IT implementation for a business. Batoi platform is capable of deploying, scaling, and securing your software applications in SaaS model or on-premises.Whether you need a website, an e-commerce storefront or software to manage data and workflows for your business, Batoi provides all of these solutions on cloud and without any large capital investments.Batoi Systems Private LimitedPlot No. 421, Saheed Nagar, Bhubaneswar 751007
MANILA, June 16 -- Four U.S. attack planes have landed in the Philippinesto take part in a joint training with Philippine air force pilots, a U.S. Navy statement said Thursday.

"The first temporary detachment of U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler airborne electronic attack aircraft arrived at Clark Air Base, June 15, for training with Armed Forces of the Philippines FA-50 aircraft pilots," the U.S. Navy Task Force 70 statement said.

The statement said the detachment is composed of four aircraft and about 120 personnel assigned to the Electronic Attack Squadron VAQ 138 expeditionary squadron based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines offered to host the U.S. Air Contingent at Clark Air Base to train with their FA-50 fighter pilots and support units which are located in the base north of Manila, it said.

"The first temporary Air Contingent was comprised of five A-10C Thunderbolt aircraft, three HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters and approximately 200 personnel deployed from multiple Pacific Air Forces units. The forces deployed to the Philippines for exercise Balikatan and completed their final mission April 28, 2016," it said.
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...
BEIJING, June 16 -- Disregarding the Chinese government's strong opposition, U.S. President Barack Obamamet with the 14th Dalai Lama behind closed doors at the White Houseon Wednesday.

This unwise behavior has broken the solemn promise of the United Statesnot to support Tibet's independence, seriously jeopardized China-U.S. relations, and deeply hurt the Chinese people's feelings.

As we all know, the U.S. government has explicitly acknowledged the one-China policy, admitting Tibet is an inseparable part of China, and not recognizing the so-called "exiled government of Tibet."

The Dalai Lama has been campaigning for Tibet's independence around the world under the guise of religion for years. No matter with what dashing identity and charming words and behavior, the Dalai Lama's goal of dividing China is obvious.

The Chinese government urges all countries and governments not to offer maneuvering space for the Dalai Lama, let alone do things which could lead to strong objection from the Chinese people.

The Tibet issue concerns China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, which involves the core interests of China. It is common sense that not meeting with the Dalai Lama is a benchmark for governments not supporting Tibet's independence.

The Obama administration knows this only too well, yet it did it anyway, sending wrong signals. By meeting with the Dalai Lama, the U.S. government has broken its own promise and thrown away its political credibility, which is an extremely rash and irresponsible act.

Wednesday's tete-a-tete was Obama's fourth meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama since he took office as U.S. president.

Undoubtedly, Obama has his own calculation by choosing to meet the Dalai Lama before his term expires in January 2017.

The White House has been betting on both sides as it solemnly affirms its stance of recognizing Tibet as an inalienable part of China and its adherence to the one-China policy on the one hand while repeatedly meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the "clique" attempting to separate Tibet from China, to court the U.S. hardliners on the other.

This flip-flopping shows the White House's narrow-mindedness and outdated way of thinking that still seeks to contain China by playing the "Tibet card."

The Tibet issue is China's internal affair. No foreign country has the right to interfere. Supporting Tibet's independence is a clear interference in China's internal affairs and is in gross violation of the norms of international relations.

Playing the "Tibet card" shows the U.S. government is overdrawing its political credit and international prestige.

The favorable status quo of China-U.S. relations should not be jeopardized, and any meddling in Tibet-related issues is doomed to fail.

The United States should show its sincerity by boosting mutual trust with China through concrete deeds, by respecting the core interests and major concerns of China, by desisting from making irresponsible moves and eating its own words, and by promoting the sustainable, healthy and stable development of bilateral ties.
Summer is almost officially in session, but it's not too late to learn something good.

TEDxMtHood, a local version of the popular internet TED Talks, puts 13 speakers and performers onstage June 18 to share Northwest-centric "ideas worth spreading."

From how to prepare for an overdue earthquake to tracking a rapidly changing Portland, speakers from across disciplines will get you thinking more deeply about the region and the world.

All the talks and performances promise to be great, but here are five that stand out.

1. Chris Goldfinger: By now, most of us have heard of "The Big One," the overdue earthquake that's expected to rattle the Northwest to a nearly unimaginable degree. Marine geologist Goldfinger has studied the Cascadia Subduction Zone, from whence the quake will rise, and he'll parse out the dangers and how Oregon communities can prepare.

2. Gustav Sculptor and Richard Cawley: The founders of art warehouse Manifestation PDX and TEDxMtHood artists in residence have built interactive sculptures for the Oregon Country Fair, the Portland Winter Lights Festival and Burning Man. They'll show a sculpture they've made especially for the conference to reflect its theme, "Endeavor," and get down to why they make their art.

3. Tiana Tozer: A former humanitarian aid worker who taught advocacy to people with disabilities in Iraq, Tozer will talk about how perspectives on disability are changing. For that change to continue, she'll argue, inclusion needs to be enforced through education, not legislation.

4. Stephen W. Manning: Having put a considerable amount of energy into protecting refugees and immigrants as a lawyer, Manning will discuss a crowd-sourced refugee rights model and ways in which we can all be more human-centered and humane as our world shrinks.

5. Kristen Kingsbury and Pippin Beard: The filmmaker couple behind the new documentary "Portland, Inc." will talk about the changing city, where it's been, where it is, and where it's going. Drawing from the citywide voices they gathered for the film, they'll contrast original plans for livability with what we're faced with now and ask whether the outlook for the future is good enough.

The ideas don't stop with these five talks. Saturday will be filled with other interesting thinkers and performers including:

-Bill Deresiewicz, author and college-system critic

-Derenda Schubert, intergenerational problem solver

-Kristofor Lofgren, sustainable sushi restaurateur

-MBRASCATU, Italian indie rock band

-Michael Allen Harrison, pianist

-Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater, contemporary dance

-Rukaiyah Adams, financial and cultural envelope pusher

-Victoria Lara, advocate for culturally sensitive media

***

TEDxMtHood 2016

When: 8 a.m.-5 p.m. June 18

Where: Revolution Hall, 1300 S.E. Stark St.

Admission: $70

--Dillon Pilorget | dpilorget@oregonian.com

503-294-5927 | @dillonpilorget
Dental fight shows high stakes in Oregon Health Plan changes

A Portland-area dentist, E. Landon Tuff, removes an infected baby tooth from the mouth of a 9-year-old. Good oral health is important throughout life.

(Faith Cathcart/The Oregonian/OregonLive/2012)

The federal government announced Thursday it is awarding $1.75 million to five health centers in Oregon to give the poor greater access to dental care.

The grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is part of $470 million awarded to clinics nationwide to improve oral health care to patients who rely on federally funded health centers.

"Oral health is an important part of our overall physical health and well-being," Sylvia Burwell, Health and Human Services secretary, said in a statement. "The funding we are awarding will reduce barriers to quality dental care for hundreds of thousands of Americans by bringing new oral health providers to health centers across the country."

The five beneficiaries in Oregon are:

Neighborhood Health Center

The Wallace Medical Concern

Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center

La Clinica del Valle Family Health Care Center

Mosaic Medical

Each center applied for the grant and will receive $350,000.

The centers use federal funds to serve patients who lack insurance or money to pay for health care. Gum disease is linked to other problems, like heart disease and blood sugar problems.

-- Lynne Terry
rainbow.jpg

Filipino members of the LGBT community stand pay tribute to the victims of the Orlando, Fla., mass shooting Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at the University of the Philippines campus in suburban Quezon city northeast of Manila, Philippines.

(Associated Press)

In times of grief, crafters turn to our handiwork. When chaos and horror descend, there's a certain comfort in the rhythm of the work, and of knowing that your work is the one thing you can control. And as crafters, when others are distraught, our instinct is to craft for them, to offer help with our hands, any way we can.

And so it was that within hours after the horrifying news about a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., broke, that I started getting emails and messages from local knitters and crocheters asking, "What can I do? What can I make for them? Do you know of any fundraisers? What can our community do to help?"

At first, I told people to donate blood. I directed them to my colleague Anna Marum's story about a GoFundMe campaign. But I hadn't heard of anything specifically from the crafting community.

Until now.

SCRAP PDX is hosting a knit-in for Orlando from noon-5 p.m. Saturday, June 18, to benefit the Pulse Tragedy Community Fund. Here's how SCRAP PDX describes it:

"We at SCRAP PDX are heartbroken over the tragedy at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. To honor our friends and loved ones in the LGBTQIA, Latin@, and Muslim communities, we would like for our craft store to become a place of emotional and financial support. Because Saturday is World Wide Knit in Public day, SCRAP PDX will host a "Knit-in" for Orlando from 12-5 p.m. Bring your own projects and materials, or shop our store beginning at 11 a.m. Basic knitting and crochet instruction will be offered from 1-3 p.m. by our wonderful volunteers Tess (facebook.com/tessknits) and Tricia (madebytricia.com).

"Admission is free and no purchase is required, but donations are encouraged. From the time we open on Saturday until we close, all donations received at SCRAP PDX will go to the Pulse Tragedy Community Fund. This fund was set up by the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida (thecenterorlando.org) to support victims and their families with counseling services. You may give directly here: https://www.gofundme.com/OrlandoUnited.

"At SCRAP PDX we're calling it craftivism: let's raise money to benefit those affected by this tragedy while also making things of beauty in each other's company." SCRAP PDX is at 1736 S.W. Alder St. in Portland.

Meanwhile, Portland indie dyer extraordinaire Lorajean Kelly, aka Knitted Wit, has created a special colorway, called Love is Love. "We're knitting with a rainbow and standing with Orlando, and our LGBTQ community around the world," Lorajean writes. "From now until the end of time we'll be donating 10 percent of all sales from this color to two local nonprofits: The Q Center and Outside In. Both organizations advocate for LGBTQ issues, with Outside In having a focus on youth."

Please consider taking part in one or both of these fundraisers. And take comfort in knowing that in a cold, hard world, crafters are doing their part to add some softness, warmth and love.

UPDATE I: Non-yarny crafters and makers are pitching in, too. Portland-based Blind Coffee Roasters is donating a portion of the proceeds from its Peace and Love blend. "[T]he coffee is $14 per pound and $5 per pound will be donated to the Orlando victims through Basic Rights Oregon," the company writes. Get it here.

-- Mary Mooney

mmooney@oregonian.com

503-412-7020; @MaryKnitsPDX
Curry County.JPG

This undated photo shows where Whalehead Creek empties into the Pacific Ocean in Curry County.

(Oregon State Archives)

The release this week of an audit by the Oregon secretary of state's office contains some good news: Every county in the state has since 2014 experienced per capita income growth and a decline in unemployment. But the audit also unmasks worrisome financial signs in four rural counties that continue to struggle to find a way forward: Curry, Douglas, Josephine and Polk.

http://media.oregonlive.com/opinion_impact/photo/agenda-2013jpg-da8a3522a991b9c6.jpg

Editorial Agenda 2016



Get Oregon centered

Better leadership in education

Make Portland a city that works

Build Oregon prosperity

Protect and expand personal freedom

Get pot right

_______________________________

The reasons for concern are by now familiar: low property tax rates, a high percentage of untaxable land in state or federal ownership, and the collapse of resource-extraction economies. Curry County's profile, for one, shows several built-in challenges: Its land area of 1,648 square miles is 66 percent federal, 22 percent private forests, 7 percent farming and agricultural, 1 percent state-owned -- leaving a tiny taxable land base. The county's low tax yield, combined with the cessation of federal timber payments designed by Congress to offset historical timber revenues, makes the state's prediction grim, if not frightening: "Curry County will have a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall beginning in fiscal year 2017-18. The shortfall will cause major county services, such as public safety, assessment and taxation, and elections, to receive drastic reductions in staff and department closures, resulting in a subsequent loss of crucial services to citizens."

What that will look like should concern all Oregonians, not just folks living in the state's scenic southwest coastal corner.

Curry County already knows what idle looks like: Just 45 percent of its residents are considered by state auditors to be participants in the local workforce, owing to high unemployment and a comparatively high concentration of older residents. And Curry residents already know about stretching the county's public safety budget: Per capita spending for officer patrols and dispatch services pencils out to $204, or nearly half the rate spent in rural Lake County. (Polk County, meanwhile, continues to underspend all counties on public safety at $165 per capita, this following reductions of road patrols in 2015 to just 10 hours a day, leaving many to feel vulnerable in the wee hours.)

Prosperity, if a rebound from recession can be called that, is unevenly distributed and disparately earned. But long-term and everywhere, it is grown from the ground up. The auditors plainly and correctly state: "Locally generated revenues should be sufficient to meet a county's current and future service needs."

It's easy, even facile, to expect that folks would simply raises taxes to raise revenues when revenues fail to cover costs. Increased tax burdens are only offset by better and more employment. But even underfunded Lane, Columbia and Polk counties managed in recent years to pass modest jail levies, commendable and difficult commitments. Curry County has not, and Mike McArthur, director of the Association of Oregon Counties, told The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board last week that he anticipates Curry will not be able to afford to run its jail at all by next year. That's called a potential Code Red.

Oregon's rural counties are in the hunt as never before for industry and commerce. Not every place in Oregon is suited for wind farms, and so none of the four troubled Oregon counties can reasonably look to the money boon seen in equally rural Gilliam and Sherman counties. Between 2011 and 2016, when most counties generated an average of at least $300 in local revenues, Gilliam posted a whopping per capita revenue stream of $6,476 and Sherman $8,454. Curry? Just $251.

Oregonian editorials

reflect the collective opinion of The Oregonian editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom.

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Erik Lukens, Steve Moss

and Len Reed.

To respond to this editorial:

Post your comment below, submit a

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But it's not all Curry's fault. After being told years ago that the federal government would not play rescuer, timber-dependent counties, Curry among them, learned otherwise as federal payments were forthcoming after arduous advocacies by Oregon's congressional delegation. But that's likely over, kaput. Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio, concerned with rural affairs, told the editorial board in an interview last Wednesday: "I had tried to make (the payments) permanent, but they're not. ... With the current Congress, there's little to no prospect of more money." Many who had opposed making the payments permanent argued that the creation of a fiscal cliff would inevitably drive an overhaul in federal forest policy. That hasn't happened, either, though efforts continue to restore logging harvests in designated areas.

Meanwhile DeFazio, McArthur's association and others are working to bolster existing businesses and create new ones that generate jobs in some rural counties. Their efforts would, over the mid- and long-term, serve prosperity.

But Oregonians everywhere, particularly in economic and population centers such as Washington and Multnomah counties, should look beyond what seem local good times and take note: Deeper fragmentation of income and opportunity across Oregon will hurt all of Oregon. In that sense, state and county leaders face a tough test but a better opportunity in helping four struggling counties to find solid financial footing.
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

I am supposed to be writing about a shooting in Orlando, but my thoughts keep circling back to a funeral in Louisville.

About the shooting, you have doubtless already heard your fill of grisly details. Suffice it to say that in the dark hours of Sunday morning, a Muslim man armed with a military-style assault rifle opened fire on Latin Night at a gay nightclub, killing 49 people, wounding dozens more.

The atrocity, the biggest mass shooting in American history, ignited another dreary spasm of Islamophobia, led by Donald Trump. In short order, the presumptive Repugnant Party candidate for president bragged about "being right on radical Islamic terrorism," suggested that President Obama is sympathetic to terrorists and renewed his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, though he did not explain how that would have stopped the killer, who, like Trump, was born in New York City.

For good measure, Trump's Islamophobia was met by the homophobia of one Roger Jimenez, a Baptist preacher in Sacramento who told his congregation it was "great" that "50 pedophiles were killed today" and went on to call for the government to "round them all up and put them up against a firing wall and blow their brains out."

So yes, this is what I need to be writing about today, the hatred, the division and the rhetorical and actual violence they spawn. But I keep coming back to that funeral for Muhammad Ali.

Perhaps you caught some part of the ceremony on television the Friday before the shooting. If you did, perhaps you were struck, as I was, by the fact of ministers, rabbis, Iroquois spiritual leaders, a Jewish comic, a black TV personality and a white politician born in segregated Arkansas, all coming together under one roof to honor an African American Muslim. Perhaps it spoke to some deep part of you of the potentialities beneath our animosities, the commonalities within our separations.

We are taught to regard the animosities and separations as definitive and unavoidable, part and parcel of what it means to be human. That this is a lie is reflected in all the tributaries of color, faith and tribe that flowed together to honor Ali. Animosities and separations are not conditions you are born with. Rather, they are conditions you choose.

Jimenez, sadly, made that choice. So did Trump. And so did the man who walked into that nightclub and butchered all those people. They are all alike. Only in degree and choice of weapon do they differ.

And as appalled, sickened and repulsed as the massacre leaves me, I am also disgusted by the response from these people in putative positions of responsibility and by the fact that their enablers on the political right will justify, rationalize or otherwise make excuses for these acts of human malpractice. I am tired of chalking this sort of thing up to ideological disagreement.

This is not about ideology. No, this is about the mainstreaming and normalizing of hatred in ways not seen for more than 50 years. It is about how people deserve to be treated, about whether we are a country where the exclusion and even execution of vulnerable peoples are bandied casually about from platforms of authority or whether we are a country with the courage of its convictions.

I don't expect much from a mass murderer. But you'd like to think you can hope for a little - I don't know - grace, dignity, statesmanship from a preacher and a would-be president. Is simple decency too much to ask?

God help us, if it is.

Friday saw all sorts of people cross all sorts of cultural lines in order to pay tribute to a man they all somehow recognized as one of their own. It offered shining proof of what human beings can be.

Then came Sunday, and an awful reminder of what we too often are.

(c) 2016, The Miami Herald
By Elizabeth Van Staaveren

"The population explosion" was an openly discussed issue some 40 or more years ago. But in recent decades the whole idea of overpopulation and even the word itself have come into ill repute and are studiously avoided in public conversation.

Unpleasant problems, however, cannot be neglected forever. Today, conditions are forcing policymakers and concerned citizens to think about population policy, the numbers of people in the U.S. and how those numbers relate to economic and social circumstances.

Cities and states are faced with many problems arising from huge increases in population in recent years. Schools everywhere are overcrowded and have insufficient funds to function satisfactorily for the numbers enrolled. Established neighborhoods resist enforced density. Expansion of buildings into natural areas is a constant source of conflict. Perhaps half of all political issues covered in news media today are related to increases in the size of the population.

We must think about the impact on the environment and quality of life as the U.S. population burgeons at the rate of one person added every 12 seconds, with no end in sight. Census figures show that in the U.S. we now have one birth every eight seconds, one death every 13 seconds and one international migrant every 28 seconds -- making a net gain of one person every 12 seconds.

Population growth in Oregon and the United States at present is mainly triggered by international immigration, not births to native-born American citizens. The Center for Immigration Studies has recently issued an interactive map showing details of population growth for each state.

Overall, one-third of the nation's 50 states now have immigrant populations (immigrants with their minor children) which are over 15 percent of total, and six states have over 25 percent immigrant populations. Oregon's total population in 2015 was 4,050,000, and 16.9 percent of that was composed of immigrants and their minor children. There were 683,000 immigrants and their minor children here in 2015. In 1970, within the lifetime of millions of citizens, Oregon had only 2,091,000 people -- of whom only 5 percent (105,000) were immigrants with their minor children.

Without reductions in immigration levels, we are headed for unsustainable population growth in the near future. Recent Census figures show that 3.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) settled in the country in 2014 and 2015, or more than 1.5 million annually. When immigration problems are discussed, usually illegal immigration is the main focus, but the enormous impact of immigration is largely the result of those brought in legally.

There is an optimum level of population related to the size and resources of a geographical area. Some scientists have made estimates and say at usual consumption rates, the optimum number for the U.S. is about 150 million people. We now have over 323 million people, with large numbers being added constantly. How can our life-giving natural environment survive this onslaught of people? Will all the forests and farmlands morph into housing developments?

The future looks grim for this country and for Oregon if immigration levels are not drastically reduced now. It's time for a lengthy moratorium on immigration on the basis of numbers alone. This would significantly ease current economic and social problems in Oregon and other states and gradually improve the quality of life.

Is it morally wrong to deny admittance to aspiring migrants? The U.S. provides financial aid and technical assistance to poor countries around the world. Citizens of other countries must look to their own governments and institutions to achieve acceptable living conditions at home, and they will do so if easy escape to the U.S. is closed for the millions now emigrating.

*

Elizabeth Van Staaveren, of McMinnville, is a longtime member of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.
1dalailama.JPG

This Monday, June 13, 2016, file photo, the Dalai Lama waves during an event at American University's Bender Arena in northwest Washington.

(The Associated Press)

By The Dalai Lama

Special to The Washington Post

Almost six decades have passed since I left my homeland, Tibet, and became a refugee. Thanks to the kindness of the government and people of India, we Tibetans found a second home where we could live in dignity and freedom, able to keep our language, culture and Buddhist traditions alive.

My generation has witnessed so much violence - some historians estimate that more than 200 million people were killed in conflicts in the 20th century.

Today, there is no end in sight to the horrific violence in the Middle East, which in the case of Syria has led to the greatest refugee crisis in a generation. Appalling terrorist attacks - as we were sadly reminded this weekend - have created deep-seated fear. While it would be easy to feel a sense of hopelessness and despair, it is all the more necessary in the early years of the 21st century to be realistic and optimistic.

There are many reasons for us to be hopeful. Recognition of universal human rights, including the right to self-determination, has expanded beyond anything imagined a century ago. There is growing international consensus in support of gender equality and respect for women. Particularly among the younger generation, there is a widespread rejection of war as a means of solving problems. Across the world, many are doing valuable work to prevent terrorism, recognizing the depths of misunderstanding and the divisive idea of "us" and "them" that is so dangerous. Significant reductions in the world's arsenal of nuclear weapons mean that setting a timetable for further reductions and ultimately the elimination of nuclear weapons - a sentiment President Obama recently reiterated in Hiroshima, Japan - no longer seem a mere dream.

The notion of absolute victory for one side and defeat of another is thoroughly outdated; in some situations, following conflict, suffering arises from a state that cannot be described as either war or peace. Violence inevitably incurs further violence. Indeed, history has shown that nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and peaceful democracies and is more successful in removing authoritarian regimes than violent struggle.

It is not enough simply to pray. There are solutions to many of the problems we face; new mechanisms for dialogue need to be created, along with systems of education to inculcate moral values. These must be grounded in the perspective that we all belong to one human family and that together we can take action to address global challenges.

It is encouraging that we have seen many ordinary people across the world displaying great compassion toward the plight of refugees, from those who have rescued them from the sea, to those who have taken them in and provided friendship and support. As a refugee myself, I feel a strong empathy for their situation, and when we see their anguish, we should do all we can to help them. I can also understand the fears of people in host countries, who may feel overwhelmed. The combination of circumstances draws attention to the vital importance of collective action toward restoring genuine peace to the lands these refugees are fleeing.

Tibetan refugees have firsthand experience of living through such circumstances and, although we have not yet been able to return to our homeland, we are grateful for the humanitarian support we have received through the decades from friends, including the people of the United States.

A further source of hope is the genuine cooperation among the world's nations toward a common goal evident in the Paris accord on climate change. When global warming threatens the health of this planet that is our only home, it is only by considering the larger global interest that local and national interests will be met.

I have a personal connection to this issue because Tibet is the world's highest plateau and is an epicenter of global climate change, warming nearly three times as fast as the rest of the world. It is the largest repository of water outside the two poles and the source of the Earth's most extensive river system, critical to the world's 10 most densely populated nations.

To find solutions to the environmental crisis and violent conflicts that confront us in the 21st century, we need to seek new answers. Even though I am a Buddhist monk, I believe that these solutions lie beyond religion in the promotion of a concept I call secular ethics. This is an approach to educating ourselves based on scientific findings, common experience and common sense - a more universal approach to the promotion of our shared human values.

Over more than three decades, my discussions with scientists, educators and social workers from across the globe have revealed common concerns. As a result, we have developed a system that incorporates an education of the heart, but one that is based on study of the workings of the mind and emotions through scholarship and scientific research rather than religious practice. Since we need moral principles - compassion, respect for others, kindness, taking responsibility - in every field of human activity, we are working to help schools and colleges create opportunities for young people to develop greater self-awareness, to learn how to manage destructive emotions and cultivate social skills. Such training is being incorporated into the curriculum of many schools in North America and Europe - I am involved with work at Emory University on a new curriculum on secular ethics that is being introduced in several schools in India and the United States.

It is our collective responsibility to ensure that the 21st century does not repeat the pain and bloodshed of the past. Because human nature is basically compassionate, I believe it is possible that decades from now we will see an era of peace - but we must work together as global citizens of a shared planet.

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the spiritual leader of Tibet. Since 1959, he has lived in exile in Dharamsala in northern India.
u.s. federal courthouse.JPG

Oregon standoff defendant Darryl Thorn , set to enter a guilty plea in the federal conspiracy case Wednesday afternoon, abruptly announced Wednesday morning that he had changed his mind.

(The Oregonian/file)

Oregon standoff defendant Darryl W. Thorn, who was scheduled to plead guilty Wednesday afternoon to a federal conspiracy charge stemming from the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, abruptly announced in court Wednesday morning that he had changed his mind.

Darryl Thorn

"I'd like to withdraw my plea today," Thorn said, standing to announce his decision during the monthly status hearing in the refuge takeover case.

Thorn's court-appointed lawyer, Laurie Shertz, also asked the court to withdraw as Thorn's lawyer. It was the second time since her appointment that Shertz asked to step aside.

The two met privately before U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown on Wednesday afternoon, before Brown accepted Shertz's removal from the case.

The judge said she was convinced there was an "irreparable breakdown'' in the attorney-client relationship between Thorn and Shertz. About a month ago, Shertz had been ordered to remain as Thorn's lawyer despite her earlier attempt to withdraw.

Thorn, of Marysville, Washington, is out of custody on pretrial release living and working in the Spokane area. He will be assigned a new court-appointed attorney, Brown said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Gabriel said the government would hold open its plea offer to Thorn "for a reasonable period of time," as he obtains a new lawyer.

The details of that offer were not made public Wednesday.

Three of 26 defendants have accepted negotiated deals and entered guilty pleas to the charge of conspiring to impede federal officers from doing their work at the federal wildlife sanctuary in Harney County. One other defendant, Jason Blomgren, is scheduled to change his plea on Thursday.

Ammon Bundy, the occupation's leader, has said the refuge takeover was done to protest the return to federal prison of two Harney County ranchers and the federal control of public land.

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian
A 43-year-old man who fled Oregon 19 years ago while accused of raping two girls was found in Mexico and has been extradited Wednesday back to Oregon.

Newport police detectives resumed a search for Eric Francisco DeCleve in February and worked with the FBI to find him working as a surfing instructor in Cancun, Mexico, according to the Newport police department. He had been referring to himself as Eric Victor Munhoven Navarro.

DeCleve was arrested in Mexico, flown to San Francisco last Friday and held in jail there until he was flown to Oregon on Wednesday and booked into the Lincoln County Jail. He is accused of first- and second-degree rape, first-degree sexual abuse, first-degree sodomy, attempted first-degree sodomy, first-degree unlawful sexual penetration and delivery of a controlled substance to a minor.

DeCleve was arrested May 2, 1997, after giving marijuana to 11- and 13-year-old girls and sexually abusing them three days earlier, court records show. He was 24 and lived in Newport at the time.

DeCleve was released from the Lincoln County jail soon after posting $10,000 bail. He was scheduled to appear in court on June 9, 1997, but never showed and an arrest warrant was issued, court records show.

Investigators learned from U.S. Immigration in 2004 that DeCleve may have been living in Mexico near the U.S. border, but he wasn't found, police said.

DeCleve is now being held on $3 million bail.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey
(Global Times) 10:46, June 16, 2016

US President Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama on Wednesday night in the White House Map Room, after they met last time in February 2014 in the same place. Having met the Dalai Lama more often than his Western counterparts in the last decade, Obama has set a bad example.

European leaders usually meet with the Dalai Lama soon after they take office to respond to public opinion, with nothing more. But Obama meets with him almost every two years, totally ignoring China's protests.

The backlash brought by such a meeting is of minor importance compared with the effects of major disputes between China and the US such as security, trade and human rights. This is not because China offers particular tolerance for Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama. This meeting doesn't make sense in any way while other divergences between China and the US can be explained by US national interests or Western values. What we can only read out of it is that Obama feels he is well-positioned to showcase the mean side in his attitude toward China.

The Dalai Lama has done more damage to China than any other exile. What the Dalai Lama's meeting with Obama has bearing on is mostly ideological rather than on international relations. For Chinese, the meeting intensifies people's doubts about the two persons and the political forces they stand for. While Obama often says he welcomes China's peaceful rise, his meetings with the Dalai Lama erode his sincerity and make him look more like he is helping the latter continue to make trouble with China. And at this time the White House appears so hypocritical in its purported concerns about human rights in China.

The Dalai Lama has once and again provoked frictions between China and Western countries, but he is losing political support from Europe in recent years. Alongside Obama, he attempted to provoke China, making self-evident his die-hard intention for Tibet independence and his role as a politician.

The meetings may upset the Chinese public, but when we learn more about the real international landscape, we will become more composed regardless of pressure exerted by the outside. With bumpy Sino-US relations, Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama indicates the US remains powerful in agenda-setting and can find fault with China in many aspects. But the substantial initiative is taken by China. So long as Tibet maintains economic development and social stability, the meeting will be just a farce.

The Dalai Lama has completely betrayed his country and the fundamental interests of Tibetan people and Tibetan Buddhist believers. The more political shows the 81-year-old stages together with the West, the clearer his role of sabotaging China's unity and peaceful rise.
The Oregon Supreme Court said Thursday that it isn't cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a man to life in prison without the possibility of ever getting out for his latest offense: exposing his genitals along a jogging path.

William Michael Althouse, pictured in 2012 in the Marion County Jail.

That's because William Michael Althouse has such a long and deeply disturbing track record of sexually assaulting children and exposing himself in public over a 30-year span, the high court ruled. Justices also noted the system's inability to stop Althouse despite repeated offers of sex-offender treatment.

Althouse, 70, was sentenced under the state's "three strikes" law for defendants who've been convicted of three felony sex crimes. Although the Oregon Supreme Court had previously upheld the constitutionality of that law in 2007, Thursday's ruling reinforces the ability of prosecutors and judges to apply it to serious cases that surface in courtrooms across the state.

In locking a repeat offender up for life, the court said it could consider both previous criminal convictions and reports of unprosecuted crimes. According to the Supreme Court summary of Althouse's criminal history, which the defendant doesn't dispute:

In 1982, he was first convicted of touching the vaginal area and buttocks of an 8-year-old relative. Althouse, who was in his mid-30's at the time, also later admitted to fondling a 5-year-old relative. He was sentenced to probation and sex-offender treatment, but expelled from treatment because "he simply chose to maintain his dangerous patterns of deviant thinking," reads the Supreme Court summary of the case.

Althouse later was sentenced to five years in prison for violating his probation.

In 1993, the mother of a 5-year-old boy told Seaside police that she saw Althouse outside her house talking to her son and put his arm around the boy "like he was going to pick him up." She told Althouse to leave, but he returned twice. The boy later told his mom that Althouse touched his genitals twice.

Two days later, also in Seaside, Althouse followed a 9-year-old boy from the beach to the boy's family motorhome. Althouse asked the boy if he could play a board game, the boy let him in and when Althouse took off his shirt, the boy tried to run. Althouse forced the boy into the bathroom, put a shirt in the boy's mouth and sexually abused him -- including forcing the boy to perform a sex act on Althouse. Althouse was convicted of several crimes.

But before Althouse was sentenced, a different 9-year-old boy in Hillsboro called out for his mother when he saw Althouse looking at him through a sliding glass door. When Althouse tried to open the door, the boy closed it and locked it. Althouse ran, and police later found him "staggering through the lot of the apartment complex with no pants on."

Althouse was then sentenced to 10 years in prison for sexually assaulting the Seaside boy. Althouse got out a few years early, but quickly violated the terms of his post-prison supervision. Those violations included stripping naked after seeing a family in a park a short distance away, exposing himself in a public hot tub, looking at pictures of naked children and masturbating three times while standing in his bedroom window, in full view of the public.

In 2002, Althouse was found walking naked through a Marion County park. He later admitted that he approached a child who was fishing in the river. He was convicted of felony public indecency. The judge could have sentenced Althouse to life in prison with no possibility of release, but instead sentenced him to four years in prison.

In 2006, one month after he finished serving that sentence, Althouse was caught viewing child pornography on the Internet. He violated his post-prison supervision terms 11 more times and was punished with stints in jail. Among his violations included doing yard work while nude, walking around nude in his neighborhood and twice walking nude near schools.

In 2011, Althouse committed the crime that led Marion County Circuit Judge Lindsay Partridge to lock Althouse up for the rest of life. Police were called to a Salem jogging path after a woman reported Althouse sitting pantless next it. He was about 150 feet away from a middle school.

Althouse appealed his life sentence to the Oregon Court of Appeals, which in 2014, affirmed it without opinion. He then appealed to the Supreme Court, which issued Thursday's ruling.

In part, Althouse argued that a life sentence was unconstitutional because it is vastly longer than the sentence he would have received solely for his latest crime of felony public indecency.

The Supreme Court disagreed, noting that Althouse's most recent conviction "reflects a deeply ingrained pattern of predatory behavior that has persisted since 1982." The Supreme Court wrote that even at the time of Althouse's first conviction, Oregon State Hospital staff knew he was a "sexually dangerous person."

The high court said given Althouse's past, he was likely to victimize others again.

Read the opinion here.

-- Aimee Green

503-294-5119
Oregon has asked the Federal Railroad Administration to place an open-ended moratorium on oil trains traveling through the state, because preliminary findings of an investigation into the June 3 derailment in Mosier suggest inspectors might not be able to detect the problem that likely caused the crash.

Investigators identified a problem with the screws that fasten the rails to the railroad ties as the cause of the derailment. But in

, an Oregon Department of Transportation administrator said recent inspections failed to catch a number of broken screws along the track in Mosier. Hal Gard, the state's rail and public transit administrator, discussed the letter at a meeting of the Oregon Transportation Commission in Hood River on Thursday.

"Until the underlying cause of the bolt failures is understood and a means of detecting this defect is developed, we request a moratorium on running unit trains over sections of track that contain track fasteners of this material in the state of Oregon," Gard wrote.

It was unclear how much of Oregon's rail system uses these types of fasteners.

Tom Fuller, a spokesman for the department, said Oregon has yet to receive a response from federal railroad officials. The broken screws along the track in mosier were already rusted, suggesting they had been damaged for awhile. Fuller said Union Pacific, which voluntarily suspended oil-by-rail shipments through the gorge on a temporary basis, claims its inspectors can identify the broken fasteners. "However, it ran over those same tracks recently and didn't detect it," Fuller said. "If they claim they can detect these bolts, why didn't they?"

Justin Jacobs, a Union Pacific spokesman, said the railroad is able to detect broken fasteners by hiring contractors to operate a device called a gauge restraint measurement system inspection vehicle. "What that does is it applies lateral pressure equivalent to a locomotive to the rail line, which is intended to find this condition of the bolts being broken," Jacobs said.

Union Pacific has committed to increase the frequency of these track inspections in the gorge, up from 18-month intervals to four times a year. Jacobs said he could not address whether the last inspection missed the rusted screws that appeared to have been broken for awhile. "I'm not our track guy, and I can't really speak to that," Jacobs said.

Gov. Kate Brown and several members of Oregon's congressional delegation had already requested a temporary halt on oil trains through the Columbia River Gorge.

-- Hillary Borrud

503-294-4034; @hborrud
This post has been updated to reflect filibuster comments from Sen. Jeff Merkley:

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden stood before the U.S. Senate on Wednesday and rattled off a grimly familiar list of cities and schools that all served as the scenes of mass shootings: Thurston, Columbine, Blacksburg, Tucson, Newtown, Aurora, Charleston, Roseburg and now Orlando.

"The news cameras will eventually leave Orlando, just like they left Roseburg," said Wyden, recalling his visit to Umpqua Community College, where nine people were killed in Oregon's deadliest mass shooting. "But trauma does not vanish."

Wyden, along with fellow Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, were among several Democrats who joined a filibuster led by Sen. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut. Murphy interrupted debate on an appropriations bill to discuss gun control in light of the shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 50, including the shooter, dead on June 12.

Oregon, Washington senators join in gun control filibuster

The four senators from Oregon and Washington were among more than 35 who joined in a filibuster Wednesday led by Sen. Christopher Murphy of Connecticut. Murphy interrupted debate on an appropriations bill to discuss gun control in light of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden:

"The idea of following up more moments of silence with more inaction is not good enough. There are common-sense steps the Congress can take now."

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley:

"I come from a gun state. I come from a state ... where they love to target practice, where they believe powerfully in the individual rights of the second amendment. But Oregon is also a state where the citizens believe we should not put guns into the hands of felons or those who are deeply mentally disturbed."

Washington Sen. Patty Murray:

"It sickens me that in America today, parents have to wonder if their children will be safe when they go to the movie theater, the mall, or just to school for the day. Every time after there is a new mass shooting, I hear the same questions from my constituents back home in Washington state - what is Congress going to do to stop this?"

Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell:

"Let's have a vote. Let's at least know where your representative and senator is on these policies. If you're on the terrorist watch list and can't get on a plane, you shouldn't be able to own a gun."

"The common thread that runs between Connecticut and Oregon is that our two states have been the sites of two very deadly school shootings," Merkley said.

The two Oregon senators used their time on the floor to urge Congress to curb gun violence.

"The idea of following up more moments of silence with more inaction is not good enough," Wyden said. "There are common-sense steps the Congress can take now."

He argued that people on the terror watch list should be prevented from buying a gun, and loopholes in background checks should be closed.

"It is way past time to stop allowing the purchase of a gun online or at a gun show without a background check," he said. "There are holes that need to be plugged, including those that keep guns in the hands of convicted domestic abusers."

Merkley spoke of steps Oregon has taken, including expanding background checks to gun shows and closing the "Craigslist loophole."

He said Oregon is a state "where people love to hunt, where they love to target practice, where they believe powerfully in the individual rights of the second amendment."

"But Oregon is also a state where the citizens believe we should not put guns into the hands of felons or those who are deeply mentally disturbed," Merkley said.

Wyden referenced his late brother, who was schizophrenic, and discussed the fear he had that his brother "would be out on the streets and would hurt himself or somebody else."

"It is time to establish, once and for all, a system through which individuals who are found to be a potential threat to themselves or others can receive the treatment that they need," he said.

He also advocated research into gun violence, saying it "makes no sense at all to block the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from gathering information that could help keep our communities and our families safe."

Wyden asked Murphy for statistics on how many people on the terrorist watch list have been able to purchase a gun.

Murphy said 244 people on the list attempted to buy weapons in 2015, and 223 were successful.

"In this building, we come together for moments of silence honoring the victims of these shootings like clockwork," Wyden said. "And like clockwork, again, Congress does nothing about it."

Merkley's question to Murphy didn't have to do with statistics: "When will Congress say enough is enough?"

You can watch a livestream of the filibuster here.

- Talia Richman

trichman@oregonian.com

@TaliRichman
Two weeks before Gov. Kate Brown unveiled her plan for spending billions of dollars in new revenue, assuming a controversial corporate tax measure passes this fall, she did something unusual. On a Sunday, she dropped by Senate President Peter Courtney's home for an informal meeting.

Did they discuss Brown's spending plan for the tax measure, known as Initiative Petition 28? What about a special legislative session meant to provide an alternative to the union-backed measure? Neither camp will say yes. Or no.

"We talked about life, and I'm gonna leave it at that," said Courtney, D-Salem, adding that the union-backed tax measure "has been a part of our discussions for quite awhile. I'm gonna tell you that because I don't want to make a mistake."

But the acknowledgment of the meeting -- and its mysterious agenda -- adds to the touchy politics around the measure, which could raise as much as $3 billion a year if it survives an expensive campaign fight from some leading Oregon businesses.

Courtney confirmed that the two had been discussing for weeks whether Brown should call lawmakers back to the Capitol. Courtney, who last year compared the measure with the Civil War and called for compromise, said he talks to Brown all the time and "the issue of" the tax measure "and the special session, that's been there for weeks now."

He also said Brown has yet to rule out a special session, at least not when they've discussed it. For many observers, Brown's announcement of a spending plan signaled she'd given up on plans to gather lawmakers before the November election.

The revelation that Brown and Courtney were discussing a possible special session at all is somewhat surprising, given that Brown told reporters in March she did not plan to call one. House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, also has said she's not interested in a special session.

"The governor has never said to me 'I will not call a special session,' in all the times I've talked about [an Initiative Petition 28] special session," Courtney said.

Yet neither Brown nor Courtney would disclose what they talked about in that particular Sunday meeting, which Brown's office said likely took place May 22. Brown's calendar lists two redacted meetings that Sunday. Brown's spokeswoman, Kristen Grainger, said neither of those was the meeting with Courtney.

Grainger wrote in an email that Brown "said she hadn't really talked with him informally since the session ended in March, so it was just a general check-in, no specific agenda. She said they had a wide ranging discussion."

On June 3, Brown shared her thoughts for how to spend the estimated $3 billion in annual tax revenue from Initiative Petition 28. The measure would raise the corporate minimum tax by charging certain corporations a 2.5 percent tax on their sales in Oregon above $25 million annually.

And while it's not unusual for governors to visit Courtney at his home overlooking the Willamette River, a special visit from Brown has, apparently, been less common.

"I don't talk to the governor a lot except in a conference room," Courtney said.

-- Hillary Borrud

503-294-4034; @hborrud
hoverboard

A hoverboard is a two-wheeled device that's similar to a Segway without handlebars.

(AP Photo/Stephen Brashear, File)

Kwaleam Pinkly

A Multnomah County grand jury on Wednesday indicted a Cedar Hills man on robbery and unlawful use of a weapon charges after police say he made a teenager turn over his hoverboard at gunpoint.

Kwaleam Pinkly, 20, was previously facing robbery and unlawful use of a weapon charges, but prosecutors couldn't proceed with the case, court records show. He was indicted Wednesday on two counts apiece of first- and second-degree robbery, and a single unlawful use of a weapon charge.

A warrant has been issued for his arrest.

Pinkly admitted in May to using a gun to rob the teenager of his hoverboard and wrote the boy a letter saying he was sorry for threatening his life, according to a probable cause affidavit filed May 18 in Multnomah County Circuit Court. A hoverboard is a two-wheeled device that's similar to a Segway without handlebars.

Pinkly recently entered pleas in a separate case, court documents show. On June 7, he pleaded not guilty to second-degree criminal mischief, second-degree criminal trespassing and harassment charges. Court records did not include any details about the case.

In the hoverboard incident, the teenage boy told police that he and two friends were walking down Southeast Harold Street on May 17 when they spotted a Honda Accord he thought was suspicious, according to the affidavit.

The friends walked to the other side of the sidewalk to stay away from the car, but its driver eventually pulled up next to them. Pinkly was sitting in the backseat and had his window down, according to the affidavit, and asked the boy if he liked the hoverboard.

He pointed a small, silver revolver at the boy, who thought he was going to be robbed and dropped the hoverboard and ran, the affidavit says.

Pinkly then got out of the car and lifted his shirt, exposing a revolver, according to the affidavit. He pointed the gun at both of the boy's friends -- one of whom said she watched Pinkly grab the hoverboard and get back into the car.

An officer who responded to the area pulled over the car near 96th Avenue and Harold Street. There were five people in the car, and its driver gave police consent to search it. An officer found a silver revolver with a black handle under the front passenger seat, and the boy and his two friends identified Pinkly as the person who pointed the gun at them and took the hoverboard.

Police found the hoverboard in the car's trunk.

-- Jim Ryan

jryan@oregonian.com

503-221-8005; @Jimryan015
The father of a 13-year-old girl paid American Airlines an extra fee for unaccompanied minors thinking his daughter would be safe on the flight to Portland on Wednesday night, an attorney said.

Chad Camp

When the plane that originated at the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport landed, Port of Portland officers and FBI agents were waiting to arrest Chad Cameron Camp. The 26-year-old Gresham man touched the girl inappropriately about 15 times within a half-hour before anyone took notice, said Brent Goodfellow, an attorney representing the girl's family.

Flight attendants sat the girl alone next to the window in a three-seat row, he said. The girl told Goodfellow that the man entered the plane wearing headphones and was talking to himself before taking the middle seat next to her, the attorney said.

Flight attendants offered to move the man to another seat, but he said, "No, I'm fine," according to the criminal complaint filed by an FBI agent.

The girl told agents the man regularly mumbled and cursed to himself before attempting to make small talk, according to the complaint. As he leaned toward the girl, she leaned away, according to the complaint.

She told agents that Camp began using his elbow to brush up against her upper arm and shoulder area as he attempted to turn the page of a magazine, according to the complaint.

Later, he stood up, leaned into the girl's seat and put his head up to the window about 12 inches from her face, according to the complaint. He then sat back down nudging the girl with his elbow, according to the complaint.

After he twice offered to share the same set of earphones for music, Camp repeatedly placed his hand on her knee and upper thigh, according to the complaint. When she moved his hand to break contact with him, he laughed and tried again, according to the complaint.

Later, a flight attendant approached the row for drink service, she told agents she saw Camp's hand on the girl's crotch, according to the complaint. The attendant told Camp he had to move, and he denied anything inappropriate happened, according to the complaint.

The attendant then noticed "a single tear coming down the victim's cheek," according to the complaint.

"She told this guy over and over, 'stop touching me,'" Goodfellow said. "At one point, he got angry and threw his earphones at her and continued to talk to himself."

Flight attendants immediately moved the girl and another witness to the front of the plane and moved Camp to the rear of the aircraft, Goodfellow said. The flight crew asked all passengers to remain seated throughout the flight, he said.

When the plane landed, the girl and another witness were allowed to exit the plane before Camp, he said. He was taken into custody and booked into a Multnomah County jail on Thursday morning.

Camp, wearing the standard blue jail scrubs, appeared briefly Thursday in U. S. District Court in Portland. He was given a chance to quietly review the criminal complaint, before his attorney entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. He stands accused of "abusive sexual contact," court papers show.

Oregon Circuit Court records show no criminal convictions for Camp. He has retained defense lawyer Steve Lindsey, and a detention hearing is set for 1:30 p.m. Monday.

According to American Airlines' website, adults can pay an extra $150 for "unaccompanied minor service" for children ages 5 to 17.

"Our unaccompanied minor service is to ensure your child is boarded onto the aircraft, introduced to the flight attendant, chaperoned during connections and released to the appropriate person at their destination," according to the airline's website.

Ross Feinstein, airline spokesman, said in an email the airline cares deeply about young passengers.

"We take these matters very seriously and have cooperated fully and immediately with law enforcement officials in their investigation of the suspect," he said. "Due to the pending criminal case against the suspect, we are referring all questions to law enforcement."

A U.S. Department of Transportation offers safety tips for parents who wish to send their unaccompanied children on a flight.

According to the agency, "Airlines try to do everything necessary to make your child's trip safe and comfortable. However, you should understand that unaccompanied-minor services do not include constant supervision or entertainment during the flight."

-- Tony Hernandez

thernandez@oregonian.com

503-294-5928

@tonyhreports
A woman with terminal lung cancer who works next to Bullseye Glass blames the company for her illness in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Valerie Silva, 63, lives in Washington state but works at the Fred Meyer headquarters next door to Bullseye in Southeast Portland. She has never used tobacco products and her husband hasn't either, the suit said. She was diagnosed with stage 4 small cell lung cancer two years ago.

"Ms. Silva has suffered pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life as a result of her cancer, the cancer treatment and the prospect of an early death. Her mother lived until she was 92 years old," the suit said.

Filed Tuesday, it accused Bullseye of negligence in allowing its smokestacks to emit high levels of contaminants from the burning of heavy metals to make colored glass.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality placed an air monitoring station in Fred Meyer's parking lot in February. It blamed Bullseye for the high levels of air contaminates that it found. The levels of arsenic were 159 times above the state's safety goal and cadmium levels were 49 times higher, increasing residents' lifetime chances of getting cancer if they breathed the same polluted air every day.

Silva walked by the glass factory on breaks and at lunch for exercise, the suit said. It doesn't indicate how long Silva has worked there. Her Seattle-based attorney, Kevin Sullivan, did not return an email or call to his office.

A spokesman for Bullseye Glass didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Company officials initially denied Bullseye was responsible for the pollution but ended up suspending the use of arsenic, cadmium and chromium. In March, it promised to install a filtration system to keep harmful emissions out of the air.

But then in May the state filed a cease and desist order against Bullseye after it found high lead levels in the area. Earlier this month, the state lifted that order after agreed to limits on its use of toxic metals, including lead.

In the lawsuit, Silva and her husband are listed as the plaintiffs. It said they have been "severely emotionally traumatized" by the cancer diagnosis and will suffer the rest of their lives.

The company is also facing a class action lawsuit filed by neighbors. Both suits note that Bullseye lobbied the U.S. Environmental Agency to be excluded from 2007 rules that required tighter controls on glassmaking.

Federal records show that Bullseye repeatedly contacted the agency and urged for its use of heavy metals to be exempted.

-- Lynne Terry
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Seven Oregon Supreme Court justices took part in State vs. Amanda Newcomb on Thursday, June 16, 2016: Justices Richard Baldwin, David Brewer, Rives Kistler, Thomas Balmer, Martha Lee Walters and Jack Landau. Senior Justice Virginia Linder (not pictured) also took part in the decision. Justice Lynn Nakamoto (pictured in the middle of the back row) did not take part in the ruling. (Oregon Judicial Department)

A Portland-area dog owner found guilty of starving her pet was rightfully convicted -- even though a veterinarian gathered evidence against her by drawing the dog's blood without a warrant, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The high court noted that dogs are not "mere" property and don't require a warrant to search internally. The court differentiated animals from, say, containers or suitcases with drugs or other items stashed inside.

The ruling reverses a 2014 Oregon Court of Appeals decision that prosecutors say made it tougher for veterinarians to provide seized animals immediate care for their injuries. Prosecutors also say the 2014 Appeals Court reversal made it more difficult to pursue criminal charges against owners accused of starving, beating or otherwise harming their animals.

According to a Supreme Court summary:

The case at issue began in 2010, when an informant told the Oregon Humane Society that then 28-year-old Amanda L. Newcomb was beating her dog, failing to properly feed it and keeping it in a kennel for many hours a day. An animal-cruelty investigator went to Newcomb's apartment in December 2010 and, once invited in, saw "Juno" in the yard with "no fat on his body." The dog, the investigator reported, "was kind of eating at random things in the yard, and trying to vomit."

The investigator asked why, and Newcomb said she was out of dog food but that she was going to get more that night, according to the summary of the case.

The investigator determined a "strong possibility" existed that Juno needed medical care and took the dog to a Humane Society vet. The vet gave Juno food, charted his weight and measured his rapid weight gain over several days. The vet also drew Juno's blood and ruled out any disease. The investigator concluded nothing was wrong with the dog other than it was very hungry.

Newcomb was convicted of second-degree animal neglect, a misdemeanor. Among other problems with the conviction, Newcomb argued, authorities violated her constitutional rights to be protected from unreasonable searches of property by drawing blood from her dog. Under Oregon law, animals are defined as property.

At a 2011 trial, Multnomah County Circuit Judge Eric Bergstrom denied her motion to suppress the blood evidence -- by agreeing with prosecutor Adam Gibbs, who argued that a dog taken to the veterinarian's office for examination and care is similar to a suspected child-abuse victim taken into protective custody for examination and care.

Gibbs also argued that a dog is not a container -- like an inanimate piece of property -- that requires a warrant. Rather, Gibbs argued that a dog "doesn't contain anything" -- and that what's inside a dog is just "more dog."

The Supreme Court Thursday agreed, stating that the chemical composition of Juno's blood was not "information" that Newcomb "placed in Juno for safekeeping or to conceal from view."

Jacob Kamins, who is the state's animal cruelty deputy district attorney, said Thursday's Supreme Court ruling is the third in a series of high court decisions to boost animal-protection efforts in the past two years.

"There's a feeling that the issue of animal welfare is really coming into its own in the criminal justice world," Kamins said.

In State v. Arnold Nix, the high court ruled that a Umatilla County man who was convicted of starving 20 horses and goats on his property could be sentenced -- not just on one count of second-degree animal neglect -- but on 20 counts, meaning each animal was treated as a separate "victim."

In State v. Linda Fessenden and Teresa Dicke, the high court said a sheriff's deputy was legally justified in 2010 in rushing onto a Douglas County pasture to get medical help for a horse that was so malnourished every one of its ribs was showing.

Read Thursday's opinion here.

-- Aimee Green

503-294-5119
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A woman was fatally stabbed at Club Skinn, 4523 N.E. 60th Ave., on June 15, 2016.

(The Oregonian/OregonLive/file)

UPDATE: Police ID woman stabbed to death at NE Portland strip club

A woman died after being stabbed at a Northeast Portland strip club late Wednesday night, police said.

The woman was stabbed at Club Skinn, 4523 N.E. 60th Ave., and died at the scene, Portland police said in a news release. Police said they detained one person who may have been involved in the stabbing.

The club's website describes it as a "long time established neighborhood full nude bar with a cozy comfy party atmosphere."

The location has been connected to violence in the past. A 33-year-old man died and a 21-year-old woman was injured in an overnight shooting outside the club in 2013, according to a previous Oregonian/OregonLive report.

And in January 2011, a man celebrating his 24th birthday was shot and killed outside the club, which was at that time called JD's Bar and Grill, according to the report.

Wednesday's stabbing is under investigation. There's no apparent public safety risk, police said.

The investigation may affect traffic on 60th Avenue near Prescott Street for several hours, police said. Officers responded to the club around 11:35 p.m.

No additional information was available early Thursday morning.

-- Jim Ryan

jryan@oregonian.com

503-221-8005; @Jimryan015
Sampson Niu

Sampson Niu on his unofficial visit to Oregon

(Courtesy of Sampson Niu)

The Oregon Ducks focused heavily on linebackers in the class of 2016, but are still in need of a few more talented additions in the 2017 recruiting cycle.

Oregon may be able to address that need, at least in part, sooner rather than later, as Rivals four-star linebacker Sampson Niu, who is set to commit in less than a week, was blown away by his recent visit to Eugene:

Lets just say.. Today was good  pic.twitter.com/y9oNzpKf3Q  Sampson Niu (@saampsonniu) June 14, 2016

Even before the trip, the 6-foot-1, 220-pound linebacker, out of Madison High School (San Diego, California), believed the Oregon trip could go a long way in determining his college future.

"Oregon is really high up there," Niu told The Oregonian. "I'm hoping to go and check out everything, hoping to love it and that will narrow down my decision even more."

It seems the Ducks may have done just that, as Niu has been openly pro-Oregon on social media since his return home.

The timing couldn't be better for Oregon, as the California defensive standout is set to announce his decision June 22.

A commitment from Niu could also signal that the Ducks have shaken a California slump that saw them finish without a Rivals top-45 talent from, "The Golden State" in the 2016 recruiting class.

Oregon landed several talented linebackers in the class of 2016, and could soon add to the position in the class of 2017, beating out Arizona, Arizona State, Cal, Michigan, Mississippi, Notre Dame, Oregon State, South Carolina, Texas A&M, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin and others for Niu in the process.

-- Andrew Nemec

anemec@oregonian.com

@AndrewNemec
The trial of 26 people who face charges related to the trafficking of 26 infants begins on June 15, 2016 in east China's Zhejiang Province. [Photo: zjol.com.cn]

HANGZHOU, June 16 -- The trial of 26 people, who face charges related to the trafficking of 26 infants, began Wednesday in east China's Zhejiang Province, according to a local court.

The cases are being heard at the people's court of Cangnan County with the intermediate people's court of Wenzhou City, which administers Cangnan, overseeing proceedings.

The principal suspect, a 51-year-old man from Cangnan, identified by his surname Zhang, confessed that he and his lover started the business in 2013.

Procurators said the babies were sold for between 10,000 yuan (1,520 U.S. dollars) and 100,000 yuan. One baby boy was resold five times, with the first buyer paying 10,000 yuan and last 83,000 yuan.

The defendants, aged between 27 and 79, are from Wenzhou, Fujian and Yunnan.

The Wenzhou court said most of the suspects were only educated to primary school level or were illiterate.

The trial is expected to last until Friday.
Daily traffic

Fog? In June? Indeed. U.S. 26 in Hillsboro in the area of Cornelius Pass Road east to Bethany saw a bank of fog this morning for early commuters. Spring is a crazy time for driving weather with sudden downpours, hail storms and the occasional thunder shower. All are possible Thursday. Leave lots of room and check the windshield wipers for possible replacing.

***

NORTHEAST PORTLAND 8:40 a.m.; Gas leak has Northeast 45th and Hawthorne Boulevard closed. Use alternate route.



Update 8:55 a.m.; Construction crew hit a gas line at 45th and Hawthrone Boulevard. Expect delays in the area as the streets are closed for repairs.

***

NORTHWEST PORTLAND 7:57 a.m.; Crash on Northwest Burnside Road at Tichner Road. Eastbound lanes blocked. Expect major delays.



***

HILLSBORO 7:56 a.m.; Four-car crash near the Middle School at Northeast Jackson School and Evergreen roads.



***

OREGON CITY 7:52 a.m.; Crash I-205 southbound near the Abernathy Bridge has the left lane blocked.

Update 8:25 a.m.; Finally cleared.

***

BEAVERTON 7:15 a.m.; Injury crash on Southwest Jenkins Road near 158 Avenue, just south of Costco.



Update 7:25 a.m.; Cleared.

***

HILLSBORO 6:50 a.m.; Non-injury crash reported on Northeast Main Street and 28th Avenue.



***

WILSONVILLE 6:48 a.m.; Crash I-5 northbound just after the Boone Bridge in Wilsonville blocking the right lane. Has traffic backing up to the rest area.



Update 7:10 a.m.; Cleared.

***

NORTHEAST PORTLAND 6:34 a.m.; Crash involving an auto and a bicycle at Northeast Grand Avenue and Lloyd Boulevard.



***

GRESHAM 6:10 a.m.; Downed tree has Oxbow Drive closed between Division and 322nd Avenue.

Heads up Vancouver commuters: C-TRAN is inviting Clark County travelers to "dump the pump" today and take public transportation for free! Yep, C-TRAN will offer free service across the system on Thursday in an effort to encourage more people to use transit. To get a bus schedule or figure out how to ride, log on to C-TRAN

Check back throughout the morning for the latest commuting updates and follow us on Twitter: @trafficportland
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Sen. John McCain has accused President Obama of being "directly responsible" for the Orlando attacks.

(The Associated Press)

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, talking about Sunday's Orlando nightclub massacre, suggested earlier this week that President Barack Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists. "Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind," Trump told Fox News on Monday.

Many Republican leaders have distanced themselves from Trump's insinuations, but today Arizona Sen. John McCain appeared to embrace them.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for [the Orlando attack], because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures," he said.

McCain, who is in a tough re-election campaign, is referring to the fact that U.S. combat troops left Iraq in 2010, in accordance with a 2008 agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. "It is time to turn the page," President Obama said at the time.

The president is in Orlando visiting with some of the families of those killed Sunday by Omar Mateen, the mass murderer who claimed ISIS inspiration for his actions. Police killed Mateen to end the murderous rampage.

McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, quickly tried to downplay his statement with a follow-up tweet, but Democratic leaders were already responding with fury and indignation.

To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obamas national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself  John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) June 16, 2016

Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, said McCain's comments were "unhinged."

During an interview with MSNBC, Congressman Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, called on McCain to retract his comments in their entirety, insisting McCain misrepresents the Obama administration's actions in Iraq and that McCain failed to mention the role of Obama's predecessor, President George W. Bush, who launched the war in Iraq.

The Huffington Post has pointed out that when U.S. combat troops left Iraq in 2010, Sen. McCain indicated that he viewed it as a foreign-policy win -- for Bush, whose administration negotiated the end of the occupation. "Last American combat troops leave Iraq," McCain tweeted. "I think President George W. Bush deserves some of the credit for victory."

Rep. Schiff chalked up McCain's comments today to the destructive coarsening of political debate during this election cycle, calling it the "Trump effect."

-- Douglas Perry
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(Screenshot via YouTube)

When it comes to speeches, our current crop of presidential candidates could take some lessons from one Chicago middle schooler who managed to impersonate several of them hilariously without delving into mudslinging or offensive rhetoric.

Jack Aiello, an 8th grader at Thomas Middle School in the Chicago area, beat out several competitors to speak at his graduation, according to ABC News, and he made the most of it, seamlessly pivoting between impersonations of Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"Politics has been something he's been interested in for several years," his father, John Aiello, told ABC. "He's always been good with impressions, so while watching along with his mom and I, he picked up phrases and mannerisms of the candidates."

Mimicking the staccato style of Trump, Aiello speaks about the virtues of the school's foreign language program where students learn the native tongues of countries like "Germany, France and China."

"And let me tell you, I love China. I mean, I have so many terrific friends in china," Aiello said to loud laughs from behind the podium, perfectly matching the business mogul and presidential hopeful's recognizable hand gestures. "But I took Spanish and, let me tell you it was fantastic. Muy fantastico."

From there Aiello moved on to Cruz, then a brief interlude as Obama, followed by Clinton and closing statements by Sanders, during which Aiello called for a "cinnamon roll revolution" in the distinctive accent of the Vermont senator.

Parents, friends, family members and fellow students in the audience, presumably from across the political spectrum, rewarded Aiello with a standing ovation, a feat yet to be achieved by any of the current candidates.

-- Kale Williams

kwilliams@oregonian.com

503-294-4048

@sfkale
Orlando nightclub shooting victims

Juan Ramon Guerrero (left), 22, Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32, were among 49 men and women killed Sunday, June 12, 2016, in a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

(Christopher Andrew Leinonen)

Before Brandon Wolf went into Orlando's Pulse nightclub on Saturday night to dance with two of his friends, Drew Leinonen turned to him to remind him of something important.

"He said, 'You know, something we never do enough is tell each other that we love each other,'" Wolf, a 27-year-old native of Canby, Oregon, told CNN. The Oregonian/OregonLive reached out to Wolf and has yet to hear back.

Wolf, along with Leinonen and his boyfriend Juan Guerrero, went into the club for Latin Night and did what people do at nightclubs, dancing and having a good time. But as Wolf and another friend, Eric Borrero, took a bathroom break as the night was winding down, shots rang out.

"We went to the bathroom and that's when the first shots were fired," Wolf told the network. "At first we didn't know what was happening and we looked at each other and said 'What is that?'"

The pair thought the sound system was malfunctioning or something was wrong with the music, but the reality of what was happening, that a gunman had opened fire in the club, dawned on them when the smell hit them.

"People started piling into the bathroom," he said in the interview. "You could smell the scent of blood and smoke. My eyes got really big and I said 'We have to leave. We have to get out of here.'"

A back-and-forth ensued with some wanting to stay in the bathroom and others wanting to make a run for it.

"People were debating about what we should do, but it was not safe so we grabbed hands and just ran for the door as fast as we could," Wolf recounted in to CNN. "We didn't look back for anybody. We didn't want to see anything. We just ran for the door."

It wasn't until Wolf and Borrero got a couple blocks away that they realized that Leinonen and Guerrero weren't with them.

"I wanted to go back so bad. It was too late by then," he said.

Soon after, Wolf saw Guerrero wheeled out of the nightclub suffering from multiple gunshot wounds and thought he would survive after he was rushed to the hospital, but it would be hours before he learned of Leinonen's fate.

"One minute you're telling yourself, 'I have to come to terms that my best friend is gone,'" Wolf told CNN. "And then the next minute you're telling yourself, 'But he could be there.'"

Both men were among the 49 killed.

As politicians, law enforcement officials and everyday Americans struggle to grapple with the overlapping issues involved -- homophobia, home-grown terrorism, racism and gun control, to name a few -- Wolf said he hoped the tragedy in Orlando would bring people together instead of driving wedges between an already-divided country.

"If I want to see anything change, it's that people get over themselves and start loving each other," Wolf told the network.

-- Kale Williams

kwilliams@oregonian.com

503-294-4048

@sfkale
Alessandra Kirby

This undated photo released by the Utah National Guard, shows 1st. Lt. Alessandra Kirby negotiating the Darby Obstacle Course at Fort Benning during the Ranger Assessment. Kirby, a Utah National Guard solider will be among a handful of women going to the grueling Army Ranger school as part of the U.S. military's first steps toward allowing women to move into the elite combat unit.

(AP Photo/US Army, Patrick A. Albright)

On Tuesday, the Senate voted to approve a defense policy bill that would authorize $602 billion in military spending, keep Guantanamo Bay open and, starting on Jan. 1, 2018, force women to register for the draft at age 18, just like their male peers. Gasp!

According to The New York Times, "Failure to register could result in the loss of various forms of federal aid, including Pell grants, a penalty that men already face."

This provision to the National Defense Authorization Act was a tricky add by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) who The Atlantic says, "offered the amendment as a dare," thinking that liberals would have to vote against it because there's no way they could actually believe in gender equality as extended to military service. Hunter himself is against gender integration in the military and voted against the provision he proposed.

Unfortunately for Hunter, he was wrong. It turns out there's wide support for opening up the draft to women, even among conservatives. The New York Times writes that Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee approves of the possible change.

"The fact is," says McCain, "every single leader in this country, both men and women, members of the military leadership, believe that it's fair since we opened up all aspects of the military to women that they would also be registering for Selective Services."

On Twitter, plenty of people have opinions on the possibility that women will have to register for Selective Services.

Why should men have to register for the draft but not women? Here is your equality feminists! (I wholeheartedly support this)  Kassy Dillon (@KassyDillon) June 15, 2016

We should STOP registering men for the draft. Not register women as well.  ULTRA GET YOUR FLU SHOT (@ULTRAGOTHA) June 15, 2016

Glad to see the Senate understands each of us has an obligation to be willing to serve our country in some capacity. #women #draft #equality  Jackie Speier (@RepSpeier) June 15, 2016

I'd argue that most feminists are in favor of including women in the draft, in addition to the idea that the draft is archaic and barbaric.  Beth the Elder One (@BethElderkin) June 15, 2016

The defense policy bill now needs to be hashed out in committee between the House and the Senate, where there's sure to be a lot of debate. And even after that, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, not because of the women thing but because of, for one, the Gitmo thing--he promised to close Guantanamo Bay on his first day in office and it's still open.

It's worth noting that the draft hasn't been used since 1973 when the government was calling boys up for the Vietnam War. Still, the addition of women to the list of people who could be required to fight in wars would mean a fundamental change in the way the military operates. And there are plenty of countries that don't just ask women to register for the draft, they actually have compulsory service for people of both/all genders. Israel for example, and Norway, and North Korea.

So, will the addition of women to the draft mean an end to sexism? The end of the military? The end of the draft? Nothing much? Only time will tell. But why not speculate? Tell me what you think in the comment or on Twitter!

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker
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BEIJING, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan, will significantly boost China's relationship with Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia, diplomats and scholar said Wednesday.

The Belt and Road Initiative will be a focus of the meetings between Xi and leaders of the three countries that have traditional friendly ties with China. All three were among the first to respond to the China-proposed initiative.

President Xi will have an in-depth exchange of views with leaders in the three countries on cooperation in the initiative, officials with the Foreign Ministry said at a press briefing about Xi's visits, from June 17 to 24.

China and Serbia will sign agreements on trade, industry and finance while China and Poland will ink deals on finance, aviation, science and education, Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Haixing said.

Within the framework of China-CEE cooperation, or the "16+1" mechanism, major projects have been given the go ahead or are underway, including a China-Europe land-sea express passage, freight train services to strengthen connectivity between China and Europe, and the construction and revamping of a rail link between the Serbian and Hungarian capitals.

In April, China's HeSteel Group signed a 46-million-euro deal to buy Serbia's century-old steel plant Smederevo, with an aim to transform the plant into one of the most competitive firms in Europe.

Xi's upcoming visit to the CEE comes on the heels of his state visit to the Czech Republic in April, signalling growing importance of the region, said Liu Zuokui, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"Given the influence of Serbia and Poland in CEE countries, their bilateral relations with China will become a model and accelerator to China-Europe relations," Liu said.

President Xi will attend ceremonies marking the completion of major cooperation projects in Uzbekistan and discuss on new projects with his Uzbekistan counterpart during his visit to the central Asian country on June 21-24, Assistant Foreign Minister Li Huilai said.

Xi will also attend a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where member state leaders will discuss anti-terrorism, drug smuggling and trans-national crimes to deepen security cooperation in the region, according to Li.

Founded in 2001, the SCO now has China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as its full members, with Afghanistan, Belarus, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistanas observers.
BEIJING, June 15 -- A summary of outcomes of the second China-U.S. high-level dialogue on cybercrime was released Wednesday, with the two nations scheduling various events for further cooperation in this regard.

The dialogue was held Tuesday in Beijing and co-chaired by senior officials from China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice.

The two sides decided to meet for the third dialogue in Washington in the latter half of this year, according to the summary released by the MPS.

Before the third dialogue, the two will carry out the second tabletop exercise on cybercrime and network protection scenarios, as the first exercise in April was deemed effective.

The hotline mechanism will be tested before September.

The two will strengthen information sharing, including a regular sharing of online threats, and cooperation.

They will conduct cooperation in four aspects including joint crackdown on online child pornography, as well as joint crackdown on assistance to violence and terrorist activities, fraud via e-mail and websites and online sales of guns.

The two sides will meet at a symposium this year in China to discuss joint crackdown on the improper use of technology and communications that facilitate violence and terrorist activities. They will also work out an action plan to cope with e-mail fraud.
On Wednesday, the People's Daily, the biggest newspaper group in China, and Tencent, China's largest and most used Internet service portal, signed a cooperation agreement in Beijing to promote media convergence. The President of People's Daily Yang Zhenwu and the Chairman of the Board of Tencent Pony Ma attended the signing ceremony.

The two parties will conduct in-depth cooperation in the regards of content, channels, platforms, operations and management in order to construct a major system of media convergence. The two partners will also explore and promote the development of media convergence focusing on standards, technologies, management and operations.

The Peoples Daily and Tencent will jointly establish a nationwide cloud platform for media convergence providing secure cloud service and applications to the Chinese media. Distribution channels of media content in and out of the country will be further expanded, with Tencent Qcloud providing technical support regarding cloud computing.

Yang met with Ma before the signing of the agreement, hailing the cooperation as a helpful attempt for the party organ to enhance its Internet content construction. He highly praised the development, technology and social contribution of Tencent, and promised to report more on such innovating enterprises represented by Tencent.

Ma said that Tencent has made great achievement on Internet cloud services with its 18-year experience. Tencent hopes to cooperate with its partners in this regard and create a large-scale data ecology with comprehensiveness, diversity and harmony, Ma added.

Taking advantage of both parties, they will expand space for mutually beneficial cross-industry cooperation. In consideration of the authority and influence of the People's Daily in the media industry, the cooperation between the two will surely provide better services, facilitate media convergence and innovation, and improve the ability to produce and spread high-quality contents.

Lu Xinning, deputy chief editor of People's Daily, Wang Yibiao, editorial board member and secretary-general of People's Daily, and Guo Kaitian, senior vice president of Tencent attended the signing ceremony.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:

Azerbaijan is the leader among the CIS countries on addressing youth employment issues, Minister for Labour and Social Protection of Population of Azerbaijan Salim Muslimov said.

He made the remarks June 16 at a conference in Baku dedicated to the preparation of decent work program for 2016-2020.

"Azerbaijan is the only CIS country included by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in ten leading countries on addressing youth employment issues," he said. "Employment strategy approved by Azerbaijani president in 2005, as well as other state programs, is highly appreciated on many international forums."

The minister also emphasized the importance of the ILO's activities to solve the issues with the youth employment in Azerbaijan.

"It should be noted that the ILO carried out a lot of work in Azerbaijan within the Partnership for youth employment in the CIS project," Muslimov said. "Azerbaijan also took the first place in the competition held by the ILO for the best practical approach to the youth employment in the CIS, and was awarded a special diploma of the organization."
The Clare-Gladwin Career & Technical Education Construction Trades students needed a project to improve their skills. The Gladwin County Land Bank Authority needed skilled trades workers to help improve a Gladwin neighborhood. And Margaret Puroll needed a new place to live.

The result was what the GCLBA hopes is the first of many new homes constructed by CTE students on foreclosed or donated lots in the county  a 1,200-square-foot home on Antler Street in Gladwin.

Christy Van Tiem, chair of the GCLBA, said everybody wins in a scenario like this.

The Land Bank board hopes to take some of the abandoned, foreclosed and blighted lots in the county and make them assets to the community, whether its for adjoining property owners or new buyers, Van Tiem said. For this first home, we had heard that the CTE Construction Trades program was looking for projects, so we decided to pursue it with CTE.

For CTE Construction Trades Instructor Josh Myers, it was a golden teaching opportunity. His students picked up valuable knowledge in many aspects of construction, including framing, roofing, interior and exterior finishing, concrete and deck construction.

The kids in this class get so much from an experience like this, Myers said. You can lecture in a classroom, and you can work on small-scale projects to replicate building pieces of a home, but this is a hands-on group of students, and nothing beats the real thing. Our students started at the crawlspace and worked until the house was finished, and gained a ton of valuable experience in the process.

Were very happy with the home, and were grateful to have had this opportunity to help keep the Construction Trades program going with projects, said Van Tiem. The new owner, Mrs. Puroll, needed to downsize from her former home, and the Land Bank house is perfect for her. Shes very pleased with the home and the kids who helped build it.

Myers said his students also gained a new measure of civic pride during the project.

Were very thankful for the opportunity to work with the Land Bank, he said. This relationship has provided local high school students with quality hands-on learning and real-world experience. Building a complete house is a great way to teach problem-solving and teach state-mandated curriculum. We also enjoyed the community service aspect  the students were very proud to build a house in their community.

Van Tiem was quick to credit local businesses and individuals who helped with time, talent and resources to get the job done.

Mike Marker from Flynn Lumber volunteered to be our contractor and help us get an account set up there, and Flynn Lumber provided the majority of materials at a great discount, she said. Roger Krueger from Flynn Lumber volunteered to take care of whatever the CTE students needed in each phase of construction. I am not sure what we would have done without his help.

In the beginning, the Land Bank board was responsible for staking out the house, so I volunteered my husband, Kevin Van Tiem from Ledge Stone Builders, to help with that, she added. The GCLBA hired Ed Fennell from Shull Trucking to do the excavating; Dennis Alward Services to do the heating; Max Guernsey from Guernsey Electric to set up the electrical; Mike Johnson from Advanced Plumbing Services; and Earls Building Supply to install the garage door and opener.

Now with a first project under their belts, CTE and the GCLBA are looking forward to what comes next.

Were planning on doing another project with the CTE students in the 2016-2017 school year, she said, but this time we are working on getting a lot in the city of Beaverton. Then were looking at possibly going back and forth between Beaverton and Gladwin each year after. Were excited about the prospects of improving neighborhoods across the county and providing well-built homes for our citizens who need them.

For more information about the CTE program, visit the CTE website at www.CTEitsworking.com or http://www.facebook.com/ClareGladwinCTE.
The administrators of two Midland governmental operations were commended Monday night for the excellent work they have done for the city and the school district.

Midland City Manager Jon Lynch was praised in his annual salary review by City Council before receiving a 2 percent wage hike. Diane Brown Wilhelm, Ward 4, read a letter from members of the city council that recognized Lynch for helping city staff and the city council to pursue their goal of maintaining fiscal responsibility.

Indeed, that is one of Lynchs biggest accomplishments, leading a city staff that has found a way year after year to maintain the services Midland residents have come to expect while also holding the line on tax increases as much as possible.

And at a Midland Public Schools board of education meeting Monday night, the school board praised Superintendent Michael Sharrow for the work he has done in the district, extending his contract another year to 2021.

The board is very pleased with your performance, Board President Angela Brandstadt told Sharrow. Im just very excited  and appreciate all the work youve done.

Sharrows contract extension came on the same night as the board learned the 2016-17 Midland Public Schools budget is projected to end up more than $1 million in the black, ending years of deficit spending and putting the district on sounder financial footing going forward.

It is easy to take the amenities Midland residents enjoy for granted and think that all communities enjoy a similar quality of life. But the reality is that Midland is a special place, one that often is ranked as one of the top cities in Michigan for a variety of traits, from housing costs to crime rates to family friendliness and more.

Midland is fortunate to have these leaders in city government and the school district, and in county government with Administrator/Controller Bridgette Gransden, we might add. They provide the vision and direction that helps create the type of community we all get to enjoy.
To the editor:

Recently I have had several acquaintances say that because they were dissatisfied with the probable candidates being put forth by the two major political parties, they were intending not to vote at all. I agree with their opinions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but we are almost certainly going to get one or the other elected as our next president in November. It is very apparent that there are major differences in the directions in which they would lead our country.

All of us, those who vote and those who dont, are going to have to live with the choices that will be made by the new president. Very important on the list of things the new president will do is appoint at least one new Supreme Court justice. This will strongly affect our countrys trend to a more or less strict constitutional interpretation of our laws and regulations. Depending on which way we go, many of our rights may be significantly altered, and our daily lives significantly affected.

With this in mind, I believe that we have a civic and moral duty to give thorough consideration to the differences in the directions that Clinton and Trump are likely to lead the country if elected. Each of us has a serious obligation to give careful thought to the effect that this election will have on the future of our country and vote. We may not be satisfied with the quality of the candidates, but they are all we have, so we should be careful to get the best we can. We, our children, and our grandchildren are going to have to live with the long-range results of this election for a long time.

If, despite this, you still choose to not cast your ballot, I suggest that you have given up your right to complain about the direction in which the country is taken. You might have made a difference.

RICHARD HEINY

Midland
RED FLAG-Alaska 16-2

Maj. Scott Meng, 18th Aggressor Squadron F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot, awaits take-off authorization during RED FLAG-Alaska (RF-A) 16-2, on Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, June 15, 2016. RF-A is a series of Pacific Air Forces commander-directed field training exercises that enable joint and international forces to sharpen their combat skills by flying simulated combat sorties together in a realistic threat environment. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Steven R. Doty)
AIM high-Loading the Aggressors

U.S. Air Force aircraft armament systems technicians from the 354th Maintenance Squadron load an ** while working the swing shift on an F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft to be flown by pilots from the 18th Aggressor Squadron (AGRS), June 14, 2016, during RED FLAG-Alaska (RF-A) 16-2 at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. The 18th AGRS supports RF-A by sharing its knowledge of flying to participating units and ensuring the U.S. and its allies receive the best air combat training possible. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Shawn Nickel/Released)
Dental providers from East Meets West, a non-governmental organization based in Vietnam, partnered with U.S., Cambodian, Australian, Vietnamese and Thai military counterparts as part of Pacific Angel 16-2, a multilateral humanitarian assistance/civil military mission, to provide the multitude of children basic dental examinations and, more importantly, educate them on the importance of proper dental hygiene.

In Cambodia, there are so many people, not only children but also adults that still think that going to the dentist only involves extraction [of teeth], said Minh Huong, the lead for the East Meets West - Dental NGO. They don't think about how to prevent dental disease or dental decay, so its very important that we help educate the children.

Minh stood in front of the crowd of nearly 200 children and explained how to brush their teeth properly using a large set of fake teeth and an oversized toothbrush. She also gave them pointers on when and how often they should brush.



We teach them very simple lessons, three times a day, or at least two times a day they should brush their teeth, and especially before bedtime, Minh said. They can use a little toothpaste or even without toothpaste. They enjoyed it a lot.

The children repeated and recited Minhs direction over and over so they could remember the instructions. After which, each child received a toothbrush and toothpaste, then went to see one of the dentists or dental assistants, such as U.S. Navy Lieutenant Matthew Kanter, a dentist deployed from Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, who were ready to provide them a quick exam and fluoride treatment.



We give the kids good looks, and provided basic treatment, Kanter said. With the resources we have available I think we did a great job bringing them in, showing them a good time, and hopefully have a positive impact.

According to the local Cambodian dentists, a large portion of the rural populations in the country do not have the education or exposure to oral hygiene, so for some, this was likely the first time the children had been exposed to the importance of brushing their teeth.



I hope that having at least been exposed to someone telling them its important might get them to start thinking about it, Kanter said. That's something that they never have had before and we were at least able to provide that service to 187 kids today.

Starting early is key for dental health throughout an individuals life Kanter said.



Its extremely important for kids to have good dental hygiene, even with primary teeth, if they get cavities it could cause infection or problems with their adult teeth too; so with any good habit, the earlier you start, the better you are, Kanter said.



Minh emphasized that the children they brought in from the school are just beginning to replace their primary teeth with permanent teeth, making the oral hygiene education all that more important.



The permanent teeth will be with them for life, so it will not help them if they dont have the opportunity to take care of primary teeth, because of lack of knowledge, lack in care, or no oral hygiene education at school, Minh said. Now they have the knowledge to help them protect their teeth. Its a great opportunity to help the people, adults and children in Kampot.

The oral hygiene education day was planned by East Meets West NGO in partnership with the Kampot Provincial Health Clinic, but executed by both U.S., Australian and Cambodian dentists and volunteers, further building on the relationships formed throughout the Pacific Angel 16-2 mission.



This is a great partnership between the U.S. Pacific Angel mission and also East Meets West - Dental, Minh said. The way we do dental care for the children and the people here, we combine the efforts.



Pacific Angel is designed to promote interoperability with partner nations, while providing needed services to people throughout the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. The mission being conducted in Kampot Province includes general health, dental, optometry, pediatrics, physical therapy and engineering programs as well as various subject-matter expert exchanges.
After coordination and planning efforts by U.S. Pacific Commands Joint Force Air Component Command headquartered at Pacific Air Forces, the first temporary detachment of U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler airborne electronic attack aircraft arrived at Clark Air Base, Philippines, June 15.

This detachment, comprised of four aircraft and about 120 personnel assigned to Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 138, an expeditionary squadron based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington, is part of a JFACC-led U.S. Air Contingent established by USPACOM in April with the approval of the Government of the Philippines to promote interoperability and security cooperation.



Armed Forces of the Philippines offered to host the U.S. Air Contingent at Clark Air Base to train with their FA-50 fighter pilots and support units which are located there.



In addition to bilateral training missions, Growler aircraft will support routine operations that enhance regional maritime domain awareness and assure access to the air and maritime domains in accordance with international law.



The first temporary Air Contingent was comprised of five A-10C Thunderbolt aircraft, three HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters and approximately 200 personnel deployed from multiple PACAF units. The forces deployed to the Philippines for exercise Balikatan and completed their final mission April 28.



Previous VAQ 138 detachments like this one have completed deployments to locations throughout the Indo-Asia-Pacific region and participated in several exercises with allies and partners.



(Commander, Task Force 70 Public Affairs contributed to this article)
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

Trend:

Armenian armed forces have 8 times violated the ceasefire with Azerbaijan on the line of contact over the past 24 hours, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said in a message June 16.

Armenian armed forces stationed in Chinari village of Armenia's Berd district opened fire at the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Agbulag village of the Tovuz district.

Moreover, Azerbaijani positions underwent fire from the positions located near Chilyaburt village of the Tartar district, Yusifjanli village of the Aghdam district, Horadiz, Ashagi Seyidahmadli villages of the Fizuli district and from the nameless heights in the Goranboy, Fizuli and Khojavend districts.

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.
Executive Observer Program Offers Valuable Insight to PACAF Leaders By Staff Sgt. Wes Wright Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska -- Maj. Gen. Kevin Schneider, Pacific Air Forces chief of staff, visited Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson June 9 to 12 as part of RED FLAG-Alaska's Executive Observer Program.



During the visit, Schneider and 13 other leaders from 12 different nations' air forces participated in presentations and discussions how the U.S. Air Force integrates and synchronizes service capabilities, resources and effects to meet national challenges. All participants focused on learning each respective air forces operational challenges, as well as developing potential way-ahead for more efficient interoperability.



The framework for this iteration of the EOP is set against RF-A 16-2, a PACAF commander-directed field training exercise for U.S. and international forces, which provides joint offensive counter-air, interdiction, close air support and large-force employment training in a simulated combat environment.



"There are a number of challenges in the world today: weapons of mass destruction proliferation, aggressive state actors, terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief," Schneider said. "Regardless of the size of the air force, there is a lot of common ground and common challenges throughout the international community.



"What the EOP allows us to do is to figure out ways to be more effective and efficient together," he added."



Schneider said it is critical each nation's forces understand how the others think and operate. In a manner of speaking, everyone needs to speak a common language.



"Our pacific partners' various roles are essential to security and stability in the pacific region, Schneider said. "The challenges we all face are such that no nation is going to go at it alone. Whether it's a disaster relief type of contingency or all the way at the other end of the spectrum -- conflict."



Schneider explained one of the main goals of the EOP is to help establish and maintain the relationships amongst people, because at the end of the day, it takes people coming together to accomplish the mission.



"Partnerships don't happen by accident," Schneider said. "Partnerships happen through interaction. Whether it be the young Airman or staff sergeant out there as a subject matter expert exchanging information in a country, or whether it's a unit level deployment like RED FLAG, those relationships take time to mature. It takes work to build on those. When crisis happens, those partnerships are what we rely on to get the mission done."



PACAF's mission is to deliver rapid and precise air, space and cyberspace capabilities to protect and defend the United States, its territories allies and partners; provide integrated air and missile warning and defense; promote interoperability throughout the Pacific area of responsibility; maintain strategic access and freedom of movement across all domains; and posture to respond across the full spectrum of military contingencies in order to restore regional security.



Schneider said he is proud of the commitment to excellence he sees in PACAF's Airmen as they work to fulfill their part of the mission.



"We're doing exceptionally well," Schneider said. "You see Airmen at very junior levels who have technical expertise, knowledge, skill sets and ultimately intellect that is tremendously advanced. They're thinking through problems that are far more complex than those facing the Air Force of yesteryear. It's truly impressive."



The general encouraged JBER's Airmen to continue to strive for excellence and highlighted the importance of their role in PACAF's area of responsibility.



"We have a strategic triangle in PACAF: Alaska, Hawaii and Guam," Schneider said. "Operationally and strategically, JBER is tremendously important because of its location and ability to project power not only in the region but around the world.



"The role the Airmen here play is vital to stability and security in the pacific region," he continued.


Nebraska-sown rock is not too far afield of the strain cultivated in the rich turf of Illinois.

Which is why Kris Lager and his namesake band have a ready-and-willing fan base in Central Illinois, a regular destination for the past decade ... including Saturday night's Twin Cities stand as headliner for this year's second edition of the Bloomington Beer Fest on the lawn of the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts.

"It's very much a defined sound," admits the man who grew up in the "other" land of Lincoln, as in Neb.

"There's an honest approach to the music," Lager adds, which befits a heartland comprised of what he calls "salt of the earth-type people ... hard-working blue-collar folks."

Folks, in other words, who can smell dishonesty a mile away. "Keep it true," then, is the credo of Lager, whose gritty vocals help tell it like it is via the songs he writes.

Exposing him at an early age to that ethic were his own parents. "My folks took me out when I was just 16, still under drinking age, when they wanted to hear something at the Zoo Bar."

The latter venue, a legendary downtown Lincoln blues mecca, was where Lager first set foot on a stage to play before an audience, via the club's Monday night jam session.

"That helped alter my course," he says of the experience.

After gigging around Lincoln with another band, "I decided i wanted to call the tunes and decide what I want to play ... so I started my own band while I was still in high school, which has had kind of a rotating cast the first few years."

Fifteen-odd years of the road warrior lifestyle later, Lager and his band are still at it, winning admirers along the way, from local musicians like Dan Hubbard, with whom Lager has shared a bill several times in recent years, to those further afield, like acclaimed bluesman Tab Benoit, who ended up producing the band's "Platte River Runaway" album.

"It was one of those things where I opened a show for him, and asked him if he'd be interested in producing an album for us ... and he said 'absolutely!'"

The timing was right, says Lager, since he was scheduled to be in Benoit's native Louisiana a couple months later, allowing for plenty of time "talking about records, chillin' and him playing all his recordings for us."

Plus, Benoit's personally hosted "swamp tour" to get Lager & Co. out of their Midwest mindset and into his bayou frame of mind.

"So he took us in his houseboat up the Intercoastal Canal south of his home and we spent the day cruising the swamps, which turned into quite a night," Lager recalls.

Loaded down with band and equipment, the trip sailed straight into a mighty swamp storm, with lighting, thunder and torrents of rain obscuring all navigational efforts.

"We had all the gear on board, and moved it all to the lower deck, and it was hilarious ... we were all jamming away for hours in this tiny houseboat, and he (Benoit) was at the helm steering it with one white-knuckled hand with his head out the door because he couldn't see out of the windshield, all at about 10 mph, while dodging barges ... these big old barges ..,. just tearing it ... it was quite something else."

And quite successful: between Benoit and the barge-dodging swamp tour that became "a near-death experience," Lager and company were infused with the spirit of the bayous to the point that the album belied their Nebraskan roots without betraying them.

The trip was even memorialized by Lager in one of the album's tracks, the ironically titled "Sunshine on the Bayou."

Whether channeling Benoit's bayou spirit or his own deep Nebraskan roots, Lager says his main mission in life and music "is to have a great time, which I do by trying move people spiritually by tapping into their emotions, articulating them and sending a direct signal to the listener ... with no interruptions."
Coming soon

Scheduled to open in area theaters next weekend (June 24) is this pair of summer heavyweights:

Free State of Jones: Quadruple Oscar nominee Gary Ross ("The Hunger Games," "Seabiscuit," "Pleasantville," etc.) directs that summer movie rarity ... a Civil War epic, this one focusing on a defiant Southern farmer (Matthew McConaughey) and his armed rebellion against the Confederacy. It involves banding together with other small farmers and local slaves in a bid to secede Jones County, Miss., from the Confederacy, creating a Free State of Jones. Keri Russell, Gugu Mbatha Raw and Mahershala Ali co-star.

Independence Day: Resurgence: Using recovered alien technology, the nations of Earth have collaborated on an immense defense program to protect the planet from what happened in "ID4" 20 years ago. Alas, nothing in the old technology prepares us for what is billed as "the aliens advanced and unprecedented force." Finding that out the hard way is newcomer Liam Hemsworth and a pack of returning original cast members, including Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Judd Hirsch, Vivica A. Fox and Brent Spiner. Also weathering the return invasion: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jessie Usher, Maika Monroe, Angelababy, William Fichtner and Sela Ward.

Film clips

Get your flicks on 66: The Normal Theater will be the site of a new film festival this fall, the Normal Short Film Festival, set for Oct. 22 as part of B-N's Route 66 Miles of Possibility Conference Oct. 20-23. The juried fest is open to filmmakers who create a short film of 15 minutes or less in length and inspired by the theme of Route 66 and "its sense of discovery and possibility." Deadline for entry is 5 p.m. Sept. 15, with filmmakers notified by Oct. 7 if their film will be included in the fest screenings. Three cash prizes will be awarded: $500 for first, $250 for second and $100 for third. Those in attendance will be able to vote for their favorite film and award it the Audience Cash Award, worth another $500. The application form and digital submission info can be found at www.normaltheater.com.

Grand-blu, USA: Pontiac, circa 1983, likely will never look better than it does when, at long last, the movie filmed in its entirety there, Grandview, USA, makes the leap to the Blu-ray format. The 1984 release, shot in the fall of 1983, took forever getting to the DVD format, introduced in 1997, with "Grandview" not issued until 14 years later, in 2011. Now, nine years into the Blu-ray format, the Jamie Lee Curtis-Patrick Swayze-starring film makes the leap to high-def via the Kino Lorber Studio Classics label on Sept. 6 ... 33 years to the very week that the Threshermen's Reunion Parade was filmed as the backdrop for the film's climax.
BLOOMINGTON  A McLean County jury acquitted a driver involved in an incident that left a cyclist injured in July of misdemeanor reckless driving Thursday but deadlocked on two felony counts, prompting a judge to declare a mistrial on the more severe charges.

Randy Crump, 62, was accused in the felony charges of forcing Dean Davis off the road and injuring him July 7, 2015, on a rural road near Hudson. Crump, a retired Eureka school superintendent, denied during his testimony that he deliberately forced Davis off the road, saying he was driving cautiously, not aggressively.

The misdemeanor count related to a second rider, Kelly Ruiter, who told police Crump approached her bike from behind and honked aggressively before passing her and slamming on his brakes just ahead of her.

Davis and Ruiter were part of a group of 10 cyclists participating in Tuesday Night Time Trials in which cyclists peddled a 20-kilometer route.

The jury notified Judge William Workman at 3 p.m. Thursday that it had reached decisions on one count but was deadlocked on two others. The judge told jurors to make another effort but an hour later another note indicated that the stalemate still existed.

The jury deliberated for about three hours Wednesday afternoon before being sent home for the night and resuming Thursday morning.

After the verdict, defense lawyer Stephanie Wong said, "We are very pleased with the partial verdict and hope to achieve the same result as to the remaining counts when our next trial concludes."

Assistant State's Attorney Ashley Scarborough declined to comment, citing the pending charges that are set for a status review hearing on July 15.

Davis, 61, of Bloomington was hospitalized with back and neck injuries after his bicycle crashed into a ditch to avoid running into the back end of Crump's vintage Cadillac. He later underwent surgery for related shoulder injuries.

Davis testified during the three-day trial that when Crump "slammed on the brakes" and immediately stopped the car in front of him, "I knew if I hit the rear of his vehicle, bad things were going to happen."

In his testimony Wednesday, Crump reiterated what he told McLean County sheriff's Deputy Jason Simmons in a video recording played in court Tuesday: He was passing some of the bicyclists and he had to brake because a car was coming from the other direction.

But under questioning by Scarborough, Crump said he was not in any danger of colliding with any oncoming vehicle when he applied the brakes after passing Davis.

According to Davis and other witnesses, there was no oncoming traffic and there were no bicyclists immediately in front of Davis, who was traveling around 20 mph to 22 mph on his racing-style bicycle.

Crump said he honked the car horn at some of the bicyclists "because I wanted them to know I was right behind them."

A civil lawsuit filed by Davis against Crump remains pending.
Program addresses LGBTQ issues

NORMAL  Issues facing LGBTQ youths will be the subjects of a training program from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 28 at Illinois State University's Alumni Center, 1101 N. Main St., Normal.

It will examine current research and trends, terminology and definitions associated with LGBTQ youth  and information on creating a culture of inclusion at work and in the community.

The lead presenter will be Bonn Wade, who has worked in Chicago- and Miami-based human services agencies for 19 years.

The training is for anyone who wants to support LGBTQ youths, including school personnel, human services agencies, university staff members, health care providers and corporate employees.

Registration costs $20 at http://bit.ly/1VfAHrB. For more information, call Project Oz at 309-827-0377.

Chenoa under boil order

CHENOA  Until further notice, the city of Chenoa is under a boil order after a water main break.

Questions can be directed to Water Commissioner Don Schultheis at 309-262-7626.
BLOOMINGTON  McLean County's mental health agency  which serves people with the greatest needs and fewest resources  hopes to expand its public counseling program and private psychiatric and counseling practice by purchasing an adjacent building.

Center for Human Services (CHS), 108 W. Market St. in downtown Bloomington, has a contract to purchase the Pratt & Pratt law building, 415 N. Center St., CHS Executive Director Tom Barr said Thursday.

John L. Pratt and Catherine Pratt will move their law offices to smaller quarters at 217 E. Washington St., Bloomington, John Pratt said.

The purchase will allow CHS to expand its outpatient counseling program for Medicaid-eligible individuals who have a diagnosed mental illness and a functional impairment based on that illness, Barr said.

Demand for those services is increasing because of state cuts to psychiatric services (medication management) to Medicaid-eligible individuals with a functional impairment as a result of mental illness, Barr said. But funding is available for the counseling program, he said.

The purchase also will allow CHS to expand its private, full-fee psychiatric and counseling practice, Professional Associates of Illinois. CHS has a private practice so the agency can recruit and retain psychiatric staff, said Barr and CHS Finance Director Kathy Sallee.

"Most psychiatrists who work in public practice also want a private practice," Barr noted.

"We are expanding the organization where there is demand for services and ongoing revenue to pay for those services," Barr said.

CHS hopes to take possession of the Pratt building by late summer.

CHS is using part of its reserve funds for the purchase. Barr declined to give the purchase price on Thursday, noting that CHS hasn't closed on the property.

"We're paying the fair market value," he said.

Sallee noted that  after the Pratt building purchase  CHS reserves will be down to $4.7 million.

CHS is spending $1.3 million in reserves to provide services in clinical programs impacted by the state cuts and lack of grant payments, including the psychiatric, crisis, residential and juvenile justice programs, Sallee said. Reserves also have been used for Mental Health First Aid, technology upgrades, building repairs, to cover delayed Medicaid payments and will be used to purchase the Pratt building, she said.

"For us, the true value of this purchase comes in its location and in our ability to expand services to people in need," Barr said. "We're literally out of space here."

Remodeling  which also will be paid from CHS reserves  primarily will be connecting the two buildings inside, Barr said. That work should be done by the end of the year.

Professional Associates of Illinois will move from the south side of the CHS building to the Pratt building, Barr said. That will free up space in the CHS building for the public clinic, including the counseling program, Barr said.

More clients on the public and private side will be served and, as needs increase, more counselors and social workers will be hired, Barr said. He didn't have specific numbers on Thursday.

"Our goal will be to expand counseling services to meet the demand and we see that demand increasing because of the decrease in community availability for psychiatric services," Barr said.

Pratt explained that when he and his sister moved their law firm to 415 N. Center St. in 1996, their father, John T. Pratt, was in practice. He died in February.

"We don't need all this space," said his son.

"We're really happy to be selling it to them (CHS) because of what they do for the community," Pratt said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Anakhanum Idayatova - Trend:

The problems and prospects of the NATO's Resolute Support non-combat mission in Afghanistan will be discussed at the Warsaw NATO summit, the Polish foreign ministry told Trend June 16.

According to the Polish foreign ministry, an Azerbaijani delegation will also take part in the discussions.

The NATO-led Resolute Support mission was launched in Afghanistan on Jan. 1, 2015.

Azerbaijan has been recently actively involved in peacekeeping missions, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The cooperation is carried out as part of the Partnership for Peace program.

NATO approved the document of the fourth stage of the Individual Partnership Action Plan for 2015-2016.

The Polish foreign ministry stressed that other key aspects of NATO-Azerbaijan bilateral cooperation will be discussed during the summit.

"Azerbaijan's initiative and active participation will be appreciated," the Polish foreign ministry said.

Many other important issues, namely, open door policy, partnership cooperation, mission in Afghanistan, NATO policy towards Russia or the Allied assistance for Ukraine and other aspects of NATO's activity will be discussed during the Summit.

The Warsaw NATO summit will be held July 8-9, 2016.
Details added (first version posted on 12:54)

Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

Ensuring human rights and freedoms, a decent standard of life of citizens are the highest goals of Azerbaijani state, said Ali Hasanov, the Azerbaijani president's aide for public and political affairs.

He made the remarks June 16 during the hearings in the Milli Majlis (Parliament) of Azerbaijan dedicated to the Human Rights Day in the country.

Independence means not only realization of Azerbaijani people's aspirations regarding statehood, but also an opportunity to secure human rights and freedoms, Hasanov added.

"In early years of Azerbaijan's independence, the country saw massive human rights violations," he said. "Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan and with the help of its patrons occupied the country's Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts."

"Thus, more than one million people became refugees and IDPs," Hasanov noted. "Unfortunately, a number of international organizations and states speaking under the slogan of human rights give no assessment to such a gross violation of the rights of more than one million citizens."

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.

Hasanov noted that with the return of Heydar Aliyev to Azerbaijan's leadership, the chaos was eliminated, stability restored.

"Starting from that period, laws on human rights with regard to the principles of international law were adopted," the presidential aide said. "The main law in this area is the Constitution. The Constitution enshrines the human rights and freedoms, social, cultural and other rights, freedom of speech and expression. Adoption of the "State Program on Protection of Human Rights" June 18, 1998 was also an important step."

Hasanov went on to add that all measures to ensure human rights and freedom of assembly were implemented. Special indoor and outdoor spaces were identified by the local authorities in Azerbaijan's districts with a view to ensure the right to freedom of assembly, he noted.

Numerous political parties, NGOs and mass media outlets operate in Azerbaijan, according to him. Some 2.5 million manats are allocated every year from the Azerbaijani state budget to finance political parties, Hasanov said.

Laws and regulations adopted in Azerbaijan provide a free activity of NGOs, he added.

The Council of State Support to NGOs under the President of Azerbaijan was created in December 2007 in order to provide comprehensive assistance to NGOs, according to him.

The presidential aide noted that a great attention is also paid to the activities of public associations of the youth in Azerbaijan. To this end, in December 2011, Azerbaijan Youth Foundation was established under the president of the country, he said, adding that to date, the foundation financed a lot of the youth projects.

Currently 15 ministries, committees and other government agencies in Azerbaijan provide grants to public organizations, said Hasanov.

He also noted that much attention in the country is paid to freedom of speech and the mass media outlets. In 1998, in accordance with the decision of the national leader Heydar Aliyev, censorship was abolished and extensive work to improve activity of mass media outlets was carried out, Hasanov said.

President Ilham Aliyev pays special attention to development of the mass media outlets and solving their problems, according to him.

"Free media outlets operate in Azerbaijan," said Hasanov. "Azerbaijan is one of the leading states regarding the number of media outlets. More than 5,000 mass media outlets operate in the country. Online resources also intensively develop in Azerbaijan, and more than 75 percent of the country's population uses the Internet."
Weyerhaeuser to Sell Liquid Packaging Board Business to Nippon Paper Industries for $285 Million

June 16, 2016 - Weyerhaeuser Company [yesterday] announced an agreement to sell its liquid packaging board business to Nippon Paper Industries Co., Ltd. for $285 million in cash. Weyerhaeuser expects to use a substantial portion of the estimated $225 million after-tax proceeds for repayment of debt.

The transaction includes one mill located in Longview, Washington, with an annual capacity of 280,000 tons.

This announcement concludes a portion of the strategic review of the company's Cellulose Fibers business, which was initiated in November 2015. Weyerhaeuser announced the planned sale of its pulp mills in May 2016. The company's review of its printing papers joint venture is ongoing.

"This transaction creates significant value for Weyerhaeuser shareholders and enhances the focus of our portfolio as we work to be the world's premier timber, land, and forest products company," said Doyle R. Simons, president and chief executive officer.

"The employees of our liquid packaging board business have much to contribute to the future success of Nippon Paper Industries. I want to thank our team for continuing to operate safely, and for delivering an exceptional customer experience throughout the strategic review process," said Simons. "Our liquid packaging board products and people are celebrated across the industry for their quality."

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory review, and is expected to close in the third quarter 2016.

The Weyerhaeuser liquid packaging board mill and Nippon Paper Industries will continue to operate separately until the transaction closes.

Weyerhaeuser Company owns or controls more than 13 million acres of timberlands, primarily in the U.S., and manages additional timberlands under long-term licenses in Canada. To learn more please visit: www.weyerhaeuser.com.

SOURCE: Weyerhaeuser Company
Different indigenous cultures are not long gone. Some people are making efforts to preserve the culture of indigenous tribes, and they are doing it through teaching the old civilization's customs and traditions.

Several summer camps are hosting programs that make attendees disconnect from their lives wrapped around technology and the modern world. For a few days, these culture and language camps give participants a glimpse about how it was like living in the old days where modernity was too far away yet.

Great Lakes Cultural Camps

Great Lakes Cultural Camps, or GLCC, is located on Manitoulin Island, Ontario in Canada. Director and founder Maheengun Shawada said the camp's summer programs include traveling along water and rivers to explore historical sacred sites that were used by our ancestors. Once there, participants learn some facts about the areas and the people who inhabited them.

GLCC offers a range of outdoor activities such as stand up paddle board, wilderness canoe trips, kayaking and whitewater rescue training. The camp's whitewater locations for paddling are the Serpent River, Wanapitei River, Palmer Rapids and Gatineau River.

Ghost River Rediscovery

According to Ghost River Rediscovery's website, the camp sees "strength for the future in our ancient connection with the earth." Through Rediscovery, participants will be able to understand how indigenous people contributed to the world we have today. Attendees will also learn how to cultivate positivity in their own families and communities where strength, acceptance and respect thrive.

Rediscovery camp attendees don't have access to technology, electric power and running water. Experienced camp leaders will teach basic survival skills including shelter building and starting a fire.

There's storytelling and "spirit spot" as well, a challenge-by-choice activity where campers will be alone in nature between 30 minutes and 1 hour. This activity is totally safe given that camp staff will check on the attendees regularly.

Camp Jungai

Camp Jungai in Australia offers indigenous education programs designed around the National Curriculum. The camp offers different sessions based on a student's age and year level.

All ages and year levels will attend the evening cultural sessions that breaks down the stereotypes and myths about indigenous Australians. Students will also get to touch real indigenous tools, weapons and artifacts, as well as paint boomerangs and throw them.

In addition, there are indigenous dance and storytelling and exploration of native plants surrounding Camp Jungai. Those plants were used by indigenous tribes as medicine and food. The young participants will also get to attend lessons designed to immerse students in nature and teach them how indigenous people took care of their lands.
The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has recently been busy due to the revisions in Pennsylvania's homeschool law. As a matter of fact, HSLDA Attorney Dan Beasly has written several letters to squash the erroneous claims that the law requires parents to submit standardized achievement test results to their school districts.

Revised Homeschool Law In Pennsylvania Becomes Less Stressful For Parents

The inaccurate request of requiring the submission of standardized achievement test results to school districts will reportedly cause stress to homeschool parents, not to mention the unnecessary paper works. Fortunately, Pennsylvania's revised homeschool law does not require such policy, making it less stressful to homeschool parents, HSLDA notes.

"The passage of House Bill 1013 in October 2014 eliminated the requirement that home education program supervisors (usually parents) submit a portfolio of various records, including standardized test results in grades 3, 5, and 8, to the local public school superintendent at the end of the school year," HSLDA wrote on its website.

Simplified Homeschool Rules

As an alternative to the submission of standardized achievement test results to school districts, supervisors are mandated to pass a certification from a qualified evaluator, who guarantees the child is receiving proper education. This simplified rule is also approved by Pennsylvania Department of Education, noting the test scores are no longer needed to be submitted to the superintendent.

Homeschool Audits Due To Lost Funding?

In other related news, the recent random homeschool audits at Clinton County was reportedly due to lost funding issue. According to One News Now, HSLDA attorney TJ Schmidt said the random audits of homeschool families were likely due to the possibility of financial loss of the district, which can amount to $300,000 to $400,000 as the number of homeschoolers increased in the area.

"There is some language that would give the local DPP some ability to check up on a private school," Schmidt said. "But in our opinion there's no authority for that DPP to get into the home or just simply demand access to records at any time."

Homeschool Parents Learn College Options

Meanwhile, homeschool parents recently learned about college options at the 33rd Annual Virginia Homeschool Convention held at the Greater Richmond Convention Center on Jun. 10. As per Richmond Times-Dispatch, the convention featured workshops, exhibits and a college fair comprising almost 30 colleges and universities that can provide homeschool parents ideal college options that suit their children.

What do you think about Pennsylvania's homeschool law? Share your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
Oh no! The future of the education sector in the United States in the hands of its incoming administration looks grim as 2016 U.S. presidential candidates have yet to disclose its K-12 or general education proposals. In fact, education issues appeared to be not the focus of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders' campaign.

Education is one of the major issues every election campaign has to tackle. Sadly, the lack of attention of the presidential candidates on K-12 education is reportedly more prominent during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaigns.

US Presidential Hopefuls' Education Platforms

As mentioned earlier, some presidential hopefuls have not yet provided any concrete education proposals. But American Enterprise Institute is giving a glimpse into the education platforms subtly endorsed by Trump, Clinton and Sanders.

For Trump, he will reportedly end common core and might as well cut the Department of Education, Talking Points Memo notes. Unfortunately, the 70-year-old real estate mogul reportedly has no actual K-12 policy plans.

Clinton, on the other hand, is believed to have vowed to support teachers and her promise of "world-class education for every child in every community," as posted on her website. But just like Trump, Clinton also has no real education proposals.

As for Sanders, the 74-year-old presidential hopeful seems to be stuck on his criticisms over "No Child Left Behind," policy, as seen on his website. But that specific policy has already been replaced last December.

Why 2016 US Presidential Candidates Are Not Devoted To Education Issues

With that sad reality about the education sector, the voting public can't but wonder why the 2016 U.S. presidential candidates are not devoted to solving the education dilemmas of the nation. As cited by Nat Malkus of U.S. News & World Report, one of the reasons there's lack of attention on education issues is due to the assumption that voters think education is irrelevant.

Another reason is also because the K-12 policy was just revised, with "Every Student Succeeds Act" replacing the "No Child Left Behind" policy. Lastly, there's also the given fact that the subject of education is not an easy topic for any presidential candidates to take, noting the contrasting opinions on the most prevalent education issues such as charter schools, standardized achievement tests and others.

Education Matters More

Those aforementioned reasons, however, are not enough to substantiate why Trump, Clinton and Sanders have not offered any concrete education proposals. In fact, Malkus highlighted that education is the "key" to the economic future of the United States so having a concrete education platform gives an opportunity for the improvement of the nation.

Do you agree that providing a concrete education plan is important for every aspiring president of the nation? Sound off below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
Whether it be the cat's soft purr, piercing eyes or the cute way it rolls on the floor, most people can't help getting smitten by the feline's alluring demeanor. The first cat cafe opened in Taiwan and have spread across the world, reaching the shores of the United States. A visit to a cat cafe would already give birth to a ton of questions on how these felines think and becomes a precursor to the way they behave.

A Japanese study examined 30 cats in cat cafes in order to better understand a house cat's behavior. As per Christian Science Monitor, the researchers tested the cat's knowledge of physics and its application of the cause-and-effect logic

The research team was curious why cats like to listen to objects surrounding them. The theory is that when cats pause and listen, they are trying to locate their next meal (via Christian Science Monitor).

The researchers visited cat cafes in Japan and individually tested felines on an isolated room. The room must only house the cat, its owner, and the experimenter with his/her instrument, a container. The container would be shaken by the experimenter with a rattling sound and the cats would respond with interest. When the container was shaken without a sound, the feline would appear disillusioned, confused why the sound didn't match with the way it looked.

Each experiment on each cafe was videotaped and analyzed by the research team. They took note of the cat's stare on both instances when there was a sound and no sound (via Christian Science Monitor).

As per the study, the cats understood the concept of gravity. According to Newton's Law of Gravity, there is an attractive force between two bodies that relies on the product of the bodies' masses and the distance between the two. Newton's three laws of motion state that an object remains at its current motion unless an external force is applied, the direction of the force would be the same direction the object would move to and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The cats understood these facts so they expected that the container would make a sound when it's moved and that something will come out of it because there was a sound made. When the experiment seemed to defy the law of physics, the cats knew something was not right.

Cats are much more than what meets the eye. Perhaps the fondness and curiosity these cats awaken in people have led cat cafes to open in the world. In America, as reported by Petcha, the first permanent cat cafe opened on 2014 in Oakland by Adam Myatt and Ann Dunn who housed 10 to 20 adoptable cats. More followed on the same year, opening in Florida, Colorado and New York.

Have you already visited a cat cafe? To check where they've been opening in North America, Eater has plotted a map for cat lovers out there. If you get to visit one, feel free to share your experience with the felines on the Comments section below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
A program about sex education to enlighten teenagers and to curb the increase of teenage pregnancy in Nepal has been launched.

The program is entitled Rockets and Space and it uses games in order to let the young men and women be more attracted and engaged to learning about the subject. The initiative is being held at four Marie Stopes centers of the 36 established in Nepal. The program was funded by Australian aid and will run for three years.

Aside from the centers, there are also visits to schools and communities as well as stalls set up along the streets as volunteers hand out leaflets and condoms.

According to The Guardian, one instance wherein games were used to entice the young people to listen is when they were asked about what contraceptive protects them against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. These young people then grab cards and raise the correct answer. A prize awaits the person who answered the quickest and the loudest.

The program was called Rockets and Space as it represents the men's penis and the women's vagina, respectively. Aside from the program itself, young people are also given notebooks, t-shirts, keyrings, and many more promoting the matter.

Cartoon characters are also used to disseminate facts about safe sex, masturbation, menstruation and even wet dreams. Young people could also take a look at the Facebook page of the program for more information. It has more than 100,000 like as of current.

One of the volunteers, named Deepa Pradhan, said in a statement that games make the young see that sex education is important and it helps them keep these topics in mind. Pradhan has been working with Marie Stopes for two years since graduating from a social work degree. She added, "I really enjoy my job. I give young people information that they might not want to talk about, but [which] they really need. It's very important for the youth, as our society doesn't allow us to talk about sexual health openly."

Nepal is recorded as the third highest country that has most numbers of pregnancy rate in south Asia back in 2014. Due do this, the Nepalese government has proposed focusing more on family planning services in the next five years.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

All spheres, including the NGOs and media require transparency, said Ali Hasanov, the Azerbaijani president's aide for public and political affairs.

He made the remarks June 16 during the hearings in Azerbaijani parliament on the occasion of the Human Rights Day in the country.

"Recently, Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has for two years banned the inspections, except for tax audits, at private enterprises," said the top official. "However, some forces under the guise of NGOs try to carry out illegal inspections on fire safety rules and protection of consumer rights in those enterprises."

Hasanov pointed out that currently, quite enough of journalists are engaged in racketeering.

Hasanov recalled that once a minister complained to him regarding blackmail from a newspaper, and it later turned out that the name of a journalist involved in the mentioned blackmail, is under 15 criminal charges. The official added that such incidents are unacceptable.

Each NGO and media outlet has tasks and they should create a transparent atmosphere for discussions, said the president's aide.
"Death Stranding" by Kojima Productions set the E3 2016 buzzing long after Sony unveiled the Norman Reedus starred and left a vastly confused audience. Hideo Kojima promises that there's more to "Death Stranding" than meets the eye and will define a new video game genre much as the "Metal Gear" franchise did.

According to IGN, Hideo Kojima hopes for "Death Stranding" to develop into a new genre of an action game. Citing how "Metal Gear" brought on the stealth action game, Hideo Kojima said "Death Stranding" will do the same.

On the matter of theme, IGN cites Hideo Kojima's use of a short story by Japanese playwright Kobo Abe to explain the motif for "Death Stranding." In Kobo Abe's story mankind developed the stick as his first tool of defense and protection, while he developed the rope as his tool of security and connection.

"Most of your tools in action games are 'sticks:' you punch or you shoot or you kick," Hideo Kojima then pointed out. "The communication is always through these 'sticks.' "

In contrast, "Death Stranding" will rely heavily on the translation of Kobo Abe's ropes to connect people. Hideo Kojima, however, assures that "Death Stranding" will still allow players to use "sticks."

Hideo Kojima also stated that the E3 2016 trailer of "Death Stranding" is full of small hidden details and meanings. This is true and fans started scavenging for "Death Stranding" clues as soon as the trailer screen went dark on Norman Reedus.

GQ cites findings by Redditor Tuomas146, who says the accessory hanging around Norman Reedus' neck in the "Death Stranding" trailer aren't ordinary dog tags. Instead, Norman Reedus appears to be wearing engravings of the formula for The Schwarzschild Radius, which is related to General Relativity, and The Dirac Equation, which is related to Quantum Mechanics.

Given comments by Hideo Kojima on small and hidden details in the "Death Stranding" trailer, Norman Reedus is likely not wearing these engravings by chance. Fans have thrown in theories on Norman Reedus being a "Death Stranding" time traveler of sorts.

A photo posted by norman reedus (@bigbaldhead) on Jun 13, 2016 at 8:37pm PDT

While "Death Stranding" is in too early a phase to talk release dates, buzz on the Kojima Productions game is not going down anytime soon, especially after Norman Reedus' threw a shade at Konami. For now, the firm details are "Death Stranding" fulfills the disrupted "Silent Hills" collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus and is being developed for Playstation 4 and PC.
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Was Orlando an Islamic terrorist attack, or was it an anti-gay hate crime? Since it can obviously be (and arguably is) both, let me rephrase the question slightly: Was Orlando primarily an Islamic terrorist attack, or was it primarily an anti-gay hate crime? I ask because Im seeing an enormous amount of disagreement on this point, and that disagreement that matters, because it runs along ideological (and party) linesand because it significantly affects our response to the tragedy.

Florida Governor Rick Scott avoided any mention of the LGBT community or the significance of the location of Sundays horrific shooting in his address later that day. And it wasnt just in his address that he avoided any mention of the sexual orientation of the victims or the clientele of the venue. Here, instead, is how he has framed the shooting:

This is clearly an act of terror that happened in Orlando this morning. It sickens me and makes me angry. Of course, this is a time of great tragedy, and in every tragedy, there is a flood of sadness, confusion and despair. But, this is an attack on our people. An attack on Orlando. An attack on Florida. An attack on America. An attack on all of us.

And he isnt the only one. Politicians, television personalities, and religious leaders across the country have described the shooting as a terrorist attack, placing the blame squarely on radical Islam and calling for increasing our efforts to fight ISIS. Donald Trump responded to the tragedy by broadening his ban on Muslim immigration to include all individuals from countries linked to terror.

I have a question. Just one wee little question. Has Trump considered that his ban would also bar U.S. entry LGBT people living in the countries on his list, Muslim or not? Probably not, but then Im not sure he or other Republican politicians are fully aware that the attack on Sunday was an attack on the LGBT community. Instead, theyve positioned the tragedy as an Islamic terrorist attack and an Islamic terrorist attack alone. The idea that their efforts to curtail LGBT rights might be at all related to what happened on Sunday? Nope.

This leads me to the vigil I attended earlier this week, one of many candlelight vigils across the country held to remember the dead. At that vigil, the attack was positioned not as an act of terror but rather as a hate crime against the LGBT community. The speakers didnt talk about radical Islam or about curtailing Muslim immigration. Instead, they talked about refusing to let bigotry win, in any form. They talked about coming together, mourning together, and moving forward together. The dance, they said, must not end.

The LGBT community is sadly accustomed to being under threat, generally from the very Republicans currently using this moment as an opportunity to engage in xenophobia against Muslims. From the perspective of the LGBT and allied community, this tragedy is another in a long string of attacks by bigots, by those who cast homosexuality as deviant and transgender people as perverted.

Last June marriage equality became the law of the land. We were overjoyed, but that was not the end of our fight, and since then weve been through a lot. Weve watched as state officials refused to issue marriage licenses, and, more recently, weve watched as states have passed laws making bathrooms more dangerous for trans people and as religious leaders and politicians have called trans people child predators. Weve watched, weve hung our heads, and weve wept. The battle for LGBT rights and full inclusion, our efforts to create an inclusive and welcoming societysometimes our goals seem to move only further away.

Every year an estimated 1240 gay and lesbian youth commit suicide. Every year dozens of trans women, often trans women of color, are murdered. Hate crimes against LGBT individuals are sadly common, and many in our community are afraid to hold their loved ones hands in public. Every year Republican politicians work to pass legislation curtailing LGBT rights, evangelical religious leaders condemn the sin of homosexuality, and conservative parents reject their LGBT children. This is our context. Hearing Republicans ignore this context to make this moment solely about Islamic terrorism has been incredibleand not in a good way.

I understand why theyre doing this. Acknowledging this event as an anti-gay hate crime would force Republicans, evangelicals, others who oppose gay rights to face the damage caused by homophobiaincluding their own homophobia. There are many ways to kill people. Republicans may not be killing people directly, but they are still taking lives. There are reasons many LGBT individuals put Orlando in the same category with the anti-gay discrimination, bigotry, and hate crimes they live with every day even as many Republicans have put the event squarely in the Islamic terrorism category and that category alone.

Look, I get that Omar Mateen called 911 and declared his allegiance to ISIS. I get that. But we also know that Omar Mateen was homophobic, that he was a member of a homophobic society, and and that he was very likely a member of a homophobic religious community. The phone calls he made that night appear to be his only sign of any connection with ISIS. This wasnt a long-homed terror plant or a carefully nurtured recruit or an ISIS-planned attack. This was a man who appears to have struggled with strong internalized homophobia (there are reports that he was a regular at the gay bar he targeted and that he used gay dating apps). This was a man who expressed disgust to his father at openly gay men kissing in public and an anti-gay man who targeted a gay bar.

How we categorize and discuss this attack affects our response to it. If we talk about it as an anti-gay hate crime, we position homophobia and anti-gay discrimination in all forms as the problem. If we talk about it as an act of terror, we focus on intelligence, terrorism prevention measures, and sadly more frequently, bans on Muslim immigration. There is also, of course, discussing it as a mass shooting, which positions access to guns, cultural violence, and (often) access to mental healthcare as the problem. This is an event that took place at the intersection of many axes of violence.

The FBI is investigating this incident as both a hate crime and an act of terror. I dont have a problem with that. I do have a problem watching my gay friends relatives tell them that this was just a mass shooting, or just a terrorist attack, and that who the victims were is incidental and irrelevant. Not so. The victims were not chosen at random. They were chosen for a reason, and ignoring that reason does not make their LGBT brothers and sisters any more safeespecially when the very ones ignoring the nature of this crime have made a hobby of opposing the rights of the victims.

What was Orlando? The answer matters.
Three and a half miles from my house runs the Milwaukee River. Not too big, not too impressive, bearing the name of a city of the same characteristics. When I first moved out of the city and north I didnt know too much about the area. What was there to know? I assumed it was, like all other small Wisconsin towns, a German settlement from back in the 1800s. I was a little worried about moving out of the city. I questioned if my creativity would suffer, if the lack of multi-cultural splatter would drain and dull my mental workshop. After all, Wisconsin soil only knows corn, soy and cow hooves  No Frank Lloyd Wright, no Carl Sandburg, no Muddy Waters echoing in these trees  or so I thought 

Three and a half miles from my house runs the Milwaukee River where the Wisconsin Chair Factory used to rest on its bank. Around the turn of the century, in an effort to sell more chairs, the company began using artists from the delta to make records in an effort to promote and sell their chairs. Artists like Charlie Patton, Ma Rainey, and Blind Lemon Jefferson came up from the south and recorded right on that river dirt. These records became so popular that they demanded to be organized and managed and Paramount Records was born. These records went out, traveled and spun, spun and traveled. Some went north and east; some went west and south.

Some in the hands of a boy named Chester Burnett. Chester became a fan of these bluesmen and eventually tracked down his idol, Charlie Patton. The two became friends and Charlie taught Chester to play guitar and feel the blues. Chester started playing and writing, took on the name Howlin Wolf, and made some records of his own. Those records traveled and spun, spun and traveled and flew across the ocean into the hands of young British boys and girls. Those British boys and girls learned how to play guitar and feel the blues too and emulated what they heard. Some of them got pretty good and started making records of their own. Their records spun and traveled and traveled and spun right back over the ocean and landed in the Billboard charts. When invited to play the popular music show called Shindig!, one of these bands insisted on inviting and introducing their idol Howlin Wolf, who otherwise couldnt get TV or radio, to play the show with them. This introduction not only served the shows audience, but was an introduction of Howlin Wolf to the American public in general. The world changed right on top of that dirt three and a half miles from my house.

Dirt does not define where the mystery dwells it only supports it. Find your dirt, plant your feet and make something spin. And when youve poured into your craft, made your space resonate and need your rest  sit back and listen  you might just hear the faint howlin of a wolf flying over head.

Howlin Wolf Is Invited To Play: How Many More Years



For More From Mike Mangione go to www.mikemangione.com
Iran's President Rouhani raps UN for delisting of Saudis, deplores regional conditions

06/16/16

Source: Tehran Times

TEHRAN - The Iranian president has leveled heavy criticism at the United Nations for delisting Saudi Arabia from its child perpetrators report, lamenting that international organizations are growingly losing their credibility.



Saudi-UN relations

(cartoon by Ehsan Ganji, Iranian daily Ghanoon)





President Rouhani's remarks come days after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon let slip why he decided to remove the Saudi-led coalition from a blacklist over its role in child fatalities in Yemen.

The UN report, which annually shames the worst perpetrators, put the blame on the coalition for 60 percent of 1,953 children recorded as killed or maimed in the conflict in 2015.

"With the UN Secretary General removing the name of a country form the list of children perpetrators over financial concerns, international organizations are growingly losing their already questionable status," Rouhani told a press conference held on Wednesday after he had a meeting with head of other two branches of the government.

Ban accused Saudi Arabia and its military allies of placing "undue pressure" on the international organization for a changed decision as Saudis had threatened to cut their dollars to UN humanitarian agencies.



cartoon by Mana Neyestani





Rouhani says with the UN Secretary General removing the name of a country form the list of children perpetrators over financial concerns, international organizations are growingly losing their already questionable status.

As a solution to the loosening credibility, the president recommended that countries themselves make the best use of their independence, security, and instability.

Rouhani also aired concerns over fragile conditions of the region, saying the region's condition is "deplorable."

"The region's condition is deplorable. Unfortunately, terrorists continue to commit brutal killings." These conditions, Rouhani implied not so vaguely, are a result of lame-duck international organizations. "Yet, we will keep assisting our neighbors, and we hope the Iraqi people will enjoy security and stability soon," he said.

This the first formal reaction of President Rouhani to the UN delisting row, coming amid Saudis' continuous sectarian accusations against Tehran.

This is while Iran was and continues to be the first regional country censuring Saudis for launching an attack on Yemeni people. The war has cost thousands of lives, including children, and millions displaced.
Iran Sues US Over Frozen Assets

06/16/16

Source: VOA

Iran has filed a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice to recover $2 billion worth of assets frozen in the United States. Iran's President Hassan Rouhani made the announcement in remarks Wednesday on state television. The tribunal also confirmed that the suit was filed, on Tuesday.



Read related report on Iranians law experts' forum on Iranian assets frozen in the U.S.

(source: Ghanoon daily)





The U.S. Supreme Court announced in April that the frozen funds would be used to compensate the victims and families of victims of the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, and other attacks that have been linked to Iran.

Iran has denied any role in the attacks and rejected the court ruling, calling it theft.

Iran's claim says the U.S. legal proceedings violate a 1955 "treaty of amity" between the two countries that covers economic relations and consular rights. It has called on the United States to make full reparations to Tehran for violating its "legal obligations."

More than 1,000 Americans have joined a suit blaming Iran for providing material support to Hezbollah, the Shi'ite Islamic military group behind the Beirut bombing and the bombing of Saudi Arabia's Khobar Towers in 1996.

The plaintiffs include people whose family members were killed in the attacks, as well as people who were injured.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Anakhanum Idayatova - Trend:

The modernization of procedures to obtain visas to Azerbaijan could substantially increase the accessibility of the country for international tourists, Head of German Embassy's mission in Baku Volker Berresheim told Trend June 16.

Germany is optimistic about the planned changes and is eagerly awaiting the introduction of the "ASAN Visa", he said.

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on June 1 on simplification of e-visas issuance procedure and the creation of the ASAN Visa system.

The decree was signed in order to simplify procedure for issuing visas to foreigners and stateless persons arriving in Azerbaijan, as well as creation of an e-visa system ensuring transparency and efficiency with the use of modern information technologies.

Germans are traditionally among the most active tourists in the world, Berresheim noted, adding that many of those, who might have found procedures to obtain visas comparatively cumbersome, might now choose Azerbaijan as a new destination to visit and to explore.

"As a result, we expect the number of tourists from Germany to Baku to increase," he said.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Anahanum
Iran's first environmental charity foundation established

06/16/16

Source: Tehran Times

TEHRAN - The first environmental charity foundation of Iran has been set up in the western province of Lorestan, the province's chief of the department of environment Mehrdad Fat'hi-Beiranvand said.

Despite the fact that Lorestan constitutes 0.7 percent of the country's area, the province's biodiversity is almost unbeatable, Beiranvand told YJC.

"Approximately 25 percent of the biodiversity of the whole country exists in Lorestan," he noted.

Kaiser's spotted newt, also known as the Lorestan newt and Zagros cave garra [with the scientific name of Iranocypris typhlops] are two species endemic to Lorestan, he noted.

Additionally 367 species and 1,700 different kinds of plants, of which 70 are endemic to Lorestan, are found in this province, he highlighted.

"Such biodiversity proves that this province has a great potential environmentally and we have to take various measures in order to protect it," Beiranvand explained.

The first step that this foundation has taken is to set up environment monitoring stations, which can play a significant role in preserving the environment, he stated.
Iran film projects on Rumi revived as Hollywood reveals new project

06/16/16

By Seyyed Mostafa Mousavi Sabet, Tehran Times

TEHRAN -- Some dormant movie projects about Molana Jalal ad-Din Rumi in Iran have recently come into the spotlight once again after Hollywood cineastes David Franzoni and Stephen Joel Brown revealed their plan to make a biopic about the Persian poet and mystic.





Photo: Portrait of Rumi, the celebrated poet and Muslim scholar





Iranian filmmakers Dariush Mehrjui and Mojtaba Raei have recently elaborated on their projects on Rumi that failed to be completed due to a lack of funds.

Mehrjui, a pioneer of Iran's new wave cinema and the director of the acclaimed 1969 drama "The Cow", was commissioned by the U.S.-based Iranian producer Marjaneh Moghimi in 2008 to write a screenplay about Rumi, which was to be filmed in English outside Iran.

The script entitled "Rumi's Kimia" was completed in 2009 based on Iranian writer Saeideh Qods' bestselling novel "Kimia Khatoon" about Rumi and Shams of Tabriz.

However, Moghimi could not lure investors into the project, Mehrjui told the Persian service of IRNA last Monday.

"Producing the film based on the screenplay I wrote needed a big budget and I wanted to make it in Kazakhstan, but the producer could not afford the project and she could not even attract investors in Iran," he added.

"The screenplay mostly focuses on the literary and philosophical sides of Rumi," Mehrjui stated.







Rumi's tomb in Konya, Turkey





In June 2014, the Cinema Organization of Iran announced its plan to team up with Turkey to jointly produce "The Drunken Peacock", which was about a professor who metamorphoses under the influence of Rumi's ethics. Raei, who wrote the script, was also scheduled to direct the movie.

In an interview with the Persian service of ISNA last week, Raei said that the project also failed to be implemented due to a dearth of money.

"We did not have enough money to make a film about Rumi while others have enough to make them," he lamented.

Franzoni's collaboration with Brown on the Rumi project has not received a welcome in Iran and the film may even be viewed as 'anti-Iranian' in the country after it is completed.

In an article entitled "Hollywood Appropriation of Rumi", IRNA focused on the project.

The article also criticized Franzoni and Brown for their wish to hire Leonardo DiCaprio to play Rumi, and Robert Downey to star as Shams of Tabriz.

The article stated that the roles are so much greater than what these actors can play.

"The scriptwriter [Franzoni] said they wanted to challenge the stereotypical portrayal of Muslim characters in Western cinema in the movie, but their casting for the leading roles shows that they are not being true to their words," the article read.

However, Raei said, "Rumi not only belongs to Iran... He belongs to the world as a whole."

He pointed to the probable objections from Iran about the Hollywood project and noted, "It is perfectly natural that any art production has its fans and opponents."
Summer Theater Camp in Persian: July 11-22, 2016 in Richmond, California

06/16/16

A unique, fun filled, educational, activity based Summer Theater Camp for ages 10-15 years in Persian!



July 11-22, 2016 - 9AM-3:30 PM, M-F (10 days - lunch is provided)

(Late pick up 3:30-5:30 PM will be accommodated for a fee)

All classes will be held at Central Stage, 5221 Central Ave., Richmond, CA

(facebook page)





A great camp for kids to experience theater in Persian and do some amazing work in their mother tongue. At the end of the two weeks, July 22nd, there will be a performance in Persian for the members of the family.

Fluent Persian and prior acting experience is not a requirement for this camp. We will accept students at all different levels.

In this full-supervised camp, students will work with stories from Ferdowsi and scenes from Shapark Khanoom, Shahre Gheseh, as well as excerpts from successful original plays in Persian and/or class selection.

Students will learn the basics of writing a script and will develop their skills to create their original work and present it to others.

Additional Details:

Class will consist of daily light exercise and movement, voice and breathing technics, storytelling, basics of play writing, acting in all levels, basic lighting and costume and set design, lunch, bonding together and having lots of fun.

This camp will teach students to be confident and expressive as developing young actors and actresses in front of an audience. Student will have the opportunity to explore their creativity in theater to their full potential in a fun and safe environment.

Classes will be taught and supervised by Mansour Taeed: actor, director, and playwright who has worked with children in Persian theater for 20+ years and his assistant.

At the end of two weeks, we will put on a show for friends and family in Persian with costumes and the whole works that will surprise all!

For application and registration please email mtaeed@aol.com,

For further information please email or call Mansour 510-823-5990

Early registration is recommended, space is limited!
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The use of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Googles YouTube by terrorist groups for propaganda, recruitment, fundraising and other activities has come into sharp focus recently.

It seemed inevitable that these companies would at some point be blamed for the misuse of these forums and become targets of lawsuits from families of victims.

A lawsuit filed in a federal court in California by the father of Nohemi Gonzalez, a victim of the Paris terror attack in November, charges that Twitter, Facebook and Google have knowingly permitted the terrorist group ISIS [Islamic State group] to use their social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits.

Gonzalez, a U.S. citizen, was killed in November when militants sprayed bullets into the bistro at which she was dining with friends. A similar suit has been brought against Twitter in January by the widow of a person killed in Jordan.

In that lawsuit as also the lawsuit filed by Nohemis father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, the companies are likely to invoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

That provision protects online intermediaries from being held responsible for content hosted on their websites by third parties, which in this case would include the ISIS.

Congress has broadly immunized entities like Twitter against lawsuits that seek to hold them liable for harmful or unlawful third-party content, including suits alleging that such entities failed to block, remove, or alter such content, Twitter said in its defense in the January lawsuit.

The January complaint does not allege any direct connection between Twitter and the killer Anwar Abu Zaid or the attack on the police compound in Jordan that killed Lloyd Fields, the victim in the attack, Twitter said. Nor does it allege that Twitter itself created any of the Tweets, messages, or other content that the Complaint strains to link, even indirectly, to that attack, it added.

The Gonzalez complaint alleges that the three companies provided material support to terrorists under 18 U.S. Code 2339A and 2339B. The services and support that Defendants purposefully, knowingly or with willful blindness provided to ISIS constitute material support to the preparation and carrying out of acts of international terrorism, including the attack in which Nohemi Gonzalez was killed, according to the complaint filed Tuesday.

The complaint cites numerous instances of the misuse of the networks by the ISIS and also points to the revenue earned by the companies by placing advertisements on posts by the terrorists groups. Astonishingly, Defendants routinely profit from ISIS. Each Defendant places ads on ISIS postings and derives revenue for the ad placement, according to the filing.

Social networks for their part claim they are doing their best to weed out terrorist content though it is turning out to be like trying to whack-a-mole, with the proscribed content or new content resurfacing elsewhere.

YouTube has a strong track record of taking swift action against terrorist content, said a Google spokesman, who said the company would not comment on pending litigation. We have clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We also terminate accounts run by terrorist organizations or those that repeatedly violate our policies, he wrote in an email.

A Facebook spokeswoman wrote that there is no place for terrorists or content that promotes or supports terrorism on Facebook, and we work aggressively to remove such content as soon as we become aware of it. A Twitter spokesman said violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our rules make that clear.

In a post on combating violent extremism in February, Twitter said that as noted by many experts and other companies, there is no magic algorithm for identifying terrorist content on the internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgment calls based on very limited information and guidance.

Gonzalez is asking the court for compensatory damages to be decided in a trial. The lawsuit is likely to add to other pressures the social networking companies are already facing on the terror issue from various quarters including Congress. Senators Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, and Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, for example, proposed legislation in December that would require tech companies to report online terrorist activity to law enforcement.
If you go shopping online for a graphics card in the next few weeks, watch out! Here be dragons.

Dutch-language site Hardware.info reports that prices on Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 980, and GTX 970 graphics cards are dropping fast as hardware makers look to clear inventory now that the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 have hit the streets. That sounds exciting, but the you can get a better deal if you just wait for newer, cheaper, more jaw-dropping graphics cards to gain wider availability.

The lay of the land

Taking a cursory glance over sites like Newegg and Amazon, some GTX 900 series cards do appear to be dropping in price, while others havent moved. When the price drops go into full effectassuming they doyou can expect the 980 Ti to be priced around $500 instead of the plus $600 range. The GTX 980 will drop by about $75, bringing it to around $325, while the GTX 970 will hit a modest low of about $265 down from $290.

Those prices still arent enticing at this pointunless, that is, youve got an extra PCIe x16 slot on your motherboard thats just begging for some dual-graphics card SLI action with the 900 series card you already own.

Brad Chacos Nvidias GeForce GTX 1070.

Buyers can get more powerful hardware at a cheaper cost from the newer generation of cards. The GTX 900 series cards are dropping in price because Nvidias new 10-series cards and the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 480 deliver much more potent price-to-performance propositions, thanks to their two-generation leap in under-the-hood graphics processor technology.

The GTX 1070, for example, has an MSRP of a mere $380. For $55 dollars above the sale price of the GTX 980and well below the sale price of the GTX 980 Tiyou can get a graphics card with better performance than the fearsome Titan X.

Eventually, that is. Right now, youre more likely to find higher-priced Founders Editions versions of the GTX 1070 for around $450. Thats still a better deal than the GTX 980 Ti considering the performance gains and newer software features, but patient PC gamers will get even more bang for their buck once the sub-$400 GTX 1070 cards roll out.

Ultra-serious bargain hunters, however, should take a long hard look at AMDs RX 480. Due out on June 29, AMD claims the RX 480 will be competitive with the GTX 970 or 980, and sold at the stupidly, outrageously, ridiculously low MSRP of $200. (Well, stupidly, outrageously, ridiculously low assuming the performance claims prove true.)

So dont bite on those plummeting GeForce 900-series cards unless youre looking to boost a current 900-series system into a multi-GPU SLI rig. A little patience can get you more performance for even less money.
Google has made no secret of its AI ambitions, and on Thursday it announced the next step in its bold plans to realize them: a brand-new research group in Europe focused squarely on machine learning.

Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe.

It will research ways to improve machine-learning infrastructure and enable the technology for practical use, for instance. Researchers will also work closely with linguists to advance natural language understanding, Mogenet said.

Machine intelligence already powers Google products including Translate, Photo Search and Smart Reply for Inbox.

Zurich, meanwhile, is home to Googles largest engineering office outside the U.S. Researchers there developed the engine that powers Knowledge Graph as well as the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in its Allo messaging app.

Googles presence in Europe hasnt been entirely smooth, however: Its facing ongoing scrutiny over antitrust concerns and tax issues.

Its DeepMind unit  creator of the widely celebrated AlphaGo AI software  is based in London.
A 20-year-old Estonia man has pleaded guilty to stealing data on more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel and providing it to the Islamic State.

Ferizis goal was to incite terrorist attacks, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.

Ferizi once led a hacking group called Kosova Hackers Security, or KHS, which claims to have defaced over 20,000 websites.

Last June he hacked into a U.S. Internet hosting company to steal the personnel data, which included addresses, telephone numbers and email logins.

Ferizi used an online account with the name KHS, which led the FBI to suspect his involvement. He also neglected to cover his tracks. When the FBI examined the hacked server, they found the IP address Ferizi had used to carry out his attack. The same IP address had been used to access his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

He was arrested in Malaysia last year and extradited to the U.S. for trial. He faces a maximum 25 years in prison.

The data he stole was passed to an ISIS member named Junaid Hussain, also a hacker. Hussain was later killed in an airstrike in Syria.

Its not the only time Ferizi supplied information to ISIS. Last April, he provided data on dozens of U.S., British and French citizens, by sending screenshots of their credit card information.

The DOJ called it the first case of its kind. Last year, the U.S. also jailed a 17-year-old from Virginia for using Twitter to provide financial support and recruitment help to ISIS.
Satya Nadella wasnt kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision.

The Wand team will be joining Bings engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The companys team members will be working primarily on Microsofts push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants.

Its a natural fit for Wand, which had been working since 2013 on apps that let users chat with one another and add outside information from sources like Yelp. Users could share music and let other people access their smart home devices using Wand, too.

The company had conducted private trials of its service but hadnt released it broadly to consumers.

Wands features fit well with Microsofts overall vision for conversational interaction between humans and computers. At the Microsofts Build conference earlier this year, company executives showed off a vision of humans interacting with bots representing businesses in order to complete tasks like booking a hotel room.

Ku called out the Wand teams expertise on a variety of topics, including third-party developer integration, semantics, and conversational interfaces, as reasons for the company to join Microsoft.

The Wand service will be shut down, CEO Vishal Sharma, a Google veteran, said in a blog post announcing the companys acquisition. However, the acquisition means its likely some of the ideas and technology behind Wand will likely be making the transition to Microsoft.

This is Microsofts second announced acquisition this week, coming on the heels of plans revealed Monday to buy LinkedIn in a deal worth more than US$26 billion. Under Nadellas leadership, Microsoft has made a slew of acquisitions leading to some significant changes. For example, the purchase of Acompli last year translated into a new Outlook app for iOS and Android.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

Trend:

Training for PR specialists was held with support of Excelsior Hotel Baku.

The event was organized by Azerbaijan Public Relations Association and Alibayov Communication & Consulting company on June 14.

Nearly 30 specialists working in this sphere from government and non-government organizations took part in the training.

Before the training, the head of Azerbaijan Public Relations Association Ilham Mammadov informed the participants about the newly-established company. It was noted that the new organization will create atmosphere for increasing the knowledge and skills of local specialists, and organize different courses, trainings, seminars, and conferences. The trainer, head of Alibayov Communication and Consulting company Vali Alibayov noted that there will be PR boom in Azerbaijan in the near future.

The country's PR specialists and heads of companies should give much attention to the development of this sphere.

Azerbaijan Public Relations Association will organize different events on following high professional and ethic standards and increasing the number of national specialists in PR sphere.
Paul Chabot believes hes competitive in San Bernardino Countys 31st Congressional District, and his campaign has the poll to prove it.

The Chabot campaign today released a poll showing Chabot, a Republican, tied with Democratic incumbent Pete Aguilar at 43 percent each with 14 percent undecided. The race is a rematch of a November 2014 contest for an open seat won by Aguilar, 52 to 48 percent.

The poll, which the Chabot campaign paid for, shows terrorism and national security as a top issue for voters in the district, home to the site of the Dec. 2 San Bernardino terror attack. The district covers San Bernardino as well as all or parts of Fontana, Upland, Redlands, Rancho Cucamonga, Colton, Rialto, Loma Linda and Grand Terrace.

Its not unusual for campaigns to pay for polls and release the findings when the results are in their favor. But Chabot campaign strategist John Thomas said the campaign stands behind the polls validity and methodology.

Titus Bond of Remington Research Group, which conducted the poll, said no bias was built into the sample or poll questions. The poll was 1,091 likely voters conducted on June 14 and 15 has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, and the poll was weighted to match turnout demographics for the November general election, according to the polling firm.

The polls results, however, run contrary to predictions by nonpartisan firms that predict congressional race outcomes. Both the Cook and the Rothenberg & Gonzales political reports, as well as Sabatos Crystal Ball, all expect Aguilar to win re-election fairly easily.

Democrats lead Republicans by 8.4 percentage points in the districts voter registration. And presidential election years like 2016 typically come with higher voter turnout that favors Democrats. That could be especially true this year if Latinos  51 percent of the districts residents, according to the census  turn out in high numbers to vote against presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

While the Chabot poll shows GOP voters preferring him and Democratic voters preferring Aguilar, it found that Chabot leads among independent voters by 8 percentage points. No party preference voters account for 22 percent of the districts votes.
A man who was shot early Sunday, June 12, by a Riverside County sheriffs deputy has been charged in the incident.

Manuel Vasquez, 28, was charged Wednesday with misdemeanor resisting a peace officer, court records show. He plead not guilty to the charge during an in-custody arraignment hearing.

Vasquez was discharged from a hospital and booked into jail late Monday afternoon on warrants for several other unrelated crimes.

Officials have released little about the circumstances of the officer-involved shooting, which occurred about 2 a.m. Sunday in the 15300 block of Canyonstone Drive.

In a news release, police said a deputy was on routine patrol when he saw a stolen vehicle being driven by a male. The driver parked and started walking toward a house on Canyonstone Drive.

After the deputy made contact with the man, the officer-involved shooting occurred, sheriffs officials said.

The deputy has been placed on administrative leave, per department policy. His name has not been released.
There are new mountain webcams to be added to my favorites list.

Thanks to a creative lease deal, the Pine Cove Water District has two new webcams that offer panoramic views from the 6,500-foot-level of the San Jacinto Mountains. More are to come.

One installed a couple months ago looks south over forested bowls above Idyllwild. The second, set up this month, is pointed west toward Hemet. It clearly shows Diamond Valley Lake and beyond.

The water district also has a new weather station with live data. Weather info and the cams can been seen at pcwd.org.

Its a great service provided by the public water district.

Thats what its all about, said Jerry Holldber, general manager of the water district.

Internet surfers who cant get to the mountains still see beautiful views on their computers.

Flatlanders, including people with second homes in Pine Cove, can tell what conditions they are driving into when they ascend into the San Jacintos. Mountain dwellers view accurate wind and temperature information.

Hikers, runners and off-road cyclists can get an idea of what trail conditions might be like at snowy times of year.

The equipment was installed at the districts Rocky Point water tanks by PJU Communications, Ty Hesleps Valle Vista-based enterprise.

Holldber said the arrangement began after he saw Hesleps work van parked at the Pine Cove Market. Besides offering phone systems and security cameras, Heslep beams wireless Internet connections to customers in remote places.

Holldber told Heslep that the district had an ideal repeater site on Rocky Point. Heslep soon made a deal to lease the site to offer Internet service.

Part of his lease agreement was to provide and maintain webcams. The plan is to add a new online camera about every six months.

Heslep also will install a couple dozen security cameras to monitor water facilities throughout the district.

He said the water district plans to add more cams over time, including one that will point to state Highway 243. It will offer real-time images of road conditions, which will be especially helpful during snow storms.

Youll be able to see the asphalt, the size of the berm alongside the road and traffic, Holldber said.

Coupled with the Village Properties webcam right in the center of Idyllwild and the cams atop the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, computer users will get peeks at several elevations in the San Jacinto Mountains.

Pine Cove residents have a new option for Internet service and the ability to review weather information and gaze at live pictures of their wooded community.

Best of all, the cams quickly will answer that all important question when winter storms blow through Southern California:

Did it snow?

Contact the writer: bpratte@pressenterprise.com or 951-368-9078
A Sacramento preacher, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church, praised the brutal massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida [Pastor chastises victims, Press-Enterprise, June 15].

He also said that Christians shouldnt be mourning the death of 50 sodomites.

Given the hatred expressed by the pastor: I hope the FBI puts him on a terrorist watch list, I hope the TSA puts him on a no-fly list and I hope his denomination removes his ministerial credentials for preaching in opposition to the teachings of Jesus, who said, Love your neighbor.

Rev. Bill Freeman

Menifee

Menifee United Church of Christ

Apples and oranges

Unity, not division, needed after Orlando [Opinion, June 15]: Your editorial suggests that the political arguments in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings miss the point. But your comparison of Trump and Obama compares apples and oranges. Trumps argument would not have stopped the shooter, true; but Obamas argument may have stopped the shooter and/or his destructive ability. Your standard for the president strays from the shooter to the global fight against ISIS.

As for the politics, it would be best if, for every minute we talked politics regarding Orlando, we also put in a minute of prayer.

Scott Hamre

Cherry Valley

  

The Press-Enterprise opinion page is always a must read for me but I had to comment on the excellence of todays piece on unity after Orlando.

Yes, it is really disappointing and disgusting to see our leaders using such tragedies to further their political agendas. The Press-Enterprise puts the real problem of division out front. Im looking forward to your series of articles on the subject. Keep furnishing your readers with fresh, well thought out and expertly expressed perspectives. We need publications like the Press-Enterprise.

Larry Palmer

Norco
A Riverside County Superior Court judge reduced bail Thursday, June 16, for a former Beaumont city official who is one of seven defendants facing felony charges in a sweeping corruption case.

David W. Dillon, the citys former economic development director, was required to post a $5 million bond after his arrest last month on suspicion of embezzlement and conflict of interest pertaining to his work as a city official.

Judge Mac Fisher reduced Dillons bail to $1 million during a Thursday morning hearing in Riverside.

Fisher also will not consider Dillons request to dissolve a temporary restraining order freezing his assets.

Fisher said its more appropriate for Judge Becky Dugan to hear the motion, since she had approved the temporary restraining order. The issue will be considered at a July 19 hearing.

At next months hearing, Dugan will consider a request by Deepak Moorjani, Beaumonts former public works director, to scrap a temporary restraining order freezing his assets.

Other defendants in the corruption case are former City Manager Alan Kapanicas, former Finance Director William Aylward, former Planning Director Ernest Egger, former City Attorney Joseph Aklufi, and former Police Chief Francis Dennis Frank Coe.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9471 or ddanelski@pressenterprise.com
Like many, Kristen Garcia awoke Sunday to the terrible news that a single gunman had killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub.

As she tried to wrap her head around the sheer number of dead and wounded, the Baldwin Park woman then received another shock when she learned someone had used her younger brothers photo to create a fraudulent GoFundMe account, claiming the young man was a victim of the despicable attack.

When I looked it up, I immediately felt disgusted, said Garcia. How could someone use such a tragic event only a few hours later, to get money from people?

In the photo was her brother, she did not want to release his name, smiling in the selfie, wearing what appears to be graduation garland around his neck.

Garcia believes the photograph was taken from his Instagram account.

Hello my name is Maria Luruz, read the post, which GoFundMe has since removed. My son 21 year old Marcosonios Luzun was killed and shoot(sic) at Pulse nightclub because of a terror attack.

The name Marcosonios Luzun was not among those identified as victims of the deadly attack.

Garcia, friends and family reported the account to GoFundMe, and it was taken down by the end of the day. It wasnt immediately clear how much money was raised by the phony account in the short time it was operational.

There are currently 150 campaigns that have raised money for the victims of Orlando, Bobby Whithorne, spokesman for GoFundMe, said in an email. We have vetted and are in communication with the campaign organizers to ensure they are communicating clearly to the donors about how the funds will be used.

We are also vetting new campaigns that are created and guiding new campaign organizers to either donate to Equality Floridas campaign, start their own charity campaign to raise funds for Equality Florida, or start their own personal campaign if they have a direct personal connection to a victim.

Whithorne said the crowdfunding site will not release any money to any account creator until the recipient is identified, verified and vetted. The GoFundMe community should feel confident in their donations to GoFundMe campaigns.

Whenever there is a large-scale tragedy, many are left feeling helpless and search for ways to support those affected  and there are plenty of people willing to take advantage of that desire, said FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller.

In the wake of any tragedy, there is no shortage of scam artists who use the opportunity to take advantage of charitable people, Eimiller said. Always go straight to the source of the charity before sending money.

A search of Pulse Orlando on GoFundMe yielded 179 results, including one set up by Equality Florida, a verified LGBT civil rights organization based in Florida that as of Tuesday morning, has raised more than $3 million for the victims.

People need to be careful and do a little research into the organization or person they are donating to, said Doug Rowand, president and CEO of the Arrowhead United Way, the same organization that led the fundraising efforts for the victims of the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino.

Rowand did not dissuade people from giving through crowdfunding sites but said it was important to make sure the person who set up the account is legitimate.

We had the mayor of San Bernardino, he set up a GoFundMe and he was able to raise, I think, $100,000, said Rowand. Mayor Carey Davis raised $135,488 through his online campaign.

Because GoFundMe is not a charity itself, it can be difficult to verify if an account is reliable.

Unless you know the person directly or can verify the post is from a legitimate source, I would say not to give, said Gregory Bradbard, president and CEO of the Inland Empire United Way. Do your homework.

Whithorne agreed donors should do their due diligence and suggested contacting the creator of the account and ask questions.

If the potential donor is not satisfied with the response or believes there is something unsavory about the creator, he should immediately report it to GoFundMe administrators.

Both Rowand and Bradbard also suggest going through an established charity and checking its standing through guidestar.org, a group that gathers information on nonprofit agencies worldwide.

Heart of Florida United Way is the local nonprofit group organizing relief and fundraising efforts following the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Garcia said shes heard of scams like the one that exploited the Orlando tragedy but never thought someone she knew, let alone her own brother, would be caught up and victimized by fraudsters.

I dont understand how people can be so disgusting and take advantage of those whose lives were really lost, Garcia said.

Contact the writer: beatriz.valenzuela@langnews.com or @BeatrizVNews on Twitter
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Some of the hottest days of the year are on the way to Inland Southern California to kick off summer.

The National Weather Service predicts triple-digit temperatures reaching as high as 113 between Sunday and Tuesday. While excessive doesnt even begin to describe the kind of heat thats headed our way, the weather service has issued an excessive-heat watch for those days.

The watch advises that people should stay indoors if possible, and if thats not possible, wear lightweight clothing and keep lots of water nearby.

The weather will stay pleasant Thursday, with highs in the low 80s, but things will start heating up quickly to near-record levels. The heat wave is expected to peak Monday  appropriately, the first day of summer  and then by next Wednesday, highs should dip back below 100 in the Inland region. Whew?

For some of us, preparing for that kind of heat means closing all the windows and queuing up an all-star Netflix playlist. But then, everyone has his or her own way of keeping cool. We spoke with a handful of folks for whom the high temperatures have very different meanings.

ICE CREAM MAINTENANCE

When you think of high temperatures, ice cream is probably your very next thought. Staff at Grandma Puccis Homemade Ice Cream in Chino know this well, so they add a couple of extra shifts to ensure they dont run out of some of their most popular flavors, said assistant manager Breanne Osborne.

We do make more ice cream on hotter days, she said. Our most popular flavor is banana graham.

That flavor includes banana-flavored ice cream with marshmallows and graham crackers. If thats somehow not your thing, the shop will have plenty of cherry, mint, cookies and cream and cookie dough flavors when the heat hits, Osborne said.

KEEPING PUPS COOL

They dont call it the dog days of summer for nothing. Some of the pups at the Riverside County Animal Shelter in Jurupa Valley live in the lap of luxury compared to their pals out on the streets. The facility cranks up the air conditioning but, picky as dogs can be, the animals are given living spaces that straddle inside and outside so they can get their exercise by puttering back and forth, said Animal Services Spokesman John Welsh.

When the heat soars to record temperatures, not much changes for the dogs, he said. They have dripping water bottles so they arent ever in danger of knocking over their water supply, and the pups get attention from both inside and outside their cages.

SWEATING IT OUT

Pablo Andreas cant avoid being outside during the hottest part of the day. The 30-year-old landscaper said the blistering heat wont deter him from trimming trees and mowing lawns. Along with his tools of the trade, he packs his pickup with extra shirts, hats and a large ice chest with more than a dozen water bottles.

When its really hot and Im working in the palm trees, I get so sweaty I have to change clothes three or four times a day, said Andreas. He and a partner were cutting the grass at a home in the Canyon Crest neighborhood of Riverside on Wednesday afternoon.

Andreas takes his mind off the heat by thinking about sitting in his truck and enjoying the air conditioning as he drives to his next job.

When triple-digit temperatures are forecast, he starts around 6:30 a.m. so he can get most work done before the suns rays make it unbearable. He goes to different houses depending on where theyre located when theres the most shade.

Andreas said hes only had to stop working once because of the weather. It was around noon one day last summer in Temecula when the heat sapped his energy and he had to clock out.

I told my customers, We cant do this. We have to come back another day.

UTILITY ON STANDBY

Riverside Public Utilities isnt taking any chances. In anticipation of the heat wave, the agency has an eight-member field crew on standby to take care of any electrical problems.

Extra crews will be called as necessary, said Heather Raymond, the agencys spokeswoman. If there are outages, we want to get repairs done quickly, she said.

To stay prepared, crews complete annual training that includes use of shade, rest, hydration and heat illness symptoms, she said.

Workers carry tent-like pop-up structures they can sit under. They also carry ice water and electrolyte drinks. And they can opt to wear short-sleeved shirts to go with their required safety gear.

They are in constant contact with dispatch, Raymond said. If it becomes unbearable and they need a break, they will bring in a different crew.

PREVENTIVE MEASURES

Of course, among the busiest people during a heat wave are firefighters, but Murrieta Fire Capt. Matt Corelli said a lot of their work comes beforehand in the form of education. Firefighters spend some time before a heat wave reminding people of the local cooling centers, which will be open this weekend, and reminding them to carry plenty of water with them.

Counterintuitively, Corelli said that before a heat wave, crews spend a good deal of time outside on the hottest parts of the days to acclimate themselves. That way, when theyre outside taking care of overheated folks or spontaneous fires, they arent caught off-guard under their pounds of gear.

From past experience, Corelli says he expects a lot of medical-aid calls from people taken by surprise by the extreme heat Sunday and Monday, so firefighters work to help people before they even call them.

PREPARE YOURSELF

Speaking of the cooling centers, if you need to find someplace other than your home to find respite on these sweltering summer days, know where you can go.

Health officials especially recommend that older adults, parents with small children, people with health conditions and homeless people should consider heading to a cooling center, especially during the hottest hours of the day: 1 to 5 p.m.

Riverside County has more than 50 cool centers, mostly community centers, senior centers and recreation centers. For a list of locations, go to www.rivcoph.org; the link is on the homepage.

San Bernardino County also has more than 50 locations. To find one, go to www.211sb.org/cooling-centers and download the PDF.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified who was eligible for the scholarship. Students who applied only needed to demonstrate a strong financial need.

The homeless shelter was not an easy place to study.

It was always really noisy  kids running around and a lot of ruckus, said Jesse Nava, 18, whose family was homeless when he was in grades four through eight. I remember one day I was studying for a test and said to myself, Im not sure Im going to be able to do this. That was hard.

Nava was one of four Riverside County students who was honored on Friday by the Southern California Gas Company: They received $1,500 or $1,000 scholarships, depending on whether they plan to attend four-year or two-year colleges, plus computers loaded with software.

We are so proud of these students, said Lea Petersen, regional public affairs manager for The Gas Company. They have worked hard, persevered through many obstacles, have graduated from high school and been accepted into college. They deserve our applause.

In previous years, the scholarship was awarded to children who had faced either homelessness or been a part of the foster-care system. This year, that was not the case.

Riverside County students accepting scholarships, computers and applause were 2016 Ramona High School graduate Nava, who will attend Bentley University in Massachusetts; Kieran Silva, also from Ramona High, who will attend Pitzer College in Claremont; and Nadail Bagsby from Poly High, who will attend Riverside City College.

Scholarship winner Kenneth Woods, headed for Alabama University, could not attend. His mother, Robin Woods, accepted his awards for him.

San Bernardino County scholarship recipients were Abraham Asare, who is going to UC Berkeley; and Ramampreet Ghorta, Pablo Ortiz, Destany Cardis and Ashley Perkins-Pettigrew, all of whom will go to San Bernardino Valley College. They were honored last week.

Congratulations, Woodie Rucker-Hughes, administrator of the Riverside Unified School Districts Homeless and Foster Education Program, said to the scholarship recipients. You are on the first rung of the stairs to success. Unfortunately, the elevator to success is broken  you have to take the stairs all the way up.

Some of those stairsteps will turn out to be people, she said  connections made and nurtured at the beginning of their journeys.

I always ask  Did you get the card of everyone here? When you need help, use the cards. And after you leave here, write notes in your own very sincere words. That shows youre a cut above.

Each scholarship winner received a certificate from the office of Assemblyman Jose Medina, D-Riverside, who chairs the Assemblys Higher Education Committee.

I know helping students afford higher education transforms their lives and allows them to pursue their dreams, Medina said in a written statement. I am thankful for the scholarships provided to students within our community.

Contact the writer: community@pressenterprise.com
ORLANDO, Fla.  Hes coming, just as he did 17 days after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, which left 14 dead. Hes coming, just as he did two days after 12 were killed in Aurora, Colo. Hes coming, just as he did two days after 27 were killed in Newtown, Conn. Hes coming, just as he did eight days after the mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., that left nine dead.

President Barack Obama is coming to Orlando Thursday, where this muggy, diverse, small-big Florida city now joins the swelling ranks of mourning municipalities marked by mass murder.

Jennifer Foster, a film producer and director in the city, said it was important to the community and to show solidarity. He will be welcomed, Foster said. His coming shows hes standing with us.

Foster met Obama in 2012 at a Florida campaign rally, and he took his picture with her and Fosters spouse, Mary Anne Metaxas. She kept that picture on her desk to remember that moment. But now she draws on that memory for the current moment.

I remember he held us tight as the picture was taken, she said. It meant so much.

The president will arrive here midmorning to spend time with victims and loved ones. If he travels down Orange Avenue to the corner of Miller Street at Orlando Regional Medical Center, he will see dozens of flowers and balloons left by people touched by the tragedy that claimed 49 lives before the gunman was taken down by police early Sunday.

If Obama works his way through the city, he will see a Subway sandwich shop just minutes from Pulse nightclub  where the shooting occurred  with its marquee that reads Pray for Orlando. If his motorcade works its way down some of the citys smaller, bumpy, red brick roads, he will see gay pride flags on lampposts. If he goes past the Amway Center, where the Orlando Magic play, hell see the electronic board that has read for the past few days, In memory of our neighbors who have tragically been taken from us.

There will be flags at half-staff at the Amway Center, where the LGBT community has gathered for days to deliver food to victims families, mental health counselors, law enforcement and even media.

The scenes have been replayed before  not long ago  in another American city.

In San Bernardino, SB Strong went up on electronic billboards and was emblazoned on T-shirts, becoming a rallying cry.

San Bernardino Mayor Carey Davis said the city is still marked by the Dec. 2 shooting, when 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik opened fire in the Inland Regional Center.

More than six months later, he alludes to SB Strong while praising the way the city came together in the midst of tragedy.

In Aurora, there were vigils. Flowers, candles and homemade signs were left near the movie theater. After that shooting  during the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises  actor Christian Bale visited the victims who survived.

Aurora Mayor Steve Hogan said having Obama come to his city near Denver was deeply meaningful.

I was glad he came. He had left it all up to us. He didnt want to be a distraction, and I thought it would be for him to be here, Hogan said. Him coming here meant a lot to the victims, but it also elevated the national focus on the event.

Hogan said the Orlando shooting rattled him and said those affected in Orlando can expect it to linger for a long time.

Newtowns First Selectman Pat Llodra agreed.

She said she was battling a sleepless night when she got up to get a glass of water and turned on the news before sunrise and saw the early reports from the Orlando shooting. It took her back to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown. I cried. I got angry, she said. I thought, Not again.

Llodra said she attended every funeral for the slain students and faculty at Sandy Hook. When asked how difficult that was, she was silent for a few moments.

Very, she said.

She said since the 2012 mass shooting, she has taken it upon herself to contact the mayor of each city that has experienced a mass shooting. Theyve become so frequent that she has developed a template on how to do it.

First, she said, she follows the events in the news. Then she reaches out to clergy involved in the tragedy. Then she reaches out to the elected officials.

I never thought this would be part of my job description, she said. Each time it happens, I think, Surely this will be the last one.

Except its not.

Roseburg, Ore. Isla Vista. Santa Monica College. Colorado Springs.

Now Orlando.

Foster said she believes the city has shown strength in the face of the tragedy. She said the community is drawing strength from the love and compassion being displayed every day. She said Orlando wont be defined by the shooting.

Hogan remembers saying the same things.

Its going to take years for Aurora to get past this, Hogan said. The positive side of me says, Well get better, and then  he paused  Orlando happens.

The Aurora mayor said the shock and pain never fully go away. But, he said, Orlando should know its not alone and that it has the support of the nation. He knows. He has been there.

Be strong, he said. Just love each other.

Staff writer Ryan Hagen contributed to this report.
As triple-digit temperatures approach Inland Southern California, public safety officials are doing their best to educate folks about what higher temperatures and lower humidity could mean for them.

Though temperatures will top out at 86 in the Inland area on Thursday, theyre going to escalate quickly, according to the National Weather Service.

WEATHER: Are you prepared for the triple-digit Inland heat wave?

Temperatures are now expected to reach 116 degrees on Tuesday with humidity dropping near 10 percent during parts of the weekend, the weather service reports.

An excessive heat warning has been issued for the Inland area starting Sunday at 11 a.m. and ending Tuesday at 8 p.m.

The weather service says the well-above-normal temperatures could break several records.

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Hot weather always means theres an added safety risk and Murrieta Fire Capt. Matt Corelli said things that folks typically do without thinking can quickly become a major hazard in the type of weather were expecting.

Throwing cigarette buts, grilling out and even a poorly maintained car can put people in danger of throwing sparks near dry vegetation.

Little things that typically on a day like today wont cause problems five days from now will be a big hazard, Corelli said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Corelli said firefighters are spending the hottest parts of the day outside in the days leading up to the extreme heat to acclimate themselves to the hot weather, but folks with indoor jobs cant always do that.

A list of cool centers can be found here.

This means office workers cant withstand extreme heat as well as some others can and Corelli said its important that people are aware of their needs  especially in terms of hydration  when they spend time outdoors.

Better yet, dont spend time outdoors.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

The Baku track is very interesting, Felipe Massa, a Brazilian Formula 1 driver, who currently drives for the Williams team, told Trend June 16.

Massa will participate in the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe to be held in Baku June 17-19.

The driver said he became familiar with the track and believes that it is similar to those in Monaco, Sochi (Russia) and Monza (Italy).

"The track is very interesting and for the present, it is unclear what to expect from it," said Massa. "In general, I believe that the races will be interesting."

The F1 driver said he hasn't yet become familiar with Baku, but the first impressions from the city are good.

"There are many welcoming and friendly people here," he said. "It is great that such a city was included in the F1 calendar."

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
The report about a car gift to President John Mahama was widely advertised. JOY FM succeeded in getting the needed attention and most especially tried to conclude President John Mahama took a bribe and is corrupt.



Manasseh Azure Awuni, the author of the FORD EXPEDITION GIFT STORY carefully crafted questions to illicit responses that will influence conclusions to be drawn. Manassehs report sought to indicate that Mr. Djibril Kananzoe, a Burkinabe contractor used undue influence to get contracts. The promo before tried to raise an alarm that KANAZOE FRERES Company is about to be awarded another project, valued at 82 million cedis after two earlier ones.



What exposes the agenda, which is a sharp departure from fairness is President John Mahamas voice in the promo which commends KANAZOE FRERES Company for an excellent job on the 46-kilometre Dodo Pepeso-Nkwanta road.



Manassehs post on his facebook wall then asks, is it Bribe, Conflict of Interest or both? For a journalist of his stature to deliberately leave out the gift component in his question, raises eyebrows.



For JOY FM to air the report twice on a single programme further suggests their agenda and interest. Fortunately, many have seen the intended political mischief.



Correspondence and documents Manasseh clandestinely acquired suggest duties were duly paid. He also could not establish if the President in deed received the car and was in his possession. More so, majority of calls into the Super Morning Show were critical of the entire report, contrary to JOY FMs expectations.



The Communications Ministry is clear in its response. There was no involvement whatsoever of the President in the processes leading up to the award of this contract. Any suggestion therefore to the contrary is palpably false and untenable.



The processes for the construction of a perimeter fence wall on a large parcel of land allocated to the Government of Ghana began in 2011, prior to President John Mahama becoming President.



Its a fact that Ghanas mission in Burkina Faso forwarded three quotations from construction companies to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration for consideration. The quotations from the respective companies were as follows and JOY FM can verify this.



 KANAZOE FRERES: 353,136,603 CFA



 COSITRAP: 413, 177, 892 CFA



 IBOUS: 462, 608, 949 CFA





Note that Architectural Engineering Services Limited (AESL) provided pre- and- post contract consultancy services in terms of architectural, structural, land surveying, quantity surveying services leading to preparation of technical specification.



Was the report a setup, or part of a grand agenda to expose the Mahama Administration as corrupt, for political gains? Take a critical look at the letter, purportedly a correspondence between Maxwell Nyarko Lartey, Head of Chancery at Ghanas Embassy in Burkina Faso. By standard practice there should be stamps acknowledging receipt. It also looks like it was not filed. Could it be a leaked document from an aggrieved former staff?



Ghanas former Ambassador to Burkina Faso (Chief Bawumia, brother of NPP's vice presidential candidate Dr Bawumia) presented a vehicle to the office of the President on behalf of the contractor in question in September, 2012.



The award of the 46.4km European Union funded Dodo-Pepesu road contract followed an international competitive bidding process which was in compliance with laid down requirements of the European Union. There was absolutely no involvement of the President in the processes leading to the award of this contract.



It is interesting to note that this journalist, Manasseh Azure Awuni has been consistent in attacking the personality of the President and his government. He has continuously incited his followers to castigate John Mahama through his posts.



On June 7, he put up a post with the pictures of President Mahama and Nana Akufo Addo which read, Take Advantage of the Conditions in which we find ourselves in  the corruption, the joblessness, the mismanagement of the economy and the rest you can think of. Thats how to win election.



On April 9th, this year, another cynical piece read, This week, I met one of the staunchest critics of President Mahamas administration. He is a respected figure, the issue of criticism of the President came up and he told me he couldnt just tolerate the abysmal leadership



That comment received 73 shares.



On March 11 when the debate on the Independence Day brochure was raging, his post read, I wonder which Bugabuga government communicator will show up for Newsfile tomorrow, a clear insult to government appointees.



And remember he referred to government appointees at the Flagstaff House as ugly monkeys. Is that journalism?



He has issued statements to ridicule the President on the distribution of free sandals and has attacked the President over his decision to seek an IMF bailout; and the rest are on his wall for anyone to verify.



On December 31, 2015, Manasseh Azure Awuni admitted in his last post of the year that he does these deliberately. He was blunt, Journalists also have opinions. A journalist who just passes on what somebody says without fighting for a course is a robot.that is why I find social media a way to help shape opinion



Question; are those dirty posts and attacks on the personality of President Mahama his way of shaping opinions? Should anyone take him serious since he could be seeing a bottle as half empty?



As a social media fan, I have seen a post by Bob Palitz which is questioning the value placed on the Ford Expedition. He also raises doubt about the chassis number/VIN of the vehicle provided in the report. He counted 15 characters instead of the standard 17.



Could something have gone wrong?



In concluding this article, I want to refer to a paragraph in the statement issued by the Communications Ministry, there is known precedence for the donation of vehicles to Heads of State of Ghana in the not too distant past. A case in point was the presentation of a Mercedes Benz vehicle to President Kufour in 2007 by Libyan donors. This donation did not attract any allegations from Joy FM of the sort being made now.



I leave the rest for your judgment.

Source: Kweku Sarfo (Accra)









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Government has admitted a vehicle given to President John Mahama by a Burkinabe contractor is part of its pool of vehicles at the Presidency.



A statement signed by Communications minister Omane Boamah said this in response to findings of investigations by Joy News' Manasseh Azure Awuni.



The Burkinabe contractor who built a wall around a parcel of land for Ghana's Embassy in that country at the cost of $650,000, Mr. Djibril Kanazoe, said he gave the vehicle to the president who is a friend.



It was not to influence the president in anyway.



Dr. Omane Boamah in his statement said the 2010 Ford Expedition is in government's pool of vehicle and that the process for the award of the contract for the construction of the wall begun in 2011 when Mr. Mahama was not president.



See the full statement as issued here:



============================================



The Ministry of Communications has noted the contents of a programme aired on JoyFM this morning. The programme sought to link a vehicle presented to the President in 2012 to two contracts awarded to a Burkinabe-owned construction firm.



The said vehicle, which was placed in the vehicle pool at the Presidency as per established convention had nothing to do with the award of the contracts.



The inference of conflict of interest is therefore absolutely false and untenable.



THE FACTS:



CONSTRUCTION WORKS AT GHANA EMBASSY, BURKINA FASO



The processes for the construction of a perimeter fence wall on a large parcel of land allocated to the Government of Ghana began in 2011, prior to President John Mahama becoming President. The scope of construction works on the 673.0 meters long fence wall involved:



Removal of topsoil, clearing of existing rice farm and compensation for owners in accordance with Burkinabe Laws



Reinforced concrete wall with an overall thickness of 300mm and an average height of 220mm above ground and 80mm below ground



The mid-section of the wall involved a reinforced 12mm diameter high tensile steel at 450mm centers both ways and



Construction of security posts with visitors waiting area among others.



Ghanas mission in Burkina Faso forwarded three quotations from construction companies to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration for consideration. The quotations from the respective companies were as follows:







KANAZOE FRERES: 353,136,603 CFA







 COSITRAP: 413, 177, 892 CFA







 IBOUS: 462, 608, 949 CFA







The Architectural Engineering Services Limited (AESL) provided pre- and- post contract consultancy services in terms of architectural, structural, land surveying, quantity surveying services leading to preparation of technical specification, bills of quantities and tender documents, evaluation of tenders, award of contract and supervision of selected contractor to execute the construction works.



Upon due diligence, the contract was awarded to KANAZOE FRERES, who presented the lowest figure among the three companies.



There was no involvement whatsoever of the President in the processes leading up to the award of this contract. Any suggestion therefore to the contrary is palpably false and untenable.



THE 46.4km EUROPEAN UNION FUNDED DODO-PEPESU ROAD CONTRACT



The award of this contract was the result of an international competitive bidding process which was in compliance with laid down requirements of the European Union. There was absolutely no involvement of the President in the processes leading to the award of this contract.



Again, any suggestion of conflict of interest in the award of this contract is without merit.



The President remains committed to transparency and accountability in governance and has worked over the past years to make that a cornerstone of his administration. That commitment is unwavering.

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Less than 24 hours after the death of Madam Abiba Nnaba, mother of President John Dramani Mahama, there is confusion over where to bury the old woman.



The Chief of Busunu, younger brother to Madam Nnabas father has refused to allow the deceased to be buried in Bole which is the hometown of President John Mahamas father E.A Mahama.



The Chief is currently in a meeting with a delegation from President Mahama fathers family led by the DCE for Damongo.



He insists that because President Mahamas father divorced Madam Nnaba along the line, it will be improper to allow the formers family to bury Madam Nnaba in Bole, as against Busunu which is the latters hometown.



Kasapa FMs Northern Regional Correspondent, Illiasu whos currently at Busunu monitoring the meeting reported that several people are grieving over Madam Nnabas death, with sympathizers gathering at the family home.



He added that theres presence of police and Military officers to ensure a peaceful deliberation.



Madam Abiba Nnaba passed on Tuesday. She is survived by six children including the President.



The family of Abiba Nnaba at Busunu in the Northern region is yet to be officially notified as tradition demands.



Her body will be flown to Busunu from Accra today for burial in accordance with Islamic tradition.

Source: kasapafmonline









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
Since the establishment of the 1992 Constitution which transitioned Ghana from military rule to a constitutional democracy, Ghanas political landscape has seen a massive uplift not just in terms of the varied policies and viewpoint by various political parties but also the inclusion of strong-minded women.



Here is a collection of the most beautiful female politicians in Ghana calling the shots in the countrys political terrain.



1. Samia Nkrumah



No one can ever underestimate the natural beauty of the female born of former president Dr Kwame Nkrumah. 56-year old Samia Nkrumah was formerly the chairperson of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP).



In the 2008 parliamentary election she won the Jomoro constituency seat at her first attempt making her Ghanas first independent parliamentary candidate.



2. Hanna Bissiw



This black beauty is the current deputy minister of food and agriculture. In spite of the various scandals and allegations leveled against her, she remains firm in the execution of her duty to the betterment of Ghanas agriculture sector.



3. Adwoa Sarfo



Never be fooled by the sheer beauty of the daughter of Ghanaian industrialist and pastor Apostle Kwadwo Safo. Born on December 28, 1981, the 35-year old politician is also a practicing lawyer and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) member of parliament for the Dome Kwabenya Constituency of the Greater Accra Region.



4. Hanna Tetteh



Hanna Serwaa Tetteh is a Ghanaian barrister and politician. She is the current minister for foreign affairs and also the member of parliament for the Awutu-Senya West constituency. Just at the time president Mahama became chairman of the authority of ECOWAS Heads of State and Government in March 2014, she also became the chairperson of the ECOWAS council of ministers at the same time!



5. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings



Zanetor is the eldest daughter of the first President under the 4th Republic of Ghana Jerry Rawlings (19932001) and former first lady Nana Konadu Agyeman. Just like her parents, this beautiful and brainy young woman is currently lacing her boots to be member of parliament for the Korle-Klottey constituency.

Source: yen.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Editor-In-Chief of the New Crusading Guide Newspaper, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako says Joy FM reporter, Manasseh Azure Awuni needs to be patted on the back for his investigative piece on a car gift to President John Dramani Mahama which some have described as a bribe.



According to him, the great lengths he (Manasseh) went to, to get to the bottom of the matter is commendable, but the attempt to link the issue to a bribe could have been better packaged.



The ace journalist, who was speaking on Metro TVs Good Morning Ghana show on Thursday, described Manasseh's investigative piece as "a serious issue" for which reason it behoves on government "to take its time and explain the issues for Ghanaians to understand and put the matter to rest."



An investigation by Manasseh spanning three months has revealed that Djibril Kanazoe who is President and Director-General of Groupe Kanazoe gave a Ford Expedition valued at $100,000 to President Mahama in 2012 after he had won two construction contracts.



One was to build a wall around a piece of land for Ghana's Embassy in Burkina Faso at a cost of $650,000. Another was the Dodo Pepeso-Nkwanta road worth 25.9million.



The investigations further showed that the contractor was being considered another contract to construct the Wa-Hamile road on sole-sourcing basis.



The gift was given in October 2012, according to reports.



The contractor initially denied giving the gift to the president but when Manasseh showed him a letter written by the Ghana Mission in Burkina Faso confirming the gift, he admitted, adding, the president called to thank him for it.



When the news went viral, government, in a statement issued by the Communications Ministry on Wednesday, explained the gift in no way influenced the decision taken by government to award subsequent contracts to Mr Kanazoe.



The statement however added that the said Ford expedition was put into a pool of vehicle at the presidency.



Contributing to a panel discussion, Kweku Baako noted that the entire transaction of the said vehicle could have been tidied up to avoid what in his view is the unnecessary public heat the matter has generated.



The Senior Journalist however told the show host, Randy Abbey that his "checks from an authentic source indeed confirms that the President is not using the car for his personal comfort" and that, as indicated in the Communications Minister's statement, "it has been added to the fleet of cars at the presidency.

Mr Kweku Baako, a known critic of the NDC party, said he knows President Mahama very well and that he will want to believe the President will be thinking on hind sight that, he should not have accepted the gift in the first place in view of the noise this whole matter, which in his (Baakos) view is not an issue, has created.



He stressed that "it is also because of the kind of politics we do in this country that has brought us here".



Trappings Of A Novice Intoxicated By Fame?



The NDC Parliamentary candidate for the Tamale North constituency, Alhaji Alhassan Suhuyini who was also on the same program described Manassehs documentary as unfortunate.



To him, the report is full of the trappings of a novice intoxicated by fame.



He added that he is inclined to believe the Joy FM investigative reporter has a personal agenda against the president.

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Senior Journalist and Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper Kwesi Pratt Jnr has downplayed suggestions that President Mahama has compromised his integrity by accepting a gift from a Burkinabe contractor.



Mr Pratt who was speaking on ADOM FM's Dwaso Nsem show Thursday, said every President since the days of Dr Kwame Nkrumah has been offered one form of gift or the other and that it is a normal practice.



I see nothing wrong with the car gift and I think this issue is much ado about nothing. Is there any President since Nkrumahs days who has never received a gift? I am totally scandalized about some of the commentary I am hearing on this matter. How can anybody conclude the President has taken a bribe? Since when did gifts to our President become a bribe? Werent we in this country when the Libyan president gave a luxurious plush Mercedes Benz to the then President Kufour sometime in 2007? Did we term that as a bribe? Please lets move beyond these kind of politics...Mr Pratt told host of the Morning show, Captain Smart



A Burkinabe contractor, Mr. Djibril Kanazoe who has won two contracts awarded by the Ghana government, said his family presented the 2010 Model of the Ford Expedition as a gift.



Joy FM's Manasseh Azure Awuni who investigated the matter said the gift was given in October 2012.



Government, in a statement, did not deny receiving the gift but said the Ford expedition has been added to the pool of vehicles at the Presidency.



Communications Minister Dr. Omane Boamah added that that the gift in no way influence the award of subsequent contracts to Mr Kanazoe.



But opinions are sharply divided over whether or not the presidents act constitutes a breach of the code of conduct for public office holders or not.



Mr Pratt said the issue about bribery doesnt even arise in the first place because the transaction regarding the said vehicle was transparent hence cannot constitute an act of bribery.



Who bribes or accepts bribe and documents it? This is common sense. We do know that the transaction right from the point of giving the car to the Ghanas mission in Burkina Faso righto the point where it arrived at the port was properly documented, written clearly in black and white and so how can you call this bribery? Is that how bribery and corruption takes places? he asked.



"If they are able to prove that there is bribery and corruption involved somehow [in this case], then we can all know what to say [but] so far as I sit in this studio, I do not see any bribery or corruption involved in this matter., he argued.



Meanwhile the Burkinabe contractor has pulled out of a GHC82million bid to construct a 28-kilometre road.



Roads and Highways Minister, Alhaji Inusah Fuseini told the media on Thursday that Djibril Kanazoe expressed disinterest in the contract "some weeks ago".



Watch a video of Mr Pratt's arguments on the vehicle on the show.







Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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UK Labour MP Jo Cox has died in hospital after being shot and stabbed on the street in by a man who yelled Britain First!  the slogan of many groups who are opposed to Britain remaining in the European Union.

Police have a 52-year-old man in custody over the attack, who The Sun have identified as local man Tommy Mair. They also allegedly have the murder weapons: a long knife and an old fashioned gun.

Eyewitnesses say that Cox had attempted to break up a scuffle between two men in Birstall, a village near Leeds, when the attack occurred. The attacker shot her three times, including once in the face, and stabbed her repeatedly with a long knife.

Her husband Brendan Cox tweeted a photo of Jo standing by the river Thames as a tribute, and has vowed to unite to fight against the hatred that killed her.

Cox has been a campaigner in favour of the UK remaining in the European Union, and the attack comes just one week prior to the referendum. Britain First, a far-right, anti-EU group, have issued a video statement disavowing the attack, but are also attempting to prove that the attacker did not yell Britain First.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn offered his condolences for Coxs death, saying Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died.

But for now all our thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

Prime Minister David Cameron also condemned the murder, saying that Parliament had lost a great star. This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news, he said. My thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan, their two children and their wider family.

The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

Cox was elected to her seat of Batley and Spen in 2015.

Source: BBC.

Photo: Getty Images.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Huseyn Valiyev - Trend:

The 2016 Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe was organized in Baku at the highest level, Maksim Savvatin, an F1 fan from Russia, told Trend June 16.

"I am in Baku for the first time and I am very glad to attend such a great event," said Savvatin.

"Baku is making a very good impression," he noted. "I would like to come here again."

The 2016 Formula 1 Grand Prix of Europe to be held in Azerbaijan for the first time will start June 17 at 18:00 (GMT + 4 hours). The European Grand Prix will be held over 51 laps on the new circuit of slightly over 6 kilometers. The maximum estimated speed at the race is 340 km/h.
One message was clear at Wednesday night's vigil for the victims of the Orlando terrorist attack: after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, words and prayers are not enough.

"We need action," said Carlisle Mayor Tim Scott, addressing a crowd of almost 200 people at the Cumberland County Courthouse on Hanover Street in Carlisle. Scott's call for gun regulation set the tone for the vigil, where speakers implored the audience to demand change in LGBT rights and gun laws in the United States.

The event came three days after a gunman who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 and injuring 53. The massacre has reignited a national debate about gun control and focused attention on violence against LGBT and minority communities.

The vigil, which was organized by Carlisle resident Christin Kapp, featured speeches by local officials, spiritual leaders, and members of the LGBT community, as well as tributes in song and dance.

Following Scott's call to action, borough councilwoman Dawn Flowers announced a proposed borough ordinance that would protect Carlisle's LGBT population from discrimination in housing, employment, and public services.

Speaking after the vigil concluded, Flowers explained that she and Scott have been discussing the ordinance "on and off for a couple of years now," and the Orlando shooting motivated them to "push it forward faster." Flowers hopes to have the ordinance approved by the borough council by the end of the year.

"We want to show everyone that Carlisle is a welcoming and progressive community," Flowers said.

Rev. Aija Simpson, representing the Unitarian Universalists of Cumberland Valley, spoke next, recalling how her "heart broke" when she heard about the shooting on Sunday. Simpson decried prejudice against LGBT people but encouraged members of the community not to hide for fear of hate.

"We [LGBT people] risk by being who we are, [but] the only thing that can keep us safe is going out and being loud," Simpson said.

Simpson then called on the audience to stand with "Muslim brothers and sisters, who know better than most what it feels like to be hated for who you love."

The evening also featured artistic tributes to the victims: Carlisle resident Marissa Riley, 17, performed a tribute in dance, and Chad Bruce, also of Carlisle, sang the song "Go Rest it on the Mountain." Rev. Miller Hoffman, a counselor and advocate with the Carlisle YWCA, read a list of the names of the 49 people confirmed dead in the shooting. Attendees were also invited to sign a card to mail to the Orlando LGBT Center.

The evening ended with a benediction from Hoffman, who encouraged the audience to "pray, protest, and petition" in the coming weeks and months. Miller listed ways to show support for the shooting victims, such as donating blood or giving to LGBT advocacy groups locally or in Orlando.

"Act to change the world so it is safer and more just for us all," Miller said in closing.

Richard Bronakoski traveled from New Kingstown to attend the vigil. He said that he came to the event "to be witness and to be part of a larger community standing together."

Bronakoski hopes to see legislative action to restrict gun access.

"It's time to stand up to the NRA and their second amendment mantra," Bronakoski said, stating that policy makers should implement assault weapon bans and require background checks for gun owners.

Kapp said that she expected "a couple dozen" people to attend the vigil, and was "extremely happy and overwhelmed" by its turnout.

"We are a small town but if we stand together we can do great things with great love," Kapp said.
temar boggs.png

Temar Boggs

(Lancaster County district attorney's office)

An 18-year-old Lancaster man recently admitted to pointing a gun at a store clerk during an armed robbery last year in the city.

Temar Savon Boggs pleaded guilty to the the crime in which he and his accomplice Yamel Yelverton, 16, stole about $200, according to a news release from the Lancaster County district attorney's office. Boggs had been accused of armed robbery on the afternoon of Dec. 17 at the El Coqui Market on the 600 block of North Plum Street in Lancaster.

During the hearing, First Assistant District Attorney Christopher Larsen explained that Boggs racked the slide of the semi-automatic handgun while demanding money from the clerk, according to the release.

Boggs and Yelverton were caught after police released surveillance footage and photos of the suspects. Yelverton's case is still pending.

Boggs pleaded guilty to felony robbery and conspiracy counts. He will be sentenced in about two months after a background check is completed.
medicinal pills

(File photo)

A state prison inmate who is serving a life sentence for raping and killing a 9-year-old girl was given a new chance by a state appeals court on Thursday to argue that he should have access to high-potency pain medication.

The Superior Court panel gave Thomas Wisniewski that opportunity by overturning a Huntingdon County judge's ruling that derailed a civil rights complaint Wisniewski's filed in a bid to secure those meds for what he claims is an excruciating back injury.

Wisniewski, 58, claims the milder pain pills medical personnel were giving him in the state prison at Smithfield weren't doing the trick. Denying him more potent pain-killers violated his protections against cruel and unusual punishment, he contends.

In the state court opinion, Judge Victor P. Stabile found the county judge hadn't given Wisniewski a sufficient opportunity to secure medical records to back his contentions before dissolving an injunction that gave him at least temporary access to more powerful pills.

Stabile's court sent the case back to the county court with orders to schedule a new hearing on the case after Wisniewski is allowed sufficient time to gather his medical evidence.

Wisniewski, formerly of Philadelphia, has been in state prison since 2001. He claims in court records that he is a disabled veteran who sustained a back injury while in the service, then aggravated his medical problems while working as a brick layer. He claims he became addicted to methamphetamine and committed the killing while in a drug-induced stupor.

According to news reports of the time, Wisniewski is serving his life sentence for the May 2000 killing of Amanda Kuhn, a friend's daughter. Investigators said he bound the girl with duct tape, raped her, then strangled her with a telephone cord.

Prosecutors said Wisniewski, who was a criminal justice major at Penn State at the time of the slaying, killed the child to act out sado-masochistic sexual fantasies. A massive cache of pornography, including child and bondage porn, was found in his home, they said.

Wisniewski pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and rape charges to avoid the death penalty.
marijuana.jpg

Harrisburg council members plan to vote on reduced penalties for possession of marijuana and possession of marijuana paraphernalia at their June 29 meeting.

HARRISBURG -- Getting caught with a small amount of marijuana or marijuana paraphernalia in Harrisburg would cost you less under a proposal by city council members discussed Wednesday night.

Councilman Cornelius Johnson released details of the proposal at a council legislative session that would further reduce marijuana penalties compared to a proposal first floated by Mayor Eric Papenfuse in February.

Most notably, the changes by council would reduce the fines for possession, increase the fines for smoking marijuana in public and expand the effort to include possession of marijuana paraphernalia. Some of the amendments stemmed from ideas or concerns shared by residents who spoke at a series of public meetings.

Both the mayor's initial proposal and the council changes reduce the charge of marijuana possession to the same level as a traffic ticket. But Papenfuse's proposal called for $100 fines that escalated with a second arrest. And his proposal didn't address a common charge that accompanies arrests for possession of marijuana: possession of marijuana paraphernalia.

The amendments by council members would reduce the fine for marijuana possession to $75 and increase the fine to $150 for marijuana use to discourage public use of the drug.

Council members kept the mayor's "three-strikes" provision, where a third arrest would revert back to a misdemeanor. The current level of state charges for possession of marijuana and paraphernalia are misdemeanors.

But council members added language to specify that the third arrest would have to occur within five years to revert to the higher criminal classification of a misdemeanor. A third arrest outside of the time frame could be processed as a summary offense under city ordinance.

Harrisburg city council members plan to vote on the amended ordinance at their June 29 meeting. In the meantime, Johnson said he'd like to hear from residents about the proposed changes. He plans to post the proposed ordinance on the city's website to encourage feedback to the city clerk, Kirk Petroski, at kpetroski@cityofhbg.com.

"I did a lot of research," Johnson said of the changes. He modeled wording from an ordinance from Orlando to be able to include marijuana paraphernalia in Harrisburg's proposed ordinance. Other drug paraphernalia would not be covered by the ordinance.

If council members did not address paraphernalia, the charge would have remained a misdemeanor and their efforts to reduce marijuana penalties may have been in vain. Most arrests for marijuana possession involve a secondary charge, which is often for paraphernalia.

Council members said they support reducing marijuana penalties to increase police officers' efficiency and free up their limited time. As it stands, officers are required to appear in court for every marijuana possession case and the district attorney often reduced the penalty to fines.

Council members said they also support the changes because arrests for small amounts of marijuana can result in the loss of employment, housing opportunities, student financial aid and other long-term consequences that seem to outweigh the infraction.

Although police officers would be able to charge offenders under the new city ordinance with reduced penalties, they would still have the option to charge under the more serious state charges. And violators could still lose their driving privileges. Under state law, an arrest for drug possession triggers a driver's license suspension.

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have already passed laws to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana.

UPDATE: This article was updated to clarify the district attorney often reduced penalties to fines.
Reckless dirt bike and ATV riders are creating dangerous conditions on Harrisburg streets, police say.

There has been an increase in reports in recent weeks of people operating dirt bikes and ATVs weaving in and out of traffic, endangering people on sidewalks, driving the wrong way on streets and creating noise, police said.

The operators are subject to motor vehicles laws, including registration, licensing and required equipment regulations. Violators can be issued citations ranging from $100 to $1,000 depending on the number of citations issued, police said. Parents may also be cited for allowing their children to operate the vehicles on city streets.

Police say the ATV and dirt bike riders have fled from officers, weaving in and out of traffic to escape, and police have not pursued them because they don't want to endanger the public in a traffic offense chase.

Police ask anyone who recognizes those in the above photos to submit a tip through Dauphin County Crime Watch.

What residents described as "bandits" terrorizing city sidewalks and streets with illegal motorized dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles were expressed at recent neighborhood meetings held by Mayor Eric Papenfuse.
prison bars

(File photo)

By Jeff Coleman and Eric J. Epstein

An old and misguided political adage claimed that Democrats built schools and Republicans built prisons.

Eric Epstein (l) and Jeff Coleman (r) PennLive file

It's simply not true, and the reality is much more complex.

It would be far more accurate to say that society creates conditions for failing schools and thriving prisons, while taxpayers underwrite the abysmal results.

Education funding remains a polarizing public policy issue, but politicians remain silent and disconnected from the perennial "corrections" hemorrhage in the state budget.

Consider a 2010 report by then-Secretary of Corrections Jeffrey Beard, who reported prison numbers that should have ignited a statewide political debate:

Pennsylvania had 8,243 inmates in 1980, but by 2010 the number soared to some 51,000. The prison population dipped by 850 in 2015 and 756 in 2014 and crested at 49,914 -- the lowest level since 2009.

The Corrections budget was $94 million in 1980, but the proposed overall departmental budget for this fiscal 2016-17 is projected to grow by $192 million, or 7.9% increase to $2.4 billion.

According to the Senate Appropriations Committee, prison overtime costs rose from $78.3 million in 2013 to $87 million in 2014, and are now more than $100 million or $6 million more to run the entire correction system in 1980.

Before 2010, Pennsylvania was adding a new prison every year and a half at a cost of approximately $250 million to build and $70 a year to operate.

The investment is astounding, and the return abysmal.

While no one argues that criminals should be isolated, there are some who should never be released and reintegrated into communities.

Prisons perform the critical function of protecting neighborhoods from the most dangerous criminals.

Pennsylvania's prison population growth spurt was largely the result of longer sentences and the rise in the 1980's and '90's of mandatory minimum sentences.

In testimony before the Senate Government Management and Cost Study Commission, Beard said that "...little more than two percent of prison growth in the past decade was attributable to violent crimes, while 55 percent of the growth was due to less serious offenses."

He added, "...the phenomenal growth is the fact that more than 3,500 of the inmates we receive each year have less than a year to serve on their minimum sentence."

Statistically, one-third of state prison admissions have a year or less remaining on their sentence. Historically, these prisoners would have completed their sentence at a county jail.

Pennsylvania is one of only a handful of states that allows misdemeanor-only offenders to serve time in a state prison.

It's time to reconsider Pennsylvania's Corrections strategy. Many states, including our neighbors, offer some instructive solutions.

New Jersey, New York, Virginia and even Texas have taken steps to reduce prison overcrowding, and we should follow suit.

Among the proactive measures Pennsylvania's next Governor should consider: filtering parole violations for late payment on fees and curfew violations; utilization of alternative settings and faith based transitional living programs for short-term offenders; and, cyber and electronic monitoring. Technology allows Pennsylvania to track and monitor prisoners 24/7 - prisons without walls.

Corrections Secretary John Wetzel got it right when he said, "Finally, offenders are getting the treatment they need at a more-appropriate level of the criminal justice system. This ensures appropriate treatment and saves the expensive state prison space for the more violent offenders - those that truly should be separated from society."

At a cost of more than $40,000 per year, per prisoner, we can't afford to put everybody in jail.

It's time to strike a balance between keeping people safe and making them go broke.

Beyond budget-crunching, the human cost of aggressive incarceration - more prisoners and longer sentences - is truly incalculable.

Jeff Coleman is a former Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and principal of Churchill Strategies, a branding and communications firm in Harrisburg. Eric Epstein is a consumer advocate and good government watchdog who founded Rock the Capital after the infamous pay raise in July 2005.
By Thomas Sowell

However great the shock of the massacre in Orlando, it is only a matter of time before we start hearing again the fact-free dogma that "diversity is our strength."

Thomas Sowell (PennLive file)

If there is any place in the Guinness Book of World Records for words repeated the most often, over the most years, without one speck of evidence, "diversity" should be a prime candidate.

Is diversity our strength? Or anybody's strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan's homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer?

Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity -- or does the very word "Balkanization" remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times?

Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization?

"When in Rome do as the Romans do" was once a common saying. Today, after generations in the West have been indoctrinated with the rhetoric of multiculturalism, the borders of Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic have been thrown open to people who think it is their prerogative to come as refugees and tell the Romans what to do -- and to assault those who don't knuckle under to foreign religious standards.

The recent wave of refugees flooding into Europe include Muslim men who have been haranguing European women on the streets for not dressing modestly enough, not to mention their sexual molestation of those women.

Smug elites in Europe, like their counterparts in America, are not nearly as concerned about such things as they are about preventing "Islamophobia." Legal restrictions on free speech in some European countries make it a crime to sound the alarm about the dangers to the culture and to the people.

In the lofty circles of those who see themselves as citizens of the world, it is considered unworthy, if not hateful, to insist on living according to your own Western values or to resist importing people who increase your chances of being killed.

But if you don't have the instinct for self-preservation, it will not matter much in the long run whatever else you may have.

America's great good fortune in the past has been that Americans have been able to unite as Americans against every enemy, despite our own internal differences and struggles.

Black and white, Jew and Gentile, have fought and died for this country in every war.

It has not been our diversity, but our ability to overcome the problems inherent in diversity, and to act together as Americans, that has been our strength.

In both World War I and World War II, the top commander of American troops who went into combat against the German army was of German ancestry -- Pershing and Eisenhower, respectively. So too was General Carl Spaatz, whose bombers reduced German cities to rubble. Whatever their backgrounds, they were Americans when the chips were down.

Today, that sense of American unity is being undermined by the reckless polarization of group identity politics.

That affects not only how Americans see themselves, but how others in our midst see America.

Some people demand American citizenship, as if it is an entitlement, while burning the American flag and waving the flag of Mexico. And the apostles of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" watch in silence. That includes the President of the United States.

Probably most people in most groups are decent.

But if 85 percent of the people in Group A present no serious problems and 95 percent of the people in Group B present no serious problems, that means you can expect three times as many serious problems when you admit immigrants from Group A.

Unfortunately, there is remarkably little interest in the relevant facts about crime rates, disease rates, welfare dependency or educational deficiencies among immigrants from specific countries.

Most debates about immigration policies are contests in rhetoric, with hard facts being ignored as if they didn't exist.

Tragically, the massacre in Orlando seems unlikely to change that. Too many people have too much invested in their own particular position to change, especially in an election year.

Thomas Sowell is a syndicated columnist. His work appears on Thursdays on PennLive. Readers may contact him through his website.
When a law as far-reaching as last week's historic liquor reform compromise passes, a lot of politicians stumble over one another to take credit.

They tout greater customer convenience and millions in new revenue while crowding together for the photo op, all white teeth and polished shoe leather. Their staffs, meanwhile, queue up competing press releases.

But the how of a law is far more important than the who or what.

In the case of House Bill 1690, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board will need to roll out 163 pages worth of changes to the state's already complex and interlocking liquor laws. With so many stakeholders involved -- from distilleries to grocery stores to state store workers -- a false move could prove costly or litigious or both.

"Our mission is to take what comes from across the street and implement it," Michael Negra, a board member since 2014, said last week. "Even if I hated it, we'd still be doing it."

And the complications are legion.

The new law addresses the long-running problem of "dead" liquor licenses by allowing the PLCB to auction them off to prospective buyers. Licenses typically go dark due to enforcement actions or financial troubles. It may be cheaper for a license holder, for example, to let a license lapse than pay back taxes. The owners simply abandon the valuable licenses without attempting to sell or transfer them.

Rodrigo Diaz, the PLCB's chief counsel, said the state "loses" between 60 and 80 licenses each year. Until now, they were left fallow because the state couldn't legally resell them. That caused a dearth of bars and restaurants in rural and poverty-stricken areas because the state bases the number of licenses on a county-by-county quota system tied to population.

So, HB 1690 solves a worsening problem while creating a new revenue stream for the state.

But it also provides a new hurdle.

Until recently, Diaz said, the PLCB kept its liquor license records on rolls of microfilm with no card catalog or any other means of searching the archive. There's no list of "dead" licenses, so creating one would mean combing through nearly 16 years worth of microfilm and manually comparing the license numbers with the list of currently active licenses.

"We'll have to get 600 interns and put them to work," Diaz said, with a chuckle.

Elsewhere, the law creates a new casino-specific license that allows for, among other things, 24/7 drink service. It also allows gas stations, grocery stores, hotels and restaurants that currently have liquor licenses to sell up to four bottles of wine to go via an add-on permit.

Diaz, a 24-year veteran of the agency, stresses that the new law doesn't override the quota system to create or destroy licenses -- "the Newtonian principle of liquor licenses" -- but it does create a lot more administrative work for the agency, at least in the short term.

The PLCB might be faced with some 13,000 applications for the new license and permits after the law takes effect in August.

"That's going to be a tall order," Diaz said.

So far, the PLCB hasn't yet run projections to determine whether additional staff will be needed to process the glut of new applications or how the new competition could cut into revenue for the state-run liquor stores, which previously dominated the wine retail market.

In the past, the three-member board has allowed the administrative staff to review routine licenses and renewals. It will likely do the same for the wine-to-go permits, particularly if hundreds of applications arrive at the same time.

"Licensing has to review all of them, but the board won't," Negra said. "There might

be some where licensing says, 'we want your opinion on this one. It's out of our pay scale.' "

And the PLCB may be overseeing its own demise with each permit it approves, according to some observers.

House Speaker Mike Turzai, whose original privatization bill was gutted in order to serve as a conveyance for the reforms, said he sees HB 1690 as the first step toward divesting the state of its liquor stores.

Wendell Young IV, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, said he believes the law will precipitate the end of the state-run stores within three to five years, based on the experiences of states like Iowa and West Virginia. The union represents about 3,500 of the PLCB's 5,000 employees.

"We have an agency that makes a lot of money for Pennsylvanians," he said, "and we're going to see that cannibalized."

But PLCB officials are cautiously optimistic, pointing to a number of measures that could help make the state stores more efficient and profitable -- such as more flexible pricing, Sunday sales and the ability to open on holidays.

"A lot of these are things we've been working on," PLCB Chair Tim Holden said on the day Gov. Tom Wolf signed the bill into law.

Those state store convenience measures will likely be the first ones ordinary Pennsylvanians notice. Not every store will open every holiday and Sunday, Negra said, but some would likely remain open between Thanksgiving and New Years, for example.

"It's a simplistic type of change that came in a very complicated bill," he said. "We'll take the low-hanging fruit wherever we can and then deal with the rest."

Beyond the increased competition over the wine market, Young was most concerned with a portion of the law decreasing the PLCB's markup on special liquor orders (SLOs) from 30 percent to 10 percent. Bars and restaurants use the SLOs to stock their shelves with far-flung products that separate them from their competition, while consumers can use it to get hard-to-find brands not stocked in the stores.

The theory behind the change, Negra said, is that the SLOs -- for licensees, at least -- will no longer be handled by the stores. Once an order gets PLCB approval, the vendor can ship the bottle directly to the licensee.

"If it doesn't go through our stores," he said, "we're going to be more efficient and we charge 10 percent on product we don't see."

Diaz said the law also has a mechanism that would allow the PLCB to step in and force the SLO's back through the state store system if a licensee is attempting to do an "end run" around the state system.

"The statute gives us the authority to decide, if this product looks awfully similar to one we have and you're selling a million cases all of the sudden and we're losing a million sales, we can say, 'no more,'" he said.

HB 1690 also gives the PLCB the authority to deviate from the old requirement that all of its products receive the same 30 percent markup. That could mean that champagne prices increase near New Year's Eve, when demand spikes, while pre-mixed eggnog prices decrease in January.

Negra said the old system didn't make any sense.

"Pappy Van Winkle (whiskey), for example--we would mark that up the same way we did Barefoot (wine)," he said.

The law does not, however, allow the PLCB to set different prices for the same product at different stores.

"Philadelphia, because of the location next to more competition in New Jersey and Delaware, won't have different prices than State College or Elk County," Negra said.

The statutory deadlines in HB 1690 are also faulty due to the fact that it was last amended in December 2015. For example, it sets a June 30, 2016, deadline for the General Assembly to consider a privatization study to be conducted by a committee that hasn't been formed yet.

Most state officials believe those deadlines will be extended, although there's no consequence for not meeting them.

"Given the extensive debate and testimony over the past six years on this subject, though, I do question the need for such a study," said Rep. Chris Ross, R-Chester County, who chairs the House liquor control committee. "Perhaps the resources needed for it could be more profitably spent elsewhere."

Administratively, Diaz said, the PLCB will need to closely study the law and create procedures that ensure the entire process runs smoothly. That will mean closely examining existing law for conflicts with the new one and removing language that's outdated or irrelevant. It will also mean formulating internal policies for employees to follow.

All of the changes will go through the three-member board while rule changes will also require approval by the Independent Regulatory Review Commission.

PLCB officials say it's difficult to predict how soon customers will be able to buy wine at Wegman's, for example, but they plan to work as quickly as they can given the scale and difficulty of the undertaking.

"It's an exciting time to be here," Negra said. "The rest of the year is going to be a lot of fun -- and next year, too."
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend:

The World Bank (WB) is considering the possibility to provide loan guarantees for financing the construction of the Azerbaijani part of the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) project, Larisa Leshchenko, head of the WB Baku office, told Trend in an exclusive interview.

Leshchenko said the WB also continues discussions on the issue of financial support to the Azerbaijani part in the TANAP project.

It is too early to speak about the volume of financing, because, currently, the discussion and preparation processes are being conducted, she added.

If the project is approved, it will increase the volume of TANAP's financing, noted Leshchenko.

Perhaps, the financing will be by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), she said adding that meanwhile, it is possible that the WB will provide loan guarantees through the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA, an institution of the World Bank Group).

WB regional director for the South Caucasus Mercy Tembon told Trend that the bank's mission on studying possible financing of the TANAP project continues to work in Azerbaijan.

There are a number of tasks that the mission must fulfill, said Tembon adding that it will take some time, because it is necessary to bring together all the fragments and send to the bank's management.

The WB is in negotiations simultaneously with Turkey's Botas Petroleum Pipeline Corporation and Southern Gas Corridor CJSC for financing TANAP.

Moreover, it is expected that additional $1.07 billion will be allocated by the European Investment Bank (EIB) for TANAP.

The loans will be long-term, and will possibly be provided under state guarantee.

TANAP project envisages transportation of gas of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field from the Georgian-Turkish border to the western borders of Turkey.

Turkey will get gas in 2018 and after completing the construction of Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), gas will be delivered to Europe in early 2020.

The project's total cost is estimated at $9.8 billion. Currently, the shareholders of TANAP are: SOCAR (State Oil Company of Azerbaijan) - 58 percent, Botas - 30 percent and BP - 12 percent.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
FILE- In this Friday, Nov. 11, 2011 file photo, a general view of a Central bank of Nigeria headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria. Nigeria will float its embattled naira currency, the Central Bank governor announced Wednesday, June 15, 2016 after months of pressure to control a spiraling crisis in Africa's biggest economy. Gov. Godwin Emefiele told reporters the naira rate will be "market-driven" from June 20. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba, File)
Police at the scene after Batley and Spen Member of Parliament Jo Cox was shot, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday June 16, 2016. Both sides in the British referendum debate Thursday suspended campaigning after Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was seriously injured in a shooting near Leeds. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT NO SALES NO ARCHIVE
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US Secretary of State John Kerry and Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Brende tour the Blomstrand Glacier, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Ny-Alesund, Norway. Kerry is visiting Norway's extreme north to view areas impacted by climate change with melting ice and the opening of new sea lanes. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Seba Aghayeva - Trend:

Latvia proposes Azerbaijan to consider the possibility of cooperation in the spheres of environmentally friendly technologies, food industry, pharmaceuticals and health tourism, said Latvia's Minister for Transport Uldis Augulis.

He made the remarks during the 6th meeting of Azerbaijan-Latvia intergovernmental commission on economic, scientific, technical and cultural cooperation in Riga, said Azerbaijan's embassy in Latvia.

The minister noted that Azerbaijan is an important economic partner of Latvia.

The priority areas of cooperation between the two countries include joint investment projects, increasing the volume trade turnover, effective use of international transportation corridors, communication in the spheres of education, agriculture, construction, tourism and health, according to Augulis.

He pointed out that Azerbaijan is an important partner of Latvia in the spheres of transit and logistics in South Caucasus.

Latvia is an important transportation artery and an integral part of the new Silk Road and the North-South transportation corridor, said the minister.

Azerbaijan's Minister of Transport Ziya Mammadov, for his part, said that the relations between Azerbaijan and Latvia are expanding.

"The cooperation with Latvia, which is a member of the European Union, is important for us," he added.

The socio-political situation in Azerbaijan creates favorable conditions for attracting foreign investments and opens great opportunities for cooperation with Latvia's state and private structures, according to Mammadov.

Following the discussions, the two sides signed the final protocol.

The document said that the import, export and sale of goods and services produced on Azerbaijan's occupied territories, including in Nagorno-Karabakh, on Latvian markets, as well as any economic activity of Latvian companies on those territories is illegal, according to the international law and Azerbaijan's law.

The products manufactured on Azerbaijan's occupied territories won't be allowed to be delivered to Latvia without receiving a certificate from Azerbaijan's relevant structures, according to the protocol.

The document also said that the bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and Latvia are based on the principles of mutual respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the two countries.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Asebaa
SEAPA board members met for their regular meeting last Wednesday and Thursday at the conference room at Parks and Rec.

The Southeast Alaska Power Agency (SEAPA) board held its regular meeting in Petersburg last week, with board members in attendance from Ketchikan, Wrangell and Petersburg. Much of the meeting focused on project updates and approving the company's FY17 budget.

SEAPA CEO Trey Acteson asked the board to consider a motion to provide one-year notice to end the contract with Ketchikan Public Utilites (KPU), concerning operations at Swan Lake hydroelectric plant near Ketchikan. For Acteson, the move makes sense because it would increase SEAPA's control of operations at the agency owned Swan Lake...
Power service went down to southern Southeast Alaska communities, following problems at the Swan Lake dam site on June 8.

The hydroelectric dam is one of two major producers utilized by Southeast Alaska Power Agency, primarily servicing the Ketchikan area. This year an effort is being made to raise the dam, a $10 million project which will increase active storage by 25 percent and yield between 6,000 and 12,000 megawatt hours

annually.

A five-megawatt load bank being used during the project experienced a problem with its cooling circuit, which ended up tripping the systems failsafe. Wrangell Municipal Light and Power superintendent Clay Hammer likened the load bank to a large, trailer-mounted toaster, a device which generates additional load.

Ordinarily used to test out newly-installed generation, in Swans case the load bank was deployed in order to help maintain water levels in the lake. During this stage of the project, any excess water cannot be drained using the dams spillway, and so must be run through its turbines. Hammer explained that the load bank uses up the excess energy being produced as a result. At 4:30 a.m. the system failed, tripping power being provided to SEAPAs member communities in Ketchikan, Wrangell and Petersburg.

Hammer recounted Wrangells backup diesel generators were fired up by 5:30 a.m., with the generators at Tyee Lake back online about 20 minutes later. Power also fluctuated just before noon on Sunday after a hiccup with the load bank, only briefly disrupting service.

The power providers CEO, Trey Acteson, explained engineers are still evaluating what went wrong, and expected a final report later this week. Need for the load bank at Swan may be passing, however, with energy-intensive fish processing soon to pick up and rainfall to become less frequent. In previous meetings of the power providers board, Acteson had identified the spring as the most crucial time to control water levels during the project.
Emmet County plans road work, new signs with ARPA funding

Bids will be going out this winter for a Camp Petosega Road project and new road signs throughout the county.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

Trend:

The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) sold $50 million to 24 banks through an auction held by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA), SOFAZ said June 16.

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 April 1, 2016, SOFAZ's assets increased by 2 percent and amounted to $34.25 billion compared to early 2016 ($33.57 billion).
Trinidad & Tobago makes $375m withdrawal from its energy stabilisation fund



Trinidad joins global energy giants in tapping sovereign fund

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic

Petroleumworld.com 06 16 2016

Trinidad & Tobago, the Caribbean's largest oil and natural gas producer, joined Qatar, Russia and other energy-rich nations by tapping its sovereign wealth fund after low oil prices left the government with a budget shortfall, Finance Minister Colm Imbert said Friday.

The twin-island country, located off the coast of Venezuela, dipped into its $5.5 billion (Dh20.2 billion) Heritage and Stabilisation Fund for the first time since it was created in 2007, withdrawing $375 million.

The purpose of this fund is to offset serious shortfalls in revenue in periods of depressed petroleum prices, Imbert said during a session of Parliament in Port of Spain. It is not, as some believe, a trophy to be kept on a shelf and never to be touched.

Suffering a recession that the central bank expects to last at least through next year, the country of 1.2 million, where oil and gas output makes up about 45 per cent of gross domestic product, has said it will rely on a combination of borrowing and withdrawals from the fund to make up budget deficit. It is facing a revenue shortfall of more than $1 billion since its budget took effect in October, due mainly to a fall in energy prices and slumping production.

In tapping its fund, Trinidad will join countries from Saudi Arabia to Norway, which built up reserves during the boom in crude prices and are now trying to shore up their finances. The value of equities held by the world's largest sovereign funds will drop to about $2.64 trillion this year from $3.04 trillion at the end of 2015, the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute reported in February.

Falling production

Trinidad, a top 10 global exporter of liquefied natural gas, saw exports decrease in 2015 to 17 billion cubic metres from 18.4 billion a year earlier, according to the BP Statistical Review of Energy released this month. A slowdown in the energy sector is expected to drive the $29 billion economy to contract 2 per cent this year and remain flat in 2017, according to the central bank.

Just a decade ago, Trinidad was the region's economic star, posting 13 per cent growth in 2006, according to World Bank figures. Due to its reliance on the energy sector, however, its economy has gone through peaks and troughs, emerging from its last recession in 2010.

The government is trying to diversify away from energy by promoting tourism, agriculture and manufacturing. It has proposed a 7 per cent tax on online purchases to bring in extra revenue.






Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The Southern Gas Corridor project will be implemented according to the schedule and will be completed in 2019, said Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Natig Aliyev in an interview with Italy's AGI news agency.

"I think the first gas to Turkey will arrive in 2019, and to Italy in 2020," he said. "A lot will depend on the speed of solving some issues in Albania, Greece and Italy."

"We have to obtain a lot of permits and construction licenses," added the minister.

Aliyev also noted that gas reserves of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field, which is the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor, are enough for both domestic consumption and for exports.

Europe is the most reliable market for Azerbaijani gas, said the minister, adding that the European Commission, in turn, wants to diversify the sources and routes of gas supply.

He also said the Southern Gas Corridor will create about 40,000 jobs.

Ten billion cubic meters of gas will be transported via the Southern Gas Corridor annually, and the supply will increase to 16 billion cubic meters, six billion cubic meters of which will be supplied to Turkey, said Aliyev.

He noted that Azerbaijan has enough promising gas fields along with the Shah Deniz field.

"For example, reserves of the Absheron field reach 400 billion cubic meters," the minister explained. "If the gas supplies to Europe are successful at the first stage, then we will increase the volume by using Azerbaijan's other fields."

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. It envisages the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian Sea region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey.

At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor project. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.

As part of the Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, June 16

By Huseyn Hasanov- Trend:

Officials from the Traffic Control Inspectorate of Turkmenistan's Interior Ministry and representatives of a local public organization dealing with road safety discussed good practices for promoting road safety awareness at an OSCE-organized three-day seminar that concluded today in Ashgabat.

Shpresa Mulliqi from the OSCE Mission in Kosovo who conducted the seminar, talked about the significance of the legal framework for traffic safety, the main factors influencing the road infrastructure and behavior, including education and culture, as well as ways to raise public awareness about road traffic safety.

The seminar placed special emphasis on the involvement of children and youngsters in awareness-raising activities for pedestrians.

"Promoting traffic safety is essential for guaranteeing the health and harmonious development of all citizens, including the youngest that represent a group of risk at roads," said Radovan Znasik, officer-in-charge of the OSCE Centre in Ashgabat.

"Our seminar highlights the importance of awareness raising activities in ensuring traffic safety and we hope that the event will be of practical use for the relevant bodies of Turkmenistan as it is committed to upgrading its efforts in the area of promoting traffic safety and designing awareness raising campaigns," he noted.

Participants exchanged views on the role of educational institutions, public organizations and media in raising public awareness on traffic safety. The seminar also covered the main content of traffic safety education, which includes general traffic safety knowledge, and the skills for analyzing and solving problems in traffic activities.

As part of the practical exercises, the participants developed traffic safety awareness messages for different target groups taking into account identified needs, the legal framework, the cultural context and financial implications.

Prior to the seminar, the OSCE expert visited the Traffic Safety School for Children of the Interior Ministry and was familiarized with national road safety campaigns.
Uzbekistan has temporarily closed its border with four of its neighboring countries, the Uzbek State Border Service said in a statement, the Interfax news agency reported.

People, vehicles and goods from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and will be unable to enter the country between June 15 and June 25.

While authorities gave no official reason for the move, local media have reported that the closure is to ensure the security of the upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit.

The annual SCO meeting will take place this year in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent on June 23-24. The group, which describes itself as promoting regional cooperation and security, is seen by some Western observers as a counterbalance to NATO. Founded in 2001, the SCO includes Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan are expected to join as full members by the end of 2016.
Tehran, Iran, June 16

By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:

Iran and China have come to terms on a joint venture to construct an oil terminal in Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf.

The $550-million contract was signed by Iran's Machine Making Company and China's largest heavy industry enterprise, Fars news agency reported June 15.

After the completion of the first phase of the joint project, Qeshm Island will be able to store 10 million barrels of light, heavy and ultra-heavy crude oil produced in Iran's West Karun region.

The oil terminal will turn the island into a major center for oil production and storage. It will be large enough to handle tankers up to 140 meters deep and store an estimated 30 million barrels of oil.

In keeping with a 10-year lease contract, the terminal will generate annual revenue of up to $300 million.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 14



By Farhad Daneshvar - Trend:



An Iranian car maker has called for expansion of trilateral ties with Turkish and Azerbaijani carmakers.



In an interview with Trend, the vice-chairman of the board of directors of Iran's Rakhsh Khodro Diesel Company, Akbar Mirza-Hosseini, said that there are several areas for cooperation between Iranian, Azerbaijani and Turkish carmakers.



According to him regional cooperation between the carmakers can benefit all three sides.



Akbar Mirza-Hosseini said that there is also a common area for cooperation between Iranian and Turkish auto-parts makers as the products of Renault, a French multinational automobile manufacturer, are assembled in both, Iran and Turkey.



They also can work together on producing tractors, he added.



Meanwhile, cars made in France, South Korea, Germany and Japan are supplied in three countries of Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkey which creates an excellent chance for cooperation between regional carmakers.



The International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA) said in a report June.6 that Iran manufactured 884,866 sedans and 97,471 commercial vehicles in 2015.



According to the OICA, Iran shared some 0.9 percent of the total car production in the world, which was 90.78 million.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Fatih Karimov - Trend:

Iran purchased 61 percent of its totally imported goods during the first two months of current fiscal year (March 20-May 20) from five countries - China, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Turkey and South Korea.

China was the main exporter of goods to Iran in the mentioned period. Beijing's exports accounted for 21.4 percent of Iran's total imports in terms of value.

Iran imported $1.175 billion worth of goods from China during the 2-month period, according to the latest statistics released by Trade Promotion Organization of Iran (TPOI).

China exports to Iran witnessed a fall of 20 percent in terms of value, according to the report.

Iran also imported $1 billion worth of goods from the UAE (39 percent fall), which marks 18.3 percent of Iran's total imports' value.

Russia, Turkey and South Korea exported $420 million, $396 million, and $347 million worth of goods respectively to Tehran.

Iran's imports from Russia recorded a huge rise by 494 percent year on year.

South Korea exports to Iran indicated a decrease by 40 percent, meanwhile imports from Turkey registered a fall by 23 percent.

Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and Italy were also European countries which took place among top exporters of goods to Tehran in the first two months of current fiscal year.

Germany was the sixth top goods exporter to Iran with $292 million worth of exports (indicating an increase by 15 percent), followed by India($280 million, 31 percent fall), Switzerland ($251 million worth of goods, 27 percent fall), Netherlands ($145 million, 93 percent increase), and Italy ($141 million, two percent increase).

Iran imported $5.5 billion worth of goods during the first two months of its current fiscal year (March 20-May 20), which indicates a 13.5 percent decline, compared to the same period of preceding year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Farhad Daneshvar - Trend:

Iran's ATA Airlines has launched flights on the Tehran-Baku-Tabriz route, the company's representative Nader Shayesteh told Trend June 16.

Airbus planes will transport 145 passengers twice a week - on Mondays and Thursdays, said Shayesteh.

He added that the price for the flights from Baku to Tehran and back will be 180 Azerbaijani manats.

The same price will be charged for the flights from Baku to Tabriz and back, added Shayesteh.

The ATA Airlines was established in 2008 and is headquartered in Tabriz.
Come get Merry on Main Audio Article The 2022 Merry on Main committee is busy preparing for the annual two-day Christmas festival held at the Pleasanton River...

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Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:

Iranian oil sector is attractive for foreign companies and they will invest in Iranian oil industry in the near future, Behrooz Abdolvand, managing director of German Consulting company DESB GmbH focusing on Iranian energy market, expert on the Caspian region believes.

"Shell and Total have already started to buy Iranian oil. Furthermore Total, Shell and Wintershall are negotiating intensively with the Iranian government about investment in the Iranian oil production. Gazprom is also in negotiations with the Iranian government," Abdolvand told Trend by email.

Besides the mentioned companies other international oil majors are interested in investing in Iranian oil fields, he said.

According to BP, Iran ranked fourth in the world in terms of proven oil reserves, which amounted to 21.7 billion tons at the beginning of 2016.

Abdolvand believes that current low oil prices will not prevent foreign oil companies from investing in Iran. He noted that against the background of the crisis in Nigeria and the sharp decrease of oil production in Canada foreign investors will invest in the Iranian oil sector, because of the comparatively low production costs there. He also noted that OPEC is currently reducing overcapacities of 100,000 barrel/day and by end of 2016 it is planned to reduce overcapacities of another 60,000 barrels/day.

Abdolvand expects Iran to continue increase its oil production. He noted that Iran has the capability to increase its production in a short period of time by 4.5 million barrel/day and another 2 million barrel/day is also possible in case that the necessary investment is made.

"Therefore Iran could increase its overall production capacity by 6.5 million barrels/day," he said.

Iran has been increasing oil production since it reached an agreement on the removal of international sanctions in July 2015. In April 2016 the country reached the pre-sanctions level of oil production. According to OPEC, oil production in Iran in May grew by more than 89,000 barrels per day - up to 3.562 million barrels per day.

Edited by EA

Follow the author on Twitter:@E_Kosolapova
Sunday Briefing: Andras Nemeth Wins the Sunday Million

June 16, 2016 Matthew Pitt Editor

With so many massive online tournaments taking place every Sunday, you dont have to travel to Las Vegas for the 2016 World Series of Poker to win big.

Just as Andras probirs Nemeth won this weeks Sunday Million at PokerStars for $164,244.32. Nemeth finished on top after a three-way deal involving Penelas08 ($149,968.21 and Paulo tricotijr Novaes ($149,247.47).

Another PokerStars tournament ending in a chop was the Sunday Warm-Up, which saw the United Kingdoms OLDWOLF133 walk away with $52,149.56 and JEKAAA7 bank a cool $43,162.44 after a heads-up chop, while Swedens Abbe77 and Russias papan9_p$ chopped the Sunday Grand, netting $58,792.22 and $48,550.18.

Other big PokerStars wins included:

lenballs1014  first place in the Sunday Kickoff for $18,402.94

 first place in the for $18,402.94 Gustavo gremistaAK Pinto  first place in the Big $109 for $23,048.19

 first place in the for $23,048.19 nofair18  first place in the Super-Sized Sunday for $33,380.65

 first place in the for $33,380.65 Luis Turko_man Rodriguez  first place in the Big $215 for $24,070.87

 first place in the for $24,070.87 Pedro peterwhooo Correa  first place in the Sunday Cooldown for $21,808.50

 first place in the for $21,808.50 Sale1337  first place in the Sunday Supersonic for $33,886.58

TruTi0 Takes Down the partypoker Super High Roller

The biggest weekly tournament at partypoker, in terms of buy-in size, is the $2,600 Super High Roller. It has been consistently beating its $100,000 guarantee, and this week was no different as 58 entrants took part, entrants who were outlasted by TrueTi0, who collected a $47,125 for their victory.

Partypoker also has two $150,000 guaranteed Sunday tournaments, the Main Event and $530 High Roller. The former was won by Cri.du.Chat for $24,150.15 with the latter won by BOOMALOOM for a bankroll-boosting $32,077.50.

TeamShippo Ships the 888poker Whale

The $600 Whale returned to 888poker this week and saw its $120,000 guarantee surpassed by $12,210. TeamShippo was the best beneficiary of this larger prize pool because they won the tournament and banked a cool $27,036.94 for their efforts.

A similar sized score was had by tedwho1 who outlasted a field of 640 in the $100,000 Mega Deep for $24,179.20, while Argentinas valitopkr11 won the $80,000 Sunday Challenge for $12,943.43 but it was Irelands Gary garyt20 Thompson who secured the largest payout, $13,230.41, thanks to a three-way chop.

Want to stay atop all the latest in the poker world? If so, make sure to get PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!
NYPD Officer Dennis Guerra died from injuries incurred in the 2014 high-rise fire. (Photo: NYPD)

A Brooklyn teenager was sentenced on Tuesday to 19 years to life in prison for having set fire to a mattress in a hallway of his apartment building, resulting in the death of a police officer who responded to the blaze.

The young man, Marcell Dockery, sat still and silent in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn as Justice Danny K. Chun issued the sentence after scolding him for having killed the officer, Dennis Guerra, and having gravely injured his partner, Officer Rosa Rodriguez, the New York Times reports. The saddest thing about this case, Justice Chun said, was that the two officers had responded to the fire because of their love for the job and their love for helping people in trouble, and because of that, Officer Guerra is dead.

After a two-week trial in April and May, Mr. Dockery, now 18, was convicted of murder, assault and arson. The officers went to the apartment building, at 2007 Surf Avenue in Coney Island, after receiving a report about the fire on April 6, 2014. When the two entered the lobby, they saw no sign of flames and took an elevator to the 13th floor. Prosecutors introduced surveillance video at the trial of the thick black smoke that awaited them, and Officer Rodriguez testified that she had been unable to breathe in the hot, chaotic scene.
Music blared and more than 300 people danced and milled about Pulse nightclub early Sunday as Orlando police officer Adam Gruler, who was working a security detail, searched the area for a teenager who had gotten into the club with a fake ID.

He couldn't find the kid, so he headed back to the club's parking lot.

That's when the shots rang out.

It was just after 2 a.m. Sunday. Gruler ran toward the entrance after hearing the shots.

He was met by gunman Omar Mateen. Armed with a .223 caliber semiautomatic rifle and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, Mateen started exchanging gunfire with the officer.

Gruler quickly realized he was outgunned and called for backup. Gruler retreated and Mateen ran further inside the club.

Lt. Scott Smith and Sgt. Jeffrey Backhaus arrived a couple minutes later and rushed into the club. There was another flurry of shots between them and Mateen, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
Two helicopters from Helinet Aviation Services will participate in the American Heroes Air Show Saturday, June 18, at Hansen Dam in Southern California's San Fernando Valley. The show is a helicopter-only, admission-free aviation event designed to demonstrate to the public, media, and community officials the vital and diverse roles of rotary aviation.

American Heroes highlights the impact of helicopters in law enforcement, public safety, communications, search and rescue, homeland security, and national defense. Helinet Aviation has a rich history of involvement with law enforcement, public safety, and emergency medical transportation, according to the company.

"The public safety and law enforcement officials in our community provide an essential service, and we're happy to support them in that important work," said Garret Dalton, Chief Pilot at Helinet Aviation. "They are truly American Heroes, and the Los Angeles community is invited to come out to see what they do on a daily basis."

Helinet will have two helicopters on display at the event, along with their crews:

A Sikorsky S76 helicopter used for the medical transport of patients and organs to and from Children's Hospital Los Angeles will be on display fully stocked with transport equipment. CHLA Pilot Bryan Andrus, along with a Registered Nurse and a Respiratory Therapist will be on hand to field questions and provide further insight to air show attendees. Helinet Aviation has a strong relationship with CHLA and has donated two Sikorsky S76 Helicopters like this one to the hospital. For nearly 20 years, Helinet has staffed these helicopters with pilots 24/7, as well as covered the maintenance and all operational costs completely free of charge. Last year alone, Helinet transported 437 critically ill children through this partnership with CHLA.

An Airbus AS350 ENG helicopter used by local TV stations KTTV (Fox) and KCBS/KCAL, will also be on display and staffed by Pilot Zeus Lehel, Fox reporter Rick Dickert, and KCBS reporter Stu Mundel. Helinet facilitates public safety through the operation of ENG (electronic news gathering) helicopters like this one for broadcast media. These types of aircraft are used to keep the public informed and safe by updating the community about wild fires, earthquakes, weather phenomena, freeway closures, pursuits, protests, and all kinds of criminal activity.

About Helinet Aviation

Helinet Aviation Services is a diversified helicopter transportation provider located in Van Nuys, CA. With nearly 30 years in business, Helinet serves the following markets: VIP Transportation, Emergency Medical Services including patient and organ transport, Electronic News Gathering (news helicopters), Motion Picture, Television and Commercial Production, and Helicopter Fleet Management. Its mission is, and has always been, to be Southern California's preferred carrier for safe, responsive, and reliable rotor wing transportation.

About Helinet Technologies A division of Helinet Aviation, Helinet Technologies is an international provider of aviation technology solutions to the law enforcement, government, and military markets. The firm offers a full suite of services, ranging from basic equipment sales to fully turnkey surveillance solutions. Helinet Technologies is online at www.helinettechnologies.com.

About American Heroes Air Show The American Heroes Air Shows are produced at sites from coast to coast by volunteers with a passion for public service and aviation. The admission-free events are dedicated to educating the public, media and elected officials about the unique capabilities rotary-wing aviation delivers every day to communities across the country. For more information, visit www.heroes-airshow.com.
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Americans continue to see Donald Trumps presidential campaign in an increasingly negative light following the attack in Orlando, according to several polls out in recent days.

According to a new CBS News survey out Wednesday, a majority  51 percent  disapprove of Trumps reckless and erratic response to the nightclub massacre.

It should come as no surprise since the presumptive GOP nominee has spent the days following the attack congratulating himself and amping up his anti-Muslim policy proposals, all while leaders in both parties condemn his rhetoric.

The same CBS poll showed Americans more evenly split over Hillary Clintons response to the attack, but still giving the former secretary of state a net-positive rating.

Another poll out today from ABC News/Washington Post shows Trump with his worst negative rating since announcing his candidacy, with 70 percent of Americans saying they view him negatively  by far the worst result in history for any major party nominee.

Yesterday, a Bloomberg Politics survey didnt just show Clinton demolishing Trump by 12 points nationally, but it also found that 55 percent of Americans would never support the presumptive GOP nominee  a number that would make it impossible for him to capture the White House in November.

In statewide polling, the news isnt any better for Trump.

A Marquette poll released today gives Clinton a nine-point lead over Trump among likely voters in the battleground state of Wisconsin. It also shows that Republican enthusiasm is dropping, with the number of GOP voters definitely voting in November falling almost 10 points since March and 12 points worse than it was at this point in the 2012 campaign.

In Utah, the most heavily Republican state in the last presidential election, a Salt Lake Tribune poll out just a few days ago showed Clinton and Trump tied, with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson claiming the support of 13 percent of respondents.

Overall, it seems that the combination of Clinton securing her partys nomination and several weeks of missteps by Trump  culminating in his reckless Orlando response  is beginning to take its toll on the spray-tanned billionaire.

The general election electorate isnt as crazy as the one that gave Trump the Republican nomination. Unconstitutional Muslim bans, incoherent ramblings, and not-so-veiled racism dont seem to be impressing them  and the man at the top isnt all that interested in changing that.

For down-ballot Republicans who hope to keep their jobs this fall, its the absolute nightmare scenario.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Emil Ilgar - Trend:

European Commission updated the EU Air Safety List and now most of the aircraft of the Iran Air are allowed to resume operations to the EU, the Commission's official website reported June 16.

"Following my visit to Iran in April, a technical assessment was successfully carried out in May," the EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc said commenting on the issue. "Based on this I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from Iran Air back into European skies."

Six airlines are subject to operational restrictions and can only fly to the EU with specific aircraft types: Afrijet and Nouvelle Air Affaires SN2AG (Gabon), Air Koryo (Democratic People's Republic of Korea), Air Service Comores (the Comoros), Iran Air (Iran) and TAAG Angola Airlines (Angola).
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Naturally, Fox News is not happy that President Obama is not willing to pull a Trump and hurl nasty names at our terrorist enemies. Ralph Peters actually says Obama is spending too much time defending Islam and not enough time protecting Americans. Because, you know, every dirty insult helps the cause of freedom. Maybe, if we hurl enough verbal abuse at terrorists, it wont matter that Republicans want to sell assault rifles to terrorists.

Appearing on Wednesdays edition of Fox News Americas Newsroom, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, who once called President Obama a total pussy, took the president to task over his comments Tuesday regarding use of the phrase radical Islam. Obama called all the wasted verbiage on the subject a political distraction, and pointed out that using such divisive language will only make America less safe.

Not so, insists Ralph Peters.

Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:

BILL HEMMER (HOST): [President Obama] addressed guns and labels in the fight. Did he address the strategy for eradicating the killers? RALPH PETERS: No, because he doesnt have one. Bill, I wish President Obama would spend more energy protecting Americans and a little bit less defending Islam. His claim was absolutely dishonest and disingenuous. The idea that the words wouldnt make a positive difference. Indeed, using the correct terminology: jihad, Islamist fanaticism, radical Islam. And words like takfir and others that apply. That has legal implications. It has strategic implications, in fact. It has military implications. It has no end of important meanings. But let me turn it around, Im glad to talk about specifically what difference it would make to call it what it is. But lets  HEMMER: But if Josh Earnest were sitting here, and he made this case two days ago at the White House. He said that they want to carry the mantle of this religion, and we are not going to allow them, afford them the opportunity to use that phrase. Now does that matter? PETERS: Well its absolute nonsense to say something like that. Lets turn it around. We have censored our law enforcement agencies. We have censored the Pentagon and our military. They cant teach certain things. They cant teach the history of jihad honestly. They cant use these terms. The FBI is restricted from using certain terms. I would ask Mr. President, how does that help us? But beyond that, we have made nice for not only since Obama came to office but all the way back to 2001. The Bush administration was reluctant to use terms like Islamist terrorism, jihad. So for 15 years we have avoided calling this phenomenon what it is, and I would ask the president how has that helped? Are there fewer jihadis now? Are there fewer terror attacks? On the contrary. Weve projected weakness, and there are, where there were a few thousand jihadis, there are now hundreds of thousands and tens of millions of sympathizers  HEMMER: No question. PETERS: And weve got to stop saying that this isnt Islam. If we have no  Jews and Christians have no authority to say what is and isnt Islam. Muslims have that authority, and hundreds of millions of Muslims believe that this is at least one part of Islam.

You will notice here that Ralph Peters believes words have power  but only certain words. We cant, for example, talk about right wing domestic terrorism, even though the definition is spot on. But we can absolutely talk about Islamist terrorism. Peters said the president was being dishonest and disingenuous but Peters is himself guilty of both those things.

Peters insistence that name-calling has military implications is interesting, in that he draws the bizarre conclusion that because we havent been name-calling, terrorists havent gone away. You can re-read his words as often as you want, but that is what he is saying. By refusing to engage in name-calling, we appear weak, which invites more attacks and grows terrorist networks.

Therefore, if we go ahead and start calling them names, well scare them away. I suspect, if Peters does not, that terrorists arent frightened by name-calling. Worse, apparently, Peters thinks ghettoizing Muslims and turning them into second-class citizens is going to make them love America, and support us rather than attack us.

As Obama said, we all know who the enemy is. Peters says the problem is worse but there have been no further 9/11s. We can properly identify the enemy and even defeat them without blaming an entire religion. The Islamic world did not go into mourning when Obama killed Osama bin Laden, and Islam should no more be blamed for the actions of a few than should Christianity.

After all, Peters doesnt want Christianity blamed when it is a Christian shooter in the news, and lets be honest here: most of the mass shootings in this country are at the hands of at least nominal Christians, not Muslims. Peters dishonesty and disingenuousness will no more solve our problems than name-calling.
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Tuesday saw CNNs Anderson Cooper put gay-hating Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to the metaphorical screws and wring out of her a confession of her long history of anti-gay activism.

We are likely offended by her claim that though she persecutes gays, she has never said she doesnt like gays. Because she was clearly, as The Young Turks Ben Mankiewicz put it Wednesday, deceitful and dishonest on the issue. But this is not what upsets conservatives.

Naturally, such journalism  the kind you dont see on Fox News, where people like Bondi thrive, the kind where hard answers are asked and actual answers are expected  did not sit well with Republicans, because, welldo you really need to have it explained to you?

Bondi later aired her grievances as being caught out to New Yorks WOR 710.

Ironically, now exposed hater Bondi complained that Cooper had tricked her, and that he had encouraged hate rather than help people: According to WOR, Bondi called Cooper the champion for the LGBT community and said he could have been helping people. She said all the interview did was encourage anger and hate.

Super bigot Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, was especially incensed on Bondis behalf, because Anderson Cooper is gay, and being gay, like being black or Muslim or Native American, is a red flag for Fischer. Apparently, gay guys should not be allowed to ask questions of heterosexuals who hate gays. Because, insists Fischer, its too emotional an issue.

Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

Anderson Cooper, who is an open, admitted homosexual  therefore ought to recuse himself from any story like this. He has no business trying to do journalism on an issue as fraught with emotion as the homosexual agenda. Hes disqualified from providing any kind of objective journalistic treatment of that topic.

We can safely imagine that women should not be able to put the metaphorical screws to misogynists either, because womens rights is such an emotionally charged issue.

Fischer apparently wants us to believe that there is no emotion involved in covering the white heterosexual male Christian agenda (traditional marriage, controlling womens reproductive processes, etc.), even though, from Fischers frequent rants over the years, we know there is quite a bit of emotion involved. Need I even mention Donald Trump?

And here again we see surfacing ideas like Donald Trumps that only white people can be impartial. For Fischer, its only heterosexuals. Everyone else  being the other  is biased.

The bigger question is if Anderson Cooper is not allowed to cover LGBT-related stories because he is gay, does that not then also disqualify white heterosexual male Christians from covering white heterosexual male Christian storylines, like traditional marriage?

Whether that means Bryan Fischer, David Barton and others who  not to be uncharitable  seem, shall we say, self-loathing, must recuse themselves from covering those storylines is best known by Fischer and Barton themselves.
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Sen. John McCain has provided the perfect example of exactly why so many Americans have been turned off by the Republican Party.

McCain first told reporters, Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures.He pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked, and there would be attacks on the United States of America, he said. Its a matter of record, so he is directly responsible.

John McCain was still stuck in 2007. Sen. McCain still believes that if we were fighting them over there, we wouldnt have to fight them over here.

Sen. McCains remarks inspired so much immediate backlash that he put out a statement clarifying his remarks that made the same point, I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the President himself. As I have said, President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL. I and others have long warned that the failure of the Presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.

McCains behavior is a textbook example of why so many Americans cant stand the Republican Party. Republicans are endlessly blaming the President for every single bad thing that happens. The GOP is clinging to the Iraq war, and blaming Obama for their own failed policies.

There would be no ISIS if John McCain, George W. Bush, and their warmongering Republican pals would not have invaded Iraq on false pretenses. Using McCains logic, it is the Republicans, not Obama, who are responsible for the Orlando shootings.

Instead of deal the real issue of easy access to deadly assault weapons, Sen. McCain is blaming President Obama, and his remarks are why so many Americans are sick and tired of the Republican Party.
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The myth that Trump is going to woo the support of working class white voters was dealt a deadly blow, as the 12.5 million-member AFL-CIO endorsed Hillary Clinton.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values. Throughout the campaign, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to the issues that matter to working people, and our members have taken notice. The activism of working people has already been a major force in this election and is now poised to elect Hillary Clinton and move America forward. Sen. Bernie Sanders has brought an important voice to this election and has elevated critical issues and strengthened the foundation of our movement. His impact on American politics cannot be overstated. We are ready to fight hard to restore faith in America and improve the lives of all working people. Hillary Clinton has proven herself as a champion of the labor movement, and we will be the driving force to elect her president of the United States.

Hillary Clinton responded via a statement:



I am honored to have earned the endorsement of the AFL-CIO.



Members of the AFL-CIO know, as I do, that we are stronger together. We are stronger when we are investing in our country and our future. As President, I will make the biggest investment in infrastructure since the Interstate Highway Systembecause to build a 21st century economy, we need 21st century roads, ports, transit systems, water systems, and electric grids. We will fight for good schools in every ZIP codebecause all of our children deserve a chance to live up to their God-given potential. And we will fight to raise the federal minimum wage back to the highest its ever been, to finally join all other industrial nations in guaranteeing paid family leave for workers, and at last secure equal pay for women.

And we know we are stronger when we have each others backs. Workers rights to organize, to bargain collectively, to be safe on the job, and to retire with dignity and security after years of hard work are fundamental to our country and to our economy. In too many statehouses across the countryand even in the halls of Congressthese rights are under concerted attack by Republicans and big corporations who have forgotten that a strong economy requires a strong workforce. As President, I will stand proudly with the AFL-CIO and fight to protect the rights and values that helped build the mighty American middle class. Workers will always have a seat at the table and a champion in the White Housebecause when unions are strong, workers are strong, and when workers are strong, America is strong.



So much for the idea that working class white voters are going to flock to Donald Trump. The presumptive Republican nominee has been trying to woo union workers with rhetoric about free trade, and he has been specifically promising to bring back union jobs.

The brutal reality for Republicans is that Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan, and this is not 1980. American workers arent going to vote for a candidate who argues that wages are too high.

Wages and income inequality are key issues to the electorate, and Donald Trump doesnt have plans to help workers on either front. Hillary Clinton got the endorsement of the AFL-CIO because she has plans to help American workers, while Donald Trump is talking tough, and hiding his $3.2 trillion tax cut for millionaires and billionaires.
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Dear Dave: I work at a company where the management will not take any risks to try new things. I believe you need to gamble and see if things could work. I know we should not "throw caution to the wind," but our competition is running all over us because we safely do nothing. Your thoughts?  R

Dear R: You are asking someone who spent more than 30 years in sales, marketing and sales management. Trust me, I and the companies I worked for would have gone nowhere if risks were not taken.

However, all risks must be calculated and taken only when research has been done to determine if the risk has any merit and chance of success. I am not saying that you should wait and analyze things for so long paralysis by analysis  that you lose the advantage of the risk, but you must create the "certainty" of the risk before gambling away your time, resources and general business health and prosperity.

The truth is, nothing is certain and that fact scares the pejeepers out of us. I think that, often, what we consider safe, reliable behavior may be riskier than we realize. That's because, even assumed safe business processes and actions may be inappropriate for current realities and not be producing what they once did  this then requires new thinking and some new well-thought-out actions.

The challenge is there are very few environments  especially business environments  that are and remain static, or unchanging. The very essence of innovation is based on the belief an explored and unknown improvement can make things better  it may be a gamble, but it is worth a try. Again, risks are minimized if careful research has been done.

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Give things a try

No one has a crystal ball, but, there are tactics you can use to get better at evaluating and determining risk. Simply, before you make a decision, find and consider all of the potential options of action. I believe managers will be less risk averse if they have a system of risk analysis they are comfortable with. Here are a few other tactics to try in reducing the panic associated with risk.

Force and factor identification.The first step in reducing business risk is to identify the factors that threaten your business  what could go wrong. Risk can arise from product failures, production errors, poor planning, mishandling customers and many other areas that negatively effect business effectiveness. These factors are crucial threats, because they make the company vulnerable. Accordingly, management should start with categorically plotting out all of these factors  get them out in the open. You can even prioritize the most threatening factors.

Risk analysis.After identifying the threats to the business, you have to determine how serious and potentially damaging they are. A serious threat has major negative effect and is likely to happen. A lesser threat has few negative consequences and is unlikely to happen. Your assessment prioritizes threats by considering both the severity of the consequences and the likelihood of the threat occurring.

Risk reduction.After assessing the effect of the threats and prioritizing the risks facing your business, you can commence with risk reduction. To reduce risk, you address the high-priority threats that were pinpointed and discuss and determine the value of continuing with the related activities. You then can create a "stop doing list" and eliminate the high-risk, low-value threats from the list and discontinue the corresponding activities.

Risk minimization.Lessening the effect of potentially risky activity in everyday business conduct involves proactively and methodically improving company procedures, processes and systems to eliminate sources of risk. Quality programs reduce product and operations risk. Sound financial management processes reduces financial risk. And hiring the best people you can find reduces project and work function risk.

Finally, you can address other risks by implementing contingency (backup) plans and knowing when to implement them. Such measures reduce the risk from threats that cannot be avoided and allows you to switch gears as needed.
A local music school has really struck a chord in Rochester.

Ryan Utterbacklaunched Pure Rock Studiosin his home in 2012. When it swelled beyond that space, he moved it into a 2,500-square-foot building at 515 Rocky Creek Drive NE.

Now that he and his teachers are working with 250 to 270 students of all ages each week, the school needs even more space. That means more than doubling the size of the school to add a new wing for for the drum classes and a stage performance area as well as renovating the existing building.

"I knew it would get here, but it just has grown much faster than I anticipated," said Utterbeck. "That speaks volumes about our instructors and the curriculum that's really just built around a fun, hands on way to learn music."

He hopes work on the 3,000-square-foot expansion will start by mid-July with the goal of opening the new wing by September.

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Pure Rock has 14 instructors teaching group and one-on-one classes in guitar, bass guitar, drums, piano and vocal. Plus Utterbeck recently added banjo, mandolin and ukulele classes due to the growing popularity of those instruments.

The students range from youth to adults with about 65 percent being younger than 18 years old.

Pure Roch's focus on performance has spurred the creation of many new bands from by the students. Utterbeck also has his students perform regularly at local venues like Thursday on First and Thirdand the Wicked Moose Bar & Grill.

"Music is a lifelong gift you can share with people," he said.

In fact, the architect and contractor working on the project are both musicians, who occasionally play at Pure Rock. Adam Ferrariof Rochester's 9.Squareis the project architect as well as a drummer.

Adam Kramerof Kramer Contractingis also a musician who has played with Utterbeck, since high school. Kramer recently launch his new construction business after work with Kraus Anderson Construction Co.  Jeff Kiger
Syrian people themselves should decide their future, Iran's foreign minister told reporters on Wednesday upon arrival in the German capital, Irna reported.



Iran's solution for the Syrian crisis is that Syrian people should be given the right to decide about their future themselves, Mohammad Javad Zarif said.



Referring to his visit earlier on Wednesday with the US secretary of state, Zarif said that John Kerry had proposed its point of views on the crisis in Syria, adding that, since talks on non-nuclear issues are not on Iran's agenda, we avoided entering inclusive talks on Syria.



But he noted that he had held talks with his American counterpart on the banking issues.



We urged the United States to take serious actions on persuading banks and insurance companies to return to Iran.



'My colleagues had some talks on money laundering and removal of sanctions with their counterparts on the sidelines of my meeting with Kerry', Zarif added.



On his visit to Germany, Iran's top diplomat said that he will discuss extremism, regional issues including Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as mutual ties with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier.



Germany is one of the European states who tried, to return Iran in the post-JCPOA era, Zarif said, adding that he will discuss furthering economic ties between Tehran and Berlin in his meeting with Steinmeier.



Zarif, who has been invited by his German counterpart to visit Germany, arrived in the European country on Wednesday.


German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Wednesday that Germany wants strong ties with Iran in all domains and not only in the political and economic but in cultural and social fields, Irna reported.



Steinmeier made the remark in an interview with reporters in presence of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif.

He said good talks were held between Tehran and Berlin in the meetings held twice in Tehran.

He also referred to nuclear talks in Lausanne and Vienna, which resulted in nuclear accord, and said all the efforts were fruitful and the two sides strived for a solution in light of patience and endeavors.

He said solution of nuclear dispute was good and the way the problem was settled can serve as a model for other disputes on which Iranian and German officials held discussions.

'We are jointly concerned over stability and preserving territorial integrity of the Middle Eastern states, especially Iraq and Syria. Over recent weeks, continuous and lengthy sessions were held on Syria with an aim to find a diplomatic solution through ceasefire and improvement of humanitarian assistance. We hope that the talks will soon resume in Geneva on the basis of joint Vienna accord.'

He predicted that the next round of talks will be tougher than before. 'The talks will not be easy but we hope the Syrian opposition will decide to take part in the Geneva talks.'

'Syrian issue and stability in the Middle East will keep us busy as before,' he concluded.
This is the time of the year to let colorful pottery decorate your table in rainbow of colors. The pottery is called Fiestaware.

Fiesta was introduced in 1936 as an inexpensive, stylish tableware by Homer Laughlin Pottery Company. Like most companies during the Depression, they had to cut back manufacturing in order to survive. Limiting glazes to a single color and creating a simple and streamline piece, the company came up with a line of dishware. Frederick Hurton Rhead a British born designer, came with a small handful of original bold bright colors  red (which can look more like orange), cobalt blue, light green (that collectors often look for), ivory and a year later yellow and turquoise.

The pieces could be mixed and matched. The colors complemented one another. Very much a type of Art Deco-style pottery. In California, it was sometimes referred to as "old Mexico colors." Being mass-produced, they were never meant to be expensive, selling at five and dime stores such as Woolworth's, as well as at Sears, Roebuck and Company. A 24-place setting cost about $11 in the '30s and that is what also made the ware successful.

Today, a single six-inch plate in a common color can cost as little as $5 to $15 and a dinner plate $30 to $40. In the early 1950s, extra colors were added, including forest green, gray, chartreuse and rose. In 1959, medium green was introduced and produced only a short time and considered a rarity. Medium green is often considered the most expensive, as a casserole in this color in mint condition can sell up to $700-$1,000, where a rose color may be around $100.

Learn more about Fiesta and how to tell old from new, fakes and reproductions and the color red, in "Warman's Fiesta Identification and Price Guide," by Glen Victorey. Other colors were introduced from the late '60s on. Striped Fiesta and other go-along items were added. A new Fiesta exclusive ladybug collection is coming out next month, as the former ladybug collection is retired. Replacements for the former collection can be found at replacements.com, eBay and Etsy as well. Also, a new foundry collection was added for cooking and baking.

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Find vintage pieces

You should have no problems finding Fiestaware at flea markets, antique shops and online.

Joan Thilges, of New Generations of Harmony Antique Mall, said, "We have Fiestaware scattered throughout the mall and it remains a popular collectible and one of my favorites."

Sarah Kieffer, of Sarah's Uniques, St. Charles, said, "It's so versatile and great to mix and match with colors textures and designs. I have a nice Fiesta cup and saucer set at $30."

A few years ago I talked with Paul Larsen, longtime collector of Fiestaware and owner of Memorabilia Antiques, Mantorville, and he told me at that time, "I started collecting when I moved to my first apartment out of college. My mom gave me some assorted old dishes to use. Included were four yellow dinner plates, marked Fiesta on the back, which I used for several years. As I started going to auctions and antique shops looking for other furnishings, I realized that the Fiesta dishes were collectible.

"Then one day I went to an area shop and found a whole box of turquoise Fiesta ware for what seemed a very reasonable price, so I bought that. For several years I collected only the turquoise, and if I found other colors I would put those colors out for sale. Over time, I realized how much the Fiesta colors complement each other, and began to save those other colors as well. I also found the pieces are a very usable, durable dinnerware, the colors are charming, and remind me of days gone by, as I have been collecting over 30 years and I have a fairly large collection (the cupboard is full)."

Larsen now says, "I still really enjoy my vintage Fiesta dinnerware. It seems as though the market for Fiesta has been light the past few years, but then we've also had a few new collectors in that purchased some really nice pieces. I've also noticed more Fiesta coming in to the shops lately, and have picked up a couple pieces myself that I didn't already have."

Larsen is also involved with Mantorville Square and the Old Rooster shop in Rochester.

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"At Mantorville Square, we have a numerous dinner plates, coffee pots, and assorted bowls in the old colors," he said. "There is also currently a good selection of Fiesta at the Old Rooster Antiques. A collection of Fiestaware can brighten up anyone's kitchen!"

What to look for

Not only do collectors look for those vintage colors, they look for the large compartment plates, refrigerator stacking set and more.

"The '50s colors are still very desirable," Larsen said, "and there has even been some interest lately in the modern Fiesta colors, especially among our younger customers."

Do make sure to inspect Fiestaware items for chips and look for the maker's mark on the bottom, which can not only gives you a clue to the age, but if it is a fake or reproduction.
Franciscan sister celebrates Silver Jubilee

On June 22, nine members of the Sisters of Saint Francis of Rochester will celebrate their Golden Jubilee with the congregation, together with a sister who will be celebrating her Silver Jubilee.

The Golden Jubilarians, celebrating 50 years with the Congregation, were detailed in this column last week.

Celebrating her Silver Jubilee, in recognition of 25 years, is Sister Wanda Mettes.She was born in Shelbyville, Mo., and entered the Rochester Franciscan Congregation from St. Peter Parish in North St. Paul. Sister Wanda professed first vows at Assisi Heights in 1991. The majority of her career was spent in pastoral ministry, serving in St. Peter Church in North St. Paul from 1987-1989 and at Immaculate Conception Church in Columbia Heights from 1991-1997, while also participating in the Twin Cities Pastoral Ministry Association and the Nicaragua Sister Parish Support Task Force. Most recently, she served as receptionist and office specialist in the business office at Rochester Community and Technical College until her retirement in 2015. Currently, Sister Wanda serves on the Congregational Finance Committee and Communication Advisory Council for the Sisters of Saint Francis.

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Pax Christi hosts founding pastor's anniversary

Pax Christi Church, 4135 18th Ave. NW, Rochester, will host a 60th anniversary celebration for the Rev. James McCauley at 10:45 a.m. Sunday with a Mass of Thanksgiving followed by a reception.

Fr. McCauley was the founding pastor of Pax Christi parish in 1973 and served there until 1981. He is a former pastor of St. John the Evangelist parish, serving there from 1991 to 1995, and he was principal of Lourdes High School from 1965 to 1970. He was also principal at Cotter High School in Winona and served as pastor of eight other parishes in the Winona diocese before his retirement in 1999.

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'Old Stone Church' is site of annual service

Hauge and Emmanuel Lutheran Churches will hold their annual service at the historic Old Stone Church at 9:30 a.m. June 26. Refreshments will be served following the service during a time for fellowship and touring of the church and cemetery.

The church is located southwest of Kenyon. At the west end of Kenyon's Boulevard of Roses, go south on County Road 12 (Huseth Street) for 1.3 miles and then go west on Monkey Valley Road for 1 mile.

Information: Sarah Broin, 507-789-5218

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Festival is fundraiser for Christian camp fund

The annual Zumbro River Community Festival, a fundraiser for a scholarship fund at Camp Victory, will be held from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. June 25 at the camp, 58212 403rd Ave., Zumbro Falls.

The free-admission festival includes a fireworks display, performances by Christian rock bands, inflatables, electronic trap shooting, a zip line, petting zoo, wagon rides, Euro bungee jump. laser tag, face painting, silent auction, and more.

More information can be found at www.campvictory.com/events/zumbro-river-community-festival .

In addition, a July 30 event, Rochester Eco Tri and 5K and 10K Trail Races, raises money for the same scholarship fund, Camp Victory Ministries, for children to attend camp who do not have the financial means.

The 8 a.m. event includes a triathlon consisting of a 4.5 mile kayak on Lake Zumbro, followed by a 7-mile mountain bike and a 3-mile trail run, all on Camp Victory trails as well as 5K and 10K trail races.

These events are open to everyone regardless of ability. Every finisher will receive a finisher's memento and there will be age group and overall awards.

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More information and registration details: www.rochesterecotri.com .
RED WING  A Hampton couple whose baby, doctors said, had "an extremely high level of heroin in her system" made their first appearance June 10 in Goodhue County District Court.

Eric Matthew Betzold, 31, and Brittney Kay Betzold, 27, both face one count each of felony endangerment of a child and gross misdemeanor neglect of a child. They've been released after posting $50,000 unconditional bail and are due back in court July 22.

The investigation began May 20, when a pediatrician at Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys Campus contacted law enforcement about the 11-month-old, who'd been hospitalized because of a suspected overdose of opiates.

The Betzolds had driven the child to a hospital in Cannon Falls after Brittney Betzold reportedly left the baby on the floor on a blanket "for a moment." When she returned, Betzold said, she found the baby unconscious, not breathing and unresponsive.

The parents didn't call 911, choosing instead to start CPR and drive to Cannon Falls.

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The little girl was still pulseless and not breathing when they arrived at the emergency department; physicians performed CPR and intubated her. The child's heart started beating again and she began to breathe.

She was transferred to Rochester, where a drug screen came back positive for morphine and codeine; heroin shows up as morphine and codeine on the type of drug screen used, the complaint says.

Doctors asked the Betzolds several times if the baby could have gotten into any prescription medication; they denied having any prescription or illegal drugs in their home or the child's grandparents' home, court documents say.

The child has been protected since before her birth after authorities reportedly learned Brittney Betzold used heroin during her pregnancy; she was sent to treatment and the baby didn't test positive at her birth. Brittney's drug tests have all been clean since the baby was born; Eric Betzold has been "uncooperative with services," the complaint says.

Both parents stayed overnight at the hospital, stayed for the doctor's rounds, then left for the day. The baby's neurological exam, head CT, skeletal survey and weight were normal by the end of May, the reports say, but she wasn't up to date on her vaccines and hadn't had a well-baby check since she was 4 months old.

Medical reports indicate no needle marks were found on the child; it was "unknown" how the baby had gotten heroin in her system.

Search warrants executed at the Betzold residence turned up a prescription pill bottle containing prazosin, typically used to treat high blood pressure, and a prescription pill bottle containing fluoxetine, an antidepressant. Both were found in a kitchen cupboard; the names on the bottles were neither Eric nor Brittney Betzold.

Three pill bottles for oxycodone, an opioid pain medication, were reportedly found behind the television on the main level of the home. One bottle was in the name of Eric Betzold, one was in the name of Brittney Betzold; the third bottle didn't have either name on it.

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In a large shed on the property, deputies allegedly found a small plastic bag and a broken glass pipe that both tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine; a glass bong and multiple plastic bags and burned tin foil, commonly used to smoke meth.

Also in the shed were several children's items, including an infant jumper toy and baby formula.
A motorcyclist was critically injured this morning when his motorcycle collided with a pickup in southwest Rochester.

The motorcyclist, described as a man in his 50s, was westbound in the 2000 block of Second Street Southwest when the eastbound pickup turned north into a parking lot, apparently pulling in front of the motorcycle, said Sgt. Frank Ohm of the Rochester Police Department.

The motorcycle struck the pickup in the rear passenger door.

The forensic mapping unit was on the scene by 8:45 a.m. in an attempt to determine more information about the crash.

The motorcyclist was taken to Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys Campus, Ohm said, with critical injuries.

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"It's been a bad week for motorcycles," he said.

A Rochester couple was killed and a third was hospitalized in critical condition after a motorcycle and a vehicle collided head-on Friday afternoon on Marion Road in southeast Rochester.

Curtis Buxton, 56, and Jennifer Buxton, 44, died in the crash. Jacob Sappington, 20, was transported by ambulance to Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys Campus, where he is listed in critical condition.

Police said a vehicle driven by Jacob Sappington, 20, collided with the motorcycle on the 2400 block of Marion Road about 3:40 p.m. Friday. The cause of that crash remains under investigation, which includes work by the police department's forensic mapping unit.

No information was available this morning about Sappington, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
A Rochester man was sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty to physically assaulting a woman and two children.

James Leslie Wilder, 43, was sentenced to a year in jail, stayed for two years. He was ordered to serve 30 days of the term, with credit for 20 days already served. In addition, Wilder must undergo evaluations for domestic abuse and chemical dependency, and complete a domestic violence inventory.

Wilder was also sentenced to a $900 fine or 90 hours of community work service.

He pleaded guilty Tuesday to two counts of malicious punishment of a child and two counts of domestic assault, all gross misdemeanors. In exchange for the plea, another count of domestic assault and one count of interfering with emergency communications were dismissed. Both are also gross misdemeanors.

The investigation began May 26, when Rochester police followed up on a child protection report at a local elementary school. There, an officer spoke with a male child, a female child and a woman; the woman had visible injuries to her face and neck, the report says.

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The woman initially denied anything had happened; the child eventually told the officer Wilder hit the woman the day before and grabbed her by the neck, the complaint says. When the boy tried to give the woman a phone to call 911, Wilder allegedly punched the boy in the face and took the phone.

The child was able to call 911 on another phone. When law enforcement arrived, the woman told him to lie, the boy said.

The officer re-interviewed the woman, who said the night before, she'd heard Wilder disciplining the girl. She told Wilder to leave the child alone, court documents say; he pushed her, but she didn't remember anything else.

The girl told an investigator Wilder had hit her with a belt, the report says, and she saw Wilder push and choke the woman. The child also recalled the woman telling them to lie to police about what happened. The girl said she is often "scared to go home because of what happens there."

Wilder was convicted of domestic battery in 2008 in Illinois.
An incident that began as a request for help for a man with apparent psychological problems ended with him behind bars, authorities said Wednesday.

Rochester police were sent about noon Tuesday to the 4200 block of 22nd Avenue Northwest, where a caller said Thomas Frankel, 26, was staying. The caller said Frankel was experiencing depression and suicidal or homicidal thoughts, said Capt. John Sherwin, and had threatened to fight with law enforcement if they intervened.

Officers learned Frankel had access to handguns in the home, "so we approached the situation with an abundance of caution," Sherwin said, and involved the department's emergency response unit, including an armored vehicle.

When the vehicle arrived, Frankel was outside the residence, the report says. He was unarmed, and complied with commands from law enforcement.

After Frankel was taken to Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys Campus for treatment, officers entered the home and removed the guns, Sherwin said.

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About 7:30 p.m., officers were called again to the home on 22nd Avenue, where Frankel had gone after being cleared medically, the report says. Several callers said Frankel was "tearing up the place," Sherwin said, breaking windows, punching walls and ransacking the house.

He was angry because his guns had been taken, Sherwin said.

As officers were en route to the home, Frankel left in a vehicle, allegedly striking a parked car and running over an electrical box. He drove to a relative's home in the 2600 block of Viola Road Northeast and forced his way inside, ransacked that house and threatened the relative, the report says.

Before officers could get to that address, Frankel returned to the home on 22nd Avenue, where he was taken into custody without incident.

Authorities again took Frankel to Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys Campus for treatment; he was cleared for mental health issues, Sherwin said, so officers took him into custody on suspicion of terroristic threats, domestic assault and third-degree damage to property.

"For one person in a mental health crisis, we obviously devote a lot of resources toward a safe resolution, which we did in this case," Sherwin said today.

"Our job is to get him to the hospital, but once there, it's out of our hands," he said. "We're not the medical professionals."
A Rochester man who is a registered sex offender has pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting a girl late last month.

Douglas Michael Lee, 26, of 3006 Kenosha Drive NW, entered the pleas Tuesday in Olmsted County District Court, where he's charged with two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct. He remains in custody in lieu of $500,000 unconditional bond and is due back in court July 8.

The investigation began the evening of May 25, when Rochester police responded to a local hospital for a report of a possible sexual assault.

The girl, who is under the age of 16, said she'd met Lee the night before at a restaurant where he worked; she left her phone number with the tip. When she got home, she received a text message from Lee. The two eventually agreed to meet in northwest Rochester about 8 p.m.

The pair drove around in Lee's car for a while, eventually ending up near Oxbow Park in rural Byron.

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According to the criminal complaint, Lee forced the victim to perform several sex acts, at one point squeezing her neck with his hand.

Lee then drove the girl home and allegedly said "it was never to be talked about again," and in a text later that night said "it felt right in the moment," she said. When the victim said she was going to report the incident, Lee said he felt bad about it, and planned to turn himself in the next day, court documents say. That's also when he told her he was a sex offender.

The girl's mother took her to the hospital for a sexual assault examination; using Lee's cellphone number and other information the victim gave them, investigators identified Lee as the possible suspect, the complaint says.

During a covert phone conversation May 27 between the victim and Lee, he admitted he knew she was under 16 and hadn't turned himself in, reports say.

Lee said he'd recently tested negative for STDs, and asked if the girl had contacted law enforcement.

He was arrested that day at his home.

Lee was convicted in 2013 of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to 48 months in prison, with credit for 101 days served.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Fatih Karimov - Trend:

Saudi Arabian naval forces have seized an "intruding" fishing boat from Iran in the Persian Gulf, Fars news agency reported June 16.

The fishing boat with three sailors was sized near Saudi Arabia's Marjan oil platform.

The Iranian boat which was sailing from Iran's Jafre waterfront, Bushehr port, intruded into Saudi territorial waters, according to Saudi Arabia sources.

No further details were revealed on the incident.
PRESTON  A 19-year-old Preston man faces assault, theft and other charges after allegedly stealing some property, threatening two individuals at gunpoint, stealing a pickup and crashing into a Preston Police squad car.

According to a Fillmore County Sheriff's Office press release, an individual came to the sheriff's office at about 10:40 p.m. Wednesday to report the theft of some property. Preston Police were able to contact the suspected thief, Dylan Bathke, and arrange for him to return the property to the sheriff's office.

Later that night, two other individuals arrived at the sheriff's office and reported that they were assisting Bathke in returning the property when he pulled a gun and threatened them. Bathke reportedly then jumped from the vehicle on the north side of Preston.

Informed that Bathke was spotted around the site of the original theft, law enforcement located him at around 12:51 a.m. Thursday. Bathke allegedly fled in a vehicle that was later reported as stolen. Bathke was taken into custody near US Highway 52 and County Road 16 between Preston and Harmony, but not before hitting a Preston Police squad car with the stolen vehicle.

Bathke could face charges of second-degree assault, fourth-degree assault (assault of a police officer) theft of a motor vehicle, fleeing a police officer in a motor vehicle, reckless driving and driving under the influence.
Are you a Rochesterfest treasure hunter ? This might interest you.

Twice this week, I've told you about the Lincoln and Washington statues that were gifts to the city from the Mayo brothers about a hundred years ago. They were in Mayo Park for at least 30 years, then apparently were toppled by vandals and went into storage. After that, they disappeared.

Some say they may been tossed in a ravine between what's now the Rochester Family Y and Soldiers Field Park and buried. As incredible as that seems, I've heard it from a few people who should know; I've also heard the names of a few long-ago city employees who may have been involved.

Well, as expected, those columns attracted worldwide attention, and I heard from Dave Wiegers , an Answer Man reader in Gurnee, Ill., who happens to be an expert on Lincoln statuary . "Would you be interested in learning about the sculptor and some background on these statues?" he asked.

Boy, was I! And Dave, who has a handsome website with pics of dozens of Lincoln sculptures he's visited, delivered.

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As I reported Tuesday, the statues were ordered by the Mayo brotherswhile on a trip to Italy in 1909. Dave says they were created by the Antonio Frilli company, based in Florence, Italy. You might see their work marked with the name, "A. Frilli, Firenze." Dave says the company still exists and he was there just last week.

"The company told me that the statues, if original A. Frilli works, would be worth in excess of 100,000 Euros each." I happen to be an expert in currency conversion, and as of this moment on Thursday afternoon, that would be about $112,254 per president .

"I would think the possible worth of the statues might be worth an archaeological dig to see if in fact they are buried," Dave says.

No kidding  I would think park department employees might want to get out there with shovels and metal detectors later today. (The sculptures have some metalwork inside the Carrarra marble elements. That's not the way Michelangelo did it, by the way.)

More details from Dave: Copies of the statues of George and Abe were displayed in San Francisco in 1915 at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Those statues went to the M.H. DeYoung Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, then were later donated to two schools named for those presidents in San Francisco. (The same thing almost happened to the Rochester statues.)

Dave says another copy of the Lincoln statue is in Lithia Park in Ashland, Ore. , but that unfortunate artwork has had its head stolen a time or two.

He hasn't found other copies of the Frilli Lincoln in the United States, and since he specializes in Abe art, he's not sure if there are other copies of the Washington. The Frilli company lost all its records in the famous Florence floods in 1966.

FYI, if you want to buy a Lincoln statue from the Frilli company, you still can: In their sales catalog is a replica of Minnesota-born sculptor Paul Manship's sculpture of the young Lincoln .

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It may not be true that those statues are under the turf near Soldiers Field. They may be in Mayowood Lake or Timbuktu. But somebody should check, and I don't mean private bounty hunters.

Dear Answer Man, can you tell us what is being developed west of the new Think Bank project on 37th Street Northwest?  David Wernecke

Good question. The Think project, which I wrote about a few weeks ago , is just one part of all the tree removal and earth-moving going on in that area between East River Road and the mighty South Fork Zumbro.

The site work is related to a new apartment project planned by Joseph Development, one of developer Joe Weis'entities. The city Planning and Zoning Commissionl in May approved a zoning change for a 2-acre site, from general commercial to medium-density residential, to allow for a 52-unit apartment project. Joe told me this morning that the next piece of the puzzle is getting financing approval, so don't look for city council action and construction until later this year.

The property is owned by Dan Penz. The rest of the lots are likely to go commercial, a la the Think Bank parcel.
MINNEAPOLIS  Two companies working on the Minnesota Vikings' new stadium face fines of $173,400 for safety violations in the death of one worker and injury to another last August.

U.S. Bank Stadium contractor Mortenson Construction and subcontractor Berwald Roofing were cited after an investigation by the state Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The reports don't provide an explanation of the accidents, but the most serious alleged violation accuses Berwald of willfully failing to have workers use proper fall protection while working at heights above 6 feet.

A previous report says two roofers, both Berwald employees, slid and fell while installing a roof last August. The Star Tribune reports that 35-year-old Jeramie Gruber of Faribault died and an unidentified worker was seriously injured.

The newspaper's attempts to reach Berwald were unsuccessful.  Associated Press

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Former Miss USA North Dakota found dead

MINNEAPOLIS  A former contestant in the Miss USA pageant from North Dakota has died in Minneapolis.

The Hennepin County medical examiner's office says the body of 37-year-old Samantha Edwards was found in her home in north Minneapolis on Tuesday. The medical examiner said Wednesday the cause of Edwards' death remains under investigation.

Edwards represented North Dakota in the Miss USA pageant in 2003. Her friend, Miss Minnesota USA 2004 Jessica Dereschuk, says Edwards had been working as a freelance makeup artist.

Dereschuk says her friend, known as Sami, loved making people feel special on their birthdays. A GoFundMe page started by Dereschuk to raise money for Edwards' funeral had raised more than $17,000 by Wednesday evening.

A funeral is planned June 24 in Edwards' hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Samantha Edwards GoFundMe page: www.gofundme.com/29gr8vw  Associated Press

Man pleads not guilty in shooting of protesters

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MINNEAPOLIS  A 24-year-old man has pleaded not guilty to charges that he shot five demonstrators protesting the shooting death of a black man by Minneapolis police in November.

Allen Scarsella, of Lakeville, faces assault and riot charges in Hennepin County. In a court filing Wednesday, defense attorneys said Scarsella will argue he acted in self-defense.

Prosecutors allege Scarsella and three other men meant to cause trouble on Nov. 23 when they went to an encampment of demonstrators protesting the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Jamar Clark in a confrontation with two white officers. Charges allege Scarsella, who is white, shot and wounded five men.

Scarsella's lawyers argue the men were only filming the protest when they were confronted.

The three other men haven't yet entered pleas to riot charges.  Minnesota Public Radio

Group sends final medical aid shipment to Somali hospital

ST. LOUIS PARK  A Minnesota nonprofit has shipped an entire hospital's worth of equipment and supplies to a medical facility in Mogadishu, Somalia.

St. Louis Park-based nonprofit Matter worked with the Minnesota Community of African People With Disabilities and the Somali Ministry of Health to send the final shipment. According to organizers, the supplies should be moved into the vacant Bahrain Public General Hospital in July.

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Organizers say political instability and violence has kept local relief groups away from the nation. Mike Muelken, Matter's vice president of international programs, said that Somalia has mostly been given aid by large international nonprofits, such as Red Cross/Red Crescent and the United Nations' World Food Programme.

While Minnesota nonprofit organizations have sent medical supplies to developing countries across the globe, this is one of the first large-scale medical-aid deliveries to Somalia, organizers said.

Mahad Hassan with the Minnesota Community of African People With Disabilities said he was shocked by the "lack of dignity" in medical care when he returned to his home county after being away for 26 years. His organization, formed in 2014, works to support disabled Somali-Americans in Minnesota and also hopes to bring quality medical care to Somali citizens back home.

Muelken said there are many issues that still need to be addressed in Somalia, including equipment upkeep and finding trained medical personnel. He said the hospital in Mogadishu has been wired with a U.S.-compatible electrical system to facilitate installation of the current and any future medical shipments.  Associated Press
DOVER  More than 25 residents showed up Wednesday night to take a trip down memory lane and look over the old Dover School building.

The city of Dover hosted an open house to ask residents to look around, ask questions and give input on whether the city should pursue negotiations with the Dover-Eyota School District to purchase the building.

Harry Zeitler, a Dover resident and the custodian of the building, said he hoped the city could find a use for the old school and buy it.

"They could use it as a community center maybe," Zeitler said. The only other option in the town for community gatherings, he said, is the fire hall.

Zeitler, who spent four years as an elementary and middle school student in the building, said the city could spend minimal money on repairs and upkeep to keep open the building, built in 1925.

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"It's a good old building," he said.

Mayor Roger Ihrke said the city has not begun negotiating with the school district for the purchase of the building, but contractors who recently inspected the building found $20,000 worth of repairs that would need to be completed. Utilities on the building run about $12,000-$15,000 a year, he said.

"The council doesn't want to commit the city to this kind of money if its not something people are interested in," Ihrke said. "This is going to be a burden on the community. The 800 residents who live here will have to pay until we find a use for it."

"I'd hate to see Dover lose the building," said Dover resident Julie Gergen during an input session after the open house. "But I understand the financial part of it."

Currently, the city uses the building for a workout center in the basement and open gym a couple of nights a week, said Council Member Jaime Putzier. As for future uses, city offices, a library, a daycare center are all thoughts she said she has heard, but nothing concrete is in the works.

The school district has stated it would like to give Dover the first opportunity to purchase the property. If the city does not buy the building, it could be sold to a private developer who might renovate it or demolish it.

"It would be hard to see the building torn down," Putzier said.

Council Member Melinda Kieffer said while she hoped there would be enough interest in keeping the building and finding a use that could pay the bills, the ongoing cost of keeping the building was a major concern.

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"We'd need to offset those costs to keep it running," she said.

Several people who came talked about the years they attended school in the building and how its loss as a school has been a blow to the community. The building served as the home for early childhood education in the school district until January. It was also home of the Hiawatha Valley Education District's alternative learning center until the end of the current school year this month.

Donald Millard said his family history is tied to the building. His father, Maynard Millard, was in the last class to go through all 12 grades in the building. His grandmother, Vera Britzius, was in the first class in the building. And his grandfather, LeRoy Millard, was on the school board when it voted to consolidate with Eyota.

"This has some history," Ihrke said. "It was built by the city of Dover for the community. The country schools started closing and sending their children here. Then the two school districts were consolidated."

As for the price the city might have to pay the school district for the building, Ihrke added, "The people in this community already bought this building once. Personally, I'm not interested in buying it again."
With a new executive director comes new events and activities to this year's Rochesterfest.

Rochesterfest will start Saturday and continue through Sunday, June 26, at Soldiers Field Park, where there will be events and activities for all ages, live performances, and a variety of festival food from 30 vendors.

In February, Brent Ackerman was named the new executive director of Rochesterfest, following the retirement of Carole Brown, who had served that position for 24 years. Previously, Ackerman was the operations manager for Townsquare Media in Rochester, which owns many local radio stations.

Ackerman has been involved with Rochesterfest for several years. First getting covering the event through the radio stations he worked with, he soon became a volunteer. Through the years he became part of the Rochesterfest board of directors, became chairman of Parade Scripts, co-chair and host of Celebrity Game Night, and finally became the Rochesterfest chairman in 2015 before receiving the executive director position.

"It's a great community event, and as a volunteer you see the joy it brings to the community," he said.

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Ackerman said that being executive director is a lot of work and has been a real learning experience, but he's happy to be part of something that he cares about deeply and is passionate about.

"It's a lot of work, but when I see the kids running around and having fun I know that the hard work will all be worth it," he said.

Ackerman has planned several changes to this year's Rochesterfest, including new midday themes. Monday will be Freedom at the Fest, a day that will have an eagle demonstration and patriotic crafts. Tuesday will be Arts at the Fest with many events, including adult and kid coloring. Wednesday will be Community Day, in which people will be able to get involved with various organizations through a volunteer fair. Lastly, Thursday's theme is Pets at the Fest, where people will be able to bring their own pets to the fair as well as be able to adopt from Paws & Claws and Camp Companion.

Old favorites will also have an appearance at this year's Rochesterfest, including the parade, theme nights, and "Party in the Park." With 70 events scheduled during the nine-day festival, Ackerman said that everyone will be able to find something that they will enjoy.

This year's theme for Rochesterfest is "Fun for Everyone." Picked by Chairman Bob Nowicki, Ackerman said that the theme was chosen with the idea of inclusivity in mind and to encourage everyone to get involved in Rochesterfest.

"Rochesterfest really is for everyone," said Ackerman. "Everyone is welcome."

This is the second year that Rochesterfest will be at Soldiers Field Park, having been moved from its previous location on Civic Center Drive and First Avenue Southeast. Ackerman said that the move has been met with a lot of positive feedback from members of the community.

"People really enjoy the open space and being able to let their kids run around," Ackerman said. "It's our new permanent home."

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Ackerman said his number one hope for Rochesterfest is that there will be great weather. Other than that, he said that he looks forward to once again seeing the smiling faces and the good spirits that appear during Rochesterfest.

"I know that the community will continue to support Rochesterfest, and anyone who wishes to get involved and volunteer will be welcomed with open arms," Ackerman said.
WELCH  A ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will leave the spent nuclear fuel at the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant right where it's sitting for the foreseeable future.

The Court of Appeals on June 3 upheld a 2014 ruling that allows for the continued onsite storage of radioactive material, mostly spent nuclear fuel. The 2014 ruling is from a case brought by several states regarding the environmental impact, and potential health and safety concerns regarding on-site storage of radioactive materials.

Shelley Buck, Prairie Island Indian Community Tribal Council president, said the community's worst fear is that the nuclear waste will remain on the tribe's ancestral homeland forever.

"Our fears are much closer to reality because of this ruling," Buck said.

Buck described the spent fuel as "some of the most dangerous and toxic substances known to mankind." That nuclear waste, she said, is stored 600 yards from the homes of some of the community's members.

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"We are frustrated that the U.S. Court of Appeals has failed to consider the very real health and safety impacts of permanent on-site storage of highly radioactive nuclear waste," she said.

Terry Pickens, director of nuclear regulatory policy for the plant, said the plant has 40 dry-storage casks at the plant used to hold spent nuclear fuel, and is licensed to hold 64 of the casks, which would bring the plant to the end of its license to generate power. Ideally, he said, the spent fuel would be transferred to a nuclear waste repository, such as the one proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Speaking at Monday's city council meeting, Red Wing City Council Member Peggy Rehder said the feeling from the offices of U.S. Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar is that the Senate will approach the idea of completing the nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain after the retirement of Sen. Harry Reid. Reid, of Nevada, has announced he will not seek re-election on the November ballot.

Rehder, who said she had just returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with Minnesota's congressional representatives, said Reid has used his position in the Senate leadership to block the completion of the Yucca Mountain site.

"Sen. Schumer's office, his staff, expressed a belief that there would be a change in the atmosphere," Rehder said, referring to Sen. Chuck Schumer, a likely replacement for Reid as minority leader of the Senate. "The House has been very much in favor of getting Yucca Mountain open."
WINONA  A teenage driver was injured while driving in town Wednesday night.

An unidentified 16-year-old male was northbound on U.S. Highway 61 near Little Cedar Road, when he crossed the center median and southbound lanes.

Minnesota State Patrol reports say the vehicle struck a cable barrier in the west ditch, crossed back over the southbound lanes and came to a rest in the center median.

The driver sustained non-life threatening injuries and was transported to Winona Health. His condition is unknown. The Winona County Sheriff's Office assisted at the scene.
WINONA  The deadline to file for a seat on the Winona Area Public Schools school board ends at 4 p.m. Friday.

The district had not properly advertised its filing period due to an administrative oversight. School Board Member Jay Kohner said a change in the district required it to hold a filing deadline to accommodate the August primary. There would need to be more than two candidates filing for a single position on the board to trigger a primary runoff.

Four candidates filed for the five openings on the Winona School Board during the filing period that ended May 31. Allison Quam filed for Position 3, Karl Sonneman filed for Position 4, and Kenneth Kersting and Tina Lehnertz, the incumbent, filed for Position 5.

Since the extension began Monday, Karen Coleman has filed for the Position 2 spot, and Jeanne Nelson filed for the Position 4 race against Sonneman.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Fatih Karimov  Trend:

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of Iran has announced that its forces killed nine members of two terror teams in the north-western border city of Oshnavieh on June 15.

An IRGC statement read that the killed people in both terror teams were members of Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and crossed into the country for terror attacks and causing insecurity, Fars news agency reported June 16.

Two IRGC members were killed in the clashes with the terrorists, according to the report.

Earlier on June 13, the IRGC said that five members of the PJAK (Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan) terrorist group, including the groups regional commander, were killed by the security forces in north-western Iran.

According to the report, the PJAK members had earlier conducted assaults against the people in the region, going as far as killing three members of the local Basij forces (militia).
Iran has censured Bahrain for suspending the activities of the Arab country's main Shia opposition group, saying such moves will further complicate the conflict in the tiny Persian Gulf state, Press TV reported.

On Thursday, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari accused the Manama regime of "confronting peaceful public protests by intensifying security measures, jailing moderate [political] leaders and human rights activists and shutting down the offices of peaceful political and social associations."

Such an approach by the Bahraini government will "complicate the domestic crisis in the country," Jaberi Ansari added.

He further expressed hope that the Al Khalifah regime would pave the way for restoration of peace and stability to the island country by taking confidence-building measures and initiating serious negotiations between the Manama government and the opposition.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Bahraini Justice Ministry announced that the kingdom had suspended all activities of al-Wefaq National Islamic Society and frozen its assets. The Bahraini ministry accused the country's main opposition group of promoting tension and extremism.

Manama also dissolved two other opposition groups, namely al-Tawiya and al-Risala Islamic associations.

Officials in al-Wefaq denounced the suspension as illegal and called on the international community to take action in the face of the Bahraini regime's suppression of dissident.

Al-Wefaq's Secretary General Sheikh Ali Salman has been in prison since December 2014 on charges of attempting to overthrow the regime and collaborating with foreign powers, which he has denied.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16

By Emil Ilgar - Trend:

Unknown gunmen attacked two Iranian cargo trailers in Turkey's southeastern region and set fire the trucks, a source at Iran's Embassy to Turkey told IRNA June 16.

The incident happened on the Dogubayazit-Van road at night, the drivers are safe and no one was hurt, added the source.

In August 2015, several attacks were carried out against Iranian trucks in Turkey, which left one dead and several injured.

IRNA earlier reported that two Iranian trucks were attacked in Turkey during March, suffering no damage.
Anne Hathaway is the latest Hollywood figure to be appointed by the United Nations as a global goodwill ambassador to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women. The Oscar-winning actor joins Nicole Kidman, Emma Watson and Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol of Thailand as fellow women's goodwill ambassadors, The Guardian reported.



Hathaway has been brought on board to shed a spotlight on what UN Women's executive director, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, described in a statement as the "motherhood penalty".



"It is a particularly insidious demonstration of gender inequality in the workplace," Mlambo-Ngucka said on Wednesday. "The appointment of Anne is timely because this year UN Women is driving hard to foster more positive mindsets and practical arrangements around workplaces that build and support equality for women."



athaway, who said in a statement that she feels "honored and inspired by this opportunity to aid in advancing gender equality", is no stranger to advocating on behalf of women's rights: the actor previously served as an advocate for the Nike Foundation, formed to support programs to empower adolescent girls in the developing world, and in 2011 traveled to Kenya to raise awareness on sexual violence in the area.



"Girls who are raped are afraid to tell anyone for fear of shame, being blamed or being branded as 'unmarriageable' by their families and communities," Hathaway wrote in a guest column, published in the Daily Beast, and co-authored by Maria Eitel. "As one - anonymous - woman in Dadaab put it: 'If you tell, no one will help. It is better to be safe and tell no one.'"



Hathaway also lent her voice to the 2013 CNN documentary Girl Rising, about the power of female education.



"Significant progress has already been made, but it is time that we collectively intensify our efforts and ensure that true equality is finally realized," Hathaway said about her appointment.
On the sidewalk outside the Centerstone Plaza Hotel north of Soldiers Field Park, Republican U.S. House candidate Jim Hagedorn outlined his position against radical Islamic terrorism Wednesday.

"The United States is at war with Islamic supremacists who adhere to the ideology of radical Islam," said Hagedorn, one of two GOP candidates challenging U.S. Rep. Tim Walz in Minnesota's First Congressional District.

In addition to the attack in Orlando by a Muslim man who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, Hagedorn referenced the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels.

"It's a religious ideology that has killed multiple times around the world," he said. "We have to once and for all declare war."

Closer to home, he said Minnesota is ground zero for the recruitment of Islamic terrorists with Somali-Americans being recruited as fighters in Iraq. It would not be surprising to see them commit attacks in Minnesota.

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"We're fortunate those terrorists wanted to fight half way around the world," he said. "Unfortunately, a terrorist incident could happen anywhere."

Hagedorn said he would take three basic steps to fight Islamic terrorism. First, he called for Congress and President Obama to secure the borders. Second, he would like a biometric entry/exit U.S. Visa and passport system that would help track and deport foreign nationals who overstay their welcome. He would also revoke the citizenship or permanent residency of those who engage in terrorist activities, he said.

Finally, he called for a timeout on the entry of refugees.

"We must stop importing enemy combatants from countries that hate the United States and abhor Western culture," Hagedorn said.

The Obama administration has brought in nearly a million such refugees and people from those countries who are otherwise unaccounted for, he said.

"(Walz) supported the Obama-Clinton foreign policy that created the Middle East chaos and the rise of ISIS," Hagedorn said.

"Walz is for giving them amnesty," he said. "We shouldn't be giving them amnesty. We should be tracking them and sending them back to their home countries."
ST. PAUL  Hopes of quickly calling Minnesota lawmakers back for a special session faded Wednesday, as legislative leaders emerged from the latest round of private negotiations reporting little progress toward a deal.

The Legislature adjourned late last month without passing a $1 billion package of public construction projects, immediately prompting talk of an overtime session. Gov. Mark Dayton's veto of a $260 million tax relief bill added to the pile of unfinished work left to tackle.

Dayton said Wednesday he and fellow Democrats are working to find a compromise on funding mass transit projects around Minneapolis, a major sticking point that prompted the so-called bonding bill's failure in the session's final moments. But he noted the vast differences between the two parties haven't narrowed since late May: Democrats still insist that funding is essential, while Republicans reject it as unnecessary and unpopular.

"We're not anywhere near being able to call a special session," he said. The two sides are expected to meet again next week.

Dayton and House Republicans are also torn about the final size of the public works bill, with the governor pushing for a larger package to accommodate projects such as a new building on the University of Minnesota campus and improvements at the state's security hospital. Dayton has vowed he won't call lawmakers back to St. Paul until they meet those demands.

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But Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt said the largest hurdle to getting a special session deal is the proposed light-rail train to southwestern Minneapolis suburbs, a small part of the $1 billion package that would also pay for road and bridge repairs across Minnesota, water quality improvement measures and other basic infrastructure. With that dispute in mind, the speaker said he doubts they could return for a special session by the end of the month, as Dayton had hoped.

"We're kind of at a standoff on that issue," Daudt said of the train funding. "It's going to be difficult to get something done before July 1."
Russia should be the one to initiate lifting of European sanctions, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday, TASS reported.

"I am among those who believe that it is necessary to lift the sanctions. We have enough problems; we cannot afford to suffer. The most powerful needs to reach out first, and Russia, President Putin - are the most powerful," he said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF 2016).

He also noted that he had asked Vladimir Putin to lift sanctions against Europe to "set an example".

"We will follow your lead then," Sarkozy said.

Sarkozy added that no one disputes the authority of the President of Russia, and that the lifting of sanctions is not a sign of weakness on the Russian side.
From Shanghai to Paris to Moscow, the world has been watching to see how the U.S. election is affected by the latest terrorist bloodbath on our soil, this time in the shadow of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Newspapers in those cities and in many others focused attention on the mass murder of 49 revelers in a gay, Orlando nightclub and what might be expected from either a President Donald Trump or a President Hillary Clinton. It escaped no one that the latest horror would become a factor in the campaign. Nothing, not even the sorrows of the bereaved, takes a backseat to political opportunity.

While Clinton spoke against anti-Muslim rhetoric, Trump leapt into the darkness with all four feet, snarling at President Obama's lack of passion in addressing the Orlando slaughter and condemning him for refusing to use the words "radical Islamic terrorism" in identifying the enemy.

These charges are familiar enough, but this time Trump went a step further, suggesting that Obama resign from office and, conspiratorially, that there's more going on than we know. Defaulting to his customary template, Trump shifted responsibility for these thoughts to "people."

"Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind," Trump said Monday on Fox News.

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"And the something else in mind  you know, people can't believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can't even mention the words 'radical Islamic terrorism.' There's something going on. It's inconceivable. There's something going on."

And who are these people who can't believe "it"? Trump's Twitter followers? The tiny voices in his head? For certain, they're not The Washington Post journalists whom Trump now has barred from his campaign events.

Why? Because the Post accurately reported Trump's words, noting the obvious implication that the president of the United States was somehow in league with the terrorists. Maybe it's only the "people" thinking this, but Trump's modus operandi is well known by now. His book, tedious even to Dick and Jane, is wide open.

In a normal world, Trump would be booed off the stage. Instead, he is applauded (by some) for adding the Post to his list of journalistic organs denied access to his campaign.

The applause is disheartening, and is evidence that newspapers are little understood or appreciated. This is owing in part to a few notorious fabricators, who were duly punished, as well as a vast array of alternative news sources. But mostly to blame for the demonization of the media broadly are faux news media outlets, Republicans and their cohorts.

For decades now, conservative news sources, many of which are aggregators dependent upon the mainstream media for their bread and butter, have joined radio hosts in blasting traditional news sources. Kill the messenger is their operating principle. Republicans who benefit from this portrayal of the media tender their silence in errant gratitude.

The fact is, Trump hasn't needed any help in exposing his prevarications, exaggerations and just plain awful behavior. His words and deeds speak for themselves. Thus, the idea that there's some sort of anti-Trump cabal in the Post newsroom is nonsense. And picking a side between a bombastic fabulist like Trump and one of the most-respected editors in the country, Marty Baron, shouldn't cut any fresh furrows in anyone's brow.

That is, not if one values the First Amendment, because you can be sure that Trump does not.

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Already, he has said he wants to "open up" libel laws so that people like him can more easily sue newspapers. This isn't only unlikely to happen but would prove otherwise problematic for Trump. Among other criteria, libel law requires evidence of defamation of character, the implicit presumption of which would seem to inoculate the accused in Trump's case.

More troubling in the long term is Trump's apparent assumption that he can block a free press  much as tyrants, potentates and dictators throughout history have done. Undoubtedly, a state news agency would suit him fine  all the news Good Citizens are fit to read.

Our allies and enemies, meanwhile, will have noted that a possible president Trump, who used the deaths of innocents to essentially indict President Obama of colluding with terrorists, would do all in his power to undermine the oldest democracy in the world.

It is hard to sell freedom when at least a sizable portion of the country promoting it seems no longer to understand what it means.

Kathleen Parker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post.
Ten years ago today, 7-year-old Arianna Macnamara was struck while crossing West Circle Drive at Third Street Northwest. The accident took her life and started a decade-long call to improve bike safety for those crossing West Circle Drive.

While a bike and pedestrian bridge across U.S. 14 West in Rochester has been dedicated to Macnamara, crossing West Circle Drive remains a challenge. Using the Second Street Southwest intersection is troublesome due to mismatched streets and the lack of visibility from some angles and the Third Street intersection remains intimidating, at best.

There is some hope future streetlights could create a safer crossing at Third Street Northwest, but accessing that area becomes a challenge due to the lack of dedicated bike lanes in the greater Country Club Manor area.

Rochester City Council member Michael Wojcik is marking the 10-year anniversary of Macnamara's death with a meeting from 5 to 7 p.m. today in the government center's room 104 to discuss a West Rochester Bikeway, which could include a pedestrian bridge and street improvements designed to safely connect neighborhoods west of West Circle Drive with the rest of Rochester.

It's an ambitious project, perhaps too ambitious to start the conversation.

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The proposed bridge near Harriet Bishop Elementary School would be expensive and a similar effort at Third Street Northwest failed after being discussed about five years ago. Even with possible state and federal funding, it could be a tough sell.

However, that doesn't mean the whole project needs to be tossed aside. A conceptual design created through volunteer efforts of Andy Masterpole and Mark Miller of SEH's Rochester office provides a fairly inexpensive option that could boost bike usage in the western portion of the city.

"This really in a sense is a striping exercise," Masterpole said, describing how three extra wide streets  36th Avenue, Seventh Street Northwest, and Third Street Northwest  would allow the creation of two-way bike lanes wide enough to include protective barriers.

Wojcik's effort to push the limits on bike safety could be considered an election-year stunt if he hadn't been sounding the same horn since taking office in 2009.

Still, it remains an uphill climb.

While it's a hill that eventually needs to be topped, the direct route may be too tough. Adding less expensive stripes provides a more gradual climb. It will bring more bikes to the streets, which could alter local opinions for future changes.

It's important to note that things like pedestrian bridges and citywide bike lanes don't pop up overnight, regardless of what bike lovers want and bike haters fear.

Small changes are needed to change the culture. Those changes will include new bike lanes, but they will also include changing attitudes toward downtown parking privileges and bus ridership.

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The changes need to be gradual to be effective. Abrupt alterations will be met with too much opposition. Too many of us still like the convenience of our cars and trucks.

Some will never give up the ability to get quickly from place to place, no matter how much or how quickly the city grows or how congested our streets become.

Yet, with gradual changes, we might find ways to encourage more people to think about options. It may start with safe weekend bike trips to city parks, opening doors to other possibilities.

For those options to effectively take root, however, they must be discovered, rather than forced into being.
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 16



By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Russian-Turkish relations gained strategic nature namely after the Justice and Development Party came to power in Turkey in 2002.



Despite political differences regarding the settlement of the Syrian crisis, Turkey and Russia continued economic and political cooperation, also for the benefit of the region.



Construction of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant and the Turkish Stream gas pipeline (the project of which, however, was previously frozen) can be mentioned among the important energy projects of the two countries.



The important point is that before the crisis in relations, Turkish and Russian authorities repeatedly stated that the political differences related to the settlement of the Syrian crisis won't affect the relations between Moscow and Ankara in any way.



This lasted until November 24, 2015, when the Russian Su-24 bomber was shot down in the Turkish sky.



Namely the destruction of the Russian bomber gave the effect expected by NATO, which, according to some Turkish analysts, feared rapprochement between Turkey and Russia.



But the rapprochement between Ankara and Moscow worried not only NATO but also the European Union, which has been applying double standards for many years regarding Turkey and Russia. It should be recalled that Turkey at the time didn't join the EU sanctions against Russia.



In order to understand who was obstructed by the Russian-Turkish cooperation, first of all, it is necessary to imagine how this cooperation would change the region in the future.



First, it is necessary to take into account that Turkey and Russia are two dynamically developing countries in the region.



Moscow and Ankara's getting closer to each other was important not only in terms of resolving the frozen conflicts in South Caucasus and in such countries as Syria and Iraq where radicalism has led to chaos.



Another important factor is that not the West, including the US, but namely Russia, Turkey and in particular, Iran are able to confront the growth of radicalism in Syria and Iraq.



Thus, close relations between Russia and Turkey would first of all disrupt the plans of the forces who are not interested in the region's stability.



Obviously, both Moscow and Ankara understand what is going on. This suggests that the two sides tend to normalize the relations.



Although Turkey has always kept its diplomatic channels with Russia open, the congratulatory letter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Vladimir Putin on the occasion of Russia Day can be considered as the first step towards normalization of the relations.

---

Rufiz Hafizoglu is the head of Trend Agency's Arabic news service, follow him on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
We have reached many milestones and witnessed plenty of success stories at the Guam Department of Labor during my current tenure, but I will b Read moreGDOL wants to be a part of your employment solutions
I cant say that this is how all overreaching government authorities should be answered, but it does set an inspirational example. At the Daily Caller Michael Bastach explains:

Alex Epstein had a terse response to a subpoena sent by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Wednesday. Healey demanded the oil giant ExxonMobil hand over 40 years of documents, including information pertaining to the companys dealings with about a dozen think tanks and trade associations, which have been targeted by environmental groups for opposing left-wing global warming policies. Healeys subpoena targeted the Center for Industrial Progress (CIP), a for-profit think tank founded by Epstein. Epstein wasnt exactly happy about being targeted for disagreeing with Healey on global warming, so he sent the AGs office the following response

Here is the response:

My response to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. pic.twitter.com/lFFhIPFMls  Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) June 15, 2016

The Massachusetts Attorney General is in bad company. Healey is running in a crowd that includes Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson, as Center of the American Experiments Tom Steward notes here. Swanson is keeping her head down on her misadventures but Bastach identifies a few others who are not so shy.

ExxonMobil has responded to Healeys subpoena the old-fashioned way, filing suit against her to bar enforcement of the subpoena. The Washington Times leads off its account of ExxonMobils response with Epsteins response.

The Boston Herald also reports on ExxonMobils response to Healeys subpoena. ExxonMobil has filed suit against Healey in federal court in Texas, protesting that the subpoena exceeds the authority of the attorney general. ExxonMobil contends that the law Healey uses carries a 4-year statute of limitations, and that the company hasnt sold fuel, owned a retail location, or sold securities in Massachusetts in that time. Epsteins response cuts to the chase in a way that ought to ring a bell in the home of the Boston Tea Party (1773 edition).

Via Stephen Green/InstaPundit.
In the wake of the Orlando terrorist attack, firearmsespecially AR-15s, which the Democrats want to banare flying off the shelves. And quite a few of them are being sold to gays and lesbians:

Gun shops typically see a spike in customers after mass shootings. But this time, many are seeing shoppers theyve never really seen before: More gays and lesbians. 

[W]hats different this time around is the clientele. Mike Smith, a firearms instructor in Colorado Springs, is one of many closely tracking the sudden surge in gays and lesbians buying weapons.

I think right now because of what happened, people are looking for answers, he said. You walk into a gun shop and you expect to see people, frankly, who look like me. I think we forget were a country of all people, not just people who fit that predetermined mold.

The Pink Pistols is a national gun club for gays and lesbians. It saw its membership soar from about 1,500 members on Saturday to 3,500 on Monday.
 George Will thinks Republicans should ditch Trump and draft Mitch Daniels for president. I heartily agree with the idea, though I doubt you can persuade Daniels to do it. I tried once, in 2011. Will:

Without explicitly mentioning the paranoia currently convulsing many campuses, Daniels identified its origin. He said that even more absurd than the idea that life is a lottery is the idea that most of us are victims of some kind, and therefore in desperate need of others to protect us against a world of predators and against our own gullibility. Danielss words to the Class of 2016 clarify why the 2016 presidential campaign offers an echo, not a choice. The presumptive Democratic nominee is a progressive committed to government ambitious enough to iron the wrinkles of luck out of life, and to distribute equity to lifes victims, meaning to everyone. The presumptive Republican nominee is a world-class whiner (a victim of debate moderators who are meanies, and most recently of a rigged judicial system) who is telling Americans that they are comprehensively victimized (by wily Chinese exporters, manufacturers making Oreo cookies abroad, freeloading allies, etc.). Purdue has the president the nation needs.

 The (London) Spectator, a most sober publication, has come out in favor of Brexit. Their editorial is behind a subscription paywall, but this link gets you to it through a workaround.) Sample:

Since 1975 the EU has mutated in exactly the way we then feared and now resembles nothing so much as the Habsburg Empire in its dying days. A bloated bureaucracy that has outgrown all usefulness. A parliament that represents many nations, but with no democratic legitimacy. Countries on its periphery pitched into poverty, or agitating for secession. The EUs hunger for power has been matched only by its incompetence. The European Union is making the people of our continent poorer, and less free. This goes far beyond frustration at diktats on banana curvature. The EU has started to deform our government. Michael Gove revealed how, as a cabinet member, he regularly finds himself having to process edicts, rules and regulations that have been framed at European level. Laws that no one in Britain had asked for, and which no one elected to the House of Commons has the power to change. What we refer to as British government is increasingly no such thing. It involves the passing of laws written by people whom no one in Britain elected, no one can name and no one can remove.

Sort of sounds like Washington, DC, and its relationship to the states, doesnt it?

 Some internet hackers are hacking into ISIS Twitter feeds and spamming them with porn and homoeroticism. I like the spirit of this, but Im not convinced that ISIS folks arent actually in favor of porn and homoeroticism. It sent me back to Richard Greniers fabulous 1983 comic novel, The Marrakesh One-Two. If Grenier had been more famous, hed have had the fatwa against him before Rushdie. Read especially the opening paragraph of chapter 9. Thats all Ill say. (Though I will share it with our VIP subscribers in our resumed regular VIP Briefings. Another reason to subscribe and become a VIP member!)

 Speaking of hackers, isnt there something circular about hacking a hack like Hillary? Anyway, the Russian hack of the DNC website has yielded what purports to be the 210-page opposition file on Donald Trump. Mother Jones has posted it here. Maybe someone wants us to believe it is a hack to get the whole thing out there all at once? Related question: why didnt the Russians hack the RNC? Probably because theres no intelligence to be found there. (Rim shot!)
Police recovered the body of a 2-year-old boy snatched by an alligator at a Disney hotel in Florida after around 19 hours of searching, officials has said.

The body was recovered intact within the immediate area where the child was last seen, leading Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings to conclude that the child had drowned.

Theres no doubt in my mind that the boy was drowned by the alligator, Demings said.

He said that members of the Orange County Sheriffs Office located the body on Wednesday at 1745 GMT and recovered it about two hours later.

The childs remains have been turned over to the county medical office for an autopsy. They will be returned to the family for burial after the procedure, Demings said.

Jacquee Wahler, vice president of the Walt Disney World Resort, said Disney was assisting the family.

Everyone at the Walt Disney World Resort is devastated by this tragic accident, she said, according to a statement quoted by multiple news outlets.

The search and rescue effort began after eyewitnesses reported seeing the boy being taken under the water by the alligator at 9 p.m Tuesday night.

Disney closed all beaches in its resort area in response to the incident in a lagoon outside the upscale Grand Floridian Resort & Spa Tuesday night.

The boy had been wading in about 30 centimetres of water in the Seven Seas Lagoon near his family when he was attacked by the alligator, officials said.

His father jumped into the water, but failed to wrestle his son from the animal, which was described between 1.2-metres and 2.1-metres long, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

The parents alerted a lifeguard, and a team of rescuers joined forces in the search.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Service worked with police officials to trap alligators in the area and manage other wildlife within the man-made lake to help find the body.

They discovered five other alligators living in the lake. (dpa/NAN)
President Muhammadu Buhari is expected back in Nigeria on Sunday and would resume work on Monday.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo disclosed this Thursday shortly before the commencement of the National Economic Council (NEC).

Mr. Buhari travelled to London on a 10-day medical vacation, to be examined by an Ear Nose and Throat specialist for ear infection.

He traveled on June 6.

Mr. Osinbajo however said the president will take the weekend off and resume on Monday.

The president will be back on Sunday. I spoke with him yesterday evening and I think it is just the best that he takes the weekend off. He will certainly be back on Sunday.

I think the most straightforward thing is when he will be back. He will be back on Sunday. There is no point rushing back on Friday or something like that.

He will just take the weekend off and be back on Sunday.

He is in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning.

Mr. President is in good condition, he is fine, he is very well. He should take a day or two off in London and rest a bit and come back hale and hearty on Sunday and be ready for work on Monday.

So we expect him back on Sunday, Mr. Osinbajo told journalists.
Six Boko Haram insurgents were killed Wednesday evening, while several others fled with injuries sustained from gunshots, as soldiers of the 7 Division Nigeria Army stepped up offensive in the ongoing Operation Crackdown counterinsurgency in parts of the volatile northeast Nigeria, officials said.

The soldiers who raided about seven different Boko Haram camps were able to rescue four women and a child in one of the camps. They also recovered vehicles, guns and food stuff.

Though a soldier was said to have sustained a gunshot injury, the troops were excited to have recovered a state of the art communication gadget which has been key to the operations of the Boko Haram.

Spokesman of the Nigeria Army, Colonel Sani Kukasheka Usman, confirmed this in a statement made available to the press.

Thestatement:



In a follow up operation to ensure proper clearance of suspected Boko Haram terrorists hideouts and prevent the fleeing terrorists escaping from Operation CRACKDOWN, troops of the 155 Task Force Battalion, carried out a swift clearance operation at Kircha Dungus village and surrounding environment, yesterday evening.

During the operation, the troops encountered pockets of the Boko Haram terrorists in which they killed 4 of them while few others fled leaving behind 4 women and a child. The troops have rescued and evacuated them for screening and further rehabilitation.

While checking the general area, the troops further discovered a pair of military desert camouflage uniform and a Boko Haram terrorists flag hoisted in the village. They also recovered a Generator set and water pumping machine.

Similarly, troops of 7 Division Strike Group Team B, attached to 21 Brigade have braved harsh climatic conditions to also clear 7 villages of Boko Haram terrorists presence north east of Kumshe village.

The villages are; Mulfuta, Baibawa, Jenere, Bembem, Maksamari, Bula Kafie and Bula Bodi.

During the advance to Jenere, the troops encountered some Boko Haram terrorists elements that engaged the troops in fierce battle. The troops were able to kill 2 terrorists, wounded several others and continued with their patrol to Jenere-Hausari.

Here, they discovered that the Boko Haram terrorists now evolved new tactics of evading surveillance by drones and aircrafts. They now hide in makeshift camps covered with shrubs. The troops recovered some motorcycles, 2 Dane guns, large quantity of foodstuffs stored in a well-constructed storage facility and solar panels.

Thereafter, the troops proceeded to Bembem, where the suspected Boko Haram terrorists also laid an ambush for them. It was however cleared successfully although a soldier sustained gunshot wound during the clearance. He has been evacuated and receiving treatment.

The team discovered and rescued some hostages held by the Boko Haram terrorists in the area. Although the patrol team did not encounter any terrorists in Maksamari, they made a very rewarding recovery of an invaluable communication gadget.

Through it, the troops discovered the terrorists new tactics and dispositions.

In a related development, troops of the newly created 8 Task Force Division have commenced operations in earnest.

The formations and units under its command have equally been involved in clearance operations through daily patrols, raids and offensive actions against remnants of Boko Haram terrorists.

It is in line with this that the troops of 153 Task Force Battalion conducted aggressive patrol to Gudusuri, Malalewa, Khadaamari, Rundi and Mugu villages in northern parts of Borno State. Although they did not encounter Boko Haram terrorists in the area, the troops recovered 5 vehicles, 6 motorcycles and 1 Boko Haram terrorists flag.

In same vein, some elements of the same unit deployed at the Forward Operation Base (FOB) Old Marte, conducted another patrol to New Marte yesterday to clear suspected remnants of Boko Haram terrorists hiding in the area.

Similarly, troops of 242 Battalion deployed at FOB Gajiganna along with 2 Civilian JTF, went on patrol to Goni Kanuburi village. Here too, no contact was made with the Boko Haram terrorists as they all fled the area.

It was the same story when the patrol team of 242 Battalion deployed at FOB Gajiram, patrolled Galle village.

The troops of 157 Task Force Battalion, 7 Brigade, have also continued to conduct fighting patrols to continue to prevent remnants of Boko Haram terrorists freedom of action or escaping.
CEO Jack Ma has vowed to get rid of counterfeits in online shopping platform Alibaba. (Photo : REUTERS)

Alibabas Jack Ma declared that the war on piracy has been more complicated than ever because counterfeits have better quality than the genuine articles.



According to a Bloomberg report, the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder deemed it more difficult to eradicate fakes from their online selling business since customers prefer them over the originals because they are made with better quality.



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"The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better prices than the real products, the real names. It's not the fake products that destroy them, it's the new business models," Ma told the company's investor conference on Tuesday in Hangzhou.



Interestingly, Quartz said Ma opted to divert the attention of the audience and put the blame on the quality of products instead of explaining how they intend to root out counterfeits from the country's largest online shopping platform.



Jack Ma on Counterfeits



During his talk in Alibaba's first-ever investor day since 2014, Jack Ma tackled one of the major concerns in the group's e-commerce leg: counterfeits.



At the time, Ma blamed better-quality fakes as the major reason why battling piracy in the online shopping industry is more difficult.



"The exact factories, the exact raw materials, but they do not use their names," he said per Bloomberg.



"We have to protect [intellectual property], we have to do everything to stop the fake products, but OEMs are making better products at a better price," Ma explained when talking about manufacturers that are hired to make products for branded sellers.



In May, Alibaba's membership with International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition was suspended due to complaints from fellow members in the non-profit global organization and a conflict of interest with IACC President Bob Barchiesi who owned stocks in Ma's company.



Luxury Brand Sellers' Reaction



Because of this, the Financial Times believes that Ma's remarks would not fare well with the luxury goods industry.



"I am stunned by his comments," said the founder of one Italian luxury goods company who refused to be named.



FT tried to get comments from Bernard Arnault's LVMH luxury group and the Paris-based Kering that sells brands like Bottega Veneta, Gucci and Saint Laurent, but both companies refused to release a statement.



In defense of his remarks during the event, Ma released a statement to clarify the purpose of his speech.



"This is simply my observation of the issues facing brands and OEMs," Ma said. "Counterfeiting is not a quality problem; counterfeiting is an intellectual property problem."






The Nigeria Police Force has set up a forensic laboratory and digital resource center in Abuja to aid the activities of its criminal Intelligence and investigation department.

The facility, which include technologies for identification of crime suspects through features like the Iris and facial recognition, possible identification marks, multiple and extended finger prints, among others, are aimed at hunting down hoodlums, armed robbers, kidnappers, and their likes in the society.

Addressing journalists in Abuja on Wednesday, the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, said the establishment of the centre would help the Force tackle the challenge of identity conflict and denial of evidence by suspects in courts of law.

With this equipments we hope to put in the past instances where suspected culprits deny that statements or evidences they gave during interrogation do not belong to them, said Mr. Arase.

He added that the facilities, which will compliment the efforts of the forensic department in Lagos, will also make it possible for the force to meet the presidential directive that all data capturing government agencies should harmonize personal information captured before the end of 2016.

Unfortunately, the Nigeria Police Force has over the years been grappling with week forensic capacity which has been a major factor in our inability to manage complex criminal situations.

With this systems, the Nigerian police is set to meet the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, 2015, to capture and remit to the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation, all the biometrics of suspected persons arrested by the police.

It will also put the police in a position to key into the presidential directives that all data capturing government agencies should harmonize and integrate personal identities captured by such agencies, on or before the end of 2016, Mr. Arase said.

Mr. Arase said the facility has the capacity to access over 5 million law enforcement research materials, like journals, reports, force orders among other things.

He said the equipment will be used to detect possible impending dangers on the field of assignment through the personal identity management systems, which will work with equipment in control rooms for monitoring officers and gathering information from the field to various substations.
A former chairman of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, Abuja chapter, Chuck Ehirim, is dead.

Mr. Ehirim died on his 50th birthday on Thursday, his associates said.

He was chairman of the Abuja chapter of the NUJ between 2012 and 2015.

Mr. Ehirim graduated in 1992 from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and worked with Tell magazine.

He later returned to the same university where he obtained a masters degree.

He was the assistant editor, northern operations of the Niche Magazine before his death.

A journalist, Chucks Ohuegbe, said he had called Mr. Ehirims wife to wish him a happy birthday, but was informed he had passed away few hours back.

Am totally gutted! Mr. Ohuegbe wrote on Facebook.

Mr. Ehirims friend, Amos Dunia, described the death as shocking and devastating.
Former Vice President and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar, has described as shocking the death of Christian Chuks Ehirim, the immediate past chairman of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, FCT chapter, who sadly passed away on his 50th birthday, Thursday, June 16 in Abuja.

Chuks was a fair-minded professional, a conscientious journalist, a progressive democrat and committed nationalist, Atiku Abubakar said in a condolence message released by his media office.

Atiku noted that the late Ehirim was a frontline champion of democratic ideals who used the medium of mass communication to advocate his avowed interest in equity, fairness and justice.

Atiku said it was painful to learn that the man, popularly called Eze-Igbo by his peers, for his belief in the identity of the Igbo nation within the Nigerian entity, would succumb so casually to the cold hands of death after a long struggle to install the current government of change.

The APC chieftain recalled that Ehirims activism dates back to his students union days at the University of Nigeria Nsukka, from where he later joined forces with democratic forces to battle the military in the annulment of the June 12, 1993 elections.

Atiku condoled with the Ehirim family, NUJ and his employers, The Niche on Sunday Newspaper.
Former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, is going to the Supreme Court to press for his freedom denied him by the federal government after three High Courts in Abuja had admitted him to bail in the criminal charges filed against him by the government, his lawyer said Thursday.

Mr. Dasuki had on Wednesday at the Court of Appeal in Abuja lost his bid to enforce his freedom.

His lawyer, Ahmed Raji, confirmed that appeal papers had been put together to be filed at the Supreme Court to challenge the judgment of the Court of Appeal, and those from the high courts that ordered his re-arrest.

Mr. Raji said there were sufficient grounds for his client to approach the Supreme Court to seek the enforcement of his freedom.

Mr. Dasuki said he was not afraid of trial on charges against him, but said the proper thing must be done by government by respecting the bail granted him lawfully but courts.

He said that since government had approached court on his matter, the same government must be fully ready to abide by court decisions in the interest of justice and the rule of law.

Mr. Dasuki had been admitted to bail by three different high courts in Abuja but he was re-arrested on December 29, 2015 by operatives of State Security Service.

The government, in its defence, claimed Mr. Dasuki being a Crown Prince of Sokoto Caliphate had large sympathizers across the length and breadth of the country who may jeopardize his trial if allowed on bail.
The Director of Defence Information, Rabe Abubakar, has said that more 700 repentant Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East have surrendered to the military.

Mr. Abubakar, a brigadier general, said this when he paid a courtesy call on the managing director of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Bayo Onanuga, in Abuja on Thursday.

According to him, a camp will be opened where the repentant insurgents will be kept before the government decides on what to do with them.

The defence spokesman said the media had a very important role to play in mitigating the crisis befalling the country.

He, therefore, called for cooperation between the media and the military in mobilising and informing the citizenry about the crisis.

We have come to understand that the military cannot do it all alone.

It must enter into collaborative efforts and synergy in certain operations with the media, which we believe will go a long way to not just project our activities or operations, but at the same time play a role which nobody can do apart from you.

Mobilising the citizens, informing them about what is happening and equally sensitizing them.

The media has a very important role in mitigating the crisis that is befalling our nation.

We have many of the Boko Haram members, who surrendered as a result of our operations in Sambisa.

We have over 700 now and very soon we will open the camp in the North-East where we will be keeping them before the government decides on what to do with them.

He said the Defence Headquarters looked forward to sustaining the cordial relationship between the military and NAN.

Responding, the Managing Director of NAN, Bayo Onanuga, told the director of defence information that the social media were following the activities of the military with keen interest.

He assured the director of the agencys support in all activities of the military aimed at maintaining Nigerias unity and securing its territory.

Mr. Onanuga said the agencys dissemination of authentic information about the military as an institution was a commitment to ensuring peace and stability in the country.

The managing director told Mr. Abubakar that because we are owned by government, we have a responsibility to ensure that whatever we push out is the authentic information.

I follow your press statements, I follow you on twitter, I follow you on Facebook, I go to the military website.

I know you are also, on your own part, trying to push out as much information as possible for our consumption.

Because we are owned by government, we have a responsibility to ensure that whatever we push out is the authentic information.

We are also careful that we dont push out something that can create crisis.

Our bulletin is the first point of reference by anybody, who wants authentic information about Nigeria.

And that is why we are very important.

Mr. Abubakar was accompanied on the visit by senior officers of the Directorate of Defence Information, Defence Headquarters.

(NAN)
A Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday admitted in evidence the alleged confessional statement made by Obi Nwabueze in the ongoing trial of alleged mastermind of Abuja 2010 Independence Day bomb blast.

Mr. Nwabueze, the second defendant, allegedly made an extra-judicial statement while in he custody of the Department of State Services, linking Charles Okah to the bomb blast.

He later denied making the statement, saying it was obtained under duress.

Justice Gabriel Kolawole, while ruling in the application, held that the defendant failed to prove the involuntariness of the statement he made in the DSS custody.

Mr. Kolawole said the statement was earlier admitted in evidence during the trial of Edmond Ibiware.

He said since the case started none of the defendants complained that they were tortured in the custody.

The judge said the allegation of torture was not only insignificant but self-serving.

It is my decision that the extra-judicial statement made on Oct. 18, 2010 is admissible and hereby marked as exhibit 2D and 2D, he declared.

The case was adjourned till July 5.

(NAN)
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has detained the immediate past governor of Adamawa State, Bala Ngillari, for his alleged role in the distribution of N450 million for the re-election of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

Mr. Ngillari is being detained at the Gombe zonal office of the EFCC.

His detention followed information provided by a former Nigerian ambassafor to the U.S., Hassan Adamu, who told the EFCC that when the chairman of PDP in Adamawa state, Joel Madaki, and himself took custody of the money from Fidelity Bank, it was taken to the government House in bullion vans by officials of the bank.

Mr. Adamu also told investigators that the chief of staff to Mr. Ngilari, Alhaji Hamman, and the accountant to the government house, Aisha Waziri, counted the money and confirmed the figure.

The duo became custodians of the fund based on the directive of their boss, the governor, he said.

Mr. Adamu also said he left after the government officials took custody of the fund and did not know how the money was shared, and did not personally benefit from it.

An official of the EFCC informed PREMIUM TIMES that Mr. Ngilari denied authorizing his former aides to take custody of the fund.

He also said a detention order had been signed and most likely, he would spend the night in EFCC custody.

A team of investigators handling the campaign slush fund grilled the former ambassador for several hours after he reported to the Commissions office at about 9.30 am on Thursday.

He was however, allowed to go.
The All Progressives Congress on Thursday inaugurated a seven-member Electoral Committee headed by the governor of Katsina State, Aminu Masari, for the 2016 Edo State governorship election primaries.

It also constituted a three-member Election Appeal Committee chaired by a former member of the House of Representatives, Bamidele Opeyemi, for the election.

Other members of the electoral committee are Andrew Uchendu (Secretary), Yusuf Maianguwa, Tunde Esan, Shuaibu Musa, Ibrahim Soja and Amara Iwuanyanwu.

Mustapha Salisu and Ekwy Onyido will serve in the appeal committee.

The committees were inaugurated at the partys national secretariat by the deputy national chairman (South), Segun Oni.

Mr. Oni said the election committee would conduct the primary election to pick the partys flag bearer for the September 10 governorship poll while the appeal committee would handle complaints and petitions arising from the primary.

Speaking at the inauguration, Mr. Masari said the committee had no preferred candidate and that it would ensure justice and fairness to all the contestants.

He said, On behalf of members of my committee, I want to assure you that we will follow the guidelines given to us by the party. I want to also assure you that we will do our best and produce the best and we hope that there will be no work for the Appeals Committee.

We are going to do a thorough job. I also want to use this opportunity to assure that we will do Justice to all. We have no preferred candidate, we have no friends and what we will be doing in Edo, we will be doing for APC, for Nigeria and for the Edo people.

The governor recounted that he had a bitter experience when he went through a similar process and that he knew how a party could lose election through an unfair and unjust primaries.

It has happened in my state and in so many states, Mr. Masari said.

He described the assignment as critical and important considering the number of candidates and the strength of the APC and that of the opposition in Edo State.

He stated, That will make us do what is right for the people of Edo state and for APC as a political party. I am assuring you that what will come out of this exercise will be a result that can stand in any court of law because you cannot rule out the possibility of somebody going on appeal.

What are critical are peace and the cooperation of the contestants. They are 12 and they need each other. Either win or lose, they still need each other. This is a very important and critical work and I am assuring the party that we are going to do the best to ensure Justice and fairness to all the contestants.

Mr. Masari thanked the party for considering the members of the committee for the assignment, adding we assure the party that we will not fail.

Mr. Bamidele expressed confidence that there would be no reason for appeal after the primaries.

While thanking the APC leadership for giving members of the committee the opportunity to add value in their own little way, the chairman noted that the constitution of the country as well as cases that had been decided by Election Petition Tribunals, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court had made it clear that before any aspirant could go to court, he should have explored and exhausted the internal mechanism available within the party.

He said, You must not only explore, but must have exhausted the internal mechanism available within the party of trying to protest or complain before coming to the court room. It is in that regard that we see the assignment given to us by the party as a very sensitive one.

Mr. Bamidele added, We hope there will be no reason for anyone to come to appeal, but it is easier we assume. What is more important is not the complaint but if the process of selecting the candidate is transparent, if will be easier to manage.

Meanwhile, the APC has said 2873 delegates will participate in the June 18 primary election to pick its candidate for the governorship election.

The National Organising Secretary of the party, Osita Izunaso, announced this in Abuja.

Going by the APC 2014 guidelines for the nomination of candidates for public office, delegates for the 2016 APC Edo Governorship Election Primaries Committee are constituted into an Electoral College comprising of the following: 12 Principal Officers of the Ward Executive Committee; all members of the Local Government Executive Committee from all the Local Government Areas in the State; all members of the State Executive Committee; all members of the National Executive Committee from the State; all members of the Board of Trustees and National Caucus from the State; all elected persons from the State.

So far, 12 aspirants, comprising 11 males and one female, collected the APC Expression of Interest and Nomination Forms for the governorship election.

Those on the list released by the partys national secretariat on Thursday are Blessing Agbomhere; Charles Airhiavbere; Fredrick Amadasun; Emmanuel Arigbe-Osula; Austin Emuan; Peter Esele; and Kenneth Imansuangbon.

Others are incumbent deputy governor, Pius Odubu; Godwin Obaseki; Justina Ojehor; Christopher Ogiemwonyi; and a former governor of the state, Oserheimen Osunbor.

All the aspirants were successfully screened a seven member committee headed by Chibudum Nwuche, a former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives.
Activities in Hospitals in Ekiti State have been paralyzed following the strike action called by medical doctors to press for the payment of their five months salary arrears.

But following the intervention of the governor, Ayodele Fayose, the unions have restored only emergency services at the hospitals.

The governor, who is away in Abuja, pleaded with the unions to wait till Monday when he would have returned to the state for a proper resolution of the crisis.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that Mr. Fayose on receiving the notice of the strike put a call through to the leadership of the unions, seeking a relief window until Monday so that the issues could be discussed and resolved.

The Association of Resident Doctors and the National Association of Government General Medical and Dental Practitioners issued a notice of the strike action on Wednesday saying the 21-day ultimatum given the government had expired.

But the governor said he never saw the ultimatum until he arrived Abuja on Wednesday.

Acting President of ARD, EKSUTH, Tunji Olaoye, said the strike would continue notwithstanding the intervention of Governor Fayose.

He said the emergency services would however be restored until Monday hoping that the issues would be resolved.

We hope that the issues will be resolved by Monday, if not the emergency services will be removed and there will be a total strike, Mr. Olaoye said.

ARD and NAGGMDP are affiliates of the Nigeria Medical ASSOCIATION, NBA, which is not a member of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, as a result they did not join the earlier general strike called by NLC and TUC.

But the Joint Health Workers Union of the Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital is a part of NLC, but sought to be left out of the ongoing striking after negotiating with the government to be paid their January salary.

ARD and NAGGMDP however, claimed that the 21-day ultimatum predated the strike called by the NLC.

Special Assistant to the governor on Public Communication and New Media, Lere Olayinka, confirmed that the conversation between the governor and the striking doctors took place.

He said talks were ongoing between the government and the doctors but no breakthrough had been achieved.
The Miss New Jersey competition isnt a team sport. Contestants hone their talents, choose their dresses and try to make the cut.

Competition, emotions and stress levels are high.

But in 2014, as Cara McCollum was preparing to relinquish her Miss New Jersey crown, she told The Press of Atlantic City that despite the competitive aspect, creating unbreakable bonds and fellowship are the norm in the Miss New Jersey community.

Cara McCollum 'gives the gift of life' with organ donation Cara McCollum, who died just after 4:30 a.m. on Monday, donated her organs to those waiting for transplants.

Were like war vets. We all have war stories to tell, McCollum said at the time.

Ive seen Miss Congeniality and Toddlers in Tiaras and heard sabotage pageant stories, but when I got here, I was pleasantly surprised.

Bonds may be unbreakable, but hearts are not. When McCollum, 24, died following a car crash in February, it was a devastating shock to the Miss New Jersey community. That loss will cast a shadow over this years pageant, being held this weekend in Ocean City, where she will be remembered by friends and honored by organizers.

One of the contestants at Saturdays Miss New Jersey finale will be awarded the first Cara McCollum Memorial Scholarship. The award is based on essays describing how a contestant can have a lasting positive impact.

For many fellow contestants, and for people outside the pageant, McCollum was the epitome of what Miss New Jersey should be: a positive role model and an example of service.

Current Miss New Jersey Lindsey Giannini, 22, of Hammonton, also spoke of the bonds shared by people in the Miss New Jersey community and what an important part of that community McCollum was.

It really is a sisterhood. Youre spending so much time with your competitors, she said. And once youre crowned Miss New Jersey, youre inducted into a really exclusive sorority.

McCollum, with her sense of humor and friendly personality, forged deep friendships during the competition, Giannini said.

Friends remember former Miss New Jersey for confidence, grace OCEAN CITY  Friends and family remembered former Miss New Jersey Cara McCollum during a mem

We can truly understand why she won that year. Cara was friends with every person she met because she was so lively and had such a strong personality. As Miss New Jersey, she made everyone feel special, Giannini said. And thats a really important part of being Miss New Jersey. She had a natural gift for that. She really did.

Giannini remembered the moments she shared with McCollum, and the fun they had together. Their dresses wrinkled while attending an event, so they took turns using a bathroom hand dryer to heat the wrinkles out.

When Giannini was crowned Miss New Jersey in 2015, McCollum was one of the first people she called.

I spoke to Cara right after, Giannini said. She really helped me prep for Miss America and taught me what to expect. She gave me a lot of confidence and guidance going into it.

And the vibrant personality known to McCollums friends also was noticed by her coworkers.

After her stint as Miss New Jersey, McCollum graduated from Princeton University in June 2015 with a bachelors degree English. Opportunities quickly came McCollums way, but a connection to New Jersey kept her in the state to start her professional career, which included anchoring the SNJ Today news broadcast.

You rarely find someone who comes in the door with the total package. She was it, SNJ Today Chief Financial Officer Frank DiMauro said. She was a Princeton graduate. She was smart. She was articulate. She was beautiful. She was caring. Very philanthropic.

DiMauro remembered calling McCollum to offer her the job. She was in Arkansas for Fathers Day, where much of her family still resides. She told DiMauro, he recalled, that she wanted the job and felt connected to her new home state. But she had a passion for cooking, she admitted to him.

So I asked her, So, you might want a cooking show? I told her, Cara, I promise you. When youre ready for that, well make it happen for you.

But in February, disaster struck.

I was the last one to see her walk out of the door after the newscast, DiMauro said. She even said on the news, Be careful driving tonight. The road conditions could be treacherous.

A prolonged cold stretch had left roads icy. As the temperatures rose Feb. 15, it began to rain.

The combination led to tragedy. McCollums car spun off Route 55 near Salem County and crashed into trees. McCollum died a week later, on Feb. 22, as a result of injuries suffered in the accident. Her giving continued even after death, as she was an organ donor.

When it comes to the void at SNJ Today, DiMauro said it could never be filled.

Its impossible. We loved Cara so much. She was part of the family and we lost her.

Theres so many times where Im still so upset that shes not here, Giannini said. Its surreal a lot of the time. It still doesnt feel real that she wont be at the pageant this year. Its going to be an emotional time for us all, she said.

DiMauro said while understanding such tragedies is often not possible, it is important to look for ways to find peace.

If you believe in a God, at some point you have to tell yourself that it was part of a bigger plan that you may never live to understand. Thats the only way I find some sort of peace from it all. God wanted his angel back. She was on loan to us and he wanted her back, he said.

We have to be content with saying, OK, shes yours now.

Contact: 609-272-7209

Twitter @ACPressSchweder
IMF urges China to make reforms for betterment of economy. (Photo : Getty Images)

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is calling for China to make urgent reforms on the financial risks that the economy is facing in the wake of the funds previous warning about corporate debts.



A press release posted on their website on Tuesday revealed the IMF's comments on the Chinese economy after a mission led by Assistant Director of the Asia and Pacific Department James Daniel to the country's capital, Beijing.



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According to the statement, IMF's First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton also convened with senior officials, including Vice Premier Ma Kai and People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, among others, to tackle the country's financial dilemmas.



Based on their findings, the IMF deemed China to be at "a crucial juncture," noting that while the country is at "a sustainable growth path and is making progress on many dimensions of rebalancing," the Asian giant should consider addressing vulnerabilities the mission found during their two-week stay in the country.



Vulnerabilities



During Lipton's meeting with top Chinese officials involved in the country's economic progress, he noted a couple of things that they should consider in order to pursue China's sustainable growth in the long run.



"China continues its transition to a sustainable growth path and is making progress on many dimensions of rebalancing," he began. "The success of this transition, while difficult and bumpy at times as we have witnessed over the past year, is crucial for China and the rest of the world."



While there may be growth, Lipton noted that there was also "uneven progress," which should be addressed immediately for the sake of the second biggest economy in the world, as cited in a report from CNBC.



He noted that there are "less improvement in governance and hardening SOE budget constraints," which eventually would lead to vulnerabilities such as structural excess capacity, rapidly rising credit, and "the increasingly large, opaque, and interconnected financial sector."



Previous Warning



Prior to the release of Tuesday's statement, the IMF had also issued a warning to China with regard to the country's debt risks.



"Corporate debt remains a serious--and growing--problem [in China] that must be addressed immediately and with a commitment to serious reforms," Lipton said in Shenzhen as cited by the Financial Times.



He further noted that such problems in the second biggest economy can bring the entire international community down.



"We have learned over and over in the past 20 years how disruptions in one country's economy and markets can reverberate worldwide," Lipton added.






Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen waves to the supporters at the celebration of the 14th presidential inauguration on May 20, 2016, in Taipei, Taiwan. (Photo : Getty Images)

China reminds the United States about its commitments in maintaining the One China policy ahead of the Dalai Lama's and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wens visits to the Western country.



In a regular press briefing on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang tackled the state visits of two of the most controversial leaders that the mainland sees as hindrance to the fulfillment of the "One China policy": the Dalai Lama and Taiwan Democratic Party's Tsai Ing-wen.



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During the media conference, Lu made it a point to call out to the U.S. and remind its leaders of their promises not to support "a split China" as well as "any separatist activities," per a report from the South China Morning Post.



On Dalai Lama's Visit



According to Reuters, the Dalai Lama is set to arrive in the U.S. capital on Wednesday where he will meet privately with President Barack Obama.



The report said that China considers the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader as a separatist, which is why the Foreign Ministry warned the Western nation to be careful during their meeting so they can avoid any misunderstanding.



"The U.S. government also made solemn commitments," Lu said on Tuesday. "It acknowledges that there is only one China [and] that Tibet is an inseparable part of China and will never recognize the so-called Tibetan government in exile. Under the cloak of religion, the 14th Dalai Lama peddles his political ambitions of dividing China all around the world."



According to Lu, foreign countries and governments should not tolerate such campaigns from the exiled Buddhist to prevent any opposition from China.



On Tsai Ing-wen



Meanwhile, Lu also made comments about the upcoming visit of Tsai, Taiwan's first female president, to the United States and echoed the same sentiments as with the Dalai Lama.



"We ask the U.S. government to honor its commitments and deal with the relevant matters in accordance with the One China policy, and not to offer any chance to any separatist forces that try to create 'two Chinas,' 'one China, one Taiwan' or split China," Lu said.



According to SCMP, Tsai is expected to transit in Miami on her way to Panama for the expansion ceremony of the Panama Canal.



During her tour, which will run from June 24 to July 2, Tsai is expected to make a stop-over in Los Angeles, though there was no confirmation on whether or not she would be visiting the White House or meeting with President Obama.






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.




Xi to Visit Central Asia, Central and Eastern European Countries to Foster Belt and Road Initiative

President Xi Jinping first proposed his Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. (Photo : Getty Images)

Eyeing to foster the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit countries in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), from June 17 to 24, the Xinhua News Agency reported.



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From June 17 to 22, he will pay state visits to Uzbekistan, Poland and Serbia.



The Chinese leader will also attend the 16th meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organization's (SCO) Council of Heads of State on June 23 and 24. The meeting, which coincides with the 15th anniversary of SCO's establishment, is seen as an avenue to enhance regional and global cooperation among the organization's members.



Under the SCO framework, the nations regard combating the "three evil forces"--terrorism, separatism and extremism--as their most urgent task.



A political analyst also stated that in the upcoming SCO summit, "many countries hope China can work to bring them out of difficulties."



"China is an important driving force for the SCO development as well as a major engine of the world economy," the analyst added.



Xi's trip to CEE comes three months after his last visit to the region. The Chinese president is expected to mainly tackle the implementation of his landmark Belt and Road initiative.



"The three countries were among the first to respond to China's Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by Xi during his 2013 trips to Central Asia and Southeast Asia," the Global Times said.



Liu Zuoki, affiliated with the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that enhancing diplomatic ties with Poland and Serbia will "play an exemplary and positive role in propelling China-CEE relations."



Serbia was the first CEE nation to have a strategic cooperation with China back in 2009. In Sept. 2015, Serbian leader Tomislav Nikolic attended China's historic 70th anniversary of the World Anti-Fascist War victory.



Chinese Ambassador to Serbia Li Manchang noted that the increased political mutual trust has helped pave way to further boost bilateral ties.



Meanwhile, it was in 2011 when Poland "elevated [its] bilateral relationship to a strategic partnership" with new China, making it one of the first countries to do so.



Since then, China remains Poland's biggest Asian trading partner as well as its third-biggest importer. Poland is also China's largest trading partner in CEE.



Uzbekistan has also witnessed a rapid growth in its ties with China since it established a strategic partnership with the country in 2012.



On the scheduled trips, President Xi will "meet heads of state and attend signing ceremonies for cooperation agreements in such fields as energy, finance, infrastructure construction, technology and tourism."


Airbus's company logo is pictured at the Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, in this Dec. 4, 2014 file photo. (Photo : Reuters)

Airbus Group is building an assembly line of commercial helicopters in China, as part of an agreement to sell 100 H135 rotorcraft to a domestic consortium.



The deal is in line with the letter of intent inked last year for the purchase order amounting to 700 million euros or about $788 million. The transaction value, however, "rises to 1 billion euros when support and initial industrial investment are included," Reuters reported.



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The consortium comprises of Citic Offshore Helicopter, China Aviation Supplies Holding Co. and Qingdao United General Aviation Industrial Development.



The deal, targeted to be completed within 10 years, is expected to counter the challenges facing Airbus's helicopter business. This arm has been one of the casualties of the global market slowdown in oil and gas, The Wall Street Journal reported.



Airbus also seems to be at the right time to enter China as the country prepares to be the world's largest market for helicopters.



The company is estimating the demand for helicopters in China to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 within a span of 20 years.



"With the further opening up of the Chinese skies and the increasing growth in the civil and parapublic segments, China is gearing up to be the biggest market for helicopters in years to come," said Norbert Ducrot, head of Airbus Helicopters China and North Asia region, in a press release.



"With their inherent versatility and reliability, these 100 H135s will be best suited to meet the soaring demand in China," Ducrot added.



The H135 is a familiar aircraft in China. It can be seen in different parapublic operations across the country, including patrol command, search and rescue, law enforcement and firefighting.



Overall, about 1,200 H135s have been delivered to different clients, logging in more than three million flight hours, according Airbus's latest numbers.


WARSAW, Poland, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- OSELL Group, an evolutionary business concept designed to connect global businesses with China, is expanding rapidly internationally and now making Poland its next country partner.

On June 20, 2016, OSELL Group will organize China-Poland Online Silk Road Economic Cooperation Forum and announce the launch of its key partner Global OConnect's facility in Warsaw.

The forum is held as part of the activities organized for the Chinese government's official visit to Poland, supported by the National Development and Reform Commission of China and Development Department of Poland. More than 300 participants from leading businesses, institutions, and media are set to attend.

OSELL Group operates businesses through its online OSell APP+ and offline OConnect exhibition warehouse. The group's vision is to promote Chinese products around the globe and introduce global products to Chinese customers. Its arrival in Poland will signify a closer tie between China and Eastern Europe and more economic benefits for the people.

At the forum, the Chairman of OSELL Group will announce the launch of the Global OConnect exhibition warehouse facility. As a State authorized agent, the company addresses the trust and warranty issues of online trading.

Through building exhibition warehouses worldwide, where interested retailers can come and see the real products after they've discovered them online, and providing warehouse services next to the exhibition for Chinese manufacturers, OSELL Group, through its partner Global OConnect enables retailers worldwide to make well-informed purchasing decisions, and Chinese manufacturers to promote their high quality goods to global markets.

The company has opened two facilities after success in Moscow and Dubai. The opening of Poland exhibition warehouse at the end of June will be accompanied by two more in Toronto and Ho Chi Min. Last month, OSELL acquired French company Comex as part of its European strategy.

The forum will be attended by representatives of relevant government departments as well as business delegations from both countries. Among Chinese business representatives are Chinese e-commerce tycoon Alibaba, telecommunications company ZTE Corporation and IT giant Huawei.

About OSELL Group

Established in 2015 and partly funded by the state, OSELL Group Cross-Border E-commerce Co. Ltd. is an essential and organic component of China's national economic strategy of going abroad. The company's mission is to introduce China-made products globally in a more interactive and efficient way.

SOURCE OSELL Group
"This is the largest single award in the history of APR Energy, and it is the result of having the best people and the best technology in our industry. I couldn't be prouder of our team," said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Campion.

"We also want to thank the Ministry of Energy and Minerals for their continued confidence in our ability to provide reliable power for the people and businesses of Argentina," Campion said. "Argentina has been a key customer for us for many years, and we are honored to receive the largest share of generating capacity awarded to an international company. We look forward to the opportunity to continue to provide Argentina with power well into the next decade."

APR Energy has had a continuous presence in Argentina since 2008. The Company currently generates a combined 75MW of power at three sites: Formosa, Magdalena and Saenz Pena.

With the 350MW in Argentina, APR Energy has been awarded more than 750MW of new business for 2016. It is APR Energy's fourth award in the past year for mobile gas turbines, including current projects in Egypt and Tasmania.

"Our Argentina award further demonstrates that turbines have a key place in the fast-track power market. They are the preferred technology of utilities and a solution that integrates well into their existing infrastructure," Campion said.

About APR Energy

APR Energy is the world's leading provider of fast-track mobile turbine power. Our fast, flexible and full-service power solutions provide customers with rapid access to reliable electricity when and where they need it, for as long as they need it. Combining state-of-the-art, fuel-efficient technology with industry-leading expertise, our scalable turnkey plants help run cities, countries and industries around the world, in both developed and developing markets. For more information, visit the Company's website at www.aprenergy.com.

Press Photo Gallery

Related Links

http://www.APRenergy.com



SOURCE APR Energy
FRANKLIN LAKES, New Jersey, and WAGENINGEN, The Netherlands, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) (NYSE: BDX), a leading global medical technology company, today announced a development and global distribution agreement with Check-Points for BD MAX assays that detect carbapenem-resistant organisms (CRO). As part of the agreement, BD will distribute the Check-Direct CPE Screen for the BD MAX assay (CE IVD) outside of the United States*, with Check-Points maintaining exclusivity in the Netherlands. Check-Points and BD plan to develop and commercialize a next-generation CRO assay for launch outside the U.S. in 2017 and in the U.S. at a later time.

The Check-Direct CPE Screen for the BD MAX assay is a real time PCR kit for the detection of CRO from rectal swabs. The Check-Direct CPE Screen for the BD MAX identifies and differentiates the presence of the four most common carbapenemase genes: KPC, NDM, VIM and OXA-48-like (including OXA-181 and OXA-232). In three prospective European studies, the assay demonstrated overall clinical sensitivity and specificity of 98.5 percent and 96.8 percent, respectively.

"We have used the Check-Direct CPE Screen for BD MAX in routine screening for nearly two years," said John Rossen, assistant professor of medical microbiology at the University Medical Center, Groningen (UMCG) in the Netherlands and scientific secretary of the ESCMID Study Group for Genomic and Molecular Diagnostics. "The assay on the BD MAX has improved our turn-around-time for CRO screening and has shown a very positive impact in our hospital."

Carbapenem-resistant organisms represent a global healthcare-associated infection (HAI) concern. In 2014, the average carbapenem resistance for K. pneumoniae in Europe was approximately 7.3 percent, with some countries reporting as high as 62.3 percent.1 Rates of K. pneumoniae resistance to carbapenems range as high as 4-54% in other WHO regions.2 In addition, the spread of CRO represents a unique antimicrobial stewardship challenge, with limited effective treatments3 and mortality rates as high as 54.3 percent4. In response, the European Centers for Disease Control (ECDC)4 have launched active surveillance programs to assess CRO prevalence and monitor for outbreaks.

The Check-Direct CPE Screen for BD MAX assay is the latest offering in the BD MAX HAI portfolio, which includes IVD assays for the qualitative detection of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium difficile (C. difficile). Together with other upcoming products on the BD Phoenix platform, BD will offer a comprehensive genotypic and phenotypic CRO solution to support clinical microbiology customers in their antimicrobial resistance programs.

*Product not available for sale in the U.S.

About BD

BD is a global medical technology company that is advancing the world of health by improving medical discovery, diagnostics and the delivery of care. BD leads in patient and health care worker safety and the technologies that enable medical research and clinical laboratories. The company provides innovative solutions that help advance medical research and genomics, enhance the diagnosis of infectious disease and cancer, improve medication management, promote infection prevention, equip surgical and interventional procedures, optimize respiratory care and support the management of diabetes. The company partners with organizations around the world to address some of the most challenging global health issues. BD has more than 45,000 associates across 50 countries who work in close collaboration with customers and partners to help enhance outcomes, lower health care delivery costs, increase efficiencies, improve healthcare safety and expand access to health. For more information on BD, please visit bd.com.

About Check-Points

Check-Points (http://www.check-points.com) is a privately owned diagnostics company in Wageningen, The Netherlands and a leading developer and marketer of molecular assays for gram-negative drug-resistant bacteria. Check-Points offers a range of IVD and RUO products for the detection of carbapenemases, ESBLs and AmpCs. In addition, the Check&Trace product line allows for fast and reliable routine molecular confirmation and serotyping of Salmonella for food and veterinary diagnostics.

1 European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Antimicrobial resistance surveillance in Europe 2014. Annual report of the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net). Stockholm: ECDC; 2015.

2 2014 WHO Antimicrobial Resistance Global Report on Surveillance.

3 European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Carbapenemase-producing bacteria in Europe: interim results from the European Survey on carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (EuSCAPE) project. Stockholm: ECDC; 2013.

4 Tumbarello et al (2012). Clin Infect Dis. 55 (7): 943-950.

Contacts:





Matthew Coppola Monique N. Dolecki BD Public Relations BD Investor Relations 201.847.7370 201.847.5378 matthew_r_coppola@bd.com monique_dolecki@bd.com

Related Links

http://www.bd.com



SOURCE BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company)
PUNE, India, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

RnRMarketResearch.com adds "Global and Chinese Bismuth Oxide Industry, 2016 Market Research Report" latest study of 150 pages, published in June 2016, to the Chemicals intelligence collection of its store.

The Global Bismuth Oxide Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Bismuth Oxide industry. Complete report on Bismuth Oxide industry divided into 11 major chapters that offer an overview of current market scenario as well as 2021 forecasts is now available at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/global-and-chinese-bismuth-oxide-industry-2016-market-research-report-market-report.html .

The Global Bismuth Oxide Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Bismuth Oxide industry. Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Bismuth Oxide industry analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions' development status.



Secondly, this report states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added. Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. What's more, the Bismuth Oxide industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.



Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered. In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.

Order a copy of this report at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/contacts/purchase?rname=608884 .



The first chapter introduces the Bismuth Oxide Industry by Brief Introduction, Development & Status of Bismuth Oxide Industry. The second chapter focuses on Manufacturing Technology of Bismuth Oxide, the third one gives Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers (Including Company Profile, Product Specification, 2011-2016 Production Information etc.) The forth chapter deals with 2011-2016 Global and China Market of Bismuth Oxide. The chapter 5 summarizes Market Status of Bismuth Oxide Industry.

List of Tables and Figures for Global & China Bismuth Oxide Industry



Figure 2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Market Share By Country

Figure 2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Major Manufacturers Market Share

Figure 2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Market Share By Application

Figure 2016 China Bismuth Oxide Market Share By Application

Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Bismuth Oxide Capacity List

Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Bismuth Oxide Capacity Market Share List

Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Bismuth Oxide Production List

Table 2011-2016 Global Major Manufacturers Bismuth Oxide Production Market Share List

Figure 2011-2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Capacity Production and Growth Rate

Table 2011-2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Rate of Capacity Utilization List

Table 2011-2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Demand and Growth Rate

Table 2011-2016 Global Bismuth Oxide Supply Demand and Consumption List

Table 2011-2016 China Bismuth Oxide Production Import Export List

Another research titled "Global Bismuth Oxide Industry 2016 Market Research Report" forecasts the market analysis provided for the Global markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. With 272 tables and figures the report provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market. Few key manufacturers included in this report are 5N Plus, Shepherd Chemical Company, Clark Manufacturing LLC., Hunan Jinwang bismuth industrial, Xianyang Yuehua Bismuth, Sichuan Shunda New Materials Technology Development Center, Chengdu Shudu Nanomaterials Technology Development, Beijing Easpring Material Technology and Henan Maiteer. Order a copy of Global Bismuth Oxide Industry 2016 Market Research Report at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/contacts/purchase?rname=468693 .

Explore more reports on Chemicals Industry at http://www.rnrmarketresearch.com/reports/materials-chemicals/chemicals .

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SOURCE RnR Market Research
'Daniela Katzenberger - Mit Lucas im Hochzeitsfieber' Photo Call In Cologne (Photo : Getty Images)

Public displays of affection (PDAs) among Chinese college students are acceptable practices, according to a new survey on the countrys youth. About 1,300 university students took part in the survey.



Almost 60 percent find nothing wrong with the some PDAs they could tolerate such as sweet talks, holding hands, hugging and quick kisses. But they drew the line when it comes to French kisses and petting. The conservative outlook was common among the students and their parents.



Advertisement

Among the various forms of PDAs, holding hands got the highest approval rate at 96 percent. However, in the case of hugging, 80 percent of the students accepted it, while only 38 percent of parents found it okay.



For quick kisses, 20 percent of parents find it tolerable, while 63 percent of students approved it. These PDAs are considered common activities among college students in China.



A fresh college graduate explained that when the youth engage in PDA, they are giving in to a natural emotional gesture. I have a long-distance relationship so its precious time for me to spend time with him  when we parted in bus station, we cant help kissing, the recent graduate said.



Academics have a different point of view when it comes to PDAs. Nankai University psychology professor Yuan Xin said PDAs are indicators of China becoming an open society. Zhejiang Sci-tech University lecturer Diao Yuquan added that PDAs are not consistent with Chinese traditional culture but copied from foreign countries.



Fujian Provincial College Instructor Luo Xuelei agreed that seeing PDAs is now normal, but it still has to be limited, reported Asiaone.






DUBLIN, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Dolomite: European Union Market Outlook 2015 and Forecast till 2020" company profile to their offering.

The report grants access to the in-depth insight into the market of dolomite. All data available in the report are presented in a convenient format. The report sheds light on the present market situation and prospects for the market development in the upcoming years.

Scope:

- Comprehensive investigation of the European Union market of dolomite, focusing on the overall EU market as well as country markets

- Historical and present market statistics, future market outlook

- In-depth coverage of market characteristics: information on production and consumption trends, prices and trade dynamics (EU total and by country)

- Profiles of the most prominent dolomite manufacturers and listing of suppliers

- A brief review of the key dolomite consumers

- Dolomite market prospects (including production, consumption and price changes)

Reasons to Buy:

- The report supplies with profound knowledge of the EU dolomite market

- Extensive market analysis and all-inclusive description of the key factors shaping the EU market assist in the gaining understanding of the predominant market trends

- In-depth discussion of the EU dolomite market will help to scale up business and sales activities

- Information on the major market players facilitates the search for prospective partners and suppliers

- Detailed market analysis will help a reader to make valid business decisions and fortify decision-making processes in a company

Key Topics Covered:

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Dolomite: properties and uses

1.2. Manufacturing process

2. EUROPEAN UNION MARKET FOR DOLOMITE (2010-2014)

2.1. Market for Dolomite not calcined or sintered in the EU countries (2010-2014)

2.2. Market for Calcined and sintered dolomite in the EU countries (2010-2014)

2.3. Market for Agglomerated dolomite in the EU countries (2010-2014)

3. LOCAL MARKETS FOR DOLOMITE (2010-2014)

3.1. Germany

3.2. Spain

3.3. France

3.4. Italy

3.5. Lithuania

3.6. Hungary

3.7. Poland

3.8. Romania

3.9. Slovakia

3.10. Finland

3.11. The United Kingdom

3.12. Croatia

3.13. Norway

4. PROSPECTS OF THE MARKET FOR DOLOMITE (2015-2020)

4.1. Production forecast

4.2. Consumption forecast

4.3. Price forecast

5. LEADING MANUFACTURERS OF DOLOMITE IN THE EU COUNTRIES

6. SUPPLIERS OF DOLOMITE IN THE EU COUNTRIES (INCL. CONTACT DETAILS)

7. CONSUMERS OF DOLOMITE IN THE EU COUNTRIES

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/gk5j49/dolomite

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

http://www.researchandmarkets.com



SOURCE Research and Markets
DUBLIN, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Carbides Market in Germany: Business Report 2016" report to their offering.

The report presents analysis of carbides market in Germany.

Report Scope:

Brief country profile includes general information and main economic indicators and specifies business environment in Germany

Carbides market is analyzed by different parameters including domestic production and consumption. Future market development is also estimated

The report presents profiles of leading producers and lists major suppliers in the country

The report also lists buyers within the sector, and provides results of the purchase activity monitoring, which is achieved by tracking various tenders databases, websites and marketplaces.

The report will help you to find prospective partners and suppliers.

Detailed analysis provided in the report will assist and strengthen your company's decision-making processes.

Key Topics Covered:



1. GERMANY: COUNTRY PROFILE



1.1. General characteristics

1.2. Economic review



2. CARBIDES MARKET IN GERMANY



2.1. Overview of carbides market



2.2. Producers of carbides, including contact details and product range

2.2.1. Producers of calcium carbides

2.2.2. Producers of silicon carbides

2.2.3. Producers of carbides other than of carbon or silicon



3. GERMANY'S FOREIGN TRADE IN CARBIDES



3.1. Export and import of carbides, of calcium

3.2. Export and import of carbides, of silicon

3.3. Export and import of carbides other than of carbon or silicon



4. MAJOR WHOLESALERS AND TRADING COMPANIES IN GERMANY



5. CARBIDES, WHETHER OR NOT CHEMICALLY DEFINED CONSUMERS IN GERMAN MARKET



5.1. Downstream markets of Carbides in Germany

5.2. Carbides consumers in Germany



For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/92zc74/carbides_market

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

http://www.researchandmarkets.com



SOURCE Research and Markets
DUBLIN, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Iso-Octyl Acrylate (CAS 29590-42-9) Market Research Report 2016" report to their offering.

This Global Report 2016 is a result of industry experts' diligent work on researching the world market of iso-octyl acrylate. The report helps to build up a clear view of the market (trends and prospects), identify major players in the industry, and estimate main downstream sectors.

The first chapter introduces the product by providing review of the most of its characteristics (composition, structure, hazards, storage, toxicological & ecological information, etc.).

The second chapter focuses on iso-octyl acrylate end-uses, the third one gives summary on a number of patents.

The fourth chapter deals with iso-octyl acrylate market trends review, distinguish iso-octyl acrylate manufacturers and suppliers.

The chapter 5 summarizes iso-octyl acrylate prices data.

The last chapter analyses iso-octyl acrylate downstream markets.

The iso-octyl acrylate global market report 2016 key points:

- iso-octyl acrylate description, its application areas and related patterns

- iso-octyl acrylate market situation

- iso-octyl acrylate manufacturers and distributors

- iso-octyl acrylate prices (by region and provided by market players)

- iso-octyl acrylate end-uses breakdown

- iso-octyl acrylate downstream industries trends

Key Topics Covered:

1. ISO-OCTYL ACRYLATE GENERAL INFORMATION

1.1. General information, synonyms

1.2. Composition, chemical structure

1.3. Safety information

1.4. Hazards identification

1.5. Handling and storage

1.6. Toxicological & ecological information

1.7. Transport information

2. ISO-OCTYL ACRYLATE APPLICATION

3. ISO-OCTYL ACRYLATE PATENTS

4. ISO-OCTYL ACRYLATE MARKET WORLDWIDE

4.1. General iso-octyl acrylate market situation, trends

4.2. Manufacturers of iso-octyl acrylate

4.3. Suppliers of iso-octyl acrylate

4.4. Iso-octyl acrylate market forecast

5. ISO-OCTYL ACRYLATE MARKET PRICES

6. ISO-OCTYL ACRYLATE END-USE SECTOR

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3txr5z/isooctyl

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

http://www.researchandmarkets.com



SOURCE Research and Markets
One of the UK's Oldest Pawnbroking Chains Uses Data Erasure Software to Permanently Erase Data from Used Electronics Sold in 187 Retail Stores

ATLANTA and LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Pawnbroking has historically been a traditional business with the core of its revenue coming from loans and cash advances. As digital devices and technology have become central to everything consumers do today, pawnbrokers have evolved their business model and the types of goods offered to include the sale of used electronics.

According to Apex Insight, the pawnbroking industry has shown considerable growth in recent years  reaching over 2,000 stores across the UK. However, a 2014 investigation led by UK's Channel 4  exposing two pawnbrokers who failed to wipe data before reselling smartphones  reiterated the potential of both financial and reputational damages that could arise in such instances.

To prevent similar data breaches for its own customers, H&T Group which trades as H&T Pawnbrokers, one of the largest pawnbroking chains in the UK, has joined forces with Blancco Technology Group to permanently erase data from all used laptops, smartphones and tablets sold in its 187 retail stores. Through the partnership, H&T Pawnbrokers will use a combination of the patented Blancco 5 solution, along with the Blancco 5 Mobile and Blancco Cloud solutions, to safeguard the privacy of its customers.

Mark Harrold, Commercial Manager of H&T Pawnbrokers, stated, "Our customers, and in particular, those using our buyback services look and buy very differently today than they once did  they're younger (mid-thirties in age), more tech savvy and highly aware of and sensitive to privacy risks. To keep H&T Pawnbrokers' 119-year-old reputation intact and serve our customers' new set of needs, we knew that data erasure and mobile diagnostics software would be vital. Working with Blancco Technology Group allows us to prove our commitment to our customers and reassure our stakeholders as to the strength and growth of our business model moving forward."

Additionally, H&T Pawnbrokers will tap into the added diagnostic features of the Blancco 5 Mobile Diagnostics solution in order to maximize the overall performance and resale value of its smartphone and tablet inventory. "When technology enables us to keep our customers' mobile devices running optimally and prevent the leak of sensitive, confidential data, that translates to increased sales, customer loyalty and retention for our business," said Robbie Fowle, Head of Marketing for H&T Pawnbrokers. "By delivering these added benefits, Blancco Technology Group has proven itself to be an invaluable business partner."

"Just because something is second-hand doesn't mean it has to be second-rate," said Pat Clawson, CEO, Blancco Technology Group. "By using our data erasure and diagnostics solutions, H&T Pawnbrokers is vowing to its customer base that the used electronics they take home will run smoothly, have longer lifecycles and won't compromise their personal privacy. And it's saying so with absolute certainty."

Unlike other data erasure vendors, Blancco Technology Group is the only one who could provide a tamper-proof certificate verifying all data has been permanently removed, solidifying its readiness to comply with security regulations.

About Blancco Technology Group

Blancco Technology Group is a leading, global provider of mobile device diagnostics and secure data erasure solutions. We help our clients' customers test, diagnose, repair and repurpose IT devices with the most proven and certified software. Our clientele consists of equipment manufacturers, mobile network operators, retailers, financial institutions, healthcare providers and government organizations worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alpharetta, GA, United States, with a distributed workforce and customer base across the globe.

Blancco, a division of Blancco Technology Group, is the global de facto standard in certified data erasure. We provide thousands of organizations with an absolute line of defense against costly security breaches, as well as verification of regulatory compliance through a 100% tamper-proof audit trail.

SmartChk, a division of Blancco Technology Group, is a global innovator in mobile asset diagnostics and business intelligence. We partner with our customers to improve their customers' experience by providing seamless solutions to test, diagnose and repair mobile assets. SmartChk provides world-class support, pre and post implementation, allowing our customers to derive measurable business results.

About H&T Pawnbrokers

H&T Pawnbrokers is the UK's leading pawnbroking company established in 1897 in London with over 180 stores throughout the UK. Discount secondhand Jewellery is a trading format of H&T Pawnbrokers and offers an extensive range of individually selected secondhand gold, diamond, gemstone and silver jewellery as well as high-end watches. In addition to pawnbroking and jewellery retail, the stores are also able to offer jewellery valuations and repairs, jewellery purchase, foreign exchange services, personal loans, Western Union money transfer and cheque cashing. Find us on www.handt.co.uk. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Media Contacts:

SHIFT Communications for Blancco Technology Group (US)

David Heffernan, Account Manager

T: (617) 779-1839

E: blancco@shiftcomm.com

SAY Communications for Blancco Technology Group (Europe)

Robert Hickling, Senior Account Manager

T: 44 (0) 20 8971 6427

E: blancco@saycomms.co.uk

Blancco Technology Group

Ragini Bhalla, Senior Director of Global Communications

T: (678) 829-8465

E: ragini.bhalla@blanccotechgroup.com

H&T Pawnbrokers

Robbie Fowle, Head of Marketing

T: +44 (0) 20 8225 2744

E: Robbie.fowle@handt.co.uk

Related Links

http://www.blanccotechnologygroup.com



SOURCE Blancco Technology Group
HANNOVER, Germany, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

KEYMILE security solution raises the bar in simultaneous delivery of ultimate data encryption and system security while guaranteeing strict critical communication high-availability and precise timing needs

KEYMILE, the leading solution provider in mission critical communication, launches the new encryption card SECU1 for its XMC20 multi-service access and transmission platform. The solution is unique in providing highly secure end-to-end encryption in mission-critical networks, while still maintaining the very high level of data availability required for such infrastructures. State-of-the-art encryption is based on keys generated by a hardware-based quantum random number generator for the highest level of assurance.

KEYMILE's new solution is targeted at mission-critical networks belonging to energy utilities, gas and oil pipelines, railway companies and authorities such as police, air traffic control and defence. The encryption technology used plays a pivotal role in guaranteeing security. The encryption keys themselves are generated by a quantum random number generator (QRNG), which harnesses the intrinsically random quantum states of photons, to ensure that they are truly random and unique.

KEYMILE's XMC20 hybrid, multi-service access and transmission platform allows companies and authorities to operate SDH/PDH-based and packet-based networks securely in one network node. The XMC20 platform stands out thanks to its fanless operation and it is also ideal in tough ambient conditions. In combination with the new solution it offers reliable encryption which does not impact the superior availability of mission-critical networks. Central and de-centralised key generation provides trustworthy and shielded distribution of keys. There is no single point of failure and all nodes can communicate securely with one another. This KEYMILE Permanent Encryption approach prevents network islands from forming.

The KEYMILE solution encrypts data end-to-end in packet-based MPLS-TP transmission networks. All the network traffic is natively encrypted in the card at layer 2. Due to the low impact on network performance, the solution meets one of the most important demands on mission-critical systems, the data availability.

The encryption card uses programmable FPGAs and therefore achieves maximum flexibility during operation. The solution can easily adapt to any changes in the future and is therefore also a secure investment in the long term.

Operators of mission-critical networks can integrate the card easily and cost-efficiently into their networks. It is inserted into a free slot on a subrack and connected with the central board. No reorganisation of the network or changes to other pieces of terminal equipment are required. As a board the card is designed to be redundant. Each card has two independent encryption units - including the power supply and hardware-based quantum random number generator. In addition, the card is tamper protected.

KEYMILE has implemented a security concept for the encryption card which can be examined at any time and which meets high level requirements on integrity, confidentiality and authentication of the data. The cards are developed by security-screened personnel in Germany and Switzerland and produced in Germany. Therefore KEYMILE can supply a backdoor-free solution, or in other words one with no concealed access options. KEYMILE allows the source code to be examined upon request. Furthermore, the company is itself currently being certified to the ISO 27001 standard.

The new security encryption card will be available in Q3.

Press contacts:

KEYMILE GmbH

Marion Bauman

marion.baumann@keymile.com



PR-COM GmbH

Hanna Greve

hanna.greve@pr-com.de

+49-89-599-977-56



SOURCE KEYMILE
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Kootenay Silver Inc. (TSXV: KTN) (the "Company" or "Kootenay") is pleased to announce that it is preparing to conduct a 3,000 metre drill program on its 100% owned La Cigarra silver project located in Chihuahua State, Mexico. The targeted drill program, scheduled to commence in Q3 2016 is designed to test the high priority RAM target and to expand La Cigarra's current mineral resource estimate by targeting continuity of high-grade trends recently identified within the resource. (Click the following link to view a map of the La Cigarra Resource and RAM drill targets)

States Kootenay President and CEO James McDonald "We are very excited to proceed with a targeted drill program on La Cigarra mineral resource and the nearby RAM target. The objective will be to further enhance the size and grades of our established silver resource estimate on La Cigarra prior to proceeding with a Preliminary Economic Assessment on the project. Concurrently, we will conduct the first drill test on our high priority RAM target that is a large, structurally controlled trend that demonstrates significant potential to further add to our current silver resources."

Drill testing on La Cigarra will test the continuity of several high-grade trends identified within the deposit with focus on stepping out from existing mineralization along the extensions of what appear to be underlying high-grade zones. This includes the southern boundary of the Las Carolinas Zone where hole 155 returned 23 metres of 138 g/t silver. (See Kootenay/Northair News Release dated Dec 15, 2014). This area remains open down dip and along strike to the southeast, which could potentially extend an additional two (2) kilometres.

In conjunction with the preparation of the drill program, Kootenay's technical team has been focused on advancing the La Cigarra deposit with the objective of moving towards a Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA"). The Company has been assessing the potential to increase grade, in order to demonstrate the economic potential of the project by seeing if there are contiguous zones of higher grade within the current NI 43-101 silver resource estimate. This approach shows promise as several north trending higher grade zones have been identified. These zones also correspond nicely with the resource blocks above a 75 g/t Ag cutoff contained within the current resource estimate. Although the existing resource estimate did not publish silver resources at a 75 g/t Ag cutoff, the ounces at a 50 g/t Ag cutoff total 44.47 million ounces of Measured and Indicated ounces grading 103 g/t Ag with another 9.6 million ounces of Inferred grading 97 g/t. *(See resource estimate below and as filed on SEDAR).

The RAM Zone, located approximately 750 metres to the west of the main La Cigarra Resource, underlies an area of anomalous silver mineralization greater than the area of the La Cigarra deposit. The target area hosts several old mine workings developed along a structurally focused quartz veining and stockwork in west dipping mineralization with similarities to the east dipping main La Cigarra trend. Previously reported sampling along a 35 metre length of a small underground exploration adit averaged 285 g/t silver across a 1.5 metre width. Surface trenching of this area completed above the adit returned 35.45 metres averaging 67.3 g/t silver (including 16.20 metres of 99.6 g/t silver and 4.85 metres of 141.4 g/t silver). Mineralization at RAM occurs at surface within the north trending RAM fault that has been traced for approximately two (2) kilometres in length within a larger target zone that measures 3.8 kilometres in length.

A larger drill program will be designed once re-logging to assess the potential to model the high-grade zones and the 3,000 metre program are complete. This subsequent program is anticipated to begin at the end of Q3 and could possibly run seamlessly from one program to the next.

La Cigarra Resource Estimate

La Cigarra's updated NI 43-101 resource estimate was completed by Allan Armitage, PhD, P. Geo. and Joe Campbell, B.Sc., P. Geo., of GeoVector Management Inc. Resource Statement for the La Cigarra silver project located in Chihuahua State, Mexico: Effective Date January 14, 2015.

The resource estimate was calculated based on results from 156 of 173 holes totaling 27,617 metres drilled along the open ended La Cigarra mineralized system which has a defined strike length of at least three (3) kilometres. The 156 holes included in the Property's resource estimate were positioned within a potentially surface minable area comprised of the San Gregorio and Las Carolinas mineralized zones, which combined form a total strike length of 2.4 kilometres. The resource estimate was constrained by a constrained pit shell utilizing a $22 /oz silver price and reported at a 35 g/t silver cut-off grade, and considers metallurgical recoveries of 84% silver. A summary of the mineral resource estimate is listed below:

Resource Category* Tonnes In-Situ Grade Contained Metal Ag Au (g/t) (g/t) Pb(%) Zn(%) Ag (oz) Au (oz) Pb (lbs) Zn (lbs) Measured 3,620,000 88.9 0.074 0.14 0.19 10,340,000 9,000 10,920,000 15,510,000 Indicated 14,930,000 85.7 0.068 0.13 0.18 41,130,000 33,000 42,950,000 59,260,000 Meas + Ind 18,540,000 86.3 0.069 0.13 0.18 51,470,000 41,000 53,870,000 74,770,000 Inferred 4,450,000 80.0 0.058 0.13 0.16 11,460,000 8,000 12,680,000 15,610,000

Note:* Mineral resources are reported in relation to a conceptual pit shell at a 35

g/t silver cut-off grade and a $22/oz silver price. Mineral resources that are not

mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. All figures are rounded

to reflect the relative accuracy of the estimate and numbers may not add up due to

rounding.



The La Cigarra mineral resource is sensitive to cut-off grade. To illustrate this, the block model quantities and grade estimates within the conceptual pit are presented in the following table at different cut-off grades utilizing a $22/oz silver price.

Resource Category* Cut-off grade Tonnes Ag (g/t) Ag (oz) Au (g/t) Pb (%) Zn (%) > 50 Ag g/t 2,670,000 105.7 9,060,000 0.082 0.15 0.20 > 40 Ag g/t 3,250,000 94.7 9,900,000 0.077 0.14 0.20 Measured > 35 Ag g/t 3,620,000 88.9 10,340,000 0.074 0.14 0.19 > 30 Ag g/t 3,980,000 83.8 10,720,000 0.072 0.13 0.19 > 20 Ag g/t 5,020,000 71.6 11,550,000 0.067 0.12 0.17 > 10 Ag g/t 6,950,000 55.6 12,430,000 0.062 0.09 0.14 > 50 Ag g/t 10,700,000 102.9 35,410,000 0.075 0.14 0.20 > 40 Ag g/t 13,390,000 91.2 39,280,000 0.071 0.13 0.19 Indicated > 35 Ag g/t 14,930,000 85.7 41,130,000 0.068 0.13 0.18 > 30 Ag g/t 16,490,000 80.7 42,770,000 0.066 0.13 0.17 > 20 Ag g/t 19,820,000 71.3 45,430,000 0.063 0.12 0.16 > 10 Ag g/t 28,240,000 54.1 49,180,000 0.059 0.09 0.13 > 50 Ag g/t 3,080,000 97.1 9,600,000 0.063 0.15 0.19 > 40 Ag g/t 3,950,000 85.4 10,850,000 0.060 0.14 0.17 Inferred > 35 Ag g/t 4,450,000 80.0 11,460,000 0.058 0.13 0.16 > 30 Ag g/t 5,010,000 74.8 12,040,000 0.057 0.13 0.15 > 20 Ag g/t 6,830,000 61.2 13,440,000 0.056 0.13 0.13 > 10 Ag g/t 10,450,000 44.7 15,030,000 0.052 0.10 0.11

Sampling and QA/QC

All technical information for the La Cigarra exploration program is obtained and reported under a formal quality assurance and quality control ("QA/QC") program. Samples are taken under the direction of qualified geologists and stored in sealed bags. Samples are delivered by the Company via courier to ALS Minerals ("ALS") in Chihuahua. The samples are dried, crushed and pulverized with the pulps being sent airfreight for analysis by ALS in Vancouver B.C. Systematic assaying of standards is performed for precision and accuracy. Analysis for silver, zinc, lead and copper and related trace elements was done by ICP four acid digestion, with gold analysis by 30 gram fire assay with an AA finish.

Qualified Persons

The Kootenay technical information in this news release has been prepared in accordance with the Canadian regulatory requirements set out in National Instrument 43-101 (Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects) and reviewed on behalf Kootenay by James McDonald, P.Geo, President, CEO & Director for Kootenay, a Qualified Person.

About Kootenay Silver Inc.

Kootenay Silver Inc. is an exploration company actively engaged in the discovery and development of mineral projects in the Sierra Madre Region of Mexico and in British Columbia, Canada. The Company's top priorities are the advancement of the La Cigarra silver project and the Promontorio Mineral Belt, in Chihuahua, Mexico and Sonora, Mexico, respectively. The La Cigarra property is 26 kilometres from the historic mining city of Parral and boasts nearby power, good road access, gentle topography, and established infrastructure. La Cigarra currently hosts a resource estimate of 18.54 million tonnes containing 51.47 million ounces of silver in the Measured & Indicated categories grading 86.3 g/t silver and 4.45 million tonnes containing 11.46 million ounces of silver in the Inferred category grading 80 g/t silver. The mineralized system at La Cigarra has been traced over 6.5 kilometres and is defined at surface as a silver soil anomaly and by numerous historic mine workings. The La Cigarra silver deposit is open along strike and at depth and is approximately 25 kilometres north, and along strike, of Grupo Mexico's Santa Barbara mine and Minera Frisco's San Francisco del Oro mine. The Promontorio Mineral Belt includes the Company's La Negra high-grade silver discovery and its Promontorio Silver Resource. The Promontorio Mineral Belt is under option to Pan American Silver whereby they can earn a 75% interest in the project with US$16 million of expenditures and payments with Kootenay retaining a 25% carried to production interest (see news release February 16 and March 4, 2016). The Promontorio Silver Resource currently hosts a resource estimate of 44.5 million tonnes containing 92 million ounces of silver equivalent in the Measured & Indicated categories grading 64.3 g/t silver equivalent and 14.6 million tonnes containing 24.3 million ounces of silver equivalent in the Inferred category grading 52 g/t silver equivalent. The Company's core objective is to create value by acquiring silver resources through discovery and acquisition and testing those resources with the ultimate goal of developing them into silver production if they are proven to be economically viable.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:

The information in this news release has been prepared as at June 15, 2016. Certain statements in this news release, referred to herein as "forward-looking statements", constitute "forward-looking statements" under the provisions of Canadian provincial securities laws. These statements can be identified by the use of words such as "expected", "may", "will" or similar terms.

Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of factors and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Kootenay as of the date of such statements, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors, known and unknown, could cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. Except as otherwise required by law, Kootenay expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statements to reflect any change in Kootenay's expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.

Cautionary Note to US Investors: This news release may contain information about adjacent properties on which we have no right to explore or mine. We advise U.S. investors that the SEC's mining guidelines strictly prohibit information of this type in documents filed with the SEC. U.S. investors are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on our properties. This news release may contain forward-looking statements including but not limited to comments regarding the timing and content of upcoming work programs, geological interpretations, receipt of property titles, potential mineral recovery processes, etc. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

This press release uses the terms "Measured", "Indicated", and "Inferred" resources. United States investors are advised that while such terms are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission does not recognize them. "Inferred Mineral Resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an Inferred Mineral Resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources may not form the basis of feasibility or other economic studies. United States investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of Measured or Indicated Mineral Resources will ever be converted into Mineral Reserves. United States investors are also cautioned not to assume that all or any part of a Mineral Resource is economically or legally mineable.

Please contact: James McDonald, CEO and President, at +1-403-880-6016; Ken Berry, Chairman, at +1-604-601-5652, +1-888-601-5650; or visit: http://www.kootenaysilver.com

SOURCE Kootenay Silver Inc.
LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The destination partners representing London's West End [Grosvenor, Heart of London Business Alliance, New West End Company and Shaftesbury] have revealed how their iconic destinations will celebrate Her Majesty's 90th birthday, this year. A new guide entitled '90 West End Ways to Celebrate HM The Queen's 90th' is now available to help UK and overseas visitors take in the sights, shopping, culture, dining and special experiences across the West End throughout Queen Elizabeth II's milestone year.

Combining the very best, hand-picked selections, the guide highlights the top ongoing and one-off happenings across the West End in celebration of Her Majesty's big birthday - from Union Flags, selfie spots, store displays and food and drink offers, to installations, events, ceremonies and famous landmarks.

To coincide with the guide's launch, hundreds of Union Flags have been displayed in key locations across London's West End. Flags can be seen fluttering on Mount Street, Duke Street and North Audley Street, as well as Oxford Street, Bond Street, Regent Street and Conduit Street. Royal bunting and decorations are also displayed across Carnaby Street, Seven Dials and The Newburgh Quarter, with some flying high and proud until October.

New West End Company CEO Jace Tyrrell commented, "The West End's prime location puts us in a unique position to celebrate 90 years of Her Majesty The Queen. Whether championing specially designed products from our best British retailers, experiencing one-off exhibitions in honour of HM Queen Elizabeth II or exploring the West End's cultural landmarks from streets Her Majesty herself has trodden, we are all set up for visitors to join the birthday celebrations throughout the remainder of 2016."

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: "Over Her Majesty's lifetime, the area in which she was born has evolved into one of the most exciting places to be on the planet. London's vibrant West End is a vital contributor to the capital's economy, creating jobs and attracting tourists from around the world. I'm confident this historic occasion will see even more people visit London and enjoy everything this great city has to offer."

The guide can be downloaded at: http://www.oxfordstreet.co.uk/90-ways-celebrate-queen

The official hashtag for the guide is #WestEnd90

SOURCE Grosvenor, Heart of London Business Alliance, New West End Company and Shaftesbury
SAN FRANCISCO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The global mannitol market is expected to reach USD 418.3 million by 2024, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Increasing demand for confectionery and bakery products such as candies, chewing gums and lozenges is expected to drive the market growth.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150105/723757 )

Mannitol is used for coating these products and also has less calorie content compared to sugar. It is widely used in sugar-free products on account of its non-hygroscopic nature and is also consumed primarily by patients suffering from diabetes.

Rising geriatric population base who do not have ready access to water at times, use mannitol-derived chewing gums. Such a trend is expected to aid the overall market over the forecast period. Owing to properties such as cooling sensation in the mouth, good aqueous solubility and lesser sensitivity towards humidity, mannitol is widely used in food grade application.

However, excessive consumption of mannitol may cause laxative effect among human beings. Such a trend is anticipated to negatively impact the global demand along with its prices over the future years.

Various regulations have been issued by European and the U.S. governments such as E421, which have been favorable to the industry growth over the next eight years. Moreover, there have been lots of technological advances in recent past to produce cheaper raw materials such as inulin which is a polymer of fructose and derived from plant tubers. These are expected to create new avenues for industry participants.

Browse full research report with TOC on "Mannitol Market Analysis By Application (Food Additive, Pharmaceuticals, Industrial, Surfactants) And Segment Forecasts To 2024" at: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/mannitol-market

Further key findings from the report suggest:

The global mannitol market demand was 16.6 kilo tons in 2015 and is expected to reach 35.9 kilo tons by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 9.0% from 2016 to 2024

Food additive emerged as the leading application segment and accounted for 36.9% of total market volume in 2015. Increasing demand for low calories sugar on account of growing health awareness is expected to drive this segment over the forecast period.

Pharmaceutical is presumed to be the fastest growing application segment at an estimated CAGR of 9.6% from 2016 to 2024. Mannitol is used as excipients in pharmaceutical tablet formulation and also helps in treating diseases related to kidney & brain.

Asia Pacific emerged as the most dominant regional market in 2015 and held over 60% of global demand for the same year. Changing lifestyle coupled with the prevalence of diseases related to sugar consumption in China , Japan and India are expected to benefit the regional market.

emerged as the most dominant regional market in 2015 and held over 60% of global demand for the same year. Changing lifestyle coupled with the prevalence of diseases related to sugar consumption in , and are expected to benefit the regional market. Key companies in the industry include Roquette, Cargill, SPI Polyols, Inc., SPI Pharma, Bright Moon Seaweed, Singsino Group Ltd., Hebei Huaxu Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd, EMD Millipore and Moga International Ltd. The market witnesses' different dynamics regarding market strategies, M&As, and product diversification.

Grand View Research has segmented the global mannitol market on the basis of application and region:

Global Mannitol Application Outlook (Volume, Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2024) Food Grade Pharmaceuticals Industrial Surfactants Others

Global Mannitol Regional Outlook (Volume, Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2024) North America U.S. Europe Germany UK Italy Asia Pacific China India Central & South America Middle East & Africa



Browse related reports by Grand View Research:

Flavonoids Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/flavonoids-market

Savory Snacks Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/savory-snacks-market

Cereal Bar Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/cereal-bar-market

Diabetic Food Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/diabetic-food-market

About Grand View Research

Grand 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.

Read Our Blogs - legalworkshop.org, grandviewresearch.com/blogs/food-and-beverages

Contact:

Sherry James

Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Grand View Research, Inc

Phone: 1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: sales@grandviewresearch.com



Web: www.grandviewresearch.com

SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
BRADFORD, England, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Eclipse Legal Systems has today announced the implementation of its Law Society Endorsed Proclaim Practice Management Software solution at Kent-based law firm, Mansfield and Chaston.

The practice provides a personal and affordable service, offering legal assistance across a range of areas, from Personal Injury to Probate and Commercial law. The firm understands the costs involved in legal services and therefore strives to keep its overheads low by offering a fixed fee service to maximise accessibility for clients.

Eclipse has implemented its ready-to-go Personal Injury Proclaim software within Mansfield & Chaston's core integrated Proclaim Practice Management solution, serving to improve efficiency and transparency whilst providing staff with a range of tools to enhance the overall client journey. Furthermore, the integrated practice management and accounting toolset will form an entirely centralised desktop application and provide firm-wide financial management.

In addition, Mansfield and Chaston will take advantage of Proclaim's A2A (Application-to-Application) functionality to process RTA (Road Traffic Accident) and EL/PL (Employer Liability/Public Liability) claims seamlessly through the Government's Portal system without having to leave Proclaim.

John Duncombe, Director at Mansfield and Chaston, comments:

"Client care is our highest priority so our core Practice Management system needed to be as efficient as possible to enable us to maximise our potential. It was clear to us that Eclipse offered the best solution in the legal software market and utilising Proclaim will enable us to provide a seamless client journey and build upon our existing reputation of excellence."



About Eclipse

Eclipse Legal Systems, part of Capita Plc, is the UK's leading provider of legal software solutions, employing over 160 staff at its Yorkshire HQ with a turnover of 10million.

The firm's Proclaim software system is in use by 23,000 professionals within a vast range of market sectors, territories and work areas. Proclaim is Endorsed by the Law Society (the only solution of its type to hold this accreditation) and integrates all case management, accounting, document management, reporting, time recording, task and diary functions into one desktop solution.

TouchPoint is Eclipse's unique self-service system, providing an always-on, platform agnostic portal for law firm clients and business partners.

Proclaim clients include:

Eversheds

DC Law (Move with us)

Co-operative Legal Services

Mansfield and Chaston

and Chaston Carillion plc

QualitySolicitors ( Howlett Clarke , Lockings, Oliver & Co, and others)

Eclipse's market territories include:

UK and Ireland

Latvia

Australia

Nigeria

Zambia

British Virgin Islands

For further information, please contact:

Darren Gower

Marketing Director

darren.gower@eclipselegal.co.uk

+ 01274 704100.

Website: http://www.eclipselegal.co.uk



SOURCE Eclipse
TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- NEXCOM network-attached storage (NAS) iNAS 330 offers data a safe harbor from hostile operating environments. Built with robust data protection at the hardware and system levels, the iNAS 330 delivers data resilience, integrity, and manageability to provide enhanced data availability for data-critical applications in the transport, oil and gas, and industrial sectors.

"The demand for robust data storage at the edge end of IoT is rising as the proliferation of IoT applications is picking up the pace. At NEXCOM, we believe the long-standing hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD) dilemma can be solved with a storage unit bringing data reliability at an affordable cost per gigabyte. With the release of NEXCOM iNAS 330, we aim to help improve public transportation safety with bus and train surveillance and enable data-based decision making in factories, oil rigs, and more," said Peter Yang, President of NEXCOM.

The iNAS 330 comes with three hard drive bays to address the needs for both large storage capacity and high fault tolerance. Depend on application requirements, the iNAS 330 can provide a maximum capacity of 3TB or a 2TB RAID 5 array to ramp up data resilience which enables data to be restored in a hard drive failure scenario with the replacement of a failed drive.

To maintain data integrity in harsh environmental conditions, the IP54-rated iNAS 330 is engineered to mitigate risk factors including vibrations and shocks, temperature extremes, and water and dust ingress. The iNAS 330 compliant with EN 61373 and EN 50155 standards shows high vibration and shock endurance suited to railway applications. If vibrations or shocks exacerbate, a buffer cache will take the place of hard drives to prevent speed drops, error-prone operations, and mechanical failures altogether. Moreover, redundant data connections and power supplies are supported by two screw-fastened M12 connectors to offer expanded throughput and failover for uninterrupted high-speed data transmission and power.

For use in the freezing cold and sizzling heat, the iNAS 330 can operate in the temperature range of -40 to 70 degrees Celsius when configured with SSD and -25 to 55 degrees Celsius with HDD. If the temperature falls below the range, embedded heaters can draw a combined total of 60 watts of power from two 802.11at PoE+ ports to quickly warm up the iNAS 330 to the required working temperature, and keep the temperature within the range throughout the operation.

As to data management, the iNAS 330 has a dedicated port for managerial purposes, which can separate data query traffic to avoid unauthorized changes to system settings.

Main Features

3x HD bays for 3TB capacity

Data protection in harsh environments

Enhanced system reliability with compliance with EN50155 and EN61373

Redundant data and power design with 2x 802.3at PoE+

Extended temperature support from -40 degrees C to 70 degrees C (SSD)

IP54-compliant for water and dust resistance

For more information, please contact our distributor HAL TECHNOLOGY L.L.C, Mehrdad Taher Zadeh at +97144547657 / taher@hal.ae or visit www.nexcom.com.

About NEXCOM: Founded in 1992, NEXCOM integrates its capabilities and operates six global businesses, which are IoT Automation Solutions, Intelligent Digital Security, Internet of Things, Interactive Signage Platform, Mobile Computing Solutions, and Network and Communication Solutions. NEXCOM serves its customers worldwide through its subsidiaries in five major industrial countries. Under the IoT megatrend, NEXCOM expands its offerings with solutions in emerging applications including IoT, robot, connected cars, Industry 4.0, and industrial security. www.nexcom.com

Liyin Lin

Marketing Director, NEXCOM

Email: liyinlin@nexcom.com.tw

Tel: +886 2 8226 7786 ext. 2110

Photo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160614/8521603880

Related Links

http://www.nexcom.com



SOURCE NEXCOM
An alligator is seen at the Gator Park in the Florida Everglades May 17, 2006 in Miami-Dade County. (Photo : Getty Images/ Joe Raedle)

It is a time for mourning in Orlando, Florida, following a series of tragedies in a span of a week. The authorities have released the first photo of the two-year-old Nebraskan boy, the Disney tragedy victim after an alligator pulled him into the Seven Seas Lagoon near the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa.



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On June 15, Wednesday, the Orange County Sheriff shared the photo of the Disney tragedy victim, Lane Graves on Twitter several hours after the body of the boy was found. The Orange County Sheriff's dive team recovered the intact body of Graves with only a few puncture injuries. His body was handed down to the Orange County Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy.



Deepest condolences to the Graves family. Thoughts and prayers are with you during this difficult time. pic.twitter.com/nXaRrgjLhl

 OCSO FL News (@OrangeCoSheriff) June 16, 2016







"The child was found within the immediate area of where he was last seen," People quoted Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings as saying. "It took some time to go through, but our divers were able to locate the body using sonar equipment."



An autopsy will prove if the child was drowned by the alligator. Graves' remains were recovered nearly 10 to 15 yards from where he was pulled by the alligator. The authorities invited a priest to deliver the news to the distraught parents, Matt and Melissa Graves.



Since the Disney tragedy incident, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has been working on taking the alligator involved from the lagoon. So far, they have taken five already to make sure that the alligator will be removed.



It was not the first Disney tragedy in its history. In July 2015, a three-year-old boy was drowned at the Art of Animation Resort. A mechanic was also killed in one of the ride vehicles at the Animal Kingdom in 2011. Earlier in 2009, the monorail system of Disney was remodeled following a crash involving a pilot, WESH reported.



This was supposed to be a grand week for Walt Disney after the opening of Shanghai Disney Resort, but the merriment turned into a disaster. The alligator attack coincides with the biggest celebration in the company's timeline after it invested $5.5 billion for the 5-year-construction of the amusement theme park in China. It also followed the Orlando shooting that killed 49 and injured 50 people.



Recently, "The Voice" alum Christina Grimmie was gunned down by a deranged fan following a concert in Orlando. Following the Disney tragedy, the company and its CEO Bob Iger released separate statements expressing their sadness in the devastating incident.



Watch the video below for more details on Disney alligator attack:






On May 26, POSCO E&C held its groundbreaking ceremony at the construction site in the Telfers industrial complex in Colon, Panama and has begun construction on the Colon CCPP.

The Colon CCPP project will build an LNG CCPP along with a 180,000m3 LNG storage tank to supply fuel at Colon, which lies near the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, and is about 70km north of Panama City, the capital of the Republic of Panama. With a construction cost of $650 million, the power plant will be completed in July 2018 and the LNG tank in May 2019.

The Colon CCPP is the largest of its kind in Panama, with a generation capacity that will allow for approximately 300,000 households to use electricity simultaneously. Once completed, the power plant will provide a stable supply of electricity to the industrial complex near Panama Canal and the Colon area.

"The project is the result of efforts to establish trust with the ordering parties in Latin America over the past decade," said Han Chan-kun, CEO of POSCO E&C, stressing the important aspect of the project. "It will be a great chance for us to showcase the high-quality construction technology of E&C across the world."

POSCO E&C entered into the energy plant market of Latin America in 2006 for the first time among domestic construction companies, with the construction of a coal-fired power plant (CFPP) in Ventanas, Chile, which was awarded by AES. The company successively won contracts of Campiche and Angamos CFPP in Chile in 2007 and Kallpa and Chilca Uno CCPP in Peru in 2009. By achieving a total of $5.6 billion in Latin America over 10 years since it made its first foray into the area, POSCO E&C has demonstrated its quality construction technology throughout the world and is endeavoring to solidify its position as one of the major players in Latin America's energy plant market.

SOURCE POSCO E&C
PORTLAND, Oregon, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- US Unlocked and OPAS enable more than 100,000 consumers worldwide to reach US businesses by using the US Unlocked Virtual Visa Prepaid Card combined with an OPAS personal US package forwarding address. This combination of services enables global consumers to shop for US items and services they want and receive them in their country of residence.

US Unlocked offers an approved virtual Visa account, designed specifically to allow non US citizens to buy increasingly popular US goods and services. A growing global middle class with increasing purchase power wants to shop and ship the goods to their homes, creating a demand for global commerce, shipping and payment solutions.

Brion Bonkowski, CEO of Tern Commerce, said: "OPAS has been a great partner to US Unlocked for many years. We are pleased they are now a certified partner and are looking forward to growing our relationship  bringing our strategic strengths together to serve our foreign customers."

OPAS' customer service based approach results in straightforward membership levels that allow consumers to shop when they want, resting assured their packages are consolidated effectively and shipped at their request. OPAS cost saving package consolidation service combines multiple packages into one, saving members millions on international shipping charges.

"We are able to offer competitive shipping rates to our customers due to the robust growth we saw in 2014 and 2015. We continue to offer first class customer service, great value and competitive international shipping rates for mail and package forwarding from the US for customers," said Toshiyasu Abe, CEO OPAS.

The solution

By making available a US based virtual debit card, coupled with an approved US package forwarding address as the card's billing address, US Unlocked and OPAS are able to offer customers unprecedented access to highly sought after goods and services they were never before able to purchase, creating substantial savings for global consumers.

The goods

Popular brands such as Ralph Lauren, Williams & Sonoma, GAP and Victoria's Secret that are often either not available in certain geographies or cost prohibitive to buy locally are now possible to purchase from retailers such as Amazon, Zappos and Sephora. Our consumers purchase genuine big brand names, luxury goods, nutraceuticals, baby goods/formula, digital goods, auto parts, medical equipment and many other products are forwarded to happy consumers daily.

The US Unlocked Virtual Card is issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa, U.S.A. Inc. "Metropolitan" and "Metropolitan Commercial Bank" are registered trademarks of Metropolitan Commercial Bank  2014.

SOURCE OPAS
LES CHARBONNIERES, Switzerland, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Valtronic has officially opened its Innovation Office in the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) Innovation Park on June 6, 2016, in the presence of government officials, researchers, customers as well as academic and other partners.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379693LOGO )



The office on the EPFL campus is Valtronic's fourth worldwide location, next to the corporate headquarters in Switzerland and the sites in Cleveland (Ohio, USA) and Casablanca (Morocco). "Our presence on campus and within the networks of Switzerland Innovation shows our commitment to innovation. Staying close to new technologies and research is key for our continued success as a partner of choice for our customers. Our presence here gives us access to technologies as well as talent in the MedTech field", said Dr. Rainer Platz, Valtronic CEO.

Mrs. Corboud Fumagalli, EPFL Vice President for Innovation and Technology Transfer, welcomed Valtronic amongst the other companies active in Biotech, Medtech, Micro and Nano-technologies on campus. Mr. Raphael Conz, head of the Economic Promotion of the State of Vaud, praised Valtronic's contribution to the economic tissue as a high-tech company, active in the second sector within Switzerland and the Canton of Vaud.

Dr. Rainer Platz outlined in his presentation the vision behind Valtronic's innovation strategy and its contribution to the generation of value for Valtronic and its customers. "Continuously fortifying our foundations of technologies, people and experience is essential for remaining competitive in the future", he said.

The following series of keynote speakers shared their visions and experiences regarding challenges and opportunities for innovation between the laboratory and finally economic success. Prof. Dr. Philippe Renaud, Professor in the Microsystem Laboratory at EPFL and the scientific director of EPFL's Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMi) shared his experiences from having encouraged and accompanied the foundation of numerous start-ups by his students. He insisted on the fact that scientific standards and the university's primary mission of teaching could not be compromised and the entrepreneurial spirit needed to come on top. Mr. Sacha Cerboni, Chief Quality Officer of Sensimed AG gave an insightful talk about innovation and its challenges from the perspective of one of these startups, emphasizing the numerous hurdles to a finally successful market introduction, as well as Valtronic's contribution to overcome these. Finally, Dr. Abed Hammoud, CEO of Renishaw Mayfield, spoke about their impressive range of products and reminding the audience of the positive impact of Medical Device Technology on patients' quality of life.

For more information about Valtronic, visit http://www.valtronic.com. To find out more about Valtronic's new office in the EPFL Innovation Park, visit http://epfl-innovationpark.ch .

About Valtronic

We innovate & manufacture miniaturized and complex products and systems for our medical device partners. Our customers are leading global suppliers of Active Implants, Medical-grade Wearables, Portables and Medical Equipment as well as advanced industrial assemblies. For over 30 years, we have helped hundreds of companies develop and produce Class II & III medical devices and advanced miniaturized electronic assemblies.

Valtronic Technologies SA

Route de Bonport 2

1343 Les Charbonnieres

Switzerland

http://www.valtronic.com



Media Contact

Marie Boissonnat

Valtronic Marketing

P: +41-21-841-01-19

E: mboissonnat@valtronic.com



SOURCE Valtronic
AMSTERDAM, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Constellium N.V. (NYSE and Euronext: CSTM) ("Constellium" or the "Company") announces results from its 2016 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders which was held yesterday. All voting items were adopted at the meeting except for the proposal to increase the number of shares under the 2013 Equity Incentive Plan (described in the annual meeting materials).

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130624/NY37453LOGO

Mr. Jean-Marc Germain was appointed as a new Executive Board Member of the Company and Ms. Martha Brooks as a new Non-Executive Board Member.

The following directors were re-appointed: Mr. Pierre Vareille as Executive Board Member and Mr. Richard Evans, Mr. Peter Hartman, Mr. Michiel Brandjes, Mr. Phillippe Guillemot, Mr. John Ormerod and Ms. Lori Walker as Non-Executive Board Members.

About Constellium

Constellium (NYSE and Euronext: CSTM) is a global sector leader that develops innovative, value added aluminium products for a broad scope of markets and applications, including aerospace, automotive and packaging. Constellium generated 5.2 billion of revenue in 2015.

www.constellium.com

Related Links

http://www.constellium.com



SOURCE Constellium
TEL AVIV, Israel, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

In world first, WakingApp's updated release allows non-developers to easily create interactive VR content (even games) for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets - including dozens of pre-made advertising, e-commerce, and educational templates.

WakingApp today announced a new innovative release allowing users to publish their own VR content also to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets without any technical skills. Wakingapp provides a powerful cloud-based platform that enables users to create virtual and augmented reality content. The firm's ENTiTi VR content creation platform for PC and Mac is the first in the world to enable non-developers easily to create rich, highly interactive virtual reality content for leading devices. Prior to this latest launch, hundreds of virtual reality and augmented reality creations were published to the WakingApp iOS and Android app daily by non-developers around the world. However now, user-generated content on the platform can be created at once, for those devices, as well as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive devices, opening up a new market and positioning WakingApp as a trailblazer in virtual reality content creation.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151104/283733LOGO )



Indeed, this is a revolution in the virtual reality industry by empowering non-developers with the ability to create and publish VR content live in a matter of hours what today can take experienced engineers months of work.

A recently published Industry Note by analysts from PiperJaffray called WakingApp "the Wix of virtual and augmented reality," and added, "The ENTiTi environments are built by using intuitive tools that shelter the builder from complex code in the same way Wix makes building a website simple. Applications of environments and experiences already built on ENTiTi include education, real estate, retail/commerce, design, gaming, and schematic planning. Our use of the app found it easy to use, and the best example we have seen in making it simple to build virtual and augmented experiences."

"We are on the verge of the biggest evolution that mankind has experienced. The way humans interact with our environment will be completely different," said Alon Melchner, Founder and President of WakingApp. "We set a goal to enable future technologies like VR, AR and IoT so everyone will be able to take part in it not only as a viewer but also as a creator of content. Very soon the focus will shift from hardware to content. Gone are the days where an engineering degree was required to be a part of the virtual reality revolution. IoT is going to be the next technology enabled by WakingApp in the next updates and it will be combined with AR and VR as the interface for IoT."

"We are proud to be pioneers in VR/AR content creation and the first to create an easy way for anyone to create virtual reality environments and experiences for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive too," said Udi Shani, CEO of WakingApp. "WakingApp is at the forefront of content creation as the leading market platform to allow non-developers - artists, advertisers, educators, small business and enterprises."

WakingApp enables anyone, regardless of prior programming experience, to create advanced interactive VR and AR content once and immediately make it viewable on leading Mobile VR glasses like Google Cardboard, Zeiss VR One, FreeFly VR and Samsung Gear VR and now also Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and upcoming new devices.

Thanks to WakingApp's ENTiTi platform, anyone can now create Virtual reality and Augmented reality content in hours and immediately publish it to all major platforms so this medium will finally be able to meet the demand for content in the near future.

Learn more at http://www.wakingapp.com, @WakingApp and http://www.facebook.com/WakingApp.

Contact:

Sharon Segal

sharon@wakingapp.com

+972-50-2066637

http://www.wakingapp.com



SOURCE WakingApp
KIRKLAND, Wash., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Evergreen Safety Council (ESC) is proud to recognize Continental Mills, Inc. as the 2015 recipient of the John D. Spellman Safety Award. The award will be presented to Continental Mills on June 24th, 2016.

The annual John D. Spellman Safety Award was created in 2006 to recognize ESC member organizations and individuals that have demonstrated outstanding safety achievements or have shown they are actively pursuing and reinforcing a positive safety culture in their workplace. The award also recognizes one of Washington's great public servants, Governor John D. Spellman. King County's first elected County Executive and Washington's 18th Governor, Governor Spellman has also been a member of ESC's Board of Directors for more than 35 years. He served as President/Executive Director during ESC's critical restructuring in 1989 and has served as Chairman of the Board since 1998.

Continental Mills, a manufacturer of premium dry-mix baked goods led by their Krusteaz brand pancake, muffin, and cookie mixes, as well as their Ghirardelli brownie mix, operates four manufacturing and distribution centers with corporate offices in Tukwila, WA.

Continental Mills, Inc was chosen for the award because over the past eight years they achieved an 87% reduction in injury incident rates. Though they started with an incident rate that was already well below the national average, further decreases since 2014 have moved them to a "Best in Class" ranking in their industry.

Continental Mills employed a company-wide strategy led by Bob Toohey, CSP, Senior Manager of EHS, to improve their safety systems including:

a goal of 100% employee involvement with program ownership by operations leaders,

use of internal safety systems audits for continuing improvement, and

establishing a "Risk Predictions" model and campaign for employee use on multiple levels in planning safe daily work.

John Heily, CEO & Chairman of the Board at Continental Mills stated, "We are very proud of the recognition we have received from the Evergreen Safety Council for promoting a culture of safety in the workplace. This recognition truly belongs to the 800 Continental Mills employees that make a safe workplace environment a reality. We will continue to invest, collaborate, train, and listen to our workforce, and strive to achieve our preferred future which is having an accident free environment."

About Continental Mills, Inc.

Continental Mills, Inc. began operating in 1932 and is family-owned. CM produces over 500 products under several breakfast, baking, and snack brands. Under the portfolio of breakfast and baking is their flagship brand Krusteaz, as well as Kretschmer Wheat Germ, Albers Cornmeal and Grits, Alpine Cider and several licensed product extensions. Under the snacking portfolio is their WildRoots Trail Mixes sold in Club stores, and new Buck Wild Snacks. Continental Mills headquarters is located in Tukwila, WA and employs 800 people between the Corporate office and four manufacturing facilities in Washington, Kentucky, Illinois and Kansas. CM products are sold through retail, foodservice, and club store channels throughout the United States.

About Evergreen Safety Council: Established in 1932, Evergreen Safety Council (ESC) has been providing safety training, consulting, and resources to organizations and individuals throughout the Pacific Northwest for more than 80 years. ESC is a private, non-profit 501(c)(3), non-governmental organization based in Kirkland Washington. ESC is a member of the National Safety Council and a founding member of the American Association of Safety Councils.

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SOURCE Continental Mills, Inc.
AUSTIN, Texas, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SoftServe, a leading global technology solution provider, today revealed findings from its Big Data Survey indicating that 62% of medium to large organizations expect to implement machine learning for Business Analytics purposes within the next two years.

The research, conducted for SoftServe by Vanson Bourne in April, polled a cross-industry panel of 100 UK and 200 US decision-makers on the risks, challenges and opportunities they see as Big Data technology evolves. The data showed that Big Data Analytics technology, despite being relatively nascent, is already widespread with 86% of organisations having systems in place. Furthermore, medium to large organizations see it as a necessity and are receptive to new technologies that build upon Big Data Analytics.

Read the full survey results.

Respondents were asked what they saw as the biggest area of opportunity for Big Data in comparison to traditional systems, with 62% agreeing that they consider real time analysis as the biggest area of opportunity today.

"It's not long ago we were visiting enterprises and having to explain why they should look at big data. Today in 2016, Big Data Analytics is already considered a necessity to remain competitive by 63% of organizations," explains Serge Haziyev, VP Technology Services, SoftServe. "It's very encouraging that machine learning has featured so prominently in this survey. I find that businesses that take the plunge and implement machine learning techniques realize the benefits early on  it's a big step forward because it delivers prescriptive insights enabling businesses to not only understand what customers are doing, but why."

The survey also considered challenges and growing pains. The retail industry stood out as most concerned by data governance. All respondents agreed that it is more of a concern when implementing Big Data Analytics than with traditional systems.

About SoftServe

SoftServe (www.softserveinc.com) is a leading technology solutions company specializing in software product and application development and services. Since 1993 we've been partnering with organizations from start-ups to large enterprises to help them accelerate growth and innovation, transform operational efficiency and deliver new products to market. Our experience stretches from Big Data/Analytics, Cloud, Security and UX Design to the Internet of Things, Digital Health and Digital Transformation. We have offices across the globe and development centers across Eastern Europe.

Contact:

Nataliya Diomova

+1-866-687-3588 x 1282

[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20151112/286830LOGO



SOURCE SoftServe

Related Links

http://www.softserveinc.com


Tenzin Lhamo (L) and her mother Dolma Kyizom (R) of New York City hold a picture of the Dalai Lama and U.S. President Barack Obama as Tibetans gather outside the White House Feb. 18, 2010 in Washington, DC. (Photo : Getty Images/Alex Wong)

Despite opposition from China, United States President Barak Obama has privately met Dalai Lama. In fact, China has condemned any meeting between the foreign leaders and the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, whom the Communist nation considers to be a separatist.



During their recent private meeting in Washington, Obama has told the Dalai Lama that he should speak to the Chinese authorities; BBC reported quoting the White House. According to reports, the two leaders, who have met a number of times earlier, held behind-the-doors discussions in the White House Map Room.



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White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said President Obama conveyed to the Dalai Lama that he encourages dialogue between the Lama and China. Earnest added that according to the United State's policy, Tibet is a part of the People's Republic of China and the United States has never expressed its support for Tibetan independence.



Josh Earnest further said that both President Obama as well as the Dalai Lama accords importance to a "constructive and productive relation between the United States and China. President Obama thanked the Dalai Lama for the latter's condolences for the victims of the mass shooting at the gay night club in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday night, Reuters reported quoting Earnest.



Earnest further said that in the past too, President Obama had articulated his "warm personal feelings" for the Dalai Lama as well as appreciated his teachings and belief in preserving Tibet's distinctive religious, cultural and linguistic traditions. He added, "All of those were policy positions of the United States before the meeting occurred. Our policy hasn't changed after the meeting.''



Meanwhile, denouncing the private meeting between President Obama and the Dalai Lama on Wednesday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang categorically stated that the meeting will send a wrong signal to the separatist forces and the Tibet independence. Kang added that any such meetings will harm the mutual trust and cooperation between the United States and China.



Stating that the Dalai Lama is a dangerous separatist, Kang urged Washington to conform to its promises to recognize that Tibet is part of China and stop any support for Tibet independence. Meanwhile, an article in Xinhua, China's official news agency alleged that Washington was breaking its promise not to support Tibet's independence by hosting the meeting with the Dalai Lama.



The commentary stated that the meeting had "seriously jeopardized China-U.S. relations, and deeply hurt the Chinese people's feelings." According to the news agency, supporting the independence of Tibet is a clear interference in China's internal affairs, which tantamount to violation of the rules that govern international relations.



Watch President Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama in the White House on Feb. 18, 2010.






BETHESDA, Md., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) announced that the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor Journal Citation Reports has just increased the impact factor of the ACMG's peer-reviewed medical genetics and genomics journal, Genetics in Medicine (GIM) to 7.710 for 2015, up from 7.329 in 2014. GIM is currently ranked 13 of 165 titles in the Genetics & Heredity category and at the top of genetic journals that have a primarily clinical focus. The Impact Factor is an objective measure of the world's leading journals, based on articles' cited references and is oft considered a measure of a journal's overall successful performance and relevance to its field.

"We're delighted that our impact factor has continued to climb, placing Genetics in Medicine in the top 3% of all indexed journals. This increase is a testament to the vibrancy of our field as a whole, the increasing importance of genetics to medical practitioners of every specialty and a testament to the excellent research being pursued in clinical genetics and genomics," said GIM's Editor-in-Chief Jim Evans, MD, PhD, FACMG. Evans added that with the continued increase in GIM's prominence, the task of selecting which submitted manuscripts to publish becomes ever more difficult, stating that "GIM's success is due to a strong editorial team and the work of countless reviewers who help us select the very best manuscripts to publish."

"I would also like to emphasize that the continued rise of GIM's impact is a reflection of the importance of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics' to the broader medical community," added Evans.

ACMG President Gerald Feldman, MD, PhD, FACMG said, "Congratulations to Dr. Jim Evans and the entire editorial team at Genetics in Medicine. The rise reflects not only the critical role of medical genetics and genomics in the practice of medicine, but also the excellent science being performed by the authors, many of whom are members of the ACMG. In addition, Genetics in Medicine publishes the official policy statements and clinical and laboratory guidelines from ACMG, and these important and widely-cited documents contribute to the rise of the impact factor."

Genetics in Medicine is published by Nature Publishing Group (www.nature.com/gim)

The journal, published since 1998, is supported by an expert Board of Editors representing all facets of genetic and genomic medicine, including such specialties as biochemical genetics, cytogenetics and pharmacogenetics.

About the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and ACMG Foundation

Founded in 1991, ACMG is the only nationally recognized medical society dedicated to improving health through the clinical practice of medical genetics and genomics. The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (www.acmg.net) provides education, resources and a voice for 2000 biochemical, clinical, cytogenetic, medical and molecular geneticists, genetic counselors and other healthcare professionals, nearly 80% of whom are board certified in the medical genetics specialties. The College's mission is to develop and sustain genetic initiatives in clinical and laboratory practice, education and advocacy. Three guiding pillars underpin ACMG's work: 1) Clinical and Laboratory Practice: Establish the paradigm of genomic medicine by issuing statements and evidence-based or expert clinical and laboratory practice guidelines and through descriptions of best practices for the delivery of genomic medicine. 2) Education: Provide education and tools for medical geneticists, other health professionals and the public and grow the genetics workforce. 3) Advocacy: Work with policymakers and payers to support the responsible application of genomics in medical practice. Genetics in Medicine, published monthly, is the official ACMG peer-reviewed journal. ACMG's website (www.acmg.net) offers a variety of resources including Policy Statements, Practice Guidelines, Educational Resources, and a Find a Geneticist tool. The educational and public health programs of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics are dependent upon charitable gifts from corporations, foundations, and individuals through the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine (www.acmgfoundation.org.)

Contact Kathy Ridgely Beal, MBA

301-238-4582

[email protected]

SOURCE American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics

Related Links

http://www.acmg.net


WALTHAM, Mass., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alere Inc. (NYSE: ALR), a global leader in rapid diagnostics, today announced that its Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect assay has been awarded World Health Organization (WHO) prequalification, making it available for public sector procurement. The Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect is the first-ever molecular diagnostic that identifies HIV-1 and HIV-2 at the point of care (POC) in less than 60 minutes, and the first testing application on the Alere q platform.

The Alere q is a portable molecular diagnostic platform designed for use at the point of care. The WHO prequalification is for the Alere q instrument and its first application, the Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect cartridge. The Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect assay has the ability to detect and differentiate between HIV-1 and HIV-2 using just 25 l of whole blood or plasma. An immediate and urgent application for this test is Early Infant Diagnosis (EID). Diagnosing HIV in infants via molecular, as opposed to antibody testing, is critical because babies born to HIV-positive mothers have the mother's protective antibodies in their blood, and current POC antibody tests are not able to discriminate between a mother's and an infant's antibodies to detect if a newborn is infected with HIV. With WHO prequalification, the Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect can be actively deployed by global health organizations in developing countries. The test will be used by health workers to identify infants born with HIV infection, and link them to antiretroviral therapy (ART).

"Children with HIV are significantly  and tragically  less likely to receive ART compared to adults1, and traditional methods of EID do not address this gap because they don't allow for immediate linkage to care," said Avi Pelossof, Alere Global President of Infectious Disease. "Now, countries with the highest burden of HIV infection will have broader access to the Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect, which delivers lab-accurate results in 52 minutes. This will empower health workers to diagnose HIV while the mother and newborn are present, and immediately initiate ART if needed  giving these children a fighting chance to survive and thrive."

"Currently, most newborns in developing countries are screened for HIV infection via dry blood spot testing, but because health workers have to wait 3 to 6 weeks for results many potentially HIV-positive infants are lost to follow-up and remain untreated," said Landon Myer, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Family Medicine, University of Cape Town. "Now that point-of-care molecular EID can be implemented as part of national guidelines, health workers have a powerful tool to help meet WHO goals for timely viral HIV screening of newborns."

About the Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect Assay

Alere q uses a multiplexed real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methodology that allows amplification and detection of more than one target at the same time. In the case of the Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect, the assay can identify and distinguish between HIV-1 subgroup (M/N), HIV-1 subgroup (O) and HIV-2 and incorporates a series of onboard controls with every sample run in 52 minutes. This ensures the broadest coverage of subgroups and recombinant circulating forms of any commercially available molecular diagnostic assay. The Alere q was designed and engineered to operate in diverse and challenging environments and can be battery-powered. The clinical evidence for Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect assay in EID was demonstrated in a 2014 study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes (JAIDS). Results showed that five clinics in Mozambique used the assay, with high sensitivity and specificity, to diagnose HIV in infants, expediting the initiation of ART.2

Prior to WHO prequalification, the Alere q instrument was IVD CE marked (self-certified) on August 1, 2014 and the Alere q HIV-1/2 Detect assay received IVD CE certification on February 12, 2015.

For more information about Alere's complete continuum of HIV diagnostic solutions from initial screening and diagnosis to staging and ongoing monitoring, visit www.alerehiv.com.

About Early Infant Diagnosis

Among the world's 2.6 million HIV-infected children, 90% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, only 32% are receiving ART.3 The WHO recommends that all HIV-exposed infants have HIV viral load testing at 4 to 6 weeks of age or at the earliest opportunity thereafter, and that ART be initiated in infants diagnosed with HIV infection. According to the most recent UNAIDS Gap Report, however, only 42% of infants born to mothers living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries received this test within two months.4 When children with HIV are not diagnosed and treated on a timely basis, as many as one-third will die before their first birthday and half will die before the age of two years.5

About Alere

Alere believes that when diagnosing and monitoring health conditions, Knowing now matters. Headquartered in Waltham, Mass., Alere focuses on rapid diagnostics for infectious disease, cardiometabolic disease and toxicology. For more information on Alere, please visit www.alere.com.

1 UNAIDS. 2014 Gap Report.

2 Jani IV, et al. Accurate early infant HIV diagnosis in primary health clinics using a point-of-care nucleic acid test. JAIDS. 2014.67(1):e1-e4.

3 UNAIDS Children and HIV Fact Sheet. http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/FactSheet_Children_en.pdf.

4 UNAIDS. 2014 Gap Report.

5 WHO/UNAIDS/UNICEF. Global HIV/AIDS Response: Epidemic update and health sector progress towards Universal Access 2011.

SOURCE Alere Inc.

Related Links

http://www.alere.com


About the Winning Project

This whole house remodel transformed a ramshackle 1960's ranch style house into an elegant essence of a Robert Stern "Shingle Style" home found in the Hamptons. With its regal entry, palladium window, and sweeping ocean and mountain views, you subconsciously feel that the house is grander than it is. A new second story, added to capture the views, was perfectly placed and looks like it has always been there.

Every element of the home was discussed in detail by the project team  which included the owners, architect Peter Becker, interior designer Randy Franks, and Allen Construction  to get it just right. One example of this teamwork and attention to detail was bringing the owner's vision of having her kitchen island look like the grand piano she left behind in New Jersey (since there was no space in this new house for it). The piece de resistance is the actual part of a piano leg that supports the back of the counter.

Earlier this month, the company was awarded GuildQuality's prestigious Guildmaster distinction. The Guildmaster Awards recognize exemplary customer service among homebuilders, remodelers, real estate developers, and home services contractors. In granting this distinction, GuildQuality considers two primary metrics for each candidate: the percentage of customers who would recommend and the percentage of customers who responded.

About Allen Construction

Founded in 1983, Allen Construction is a nationally recognized, award-winning builder with a sustainable focus. The employee-owned company has offices in Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez, Ventura, and Los Angeles and provides both commercial and residential clients with remodeling, new construction, and energy services. In the past year alone, the company has won more than twenty awards, including two National Contractor of the Year awards from the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI).

Contact: Jen Lilienstein

Allen Construction

t: 805.450.5972

e: [email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380022

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380021

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380020

SOURCE Allen Construction

Related Links

http://www.buildallen.com


"With the momentum we're seeing in brain tumor research, treatment and care, we believe this annual conference is the ideal forum in which to bring patients and families living with a brain tumor diagnosis together with world-renowned researchers and medical practitioners to hear first-hand how precision medicine is impacting the understanding and treatment of their brain tumors," said Elizabeth Wilson, ABTA president and CEO.

The national conference, being held in Chicago July 29-30, is the nation's largest gathering of brain tumor patients, caregivers, healthcare professionals and researchers, attracting more than 250 attendees who come together for two days of education, support and networking opportunities.

"We are grateful for the leadership of program co-chairs Manmeet Ahluwalia, M.D., FACP, Cleveland Clinic Rose Ella Burkhardt Brain Tumor & Neuro-Oncology Center and Elizabeth B. Claus, M.D., Ph.D., Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Yale School of Public Health, in assembling a dynamic roster of presenters who will address current and emerging issues in brain tumor research and treatment," Wilson said.

Topics and speakers include:

Metastatic brain tumors & trends in glioma - Manmeet Ahluwalia , M.D., FACP, Cleveland Clinic, program co-chair

, M.D., FACP, Cleveland Clinic, program co-chair WHO reclassification of glioma - Kenneth Aldape , M.D., University of Toronto

, M.D., Surgery and brain mapping - Mitchel S. Berger , M.D., FACS, FAANS, University of California, San Francisco

, M.D., FACS, FAANS, High-Grade Tumors - E. Antonio Chiocca , M.D., Ph.D., FAANS Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School

- , M.D., Ph.D., FAANS Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Low-Grade Glioma Registry & research trends - Elizabeth B. Claus , M.D., PhD, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Yale University School of Public Health , program co-chair

, M.D., PhD, and Women's Hospital and , program co-chair Genomics - David A. Reardon , M.D., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

, M.D., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Meningioma - Galareh Zadeh, M.D., Ph.D., FRCSC, Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network

Galareh Zadeh, M.D., Ph.D., FRCSC, Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network Young adult and adolescent brain tumors - Jill Barnholtz-Sloan , Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center

, Ph.D., School of Medicine, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center Caring for the caregiver - Jean Arzbaecher, RN , MSN, APN, University of Illinois, Chicago

The ABTA National Patient & Family Conference, "Precision Medicine and its Impact on Brain Tumors: Low Grade, High Grade and Metastatic," will be held at the Westin O'Hare in Chicago, July 29-30, 2016. Advance registration is required by July 22, 2016: visit www.braintumorconference.org or call 800-886-ABTA (2282) or email [email protected]. A full agenda and conference schedule can be found online.

To register online, go to www.braintumorconference.org.

ABOUT THE AMERICAN BRAIN TUMOR ASSOCIATION

Founded in 1973, the American Brain Tumor Association was first and is the only national organization committed to funding brain tumor research and providing support and education programs for all tumor types for all ages.

For more information, visit www.abta.org or call 800-886-ABTA (2282).

CONTACT:

Martha Carlos

[email protected]

773-577-8790

Video - https://youtu.be/Z-Tp2p25W3o

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150901/262855LOGO

SOURCE American Brain Tumor Association

Related Links

http://www.abta.org


NEW YORK, June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading facilities-based telecom and fiber consulting company APTelecom, today announced several milestones achievements and notable announcements throughout the first half of 2016.

Among the most notable milestones the company achieved over the first six months of 2016 include:

Network Builds : APTelecom has proudly been involved in the network builds and contract in force (CIF) milestones for clients Angola Cables and NTT Docomo Pacific. Angola Cables went CIF for its highly-anticipated South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) network earlier this year, and NTT Docomo Pacific announced its Guam to Saipan network build.

: APTelecom has proudly been involved in the network builds and contract in force (CIF) milestones for clients Angola Cables and NTT Docomo Pacific. Angola Cables went CIF for its highly-anticipated South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) network earlier this year, and NTT Docomo Pacific announced its to Saipan network build. Client Growth and Expansion : APTelecom's client base has continued to increase throughout the first half of 2016, with expansion into new markets including France-IX in France.

: APTelecom's client base has continued to increase throughout the first half of 2016, with expansion into new markets including France-IX in France. APTelecom Digital Expansion: APTelecom continued to expand its digital presence in 2016, providing its global client base with access to the latest content, industry trends, and news on an ongoing basis. APTelecom's signature monthly expert video series on YouTube has received a warm response from clients and influencers in the subsea cable industry. Additionally, APTelecom's new website is expected to be launched in July 2016 , and will include a range of new content and multimedia features.

APTelecom continued to expand its digital presence in 2016, providing its global client base with access to the latest content, industry trends, and news on an ongoing basis. APTelecom's signature monthly expert video series on YouTube has received a warm response from clients and influencers in the subsea cable industry. Additionally, APTelecom's new website is expected to be launched in , and will include a range of new content and multimedia features. Media Accolades and Recognitions : APTelecom's management team has been featured in a range of leading industry publications and events as experts on the subsea cable industry. So far in 2016, APTelecom's management team has been featured in Entrepreneur Radio, International Business Times, PTC '16, CommunicAsia, and others. Additionally, APTelecom Co-Founder and CEO Eric Handa will appear as a featured speaker at Submarine Networks World (SNW '16) this September in Singapore .

: APTelecom's management team has been featured in a range of leading industry publications and events as experts on the subsea cable industry. So far in 2016, APTelecom's management team has been featured in and others. Additionally, APTelecom Co-Founder and CEO will appear as a featured speaker at Submarine Networks World (SNW '16) this September in . Pre-Sales Milestones : With half of 2016 in the books, APTelecom has reached a significant milestone this year, having seen over US $500 million in client systems achieve Ready For Service status (RFS), covering every continent on the globe.

: With half of 2016 in the books, APTelecom has reached a significant milestone this year, having seen over US in client systems achieve Ready For Service status (RFS), covering every continent on the globe. State of Subsea : APTelecom's "State of Subsea" initiative has continued to accelerate, with more than $100,000 in donations secured for underprivileged markets that are still struggling with access to critical ICT functions and infrastructure.

"We're extremely encouraged by the momentum thus far in 2016," said Eric Handa, Co-founder and CEO of APTelecom. "Our ability to work with clients on a global scale for their subsea cable and fiber consulting needs has proven to be critical in this environment .We look forward to continuing to expand our footprint and help clients reach their subsea and fiber goals as we get deeper into 2016."

For more information on APTelecom please visit www.APTelecom.com, and follow them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

ABOUT APTELECOM:

APTelecom is a leading telecom and fiber consulting company specializing in emerging markets. APTelecom combines superior customer service, cost-competitive telecom products, and deep experience across a wide range of sectors in the submarine cable and fiber industry to help clients achieve intelligent, sustainable growth. Among the company's core offerings are submarine cable pre-sales, established system sales, due diligence telecom consulting, cloud-based solutions and security, and strategic fiber consulting services.

APTelecom has been named the "Sales Team of the Year" by the Customer Sales and Service Awards, and also captured the "Fastest Growing Companies" Best in Biz EMEA Silver Award. The company has been sought after for commentary on emerging market trends and been featured in dozens of media outlets, including TechTalk, Wall Street Journal, Fox Business Network, Reuters, Yahoo News, Fierce Telecom, SubTel Forum, and Commsday International, among others.

APTelecom is a member of TRACE International, and is FCPA compliant and certified.

* APTelecom's 'State of Subsea' is a 501(c) organization (501c), a tax-exempt nonprofit organization based in the United States, and is covered under United States Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C.  501(c)).

Media Contact:

North 6th Agency, Inc. (For APTelecom)

[email protected]

212.335.9753 ext. 101





SOURCE APTelecom

Related Links

http://www.aptelecom.com


HERZLIYA, Israel, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Phoenix Group (TASE: PHOE), one of Israel's largest Insurance and Finance Companies, and Arkin Holdings, an investment entity specializing in the life science field, today announced a Strategic Collaboration Agreement for investment in pharma and biotech companies, for a total of approximately $60 Million (with an option to increase the investment in the future). The new partnership, 'Arkin Bio-Ventures' (51% Arkin Holdings and 49% Phoenix) aims to invest in companies that develop promising innovative pharmaceuticals in pre-clinical and more advanced stages, both in Israel and globally. Dr. Pini Orbach, Head of Pharma at Arkin Holdings, will manage the Partnership. On behalf of Phoenix, Mr. Elad Givoni, Head of Private Equity, led the venture.

This is the largest investment ever made by the Phoenix Group in private pharma companies, and the first time its Investment Division promotes such an extensive life science collaboration. The joint venture will expand Phoenix's investment and return opportunities in private pharma companies, in Israel and worldwide. Phoenix believes that leveraging its financial resources and capabilities, along with the well-recognized specialized pharma expertise of Arkin Holdings will provide the Phoenix group an access to significant lucrative investments and involvement in a variety of promising pharma companies.

Arkin Holdings, managed by Mr. Nir Arkin, is well known as the largest and leading Israeli-based life science investor. The Arkin Holdings Group, founded by Mr. Mori Arkin, has successfully performed strategic investments in recent years in private pharma and biotech companies. The most prominent is cCAM Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage cancer immunotherapy company, which was acquired by Merck in July 2015 for a total of approximately $605 Million.

Mr. Roy Yakir, CEO, Phoenix Investments and Finances, commented: "Phoenix has been searching, for some time, for a way to be significantly exposed to private companies in the pharma field. This field is considered to have a potential for particularly high profitability, especially in connection with investments in private companies at the development stages. We believe that the experience and prominent reputation accumulated by Arkin Holdings in recent years as an investor specializing in the pharma industry will help us increase our exposure to the sector with an attractive yield-risk profile".

Mr. Mori Arkin, Chairman and Founder, Arkin Holdings, said: "We are extremely happy to collaborate with the Phoenix Group, one of Israel's largest Institutional Investors, and regard it as a first-rate financial and strategic partner. The joint platform we have created is an important milestone in the expansion of the Arkin Group's Pharma activity and will enable us to jointly capitalize Arkin group's substantial experience and knowledge, with Phoenix's proven investment abilities and track record, to the benefit of the Israeli Pharma Industry".

Phoenix Group manages approximately NIS 160 Billion through a variety of investment channels and various fields, such as real estate, non-bank financing, Private Equity and more.

The Arkin Group also operates in the life science field through Accelmed Fund, which manages over $250 Million invested in medical device, and through Sphera Global Healthcare fund, the largest hedge fund in Israel, managing approximately $500 Million invested in public pharma companies.

Additional information may be found on Arkin Holdings' website: http://www.arkinholdings.com

For more information (Arkin Holdings) :

Meirav Bauer

KM Investor Relations

Tel: +972-3-5167620

[email protected]

http://www.km-ir.co.il





And/or (Phoenix):

Nimrod Kelmer

Debby Communication

Tel: +972-3-5683000

[email protected]



SOURCE Arkin Holdings and Phoenix Group
NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Executive Summary

The global dairy industry has been experiencing a downturn lately. Key reasons include the slowdown in China's economy, abolition of the European Union's dairy-production quotas and Russia's ban on European Union's produce.



China's dairy sector,which was valued at USD 40.6 billion in 2013, is currently experiencing oversupply to such an extent that farmers are pouring milk down the drain and slaughtering cattle. The sector is also suffering on account of the global fall in milk prices and the quality issues in domestic milk production. Locals who can afford it prefer to consume only foreign brands of milk and milk products and this is causing a decrease in demand.



China's cow milk production grew at a fast rate from 2000-2007 but dropped sharply in 2008 due to the melamine scandal where a chemical was added to milk to artificially increase the protein content. Since 2008 milk production in China has been increasing at a moderate rate.



China with its huge populating and the rising urban middle class currently consumes less than one third of the global per capita milk consumption average. There lies an immense opportunity in the country's dairy sector but the sector can thrive only once it has been streamlined and modernized.



Why should the report be purchased?

The report 'Assessment of China's Dairy Industry 2016' highlights key dynamics ofChina's dairysector. The growing opportunity in the sector has been investigated along with key challenges. Key players including China Mengniu Dairy Company Ltd., Yili Group, Bright Dairy & Food Co., Ltd., Sanyuan Group, Nestle, Friesland Campina, Danone and Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd.The report contains latest industry-related opinions.



Research methodology and delivery time



Smart Research Insights has conducted comprehensive desk research to arrive at key insights. Data collected from key public industry sources and publications has been scanned and analyzed impartially to present a clear picture of the industry. All recent developments which impact the sector dynamics have been captured and used to support the research hypothesis.



The report is available as single-site single-user license. The delivery time for the electronic version of the report is 3 business days as each copy undergoes thorough quality check and is updated with the most recent information available. The dispatch time for hard copies 4 business days, as each hard copy is custom printed for the client.



Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p03658133-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, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Aterian Investment Partners ("Aterian"), a leading private equity firm, announces that one of its affiliates has completed the sale of Burner Systems International, Inc. ("Burner Systems" or the "Company") to Robertshaw US Holding Corp. ("Robertshaw").

Following the acquisition of Burner Systems, Aterian invested substantially in strategic growth initiatives, new equipment, innovation and an add-on acquisition in South America to further support its global long-term business plan and customer base.

Founded in 1960, Burner Systems is among the largest global suppliers of components, assemblies and system solutions for the gas-fueled cooking and heating appliance industry. Headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and with additional manufacturing facilities in Mexico and the United Kingdom, Burner Systems maintains market-leading positions with a broad spectrum of OEM's. As part of Robertshaw, Burner Systems will be focused on the continued expansion of their broad-based portfolio of products and services.

"We want to thank Aterian for their unwavering support and investment behind our growth, operating and organizational plan to further advance Burner Systems as the North American market leader in gas components," said Eric Griesemer, CEO of Burner Systems. "We are appreciative of Aterian's partnership and significant contribution to Burner Systems and look forward to continue this success with Robertshaw as we enter the next phase of our growth strategy."

Christopher H. Thomas, Partner at Aterian, added "Burner Systems is a strong Company with market-leading technology. It has been a pleasure to partner with the highly talented Burner Systems management team and invest in the Company's employees, product offering, innovation and international growth. We wish Burner Systems the best of success and look forward to watching Robertshaw and the Company in its continued progress."

"In concert with our new partner Robertshaw, this acquisition puts Burner Systems in an incredible position to serve the gas appliance industry. Robertshaw is a known and respected worldwide leader in appliance components. With their support, we will continue to develop our innovative product portfolio and offer even greater value to our customers," said Eric Griesemer.

About Burner Systems International, Inc.

Burner Systems International is a leading global manufacturer of components and full assemblies for the global gas cooking industry. BSI serves a broad spectrum of OEM's with the most complete gas technologies available, including capabilities for engineering, testing, and manufacturing to support customer designs. BSI's strategically located facilities provide high quality, low-cost assemblies and system solutions on a competitive timeframe. For more information, please visit www.burnersystems.com/

About Robertshaw

With a history dating back to 1899, Robertshaw is a leading designer, engineer and manufacturer of product solutions to the white goods industry. Robertshaw employs over 4,800 employees in 10 countries, has three engineering centers, nine manufacturing locations, and seven distribution centers worldwide. For more information, please visit www.robertshaw.com

About Aterian Investment Partners



Aterian is a leading private equity firm with a focus on partnering with middle-market businesses possessing strong, proven franchises. The firm provides resources to further enhance operations, growth and investment initiatives. Aterian specializes in complex and operationally-intense situations primarily across industrials, chemicals & commodities, metals & mining, retail, consumer products and healthcare services. For more information, please visit www.aterianpartners.com

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SOURCE Aterian Investment Partners

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DAYTON, Ohio, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Beacon Capital Management (www.BeaconInvesting.com), a registered investment advisory firm that offers long-term investors innovative portfolio management solutions, has been named to the Financial Times 300 Top Registered Investment Advisers list. The list, which recognizes top independent RIA firms from across the United States, was created from more than 1,500 pre-screened RIA firms invited to apply for consideration.

"It is truly an honor for us to be recognized as one of the top 300 RIA firms, especially from such a large field of worthy candidates. We pride ourselves on our three-pillar approach to investment management, which is to maximize diversification, minimize losses and maintain discipline. As a portfolio manager, we partner with advisors and institutions to offer investors cost-efficient portfolios that work to capture market gains while limiting market losses. We see this ranking as a testament to the fact that investors are seeking out the risk-managed benefits our investment strategies can provide," said Chris Cook, founder and CEO of Beacon Capital Management.

The "average" FT 300 firm has been in existence for 22 years and manages $2.6 billion in assets. The 300 top RIAs hail from 34 states and Washington, D.C. RIA firms were chosen based on their assets under management (AUM). Applicants that applied were then graded on six criteria: AUM; AUM growth rate; years in existence; advanced industry credentials of the firm's advisors; online accessibility; and compliance records. Neither the RIA firms nor their employees pay a fee to The Financial Times in exchange for inclusion in the FT 300.

This is the third annual FT 300 list, produced independently by the Financial Times Ltd. in collaboration with Ignites Research, a subsidiary of the FT that provides business intelligence on the investment management industry.

About Beacon Capital Management

Beacon Capital Management is a next-generation registered investment advisory firm dedicated to fundamentally improving the science of investing for fee-based financial advisors and institutions and the clients they serve. Beacon Capital Management was founded in July of 2000 to provide long-term investors innovative portfolio management solutions that work to capture gains while limiting losses from today's market volatility. In addition to investment management services, the firm empowers advisors with and turnkey marketing, operational and account management support. For more information about Beacon Capital Management, please visit www.BeaconInvesting.com or call 866-439-9093.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

SOURCE Beacon Capital Management

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HOUSTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Belmont Village Senior Living's memory enrichment program, Circle of Friends for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild to moderate dementia was recognized with the 2016 Best of the Best Memory Care Award at the Argentum Senior Living Executive Conference in Denver. Argentum, formerly the Assisted Living Federation of America, is the largest industry trade association for senior living companies. Its Best of the Best awards recognize initiatives that advance excellence in senior living.

"This year's nominations are a testament to the creativity, commitment, and care that is currently shaping our industry," said Argentum President and CEO James Balda. "These companies are truly setting new standards in the industry for their peers to embrace and emulate. We are proud to recognize their efforts."

Established at Belmont Village in 2007, Circle of Friends was developed to address the needs and abilities of residents with MCI and early stage memory loss. Under the leadership of nationally recognized gerontologist Beverly Sanborn, the Belmont team translated research findings into a first-of-its-kind, therapeutic program that supports a Whole Brain Fitness lifestyle, a combination of a wellness model with mental fitness. This innovative, unique approach focuses on brain health and promotes a higher level of cognitive, physical and social engagement, with the goal of slowing cognitive decline.

"Research shows apathy associated with dementia has been linked to accelerated decline in all physical and mental areas," said Beverly Sanborn, Belmont Village Vice President of Program Development. "Circle of Friends addresses apathy by creating an environment that encourages residents to actively participate in therapeutic activities that build cognitive reserve. Our family members have been very satisfied with the program and the positive impact it's made on their loved ones' lives."

Circle of Friends residents engage in small group activities seven days a week led by a dedicated and specially trained staff. Groups are organized by ability and activities are personalized to create the "just right challenge" for each resident. The work-outs engage six domains of mental fitness  critical thinking, memory-body movement, learning, sequencing, long-term memory and problem solving. To maintain effectiveness and resident interest, the evidence-based program relies on regular evaluations, conducted in consultation with Vanderbilt University's Center for Quality Aging.

Currently operating 24 communities nationwide, Belmont Village is a leading senior living provider known for its innovative programs, high standards for life safety, and reputation for quality. For more information, please visit www.belmontvillage.com.

FOR MORE INFO:

Lorena Grimes, [email protected]

713-463-1786 direct line

832-459-3276 cell

SOURCE Belmont Village Senior Living

Related Links

http://www.belmontvillage.com


U.N. Permanent Court of Arbitration to Release Decision on Philippines vs. China Claim on Scarborough Shoal on July 7

Scarborough Shoal (Photo : YouTube)

News of China planning to set up an outpost on Scarborough Shoal, or Panatag, made U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter warn China of military action. It is not only Washington which is observing developments in the South China Sea as the issue of which country owns the shoal has been elevated to an international court.



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The U.N. Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) said on Thursday that it would enter into deliberations on the arbitration case over ownership of Panatag Reef which the Philippines asked the tribunal to resolve. The U.N. body said it plans to issue its decision on July 7, 2016, reported Manilalivewire.



In anticipation of the release of the courts verdict, officials of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs are conducting emergency meetings with senior diplomats and foreign policy experts. The meetings aim to develop a concrete strategy once the decision is released.



Although the shoal is within the Philippine exclusive economic zone, China refused to withdraw from Panatag, resulting in Manila filing the memorial with the PCA based in The Hague, The Netherlands.



China claims that Scarborough is theirs based on its nine-dash line claim, but the Philippines said that Beijings claim is invalid since it breaches UNCLOS agreements on exclusive economic zones and territorial waters.



In turn, China, besides not participating in the deliberation, charged Manila with violating the voluntary Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, inked in 2002 between China and the ASEAN which includes the Philippines.



Meanwhile, Japan Times reported that Japan, in a span of one week, said it saw a Chinese reconnaissance vessel sailing on Wednesday through its territorial waters at about 3:30 a.m. The ship was spotted near Kochinoerabu Island in East China Sea.






THE SPY brings to life the true story Mata Hari, the famous courtesan and accused spy who was executed for treason one hundred years ago. Mata Hari was a dancer who shocked and delighted audiences during the First World War, and she became a confidant to some of the era's richest and most powerful men. She dared to liberate herself from the moralism and provincial customs of the early twentieth century, but she ultimately paid for it with her life. As she waited for her execution in a Paris prison, one of her last requests was for a pen and some paper to write letters.

Over the past twenty years, Germany, Holland, and MI5 in the UK have released their files on Mata Hari, and it provided Coelho with a trove of information as he was researching his novel. "I ended up with a mountain of documents," Coelho said, "but also with a question: What did Mata Hari write in those letters? And how was she caught in so many traps, set by both friends and enemies?"

Using first-person narrative, Coelho reimagines Mata Hari's life through her final letter, which was written the week before her execution. There, from prison, Mata Hari reveals the choices she made in pursuing her own truth--from her childhood in a small Dutch town, to her unhappy years as the wife of an alcoholic diplomat in Java, to her calculated and self-fashioned rise to celebrity in France. "Mata Hari was one of our first feminists," Coelho said, "defying male expectations of that time and choosing instead an independent, unconventional life. There are lessons we can draw from her life today, where accusations by the powerful still cost the innocent their lives."

At her death by firing squad -- as she stared down her executioners and refused to be blindfolded -- Mata Hari famously said, "I am ready." Coelho says of that moment, "her only crime was to be an independent woman."

THE SPY will be published by Knopf in hardcover and as an eBook, and by Penguin Random House as an audiobook and digital download, translated from the Portuguese by Zoe Perry; it will be published by Vintage Espanol as a Spanish-language hardcover.

About the author:

One of the most influential writers of our time, Paulo Coelho is the author of many international best sellers, including The Alchemist, Aleph, Eleven Minutes, Manuscript Found in Accra, and Adultery. Translated into 80 languages, his books have sold more than 195 million copies in more than 170 countries. Coelho has an enormous digital media presence, with more fans than any other author worldwide: over 17 million fans through Facebook page and 9 million followers on Twitter. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and has received the Chevalier de l'Ordre National de la Legion d'Honneur. In 2007, he was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Translated by Zoe Perry.

Author Site: paulocoelhoblog.com

Social: Facebook.com/paulocoelho; twitter.com/PauloCoehlo;

instagram.com/paulocoelho/

THE SPY by Paulo Coehlo

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Publication date: November 22, 2016

First print: 150,000

ISBN: 9781524732066 / $22.00 US / 208p

CONTACT: Paul Bogaards, Executive Vice President, Alfred A. Knopf

212-572-2177

[email protected]

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SOURCE Alfred A. Knopf

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San Francisco based Blueshift already serves several prominent customers in the APAC region, including Redmart, Singapore's largest online grocer, as well as India based companies like Snapdeal, Shopclues, Urban Ladder and Oyo Rooms.

"Blueshift has helped us drive targeted lifecycle marketing and improve our re-engagement rates dramatically," said Todd Kurie, VP of Marketing at Redmart. "With Blueshift, we are now able to launch personalized campaigns on email & mobile app push notifications, and drive a consistent message across different marketing channels."

As VP & Head of APAC, Shanker will lead Blueshift's expansion by establishing and developing relationships with brands and other leading marketers in the region. Prior to Blueshift, Shanker was the Head of Affiliate Marketing, Asia Pacific, for Groupon, based in Singapore. At Groupon, he was responsible for driving strategy, implementation and optimization for the company's highest trafficked region. Before joining Groupon, he worked for Yahoo!, Google and Dell in a variety of strategic management positions.

As VP of Engineering, Bhatia will oversee Blueshift's technology organization as the company continues to grow. Bhatia joins Blueshift from @WalmartLabs, where he was the Senior Director of Engineering, Smart Pricing, and led the team responsible for designing and executing the pricing platform that powers Walmart 's Global eCommerce. Prior to @WalmartLabs, Bhatia worked for Kosmix and Oracle in Silicon Valley, after graduating from Stanford University.

"As Blueshift continues its growth, we saw a great opportunity to introduce Segment-of-One marketing automation to the Asia Pacific region," said Blueshift's Co-Founder & CEO, Vijay Chittoor. "Dhruv and Nipun's impressive expertise and track records align perfectly with Blueshift's mission and we are happy to have them come aboard at this time of explosive growth."

"Having worked in the APAC region for a number of years, I'm excited to be joining Blueshift as we push to enter the ever growing Asia Pacific market," said Shanker.

"I'm thrilled to be joining Vijay and the rest of the team at Blueshift as we continue to grow and put our stamp on the global marketing automation landscape. I look forward to what's ahead as we combine machine learning and artificial intelligence to bring 'Rocket Science as a Service' to a whole new range of B2C marketers," said Bhatia.

About Blueshift:

San Francisco based Blueshift is the leader in Segment-of-One marketing automation for B2C companies. Using the power of real-time segmentation and dynamic-content personalization, Blueshift enables marketers to automate individualized messages across multiple channels including email, push notifications, Facebook & SMS. Blueshift was founded by serial entrepreneurs with backgrounds at successful companies such as Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs) and Mertado (now Groupon Goods). The company is funded by prominent venture capital and angel investors, including Storm Venture Partners, Luma Capital Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.

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SOURCE Blueshift

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SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico and MUNICH, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today's ground-breaking signals the start of construction of the new BMW Group plant in Mexico. Guests attending the official ceremony in San Luis Potosi included Rogelio Garza Garza, Undersecretary of Industry and Commerce at the Mexican Ministry of Economics; Dr. Juan Manuel Carreras Lopez, Governor of the state of San Luis Potosi; Oliver Zipse, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, responsible for Production and Milagros Caina-Andree, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, responsible for Human Resources and Labour Relations.

Newest BMW Group plant with cutting-edge technologies

Board of Management member for Production Oliver Zipse believes the new plant in San Luis Potosi will be a special location: "All of the BMW Group's knowledge and capabilities will be on show at our new location in Mexico. The production system being established there will be a leader in productivity and sustainability, thanks to the use of innovative technologies. I am delighted to launch this ground-breaking BMW Group plant on its way." Board of Management member for Human Resources Milagros Caina-Andree underlined the BMW Group's role as an employer: "Our success depends above all on the people who work for us. Their capabilities create our products. They form the strong foundation of our new BMW Plant San Luis Potosi. For this reason, it is also important for us to be an attractive employer here, to inspire passion for the BMW Group among employees, to encourage their ambition and develop their talents." Governor Juan Manuel Carreras Lopez commented: "The BMW Group is an important partner for our state and will help to further develop the industry in the region. San Luis Potosi is an attractive state for the automotive industry with skilled workers, a logistically interesting location and the necessary infrastructure for the development of this kind of project. In San Luis Potosi, we are ready to support the industry."

Start of production for BMW 3 Series Sedan planned for 2019

San Luis Potosi will build the BMW brand's best-selling model series, the BMW 3 Series Sedan. For more than the 40 of the company's 100 years, the iconic BMW 3 Series has been the heart of the brand and set the benchmark for dynamic performance, efficiency and design. The plant in San Luis Potosi will also balance out production capacity at BMW Group Plant Rosslyn in South Africa, which will build the new BMW X3 instead of the BMW 3 Series in the future. Start of production is scheduled for 2019, with an annual production capacity of up to 150,000 units. The BMW Group is investing around a billion US dollars in the new plant and creating at least 1,500 new jobs. The decision to locate in San Luis Potosi was based on criteria such as the broad supplier network and qualified local workforce, as well as the technical and social infrastructure.

Mexican plant to set new standards

The BMW Group Plant San Luis Potosi will be a full plant, comprising body shop, paint shop and assembly, characterised by an innovative production system and comprehensive sustainability standards. From the first full year of production, the plant will be the BMW Group's most resource-efficient production location worldwide.

For example, the use of renewable energy sources ensures that the plant is supplied with 100% CO 2 -free electricity. Most of the electricity comes from a solar system on the plant's grounds. Responsible use of water resources is a particular sustainability goal in San Luis Potosi. The facility will have the lowest water consumption per vehicle produced in the production network. This will be the BMW Group's first paint shop to produce zero process wastewater. The water needed for the painting process is reconditioned and recycled.

The BMW Group is relying exclusively on digital 3D plans for both building construction and equipment installation at the plant. During every phase of construction, architects enter specific information, such as location, dimensions or completion date into digital models. Digital 3D-scan technology is being used for the first time during the set-up phase. The combination of these two technologies enables real-time analysis of construction progress and cost-efficient modifications, and provides the BMW Group with constant planning reliability.

Plant will benefit from experience within the production network

Everything is in place for the start of production: 25 young mechatronics engineers began their training in September 2015. This year will see the launch in cooperation with local technical colleges of similar programmes for production mechanics and automotive mechatronics experts. Mexico has a work-linked training concept based on the German model.

The plant in San Luis Potosi will benefit from experience within the BMW Group production network. Plants Munich and Spartanburg are demonstrating their strengths by helping set up the Mexican facility. The Munich plant will serve as the lead plant for set-up and training, and will train more than 500 Mexican employees by 2019. "The training programme for future employees is an important cornerstone for us. The new plant will set international standards with innovative technologies and resource-saving production," explained Hermann Bohrer, head of the BMW Group Plant San Luis Potosi.

BMW Group sets the course for continued growth in the NAFTA region

The BMW Group production network comprises 31 locations in 14 countries on four continents. The expansion of its international production network has always followed growth in markets around the world. In this way, the BMW Group ensures itself a highly-efficient and flexible international production network with a balanced distribution of value creation between Europe, Asia and the Americas. With this in mind, Mexico is another building block in the BMW Group's growth strategy. The country is a member of the NAFTA free-trade zone with Canada and the US, and has concluded free-trade agreements with the European Union and MERCOSUR countries, making it easier to export automobiles and import supplier parts.

North America is one of the most important growth markets for the BMW Group. The company will invest a total of one billion US dollars in the expansion of its American plant in Spartanburg by the end of 2016 to achieve a production capacity of 450,000 units. The plant, which specialises in BMW X models, became the largest in the BMW Group production network in 2015. This expansion is in response to strong global demand for X models. The new BMW X7 will be produced in Spartanburg in the future. With Spartanburg and San Luis Potosi, the BMW Group will have full production capacities at key locations in North America.

The BMW Group in Mexico

The BMW Group has operated a local sales company in Mexico since 1994, and in 2015, sold a total of 17,475 vehicles (12,170 BMW, 5,305 MINI)  an increase of more than 17% over the previous year. Motorcycle sales for the same period reached 2,615 units (+15.2% YOY).

The BMW Group opened its Purchasing and Supplier Network Mexico in 2008. From here, the BMW Group maintains close relationships with its suppliers in Mexico and North and Central America. Last year, the BMW Group purchased products worth more than 2.5 billion US dollars from Mexican suppliers. This represents an increase of about 18% compared with the previous year. Over the long term, the Purchasing and Supplier Network Mexico will be managed out of in San Luis Potosi.

The BMW Group

With its three brands BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce, the BMW Group is the world's leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles and also provides premium financial and mobility services. As a global company, the BMW Group operates 31 production and assembly facilities in 14 countries and has a global sales network in more than 140 countries.

In 2015, the BMW Group sold approximately 2.247 million cars and nearly 137,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax for the financial year 2015 was approximately  9.22 billion on revenues amounting to  92.18 billion. As of 31 December 2015, the BMW Group had a workforce of 122,244 employees.

The success of the BMW Group has always been based on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company has therefore established ecological and social sustainability throughout the value chain, comprehensive product responsibility and a clear commitment to conserving resources as an integral part of its strategy.

www.bmwgroup.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BMWGroup

Twitter: http://twitter.com/BMWGroup

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/BMWGroupview

Google+: http://googleplus.bmwgroup.com

SOURCE BMW of North America, LLC

Related Links

http://www.bmwgroup.com


LYON, France, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Bouygues Telecom, the French global electronic communications operator with more than 15 million subscribers in France, selects the latest release of Anite's Nemo CEM, an EQual One-based solution that monitors the quality of its network services.

V3D Logo (PRNewsFoto/V3D)

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160613/378351LOGO )

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140114/663387 )

Bouygues Telecom's teams are using customer-based monitoring to collect overall indicators on quality and performance, thanks to Anite's Nemo CEM solution, in order to maintain their 4G network referent position in France.

"Our priority is to support the daily digital uses of our customers and make them live a 4G experience constantly improved. We are proud to work with V3D, an innovative French startup, whose solution fits perfectly into this strategy of aiming to increase the performance and quality of our network", specifies Jean-Paul Arzel, Network Director of Bouygues Telecom."

"We are really pleased that our partnership with Anite and our combined offering has been well received since 2012 by an operator such as Bouygues Telecom. This agreement is in line with V3D's strategy of bringing customer-based tools as a complement to the traditional QoS solution in order to deliver a complete global CEM suite", comments Philippe Vial-Grelier, Chief Executive Officer of V3D.

About V3D

Specialized in mobile technologies, V3D Solutions enable Mobile Operators to monitor true network Quality of Experience (QoE) straight from the subscribers' perspective. This complementary approach to traditional measurement methods of network performance offers technical and business benefits to various departments of an operator, from CEM & Marketing to Network Operations or Customer Care.

V3D portfolio focuses on customer experience and mobile network service performance. EQual One solution is based on a combination of Device Quality Agents (DQA) deployed on commercial devices and a powerful server interacting over-the-air with the DQAs and potentially integrated with existing systems. V3D headquarter is based in Lyon, France.

For more information, visit: http://www.v3d.fr

SOURCE V3D
LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The directors and management of Capital Venture Europe PLC (PINKSHEETS:CPVNF) are pleased to provide an update on the Company's primary assets.

The company's flagship asset remains the Islandia project for which it has exclusive rights to negotiate the acquisition of the project. The Islandia is a resort to be constructed on the Pulau Abang Besar island near Bintan in Indonesia. The Company is in collaboration to develop the resort with Huafa Assets, a Malaysian property developer and South Decoration Engineering, a Chinese engineering firm. The $900 million project hopes to develop the island pending a reorganization to feature hotels, resorts, short-term residences and a nature-based theme park of over 1200 hectares. The Company hopes that this project will break ground in 2017. More information can be found on www.theislandia.com.

The company also owns 26% of Heulab Pte. Ltd. Heulab Pte. Ltd. is a multi-award-winning technology company specializing in touch-based computing, E-learning and other enterprise collaboration solutions. The company looks forward to Heulab continuing the development of its technology into a long-term asset to enhance the company's portfolio.

Capital Venture Europe PLC is a diversified holding company with holdings in world-class assets that span the globe. The Company maintains a focus on expanding its portfolio assets around the globe specifically in the real estate and technology sectors that synergistically enhance the value of our intrinsic valued portfolio to maximize returns for our clients and investors.

FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words "will" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Corporation's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. Various assumptions or factors are typically applied in drawing conclusions or making the forecasts or projections set out in forward-looking information. Those assumptions and factors are based on information currently available to the Corporation. The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof and the Corporation is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein. U.S. GAAP, ASC 450-20 defines a contingency as an "existing condition, situation, or set of circumstances involving uncertainty as to possible gain (gain contingency) or loss (loss contingency) to an entity that will ultimately be resolved when one or more future events occur or fail to occur."

SOURCE Capital Venture Europe PLC
THE WOODLANDS, Texas, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CB&I (NYSE:CBI) today announced Chevron Lummus Global, a joint venture between CB&I and Chevron, has been awarded a contract by Beowulf Energy Sweden LLC, who recently signed a cooperation agreement with Preem, for the technology license and development of a residue upgrading complex in Lysekil, Sweden. The scope of the contract includes the license of Chevron Lummus Global's LC-Slurry technology with integrated ISOCRACKING and ancillary units. Under the agreement, CB&I also will develop a detailed cost estimate and execution plan for the engineering, procurement and construction phase of the project.

"We look forward to this new partnership with Beowulf, as well as continuing our long-standing relationship with Preem," said Daniel McCarthy, President of CB&I's Technology operating group. "This award marks the first LC-Slurry license since adding the maximum residue conversion technology to our CLG portfolio last year."

About CB&I

CB&I (NYSE:CBI) is a leading provider of technology and infrastructure for the energy industry. With over 125 years of experience and the expertise of more than 40,000 employees, CB&I provides reliable solutions to our customers around the world while maintaining a relentless focus on safety and an uncompromising standard of quality. For more information, visit www.CBI.com.

Important Information For Investors And Shareholders

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding CB&I and represents our expectations and beliefs concerning future events. These forward-looking statements are intended to be covered by the safe harbor for forward-looking statements provided by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. When considering any statements that are predictive in nature, depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, or use or contain words, terms, phrases or expressions such as "achieve," "forecast," "plan," "propose," "strategy," "envision," "hope," "will," "continue," "potential," "expect," "believe," "anticipate," "project," "estimate," "predict," "intend," "should," "could," "may," "might" or similar forward-looking statements, we refer you to the cautionary statements concerning risk factors and "Forward-Looking Statements" described under "Risk Factors" in Item 1A of our Annual Report filed on Form 10-K filed with the SEC for the year ended December 31, 2015, and any updates to those risk factors or "Forward-Looking Statements" included in our subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC, which cautionary statements are incorporated herein by reference.

Investors: Scott Lamb, +1 832 513 1068, [email protected]

Media: Gentry Brann, +1 832 513 1031, [email protected]

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SOURCE CB&I

Related Links

http://www.cbi.com


LOS ANGELES, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Cetera Financial Group ("Cetera" or "the Company")*, a leading network of independent broker-dealer firms, today announced that its parent holding company - Aretec - has completed the formation of its Board of Directors with the addition of three veteran executives as directors. The seven members of the new Board are experienced and widely-respected senior leaders with a diverse range of backgrounds and expertise, including noted executives from the independent retail financial advice sector. The new Board of Directors, led by a non-executive Chairman, has been formed in accordance with the highest standards of corporate governance and independence.

The three new directors - Mary Cranston, Robert "Bob" Dineen and Edmond Walters - join the four members of the Board who were previously appointed as part of Cetera's recently completed reorganization process: non-executive Chairman Robert Moore; Michael Kaufman, Principal at Redwood Capital Management, LLC; David King, Managing Director at Fortress Investment Group; and Larry Roth, who also serves as CEO of Cetera Financial Group.

Cetera Financial Group's parent company Chairman Robert Moore said, "I am pleased and honored to serve alongside this talented group of experienced industry leaders on our new Board of Directors. The completion of our new Board reflects the confidence that senior leaders place in Cetera. This also reflects the commitment we all have to our shared mission of helping our advisors and the financial institution investment programs we support to continue to grow their businesses by delivering exceptional value to their clients."

Further details of the newly appointed three Board members are as follows:

Mary Cranston is a retired Senior Partner and past Chair of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP., an international law firm. In her eight years as Chair, Ms. Cranston expanded the firm from a regional California base into an international platform. She currently serves on the Boards of Visa Inc., The Chemours Company, and Myokardia Inc.

is a retired Senior Partner and past Chair of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP., an international law firm. In her eight years as Chair, Ms. Cranston expanded the firm from a regional base into an international platform. She currently serves on the Boards of Visa Inc., The Chemours Company, and Myokardia Inc. Bob Dineen most recently served at Lincoln Financial Network as Vice Chairman and a member of Lincoln Financial Group's Senior Management Committee. Previously, Mr. Dineen headed Lincoln Financial Network, the retail distribution arm of Lincoln Financial Group, and served as Chief Executive Officer of Lincoln Financial Securities Corporation and Lincoln Financial Advisors Corporation. Mr. Dineen serves on the Board of Aegon NV, a Dutch life insurance, pensions and asset management company.

most recently served at Lincoln Financial Network as Vice Chairman and a member of Lincoln Financial Group's Senior Management Committee. Previously, Mr. Dineen headed Lincoln Financial Network, the retail distribution arm of Lincoln Financial Group, and served as Chief Executive Officer of Lincoln Financial Securities Corporation and Lincoln Financial Advisors Corporation. Mr. Dineen serves on the Board of Aegon NV, a Dutch life insurance, pensions and asset management company. Edmond Walters most recently served as Chief Executive Officer of eMoney Advisor, which provides a web-based wealth planning system to over 55,000 financial advisors. eMoney was sold to Fidelity in 2015. Previously, Mr. Walters spent more than 20 years in the financial services industry advising high net worth clients, and was a founder of the Wharton Business Group, a financial advisory firm based in Pennsylvania . Mr. Walters currently serves on the board of InsPro Technologies Corp.

Mr. Moore concluded, "With the separation of the CEO and Chairman roles together with the formation of a Board that is empowered to make independent decisions, I believe we are leading the way towards serving as a model of corporate governance best practices. This is an approach that we are confident will generate sustainable superior outcomes for all of our stakeholders, including the advisors and institutions we serve. Now that our strategic transformation process is complete, giving us a healthy balance sheet in addition to the strong loyalty we continue to enjoy from our advisors and institutions, we are eager to move ahead with our singular focus on empowering the delivery of objective financial advice to individuals across the country."

Further background information on the previously-named members of the Board of Directors follows below:

Chairman Robert Moore is the Chief Executive Officer of Legal & General Investment Management America (LGIMA). Prior to joining LGIMA, Mr. Moore served as President of LPL Financial with oversight of the company's primary client-facing functions, client service and operations teams. Prior to becoming President of LPL he served as CFO.

He is Past Chairman of the Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) Board of Directors, a former member of the board of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), and a past member of the board of the Financial Services Institute as well as the Financial Services Roundtable. Mr. Moore has served on the LGIMA Board since 2008.

Michael Kaufman is a Principal at Redwood Capital Management, LLC. Previously he was an investment banker in the financial institutions group at Citigroup Global Markets and worked at Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm, pursuing control and non-control equity investments in various industries.

David King is a Managing Director at Fortress Investment Group. Previously, he founded and was the Senior Managing Director of Culpeper Capital Partners LLC. Mr. King was formerly a Senior Managing Director at Bear Stearns Merchant Banking and its successor firm Irving Place Capital. He serves on the board of directors of State National Companies, Inc., and is a member of the board of several private financial services companies.

R. Lawrence "Larry" Roth is Chief Executive Officer of Cetera Financial Group. Mr. Roth has over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry, including his service as President and Chief Executive Officer of AIG Advisor Group from 2007 until 2013. Mr. Roth was previously Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Financial Services Institute, as well as for the Insured Retirement Institute where he currently serves as a board member.

About Cetera Financial Group

Cetera Financial Group ("Cetera") is a leading network of independent retail broker-dealers empowering the delivery of objective financial advice to individuals, families and company retirement plans across the country through trusted financial advisors and financial institutions. Cetera is the second-largest independent financial advisor network in the nation by number of advisors, as well as a leading provider of retail services to the investment programs of banks and credit unions.

Through its multiple distinct firms, Cetera offers independent and institutions-based advisors the benefits of a large, established broker-dealer and registered investment adviser, while serving advisors and institutions in a way that is customized to their needs and aspirations. Advisor support resources offered through Cetera include award-winning wealth management and advisory platforms, comprehensive broker-dealer and registered investment adviser services, practice management support and innovative technology. For more information, visit www.ceterafinancialgroup.com.

* "Cetera Financial Group" refers to the network of retail independent broker-dealers encompassing, among others, Cetera Advisors, Cetera Advisor Networks, Cetera Financial Institutions, Cetera Financial Specialists, First Allied Securities, Girard Securities, The Legend Group and Summit Brokerage Services.

Media Contacts:

Chris Clemens

Haven Tower Group

424.652.6520 ext 102

[email protected]

Matthew Griffes

Haven Tower Group

424.652.6520 ext 103

[email protected]

SOURCE Cetera Financial Group

Related Links

http://www.ceterafinancialgroup.com


FORT MYERS, Fla., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chico's FAS, Inc. (NYSE:CHS) today mailed a letter to shareholders in connection with its upcoming Annual Meeting of Shareholders to be held on July 21, 2016.

Highlights from the letter include:

Under the direction of a new CEO, Shelley Broader , Chico's FAS is successfully executing on its strategic plan to deliver enhanced shareholder value;



, Chico's FAS is successfully executing on its strategic plan to deliver enhanced shareholder value; Within just 180 days of Ms. Broader's appointment, the Company has taken significant actions and is making substantive progress in virtually all areas  leadership, strategy, operations, finance and governance;



Barington is misleading Chico's FAS shareholders about the changes that have been made and the progress underway; and



The Chico's FAS Board of Directors believes Barington has failed to demonstrate any ideas, vision or expertise that would warrant Board representation in place of the Chico's FAS highly-qualified director nominees.

The full text of the letter being mailed to shareholders follows:

UNDER THE DIRECTION OF A NEW CEO, WE ARE SUCCESSFULLY EXECUTING ON OUR STRATEGIC PLAN TO DELIVER ENHANCED SHAREHOLDER VALUE

SUPPORT OUR PROGRESS  VOTE "FOR" ON THE WHITE PROXY CARD TODAY

June 16, 2016

Dear Fellow Shareholder:

Over the past several months, we have been pleased to report the positive changes underway at Chico's FAS. Our new Chief Executive Officer and President, Shelley Broader, and her management team have been successfully executing on a new strategic plan that we believe will enable us to fully capitalize on the Company's many strengths, enhance shareholder value and drive profitable growth.

Within just 180 days of Ms. Broader's appointment, the Company has taken significant actions and is making substantive progress on implementing its new plan.

In December 2015 , following her appointment, Ms. Broader launched a comprehensive review of the Company's operations. This review affirmed our view that Chico's FAS has a powerful, industry-leading portfolio of brands that provides a strong platform for profitable growth and value creation. Ms. Broader also determined that there were operating improvement opportunities, and she developed new focus areas for the organization to address these opportunities.



This review affirmed our view that Chico's FAS has a powerful, industry-leading portfolio of brands that provides a strong platform for profitable growth and value creation. Ms. Broader also determined that there were operating improvement opportunities, and she developed new focus areas for the organization to address these opportunities. In January 2016 , Ms. Broader began a search for new leaders who bring skills and expertise to support and accelerate the Company's progress. As a result of this search, Ms. Broader has made important new hires across the Company, including in real estate and construction, planning and allocation, legal and human resources.



As a result of this search, Ms. Broader has made important new hires across the Company, including in real estate and construction, planning and allocation, legal and human resources. In February 2016 , Ms. Broader publicly introduced her four new focus areas to help drive better and more consistent growth and performance across our brand portfolio, accelerate our ability to achieve double-digit operating margins, and fortify our brands' relationships with new and existing customers.



to help drive better and more consistent growth and performance across our brand portfolio, accelerate our ability to achieve double-digit operating margins, and fortify our brands' relationships with new and existing customers. In April 2016 , the Company announced the first of many planned strategic, operating, and financial initiatives as part of Ms. Broader's new focus areas. In particular, we announced a realignment of the Company's Marketing and Digital Commerce functions, placing the decision makers directly into the Company's three brands, thereby reducing complexity and resulting in approximately $14 million of expected annualized cost savings.



In particular, we announced a realignment of the Company's Marketing and Digital Commerce functions, placing the decision makers directly into the Company's three brands, thereby reducing complexity and resulting in approximately of expected annualized cost savings. In May 2016 , the Company announced three additional initiatives, which together are expected to result in incremental annual cost savings between $50 million and $70 million . By improving our supply chain, non-merchandise procurement and marketing, these initiatives are also expected to fundamentally change and improve our operating model and the cadence in which we go to market.



By improving our supply chain, non-merchandise procurement and marketing, these initiatives are also expected to fundamentally change and improve our operating model and the cadence in which we go to market. In May 2016 , the Company announced positive and important changes to the composition of your Board of Directors as a result of a search for new, independent directors that we began in February 2016 with the assistance of Herbert Mines Associates. After a thorough review of the field of candidates, the Chico's FAS Board unanimously determined that Bonnie Brooks and William "Bill" Simon, together with other members of your Board and new CEO, have the most current and relevant skill sets and experience to support the Company and the actions being taken to improve performance and drive value. With the election of Ms. Brooks and Mr. Simon, four of the Company's nine directors, or almost half of the Board, will have been new to the Board in the past three years.



with the assistance of Herbert Mines Associates. After a thorough review of the field of candidates, the Chico's FAS Board unanimously determined that and William "Bill" Simon, together with other members of your Board and new CEO, have the most current and relevant skill sets and experience to support the Company and the actions being taken to improve performance and drive value. With the election of Ms. Brooks and Mr. Simon, four of the Company's nine directors, or almost half of the Board, will have been new to the Board in the past three years. In addition, the Company also recently announced governance enhancements that further exemplify our desire to embrace change as we seek to improve all aspects of our business and organization. As discussed in our proxy materials, the Board is recommending "FOR" a Company-sponsored proposal to declassify the Board over a three-year period, such that the entire Board would stand for election at the 2019 Annual Meeting. We have also adopted a formal policy limiting directors to service on four public company Boards of Directors, in addition to the Chico's FAS Board.

These actions demonstrate substantial change and meaningful progress in virtually all areas  leadership, strategy, operations, finance and governance. Notably, this progress is just beginning, as we expect to announce additional initiatives in the coming weeks as part of Ms. Broader's plan.

BARINGTON IS MISLEADING CHICO'S FAS SHAREHOLDERS ABOUT THE CHANGES THAT HAVE BEEN MADE AND THE PROGRESS UNDERWAY

"Susan Anderson, an analyst with FBR Capital, said Chico's was making progress before feeling any pressure from Barington. Barington, she said, seems to be taking credit for changes it had nothing to do with"1

We are already making great progress in the areas where Barington is focused. In our conversations with Chico's FAS shareholders, many recognize the positive change underway and that Ms. Broader is the catalyst for this change. Rather than work constructively with us, Barington has chosen to launch an unnecessary solicitation in opposition to our director nominees and is attempting to take credit for changes we have already made, considered and/or have underway, as discussed above.

While we expect to announce further cost reductions, Barington's suggested cuts ignore reductions that have already been accomplished and risk harming the very brand differentiators that have supported our success. Already, Ms. Broader has announced initiatives that are estimated to reduce costs by between $65 million and $85 million annually. The Company's cost review is ongoing, and we expect to identify additional opportunities for savings and efficiencies. Unlike the levels proposed by Barington, the associated Chico's FAS operating improvements are carefully structured in order to drive savings without compromising the customer service that has long differentiated the Company's brands and fostered customer loyalty.

Further, Barington's estimates for advertising costs include Boston Proper, which the Company sold in fiscal 2015. The marketing savings from Boston Proper, in addition to the $25 million expected savings from recently announced initiatives, exceed the reduction in advertising costs that Barington targets. Barington's estimates also ignore the $10 million to $20 million of non-merchandise procurement savings that we have already identified and announced.

Barington's proposed bricks & mortar store growth strategy for Soma represents a lack of understanding of the current dynamics of the apparel sector, with a consumer base that is increasingly interacting with brands through digital channels as well as in-store. Chico's FAS management remains committed to the profitable growth of its brand portfolio, including Soma, but will exercise discipline in the allocation of capital. Whereas Barington suggests opening 200 to 300 additional stores over the next five years, shareholders have praised Chico's FAS management for its measured store growth plans and decisions to close underperforming stores.

Barington ignores the fact that "strengthening the position of each Chico's FAS brand" was announced in February as a key component of our profitable growth plan, and we are already executing on it with new marketing, supply chain and merchandising initiatives. As discussed above, we have moved the marketing function within each brand and have launched actions to improve our supply chain and speed to market. Examples of new merchandising initiatives underway include testing petites in Chico's stores after a successful online test, a renewed focus on special occasion at White House Black Market, and a rollout of swim to all Soma stores after a successful test. There is nothing to suggest that either of Barington's director candidates have experience that would enhance the merchandising improvements already underway or planned, especially in light of the fact that neither of Barington's candidates has recent merchandising experience and both lack digital experience.

Contrary to Barington's assertion, capital returns to shareholders through quarterly dividends and our share repurchase program have been and will remain a priority. Since 2010, more than $1.1 billion, or approximately 131% of free cash flow, has been returned to shareholders through quarterly dividends and share repurchases. This is significantly higher than the median of our peers as defined in our 2015 proxy statement, who have returned only 103% of their free cash flow to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases over the same time period. Chico's FAS has returned $398 million, or approximately 302% of free cash flow, to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases since the beginning of 2015.

Barington's proxy materials misleadingly portray our discussions with them. We seek to maintain a constructive and open dialogue with all of our shareholders, Barington included. Members of the Company's Board and management team have had numerous discussions with Barington, including four separate phone calls between the Company's CEO and Mr. Mitarotonda. Barington was also invited to present to the full Board, an invitation to which Barington failed to respond. While we have already given Barington ample opportunity to present its views, we are of course open to further meetings with Barington as we are with any shareholder.

Contrary to Barington's assertions, the Board carefully considered all five of the director candidates Barington suggested  and the Board determined to reject them because they were not the best qualified individuals to represent shareholders' interests. Notably, of the five potential candidates Barington originally named, it is seeking to elect only two, which may indicate that Barington also recognizes the flaws in its candidates. After considering their qualifications and input from Herbert Mines Associates, members of the Board met with one of Barington's candidates, invited a second to an in-person meeting (whereupon she immediately withdrew from the process) and spoke with Mr. Mitarotonda by phone. The fourth and fifth candidates were not interviewed for the reasons discussed below.

Janet Grove has executive retail and merchandising experience, but her executive experience is dated by five years, a significant gap in an industry as dynamic as retail. She also lacks recent digital and ecommerce expertise, which are essential components of the Company's strategy and drivers of success in the current retail environment.



has executive retail and merchandising experience, but her executive experience is dated by five years, a significant gap in an industry as dynamic as retail. She also lacks recent digital and ecommerce expertise, which are essential components of the Company's strategy and drivers of success in the current retail environment. Jim Mitarotonda , according to his own proxy materials and website, has served on only one apparel retail company Board, and that company was sold just seven months later for barely a 10% premium. He also lacks digital expertise, and the experience and skills he does offer are already represented by current Chico's FAS directors and/or Ms. Brooks and Mr. Simon.



, according to his own proxy materials and website, has served on apparel retail company Board, and that company was sold just seven months later for barely a 10% premium. He also lacks digital expertise, and the experience and skills he does offer are already represented by current Chico's FAS directors and/or Ms. Brooks and Mr. Simon. Shan Atkins withdrew her name and declined to meet with the Company or any of its Board members, despite an invitation to do so.



withdrew her name and declined to meet with the Company or any of its Board members, despite an invitation to do so. Most of Frank Mori's retail experience is over ten years old, and he appears to have gained much of his more recent Board experience by serving as a regular Barington representative and director candidate.



retail experience is over ten years old, and he appears to have gained much of his more recent Board experience by serving as a regular Barington representative and director candidate. The Deloitte & Touche LLP consulting and accounting firm experience that Noel Spiegel would provide is already well-represented on the Chico's FAS Board by John J. Mahoney , a former partner at Ernst & Young LLP, who also provides significant retail experience as the former Vice Chair and Chief Financial Officer of Staples, Inc. and current director at Bloomin' Brands, Inc., Michael's Stores and Burlington Stores.

Barington wrongly claims that there is a lack of merchandising expertise represented on the Chico's FAS Board. Including our new nominees, five of the Board's nine directors, specifically Shelley Broader, Bonnie Brooks, Bill Simon, Stephen Watson and Andrea Weiss, would have more than 90 years of merchandising experience in the aggregate.

Barington misleadingly portrays the Company's actual compensation practices. Barington includes in its compensation calculations customary, one-time "make whole" payments designed to address economic losses Ms. Broader incurred as a result of leaving her prior employment. In fact, Ms. Broader's compensation is in-line with peers, directly tied to performance, and includes equity components to align her interests with the interests of all Chico's FAS shareholders and to incentivize enhanced value creation. Ms. Broader's compensation was established following a detailed competitive analysis conducted by an independent compensation consultant, Frederic W. Cook & Co. The analysis, which considered a comparative peer group of 20 U.S.-based, publicly-traded retailers, shows that Ms. Broader's target total direct compensation is approximately 10% above the median, with a pay mix that is consistent with median competitive practice. Further, beyond fiscal 2016, more than 50% of total compensation is performance based and at risk, as detailed in previous public materials.

Neither Hudson's Bay Company nor any of the department stores within its portfolio, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, are competitors in any practical sense to Chico's FAS or any of its brands, as Barington has claimed. Our brands serve different price points, different geographic areas and different consumer demographics.

WE BELIEVE BARINGTON HAS FAILED TO DEMONSTRATE ANY IDEAS, VISION OR EXPERTISE THAT WOULD WARRANT BOARD REPRESENTATION IN PLACE OF THE BOARD'S HIGHLY-QUALIFIED NOMINEES

When searching for new, independent director candidates earlier this year, the Board considered the need for specific expertise in the areas of merchandising, cost efficiency, supply chain and retail operations to help support Ms. Broader's focus areas. The Board has also long recognized the fact that digital commerce is reshaping the retail landscape. We believe that with our new CEO and refreshed Board, we have world-class leaders  and the right four director nominees  with the skills and expertise to continue executing on our new plan and support the Company given the digital demands in our industry:

Shelley Broader , our new CEO and President, brings to Chico's FAS a remarkable track record that includes more than 25 years of experience leading premier retail businesses. We believe the actions she has taken in just the few months since her appointment demonstrate that she has a keen understanding of how to drive value in a competitive retail environment. We believe Ms. Broader's service on the Board is critical to the continued successful execution of our new strategic plan.



, our new CEO and President, brings to Chico's FAS a remarkable track record that includes more than 25 years of experience leading premier retail businesses. We believe the actions she has taken in just the few months since her appointment demonstrate that she has a keen understanding of how to drive value in a competitive retail environment. We believe Ms. Broader's service on the Board is critical to the continued successful execution of our new strategic plan. Bonnie Brooks , as detailed in materials previously sent to you, brings substantial retail, merchandising, and turnaround skills from some of the world's leading retailers. She is currently the Vice Chairman of Hudson's Bay Company and has more than 30 years of global executive leadership experience in retail and merchandising, including having led three major international department store turnarounds, including at Hudson's Bay Company and the Lane Crawford Group in Asia. The Lane Crawford Group is one of the world's leading fashion specialty department stores and one of the largest distributors of American and European contemporary and luxury brands in Asia. In her most recent executive role as Chief Executive Officer and President of Hudson's Bay department stores, the Company's digital platform was completely overhauled resulting in an entirely new ecommerce site and digital marketing capability. Digital marketing and ecommerce have been major elements of her formula for success and turnaround work over the past decade.



, as detailed in materials previously sent to you, brings substantial retail, merchandising, and turnaround skills from some of the world's leading retailers. She is currently the Vice Chairman of Bay Company and has more than 30 years of global executive leadership experience in retail and merchandising, including having led three major international department store turnarounds, including at Bay Company and the Lane Crawford Group in Asia. The Lane Crawford Group is one of the world's leading fashion specialty department stores and one of the largest distributors of American and European contemporary and luxury brands in Asia. In her most recent executive role as Chief Executive Officer and President of department stores, the Company's digital platform was completely overhauled resulting in an entirely new ecommerce site and digital marketing capability. Digital marketing and ecommerce have been major elements of her formula for success and turnaround work over the past decade. Janice Fields is one of the Company's newest independent directors, having joined the Board in 2013. As Chair of the Board's Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee since 2013, she has made important contributions to Chico's FAS, in the areas of driving Board refreshment, including identifying our two new independent director nominees, overseeing the succession planning and executive search process that resulted in Ms. Broader's appointment, and implementing numerous corporate governance enhancements, such as those recently announced as well as the rotation of the Company's independent Chair role.



You may also be interested to know that, in addition to her contributions at Chico's FAS, Ms. Fields is an accomplished executive recognized by both Forbes and Fortune for her leadership. As the former President of McDonald's USA , LLC, she developed and oversaw consumer marketing strategies and drove improvements in McDonald's supply chain and multi-unit operations, reinforcing McDonald's world-renowned consumer brand and its reputation for being a lean, highly-efficient company, just as Chico's FAS is working to be. In addition, Ms. Fields brings valuable perspective serving as an independent director of Monsanto Company, which is also well regarded for its highly-efficient operations and global supply chain.



We believe Ms. Fields' contributions to the Company's leadership and governance, her current governance expertise, unique marketing, consumer brand and supply chain insights, and her experience managing multi-unit operations and franchise growth are essential to executing our strategic plan, particularly as we seek to drive consumer engagement and further optimize our own multi-unit real estate footprint.



is one of the Company's newest independent directors, having joined the Board in 2013. As Chair of the Board's Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee since 2013, she has made important contributions to Chico's FAS, in the areas of driving Board refreshment, including identifying our two new independent director nominees, overseeing the succession planning and executive search process that resulted in Ms. Broader's appointment, and implementing numerous corporate governance enhancements, such as those recently announced as well as the rotation of the Company's independent Chair role. You may also be interested to know that, in addition to her contributions at Chico's FAS, Ms. Fields is an accomplished executive recognized by both Forbes and Fortune for her leadership. As the former President of McDonald's , LLC, she developed and oversaw consumer marketing strategies and drove improvements in McDonald's supply chain and multi-unit operations, reinforcing McDonald's world-renowned consumer brand and its reputation for being a lean, highly-efficient company, just as Chico's FAS is working to be. In addition, Ms. Fields brings valuable perspective serving as an independent director of Monsanto Company, which is also well regarded for its highly-efficient operations and global supply chain. We believe Ms. Fields' contributions to the Company's leadership and governance, her current governance expertise, unique marketing, consumer brand and supply chain insights, and her experience managing multi-unit operations and franchise growth are essential to executing our strategic plan, particularly as we seek to drive consumer engagement and further optimize our own multi-unit real estate footprint. Bill Simon , as detailed in materials previously sent to you, brings substantial cost efficiency and supply chain expertise. As the former President and Chief Executive Officer of Walmart U.S., he is a seasoned executive with a proven track record leading large, complex global retailers with best-in-class cost structures and premier consumer brands. Mr. Simon's vision and execution placed Walmart on a path to future growth with the expansion of small format stores and the integration of the digital and physical retail experience.

Neither of Barington's proposed candidates has expertise equivalent to any of the Board's four nominees. We believe that replacing any of your Board's superior nominees with any one of Barington's less qualified candidates would jeopardize the progress we are making. Accordingly, your Board unanimously recommends that shareholders vote "FOR" all four of its experienced and highly qualified director candidates  Shelley Broader, Bonnie Brooks, Janice Fields and Bill Simon  on the enclosed WHITE proxy card.

SUPPORT THE IMPORTANT PROGRESS UNDERWAY BY VOTING "FOR" ON THE ENCLOSED WHITE PROXY CARD TODAY

We strongly believe that Barington's actions are undermining the future of Chico's FAS and its ability to continue driving profitable growth and value creation. Barington's ideas are not new; its candidates lack key skills; and its opposition campaign is misguided, given the significant progress already in process under new leadership.

We urge you to reject Barington's self-serving campaign and protect the value of your investment. Please simply discard any Blue proxy card that you may receive from Barington and use the enclosed WHITE proxy card to vote "FOR" your Board's nominees TODAY  by telephone, by Internet, or by signing, dating and returning the WHITE proxy card in the postage-paid envelope provided.

On behalf of your Board of Directors, we thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

/s/ David. F. Walker

David F. Walker

Chair of the Chico's FAS Board

If you have any questions or require any assistance with voting your shares,

please contact the Company's proxy solicitor:

Innisfree M&A Incorporated

Toll-free at (877) 825-8971 (from the U.S. or Canada)

or

(412) 232-3651 (from other locations)



ABOUT CHICO'S FAS, INC.

The Company, through its brands  Chico's, White House Black Market, and Soma is a leading omni-channel specialty retailer of women's private branded, sophisticated, casual-to-dressy clothing, intimates, complementary accessories, and other non-clothing items.

As of April 30, 2016, the Company operated 1,517 stores in the US and Canada and sold merchandise through franchise locations in Mexico. The Company's merchandise is also available at www.chicos.com, www.whbm.com, and www.soma.com. For more detailed information on Chico's FAS, Inc., please go to our corporate website at www.chicosfas.com.

SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT UNDER THE PRIVATE SECURITIES LITIGATION REFORM ACT OF 1995

Certain statements contained herein may contain certain "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, which reflect our current views with respect to certain events that could have an effect on our future financial performance, including but without limitation, statements regarding our plans, objectives, and future success of our store concepts, the implementation of our previously announced restructuring program, and implementation of our program to increase the sales volume and profitability of our existing brands through four previously announced focus areas. These statements may address items such as future sales, gross margin expectations, SG&A expectations, operating margin expectations, planned store openings, closings and expansions, future comparable sales, inventory levels, and future cash needs. These statements relate to expectations concerning matters that are not historical fact and may include the words or phrases such as "expects," "believes," "anticipates," "plans," "estimates," "approximately," "our planning assumptions," "future outlook," and similar expressions. Except for historical information, matters discussed in such oral and written statements are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based largely on information currently available to our management and on our current expectations, assumptions, plans, estimates, judgments and projections about our business and our industry, and are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from historical results or those currently anticipated. Although we believe our expectations are based on reasonable estimates and assumptions, they are not guarantees of performance and there are a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, contingencies, and other factors (many of which are outside our control) that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Accordingly, there is no assurance that our expectations will, in fact, occur or that our estimates or assumptions will be correct, and we caution investors and all others not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, general economic and business conditions, conditions in the specialty retail industry, the availability of quality store sites, the ability to successfully execute our business strategies, the ability to achieve the results of our restructuring program, the ability to achieve the results of our four focus areas, the integration of our new management team, and those described in Item 1A, "Risk Factors" and in the "Forward-Looking Statements" disclosure in Item 7. "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" of our Form 10-K. There can be no assurance that the actual future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements will occur. Investors using forward-looking statements are encouraged to review the Company's latest annual report on Form 10-K, its filings on Form 10-Q, management's discussion and analysis in the Company's latest annual report to stockholders, the Company's filings on Form 8-K, and other federal securities law filings for a description of other important factors that may affect the Company's business, results of operations and financial condition. All written or oral forward-looking statements that are made or attributable to us are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary notice. The Company does not undertake to publicly update or revise its forward looking statements even if experience or future changes make it clear that projected results expressed or implied in such statements will not be realized.

Additional Information

Chico's FAS, its directors and certain of its executive officers are participants in the solicitation of proxies from Company shareholders in connection with the matters to be considered at the Company's 2016 Annual Meeting. The Company has filed a definitive proxy statement and WHITE proxy card with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") in connection with any such solicitation of proxies from Company shareholders. COMPANY SHAREHOLDERS ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO READ THE DEFINITIVE PROXY STATEMENT AND ACCOMPANYING WHITE PROXY CARD AS THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Information regarding the identity of the participants, and their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, is set forth in the proxy statement and other materials filed with the SEC. Shareholders will be able to obtain any proxy statement, any amendments or supplements to the proxy statement and other documents filed by the Company with the SEC for no charge at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Copies are also available at no charge at the Company's website at www.chicosfas.com, by writing to Chico's FAS at 11215 Metro Parkway, Fort Myers, FL 33966, or by calling the Company's proxy solicitor, Innisfree, toll-free at (877) 825-8971.

Contacts:

Investors:

Jennifer Powers

Vice President - Investor Relations

Chico's FAS, Inc.

(239) 346-4199

Arthur B. Crozier / Jennifer M. Shotwell / Jonathan E. Salzberger

Innisfree M&A Incorporated

(212) 750-5833

Media:

Barrett Golden / Leigh Parrish / Joseph Sala

Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher

(212) 355-4449

1 Naples Daily News, "Chico's fires back at activist investor Barington," 06/03/16; permission to use quotation neither sought nor obtained

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160209/331560LOGO

SOURCE Chico's FAS, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.chicos.com


HENDERSON, Nev., June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The new flights approved by The Department of Transportation are due to the historic efforts of President Obama to reestablish our relationship with Cuba. The new agreement between Cuba and the United states will allow 110 flights daily between the two countries. This is the first time in over fifty years such travel has been allowed. Until now, only expensive chartered flights were available.

The 6 airlines hope to start selling tickets by late June and begin flights as early as September 2016. The airlines include Southwest, American, JetBlue, Sun Country, Silver Airways and Frontier. Eastern Airlines, offers chartered flights but was not approved because they failed to submit the application on time. Eastern Airlines application is now pending until a decision is made between Havana and the DOT.

The cities in Cuba which will be receiving flights include Camaguey, Cayo Coco, Cayo Largo del Sur, Cienfuegos, Holguin, Manzanillo, Santa Clara, Santiago de Cuba and Matanzas. No flights into Havana will be authorized until later in the summer and will be limited to just 20 per day. The flight departures in the U.S. will include Miami, Chicago, Ft. Lauderdale, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis.

The availability of non-chartered flights between Cuba and the United States is not a signal that tourist travel is now authorized for just any traveler. People traveling to Cuba must still prove that their travel plans fall under one of the 12 travel categories that include religious work, humanitarian and educational activities, journalism, family business, official business of the U.S. Government, exportation, importation, or transmission of information or information materials, foreign governments, and certain intergovernmental organizations or professional research. The Department of Transportation suggests travelers become informed about the rules and regulations before making travel plans.

Since the initiative to loosen travel regulations between the two countries, the travel rate has increased by about 8% with over 120 million people visiting Cuba in recent months. With lower oil prices, less overhead and the opening of non-commercial flights between the U.S. and Cuba, the DOT expects to see a significant decrease in airfares and an increase in travel beginning in the fall. This is a great sign for not only American travelers and the Cuban economy, but for the continued opportunity to restore our diplomatic relationship with Cuba.

Coconut Club Vacations is a value members-only travel club providing members with member benefits which range from access to discounted travel to packages and tours as well as consumer benefits.

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SOURCE Coconut Club Vacations

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SAN FRANCISCO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Collokia, a machine learning-based collaboration platform, announced today it has secured $1.3 million in seed funding, led by software giant Globant and Fundo Pitanga, a Brazilian venture capital firm. The technology has been in development and testing since 2014 and is currently available for beta customers.

Collokia's platform fosters collaboration between co-workers by enabling improved access to information and knowledge, with its unique combination of plug-in technology and Artificial Intelligence. Collokia's plugins run in the natural work environment silently collecting information, identifying patterns, and mapping employee decision-making to provide contextual support. Machine learning algorithms analyze the collective experience and automatically connect people with other colleagues, research, solutions and sources of knowledge - right when they need it.

"Knowledge workers spend a significant amount of time searching for information, either through standard search engines or through specialized tools", said Pablo Brenner, co-founder of Collokia. "In many situations, co-workers have already searched for similar information, but the work is recreated because there is no knowledge or experience sharing, leaving them unaware. Collokias platform automatically identifies such collaboration opportunities and eliminates the time wasted on redundant research efforts. For example, when searching for a specific subject, Collokia alerts users to similar activities that have already been completed, offering recommendations and connecting them with others within the organization that have expertise on the information they are seeking."

In contrast with most collaboration platforms where sharing information requires extra effort by the employee, Collokias knowledge mapping, collection and distribution is completely transparent and effortless for all involved parties. Through the use of machine learning algorithms, Collokia makes it easy for employees to not only find key information in their company's systems, but to update and edit these search results. This means that search results, rather than being static, instead become living, active documentation.

"This investment underscores Globant's focus on innovation," said Martin Umaran, Globant Chief of Staff and co-founder. "We see that a huge obstacle for companies to innovate are the separate silos found within them. We believe that Collokia is an innovative tool to accelerate learning, propel productivity, decrease redundant work and, overall, improve the experiences within these organizations."

The funding will be used to expand commercial operations and continue to build out the platform for use in key vertical markets, starting with the IT development industry.

About Collokia

Collokia is a machine learning company aiming to build seamless collaboration solutions for knowledge workers. Collokia was formed in 2014 by Pablo Brenner, former Global VP of Innovation at Globant, and Jayson Minard, former Technologist at Prezi and CTO at Abebooks (an Amazon.com company). For more information, visit www.collokia.com

Media contact:

Jennifer Fugel

845-657-4202

SOURCE Collokia

Related Links

http://www.collokia.com


Black hole collision generated gravitational waves more powerful than out put of all the stars in the universe (Photo : YouTube/LIGO Lab)

Black holes have been theorized for a little more than a century. In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his famous theory of general relativity, which sparked the search for these elusive celestial objects. Nevertheless, despite the hundred years of research, black holes are still shrouded in mystery. In fact, less than a week ago, scientists discovered another black hole related phenomenon that have left them baffled.



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In June 8, scientists from Chile detected clouds of cold gas going towards the center of a massive black hole, about 1 billion light years away from earth. According to MIT News, the said clouds are travelling at a whopping 355 km per second into the middle of the black hole's bottomless center.



Using the ALMA telescope located in Chile's Atacama desert, the team of scientists detected the pile of carbon monoxide cloud 300 light years away from the hole. In astronomical terms, 300 light years means that the cloud is about to be devoured by the massive astronomical anomaly.



"It was magical being able to see evidence of these clouds accreting onto the supermassive black hole. This is telling us more about what [supermassive black holes] like to eat and how they evolved," quipped Timothy Davis from Cardiff University as reported by The Guardian.



The phenomenon was discovered ultimately by mistake. Upon discovering the black hole, the team who were conducting research at the Atacama Desert set out to measure how many stars are born in the galaxy. According to Davis, his team used the black hole as a back light. In doing so, they discovered the shadow of the controversial clouds.



"So what we see in this case is the shadow of the clouds as they fall into what's the black hole ... they're between us and the black hole so they blank out some of this light," explained Davis in the same report from The Guardian.



A black hole is quite simply a celestial object that exhibits a massive amount of gravitational force; massive enough that nothing can escape from inside it. At present, definitive observation of a black hole has yet to be achieved.


PLYMOUTH NOTCH, Vt., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation is pleased to announce the names of the three students selected as the inaugural recipients of the Coolidge Scholarship. The Coolidge Scholarship is among the most generous scholarships in America. This full-ride, non-partisan merit award covers a student's tuition, room and board for four years of undergraduate study. Unlike many other full-ride scholarships, the Coolidge Scholarship may be used by recipients at any accredited college or university in the United States.

The Coolidge Scholarship was established by the Coolidge Foundation to honor America's thirtieth president and to elevate the values for which President Coolidge stood. Amity Shlaes, Coolidge biographer and Coolidge Foundation chairman said, "Coolidge is a president little-known by many Americans today. But his example of principled, civil leadership is a model that could guide our country. The Coolidge Foundation is proud to establish this scholarship to honor Coolidge and his legacy."

The main criterion that distinguishes Coolidge Scholars is academic merit. Students must also demonstrate a keen interest in public policy, an appreciation for the values Coolidge championed, humility and leadership potential.

More than 2,350 students from 48 different states applied for the Coolidge Scholarship in this inaugural year. Matthew Denhart, Coolidge Foundation executive director, remarked, "We are pleased by the student response. Not only did a large number of students apply, but the applicant pool was of the highest quality imaginable."

Coolidge Scholars are chosen in a multi-stage process. Students must apply for the Coolidge Scholarship during their junior year of high school. All applicants are reviewed by the Coolidge Foundation. The most promising candidates are reviewed by semifinalist juries which meet to consider applicants and select finalists. Ten finalists are flown in for a finalist weekend at the Coolidge Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. During finalist weekend the candidates are interviewed by the Coolidge Scholars Finalist Jury, chaired by Dr. Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Distinguished members of the finalist jury include:

Mr. John W. Childs

Mr. Richard L. Chilton, Jr.

Dr. Bruce Cole, Jury Chairman

Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.

Gov. James H. Douglas

Ambassador C. Boyden Gray

Gov. Bobby Jindal

Judge Edith Jones

Professor Wilfred McClay

Hon. Kurt Schmoke

Miss Amity Shlaes

Mr. Milton G. Valera

Hon. J.C. Watts

Members of the inaugural class of Coolidge Scholars include:

Miss Regan Brady, Shaker Heights, Ohio

Mr. Joshua Moriarty, New York, New York

Mr. Samuel Reddick, Bartlett, Tennessee

This new scholarship program builds upon the Coolidge Foundation's longtime efforts in the areas of high school debate and scholarship support for students. Each summer the Coolidge Foundation's well-regarded debate program attracts hundreds of high schoolers who come to Plymouth Notch to engage in civil debate on important policy issues in economics.

More information about the Coolidge Scholars Program is available at Coolidgescholars.org.

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SOURCE Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation
Cama, who will remain active in serving financial services and public company audit clients, joined Crowe in 1990 from Laventhol & Horwath. A graduate of Illinois State University, she was elected partner in 2003, when she relocated to Livingston, N.J. She opened a Crowe office in that city and until recently served as the Livingston local office managing partner. Cama is now the New York local office managing partner and leads the Northeast Regional Audit group. She is also an active member of Women Leading @ Crowe, Crowe's women's leadership group, and acts as a performance manager and mentor to several women in the firm.

Cama is also involved in many national accounting and banking associations, including the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Council, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the Center for Audit Quality, Financial Managers Society and several New Jersey and New York accounting and banking associations. Additionally, she serves on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Union County, N.J., and on the board of Junior Achievement of New Jersey. She was named one of NJBIZ's Best 50 Women in Business in 2016.

About Crowe Horwath

Crowe Horwath LLP (www.crowehorwath.com) is one of the largest public accounting, consulting, and technology firms in the United States. Crowe uses its deep industry expertise to provide audit services to public and private entities while also helping clients reach their goals with tax, advisory, risk and performance services. Crowe is recognized by many organizations as one of the country's best places to work. Crowe serves clients worldwide as an independent member of Crowe Horwath International, one of the largest global accounting networks in the world. The network consists of more than 200 independent accounting and advisory services firms in more than 120 countries around the world.

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SOURCE Crowe Horwath LLP

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MAUMEE, Ohio, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Dana Holding Corporation (NYSE: DAN) will present its VariGlide planetary variator for beltless continuously variable transmissions (CVTs) at the International VDI Conference, to be held June 21-22, 2016, in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

As part of a special session dedicated to CVTs in automotive applications, Dana will showcase this technology with subject-matter experts available to provide insights and answer technical questions related to the technology.

Dana's VariGlide technology features a unique planetary, coaxial configuration, which eliminates belts and pulleys used in conventional CVTs. In addition to providing fuel economy benefits relative to 6-, 8-, and 9-speed transmissions, the VariGlide variator has the potential to improve fuel economy by up to 10 percent when compared with conventional CVTs with belts.

Developed as a modular, bolt-in solution, the VariGlide variator provides a highly flexible, highly adaptable, power-dense solution that easily integrates into existing front-wheel-drive, all-wheel-drive, and rear-wheel-drive vehicle configurations with the added ability to support towing. With more than 70,000 hours of durability testing accumulated on the core technology, the VariGlide variator provides OEMs a superior and robust CVT technology. The VariGlide variator functions without the need for a high-pressure pump and associated complex supporting control system. It also protects against traditional CVT slip-related damage.

"Vehicle manufacturers are seeking to meet increasingly higher standards for efficiency and fuel economy, while improving drivability and function. Aimed at helping OEMs effectively meet these challenges, Dana's VariGlide planetary variator presents a durable, scalable, and cost-effective alternative to traditional belt CVTs," said Bob Pyle, president of Dana Light Vehicle Driveline Technologies. "Our VariGlide technology offers a highly adaptable, customizable, and robust solution for most driveline configurations."

Similar to bearing technology, VariGlide offers superior NVH characteristics through its smooth and seamless operation. The scalable nature of the technology provides solutions for vehicle architectures ranging from subcompacts to pickups and internal combustion to hybrid powertrains. The ability to support more than 300 powerpath configurations provide OEMs the unique opportunity to customize transmission solutions for specific applications and markets to align with critical attribute needs.

Gordon McIndoe, Dana Light Vehicle Driveline Technologies transmission systems expert, will discuss the technology's capabilities in detail during the presentation entitled, "CVT Powerpath Solutions Using Continuously Variable Planetary Technology for Maximum Fuel Economy" on June 22 at 1:30 p.m. CET in Stand 20. The presentation will highlight the use of continuously variable planetary technology for maximizing fuel economy and optimizing ratio spread and efficiency, with an example of a fuel economy simulation for a typical automotive application.

The dedicated CVT session, new to this year's International VDI Drivetrain conference, will address current challenges within the scope of continuously variable transmissions. International experts from the automotive sector and industry researchers will be discussing integrated concepts and optimization for CVT components. For additional information about the International VDI Conference, visit www.vdi-wissensforum.de/en/event/cvt.

For more information about Dana's VariGlide planetary variator transmission (CVT) technology, visit www.variglide.com.

About Dana Holding Corporation

Dana is a world leader in the supply of highly engineered drivetrain, sealing, and thermal-management technologies that improve the efficiency and performance of vehicles with both conventional and alternative-energy powertrains. Serving three primary markets  passenger vehicle, commercial truck, and off-highway equipment  Dana provides the world's original-equipment manufacturers and the aftermarket with local product and service support through a network of nearly 100 engineering, manufacturing, and distribution facilities. Founded in 1904 and based in Maumee, Ohio, the company employs more than 23,000 people in 25 countries on six continents. In 2015, Dana generated sales of nearly $6.1 billion. Forbes Magazine has again selected Dana as one of America's 100 Most Trustworthy Companies for 2016. For more information, please visit dana.com.

SOURCE Dana Holding Corporation

Related Links

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WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Federation of Government Employees is praising the U.S. House of Representatives for including a bipartisan measure in next year's Department of Defense appropriations bill that will protect civilian jobs from being outsourced.

The American Federation of Government Employees is praising the U.S. House of Representatives for including a bipartisan measure in next year's Department of Defense appropriations bill that will protect civilian jobs from being outsourced. "Civilian employees are the backbone of our military and no effort to outsource their jobs should move forward until DoD can show it has an unbiased process in place for conducting privatization studies," AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said. AFGE represents 270,000 DoD civilians nationwide and overseas.

"The Armed Forces rely on civilian employees for a range of services that are vital to military readiness, from training warfighters and maintaining equipment to treating the wounded and sustaining facilities," AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said. "The House action ensures that these jobs cannot be outsourced, since the current privatization process is biased against federal workers."

The House on June 15 included a provision in the fiscal 2017 DoD Appropriations Bill that bans conducting public-private contracting studies under Office of Management and Budget Circular A-76.

The provision was added as a bipartisan amendment offered by Reps. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Don Beyer of Virginia, and Rob Bishop of Utah. The House approved the amendment by voice vote.

"A ban has been in place since fiscal 2010 because of systemic problems with the contracting out process and DoD's failure to produce a full and meaningful inventory of its contractor workforce," Cox said. "Some lawmakers have proposed lifting this ban, even though these well-documented problems remain in place. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the four members of Congress who pushed to include a DoD-wide ban in the Defense appropriations bill."

The Senate dropped the moratorium from its version of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act and failed to consider a bipartisan amendment that would have restored the ban. This is the first time a DoD-wide ban has been included in the Defense appropriations bill.

"Civilian employees are the backbone of our military and no effort to outsource their jobs should move forward until DoD can show it has an unbiased process in place for conducting privatization studies," Cox said.

AFGE represents more than 270,000 DoD civilian employees nationwide and overseas.

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

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SAN FRANCISCO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- EPIC Insurance Brokers & Consultants (EPIC), a retail property, casualty insurance brokerage and employee benefits consultant, today announced a significant milestone, having become the 15th largest employee benefits broker/consultant in the U.S. In addition, EPIC ranks #11 among the country's fastest growing large group broker/consultants, based on Form 5500 data from the Department of Labor, compiled by business intelligence provider miEdge.

According to miEdge CEO Mark Smith, "EPIC is now impressively at number 15 among the largest broker/consultant in the country and is very close to overtaking CBIZ at number 14."

Aside from impressive organic growth, EPIC's rapid climb was fueled by the acquisition of Ascende Human Capital Consulting in January 2016. Founded in 1995, Houston, Texas-based Ascende (now Ascende  an EPIC Company) is one of the largest independent employee benefits consulting firms in the country, providing solutions in a variety of human capital related fields, including health and welfare, benefit plan administration, retirement, investment advisory, pharmacy management, wellness, communications, global benefit solutions, mergers and acquisitions consulting and human resources consulting services.

The addition significantly expanded EPIC's employee benefit capabilities nationally, adding nearly 100 top professionals and a strong client base in the Southwest to EPIC's existing team of more than 200 employee benefits professionals across the country.

Said EPIC CEO John Hahn, "EPIC has been investing heavily in our employee benefits consulting capabilities and Ascende, with the leadership of Jim Watt and his team in the Southwest, adds significant value to our clients and creates further opportunities for our employees' long term growth and career success. It is a very significant achievement to reach number 15 among the country's largest benefits consultants in partnership with Ascende."

About miEdge:

miEdge is the leader in prospecting solutions specifically designed for insurance & financial professionals. The innovative miEdge solution utilizes Form 5500 data from the Department of Labor and applies proprietary business logic, along with algorithms and data cleansing to provide unrivaled data intelligence in an easy to use intuitive interface. miEdge technology solutions include; employee benefits health & welfare and retirement prospecting, health & welfare analytics and advertising solutions. Visit www.miedge.biz to learn more.

About EPIC:

EPIC is a unique and innovative retail property and casualty and employee benefits insurance brokerage and consulting firm. EPIC has created a values-based, client-focused culture that attracts and retains top talent, fosters employee satisfaction and loyalty and sustains a high level of customer service excellence. EPIC team members have consistently recognized their company as a "Best Place to Work" in multiple regions and as a "Best Place to Work in the Insurance Industry" nationally.

EPIC now has more than 850 team members operating from offices across the U.S., providing Property Casualty, Employee Benefits, Specialty Programs and Private Client solutions to more than 13,000 clients.

With more than $200 million in revenues, EPIC ranks among the top 20 retail insurance brokers in the United States. Backed by the Carlyle Group, the company continues to expand organically and through strategic acquisitions across the country. For additional information, please visit www.epicbrokers.com

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MEDIA CONTACTS:

Dave Hock, of EPIC

650.295.4608

[email protected]

Nicole Conley

408.295.4309 x104

[email protected]

This release was issued through Send2Press, a unit of Neotrope. For more information, visit Send2Press Newswire at https://www.Send2Press.com

SOURCE EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants

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LONG BEACH, Calif., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Epson America, Inc., today announced that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Patricia O'Brian, director, Commercial Sales, to its prestigious 2016 Women of the Channel list. The women executives who comprise this annual list span the IT channel, representing vendors, distributors, solution providers, and other organizations that figure prominently in the channel ecosystem. Each is recognized for her outstanding leadership, vision, and unique role in driving channel growth and innovation.

This year's female executives were carefully reviewed and selected by CRN editors based on their professional accomplishments, expertise and ongoing dedication to the IT channel. O'Brian was chosen for her contributions to the growth and streamlining of channel and end-user teams, allowing Epson to build and strengthen its channel partnerships, programs, and strategies, as well as provide end user teams with the ability to generate new opportunities with their accounts and cross sell all product categories.

"These executives have made a lasting mark on our industry  growing and elevating partner programs, leading transitions to new business models and introducing cutting-edge go-to-market strategies, among other remarkable achievements," said Robert Faletra, CEO, The Channel Company. "We congratulate all the 2016 Women of the Channel and celebrate their singular contributions to the advancement of the channel ecosystem."

"I am honored to be named a 2016 CRN Woman of the Channel," said O'Brian. "Along with a continued effort in technology innovation and advancements, and strong channel partnerships, our goal is to implement ongoing improvement and growth to channel and end-user programs, provide best-in-class support and an increased value in channel partnerships that can lead to long-term relationships."

The 2016 Women of the Channel list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.CRN.com/wotc2016.

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers and end users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelco.com

CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. The Channel Company logo is a trademark of The Channel Company, LLC (registration pending). All rights reserved.

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 trademarks and EPSON Exceed Your Vision is a registered logomark of Seiko Epson Corporation. All other product and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Epson disclaims any and all rights in these marks. Copyright 2016 Epson America, Inc.

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SOURCE Epson America, Inc.

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NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP, a leading national securities law firm, is investigating potential misconduct at Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. ("Walgreens" or the "Company") (WBA).

The investigation focuses on whether the Company's Board of Directors and/or its officers committed mismanagement and breached their fiduciary duties in connection with the Company's partnership with and investment in Theranos Inc. ("Theranos"). On May 25, 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that "Walgreens wound up making a deal [with Theranos] that included plans to put Theranos blood-testing centers in thousands of its drugstores across the U.S. despite never fully validating the startup's technology or thoroughly evaluating its capabilities." According to The Wall Street Journal, prior to announcing the deal with Theranos in September 2013, some Walgreens executives and outside advisers had doubts about Theranos and its technology. Despite these doubts, however, Walgreens moved forward with the deal partly because "executives worried Theranos would choose a different drugstore chain as a partner if they pressed Ms. Holmes too hard." Additionally, The New York Times reported that "Walgreens was so eager to cement the relationship that it lent Theranos money, acquired warrants to buy Theranos stock and skipped its usual due diligence when evaluating a pharmacy partner." In a press release filed by the Company on June 12, 2016, Walgreens announced that it had informed Theranos that it will be terminating its relationship and closing operations at all 40 Theranos Wellness Centers at its stores in Arizona, effective immediately.

Request more information now by clicking here: www.faruqilaw.com/WBA. There is no cost or obligation to you.

Take Action

If you currently own Walgreens stock and would like to discuss your legal rights, please visit www.faruqilaw.com/WBA. You can also contact us by calling Stuart Guber toll free at (215) 277-5770 or by sending an e-mail to [email protected] Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP also encourages anyone with information regarding Walgreens' conduct to contact the firm, including whistleblowers, former employees, shareholders and others.

Attorney Advertising. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP (www.faruqilaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome with respect to any future matter. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your particular case. All communications will be treated in a confidential manner.



FARUQI & FARUQI, LLP

685 3rd Avenue, 26th Floor

New York, NY 10017

Attn: Stuart Guber

[email protected]

Telephone: (215) 277-5770

Attn: Nina Varindani

[email protected]

Telephone: (212) 983-9330

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SOURCE Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP

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SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Bringing its brand name to life, Fingerpaint, a marketing innovation agency and founding partner of Cannes Lions Health, will unveil the first-ever Virtual Reality (VR) Fingerpaint Studio at the Cannes Lions Health Festival, taking place from June 18  19, 2016 in Cannes, France. Lions Health is part of the larger Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, held from June 18  25, 2016.

Within the Fingerpaint pod, guests will have the opportunity to be virtually transplanted to famed fingerpainting artist Iris Scott's art studio, who served as the inspiration behind the agency's new brand story. Using a virtual display of fingerpaint colors and their own fingers, guests will create artwork on a canvas screen, and the finished piece will be printed and added to a growing gallery wall within the pod. Guests can also share a digital copy of their artwork with friends and family via their social media channels, by tagging @fingerpainters and using the following hashtags: #FirstEverVRFingerpaintStudio, #FingerpaintLife and #HandsOnBrands.

"By combining Oculus Rift and LeapMotion technologies, the Fingerpaint VR Studio offers participants the chance to not only become part of a virtual world, but also interact with it," said Fingerpaint Founder Ed Mitzen. "It's a literal way for our brand, and our new Hands-On Brands approach, to come alive, and to connect with clients and the community over artistic expression."

Fingerpaint is launching its Hands-On Brands movement in Cannes, which details the agency's rebrand from "Ad Agency" to "Idea Agency," and how it will provide an entirely new take on communications for its clients. Guests will receive prints of various Iris Scott paintings, which will include more information about the new brand story.

Additional pod activations include a co-branded "Presented by MedAdNews. Powered by Fingerpaint" Blab conversation. MedAdNews will guide online discussions with a mix of agencies, brand executives and the general public about various creative campaigns submitted to the Lions Health Festival. The Blab will be streamed live on Twitter as well.

"We look forward to experiencing the brilliant idea sharing and creative thinking that makes the Cannes festival so special, and introducing our ideas for how to better service and communicate with clients," added Mitzen.

The Fingerpaint pod will be located at Palais des Festivals, Rotonde Lerins. and open from 9:00am  6:00pm on Saturday, June 18 and Sunday, June 19.

About Fingerpaint:

Fingerpaint is a marketing innovation agency committed to original thinking and uncommon collaboration. Integrating talent across Saratoga Springs, New York, Scottsdale, Ariz., and Villanova, Penn., Fingerpaint transforms traditional advertising into more engaging, more responsive, and more personal brand experiences, called Hands-On Brands. fingerpaintmarketing.com

For Press Inquiries:

JONESWORKS

Jill Sciuto

[email protected]

212.839.0111

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SOURCE Fingerpaint Marketing

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WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) announced an innovative new energy storage pilot project in conjunction with today's White House summit on scaling renewable energy and storage with smart markets. FPL's project aims to strengthen the electric grid by testing multiple applications of advanced battery technologies under real-life conditions.

FPL will install several different types of battery systems at locations in the southern Florida counties of Miami-Dade and Monroe to research a range of potential future benefits of energy storage, including grid reliability and power quality. In addition, the research has the potential to improve the integration of renewables in the future as FPL continues to expand its use of solar energy to serve its 4.8 million customers.

"President Obama believes in the need to transition to a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable 21st century power grid. Under his leadership, transformations in how we produce and consume electricity are decreasing carbon pollution, scaling up renewable energy, and generating savings on consumers' energy bills," the White House noted in a statement announcing a series of federal and private-sector commitments, including FPL's project.

"FPL is one of the cleanest, most affordable energy providers in the nation because of our persistent commitment to investing in the future. We are always looking long-term, and we recognize that energy storage has enormous potential for both the reliability of the grid and the advancement of affordable clean energy," said Eric Silagy, the company's president and CEO.

FPL's energy storage pilot program will look at various applications of battery technologies to study potential benefits. Key components of the project:

Repurposing used "second-life" batteries from more than 200 BMW electric vehicles to test "peak shaving" for better grid management during periods of high demand via a storage system to be installed in a densely populated residential area in southwestern Miami .

. Designing a mobile storage system that could be relocated as needed to prevent power interruptions at major, economically important events (e.g. nationally televised sports, etc.). FPL plans to build the portable battery system in time for testing during the 2017 Miami Open at Crandon Park Tennis Center on the island of Key Biscayne .

. Building a battery back-up system in the Flamingo community of Monroe County  the southernmost tip of Everglades National Park , where a visitor center, campground and water treatment facility lie 45 miles from any other electric customer  to study ways to improve reliability for isolated areas and develop microgrid foundations.

"Many miles from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, Flamingo is the southernmost developed area in Everglades National Park, providing essential support and amenities so visitors have the opportunity to view wildlife in their natural, undisturbed setting. Because of our remote location, the concept of having clean, quiet, on-site back-up power is exciting. FPL's project could make a big difference for us and our ability to provide uninterrupted access to this national treasure for thousands of people around the world," said Mike Jester, chief of facilities management for Everglades National Park.

FPL expects to begin construction on the project this summer with most components in operation by the end of the year.

The project is an extension of FPL's clean energy research program, which includes a major, commercial-scale distributed solar energy system that opened in April at Florida International University's College of Engineering in Miami.

In addition, the company continues to make progress on the construction of three new solar power plants that will be among the largest solar power facilities ever built in the eastern U.S. Comprising more than 1 million solar panels, the new, cost-effective plants will begin powering FPL customers later this year, tripling the company's use of energy from the sun.

FPL's commitment to clean energy is not new. In fact, because of investments that have been made year after year, FPL is already cleaner today than the 2030 carbon emissions rate goal set for Florida by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan. At the same time, FPL's typical residential customer rates are about 30 percent lower than the national average.

In addition, as part of NextEra Energy, Inc., a global leader in clean energy, FPL is able to leverage the learnings and technical expertise of its sister company, NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, which has energy storage installations in operation or development in Arizona, California, Maine, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Canada.

For more information about FPL's affordable clean energy strategy, visit www.FPL.com.

Florida Power & Light Company

Florida Power & Light Company is the third-largest electric utility in the United States, serving more than 4.8 million customer accounts or more than 10 million people across nearly half of the state of Florida. FPL's typical 1,000-kWh residential customer bill is approximately 30 percent lower than the latest national average and, in 2015, was the lowest in Florida among reporting utilities for the sixth year in a row. FPL's service reliability is better than 99.98 percent, and its highly fuel-efficient power plant fleet is one of the cleanest among all utilities nationwide. The company was recognized in 2015 as one of the most trusted U.S. electric utilities by Market Strategies International. A leading Florida employer with approximately 8,800 employees, FPL is a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Fla.-based NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE), a clean energy company widely recognized for its efforts in sustainability, ethics and diversity, and has been ranked No. 1 in the electric and gas utilities industry in Fortune's 2016 list of "World's Most Admired Companies." NextEra Energy is also the parent company of NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, which, together with its affiliated entities, is the world's largest generator of renewable energy from the wind and sun. For more information, visit these websites: www.NextEraEnergy.com, www.FPL.com , www.NextEraEnergyResources.com.

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SOURCE Florida Power & Light Company

Related Links

http://www.FPL.com


Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned candidates in the US presidential election against questioning the Islamic republic's nuclear deal with world powers, his official website reported on Tuesday.

"We do not violate the nuclear accord... candidates in the American presidential election are threatening to tear up the nuclear deal. If they do so, we will burn it," he told visiting dignitaries.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has called the nuclear agreement "catastrophic".

In March, Trump said that if elected his first foreign policy priority would be to dismantle the deal and what he said was Tehran's global "terror" network.

The nuclear agreement signed in July last year between Iran and the P5+1 group -- the US, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany -- came into force in January.

Under it, Iran has limited its nuclear programme in exchange for a lifting of many international sanctions.

Tehran accuses Washington of not actively promoting relations between Iran and international business, especially banks.

"The other party had to lift sanctions but has not done so. The question of banking has not been regulated... we are unable to recover oil revenues and other capital we have in other countries," Khamenei said.

"The Americans are not applying a large part of their commitments as we have done," he said.

Iran complains that major international banks, particularly in Europe, are reluctant to do business with it for fear of US punitive measures.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, at the Oslo Forum in Norway where he is due to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, urged Washington to lift "psychological" barriers to Iran doing business.

"I think that while on paper the US has lifted all sanctions, the psychological aftermath associated with many years of sanctions remains, and I think the US should play a more active role to remove them," he said.

Zarif said he would raise the issue when he met Kerry on Wednesday.

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Cooking has become a popular pastime with children, and it comes as no surprise since there is an increase in the number of consumers preparing and eating meals at home 1 . Exposure to cooking at home inspires kids to get involved and allows them to develop a taste for fresh, wholesome ingredients 2 .The kid-friendly creations prepared by the Jr. Got Milk? Chefs are packed with fresh fruits, vegetables and smart ingredient swaps (e.g. buckwheat instead of traditional flour). And with milk as the pairing beverage of choice for each meal, the overall nutritional value beats that of pre-packaged options. "What better way to keep kids engaged in the summer than by allowing them to express their creativity in the kitchen," said Steve James, executive director of the CMPB. "I was impressed by all of our junior chefs' recipes, and was excited to see how milk plays a key role in complementing each one," said Steve.

An example of creativity at work is the "Mole Nachos" dish created by father and son team Scott Davis and Max Davis-Young of "The Culinary Dude," a cooking academy based in San Francisco. With smoked paprika, cinnamon and semisweet chocolate chips, these nachos are sophisticated yet a breeze to make  and their flavor and crunch go perfectly with a creamy glass of milk! Another example are the "Buckwheat and Blueberry Pancakes" created by Tina Fanelli-Moraccini, Valentina and Mimi Moraccini from "Piccolo Chef" in Los Angeles. Their recipe proves that not all pancakes are created equal, as they contain ground flaxseeds and chia seeds that are full of fiber, antioxidants and omega-3 fats (aka good fat) 3. Paired with a glass of milk, it's a well-balanced breakfast or lunch for late sleepers!

All of the Jr. Got Milk? Chefs have contributed their own unique styles, reinventing traditional favorites into tasty and easy-to-make meals. "We encourage kids to try these milk pairing recipes at home as a fun way to keep their minds active while getting the nutrition they need," added Steve James. When kids are learning to cook they are also learning science, language, counting, fractions, problem-solving, sharing, fine motor skills and they're also reading and learning about other cultures  all of which make cooking an enjoyable and educational summer activity4. For all of the summer and back-to-school Jr. Got Milk? Chefs' recipes, visit: www.gotmilk.com and follow got milk? via social media on Facebook/ Twitter @gotmilk and Instagram @officialgotmilk.

About the CMPB

The California Milk Processor Board was established in 1993 to make milk more competitive and increase milk consumption in California. Awareness of got milk? is over 90% nationally and it is considered one of the most important and successful campaigns in history. Got milk? is a federally registered trademark that has been licensed by the national dairy boards since 1995. The CMPB's Spanish-language campaign began in 1994 using the tagline "Familia, Amor y Leche" (Family, Love and Milk). The TOMA LECHE (Drink Milk) campaign replaced it in 2006, in order to better align the English and Spanish language work. The CMPB is funded by all California milk processors and administered by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

1 http://www.ift.org/newsroom/news-releases/2016/january/15/interesting-facts-about-americas-eating-habits.aspx

2 http://www.thekidscookmonday.org/why-cook-with-kids/

3 http://www.shape.com/healthy-eating/diet-tips/ask-diet-doctor-should-i-eat-flaxseeds-chia-seeds-and-hemp-seeds

4 http://www.thekidscookmonday.org/why-cook-with-kids/

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380026

SOURCE California Milk Processor Board

Related Links

http://www.gotmilk.com


ANNAPOLIS, Md., June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc. ("Hannon Armstrong," or the "Company") (NYSE: HASI) announced today the pricing of its public offering of 4,000,000 shares of common stock for total estimated gross proceeds of approximately $82.0 million before deducting estimated offering expenses payable by the Company. The Company has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 600,000 additional shares of common stock.

BofA Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo Securities and Baird are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering. The underwriters propose to offer the shares of common stock from time to time for sale in negotiated transactions or otherwise, at market prices prevailing at the time of sale, at prices related to such prevailing market prices or at negotiated prices.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus. A copy of the preliminary prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus related to the offering can be obtained, when available, by contacting: BofA Merrill Lynch, NC1-004-03-43, 200 North College Street, 3rd floor, Charlotte, North Carolina 28255-0001, Attention: Prospectus Department, or by e-mailing [email protected]; Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York 10014, Attention: Prospectus Department; Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, 375 Park Avenue, 4th Floor, New York, New York 10152, Attention: Equity Syndicate, or by telephone at 800-326-5897, or by e-mailing [email protected]; or Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Attention: Syndicate Department, 777 E. Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202, or by telephone at 800-792-2473 or by e-mailing at [email protected].

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any of the offered shares, nor shall there be any sale of such shares in any state or other 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 other jurisdiction.

About Hannon Armstrong

Hannon Armstrong provides debt and equity financing to the energy efficiency and renewable energy markets. The Company focuses on providing preferred or senior level capital to established sponsors and high credit quality obligors for assets that generate long-term, recurring and predictable cash flows. The Company is based in Annapolis, MD.

Forward-Looking Statements

Some of the information contained in this press release are forward-looking statements and within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. When used in this press release, the words such as "believe," "expect, "anticipate," "estimate," "plan," "continue," "intend," "should," "may," or similar expressions, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Investors are cautioned against placing undue reliance on such statements. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements include those discussed under the caption "Risk Factors" included in the Company's report on Form 10-K that was filed with the SEC, as well as in other reports that the Company files with the SEC.

Forward-looking statements are based on beliefs, assumptions and expectations as of the date of this press release. The Company disclaims any obligation to publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements reflecting new estimates, events or circumstances after the date of this press release.

Contact: Investor/Media Relations

Phone: 410-571-6189

Email: [email protected]

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SOURCE Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc.

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http://www.hannonarmstrong.com


RESTON, Va., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- hCentive, the leader in health insurance exchange solutions, announced a major update to its WebInsure Benefits marketplace, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. The new features and several enhancements are designed to provide brokers and agents a comprehensive digital solution to serve employer groups from "quote to close". Employers and employees use the same platform to access, enroll and administer a wide range of health, financial, ancillary/voluntary and other benefits. The WebInsure Benefits platform is already in use by clients in multiple state markets.

Highlights:

WebInsure Benefits, launched in late 2014, is a benefits marketplace for brokers and agents. hCentive continues to expand the range of benefits products available on its benefits platform from national and regional carriers across Health (Medical, Dental, Vision, Wellness); Financial (Flexible Spending Accounts; Health Savings Accounts; Employee Loans); Voluntary (Life, Short-Term Disability, Long-Term Disability, Accidental Death & Dismemberment insurance; Identity Protection) and more.

The platform allows brokers and agents to manage their book-of-business with client management, dashboards and analytical tools; brand their own exchange to market to clients; create custom plans and rates backed by compliance and validation tools to accelerate time to market; create best-fit and best-rate proposals for employers.

For employers, the marketplace provides tools to select benefits from a wider array of carrier and product choices to fit with their business and budget; configure contribution strategies for each product; simplify administration of enrollments and status changes.

Built-in decision-support tools and calculators aid employees in smarter health and financial choices.

WebInsure Benefits supports direct enrollment for consumers in states that use HealthCare.gov for on-exchange plans offered under the Affordable Care Act, so brokers can use the same platform for both employer group and individual enrollments.

Quotes:

Derrick Cobey, Chief Product Officer, hCentive, Inc.

"We continue to build on our commitment to make WebInsure Benefits a one-stop shop for brokers and agents to efficiently serve employers for all their benefits needs. The upgrades we have made provide employers more control and options over benefits strategies while offering employers and employees more choice of health insurance and benefits products with smarter tools to select and manage those benefits."

Resources:

About hCentive:

At hCentive, our mission is to empower everyone to gain access to health benefits. We are a leader in public and private exchange solutions that simplify the distribution and management of health insurance and ancillary benefits. Our WebInsure solutions fully support government agencies, insurance carriers, and brokers as they engage consumers and businesses and offer transparent access to benefits choices. Our innovative technologies deliver an integrated online benefits shopping and enrollment experience that is convenient and available anytime and anywhere.

For more information, visit www.hcentive.com

SOURCE hCentive

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LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The global High Performance Pigments Market is expected to reach USD 6.32 billion by 2022, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Growing of automotive coatings demand on account of increasing automobile production particularly in Asia Pacific is expected to remain a key driving factor for the global High Performance Pigments Market.



The growth of global personal care industry is also expected to have a positive influence on the market growth. Volatile raw material prices coupled with the high price of these pigments is expected to remain a key challenge for market participants. The market displays high competition among its industry participants which has resulted in companies taking strong measures to reduce manufacturing costs and yet provide superior quality products.



Inorganic high performance pigments emerged as the leading product segment with demand share exceeding 60% of the global market in 2014. However, organic high performance pigments are presumed to witness a faster growth rate on account of changing customer buying patterns and favorable regulatory scenario.



Further key findings from the report suggest:



Global High Performance Pigments Market demand was 154.8 kilo tons in 2014 and is expected to reach 233.0 kilo tons by 2022, at a CAGR of 5.2%from 2015 to 2022.



Coatings were the leading application segment and accounted for 59.9% of total market volume in 2014. Growth of global automotive coatings industry is expected to drive this segment over the forecast period. It is also expected to witness the highest growth of 5.4% over the forecast period. Developments in the ink jet printing technology are expected to lead high performance pigment demand in the ink industry.



Europe dominated the global market with demand share estimated at 31.8% in 2014. Developed markets of North America and Europe have had their dominance in the past. However, the recent economic downturn critically impacted key end-use industry growth in these regions. Recovery of U.S. automotive industry from the economic downturn is expected to re-establish high performance pigment demand in North America.



Asia Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth of 6.0% from 2015 to 2022. Increasing automobile production in China, India, Thailand and Indonesia is expected to drive the regional market over the forecast period.



The global high performance pigment industry was once recognized by a few multinational corporations. However, the advent of globalization has led new entrants in the industry. Companies have been taking key strategic initiatives to enhance their product portfolio and penetrate the market deeper by targeting applications such as cosmetics, inks, and plastics. Some leading companies in the global market include Sun Chemical, Clariant, BASF, Ferro, Heubach, Sudarshan Chemical Industries Ltd, Merck, Eckart Effect Pigments and Horst Chemicals Zhuhai Co. Ltd.

Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3847273/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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LOURES, Portugal, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Hovione announced today that it held on June 8th the official groundbreaking for the expansion of its New Jersey Facility in East Windsor, USA.

The expansion will add an additional 30,600 ft (2,843 m) to the existing 24,000ft (2,211m) facility. It will introduce a new commercial spray dryer unit to complement the existing pilot unit and this installation will be specifically designed to handle potent drug substances (APIs). In addition the Hovione New Jersey facility will more than double its capacity to manufacture drug substance. The expansion is expected to add approximately 60 new jobs to the current workforce over the next three years.

"The start of the construction activities to expand our site in East Windsor is a very exciting moment for us and for our customers. This is an important step to strengthen our continued commitment to the pharmaceutical industry and to the patients by offering innovative technologies and services. The site will be unique in offering at a single location drug substance, spray drying, hot melt extrusion and drug product manufacturing services using innovative continuous manufacturing technology. The state and especially the local government have been extremely supportive and we are happy to strengthen our presence in East Windsor by creating highly qualified jobs in the local community," said Dr. Marco Gil, General Manager, Hovione New Jersey.

"This investment is part of the company's strategy to increase its global development and commercial capacity which will meet the increasing demands of Hovione's customers in the API and Spray drying services. It will also include the addition of a continuous drug product manufacturing capability to its offering through the partnership with Vertex Pharmaceuticals announced earlier this year," said Kristine Senft, Vice President Marketing and Sales.

The start-up of the operation is expected to take place in April 2017 for the drug substance and spray drying services while the continuous drug product manufacturing is planned for the end of 2017.

About Hovione

Hovione is an international company with over 50 years' experience in the development and compliant manufacture of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients and Drug Product Intermediates. With four FDA inspected sites in the USA, China, Ireland, and Portugal, and development laboratories in Lisbon and New Jersey the company focuses on the most demanding customers in the most regulated markets. The company also offers branded pharmaceutical customers services for the development and compliant manufacture of innovative new drugs, and is able to support highly potent compounds. In the inhalation area Hovione is the only independent company offering a complete range of services. Please visit http://www.hovione.com

Contact

Isabel Pina

Director of Corporate Communications

Tel.: +35121-982-9362

[email protected]



SOURCE Hovione
DALLAS, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- With one in three U.S. families unable to provide fresh, clean diapers for their baby, diaper need garnered national attention from the White House earlier this year when President Obama urged companies to help. Meeting that call in March, Huggies extended its long-standing commitment with a donation of 22 million diapers, and is continuing to help "wipe out" diaper need with a matching donation of 22 million free Huggies Wipes to the National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN).

This Father's Day, Huggies donates 22 million wipes to match 22 million diaper donation to families in need. As the founding sponsor of the NDBN, Huggies has donated a combination of more than 200 million diapers and wipes in the past six years.

According to the NDBN, more than half of its member diaper banks provide other basic need items besides diapers, with body cleansing products  including wipes  as the second-most distributed item. As the founding sponsor of the NDBN, Huggies has donated a combination of more than 200 million diapers and wipes in the past six years.

"We are thrilled that Huggies is broadening its support for the NDBN beyond its annual donation of diapers to include 22 million baby wipes to ensure babies in need have clean and dry bottoms to remain healthy," said Joanne Goldblum, executive director of the National Diaper Bank Network. "We receive frequent requests for wipes from our member diaper banks, and this additional offering will help further meet the basic needs of the families we serve."

This Father's Day, Huggies is also teaming up with the City Dads Group and The Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN) to engage parents on skin health and diaper need. Everyone can join in the conversation during the "Huggies Wipes Out Diaper Need" Twitter Party, taking place on June 23 from 8-9 p.m. EST using #DiaperNeed.

Diapering is more than just putting on a diaper and wipes are one of the best products for maintaining a baby's naturally perfect skin. "Diapers and wipes go hand in hand to ensure proper hygiene," said Lynn Erdman MN, RN, FAAN, chief executive officer of AWHONN. "Nurses understand the importance of maintaining a baby's skin integrity and preventing irritation that could lead to more serious issues."

With these partners, Huggies is continuing to elevate the topic of diaper need and raise awareness of the importance of skin health in the diapering process.

"We're committed to fighting diaper need by providing great skin care to all babies through diapers and wipes donations," said Giusy Buonfantino, president of Kimberly-Clark baby and child care North America. "We want to embrace all babies so they have the opportunity to grow up healthy and thrive - it's how we got our name: Hugs + Babies = Huggies."

Together with Huggies, parents can help too: visit Huggies.com/Rewards and donate your Huggies Rewards points to help a baby in need. For more information on Huggies donation efforts, visit the "Why Huggies?" page at Huggies.com.

About the National Diaper Bank Network

The National Diaper Bank Network (NDBN) is a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to eliminating diaper need in America, by leading a national movement to help meet the basic needs of all babies and their familiesincluding access to clean, dry diapers and other material goods. Founded in 2011 with the support of Huggies, the network raises national awareness of diaper need (#DiaperNeed) and supports the development and expansion of diaper banks in communities throughout the country. Its active membership includes more than 300 diaper banks, diaper pantries, and food banks located in 45 states, the District of Columbia and Guam. More information on NDBN and diaper need is available at www.nationaldiaperbanknetwork.org, and on Twitter (@DiaperNetwork) and Facebook.

About The Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses

Since 1969, the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses (AWHONN) has been the foremost authority promoting the health of women and newborns and strengthening the nursing profession through the delivery of superior advocacy, research, education, and other professional and clinical resources. AWHONN represents the interests of 350,000 registered nurses working in women's health, obstetric, and neonatal nursing across the United States. To combat diaper need, AWHONN's patient education channel, Healthy Mom&Baby, in partnership with Huggies and the National Diaper Bank Network, captures the efforts and shares the stories of nurses combatting diaper need throughout the country. This year, nurses have the goal to raise more than 250,000 diapers for banks in their communities through the Healthy Mom&Baby Diaper Drive at DiaperDrive.org. Follow their efforts at #nurses4babies. Learn more about AWHONN at www.awhonn.org .

About Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) and its well-known global brands are an indispensable part of life for people in more than 175 countries. Every day, nearly a quarter of the world's population trust Kimberly-Clark brands and the solutions they provide to enhance their health, hygiene and well-being. With brands such as Kleenex, Scott, Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex and Depend, Kimberly-Clark holds the No.1 or No. 2 share position in 80 countries. To keep up with the latest news and to learn more about the company's 144-year history of innovation, visit www.kimberly-clark.com or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

[KMB-B]

Contact: Sarah Hintze

312-240-2886

[email protected]

Contact: Terry Balluck

972-281-1397

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379981

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379982

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SOURCE Kimberly-Clark

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MONTREAL, June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Eric Martel, Hydro-Quebec's CEO, was in Boston today to meet with members of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Green Economy Caucus of the Massachusetts State Legislature, a group chaired by State Senator James Eldridge and State Representative Frank Smizik, and comprised of the Massachusetts Senators and Representatives, to discuss the advantages of Quebec hydropower and the inclusive approach that Hydro-Quebec is following to bring more clean energy into New England.

Clean energy, available to Massachusetts today

Quebec hydropower is a proven technology offering a clean, renewable source of energy for Massachusetts. Hydro-Quebec is well positioned to supply large quantities of its power to New England now, but new transmission into the region is needed.

"Massachusetts is leading the region and the U.S. in transitioning to a clean energy future", Martel said. "That's why it was so important for me to be in Boston today and meet with business and legislative stakeholders as they work out the details of how to meet the modern-day challenge of building a clean energy future while maintaining price stability, ensuring reliability and maximizing GHG emissions reductions."

Low-carbon Quebec hydropower can help promote the development of intermittent renewables such as wind and solar. That's why Hydro-Quebec is pursuing projects that can blend multiple renewable resources, and hydro projects that allow for the integration of a higher concentration of intermittent resources such as offshore and onshore wind and grid-scale solar.

Hydro-Quebec and Eversource Energy are pursuing the Northern Pass Transmission project to bring more clean energy to New England. The Regie de l'energie, Quebec's energy board, recently approved the project. Commissioning of this new line is planned for 2019, in time to help Massachusetts meet its 2020 carbon reduction goals.

Stable prices that will generate savings in wholesale energy costs

Mr. Martel underscored the price predictability of Quebec hydropower, noting that his company's generation costs have followed the consumer price index over the last 50 years, whereas petroleum products have increased in cost at more than twice that rate.

Stable prices over long periods of time mean savings for consumers. A study conducted by Power Advisory LLC at the request of the Massachusetts Clean Electricity Partnership estimated that clean electricity imports would produce a net benefit of US$ 171 million per year for energy customers in Massachusetts.

A long-standing electricity trading relationship that can go further

"Following the outcome of the COP21 meeting in Paris, there is a tremendous opportunity to deepen our collaboration with Massachusetts on a wide array of fronts", said Mr. Martel. "Hydro-Quebec is ready to partner on energy innovation, including the deployment of utility-scale battery storage to help firm local renewable energy, and working with our state partners to mainstream the use of electric vehicles."

Hydro-Quebec delivers reliable electric power and high-quality services. By developing hydraulic resources, we make a strong contribution to collective wealth and play a central role in the emergence of a low-carbon economy. As recognized leaders in hydropower and large transmission systems, we export clean, renewable power and commercialize our expertise and innovations on world markets.

SOURCE Hydro-Quebec

Related Links

http://www.hydroquebec.com


NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hynes Keller & Hernandez, LLC is investigating potential claims against the Board of Directors of Cobalt International Energy, Inc. ("Cobalt" or the "Company") (NYSE: CIE) concerning possible breaches of fiduciary duty arising from a January 19, 2015 ruling by a federal court. The court concluded that Cobalt must face claims that it committed securities fraud in connection with certain Cobalt securities offerings and other representations made by the Company, specifically, that certain officers and directors of Cobalt misrepresented and failed to disclose the true facts about Cobalt's business and oil wells in Angola.

Click here for more information about our investigation of CIE: http://hkh-lawfirm.com/investigations-cases/cobalt-international-energy-inc-cie/

Hynes Keller & Hernandez, LLC is a national law firm that represents institutional and individual investors. The firm is focused on providing exemplary legal services in the area of shareholder litigation. The firm has an experienced litigation team which has achieved significant victories on behalf of the firm's clients. You can visit our website at www.hkh-lawfirm.com for more information. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

If you hold shares in CIE and would like to obtain additional information about your legal rights and protect your investment, please visit our website or contact the attorneys below. There is no cost or obligation to you.

Contact:

Hynes Keller & Hernandez, LLC Hynes Keller & Hernandez, LLC Ligaya T. Hernandez, Esq. Beth A. Keller, Esq. 1150 First Avenue, Suite 501 100 South Bedford Road, Suite 340 King of Prussia, PA 19406 Mount Kisco, NY 10549 Telephone: (610) 994-0292 Telephone: (914) 752-3040 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Hynes Keller & Hernandez, LLC

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KARLSRUHE, Germany, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

ICIS is very pleased to announce its launch of a price assessment for the national emissions trading scheme in China. On a weekly basis, the company is assessing how Chinese and international companies value Chinese Certified Emission Reductions (CCERs), a unit that can be used to comply with the Chinese national emissions trading scheme that is poised to launch next year.

In its first assessment on 16th June, the bid/offer spread for a CCER delivered in March 2018 that is eligible for compliance at time of delivery was assessed at 8-12CNY/t. The weekly assessment is offered free of charge for ICIS China carbon market clients, and can be received by non-clients with a one week delay by registering on https://analytics.icis.com/golden-ccer-price-report/.

"Our Golden CCER price assessment is the first time the market gets transparency on expected costs in the national market in China. The Chinese government expects more than 7,000 companies to participate in this market - so our weekly publication should help a lot of entities to manage their costs and make better decision", says Jan Ahrens, Business Director Carbon Analytics.

First transactions

We are happy to announce that Shell Energy (China) Limited, the trading entity for Shell in China, and SPDDR Carbon Asset Management Centre have agreed to pursue the 1st Golden CCER trade for a fixed price. The deal was announced at the 7th Earth Temple Forum in Beijing earlier today. This transaction shows support of the national market and we hope it will encourage more Golden CCER transactions in future.

"We see this initiative of ICIS as very positive for the development of the Chinese carbon market and hope that our deal is just the start of more trading in the run-up to the national ETS", says Mr. Yao Fuming, Director of the SPDDR Carbon Asset Management Centre.

For more information contact: Amy Holland

About ICIS

ICIS is the world's largest petrochemical market information provider and has fast-growing energy and fertilizer divisions. We provide information and intelligence for global carbon markets through utilizing a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative research, as well as expert opinion to deliver detailed insight into emissions and carbon trading schemes. Our Timing Impact Model is the cornerstone of our analysis and provides clients with a more rounded perspective than conventional approaches. This gives our subscribers a competitive advantage over their competitors. ICIS offers products that cover the California/Quebec, RGGI, EU, South Korea, and China carbon markets.

With a global staff of more than 800, ICIS has employees based in Houston, Washington, New York, London, Montpellier, Dusseldorf, Karlsruhe, Milan, Mumbai, Singapore, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Yantai, Tokyo and Perth. Some 350 of ICIS's staff are journalists engaged in reporting market prices and news, and ICIS is fully committed to upholding the highest journalistic principles of verification, corroboration and authentication. ICIS has a compliance framework that along with its methodologies and business processes adheres to the requirements of the IOSCO PRA Principles.

About Reed Business Information

At Reed Business Information we provide information and online data services to business professionals worldwide. Customers have access to our high-value industry data, analytics, information and tools. Our strong global brands hold market-leading positions across a wide range of industry sectors including banking, petrochemicals and aviation where we help customers make key strategic decisions every day. RBI is part of RELX Group Plc, a leading global provider of data, information and solutions for professional customers.

About RELX Group:

RELX Group is a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries. The group employs about 28,000 people of whom half are in North America. RELX PLC is the London Stock Exchange listed vehicle for holding shares in RELX Group. Shareholders in RELX PLC own a 52.9% economic interest in RELX Group. RELX NV is the Amsterdam Stock Exchange listed vehicle for holding shares in RELX Group. External shareholders in RELX NV own a 47.1% economic interest in RELX Group. The total market capitalisation of the two parent companies is approximately 24.1bn/30.5bn. Its shares are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RUK and ENL. www.relx.com

Further information about ICIS can be found at www.icis.com.

For further information about this release, please contact:

Amy Holland

Marketing Manager, ICIS

Email: [email protected]

Direct: +1 (713) 525 2673



SOURCE ICIS
LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Indonesia is one of the most populated regions in the world as well as one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia. In order to further strengthen its position as a major industrial region in South East Asia, the Indonesian government plans to introduce 36 industrial hubs across the country. Motors form the core of pumps, which are used for numerous industrial applications such as crude oil extraction, refining, power plants, cement industry, chemical & fertilizers, etc. Apart from pumps, electric motors are also used in compressors as well as in mechanical movement applications. On account of anticipated industrial growth in the country over the next five years, the demand for electric motors is expected to grow through 2020.



According to TechSci Research report, "Indonesia Electric Motors Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2020", the electric motors market in Indonesia is projected to grow at a CAGR of around 3% through 2020. Market growth is being driven by increasing adoption of energy-efficient electric motors, growing industrial sector and favorable government initiatives. Industrial sector, which is a major contributor to the country's GDP, dominated the Indonesian electric motors market over the last five years and this trend is expected to continue through 2020. Region-wise, Java dominated the electric motors market in 2014, however, the region is anticipated to witness a slight decline in its share over the next five years due to higher government focus on developing other regions in the country. Few of the major players operating in Indonesia's electric motors market include ABB, Siemens, TECO, WEG and Hitachi. "Indonesia Electric Motors Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2020" discusses the following aspects of electric motor market in Indonesia:



- Indonesia Electric Motors Market Size, Share & Forecast

- Segmental Analysis  (AC & DC)

- Regional Analysis - Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, etc.

- Policy & Regulatory Landscape

- Changing Market Trends & Emerging Opportunities

- Competitive Landscape & Strategic Recommendations



Why You Should Buy This Report?



- To gain an in-depth understanding of electric motors market in Indonesia.

- To identify the on-going trends and anticipated growth in the next five years

- To help industry consultants and electric motor manufacturers align their market-centric strategies

- To obtain research based business decisions and add weight to presentations and marketing material

- To gain competitive knowledge of leading market players

- To avail 10% customization in the report without any extra charges and get the research data or trends added in the report as per the buyer's specific needs



Report Methodology



The information contained in this report is based upon both primary and secondary research. Primary research included interviews with electric motor manufacturers, suppliers and industry experts. Secondary research included an exhaustive search of relevant publications like company annual reports, financial reports and proprietary databases.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/3101134/



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers

http://www.reportbuyer.com



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +44 208 816 85 48

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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The interior ministry says gunmen attacked the house of the policemen and shot them dead

Two policemen were shot dead on Thursday morning in Al Arish of North Sinai, Egypts interior ministry said.

Four masked gunmen approached the house where the two policemen were staying in the North Sinai provincial capital Al-Arish and opened fire on them, the ministry added in a statement.

Egypt has seen a spike in militant activity since the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, with most of the attacks occurring in the North Sinai region bordering the Gaza Strip.

The violence has mainly targeted police and army personnel and at times has occurred in the capital Cairo and other places on the Egyptian mainland.

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SAN FRANCISCO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

The global industrial protective footwear market size is expected to reach USD 6.56 billion by 2024, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The substantial growth prospects of the market can be attributed to the rising number of worker accidents across global organizations.

Grand View Research Logo (PRNewsFoto/Grand View Research_ Inc_)

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150105/723757 )

Comfort, innovation, safety, and aesthetic value are the key characteristics of the industrial safety footwear. The global shoe manufacturers over the years have been striving to integrate these features into their products in order to offer improved safety in the workplace as well as provide comfort to workers. Industrial protective shoes have been facing a substantial demand from various industries to avoid fatalities and accidents in the workplace.

With a paradigm shift towards worker safety instead of maximizing profits, a huge demand has been created for protective footwear in hazardous work environments and is anticipated to drive the industry over the forecast period.

In the recent years, safety wear has emerged as an increasingly preferred choice for many companies. These safety products are essential for the prevention and protection against occupational fatalities to workers as well as for the prevention of legal action towards organizations.

However, the high sale volume of spurious and cheap products in the industry is envisioned to challenge the industry growth in the near future. Furthermore, due to the increasing popularity and rising demand for premium branded safety shoes, these products become the sole target for counterfeiting. Thus, high sales volume of counterfeit and low-quality products are expected to challenge the industry growth.

Browse full research report with TOC on "Industrial Protective Footwear Market Analysis By Product (Leather, Waterproof, Rubber, Plastic), By Application (Construction, Manufacturing, Mining, Oil and Gas, Chemicals, Food, Pharmaceuticals, Transportation) And Segment Forecasts To 2024" at: http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/industrial-protective-footwear-market

Further key findings from the report suggest:

Leather footwear is presumed to emerge as a predominant product over the forecast period. Leather is increasingly used in safety shoes to provide protection against fatal electric shocks due to its non-conductivity. Moreover, a genuine leather provides protection against falling objects, punctures, cutting hazards, burns, and extreme weather.

The rubber safety shoe market was valued at over USD 120 million in 2015 and is expected to grow at a considerable rate over the forecast period. With the emerging use of intense colored rubber materials, safety shoes have now become ergonomically enhanced, water resistant, and lightweight, thereby making them a good choice for various industries.

in 2015 and is expected to grow at a considerable rate over the forecast period. With the emerging use of intense colored rubber materials, safety shoes have now become ergonomically enhanced, water resistant, and lightweight, thereby making them a good choice for various industries. Construction is expected to emerge as a predominant application segment over the next eight years. Growth in this segment is primarily driven by the rising number of workplace accidents, which has, in turn, fueled the adoption of industrial shoes among infrastructure developers to improve occupation safety.

Europe led the industry in terms of market share in 2015 and is expected to retain its dominance over the forecast period. The demand in this region is mainly driven by the implementation of standards and compliance with stringent regulations that mandate the use of safety shoes at the workplace. The widespread presence of safety shoe manufacturers in the region is anticipated to drive the industry growth in the region.

led the industry in terms of market share in 2015 and is expected to retain its dominance over the forecast period. The demand in this region is mainly driven by the implementation of standards and compliance with stringent regulations that mandate the use of safety shoes at the workplace. The widespread presence of safety shoe manufacturers in the region is anticipated to drive the industry growth in the region. Low-cost labor, capital, and raw materials, as well as low-interest loans and tax incentives, have forced footwear manufacturers to migrate from North America , UK, and Italy to Asia , especially China . Moreover, the Chinese government is presently attracting footwear manufacturers with various incentives and is working to shift the footwear production sites from the coastal regions to internal territories.

Grand View Research has segmented the global industrial protective footwear market on the basis of product, application, and region.

Industrial Protective Footwear Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2024) Leather Footwear Waterproof Footwear Rubber Footwear Plastic Footwear

Industrial Protective Footwear Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2024) Construction Manufacturing Mining Oil and gas Chemicals Food Pharmaceuticals Transportation

Industrial Protective Footwear Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2024) North America Europe Asia Pacific RoW



Browse related reports by Grand View Research:

Chemical Protective Clothing Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/chemical-protective-clothing-market

Ballistic Protection Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ballistic-protection-market

Sulfur Dyes Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/sulfur-dyes-market

Athletic Footwear Market - http://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/athletic-footwear-market

About Grand View Research

Grand 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.

Read Our Blogs - mediafound.org, grandviewresearch.com/blogs/advanced-materials

Contact:

Sherry James

Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Grand View Research, Inc

Phone: 1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: [email protected]

Web: http://www.grandviewresearch.com



SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
SAN DIEGO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Visage Imaging, Inc. ("Visage"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Pro Medicus Ltd. (ASX: PME), has announced the successful validation of numerous interoperability capabilities of the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform performed at the recent Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Connectathon 2016, held April 11-15 in Bochum, Germany. Visage 7 enables enterprise imaging with amazingly fast, thin-client, server-side processing technology, as well as simple diagnostic mobile access via Visage Ease Pro.

IHE's vision is to "Enable seamless and secure access to health information whenever and wherever needed." The annual IHE Europe Connectathon is one of the largest interoperability testing events in the world, bringing health IT professionals and industry together to advance health IT interoperability.

As a leading enterprise diagnostic viewer, Visage 7 is on the forefront of interoperability supporting modern industry standards for information exchange. At the recent IHE Europe Connectathon 2016, Visage successfully tested and validated a number of profiles and actors with Visage 7, including:

Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT): Image Manager and Image Display

Image Manager and Image Display Image Object Change Management (IOCM): Image Manager, Image Display, and Change Requestor

Image Manager, Image Display, and Change Requestor Cross-Enterprise Clinical Documents Share (XDS.b): Document Consumer

Malte Westerhoff, PhD, Co-founder and Global CTO of Visage Imaging explained, "IHE provides the global foundation for healthcare interoperability. We're proud Visage 7 is one of the first, if not the only, thin-client enterprise diagnostic viewer that provides comprehensive support for multi-modality breast imaging, including digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT). Our successful validation of the DBT profile confirms our approach and paves the way for institutions to eliminate specialty breast workstations."

Dr. Westerhoff continued, "Visage 7 also includes a comprehensive toolset for quality assurance (QA), making it one of the first, if not the only, thin-client enterprise diagnostic viewer with this critical functionality. Our successful validation of the IOCM profile, as both a change consumer and change requestor, enables automatic synchronization to vendor neutral archives (VNAs), DICOM archives, and other systems without any manual intervention. Practically speaking, the implementation of a modular, multi-vendor imaging infrastructure without automation and support of IOCM would require manual workarounds that most institutions are ill equipped to handle. With Visage 7, interoperability is both standardized and safe for the world's largest imaging institutions."

Complete results of the IHE Europe Connectathon 2016 may be found at this link.

To learn more about Visage 7, please schedule a priority meeting and/or demonstration at Visage Booths 501/503, SIIM 2016, Portland, Oregon, June 29  July 1.

About Visage Imaging, Inc.

Visage Imaging is a global provider of enterprise imaging and advanced visualization solutions for diagnostic imaging. Visage 7 delivers amazingly fast server-side rendered images streamed via an intelligent thin-client viewer. Radiologists and referring physicians have a customized, protocol-driven workflow to natively view multi-dimensional imagery across a single desktop. Powerful imaging solutions include enterprise viewing and interpretation; image enablement of EHRs, VNAs, HIEs and portals; RIS/PACS, as well as anywhere mobile diagnostic access. www.visageimaging.com

About Pro Medicus Limited

Pro Medicus Limited [ASX: PME] is Australia's leading imaging IT provider. Founded in 1983, the company provides a full range of integrated software products and services to hospital, imaging centers and health care groups worldwide. www.promed.com.au

Visage, Visage Imaging, Visage Ease Pro, Visage Ease, ANV, and Deconstructed PACS are trademarks, registered trademarks and service marks that are licensed by Visage Imaging Inc. Other product and company names mentioned may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners or licensees.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160209/331534LOGO

SOURCE Visage Imaging, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.visageimaging.com


MIAMI, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Communicator, author and international lecturer Ismael Cala announced this Tuesday that he is leaving CNN en Espanol after five and a half years hosting the successful prime time interview show CALA, and fifteen years of affiliation with the network.

After arriving to an amicable settlement with CNN en Espanol, Cala explained that he will now be focusing on his career as a lecturer and inspirational author and as president of his own company, Cala Enterprises. Which was founded to have a positive impact on the lives of millions of People through self-mastery, leadership, meditation, awareness of well-being and mindfulness.

Nonetheless, he mentioned that he is already working on other TV projects in the United States and Latin America. Projects that will be produced by his production company, and will be keyed to his mission of inspiring, awakening and transforming lives.

"A magnificent cycle is closing, one in which I have learned so much. I thank CNN en Espanol, Cynthia Hudson, Eduardo Suarez and all of the executives for the trust they placed in me this whole time. I will be eternally grateful to my great production team. I have enjoyed the journey and the growth of the program, but now it's time to break paradigms, explore new horizons and reinvent myself. Special thanks to our viewers all over the Americas, for all the affection and kindness they have shown over time. We are working on new TV projects, and will continue with our embrace through my books, social networks and meditation challenges, as well as at events, lectures and special journeys we arrange throughout the year in various parts of the world," Cala explained.

Ismael Cala arrived at CNN en Espanol in 2001 through an internship in Atlanta. He then worked as an employee from Toronto, where he covered the visit of Pope John Paul II. Subsequently, he returned to Atlanta and Miami, where he served as a substitute and weekend news anchor. In 2010, he made it to prime time with CALA, which received heads of State and government officials, celebrities in music, film and literature, athletes and scores of inspiring individuals.

ABOUT ISMAEL CALA

Ismael Cala is a communicator, author and international lecturer on issues of personal development and leadership. For more than five years he was host of the prime time show CALA on CNN en Espanol.

He is currently considered one of the leading communicators in the Americas, and his message of social entrepreneurship, mindfulness and well-being is a touchstone for millions of followers attuned to his books, seminars, workshops and lectures. Cala has traveled to more than 25 countries and impacted the lives of thousands of people with his message.

He is the author of the bestsellers El analfabeto emocional ('The emotional illiterate') (2016), Cala y Cruz: Las dos caras de la comunicacion ('Cala and Cruz: The two faces of communication'), (2016), El secreto del bambu ('The secret of bamboo') (2015), Un buen hijo de P ('A real S.O.B.') (2014), and El poder de escuchar ('The power of listening') (2013).

He writes a weekly column for more than 50 publications in Latin America and the United States.

Cala was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1969. He has a degree in Art History from Universidad de Oriente, and studied journalism and television production at York University in Toronto.

SOURCE Cala Enterprises Corporation

Related Links

http://www.IsmaelCala.com


NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- After nearly 12 years at the helm, Judith Rodin, the first female president of The Rockefeller Foundation, announced her decision to depart the institution once a new president is identified and takes office. Rodin's leadership ushered The Rockefeller Foundation into a new era of strategic philanthropy that emphasized partnerships with business, government, and the philanthropic community to address and solve for the complex challenges of the 21st century. In her planned announcement to the board, Rodin and longtime colleague and Board Chair, Dick Parsons, committed to a seamless transition. Until a new president takes office, Rodin will continue to actively lead the Foundation as she has for the past 12 years.

As president, Rodin recognized that the Foundation's funding alone was unable to spur the kind of systemic change necessary to solve the key challenges facing the world. Responding to that dynamic, Rodin led the Foundation in a sweeping transformation that modernized all operational and programmatic aspects of The Rockefeller Foundation. Rodin looked for new spaces where there was momentum for innovation, identified places where Rockefeller could use its influence to leverage additional financing and engage private and public sector partners to ensure impact continues after Rockefeller grant-making ends. Building on the Foundation's history of creating and developing the field of public health and the Green Revolution, under this new form of strategic philanthropy, Rodin championed two whole new fields that are now pervasive: resilience and impact investing.

"The Rockefeller Foundation has benefitted enormously from Judy Rodin's tenure as our President and CEO. Over the last 12 years, she has lead the Foundation to embrace a new and cutting-edge approach to grant-making and innovation, and she has positioned us as a global leader in the urgent dialogue regarding how to make ours a better, more just, and more sustainable world. As both a longtime friend and a colleague her presence will be missed, though her vision will continue to guide us," said Dick Parsons, Board Chair of The Rockefeller Foundation.

"It has been thrilling to guide The Rockefeller Foundation's evolution to face the complex challenges of the 21st century and develop innovative solutions. We worked to transform this organization into one that is fit to deliver rapid and scalable impact for the multitude of changes around the world, " said Rodin. "Through this evolution, I have witnessed transformative impact on the lives of our beneficiaries; I have seen resilience progress from concept to global practice with 100 cities on six continents that are now better prepared to face global challenges and climate change; and the creation and growth of impact investing into a $60 billion industry embraced by major investors. I have also had the joy of watching the first group of 20,000 inner-city students, bursting with excitement and a newfound love of American history meet and work with the cast of HAMILTON, thanks to our partnership with the producers and cast of the transcendent musical. If these were the only successes I witnessed as President I would be humbled. As is always the case in philanthropy, our work is never done. I look forward to seeing the Foundation continue to grow, transform and affect change worldwide and am committed to working as hard as ever until the day a new president takes over this amazing organization."

David Rockefeller, Jr., former Board Chair and great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. said, "I am so grateful to Judith for her leadership of The Rockefeller Foundation over 12 years. With Judith at the helm The Rockefeller Foundation has charted a clear course through a rapidly changing world. She has truly been a transformative president who responded nimbly to global disruption and dynamism with a clear focus on fostering resilience among people, organizations and communities and building more inclusive economies. She achieved those goals by first strengthening the Foundation's infrastructure, then reinventing the rules of philanthropic partnership, embracing strategic grant-making and innovation, and deploying the power of The Rockefeller Foundation name and legacy. It was an enormous honor for me to be Chair of the Board as the Foundation marked its centennial in 2013. I was able to work with Judith as we celebrated the Foundation's history of innovation and launched the Foundation's second century. With Judith's inspired leadership our future is bright."

Resilience

The Foundation's resilience focus was largely influenced by Rodin's work to revitalize West Philadelphia while leading the University of Pennsylvania. In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and watching cities worldwide struggle with the combined impacts of urbanization, globalization and climate change, Rodin made it her mission to help cities build long-term resilience. In doing so, she ensured resilience was understood as a compendium of solutions that foster social cohesion, economic stability, and physical and environmental integrity.

Under her presidency, the Foundation invested more than half a billion dollars and leveraged billions more in resilience programs including: establishing 100 Resilient Cities, the creation and growth of the chief resilience officers around the globe, the Global Resilience Partnership, collaboration with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to support the National Disaster Resilience Competition and the Rebuild by Design competition, along with a decade of support for the City of New Orleans to help it become a model of resilience after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The Foundation's resilience investments have leveraged billions of dollars from the public and private sectors, including commitments from an initial group of 10 cities in the 100 Resilient Cities network to direct $5.2 billion of their own budgets to address resilience challenges; billions from multinational organizations like the International Finance Corporation who committed $19 billion to resilience programs; and partnerships with the private sector and non-governmental organizations giving communities access to hundreds of millions of dollars in innovative resilience services.

Impact Investing

Rodin's efforts to incentivize private sector engagement in global problem-solving helped catalyze the growth of impact investing around the world. As part of an effort to significantly increase the amount of private sector funding available for social impact through investments that yield a financial and social return, the Foundation invested $50 million to support building the field of impact investing. The term "impact investing" was coined at an international conference the Foundation hosted at its Bellagio Conference Center in 2006. Four years later, despite the 2008-2009 worldwide financial meltdown, $6 billion of new investment capital had gone into impact investments. Three-quarters of that growth has been tied directly to Rockefeller's efforts, leveraging the Foundation's investment one hundred to one. The sector is now estimated at $60 billion. The Foundation has continued to build on its impact investing initiative through leading the development of the field of innovative finance. Rockefeller's Zero Gap initiative sources and seed funds new and creative ways of mobilizing private capital to close the gap between development funding and global need.

HAMILTON

One of the most high-profile examples of the nimble and strategic approach Rodin brought to philanthropy was the partnership she developed with HAMILTON, The Musical. Under Rodin's leadership, The Foundation leveraged a $1.5 million investment to provide 20,000 inner-city kids with access to see the musical and incorporate Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers into their 11th grade history curriculum, through an arts education program. The success of the New York program has inspired similar efforts in Chicago and other cities where HAMILTON will be performed.

Rodin is the longest serving president of The Rockefeller Foundation in the last 40 years and is its first female president. Prior to her tenure at the Foundation, she served as the first female president of an Ivy League university at the University of Pennsylvania after having served as provost of Yale University.

Rodin will remain as president of the Foundation until a successor is identified and a smooth and seamless transition can take place. The search for a new president will begin late this summer.

SOURCE The Rockefeller Foundation
LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Global disputes and investigations firm Kobre & Kim announces today that it has strengthened its Government Enforcement & Investigations team with the addition of Jason A. Masimore in London.

As a former prosecutor for the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Mr. Masimore will focus his practice on advising corporations and individual clients in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa facing allegations of corruption and bribery; securities fraud and tax and accounting fraud; market manipulation; and violations of US sanctions, among other violations.

When asked about joining the firm, Mr. Masimore said, "I am delighted to be joining Kobre & Kim in London. The firm has built an impressive team that has an unparalleled reputation. I am excited for the opportunity to help enhance the firm's abilities to advise international clients facing investigations and cases from US regulators."

Mr. Masimore brings extensive experience investigating criminal matters to Kobre & Kim's London office. With his addition, a total of five former DOJ lawyers will be based at that location. Among these are Lara Levinson and Roger Burlingame; they and Mr. Masimore are permanently based in London. Other former DOJ lawyers on the team include Robert Henoch, who splits time between Tel Aviv and London, and the firm's co-founder, Michael Kim, who also practices part of the time from the London office.

All five of the firm's former DOJ lawyers in London focus on Europe/Middle East/Africa matters, and are part of a larger group of 13 former US government lawyers throughout the firm, including a specialty Asia-focused team based in Hong Kong and Seoul, and another focusing exclusively on Latin America.

"The DOJ and other US authorities investigate EMEA-based entities and individuals without regard to national boundaries, and the level of US enforcement activity is only increasing," Mr. Burlingame said. "Jason's deep white-collar experience from both sides of the table will strengthen our ability to serve EMEA-based clients facing US government inquiries."

Prior to joining Kobre & Kim, Mr. Masimore served for years with the US government, serving as a prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he tried numerous federal criminal cases involving charges including corruption, tax and accounting fraud, and securities fraud, among others. Prior to his tenure with the Department of Justice, Mr. Masimore was an associate in the White Collar & Regulatory Defense practice at Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP. He received his JD from the Georgetown University Law Center.

About Kobre & Kim

Kobre & Kim is an international disputes and investigations firm comprised of over 150 lawyers and analysts based in New York, London, Seoul, Hong Kong, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Miami, San Francisco, and Washington DC. The firm's conflict-free profile focuses exclusively on serving as special counsel, allowing it to advance aggressive positions against virtually any adversary.

Kobre & Kim is one of the few firms to have former US government prosecutors and investigators permanently based in Europe and the Middle East (currently in London and Tel Aviv). The EMEA team, led by five former US Department of Justice lawyers and investigators, includes a diverse group of professionals with local experience and native language skills such as French, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, and Hebrew, with a particular focus on advising companies, boards of directors, and individual executives in internal investigations and related cross-border government enforcement actions.

For more information visit: www.kobrekim.co.uk

SOURCE Kobre & Kim

Related Links

http://www.kobrekim.co.uk


CHICAGO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Label Insight, the leading provider of SaaS data solutions that power transparency between CPG brands, retailers and consumers, announces that Label Insight VP of Sales, Dave Byman, will present at FMI Connect 2016 on Tuesday, June 21 and Wednesday, June 22 at McCormick Place in Chicago.

Byman, who has spent his career consulting CPGs and retailers on strategies for innovation, merchandising, marketing, and operational execution, will represent Label Insight's standing as a market leader helping brands bring product transparency to market with SmartLabel. As the industry comes together around this standard, Label Insight is leading the charge with a best-in-class SmartLabel solution suited for rapid scale.

"Consumer demand for product transparency is at an all-time high," said Byman. "Driven by an expectation from consumers to be able to access and curate in-depth product information at any time, brands and manufacturers are presented with an opportunity to implement an efficient, accurate solution that ultimately helps meet consumer needs."

FMI Connect is the premier food retail event, drawing thousands of industry leaders each year. The event is designed to help attendees stay relevant based on evolving consumer needs. FMI Connect 2016 will feature topics ranging from supply chain and technology solutions, to food safety and consumer insights.

Byman, who will be accompanied by Label Insight's CEO and co-founders, will present two sessions at the event:

Health & Lifestyle Bite: The SmartLabel Initiative: A Differentiator for Private Brands Tue. June 21 | 1:45 PM - 2:15 PM | Health & Wellness Pavilion Byman will provide insights into how retailers can participate in the SmartLabel initiative and capitalize on the opportunity to fulfill consumer demands for in-depth product information.

Getting Smart About SmartLabel Wed. June 22 | 2:00 PM - 2:20 PM | SmartLabel Mini Lab, Booth 855 Byman will present a 20-minute session on the successful SmartLabel implementations by brands such as Unilever and Pascha Chocolate.

Label Insight will also be launching a new Food Revolution Study highlighting the effects of consumer demand on the food industry as a whole. Label Insight will be exhibiting in Booth 956 within the SmartLabel Pavilion.

To learn more about the company, visit www.labelinsight.com.

About Label Insight

Label Insight is the leading provider of SaaS data solutions that power transparency between CPG brands, retailers and consumers. The company's cloud-based product data engine enables CPG brands and retailers to transform basic product data into smart attributes, providing a deep understanding of their product set. Label Insight offers an unmatched level of data, generating 15,000 attributes - such as nutrients and allergens - per product. These attributes serve as building blocks for a live view of data for more than 300,000 products across 17,000 brands, totaling over 80 percent of the U.S. retail food and beverage market. Label Insight customers use this deep level of product data to provide greater transparency to consumers; maximize category growth potential; easily participate in industry and government initiatives, such as SmartLabel; and create more connected omni-channel experiences. To learn more about Label Insight's, visit www.LabelInsight.com.

SOURCE Label Insight

Related Links

http://www.labelinsight.com


SAN DIEGO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Procopio is pleased to announce the addition of partner Robert (Bob) Ramos to the firm's recently expanded Life Sciences practice group.

Mr. Ramos has over 20 years of Life Sciences intellectual property experience in both private practice and the biotechnology industry related to worldwide patent and trademark acquisition and strategic counseling. He has assisted venture-backed startups, mid-sized companies, basic research institutes, as well as large biopharmaceutical companies in need of extensive portfolio management in the biotechnology arts, including molecular biology, modern genomics for personalized medicine, antibodies, cancer therapies, gene therapy and cellular immunotherapy.

Mr. Ramos conducted his graduate work in biology at UCSD, with an emphasis on molecular genetics, where he constructed genetically engineered viruses for potential use in gene therapy. Prior to joining the firm, he practiced at Amgen for over 10 years where he was the lead IP Attorney for two commercial and two Phase I biologics.

"We enthusiastically welcome Robert to the firm," said Tom Turner, Procopio's Managing Partner. "The combination of his background in molecular biology with his keen understanding of the unique challenges faced by companies in the Life Sciences sector is truly an invaluable asset to our clients."

Procopio's Life Sciences group has decades of experience serving biotechnology and molecular biology clients, providing counsel on matters involving intellectual property, financing, licensing, facilities and mergers and acquisitions.

About Procopio

Procopio is a full-service business law firm committed to thoughtful problem solving and improving your bottom line. With more than 150 attorneys based in San Diego, Silicon Valley, Phoenix and Austinwe're passionate about knowing your business and helping you grow and protect it for the long term. Procopio has the cost efficient and flexible infrastructure to support both small to mid-sized companies and large multinationals at every stage of the business life cycle. Our global reach across Asia and Latin America further expands our international partnerships and cross border capabilities. At Procopio, we are focused on what is important to youproviding smart, innovative and practical solutions in a cost-effective manner to help your business thrive. Log on to Procopio.com for more information.

Media Contact: Angela Giombetti

Communications and Public Relations Manager

Phone: 619.906.5740

Email: [email protected]

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch LLP

Related Links

http://www.procopio.com


NEW YORK and WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lockton will add its Washington, DC operations to a newly combined Lockton Northeast team to sustain double-digit growth and expand client services in risk management, employee benefits, and retirement services. Lockton is the world's largest privately held, independent insurance broker.

Michael Calabrese will remain as Chairman and CEO of the expanded Lockton operations in the Northeast. Bob Connolly will continue as President of Lockton's Washington, DC business and join the executive committee of Lockton Northeast.

Lockton has more than 300 Associates in its offices in New York, Washington, DC, Northern Virginia, Hartford, Boston, and Philadelphia. Revenue for the offices grew by 10.8 percent in the recently completed fiscal 2016.

"We have generated dramatic growth because of our focus on delivering customized solutions for clients," said Calabrese. "Adding the Washington, DC team allows us to offer even more options to clients and grow faster."

Added Connolly, "This allows us to offer our clients access to an even broader and deeper set of expertise and resources. It enhances our risk management, employee benefits, and retirement plan consulting solutions."

About Lockton

More than 6000 professionals at Lockton provide 48,000 clients around the world with risk management, insurance, employee benefits consulting, and retirement services that improve their businesses. From its founding in 1966 in Kansas City, Missouri, Lockton has attracted entrepreneurial professionals who have driven its growth to become the largest privately held, independent insurance broker in the world and 10th largest overall. For seven consecutive years, Business Insurance magazine has recognized Lockton as a "Best Place to Work in Insurance." To see the latest insights from Lockton's experts, check Lockton Market Update.

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SOURCE Lockton

Related Links

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SPRINGFIELD, Ill., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Organizations might wonder just how dangerous cybercrime can be. The short answer is: Very.

IBM estimates that businesses are attacked an average of 16,856 times a year, which works out to 46 attacks every day, or nearly two attacks an hour. The company has also found that the average total cost of a data breach in an organization is $7.01 million.

To provide even more detail on the dangers cybercrime poses for organizations in today's interconnected world, LRS IT Solutions is hosting seminars featuring Etay Maor, Executive Security Advisor for IBM and one of 17 IBM employees recently listed as "rock stars" by BusinessInsider.com.

A globally recognized expert in cybercrime, Maor watches active hack attacks and helps corporations defend against them. He also studies how different malicious groups use the internet and their own off-the-grid version known as the "dark net."

Joe Regan, Senior Manager for LRS IT Solutions, said Maor's message is vital for organizations to hear. "His insights will help everyone understand just how dangerous cybercriminals are," Regan said. "Even more important, he'll talk about the steps that can be taken to protect organizations and their data."

Regan noted that the seminar will also feature information from Carbon Helix, a partner of LRS IT Solutions. Carbon Helix offers cybersecurity solutions that help the largest organizations in the world safeguard their IT systems and data.

Seminars are scheduled for Thursday, July 14, in Madison, Wisconsin, and Friday, July 15, in Des Moines, Iowa. Details and registration are available at http://www.lrsitsolutions.com/Learn-More/Events.

About LRS

LRS is a privately-held U.S. company with corporate headquarters located in Springfield, Ill. Remote offices are located throughout the United States and in key geographic regions around the world. Since 1995, the LRS IT Solutions division of LRS has been dedicated to creating Information Technology solutions for customers. Our solutions incorporate the best IT products along with valuable services delivered by our outstanding staff of IT professionals. For more information, visit www.LRS.com.

 Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. All rights reserved. LRS is a registered trademark of Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or service marks of their respective holders.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

Joe Regan

Senior Manager

LRS IT Solutions

217-793-3800, x1782

[email protected]

SOURCE LRS

Related Links

http://www.lrs.com


WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In cooperation with Lumber Liquidators, of Toano, Va., the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is announcing that Lumber Liquidators has agreed to not resume sales of laminate wood flooring previously imported from China. The company also agreed to continue conducting a comprehensive testing program as part of a recall program that affects consumers who purchased Chinese-made laminate flooring from Lumber Liquidators during a three-year period. In homes where the Chinese-made laminate flooring is found to emit elevated levels of formaldehyde, the company will provide any required remediation.

Today's announcement is not intended to cause consumers to pull up Chinese-made laminate flooring installed in their home. That approach could expose residents to increased formaldehyde levels. Instead, consumers should contact Lumber Liquidators to participate in this testing program.

Out of an abundance of caution, Lumber Liquidators has tested the air quality in more than 17,000 households and has retained third-party certified laboratories to conduct formaldehyde emissions tests for about 1,300 of those consumers' floors. None of those floors has tested above the remediation guideline.

About 614,000 consumers nationwide purchased Chinese-made laminate flooring through Lumber Liquidators from 2011 through May 2015. Today's announcement comes after Lumber Liquidators suspended the sale of Chinese-made laminate flooring in May 2015 and announced its decision not to sell about 22 million board feet of this flooring. Any future sale, disposal or transfer of the inventory can only take place with CPSC's approval.

Lumber Liquidators will continue its voluntary program to test for formaldehyde emissions in consumers' homes. Lumber Liquidators and the CPSC encourage consumers who purchased Chinese-made laminate flooring from the company from February 2012 through May 2015 to request a badge kit and screening test. There is no cost for the kits.

For consumers found to have elevated levels of formaldehyde in their homes, Lumber Liquidators will contact them for more extensive testing of their laminate flooring. Based on these test results, Lumber Liquidators has agreed to work with consumers to reduce the formaldehyde emissions levels and improve the indoor air quality of the home. If those efforts are unsuccessful, the company will pay for a certified industrial hygienist to examine the home and propose an additional remedy for the homeowner. The additional remedy would be free to the consumer and could involve replacement of the flooring or repairs to the home.

Consumers should immediately contact Lumber Liquidators to request a free testing kit by calling 800-366-4204 between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, between 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. ET on Saturday, or between 11:00 a.m. through 7:00 p.m. on Sunday; or visit http://www.lumberliquidators.com/ll/testkit.

Investigation Findings

The company's actions come as CPSC has completed its evaluation of the safety of laminated flooring imported by Lumber Liquidators from China since 2011. Since the spring of 2015, the federal government has dedicated significant resources to determining if the Chinese-manufactured laminate flooring sold by Lumber Liquidators and installed in homes represents a health risk. The flooring was the focus of a 60 Minutes segment in March 2015 alleging that certain boards did not meet current California Air Resources Board standards for formaldehyde emission.

On March 25, 2015, CPSC Chairman Elliot F. Kaye announced that the agency had opened an investigation into the matter. CPSC staff purchased samples of the product and contracted with certified laboratories to test for formaldehyde release from those flooring samples reported by 60 Minutes to have the highest formaldehyde emission. CPSC also requested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (NCEH/ATSDR) evaluate the testing results for possible human health effects from formaldehyde released into indoor air from this China-manufactured laminate flooring. CPSC staff reviewed the ATSDR report and substantially concurred with their findings.

CPSC and ATSDR determined that eye, nose, and throat irritation could occur with the higher formaldehyde emitting flooring samples in certain home environments. Irritation can happen in anyone, but is more likely among children, older adults, and people with respiratory issues, such as asthma or other breathing problems. Very high levels of formaldehyde in homes may also be associated with a small increase in cancer risk.

Some homes may already have high levels of formaldehyde emitted from products other than laminate flooring, such as cabinets, furniture or curtains, or from environmental tobacco smoke.

Lumber Liquidators agreed that its future laminate flooring products will be subject to enhanced supplier controls designed to achieve compliance with California formaldehyde requirements and any future federal requirements for laminate flooring. Currently, Lumber Liquidators' laminate flooring only comes from North America and Europe.

Where can I get more information?

If you have questions or concerns about the products used in your home, contact the CPSC Consumer Hotline at 800-638-2772.

For more information on formaldehyde please visit: www.cpsc.gov/en/Safety-Education/Safety-Guides/Home/

For more information on sources of formaldehyde and where levels may be higher, visit www.cdc.gov/nceh/formaldehyde

Frequently Asked Question:

http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroom/Press-Statements/Lumber-Liquidators-FAQs

About U.S. CPSC:

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death associated with the use of thousands of types of consumer products under the agency's jurisdiction. Deaths, injuries, and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the nation more than $1 trillion annually. CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical or mechanical hazard. CPSC's work to ensure the safety of consumer products - such as toys, cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters and household chemicals  contributed to a decline in the rate of deaths and injuries associated with consumer products over the past 40 years.

Federal law bars any person from selling products subject to a publicly-announced voluntary recall by a manufacturer or a mandatory recall ordered by the Commission.

To report a dangerous product or a product-related injury go online to www.SaferProducts.gov or call CPSC's Hotline at 800-638-2772 or teletypewriter at 301-595-7054 for the hearing impaired. Consumers can obtain news release and recall information at www.cpsc.gov, on Twitter @USCPSC or by subscribing to CPSC's free e-mail newsletters.

CPSC Consumer Information Hotline

Contact us at this toll-free number if you have questions about a recall:

800-638-2772 (TTY 301-595-7054)

Times: 8 a.m.  5:30 p.m. ET; Messages can be left anytime

Call to get product safety and other agency information and to report unsafe products.

Media Contact

Please use the phone numbers below for all media requests.

Phone: 301-504-7908

Spanish: 301-504-7800

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SOURCE U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

Related Links

http://www.cpsc.gov


The hijacker, Seif El-Din Mostafa, is fighting the extradition in court, arguing he would not receive a fair trial in Egypt

Egypt's Prosecutor-General Nabil Sadek discussed in Larnaca with his Cypriot counterpart, Costas Clerides, the extradition of the Egyptian man who hijacked an EgyptAir plane from Egypt and redirected it to Cyprus in March, Ahram Arabic news website announced.

The Egyptian prosecutor-general headed to Larnaca on Wednesday to follow up in a three-day visit on the investigations into the actions of the hijacker, Seif El-Din Mostafa.

Sadek also signed with Clerides a memorandum of judicial cooperation in the field of cross-border crime.

An informed source told Ahram Arabic news website that the Cypriot government was willing to extradite Mostafa to Egypt, although Mostafa is challenging the extradition in court, arguing he would not receive a fair trial in Egypt and could face torture or be given the death penalty.

Proceedings in the case have been adjourned until 17 June.

Cypriot authorities have rejected his request for political asylum, deeming him a "perpetrator of serious crimes."

Mostafa is accused of using a fake suicide belt to seize the plane, which was en route to Cairo from Alexandria, and diverting it to Cyprus on 29 March.

He was arrested when he stepped off the plane after all 55 passengers on board were released unharmed following a six-hour standoff.

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HOONAH, Alaska, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alaska Marine Lines and LTI, Inc. donated the transportation of a ceremonial totem pole from Bellingham, WA to Hoonah, AK for a June 4 dedication in the Tlingit village. Carved by Scott Jensen, Jeff Skaflestad and Fred Fulmer at Jensen's Bellingham studio, the totem was requested by elders of the Chookaneidee Clan to replace an ancestral totem pole that, according to legend, served as a source of wisdom, protection and direction for the clan's shaman when the clan was located at Glacier Bay, AK.

The advance of the "Little Ice Age" between 1300-1870 drove the Tlingit out of Glacier Bay. The pole remained and was eventually enveloped in ice. "After Glacier Bay was designated a national park, the clan was not allowed to return to their homeland," explains Master Carver Scott Jensen. "The clan relocated in Hoonah and, years later, the totem reappeared in the creek there. Although the pole is now gone, the clan elders have wanted to replace it for generations."

Skaflestad relocated from Hoonah to Bellingham and Fulmer from Juneau to help Jensen carve the totem in his studio. After five months of work, the totem was finished and ready to begin its journey to Hoonah. Jensen called Lynden for help.

The Alaska Marine Lines team arrived at Jensen's Bellingham studio in May to pick up the 11-foot, 2,000-pound totem, which is considered both a clan and shaman pole. The crated totem pole was secured on a trailer for the ride to Lynden, WA where LTI, Inc.'s Tom Rainey used a forklift to carefully place it into a container for the ride to Seattle and transfer onto the barge for the journey to Southeast Alaska. In Petersburg, AK, the pole was transferred barge to barge for the final leg to Hoonah. "As a company serving Alaska for over 60 years, Lynden is proud to provide the transportation to bring this important ancestral piece back to Hoonah," says Executive Vice President Alex McKallor.

Although the elders who requested the new totem passed away before the dedication in June, the carvers say the ceremony was very moving. "We felt the presence of our ancestors," says Skaflestad who is part Tlingit. "There were many tears as we placed the totem pole in its ceremonial location in the creek. It was a proud moment of unification for all of us."

"We feel very blessed to have Lynden's support in this project," Jensen says. "Each member of the Lynden team took great care in making sure the totem was safe and secure along its journey."

Alaska Marine Lines and LTI, Inc. are part of the Lynden family of companies whose combined capabilities include: full-load and less-than-full-load freight to Alaska, scheduled and charter barges, rail barges, intermodal bulk chemical hauls, scheduled and chartered air freighters, domestic and international shipping via air and ocean forwarding, customs brokerage, trade show shipping, remote site construction, sanitary bulk commodities hauling, and multi-modal logistics. Lynden International and Lynden Transport were both voted No. 1 in their respective categories in the 2015 Quest for Quality customer service awards presented by Logistics Management magazine.

Contact: David Rosenzweig

Vice President of Marketing and Media

Lynden, www.lynden.com

(206) 439-5527, Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Lynden

Related Links

http://www.lynden.com


ST. LOUIS, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: MNK), a leading global specialty biopharmaceutical company, today announced that it will purchase and donate more than 1 million Deterra drug deactivation pouches to help combat one of the top public health threats in the U.S. today  abuse of prescription pain medications. Through this initiative, families can actively address concerns with the responsible use of pain medications and patient safety.

"As a company focused on our patients and communities, Mallinckrodt has long been a strong advocate of addressing the complex issues of opioid misuse and abuse that cause so much harm to families," said Mark Trudeau, Mallinckrodt President and Chief Executive Officer. "We share the concerns of parents around the country, and believe that providing patients with a safe, environmentally responsible way to dispose of unused medications is critical in this fight against prescription drug abuse. Mallinckrodt is committed to working with policy makers, community leaders, law enforcement and industry partners to ensure the responsible use of pain medication and prevent unused medications from ending up in the wrong hands."

The pouch-based systems that Mallinckrodt is donating deactivate prescription drugs and render chemical compounds safe for landfills. The pouches are also biodegradable, providing an environmentally responsible way to deactivate and dispose of drugs. The company plans to distribute the pouches through collaboration with policy champions and community leaders who share its goal of building public awareness of the critical role of responsible drug disposal in the fight against prescription drug abuse. In particular, the initiative reinforces Mallinckrodt's long-standing commitment to the safe and responsible use of medications.

A national survey of U.S. adults who used opioids showed that nearly 6 out of 10 had or expect to have leftover opioids, according to findings published online June 13, 2016, in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal. Nearly 68 percent of those who used prescription pain relievers non-medically in 2012-2013 got them from friends or relatives, according to the 2013 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

"Substance abuse is arguably the greatest public health crisis facing the U.S. today," said CADCA (Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America) Chairman and CEO Gen. Arthur T. Dean. "Addressing our nation's misuse of pain medication requires collaboration and commitment from every sector. We commend Mallinckrodt for their efforts to make drug disposal safer and easier for patients, and we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with Mallinckrodt and others on these types of industry-led initiatives."

Beyond today's commitment to donate 1 million drug deactivation systems, Mallinckrodt has made past donations of about 500,000 pouches to providers, patient groups and other stakeholders through partnerships with organizations such as CADCA, The Jed Foundation and ACT Missouri. These are part of the company's multi-million dollar investments in a comprehensive effort to address opioid abuse and misuse.

An integral part of Mallinckrodt's vision is to invest in and expand the use of opioid abuse-deterrent technology. The company supports development of tamper-resistant/abuse-deterrent technologies and regulatory standards that support the adoption of these technologies. Other elements of this comprehensive effort include:

Improving integration of federal and state prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) and efforts; and Mallinckrodt has strongly advocated for a PDMP in Missouri , the lone state without such a program;

has strongly advocated for a PDMP in , the lone state without such a program; Developing and sharing best practices for monitoring suspicious orders, both at the manufacturing and supply chain stages  an area where Mallinckrodt is an industry leader;

is an industry leader; Improving stakeholder education for patients, providers and the public at large, including education initiatives validated by measurable outcomes; and

Enhancing drug take-back and addiction rehabilitation programs.

Deterra systems are manufactured by Minneapolis-based Verde Technologies. Find more information at www.mallinckrodt.com/disposal.

ABOUT MALLINCKRODT

Mallinckrodt is a global business that develops, manufactures, markets and distributes specialty pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical products and therapies, as well as nuclear imaging products. Areas of focus include autoimmune and rare diseases in specialty areas like neurology, rheumatology, nephrology and pulmonology; immunotherapy and neonatal respiratory critical care therapies; analgesics and hemostasis products; and central nervous system drugs. The company's core strengths include the acquisition and management of highly regulated raw materials and specialized chemistry, formulation and manufacturing capabilities. The company's Specialty Brands segment includes branded medicines; its Specialty Generics segment includes specialty generic drugs, active pharmaceutical ingredients and external manufacturing; and the Nuclear Imaging segment includes nuclear imaging agents. To learn more about Mallinckrodt, visit http://www.mallinckrodt.com/.

Mallinckrodt uses its website as a channel of distribution of important company information, such as press releases, investor presentations and other financial information. It also uses its website to expedite public access to time-critical information regarding the company in advance of or in lieu of distributing a press release or a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosing the same information. Therefore, investors should look to the Investor Relations page of the website for important and time-critical information. Visitors to the website can also register to receive automatic e-mail and other notifications alerting them when new information is made available on the Investor Relations page of the website.

CONTACTS

Media

Rhonda Sciarra

Senior Communications Manager

314-654-8618

[email protected]

Meredith Fischer

Senior Vice President, Communications and Public Affairs

314-654-3318

[email protected]

Government Affairs

Mark Tyndall

Vice President, Government Affairs

202-383-0090

[email protected]

Investor Relations

Coleman N. Lannum, CFA

Senior Vice President, Investor Strategy and IRO

314-654-6649

[email protected]

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SOURCE Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals

Related Links

http://www.mallinckrodt.com


LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

FCA outperformed the European market once again in May with sales up 25.3% (versus 15.5% for the industry). Market share was 60 basis points higher at 7.4%, with the Group ranking fourth in the European sales rankings for the second consecutive month. By brand, sales were up 31.9% for Lancia, 30.0% for Jeep and 26.8% for Fiat. The Fiat Panda and Fiat 500 dominated the A segment with a combined 30.7% share. The Fiat 500L was the best-selling vehicle in the Small MPV segment with a 32.9% share. The Fiat 500X and Jeep Renegade continued among the leaders in the Small SUV segment and the new Fiat Tipo continued to climb the European rankings.

FCA closed the month of May with year-over-year sales growth in Europe (EU28+EFTA) significantly higher than the industry average. In fact, Group sales totaled 98,000 vehicles, increasing 25.3% versus 15.5% for the industry overall. Market share was 60 basis points higher at 7.4%, making FCA fourth overall in the European sales rankings for the second consecutive month.

FCA also outperformed the industry for the five months year-to-date, with sales up 17.6% (versus 9.7%) to 452,000 vehicles.

In May, the Group posted increases in nearly all major markets, with sales up 33.3% in Italy, 8.9% in Germany, 28.1% in France (versus 22.3% for the industry) and 37.0% in Spain (+21.1% for the industry).

Fiat brand posted European sales of 74,500 vehicles, representing the brand's 21st consecutive monthly increase and a 26.8% increase over May 2015. Market share was 50 basis points higher at 5.6%.

By major market, sales were up 33.0% in Italy, 10.8% in Germany, 39.5% in France, 1.3% in the UK and 31.0% in Spain. For Europe excluding Italy, brand sales were up 20.0%.

Year-to-date, brand sales were up 18.4% to 343,200 vehicles and market share was 40 basis points higher at 5.2%.

The Fiat Panda and Fiat 500 consolidated the brand's leadership in the A segment with a combined 30.7% share. The Panda was overall leader with 18,300 units sold (+19.9%) followed by the 500 with nearly 16,400 units sold (+8.0%). The 500L continued as leader in the Small MPV segment with a 32.9% share and more than 10,500 units sold. The 500X, firmly established as one of the top four in its segment, posted another strong monthly increase with sales up 82.2% to more than 10,400 vehicles. The new Fiat Tipo also continued to gain momentum, ranking second in its segment in Italy and steadily climbing the European rankings with a total of 4,800 units sold for the month.

Lancia/Chrysler also outperformed the industry with sales up 31.9% to 7,500 vehicles and share up 10 basis points to 0.6%.

For the year-to-date, brand sales were up 16.6% to 34,500 vehicles and share was stable at 0.5%.

In Italy, brand sales in May were up 38.0% and market share was 30 basis points higher at 3.8%. The best-selling Ypsilon also remained leader in the Italian B segment, with sales up 39.3% to 7,200 for the month and share 160 basis points higher at 14.3%.

Alfa Romeo closed May with more than 5,500 vehicles sold and European market share at 0.4%. Sales performance was particularly positive in Italy (+7.1%) and Germany (35.4%).

Year-to-date, brand sales totaled 26,300 units (+3.4%) and market share was stable at 0.4%. Compared with the same period in 2015, sales were up 4.8% in Italy, 6.6% in Germany, 2.4% in France, 4.9% in the UK and 7.6% in Spain. Sales of the Giulietta were up 4.55% for the period to nearly 20,000 units.

The launch of the new Giulia is expected to further boost brand sales across Europe.

Jeep posted a 30.0% increase in May sales to nearly 9,900 vehicles. This represented the brand's 31st consecutive monthly increase. Market share remained in line with a year ago at 0.7%.

Year-to-date, brand sales were up 24.2% to nearly 45,300 vehicles and market share was 10 basis points higher at 0.7%.

May sales were up 61.0% in Italy, 6.0% in Germany, 14.1% in France and 109.9% in Spain. The Jeep Renegade posted a 52.6% year-over-year sales increase in May and has firmly established itself among the top ten in the Small SUV segment with a 6.45% share for the month. For the year-to-date, sales of the Renegade were up 50.6%.

For Maserati, the Group's luxury brand, European sales totaled 559 vehicles in May and 2,636 for the year-to-date.

SOURCE Fiat Chrysler Automobiles
JERSEY CITY, N.J., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is being released by AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust:

WHO:

Jersey City Mayor Steven Michael Fulop

Mayor Patrick Kelleher , President of the Hudson County Building and Construction Trades Council

, President of the Hudson County Building and Construction Trades Council Bill O'Dea , Hudson Country Freeholder and Standard Bearer of South Hudson Civic Assn.

WHAT:

A press conference with Mayor Fulop, Hudson County Freeholder O'Dea and the Hudson County Building and Construction Trades Council President Patrick Kelleher who will be celebrating the near completion of an 8-unit, homeless veteran apartment complex being built in collaboration with the City of Jersey City, Jersey City Redevelopment Authority, and local contractors. Jersey City provided the land, trade unions are volunteering their labor and contractors are providing the materials and supplies for the project. United Way will provide support services to occupants. The transitional housing will provide stays from 6 to 18 months. Participants of Project IMPACT ("Increasing Minority Participation and Access to Construction Trades), a partnership started between the Hudson County Building Trades, South Hudson Civic Association and the City of Jersey City and supported by the American Reinvestment Company, are also working on the project. Project IMPACT, which aims at increasing the number of women, minorities and veterans in the construction trades and related unions, has put dozens of Jersey City residents on course to be union apprentices.

WHEN:

Saturday, June 18

8:30 am

WHERE:

665 Ocean Avenue

Jersey City, New Jersey 07305

Contact:

Patrick Kelleher

(201) 407-3527

SOURCE AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust
MENLO PARK, Calif., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Menlo Security was named the Grand Prize Winner for Best of Show at Interop Japan at the premier networking and security event held in Tokyo. The judging panel for Interop Best of Show select products that maximize the business value of enterprise IT infrastructures with an eye towards new innovation, game-changing designs and features, and products that present practical and cost-effective use to IT departments.

Along with regional distribution partner Macnica Networks, Menlo Security has rapidly grown its worldwide presence by establishing a strong following in Japan and Asia-Pacific.

"We are honored to be named the Grand Prize Winner for Best of Show at Interop Tokyo," said Doug Schultz, Vice President of Americas and APAC at Menlo Security. "The Japan market is very strategic for Menlo Security and we are committed to the success of our partners and customers."

The Menlo Security Isolation Platform (MSIP) isolates and executes all Web content, email links and documents in the cloud. Without the need for software on the endpoint, the Menlo Security solution uses patent-pending Adaptive Clientless Rendering (ACR) technology to deliver a malware-free rendering of the user's isolated session to their native browser, providing a transparent user experience that is 100 percent safe.

About Menlo Security

Menlo Security protects organizations from cyber attack by eliminating the threat of malware from Web, documents and email. Menlo Security's cloud based Isolation Platform easily scales to provide comprehensive protection across organizations of any size without requiring end point software or impacting end user experience. Menlo Security is trusted by some of the world's largest enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies and financial services institutions. Backed by General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures and Osage University Partners, Menlo Security is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit http://www.menlosecurity.com or @menlosecurity.

Media Contacts:





Menlo Security Zonic Group PR Peter Lunk Gregory Cross [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE Menlo Security

Related Links

http://www.menlosecurity.com


"Given the hardships many Detroit residents face, it's important that students have the proper school supplies to begin the year winning," said Mike Morse, Mike Morse Law Firm. "The disadvantages these students face by going to school without proper supplies can be devastating, affecting their self-worth, self-image, confidence, attitude, behavior and willingness to participate and to learn."

Last year, the Mike Morse Law Firm provided over 22,000 backpacks full of school supplies to DPS students, grades K-5. The effort met with resounding success, for which the firm garnered a "Spirit of Detroit" award.

"This can be a major game-changer for some students," said Alycia Meriweather, Interim Superintendent for Detroit Public Schools. "Being able to start the school year with appropriate supplies is a great first step in being well prepared for a successful school year. On behalf of Detroit Public Schools, I want to thank the Mike Morse Law Firm for choosing to invest in our students in this tangible way so that our K-8 students can start the year with a baseline of school supplies all across the district."

Approximately 31,500 backpacks will be distributed with supplies this fall. Please watch for more information by visiting detroitk12.org in August.

Morse continues, "Our goal is to increase every child's chances for academic success by leveling the playing field as much as possible from the outset. Having the proper supplies increases a student's ability to perform. It provides dignity and confidence. And showing them there are people out there who care, who have their back on this, is huge to them. We're glad to do more this year by expanding the number of students we serve."

The Mike Morse Law Firm is Michigan's largest personal injury firm, handling cases statewide, with their main office in Southfield, Michigan. If you or your company would like to help in the school supplies initiative, visit 855MikeWins.com to learn more.

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In 2014, 82 percent of public school students graduated from high school. By comparison, the graduation rates of many military schools averaged anywhere from 90 percent to 100 percent. Military schools routinely produce higher graduation rates due to their focus on academics, lower student to teacher ratios, and structured environment. While a high school diploma is an important first step in setting young adults on a path toward career success, parents should seek out schools that aim to position their children to earn post-graduate degrees.

"Military schools like St. John's place a high emphasis on college preparation," said Ginger Wooten, St. John's Military School's academic dean. "For many cadets, this focus impacts their decision to enroll in college, and their ability to achieve greater levels of success in an institution of higher learning."

According to the Alliance for Excellent Education, it is expected that by 2020, 65 percent of jobs will require postsecondary education, and only 36 percent of jobs will be available to high school graduates with no advanced degree. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately three million students are expected to graduate from high school from 2015- 2016, but the percentage of students who will enroll in college immediately following high school is expected to average less than 75 percent.

Read on> http://bit.ly/1VZGMZC

CONTACT: St. John's Military School

Melissa McCoy

Marketing Director

St. John's Military School

P.O. Box 5020

Salina, KS 67402

Office: 785.309.5444

Toll Free: 866.704.5294

[email protected]

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WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Lifestyle brand ModCloth hosted an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC today to raise awareness for the Truth in Advertising Act 2016, a bill designed to combat the harmful effects of material photoshopping. The bill asks the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to develop a regulatory framework for advertisements that significantly change the people in them through image-altering techniques like photoshop.

ModCloth Founder Susan Gregg Koger spoke at the event and was joined by the bill sponsors Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL-27), Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA-24), and Rep. Theodore E. Deutch (D-FL-21). In addition to raising awareness on this issue on Capitol Hill, ModCloth is calling on its community of customers to support the Truth in Advertising Act by joining a letter writing campaign started by The Representation Project and I Am That Girl.

In August 2014, ModCloth was the first and only retailer to sign the Truth in Advertising pledge, pledging to not materially photoshop its models. ModCloth has never materially photoshopped and also frequently sources models from its own community of customers to ensure an authentic and diverse portrayal of women. Its namesake label is available in a full size range (XS-4X) to provide an inclusive shopping experience for all women.

ModCloth Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Susan Gregg Koger: "Portraying women in an honest and realistic way is essential to fulfilling our brand purpose of empowering women to be the best version of themselves. It demonstrates to young women that measurements are a fact, not a judgement. We want to lend our voice and the support of the ModCloth community to this movement to stop the extreme and harmful photoshopping of women in advertisements."

Rep. Ros-Lehtinen: "The Truth in Advertising Act is important for so many young women and men who face body image issues due to unrealistic depictions in advertisements. Young women and men are often trying to live up to an unattainable and unhealthy 'ideal body' instead of a healthy body. All stakeholders should come together and find a solution that respects consumer health and wellbeing while permitting creativity and artistic expression."

Rep. Capps: "What we see in advertisements and fashion magazines colors our expectations, even if those images are unknowingly altered. This especially affects young people who internalize this unrealistic ideal of beautyleaving them at risk and vulnerable. We must do all we can to ensure that our nation's consumers have the tools necessary to distinguish real life from fiction so that they can form a healthy body image."

Rep. Deutch: "Our culture is so saturated with unrealistic, digitally-altered body images that we hardly notice. When advertisers try to sell these distortions as truth it can create damaging expectations, especially for young people. I'm proud to support the Truth in Advertising Act to bring together regulators, parents, health professionals, and the business and advertising communities to develop a better understanding of the health impacts of altered body images used to sell products, and what we can do together to create a healthier and more inclusive environment for American consumers."

ModCloth is also currently hosting a pop-up shop in Washington, DC as part of its "ModCloth IRL (In Real Life) Tour", a series of five pop-up shop events taking place across the country this summer. The hybrid showroom and store concept disrupts the traditional retail model and brings ModCloth's online community to life.

ModCloth IRL Tour Schedule:

* June: Washington, DC at 1626 Wisconsin Ave NW

* July: Portland, OR at Pioneer Place, 700 SW 5th Ave. Suite 2115

* August: Denver/Boulder, CO (location to be announced)

* September: Pittsburgh, PA (location to be announced)

About ModCloth

ModCloth is a digitally-native lifestyle brand committed to inspiring personal style and helping its community feel like the best version of themselves. ModCloth designs and sells its own exclusive line of apparel in a full range of sizes, and carries a unique assortment of fashion, accessories, shoes and home decor from hundreds of independent designers. Founded in a college dorm room by high school sweethearts Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger in 2002, ModCloth has since grown to over 350 employees across offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. ModCloth investors include Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Floodgate, StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr, and Norwest Venture Partners.

Contact Information

Lauren Whitehouse

[email protected]

SOURCE ModCloth

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NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- For the first time ever, MRket and PROJECT join forces to give retailers unprecedented access to the best brands in menswear Sunday, July 17 through Tuesday, July 19th, bringing retailers a convenient and comprehensive men's shopping experience during the official men's market week.

The upcoming trade shows located at the Javits Center in New York City, will share one show floor, allowing retailers and press seamless access between the events. One badge will ensure access to both MRket and PROJECT as well as offer shared amenities including refreshments and food, VIP car service to and from the show, cross-show promotion and key activations. Among the many offerings shared between the two shows will be PROJECT's Blogger PROJECT that will now be centrally located so brands will have access to the digital influencers and editors.

Erik Ulin, President of Men's, UBM states: "We are very excited to join forces with MRket. This opens up a venue of new opportunities for specialty retailers to explore brands in the contemporary world at PROJECT and vice versa. We have a great selection of brands to kick off the beginning of men's market after NYFW: Men's."

"The integrated MRket and PROJECT shows offer our attendees the most breadth and depth of any menswear trade event in North America," reaffirms Lizette Chin, Vice President of MRket.

The combination comes two months after UBM PLCthe world's leading business-to-business events organizer and PROJECT's parent companyacquired Business Journals IncorporatedMRket's former parent company. At the time of the acquisition, UBM articulated goals to coordinate between complementary shows.

MRket and PROJECT still operate separate sales and marketing teams but are working closely together to align programs and benefits for exhibitors, media and retailers. Looking beyond July, the teams are working to fully integrate all aspects of both shows.

About MRket: MRket is a global fashion trade show representing the best collections in men's clothing, sportswear footwear and accessories from the United States, Canada and abroad. MRket is the only show in North America to spotlight international groups such as Made in Italy and UK Design, Brits in New York as well as curated brands sections: Vanguards Gallery, MOVE and Modern Prep. The best men's stores in North America and over 47 countries attend MRket because it is a serious writing, networking and press event.

About PROJECT: Held bi-annually in New York and Las Vegas, PROJECT is the world's preeminent contemporary fashion trade event, encompassing men's, women's, accessories and footwear brands within PROJECT Vegas, PROJECT Women's, THE TENTS, PROJECT New York and PROJECT SOLE New York. Bringing expertise and relevance to the global fashion industry through a highly merchandised approach, PROJECT creates destinations where innovation, commerce and service converge. For more information, please visit www.projectshow.com. For the latest, go to: www.mrketshow.com | www.magiconline.com/project-new-york

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SOURCE UBM
Italy's foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni said Thursday that Italy would not send its ambassador back to Cairo over Egypts handling of investigations into the murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Egypt earlier this year, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

"The government recalled the ambassador two months ago and this decision has not changed," Gentiloni said during a visit to Bosnia, according to ANSA.

In April, Italian ambassador Maurizio Massari was recalled "for consultations" following a meeting in Rome where the Egyptian team of investigators looking into the murder submitted a 2,000-page report to Italian chief prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone on the investigation.

Italian officials have criticised what they described as a lack of transparency in the investigation.

A new Italian ambassador to Cairo, Giampaolo Cantini, was appointed in May, though it is unclear when he would assume his new post.

The Italian foreign minister's statements come one day after Regeni's parents met with the EU's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

In an official statement, Mogherini said she had personally raised the case with the Egyptian foreign minister [Sameh] Shoukry.

"The EU supports all the initiatives the Italian authorities are taking in their search for the truth on the death of Giulio Regeni," the statement added

Regeni, who was in Cairo conducting research on independent trade unions, went missing on 25 January. His body was found, bearing signs of severe torture, by a roadside on the outskirts of the capital nine days later.

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has insisted that the investigation into the murder of Regeni in Cairo was being conducted with the "utmost transparency," with Egyptian officials repeatedly denying speculation that security forces were involved in the murder.

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HOUSTON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Research sponsored by Novo Nordisk and conducted in collaboration with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health identified three kinds of vulnerability to diabetes across communities and specified 14 social and cultural factors that reinforce them. The research was presented at a Cities Changing Diabetes  Houston Town Hall event held today at City Hall. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner kicked off the program and gave his support to the initiative.

Across vulnerable populations, the key social and cultural factors include the perception of change and transition (77.6%), the feeling of being financially constrained (44.8%), the adherence to nourishing traditions (42.4%), the use of cars for long commutes (41.6%) and the experience of time poverty (40%).

The research findings are based on extensive, prior data analyses and in-depth interviews with 125 Houston households, as part of Cities Changing Diabetes, a global program of Novo Nordisk in which seven cities around the world are learning how to improve diabetes detection and care in their communities. Houston is the only American city participating.

"Vulnerability to diabetes is prevalent in neighborhoods throughout Houston," says Stephen Linder, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Health Policy, UTHealth School of Public Health and lead researcher with Cities Changing Diabetes in Houston. "By being able to understand the social and cultural factors behind it, we can develop targeted prevention methods."

During the event, the Cities Changing Diabetes  Houston coalition announced a challenge grant of $100,000 ($50,000 in funds and $50,000 in technical assistance and support) to jump start the virtual Houston Diabetes Resource Center (HDRC). HDRC will serve as a "one-stop shop" website for consumers, providers and employers and house important resources for diabetes prevention, detection and care. Gateway to Care is going to administer the funds; the grant is provided by Novo Nordisk.

In addition to the HDRC, concepts the coalition developed and presented are:

Walk It Out Houston: A collaboration with Super Neighborhoods across Houston to decrease prediabetes and diabetes through physical activity, nutrition education and community engagement

A collaboration with Super Neighborhoods across to decrease prediabetes and diabetes through physical activity, nutrition education and community engagement Promoting Quality Among Providers: A working collaboration to promote the implementation of a diabetes care recognition program designed to spread best practices in Houston that promote consistent and cost-effective care for people with diabetes and at risk for diabetes across not-for-profit clinics and physician practices

A working collaboration to promote the implementation of a diabetes care recognition program designed to spread best practices in that promote consistent and cost-effective care for people with diabetes and at risk for diabetes across not-for-profit clinics and physician practices MEND (Mind Exercise Nutrition Do It!): Implementation of the MEND program which is one of the world's largest evidence-based healthy lifestyle programs that empowers 7-13 year olds by helping families change unhealthy attitudes about food and activity

Implementation of the MEND program which is one of the world's largest evidence-based healthy lifestyle programs that empowers 7-13 year olds by helping families change unhealthy attitudes about food and activity Faith and Diabetes: Promotion of evidence practices for diabetes prevention and management in faith-based environments

"Diabetes affects all Houstonians - our families, our communities, our schools, our workplaces, our places of worship and ultimately our economy," says Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. "It is an epidemic that has enormous financial and human costs. As leaders who care about Houston, we owe it to our community to do all that we can to help them prevent it."

"Traditional methods for promoting the prevention and detection of diabetes have gotten us far, but we can no longer solely rely on these to have an impact on this serious disease," said Faith E. Foreman, Dr. P.H., MPH, LVN, Assistant Director, Houston Health Department. "We appreciate Novo Nordisk stepping forward to provide the initial funding and look forward to other community partners accepting the challenge."

The Cities Changing Diabetes program launched in Houston in November 2014 with comprehensive analysis of the major gaps and vulnerabilities associated with diabetes. Soon after it launched, the program invested more than a year researching the diabetes epidemic in Houston. A community-wide assessment identified the populations most at risk for developing the disease and compared them to Houstonians already diagnosed with diabetes.

This work, and 11 round tables conducted with a wide range of community stakeholders, led to the formation of five Action Work Groups with representatives from approximately 60 faith-based organizations, government, health insurance companies, medical providers, employers and non-profit entities that proposed a number of initiatives for addressing the diabetes epidemic locally.

Diabetes in Houston

Houston is the fourth largest city in the United States. There are 2.1 million people living in Houston and 4.3 million in Harris County1. Approximately one in 10 adults in Houston/Harris County have diabetes2.

Obesity is the most common chronic condition in Houston, affecting 32 percent of adults2. Obese men and obese women have a 7- and 12-fold risk, respectively, of developing diabetes3.

About Urban Diabetes and Cities Changing Diabetes

Of the estimated 415 million people worldwide who have diabetes, nearly two-thirds live in urban areas4. By 2040, the number of people with diabetes is expected to rise to 642 million, with 74% of them living in urban areas4.

Cities Changing Diabetes is a first-of-its-kind collaboration developed to stem the tide of urban diabetes by providing practical, long-term solutions. The partnership aims to tackle the challenge by first understanding the driving factors behind the rise in diabetes in cities and use that knowledge to share concrete, real-world solutions.

The aim of Cities Changing Diabetes is to map the problem, share solutions and drive concrete action to fight the diabetes challenge in selected focus cities across the world.

The Houston Health Department and UTHealth School of Public Health serve as core partners on the project and lead the research for Cities Changing Diabetes  Houston in collaboration with Novo Nordisk. Other local partners include the American Diabetes Association Houston, Clinton Foundation Health Matters Initiative, Houston Business Coalition on Health, City of Houston HR Department, Harris County Public Health & Environmental Services, Gateway to Care, The Fountain of Praise and Harris County Medical Society. Globally, the program is supported by University College London (UCL) and Steno Diabetes Center, Denmark, a world-leading institution in diabetes care and prevention, and Novo Nordisk.

About Novo Nordisk

Headquartered in Denmark, Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with more than 90 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care. The company also has leading positions within hemophilia care, growth hormone therapy and hormone replacement therapy. For more information, visit novonordisk.us or follow our news in the U.S. on Twitter: @novonordiskus.

About UTHealth

Established in 1972 by The University of Texas System Board of Regents, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) is Houston's Health University and Texas' resource for health care education, innovation, scientific discovery and excellence in patient care. The most comprehensive academic health center in The UT System and the U.S. Gulf Coast region, UTHealth is home to schools of biomedical informatics, biomedical sciences, dentistry, medicine, nursing and public health and includes The University of Texas Harris County Psychiatric Center and a growing network of clinics throughout the region. The university's primary teaching hospitals include Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital and Harris Health Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. For more information, visit www.uth.edu.

References:

1. The State of Health in Houston/Harris County 2012. Harris County Healthcare Alliance, Houston, Texas.

2. Health of Houston Survey. HHS 2010 A First Look. Houston, TX: Institute for Health Policy, The University of Texas School of Public Health, 2011.

3. Guh DP et al. The incidence of comorbidities related to obesity and overweight. BMC Pub Health. 2009; 9:88.

4. IDF. International Diabetes Federation, 2015. IDF Diabetes Atlas. 7th edn. Brussels, Belgium: International Diabetes Federation.

Novo Nordisk Inc.

800 Scudders Mill Road

Telephone:

Internet: Communications

Plainsboro, NJ

609-987-5800

www.novonordisk.us & Public Affairs

08536

Telefax:

Twitter:







609-919-7801

@NovoNordiskUS

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CORAL GABLES, Fla., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The ailing newspaper industry could increase gross profits by as much as 17 percent by adopting a subscription formula developed in a University of Miami School of Business Administration study. The model determines the best combination of print, online and mobile news distribution, as well as the best subscription pricing, to optimize profits for newspapers. Forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, the study offers the first model of its kind that can monetize the different formats of news delivery, offering a sustainable subscription solution for an industry with revenues in steady decline over the past decade.

By collecting and studying reader-preference data from newspaper readers, advertiser transactions and marketing investments of a major west coast daily newspaper, the researchers built a math model that derives optimum subscription bundles that can help newspapers target their audiences with plans that can maximize both subscription and advertising profits.

"Over the past decade, the distribution of content by media companies has greatly transformed due to changing consumer preferences, leaving advertisers in need of new ways to get in front of news consumers and newspapers suffering from declining ad dollars," said Vamsi Kanuri, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, who conducted the study along with researchers from the University of Missouri. "This model provides a well-designed, sustainable solution for news companies and advertisers in great need of multi-platform subscriptions plans. If applied, it could have a sizable impact in the industry."

Methodology



The researchers gathered preference data for subscription bundles from more than 1,000 readers of a daily newspaper with three main revenue streams: print subscriptions, print advertising, and digital advertising. The readers were screened based on their frequency of news consumption through the newspaper's media formats (print and online) and smartphone and tablet device ownership. The data was used to measure the demands of reader segments and advertisers corresponding to alternative subscription bundles. These demands, along with estimates from a dynamic marketing-mix response model calibrated using nine years of archival data, were then put into a math model, specifically a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization program, that simultaneously derived the optimum number, composition, and prices of subscription bundles that could be offered to each target audience.

To view the full study, visit: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2711283.

About the University of Miami School of Business Administration



The University of Miami School of Business is a leader in preparing individuals and organizations to excel in the complex, dynamic, and interconnected world of global business. One of 12 schools and colleges at the University of Miami, the School offers undergraduate, master's, doctoral, and executive education programs. With its location in a major center for international business, the School is acclaimed for its global perspective, student and faculty diversity, and engagement with the business community. More information about the University of Miami School of Business can be found at www.bus.miami.edu.

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DENVER, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Projected to reach revenue of more than $20B by 2020, the cannabis industry is attracting elite business leaders from around the world. Colorado, currently the front line for cannabis, is luring a substantial wave of accomplished professionals away from traditional roles.

Denver investment firm First Capital Ventures (FCV) has raised the bar on cannabis industry finance with the addition of Erin Turoff as COO and Managing Director. In this role, she oversees operations, fund management and capital raising efforts across all investment strategies, including cannabis.

Turoff moved from New York City, where she demonstrated fund formation expertise as COO and Co-Founder of hedge fund-focused Red Ivy Capital. Eager to participate at the ground floor of this exploding industry, Turoff made the transition to the cannabis movement.

"Cannabis is no different than any other high-potential investment," says Turoff. "We believe it is a lucrative strategy for investors to get in now, ahead of the large investment banks and multinational corporations - many of whom are ramping up for entry."

Colorado's Premier Cannabis Investment Team

Turoff joins FCV's Viridis Fund I experts, including Wall Street veteran Gary Graham and Fund Managers Chris Franz and Brent Johnson.

"As a rising leader in the industry, First Capital has launched one of the world's first institutional-quality cannabis funds," says Turoff. "Our highly experienced team has the ability to discover outstanding, disruptive companies like Coda Signature (our first $2.5M project)."

About Erin Turoff

Prior to joining FCV, Turoff co-founded and served as Partner and COO of Red Ivy Capital. Prior to forming Red Ivy, she served in leadership positions for Commonfund, Mercer Investment Consulting, and BMO Global Asset Management. Erin earned an MBA in Finance from Loyola University Chicago.

About First Capital Ventures, LLC

First Capital Ventures (FCV) is an early-stage venture capital firm that takes an active approach to strategy, management and execution - while seeking to maximize shareholder value. The team has 200+ years of combined expertise in starting, growing and financing emerging growth companies.

Disclaimer: This is not intended as an offer, a solicitation of an offer, or an advertisement for the sale of interests in the Fund. Any such offer or solicitation, if made, will only be made by means of appropriate disclosure documents delivered to qualified investors.

Contact

Kate Bailey

Annabel Media

[email protected]

1-303-909-4933

SOURCE First Capital Ventures, LLC

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LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Noble Corporation plc (NYSE:NE) today announced that its report of drilling rig status and contract information has been updated as of June 16, 2016. The report, titled "Fleet Status Report," can be found on the Company's Website www.noblecorp.com, under the "Investor Relations" section of the Website.

About Noble Corporation plc

Noble is a leading offshore drilling contractor for the oil and gas industry. The Company owns and operates one of the most modern, versatile and technically advanced fleets in the offshore drilling industry. Noble performs, through its subsidiaries, contract drilling services with a fleet of 30 offshore drilling units, consisting of 16 semisubmersibles and drillships and 14 jackups, focused largely on ultra-deepwater and high-specification jackup drilling opportunities in both established and emerging regions worldwide. Noble is a public limited company registered in England and Wales with company number 08354954 and registered office at Devonshire House, 1 Mayfair Place, London, W1J 8AJ England. Additional information on Noble is available at www.noblecorp.com

SOURCE Noble Corporation

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The NoninConnect Elite measures arterial blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate and features Nonin's clinically proven PureSAT  pulse oximetry technology. The device is designed to help clinicians and their patients with challenging respiratory conditions like COPD to proactively identify issues for early intervention and avoid re-hospitalization. (An oximeter prescription is required for patients in the U.S.)

"Making the right decision for patients who have COPD and complicating co-morbidities such as CHF often depends on getting an accurate oxygen saturation reading," said Rick Eagle, vice president of sales for Nonin Medical.

"We've known for some time that not all FDA-cleared pulse oximeters perform alike on all patients," he added.

"However, a new independent hypoxia lab study on humans, which simulated COPD patient conditions, demonstrates that Nonin's PureSAT pulse oximetry technology captures and reports worsening patient conditions better than other FDA-cleared oximeter brands," Eagle said.

"These findings are significant for clinicians who want a pulse oximeter that is going to be accurate, reliable and cost effective for all patients, including very sick patients like those with COPD," Eagle said.

Easy to Use, Easy to Share

The NoninConnect Elite uses state-of-the-art Bluetooth Smart (low energy) wireless technology to allow clinicians to remotely (up to 10m/32 ft) view their patients' SpO 2 readings in real time. Clinicians and patients can easily save or share their SpO 2 history via e-mail, using the NoninConnect iOS mobile app on their compatible Apple device. Patients are able to share spot-check readings via Apple's Health app. Compatible devices with the NoninConnect Elite and NoninConnect app include: iPhone 4S and newer, iPad 3 and newer, all iPad Air and iPad Minis, and the iPod Touch 5th edition and newer (with Apple iOS 8.1 or newer installed).

The NoninConnect Elite Advantage

Provides SpO 2 and pulse rate readings from small to large fingers, good to poor perfusion and dark to light skin tones

and pulse rate readings from small to large fingers, good to poor perfusion and dark to light skin tones Provides simplified pairing for vital information exchange over a secure wireless connection

Long battery life: Up to 2,200 spot checks on two AAA batteries

Two-year warranty

RoHS and REACH compliant and environmentally friendly with no lead or hazardous materials

Made in the USA

For more information about the NoninConnect Elite Model 3240 Bluetooth Smart wireless pulse oximeter, visit nonin.com/NoninConnectElite. The NoninConnect pulse oximetry software application can be downloaded free from the App Store in the Apple iTunes Store.

For more information about the new hypoxia lab study, visit nonin.com/documents/ClinimarkFingertipWhitePaper.pdf.

About Nonin Medical, Inc.

Nonin Medical, Inc. invented the finger pulse oximeter (the original Onyx brand) and designs and manufactures noninvasive medical monitoring solutions that meet customers' technology needs today and tomorrow. Headquartered in Plymouth, Minn., USA, with an additional customer service center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Nonin Medical sells its pulse and regional oximeters, capnographs, sensors and software to health professionals and consumers in more than 125 countries. The company has more than 300 OEM partners worldwide. For more information, visit nonin.com.

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LOS ANGELES, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Tavis Smiley, host of the late night television talk show Tavis Smiley on PBS, in collaboration with the National Center for State Courts, is convening a series of town hall meetings under the banner COURTING JUSTICE, the first of which was held in Los Angeles on June 10th and will air on PBS stations on June 22nd (check local listings). At these town hall meetings, judges from around the country are engaging in an unprecedented dialogue with the communities they serve and are providing stakeholders from disenfranchised communities an opportunity to discuss the issues that continue to erode trust in our judicial system, while offering real world solutions.

"This is essentially a listening tour--something we expect from political candidates but not from judges who preside over the highest courts in our land," said Smiley. "I am gratified that many of the most influential judges in the country are eager to step down from the bench and engage in a free and open exchange with the people most affected by their decisions. This frank discussion is unprecedented. Securing the public's trust in our judicial system is fundamental to our democracy."

"In order to be fair and impartial, judges have to be equal opportunity listeners," said Chief Judge Eric T. Washington, District of Columbia Court of Appeals, "While we are used to listening to the concerns of the litigants who appear in our courtrooms, our focus on resolving individual cases has in many ways kept us from seeing the forest for the trees. As a result, surveys show that there has been an erosion of trust between the courts and the communities we serve, especially communities of color. This innovative, multi-city town hall series will allow us to hear from, and listen to, new perspectives on how courts can better deliver justice for all."

The first Town Hall meeting took place at Loyola School of Law in Los Angeles on June 10th and will be broadcast on June 22nd as part of Tavis Smiley's nightly program on PBS stations across the country. The Town Hall will also be broadcast as part of Smiley's weekend public radio show, "The Tavis Smiley Show" on PRI  Public Radio International. The next Town Hall will be in Little Rock, Arkansas in September followed by Cleveland, Ohio.

Participants in the Town Hall are Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye (California), Chief Judge Eric T. Washington (District of Columbia) and Judge Jimmie Edwards (St. Louis), Associate Justice Maria P. Rivera (California, First District Court of Appeals, Division Four) and Judge Daniel J. Buckley (Superior Court Los Angeles County). The audience is drawn from community activists, public defenders, justice reform advocates, trial court judges, and others directly affected by the decisions of the courts. COURTING JUSTICE is co-hosted by the National Center for State Courts. Funding for COURTING JUSTICE is provided by the State Justice Institute, Walmart, The California Endowment and the Public Welfare Foundation.

About Tavis Smiley

Tavis Smiley is currently host of the late night television show Tavis Smiley on PBS, now in its 13th season, as well as "The Tavis Smiley Show" on Public Radio International. He is the author or co-author of 20 books, and his non-profit Tavis Smiley Foundation is now in the midst of a $3 million four-year campaign called "Ending Poverty: America's Silent Spaces" to help focus on alleviating endemic poverty in America. TIME magazine named Smiley to the TIME 100, a list of "The World's 100 Most Influential People."

About the National Center for State Courts

The National Center for State Courts, headquartered in Williamsburg, Va., is a nonprofit court organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice by providing leadership and service to the state courts. Founded in 1971 by the Conference of Chief Justices and Chief Justice of the United States, Warren E. Burger, NCSC provides education, training, management and research services to the nation's state courts.

SOURCE Tavis Smiley on PBS
PUNE, India, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report "Pharmaceutical Excipients Market by Type (Organic Chemical (Sugar, Petrochemical, Glycerin), Inorganic Chemical), Functionality (Filler, Binder, Lubricant, Preservative), Formulation (Oral, Topical, Coating, Parenteral) - Global Forecast to 2021", published by MarketsandMarkets, The global market is expected to reach USD 8.1 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 6.1% from 2016 to 2021.

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Browse 194 market data Tables with 46 Figures spread through 256 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Pharmaceutical Excipients Market"

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This report studies the pharmaceutical excipients market over the forecast period of 2016-2021. In this report, the pharmaceutical excipients market is segmented by product, delivery form, functionality, and region. It also discusses the key market trends, drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities in this market and its submarkets.

The growth of the market is attributed to the increasing demand for functionality excipients, recent patents expiries driving the demand for pharmaceutical excipients in generic drug manufacturing, advancements in nanotechnology, and the emergence of new excipients for the pharmaceutical industry. However, decline in the R&D investments and increasing regulatory requirements are expected to hinder the market growth.

In 2015, Europe accounted for the largest share of the global pharmaceutical excipients market, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific. The presence of a large number of pharmaceutical excipients manufacturers in the European and North American regions has led to their large shares in the pharmaceutical excipients market. However, the Asia-Pacific region is projected to register the highest growth during the forecast period.

In 2015, the organic chemicals segment accounted for the largest share of the pharmaceutical excipients market, followed by inorganic chemicals. The large share of organic chemicals can be attributed to the wide applications in the manufacturing of pharmaceutical drugs.

Amongst formulations, oral formulations accounted for the largest share of the pharmaceutical excipients market in 2015, owing to the shrinking pipeline of new chemical entities (NCEs), and focus on the development of orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs) and other novel methods of oral drug delivery. There is also a growing trend towards the formulation of sachets. Topical formulations are expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

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The major players in the pharmaceutical excipients market include Ashland, Inc. (U.S.), BASF SE (Germany), The Dow Chemical Company (U.S.), Roquette (France), FMC Corporation (U.S.), Evonik Industries AG (Germany), Associated British Foods Plc. (U.K.), Archer Daniels Midland Company (U.S.), Lubrizol Corporation (U.S.), and Croda International Plc. (U.K.).

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http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/drug-delivery-technologies-market-1085.html

Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Market by type (Innovative, Generic), Type of Synthesis (Synthetic, Biotech), Type of Manufacturer (Captive, Merchant), Therapy (Oncology, diabetes, Orthopedic, CNS, Nephrology, Ophthalmology) - Global Forecast to 2020

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/API-Market-263.html

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SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Plug and Play's Insurance Platform announces a call for applications from startups for its accelerator program, giving them the chance to compete for a spot in Plug and Play's first insurance batch. Plug and Play Insurance has recently been launched in partnership with Admiral Group, Compare.com, Deloitte, Farmers Insurance, Munich Re, Nationwide, Porto Seguro, SOMPO Digital Lab, State Farm, Travelers, and USAA.

"There's been more of a focus on InsurTech in Silicon Valley, and partnering with Plug and Play will keep us and other industry players informed about emerging technologies that could play a role in our sector in the next decade," says Robert Mozeika, Executive Innovation Strategy at Munich Re in Silicon Valley.

Startups accepted into the 12-week program will receive office space in Plug and Play's headquarters, expert mentor curricula, business development, exposure to their extensive corporate partner network, and a chance to pitch in front of Silicon Valley's biggest investors at EXPO.

An insurance kickoff event was held at Plug and Play last week with over 100 attendees and 20 corporations. Startups had the chance to present on stage in front of top corporations and attend a panel discussion with Munich Re, USAA, Deloitte, and AIG that dove deeper into how startups can work with corporations and the types of technologies insurance companies may expect.

"The outcome of our insurance launch event was terrific. We had a great turn out with insurers that are interested in technology advancements that can help the industry and consumers. This is just the beginning of our insurance program and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here," says Saeed Amidi, Founder and CEO of Plug and Play.

With over 400 portfolio companies and more than 100 corporate partners, Plug and Play is a leader in startup success. They have created focused innovation platforms in the areas of: FinTech, Brand & Retail, Internet of Things, Media & Mobile, Connected Health, Travel & Hospitality, New Materials & Packaging, and now, Insurance. Plug and Play aims to empower entrepreneurs to innovate, pair startups with investors, and connect forward-thinking minds.

"We are already working with thousands of startups in our ecosystem, but with this new initiative, we are looking for stage-agnostic InsurTech startups that could facilitate changes in various aspects of the industry," said Ali Safavi, Director of Plug and Play Insurance.

Startups of all stages are encouraged to apply: http://bit.ly/startup-apply

Application deadline is August 1, 2016.

About Plug and Play Tech Center

Plug and Play Tech Center is the world's largest global technology accelerator and venture fund. Since inception in 2006, our program has expanded worldwide to include entrepreneurs from 24 countries, providing necessary resources to succeed in Silicon Valley. With over 400 startups and 100 corporate partners, we have created the ultimate startup ecosystem. Plug and Play provides active investments with 180 leading Silicon Valley VCs, and more than 365 networking events per year. Companies in our community have raised over $3.5 billion in funding, with successful portfolio exits including Danger, Dropbox, Lending Club, PayPal, SoundHound, and Zoosk. For more information, visit: http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com

Media Contact:

Allison Romero

Phone: 408-524-1457

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Plug and Play Tech Center

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BOULDER, Colo., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Prima-Temp announced today it placed in the top 3 amongst over 1,000 global innovative companies at the annual Challenge Cup 1776 finals.

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Sponsored by technology incubator and seed fund 1776, the competition featured entrepreneurs from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, Philippines the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the U.S.

Prima-Temp has garnered a cash prize and global recognition as a ground breaking, much needed technology. Dr. Lauren Costantini, CEO, presented Priya, the company's personal fertility sensor, designed to help a woman get pregnant - www.priyaring.com - as well as other potential life saving platform extensions using Prima-Temp patented technology.

Prima-Temp Inc. has developed a product that monitors continuous core body temperature, one of the most reliable indicators of female fertility. "Priya has well-accepted technology," Dr. Costantini told the audience at the 1776 Challenge Cup finals; "Priya is truly effortless, discreet, and precise. When a woman is trying to get pregnant, she simply inserts the sensor that automatically sends data to the Priya app on her smart phone, and notifies her when she is most fertile."

Priya may help couples avoid costly fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization/IVF.

About 1776

Each year 1776, a global incubator and venture fund, hosts a worldwide tournament called the Challenge Cup. Together, with Startup Federation partners, Revolution, the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) and over 50 incubator hosts around the world, they discover the most promising, highly scalable startups that are poised to solve the major challenges of our time.

Startups advance through three rounds: Local, Regional and Global Finals. All of the regional winners and a host of wild cards were then invited to participate in the Challenge Cup Global Finals last week in Washington, D.C. There, they competed for over $1 million in prizes, as well as spent time with the investors, customers, media and other key connections that can help a company succeed on a global scale. Reportedly, Steve Case of AOL was one of the visionaries who founded "1776" to foster a global community of innovators tackling global challenges.

About Prima-Temp

Prima-Temp brings new, innovative approaches to many of today's healthcare challenges through the application of 21st century thermometry. Prima-Temp's continuous temperature sensors and associated software allow the most precise method to measure true core body temperature, with the potential to address a multitude of applications including the PRIYA personal fertility sensor, early detection of infection or Sepsis, sleep disorders, therapy, weight control and exercise. For additional information, visit www.prima-temp.com.

Contact: Jacqueline Dayton: (415) 816-3715

Related Links: http://priyaring.com

http://www.prima-temp.com/blog/prima-temp-global-1776-challenge-cup

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LinkedIn: http:/www.linkedin.com/company/prima-temp

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/primatemp/

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/Primatemp

SOURCE Prima-Temp

Related Links

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HARRISBURG, Pa., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A settlement has been proposed in a class action lawsuit (In re: Shop-Vac Marketing and Sales Practices Litigation, MDL No. 2380) about certain advertising related to Shop-Vac brand wet/dry vacuums (the "Vacuums"). The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania authorized this Notice and will decide whether to approve the settlement.

Plaintiffs allege that Defendants Shop-Vac Corporation and Lowe's Home Centers, LLC misrepresented the peak horsepower ratings and tank capacity of the Vacuums. Defendants deny these allegations.

The Settlement would extend the manufacturer's warranty on the motors of the Vacuums for at least 2 years. The proposed Settlement also includes changes to the descriptions of peak horsepower ratings and tank capacity on marketing materials.

"Settlement Class Members" are each person in the United States and its territories who, from January 1, 2006 to May 26, 2016, either (1) purchased a Vacuum, or (2) received a Vacuum as a gift, or (3) acquired possession of a Vacuum through other lawful means, other than for resale or distribution.

Settlement Class Members do not need to do anything in order to qualify for the settlement benefits. The manufacturer's warranty extension will automatically apply and the changes to the peak horsepower ratings and tank capacity descriptions will be made.

The Court will hold a Fairness Hearing at the Ronald Reagan Federal Bldg. & U.S. Courthouse, 228 Walnut Street, Harrisburg, PA 17101 on September 15, 2016 at 9:30 a.m. to determine whether the Settlement is fair, reasonable and adequate and to consider interim Class Counsel's applications for attorneys' fees and expenses of up to $4,250,000 to be paid by Defendants and for awards up to $5,000 each for the five plaintiffs to be paid from the attorneys' fees awarded. Settlement Class Members or their lawyers may ask to appear and speak at the hearing at their own expense, but do not have to.

If the Settlement is approved by the Court, any Settlement Class Members who do not exclude themselves will be bound by the judgment and legal claims that they may have against Defendants related to the Vacuums will be released. Settlement Class Members who do not wish to be bound by the Settlement must mail a written request for exclusion to Shop-Vac Wet/Dry Vacuum Class Settlement, Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 4129, Portland, OR 97208-4129 postmarked by August 15, 2016. Or, Settlement Class Members may file a formal written objection to the Settlement by August 15, 2016.

This notice is only a summary. For more information, visit www.ShopVacPHPSettlement.com , or call 1-844-807-7711. Do not contact the Court.

Key Dates

Deadline to request exclusion from the Settlement Class Must be postmarked or received by August 15, 2016 Deadline to object to the Settlement Must be postmarked or received by August 15, 2016 Deadline to send your Notice of Intention to Appear at the Fairness Hearing Must be postmarked or received by August 15, 2016 Court's Fairness Hearing September 15, 2016 at 9:30 a.m.

SOURCE Milberg LLP

Related Links

http://www.ShopVacPHPSettlement.com


Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards killed 12 Kurdish rebels near the Iraqi border in clashes in which three Guards were also killed, an Iranian news agency reported on Thursday.

Wednesday evening's fighting took place in Oshnavieh in the northwest, the Tasnim news agency said, citing a statement from the Guards.

Two separate groups of rebels had slipped across the border to carry out acts of "sabotage" and "create insecurity among the population", it added.

Oshnavieh lies around 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the border with the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

Iran's top police officer, General Hossein Ashtari, said the fighters killed were members of PJAK -- the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, an Iranian Kurdish group with close links to Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

"A large quantity of arms and ammunition was seized from this terrorist group," Ashtari told Tasnim.

The incursion comes days after five Kurdish rebels and five jihadists were killed, along with a police officer, in separate clashes in the northwest and southeast of Iran.

"A team of five from the PJAK terrorist splinter group... has been identified and destroyed in the Sardasht region" on the Iraqi border, a Guards statement said on Monday.

Later that day, state television reported six more deaths in armed clashes in Sistan-Baluchistan province in the southeast.

One police officer and five militants were killed in the fighting, which pitted Iranian forces against Sunni militant group Jaish-ul Adl.

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Investment fuels Moncton startup's mission to expand the growth of its platform designed to boost job seeker self-esteem and add a personal touch to hiring



MONCTON, NB, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ - Qimple, an HR software company, backed by 500 Startups (Batch 12), with a mission to humanize online hiring by improving the way job seekers and employers interact, announced today that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. The round was led by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation (NBIF), with participation from Green Century Investment. This round brings the company's total funding to $1.6 million. Qimple will use the funds to grow its team and further break-down the barriers associated with online hiring practices.

Qimple has impressed a multitude of tech and non-tech clients with its streamlined, yet humanized approach to hiring. Some of the company's clients such as, Audiobooks.com and CareGuide were so impressed with the results they achieved that they personally invested in the hiring software solution. "I was so impressed with Qimple's performance for Audiobooks.com's hiring needs that I decided to invest personally in the company," says Sanjay Singhal, the Canadian Venture Partner for 500 Startups and Founder of Audiobooks.com.

Qimple is approaching $1 million in revenue since company inception and has doubled its team to 12 people in the past three months. The product launched in 2015 as a quick and simple hiring solution. Today, the company has been strategically evolving away from traditional online hiring practices into a more comprehensive approach with a personal touch.

"Qimple understands the issues with online hiring and knows exactly what needs to happen to make it a better experience", says company Co-Founder and CEO Yves Boudreau, "the team respects that job searching can be a very emotional experience with feelings of stress, frustration and sadness." In fact, according to Gallup, over half (54%) of underemployed Americans are "struggling" due to stress and negative outlook of their future.

"Our platform boosts job-seeker self-esteem and we're proud to say that we receive daily positive feedback from job seekers on how rewarding and empowering the application experience is for them. Job seekers who are upbeat and optimistic perform better in interviews, are more likely to receive offers, and enter jobs ready to help their teams succeed. We're proud of the role we play in that," says Boudreau.

In addition, Qimple will soon be launching the world's first Resume Snapshot tool in an applicant tracking system. This feature will help hiring managers like never before.

"We know that hiring great people comes with its set of challenges, especially lack of time and resources to truly see if candidates are a great fit. The Resume Snapshot tool presents consistent information for all applicants with the most advanced resume parsing technology," says Boudreau, "hiring managers are now able to consume more information in a shorter period of time, and the playing field is leveled out for job seekers."

"We first invested $100,000 in Qimple two years ago as a startupbefore they launched and started raising capital," says NBIF President and CEO Calvin Milbury. "Now that they've launched their product and are showing good market adoption, we're helping them to go from a start-up company to a scale-up company and accelerate their growth. The passion and commitment Qimple has for building a great product is unique and powerful. We are excited to be part of it and to be supporting the growth of the startup ecosystem in New Brunswick."

Also, Larry Liu, Principal of Green Century Investment, is delighted to welcome Qimple to their family of companies. "Qimple's mission stems from their deep-rooted company culture of constant learning, open-mindedness and collaboration. Yves is building a great team that will be a core part of Green Century's portfolio of companies. We are looking forward to supporting and participating in their growth and success!"

Qimple has been busy over the past year building a unique product that breaks down barriers and fundamentally improves the hiring experience. "We're excited to see how people will react to what we release in the future and are even more excited to see that our investors believe in our team and product so much," says Boudreau, "we are clearly doing something that is different and better for everyone."

Downloads:

Images and media kit included in this link.

About Qimple

Based in Moncton, Qimple is a human resources software company operating in the $6 billion talent sourcing market, with the mission to humanize online hiring by improving the way employers and job seekers interact. Founded in 2014, Qimple has raised a total of $1.6 million in financing from investors such as, 500 Startups, New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, Green Century Investment and BDC Capital Inc. Learn more: Qimple.com

About New Brunswick Innovation Foundation

NBIF is an independent, not-for-profit corporation that invests in new growth-oriented companies and R&D activities. With over $73 million invested, plus $380 million leveraged from other sources, NBIF has helped to create over 97 companies since its inception in 2003. All of NBIF's investment returns go back into the Foundation to be re-invested in other new startup companies and R&D initiatives. Learn more: nbif.ca

About Green Century Investment

Green Century Investment Ltd (GCI) is a Canadian private equity and venture capital investment company located in Toronto, Ontario. As a strategic investor, GCI funds growth opportunities where we can add value in technology and innovation, real estate and alternative energy assets. Learn more: greencenturyinvestment.com

SOURCE Qimple.com
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Valpak, a leader in local print and digital coupons, announced today Karen Grizzaffi has acquired the existing Valpak of Lafayette territory (Louisiana). Under new ownership as of May 1, Valpak's signature Blue Envelope now mails to over 60,000 households in Lafayette and its surrounding areas, including Broussard, Youngsville, Scott and New Iberia.

"I'm incredibly excited to be a part of the Valpak franchise network and take over the Lafayette territory," said Grizzaffi. "The brand's impressive tenure in the area combined with my over 20 years of sales experience made for a perfect business fit. I look forward to providing local consumers with even more great ways to save with Valpak."

Prior to joining Valpak, Grizzaffi had a career in the medical sales industry for over 20 years. Throughout her career, she's worked for three Fortune 500 companies, including positions with Merck & Co., Inc. and Bayer HealthCare Diabetes. After reviewing the many benefits of owning a Valpak franchise, Grizzaffi decided to jump at the opportunity to purchase the Lafayette territory and become her own boss.

"We are ecstatic to welcome Karen to the Valpak franchise family," said Shak Turner, director of franchise sales for Valpak. "As a sales expert with impressive experience, we know she will provide customers in Lafayette and its surrounding neighborhoods with the consumer savings they have come to rely upon."

A leader in cooperative direct mail, Valpak mails coupons to nearly 39 million demographically targeted households per month in 45 states and four Canadian provinces. Today, in addition to its flagship Blue Envelope, Valpak offers its advertisers an impressive portfolio of digital advertising products including valpak.com, Smartphone apps, Google partnerships, website development, mobile web optimization and reputation management.

With more than 25 million Americans using couponing apps each month, Valpak's digital offerings have been a big draw for new franchisees. Digital coupon use is on the rise, and ample gains are projected in 2016. In the past year, Valpak's print offerings have also expanded with on-envelope advertising and circulars.

Ideal candidates for Valpak franchise ownership should possess a desire to join a trusted, industry-leading brand, work within a proven franchise system, develop relationships with local businesses and have a comfort level with selling new, digital technologies. Franchisees should also possess a minimum liquidity of $75,000, and a minimum net worth of $150,000.

For more information on advertising with Valpak of Lafayette, please contact Karen Grizzaffi at [email protected] or (337) 445-9035.

For more information on Valpak franchise opportunities, please contact Shak Turner at [email protected] or 727-399-3091 or visit www.valpakfranchising.com.

About Valpak

Based in St. Petersburg, FL, Valpak is one of the leading direct marketing companies in the U.S. and Canada. We provide print and digital advertising through a network of 160 local franchises. From mailbox to mobile phone, Valpak brings exciting local business offers and opportunities to millions of consumers. Each month, our well-known Blue Envelope of savings is mailed to about 39 million demographically targeted households in 45 states and in four Canadian provinces. Our digital suite of products, including valpak.com, reaches more than 110 million users. Founded in 1968, Valpak is owned by Cox Target Media, a subsidiary of Cox Media Group in Atlanta.

CONTACT: Samantha Rego

Valpak

727-399-3139

[email protected]





Sloane Fistel

Fish Consulting

(954) 893-9150

[email protected]

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SOURCE Valpak

Related Links

http://www.valpak.com


Should try engage management behind-the-scenes with a strategy that permits management to be part of the solution. I think most of management resistance to activism is ego-driven. Activism threatens management's control over the Company, and implicitly suggests that management is doing a bad job. So if an activist can engage management with a plan that can create the appearance that management is part of the solution, it can take some of the sting out of an activist campaign. This is not possible with certain campaigns, and certainly some management teams, but it is worth a try.

Need to be prepared to respond to management claims of "Short-termism," which is a bogus slur invented by incumbent management to excuse poor results. Activists want a return on their investment. That is what stockholders want, too. And a rational stockholder wants that return sooner rather than later. Importantly, no reliable consensus has emerged from academic research showing that activism harms companies in the long term. So the short-term vs. long-term argument sounds like nothing more than an empty activism defense "talking point" to me.

Should expect to see more aggressive activism in the coming years, with more activism targeting larger corporations, as in the case with Yahoo! As for future corporate governance issues, Sam opined that the most pressing corporate governance issues will focus on what makes the most effective board of directors. There will be more attention paid to ensuring that a board of directors is truly independent of management, including having directors nominated or identified from independent sources. We will also see more focus on reducing the tenures of some directors, to discourage the clubby and status quo thinking we see all too often in corporate boardrooms. Another important issue we will see debated is whether activist fund managers, and other investment advisers, should more often be on the board of major corporations.

The event brought together more than 350 activist investors, institutional investors, hedge funds, board directors, CEOs, proxy solicitors, corporate and securities attorneys, investor relations professionals, investment bankers and others for dynamic sessions and a full day of networking.



About Sadis & Goldberg LLP



Sadis & Goldberg is a leading New York based law firm with practices in hedge, private equity, venture capital, real estate and commodity fund formation, family office, transactional counseling, compliance services, regulatory representation, litigation, derivatives, tax, ERISA, estate planning and real estate.

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SOURCE Sadis & Goldberg LLP
CINCINNATI and DURHAM, N.C., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Schulman IRB, the industry-leading central IRB in customer service and technology, will be exhibiting at the 2016 Drug Information Association (DIA) Annual Meeting from June 27-29 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Members of the Schulman Technology, Consulting, Study Management and Executive Leadership teams will be at Booth 1607 to discuss Schulman's robust service offerings, including oncology review expertise and technology. In addition to exhibiting, Schulman will also host a private event at the One Liberty Observation Deck after Monday's sessions. Attendees can get their exclusive invitation to the event by stopping by Schulman's booth.

"DIA is a must-attend event for the clinical research community," said Robann Cunningham, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Schulman. "It's an important opportunity for key thought leaders and innovators to share their views, knowledge and experiences with attendees across all disciplines. We look forward to meeting with everyone and contributing Schulman's experience and expertise to the conversation."

More than 7,000 professionals from industry, academia, regulatory and government agencies, health, patient and philanthropic organizations attend DIA annually. These individuals come from all disciplines involved in the discovery, development and life cycle management of health care products.

To learn more about the event, visit http://www.diaglobal.org/en/flagship/dia-2016/.

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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SOURCE Schulman IRB
CHICAGO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ShipBob announced today that it has closed $4 million in a Series A round of funding to empower more businesses around the world with better, easier, more affordable logistics and shipping. This round, led by Hyde Park Venture Partners (HPVP), will fuel ShipBob's growth as the company increases its geographic footprint, expands its team, and further develops the product.

ShipBob was founded to optimize logistics for e-commerce companies to help them achieve the scale, speed, reach and efficiency of Amazon. The company participated in Y Combinator in 2014 and has since experienced double-digit growth month-over-month. It is operationally profitable in Chicago and New York, where it is currently active. This funding is a testament to the company's impressive traction and will support ShipBob as the company scales and continues to transform the entire fulfillment lifecycle for SMBs. ShipBob plans to launch another city later this summer.

ShipBob's free online platform manages the entire fulfillment process from end to end, combining order management, inventory management, customer communication, and seamless shipping in one simple web dashboard. It integrates with the most popular online e-commerce platforms, including eBay, Shopify, Amazon, and Magento. When a merchant makes a sale, all they have to do is schedule a pickup and ShipBob takes care of the rest.

ShipBob professionally packs items and optimizes savings for businesses by comparing USPS, UPS, FedEx & DHL for the lowest shipping rate. It will ship anywhere in the world and fill out all the customers' paperwork, so merchants don't have to worry about a thing. The company also offers warehousing, so customers can store inventory at the company's warehouse and ShipBob will package and ship out orders as they are placed.

"My cofounder and I were running an e-commerce store ourselves and every time we got an order, we had to go to the post office and stand in line to mail our items," said ShipBob cofounder Dhruv Saxena. "We realized shipping was broken for SMBs and there were no good solutions out there. That's when we decided to start ShipBob. We've grown rapidly and this round of funding will enable us to scale up to meet demand, to take the pain out of shipping for more small businesses and help them scale as they grow."

Logistics for small businesses are complicated and painful. E-commerce platforms have simplified the process of selling online, but the fulfillment process remains antiquated. Most SMBs juggle multiple products and services for various steps of the fulfillment process and none of these systems talk to each other, which leads to inefficiencies and mistakes. Once they reach a certain volume, they also have to hire their own staff for packaging and shipping, which is also expensive. As a result, small businesses can spend 25 percent of revenue on fulfillment alone.

ShipBob solves these problems with a single technology platform that integrates all the products and services SMBs need. ShipBob serves as their outsourced logistics arm, which is cheaper and allows small businesses to grow without worrying about their logistics infrastructure. Its software-first approach stands out in a stagnant market where incumbents take months to onboard customers. With ShipBob, merchants do not have to pay to use the platform, only for the services they use -- there are no minimums and no contracts.

"In an e-commerce world where shipping speed and cost efficiency matter, ShipBob has an innovative approach to helping small and medium e-commerce companies provide efficient and cost-effective logistics," said Ira Weiss, from Hyde Park Venture Partners (HPVP). "Merchants need better tools to take the pain out of fulfillment and ShipBob's platform makes the entire process simple and straightforward. The opportunity is huge and we are excited to see ShipBob realize its global vision."

In addition to HPVP, other investors include Hyde Park Angels, FJ Labs, Recruit Strategic Partners, FundersClub, Startcaps Ventures, NFQ Capital, Network Ventures, Bluestein and Associates, Service Provider Capital, Russell Long, SV Angel and Y Combinator, which ShipBob went through in 2014.

About ShipBob

ShipBob's goal is to make shipping effortless and efficient, businesses can skip standing in line at the post office and focus on what really matters in their business. Its online platform combines order management, inventory management, customer communication, as well as optimized shipping for e-commerce companies. The technology platform integrates into online ecommerce platforms such as eBay, Shopify, Amazon, Magento. Shipbob provides this technology platform for free so that any business can sign up and start using Shipbob's online platform within minutes. ShipBob offers value-added premium services built on top of its platform, allowing it to capture some of the savings provided to its clients.

About Hyde Park Venture Partners

Hyde Park Venture Partners (HPVP) is an early stage venture fund focused on high-growth software startups across the Midwest. With offices in Chicago and Indianapolis and a network of deal sources and advisors throughout the Midwest, the firm invests in technology startups raising their first or second institutional round of capital. Example investments include Farmlogs, FourKites, G2Crowd, and Geofeeedia. Follow HPVP @hydeparkvp.

SOURCE ShipBob
Guido's Pizzeria and Tapas

The Kitchen Sink

Tani Sushi Bistro

IHOP

Barcelona Tapas

Basil Spice

"SkipTheDishes is about helping people gain more time in their day," said Joshua Simair, CEO and co-founder of SkipTheDishes. "Delivery orders placed through SkipTheDishes.com or our iOS and Android apps feature real-time GPS tracking, live order updates, and no menu markups or hidden fees. These exclusive features allow busy people to enjoy St. Louis's diverse restaurant scene, while having more time to spend on what's important to them."

Busy St. Louisans aren't the only people who will benefit from the new service - local restaurants that are accepted onto the SkipTheDishes network can expect an increase in profits, with no new work.

"Another important aspect of our network is that we send millions of dollars in extra revenue to local restaurants," said Simair. "Many of the restaurants using SkipTheDishes in St. Louis have never offered delivery before, so this will be a brand new way for them to grow their customer base and benefit from a 10-30% increase in business."

Delivery is currently available from 5:00PM  9:00PM in St. Louis and surrounding areas, with plans to expand delivery hours in the coming weeks. Current delivery areas include Downtown, Creve Coeur, Brentwood, University City, Clayton, Kirkwood, Richmond Heights, Rock Hill, and many more.

For a full list of restaurants offering delivery in St. Louis, and to download the apps, please visit: SkipTheDishes.com.

About SkipTheDishes:

SkipTheDishes is a North American technology company that enables food delivery in 16 North American cities including St. Louis, Columbus, Cincinnati,Cleveland, Buffalo, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa, Calgary, Toronto, and Vancouver. Through the Skip The Dishes network, restaurants gain more business, independent couriers earn extra money on their own schedule, and hungry customers are able to save time by ordering from hundreds of local Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, and Pizza restaurants that have never offered delivery before. For more information, please visit: SkipTheDishes.com or download the apps on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160616/380399

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160616/380400LOGO

SOURCE SkipTheDishes

Related Links

https://www.skipthedishes.com


LOS ANGELES, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SONIFI Solutions, the leading provider of innovative guest engagement solutions in hospitality and Single Digits, the leading global provider of High Speed Internet Access (HSIA) solutions, today announced extending their existing partnership by developing seamless pairing functionality and by signing a reseller agreement that makes SoniCast available to Single Digits' current and future customer base.

Seamless pairing enables a hotel guest to pair their device with TV in the room by simply signing on the hotel Wi-Fi. This integration works with existing Wi-Fi infrastructures and does not require an access point in every room. Through this new agreement, Single Digits will begin offering SoniCast  powered by Chromecast, a state of the art over-the-top platform that enables guests to cast 1000+ apps to the in-room television by simply signing onto the hotel Wi-Fi.

"We are excited to offer SoniCast to our customers. No service is more requested by hotel guests today than casting over-the-top subscriptions from apps such as Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV and MLB," said Bob Goldstein, CEO of Single Digits. "Through our technical collaboration with SONIFI, Single Digits' Broadband Authentication Platform software enables a solution for seamlessly pairing a guest device to their room by simply signing onto hotel Wi-Fi. This product is transforming the industry, and our partnership will help accelerate its deployment."

"Single Digits has been a great partner to SONIFI in providing best-in-class technology for our Internet Services platform," said Ahmad Ouri, CEO of SONIFI Solutions. "It was natural to collaborate with Single Digits on the implementation of the SoniCast API and to welcome them as our first reseller, as their software uniquely positions SoniCast to pair without the use of an 'app'. SONIFI and Single Digits customers will now enable a seamless over-the-top experience for their guests in one single step."

Interested parties can witness this behavior and learn more about SoniCast at SONIFI's Booth #1101 and Single Digits' Booth #219 at HITEC in New Orleans June 21 - 23.

About SONIFI Solutions

SONIFI Solutions, the leader in innovative guest engagement solutions for the hospitality and healthcare industries serves 500 million travelers in over 1.2 million hotel rooms annually. The Company's core services include: guest internet access, mobility, interactive television, OTT Casting and free-to-guest solutions along with unparalleled nationwide technical support and professional services. For more information, please visit www.sonifi.com.

About Single Digits

Single Digits offers a complete guest HSIA solution, including an award winning cloud-based software, IP network design, engineering, professional services, ongoing maintenance, network monitoring, multi-lingual support, revenue reporting and authentication tracking. Our industry leading Broadband Authentication Platform software and managed service solutions are leveraged at more than 3000 properties globally, including 7 of the 20 largest hotels in the United States. More on our solutions can be found at www.singledigits.com

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080115/AQTU120LOGO

SOURCE SONIFI Solutions

Related Links

http://www.sonifi.com


NEWARK, Calif., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Hospi Corporation today announced the publication of a study in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management demonstrating that use of its Macy Catheter device resulted in improved absorption of the sedative anticonvulsant phenobarbital, as compared to administration via suppository. The Macy Catheter is a specialized catheter that enables rapid, discreet and comfortable administration of medications via the rectum. The results show the absorption kinetics of Macy Catheter-administered phenobarbital were superior to phenobarbital suppositories based upon the rate of early absorption, overall absorption, variability, and comfort of administration. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and completed in partnership with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

"These results are extremely important to hospice care in the home setting as phenobarbital is used extensively in the care of patients experiencing severe symptoms such as agitation, seizures or intractable suffering," said Brad Macy, RN, BSN, CHPN, inventor of the Macy Catheter and Hospi Corporation's President. "This pharmacokinetic study comparing micro-enema delivered phenobarbital versus suppositories will help clinicians to make good treatment choices and facilitate quick and easy administration of medications to assist patients. Effective symptom management helps keep patients comfortable in the home, while decreasing the burden of care on caregivers and the health care system as a whole. Hospi is committed to enhancing the scientific evidence base and continuing to raise the standard of care in symptom management."

The study was a randomized, open label, cross over study with three arms: a phenobarbital suppository (194.4 mg) and two different micro-enema suspensions with the same dose of phenobarbital tablets administered via the Macy Catheter. The catheter-administered doses were crushed and suspended in 6 ml (MC-6) and 20 ml (MC-20) of tap water, respectively. The results showed:

After ten minutes, the mean plasma concentrations were 12 times higher for the MC-20 and 8 times higher for the MC-6 demonstrating a more rapid early absorption compared to the phenobarbital suppository. Concentrations achieved in 30 minutes via MC-20 took almost three hours to achieve by suppository.

Less variability in the extent of drug absorption for both MC administrations (1.4-fold to 1.9-fold difference) compared to a 4.4-fold difference with administration via suppository.

Participants of the study described the Macy Catheter to be a "comfortable" way to give medication compared to suppository, rated to be "mildly uncomfortable."

Helping Reduce Cost of End-of-Life Care

In 2014, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released an extensive and detailed report on "The State of Dying In America," highlighting that the last few months of life are characterized by "frequent hospital and intensive care stays." IOM reported that the health care system has room for improvement in meeting "the needs, values and preference of our patients" and that the healthcare system spends too much on end of life care in "unneeded and unwanted acute care services" rather than other ways to improve the quality of end of life care. [1]

"In addition to the clinical effectiveness of the Macy Catheter, the potential savings to healthcare providers in medication costs and care burden is of great import given the fiscal challenges facing the industry today," said Igal Ladabaum, Hospi Corporation's CEO. "If hospice clinicians have an option for medication administration that allows for dignified end-of-life care in the home setting when the oral route is compromised, we can potentially avoid the suffering and costs associated with more invasive methods, including transport to inpatient settings."

The Macy Catheter is a quick, cost-effective alternative for medication and fluids administration when the oral route is compromised and IV access is difficult or not indicated. While it is particularly useful for patients who wish to remain at home and cannot swallow medications, it also has broad applications in the emergency room and other acute care settings as a bridge to IV access or to facilitate discharge to a lower acuity setting.

About the Macy Catheter

The Macy Catheter leverages the known benefits of the rectal route of administration by enabling rectal delivery in a dignified and discreet manner. The catheter allows clinicians and caregivers to comfortably administer medication repeatedly from a medication port secured to the leg or abdomen, maintaining patient privacy and without having to reposition the patient.

The Macy Catheter is the only device with regulatory clearance solely for the ongoing rectal delivery of medications and fluids. It is currently used in the hospice/palliative care settings in the United States where it offers clinicians and patients an easy, comfortable and cost-effective alternative to IV or oral administration. Recently published case reports (American Journal of Emergency Medicine, August 2015) support its use in the emergency room and intensive care unit (ICU) settings and it is now being adopted in the emergency/acute care arena. In addition to the hospice setting, the Macy Catheter can is an attractive option for emergency/acute care patients with difficult IV access who are in pain, agitated, dehydrated, febrile, nauseated or vomiting.

About Hospi Corporation

Hospi Corporation is an ISO-certified medical device company that improves quality of life by innovating practical, high-impact medical devices that enhance patient comfort and wellbeing, ease caregiver burden, and reduce cost. The company is dedicated to providing medical devices that enable compassionate care of patients. The company's patient-centric focus, which is inspired by a nursing perspective, guided the development of the Macy Catheter. The Macy Catheterwhich has received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance (2014) and CE Mark approval (2015) is the only device designed solely for ongoing rectal delivery of medications and fluids. For more information, visit www.hospicorp.com.

[1] Institute of Medicine. "Dying in America: Improving quality and honoring individual preferences near the end of life." www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2014/Dying-In-America-Improving-Quality-and-Honoring-Individual-Preferences-Near-the-End-of-Life.aspx

Accessed: April 2016

Contact:

Ami Knoefler

Spark BioComm

650-739-9952

SOURCE Hospi Corporation

Related Links

http://www.hospicorp.com


CENTER CITY, Minn., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Summer provides us with many reasons to celebrate, which oftentimes means consumption of liquor and other inebriating substances. For children of those suffering from addiction, summer can be especially difficult as they watch family members or relatives descend into unpredictable behavior, mood swings and seclusion.

"We often overlook the true victims of addiction - the children," says Jerry Moe, National Director Children's Programs at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. "Kids suffer silently as parents and siblings become distant, hostile and non-responsive. Children lack the skills to understand the disease and its effects on the family."

For decades, The Betty Ford Center, part of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, has administered counseling to children of adults suffering from addiction. At its regional centers in Dallas, Denver and Rancho Mirage, California, counselors assist children with how to identify and express their feelings, develop self-care skills, and deepen communication with parents.

"They gave me my son back. I thought I was going to lose him."

- Denise C., Denver.

How the Children's Program works

The program features a balanced blend of learning, playing and growing. Children ages 7-12 learn about addiction in an age-appropriate way, share feelings, develop a variety of coping and self-care skills and build upon their strengths and intrinsic worth. Just as importantly, the program provides the opportunity for children to be kids, as recreational and other fun activities are included in the program.

Helping children to learn that it's not their fault and they are not to blame allows them to become kids again. Research clearly shows that addiction tends to run in families so children from alcoholic and other drug addicted families are at high risk. Empowering these kids with healthy living skills is truly prevention in its purest form.

No child is ever turned away due to an inability to pay. Up to 90% receive financial assistance to cover costs.

"Alcoholism and drug addiction are family diseases, so we treat the whole family, including the kids," says Moe. "Children of those suffering from addiction have a greater chance to develop an addiction as adults. This program acts as a barrier to the future progress of this disease."

About the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation

The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation helps people reclaim their lives from the disease of addiction. It is the nation's largest nonprofit treatment provider, with a legacy that began in 1949 and includes the 1982 founding of the Betty Ford Center. With 16 sites in California, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Colorado and Texas, the Foundation offers prevention and recovery solutions nationwide and across the entire continuum of care for youth and adults. It includes a specialized program for legal professionals, the largest recovery publishing house in the country, a fully-accredited graduate school of addiction studies, an addiction research center, an education arm for medical professionals and a unique children's program, and is the nation's leader in advocacy and policy for treatment and recovery. Learn more at www.HazeldenBettyFord.org and @hazldnbettyford.

About Rambeau Media LLC

Rambeau Media LLC is a full service media and communications agency. With offices in Denver, CO and in Austin, TX, RambeauMedia.com offers strategic counsel, reputation management, media production and distribution in all format types.

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SOURCE Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation

Related Links

http://www.HazeldenBettyFord.org


FREMONT, Calif., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX), a leading business process services company, announced today that its Fortune 500 ranking of the largest US companies advanced eight positions to #212. The Fortune 500 list ranks the largest private and public US companies based on their prior year's annual revenue. SYNNEX reported $13.34 billion in revenue for its 2015 fiscal year, and celebrated a 15.8% year-over-year increase in net income.

SYNNEX Corporation operates two business segments: Technology Solutions, a value-add provider of commercial and consumer technology products and services; and Concentrix, a business services company focused on customer experience, analytics, automation and process optimization.

"Our new position as number 212 on the Fortune 500 list demonstrates SYNNEX' ability to help our business partners achieve their goals by capturing the opportunities created from the constant evolution occurring in our industries," said Kevin Murai, President and Chief Executive Officer, SYNNEX Corporation. "By investing in relevant high growth and high value capabilities and markets, we were able to increase our shareholder value and enhance our leadership position in the markets we serve. I am proud of the dedication and exemplary results our teams continue to deliver."

Since its debut on the Fortune 500 list in 2007 at #360, SYNNEX has moved up 148 spots to its current position at #212. SYNNEX's 5 year 2010-2015 compound annual growth rate for revenue was 9.1%.

For more information about the Fortune 500 list, visit http://www.fortune.com.

About SYNNEX

SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX), a Fortune 500 corporation, is a leading business process services company, optimizing supply chains and providing customer care solutions for its clients. SYNNEX distributes a broad range of information technology systems and products, and also provides systems design and integration services. The Concentrix segment offers a portfolio of end-to-end outsourced services around process optimization, customer engagement strategy and back-office automation to clients in ten identified industry verticals. Founded in 1980, SYNNEX operates in 26 countries around the world. Additional information about SYNNEX may be found online at www.synnex.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

Statements in this release that are forward-looking involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause the Company's actual results in future periods to be materially different from any future performance that may be suggested in this release. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release.

Copyright 2016 SYNNEX Corporation. All rights reserved. SYNNEX, the SYNNEX Logo, CONCENTRIX, and all other SYNNEX company, product and services names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of SYNNEX Corporation. SYNNEX, the SYNNEX Logo, and CONCENTRIX Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Other names and marks are the property of their respective owners.

SNX-F

SOURCE SYNNEX Corporation

Related Links

http://www.synnex.com


Despite suffering major losses in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State group can still conduct and inspire attacks across the globe, America's spy chief warned senior lawmakers Thursday.

John Brennan, the director of the CIA, testified before the US Senate Intelligence Committee amid renewed fears about IS and the threat of terror attacks, after a gunman slaughtered 49 people in a Florida gay nightclub.

Though the CIA has not found a direct tie between the shooter, Omar Mateen, and any foreign organization, he pledged allegiance to the jihadists and other groups as he perpetrated the worst mass shooting in US history early Sunday.

The IS group has lost much of the territory it once held across its so-called "caliphate" in northern Syria and Iraq, and has seen its ranks thinned by US-led air strikes and desertions.

Authorities estimate between 18,000 and 22,000 IS jihadists remain in Iraq and Syria, down from about 33,000 last year.

But despite upbeat Pentagon assessments about progress in the anti-IS fight, Brennan warned the group is still able to inspire and direct attacks beyond the territory it holds.

IS claimed responsibility for the Orlando massacre and is thought to be behind a string of deadly suicide bombings in Baghdad and Damascus, as well as recent attacks in Paris and Brussels.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan told lawmakers, using an acronym for the IS group.

IS fighters are "probably" exploring a variety of means for sneaking operatives into the West, he added, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes and through regular travel.

"We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks," Brennan said.

"ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West."

Strikes against IS cash hoards and oil smuggling infrastructure have affected the jihadists' financing, but they have made up for the shortfalls through new taxes in the territories it controls and continued smuggling.

And even though it has lost large bands of territory in Syria and Iraq, including major cities like Ramadi, IS is pushing to expand footholds in other countries.

Between 5,000 and 8,000 IS members are based in Libya and another 7,000 in Nigeria, plus hundreds more in Yemen and Afghanistan, authorities estimate.

"The branch in Libya is probably the most developed and the most dangerous," Brennan said.

"It is trying to increase its influence in Africa and to plot attacks in the region and in Europe."

Lawmakers voiced concern about extremists' online outreach and the ease with which they can inspire potential "lone wolf" attackers through the Internet.

Authorities are also troubled about the growing use of encrypted devices and apps that make it difficult for intelligence agencies to monitor communications.

US tech giants and the law enforcement community have been feuding for months about whether the government should have access -- sometimes called a "back door" -- to encrypted communications.

The issue gained new traction after a legal standoff between the FBI and Apple when it refused to unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a mass killing in San Bernardino, California, last year.

Brennan had publicly supported the FBI in the case but he told lawmakers he also supported encryption as a "capability that protects our way of life, our prosperity, our national security."

Still, experts should find a solution "that is not going to be perceived as a back door, but is going to allow the government to legitimately carry out its responsibilities while not compromising the great benefits that accrue to encryption."

Brennan added it was time for the private sector and the government to reach an understanding about "what our respective roles and responsibilities are going to be."

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SAN ANTONIO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- San Antonio attorney Thomas J. Henry is throwing a private star-studded after party for attendees of the Texas Democratic Convention this Friday. The convention is being held at the Alamodome in San Antonio from Thursday through Saturday and will be attended by approximately 10,000 Democrats from Texas and beyond.

Attorney Thomas J. Henry (PRNewsFoto/Thomas J. Henry Injury Attorneys)

Thomas J. Henry's after party is being held at Sunset Station in downtown San Antonio on Friday evening. It promises to be a memorable bash with performances by some of Texas' top artists. Party goers will enjoy performances by Pitbull Globalization Sirius XM Mixer DJ Kidd Spin, Clarissa Serna of The Voice fame, and Texas' premier honky-tonkers, Bart Crow Band. To drive the night home, the evening will be headlined by a surprise performance by one of Texas' leading country music artists.

There will also be food trucks serving up the best of San Antonio street eats and a demonstration by Cruz Ortiz, official artist of the Texas Democratic Convention.

Thomas J. Henry is a high-powered attorney and well-known philanthropist who regularly supports Democratic causes. "I am happy to support the convention after party," Thomas J. Henry stated. "This is a celebration of our democratic values!"

EVENT INFO

Date: Friday, June 17

Time: 8:00 PM  2:00 AM

Location: Sunset Station (1174 E Commerce St. San Antonio, TX 78205)

Invite: By invitation only

ABOUT THOMAS J. HENRY

Thomas J. Henry is the owner of Thomas J. Henry Injury Attorneys, a national injury firm based in San Antonio, Texas. Thomas J. Henry handles accident, catastrophic injury, and wrongful death cases throughout the United States. The firm has litigated against some of the largest companies in the world, including Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, and has achieved multiple record-breaking awards and settlements. Thomas J. Henry has been named a lifetime member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, a Top 100 Trial Lawyer by the National Trial Lawyers, and a "Top Birth Injury Advocate" by Parenting Magazine. In 2014, Thomas J. Henry was named one of the 10 Best Attorneys in the Nation by Newsweek.com, and, in 2015, Newsweek Legal Insight featured Thomas J. Henry as a Legal Superstar. In 2016, Thomas J. Henry was designated a Lifetime Charter Member of Rue Ratings' Best Attorneys of America. For more information about the firm, visit tjhlaw.com.

Media Contact

Thomas J. Henry Injury Attorneys

Ruben Herrera

[email protected]

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140507/85180

SOURCE Thomas J. Henry Injury Attorneys

Related Links

http://www.thomasjhenrylaw.com


Hawk and fellow Birdhouse Skateboards pros Shawn Hale and Clint Walker, and South African phenom Thalente Biyela rode with the park's regulars and enjoyed its many unique features. With ample "street" terrain and a bowl that descends to 10-feet deep, A-Dog Skatepark is destined to become a Northeast skate destination.

See photos from the event on THF's facebook page: http://bit.ly/1UGhZam

A-Dog Skatepark is the result of more than ten years of persistent grassroots advocacy spearheaded by Brendan Foster and Trina Zine of Burlington's Maven Skate Shop. Strong community support for the project helped it qualify for funding from the Tony Hawk Foundation in 2010. "We applied for a $10,000 grant from the Tony Hawk Foundation, which was a catalyst in helping our project succeed," said Foster.

Together, the locals and their city leadership chose a central location along the redeveloped Lake Champlain waterfront, and brought in top specialists to develop the landmark facility.

Andy "A-Dog" Williams was a local skater, DJ, and artist who passed from Leukemia in 2013. His friends resolved to dedicate the skatepark to him, but little did they know that its completion also set a milestone for the Tony Hawk Foundation.

"It was an honor to be in Burlington for the A-Dog Skatepark naming ceremony and to skate with the locals," said Tony Hawk. "We're proud to have been involved with this projectit's a great park that resulted from a strong grassroots effort from local advocates and a true commitment from the city. It also represents the 500th park to open with assistance from THF. Here's to the next 500!"

With International Go Skateboarding Day approaching on June 21, THF is celebrating the completion of its first 500 skateparks with a campaign to help create the next 500 parks.

Observe International Go Skateboarding Day by visiting your local skatepark, and by making a donation to the Tony Hawk Foundation to help THF create #500MoreSkateparks: http://bit.ly/1WZ52fj

Communities in the U.S. that are pursuing free, concrete skateparks are encouraged to learn more about the process at www.tonyhawkfoundation.org.

Video - http://youtu.be/ARqylddqwiw

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379901

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379902

SOURCE Tony Hawk Foundation

Related Links

http://www.tonyhawkfoundation.org


NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two of the highest-qualified neurosurgeons in New York City are now part of NYU Lutheran Medical Center, a member of NYU Langone Health System and its central hub in Brooklyn, and add decades of experience to one of the region's most talented neurosurgery teams.

Erich Anderer, MD, and David Gordon, MD, bring to NYU Lutheran a combined 30 years of experience in neurosurgical care. Dr. Anderer assumed the role of chief of neurosurgery at NYU Lutheran on June 1, and Dr. Gordon joined as a senior member of the neurosurgery team at the hospital's main campus in Sunset Park. Together, they will add their talents to the neurosurgery services available to patients, including:

Comprehensive door-to-discharge care

Treatment of the most serious, complex neurosurgical conditions, including brain tumors, aneurysms and spinal conditions

Referrals services to on-site or off-site rehabilitation care

A 24/7 team of specialists available for treatment of a variety of neurological conditions

A continuum of care that follows up with every patient to ensure they are getting the best possible treatment after surgery and discharge from the medical center

"The appointments of Drs. Anderer and Gordon to our medical staff underscore NYU Lutheran's commitment to further enhance accessibility to high-quality medical care at our hospital," said Bret Rudy, MD, chief medical officer at NYU Lutheran. "They will help in continuing to raise our neurosurgical capabilities. We are delighted to welcome them to our already robust stable of high-quality, highly skilled surgical practitioners."

Decades of Experience Add to NYU Lutheran Specialties

Dr. Anderer has been a clinical assistant professor at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan since July 2010. He also has been serving simultaneously as an attending physician in the division of neurological surgery and the department of orthopedic surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, most recently as its director of neurotrauma. An undergraduate alumnus of Columbia University, Dr. Anderer earned his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed his residency in neurosurgery at NYU Langone.

Prior to joining NYU Lutheran, Dr. Gordon served as the director of vascular neurosurgery at Montefiore Medical Center, where he was on the surgical staff for 11 years. He was appointed assistant professor of neurological surgery and radiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine during his tenure at Montefiore. Dr. Gordon earned his undergraduate degree in neural science from Brown University and his medical degree from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in neurosurgery at the University of Washington in Seattle and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Gordon received subspecialty fellowship training in skull base surgery at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center and endovascular neurosurgery and neurocritical care at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia.

Both board-certified doctors have distinguished themselves with extensive research in the field of neurosurgery, and have made numerous presentations at hospitals on the results of this investigative work, including talks on best practices related to neurosurgical trauma patients and traumatic spinal cord injury. Together, they have published findings in more than 35 peer-reviewed journals and publications.

"We are extremely confident that the appointments of Drs. Anderer and Gordon will not only give the people of Brooklyn access to the highest quality of neurosurgical care, but also strengthen continuity and collaboration between NYU Lutheran and the team at NYU Langone," says John G. Golfinos, MD, chair of NYU Langone's Department of Neurosurgery. "Having them on the staff at NYU Lutheran will bring enormous benefit to those who turn to them for help."

Media Contacts:

Neal Gorman

Phone: 718-630-8316

[email protected]

Colin DeVries

Phone: 718-630-7414

[email protected]

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SOURCE NYU Langone Medical Center

Related Links

http://nyulangone.org


PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Travel Yucatan, a leading English language specialist in travel information and bookings for the entire Yucatan Peninsula and Riviera Maya since 2000, announces a website relaunch. All content and design has been updated to reflect the most current travel and cultural information. Visitors will discover large format images and video that captures the beauty of the region. The new website offers:

The Secret is Out on Tulum Mexico Relax on the soft white-sand beaches of the Riviera Maya Swimming with Whale Sharks in the Yucatan Peninsula

A more user-friendly interface to make information quick and easy to access on all types of devices.

New hotel booking system provided by Expedia.com as a white-label solution. Hotel prices are now provided at the lowest prices online with 24 hour customer service and lenient cancelation policies.

New tour, transfer, and package booking system provided by BD Travel Solutions in Cancun . This integration makes booking tours, transfers and packages across the Yucatan Peninsula simple and trustworthy.

. This integration makes booking tours, transfers and packages across the simple and trustworthy. A blog, written by on-the-ground Mexico specialists, which offers travelers insightful local tips to help travelers plan their visit to some of Mexico's most popular tourist destinations.

Randy Bonds, who obtained TravelYucatan.com in 2015, said "I am delighted to see our website, which is full of useful information for every type of traveler being revived and given new life. It is now a one-stop-shop for planning and booking the perfect vacation to this fascinating part of Mexico."

About Travel Yucatan: TravelYucatan.com provides travelers with all the information they need to research and plan a vacation in the Yucatan Peninsula and Riviera Maya. The website answers all common travel questions, provides helpful and interesting details about each location and provides a resource for booking hotels, transfers, tours, and package vacations.

Glossary

Yucatan Peninsula

Located in Southeastern Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula lies between the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. A rich and diverse area, boasting an abundance of archeological sites, stunning beaches, interesting colonial towns and rich regional cuisine, it has something for every taste. Important locations in the Yucatan Peninsula include Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Merida, among many others.

Riviera Maya

The Riviera Maya stretches from Punta Brava, just south of Cancun International Airport to Punta Allen, just south of Tulum and offers a variety of vacation options from all-inclusive world-class resorts to rustic lodgings on semi-deserted beaches. The adventurous can find plenty of opportunities to explore and get off the beaten track, while those who simply want to relax can sip cocktails under a palm tree on the white sands while admiring the turquoise sea that stretches out before them.

Randy Bonds

405-673-5588

Travel Yucatan

www.travelyucatan.com

Video - http://youtu.be/eHByQYJV0HM

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379770

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SOURCE Travel Yucatan

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CHANGZHOU, China, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Trina Solar Limited (NYSE: TSL) ("Trina Solar" or the "Company"), a global leader in photovoltaic modules, solutions, and services, today announced that it has accepted the resignation of its chief financial officer, Ms. Teresa Tan, effective July 15, 2016. Ms. Tan has resigned to pursue other personal interests. Ms. Xu Ying (Merry Xu), currently a vice president and strategy assistant to the CEO at the Company, will act as interim chief financial officer until a permanent replacement is hired.

Ms. Xu joined Trina Solar in 2006 and has served in a number of important roles, including finance director, finance vice president, CEO office head and vice president and strategy assistant to the CEO. She has been a part of the Company's core management team for years and has participated in the Company's recent key development initiatives.

Commenting on this announcement, Mr. Jifan Gao, Chairman and CEO for Trina Solar said, "Over the past two-and-a-half years, Ms. Tan has worked closely with our key management team and the board and effectively led the finance team in supporting the Company's strong growth. I would like to thank Ms. Tan for her contributions to the Company and wish her continued success in her future endeavors. Ms. Xu has been with Trina Solar for more than 10 years, and she has a deep knowledge of the Company and the industry, as well as sound financial expertise. We are confident she will be an effective interim CFO for the Company."

About Trina Solar Limited

Trina Solar Limited (NYSE: TSL) is a global leader in photovoltaic modules, solutions and services. Founded in 1997 as a PV system integrator, Trina Solar today drives smart energy together with installers, distributors, utilities and developers worldwide. The company's industry-leading position is based on innovation excellence, superior product quality, vertically integrated capabilities and environmental stewardship. For more information, please visit www.trinasolar.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical fact in this announcement are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, the Company's ability to raise additional capital to finance its activities; the effectiveness, profitability and marketability of its products; the future trading of the securities of the Company; the Company's ability to operate as a public company; the period of time for which the Company's current liquidity will enable the Company to fund its operations; general economic and business conditions; demand in various markets for solar products; the volatility of the Company's operating results and financial condition; the Company's ability to attract or retain qualified senior management personnel and research and development staff; and other risks detailed in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections about the Company and the industry in which the Company operates. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent occurring events or circumstances, or changes in its expectations, except as may be required by law. Although the Company believes that the expectations expressed in these forward looking statements are reasonable, it cannot assure you that such expectations will turn out to be correct, and the Company cautions investors that actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results.

Trina Solar Limited Christensen IR Teresa Tan, CFO (Changzhou) Linda Bergkamp Email: [email protected] Phone: +1 480 614 3014 (US)

Email: [email protected] Yvonne Young

Investor Relations Director

Email: [email protected]



SOURCE Trina Solar Limited

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BALTIMORE, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Under Armour, Inc. (NYSE: UA, UA.C) today announced the final distribution ratio for its upcoming $59 million dividend to holders of the Company's Class C non-voting common stock in satisfaction of the previously announced settlement agreement entered into by the Company in connection with shareholder litigation related to the creation of the Class C stock.

On June 3, 2016, the Company previously announced that the Company's Board of Directors had approved the payment of this dividend in the form of shares of Class C stock, with cash in lieu of any fractional shares. The Company has determined that the final distribution ratio will be 0.007098 of a share of Class C stock for each share of Class C stock held.

The shares of Class C stock will be distributed on or about June 29, 2016, to stockholders of record of Class C stock on June 15, 2016.

For additional information, please visit the "Stock Info" section of Under Armour's Investor Relations website at www.uabiz.com/investors.cfm.

About Under Armour, Inc.

Under Armour (NYSE: UA, UA.C), the originator of performance footwear, apparel and equipment, revolutionized how athletes across the world dress. Designed to make all athletes better, the brand's innovative products are sold worldwide to athletes at all levels. The Under Armour Connected Fitness platform powers the world's largest digital health and fitness community through a suite of applications: UA Record, MapMyFitness, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal. The Under Armour global headquarters is in Baltimore, Maryland. For further information, please visit the Company's website at www.uabiz.com.

Forward-Looking Statements



Some of the statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements relate to expectations, beliefs, projections, future plans and strategies, anticipated events or trends and similar expressions concerning matters that are not historical facts, such as statements regarding our planned dividend of shares of our Class C common stock. In many cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "outlook," "potential" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release reflect our current views about future events and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and changes in circumstances that may cause events or our actual activities or results to differ significantly from those expressed in any forward-looking statement. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release reflect our views and assumptions only as of the date of this press release. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

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SOURCE Under Armour, Inc.

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NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Noor Pharmaceuticals, makers of NoorVitamins the leading halal vitamin brand, is partnering with Islamic Relief to donate thousands of meals to those in need here in the US during June, inspired by the month of Ramadan, the most important religious month of year for Muslims.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379884

Young child receiving food donation

Close to 800 million people or one in nine people in the world do not have enough food for a healthy active life. Surprisingly, the vast majority of the world's hungry people live in developed countries, where 12.9% of the population is undernourished. What's even more staggering is the number of children that go hungry on a regular basis; more than 3 million children die of hunger every year. According to the USDA, more than one in seven American households  49 million individuals, including 12 million children  struggles to have enough to eat.

Noor Pharmaceuticals, a New York-based pharmaceutical company known for it's natural, potent and proprietary line of halal vitamins that are pork, alcohol and animal cruelty free is donating a full meal for every bottle they sell on noorvitamins.com to those in need through Islamic Relief, a nonprofit known for its global humanitarian work. Noor is hoping to make a dent in these daunting hunger figures by donating thousands of meals in the month of June. The campaign has been creatively termed #NoorishTheHungry and is inspired by the month of Ramadan, the month in which Muslims around the world fast by abstaining from food and water from sunrise to sunset.

In addition to donating a meal for every bottle of vitamins sold, Noor and Islamic Relief are looking to raise awareness about the hunger epidemic by donating meals just when the hash-tag #NoorishTheHungry is used on social media. "Being a healthcare company, we can't overlook the impact of hunger on nutrition and health but more importantly on the livelihood of people" Dr. Mohamed Issa, CEO of Noor Pharma said.

Islamic Relief has already been working on impacting the hunger epidemic by having feeding programs worldwide. David Hawa, Director of Communications for the non-profit added, "Islamic Relief sends Ramadan food packages to help low-income and impoverished families every year. This year, we are distributing 5,000 food packages to struggling families right here at home in the United States. We are excited to partner with NoorVitamins to help us reach our goal."

Learn more about the campaign on www.noorvitamins.com

About NoorVitamins

Noor Pharmaceuticals, based in New York, is the first and only halal based pharmaceutical company. Its mission is to innovate nutrition and create desirable vitamins and supplements that are pure, potent and sustainable.

Noor Pharmaceuticals is the maker of NoorVitamins, the leading halal vitamin brand worldwide. NoorVitamins (www.noorvitamins.com) is a premium and highly potent line of essential and specialty halal vitamins. Noor Pharmaceuticals also produces Amanah Vitamins (www.amanahvitamins.com), a low cost basic line of essential halal vitamins.

Noor pharmaceuticals was founded and is still managed by doctors and scientists and produced all of their products in North America in Food and Drug Administration Good Manufacturing practices (FDA GMP) certified facilities. Many of the products in the NoorVitamins line are proprietary and formulated in house just for Noor pharmaceuticals.

Learn more at www.noorvitamins.com and www.amanahvitamins.com.

State of Food Insecurity in the World, FAO, 2015

About Islamic Relief

Islamic Relief USA, based in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) humanitarian organization. Its mission is to provide relief and development in a dignified manner regardless of gender, race, or religion, and works to empower individuals in their communities and give them a voice in the world.

Its programs benefit millions of people each year in more than 40 countries around the world, including in the United States.

Islamic Relief USA meets all of the Standards for Charity Accountability of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, a national charity monitoring group affiliated with the Better Business Bureau system. Islamic Relief USA is on the U.S. government's Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) charity list, and it is also a signatory to the code of conduct of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

For more information, visit us at www.irusa.org

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com

SOURCE Noor Pharmaceuticals
LES CHARBONNIERES, Switzerland, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Valtronic has officially opened its Innovation Office in the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) Innovation Park on June 6, 2016, in the presence of government officials, researchers, customers as well as academic and other partners.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379693LOGO )



The office on the EPFL campus is Valtronic's fourth worldwide location, next to the corporate headquarters in Switzerland and the sites in Cleveland (Ohio, USA) and Casablanca (Morocco). "Our presence on campus and within the networks of Switzerland Innovation shows our commitment to innovation. Staying close to new technologies and research is key for our continued success as a partner of choice for our customers. Our presence here gives us access to technologies as well as talent in the MedTech field", said Dr. Rainer Platz, Valtronic CEO.

Mrs. Corboud Fumagalli, EPFL Vice President for Innovation and Technology Transfer, welcomed Valtronic amongst the other companies active in Biotech, Medtech, Micro and Nano-technologies on campus. Mr. Raphael Conz, head of the Economic Promotion of the State of Vaud, praised Valtronic's contribution to the economic tissue as a high-tech company, active in the second sector within Switzerland and the Canton of Vaud.

Dr. Rainer Platz outlined in his presentation the vision behind Valtronic's innovation strategy and its contribution to the generation of value for Valtronic and its customers. "Continuously fortifying our foundations of technologies, people and experience is essential for remaining competitive in the future", he said.

The following series of keynote speakers shared their visions and experiences regarding challenges and opportunities for innovation between the laboratory and finally economic success. Prof. Dr. Philippe Renaud, Professor in the Microsystem Laboratory at EPFL and the scientific director of EPFL's Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMi) shared his experiences from having encouraged and accompanied the foundation of numerous start-ups by his students. He insisted on the fact that scientific standards and the university's primary mission of teaching could not be compromised and the entrepreneurial spirit needed to come on top. Mr. Sacha Cerboni, Chief Quality Officer of Sensimed AG gave an insightful talk about innovation and its challenges from the perspective of one of these startups, emphasizing the numerous hurdles to a finally successful market introduction, as well as Valtronic's contribution to overcome these. Finally, Dr. Abed Hammoud, CEO of Renishaw Mayfield, spoke about their impressive range of products and reminding the audience of the positive impact of Medical Device Technology on patients' quality of life.

For more information about Valtronic, visit http://www.valtronic.com. To find out more about Valtronic's new office in the EPFL Innovation Park, visit http://epfl-innovationpark.ch .

About Valtronic

We innovate & manufacture miniaturized and complex products and systems for our medical device partners. Our customers are leading global suppliers of Active Implants, Medical-grade Wearables, Portables and Medical Equipment as well as advanced industrial assemblies. For over 30 years, we have helped hundreds of companies develop and produce Class II & III medical devices and advanced miniaturized electronic assemblies.

Valtronic Technologies SA

Route de Bonport 2

1343 Les Charbonnieres

Switzerland

http://www.valtronic.com



Media Contact

Marie Boissonnat

Valtronic Marketing

P: +41-21-841-01-19

E: [email protected]



SOURCE Valtronic
GREENWICH, Conn., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --W. R. Berkley Corporation (NYSE: WRB) today announced the appointment of Jared E. Abbey as senior vice president  corporate strategy and development. The appointment is effective immediately.

Mr. Abbey has nearly 20 years of experience as an investment banker focused on the insurance sector, advising clients on mergers and acquisitions, strategic transactions, corporate restructuring and capital-raising. He most recently served as managing director and co-head of North American insurance investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Mr. Abbey earned a B.A. in mathematics and economics from Dartmouth College.

In making the announcement, W. Robert Berkley, Jr., president and chief executive officer, said, "We are pleased to welcome Jared to our corporate team. He brings a wealth of experience and capabilities to the organization that will add breadth to our financial team and will provide a meaningful contribution to the Company in the future."

For further information about W. R. Berkley Corporation, please visit www.wrberkley.com.

Founded in 1967, W. R. Berkley Corporation is an insurance holding company that is among the largest commercial lines writers in the United States and operates worldwide in two segments of the property casualty insurance business: Insurance and Reinsurance.

W. R. Berkley Corporation

475 Steamboat Road

Greenwich, Connecticut 06830

(203) 629-3000

CONTACT: Karen A. Horvath

Vice President  External

Financial Communications

203-629-3000

SOURCE W. R. Berkley Corporation

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US Democrats claimed victory Thursday after a nearly 15-hour filibuster persuaded the Senate to vote on legislation barring terror suspects from buying firearms, as Donald Trump signalled he could modulate his gun rights stance and back such a move.

The breakthrough in the Republican-controlled Senate, potentially ending a years-long logjam on how to reduce US gun violence, follows the weekend massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

It was the deadliest mass shooting in US history.

Democrats and some Republicans have joined in questioning how a man investigated for suspected extremist ties and who previously figured on an FBI watchlist was able to commit mass murder with a legally purchased assault rifle.

Under so-called "no-fly no buy" legislation, people on US terror watchlists or no-fly lists would be barred from acquiring firearms.

The filibuster, a procedural obstruction, was led by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook shooting left 26 people dead in 2012, most of them elementary school children.

"I'm at my wit's end," said Murphy, as he began his takeover of the Senate floor.

"I'm going to remain on this floor until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together."

Murphy, with support from 40 senators including Republican Senator Pat Toomey, spent hours discussing ways to reduce gun violence -- a tactic that eventually prompted leaders to schedule a vote on gun measures.

At 1:53 am (0553 GMT) Thursday, he claimed victory on Twitter.

"I am proud to announce that after 14+ hours on the floor, we will have a vote on closing the terror gap & universal background checks" including for sales at gun shows and on the Internet, Murphy wrote.

Passage of such controversial measures, particularly the background check expansion, is unlikely in the toxic 2016 election climate.

Republicans largely oppose legislation that would deny weapons to people on such lists, arguing it would infringe on the Second Amendment rights of everyday Americans, including those who may have been placed unfairly on suspect lists.

Studies however show a large majority of Americans support such limits.

Murphy told MSNBC he and fellow Democrats will pressure Republicans to consider the "no-fly no buy" legislation and insisted "we have a shot to at least get that passed."

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan however poured cold water on the prospect of swift action.

"We don't take away citizens' rights without due process," Ryan told reporters.

"And so if you have a quick idea in the heat of the moment that says let's take away a person's rights without their due process, we're going to stand up and defend the constitution."

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made waves Wednesday when he tweeted that he would meet with the National Rifle Association "about not allowing people on the terrorist watchlist, or the no fly list, to buy guns."

The softening of his stance may put Trump on a collision course with the powerful NRA, which has said that restrictions "like bans on gun purchases by people on 'watchlists' are ineffective, unconstitutional or both."

The group answered that they would be "happy to meet" with the Republican flagbearer.

"The NRA believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms, period," the group said in a statement.

"Anyone on a terror watch list who tries to buy a gun should be thoroughly investigated by the FBI and the sale delayed while the investigation is ongoing."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has clashed with Trump, told Fox News that this time, he was "on the right path... when it comes to making sure guns don't fall into the hands of people who can't fly on airplanes."

Trump's Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton supports the limits pushed by Murphy.

"Surely we can agree, if the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you should not be able to buy a gun with no questions asked," she said.

The renewed push for legislation comes after a US government report showed that known terror suspects have passed background checks for gun sales 91 percent of the time since 2004.

"I do think our filibuster made a difference," Murphy told CBS This Morning.

"Let's be honest. The Senate was not going to debate these measures, had no plans to talk about ending gun violence this week on the floor of the Senate."

A measure that would have stopped those on FBI watchlists from buying firearms and explosives failed in December, with every Senate Republican but one voting in opposition.

Some Republicans appear to be reconsidering, including congressman Bob Dold, who is facing a tough re-election fight in Illinois.

"Thoughts and prayers are not enough," Dold said Tuesday on the House floor.

"It's time for action."

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USX is a non-profit organization that summited Mount Everest to bring awareness to the veterans and active duty service members who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Zac has always taken a deep interest in supporting military members and their families. One element of Camp Southern Ground, Zac's non-profit passion project, will be its ability to act as a respite center for military families struggling with post-deployment issues, including PTSD. To further support the mission of Team USX, Zac outfitted the climbers with knives from Southern Grind, his metal works shop based at Southern Ground headquarters.

Southern Grind and the Southern Ground family of brands are excited to welcome the team home safely, and grateful to have been of service to Team USX on their journey.

Event Details

Guests will be provided dinner by Chef Collins Woods, personal chef to Zac and his family, along with gluten free dessert options from Southern Grounds own "Doctor of Dough", Nicole Crane.

The climbers will participate in a moderated Q&A beginning at 7:00 pm ET. The Q&A will be live streamed via: http://southernreel.com/usx

ABOUT CAMP SOUTHERN GROUND

Mission-driven, Camp Southern Ground offers children a world-class campus in a beautiful natural setting, with groundbreaking programs that inspire children to magnify their gifts, enhance their perspectives of self, empower them to overcome limitations, and spread love to impact their world. With state-of-the-art buildings and outdoor spaces, Camp Southern Ground is a one-of-a-kind place of learning and growth designed with children of diverse abilities and skill sets in mind, and will become a timeless institution that is the cornerstone of research and innovation. Camp Southern Ground is registered non-profit, 501(c)(3).

ABOUT SOUTHERN GROUND

All under one roof. Southern Ground is Zac Brown's unique lifestyle brand that is firmly based on a strong belief in originality, quality and philanthropy. Each of the distinctive companies in the Southern Ground family is brimming with incredibly passionate artists brought under one roof to work together and create experiences that go beyond the craft, the food or the music. Southern Ground's efforts work to help develop Zac's biggest passion: Camp Southern Ground.

ABOUT SOUTHERN GRIND

Southern Grind, Zac Brown's Georgia-based metal shop, offers unrivaled knife lines and unique metal works made by American hands using extremely high quality materials and an unparalleled attention to detail.

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SOURCE Southern Ground

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The yields on Egypt's six-month and one-year Treasury bills rose at auction on Thursday, central bank data showed.

The average yield on the 182-day T-bill was 13.965 percent, up from 13.895 percent at the last sale on June 9. The yield on the 357-day bill rose to 14.188 percent from 14.115 percent at an auction a week ago.

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Following diplomatic and archaeological procedures, Egypt succeeded in returning the lids of two sarcophagi that had been stolen and illegally smuggled out of the country.

Shaaban Abdel Gawad, the general supervisor of the Antiquities Recuperation Department, told Ahram Online that both lids were stolen through illegal excavations and then smuggled out of the country to Jerusalem via Dubai through an Israeli antiquities trader.

Abdel Gawad explained that the Israeli Antiquities Authority and the Jerusalem Interpol noticed both lids in the showroom of an auction Hall in Jerusalem in 2012 and the Jerusalem Interpol reported the incident to the Egyptian Interpol who in turn passed the information on to the antiquities ministry.

After diplomatic procedures, both lids arrived safely to Cairo airport on Thursday afternoon and are to be transported to the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir for restoration and permanent display.

Both lids date back to the ancient Egyptian era and are carved in wood and painted with coloured cartonage and decorated with hieroglyphic symbols.

"This is the second time that Egypt has recovered artefacts from Israel," Abdel Gawad asserted, adding that the first time was during the 1990s, when Egypt received a large collection of objects that had been excavated in Sinai by an Israel archaeological mission during the countrys occupation of the peninsula.

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New Delhi : As two senior Indian ministers tussle over the declaration of some wild animals as "vermin", the damage to crops from animal attacks declined 33 per cent over two years to 2012, according to an answer given to the Rajya Sabha in August 2014.

Crops damaged across India declined from 29,989 hectares in 2010 to 19,962 hectares in 2012, according to the government. Crops damaged in 2012 were 81 sq km, equivalent to an area roughly a fourth the size of Surat.

Bihar, one of five states that applied for permission after the environment ministry invited culling proposals in December 2015, reported four times more crop damage from wildlife incursions into farms over two years to 2012. There were no data available for the other four states that applied to cull animals.

Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar and Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi, an animal lover, have taken opposing positions on the environment minister's permission to cull some wild animals, including nilgai (an antelope), wild boar and monkeys.

The environment ministry is showing a "lust for killing animals", Gandhi said on June 9, 2016. The environment ministry has allowed Himachal Pradesh to kill monkeys and Bihar, nilgai and wild boar, where they were in conflict with humans.

"The centre should have tried to explore other options instead of advising the states to shoot animals," Gandhi said.

Bihar and Himachal Pradesh were among five states that responded to an environment ministry advisory asking states to list animals that destroy crops. Uttarakhand wants to cull wild boar, and Maharashtra and Gujarat both want to curb nilgais.

While proposals from Bihar, Uttarakhand and Himachal have been considered by the ministry, proposals from Maharashtra and Gujarat are under "active consideration", according to a report in The Quint.

In Chhattisgarh, crops damaged by wild animals rose 13 per cent, from 11,828 hectares to 13,321 hectares in 2012.

In Karnataka, damage declined 75 per cent, from 7,572 hectares to 1,900 hectares in 2010-2012.

Bihar did not receive any compensation despite the increasing damage wild animals caused to crops. The compensation received by various states increased 17 per cent, from Rs 1.1 crore in 2010 to Rs 1.29 crore in 2012.

"Wild pigs and nilgais have been disturbing farmers for several years," said Anish Andheria, president of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, an NGO. "So, states have started to finally give in to demands to cull animals on farmland and not in wildlife sanctuaries, national parks or forests."

Andheria said killing "too many animals" can affect the food chain, since carnivores prey on nilgai and wild boar. If prey decline, carnivores could turn their attention to farm animals and humans, he said, suggesting that culling be done "under proper supervision and monitoring".

(11.06.2016 - In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism platform, with whom Shreya Mittal is an intern. The views expressed are those of IndiaSpend. The author can be contacted at respond@indiaspend.org)
Beijing, June 12 : China on Sunday said more discussion was needed to forge consensus on the issue of countries not signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty NPT) joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a 48-member bloc that India has applied to join.

"China's stance is applicable to all non-signatories to the NPT, not just certain countries. Many other NSG member states also hold the same stance," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said.

Hong's clarificaton was to a question relating to China, New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria having objected to India's accession to the NSG because New Delhi has not signed the NPT.

Hong also said that the NSG Chair, the Argentine ambassador, convened an unofficial meeting on June 9 in Geneva but there was "no deliberation on any items related to the accession to the NSG by India or any other countries that are not signatories" to the NPT.

According to him, the NSG chair said the meeting has no agenda and is only convened to heed opinions from all parties on the outreach of the NSG and prepare for a report to be submitted at the NSG Plenary Meeting in Seoul later this month.

Alluding to India and Pakistan, Hong said that "China has noted that some non-NPT countries aspire to join the NSG. When it comes to the accession by non-NPT countries, China maintains that the group should have full discussion before forging consensus and making decisions based on agreement.

"The NPT provides a political and legal foundation for the international non-proliferation regime as a whole. China's position applies to all non-NPT countries and targets no one in particular. The fact is that many countries within the group also share China's stance," he said.

He said NSG members are divided on the issue of admitting non-NPT countries.

"China will continue to support further discussion within the group to forge consensus at an early date. China will proceed with relevant discussion in a constructive manner. China has always supported a full discussion within the NSG on the membership issue and a decision based on the consensus of all sides through consultation," he said.

Both India and Pakistan applied in May to join the grouping that regulates global nuclear trade.

India has secured crucial backing for its membership from Mexico, Italy and Switzerland and the US, even as Pakistan has been lobbying hard to scuttle India's membership bid.
Kolkata, June 12 : West Bengal Pradesh Congress President Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Sunday urged the Centre to put pressure on the Afghanistan government for securing the release of an Indian woman aid worker abducted by unidentified gunmen in the Afghan capital.

"We have friendly relations with Afghanistan. The central government should be more proactive to secure the release of Judith and should put pressure on the Afghan government. I have sent a letter to the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) and National Security Adviser (Ajit Doval)," Adhir said.

Judith D'Souza, 40, working with Aga Khan Foundation, an NGO, was kidnapped on Thursday night while she was returning home after a dinner at a friend's place in the Qala-e-Fatullah area of Kabul.

A Communitst Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) delegation led by its General Secretary Sitaram Yechury met members of D'Souza's family here during the day.

"Our mission in Kabul, the government and the organisation with whom she works are apparently in touch with the family. Everybody is making all their efforts. We have met members of her family and expressed our solidarity," said Yechury, who is also the member of the Consultative Committee of the Ministry of External Affairs.

"We conveyed (to them) anything that they require in terms of putting pressure on the government and eliciting information from our mission, as a member of the consultative committee, I will be available to do that."

D'Souza's family members, however, lauded the efforts of the government.

"Both the Indian Embassy in Kabul and MEA are updating us twice a day and they updated us on the process of release that is taking place. Likewise, the organisation is also updating us," said Judith's brother Jerome D'Souza.

"Some of the efforts are shared with us, but some are not, due to obvious reasons. Huge efforts are being made by the government to bring back my sister," he said.

No group has claimed responsibility for the abduction but it is feared that she may have been kidnapped by a criminal gang in Kabul motivated by ransom, according to Afghan officials.

Abductions for ransom in Afghanistan are common and criminal gangs have made millions of dollars from kidnapping foreign nationals.
Phnom Penh, June 14 : A Cambodian court on Tuesday sentenced a 53-year-old American man to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of indulging in child prostitution.

Brian Naswall, former Chief Executive Officer of Phnom Penh-based aviation firm Aero Cambodia, was "found guilty of purchasing child prostitution", said a court verdict.

The court also ordered Naswall to pay $2,000 in compensation to each of his eight victims.

Naswall was arrested on May 22 last year on Koh Pich island in Phnom Penh for allegedly having a 13-year-old girl touch his genitals in front of her two friends.

Six other underage girls have also joined the case to testify against him.

Cambodia launched an anti-paedophilia operation in 2003 in a bid to end its reputation as a haven for child sex offenders.

Since then, dozens of foreigners have been imprisoned for child sex crimes.
Kabul, June 14 : A total of 117 militants were killed in military operations launched by Afghan security forces within the last 24 hours, the country's defence ministry said on Tuesday.

"Afghan security conducted several military operations over the past 24 hours, killing 117 militants, wounding 50 and detaining two other militants," Xinhua news agency quoted the ministry as saying in a statement.

Some 15 militants of the Islamic State (IS) were among the killed, the statement said.

Two personnel of the Afghan army were also killed over the same period, the statement confirmed.

The Taliban militants, who ruled the country before they were ousted in late 2001, renewed armed insurgency, staging ambushes and suicide attacks, killing combatants as well as civilians.

The Taliban have yet to make comments.
New Delhi, June 15 : The Supreme Court will hear a plea challenging three government notifications declaring as vermin nilgais, wild boars and monkeys, thereby paving the way for their culling in Bihar, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

An apex court vacation bench of Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and Justice L. Nageshwara Rao agreed to hear two PILs by animal rights activist Gauri Maulekhi and Wildlife Rescue and Research Centre (WRRC) who challenged the notification issued under section 62 of the Wildlife Protection Act by which these animals were declared vermin, equating them with rats and pests.

Appearing for Maulekhi and the WRRC, Senior Counsel Anand Grover told the bench that the government has already recruited people to hunt and kill these animals in the three states.

He said that the decision was taken without undertaking any study.

Upon the mentioning of the matter by the senior counsel, the bench said that it will hear it any day within a week's time.
Washington, June 15 : A two-year-old boy who was attacked and dragged into the water by an alligator in Orlando's Disney Grand Floridian Resort and Spa Tuesday night was still reported missing early Wednesday morning.

Orange county Sheriff Jerry Demings said rescue personnel had been actively looking for the child in the Seven Seas Lagoon for hours in a search and recovery effort but had not found him, the Orlando Sentinel daily reported.

They hoped to find him before daylight, he said. A dive team with sonar equipment was on standby -- just part of a 50-person rescue team on the scene.

"As a father, as a grandfather, we're going to hope for the best in these circumstances, but based on my 35 years of law enforcement experience, we know we have some challenges ahead of us," Demings said.

Demings said the Nebraska family of five was relaxing on the shoreline when the alligator attacked the boy.

The father entered the water and tried to grab the child from the alligator, but was not successful. He had scratches on his hands after the ordeal.
Cairo, June 16 : The search vessel hired by the Egyptian government provided several locations of the wreckage of the EgyptAir flight MS804 recently crashed in the Mediterranean, the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee said in a report on Wednesday.

"Based on the wreckage locations, the search team and investigators on board of the vessel will draw a map for the wreckage distribution spots," the committee said in the statement, noting it has been provided by the first images of the wreckage from one of the spotted sites, Xinhua news agency reported.

EgyptAir Flight MS804, an Airbus A320, went missing from radar screens earlier in May en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French.

Later on, the Egyptian military announced the finding of some personal belongings of the victims and small pieces of the plane wreckage in the Mediterranean Sea 290 km north of the coastal city of Alexandria.

The Egyptian investigation committee added in the statement that it held an immediate meeting with all its members to thoroughly study the new findings and to "plan how to best handle the wreckage in the coming period."

Probe are still underway into the doomed EgyptAir plane with all theories, including a terrorist bomb and a severe technical failure, are on the table yet without a strong clue for any.
Egypt's parliament is currently discussing a proposed law that would abolish jail terms for publishing-related offences

An Egyptian misdemeanor court sentenced on Tuesday a journalist working for the Sawt Al-Oma weekly newspaper to one year in jail and an EGP 30,000 fine for accusing a businesswoman of corruption.

The court also levied a fine of EGP 10,000 for the newspapers editor-in-chief, renowned journalist Abdel-Halim Qandil, for negligence.

Sawt Al-Oma had published reports by journalist Mohamed Saad, against whom the jail sentence was issued, accusing businesswoman Mona Aboud of corruption in several real estate dealings.

Egypt's House of Representatives is currently discussing the new "unified media law" which regulates media and journalism in Egypt.

The imprisonment of journalists for publishing-related crimes will be replaced with fines under the new media law.

According to the Journalists Syndicate, 32 journalists, including 14 syndicate members, are currently imprisoned, with 20 jailed in cases related to their work.

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Washington, June 16 : Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed nearly 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) on Facebook message which he posted moments before the worst mass shooting in the US.

"America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state..I pledge my alliance to (IS leader) Abu Bakr al Baghdadi ..may Allah accept me," Mateen posted.

"The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west" and "You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance."

According to the report, Mateen also declared allegiance to IS and al-Baghdadi in 911 calls he made during the attack, CBS News reported on Thursday.

A US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official said the massacre at the Pulse nightclub was both hate crime and an act of terror.

"This was an act of violence, born out of hate, that inflicted terror on an entire community," said Ron Hopper, special FBI agent in charge of the case.

"So I would call it a hate crime. I would call it terrorism. It's both," Xinhua news agency quoted Hopper as saying.

The US authorities were also considering filing criminal charges against Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, for failing to inform the FBI what she knew before the attack.

Salman, has told the FBI that she drove Mateen, 29, to the Pulse nightclub on a prior occasion but that she tried to talk him out of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, officials told NBC News.

Several officials familiar with what she has told the FBI said she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster. She also once drove him to the nightclub because he wanted to see it in advance, the officials said.

The couple has been married since 2011. They have a three-year-old son.

The FBI is investigating reports that Mateen made several visits to the Pulse nightclub and made contact with other men on gay dating apps.

President Barack Obama was scheduled to travel to the scene of the attack in Orlando on Thursday.
New Delhi : Title: Timeless Wisdom from Ancient India; Author: Basant K. Gupta; Publisher: Laksmi di Asya Om (Italy); Pages: 235; Price: Not listed.

It is not another book on spirituality. A key reason being the author, when the book came out, was a serving diplomat, India's ambassador to Italy and San Marino. Basant K. Gupta admits he has not written anything original. But he feels it is vital to repeat and sharpen the message in our scriptures in new forms and plain language. And Gupta has succeeded in doing that.

The scriptures say that spirituality is nothing but an extension of morality or Dharma and remains relevant to everyone regardless of age and profession. It is also an integral part of our daily lives. But the pursuit of spirituality will require harmony between the body, mind and the soul. In simple language, Gupta, a versatile exponent of both the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, writes how one can accomplish it.

The first part of the book covers the genesis of the Vedas and the six schools of Indian philosophy that emerged from them. It also discusses the basic tenets of Vedanta. The second part introduces the history of the Mahabharata and the message of the Bhagavad Gita and extensively brings out the teachings of its 18 chapters.

Gupta says that people can resolve their inner problems and calm their restless mind only by integrating Dharma into daily life. "Without inner peace, outer peace is impossible. We may change our home or job countless times, but until we calm our restless, disconnected mind, we shall never find true happiness. In order to establish peace within our minds, we need to relentlessly pursue spiritual paths."

It is no new message. But Gupta - with his diplomatic skills - conveys the idea beautifully.

(M R Narayan Swamy can be contacted at narayan.swamy@ians.in )
New Delhi : Title: Crumbs! Bread Stories and Recipes from the Indian Kitchen; Author: Saee Koranne-Khandekar; Publisher: Hachette; Price: Rs 450, Pages: 256 There's a lot more to bread than what goes with your breakfast -- coated with jam or munched with an omelette or scrambled eggs. Similarly, there's a lot more to rotis than what you dip in a gravy for the sheer pleasure of warmness.

But did you know that there's a whole lot of this stuff that can be easily made at home, giving multiple twists to their taste, molded into different shapes and turned into delectable recipes? Saee Koranne-Khandekar's latest book is a discovery of an array of recipes for breads, rotis and naans.

"My aim in this book is to try and demystify yeast and fancy terms such as 'bread flour' so that bread-making can be brought into the everyday Indian kitchen," the author writes in the introduction.

Being a food writer and consultant since 2008, Koranee-Khandekar draws from her earliest memories of home-made bread with Radha Kaku - her great grandaunt who baked small, dense and chewy loaves in Amul processed chesse tins with their edges carefully filed and smoothened out.

"As a child, I much preferred the white sliced bread that was so soft; it would feel almost insubstantial compared to the dense, moreish loaves baked at home. My brother and I just loved gorging ourselves on white sliced bread in every fathomable form," Koranee-Khandekar writes.

"With my love for bread firmly established in my formative years, it was no surprise that I decided to enroll in a junior college that will allow me to choose bakery and confectionery as optional subjects in my arts programme," the author says.

For the author, the kitchen laboratory relaxed every muscle in her body with its nutty, lactose sweetness - the aroma of freshly baked bread.

The book then tells the story about how bread was brought into existence -- born accidentally and not an artistic creation. The earliest leavened or yeasted bread is said to have been found in ancient Egypt, where the first sourdough made an appearance. The book also details how tools evolved over years - easing the bread-making process.

The most exciting part of the book is the mouth-watering recipes that begin with the art of making basic breads. It then comes up with recipes for a variety of stuff, for instance, dinner rolls which are usually referred to as 'aath number' in Mumbai because of the tightly coiled '8' shape.

Thereafter, there's Focaccia Italian bread; Pita which she first encountered in school - fat, sponge-like - sliced horizontally through the middle and filled with tomato and cheese slices; brioche - the very versatile classic French bread; the Turkish-origin Lavash used most often to wrap meats in; Baba au Rhums -traditional yeast cakes soaked in a syrup liberally laced with alcohol; soda bread for those who cannot stand the yeasty smell; and sun-dried tomato and olive bread - the first recipe that she shared in a newspaper column, to mention just a few.

She also loads the book with recipes like Sheermal - a soft, mildly sweet bread, infused with the warm aroma of saffron and an occasional punctuation of a fennel seed; Iyengar bakery style masala bread; Malabar porotta; and thaalipeeth - spiced multigrain flatbread.

In the latter half of the book, Koranee-Khandekar also sketches some of the people who own and run traditional Indian bakeries across the country like the Kyani Bakery -- her first visit to an Irani restaurant -- the Yazdani, Military and Merwan bakeries and even Dorabjee's in Pune that's over a century old.

Towards the end, the book is spiced up with recipes for jams, chutneys and butter. For those who love experimenting with wheat and barley the book is a must-have treasure on the kitchen shelves.

(Somrita Ghosh can be contacted at somrita.g4@ians.in )
Bangkok, June 16 : Thai police on Thursday raided the Dhammakaya temple in Khlong Luang district to arrest its abbot, who is wanted on corruption charges.

The temple's abbot, Phra Dhammajayo is accused of involvement in money laundering and receiving stolen property worth 1.2 billion baht (about $34 million), the Bangkok Post reported.

He has denied all accusations claiming they are politically motivated.

The 72-year-old has for months stayed inside the temple, north of Bangkok, citing poor health to avoid orders to appear before officials.

According to temple officials, the abbot was still receiving medical treatment at the temple.

Department of Special Investigation (DSI) officials are authorised to search all buildings and structures in the temple compound to locate and arrest Phra Dhammajayo.

Thousands of devotees from the controversial Buddhist sect have camped outside the sprawling temple, complicating efforts by police to enter the grounds.
Manila, June 16 : Philippines-based extremist group Abu Sayyaf has threatened to kill another hostage, three days after executing Canadian Robert Hall for non-payment of ransom within the deadline it had set.

"We will upload a new video soon for our new ultimatum. No ransom, another beheading," Abu Sayyaf spokesperson Abu Raami told the Daily Inquirer on Wednesday.

The militants are still holding hostage Norwegian national Kjartan Sekkingstad and Filipino woman Marites Flores on Sulu island, where they had executed another Canadian hostage, John Ridsel, on April 25.

The rebels had abducted the four in September 2015 from a resort in Samal island and demanded around $6.4 million for each of the hostages.

"All I can say is the demand has to be met. Otherwise, we will be executed," Sekkingstad said on the phone.

Since March, when Abu Sayyaf began issuing threats against these hostages, the Philippine Army has unsuccessfully launched several offensives against the rebels.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino, who met with security forces involved in the operations in Sulu on Tuesday said that kidnapping was a very complicated problem and that he understood the difficulties in pursuing Abu Sayyaf.

"If we pay ransom, it would only worsen the problem and encourage others (to engage in kidnapping)," he had added.
Los Angeles, June 16 : Blake Lively has revealed that there was a time when she didn't want to follow her family into the film business and become an actress.

She is the daughter of Ernie Lively, an actor, and his wife, Elaine, who worked as a talent scout.

The "Gossip Girl" star says she once tried to stray away from films as all her family had worked in the movie industry, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

"I didn't want to be an actor, because they were all doing it," Lively told Marie Claire magazine.

"When you are the youngest of five kids, you think, 'Who am I?' If this is who they are, and they are shaping who I am so much, then who would I be? You strive for your own identity," she added.

The 28-year-old actress -- who has a 17-month-old daughter James with Ryan Reynolds and is expecting her second child -- had previously said she had to take a two-year break from acting as she was "exhausted both physically and creatively".
Los Angeles, June 16 : Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway is the latest Hollywood figure to be appointed by the United Nations as a global goodwill ambassador to promote gender equality and women empowerment.

Hathaway joins Nicole Kidman, Emma Watson and Princess Bajrakitiyabha Mahidol of Thailand as fellow women's goodwill ambassadors.

Hathaway has been brought on board to shed light on what UN Women's Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka described in a statement as the "motherhood penalty", the Guardian reported.

"It is a particularly insidious demonstration of gender inequality in the workplace," Mlambo-Ngucka said on Wednesday.

"The appointment of Anne is timely because this year UN Women is driving hard to foster more positive mindsets and practical arrangements around workplaces that build and support equality for women," Mlambo-Ngucka added.

Hathaway, who said in a statement that she feels "honoured and inspired by this opportunity to aid in advancing gender equality", is no stranger to advocating on behalf of women's rights.

The actor previously served as an advocate for the Nike Foundation, formed to support programmes to empower adolescent girls in the developing world, and in 2011 traveled to Kenya to raise awareness on sexual violence in the region.

She also lent her voice to the 2013 CNN documentary Girl Rising, about the power of female education.

"Significant progress has already been made, but it is time that we collectively intensify our efforts and ensure that true equality is finally realised," Hathaway said about her appointment.
Manila, June 16 : Activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) staged a protest in Philippines' capital Manila on Thursday against the use of ostrich leather in luxury brand products.

The group held the protest outside the store of French high fashion luxury goods manufacturer, Hermes, which PETA claims sells bags and sofas that are made from ostrich-leather, EFE news reported.

The demonstrators, which included both foreigners and Filipinos, brought life-size cardboard cutouts of ostriches which they erected in front of the shop, and held placards with the message "Hermes: Accessories to murder" printed on them.

The protest follows a similar one held by PETA activists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in April, when they set up the same cutouts of ostrich images in front of a Prada store.

"Every ostrich-leather bag and sofa in Hermes' stores represents smart, sensitive and curious young birds who were shocked, slaughtered, plucked and skinned," said PETA Vice President of International Campaigns Jason Baker, in a statement in April.
Tokyo, June 16 : A Japanese government advisory panel on Thursday decided to recommend tougher sentences for rape as well as making the offence easier to prosecute and widening its definition.

The statutory minimum penalty for rape should be raised to imprisonment of five years from three, putting it on a par with punishment for robbery, according to the panel, a subcommittee of the Legislative Council.

The move follows criticism that rape has been treated more leniently than robbery in Japan, the Japan Times reported.

The advisory panel also decided to seek removal of a clause that prevents prosecutors from filing a rape charge without receiving a criminal complaint from the victim.

The panel is expected to hand over the recommendations to the minister by the end of this year.

The panel has also planned to recommend extending the charge of rape to parents or other guardians who have sex with minors in their charge who are younger than 18 years old even without violence or threat.

The penalty for rape resulting in injury or death, meanwhile, should be raised to at least six years in prison from at least five years, the panel added.
New Delhi, June 16 : Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Kalikho Pul sounded upbeat when he promised drastic changes to improve the health sector in his border state. And to ensure that, he has plans to establish well-equipped zonal hospitals, besides recruiting 2,000 health care professionals at these facilities in 2016.

"Arunachal Pradesh will undergo the much-needed revolution in terms of its development. We are focussing on this concept of zonal hospitals. We will establish a zonal hospital in all centrally located places. These hospitals will be fully equipped with advanced medical instruments, provide free medicines and the patients will be treated by specialist doctors," Pul told IANS in an interview here.

Pul was recently in the national capital to hold meetings with various union ministers over several schemes in Arunachal Pradesh.

The 46-year-old leader, who became the eighth Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh after a political turmoil, said these zonal hospitals will negate the hardships faced by people of the state who now travel to Tezpur, Guwahati and even Delhi for medical treatment.

"A zonal hospital will be fully equipped and centrally located, helping the people from various constituencies and districts. The patients will be treated within the state," Pul said.

According to the Chief Minister, the list of places where these zonal hospitals will be established includes Bomdila, Ziro, Pasighat and Khonsa among others.

"Zonal hospital in Ziro will cater to the medical needs of people in Kurumkumey, Subhansiri, Lower Subhansiri. Similarly, for the Siang belt we will have a zonal hospital in Pasighat. For Tirap, Longding and Changlang there will be a zonal hospital in Khonsa," Pul told IANS.

According to the plan, a zonal hospital will also be established in Tezu, catering to the medical needs of people in Dibang Valley, Lohit, Anjaw and Namsai, among others.

It appears that the Public Health Centres (PHC) established by the previous government could not cater to the needs of the people, as most of these health care facilities were in a shambles.

After Pul took over as Chief Minister, these PHCs have been handed over to the NGOs who operate them.

Referring to the recruitment drive in the health sector, the Chief Minister said the government has identified 2,541 vacancies in the health department, including that of super specialist doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, peons and ambulance drivers. The Chief Minister said all these posts will be filled up in 2016 itself.

"The approximate cost for this entire project will be about Rs 8 crore," Pul said.

Even though Arunachal is one of the largest states in India, the population count here is a little over 1.3 million. Over the years, health indicators of the state have been deteriorating, with infant mortality rate and total fertility rate on the rise. Due to lack of proper nutrition, 30 percent of young mothers in the state are anaemic, say experts.

The Chief Minister also touched upon the issue of law and order, saying that all steps would be taken to improve the situation across the state. The plan, he said, includes recruitment of more police personnel.

"We have identified vacancies of 2,664 posts in Arunachal Pradesh Police. We have more vacancies for women in the police force. Every district has vacancies for female police personnel," Pul said, adding that efforts would be made to make the force efficient and people-friendly.

(Rupesh Dutta can be contacted at rupesh.d@ians.in )
(Beijing)  Chinese appliance giant Midea Group Co. Ltd. CEO Fang Hongbo is convinced his company will eventually win a controversial bid to become German robot maker Kuka AG's largest stakeholder.

Negotiations between Midea management and Kuka shareholders began May 18 and were continuing in early June. Analysts in China said the appliance maker hopes to increase its holding of Kuka's shares to at least 30 percent from 13.5 percent it already owns. The expected all-cash deal put Kuka's market capitalization at as much as 4.5 billion euros.

Fang told Caixin on June 1 that negotiations were "proceeding normally." He then brushed off German media reports about possible roadblocks in the form of competing bids, German government objections, and regulatory hurdles in the European Union and United States that reflect what have become in recent years typically negative  and sometimes robotic  reactions to Chinese bids for western companies.

"The project benefits both China and Germany," Fang said. "Why would it be blocked?"

Midea shareholders at a meeting in Foshan, Guangzhou Province, on June 6 approved its offer of 115 euros for each of Kuka's shares traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Private and institutional shareholders currently control 51 percent of the stock, while the German engineering company Voith Group is the largest single stakeholder with about 30 percent and German billionaire Friedhelm Loh is the third largest, after Midea, with about 10 percent.

After the shareholder vote, though, the deal still hung in the balance, as it needs government and regulator backing.

Aware of the controversy stoked by recent Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and Bloomberg wire service reports, Kuka CEO Till Reuter told a Frankfurt newspaper June 6 that he was approaching Midea's bid with "an open mind." Regardless of the outcome, he said, "Kuka is a German company, and we (will) remain a German company."

Shenzhen-listed Midea is already Kuka's second-largest shareholder and started its latest quest March 25 after its board of directors gave management a green light to pursue an offer.

In a press statement on May 18, Midea said it wants to work with Kuka to boost robot sales in China and promote mutually beneficial business diversification projects. It also promised, if the bid succeeds, to let the German company function independently and make no immediate changes to Kuka's management.

Kuka, the world's leading supplier of auto factory robots and third-largest supplier of basic manufacturing robots, has a plant in Shanghai and has been selling automation equipment in China since 1994. The company reported revenue from robot sales in China rose to 425 million euros last year, rising from 150 million euros in 2013, and plans to increase China sales to 1 billion euros by 2020.

In addition to the Kuka stake acquired between August 2015 and May 18 by its subsidiary Mecca International Ltd., Midea last year bought 18 percent of the Chinese robot manufacturer Anhui Efort Intelligent Equipment Co. and launched two joint ventures in southern China's Guangdong Province with Japan's Yaskawa Electric Corp.

Pan Wei, a robot market analyst who writes for the Chinese B2B website OFweek, said Midea plans to build business through access to Kuka's technology and its own experience with robots in appliance manufacturing. Midea thus hopes to expand into new arenas by, for example, selling automation systems to industrial clients.

Kuka, Pan said, would benefit by partnering with Midea. The German company could expand in China and extend beyond its traditional business focus in the automotive sector.

"China's general industry robot market is taking off," Pan said. "Those who secure downstream resources will get a first-mover advantage."

Manufacturing Match-Up

Founded in 1898, Augsburg-based Kuka is a manufacturer whose European rivals include Siemens and ABB. The company supplies automation equipment for auto companies such as Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler, as well as aviation giant Airbus. The company earned 3 billion euros in revenues last year.

Last year, the International Federation of Robotics ranked Kuka the world's No. 1 supplier of automation equipment for automaker assembly lines. And its share of the European market for what the federation calls "general" manufacturing, including food and pharmaceuticals processing, was No. 3 in 2015.

Founded in 1968, Foshan-based Midea is China's second-largest maker of home appliances including air conditioners, washing machines and kitchen gadgets. It also exports products to African and Southeast Asian countries. In 2015, the company reported a 12.7 billion yuan profit on revenues totaling 138 billion yuan.

Following in the footsteps of other Chinese manufacturers that have expanded abroad in recent years, Midea offered a premium price for Kuka shares in hopes of accessing valuable German technology.

The corporate merger and acquisition tracker Dealogic said Chinese companies paid a combined US$ 3.4 billion for German companies between January and April. Also during those four months, Chinese companies spent US$ 17.6 billion in connection with 69, technology-related deals, compared to US$ 14.9 billion last year, according to Dealogic.

Some analysts in China said Midea's initial offer for Kuka may have been too high. But a Citic Securities report May 25 called the offer "reasonable" based on Kuka's technological advantages. An investment banker who asked to remain anonymous said Midea sees value in Kuka's ability to have a positive impact on its future business strategy.

Nevertheless, Midea's proposal touched a raw nerve among some German leaders, according to Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which June 1 quoted government sources as saying that German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel feared a Chinese takeover of German technology, and wanted to forge an alliance of German or European firms to counter Midea's bid. The government later denied the report.

Moreover, Bloomberg recently quoted European Union Digital Economy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, a former German politician, as saying Europeans should retain control of Kuka and its technology.

In a separate report, Sueddeutsche Zeitung said the widespread use of Kuka robots in U.S. auto plants could spark an investigation of Midea's proposed deal by the U.S. government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which in the past has used its power to nix Chinese business deals that were seen as threatening American security.

Midea also must win support from Chinese regulators. The proposed Kuka deal is currently being reviewed by the Beijing government's National Development and Reform Commission, as well as the Ministry of Commerce.

Midea's chief Fang has been mulling over potential business transformation options for his company since 2013. In an interview with Caixin last year, he said something new was needed because the home appliance industry is no longer growing quickly in China.

One interest for Fang has been the area of "smart home" and "smart manufacturing" research and development. The goal is to leverage the power of the Internet to improve appliance and auto manufacturing.

Midea's press statement said the company is counting on Kuka's robots and automation products to help upgrade its own manufacturing plants, as well as help the company expand into new Chinese markets, such as the auto equipment and logistics sectors.

Midea's closer ties to Kuka would mark "a strategic transformation" for the appliance company, said an analyst who asked not to be named.

Midea already operates Kuka robots at several air conditioner and refrigerator factories. A Midea source told Caixin the company has been spending up to 150 million yuan on factory automation.

And Kuka is no stranger to China. The company's Shanghai factory produces more than 10,000 robots a year, mainly for Chinese clients.

"Up to 60 percent of Kuka's Chinese clients are tied to the auto industry, while the rest are for general industries such as engineering, consumer electronics and food processing," said a Kuka China sales manager who asked not to be named.

Makers of consumer goods and electronics are expected to be among the Chinese manufacturers who in coming years replace increasingly high-cost labor with robots, thus offering factory automation suppliers new growth areas, said Liu Yinghang, technology investment director at the investment bank China Renaissance Partners.

In a May 18 interview, ABB (China) Ltd. Chairman Gu Chunyuan said his company plans to partner with Chinese companies to develop robots for electronics manufacturing, food processing and pharmaceutical making.

Business growth has been tapering off for robot makers who supply the auto industry, said Liu Jianwei, general manager of the robot design division at Shanghai ABB Engineering. But it's picking up in other manufacturing arenas.

"In recent years, the market's demand for industrial robots in China has been changing," Liu said.

(Rewritten by Han Wei)
Beijing, June 16 : The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the action plan for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by Beijing.

China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS. The aim is to complete the deployment of the 35 satellite constellation around 2020 to provide services to global users, Xinhua news agency reported.

This is the first white paper on the navigation satellite system.

Initially, China aimed to provide services to domestic users. The next stage featured the expansion of the network to cover the Asia-Pacific region, which was achieved by the end of 2012.

Currently, B1I and B2I open service signals are being broadcast by the operating BDS-2, providing open services to the Asia-Pacific region free of charge, according to the white paper.

The services cover an area between 55 degrees north latitude and 55 degrees south latitude, and between 55 and 180 degrees east longitude, with positioning accuracy less than 10 metres, velocity measurement accuracy less than 0.2 metres per second, and timing accuracy less than 50 nanoseconds.

BDS spokesperson Ran Chengqi said tests in the Asia-Pacific region showed the system to be performing well.

Ran, who is also Director of China's Satellite Navigation System management office, said in priority cities including Beijing and Urumqi, capital city of Xinjiang Uygur region, positioning accuracy was less than 5 metres.

The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.

The BeiDou project was formally launched in 1994. However, the first BeiDou satellite was not launched until 2000. The 23rd satellite was launched on Sunday.

According to the document, the BDS is designed to provide open satellite navigation services free of charge.

International cooperation and exchanges on navigation satellite systems will be encouraged and the BDS compatibility with other systems will be enhanced to provide better services to end users.

Products related to the BDS have been used in areas including communication and transportation, marine fisheries, weather forecasting, mapping and geographic information, forest fire prevention.
Washington/Beijing, June 16 : US President Barack Obama met privately with the Dalai Lama at the White House, drawing much anger and criticism from China with a leading Chinese daily saying the meeting exhibited Obama's "mean side".

The two leaders met at the Map Room on Wednesday, and discussed issues including human rights and climate change -- in what the White House termed a personal conversation based on Obama's appreciation of the 81-year-old Buddhist leader's teachings.

Beijing has strenuously objected to the meeting.

Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary, said the meeting's venue indicated that it was a personal greeting rather than formal bilateral talks.

"Both the Dalai Lama and President Obama value the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the US and China," Earnest said.

During the meeting, Obama repeated the US position that Tibet is part of China and that Washington does not support Tibetan independence, the White House said. The President also urged the Dalai Lama and his representatives to work directly with Chinese officials to resolve differences.

The Dalai Lama fled from Tibet to India in 1959 and established the Central Tibetan Administration after a failed uprising against Chinese communist rule.

The Dalai Lama reaffirmed that he was not seeking independence for Tibet and wants to resume a dialogue with the Chinese government, the White House said.

However, China's Foreign Ministry said it had expressed its opposition to the meeting in "solemn representations" to the US Embassy in Beijing.

"We need to emphasise that the Tibetan issue is China's internal affair and other countries don't have any right to interfere with this," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Wednesday.

In an editorial, China's leading daily, the Global Times said the meeting showed Obama's "mean side".

"While Obama often says he welcomes China's peaceful rise, his meetings with the Dalai Lama erode his sincerity and make him look more like he is helping the latter continue to make trouble with China," the daily said in an editorial.

"Having met the Dalai Lama more often than his Western counterparts in the last decade, Obama has set a bad example," it added.

Another editorial issued by the same daily, which is generally known to reflect the views of the leadership of the Communist Party of China, said Washington's "unwise behaviour has broken the solemn promise of the US not to support Tibet's independence, seriously jeopardised China-US relations, and deeply hurt the Chinese people's feelings".

"By meeting with the Dalai Lama, the US government has broken its own promise and thrown away its political credibility, which is an extremely rash and irresponsible act," it said.

The editorial also said this flip-flopping shows the White House's narrow-mindedness and outdated way of thinking that still seeks to contain China by playing the "Tibet card".

"Playing the 'Tibet card' shows the US government is overdrawing its political credit and international prestige," the editorial added.

Obama has met with the Dalai Lama on three other occasions in 2014, 2011 and 2010.
Sofia, June 16 : The Bulgarian parliament has approved a bill that would ban the wearing of garments concealing the face entirely or partially in public places.

A total of 108 MPs voted in favour of the bill on Wednesday, proposed by the nationalist Patriotic Front (PF). Only eight lawmakers were against and none abstained from voting on the bill that would prohibit women from wearing naqabs and burqas, state run Novonite news agency reported.

The bill will be applicable to all official institutions and sites which provide administrative, educational or social services as well as places for public relaxation, sport, culture and communications.

Prior to entering the plenary chamber, the bill underwent approval by several parliamentary committees.

Bulgaria's second largest opposition party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), proposed withdrawing the bill and including it in counter-terrorism legislation but that was rejected..

The law has already come into force in the municipal councils of Pazardzhik, Stara Zagora, Sliven and Burgas.

In May, the Dutch government implemented a partial ban on wearing veils in schools, hospitals and and while travelling in public transport.

In 2011, a law banning full face covering came into force in Belgium.

France has also banned veils and forbids head scarves and other religious accessories in schools and public buildings.
Islamabad, June 16 : Continuing its diplomatic efforts to muster support for NSG membership, Pakistan on Thursday sought a "non-discriminatory approach" if non-NPT states, including Islamabad and New Delhi, wanted to join the 48-member NSG.

Sartaj Aziz, Pakistan's foreign affairs advisor, made telephone calls to Foreign Ministers Sebastian Kurz of Austria and Mevlut Cavusoglu of Turkey and demanded support for its application to the bloc.

The appeal came ahead of the Nuclear Suppliers Group's next plenary scheduled on June 23-24 in Seoul when the applications for membership of Pakistan and India are to be taken up.

Aziz thanked Turkey for its stand that the application of both Pakistan and India should be considered simultaneously.

He thanked Cavusoglu for the "principled position adopted by Turkey" at the June 9-10 Vienna meeting.

Aziz also spoke to Argentine Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra.

Both India and Pakistan filed their applications in May to enter the nuclear cartel that controls global nuclear trade. Pakistan is opposed to India alone being made a member of the NSG.

The Vienna meeting remained inconclusive on India's membership bid despite the US strongly pushing its case and with most member countries supporting New Delhi.

However, China opposed India's bid arguing that the NSG should not relax specific criteria for new applicants. The NSG controls access to sensitive nuclear technology.

Pakistan's continuing diplomatic outreach for pushing its NSG membership comes even as a leading and influential Chinese daily on Thursday said that Beijing could support New Delhi's entry into the NSG if it promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

As India has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty or the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), it was not fit to get into the NSG, the daily said.

"Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organization," said the commentary by Fu Xiaoqiang of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Commentaries in the English-language Global Times are generally known to reflect the views of the leadership of the Communist Party of China.
Brussels, June 16 : The mascot of Brussels city, Manneken Pis, and one of the most famous cartoon characters in the world in recent times, Smurf from Belgium, promoted the International Day of Yoga (IDY) in Brussels at an event held here.

The event was organised by the Embassy of India at the City Centre where Manneken Pis was dressed in a costume imprinted with cartoon character Smurf promoting IDY, on Wednesday evening.

Manneken Pis is a landmark small bronze sculpture in Brussels situated near the famous Grand Place. It is visited by thousands of tourists every day. Ambassador of India to Belgium, Luxembourg and the EU, Manjeev Singh Puri attended the event.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament in Brussels will be hosting the celebrations of the 2nd International Day of Yoga on June 21 in its famous Yehudi Menuhin Hall.

The venue for the celebrations assumes significance since it was Yehudi Menuhin, the global music legend, who introduced B.K.S. Iyengar's Yoga magic to the western world.

The celebrations for the 2nd International Day of Yoga at the European Parliament will be inaugurated by yoga exponent Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living Foundation, who will travel there from India.

Sri Ravi Shankar will lead an open meditation session that would be followed by yoga "asanas" under the guidance of yoga expert, Samir Khan, of the European Yoga Institute of Brussels, also an Indian national.
Panaji, June 16 : Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal sought the support of the states on Thursday to stop the menace of power thefts in the country.

"Urban areas and our cities and towns also need 24x7 power," Goyal said in his inaugural address at the two-day conference at Consolim, 26 km from here, of power ministers from states across the country.

Sharing the Gujarat experience of reducing power thefts, Goyal said the tariff increase in the state had been the lowest.

"It is not the poor who steal, and it's the bigger power thefts which make corruption," the power minister said.

He appealed to all states to reduce power thefts and said there is great political benefit that will accrue from stopping such thefts. The minister also sought the states' support for some of the central government's initiatives in this regard.

Later, during the conference, Goyal will launch an application named Urja, developed by the Union Power Ministry, that will facilitate easy access to information related to the power situation of the user's locality.

Urja is designed to help the consumer connect better with the urban power distribution system by providing information such as on power outage, timely release of connections, addressing complaints and power reliability.

The ministry will also be launching a soft campaign called Urjagiri, which will entail felicitating and garlanding people caught stealing power, so as to shame them into stopping the practice.

The average accumulated technical and commercial (AT&C) losses, for instance, in Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand are among the highest at around 30 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively.

Delhi loses an estimated Rs 1,000-1,300 crore annually owing to power thefts.
London, June 16 : Britain's "special relationship" with the US could come under stress as Washington throws its support behind the Argentine foreign minister's bid to become the next UN Secretary-General.

The White House is reportedly enthusiastic in its backing of Susana Malcorra's application for the UN's top job, despite the concerns of its "closest ally" Britain.

The US move could be interpreted as a snub, threatening to expose existing differences in policy between Britain and America over the Falkland Islands, known to Argentina as Las Islas Malvinas.

While Britain backs the islanders' right to self-determination, the US holds on tightly to its historic policy of conspicuous silence over the issue.

A 2013 referendum on the Falkland Islands -- over which Britain went into war with Argentina in 1982 after Argentina seized them -- found 99.8 percent of the population favours remaining part of Britain.

"It's a really tough call for the UK. There is obvious concern at having someone heading up the UN who firmly believes that the Falklands should belong to Argentina," a British diplomat was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

"But at the same time, Downing Street doesn't want to appear petty by blocking an otherwise excellent candidate, just for her country's claim."

Since becoming Argentina's foreign minister last December, Malcorra has insisted the Falklands question is no longer a major issue, as it had been with the previous government.

However, she said the Malvinas -- as the Falklands are referred to in Argentine -- are still "a top priority because they are in the constitution and if I were to dismiss the issue. I would be going against the constitution."

Washington refused to take sides during the Falklands War, to the grievance of the British government at the time, and has refused to go public on the issue since then.
Mumbai, June 16 : Negative global cues, along with profit booking and a weak rupee, dragged the key Indian equity markets lower on Thursday.

The benchmark indices closed the day's trade in the red, after some handsome gains the previous day.

Around the afternoon session, the key equity index plunged over 400 points, as heavy selling pressure was witnessed in banking, automobile and capital goods stocks.

The wider 51-scrip Nifty of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) edged down by 65.85 points or 0.80 per cent, at 8,140.75 points.

The barometer 30-scrip sensitive index (Sensex) of the BSE, which opened at 26,686.03 points, closed at 26,525.46 points -- down 200.88 points or 0.75 per cent from the previous close at 26,726.34 points.

The Sensex touched a high of 26,686.03 points and a low of 26,314.91 points during intra-day trade.

The BSE market breadth was skewed in favour of the bears -- with 1,650 declines and 940 advances.

Both the key Indian indices during the previous trade sessionon Wednesday ended on a higher note. The barometer index urged by 330.63 points or 1.25 per cent, while the Nifty rose by 97.75 points or 1.21 per cent.

In terms of broader markets, both the midcap and smallcap indices closed lower by 0.37 and 0.55 per cent respectively.

Initially, the equity markets opened on a negative note in sync with their Asian peers, which had receded after the Bank of Japan (BoJ) decided against an increase in its stimulus measures.

Apart from BoJ, the US Federal Reserve also dampened sentiments as it reduced US economy's growth forecast.

Further, the US Fed decided to maintain its key lending rates at the conclusion of its two-day policy meet that ended late Wednesday.

The US Fed also signalled its intention to limit the times it might increase key lending rates due to weak domestic jobs market.

Besides, disappointing macro-economic trade data which showed a decline in exports for the 18th consecutive month in May further panicked investors.

In addition, lower global crude oil prices and a weak rupee curtailed investors risk taking appetite.

However, a late spurt of value buying triggered short covering which aided the equity markets to pare some of their losses.

"Negative global cues spooked investors into some early liquidation of positions," Anand James, Chief Market Strategist, Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services, told IANS.

"Lower crude oil prices and moderately weaker rupee too dented investors' sentiments," he added.

Dhruv Desai, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Tradebulls, said that Nifty opened down tracking negative global cues but recovered from day's low in the second half of the session due to short covering at lower levels from traders.

"Banking sector stocks witnessed handsome recovery from day's low on fresh buying support and ended on a positive note," Desai pointed out.

Both the foreign and domestic institutional investors (DIIs) were net sellers during the day's trade.

Data with stock exchanges showed that the foreign institutional investors (FIIs) sold stocks worth Rs 156.75 crore, whereas DIIs divested scrip worth Rs 163 crore.

Sector-wise, all the sub-indices except metal stocks witnessed heavy selling pressure.

The S&P BSE banking index plunged by 283.42 points, followed by the automobile index, which declined by 177.09 points, and the capital goods index fell by 151.72 points.

On the other hand, the S&P BSE metal index rose by 33.96 points.

Major Sensex gainers during Thursday's trade were GAIL, up 1.08 per cent at Rs 382.35; Asian Paints, up 0.85 per cent at Rs 1,006.80; Wipro, up 0.59 per cent at Rs 549.85; Hindustan Unilever, up 0.56 per cent at Rs 879.75; and Tata Motors, up 0.40 per cent at Rs 454.

Major Sensex losers during the day's trade were Maruti Suzuki, down 2.93 per cent at Rs 4,084; Bharti Airtel, down 1.58 per cent at Rs 346.25; ICICI Bank, down 1.54 per cent at Rs 239.60; NTPC, down 1.43 per cent at Rs 151.75; Hero MotoCorp, down 1.41 per cent at Rs 3,023.40.
New Delhi, June 16 : Senior Congress leader Kamal Nath, who quit as in-charge of party affairs in Punjab over his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, has vehemently proclaimed his innocence and said he is ready for any probe, including by the CBI.

"There has been SIT (Special Investigation Team) probe, the (Ranganath) Misra Commission inquiry, (G.T.) Nanavati Commission inquiry. I am ready to face any other probe, including that of the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation)," Nath said in an interview to 'India Today' news channel.

"There was no mention of my name (in the anti-Sikh riots) for many years... no statement from any quarter or any individual accusing me of involvement... then someone approached the Nanavati Commission to probe my role. The commission exonerated me of all charges," Nath added.

The G.T. Nanavati Commission was set up by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 2000 to inquire into the 1984 anti-Sikh violence that broke out in Delhi after the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984.

On the charges levelled against him by senior lawyer and Aam Aadmi Party leader H.S. Phoolka, Kamal Nath said: "Where was Phoolka all these years? Why did he not file an FIR or a case against me? Why is he making the allegations now, despite the Nanavati Commission exonerating me of all charges?"

The Congress leader elected to the Lok Sabha from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh said it was his own decision to quit as in-charge of the party affairs in Punjab and nobody asked him to.

"It was my own decision to quit in the party's interest. I did not want this inconsequential issue (of his alleged involvement in the anti-Sikh violence) to overshadow more important and relevant issues in Punjab today."

Kamal Nath said, "The real issues in Punjab are misgovernance, drug menace, the flight of youth from the state for lack of opportunities and employment, et al. I resigned as Punjab in-charge lest public attention was diverted from these issues."

On his presence outside Delhi Gurdwara Rakabganj on November 1, 1984, Kamal Nath said he has never denied it.

"I was present there because I was asked by my party to reach there. There was a mob outside the gurdwara. I tried to stop them from attacking it. The police had requested me to control the mob till their reinforcements arrived," the Congress leader maintained.

The opposition has, on the contrary, accused Kamal Nath of instigating the mob outside the gurdwara.
New Delhi, June 16 : The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday said the decision to suspend legislator Alka Lamba as a spokesperson of the party was an "internal" matter.

"This may be of interest to a certain section of people but this is an internal matter of our party," AAP Delhi convenor Dilip Pandey said.

"Who we appoint as a spokesperson, who we appoint at the block, district or state level is for the party to decide," Pandey said.

He did not say whether Lamba was "relieved" for deviating from the party line on the issue of Gopal Rai, who has resigned as the transport minister.

Earlier, Lamba said she was ready to "repent" if she had committed any mistake.

"I am a disciplined worker of the party and respect its every decision. If I have done any mistake unknowingly, I am ready to repent so that my party will not face any trouble in its fight against corruption," Lamba tweeted.

Two days ago, Lamba said Rai had resigned from the post to make way for a fair probe into a proposed Premium Bus Service scheme, which has come under criticism, while the party cited health reasons.

Pandey reiterated that Rai, who limps because of a gunshot injury he suffered when he was a student activist, had major health issues.

"Rai's health has worsened in recent times. He spends 95 percent of his time in hospitals. The transport ministry is a very time-consuming portfolio.

"Therefore, the party decided to relieve him of some of his burden," he said.
(Beijing)  Fans of popular Chinese smart device maker Xiaomi have got used to the swashbuckling moves from its founder Lei Jun.

But recent wobbly sales figures from Xiaomi Inc., the world's second highest-valued startup worth US$ 45 billion, has upset market analysts.

Lei's January announcement that the company failed to hit its annual sales target for 2015, after a solid 227 percent growth in handset sales in 2014, raised concerns about the future prospects of the company, that relies on the fast saturating smartphone market at home for growth.

Demand for smart handsets was lukewarm in China, where smartphone penetration rate has exceeded 90 percent, said Liu Ruofei, an analyst at Beijing-based market information provider CCID Consulting Co. Ltd.

In the first quarter, the total smartphones sold in the country dropped 4.9 million to 105 million units, compared to the same period in 2015, said Liu, and the sluggish growth is likely to continue until the fifth generation of wireless telecom networks are rolled out over the next few years.

Xiaomi's enthusiastic fan base gave a cold reception to its latest models, because according to Liu, they lacked attractive new features.

In 2015, the company unveiled a pricier, large-screen model, the Xiaomi Note, in an attempt to break into the high-end market dominated by the iPhone from Apple Inc. It also released three low-cost Redmi models last year. But demand has remained lackluster. Even a February launch of the latest model of its flagship product, Mi5, failed to make a splash, because it lacked a "wow" factor, analysts said.

The upstart failed to pick up steam, selling 12.8 million handsets in the first quarter of the year, an 8.6 percent decline from the same period in the previous year, data from CCID showed.

Domestic rivals have also been nibbling into Xiaomi's market share, slowing its expansion. A low-cost Chinese smartphone maker, Vivo Electronics Corp., knocked Xiaomi off the list of top five phone makers in the world in the first quarter, data from research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) showed. In second quarter of 2014, IDC ranked Xiaomi the third largest smartphone maker in term of market share.

Xiaomi has been struggling to build an "ecosystem" of interconnected devices and services that range from a smart rice cooker to drones to deliver packages or take photographs. This year, the company also launched a new smart home appliance brand "Mijia," or "Mi-home." By March, it had invested in 55 startups with businesses ranging from Internet financial services, mobile games, e-commerce to smart home appliances and online health care services, company data showed.

Analysts are concerned that this attempt to spread its tentacles in all directions would distract Xiaomi from its core business. "It is unclear where Xiaomi will go," said one analyst.

But the team steering the company remained confident. Wei Lai, Xiaomi's vice president of marketing, told Caixin in a June interview that the management had a clear picture of the company's future.

"Xiaomi's development path has never changed," said Wei, and the company is eyeing to establish its brand in the high-end market.

It will roll out more competitive products this year and has invested more on research to improve the devices' battery life, camera and other features, said Wei.

Close Race

Since launching its first software in 2010, and its first handset, the Mi1, a year later, Xiaomi has been one of the fastest growing smartphone makers in China, attracting a large number of devoted "Mi-Fans". But competitors are fast closing in on its heels and the company needs to win more users to weather the current rough patch, said a shareholder who asked not to be named.

Some smartphone suppliers and dealers interviewed by Caixin cast doubts on Xiaomi's ability to maintain high growth levels as seen in the past. A mobile phone supplier in Shanghai said that after years of fast expansion the company has now entered a stable growth phase. But if it doesn't roll out better products soon, a decline was imminent, he said.

The company is facing a squeeze in the mid-price range, which it has set out to dominate, as competitors quickly bridge the quality gap. "I feel that Vivo and OPPO are showing robust growth, while Xiaomi is declining," said a mobile phone company manager in Beijing. "Huawei Technologies Co. has remained stable."

Xiaomi was a pioneer of a maverick marketing model that included nail-biting flash sales, and placing online reservations months in advance.

But its effectiveness has frizzled off. "Xiaomi's Internet-based business model brought quick growth at the beginning, because traditional offline sales networks were inefficient," said a sales manager of a mobile phone maker in the southern city of Shenzhen. "But in recent years offline sales tactics have improved and has come close to beating online figures starting last year."

Deals made in brick-and-mortar stores accounted for around 80 percent of sales for OPPO and Vivo in the first quarter, company data showed. Huawei made more than 70 percent sales offline, Zhu Ping, president of the company's consumer goods division, said.

Xiaomi has been a notable absentee in the stock list of major mobile phone dealers, said the Shenzhen sales manager.

But the brand relies on cultivating loyal customers online, with fan groups speculating on the company's latest models, said Wei. Currently, Xiaomi generates more than 70 percent of its sales online, company data showed.

Last year, its production lines were also slowed down by problems with part supplies, said Wei.

Several parts suppliers could not keep pace with the company's manufacturing schedule as it grew, said Wei. Some components did not meet the technical standards and needed extra time to be reworked causing delays, but these bottlenecks have been cleared in recent month, he said.

In May, the founder, Lei, started supervising the research and supply teams himself.

But parts suppliers have been cautious about working with Xiaomi, amid rising market concerns about its sales outlook. "Although Xiaomi's shipment figures remain strong, its (declining) sales forecast has affected the supply chain. Many have decided to wait and watch," said one of Xiaomi's suppliers in Shanghai.

Clearing Hurdles

Xiaomi is expanding its sales network from online to offline, embracing brick-and-mortar retailers, said Wei. The company has set up sales booths in more than 100 outlets operated by the country's largest electronics retailer Suning Commerce Group. Lei said earlier that new Xiaomi models will be available at more than 1,400 Sunning outlets across the country this year.

Meanwhile, the company has rushed to open its own outlets and invited retailers to market Xiaomi devices through franchise agreements. By the end of June, the number of Xiaomi stores, where potential buyers can test its devices before purchasing, will total 30.

But the startup's ambitions go far beyond propping up its ailing handset sales. "In future, a mobile phone will be able to control different smart Xiaomi devices over the Internet," said a shareholder, giving a glimpse of the company's plans to expand into the world of Internet-of-Things. The sale of devices that can be controlled by a smartphone will reach 10 billion yuan in sales in 2016, said Xiaomi vice president Liu De. The company will also focus on research and development of robots, artificial intelligence, virtual reality technology and transportation this year, he said.

But, before it can realize this long term vision, the company needs to clear a more immediate hurdle. It must pour more energy into retaining its loyal users who are a cash cow for future businesses, the shareholder said, adding losing clients "is the biggest risk" for Xiaomi.

(Rewritten by Han Wei)
Chennai, June 16 : Megastar Rajinikanth is fine and vacationing in the US, said a source close to the actor amid rumours that he is not well.

His publicist has clarified that Rajinikanth is well health-wise.

"Rajinikanth sir is absolutely fine. He is vacationing in the US and is expected is return soon. Due to rigorous shooting schedule, doctors had advised him to take a break. Hence, he decided to go on a holiday," the publicist told IANS.

Some reports also suggested that Rajinikanth is undergoing kidney-related treatment in California.

"He had undergone full medical check up in Chennai before he left for the US," the publicist clarified.

From the first week of July, the 65-year old is expected to join the sets of Tamil actioner "2.o".

Rajinikanth's "Kabali", in which he plays an ageing gangster, is slated for release on February 15.
London, June 16 : A former soldier who was once the world's most tattooed man died in a care home at the age of 80.

Tom Leppard, born Tom Wooldridge, spent $7,761 on his art and lived in a small bothy in Skye, Scotland, for more than two decades, Daily Mail reported.

The pensioner - known as the "Leopard Man of Skye" -- swapped his hut on the banks of Loch na Beiste for a house in 2008 and later moved into a home in Inverness, where he died on Sunday.

Leppard said he had no regrets about his tattoos, which began as a way to make money.

"I thought if I get the biggest of something and live in a strange way people might pay me," the Leopard man added.

Despite his spots, he felt no affinity with leopards and called spiritual questions about his tattoos "rubbish".

When living in Skye, his home was a ruined shelter under a roof made from pieces of plastic sheeting.

He had no electricity, no furniture and had to canoe three miles for his weekly shopping.
New Delhi, June 16 : India on Thursday said it was already recognised by the United States as a "major defence partner", downplaying the US Senate's rejection of a key legislative amendment that would have brought New Delhi at par with NATO members and other close American military partners.

The Senate on Wednesday refused to pass the India-related amendment to the defence policy bill for 2017 that authorises over $600 billion for military purposes, including war spending.

Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in a statement here that it was early to speculate about the outcome of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) 2017.

It "is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content", Swarup said, about the annual US federal law that specifies the defence budget and expenditures and also limits funding levels and sets out the defence policy framework.

As moved in the Senate on Wednesday, one of the amendments introduced by top Republican senator John McCain included modification of American defence export control regulations that would have recognised India as a key strategic military partner.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the NDAA by the US Senate," Swarup said.

The spokesperson noted that "preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US government to recognize India as a major defense partner".

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US joint statement of June 7," he said referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's White House meeting with President Barack Obama.

"A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US government. It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," Swarup added.
New Delhi, June 16 : A 38-year-old businessman was strangled to death by robbers when he resisted them at his farmhouse here early on Thursday, police said. Five robbers have been arrested.

Investigators said the incident occurred between 1 and 2.30 a.m when the robbers barged into Rohan Gupta's two-storey farmhouse in south Delhi's Chhhatarpur area by scaling its wall.

In its preliminary investigation, police found out that the robbers first entered the ground floor of the farmhouse where Gupta's parents were asleep.

"The robbers sedated the parents using chloroform and started collecting cash and jewellery. A few robbers went to the first floor where Gupta was sleeping," a police officer said.

The men attempted the same modus operandi on Gupta. But he woke up and started fighting back.

"In the scuffle, the culprits strangulated Gupta to death," the officer said.

One of Gupta's neighbours called the police after he sensed something amiss at Gupta's house.

Police personnel who rushed to the scene surrounded the farmhouse and caught five of the accused - Ajay, Vipin, Vinod, Shivnath and Vinod Kumar. One of the robbers is believed to have escaped.

Gupta's domestic help and another staff along with the security guard who was deployed at the main gate of the colony were being interrogated to get information about a suspected insider who might have helped the robbers.

The arrested men told police that they had not intended to kill anyone.
Mumbai, June 16 : "Dishoom" actor Varun Dhawan and producer Sajid Nadiadwala have denied that a kirpan -- a Sikh ceremonial dagger -- was used in the film's song "Sau Tarah Ke".

At an event here, Varun was asked to comment on a complaint regarding the use of a kirpan-like dagger as an accessory on actress Jacqueline Fernandez's short outfit.

He explained: "It's not a kirpan. It's an Arabic sword which has been used and we must actually be having it, so we can show it. I am a Punjabi myself, and so is my brother (director Rohit Dhawan). So we would never do something like that. It's a misunderstanding."

Nadiadwala said he had read the news that the Sikh community had condemned how Jacqueline is seen shaking a leg wearing a short dress with a short sword, resembling the kirpan, around her waist.

"We shot the song in Morocco. So there's no question (of using a kirpan). Once they see the song, they will know. They saw the clipping and they thought it is a kirpan," the producer said.

An open letter is said to have been addressed to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) demanding to remove the song from the film and from websites like YouTube. Not only that, also they asked for an apology from the makers of the film and posted the same on his Facebook wall terming Jacqueline as 'semi-clad actress'.

Scheduled to release on July 29, the much-awaited action-comedy film is helmed by Rohit Dhawan and also features John Abraham in the lead role.
London, June 16 : A woman claiming to be the "wife" of late Saudi King Fahd has lost the latest round of a legal battle with his son over a $28 million payout she was awarded by the courts.

The Palestinian-born socialite Janan Harb, 68, claimed she married the late King Fahd when she was 19, and his son, Prince Abdul Aziz, promised her the package "to buy her silence", Daily Mail reported.

A judge awarded her $16.9 million, plus interest, and two Chelsea properties worth $7 million last November, but Prince Aziz asked the appeals court to quash the unsustainable award.

His legal team claimed that the judge did not analyse the evidence before him correctly and may have been biased due to a public spat with one of the barristers representing the prince.

The appeal judge called her "unsatisfactory" and described some of her evidence as "bizarre".

"We regret to say that in our view the deficiencies in the judgment are so serious that it cannot be allowed to stand and that the matter must be remitted to the High Court for re-trial," Judge Lord Dyson said.

Harb married a Lebanese lawyer in 1974 and had two daughters and claimed the late king gave her money to help support them and $1.4 million to buy one of the Chelsea flats.

She also purchased the second flat and later sold them back to the King for $3.6 million.

The court heard that, in 2001, the late King gave her $7 million through his agent Faez Martini.

In his judgment, Justice Smith said she used $4.2 million of that to pay off debts including an $119,935 gambling debt, then gambled away or spent the balance of $2.6 million within two years on her lavish lifestyle.

In her battle with the prince, she threatened to "spill the beans" on their relationship and has written two books that are as yet unpublished.
Kochi/Aluva (Kerala), June 16 : A 23-year-old Assamese man has been arrested in the rape-murder of a Dalit woman law student in Kerala that grabbed national headlines for the sheer brutality of the April 28 crime and became a hot political issue during the state assembly elections.

The Assamese man, identified as Amiyur ul Islam, was picked up from Tamil Nadu near the Palakkad border two days ago. According to police, forensic and other evidence has shown the man's involvement in the crime, that was being compared to the December 16, 2012 Delhi gang rape.

B. Sandhya, Additional Director General of Police, who headed the probe in the Jisha murder case, on Thursday said the arrest of the accused has been recorded.

"It was through an extensive probe that the accused was tracked down and finally taken into custody," Sandhya told reporters at the Aluva Police club, where the accused was brought.

Reacting to news of the arrest, the woman's mother Rajeshwari said: "He should be dealt with in the manner in which he assaulted my daughter, and after that he should be hanged to death."

"Not a single woman in the country should ever be made to undergo what my daughter underwent," said Rajeshwari.

Earlier in the day, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, announcing the arrest, said in Kochi: "This is going to be a feather in the cap of the police probe team."

Sandhya led the police questioning of the suspect at Thrissur.

On Thursday evening, Islam was brought to Aluva where all the top police officers, including Sandhya, were present.

According to police, two vital clues turned out to be the clinching evidence for nailing him -- the footwear which was left near Jisha's home and a photo of Islam and Jisha taken at a local studio near her house.

The footwear shop owner and the studio owner identified the man, even as police concluded, from the evidence, that the crime was committed by someone known to Jisha.

Islam had taken part in the construction of Jisha's home, and they were in touch and had some verbal duel over the construction.

According to the information, the Assamese man had come to her home on the morning of April 28 and they had a fight. He came again in the afternoon when he was drunk and committed the crime.

Police zeroed in on Islam after his DNA samples, checked against the saliva and blood samples found on Jisha's body, matched when the results came in on Thursday.

Director General of Police Loknath Behra, who is in Mumbai, told reporters there that things are going well in the case and expressed happiness at the Chief Minister's praise of the police force.

Jisha, 27, was found dead on April 28 at her home in Perumbavoor in Ernakulam by her mother Rajeshwari, who works as a casual labourer. Her body bore injuries in a way that gave rise to suspicion that she was raped before being killed.

The murder attracted national headlines and became a hot topic in Kerala's election season. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) said it reflected the slide in law and order that the then ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) had allowed, and promised to book the culprits within hours, if elected to power.

Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said when the probe began (he was then Home Minister), and the probe team came out with a report that crucial evidence of a pair of footwear is going to be the clinching evidence, the media looked at it with disdain.

"See, now the same footwear has turned out to be the crucial evidence; so it means what happened during our time was on the right track," said Chennithala.

The LDF government, which assumed office on May 25, changed the entire team probing the case and replaced Director General of Police (DGP) T.P. Senkumar with Behra.
Ahmedabad, June 16 : A major fire broke out in an ancillary unit at the Tata Nano plant in Gujarat on Thursday. No one was injured, officials said, though the damage could run into lakhs of rupees.

The fire broke out in Supreme Industries, an ancillaries manufacturing unit of Tata Nano, at the Vendors Park in Sanand in Ahmedabad district around 1 p.m., Additional Chief Fire Officer Rajesh Bhatt said.

Rubber mats, raw material and other equipment on the premises were damaged though nobody was injured. Bhatt said four engines controlled the blaze in over two hours.

The Tata Nano plant's operations were not affected.

The cause of the fire was not yet known but most likely, a short-circuit caused by overheating was to blame, Bhatt said.
New Delhi, June 16 : Indian pharmaceutical exports are likely to cross $20 billion by 2020 from $14 billion in 2016, by registering a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of eight per cent, said an Assocham- TechSci research joint study on Thursday.

However, delay in regulatory approvals in US, Russia, Africa and others may cut down export growth to almost half - from a 15 per cent CAGR growth level clocked in 2010-2014 to eight per cent during 2015-2020, said the study "IPR in pharmaceuticals: Balancing, innovation and access".

"Consolidation of pharmacy players is leading to an increase in pricing pressures for generic companies existing in the US market which is expected to result in decline in year-on-year growth of pharmaceutical exports from India over next five years," it said.

In the US, Indian pharmaceutical exports rose from $3.4 billion in 2013 to $3.7 billion in 2014 on account of increasing demand for high quality generic drugs in the market.

"However, growth rate for exports of pharmaceutical products from India to the US is declining, due to increasing US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) scrutiny on the quality of pharma products coming from drug manufacturing plants located in India," said the study.

Complying with USFDA regulations is the only way out for Indian companies to bolster pharma exports to US, it noted.

Steep currency decline in emerging markets like Africa, Russia, Ukraine and Venezuela are also expected to add woes to drug manufacturers as low-priced currency will hit margins.

About Russia, the study said the prevailing exchange rate crisis in the country is affecting Indian exports while many Indian companies supply drugs to Russia through Pharmaceutical Benefits Program (PBP) and hospital tenders where prices are regulated by the state.

Meanwhile port delays and prolonged customs valuation are proving detrimental to India's exports to Africa, the study said.

Assocham Secretary General D. S. Rawat said: "Pharmaceuticals' exports are a major factor contributing to growth of this industry in India with the US and few fast growing markets like Brazil, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and in South-East Asia emerging as the main export markets for generic drugs."

According to the study, India's pharmaceutical market may reach $20 billion in 2016 and $55 billion by 2020 marking a CAGR of 22 per cent.

"Pharmaceutical market in India is being driven by rapid socio-economic changes, rising sedentary lifestyle amid people and expected growth in number of people suffering from obesity, diabetes, cardiac problems and other related ailments," Rawat added.
New Delhi, June 16 : Army chief General Dalbir Singh on Thursday paid tribute here to Signalman Ajay Singh Choudhary, who was martyred in a gunfight with terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.

General Singh paid the tribute after the soldier's body was flown to Delhi.

The body has since been sent to the soldier's native Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan by a helicopter.

The soldier was martyred while combating terrorists in Machil Sector in the frontier Kupwara district on June 14. An unidentified terrorist was also killed.
New Delhi, June 16 : A day after he resigned as general secretary incharge of poll-bound Punjab, Congress leader Kamal Nath came under fresh attack from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which demanded a probe against him for his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Kamal Nath said he was prepared for any investigation, while Congress said there was never a case against him.

AAP leader H.S. Phoolka told reporters here that Kamal Nath himself had admitted in an affidavit that he was present at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj in the heart of Delhi when a mob attacked it and killed two Sikhs.

"Kamal Nath is responsible for this and police should ask him who were the people who had assembled unlawfully. He was the leader and controlling them," Phoolka said.

"Kamal Nath still hasn't been questioned over this. This is a mockery of the law."

The Aam Aadmi Party also questioned the links of other Congress leaders with the riots that followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

The violence left over 3,000 Sikhs dead, almost all of them in Delhi.

AAP MLA Jarnail Singh wanted to know why Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was still with the Congress if, as party leader Amarinder Singh says, that he was one of the accused in the riots.

Kamal Nath was on Wednesday relieved from the post of general secretary in-charge of the upcoming elections in Punjab after he made a request to party President Sonia Gandhi.

Punjab is to go for elections early next year and AAP is making a serious bid for power in the state.

AAP leader Dilip Pandey said the Congress had taken the decision concerning Kamal Nath due to constant pressure.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Avinash Rai Khanna said that Kamal Nath's appointment as incharge of Punjab "had rubbed salt on the wounds of Sikhs".

"He offered to resign after opposition from several quarters. The Congress had to bow before the truth. Congress has suffered a setback even before the build up of campaign for the elections in Punjab," Rai said.

In an interview to India Today news channel, Kamal Nath said he was prepared to face any probe.

"There has been a SIT probe, the (Ranganath) Misra Commission enquiry, (G.T.) Nanavati Commission inquiry. I am ready to face any other probe, including CBI," Kamal Nath said.

He said there was no statement from any quarter accusing him of involvement in the riots. "Then someone approached the Nanavati Commission to probe my role. The Commission exonerated me of all charges," Nath added.

The G.T. Nanavati Commission was set up in May 2000 by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to probe the 1984 anti-Sikh violence.

Asked about charges levelled by Phoolka, Kamal Nath said: "Where was Phoolka all these years? Why did he not file an FIR or a case against me? Why is he making the allegations now."

The Congress MP from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh said it was his own decision to quit as in-charge of party affairs in Punjab.

"I did not want this inconsequential issue (of allegations against him) to overshadow important issues in Punjab -- like misgovernance, drug menace, plight of farmers, the flight of youth from the state. Why should these issues be diverted," he said.

On his presence outside Delhi Gurudwara Rakabganj on November 1, 1984, Nath said he had been asked by the party to reach there.

"There was a mob outside the Gurudwara and I tried to stop them from attacking the Gurudwara. The police had requested me to control the mob till their reinforcement arrives," he said.

Kamal Nath had written to Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday, saying he had been hurt by the "unnecessary controversy" concerning him.

At the regular Congress briefing on Thursday, party leader Anand Sharma also strongly backed Kamal Nath, who is now into his ninth term as member of Lok Sabha.

"There was no case against him, so demand for a probe is ridiculous," Sharma said.
London, June 16 : A man has been arrested after a British Labour MP was shot at in Birstall in West Yorkshire, police said on Thursday.

The injured woman is said to be Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen.

West Yorkshire Police said they were called to Market Street at Birstall where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries, Xinhua news agency reported.

She was shot at and was seen lying bleeding on the pavement.

The attack took place near the town's library, according to reports.

Police said she was in a critical condition and had been sent to hospital, while a man nearby also suffered slight injuries.

"A 52-year-old man was arrested in the area," police said but did not give further details.
New Delhi, June 16 : The Congress on Thursday sought to puncture claims on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's successful tour of the United States, saying the US Senate finally "exposed the hollowness and the falsity of the claims" made by Modi and his propagandists.

The US Senate had refused to pass a key amendment to modify its export control regulations to recognise India as a global strategic and defence partner of the US.

"What was the Modi's address to the US Congress? Was the US Congress in session? There were not even 50 Congressmen present -- the rest were staffers and those taking autographs as also non-resident Indians, people who were attending through invitation," Deputy Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma told the media at the party headquarters here.

"Please go by the visuals, take out the list, that standing ovation -- many of them were cheerleaders of Modi himself. Let this list be published by the US Congress and tell how many Congressmen had signed and who all were present," Sharma said while accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party's "propaganda machinery" to go overboard to deviate public attention from real issues back home.

"When we hold a function in the Central Hall (of Parliament), invitations are sent out and so many people who are not even members come for major functions. Sometimes, half of the Central Hall is full of non-MPs. It is not something exceptional that has happened," he added.

"Now, the US Senate has finally exposed the hollowness and the falsity of the claims made by Modi and his propagandist. They have refused to okay this strategic and defence partnership with India," Sharma said.

He said the government must clarify if India remained a strategic partner of the United States or just a buyer of military equipment.

"What has the government to say? Do we remain strategic partners or buyers of military equipment or defence platforms? You are just a buyer; you are paying billions of dollars; and then they refuse to recognise you as a strategic partner," the Congress leader said.
New Delhi, June 16 : National Institute of Design (NID), Kurukshetra, will begin its academic session from 2016-17, as part of a measure to help making India a hub for world class designing, an official statement said on Thursday.

Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has given approval to begin the academic session 2016-17 for NID Kurukshetra, a ministry statement said.

NID, Vijayawada has already commenced its academic session last year, the statement said, adding that Sitharaman has approved setting up of four new NIDs at Hyderabad, Goa, Varanasi and Jaipur.

"The aim is to establish India as a hub for world class designing, and the NIDs shall play a crucial role by providing the skills to empower our human capital towards world class designing," the statement said.

In September last year, the union cabinet had approved the creation of four posts of directors for the four new NIDs at Kurukshetra (Haryana), Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), Jorhat (Assam) and Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh).

The cabinet had already approved financial implications including salaries, for setting up of these new NIDs in its meeting held in February 2014.

One of the components of the Action Plan for implementation of the National Design Policy, approved by the cabinet in 2007 is the setting up of four more institutes on the pattern of NID, Ahmedabad.
Bengaluru, June 17 : In a bid to promote tourism to the state, Karnataka's Department of Tourism on Thursday appointed 111 Tourist Guides and 298 'Tourist Mitras'.

The tourist guides who went through a Comprehensive Guide Training Programme at five universities were issued guide licenses and identity cards, while "Tourist Mitras" are part of a programme of the Department of Tourism and the Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation (KSTDC) in association with the state Home Department.

"The Tourist Mitras will be working in co-ordination with the local police stations. They have been given basic training to provide information on art, culture, cuisine, heritage, etiquette, first aid, disaster control and etc," said an official statement. The 298-strong third batch include 84 women.

Besides training in languages like French, Russian and German, the tourist guides were imparted knowledge on history of tourist destinations, communication skills and friendly behaviour among others.

Another 500 eligible candidates have been shortlisted for training.
More than half of developers and builders in the UK are planning to increase housing starts and completions over the next 12 months, according to a new survey report.

Some 56% said they were planning to recruit more skilled workers in the next three years but many want to see more resources in local authority planning departments, the House Building Report 2016 from real estate consultants Knight Frank shows.

Indeed, some 30% said making the planning process for public sector land more streamlined would help boost development numbers and 57% said they had not seen an increase in access to public sector land.

On top of this 73% said the cost and availability of labour will have a negative impact on future housing supply at a time when it is at the centre of the national and local political debate.

The expanding UK population, a structural historical undersupply of new housing and a slowdown in movement up and down the housing chain is now injecting a sense of urgency into the need to deliver more new build property, the report points out.

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Over the last five years, the UK Government has made significant changes to the planning system, introduced schemes to boost development and put pressure on local authorities and public bodies to sell surplus land.

While there has been an increase in housing delivery, but the supply of new build homes is still lagging demand on an annual basis, disregarding the historical shortfall. The countrys largest housebuilders, along with the Home Builders Federation (HBF), have recently pledged to help deliver one million homes by 2020, recognising that there needs to be significant further action from the housebuilding industry.

The report assesses the next steps required to address the need for housing over the coming years. For example, the need to address the increasingly onerous levels of pre-commencement conditions applied in some planning permissions and the length of time taken to sign them off.

The report points out that official house building data released each quarter from Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) shows that some 152,440 new homes were completed across the UK in 2014/2015 and Knight Frank estimates that this will rise to around 172,000 in 2015/2016.

New quarterly data on English new build completions show a 12% rise in 2015/2016 to just under 140,000. However, separate retrospective data published by the DCLG shows that 155,080 new homes were completed in 2014/2015. This suggests that the quarterly data is underestimating total house building across England, said Grainne Gilmore, head of UK residential research at Knight Frank.

Whatever data is considered, there has been a significant step up in the delivery of new homes over the last few years and large house builders are now constructing 60% more homes than in 2010, she added.

She explained that on an annual basis, Knight Frank estimates a 12% rise in new build completions in the last year. However, on both DCLG measures, this would still indicate that in England, house building is some way under the Governments goal of 200,000 new homes a year.

Reaching the Governments target would be a milestone. However, it is still fewer new homes than government projections suggest will be needed. The household growth projections, produced by the DCLG, indicate a potential 220,000 additional households being created every year in England on average over the next decade, said Gilmore.

Achieving this level of house building would mean keeping up with current demand, but would not address the structural undersupply that has been running for several decades. Also, there is the continuing challenge of delivering the spectrum of housing to meet all household demand, she added.

The report also points out that in the wider political landscape, uncertainty remains about the outcome of the European Union referendum. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has said that a vote to leave the EU could result in a fall in house prices.

However, it explained that overall, developers expect the number of new home starts and completions to rise in the coming years, chiming with the recent pledge by the UKs largest house builders to keep working towards 200,000 homes a year, and to build double the number of houses in 2019 than they did in 2010.

The majority of house builders and developers questioned in the Knight Frank survey are set to increase their activity over the next year, with 56% saying that completions volumes will rise. Some 24% said their completions would rise by 10% and a further 11% said they expected a rise of up to 25%.

Looking further into the future of supply, some 22% of respondents said that they plan to increase start volumes by up to 10%, while 17% said their business was poised for an increase of between 25% and 50%.

The report also points out that accessing public sector land remains a challenge for housebuilders, despite a large scale effort from policymakers to release such unused land. Earlier this year, the Government announced another tranche of public land sales, some 600 acres.

However, the report says that there still seems to be a blockage in the system, hampering the swift movement from the identification of a potential site for sale to development. This can often happen in and around the disposal, especially when the owner may want to retain an interest in the site.

Only a quarter of respondents of the survey said that they had seen a rise in the availability of land owned by public bodies such as local government, the NHS or the Ministry of Defence, for sale over the last 12 months. More than a half said they had not seen a difference.

The planning system also poses challenges, house builders say, with four in five respondents saying it will have a negative impact on supply. While the changes brought about by the introduction of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) in 2012 have largely been absorbed, there are still some key issues around the time taken to achieve planning decisions, and the conditions applied to those permissions with suggestions for a time limit to be applied to signing these off.

The need to bolster local planning departments is still seen as the biggest priority for policymakers, echoing the findings of last years survey, and underlining that there is still room for progress in this area.

Access to labour is also an ongoing problem in the construction sector. Many skilled construction workers moved away from the sector as activity largely ground to a halt after the financial crisis, the report explains.

Skilled workers from overseas have always made up a significant part of the construction sector, and this remains the case. There are concerns that a vote to leave the EU in June could ratchet up the pressure on skilled workers if the free movement of workforces between the UK to the EU is impaired.

The report suggests that luring former construction workers back to the sector and training younger entrants to the market is a key challenge, especially as the average age of workers in the sector is relatively high, exacerbating labour shortages as older workers start to retire.

As a result, the Home Builders Federation (HBF) and the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) earlier this year announced a scheme to boost the number of workers in the industry.

They pledged 2.7 million to help train an additional 45,000 workers by 2019 in a bid to increase capacity in the sector and thereby allowing a continued rise in the supply of new homes. Certainly the demand for skilled workers is set to remain strong, with more than half of respondents saying they were set to increase hiring over the next three years, added Gilmore.
(Beijing)  Once a promising career that brought respect and handsome salaries, a vice president's job at China's major commercial banks is rapidly losing its luster, the victim of recent anti-corruption and frugality campaigns that have seen salaries shrivel and other perks evaporate.

Bank of China, one of the country's biggest lenders, is just one of many lenders that have faced a vice president shortage since the start of this year. First one of its six vice presidents retired, and then another left to become president of China Everbright Bank earlier in the year.

The elite group continued to shrink after another vice president, Zhu Hexin, was appointed vice governor of southwestern Sichuan Province on June 2. Such movement is relatively common in China, where the Communist Party often treats high positions at big state-run enterprises as a type of government posting for rising bureaucrats.

Depending on their size, a typical Chinese bank has five to eight vice presidents at its head office, usually tasked with establishing and maintaining relationships with customers and business partners, overseeing assistant managers, and monitoring overall financial performance, according to a person working in the sector.

"We urgently need vice presidents now," a bank employee told Caixin only half-jokingly.

Shanghai-based China Minsheng Bank, China's largest private lender, fired its only vice president Xing Benxiu, who was in charge of credit card services, the lender said in a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange last week. Previous reports indicated that Xing was dismissed because he did not pass a performance evaluation, but several knowledgeable people told Caixin the dismissal was linked to a corruption investigation.

Further details regarding the investigation and Minsheng's plan to fill the vacancy were not revealed.

China has embarked on a three-year-old anti-graft campaign under President Xi Jinping, who has vowed to go after powerful "tigers" as well as lowly "flies." That drive has struck down Wang Yaoting, a former vice president of Huaxia Bank who was accused of taking 1.06 million yuan ($160,000) and tried in late 2015.

No verdict has been announced yet. Huaxia now has only two vice presidents, and it is planning to promote two more people to fill the position, a person familiar with the issue said.

Xi's administration has also been cutting salaries for top executives at big state-run enterprises, as part of a broader frugality campaign that also discourages gift giving and hosting lavish events. Salaries for presidents of China's five biggest banks all dropped 50 percent in 2015, the lenders' annual reports show. Such cuts and loss of other perks are pushing bank executives to pursue better pay in the private sector and elsewhere.

The drastic pay cuts have raised concerns among some analysts, who say state banks could lose talent to private banks, which are not subject to Beijing's frugality campaign.

Qiu Huofa, one of Everbright Bank's former vice presidents, left his employer to pursue another job, the bank said in a filing to the Shanghai bourse last month. Caixin has learned that he may become chairman of a private bank which sources said is being set up by property developer Evergrande Group.

A former vice president at Huaxia, Huang Jinlao, also quit his position in August 2015 and became vice president of the privately owned household appliances and electronics retailer Suning Commerce Group Co. Ltd.

(Rewritten by Chen Na)
The new module of the DataParser for HipChat Server ensures messaging compliance...

17a-4 has released a new module of the DataParser to support Atlassian HipChat Server. The DataParser is middleware to handle regulated data for retention in an archive. HipChat is a popular communication platform gaining ground with corporate users, many of whom have compliance requirements. The new module of the DataParser for HipChat Server ensures messaging compliance just as with Microsoft Skype for Business, Cisco Jabber, Thomson Reuters Eikon Messenger, Bloomberg, InvestEdge, FactSet and other supported data sources.

HipChat offers group and one-to-one chat with audio, video, and screen sharing. The DataParser handles the daily export from HipChat Server to format users' conversations into daily threaded emails. Metadata and participant information are included in the emails. The DataParser also handles all HipChat Server attachments and maintains source files.

HipChat Server has quickly become a leading enterprise communication platform by focusing on scale, reliability and security, said Alison Huselid, offering lead for HipChat Server. The new DataParser integration extends HipChat Server by providing customers with a data compliance solution.

The DataParsers modular architecture provides an efficient and cost effective platform to collect and control many sources of data and to apply unified compliance policies and procedures. It is designed to integrate easily into existing infrastructures and to run multiple configurations in more complex client environments. The DataParser supports all major archiving technologies, both in-house and out-sourced, allowing clients to leverage resources and keep compliance costs to a minimum. The various delivery options include the ability to send messages directly into an archive, to a file location and/or into Exchange or Office 365. If clients are using Office 365 for compliance, the DataParser can deliver to the third-party data mailbox which allows for Microsofts new Security & Compliance features to be applied.

We are continuing to develop interfaces for clients that need to bring messaging into compliance, offers Curt Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, we have an architecture that allows us to quickly create a new module for the data source, while creating a consistent email or XML record that may be ingested into any archive.

For more information about 17a-4s DataParser for HipChat please visit 17a-4.com.

For more information about Atlassian HipChat Server visit hipchat.com/server.

About 17a-4 llc:

17a-4 is a compliance services and software company with a focus on e-messaging and software solutions to meet regulatory and e-Discovery needs of institutional clients. Clients that are required to adhere to SEC (Rule 17a-4), FINRA and CFTC regulations leverage 17a-4s expertise to ensure their information infrastructure is in compliance. 17a-4s architecture provides for a single-point in which all e-messaging content may be managed for retention, legal and regulatory holds and e-Discovery productions. 17a-4 has also developed the SEC-FINRA DeskTop which is a hosted, SEC-compliant SharePoint platform for many types of SEC and FINRA documents and regulatory workflows. 17a-4 is based in New York City but operates remote offices nationwide.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
(FROM LEFT) David Clay, CIO, Powersports Listings M&A | Laura & Steve Tuchschmidt, Owners/Sellers, Mid-America H-D, Tom Macatee, CEO, Powersports Listings M&A The Powersports Listings M&A team is a class act! Thank you for working so closely with me and my family to make this process as seamless as possible. It's been a difficult and emotional course and we are so grateful we chose to work with the PROS! Past News Releases RSS Powersports Listings M&A...

Powersports Listings M&A (PLMA) is a preferred Harley-Davidson dealership brokerage which was recognized by Mid-America Harley-Davidson owners of 15 years, Steve & Laura Tuchschmidt after an introductory meeting at a dealer event the summer of 2015. Tom Macatee, CEO of PLMA shook hands with owner Steve Tuchschmidt on an engagement agreement following that meeting and less than one year later, ownership was successfully transitioned and Steve had sales proceeds wired to his account.

This Columbia, Missouri dealership is a perfect example of the American dream in entrepreneurship. Steve & Laura targeted the dealership for purchase in 2001 and found themselves at the closing table on the fateful day of September 11, 2001. Despite the incredible turmoil in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Tuchschmidt family forged ahead and acquired the Columbia, Missouri dealership and embarked on an incredible 15 year journey as dealer principals in the exclusive Harley-Davidson club.

The acquired location in 2001 was a small 5,000 sq. ft. building which they relocated in 2003 to a newly constructed 22,000 sq. ft. flagship facility. From there, the Tuchschmidt family stacked up accolades including Small Business of the Year as named by the Columbia Chamber of Commerce and three time Harley-Davidson Bar & Shield award recipient.

Columbia, Missouri area entrepreneurs Steve & Laura Pecoraro along with partner Mike Prost were identified by PLMA as the best fit for the acquisition despite not having a background as dealership owners. The group boasts a very successful entrepreneurial business background namely in the transportation field and is poised to grow the operation to the next level.

PLMA was on site at the dealership to assist with the final closing reconciliations and settlement accounting. The successful closing occurred on Monday, June 13, 2016. Owner/Seller Steve Tuchschmidt commented, "The Powersports Listings M&A team is a class act! Thank you for working so closely with me and my family to make this process as seamless as possible. It's been a difficult and emotional course and we are so grateful we chose to work with the PROS!."

About Powersports Listings Mergers & Acquisitions (PLMA)

Powersports Listings Mergers & Acquisitions (PLMA), the professional Powersports Industry dealership brokerage, specializes in professional intermediary services to buyers and sellers of Harley-Davidson and Powersports dealerships.

The company is an independent affiliate of the Sunbelt Network, the largest and most professional business brokerage network in the world servicing privately held companies. The PLMA difference is that its clients get the benefit of a true professional firm with an unmatched domestic and international footprint that reaches far beyond that of an individual broker. Our Sunbelt affiliation provides us with proprietary technologies, world class training, and the scale of the organization which sells more businesses than any other in the world. We provide all of this to Harley-Davidson and Powersports dealership owners on a success fee basis.

The PLMA team has over 50 years of combined Powersports Industry experience and our firm has arguably handled the successful sale of more Powersports Dealerships than any other in the world. Our relationships run the spectrum from the Industry Manufacturers, Distributors, Dealers, and Consumers which keeps us highly networked in order to identify strategic buy/sell opportunities. At the same time, our network and technology spans worldwide to assure that the highest and best buyer may be located whether currently in the Motorcycle Industry or from some other line of business. Further, we hold regular meetings with the Harley-Davidson Dealer Development Group to remain up to date on objectives and procedures of the Motor Company.

The PLMA home office is centrally located in Dallas, Texas. To learn more about PLMA, please visit http://www.powersportslistings.com.
On January 8th, Carlson Craft appeared on Marcando Pasos on the Galavision Network. Together with guest Tatiana and her mother, Carlson Craft was able to showcase quinceanera invitations and the importance of them.

One of the most important times in the life of a teenage girl is her Quinceanera! Its the special passage where she enters into adulthood, leaving behind her adolescence on her fifteenth birthday. While looking through all the different trends, guest Tatiana discovered the importance of her invitations. These are memories that will last forever and something to look forward to.

Carlson Craft is one of the nations leading companies for all things wedding and social stationary including quinceanera invitations. These invitations can come in both Spanish and English and we have tools available on our website that can help assist in the planning of the Quinceanera. This is a big day for you and your daughter; let us help make it memorable.

ABOUT CARLSON CRAFT

Carlson Craft is a wholesale printing company that markets products through a nationwide network of authorized retailers. High-quality products, fast turn around, expert customer service and product innovation are key to maintaining our position as a leader in the print industry.
Valuebound, one of the leading Drupal service providers, today announced achieving the No 3 position in the world & No 1 position in India as per Drupal.org market place - https://www.drupal.org/drupal-services - which is maintained by the Drupal Association & volunteers. It was a big leap for Valuebound climbing the ladder from the 40th position to be one among the top 3 Drupal players in the world within last 6 months.

On the companys recent achievement Rakesh James, one of the senior Drupal consultants stated, "I feel excited to be part of this success story. Looking back, it was a great journey rising to the top position in Indian Drupal Space. It was our commitment to the Drupal community which made it happen. And we look forward to increase our contribution to the community.

Talking about the strategy behind this success, Valuebound says it focuses on the following key points:



Valuebound believed in not only providing Drupal service but also giving back to the Drupal Community in the form of contributions. With 321 issue credits & 40 projects supported on Drupal, the company is quickly advancing its predecessors.

Client satisfaction is one other aspect to this achievement. Having most of its prominent clients from North America, Valuebound has successfully serviced over 30 projects in Drupal servicing, development & consulting. Emphasising on quality has helped in seeing happy clients making them stick with Valuebound for a longer time.

They say its more about passion! The passion towards Drupal accelerates their learning, improving Drupal knowledge which in turn, not only helps in making a difference in the community but also helps in better project outcomes.

About Valuebound

Valuebound based out of North Bergen, NJ with development centre in Bangalore, India is the service provider of Drupal, the leading Content Management System. The company specializes in providing expert Drupal consulting, development, training and support for media, publishing & high tech companies. From February 2016, Valuebound has been consistently ranked as the Top 3rd Drupal service provider in the world & No 1 in India at Drupal.org market place. More information on their services can be found on http://www.valuebound.com.

About Drupal Marketplace:

Drupal Marketplace holds a list of companies which offer Drupal related services, development, training also including Drupal related books. It is catalogued as per the issue credits reviewed by project maintainers, supporting partner status & also by the organization title. To know more follow https://www.drupal.org/marketplace/guidelines

Media Contact

Neethuja

neethuja(at)valuebound(dot)com

+1 (201) 383 5005
Tampa, Florida-based Dunn&Co, a leading independent full-service advertising agency and production company, today announced the opening of its first international office in London, England. The new European arm will offer strategic planning, branding, advertising, digital, and packaging services to Dunn&Co.s existing European business, while also building its own portfolio of clients.

Having supported clients in the European market for the past 13 years, and with more than a decade of global healthcare and hospitality experience, the time is right to plant a flag in the ground and expand our operational footprint into Europe,  said Troy Dunn, President and CCO.

"This expansion is a direct result of strong demand from our clients to increase our footprint and breadth of services abroad, said Grant Gunderson, design director of the new London office. We're already working with clients in the U.K. and on the European continent, and having a local presence will immediately enhance our ability to meet their needs.

The agency currently works with clients across more than 10 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas and its portfolio includes work for international clients Baxter Healthcare, the Island of Curacao, Monin, GE Healthcare, Zubrowka vodka and Scope Ophthalmics.

Dunn&Co. has recently been one of the most awarded marketing agencies in the American Southeast, having been recognized in the past year by the CLIOs, Communication Arts, Graphis, American Advertising Federation, HOW, PRINT and Packaging of the World for exceptional creative product.

About Dunn&Co.

Dunn&Co. (http://www.dunn-co.com) is a full-service advertising and marketing communications firm housed in a century-old former cigar factory near Tampas historic Ybor City. Dunn&Co. provides award-winning creative solutions for clients worldwide, including GE Healthcare, The Tampa Bay Lightning, Ahold USA, Baxter Healthcare, Monin, Tijuana Flats, Civco, Sabal Trust, St. Petersburg Distillery, Majestic apparel, Hexa watches, Sempermed USA, ATG, and The United Way. Dunn&Co. also provides pro-bono services to the ALS Association Florida Chapter to help fight Lou Gehrigs disease.
Building upon the White House Early Learning STEM commitments, Congressman Mike Honda (U.S. Representative California's 17th Congressional District) invited Carrie Lynne Draper, Executive Director, Readiness Learning Associates, to be one of the four panelists at his briefing on Early Learning STEM. Representative Honda and his staff organized the briefing, along with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (U.S. House of Representative Texas's 18th Congressional District) and her staff. Members of Congress, congressional staff and key stakeholders were in attendance.

The briefing, held in the Capitol Visitor's Center Congressional Auditorium on June 10, 2016, was moderated by Dr. Russell Shilling, Executive Director of STEM for the U.S. Department of Education. The four panelists were: Ms. Draper; Ms. Wendy Brenneman, Manager of Early Childhood STEM Initiatives, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, PA; Ms. Rudo Kashiri, Education Programs Manager, NASA and Virginia Space Grant Consortium, Hampton, VA ; and Mr. David Lowenstein, Senior Director, Ready to Learn, PBS KIDS Digital, Arlington, VA.

Panelists shared the latest findings and research on how to prepare our youngest learners to create the future; developing opportunities for STEM learning with informal education and community partners; fostering inclusive STEM practices and supporting all families; and the role of public media in STEM learning for children under the age of five.

Congressman Honda is very passionate about working towards equity in education in all areas. One area focuses on ensuring that all children have access to high-quality early learning education. The Department of Education is currently leading in the area of Early Learning STEM, and Congressman Honda hoped to broaden the knowledge of the promising practices in this area on the Hill through this briefing. The panelists deep knowledge and experience in this area make a critical difference in communicating key facets of Early Learning STEM to the Hill audience. The final hearing in this series, will be held on July 12, 2016, and will focus on Global Girls Education.

Ms. Draper shared how young children are born to be innovative thinkers and require certain STEM practices. "Children under the age of five are capable of understanding the nature of science, technology, engineering and math and their applications. They just need a knowledgeable teacher who creates an environment for STEM learning that engages their natural curiosity."

Readiness Learning Associates brings more than thirty years of STEM Readiness Education experience, providing STEM learning for children six months of age through post-secondary and their educators. The organization is based in Los Angeles, CA with an east coast office in Virginia Beach, VA.

For more information regarding the Congressional Series, please contact Congressman Honda's office at 202.225.2631 and Joanna.hubbard(at)mail.house(dot)gov
Auvik's network infrastructure RMM Auvik is tremendously powerful yet incredibly easy to use, and it proves its business value very quickly.

Members of The 20, a business development group for growth-focused managed service providers, have chosen Auvik as their network infrastructure tool.

The partnership, announced today, brings Auvik infrastructure-focused remote monitoring and management (RMM) capabilities to The 20s 70 members.

Auvik knocked our socks off in terms of what it can do to help MSPs manage their clients network infrastructure more efficiently, said Tim Conkle, founder of The 20. The 20 is focused on helping its members grow quickly and profitably, so it was an easy decision to bring Auvik to the group.

Conkle, who is also the CEO of Dallas-based Roland Technology Group, grew his MSP business from $850,000 to $10 million in annual revenue in five years.

Selected members of The 20 rigorously evaluate new technology products before theyre recommended for everyone in the group.

Auvik is tremendously powerful yet incredibly easy to use, and it proves its business value very quickly, said Jonathan Blakey, CIO of The 20. Members who have already implemented Auvik are seeing big efficiency wins on their network services.

Auvik provides instant visibility and control of network infrastructure devices, such as routers, switches, and firewalls. Using Auvik, MSPs can slash network troubleshooting time and improve proactive network maintenance.

The 20s members are innovative and forward-thinking MSPs. To have them choose Auvik as their network infrastructure tool is real validation of our innovation in the network space, said Alex Hoff, VP Product and Sales at Auvik. It feels great that Auvik is helping this caliber of MSP achieve more in their businesses. Thats what we strive for here.

About Auvik Networks

With its cloud-based network management system, Auvik helps managed service providers build a profitable network service. Auvik's infrastructure-focused RMM (remote monitoring and management) provides unprecedented insight into client networks and automates complex and time-consuming tasks so MSPs can scale their businesses efficiently. Auvik was named to the ChannelE2E 100 list in 2016, which identifies top disruptors and innovators in the IT channel. Visit http://www.auvik.com or follow @AuvikNetworks on Twitter.

About The 20

The 20 is a results-oriented business development group for the IT Industry. The 20 was created from the idea of the 80/20 rule. This rule states that 20 percent of companies in a given industry dominate that industry. The remaining 80 percent of companies in that industry are either irrelevant or working to be in the 20 percent. We provide you with the tools and resources to propel your managed IT company into the 20. For more information, visit http://www.Top20MSP.com

Media contacts

Jennifer Tribe

Director of Content, Auvik Networks

jtribe(at)auvik(dot)com

519-804-4700 x132

Ciera Cole

Director, The 20

ccole(at)the20msp(dot)com

972-642-9025
Greater Miamis best days are ahead of it."

Miami and Miami Beach, once a refuge for retirees and those looking for fun and sun is on the rise as a great economic powerhouse, according to a new report from Florida International University and the Creative Class Group, Miamis Great Inflection: Toward Shared Prosperity as a Creative and Inclusive Global City.

For the report, a first step in a multi-year study, researchers examined Miamis economic progress and studied the divides and challenges it faces. Miami has a window of opportunity to capitalize on its economic strengths, explained Richard Florida, Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and Visiting Fellow of the FIU-Miami Creative City Initiative.

Greater Miamis best days are ahead of it. It has amazing quality of place, green spaces, walkability, great weather, beautiful beaches and parks. It has a world-class airport with international connectivity and has a port for major waterways. These attributes are making it a place that is attractive to a large number of entrepreneurs and the Creative Class, stated Richard Florida.

The report unveils 10 key areas of opportunity for building a greater economy:



Take Even Greater Advantage of the Regions Size and Scale. Greater Miami is one of the largest economic regions in the U.S. and the world, comparable to Singapore and Hong Kong. Miami is also the hub of the So-Flo mega-region, which extends to Tampa and Orlando and produces more than $750 billion in economic output.

Leverage the Regions Role as a Globalization Hub. With its global airport and port, Miami is the economic and financial hub of Latin America and increasingly a gateway to Europe and the world. It also now ranks as one of the 25 most important global cities.

Broaden and Deepen the Regions Growing Startup Ecosystem. With approximately $300 million in venture capital in 2015, Miamis entrepreneurial ecosystem ranks 16th among U.S. metros. The broader So-Flo mega-region took in nearly $600 million in venture capital, roughly comparable to Greater Chicago or Austin.

Build a Fully Creative Economy. Greater Miami is home to roughly 700,000 Creative Class workers; there are nearly 1.7 million Creative Class workers in So-Flo mega-region. The regions economic future lies in the full breadth of its creative economy.

Upgrade the Regions Service Sector. 1.3 million Miami residents have service sector jobs. By upgrading these low-pay, low-skill jobs, the region can bolster its middle class while increasing the productivity and competitiveness of its hospitality, tourism, and service sector across the board.

Capitalize on Brain Circulation. Greater Miami is home to 438,000 full-time and part-time students, making it the eighth largest college town in the nation. It ranks 16th of the 50-plus metros with populations of over a million with its 67% retention rate of graduates. The future key is to capitalize on Miamis role as a hub in the process of brain circulation from around the world.

Promote the Regions Tolerance and Diversity Strengths. Greater Miami is one of the most open-minded and diverse metros in the nation. Four in 10 of Miamis residents are foreign-born, a larger share than that of even New York and Los Angeles. Miami ranks 16th among large metros on the Gay and Lesbian Index, which measures the concentration of same-sex couples.

Use Quality of Place as an Economic Driver. With its warm climate, spectacular coastline, world-class arts and cultural infrastructure, and the amenities of a large, global city, Greater Miami has a significant quality of place advantage that is critical in attracting and retaining talent.

Engage All of Miami in Inclusive Prosperity. Miami suffers from many of the growing divides that vex other large, successful global cities and metro areas. Greater Miami is one of the nations most unequal and segregated metros, with a level of income inequality on par with Nicaragua or Zimbabwe.

Address the Regions Growing Crisis of Success. Greater Miami has reached an inflection point in its growth. The average greater Miami commuter wastes more than a week of work (52 hours) annually stuck in traffic, the 12th worst in the country.

It is clear from this study and others that we have done at FIU, that as a community we have challenges but also golden opportunities to shape our future, said FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg. We must harness the entrepreneurial energy in South Florida into ventures that will lead to jobs and wealth accumulation.

Key Miami Facts:



5.8 million residents

$300 billion gross regional product

682,000 in Creative Class

1.3 million service sector workers

$300,000 in venture capital investment

438,000 full-time and part-time students

67% graduate retention rate within the region

4 in 10 residents are immigrants

7th among all U.S. metros for income inequality

About Creative Class Group: The Creative Class Group is an advisory services firm composed of leading next-generation researchers, academics, and business strategists. Utilizing its unique approach and metrics, CCG works with companies and governments worldwide. Founder, Richard Florida, the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at The University of Torontos, Rotman School of Management and Global Research Professor at NYU. He is Senior Editor at The Atlantic where he cofounded and serves as Editor-at-Large for City Lab and is a Visiting Fellow of the FIU-Miami Creative City Initiative. Rana Florida, CEO of CCG who writes on business and entrepreneurship for Fast Company and the Huffington Post, serves as Director of the FIU-Miami Creative City Initiative. Steven Pedigo, Director of Research at CCG is a Visiting Fellow. Reham Alexander, CCGS Director of Operations and Events and runs the events programming for the FIU-Miami Creative City. For more information about CCG, visit: http://www.creativeclass.com

About FIYU: Florida International University is classified by Carnegie as a R1: Doctoral Universities - Highest Research Activity and recognized as a Carnegie engaged university. It is a public research university with colleges and schools that offers 196 bachelors, masters and doctoral programs in fields such as engineering, computer science, international relations, architecture, law and medicine. As one of South Floridas anchor institutions, FIU contributes almost $9 billion each year to the local economy. FIU is Worlds Ahead in finding solutions to the most challenging problems of our time. FIU emphasizes research as a major component of its mission. FIU has awarded more than 220,000 degrees and enrolls more than 54,000 students in two campuses and three centers including FIU Downtown on Brickell, FIU@I-75, and the Miami Beach Urban Studios. FIUs Medina Aquarius Program houses the Aquarius Reef Base, a unique underwater research facility in the Florida Keys. FIU also supports artistic and cultural engagement through its three museums: Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. FIU is a member of Conference USA with more than 400 student-athletes participating in 18 sports. For more information about FIU, visit http://www.fiu.edu/.

About the FIU-Miami Creative City Initiative: A collaboration between Florida International University and the Creative Class Group, the FIU-Miami Creative City Initiative engages political, business, and cultural leaders, faculty, students, alumni, and the greater community in a dialogue on how creativity, culture, design, and innovation can drive the greater Miami regional economy.

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OSIsoft, a global leader for enabling operational intelligence, has announced that Compressor Controls Corporation (CCC) will integrate OSIsofts PI System into its TrainView II turbomachinery control system. With TrainView II, CCC customers will be able to better prevent process disturbances, cut costs, and identify maintenance issues.

CCC, a subsidiary of Roper Technologies, has been a leading supplier of turbomachinery control solutions for over 40 years. The companys systems are widely used by upstream, midstream and downstream companies to control the complex process of chilling and distributing liquefied natural gas as well as by copper and steel companies to fine tune air flow in their production processes. Historically, CCC customers had to maintain separate hardware and software systems for managing and analyzing the high-volume, high-speed data regarding equipment vibration or shaft orbits.

With the release of TrainView II integrated with OSIsofts PI System, critical real-time data and data analysis can be combined in the operational system, thereby reducing costs, complexity, overhead employee training and systems. The PI System can capture over 400,000 events per second, a sampling rate that high performance vibration diagnostics applications can require. By consolidating real-time and historical data management into a single platform, TrainView II also allows CCC customers to improve preventative maintenance, accelerate root-cause detection and cut the time and costs required for conducting analytics.

The increasing ability to store and correlate high frequency data will enable PI System users to dramatically reduce the time required to identify machinery malfunctions from hours, if not days, to minutes. We are very excited about Total Train Analytics and the ground-breaking ability to prevent process disturbances, control events, and machine health changes at millisecond resolution in a single platform. PI System users can now leverage their existing platform and further expand the return on their investment, said Pier Parisi, the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at CCC.

SETPOINT, a Roper subsidiary company specializing in condition-based maintenance systems and software, also incorporates the PI System into its award-winning products for oil & gas, mining and power.

The PI System: Powering Operational Intelligence

Deployed at over 19,000 sites worldwide, OSIsofts PI System is one of the worlds most widely used software technologies for the Industrial Internet of Things. The PI System captures operational data regarding energy consumption, asset utilization or complex process flows from thousands of sensors and other sources across an organization. The PI System then transforms this data into rich information streams that can be accessed by plant engineers, executives, data researchers or integrated into supply chain or productivity applications to save money, improve safety and productivity and make better long-term decisions.

More than 1,000 leading utilities, 95 percent of the largest oil and gas companies, numerous government agencies and more than 65 percent of the Fortune 500 industrial companies rely on technology from OSIsoft and its partners. Worldwide, more than 1.5 billion sensor-based data streams are managed by the PI System.

Dataand fast access to datawill increasingly play a vital role in industrial operations. Data is one of the most important assets a company has, said Aaron Pratt, Global Accounts and Channels at OSIsoft. Were very proud to be working with Compressor Controls to help their customers develop a more mature data infrastructure and achieve a competitive edge.

About Compressor Controls Corporation (CCC)

CCC is a leading supplier of turbomachinery control solutions. They employ the most knowledgeable and comprehensive team of turbomachinery professionals in the world. Their engineers utilize fast and reliable automation platforms and field-proven control applications to deliver tangible economic benefits to their customers. Owning the lifecycle of the entire control system  including hardware, software, and control applications  enables them to develop robust control solutions with global support like no other company. CCC (Compressor Controls Corporation) was founded in 1974 as the inventor of the worlds first digital antisurge control system and has been serving the process control industry for more than 40 years. Today there are more than 10,000 turbomachinery trains worldwide powered by CCC control solutions  helping customers achieve reliable and efficient plant operation every day. CCC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Roper Technologies, Inc.  a constituent of the S&P 500, Fortune 1000, and the Russell 1000 indices. For more information, please visit http://www.cccglobal.com.

About OSIsoft, LLC

OSIsoft, a global leader enabling operational intelligence, delivers an open enterprise infrastructure to connect sensor-based data, operations and people to enable real-time and actionable insights. As the maker of the PI System, OSIsoft empowers companies across a range of industries in activities such as exploration, extraction, production, generation, process and discrete manufacturing, distribution and services to leverage streaming data to optimize and enrich their businesses. For over thirty years, OSIsoft customers have embraced the PI System to deliver process, quality, energy, regulatory compliance, safety, security and asset health improvements across their operations. OSIsoft is a privately held company, headquartered in San Leandro, California, USA with offices around the world. For more information, visit http://www.osisoft.com.

Media Contact:

Michael Kanellos

OSIsoft, LLC

Tel: 510-877-9331

Email: mkanellos(at)osisoft(dot)com
James Speer, M.S., joins Reproductive Medicine Associates of Connecticut Being a genetic counselor is a fascinating combination of genetics and psychology, says Speer. Im able to empower people with information, and help them come to the best decision for themselves."

James Speer, M.S., a certified genetic counselor, is joining Reproductive Medicine Associates of Connecticut (RMACT), a leading fertility practice with a well-rounded pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) program. As the medical fields understanding of genetic conditions expands and testing becomes more comprehensive, there is a growing need from fertility patients to work with a specialist to understand and consider their options.

As a genetic counselor, Speers role is to obtain detailed health and family histories, identify conditions with genetic components and risk factors, discuss inheritance patterns, and provide information regarding genetic testing options. Once test results are attained, he will provide non-directive counsel and support to patients. Many of the patients he works with will have donor sperm or donor oocytes as part of their fertility treatment.

In addition, Speer is establishing an embryo donation program at RMACT. According to the Department of Health & Human Health Services, there are over 600,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the U.S. RMACT patients will now have the opportunity to donate their remaining embryos to the practice, which can then in turn match the embryos to screened recipients. This program will give patients who have successfully completed their family-building another option as they consider what course of action to pursue with their extra embryos, and will add to the extensive options RMACT has available for hopeful parents-to-be.

Being a genetic counselor is a fascinating combination of genetics and psychology, says Speer, who has over 10 years of experience in the fertility field. Im able to empower people with information, and help them come to the best decision for themselves. Im especially excited to start the embryo donation program because it cultivates positive energy to the practice as a whole. There are many embryos available to be donated, and many potential recipients for these embryos, so it is wonderful to be able to offer this option at RMACT.

Speer earned his Bachelor of Science in Medical Cytogenetic Technology from the University of Connecticut School of Allied Health Professions and then went on to earn his Master of Science in Human Genetics from Sarah Lawrence College. His career started as a lab technician conducting genetic research and testing. In addition to working with patients for more than 20 years, Speer has been a professor and was the Associate Director of the Joan H. Marks Graduate Program In Human Genetics at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. Outside of the office, Speer keeps busy as a father of four children.

We believe that part of our responsibility as a fertility practice is to ensure that each patient is informed and supported throughout their treatment, says Dr. Mark Leondires, Medical Director at RMACT. We want our patients to receive the best medical care and with Jamie, we have taken another step to caring for the entire patient.

About Reproductive Medicine Associates of Connecticut (RMACT)

RMACT specializes in the treatment of infertility, including assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and Pre-implantation Genetic Screening (PGS). RMACT, Fairfield Countys largest fertility clinic and egg donation center, is one of 11 leading In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) centers nationwide chosen by In Vitro Sciences to participate in its Centers of Excellence program. RMACT has offices in Norwalk, Danbury, Stamford and Trumbull, and an affiliate office now in Poughkeepsie, NY. RMACT also offers infertility treatment financing and support services, such as nutrition counseling, individual and couples psychological counseling, acupuncture and yoga, through RMACTs Integrated Fertility and Wellness Center.

The RMACT team includes lead physicians Drs. Mark P. Leondires, Spencer S. Richlin and Joshua M. Hurwitz, as well as fertility specialists Drs. Cynthia M. Murdock and Shaun C. Williams. All five physicians are Board-Certified Reproductive Endocrinologists and are members of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) and the Fairfield County and Connecticut Medical Societies. Each has received numerous awards, and all five are Castle Connolly "Top Doctors." RMACTs IVF laboratory is accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP), and CLIA; other accreditations include the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) and the American Institute for Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM). For more information visit http://www.RMACT.com or find us on Facebook.
(Zhoushan)  Events that preceded the sinking of fishing boat 11307, apparently with the loss of all hands, are shrouded in mystery as thick as the fog that frequently blankets the Zhoushan coast.

Equally mysterious, at least in the eyes of some in the fishing industry and relatives of the 18 crew members missing since the 11307 sank May 12, are safety oversight gaps that some say contribute to high fatality rates for sea and coastal fishermen in China.

The 11307 was one of four, Zhoushan-area fishing boats that reportedly sank within a week in early May. Each may have collided with another vessel off the coast of eastern Zhejiang Province and-or Shanghai, according to media reports.

Fishermen were among the 74 people who died or were reported missing in connection with 69 coastal shipping accidents  many of which involved two-vessel collisions  tallied between January and April, according to the central government's Ministry of Transport. A separate Caixin tally, based on media reports, concluded 14 fishing boats sank nationwide in May, including the 11307, leaving at least three people dead and 71 missing.

And a significant number of sinkings and fishing crew fatalities apparently never reach the media or official record books.

Sun Yingshi, a former secretary-general of a trade group called the China Fishery Mutual Insurance Association, said government statistics often overlook deadly incidents involving the 90 percent of China's estimated 2 million fishermen who work without insurance coverage.

In an interview with Caixin, Sun said according to his estimates about 2,607 fishermen working on licensed vessels die on the job every year. No one knows the death toll for those employed on unlicensed boats.

The insurance association's latest figures, based on life insurance company payouts to policy holders, indicate an average 210 per 100,000 fishermen in China were killed in the line of duty or went missing between 1994 and 2003. The international average is 80 per 100,000 fishermen, according to the United Nations.

And according to Zhang Zhuli, director of Shanghai-based research agency Fisheries Machine and Instrument Supervision Center, at least eight fishermen lose their lives and 25 are injured in shipping incidents every day in China.

The fishing industry's government supervisors have been criticized for a lack of a cohesive oversight mechanism, which in turn factors into gaps in safety regulation that leaves fishing boat crews vulnerable to accidents and death.

A Zhoushan government maritime agency official who asked not to be named told Caixin that fishing sector supervision stands divided, with Ministry of Transport agencies in charge of some tasks and fishing industry regulators at the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Land and Resources' State Oceanic Administration handling others.

Transport ministry departments oversee maritime traffic safety, while the agriculture and oceanic agencies are responsible for fishing boat licensing and management. These central government agencies also work alongside provincial and local government counterparts.

Government agencies are supposed to work together to provide support and handle investigations after a fishing boat gets into trouble, collides with another vessel, or sinks, said the Zhoushan official. But these agencies do not always cooperate with each another.

Moreover, the extent of fishing industry safety problems is unclear since the government does not track all fishermen fatalities nor every boat in the nation's huge fishing vessel fleet which, according to the United Nations, includes one-fourth of the world's fishing boats.

Sun said the Chinese government's ongoing effort to improve workplace safety across the country has long overlooked the fishing industry. As a result, fishermen labor on vessels that lack adequate safety equipment and without the kind of training that in an emergency could save lives.

"Safety equipment, fishermen training and rescue operations investments have all been inadequate," said Sun.

To most fishermen, fishing is about placing the net and catching fishes, a task that "can be done by anybody," said Li Xinbiao, a Zhoushan fisherman. Very few have knowledge of how to handle safety equipment properly.

Slow Response

A notice issued by the Daishan County government May 27 informed relatives of the 11307's missing crew members that all were "presumed dead." The 45-meter boat, one of 2,407 registered in a Daishan fishing town, was owned by Captain Hu Guangcai.

The notice came a full 15 days after the vessel disappeared during a crab-catching voyage that started April 30, and 11 days after the sunken wreckage, with neither survivors nor bodies, was found.

The long pause between the ill-fated vessel's discovery and the notice's release was typical of the slow and sometimes scattered reactions by government agencies whenever a fishing vessel goes missing.

The Shanghai Maritime Safety Administration dispatched search and rescue teams to look for the crew of the 11307 one day after Zhoushan-area fishermen reported it missing to the local Ocean and Fishery Bureau, and some 33 hours after it disappeared from the radar screens monitored by local fishery authorities. The search, which lasted more than four days, ended when the vessel was found at the bottom of the sea near the mouth of the Yangtze River.

A Zhoushan Maritime Safety Administration official was cited by local newspaper as saying the fishing vessel's hull has been damaged in a way that suggested it may have collided with a much larger boat. Indeed, the 11307 sank near a marine traffic lane used by container ships traveling to and from the nearby ports of Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan.

Lin Yun, the widow of the ill-fated vessel's chief officer Zhao Xiaohe, said she learned that in a phone chat on the evening of May 11, Hu told his wife that he had decided to sail toward the Yangtze estuary some three hours away from the boat's then-position. That was the last time anyone on board communicated with anyone on land, she said.

Fog that night may have impeded visibility, said a fisherman who was working May 11 near where the sunken 11307 was found. The fisherman, who declined to be named, told Caixin he saw dozens of container ships pass by the area that same night.

A Daishan county fishery department official told Caixin that most registered fishing boats have installed China's home-developed Beidou satellite navigation system, which sends their location information to radar screens monitored by county governments and local fishery bureaus.

The tracking system records showed that 11307 disappeared from radar in the early hours of May 12, according to the Zhoushan ocean and fishery bureau.

But local newspapers reported that the Zhoushan fishery bureau only received reports from county officials about the missing vessel on the morning of May 13, and it immediately dispatched rescue force. Authorities haven't explained this delay in sending out a distress signal.

Relatives of the lost fishermen complained about the official response to the 11307 incident. Some rallied outside a local government office May 16 to protest what they saw as a slow rescue effort. And throughout the search and rescue period, many demanded more information about the incident and urged government agencies to explain their response.

The protests ended when the families of each missing fisherman received from local government a death compensation payment ranging from 800,000 yuan to 1.2 million yuan. By accepting a payment, each accepted the official conclusion that the sinking was accidental and forfeited rights to additional claims.

Also forfeited was any hope of seeing the 11307 again, as raising the boat from the sea floor was deemed too expensive.

"Salvaging would cost more than 20 million yuan," said He Jianlai, whose brother was among those aboard the 11307. "It's not worth it."

(Rewritten by Han Wei)
America's largest most attended annual Latin food, wine and spirits celebration.

After the successful completion its Los Angeles festival in March, Latin Food Fest! (http://www.latinfoodfest.com) returns to San Diego August 12 - 15, 2016 for its fourth annual Latin culinary classic and announces the agenda.

Kicking-off the Latin food, wine and spirits celebration is Chefs Night Out Party, on Friday August 12, with Grande Tasting August 13 - 14, and closing with Latin Caribbean Supperclub on August 15.

Taking place at the Embarcadero Marina Park North, Grande Tasting is the festivals all-inclusive signature event that will showcase 100 food, wine and spirits stations, and activations such as Cooking Demos and Wine Workshop, Spirits of the Americas Expo, Best of Fest Awards, Mission Fed VIP Tent, and music by the legendary Amistad Cubana, on tour from Cuba.

At the Spirits of the Americas Expo, mixologists and distillers will hold tastings of Bacanora, Cachaca, Mezcal, Pisco, Rum, Sotol and Tequila. In the Culinary Pavilion, chefs such as Claudia Sandoval will conduct on-stage demonstrations.

A VIP ticket grants early admission and into the Mission Fed VIP Tent where each guest will receive a gift bag and enjoy Spanish jamon, Baja oysters, ahi shashimi (stripped down live by fishmonger Tommy Gomes), DF style braised pork shanks by chef Mario Medina, organic Tequila, KORBEL Champagne, two-story Montejo Beer Bar, cocktails by Grand Marnier, massages and so much more!

Use promo code PRW to get tickets for 10% off at http://www.latinfoodfest.com.
Rebecca Mandal-Blasio, PhD, BCBA-D We are passionate about the difference ABA makes in the lives of the kids we serve and are also committed to partnering with great local parent groups, who do amazing work to support families.

Autism Spectrum Therapies (AST), an agency that provides comprehensive autism services, began serving New Orleans in 2011 and is now expanding to Baton Rouge. AST provides support for individuals with autism from infancy through adulthood, as well as their parents, families, schools, and communities.

Celebrating 15 years of serving the autism community and 5 years in Louisiana, AST has established itself as a trusted provider of ABA and an asset to the New Orleans community.

AST's Clinical Director, Rebecca Mandal-Blasio has been a powerful force in the New Orleans autism community, helping to build an extraordinary team that provides in-home and clinic-based ABA services. Rebecca is also well known for her efforts to collaborate with parents and parent groups in the community. We are passionate about the difference ABA makes in the lives of the kids we serve and are also committed to partnering with great local parent groups, who do amazing work to support families. Jamie Tindle, Executive Director of Families Helping Families of Baton Rouge had this to share, This is an exciting time for the autism community in Baton Rouge. Given the limited resources for ABA, gaining AST as a provider is a great benefit for our families. AST's newest office is located at 10000 Celtic Drive, Suite 802 Baton Rouge, LA 70809.

AST is also celebrating the opening of the AST Learning Center in New Orleans. Headed by Santino LoVullo, PhD, BCBA, the AST Learning Center was created to provide one-on-one support to children 18 mo to 5 years of age. To learn more about AST's programs in New Orleans & Baton Rouge, call (866)727-8274.

About Autism Spectrum Therapies:

Autism Spectrum Therapies (AST) is in its 15th year of serving the autism community and is committed to helping children succeed in school and in life. Rooted in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), the strongest and broadest evidence-based approach, AST offers the most clinically appropriate and effective services within a family-friendly environment to infants, children and adults. Working in families homes, communities, and schools, AST addresses all developmental needs, including language development, social skills, and building independence across the lifespan. Employing the finest clinicians including an unmatched number of Ph.D.s and over 60 Board Certified Behavior Analysts, AST continues to grow nationally in applied clinical and research communities. Explore our website, http://www.autismtherapies.com, and discover how Autism Spectrum Therapies is helping individuals with autism achieve their full potential.

AST is part of the Learn It family of companies, helping children succeed in school and life. Learn more about our companies at http://www.learnitsystems.com/family
Denver Comic Con (DCC) holds its fifth annual convention this weekend, June 17 - 19, at the Denver Convention Center. Over its brief existence, DCC has surpassed any reasonable expectations by quickly growing into one of the largest events of its kind in the country. Attendance has grown from 27,000 in 2012 to over 105,000 in 2015. By comparison, San Diego Comic Con International, the worlds largest comic convention, drew around 167,000 people in 2015.

DCC is unique among comic-cons in that it is one of the few independently operated such events of its size. It was founded as, and remains, a program of the non-profit educational organization, Pop Culture Classroom (http://popcultureclassroom.org/). Pop Culture Classrooms mission, as stated on their website, is to inspire a love of learning, to increase literacy, celebrate diversity and build community through pop culture education. Through DCCs dramatic rise in popularity, Pop Culture Classroom, a Denver-based organization, has managed to stay true to the community component of its mission by relying heavily on local artists and local businesses to stage the convention.

The official print partner of DCC is Denver Print Company. Similar to DCC and Pop Culture Classroom, Denver Print Company is a business that has come a long way in a short amount of time. Founded in just 2008, Denver Print Company has now become one of the leading locally-owned print shops in the metro area, poised to near 2 million in sales for 2016.

A big part of Denver Print Companys success has been its early partnership with DCC. 2016 marks the companys fourth year as DCCs official print partner. An event the size of DCC requires a massive amount of printing simply for crowd control and directional signage. While Denver Print Company handles all of this more mundane type of printing for DCC, they also produce the more high-profile items, such as the banners announcing celebrity appearances.

This my favorite thing that we print all year! says Denver Prints COO, David Cowell. It all began with a phone call, and its been great. Ive been a huge fan of comics and all that stuff since I was a kid, so it always gets me excited.

While the business from DCC has, of course, been of benefit to Denver Print Company, the exposure to the highly profitable pop-culture niche market (sometimes affectionately called the geek or nerd market) has also been invaluable. In part due to the DCC partnership, Denver Print Company also has contracts to do printing for the Star Wars Night events that are held annually by the Rockies, Avalanche, and Rapids. They also have a steady stream of business that comes from selling custom-designed geek stickers and t-shirts, both online and from their north Denver shop.

There are many large printing corporations with operations in the Denver area. It would not have been surprising if a large-scale event such as DCC had turned to one of these companies for their printing needs. It speaks to Pop Culture Classrooms commitment to the local community that they decided to partner with a 20-employee Denver company for their printing needs. The fact that Denver Print Company can meet these printing needs and bring DCCs business back year after year, suggests that they might be doing something right as well.

Denver Print Company will have a booth at DCC this weekend. Guests can have their picture taken in an action figure package, and there will be unique custom-designed pop-culture t-shirts, hats, and stickers for sale.

http://www.denverprintcompany.com
Techbridge's New CEO Nikole Collins-Puri If girls are left behind in STEM, the nation will continue to be left behind. And for all of us at Techbridge  that is not an option.

After a months long national search process, Techbridge today announced the appointment of Nikole Collins-Puri as Chief Executive Officer / Executive Director, effective July 18. Ms. Collins-Puri succeeds Techbridge founder and CEO, Dr. Linda Kekelis, who retired from Techbridge in December 2015.

Nikole's leadership and proven track record working with women and girls around economic empowerment gives her a unique and powerful perspective on Techbridges mission," said Kim Ondreck Carim, Chair of Techbridge's National Board of Directors. I am confident that her diverse experience and passion will allow us to lead the organization and the girls we serve well into the future.

Ms. Collins-Puri has deep experience in strategy, leadership, fund development and implementing ideas that advance progress for girls, women and communities of color. She comes to Techbridge from the Womens Foundation of California, where she served as Chief Strategist of Philanthropic Initiatives. In this role, she led the Womens Economic Mobility initiative to ensure low-income women have skills and opportunities to provide for their families and future. Prior to this position, she held senior roles at College Board and AT&T, where she scaled a Diversity and Inclusion initiative for 60,000 global employees, resulting in the companys #2 position of most diverse companies for Diversity Inc. magazine. It was during these years that Ms. Collins-Puri saw the importance of engaging girls in the field of STEM.

I am excited and humbled to lead Techbridge in its next chapter, said Ms. Collins-Puri. Increasing the number of girls who pursue a career in STEM is essential for innovation and critical to the nations competitive position in the world. If girls are left behind in STEM, the nation will continue to be left behind. And for all of us at Techbridge  that is not an option.

Looking ahead to the future of Techbridge, Ms. Collins-Puri reflects, Techbridge is at the forefront of shifting the national conversation about girls in STEM. We have the research, practice, expertise and community connections we need to scale and inform systems and strategies that will move girls from pipeline to a position of power within the STEM field. I am honored to build upon the 16 years of dedication and success that Techbridge has achieved and lead the organization through its next chapter.

Nikole received her BA from the University of South Florida and MPA from Baruch College in New York. She resides in Oakland, CA with her husband, Ashwin and son, Xavier.

The search for the CEO began in January 2016 and was led by a team from Olive Grove, a consulting firm specializing in the nonprofit and philanthropic fields.
Billboard about Islam in chicago - GainPeace organization the billboard has generated numerous calls of support for the Muslim community and commend GainPeace on embarking on a campaign to educate and build bridges.

GainPeace, an outreach organization in Chicago, has launched an educational campaign using a billboard to invite public to learn about the true teachings of Islam. The campaign will run from June to Aug 16, 2016. The campaign includes a billboard on Islam and Muslim on Highway 294, two blocks north of Highway 290, facing north. GainPeaces campaign is in response to the increasing rhetoric by presidential nominee, Mr. Donald Trump, and the recent mass shooting in Orlando, FL,

As a free offer, the visitors to the website, GainPeace.com, and the callers to the hotline, 1-800-662-ISLAM, can obtain a free copy of the Quran in English and a book on the life of Prophet Muhammad.

Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, director of GainPeace, proclaims: the billboard has generated numerous calls of support for the Muslim community and commend GainPeace on embarking on a campaign to educate and build bridges. He added: Hopefully, by reading from the source of Islam, the Quran, the readers will find that Islam stands against violence, killing and injustice and for justice and preservation of all lives.

Due to the success response to the current billboard, GainPeace is renting two more billboards in Chicago near the Midway airport.

Additional outreach efforts by GainPeace includes sending postcards about Muslims in America, Myths about Islam to peoples homes, Mosque open houses for neighbors and info tables on Islam at major festivals in the Chicago area.

GainPeace is an outreach project of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). ICNA is one of the largest, non-profit, independent, and grassroots organization of American Muslims with several chapters and affiliates across the nation. ICNA is also a leading American Muslim organization dedicated to the betterment of society through the promotion of Islamic values. Since 1968, ICNA has worked to build relations between communities by devoting itself to education, outreach, social services and relief efforts.

Media Contacts and interviews:

1. Sabeel Ahmed, Director, GainPeace, 847-858-6680, Sabeel(at)GainPeace(dot)com

2. Hafiz Abdul Basit, Public Relations, 312-231-2749, basit(at)GainPeace(dot)com

Sincerely,

Hafiz Abdul Basit

Director of Public Relations, GainPeace - Chicago

Website: GainPeace.com

Youtube: youtube.com/GainPeace

For media files, please see the links below:

1. Billboard Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gainpeace/albums/72157669106476056

2. Billboard Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMIKpzBKoZE&feature=youtu.be

3. Postcards on Islam - https://www.flickr.com/photos/gainpeace/albums/72157667082405163

4. Mosque open house - https://www.flickr.com/photos/gainpeace/albums/72157666347731686/page2
76 The Movie A Story of Love, Honour and Bullets

Award winning marketing and events company EMC3 (http://www.emc3nigeria.com) , are proud to announce that they have been formally engaged to handle the International Marketing, Publicity and Global Promotional Campaign for 76 the Movie  a US$3 million period dramatization.

The production is a love story embedded in treachery, deceit, patriotism and faith. Set in Ibadan, Nigeria, against the backdrop of transition and the struggle for political stability. Nigeria is Africas most populous nation with 175 million people, whose major languages include English (official), Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa along with numerous indigenous dialects, Christianity and Islam being the main religions.

February 13, 1976 was a black Friday that Nigerians will never forget. The nation was rocked by the news of the assassination of General Murtala Ramat Muhammed, the beloved Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. He was killed along with his Aide de Camp, Lieutenant Akintunde Akinshehinwa on his way to the Mosque. Colonel Ibrahim Taiwo, the military Governor of Kwara State and a number of other officers were also killed. Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka played a leading role in the failed military coup against the government. Over 30 conspirators were executed on March 11, 1976 at Bar Beach, Victoria Island, but Dimka was publicly executed on May 15, 1976 at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos.

76 the Movie, which recently had the full approval and endorsement of the Nigerian Army and the Muhammed family is set during this era of military assassinations and political unrest in Nigeria. It comes 40 years after the actual events, and follows four years of work by the multi award winning Director Izu Ojukwu and the production teams of Adonis Productions and Princewills Trust.

The film stars renowned and notable Nollywood megastars Rita Dominic, Ramsey Nouah, Chidi Mokeme, Ibinabo Fiberesinma, Ada Ofoegbu, Daniel K Daniel (2016 Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards Best Actor Winner) and a host of other rising stars. At the centre of this romantic thriller is the charismatic, Captain Joseph Dewa, indicted by the military for his alleged role in the coup. According to its Director Izu Ojukwu, Its actually a story told from a dual point of view  from the soldiers patriotic perspective and from that of the officers wife. The film celebrates the strongest of human values: courage, loyalty, patience, trust and sacrifice.

The international promotional campaign looks to bring this powerful, heart wrenching and dynamic movie (whilst lending some considerable knowledge of these historic events) to a global audience as well as a new generation of film lovers.

Executive Producers Prince Tonye Princewill and Adonijah Owiriwa at a press briefing to unveil the new http://www.76themovie.com website and introduce the new marketing team confessed that paying attention to detail came at a big price. "...And since the money was raised from within, we took our time. In the end, we are glad we did. '76 the Movie is coming at the best time and it appears from initial feedback, that the wait was well worth it", Adonijah said.

The movie is currently on a tour of educational institutions and select private screenings after which it is due to be released at the end of the year. Visit the website for details or follow 76 the movie on all social media platforms.

VIEW THE TRAILER HERE : https://youtu.be/AkVPKe5q6IM

Website: http://www.76movie.com/

Facebook: 76TheMovie (NOTE: no spacing) : https://www.facebook.com/76themovie/

Twitter: @76themovieng (Hashtag #76TheMovie) : https://twitter.com/76themovieng

Instagram: 76_The_Movie (Hashtag #76TheMovie) : https://www.instagram.com/76_the_movie/

For further information please contact:

Baba-Jallah Epega Baba(at)emc3(dot)eu / +447973602117

JayJay Epega news(at)epegamedia(dot)com / +447505045221
Exterion UK display using BroadSign and TINT platforms in the London Underground. Already working with leading technology platforms in other media, we are excited to be collaborating with the industry standard in digital signage (BroadSign). - Tim Sae Koo, CEO at TINT

The top-ranked digital signage software provider, BroadSign International, LLC, has partnered with TINT to make its social media marketing platform readily available to Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) media owners.

TINTs platform allows marketers and advertisers to source real content from local communities, which increases engagement and drives conversions through dynamic social platforms and layouts. DOOH media owners using BroadSigns automated CMS will be able to personalize and control the content taken from major social networks, messaging apps, review sites and blogs before displaying it on prominent screens with the confidence that only desired content will be played.

Already working with leading technology platforms in other media, we are excited to be collaborating with the industry standard in digital signage, said Tim Sae Koo, CEO at TINT. BroadSigns campaign-based approach to content management, API for integrations and proof of performance reporting will work synergistically with TINTs platform and benefit premium digital signage networks and their viewers.

BroadSign and TINT have already seen joint execution come to life through Exterion Media UKs March 2016 World Wildlife Fund campaign and Global Radio activation across the London Underground. DOOH displays encouraged transit passengers to declare their support through social media, with TINT enabling the collection and curation of all conversations shared via #EarthHourUK on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

BroadSign customers are looking for a simple and effective means of incorporating social media in their campaigns, be they in advertising or verticals such as internal communications, said Jean Beaudry, Chief Operating Officer at BroadSign. With global offices, a cross-license deal with Monster Media and relationships with brands from Coca-Cola to the United Nations, we believe TINT will be an appealing addition to our customers toolkits.

To learn more about BroadSign and TINTs partnership, complete this short form to speak with a company representative.

About BroadSign

BroadSign International, LLC is the first global provider of cloud-based digital signage software. Its award-winning, automated approach to content management is mature, reliable and robust, and gives digital out-of-home networks an unlimited capacity for growth without adding personnel.

BroadSigns constant growth, extensive customer base and dedication to predicting and responding to industry trends make its digital signage solutions a safe bet for the future of networks with even the most complex of requirements. For more information about BroadSign, visit http://broadsign.com.

About TINT

TINT is a content marketing platform that allows brands to source authentic community content from social media, news, review sites, etc. and display it dynamically onto any digital channel (websites, TV screens, apps, DOOH billboards, ad units, etc.) to drive conversions. Over 45,000 brands in 172 countries use and love us.

About Exterion Media

Exterion Media is Europes largest privately held Out-of-Home advertising business. Engaging consumers on the move and using wide-ranging insight tools, it delivers valuable, relevant audiences to advertisers. Its diverse inventory formats and environments, both classic and digital, include transport (London Underground, bus, rail) billboards, street furniture and retail.

Exterion Media believes in making the everyday inspirational  by putting the right content, in front of the right people, at the right time and in the right location, Exterion Media transforms ordinary journeys into extraordinary experiences.

With operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, The Netherlands and Spain, Exterion Media works with a global portfolio of partners to engage and deliver audiences on a local and multi-country scale.
Life is Good and ALEX AND ANI, CHARITY BY DESIGN launched a new Life is Good Collection today, featuring four charm bangles to spread the power of optimism and support kids in need. The four charms, available in shiny gold and shiny silver finishes, retail for $28 and serve as everyday reminders to focus on the good:

Listen to Your Heart  Trust, Love, Devotion

Simplify  Pure, Minimalist, Genuine

Fear, Less  Strong, Brave, Undefeated

Life is Good  Joy, Choice, Optimism

For every Life is Good charm bangle sold between June and December 31, 2016, ALEX AND ANI will donate 20% of the purchase price, with a minimum donation of $25,000, to the Life is Good Kids Foundation. The funds will support childcare professionals and their work to build healing, life-changing relationships with children and their caregivers.

At Life is Good, we are always looking for like-minded partners to drive our mission to spread the power of optimism forward, said Steve Gross, the Chief Playmaker of the Life is Good Kids Foundation. This new collection with ALEX AND ANI will help fuel our mission by supporting high-quality care for children across the United States and Haiti who are growing up amidst poverty, violence, and illness.

Our partnership with the Life is Good Kids Foundation was formed based on the common belief that positive action has the ability to transform our next generation of youth, said Nicki Maher, SVP of ALEX AND ANI, CHARITY BY DESIGN. Four designs were created through the teamwork of two like-minded brands, who believe in the power of collaboration to create a strong impact within our community. Our hope is that customers will connect with these bangles through their fun-loving designs and with the knowledge that their purchase is generating change for children who will witness the effects first hand.

Join Life is Good and ALEX AND ANI to celebrate the launch tonight, June 16th from 7-9:00 P.M EST at their Patriot Place storefronts in Foxboro for food, cocktails, and an appearance by Life is Good Kids Foundations founder Steve Gross. Fans can RSVP for the event at http://do617.com/lifeisgood. Each RSVP will be entered to win a pair of tickets to Luke Bryans sold out show at Gillette Stadium on July 16th.

The Life is Good collection will be available at ALEX AND ANI stores nationwide, alexandani.com, lifeisgood.com and authorized retailers for $28 each. For more information about the Life is Good bangles, visit alexandani.com. For more information about Life is Good, visit http://www.lifeisgood.com

ABOUT THE LIFE IS GOOD COMPANY

The Life is Good Company is a $100 million lifestyle brand dedicated to spreading the power of optimism. The company donates 10 percent of its net profits to help kids in need. To date, the company has helped to raise over $11 million, principally through Life is Good products, events and community fundraising efforts. Life is Good is a registered trademark of The Life is Good Company. Please visit lifeisgood.com for more details and follow Life is Good on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

ABOUT THE LIFE IS GOOD KIDS FOUNDATION

The Life is Good Kids Foundation is an accredited 501(c)(3) that partners with organizations serving the most vulnerable children to improve the quality of their care. The Foundation's Playmaker program connects with schools, hospitals, camps, and a variety of social service agencies to give childcare professionals the resources they need to make a positive, life-changing impact at a pivotal time in a child's development. For more information, please visit lifeisgood.com/kidsfoundation

ABOUT ALEX AND ANI

ALEX AND ANI creates meaningful, eco-conscious jewelry and accessories to positively empower and connect humanity. Carolyn Rafaelian, Founder, CEO, and Chief Creative Officer designs each piece. Carolyn believes that every individual has their own positive energy to share with the world. By incorporating powerful symbolism and personal meaning into each product, ALEX AND ANI provides a vehicle for consumers to express their individuality. The company is passionate about the wellbeing of our planet, our communities, and our individual paths. ALEX AND ANI uses recycled materials with eco-conscious processes. Its CHARITY BY DESIGN division has strengthened non-profit organizations through innovative partnerships and collaborative experiences, resulting in donations of more than $30 million. An Inc. 500 Company, ALEX AND ANI has retail stores as well as retail partners worldwide. ALEX AND ANI products are proudly designed and crafted in America and made with love. The companys World Headquarters is located in the greater Providence, Rhode Island area. Please visit alexandani.com for more information.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Kelsey Cycan  Life is Good

(410) 627-5948; Kelsey(at)harmonica(dot)co

Meredith Pratt  ALEX AND ANI

Bailey Thomas  Full Picture

mpratt(at)alexandani(dot)com; bthomas(at)fullpic(dot)com
OrganicPop Ancient Grains We are excited to continue our trend of industry firsts with the OrganicPop line, said Jim Schneider, President and Managing Partner of Saratoga Chips.

Saratoga Chips, Americas First Kettle Chip, is excited to announce the launch of a new range of organic ready-to-eat popcorn. The product range, OrganicPop, is a USDA Certified ready-to-eat (RTE) organic popcorn line offered in four flavor varieties. OrganicPop was developed to satisfy two consumer driven trends in the snack food industry. Its no secret that both ready-to-eat (RTE) Popcorn and Organic Snack Foods are both posting double digit growth in consumer research data, year over year. OrganicPop is a fusion of these two hot trends in one unique and innovative line-up, said Jim Schneider, President and Managing Partner.

The difficulties of creating an organic popcorn snack range from the ground up has been challenging, explained Danny Jameson, Vice President of Operations and chief architect behind the OrganicPop brand. From ingredient validation, supplier certification and ultimate USDA approval, every step of development and production has to be documented and proven to meet the USDAs strict organic standards, Jameson continued.

The first of the four varieties in the new OrganicPop line is Ancient Grains, which is a kettle-popped cluster product that includes black chai seeds, red quinoa, and golden amaranth kettle cooked in organic raw turbinado sugar. The second variety is a family favorite, Farmhouse Butter, which is made with real organic butter. The third variety is another household favorite, Heartland Cheddar, which is made with real organic white cheddar cheese. And finally, rounding out the line up for OrganicPop is Roasted Garlic and Kale, which is a delicious blend of oven roasted organic garlic and freeze dried kale with only 35 calories per cup, making it one of the lowest calorie RTE popcorns on the market. The entire OrganicPop line up is USDA Certified, Non-GMO Project Verified, Certified Gluten Free, Kosher OU, and made with Saratoga Chips Mountain Pure Pink Himalayan Salt.

Saratoga Chips has seen significant growth over the last few years and is excited about future expansion plans in both their traditional kettle chips, Saratoga Chips, as well as the new OrganicPop range. Saratoga Chips also has plans for new and exciting products to be released later in 2016 and in 2017. We are excited to continue our trend of industry firsts with the OrganicPop line, said Jim Schneider, President and Managing Partner of Saratoga Chips. Our ongoing commitment has been and will always be to provide delicious, better for you, snack options, he added.

The OrganicPop range can be found at all Shoprite Supermarkets, all Hannaford Grocery Stores and all Price Chopper Stores. Additional retailers are joining the OrganicPop movement daily, so customers are encouraged to visit the Saratoga Chips website for an updated list of retail outlets.

About Saratoga Chips:

Saratoga Chips are Simply Made, Simply Natural, Simply Delicious . The All-Natural chip, available in 8 flavors, is Certified Non-GMO, Zero Trans Fats, Nut Free, Lactose Free, Kosher Certified, Zero Cholesterol, and Gluten Free. The delicious snack was created in Saratoga Springs, New York in 1853 and reintroduced to grocery retailers in 2009. Customers can find Saratoga Chips at select retailers such as Walmart, Hannaford, Price Chopper, ShopRite, Weis Markets, The Fresh Markets, Tops Markets, Shaws, Bed Bath & Beyond and Sams Club.
Today, at European Development Days, representatives from Rwanda and Mexico joined leadership from Conservation International and current partners to announce the first two countries to join the Sustainable Coffee Challenge  a global collaborative effort aimed at making coffee the worlds first sustainable agricultural product. The Challenge convenes industry, conservation, agricultural development partners  and now for the first time, governments  in the shared goal of increasing demand for sustainable coffee by establishing commitments by actors across the sector. These commitments will stimulate further collective action around a common framework, which will underscore the necessary and urgent need to increase widespread adoption of sustainable practices by producers to help safeguard the prosperity and well-being of farmers while also conserving forests, water and soil. All of these efforts will help to ensure a lasting and sustained coffee supply for generations to come.

Conservation International identified the need for the Challenge in collaboration with Starbucks and launched the initiative with 18 partners during the UN climate negotiations in Paris in December 2015. The Challenge has since grown to comprise 48 partners, including inaugural commitments from these two countries toward ethical and sustainable agricultural practices for their coffee sectors.

"Coffee is a critically important commercial crop in Rwanda. It plays a major role in the economy of the country, contributing significantly to foreign exchange earnings and to the monetisation of the rural economy, said Ambassador Bill Kayonga, Chief Executive Officer of Rwandas National Agricultural Export Development Board (NAEB). More than 355,000 small holder farm families produce and depend on it for their livelihoods. We have an obligation to these farmers, their lands and the economy of our country to ensure the continued sustainability of the industry.

Rwandas commitment includes efforts to increase production/yield per tree, improve soil fertility, strengthen farmer organizations, increase local coffee consumption, and improve the traceability along the value chain.

Coffee is a crucial product for Mexico with a current estimated production of 2.35 million bags annually, added Santiago Arguello, Director of Coordination for Mexicos Integrated Plan for the Care of Coffee from the Secretary of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA). As in most coffee producing regions around the world, the vast majority of our coffee is grown by smallholder farmers  nearly 500,000  who rely on the industry for their economic livelihoods. We believe that by publicly stating our commitment to work with our farmers to ensure sustainable practices that increase productivity and enhance their livelihood, while also minimizing the impact on the ecosystem, we can help set an example of how to elevate positive outcomes across all coffee producing regions.

Mexicos commitments include improving farm productivity, providing access to credit programs and improving the capacity and skills of the producers.

The Challenge comes at a pivotal time, as warming temperatures, drought and changing weather patterns, compounded by market volatility and aging coffee trees continue to negatively impact the industry. These issues are already affecting coffee growing regions of Mexico and Rwanda by way of extreme weather, floods and increased crop diseases, such as leaf rust. These fluctuations affect supply, producer livelihoods and the overall environment.

At Starbucks, we source coffee from more than thirty countries around the world, working hand in hand with farmers to ensure they get access to the tools, information and resources that will help ensure their longevity and the sustainability of the industry, said Craig Russell, executive vice president, global coffee, Starbucks. We are proud purchasers of high-quality coffee from Mexico and Rwanda for many years, with both countries part of our ethical sourcing program for over a decade. Its exciting to see their engagement in the Challenge and the role they can have in effecting change on a broad scale.

Beginning next week, the Sustainable Coffee Challenge will be collecting commitments like those made by both countries through an online Commitments Hub on http://www.sustaincoffee.org. The Hub will help identify and catalogue various commitments to sustainable production and related initiatives underway across the coffee sector. The goal is to increase transparency about what is already being done, share knowledge of what is working, measure successes in concrete terms and, ultimately, ensure shared success in making coffee sustainable for the long-term.

Conservation International has been working with companies across the coffee industry to encourage sustainability for nearly two decades. We know from experience that we can grow coffee in a way that protects forests and farmers  but we need to keep pushing these techniques to global scale, said Peter Seligmann, Chairman and CEO of Conservation International. No single entity can do it alone. Were encouraged by the commitments made today by Mexico and Rwanda and challenge others to join us in this effort toward truly achieving the worlds first sustainable agricultural product.

###

About The Sustainable Coffee Challenge

The Sustainable Coffee Challenge is a growing global network of 48 current partners from across the coffee industry. We are dedicated to ensuring that coffee is sustainable for the long term while protecting the prosperity and wellbeing of farmers and conserving forests, water and soil.

The Sustainable Coffee Challenge is managed by Conservation International with initial funding and support from founding partner Starbucks. To learn more about the challenge and our partners, go to http://www.sustaincoffee.org.

About Conservation International

Conservation International (CI) uses an innovative blend of science, policy and partnerships to protect the nature people rely on for food, fresh water, and livelihoods. Founded in 1987, CI works in more than 30 countries on six continents to ensure a healthy, prosperous planet that supports us all. Learn more about CI and the "Nature Is Speaking" campaign, and follow CI's work on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

For more information, please contact:

Amy Rogers

VOX GLOBAL (on Behalf of Conservation International)

202.772.5037

arogers(at)voxglobal.com
This is the seventh year that we have held this contest and unveiling, and every year the quality of the contest submissions get more impressive.

AccuQuilt hosted its annual quilt block Unveiling Event on June 9, and the new winning quilt block design, Point of View, by Terri Vanden Bosch of Doon, Iowa made its debut on a gigantic 17' x 17' billboard outside of their headquarters where it will reside all year. AccuQuilt employees as well as thousands of people who travel along I-80 will see the huge billboard everyday.

Originally called the Barn Quilt Contest, AccuQuilts 7th Annual Quilt Block Design Contest pays homage to the Barn Quilt Trail movement, which was started in 2001 by Donna Sue Groves of Adams County, Ohio. At the start of the contest, quilters have about three weeks to submit their designs and then two weeks of voting begins. After the designs have been narrowed down, three lucky winners walk away with the top prizes.

Vanden Bosch got inspiration for her design after returning home from a motorcycle ride while contending with less than ideal windy conditions. Her quilt block design boasts an assortment of squares, diamonds, triangles and bright, vibrant colors. Vanden Bosch, a longarm quilter, almost did not enter the contest this year after entering several times in the past. Further, not only did Vanden Bosch receive top honors as the grand prizewinner, but she also received an honorable mention for another quilt block design.

Over 100 quilters from the Let's GO! Quilting Retreat--sponsored by AccuQuilt and Country Traditions quilt shop (Fremont, Nebraska)--were in attendance. Before the unveiling and trunk show by quilting icon Eleanor Burns, AccuQuilt President Greg Gaggini shared the AccuQuilt story with retreaters after they toured the AccuQuilt Gallery and viewed quilts from the 2015 Quilt Block Winner Exhibit.

Additionally, retreaters spent a little time in AccuQuilt's state-of-the-art Dream Studio where staff members conducted demonstrations of the fabric cutters and fabric-cutting dies. It was a special treat for those quilters who were not already familiar with AccuQuilt's products.

Gaggini reflected on the event, "This is the seventh year that we have held this contest and unveiling, and every year the quality of the contest submissions get more impressive. We were particularly honored to have Eleanor Burns join us this year. She is a legend in the quilting world and the attendees were thrilled to be able to meet her."

After Gaggini finished entertaining the energetic crowd, he led them outside to watch the quilt block unveiling. Before the big moment, Vanden Bosch shared the inspiration for her design with the audience. Many took photos of the festivities before coming back inside for Burns' trunk show. Burns called on two retreaters to assist her with the quilts. Both ladies proudly unfolded the quilts, making sure to show the crowd the front and the back as Burns discussed each quilt's history. Her quilt collection included countless amazing antique quilts, some with a modern twist.

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 accuquilt.com or call 888.258.7913.

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7700 Old Georgetown Road, Bethesda MD Bethesda is the perfect place for us to launch the next era of RainKing.

RainKing Solutions, Inc., a leader in IT sales intelligence, is moving from its current headquarters on Rockledge Drive in Bethesda to a new, larger space on Old Georgetown Road. As part of the relocation and expansion, RainKing is planning to add more than 60 new sales, research, engineering and client success positions as it continues to successfully grow its market share within the sales intelligence solutions industry.

Since RainKings inception, Maryland has been our home, and we are excited at the prospect of continuing the growth and success of the company in downtown Bethesda, said CEO John Stanfill. Bethesda is the perfect place for us to launch the next era of RainKing. The lively urban setting, complete with direct access to the metro and hundreds of eateries, will allow us to attract and retain the regions best and brightest sales professionals. 

RainKing provides rich, up-to-date sales intelligence on more than 50,000 mid- to large-size organizations and over 700,000 IT leaders and decision-makers across the globe. Its SaaS-based solution allows customers to identify their best prospects and empowers sales teams to effectively target the key decision makers. RainKings research team also uncovers more than 1,500 new, actionable spending triggers  called InsideScoops  which are published to customers every business day. The company works with established players in the tech space, like HP, Dell and IBM, as well as high-growth companies like Tableau, FireEye, and Splunk.

Creating jobs and helping companies reach the next level of growth is a key goal of our administration, said Governor Hogan. RainKing is one of a number of high-tech companies that have chosen to grow and expand in Maryland this year  a testament to our well-qualified workforce and growing business environment. We wish them even more success in the years to come.

We are proud to support RainKings expansion in Maryland, said Maryland Department of Commerce Secretary Mike Gill. Maryland Commerce, working in lock step with our local partners in Montgomery County, is committed to help growing companies like RainKing and ensuring they continue to call Maryland home.

Montgomery County is pleased to support the relocation and expansion of RainKings cutting-edge information and software work, said Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett. The future is here and companies such as RainKing are an important part of that future.

To assist with the expansion, the Maryland Department of Commerce has approved a $200,000 conditional loan through the Maryland Economic Development Assistance Authority and Fund (MEDAAF). The company is also eligible for a number of state and local tax credits. Additionally, Montgomery County has approved a $100,000 grant convertible to a loan from the countys Economic Development Fund.



Media Contact:

Melissa Macatuno, Marketing Manager

(240) 781-5815
Oil and propane prices have returned these heating fuels to their best value status for most of the last 30 years. Theres really no real reason to switch. The door hanger will save you time on explaining your preference.

Maine Energy Facts, Maines 24/7 source for home heating advice, launches the Maine Energy Facts Do Not Disturb Contest that allows homeowners who are happy with home heating oil or propane to inform natural gas salespeople of their disinterest in switching products. The door hanger will be distributed through newspapers across Maine, and is also available to download and print at-home on the Maine Energy Facts website.

Participants can enter the contest by emailing a photo of their door hanger in place to Maine Energy Facts. Once submitted, theyll have a chance at winning a $25 gift card to Amazon.com. Maine Energy Facts is expected to give away four gift cards per week for six weeks in a row.

The campaign was born from homeowners dissatisfaction with numerous house calls from natural gas sales teams during the summer months in Maine. Summer is a time for relaxation and spending time with the family without any interruptions from a salesperson, said Jamie Py, President of Maine Energy Marketers Association. Oil and propane prices have returned these heating fuels to their best value status for most of the last 30 years. Theres really no real reason to switch. The door hanger will save you time on explaining your preference.

Maine Energy Facts encourages Maine homeowners who would like to keep gas salespeople away to download the door hanger from their website immediately. The door hanger is home printer-friendly, and can be accessed at: http://www.maineenergyfacts.com/contest.

The photo contest will begin on June 16th, 2016 and end on July 28th, 2016. Twenty-four (24) Grand Prize winners will be awarded and will receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Participants will have a chance to win by submitting a photo with the Maine Energy Facts door hangers in place through email to photocontest(at)maineenergyfacts(dot)com. To access the official rules, go to http://www.maineenergyfacts.com/contest, and be sure to visit Maine Energy Facts Facebook page for the latest contest updates.

About Maine Energy Facts

Maine Energy Facts is Maines source for home heating advice, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sponsored by the Maine Energy Marketers Association, Maine Energy Facts aims to provide truthful information to Maine homeowners about their energy options. To get more facts about home energy, visit http://www.maineenergyfacts.com/

About Maine Energy Marketers Association (MEMA)

MEMA is a statewide association made up of more than 350 member businesses. MEMA members serve more than 415,000 Maine households in keeping nearly one million Maine residents warm and cozy. For more information on MEMA, visit http://www.maineenergymarketers.com/.
Misty Hataway-Cone and R. Alan York of GODWIN PC have been selected to H Texas Magazine's 2016 "Top Lawyers in Houston"

For GODWIN PC President, COO and Managing Shareholder, Alan York, the 2016 Top Lawyers honor marks his eighth selection to this prestigious list. Houston Administrative Shareholder, Misty Cone has now been honored five times by H Texas Magazine among Houston's best.

GODWIN PC Chairman and CEO, Don Godwin lauded the selections, saying, "Alan York and Misty Cone are two of the finest attorneys in Houston. They are the leaders of our Houston office, and among the top leaders in our firm. We are very proud to have them as part of GODWIN PC."

The H Texas Top Lawyers list is the longest-running legal honors program in Houston and is the go-to resource guide for many top-level decision makers as they research the top attorneys in Houston and its surrounding areas. Winning attorneys are nominated by clients, peers, and the magazine's readership before going through the final selection process for this highly sought-after accolade.

GODWIN PC is a trial and appellate law firm with offices in Dallas and Houston, Texas. The firm focuses on a wide array of legal matters including commercial litigation, appellate law, employment law, family law, bankruptcy, and more. They have been providing effective representation to Fortune 500 companies, middle-market leaders and notable individuals in some of the nations most public and high-stakes trials for more than 35 years. To learn more about GODWIN PC, visit their website at http://www.godwinlaw.com/.
As a company that has been around for 16 years now, its very exciting to still be among the fastest-growing businesses in Chicago.

@properties, the largest independent real estate brokerage firm in Illinois, has been named to the Crains Chicago Business annual Fast Fifty list of the fastest-growing companies in Chicago for the fifth time. @properties co-founders Thaddeus Wong and Michael Golden made the announcement.

Chicago-based @properties made the 2016 list at No. 42 based on five-year revenue growth of 307 percent. Last year the firm ranked No. 43. @properties had the 7th highest annual revenue among this years Fast Fifty companies, and was also the only for-sale residential real estate brokerage firm to make the list. The company first appeared on Crains Fast Fifty list in 2007, ranking fifth.

Established in 2000, @properties has grown from a four-person boutique firm to one of the top 11 residential brokers in the U.S. by sales volume. The firm now has 23 office locations and more than 2,000 licensed brokers in Chicago, surrounding suburbs, Southwest Michigan and Lake Geneva, Wisc., where it opened an office last year. 2015 was a record year for the firm, with closed annual sales of $7.4 billion  its highest volume in company history.

As a company that has been around for 16 years now, its very exciting to still be among the fastest-growing businesses in Chicago. Last year was our most successful year yet, and were grateful for our brokers and staff and their commitment to @properties, said Golden.

While we continue to grow, weve remained a local, independent company with a unique culture, and that has resonated with both our brokers and clients, said Wong.

To view the complete Crains Fast Fifty list, visit http://www.chicagobusiness.com/section/fast-50

About @properties

@properties is the No. 1 independent residential brokerage firm in Illinois and one of the top 11 residential brokers in the U.S. by sales volume. @properties has more than 2,000licensed brokers in 23 offices throughout downtown Chicago, surrounding suburbs, southwest Michigan and Wisconsin. For more information, visit http://www.atproperties.com.
VISR, a predictive wellness startup dedicated to the health and safety of children, announced today that CEO Robert S. Reichmann will present at Founders Forum 2016, joining His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge during his headline session on technology and cyberbullying. A private, invitation-only event for world-class innovators, entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs, and senior investors, the prestigious forum will be held June 15  16 at the Grove, Hertfordshire, just outside of London.

The VISR CEO was personally selected to not only attend, but also present at Founders Forum, speaking June 16 on the headline session topic Tech for good: start-ups for social impact and tackling cyberbullying. VISR provides an innovative app, powered by big data and machine learning, that warns parents about issues their children face online. To date, its solution has analyzed millions of social media posts and generated tens of thousands of alerts on cyberbullying and other potentially harmful online activity like predatory behavior, explicit content, and late-night use. The app also detects signs of mental health concerns including depression, eating disorders, and self-harm.

The Duke of Cambridge formed a new taskforce in April to help children and families touched by cyberbullying. The yearlong taskforce, led by technology industry partners, aims to develop an industry-wide response to online bullying and its impact on young teens.

VISR is honored to be invited to this unique event, and Im especially proud to take part in The Duke of Cambridges session on cyberbullying, Reichmann says. Our mission is protecting kids and supporting parents in the unpredictable world of social media, texting, and email, so its gratifying to have a voice before such an impressive community of influential tech leaders from around the globe. Online bullying is just one of the emerging problems that raises a red flag in our solution, so we can alert parents to the problem before it becomes larger and more complex. By analyzing the online activities and interactions of kids and notifying parents of potential issues, our app helps parents achieve a perfect balance between protecting their children and allowing them privacy and independence.

Now in its eleventh year, Founders Forum London brings together accomplished and inspiring digital entrepreneurs, corporate CEOs, and senior investors to engage in open debate, brainstorming, and problem-solving. From its London beginnings, the private network has now expanded into cities around the world, including New York, Madrid, and Paris. Founders Forum is dedicated to selecting the highest caliber and an optimal mix of guests, fostering a collaborative atmosphere, and offering intimate events where all guests have an opportunity to meet one another.

About VISR (http://visr.co/)

VISR (vizr) is a predictive wellness startup on a mission to help kids stay safe and healthy, by fusing technology with parental instinct. Powered by data and machine learning, VISR is an app that alerts parents to issues their kids face online.

The company was founded in 2014 by a team of parents and technologists who love innovation and want it to work towards a better world for their children. VISR is funded by Horizons Ventures and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Centres of Excellence.
While consumers usually see a rise in gas prices during the summer, there are several easy steps a person can take, such as carpooling or using public transportation, to reduce the expense of driving.

As summer nears, many consumers will take advantage of long awaited warm temperatures to take road trips or drive to the beach. With this added travel, there are still ways to avoid the burden of higher gas prices. As part of National Dump the Pump Day, American Consumer Credit Counseling has developed savvy tips to save consumers money at the pump.

With increased summer travel, consumers usually begin to notice the effect the cost of driving has on their wallets, said Steve Trumble, President, and CEO of American Consumer Credit Counseling, which is based in Newton, MA. While consumers usually see a rise in gas prices during the summer, there are several easy steps a person can take, such as carpooling or using public transportation, to reduce the expense of driving.

According to a 2015 AAA study, the average cost for a vehicle driven at 15,000 miles a year adds up to $8,698 per year, about $725 per month and 58 cents per day. Costs can vary based on the type of vehicle  small sedans average $6,729 per year where SUVs cost an average of $10,624 per year. Over the course of five years consumers owning an SUV could pay as much as $18,000 just on fuel compared to $11,000 for smaller cars.

ACCC offers these smart and savvy tips to save consumers money on transportation:

1. Carpool  Carpooling is an excellent alternative, especially if public transportation is not an option. By carpooling consumers save money on gas, reduce congestion on roads and highways, and have the ability to use carpool lanes, which could reduce consumers overall commute time.

2. Public transportation  Utilizing public transportation is a great way to avoid gas costs. Taking the bus or train can help both your wallet and the environment.

3. Dont speed  The majority of cars are most efficient and use the least amount of gas when traveling between 50 and 55 miles per hour. Going over this limit will decrease efficiency and increase the amount of fuel used.

4. Bike  Bike sharing has become extremely popular in most major cities, such as Boston (Hubway), New York (Citibike), Philadelphia (Indego) and Chicago (Divvy Bikes). Bike sharing can also increase options for getting around the city without having to deal with the expense of gas and parking or wasting your time sitting in traffic.

5. Route selection  Before hitting the road plan the route, and try to choose routes with less stop signs and traffic lights to avoid having to stop and accelerate too much. If you plan to make a few stops on your trip, make sure they are close in proximity.

6. Utilize gas saving websites  Sites such as gassbuddy.com compares prices of gas stations in your location and can help consumers find the lowest price.

ACCC is a 501(c)3 organization that provides free credit counseling, bankruptcy counseling, and housing counseling to consumers nationwide in need of financial literacy education and money management. For more information, contact ACCC:



For credit counseling, call 800-769-3571

For bankruptcy counseling, call 866-826-6924

For housing counseling, call 866-826-7180

Or visit us online at http://www.ConsumerCredit.com

About American Consumer Credit Counseling

American Consumer Credit Counseling (ACCC) is a nonprofit credit counseling 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to empowering consumers to achieve financial management through credit counseling, debt management, bankruptcy counseling, housing counseling, student loan counseling and financial education. In order to help consumers reach their goal of debt relief, ACCC provides a range of free consumer personal finance resources (http://www.consumercredit.com/financial-education) on a variety of topics including budgeting, credit and debt management, student loans, youth and money, homeownership, identity theft, senior living and retirement. Consumers can use ACCCs worksheets, videos, calculators, and blog articles to make the best possible decisions regarding their financial future. ACCC holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and is a member of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC). For more information or to access free financial education resources, log on to http://www.ConsumerCredit.com or visit http://www.TalkingCentsBlog.com.
Advantage/E-Z Rent-A-Car Stands Orlando Strong. Orlando is our headquarters and one of our flagship locations, said Scott Davido, President of AEZ. We want to assist those affected by this tragedy, and help the greater Orlando community persevere during this incredibly trying time."

The shooting at Pulse nightclub in our hometown of Orlando last Sunday morning has deeply affected all of us at Advantage Rent A Car and E-Z Rent-A-Car (AEZ). We would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to all of the victims and their loved ones.

Orlando is our headquarters and one of our flagship locations, said Scott Davido, President of AEZ. The events of this past weekend have hit home for us. We want to assist those affected by this tragedy, and help the greater Orlando community persevere during this incredibly trying time.

Both AEZ brands are providing free rentals in Orlando to immediate family members and domestic partners of those killed or injured in this tragedy.

These complementary rentals are available for standard and full-sized cars. We are asking that family members and partners book these reservations by phone (407-775-4337) rather than Internet. Additional information can be found on our web page, Advantage.com/OrlandoStrong.

Advantage and E-Z also are partnering with other local businesses to support the victims and their families by contributing to the OneOrlando Fund (OneOrlandoFund.org). In addition to the corporate donation, Advantage and E-Z are encouraging employees to give as well, and CEO Mehrdad Memarpouri has announced that the company will match staff donations to OneOrlando dollar for dollar.

AEZ believes in inclusiveness and diversity, Davido said, and fully supports the LGBT community. All customers, business partners and members of the AEZ team are treated with respect, regardless of sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, and the Company does not discriminate in its hiring practices.

Orlando is our city, our home. We stand with Orlando.

About Advantage Rent A Car

Advantage Rent A Car was founded in 1963 and is one of the leading rental car companies in the United States. Operating out of 44 locations, Advantage features one of the industrys newest and most diverse rental car fleets. The company also recently launched growth initiatives including Advantage for Business, a business customer program that offers a flat pricing structure and other perks for frequent business travelers. For more information about Advantage, visit Advantage.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

About E-Z Rent-A-Car

Founded in 1994 with a fleet of just nine cars, E-Z Rent-A-Car has grown to be one of the leading car rental companies in the United States. E-Z has delivered value to its customers by offering quality vehicles at attractive prices in convenient locations backed by responsive customer service. The company has expanded operations in the U.S. by growing its footprint in smaller markets. Today, E-Z services customers with over 30 conveniently located facilities throughout the country. For more information about E-Z Rent-A-Car, visit E-ZRentACar.com and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Coastal Living Magazine named it the best beach in America for a reason  and its in large part thanks to businesses like our sponsors who provide a memorable experience for families every summer.

OCNJ Daily, Ocean Citys daily online news source, just wrapped up a contest for a free weeks stay in a beach house valued at more than 6,000 dollars. After 30,000 entries were received, a winner was selected at random. Teresa Maute-Carr of Quakertown, Pennsylvania was the lucky winner.

Carr will begin her dream vacation, rent free in a five bedroom home, starting June 25th and ending July 2nd. The contest came on the heels of Coastal Living naming Ocean City, NJ the best beach in America. More information on this award can be found in the June issue of Coastal Living Magazine.

In addition to the vacation home, OCNJ Daily had a number of additional contest sponsors who are providing food and fun for the Carr Family.

Ken Wisnefski, Co-Owner of OCNJ Daily credits the success of the contest to the sponsors and the beauty of Ocean City, NJ. Wisnefski explained saying, We are thrilled that more than 30,000 people were excited for the opportunity to win a beach house in Ocean City, NJ. Coastal Living Magazine named it the best beach in America for a reason  and its in large part thanks to businesses like our sponsors who provide a memorable experience for families every summer.

Thanks to the sponsors, the Carr family will enjoy:



Passion Vines is providing a $25 gift card and a premium bottle of vodka.

Gillians Wonderland Pier is providing $150 worth of ride tickets.

Berkshire Hathaway Home Services is providing five weekly beach tags.

A wine, cheese and candy gift basket will be provided courtesy of JASM Consulting

Four all-day passes to OC Waterpark

Four min golf passes to OC Adventure Golf

Two dozen macaroons from Georges Candies

Two cheese pizzas from Tony Ps House of Pies

Two weekly passes to Local Gym & Fitness

About OCNJ Daily

OCNJ Daily is Ocean Citys Daily News Source. The company provides daily news coverage and comprehensive information on the islands events, businesses and services, attractions, real estate, beach, boardwalk and more. The company is committed to covering Ocean City, NJ news exclusively.
Edible New Orleans winning Special Issue - 'Makin' Groceries'

Edible Communities has just announced the winners of their annual EDDY Awards in both Critics and Readers Choice categories. The EDDY's showcase the very best content produced by the organizations award-winning family of 90+ Edible publications, including profiles of local farmers and fishermen, artisans and chefs, eye-opening coverage of crucial social issues, exceptional magazine covers, illustrations, and photography.

Publishers submitted more than 600 entries, representing the best writing, photography and illustration that appeared in their publications last year. Entries were then narrowed down to a set of finalists by 55 esteemed professionals in the food world including the Beekman Boys, Chef Virginia Willis, Melissa Hamilton & Christopher Hirsheimer of Canal House, and Barry Estabrook among others. Meet all of this years judges here.

The public voted online for the Readers Choice winners while an independent panel of judges decided Critics Choice winners. In results announced yesterday, 25 publishers from across the US and Canada took home top honors in 6 categories: Best Feature, Best Imagery, Best Recipes, Best Story, Best Digital, and Best Issue.

The EDDY Award for Best Special Issue went to Edible New Orleans for its Makin Groceries Issue. Judging the category was Lisa McManus, an executive editor at Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country magazines: This cover image is both enticing and forbidding; it's stark and dramatic. It reminds me of paintings by CaravaggioOn the inside, unlike some of the competitors, this issue's theme of "Makin' Groceries" was very consistently carried out throughout the issue, and it was done in a fresh and authentic way Fantastic job.

Find winners at: http://www.ediblefeast.com/eddyawards.

Follow the conversation on Facebook and Twitter by searching for #EDDYAwards2016.

About Edible Communities

Since its creation in 2002, Edible Communities has grown to be the widely respected leader in the local food space, distributing an average of 1.4 million copies per issue in 90+ local communities across the US and Canada. Through its distinctive licensing business model, individual entrepreneurs in distinct geographic areas lead the creation of hyper-local content through the lens of sustainability and seasonality. With engaging writing, gorgeous design, and photography, the brand was honored in 2011 with a James Beard Award for Publication of the Year. Along with its award-winning print magazines, the Edible brand includes EdibleFeast.com and local websites, digital venues, podcasting, and local events.

Learn more at: http://www.ediblefeast.com
It is truly a dream come true to have not only a facility but an entire campus that is designed to help children and young adults with autism not only succeed, but excel.

Including Kids, a non-profit organization that works with kids and young adults with autism and related developmental delays, will break ground soon on a new state-of-the-art treatment center.

The groundbreaking for the new 2.5-acre facility in Humble is scheduled to take place 15th of July 2016 at 9am. It will be located on property donated by two longtime supporters of Including Kids, as well as on an adjacent parcel purchased by the organization.

Including Kids began in 2003, serving 10 kids and their families. The organization now provides services for about 150 kids each year. More information about the services for children, young adults, and their families can be found at http://www.includingkids.org.

The announcement comes as Including Kids is $1 million into a $4 million capital campaign that was launched to purchase the property, buy fixtures and furniture for the special student population they serve, and more.

It is so exciting to see that almost three years of hard work in planning and fundraising are now paying off, said Jennifer Dantzler, executive director of Including Kids. It is truly a dream come true to have not only a facility but an entire campus that is designed to help children and young adults with autism not only succeed, but excel.

Including Kids currently rents 16,000 square feet of unconnected space in a Humble shopping center.

The new stand-alone building, designed specifically with the needs of children and young adults with autism in mind, will be an extension of the organizations early intensive therapies and program offerings.

The new facility and its location will also allow for expansion in the future, so the organization can continue to provide even more young people with intervention and instruction in areas including language, academics, and behavior management, as well as social, domestic, and vocational skills.

The support from our parents and donors is so humbling, Dantzler said. I am eternally grateful for the love and support.

About Including Kids, Inc.

Located in Humble, Texas, Including Kids was founded in 2003 to provide research-based behavioral intervention and instruction for children and young adults with autism and related delays. Including Kids offers multiple programs, including a full-time therapeutic program, inclusion programs, after-school community outreach, and development programs. For more information, visit http://www.includingkids.org.
More than 11 millions Syrians have displaced by violence. The scale of the suffering is devastating. Each of the millions of displaced Syrians is an individual uprooted from a full life, a career, a loved one, says Kevin Hartigan who manages the Syrian refugee response for Catholic Relief Services (CRS).

On World Refugee Day, consider this statistic: Refugees are now displaced for 17 years on averagealmost twice as long as 20 years ago. Since half of the 60 million people who have been forced to flee are children, this lost generation could spend their entire childhood without a place to call home.

The conflict in Syria alonenow into its sixth year has put more than 11 million people on the move.

Catholic Relief Services (CRS), a Baltimore-based international humanitarian organization, has seven ways Americans can help make a difference in the lives of those whove had to leave one of their most cherished possessions behind: their homes.

1. RAISE AWARENESS: The Syrian Civil War has led to massive displacement. Watch this video and share it on social media to help raise awareness about the plight of Syrian refugees.

2. LEARN MORE: The more Americans know about this crisis, the more they will understand its underlying causes, and the better they will be able to teach others. Continued warfare in Syria and violence in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has contributed to the surge of refugees from those countries. Meanwhile, deteriorating economic conditions in places like Sub-Saharan Africa has led people to Europe in search of a better life just as violence in Central American neighborhoods has sent people looking for safety.

3. DONATE: Donate to those organizations like Catholic Relief Services that are providing immediate life-saving assistance to refugees in need.

4. ADVOCATE: For years, countries in the Middle East have been sheltering the largest number of Syrians and Iraqis. Americans can urge their members of Congress to continue and expand humanitarian assistance to help refugees in these countries, as well as those burdened by this new migration.

5. USE SOCIAL MEDIA: Connect with other like-minded people and organizations worldwide that are advocating for refugees through social media channels. Look on Twitter for the latest updates on the #RefugeeCrisis.

6. SUPPORT REFUGEES IN THE UNITED STATES: Let Capitol Hill know that this issue matters while supporting organizations such as Migration and Refugee Services and Catholic Charities. Or volunteer to help nearby refugees through local refugee resettlement centers.

7. PUSH FOR PEACE: Realize that until the bloodshed stops in their homelands, these refugees will continue to live in limbo. Until people have economic opportunities, they will travel to seek security for themselves and their families. Pope Paul VI said Development is the new name for peace. So Americans can become advocates for peace and development because 17 is too many years to lose.

Additional Information:

[For additional resources on the Syrian refugee crisis and World Refugee Day, click here.]
Passengers at Denver International Airport will be treated to a very special event on June 20. Hudson Booksellers, which operates The Tattered Cover Book Stores at Denver International Airport, has announced that Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado will speak and sign his memoir, The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics, at the Terminal A location at 1 p.m.

John Hickenlooper was inaugurated as the governor of Colorado in 2011. The first professional geologist to become a governor in the history of the nation, and the first brewer since Sam Adams in 1792, Hickenlooper previously served as mayor of Denver, an administration for which Time magazine named him one of the five top big-city mayors in America. In just over a decade, John Hickenlooper has gone from a craft-brew entrepreneur to mayor of Denver to governor of Colorado, hailed by many political analysts,The New York Times, and Fox News alike as a solid contender to be the next vice president. It is an unlikely tale of success, quintessentially American yet utterly exceptional. In The Opposite of Woe, Hickenlooper tells his own story of determination and daring, from business to politics, in his singularly sharp and often hilarious voice.

About the Tattered Cover Book Store:

Established in 1971, Tattered Cover Book Store is one of America's premier indie bookstores. A locally-owned business with an unwavering commitment to the customer and the community, Tattered Cover Book Store has four unique stores in metro-Denver, and three satellite stores at Denver International Airport. Each location offers personal service and a well-curated selection of books, periodicals, and gifts. The larger stores have cozy coffee shops with free Wi-Fi, and host frequent author appearances and community events. Readers can join our literary conversation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, and can shop 24-hours a day for books, digital audiobooks, and e-books at tatteredcover.com.

About Hudson Booksellers/Hudson Group:

Hudson is one of the most prominent book retailers in the country, successfully operating 60 full-service bookstores and over 400 Hudson and Hudson News travel convenience stores in airports and transportation terminals throughout North America, while also selling books online at http://www.HudsonBooksellers.com. Hudson Booksellers is a brand unit of travel retailer Hudson Group, the largest duty-paid travel retailer in North America, and a wholly-owned subsidiary of international travel retailer Dufry AG (DUFN) of Basel, Switzerland. Hudson Group operates over 700 Hudson, Hudson News, Hudson Booksellers, cafes, specialty retail and duty free shops in 70 airports and transportation terminals in the United States and Canada. Dufry operates over 1,700 stores in more than 58 countries and 240 airports and transportation terminals around the world.

For more information, visit http://www.tatteredcover.com, http://www.hudsonbooksellers.com, http://www.hudsongroup.com and http://www.dufry.com.
Children's Specialized Hospital Staff Celebrate 125 Years By saying Hats Off with Fun Hats!

This year marks Childrens Specialized Hospitals 125th anniversary of helping children with special healthcare needs achieve more of their goals.

It was 125 years ago that group of concerned Westfield residents held their first meeting to discuss how they could help the unfortunate children living in tenements in nearby cities. William G. Peckham and Laura Thurston Peckham led the group which organized a Board of Managers and named Laura as president. The group decided to operate a summer haven for the children in the hopes that a respite from city life would bolster their health and well being. The local residents eagerly raised money through bake sales and benefits and collected household items and furnishings to outfit a "home away from home" for the children.

July 15, 1892, Childrens welcomed its first residents to its home at the Levi Cory House at the corner of Mountain Avenue and New Providence Road. The 59 children who stayed at Childrens that summer relished life in the country. Most had only known poverty, deprivation, and squalor in the urban slums they called home. After a two-week stay filled with plenty of good food, fresh air, and exercise, they were returned home with new clothes, shoes, and hats donated by charitable folks. While Childrens was originally intended as a respite from city life, it soon became apparent that the children were in desperate need of medical attention. Local doctors, dentists, and nurses donated their time and skills to tend to their various needs.

Now in its third century of caring for children in need, Childrens Specialized Hospitals history is unique however the mission hasnt changed  to be the nation's leading provider of specialized healthcare services for infants, children and young adults. The services have evolved with the ever changing needs of its community.

To commemorate their actual anniversary of their date of incorporation, June 8, 1891  the hospital staff, and patients, said Hats Off by wearing fun and creative hats! (View Facebook gallery here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1223181341048564.1073741890.134970126536363&type=1&l=78f03bca56)

Hats Off is a unique way to show appreciation to early founders, supporters, physicians, and dedicated staff members who have helped Childrens Specialized Hospital grow to meet the demanding needs of children recovering from traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries, or to treat the thousands of children on the autism spectrum and those with complex medical needs. Visit the special website (http://www.childrens-specialized.org/125th-anniversary) dedicated to the 125th anniversary full of trivia, interactive timeline, videos and decades of patient stories.

I think what Childrens does best is the way we literally wrap our arms around the families and the patients that we treat, said Philip Salerno, III, chief development officer and president, Childrens Specialized Hospital Foundation. As hard as we work, I want to make sure that we spend as much time celebrating the achievements that we have but also celebrating the lives of the children who we have been able to help along the way.

The annual Walk n Roll was the official kickoff to the 125th anniversary yearlong celebration, with the Hats Off theme. To say Hats Off, over 2,200 kids, parents, community members, and hospital staff showed their support for the programs and care provided by Childrens Specialized Hospital by raising over $300,000. Everyone stayed for the free kids carnival with food, games, prizes and fun!

This was the second special event for the 125 anniversary of partnering with families and a great opportunity to celebrate that Childrens Specialized Hospital treats nearly 29,000 patients from birth to age 21 with special healthcare needs each year at 13 locations across New Jersey.

Visit the hospitals special 125th anniversary website for future events and find out how you or your business or organization can get involved today!

For more information or to donate, visit http://www.childrens-specialized.org/125th-anniversary

Childrens Specialized Hospital is the nations leading provider of inpatient and outpatient care for children from birth to 21 years of age facing special health challenges  from chronic illnesses and complex physical disabilities like brain and spinal cord injuries, to developmental and behavioral issues like autism and mental health. At thirteen different New Jersey locations, our pediatric specialists partner with families to make our many innovative therapies and medical treatments more personalized and effective...so children can achieve more of their goals. To help, or find more information: call 888-CHILDRENS; visit http://www.childrens-specialized.org; Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/childrensspecialized; Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/childrensspecnj; YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/cshnj; LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/children's-specialized-hospital

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The following is an open statement signed by 50 major LGBTQ and gun violence-prevention groups, outlining priorities to substantively address gun violence in the wake of the Orlando shooting.

The statement is also available in the following other languages:

: arcus.link/arabic6-16

Espanol: arcus.link/spanish6-16

"As U.S. government leaders continue to grapple with addressing gun violence-prevention following last weekends homophobic massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, LGBTQ and gun violence-prevention advocates and activists are calling for more stringent checks to keep guns out of dangerous hands.

"The Orlando tragedy, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, highlights how vulnerable LGBTQ communities are to hate-fueled violence, especially LGBTQ communities of color.

"Hate violence has risen sharply in recent years, with a 20% increase in reported LGBTQ homicides in the U.S. between 2014 and 2015, according to a study released this week by The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP). Of the homicides reported last year, 62% were LGBTQ people of color.

"Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) hate crime statistics tell us year after year that people are most frequently targeted for hate violence based on personal characteristics related to race, religion, and sexual orientation. According to The Williams Institute, gay men report being victims of violent hate crimes at a higher rate than any other targeted group, and these crimes are more violent and result in hospitalization more often.

"And yet we cannot ignore the fact that transgender people are at great risk of being victims of hate violence because of their gender identity and this reality is even worse for those who are also targeted on the basis of their race, ethnicity, class, and citizenship status. Fifty four percent of all hate-violence related LGBTQ homicides were transgender women of color, according to the NCAVP study.

"We recognize the need to address the bigotry that motivates acts of violence toward LGBTQ people, and we also recognize that such violence is far more deadly when carried out with firearms.

"Any solutions to the problem of hate violence, including anti-LGBTQ violence, must address the alarmingly easy access that bigots have to such deadly weapons. For example, under current law, people convicted of violent hate crimes can legally buy and possess guns. This is unacceptable.

"With each new massacre, most recently the one in Orlando, we hope the number of homicides has pushed Americans over the threshold of tolerance for hatred fueled by people who seek to divide the country; for weak gun laws that arm those with hate in their hearts; and for the more than 90 victims of gun killings nationwide each day, affecting people of all backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identities.

"Assault-style weapons, like the Sig Sauer MCX rifle used in Sundays Pulse nightclub shooting, can be purchased legally in the state of Florida without a background check  as long as the purchase is made from an unlicensed seller.

"Eighteen states have already taken steps to close this dangerous 'unlicensed sale loophole.' But in the remaining states, including Florida, anyone can buy a gun from an unlicensed seller with no background check, no questions asked.

"Under current U.S. federal law, people on terror watch lists can legally buy guns, exploiting this 'terror gap.' Since 2004, more than 2,000 terror suspects have taken advantage of this loophole. But we also recognize how this screening mechanism has the dangerous potential to profile specific communities on the basis of their actual or perceived race, religion, national origin, and other attributes.

"Orlando is the sixth mass shooting in the U.S. since January 2009 to be investigated as an act of terrorism by the FBI. Americans are 25 times more likely than people in other developed countries to fall victim to a gun homicide.

"The federal background check system established in 1994 by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act has blocked more than 2.6 million gun sales to prohibited purchasers at licensed dealers; however, an estimated 40% of gun sales across the U.S. take place without a background check, primarily at gun shows and online.

"We urge Congress to make a start towards stronger protections against gun violence nationwide by enacting laws to:

1. Prevent known and suspected terrorists and those convicted of violent hate crimes from legally buying guns.

2. Ensure that criminal background checks are required on all gun sales, including online and at gun shows."

Signed,

(Listed alphabetically as of June 16, 2016)

AIDS Alabama

Americans for Responsible Solutions

The Arcus Foundation

Athlete Ally

Auburn Theological Seminary

Believe Out Loud

BiNet USA

Bisexual Resource Center

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence United with The Million Mom March

Campaign To Unload

Congregation Beit Simchat Torah

The David Bohnett Foundation

Equality Alabama

Equality Federation

Equality Florida

Equality Illinois

Equality New Mexico

Equality North Carolina

Equality Pennsylvania

Everytown for Gun Safety

Fair Wisconsin

Faith in America

Family Equality Council

Freedom to Work

Gay Mens Health Crisis

GLAAD

GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders

GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality

GLSEN

GroundSpark/The Respect for All Project

GSA Network - Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network

International Imperial Court System

Lambda Legal

LPAC

National Black Justice Coalition

National Center for Lesbian Rights

National Center for Transgender Equality

National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce

National LGBTQ Task Force

NMAC: National Minority AIDS Council

National Religious Leadership Roundtable

New York City Anti-Violence Project

One Colorado

Open and Affirming Coalition of the United Church of Christ

Out & Equal Workplace Advocates

OutServe-SLDN

Pride at Work

Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE)

Stonewall National Museum & Archives

Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund

The Trevor Project

United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries

Womens Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER)

Campaign hashtags

#DisarmHate

#WeAreOrlando
June 2016 Issue With this magazine we have an opportunity to make a real mark in the behavioral health care industry.

West Palm Beach, Fla. (June 15, 2016) - Redwood Recovery Solutions is pleased to announce the launch of Behavioral Sightings, a monthly lifestyle magazine for professionals working in the behavioral healthcare industry. Each month Behavioral Sightings provides nationwide coverage of industry events and conferences and showcases addiction treatment centers and rehab service providers.

The June, 2016 issue marked the premier issue of the full-color publication which, is also available in an online digital format. The magazine reaches thousands of behavioral healthcare providers every month through distribution to residential facilities, treatment centers and major conferences throughout the United States.

Founders Statement

Behavioral Sightings Editor-in-Chief Jason Brian mentions With this magazine we have an opportunity to make a real mark in the behavioral health care industry. We wanted to reach the industry in a way that no one else did."

Our creative team travels to events across the country to spotlight the industrys community leaders and top influencers. The magazine is the perfect chance to reach out and connect with people looking for your services

A Focus on Recovery

Through news and reviews, insights from key players and event coverage Behavioral Sightings strives to inspire, inform and offer networking opportunities in the addiction treatment industry

Behavioral Sightings magazine is the perfect marketing and advertising opportunity for anyone working in the behavioral healthcare field:

Toxicology Labs

Billing Services

Advertising Agencies

Marketing Firms

Health & Wellness Centers

Fitness & Nutrition Centers

Conference Organizers

Service Providers

Leadership Retreats

Sales Training

Legal Counsel

Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Software Specialists

Behind the Scenes Coverage

Behavioral Sightings magazine goes behind the scenes to provide information on the drug and alcohol rehab industry by focusing on the people and facilities providing treatment. The publication caters to therapists, counselors, psychologists, interventionists, doctors, nurses, volunteers and executive level decision makers in public, private and not-for-profit organizations.

Every issue includes reports and photographs of local, regional, and national industry conferences. The magazine also publishes articles on treatment centers and highlights their services and amenities and how theyve succeeded in providing quality care to their patients and clients.

Readers can view the current issue of Behavioral Sightings to learn about opportunities to network with industry professionals, develop new business partnerships and reconnect with friends and peers while attending local, regional and national conferences.

Reach out to Behavioral Sightings and discover how to get the businesses services featured in the magazine that is being called the People Magazine of the Treatment Industry: 866-954-9821.

About Redwood Recovery Solutions

Redwood Recovery Solutions is the parent company behind of a group of behavioral healthcare marketing sites based out of West Palm Beach, Florida. Founded in 2014, the company provides business services to the addiction treatment industry.

The companys brands include TreatmentCalls.com, TreatmentAttorneys.com, 1800Addicts.com and Mako Marketing Group. For more information on the magazine, visit BehavioralSightings.com.
We feel both obligated and privileged to help those in our community who are living with the daily struggles of sexual exploitation. We hope the whole community rallies behind these women and Ohio Womens Refuge by donating generously to our campaign.

Erlanger Agency launches another charity campaign as part of their ongoing community involvement program serving the metro Columbus area. Partnering with Ohio Womens Refuge, the local insurance agency is focusing their efforts on helping victims of sexual trafficking and exploitation. Donations from the compassionate community are now being accepted at: https://www.crowdrise.com/safe-haven-for-slaved-women/fundraiser/boberlanger.

Ohio Womens Refuge is a faith-based nonprofit organization which was founded in 2013 as a way to offer a new beginning for women leaving the sex industry. Guests live and work together for a minimum of three months, during which time they focus on physical and emotional health, spiritual growth, education and life skills, all at no cost. Dedicated staff and volunteers guide and mentor guests in the development a life plan which addresses each womans own unique challenges, and then partners with local resources to provide a wide variety of services which will further the accomplishment those future goals.

This cause is very dear to my team, stated Bob Erlanger, owner of Erlanger Agency. We feel both obligated and privileged to help those in our community who are living with the daily struggles of sexual exploitation. We hope the whole community rallies behind these women and Ohio Womens Refuge by donating generously to our campaign.

Erlanger Agency desires to bring about greater awareness and support for Ohio Womens Refuge by marshaling their own network of personal and professional contacts from their two area locations to help spread the word about the campaign. The agencys caring team has set a fundraising goal of $500, and has pledged to donate $10 for each and every recommendation they receive for an insurance quote, with no purchase necessary. Readers who wish to join Erlanger Agencys efforts to provide for sexually exploited women may visit http://www.erlangeragency.com/Safe-Haven-For-Slaved-Women_15_community_cause to recommend a friend and/or make a personal donation, and are asked to share the page with their own family, friends, neighbors and business contacts.

The agency has also featured the initiative in their monthly magazine, which is delivered to thousands of households in the greater Columbus metro area. The electronic Flipbook version of the current issue of Our Hometown magazine may be viewed here: http://www.erlangeragency.com/Our-Hometown-Magazine_46.

Erlanger Agencys ongoing Community Program will continue to highlight and support people in need in the local community, promising to debut a new campaign every two to three months. Readers who wish to suggest ideas for future campaigns may do so here: http://www.erlangeragency.com/Add-Community-Cause_45. To learn about past causes supported by the agency and keep to tabs on future causes, please bookmark: http://www.erlangeragency.com/community-cause. More information on Erlanger Agency may be found at: http://www.erlangeragency.com/.

About Erlanger Agency

A full-service insurance firm serving the families of metro Columbus from offices in Clintonville and Worthington, award-winning Bob Erlanger and his team of dedicated professionals have one simple mission: to provide the finest insurance and financial products in the industry, while delivering consistently superior service. Their focus is on helping families protect the things which are most important to them (their families, homes, cars and more), while developing strategies to achieve long-term financial goals. The caring agents at Erlanger Agency may be reached by calling 614-451-6600 (Clintonville) or 614-349-4499 (Worthington).
Gary Johnson, U.S. Presidential Candidate Libertarian Party, to Speak at Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition in New York (www.cwcbexpo.com)

WHEN: Thursday, June 16, 2016

11:30 AM ET

WHERE: Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition

1A Hall

Javits Convention Center

655 W. 34th Street

New York, NY 10001

http://www.cwcbexpo.com

WHAT: Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's nominee in the 2016 election will be the first U.S. Presidential Candidate giving a special address at the Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition (CWCBExpo) at the Javits Convention Center in New York, NY, on Thursday, June 16th, 2016.

The Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition (CWCBExpo) is the leading business exposition for the medical marijuana and legalized cannabis industry. He is the first U.S. Presidential candidate to speak at a Cannabis trade show and conference.

Governor Johnson, who has been referred to as the most fiscally conservative Governor in the country, was the Republican Governor of New Mexico from 1994-2003. A successful businessman before running for Governor of New Mexico in 1994, Gary Johnson started a door-to-door handyman business to help pay his way through college. Twenty years later, he had grown that business into one of the largest construction companies in New Mexico, with more than 1,000 employees.

Governor Johnson brings a distinctly business-like mentality to governing, believing that public policy decisions should be based on costs and benefits rather than strict ideology. Johnson is best known for his veto record, having vetoed more than 750 bills during his time in office, more than all other governors combined. His use of the veto pen has since earned him the nickname Governor Veto. He cut taxes 14 times while never raising them. When he left office, New Mexico was one of only four states in the country with a balanced budget. Term-limited, Johnson retired from public office in 2003. In the 2012 presidential election, Johnson placed third and garnered more votes than any other Libertarian candidate in history.

An avid skier, adventurer, and bicyclist, he has scaled the highest peak on each of the seven continents, including Mt. Everest.

For more information about Cannabis World Congress & Business Expositions (CWCBExpo) visit http://www.cwcbexpo.com
The collaboration with EMD Serono will be officially announced at the June 19th Surrogacy and Gay Parenting Conference in Dallas, TX Our mission at EMD Serono is to advocate for people who want to have a child. We are thrilled to work with Men Having Babies to provide financial assistance, in the form of discounted medicine, directly to the gay community. Past News Releases RSS American nonprofit Men Having...

Men Having Babies Joined Leading...

Brussels Conference Offers European...

Men Having Babies (MHB) Gay Parenting Assistance Program (GPAP) announced today that EMD Serono, the biopharmaceutical business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, in the U.S. and Canada, will provide eligible prospective gay parents with up to a 75% discount on select fertility medications for use by their surrogates when redeemed at an EMD Serono participating pharmacy.

GPAP annually provides dozens of prospective parents with over a million dollars worth of cash grants, discounts and free services from more than fifty leading service providers. GPAP was created to promote affordable surrogacy services for gay men, the first such program to do so, said Ron Poole-Dayan, the executive director of Men Having Babies. In the last two years more than 300 couples became eligible for substantial discounts off the cost of surrogacy services, and more than 40 couples have received direct Stage II financial assistance, including grants and free service. Ten babies were already born to Stage II couples, and many more are on their way.

Our mission at EMD Serono is to advocate for people who want to have a child, said Craig Millian, Sr. Vice President, US Fertility & Endocrinology at EMD Serono. We are excited to be the first manufacturer to provide financial assistance, in the form of discounted medicine, directly to the gay community. Most importantly, we are thrilled to work with Men Having Babies to try to help more and more people build families.

The collaboration will be officially announced at a special dinner reception at the upcoming Surrogacy and Gay Parenting conference in Dallas, TX, this Father's Day, which EMD Serono is co-sponsoring. The conference is based on the successful model of programs MHB has already organized in NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Brussels and Tel Aviv. It will bring together under one roof community activists, experts, parents and surrogates who will share their experiences. Prospective parents at all stages of their journey are encouraged to attend  from those who are just beginning to weigh their parenting options to those who are already in process.

Some of the other sponsors of the Dallas conference are also major supporters of GPAP, including Simple Surrogacy and Fertility Specialists of Texas, which have already helped several couples that have had children or are currently pregnant.

For a same-sex couple, conceiving a child through third-party infertility treatments can be incredibly expensive, said Jerald S. Goldstein, MD, medical director and founder of Fertility Specialists of Texas. Through strong support initiatives like the Gay Parenting Assistance Program (GPAP), having a biological child is becoming more of a reality for intended fathers worldwide. We are proud to partner with Men Having Babies and to be a continued participating infertility center with GPAP.

Kristen Hanson, the co-founder and executive director of finance for Simple Surrogacy, agreed. "Simple Surrogacy is a proud supporter of GPAP because it puts surrogacy within reach for many men for whom it was previously too expensive. We firmly believe that surrogacy should be affordable to everyone, said Hanson.

The conference will take place on June 19th, 2016, 8:30 a.m.  5:30 p.m. at the Wyndham Dallas Suites - Park Central. Go to menhavingbabies.org/dallas for advance registration and additional information.

***

About Men Having Babies

With over 4500 future and current gay parents worldwide, the international nonprofit Men Having Babies (MHB) is dedicated to providing its members with educational and financial support. Each year over a thousand attendees benefit from unbiased guidance and access to a wide range of relevant service providers at its monthly workshops and conferences in NY, Chicago, Brussels, San Francisco and Tel Aviv. The organizations Gay Parenting Assistance Program(GPAP) annually provides dozens of couples with over a million dollars worth of cash grants, discounts and free services from over fifty leading service providers. Collaborating with an advisory board made of surrogates, MHB developed a framework for Ethical Surrogacy that has received endorsements from several LGBT parenting organizations worldwide. In addition, MHB offers extensive online resources, a directory with ratings and reviews of agencies and clinics, a Surrogacy Speakers Bureau, and a vibrant online community forum.

The objective of the Gay Parenting Assistance Program is to assist eligible gay prospective parents who cannot afford the full costs of biological parenting by providing grants and access to discounts and pro bono services from in-vitro fertilization clinics, surrogacy agencies, egg donation agencies, providers of reproductive health services, law firms, and other providers of related health, medical, legal and other services.

More information: http://www.menhavingbabies.org
TopConsumerReviews.com 5-Star Blue Ribbon Award Blue Nile stands out among online retailers of Jewelry... we are happy to award Blue Nile our highest ranking for Jewelry retailers in 2016.

TopConsumerReviews.com recently awarded their top 5-star rating to Blue Nile, an industry leader in Jewelry sales.

As the Internet has grown in size, shoppers have used it with increasing frequency to find the best deals on nearly every imaginable product. Jewelry is no different: online jewelry stores offer an impressive selection of diamonds and other gems, unique pieces that can be passed on for generations as family heirlooms, and with extremely competitive pricing. Customers quickly see that the cost, selection, and customer service provided by online jewelry stores can easily meet or exceed what they typically see at a traditional local jeweler.

Blue Nile stands out among online retailers of Jewelry, explained Brian Dolezal, of TopConsumerReviews.com, LLC. Their quality standards are very high, and their extensive inventory allows them to keep prices at an impressive 30-35% less than similar items offered by competitors. Its no wonder that Blue Nile is the largest retailer of engagement rings in America, with more than 60,000 loose diamonds from which to choose. All jewelry purchases are shipped at no cost via FedEx, and every order is protected by an exceptional 30-day refund or exchange policy. For all of these reasons, we are happy to award Blue Nile our highest ranking for Jewelry retailers in 2016.

To find out more about Blue Nile and other Jewelry retailers, including reviews and comparison rankings, please visit the Jewelry category of TopConsumerReviews.com at http://www.topconsumerreviews.com/jewelry/.

About Blue Nile

Founded in 1999, Blue Nile has grown to become the largest online retailer of certified diamonds and fine jewelry. Internet Retailer Magazine reports Blue Nile is bigger than the next three largest online jewelers combined, gaining notice from publications such as The New York Times, Forbes, and Money. Every order is shipped free, guaranteed and returnable within 30 days.

About TopConsumerReviews.com

TopConsumerReviews.com, LLC is a leading provider of independent reviews and rankings of hundreds of consumer products and services. From Jewelry Stores to Loose Diamonds and Home Security, TopConsumerReviews.com delivers in-depth product evaluations in order to make purchasing decisions easier.
Fudge business owners will be extremely satisfied with how it improves their production capabilities and profitability.

In honor of National Fudge Day, June 16th, Gold Medal is pleased to officially announce the introduction of Sweet Selections Fudge Mix, the 1-STEP fudge mix that is unmatched in the industry. Competitors require time-consuming, step-by-step instructions and multiple mixes. With Sweet Selections, simply combine butter, water and only one bag of mix and youre done. A process comparison shows the production time to be just 16 minutes versus over 40 minutes for the competitor.

Gold Medal designed the Sweet Selections Fudge Program to be efficient and cost-effective, while delivering a superior quality and delicious tasting product, stated Gold Medal president, Greg Miller. Fudge business owners will be extremely satisfied with how it improves their production capabilities and profitability.

Sweet Selections Fudge Mixes are available in chocolate and vanilla flavors. There is also a base mix free of flavor and color, which can be customized with inclusions to create a customers own signature flavor combinations. Each is packaged in a convenient 7-lb. batch size. Additionally, Gold Medal manufactures the Sweet Selections Fudge Mixer. This user-friendly machine comes equipped with silicone paddles to gently mix flavorful fudge to the desired consistency. It is UL Sanitation Listed. Plus, the compact design allows operators to produce maximum profits per square foot.

Sweet Selections Fudge is a beneficial addition for businesses such as candy shops, tourist attractions, grocery stores, gift shops and other locations. Profit margins average 80%, making it an attractive business opportunity.

More details on Sweet Selections Fudge are available at the website: sweetselectionsfudge.com. Or to schedule a demonstration, please contact Gold Medal at 800-543-0862.
GV Financial Advisors Named to FT300 Top Financial Advisors 2016 Being included in the FT 300 highlights the strength of our financial planning and our Behavioral Wealth Management process, which is based in the science of behavioral economics and behavioral finance.

GV Financial Advisors, the Behavioral Wealth Management firm in Atlanta, has been named to the Financial Times 300 (FT 300) Top Registered Investment Advisers list for the second time in three years. The ranking recognizes the top independent RIA firms across the United States based on assets under management. GV Financial Advisors is one of just eleven FT 300 RIAs located in the state of Georgia.

Its great to be recognized by the Financial Times as one of the top RIA firms in the country and its an honor to be part of such a prestigious group, said David Geller, GV Financials CEO and Co-Founder. GVs team of financial advisors really deserves the credit for all that they do to take care of our clients. Being included in the FT 300 highlights the strength of our financial planning and our Behavioral Wealth Management process, which is based in the science of behavioral economics and behavioral finance.

We pioneered Behavioral Wealth Management for many reasons, he continued, especially to take individual client planning to the next level: helping clients use their wealth to create and live extraordinary lives.

FTs evaluation criteria used six factors: total assets under management (AUM), AUM growth rate, years in practice, the firms compliance record, advisor industry certifications, and online accessibility for investors.

ABOUT GV FINANCIAL ADVISORS

Believed to be the first and only Behavioral Wealth Management firm in the U.S., GV has invested over a decade applying neurobiology and the scientific principles of Behavioral Economics and Behavioral Finance to create a new paradigm in wealth management. Established in 1991, GV is one of the leading registered investment advisory firms in Atlanta with 46 employees and $1.125 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2015. Over the years, GV & team have earned spots on a number of prestigious lists, including Barrons Top U.S. Investment Advisors, REP's Top 100 U.S. Registered Investment Advisors, Financial Advisors U.S. RIA Ranking, & the Financial Times 300, based on assets under management and other factors. Their writings have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post. To learn more, visit GV Financial Advisors.

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The 2016 Financial Times 300 Top Registered Investment Advisors is an independent listing produced by the Financial Times (June, 2016). The FT 300 is based on data gathered from RIA firms, regulatory disclosures, and the FTs research. Neither the RIA firms nor their employees pay a fee to The Financial Times in exchange for inclusion in the FT 300.
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Evan Turks The Storyteller (S&S/Atheneum, June) is the culmination of the author-illustrators long-held fascination both with Moroccan art and ancient modes of oral storytelling. Here, Turk shares photos from his own personal trips to Morocco, which inspired the book, as well as photos of the indigo painting process he learned while abroad.

The Storyteller began as far back as 2012, when Turk began working on the project while attending a summer workshop in DisneyWorld with Dalvero Academy, an independent school of continuing studies in art and illustration, of which Turk is a part. Inspired by drawing and learning at Epcot Morocco [a Moroccan-themed pavilion within Walt Disney World in Orlando], he told PW in an email, my husband and I planned a trip to visit Morocco that fall. Here the couple adventures through the North African dunes with two new companions.

But it wasnt all play and adventure in Morocco. Turk spent a lot of time meeting with craftsmen and artisans from various fields to get a sense of their work and processes. Here he observes workers at a zelij mosaic workshop in Fez.

Here, some local artists join Turk in some sketching.

Turk turned his travels into sketches that would ultimately inspire the final spreads of his book. Here he depicts the mosaic workers.

Two central storylines of The Storyteller concern carpet weavers. Turk arranged to meet a community of traditional weavers in Anzal, Morocco. Here, he depicts one at her loom.

Turks immersion in the Moroccan landscape filled his sketchbook, and eventually found its way to the pages of his book.

Drawing from his own experience, and inspired by Richard Hamiltons book The Last Storytellers, Turk returned home from Morocco and began sketching out thumbnails for his own book.

The early thumbnails also included the color palette Turk sought to incorporate, found in the local carpets and mosaic tiles he observed.

One locally inspired technique Turk discovered was the use of indigo and an invisible ink process that the artist observed. While I was in Ait-Ben-Haddou, the UNESCO site, I met two artists who were making paintings for tourists [in this way], Turk said.

They painted on the paper, held it over a gas flame and the image would appear. I told [one of the painters] I was an artist, and he became excited and showed me how to do the technique and let me try.

The ink was actually very sugary green tea, and the color results from the caramelizing of the sugar in the tea. After the demonstration, he shared a pot of tea (and showed me how much sugar to put in), and chatted for a while. After our tea, I went to leave, and as I had been shopping for indigo, he ran after me to give me a little rock of indigo for good luck.

I had purchased some indigo powder on our first trip, which I decided to use for the water/stories in the book. I was playing around with the tea/fire technique, and decided to put some of the indigo ink on there and was surprised to see an amazing color change from the fire! The color turns from dark purplish-blue to a vibrant turquoise.

The materials and the effect give The Storyteller its palette and style. The book opens in an ancient Morocco in which fountains and storytellers are plentiful.

But as the expanse of the Sahara grows, both water and storytelling dwindle, until one boy fights to bring them back.

The boys efforts are aided in listening to stories told to him by weavers, inspired by Turks research and travels. The finished book is due out later this month.

The Storyteller by Evan Turk. S&S/Atheneum, $18.99 June ISBN 978-1-4814-35183-3
Knopf has acquired the U.S. publishing rights to The Spy, a new novel by Paulo Coelho. The book, by the bestselling author of The Alchemist, is set for a November 22 release.

Anne Messitte, executive v-p of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, brokered the deal with Monica R. Antunes at Sant Jordi Asociados. The book is set to be published simultaneously in English language territories around the world.

The Spy is based on the life of Dutch exotic dancer and accused spy Mata Hari, who was executed during the First World War. Coelho, using on first person narration, tells a reimagined version of her life in the novel. Mata Hari was one of our first feminists, defying male expectations of that time and choosing instead an independent, unconventional life, the author said in a statement.

With an initial print run of 150,000, The Spy will be published by Knopf simultaneously in hardcover and e-book. Penguin Random House will be releasing a physical audiobook edition, and a digital download. The novel will also be published by Vintage Espanol as a Spanish-language hardcover.

According to Knopf, Coelhos books have been translated into 80 languages and have sold more than 200 million copies in 160 countries.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said this acquisition marked a move of house for Coelho. It does not. He has been published by Knopf for a number of years.
Seal Press, currently an imprint of Perseus Books' subsidiary Avalon Group, will become an imprint of Da Capo Press. The move was outlined in a letter sent to employees, on June 15, from Perseus Books senior v-p and publisher Susan Weinberg. The change marks the first major reorganization to hit the company since Hachette Book Group acquired Perseus earlier this year.

Renee Sedliar, the editorial director of Da Capo and its Lifelong Press imprint, will serve as editorial director of Seal. She will remain based in Berkeley, Calif., where both Da Capo and Seal have offices. The publisher position at Seal is being eliminated in the reorganization, and current Seal publisher Krista Lyons will leave the company on July 1.

Speaking to the changes, Sedliar said: Seal Press has been an extraordinary presence for 40 years. Were looking forward to furthering Seals mission of publishing life-changing books that range from gutsy to provocative to hilariousbooks that start conversations and keep them going."

Seal executive editor Laura Mazer and senior editor Stephanie Knapp will report directly to Sedliar, while associate publicist Molly Conway will report to Da Capo publicity director Lissa Warren.

Warren said that there are no plans to reduce the number of Seal titles published per year as a result of the changes, and added that Seal's fall list will stay on its current track with the Avalon Group. Seal books slated for publication during the next year include Courtney Martin's The New Better Off, Jessica Teich's The Future Tense of Joy, and The Women Who Made New York by Julie Scelfo.

Seal's spring 2017 list will be the first published under the Da Capo banner.
-- What: Quad City Music Guild's "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."

-- When: 7:30 p.m. tonight, Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday.

-- Where: Prospect Park theater, 1584 34th Ave., Moline.

-- Tickets: $16 for adults, $11 children, available at 309-762-6610.

You don't need to be a child or parent to appreciate the boundless warmth, affection and inspiration delivered in this truly wonderful production at Quad City Music Guild.

Directed by Kevin Pieper (reliable Guild veteran on and off stage), this tuneful "Chitty" -- based on the beloved 1968 film -- is a fanciful, fun-filled fairy tale for the whole family. The perennially optimistic inventor Caractacus Potts (Nathan Bates) saves and restores an old race car from a scrap heap with the help of his children, Jeremy and Jemima (Gage McCalester and Molly Ahern). They discover that "Chitty" has magical properties -- including the ability to float and fly.

This irresistible musical has many magical properties as well. Mr. Bates is a patient, comforting guide through an adventure that shows us the importance of perseverance, teamwork and love. Gage and Molly are precocious, perky kids, with a tireless can-do attitude, reflective of their widowed stage father.

Among many highlights, Mr. Bates' "You Two" is clear and solid in voice and choreography, and the gentle lullaby "Hushabye Mountain" is poignant and profoundly moving. A feisty Joanna Mills is in lovely vocal flower in her title tune, "Truly Scrumptious."

The evil but childish Bulgarian Baron Bomburst (Shane Pruitt) wants the car for himself and sends spies to find it. Mr. Pruitt and the melodramatic Baroness Bomburst, played by Jenny Winn, are cartoonish villains -- a spoiled couple who banish all children from the village, and share silly terms of endearment.

Ms. Winn often steals the show as a selfish, sexy queen, showing off some sultry, suggestive outfits. In her exuberant, celebratory samba (in Act II with the ensemble) the stylish, droll Ms. Winn unleashes flashy dance proficiency I'd never seen before (as well as her rare role as "unlikable").

Costume design is by Deb Holmes, producing 152 costumes for this show, including 33 made from scratch. The bumbling thieves are played over the top by James Alt and T.J. Green; at one point with long black capes, they look like budding vampires.

Of the big group numbers, "Toot Sweets" itself is a marvelous, musical morsel -- clever and rambunctious, with a strong chorus. The brisk "Me Ol' Bamboo" is enthusiastic and impressive; "Posh" a rousing march.

One beautiful backdrop comes to life by lighting designer, John Weigandt, creating a spectrum of eight hues, one after another. Applause greeted the smooth, self-propelled vehicle around the stage at last Friday's performance.

Traveling to a happy ending, Mr. Bates inspires all the kids -- many hidden under the castle -- to band together ("teamwork can make a dream work"), and the cute children are winningly boisterous. It's all quite a ride.
A licensed federal firearms dealer on Wednesday was sentenced to two years of probation for illegally selling a gun to a man later involved in a stand-off with Davenport police.

"People need to know this is how guns get in the hands of terrible people," Chief Judge John A. Jarvey said during a sentencing hearing for Paul Hein, of Blue Grass, no age given, at the federal courthouse in Davenport.

The judge agreed with attorneys that prison was not an appropriate punishment for the former teacher, who had no prior criminal history and otherwise had lived an "exemplary" life.

In November 2015, Mr. Hein was charged with selling a Glock semi-automatic pistol to a family friend  Charles Bryan Ewert, 36, of Davenport  despite Mr. Ewert being prohibited from buying or possessing a firearm because of a 2002 conviction for felony eluding.

In court records, prosecutors said Mr. Hein "inexplicably" agreed to the sale, despite Mr. Ewert using someone else's identity to buy the gun.

Mr. Hein's attorney, Murray Bell, said his client was not aware of Mr. Ewert's felony record at the time. Prosecutors said Mr. Ewert's refusal to use his own name should have indicated he could not legally buy the gun.

Prosecutors also said that, when questioned by federal investigators about the sale, Mr. Hein lied about the purchaser. A "cover-up" is sometimes worse than the crime itself, Assistant U.S. Attorney Clifford Cronk said, adding Mr. Hein "wouldn't be here today" if he had been truthful and accepted responsibility.

The firearm sale took place April 17, 2013, records said. On Aug. 18, 2014, Davenport police responded to a 911 call by a woman reporting she had been "physically and emotionally abused" by Mr. Ewert, who was not letting her leave his home.

Mr. Ewert was "uncooperative and the situation was handled as a barricaded suspect who was possibly armed," court records said. An hour-long stand-off ended peacefully after an officer approached Mr. Ewert, gun drawn, and took him into custody.

Eight guns and "a large amount of ammunition" were recovered from Mr. Ewert's home, records said. He was sentenced last year to seven years in federal prison for possessing firearms as a felon and for making false statements during a firearm purchase.

On Wednesday, Mr. Hein apologized for the "heartache" caused by "the mistake I made." He identified friends, family members and former students who came to court to support him and said many more wanted to attend.

"I could have filled this room up," he told Judge Jarvey.

Prosecutors said Mr. Hein told the truth about the gun sale only after police confronted him about discrepancies in his story. That delay prolonged the investigation and "violated" the government's trust, prosecutors said.

Rather than "misplaced trust" or "a single mistake or error in judgment," prosecutors wrote in court records that the case involved a "series of criminal acts" to deceive the government.
The Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus care about accuracy. Mistakes occur, however. Our policy is to correct errors of fact as soon as possible. If you see a mistake in the paper, please call it to the attention of Laura Yeater, newsroom administrative assistant, at 309-757-4954, or send an email to press@qconline.com.
ROCK ISLAND  To fight summer learning slide, the Spring Forward Learning Center is offering a summer camp for academically challenged Rock Island-Milan students.

The camp, started in 2013 to provide a summer enrichment program for those students, formed a partnership this year with the Rock Island Public Library for students entering kindergarten through seventh grade.

On Wednesday, library staffers visited the Rock Island Academy, one of Spring Forward's four summer enrichment program sites, to kick off the summer reading program. The event included a pep rally, parade of books and visits by Rascal the Bandit and Max Reader Mouse.

Lisa Lockheart, library publicist and outreach liaison, said the library has given book boxes to Spring Forward for children without library access. They also will provide prizes for completing the reading program and staff members will help the kids get library cards.

Spring Forward already sets aside 45 minutes four days a week for reading and instruction, so a partnership with the library made sense, Spring Forward executive director Dan McNeil said.

The partnership increases resources available to kids in the program and expands the reach of the library.

"It's a win-win for us both," Ms. Lockheart said. "It's a great match."

"We knew through serving children at our camps the library could reach kids that might not otherwise participate in the program," Mr. McNeil said.

Besides the Rock Island Academy, the enrichment program has the camps at Frances Willard, the Center for Math and Science and Thomas Jefferson Elementary schools.

Each camp has four counselors and four teachers. Spring Forward also provides four teachers for the Martin Luther King Community Center. Combined, these sites serve nearly 400 students, according to a news release.

The main goal is to curb summer learning loss, and help students maintain and hopefully improve their reading level during summer break, Mr. McNeil said. "Our mission is to provide free education opportunities."

They've seen a 9.3 percent increase in literacy scores over the summer for students who participated in the camp, according to the release.

The program includes lunch and breakfast for students, as well as STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), team building and recreation activities. On Fridays, kids can go on field trips to places such as the Putnam Museum, Deere-Wiman House and Whitewater Junction.

"We're always looking for ways to engage our children," Mr. McNeil said. "They're learning and having fun."

The camp runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays until July 22. Spring Forward Learning Center also offers after-school programs during the school year.
Something similar is happening to doctors, nurses and pharmacists. And when theyre hit with too much information, the result can be a health hazard. The electronic patient records that the federal government has been pushing  in an effort to coordinate health care and reduce mistakes  come with a host of bells and whistles that may be doing the opposite in some cases.

Whats the problem? Its called alert fatigue.

Electronic health records increasingly include automated alert systems pegged to patients health information. One alert might signal that a drug being prescribed could interact badly with other medications. Another might advise the pharmacist about a patients drug allergy. But they could also simply note each time that a patient is prescribed painkillers  useful to detect addiction but irrelevant if, say, someone had a major surgery and is expected to need such meds. Or they may highlight a potential health consequence relevant to an elderly woman, although the patient at hand is a 20-something man.

The number of these pop-up messages has become unmanageable, doctors and IT experts say, reflecting what many experts call excessive caution, and now they are overwhelming practitioners.

Clinicians ignore safety notifications between 49 percent and 96 percent of the time, said Shobha Phansalkar, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

When providers are bombarded with warnings, they will predictably miss important things, said David Bates, senior vice president at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.

Now, doctors, health information technologists and software vendors are trying to fix the problem.

Research on this human-computer interaction is starting to explore the degree of risk posed by excessive alerting versus the benefits the alerts produce. The companies selling electronic health records say advances are moving their systems toward more targeted, relevant warnings, instead of broad-brush signaling.

This is an issue that everyones going to have to wrestle with eventually, said Bill Marella, executive director of patient safety operations and analytics at ECRI Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies health care safety and quality issues. In April, the institute ranked design and implementation of new health IT systems as its top safety concern for 2016.

Some hospitals and health systems are already paving the way.

Take Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. In 2012, the inpatient facility switched over to a new electronic health record, said Eric Shelov, a physician and the hospitals associate chief medical information officer. Immediately, he said, practitioners began seeing far more alerts, to the point that doctors were overriding almost all of them. The problem, Shelov said, is that if you see enough nonsense, youre going to start ignoring it.

That has consequences. In one instance at Childrens, doctors ignored relevant information about how a patient might respond to a drug, Shelov said, because it appeared alongside heaps of other superfluous notifications  warnings, for instance, about drugs that posed minimal risk of interfering with each other. Consequently, the patient received medication that induced a potentially lethal reaction.

The hospital caught the mistake in time, but the incident spurred a series of changes. A team of pharmacists, doctors and other clinicians have sorted through what triggered alerts in their system, turning off the ones they decided werent actually relevant or necessary. That has helped. But its still an ongoing battle, Shelov said. Its a little bit of trying to turn off the fire hose.

Systems such as Cleveland-based MetroHealth, the University of Vermont Medical Center and Group Health Collaborative of Southern Wisconsin have undertaken similar projects. Still others, like Brigham and Womens, are working on it.

But figuring out what merits a computer warning takes time, manpower, expertise and money. Not all hospitals have those resources, Bates said. Its inherently subjective. Some stakeholder groups have put out recommendations, and hospitals like Childrens have presented on ways to combat alert fatigue. But individual hospital task forces often end up deciding for themselves whats risky enough to warrant an alert.

Patients, meanwhile, arent standing beside their doctors as they scroll through their medical records, noted Helen Haskell, a patient safety advocate. Patients can request access to their records, but thats a static page theyll see only after getting care. That means that, while this hyper-alerting poses a danger, theres no way for consumers to know if, say, they got worse care because the doctor missed a warning.

Its very rare that patients are granted that perspective, she said.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Software vendors say theyre trying to make their systems smarter.

Epic Systems, outside Madison, Wis., for example, has been hearing feedback for years from doctors about redundant or irrelevant alerts, said Bret Shillingstad, a physician who works on Epics clinical informatics team. Theyve added in functionality for hospitals to turn those alerts off. Theyre working now to develop software that might target alerts based on things like a patients health condition or recommend medications that better match someones overall profile. Then there are simpler adjustments, like changing a system so that if a patient needs a vaccine, reminders just go to the primary care doctor, not the orthopedist, too.

In the long term, system designers are trying to better consider the nuances of a patients medical needs so that they can use fewer warnings and send them only when they matter, said Terry Fairbanks, an emergency physician and director of MedStar Healths National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in Washington, D.C. For instance, people with advanced cancer often need doses of morphine that might be unsuitable for other patients. A smarter system would warn doctors about that morphine order for patients who dont have cancer but would treat it as normal for someone in the diseases late stages.

Such a change could limit distractions so that physicians act upon pressing reminders  like notifications highlighting if a patient is at risk for sepsis, which can be deadly if its not noticed early.

But theres still debate. Haskell said she would argue doctors should always be warned about certain medications and drug interactions.

All of these alerts have really reduced medication interactions. Its a service, she said. It just needs to be refined.

But theres clearly a cultural shift underfoot, added Phansalkar, who also works as director of informatics and clinical innovation at Wolters Kluwer Health, which supplies drug information to electronic health record systems. Alert fatigue is no longer just something providers complain about, she said. In health care, people are trying to devise more effective, nuanced ways for electronic systems to improve care.

Because its so easy to put an alert to address a problem, thats peoples natural, knee-jerk reaction, said Douglas Gentile, medical director of clinical information systems at the University of Vermont Medical Center. But as you add those, it creates additional problems. And you get collateral damage.
The only reasonable response to the massacre in Orlando is to ban the sale of military-style assault weapons. All else, I'm afraid, is just noise.

If this ensconces me in an ideological corner, I'm fine with that. If it insults the Constitution, so be it -- any other response would do far greater harm to our freedoms. Or we could argue for a while and then do nothing. We've tried that many times, and it doesn't work.

An Islamic State sympathizer was able to go into a gun store and buy both a pistol and an AR-15-style semiautomatic assault rifle, which he used to kill 49 men and women at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Had he been armed with the pistol alone, he still would have killed people -- but not so many. Keeping military-grade combat weapons out of the hands of maniacs should not be a controversial idea.

The Second Amendment enshrines the right to keep and bear arms, and the Supreme Court has ruled that this is an individual right, not a collective one. The court has made clear, however, that this does not preclude reasonable gun control measures. Not all weapons must be considered suitable for private hands.

When the framers wrote of "arms," they were thinking about muskets and single-shot pistols. They could not have foreseen modern rifles or high-capacity magazines. They lived at a time when it was impossible to imagine one man barging into a crowded room and killing more than one or two people before having to reload and surely being subdued. Today it is not only imaginable but tragically commonplace.

No one needs an AR-15

No hunter needs an AR-15 to bring down a deer. None of us needs such a weapon to defend our families against intruders. And for those who believe assault rifles offer protection against a hypothetical tyrannical government -- or who perhaps consider the present government a tyranny -- I have sobering news: If and when the black helicopters come, they will be accompanied by tanks.

Why focus exclusively on the guns? Because other proposed solutions would violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution -- and surely wouldn't work anyway.

One of the presidential candidates -- I don't want to sully this column with his name -- has suggested a ban on Muslim immigration. The idea would be laughable if it were not so dangerously un-American.

First, it would be useless. The Orlando murderer -- I don't want to use his name, either -- was born in New York, just like the presidential candidate in question. And in the San Bernardino killing spree, also inspired by the Islamic State, the wife was an immigrant but the husband was born in the U.S. The self-radicalization of American citizens is not going to be solved by banning all believers in Islam from entry.

Which would be impossible. Immigration officers could ask every foreign visitor whether he or she is a Muslim, but then what? If the answer is no, wave them through? Stop them for further questioning if they "look" Muslim, whatever that means? Don't you think Islamic State operatives might be smart enough to have Bibles in their carry-on rather than Qurans?

A loathsome idea

Attempting such a prohibition would also be obscene in a nation that enshrines religious freedom in the First Amendment. Enough said about this loathsome idea.

Another possible response would involve more vigilant surveillance. The Orlando shooter had been interviewed by the FBI at least twice because of alleged extremist leanings or connections. He was apparently on a terrorism watch list for a time, but was removed after authorities decided there was no need to keep him under suspicion.

By all means, Congress should immediately ban gun sales to anyone on such a watch list. But that wouldn't have helped in Orlando. No level of surveillance remotely permissible under the Constitution would allow authorities to detect all instances of self-radicalization and act on them. We put people in jail for what they do, not what they think.

Should there be universal background checks for gun purchases? Yes, of course. But the Orlando killer passed a background check. It is not possible to have a free society without the presumption of innocence.

Freedom is possible, however, without the right to buy military weapons designed for killing sprees. Banning them would not end mass killings, but it would mean fewer deaths. If we do not act, the blood of future victims will be on all of our hands.
G'day! It's Murray here. I've put together a little quiz to test your musical knowledge. Think you can score top marks in Murray's Magic Music Quiz? Give it a go now!
CH2M will be involved with planning, risk management, assist with the acquisition of a fleet of DMUs, and conduct a fare collection study.

San Bernardino Associated Governments (Sanbag) is responsible for the project which is being funded by federal, state and local governments including a half-cent local sales tax.

The project entails upgrading a 14.5km railway to provide a commuter rail service between the existing Metrolink station in San Bernardino, Downtown Redlands and Redlands University, with four new stations. Final design is currently underway with a view to starting construction in 2017. The line is expected to open in 2020.

Trains will operate every 30 minutes during peak hours, and at hourly intervals off-peak. In addition, Metrolink Express trains will be extended to serve Downtown Redlands to provide a limited-stop service to and from Los Angeles during peak hours.

Annual operation and maintenance costs are estimated at between $US 8m and $US 10m.
The order is part of a five-year framework contract awarded last October, when SNCF Network also signed similar deals with Voestalpine, Arcelor Mittal, and Lucchini.

Prior to the recent sale of its Long Products Europe business to Greybull Capital, Tata Steel invested 35m in the rail mill at Hayange, enabling the plant to produce 108m-long rails and increasing overall rail production capacity from 300,000 to 400,000 tonnes. The upgrade included a new 12m heat treatment plant, which increased capacity for heat-treated rails from 55,000 tonnes to 125,000 tonnes.

The latest contract with SNCF Network represents around 30% of the plant's order book.

"This contract supports the steel industry in France and reflects the will of SNCF Network to develop long-term partnerships with its suppliers," says Jeantet. The signing of this contract enables SNCF to achieve economies of scale while increasing production capacity to cope with the unprecedented workload generated by the renovation of the conventional network."
On June 16, Amtrak, Brandywine Realty Trust, Drexel University, PennDOT and SEPTA unveiled the Philadelphia 30th Street Station District Plan and announced the initiation of several follow-on projects to improve the immediate station area and catalyze future development throughout the District.

The Plan is a collaborative two-year joint planning effort to produce a single, integrated long-term vision for growth and development in the area surrounding 30th Street Station.

Forty new acres of open space and 18 million square feet of new development are envisioned in the Plan, including an entirely new mixed-use neighborhood anchoring the District atop 88 acres of rail yards along the western bank of the Schuylkill River.

With a proposed $2 billion investment in roads, utilities, parks, bridges, and extension of transit services, developers see the potential to unlock $4.5 billion in private real estate investment, in addition to $3.5 billion for Drexels Schuylkill Yards project being developed by Brandywine Realty Trust. Developers see the potential to generate $3.8 billion in City and State taxes and 40,000 new jobs.

As outlined in the Plan, the coming months will see action on one of the most common areas of community feedback, as SEPTA starts preliminary work to support consideration of a preferred option for restoring the underground connection between 30th Street Station and its Market-Frankford Line.

The 30th Street Station District Plan is a transformative approach, said SEPTA General Manager Jeff Knueppel. This location is well served by the Market Frankford Line, 5 Trolley Lines, 6 Bus Routes and all Regional Rail Lines, and the District Plan is another example of how transportation can drive economic development. SEPTA is excited to partner with Amtrak and all stakeholders to accelerate a vision that re-energizes this area and continues to meet the regions travel needs.

The vision for the 30th Street Station District complements the recently unveiled master plan for Schuylkill Yards to be developed by Drexel and Brandywine, said Drexel President John A. Fry. Together these two developments will bring fundamental transformation to University City and become the centerpiece of Americas next great innovation district, a district characterized by its superior access to transportation.

To pave the way for future development of the conceptual Arch Street Transportation Center, PennDOT will work with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to study possible changes to the I-76 on- and off-ramps at 30th Street.

The department works hard to support development for all modes, including safer driving, walking, or riding bicycles and transit, PennDOT Secretary Leslie S. Richards said. I am encouraged by the vision that has been created for the area around the station.

With an eye toward improving station conditions in the near term, Amtrak will pursue funding to advance the Station Plaza concept outlined in the District Plan. Station Plaza involves the development of new public spaces on all four sides of 30th Street Station, creating a more welcoming and seamless experience for all station visitors.

Later this year, Amtrak also intends to solicit partners to develop certain property adjacent to 30th Street Station, as well as to analyze and suggest station improvements including retail offerings.

Philadelphias iconic 30th Street Station is poised to anchor what could be a transformative new neighborhood built around transportation and the Schuylkill River waterfront, said Amtrak Board Chairman Tony Coscia. The Amtrak team is committed to continuing the important and productive collaboration reflected in the creation of this single, integrated District Plan and will work hard to help realize the great opportunities it envisions.

This vision is an excellent collaboration between key stakeholders to create long term civic and economic value for Philadelphia at our regional mass transportation hub and represents the next phase in the ongoing renaissance of University City, said Jerry Sweeney, President and CEO of Brandywine Realty Trust.

Crafting meaningful consensus toward a unified vision within a multitude of stakeholder interests is hard work that requires imagination, problem-solving creativity, flexibility and perseverance, said Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Project Manager Kristopher Takacs. This journey has been a sheer delight for SOM and our world-class team of professional experts, whose leadership and collaboration have laid the foundations for a game-changing transformation.
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Some declare the Arab Spring over and its revolutions a failure, with counter-revolutions ranging from political to violent.

The news from the Middle East after the Arab Spring is often dismal. But the reality is much more complex. It is too short a time frame to fully understand it.

Pessimistically declaring the Arab Spring a failure in 2016 would be as naive as optimistically declaring it a success in 2011. Something comes nextbut what?

It will take a generation or more to fully realize its effects. Mehran Kamrava at Georgetown University comes to a similar conclusion. He argues that the ruling bargain in the Middle East is changing with the Arab Spring, although the outcome is not yet set. It is not clear yet what will emerge.

In many countries, in the wake of the protests, small, quiet and incremental changes are taking place (even in Egypt). At the root of these changes are both a newfound sense of agency among the people of the Middle East and a wariness of the too fast change that created chaos in some countries.

There are new or revised constitutions, with calls for new social contracts with pluralistic inclusion in society, accountability and participation. Relationships between peoples with varying religious, ethnic, or national identities are being redefined.

How Islam fits into governance of society is being both peacefully debated and violently fought over. Women are remodeling their roles, rights and responsibilities. Youth are rejecting the social order of stagnation and stability to which their parents acquiesced. Business and government leaders are recognizing the need for new educational and economic models that offer merit-based opportunities.

But in other countries, borders are being challenged, and there are mass migrations of people displaced by violent conflict, inflicting untold human suffering.

In some places, the Arab Spring has unleashed conflict and deepened religious, social, class-based, political, and ethnic cleavages in society. Some parts of the Middle East are unlikely to enjoy stability and prosperity for a decade or more, with civilians suffering damage to their bodies, minds and communities that will take generations to heal.

There is a compelling case to be made that countries across the Middle East, as a group, are not looking very democratic several years after the 2011 events. Tarek Masoud at Harvard concludes, Arab democracy seems further away today than it has at any point in the last twenty-five years.

Liberal democracy is not the only measure of the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

I would propose that liberal democracy is not the only measure of the aftermath of the Arab Springit is one of a number of goals (political, economic, social and legal) that could be summed up as creating a good society.

We conflate the term democracy with a package of elements that make up a good society, and electoral democracy is but one (albeit very important) piece.

There are other changes underway in Middle East countries not mired in civil wars that give cause for measured optimism in the long run: removing stagnant governments, newfound official or tacit accountability, experimentation with government models, seeking to create new social contracts through constitutions, economic stimuli, increased investment in public services, reining in the behavior of the police (or at least having public debates about their behavior), popular sentiments that freedom of speech is an irreversible right, and more.

What can we learn from other great waves of revolutions in modern history? The American Revolution, French Revolution, the Springtime of Nations of 1848, the Russian Revolution and the 1989 revolutions that swept Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc (also named after a season, the Autumn of Nations, or labeled various color and flower revolutions).

While they unfolded in different ways, their implications often took several decades to be understood. While we can learn from history, perhaps every revolution is unique to itself.

No one can predict the future. Few would have predicted that stable autocratic governments around the region would have been toppled in a matter of months in 2011.

Five years ago, few would have imagined that a medieval Islamist group would declare a caliphate, inflict brutal violence on a regions population and take over parts of Iraq and Syria. After Egypts 2011 revolution, few would have predicted a second revolution in 2013.

What will the Middle East look like in the next few decades? We have all been surprised so far.

Out of the upheaval that was the Arab Spring, a pessimistic scenario looking forward could see continued violence and warfare, ISIS as a country and a repressive Egypt that undergoes another revolution in a decade.

But another scenario could see the Arab Spring movements over time translating ideals into institutions, building prosperous societies, with economic opportunities, quality education, pluralistic participation and equal rights before the law regardless of identity, with citizens empowered to shape their future.

This generation will likely not witness the full results of its revolutions.

But what will happen in two decades when the generation of youth who overthrew governments because of shared ideals will have more presence in leadership roles in society?

While youth protesters toppled governments or forced change, that same generation of youth will now need to determine how it will develop the gradual changes needed to support the ideals of the Arab Spring.

Shelly Culbertson is a policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. This is excerpted from her book The Fires of Spring: A Post-Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East. Copyright  2016 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press.

This commentary originally appeared on Newsweek on June 15, 2016. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
After the mass shooting that killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, hundreds of people gathered outside the Apartment Lounge in Grand Rapids to tell the world: We will always unite against hate.

As the sun sets this past Sunday, a day that begins with one of the worst mass shootings in the history of the United States, the people of Grand Rapids start to descend upon the streets around the Apartment Lounge. There, outside Michigans oldest gay bar, people from all walks of life stand shoulder to shoulder, raising candles towards the darkening night sky and begin to sing.

Theres a dream in the future, Jasinya Sanchez, a beloved drag performer in Grand Rapids,

It is a moment of both strength and heartbreak at a time that should have been a day of celebration for the LGBTQ community around the nation, with Pride parades and other Pride Month events organized across the country where, almost exactly one year ago, marriage equality became a reality.

Instead, it became a day of mourning after a gunman, armed with an assault style rifle, shot and killed 49 individuals, many of them gay, lesbian and transgender people of color, during a Latin-themed night at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Another 53 people were wounded in the attack that happened in a space that was supposed to be safe -- safe for an LGBTQ community that has, for far too long, been subjected to constant violence and harassment, safe for people to be who they are, safe for anyone, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation or race, to dance and laugh and raise their glass with friends.

In cities around the globe, from Grand Rapids to New York to London, LGBTQ communities, and their allies, gathered to mourn the victims, who ranged in age from 18 to 50 and included avid travelers and talented dancers and recent graduates -- individuals who family members described as the best people, the greatest daughters and sons and parents and friends.

When I woke up Sunday morning and saw everything that was going on, I called my manager right away and said, We need to put together a vigil tonight and show the world that Grand Rapids cares, and that we support our community -- not just here, but across the world, says Bob Johnson, the owner of the Apartment Lounge.

And show they did. Hundreds of people flooded the downtown streets, which Johnson notes the Grand Rapids Police Department immediately agreed to shut down to cars and patrol during the event, for the candlelit vigil, which included hugs, tears, impromptu singing, and many a story from residents who spoke of the importance of the Grand Rapids LGBTQ community in their lives. They spoke of coming out, of finding strength among their peers, of feeling scared and vulnerable and angry after the shooting. They cried and hugged and wiped tears from others faces. They spoke of strength, of support, of pride. Gently, they placed candles around a rainbow flag, upon which hand-drawn signs read: Remember our Pulse and Love wins. And, thanks to the vigil, Johnson was able to donate $2,200 that was raised to a fund set up for victims in Orlando.

Following Sundays powerful event, Rapid Growth asked individuals from the LGBTQ+ community for their thoughts on the importance of Grand Rapids LGBTQ+ community, as well as on the Orlando shooting and the vigil. Below are the incredibly heartfelt and important responses we received. Wed love to hear your thoughts as well; please feel free to share your own feelings on these events in the comments below.

Bob Johnson, owner of the Apartment Lounge

[The vigil] restored my faith in humanity. I cant believe in todays world this, this shooting, can still happen. When it happened, it made me sick to my stomach. I called Rumors [Night Club] right away and the Pride Center right away and told them we organized this vigil. Rumors closed for an hour and a half to bring their people over, and the Pride Center was there. It was important to me that we unified our entire community. It was an important thing to show the people who live here were all united.

Its empowering, but we have to remember we cant let it cripple us and make us afraid. We have to let it empower us; we are trying to change things. We still have a ways to go, but when I saw the outpouring of emotion and support last night, it was amazing.

Our community is very supportive of everyone. We have the

Weve got an amazing network of support here. I want to show the world that a community can come together and make a difference as a whole.

Mike Hemmingsen, board president at the Grand Rapids Pride Center

The community -- the community as a whole, the entire Grand Rapids community -- needs to understand the value that the LGBTQ individuals bring to our community from the perspective of cultural differences, support in the economy, and just overall a better understanding and openness to anyone who isnt quote-unquote the norm. At the vigil, I heard several stories about individuals whod just come out and how real and difficult it still is to go through that process, even with marriage equality, which demonstrates the need for us to continue the advocacy work that were doing.

[This weekends Pride] is going to be a true testament as to where our community stands from an ally perspective. If there ever was a time to come out and demonstrate the support for the LGBT community, Saturday, June 18 is it. And, well be giving a dollar for each ticket sold for

We have hundreds of LGBTQ youth who are homeless and at-risk each year. We still have kids and young adults that face tragedy on a regular basis. When you come out and buy a ticket, no only are you giving to Orlando victims, but youre supporting our youth. The money raised goes to programs and groups we host on a weekly basis to support the LGBT community. Im really excited to see our community demonstrate their support.

Stand up and protect [LGBTQ residents]. When you see inequality being demonstrated towards an individual or a group, use your voice. Tell people thats not acceptable. Tell people everyones welcome in our community, and be strong about it.

Its been awhile since we had our final last calls at Diversions, Pub 43 and The Mixx.

Having owned gay bars for over 21 years, the attack on Saturday night/Sunday morning felt very personal. I opened my bars to create a safe gathering place, a place where we could escape from the prejudices of life. A place where we could gather, have fun, and let our cares melt away. A place where we were free to be who we are. A place to meet and grow our gay families. A place to belong.

Historically, gay bars were one of the first places our community gathered and felt safe. Bars are where we met for social events, political events, fundraisers and so much more. Gay bars were a place where we organized for social justice and LGBT rights. The Stonewall Inn many consider to be the site of the beginning of our Gay Rights Movement. So much of our communitys history was wrapped around, built upon and inspired by the Gay Bars.

Gay bars made us feel like we were home.

And then, on Sunday morning, our home was invaded and senselessly attacked. While this happened in Orlando, this could have been any bar in any city. I did not know any of those who were injured of any of those who lost their lives, but I feel like this was an attack on my own brothers and sisters in my own gay family. Like all of our community, I am sickened by this.

My heart, thoughts, and prayers go out to all of those affected by this attack

.

Where do we go from here? I believe that we have to stay strong, remain defiant and fight to continue to move our community forward. As a community, we have struggled so long and have existed through so much to make it where we are today. Our triumph with gay marriage was huge, but last weekends event demonstrates we have so much further to go.

We must continue to talk truth to the demagoguery and vitriolic rhetoric that is being spewed this political season. And this fall we must vote and have our voices heard.

This month is Gay Pride Month, when we gather in many cities in the U.S. and around the world to celebrate our diverse community. So, lets gather, show our many colors, our pride, and our love.

While we are all different, this is the one time a year that we celebrate that we are also all the same.

We Are Orlando!

Elisa

I have no words to describe my feelings about the massacre that happened in Orlando over the weekend. I deeply feel sad and sorry for those families who are suffering for the death of their loved ones because no one deserves to die in such a cruel way. It frightens me to think that tragedies are becoming something normal in the United States because it feels like theres one every month!



However, we cannot continue to ignore that shootings are becoming part of our lives; we have to wake up and do something about it. The Orlando massacre is the result of an intolerant society that does not accept the uniqueness of its individuals. The LGTB+ community can only stay strong if we get support and protection from the whole society.

Graci Harkema, Grand Rapids business leader

I still cry.

I still cry for the victims. For the survivors. For the families. For the friends. For the allies. For the community.

I cry for the morning, realizing this isn't a dream. I cry for the night, knowing their loved ones won't be there.

I still cry.

But in my tears, I stand. I stand with my LGBT community for the voice we all deserve. I stand for equality. I stand for freedom. I stand to fight and not sit on what's right. I stand to speak up. I stand to speak out. I stand for love.

This is our community and together we stand.

Madison Sanchez, drag performer

The gay community of Grand Rapids Michigan means the world to me. As an entertainer, I have been blessed to meet so many people from so many different walks of life that without entertaining I probably would have never met. The love that each and every single person in this community shows on a regular basis is amazing and humbling all at the same time. I have personally never felt more accepted by anyone as much as I do the LGBT community here. It's special, and I love you all for it.

Kennedy Martin, LGBT+ and womens rights activist

Grand Rapids' LGBT+ community means the world to me, first and foremost; I've never felt a stronger sense of unity than I do with my pride family. Knowing that if at any time I need a shoulder to lean on, I can always count on these beautiful people to see my through my hard times. The undeniable support you get in this amazing community; you just can't get anywhere these days -- they keep me strong.

Simon Kittok, executive director and treasurer at the Grand Rapids Trans Foundation

We in the queer community have been trying to grapple with this heartbreaking and terrifying event in Orlando. Emotions are high. We're all pretty shaken up.

It was beautiful to see such a large number of the local LGBTQ+ community come out to the vigil to mourn, to remember, to stand in solidarity with those in Orlando. We are family, and I think many of us needed to see each others' faces, to hug and cry together. But I think it's important to mention that I know many queer folks that felt too scared, too shaken up, too emotionally traumatized by the news of the shooting to even leave their houses.

Yes, we've come a long way, and yes, we've mobilized to create incredible societal change in just a few decades. But at the end of the day, queer folks still know that it's a dangerous world for them to exist in. Even more dangerous for queer people of color and trans folks. This traumatizing event is just another reminder that we still have a long way to go.

Beau Laine Vansolkema, president of the Grand Rapids Community Colleges LGBTQ+ club, StandOut!

This is an unfortunate reminder that the LGBTQ communities everywhere still have to fear what may happen to them for being who they are. We have done some great things but still have a long ways to go. Same sex marriage was the first to do; now we have the restroom epidemic to hurdle over next. What happened in Orlando can happen anywhere. Hate is everywhere. This is a significant factor when mixed with violence, more specifically a firearm in this case. Fifty lives were lost and another 53 were injured. West Michigan and our strong community will not give up. Our human rights need justice; this battle is just beginning, and, like Martin Luther King Jr. said, "I have a dream. I have a dream of my own, and that's when all LGBTQ individuals can walk with their heads held high, not living in fear and be who they were born to be.

We also reached out to Mayor Rosalynn Bliss, who shared this statement with us:

Grand Rapids LGBTQ community enriches our city and adds to the inclusive nature of our diverse culture. I am incredibly saddened by this senseless act of violence. There is no place in our society for hatred of any kind. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their loved ones. On behalf of the entire Grand Rapids community, I send my deepest condolences to the city of Orlando and all those impacted by this tragedy. May they find peace in the support of our community and knowing they are not alone in their grief.

The Grand Rapids Community Relations Commission too issued a statement of support:

The City of Grand Rapids Community Relations Commission (CRC) hereby condemns and denounces the repulsive hate crimes committed upon the LGBTQ community and the entire Orlando community. In 1994, the CRC revised City ordinances to provide protection in employment, housing and public accommodation. These ordinances include LGBTQ protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity, expanding protection to transgender citizens.

We mourn with the Orlando victims and families. We stand in solidarity with citizens affected by this terrible loss. Hate and intolerance have no place in our society. The Community Relations Commission will continue to work to ensure the safety and inclusion of the LGBTQ community. The CRC has a long history of opposing acts that promote hate. It continues to fight to bring equity and inclusion to our City. Hate crimes and bias incidents affect the families and individuals involved. They also impact the entire community. Every individual has a right to feel safe in their own home and community without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, marital status, disability, source of lawful income, sexual orientation or gender identity. The Community Relations Commission urges residents to join us in supporting the LGBTQ community.

We encourage our citizens to condemn this.
Smart TVs are the latest target for ransomware, with analysts finding that the FLocker Android ransomware is a police Trojan that pretends to be US Cyber Police or another law enforcement agency.





The malware locks the TV and displays a screen that accuses potential victims of crimes they didnt commit. It then demands $200 worth of iTunes gift cards to give TV access back.Ever since FLocker (short for Frantic Locker) first came out in May 2015, Trend Micro has gathered more than 7,000 variants in its sample bank.Using multiple devices that run on one platform makes life easier for a lot of people. However, if a malware affects one of these devices, the said malware may eventually affect the others, too, said Trend Micro researcher Echo Duan, in an analysis Interestingly, when launched for the first time, FLocker checks whether the device is located in the following Eastern European counties: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, Armenia and Belarus. If it is, it deactivates itself.The attack surface is a growing one. IHS has found that worldwide shipments of smart TVs will reach 109 million in 2016, rising to 134 million in 2020. North America and Asia-Pacific are leading the way as surging markets.Users can be infected via SMS, or by downloading a malicious app, and should be wary of what they decide to enable on their TVs.
The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has broadly upheld the FCCs reclassification of broadband as a Title II service.





Justices Tatel and Srinivasan, writing for the majority, affirmed the FCCs broad discretion to reclassify wired broadband service as a telecommunications service, and found that none of the challenges raised to FCC authority had merit. Even in his dissenting opinion, judge Stephen Williams concurred on the merits. His opposition came on process, where he argued that the FCCs change of position was arbitrary and capricious.In January 2014, Verizon won its challenge of the Open Internet Order in US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Verizon argued that the FCC lacked the authority to enforce Net neutrality regulations because, it claimed, Congress did not grant the agency the ability to do so. And that's because broadband was not classified as a public utility, the way telecoms are. Last March, the FCC decided to change that by simply voting to make it a public utility, bringing broadband regulation back under its purview.Verizon and other ISPs have challenged that move, bringing a series of court cases to bear.The FCCs discretion to reclassify wired broadband stemmed from Congresss silence on the matter in the 1996 Act, said Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson The strongest argument for wireless being viewed differently was that here Congress was not silent. The panel rejected that argument, calling the FCCs decision to reclassify reasonable.It is highly likely that the order will be appealed, first to an en banc review by the full DC Circuit Court, and barring that, to the Supreme Court  a process that could take years.The prospect of a Supreme Court challenge is likely to stay the most Draconian interpretations of the FCCs pricing authority for at least the next few years, said Moffett. A different FCC or a different Congress could easily eliminate that ex post loophole even without re-re-classifying. But we doubt they will. And what matters here is the long term picture. The pendulum was already swinging towards regulation. Today it just swung a bit further.The panel also decided to uphold the FCCs authority to treat wireless the same way, and agreed that interconnection is simply a necessary part of the broadband market.
Russian Supreme Court bans Jehovahs Witnesses branch in Stary Oskol

MOSCOW, June 16 (RAPSI)  The Supreme Court of Russia on Thursday declared The Jehovahs Witnesses of Stary Oskol in Belgorod Region an extremist organization and ruled to liquidate it, RAPSI learned in the courtroom.

Previous ruling to liquidate organization, issued by the Belgorod Regional court on February 10, was found legal. The ruling came into force today.

Representatives of the organization claimed that its liquidation is a disproportionate measure that is cruel to believers. An appeal also mentioned refusal to consider motions filed by the organization.

A lawyer representing the Jehovahs Witnesses said that the Belgorod Regional court mistakenly found the organization extremist because forbidden literature was found in possession of some of its members. He also said that Russian law enforcement agencies are showing discriminatory attitude towards the Jehovahs Witnesses. He quoted rulings of Russias Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, referring the inadmissibility of restrictions on freedom of conscience, including the guise of fighting extremism.

Jehovahs Witnesses have had many legal problems in Russia.

On June 9, Russias Supreme Court on Thursday banned the Jehovahs Witnesses of Belgorod as extremist organization.

In March 2015, a court in Tyumen fined the organization 50,000 rubles ($773) and seized prohibited literature.

In January 2014, a court in Kurgan ruled to ban the organizations booklets as extremist. The books talk about how to have a happy life, what you can hope for, how to develop good relations with God and what you should know about God and its meaning.

In late December 2013, the leader of the sects group in Tobolsk, Siberia was charged with extremism and the prevention of a blood transfusion that nearly led to the death of a female member of the group.

In 2004, a court in Moscow dissolved and banned a Jehovahs Witnesses group on charges of recruiting children, encouraging believers to break from their families, inciting suicide and preventing believers from accepting medical assistance.

Jehovah's Witnesses is an international religious organization based in Brooklyn, New York. Since 2004 sever branches and chapters of the organization were banned and shut down in various regions of Russia.
"Inflation is the primary question for our clients in conversation," says Nudo. "What we really want to do is understand how theyre accounting for it in their portfolios."
Paul Salem is the Vice President for Policy and Research at the Middle East Institute. This piece has been published in collaboration with the Institute. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

Since the ISIS downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai in October 2015, there has been a bustle of activity between Washington and Cairo. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been to the Egyptian capital twice, in addition to visits by high-level Congressional, military, intelligence, and business delegations. Despite continued high concern about the countrys dismal human-rights situation, there is deep awareness that Egypt needs urgent aid in its fight against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as well as serious assistance in boosting its slow economy. There is also growing awareness that while Washington has serious and legitimate differences on a number of domestic and regional issues with almost all of its Middle Eastern allies, the United States cannot face regional challenges on its own, and must negotiate partnerships and burden-sharing with the allies it has in the region.

Egypt is indeed too big to fail, and while Cairo has a long way to go on essential economic and political reforms, it is strategically important to prevent a terrorist victory or an economic collapse in the country.

Egypt faces daunting challenges, and the United States has a keen interest in helping the most populous Arab nation overcome them. After three years, the war against ISIS in Sinai grinds on with no decisive resolution in sight. The Egyptian armed forces have denied the militant jihadist group their signature goal of setting up an independent polity in northern Sinai, as ISIS has done in other countries, but this has come at a very high cost to civilians. ISIS has reverted to al-Qaeda tactics of guerilla war, but is exacting a heavy price on Egyptian military and police forces. Al-Qaeda, in the meantime, in its ambition to compete with ISIS for jihadist primacy, is urging cells and sympathizers in Egypt to take more action.

The United States has offered equipment and training to enhance Egypts effectiveness against the Islamic State in Sinai, as well as to secure its long border with Libya in the west. This includes AH-64 Apache helicopters and most recently a consignment of 762 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles. This cooperation needs to continue.

The International Monetary Fund predicts Egyptian GDP growth of 3.3 percent in 2016, which is down from 4.2 percent in 2015. That is higher than the projected growth rates in Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, but still well below the growth needed to bring down high unemployment and poverty. Low oil prices have meant that Suez Canal revenue is down, as are remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf. And as in Tunisia, terrorist attacks have reduced tourism to a trickle. Egyptian exports have also declined as a result of a combination of challenging conditions, including slow global growth, an overvalued Egyptian pound, and foreign exchange shortages. But the same IMF report predicts a rebound in 2017 to growth of 4.3 percent as the effects of foreign direct investment from Gulf countries and other sources bear fruit.

The United States participated in the Egypt Economic Development Conference held in Sharm el-Sheikh last year, and a number of American companies are active in Egyptian markets. The U.S. government also annually provides $150 million in economic aid. Senator Lindsey Graham is right, however, in emphasizing, after his latest visit to Egypt, that the stakes are very high. He is correct to say that the United States needs to think big about how it can lead an international effort to channel more targeted assistance and investment to Egypt, while at the same time pressing its government to move forward on urgently needed economic reforms.

In the political sphere, while parliamentary elections of sorts went ahead in late 2015, repression and restriction of civic and political freedoms are at an all-time high, and elections in the absence of freedom do not constitute a credible pathway to democratization. The government fears large-scale public protests such as those of 2011 and 2013, but despite the harsh crackdown, hundreds of labor demonstrations have broken out over the last year, and mass protests erupted in late May after the government announced the transfer of the two Red Sea islands of Sanafir and Tiran to Saudi Arabia. Without rapid economic progress, and with ever-restricted political space, the risk is that the country is being primed for another paroxysm of massive unrest sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Political development in Egypt is up to the Egyptian people. After all, they have had two massive uprisings, or revolutions, in five years, and we will surely hear from them again in coming months and years. The United States, however, should continue to press for the release of political prisoners, the lifting of repressive security laws, and the inclusion of all actors in the political process, provided these commit to pluralism, non-violence, and the constitution.

Finally, Egypt remains an important actor in regional affairs. President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi breathed new life last month into the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, drawing a positive response from Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Egypt is currently hosting long overdue reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas and has also hosted Syrian opposition talks while maintaining links to Syrian President Bashar Assad. And Cairo will always be an important player in Libya. As U.S. diplomacy has faltered in all of these difficult crises, enlisting more regional leadership is a necessity.

U.S. relations with Egypt have gone through various ups and downs. Some differences will continue, but it is important that the United States and Egypt build on areas of common interest, and engage each other in areas where disagreements persist.
The EU summit on June 28-29 in Amsterdam promises to run hot, as leaders of the member states clash over a number of topics. This at a time when public confidence in the European Union's ability to solve problems is diminishing fast.

The main issues playing out before the whirring cameras will be the future of the EU-Turkey deal on refugees; the outcome of Great Britains referendum on EU membership; the political response to the Dutch referendum on the Association Treaty with Ukraine (to which the Dutch said No); and the success or failure of a far-reaching, EU-wide deal on tax reform and tax avoidance in the wake of the high-profile Panama Papers scandal.

So to say that the Dutch temporary chairmanship and European Council President Donald Tusk will have their hands full is an understatement.

The days before a summit generally see a lot of jostling among countries, with governments strategically leaking positions and opinions.

It is no different this time. The Czech government has made a series of "impossible" last-minute demands that could scupper a hard-fought deal on tax dodgers to which the other 27 EU nations finally seem to agree, after years of tough deliberations and compromises.

Turkey or turkey

Another hot topic is the deal between the EU countries and Turkey on refugees. The EU summit agenda touches on the subject lightly, stating that the leaders will "take stock of the situation, which is a diplomatic way of stating that there is concern without publicly saying that it is concerning.

Capitals have been sending mixed signals. One day the Turkish government will signal its anger, demonstrating a willingness to sink the deal unless Ankara gets what it wants. Then someone in the Brussels apparatus will voice concern, signalling to Ankara that scuppering the deal means Turkey won't get what it covets: visa liberalization for Turkish citizens. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told his public that visa liberalization is a done deal. His credibility is now on the line, and the EU countries know it.

While that process goes on, another connected problem is the staunch unwillingness by some countries to accept any deal that could see millions of Turks freely traveling to and through the European Union. Some are concerned that repressed Turkish Kurds will use the liberalization to flee to Europe and request asylum. There is also considerable resistance to the idea of Turkeys eventual EU accession being taken up again, as Turkey demands.

With elections coming up in 2017, Germany, the Netherlands, and France would especially like the refugee deal with Turkey to be kept alive amid increasing popular resentment against asylum seekers. New images of refugees entering the EU en masse through Turkey and seeking asylum in their countries are sure to doom the governing parties electoral hopes.

London Falling

Depending on the outcome of the British referendum on leaving the European Union, the seat ordinarily reserved for the British Prime Minister will either be filled or remain empty. Although the official mantra is that the EU leadership has no plan on hand for Brexit, as an extra means to up the pressure on Remain-leaning British voters, summit attendees will discuss and formalize which unofficial scenario will be implemented to deal with the aftermath.

Several EU members have been pushing hard to punish Great Britain in case of Brexit. This is also to send a clear warning to other countries where popular parties and movements are mulling the idea of organizing their own referendum on leaving the EU family. In this scenario, London is expected to pay a high price -- it may see the way blocked to a favourable trade treaty with the European Union, such as those enjoyed by non-members Switzerland and Norway.

An empty chair where the British used to sit is also certain to have repercussions for the usual distribution of power and associated plays at the summit table. Countries like the Netherlands like to use Britain's position at the table as a counterweight to the Paris-Berlin axis. If London is aloof, these countries will have to recalibrate and latch on to a new ally.

Ukraine knocks on the door

Another politically painful dossier is the recent referendum in the Netherlands on the EU's association treaty with Ukraine.

In April, a majority of those who turned up voted against it, even though the 27 other EU nations had already agreed to it. So far the Dutch government has refrained from simply pulling out of the treaty, instead trying find ways to renegotiate or re-interpret the treaty.

The Netherlands doesn't have much to offer its 27 individual counterparts in exchange for their support for any new compromise. A total opt-out of the association treaty, however, doesn't seem to be a credible solution.

A year ago the Dutch chairmanship seemed easy -- six months to be spent tying up loose ends and ceremoniously officiating several compromises that have been worked on by the members states in the preceding years, such as tax reform. The reality has changed fast. On June 28 and 29, the Dutch and EU Council President Donald Tusk will have their work cut out for them.
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The MECCANO TRILOGO Collector's Handbook is a 5x7" pocket size book featuring 220 color pages of awesome MeccanoA new book from Stephane Faucourt, author of "Meccano to Trilogo" (2006) and "La French Touch - the Definitive Guide to Star Wars French vintage collectibles (2015), co-authored with Yann Leroux.It goes back to the BASICS with content strictly focused on KEY information: LARGE individual pictures of EACH blister card, chosen among the best condition available, card FRONT/BACKS combinations, collectors checklist and an update RARITY index.It is the perfect companion to your journey intovintage Meccano & Trilogo action figure collecting. It can be used and enjoyed everywhere, anytime. It helps managing efficiently the collection at home and can be carried on a hunt.Read more and discuss about it here in the Rebelscum Forums In case you missed Stephane's "French Touch" book, you can find it here on Amazon The book can now be ordered from the authors for a delivery at CELEBRATION EUROPE 3 London from July 15th to 17th.The book will be signed, hand numbered, with the exclusive 2006 Meccano to Trilogo ink stamp, at the special price of 23 gbp (or 30 euros or 34 usd).A complimentary giveaway will be available each day at the pickup location, and one exclusive with the offer.Fill the online form and wait checkout instructions: http://goo.gl/forms/55YbKipd4BVKJbH32 Stephane Faucourt and Yann Leroux will redeem the books personally each day from the Vintage Rebellion and Mintinbox.net fan booths.If you miss the offer or can't make it to CE3, the book will be online on Amazon later in June!NOW delivered ANYWHERE in your GALAXY #FrenchTouch MECCANO TRILOGO Collectors' HANDBOOK available on AMAZON at the regular price!Couldn't attend CE3? now's the time to go !!
A horse was fraudulently sold to a woman, police search for marijuana users in Sanford and equipment stolen from journalism building all between May 14 and June 8.
Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight Murder victim Marysa Nichols' mother, Diane Whitmire, right, hugs Debbie Allard of the Tehama County District Attorney's Office after Quentin Bealer's murder conviction in Sacramento County Superior Court.

SHARE Jim Schultz/Record Searchlight Murder victim Marysa Nichols' mother, Diane Whitmore, left, and Debbie Allard comforted each other outside the Sacramento County Courthouse after Bealer's murder conviction. Quentin Bealer Marysa Nichols

By Jim Schultz of the Redding Record Searchlight

A Sacramento County jury found Quentin Ray Bealer guilty of first-degree murder Wednesday in the 2013 murder of 14-year-old Marysa Nichols of Red Bluff.

Bealer, who is facing a 25-year-to-life prison term when he's sentenced July 8, slumped forward in his seat and bowed his head when the verdict was read.

The 42-year-old Bealer, who has long proclaimed his innocence, was convicted of strangling the teen, whose body was found Feb. 28, 2013, lying facedown in a creek bed near her high school.

Her yellow tank top was tied tightly around her neck with her right breast exposed. Bealer's DNA was found on the garment.

Two jurors on the panel said after Wednesday's verdict that Bealer's DNA was the key piece of physical evidence that helped to convict him.

Juror Willie Hall said the jury thoroughly considered a number of theories posed by the defense to cast doubt on Bealer's guilt.

But, he said, those theories, including that Bealer's DNA being found on the tank top tied around the teen's neck was the result of a cigarette he had given her, did not meet the beyond a reasonable doubt test.

"Once the pieces of the puzzle didn't fit, it went back to the DNA," Hall said, adding Bealer's credibility also came into question because his story changed a number of times.

Another juror, who wished to remain anonymous and wants to establish a scholarship at Red Bluff High School in Marysa's memory, agreed.

"Ultimately," it all boiled down to the DNA, he said.

Marysa's mother, Diane Whitmire, expressed relief  and delight  that Bealer was found guilty of murdering her daughter.

"I am overjoyed," she said, adding that justice has finally been served in the case. "I couldn't be happier."

Tehama County District Attorney Gregg Cohen felt much the same way, praising prosecutor Donna Daly, law enforcement, the jury and others for their work resulting in Bealer's conviction.

"The jury had finally spoken," he said. "This is Marysa's day."

But Cohen also did not mince any words about Bealer, calling him a child molester, child killer and liar.

"His DNA  and only his DNA  was found on the murder weapon," Cohen said. "Now there is justice for Marysa, and there will be justice for Quentin Ray Bealer."

Red Bluff Police Chief Kyle Sanders also issued a statement after the verdict saying, "While we continue to mourn Marysa's loss, we are thankful the jurors saw the truth and returned their unanimous verdict, finding Bealer guilty of first-degree murder."

Although it's certain Bealer's conviction will be appealed, his court-appointed defense attorney, Shon Northam, did not appear in court to take the verdict.

Northam was unable to attend because he had other cases being heard in the North State that needed his attention, said Sacramento Superior Court Judge Delbert Orso, who presided over the nine-week murder trial.

But, he said, Northam had earlier arranged to have another attorney fill in for him on Wednesday.

The nine-man, three-woman jury reached its verdict late Tuesday afternoon, but it was not read until Wednesday morning to the lateness of the hour.

Bealer, a Red Bluff resident, will remain in jail without bail as he awaits sentencing, which is likely to be held in Red Bluff once a motion is filed to have the case returned to Tehama County.

The trial, which began in late April, was moved to Sacramento due to extensive pretrial publicity in the North State to ensure an impartial jury could be selected. Cohen said the change-of-venue trial added about $100,000 to the cost to prosecute and try him, and estimated that Northam's cost to defend Bealer will be around three times that amount.

That money will come from Tehama County's reserve fund, he said.

Bealer was arrested March 2, 2013, after he turned himself in to police after the release of a surveillance video that showed a man matching Bealer's description outside the high school.

Although Bealer confirmed he was the man in the video surveillance, he maintained he had nothing to do with the teen's violent death.
Wendy Dickens

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By Alayna Shulman of the Redding Record Searchlight

First 5 Shasta has a new executive director.

Former Shasta County Health and Human Services Agency children's services branch employee Wendy Dickens took over for the organization in May.

At the county, Dickens worked as a supervisor and program manager and as a social worker for foster families. But in her new role, Dickens said she's excited to have a chance to work with families to prevent problems than confront them once they've already come up. First 5 provides resources for young children in the community and education for their parents.

"I get to work with the community as a whole in a holistic approach rather than just one subset," she said Wednesday. "As a child-welfare social worker, it's a lot more challenging to engage with the family than I think it will be to engage with a family as First 5."

Preventing problems is a tall order in Shasta County, which has high rates of neglect and poverty compared to the rest of the state.

"Coming from child welfare definitely opened up my eyes to the ... populations that have a great need for intervention," said Dickens, who majored in child development, psychology and social science at California State University, Chico, and got her master's degree in social work at CSU, Sacramento. "(Kids 0-5), many times they get the least support, because they haven't entered the school system."

That's why Dickens said she wants to be careful to both preserve what grants and programs are working well for First 5 and look into finding areas that could stand to be improved.

"There's been a good foundation here to build upon, so I don't want to lose what's already been achieved," she said. "There are things, though, that I definitely want to see grow and develop and flourish, and making sure that we're hitting the population that we need to hit."

One way Dickens wants to do that is by holding a series of community forums to educate parents on resources available and gather input on what more First 5 could be doing. That'll be especially important because the organization is soon due for a new strategic plan, she said.

Her job also will entail managing the organization's $1.2 million annual budget.

"I think sometimes it gets lost because we focus so much on what are we doing for the school-age child or the high school youth; but really, we need to start even earlier than that," she said. "How can we help develop a community that produces people that are contributing effectively?"

Dickens is replacing Joy Garcia, who recently left the organization to work with children in Peru.

"That old adage, 'It takes a village,' it takes a whole community in this day and age," Dickens said.
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By Nathan Solis of the Redding Record Searchlight

The Shasta County grand jury found a lack of oversight and a backlog of seized assets going back to the 1990s in its investigation into the Shasta County Sheriff's Office trust accounts.

The money in the accounts are collected by the Sheriff's Office through wage garnishments, gun permit and fingerprinting fees, property or evidence held during an investigation and court fees.

The grand jury looked into five trust accounts, one of which holds funds for county jail inmates.

What happens to a person's money when they are booked into the county jail? For inmates who don't already have an account with the jail commissary system, their cash is taken during booking, sealed in an envelope and manually entered into the system.

The grand jury said there is no oversight to make sure the money entered into the system matches the amount taken from the inmate during booking.

The grand jury applied the same logic in how the Sheriff's Office collects garnished wages and enters the information into its computer system.

The same employees who receive garnishment orders could potentially change the address of where that money is sent, "thereby creating the risk of improper diversion of funds," according to the report.

Sheriff Tom Bosenko said this has never been an issue with staff in his office. If a company or person were receiving payment from a garnished wage and it suddenly stopped or changed in some way, the Sheriff's Office would notice, Bosenko said.

"We of course have valuable and trustworthy employees and have never had an issue with those accounts before. There is no evidence or indication of wrongdoing and misappropriation of funds," Bosenko said.

Also mentioned in the report is a large backlog of items held during court cases and investigations that stretches from the 1990s to 2012.

Bosenko said staff has been working on the backlog before the grand jury investigation. Moving forward, the Sheriff's Office could hire a part-time staffer to process that backlog, but it would take time to fill that position since applicants would have to go through a background check and lengthy hiring process. This clearing of a large backlog would most likely go past the deadlines set by the grand jury later this year, said Bosenko.

"It gets down to a matter of staffing and having the available staff. If there is a big case they could get pulled away from those other cases," Bosenko said.

The process to clear that backlog can be lengthy if a court decision did not specifically say what to do with the money or property.

The Sheriff's Office is supposed to contact the last owner of the money or property after a decision is made in a case or investigation.

When the grand jury reviewed the Trust Administration Fund, over $131,000 was found to be unclaimed funds. At least one case accounts for $105,000, leaving about $26,000 that could go to the county if left unclaimed.

Currently there is no policy in the Sheriff's Office to decide what to do with these assets and instead a judgment call is made on a case-by-case basis.

Bosenko said that depends on the arresting officer and his or her supervisor, who will then consult with the District Attorney's Office to determine what a court decision was on the seized assets.

The report did applaud the Sheriff's Office for making the switch to prepaid debit cards instead of signing over a check of an inmate's money after they leave the county jail. This eliminates the need for staff to follow up with unclaimed checks.

The grand jury report also recommended the county Auditor-Controller conduct more frequent surprise audits of the Sheriff's Office assets held as evidence.
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One sentence from a recent Ninth District U.S. Court of Appeals ruling can sound jarring to many in Shasta County.

"The right of a member of the general public to carry a concealed firearm in public is not, and never has been, protected by the Second Amendment," it says in Peruta vs. County of San Diego.

The opinion addressed cases against San Diego and Yolo counties over their "good cause" provisions that restrict to whom the sheriff of those counties will grant carry concealed weapons carry permits, known as CCWs for short.

In San Diego, applicants for a CCW must show circumstances about why they want to carry a concealed weapon  and "simply fearing for one's personal safety alone is not considered good cause," according to the San Diego sheriff. Yolo County has similar restrictions, with its sheriff declining to issue licenses if applicants are seeking it for self-protection without credible threats of violence.

The plaintiffs in the cases said such restrictions, coupled with California's restrictions on carrying weapons in public, violate the Second Amendment.

The court said that while recent court cases show that the Second Amendment protects open carry, it doesn't protect concealed carry.

It came to that conclusion through a deep dive into weapons laws dating back to 1299 England when Edward I directed a couple of sheriffs to prohibit anyone from going around armed without "the king's special license" all the way up to the 2008 decision that said Washington, D.C., residents can have guns in their homes for self protection.

What the justices concluded was that nearly 500 years of British law  the very laws that influenced our Founding Fathers' drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights  banned concealed weapons under various situations. After the U.S. became a country, bans on concealed weapons continued through the early 19th century and into the 20th. The U.S. Supreme Court said in 1897 that "The right of people to keep and bear arms is not infringed by laws prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons."

But for those who fear the decision will curtail the ability to get CCWs in all California counties, the justices put that to rest. It stresses that decisions to grant CCWs still rests with sheriffs and police chiefs. "California entrusts the decision-making responsibility to local law enforcement officials because they are best positioned to evaluate the potential dangers that increasing or decreasing concealed carry would have in their communities," the court states. "In short, California's decision to place licensing in local hands is itself reasonable."

So if you want to have laxer rules for CCW licenses, look to your local sheriff.

In Shasta County, Sheriff Tom Bosenko has significantly fewer restrictions on qualifies for a CCW. Applicants need to be at least 21, pass a criminal-background check, undergo required training, be free of certain psychological conditions, and pay all the associated fees. The Shasta County requirements also include "be of good moral character" and "show good cause for the issuance of the license" but they don't go into too many details on what that means. Instead, those are discussed during an in-person interview.

So, even if the ruling says the Second Amendment doesn't protect concealed carry, Bosenko will be able to continue to provide CCWs as his office sees fit. Shasta County has put its trust in Bosenko and his policy reflects the rural and independent spirit of our community.
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Last year when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to prevent carry concealed weapon license holders from being armed in schools and colleges, I wrote a letter to the editor explaining why the governor would do such a thing.

It is my opinion that the governor and the rest of the liberal Democrats love these mass shootings and hope that each one is more severe than the last one so that they can immediately jump on the "more gun control" bandwagon. What other reason would anyone create "gun-free zones"? With not an armed soul to make an attempt to stop the killings, the result would be more massive killings to prove that we need more "gun control."

All of the gun bills introduced this year in Sacramento by Democrats will only place more restrictions on people who are not committing crimes. Does anyone think that criminals and gang members are going to conform to new gun restrictions? What is really their reason for the continual effort to disarm this country? What is the true meaning of the words "shall not be infringed"? It makes you wonder what the governor and the Democrats in Sacramento are smoking these days.

Years ago I was a registered Democrat. The main reason that I am no longer with them is because they constantly violate their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, including the Second Amendment.

As a side note: I would like to commend the principal of Anderson High School for having the common sense to allow CCW holders to bring their weapons onto the school grounds for the possible protection of the students. One more side note: thanks to Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko for supporting the Second Amendment and allowing hundreds of law-abiding Shasta County residents to acquire CCW permits. The words "hunting, target practice and gun collecting" do not appear in the words of the Second Amendment.

Richard Wilkinson lives in Redding.
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The Shasta Family YMCA has received a $6,000 grant to partially fund a special session of summer camp for children in the foster care system.

The camp will be offered at low or no cost to 40 foster children in fourth through eighth grades. It will run July 5-9 at Camp McCumber. The daily schedule will include archery, canoeing, guided hikes, bunk activities, campfires, songs, crafts and team games.

"For the most part, this camp will look like any other summer camp. The goal is to provide a normal childhood experience to these foster children whose lives are often anything but normal," says Linda Delles, director of Child Care and Camps at the Shasta Family YMCA.

The grant requires matching funds, dollar for dollar, so a special campaign has been set up to allow for direct contributions to the foster camp project. Active 20-30 and the Sunset Rotary clubs have each pledged $1,500, leaving $3,000 to be raised to reach the total goal of $12,000. The Y also raises funds to help offset the cost of other camp sessions for qualifying families.

To help send a child to summer camp, contact Becky Dominguez, director of development, at 530-246-9622, Ext. 112. Gifts can be made by check, cash or online at www.sfymca.org/donate. The YMCA is a non-profit organization and all gifts are tax deductible.

Families interested in having a child participate in the session for foster children should contact their case worker or Foster Family Agency.

For general information about YMCA Camp McCumber, pick up a packet at the front desk at the YMCA or visit www.sfymca.org.
Amy Schumer arrives at the GQ Men of the Year Party at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. (Jordan Strauss / AP)

Comedian Amy Schumer and Chicago furniture designer Ben Hanisch are still feeling that new relationship bliss.

Schumer is featured on the cover of July's issue of Vogue, and the comedian speaks out about a wide array of topics including her high school and college years, her interactions with Hillary Clinton and yes, her relationship with Hanisch.

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"We're in love," she said. "And we're still in total honeymoon phase. It's a real relationship. Who knows what will happen, but we're real good right now."

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Schumer, known for her nothing-is-off-limits style, revealed that she is protective of her boyfriend's family, as well as her own.

"If I am going to tell a joke about my boyfriend or his mom, I'll make sure that they're OK with it. I'm not like Nora Ephron  everything's copy. For me, everything's copy if friends and family approve."

The couple went public with their relationship in January and recently celebrated their six-month anniversary in Hawaii.

Schumer's show "Inside Amy Schumer" is in its fourth season, and the comedian has a memoir "The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo," coming out August 16.

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Watch the latest movie trailers.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 126 Woody introduces the gang to a homemade spork toy with self-esteem issues in "Toy Story 4." Read the review. (Pixar / AP)
Ricky Gervais attends Tribeca Talks After the Movie: "Special Correspondents" during the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. (Andy Kropa/Invision/AP)

Ricky Gervais is reopening "The Office" for a spinoff movie to stream on Netflix.

The service announced Thursday that it has acquired the film, in which Gervais will reprise the painfully awkward David Brent. In "David Brent: Life on the Road," a documentary crew catches up with the former boss 12 years after "The Office." Brent is now a traveling salesman pursuing his rock 'n' roll dreams with his band Foregone Conclusion.

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The film will premiere in most counties on Netflix next year, but will receive a theatrical release in August in the U.K, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

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Gervais, who recently released his film "Special Correspondents" with Netflix, said he's "so glad the mighty Netflix have once again outbid all competitors in North America to show my movie exclusively."

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Watch the latest movie trailers.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 126 Woody introduces the gang to a homemade spork toy with self-esteem issues in "Toy Story 4." Read the review. (Pixar / AP)
Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment's "Surf," which prominently featured Chance the Rapper, was one of 2015's best full-length projects, was universally acclaimed and was reportedly downloaded 618,000 times in its first week. Because it was released for free on iTunes and was never "for sale," it was not nominated for a Grammy Award. In fact, it wasn't even eligible.

That's all going to change because this morning, the Recording Academy announced some much-needed changes to its eligibility process. According to the Associated Press, starting today, the Grammys are allowing streaming-only music to be considered for awards. Previously, albums had to be commercially released with general distribution online or via physical copies to be considered. When three of the best Chicago projects of the year (Chance the Rapper's "Coloring Book," Joey Purp's "iiiDrops" and Vic Mensa's "There's Alot Going On") were all streaming-only free releases, this is big news.

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"We noticed that there were a number of higher-profile artists who were choosingfor philosophical reasons as much as anythingto release their music through streaming-only, and we did not want to be exclusionary toward them," Bill Freimuth, the academy's senior vice president of awards, told the AP. Good observation!

One interesting thing about these changes is that they are already in effect for the entire nominating year so far, meaning that any album or project released between Oct. 1, 2015, and Sept. 30, 2016, will be eligible for a nomination for the 2017 Grammys. Chance the Rapper's "Coloring Book," which made history last month by being the first record to chart on the Billboard 200 based on streams alone, with 57.3 million streams or 38,000 equivalent album units scored in its first week, is eligible. Joey Purp's and Vic Mensa's respective projects are also eligible.

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Before "Coloring Book" was released in May, Chance the Rapper and his team backed via Twitter an online petition urging the Grammys to reconsider their rules. As of press time, the Change.org petition had gathered just under 35,000 signatures. Looks like they got their wish.

@joshhterry | jterry@redeyechicago.com
'If an airline is willing to get the funding, it will fly in unviable routes.'



For the first time, India has announced an integrated civil aviation policy.

The thrust of the policy is to make flying more affordable for the expanding middle class, bolster competition and get more regions connected.

Ashok Gajapathi Raju, minister for civil aviation, speaks to Arindam Majumder on the policy.

Excerpts:

Some airlines are saying the government has not been able to do away with 5/20 rule fully and has walked a middle path instead. What's your take on it?

No policy is true for lifetime.

It will have a periodic viability so that economic activity can increase.

We felt the (5/20) rule was an impediment for business in India.

The present rule, in fact, had no commitment to deploy aircraft in India.

If you could manage 20 aircraft, you could fly all of them on international routes.

This policy attempts to address that concern too. Indian players should (first) serve India.

Is protecting Indian carriers the same reason why the proposal of auctioning of bilateral rights was scrapped?

The idea of auctioning bilateral rights was to bring transparency to deliver the unused bilateral rights, especially on part of Indian carriers.

There were some allegations too, regarding the process of giving bilateral rights during the previous government.

So we thought why not auction the unused bilateral. That would have brought revenue too.

Ultimately, after consultation with various stakeholders, we felt that it requires more thinking.

Why is the policy silent on the modality of viability gap funding?

The modalities of funding are being worked out and we will release them soon.

We wish to implement them from the second quarter of this financial year.

The participation of the states and airlines is very important.

Some of the unconnected routes are like low-hanging fruits where there will be immediate interest and players will not even ask for funding.

How will you bring states on board when previous governments have failed in reducing ATF charges?

When you ask the states to reduce aviation turbine fuel charges, they see it as revenue loss.

We have asked them to rejuvenate the airports that are idle assets.

So, nobody loses money.

States like West Bengal and Maharashtra have already come ahead with proposals like differential taxation for different destinations.



Ideally, it would be beneficial if ATF comes under Goods and Services Tax.

While Airlines wanted that, state governments didn't. This has worked well with the states.

How will you convince the airlines to fly on unviable routes?

India needs such a policy. Nobody will force an airline to participate.

If an airline is willing to get the funding, it will fly in these routes.

Normally, it takes about two-three years to develop a new route. The funding will be for that period.
Proposal to cap additional fees other than base fare and government taxes will bring respite

Indian air travellers would be happy to know they are in a better position as compared to foreign counterparts.

For one, most Indian airlines offer refundable tickets, while most foreign ones dont.

Also, charges on excess baggage are less than what is charged by foreign airlines.

Foreign airlines charge $100-200 or euro 75-150 for excess baggage, while Indian airlines charge Rs 300-500 per kg above 15 kg.

With the civil aviation ministry has proposed to bring excess baggage charge to Rs 100 for five kg, above the 15 kg free limit, things could get even cheaper.

There is also a proposal to reduce cancellation fees and raise compensation paid to passengers in case of not being allowed to board. Currently, these numbers stand at Rs 2,000-4,000 depending on the duration of the flight. It is proposed to increase this to Rs 5,000-10,000.

These measures are expected to bring in transparency and ensure that airlines dont resort to over booking of flights or cancel flights at the last minute.

Typically, the mandatory charges on an air ticket include base fare and government taxes.

Additional charges include convenience fee for online booking, fees for excess baggage, seat selection, food, cancellation, rescheduling or changing flight, seat upgrade, name change, stretcher, sport equipment and no-show charges.

For instance, on a Mumbai-Bengaluru flight for July 22, the base fare was Rs 1,519, the surcharge Rs 841 and the fare totaled Rs 2,360.

This is for a full service carrier. This is on the lowest economy.

However, if you cancel the ticket, you lose all the money as the airline has a cancellation charge of Rs 2,500.

Similarly, if you want to change the date, they charge you Rs 2,250. In case of a non-refundable ticket, you only get your statutory taxes refunded, while on refundable fare the cancellation charges are charged and the convenience fee is not refunded, says John Nair, head corporate travel, Cox and Kings.

It also depends on when you decide to cancel tickets, says Neelu Singh, chief executive officer and director, Ezeego1.com.

If the tickets are cancelled or if the passenger does not show up, then only government taxes are refunded.

If the base fare plus fuel charge is lower than the cancellation charges, then the entire base fare plus fuel charge will be deducted as cancellation fee.

In such cases, the governments proposal that cancellation charge should not be more than the basic fare will help.

Also, airlines should not levy additional charge to process the refund.

And in case of no show, statutory taxes, user development fee/airport development fee/passenger service fee should be refunded.

The capping will make it easier for customers to understand because different airlines have different charges and off late they have been increasing, says Amit Taneja -- chief revenue officer at Cleartrip.com.

If the ticket is booked through an agent or an online portal, there could be a variable handling fee depending on agency and client.

Airlines also charge convenience fee of Rs 100-200, which includes credit, debit, internet banking charges, web fee for online transactions, airport ticketing counter charges, etc.

Preferred seat charges are Rs 500800 and are applicable for customers choosing a seat with more leg room and convenience, with wider seat pitch and located near the exits.

This also varies on the choice of destination, says Singh.

The aim is to discourage airlines from cancelling flights and excessively overbooking.

"So if compensation is high airlines will make efforts to operate the flight.

The proposed amount will at least cover the cost of trying to arrange alternate modes of transportation," Taneja says.
Nokia dominated around 40 percent of the world's mobile phone industry in 2008, but its products were eclipsed by touch-screen smartphones made by Apple and Samsung.

IMAGE: Finnish companies don't pay as much as their Asian and Silicon Valley peers. Photograph: Tuomas Forsell/Reuters

Finland, whose once-renowned technology sector shed 15,000 jobs with the demise of Nokia's mobile phone business, is struggling to fill thousands of vacancies for software developers because it lacks people with the right skills.

At the same time, technology firms say immigration policies hamper recruiting trained workers from abroad, adding to the factors weighing on growth prospects for an industry considered key to the stagnant economy's recovery.

"We want the best game developers working for us, but not all of them can come from Finland," said Ilkka Paananen, chief executive of mobile game maker Supercell which made close to $1 billion in core profit last year with just 180 employees.

"Hiring the world's best to come here is the best opportunity", but inability to hire the right staff would pose "the biggest risk to our company's growth," he said.

The country's technology sector is looking for about 7,000 programmers, according to the Finnish Software Industry and Entrepreneurs' Association.

The country has high hopes for its start-ups, especially mobile gaming firms, following global successes for Finnish firms such as Supercell's 'Clash of Clans' and Rovio's 'Angry Birds' mobile games.

Small software firms often look for people with special skills who are ready to start work without training, officials and entrepreneurs say.

That is bad news for Nokia veterans.

Nokia dominated around 40 percent of the world's mobile phone industry in 2008, but its products were eclipsed by touch-screen smartphones made by Apple and Samsung.

Thousands of highly-paid engineers lost their jobs before and after Microsoft acquired Nokia's mobile phone business for 5.4 billion euros ($6.06 billion) in 2014.

IMAGE: The decline of the handset business and the lack of substitute jobs is the main reason for Finland's economic malaise. Photograph: Reuters

MORE JOB CUTS

Just last month, Nokia, nowadays focused on telecom networks, and Microsoft announced they would cut about 2,400 further Finnish jobs in total.

The decline of the handset business and the lack of substitute jobs is the main reason for Finland's economic malaise that has pushed unemployment to above 9 percent.

Microsoft's recent plan to pull out from phone development has angered the Finnish government which has demanded the company help those who are laid-off to find new jobs or set up their own businesses.

Nokia and Microsoft both offer retraining programs as part of their severance packages. The government has put aside funds for training and is seeking EU funding.

However, some entrepreneurs say start-ups are often reluctant to hire people with a background in companies like Nokia with organizational hierarchies and narrow expert roles.

"It's not necessarily a question of skills, but of fitting in to the workplace. Working in a fast-changing start-up environment is very different than working for a large corporation," said Micke Paqvalen, chief executive of advertising automation company Kiosked.

Kiosked and other start-ups regularly hire some Finnish university graduates, but for more experienced coders they must look abroad - and that too is challenging.

Supercell's Paananen said lengthy application procesess have stalled recruitment and may have led to potential employees taking up offers from Silicon Valley, Berlin or Singapore instead.

"Getting residence and work permits can take up to six months. In our business, this is an eternity, and the situation is even worse for spouses, who might not get permits at all," he said.

IMAGE: Eyas Taha (L to R), Nabard Jawad, Integrify CEO Daniel Rahman and Sharmake Abukar Amin work at startup Integrifys office in Helsinki, Finland. Photograph: Tuomas Forsell/Reuters

FREE SCHOOLS, HIGH TAXES

Some software companies don't see it as their role to train recruits for more senior jobs. Rasmus Roiha, CEO of the Software Industry and Entrepreneurs' Association, said companies he represents tell him: "We are not in the education business, we are software companies."

Finnish companies don't pay as much as their Asian and Silicon Valley peers, but experienced software engineers earn roughly the same as they would in other European cities, according to Finnish ICT (information and communications technology) Association Tivia.

However, the Finnish education system, free up to university level, is attractive.

"If the recruits are single, they'll get more money elsewhere. But once they have a family, Finland becomes competitive," Roiha said.

Experienced developers rate Finnish public services very highly when considering job offers, though "taxes make them roll their eyes", said Christian Fredrikson, chief executive at cyber security firm F-Secure.

Finland, along with other Nordic states, has one of the world's highest tax takes, equivalent to 44.5 percent of GDP in 2015.

IMAGE: Integrify has launched a new initiative to tackle the problem. Photograph: Tuomas Forsell/Reuters

Helsinki-based start-up Integrify has launched a new initiative to tackle the problem: In April, it started training asylum seekers in specialized programming skills as a fast track to jobs that require no Finnish language ability.

"In software companies, English and coding skills are all you need," said Integrify CEO Daniel Rahman.

The company has partnered with seven programming firms which give asylum seekers trainee jobs as part of a six-month course. The aim is to train up to 200 asylum seekers this year.

Sharmake Abukar Amin, a Somali journalist who came to Finland seeking asylum in January, said he previously thought his only option for finding a job was to learn Finnish.

"Coding is another opportunity to me. Better than cleaning or working in a restaurant," he said.

Roiha, from the software association, said Integrify's coders might have a good chance to find entry level positions, but would need further studies to land more specialized jobs.

"Six months is not enough to become a software developer, but it can be a good start for a long career."
Employee integration and branch rationalisation are major challenges.

IMAGE: SBI headquarters, Mumbai Photograph: Manjulkumar/Wikimedia Commons

In a definitive push for consolidation in the banking sector, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday gave a go-ahead to the merger of State Bank of India (SBI) with its five associate lenders and Bharatiya Mahila Bank.

The combined entity would create a financial sector powerhouse, with total assets worth Rs 29.7 lakh crore.

SBI has indicated it wants to complete the merger in 2016-17.



While India's largest lender would reap benefits of scale and a larger balance sheet, it will be a major challenge to integrate staff and rationalise branches.

In the near term, SBI would concentrate on valuation to finalise the swap ratio for merger.



The valuation process would take about two months, SBI managing director (associates and subsidiaries) V G Kannan said.

SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya said the merger is a win-win scenario for both SBI and the associate banks.



Not only will the SBI network expand, its reach would multiply.

"The group will get the benefit of efficiencies to be created from rationalisation of branches, common treasury pooling and proper deployment of a large skilled resource base," the SBI chief said.



A significant aspect of employee rationalisation will be aligning the pay structures. The associates have a little over 70,000 employees, or 34 per cent of SBI's employee base.

While SBI employees receive pension, provident fund and gratuity, those at associate banks do not receive contributory provident fund.



The actual incremental employee cost will depend on their internal arrangement and negotiations.

In the recent past, SBI merged two of its erstwhile associate banks with itself - State Bank of Saurashtra in 2008 and State Bank of Indore in 2010.

Former SBI Chairman P Chaudhuri suggested that one associate bank should be merged with the parent every year to ensure healthy and smooth integration.

Chaudhuri was involved in merger of State Bank of Saurasthtra with the SBI.

Global rating agency Moody's, in its report last month, said the merger will have limited impact on SBI's credit metrics, given that SBI already fully owns SBH and SBP and has majority stakes in the other three associate banks.

In addition, BMB only started operations in 2013 and accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of SBI's total assets.

The implementation of the merger is likely to be challenged by strong employee unions.

The staff unions of the associate banks went on a one-day strike last month and have threatened to launch a larger protest in near future.

The five associate banks are State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur (SBBJ), State Bank of Hyderabad (SBH), State Bank of Mysore (SBM), State Bank of Patiala (SBP) and State Bank of Travancore (SBT).

In the last financial year, only SBP posted a loss, while all others were in profit.

SBP had posted a net loss of Rs 972 crore in FY16, against a net profit of Rs 362 crore in FY15.

SBH posted highest net profit of Rs 1,065 crore in FY16 among the peers.

SBI and its subsidiaries witnessed hectic buying after the Cabinet decision, surging up to 20 per cent.

Shares of SBM jumped 20 per cent to Rs 547.90, SBT zoomed 19.99 per cent to Rs 478.90 and SBBJ soared 19.99 per cent to Rs 599.60 on BSE.

All these banks hit their highest trading permissible limit for the day on the bourse.

The scrip of SBI also moved up by 3.90 per cent to Rs 215.65.
Vistara has a three-class configuration with business, premium economy and economy cabins.

Vistara and AirAsia India, airline ventures of India's biggest conglomerate Tata Group, aim to boost their fleet sizes to 20 planes within a year and launch international services after the country overhauled aviation rules, two people familiar with their strategy said.

The Indian government revised on Wednesday its so-called '5/20' policy, removing a restriction that domestic carriers have to operate for five years before they can fly abroad.

They must, however, still deploy 20 aircraft or 20 percent of total capacity in India, whichever is higher.

Vistara and AirAsia India, which began operations in January 2015 and June 2014, respectively, will prioritise services to the Gulf and flights to Southeast Asia to connect with their investors Singapore Airlines and AirAsia added the sources, who declined to be identified as they were not authorised to speak to the press.

Singapore Airlines has a 49 percent stake in full-service carrier Vistara, while Southeast Asian low-fare pioneer AirAsia owns 49 percent of budget airline AirAsia India. Tata Group has a 51 percent stake in Vistara and 49 percent in AirAsia India.

AirAsia India CEO Amar Abrol said on Wednesday that the airline will increase its fleet from six to 20 aircraft "as soon as possible".

These will come from Malaysia-headquartered AirAsia, which supplies Airbus A320s from its large orderbook to affiliates around Asia. AirAsia declined to comment.

Vistara has 11 A320s and will get two more this year, and it originally planned to have 20 planes by June 2018.

All of these are from leasing firms, and it will turn to them for more planes, said a source familiar with the company's plans.

Widebody aircraft could also be on the cards for Vistara, but that is not a priority, added the source.

Singapore Airlines referred questions to Vistara, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vistara has a three-class configuration with business, premium economy and economy cabins.

This is geared towards the higher-yield international segment, where executives believe they can compete against Gulf carriers such as Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways which dominate the market for travel to and from India.

International services by AirAsia India and Vistara may not significantly hurt incumbents such as Air India, Jet Airways and InterGlobe Aviation's IndiGo, some analysts said.

"We don't really see this as a negative for the competition because in today's global environment, the airlines also need to compete with carriers from abroad and they do not just face the local competition alone," said Pankaj Sharma, Head of Equities, Equirus Securities.

(Additional reporting by Aditi Shah in New Delhi)
The controversial 5/20 rule required an airline to have five years of domestic operations and 20 aircraft in its fleet to be able to fly abroad.

In spite of the government's attempts to open up India's skies by tinkering with the 5/20 rule it will not allow new carriers to fly abroad immediately.

This experts feel is due to the scale of investment, pilots shortage and slots constraints in airports.

The government has decided to scrap the five-year requirement but has decided an airline must deploy 20 aircraft or 20 per cent of its capacity, whichever is higher, on local routes if it wishes to fly abroad.

"This is to ensure new airlines should serve remote parts of the country," an official said.

"For a start-up airline, it will take at least 3-4 years to ramp up to 20 aircraft. So effectively the 5/20 Rule is being replaced by a 3/20 Rule. Ideally the illogical, discriminatory and anti-competition 5/20 rule should have been long abolished," said Amber Dubey, partner and India head of aerospace and defence at global consultancy KPMG.

Vistara and Air Asia the two new Indian carriers which will be benefitted from the relaxation of the rule said that they will keep lobbying for complete abolition of the controversial rule.

Vistara Chief Executive Officer Phee Teik Yeoh said, "We would ideally want an unconditional removal of the 5/20 rule." Amar Abrol, chief executive officer, AirAsia, said the airline would continue to lobby for complete abolition of the rule.

Older airlines like IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir and Jet Airways want the original regulations to be retained.

Executives of these airlines are miffed with the ministry's refusal to allow them to present their views on the matter.

"We have kept certain criteria to protect Indian carriers," said Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju.

Vistara and AirAsia maintain the 5/20 rule stifles the prospects of new airlines.

In February, Tata Group Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata had accused older airlines of using "monopolistic pressures" to retain preferential treatment under the 5/20 rule.

Vistara and AirAsia have 11 and six aircraft, respectively.

Experts feel the new airlines will not find it easy to meet the condition of a 20-aircraft fleet immediately.

"If 5 goes out and 20 remains, it wouldn't be that helpful really as getting to that scale takes a lot of investment, infrastructure, and licensed professionals such as pilots and engineers. SpiceJet and IndiGo had 20 aircraft when they became five years old," said aviation consultant Anurag Jain.
'China's development is on a different scale from India's. They are very far ahead.'

'I don't think it will be possible in the next 30 years for us to catch them,' says Aakar Patel.

Photograph: Rajesh Karkera/Rediff.com

The United Nations draws up a list of countries ranked by per capita GDP. India is ranked 150. Our per capita GDP is $1,586 per year. This means that the average Indian produces goods and services worth Rs 8,800 per month.

Countries below India in the ranking include Yemen ($1,418), Pakistan ($1,358), Kenya ($1,358), Bangladesh ($1,088), Zimbabwe ($965), Nepal ($692), Afghanistan ($688) and Congo ($480). Somalia ($131) is at the bottom.

Right on top are the small European States Monaco ($187,650), Liechtenstein ($157,040) and Luxembourg ($116,560) where the wealthy live. Singapore ($55,910) and the United States ($54,306) are better representatives of high income nations.

South Korea ($28,166) is catching up with Japan ($36,298) while Germany ($47,966) and the United Kingdom ($46,461) are quite close together.

These figures are a good indicator but they are not the only one we must consult. Median income, meaning the income of someone in the middle of the list, rather than the overall average, is higher in Pakistan than in India.

This means that income of Pakistanis, even though lower than that of Indians, is better distributed and it is economically less unequal than India.

It will interest many readers to know that countries like Zambia ($1,715), Vietnam ($2,015), Sudan ($2,081) and Bhutan ($2,569) are ahead of India. Sri Lanka ($3,635) has a per capita GDP more than double of India's. This will not be surprising to those who have visited the country and seen how much more prosperous its people are than Indians.

The size of the nation, the source of its income and many other such things need to be considered when we make such comparisons. But looking at these data will give us a good idea about where we stand. And perhaps we can also then consider what we need to do to make India a developed country.

The World Bank has now decided to not use the term 'developing country' and will instead classify nations by per capita GDP. India is a low middle income country. The definition is as follows.

Countries with lower than about $1,000 are low income, between $1,000 to $4,000 are low middle income, between $4,000 to $12,000 are high middle income, and over that are high income.

Most of the European nations are high income and so far as I know the lowest is Serbia which has a per capita GDP of $6,000.

The governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, recently spoke about what sort of per capita GDP India would require to reach if it had to be rid of poverty. Or at least the worst aspects of it, because no nation can successfully eliminate poverty entirely.

'At one level,' Rajan said, 'we are still a $1,500 per capita economy. All the way from $1,500 to $50,000, which is where Singapore is, there are a lot of things to do. We are still a relatively poor economy and to wipe the tear from every eye, one would at least want to be middle-income, around $6,000 to $7,000 which, if reasonably distributed, will have dealt with extreme poverty. And that is two decades worth of work to be even moderately satisfied.'

China has a per capita GDP of $7,600, meaning it has been able to recently achieve what Rajan is talking about. Those who visit China will know that the development of that country is on a different scale from India's and it would not be fair to compare the two. They are very far ahead.

I do not think it will be possible in our lifetime, meaning in the next 30 years, for us to catch them.

So what will be required for India to make the four times jump from $1,500 to $6,000?

The debate in India tends to focus only on what the government can and should do. The thinking is that if we need to have more and better laws, through economic reforms like a unified goods and services tax (GST).

And secondly we need good governance, meaning a non-corrupt and efficient administration.

Assuming that this second thing is possible in a country where corruption and inefficiency are a product and part of culture, I would still add that these two things are not enough. They are not even the major part of what is required.

Those who travel to those countries which have achieved high income status will have observed that their societies function in a different way than in India.

The respect for the individual, the attention they pay to not offending the stranger, the harmony in their societies is something missing in ours, even in our best cities.

Reform of society, much more than reform of government, is what has made nations rich and made their per capita GDP high.

So long as our focus remains on changes produced by government, India will continue to be slow in its march up the ladder.

Aakar Patel is Executive Director, Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are his own.
Doesn't he know that the Indian audience has settled itself with a certain strain of mediocrity that lands up at the cinemas every Friday, asks J Jagannath.

Just who does Nagraj Popatrao Manjule think he is?

Doesn't he know that the Indian audience has settled itself with a certain strain of mediocrity that lands up at the cinemas every Friday?

The vacuous Bollywood nonsense, the snooze-inducing carousel of superhero movies from Hollywood, the hero-worshipping South Indian cinema -- he thinks he's above all these filmmakers?

Even after ruffling enough feathers for a lifetime with his debut feature Fandry, why isn't this Marathi filmmaker nowhere near done with shaking us to our core?

IMAGE: Nagraj Manjule and Rinku Rajguru on the sets of Sairat.

These were a few questions that were swirling around in my head after I watched his new movie Sairat (Marathi for wild).

The film follows the story of Parshya, a lower-caste boy (an understated Akash Thosar), and Archie (a dynamite-like Rinku Rajguru), a daughter of a rich upper-caste landlord and politician, who fall in love despite opposition from society.

The couple manage to elope only to find themselves living under oppressive circumstances in Hyderabad and drawn apart. Tonally, the movie is similar to the 2002 Telugu movie Jayam, but that's where the similarity ends.

Manjule is steadily claiming rural Maharashtra as his own Yoknapatawpha County. Like Faulkner on page, Manjule turns the boondocks into a self-contained universe on screen.

The first half zips through like a TGV in this part social tapestry, part bildungsroman of a movie. Tanaji Galgunde as Langdya and Arbaz Shaikh as Salim, who act as friends of the hero and help him woo his lady love, offer some of the most hilarious scenes in the movie.

With nearly an all-new casting, the director extracted the most possible deftness from their acting and gave it staggering depth. The subtlety in the rawness of the acting will be spoken of for years to come.

Despite its shoe-string budget (Rs 4 crore/Rs 40 million), the movie is a technical achievement. The editing by Kutub Inamdar is taut. The Solapur district is shown at its vibrant best through Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti's hypnotising lens. Not a single shot in the movie looks 'cinematic'.

There's a shot in the second half where the young couple lands up in Hyderabad after eloping and Yakkanti got the camera tight enough to show us that the girl is drinking bottled water while the boy is quenching his thirst from supposedly dirty water.

Ajay-Atul's resplendent soundtrack took the movie to the next level. This music director duo has barely done any significant work and in Sairat they painted sonic masterpieces like Jackson Pollock (especially in the Yad Lagla track). Quite a few scenes got the requisite fillip from their brilliant background score.

One scene where Archie raises a furore over how Parshya and his friends are being indicted in a false case has slow burning drumbeats reach a deafening crescendo in the background.

IMAGE: Rinku Rajguru and Akash Thosar in Sairat.

Throughout the movie my jaw kept dropping, but it reached the floor when that climactic shot unfolded.

I have been stuck long enough to the blistering barnacles of the cinemas showing insipid, trite stuff that when I witnessed that outstanding climax, Manjule managed to wake me up from my stupor.

He is giving us film goers hope that it's quite possible for an Indian to make that most coveted hybrid of a movie: An international film festival darling (it got a standing ovation at Berlinale last year) and a wonderful commercial success.

This is the kind of a film we expect from Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Dardenne brothers, maybe even Bela Tarr.

The best part is that Manjule wears his politics on his sleeve and he stands next to each of us at the cinema goading to mess with the status quo.

This year quite a few pieces of art have deeply affected me already: Season Five of Girls, the Neapolitan tetralogy by Elena Ferrante, an album called Pool by Porches, an American synthpop project of New York-based musician Aaron Maine. This brave new film is the latest addition to this list.

PS: If you want to see what this movie would have looked like if the couple had courted each other in their mid-20s, check out the Malayalam film Annayum Rasoolum.
'Kejriwal has read the Constitution, still he misused office to benefit his MLAs.'

'If the BJP and Congress are wrong, does that mean even you will do wrong things?'

'So how is Kejriwal different from the others?'

IMAGE: Arvind Kejriwal's AAP is under flak over the appointment of 21 parliamentary secretaries.

Even as the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi helmed by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal battles the Narendra Modi government at the Centre over the appointment of parliamentary secretaries, one name keeps cropping up.

Prashant Patel, an advocate, filed a complaint before President Pranab Mukherjee, seeking the disqualification of 21 Delhi MLAs appointed as parliamentary secretaries.

Patel's contention was that since the 21 AAP MLAs are allowed to use government transport and space in the minister's office, they are illegally occupying offices of profit.

Patel, whose petition has ensured turmoil in the Kejriwal government, spoke to Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com about how he unravelled the parliamentary secretaries issue.

When did you feel that there was some wrongdoing in the appointment of parliamentary secretaries?

Arvind Kejriwal appointed these parliamentary secretaries on March 13, 2015. I read about it in the newspapers. In June, I read a book by S K Sharma, a former Delhi assembly secretary (Delhi Sarkar Ki Shaktiyan Aur Seemayen).

According to the book, the appointment of the 21 parliamentary secretaries was illegal as they come under an office for profit.

On June 19, I filed a petition with the President's office regarding this unconstitutional appointment. The very next day (June 20), the AAP cabinet ministers met.

They decided during the meeting that all these new parliamentary secretaries appointed would be kept out of the office of profit.

They passed the bill without following any Constitutional procedures and sent the bill to the lieutenant governor (Najeeb Jung) who sent it to the President who rejected the bill.

Did you feel there was a malafide intention in the appointment of these 21 parliamentary secretaries?

After I read S K Sharma's book, I felt there was some wrongdoing. Constitutional expert Subhash Kashyap said these posts of parliamentary secretaries were unconstitutional. They come under the office of profit. Therefore I filed the petition.

Arvind Kejriwal says these 21 parliamentary secretaries did not receive a single rupee as salary. What do you have to say about that?

The office for profit definition is very broad. Only economic benefit is not considered. If you get a post, then it automatically comes under the office of profit.

Once you are appointed as parliamentary secretary, your status rises compared to other MLAs.

These parliamentary secretaries have got well-furnished rooms with air-conditioning and LCD TVs. These are benefits.

And once you are attached to a ministry, then you are a decision-making authority and money is a secondary thing.

These 21 MLAs were attached to ministries. (AAP MLA) Madan Lal was attached to vigilance and Sandeep Jha to transport. They now enjoy the status of ministers.

Legally, how many parliamentary secretaries could Delhi appoint?

Till date, the law said that only one parliamentary secretary could be appointed. AAP appointed 21 parliamentary secretaries.

IMAGE: Prashant Patel refutes claims of working at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Arvind Kejriwal says other states too have parliamentary secretaries.

Other states drafted a law, then they appointed parliamentary secretaries.

Delhi is not like other states, it is a Union territory. If they want to bring a new bill, they need to take the approval of the central government and the lieutenant governor.

Only after that can they pass a bill. The LG (lieutenant governor) is the main administrator of Delhi. The chief minister does not have that many powers.

Maybe Kejriwal was unaware of the rule as he is new to politics.

He is a learned man. He is an expert on the Constitution. He wanted to accommodate his MLAs in the Delhi ministry.

I just want to ask Kejriwal one question: If the BJP and Congress are wrong, does that mean even you will do wrong things?

If he is following them, how can he be honest?

What is your opinion about Kejriwal?

He is a learned man. He is from the IRS (Indian Revenue Service). He has read the Constitution, still he misused office to benefit his MLAs. He is indulging in political corruption.

He only wanted to grab power by telling people that he is fighting against corruption.

Take, for instance, Gopal Rai's example -- his minister who has been accused of corruption. He had to step down. Kejriwal always said that he is against corruption, but he is also corrupt.

Earlier, Kejriwal said AAP was different from other political parties and that he and his party members would not take cars, posts and bungalows.

Why do his MLAs now wants posts? He is doing the exact same thing that the BJP and Congress did.

So how is Kejriwal different from the others?

Former Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit had three parliamentary secretaries, Kejriwal has 21. So, how can he say he is any different from the others?

Why do you think he wanted to appoint so many parliamentary secretaries?

AAP won 67 seats in the 70-member Delhi assembly. The rule says that not more than seven ministers can be appointed in Delhi.

Kejriwal feared that his party would split if he did not appoint parliamentary secretaries. Therefore, he appointed parliamentary secretaries.

Look at how he deceived even the President. Kejriwal appointed 21 parliamentary secretaries on March 13, 2015. I filed this petition on June 19 and Kejriwal called a cabinet meeting on June 20.

On June 23, he passed the bill stating that these 21 parliamentary secretaries will be kept out of office for profit. And they showed in the meeting that this bill was passed on February 14, 2015. They backdated the entire procedure.

This means he deceived the President of India too.

Do you have any political leanings?

I am a law abiding citizen and I saw there is political corruption. AAP has violated the Constitution and therefore I challenged it.

You are from the Hindu Legal Cell. There are allegations that you are doing this at the BJP's behest.

The Hindu Legal Cell is an independent trust of advocates. It is not related to the BJP.

Does it mean that anyone who speaks for Hindus is associated with BJP and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)?

Many advocates are members of this cell which is an independent trust. I have said many things against the BJP too in the past.

Do you feel these 21 MLAs will be dismissed?

100 per cent.
'My religion is great and it has given a lot of rights to women, but these intermediaries are interpreting it wrongly and ruining it.'

'I have great faith in our judiciary. I am sure they will see through the drama of men.'

Bader Sayeed is one of the top lawyer-activists in Chennai, the first woman chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Wakf Board.

A schoolmate of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, she was the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam candidate in the 2004 parliamentary elections from the Chennai South constituency, and was defeated by the DMK's T R Baalu.

Bader Sayeed was in the forefront supporting the Shah Bano case judgment in the 1980s that granted maintenance to divorced Muslim women. Now, she has gone to the Supreme Court seeking a ban on triple talaq, resorted to by Muslim men to divorce their wives without recourse to law.

Bader Sayeed, image, left, tells Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com why she has moved the Supreme Court.

After so many years of working as a lawyer and activist, why did you decide to go to the Supreme Court now for a ban on triple talaq?

My prayer is not only on triple talaq. Two years ago, I filed a writ petition in the Madras high court seeking to stop the qazis who exercise their rights, which they do not have, to validate divorces by men.

They have no judicial power to do so under the Kazis Act of 1880.

But that's how it is practised in India, where after pronouncing talaq three times men go to the clergy to validate the divorce.

That is wrong, and it is high time it is stopped. That is why I filed a petition in the high court to stop it. It has been pending in the high court.

Now that Saira Bano has moved the Supreme Court against triple talaq, I thought it was a good time to move a writ petition on triple talaq.

My view is that every divorce should go through the court of law. You can follow the Quranic practice of three months (wait), but the final arbitrator should be the court.

Who gives the clergy the authority to issue the validation?

He says he is the chief qazi and he has the authority to validate. But according to the Kazis Act, he has no such authority.

Their argument is that they have been doing it for years. They do not even call the women and hear their side of the story; the wives suddenly get the (divorce) notice by post.

Many women complain that they get talaq by email, even via WhatsApp. Is it acceptable?

Whether it is acceptable or not, they send talaq and get it validated by the qazis. This is wrong. That's why I am fighting it.

I am also of the opinion that every talaq must go through the court. These men say that it would be interpreted as interference. How can you call it interference?

The court has to protect every citizen. If something violates what the Constitution says -- the Right to Live with Dignity -- how can you call it interference?

In the case of child's rights, the court decides with whom the child should live. When it comes to domestic violence, the court comes to a decision. Similarly, in this case also, I don't see any interference.

How did triple talaq come into being?

It has been there from the British days and they validated it. In 2004, the Supreme Court said you have to follow the Quranic law, which is three months' wait period, but nobody is following it.

Can a Muslim woman go to court and get a divorce? Or, does she also have to go to the qazi?

She can go to the court under the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, but then the man, the defendant, has to come to court. A divorced woman cannot even file for maintenance. He can immediately come and say that he has divorced her and need not pay maintenance.

Last year, Justice Kamal Basha of the Kerala high court gave a landmark judgment, asking a Muslim man who has divorced his wife to give her medical and maintenance expenses for 10 years.

Yes, he has to give maintenance to his wife. That is the right judgment.

Are not the qazi, by validating a man's talaq, reinforcing patriarchy?

Of course. They are showing the control a man has over a woman's life.

My first statement would be, religion should be kept outside of this. What we are talking about is gender justice. We are not mixing religion in this.

My religion is great and it has given a lot of rights to women, but these intermediaries are interpreting it wrongly and ruining it.

What gives them the right to say this is right and that is wrong? We want the court to decide.

Some say that tinkering with the Sharia is anti-Islamic.

Where is the tinkering? We are not tinkering with anything. We are not talking about interpreting the Quran. They are the ones talking about tinkering.

All Muslims go to court for child rights and domestic violence. Is that also tinkering?

Do you feel the resistance is because you are trying to take away the power some men have?

Absolutely. They think they can say talaq and marry a second, third and fourth time. They feel we are taking away that right also.

According to these men, Islam gives them the right to have four wives.

See, those were the days of war and there were more women than men. And women needed security. That was how they were allowed to marry four times at the most, but they were to treat all wives equally.

Can anybody treat four women equally? This is also the patriarchal power in their hands.

Can a woman say talaq and remarry again? Why is it that only men have that power?

There is no Quaranic injunction that says so. These are all man-made.

Will it be possible for Muslim women to have the legal power to face this kind of patriarchy?

Why not? If the court decides, yes. If the court bans triple talaq, if the court says every divorce must go through the court of law, then all women will get the legal power. It is for the Supreme Court to decide.

So many women have tried it, even you have tried before. Why is it that nobody has succeeded so far?

Because of vote-bank politics. Politicians feel that Muslims will be upset and won't vote for them. It is not interference. It is not tinkering. It is gender justice. It is high time the court steps in and decides for women.

You feel it is mainly because of politics that this case is not moving forward?

Yes, politics is there. Why can't they say, this is hurting Muslim women and it's not interfering in any Muslim law.

According to Article 46 of the Constitution, the State should protect the underprivileged. But in this case, the State does not protect women.

So many women must have approached you for justice.

You cannot imagine how many Muslim women come to meet me every day and for half of them I work free as they are so poor. All the time I am innovating to get justice.

Did you ever feel helpless?

Many times, yes. These men marry again. They don't come to court. They change their address. He is free to give a divorce any time. He is free to remarry any time. What do you do then?

It happens not only to uneducated women, it happens to educated women too. We have to fight every case, as there is no law.

Because there is a law against bigamy, you can go to court and get justice, but in the case of Muslim women there is no law. Muslim men say we can get married four times. There is nothing to debar them from doing this.

Don't you feel all women, irrespective of the religion they belong to, should have the same law to get gender justice?

That will be the Uniform Civil Code. That is not going to happen overnight. Until that time, we need gender justice. Women need to survive.

How do men react to you fighting for Muslim women?

They tell me to follow the Quran. They say I am not religious and I do not know what Islam is.

I even fought during the Shah Bano case. I collected thousands of signatures in 1986 and gave them to the prime minister (Rajiv Gandhi), but what did he do?

Now they have collected 50,000 signatures. I hope this will have an impact.

Who has to take the lead, the legislature or the judiciary?

Both have to act together. The judiciary can pass the orders and frame the guidelines and then the Muslim Personal Law Board can come and create obstacles. Then the government has to file a counter. But the judiciary can ignore anyone and pass orders.

In the Shah Bano case, there was a good judgment, but then Parliament brought in a law defying it.

Are you hopeful of justice?

I am very hopeful of our judicial system. I have great faith in our judiciary. I am sure they will see through the drama of men.

It is not 1986. It is 2016. I would say, chhodo kal ki batein, kal ki baat purani. Naye dor mein likhenge hum milkar nayi kahani (leave the past behind, it is outdated. In this new age, let's together pen a new script). Women have come forward now and we will write a new kahani.

When faith becomes hope, hope becomes miracle, and I believe miracles do happen.

IMAGE, top, published only for representational purposes. Photograph: Ahmad Masood/Reuters. Bader Sayeed's photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj
IMAGE: An aerial view of the Grand Floridian is seen after a two-year-old boy was dragged by an alligator into the lagoon at the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Florida, US. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

A 2-year-old boy who was snatched by an alligator at a Disney resort in Florida has been found dead, officials said on Wednesday.

Divers found the remains of the boy near the area where he was attacked on Tuesday night, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Deming said.

The sheriff identified the boy as Lane Graves. The boy's parents, who are from Elkhorn, Nebraska, were identified as Matt and Melissa Graves, CNN reported.

Lane's body had only a few puncture wounds, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

He likely drowned, Demings said.

"Of course, the autopsy has to confirm that, but there is likely no question in my mind that the child was drowned by the alligator," Demings said.

The boy's family was at a movie night outdoors at the Grand Floridian resort when the boy waded into about a foot of water in a lagoon, authorities have said.

Witnesses, including the boy's horrified parents, tried to save him. His father jumped in and tried to pry the gator's mouth open. His mother jumped in, too.

The child was dragged underwater in the Seven Seas Lagoon, witnesses told authorities. The lagoon is connected to a series of canals that feed into large bodies of water, Nick Wily from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Service said.

By midmorning Wednesday, Disney had closed all beaches in its resort area "out of an abundance of caution" after the attack, a Disney representative said.

Alligators are common in Florida, where they can be found in bodies of fresh water across the state, Wily said.

However, it is "very rare" for an alligator to attack a human, he added.
The black box of the EgyptAir plane which crashed last month killing all 66 on board, was recovered on Thursday from the Mediterranean, a breakthrough towards finding the cause of the tragedy.

The vessel John Lethbridge that is affiliated to the company Deep Ocean Search found the cockpit voice recorder of the Airbus A320, according to a statement by the Egyptian committee that investigated the crash of plane.

The statement added that vessel, which joined the search team last week, succeeded in pulling out from the Mediterranean Sea, the memory unit which is the most important part in the recorded although it (the recorder) was damaged.

The vessel which was contracted by the government to join the search for the two black boxes has found and obtained on Wednesday images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.

EgyptAir flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo carrying 66 people, including crew, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea about 280 km from the Egyptian seacoast on May 19 with 56 passengers and 10 cabin crew on board.

The passengers included 15 French, 30 Egyptians, a British, a Belgian, two Iraqis, a Kuwaiti, a Saudi, a Sudanese, a Chadian, a Portuguese, an Algerian and a Canadian.

A deep-sea robot has also located pieces of the missing EgyptAir plane at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

While the wreckage discovered could offer clues about why the plane went down, Airbus said the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery.

Some wreckage had been pulled out of the sea by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers.

The pings emitted by the black boxes were detected on June 1 but the flight recorders exact location has not yet been established.

IMAGE: An EgyptAir plane scheduled to make a flight from Paris to Cairo taxies on the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters
Acknowledging that India is inching closer to get membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Chinese official media on Thursday said if New Delhi is admitted into the elite grouping, nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken.

Stating that Indias entry into Nuclear Suppliers Group will shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region, an article in the state-run Global Times however said China could support Indias inclusion in the 48 member nuclear club if it played by rules.

Written by Fu Xiaoqiang research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the article a second in as many days by the same daily highlights Chinas strident and vocal opposition to Indias entry into NSG and concerns that its all weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because entry into the NSG will make it (India) a legitimate nuclear power.

New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the United States, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month, the article said mentioning for the first time Indias progress in getting support from Mexico and Switzerland.

Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power, said the article titled Beijing could support Indias NSG accession path if it plays by rules.

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that Indias admission into NSG would jeopardise Chinas national interest and touch a raw nerve in Pakistan.

If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use, said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by Peoples Daily.

The major goal for Indias NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken, it said.

As a result, Pakistans strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region, it said.

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office, it said.

The US recognised New Delhi as a major defence partner during Modis recent visit, meaning that the White House has given India the treatment as a US military ally, it said.

The article said that over the years, the US has been bending the rules to back Indias nuclear projects.

Against the backdrop of Washingtons accelerated pace of promoting its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, it will be highly likely to keep supporting New Delhis nuclear ambitions, in order to make it a stronger power to contain China, it said.

The attitude of the US has had and will undoubtedly have an impact on some other nations. For those countries which also wish to put a finger in the pie of Indias market, many of them begin to back Indias NSG membership, or at least not oppose it, the article said in apparent reference to majority of the countries in the NSG supporting Indias entry.

However, as a country that has signed neither the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG, it said.

Thats why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to Indias membership, it said.

The article made no mention of problems faced by Pakistan in getting into the NSG due to its past record of proliferating the nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, where as India is seeking entry into group based on clean non-proliferation record.

As a crucial defender of the international system against nuclear proliferation, China does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to

be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules, the article said without referring to Beijings own nuclear power cooperation with Islamabad in supplying a number of nuclear reactors, including two 1100 mw reactors currently under construction in Karachi.

For those countries that are developing nuclear technology without the acceptance of the international community, perhaps counting them into the non-proliferation mechanism will better safeguard nuclear security, it said.

But at the same the article said China backs Indias entry if a fair and just principle is worked out through consensus.

Yet before that, a fair and just principle must be made through common consensus of all current members of the NSG, rather than the US and Indias reckless pushing at the cost of rule-breaking.

So far, all NSG members have signed the NPT. So the question is, if any non-signatory of the treaty wants to join the group, under what condition can it be accepted? If such a standard is to be made one day, then it will be possible for both India and Pakistan to become part of the group, it said.

Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organisation, it said.

As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhis path toward the club, it said.
Jailed Patel quota agitation leader Hardik Patel's family was put under house arrest and seven women from the community were detained on Thursday for sloganeering and demanding his immediate release.

The action was taken when Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel was addressing a gathering in the jailed leader's hometown, Viramgam, in the Ahmedabad district.

The police action drew flak from the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti, which spearhead the quota agitation, even as the women were later let-off and Hardik's family was released after the CM's programme ended.

As a precaution ahead of the CM's visit, Hardik's family, who lives in the town, was kept under house arrest till the programme ended Thursday afternoon, Viramgam town Police Inspector Vishwarajsinh Jadeja said.

"We detained seven women as they started shouting slogans when the CM was delivering her speech at Shala Praveshotsav (school enrolment) programme. We released them after the programme ended in the afternoon," Jadeja said.

"To stop Hardik's family from creating any trouble during CM's visit, we kept his father, Bharatbhai; mother, Ushaben and sister Monika under house arrest. The house arrest was later lifted after the function ended," he said.

Meanwhile, on seeing the women chanting slogans during her speech, Anandiben said reservation will not solve problems as there is no substitute to hard work.

"Reservation alone is not the solution. People want to bypass hard work and wish to get a high ranking job, such as superintendent of police. They must first apply for a post of lower ranking job, such as a constable, and then climb to higher position with hard work," Patel told the gathering.

The police action on women and Hardik's family drew flak from the members of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti, which is spearheading the agitation for the inclusion of Patels under OBC quota for reservation.

According to a Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti member and Hardik's close aide Dinesh Bambhaniya, the government is suppressing the voice of Patel community.

"This is clear violation of our rights, as our women are not allowed to speak. We also condemn the unlawful detention of Hardik's family, who were under house arrest since late yesterday night," Bambhaniya alleged.

He was recently released on bail in a sedition case filed against Hardik and five of his aides (including Bambhaniya) by the city Crime Branch in Ahmedabad.
India on Thursday downplayed the United States Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as "global strategic and defence partner", saying it would be "premature" to speculate about its final content.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit there last week.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act by the US Senate.

"The preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

"The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He also noted that preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US government to recognize India as a major defense partner.

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US government.

"It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," he added.

The US Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

Top Republican senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with America's closest allies.

The NDAA was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13. But some of the key amendments including the (SA 4618) -- even though they had bipartisan support.
The Jaish-e-Mohammed leader who gave directions over the phone to the terrorists during the attack on the Pathankot airbase has reportedly managed to flee to Afghanistan from Pakistan, an official said.

The alleged JeM handler who communicated by telephone more than two-dozen times with the terrorists in Pathankot before they carried out the attack on the airbase on January 2, 2016 has managed to cross into Afghan border, a member of the Joint Investigation Team probing the attack said on Thursday.

He said the JeM handler, who is in his late 20s, was in the tribal area of Pakistan when he communicated around 18 times with the terrorists.

The law enforcement agencies tried to trace him (in the tribal belt) but there are reports that he managed to escape to Afghanistan, he said, without disclosing the JeM leaders identity.

Interestingly, during interrogation JeM chief Masood Azhar claimed that the handler of the Pathanokot operation had quit the organisation sometime ago.

Azhar disowned the JeM handler (to prove his innocence), another source privy to the development. He said the investigation agencies have been under immense pressure from Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to thoroughly probe the matter and come up with true facts of the Pathankot incident.

Although the counter-terrorism department of the Punjab police had registered an FIR against the alleged attackers of the Pathankot airbase and their abettors, not a single person has been charged in this regard.

The FIR was registered in the CTD police station Gujranwala under sections 302, 324 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code, and sections 7 and 21-I of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The FIR says Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval informed authorities that the four attackers had come from Pakistan and had probably crossed the border adjacent to the Pathankot general area.

The NSA says the terrorists made phone calls to cell phones that belonged to a proscribed organisation. Five terrorists and seven Indian army personnel were killed in the gun battle at the Pathankot airbase.

The attack occurred just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a surprise visit to Sharif on his birthday on December 25 and the occasion of his granddaughters wedding -- a move that appeared to promise better ties between the two countries in future.

Adviser to Pakistan Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz also confirmed that one of the mobile phone numbers linked to those who attacked the airbase had been traced to the JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur, some 400 kilometre from Lahore.

JeM chief Azhar, who has been named by India as the mastermind of the airbase attack, had been under protective custody since January 14.

Aziz said that Azhar, along with a few other operatives of JeM, had been kept under protective custody and that some of the JeMs premises have also been sealed.

He said action against Azhar and others would follow the moment evidence becomes available.

However, despite the visit of the Joint Investigation Team, comprising of members headed by Additional Inspector General of Police Tahir Rai, no progress has been made in the investigation so far.
Army foiled second infiltration attempt along the LoC in Kashmir in three days, reports Mukhtar Ahmad from Srinagar.

Four militants and a soldier were killed as the army foiled an infiltration bid in the Tangdhar sector of the Line of Control in north Kashmir's Kupwara district on Thursday.

A defence spokesman said that alert troops detected a group of militants trying to infiltrate in the Tangdhar sector. As the troops challenged them, the militants opened fire on the army triggering a fierce encounter.

"The operation is still on. So far four militants have been killed," the spokesman said.

He said one soldier wounded in the gunfight succumbed to injuries in the hospital.

On Tuesday, an infiltration bid was foiled in Machhil sector of Kupwara district.

Image used for representation purpose only
United States President Barack Obama has warned that horrific mass shooting incidents like the recent one in Orlando will continue to occur unless tougher gun control laws are adopted.

US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden pause as they place flowers at a makeshift memorial for shooting victims of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, US. Carlos Barria/Reuters

"We can't anticipate or catch every single deranged person that may wish to do harm to his neighbours, or his friends, or his co-workers, or strangers. But we can do something about the amount of damage that they do," Obama told media persons.

"Unfortunately, our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons -- and they can do so legally," Obama said.

Obama along with Vice President Joe Biden met yesterday victims and families of the weekend's mass shooting in which a self-radicalised Afghan-origin youth pledging allegiance to the ISIS killed 49 people in a gay club in Orlando, Florida.

Another 53 were injured during the shooting that took place in the wee hours of Sunday.

IMAGE: US President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden place flowers at a makeshift memorial for shooting victims of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Carlos Barria/Reuters

While laying flowers at a memorial in downtown, about a mile and a half from the club where the shooting occurred four days earlier, Obama said the city was shaken by an evil, hateful act.

Obama said that when he and Vice President Biden met with family members of the people slain on Sunday, their grief was indescribable.

"This debate needs to change. It's outgrown the old political stalemates. The notion that the answer to this tragedy would be to make sure that more people in a nightclub are similarly armed to the killer defies common sense. Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense," Obama said.

"And if we don't act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this -- because we'll be choosing to allow them to happen. We will have said, we don't care enough to do something about it," Obama added.

Republican presidential presumptive nominee Donald Trump has said that the casualties could have been far less if people were allowed to carry guns.

Obama has been seeking tougher gun control laws that make its difficult for people to purchase such weapons of mass casualties.

The strong gun lobby assisted by a Republican-controlled Congress is preventing Obama to accomplish his goal of a tough gun control laws.

IMAGE: US President Barack Obama receives a t-shirt from Mayor of Orlando Buddy Dyer (C) as he arrives in Orlando to meet with families of victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, in Florida, US. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

"Today, once again, as has been true too many times before, I held and hugged grieving family members and parents, and they asked, why does this keep happening? And they pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage," he said.

In his presidency, Obama has made seven such trips to meet families and victims of a mass shooting.

Hoping that Senators would "rise to the moment and do the right thing", Obama said he is pleased that the Senate will hold votes on preventing individuals with possible terrorist ties from buying guns, including assault weapons.

"I've said this before -- we will not be able to stop every tragedy. We can't wipe away hatred and evil from every heart in this world. But we can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives. We can reduce the impact of a terrorist attack if we are smart," Obama said.

Republican Senator from Florida Marco Rubio also accompanied Obama and Biden in their meeting.

"They don't care about the politics. Neither do I. Neither does Joe. And neither should any parent out there who's thinking about their kids being not in the wrong place, but in places where kids are supposed to be," Obama said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the mass shooting as an act of terror. In a 911 call during the attack, Omar Mateen, 29, the shooter, pledged allegiance to ISIS and its leader.

Obama said the US-led coalition is determined to defeat ISIS.

"We will continue to be relentless against terrorist groups like ISIL and al Qaeda. We are going to destroy them. We are going to disrupt their networks, and their financing, and the flow of fighters in and out of war theaters. We are going to disrupt their propaganda that poisons so many minds around the world," he said.

"We're going to do all that. Our resolve is clear. But given the fact that the last two terrorist attacks on our soil -- Orlando and San Bernardino -- were homegrown, carried out it appears not by external plotters, not by vast networks or sophisticated cells, but by deranged individuals warped by the hateful propaganda that they had seen over the Internet, then we're going to have to do more to prevent these kinds of events from occurring," Obama said.

It's going to take more than just our military, Obama asserted.

"It's going to require more than just our intelligence teams. As good as they are, as dedicated as they are, as focused as they are, if you have lone wolf attacks like this, hatched in the minds of a disturbed person, then we're going to have to take different kinds of steps in order to prevent something like this from happening," he said.
The gunman who killed 49 people at a gay club in the US this week wrote a series of Facebook posts about the filthy ways of the West before and during the shooting rampage, a top US Senator has said and asked the founder of the social networking site to assist in the probe.

Such an assertion by Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs came amidst reports that Mateen, 29, made as many as 16 phone calls, including three to 911 and one to a local television stations during the several hours of early Sunday morning when he carried out the deadliest shooting in American history.

In a letter to the Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Johnson said it is his understanding that Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content.

I appreciate Facebooks support of the law-enforcement investigation into this attack and previous attacks. While Facebook is not a target of the committees inquiry, I respectfully request your assistance with the committees inquiry, he said.

Johnson said according to information obtained by his staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen.

On June 12, 2016, Mateen apparently searched for Pulse Orlando and shooting.

Mateen also apparently posted America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State... I pledge my alliance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi... May Allah accept me.

He then posted The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the West and You kill innocent women and children by doing airstrikes Now taste the Islamic State vengeance.

In a final post, Mateen apparently wrote, In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the USA.

In his letter on Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained and posted by Fox News, Johnson said his staff learned that in May 2016, Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists. On June 4, 2016, Mateen apparently searched Baghdadi Speech.

My staff has also learned that Mateen apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FBI searches, including searching for specific law enforcement offices, Johnson said asking full support of Zuckerberg in its investigations.

I ask that you please provide all Facebook data on Mr Mateens activities on his account and any affiliated Facebook accounts, including but not limited to activity logs, Facebook timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts, he said.
Congress veteran Sheila Dikshit on Thursday met party president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi amid speculation that she may be made the party's chief ministerial face for next year's assembly polls in politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.

Dikshit, who served as Delhi chief minister for three terms, is said to have been sounded by the Congress high command for a leading role in Uttar Pradesh, possibly as the chief ministerial candidate.

She is believed to have sought time to make up her mind.

Congress party's election strategist Prashant Kishor is said to be in favour of a Brahmin face in UP elections and is believed to have suggested Dikshit's name.

The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress, shifted allegiance to BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of Mandir-Mandal politics. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community.

The community's support determines the poll outcome in several seats in Central and Eastern UP.

Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Congress leader from UP Uma Shankar Dikshit, who served as Union minister and governor for a long time.

The Congress is trying to regain the lost ground in UP where currently it has just 30 MLAs in the 403-member assembly. Congress could win only two seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls represented by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi respectively.

The Brahmin community plays a significant role in election outcome in central and eastern UP as it is the dominant caste in these areas.

There was also a buzz that 78-year-old Dikshit could be made Congress' in-charge of poll-bound Punjab as the party was looking for a leader having connection with the state in the wake of Kamal Nath quitting the post last night. Dikshit is originally from Punjab.

Sources said party's preparation for assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab came up for discussion during the meeting Dikshit had with the Gandhis.
IMAGE: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses an audience at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, US. Photograph: Chris Aluka Berry/Reuters

A day after United States President Barack Obama criticised him for using the term "radical Islam", Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday vehemently defended his stand arguing that the phraseology makes a "big difference" in the war against terrorism.

"It makes a difference and it makes a big difference because unless you're willing to discuss and talk about the real nature of the problem and the name of the problem, radical Islamic terrorism, you're never going to solve the problem," Trump said at a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

He was responding to the allegations of Obama that the use of controversial term 'radical Islam' would do more harm than resolving the issue.

"We're trying to be nice. We have a President who wants to be so politically correct that he doesn't want to use the term radical Islamic terrorism, doesn't want to use it," said Trump, who is known for his anti-Muslim rhetorics.

"He gives a speech yesterday, a long speech that at the end of it, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. Nobody knew. He's trying to justify why he won't use it and he said radical Islam because he didn't want to use the word terrorism," he said.

"Why he won't use that term or why he doesn't use it and how it doesn't make difference, but it does make a difference," Trump argued and alleged that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is blindly following the US President.

"Then crooked Hillary Clinton gets up the other day, and she wouldn't use the term. She wouldn't use it. But I was hitting her hard on it. Very hard. And finally, she gets up and she said, 'I would use it.' And by the way, the press didn't report this. They said she used the term. They didn't say about Trump," he said.

"Clinton gets up and she sort of acted like, no problem using the term. And she said, 'I would use the term.' But she didn't use it. But she didn't call it radical Islamic terrorism. She said radical Islamism. And I'm not saying that's wrong. Let's see how much she uses it," he said.

"She'll basically do whatever Obama wants her to do. You understand why, because that whole thing is just ridiculous what is going on there. That's just ridiculous. How that can happen in our country today is absolutely one of the great insults to law enforcement. And let's see what happens. But she's being totally protected. She is being 100 per cent protected," Trump said.
The United States Senate has moved to block $300 million (Rs 2,017 crore) military aid to Pakistan unless the defence secretary certifies that the country is taking demonstrable steps against the dreaded Haqqani Network terror outfit. This forms part of the National Defence Authorisation Act-2017 passed by the Senate 85-13 votes on Wednesday.

Notably Defence Secretary Ashton Carter is yet to give the necessary certification to Pakistan for a similar legislation passed by the Congress last year under NDAA-2016. As a result, the Pentagon has not been able to release $300 million of Coalition Support Fund to Pakistan for the fiscal year 2015-2016 ending September 30 this year.

However, the Senate version of the NDAA differs with that of the House, which calls for blocking $450 million (Rs 3,026 crore) of the $900 million (Rs 6,052 crore) US aid to Pakistan in coalition support fund. The Senate version has reduced both the figures respectively to $300 million and $800 million.

Ahead of the Senate voting on NDAA-2017, the White House had opposed any such move. We share concerns regarding the threat posed to our forces and interests in Afghanistan by the Haqqani Network, and we continue to engage with Pakistan at the highest levels regarding the need for concerted action specifically against the group, the White House said in a statement on June 8.

The White House had made similar objections to the House version of the National Defence Authorisation Act. Since 2002, the United States has disbursed $12 billion (Rs 80,670 crore) to Pakistan under coalition support fund.

The United States strongly supports ongoing Pakistani counterterrorism efforts. Pakistan has suffered at the hands of terrorists and violent extremists, and the United States will continue to work closely with Pakistan to achieve our shared counterterrorism goals, a Pentagon official said.

In our discussions with Pakistan, we have long said that it is in the interest of Pakistan to eliminate safe havens, and we continue to urge Pakistan to take action against all militant groups, particularly the Haqqani Network, the official said in response to a question.
Its current majority of 22,078 votes for the purpose of the presidential elections is considered thin, particularly when BJP might not be able to predict voting behaviour of its allies like Shiv Sena, reports Archis Mohan.

The Bharatiya Janata Party foresees a close contest to elect the successor to President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan. It is, therefore, keen to improve its tally of seats in the assembly polls to five states, including the key state of Uttar Pradesh, that are scheduled to be held by February-March 2017. The Presidential polls are slated for July 2017.



According to the BJPs calculations, the National Democratic Alliance currently has a majority of 22,078 votes for the presidential elections. The numbers in its favour have increased after its resounding two-third majority victory in Assam, winning three seats in West Bengal and one in Kerala in the recently concluded polls.



A senior party leader on Wednesday expressed the confidence that the NDA, which comprises over half a dozen parties with a presence in Parliament, can win the elections on its own. However, a majority of 22,078 for the purposes of the presidential elections is considered thin, particularly when the BJP might not be able to predict the voting behaviour of its allies like Shiv Sena and Telugu Desam Party.



Election of the President of India is indirect. The President is elected by an electoral college comprising all members of Parliament, minus its nominated members, and the members of all legislative assemblies, including of the two quasi-states, Delhi and Puducherry.



The value of each of the 4,120 MLAs and 776 MPs (both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha) is calculated by a formula. The total value of all these votes is 1,098,882, which makes quite miniscule a majority of 22,078.



This is one reason why the BJP has been striving hard to improve its numbers in all state assembly polls as well as in the Rajya Sabha.



For the presidential polls, the value of each vote of an MLA is calculated on the basis of a formula that divides the population of that state with the number of seats in the Assembly of that particular state and further divided by a thousand. For ascertaining the population of a state, the 1971 Census is taken as the benchmark.



Among the states, value of the vote of an Uttar Pradesh MLA is the highest because of its population, and consequently the biggest assembly with 403 seats. The value of the vote of each UP MLA is 208. The total value of the votes of all 4,120 MLAs is 549,474.



As for Parliament, nominated members of the two Houses cannot vote in the presidential elections. The value of an MPs vote is calculated by dividing the total value of the votes of MLAs by the number of 776 MPs (Lok Sabhas 543 and Rajya Sabhas 233). Each MPs vote has a value of 708. The total value of MP votes is 549,408.



The BJP as well as NDA is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha. The BJP, along with its allies like Peoples Democratic Party and Shiromani Akali Dal, have governments in 12 states. It faces two term anti-incumbency in both Punjab and Goa. Its allies have governments in Andhra Pradesh and Nagaland. However, it doesnt have governments in some of the states with large assemblies like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Tamil Nadu.



Currently, BJP has barely 50-odd MLAs in UP assembly. It wants to win UP, but even in the worst case scenario it would want to improve its current tally in that assembly.
Ban urges 'maximum restraint' in wake of reported fighting at border between Ethiopia and Eritrea

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Ban urges 'maximum restraint' in wake of reported fighting at border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624a7940b.html [accessed 26 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.

15 June 2016 - Deeply concerned by reports of fighting on 12 and 13 June on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is on an official visit to Belgium, met in Brussels today with top officials from both the African countries, with the parties calling for maximum restraint.

A statement issued by his spokesperson confirmed that Mr. Ban discussed the issue in his meeting in Brussels today with the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, while the Deputy Secretary-General called the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Eritrea.

"They urged both Governments to exercise maximum restraint and refrain from any act or statement that could exacerbate the situation," said the statement, which added that they also called on both Governments to resolve their differences through peaceful means, including by ensuring the full implementation of the peace agreement they signed in 2000.

The United Nations, according to the statement, remains available to assist the two countries in this endeavour.
At Security Council, UN envoy warns LRA shifting focus to more high-profile targets in Central Africa

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as UN News Service, At Security Council, UN envoy warns LRA shifting focus to more high-profile targets in Central Africa, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624bc840c.html [accessed 26 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.

15 June 2016 - The United Nations is concerned about the impact of Uganda's potential withdrawal from military operations against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, the Secretary-General's envoy for the region said today, stressing that a departure of Ugandan troops must be well-coordinated.

"The LRA continues to threaten the security of the population in its operating area and has notably increased its alleged attacks in the Central African Republic (CAR) during the reporting period, reportedly extending into areas that had previously seen little to no LRA movement," said Abdoulaye Bathily, the Secretary-General's Special Representative and head of the UN Regional Office For Central Africa (UNOCA), in his briefing to the Security Council.

Group elements have also persisted in attacking the civilian population in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), he added.

UNOCA has continued its active engagement to fill coordination gaps on the LRA issue over the past six month, convening the bi-annual meeting of LRA focal points in April and also, together with the AU and other UN partners, organizing a workshop in March to identify more clearly the respective roles and responsibilities of different actors in LRA-affected countries that are assisting LRA members who have defected or escaped from the group, Mr. Bathily said.

Although the successful holding of presidential and legislative elections in CAR has put the country back on the path of sustainable peace, development and longer-term peacebuilding, challenges remain immense, in the context of ongoing, serious protection and humanitarian needs, crushing poverty and urgent requirements in the areas of disarmament, demobilization, reintegration and repatriation as well as on security sector reform, he noted.

"Armed groups still control large parts of the country, and the Government is in need of the full political, programmatic and financial support of the international community to ensure the re-establishment of state authority throughout the country," Mr. Bathily explained.

On Boko Haram insurgents, he said that the collective efforts of the Lake Chad Basin countries have reduced the terrorist group's capacity to undertake frequent attacks, as the cross-border operations by the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) have captured Boko Haram fighters, freed captives and reclaimed territory from the group.

Boko Haram, however, continues to pose a serious threat to regional stability, he said. While humanitarian assistance has been mobilized for the populations affected by Boko Haram, the number of internally displaced persons and refugees fleeing from Boko Haram violence continues to rise, with limited funding received thus far to address the growing humanitarian needs.

"For these reasons, it is crucial that international partners maintain their support to the region to end the threat posed by the group and stress the need for a holistic regional approach, as emphasized during the Second Regional Security Summit, held in Abuja on 14 May," he said, urging the global community to support MNJTF through the mobilization of requisite political, logistical and financial support in a flexible manner.

In all of UNOCA's work, he noted, principal partner remains the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and during the reporting period, the two institutions have focused on the further strengthening of their relationship.
Haiti: UN and partners warn against 'institutional vacuum,' call for return to constitutional order

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Haiti: UN and partners warn against 'institutional vacuum,' call for return to constitutional order, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624c53411.html [accessed 26 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.

15 June 2016 - The United Nations and its partners in Haiti have today expressed concern that as the provisional president's agreed 120-day mandate has come to end, "no measures have been taken to ensure institutional continuity" in the island nation, where several key deadlines regarding the political transition process have been missed.

In a joint press statement he Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Haiti, Sandra Honore, and the other members of the international community in Haiti represented in the "Core Group" (the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the United States and the European Union, and the Special Representative of the Organization of American States) took note of the opening of the second ordinary session of Parliament in accordance with the Constitution.

"The Core Group expresses concern that no measures have been taken to ensure institutional continuity beyond 13 June as provided for in the 5 February Agreement," said the press statement.

On 14 February, the Haitian National Assembly elected Jocelerme Privert as the island nation's interim President, one week after former President Michel Martelly departed without a successor. Mr. Privert served as interim President for 120 days, and an election had been scheduled for 24 April, following an agreement - known as the 5 February Agreement - between Haitian stakeholders to preserve institutional continuity and further the electoral process.

Subsequently, on 25 April, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson issued a statement underlining the UN chief's deep concern that that the agreed upon date for holding elections in Haiti was not met and that no alternate electoral calendar was announced.

As Mr. Privert's 120-day interim period has come to an end, the Core Group statement today called on the National Assembly to take action and reach a solution which avoids an "institutional vacuum," and facilitate the return to constitutional order through the holding of elections without further delay.

The Group urged all actors, political parties, candidates and their supporters and others to maintain calm and to refrain from violence.
Colombia: UN experts urge protection of Afro-Colombian communities against elevating violence

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Colombia: UN experts urge protection of Afro-Colombian communities against elevating violence, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624d8a40b.html [accessed 26 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.

15 June 2016 - Distressed over reports of violence against people of African descent in Colombia, a United Nations expert panel has called on the authorities to take concrete and urgent measures to protect the country's Afro-Colombian communities.

"We are concerned that many Afro-Colombians community leaders have faced repeated death threats following their call for their ancestral land rights and to prevent the exploitation of their territories by outside mining interests, including multinational mining companies," said human rights expert Ricardo A. Sunga III, who currently heads the Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent.

The call came at a time when several Afro-descendant leaders are being subjected to intimidation, including death threats, as they campaign for territorial rights.

"We ask for protection of Afro-Colombians, especially those engaged in active campaign for land restitution including in the Cauca Department. The communities' territorial rights must also be respected," Mr. Sunga stressed earlier in the week. "We urge the Colombian authorities to put an end to criminalisation and threats against human rights defenders and members of their families," he added.

While acknowledging ongoing efforts by the Government, the human rights expert emphasized that much more work is required to address the situation. "The Colombian Government must take effective action to guarantee the safety of their communities, undertake full and impartial investigations into the threats and bring all those responsible to justice," Mr. Sunga underlined.

Recalling the Working Group's request for an official invitation in December 2014, the expert reiterated their willingness to visit the country to investigate the Afro-Colombian community's human rights situation.

The Working Group's appeal to the Colombian Government has also been endorsed by the Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Rita Izsak-Ndiaye; the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Michel Forst; the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns; and the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Mutuma Ruteere.
Conflict prevention efforts more effective and sustainable when women participate  Security Council

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Conflict prevention efforts more effective and sustainable when women participate  Security Council, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624db640c.html [accessed 26 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.

15 June 2016 - Despite commitments of the international community, inconsistent levels of political will, resourcing, accountability and gender expertise often hinder the full and meaningful inclusion of women in efforts to prevent conflict, the Security Council said today.

Adopting a Presidential Statement during a formal meeting this morning, the 15-nation body welcomed the adoption of regional frameworks to implement resolution 1325 (2000) on 'women, peace and security,' including the African Union's Gender, Peace and Security Programme 2015-2020. It also welcomed the efforts of Member States in developing national action plans.

The Council also emphasized the importance of undertaking a comprehensive approach, and reaffirmed the substantial link between women's meaningful involvement in efforts to prevent, resolve and rebuild from conflict and the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of those efforts.

It also reiterated its call to increase the equal participation, representation and full involvement of women in preventive diplomacy and all related decision-making processes.

By the text, the Council acknowledged the positive impact that the economic empowerment of women could have on their full participation in political decision-making and peace and security efforts, and called upon Member States to provide better occupational skills training and greater funding for entrepreneurships for African women.

It encouraged Member States to increase their funding on women, peace and security, particularly for conflict and post-conflict situations, and to provide further support to civil society.
Security Council urges political solution to Guinea-Bissau crisis

Publisher UN News Service Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as UN News Service, Security Council urges political solution to Guinea-Bissau crisis, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624ddb40b.html [accessed 26 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.

15 June 2016 - Following a briefing yesterday by the head of the United Nations peacebuilding office in Guinea-Bissau, the Security Council has encouraged national actors to abide by the constitution and rule of law, while striving to find a political solution to the crisis in the country.

Yesterday, the 15-member body heard from Modibo Toure, the Secretary-General's Special Representative and head of the UN Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNIOGBIS), who warned that the longer the country's political crisis continues, the more likely the country could see setbacks to its development and economic gains.

In a press statement released today, the members of the Council commended the security forces of Guinea-Bissau for their "non-interference in the political situation and the restraint shown in this regard," and reminded the security and defense services of the need to continue abiding by civilian control.

Expressing serious concern over the latest political developments, the Council also commended the peaceful way in which Guinea-Bissau's population is following the political situation in the country.

In its statement, the Council welcomed the decision taken by the 49th Ordinary Summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Authority of Heads of State and Government held in Dakar to designate a presidential mission comprising the Heads of State of Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone to meet and conduct discussions with those involved in the political crisis in Guinea-Bissau.

The Council encouraged those regional leaders to further engage in addressing the country's current political situation. They also welcomed the decision to extend for one year the mandate of the ECOWAS security mission in Guinea-Bissau and, in that respect, commended the decision of the European Union (EU) to provide financial support to the mission.

The members of the Council also encouraged ECOWAS to continue extending its political support to the authorities and political leaders of Guinea-Bissau through the use of good offices and mediation.

Stressing the importance of national reconciliation, inclusive dialogue and good governance, the Council highlighted the need for the Government of Guinea-Bissau to continue to take concrete steps towards peace, security and stability in the country, by effectively reforming the security sector and tackling corruption.

They urged relevant Bissau-Guinean actors to "uphold and proceed with continuous and constructive dialogue, within the established constitutional parameters and with respect for the separation of powers, in order to strengthen democratic governance and work towards consensus on key political issues, particularly with regards to the urgent implementation of necessary reforms," according to the statement.

The members of the Council recalled their full commitment to support the consolidation of peace and stability Guinea-Bissau and noted that the pledges made at the Brussels International Donor Conference of March 2015 required a stable political environment in order to materialize.

Further, the Council noted that "courageous and inclusive political steps are needed to help fulfil these pledged commitments, in the best interests of all the people of Guinea-Bissau," the statement said.

In addition, the members of the Council welcomed the joint efforts by international partners, in particular the UN, African Union (AU), ECOWAS, EU and the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries (CPLP), to enhance cooperation in support of the Government in Guinea-Bissau. The Council encouraged them to continue to work together towards the country's stabilization in accordance with the key structural reforms established by the Government.

Moreover, the Council encouraged ECOWAS and the CPLP to take the necessary steps towards organizing a meeting of the international contact Group on Guinea-Bissau, in consultation with the UN, EU and all concerned stakeholders.
Cote d'Ivoire: Arbitrary Evictions in Protected Forests

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 13 June 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Cote d'Ivoire: Arbitrary Evictions in Protected Forests, 13 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57624e5f4.html [accessed 26 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.

Residents of Cote d'Ivoire's protected forests live in fear of arbitrary evictions and have suffered extortion and physical abuse by forest conservation authorities, Human Rights Watch and the Ivorian Coalition of Human Rights Actors (Rassemblement des Acteurs Ivoriens des Droits Humains, RAIDH) said today. The Ivorian government should halt all forced evictions, investigate and prosecute abuses, and introduce legislation that provides farmers with the protections required by international law.

The Forestry Development Agency (Societe de Developpement des Forets, SODEFOR), a state agency under the Water and Forests Ministry, regularly evicts farmers without warning, often burning their homes and possessions in the process. Farmers are also frequently beaten and humiliated during eviction operations.

"Families are being violently evicted from the land on which they have lived and worked for years, and are seeing everything they own destroyed in an instant," said Jim Wormington, West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The lack of oversight of SODEFOR's operations has left these communities vulnerable to abuse."

Cote d'Ivoire's 231 protected forests (forets classees), state land set aside for conservation, have been devastated by deforestation, with more than half of the country's four million hectares of protected forest cut down for farmland. As part of its efforts to combat climate change, announced prior to the December 2015 Paris climate summit, the Ivorian government in September restated its intention to restore protected forests as part of a broader commitment to return at least 20 percent of its territory to forest.

While conserving forests can play an important role in combatting climate change, however, environmental protection measures should respect the human rights of people living in protected forests. International law protects anyone who occupies homes or land from forced evictions that are not preceded by adequate notice or do not respect the dignity and rights of those affected, regardless of whether they occupy the land legally.

In May 2015 and March 2016, Human Rights Watch and RAIDH conducted week-long research missions to the protected forests of Cavally, Goin-Debe and Scio in western Cote d'Ivoire. These forests, in which cocoa farms run by small-scale farmers have replaced vast tracts of forest, typify the challenge the Ivorian government faces in protecting the environment while respecting the rights of farmers.

Human Rights Watch and RAIDH interviewed more than 85 community leaders, union activists, SODEFOR officials, and farmers, including 25 people whose homes or plantations had been destroyed by SODEFOR during eviction operations spanning 2014 to 2016.

None of the families evicted, many of whom had lived in protected forest for years, had been notified in advance of when the eviction was to occur, as required by international law.

Several people interviewed showed researchers the burned out remains of their homes, with their charred possessions still visible inside. Villagers said that they were not given the opportunity to remove their belongings before their houses were set alight.

"My house was in the first courtyard as you enter the settlement, and as soon as SODEFOR arrived they started burning down the houses," said one farmer, who said his house was set alight while his newborn baby slept inside. "Fortunately my wife heard the firing and shouting, and she rushed back to the house to save the child. SODEFOR hadn't checked to see who was in the house before they set it on fire."

For communities in protected forests, many of whom rely on their land for cash crops and food to support their families, the impact of losing their longtime homes and livelihoods is severe. "Without our land in Goin-Debe, I don't know what we're going to do," one farmer said. "The people you see today have practically nothing to eatWe don't even have enough food to give us the energy to work."

Community leaders and aid workers said that SODEFOR failed to ensure that families who have been evicted and are unable to provide for themselves have adequate alternative housing or productive land, as international law requires.

Many community leaders and farmers also said that SODEFOR officers regularly use the threat of eviction to solicit money or other 'gifts,' including livestock. "He told me that a commander from a nearby town will be coming," said a farmer, recounting a recent call with a SODEFOR officer. "So I understood that to mean the reception we give them should be bigger than usual."

One farmer said that he had paid a SODEFOR agent 75,000 CFA (US$125) in February 2015 to spare his plantation during an eviction operation. But when SODEFOR returned in December 2015, he was away from his plantation and had been unable to make the payment necessary to protect his crops. "I lost 18 hectares that were either burnt or destroyed," he said. "I wasn't there to persuade them otherwise."

Farmers who fail to give money to SODEFOR agents also risk arrest and prosecution. Cote d'Ivoire's forestry code criminalizes farming in protected forest without prior approval, and SODEFOR frequently arrests and detains farmers during eviction operations.

Community leaders told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH, however, that whether farmers are prosecuted frequently depends on their ability to pay SODEFOR officials to secure their release. One cocoa buyer said that after he was arrested in Goin-Debe, SODEFOR agents told him, "Give what you can and we will leave you alone." He gave them 200,000 CFA (US$334) and was released.

Human Rights Watch and RAIDH also documented several incidents in which eviction operations were accompanied by violence against farmers arrested or detained by SODEFOR. Three farmers said SODEFOR agents, upon arriving in their village in January 2016, forced them and more than a dozen other young men to lie on the ground and then whipped them across their backs and buttocks with sticks, belts and the flat side of machetes.

The farmers were then taken by SODEFOR to a nearby town, where SODEFOR agents told one of the detainees to pretend to shoot a video as other prisoners were beaten. "They made us get into a prayer position, on our knees facing forward," said one of the farmers, who needed three days of hospital treatment following the abuse. "They told him to hold a wooden block on his shoulder, like he was filming us with a camera  I guess it was a way to humiliate us."

To prevent future abuses, the Ivorian government should immediately halt forced evictions until it passes legislation giving occupants of protected forest protection from arbitrary evictions, and should find a long-term solution that would both conserve protected forests and protect residents' rights. SODEFOR officers implicated in physical abuse, extortion, or criminality should be investigated and prosecuted.

"An immediate halt to forced evictions is the only way to prevent further abuses," said Bamba Sindou, General Coordinator of RAIDH. "Cote d'Ivoire should urgently investigate alleged abuses by SODEFOR and prosecute those agents implicated in criminality."

Cote d'Ivoire's Protected Forests

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Cote d'Ivoire's forests have been decimated by deforestation for agriculture, with one government factsheet stating that the proportion of the national territory covered by forests declined from about 50 percent in 1900 to less than 12 percent in 2015.

Cote d'Ivoire's 231 protected forests, established for conservation, have not been spared, with large stretches of forest replaced by plantations growing cocoa and other commodities. The Ivorian government, in policy documents seen by Human Rights Watch, acknowledges that 30 to 40 percent of Cote d'Ivoire's national cocoa crop  which makes up 15 to 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)  comes from land designated as protected forests.

"Given how large these forests are, the extent of the destruction is extreme," Jean-Baptiste Kouame, head of SODEFOR's Forest Management Unit (Unite de Gestion Forestiere) for Cavally, told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH. "In Scio [88,000 hectares], there is no forest left; it's all cocoa, or some coffee and rubber. In Goin-Debe [133,170 hectares], it's the same thing. There's maybe 10,000 hectares that is still forest. Cavally [64,200 hectares] was better protected, but there has recently been a big infiltration there."

Much of SODEFOR's workforce consists of forestry agents (Corps Eaux et Forets), a uniformed service under the Water and Forests Ministry. A Forest Management Unit oversees each protected forest, although given SODEFOR's limited resources these units often only comprise a handful of forestry officers. While eviction operations and patrols in protected forests are typically led by officers from the Forest Management Unit, SODEFOR also often uses civilian laborers from nearby villages who can assist in destroying plantations and evicting farmers. For larger-scale operations, or for patrols in insecure areas, officers from the Forest Management Unit may be assisted by forestry agents brought in from another location, or by soldiers from the Ivorian army.

In addition to protected forests, Cote d'Ivoire has national parks, administered by the National Office for Parks and Reserves (Office Ivoirien des Parcs et Reserves) under the Environment and Sustainable Development Ministry. Certain national parks, most infamously Mont Peko in western Cote d'Ivoire, have also been used for significant illegal cocoa production and have been targeted for upcoming evictions.

The occupation and exploitation of protected forests occurred in several stages. Multiple community leaders interviewed by Human Rights Watch and RAIDH said that their communities settled there before the forest had been classified as protected. "I'm 47 years old and I was born in Goin-Debe, before it was classified as protected forest in 1978," said one farmer. "I've been living there ever since  all of our families' assets are invested here."

Other farmers said that, while they had begun their plantations on land they knew had been classified as protected forest, they believed the government had ignored their arrival, preferring increased agricultural production to conservation. Multiple villages in the protected forests of Goin-Debe and Scio have mosques, churches and government-run schools, and several voting offices were established there during the 2015 presidential elections.

Government officials and community leaders also said that Cote d'Ivoire's 2002-2003 armed conflict and 2010-2011 post-election crisis had made it difficult, and often dangerous, for SODEFOR and Ivorian security forces to operate in protected forests, facilitating a new wave of occupations. In some areas, including in parts of Cavally, Goin-Debe and Scio, armed groups took advantage of the security vacuum to forcibly take control of large sections of protected forest and sell tracts of land to farmers.

Forced Evictions from Protected Forests

In May 2012, the water and forests and defence ministers cosigned an inter-ministerial policy directive that warned residents of protected forests to leave or be evicted. This directive presaged a harsher government approach toward residents of protested forests, and in February 2013 the then-Water and Forests Minister, Mathieu Babaud Darret, said publicly, "The time for awareness-raising has passed. We are to move now to repression."

The 2012 policy directive, however, did not give communities in protected forests notice of when evictions in their specific locality would begin. The first major evictions only began in June 2013, when SODEFOR, in conjunction with the army, undertook a large-scale operation in the protected Niegre forest, in southwestern Cote d'Ivoire, with more than 20,000 people reportedly forced to flee to neighboring villages and camps. Credible media reports said that SODEFOR and the army used bulldozers to raze Baleko-Niegre, the main settlement, flattening homes and shops and destroying the local school, church and marketplace.

In July 2014, Cote d'Ivoire enacted a new forestry code the objectives of which included restoring at least 20 percent of the country's territory to forest. Since its passage, although SODEFOR has not embarked on an operation of a scale similar to that in Niegre, hundreds of families living in protected forests have been evicted. Human Rights Watch and RAIDH documented at least six eviction operations in Goin-Debe between April 2014 and March 2016, and several more in Cavally between December 2015 and March 2016. Community leaders said that SODEFOR had conducted large-scale evictions in Scio in 2014.

Community leaders said that SODEFOR generally only targets a specific area of forest in each operation. In January, the Danish Refugee Council reported that eviction operations in Goin-Debe and Cavally had targeted three settlements, with 31 houses burned in one settlement and 21 targeted in the others. At least 250 people, including 92 children, were displaced. A community leader showed Human Rights Watch and RAIDH a list of families affected by an eviction operation in 2014 in Goin-Debe that had destroyed four settlements, displacing more than 140 people. One farmer from Goin-Debe said that, when a SODEFOR operation targeted his village in December 2015, about 30 houses were burned down, and "more than 100 people lost their homes when you include the women and children who lived with us."

Failure to Provide Advance Notice of Evictions

Without exception, farmers evicted by SODEFOR told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH that they had no notice that an eviction operation had been scheduled for their locality or when the evictions would occur. "I had no prior warning, none at all," said one village chief from Goin-Debe. "I heard them firing in the air, and people shouting and crying, and saw the smoke coming from the house. We've lived in this forest since 1975I was watching the village burn, but I couldn't do anything about it."

One farmer said SODEFOR burned down his home in January 2016 while he was at church. "When my friend saw SODEFOR coming, they sent someone to come to find us," the farmer said. "We rushed back as quickly as we could, but by the time we got back, my whole house had burned down. I sat there in the courtyard of my house in disbelief."

By arriving suddenly in villages and plantations to burn down houses and crops, SODEFOR is putting lives at risk. Several women told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH that after their homes were burned down, their children had to walk dozens of kilometers to find shelter with relatives in other villages. "Their trucks arrived, and we suddenly heard them firing into the air so we ran quickly into bush," said one woman, describing a June 2015 eviction operation. "My children and I got separated, and so I had to look for them in the undergrowth. We had to walk from our house back to our relatives in another village; it was about 16 kilometers."

Another farmer told of his family's hardship and loss since they had to walk from their burned out home to relatives in another village. His wife died several months later. While the cause of death was not entirely clear, he suspected that the eviction played a role:

SODEFOR came to burn down the houses in our plantation in April 2014. We ran into the bush, but my wife was in the early stages of a pregnancy and said that she could feel a pain in her stomach. I told her to stop carrying the luggage that she had on her head, and we walked slowly to a nearby village. Her pain got worse, and so I took her to a hospital. The nurses said she would struggle to survive  the fetus had died and gone rotten in her stomach. She died in the hospital four months later. I'm now looking after our three children on my own  I've lost my land and my wife.

Property Destruction

Victims of evictions described their shock at seeing their homes, and much of what they owned, destroyed. "I lost a lot of my possessions that day," said one woman who had returned from working in the fields to find her home had been burned down. "The mattress that me, my husband and my children sleep on, cooking utensils, and at least 100,000 CFA (US$167) was burned." Other women said they lost tools and materials they used for home-based businesses. A man who had been keeping money for friends and family at his house said that 1.5 million CFA (US$2,500) went up in flames.

Although international law requires governments to ensure that those affected by evictions are not arbitrarily deprived of personal property, victims said they were not given the opportunity to remove their possessions before their houses were set alight. They also had not received the required compensation for property lost during evictions. A shop worker whose store was burned to the ground said:

It all happened before people could even take out their belongings. Ours was the only big store in the area, selling goods like rice, oil, and sugar to communities from many of the settlements nearby. They burned the whole thing. It was around the time of a religious holiday, so we had a lot in the store. We probably lost around 8 million CFA (US$13,360) worth of product.

Several farmers said that they had lost their identity cards and birth certificates during evictions, a particular problem in western Cote d'Ivoire, where in July 2015 Human Rights Watch reported that security force extortion at checkpoints often targets those without identity cards. "I don't know how I can travel now," said one farmer in Goin-Debe. "I traveled to town the other day but, because I didn't have my ID card, I had to pay 4,000 CFA (US$7) to the security forces at the checkpoints."

Impact on Livelihoods and Food Security

Famers described extreme hardship not only as a result of losing income from growing cash crops, but also from losing land for growing subsistence food crops, particularly rice. One woman, who was evicted in June 2015, said her family with six children is "surviving now only thanks to the grace of God."

Many evicted farmers said that they were now living with family members in villages bordering protected forest, and several village leaders said they were struggling to cope with the new arrivals. "There will be a big famine here soon," one community leader said. "These farmers were producing rice for food in protected forest, as well as cocoa to sell. We're trying to farm some of the paddy fields near the village, but that will never suffice for the whole village."

A number of evicted farmers said that they had returned to their plantations to find them being farmed by someone else. "I've visited my plantation," one said. "Someone else is living there and farming the fields while we suffer."

International law states that evictions should not leave people homeless or at risk of other rights violations. Governments should ensure that evicted people have food, potable water and sanitation, basic shelter and housing, essential medical services, and educational opportunities for their children. None of the evicted families interviewed by Human Rights Watch and RAIDH had received assistance finding alternative housing or land.

Several women said that the loss of income had prevented them from sending their children to school. "I still haven't gotten back on my feet," said a woman who was evicted in June 2015 and now lives in a village bordering Goin-Debe. "I have trouble feeding my children, and they are not going to school anymore. Without income from cocoa, there just isn't the money to send them to school."

Moussa Kone, president of farmer's union National Agricultural Union for Progress in Cote d'Ivoire (Syndicat National Agricole pour le Progres en Cote d'Ivoire, SYNAP-CI), told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH that, given the government's commitment to restore protected forests to fight climate change, he was fearful that the pace of evictions will accelerate. Though forced evictions have so far been sporadic, one community leader said: "It's impossible to know when they will pick up again. No one knows what the government will do."

Extortion and Criminality

To protect their land and livelihoods, residents of protected forests told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH that they felt obliged to give SODEFOR officers money or other offerings to avoid potential evictions, while several farmers said that SODEFOR officers had extorted money by threatening evictions.

Community leaders told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH that, when SODEFOR officers visit their settlements, they give them money or other gifts, such as chickens. Several farmers said such offerings were not in response to specific eviction threats, but rather were intended to ensure their village maintains good relations with SODEFOR and avoids potential evictions.

One community leader in Scio said:

I have my own cocoa plantations in protected forest. When SODEFOR comes through, we welcome them. We ask each settlement in the area to contribute something, and then when they come we give them a few chickens and some money for their gasoline  something like 50,000 or 100,000 CFA (US$84 to US$167). We are happy to do it because we are here illegally, and we don't want to be moved off the land. I'd say that happens three or four times a year, although SODEFOR came to visit our village only last month, and one of their officers called me yesterday to tell me they will be passing through this week.

Another farmer from Goin-Debe said: "When they come, it's not like SODEFOR directly solicits money. It's rather that you're going to find something for them. The chief [of the settlement] asks the farmers, 'Find something for them.' And that could be chickens, but if you don't have any chickens you give money." Several community leaders called the practice of asking each farmer to contribute to a financial gift or offering to SODEFOR as "paying dues" (cotisations).

Multiple farmers said they believed that their communities and plantations had been targeted for evictions because they did not make regular payments to SODEFOR. "We don't pay SODEFOR, we don't pay dues," said one community leader from Goin-Debe. "And our community has been especially targeted for these evictions."

If SODEFOR's decision as to where to target evictions is influenced in any way by whether settlements give money or other offerings, even if those offerings are voluntary, this would mean the evictions are arbitrary and a clear breach of international human rights law.

Human Rights Watch and RAIDH also interviewed farmers who said they paid SODEFOR specifically to avoid a threatened eviction. One farmer said:

If you're able to approach a SODEFOR agent when they are not out in force in a big group, then you can say, "Don't go over in this area when you do your next excursion, leave my fields alone," and if you give them something, then they will usually leave your plantations alone.

Another community leader said SODEFOR had, in December 2015, asked him and the heads of nearby settlements to pay a fee of 10,000 CFA (US$17) per farmer as part of a SODEFOR "census" in the area. "We gave them the money," he said. "All the settlements in the area did. We asked for a receipt, but they never gave us one." A farmer from the same village said: "Someone said, 'You need to give something, 10,000 CFA, so that we're able to stay here.' So we all gave it."

Two cocoa buyers interviewed said that for the period when SODEFOR was conducting an eviction operation in a particular section of forest, they were required to pay SODEFOR a fee to buy cocoa from that area. "They had a checkpoint [near the entrance to the protected forest] for about a week," one said. "And you had to pay each time you wanted to go in to get cocoa. If you were buying 20 tons, you paid 100,000 CFA (US$167), and if it was five tons, you paid 60,000 CFA (US$100)." Such extortion, as an arbitrary seizure of money and other property, violates the right to property under article 14 of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights.

Cote d'Ivoire's 2014 forestry code makes it an offense for someone to create lodgings and clear forest or grow crops in classified forests without prior authorization, punishable by imprisonment from four months to three years and a fine of 250,000 CFA (US$417) to 5,000,000 CFA (US$8,350).

Farmers and union leaders told Human Rights Watch and RAIDH, however, that in many cases SODEFOR uses the threat of prosecution to extort money from farmers arrested during eviction operations. One farmer explained that after he spent two nights in a SODEFOR camp, he and two others were released once their families agreed to pay the SODEFOR agents 50,000 CFA (US$84) per person. A farmer released at the same time confirmed that his brother had paid 50,000 CFA for his release.

Another farmer, who had been badly beaten during an eviction operation and needed medical treatment, was released after his parents paid SODEFOR agents 15,000 CFA (US$25). Several farmers who had been detained by SODEFOR during eviction operations said their cell phones and cash were taken from them and not returned upon their release.

Physical Abuse

Numerous farmers arrested and detained by SODEFOR also described beatings and other humiliations. One farmer said he had been hospitalized in March after SODEFOR detained him and four colleagues:

SODEFOR arrived and surprised us while we were eating lunch under a cabana. I fled, and they tried to catch me, and as they got closer one hit me, and I fell. Then they hit me on my buttocks and my lower back. Once they had subdued me, they took me toward the cabana, where they forced us all to hunch up and cover our eyes. Then they hit me again, with batons, but also with the ends of their guns on our backs. I was so seriously injured that I had to be taken to the hospital for painkiller injections.

Another farmer, detained at the same time, showed Human Rights Watch open wounds on his shins, which he said were from this incident. Human Rights Watch and RAIDH also met a farmer from the protected forest of Cavally who alleged that SODEFOR agents and civilians working with them had beaten to death a family member, Guetayoaba Ouedraogo, in 2014.

Two detainees, held in different locations by SODEFOR in January 2016, independently said that SODEFOR officers had asked them to pretend to film other detainees while agents beat or humiliated them. "They asked us to undress, or at least take off our tops, and then to sing and dance for them," one farmer said. "You couldn't refuse or they would hit you, and they asked one or two of us to pretend to film us dancing, holding a block as a pretend camera." Human Rights Watch and RAIDH interviewed someone detained with this man, and who said he had been asked to do the filming:

The SODEFOR agents took me to their base, and when their colleagues arrived they started to hit me with batons, and pour water on me. It's only when my friend called our boss, and asked him to speak to the SODEFOR officer, that they stopped hitting me. I was then the one who was asked to film the other detainees while they danced, with a piece of wood as a pretend camera.

Two farmers said they had seen SODEFOR agents force fellow detainees to eat raw hot peppers in January. "If you finished one pepper, they gave you another," one said. "You couldn't refuse or they would hit you again."

Following the 2013 SODEFOR and army operation in Niegre, the then-United Nations independent expert on human rights in Cote d'Ivoire, Doudou Diene, stated that during the operation, "some serious incidents were reported, including the death of three persons, ill-treatment, rapes, extortion and the destruction of property by the Forces Republicaines de Cote d'Ivoire (FRCI) and employees of SODEFOR."

Jean-Baptiste Kouame, head of the Forest Management Unit for Cavally, denied that farmers were beaten during eviction operations and said, "SODEFOR frequently has to pursue farmers who are trying to escape or resisting arrest."

One farmer in Cavally, however, said that his village was so fearful of abuses that they hide in the bush or other villages when SODEFOR operates in the area. "When they come through, we're obliged to hide during the day  we're fearful of them," he said. "We hear the gunshots where they are working, and it's only in the evening, around 5 p.m., when we are able to see what they have done, and what's been burned."

International standards require governments to ensure that no one is subjected to direct or indiscriminate attacks or other acts of violence during forced evictions, and that any legal use of force must respect the principles of necessity and proportionality.

SODEFOR agents implicated in physical abuse, extortion or criminality should be investigated and prosecuted. In March, Human Rights Watch and RAIDH attended a hearing at the first instance court in Guiglo in which six young farmers were sentenced to 12 months in prison for farming in protected forest. During his sentencing remarks, the presiding judge, N'Guetti Assoa, told SODEFOR commanders: "I have heard of allegations that it's only people who don't pay you who are brought before the courtof stories of people beaten by SODEFOR agents, sometimes even to death. You should know that, if these facts are ever proven, the law applies to everyone. You will be brought to justice."

Suspend Evictions to Prevent Abuses

Cote d'Ivoire should immediately halt all evictions in protected forests until it introduces legislation that provides farmers with the protections accorded to them under international law. The new law should specify the circumstances in which forced evictions from protected forests can occur, if at all, and the protections required for occupants, including adequate notice and access to alternative housing or land if the residents are unable to provide for it themselves, as well as the ability to challenge the eviction in court or other equivalent body.

The Ivorian government should also strive for a long-term solution to conserving protected forests that respects farmers' rights. The 2014 forestry code stipulates that the government should issue a decree setting out a process for gradually reforesting agricultural plantations in protected forests. SODEFOR has said that this would enable farmers to become partners in sustainable management of protected forests through contractual agreements that would require them to replant trees, an approach that would permit many farmers to continue to live and work in protected forests.

The Water and Forests Ministry should accelerate consultations on, and the eventual adoption of, this decree, making sure that communities in protected forests, including men and women from a wide range of ethnic groups, are able to fully participate in the consultation process.

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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.
Bahrain: Order to Dissolve Key Opposition Group

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 16 June 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Bahrain: Order to Dissolve Key Opposition Group, 16 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576252d94.html [accessed 26 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.

Bahraini authorities said on June 14, 2016, that they intend to dissolve Al Wifaq, the country's main opposition group. On June 13, Bahrain authorities detained Nabeel Rajab, a prominent human rights activist on charges that relate solely to his peaceful criticism of the authorities.

The report said that Al Wifaq provided "a nourishing environment for terrorism, extremism and violence." The news agency said that Rajab is facing charges of "spreading false news in an attempt to discredit Bahrain." On June 14, a public prosecutor extended his detention for a week.

"Nobody should be under any illusion as to what Bahrain's rulers are up to  nothing less than squeezing the life out of its peaceful opposition movement," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director. "Bahrain's allies in London, Washington, and elsewhere should publicly condemn these actions and let Bahrain know there will be consequences."

On June 12, the authorities prevented a delegation of opposition figures from leaving Bahrain to attend the session of the UN Human Rights Council that began on June 13 in Geneva.

Bahrain prohibits political parties, and Al Wifaq is by far the largest of approximately 20 licensed political societies, including Islamist and secular, pro-government, and opposition.

The Bahrain News Agency statement said that Al Wifaq has "worked for decades on diverting from the concept of the state, [and to] secure legal cover for acts associated with extremism and terrorism."

The authorities have produced no evidence to support their allegations. Al Wifaq was a leading signatory of a declaration of non-violence, issued in 2012 by Bahrain's opposition groups, and regularly urges protesters to remain peaceful and condemns violence against the security forces.

On May 30, Bahrain's First High Court of Appeal affirmed the conviction and more than doubled the prison sentence of Wifaq's secretary general, Sheikh Ali Salman, from four years to nine years, despite an unfair trial and charges that clearly violated his right to free expression.

Rajab is already facing two outstanding charges. One is for "offending national institutions," under article 216 of Bahrain's penal code, based on his social media comments in March 2015 about the alleged torture of detainees in Jaw Prison. The other is for allegedly "disseminating false rumors in times of war," under article 133, based on his social media posts criticizing air strikes in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition, which includes Bahrain. Violations of article 133 carry a possible sentence of up to 10 years in prison, and article 216 violations carry a sentence of up to three years.

Rajab had earlier been imprisoned from April 2 to July 13, 2014 on charges of "offending national institutions," which related to his criticism of the government on social media. A public prosecutor imposed a travel ban on Rajab on the day King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa pardoned him.

In his opening statements at the 32nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on June 13, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein, said in reference to Bahrain that, "Repression will not eliminate people's grievances; it will increase them." Bahrain's Foreign Minister, Khalid Al Khalifa, responded to Zeid's comments on Twitter, saying: "We will not waste our time listening to the words of a high commissioner who has no strength or power."

Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) guarantees the right of citizens to participate in public affairs and to vote and run for public office in free elections. The UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), the body of independent experts who review state compliance with the covenant, has determined that this article protects the right to "join organizations and associations concerned with political and public affairs," and that "political parties and membership in parties play a significant role in the conduct of public affairs..."

On June 14, the US State Department issued a statement calling on the Bahraini authorities to reconsider the decision to dissolve Al Wifaq, and criticized the arrest of Rajab and the increased prison sentence for Sheikh Salman, which it said would "restrict freedom of expression." In June 2015, however, the US resumed arms sales to Bahrain based on a seriously flawed assessment of Bahrain's human rights situation.

The UK government has not publicly criticized the arrests or prosecution of Nabeel Rajab or Sheikh Ali Salman, nor has it called publicly for the release of any of Bahrain's high-profile political detainees, many of whom have been serving life sentences since 2011  although it makes public statements on behalf of human rights defenders in other countries around the world. In April 2016, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office said there had been "progress on human rights in Bahrain throughout 2015," despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.

The Bahrain government should end its efforts to close down Al Wifaq, and reverse the decision to close the group's headquarters and seize its funds, Human Rights Watch said. The authorities should also release Rajab.

"Bahrain's once vibrant activist community is in danger of being wiped out and Bahrain's friends in the UK government are failing to speak out against this dangerous and totally unjustified action," Stork said.



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Pakistan: Prosecute Rampant 'Honor' Killings

Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 14 June 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Pakistan: Prosecute Rampant 'Honor' Killings, 14 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5762535f4.html [accessed 26 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.

In Pakistan, murders to protect family or community "honor" have received widespread attention in recent weeks. On June 8, 2016, Zeenat Rafiq, 18, was burned to death in Lahore by her mother for "bringing shame to the family" by marrying a man of her choice. On May 31, family members tortured and burned to death a 19-year-old school teacher in Murree, Punjab province for refusing an arranged marriage proposal. On May 5, the body of Amber, 16, was found inside a vehicle that had been set on fire in Abbottabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, after a jirga, or traditional assembly of elders, ordered her death for helping her friend marry of her own choice.

"So-called honor killings have been a long-festering problem in Pakistan, and the recent escalating trend makes it clear they won't go away on their own," said Brad Adams, Asia director. "The government needs to step up its prosecution of these horrific cases and send a message of zero tolerance."

Pakistani law allows the family of a murder victim to pardon the perpetrator. This practice is often used in cases of "honor" killings, where the victim and perpetrator frequently belong to the same family, in order to evade prosecution. The 2004 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act made "honor" killings a criminal offense, but the law remains poorly enforced.

In February 2016, a documentary about "honor" killings by Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, "A Girl in the River," won an Academy Award. The film prompted Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to speak out publicly on "honor" killings, stating that he would look into the issue and seek reform, yet he has so far taken no action.

In March, Pakistan's senate passed an anti-honor killing bill, which is now pending National Assembly approval. Prime Minister Sharif should support the bill, which seeks to eliminate the option of murder committed in the name of "honor" to be "forgiven."

"Pakistani law literally allows killers to get away with murdering the women in their families," Adams said. "The law should be protecting women from these vicious acts  not enshrining an escape clause for their killers."

Legislative changes are only a part of the solution. The Pakistani government should ensure that police impartially investigate "honor" killings without bowing to political or other pressure from local and religious leaders. The government should also ensure that safe emergency shelter, protection, and support is available to any woman or girl who may be at risk from her family.

In most reported cases, the harshest punishments on grounds of "honor" come from the jirgas, village councils that have no female representation. There are no credible official figures on "honor" killings because they often go unreported or are passed off as suicide or natural deaths by family members. According to the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), 1096 women were killed on the pretext of "honor" in 2015.

In May 2016, the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), the highest constitutional religious body in the country, proposed that men should be allowed to "lightly" beat their wives, "if needed," and prohibited the mixing of genders in schools, hospitals, and offices. The CII is an advisory body whose recommendations are not binding in parliament. The CII's recommendations came in response to the Protection of Women Against Violence Bill 2016, which was passed in the Punjab Assembly earlier this year, and is aimed at providing remedy to women facing domestic abuse.

During a June 10 television program, a senator from an Islamist political party, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), verbally abused and attempted to physically assault Marvi Sirmed, a human rights activist, for criticizing the CII.

"Statements from the governmental Council of Islamic Ideology are making an already toxic environment for women in Pakistan worse," Adams said. "The Pakistani government should act quickly and decisively to ensure that no interpretation of religious or cultural norms prevails over basic rights."

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Moscow Signals It Intends to Rely on Brute Force in the North Caucasus

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Valery Dzutsati Publication Date 15 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 107 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, Moscow Signals It Intends to Rely on Brute Force in the North Caucasus, 15 June 2016, Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 107, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/57625fde4.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

Vladimir Putin's surprise decision, in April, to establish the Russian National Guard attracted wide attention from analysts (RIA Novosti, April 6). Much of the analysis focused on the personality at the head of the new force-Viktor Zolotov, the long-time chief of Putin's body guards (Openrussia.org, April 7). Yet other top Russian National Guard officers are also quite colorful figures. Since political processes in Putin's Russia are deliberately made notoriously obscure, understanding the personalities behind the organization aids in predicting the future of Russian domestic politics.

Previously, some observers suggested that the Russian National Guard was created in order to change Russia's policies in the North Caucasus. In particular, Novaya Gazeta alleged that the National Guard would strip Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov of his armed forces and solve the Chechnya problem once and for all (Novaya Gazeta, April 9). Others pointed out that Zolotov and Kadyrov are friends and are unlikely to fight each other. Both may have played a part in the murder of the prominent Russian opposition figure, Boris Nemtsov, in Moscow in February 2015 (Svoboda.org, April 9). However, other important figures in the newly created National Guard, such as Colonel-General Sergei Chenchik, have remained below the radar until recently. General Chenchik has played a pivotal role in the North Caucasus since the start of the second Russian-Chechen war in 1999. An analyst with the website Kavkazskaya Politika, Ramazan Magomedov, has provided a rare glimpse of Chenchik, who has been appointed Zolotov's first deputy in the National Guard.

According to Magomedov, Chenchik was one of the main architects of the repressive system that has been in place in the North Caucasus over the past two decades. Chenchik first appeared in the North Caucasus at the end of the first Russian-Chechen war in 1996 as the commander of the Ministry of Interior's troops from the Volga Military District. At the end of 1998, then-colonel Chenchik was appointed commander of the Vega police special forces unit. The group participated in repelling the incursion Shamil Basaev and Amir Khattab launched into Dagestan in 1999. Chenchik also became known for the military operation in the village of Karamakhi, the so-called Wahhabi enclave in Dagestan's Buinaksk district. The operation started on August 29, 1999, and lasted for a month. First, the Russian military targeted an estimated 120 houses in the village allegedly belonging to local Salafists. Eventually, over 1,600 homes were destroyed-nearly the entire village (Kavkazskaya Politika, May 25).

Following the epic destruction of Karamakhi, some Salafists created an armed underground movement and started to take revenge against the government forces. Prior to the attack on the village, there were practically no militants in Dagestan. However, the Pyrrhic victory in Dagestan in 1999 did not affect the rise of Chenchik, who received raises and new appointments. In 2007, he was dispatched to oversee a special operation in the village of Gimry, the Salafists' stronghold in Dagestan's mountainous Untsukul district. After the rebels killed Gazimagomed Magomedov, a Dagestani parliamentary deputy who was also likely an agent of the Federal Security Service (FSB), an estimated 1,000 servicemen descended on the village. The government forces surrounded a group of militants operating under the command of Ibragim Gajidadaev and sealed off the area around them. Yet, the militants managed to escape by pretending to be a special police unit from Buinaksk. The commanders of the government forces only found out that a special police force from Buinaksk had not taken part in the operation later, after the rebels had left, leaving behind one militant to cover their withdrawal. During the entire operation, the government forces under Chenchik's command managed to kill only the militant who was left behind by the rebels. Several servicemen were killed by "friendly fire" and, as a result of the extremely rough terrain, made the rebel forces the net winner of the encounter (Kavkazskaya Politika, May 25).

Despite a few failures, Sergei Chenchik successfully weathered all the changes made to the interior ministry's forces in the North Caucasus and Russia more widely. Chenchik was briefly removed from his position after Putin allowed Dmitry Medvedev to take over the presidency in 2008. However, Chenchik was soon reappointed and oversaw a spike in terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus from 2009 to 2011. While terrorist activities in the North Caucasus have declined since 2013, it is unclear why that has happened. Chenchik's reappointment as head of the National Guard in the North Caucasus indicates that Moscow strongly approves of the general's approach to fighting extremism.

Meanwhile, the Russian government forces' extreme brutality and disregard for human rights in fighting the secessionist movement in the North Caucasus have inevitably spread to other police activities. Rights activists recently uncovered a secret prison in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, which some have already dubbed the "North Caucasian Guantanamo." Police there used torture-including electric shocks-to extract confessions from suspects. Unlike Guantanamo, however, the Russian police used the secret detention site to interrogate Russian citizens, and for reasons having little to do with fighting terrorism. Along with suspects in serious crimes, such as murderers, the police also detained people for economic crimes. The report suggests other similar secret detention facilities exist across the North Caucasus and that the government does not intend to stop its illegal practices (Novaya Gazeta, June 10).

Moscow's policy in the North Caucasus remains heavily reliant on the patent abuse of power, disregard for legal procedures, and brutality embedded in the law enforcement agencies. The government appears to be resisting efforts to scale down the intensity of police operations despite the reported decline in terrorist attacks in the region.

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
For Protection From 'Terrorists,' Moscow Offers Central Asians Air Defense

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Aleksandr Golts Publication Date 15 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 107 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, For Protection From 'Terrorists,' Moscow Offers Central Asians Air Defense, 15 June 2016, Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 107, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576260374.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

During his recent trip to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu repeatedly spoke about the need for a joint effort against terrorism. "We need to discuss everything happening in the world, to look at and draw up additional joint measures in the fight against terrorism. I hope today we will have such an opportunity," Shoigu told his Kazakhstani counterpart, Imangali Tasmagambetov, on June 8 (TASS, June 8).

Indeed, the situation in the region has become truly threatening. According to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "It must be acknowledged that the military and political situation in [Afghanistan] remains extremely tense. The Taliban continues to fight in a number of provinces. They extensively use terror against their compatriots, with civilians accounting for most of the victims. The ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria-a former name for the Islamic State terrorist group] branch in Afghanistan also remains as active as ever" (Mid.ru, June 3). The chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, was also quite clear in his risk assessment. "There are currently up to 50,000 militants in Afghanistan united into more than 4,000 units and groups of different kinds. The core is the Islamic Movement Taliban [sic] with more than 40,000 militants," Gerasimov said last October, at the opening of an international security forum on Afghanistan, hosted in Moscow by the Ministry of Defense (TASS, Oct 8, 2015).

In such a situation, the post-Soviet authoritarian Central Asian regimes that border Afghanistan-Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan-are all under serious threat. Poverty and arbitrary governance by their authorities create an ideal breeding ground for spreading radical militant Islamist ideas. In the coming years or even months, these countries could likely experience multiple riots and popular uprisings. The first signs of such future conflicts can be seen today. Just this past month (June 5), several dozen extremist gunmen, allegedly linked to jihadist groups in Syria, targeted the city of Aktobe in a deadly terrorist attack (Kazakh-tv.kz, June 9; TASS, June 14). Whoever organized this attack, it is particularly alarming for Moscow. Kazakhstan is the only barrier that separates Russia from instability in Central and South Asia. But the Russian-Kazakhstani border, which is much longer than the Russian-Chinese frontier, exists only on maps. It can be easily penetrated. In a worst-case scenario, tens if not hundreds of thousands of refugees could one day appear on Russia's southern steppes near Orenburg oblast. Almost certainly, armed gangs would attempt to blend in among these refugees.

It should be recognized that Moscow identified this threat early. As soon as it became clear that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led international peacekeeping coalition would withdraw from Afghanistan, Russia began to create a Collective Rapid Reaction Force within the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The existence of this unit implies that Russia would, at an early stage, seek to intervene in an internal conflict occurring in Central Asian. And in fact, the strategic military exercise Tsentr (Center) 2015, held last September in the Central Military District (MD), demonstrated how Moscow intends to act in a moment of crisis in the region. First, a paratrooper regiment would take an airfield in the country that was captured by "terrorists." Then, an airborne division would deploy. At the end of the day, a 90-thousand-man Russian ground force would arrive to the area (Voenno-Promishlenniyi Kuryer, November 4, 2015).

In this regard, it would be logical to assume that Shoigu would propose additional measures for military cooperation with the Central Asians, which would facilitate the realization of such a scenario-whether via joint exercises or even the establishment of new Russian military bases in the region. But Shoigu said something totally different: "We are paying special attention to [the] development of [] Russian-Kazakhstani ties in the field of air missile defense. We have delivered the S-300PS air missile defense systems and missiles for them to Kazakhstan free of charge with an aim to strengthen the unified regional air missile defense system" (TASS, June 9).

S-300 batteries are entirely inappropriate for confronting the threat posed by paramilitary groups linked to the Taliban, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. A regional air defense system based in Central Asia could cover Russia from a threat posed by China (considered Moscow's "strategic ally") or Iran (which has become a de facto ally of Moscow in the course of operations in Syria). But it is useless in a fight against the main threat to the security of the Central Asian states-terrorism and incursions by militant groups from the South. Yet, at the same time, a unified air defense system is the only program of military integration in the region that Russia is able to offer without promising to deploy more troops to the region.

Currently, Russian strategy is undergoing a major shift in focus: Russia's war machine is pivoting from the South to the West. It has now become known that in parallel with the formation of three new divisions-two in the Western and one in the Southern MD (see EDM, April 5)-Russia is also moving to the Western border two separate motorized rifle brigades from the central parts of the country. The 28th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade has already begun its redeployment from Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk oblast) to Klintsy (Bryansk oblast, on the border with Ukraine and Belarus). And the 23rd Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade began its redeployment from Samara to Valuyki (Belgorod oblast, north of eastern Ukraine) (Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozrenie, June 10). Both units were previously subordinated to the Central MD, whose area of responsibility includes Central Asia. Now they become part of the Western MD and will have to prepare for a confrontation with NATO or Ukraine.

Consequently, the Central Military District today has fewer troops available to execute, if need be, the scenario practiced in the Tsentr 2015 exercise. It will not have enough troops to reinforce a ground invasion. And at the same time, Russia's on-the-ground ability to ensure a successful deployment into Central Asia has also been weakened. In 2015, Major General Eugene Tubal, the commander of Russia's largest overseas military facility, the 201st base in Tajikistan, insisted that the number of soldiers at the base would be increased from 5,900 to 9,000 over the next five years (Fergananews, April 4, 2015). However, a few months ago, Moscow decided to downgrade the strength of the 201st base from a division to a brigade (TASS, January 30). Clearly, Moscow is ignoring a real military threat in order to take part in a new cold war.

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
Moscow Offering Crimean Tatars Ersatz Autonomy

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Paul Goble Publication Date 14 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 106 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, Moscow Offering Crimean Tatars Ersatz Autonomy, 14 June 2016, Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 106, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576260a24.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

Having illegally occupied Crimea and worked to destroy the Milli Mejlis (the de facto quasi-governing assembly of the Crimean Tatars) and all other independent Crimean Tatar organizations, Moscow is now offering that nation an ersatz form of autonomy. Russian propagandists will undoubtedly use this alternative to undermine the will of the Crimean Tatars, the most consistent opponents of the Crimean Anschluss. Moreover, this substitute form of "autonomy" will be used to confuse people in the West about what Russia is doing in Ukraine by implying that it is supportive of the Crimean Tatars when, in fact, it is just the reverse.

On Sunday, Zaur Smirnov, the head of the Russian occupation's state committee for inter-ethnic relations and deported citizens, announced that "Crimean Tatars who live in various regions of Russia intend to establish a federal national-cultural autonomy." He described this arrangement as "a form of national-cultural self-determination, which allows representatives of this or that ethnic community to independently decide issues of the preservation of their uniqueness, the development of their language, national culture and education" (RIA Novsoti, Nazaccent.ru, June 12).

Smirnov added that the Crimean Tatars already have a national-cultural autonomy on the peninsula but that to form a federation for representation in the presidential council of national cultural autonomies, there must be support from "no less than half of the registered regional national-cultural autonomies of Russian citizens who say they are members of the corresponding ethnos." He added that "now, work is going on in St. Petersburg, Astrakhan oblast, and Moscow to create [such bodies], and after that happens, the Crimean Tatars will receive the right to create a national-cultural autonomy at the federal level."

The goal of that institution, Smirnov said, is "to consolidate all Crimean Tatars who live in Russia: the head of [it] will be represented in the Presidential Council on ethnic issues, which includes all the leaders of federal-level autonomies. At the present time, there are 16 such federal-level autonomies who represent some but not all of the more than a hundred local and regional national-cultural autonomies in the Russian Federation."

All this may seem like a positive development to those who do not know the history and current state of such organizations in Russia. But there are three reasons why these institutions, which began to appear in 1996, after Moscow adopted a law on them, are in most cases more a symbolic deception than a real deference of the state to the needs of particular ethnic groups.

First and perhaps most importantly, these institutions are more symbolic than real. They were established and remain legally defined as non-governmental organizations (NGO), rather than governmental bodies. As such, they cannot collect taxes, make binding decisions even on their members, or give orders to government officials on the territory where they live. Indeed, according to the provisions of the 1996 act on national-cultural autonomies, they have even fewer rights than NGOs that are not tied to ethnic communities, because of Russian government restrictions on the use of nationality in that sector.

Second, Moscow has repeatedly used these institutions to block efforts by ethnic communities to either establish or re-establish ethnic territorial autonomies. Thus, the Russian Germans were accorded a federal national-cultural autonomy in order to keep them from demanding the restoration of a German autonomous republic, as Russian legislation had required. It appears that the Russian authorities are doing exactly the same thing in the case of the Crimean Tatars, thus squelching their hopes that Vladimir Putin will live up to his promise to fully rehabilitate them-again, as Russian law requires.

And third, the Russian authorities not only are using this device against groups that do not have territorial autonomy-the chief form of defense of ethnic rights in the Russian Federation-but also against those that do. Indeed, some political commentators argue that national-cultural autonomies should replace national-territorial autonomies as Russia continues to move toward a highly centralized unitary state (for a discussion of such notions, see Alexander Osipov, "National Cultural Autonomy in Russia: A Case of Symbolic Law," Review of Central and East European Law, 35:1 (2010), pp. 27-57).

But despite all this, the Crimean Tatars may be able to exploit this new structure for their own purposes by increasing contacts among their communities across the former Soviet space and even by advocating for the advancement of their interests as some other federal national-cultural autonomies have done. Perhaps the most successful such approach has been pursued by the Azerbaijani federal national-cultural autonomies, which has used this structure to promote Baku's positions on a wide variety of issues and to oppose Russian policies its members and the Azerbaijani government dislike. It will be far more difficult for the Crimean Tatars to follow this example given their numerically smaller size and lack of a co-ethnic state abroad. But the possibility they will do so suggests that the Kremlin will allow their ersatz autonomy even less freedom of action than it affords to other nationalities within Russia.

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
Chechnya's Governor Confirms His Special Status Within the Russian Federation

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Valery Dzutsati Publication Date 13 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 105 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, Chechnya's Governor Confirms His Special Status Within the Russian Federation, 13 June 2016, Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 13 Issue: 105, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576261c54.html [accessed 26 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.

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Chechnya's governor, Ramzan Kadyrov, continues to capture the news headlines in Russia. On May 30, a delegation from the Russian Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation set out to visit all the North Caucasus republics. Among all the region's governors, only Kadyrov refused to meet the members of the delegation. Kadyrov reportedly warned that if his long-time nemesis Igor Kalyapin, the head of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, was in the delegation, he would not receive it. Moreover, Kadyrov allegedly warned members of the Russian presidential council that he could not guarantee their safety if they arrived in Chechnya with Kalyapin. After some consideration, the group's members quickly crossed Chechnya on their way from Dagestan to Ingushetia without stopping in the republic.

The deputy head of the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council, Yevgeny Bobrov, told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper: "We have notified the leadership of the Russian presidential administration and they have recommended that we do not visit Chechnya at this time. We had a busy schedule in the republic, as we planned to visit social and penal institutions. Volunteers and other activists were waiting for us. But in order not to put them at risk, we chose the lesser of the two evils [i.e. to avoid visiting Chechnya]. Perhaps, Ramzan Kadyrov will come to his senses and stop making a scandal out of nothing. In any case, after our trip to the Caucasus, we will bring this unacceptable situation to the attention of the country's leadership at a government meeting. Let Kadyrov then do the explaining. He lives in Russia and must act according to the Russian laws, and not according to whatever his predilections are" (Novaya Gazeta, June 6).

Apparently, the leadership of the Russian Federation did not discern any problem with Kadyrov's behavior. Referring to Kadyrov's refusal to meet the delegation from the presidential human rights council, Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, stated: "[I]t is not a violation of some mandatory rules. From the bureaucratic point of view, it is not an extraordinary situation. The rules of behavior of state bureaucrats were not violated." Peskov also claimed he did not have the full information. "The topic is fairly sensitive, but without knowing all the details-who refused to meet, why, and what caused this-I would not like to provide comments," he said. "It would be wrong." In March, unidentified individuals attacked rights activists and journalists at the administrative border between Chechnya and Ingushetia. Several days later, the head of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, Kalyapin, was attacked in Grozny (Lenta.ru, June 2). In neither of these cases did the authorities manage to find the perpetrators of the attacks or, in fact, make any substantial effort to find them.

Members of the Russian human rights delegation planned to raise several important issues with the leadership of Chechnya. Chechen authorities have recently resorted to arson attacks targeting the houses of suspected militants and their relatives. The case of Ramazan Jalaldinov, a resident of Kenkhi, an Avar village in Chechnya, received substantial attention in the rest of Russia, and the delegation planned to raise the issue with Chechnya's leadership. After Jalaldinov posted a video to YouTube in which he complained to Vladimir Putin about the dire conditions in the village, the Chechen police destroyed his house, and Jalaldinov and his family had to escape to neighboring Dagestan. After days of hiding in Dagestan, Jalaldinov recorded another video, in which he apologized and praised Kadyrov. The Chechen governor's spokesperson, Alvi Kerimov, said: "Our republic has ceased to be a region where problems happen all the time [W]e do not have problems with human rights here" (Kommersant, June 2).

Another scandalous situation connected to Kadyrov's family unexpectedly unfolded in St. Petersburg, where city officials decided to rename a bridge in the city after Kadyrov's father, Akhmad Kadyrov. The initiative immediately resulted in a controversy, as many residents of the city protested against the decision. Previously, several organizations and politicians tried to rename one of the streets in Saint Petersburg after Akhmad Kadyrov. Critics say that the elder Kadyrov had no connection to the city and that Ramzan Kadyrov has been implicated in political killings, the Islamization of Chechnya, and violations of the Russian constitution (Moskovsky Komsomolets, May 30).

Akhmad Kadyrov was the first pro-Russian leader of Chechnya after the republic's period of de-facto independence in the 1990s. In May 2004, he was killed in a bomb attack at a stadium in Chechnya's capital Grozny. Russian supporters of naming the bridge after Akhmad Kadyrov say he helped maintain the Russian Federation's present borders. While the opposition of Russians to commemorating Akhmad Kadyrov may seem entirely legitimate, it is certainly motivated in part by Russian nationalism. The proposed Akhmad Kadyrov bridge in St. Petersburg is not a historical structure: indeed, it became operational only on May 1, 2016. Yet, large numbers of St. Petersburg residents rallied against renaming the bridge. Critics of the decision see it as an attempt to flatter Ramzan Kadyrov (Meduza.io, June 6). Near the bridge, unidentified individuals painted a graffiti portrait of Colonel Yuri Budanov, who was convicted for the March 2000 sexual assault and murder of a Chechen girl (Vk.com, June 8). After his release from prison, Budanov was gunned down in Moscow in June 2011 and remains a hero to Russian hardliners.

Kadyrov remains in the Russian news headlines, and part of the reason for that may be related to an ongoing fight within the Russian government over the future of Chechnya. He is scheduled to run for another term as the republic's governor in September 2016. If Kadyrov wins, he will acquire even more legitimacy than he already has. Chechnya is also a territory that is genuinely quite different from the rest of Russia, which apparently unnerves some forces in the Russian government and wider society. The controversy over the bridge in St. Petersburg suggests that Kadyrov is increasingly seen as the second most powerful person in Russia after Vladimir Putin. Regional bureaucracies make overtures to Kadyrov with the apparent aim of winning Putin's gratitude. However, given the influence of Russian nationalism, it unclear how long Kadyrov's elevation will be allowed to continue.

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
U.S. Backing Gives Kurds Cover for United Federal Region in Northern Syria

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Wladimir van Wilgenburg Publication Date 13 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, U.S. Backing Gives Kurds Cover for United Federal Region in Northern Syria, 13 June 2016, Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576262754.html [accessed 26 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.

After months of negotiation, the United States finally gave the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) - which is dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and includes the Syrian Arab Coalition (SAC) - the green light to launch its offensive to take the Syrian town of Manbij, a key Islamic State (IS) stronghold northwest of Aleppo. The operation began on May 31, coming only after General Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, visited both the Syrian Kurds on May 21 and Turkish officials on May 23 (ARAnews, May 22; Hurriyet, May 25).

The move further squeezes IS forces in Syria. It also brings the Kurds closer to their goal of establishing a contiguous territory on the Syrian-Turkish border, something the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) has been hoping to do since the beginning of the Syrian crisis in 2011 and the Turkish government has been trying to prevent (Kurdistan24, June 1). Turkey is concerned about the ties between the PYD and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting an active insurgency in Turkey's southeast since the breakdown of the ceasefire in July 2015. Ankara has tried to convince international powers to create a safe haven or a buffer zone inside northern Aleppo in order to prevent Kurdish advances, but Turkey's Western allies have been cold to this idea.

Kurdish Strategy

The Syrian Kurds will try to use the Mabij operation to create a contiguous territory on Turkey's border in cooperation with local Arabs. Turkey's options are limited due to the popularity of the Kurd's strategy of working with local Arabs and ethnic groups to share power on a community level and the weakness of Turkish-backed rebels in Syria. On May 27, the Islamic State almost overran the last strongholds of Turkish-backed rebels in Marea and Azaz in Northern Aleppo (Daily Sabah, May 29).

Kurdish officials have been clear that the current operation intends to unite the Kurdish-controlled Syrian enclaves. In June 2015, they linked the canton of Cizere (Hasakah) with the canton of Kobani with U.S. support by taking Tal Abyad (Terrorism Monitor, December 16, 2015). Now they want to link Kobani to Afrin.

"Today we are in Manbij, but tomorrow we will be in Afrin, and we will link all the three cantons [Jazira, Kobane and Afrin]," Ismet Sheikh, a senior defense official in Kobani, said during a funeral ceremony on 2 June (ARAnews, June 2).

Saleh Haji Mohammed, the deputy co-head of the Manbij civilian council, similarly announced: "The liberation of Manbij means the complete liberation of the areas of the northern countryside, and also the Shahba [northern Aleppo] region" (Hawar News, June 1). His comments echo those of Talal Silo, the official SDF spokesperson, from May 31 (Hawar News, May 31).

This, however, does not mean that the SDF-forces have no interest in defeating IS in Raqqah or Deir ar-Zour. Ismet Sheikh, a senior defense official in Kobani, insisted: "As we promised all our martyrs and all our people, we will eliminate IS where they are. It doesn't matter if it's Manbij, Jarabulus, or other areas." [1]

U.S.-PYD relations

Syrian Kurds are spread out over the Kurdish enclaves of Afrin, Kobani, and Jazira. Realizing they would have difficulty imposing Kurdish rule across an entire federal region that is not predominantly Kurdish, the PYD early on adopted a multi-ethnic strategy. It has incorporated Christians, Turkmen, and Arabs into their local administrations, working with local Arab tribes, Christian parties, and smaller Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups. The PYD has also recruited many Arabs to the YPG forces and the local police. In October 2013, the YPG worked with the Shammar tribe to capture the Yaroubiya border crossing from IS even before working with the U.S.-led coalition (Terrorism Monitor, December 13, 2013). Moreover, the Kurds formed a joint command room with FSA fighters in September 2011 to expel IS from Raqqah and the Kobani countryside (ARAnews, September 12, 2014). This led IS to besiege Kobani, which was finally liberated on January 26 with the support of FSA and Peshmerga reinforcements from the Iraqi Kurds and continued U.S.-led airstrikes (Kurdistan24, January 28, 2015).

After this, the United States backed the Arab-Kurdish coordination model for several reasons, not least because moderate Arab rebels were defeated in both Hasakah province and Raqqah. As a result, the only way to battle IS was through Kurdish-held territory. Moreover, unlike FSA rebels, the major goal of the Kurds was to fight jihadists and to create a multi-ethnic federal region, rather than get rid of President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. This aligned with the U.S. strategy to fight jihadists rather than impose regime change. FSA groups cooperated initially with extremist groups such as Ahrar as-Sham, al-Nusra, IS, and the Islamic Army to defeat Assad. The Kurds, on the other hand, rejected any form of cooperation with Islamist rebels.

The YPG-led SDF is not only interested in Kurdish areas. It also fights in non-Kurdish areas; the SDF defeated IS in Hasakah, Tal Abyad, Shadadi, al-Hawl, Tal Brak and Tel Tamr. It plans in the future to fight in Deir ar-Zour and Raqqah and has recruited many Arabs from these areas. The only real sticking point for the United States was Turkish criticism that the YPG is linked to the PKK and the PKK insurgency in Turkey.

Joining the Dots

The U.S. alliance with the Kurds made it possible for the Kurdish-led SDF forces to cross the Turkish red lines. Prior to the U.S.-backed SDF's capture of the Tishreen dam on December 27, 2015, Turkey made clear that any incursion west of the Euphrates River by Kurdish forces would be crossing a Turkish red line (TRTworld, July 1, 2015). Turkish tanks and artillery have previously fired on YPG and YPG-aligned FSA rebels in Aleppo and Raqqah province. Due to U.S. backing, however, the SDF now controls Tisreen and will eventually capture Manbij.

Syria's rebels now worry that the United States will push FSA-groups in northern Aleppo to join the SDF alliance and that under U.S. pressure Turkey will give up preventing the Kurds from connecting their enclaves. Abdurahman Harkoush, a former spokesperson of the Islamic Army wrote on Twitter: "The rebel controlled area from Azaz to Jarablus has become from the past. The new plan is to merge the VSO rebels in Azaz and Marea with YPG" (Twitter, June 3).

In March, the PYD and its allies announced plans to establish a federal system for Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and northern Syria within six months. They appointed Mansour Saloum, an Arab from Tal Abyad, and Hediya Yousef, a Kurd, as co-leaders for this new federal region for northern Syria (ARAnews, March 19). The Kurds are also setting up local councils for Arab-dominated areas, led by Arab tribal leaders, in areas under IS control such as Jarabulus and Manbij, or in areas recently captured from IS, like al-Hawl and Shadadi.

Moreover, they also set up a council of elders for the Shabha region, suggesting the ongoing Manbij operation has wider aspirations for all of northern Aleppo (Cantonefrin, January 31). Thus far Turkey has accepted the operation because of U.S. assurances the operation is dominated by Arabs, but it is unlikely Ankara will accept planned Kurdish advances towards al-Bab and Jarabulus. Despite this, the Kurds already have plans to set up councils for both cities (Dailysabah, June 2). This could prompt Turkey to carry out cross-border operations to create a safe-zone, although it would only find backing from Russia and the United States if it could be portrayed as being established against IS (Daily Sabah, June 3).

The Long View

The multi-ethnic strategy of the PYD could succeed in establishing a federal region in northern Syria, despite Syrian political opposition. Such a zone would fall strongly under U.S. influence and could, in the long-term, lead to the defeat of IS in all of northern Syria, including Raqqah.

The biggest challenge for the PYD would be winning the local acceptance of Arabs and rival Kurdish parties to the project, opening it up for democratic elections, and building relations with Iraqi Kurds and neighboring Turkey, which has now closed its border. The PYD hopes to end this embargo by building relations with Iraq across the Syrian-Iraqi border, but the Kurds know this will not be enough. That the PKK ended their fight against the Turkish state in the city of Nusaybin one day before the northern Raqqah operation suggests the Kurds want to have good relations with Turkey (IMC tv, 26 May). Turkish acceptance of the Manbij operation and the development of the social contract of the Manbij council suggests they may have a chance (ANHA, June 1).

In the long-term, there is the possibility of better relations with the Turkish state if a new peace process is reopened in Turkey with the PKK. That will be important since it is unlikely the PKK will be able to control any territory by fighting an insurgency against the Turkish state.

Turkey may still try to create a Cyprus-style intervention in northern Syria to prevent the linking of Kurdish administrations and establish a "safe zone" on its border. It might also come round to the idea. Ankara initially rejected Kurdish autonomy in Iraq in 2003, before deciding it was better to have good relations with the autonomous Kurdistan region.

Notes

[1] Author's interview, Ismet Sheikh, the local defense minister for Kobani, Kobani, May 24, 2016

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
The Niger Delta Avengers: A New Threat to Oil Producers in Nigeria

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Jessica Moody Publication Date 13 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, The Niger Delta Avengers: A New Threat to Oil Producers in Nigeria, 13 June 2016, Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576262cb4.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

Since the start of 2016, the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), a hitherto unknown group, has claimed responsibility for increasingly frequent attacks on oil infrastructure in the Niger Delta. According to Nigerian Oil Minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, the attacks have resulted in oil production dropping by 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) to a 20-year-low (Premium Times, May 16; Leadership, May 30). Both Shell and Chevron are reported to be evacuating staff as a result of the attacks, with Shell also declaring force majeure at its Forcados Terminal after an attack on its subsea crude export pipeline in February (The Guardian [Nigeria], May 21; The Guardian [Nigeria], February 22).

The violence, and the resulting disruption to the oil sector, has raised fears of a return to the days of the Niger Delta insurgency, waged by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) between 2004 and 2009. That conflict - which quietened considerably as a result of a 2009 presidential amnesty program (PAP) under which many former insurgents grew extremely wealthy - halved Nigeria's oil production to 1m bpd (NTA, June 2).

With the emergence of the NDA, the question is whether there is now a possibility of a return to the previous level of violence.

Links to Former Militants

The NDA appears to be a relatively small insurgency made up of Delta residents angered by the continuing failure to redistribute oil wealth from the elites to those living in the region. Although former militants are almost certainly involved in the group, it is unlikely that the NDA has been able to recruit vast numbers of ex-fighters, since many of those who previously fought in the Delta have become wealthy through the PAP and are weary of fighting. Retired General Paul Boroh, Buhari's special adviser on the Niger Delta, said that militants who accepted the amnesty had "disassociated" themselves from the 2016 violence and were actively assisting in tracking down the militants involved in the latest attacks (The Guardian [Nigeria], January 23).

That fits with posts on the NDA's website, where the group repeatedly states it will do a much better job of liberating the Niger Delta than the previous insurgency and that it has no intention of killing innocent people or conducting kidnappings as previous militant groups have done (Niger Delta Avengers, April 17; Niger Delta Avengers, May 12).

The circumstances surrounding the latest violence, however, suggest there are still strong links with some of those from the earlier insurgency. Ex-MEND leader Government Ekpemupolo (a.k.a. Tompolo) has stated on several occasions that he has nothing to do with the NDA, but days before the first attack took place, Abuja issued an arrest warrant for him on 14 charges of money laundering and theft, equivalent to $171m (Premium Times, January 14). That prompted Tompolo to go into hiding, swiftly followed by the outbreak of attacks on oil facilities. References in the NDA's manifesto to Buhari's one-sided anti-corruption crackdown further underscores the likely involvement of the former commander and his affiliates (Niger Delta Avengers, February 13).

Policy shifts under President Buhari present other obvious triggers for the resurgence in violence. Abuja has angered former fighters by changing the terms of the PAP. Buhari agreed to renew the amnesty, but he halved monthly stipends for former fighters, with a view to removing them completely in 2017 (Daily Post, February 16). The president has also refused to renew several lucrative pipeline security contracts with amnesty program participants (Naij, June 31, 2015). Anger over these changes are evident in the NDA manifesto where the group demands the continuation of the amnesty program with full funding for the foreseeable future (Niger Delta Avengers, February 13).

Potential for Further Attacks

Although the NDA appeared to begin as an ad hoc movement aimed at forcing a change in Buhari's policies, the frequency and intensity of the group's May assaults suggests it has greater ambitions. The group's aims, however, remain unclear. The NDA's social media presence is amateur and posts on its website oscillate between demands that oil wealth be redistributed to the Delta and calls for an autonomous Niger Delta state with UN recognition (Niger Delta Avengers, May 12).

As time goes on and the group generates more support among Delta communities, it will likely be able to carry out attacks on the scale of the previous insurgency. The potential following available to the group was underscored in mid-May when another militant group calling themselves the Red Egbesu Water Lions emerged and vowed to join the NDA in their fight (This Day Live, May 18).

The problem is compounded by the vast array of weaponry at the NDA's disposal. As a result of ineffective disarmament programs carried out at the end of 2009, would-be-militants in the Delta have large stocks of weaponry at their disposal. Tompolo's purchase of six haulk-class missile boats from Norway during the amnesty period underscores this point (Premium Times, December 13, 2014). Nigerian journalist Fidelis Mbah says that disarmament efforts have been so poor that the weaponry available in the Delta now is greater than during the 2000s conflict. [1]

Although it is unlikely that there were large numbers of fighters behind the recent NDA attacks, several of the assaults demonstrate a high degree of sophistication. The attack on Shell's subsea export pipeline would likely have required high-tech detonators, well-trained fighters, and potentially also a diver. Additionally, the bombing attack on Chevron's offshore facility in May further emphasized the involvement of experienced militants - working offshore requires considerably more skill than opportunistic onshore attacks.

Need for Community Support

In May, the government announced it planned to hold talks with leaders in the Niger Delta to address their grievances, and Buhari has sought to improve development initiatives in the Delta (Naija Details, May 29). These programs, however, are slow to be implemented and continue to be vehicles for embezzlement and corruption (Premium Times, August 19, 2015). Without rapid development, communities in the Delta, where jobs and education are lacking, are likely to form easy recruitment bases for the NDA.

The Delta's creeks and pipelines are also hard to protect without the support of local communities, gang leaders, and the militants themselves. The government has little support in the Delta, not least because of its heavy-handed attempts to crack down on the fighters thus far. In May, troops raided the Delta village of Oporoza in search of militants. Locals reported that troops harassed and wounded residents and prevented children from going to school (Vanguard, May 30).

Despite reported arrests, government efforts to crackdown on militancy and prevent attacks have proven ineffective. Without sustained negotiations, an extension to the 2009 amnesty, or mass development in the Niger Delta, the NDA's insurgency is likely to expand and further attacks can be expected over the next 12 months.

NOTES

[1] Author's Interview, Nigerian journalist Fidelis Mbah, March 31, 2016

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
Taliban Victories in Helmand Province Prove Test for Afghan Government

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Abubakar Siddique Publication Date 13 June 2016 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, Taliban Victories in Helmand Province Prove Test for Afghan Government, 13 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5762631b4.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

Days after a U.S. drone strike killed the Taliban leader Mullah Akhar Mohammad Mansur in southwestern Pakistan on May 21, Afghan lawmakers warned of the impending collapse of Afghanistan's largest province. "Helmand is on the verge of collapse; 58 people were martyred during a single night; isn't it shameful? Isn't it a shame for the [Afghan] minister of defense, president, chief executive and minister of interior?" Senator Hashim Alokozai asked in Kabul (Tolo TV, May 31).

His views were echoed on ground in Helmand where Karim Atal, the head of Helmand's provincial council, told journalists on May 30 that Lashkar Gah, capital of the southern Afghan province of Helmand, might be soon overrun by the Taliban. "If we don't get air support and reinforcements, Lashkar Gah and Helmand will fall within 48 hours," he said, warning "it is a mistake to view the ongoing fighting in Helmand as routine" (Gandhara, May 30).

The claim of Afghan lawmakers that Afghanistan's largest province was on the cusp of falling to the Taliban immediately set alarm bells ringing. An immediate influx of special forces and air strikes ultimately prevented Lashkar Gah, a city of 150,000, from falling to the Taliban. The group has ramped up efforts to capture the province, the epicenter of the multibillion-dollar global opium trade and long seen as a coveted prize by the insurgents.

In a sign of things to come, the May 21 killing of Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur has barely dented the Taliban's efforts in this regard. Atal's claim shows just how close the Taliban are to overrunning Helmand.

Taliban Advance

By providing a bulk of recruits and funding through its drug trade, Helmand was central to the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. When amid a civil war, the student militia quickly swept the Pashtun-populated regions in southern and eastern Afghanistan and conquered most of Afghanistan before the demise of their regime in late 2001.

After the end of major NATO combat operations at the end of 2014, which entailed the withdrawal of thousands of international troops, the Taliban set their sights on reclaiming Helmand. Bordering Pakistan and located in close proximity to Iran, this region has a territory of more than 58,000 square kilometers, larger than Switzerland. Most of the world's opium is grown and processed into heroin here, and the drugs are then smuggled to the West and the Middle East through Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asia. Control over, or a major share in, this multi-billion dollar illicit industry could boost the Taliban's strategic prospects.

The group notably refined their 2015 spring offensive, which typically follows the harvesting of opium crops in Helmand in multiethnic northern Afghanistan, making advances and briefly capturing the city of Kunduz in September.

In Helmand they made more steady progress. At the beginning of 2015, the insurgents controlled only two of Helmand's 15 districts - the desert district of Dishu in the south, near the Pakistani border, which has been a base for drug trafficking since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the desolate mountainous region of Baghran in the north - both of which have been under de-facto insurgent control since 2001 (Gandhara, June 24, 2015). By the end of the year, at least three more districts were in Taliban control, and another six were being contested.

Operation Zulfiquar

The Afghan military offensive to prevent the Taliban from expanding control in rural Helmand, known as Operation Zulfiqar, largely failed to stop the downward spiral in northern Helmand. Local lawmakers blamed the central government, apparently overwhelmed by political infighting and the biggest Taliban offensive in years. Abdul Majid Akhundzada, who represented the northern Kajaki district on the provincial council, warned of an imminent Taliban takeover of his constituency in June 2015: "The threat persists because nothing is being done to turn the Taliban tide," he said. "We have not seen any government reinforcements or other measures to push the Taliban out of our district" (Gandhara, June 24, 2015).

By July 2015, the Taliban were on the march across the rural agricultural regions of Kajaki and four surrounding districts of Nawzad, Sangin, Nahr-e Saraj, and Musa Qalah. Sharafuddin, an Afghan police commander who like many Afghans goes by one name only, complained that his men were exhausted after defending one of Afghanistan's major hydroelectric dams in Kajaki district for two weeks straight. "My soldiers are not lions. How long will they hold out against this unending onslaught?" he asked (Gandhara, July 02, 2015). The commander said the Taliban had rallied a special force called Red Division, which attacks security forces from all sides and has a constant supply of new fighters. "We don't have any tanks or air support," he said. "A few days ago, one of my soldiers died from his wounds because we had nothing to stop his bleeding or to evacuate him from Kajaki" (Gandhara, July 02, 2015).

Afghan security officials, however, downplayed the Taliban victories. "They were saying that they will topple the Afghan government this year, but you can see no such thing is happening," said Brigadier General Dadan Lawang, an Afghan army commander in Helmand (Gandhara, July 02, 2015).

While the government somehow defended the dam in Kajaki, the loss of Musa Qalah and Nawzad districts after intense battles in August 2015 proved a significant blow. The loss of Musa Qalah, in particular, gave the Taliban control over poppy cultivation and trafficking. The Taliban had repeatedly fought to reclaim Musa Qalah since 2001, leading to a major battle in 2007 against British and U.S. forces. Gaining control in August 2015 put them in a position to overrun all of northern Helmand and the entire province. "Unfortunately, Musa Qalah is now in the hands of the Taliban. It is a [strategically] vital district, and its fall implies the fall of Helmand," Abdul Hai Akhundzada who represents Helmand in the lower house of Afghan Parliament said (Gandhara, August 26, 2015).

Over the course of just a few months, the Taliban added the districts of Nawzad, Musa Qalah, and Nawmish to the Dishu and Baghran districts they already controlled. Breaking with the past, the Taliban and Afghan forces kept fighting over Nad-e Ali, Kajaki, Marjah, Khanashin, Sangin, and Nahr-e Saraj district despite the winter. This meant the insurgents were inching closer to the provincial capital Laskhar Gah in central Helmand. In an open letter to President Ashraf Ghani via Facebook, Helmand Deputy Governor Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar requested urgent reinforcements in late December 2015, urging immediate reinforcements to stop the Taliban's "rapid advance" (Gandhara, December 20, 2015).

Enter General Qahraman

At the beginning of this year, alarmed by the Taliban's advances, President Ashraf Ghani appointed former Lieutenant General Abdul Jabar Qahraman as the "operational commander" of all Afghan forces in Helmand on January 27. Qahraman, who represented Helmand in the lower house of Afghan Parliament, distinguished himself in the 1980s by launching some of the most successful counterinsurgency operations against the muhajedin, the Islamist guerillas backed by the United States and Pakistan at the time.

"People of Helmand, I promise you I will take away a general's uniform if he fails to [protect] you," Qahraman told Helmand residents (Gandhara, January 27). He pledged to do away with personal rivalries, endemic corruption, and a lack of coordination among the estimated 32,000 government forces, which are made up of national and local police and the Afghan National Army.

Qahraman's return to the scene was aided by some 500 U.S. soldiers who mainly focused on retraining thousands of Afghan Army soldiers operating under the umbrella of the Afghan National Army's 215th Maiwand Corps in Helmand. As Qahraman went on to improve the discipline, morale, and coordination of his troops, U.S. and NATO forces worked on increasing their capacity. By April, the 215th Corps had its own drone fleet to surveil Helmand form the air. The military effort was aided by a covert offensive by Afghanistan's intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, which created a secretive unit of 300 operatives to infiltrate Taliban ranks to take advantage of infighting among Taliban factions. "We have built the military capacity to face any eventuality in Helmand," Qahraman said (Gandhara, April 18).

Resurgent Taliban

Helmand's battlefield, however, painted another picture. By May, the Taliban's virtual siege of Lashkar Gah had been in place for nearly two months. The Afghan forces lost a precious opportunity to attack insurgents that month while a majority of Taliban fighters were busy harvesting poppies, a highly labor-intensive exercise. "We urged the government forces to abandon their defensive positions and attack the Taliban fighters who were busy harvesting poppies," said Abdul Tawab Qureshi, a military expert in Helmand, "but they preferred to remain bunkered, which encouraged the Taliban to mount a bold offensive." [1]

The emboldened Taliban mocked Qahraman. "The battle is now raging in Baba Ji, the door to Lashkar Gah and part of its fourth district, and it is consuming the enemy soldiers," read a Taliban statement sent to the media on May 10. [2] Locals see the Taliban control of Musa Qalah and their stranglehold over the region's drug trade as the key factor in pushing their offensive forward. "The Taliban can find enough recruits from among Musa Qalah's estimate 400,000 residents," said Abdul Baseer, a local tribal elder. "In the northern parts of the district, they have established large training camps and are ramping up their war effort." [3]

Helmand Governor Hayatullah Hayat said winning back control of Musa Qalah is a priority in order to reverse the Taliban advance. For Helmand residents, however, the government is running out of time. In an interview on Radio Free Afghanistan on June 2, Lashkar Gah resident Abdul Rauf Meharpur said: "The longer the government fails to establish security and reverse the Taliban's gains, the more they will lose people's faith and good will." [4]

In early June, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited Helmand to boost the morale of his troops and reassure locals that Kabul is paying full attention to the fighting in the region. "Those who say Afghanistan is in danger should think again. Because the security and defense forces are safeguarding this soil by sacrificing their lives," he told soldiers and officers at 215th Corp's headquarters in Lashkar Gah (Tolo TV, June 4).

It will be a difficult fight. A Helmand-based journalist said that after filling their coffers with drug money, the Taliban are now paying nearly $100 in monthly stipends to their fighters and are openly pressing farmers to donate a portion of their poppy proceeds in the name of Islamic taxes. Proceeds from the drug trade have helped the Taliban arm fighters with newer weapons. [5] Sources in Helmand say the insurgents have recruited 2,000 more fighters, including foreign jihadists, for their next attempt to overrun the province.

Notes

[1] From a Radio Free Afghanistan (Pashto) broadcast, May 30, 2016

[2] Qya Ahmadi, e-mail to author, May 10, 2016

[3] From a Radio Free Afghanistan (Pashto) broadcast, June 2, 2016

[4] Ibid.

[5] Author's interview, Mohammad Ilyas Daee, May 2016

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
Libya: Closing In On Islamic State's Stronghold

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Alexander Sehmer Publication Date 13 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, Libya: Closing In On Islamic State's Stronghold, 13 June 2016, Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576263a14.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

Libyan forces have had a run of luck against Islamic State (IS) fighters in recent weeks, with two separate militias capturing several towns and closing in on the extremists' stronghold of Sirte.

The Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG), the unit set up to protect Libya's oil installations, took control of the town of Ben Jawad on May 30 and moved on to capture Nawfiliyah, forcing IS fighters back towards Sirte (Libya Herald, June 1). Misratan-led militias, meanwhile, have closed in on Sirte from the west and the south. As June got under way, they were apparently as close as the al-Gardabiya airbase, just 20km away, and have continued to advance since (Libya Observer, June 4). Progress for both the PFG and the Misratan-led forces has been relatively slow as IS has reportedly mined the surrounding area. Despite this, Sirte now potentially faces a three-pronged attack (Libya Herald, June 8).

If that attack comes - which as of June 9, following somewhat of a lull, looks likely - there could be a long battle ahead. IS is thought to have heavily fortified Sirte. The advancing forces will face thousands of fighters and potentially suicide bombers and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). There also remains the question of just how unified an assault will be. The Misratan-led forces have been brought together under the Bunyan Marsous Operations Room (BMOR), established by Prime Minister Faiez Serraj, head of the Government of National Accord (GNA) (Libya Herald, June 8). According to BMOR, they are working with the PFG. Amid Libya's fractious politics, however, it is unlikely to be that simple.

The PFG is not a natural ally for the Misratans, and the PFG have a separate command. As the PFG closed in on Nawfiliyah, Serraj, and Ahmed Maiteeq, a deputy prime minister met with Salem Jadhran, the mayor of Ajdabiya and brother of PFG commander Ibrahim (Libya Herald, June 1). Although this was officially about run-of-the-mill municipal affairs, Salem Jadhran was likely hoping to secure reassurances for his brother if he continued to pursue IS.

Meanwhile, the Libyan army, which pursued IS fighters as they fled from Derna in April, has maintained its distance. It is unclear if it will join an offensive. The army's leader, General Khalifa Haftar, has so far refused to fall in line with Serraj and the GNA, and his troops may hang back. A successful assault on Sirte without him could leave him isolated and dangerous. There is a possibility that the increasingly successful military campaign against IS could come at the expense of the battle for political unity in Libya.

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
South Africa: U.S. Terror Warning Troubles Pretoria

Publisher Jamestown Foundation Author Alexander Sehmer Publication Date 13 June 2016 Citation / Document Symbol Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12 Cite as Jamestown Foundation, South Africa: U.S. Terror Warning Troubles Pretoria, 13 June 2016, Terrorism Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 12, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576263f14.html [accessed 26 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.

Link to original story on Jamestown website

The United States and Britain issued a revised terrorism warning on South Africa this month. The British Foreign Office upgrading the risk of a terrorist attack to "high," while the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria warned its citizens of possible Islamist attacks in Cape Town and Johannesburg. South Africa, which has a limited history of Islamist violence, was displeased.

David Mahlobo, South Africa's state security minister, announced that there was "no immediate danger" (eNCA, June 6). The foreign ministry released a statement calling the intelligence "dubious and unsubstantiated", and President Jacob Zuma moved to reassure the media that relations with the United States were still cordial (eNCA, June 9).

The precise nature of the threat is unclear. Neither Nigeria's Boko Haram nor Somalia's al-Qaeda affiliated al-Shabab - a more likely candidate for an attack in South Africa - have carried out attacks there in the past. Furthermore, the local Muslim population is relatively well integrated. There is also a feeling that South Africa maybe protected from terrorist attack since so much financing for extremist groups flows through the country (Mail & Guardian, February 4, 2015). South Africans speculate that, amid racial division, a terror attack is more likely to come from a different direction, possibly a racist attack. That would certainly be more in line with the country's past experience of terrorism such as the 2002 Soweto bombings, which were carried out by a white supremacist group.

Such an attack was not the focus of the U.S. warning, and the South African security services would do well not to ignore the threat. The country has been a hiding place for Islamists in the past. Samantha Lewthwaite, the so-called White Widow, lived in Johannesburg under a false passport for several years, even giving birth to her fourth child in at a private clinic there (The Citizen, October 25, 2013). Meanwhile, documents leaked to Al Jazeera make clear the South African security services are highly politicized and have little focus on preventing Islamist terror attacks, whether from abroad or by lone-wolf operators at home (Al Jazeera, February 24, 2015).

Sources close to South African intelligence let it be known they view the intelligence behind the recent U.S. warning as coming from a "discredited" East African businessman (News24, June 7). Nevertheless, it has to be assumed the British and Americans believe their intelligence to be credible. Neither nation has reason to be scaremongering, especially when dealing with Africa's second largest economy.

Copyright notice:  2010 The Jamestown Foundation
Safe countries of origin

Publisher Germany: Federal Office for Migration and Asylum Publication Date 24 March 2016 Cite as Germany: Federal Office for Migration and Asylum, Safe countries of origin, 24 March 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576265444.html [accessed 26 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 legislature can define a country of origin as a safe country of origin if it is possible to prove on the basis of the democratic system and of the general political situation in this country that no state persecution is to be feared there as a rule, and that the State provides protection against non-state persecution. That the State provides protection against non-state persecution means for instance that there are legal and administrative provisions in place to provide protection for the population, and that these are also made accessible to all and indeed applied. If a country has been qualified as a safe country of origin, the "default presumption" applies that there is no risk of persecution.

Germany considers the following countries to be safe countries of origin:

the Member States of the European Union

Albania

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Ghana

Kosovo

Macedonia, former Yugoslav Republic of

Montenegro

Senegal

Serbia.

If an individual comes from such a safe country of origin, and if the asylum process is carried out, he/she will be afforded the opportunity during the interview to submit facts or evidence in support of the case that he/she is at risk of persecution in his/her home country, in derogation from the default presumption. Assuming that the legal prerequisites apply, he or she would be entitled to protection in Germany. If however the facts or evidence are inadequate to refute the default presumption, the asylum application is to be denied as manifestly ill-founded.

An individual asylum procedure is consequently available for each individual, including those who come from a safe country of origin.

Acceleration of the process

The safe countries of origin arrangement has the effect of accelerating the asylum process since the submission of facts is insufficient in many sets of proceedings to refute the default presumption, and hence the time-consuming process of taking evidence and carrying out factual investigations is avoided. In addition, the appeal periods are curtailed for asylum applications which are turned down as manifestly ill-founded. This also has the effect of accelerating the proceedings for court actions that are lodged with the administrative courts.

Obligation to reside in a particular place

Applicants from safe countries of origin are obliged to live in the reception facility responsible for receiving them until the Federal Office's decision is taken. Such individuals may also not engage in gainful employment during this period.

Hervorhebung_Gesetzgebung: Background information

Reasons for the legal amendments carried out in 2014 and 2015

A new law came into force in Germany on 6 November 2014 defining the states Serbia, the FYR of Macedonia, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, as safe countries of origin. The remaining states of the Western Balkans, that is Albania and Kosovo as well as Montenegro, were declared safe countries of origin when a further legal amendment came into force as per 24 October 2015.

The legislature has defined the Western Balkans as safe countries of origin as it appears to be guaranteed there that the prerequisites for granting refugee protection, asylum and subsidiary protection are met in isolated cases only for nationals of these states. The Geneva Convention on Refugees does not include poverty among its grounds for asylum. Furthermore, the background for the examination of whether the prerequisites apply in the Western Balkan states to define them as safe countries of origin were that, in the first nine months of 2015, 40.8% of all applications (from all countries of origin) were lodged by asylum-seekers from the Western Balkans, and only 0.3% satisfied the prerequisites for granting protection.

Hervorhebung_Gesetzgebung: The legal basis

 Art. 16 a of the Basic Law - Right of asylum

The Basic Law (Grundgesetz - GG)



 section 29 a of the Asylum Act (Asylgesetz - AsylG) - Safe country of origin

 section 47 subs. 1 a of the Asylum Act - residence in a reception facility

 section 61 subs. 1 of the Asylum Act - gainful employment

Asylum Act
Roma fear paying the price of Germany's "safe countries" policy

Publisher IRIN Author Yermi Brenner Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as IRIN, Roma fear paying the price of Germany's "safe countries" policy, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576265ca4.html [accessed 26 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.

In late April, the German authorities notified Hidayet* and his wife and daughter that their asylum applications had been rejected. They were given one week to leave the country, their home for the past two years.

Three weeks later, German police raided the family's residence in Hamburg. Nobody was home. With the help of a network of activists and supporters, the family had gone into hiding.

Hidayet and his wife are Roma  a dispersed ethnic minority group that has long faced segregation and discrimination in the Western Balkans. Their families originate from Kosovo, but the couple lived in Serbia before seeking asylum in Germany. Hidayet fears that if he is caught and deported to Kosovo, he will be targeted and attacked.

"I cannot return to Kosovo because in the time of [the Balkan] war, I was recruited to the Serbian military," Hidayet told IRIN, adding that since he is Muslim and his wife is Christian they are not accepted either by Serbian or Kosovar society.

"I have only one wish: to stay in some place where we could be safe, and this for now is Germany," he said.

More asylum seekers = more "safe countries"

Germany carried out a total of 20,888 deportations in 2015. About three quarters of those were to Western Balkan countries, more than three times the number in 2014. The pace of forced returns has further increased in the first four months of this year, following an amendment to Germany's refugee legislation last October that added Kosovo, as well as Albania and Montenegro, to a list of "Safe Countries of Origin". Germany's "Safe countries" list already included all the other Western Balkan nations outside the EU: Serbia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Six Western Balkan nations feature on Germany's "Safe Countries of Origin" list

Designating the Western Balkans as "Safe Countries of Origin" was part of a strategy to address a huge increase in asylum applications in Germany, particularly in the latter half of 2015 when asylum seekers fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere poured into the country.

The German Constitution defines "Safe Countries" as those where in general "neither political persecution nor inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment exists". Asylum seekers from those countries are channelled into a fast-track process, which critics argue gives them little opportunity to refute the default presumption that, due to their nationality, their claims must be unfounded.

Minorities aren't protected

Nizaqete Bislimi, a lawyer and activist, says the legislation means that minorities from the Balkans in need of protection aren't getting it.

"They started to divide the refugees into good refugees and bad refugees," Bislimi told IRIN, adding that Germany's refugee laws favour asylum seekers from the Middle East and discriminate against those from the Balkans.

Bislimi, who is Roma herself and was born in Kosovo, has lived in Germany since 1993. She has many friends and clients who have been deported or face the threat of deportation.

Amnesty International's latest global report found that Roma people in Serbia face discrimination, racial segregation, and limited access to employment, while Roma in Kosovo "suffer institutional discrimination, including in access to social and economic rights".

According to Professor Albert Scherr, a sociologist at Freiburg University of Education who has done extensive research on Roma communities in Germany and in Eastern Europe, Roma people in former-Yugoslavian countries face not just discrimination and poverty, but open aggression.

"They have no chance at all to live a normal life, to find a job, to send their children to school, to get medical care," Scherr told IRIN. "It's an overwhelming situation of discrimination, which does not allow a reasonable life. That's why they come here."

Past and present

On 3 June in Berlin, a group of protesters demonstrating against Germany's "Safe Countries" policy marched past the Reichstag building and convened next to the memorial commemorating Roma and Sinti Holocaust victims.

Among them was 15-year-old Victoria Zenkulovic Veselovic, a Serb Roma who arrived in Germany with her mother and brother in 2011. Their asylum applications were rejected and they were assigned a tenuous legal status known as Duldung  which means that deportation is temporarily suspended. Veselovic told IRIN she is afraid to go back to Serbia.

Yermi Brenner/IRIN Victoria Zenkulovic Veselovic, a Roma from Serbia, with her mother at the protest in Berlin

"I hope I stay here because I don't have a future in Serbia," Veselovic said. "If we go there, I will face discrimination and attacks."

In 2015, Roma people accounted for around 30 percent of all asylum applications from Western Balkan countries, according to estimates from the Ministry of the Interior, but very few were recognised as refugees. Last year, less than one percent of all asylum seekers from the Western Balkans were granted protection status in Germany.

What is persecution?

German authorities have emphasised that the "Safe Countries" classification does not mean that asylum applications by individuals from these countries are always rejected. Tobias Plate, a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior told IRIN that each asylum application is reviewed individually, and applicants have the opportunity to describe their situation and provide any evidence to back up their claim. "This applies, without exception, to all asylum applicants from safe countries of origin, including members of the Roma ethnic group," he said.

Plate said the German government was aware of discrimination against minorities in Western Balkan countries, but added that this did not necessarily amount to persecution, which would be grounds for asylum.

"There are no facts that justify the assumption that the situation in the Western Balkan countries forces the Roma ethnic group and other groups of persons to leave," he said.

But a spokesman with the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, in Germany, Martin Rentsch, said the social, economic, and cultural disadvantages experienced by Roma people in some Western Balkan societies can be considered a form of persecution under the 1951 Refugee Convention. He added that Germany has been upholding its obligation to review every application individually.

The "Safe Countries of Origin" policy appears to be having the desired deterrence effect. In recent months, there has been a steady decline in the number of Western Balkan citizens coming to Germany and applying for asylum.

*Not his real name
UN defends impartiality of Syria aid

Publisher IRIN Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as IRIN, UN defends impartiality of Syria aid, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576265f84.html [accessed 26 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 World Food Programme has hit back strongly at allegations that the UN has allowed its aid operations in Syria to be controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, emboldening the siege warfare tactics that have become characteristic of the five-year war.

"We act impartially, neutrally and independently, and have contact with all parties to negotiate unimpeded and safe access to all vulnerable people who are in need," a WFP spokesperson told IRIN by email.

In a Wednesday report, advocacy group The Syria Campaign said the UN had "allowed the Syrian government to direct aid from Damascus almost exclusively into its territories," pointing out that 96 percent of UN food aid delivered from inside Syria from June 2015-April 2016 (excluding October-December 2015) went to government-controlled areas. The report, based on interviews with current and former UN staff as well as other humanitarians and Syrians living under siege, argues that by relying on permission from the Syrian government for aid access, the UN has lost its impartiality and may be fuelling the conflict.

But the WFP told IRIN that some 30 percent of its assistance is delivered to opposition-controlled areas, through cross-border operations from Turkey and Jordan.

"WFP works to reach all those in need, regardless of areas of control," the spokesperson said. "Hungry children don't know or care whether they are in a government-controlled area or opposition-controlled area. They just want food and a safe place to live."

The UN's aid operations in Syria have been dogged by controversy from the start of the war in 2011, with aid access carefully negotiated, including a series of oft-criticised one-to-one trades into besieged and hard-to-reach areas.

Some besieged areas saw an initial uptick in aid as part of a February agreement by the International Syria Support Group that was also meant to lead to a "cessation in hostilities." US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called this truce "frayed", and work to ensure humanitarian access has not been a resounding success either: by 17 May, the ISSG was calling on the WFP to begin air drops starting 1 June if entry hadn't yet been granted to areas under siege.

The drops did not go ahead, and the statement was largely seen as a diplomatic move to pressure Assad to allow more convoys into areas his forces control.
Has Kenya's brinkmanship over Dadaab worked?

Publisher IRIN Author Obi Anyadike Publication Date 15 June 2016 Cite as IRIN, Has Kenya's brinkmanship over Dadaab worked?, 15 June 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/576266944.html [accessed 26 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.

Kenya has called on the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, to help develop a plan for the repatriation of 315,000 Somalis from its sprawling Dadaab refugee complex  a move that might allow the extension of a controversial and unlikely November deadline for their return.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told a press conference in Nairobi on Monday that Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta had asked him: "give me a plan, and we'll discuss it".

Grandi said the plan was still being worked on "with our partners" and would be presented to the foreign ministers of Kenya and Somalia at a meeting in Nairobi on 25 June. "We'll talk about these plans and possible extensions," he added. "We'll take it step by step."

While the exact timing may be a matter for debate, Kenya has repeatedly said its decision in May to close Dadaab  which it regards as a "security threat"  is irreversible.

Rashid Abdi, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, said Kenya was hostage to its own rhetoric. "It's staked its reputation on closing the camp," he told IRIN. It now, along with UNHCR, needs to find "a win-win solution for everybody".

A leaked report by a Kenyan government taskforce to establish the modalities for return  which was obtained by IRIN  said Kenya would implement a "fast-track" repatriation of refugees from June to November this year, at an estimated cost of $200 million.

A question of time and money

While the eventual closure of Dadaab now seems inevitable, Grandi made it clear the taskforce's deadline was unrealistic. He suggested that UNHCR's plan could involve a much longer timeframe to close the world's largest refugee settlement.

"The timeframe of a few months is very short. I'm sure [repatriation] will be longer than November, how long I don't know," Grandi said. "It will also depend on developments in Somalia to ensure security, and that is something I can't guarantee."

A critical issue is financing. At a conference last year in Brussels, Western donors pledged $110 million (out of the $500 million requested) to fund voluntary return and reintegration. To date, only $7.2 million has been received, incensing Kenya over what it regards as the bad faith of the international community.

"From what I understand, Kenya doesn't want to see another aspirational plan where financing still needs to be mobilised. It wants a viable plan," Gabrielle Waaijman, regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told IRIN. "We certainly hope the funding will be available."

Forced or voluntary?

The issue of refugee consent is also vital to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Dadaab, which would only fuel the insecurity Kenya fears.

Grandi, who had met Kenyatta on Sunday, said he was "happy to hear the president say emphatically that any solution  and repatriation is obviously the best solution  has to be conducted in a manner that is humane, dignified, safe and respects international law and principles".

But even phased repatriation "doesn't make the dilemma any easier", said Abdi. As a result of the al-Shabab insurgency and the jihadist group's aggressive recruitment of civilians, "you'll be inserting people into an unsafe situation".

Obi Anyadike/IRIN

Human Rights Watch told IRIN that UNHCR should make it clear to Kenya that setting deadlines for refugee returns prepares the way for illegal forced return.

"The UN refugee agency's mandate is to protect refugees as long as they face harm back home, not to agree to deadlines by which refugees have to return home to harm," said senior researcher Gerry Simpson. "UNHCR has recently published a new report which makes clear just how dangerous Somalia still is."

Back to where?

UNHCR has declared just nine areas of Somalia as relatively safe. Kenya, however, is urging repatriation based on the claim its forces have secured much of the southern border region  despite the devastating loss of its El Adde base in January.

Al-Shabab alleged it killed more than 100 Kenyan troops in that attack. The Somali government said it was 180, but Nairobi has refused to confirm the death toll. Kenyan troops entered Somalia five years ago to stop cross-border raids by al-Shabab but have enjoyed little lasting success.

Waaijman said she would like to see "all durable solutions put on the table" regarding Dadaab.

That includes repatriation, local integration, and the tackling of the backlog of refugees who have been identified for relocation to a third country.

A verification exercise would also help determine who are genuine refugees. Local Kenyan Somalis are known to have registered to take advantage of the food aid and services, and an unknown number of refugee women have married Kenyan men, entitling them to Kenyan citizenship.

Persuading Somalis to go back

Kenya regards the voluntary repatriation agreement, signed with Somalia and UNHCR, as a failure. Since the programme began in December 2014, only 14,000 refugees have returned.

UNICEF/Kate Holt

But half of that total went home between January and April this year, suggesting a surge in interest. According to Grandi, "tens of thousands" have additionally relocated under their own steam. The agreement set a target of returning 50,000 people by the end of the year.

More money would help. The lack of livelihood opportunities and basic services in Somalia  after more than 20 years of conflict  have put the brakes on repatriation.

Grandi said he'd been told by returned refugees he met in Somalia last week that the UN's reintegration offer  supposed to include enough food and cash to last three months  is inadequate.

He said a more generous package was needed to act as a better incentive, tiding returnees over for between six and 12 months. "On that basis we can discuss with the refugees [in Dadaab] again," he said.

But that doesn't solve the insecurity problem. Some refugees who relocated to Somalia have returned to Dadaab, complaining that the conditions back home are too hard. It's clear that a humane repatriation programme will be more drawn out than Kenya likes to admit.

Insecurity notwithstanding, Grandi has called for much greater investment by the international community in Somalia  a "change of gears" to create real opportunities and development strategies.

"Otherwise, we can plan whatever we want, and the people will flow back [to Kenya] or flow elsewhere, and continue to be a factor of instability in this region," he warned.
Community leaders discuss future of mental health services in Morgan County

A large crowd gathered at First Christian Church to learn about local efforts that are underway to manage growing mental health pressures facing the city and all of Morgan County.
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.

Abilene Creative Arts Club

The club elected the following 2016-17 officers at its May 14 meeting: Doris Kinney, president; Shirley Minzenmayer, vice president; Janet Jergins, secretary; and Lucy Smith, treasurer. If you are artistic and creative, you can become a member by contacting Lucy Smith at 660-3487 to pay dues before July 1. Look for members' paintings at Taylor County Courthouse lobby, Bogie's and Cypress Street Station, with a live painting demonstration outside the restaurant during ArtWalk.

Regular meetings: 1:30 p.m. second Saturdays September through May (except December), Buffalo Gap Historic Village, Rode Gallery, 133 N. William St., Buffalo Gap.

Contact: Doris Kinney, 660-6834.

Rotary Club of Abilene

Jay Evans, president of the board of Taylor County Expo Center, will be guest speaker this week. Evans has been involved at the Expo Center since 1998. Garrison Bluhm, a local high school exchange student who recently returned from Brazil, spoke last week. His presentation on his experiences in that country were interesting and entertaining. Congratulations to Rotarian of the Week, Bill Core.

Regular meeting: noon Fridays, Beehive Restaurant, 442 Cedar St.

Contact: Mary Beth Kilgore, 518-5288.
Steve Parks had one dream: Have his photo taken with las chicas bonitas.

When you catch a fish at the Rodeo de Lanchas Mexicanas ('lanchas' means small boats), said to be the second largest fishing competition in Mexico, you not only are in the running for the grand prize, you can get your photo taken holding the fish and surrounded by a school of bikini-clad women.

Anyone who looks at the photo back home eventually will see the 26-pound mahi-mahi.

'Seriously, what guy wouldn't want to be surrounded by young attractive women?' Steve joked. 'But you can't go up there unless you catch something. We caught nothing our first three years, and we spent thousands (of dollars). Then the first year we did, my camera battery ran out.'

Pobre senor.

Last year, Steve's fishing team, Los Pescadores Gringos Locos (Crazy American Fishermen) finished ninth out of more than 150 teams. Members actually placed 10th and earned 10,000 pesos before moving up a spot and winning a motorcycle because a team ahead had cheated.

Some who enter the competition are professional anglers, and the boats includes fishing yachts that cost more than Robert Briley's home back in Abilene. It's a two-day, 10 hours-a-day tournament; competitors accumulate points on what they catch. The top 10 places pay.

What they want to catch are billfish  predatory fish such as marlin and sailfish in these tropical waters. Blue marlin are worth 3,000 points, white marlin 2,000 points and sailfish 1,000 points These guys don't just putter around  they can hit 50 mph. This is not Andy taking Opie to a favorite fishing hole; it's more like 'We need a bigger boat' fishing.

In May, Team Gringos Locos finished ninth again out of 163 teams. The winner landed an almost 400-pounder.

Your billfish has to be at least 86 inches in length to keep, otherwise, after documenting the catch with a video, it's catch-and-release to keep the fish police happy. You can score points with mahi-mahi, barracuda, tuna and other fish more than 10 pounds.

First place this year was a new Mercedes (yes, the luxury car), second a truck and third a smart car. Sixth through ninth place was a new motorcycle.

Team Gringos Locos now has two Suzukis, which are kept at team member Richard Hilleman's condo. And they have photos taken with young women whose sunglasses and smiles are larger than their swimsuit tops and bottoms.

'The fishing gods have smiled on us,' Steve said. 'We're not great fishermen.'

He credits the crew of the Kay Kib  Captain Luis and mates Rico and Jaime  for helping a little.

Steve is a partner at Bryan Parks & Associates, a local engineering consulting firm. He and wife, Trina, for 35 years have traveled to Cozumel at least twice a year  in May for their anniversary and the tournament (she is OK with him trading fishing stories with las chicas bonitas)  and in September for his birthday, which falls the day before Mexican Independence Day.

'I tell everyone they are throwing a big parade for me,' he said. They go so often that a local travel firm contacts Steve and Trina with customer questions. The couple have seen Cozumel grow from a sleepy island to a tourist destination, thanks largely to cruise ship stops.

Their team has competed since 2011 and membership has held steady the past three trips to the Yucatan Peninsula  Steve; his wife, Trina; Hilleman, a police chief who lives in Pennsylvania, and his wife, Susan; Patricia Hilleman, who's Richard mom; and their friend, Michelle Bowen, also from Pennsylvania.

Patricia is 81. Michelle has seen 70 come and go. No pollos de la primavera (spring chickens) in this group.

Steve and Trina met Richard and Susan years ago scuba diving.

And why is Steve's business partner not part of this group?

'Somebody has to work,' Steve joked. 'Our kids are grown and we can do these things. We have the time and the money.'

I have been to Cozumel. I remember flying Air Mexicana, and I was hoping the pilots were not having near the fun the passengers were having. This was a party flight. If you've flown to Lost Wages (Vegas), you know what I'm talking about.

Someone across the aisle randomly asked if anyone in the group spoke Spanish, and a guy raised his hand and said: 'Si.'

His wife/girlfriend giggled and said, 'You don't speak Spanish.'

'I do too,' he said, trying to keep a straight (sober?) face. 'Una mas cerveza, por favor.'

We all laughed. All he needed to know, besides, 'Donde esta el bano?' (Where is the bathroom?), apparently was 'One more beer, please.'

You go to Cozumel to have fun. Steve and Trina and their crew go to have fun, but also to seriously fish.

Did they bring back any big fish for a fish fry?

'We've never landed one to bring back in,' Steve said.

Steve and Trina live near Lake Abilene, which again looks like a lake after going dry due to recent drought. Maybe Steve would like to start Rodeo de Lanchas Mexicana del Norte at our lake?

'They have to stock it first,' he said. 'I hear they're going to maybe this summer. We used to go kayak fishing out there.'

Won't be marlin, though. The only Marlin you'll find in Texas is near Waco.

'Or you'd better be offshore,' Steve said. Preferably off Cozumel.
Halloween events, fall festivals pack October in Abilene, Big Country

From family-friendly to frightful, there are plenty of opportunities to don the costumes and scare up some treats.
Officials at the Texas Tech University System have named Lawrence Schovanec as sole finalist for the presidency of Texas Tech University.

Schovanec is currently provost and senior vice president at Tech and has served the university for more than three decades in multiple roles, beginning as a member of the faculty in 1982.

'It is truly an honor to be selected as the sole finalist for the president position at Texas Tech University,' Schovanec said in a news release. 'I came to Texas Tech more than 30 years ago and have witnessed this university grow tremendously over the years thanks to the achievements and continued dedication of our students, faculty, staff and supporters. We have much to be proud of and an even greater future ahead. I am truly humbled and thank Chancellor (Robert) Duncan and the Board of Regents for this opportunity.'

Duncan and regents announced Schovanec for the position at a special called board meeting Thursday. Under state law, at least 21 days must pass before final action can be taken by a university governing body for the official appointment of a president.

A nationwide search, led by regent Tim Lancaster of Abilene, was conducted to recruit and identify a pool of experienced leaders for the position. The board voted to select Schovanec as sole finalist after conducting interviews with candidates and considering recommendations from Duncan and the presidential search committee.

'The search committee conducted a deliberate and thorough national search that yielded a very strong pool of candidates which included sitting presidents and provosts of major universities, as well as nontraditional candidates with strong leadership skills and ties to higher education,' said Lancaster, CEO of Hendrick Health System. 'I thank my fellow members of the search committee for their commitment during this process and for helping to identify the best candidate to lead Texas Tech University.'

Schovanec has been provost since January 2014. He has also served Tech as interim president, dean and interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and as chairman of the Department of Mathematics & Statistics.

He earned his doctorate in mathematics from Indiana University, his master's degree from Texas A&M University and his bachelor's degree from Phillips University.

'It is with great pleasure that we announce Dr. Schovanec as the sole finalist to be the next president of Texas Tech University,' Duncan said. 'Dr. Schovanec has a proven record of success as a leader in higher education and has a long history of accomplishment with Texas Tech. We share the same bold vision for elevating Texas Tech to new heights, and I am confident he will build on the current momentum we've achieved over the last several years to create an even brighter future.'
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By Timothy Chipp of the Abilene Reporter News

The Development Corporation of Abilene on Thursday approved spending up to $52,000 to remove trees and shrubs from about 80 acres in an industrial park at State Highway 36 and FM 18.

Chief Executive Officer Kent Sharp said the plan is to remove a majority of the plant life at the property to make it more intriguing to potential buyers.

"It's hard to show off that land to any perspective businesses," Sharp said. "We'll drive out there and mark the trees we'll decide to save. We don't want to knock it all down."

The DCOA-owned land is part of a larger portion of about 108 acres. The city of Abilene owns the other 28 or so acres. Sharp said that land wouldn't be touched.

Todd Johnson Dozer Service of Abilene was the low bidder of two contractors, quoting the DCOA a price of $628 per acre. The other bidding contractor was Best Tree Service LLC, another local service.

Removing the trees and shrubs to make a property more appealing to potential buyers is nothing new to the DCOA, Sharp said.

"We did something similar with the Five Points Business Park," Sharp said.

In other business the DCOA heard a sales tax report from Mike Rains, the city's director of finance.

Rains told the board the city as a whole suffered a weak April, falling 8 percent below last year's revenue. The low figure pushed the city about 4 percent below last year's to-date figure. He said he didn't expect the rest of the year to get much better.

"It's just a general lack of sales," Rains said. "Retail was down, wholesale trades were down."

Retail, he said, generally accounts for about 50 percent of all sales tax revenue. So when that number dips, the overall number follows.

Statewide, figures in most communities are fairly similar to what Abilene has experienced, both Rains and Sharp said. The major problems appear to be in oil-heavy economies such as Midland, Odessa and Houston. By contract, the Dallas/Fort Worth area has seen increases, they said.
Americans have absorbed so many shocks since 9/11 that you'd think the nation would have thick emotional calluses by now, but each new attack rips off the bandage and exposes some of the same rage, grief and fear that prevailed on that cloudless fall day almost 15 years ago.

The best leaders respond with grace and resolve in moments of national tragedy, reminding Americans of their common purpose, appealing to their best instincts and outlining reasoned ways to prevent future calamities. And then there's Donald Trump.

The day after the nation's worst mass shooting, the slaughter of 49 people in an Orlando nightclub early Sunday by a Muslim American claiming solidarity with the Islamic State, Trump revived his repellent call for banning all foreign Muslims from entering the United States. The supposedly temporary ban would last until the nation can 'perfectly screen those people coming into our country,' which, given the imperfection in any human endeavor, would be approximately forever.

The proposed ban is, of course, wholly impractical. Religious affiliation is largely invisible, and any would-be terrorist could simply lie about being Muslim. Nor would new border controls address the problem of radicalized U.S. citizens. The Orlando shooter was born in Queens, N.Y., just like Trump was, to parents who emigrated from Afghanistan.

Much more important than the practical considerations, a ban on Muslim immigration is an affront to American values, one that would make the United States less safe by undercutting the nation's ability to work with Muslim nations to battle the scourge of radical Islam.

None of this seems to matter to Trump, who continued his toxic habit of conflating the fanatical few with millions of mainstream Muslims throughout America and more than a billion worldwide. The presumed Republican nominee is either oblivious or indifferent to the danger of implying that all Muslims are America's enemies. In addition to banning them from entering the country, he has talked about closing mosques and even creating a national registry of Muslims

Trump always has had a peculiar obsession with President Obama, but he may have outdone himself by suggesting to Fox News that Obama may know better than he lets on what's behind these terrorist attacks and 'has something else in mind' besides trying to stop them. Innuendo like this is the tool of demagogues, not someone who aspires to lead the nation.

Obama's response Tuesday echoed George W. Bush's words after 9/11.

'If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush, and imply that we are at war with the entire religion  then we are doing the terrorists' work for them,' Obama said.

Americans are rightly fearful after an attack like the one in Orlando, but, as the president noted, 'We've gone through moments in our history before when we acted out of fear  and we came to regret it.'

During World War II, fear about enemy saboteurs led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. And the Red Scare of the early 1950s fed Sen. Joseph McCarthy's wild accusations about communist sympathizers. Both episodes are now regarded as overreactions that trampled on American values.

Preventing future Orlandos will require a full array of tools, including superior intelligence, smarter gun laws, taking the fight to ISIL terrorists in Syria and Iraq, cutting off their financial lifelines and enlisting the cooperation of mainstream Muslims everywhere. Trump's proposed ban wouldn't just make the fight harder, it would be another shameful episode in U.S. history.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff.
N.M. Boylston, Abilene

Charles Spurgeon, a British preacher in the late 1800s, said: 'Inconsistent professors injure the Gospel more than the sneering critics or the infidels.'

Praise the Lord! Joe Alcorta is not one of those inconsistent professors! In his article June 5, he speaks the truth. That is what all of us who call ourselves Christian should be doing. Right is right, and wrong is wrong.

Unless America repents and returns to God, the Bible and the Constitution we are doomed!

II Chronicles 7:14, Psalm 33:12  John 14:6
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Cambodia has been in the grips of a political crisis for months as Prime Minister Hun Sens government has pursued an investigation into an alleged affair between Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) deputy leader Kem Sokha and a young hairdresser. The investigation has led to the arrest of four human rights workers and an election commission official who are accused of bribery or accessory to bribery charges for attempting to keep the woman quiet, and it has also seen heavily-armed police attempt to arrest Kem Sokha at the CNRP's headquarters.

While that is the most high-profile case, Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) have also pursued other cases against opposition lawmakers. Opposition party Senator Um Sam An was charged with two criminal offenses over his accusations that the government conceded land to Vietnam along its border. The government is also holding more than two-dozen other opposition party officials on various charges, including Senator Hong Sok Hour and CNRP media director Meach Sovannara.

Cambodia National Rescue Party President Sam Rainsy went into self-imposed exile following his removal from parliament in November 2015 by the CPP because of a warrant issued for his arrest in an old defamation case. Most analysts say the campaign against the CNRP is designed to intimidate and weaken the party before elections due in 2017and 2018. In a live interview on June 15 in the RFA studio in Washington, DC. Sam Rainsy discussed the situation in Cambodia with RFA Khmer Service journalist Vuthy Huot.



RFA: The situation in these past few days seemed to hold some positive signs for the CNRP. The international community, including the U.N., European Union and the United States, seemed to back the CNRP. How much of this is the result of the diplomatic efforts by you and the CNRP?

Sam Rainsy: People are finally getting a clear understanding of the political situation in Cambodia. The world has learnt that the situation in Cambodia has reached a most dangerous stage due to the strategy of the dictatorship of Cambodia.

The government used intimidation, threats, violence and the court system, under the control of the CPP, to put pressure on CNRP members or on the members of the civil society who were just speaking the truth and who protected and provided justice to the victims, so it is not hard for the world to see it.

RFA: I can understand how international recognition is helpful and it puts pressure on Cambodias rulers, but Im not sure how much that moves Prime Minister Hun Sen. He recently said discussions about the detention of CNRP officials and civil society workers is off limits in any negotiations to end the crisis. What does this mean for the culture of dialog?

Sam Rainsy: I want to emphasize that I always value and hail the culture of dialogue. The culture of dialogue is not just between two individuals or two parties, but it is for all parties so the Khmer people of all political stripes can move into the future.

That said, the culture of dialogue in Cambodia is still very new and there are difficulties, but we have to have trust that the culture of dialogue will remain alive and replace the culture of violence. We have experienced only the culture of violence, the culture of destroying each other. We should give up this culture and grasp the culture of dialogue so that the Khmer people can experience peace, to ensure our countrys stability and real democracy.

RFA: From the outside, Cambodia looks like its in trouble?

Sam Rainsy: Since the coup d etat in 1997, Cambodias crisis is currently at a stage that could lead the country over the edge to disaster if we do not solve it peacefully. The CNRP is ready to start discussions with mutual respect. We did not put conditions regarding date, time, venue, or topic on the discussion. The topic we need to select is the one that is relevant and reflects the current tense situation. Now lets ask the people, what are their biggest concerns and sufferings? We have to put these issues on the table for discussion.

RFA: So, will you drop the insistence on conditions before there is negotiation?

Sam Rainsy: There are no longer any conditions. Everything has to have a starting point, but it has to lead to topics that reflect the peoples concerns.

RFA: Hun Sen wants the CNRP to stop boycotting the national assembly. Do you plan on returning to the parliament any time soon?

Sam Rainsy: The CNRP is not quarreling, but is a victim of successive problems created by those who keep drumming up allegations and accusations against the CNRP. Before returning to the National Assembly, we want to see lawmakers immunity fully respected and protected as it is laid out in the constitution.

Currently, the national assembly is not working properly because it is now going back to the situation before the Paris Peace Accords. When there was only one dominant party. Its even worse than that, because it is only one man who causes all the troubles on his own free will.

We are not going to join this game. We want to have a real multi-party government with democratic principles. We want the situation to go back to normal as it was about six months or a year ago before we return to our National Assembly duty.

RFA: Does that mean you want to have a negotiation process in place before the CNRP returns to parliament?

Sam Rainsy: Per our experience, unless there is a package solution we must not accept partial or temporary solutions. They release some people and later on, they arrest this or that personWe need an official declaration of a principle that stops using the court system to put pressure on people and creates an intimidating environment that would affect the upcoming election process.

RFA: Did the culture of dialog lead you to write a letter regarding the published allegations on Hun Sen -- Facebook posts saying one of his sons is the child of his wife and a former Vietnamese leader? Have you received any response from the CPP or from the prime minister regarding your letter?

Sam Rainsy: I regret and I denounced the allegations and accusations against Mr. Kem Sokha who is deputy head and currently acting head of CNRP. Because those allegations and accusations are a personal issue that is of no use. Its a petty thing that is just diverting peoples attention from the vital issues of the nation.

Since I feel that way about him, I also feel regret and denounce those who create the same problem for others. That is why I wrote that letter expressing regret regarding the accusation against Prime Minister Hun Sen.

RFA: Have you gotten a response?

Sam Rainsy: I did not write the letter because I expected a response. I wrote it to affirm the morality of the CNRP, its leaders and its members, who have maintained a noble dignity. We did not make any allegations and accusations on a personal issue that would lead to humiliation and defamation against others, stain their dignity or cause them pain.

RFA: But have you received any response?

Sam Rainsy: I am now in Washington D.C., and I have not received any information on the response from Mr. Hun Sen, yet.

RFA: Since the scandal issue broke, the CNRP has declared that it will stay silent, not quarrel or respond. That all its efforts and focus is on preparing for the upcoming commune elections. But this is the state of play: The CNRP leader is still in exile; the acting head is in self-detention within the partys headquarters; and it looks like all CNRP members, lawmakers, and supporters in the country have gathered around the headquarters in Phnom Penh.

It looks like the focus on the election has been postponed. How you are going to deal with the situation?

Sam Rainsy: The situation is not at a standstill, but actually moving forward with positive prospects for the CNRP. We can see, at the grassroots level in 25 provinces and cities across the country, including the capital city of Phnom Penh, that the threats and intimidation are not scaring anyone off. Instead people are stronger and more supportive of the CNRP.

They continue encouraging CNRP leaders by coming to the party headquarters with tens of thousands of petitions and staying for days regardless of all the difficulties. People inside and outside the country have provided financial support to buy food and water, while others cook meals for those who stay at the party headquarters. It is a good sign for the CNRP as well as for its plan for the upcoming elections in 2017. And those who have caused the problems in the hope to weakening the CNRP, we have proved them wrong. We have become stronger than ever.

RFA: When will you return to Cambodia?

Sam Rainsy: I will go back before the election date. Even if for just a short period of time prior the election. Even a short stay would be sufficient. In 2013, they created so many troubles for me. I returned to Cambodia less than 2-3 weeks before the last election date and it was enough time. There were people showing their strong support before my return. This time, the peoples will and support are even stronger than before, and we will stick to our vital goal that is to have peaceful change on the path of democracy in the country.

Translated by Yanny Hin.
Yang Maoping (R), sister of jailed Chinese activist Guo Feixiong, waits outside Yangchun Prison in southern China's Guangdong province in the hope of visiting her brother, June 14, 2016.

Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong are 'deliberately' preventing the sister of jailed rights activist Guo Feixiong, who has been on hunger strike for more than a month, from visiting him in prison, an overseas rights group said on Thursday.

The New York-based Human Rights in China (HRIC) group said it has learned from an "informed source that prison authorities are deliberately obstructing a visit by the elder sister of imprisoned rights defender Guo Feixiong.

In a statement on its website, the group said Guo's sister Yang Maoping and his U.S.-based wife Zhang Qing are both urging him to call off his hunger strike begun on May 2 amid fears that it could kill him.

"HRIC strongly deplores the prison authorities actions that are endangering Guo Feixiongs life and calls upon them to immediately allow Guos sister to visit him," it said.

"The denial of a family visit for Guo at this critical time raises serious concerns about compliance with [international] standards ... in light of his serious health condition."

When she tried to visit Guo in prison earlier this week, Yang was told that Guo's brother, who saw him in early June, had used up the monthly quota of family visits, before waiting for several hours outside in the hope that the authorities would change their minds.

However, she was allowed to exchange scribbled messages on paper that were then relayed to him by prison guards, who shot video of both parties writing and receiving the notes, Yang told RFA on Wednesday.

Guo wrote back that he has already seen a letter from his wife, but declined to stop, Yang said in a statement posted on the HRIC website.

"Because none of his demands have been met, there was no way for him to stop the hunger strike," the statement said.

Acts of humiliation

Guo began his hunger strike after being subjected to a forced rectal cavity search at the instigation of state security police, as well as forced head shaving and verbal abuse from prison guards, rights groups have said.

Prison guards had filmed the procedure and threatened to post the video online, according to the Twitter account of the Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group (CHRLCG).

Yang wrote: "Prison authorities have continuously engaged in other smaller acts of humiliation since he started the hunger strike."

She said Guo has asked her to visit on the 100th day of his fast, July 28, when he plans to dictate a letter requesting a transfer to another prison.

Yang also accused the prison authorities of deliberately dragging their feet over the delivery of mail to Guo.

"I had a discussion with the prison about this, and they said that the state security police took too long reading the letters first," she said.

Reported by Wen Yuqing for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
The fourth of five missing Hong Kong booksellers to return to the city has confirmed that he was detained as he crossed the internal immigration border into mainland China last October, before being blindfolded, spirited away, and interrogated for months by a special police unit directed from Beijing.



Lam Wing-kei told a packed news conference that he was detained at the Lo Wu border crossing between the former British colony and the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, with no reason given at first for the detention.



"On Oct. 24 last year, I was detained as I was crossing the border into Shenzhen," Lam said. "The police seized my travel documents and sent me to a local police station where I was held."



"A few days later, some officials blindfolded me and took me away in their car on a journey that lasted more than 10 hours," he said. "I was taken to Ningbo city in Zhejiang province."



"I was then interrogated by some other people," he said. "The main thrust of the questioning was to figure out my relationship with Causeway Bay Books and [its sister imprint] Mighty Current Publishing."



"They wanted to know who was buying the books and stuff like that," Lam said, adding that he heard that his case was being handled directly by a special task force set up by the central government in Beijing.



Lam said he had been sent back to Hong Kong on a mission to obtain a hard drive listing all the known contacts, including authors and mainland China-based mail order customers, of Causeway Bay Books and Mighty Current on behalf of the state security police.



Won't go back



Lam said he wouldn't be returning to mainland China in spite of his instructions to do so. "I don't dare go back there," he said. "Besides, I think the people of Hong Kong should stand up to power and say no."



But Lam warned: "If I suddenly disappear one day, then everyone will know the reason why. I haven't asked for special protection. We'll have to see how the Hong Kong government protects its own people."



Lam called on the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing to explain whether or not his detention, during which he had no access to a lawyer, was in breach of the "one country, two systems" policy governing Hong Kong's 1997 return to Chinese rule.



Lam, who went missing last October around the same time as four of his colleagues at Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Books, is the fourth to return to the former British colony.



Store manager and British passport-holder Lee Bo, 65, went missing from his workplace in Hong Kong on Dec. 30, while general manager Lui Bo (also spelled Lui Por), and colleagues Cheung Chi-ping are believed to have been detained during trips to China from their usual base in Hong Kong.



Publisher and Swedish nation Gui Minhai left his Thai holiday home under opaque circumstances before appearing on state television CCTV "confessing" to involvement in a drunk-driving death 10 years earlier, a claim that his family have dismissed as highly dubious.



Lee, who went missing from his workplace in Hong Kong on Dec. 30, returned to mainland China after spending less than 24 hours in Hong Kong. The U.K. government has said he was "involuntarily removed" from the city.



No help from Hong Kong



Cheung Chi Ping, business manager of Causeway Bay Books, entered Hong Kong on March 6, two days after his colleague Lui Bo, the bookstores general manager, but they too stayed only a few hours in the city before going back to China.



Both were granted bail by Chinese authorities, allowing them to travel to Hong Kong, and all three men had asked for their missing persons files to be closed, Hong Kong police said at the time.



Lam said he believes Lee Bo was abducted by Chinese police in an unauthorized cross-border operation, giving the lie to Lee's claim during his brief return to Hong Kong in March that he went to mainland China willingly.



He said he is the only one among his colleagues who can afford to ignore instructions from the Chinese police.



While in Ningbo, Lam said he was held in a small room of 200-300 square feet and repeatedly interrogated, before being transferred back to Guangdong province, which neighbors Hong Kong, in March.



He said his televised "confession" was scripted, edited, and filmed under the supervision of a director.



"I decided to go public with this when I saw how much fuss Hong Kong people were making [about our disappearances]," Lam told reporters.



Asked if he had anything to say to the Hong Kong government, he replied: "I don't think they did anything to help us. I have nothing to say to [chief executive] Leung Chun-ying."



Coordinated by Beijing



Veteran journalist Ching Cheong said covert arrest operations are always coordinated by Beijing.



"Special task forces like this were very common during the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976], and were used when they wanted to target a specific individual," he told RFA.



"The centrally controlled task force would then set about collecting evidence against them, giving rise to a large number of miscarriages of justice."



Ching said: "The mention of these central task forces, which are a toxic throwback to the Cultural Revolution, is abhorrent to a lot of people ... and now it seems as if they are staging a comeback."



Richard Choi, deputy chairman of the Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China, said that Chinese authorities had disregarded legal procedures in their handling of the booksellers' cases.



"We need to keep up the pressure on the Chinese government, because ... otherwise we won't know whether the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong people have been affected," he said.



An official who answered the phone at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London said they would issue a statement 'soon,' but hadn't responded to requests for comment at the time of writing.



The United Kingdom government has said in an official report that Lee Bo was "involuntarily removed" from the city, which has maintained a separate law enforcement jurisdiction and an internal immigration border since returning to Chinese rule in 1997.



The U.S. State Department said in its Hong Kong Policy Act Report earlier this month that the booksellers' detentions "have raised serious concerns in Hong Kong and represent what appears to be the most significant breach of the one country, two systems policy since 1997."



Dubious confession



Swedish national and bookstore founder Gui Minhai, who disappeared from a Thai holiday resort last October, has yet to reappear.



He is known to be in detention in China after making a televised "confession" of involvement in a drunk-driving death 10 years ago that has been rejected as highly dubious by his family.



Gui Minhai's daughter Angela Gui praised Lam on Thursday for his courage in speaking out about his nightmare ordeal.



"I am very happy that he has had the courage to speak the truth," she told RFA. "But Lam Wing-kei's account makes me fear for my father."



"I hope this news will result in more attention on my father's case, so that he can be released."



Angela Gui has said she strongly doubts that her father left his holiday home in Thailand voluntarily, despite having said so in a televised "confession."



She has said her father had sent her messages on Skype in November and in January, asking her to keep quiet, probably "under duress."



Reported by Hai Nan for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Xin Lin for the Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.




Chinese petitioners with grievances against the local government gather outside Shanghai Disney Resort in Shanghai, June 16, 2016.

Authorities in Shanghai have detained or placed under surveillance more than 100 people trying to highlight grievances against the government, as the Walt Disney Co.'s U.S.$5.5 billion Shanghai Disney Resort which opened to a waiting crowd of thousands on Thursday.

The opening gala had been due to feature fireworks, live music and dance, but was called off on Wednesday night owing to rainy weather.

Instead, officials held a muted ribbon-cutting ceremony before allowing the first Disney fans to start using the first Disney park on mainland Chinese soil.

"This is one of the proudest and most exciting moments in the history of the Walt Disney Company," chief executive Bob Iger told assembled dignitaries, before he and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang read out letters of support from Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping.

However, city authorities evicted hundreds of residents and dozens of businesses to clean up the air and make way for the park, recent reports have indicated.



Security out in force

Petitioners who tried to attend the opening ceremony in the hope of making their grievances heard were detained by police after arriving at the Disney Resort stop on Shanghai's metro system, they said.

Petitioner Yan Xiuying told RFA that police and private security guards were out in force ahead of the opening ceremony, and had detained more than 100 people on their way to the resort.

"We have all been detained and taken away by the government. We were on a bus," Yan said. "Now the police are taking us into a small room."

"There were several dozen police guarding more than 20 people on the bus, and taking photos and video of them," she said. "They confiscated our cell phones immediately."

Asked to confirm that more than 100 petitioners had been detained, Yan

replied: "Yes, yes, there were."

However, a later attempt to connect to Yan's cell phone resulted in a switched-off message.

Yan's sister Yang Xiulan said the petitioners were trying to get the attention of city leaders and the international media to highlight their grievances.

"The leaders know that we have a grievance, and the local officials are trying to cover it up," she said. "They won't let us protest, and if you go shouting about injustice, they lock you up."

"They are afraid of the foreign media, of international public opinion, so they are stopping us from speaking out about the situation," she said.

Pretty scary

Fellow petitioner Shen Zhiying said she was detained along with some 17 petitioners by police on Wednesday after arriving at the Disney metro stop a day ahead of the official opening.

"I don't know where they came from; they were all wearing black, probably private security," said Shen, who witnessed the detentions. "It was pretty scary."

"It's not right for them to do that; why do they have to detain ordinary people, who are just trying to stand up for our rights?" she said.

She said the authorities had detained some of the group in the Liuzao township government office buildings, before releasing them later that evening.

Shen said officials gave no reason for detaining her.

An employee who answered the phone at the police department in Pudong district, where the Disney resort is located, declined to comment on Thursday.

"I don't know about this. Don't know. Never heard of it," the officer said.

She said the Disney resort doesn't come under the jurisdiction of Pudong New District police.

Reported by Wong Lok-to for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
North Koreans stand on a boat on the Yalu River near the town of Sinuiju in North Pyongan province across from the Chinese border town of Dandong, Feb. 9, 2016.

North Koreas sudden suspension of travel permits for individuals with families and relatives in China has caused headaches and financial losses for those who had been regularly visiting relatives or doing unauthorized cross-border business, sources inside the country said.

Authorities previously required North Korean citizens with relatives in China to get individual travel permits to leave their country. But they have not issued these visas since March, sources said.

The measure does not affect North Koreans official travel to China, they said.

North Koreas National Security Department has not issued any travel visas for China since early March, a source in Yanggang Province, which borders China, told RFAs Korean Service. The department also announced that all the North Koreans traveling in China for personal reasons should return to North Korea by mid-March.

The National Security Departments provincial officers used to issue individual travel visas for citizens with family members in China for 3,000-yuan (U.S. $455) bribes to the offices Foreign Affairs Division, which processed the visa applications, he said.

North Koreans who obtained the visas so they could cross the border to trade goods, are known as donjupeople who accumulated wealth through such activities, the source said.

But they can no longer engage in such trade because the travel visas to China have been discontinued since March, he said.

North Korean authorities still issue visas for the Chinese residents in North Korea to visit their country though, a source from North Hamgyong province, which borders China, said.

North Korean residents are criticizing the National Security Department, saying that the department has helped only Chinese merchants, he said.

Provincial officers from the department are telling North Koreans they can do nothing about the situation because they are merely carrying out orders from the central authorities, he said.



Officials only

North Koreans hoping to cross the border into China were looking forward to a late-March visit to their neighboring country by Ri Su-yong, vice chairman of the North Korean ruling Workers Party of Korea, he said. But the officials visit did nothing to resolve the issue.

The purpose of Ri Su-yongs visit was to brief Beijing on the party congress North Korea held earlier that month, reinforce bilateral relations, and discuss leader Kim Jong Uns dual policy of developing the economy and nuclear arms, according to media reports.

China had criticized Pyongyangs nuclear test and missile launch earlier this year and supported the U.N. Security Council's (UNSC) new sanctions against its neighbor and ally.

The losses that individual traders and manufacturing companies will suffer from the sudden suspension of visas to China will be substantial, because most traders make money by delivering Chinese products to the North Korean firms and factories that have ordered them, he said.

One resident of Chongam district in Chongjin city, North Hamgyong province, recently received an order from a nearby collective farm to purchase pesticides and vinyl film for agricultural use from China, the source said.

The trader sent an advance payment to China for the product, but when North Korean authorities suddenly stopped issuing travel visas to the country, he could not make the trip to pick up the products he paid for, he said.

Eventually, he had to sell his house so that he could compensate the North Korean collective farm that asked him to place the order, the source said.

Reported by Sunghui Moon for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Dohyun Gwon. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
While the Vietnam government drags it feet on addressing an environmental disaster in which tens of thousands of dead fish washed ashore in the countrys central coastal provinces, other actors are taking steps to limit the damage.

At least 100 tons of dead fish began washing ashore in Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, and Thua Thien-Hue provinces in early April apparently killed by industrial effluents.

The cause of the catastrophe remains unknown, although it is widely believed that sewage-pipe runoff from a huge steel plant run by Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corporation, a subsidiary of Formosa Plastics Corporation of Taiwan, poisoned the fish.

The company has denied responsibility.

A group of Vietnamese-American activists in California has now sent a petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), urging it to thoroughly test and inspect all seafood and fish products imported from Vietnam.

Do Thanh Cong, a rights activist who signed the petition, also sent letters to Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), and to congressmen in California.

We have to understand that HHS is the main agency [dealing with this matter], while the FDA is just an auxiliary, Cong told RFAs Vietnamese Service, adding that the group has also launched an online petition.

So far, the group has received responses from the FDA, which said it is looking into the matter, and Burwells office.

When asked about the financial consequences that Vietnamese fishermen will face if they cannot export fish to the U.S., Cong pointed out that Vietnamese are still buying and exporting fish and other marine products, even though they have been poisoned.

So who is the victim here? he said. The direct victims are people inside the country, and we are the indirect victimsmillions of overseas Vietnamese who consume such products.

Products that will harm us

Fishermen from Vietnams central region have not been able to fish offshore for several weeks, and local merchants complain that they have not yet received promised support from the government. Security forces have also arrested Vietnamese activists who staged public protests, including one in Hanoi.

The government has provided each family affected by the environmental disaster with 22 kilograms (49 pounds) of rice, but still has not informed them of the cause of the fish deaths.

Knowing about the problem, can we still let Hanoi export contaminated products that will harm us? Cong said. We have to take care of our health first, and then address the problems that fishermen over there are facing.

But Dang Kim Son, the former director-general of the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development under Vietnams Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, told RFA that the situation isnt that serious.

If we [stop fish exports from Vietnam], the first victims will be our own fishermen, especially those who have invested a lot in long trips faraway by sea, he said. In fact, the pollution has not spread any farther than the currents near the coast.

Taiwans lawmakers call for action

The Vietnamese government has remained tight-lipped about the incident, saying only that it will announce the cause of the mass fish kill sometime this month and is preparing a report to submit to lawmakers when they meet in July.

But Taiwanese lawmakers urged the government on Thursday to investigate Formosa's possible role in the environmental disaster, Agence-France Presse reported.

They fear the incident could jeopardize new President Tsai Ing-wens Southbound Policy, which promotes business and investment ties in Southeast Asia to wean Taiwan off its economic reliance on China, the report said.

Formosa has been involved in other pollution incidents in its home country, in the U.S., and in Cambodia.

Taiwan has offered to help the Vietnamese government investigate the incident, but the communist nation refused, the AFP report said.

On Wednesday, Formosa postponed the June 25 operational start date for a furnace at its steel complex in the Vung Ang Economic Zone in Ha Tinh province, with no future date set, according to Taiwans official Central News Agency.

The delay came after Taiwanese media reported that Vietnamese authorities have demanded that Formosa pay U.S. $70 million it owes in taxes. The media also reported that Vietnamese authorities needed more time to process an application the company had submitted to begin production at the steel mill.

Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Sowing distrust and disbelief in Europe and its institutions is the main aim of Russian propaganda in the Czech Republic, according to a new study.

And unlike the attention-grabbing tactics used during the Soviet era, according to research conducted by two academics at Masaryk University in the eastern Czech city of Brno, Moscow is playing a sophisticated long game in the Central European country.

"When you mention propaganda, most people imagine posters, drawings, and videos aimed at eliciting some kind of emotion and altering views," explains Milos Gregor, one of the study's authors. "It turns out those kinds of manipulative techniques are rarely used. The techniques are much more sophisticated and subtler, employed over time to change views and opinions."

The approach is also not isolated to the Czech Republic. Brussels is so concerned with Kremlin efforts to mold minds across the EU that it set up its first operation to counter Russian propaganda in March 2015. EU leaders, especially in the Baltic states, have been alarmed at how Moscow has used its media to gain support for its views and policies.

In the Czech media sphere, ad hominem attacks, finger-pointing, and outright fabrications are all elements in the propaganda practiced by pro-Kremlin Czech news websites, according to Gregor. He stresses that Kremlin propaganda efforts are not as focused on challenging individual facts, but rather "framing the debate" in a way that is sympathetic with Moscow's goals.

Migrants Bad, Ukraine Not So Much

The study looked at four news websites, which the authors of the study found disseminate the most pro-Kremlin news. In particular, the study focused on how these sites covered the migrant crisis in Europe, as well as the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.

Russian propaganda is exploiting the migrant crisis in hopes of sowing distrust in European institutions and its elites, the study found. On the other hand, in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, where Russian actions are said to be fueling tensions, if not worse in eastern Ukraine, Russian propaganda seeks to minimize such perceptions.

"Articles on the migrant crisis were very emotional, using lots of emotional techniques, spreading rumors, appealing to fear, etc. In contrast, with the conflict in Ukraine, or Syria, in these articles the events were downplayed perhaps to leave the reader with a sense it was not such a big problem or not such a horrible event as first may appear," Gregor explains.

Gregor says information and articles critical of EU or U.S. policy are fine as long as they are grounded in fact. That, Gregor says, is not the case with Russian propaganda.

"The fact that someone criticizes the European Union doesn't mean, of course, that they're serving Russia or that they are paid by the Kremlin," Gregor explains. "Of course the European Union has taken political steps that we can criticize, and that doesn't mean it tactically serves the Kremlin.

"We focused on whether criticism of the European Union was, let's say, fair and factual or whether manipulative techniques were employed, either with labeling, demonization of an 'enemy,' or something along those lines," he adds.

Outspoken Or Manipulative?

Speaking at a press conference earlier this week in Prague to unveil the study, its other author, Petra Vejvodova, also stressed the sophistication of Kremlin efforts, saying they rarely if ever blatantly back Moscow policy or its leaders.

Vejvodova noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was cited in only 30 percent of the material examined by the study. That put him third behind Czech President Milos Zeman and Finance Minister Andrej Babis.

The four websites examined in the study are the Czech version of Sputnik, a Kremlin-controlled news services operating in several countries, two openly pro-Russian sites, AC24 and Svet kolem nas (World Around Us), and Parlamentni listy (Parliament Papers).

The inclusion of Parlamentni listy has stirred some controversy.

Daniel Kaiser, a commentator at Echo24.cz, noted it had by far the largest readership of any of the five sites in the study. "Even the casual reader will notice that this portal is open to all, the more outspoken and emotional, the better," Kaiser wrote.

Naturally, the head of the publishing company behind Parlamentni listy didn't agree with its characterization as pro-Kremlin. "Why were we included among the pro-Kremlin websites? Because we are a big and influential organization, which obviously bothers someone," Jan Holoubek told iDNES.cz. "More important for us is our 300,000 readers. Let each make up his mind himself."

Gregor says content on the site was found to have employed the same "manipulative" techniques as the openly pro-Kremlin sites, even more so in some coverage of foreign news.

Activists in the Czech Republic say the best way to counter Kremlin propaganda is to raise awareness, especially among youth.

The NGO Clovek v Tisni (Person In Need) is offering schools an audiovisual study program on propaganda, which has reportedly met with great interest from educational administrators.
Russia continues to strike targets across Ukraine, causing damage and killing civilians, as its forces are preparing for battle in the strategic southern region of Kherson, Ukrainian officials and the military said.

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.

Ukraine on October 26 reiterated its call for the development of an air-defense system to repel the Russian missile and drone attacks.

The immediate delivery of a sufficient number of air-defense systems is urgently needed to repel "Russian missile terror," the head of the president's office, Andriy Yermak, said after talks with the national-security advisers of the United States, Britain, and France in Kyiv on October 26.

On October 25, the head of U.S. aerospace and defense corporation Raytheon Technologies told CNBC television that Washington has already delivered to Ukraine the first two NASAMS medium-range antiaircraft missile systems.

We delivered two systems to the U.S. government a few weeks ago. They are currently being deployed in Ukraine," Greg Geis said.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said early on October 26 that more than 40 settlements were hit by Russian strikes during the previous day.



Russia used a combination of air strikes, rockets, and missiles to hit Ukrainian targets, the General Staff said in its morning report.



In the central city of Dnipro, at least two people, including a pregnant woman, were killed in the Russian bombardment, regional Governor Valentyn Reznichenlo said.

In the southern city of Kherson, Russian forces are digging in for the "heaviest of battles," said Oleksiy Arestovych, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

A Ukrainian counteroffensive has driven Russian forces back in the region, where the provincial capital of Kherson has been in Russian hands since the early days of the invasion eight months ago.

"With Kherson, everything is clear. The Russians are replenishing, strengthening their grouping there," Arestovych said in an online video late on October 25.

Russia-installed authorities are evacuating residents to the east bank of the Dnieper River as Russian forces prepare to defend the city, he said.

"It means that nobody is preparing to withdraw. On the contrary, the heaviest of battles is going to take place for Kherson," he said.

Zelenskiy on October 25 reiterated a pledge to retake the city of Kherson, the loss of which would be a big setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Of the four Ukrainian provinces partially occupied by Russia that Putin proclaimed to have seized last month, Kherson is arguably the most strategically important.

It controls the only land route to the Crimea region that Russia illegally annexed in 2014 and the mouth of the Dnieper River that that bisects Ukraine.



Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden warned Russia on October 25 that the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine would be an "incredibly serious mistake."

Moscow over the weekend claimed Ukraine is preparing to use a so-called dirty bomb on its own territory, drawing immediate dismissal from the United States and other countries that have backed Ukraine.

Kyiv and its allies suspect Russia might have made the claim to set up a "false flag" attack in which it would use a dirty bomb itself but would blame the attack on Ukraine and use it to justify the use of conventional nuclear weapons by Moscow.



"Let me just say Russia would be making an incredibly serious mistake were it to use a tactical nuclear weapon." Biden told reporters. "I cannot guarantee you that it is a false flag operation yet. We dont know. But it would be a serious mistake."

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu presented no evidence for the claim when he spoke on October 23 with his counterparts from several NATO countries, including Britain, France, and the United States, who dismissed the claim after the series of calls.

WATCH: Speaking to Current Time in Riga on October 22, Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks said Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot change the course of war in Ukraine by dropping nuclear bombs.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on October 26 that Russia would "vigorously" continue to make the case to the international community that it believed Ukraine intended to detonate a dirty bomb with radioactive contaminants.

Peskov told reporters Moscow wanted to prompt an active response from the international community.

A dirty bomb would use a conventional warhead to create an explosion that would spread radioactive, biological, or chemical materials over an area.

Moscow took its accusations against Ukraine to the UN Security Council on October 25, and the country's UN ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said afterward that Russia was "satisfied because we raised the awareness."

Speaking to reporters, he added: "I don't mind people saying that Russia is crying wolf if this doesn't happen because this is a terrible, terrible disaster that threatens potentially the whole of the Earth."



The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said earlier on October 25 that it is preparing to send inspectors to two Ukrainian sites in the coming days in reaction to Ukraine's request for an inspection following Russia's claims.



Enerhoatom, Ukraines nuclear energy operator, issued a statement on October 24 voicing its concern that Russias statements may indicate that Russia is preparing an act of nuclear terrorism.

Russian troops have occupied Ukraines Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, Europe's largest, since March. It is still run by Ukrainian engineers though Russia claimed after its illegal annexation of the Zaporizhzhya region that it is on Russian territory.

Enerhoatom said that Russian forces have carried out unauthorized, secret construction work over the last week at the plant in the area of the spent nuclear fuel storage facility.

Russian officers controlling the area wont give access to Ukrainian staff or monitors from the IAEA that would allow them to see what they are doing, the operator said.

Enerhoatom added that it assumes the Russians are preparing a terrorist act using nuclear materials and radioactive waste stored at the plant.

With reporting by AFP, dpa, BBC, and Reuters
Ukrainians have increasingly woken up to the sound of suicide drones as Russia turns to Iranian-made imports to destroy civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Now they may have another deadly Iranian weapon to worry about -- ballistic missiles.

Cheap but effective, Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 "kamikaze" drones have already made a deadly impact in Ukraine.



If U.S. intelligence assessments pan out, Russia will soon be able to supplement its use of Iranian suicide drones and its own cruise and ballistic missiles with powerful short-range Iranian Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar ballistic missiles.



Coming as the Kremlin is reportedly struggling to maintain its depleted stockpile of aerial weapons as it ramps up strikes, the missiles would potentially boost Russia's ability to continue its costly air campaign.



Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East defense specialist at the global intelligence company Janes, said having more missiles gives Russia the ability to sustain the bombardment against Ukraine."



Going Ballistic



The Fateh-110, which was unveiled in 2001 and has a stated range of 300 to 500 kilometers, was developed from a heavy artillery rocket dating from the 1980s. To increase the weapon's accuracy, the Fateh-110 was given a guidance system and movable fins that allow it to be steered as it approaches its target.



The Zolfaghar, which debuted in 2016 and also has guidance capabilities, comes from the same family as the Fateh-110 but boasts a much longer range due to its use of a lighter carbon-fiber airframe and a smaller warhead.



Binnie said the Zolfaghar's use against the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in eastern Syria confirmed that the missile was capable of reaching at least 650 kilometers, which he said is "a statement of how much the Iranian tactical missile program has really advanced over the years."



Iran's claim that the Zolfaghar can travel even farther -- up to 700 kilometers -- would put the western Ukrainian city of Lviv within range of strikes launched from Russian territory, while the more powerful Fateh-110 could potentially hit the city from Belarus, which has served as a staging ground for Russian attacks.



While there has been no indication that Russia plans to purchase launching systems from Iran, Binnie suggests that the Russian military could pair the missiles with existing equipment because the Iranian launchers were adapted from a Soviet-era system.



"It might be possible for the Russians to quickly adapt some old equipment they have lying around into launch systems," Binnie said.



The Iranian military, he added, fitted the Soviet system to trucks, allowing for mobility and concealment.



"Those civilian trucks can be covered over to make it hard to spot that they're actually missile launchers," Binnie said.



'Lawnmowers' And 'Mopeds'



Iranian military drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have been homing in on targets across Ukraine since late August, according to the United States.



The buzzing sound of the Iranian Shahed-136 and Shahed-131 drones, built with off-the-shelf components, have earned them derisive monikers such as "lawnmowers" and "mopeds." But the slow-moving, low-flying drones, which are maneuvered to crash into their target, have proven themselves capable of hitting their mark both in terms of military effectiveness and cost.

It is capable of extracting or delivering attrition and damage when launched, but it costs little compared to other UAVs that Russia has in its own arsenal," said Samuel Bendett of the Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses (CNA).

Ukraine alleges Russia has ordered 2,400 of the Iranian suicide drones, and its military has claimed to have shot them down in great numbers, often using conventional anti-aircraft guns or even small-arms fire. But their ability to be launched in bunches of five -- often from the cover of civilian trucks -- improves their chances of reaching their target.



"The Ukrainians are stopping most of these, but the whole point of these drones is that they fly in a large mass," Bendett said. "The air defense does not always catch all of them. All it takes is for several or even one to make it through."

The estimated range of the Shahed-136 varies, but Iran says it is capable of traveling 2,500 kilometers. The slightly smaller and older Shahed-131, which has been used by Huthi rebels in Yemen to attack Saudi targets in the Arabian Peninsula, has been estimated to have a range of 900 kilometers, according to tests conducted by the Ukrainian military.



Ukraine's Defense Ministry has published multiple images of downed Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks, and the Ukrainian National Guard on October 19 claimed to have shot down a Shahed-131.



Ukraine has also claimed to have shot down a more advanced Iranian combat UAV, the Mojer-6 drone capable of carrying out both reconnaissance missions and aerial strikes within a range of 200 kilometers. There have also been reports of Russian interest in obtaining Irans Shahed-129 and Shahed-191 combat drones.



"When launched from any territory that Russia controls or is allied with -- anywhere from the south, from the Donbas, from Belarus -- they're able to strike a lot of Ukrainian targets," Bendett said.

In addition to the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia will soon boost its arsenal with Iranian ballistic missiles, as first reported by The Washington Post on October 16, the White House on October 20 said that Iranians are now "directly engaged on the ground" in Moscows war against Ukraine after sending "a relatively small number" of personnel from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to assist Russian forces in using the Iranian drones.

Iran has denied sending combat drones to Russia, and Moscow has rejected claims that it is using Iranian UAVs.

Images of downed Iranian drones appear to show that they have been rebranded to look Russian-made, experts say, with the markings in Cyrillic naming them as the Geran-1 (the Shahed-131) and Geran-2 (the Shahed-136).

Observers are widely skeptical of Russia's denials, noting that the drones are essentially identical right down to the font of the serial numbers. Even Russian Defense Ministry experts have unwittingly admitted that the suicide drones are Iranian.



But the rebranding of the drones to make them appear to be Russian has opened the possibility that Moscow could, if it is not already doing so, seek to manufacture or assemble the Iranian drones on its own territory.



Sustaining A Campaign



The new aerial weaponry fits well with the Russian military's renewed focus on striking military and civilian targets far from the front lines in southern and eastern Ukraine. The air assault has ratcheted up following the October 8 appointment of Colonel General Sergei Surovikin, a former Aerospace Forces commander, to lead the Russian war effort.



Just days after Surovikin's appointment, Russia launched the biggest air strikes since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine in February. Moscow said the drone and missile strikes, which targeted civilian areas and infrastructure in cities throughout Ukraine, were in response to a bomb blast that damaged a key bridge linking Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula.

While the Kremlin has accused Ukraine's intelligence services of carrying out the "terrorist" attack on the Crimea Bridge, Ukraine has denied responsibility.



Since the initial air assault in response to the bridge blast, Russia has continued to pound Ukrainian infrastructure, often targeting power plants in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said is a deliberate effort to wear down the Ukrainian people by denying them heat and electricity as winter approaches.



"Civilian infrastructure is obviously the new layer in this war. The Ukrainian economy is now the target, the Ukrainian population is now the target," Bendett said.



Hard To Stop



The hypersonic speed and high trajectory of Iran's Fateh-110s and Zolfaghars, should they arrive, would be extremely difficult for Kyiv to counter without a network of high-tech and costly antimissile batteries it currently does not possess.



Ukraine has repeatedly requested more advanced missile-defense systems from the West, and in the face of the threat of the delivery of Iranian ballistic missiles reportedly sent an official request to Israel this week for components of its "Iron Dome" system.



While the United States has said that it is seeking to expedite the process of sending two U.S. air defense systems known as NASAMS, Washington has appeared reluctant to provide more advanced Patriot missile systems.



Janes' defense expert Binnie is skeptical that the delivery of the Patriot system, which has proven to be successful in shooting down ballistic missiles, is realistic for Ukraine.

"It's eye wateringly expensive and it's probably not really practical because each [missile] battery only covers one city," he said. "You would never get enough batteries to get the coverage you would want. You just wouldn't be able to find them, produce them, and train enough Ukrainians."
CIA Director John Brennan says the extremist Islamic State (IS) group is attempting to deploy fighters in the West to carry out further attacks, drawing from a pool of tens of thousands of militants throughout the world that outnumbers that of Al-Qaeda at the height of its reach.

Brennan's testimony at a June 16 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing came just days after an IS sympathizer shot and killed 49 people in an Orlando gay nightclub -- the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

"We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks," Brennan told the hearing, using another acronym for the group. "ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West."

Brennan added that the IS group likely is attempting to smuggle militants into Western countries, possibly posing as refugees or through normal, legal travel.

He said that the group has suffered significant losses in Syria and Iraq but is nonetheless capable of carrying out attacks across the globe.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan said.

"The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower, and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly," he added.

Brennan said that the CIA has not found any direct links between Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old gunman who carried out the June 12 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and any foreign terrorist organization though he pledged allegiance to the IS group during the attack.

Brennan called the attack in Orlando a "heinous act of wanton violence" and an "assault on the values of openness and tolerance" that are essential to the United States as a nation.

President Barack Obama and federal law-enforcement officials have said that Mateen, the son of immigrants from Afghanistan, appears to have been radicalized at least in part through extremist information disseminated on the Internet.

Brennan said in his June 16 testimony that the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS militants in Syria and Iraq is working to counter the group's "expansive propaganda machine."

He said the organization primarily uses the social media sites Twitter and Tumblr, as well as the messaging app Telegram, to disseminate its propaganda and that "it relies on a global network of sympathizers to further spread its messages."

Brennan said that he is concerned about Libya serving as a platform for IS militants to carry out attacks in Europe and elsewhere.

"The branch in Libya is probably the most developed and the most dangerous," he said. "We assess that it is trying to increase its influence in Africa and to plot attacks in the region and in Europe."

Asked about the broader security crisis in the region, Brennan said that Russia's military backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has strengthened his hold on power.

"A year ago, [Assad] was on his back foot as the opposition forces were carrying out operations that were really degrading the Syrian military," he said. "He is in a stronger position than he was in June of last year."

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP


During a visit to Russia, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has said the EU needs to engage with Moscow despite the sanctions exchanged over the past two years.

Juncker made the comments at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 16, ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

He is the highest ranking EU official to visit Russia since it annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, triggering economic sanctions from the EU. Moscow retaliated by banning some products imports from the block.

"I take the view that we must talk with Russia, the leadership, its people," Juncker said.

He also said the relationship between Russia and the EU is "not broken beyond repair." "We need to mend it and I believe we can," he added.

However, he warned that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements the Minsk peace agreement for Ukraine.

"This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed."

During his meeting with Putin, Juncker said "some in Europe weren't pleased" with him meeting the Russian president but stressed it was an opportunity to "exchange opinions."

Based on reporting by AP and AFP


BISHKEK -- A group of civil rights activists rallied in front of the Kyrgyz parliament building to protest a proposal to ban foreign individuals and organizations from owning and establishing media outlets in the country.

About a dozen activists held placards on June 16 saying: "Lawmaker, hands off Radio Azattyk!" which is a reference to RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service.

The rally was held as lawmakers began discussion of a June 10 proposal by a group of parliament members to introduce the amendments to the mass-media law.

RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service, which has a bureau in Bishkek, has been a major independent source of information in the Central Asian country for decades and is also broadcast by the country's main state broadcaster.

Well-known civil rights activist Rita Karasartova said at the rally that "the hastily proposed bill's major goal is to curb the flow of independent and timely information in Kyrgyzstan."

"Radio Azattyk has been the only source of trustworthy information that civil rights activists could refer to when there were obstacles at state-controlled media platforms," Karasartova said.

Kyrgyz lawmakers decided to postpone debate on the bill until next week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the St. Petersburg economic forum on June 16.

Possible topics for discussion include relations between Russia and the European Union, anti-Russian sanctions and Russian countermeasures, and the EU's migration crisis, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said on June 15..

Putin and Juncker might also discuss international problems, such as the stalled peace talks to end the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, he said.

They will also discuss energy-related issues, including the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project and prospects for resuming energy dialogue between Russia and the EU.

After meeting with Juncker, Putin will visit with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to discuss efforts against terrorism, the situation in Syria, and the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis.

Based on reporting by TASS
Russia's Defense Ministry has announced that a 48-hour cease-fire will start on June 16 in the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo.

A U.S. State Department spokeswoman confirmed to dpa that Syrian parties have agreed to "recommit to the cessation of hostilities" in Aleppo starting at midnight Damascus time on June 16.

Moscow's announcement came after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Russia and the Syrian regime on June 15 that U.S. patience was wearing thin and they must respect a cease-fire instituted in February.

Russia accused Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the Al-Nusra Front, of attacking various Aleppo neighborhoods with multiple rocket launchers, as well as mounting a tank attack southwest of the city.

Russia has provided air support to troops loyal to the Syrian regime as they battled the militant group and other Syrian rebels located in Aleppo.

Since June 14, some 70 fighters have been killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Based on reporting by AFP, dpa, and TASS


PRAGUE -- The U.S. State Department's chief sanctions-policy coordinator is confident the European Union will maintain its travel and economic restrictions against Russia until Moscow fulfills the terms of a peace agreement to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Speaking to RFE/RL in the Czech capital after a weeklong tour of four Central European states to shore up support for the sanctions regime, Daniel Fried on June 16 called costs to the West of sanctions "the price" of combating "Russian aggression."

The United States and European Union imposed sanctions on Russia for its seizure of Crimea in March 2014 and its backing of armed separatism in eastern Ukraine, leaving President Vladimir Putin internationally isolated.

Western officials vow the measures will be lifted only after the fulfillment of the 2015 Minsk accords, which set out steps to bring a lasting peace to eastern Ukraine, where more than 9,300 people have died in fighting since April 2014.

"Sanctions can be costly, but happily European countries have suffered much less than Russian propaganda makes it out to be," Fried said. "Some have been hit harder than others, the Baltic states in particular, [and] Finland. So we need to stick together. American companies have also been hit. But this is the price we all need to pay if we're to successfully resist Russian aggression."

The sanctions have hit Russia's economy most dramatically by closing long-term EU lending to Russian companies and discouraging foreign investment.

Some of Putin's inner circle have also been targeted with asset freezes and travel bans.

However, European countries have been hit by countermeasures ordered by the Kremlin, including a Russian import ban on meat, vegetable, and dairy products from the EU.

That has led to growing calls in some quarters of Europe to lift the sanctions.

'Worse Without Sanctions'

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 16, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for the European restrictions to be lifted, saying, "We have enough problems without it, and we cannot afford to suffer."

In his RFE/RL interview, Fried countered by saying that, at the same forum, European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker spoke firmly in favor of sanctions remaining until the terms of the Minsk accords are met.

"This was a good statement," Fried said.

Fried rejected any suggestion that a recent uptick in violence in eastern Ukraine casts doubt on whether the sanctions are working.

"If it weren't for sanctions, things would be much worse. And anybody who thinks that it couldn't be worse in Ukraine simply lacks imagination," Fried warned. "Sanctions did two things: They prevented the Russians from going much further, and I think, without the sanctions, the Russians would have gone much further."

Fried said in a reference to a key coastal stretch of Ukraine that Russia-backed separatists "might have attacked Mariupol, they might have driven a so-called land bridge to Crimea."

"The second thing sanctions achieved was to provide the conditions for getting a framework, the Minsk accords, to end the conflict. No sanctions, no Minsk accords," Fried added.

Working Diplomatic Channels

Asked whether sanctions may have played into the hands of Putin, allowing him to blame the West for his country's economic woes, Fried said there was virtually no other course of action available.

"How would the Russians have responded if the West had been weak? What conclusions would the Russians have drawn had we failed to resist their aggression?" Fried said. "Would their behavior have been better? Really? I think that a strong response has prevented things from being worse and given us the road to get out of the situation."

As for whether Putin's popularity has been boosted by the crisis with the West, Fried was skeptical.

"As for popularity, well, I've always had a healthy skepticism of public opinion polls conducted in countries where it is not perhaps safe to say you don't support the leader," he said.

Polls of Russians, who are used to seeing media toe the Kremlin line since authorities began silencing independent news outlets soon after Putin was appointed to succeed Boris Yeltsin at the end of 1999, consistently show strong support for the former KGB officer.

Fried also rejected suggestions that average Russians were suffering more as a result of the sanctions than some of Putin's cronies blacklisted by the EU and Washington.

"As for hurting the Russian people, the West, the EU and the U.S., never considered sanctioning food exports to Russia. We would never do that," Fried said. "It is the Russian government itself that has deprived the Russian people of access to good quality food. You'll have to ask them why they did this."

The EU trade and financing sanctions must be renewed every six months, with the next vote coming at an EU heads-of-state summit in Brussels on June 28 and 29.

Greece, along with Hungary, Italy, Cyprus, and Slovakia, have been among the most vocal critics within the EU of the sanctions.Russia is the EU's third-largest trading partner.

Diplomats in Brussels have expressed confidence that the sanctions will be extended next month. But analysts have wondered aloud whether they will be prolonged again six months later.

Moscow is now working its diplomatic channels to erode EU unity to ultimately end or dilute the sanctions regime.


The college students got the hash. They got the opium. But they left their high school-age friend behind as promise for payment in a cross-border drug deal gone bad.

Now Ahmadshoh Sherov and Rahimali Sharif will pay the price, having been sentenced by a Tajik court to 14 years in prison each on charges of drug dealing and illegal border crossing.

The two 19-year-old college students are residents of the southern village of Yol, located not far from Tajikistans porous border with Afghanistan, the worlds largest opium producer.

Tajik officials say the two admitted to crossing the Tajik-Afghan border illegally in January to buy hashish and opium from Afghan drug traffickers.

According to Tajikistans State Committee for National Security, the men crossed the border in search of drugs along with a fellow villager, high-school student Alisher Abduhafiz. Sherov and Sharif returned with 17 kilos of opium and 15 kilos of hashish, upon which they were arrested by security services, according to Tajik officials. But Abduhafiz never made the trip back -- he was left with Afghan drug dealers as a guarantee of future payment.



Abduhafiz, 19, was released in an operation carried out by Tajik security forces in early February.

Abduhafizs parents insist their son was deceived -- claiming he was told they were merely going to collect wood -- and taken to Afghanistan against his own wishes. But the Shamsiddin Shohin district court saw things differently, and Abduhafiz was sentenced on June 16 to six years in prison for illegal border crossing and involvement in drug smuggling.

Tajikistan shares more than 1,400 kilometers of border with Afghanistan, which produces 90 percent of the worlds opium, according to the United Nations.



Tajikistans Drug Control Agency estimates that at least 20 percent of drugs coming from Afghanistan are smuggled to Europe through the so-called northern route, via Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Written by Farangis Najibullah based on reporting by RFE/RLs Tajik Service
WASHINGTON -- Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman urged Western governments to maintain tough sanctions on Russia until it withdraws forces from eastern Ukraine and cedes control of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow seized from Kyiv in 2014.



Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington on June 16, Hroysman also heralded his government's steps toward institutional and economic reforms, saying changes to the customs service, public procurement procedures, and the courts will make the country more attractive to investors.



"Ukraine needs reforms, and my message is that the new governmentis ready to reform the country, is ready to lead the changes and implement the changes that are needed for Ukraine," he told reporters.



Hroysman's visit to Washington -- his first since becoming prime minister in April -- comes amid struggling efforts by Kyiv to shore up support financial and technical support for its fragile economy.



Ukraine's economy has been battered by the precipitous drop in trade with Russia that followed Moscow's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 after its military seizure of the peninsula. The ensuing war in eastern Ukraine, home to much of the country's industrial base, also eviscerated the economy.

Kyiv has been struggling to implement deep structural reforms, including rooting out endemic corruption, to meet conditions attached to International Monetary Fund (IMF) assistance.



Hroysman's senior economic adviser, Ivan Miklos, said on June 15 that officials are hoping the IMF will release $1.7 billion in delayed aid this year in two installments as Ukraine institutes required reforms.

Waning Support For Sanctions?



U.S. and EU backing for Ukraine in its standoff with Russia has included sweeping economic sanctions that have helped drive Russia's economy into recession.



But support for the sanctions in some Western capitals appears to be waning; the EU is expected next month to prolong its sanctions for another six months, though rhetoric from some of the bloc's leaders indicates that they could be scaled back next year.



"The sanctions can be eliminated only when the aggressor returns within its borders, when the aggressor renounces his aggressive plans. Only in such a case can the sanctions can be eased or eliminated," Hroysman said.

"The removal of sanctions can be absolutely real if the aggressor demonstrates respect for the international law and leaves the sovereignty of an independent state and returns its troops to its own territory," he added.

Russia has consistently denied involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine despite what Kyiv and NATO call overwhelming evidence that it has supported the separatists with troops and weapons.



Russia and Ukraine have also been at loggerheads over billions of dollars in debts that each side claims the other owes. Moscow offered Kyiv a $15 billion cash infusion in 2013, in a bid to persuade the government of then President Viktor Yanukovych not to sign an EU association agreement.

Moscow had transferred only $3 billion of that infusion before Yanukovych was ousted amid violent street protests, and Russia has since demanded the money back.



Hroysman sought to link the debt issue to the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory.



"In reality, it is Russia that has huge debts to Ukraine, and these debts could be somewhat decreased by the de-occupation of Crimea and withdrawal of Russian troops from the territories of the Donbas," he said, referring to the region in eastern Ukraine where Russia-backed separatists control territory.

"And I think after these things happen, we could consider settlement of all other financial debts," Hroysman added.



The White House announced a day earlier that Washington would give Ukraine $220 million in new aid this year to support reform efforts, bringing total U.S. aid to Kyiv since 2014 to $1.3 billion.



The United States has also provided $2 billion in loan guarantees, and earlier this month approved an agreement allowing Kyiv to use one-third of a $1 billion guarantee in the coming months.


Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations has said he was "completely outraged" by the UN chiefs speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

In his June 16 speech, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Russia "has a critical role to play" in addressing global issues "from ending the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, to safeguarding human rights and controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

Ukrainian Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko said he doesn't understand how the UN chief "can say such things which sort of praise the role of Russia in settling the conflict in Ukraine when the Russian Federation is the main player in aggressing Ukraine and in keeping this conflict boiling."

Yelchenko also said Russia is accused of rights abuses in Crimea and that Moscow is "building up the nuclear potential" on the Black Sea peninsula.

Russia forcibly annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March 2013 and backs separatists in the countrys east.

Based on reporting by AFP and AP


UN investigators say Islamic State (IS) extremists are committing genocide in Syria and Iraq against the Yazidi religious minority.

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing," said Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, in Geneva on June 16.

The special UN commission said in a report issued the same day that more than 3,200 Yazidi women and children -- taken from Iraq -- were still being held in Syria by IS fighters and used as sex slaves.

The report adds that IS militants carried out mass executions of Yazidis when they were based in Iraq in August 2014.

The report says sexual slavery, slave labor, torture, and forced conversions to Islam are the main methods used in the Yazidi genocide.

"Girls as young as nine were raped, as were pregnant women," says the report, largely based on interviews with survivors, activists, and medical personnel.

The report claims that Yazidi women were also prevented from giving birth by separating the men from the women and traumatizing females.

Commission investigators said the UN Security Council should take steps to stop the genocide and other crimes being committed against Yazidis.

There were an estimated 720,000 Yazidis in Iraq and Syria before the IS attacked the group on 2014.

Based on reporting by dpa and AFP
The White House says it will give Ukraine $220 million in new aid this year to support Kyiv's economic, political, and energy reform efforts.

The badly needed aid for the war-shattered country was announced on June 15 after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman by phone.

The White House said the aid will help Ukraine "strengthen democratic institutions and the rule of law, reinforce the foundations for sustainable economic growth, and respond to humanitarian needs."

Among the items on Hroysman's "ambitious reform agenda," the White House said, is an acceleration of customs reform, an ongoing fight against corruption through reform of the justice sector, and implementation of constitutional amendments adopted by Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada on June 2.

Hroysman intends to increase "support for independent media and civil society," it said, and extend decentralization across Ukraine to improve the government's delivery of services and increase citizen engagement.

Hroysman has also committed to energy reforms, including establishing competitive gas and electricity markets in line with European Union standards, diversifying sources of energy away from Russia, and privatization of state energy agencies.

The White House said that on June 9 the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation approved up to $62.5 million in financial support for two private equity funds that will invest in Ukraine across a number of sectors, including agribusiness, health care, infrastructure, retail, consumer goods, and real estate.

These two investments are in addition to previous corporation financial commitments to Ukraine totaling $185 million, according to the White House.

U.S. aid to Ukraine since 2014 has totaled $1.3 billion, it said, including $112 million in humanitarian assistance for civilians affected by the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the east.

The U.S. government has also provided $2 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine, and on June 3 approved an agreement allowing Ukraine to use a third of a $1 billion guarantee in coming months.

"These loan guarantees help Ukraine stabilize its economy and protect the most vulnerable households from the impact of needed economic adjustment," the White House said.

Separately, Hroysman's senior economic adviser, Ivan Miklos, told Reuters on June 15 that Ukraine hoped the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will release $1.7 billion in delayed aid this year in two installments as Ukraine adopts reforms sought by the global lender.

Miklos, who was visiting Washington, said Ukraine hoped to get the first installment of IMF aid of $1 billion next month, an amount that he said would suffice to keep the economy stable.

However, efforts to get reform legislation through the Rada continue to lag, he said.

"There is not sufficient ownership of reform" in parliament, he said. "There is not sufficient understanding that the reforms are necessary."

With reporting by Reuters
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A New Jersey woman pleaded guilty Thursday in a scheme that allegedly used shell businesses to purchase at least $9.5 million worth of Virginia cigarettes and transport them to New Jersey and other states for illegal resale.

Laila Alayat, 37, faces up to 15 years in prison when sentenced Sept. 15 by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne for conspiracy to traffic in contraband cigarettes and witness tampering.

An Arabic translator interpreted for Alayat at Thursdays hearing. A U.S. citizen, Alayat is also said to have Jordanian citizenship.

Alayat and Eyad Salahedin, 39, also of New Jersey, were indicted March 2 on the conspiracy charge.

Alayat was also charged with tampering with a witness.

Salahedin was also scheduled to plead guilty to conspiracy Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Roderick C. Young. However, shortly before he was to do so his lawyer, Charles E. James Jr. told Young they were not prepared to proceed.

Salahedin, who is not in custody, then attended Alayats plea hearing. He has a trial date set for Aug. 29.

With the second-lowest cigarette excise tax in the country at $3 a carton, Virginia is a primary source state in a thriving bootleg industry in which cigarettes are transported for illegal resale in high-tax states such as New Jersey, where the tax is $27 a carton, or New York City, where the combined state/city tax is $58.50 per carton.

Complaints filed in U.S. District Court in February alleged Alayat and Salahedin  and others acting on their behalf  purchased millions of dollars worth of cigarettes from Virginia wholesale club stores using cash and structuring the transactions to keep each purchase below $10,000 so that federal forms reporting their names would not be required.

The government alleged that of 1,735 cash transactions between March 2014 and August 2015, at Virginia Sams Club stores totaling $6.3 million, none exceeded $10,000.

Court papers show that the two met with authorities and were offered a plea deal on Jan. 7, but it expired without either of them accepting it.

According to authorities, Alayat was warned in January that any attempt to leave the U.S. would be construed as an attempt to flee prosecution.

Nevertheless, she was arrested Feb. 11 at JFK International Airport with a ticket to Amman, Jordan. Salahedin was arrested shortly after dropping Alayat off at the airport.

An affidavit from Stacey Ivie, a detective with the Alexandria Police Department deputized with the U.S. Marshals Service, alleged that controlled buys of cigarettes with Virginia tax stamps were made from Salahedin in New Jersey and that he used a storage unit in Clifton, N.J., to store cigarettes until transferring them.

Three of the six Virginia businesses linked to the two and created online were said to be in the Richmond area and three in Woodbridge.

At least five of them never paid any Virginia taxes.

Alayat is also alleged to have asked an unidentified confidential informant to lie to investigators if shown photographs of her and to say the images were of a cousin who has returned to Jordan.

She pleaded guilty Thursday to attempting to corruptly persuade S.O. to lie to law enforcement about her identity on Jan. 4 by promising to pay $500.
Richmond police are looking for a man in connection to a shooting outside a Jefferson Davis Highway market two weeks earlier.

On May 29 at about 10:20 p.m., an ambulance was flagged down on Chippenham Parkway, according to a statement from police. A male passenger in the car that stopped the ambulance had been shot. He was transported to a hospital with non-fatal wounds.

An investigation revealed the shooting took place outside the Golden Food Market at 2701 Jefferson Davis Highway. Police received surveillance footage from the market showing a man who is wanted in connection with the shooting.

The man is described as black, about 5-foot-5 inches to 5-foot-8, and 145 to 155 pounds. He was wearing dark shorts; a white T-shirt; and a blue, red and white ball cap.
After deliberating for roughly five hours, the jury in the trial of Richmond police officer David L. Cobb appears to be deadlocked.

Minutes ago, Judge David Johnson read a note from the jury that said they cannot reach a unanimous decision: "We are at a deadlock and further deliberations will not change our decision."

Judge Johnson asked them to keep trying and sent them back to continue deliberations. The jury deliberated two hours on Thursday and three hours Friday morning.

Cobb is on trial for murder in the shooting death of 18-year-old Paterson Brown Jr.

(This is a breaking news update. Check back for more details this afternoon.)

Prosecutors say Richmond police officer David L. Cobb needlessly shot and killed an unarmed teen who posed no real threat. But the defense argued Thursday that the teens bizarre and fear-inducing behavior justified the use of deadly force.

Today, a Chesterfield County Circuit Court jury will resume deliberations to decide which version is more believable.

In testimony on Thursday, the third day of Cobbs trial, the 47-year-old officer created an emotionally charged stir when he broke down on the witness stand and sobbed loudly. He was recounting the moment last October when he learned that the teen he shot, 18-year-old Paterson Brown Jr., had died.

As Cobbs family and supporters looked on in dismay, the nine-year veteran officer  with his head bowed as he wept  seemed so overwhelmed with emotion that he could not immediately continue to testify in his defense. Chesterfield Circuit Judge David E. Johnson called a 10-minute recess to help him regain his composure.

Under guidance from his attorney, Cobb recounted for jurors the events of Oct. 17 when he fatally shot Brown after the teenager inexplicably got into Cobbs girlfriends vehicle as Cobb prepared to have it washed at Better Vision Detail & Car Spa on Midlothian Turnpike. Cobb was off-duty at the time.

My intent was not to kill Paterson Brown, Cobb testified. My intent was to stop the threat.

The officer claims he fired in self-defense when Brown, who was acting strangely and incoherently, apparently from drug use, kept trying to close the car door as Cobb tried to keep it open, and repeatedly refused Cobbs commands to stop moving inside the Nissan Altima.

But Cobb said that after he warned the teen four times to stay still, Brown persisted a fifth time and moved his left hand across his waist to his right as the car moved forward. The officer fired a single shot that severed a vital artery in Browns pelvis.

Cobb said he believed Brown was reaching for a weapon. The teenager, as it turned out, was unarmed.

Cobb insisted that keeping Brown from stealing his girlfriends car was not a factor in his decision to fire.

Cobb said he didnt think he had an option to back down because a crime was unfolding, and he believed my life and civilians lives were possibly at risk.

After Cobbs testimony, prosecutors dropped earlier strong objections to the defenses only other witness  Juan Carrillo, a teen friend of the victim who was with Brown at the car wash when the shooting occurred.

Defense attorney David Baugh wanted Carrillos testimony in relation to an incident that occurred a year before the shooting, when Brown was charged with robbing a James River High School student at gunpoint. The testimony was intended to illustrate Browns character, past bad acts and alleged propensity for violence.

Juan Carrillo testified that Brown hid in the back seat of a car and placed a gun to the head of the victim on Oct. 13, 2014. Carrillo said he was driving.

Brown was convicted of a reduced count of grand larceny of a person in connection with the robbery. He was sentenced to 12 months in jail, all suspended, but the judge placed him on home incarceration with an electronic monitoring device for about six months, ending in May.

Carrillo said he didnt know what happened to the gun after the robbery, but that Brown wasnt armed with a firearm during the confrontation with Cobb.

He wasnt threatening nobody, Carrillo said of Brown, referring to the confrontation with Cobb that led to Browns shooting death. He didnt seem angry at all.

Carrillo, Brown and a 16-year-old runaway named Jennifer Ingles had arrived together at the car wash in Carrillos car that morning after being out all night together.

The defense rested its case after Carrillos testimony.

In closing arguments later Thursday, Deputy Commonwealths Attorney Melissa Hoy argued that Browns actions did not represent an imminent threat of death or injury to Cobb, and said the officer likely would have defused the encounter by employing the crisis-incident training that he teaches to other Richmond officers.

Brown did not make any overt threats to Cobb during their 4-minute confrontation, Hoy said, even when the officer pointed his gun at the teen and yelled commands for him to get out if the car. Brown did try to close the car door that Cobb opened, but the teen was high on marijuana and he likely wanted to avoid a confrontation, the prosecutor suggested.

When Cobb loudly announced he was a police officer, Hoy said, Brown leaned back away from Cobb and said, I dont f--- with cops  as if he didnt want trouble.

This was about David Cobb believing Paterson Brown was taking his girlfriends car, Hoy said of the officers motivation. He did not want Paterson Brown to drive away with this car.

This was not about his personal safety, Hoy said, or the safety of nearby citizens.

Hoy said none of the car wash or gas station employees on the scene perceived any fear from the encounter until Cobb pulled his gun.

He changed the situation, something that could have been resolved peacefully, she said.

There was no legal excuse or justification for his actions, the prosecutor charged, noting that Browns reaching (inside the car) by itself does not give you the right to use deadly force.

While I will submit that Mr. Cobb is a good person, he made a bad choice, a wrong choice, Hoy said.

Baugh, who over the years has represented five other Richmond officers in use-of-force cases, countered that every officer fears for his or her life when approaching a vehicle, and they are responsible for stopping crime when they see it.

Baugh said it didnt matter whether the car Brown entered was Cobbs girlfriends or a strangers, he has a duty to stop a crime.

He doesnt have a right to walk away, Baugh said. He took an oath. Its his moral duty to stick his nose in it.

To convict Cobb, Baugh told jurors, prosecutors have to convince you theres no reason to be scared.

Is he reasonable to be fearful? Baugh added. Yes. (Officers) all know.

Baugh said Brown immediately set the tone by his bizarre behavior, glaring at Cobb after the officer spotted him inside the vehicle.

The law says you dont have to wait to see a gun to use deadly force if you are in imminent fear for your life, Baugh said. There was something seriously wrong with that kid, and nobody knows what it is, he added.

Baugh said Cobb didnt want to hurt Brown and that Cobb tried to keep things under control until Chesterfield police arrived.

Brown died because the teen created a fearful situation that escalated his threat level, Baugh said.

The mindless death of a child is excruciating, Baugh said.  I would like to have a reason. It makes no sense.

But in rebuttal, Deputy Commonwealths Attorney John Childrey challenged the notion that Cobb couldnt just walk way from the car and call police.

Is there some problem with Mr. Cobb doing that? Childrey told jurors. Why cant he wait? He can wait, and the law requires that he wait.
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A report issued Wednesday by the ACLU of Virginia seeks to educate voters about what it says is the undue power of commonwealths attorneys and to encourage more candidates to seek the office.

Unparalleled Power, a 32-page report, says that commonwealths attorneys  the top prosecutors in 120 Virginia localities  ran uncontested for office in 72 percent of elections from 2005 to 2015. Forty percent of the offices did not have a single contested race during that period, the study found.

Local, elected prosecutors in Virginia hold tremendous influence over the criminal justice system but face few challenges to their authority, according to the ACLU.

The report says commonwealths attorneys powers include deciding whether a case will go to trial and, if so, as a misdemeanor or felony; insisting a defendant be kept in jail before trial without bail; requiring a jury trial over the objection of the defendant; and withholding information such as police reports and witness statements about a case from the defendant.

For years, commonwealths attorneys have opposed common-sense reforms to Virginias criminal justice system, the ACLU report alleges. Instead, Virginias prosecutors have lobbied the General Assembly to ramp up the failed war on drugs.

The prosecutors, says the ACLU, have an important self-interest in opposing change: Virginias draconian sentencing laws  from mandatory minimums to the abolition of parole to jury sentencing  fundamentally shift influence over outcomes from judges to prosecutors.

The report says that only commonwealths attorneys have the authority to decide how many charges a person will face at trial and whether those charges will carry mandatory minimum sentences. Because the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains, a prosecutor is more likely to decide a criminal defendants fate than a judge or jury, the ACLU says.

Prosecutors, however, strongly disagree with much in the study.

None of us had any idea this was coming along; we had no idea we have unparalleled power, said La Bravia Jenkins, the Fredericksburg commonwealths attorney and president of the Virginia Association of Commonwealths Attorneys.

The premise of this report is totally off-base, and so slanted as to be inaccurate, she said. For instance, she said the defendant also has a choice in whether a case goes to trial: He or she can accept a plea agreement or not, Jenkins said after scanning the report.

Also, she said each side decides whether they want a jury trial. Its not unparalleled, because the defendant has a parallel power to demand a jury trial, Jenkins said. We will study it more and maybe just address each of the charges individually at a later time.

Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, said that although both the defendant and the prosecutor can ask for a jury trial, a defendant may be reluctant to do so, because juries, unlike judges, arent allowed to see presentence reports or the sentencing guidelines. This means that juries often recommend harsher sentences than called for under the guidelines. Prosecutors can seek their right to a jury trial as a means of pressuring a defendant to accept a plea agreement, she said.

The report says that once elected, local prosecutors often stay in office for decades wielding broad discretion in how cases are handled while also lobbying aggressively against reforms to the criminal justice system that polls show the public supports.

Several local [commonwealths attorneys] have held the same office for more than 40 years, with one in six having been in office for more than 20 years, the report says.

Also, elections for commonwealths attorneys are held with those for other local offices in off-year elections with no federal or statewide races on the ballot. Voter participation can more than double when other, more prominent races help to drive turnout.

The report concludes, The interactions between [commonwealths attorneys] and the voters who put them in office may decide whether Virginia enacts meaningful criminal justice reforms.

By engaging with [commonwealths attorneys], cultivating reform-minded candidates and showing up at the polls, voters can reclaim the power and change a broken criminal justice system, the ACLU report contends.
The Ministry of Knowledge Economy is mulling a raise in electricity charges by 5-7 percent this year. Power monopoly KEPCO had requested an average hike of 13.1 percent on April 26.

A ministry official on Sunday said, "We are considering raising electricity prices as the current prices are below production cost." But the ministry plans to negotiate the hike range and timing in order to minimize the impact on consumer prices.

The ministry will then negotiate with the Ministry of Strategy and Finance. The government raised electricity charges twice last year, by 4.9 percent in August and 4.5 percent in December.
In the third quarter of 2022, Norilsk Nickel produced 59,000 tons of nickel, 113,000 tons of copper, 712,000 ounces of palladium and 171,000 ounces of platinum According to Norilsk Nickel, in the third quarter of 2022, the company produced 59,000 tons of nickel (+22% QoQ), 113,000 tons of copper (+1%), 712,000 ounces of palladium (+0.4%) and 171,000 ounces of...

Implats lifts stake in RBPlat to 40.66% Impala Platinum (Implats) has further increased its shareholding in Royal Bafokeng Platinum (RBPlat) to 40.66% from 40.49%. The platinum miner said it concluded agreements to acquire a further 507 000 RBPlat Shares constituting...

Petra Q1 output, revenue dip Petra Diamonds first quarter production for the fiscal year 2023 dropped 13% to 763,220 carats compared to 876,411 carats, a year earlier. The decline was due to lower grades at Cullinan Mine and Finsch Mine in South Africa.

Chinas billion-dollar cash-for-copper trade grinds to a halt According to Chinese physical traders, they expected Shanghais bonded copper stocks to drop further  potentially to zero, or just a few hundred tons  as market participants have lost confidence in the business of using metal to raise financing for...
Union Pacific plans to invest $44.3 million to improve its infrastructure in Wyoming and Utah this year. The company says its multi-million dollar private investments will enhance employee, community and customer safety and increase rail operating efficiency.

UPs $28.5-million investment in Wyoming includes $25.9 million to maintain railroad track and $2.4 million to maintain bridges in the state. Key projects planned this year include a $7.6-million investment in the rail line between Cheyenne and Granite Canon to replace more than 13 miles of rail and a $2.6-million investment in the rail line between Rawlins and Rock Springs to replace nearly four miles of rail.

This years planned capital expenditure in Wyoming is part of an ongoing investment strategy. From 2011 to 2015, UP invested more than $164 million strengthening Wyomings transportation infrastructure.

UPs $15.8-million investment in Utah includes $7.9 million to maintain railroad track and $7.8 million to maintain bridges in the state. Key projects planned this year include a $2-million investment in the rail line between Cedar and Mack, Colo., to replace almost three miles of curve rail; a $1.1-million investment in the rail line along the Lynndyl Subdivision south of Delta to replace almost two miles of curve rail and a $895,000 investment in the rail line along the Provo Subdivision north of Helper to replace more than one mile of curve rail.

This years planned capital expenditure in Utah is part of an ongoing investment strategy. From 2011 to 2015, UP invested more than $157 million strengthening Utahs transportation infrastructure.

We constantly evaluate our customers needs to make targeted investments that enhance our efficiency and deliver the goods American businesses and families use daily, said Wes Lujan, Union Pacific vice president public affairs, Western Region. Continuing to aggressively invest in our infrastructure is an important element in Union Pacifics unwavering safety commitment.
As NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels discuss efforts to deter Russian aggression, rising tensions not seen since the Cold War will be on the minds of central and eastern European foreign ministers gathering Thursday in the former Yugoslavia.

The agenda of the annual meeting of the Central European Initiative (CEI) in Banja Luka aims to focus on Europes migration crisis as well as business, transportation, and energy issues.

But the 18-member state group is expected also to discuss plans by some Balkan nations to join NATO, the Euro-Atlantic military alliance whose expansion Russia has deemed a threat to its security.

NATO foreign ministers in May signed the Accession Protocol for CEI member Montenegro, paving the way for Podgorica to become the defense alliance's 29th member as soon as July.



Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia are also pursuing NATO membership, while Russias strongest ally in the region, Serbia, is so far remaining neutral. Albania and Croatia became NATO members in 2009.

 Pushed Towards NATO

NATO expansion in the region underscores Balkan security concerns but also Moscows waning influence in the former zone of Soviet influence.

"For Russia it's something like a very telling signal... that it's losing it's traditional influence it had lost with many countries in eastern and central Europe," says Moscow State University's Institute of International Relations' Viktor Mizin. "And, now it's the turn of [the] Balkans," he adds.

While all the Balkan countries looking to join NATO began their efforts years ago, Russia's aggression in Ukraine has only spurred the drive toward NATO, says Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based independent military analyst and visiting researcher at Uppsula University in Sweden. "And, I think it's a clear [example] of Russian 'successes' in foreign policy when the most closest allies to Russia are trying to escape from it as soon as possible," he tells VOA's Moscow Bureau via Skype. "Of course, it's the result of Russia's 'successes' in Ukraine and Crimea," he adds.

Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and ongoing military support for rebels in eastern Ukraine sparked calls for stronger deterrence in NATO's eastern European members.
RailPros, an engineering and management firm serving the California rail market, has awarded a program management services contract to CH2M to assist with the development and implementation of the Redlands Passenger Rail Project (RPRP) for the San Bernardino Associated Governments (SANBAG).

The goal of the RPRP is to connect residents, businesses and visitors to a variety of leisure, education, healthcare and other destinations and provide additional transportation choices through the implementation of a new passenger rail service. The nine-mile rail extension, which is designed to integrate conveniently with other modes such as auto, bus and bicycle, will modernize an existing rail right-of-way owned by SANBAG and provide a new train line connecting to the Los Angeles Basins existing Metrolink commuter rail lines.

As a subcontractor to the projects lead program manager, RailPros, CH2M will provide planning, coordination and risk assessment and management services for the RPRP.

CH2M also will assist with the rail passenger vehicle acquisition and conduct a fare collection system study. CH2M will work closely with RailPros, SANBAG, the Federal Railroad Administration and other regulators and rail operators to develop system processes that ensure public safety.

CH2M looks forward to delivering high-quality services for RailPros, SANBAG and the rail passengers of Southern California, said Tom Donahue, CH2Ms transit and rail director.
The total number of new motor vehicle sales in Australia was down a seasonally adjusted 1.1 percent on month in May, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday - standing at 95,855.

That follows the 2.5 percent monthly decline in April.

On a yearly basis, new motor vehicle sales climbed 1.7 percent - slowing from 2.4 percent in the previous month.

By region, the largest downward movement across all states and territories was in Western Australia (-1.5 percent), while the largest gain was in the Northern Territory (1.6 percent).

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.
South Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics (SSNLF.OB,SSNNF.OB,SMSN.L) announced late Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Joyent, Inc., a public and private cloud provider. The transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions.

With Joyent's superior cloud , Samsung will now have access to its own cloud platform capable of supporting its growing lineup of mobile, Internet of Things or IoT and cloud-based software and services.

Following the deal, Joyent's team of technologists, including CEO, Scott Hammond, CTO, Bryan Cantrill, and VP of Product, Bill Fine will join Samsung to work on company-wide cloud initiatives.

Injong Rhee, CTO of the Mobile Communications at Samsung said, "Samsung evaluated a wide range of potential companies in the public and private cloud infrastructure space with a focus on leading-edge scalable technology and talent. In Joyent, we saw an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers."

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Indian shares fell notably on Thursday, proving the previous session's recovery short-lived. Global sentiment took a turn for worse as declining oil prices and policy inaction by central banks in the U.S.,Japan and Switzerland added to concerns over slowing growth.

With a week to go until the referendum, investors remained concerned about the impact of a British exit from the European Union on the global financial system. The rupee pared early gains and traded down about 6 paise at 67.21 per in the afternoon, as Brexit fears overshadowed dovish comments from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

India's trade deficit widened in May to its highest level in three months, a government report showed today, further weighing on investor sentiment.

The 30-share BSE Sensex hit as low as 26,314.91 in noon trade before ending the session down 200.88 points or 0.75 percent at 26,525.46. The 50-share Nifty index dropped 65.85 points or 0.80 percent to finish at 8,140.75.

Maruti Suzuki shares tumbled 3 percent as the Japanese yen hit as high as 104 yen per dollar to reach its highest level in almost two years. Bharti Infratel slumped 4.3 percent after a brokerage downgrade.

Sugar stocks fell across the board after recent sharp gains. Dhampur Sugar Mills, Bajaj Hindusthan, Shree Renuka Sugars and Dwarikesh Sugar Industries plunged 5-11 percent.

SBI associate banks extended Wednesday's rally after the Union Cabinet gave in-principle approval for their merger with the parent. State Bank of Travancore climbed 13.6 percent, State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur soared 16 percent and State Bank of Mysore jumped 20 percent.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis
Crude oil futures tumbled Thursday, extending this week's significant retreat amid demand concerns and a global supply glut.

Global economic headwinds are blowing relatively hard just as supplies from Canada, Libya and Nigeria are coming back to market.

Canadian oil sands operators are resuming operations after last month's devestating wildfires near Ft. McMurray.

Meanwhile, EIA data yesterday showed U.S. oil inventories fell less than expected.

WTI Crude oil for July was down 80 cents at $47.20 a barrel, having topped out near $52 last week.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis
New Zealand will on Friday see May results for the Performance of Manufacturing Index from Business NZ, highlighting a light day for Asia-Pacific economic activity.

The index had a score of 56.5 in April, well above the boom-or-bust line of 50 that separates expansion from contraction.

New Zealand also will see June results for the consumer confidence index from ANZ; in May, the index dipped 3.2 percent to a score of 116.2.

The Philippines will release Q1 numbers for current account; in the three months prior, the account had a surplus of $3.82 billion.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.
The 2020MY Nissan Kicks features substantial improvements in terms of cosmetics and equipment

Ahead of its official introduction in Thailand, the Nissan Kicks crossover has been leaked in full on social media. News regarding a new major update to the popular urban SUV was floating around the internet for quite some time. In fact, multiple spy shots of the 2020MY Nissan Kicks were shared from various ASEAN regions over the past few months. We have also shared an interesting picture of a batch of undisguised production-ready 2020 Nissan Kicks units being transported somewhere in Thailand, amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

One the other hand, the Indian market is yet to receive the BS6-compliant 2020MY Nissan Kicks. It is expected to launch in a few weeks time as shared on an official dealer booklet. The brochure reveals some key details such as the introduction of a new 1.3-litre turbo petrol engine.

Coming to the facelifted Thai-spec Nissan Kicks, it features the Japanese brands e-Power series hybrid powertrain. Reports state that the system comprises of a 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol motor and an electric motor coupled to a 1.5kWh battery pack, to produce a combined output of roughly 150bhp.

Unlike a traditional hybrid vehicle, a series hybrid or range extender employs the ICE power plant as a generator to charge the battery and also to run the motor. In other words, the petrol or diesel mill is used as an APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) and does not directly drive the wheels. Nissans e-Power range of products can also run on full-electric mode.

Cosmetic changes include full-LED swept-back headlamps and wrap-around tail lamps. It rides on bigger five-spoke wheels and showcases significant upgrades in terms of interior equipment and material quality. At the moment, it is unsure whether it will come in the same format in global markets. It was only recently that Nissan shared its plans to exit Europe to concentrate on markets such as the US, China and Japan.

Another detail worth noting is that the new Thai-spec Nissan Kicks continues to wear the current Nissan badge and not the new logo one that was revealed earlier in the year. While the Thailand market receives a major revamp, the upcoming India-spec Nissan Kicks BS6 is aesthetically identical to its BS4 counterpart. There will be two four-cylinder petrol engine choices: HR13 1.3 turbo and H4K NA. The former makes 154bhp and 254Nm (highest in its class) while the latter is good for 105bhp and 142Nm. Transmission choices include a 6-speed manual or 8-step CVT and a 5-speed manual, respectively. In India, the Nissan Kicks replaces the Terrano.

Source
Maruti Celerios replacement and the new 800cc model, which could possibly replace the Alto  will be priced under Rs 5 lakh

Maruti Suzuki has announced that it will be launching two new products on the Indian market; the first one being the replacement for the Celerio. It is expected to hit the market this Diwali 2020. Set to be priced below Rs 5 lakh, the new budget Maruti Suzuki models (probably hatchbacks) will come with 1.0-litre and 800cc engines, respectively.

At an official event held in Mumbai, Kenichi Ayukawa, MD & CEO of Maruti Suzuki, told Economic Times that the company is working on an 800cc small car alongside various other products. He stated that the challenges in developing a small car primarily revolve around keeping the costs low. Furthermore, it has to meet all the latest safety and emission norms. In effect, this would bring the base price up by 10% over that of the current BS4 scenario.

Ayukawa also believes that the Indian automotive market has a high demand from rural sub-markets and affordability is the way to go forward. Maruti Suzuki currently commands a market share of more than 50% and a good majority of the sales are contributed by budget products such as the Alto. The company has had some rough times in 2019, but still leads on the sales chart by a strong margin from its closest rival, Hyundai India.

The 1.0-litre compact car is internally codenamed YNC. As per rumours, it will replace the Maruti Celerio which comes in both 1.0-litre and 1.2-litre avatars. On the other hand, the 800cc car is dubbed as Y0M and it is worth the wait to see if it will be the replacement to the evergreen Maruti Alto. It will make its debut only in Diwali 2021.

Interestingly, major brands such as Hyundai and Tata Motors have shifted their focus away from the budget or sub-5-lakh-rupee vehicle segment. Apparently, the increased cost to comply with the updated set of rules and regulations would make budget cars a lot less viable.

However, Maruti Suzuki has decided to go forward with their expertise in making decent products in the entry-level segment. Compared to its competitors, the company may not be making the best products higher up on the price ladder even though the monthly sales figures tell a different story. Maruti Suzuki is arguably the best choice when it comes to budget cars.

As per the latest data, the market for small cars is shrinking at an alarming pace. The segment accounts for less than 8% in 2020 on the Indian automotive market in comparison to around 25%, a decade ago in 2010. Maruti Suzuki has always been the go-to choice for average Indian buyers when it comes to driving home their first car, particularly in the sub-5-lakh price category.

Source
Micheiln launched new tyres called ENERGY XM2+ which is a successor to the ENERGY XM2. We were in Chennai recently to test these new tyres.

Unlike the predecessor, the new tyre has a lot to boast about, and Michelin couldnt have done it more literally. The USP of the ENERGY XM2 plus is its consistency in the road grip throughout its life of several thousand kilometres. When we say grip, it means the general road holding capability while driving on various practical road conditions, and also the braking performance.

While handling is a quite subjective concept which cant be demonstrated on a first person basis among so many journalists or prospective customers, braking quite definitely could be, and thats what Michelin did with us to outright prove how true the new tyres are to the marketing slogans.

Its very simple, Michelin took us to a safety controlled track, where the road is wet, and made us brake with full force on the wet road, and made us realise the amount of confidence and grip this new tyre had. How do we say its so much better than other tyres? They also let us do the same test on the same kind of car with competitor tyres, the Bridgestone B290, on the same wet road.

But thats not the catch yet. Remember the USP, grip as good as new even at end of tyre life; now picture those tests happening at almost completely worn out tyres, in both cases, the Michelin and the Bridgestone! Thats how cool and confidently they proved their new tyres worth to us journalists who tirelessly look for ways to pull their legs and returned surprised.

Both cars were Maruti Swift diesel, of similar mileage on the odometer, exact same model, just with different tyres, the ENERGY XM2+ and the Bridgestone B290, in the same end of life condition with 1.5 mm tread depth, and at same tyre pressure which is the OEM recommended pressure mentioned near the driver side door of the vehicle. It doesnt get fairer than that.

The test track in question, was the WABCO Proving Ground near Chennai, which is sort of the go to place for car companies, tyre companies, brake system development companies and other vehicle technology and service providers go, to put their work to test before they proceed to homologation. So even the track where we did the test on the Michelin XM2+ was beyond legit.

So in all credibility, we declare that the Swift with the Michelin XM2 plus tyres stopped almost 3.3 metres ahead of the other car, on wet road, which is roughly 10 feet quicker, which is way more than the difference between getting home and getting to the hospital, in case of an unfortunate situation ahead of the car.

Please note that we did the full force panic braking on both cars at 100 kmph on the wet road, and the cars already had ABS working at maximum effort. And since we could feel the ABS pulsating clearly on the brake pedal on both cars, we know for sure that the base brake system was in good condition, in case if anybody was wondering if the brake system was rigged to fabricate a desired outcome.

Michelin claims that in ideal driving conditions, the tyres would last up to 1,20,000 km, which is somewhat an average lifetime that a single owner would use the car for, and hence they state that the new ENERGY XM2plus lasts a lifetime. They also called these tyres, the fit and forget type.

So, bottom line, the Michelin XM2 plus tyres have a better grip, throughout its life till the time it is to be replaced, and they last longer than most tyres out there. Isnt that the ultimate goal for a tyre manufacturer, and for the car owners as well? The company showed various graphs and charts detailing the numerous statistics of tests, life, performance, braking results, etc., which can be seen first hand in the image gallery below. We have conveyed the crisp version in the text so far.

The Michelin ENERGY XM2+ will be available from this month (January, 2020) across all Michelin dealerships in India, phase-wise probably. So far this model is meant for, rather first launched for aftermarket replacement, and Michelin is working on deals getting this tyre to be factory fitted on popular cars. The XM2+ will be available in 30 different sizes, fitting 12- to 16-inch wheels, meaning itll be available for most of the cars plying on roads in India, starting with A-segment hatchbacks like the Maruti Alto, to C-segment sedans and Crossover SUVs too namely the Honda City and Hyundai Creta respectively. The starting price of a single Michelin XM2+ tyre is Rs. 5,090 which would be the smallest size. This is a tiny bit pricey compared to the alternates youll find on the shelves of various tyre dealers, but considering the testimony above, the price should seem more than justified.

Disclaimer  For this review, Michelin India invited and hosted us at Chennai. They paid for our travel, stay and food.
Iranian news agencies reported Wednesday that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is accused of taking part in media and intelligence projects aimed at causing the "soft toppling of the Islamic Republic."

A British-Iranian woman being detained in Iran has been charged with attempting to overthrow the country's government.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 37, was arrested at Tehran Airport on April 3 as she prepared to leave the country with her daughter after visiting family in Iran. The statement from the Guards said she is now being held at a prison in southeastern Kerman province.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe is an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable branch of the news agency.

Iran does not recognize dual citizenship and if Zaghari-Ratcliffe is put on trial, she will be considered an Iranian.
Elderly drivers are more prone to accidents involving illegal lane crossings, while novice drivers cause more collisions, according to the Korea Transport Institute.

The institute analyzed 5,348 traffic accidents between 2011 and 2013 involving damage to people. Drivers aged 60 or above were more prone to accidents like driving on the wrong side and turning at intersections.

A KOTI spokesman said, "Elderly drivers are less able to judge distances between objects and often swerve too sharply."

But novice drivers are more prone to collisions during lane changes or rear-ending other cars at traffic lights.

"Novice drivers are not adept at maneuvering their cars and inexperienced in making swift decisions behind the wheel, and they get into accidents while speeding," the spokesman said.
Millennial Moms Review: 2022 Acura MDX is pretty close to the perfect family car

I dont know if perfect is attainable, especially considering weve got the world of options when it comes to modern vehicles. Were spoiled and, as such, we have very specific needs and wants. Driving-wise, the 2022 Acura MDX is one of my favourite ...
By SA Commercial Prop News

Graphic showing the epicentre of the magnitude 5.3 earthquake which struck South Africa, claimimg at least one life in Orkney North West. Image gallery



An earthquake shook buildings in South Africas biggest cities and most populous province on Tuesday, claimimg at least one life in a mining town of Orkney in the countrys North West province.

Tremors were felt in various parts of the country shortly after 12 p.m, shaking buildings, rattling windows and resulting in building evacuations.

The quake, one of South Africas largest magnitude earthquakes in the past decade, was felt as far Mozambique and Botswana.

The Council for Geoscience said its epicentre was in the Orkney region in North West province, after the United States Geological Survey earlier reported it being a 5.3-magnitude quake.

"It occurred in the Stilfontein, Klerksdorp and Orkney region (in the North West) and it was quite widely felt as far as the Eastern Cape," said the Council for Geosciences Michelle Grobbelaar.

The magnitude earthquake centered 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from the town of Orkney, the U.S. Geological Survey said. A 31 year-old male was found dead beneath some rubble after a wall fell on him, Luyanda Majija, spokeswoman for emergency services ER24, said by phone from Johannesburg.

Schools in Orkney were damaged while AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. (ANG), the worlds third-biggest gold miner, evacuated about 3,300 people from two of its mines in the area. The Johannesburg-based company said 21 employees were being treated for minor injuries.

Grobbelaar said more tremors, aftershocks and possibly a second quake of the same magnitude were expected in the coming days, but it was unknown when.

The area around Johannesburg and to its south is home to some of the deepest gold mines in the world.

Reports of buildings being evacuated in Johannesburg, Durban and other cities were also seen on Twitter.

A handout community intensity map image made available by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center showing the area of the 5.3 magnitude earthquake centred on Orkney, South Africa.
China on Tuesday banned the sale to North Korea of about 40 goods and technologies that could be used to make nuclear weapons and missiles.

The move came two months after Beijing banned trade of 25 goods like iron ore, coal and aviation fuel after the UN Security Council adopted sanctions against the North on March 2.

The ban delivers a clear message to Washington, which has doubted China is serious about taking action against the North following a visit from former North Korean foreign minister Ri Su-yong to Beijing.

The 40 banned goods and technologies are so-called dual-use items that also have a harmless civilian application but can be used to make nuclear and biochemical weapons and missiles.

Twelve can be diverted for developing nuclear weapons and missiles. They include magnetic alloy materials, high-strength aluminum alloy, filament and microfilament, coil winding machines, laser welding equipment, plasma cutters, and metallic hydrogen compounds.

Also on the list are 14 chemical materials like aluminum chloride, sulfur trioxide, and tributylamine that can be used to make biochemical weapons, and lab equipment such as chemical reactors, cooler condensers, pumps, valves and distillers.

In early March, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution banning trade of coal, iron ores, and aviation fuel with the North in response to its fourth nuclear test in January. The dual-use items were added in April.

The U.S. State Department welcomed Beijing's latest action. "The United States and China agree on the fundamental importance of a denuclearized North Korea, and we welcomed China's agreement on the strongest sanctions the Security Council has imposed in a generation," said spokeswoman Anna Richey-Allen.

"Chinese officials have made clear that they intend to implement the resolution. These measures appear to be a step toward following through on those commitments."
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The technology of Chinese smartphones is starting to overtake market leaders. They are rolling out smartphones with groundbreaking features to grab a bigger slice of the premium market dominated by Samsung and Apple.

Lenovo last Thursday unveiled the world's first bendable smartphone and tablet PC in San Francisco. It is hoping to start commercial production early next year.

Lenovo is on a newly powerful position because it acquired Motorola of the U.S. last year.

Samsung is developing a smartphone with similar traits but has yet to roll out even a prototype.

Now Chinese smartphone makers also use new software and core components faster than any other leading player. Chinese firm LeEco is expected to be the first in the world to roll out a smartphone that can use Google's Daydream virtual reality platform.

LeEco was also the first in the world early this year to release a smartphone with Qualcomm's cutting-edge Snapdragon 820 processor. The company started out as a video contents business but is now expanding into smartphones and TV sets.

Chinese companies are industry leaders when it comes to adopting high-capacity processors that can speed up smart devices. Increased memory enables smartphones to run several applications quickly and simultaneously.

Vivo was the first in the world to roll out a smartphone with 6 GB memory capacity in March of this year, and Lenovo and OnePlus also followed suit.

Apple's smartphones have only 2 GB, while Samsung's Galaxy S7 released in March has 4 GB. Samsung plans to launch 6 GB memory phones in the second half of this year.

Eight out of the top 12 smartphone makers in terms of sales in the first quarter of this year were Chinese. And now their sales are soaring not only due to cheap price tags but also due to increased recognition for quality and technology.

Their smartphones are selling well not only in China but in Southeast Asia, while Huawei, the world's No. 1 manufacturer of communications equipment, had hit products in Europe.

But critics say that the new technologies are merely gimmicks and do not signify a radical shift in the industry paradigm.

"The bendable smartphone will not be mass produced right away," an industry insider said. "It remains to be seen whether other functions will be enough to entice consumers."

Lee Jeong-dong at Seoul National University said, "Chinese smartphone makers have not fully overtaken their Korean rivals, but they're definitely developing new technologies faster. Korean smartphone makers need to maintain their lead by developing new components and innovative materials."
Here's who is on the ballot in Saline County

Advance, in-office voting is underway in Saline County, as voters in the 2022 general election have several options on who and what to vote for.
The new Chief Executive Officer of the Samoa Ports Authority (S.P.A), Aiganalaavasa Asofa Fereti, addressed a number of questions from members of the business community on Monday evening.

The opportunity came about during the Samoa Chamber of Commerces monthly members meeting at the Tanoa Tusitala Conference Center.

The meeting was made possible with the kind assistance of the F.A.O Office in Samoa.

The Samoa Ports Authority was invited to address the ongoing issues and queries highlighted by the members of the Chamber with regards to inter-agency communication, time-frame to clear containers, plug in and wharfage charges, bio-security and sea container hygiene, allocation of wharf space as well as the ports expansion initiatives.

Aiganalaavasa assured the business community that their focus is on improving service delivery. S.P.A has taken all these issues on board to help improve their service delivery, emphasizing the need for all implementing agencies pertaining to shipping and cargo services to be more cohesive, he said.

The expansion of our ports is also expected to reduce congestion and delays in ports processing that would benefit our local business community.

Fiasili Lam, Assistant Food Agricultural Organizations (F.A.O) Representative, highlighted their mission in achieving the sustainable development goals, with emphasis on Achieving Food Security for All and the Private sectors role in achieving food security for all of Samoa.

Mrs. Lam also commended the Samoa Chamber of Commerce and Industry as a key partner in the implementation of F.A.Os local projects. Two new members were introduced and they were Pasefika Inn and Small Business Association of Samoan Cultural Arts and Handicrafts.

The Samoa Chamber of Commerce & Industry Inc. as the National Private Sector Organisation (NPSO) is funded by the Pacific Leadership Program (PLP).
Donating blood can save a life.

With that thought in mind, members of the public lined up at the ANZ Bank on Tuesday to donate blood as part of the local commemoration of the World Blood Donor Day (W.B.D.D).

The blood drive was organised by the ANZ Bank with the help of Samoa Red Cross Society and the National Health Services.

The event was guided by the theme Blood connects us all.

Brenda Koon-Wai-You, of the Samoa Red Cross Society, said the turnout was great.

A lot of people turned up today willing to donate blood, she said.

Some of them werent able to do so because they couldnt meet the criterias required for donors.

Most of those who showed up for the blood drive are the regular donors that have donated blood over the years. Many of them were new donors as well which proves that more and more people are aware of the importance of this initiative.

The W.B.D.D was not only celebrated in Apia.

The same activity was held in Savaii.

This is a very important event, said Ms. Koon Wai You.

Many people suffer from the loss of blood and the blood donated today may save more than two lives tomorrow. And we are very grateful to the people who came in today and donated blood.

I am also grateful to the people who showed up but werent able to donate. Its the thought that counts.

Iherena Ulumani, a medical lab technician from the National Health Service said there has been a lot of improvement in the process of the blood drive over the years.

More and more people are now aware of how this process is done, she said.

Over the years, the number of donors keeps increasing as well. This shows that people have come to realise how important this is.

And the good thing about this is they willingly offer to donate without anyone forcing them to do so. They are here on their own free will and that shows that they want to help others for free.

In March, the ANZ Bank also hosted a blood drive in collaboration with the Samoa Red Cross and the National Health Service.

That helped create awareness for this weeks event.

No one knows what will happen tomorrow, Iherena Ulumani said. Donating blood is no different from investing money for the future. You never know what will happen. Who knows maybe the blood you donate today will save the lives of your loved ones, or yourself in the future?

Weve had a number of foreigners coming in as well wanting to donate blood, and we are grateful to them for having the heart for our people.
The headline on the front page of the Samoa Observer on 8 June 2016, reads: P.M. Tuilaepa demands honesty and integrity.

Just below it, is Tuilaepas photo showing him clad in a blue shirt, he is standing behind the podium speaking into the microphone, and he is delivering an address.

That address of his, as the front page story will soon reveal is directed at elected government leaders and public servants, warning them:

Each and every Samoan has the right to expect their elected leaders to remain ethical and honest, in return for paying their taxes.

They place their trust in you as the pubic sector, to make the right decision that will not in any way harm their livelihoods.

Tuilaepa continued: There is nothing more valuable than the principles of honesty and integrity.

The price of dishonest and unethical behavior is paid for by the average citizen. Because every cent you misuse and misappropriate contributes to a bigger problem, which ultimately affects the life of the ordinary person.

Now who is this man?

In one breath hes condescending, arrogant and foul-mouthed, and in the next hes caring, considerate, loving.

Listen to him: Less money trickles down to the village school that is in need of more books and teachers; or to our public hospital that needs more doctors and resources; or to improve the quality of our roads, particularly for our rural communities.

Now seriously, what kind of joker is this man? Is he real?

Were asking these questions because just five days later - on 13 June that was  Prime Minister Tuilaepa had changed so dramatically he was now a totally different person.

It all began when the governments Savali Newspaper sent the Samoa Observer a copy of an interview it had conducted with its boss, Tuilaepa.

Later, the Observer published the entire interview unedited, and almost right away a brand-new Tuilaepa emerged.

This time he was arrogant, condescending and above all, he sounded so spitefully vengeful it was scary.

Listen to what he said: Perhaps its because the HRPP has recently made history with its landslide victory in our general elections, and some old dogs still have a bone to pick about that.

But with old dogs, their bark is usually worse than their bite.

Oh, is that so?

He certainly has a way with words this joker, our dear prime minister.

Where else in the world would a leader of a country founded on God insist on injecting the fear of the devil in everyone?

Listen to his next words: Now that we have no more opposition party, maybe the Observer has decided to take on the role themselves, and keep the tradition of barking up the wrong tree.

Well now, that hurts.

And then as if he truly doesnt care, hes saying: But with old dogs, their bark is usually worse than their bite.

Oh, is that so?

Now we know. But then he needs not worry.

Let him be assured therefore that as a newspaper, the Samoa Observer is the proverbial watchdog of the government, for the public interest that is.

And that is the only role it feels duty-bound to play.

Besides, it does not bark, nor does it bite.

Still, Tuilaepa is not finished with his attack, and this time hes becoming an idiot, as hes saying: Sano should check his facts before he starts to write about issues that he has obviously forgotten.

Now that truly hurts. What does he know about facts when all he does is distort facts?

Did he not know that the person hes talking about does not forget anything, since hes built never to forget?

In fact, he talks only facts. And facts never lie.

Poor Tuilaepa!

He said: All in all, these wasteful tales from Sano these past few weeks can be summed up in two letters  BS.

Well then, if thats the acronym for BULLSHIT, then surely its time now for Prime Minister Tuilaepa to be thrown in the dungeon, and then throw away the key.

What is going on with this man anyway? Will he ever be satisfied with anything any more? It looks as if now that he is so powerful he can just about break anyone apart hes become a lousy chameleon, and a pretty crafty one at that too.

So lets go back to 10 April 2016.

That was when the Samoa Observer - during the performance of its duty as the watchdog of the government in the public interest - published on its front page the story titled: P.M. unaware of the diplomats role in Mossack Fontesca.

In that story, he denied having any knowledge that his government was involved in the Mossack Fonseca scandal that  at the time - was rocking the financial world to its knees.

I dont understand it, he said. I need to know the context.

And yet, it later turned out that Samoas High Commission in Australia had routinely assisted Mossack Fonseca, in creating shell companies.

Did he not know about that too?

In fact, one of those shell companies later faced sanctions for supplying goods to the Syrian government and military; the details are part of the Panama Paper leak, which is now making international headlines.

At the time, the Governor of the Central Bank of Samoa, Maiava Atalina Ainuu Enari, could not be reached for a comment.

Questions sent to her email as the head of Samoas Money Laundering Prevention Authority, were somehow not responded to.

And yet, Samoas connection with Mossack Fonseca, at the time, was indisputable; in fact, it had already been established that Mossack Fonseca had an office in Samoas High Commission in Canberra.

At that time also, that office was assisting with the forwarding of documents for the creation of shell companies to other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.

One report said the Samoan High Commissioner had made known in a statement that she was not aware of any instances, where documents had been received from Mossack Fonseca for legalization.

Later still, a report said some documents had been forwarded for processing only to foreign authorities.

And then in an email dated 16 April 2013 from Mossack Fonsecas Samoan office in Australia, the details of the process being used to send documents from there to UAE, were spelt out.

Wrote a Mossack Fonseca employee:

We had forwarded on 15 March 2013 to the Samoa High Commission a Certificate of Good Standing for the above company, for authentication by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, and then to be forwarded to the UAE embassy for further endorsement.

The reports went on to say that last month, Samoas Money Laundering Prevention Authority issued a warning to professional money launderers, and international money launderers who may be using Samoa as a stage in their dealings.

And then Maiava, in a media statement issued by the Central Bank, said: One professional money launderer can move tens, or hundreds of millions of tala out of, or through Samoa in a matter of minutes.

It is these people we must, and will, shut down to reduce the harm caused to Samoans by money laundering, and the crimes that generate laundered funds such as drug crime, corruption, tax evasion, fraud, scams and extortion.

Did Maiava warn her boss, Prime Minister Tuilaepa, about what was going on at the Central Bank of Samoa, right here in Apia?

We dont know. Neither does the public.

All we know is that the warning from Maiava came at the time when Samoas Financial Intelligence Unit (F.I.U), started the first of a series of operations to identify, and address some of the challenges raised in a report by an international team into Samoas efforts to address money laundering.

The Financial Intelligence Unit knows that most entities that will be examined under this operation are doing the right thing, but it is that 1% that are operating outside the law that are on notice.

Incidentally, money laundering is the process of trying to make illegally-obtained money look like it came from a legal source.

Money laundering goes on, to a greater or lesser extent, in all countries in the world.

The work being done by the F.I.U is to ensure that the protection of Samoas financial institutions and systems are absolutely water-tight and adaptable in order to keep up to date with ever changing circumstances in the money laundering arena.

The operation is focused on professional money launderers in Samoa, as well as international money launderers who may be using Samoa as a stage in their money laundering processes.

International experience has shown that professional money launderers are more likely to be found in industries such as lawyers, accountants, real estate agents and bankers, as well as financial sectors that commonly handle large amounts of cash, or that can move funds internationally as part of their legitimate business.

The F.I.U has a range of powers and sanctions to address this issue through enforcement of the anti-money laundering legislation, which it expects it may have to exercise for the first time over the coming months.

The question then is: With all this information available from the office of Samoas High Commissioner in Australia, why is it that Prime Minister Tuilaepa, did not know anything?

Indeed, why is it that he had not been informed so that like someone who had no interest in these things - or that he had been deliberately shut out for whatever reason - did not know anything to the point that all he could say, was: I dont understand it. I need to know the context.

Stay tuned.
To provide A.P.T.C students with opportunities to auxiliary widen their vocational, employment and life goals was the main focus of the Work Skills Forum that was held yesterday at the N.U.S Fale.

It intends to prepare graduates with the ability and understanding to start a small business utilising occupational expertise attained or through hidden talents recognized during training.

It supports the apprentice in their profession preparation and develops their employability skills.

The Forum complements the work skills programme that is delivered throughout the semester as a response to skill needs of local industries and to prepare the students in their transition back to their work places.

Throughout the presentations from the special guests, students will engage with employers on expectations from A.P.T.C graduates when returning to work.

The forum was divided into two phases, the continuity of the A.P.T.C to Work End of the Course Forum and the Introduction of the Small Business Workshop.

A.P.T.C invited not only representatives of the industries of courses offered at the A.P.T.C to share their employer perspectives with the students, but business related organisations and individuals to share their views and services in operating small business.

The aim is for these representatives to indicate additional, rational and harmonizing information to what was delivered in the work skills programme.

Various speakers covered a range of areas and offered advice to students in preparing them in their transition back to work and address any inquires on employment expectations and self-employment.

The A.P.T.C students will benefit from this enormously.

It will greatly enhance the work skills of the graduates and provide them with the skills and knowledge that the industry expects them to get back in the workplace.

Furthermore, it will also present them with the assurance to set up their own businesses if they choose this path of employment.

The graduates could also go and operate successful small enterprises in the future.

This in turn will produce employment and produce profits for the general nation.

In addition to their vocational training, A.P.T.C also reinforces the learners journey in providing pathways for returning to employment, new employment, self employment, voluntary work and future learning post A.P.T.C.

The programme is delivered throughout the semester alongside vocational training with work orientated areas including an overview of the Australian Core Skills Framework.

This forum will not only engage the student with industry representative but provide them with an opportunity to venture into self-employment at the completion of their vocational studies.
Director General, Shan Jiang of the Department of American and Oceanian Affairs Ministry of Commerce in China met with several representatives of the Pacific Media (details on Wednesdays issue of the Samoa Observer) at the MOFCOM head quarters in Beijing on Monday Morning.

The visit aimed at creating a better economic understanding on relations between China and the South Pacific.

Mr. Jiang shared a brief history of trade with the Pacific before giving some advice on how to strengthen the economic relations with China.

Talking about trade in general, after a lot of work Chinas foreign trade reached about USD$4trillion, he said.

We are now the number one in terms of trade in the world.

In regards with the Pacific we had very little trade with you 30 years ago because we didnt have much to trade with you and vise versa.

In 2006 however we launched something called Chinas Pacific Islands Countries Economic Forum in Nadi Fiji.

This was the first ever Forum of the sort conducted with the Pacific Islands; we had an in depth discussion on how we were going to develop trade between our countries.

Since then we have had many more Chinese companies visiting the Island nations to develop better trade.

Mr. Jiang stated that the Chinese market is open to all sorts of Pacific products, but the only problem is that China does not know what is offered to them.

Right now China is open to more trade with the Pacific such as seafood products, he said.

Both China and the Pacific needs to do some homework in order to develop more trade; on your side you need to do more promotion on what products you have for trade because our consumption is very good here.

China produces large varieties of products so if you produce something similar then you need to promote how good it is and why we should choose yours instead.

Take Fiji water for example; China produces a lot of its own bottled water but since it (Fiji Water) was promoted well we have now provided a good market for it here in China.

According to Mr. Jiang, one of the biggest markets that China is exploring in the Pacific is tourism, and that is where a lot of promotion should be focused at.

In recent years we have seen more and more Chinese tourists visiting the Island nations, he said.

Tourism is a perfect market that can benefit the Pacific greatly, if you do not enjoy your own scenery then let us share.

Promoting your country as a safe and beautiful place to visit will help your nations economy bloom.

When they are there and see business opportunities then they can use their wisdom to import products.
As Samoa Observer reported recently, the emergency service provided by Samoa Helicopters, currently under the ownership of pilot Mr Rodger McCutcheon, is not operating at the moment.

Rumours appeared, stating that the helicopter had to be returned to New Zealand due to safety reasons or that the service simply stopped working in Samoa.

Now, Mr McCutcheon has responded to these rumours, rejecting them as rubbish and assuring that things are progressing well for the Samoa Helicopters operation.

McCutcheon further explained: In the first two months of operation, it became clear we need to focus on a funded emergency services helicopter so this is what I'm working hard on at present.

Rodger McCutcheon, who is in New Zealand at the moment, stated that the helicopter is going through a change of ownership, it will be owned and registered in Samoa and will be flown by New Zealand pilots and Samoan paramedics.

Even though this will mean a change in personnel for the company that had only started in late April this year, Mr McCutcheon assured Samoa Observer that there is no question [Samoa Helicopters] will be back flying and ready for emergencies as requested.

He also pointed out that although the public could only reach the companys mailbox during the last two weeks, the medical authorities in Samoa were informed about the absence of Samoa Helicopters in advance: The hospital team are aware we are refocusing and will be available once the ownership has been finalized.

However, Rodger McCutcheon was not able to tell the exact date of return for the emergency service provided by the company.
The Police Commissioner Fuiavailili Egon Keil has confirmed that the escaped prisoner Valufitu Fiu Uolilo who flew out of the country a year ago has been found and is being detained in Australia.

Uolilo was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment for causing actual bodily harm and armed with a dangerous weapon.

Fuiavailili said the convicted prisoner was found six months ago and he did not elaborate where Mr Uolilo was found.

He is going through a legal process in Australia and they had to decide whether to deport him back or keep him there, said Fuiavailili.

He said he is not familiar with the Justice System in Australia but they are hoping that the accused will be returned home to serve the rest of his penalty at Tafaigata.

Fuiavailili told the Samoa Observer yesterday that the process could take months and years and they are waiting patiently for his return.

In the meantime the Transnational Crimes Unit is in contact with the Australian Federal police on the updates of Mr Uolilos case in Australia.

The police commissioner believed that the Government of Australia are terrific and they did a great thing.

I dont know why someone would want to keep a criminal there especially an escaped prisoner, I would rather have that person out of my country as well but thats their opinion. They are going to do what they need to do, added Fuiavailili.

We did the best we can and we do with the resources we have. We are just going to hang tight until we hear anything else from Australia.

Fuiavailili also thanked the Australian Government and their law enforcement for playing thier part and they are still cooperating with them on the legal framework.

We thanked the Australian Government and their law enforcement on doing their side of the job but we are still trying to work with them in the legal framework of everything else.

Fuiavailili did not confirm when Mr Uolilo will be transferred to Samoa as they are still waiting for the Australian Federal Police for an update.
The European Union and Government of Samoa sign a new Agreement for 20.2 million/SAT 58 million in Water and Sanitation

The European Union (EU) and the Government of Samoa have signed a Financing Agreement for a value of SAT 58 million (20.2 million) on the occasion of the Prime Minister attending the European Development Day summit in Brussels.

The Agreement was signed by the Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi and the European Union Commissioner for International Cooperation & Development Mr. Neven Mimica on Wednesday the 15th of June.

Commenting on the signing of the Financing Agreement, the European Union Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development Neven Mimica said: "I am proud to sign today an agreement for the continuation of our cooperation with Samoa in Water and Sanitation.

We have worked closely with the country for the last decade and have seen very positive results.

We now look forward to the country maintaining this high level of achievement and continue to help deliver clean water to a growing number of Samoans."

The Hon Prime Minister of Samoa acknowledged with appreciation the continuing support of the European Union to this sector;  Water is life particularly for small island countries in the frontlines of climate change.

We acknowledge with appreciation the continuing support of the EU which has not only helped leverage other assistance for the sector but also encouraged improved sustainable management practices.

The purpose of the agreement is to provide financial assistance to Samoa to support the implementation of the Samoa water and sanitation policy of "Reliable, clean, affordable water and basic sanitation within the framework of Integrated Water Resources Management, for all the people in Samoa to sustain health improvements and alleviate poverty".

The action will focus notably on policy elements which are highly relevant to Climate Change adaptation such as watershed management plans, community extension services within critical watershed areas and the development of an early flood warning system. Ultimately the initiative will contribute to strengthen the Sector Governance, improve Watershed Management and increase access to Clean, Reliable and Affordable Water for all Samoans.

In line with the principles of Aid Effectiveness, the responsibility for implementation of the initiative is entirely with the Government of Samoa. The programme will put some emphasis on specific policy areas such as the collection efficiency for domestic customers, the reduction in urban Apia Non-Revenue Water or the improvement in the water quality for Urban Apia Samoan Water Authority treated reticulated systems among others.

With the implementation modality being Budget Support, disbursements will also be linked to Samoa's general performance in maintaining macroeconomic stability, strengthening its Public Finance Management systems as well as the implementation of the Water & Sanitation Sector Plan.

Background

The water and sanitation sector has been identified as a national priority under the current Strategy for Development of Samoa (2012-2016), highlighting the impacts of climate change on the water sector and the need to focus on adaptation strategies. The EU "Water & Sanitation Sector and Climate Change Adaptation Support Programme" aims to support the Samoan Government's Water for Life Sector Plan 2012  2016" and it's successor with the purpose of providing reliable, clean and affordable water and basic sanitation for all the people of Samoa to sustain public health improvements and alleviate hardship particularly of vulnerable groups.

Delegation of the European Union to the Pacific




Country

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Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
Open your eyes

My wife and I are retired in Pennsylvania and just finished a 10-day tour of New Mexico. It is truly the Land of Enchantment. We loved visiting as tourists this magnificent land. The same cannot be said about a significant portion of the people in New Mexico.

It is a land filled with radical feminists, angry Indians, and illegal Mexicans. We were verbally attacked twice in Santa Fe simply because we are Christian conservatives and hold a different political point of view. We were forced to keep our mouths shut for fear of physical reprisals. In Taos, we both got a massage. I told the masseuse about our encounters in Santa Fe and that we support Trump. Her exact words to me were to keep our mouths shut because we would be physically attacked. How true her words were.

We returned to Albuquerque to fly home the night after the Trump rally. The so-called political protesters showed their true color by rioting, burning autos, stoning police, and threatening physical harm to Trump supporters. We didnt attend the rally but were scared. What a disgrace to such a beautiful state! I hope this letter opens some eyes of reasonable New Mexico residents. If you want tourists to visit your city and state, something needs to be done.

William R. Strong

Oil City, Pa.
Oklahoma City, OK -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/16/2016 -- Oklahoma Heart Hospital in Oklahoma City currently has a job listing available for cath lab nurses. Those who are hired into this position will be responsible for direct patient care in this department as well as other areas of the Hospital when needed. All cath lab nurses must demonstrate knowledge and adherence to both federal and state regulations. These nurses must also be able to monitor, scrub and/or circulate on all Cath Lab procedures, including Electro physiology, Pacemaker and AICD insertions.



Cath lab nurses that work at Oklahoma Heart Hospital will have to operate all equipment efficiently in this department, including hemodynamic monitoring, blood analysis, cine projector, intra-aortic balloon pump, injectors, cautery, electro physiology and ablation equipment, pacemaker, defibrillator and all other equipment that is used in the Cath Lab.



These nurses will be expected to trouble shoot and assess equipment failure and provide a backup plan when one is needed. Cath lab nurses must ensure that all supplies are readily available as needed for every single patient.



There are a number of different requirements for the Cath Lab nursing position, including that all applicants must have graduated from an accredited nursing program. With regards to licensure/certification, all applicants must be a registered nurse with current state licensure, ACLS within 18 months hire and current BLS certification required, though CCRN is preferred. A minimum of one year continuous experience in a cath lab as well as previous critical care experience is preferred.



There are a number of benefits that nurses who work for Oklahoma Heart Hospital will enjoy, including health benefits that consist of Medical, Pharmacy, Dental, Vision and Flexible Spending Accounts. All nurses begin receiving full benefits as soon as they are hired. The hospital's medical plan allows you to see a specialist without a referral from a primary doctor as well.



Those who are hired into Oklahoma Heart Hospital as nurses will have access to Health and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account Plans well as voluntary Dental and Vision Plans, so you can see any doctor without being limited to a network. Many people apply for open positions at Oklahoma Heart Hospital because of the excellent working conditions and many benefits that come along with being hired in. Those who are interested in being a Cath Lab nurse can apply for the position on the hospital's website by uploading their resume.



About The Oklahoma Heart Hospital

The Oklahoma Heart Hospital is a physician-owned hospital and was designed by cardiologists to bring exceptional care directly to those who need it the most. OHH is the first of its kind in Oklahoma and the first all-digital hospital in the United States. OHH has two locations in Oklahoma City, along with a network of more than 70 cardiovascular specialists at more than 60 clinic and hospital locations across the state of Oklahoma.



Contact:

Oklahoma Heart Hospital

Address: 5200 Interstate 240 Service Rd, Oklahoma City, OK 73135

Phone: (405) 608-3304

https://www.okheart.com/
Singapore -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/15/2016 -- The pending impact of technology is something that a lot of the world has yet to see as cities are still beginning to transition into the age of "smart" cities. With more home owners looking into smart technologies for their houses, it has brought governments to think about how these technologies can benefit their cities as well. Over the next 4 years there are a variety of cities that are going to transition into smart cities, according to a study conducted by IHS Technology. Just by becoming "smart" cities can get up to $25 billion in opportunities for operators.



With the idea of a smart city, cities are given the opportunity to streamline all of their processes through technological means. This could turn into managed law enforcement, schools, transportation systems, hospitals, water supply networks, power plants, and more. The main objective of any city that is interested in smart technology is to make things easier for citizens and governing organizations. The idea is to provide a better quality of life in order to make services more readily available to residents and to meet their demands.



One great example of how a smart city can improve quality of life is by thinking about monitoring systems. As a smart city, all of the monitoring systems will be in real-time, giving law enforcement agencies the ability to get updated information about any issues in the area. The information will be gathered from various devices and citizens themselves so it can quickly be received, processed, and analyzed. The main purpose is to help get rid of any inefficiencies. A smart city is also a great opportunity for an area to cut back on costs and the amount of resources that they consume on a regular basis.



The most likely cities that will transition to smart cities by 2020 include: Tokyo, London, New York, Chicago, Seoul, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Singapore. At this moment in time there are over 423 independent projects in motion pertaining to mobility, transport, the efficiency of resources and energy, healthcare, governance, and infrastructure around the world. Most cities are putting the majority of their efforts into mobility and transportation, with over 110 projects. 107 projects are dedicated to infrastructure, 104 towards the efficiency of energy and resources, and 13 for the healthcare industry.



If you're a company that is looking for ways to implement smart technology, IHS suggests that you visit either the Asia Pacific or the United States. As the country with the most amount of smart projects at this time, the United States has over 91 different programs currently being developed. Though it is important to note that the Asia-Pacific area is also starting to make their mark on smart city developments. This is mostly as a result of growing populations and the increased desire for urbanism in their cities. Economic growth is another factor that significantly influences the funds that are available to turn into a smart city, and many places in the Asia-Pacific region are experiencing such growth.



About Morris Edwards

Morris Edwards is a content writer at companyregistrationinsingapore.com.sg, he writes different topics like "Types of Companies in Singapore", Doing Business in Singapore and all topics related to Company Registration.



Contact:

Singapore Company Incorporation Consultants Pte Ltd

Telephone: +65 66531211

Address: 10 Anson Road International Plaza #27-15, Singapore 079903

E-mail: info@companyregistrationinsingapore.com.sg

Website: http://www.companyregistrationinsingapore.com.sg
Charleston, SC -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/16/2016 -- Rebatesonrealestate.com, a real property portal that has slowly built trust in buyers and sellers of real properties in Charleston and the whole of South Carolina, recently brought in an exciting cashback offer for buyers and sellers. The owners of the real estate listing portal said that the new cashback offer would work as an added motivation for many prospective buyers and sellers to take property selling and buying decisions quickly. The owners also added that the cashback offer is here to stay for some time, as they want to promote their Charleston real estate listing services by gaining competitive advantage.



"Michael Porter, the famous economist of our time points out that to create competitive advantage, companies should develop more customer-focused marketing and sales strategies. We are following Porter's model in this case as we believe a little sacrifice can really leverage our brand's popularity in a big way. From now on, our associate local real estate agents would give a cashback to each buyer and seller from their commission while working as Exclusive Agents with the buyers or sellers", said Tom Wingard, the marketing head of Rebatesonrealestate.com.



"However, we expect our dear patrons would cooperate with us and we also believe that they won't negotiate with our authorized and highly experienced agents. We are here to assist and arbitrate during the real estate transactions taking place between the buyers and sellers, with authorized agents working as intermediary", added Tom during a press conference where he explained how a buyer can find rebates.



Tom Wingard also informed the local press that their agents are all certified after thorough training and they have been working in the Charleston real estate sector for a couple of years now. He also said that more than 40 US states have already approved the rebate system currently used by them to their buyers and sellers.



He added that the cashback on commission is only available after a real estate transaction is complete through http://rebatesonrealestate.com/



About Rebatesonrealestate.com

Rebatesonrealestate.com is a real property listing portal in Charleston, South Carolina, offering latest MLS data, advanced search and a lot more to potential buyers and sellers of real properties.



Media Contact

Company Name: Rebates on Real Estate

Contact Person: Tom Wingard

Phone: 888-704-0727

Address: Charleston, SC, United States

Website: http://rebatesonrealestate.com/
Salt Lake City, UT -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/16/2016 -- Warehouse Mobile Solutions, the leader in logistics solutions, has installed the newest release of its Tablet Directed, Barcode/Order Fulfillment Solution, WarehouseOS at CampSaver retail stores in Nibley, UT. It will be the first application utilizing the latest version of WarehouseOS, Version 2.0, fully integrated with Monsoon Stone Edge Ecommerce Order Management Software.



Due to CampSaver's rapid sales growth and product expansion it became critical to increase inventory capacities. The option was to expand to an outside facility or find a software product enabling them to maximize storage by combining different items in the same bin location. The implementation of WarehouseOS made this possible as items can now be stored in any location by warehouse personnel, even if there is already a different item in the bin. In addition, actual images of each product are displayed on the tablet screen so pickers can clearly identify the correct product. The need to quickly manage inbound purchase orders and inventory for the on premise retail store with a simple and affordable software solution forced them to move from their current barcode tracking system.



CampSaver.com began in 2003 as a small startup headquartered out of a Utah State University apartment in Logan, UT. The original goal was to create an online destination for outdoor enthusiasts who want to find the best gear at the right price quickly and easily. Today, CampSaver.com employs over 75 people and has grown into a leading online retailer of fine outdoor merchandise.



To read more, go to: http://bit.ly/1U7SKO7



About WarehouseOS

The RF gun, constant verifications, small keypads, and hard to read screens are quickly becoming yesterday's technology. Tablets are replacing the RF gun. WarehouseOS, a new tablet-based Warehouse Operations System brings warehouses into the future today. Warehouse management systems have been around for a long time with too many companies still using the RF gun to conduct inventory management, scan in new items, and pick orders. The RF gun solutions typically cost double what modern solutions offer. WarehouseOS and associated apps have been developed to make everything about the warehouse easier and better. Apps allow small or large companies to receive products, manage inventory, perform cycle counting, conduct single picks or do batch picking, verify items picked and pack them into boxes.



An easy to navigate user interface means warehouse personnel need almost no training before performing warehouse tasks. Receiving, put-away, picking, and packaging quickly become the easiest jobs on the floor. A team of experts in material handling equipment and solutions developed WarehouseOS to maximize the throughput of warehousing and distributing facilities. From small eCommerce, to high volume SKU facilities, from omni-channel companies to FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), WarehouseOS is equipped to handle everything. From small startups with simple needs to complex, large distribution centers, WarehouseOS is the table solution which enables manufacturers and distribution centers to be a step ahead of the competition.



Learn more at http://www.warehousemobilesolutions.com and follow on Twitter @WarehouseOS.
ICTs can help disaster response, so long as they are fully integrated into overall systems, says Nalaka Gunawardene.



When hazards turn into disasters, they challenge even the best prepared societies: history is awash with examples, from the impact of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011, to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. But countries lacking robust disaster management plans can easily become overwhelmed.



Tropical cyclone Roanu  which affected Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka mid-May  highlighted strengths and weaknesses in how these countries cope with hydro-meteorological disasters. [1]



Although it was a relatively weak cyclone, Roanu still brought some of the highest rainfall levels experienced in recent years in southern India and Sri Lanka. It is another example of the extreme weather events associated with climate change.



Sri Lanka was the worst hit  and, as it turned out, also the least prepared to cope with the impacts.



Torrential rains caused the worst floods in over two decades in the densely populated Western Province, destroying or damaging over 5,000 homes and displacing more than 300,000 people. They also led to landslides in hilly areas that buried entire communities. In total, these events killed 104 people and another 99 were missing by May 26. [2]



According to official estimates, between 25,000 and 30,000 businesses were impacted, most of them small enterprises. In a preliminary assessment, the finance ministry placed the economic loss at around US$2 billion, equal to 1.6 per cent of total GDP. [3]



Deadly information blocks



While property damage from rising waters and collapsing hills is unavoidable, loss of lives can be minimised with early warnings and timely evacuations. And after disasters hit, better information sharing can improve the rescue and relief efforts. Technologies can help this endeavour, provided they are integrated into overall systems and anchored in good policies and practices.



There have been glaring gaps on both fronts in Sri Lanka. This has reignited the debate on improving disaster communications.



Post-disaster analyses have faulted government agencies for being ill-prepared and poorly coordinated. For example, survivors in landslide-affected villages have alleged that the authorities had failed to issue any alerts or evacuation warnings.



The onset of Roanu was known several days in advance, and the department of meteorology had cautioned about heavy rains and strong winds. However, location specific warnings were not issued, or did not reach those in immediate danger.



According to media reports, the governments Disaster Management Centre (DMC) was using loudspeakers and megaphones to warn residents at risk from landslides. [4]



The question arises: why rely on one or two such basic methods? In Sri Lanka mobile phone subscriptions outnumber people (116 to every 100 persons), and practically every adult carries a mobile. But government agencies have not yet incorporated ICTs into their warning strategies.



All mobile subscribers in Sri Lanka receive unsolicited text messages (SMS) from their President at the new year and other special occasions. So why was this technology not used to warn people when adverse weather caused havoc, asked The Sunday Times newspaper. [5]



The Colombo-based ICT research organisation LIRNEasia has also been promoting the use of mobile broadcasting for disaster communications: mobile networks are used to deliver text messages simultaneously to multiple users in a specified area. [6]



That telecom companies are willing to play their part was demonstrated when the largest network allowed subscribers to donate money to flood relief through a simple SMS. But only government agencies can issue disaster warnings and evacuation orders  which they did belatedly and patchily in this instance.



As ICT researcher and activist Sanjana Hattotuwa wrote: The DMC needs to urgently upgrade, or shut down. The untenable reliance on antiquated infrastructure and old thinking just adds to any disaster. [7]



The tech is out there, so why not use it?



After the floods and landslides, Sri Lankan society responded with characteristic generosity to help those affected. Frustratingly, though, relief support did not reach some communities while others received too much.



These mismatches could have been avoided if the first responders had used Sahana, a locally designed software system for disaster information management, first developed by Lankan computer professionals in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.



Sahana uses a set of interconnected databases that can be incorporated into a system to manage disaster relief efforts. For example, it can match relief supplies with locations that need them, or track missing persons and compare with those rescued yet separated from loved ones. [8]



Trust is the oil that moves the wheels of law and order, as well as public safety, in the right direction. Nalaka Gunawardene

Since 2005, Sahana has evolved into a global free and open source software project supported by hundreds of volunteer contributors around the world. It has been used by relief agencies responding to sudden-onset disasters in locations as far apart as Haiti, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United States.



For unknown reasons, Sahana has not yet been accepted and implemented in Sri Lanka, says LIRNEasias chair Rohan Samarajiva, who was associated with its early development and promotion.



The disaster management ministry has acknowledged there were gaps in the official response, but its secretary says such lapses were unavoidable during a disaster of this magnitude.



Nevertheless, better management of disaster information is vital for all disaster risk reduction policies and strategies. For Sri Lankas current government, with its public commitment to enhancing governance, it is an imperative.



Disaster response must evolve



Another factor that came into sharp focus during Sri Lankas encounter with Roanu is the importance of public trust in effective early warning systems and post-disaster response.



Trust is the oil that moves the wheels of law and order, as well as public safety, in the right direction.



When people receive warnings but choose to ignore them, it is important to probe why. Is it that they have so many false alarms that they have lost faith in such systems? Do they lack trust in the governments capacity to safeguard private property after evacuation?



In the Kelani River deltaic suburbs of Colombo city, many residents hesitated to evacuate homes as river levels kept rising. The prime minister assured them on television that armed forces and police would protect property, but that did not convince everyone.

People are not sheep to be herded around, albeit in their own interest. Governments need to work on building public trust gradually if their words are to be widely heeded during crises.According to Samarajiva, LIRNEasias research shows that people usually have good reasons for ignoring warnings and orders, so if we want to design effective messages, we have to start from the minds of the recipients. We must practice empathy. [9]Complexity in modern societies is why technological and bureaucratic solutions must be accompanied by sociologically sound approaches.Gone are the days when disaster managers had the last word. As more disaster-affected people use social media to directly express their needs and sentiments, disaster managers have another public platform in which to listen  and engage.Nalaka Gunawardene is a Colombo-based science writer, blogger and development communication consultant. He co-edited Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book in 2007. He tweets from @NalakaG
The galaxy robots, named as Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument will assist researchers accurately locate millions of galaxies, stars and quasars. The project is planned to be installed on the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona on August and September.

These 5,000 arrays of galaxy-seeking robots are managed by 200 scientists and 45 institutions worldwide, Science Daily reported. DESI will produce a 3-D detailed map of the galaxy, which is expected to help in improving knowledge in the structure of the galaxy as well as the dark matter. ProtoDESI's cylindrical robots are integrated with a fabric-optic cable that captures light at the exact location of the object in the night sky. BOSS, DESI'S predecessor requires light-gathering cables that are plugged into metal plates regularly by hand. Holes are drilled to match the selected sky objects in a certain placement. The creation of DESI greatly speeds up this process.

The galaxy robots require precision in spinning to avoid collision as these robot changes position several times to collect light from pre-selected sky objects. This is done by using a software-controlled choreography. This technology is 10 inch long with to small motors that facilitates rotating motions in positioning the fibres in 12 millimetres in diameters orbit, Economic Times reported. DESI robot's primary targets are galaxies while the prototype will use most bright stars to manipulate the system's accurate positioning to track movements of objects in the galaxy.

Parker Fagrelius, the manager of ProtoDESI project at Berkely lab stated that the main goal for this robot is to fix fibres on selected objects and hold it in the exact same position. Reportedly, the 10-robot system is integrated with a set of 16 light emitting rods that projects blue light to calibrate the positioning system onto a camera. The illuminated fiducials will contain 120 devices as the project is completed.

The galaxy robot DESI is expected to be installed in 2018 while ProtoDESI will run tests at Mayall in September during a good weather condition.
United States animal migration has begun. Animals and plants are migrating to an area with a suitable climate condition. However, human activity could delay these transitions. Researchers are finding ways by map to help species escape from the current condition.

The scientists found out that the migrations are impeded by roads, cities, and farms, which produces fragmented landscapes and presents challenges to migrating animals. Due to high temperatures, some species are hundreds of kilometres away from the suitable areas. Climate connectivity has a major role for facilitation of animal movements. A study by Jenny Mcguire, a spatial ecologist stated that the United States is denser and impacted by humans. Few areas are left for species to live through in the east.

US animal migrations were assessed by researchers and found an ice-free corridor that leads to the Rocky Mountains during the Pleistocene period. The connectivity was found to be completely open 13,000 years ago as revealed by radiocarbon dating from bison fossils, NH Voice reported. The discovered area is where first movements of humans southward from Alaska.

The opening of the corridor serves as new opportunities for animal relocation and the interaction between people living north and south. Human migration 13,000 years ago was from south to north most of the time, University of Santa Cruz California reported. People were bison hunters at that time and they followed the bisons as they moved into the corridor up north. The corridor closed after the glacial maximum. The ice sheets coalesced and the population were separated leaving a distinct southern lineage.

US animal migration is rapid as the species keep up with the climate change. McGuire added that the corridors are going to be one of the important tool to aid animal survival. Studies about animal movement were taken to avoid conflict with humans by determining various strategies.
Electronic vehicles and drones having been using compact machineries similar to go-karts, but a new engine has been unveiled outside the laboratory for the first time.

Alexander Shkolnik, co-founder and president of LiquidPiston, built a rotary designed engine with a pistonless set up that maximizes ratio of power and weight. The Connecticut-based firm has spent $18 million and 13 years in modifying a rotary engine that was built in 1960 by Felix Wankel, Wired reported. On 2012, Mazda gave up on the said engine, but Shkolnik remodelled the rotary engine based on his father's design, a combustion technology by a physicist, Nikolay. Engineers took the conventional engine from the Kart and installed the X mini on Monday. The performance was exactly what they expect.

EV's and drones are the potential products to use LiquidPiston's engine. The 1.5 kilogram battery medium-duty and propeller-powered drone caught the United States military's interest, Spectrum reported. The company has received $1million fund from the Defence Advanced Military Research and Projects to address certain oil problems and engine reliability. The engine, after undergoing half a dozen modifications has resulted in an all-metal rotary engine that is far different from the conventional engine, the famous operational engine of the Mazda RX series.

Instead of a triangle inside a peanut model, the chamber itself is triangular with a peanut-shaped rotor that seals gas from moving from one chamber into another. It makes the engine easier to lubricate wihout burning oil as combustion occurs, a feature called over-expansion.

EV's and drones have an urgent need for compact engines. LiquidPiston has a continuously expanding range of engine models with different functions. The engine demonstration on Monday proved that the company has a manufacturing capability. However, the company has a long way to go. Production and practical application in a drone will take years.
In honor of the National Park Service's centennial, The 2016 Partners in Preservation organizes a contest open to national parks across the United States. The historic sites that have the most votes will receive a part of $2 million in corporate funding. It is up to you which sites will get the money.

According to National Geographic, those with most votes will be granted up to $250,000 for the conservation or restoration of the project. The voters can choose from historic sites across the mainland United States. These include Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico. The 2016 Partners in Preservation contest is initially the one to occur on the national level. Make your choice now and vote here.

The Partners in Preservation Program is created by American Express and the National trust for Historic Preservation. They aim to increase the public's awareness of the significance of historic preservation in the United States and to conserve America's historic and cultural places.

The program has pledged $16 million in support of historic places across the U.S. They help historic places in eight cities to date. These include Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Boston, New Orleans, Saint Paul/Minneapolis, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Metro. The National Geographic also collaborated with the American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation this year.

John Hildreth, the trust's senior advisor for reservation stated that for ones to continue to mature as a society, they need to make sure that they are preserving these places that cannot be replaced. He urged to protect not only the natural heritage but also the historic and cultural parts of the United States.

So, where would they use the grants in case they are the ones chosen by the people? The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta, Georgia would use the winning amount to conserve the outside of Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is the home church of one of America's most important civil rights leaders. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico's San Juan National Historic Site would use the $250,000 to restore the parts of Castillo San Felipe del Morro, which is a 16th-century legacy of Spanish colonialism.
DARLINGTON, S.C.  Amazing. Awesome. Really cool.

Those were a few of the descriptions of Annie , a Cobra attack helicopter that served in the Vietnam War and is now used by the Celebrate Freedom Foundation to promote science, engineering, technology and math programs.

As part of the West Columbia-based nonprofit foundations SOaR program (school/student opportunities and rewards) the foundation reaches about 25,000 students each year in the Southeast to emphasize the importance of STEM (science, engineering, technology and math) and to instill respect and honor for the military.

On Wednesday morning, Annie was trailered into the Darlington County Adult Education campus for those students as well as fourth- , fifth- and sixth- graders taking part in the Darlington Summer Academic Program based at Mayo High School for Math, Science and Technology.

I think its really cool, said Bryan Barfield, 10. You get to learn about a helicopter that flew into battle. Im kind of thinking about being a pilot when Im grown up.

I love doing this, said Russell David, a Navy veteran who serves as the foundations aviation aerospace UAV education director. It helps give the kids ideas instead of working at McDonalds. I tell them: The only reason you should go in McDonalds is to buy a hamburger.

Flying drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is not just a lucrative future, he said, but is attainable and in high demand by varying sectors of the economy.

Any kid who is playing video games now can fly UAVs, he said. Im here to show them how they can get a (FAA) certificate without going through all the junk.

The AH-1F copter is named in honor of actor and entertainer Ann Margaret and her USO performances, said Lori Wicker of the Celebrate Freedom Foundation.

I didnt know the Army flew these. I thought it was just the Air Force, said Ashley Lisbon, 18, who is taking an economics class at Adult Ed. Its awesome.

Tequan Washington was also in awe.

Im interested in technology, said the 24-year-old Darlingtonian whos taking an English class at Adult Ed. Im thinking about taking classes at Tech (Florence-Darlington Technical College) or DeVry (University).

Emma Ruth Calcutt, 10, said shes thinking of working in the medical field when shes older.

Its cooool, she said while peering into the cockpit.

That is what its all about, said Frederick Thompson of Celebrate Freedom Foundation.

Were here for them  this is our mission and our purpose, to give them an opportunity to do well in life, he said.
Shanghai Disneyland is officially open

From:Shanghai Daily | 2016-06-16 14:03

DISNEY Cast Members lined up along the Mickey Avenue near the entrance of the Shanghai Disneyland to welcome the first batch of guests after the theme park officially opened around 11:30am today.

The Cast Members, that is how Disney employees are called, waved and clapped hands as visitors braved the drizzle to get a look at the first Disneyland on Chinas mainland.

Many of them rushed to the popular attractions in the park such as Soaring over the Horizon at the Adventure Isle. Others posed in front of the iconic castle.

A security staff at the park entrance said visitors started arriving at the gate as early as 4:30am when some of the staff members began to make preparation for the official grand opening.

The park will be open till 10pm today.

Guests must have a ticket to enter as no tickets are being sold at the site today.

Shawn Ryan Holt from the United States wore a hat with Mickeys ear on it and held a Mickey Mouse doll while entering the theme park.

I used to study at a college in Orlando and became a big Disney fun. So I flew to Shanghai and waited in front of the gate at 9am today on the opening day of the Shanghai Disneyland, he told Shanghai Daily.
People in the business community had mixed reactions Wednesday to the news of a campaign among Atlantic Beach Bikefest attendees to boycott the city next year.

Some Bikefest participants, who stayed in Myrtle Beach over the Memorial Day weekend, were infuriated over enforcement efforts that included a traffic loop, extra police presence and barricaded roads city leaders say were needed to keep everyone safe.

Some vowed never to return, opting instead on a plan to spend money in beach towns north of Myrtle Beach in order to hit the city they said mistreated them where it would hurt most  in their pockets.

The move for 2017 is to boycott the city of Myrtle Beach. Move everyone to Atlantic Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Cherry Grove, and the surrounding areas, and to not spend a single dime in the Myrtle Beach city limits, said Clarence Middleton, moderator of www.blackbikeweek.us and its corresponding Facebook page, on a GoFundMe site he set up for the boycott campaign. Let's bankrupt Myrtle Beach!

Business leaders doubted the move would bankrupt Myrtle Beach.

I feel like they can do whatever they want to do. I dont think they can bankrupt the city, said Max Alon, owner of NY Pizzeria at 706 N. Ocean Blvd.

Business is business, he said.

It was a good weekend before they came. Its going to be a good weekend after they came. It doesnt matter, Alon said. We work very hard that weekend. But Im sure it will be fine. Somebody else will come.

But the temporary absence of Memorial Day weekend customers that crowd the 8th Avenue Tiki Bar next door, which was full of patrons mostly in town for Bikefest this year, may hurt at first.

As a business guy, yes, it will hurt business, said Gil Reibenbach, general manager at the 8th Avenue Tiki Bar. But, where I come from, I come from up north and Memorial weekend is a big family weekend.  Its not about bikers.

He says he loves the bikers and the business they bring, but he doesnt care for the stigma or the trouble that seems to haunt that weekend.

Reibenbach said some of his employees had parked near the FountainBleau Inn and looked to him for a ride home when their cars were locked behind crime scene tape early Friday morning after a fatal shooting at the hotel.

I love the weekend. I look forward to the weekend. I make money and thats my end goal at the end of the day. I dont care who you are, he said. The problem is I always look towards the safety of my guests, my customers and my staff.

And if patrons are too afraid to walk to their cars, he said, that can scare off business, too.

Middleton said the goal for next year is to avoid spending money in Myrtle Beach to send the city a message, but he said he felt bad for the businesses that would be hurt in the process.

For every boycotter, there are numerous travelers looking for a safe, enjoyable, family-friendly experience, said Brad Dean, president and CEO of the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. We welcome any visitor that respects our community and obeys our laws, and given the number of visitors who have regularly expressed their displeasure with the antics related to some Atlantic Beach Bikefest attendees, we don't expect any such boycott to have a long-term impact on our local tourism industry.

The transition to a new base of visitors might not happen overnight, but given the significant national travel volume during Memorial Day Weekend, we don't believe it would take long for families to return.

Mickey James, president of the local NAACP chapter in Myrtle Beach, said the city has been trying to push Bikefest attendees out.

The city has really continued to move forth with an effort to drive these people away, he said. I think they are relentless  with the 23-mile loop.

Myrtle Beach initiated the 23-mile traffic loop in 2015 to ease traffic congestion along Ocean Boulevard that officials said led to street parties and problems in 2014, when three people were killed and seven injured in eight shootings over Memorial Day weekend.

James said it took him six hours to travel the full loop, noting the traffic remained congested.

Its just backing the boulevard up, backing up the entire city, he said. Where some would suggest its making a difference, its not.

Unless the difference is deterrence of a group he says the city doesnt want here. James applauds the groups efforts to boycott Myrtle Beach.

They dont need to come back to Myrtle Beach, he said. Theyre not welcome in Myrtle Beach. They need to boycott.

Some business leaders are looking forward to the crowds they say will come in their place.

Memorial Day weekend is one of the most heavily traveled weekends of the year, but due to the problems created by some reckless individuals who don't respect our community or obey our laws, Memorial Day weekend in the Myrtle Beach area is not currently a family-friendly experience, Dean said. We should be awash in red, white and blue, celebrating our true American heroes amidst parades, picnics and backyard barbecues.

The additional police presence and 23-mile traffic loop are necessary to ensure the safety of our residents and visitors and, hopefully, help us restore Memorial Day weekend to what it once was.
Xi's visit to boost partnership projects

2016-06-16 04:37

Collaboration on production capacity will enhance work along Belt and Road route

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov in Beijing, Sept. 2, 2015.[Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping's visit to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan will lead to more projects involving production capacity cooperation, Foreign Ministry officials said on Wednesday.

During the eight-day trip that will begin on Friday, Xi will attend signing ceremonies for cooperation documents in the three countries, all of which are along the route of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said Liu Haixing and Li Huilai, both assistant foreign ministers.

Liu told a news briefing that Xi will visit Serbia's Smederevo steel mill, which was founded in 1913 and acquired in April by Hesteel Group, China's largest iron and steel business group in terms of production capacity.

The deal is worth 46 million euros ($51.7 million).

Construction of Serbian power stations and highways in projects involving contracts with Chinese companies is going smoothly, he said.

In Serbia, the Zemun-Borca Bridge, newly renamed Pupin Bridge, was opened in 2014. The bridge over the Danube River is the first built in Europe by a Chinese company.

"The bridge is fondly known by the local people as the Chinese Bridge," Liu said.

The Chinese government is encouraging domestic companies to invest in Poland's nuclear power industry, Liu said.

Poland has been China's largest trade partner in Central and Eastern Europe for 11 consecutive years. It is also the only CEE country that has joined the China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Liu said.

Liu Zuokui, an expert at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that promoting bilateral cooperation with Serbia and Poland will play a positive role in propelling China-CEE relations.

To show support toward China-Uzbekistan cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi will attend a ceremony for the completion of a tunnel made by China, Li said.

While attending the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Xi will discuss with other leaders the applications by India and Pakistan to join the SCO as members, Li said.

Chen Yurong, a researcher of European and Asian studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said the SCO summit is expected to have a huge, positive influence on the growth of the organization, which marks its 15th anniversary this year.
Brexit would shake EU, Germany warns

2016-06-16 11:50

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier attends a press conference in Berlin, Germany, June 15, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

BERLIN - A British vote to leave the European Union would shake the bloc and require a concerted effort to ensure its stability, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a joint news conference with French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, Steinmeier said they both hoped that Britons would vote to stay in the EU in their June 23 referendum. "That would be the right decision to make," he said.

"A vote to leave would shake the union. It would not just carry on as 28 (members) minus one. It would require concerted efforts to ensure that the union holds together and that a decades-long, successful integration effort does not end in disintegration," he said.

Steinmeier said France and Germany had a special role to play since they had helped to found the European Community and had experienced the fruits of successful integration for perhaps the longest period.

"We both belong to those who say ... we cannot lapse back into a nationalism that pits one European state against another," Steinmeier said.

He said both countries would work to ensure the EU's continued survival and success even if Britons voted to leave.
Businesses support UN sustainability plan

2016-06-16 13:42

Wang Shuguang, general manager of Broad USA, signs a commitment letter promising to help the United Nations achieve its "2030 Agenda", on Monday at UN headquarters in New York. [PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY]

Dozens of members of the Chinese business community have taken their corporate responsibility to the global level, committing to help the United Nations achieve its "2030 Agenda".

Last fall, more than 190 world leaders signed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which listed 17 goals ranging from ending poverty to addressing climate change.

On Monday, 32 Chinese and multinational businesses presented a commitment letter to Lenni Montiel, the assistant secretary-general for economic development.

"Business participation will be crucial" to realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), said Montiel, and praised the participating companies for their "remarkable leadership and initiative".

The submission of the letter took place as part of a symposium, co-organized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and FiSO Group and sponsored by the New Empire Real Estate Group and Lanyu Inc, at UN headquarters in New York City.

"Achieving the SDGs will require more than the commitment and energy of nations and governments," said Jing Zhao Cesarone of FiSO Group, in opening remarks at the symposium.

"The scale and ambition involved mean that businesses, organizations, communities and individuals must be mobilized to realize the SDGs," she continued.

Business representatives spoke of making sustainability as key focus in their operations, improving employee welfare and promoting partnerships for sustainability.

Contact the writer at hezijiang@chinadailyusa.com.
The State Council decided to invalidate hundreds of outdated documents in an effort to tackle conflicts in regulations or between policy documents and regulations, and improve administration efficiency.

The decision was made at the State Councils executive meeting on June 15, chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.

Our goal, by invalidating these outdated documents, is to get rid of outdated regulations that hinder market potential, entrepreneurial spirit and innovation, Premier Li said.

Over 500 documents that affect the countrys sustainable growth, structural reform and peoples livelihood were deemed invalid after the meeting on June 15. All had been issued between 1978 and 2013, during which China started its reform and opening up strategy, and gradually integrated itself into the global context. Some documents were issued in particular social and economic contexts. Over decades, many new regulations covering similar areas were issued to better suit the countrys new evolving reality, causing potential overlaps with the old ones, which were still legally effective and had not been systematically overhauled, causing confusion in some sectors.

Major documents being invalidated this time include those that are obviously not adapted to a market economy, or unnecessarily restrictive in enterprise operations, pricing and fund management, blocking enterprise potential. Also, certain rules regarding approval for market access, investment, vocational qualifications and residency need to be further delegated or eliminated.

Documents related to workplace safety and food security will not be affected.

In December 2015, a total of 489 outdated documents were made invalid as part of the first stage of document overhaul. An office was set up under the State Council to work on the task, consulting related departments and experts, and sometimes netizens.

Premier Li also called for all related government departments to better streamline administration, and delegate power to lower tiers, sending clear and accurate messages of Chinas commitment at home and abroad.

The move is in line with government efforts to transform government functions, streamline administration and delegate power to lower tiers. It also helps governments at all levels to work more effectively with less institutional costs that arise from regulations that have outlived their usefulness, and improve government credibility.
Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia, "Mutatum" Scion

Roly Polys - part of the Myopia exhibit at the Akron Art Museum

Mark Mothersbaugh at MOCA Cleveland

Ruby Kustard sculpture

Mark Mothersbaugh on the Magical Myopia Bus Tour from Cleveland to Akron

Booji Boy mask, far left, on display at MOCA Cleveland

Doorbell Keyboard created by Mark Mothersbaugh on display at MOCA Cleveland

Of course, we here at Metromode love Detroit. But sometimes you just have to get away. If you happen to find yourself in the Cleveland area during a day trip this summer, we highly recommend checking out two exhibits by former DEVO frontman Mark Mothersbaugh showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and the Akron Museum of Art.This article originally appeared in Fresh Water Cleveland Whether you are viewing this on a Samsung Galaxy phone or a 27-inch iMac, the screen is simply not big enough to convey the impact of Myopia, the summer's quintessential cultural event spanning from University Circle to downtown Akron.Myopia, which includes a vast array of Mark Mothersbaugh's work dating back to the 1970s, launched last month. And while Fresh Water wholly appreciates managing photographer Bob Perkoski's visual documentation, this staggering collection truly must be viewed in person and in scale, from the army of eerily oversized (or are they undersized?) "Roly Polys" that occupy an entire gallery at the Akron Museum of Art ( AMA ), to the copious collection of media documenting the work and creative efforts of DEVO, of which Mothersbaugh was a co-founder, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland ( MOCA ).Myopia is a wholly immersive experience. Words matter herein, as do the size and colors of things and their relation to one another. Mutatum, for instance, is an unusual Scion (yes, the car) installed at MOCA that you will at once adore and pity. It's unlikely cousins in Akron, a trio of works each named My Little Pony, are weirdly friendly despite being headless. Some viewers saw push-you/pull-me animals (sorry Dr. Doolittle); others saw giant molars. Beholder's conclusions notwithstanding, every object in this show has an unexpected point of view.Stepping through Myopia, the overarching revelation that "Jocko Homo" and Pee-wee's Playhouse are stalwartly tethered makes perfect sense. Discovering all the rest of Mothersbaugh's artistic surprises is just plain fun. Add to that the striking colors and larger than life graphics at both museums and Myopia is a perfect family event, particularly if mom or dad is a closet DEVO nerd.But what about the man behind the Booji Boy mask?Just ahead of the show's opening, MOCA hosted a tour and event that included previews of the installations in both museums and bus rides in between. It also included Mothersbaugh.You have all summer to view the show in person, but if you want to get an idea of the Akron native's creative genius that is intentionally scaled to the screen before you, spend a few minutes poking around his Mutato Muzak page, which is credited to Funkhaus , but is wall-to-wall Mothersbaugh. Go if only to see what happens to your cursor on the home page, but Fresh Water suggests you stay for the Listerine, interactive Necco-wafer colored keyboard and Gene Hackman. Also: Jesus meets Mr. Potato Head with an Energy Dome? We've got that Funny, charming, and completely engaging with a surprise around every corner, the site gives a telling if insufficient glimpse of the man fueling it all, as Mothersbaugh was that and so much more during the May 25 preview event. Consider this: when Steve Presser of Big Fun fished out a pack of candy cigarettes from a paper sack, Mothersbaugh immediately plucked one from the tiny cardboard box and did not set it down for the rest of the day."If I burn anybody with my candy cigarette, I'm sorry," he offered preemptively.Mothersbaugh infused the event with an unmistakable energy that will no doubt linger throughout both sets of galleries north and south until Myopia leaves us on August 29. He regaled the group with stories about his art and DEVO in both museums and for the entire ride from Cleveland to Akron, fielding any number of questions. For example:Q: What are your musical influences?A: (pauses to consider) Auto insurance, traffic jams, rent payments, the news, TV commercials for sure because they're so subversive and they make people do things they shouldn't do and it just amazes me.I don't know. I like a lot of stuff.Then there was his description of the sculpture Ruby Kustard, which is crafted from a 33,000-carat ruby and polished bronze, "What am I going to do with the world's largest ruby?" he recalled when he first considered it. "I'm going to carve it into a turd."The following assertion came during a lull on the bus ride, "Akron is over 50 years old, by the way, if anyone didn't know," which was followed by a comments regarding the fair Akronites. "They're a very friendly people and the best way to reflect your friendship is to pin some money to your shirt."It's probably best to let Mothersbaugh speak for himself. And while the following clip is safe for work, it does include Brian Eno and a little nudity.And the story behind the DEVO uniforms:He also gave background on his elaborate Orchestrions, which may be the only objects you will ever hear that can burp elegantly - an assertion you may deem true or false when you hear one at the end of this clip:Towards the end of the day, Mothersbaugh stepped into the AMA gallery housing 30,000 postcards the artist has created over the years, which visitors are free to explore."My secret brain has been exposed," said Mothersbaugh, adding that sharing the cards was a bit uncomfortable at the first Myopia show in Denver , but that the idea has grown on him. "I'm almost totally accepting of it," he said to the small gathering. "It was the trip I had to take to get here today."Then someone asked about his family."My father died two days ago," said Mothersbaugh. "And I really wanted him to see this show. I just so much did, because he was so supportive my whole life  so supportive and he was enthusiastic," he said, noting that his father portrayed the iconic DEVO character Booji Boy's father, General Boy "He was part of us."After a beat filled with exhales and murmurs of "sorry" deflated into silence, Mothersbaugh shrugged and smiled. "Yeah, so  yeah," with an easy inflection that diffused the moment and made the small group in the gallery chuckle and grin.And in that bittersweet moment, it truly was a beautiful world.On June 18 and again on August 20, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., MOCA will offer a Magical Myopia Bus Tour to the public, $20 for members and $30 for non-members. The adventure begins at MOCA with a guided tour of the exhibition. Then a bus ride with a few surprises will transport attendees to the AMA for a second guided tour. The ticket includes museum admissions, lunch, and round-trip bus transportation. Contact Ruth Haggerty at 216-658-6918 for tickets.On June 16 at 6:30 p.m., the AMA will host a trolley tour that will visit DEVO related venues such as the Crypt nightclub, an old rubber stamp shop at Quaker Square, and Harlan Hall, the band's secret Akron headquarters. $10 for members, $15 for non-members. Tickets are available online For those on a budget, admission is free at MOCA for all visitors on the first Saturday of the month, courtesy of PNC Bank, and the J. M. Smucker Company sponsors Free Thursdays every week at the AMA.
First, technically there is no national ban on blood donations from gay men and women. There are restrictions, which as the "Des Moines Register" noted, were "borne out of fears of HIV/AIDS transmission, [and] are a nationwide rule and not a flat-out ban.... It's not forbidden for gay men to donate blood, but there are restrictions."

In the hours and days after the shooting, rumors shared in the news and social media expressed outrage and exasperation that gays were being prevented from donating badly-needed blood for the victims. Actress Mia Farrow, for example, tweeted "Straight people please donate blood for the wounded because Orlando won't accept gay people's blood," and Bobby Blanchard of the "Dallas Morning News" wrote, "Orlando Hospitals need blood donations to help save gay people. Yet gay people can't give blood to help their own. Because they're gay."

Misinformation about the Orlando shooting is rampant, and many uncertainties remain about everything from the shooter's motivation to the type of weapon he used. This confusion is inevitable in any complex news story-and especially in a tragedy of this magnitude.

Rumors often circulate widely in the wake of health scares and national tragedies. In 2014, for example, rumors spread on social media claiming that salt water could cure or prevent Ebola, causing illness and deaths in West Africa.

When it comes to national tragedies, the earliest news reports and social media messages are typically the least reliable, with proven fact mixing freely with speculation and rumor. The public wants to know what happened right away, but there is a gap and time lag between investigation and credible reporting; that lack of information (along with fear and uncertainty) creates a vacuum often filled by myths and misinformation.

Those restrictions include a 12-month wait after last sexual contact, which also applies to heterosexual men and women who have sex with HIV-positive partners of the opposite sex (or men with any commercial sex worker). Whether those FDA rules are medically necessary or overly restrictive is open to debate, but the fact is that homosexuals have been able to donate blood since 2015.

Adding to the confusion, information on social media soon circulated suggesting that the FDA's restrictions had in fact been lifted (presumably in response to the dire need for blood for victims of the Orlando attack). This, too, was debunked hours later when a tweet corrected the misinformation: "All FDA guidelines remain in effect for blood donation. There are false reports circulating that FDA rules were being lifted. Not true." In other words the restrictions (not ban) on gay blood donations remained.

This leads to a second piece of misinformation about blood donation. There would be no reason for the FDA to alter its rules since there was in fact no shortage of blood on hand for victims of the Orlando attack. Orlando Health sent out a tweet at 8:49 AM on June 12 that "While we are prepared with enough blood stock, we always appreciate donations," and few minutes later notifying the public that "We brought in six trauma surgeons immediately this morning, & received plenty of units of blood from our local blood banks to prepare."

RELATED: Why So Many Assault Weapons?

Blood donations are always welcome, and health officials are understandably reluctant to issue a statement explicitly asking people not to donate blood. But since there was plenty of blood on hand at Orlando area hospitals, it was clear that additional blood was not needed for victims of that attack-regardless of the sexual orientation of the potential donor.

Part of the reason blood wasn't needed is that more and more hospitals are specifically preparing to treat large numbers of wounded patients. While 50 victims at one time seems like a shockingly high number, hospitals typically have enough blood on hand to adequately respond to far more patients than that. A serious public transit crash might bring dozens of badly injured patients to an emergency room at one time; for example about 200 people were hospitalized after a Washington-to-New York Amtrak train derailed on May 12, 2015.

The outpouring of support and desire to help is of course natural and encouraging. When tragedies strike it's often difficult for the public to directly help the victims; that role is typically filled by police, medics, and first responders.

WATCH: Why Do We Have Different Blood Types?

A similar issue emerged in the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when people generously donated blood for the victims. However none of the blood helped victims of the attacks. This is because only five people were pulled alive from the World Trade Center rubble. The Washington Post reported that the American Red Cross collected hundreds of thousands of blood donations, knowing that the blood could not be used for the victims of the attacks.

There was easily enough on hand at any local hospital to cover the victims. In the first hours of chaos it was unclear how much blood would be needed of course, but within a few days it was evident that they had more blood than could be used. And because donated blood has a short shelf life, too much blood donated at one time is likely to be thrown away.

Even though most of the blood donations in these cases was unnecessary, it might help the donors more than the victims. Researchers have found that people who employed "active coping strategies" following these tragedies (such as giving blood or attending memorial services) had lower stress levels than those who didn't. In the wake of this latest attack, anything that relieves stress can only be a good thing.
There's a rainforest tree frog embryo that knows how to hit the exits early and hatch prematurely when it's feeling threatened, and a new study suggests the mechanism behind the magic.

In research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, scientists with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), in Panama City, Panama, offer an explanation for how the red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas) manages to break free of its jelly-coated egg up to two days early if it's in danger.

RELATED: Kermit Sutra: New Frog Mating Position Discovered

The red-eyed tree frog dwells in tropical rainforest trees. It deposits its eggs on leaves and branches dangling over water, in clumpy clusters of a few dozen eggs.

If all goes well, tadpoles will develop and hatch out of the eggs in a week or so and drop down into a pond or stream.

But, all doesn't always go well. Wasps and snakes love to make meals out of the eggs, and some embryos never get to be frogs.

RELATED: 7 New Teeny Frogs Found in Brazil: Photos

It's not all doom and gloom, though. The embryos are actually well attuned to their surroundings, especially vibrations that spell trouble.

"Most people think of embryos as fairly passive," said STRI research associate Karen Warkentin in a statement. "But evidence keeps accumulating that embryos of many species are actively engaged with their world, not only receiving information but also using it to do things that help them survive."

RELATED: New Poison Dart Frog Species Found in Panama

That brings us to the embryo's escape artistry, and how the future frog avoids becoming a snack.

The STRI researchers captured the frog embryos on high-speed video as they performed their escape maneuvers.

In this video with a parrot snake, you can see how the embryos escape the cluster as the reptile feasts (Video credit: Michael S. Caldwell and Karen M. Warkentin):
With the era of autonomous vehicles and smart urban grids nearly upon us, we've seen a lot of futuristic concept cars come down the notional turnpike in recent years. There's this one. And this one. And, a personal favorite, this one.

But nothing quite compares with the specimen that luxury automaker Rolls-Royce unveiled this week in London.

RELATED: Vertical-Lift Flying Car Is a Perfect Personal Aircraft

Five feet tall and more than 20 feet in length, the Rolls-Royce Vision Next 100 is like a futuristic sci-fi monster of aggressive luxury. It's Rolls-Royce's vision of what conspicuous consumption ought to look like in 20 years or so.

Although the Vision Next 100 is just a concept for now, the automaker rolled out a prototype model at London's Roundhouse arts venue this week. The Vision is designed to be a 100-percent electric zero-emission vehicle, but with the V-8 weight and swagger we've come to expect from Rolls Royce. It's also meant to be fully autonomous, since the discerning motorist of the future would never deign to actually drive a car.

RELATED: Is There a Future for Tiny, High-Tech Luxury Cars?

In fact, the Vision will be operated by an artificial intelligence named Eleanor, named after the iconic Spirit of Ecstasy figurine that adorns all Rolls-Royce vehicles. As your digital chauffeur, valet, concierge and personal assistant, Eleanor will handle everything from navigating the city to confirming your dinner reservations.
If you were wondering what electric vehicles can really do, the World Advanced Vehicle Expedition (WAVE) Trophy EV Rally heading across Europe is massive proof.

Encompassing e-bikes, trucks, and even retrofitted classic cars, a wide range of vehicles joined the convoy in Germany that passes along more than 1,110 miles to the finish in Switzerland.

RELATED: Top 10 Fastest Electric Vehicles (For Now): Photos

The rally set off on June 11 in Bremerhaven, Germany, with 70 teams from 10 countries. They are passing through a bunch of cities en route to the cobblestone streets of Liestal near Basel in Switzerland. Along the way, the EV enthusiasts are raising awareness for green transport as well as connecting with sustainability companies that dot the route.

School kids are also getting involved by writing pledge cards committing to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Local electric vehicles picked up the pledge cards, and the WAVE Trophy convoy is stopping at the United Nations in Geneva to present all of them as a single card.

The WAVE EV rallies first started in 2011, the vision of Swiss environmentalist Louis Palmer. The 25 vehicles participating in that first event went from Paris through the Swiss Alps to the Czech Republic in two weeks. They wanted to inspire mayors and locals with clean vehicle tech at stops in 40 cities.

RELATED: 'Electric Highways' Could Charge Electric Cars

Last year, Palmer's WAVE at the Formula E race at Berlin Tempelhof Airport brought together 576 vehicles and set a Guinness World Record for largest parade of electric vehicles.

So far, the 2016 WAVE Trophy EV Rally has received enthusiastic welcomes from the public at each stop. Even a bunch of rain in recent days hasn't dampened spirits.

When a Tesla Roadster participating in the rally recently showed up in Choindez, Switzerland, school kids there understandably got excited. Summer is a time for parades, and this ambitious one is worth cheering.

WATCH VIDEO: Is This the Most Dangerous Boat Race in the World?
Press Release

June 16, 2016 Legarda Supports Climate Change Commission's Energy Policy Review Senator Loren Legarda, Chair of the Senate Committee on Climate Change, today expressed support for the Climate Change Commission's (CCC) policy review of all existing energy policies. "There have been challenges in our efforts to fast track the development of our renewable energy resources more aggressively. This is why the review of our energy policies is most welcome and I laud the CCC in leading a multi-stakeholder review of our existing energy policies and formulating a comprehensive policy framework on energy," Legarda said as the CCC launched the National Energy Policy Review (NEPR) at the Kalayaan Hall in Malacanan Palace today. The Senator stressed that while the Philippines has yet to ratify the Paris Agreement, the CCC is taking an important step towards keeping the country's commitment to mitigate climate change by doing a review on energy policies. "It is true that we need energy to build the foundations of our growth and I subscribe to a healthy energy mix, not on the misguided axiom that our country should develop and acquire the energy and power it needs at all costs, regardless of whether it sustains or kills life. Today's issue is not just about security of energy supply. It is not just about reliability or affordability. It is about increasing clean energy supply, and using it wisely and efficiently. Energy security that assails the safety of our people and the environment can never guarantee inclusive development," the Senator pointed out. According to the Department of Energy's Energy Policy and Planning Bureau, the indigenous renewable energy resources could help address the expected average increase in demand for energy at 4.79 percent per year, at the same time, realize the provision of electricity to more remote sitios. Thus, a window for high carbon dioxide avoidance potential to support sustainable energy development is achievable. "We have to admit that we cannot totally get rid of coal today. Since we have not developed enough baseload renewable energy, we need to see coal as a transition energy source. But we seek the development of more renewable energy capacities so that in time, we can achieve greater self-sufficiency, sustainability and security in the energy sector," she said. The policy framework development of CCC will consider the implementation of the post 2015 development frameworks--the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the Paris Agreement. The review will also benefit from inputs and comments on the 10 policy issue papers by participating stakeholders in the NEPR Website Forum. After six months, the CCC will come up with a comprehensive policy framework on energy based on the synthesis of comments and recommendations from the series of consultations, dialogues and discussions. This framework shall be the basis for executive or legislative actions on energy policy reform. "The Philippines has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by year 2030 from the business as usual scenario from energy, transport, waste, industry and forestry. We may not be a major emitter of carbon dioxide, but that does not mean we have no obligation to promote environmental sustainability. We need to deliver on our commitment. We can only meet this if there is radical shift in the way our country develops our indigenous clean energy resources and the energy sector has a crucial role toplay in achieving these goals," Legarda stressed. "The world is not just about us. The future is not twenty years from now. It begins today, dedicated to those who will be born beyond our time. It is clear injustice to let future generations suffer the irreversible consequences of our irresponsible actions. We should act to protect the Earth not just with a sense of urgency, rather with a sense of great emergency," Legarda concluded. (Please find attached message of Senator Loren Legarda for the launch of the Energy Policy Review by the Climate Change Commission.)
Facing criticism that its proposed 304-unit apartment complex on central Market Street does not provide enough affordable housing, a developer has agreed to buy the shuttered post office on Hyde Street and give it to the city for a low-income housing project.

Under the proposed deal, which the City Planning Commission will vote on Thursday, the Shorenstein family will transfer the 27,000-square-foot parcel at 101 Hyde St. to the Mayors Office of Housing, which would then select a nonprofit developer to build there.

The property at Hyde Street and Golden Gate Avenue, a one-story building, is approved for a 12-story mid-rise with 87 units. Shorenstein is in contract to pay $12.5 million for the property, which has been on the market for nearly a year, and also has committed to provide $6.5 million to the nonprofit housing developer picked to build on the site.

With 87 permanently affordable units, the deal could ease criticism that the Shorenstein project at 1066 Market St. represents wholesale gentrification on the edge of the Tenderloin, one of the citys poorest neighborhood, said Jeff Buckley, senior adviser to Mayor Ed Lee on housing issues,

While the address of the Shorenstein project is on Market Street, most of the property  the former site of the Paramount Theatre  fronts onto the Tenderloins Golden Gate Avenue and Jones Street.

This takes a project that had been pretty divisive and turns it into something that I think everyone can get behind, said Buckley.

Michael Noble Jr./The Chronicle

Kim brokered deal

The deal was brokered by Supervisor Jane Kim. Kim said that while she generally prefers that market-rate developers put required affordable units on-site, 101 Hyde St. is a special case. Not only is the parcel fully approved for housing, as a former post office it has a symbolic significance as well. For years, the building provided post office boxes to thousands of Tenderloin residents who struggled to get reliable mail delivery service at residential hotels.

It was a site that served Tenderloin residents and we wanted to make sure it stayed that way, said Kim.

At a contentious hearing on the project in March, neighborhood residents complained that not only did the Shorenstein project not include enough affordable housing  they had proposed 36 units, or 12 percent of the total  but that the rent of those units still could be beyond the reach of most current Tenderloin residents. The units would have targeted households earning 55 percent of the areas median income, $47,400 for a two-person household.

We heard from TL residents that they cant afford the rents under the citys inclusionary program, and Shorenstein worked with us to come up with a creative alternative that will generate more housing at deeper levels of affordability, said Don Falk of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., which had appealed the original deal to the Board of Supervisors.

Common ground

We are pleased to find common ground through collaboration with TNDC, Meg Spriggs, Shorensteins managing director, said in a statement. We look forward to finally being able to move 1066 Market forward and fulfill our goal of delivering much-needed housing to San Francisco.

The potential deal underscores the frequently debated question of how best to leverage private housing investment to generate affordable units, and who gets to live in those homes. It also shows the lengths market-rate developers must go to win community support in the current political environment, said Tim Colen of the Housing Action Coalition, which advocates for residential development.

Shorenstein did what they had to do to save a project in which they had invested a whole lot of time and resources, he added.

For some Tenderloin residents, the most pressing concern is the current state of the post office site.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

There is a ton of drug dealing and drug use on that block, said Tenderloin police Capt. Teresa Ewins.

In 10 minutes just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, a Chronicle reporter observed a steady stream of drug transactions as two separate groups slouched against the shuttered postal facility, smoking crack cocaine on both the Hyde Street and Golden Gate Avenue sides of the building.

That post office is the No. 1 blight in the Tenderloin  no one would dispute that, said Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which is located across the street. Sometimes you cant even walk by it, the bodies are so thick.

Interim use for site

The plan calls for up to $1 million of the Shorenstein money to be spent on an interim use that could include a food market, similar to the Hall at 1028 Market St. The city estimates it could take five years to raise the money needed to build the 87 affordable units, which will likely cost another $21 million.

The most important thing is getting an interim use in there that helps promote activity, said David Seward, chief financial officer for the nearby UC Hastings College of the Law. Walking down Golden Gate Avenue is not a pleasant experience.

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: sfjkdineen
Twelve Northern California colleges and universities have been selected to share $50 million from the Koret Foundation to pay for scholarships, improve technology and expand research.

But unlike the typical philanthropic approach, where a charity bestows money for its pet purposes, the foundation wont tell the schools how to spend the cash that will be provided over five years. The schools were instead asked where they needed help the most.

These funds will be a tremendous help to our students, said Susan Lamb, chancellor of City College of San Francisco, where outdated technology has been a severe problem. City College will use its $1 million grant to enhance its Web technology and improve security on campus, Lamb said.

The idea of giving campuses freedom in spending the money came from Michael Boskin, president of Koret, a San Francisco foundation that focuses on Bay Area institutions and Jewish causes.

This program is designed to be a catalyst for new approaches to optimize student success ... particularly among underserved populations, Boskin said.

San Francisco State Universitys $2 million will provide college prep workshops at the S.F. Junior Giants Urban Youth Academic Family Program, among other uses.

The largest grants go to UC Berkeley ($11 million) and Stanford University ($10 million). Berkeley will establish an undergraduate research program and a research collaboration with UCSF at Berkeleys planned Global Campus in Richmond. Stanford will support its Koret Young Israeli Scholars program and help maintain its new Neuroscience and ChEM-H research complex.

Including Stanford, four recipients are private institutions. The University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, will receive $5 million, in part for a new residence hall. Santa Clara University, also Jesuit, will use part of its $2 million for scholarships to first-generation college students and to support those studying science, technology, engineering or math.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Notre Dame de Namur, a Catholic college in Belmont, will add $1 million to its capital campaign to save the grand Ralston Hall, an 1868 national landmark that houses its admissions office and is rented out for weddings.

UCSF and UC Davis will each receive $6 million for medical programs and, at Davis, to help transfer students specializing in engineering and computer science.

San Jose State, Sonoma State and UC Santa Cruz will share $4 million, in part for scholarships.

The final $2 million will be set aside for the schools future priorities.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: NanetteAsimov
Mission activist and hunger striker Edwin Lindo missed Tuesdays deadline to file papers for District Nine supervisor, effectively and surprisingly withdrawing from the race.

The decision paves the way for Hillary Ronen, chief of staff for current Supervisor David Campos, to run as the go-to progressive candidate in District Nine, which includes the Mission District and Bernal Heights. Campos, who has endorsed Ronen, is termed out at the end of the year.

Lindo held his campaign kick-off event in December and has been raising money and campaigning ever since. That created some tensions within the progressive community because Lindo and Ronen were essentially courting the same voters in an effort to defeat the more moderate candidate, Joshua Arce, a community liaison for Laborers Union Local 261.

While Lindo was considered the least-established candidate of the three, his profile increased considerably as a result of the hunger strike in late April and early May. He was one of five people who went without solid food for 17 days to raise awareness about fatal police shootings of minorities and demand the replacement of then-Police Chief Greg Suhr.

Michael Macor/The Chronicle

Suhr submitted his resignation May 19, after the hunger strike had ended, following the fatal police shooting of an African American woman suspected of driving a stolen car.

In a video posted on his Facebook page, Lindo said he decided not to run because the process compromised his values.

Its a process that forces you to lay your values down for the hope of getting elected to a position that in all honesty has never proven to create the change that this city needs, he said. The change that this city needs ... are folks that are uncompromising, unapologetically willing to stand for what is right, even when its not politically expedient.

Two other candidates in addition to Arce and Ronen have filed papers to run  Iswari Espana and Melissa San Miguel.

Ronen said Lindo did not inform her of his decision to withdraw from the race. She praised his activism.

I and the rest of the city owe him a great deal of thanks for his sacrifice and work, Ronen said. Given the fact that we agree on 99 percent of the issues  I will continue to work with him on the many critical issues facing our city.

 Emily Green

Homeless sweeps: Mayor Ed Lee is facing criticism yet again for his controversial sweeps of homeless encampments around the city.

In a letter to Lee, the Committee for Civil Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the WilmerHale law firm claimed the citys destruction of homeless individuals property was unlawful. The sweeps violated federal, state and city law because people were not given the opportunity to reclaim their belongings, the letter said.

These practices have permanently deprived vulnerable individuals of their personal shelter, food, medication, cooking utensils, family photographs, keepsakes, identification cards ... and other items critical to their health and well-being, the letter said.

The groups called on Lee to stop the sweeps in favor of improving policies for outreach, shelter and housing of homeless individuals, and to create a clear process for people looking to recover lost belongings.

The legal organizations asked to meet with the mayor to discuss the issues before June 30. Lee has yet to respond to the invite.

 Lizzie Johnson

Loophole closed: The Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to close a loophole that allowed people living with HIV/AIDS to be hit with steep rent increases.

Under the Housing Opportunities for Persons with HIV/AIDS program, people living with the disease receive monthly rental assistance vouchers to pay rent. But, unlike other federal housing programs, it did not protect tenants from rent increases.

Supervisor Scott Wiener sponsored the legislation. He called the loophole irrational, saying renters and long-term HIV survivors cannot afford rent spikes.

The legislation will take effect next month.

 Lizzie Johnson

Crime board: Mayor Ed Lee introduced legislation Tuesday to create a 25-person Neighborhood Crime Advisory Board.

The board would be charged with advising the mayor and the Board of Supervisors on strategies for addressing neighborhood crime. Each supervisor would name one member to the body, with the mayor appointing the other 14 members.

The board will have to submit a report no later than six months after its first meeting.

In a May meeting with The Chronicle editorial board, Lee said judges were partially to blame for the spike in property crime because they were too easy on repeat offenders. He suggested that a group of volunteers show up to court to pressure judges to impose tougher sentences.

 Emily Green

Email: cityinsider@sfchronicle.com Twitter: SFcityinsider
Boones toes are way too big for a keyboard  but the black rhino has nonetheless become a Twitter sensation.

The San Francisco Zoos most popular herbivore has amassed more than 1,200 followers on his account, @boonetherhino, for his tweets about Mondays, philosophy, current events and the rocks in his enclosure. What started as a ploy to crowdfund the rhinos new $15,000 Foobler  essentially a huge version of the dog toy  has morphed into an account with a cult following.

Its absolutely ridiculous that hes picked up this many followers, said Bethany Krebs, a zoo wellness researcher and the brains behind Boones tweets. Even though you know its a human at the other end, I think its fun for people to connect with Boone. Its a good outlet to do informal outreach and teach people about rhinos, especially since poaching is a problem.

Boone isnt the only animal in cyberspace. Zoos around the nation are using Twitter to engage people beyond or in lieu of a visit. The Cincinnati Zoos lion posts photos with his cubs, the Oakland Zoos six lemurs chronicle their high jinks, and the Bronx Zoos Egyptian cobra reflects on pop culture.

Useful outreach tool

They are part of a unique cohort of tweeters  without opposable thumbs  who use social media as a platform to educate users. And the research proves that its working.

A study conducted at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago from July 2010 through October 2011 showed that animal tweets generate more excitement and interest in scientific tools and methods, and in animal issues among followers. Researchers measured how often the animals were retweeted in comparison with informational zoo messages. It was substantially more, they discovered.

We tended to have quite the following, said Cynthia Hood, a computer science professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who helped conduct the study. Even though people know its not the actual animal, they feel like theyre making a connection. It feels personal and real.

That connection helps engage and inform people about world issues, like rhino poaching, one of Boones key issues. The tweets, which foster a relationship between the animal and the person, also help draw more visitors to the zoo.

Connor Radnovich/The Chronicle

People want to hear directly from the animals, said Jason Watters, the vice president of wellness and animal behavior at the San Francisco Zoo. Most zoos have a mission of trying to educate and empower people to take conservation action and play a positive role in the survival of the planet. Boones a little goofy and awkward and perfectly helps us do that.

Boone, a 7-year-old black rhino born at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, moved to San Francisco three years ago. His plucky, GIF-filled messages are modeled after Doug, the oblivious dog from Pixars movie Up, and Jackie Frenchs childrens book Diary of a Wombat.

In one tweet, he bemoans mornings, saying, I like you, sun, but why do you have to be such a morning person? Some of us are still sleepy, come back later! In another, a close-up photo of his horn is captioned, Whoopsie, got a little overzealous with the zoom on this one.

Learning to love rhinos

Its Boones personality that draws people to him  even though hes not traditionally cute  said Alyssa Lynne, who runs a Twitter account for Bao Bao, a panda at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., in her free time. The two animals frequently interact on Twitter and consider themselves best friends.

I never really thought of rhinos as being super cute, Lynne said. I love animals, but if you were to ask me what my favorite one was, rhino would not come to mind first. But now I care about what is happening with rhinos more than I ever have before because my friend Boone is one of them.

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Boones fan base stretches across the country. One of his biggest admirers  and most generous donors for his crowdfunding campaign  is from the East Coast. Cecily Keating, a consultant in New York City, said she considers the rhino a friend and checks his feed several times a day.

Connor Radnovich/The Chronicle

People think Im nuts when I talk about my rhino friend, she said, laughing. Boones Twitter is so great at explaining himself and rhinos, and his personality is funny as heck. You just become fond of this little  well, big  creature. I know it makes me sound like a goofball, but its true.

Boone declined to comment on his newfound celebrity. On a recent afternoon at the San Francisco Zoo, he sleepily blinked and walked slowly around his enclosure. The fame didnt seem to be inflating his ego.

We have loved seeing this online community grow, Watters said. Its really cool to see people taking steps to spread the message about rhinos and Boone.

Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @lizziejohnsonnn
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Just when it seemed like there couldnt be any more monkey business at the troubled San Francisco Zoo, along comes the sad story of its three elderly chimpanzees and their less-than-stellar accommodations that could cost the institution its accreditation.

The smiley, hirsute creatures were a family of four until matriarch Tallulah died in 2013 of heart disease complicated by breast cancer. The beloved trickster was known for occasionally escaping her confines to hit the snack bar or fiddle with pay phones  and zoo legend has it that her face was the muse for the equally beloved Star Wars character, Yoda.

Her death prompted the zoos accrediting body, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, to recommend that the remaining three chimps  Cobby, Minnie and Maggie  be moved to another facility because the animals do best socially when theyre in larger groups.

Tanya Peterson, executive director of the zoo, said that she asked instead to keep the three chimps and add a fourth, but that the association also considered that plan problematic.

The concern was that our aging facility wasnt state-of-the-art and may not be suitable for a younger chimpanzee, Peterson said.

Plans for enclosure

The zoo has drawn up plans for a new chimpanzee enclosure, but it will cost close to $10 million to build. The eye-popping figure will be tough to reach considering the zoo is already fundraising for a $6 million South American Tropical Rainforest and Aviary building that will house birds, reptiles, a sloth and a 15-foot anaconda.

We would have bet that raising money for chimps would have been an easier sell than sloths and anacondas, but Peterson said thats not the case.

The chimpanzee exhibit wasnt speaking to some of our major donors, Peterson said. Everybody has their favorite animals, and I think there is a population that really cares about birds.

Birds are great, but better than cuddly chimpanzees that look like Yoda? We think not.

Far short of the necessary funds, Peterson then went looking for a new home for the chimps, even visiting a Florida amusement park that also keeps animals. (Its a tough job, but somebodys got to do it.)

She said she was impressed by the facility, but that it already has 19 chimps, and she was worried the San Francisco primates would have a hard time adjusting to such a large group. While many senior citizens relocate to Florida, Peterson determined that Cobby, who at 57 is downright ancient for a chimp and one of the oldest male chimps in captivity anywhere, would have an especially hard time with the move.

Seeking funds

So Peterson is back to trying to finagle $10 million out of rich people who arent particularly enamored with chimps and is making smaller improvements to the current chimp enclosure in the meantime. The improvements include more time with zoo staff and more chutes to climb on.

Peterson said the accrediting association cant make the zoo give up its chimps, but it can take away its accreditation, which allows zoos to receive federal funds, win financial support from foundations and exchange animals with other accredited zoos.

The accreditation was up in the air after the death of two elephants at the zoo in 2004, but was eventually renewed in 2006 and again in 2011. The credentials are good for five years.

The accreditation is important to us, Peterson said.

The uncertainty comes as just one more blow to the zoo, which in November lost its baby gorilla, Kabibe, after she was crushed to death under an electric door. Five zookeepers who work with primates told The Chronicle that the 30-year-old gorilla enclosure had a flawed layout, faulty doors and inadequate staffing  and that Kabibes death could have been prevented.

Animal tragedies

The past 11 years have not been kind to the zoo  or, one could say, the animals in it. In 2004, two elephants died, and an angry Board of Supervisors voted to move the zoos remaining two elephants to an animal sanctuary.

In 2007, three giant eland African antelope from the San Diego Wild Animal Park were moved to the zoo and put in a single indoor stall where two of them died. Right around the same time, a hippo named Puddles died following a move to new quarters that employees said was bungled.

Most famously, of course, a tiger escaped from her enclosure in 2007 and killed a 17-year-old visitor to the zoo. The tiger enclosures wall was four feet lower than recommended national standards.

In a Chronicle op-ed just after the recent baby gorilla death, Peterson  who took the top post in 2008  said the zoo receives just over $4 million a year from the city, an amount that hasnt changed since the 1990s. The zoos annual operating expenses top $17 million annually, meaning the zoo must rely on donors and operational funds (such as admissions, memberships, food sales and increasingly expensive train and carousel rides) to make up the difference.

Rehabilitating exhibits that date back to the Great Depression is, therefore, a depressing proposition.

No doubt we are an 85-year-old zoo, Peterson told us. I feel like were like the Golden Gate Bridge: We just have to continually improve.

Likening an old, tired facility to the Golden Gate Bridge might be a stretch, but Peterson said the zoo has a lot we can feel proud about. She pointed to the African Savanna exhibit, the two new red pandas and the Lipman Family Lemur Forest.

Dont tell the chimps that even the lemurs are faring better than they are. By the way, if youre a fan of the zoos chimps, you can help fund their new home by visiting sfzoo.org and donating to Help the Chimps.

Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer who covers City Hall politics. E-mail: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
One of the San Francisco Zoos newest exhibits is specially designed to keep people away.

Forty years ago, the Mexican gray wolf population all but disappeared from the wild.

One by one, the wolves vanished in the Southwest: killed by ranchers, hunted by trappers, shot by government officials. By 1976, there were only seven left in the world  two of them in captivity. After decades of careful conservation and captive release, their numbers have surged to 100 in the wild, with another 250 in captivity. But not without issues.

The San Francisco Zoo recently welcomed three of these rock stars of the animal world, brothers aptly named Prince, David Bowie and Jerry Garcia, from a center near Albuquerque as part of the wolfs species survival plan. Three federal agencies oversee the program, in which zoos and nature centers raise wolves that can later be released into the wild.

Little human interaction

But with daily human interaction, is a successful transition possible?

It can be done, said Jason Watters, the zoos vice president of wellness and animal behavior. We just have to make sure the animals dont become used to humans.

At the zoo, that means little interaction with animal keepers. Two former bear grottoes were renovated into a habitat akin to what the wolves would find in nature. It features dirt mounds, trees, plants, a wading pool and a heated boulder. Fourteen swiveling cameras eye the canines at all times.

Yet mankinds touch is apparent in the replica oasis. Kibble, not wild game, is dispensed into troughs from electronic boxes on the walls. Wide windows cover an expanse of the exhibit, and a covered inlet provides zoo-goers with 270-degree views within the canyon. The wolves can hide in their den or behind vegetation, but in the exhibits valley, theyre accessible to prying eyes.

Our main focus is to ensure that they can have their own social interactions that are not guided by us, Watters said. We dont want them reliant on us. We want them engaged in their space and acting in a fashion that approximates what they would be doing in the wild.

It has been done successfully. The California condor was brought back from the brink of extinction after a captive breeding program was started in the 1980s. And this year, six Mexican gray wolf pups were released to surrogate families in the wild.

The wolves are naturally shy and probably wont be spotted near the exhibits viewing windows, said Ron Whitfield, the zoos curator of carnivores. Occasionally, though, they will be seen trotting around.

Bowie is basically the alpha male and runs the group, Whitfield said. When people are around, they tend to hide away and not be seen for a little while. Garcia will come out and look at people, but he stays far away. With the windows and the viewing area, people will be close, but we dont want them interacting with the wolves.

The brothers, who are 11 years old, probably wont be released back to the wild because of their age. Instead, scientists will take sperm from them to breed future pups. About 55 institutions across the United States and Mexico collect the sperm and eggs, which are shipped to two gamete banks: one in St. Louis, the other in Mexico City.

It helps ensure genetic diversity in future wolf populations. Certain packs have inbreeding problems, which can cause physical abnormalities. The most common effect is reduced liver size, which scientists say does not affect the wolfs health.

The only genetic material we have is what was captured from those seven original wolves, said Peter Siminski, director of conservation at the Living Desert in Palm Desert (Riverside County). Thats not the best. To preserve gene diversity, we have to carefully breed wolves for the best genetic goals. A wolf in San Francisco may be fathers of puppies 20, 30, even 40 years from now because of what was preserved from them in our gene bank.

Reversing a grave mistake

The program is largely a success, Siminski said. People are becoming more knowledgeable about the wolfs dwindled population in the wild, and more litters are being born outside of zoos.

Most of the wolves in the wild today were born there, he said. Thats a good thing. Were slowly reversing a grave mistake humans made. Wolves belong in nature.

Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: LizzieJohnsonnn
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RocketSpace, a workspace for startups in downtown San Francisco, is where businesses like Uber grew from good ideas into success stories. Now the provider of shared office space is turning its attention toward food, an area of innovation thats seen an influx of funds in recent years.

On Thursday, CEO Duncan Logan is announcing plans to create Terra, an endeavor that he is calling a food and agriculture tech accelerator. Rabobank, one of the worlds largest banks for food and agribusiness, is covering some of the costs of the program and is providing staff to run workshops and offer advice.

Food-related startup investments totaled $5.7 billion in 2015, up 152 percent from 2014, according to CB Insights. And while there are many businesses  incubators, accelerators, boot camps, and the like  that foster Internet startups, food-tech accelerators are a relatively new phenomenon, said Danielle Gould, CEO and founder of Food + Tech Connect, a research and advisory firm.

Terras startups will also work with KitchenTown, a commercial production facility in San Mateo that provides space for smaller producers. There, companies will be able to develop and test their products before sending them to market.

Entrepreneurs might test new hardware gadgets (think Keurig-like machines that use fully formed pods to deliver food or beverages at the push of a button), experiment with new plant- or insect-based protein sources or test recipes to reduce salt and sugar.

James Tensuan/Special to The Chronicle

KitchenTown is our ability to be at the consumer-facing end of innovation, said Logan. We want to be able to cover them through the whole chain, from the mechanical end to how they grow things, even seed production and animal husbandry.

RocketSpace is joining dozens of organizations that offer advice, office space, connections and investments to startups working on ideas in food and agriculture. Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt is behind Farm2050, a Palo Alto accelerator that has backed CropX, a company developing irrigation technology. Jon Sebastiani, the founder of Krave Jerky, has an incubator called Sonoma Brands that has invested in Berkeleys Dang Foods, a maker of flavored coconut and onion chips, and plans to start or back other food ventures.

Unlike some accelerators, RocketSpace is not taking a financial stake in the Terra startups. The program will help RocketSpace mold its startup and corporate innovation programs to bring large and smaller companies together, while Rabobank hopes to forge connections at an early stage with companies that might later need its corporate banking services or investment.

The move is the latest sign of food techs upward trajectory, as investors and large food corporations recognize the importance of streamlining and automating everything from growing food to delivery.

The food and ag space is enormous, said Logan. Its basically a dozen industries rolled into one.

Near and dear

For the RocketSpace CEO, the decision to open the accelerator stemmed from a very personal place.

Im Scottish. I studied ag and my parents are farmers, so I thought I would be a farmer, too, he said, adding that his wife works in food and nutrition. This subject is really near and dear to me.

But he said the opportunity became a reality when he spoke with Rajiv Singh, CEO of Rabobanks North American wholesale business, and discovered how focused the bank was on food and agriculture.

Rabobank started as a farmers cooperative in the Netherlands in the late 1800s, and brings to the venture knowledge of the sector, plus the ability to connect startups to its global network of customers and suppliers.

Food and agriculture is in the DNA of Rabobank, and weve always been focused on it and at the forefront of new development, said Singh. We make sure that where food gets logically grown and logically consumed are connected in the most efficient manner. We think about it as a system.

Singh said that Rabobank came on board primarily because the time is right.

There hasnt been a huge amount of innovation in this sector until very recently, he said. The newfound interest from entrepreneurs and investors, he believes, stems from the realization that in the next three decades, there will be a huge strain on the food system, which will have to provide enough food for what will be 9 billion to10 billion people by 2050.

The food industry has always been able to add resources, land and labor, but thats no longer feasible. Its a huge challenge, Singh said, but it also presents an opportunity.

This population increase represents a huge new market, he said. The upside for the industry comes from a growing middle class that has disposable income and is more discriminating in food choices.

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Theres a very attractive economic opportunity, if people can create businesses around this dual element of having constraints, but also having people who are willing to pay someone who can solve those problems.

Thursdays announcement comes in conjunction with Rabobanks FoodBytes conference in San Francisco. There, young ag-tech companies like Imperfect Produce and HarvestPort, a marketplace for seasonal farming assets, will pitch their companies to an audience of investors, large food corporations, and food-tech professionals. At the conference, Logan and Singh will call for startups to apply to the program; a team from RocketSpace and Rabobank will select the companies over the next several weeks.

The accelerator will open in August, and the first group of eight to 10 startups will participate in an eight-week program, including introductions to suppliers and distributors.

Food + Tech Connects Gould said its hard to anticipate how successful accelerators will be in the food business, since it takes years for their startup bets to play out.

Flows like water

Logan is nonetheless sanguine about his effort.

Innovation flows like water; it goes into easy spaces, like digital products, first, he said, explaining that its easier to build software than to change the way we grow and distribute a physical product like food.

Food and ag is at the beginning of that process. Were going to see a huge explosion in the next few years.

Amanda Gold is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: agold@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @amandagold
In late May, the Franchise Tax Board sent erroneous notices to about 30,000 Californians saying they underpaid their state income taxes for 2015. The notice sparked so many calls to the tax-collection agency that it was able to answer only 20 percent of them last week.

On June 7, the agency posted a note on its website saying, We are currently experiencing unusually high call and chat volumes and thanked people for their patience.

It added this cryptic note: If youre contacting us about a Notice of Tax Return Change dated May 18 through June 15 regarding adjustments to your 2015 tax return, well allow you an additional 2 weeks from the due date if you need to contact us. No additional action will be taken during this timeframe.

It provided slightly more information in a news flash to tax professionals, but some pros who saw it were still perplexed.

Taxpayers who got the erroneous notice will soon get a Second Notice of Tax Return Change apologizing for the first. Those due a refund will get a check seven to 10 days later.

The tax board said the snafu stemmed from late reporting of employee tax withholding.

Employers withhold state income tax from paychecks and pay this tax to the Employment Development Department, the states employment agency, quarterly. The department then reports the withholding to the tax board. When an individual files a tax return, we compare the claimed withholding against what our records show and then either issue a refund or a bill depending on the amount of income tax withheld, tax board spokesman John Barrett said in an email.

For reasons it could not explain, the tax board said multiple unidentified employers paid their withholding late this year, and the board got the data after it had processed their employees 2015 returns.

When a taxpayer who worked for one of these companies filed and claimed the withholding shown on their W-2, that amount did not match our records. So we either reduced the refund to the amount of withholding we had or issued a bill. In either case, we issue notices informing the taxpayers of the adjustments we made, Barrett wrote. When these taxpayers received the notice, they called their tax professionals, who in turn, contacted us.

The board got so many calls, our level of access was dropping to completely unacceptably low levels, said Jacob Roper, a spokesman for the the tax board. The agency redirected resources to customer service and is now answering 63 to 77 percent of calls, he added.

In an email, Employment Development Department spokeswoman Loree Levy said, Each quarter, there are a number of employers who are delinquent in filing their wage and withholding reports, but our historical data shows that the employer delinquency rate is no different this year than the rate experienced for the same time period last year.

Taxpayers who got a lower refund than they deserved because of the late withholding information will receive a check making them whole. Those who got a bill for the incorrect amount will receive a corrected bill.

Not everybody who got a notice about their 2015 tax return will be getting a refund or a grace period.

In late May, the board sent a notice of tax return change to about 600,000 taxpayers for a variety of items related to their 2015 returns. Of these, 115,000 were for wage withholding adjustments. Of these, only 30,000 were caused by the late withholding data.

The grace period applies only to the people who received a wage withholding adjustment notice dated between May 18 and June 15, not to all 600,000 people who received a tax return change notice, Barrett said. Those who qualify for the grace period will have an extra two weeks to respond to the notice before the tax board takes any action, including collection activity.

That wont help everyone who had trouble getting through on the phone. Tim Bland of San Francisco said he got a notice dated May 13 saying he did not pay the annual $800 fee for his limited liability company, even though he paid the fee and has the canceled check. The notice demanded $800 plus $112.56 in penalties and interest, but then gave him an $800 credit against those charges, which had Bland scratching his head.

Bland said he started calling the tax board after he received the notice in late May, but could never get through.

Last week, I stopped when they put the notice up. Before that, I was trying at least twice a day for at least a week, he said. Each time, he had to listen to a long voice mail spiel, then go through a menu of options, followed by another long recording, after which he was cut off. There was no way to stay on hold or leave a message, he said.

The two-week grace period would not apply to limited liability company fee payers, said Roper of the tax board. Hopefully the added (phone) capacity will allow those taxpayers with questions to get through and resolve any issues on their accounts.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: kathpender
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Pacific Gas and Electric Co. goes on trial Thursday, on criminal charges of violating pipeline-safety laws, because one of its gas pipes exploded and burned in San Bruno nearly six years ago, killing eight people, destroying 38 homes and devastating a neighborhood.

And while a federal judge has ruled that this is not a trial about the San Bruno explosion, prosecutors will do everything they can to implant the events of Sept. 9, 2010, in the jurys hearts and minds over the next six weeks.

Historically, disasters linked to unsafe practices have not led to criminal prosecutions, but instead to damage suits by victims and their families and to regulatory actions by the government  like the $1.6 billion penalty levied against PG&E by California regulators.

But the Justice Department under President Obama has mounted some noteworthy prosecutions resulting from safety violations. Criminal charges against BP for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers led to corporate guilty pleas and $18 billion in fines and penalties. In April, Don Blankenship, former chief executive of Massey Energy Co., got a year in prison for conspiring to violate mine-safety laws in the 2010 explosion that killed 29 workers at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia.

The Justice Departments second-ranking official, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, has encouraged the 93 U.S. attorneys offices that prosecute federal crimes to take up workplace safety cases and consider charges, like conspiracy, that can illuminate a corporate defendants disregard for the law.

In the PG&E case, that charge, added by a federal grand jury in July 2014 to the 12 pipeline-safety counts in the original indictment, is obstruction of justice.

Specifically, the company is accused of trying to interfere with the San Bruno investigation by hiding an alleged policy of testing older pipelines for welding problems only if the pipe pressure exceeded the federal maximum by 10 percent, leeway that federal law does not allow. That policy, which allegedly predated the explosion, was described in an internal memo that PG&E provided to the National Transportation Safety Board. In April 2011, however, the company told the same agency  falsely, prosecutors say  that the document was only a draft that had never been implemented.

Beyond the specifics, the obstruction charge brings the San Bruno explosion, the subject of the federal boards investigation, into the courtroom.

PG&E request denied

As U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson put it in a September 2014 ruling denying PG&Es request to remove all references to the explosion from the indictment, It would be exceedingly difficult for a jury to determine the (criminal intent) of PG&Es obstructive actions without knowing the nature of the investigation and its potential outcome, which would provide a strong motivation for obstruction.

As jury selection began Tuesday, Henderson rejected the utilitys motion to sever the obstruction charge and try it separately before another jury.

The government wants to talk about the explosion, said Kevin Collins, a Texas attorney and former federal prosecutor who has followed the case closely. The company doesnt want to talk about it. Obstruction gives (prosecutors) a way to talk about it.

PG&E argues that the case is about its compliance with pipeline-safety laws and that the explosion is irrelevant. Prosecutors, the company says, are trying to use what happened in San Bruno to prejudice the jury.

The governments intent to inject evidence of the San Bruno rupture whenever possible is clear, company lawyers said in a court filing last week. There is a significant risk that the jury will be misled into believing that this case is about the terrible accident.

The company also noted that the safety violations charged in the case took place after the explosion.

Henderson, in an April 18 ruling, agreed with PG&E that the trial would not be about the explosion, but said jurors could hear about San Bruno, within limits.

He said prosecutors could present evidence of the explosion to provide the context for the transportation safety boards investigation and PG&Es potential motives for obstructing it. But he barred evidence about the resulting deaths, injuries and property damage, or any photos or descriptions of the scene. He excluded any reference to findings by both the federal board and the state Public Utilities Commission that PG&E was at fault for the blast, an issue that he said was unrelated to the criminal case and potentially prejudicial to the utility.

Henderson also denied prosecutors request to haul the wrecked 28-foot-long, 3,000-pound pipeline from the San Bruno blast to the front of the courthouse for juror viewing.

Wont be forgotten

But judicial precautions may not be enough to dispel the events of September 2010 as the backdrop to everything the jury hears, said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor and co-director of the law schools Criminal Justice Center.

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Even if the jury gets an admonition not to let evidence from one charge (obstruction) bleed over to another, the government hopes it will all blend in the jurys mind, he said.

Much of the prosecution testimony will seek to show deliberate violations of the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, which requires operators of gas pipes to maintain accurate records, identify risks to lines, and inspect or test when pipe pressures exceed the legal maximum.

The 12 felony charges stem from the transportation safety boards investigation after the explosion. They carry potential fines of $562 million, twice the amount that prosecutors allege PG&E saved by flouting the safety rules.

To obtain convictions, prosecutors must prove not only that the rules were broken but that PG&E broke them knowingly and willfully. That standard may be difficult to meet, particularly since  unlike the BP and Blankenship prosecutions  the government has not accused any individual executives of criminally turning a blind eye to safety requirements.

Prosecutors will try to establish the companys mind-set with testimony from former employees, including Peter Darbee, PG&Es chief executive from 2005 to 2011. Leslie McNiece, hired by the utility in 2012 to improve its record keeping, will describe the resistance she encountered from high-ranking officials, prosecutors say. The prosecution will also try to show that PG&E cut costs on pipeline safety to increase its profits.

The company has argued that the federal safety standards were unclear. Henderson  who described the standards as complex and confusing in a pretrial ruling  will allow PG&E to present documents from the transportation safety board raising questions about interpretations of some of its regulations.

But even without any firsthand admissions, Stanfords Weisberg said, prosecutors may be able to show that PG&E must have known it was breaking the rules.

In a company that large and sophisticated, he said, its hard to believe that you werent aware that the right steps werent taken.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@egelko
Moshe Cohen sat cross-legged on a confetti-covered performance space in SoMas Museum of Performance + Design. Eight of us joined him to create a circle while the noted clown offered a brief history of commedia dellarte. As Cohen spoke, a wind-up penguin waddled past him on the concrete floor, all but ignored.

Id signed up for a Saturday clown class, Humoring the Performer, at the casual suggestion of my editor. My initial instinct was to respond to his email, Are you mad at me? Instead, I showed up Saturday morning with my guard up, determined to survive a five-hour clown workshop with as little participation as possible. An hour later, I found myself in a farcical tug-of-war over a plastic bag with a former principal dancer of the San Francisco Ballet  and I was into it.

The Museum of Performance + Design houses over 3.5 million items on the history of performance in the Bay Area. Founded in 1947 and formerly located in the Veterans Building, it has a new South of Market space that looks a bit like a whitewashed, skylit version of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Rows and rows of research material, books and storage boxes stretch past human reach, while two transparent photo scrims decorate the negative space near the ceiling.

In the middle of all that research material was our performance space  a pockmarked concrete floor covered in stage markings. Full-length mirrors leaned against a wall of books. Outside, the Muni 12-Folsom pulled up every 20 minutes, dropping off folks who remained oblivious to the detailed clown instruction occurring just inside.

The smallest inner smile that you have to share has value, beamed Cohen, a 35-year veteran of performing and teaching the art of clowning. Bald on top with an appropriately clownish tuft of monastic hair, Cohen wore jeans and a simple chambray kimono. He was barefoot and sported a tiny enamel clown pin. Im Mr. Positivity, announced Cohen, as his students pranced around the space with plastic bags. Everything youre doing is great.

Cohen, who prefers to use the word clown as a verb, has a long history of clowning with organizations like Clowns Without Borders. Through his performance and teaching, he uses therapeutic humor to work with children and elders in war-torn countries. Cohen also brings his skills to the corporate world, teaching clowning to the staff of local tech giants.

Humoring the Performer was clown class for the rest of us. For five hours, we used bubbles, fans, confetti and that wind-up penguin to expose the silly versions of the feelings inside each of us. The average 16-year-old would have been in his or her own personal hell. A handful of San Francisco grown-ups, however, happily risked looking ridiculous. It was exhausting.

Joining our student ranks was Muriel Maffre, the aforementioned ballet dancer who is now the executive director of the museum. At nearly 6 feet, the very French Muriel is as tall as I am, only thin and graceful. We were partnered for the plastic-bag exercise, instructed to connect with a feeling and then make it funny. Muriel got it right away, while Cohen looked at me. Inject humor! he smiled while injecting an invisible hypodermic needle into his elbow.

Itd been a long week for me, a hard week. And suddenly I was angry at this stupid plastic bag. With dramatic silly gestures, I kicked that dumb bag, I threw it, and I blew it across the room. Good, good! Cohen encouraged while he leaned against a bright-red wheelchair ramp along our stage. Now give it a sound!

Cohens clowning certainly allows for sound, but its either natural, guttural sounds or gibberish talk. In a brief segue into mime, Cohen demonstrated fighting an invisible locked door. As he lamented his silly situation aloud, Cohen sounded like a cross between Mr. Bean and a Minion.

In between our clowning exercises, Cohen regaled us with short stories of his global travels, and dropped the names of apparently legendary clown mentors. Everyone except me nodded in recognition.

We resumed our cross-legged circle at the end of the afternoon. Cohen passed a colorful pinwheel  a gift from some famous Japanese clown  and one by one, we each expressed how we felt about our day as clowns. Wonderful, everyone. Wonderful, said Cohen. Now were going to give this positive energy away.

We rubbed our hands together, we clapped them up to the ceiling, and we hopped the 12-Folsom back into the real world.
At imprecisely 10:30 a.m. June 26, the world-famous Dykes on Bikes will rev up their motorcycle engines and roar down Market Street, kicking into gear the 46th annual San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade.

The weekend-long San Francisco Pride Celebration, where people from all over the world descend on the city, is the Bay Areas version of Mardi Gras, and over the years, it has attained bucket-list status for gay and straight folks alike.

As the centerpiece of this celebration, the parade and its ubiquitous rainbow flags offer one of the most colorful symbols of acceptance on the planet.

Thats why its a destination event, said parade manager Marsha Levine. There is more acceptance from society, and that changing mood within our allied community has carried over into the parade. It brings out everyone in our city.

There will be an endless array of weekend events, ranging from the somber to the silly, and the multitude of choices can be overwhelming to the uninitiated  even to the initiated. So weve come up with a guide to enjoying (and surviving) Pride Weekend: the parade, the parties, the commemorations, the films, the food, the transportation  everything except your costume, which you will have to provide yourself.

But first, a little history.

The parade started off as a small march on Polk Street in 1970, marking the first anniversary of New Yorks Stonewall riots, generally regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement. Within two years, the event had attracted a few thousand marchers, many of them wearing outrageous outfits  or nothing at all. The images went global, and so did the march.

Last year, the parade attracted more than 1 million people. Since the beginning, it has always been a combination of the political and the celebratory, but the weight of those factors has depended on the times.

The LGBT Pride Parade was very celebratory from 1972 to 1976, said Greg Pennington, a founder of the GLBT Historical Society. It became more political in 1977 to 1979 because of the Anita Bryant campaign to repeal gay rights ordinances and the Briggs Initiative (an unsuccessful 1978 California ballot measure) to ban gay schoolteachers.

In 1980 there were carnival rides in Civic Center for the festival for the only time, and many railed at the lack of a political focus that year. From 1982 to 1985, the parade was focused on the AIDS crisis.

With the advent of same-sex marriage and increased public acceptance of LGBT rights, the tone has been decidedly celebratory  and corporate, as more firms realize that supporting LGBT causes is good business. But this year, expect a lot more than just sequins and company logos.

The theme of this years parade is For Racial and Economic Quality. The Black Lives Matter organization has been selected as a community grand marshal, and there is heated political opposition to bathroom laws that target transgender people in North Carolina.

Most dramatically, the nation is reeling from the June 12 massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando  and a remembrance of the victims will be an important, heartfelt feature of the weekend.

Brandon Chew/The Chronicle

If history is any indication, love, unity and a measure of defiance will be the order of the day, as LGBT folks and their allies bring home the message that even epic acts of hate wont stop the huge strides that have been made for LGBT rights. That is the power of the parade, bringing together weekenders of all stripes in a celebration of the power of diversity.

Beyond current events, Pride Weekend will be affected in other ways this year. One of the biggest changes will be the official absence of the Pink Party (formerly known as Pink Saturday), a nighttime bacchanal in the Castro District that has attracted massive crowds. The event got so popular  and unruly  that the neighborhood couldnt support it anymore, much like what happened with the huge Halloween celebration that took place every year in the gay enclave before the party was moved to Civic Center.

And Civic Center is where much of the Pride action will be, as the area around City Hall morphs into a continuous party. Starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 25, more than a dozen stages and venues will entertain and enlighten the crowds. On June 26, the Civic Center festivities will double in size for the post-parade extravaganza, as prominent performers and speakers take center stage.

Another pillar of the weekend  and worth your while  is the Dyke March on Saturday, which starts in the day with a rally in recently refurbished Dolores Park and ends with a late-afternoon march that winds through the area.

For those who want to get even an earlier start to their Pride Weekend, the annual Trans March  one of the largest trans events in the world  will be held Friday, June 24. The Friday tradition, which started in 2004 and now draws 7,000 attendees, begins at Dolores Park and ends at Civic Center.

One of the most dramatic hallmarks of Pride Weekend is the giant Pink Triangle that appears on Twin Peaks every year. The striking triangle serves both a somber and festive purpose: It commemorates a dark chapter of gay persecution during the Nazi era, yet it also sets an exuberant tone for the parade and the weekend to come.

The parade is all about being yourself, doing your thing, said Patrick Carney, co-founder and yearly organizer of the Pink Triangle. Some dress conservatively. Some dress flamboyantly. Hopefully that freedom to be yourself will never change.

David Lewis is a Bay Area freelance writer.

The San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade

When: 10:30 a.m., June 26.

Where: The parade begins at Market and Beale streets and ends at Market and Eighth streets.

Civic Center celebrations: Noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 25; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. June 26.

For more info: www.sfpride.org

The Pink Triangle

Visitors are welcome to attend the commemoration of the Pink Triangle, and volunteers are urged to help put it up and take it down.

Where: Twin Peaks parking area, 100 Christmas Tree Point Road, S.F.

Installation: 7 to 10 a.m. Saturday, June 25.

Commemoration ceremony: 10:30 a.m. June 25.

Deinstallation: 4:30 to 8 p.m. June 26.

Note to volunteers: Bring a hammer and gloves.
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I couldnt say what thoughts were passing through the head of the guy next to me at Blue Bottles Mint Plaza store, as we both watched a barista pour coffee grounds into a bulbous glass siphon pot  but I can bet you I was thinking what most Americans would: Could this coffee be worth $20 a cup?

The coffee, grown on the Hussein al-Haba farm in Yemen, was brought to the United States by Mokhtar Alkhanshali, an Oakland coffee enthusiast who spent a year helping Yemeni farmers prepare their crop for the international market. In spring 2015, Alkhanshali escaped Yemens civil war on an inflatable boat to bring two suitcases of beans to an international coffee conference.

James Freeman, owner of Blue Bottle, was so smitten with the Yemeni coffees that he bought the next harvest to offer at his cafes in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York  at a cost of $16 per pour-over cup and $20 for a siphon pot. While waiting for my cup, I read about the coffee in a thick, four-color brochure and pecked at a pair of cardamom-sesame cookies that accompanied the coffee.

Blue Bottles Yemeni coffees may be the most expensive cup the Bay Area has ever seen, but only by a dollar or two. Equator, Ritual and Verve have all sold high-priced cups this year, courting press  and controversy  and catching the attention of connoisseurs and the mildly curious alike.

In many ways, $16 coffee is a food stunt, San Franciscos version of the KFC Double Down or the Blueberry Pie Oreo. It is made to be discussed, even if half that discussion consists of WTF NO WAY tweets. (See the comments below.)

Roasters, however, say these ultra-premium cups represent so much more.

The $16 cup had its origins in Panamanian coffee beans grown by Hacienda La Esmeralda, which stunned the specialty coffee world in 2007 when it auctioned for $130 a pound. The beans came from Gesha (or Geisha) trees, an Ethiopian varietal first planted in Central America in the 1960s and neglected until they won crazy scores at cuppings, or professional tastings.

In 2008, Verve, a Santa Cruz roaster, helped discover a plot of Gesha trees growing on another Panamanian estate, and has been selling small lots of its Elida Green-Tip Gesha ever since, purchased directly from the grower. Other Gesha coffees currently retail online for $55 a half-pound; during the holiday season, Verve stores sell brewed cups for $12 apiece.

James Tensuan/Special To The Chronicle

Hacienda La Esmeraldas results inspired Brooke McDonnell and Helen Russell of San Rafaels Equator Coffees & Teas to plant roughly 35 acres of Gesha trees on Finca Sophia, a high-altitude parcel of land they purchased in Panama with local coffee consultant Willem Boot.

Few other roasters have attempted what Equator is doing: producing its own Grand Cru coffees, as McDonnell calls them. When you see a $15 cup, this is a coffee that is not about prolific production, she says. Its grown at certain altitudes, she adds, then picked, processed and roasted carefully in tiny amounts. It took eight years and a lot of seed money before Equator could harvest the first 300 pounds of beans last year.

Within hours of the coffees release in February 2016, $15 for a cup of coffee! stories began appearing. Legions of writers paid $15 for the privilege of voicing their enthusiasm, befuddlement or outrage over the Finca Sophia. Many repeated the process this past week at Blue Bottle.

Blue Bottle owner James Freeman reasons, Sixteen dollars, thats the cost of an appetizer at a pretty nice restaurant or a medium glass of wine  or one of the best coffees, hopefully, that people will ever taste.

Not all coffee roasters agree. The $15 cup is about hype unless there is some social mission to it, argues Four Barrel owner Jeremy Tooker. Hes not a fan of Panamanian Geshas, which he says taste great in cuppings but not brewed using normal methods. Were not into novelty coffees. Our model is about long-term sustainability in every way we can think of.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Amy Osborne/The Chronicle

More in line with Tookers philosophy, perhaps, were the $12 cups Ritual Roasters offered last month. On a visit to the Monte Rey estate in El Salvador, whose coffees normally cost $3 a cup at the cafe, Ritual baristas picked 35 pounds of coffee, then calculated how much a cup would cost if the estates farmworkers were paid San Francisco wages.

Eight dollars from the sale of each cup was sent back to Finca Monte Rey to fund water and food projects for its workers. I want to live in a world where we value every persons contribution, Ritual owner Eileen Hassi Rinaldi wrote in an email, and we start valuing the labor that goes in to labor-intensive products like coffee. Equators McDonnell is vociferously in accord.

Ultra-premium tea, which fetches even higher prices than Finca Sophia, has its own internationally savvy stratum of connoisseurs. The two beverages are similar in another way: The quality of the cup depends on your brewing skills.

Rather than spend $65 on 6 ounces of Blue Bottles Hussein al-Haba beans, I decided to fork over $20 and let the barista do the work. It paid off. Coffees brewed in a siphon pot tend to have a lighter color and body  more like tea  but the method unpacked all the aromatics in the bean: strawberry and orange peel, warm yeast, sweet spices.

I brought the coffee back to the office and portioned sips out to co-workers. Some, like me, marveled over the nose. Others thought it was kind of gross. The worth of a $20 cup of coffee, it seems, is in the mind of the drinker. Luckily for Blue Bottle, the Bay Area doesnt lack for receptive minds.

Jonathan Kauffman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jkauffman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: jonkauffman
They make an odd couple: fortyish Dan Schauble, ebullient and optimistic even as he worries about his future, and sixtysomething Bob, the gruff owner of Dots bar, smarting over the recent separation from the wife (Khandi Alexander) he named the bar after. Yet in Tom E. Browns comedy Pushing Dead, starring James Roday as Dan and Danny Glover as Bob, the two are the best of friends.

On the East Coast, I had this old guy I worked with in a retail store, says Brown, whose film has its world premiere on Saturday, June 18, at Frameline. He and I were pals. Mickey. Mickey Krueger. He was in his 70s. ...

I was in my 20s, feeling like I was in my golden years, because my doctor had come to me and said, I dont know where youre going to be in three months, maybe three years, adds Brown, who found out then that he was HIV-positive. You immediately feel, How am I going to live the final years of my life now? Thats what I think fascinated me about bringing someone whos younger and someone who is a senior together as pals.

Pushing Dead is a quintessentially San Francisco movie  at least the San Francisco before rapid gentrification pushed so many people out of town. Dan and Bob are two members of a makeshift family that includes Dans lonely roommate Paula (Robin Weigert).

Courtesy of Frameline

In someone elses hands, the film might have been melodrama, as sweet-natured Dan becomes trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare when his mothers $100 birthday check pushes his income over the limit for insurance subsidies, making him liable for thousands of dollars he doesnt have for the medication that keeps his HIV in check. But Brown, as optimistic as his protagonist, pursues a tone that is anything but downbeat.

I always look for the silver lining to any bad situation, he says.

After moving to the Bay Area from his native Connecticut just over 20 years ago, Brown, 49, quickly established himself as a filmmaker with an initial focus on shorts. Dont Run, Johnny (1997), Rubber Gloves (1998) and Das Clown (1999) made the circuit, playing Frameline, Sundance and other festivals. In 1999, he won a Golden Spire Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival for Rubber Gloves. Most recently, he made the comedy Tradesmans Exit, which screened at Frameline last year.

When the Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs accepted him in 2000 on the strength of the Pushing Dead script hed completed in a month, his first feature seemed near at hand. Instead, Browns ability to look on the bright side stood him in good stead on the long road to getting the film made.

At the Sundance Labs, he picked up a producer in his writing adviser, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King), a partnership that has held firm over the past 16 years. San Francisco native son Glover, who shot to stardom in the Lethal Weapon franchise, signed on seven years ago and never wavered in his commitment.

The actor was also instrumental in the signing of Psych star Roday. Glovers agent sent Brown Rodays reel. Glover and Brown lived not far from each other in the city when Glover agreed to do the movie, but they hadnt met yet  the only actor Brown didnt meet before signing.

Despite the heavy hitters attached, Brown still struggled to get the film made. At one point, he had a green light  but only if he would relocate the story to New York.

I just thought, This is a San Francisco movie. Thats one of the things that wouldnt feel right, having this group, this family in New York, says Brown, who located Dots bar at the Missions Blind Cat bar and set one scene in the now-defunct Lucky Penny restaurant. I went to great lengths to find the San Francisco that is a bit untouched. I wasnt sure until after we were finished if it would feel like my San Francisco.

Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer. Twitter: cinepam

Pushing Dead: 6:30 p.m. Saturday, June 18. Castro Theatre, S.F. 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 21. Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Berkeley. $10-$12. www.frameline.org

To watch a trailer, go to https://ticketing.frameline.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?FID=53&id=3805
Dear Mick: In Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck is in Fred MacMurrays apartment as Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) is in the elevator to visit Fred. If he sees Barbara there, its all over for both killers. Fred blocks Keyes view by hiding Stanwyck behind the apartment door facing outward. But no apartment door faces outward for obvious reasons. Im curious to know how many viewers have caught this flaw.

Art Poretz, Greenbrae

Dear Art: Nobody catches it on first viewing, because the moment is too tense. Viewers are distracted by their identification with MacMurray and Stanwyck. Its only by reading about it later that we ever find out that apartment doors open in and not out. And even then, if we see Double Indemnity again, the moment is just as tense the second time.

Dear Mick: I am always fascinated by the foreigners take on Americana, be it novels, breakfast food or cinema. Do the French ever publish your reviews of their movies?

Steven Banks, Mountain View

Dear Steven: Theres no forum for them to publish my reviews, but they did have a chance to publish my book about contemporary French actresses, and they didnt, which is too bad, because that might have been, like, oh you know, actual money. I have a British friend, a film critic and former publisher, who warned me that the French would never publish a book by an American on a French topic, but of course I didnt listen to him, because that would have been sensible.

Dear Mick: It was hard for me to accept the portrayal of Olympic official Avery Brundage in Race. He is shown going up against Joseph Goebbels prior to 1936. In reality, Brundage was an anti-Semite. How important is it that movies depicting real-life people and events be as accurate as possible?

Jonathan Swain, San Francisco

Dear Jonathan: There are differing opinions on this, and practices vary from generation to generation. It used to be that Hollywood biopics had almost no relationship with the truth, and no one minded. But now, when I see a biopic, I expect it to be true, or at least mostly true; otherwise I feel as if my time has been wasted. A recent example of a waste of time was Eddie the Eagle, loosely based on the story of a British skier, but with all the relationships, characters, circumstances and settings changed. What was the point of telling that story?

Good morning, Mick: There have been hundreds of movie remakes over the past 80 years. Are there any films you would like to see remade?

Paul Sheinfeld, San Rafael

Good morning, Paul: The best movies to remake are movies that werent any good to begin with. But how can you tell whether something was mishandled or simply doomed by design? One way to tell is when a bad movie is made from a good novel, which happens often enough. The example that leaps out for me is Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1931), a very bad 76-minute Greta Garbo movie that was made from the 1,000-page novel of the same name by the muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips. It was a turn-of-the-century panorama about a woman born into poverty who experiences every possible degradation before ending up as a great actress. It would make a great three-hour movie for a young actress of unusual maturity and self-possession  for example, the Nastassja Kinski in the early 1980s, or maybe Adele Exarchopoulos today.

I can also think of a lot of movies made from racy novels or plays, which had to be neutered into respectability. Kitty Foyle, for example. Then theres Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which was censored into stupidity and incoherence when Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives starred in it in 1958. Jessica Lange and Rip Torn starred in a brilliant TV version in 1984, but Id like to see a big-screen remake get it right. Perhaps Tommy Lee Jones, who played Brick in 1984, could play Big Daddy in the remake.

Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification.
Growing up in North Hollywood, Jessica Rivas never gave much thought to the glacier-carved monolith that is Half Dome, rustic cabins along the Merced River or uniformed park rangers in flat brim hats.

These days she often can be found walking near the river, in the shadow of the granite peak.

Wearing the hat.

As a wilderness ranger working in Yosemite National Park, Rivas represents the park and the National Park Service and, she says, the nature that can be life-changing. As a 22-year-old woman of Mexican and Lebanese descent, however, she is far from representative of most visitors and workers in a park system that belongs to an increasingly diverse U.S. population.

Just 22 percent of park-goers are ethnic minorities, according to a 2011 study that also points out that percentage had not changed noticeably since the previous survey in 2000.

The lack of diversity is even more dramatic in light of predictions that by 2020 half of all youths in America will be of color, and by 2043, whites will no longer be a majority of the U.S. population.

Its been a dilemma for all of the National Park Services 100 years: The legacy left for all Americans  and paid for with everyones taxes  should be easily available and welcoming to the entire population.

But as the Park Service celebrates its centennial this summer, officials and experts are concerned that if they cant broaden the base of visitors and others who support the parks, looking forward to another 100 years might be wishful thinking.

In one word, its called relevancy. We need what America looks like now to support the National Park Service so we can continue to care for these great natural resources, and the cultural and historical parts of Americas story, says Jeffrey Olson, spokesman for the National Park Service.

If were not relevant, whos going to care if we stay?

Part of the solution might be, quite literally, a walk in the park.

Outdoor Afro field trip

At a break in the trees on the northwest side of Angel Island, a cluster of African American men and women stop to capture the view of Marin and Mount Tamalpais from a new angle. A few take selfies with a nature-filled backdrop. The field trip was organized by Outdoor Afro, one of the variety of organizations and programs working to increasing the diversity, both in ethnicity and age.

So much of how I became who I am is because of nature. There are lessons that nature taught me that I wouldnt have learned anywhere else, said Rue Mapp, founder of Oaklands Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit network focused on reconnecting African Americans with the outdoors. We have a chance to use nature as the ultimate open-source platform, Mapp said. Nature doesnt see race. When I go out, the trees dont know that Im black.

Mapp fell in love with the outdoors as a child exploring the Oakland hills and with wilderness while on a trip to Sequoia National Park when she was 20. The goal of the trips she organizes now is to get outside, as a community, for experiences that further appreciation for nature and well-being.

Robbin Summerall, with her daughters, Milan, 11, and Tahlia, 10, said that the Angel Island trip is the kind of opportunity for her family that she didnt have.

We just didnt do it. It didnt even come into our psyche to go hiking or do the parks, said Summerall of Suisun City. And economically, we couldnt afford it either.

We had one neighbor, they were Caucasian, and they would go to Yosemite and stuff, said Summerall, who grew up in Vallejo. We would just be like, OK, Yosemite. And? What, is Yogi Bear there? she said, referring to the cartoon character from fictional Jellystone Park. Thats about the only exposure I had was cartoons. Yogi Bear.

Michael Macor/The Chronicle

Outdoor Afros primary demographic is African American, although anyone can sign up and attend. Similarly, San Franciscos Latino Outdoors organizes outings and events geared toward a Latino population that emphasize leadership and culture.

The short day hikes often are a gateway to longer trips and bigger parks, said Mapp. Our priorities include our national parks, but all public lands whenever possible. Not everybody is going to go to Yosemite or Yellowstone.

Presidential visit

Michael Macor/The Chronicle

President Obama and his family, who have visited national parks including Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Acadia during his presidency, visited Yosemite this weekend in part to draw attention to the importance of public lands. The visit certainly doesnt hurt the cause of the Next 100 Coalition, a group of organizations (including Latino Outdoors and Outdoor Afro) asking Obama for a presidential memorandum aimed at increasing inclusion and representation of Americas communities of color in our national parks and other public lands.

Among supporters for coalition efforts is Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, who is on the National Park Service advisory board looking at issues of diversity.

According to Finney, the lack of diversity in the great outdoors  and its causes  isnt really separate from many other elements of American life. Most of whats behind it can be divided between the assumptions that society makes about ethnic minorities as it relates to the environment and representation, from the faces on park brochures to the stories that are told in the park, to who makes the decisions. Historically, the who has overwhelmingly been white. Environmental organizations in general are really poor in terms of diversity in their leadership, she said.

Jason Henry/Special to The Chronicle

Its not simply about visitors. Its about a broader understanding of who are the parks for, who participates in deciding how the parks are represented and understood, Finney said. Visitors are just one piece of a larger issue.

City girl to park ranger

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Among those trying to change assumptions is Yosemite ranger Rivas, who in 2011 as a UC Merced freshman took a left turn at a flyer for the Yosemite Leadership Program and soon went from city girl to park ranger. The two-year program takes 25 students per year and, along with summer internships, prepares students to enter the National Park Service following graduation.

Jason Henry/Special to The Chronicle

Rivas, who now works at the wilderness centers at Yosemite and at UC Merced, leads ranger-guided tours, and helps bring fourth-grade classrooms from rural communities into the park as part of the White Houses Every Kid in a Park initiative, said that her stint in the leadership program left her addicted.

As we become more technological, we become more removed, and I think that these places offer a sense of overall care for things that are beyond us and bigger than us, she said. These places exist for a reason, and it can change your life.

Yosemite Leadership Program is part of a drive at UC Merced, a school in which 68 percent of the students are first-generation Latino or Asian, to guide a young, diverse body of students into the workforce that protects and represents public lands. Its tied to other programs that focus on high school students, including Wild Link, NatureBridge and Adventure Risk Challenge. The Park Service also connected with the Student Conservation Association, which places youth volunteers in work projects and internships.

The Yosemite program and others are valuable, Rivas said, if only because minority visitors will begin to see more of the parks workforce, including rangers, who look more like them. The more people see themselves, the more connected they feel to these places, she said. It makes people care about these places because it shows that they belong. It shows theyre welcome.

Steve Shackelton, a former chief ranger for both Yosemite and the National Park System who works with UC Merced now, says the universitys programs are part of the strategy to solve both of the major issues that stem from the lack of diversity: fairness and relevance.

We need to do it because we want there to be a park system going forward, he said, but also because its the right thing to do.

Progress in diversity

The Park Services Olson said there has been progress in terms of cultural diversity of the parks themselves  most of the parks opened in the past decade have been cultural and historical in nature, including the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad, Cesar Chavez, Belmont-Paul Womens Equality and Pullman national monuments.

And if the parks fail to be relevant with an increasingly diverse population? According to Olson, the unthinkable becomes possible. If we expect to be here and do what we do, then Congress needs to know that its important to the people who send them to Congress.

Its important across a wide spectrum. Its very American, part of our heritage, and we need to pass that along to new Americans, Olson said. And its a real, cold dollars-and-cents issue on the other end of the spectrum.

Spud Hilton is The San Francisco Chronicles Travel editor. Email: shilton@sfchronicle.com Twitter: spudhilton

Free entrance days

Entrance fees are being waived at all National Parks Service sites that charge fees  including Muir Woods National Monument and Yosemite, Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Lassen, Pinnacles and Death Valley national parks  from Aug. 25 to 28 for the park services birthday, on Sept. 24 for National Public Lands Day, and on Nov. 11 for Veterans Day. For more information, go to www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/fee-free-parks.htm.
Gabrielle Lurie Gabrielle Lurie/Special to The Chronicle

San Francisco is pushing ahead with a promising plan to solve one of its most obvious and tangled problems. City leaders are pledging to open six experimental homeless shelters with the potential to move hundreds off the streets and into safe housing.

The plan builds on the initial success of the year-old Navigation Center in the Mission District, which combines relaxed rules and intensive counseling to handle homeless who are wary of conventional shelters. Help with mental health and alcohol issues, temporary quarters and even a bus ticket home are all on the menu in a small-scale setting.
There are few issues in Congress more polarized than gun control. The National Rifle Association gives 56 U.S. senators an A grade for their devotion to gun rights  and 36 senators a grade of F. Just 11 senators have scores ranging somewhere else on the scale.

The stark division makes it unlikely that Congress will pass strict gun control, despite the past few years heartbreaking series of massacres. Its outrageous that last weekends shooting deaths of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando  the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history  wont immediately lead to passage of an assault weapons ban, but its unlikely.

More likely, but still challenging, is the chance that Congress will take action on two narrower measures.

One, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would keep people on the terrorist watch list from buying firearms. A similar measure failed in December, but Senate Democrats have resurrected efforts to pass it this week.

The other would require background checks for guns purchased online and at gun shows.

On Wednesday, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., launched a surprise filibuster on the Senate floor, demanding that the Senate adopt the measures.

Murphys frustration with Senate inaction on gun control is long-standing  Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of a horrific 2012 mass shooting that killed 20 children and six teachers, is in Connecticut. Other Senate Democrats rushed to join him.

Even in the Republican-dominated House, there are signs that the status quo is not holding.

On Monday night, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., tried to hold the usual moment of silence on the House floor. Instead, chaos erupted, with Democrats shouting at him to bring gun control bills to a vote. Some even walked out in protest.

Some centrist Republicans in the House, like Bob Dold, of Illinois, have called on their fellow Republicans to take up the gun control measures on background checks and terror watch suspects.

For now, Ryan is determined to avoid bringing the legislation up for a vote.

His recalcitrance has been especially frustrating for the California delegation. The state has strong gun-control measures, but theyre pretty permeable without federal action. Guns simply leak across the border from neighboring states like Arizona and Nevada, where gun control is weak.

Theres hope, especially when it comes to Feinsteins measure. Senate Republicans have hinted that theres a way to compromise by giving watch listees due process so they can still buy guns if theyre listed by mistake. The rare concession suggests that they know the nation is demanding action.
Vacation crowds can turn Yosemite, Big Sur, Monterey, South Lake Tahoe and San Francisco into pressure cookers. The Redwood Empire can provide a relief valve.

You can get world-class beauty, trails and campsites without the world-class crowds. You have to do your homework, of course.

For some, redemption comes when you awaken at your camp and take in the deep scent of an old-growth forest. For others, its rubbing shoulders with the giant redwood; old trees for old souls. Or you might want to search out hidden trails, streams or just get away from everybody and find a place to call your own.

The price you pay, at least for most, is a long drive. Parks are sprinkled from Mendocino County at Standish-Hickey State Recreation Area (177 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge) on north to the Smith River National Recreation Area in Del Norte County (366 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge).

Across that range is an array of state and national parks, plus national forests, and within them, 60 campgrounds, dozens of trailheads and pretty streams. Here are the 10 best, ranked 1-10:

1. Prairie Creek Redwoods

Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park gained worldwide attention when National Geographic turned a photo of a redwood tree into a foldout centerpiece. Ever since then, tourists from all corners of the world have been coming in high numbers and want to see that tree (its located in the old-growth grove on the trail south of Cal Barrel Road). That makes reservations a must these days at its campground near Elk Prairie (it will sell out every day of summer), and weekday arrivals for the first-come, first-served sites along Gold Bluffs Beach. The trails are sensational: The best for world-class redwoods, Douglas fir, Western hemlock and Sitka spruce, all in the 300-foot range, is the James Irvine Trail; one of the prettiest places in California is Fern Canyon, where you can walk at the base of 50-foot-high walls covered with giant ferns; the Coastal Trail extends from Fern Canyon north on the edge of wilderness forest to your right, beach to your left.

Contact: Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, (707) 465-7347, www.parks.ca.gov.

2. Jedediah Smith Redwoods

This is the most distant park in Californias north state, yet has become one of the most popular. The campground sells out virtually every summer day and reservations are a must through Labor Day. The Forest Service campgrounds provide options in the area along the Smith River and South Fork Smith River. The Smith is one of the prettiest rivers in America and runs right through the park. On the far side of the Smith, you get access just north of Hiouchi off Highway 199, across the two bridges over the Middle Fork Smith and South Fork Smith, to Howland Hill Road. That is where you will find trailheads for the Stout Grove Trail and Boy Scout Tree Trail, two of the prettiest redwood walks anywhere.

Contact: Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, (707) 465-7335, www.parks.ca.gov.

3. Redwood National Park

This is the destination for thousands from across America, many who havent seen old-growth redwoods. They inevitably end up driving Avenue of the Giants. You can separate yourself from them on the Tall Trees Trail or the Skunk Cabbage Trail, both one-of-a-kind, world-class experiences. Heres the key: At the visitor center, ask for the free permit and gate code for the locked gate to the trailhead for the Tall Trees Trail. Then its a 2-mile walk to the grove. Meanwhile, the Skunk Cabbage Trail, signed right off U.S. 101 north of Orick, gets skipped by most everybody. Its a personal favorite. In the spring and early summer, the giant leafy greens of the wild cabbage create a dramatic understory under the rain-forest canopy that make it feel as if youve entered a set for Jurassic Park.

Contact: Redwood National Park and State Parks, (707) 467-7335, www.nps.gov/redw.

4. Humboldt Redwoods

Humboldt Redwoods has four big campgrounds and a network of trails. That makes it popular for families, and its location south of Eureka near Weott makes it far closer for most than Prairie Creek and Jedediah Smith. The best hike is not off Avenue of the Giants, as so many believe, but rather nearby off Honeydew-Mattole Road: the Lower Bull Creek Flats Trail. The Federation Grove is a popular spot. The trail is then routed 3.5 miles along Bull Creek up to the Big Tree Area, with a series of mammoth redwoods. The location is just obscure enough to get overlooked by the out-of-state tourists.

Contact: Humboldt Redwoods State Park, (707) 946-2409, www.parks.ca.gov.

5. Grizzly Creek Redwoods

All the tourists and most of the vacationers miss this state park. It is located on Highway 36 near Bridgeville, near the headwaters of the Van Duzen River, 17 miles east of U.S. 101. What you will find is a series of small, pristine groves of old-growth redwoods. The Rathert Grove is jaw-dropping beautiful, reached with a short, easy walk, and yet you often can have it completely to yourself. In all, there are seven groves and a first-come, first-served campground. Yet the park receives fewer than 25,000 visitors per year.

Contact: Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park, (707) 777-3683, www.parks.ca.gov.

Best of the rest, 6-10

6. Smith River National Recreation Area, Gasquet: Features campgrounds along the Smith River and South Fork Smith River, trailheads into Siskiyou Wilderness, including South Kelsey Trail, Bucks Lake, Devils Punchbowl. (707) 457-3131, www.fs.usda.gov/srnf.

7. Richardson Grove State Park, Garberville: Famous redwood park located along U.S. 101 south of Garberville, highlighted by old-growth within 100 yards of highway, Toumey Grove and South Fork Eel River. (707) 247-3318, www.parks.ca.gov.

8. Patricks Point State Park, Trinidad: Gorgeous campsites in Sitka spruce forest, where Rim Trail provides access to series of spectacular coastal lookouts. (707) 677-3570, www.parks.ca.gov.

9. Trinidad Head, Trinidad: A 1.5-mile hike called Tsurai Loop rises for coastal views, ends near Seascape Restaurant at Trinidad Pier for mouth-watering crab-and-shrimp omelets. (707) 677-3762, www.seascape-trinidad.com.

10. Standish-Hickey State Recreation Area, Leggett: Southern gateway to Redwood Empire, set along South Fork Eel River, crowned by 225-foot Miles Standish Tree, and a campground often with sites available; for people who dont like to drive, a good first-nights destination. (707) 925-6482, www.parks.ca.gov.

Tom Stienstra is the author of the book Moon California Camping. His Outdoor Report can be heard at 7:35 a.m., 9:35 a.m. and 12:35 p.m. Saturdays on KCBS (740 and 106.9) Email: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com Twitter: StienstraTom
I tried to shake off the creeping disappointment as I perused the Locanda menu and realized that the Jewish-style artichokes were missing. The crisp, meaty leaves and heart were unforgettable, a dish Ive had on multiple visits to the Mission restaurant.

However, when the fried Castelvetrano olives ($7) arrived, any hint of disappointment receded. The golden, deep-fried olives, flecked with herbs, cracked on impact, giving way to a buttery interior with a creamy cheese surprise in the center.

Every dish that arrived thereafter continued to buoy my spirits. Green tomato soup ($11) was all the better for its smoked croutons and half-moon of avocado; Sonoma lamb carpaccio ($16) paved the dinner plate, strewn with arugula, salt-packed capers and Parmesan cheese. The tissue-thin slices of meat were subtly but masterfully seasoned so the natural flavors bloomed.

Chef Anthony Strong, whos been at the Roman-inspired restaurant since it opened in 2011, consistently produces excellent pasta, but hes taken his skill to a new level. With a similar casual vibe as Craig and Annie Stolls other restaurant, Delfina, the expert servers know their audience, appreciate the menu and are adept at pointing out items a diner might otherwise overlook.

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As we were trying to decide on pasta dishes, our waiter let us know we could order half portions of six of the seven. We tried three  all very different and all precisely cooked. In tonnarelli cacio e pepe ($17), a famous Roman preparation, theres no place for the ingredients to hide, and the pasta becomes the most important element. It didnt let us down. The pasta was simply sauced with Pecorino and black pepper. Strong uses long pepper, which is hotter and more robust.

Tortelli ($21), tender packets filled with Bellwether Farms crescenza cheese, oozed like thick cream when cut, blending with the earthy mushroom sauce and whole morels. Radiatori ($20), shaped like radiators, were tender and velvety at the fluted end but appropriately toothsome at the core  a perfect pairing with the lamb ragout and chunky tomato captured between the ruffles of pasta.

If there was any disappointment, it would be the pancetta-wrapped chicken ($26), but only because the other dishes created soaring expectations. The waiter pointed out that it was only dark meat, but the flavors were a tad one-dimensional, even with ramp jus, farro and fava beans.

Michael Bauer/San Francisco Chronicle

The chicken letdown lasted only until we forked into the next dish, a whole fish. The restaurant offers one or two varieties a day, either grilled or cooked acqua pazza (poached). We chose petrale sole ($38) weighing in at more than a pound. The waiter suggested we forgo grilling because the fish is so delicate, and we could have it either whole or boned in the kitchen. We chose the latter and it arrived precisely filleted, soaking in a seasoned white wine broth with capers, black olives, chunks of tomatoes, Italian eggplants, potatoes and other vegetables. It was a brilliant treatment for this fish.

When I initially reviewed the restaurant, I was disappointed in the fruit crostata ($9) with a too-sweet cherry filling, but the version I had on my most recent visit continued to show how the kitchen team has come together. The pie-shaped crust was flaky and crisp, filled with barely sweetened apricots and smoothed by a generous dollop of elderflower cream and a scattering of almonds. The strawberry semifreddo ($9) tasted like the essence of the fruit, with the square of frozen mousse separated by pistachio cake. It was presented simply with sugared nuts and slices of fresh strawberries.

John Storey/Special to the Chronicle

Locanda  with its bustling 90-seat interior and a visible kitchen between the two dining areas  is now a fully realized restaurant. Its moved near the top of my recommendations for must-visit Italian restaurants.

Michael Bauer is The San Francisco Chronicles restaurant critic and editor at large. Find his blog at http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com and his reviews on www.sfchronicle.com. E-mail: mbauer@sfchronicle.com Twitter: michaelbauer1

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

  

Locanda

Food:   

Service:   

Atmosphere:   

Price: $$$$

Noise: Four Bells
One of the ways we determine quality in an artistic creation is whether it stands the test of time. Or, more to the point, the test of the times in which it is experienced.

Picassos Guernica, for example, was inspired by the bombing of the Basque village of that name during the Spanish Civil War. Its safe to say that many who marvel at the profundity of its visual statement have no idea about the specific incident that inspired the paintings creation. Instead, we look on it and perhaps think of the totality of war in human history, or perhaps specific conflicts in our lifetimes or those of our parents  World War II, Vietnam, Korea and more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is as it should be: Art should provoke us to bring our own context to the process of experiencing it, and thats certainly something youll feel watching Jason Benjamins Suited, airing on HBO on Monday, June 20. What we now bring to watching this thoughtful and beautifully tailored documentary could never have been known as it was being made.

Rae Tutera and Daniel Friedman are the owners of Bindle & Keep, the small Brooklyn custom tailor shop specializing in creating clothes for transgender people. The film introduces us to several clients whose individual stories are about much more than fabric and fit. Everett is an Atlanta law school student and transgender man. He interviews for a job and is told hed be perfect for it, but the law firm isnt prepared to hire a transgender person. We just dont have the things that would make it comfortable for you or for anyone else, he says hes told.

Derek is a transgender man from a small Pennsylvania town who needs a suit for his wedding to Joanna, who considered herself lesbian until she met him.

Courtesy HBO

Jillian is a transgender woman who wants the perfect suit to wear when she argues an important transgender case before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Aidan is a 12-year-old transgender boy from Arizona who needs a suit for his forthcoming bar mitzvah. He enjoys support from his family  his grandmother contacts Bindle & Keep on Aidans behalf  and despite his youth, he wants a bar mitzvah and not a bat mitzvah: Its about Aidan becoming a man.

On a practical level, its a struggle for transgender people to find clothes that fit them correctly.

I spent countless hours walking through department stores, and theres like nothing here for me at all, says Everett.

Its not just about shopping, though, for Everett or any of the trans or gender-queer subjects of Benjamins film. Its about an affirmation of who they are as people.

Understanding that is part of the context viewers will bring to Suited, but that context has deepened in just the past few days.

I first screened the film nearly two weeks ago. I found it smart, poignant and important. Before writing this review, I watched it again.

In between, Orlando happened. It didnt personally happen to me and it didnt personally happen to most of the people who will watch Suited on HBO. But the deaths of 49 people at the hand of a gunmen at a gay club in Florida on Sunday, June 12, will  and should  come to mind as you watch Benjamins film.

Like most of the dead and wounded in Orlando, the subjects of Suited ask to be accepted for who they are. You may not fully understand what it means to be transgender, but understanding other, no matter how it is defined, is fundamental to a progressive civilization. The nations history is a history of otherness, of waves of social and political outliers struggling for acceptance and respect, enduring indignities and worse in the process.

It will take more than an informative and engaging documentary on a pair of custom tailors to prevent another Orlando, but Suited makes a valuable contribution to understanding what it means to be transgender in the U.S. in 2016.

The film ends with a Bindle & Keep fashion show, as the trans people weve come to know in Suited and many others proudly strut the catwalk to the cheers of a live audience.

At one point, two older women show up to participate in the show. Rae Tutera greets them and directs them to the backstage area.

Its a little crowded back there, she warns, because theres tons of us.

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: WaitWhat_TV Follow me on Facebook.

Suited: Documentary by Jason Benjamin. 9 p.m. Monday, June 20, on HBO.
Connie Wolf, a major force in the small world of Bay Area museum directors, has abruptly resigned after less than five years as director of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

A Stanford graduate who majored in Chinese art history, Wolf, 56, said that her resignation was her decision alone and that she had accomplished what she set out to do, which was to make the museum vibrant on campus.

Wolf seemed born for this job, and she approached it with red-hot enthusiasm after having achieved enviable success at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Reached Wednesday, Wolf said she is considering a few career possibilities but declined to discuss them.

During her tenure, annual attendance at the free art museum has risen by 60 percent, from 170,000 to 270,000. Wolf has improved both the collection and the prestige of the museum, and in return the university has granted her a paid sabbatical through September.

I am looking at this as a wonderful chance to reflect and think about the role of arts in our society, she said. In our world we never have time to be thinking deeply about the ideas that matter to us, so this is an incredible gift from the university.

A search committee for her successor will be formed under the direction of Richard Saller, dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences. There will be no interim director. Wolf is aiding the transition and expects to be out the door for good by the end of next week.

Im very sad to see her go, said Sue Diekman, chair of the directors advisory board at Cantor. Five years is not all that short for a museum director these days, and she fulfilled her mandate beautifully during that time. She made that museum relevant to students, faculty and the broader community.

Wolf said this will be her first break in 17 years, since she was hired as director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in 1999. She guided that institution to its opening in its new site on Mission Street in 2008.

She was hired away by Cantor and started Jan. 1, 2012. Among her accomplishments at Cantor, Wolf organized exhibitions that highlight the depth of the collection, with photography being a particular strength.

Using unknown works from Stanfords collection, Cantor mounted Robert Frank in America in the fall of 2014, which attracted national attention and included a rare appearance by Frank himself, who came out from New York for his 90th birthday.

Exhibitions of works by Lee Friedlander and Richard Misrach were accompanied by gifts, bringing the Friedlander holding to about 100 images and Misrach to six, including three wall-size landscapes from his California Cantos series photographed in the 1980s.

As a testament to the growing prestige of Stanfords photography collection, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York City gifted to Cantor all of the pop artists black-and-white contact sheets and negatives from the last 13 years of his life, more than 120,000 images.

Another major acquisition under Wolf was the sketchbooks of Stanford alum Richard Diebenkorn, 1,100 drawings covering his entire career. These had never been shown before the exhibition Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed, which is up until Aug. 8.

In the same room is Edward Hoppers New York Corner, from 1913, acquired by Cantor last year.

The Edward Hopper alone is a transformative acquisition, Diekman says, and Gretchen Diebenkorn made it clear that the gift of her fathers sketchbooks was largely because of Connie. These gifts elevate the Cantor Arts Center to the level of major national museums.

It wasnt always this way. When Wolf came out from Grand Rapids, Mich., as a freshman in 1977, a trip to the Stanford Art Museum, as it was then called, was an expedition into unknown territory, marked only by the dark and spooky Leland Stanford Jr. Mausoleum.

When she returned, 30 years later, the Stanford Art Museum had been rebuilt and expanded into the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and the university as a whole had embarked on an initiative to support the arts on campus.

In the past five years, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University has opened on one side of Cantor, and the McMurtry Building for the department of art and art history is on the other side. Across Palm Drive sits Bing Concert Hall.

These pieces form the Stanford Arts District, with Cantor as its anchor.

Ive been lucky to be part of Stanford at such an exciting moment for the arts, Wolf said. The museum is stronger than ever.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art
The Bay Area has long grappled with mental illness, struggling in historic and modern times to treat its citizens.

San Francisco's history of mental health facilities starts with a shocking tale. During the Gold Rush, San Francisco used a ship called the Euphemia docked off the city to house the mentally ill. There, they were imprisoned along with criminals deemed unsafe to be left on land. In 1850, 12 individuals judged to be "insane" were locked in the Euphemia's hold.
A Palo Alto High School science teacher was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old female student who volunteered to help clean up his classroom just five days after school ended for the year, police said Thursday.

Ronnie Farrell, 46, of Palo Alto was taken into custody Wednesday night after one of the girls parents reported that the teacher invited the daughter, who just completed her freshman year, into his classroom on one of the first days of summer break and touched her inappropriately, police said.

Palo Alto Police Department officials said Farrell asked the girl, who was in his ninth-grade biology class, to come to the school on the morning of June 7 to help with classroom chores  something officials said wasnt out of the ordinary for the girl to do voluntarily.

When she arrived about 9 a.m., Farrell led the girl into his classroom, where they were alone. After making small talk, he placed his hands under her clothes, groped her breasts and put her hands on his groin, over his clothes, police said. Farrell then had the girl leave the room.

More for you Teacher accused of sex with teen student turns herself in

One of the girls parents reported the incident to police on Monday. Detectives quickly learned that Farrell had sent the girl private messages on social media and continued to do so after the classroom incident.

Farrell arranged a second meeting with the girl at the school on Wednesday evening, police said. But when he arrived at the school, detectives were waiting and arrested him without incident, officials said.

He was booked into the Santa Clara County Main Jail on four felony charges, including child molestation, sexual battery, communicating with a minor with the intent to commit a sex crime and arranging a meeting with a minor with the intent to commit a sex crime.

Farrell has taught full time at Palo Alto High School since 2012, said Jorge Quintana, a spokesman for the Palo Alto Unified School District. Following his arrest, he was placed on unpaid administrative leave, Quintana said.

Kevin Schultz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kschultz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: KevinEdSchultz
The trial of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on criminal charges of violating pipeline-safety laws opens Friday in San Francisco after 21/2 days of jury selection.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson had scheduled opening statements by prosecution and defense lawyers for Thursday, but postponed them after selection of the 12 jurors and six alternates stretched into the early afternoon. Prospective jurors were questioned about their attitudes toward PG&E, as utility customers and as observers of media accounts of the September 2010 pipeline explosion and fire that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno.
The father of a young woman killed in Novembers Paris massacre is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter, saying the companies provided material support to extremists in violation of the law.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the attacks, filed the suit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The suit claims the companies knowingly permitted the Islamic State group to recruit members, raise money and spread extremist propaganda via their services.

Facebook, Google and Twitter all said the lawsuit is without merit.

Under U.S. law, Internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks. It isnt clear if that legal defense will suffice in this and similar cases.

Grocers

FDA warns

Whole Foods

The Food and Drug Administration has sent a stern warning letter to Whole Foods Market, saying the grocer failed to address a long list of food safety issues the agency raised this year after an inspection at a plant in Massachusetts that makes prepared foods for stores in the Northeast.

The inspections, which occurred in February at the companys North Atlantic Kitchen in Everett, just outside Boston, found several incidents of foods exposed to dripping condensation; inadequacies and failure in hand-washing practices; and soiled and improperly cleaned dishes and equipment, among other things. The company was alerted to the problems the FDA found immediately after the inspection.

While the FDAs inspection did not find any pathogenic bacteria in the plant, 1 out of 100 swabs taken on surfaces that come into contact with food and other surfaces tested positive for Listeria.

This finding demonstrates that conditions exist in and on your equipment that would support the presence and growth of Listeria monocytogenes  a highly pathogenic version of the bacteria  and indicates that your cleaning and sanitation practices may be inadequate, the FDA said in the June 8 warning letter.

Whole Foods said it had taken steps to correct the problems the agency found. Weve been in close contact with the FDA, opened our doors to inspectors regularly since February and worked with them to address every issue brought to our attention, Ken Meyer, the companys executive vice president of operations, said in a statement.

The company was given 15 business days to respond. The FDA would not comment on potential steps it might take. But if Whole Foods cannot document the changes it has made to address the problems the agency identified, the agency will reinspect the operation.

The FDA said that the response to its warning in February was not enough. The agency said the company had failed to provide photos, invoices, records of product destruction and other documentation that would demonstrate the necessary corrections.

Publishing

Ebony and Jet

magazines sold

Ebony and Jet magazines, which have chronicled African American life for 71 years, have been sold to a private-equity firm.

Johnson Publishing Co. announced Tuesday that Ebony and digital-only Jet were sold to Clear View Group. The sale of the magazines closed in May, and no price was disclosed.

Johnson Publishing will retain its Fashion Fair Cosmetics business and Ebony photo archive, which is for sale, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The sale allows the publishing company to reduce its debt associated with the media industry, Johnson Publishing CEO Desiree Rogers said in a statement.

Ebony was founded by John Johnson in 1945, but had been affected by declining circulation and revenue in recent years as it tried to evolve from print to digital.

Johnsons daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, will serve as chairwoman emeritus of the new company, Ebony Media Operations. Kyra Kyles will be the new editor in chief of Ebony after Kierna Mayo steps down.

Education

Accreditor

may be closed

The U.S. Department of Education proposed Wednesday to shut the nations largest accreditor of for-profit colleges, a move that could put dozens of schools at risk of losing federal funding.

The recommendation from the departments staff would sever ties with the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which oversees 900 campuses and wields the seal of approval that colleges need to receive federal aid. The group has been under intense scrutiny after critics, including attorneys general in 13 states, accused it of overlooking deception at some schools.

Anthony Bieda, the councils chief, said it takes the education departments recommendation very seriously.

The recommendation to deny recognition is disappointing, and must be addressed directly and decisively by the board and senior management of the agency, he said.

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The taupe stucco house at 317 Bougainvilla Drive looks like any other  which is part of the point.

No outward sign distinguishes it from the other homes taking shape on this street of new construction teeming with work crews. Two stories, with a two-car garage; a shaded front porch offers shelter from the blazing sun.

But this particular house is an experiment. And it could represent Californias future.

If all goes as planned, the home will generate as much electricity as it pulls from the grid over the course of a year, achieving a status known as zero net energy. Within four years, California officials want all new residential construction in the state to consist of zero net energy homes  a tall order.

Itll just be normal

Designed by the Pulte Group development company, the Brentwood house uses two small solar arrays to generate electricity and highly efficient lights and appliances to conserve it. But the house looks and feels like a typical three-bedroom, two-bath home, rather than a test bed for new technology.

Pulte is going to help make this normal, where it isnt something weird that causes 100 people to come out and look, said Drew Bohan, chief deputy director of the California Energy Commission. Itll just be normal. That happened with solar; itll happen with this.

It was also designed to be mass-produced. Although some of its technologies are new, it is a model that can be replicated again and again  or scalable, in a term the builder is borrowing from Silicon Valley.

Everything we put into the house, we put here because its scalable, said Brian Jamison, Pultes national purchasing director.

For now, its still a rarity. Although interest in zero net energy buildings  both residential and commercial  has been rising for years, fewer than 200 had been built nationwide by last year, according to a list compiled by the New Buildings Institute.

And yet, California is counting on zero net energy buildings as part of the larger fight against climate change.

The state has set a nonbinding goal that by 2020, all new single-family homes and new apartment buildings three stories or smaller will be able to produce as much energy as they consume over the course of a year. All new commercial buildings should meet the same standard by 2030.

Were not going to solve our climate and resources challenges if we dont start building homes like these, Bohan said.

The Brentwood home generates electricity through a pair of solar arrays supplied by San Mateos SolarCity. On a typical summer day, those arrays produce more electricity than the house needs, feeding the excess to the grid. At night, the house relies on the grid for power. Pulte chose not to equip the home with a battery that could store excess solar energy for use after dark.

Learning residents habits

The house relies heavily on sensors and automated systems to trim energy use. When direct sunlight strikes the windows, shades lower automatically, although the resident can choose to raise them again.

A smart thermostat from Lennox learns the residents habits and, when synced with a smartphone, automatically turns down the air conditioning when the resident leaves the house. The thermostat can also tell when the resident, and his phone, is approaching the home at the end of the day and turn up the AC accordingly.

A tank-less water heater from Rinnai, combined with a pumping system, saves energy and water. The resident activates it by pushing a button in the bathroom or kitchen. Within about 10 seconds, the system will heat the water and pump it to the faucets. Cold water sitting in the pipes gets pushed back to the heater. Theres no need to let the faucet run until the water warms up.

Youre not wasting one drop of water waiting for it to get hot, Jamison said.

One of the homes biggest energy-saving features may also be one of the simplest. Instead of placing insulation on the floor of the attic as builders typically do, the insulation is cathedralized  installed under the roof. That keeps the attic from heating up. And because the air-conditioning ducts run through the attic, keeping the ducts cool means the air conditioning doesnt have to work as hard as it otherwise would.

Pulte wont say how much the house cost to build, noting that its a prototype.

Well start talking about pricing once weve built more of these, Jamison said.

Technologys costs fall

The company will, however, put the Brentwood house up for sale at the end of the month. And Pulte plans to stay in touch with the buyers after the sale, gathering details about how well they like the energy-saving appliances and home features. Their feedback will help refine the next zero net energy homes that Pulte builds.

The state, meanwhile, may have a hard time meeting its 2020 goal. But Bohan said its not impossible. The technology to make zero net energy homes exists and is getting cheaper with time.

I dont think its some crazy notion, he said. Its ambitious, but its doable.

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: DavidBakerSF
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The case of Raymond Shrimp Boy Chow, the Chinatown kingpin convicted of racketeering and murder, took a new twist Wednesday when a federal judge granted one defense lawyers request to withdraw but denied two others.

After a closed-door hearing with Chow, joined later by his lawyers, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco allowed attorney Curtis Briggs to leave the case but told his colleagues, J. Tony Serra and Tyler Smith, to stay on, at least for now.

Breyer did not explain his decision, and the lawyers have not disclosed why they wanted to withdraw, saying only that recent contacts with Chow had led to irreconcilable differences, which they cant describe publicly because of lawyer-client confidentiality.

All three of us are not abandoning him, Serra, one of the states best-known criminal defense lawyers, said after the hearing. He said they all continue to believe in Chows innocence.

Briggs, interviewed separately, said he was relieved to be off the case because it was ruining him financially.

Ive lost everything, he said. Im behind in my office rent. ... I wish him the best. I just didnt want to be his lawyer any more.

A jury convicted Chow in January of operating a century-old Chinatown organization, the Ghee Kung Tong, as a racketeering enterprise that trafficked in guns, drugs and stolen goods, and of ordering the murder of its former leader, Allen Leung, in 2006. He faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

The prosecution arose from a five-year undercover FBI investigation that implicated more than two dozen defendants, including then-state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from agents posing as contributors and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Chows lawyers have defended him vocally, in court and out, since he was indicted in 2014. They accused prosecutors of framing him while sparing others with stronger political connections who were also investigated by the FBI. Briggs had some sharp exchanges with Breyer during the trial, and the defense later cited the judges alleged unfairness toward Briggs as one of their grounds for seeking a new trial. Breyer rejected their request.

Briggs said Wednesday he had been acquainted with Chow in the past, had brought the other lawyers into the case, and remained Chows main point of contact until the end, taking as many as eight phone calls a day from the defendant and his family.

At some point, I had to stop, he said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitte: @egelko
SACRAMENTO  She didnt hear him come in. But there he was, standing in the doorway of her bedroom.

He had a ski mask on and a knife in his hand when he jumped on her bed, said the woman. Its believed she was the first victim of the East Area Rapist, a serial rapist and killer who has eluded authorities for four decades.

On Wednesday, the FBI released a newly recorded statement by the woman leading up to the 40th anniversary of that first attack, in the eastern Sacramento County city of Rancho Cordova.

There would be many more brutal crimes: The East Area Rapist is believed to have been responsible for 12 killings and 45 rapes over a decade starting in 1976.

In May 1986, he mysteriously stopped. FBI and local law enforcement officials dont know if hes still alive, but theyve never stopped trying to bring him to justice  and on Wednesday, they offered a $50,000 reward and issued a fresh appeal for the publics help in identifying him.

Obviously, with the 40th anniversary, this is a time we want to take to acknowledge this serial offender who was probably one of the most prolific, certainly in California, possibly in the United States, but also to let the victims know that well never give up, said Sgt. Paul Belli, the Sacramento County Sheriffs Department detective assigned to the case.

The first attack was on June 18, 1976, when the assailant broke into the home of the Rancho Cordova woman, tied her hands and raped her in her bed. In the recording, she said she had waited for what felt like forever before getting help, fearful he was still in her home.

She said the rape changed her to an outsider who always looks over her shoulder.

I dont want him to be dead, because I think that wouldve been the easy way out for him, and I dont want that, the woman said.

Police have given the East Area Rapist other names, including the Golden State Killer and the Original Night Stalker, to distinguish him from Richard Ramirez, a break-in specialist who murdered 13 people in the 1980s.

Distinctive method

DNA evidence links the East Area Rapist to many of the crimes, and his unusual method of toying with and torturing his victims connects him to the rest.

He often lingered in the homes of his victims for hours, sometimes eating their food. At first he targeted single women, but he then began breaking into homes where couples lived. He would tie up the man and place dishes on him, then rape the woman in another room. If the man tried to break free, the crash of dishes would give him away.

He used shoelaces to tie up his victims, in some cases with elaborate diamond knots. He was an unusual serial criminal in another respect: His rape victims spanned a fairly wide age range, from 13 to 41.

In addition to rapes and killings, he was a prolific burglar. Police say he is suspected of more than 150 residential break-ins and that those crimes often were followed by clusters of sexual assaults.

He was white, and if hes still alive, hed be 60 to 75 years old. Victims described him as about 5 foot 9, with blond to light brown hair.

At the time the crimes started, there were two military installations in the Sacramento area, McClellan and Mather air force bases. One theory is that he was affiliated with one of the bases: Some of his crimes revealed an interest or training in military or law enforcement techniques, authorities say. And he was clever enough to avoid being caught.

Detectives think the East Area Rapist lived in the Sacramento area until at least 1978, because thats where the sexual assaults began. They say in February 1978 he committed his first killings, shooting Mather Air Force Sgt. Brian Maggiore and his wife, Katie, as they were out walking their dog in Rancho Cordova.

Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert was 12 years old and living in the area when the crimes began. She remembers the atmosphere of fear.

It was a time when in essence a community was taken hostage, Schubert said. It was on the news every night. And all they knew at the time was it was a white male.

The rapes spread to Davis, Modesto and Stockton. Then, for about a year starting in October 1978, the rapist assaulted women in the Bay Area  in Danville, Walnut Creek, Fremont and San Jose. The fear lingered long after he moved on.

In December 1979, he showed up in Goleta, on the coast north of Santa Barbara, where he broke into a home and tied up a man and woman. The couple managed to escape, and the assailant fled.

The East Area Rapist went on to commit a string of especially savage attacks in Santa Barbara and Orange counties that left 10 people dead. His last known crime was May 5, 1986, when he bludgeoned 18-year-old Janelle Cruz to death in her parents Irvine home.

End of the trail

There, the trail stops. Maybe he moved to another state and resumed his attacks there  one of the reasons authorities went to the public Wednesday was to spread the word beyond California, to a place where someone might recognize one of the sketches of the attacker.

One hope is that the East Area Rapist held onto some of the items he stole from his victims homes  rings, earrings, even the womens drivers licenses. Anyone who comes across such a stash, they said, could hold the key to identifying the killer.

The answer is out there, Schubert said. We need a name. When we match that name to that (DNA) profile that journey for justice will come to an end.

People with information about the case are asked to call the FBI at (800) 225-5324, or submit tips online at tips.fbi.gov.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: MelodyGutierrez
A suspected serial child molester was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting at least five young girls in Millbrae over a two-decade span, police said Wednesday.

Latu Kamisese Lavaki, 59, was apprehended in South Jordan, Utah, on Tuesday by Salt Lake County Sheriffs deputies, authorities said.

The alleged incidents occurred in Millbrae between 1985 and 2006. The San Mateo County Sheriffs Office issued a warrant for Lavakis arrest after a 10-month investigation revealed he abused young girls between 5 to 8 years old, the department said.

Lavaki was a former Millbrae resident who later moved to Utah. He was unaware of the investigation, said Detective Sal Zuno, a San Mateo County Sheriffs Office spokesman.

Investigators did not release information about the relationship between Lavaki and his victims, but said the alleged molestation did not occur at public spaces.

A victim and her family came forward in August 2015, which prompted police to investigate, Zuno said. As detectives worked the case, they identified four more victims, he said.

We understand that this will be very uncomfortable and is going to bring up some very traumatic memories, Zuno said. We want to do everything we can to help them through the process.

Police said they obtained information suggesting additional victims, but would not disclose what the evidence was or how many more girls were possibly molested.

Lavaki was being held without bail at Salt Lake County Sheriffs Office Metro Jail in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he awaited extradition to California.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: JennaJourno
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Amuse bouche, en papillote: Diners often encounter words on a menu that they just don't recall seeing before and can't figure out.

Those words and terms that diners don't know impact how they order at restaurants. OpenTable commissioned a Harris Poll survey to find out which menu terms are confusing people when they order at restaurants, and how it affects the dining experience.

The online poll surveyed 2,035 diners, according to the Associated Press, and discovered 56 percent of diners worried about ordering a dish that had an unfamiliar word in it, thinking it could ruin their meal. Another 74 percent said they would feel like they wasted money if they didn't like the dish they ordered.

The terms that confused diners included a mix of international dishes and condiments, along with "heritage techniques" in cooking that chefs are incorporating into their style of food, the Associated Press reported.

"Chefs are reaching back, they're reaching to all corners of the globe," Caroline Potter, OpenTable's chief dining officer, told the Associated Press. "When you talk to chefs, the way they're spending their downtime, they're saying I'm going to Thailand for two weeks and I'm going to eat my way through street food and all these restaurants and come back with inspiration."

The Harris Poll also found diners said that they would be more likely to order menu items they were unfamiliar with if the menu had photos (53 percent) or explained the terminology (30 percent).

Scroll through the slideshow above to find out which 25 menu terms are confusing diners.

To read more about the survey from OpenTable, click here.
Gregor Blanco was ecstatic even before the Giants took the field and beat Milwaukee 10-1 Wednesday. As soon as he arrived in the clubhouse and checked the lineup, Blanco was comfortable.

I feel more myself every time I can be in the leadoff spot, Blanco said. Its a lot more fun for me. As soon as I saw myself in the lineup leading off, I was like, Yes!

Manager Bruce Bochy moved Blanco to the top of the order after he noticed flashes of positive play from the outfielder Tuesday night. Blanco was 2-for-4 with a double in a game that both the manager and player hoped signaled a return to form. Blanco was 3-for-6 and scored twice Wednesday.

Before Tuesday, he had been in an 0-for-27 slump during which he was slowed by a right shoulder injury. He said he received a cortisone shot in recent weeks, which helped alleviate the discomfort.

Blanco has hit leadoff four times this season and is 8-for-20 in the spot. He has batted leadoff 305 times in his career, nearly double any other spot.

Belt update: Brandon Belt struggled to coax his swollen right foot into his size-15 shoe and sat out Wednesdays game, a day after being hit by a pitch. The first baseman said he felt better when he awoke and plans to play in Fridays opener against the Rays in St. Petersburg, Fla.

When I got some treatment, it got even better, so I dont think Im limping anymore, Belt said. It doesnt feel half bad.

Cain update: Matt Cain, who returned to the disabled list Tuesday with a hamstring strain, said he didnt feel it on any one play Monday but that it tightened during his 32/3 innings.

I dont think its any worse, Cain said when asked to compare it to his original hamstring injury, which put him on the DL for two weeks. It just wasnt right.

Bochy said he could skip Cains turn in the rotation, which is possible with Thursdays off day. The Giants could start Albert Suarez on Sunday or push back Jake Peavy (sore neck) a day and start Suarez on Saturday.

Claire Fahy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cfahy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: clairemfahy

On deck

Thursday

Off

Friday

at Rays

4:10 p.m. CSNBA

Samardzija (7-4) vs. Archer (4-8)

Saturday

at Rays

1:10 p.m. CSNBA

Peavy (3-6) vs.

Moore (3-4)

Leading off

Bumgarner DH? With the Giants using a designated hitter this weekend in St. Petersburg, Fla., Bruce Bochy said hed use Buster Posey at least one game and perhaps Brandon Belt. Bochy also volunteered this, perhaps jokingly: Could be Madison.

 Claire Fahy
Proceed to the Central Valley with caution if you'd like your car to drive back from wherever you came. The Central Valley region appeared many times in a ranking of nationwide car thefts. Eight California metro areas made the top 10 list, including the San Francisco-Oakland region. Beyond the top 10, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Fresno and other California cities made an appearance.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau ranked (and mapped out) the nation's metropolitan areas each year by car-theft rate and also issued a ranking for each state.
The Conjuring 2: The sequel is a half step below its 2013 predecessor, but its still better than any other mainstream horror film since It Follows. The drama returns with The Conjuring exorcists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who help a London family terrorized by a demon. Director James Wan rewards audience patience, focusing on character development that makes the scary parts more terrifying. Rated R. 134 minutes.

 Peter Hartlaub

Genius: Colin Firth is Max Perkins and Jude Law is Thomas Wolfe, in this story of the great Scribners editor who discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and then took Wolfes seemingly unpublishable manuscript for Look Homeward, Angel and edited it into commercial and artistic success. A real treat for people interested in this period of American literature. Rated PG-13. 104 minutes.

 Mick LaSalle

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping: Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone wrote and star in this very funny, sometimes jaw-dropping satire, which not only sends up the career of a hip-hop star (Samberg) but also skewers contemporary celebrity culture. Rated R. 86 minutes.

 Mick LaSalle

Time to Choose: This solemn but hopeful documentary argues that we have the technology to intervene in climate change, despite all the doomsday scenarios. Its a beautifully shot, important film that makes a strong case. Not rated. 97 minutes.

 David Lewis
Philip W. Majerus, a biochemist who was credited as being the first to theorize that taking small doses of aspirin regularly can prevent heart attacks and strokes in vulnerable patients, died June 8 at his home in St. Louis. He was 79.

The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Dr. Elaine Majerus, said. He had taught at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis for almost 50 years.

Even before his findings were confirmed in a study by other researchers a decade later, Philip Majerus was taking aspirin daily.

I was already convinced that aspirin prevented heart attacks, he recalled in the journal Advances in Biological Regulation in 2014. I was unwilling to be randomized into a trial where I might end up with the placebo. I refused to participate.

Daily dose

Dr. Majerus recommended that all adults should take an aspirin daily unless they are among the few percent of the population that cannot tolerate the drug. The cardiovascular benefit of aspirin was fully achieved by 50 to 75 milligrams daily, he said, and there is no evidence that branded aspirin, which is much more expensive, is in any way superior to the generic version.

Later studies found that for people in their 50s who are vulnerable to heart disease, taking daily doses of aspirin reduces the risk of heart disease.

In 1998, Dr. Majerus received the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cardiovascular Metabolic Research for his findings, which were credited with saving countless lives.

AHA plaudits

When he received the award, Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, said it was Dr. Majerus who first proposed that low-dose aspirin could be used to treat people at risk of heart attack, stroke and other ailments associated with blood clots.

He later theorized that aspirin could also be effective in preventing some forms of cancer, pointing the way to recent studies indicating that daily doses of aspirin also reduces the risk of colon cancer.

Philip Warren Majerus was born in Chicago on July 10, 1936, the son of Clarence Majerus, a manufacturer who owned a five-and-dime store in Quincy, Ill., and the former Helen Mathis.

Notre Dame undergrad

He received a bachelor of science degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1958, graduated from Washington University School of Medicine and did postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health. He joined the Washington University faculty in 1966 and retired in 2014 as a professor of medicine and biochemistry and molecular biophysics.

I got my start in biochemistry because of the Vietnam War, he recalled in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. As I was finishing my medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1963, I had two choices going forward: Either I could go to Vietnam as a physician, or I could become a research associate in the United States Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health. The choice was easy.

As early as the 1950s, studies had demonstrated that aspirin reduced clotting; one California doctor, Lawrence Craven, reported that he had prescribed daily doses to thousands of patients without a single case of detectable coronary or cerebral thrombosis.

Aspirin and platelets

In the 1970s, Dr. Majerus and his postdoctoral research fellow, Gerald Roth, focused on the impact of aspirin on platelets, small cells that precipitate clotting when a blood vessel is injured. They clump together and a clot forms and seals the wound.

Late one afternoon, I looked in the St. Louis phone directory for aspirin and found a company in town, Rexall, that made aspirin tablets, Dr. Majerus recalled in 1978. I called after hours, and a man answered the phone. I explained what I wanted: 100 bottles of 100 tablets containing 160 MG aspirin and the same number of bottles of a matched placebo. The man said he could make them without any problem, and he delivered them to my lab the next morning at no charge.

Inhibits clotting

He studied patients who were being treated for kidney failure and, to facilitate dialysis, had shunts, which can cause clotting, inserted in their arms. After six months, 18 of the 25 patients who were taking a placebo developed a blood clot, compared with six of the 19 who were given aspirin.

Investigating how aspirin inhibited clotting, Dr. Majerus concluded that the medicine modified an enzyme that leads to the formation of a platelet-made molecule that constricts blood vessels and aggregates platelets. The pills effect lasts for the platelets life span, typically about two weeks.

Nobel laureates praise

Phil Majerus, more than any other individual, has produced the most original body of work on biochemistry of platelets as it relates to thrombosis, Professor Joseph L. Goldstein, a Nobel laureate at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said when the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award was announced.

Harvey Weiss and John Vane were among the other scientists who pioneered research into the efficacy of aspirin in preventing heart attacks. Dr. David Sackett, who died last year, conducted clinical trials that confirmed their findings as he developed what became known as evidence-based medicine.
ORLANDO  President Obama said Thursday that a military campaign against terrorism abroad wont be enough to prevent lone wolf attacks like Sundays nightclub shooting in Orlando, as he offered condolences and support to families of the victims.

Were going to have to do more to prevent these kinds of events from occurring. Its going to take more than just our military, Obama said, an apparent reference to proposals for stricter gun-control laws. That was after he laid flowers at a makeshift memorial during an afternoon visit to the grieving city.

We cant wipe away hatred and evil from every heart in the world. But we can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives, he said.

Obama praised the Senate for scheduling votes next Monday on gun control measures, although the legislation is likely to fail.

Obama traveled to Orlando as the city prepared to bury its first victims from the mass shooting. The president and Vice President Joe Biden spent hours meeting privately with survivors of the attack, victims relatives and police officers who responded to the scene on Sunday, when 49 people were killed.

The president later told reporters the families talked to him about their loved ones and their grief over young lives taken.

Our hearts are broken, too, Obama said he told them.

The low-key visit reflected the challenge for the president to find something meaningful to say about an attack that has stoked a wide mix of fears about terrorism, guns and violence against gays.

Obamas call for solidarity and empathy stood in contrast to the roiling political debate in Washington and the campaign trail that has sprung up since the attack. Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican and frequent Obama critic, accused the president of being directly responsible for the shooting because, he said, Obama had allowed the growth of the Islamic State group on his watch.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, had made calls during the attack saying he was an Islamic State supporter. But CIA Director John Brennan said Thursday that the agency has found no connection between the gunman and any foreign terrorist organization.

The White House had no immediate response to McCains comments.

Outside the Amway Center in downtown Orlando, where Obama met with families, hundreds gathered in punishing heat hoping to get a glimpse of the president  including some who knew victims of the shooting. Brittany Woodrough, 20, was still in shock as she recalled one of the victims, Jason Benjamin, whom she described as a close friend.

Seeing President Obama here makes it real, Woodrough said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said part of Obamas goal was to show solidarity with gays and lesbians who were targeted in the attack. He called the visit a solemn responsibility that had weighed heavily on the president in the days since the attack.

The president understands that he is a symbol of the country, Earnest said.

Obamas call for rejecting bigotry against gays and lesbians is complicated by the possibility that the gunman may have been wrestling with his own sexuality. The FBI has been looking into reports that Mateen frequented the nightspot and reached out to men on gay dating apps.

For Obama, the trip to Orlando was an unwelcome return to one of the most difficult roles a president must fulfill: trying to reassure the nation at times when few words seem capable of providing much comfort. Obama has lamented the frequency with which hes had to perform that duty, calling his inability to enact stricter gun laws the biggest frustration of his presidency.
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NEW YORK  Meet Peggy Albrecht and John Dearth. Albrecht is a freelance writer and comedian from Los Angeles who loves Bernie Sanders. Dearth, a retiree from Carmel, Ind., grew up a Democrat but flipped with Ronald Reagan. Hes a Trump guy.

They live in the same country, but as far as their news consumption goes, they might as well live on different planets.

Abrecht watches MSNBCs Rachel Maddow each night. She scans left-leaning websites Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and Down With Tyranny, where recent headlines described Donald Trump as pathetic and temperamentally unfit to be president. The liberal website Think Progress sends her email alerts.

Dearth is a fan of Fox Business Network anchors Neil Cavuto and Stuart Varney. He checks the Drudge Report, Town Hall and Heritage Foundation websites, where recent stories talked about Trump supporters being terrorized by demonstrators. Because of his search history, hes bombarded with solicitations to donate to conservative causes.

The growth in partisan media over the past two decades has enabled Americans to retreat into tribes of like-minded people who get news filtered through particular world views. Fox News Channel and Talking Points Memo thrive, with audiences that rarely intersect. Whats big news in one world is ignored in another. Conspiracy theories sprout, anger abounds, and the truth becomes ever more elusive.

In this world of hundreds of channels and uncounted websites, of exquisitely targeted advertising and unbridled social media, it is easy to construct your own intellectual ghetto, however damaging that might be to the ideal of the free exchange of ideas.

Right now the left plays to the left and the right plays to the right, said Glenn Beck, the former Fox News host who started TheBlaze, a conservative network, in 2010. Thats why we keep ratcheting up the heat. Were in a room that is an echo chamber, and everybodys cheering.

Thats the kind of thinking that inspired Roger Ailes to launch Fox News Channel in 1996. The former GOP operative mixed news during the day with a prime-time lineup that appealed to conservatives.

By 2002, Fox had raced past CNN to become the top-rated news network, beginning the golden age of partisan media.

There wasnt anything to compare on the left, at least until summer 2006 when Keith Olbermann began a series of commentaries after being angered by a speech where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld equated Iraq War opponents to pre-World War II appeasers. His show became home for disaffected liberals in the Bush administrations final years.

Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, spoke with some distress this spring at the commencement of Temple Universitys School of Media and Communication.

Today we are not so much communicating as miscommunicating, he said. Or failing to communicate. Or choosing to communicate only with those who think as we do. Or communicating in a manner that is wholly detached from reality.
ORLANDO  The gunman who went on a rampage at a gay nightclub early Sunday told police he would strap explosives to four hostages and strategically place them in the corners of the building, Orlandos mayor said Wednesday, shedding some light on the decision to send a SWAT team into the building as well as the delay in removing the dead.

Over the course of several hours after Omar Mateen attacked the Pulse nightclub and took hostages, he told police negotiators that he planned to strap bombs to four people, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said. In phone calls and text messages to 911 operators, friends and family members, people trapped inside the club, who heard statements the killer was making, also warned of explosives.

We had independent verification of that, Dyer said. We had a lot of information from the inside, and they independently were saying yes, the bomber is about to put on an explosive vest.

Dyer confirmed reports that Mateen, 29, had been driving around that night visiting locations, apparently casing potential targets for a massacre.

But on Wednesday, Ronald Hopper, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBIs Tampa office, said investigators believed that Pulse was the gunmans sole intended target.

Hopper would not say whether Mateen actually had any explosives.

Investigators have been looking into whether the gunmans wife, Noor Zahi Salman, knew in advance what her husband had planned, and they were scouring his computer use.

Salman has told FBI investigators that she tried to talk her husband out of some kind of attack, according to senior law enforcement officials. But she also told them that she had gone with him to buy ammunition and that she had once driven him to Pulse, they said.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, officials would not discuss the possibility that she or anyone else would face criminal charges.

Im not going to speculate with respect to any charges that might be brought, said A. Lee Bentley III, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida. Were not sure what charges will be brought, or if charges will be brought.

Hopper urged patience. Investigations are deliberate by their very nature, he said. Investigators were still analyzing a crime scene at which well over 100 shots were fired, a labor-intensive process.

Hopper appealed for the publics help in retracing Mateens movements and contacts, and said investigators were going back years in time in search of a motive or possible accomplices.

Orlando Police Chief John Mina has said that after a three-hour standoff Sunday morning, law enforcement officials made the decision to storm the club using explosives and an armored vehicle because they had reason to believe they were facing an imminent loss of life, but he did not elaborate.
LOS ANGELES  An Indiana man who said he was headed to a gay pride event had a loaded assault rifle with magazines rigged to allow 60 shots to be fired in quick succession, along with 15 pounds of chemicals mixed and ready to explode, according to police in California.

James Wesley Howell, 20, of Charlestown, Ind., also had two other loaded rifles, ammunition, a stun gun, a buck knife and a security badge when he was arrested early Sunday in Santa Monica, authorities said Tuesday.

Howell made his initial court appearance Tuesday and pleaded not guilty to three felony weapons and ammunition charges. The judge set bail at $2 million.

Alone, each item found in Howells car might not indicate anything sinister, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz said. But together, they just dont pass the common sense test.

I cannot in good conscience think of any reasonable reason that somebody would be traveling across the country with all of these things, he said.

Howell recently drove from Indiana to Los Angeles because of pending charges against him in his home state, according to statements he made to police.

Authorities havent disclosed any evidence that Howell intended violence at the Los Angeles Pride event in West Hollywood that attracts hundreds of thousands of people.

Friends in Indiana described Howell as a gun enthusiast with a short temper. In October, he twice was accused of pulling a gun and making threats, once against his then-boyfriend and once against a neighbor.

Howell was convicted in April of misdemeanor intimidation for the incident with his neighbor. Under the terms of his probation, Howell was not allowed to have weapons or leave Indiana.

When he was picked up in Santa Monica, there was an assault rifle in his cars passenger seat and 15 pounds of Shoc-Shot, two chemicals that explode when mixed and shot. The assault rifle was loaded with a 30-round magazine, which had another inverted 30-round magazine taped to it, according to police.

Deputy District Attorney Sean Carney said gun enthusiasts dont mix Shoc-Shot until its ready to be used, as federal regulations require, and the amount that Howell had far exceeds any amount that would reasonably be used.

Howells attorney, Pamela Jones, told the judge there was no evidence Howell planned to detonate the chemicals. She said a black hood found in his car was just a clothing item, and nothing indicated Howell planned to use it as a mask, as police contended was a possibility.

James Wedick, a former longtime FBI agent, said the manipulation of the gun magazines would allow someone to reload 30 rounds in less than 2 seconds.

It doubles your killing capacity by 100 percent, he said. For a civilian to have a weapon rigged as such, it suggests his purposes are deadly.

The FBI took the lead in the investigation and its probe continues, spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said.
WASHINGTON  Donald Trumps latest accusation against President Obama  that hes putting U.S. enemies ahead of Americas own people  is thrusting him into uncharted territory for a presidential candidate of any major political party.

Trump spent the first days after the Orlando nightclub massacre hinting Obama was sympathizing with or even supporting terrorists. Some of those times he said he was repeating what many people believe  one of the presumptive Republican nominees favorite ways to sprinkle conspiracy theories into the presidential campaign.

By Wednesday, Trump abandoned the innuendo and embraced a more pointed accusation against Obama.

Media fell all over themselves criticizing what Donald Trump may have insinuated about @POTUS. But hes right, Trump posted on Twitter. The message included a link to a story by Breitbart News, a Trump-friendly website, that claimed to have proof the Obama administration backed a terror group in Iraq.

It was unclear whether Trump wrote the message himself or was re-tweeting someone elses words. But in either case, it was an effort by the GOPs White House pick to explicitly link the sitting Democratic president with those seeking to harm Americans, just days after 49 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Florida.

Trumps comments regarding the president crossed every line, said John Weaver, who managed Ohio Gov. John Kasichs failed Republican presidential campaign. He cast Trump as a peddler of lies, fantasies and half-baked conspiracy theories.

For years, Trump has been the most high-profile proponent of the birther movement that falsely claims Obama is a Muslim who was born outside the United States, when in fact he is a Christian born in Hawaii. The businessman has also floated debunked conspiracy theories about former rival Ted Cruzs father being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton playing a role in the death of former White House aide Vince Foster.

For Republican officials already struggling with whether to fully embrace him, Trumps willingness to engage in stories usually limited to supermarket tabloids is only making their options more complicated.

I dont go for these conspiracy theories and the birtherism nonsense, said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa.

Trump has offered no verifiable information to back up his assertions. His theory was not supported by the document cited in the report he linked to Wednesday  a secret 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency analysis. The Breitbart story, citing that document, suggested that the United States was in league with al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to the Islamic State.
Jacom Stephens/Getty Images

FREMONT (BCN)



A Sacramento woman was arrested on suspicion of burglary and auto theft after returning the victim's keys while the investigating officer was still at the scene, according to police.

The break-in was reported in the 4000 block of Doane Street around 8 a.m. Monday. The resident said that some of his clothing and a truck belonging to his girlfriend had been stolen.




Mammootty's Rorschach hits all the right notes, except in the end | Movie Review
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Melanie Aquino's cafe mochas are dazzling masterpieces.

The barista at Elite Audio Coffee Bar in San Francisco's SoMa uses a metal skewer and a pot of chocolate to draw remarkably detailed sketches of everything from sweet-faced pugs to London's Big Ben atop the frothy foam.

Aquino first started experimenting with coffee art four years ago when she took the job at the coffee bar by drawing faces and bears.

"When I first started doing it, I didn't think it looked that good," Aquino says. "But customers started to come in and really liked it and would ask for a bear for their kids and it would make them so happy and it would brighten my day."

Over time, Aquino, who grew up in Hawaii and moved to San Francisco 10 years ago, has perfected her art and Mashable recently named her the best coffee artist in the world.

"I thought that was a really bold statement..." Aquino says. "I may be one of the best, but I don't think I'm the best. It's a lot about perception."

And while Aquino would never say she's creating the best coffee art in San Francisco, it seems as if she probably is, as she's ranked at the top on both Yelp and FourSquare.

What's more, we checked in with Sarah Allen, the editor of Barista Magazine, who has judged coffee art competitions for over 10 years, and asked her to look at Aquino's work.

"Melannie would stand a real chance at nabbing an international title for this kind of work!" Allen wrote in an email.

Most coffee art is made by "free pouring" steamed milk into a shot of espresso and adjusting the pour to create certain patterns and designs. The drawing method, Aquino says, is unique and she knows of only a few "drawing" artists through Instagram.

Aquino posts her schedule on her Instagram account and says Elite charges $5 extra for her sketches, which take about three to five minutes to make. She used to offer the art on both lattes and mochas, but now only does the chocolate coffee drinks because the design lasts much longer.

"With a latte, the picture starts degrading after a few minutes," she says. "Whereas with a mocha it sticks together for about 20 minutes."

Whole milk works best, while almond doesn't cooperate.

Corgi dogs are currently the most commonly requested, and unicorns were popular for a while. R2D2 is also a favorite because a video of her creating the droid was featured on Instagram on Star Wars Day. She won't do portraits or company logos.

The most unusual request she has ever received was for Marvel Comics character Baymax holding a turtle and wearing a party hat.

Once a girl used one of her creations to ask a boy out to prom. "While he was in the bathroom, she ordered his drink and asked me to write 'Prom?'" she says. "He said yes."

Aquino has always been a doodler, but she says her ability improved when she was studying film at the Academy of Art and required to take a drawing class.

"I've always been doodling throughout my life, but that class really showed me the basics of shape and shadowing and that's where I learned to make my drawings a little more refined," she says.

Moving to San Francisco and going to art school wasn't what Aquino's parents had in mind for their daughter.

"It's one of those things where they wanted me to go to college and get a stable job," she says. "And they wanted me to stay in Hawaii."

But now that Aquino has over 22,000 followers on Instagram, websites calling her the best at her craft and people from all over the world coming to Elite to order her creations, she says her parents are proud, and most importantly she's happy with what she's doing.
STANISLAUS COUNTY, Calif. (KCRA) A UPS driver rescues a puppy he witnessed being dumped in the middle of a busy intersection in Hughson in Stanislaus County.

According to Hughson Police Services, the UPS driver saw a car stop on East Hatch Road, a door open and the puppy being dropped in the middle of the street.
One of the 300 soldiers who stood guard outside of the jail where Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is being held in Ciudad Juarez was found dead near the Texas border with signs he was tortured, according to local media.

RELATED: Beauty queen wife of drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman visits him in prison near Texas border

Jorge Mauricio Melendez Herrera, 20, was identified by his family over the weekend after his body was found on a dirt road in a remote park less than five miles from the Texas border Friday covered with blankets and a bag over his head, according El Diario, a newspaper based in Ciudad Juarez.

Herrera was killed from a blow to the back of his neck and was stabbed multiple times, according to a forensic expert.

Herrera stood guard with the 300-person team outside of Cefereso No. 9 prison where Guzman has been held since May 7. Guzman was moved to the Juarez prison from a maximum-security Altiplano lockup near Mexico City.

RELATED: Mexico drug lord 'El Chapo' Guzman moved to Juarez prison

At this time, an investigation is underway to determine if Herrera's murder is linked to Guzman.

"El Chapo" first broke out of a Mexican prison in 2001. He was recaptured in 2014, but escaped the next year through a mile-long tunnel dug to the floor of the shower stall in his cell.

RELATED: Report: Drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman had almost 600 planes  more than Mexico's airlines

Mexican marines re-arrested him in the western state of Sinaloa in January, after he fled a safe house through a storm drain.

Guzman was returned to Altiplano, where he was placed under constant observation from a ceiling camera with no blind spots, and the floors of top-security cells were reinforced with metal bars and a 16-inch (40-centimeter) layer of concrete.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
The victim fought back with words of rage.  I thought theres no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in my body, he ran but was caught, she wrote in a 12-page statement at the sentencing of Brock Turner, the former Stanford student convicted of sexually assaulting her. Hes going to settle, formally apologize, and we will both move on. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators who were going to try and find details about my personal life to use against me.

The case went to trial and a jury found Turner, a former swimming-scholarship student, guilty of three counts of sexual assault. He had told authorities the woman consented to being digitally penetrated near a trash bin, even though she had consumed too much alcohol to be capable of giving consent. Turner ran away when two Swedish graduate students intervened  which shows consciousness of guilt. His quickness to blame alcohol for his actions  and to misrepresent himself as new to the party culture  seal his reputation as an entitled white kid who refused to own his crimes.
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In an unexpected twist, Supervisor Jane Kim has pulled even closer to opponent Supervisor Scott Wiener in their state Senate primary, with the final votes still to be counted.

After trailing Wiener by 2 percent on election day, the gap has narrowed to 0.3 percent as remaining votes are counted. As of Thursday evening, she had 112,098 votes to Wieners 112,890. In San Francisco, where most of the two-county district lies, she was leading Wiener by 322 votes, 106,539 to 106,217. About 8,500 more ballots remain to be counted in the city, including about 7,500 provisional ballots, with an unknown number remaining in San Mateo County.

Wiener and Kim are battling for termed-out Sen. Mark Lenos seat, which includes San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. The primary result has little significance for the November election, because both supervisors are running far ahead of the third candidate in the race, Republican Kenneth Loo. The two Democrats will meet again in the fall rematch to determine who will go to Sacramento.

But a primary win would be a major boost for the underdog, Kim, and an indication that her endorsement by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont made a difference with voters.

This race, for me, is not just about winning, Kim said. Its about connecting people with ideas and a vision for the Bay Area that is inclusive and just. It gives me immense hope that our ideas resonated with voters, and theyve made it clear that special interests and corporate money arent going to buy this race.

In the months leading to the primary, Wiener had both the time, endorsement and fundraising advantage. He said he would run July 1, while Kim didnt get in the race until Oct. 14. Wiener collected the endorsements of the state Democratic Party, Leno, Mayor Ed Lee and big-name Democrats such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris. He also raised more than $1.4 million, while Kim collected about $736,000.

But after Sanders endorsement, fresh money rolled in and Kim went on a campaign blitzkrieg of appearances with the presidential candidate, who had cameras following him everywhere. Political consultants said the spotlight helped Kim find a platform for her message that she would be a fighter for the middle class.

Wiener, who is billing himself as an effective leader who can work across party lines on regional issues like expanding public transportation, did not have as glossy and visible a campaign, the consultants said.

But regardless of who finishes on top when all the primary ballots are tallied, the vote that counts will be the one in the fall.

This is a close race; weve always known it would be close, Wiener said. And we are focused on winning in November.

Kim said her campaign  and her support  will continue to grow.

Even after being outspent 3-1, voters understood that I am the candidate who will stand up for them in Sacramento, she said. We have incredible momentum heading into the general election.

Lizzie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ljohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: LizzieJohnsonnn
BEIRUT  The Russian Defense Ministry said a 48-hour cessation of hostilities has been declared in the divided northern Syrian city of Aleppo, and activists reported a relative calm in Syrias largest city on Thursday.

In past months, Aleppo has witnessed fierce fighting and bombardment, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides of the contested city.

Russia said the truce went into effect after midnight Wednesday. Several similar truces have been declared in the city in recent months.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the city was calm early Thursday but that government warplanes later bombarded several rebel-held neighborhoods in Aleppo.

The Observatory said that since the latest round of violence began on April 22, 627 people have been killed and 2,900 wounded. It said the dead included 124 people under the age of 18.

Rebels seized part of Aleppo from forces loyal to President Bashar Assad in 2012. Assads forces, backed by Russian air strikes, have nearly encircled rebel-held parts of the city in recent months.

Aleppo-based activist Baraa al-Halaby said opposition fighters in the city  once Syrias commercial center  were not informed about the truce. He said that although there is a truce, government forces as well as Russian and Syrian warplanes have been targeting the Castello road that links rebel-held areas with the rest of the country, preventing people from leaving.

Jan Egeland, who is leading the U.N. Syria envoys effort to get humanitarian aid into the country, called the truce a key step toward possibly getting convoys into Aleppo where it has been impossible to do humanitarian work in many areas for too long.

The fighting has gotten worse. The bombing is worse. The protection needs of the civilian population are being trampled upon across the Syrian map, he told reporters in Geneva.
SHANGHAI  Walt Disney Co. opened Shanghai Disneyland, its first theme park in mainland China, with a lavish celebration Thursday featuring Communist Party leaders, a childrens choir, Sleeping Beauty and other Disney characters.

A vice premier joined Disney CEO Bob Iger in cutting the grand openings red ribbon, showing the ruling partys support for the $5.5 billion investment in promoting tourism at a time of slowing economic growth. They read letters of congratulations from the Chinese and American presidents, Xi Jinping and Barack Obama.

This is one of the proudest and most exciting moments in the history of the Walt Disney Co., Iger said after the choir sang. Later, actors dressed as Sleeping Beauty, Donald Duck and other Disney characters danced on stage.

The company hopes Shanghai Disneyland will burnish the brand behind Frozen in the worlds most populous film market and help revive Disneys struggling international theme park business.

Analysts expect Shanghai Disneyland to become the worlds most-visited theme park, attracting at least 15 million and as many as 50 million guests a year. By contrast, Walt Disney World drew 19.3 million people in 2014.

Speaking as a light rain fell, Vice Premier Wang Yang quipped, I would like to call this a rain of U.S. dollars or of renminbi, the Chinese currency.

Wang, a member of the ruling partys Politiburo, described the park as an example of Sino-U.S. practical cooperation and people to people exchanges.

Despite slower growth, Chinas economy still is one of the worlds best-performing, and tourism spending is rising.

Shanghai represents a market of 300 million people living within three hours of the park by car or train in one of Chinas most affluent regions. Chinas bullet train network can draw in areas further afield.

YouGov, a market research firm, said 44 percent of people it surveyed in China in May said they plan to visit Shanghai Disneyland within a year. It said 80 percent plan to take family members.

I think its really lively here, and every girl can realize her dream of becoming a princess, said Gong Haiyan, a visitor from western Chinas Sichuan province.

Wang Lei, 34, said she liked the park, despite long waits for some things.

Im sure I will go again, maybe again and again, said Wang, a buyer for a Shanghai food chain. Ill bring my kids and relatives from my hometown.

The park should generate $1.5 billion to $4.5 billion a year in revenue, according to Drexel Hamilton analyst Tony Wible.
Nationwide, 12.4 million people live within half a mile of an oil or gas well, and within that radius, they are at risk for increased incidence of cancer and life-threatening respiratory ailments. An online map, oilandgasthreatmap.com, initiated by EarthWorks and completed with the help of the Clean Air Task Force and FracTracker, puts a visual on that development in the US and its effects on the 238 counties that have seen increased cancer risks, contributed to by four known carcinogens used in the oil and gas industry: formaldehyde, benzene, acetaldehyde and ethylbenzene. The oil and gas industry emits thousands of tons of these pollutants each year, and they've been linked to health impacts including cancer, anemia, brain damage, birth defects, respiratory irritation, and blood and neurological disorders.

The US Bureau of Land Management and the US Environmental Protection Agency are crafting a suite of rules to deal with oil and gas well emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide (over a 20-year period).

"This is a being-a-better-neighbor rule," says Camilla Feibelman, director of the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club. "It allows oil and gas to do the good work that they do for our communities, keeping the lights on and our vehicles moving, but at the same time doing it in a cleaner way that doesn't affect our communities as much."

The release of the Oil and Gas Threat Map is part of an effort to increase public awareness about proximity of these wells to homes, schools and medical facilities, given that people who live closer to these wells are more likely to be concerned about them, says Alan Septoff, strategic communications director with EarthWorks. The map overlays publicly available data on oil and gas well locations and emissions information from the EPA's National Air Toxic Risk Assessment with Census data to show countywide risks to the public. Cumulatively, the area of land across the nation within half a mile of an oil or gas well, in the "threat radius" for increased health effects, is larger than the state of California. That's still a rough estimation, based on statistical likelihoods.

"It's not a bright line; it doesn't mean that inside half a mile, you're doomed and outside half a mile, you're safe," Septoff says. "It means that inside half a mile is where there are the most strongly correlated health impacts to living within oil and gas development. If you live within half a mile, you have serious cause for concern, and you should be checking."

Users can hop on the website, zoom into their states and counties, and even identify the names of schools and medical facilities as well as demographics of threatened population, including median income. Typically, these effects concentrate in lower income communities, and they are not something a physician could prescribe lifestyle changes to address, such as quitting smoking or exercising more.

In the state of New Mexico, 145,608 people (out of 2 million) are considered threatened; 46,592 of them are Latino/Hispanic. The total area affected covers 9,000 square miles, most it concentrated in San Juan, Eddy, Lea and Chaves counties, and includes 89 schools.

"These air toxins do travel a little, so there are a few counties where you don't see facilities but do see increased risk," says Lesley Fleischman, technical analyst with the Clean Air Task Force. "For the most part, the impacts are pretty localized."

Later this year, the Clean Air Task Force will be releasing a report on the same analysis of ozone data, contributor to smog and linked to many health issues, including asthma. That pollutant, by contrast, does travel much farther than methane. Santa Fe, often touted as having some of the cleanest air in the country, saw its rating from the American Lung Association drop from an A level to a B level this year after exceeding EPA standards for ozone, 70 parts per billion, for one day.

The solution for methane, Feibelman points out, simply means capturing more of the methane emitted from these wells, which would increase industry earnings, add to state tax revenue, improve community health and create jobs. Some of the 12 companies in New Mexico working on this issue have even offered to do the installations for free, in exchange for a share of the earnings generated.

"There is a voluntary program the EPA has implemented, but nationwide only 40 or so members of the industry have actually signed up for that program," Feibelman says. "A lot of times, what we hear from members of industry is that it's hard to change the way that you do things, and these rules can really help, and we've got a good example of that just north of that in Colorado."

Colorado has implemented methane regulations, and despite protests that they would kill the industry, oil and gas production in the state has continued to climb.

"The reason that this map is necessary and the reason that we're appealing to EPA and BLM to deal with this is because industry actually has been uncooperative on this issue," Septoff says. "The oil and gas industry has said repeatedly that they don't need regulations because they're dealing with the problem, but when asked to make concrete commitments to do specific things to deal with the problem, they have refused to do that. So this is just sharing information about what that has wrought.  This is just about the facts and what the science is telling us now, and what happens with it is a different story."

New Mexico State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn has spoken out in opposition to the BLM rules, which would apply to oil and gas facilities on all public lands, blaming a significant amount of the venting and flaring on delayed approvals from the BLM for pipelines to move natural gas from New Mexico's oil fields.

"It is hypocritical for the BLM to find fault with oil and gas producers and impose essentially punitive and costly new rules when the agency's own actions have been responsible for a large part of the problem," Dunn said in an April press release. As the argument continued, he wrote later in a commentary on nmpolitics.net that new rules would decrease income, translating to lost revenues.

"The correlation is quite simple: Regulations cost money. If there were a cost-effective way for oil and gas producers to capture every molecule of natural gas that is currently being vented or flared, I believe that the industry would be doing it already," Dunn wrote. "If BLM's proposed rules are implemented, the Land Office will most likely see a large-scale abandonment of oil and gas wells on State Trust Lands, with marginal wells being pushed beyond their economic thresholds. This would be followed by a wave of bankruptcies from small oil and gas companies; we've already seen at least two dozen such bankruptcies in the past year." Income from shut wells and closed business, he argued, is easy to calculate: zero.

That stance has been rebuffed by Conservation Voters New Mexico; the New Mexico Wildlife Federation; Moms Clean Air Force; and Hispanics Enjoying Camping, Hunting and the Outdoors. The Western Values Project has estimated the state lost $50 million in revenue over the last five years to methane that has escaped or been deliberately vented from oil and gas facilities, which can leak or vent the gas at multiple stages in drilling and processing wells.

The EPA recently finalized its rule for new and modified sources of methane, and the agency has proposed one for existing sources. That latter category is expected to produce 90 percent of the methane pollution we'll see in 2018, Feibelman says.

A community webinar for members of the public will be held at 7 pm Tuesday, June 21. Details are available at riograndesierraclub.org.

Santa Fe Reporter
Democrats Filibuster Senate for Gun Law Reforms

Both of New Mexicos U.S. senators joined with fellow Democrats on Wednesday in a filibuster to try to force Republicans to allow a vote on

in the wake of last weeks massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Steve Terrell reports.

State of Emergency Declared as Dog Head Fire Rages

On Wednesday, Gov. Susana Martinez declared a state of emergency as that large fire in the Manzano Mountains continues to

. Residents have now been ordered to evacuate, and

Cancer Risks Increase Near Fossil Fuel Sites

A new report reveals that

In New Mexico, that radius includes 89 schools and four medical centers. SFR's Elizabeth Miller reports, "The total area affected covers 9,000 square miles, most it concentrated in San Juan, Eddy, Lea and Chaves counties."

Chans Retrial Scheduled

Former Santa Fe County Sheriffs Deputy

His first ended in a mistrial earlier when jurors could not agree on a verdict.

Laboratory Jobs Discussed

US Sen. Tom Udall and US Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, both Democrats from New Mexico, along with Rio Rancho city officials are

at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories.

Fraud Scheme Hits New Mexico Public Entities

Matthew Reichbach reports that two New Mexico school districts and San Miguel County have been scammed for

initiated by email scammers.

Santa Fe Reporter
A string of better-than-expected data points to faster economic growth on a per capita basis than Treasury's projections, Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce says.

Data released by Statistics New Zealand earlier this morning showed gross domestic product per capita had edged up just 0.1 percent in the first quarter. In its Budget economic and fiscal update released at the end of May, Treasury said annual average per capita GDP growth was "expected to remain low at 0.5 percent in June 2016 and increase modestly to 0.9 percent in June 2017."

Questioned by Labour's David Clark about that prediction at Parliament's commerce select committee, Joyce said per-capita GDP was growing and he disagreed with Treasury's forecasts.

"Treasury predicts reasonably low per-capita GDP growth for the next couple of years, but actually, I think it will be stronger than that," Joyce said. "Why do I think that? A lot of the economic performance indicators, including yesterday's balance of payments information, was better than previously."

At a separate committee this morning, Finance Minister Bill English said GDP per capita was a useful measure in the long run, and it was down because "we've had a surge in people ... that's been more rapid than expected."

If migration slowed to what was in line with Treasury assumptions "you'd see per capita lift up", which the government wants to see, English said.

Treasury's migration assumptions are based on long-run averages.

Strong tourism numbers have underpinned New Zealand's economic growth over the past year, and Joyce was asked about 'Project Palace', the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise programme to try to increase the number of international investors in hotels in New Zealand. A report released last month showed New Zealand would need another 4526 hotel rooms, or 26 hotels, by 2025 to cope with expected increased visitor numbers.

Joyce said he had met with a number of investors already investing in New Zealand hotels when he was in Vietnam and Singapore, and they had been very interested in the report.

"A number of them indicated they would be keen to make a further investment in New Zealand," Joyce said. "If we can provide quality background information that speeds up that investment, that's good."

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Envirowaste Services, New Zealand's second-biggest waste management firm, boosted annual profit 50 percent as its Mastagard acquisition and a growing population helped lift sales.

Net profit rose to $8.9 million in calendar 2015 from $5.9 million a year earlier, financial statements lodged with the Companies Office show. Revenue rose 12 percent to $226 million in the year, which chief financial officer Jason Miles said was a combination of the first full year of Mastagard contributing to sales and the increased demand for waste management that comes with a growing population.

"Part of that growth was our acquisition of Mastagard in Christchurch in early to mid-2014," Miles told BusinessDesk. "Weve got the flow-through of full-year revenue of that business, and its enabled us to further invest in a Christchurch transfer station on top of that."

Envirowaste bought Mastagard for $21.1 million in May 2014, just over a year after the Auckland-based waste management firm was itself purchased by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing's Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings for $492 million. Since 2013, the company's workforce has climbed to about 800 from 600 at the time of the takeover.

Miles said the Mastagard acquisition turned Envirowaste into "a pretty large player" in Christchurch, which has needed major waste management services since a series of earthquakes through 2010 and 2011 leveled the city and led to a major reconstruction phase.

The waste management firm's 2015 revenue was bolstered by increased building activity in Auckland, Tauranga and Hamilton, he said. That was through extra demand from a growing population and also construction waste disposed of at Enivrowaste's clean fill sites, for refuse which won't damage the environment.

The population growth in that area that creates more households and more waste from households, Miles said. The last couple of years have seen very strong and robust economic growth.

Envirowaste's 2016 revenue growth is tracking at roughly the same pace as last year: Its almost going to be a similar level around that 10 to 12 percent by the looks of it.

Larger rival Waste Management NZ is going through a capital restructure where its owner Beijing Capital Group will pour a controlling stake into a Hong Kong-listed entity it also controls in a transaction that values it US$470.9 million, or 3.06 billion Chinese yuan, compared to the NZ$950 million, or 5.17 billion yuan, the Chinese state-owned enterprise paid in 2014.

Waste Management NZ parent Beijing Capital Group NZ Investment Holding generated a profit of $13.9 million on $444.8 million of revenue in the 12 months ended Dec. 31. During the year the company bought the 50 percent of Living Earth it didn't already own for $18.6 million, Gordies Bins for $2.3 million, and Waste Services Marlborough for $2.5 million.

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The Ministry for Primary Industries says its goal of doubling New Zealand's primary sector exports by 2025 will require the annual growth in the value of exports to almost triple starting this year.

MPI set the target of reaching $64 billion in annual exports back in 2012. In its latest Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries report, released today, the ministry forecasts primary sector export revenue to rise to $36.7 billion in the year ending June 30 and to reach $44 billion in the June 2020 year, "which leaves us more to do" to reach $64 billion by 2025.

The nominal value of exports rose an average 3.3 percent a year between 2012 and 2016, MPI said.

"In order to reach our real export target by 2025, primary sector exports would now need to grow by an average of 9.5 percent per year from 2016 onwards," the ministry said. "Horticulture and other primary sector exports and foods have shown strong growth since 2012, but we will need contributions from the larger sectors such as dairy, and meat and wool in order to reach that target."

For the June 2017 year, MPI forecasts primary sector exports will grow 3 percent, the second straight year with that rate of growth, before accelerating in the following year.

"Next years price outlook reflects expectations that global agricultural markets are expected to turn a corner in 2017 and prices for key commodities should start to recover," it said. "The boost to New Zealand export growth is expected to be strongest in the dairy, forestry, and horticulture sectors. These sectors are expected to lead a 10 percent increase in export value from June 2017 to June 2018."

Horticulture is the star in 2016 with exports forecast to surge 20 percent to $5.1 billion, the first time the sector has exceeded $5 billion. Growth is projected to moderate to 6 percent in 2017, with total exports reaching $5.7 billion in 2020

"The sector is expected to continue its run of impressive growth over the medium term," MPI said. "Kiwifruit exports hit record levels for the year to March 2016, and exports of wine, apples, and pears are increasing due to new plantings reaching maturity. Horticulture prices have also increased as New Zealand has maintained its position as a supplier of premium products."

Dairy, though, faces its second weak year, with exports projected to fall 6 percent to $13.2 billion, following last year's 21 percent slump. MPI's projections are for the value of dairy exports to resume growth in 2017, at 4 percent, before jumping 20 percent in 2018 and reaching $17.7 billion in 2020.

"Dairy prices still face headwinds from increased milk production in the EU, and this is expected to keep prices low for the remainder of 2016," it said. "EU production is stabilising at higher levels but we expect any global price increases to be met with increased EU production and run down of inventories. As a result, we do not expect global export supply to fall quickly. This means a significant export recovery is not forecast until the 2017/18 season."

After growing 10 percent in 2015, meat and wool export growth is forecast to slow to a 1 percent rate in the June 2016 year to about $9.1 billion, before falling 8 percent in 2017 and remaining below this year's levels through 2020, when it is projected to be $8.8 billion.

"Herd size decreases, as well as lower cow slaughter rates as dairy herds stabilise, will contribute to declining production in the coming years," MPI said. "Beef prices continue to come down from 2015 highs due to recovering herds in Australia and the US, combined with increasing competition from Brazil."

The value of forestry exports likely grew 8 percent to about $5.1 billion in the year ending June 30, still below its 2014 high, after a 10 percent drop in 2015, and is projected to continue growing through the forecast horizon to reach $6.3 billion in 2020.

Export growth is being underpinned by log prices and increasing demand for sawn timber exports, MPI said. "New Zealand wood is expected to gain market share in China, where despite reduced overall demand, supply from USA and Canada is expected to reduce due to strong domestic demand in those markets. New Zealand is well placed to supply the growing pulp market in China, and we expect some volume increases out to 2019/20."

Demand in the US and China is expected to drive 15 percent growth in the value of seafood exports to $1.79 billion this year and the sector is also benefitting from a weaker New Zealand dollar. Exports are forecast to reach $2.1 billion in 2020.

The value of other primary sector exports and foods, which includes honey, some processed foods, vegetable-based dyes and spices, is forecast to grow 14 percent this year to $2.37 billion and to continue rising through the next four years to reach $2.9 billion in 2020.

"Honey prices continue to increase, driving a 20 percent increase in hive numbers in the past year," MPI said. "Overall though, honey production is expected to be down 5-10 percent this year due to unfavourable weather conditions over spring and summer."

Exports of arable farm products are expected to grow 14 percent to $202 million this year and to have climbed to $243 million in 2020.

"The outlook for vegetable seeds is good, with increased demand for global food production and New Zealands good supply reputation contributing to higher prices," MPI said. "The 2015/16 season produced average crop yields and prices for domestic feed grains have been poor due to the downturn in the dairy sector and abundant international supply."

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Tourism Industry Aotearoa, which represents 140 New Zealand hotels, says occupancy rates hit a five-year high in 2015.

The average occupancy rate was 78.8 percent, up 3.1% on 2014. The average daily rate achieved rose $12 to $157, another five-year high. Total revenue for all members rose to $1.17 billion from $1.05 billion in 2014.

Auckland achieved the highest annual occupancy rate of 84 percent, followed by Queenstown at 78.6 percent and Wellington at 77.9 percent. Total capacity was static at 17,900, with an increase in capacity in Christchurch offset by the temporary closure of an Auckland property for refurbishment.

The industry figures tally with the official data release from Statistics New Zealand which has recorded increases in guest nights for the past twenty-five months, driven by soaring tourist numbers. In its most recent release, the official government body flagged that while demand for accommodation had soared in recent years, capacity remained little changed.

A New Zealand Trade and Enterprise programme, 'Project Palace' aims to increase the number of international investors in hotels in New Zealand. A report released last month showed New Zealand would need another 4526 hotel rooms, or 26 hotels, by 2025 to cope with expected increased visitor numbers.

Earlier today, Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce said he had met with a number of investors already investing in New Zealand hotels when he was in Vietnam and Singapore, and they had been very interested in the report.

"A number of them indicated they would be keen to make a further investment in New Zealand," Joyce said. "If we can provide quality background information that speeds up that investment, that's good."

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AIA - 2022 Annual Meeting Chair & Chief Executive Addresses


Serco has sold its equity stake in the company that holds the contract to design, build and run Wiri Prison in South Auckland but continues as sub-contractor to operate the facility.

Serco was one of the original shareholders in SecureFuture Wiri, which won the contract for the Auckland South Corrections Facility, a high-security men's prison at Wiri, in 2012 via a public-private partnership (PPP) arrangement. This month, Serco sold its 10 percent stake in SecureFuture to InfraRed Infrastructure, part of London-based InfraRed Capital Partners. The other shareholders are John Laing Investments and the Accident Compensation Corporation.

The exit is among changes in Serco's New Zealand business since the London Stock Exchange-listed company lost its management contract for the Mt Eden Corrections facility, leaving it with the 25-year contract to run Wiri, which opened in May last year. Serco New Zealand's revenue doubled to $64 million in calendar 2015 but costs including a $10 million onerous contract provision associated with the Mt Eden contract and a doubling in its wage bill to $40 million led to a wider loss of about $11 million, from a loss of $2.6 million in 2014.

Serco last year agreed to pay $8 million to Corrections after the department's chief executive Ray Smith invoked a step-in clause in the Crown's contract with Serco, taking back management of Mt Eden. Under the agreement, Serco's involvement was shrunk back to labour supply and other transition services through until the end of the contract in March 2017.

A Serco spokeswoman said it had always been the company's intention to dispose of its equity holding in SecureFuture after the first year of operations and Corrections "was fully aware of this intention to sell through the procurement process". The onerous contract provision for costs associated with the Mt Eden contract "included the direct costs of the step in, indirect costs and disengagement costs arising from the final exit of the contract," she said.

Serco New Zealand's latest annual report shows the company got a $20 million infusion via the issue of 20 million shares to its immediate parent in a transaction approved on May 31 this year. The consideration was settled by an intercompany loan. During 2015, the company got a $13 million loan from its ultimate parent Serco Group Plc with no fixed maturity date. The parent also provided a letter of support saying it would provide more funds if needed to ensure the local unit can continue as a going concern.

"We remain absolutely committed to serving the people of New Zealand, providing services where we can deliver meaningful economic and social outcomes," Serco Asia Pacific chief executive Mark Irwin said in a statement. At the Wiri prison "we remain focused on doing a great job. We have a highly professional team in place and we have made a solid start.

The government has said there is nothing to stop Serco bidding for more Corrections work.

Last month, the government announced a $355.6 million increase in funding for Corrections over the next four years, $290.6 million of which has been earmarked to cope with a swelling prison population forecast to reach 9,800 by the end of the year. Within that extra funding, an annual $5 million has been set aside to cover the Department of Corrections taking back management of the Mt Eden prison, on top of what it already gets.

The Department of Corrections' expenditure on prison-based custodial services is expected to be about $900 million in the 2017 financial year.

Serco Group Plc runs outsourced public services around the world in numerous sectors, employing 122,000 people in 30 countries, including Australia's mainland and Christmas Island immigration detention centres to house asylum-seekers and illegal migrants arriving by boat and air.

Serco's shares have climbed 13 percent this year on the LSE and last traded at 107.1 pence. The stock is rated a 'hold' based on the consensus of 17 analysts polled by Reuters.

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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AIA - 2022 Annual Meeting Chair & Chief Executive Addresses


HYDERABAD: Hyderabad achieved IT exports of Rs 75,070 crore in 2015-16, a growth of 13.26% over the previous year, theTelangana government announced on Wednesday.

IT Minister K Tarakarama Rao told reporters that Hyderabad's growth in IT and IT Enabled Services (ITES) exports was higher than the national average of 12.3%.



The city also created nearly 35,611 new jobs in the sector during the year, taking the total workforce to 407,385.

The minister released the annual report of IT, Electronics and Communications of the state.

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WASHINGTON: The U.S. Senate has passed a legislative amendment as part of the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) 2017 that proposes to bring defence sales with India at par with America's close allies and NATO members.



The amendment 'Defence and Security Co-operation with India' was moved by the Illinois Senator Mark Kirk on May 25 andpassed by the US Senate yesterday along with the National Defence Authorization Act-2017.



While the amendment was approved by a voice vote, NDAA- 2017 was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13.



"The Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce, shall ensure that the authorisation of any proposed sale or export of defense articles, defense services, or technical data to India is treated in a manner similar to that of the US' closest partners and allies, which include NATO members, Australia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Israel and New Zealand," it says.



As per the amendment, the US President shall endeavor to further align laws, regulations, and systems within India and the US for the facilitation of defense trade and the protection of mutual security interests.



The President shall develop a plan for such facilitation and coordination efforts that identifies key priorities, any impediments, and the timeline for such efforts, it says.



If passed by the Congress, it would require the President to submit to the Congress a report detailing this coordination plan. The US House of Representatives has already passed a similar amendment attached to the NDAA-2017.



However, the House version of the amendment, which was passed by voice vote, which also calls for strengthening of India-US Defense ties, does not specifically mentions bringing the defence trade to that of a NATO ally.



The two versions of the bill would now have to be reconciled by both the Chambers of the Congress through conference. It is only after the common version of the bill is passed, President Barack Obama would sign that into law.

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HOUSTON: Renowned Indian-American author and philosopher Raja Raos archive, having a broad range of materials from unpublished works to manuscripts of his well-known novels, has been acquired by the University of Texas for advancing the study of arts and humanities.

Raos estate donated the archive to the Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas in Austin.

According to Ransom center, "Its a notable acquisition in part because Rao is widely considered to have been one of Indias most noted authors, having received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and other honours".

The Harry Ransom Center is an archive, library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, specialising in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the US and Europe for the purpose of advancing the study of the arts and humanities.

Raja Rao (1908-2006), considered one of Indias earliest and most outstanding English-language novelists, was the author of numerous works of fiction, short stories, poetry, talks, essays and "The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi" (1998), about Mohandas Gandhis time in South Africa.

Raos archive includes a broad range of materials, from unpublished works to manuscripts of his well-known novels Kanthapura (1938), The Serpent and the Rope(1960) and The Chessmaster and his Moves (1988).

"Departing boldly from the European tradition of the novel, Raja Rao has indigenised it in the process of assimilating material from the Indian literary tradition," said R Parthasarathy, professor emeritus of English at Skidmore College.

Educated at the Aligarh Muslim University and the University of Madras and other foreign universities, Rao was already an internationally known author when he was recruited by former UT President John Silber to teach Indian philosophy and Buddhism in Austin.

His archive contains materials in several of the languages that Rao spoke, including English, French, Sankskrit and his native Kannada.

Rao won the Indian National Academy of Letters Sahitya Akademi Award for Literature in 1964 for the philosophical novel The Serpent and the Rope. In 1969, he was the recipient of the Padma Bhushan Award, one of Indias highest awards for literature, and in 2007 he was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the government of India.

Alongside the archives by Rao at the Ransom Center are manuscript collections of prominent international writers including J M Coetzee, Anita Desai, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Amos Tutuola.

Read Also: U.S. Investors Optimistic About Indian Economy: U K Sinha

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Picture this  it's a Friday night in June, I'm at a local gig at the Polish Club, geared up to watch Canberra's own feminist punk band, Glitoris rock out for one last time before they release their EP later this year.

But instead of jumping around to empowering feminist lyrics, I'm staring at the back of a guy's head, while he jumps around, seemingly ignorant to the many women stuck behind him who can't even glimpse the band. And he's not the only one  there are guys dancing at the very front, knocking into the women on either side of them, completely unaware of their impact. There are guys ripping off their own shirts when the band commands the audience to in one of their songs, not realising that the whole point of the song (to my mind at least) is for women to take off their shirts in an act of defiance towards the body policing that defines our public lives.

Glitoris performing live, covered in glitter.

To be fair, there are also a number of male Glitoris fans standing patiently at the back of the crowd, letting women ahead of them, and acknowledging the truth of this particular space  as a space specifically made to explore female empowerment through music.
Garran Primary School will receive a demountable classroom after almost two years of struggling to house all its students.

The popular Woden Valley school has been at capacity enrolments for some time  with at least one class having 37 students  and teachers have resorted to using their own staff room and library as classrooms.

Garran Primary School has been at capacity enrolments for some time. Credit:Graham Tidy

The school was formally notified on Thursday by Education Minister Shane Rattenbury that a demountable would be installed for the start of term three and would be used to accommodate science and maths learning.

Mr Rattenbury accepted an invitation from the Parents and Citizens' Association to tour the school last month.
Air-crash investigators have located the wreck and black box of EgyptAir Flight MS804 in the eastern Mediterranean, four weeks after the jet disappeared from radar screens with 66 people on board.

Images of the Airbus A320's remains were taken by specialist search vessel RV John Lethbridge, which had been brought in to scan the seabed, Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement.

Search teams also found the cockpit flight recorder, which was damaged and had to be salvaged over several stages. The black box's memory unit, which is considered the most important part of the recording device, was able to be recovered.
It is hard to believe anything could top the surfwear wipeout that was Gordon Merchant's Billabong a few years back, but SurfStitch is sure giving it a good shake.

In the space of six months we've had multiple profit downgrades, each one compounding the scale of the disaster.

One of these downgrades was followed by the aborted management buyout by investment banker/founder Justin Cameron.

What was it Angus Aitken said about the view that "former investment bankers tend to be crap at most things in the listed world?"
First Sam Harrison was shocked and then she was furious.

For 15 years she paid for Medibank's most comprehensive private health insurance policy, giving her peace of mind she wouldn't pay out-of-pocket fees in hospital.

And for 15 years, that was the case, even when her chronic Crohn's disease saw her admitted up to 10 times a year.
The rollout of solar cells on industrial and commercial buildings could accelerate significantly across Australia if an initiative to simplify lease agreements and finance costs is successful in reaching the hip-pocket nerves of landlords and tenants.

While Australia has the world's highest per capita penetration of solar panels on residential rooftops, it lags with solar on commercial buildings despite having acres of low-rise industrial sheds suitable for power generation.

Solar panels on a commercial building in Melbourne.

"There is a lot of roof space out there currently not generating any energy," said Ivor Frischknecht, the chief executive of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

Small businesses in particular were failing to reap the benefits of lower electricity prices on commercial properties they lease because their agreements lumped the cost of installing energy efficient features on the landlord, while giving the savings to tenants.
Unaoil's owners, the Ahsani family: Saman, Cyrus and Ata. The company denies paying bribes. As part of our revelations, we wrote about meeting one of our key sources, whom we had codenamed 'Le Figaro' (this person had asked us to place an advertisement in Le Figaro newspaper to establish contact). We had our first dealings with Le Figaro in June 2015 and that person was the catalyst for our corruption expose. What we have not reported until now is that Le Figaro not only contacted us in June 2015; they also contacted the Australian Federal Police anti-bribery team (because Unaoil had paid bribes on behalf of the offshore arm Australian company Leighton Holdings). In the event, the source chose to work with us, although they regularly requested we pass information to the police. We relayed Le Figaro's revelations to the AFP in June 2015 and, in the months following, to the US Department of Justice, the FBI, the City of London Police and, in October 2015, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Le Figaro wanted anti-bribery authorities to launch a major investigation into Unaoil. Le Figaro believed a big media expose would help achieve this.

Along the way, new sources came forward to give us additional information. In October and November more of Unaoil's files and emails started arriving. We were told they had been removed from Unaoil's system by the Ahsani family, which owns and runs the company, because they contained damning information about corruption. We notified authorities that we were receiving this information, and passed the files to the authorities, months before we published our series of expose. We also spoke to sources inside large companies that had employed Unaoil and suspected they were corrupt. Then, the day after we published our first Unaoil story on March 30, we learned that the SFO had raided Unaoil alongside Monaco authorities. An unnamed Monaco government official described it as "a case of vast corruption with international ramifications". Perhaps predictably, Unaoil's response has been to launch a distraction campaign. Six weeks after our revelations, Unaoil's London public relations firm, Tancredi, gave a story to News Corp's The Australian newspaper. Their story revealed Unaoil's claims that it had been the subject of an extortion attempt launched by an unknown person who claimed to be Russian and who, between December 10 and March 25 (after we had received data and given it to the police) threatened to release information to the media or WikiLeaks that exposed Unaoil's corruption, unless he was paid a large sum of money.

Unaoil never raised any extortion plot with our team of reporters prior to, or after, we published our story. Had Unaoil told us it had been extorted, we would have reported it to our readers. We would have also pointed out that it did not diminish evidence exposing Unaoil's rampant corruption. Curiously, Unaoil also did not tell police about the extortion attempt. Rather, it chose to pay off the extortionist, saying it did this on the advice of experts. Our best guess is that someone who had been close to the Ahsanis had fallen out and was trying to play on their fear that the company's bribery may be exposed. Hard as it tries, Unaoil's public relations campaign can't distract from the issue of its corruption. Rather, it illustrates how the "bribe factory" will do anything to avoid being brought to account. It is an attempt to muddy the waters.

Unaoil's lawyer Rebekah Giles has stated she will launch a defamation action against Fairfax Media. This is no idle threat. Unaoil is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and could spend years pursuing unwarranted litigation. It may also be that the Ahsanis fear being charged by police and hope that a law suit may bolster their inevitable "trial by media" claims. But consider this: Unaoil's owners, Ata, Cyrus and Saman Ahsani, are all suspects in a major federal police bribery probe (along with FBI, Department of Justice and SFO inquiries). If they came to Australia, as they would need to in a defamation trial, they would almost certainly be arrested and questioned by federal police over allegations they paid bribes to Iraqi officials on behalf of the offshore arm of Australian company Leighton Holdings. If the police act on the evidence of Unaoil's corruption, criminal charges will follow. The defamation tactic appears another attempt to delay, obfuscate and threaten. Perhaps it is a coincidence that it was flagged just days after we sent the company another list of questions, this time asking about evidence revealing Unaoil's possible breach of sanctions on Iran, among other serious misdeeds. Just like the first set of questions we sent, our latest remains unanswered.
Cracks are emerging in the campaign attacking the Andrews government's deal with the firefighters' union, as more volunteers speak out against "misinformation" that is stirring "animosity, anger and uncertainty".

Premier Daniel Andrews' decision to back a union deal has already led to minister Jane Garrett quitting and fuelled widespread community anger, with rallies across the state against the Premier's intervention.

But in a scathing letter, obtained by Fairfax Media, volunteer firefighters at Greenvale CFA in Melbourne's north have condemned the Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria association for highly public and inflammatory comments about the impact of the union deal.

The association has been leading the charge against the agreement, saying it amounts to a takeover of the largely volunteer firefighting force by giving the United Firefighters' Union sweeping powers to interfere with management and operations.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: "We may have no choice but to reorganise our business model" in the UK. Credit:Bloomberg "On the financial markets, there is nothing they can do; it will just hit them," said Adam S. Posen, a former member of the rate-setting committee at the Bank of England and now president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "If my house is going to catch on fire, I can plan to have some water on hand, but there's only so much you can do." Panicked hedging If you run a central bank, water comes in the form of liquidity. Most experts assume the Bank of England and its counterparts have readied plans to lend to financial institutions that could face cash shortages. In recent days, European Central Bank officials have signalled readiness to inject money into the financial sphere. In a speech last week, the Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen warned that a Brexit could have "significant economic repercussions." She made similar comments overnight as she explained the US central bank's decision to keep rates on hold. Much of the business world once shrugged off the Brexit vote as noisy political theatre that would eventually be muted by economic common sense. But recent polls have showed the "leave" camp slightly ahead.

"That kind of threw the cat among the pigeons and panicked everyone," said Jeremy Cook, chief economist at World First, a London company that manages foreign exchange for multinationals. "We've seen a pickup in client hedging." No one is going to have the faintest idea what impact it will have A company that, say, imports goods from China to sell in Britain fears that the pound is about to drop, making those Chinese goods more expensive. So it buys contracts that essentially lock in today's exchange rate for the future. According to Laurence Wormald, head of research at FIS, which provides technology and market intelligence to financial services companies, British stocks would most likely fall 15 per cent after a Brexit, with the pound dropping by a similar proportion. If a Brexit vote hurts the British economy, the central bank might feel compelled to lower rates to motivate businesses and households to borrow and spend. But the bank might well do the opposite, raising rates to stop a currency slide.

The most nettlesome variable may be trade. Britain sells nearly half its exports within the European Union. Multinational corporations have set up headquarters in Britain, using those bases to serve customers across the continent. Those campaigning for a Brexit assure that a vote to leave would change nothing right away. Britain would remain a fully fledged member of Europe's marketplace for two years as it negotiated a new arrangement with the 27 remaining members of the union. But if Britain failed to secure a deal, commerce with Europe could be governed by the terms of the World Trade Organisation, which gives member nations the authority to impose potentially steep tariffs on imports. Fanciful and delusional The debate over the Brexit is full of references to sundry alternative models. Norway enjoys access to the European market although it remains outside the union. Switzerland has achieved similar status through a thicket of treaties. But in both cases, they must accept something supporters of Brexit want to eliminate - European rules that allow people to move liberally from country to country.

Those urging a Brexit insist Britain can negotiate a tailor-made deal. Many economists describe that notion as somewhere between fanciful and delusional. Eager to discourage other members from considering an exit, Europe would seek to ensure that Britain paid a price. If Britain dumps Europe, "they are not going to say, 'Well, OK, here's a good deal,'" said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research institution in London. Nowhere are preparations more intense than in finance. London has parlayed expertise in banking and inclusion in Europe to secure dominance over large areas of trading. As the referendum approaches, financiers are now consumed by a jigsaw puzzle of diabolical complexity: They are mapping out what assets they hold and where, seeking to anticipate what jurisdictions and rules might apply post-Brexit. "Investment banks and asset managers are pre-booking law firms, consulting firms and accounting firms for July," said William Wright, managing director of New Financial, a research institution in London. "If we do vote to leave on June 23, no one is going to have the faintest idea what impact it will have." Refashioning the world map?
This week, the queer community has struggled to comprehend that the biggest mass shooting in US history was also a hate crime directed right at us in the very space we consider our most sacred, the gay nightclub.

Here in Sydney, the Orlando massacre happened at the tail end of the Queen's Birthday long weekend, one of the biggest party weekends in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer community's calendar. That such a horrific event could have taken place at any of these parties was not lost on many of us, save perhaps for this country's exemplary gun laws.

For several years, the necessity and viability of gay bars have been called into question. Hookup apps like Grindr have replaced them as the most popular way gay men (as well as trans men and women) find sexual partners. With the increased visibility and acceptance of gay and lesbian people, some in the community no longer feel confined to gay bars when socialising.

But the importance of gay clubs and queer nightlife becomes even more important when we consider the minorities within the minority. It has been telling that much of the coverage and social media outpouring about Orlando ignores that it was a Latin night featuring trans performers.
"The perpetrator is engaging in a general pattern of control over the victim  her finances, her social contacts, the clothes she wears," said Deborah Epstein, who runs Georgetown University Law Centre's domestic violence clinic. The Pulse nightclub the day after the worst shooting in US history. Credit:AP Violence is the perpetrator's means of enforcing that control  and of punishing any attempts to break it. Sitora Yusufiy, Mateen's the former wife of Orlando shooting suspect Omar Mateen, and her fiance Marcio Dias, give a statement to the media at their home outside Boulder, Colorado. Credit:Autumn Parry Mateen's brief marriage to Sitora Yusufiy seems to fit this model. She has said that he forced her to hand over her pay cheques to him, forbade her to leave the house except to go to work, and prevented her from contacting her parents. Even small perceived infractions were met with a violent response.

"He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn't finished or something like that," Yusufiy told The Washington Post. Take this dynamic of coercive violence to intimidate and control to its most horrible extreme, and it looks an awful lot like the way Islamic State treats women in its self-proclaimed caliphate. As my Times colleague Rukmini Callimachi has reported, the group has created a vast infrastructure of rape and slavery in which women are held captive and bought and sold by its fighters. It is intimate violence on an industrial scale. Domestic violence, experts say, is also often a way for male abusers to impose their view of "traditional" gender roles. Epstein said such "traditions" in the US were rooted in the idea of men having control over women. "That's our culture: It's all about men controlling women in their lives," she said. "Intimate terrorism stems from that desire to control." This bears striking similarities to how Islamic State presents its treatment of women as a recruiting tool, promising young men abroad  particularly in Europe  that its caliphate will allow them to restore supposedly "traditional" gender norms of male dominance. This dominance is exercised in part through violence, including systemic rape and the threat of rape. The group often presents this violence as a means to measure and protect men's honour.

It seems natural, then, that Islamic State might appeal to men who desire that sort of control over the women in their lives, separate from any ideological draw  the kind of men who might have domestic violence in their past. Nimmi Gowrinathan, a visiting professor at the City College of New York who studies women's roles in insurgent and terrorist conflicts, said that restrictive norms about gender and sexuality could be a "pull" factor for terrorist organisations  but that people who were drawn to them were also often "pushed" by their own attitudes or desires. Deadly partners Terrorist attacks and mass shootings garner attention and frighten the public much more than episodes of domestic violence. But domestic violence has a much higher death toll in the US. According to the Violence Policy Centre, 895 women in the US were murdered by their current or former intimate partners in 2013 (and this does not include those killed amid mass shootings). That is more than nine times the 92 people the New American Foundation has counted as killed in jihadi attacks on US soil in the past decade.

But there are striking parallels between the intimate terrorism of domestic violence and the mass terrorism perpetrated by lone-wolf attackers like Mateen. Both, at their most basic level, are attempts to provoke fear and assert control. Domestic violence, experts say, often occurs when an abuser concludes that violence is the best tool to solve his or her grievances. That might mean a husband who perceives his wife's failure to do the laundry as a challenge to his rightful authority, leading him to try to reimpose his will through violence. Clark McCauley, a professor at Bryn Mawr College who studies the psychology of mass violence and terrorism, said he was not aware of research finding a causal relationship between domestic violence and terrorism. But he has found that a characteristic common to mass killers is a sense of grievance: a belief that someone, somewhere, had wronged them in a way that merited a violent response. That grievance could be personal, or it could be political  a sense that the perpetrator needed to act in the name of a larger group. Paul Gill, a senior lecturer at University College London who studies the behaviour of lone terrorists, said that violence was, in a sense, a learned psychological skill: "Having a history of violence might help neutralise the natural barriers to committing violence."

From that perspective, domestic violence can be seen as a psychological training ground for someone like Mateen to commit a mass attack. Turning to violence A domestic abuser's desire to impose, by force, supposed traditional gender roles also sometimes includes sexuality. Such abusers, experts say, may see homosexuality as a threat to their masculinity. "There is an idea that what it means to be masculine is to be vigilant of your sexuality, and hypervigilant towards keeping anyone from perceiving you as gay," said Gillian Chadwick, a fellow at Georgetown University Law Centre. Intimate terrorism, in that sense, rests on a broader spectrum of violence meant to preserve the traditional dominance of heterosexual men, and coerce those who are perceived as threatening that order. That spectrum, at the extreme end, includes mass shootings.

This connection makes it somewhat easier to understand an apparent contradiction: that Mateen targeted a gay nightclub and that his father and former wife have said he had a history of homophobic remarks, but that he also had been seen visiting Pulse, the gay nightclub he targeted, and, according to some news reports, used a gay dating app. Could Mateen have been trying to use violence to reimpose rules about gender and sexuality that he himself was troubled about violating? If so, he would not be the first. Chadwick said there was an entire category of legal argument, called "gay panic" and "trans panic" claims, in which defendants say that they turned to violence because they were so upset about being perceived as gay, or about discovering they were attracted to a transgender person. Gowrinathan, who studies gender and terrorism, warned against making assumptions based on Mateen's having been a Muslim raised by Afghan immigrants to the US, saying that domestic violence and homophobia are prevalent across cultures. "He is the outcome of the United States' political culture, not the Islamic State's," she said.
Here is an idea that is good for the environment and just might help clean up a pretty grubby practice in Australian politics, too  ban "how to vote" cards on election day.

Anyone who has gone to a polling booth knows the gauntlet that must be run, past the thrusting hands of party volunteers with those annoying leaflets. The instructions they are presumed to convey treat voters with contempt, as if people are not discerning enough to judge for themselves the quality of candidates in the race. But this will not be the final election with these pesky cards. We can rely on political self-interest to ensure that. Even the usually environment-conscious Greens insist on distributing them, albeit on recycled paper.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari Credit:rocco fazzari

So maybe a little people power is the next best thing. Just boycott the leaflets altogether, or if you feel compelled out of politeness to accept them, ignore the recommendations when filling out your ballot paper. Make a decision as an informed citizen. Democracy is founded on representing the will of the people, but the political parties are treating your vote as a commodity for trade. The misbegotten tradition of how-to-vote cards is fuelling cynicism about the political process, encouraging people to see what should be a nuanced system of preferential voting as a rubber stamp for backroom deals.

The early polling centres have opened before the July 2 election and the political fix is becoming clear. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has attempted to make a virtue of not distributing the Liberal Party's recommended preferences to the Greens, but this as much a tactical gesture to paint Labor as in thrall to the minor party, given Liberal powerbrokers in Victoria had been attempting to negotiate a deal. The Greens are also closing in on Higgins, which has previously been a blue-ribbon Liberal seat.
The protests will see artists down tools and use their creative talents to shine a spotlight on the effects the cuts have had on the sector in the lead-up to the July 2 election. Arts leaders led by MCA director Liz Ann Macgregor and the STC's executive director Patrick McIntyre have launched a campaign against arts funding cuts. Credit:Edwina Pickles The lobby group Live Performance Australia, meanwhile, has issued a report card assessing the election promises of the major political parties that compares $20 million in new arts funding promised by the Coalition to Labor ($176.6 million) and the Greens ($270.2 million). Arts collective The Protagonists is calling on artists to "create a happening" and "make a noise". One happening includes a gathering outside Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's Sydney electorate office on Friday morning.

Hugo Weaving. Credit:James Green Organisers of the protest say the Turnbull/Abbott government is not committed to an arts policy and has cut $300 million to the arts and cultural sector over the past three years. "The Liberals have both cut funding to the arts and attacked the independence of funding artists can apply for," said Zanny Begg, an artist and University of NSW academic. "This is having a devastating impact on culture as a whole by squeezing resources for new and challenging art practices," Ms Begg said. "Focusing on top-heavy organisations and established art forms risks turning Australia into a staid museum rather than a generator of the imaginative culture." Former Australia Council chief Michael Lynch said the next government had to address the harm that had been caused to the arts sector.

"Governments must address the damage they have done to the arts sector, whoever wins the election," he said. "Labor and the Greens have attempted to address the issues through their recent policy pronouncements. The ball is in your court, Mr Turnbull." Artist David Pledger of Not Yet It's Difficult is running for election as part of a durational performance in the form of a campaign. In Melbourne, an all-star cast of performers, writers and artists are joining forces to mark what they have called a "bleak midwinter" for culture in Australia. Malthouse Theatre is hosting three shows this weekend under the title In The Bleak Midwinter, using the winter solstice as a metaphor for the "needless slaughter" of the arts following cuts of more than $300 million in funding by the Abbott and Turnbull governments during less than three years in power. The shows by theatre company the Rabble will form a quiet political protest against the cuts. Described as a "series of absences", the shows will feature Alison Croggon, Angus Cerini, Dana Mitlins and Jess Keeffe in a performance in the dark, a scene with no actors and a voice you can't hear.

Last month, 65 arts organisations lost recurrent Australia Council funding after the arts funding agency was forced to cut its multi-year grants program back from six years to four years after losing more than $100 million in government funding in 2015. Small and mid-sized companies and organisations such as Red Stitch Actors Theatre and the Next Wave festival were among those that missed out.Arts Minister Mitch Fifield has come under fire for not releasing an arts policy, while both shadow Arts Minister Mark Dreyfus and Greens Arts spokesman Adam Bandt have both released detailed cultural policies in recent weeks. Theatre Network Australia director Nicole Beyer, a co-convenor of arts umbrella group ArtsPeak, said the damage to the sector had galvanised people across the country. She said the Arts Industry Council in South Australia was running a campaign targeting the marginal seat of Hindmarsh, Tasmania's Creative Industries Council would stage a debate with candidates from the major parties as well as independents, while the Chamber of Arts and Culture in Western Australia was also holding events as part of the campaign. "I think we've moved beyond gimmick and we actually want to engage politicians in a sophisticated conversation," Beyer said. "Getting the audience to stand up immediately engages audience members. It's a call to action, they're there, they're engaged and invested in it, and will take that forward.
The never-ending movie franchise that is the Fast and Furious series has a very high-calibre recruit to its eighth outing.

Dame Helen Mirren has confirmed she will join the production "for the fun of it".

The acclaimed actor will join Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel in Fast 8, which has already begun production in Cuba and Iceland and will continue filming in the US later this year.

In an interview with Elle, she revealed she was joining the huge franchise, saying she aimed to make her film choices a mix of "some fun and some relevant, serious, important movies".
Writer/director Andrew Stanton swore after making the 2003 animated hit Finding Nemo that he would never revisit that world again.

"I spent four years with fish, so why do it again?" the 50-year-old animator says as he explains the genesis, 13 years later, of the sequel Finding Dory. "It was the last thing I thought was ever going to happen, as if you'd said, 'we're done with kids' and 10 years later you were suddenly like, 'OK, we're having another kid!'"

Why did Pixar's vice president of creative  the man who oversaw hits such as Toy Story, Bug's Life, Monsters Inc. and Brave  change his mind? "Finding Nemo was converted into 3D and I went to the theatre to see it, because they needed my approval, so I got to see it like an audience would see it, because so much time had passed," Stanton, the bespectacled filmmaker says in a Los Angeles hotel room, surrounded by Dory toys. "This time I immediately saw that Dory was completely unresolved and still hurting on the inside. She was a tragic figure, hiding loss and abandonment and being someone who had to apologise for her handicap constantly," he adds with a pained expression, "and that really started to bother me."

The Massachusetts native who joined Pixar in 1990 as its second animator and ninth employee suddenly looks chagrined, as he acknowledges he missed the story in front of him for over a decade. "I suddenly realised, 'man, I fight for years to come up with new stories for a main character and she's just sitting there with all that unresolved stuff', and then I just couldn't drop it."
Even after all these years, it's still horrifying to see news footage of the Cronulla riots at the start of the new Australian film Down Under.

After a minute of people enjoying the surf in the lead-up to Christmas in 2005, the scene turns nasty as locals turn on "Lebs" in running fights that lead back to the railway station.

All those images that were broadcast around the world are back on screen  the sneering insults, ugly mob attacks, we-grew-here-you-flew-here written on bare chests, the drunken ranting, police wielding batons on rioters, the flag-waving, attacks on cars, arrests by the roadside.
"The event organiser has not cooperated with us on a refund process as required by our terms and conditions, leading to us pursuing them via legal avenues," TryBooking CEO Jeff McAlister said in a statement. Maitreya Festival usually attracts up to 10,000 punters. Credit:Lenny Maddy In the months since Maitreya Festival was cancelled, disgruntled music festival fans have continued to flood the festival's Facebook page with angry messages relating to the cancelled event. In a series of Facebook posts, Maitreya organisers have declined to explain to affected punters their refusal to issue refunds. "We can't in any number of words express to you the ins and outs of the rabbit hole that the event ended in this year," a statement on the page reads.

"We can't turn back time and give you back what might have been  but we do hold a deep belief that everything happens for a reason, even if that reason is really hard to understand or uncover in the short term." Organisers, however, had plenty of time to realise that the festival was in trouble. As early as February, Buloke Shire Council refused to issue the necessary permits over concerns about safety and the environmental impact of the event, which is staged near Charlton in central Victoria. Festival organisers took the council to VCAT, but a hearing on February 29 upheld the council's decision. On March 4, VCAT told festival organisers to notify ticketholders that the event would not proceed and to clear the site within 14 days. Despite that, Maitreya posted on its Facebook page the following day that the event was "100 per cent go". Tickets were still on sale.

Organisers finally cancelled the event on March 10, citing bad weather as the reason. They promised a substitute event later in the year. Several international DJs, including Swiss artist Liquid Soul and and Serbian DJ Zyce, confirmed to Fairfax they had been paid their full performance fee by organisers, indicating some of the missing funds have been spent on maintaining relationships with headline acts. Many Maitreya fans, though, remain out of pocket. The festival's most recent Facebook post has more than 500 comments from punters, who call the fiasco "a disgrace". "Truly deplorable behaviour and absolute nonsense response," one festival goer wrote.

Dozens of disgruntled fans are considering launching legal action of their own, with calls for a class action lawsuit. Slater and Gordon refuted claims on Facebook they were launching a class action. Maitreya organisers and their legal representatives declined to speak to Fairfax Media for this story. Do you know more? Email ebonybowden@fairfaxmedia.com.au Maitreya: Timeline of a failed festival February 10, 2016

Buloke Shire Council refuses Maitreya planning permit. Organisers failed to provide information for planning permit, including traffic management, insurance policy, emergency and environmental plans. Festival promoters launch VCAT action against council ruling. February 15 Alan Getley, president of local business association the Charlton Forum, says cancellation is devastating for local economy. Wants to see festival go ahead. February 25 Louise Staley, member of parliament for Ripon, says she has been inundated by community groups calling for festival to go ahead.

February 29 VCAT rules in favour of the council that festival cannot go ahead as scheduled. Maitreya argued the problem was with how festival was categorised in the planning permit. Organisers had no consent from Parks Victoria and no cultural heritage site management plan. March 3 Alan Getley says council should do whatever it can to help festival go ahead. Announces he will run for council. March 4

Maitreya ordered by VCAT to notify ticket holders and to clear site within 14 days March 5 Promoters on Facebook say event is "100% go" with new venue. March 6 Promoters still advertising tickets on Facebook page.

March 7 Victoria Police urges organisers and attendees to stop their plans to attend festival. They warn that support agencies such as St Johns have withdrawn services. March 8/9 Maitreya Facebook post says stages are built and they will have medical, security and fire services. Headline acts Liquid Soul and Zyce arrive in Melbourne. CFA District 18 Operations Manager John Bigham says any businesses on the site would be breaking the law.

March 10 Swan Hill Local Area Commander Inspector Dan Davison says event is a "recipe for disaster" and potential fire risk. No water, toilets, medical care and emergency response. Maitreya organisers cancel festival, blaming poor weather and flooded site. March 11 -14 Around 1000 people still descend on the Charlton district and stage informal festival.
Katz, who is best known for her plays Neighbourhood Watch and The Dog/The Cat, turned to her long-time collaborator, director Chris Kohn, for help. "We decided we needed a karate consultant," Katz says. "Someone who knew what they were talking about. That's how we met Natsuko." Natsuko is the Melbourne-based karate champion and classically trained soprano Natsuko Mineghishi. "She is an amazing performer and right away we knew she could be our sensei," Katz says. "And then I thought, well, I can't write this play without knowing about karate myself, so I trained in Natsuko's dojo in Melbourne for two years. I got to my yellow belt. But I've just been demoted back to white belt because I haven't practised enough." Katz began writing her father's story in 2010. "I wanted him to be in the play originally but he wasn't a good enough actor to play himself, so we cut him out," Katz says, laughing. "Then we felt we needed to make things a bit more dramatic. So I basically made up a whole lot of stuff about him." Her father has "mixed feelings" about the project, Katz says. "Some things are a bit too close to the bone for him. One of the reasons we had to cut him out of the play was because he was too emotionally involved. He was sort of relieved. He didn't really want to be in the theatre every single night. He just wanted to hang out and do karate."

Mineghishi was involved throughout the writing, Katz says, so much so that she became indispensable to the play. Coincidentally, Mineghishi's teacher's teacher is the sensei who taught Dan Katz's teacher's teacher. "It was meant to be," Mineghishi says. The resulting play, a co-production with Melbourne indie company Stuck Pigs Squealing, is an ensemble piece, featuring Harry Greenwood as the younger Dan Katz and Brian Lipson as the older. Cutting back and forth in time, characters in the present learn from the past. One of Mineghishi's roles is to ensure the authentic representation of her martial art on stage. "It is important that it is not the Hollywood version of karate," Mineghishi says. "There is quite a bit of action on stage but we also wanted the philosophies of honour, identity, humility and respect for others." Back at the Dojo reflects a Japanese sensibility, Mineghishi says. Back at the Dojo - starring Natsuko Mineghishi, Dan Katz and Luke Mullins. Credit:Brett Boardman Photography "The difference between a typical Western-made marital arts story and Lally's story is that in Hollywood, they have to explain everything," she says. "That is the Western way. There is a cause and effect and there has to be a conclusion, just like an essay. In Japanese stories we don't have introductions and conclusions like that. The story can go anywhere. One stage, I don't need to explain the power of karate. I just show it. The audience will feel it with all their senses."

Mineghishi has trained the cast  which includes Luke Mullins, Dara Clear, Catherine Davies, Shari Sebbens and Fayssal Bazzi  in the rudiments of the martial art. One cast member, Dara Clear, already holds a black belt. "It's wonderful to teach actors because they are not afraid to try something new," Mineghishi says. "They are not afraid to step into someone's shoes and they are not judgmental. Actors also absorb things very quickly and are not embarrassed. They are in their bodies. So it has been easier and quicker than I expected. But some elements of karate take a lifetime to learn. So the actors are beginners in their knowledge." Each rehearsal begins with a karate class, Katz says. "If we start the day without karate now, the actors don't like it. And before every run of the play, Natsuko takes everyone through a karate meditation. It puts everyone in the zone." Creating the play has made fast friends of Katz and Mineghishi. "One of my dreams is to write my own play and that became concrete after meeting Lally," Minegishi says. "She has shown me that you can write your own story. I find Lally so inspiring. She meets lots of crazy people and she is a little bit crazy herself but then she utilises that in her writing. I can really learn from that."

Minegishi, meanwhile, has become Katz's sensei. "She's my mentor, without a doubt," Katz says. "A sensei is someone you go to for spiritual advice or life advice. Sometimes, if I have a romantic problem, or any kind of problem, if I talk to Natsuko she will have a clear way of seeing it. She cuts through confusion and shows me a path that was invisible to me. "Since starting karate I've realised how much my path to inner happiness is through the physical. Natsuko is always trying to get me to slow down and focus and be in myself and to own the space that I'm in. The things you need to learn in karate, are often the things you need to learn in life." Once Back at the Dojo opens, Katz says she will focus on training and getting back her yellow belt. "Karate is a lifetime sport, you do it forever. It's part of your life. There might be interruptions but you keep going." Back at the Dojo is at Belvoir Street Theatre from JUne 18 to July 17.
Keller went in for a meeting with Brown who, she recalls, "looked as bewildered as I was. I said to him, do you really know what this show will be? And he said, no, not really. And we went into it in good faith. I've done that before and it hasn't always worked, but this time, it absolutely did." Amanda Keller Credit:Nic Walker The show is a blend of studio-based segments and pre-filmed stories. It is, she offers, a tonight show by stealth. "One of the executives once said it's almost like we're doing a Tonight Show by stealth because it has its unpredictable moments. That's the bit where I think the friendship of the four of us really shines." For Keller, and the slow coalescence of a number of elements, including separate television and radio deals, has created what she described as a perfectly balanced life. "I feel that I've sorted out in my life the difference between being busy and being stressed and I like being busy," she says. "I like being busy but I don't like being stressed." "Radio ... it's different everyday," she adds. "The hours are hard but I love the adrenaline of it. I love the freedom of what we do. I also love The Living Room so much. That's not stressful either. It's busy, but it's engaging in a different way. With those two things, I feel in this moment of amber could not be happier."

It was not always so. There were times, she says, that she had to read in the newspaper that projects she was working on were destined for the axe. And other times, when presented with a show, that the execution did not live up to the vision. "No one sets out to make a crap program," Keller says candidly. "People sit at home in judgment and go, why would you make it? [But] no one sets out to make that. I know Elle McFeast [Libbi Gorr] went through that when she did her own show [with] Chopper Read. It pretty much died on that first night. The same with Ben Elton when he did his show." The rush to judge in the digital age, she observes, is brutal. "People are so quick to vilify that it makes, you for a number of years ... I really didn't want to stick my head up because of those experiences that other people had. You think, I'm happy at this certain level. If I stick my head up, you risk that." Keller's success in radio, and the enduring power of radio as a format, sit beautifully on the modern digital landscape, a sort of double contradiction that either programmed radio itself cannot survive in the era of iTunes and personalised playlists, or that where radio survives it must be fronted by teenagers pushing the boundaries of offence. "It's interesting, isn't it," she says. "When I first started at WS, which is 11 years ago, the program director at the time said because all of the personal music, the iTunes, your radio is no longer your jukebox. That means that our job is even more important. If you're not relying on your radio necessarily just for your music, what's in between the songs it was what has to be compelling."

That made the task of hosting a radio programs, she adds, doubly important in terms of tone and delivery. "I think that's why, in this age of intimacy, radio is still so intimate. You can't wear a mask on radio. That's why people forge these friendships with you. "That's the biggest compliment someone can give you is, I feel like you're one of my friends, you remind me of me, or, my girlfriends are like you," Keller says. "I think radio gives you that far more than anything else. That's because you are on for three and half hours on air everyday." For Keller, she is blessed the show doesn't require her to fudge her age, or pitch to a demographic outside her own. "It'd be very hard to not be yourself or if you are faking it, it'd be a very hard act to keep up," she says. "I'm lucky that our program is within my age demographic. I don't have to pretend to be a different age." In truth what actually sets WSFM's breakfast show, which is hosted by Keller and Brendan Jones, apart from its competitors is that in an age where radio is still driven by stunts, albeit in a somewhat muted fashion given the avalanche of bad press slung at Austereo in the wake of several disastrous program decisions, WSFM seems to have navigated a scandal-free (and stunt-free) way to the top of the ratings. "We haven't necessarily set out to do that," Keller says. "I just hate stunts. I think probably our age group is, say, 40 to 50, 35 to 50. [And] I'd like to think they're not into them either. There was a time when we all thought that that was funny. There is a lot of stations that still do it and they are funny. I'm glad I've never had to do it. It hasn't been a necessary choice."
He first appeared on our screens in Channel 10's surprise hit of last year, The Bachelorette - and now Richie Strahan is back. This time though, he takes centrestage as The Bachelor Australia.

Expectations for The Bachelorette were low before it went to air, the assumption being that the appeal of the male version was the cattiness and competition between the female contestants. Without that element, the show with Sam Frost looking for love was not expected to work. How wrong that was: The Bachelorette rated well, was all over social media and launched Frost into a career in radio.

Richie Strahan, The Bachelor 2016. Credit:Ten

Strahan is blonde and blue-eyed, an outdoors type who works on oil rigs ("It's incredibly tough to meet someone in the industry I am in"). He's looking for an easy-going girl who is "also a bit of a thrill seeker". Asked how he feels about the show, Strahan was frank: "Mate, I am absolutely sweating bullets."
Ben Chifley, the reform-minded Labor Party leader and Australia's 16th prime minister, famously spoke of "the light on the hill" in a 1949 speech. The shared hopefulness of that phrase was turned upside down at the opening of Secret City, the new political thriller screening on Showcase: a young man runs for his life through the dark Canberra night, the lights of Parliament House glowing in the background. Darkness, in this instance, prevails.

When the young man's body is found by the police the next morning, sliced open so as to retrieve something valuable he swallowed, it's observed by political journalist Harriet Dunkley (Anna Torv), whose desire for a story is well-matched to the six part mini-series' feel for tight plotting and urgent revelations in what is a smart, telling success.

The backdrop feels recognisable, from the location shooting in the courtyards and corridors of Parliament House to the debate between a Labor government's Defence Minister, Mal Paxton (Dan Wyllie), and military brass and department mandarins over whether the next generation of Navy submarines should be built in Japan or Australia. A disparaging remark about Joint Strike Fighters ticks the final expensive box.

There's long been a belief that political thrillers won't play with an Australian backdrop because we're an international backwater, short on goons and gunplay. But the primary weapons in Secret City are electronic warfare and the struggle is over information. The storyline's conspiracy involves an Australian student who used self-immolation as a political protest in China, and it's played out through SIM cards, digital surveillance and computer hacking.
Brian D. Frary, Endeavour Hills Tomorrow's world I'm really enjoying the ultra stylish sci fi series Trepalium (SBS on Demand) from Arte France. It portrays a dystopian near-future where the Actives are separated by the Great Wall from the Jobless. A revolt is simmering over a precious commodity: water. A situation all too familiar to us in contemporary times. Ian McPhail, Northcote The rebooted

Wasted opportunity What a waste of a Green Guide cover to feature the anonymous Stig, from a BBC show. Far more interesting is the interior photo of Jacki Weaver and Alan Dale in the new thriller Secret City. Surely our great Australian actors are better copy than someone in a white suit and full helmet. Lynne Boyd, Brighton East Bias cut Re "Bad Taste in the Kitchen" (Letter of the Week, June 2), come on Peter Waterhouse, you just got exactly what you wanted  a "fascinating insight" into the real Jacqui Lambie, who always speaks just like you and me around the barbie or down the pub. And why is it that just because she is a female, people like you have to turn it around into a gender issue. No one mentioned anything about verbal abuse of women on the program. Take a peek under your own petticoats (oops! "bad taste polemics") and you will see that your own ignorance and gender bias is showing.

Garry Rice, Kangaroo Flat Tut tutting I am a regular viewer of Channel Seven's evening news and appreciate Peter Mitchell's no-nonsense approach to reading the day's bulletin. However, I am most disappointed at Jennifer Keyte's persistent "tutting" after a bad news story. Jennifer, there are many distressing things happening in the world today, please keep your personal opinions about them to yourself. Pat Lynas, Gladstone Park Welcome back Rake

Your preview pick of Rake for best show last week was spot on. It's cynical, sarcastic, sophisticated, immoral and wildly entertaining adult fare. It's also very Australian. Clearly the writers and actors have a ball creating the fast-moving ever-madder scenarios. I cannot recall seeing actors having so much fun. Even the smallest characters have great moments and hilarious lines. Long may Cleaver's crew run. Ken Ring, Beaumaris  or maybe not I have enjoyed watching Rake, but I think that the series is rapidly approaching its use-by date. Rake was always a comedy-drama, but in recent episodes the drama component has become simply preposterous. The end of season 4 seems like a good time to call it a day.

Al Morris, Doncaster Two too much Shaun Micallef is "delighted that we are straddling an election", intending to select video of politicians' faux pas for material for satire in Mad as Hell. Last Wednesday he and his writers did this with acumen. Unfortunately, the next program, The Chaser's Election Desk, did exactly the same, which included running identical clips of political leaders garbling their interpretation of superannuation policies. Their humour was blunted accordingly. I wonder if the ABC schedulers are regretting this juxtaposition of two satirical programs, either of which would be wholly entertaining as a stand-alone. Andrew Smith, Leongatha ABC's high-def no show

In November 2015, ABC TV Director of Television Richard Finlayson "confirmed" in the media that ABC TV would be re-instigating its Hi Definition broadcasting in June 2016 in the form of a simulcast of its main channel, in the same way as Ten, Nine and Seven. We are well into June, nothing has happened, and I can't seem get a satisfactory or coherent and un-ambiguous answer from the ABC's switchboard as to exactly when or if. Paul Fuller, Richmond Out for the count The ABC Classic FM 100 Countdown is broadcasting over the Queen's Birthday long weekend. Unable to enter my nominations or votes or even access the list of nominations due to changed procedures for doing so, it seems the generation who only know email and good old telephone contact are henceforward to be excluded from voicing their choices, voices or opinions with the ABC. For many years I have participated in this event, but with the changed rules, this year, was unable to, due to my lack of technological know-how.We oldies no longer matter, even though we may be Aunty's longest and most loyal listeners. Ros de Bruin, Balwyn

Bill Shorten addresses Credit:ABC Straight answers Do we have a politician who actually answers a question without prevarication? Yes, we do. Bill Shorten's appearance on Q&A on Monday was impressive and without the usual political "fluff". Roy Hayton, Beaumaris Getting personal ...
Canadian husband-and-wife team Michelle and Jared Brock (who are also founders of abolitionist charity Hope For The Sold) travel to 10 countries exploring the way governments around the world regulate or intervene in sex work and human trafficking. They talk to politicians, sex workers, "johns", pimps and "loverboys"  men who groom women for the trade in human trafficking  in an attempt to discover what can be done to prevent sexual exploitation. By the film's end, though, there's a distinct dearth of any clear answers, and the filmmakers appear to have an agenda  that countries with more-liberal prostitution laws might "normalise" the kinds of exploitation that can arise from sex work  but no direction in which to further their argument or propose solutions. Kylie Northover

One, 8.30pm

Decried as a disappointment, Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own seems to have been motivated by its star casting as much as anything else. Harrison Ford was at the height of his fame, a major Hollywood figure with enormous off and on-screen stature and a graciously ageing presence. Pretty boy Brad Pitt was a new star, even if critics were reluctant to accept his thespian talent. So, The Devil's Own was a teaming of two acting and cultural generations, one comfortably in power, one rising to prominence but still not afforded full flower. And that matches in many ways the plot of Pakula's film, with Ford a seasoned and respected New York police sergeant of Irish background, and Pitt a brash rebel over from Belfast and spouting a lot of IRA rhetoric. The time will come when the older man must challenge the younger. The plot's a mess and the drama unconvincing, but the stars are almost enough. Scott Murray

The Grinder

Eleven, 9.30pm

On paper, this new comedy has the potential to sound utterly appalling  Rob Lowe and Fred Savage as brothers who couldn't be less alike!  but it's actually very funny, and a little bit quietly subversive in its piss-take of the earnestness of television and its actors. Lowe plays charismatic, handsome Dean Sanderson, who for the past decade has starred as a dashing, high-flying lawyer on a courtroom drama called The Grinder. When the show's axed, he's at a loss, and moves to the family home in Idaho, where his brother Stewart (Savage) is a real-life lawyer, one who lacks the charisma of Dean's fictional character. Dean believes his experience playing a TV lawyer makes him qualified to practice law  as, it seems, do many others  and he joins the family law firm, bandying around legal terms he knows only from TV, and winning over even other lawyers with his charm and good looks. It's completely silly but also a brilliantly subtle comment on celebrity culture, and Lowe is just perfect for the role. Kylie Northover
One a dull day for free-to-air movies (apart from Rollerball: see Doug Anderson's review), an unexpected highlight could be this unsighted French television documentary, Film and Its Era, which examines two classic 1975 films: Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor and Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Both define their time, with Pollack's spy drama the quintessential paranoia thriller, with a rogue division of the CIA running riot over democratic rights and human life. As for Forman's Cuckoo's Nest, it denounces institutional cruelty in the mental health area, while celebrating the individual spirit's rebelling against those who attempt to limit and control it. Made by one of the Czech Republic's greatest directors, it is also a paean to the free flow of ideas and talent across the cinematic world. As bureaucratic and ideological repression increases daily, on all sides of politics, business and culture, these two films are precious reminders of a different time. Scott Murray

Wednesday, History, 8.30pm

A gripping feature-length documentary telling the story of the 1846 pioneer expedition that collapsed into starvation and cannibalism in the bitter snows of California's Sierra Nevada. The wagon train comprising nearly 80 men, women and children left Independence, Missouri, in what should have been plenty of time to make it to California before winter. Tragically, they decided to take a risky shortcut through trackless wilderness and baking desert that wound up putting them weeks behind schedule. Historians and a descendant of expedition leader George Donner paint a fascinating picture of the journey and some of the remarkable personalities involved. The re-enactments are compelling too  if a little nauseating when it comes time to peer into the cooking pots. As horrific as the story is, however, it is also full of touching tales of heroism, sacrifice and survival. Well worth a look. Brad Newsome

The Chaser's Election Desk

9pm, ABC

Australian politics continues to doggedly follow the endless cycle of life, death and rebirth as outlined in Eastern mysticism, and the Chaser team remain the straw to the drowning man that is the voting public. Six elections into their tenure as the ABC's resident satirists (gosh it's easy to get all misty-eyed over the fun frolics with Kim Beazley, Brian Harradine and the Tampa back in 2001) they remain committed to the cause of chasing political leaders around the hustings wielding cardboard cutouts of their party rivals and demonstrating that the more things change, the more they stay exactly the same. Not as far as the previously male-dominated Chaser team are concerned, however, with women such as Zoe Norton Lodge and Kirsten Drysdale joining the Election Desk cast, although no number of chicks will keep Chas Licciardello and Andrew Hanson from their exalted status as the show's Statler and Waldorf. Larissa Dubecki
Egg farmers on both sides of the production fence say major supermarkets will not have enough stock to fulfil their pledge to phase out cage eggs.

Coles no longer sells cage eggs under its private label brand and Woolworths has committed to phasing out cage eggs by 2018. Aldi recently announced that it will phase out cage eggs in its stores by 2025.

But producers say supermarkets will never meet their customers demand if they rely solely on free range eggs.

Industry researcher IBISWorld says the major supermarkets are responding to changing spending habits and an increasing push from customers to source ethically produced livestock products.
Queensland MP Bob Katter has been condemned by both sides of politics for an election ad that depicts him shooting his rivals.

The independent member for Kennedy's campaign ad starts with two men in ALP and LNP T-shirts shaking hands over an "Australia for sale" sign.

Mr Katter is then shown grinning and blowing the smoke from a cowboy pistol with the two men dead behind him.

The video was released on Wednesday, just days after 50 people were killed in a horrific mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.
Maverick MP Bob Katter implied he was unaware of the mass shooting in Orlando before publishing a controversial and ill-timed campaign advertisement in which he shoots dead two political rivals.

In a chaotic and heated exchange with Sunrise's David Koch, Mr Katter defended the "screamingly funny" video and said he "quite frankly would have no idea" about the worst gun massacre in modern US history.

"I don't know what is going on in the media. I don't watch television. I get to bed at midnight every night," the leader of the Katter's Australian Party said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has praised the embattled NBN boss Ziggy Switkowski, after he was found to have wilfully breached election rules designed to keep public servants from engaging in partisan politics.

Labor is gunning for the former Telstra-boss, who it regards as politically tainted through his "shameful" actions as chairman of NBN Co and in a series of high-profile public appearances with senior Liberal Party figures dating back years.

The latest furore exploded after Fairfax revealed an opinion article by Dr Switkowski which had breached the caretaker conventions and was submitted against the express advice of the nation's top public servant, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Martin Parkinson.
A senior government minister says Malcolm Turnbull will come under pressure to reinstate Tony Abbott to cabinet if the Coalition wins the July 2 election.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton made the prediction amid fresh speculation Mr Turnbull could face a push from the conservative Coalition wing to offer Mr Abbott a frontbench position if the government is re-elected with a reduced majority.

Mr Abbott said on Thursday he did not expect to return to cabinet, while Mr Turnbull has previously said he would favour renewal through the promotion of younger MPs and women into the ministry.
University leaders have lashed out at a claim by the elite Group of Eight universities that it is time to "declare victory" on increasing university enrolments, with one comparing it to George W. Bush's much-ridiculed "mission accomplished" speech during the Iraq War.

The Group of Eight, which includes prestigious institutions such as the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, on Wednesday released a discussion paper calling for moderation to the demand-driven system that allows universities to enrol as many students as they want.

Michael Spence, chair of the Group of Eight, has been likened to George W. Bush for his comments. Credit:Ben Rushton

With the proportion of young people with a degree nearing 40 per cent, Group of Eight chair Michael Spence said it was time to "declare victory" on increasing university participation.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has condemned as unacceptable and wrong the views of an Islamic preacher who described homosexuality as an "evil act".

Sheikh Shady Al-Suleiman, the national president of the Australian National Imams Council, was once recorded on video preaching that homosexuality was an "evil act", which brought "evil outcomes" in the form of sexually transmitted diseases.

He was one of Mr Turnbull's personal guests at Kirribilli House at an Iftar dinner - marking the end of the day's fast during the holy month of Ramadan - on Thursday night, during which the Prime Minister called for unity in the face of terrorist attacks.
A 'smooth criminal' who won an army of admirers around the world for his 'hot mugshot' has shared his first modelling photo on Instagram.

Jeremy Meeks became a viral star in 2014 when his photo was posted on a California police department's Facebook page, attracting comments like: "Apparently, it is a crime to look this fine."

A Stockton Police Department photo shows Jeremy Meeks arrested in 2014. The 'hot' mugshot later went viral on Facebook. Credit:Reuters

The mugshot star, who attracted attention for his piercing blue eyes and chiselled jaw, was sent to prison for the illegal possession of a firearm and signed by talent agency White Cross Management while he was behind bars.

His modelling agency shared the headshot on Instagram, with the caption: "Our #warriors fan @jmeeksofficial ready for tipoff."
Sydney's housing squeeze has reached a new threshold: Blacktown has slipped into the unaffordable category for renters.

It was once a haven for families in search of inexpensive housing but now Blacktown has moved from an "acceptable" level of affordability to "moderately unaffordable" according to the latest rental affordability index published by Shelter Australia, Community Sector Banking and SGS Economics and Planning.

Greater Sydney has long been Australia's most expensive city for renters and the index shows nearly all suburbs in the affordable range are now at least 45-50km from the central business district.

Most suburbs east of Parramatta are "severely unaffordable" and 14 postcodes clustered around Sydney harbour have the highest possible rating of "extremely unaffordable." An "extreme" rating means tenants are paying more than 60 per cent of Sydney's average weekly household earnings on rent. It is generally accepted that a household is in housing stress if it pays more than 30 per cent of disposable income on rent.
A teenager charged with terrorism offences allegedly planned a mass stabbing in Sydney and had expressed his support on Facebook for the Orlando nightclub massacre.

The boy was arrested on Tuesday afternoon at his family home in The Oaks, a semi-rural suburb about 25 kilometres west of Campbelltown.

He was denied bail on Thursday despite his lawyer, Aaron Tang, telling Parramatta Children's Court that his parents would lock up all the knives in their home and effectively keep the boy under house arrest.

The boy, who is of Greek background and has significant developmental disabilities, has no affiliation with religious extremism but allegedly sought to carry out the attack for ideological reasons.
Labor MP Hugh McDermott's military service record was referred by senior party officials to a candidate review committee before the 2015 state election after an anonymous allegation was sent to ALP head office.

But a party source said there was insufficient evidence to support the allegation that there were "issues" with Dr McDermott's service record.

Labor MP Hugh McDermott has been challenged to table his military service record. Credit:Facebook

He went on to win a bitterly contested rank and file preselection to successfully contest the western Sydney seat of Prospect at last year's election.

On Thursday, Dr McDermott said the complaint to the ALP was "an anonymous smear, much like the ones I'm being subjected to now. I make no further comment".
Boys at Wollongong's Edmund Rice College in the 1980s knew sexual predators moved freely among them, and would share advice about who to avoid being alone with, Throsby MP Stephen Jones  a former school captain  has revealed.

Following another teacher's admission of guilt over historic child sex crimes at the West Wollongong all-boys college, Mr Jones said the school had felt like a "dumping ground" for paedophiles whose crimes were overlooked by those who could have ended the abuse.

Stephen Jones was a student at Edmund Rice College in Wollongong in the early 1980s. Credit:Steven Siewert

"There was a whole bunch of them [paedophiles] at the time I was there," said Mr Jones, who graduated from the school in 1983.

"Boys would [avoid them] in all sorts of ways. We would just talk amongst ourselves about it  'don't get caught with this person or that person'."
Corrective Services Minister David Elliott says he wishes he didn't have to spend $3.8 billion to expand NSW prison capacity, but "strong" bail laws and "efficient policing" make it necessary.

An anticipated surge in the NSW prison population to around 18,000 by 2020 will be met with a $3.8 billion funding injection to create an extra 7000 beds over four years.

"High demand and a high need for this capacity in our prisons": David Elliott. Credit:Tim Hunter

The prison population has surged over the past two years in particular to about 12,000, sparking an overcrowding crisis.

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics has put the surge down to rapid growth in the number of people being arrested and a backlog of trials in the District Court, meaning people are held for longer on remand.
The woman who became the face of the fiery first Inner West Council meeting after spitting on the state-government appointed administrator has avoided a criminal conviction.

Nicola Minus, 26, was charged with offensive conduct after she spat on Richard Pearson during a rowdy meeting in May which ended with the riot police on scene.

Minus' lawyer Miranda Moody entered a guilty plea to the charge on her behalf in Newtown Local Court on Thursday, saying her client acted in the heat of the moment and was "utterly remorseful".
Three days before Warragamba Dam could spill due to severe storms, the Baird government has committed to raising its wall to prevent a potential flood disaster in western Sydney, four years after being advised to review the options.

As a looming east coast low raised the possibility that the dam could spill on Sunday, the government said it will commit $58 million towards raising the wall by 14 metres to avoid a catastrophe that could place 43,000 western Sydney residents at risk.

Construction, at an estimated cost of about $690 million, is expected to be complete within three to four years after a business case is signed off in 2019, subject to planning approvals.

The Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley between Penrith and Sackville has the greatest flood risk of anywhere in NSW.
Have you been down to South Bank's Cultural Forecourt yet to experience the Brisbane Times Night Noodle Markets? No? Well, you simply must. A world of smoky, braised, glazed, simmered, streamed, fried, pleated, grilled, baked, roasted and toasted deliciousness awaits.

And if you have been down, have you eaten your way through our list of 10 dishes you need to try? You might need to plan a return visit.

Further, our intrepid reporters have been at the stir-fried frontline and can bring you another three dishes you really need to eat before the Fat Noodle lady sings on Sunday night.

Bao Stop, Bao Trifecta

Bao Stop right now, thank you very much. Tacos are totally 2010. These days it's all about gua bao (often shortened to 'bao' in Australia), a Taiwanese street food traditionally made with braised pork belly, pickled mustard greens, crushed peanuts and coriander cradled in a steamed, taco-shaped bun. Grab a trifecta selection of pork belly, fried chicken and Peking duck varieties from these Sydney legends.

Fat Noodle, Fat Pho noodles

Big night on the Coopers and Yalumba red? No matter. Luke Nguyen's Fat Pho is here to revive your corpse and put spring onion in your step. (Pho has slayed my hangovers more times than I care or want to remember - it has healing properties bacon rolls only dream of). You don't need to be dusty to experience the majesty of big, full flavoured broth, either - especially one like Nguyen's with a fragrance that wafts through the nostrils and pows right in the kisser.

Madame Wu, Lion's head meatball sandwich with black vinegar

Delicate strawberry watermelon cakes are all well and good. As are ethereal raindrop cakes and bite-sized dumplings. But sometimes you just want to jam your face with a fistful of meat. And that meat, like all good things, should be in a sandwich. Lion's head meatballs are a traditional Shanghainese dish - juicier and less coarse than their Italian cousins. Perfect for a sandwich, in other words. There's nothing misguided about this Wu.

Night Noodle Markets, Cultural Forecourt, South Bank. July 20-31. Weekdays 5pm-late; weekends 4pm-late. Free entry. See brisbane.goodfoodmonth.com
Queensland has finally made a move to standardise the age of consent for anal sex, with Labor looking to end one of the last legal discriminations against the state's homosexual community.

Queensland remains the only state to differentiate between vaginal and anal sex in legislation.

Queensland's consent laws hark back to the state's discriminatory past towards its LGBTIA community. Up until 1990 homosexuality was illegal in Queensland and the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Government tried to keep it that way. Credit:Fairfax Media

For all other intercourse other than anal, the age of consent is 16. Anal intercourse, which is still referred to as the biblical name of sodomy in the law books, is not legal until 18.

The law has had wider implications, with young teenagers, particularly gay men, unable to receive advice about the act until they were over 18.
The first maps to track the global expansion of HIV over the past 50 years paint a fascinating picture of how the spread of the virus mirrored human migration patterns.

Geopolitical events that affected the movement of people, such as the fall of the Iron Curtain dividing Soviet-controlled Europe and the West, also influenced how the virus spread, according to the new research, published in the Journal of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases.

The infection mostly spread outward from North America to the rest of the world. Yellow arrows indicate strong links. Credit:European Society for Translational Antiviral Research

"Viral dynamics are influenced by host ecology, and human ecology is defined by geopolitics," co-lead author Gkikas Magiorkinis, of the Department of Zoology at Oxford University in Britain, said.
Expect to see people hanging around phone booths and Telstra stores this weekend, because they will be pouring out free Wi-Fi to celebrate the first ever World Wi-Fi Day.

Usually only available to Telstra customers, anyone with a Wi-Fi enabled device will be able to connect to the pink-box Wi-Fi hotspots for free from Friday, June 17, to Monday, June 20.

However, the hotspots only offer 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi at a time. Telstra also plans to cap the number of users at each hotspot.

Telstra's Crowdsupport website warns: "If you're trying to connect to a hotspot that's full, you'll see an on-screen notification to move to the next available hotspot on the Telstra Air Map." It also warns that its hotspots are public and unencrypted, so probably not the best place to do internet banking.
A man accused of the bloody stabbing murder of Melbourne woman Rani Featherston is also facing charges of attempting to murder someone else.

Christian Bain-Singh, 22, appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday, charged with one count of murder relating to Ms Featherston's death in April 2014.

He was also charged with attempted murder over an aggravated burglary in Doveton more than a week before Ms Featherston was killed.

She was found dead in a pool of blood just 500 metres from her home.
Household water bills should fall next year but projected savings could be watered down by the desalination plant, which will be supplying Melbourne for the first time from next month.

Melburnians could have expected bills to shrink by as much as $15 next year, thanks to upgrades to elderly infrastructure.

Melburnians could get smaller water bills next year. Credit:Dominic O Brien

However, the cost of buying water for the first time from the Wonthaggi desalination plant could cut that to just $3  enough to buy a single bottle of water.

A water services review by the state's Essential Services Commission has found Melbourne Water was likely to save $94 million in delivery costs over the next five years.
The life of Melbourne Zoo's newborn elephant calf hangs in the balance, after it was born with a never-before-seen medical condition.

Although the birth on Wednesday morning went smoothly, two of the female calf's feet are curled backwards, leaving her unable to walk.

Since she can't stand, the calf has not been able to suckle. Keepers are milking mother Num-Oi in order to bottle-feed the baby.
A mother is desperately appealing for help to find her backpacker son who has not returned from his trip to Europe.

Louisa Fantauzzo said that her son Dean Ranieri, a 21-year-old construction worker from Wallan, was due to return from Brussels on Friday but never arrived. .

He left on a flight to France on May 14. It was his first overseas trip.

Ms Fantauzzo said police have informed her that her son has not used his credit card since May 16.
Was Australia invaded or settled? What's the difference between Aboriginal, Koori and Indigenous people?

White teachers, who are often anxious about teaching Indigenous cultures and students, will soon benefit from a new online resource which tackles these questions.

Invaded or settled? A new tool will improve teachers' understanding of Indigenous cultures. Credit:James Alcock

The Australian-first initiative will also help teachers identify and respond to racism, understand their own prejudices and boost their expectations of Indigenous students.

"If Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are stereotyped as troublesome and unable to learn, this is doing them, and you as the teacher, a disservice," it says.
Premier Colin Barnett will front residents of bushfire-ravaged Yarloop next week when he travels to the town to present fundings from the long-awaited special inquiry into the January 2016 Waroona Fire.

The visit comes in the wake of a major clean-up of the town, which is scheduled to be re-opened to the public next week, and the whole town expected to be accessible by August.

The South West town of Yarloop was almost completely razed by bushfires in January 2016. Credit:nearmap

The Waroona blaze last January killed two elderly men and destroyed 181 properties, including 162 houses and the heritage-listed Yarloop Workshops. Residents were told at a community meeting on Wednesday night the school would re-open for term one next year and the police station would soon become operational.

Earlier this year, the Premier appointed former Victorian Country Fire Authority chief Euan Ferguson to undertake an extensive inquiry into the recent bushfires which devastated Yarloop and other areas in the South-West. The findings will be presented at the Harvey Recreation and Cultural Centre on Thursday morning.
The latest addition to Perth's ever-growing list of "things people have added a motor to and rode around on the streets" is a couch.

"Oh my god, this just topped off my day. On my way to the gym and see this," a Perth woman posted on Facebook on Wednesday with a video of the couch.

"I lost it laughing overtaking him.

"I doubled back and said "dude this is gold, can I record you?
Orphaned kangaroo joey Cuejoe isn't the only baby animal in West Australian cop custody, with a lucky lamb now calling Mundaring police station home.

The orphaned six-day-old lamb is keeping warm in a washing basket under Senior Constable Emma McNaboe's desk after he was found abandoned on her property near York, in WA's wheatbelt, earlier this week.

Buck the six-day old lamb has been adopted by Mundaring police. Photo from @MundaringPol on twitter Credit:Peta Rule

Sen Const McNaboe said she brings the little lamb, named Buck, into work every day to make sure he's adequately fed.

She said Buck was relatively well behaved for a new recruit.
Washington: Senate Democrats, led by Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have ended a filibuster on the US Senate floor after nearly 15 hours, announcing Republican leaders agreed to hold votes on Democrat-backed measures to expand background checks and prevent suspected terrorists from acquiring guns.

Democrats were angling for votes on the two gun control measures, which they are presenting as amendments to a pending spending bill, demanding that it was the least the Senate could do to respond to the Orlando massacre that killed 49 last weekend.

"I am prepared to stand on the Senate floor and talk about the need to prevent gun violence for as long as I can. I've had #Enough," Senator Murphy tweeted.
It is thought that the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, who was shot by police, had visited the gay nightclub Pulse many times and used a gay dating app. He was described as a closet homosexual who was deeply conflicted about his feelings at a time when he was also becoming increasingly radicalised online by followers of Islamic State. One of the hacked accounts was quickly pulled down. As the Ghost hijacked accounts on Sunday night following news of the attack, he added them to a public list titled, "Jacked accounts." Twitter then suspended them until the list was empty by midday. It is believed that Wauchula Ghost, a member of the hacking clan "Anonymous," has compromised hundreds Twitter accounts of Islamic State supporters and flooded them with pornography.

"Daesh doesn't like porn," Ghost said, referring to the Islamic State in its Arabic transliteration. He declined to give his real name. "They don't like women in general. We just started using it to poke fun at them and diminish their presence online." IS has used the Internet to spread its message and find recruits. FBI Director James Comey said Monday he was "highly confident" shooter Mateen, 29, was radicalised "at least in some part through the Internet." Instead of messages supporting the self-described caliphate or encouraging violence, some 160 accounts hacked by the Ghost have tweeted photos of nude women. Some users' avatars now read "I [heart] porn." The content is a jab at the group's interpretation of Muslim religious customs that require piety and chastity. By tweeting sexual content rather than traditional battle cries against the West, the Ghost said he wants to undermine the voices of ISIS recruiters and chase them off popular social networks.

"The government really hasn't been doing enough especially on social media," he said. "You see the beheading images everywhere. Kids get online and shouldn't see these images." The Ghost started hacking at age 16 he bought his first computer, took it home and disassembled it. When he put the machine back together and it refused to run, a local big-box store tech guru taught the teen how to hack. Shouting down web-based terrorist recruiting cells is a good thing, said Ryan Calo, professor of law at the University of Washington and co-director of the Tech Policy Lab. Porn on Twitter, maybe not such a good thing, he said. It could be offensive to religious Muslims (or Christians or Jews), the overwhelming majority of whom are not terrorists and want nothing to do with sexually explicit images.

"A hacktivist is really someone trying to advance a civil agenda by using their technological tools," Professor Calo said. "To me, it's about targeting appropriately and making sure you're targeting the real enemy rather than Muslim people or the vulnerable." "If sending this message could end up in the wrong hands, children or non-consenting adults, that could be a problem," said Sandy Davidson, a professor of communication law at the University of Missouri. "And images present their own problems because once an image is seared in your mind, then you can't un-see it." Under US law, social media platforms are responsible for policing content users post. Though the government could ask sites like Twitter or Facebook to remove certain material, they cannot be held liable for content posted on their sites and can remove content for any reason whatsoever. So while the government might have to file paperwork and jump through legal hoops to shut down an extremist's Twitter account, Twitter itself can do so whenever it wants. Since 2015, Twitter has suspended more than 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts primarily related to IS, actions lawmakers have applauded. "We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter rules make it clear that this type of behaviour, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service," the company said in a statement.
Orlando: Corpses do not faze him but Joshua Stephany, Orlando's chief medical examiner, still has the image of what he saw inside the Pulse nightclub on the morning of the slaughter seared into his head.

Strobe lights were still flashing. The television was still on. Purses and cellphones were strewn about the floor. And there were bodies everywhere.

"What you saw was drinks that were just served. You saw bills that were about to be paid. You saw half-eaten food," said Dr Stephany, 41, who was called into duty hours after Omar Mateen barged into the popular gay nightclub and opened fire. Forty-nine people were killed in the attack.
But on Tuesday evening, there were reports of a new opinion poll  Americans didn't like Trump's self-aggrandising response to the Orlando tragedy. A mere 25 per cent of respondents to the CBS News poll actually approved of his response; 51 per cent disapproved and 25 per cent didn't know what to think. Judy Rettig, right, and Karen Castelloes cry during a prayer vigil in Orlando after the massacre at the Pulse Orlando nightclub. Credit:AP More troubling for Trump, who has prostrated himself before the all-powerful Nation Rifle Association, was the polls revelation of growing support for a ban on assault rifles, the weapon of choice in a good number of American mass killings  recorded at 44 per cent in the wake of San Bernardino, it has leapt to 57 per cent in the wake of Orlando. Course correction required. A vigil for the Orlando dead in Atlanta on Sunday. Credit:AP

First thing Wednesday morning  6.50am, no less  Trump fired off a tweet: "I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns". At 11.58am, the NRA tweeted back: "Happy to meet @realdonaldtrump. Our position is no guns for terrorists - period. Due process & right to self-defence for law-abiding Americans". Austin Hagge, left, cries on the shoulder of Austin Matthew, during a candlelight vigil in Orlando. They lost two friends in the shooting. Credit:AP Don't hold your breath. This is the 21st major mass shooting in the six years I've been living in the US  five of which have made it on to the Top 10, worst-ever massacres:



2016 - Orlando, Florida: 49 dead; 53 wounded



2015  San Bernardino, California: 14 dead; 21 wounded



2012  Sandy Hook, Connecticut: 27 dead; 1 wounded



2012  Aurora, Colorado: 12 dead; 58 wounded



2009  Fort Hood, Texas: 13 dead; 32 wounded

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Moon, Pennsylvania. Credit:AP And nothing has happened  and I don't expect anything to happen. Some Americans blanch when I refuse to take seriously the post-massacre operatics  there's the same ritualistic hand-wringing; the same denigration of the obvious great sense in removing weapons from civilian hands; and the same Deliverance-speak politicking by the likes of the National Rifle Association and  surprise, surprise  in the case of Orlando, the wonderful hypocrisy of Donald Trump. US-born Omar Mateen shot dead 49 people before being killed by police. Consider Christopher Murphy, a US senator whose constituents include the Newtown community in Connecticut  setting for the Sandy Hook school massacre that took 27 lives in 2012.

Murphy has been pressing for meaningful gun reform since then  and yesterday he was back on the Senate floor, speaking 'for as long as I can' to make as point on the absence of reform. President Barack Obama: following an update on the Orlando shooting. Credit:AP "I've had enough," he said. "I couldn't just come back to the Senate this week and pretend like this is business as usual." As a callow presidential hopeful in 2008, Barack Obama suffered a self-inflicted political wound, when he said of the people of Pennsylvania  "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them". It was wrong of the would-be president to single out the people of one state, making Pennsylvania sound like Deliverance. Wrong, because it is the whole country that clings to its weapons.

And Trump and his ilk urge them to keep clinging  purely for political purposes. In 2000, Trump wrote in The America we Deserve that Democrats and Republicans were barking mad when it came to gun control, but that there was an obvious middle path: "I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun." But then Trump decided to run for the White House, and suddenly guns are a sacred right  as president, he'll even ditch the law under which schools are declared to be gun-free zones. Sure, pack some real heat in little Johnny's lunchbox. Candidate Trump's new gun philosophy hinges on the notion that more guns mean greater safety, because the whole town can shoot at each other if some idiot lets off a round.

He argues that the death toll in the Paris and San Bernardino attacks would have been lower, if civilians had weapons to fight back. And he jokes about his own concealed weapon licence which he acquired in 2010  "Somebody attacks me, oh, they're gonna be shocked". Historically, the US is quick to respond in a crisis, even if it's an off-the- wall response that risks severe blowback  think of the invasion of Iraq. But that's history; big-picture stuff and it's churlish to go there now. Closer to the Orlando moment is the case a couple of weeks ago, of the rare gorilla that was shot dead at Cincinnati Zoo, to save the life of a child that had found its way into the animal's enclosure. It was human error that left the gap through which the child crawled; but like it or not, the response of the experts was that the animal be killed. And this week, in the shadow of the greater Orlando tragedy, a lesser but quite horrific one  an alligator snatched a two-year- old boy at a Disney resort a few miles from the city. The child was allowed to be "partly in the water", in which alligators live; and the immediate response by authorities was to hunt and kill five alligators, to establish if any was the culprit  none was. Join the dots  there's a problem gorilla, deal with the gorilla; a problem alligator, deal with all nearby alligators. But when too many of the wrong kind of guns are in the wrong kind of hands and scores of human beings are mown down, it seems that nothing is done.
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Court House and other institutions should follow.

PHILIPSBURG:--- Minister of Finance, and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Gibson Sr said he recently met with Chief Prosecutor Ton Maan who informed him that they are currently training a local to become a prosecutor on St. Maarten. Gibson said that the Chief Prosecutor contacted him after he said that institutions such as the prosecutors office, court house and large resorts should start hiring locals for top positions just like its done in other countries. He said that he said back then that this can be done through evolution and dialouge or revolution. The Minister said its time that people see the St. Maarten image in these institutions.

Gibson commended the Prosecutors Office for taking the steps to put in place a program that would train locals. He said the Chief Prosecutor assured him that the program is a long term program which would allow locals to be hired as prosecutors.

The Deputy Prime Minister called on the other institutions to take the same initiative to train locals. He again issued a call to owners of resorts on the island to give locals the opportunity to run these resorts and to stop the importation of labor for high paying jobs.
GREAT BAY (DCOMM):--- Ministry of Public Housing, Environment, Spatial Development and Infrastructure (Ministry VROMI), announces that painting of road marks will take place on Saturday, June 18.

Painting of road marks will take place at the intersection Wringly Road/Wellington Road and Welfare Road/Cay Bay Road.

This will take place from 5.00AM to 5.00PM.

The aforementioned works will take place in close cooperation with the Community Police Officer.

Road users must pay keen attention when they are in the areas mentioned.

Ministry VROMI apologizes for any inconveniences this may cause.
The things you take for granted. You punch in a web address, and the page you're looking for just pops up. Just like that.

You probably never stop to think about what really happens when you type in that something dot something. And you shouldnt have to, because they take care to that for you.

That second somethingthe part AFTER the dotis called a top-level domain or TLD. And they are at the centre of a lucrative, global business of TLDs. You probably already know the popular ones like .com, .org and .net but the full list of TLDs is much more impressive.

Albert Daniels says entrepreneurially minded Caribbean folks should be tapping into the streams of revenue flowing around TLD registration and operation. He should know. Hes one of the they.

Daniels is the Stakeholder Engagement Senior Manager for the Caribbean at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an organisation that promotes the expansion of the global Internet. For ICANN, a non-profit, business is booming globally. But when it comes to the Caribbean region, Daniels sees room for greater expansion. And expansion could mean significant business opportunities for Caribbean citizens with the savvy (and the capital) to step up to the challenge.

In a May 5 interview at the 25th meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Registry (LACNIC) in Havana, Cuba, Daniels said theres plenty encouraging evidence of potential for growth but some challenges remain.

And a recent report by the Latin America and the Caribbean TLD Association (LACTLD) stated that nearly all the country code TLDs in the LACTLD region showed positive annual growth rates, in spite of a general downward trend in the growth rate of domain names across all TLD groups. The report gave further insight into how country code TLDs like Anguilla (.ai), Aruba (.aw), Cuba (.cu), Curacao (.cw), Guyana (.gy), Haiti (.ht), Puerto Rico (.pr) and the Dominica Republic (.do) are all working steadily to overcome their unique challenges.

The closure of 2015 shows a positive growth rate for ccTLD domains in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a balance of 8.3 million registered domain names. This figure represents an absolute growth of over 400,000 domains with respect to the endow 2014, the report said.

From August 22-25, the Dominican Republic will be marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of its .do TLD as part of a four-day event called Internet Week. The event is organised by LACNIC, alongside ICANN, LACTLD, the Dominican Republic telecommunications regulator (INDOTEL) and the .do administrator, Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra.

Kevon Swift, Head of Strategic Relations and Integration at LACNIC, announced the event at the second Caribbean Peering and Interconnection Forum, in Willemstad, Curacao on June 9.

We are very pleased to be going to the Dominican Republic for what promises to be a very productive week. We have a full agenda planned, with sessions covering a range of topics including cybersecurity and other technical areas related to the development of the regional Internet, Swift said.

Next time youre pasting a link into your browser, its cool to think that they are out there working together to keep the Internet working, and to strengthen the networks of the Caribbean.
Samenwerkende Fondsen, also known as the Cooperating Foundations for the Dutch Caribbean, will be hosting an information session focused on funding opportunities for social projects.

Samenwerkende Fondsen is an organization that is facilitated by 5 funds, originating from the Netherlands. It was set up in 2010 to support social initiatives on the Dutch Caribbean islands. Locally, after some organizational changes, a new Project Coordinator has taken up the role of assisting with assessing possible funding opportunities, locally, as well as on Saba and Statia.

The presentation on Wednesday June 22nd will be hosted for any organizations that are interested in executing social projects but lack the required funding to do so. It will be hosted by the new Project Coordinator and a visiting Project Advisor from the Netherlands. There will be time allocated for discussion and questions pertaining to specific funding opportunities. An opportunity that must therefore not be missed.

The presentation will take place on Wednesday June 22nd at the NIA Black Box Theatre at the John Larmonie Center, Longwall Road # 20 in Philipsburg, from 5.30-7.30PM. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

For more information on Samenwerkende Fondsen / the Cooperating Foundations for the Dutch Caribbean, please visit http://samenwerkendefondsen.org/en, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call +1721-586 08 08.

A downloadable funding application form can be found on the website, and appointments can be made via the abovementioned contact information.

Samenwerkende Fondsen is looking forward to seeing all organizations in attendance, new and longstanding, as well as ones already aware of the scope of the organization.
Sint Eustatius:--- On Wednesday June 8th a robbery took place in a shop on St. Eustatius. The two culprits forced the shopkeeper to hand over the cash drawer under threat of striking and stabbing weapons. On Friday, June 10th a first suspect of 33 years of age with the initials R.E.M., was arrested by the Dutch Caribbean Police Force. Of course the investigation is continuing and further arrests are therefore not excluded.

As in other cases, tips can be passed on via the hotline 00599 717 7251.
If true, San Diego lawyers story could open Disney to punitive damages.

According to CBS News, a San Diego father who chased an alligator away from his five year old son last year at Disney World in Orlando, has been interviewed. He said he told resort officials, and they responded that he "should not worry, because the alligators are tame as pets."

In April of 2015, San Diego lawyer David Hiden took his family to the theme park. His five-year-old son waded calf-deep into a lagoon behind their hotel.

"I saw something rapidly coming on like a submarine," Hiden told CBS News. "And I look and I went, 'Oh my god. That's an alligator.' And it was probably about six to seven feet."

Hiden whisked his son to safety -- and spotted a second alligator lurking nearby. But a year earlier, Hiden says he warned a hotel manager, and even showed her a photo he took of one of the gators.

The family was staying at Disney World's Coronado Springs Resort, which is three-and-a-half miles from the Grand Floridian Resort and Spa, where two year-old Lane was killed.

"And the response, I couldn't believe it," Hiden said. "It was, 'Those are resident pets, and we've known about them for years. And they're harmless, they're not going to attack anybody. . . . but I told them one day, one of your resident pets is going to kill somebody!"

Legally speaking Hiden's story is significant, because it shows Disney had notice of the defective condition--dangerous animals on their resort. Since they did not ameliorate the condition, their potential legal liability is much greater.

Updated Lane Graves, the 2-year-old boy who witnesses said was pulled by an alligator into a lagoon near a Walt Disney World hotel last night has been found drowned. His parents have been identified as Nat and Melissa Graves, of Elkhorn, Nebraska. They have released his photo, which is below.

Rescue teams initially hoped to find the boy alive, but officials now say the attack was "not survivable." Authorities euthanized 5 alligators that they found in the lagoon, one of which they believe, was in fact the alligator who attacked Lane.

Walt Disney Resort temporarily shuttered its resort beach areas and recreational marinas following the gator attack. Since 1948, Florida has had 383 attacks on human beings, with 23 deaths. Meaning a person dies about every 3 years from an alligator attack in Florida. Disney world has never had an alligator attack before, in its 45 year history.

The boy was "playing" in the water when the alligator snatched and dragged him into the lake, officials said. The attack occurred around 9:15 p.m. Eyewitnesses saw the child grabbed by the alligator, Demings said.

Nat Graves entered the water and tried to grab the child from the gator, but was not successful, Demings said. The family is still in the area because the coroner isn't yet finished comparing aLligator teeth marks to the wounds on Lane Graves' BODY.

The boy's parents then alerted a nearby lifeguard that an alligator had attacked the boy. Witnesses estimated the alligator was between 4 and 7 feet in length

A little boy named Channing Vendetti standing by the Seven Seas Lagoon, moments before an Alligator snatched little Lane Graves.

"Everyone here at the Walt Disney World Resort is devastated by this tragic accident. Our thoughts are with the family. We are helping the family and doing everything we can to assist law enforcement," Jacquee Wahler, vice president of Walt Disney World Resort, said in a statement. Disney stock is apparently unaffected by the tragedy, since it's up slightly today.

Dozens of rescue crews -- including the Florida Fish and Wildlife, Reedy Creek Fire Rescue and the Orange County Sheriff's Office - helped search the lake with sonar equipment. Experienced alligator trappers were also brought in to help with the recovery effort, officials said.

In the end, the boy was found nor more than 15 feet from the last place his parents saw him, playing at the edge of the lagoon.
Trump: I'm a Better Friend to the Gay Community than Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump says people will vote for him because he's better on ISIS than Hillary Clinton.

About 24,500 people are on the TSA's Terror Watchlist, and once you're on it, good luck flying. Soon, those 24,000 people won't be able to purchase guns legally either. Even though Omar Mateen was never on it.

Donald J. Trump is ready to modify his position on Second Amendment protections on Wednesday, tweeting that he would be meeting with the National Rifle Association to discuss preventing individuals on the terrorist watch list from purchasing guns.

This on a day when the New York Times said the current atmosphere of hatred promoted by Trump, is directly responsible for this hate crime against gays. "Hate crimes don't happen in a vacuum," said the New York Times.

I will be meeting with the N.R.A., who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns, Mr. Trump wrote Wednesday morning. The N.R.A. said it would be happy to meet with Mr. Trump in a Twitter post of its own.

Trump reacted today to news that some in the Gay community now support him after fifty people were shot and killed at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In an interview by Greta Van Sustren, he said:

"Moslem countries like Saudi Arabia, they kill gays and women, they treat them as slaves," said the US Presidential candidate on FoxNews. "She (Hillary Clinto) has taken millions and millions of dollars from countries that kill gays. She wants a 550% increase over Obama of people coming into this country, that don't share our beliefs. I've heard a lot of talk over the last two days, a lot of people are supporting me that you wouldn't think would be supporting me. And they're supporting me, biggly," he said.

"Secretary Clinton took $25 million for his foundation from countries that execute gays and women, they treat as slaves."

About the hack into Democratic party computers, in which data including opposition research on Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee said: "Knowing Debbie Wassermann Schulz, they probably should call me and apologize. But they have not apologized. And they probably should be apologizing."

You tweeted today you'd be meeting with the NRA, about not allowing people on the terrorist gun list to buy guns. Trump said :I'm going ot be meeting with them. They're terrific people, my sons are also members, I want to meet with the NRA, a number of people have brought this to my attention, and that's why we're going to be discussing it.

Your unfavorable ratings have jumped to 70%. All I can do is do what I'm doing. People like me because I"m tough on terrorism. Hillary I think she would be inept, even her secret service agent said she would be inept, I think she would be a disastrous president. People are afraid to go to a movie theater now.

"Isis is getting worse and worse, and you've got to hit them very hard, but a lot of these young people are getting away with atrocities, we're creating it. We shoulda never been in Iraq, but we should never have gotten out by just leaving. Isis is growing because people are leaving our country to join ISIS, because they're respecting them. We have to be sure they don't respect them."
Eric Trump asserts 20% of the $1 billion raised by Clinton, comes from the Saudis.

Eric Trump asserts 20% of the $1 billion raised by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, comes from the Saudis. Yet on Monday, Clinton issued a pointed warning to US allies in the Middle East, saying countries like Saudi Arabia must crack down on citizens supporting extremism.

It is known that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated around $25 million to the Clinton foundation. This has been known since 2008, when the new Secretary of State disclosed potential conflicts of interest. On Sunday, Trump called on Clinton to return the $25 million, to the Saudis. Donating to Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign would be different and newsworthy.

Following the weekend massacre at a gay club in Orlando by a gunman who the FBI says may have been radicalized, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee vowed to step up efforts to stop so-called lone wolf attacks, and said Americans should unite to defeat domestic terrorism.

But she also called on other governments to reconsider policies that allow extremism to thrive, calling out three US allies which already have sensitive ties with Washington.

"It is long past time for the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist organizations," Clinton said in a national security speech in Cleveland, Ohio.

"And they should stop supporting radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path toward extremism."

According to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups... Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." These were her words in 2014; she called Saudi Arabia and Kuwait indirectly responsible for the recent shooting of over 100 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have piled on outrage after Hillary Clinton condemned the weekend slaughter in Orlando and directly linked the oil-rich monarchies to the funding of terrorism.

In separate letters to Fairfax Media, the embassies for both countries in Australia took exception to reporting of Mrs Clinton's call to "stop supporting radical schools and mosques around the world".

"Accusations leveled against the Kingdom of being lax or of supporting extremism fails to recognize the Kingdom's leadership role in combating terrorism," the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia wrote.

In her half-hour speech, the former secretary of state said "American leadership" was crucial in resolving political conflicts that fuel Islamic State extremists, as well as waging the immediate battle against terror groups and messages, including online.

"The Orlando terrorist may be dead, but the virus that poisoned his mind remains very much alive and we must attack it with clear eyes, steady hands, unwavering determination and pride in our country and our values," she said.

"The threat is metastasizing," she added.

"We face a twisted ideology and poisoned psychology that inspires the so-called lone wolves," whom she described as radicalized individuals who may or may not have direction from a formal organization.

Preceding Barack Obama's 2009 nomination of Hillary Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State, Bill Clinton agreed to accept a number of conditions and restrictions regarding his ongoing activities and fundraising efforts for the Clinton Presidential Center and the Clinton Global Initiative. Accordingly, a list of donors was released for the first time in December 2008. The list was large and included politically sensitive donors from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to Blackwater Worldwide. The foundation stated that the disclosures would ensure that "not even the appearance of a conflict of interest" would exist once Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
Found Sunday with guns and explosives in his car in Santa Monica, CA

JEFFERSONVILLE, Ind. - James Wesley Howell was charged with child molestation on Wednesday, officials with the Clark County prosecutor's office said.

Howell, 20, is accused of sexually penetrating an underage girl on May 31, just days before he was arrested in Santa Monica. He was found in possession of weapons and an explosive mixture called Tannerite. He told Santa Monica Police that he was on his way to the West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade.

Howell left Indiana because he was told that he was under investigation in the alleged molestation, Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull told IndyStar.

"I believe he left the state of Indiana and went to California because he understood that this child molesting investigation was ongoing and he was in imminent danger of being arrested," Mull said.

Weapons and explosives charges have been filed against Howell who was arrested in Santa Monica Sunday with rifles, ammunition and explosive chemicals in his car while headed to a gay pride event.

Howell was charged Tuesday with three felonies: possession of an assault weapon, possession of explosives on a public highway and possession of a high-capacity magazine. He was also charged with a misdemeanor, possession of a loaded weapon, according to L.A. County Deputy district attorney Sean Carney.

Howell's bail was increased from $500,000 to $2 million Tuesday because of his perceived danger to the community, Carney said. Howell's lawyer entered not guilty pleas during a Tuesday afternoon arraignment.
The benefits included in the Drive Kona Kai Summer Package include best available rates

To beachfront Kona Kai Resort & Spa  a Noble House Resort located on San Diego's historic Shelter Island  is offering a package for locals and nearby visitors. The Drive Kona Kai summer Package is an incredible deal for San Diego locals to partake on a luxurious staycation, or for L.A. and Southern California residents traveling by car to embark on a perfect beach getaway weekend.

The benefits included in the Drive Kona Kai summer Package are listed below:

 Guaranteed best available rate

 25 percent off water activities, including jet ski, kayak and paddleboard rentals

 $50/day of resort credit (can be used anywhere on property, except towards room and tax)

 Two night minimum

To book this package, guests can use the following link: http://www.resortkonakai.com/insider.aspx

Kona Kai Resort & Spa just recently announced its new summer programming to celebrate the summer season and the resort's recent multimillion dollar revitalization of the iconic property. Last July, the boutique resort updated all guest rooms, refreshed the lobby, added the 7,020 square foot SpaTerre, renovated its waterfront restaurant Vessel, and built a new Tiki Bar adjacent to the revamped pool. This summer will be the first travel season where guests can experience all the resorts new offerings.

Hawaiian staycation in San Diego for so cal residents

The recently refurbished Kona Kai Resort & Spa, a Noble House Resort features California-contemporary island-inspired decor on the tip of San Diego's historic Shelter Island with amenities and experiences that embrace its unique location and historic past. With 129 guestrooms, Kona Kai Resort & Spa is intimate, yet all-encompassing with Vessel Restaurant, SpaTerra, the Kona Kai Marina, 55,000 square feet of versatile indoor and outdoor meetings and events space, and the Kona Kai Club.

Located just ten minutes away from the San Diego Airport and the historic downtown Gaslamp Quarter, Kona Kai Resort & Spa is a prime destination for locals and visitors alike with its close proximity to many famous San Diego attractions making it a perfect choice for families and couples looking for an easy, convenient getaway. For more information and reservations, please call 619.221.8000 or visit http://www.resortkonakai.com.
Every mass shooting event in the United States prompts renewed debate about the efficacy of gun control regulations, and the 1 October 2015 shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that left nine people dead on was no exception. Such debates typically feature each side presenting charts contrasting violent crime and homicide rates in countries with permissive and restrictive gun ownership laws to make the case that the prevalence of guns corresponds to either higher or lower crime rates.

The wake of the Umpqua Community College shooting brought the widespread online circulation of an image which sought to make the point that two countries of roughly equal population, Honduras and Switzerland, had radically different laws regarding gun ownership and radically different homicide rates: Switzerland, where gun ownership is supposedly mandatory, has the worlds lowest homicide rate, while Honduras, where gun ownership is supposedly prohibited, has the worlds highest homicide rate:

First off, even before we check the specific claims about each country, we have to note that this item presents a flawed premise. For a comparison of this nature to be valid, the two things being compared should be fairly equivalent outside of the factors being examined, but that isnt the case here. The two countries mentioned here are so very different that this isnt just a comparison of apples and oranges; its more like a comparison of apples and radishes.

Honduras and Switzerland are roughly equivalent in population (a little of upwards of 8 million people each), but other than that, they arent the least bit similar in geography, economics, or culture. Switzerland is a small, landlocked country in western Europe surrounded by three of the most affluent countries in the world (Germany, France, and Italy) in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), and even though Switzerland itself is fairly small in population (96th in the world) and size (134th in the world), it ranks in the top 20 in terms of GDP. On the other hand, Honduras is a Central American country that is nearly three times the size of Switzerland and possesses coasts along both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean sea, but is a lower middle-income country with persistent poverty and inequality challenges,with a GDP only about 2.5% that of Switzerland and three neighbors (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala) that share similar economic conditions. Not to mention that Honduras is right in the path of the flow of drugs shipped by sea and air from Colombia and has therefore been ravaged by the drug war and its attendant factors of massive criminal organizations, violence, and governmental instability.

As far as homicide rates go, Honduras does have the highest intentional homicide rate in the world at about 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people per year (which is even shockingly higher than the homicide rate of the next worst country, Venezuela, at 53.7). Although Switzerlands intentional homicide rate is indeed low at 0.6, it isnt quite the lowest in the world: its bested by several other countries such as Liechtenstein, Monaco, Iceland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, the latter two of which have some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the world. Moreover, a better metric for comparison purposes here might perhaps be the firearm-related death rate rather than the overall intentional homicide rate; in that case, Honduras is still the worst, but Switzerland doesnt fare quite as well (ranking behind about 43 other countries).

Additionally, it is not true that Honduras bans citizens from owning guns nor that Switzerland requires citizens to own guns. Honduras enacted a ban on open and concealed carry in 2007, but a 2012 news report stated that under the existing law, citizens are allowed to own as many as five personal firearms, and in mid-2014 Guns & Ammo rated Honduras as one of the 10 Best Countries for Gun Owners, saying that Hondurans may purchase most popular types of shotguns, handguns or rifles for the recognized purposes of self-defense and recreation. While Switzerland ranks fourth among all countries in gun ownership per capita (much higher than Honduras), they do not require all their citizens to own guns. Switzerland has a long history of mandatory military service for all able-bodied male citizens. The government issues firearms to conscripted men which, after training, they take home with them and keep until the conclusion of their military obligation (about age 34 for non-officers), but no other citizens are required to own guns:

Switzerland trails behind only the U.S, Yemen and Serbia in the number of guns per capita; between 2.3 million and 4.5 million military and private firearms are estimated to be in circulation in a country of only 8 million people. Yet, despite the prevalence of guns, the violent-crime rate is low: government figures show about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. By comparison, the U.S rate in the same year was about 5 firearm killings per 100,000 people, according to a 2011 U.N. report. Unlike some other heavily armed nations, Switzerlands gun ownership is deeply rooted in a sense of patriotic duty and national identity. Weapons are kept at home because of the long-held belief that enemies could invade tiny Switzerland quickly, so every soldier had to be able to fight his way to his regiments assembly point. (Switzerland was at risk of being invaded by Germany during World War II but was spared, historians say, because every Swiss man was armed and trained to shoot.) The gun in every closet tradition was challenged in 2001, after a disgruntled citizen opened fire with his army rifle inside a regional parliament, killing 14 and injuring 14 others. The subsequent opposition to widespread gun ownership spearheaded a push for stricter arms legislation. The government and pro-gun groups argued, however, that the countrys existing laws regulating the sale, ownership and licensing of private guns, which includes a ban on carrying concealed weapons, are stringent enough. The law allows citizens or legal residents over the age of 18, who have obtained a permit from the government and who have no criminal record or history of mental illness, to buy up to three weapons from an authorized dealer, with the exception of automatic firearms and selective fire weapons, which are banned. Semiautomatics, which have caused havoc in the U.S., can be legally purchased. The authorities made one concession, though: since 2008, all military  but not private  ammunition must be stored in central arsenals rather than in soldiers homes. The debate culminated in a nationwide referendum, when 56% of voters rejected the proposal initiated by anti-gun organizations to ban army rifles from homes altogether.



Swiss citizens may buy and keep firearms, subject to certain restrictions and licensing requirements:

An acquisition license is required primarily for handguns. Rifles and semiautomatic long arms that are customarily used by recreational hunters are exempt from the licensing requirement,whereas fully automatic guns are banned. An applicant for a weapons license must be at least eighteen years of age, may not have been placed under guardianship, may not give cause for suspicion that he would endanger himself or others with the weapon, and may not have a criminal record with a conviction for a violent crime or of several convictions for nonviolent crimes. The license is issued by the canton of residence of the applicant but is valid throughout Switzerland.



All in all, this meme compares two countries that arent the least bit similar, then gets wrong nearly all the aspects of those countries it references. As such, it isnt the least bit useful or instructive as a discussion point for debates over gun ownership laws.
CORRECTION  RedSeal CEO to Present to Israels Leading Cybersecurity Leaders and Innovators

SUNNYVALE, CA  (Marketwired)  06/15/16  In the news release, RedSeal CEO to Present to Israels Leading Cybersecurity Leaders and Innovators, issued earlier today by RedSeal, we are advised by the company that the WHEN and WHERE sections should read Sunday, June 19, 2016, 13:00  15:15 and GKH Law Office, Azrieli Center, Round Building, Floor 40, Tel Aviv 6701101, Israel rather than what was originally issued. Complete corrected text follows.

SUNNYVALE, CA  Jun 15, 2016 

The event will bring together 50 to 75 C-level executives from Israels most innovative cybersecurity vendors for an open lecture on the market needs, trends and challenges in cybersecurity.

Past Cyber Together speakers have included former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the CSO of Hertz, the CTO of Netflix and the CSOs of both the World Bank and Citibank. This event supports the mission of Cyber Together to accelerate the growth of Israeli cybersecurity innovation.

Cyber Together, a not-for-profit cybersecurity organization, fosters strategic initiatives in global cybersecurity.

Israel has led the cybersecurity industry in prevention and detection innovation, but the landscape for cyber defense has shifted. Digital and network resilience  the ability to respond and rebound quickly once a network is compromised  is now critical for organizations. Cybersecurity innovators, regulators and leaders alike must evolve  and fast.

Ray Rothrock, CEO of

Sunday, June 19, 2016, 13:00  15:15

GKH Law Office, Azrieli Center, Round Building, Floor 40, Tel Aviv 6701101, Israel

RedSeal puts power in decision makers hands with the essential cybersecurity analytics platform for building digitally resilient organizations. RedSeals Digital Resilience Score, modeled after a creditworthiness score, measures how prepared an organization is to respond to an incident and quickly rebound. The companys platform adds value to existing network devices by working with them and building a network model. With this, customers can understand the state of their networks, measure resilience, verify compliance, and accelerate incident response. RedSeals customers are Global 2000 corporations and government agencies that depend on the most sophisticated security. Founded in 2004, RedSeal is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and serves customers globally through a direct sales and channel partner network.

Established in 2014, Cyber Together is an independent organization formed to advance cybersecurity in a wide range of IT sectors. The organizations purpose is to provide the glue between security providers (OEMs, service companies), distributors (VARs, Integrators), key decision makers (CISOs, CxOs) and security staff workers. In addition, Cyber Together serves as an information source to the industry.

Alon Refaeli

Cyber Together

Alison Busse

Finn Partners

+1 (415) 348-2722
Urbanimmersive Announces Pilot Project With TC Media

MONTREAL, QUEBEC  (Marketwired)  06/16/16  Urbanimmersive Inc (the Company or Urbanimmersive) (TSX VENTURE: UI), the real estate content marketplace, is pleased to announce that it has launched a pilot project with TC Media, a division of Transcontinental Inc., aiming for the integration of Urbanimmersives content marketplace with TC Medias publishing solutions targeted for real estate agents and home builders.

The pilot project will start immediately, with results anticipated during the summer and fall 2016. Following this pilot, Urbanimmersive could potentially reach a partnership agreement with TC Media.

Urbanimmersive CEO Ghislain Lemire said about the pilot project: We are incredibly excited to be piloting our technology with TC Media and demonstrating our platforms ability to increase distribution of our collaborators services. We believe the integration of TC Medias digital and print publishing solutions embedded in our real estate content platform will contribute to increase our clients productivity. Through that integration, we can offer to real estate agents a seamless process where in just a few clicks they can book a photo session, order a custom blog article and now, with this pilot project, publish content on the TC Media network.

Urbanimmersives content marketplace is a solution allowing real estate professionals to search, find, compare and book online visual and written content providers services. The solution provides a comprehensive suite of tools enabling each aspect of content creation and distribution.

ABOUT URBANIMMERSIVE

Urbanimmersive is a content marketing marketplace for real estate professionals. The Company connects real estate professionals, photographers and writers in order to simplify and optimize original content production workflow. Urbanimmersive enables its customers to leverage their marketing investment while increasing productivity, competitiveness, their web visibility, consumer engagement with their brand and ultimately, their revenue.

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements that reflect the current views and/or expectations of the Company with respect to its performance, business and future events. Such statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Actual results and events may vary significantly.

The TSX Venture Exchange Inc. has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

Contacts:

For more information, please contact:

Urbanimmersive Inc.

Ghislain Lemire  President & CEO

514 394-7820 X 202

For investor relations, please contact:

Contact Financial Corp.

Frederick Chabot

438 863-7071
Delphix Positioned as a Leader in 2016 Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement

MENLO PARK, CA  (Marketwired)  06/16/16  Gartner today recognized Delphix, a market leader in data virtualization, among the global providers of structured data archiving. The full report, titled Magic Quadrant for is available for download on the Delphix website.

Delphix believes its presence in the leaders quadrant for the second year validates the Delphix approach for data archiving and instant recovery, and the companys sustained commitment to supporting customers as they modernize IT infrastructure.

Were honored to be included as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement, said Peter Chargin, Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing at Delphix. We have improved our position moving further up and to the right in the quadrant which we feel affirms our concept of supporting the entire data and application lifecycle. The breadth of our technologys applicability is a major asset for enterprise customers, who not only deploy Delphix for archiving, but also for application development, testing, analytics and other ongoing business-critical projects. Its gratifying to receive recognition for our efforts.

Global Fortune 500 companies increasingly rely on Delphix technology to manage major, enterprise-wide modernization efforts. One of the most difficult aspects of cloud migration and application retirement projects is preserving historical data without disrupting existing operations. Efficiently archiving full application states while operations continue to run allows Delphix customers to tackle challenging IT concerns like compliance with increased regulations, the digitization of paper records, and pushing applications into the cloud.

To learn more about how Delphix technology can support your companys data management strategy, join us at one of these , sign up for our next on June 23, 2016, or connect with us on social media.

Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner report:

Read our blog:

Follow us on Twitter:

Like us on Facebook:

Learn more at:

(1) Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement 13 June 2016

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartners research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Delphix is the market leader in data virtualization, helping organizations release applications up to 10x faster by delivering secure, virtualized data across the application lifecycle. More than 30 percent of the Global 500 use Delphix software to deliver data across development, testing and reporting environments, improving developer productivity and data security on premises or in the cloud. Delphix is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices around the world, and can be found online at .

Delphix is a trademark of Delphix Corp. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names may be trademarks of their respective organizations.

Kate Frost

Delphix Public Relations

+1 (919) 274-4205

Steven MacDonnell

Text 100 for Delphix

+1 (415) 593-8473
EU Parliament Members Visit the Largest Optical Fibre Plant in Europe

Posted by Publisher Internet, Networking

Milan, June 16, 2016  Today, a cross-party group of MEPs visited Europes largest and most modern site for the production of optical fibre, in Douvrin, France. With the European Commissions telecommunications review rapidly approaching, the framework for progress in this area will soon be defined. The outcome of this review will determine whether Europe develops a high performing telecommunications network and therefore attains the gigabit society and next generation connectivity to which it aspires.

Prysmian Group, world leader in the high-technology cables and systems industry, hosted the group, providing a guided tour of its state-of-the-art facilities. Following this, participating MEPs contributed to a policy debate on the Prysmian premises, raising issues of ICT investment, the forecast expansion in demand for data, and the connections between optical fibre and 5G.

Austrian MEP Paul Rubig (EPP) commented on the visit, Prysmians presentation of optical fibre technology has impressed on me that this is the foundation for the telecoms networks of the future. As Chair of the Parliaments Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel, I am keenly aware that I and my fellow European legislators have a responsibility to educate ourselves on the issues surrounding the transition to this technology and understand how we can best facilitate it.

The demand for data in Europe is expected to rapidly expand in the coming years, driven by developments such as the Internet of Things, media sharing and autonomous driving. Techniques such as vectoring applied to legacy copper networks may in the short-term be able to provide a response to this consumer demand. However, as MEP Dominique Riquet (ALDE, FR), President of the Intergroup on Long Term Investment and Reindustrialisation, noted, In the long run a shift to optical fibre is essential to meet this exploding demand and ensure that Europes telecoms networks are future-proof.

The conversation also picked up on the links between mobile connectivity and fixed infrastructure, previously raised by Commissioner Oettinger, who claimed that 5G mobile would not be possible without the widespread roll-out of optical fibre. Recalling this point, MEP Flavio Zanonato (S&D, IT) commented There are of course challenges, for example in terms of the level of investment required, associated with the move to optical fibre, however we should not lose sight of the positive vision that this will facilitate, from 5G to the gigabit society.

The EUs Digital Single Market strategy places the availability of reliable, trustworthy and high-performance networks firmly at the centre of its vision. Philippe Vanhille, Senior Vice President of Prysmians Telecoms Business commented, As a leading multinational, which manufactures state-of-the art products in Europe for Europe, Prysmian Group is proud to contribute to the realisation of this vision. The policy debate revealed a growing consensus on the central role of connectivity. In response to this, it is essential that the Commission places the appropriate emphasis on modernising the telecoms framework and creating favourable conditions for investment in next generation telecoms networks.
Light Readings Upskill University Kicks Off Free Online Analytics Courses

NEW YORK, NY  (Marketwired)  06/16/16  , a free online educational forum that focuses on delivering must-have education on the overall business transformation occurring in the telecommunications industry, has kicked off a four-part, online lecture series on big data analytics. During these courses, lecturers from Stanford, Princeton, Masergy and Disney will cover the impact of analytics on network virtualization, customer experience, cyber security and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Upskill U is a unique online community hosted by Light Reading in association with Cisco where service provider and enterprise decision-makers can crowdsource the mission-critical intelligence they need to formulate business technology strategies and gain the know-how required to architect and monetize next-generation, all-IP networks.

Upskill Us is always built around some of the hottest topics in the industry. The four-part analytics series includes the following lectures:

(Wednesday, June 15, 1:00 p.m. ET): Sachin Katti, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Stanford University, will examine the fundamental questions as to the role of big data and advanced analytics and explain what service providers need to be doing as they prepare for virtualized networks.

(Friday, June 17, 1:00 p.m. ET): In this lecture, Ray Watson, Vice President, Global Technology, Masergy, explains how analytics can be used to strengthen network and advanced threat protection capabilities, and automate threat intelligence to detect, analyze and remediate attacks.

(Wednesday, June 22, 1:00 p.m. ET): During this course, Juan F. Gorricho, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Partners Federal Credit Union, The Walt Disney Company, will discuss how businesses can tackle data integration and the lack of skilled staff to implement strategies that can boost the bottom line.

(Friday, June 24, 1:00 p.m. ET): Nick Feamster, Acting Director, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University, returns to Upskill U to lecture on the role of the telco, cloud providers and other stakeholders in developing an integrated IoT and data analytics strategy. Centralized intelligence versus the edge of the network will also be addressed.

Each course is a 45-minute session where students can ask questions, interact with other students with similar business and technological challenges (and expertise) and download a wealth of additional learning materials. Courses are archived, and online educational discussions take place 24 hours a day.

Weekly Upskill U courses will continue to highlight some of the biggest names in the industry. So dont get left in the dark when it comes to NFV, SDN, IoT and more. Let Upskill U be your guiding light. for our current courses and upskill yourself today.

For the complete Upskill U schedule, visit our website: .

Light Reading () combines its research-led online communities and targeted events portfolio to help those in the global communications industry make informed decisions. is the ultimate source for telecom analysis for more than 400,000 subscribers each month, leading the media sector in terms of traffic, content and reputation. Light Reading produces targeted communications events and focused one-day conferences each year for cable, mobile and wireline executives across five continents.

Contact:

Amy Averbook

917-743-2693
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JUNE 15, 2016

Arizona needs 10,000 qualified individuals who will work on election day





Phoenix  The 2016 election cycle is going to be busier than ever as America elects a new President. This means Arizona could see record levels of voter participation. With more than 1,500 polling locations and seven positions needed per location, Secretary of State Michele Reagan is urging Arizonans to become an integral part of the process and join the ranks of those who serve as paid poll workers.



As we approach the August and November elections its possible that more Arizona voters participate in the process than we have seen in a long time, said Secretary Reagan. The simple truth is that poll workers are on the front lines of our democracy as they ensure our elections are run efficiently and fairly. Compensation varies, but each county pays their workers for their service.



With more than 3.3 million registered voters in Arizona, voter turnout could reach 80 percent in the General Election with more than 2 million voters participating. With thousands of polling places scattered in every corner of the state, I would encourage those who would like to have a front row seat on election day to contact their local election officials and find out how they can get involved.



Do you qualify to be a poll worker?



Must be at least 16 years old



Must be a U.S. Citizen



Must attend required training



Must be available for either the Primary Election, August 30 and/or the General Election, November 8



Must be a Registered Voter (Unless participating in a student program)



What are the responsibilities of a poll worker?



Assisting in setting up and taking down the polling location



Providing direct help to voters as necessary



Knowing how to properly operate the voting equipment



Checking voter ID



Issuing voters their proper ballot



Serving all voters promptly and with specific sensitivity to voters with special needs.



To sign up as a poll worker, or to learn more about qualifications, training, responsibilities and compensation visit: www.azsos.gov or sign up: http://bit.ly/24AhNfy.
Feature Articles

June 15, 2016

With summer upon us, the temperatures in Arizona have already begun to soar. The first weekend in June broke old record temperatures when we hit 115 degrees. When everyone else leaves for cooler climates in the summer, our farm residents don't get to. They have to endure brutal temperatures from May through October. It is crucial to their well-being to add misters to their shade structures to help keep them cool.

SPOOF SPACE BY STEELE CODDINGTON | June 15, 2016

In an exercise of frustration a bunch of my brilliant elementary school readers asked a question that reflected their interest in the plethora of media concentration on Millennials. "Who the hell are they?" they asked. Their adult-like seriousness was implied by the injection of a mild profanity to convince us they didn't want to be a part of them. Their reasoning? "If 53 percent of Millennials believe Socialism is better than Capitalism, they had better be reeducated in a Charter School that offers a realistic history of economic systems," they opined!
Guest Editorial



By Matt Barber | JUNE 15, 2016

Indecent exposure: The 'gender identity' agenda

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength. This was the slogan of George Orwells fictional English Socialist Party (INGSOC) of Oceania, from his timeless dystopian novel 1984.



Orwell depicted a mind-control technique employed by INGSOC called doublethink, which describes the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts. If the malleable masses could be made to believe self-contradictory, patently absurd and empirically impossible concepts as true, went Orwells thesis, they could then be made to believe, or do, anything.



We have entered an age that George Orwell might never have imagined. Todays American Socialist Party (the secular left) has applied the doublethink mind-control technique on a grand scale. Its slogan?



Male is Female; Female is Male; Evil is good. Indeed, not only do secular leftists like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton stubbornly maintain that objective morality be treated as relative  that evil is good and good evil; they now demand that the immutable laws of physics and biology be similarly repealed.



There are things true and things untrue. It is true, for instance, that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (H20). No amount of wishful thinking, angry foot-stomping, or even a tyrannical presidential edict issued to Americas public school chemistry classes can change this unchangeable reality.



It is likewise true that a person born with XX chromosomes is, and shall always be, female, while a person born with distinct X and Y chromosomes is forever male. Again, no amount of self-delusion, gnashing of teeth, cross-dressing, genital mutilation surgery, or utterly bizarre presidential doublethink dictates can alter this unalterable fact.



While we would call a person who subjectively insists that water is comprised of pure hydrogen either ignorant or insane, we incongruously call the person who similarly insists that a man can somehow transition to a woman, progressive. Even so, it is neither ignorance nor insanity that drives the progressive goal of a creating a genderless society. It is something far more sinister.



It is temporal control.



And it is spiritual defiance.



Progressive efforts to legalize genderless marriage by way of extra-constitutional judicial fiat do not make it legitimate marriage any more than legalizing abortion makes it not murder. Likewise, calling a sexually confused man a trans-woman makes him no more a woman than cutting the stem off a banana makes it a cantaloupe.



Yet, this Emperors New Clothes agenda moves ahead at breakneck speed. The necks to be broken, of course, are possessed by those who embrace the biblical sexual ethic and the morality of modesty.



There are multiple layers within progressivisms pseudo-utopian, truly dystopian philosophy. The lefts lust for redistributionist statism is well-known. Less understood is the progressive rush toward cultural Marxism. With the fast-burgeoning and well-organized push to open girls bathrooms and showers to sexually confused men, the menace of cultural Marxism has reached unprecedented levels.



Cultural Marxism entails, among other things, that secularist aspect of left-wing statist ideology that seeks, within society, to supplant traditional values, norms and mores with postmodern moral relativism. It endeavors to destroy innocence, sexualize children, desensitize them to sexual perversion of every stripe and, quite literally, expose as many young girls as possible to adult male genitalia.



Cultural Marxists aim to scrub America of her Judeo-Christian, constitutional-republican founding principles and take, instead, a secular-statist Sharpie to our beloved U.S. Constitution.



Historian and U.S. military affairs expert William S. Lind describes cultural Marxism as a branch of Western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as multiculturalism or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as multiculturalism.'



Pastor, attorney and former Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively is globally admired by liberty-loving traditionalists. Conversely, hes universally reviled by cultural Marxists. He drills down a bit deeper: Cultural Marxism is a variation of the Marxist strategy to build a utopian socialist order on the ashes of Christian civilization, but through subversion of the moral culture, especially the elimination of the natural family, rather than solely through destruction of capitalism. True though this may be, the ideological seeds of contemporary cultural Marxism nonetheless sprout from deep within the dead soil of historical communism. It is not economic redistributionism alone through which progressives seek to both fundamentally transform America and otherwise conquer the world, but rather, and perhaps primarily, it is through victory over the pejoratively tagged social issues (i.e., sin-centric gay marriage, gender identity and neutrality, perverting human sexuality, morality and the natural family structure, child sacrifice via abortion on demand, abolishing religious liberty and so on).



Regrettably, todays low-information voters, as Rush Limbaugh calls them  to include the useful idiots within the GOPs moderate and libertarian wings  are simply too lazy, shortsighted or both to learn the facts. Surrender on the social issues! demands the GOPs cultural Marxist-enabling kamikazes.



Still, as the American Family Associations tremendously successful boycott of Target, which has cost that gender-bending company billions of dollars and millions of customers, coupled with the dozen or more states that have rejected Obamas open bathrooms and showers edict reveals: We Americans who happen to be tethered to scientific and moral reality will never, ever surrender.



In the temporal realm, secular leftists chaotic crusade to destroy marriage, the family and create a Brave New World of despotic androgyny is a revolt designed to bring down Western civilization  an oppressive patriarchy, as they view it, which stems from the archaic precepts of Judeo-Christian morality.



In the spiritual realm, the gender agenda represents fist-shaking rebellion against the very Creator who, at the beginning  made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh' (see Matthew 19:4-5).



It remains to be seen how the temporal battle will play out.



The spiritual battle is a foregone conclusion.



Matt Barber is founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com. He is an author, columnist, cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Having retired as an undefeated heavyweight professional boxer, Matt has taken his fight from the ring to the culture war. (Follow Matt on Twitter: @jmattbarber).
Guest Editorial



By Natalia Castro | JUNE 15, 2016

Hillary clinches nomination, but will she be indicted?

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest reminded Americans on Sept. 3, 2015 that "the success of our democracy depends on rule of law. And there is no public official that is above the rule of law. Certainly not the President of the United States."



However, almost a year later and a potential federal indictment continues to loom over the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, over her housing classified information on her private email server. In the meantime, most of her staff, herself, and her fellow Democrats are treating the issue as if she possesses immunity.



Clinton is accused of having violated 18 U.S. Code  1924(a), entitled, "Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material," which states "Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both."





Clinton has tried to frame this as a situation in which she was simply negligent of the rules and standards, but the latest Wikileaks released email raises very serious questions. Clinton appears to have knowingly removed these documents, in an email on June 17, 2011, when she directed one of her staffer to "turn into non paper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure."



The email was discussing confidential information and a broken secure fax machine. Rather than finding a more secure method, Clinton directs illegal activity for her convenience.



Clinton might have won the Democratic primaries in most states, but she could be completely unprepared for the FBI primary which she will be battling next.



In the month leading up to the release of this latest piece of email evidence, the FBI and the State department have become highly critical. In a May 2016 Department of State Inspector General report, the State Department highlights how Clinton's actions are clear breaches in policy and security, and recommends accountability.



The report notes "the use of non-departmental systems creates significant security risks. Department policies have evolved considerably over the past two decades; but since 1996, the FAM and FAH have contained numerous provisions regulating the use of such outside systems."



So, not only did Clinton apparently break the law, but her private email serve may have put our nation at risk. Now, the FBI must hold themselves to the rule of law which is known to be so integral to our democracy, but even President Obama seems to be working against them.



The Department of Justice has already granted partial immunity to Bryan Pagliano, who assisted in setting up Clinton's email servers. The department is also allowing for Pagliano to delay his testimony despite clear evidence which his attorneys say "will inevitably cover matters that might furnish a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute," according to the Washington Post on June 7.



But the executive mishandling of the case continues up the line, as evidence mounts against Clinton which could lead to indictment, that has delayed the release of emails and downplayed the significance of this security threat. A Freedom of Information Act request on releasing some of the emails will not be complete until November 31 according to the State Department  after the elections are over.



Meanwhile, Democrats in power are stepping up to support Clinton, despite the clear case against her, so now it is in the FBI's hands and a decision must be made. The FBI cannot continue this train of protection simply because of Clinton's status.



While indicting a major party's nominee for a breach of classified information would be unprecedented, neglecting an indictment simply sets the undesirable precedent that the rule of law can be dismissed out of political consideration, making the use of executive power to complete any illegal act acceptable.



Even Clinton challenger Bernie Sanders knows this is an awful idea to put in place, as Politico writers Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti explain, while Clinton appears to have won the nomination, a likely reason Sanders won't step down is because of the likelihood of an indictment before the convention.



A pre-convention indictment could result in Clinton losing major support from Democrats who are backing her simply because she is expected to win  it would be the ultimate proof that Clinton cannot be trusted. The Democrats would have no choice but to select Sanders (or somebody else) as their nominee simply because the revolutionist is better than the criminal campaigning from a court room.



The FBI has the evidence to indict Clinton on the classified information on a private email server scandal, and they cannot continue neglecting the rule of law simply because of her high establishment status or political considerations. Whether she is able to continue as the Democratic nominee with the new evidence released is a major political question, but it is not the FBI's to be asking, their job is to simply enforce the law which Clinton is breaking.



Natalia Castro is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.
June 15, 2016 | Kerry Picket

Astorino: Trump will stop Obamazoning of your neighborhood







WESTCHESTER, New York  Donald Trump told Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino he will discontinue the Housing and Urban Development regulation that allows the federal government to dictate local and state zoning laws.



Following a press conference Trump gave in Briarcliff Manor to reporters announcing he would give a major speech next week, Astorino met with the presumptive GOP nominee and discussed the battle he is engaged in with the Justice Department and HUD over an affordable housing settlement made in 2009 between Astorino's predecessor and a New York based five person non profit, which put the county on the hook for 750 units of affordable housing.



Astorino argues the federal government now wants more than what the county originally agreed to in the settlement and can actually afford. In 2015, HUD Sec. Julian Castro established a rule, known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).



"[Trump] is aware of it and he understands it and he absolutely opposes what the Obama administration is trying to do and what Hillary would perpetuate. It's urbanizing the suburbs and it's taking away the rights of local communities through their own elected officials to determine how their community is made up," Astorino told The Daily Caller. "And that's exactly what the Obama administration is doing through the powers of the federal government. It would not continue under the [Trump] administration."


June 15, 2016

Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents foil weekend smuggling at I-8 checkpoint





Arrests made for alien and narcotics smuggling

Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents working at the Interstate 8 immigration checkpoint thwarted two smuggling attempts resulting in arrests for alien and narcotics smuggling this past weekend.Agents arrested a male U.S. citizen who attempted to smuggle four illegal aliens. The man tried to avoid inspection by circumventing the checkpoint through Dome Valley on Friday morning.On Saturday afternoon, a male Mexican national was arrested at the checkpoint for narcotics smuggling. The driver, in possession of an I-94 and a Border Crossing card, was referred for a secondary inspection after a canine detection team alerted to the vehicle he was driving. Agents discovered nearly 17 pounds of methamphetamine, valued at an estimated $51,000, hidden in the vehicles engine compartment.The suspects, narcotics, and vehicles were processed per Yuma Sector guidelines in both incidents.Federal law allows agents 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 or until competent evidence is presented to a jury that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents effectively combat smuggling organizations attempting to illegally transport people and contraband through southwestern Arizona and California. Citizens can help the Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection by calling 1-866-999-8727 toll-free to report suspicious activity. Callers can remain anonymous.Customs and Border Protection officers arrested a female Mexican national when she allegedly attempted to smuggle nearly 51 pounds of methamphetamine through the Port of Nogales over the weekend.CBP officers at the Dennis DeConcini crossing referred a 45-year-old Obregon, Sonora, Mexico, resident for further inspection of her Mitsubishi SUV on June 11. The search led to the discovery of multiple packages of methamphetamine, worth approximately $153,000, concealed in the vehicles firewall.Officers turned the suspect over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations after seizing the drugs and the vehicle.Nogales Port Director Guadalupe Ramirez credited the experience of his personnel for the successful seizure.Our CBP officers have always produced effective results when it comes to interdicting illegal contraband, he said. They have and will continue to make it difficult for criminal organizations to smuggle drugs through our ports of entry.A Yuma Sector Border Patrol agent discharged his service-issued weapon while being assaulted by an adult male who crossed illegally into the United States near Somerton, Arizona, Thursday night at approximately 10:00 p.m.During the arrest, the subject grabbed the agents radio and collapsible steel baton and began striking him in the face and head while he also attempted to remove the Agents sidearm from its holster. The agent, fearing for his life, discharged his weapon, which struck the suspect.Both the agent and suspect were transported to Yuma Regional Medical Center via ambulance, where medical professionals were unable to resuscitate the suspect and he was pronounced dead.The agent sustained multiple bruises and lacerations to his head, face and torso, one of which required stitches to close the wound. He was also diagnosed with a concussion.In accordance with CBP Policy, the agent has been placed on administrative leave.Customs and Border Protections Use of Force Incident Team, the lead investigative agency, was assisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in processing the scene. The U.S. Border Patrol is fully cooperating with this investigation.Customs and Border Protection officers arrested a Mexican national June 8, after finding nearly $298,000 worth of heroin hidden in the vehicle he was driving.Officers working at the Port of Nogales Dennis DeConcini crossing referred the 27-year-old man for a secondary inspection of his Ford sedan which lead to them discovering multiple packages containing more than 17 pounds of the drug within the front bumper.Officers seized the drugs and vehicle, before turning the subject over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations.Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents assigned to the Nogales Station arrested three United States citizens for smuggling methamphetamine and other controlled substances at the I-19 checkpoint on June 6.Agents referred the vehicle for a secondary inspection after a canine team alerted to the vehicle during an immigration inspection. Agents searched the driver and two passengers of the vehicle during the secondary inspection.Agents observed suspicious bundles in the male passengers socks and discovered additional bundles concealed on his body after an additional search. The bundles were found to contain methamphetamine after closer inspection.A search of the female passenger revealed a mixture of drugs concealed under her clothing. She was carrying a package containing marijuana, cyclobenzaprine, methamphetamine and amitriptyline.Agents seized more than five pounds of contraband with an estimated value of more than $15,000. Both passengers and the driver of the vehicle have been submitted for prosecution for narcotics smuggling.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.Four individuals were arrested by Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents in separate incidents, over the past few days.A vehicle attempting to pass through the Interstate 8 checkpoint east of Yuma was referred to secondary inspection, Monday afternoon, June 6, leading to the arrest of two U.S. citizens. Both had active warrants, one from Tucson, and the other from Yuma County Sheriffs Office. Both were turned over to the Department of Public Safety.In incidents Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, two illegal aliens were arrested by agents. One near Las Palomas Ranch, and the other along the west side of the Granite Mountains. Both had warrants from the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) and will be returned to DOC to complete the remainder of their sentences.Also over the weekend, agents assisted La Paz County Sheriffs Office in determining that a subject in their custody was illegally present in the U.S. for alleged armed robbery.Customs and Border Protection officers arrested a U.S. citizen and a Mexican national from neighboring Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, during mix-load smuggling attempts at the Area Ports of Nogales within two days of one another.On June 4, CBP officers working at the Dennis DeConcini crossing referred a 24-year-old Mexican national for an inspection of his Chrysler sedan. Officers found 23 pounds of meth worth more than $69,000 and three pounds of heroin worth more than $54,000 within the front center hump of the vehicle after a CBP narcotics-detection canine alert.Two days later, officers referred a 32-year-old woman for a secondary inspection of her Chevy van on June 6, at the Mariposa crossing. Officers discovered almost 21 pounds of meth worth nearly $63,000 after a positive CBP narcotics detection canine alert. Officers discovered nearly three pounds of heroin worth nearly $48,000 within the passenger side of the vehicles front fender.Officers seized both vehicles, all the discovered narcotics, and turned both subjects over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations.
June 15, 2016

California proposes Obamacare for illegal immigrants





New legislation would use ACA loophole to open exchanges to undocumented aliens

WASHINGTON, DC  If lawmakers in California have their way, the doors will open wider for illegal aliens. Legislators in that state have passed a measure that would use an Affordable Care Act loophole to open its Obamacare Exchanges to undocumented immigrants."If liberal Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill into law, California would become the first and only state in the nation to invite illegals to sign up for subsidized healthcare. And, it would tempt other so-called 'socially responsible' states to follow suit," according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens.Notwithstanding the fact that the law clearly states that "undocumented immigrants aren't eligible to buy Marketplace health coverage, or for premium tax credits and other savings on Marketplace plans," President Obama apparently foresaw that the ACA might be modified, Weber said. "It contains a provision called the 'innovation waiver' that allows states to modify elements of the ACA as long as the modifications are designed to increase number of users and as long as they don't increase federal costs." It's not certain whether Governor Brown will sign the legislation, but its sponsor Democratic State Senator Ricardo Lara seems to believe the law will be enacted. He said that some 390,000 illegals would become eligible when it is signed and a request for a waiver is okayed by federal officials. Once Gov. Brown signs the bill, the next step would be to petition Washington for a go-ahead.The California law does not require the state or the federal government to provide subsidies, but there are many who believe the measure is a foot-in-the-door that may eventually leave taxpayers holding the bag, Weber said. "And, if you believe that the progressive California legislature is above such chicanery, bear in mind that 18 states already provide health insurance for the children of illegals and prenatal care for undocumented women."The Federation for American Immigration Reform has raised objections to the California's overreach. Spokesman Ira Mehlman told U.S. News and World Report: "This is the first step in another misrepresentation of the Affordable Care Act. It [the ACA] was sold to the American people on the fact that you wouldn't have to subsidize health care for illegal immigrants.""Expansion of ACA benefits to illegal aliens has far reaching implications and, thus, it must not be allowed. If lawmakers wish to focus on a truly needy group they need look no further than our nation's ill-served senior citizens. Under this proposal, every dollar spent to care for individuals who sneak into the country means there is less money available for our own elderly population who have spent lifetimes paying income taxes and Social Security taxes. How frustrating it must be for them that legislators are willing to consider funding healthcare for illegals when they don't care enough about seniors to provide a meager one-percent Cost of Living benefits increase," Weber concluded.
June 15, 2016

Support for Katko amendment to stop IRS intimidation







FAIRFAX, Va.Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning issued the following statement in support of an amendment to the Department of Treasury appropriations bill that prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from hiring outside individuals or firms to take sworn testimony, or to conduct examination work involving confidential taxpayer information:



"Representative John Katko's proposed amendment to the Department of Treasury appropriations bill rolls back an IRS regulation that further weaponizes that agency's ability to intimidate companies or individuals, and must be included into the bill.



"President Obama's Internal Revenue Service's abuse of taxpayer privacy and the politicization of the Agency has been on-going for years. Representative Katko's amendment would prohibit the IRS from hiring outside individuals or firms to take sworn testimony, or to conduct examination work involving confidential taxpayer information.



"Taxpayer records are supposed to be confidential under penalty of a federal felony for releasing them for a reason, as even the hint of an IRS investigation can cause stock prices to plummet and do heavy damage to a company's reputation. Yet, the IRS has skated this prohibition by allowing outside law firms to conduct investigations on their behalf targeting corporations, and Katko's amendment would stop this new Obama Administration practice.



"Very few things can have the same chilling and intimidating effect on a corporation as an IRS investigation. Americans for Limited Government strongly urges the House Rules Committee to allow the Katko amendment to be voted on by the full House of Representatives. It is a common sense rollback of an Obama Administration regulation that threatens the legal prohibitions against IRS disclosure of investigation targets, and would end one area where IRS intimidation has a real impact."



Resources:



"Letters of marque and reprisal granted by IRS," By Americans for Limited Government Foundation President and Counsel Nathan Mehrens, May 21, 2015 at http://netrightdaily.com/2015/05/letters-of-marque-and-reprisal-granted-by-irs/


By Linda Bentley | June 15, 2016

Jury finds Minuteman co-founder Simcox guilty of child molestation

Had Simcox not been acquitted of those three sexual conduct charges, he would be facing a mandatory life sentence without parole





PHOENIX  On Wednesday, June 8, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury found Chris Simcox, 55, guilty of two counts of child molestation, a class 2 felony, and one count of furnishing obscene material to a minor, a class 4 felony.



The victim, who was 5 years old at the time, was a playmate of Simcoxs two young daughters, one of which also accused Simcox of molesting her.



After listening to three weeks of testimony, the jury, which had been deliberating since Monday afternoon, found Simcox not guilty on three other counts of engaging in sexual conduct with a 6-year-old girl, a class 2 felony.



Had Simcox not been acquitted of those three sexual conduct charges, which falls under the dangerous crimes against children statute for sentencing, he would be facing a mandatory life sentence that is not eligible for suspension, probation, pardon or release from confinement on any basis.



Simcox, who defended himself during the trial, was indicted by a grand jury in June 2013 following an investigation into the allegations by the Phoenix Police Department.



Simcox is best known as the co-founder of the Minuteman Project with Jim Gilchrist and founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. after they went their separate ways.



In an effort to deter illegal immigration, the organizations held volunteer border watch events at various locations along the Mexican border, notifying the Border Patrol of locations where they spotted illegal aliens crossing into the United States.



Simcox purchased the Tombstone Tumbleweed newspaper in 2002 after moving to Arizona from Los Angeles where he worked as a kindergarten and elementary school teacher for 13 years at Wildwood School.



Simcox launched a 2010 Republican primary challenge against Sen. John McCain but withdrew from the race after former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth officially launched his campaign leaving Simcox without the financial resources to continue..



Sentencing is scheduled for 10:30 on July 5 before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jose Padilla, where Simcox is facing a sentence of 10-24 years in prison, potentially the rest of his life.
By Linda Bentley | June 15, 2016

Had Simcox not been acquitted of those three sexual conduct charges, he would be facing a mandatory life sentence without parole

PHOENIX  On Wednesday, June 8, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury found Chris Simcox, 55, guilty of two counts of child molestation, a class 2 felony, and one count of furnishing obscene material to a minor, a class 4 felony.



The victim, who was 5 years old at the time, was a playmate of Simcoxs two young daughters, one of which also accused Simcox of molesting her.



By Linda Bentley | June 15, 2016

I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of Americas most hated minorities

PORTLAND, Ore.  Last Friday, Multnomah County, Ore. Circuit Court Judge Amy Holmes Hehn ordered the sex of Portland resident Jamie Shupe to be changed from female to non-binary.



Shupe, 52, was born a male and served 18 years in the army, retiring as a sergeant in 2000.



Suffering from gender dysphoria, Shupe decided at the age of 49 to transition to becoming female via hormone therapy.



By Linda Bentley | June 15, 2016

SNAP recipient fraud can undermine the integrity of the program and the publics

confidence in the program

WASHINGTON  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) provided testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Interior, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding development of enhanced detection tools and reporting to combat recipient fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

June 15, 2016

CASA GRANDE  Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu chastised the Arizona Democratic Party and one of his congressional challengers for considering an attempt to remove candidates from the Congressional District 1 field.



Democrats and their allies pulled the signatures of several CD1 Republican candidates, including Sen. Carlyle Begay, former Secretary of State Ken Bennett and Navajo businessman Shawn Redd. A supporter of Gary Kiehne also pulled the nomination signatures for several candidates.



June 15, 2016

WASHINGTON, DC  If lawmakers in California have their way, the doors will open wider for illegal aliens. Legislators in that state have passed a measure that would use an Affordable Care Act loophole to open its Obamacare Exchanges to undocumented immigrants.



"If liberal Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill into law, California would become the first and only state in the nation to invite illegals to sign up for subsidized healthcare. And, it would tempt other so-called 'socially responsible' states to follow suit," according to Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens.



June 15, 2016 | Kerry Picket

WESTCHESTER, New York  Donald Trump told Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino he will discontinue the Housing and Urban Development regulation that allows the federal government to dictate local and state zoning laws.

June 15, 2016

FBI Expanding Abilities to Monitor Internet Activity?

In what is potentially one of the most explosive changes in the internet era, FBI Director James B. Coney is lobbying Congress to amend the surveillance law to give the FBI authority to have access to a persons internet browsing history without a warrant in terrorism and spy cases. Meanwhile, Facebook, Google and Yahoo have sent a joint letter to Congress saying surveillance laws do NOT apply to web browsing records.

June 15, 2016

Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents working at the Interstate 8 immigration checkpoint thwarted two smuggling attempts resulting in arrests for alien and narcotics smuggling this past weekend.



Agents arrested a male U.S. citizen who attempted to smuggle four illegal aliens. The man tried to avoid inspection by circumventing the checkpoint through Dome Valley on Friday morning.

June 15, 2016

FAIRFAX, Va.Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning issued the following statement in support of an amendment to the Department of Treasury appropriations bill that prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from hiring outside individuals or firms to take sworn testimony, or to conduct examination work involving confidential taxpayer information:



"Representative John Katko's proposed amendment to the Department of Treasury appropriations bill rolls back an IRS regulation that further weaponizes that agency's ability to intimidate companies or individuals, and must be included into the bill.
South Bend Human Rights Commission director fired amid workplace concerns

Yolanda Young-Smith, hired in December, oversaw the Human Rights Commission as it lost longtime workers with a combined half-century of tenure.
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The newfound asteroid 2016 HO3 has an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth.

It seems the moon is not Earth's only cosmic companion.

The newly discovered asteroid 2016 HO3 orbits the sun in such a way that the space rock never strays too far from Earth, making it a "quasi-satellite" of our planet, scientists say.

"One other asteroid  2003 YN107  followed a similar orbital pattern for a while over 10 years ago, but it has since departed our vicinity," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Wednesday (June 15).

"This new asteroid is much more locked onto us," Chodas added. "Our calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come."

Indeed, 2016 HO3 is the best example of an Earth quasi-satellite ever found, scientists said.

The asteroid was discovered on April 27 by scientists using the Pan-STARRS 1 survey telescope in Hawaii. 2016 HO3's exact size is unknown, but researchers think it's between 130 feet and 330 feet wide (40 to 100 meters).

The newfound asteroid 2016 HO3 has an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech )

As the space rock circles the sun, it loops around Earth as well, zooming ahead of the planet half of the time and trailing behind the other half, NASA officials said. 2016 HO3's orbit is tilted slightly relative to that of Earth, so the asteroid also bobs up and down through our planet's orbital plane.

The path of 2016 HO3 tends to twist and drift over time, but Earth's gravitational pull keeps the asteroid contained: It never comes closer than 9 million miles (14.5 million kilometers) to our planet, and it never gets more than 24 million miles (38.6 million km) away, researchers said.

"In effect, this small asteroid is caught in a little dance with Earth," Chodas said.

This dance is not dangerous: 2016 HO3 poses no threat to the planet, NASA officials said.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
An artist's concept of the ancient galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2, which is 13.1 billion light-years from Earth and likely formed just after the universe's "dark ages." The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. The green color indicates oxygen in the galaxy as seen by the ALMA radio telescope, while purple denotes hydrogen detected by the Subaru telescope.

Astronomers have discovered signs of oxygen in one of the universe's first galaxies, which was born shortly after the cosmic "Dark Ages" that existed before the universe had stars, a new study finds.

The discovery  which centers on the truly ancient galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2, located about 13.1 billion light-years from Earth  could help solve the mystery of how much the first stars helped to clear the murky fog that once filled the universe, the researchers said.

Previous research suggested that, after the universe was born in the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was so hot that all of the atoms that existed were split into positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons. This soup of electrically charged ions scattered light, preventing it from traveling freely. [Slideshow: From the Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]

"Dark Ages" of the universe

Prior work suggested that, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled down enough for these particles to recombine into atoms, finally allowing the first light in the cosmos  that from the Big Bang  to shine. However, after this era of recombination came the cosmic "Dark Ages"; during this epoch, there was no other light, as stars had not formed yet.

Previous research also suggested that, starting about 150 million years after the Big Bang, the universe began to emerge from the cosmic Dark Ages during a time known as reionization. During this epoch, which lasted more than a half billion years, clumps of gas collapsed enough to form the first stars and galaxies, whose intense ultraviolet light ionized and destroyed most of the neutrally charged hydrogen, splitting it to form protons and electrons.

Details about the epoch of reionization are extremely difficult to glean because they happened so long ago. To see light from such ancient times, researchers look for objects that are as far away as possible  the more distant they are, the more time their light took to get to Earth. Such distant objects are only viewable with the best telescopes available today.

The ancient galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2 (at center of right image and in insets on left) is seen in this color composite image from the Subaru XMM-Newton Deep Survey Field. The galaxy appears in red and is 13.1 billion light-years from Earth. (Image credit: NAOJ)

Much remains unknown about the epoch of reionization, such as what the first stars were like, how the earliest galaxies formed and what sources of light caused reionization. Some prior work suggested that massive stars were mostly responsible for reionization, but other research hinted that black holes were a significant and potentially dominant culprit behind this event.

Now, by looking at an ancient galaxy, researchers may have discovered clues as to the cause of reionization.

"The galaxy we observed may be a strong light source for reionization," study lead author Akio Inoue, an astronomer at Osaka Sangyo University in Japan, told Space.com.

Hunting for ancient galaxies with oxygen

Scientists analyzed a galaxy called SXDF-NB1006-2, located about 13.1 billion light-years from Earth. When this galaxy was discovered in 2012, it was the most distant galaxy known at that time.

Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the researchers saw what SXDF-NB1006-2 looked like 700 million years after the Big Bang. They focused on light from oxygen and from dust particles.

"Seeking heavy elements in the early universe is an essential approach to explore the star formation activity in that period," Inoue said in a statement.

A close-up view of the ancient galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2, showing ionized oxygen (in green) as seen by the ALMA radio telescope, and ionized hydrogen (in blue) seen by the Subaru Telescope. Ultraviolet light detected by the UK Infrared Telescope is shown in red. (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NAOJ)

The scientists spotted clear signs of oxygen from SXDF-NB1006-2, the most distant oxygen detected yet. This oxygen was ionized, suggesting that this galaxy possessed a number of young, giant stars several dozen times heavier than the sun. These young stars would have also emitted intense ultraviolet light, the researchers suggested.

The scientists estimated that oxygen was 10 times less abundant in SXDF-NB1006-2 than it was in the sun. This estimate matched the research team's simulations  only light elements such as hydrogen, helium and lithium existed when the universe was first born, while heavier elements, such as oxygen, were later forged in the hearts of stars.

However, unexpectedly, the researchers found that SXDF-NB1006-2 has two to three times less dust than simulations had predicted. This dearth of dust may have aided reionization by allowing light from that galaxy to ionize the vast amount of gas outside that galaxy, the researchers said.

"SXDF-NB1006-2 would be a prototype of the light sources responsible for the cosmic reionization," Inoue said in a statement.

One possible explanation for the smaller amount of dust is that shock waves from supernova explosions may have destroyed it, the researchers said. Another possibility is that there may not have been much in the way of cold, dense clouds in the space between SXDF-NB1006-2's stars, which grow in these clouds a bit like how snowflakes do in cold clouds on Earth.

This research may help to answer what caused reionization. "The source of reionization is a long-standing matter  massive stars or supermassive black holes?" Inoue said. "This galaxy seems not to have a supermassive black hole, but have a number of massive stars. So massive stars may have reionized the universe."

The researchers are continuing to analyze SXDF-NB1006-2 with ALMA.

"Higher-resolution observations will allow us to see the distribution and motion of ionized oxygen in the galaxy and provide precious information to understand the properties of the galaxy," study co-author Yoichi Tamura, of the University of Tokyo, said in a statement.

The scientists detailed their findings online June 16 in the journal Science.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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The age of criminal responsibility will be lowered by one year from the current 14, the Ministry of Justice said Wednesday, announcing measures to cope with an increasing number of...

Police on Wednesday made an emergency apprehension of a man in his 40s on suspicion of killing his wife and their two teenage sons at their home in Gwangmyeong, just south of Seoul...
Jim Sillars is a man who feels confident in his forecasts. The former SNP head is the only member of the Scottish party who favors Brexit. This is ironic, because the 78-year-old, who also served as the architect of the Scottish Independence in Europe movement in the late 1970s, was one of the leading proponents of independence in 2014. He lost that battle.

Today Sillars rails against the EU. "I don't want to live in a democratic society in which a political elite makes decisions about my life." He says no one knows the real decision-makers in the European Commission -- people who, incidentally, were not elected. He warns that Scotland could suffer the same fate as Greece or Portugal within the EU. Brussels truly badgered these countries, says Sillars, sitting in a chair in his living room in Edinburgh. Without the EU, he explains, Scotland will be able to make its own decisions again about fishing, oil and energy production.

He blames Nicola Sturgeon's "Stalinish leadership of the party" for the fact that he, an experienced trade unionist, is the only person in the SNP expressing these opinions openly. He insists he doesn't want to be disloyal to the party leadership but then he voices his opinion nonetheless, saying he has the feeling that many of his fellow party members are in favor of "out." He believes that "once Britain is out, there will no longer be any problems with the EU."
Washington, June 16, 2016 (SPS) - Morocco tried to foil a technical mission of the United Nations, dispatched in Laayoune, to negotiate the return of the staff of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINUROS), expelled by Morocco, said Ahmed Boukhari, representative of the Polisario Front at the United Nations.

The information that we have is that the Moroccan authorities tried to divert this technical mission from its purpose, said Boukhari, in 2016s session of the UN special committee on decolonization , called also Committee of 24, held in Nicaragua.

The Moroccan authorities tried to divert this mission from its objective by giving a tourist aspect to the visit of the UN delegation which visited Friday Laayoune to discuss the restoration of MINURSO, according to Boukhari.

Morocco also circumvented the technical discussions, scheduled for this purpose, by directing the meeting with the UN mission towards a political debate on the issue of Western Sahara, said the Sahrawi official.

The Polisario Fronts representative considered that the disrespectful attack against Ban ki-moon and the unilateral decision to expel the civilian component of the MINURSO show that the occupying power opted for a confrontation with the international community to put an end to the peace process.

In this regard, Boukhari reiterated the resolution of the Security Council, adopted in April, underlining the urgency to fully implement MINURSO mandate, by enabling it to organize a self-determination referendum.SPS

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Washington, June 16, 2016 (SPS) - United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, Committee of 24, has reaffirmed Sahrawi people's right to self-determination, and expressed concern over the standstill in the UN-sponsored peace process in Western Sahara, Africa's last colony.

During the ordinary session of the Committee in New York, Algeria's representative to the UN Sabri Boukadoum said that the Western Sahara conflict "is a decolonization issue that could only be resolved by granting the Sahrawi people their inalienable right to self-determination."

Boukadoum called on the UN to assume its responsibility, adding that dozens of UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions reaffirm their right to self-determination.

Security Council's resolutions should be "well read and well heard," he insisted.

Algeria's representative focused on the situation of human rights in the occupied Sahrawi territories and the illegal exploitation of Western Sahara's natural resources by Morocco.

The Sahrawi people's patience should not be abused, he warned, adding that there were no other alternative to giving the Sahrawi people the free choice to decide their future.

Like several representatives attending the meeting, Boukadoum invited the Committee to visit the region and "make their own opinion."

Other representatives asked the Committee to hold an extraordinary session on Western Sahara conflict.

Cuba's representative recalled that the Committee has been discussing the question of Western Sahara for 53 years, deploring that there had been no progress towards an effective solution, despite the constant efforts.

He added that the situation of Sahrawi people had become unbearable, underlining the urgent need to allowing them exercise their right to self-determination.

He also urged the Security Council to assume its responsibility and resolve the conflict by providing the UN Mission for Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) with all necessary means to carry out its work.

For his part, the representative of Venezuela expressed concern about the situation in Western Sahara, which "is still Africa's last colony," while nearly 40 UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions have recognized the right of Sahrawi people to self-determination over more than 25 years.

The Venezuelan representative also denounced the "unjust occupation" by Morocco.SPS

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The herd, based on Ashcourt Farms Millington Grange Estate near York, will be sold at Borderway Mart in Carlisle on August 19. The Millington females have been bred for size, strength, structure and muscle and their quality has taken the herd into the breeds top 10 per cent. In total, 170 head of cattle including calves will be going under the hammer, giving buyers a rare opportunity to buy some of the best Limousin genetics in the UK.

H&H auctioneer James Little said:

It has been an important herd for a number of years and this is a major Limousin sale.

Harrison & Hetherington are delighted to have received instructions to conduct the sale. There has been a lot of emphasis on the health status of the Millington herd, registered as a high health herd and with the genetics on offer this sale is sure to attract interest from across the UK and Ireland.

The Millington Limousins herd is being totally dispersed as a result of a change and restructuring of Ashcourt Farms farming policy. The herd owned by Bob Bousfield and family and managed for five years by Ian Nattress, comprises 50 pedigree Limousin cows.

Limousin stock bull Ecran was imported from France in 2011 to improve the female bloodlines, many of which included in the sale. Also Greenwell Fieldmaster was purchased from Procter Farms in 2012 to add size and frame. In 2014, the herd added stock bull Norman Hawk, sired by Claragh Franco, from Carlisle's February sale, and Spittalton Imij, sired by Haltcliffe Vermount, who was purchased privately in the September. The additions were brought in to add shape and muscle to the herd.

Foundation females include Ronick Nestle, full sister to the famous Ronick Hawk, whose bloodlines are dominant in the herd. Progeny of Brockhurst Option, such as Millington Davina, Supreme Champion at the Royal Show as a maiden heifer in 2009, have sold for a top price of 28,000 guineas.
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RIDGEFIELD  The Board of Selectmen has formally accepted recommendations made by a committee studying how best to use 30 acres of town-owned land on the Schlumberger property, but has yet to decide how to act on the proposal.

Last month the Schlumberger Citizens Committee proposed converting the land, once a sprawling office complex, into a cultural destination with a flagship outdoor amphitheater and walking trails snaking around the property.

The plan also calls for leasing at least two of the three remaining buildings to private organizations, which would be responsible for renovating and maintaining them  a component that the selectmen are more likely to act on before deciding about the amphitheater.

Schlumberger Citizens Committee Chairman Dick Larson told selectmen Wednesday night that leasing the buildings could generate revenue to help offset the cost of building and maintaining the rest of the property.

With folks willing to restore them, this is a big opportunity for the town, Larson said.

One of the structures, called the Philip Johnson building after the renowned architect who designed it, has drawn interest from BassamFellows, a modern furniture design company that would like to use the building for offices, a showroom and museum, Larson said.

He said that the organization would prefer buying the building, which is in disrepair, but the committee recomnended leasing the structures instead, and selecmen agreed.

I feel strongly about the lease, said Selectman Steve Zemo. I dont want the Philip Johnson building sale to be driving what can happen in the area. We need to lease it and structure a deal they are happy with.

A separate theater organization, ACT of Connecticut, wants to use the adjacent auditorium.

ACT is willing and able to rehab that facility without public funding, said one of its members, Bill Diamond. One of the nice things about what we want to do is we dont need the rest of plan. We can live and coexist with anything the committee comes with.

But questions still remain about the cost and feasibility of the rest of the cultural plan for the property, which will need significant landscaping and re-grading.

The feedback has been that this is well received, said Selectman Bob Hebert. But how do we pay for it? Who is going to pay for it?

As a next step, the committee recommends that the selectmen form an implementation committee to drill down on outstanding details including the cost, what organizations might use the amphitheater and whether the facility would generate enough revenue to sustain itself.

The town first purchased the 45-acre property in 2012 for about $7 million. Since then, two parcels totaling about 15 acres have been sold for $5.6 million.

Martin Handshy, who bought a 10 acre-parcel on Sunset Lane and is building 54-units of age-restricted housing, said most of the prospective tenants support the plan.

They are supportive of the concept and find it compatible, Handshy said. There are some concerns, primarily about the hours and sound levels, and what the actual means of egress would be for 560 cars.

awolff@newstimes.com; 203-731-3333; @awolffster
The reporting of sexual assaults has always created image issues for municipal leaders and academic institutions.

Crime statistics are the foundation of any towns reputation. Its understandable that a spike in reported rapes is particularly unsettling for residents, as well as for municipal guardians trying to project an image of safety.

For college students, as well as for their parents, that concern is multiplied on the campus. Anyone with ties to the University of Connecticut would find the latest headline unsettling: UConn first among schools reporting rapes.

The 43 rapes reported at UConn in 2014 placed it first in the nation (along with Brown University in Rhode Island), according to federal crime data reviewed by the Washington Post. Wesleyan University in Middletown wasnt far behind, landing fourth on the list with 37 rapes reported.

Unlike most crime statistics, though, figures on sexual reports have always been unreliable due to the stigma that can block victims from reaching out. Many victims who might have stayed quiet decades ago are no longer doing so. Yes, the bad news is in the true, disturbing, numbers that are emerging. The good news is they indicate an end to the silence.

UConn was already coping with a reputation for being indifferent to reported sexual assaults, resulting in the 2014 payment of $1.3 million to settle a complaint. Part of the settlement to five students and former students was the agreement that the school would overhaul how sexual assaults are handled.

UConn appears to be succeeding in creating a more supportive environment, and in heightening an awareness of the responsibility to report inappropriate behavior. We believe the rise in the numbers of these crimes truly means more survivors are finding their voice.

Unfortunately, the figures also underscore how much hard work remains to be done.
Whenever my wife asks me to tidy up the bathroom, I feel like throwing in the towel because I could never get it to look as nice as the porcelain convenience at a place like the Waldorf Astoria.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I met a guy whose job is to throw in the towel in the porcelain convenience at  you guessed it  the Waldorf Astoria.

I recently attended a dinner at the famed New York City hotel, which is ritzy enough to rival the Ritz but does not, to my knowledge, serve Ritz crackers, at least not in the bathroom, where I went to answer the call of nature, which called collect.

As I was washing up (according to some people, I have been washed up for years), I was handed a towel by a gentleman dressed to the tens, which is even better than the nines. He was nattily attired (if we were in the ladies room, he would have been Natalie Attired) in a white, pleated, wing-collar shirt; a black, crisply tied bow tie; a neat black vest; sharply creased black pants, and shiny black shoes.

I, dressed to the sevens in a wrinkled gray suit, took the perfectly folded paper towel, which was embossed with the Waldorf logo, and dried my hands, though not before dripping water all over my dull black shoes.

Would you like another towel, sir? washroom attendant Alex Giannikouris asked politely.

Thank you, I replied as he handed me one. Now I can shine my shoes.

I also took a shine to Alex, who has worked at the Waldorf for 32 years and, judging from the many visitors who stopped in to get tidied up themselves, is even more popular than the celebrities who frequent the premises.

Alex! exclaimed one gentleman (we were, after all, in a room marked Gentlemen, which made me wonder what I was doing there). Como esta?

Muy bien, responded Alex, a native of Greece who speaks about half a dozen languages.

The two men carried on a brief conversation in Spanish, at the end of which Alex said, Adios!

Another man, tall, handsome and bedecked in a tuxedo, greeted Alex with a handshake  after, of course, drying his hands on the towel Alex gave to him.

Are you a regular? I asked the visitor.

What? he replied indignantly.

A regular, I explained. Not irregular.

Yes, said the man, who seemed relieved. Ive known Alex for years. Hes a great guy.

That was the consensus among the other visitors, one of whom spoke with Alex in French and another in Greek.

I even know a little Korean, Alex said, in perfect English.

Then he regaled me with stories of the celebrities who have stopped in to admire themselves in the mirror.

The best, Alex said, was Frank Sinatra.

Did he do it his way? I asked.

Alex smiled and said, Yes. He was very nice and very generous. A big tipper.

How much money did he give you? I wondered.

I cant say, Alex replied. The IRS might find out.

At least Alex wont get in trouble with the Social Security Administration. Thats because Bill Clinton, when he was president, signed Alexs Social Security card. Alex pulled it out of his wallet and showed me the inscription: To Alex: Thanks, Bill Clinton.

Are you going to vote for his wife? I asked.

I dont talk politics in here, said Alex, who was happy to talk about George Burns (a funny guy), Al Pacino (he washed his face in the sink) and Ingrid Bergman.

Ingrid Bergman was in the mens room? I spluttered.

No, said Alex. I saw her upstairs. She was very beautiful. One other time, I saw Pope John Paul II upstairs. As he walked past, he gave me a blessing.

But Alex said he feels especially blessed to be married to Maria, his wife of 39 years.

One woman for all that time? Why not? Alex said with a broad smile.

Do you show your appreciation by tidying up the bathroom at home? I wondered.

No, she does it, admitted Alex, who leaves the tidying up at the Waldorf to a cleaning crew.

He and Maria have three grown children and two young grandchildren.

Im a grandpa, too, I said. My granddaughter calls me Poppie.

Im called Papou, which is Greek for grandfather, said Alex, who is 63 and plans to retire soon.

Ive had a good career at the Waldorf, he said. Ive met a lot of nice people. But one of these days it will be time to go. And then, he added, Ill really throw in the towel.

Stamford native Jerry Zezima is the author of three books. His latest is Grandfather Knows Best. Visit his blog at www.jerryzezima.blogspot.com. Email: JerryZ111@optonline.net.
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If you plan on visiting the Mount Rushmore National Memorial on your next family vacation there is one part of the iconic monument to some of our greatest presidents that wasn't quite completed, at least not to the artist's expectation.

A large chamber was to serve as a repository for some of our country's priceless charter documents, but it ended up holding a descriptive "postcard" for civilizations far in the future.

The man who envisioned the Mount Rushmore sculpture, Doane Robinson, tapped artist Gutzon Borglum to sculpt something grand to attract people from all over the country to South Dakota's Black Hills. Borglum and his family had immigrated to the United States when he was a young boy, eventually settling in Nebraska.

PRETTY PHOTOS: NASA Earth Observatory highlights national parks in satellite photo series

For Borglum, it was thrilling to be able to create something that would honor the country that embraced his family. After sculpting the head of Robert E. Lee in Stone Mountain, Ga., he was freed up to work in South Dakota.

He started work on Mount Rushmore in 1924, at age 57. Sculpting began in earnest in 1927 when the first piece of stone was chipped away and President Calvin Coolidge presided at the official dedication.

The inspired sculptor had a grand design for the monument, one that would include a Hall of Records to hold all the important documents in American history inside a hollowed-out cave behind Abraham Lincoln's stone head.

The National Park Service details the Hall of Records plan on its official site.

It sounds like a lofty proposition, relocating things like the Declaration of Independence and such into the Hall of Records. Despite logistical hurdles of wresting those documents away from Washington, D.C., the federal government even approved the idea but soon decided that getting the heads completed was a better use of the artist's time.

Borglum wouldn't see the monument to completion, dying in 1941 a few days shy of his 74th birthday. His son Lincoln continued the work.

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The Hall of Records was finished in the 1990s, sans those original charter documents, but its precarious position makes public viewing impossible.

Finally in 1998, in place of the documents, a collection of tablets telling the story of our nation were sealed into a vault in the Hall of Records, according to the National Park Service.

Also included is a description of the presidents whose heads are carved into the stone and why they came to be immortalized in the middle of South Dakota.

It's not a time capsule, meant to be opened in a few decades, but is supposed to remain there for thousands of years for identification purposes.

HIDDEN TEXAS: The Republic of Texas' somewhat-hidden embassy in London, England

"You might as well drop a letter into the world's postal service without an address or signature, as to send that carved mountain into history without identification," Borglum had said.

The whole package is sealed in a teakwood box inside a titanium vault and covered with a one-ton granite capstone.

One day in thousands of years when apes finally take the reins of Earth from humankind, some distant relative of us all might stumble upon the tablets in the vault -- maybe revealed by an earthquake -- behind the collection of weathered stone heads and find out that at one time we went to the moon and rode around in four-wheeled chariots.

Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth.
STAMFORD  A Belltown man has been accused of running down a teenager with his car while he was fighting with a group of men attending a graduation party on his street early Thursday morning.

Sgt. Kathleen Haley said witnesses told police a black Honda was racing up and down Alton Road about 12:30 a.m. One witness said the car drove toward a group of men at the end of the street, Haley said. Another witness said there was an altercation in front of the home where the driver of the Honda lives, Haley said.

When police found the Honda, the car had damage to the front fender and windshield, Haley said.

The driver, Michael Stramandinoli, 25, of Alton Road, told police he was in his car with three friends when they drove down his street and encountered a group of a dozen young men attending a nearby graduation party, Haley said. The group began pounding on the Honda and shaking it before pulling three of his friends out of the car beating them, Lt. Diedrich Hohn said.

Stramandinoli said he jumped into the drivers seat and began driving away for his own safety while looking for his friends and accidentally struck a 17-year-old boy walking down the street.

The victim returned to the scene and told police he was not associated with the group that had the fight with Stramandinoli and his friends, Hohn said.

He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, Haley said of the teen.

The teen was taken to Stamford Hospital for treatment. The extent of his injuries was unknown.

Stramandinoli was charged with first-degree assault with a motor vehicle, leaving the scene of an accident and driving with a suspended license.

Haley said he was held overnight on a $50,000 court appearance bond and was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon.

jnickerson@scni.com;
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STAMFORD  A group of middle school graduates recently completed a leadership program for girls aimed at fostering friendships with each other and building relationships with police officers.

Hannah Hernandez, 14, Kymmonie Campbell, 14, Deborah Garcia, 14, and Michelda Fabre, 14, were the latest class to graduate from the Girls Leadership Group.

Police Chief Jon Fontneau formed the group four years ago as a way for middle-school-aged girls to forge friendships and develop positive relationships with police officers. The group had 13 members this year.

Fontneau teamed with Domus, the nonprofit foundation that provides services to at-risk youth at the Chester Addison Community Center, and had six female police officers serve as mentors to the girls, who are mostly from the citys West Side.

Francesca Principe, who is an advocate at Domus and works with the police officers to coordinate activities for the girls, said the four graduates each received certificates at a celebratory dinner recently at Luckys Classic restaurant on Bedford Street.

One of the officers, Desiree Sherperis, said the event was particularly satisfying to see the appreciation the girls and their families had for the program.

It was nice to see how appreciative the families are and the girls really opened up about how we broke down the barriers and they can trust us now, she said. They said they like to see us outside of being a police officer.

The girls, who created the citys first anti-graffiti group, participated this year in three graffiti cleanup efforts in various parts of Stamford.

The biggest part of the program is that we decided it was important for the kids to give back and do more community service projects over the past two years, Principe said.

As a result, they participated in a turkey give-away at the Food Bank of Lower Fairfield County, cooking and serving for the $1 community dinners at St. Lukes Parish in Darien and helped with a bake sale to raise money for the Hope in Motion Cancer Walk & Run event held earlier this month.

The girls also participated in team-building activities like the Malcolm Pray Challenge, a CPR class, a Zumba workout and a trip to New York City  the first time in the Big Apple for several of the girls.

Youth Bureau Sgt. Joseph Kennedy said the program is funded by a $10,000 municipal grant. But Kennedy said the funding is not guaranteed.

The group needs all the funds it can get to keep the effort going, Kennedy said. But it is public participation that is whats going to make this group really go forward. They stretch that $10,000 like anything.

Like the meal at Luckys, whose owner offered the food at a discounted price to help support the group, Sgt. Jennifer Lynch said.

When people hear about the program, they cant help but want to be a part of it, Lynch said, explaining thats how the group earned some support from the Malcolm Pray Achievement Center Foundation. Its a great program.

The other officers in the program are Sgt. Kelly Connelly, officers Andriana Molina, Nicole Petrenko and Leslie Lugo.

jnickerson@scni.com;
T here are plenty of free goodies you can snag on a flight, if you know to ask for them.

A Reddit thread asked flight attendants about secret perks passengers should be taking advantage of on flights. We consulted that thread and did some of our own research to create the following list.

From free alcoholic drinks to ibuprofen, here are ten things you should ask for on your next flight.

1. The entire can of soft drink

Flight attendants generally dole out half of a can, which, combined with the quantity of ice they dispense, simply isn't enough to quench our thirst.

Next time, order a whole can. Flight attendants are often happy to oblige, or, if they've run out of cans, they'll be happy to return to refill your cup.

2. Hot chocolate

As an alternative to coffee or tea, most airlines also offer hot chocolate.

Etihad Airways and Southwest Airlines are just some of the airlines that offer hot chocolate in Economy. Qantas even has hot chocolate made with Cadbury chocolates to satisfy your sweet tooth.

3. Temporary babysitting

For parents traveling with children, its great to have a helping hand when you need to step away for a few minutes. Many flight attendants will be happy to briefly assist you with your kids.

Etihad Airways offers "Flying Nannies", who can organise everything from arts and crafts to hand puppet games and magic tricks for kids, while Gulf Air has its "Sky Nanny", who can assist you with boarding and disembarkation.

4. Sanitising Wipes

Airplanes are dirty and carry a lot of germs, which is why you want to wipe down surfaces like the tray table in order to avoid getting a cold.

If you forget to pack your own sanitising wipes, ask a flight attendant since they usually have them on hand.

5. Grooming Kits

On longer flights, some airlines tend to stock items like earplugs, pens, combs, and playing cards that they're happy to give away.

Virgin Atlantic gives away free amenity kits on economy, while Etihad's complimentary amenity kits on longer flights include socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and earplugs.

6. Extra snacks

The complimentary snacks offered on flights are tiny and often leave you hungry.

Simply ask for seconds  if there are leftovers after all customers have been served, flight attendants will happily give you an extra snack.

7. Alcohol

Since airlines are basically charging passengers for everything these days, most assume this applies to alcoholic beverages as well. However, many airlines do still offer free booze.

Lufthansa offers a selection of free champagne, wine, and beer on its flights, while Finnair has complimentary beer and wine. Etihad also offers passengers a complimentary bar service, with a range of beers, wines, and spirits to choose from.

8. Basic medications and bandages

While it depends on the airline's regulations, most flights are equipped with basic medications like painkillers and antacids, as well as plasters. These are free if you ask.

9. Wing pins for kids

While wing pins, which are small plastic wings with an airlines logo, seemed like they had become an amenity of the past, some airlines like Delta still offer them on flights.

Forbes recently reported that American Airlines brought kids wings back, starting with flights from Charlotte to Orlando where kids often travel to destinations like Disney World and SeaWorld.

10. Bottles of water

Whether you're in need of more water or want to avoid drinking water on an airplane unless it is bottled, airlines will usually have small bottles of water on hand that they can supply to passengers who ask for them.
P oundlands outgoing boss today insisted that a potential takeover bid from South African suitor Steinhoff would not be as big a distraction as its own merger with 99p stores, which he blamed for an 84% plunge in annual profits.

The team can take whatever comes at them in their stride, said Jim McCarthy, who will hand over to former B&Q boss Kevin OByrne at the end of this month.

Steinhoff, which owns a 23% stake in the business, yesterday said it was considering making an offer for the pound shops chain.

McCarthy said he couldnt see anything being more challenging than Poundlands recent acquisition of rival 99p Stores.

The company was subjected to a protracted investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority and later forced to accelerate the conversion of 99p Stores after finding them in a mess.

That took a little bit of focus away at a time when it was also under pressure from fiercer competition from fellow discounters and supermarkets engaged in a price war.

It is also being challenged by changing shopping habits such as a shift to online shopping.

Pre-tax profits sank to 5.9 million in the year ended in March, from 36.2 million a year earlier.

Without the 99p Stores deal, underlying profits were down 13.5% at 37.8 million. Like-for-like sales fell 3.9%.

Poundland expects the first half of this year to remain challenging, with negative same-store sales growth and continued disruption related to 99p Stores, but trading should improve in the second half.

McCarthy, who is planning a break from corporate life after a decade leading the firm, said Poundlands increased scale should help it recover.

[It] gave us five years store growth in the UK in one move. That gives us leverage with suppliers and means we can add value in product. We have firepower to respond to competition.

Its recently launched online operations and a trial in Spain were progressing well, he added.

Shares in the company, which listed in 2014 and have soared on the recent bid speculation, increased by 3p to 203p.
G ermany is in the European Union but its biggest trading partners are not. It exports more to the United States than to any of its EU partners. The Germans import more from China that from any other EU country. Indeed, of its top eight trading partners four are countries outside the EU. Britain is rather different. It trades more with the 4.5 million people of the Republic of Ireland than with the two billion of India and China combined.

The German experience punctures one of the central arguments of the Brexit camp  that we have to leave the European Union in order to trade with the rest of the world. The Germans have proved otherwise and point us to a quite different lesson  that if you want to trade successfully you have to be organised in a way which gives meaningful support to your exporters and you have to make products the rest of the world wants to buy.

We fail miserably on both these counts, as our trade figures show. Britains trade deficit as a percentage of total economic activity is worse today than at any time since 1948, when the country was on its knees after the war. Our support to exporters is lamentable but the more telling point is that even when the pound was devalued and our exports became 30 per cent cheaper overnight after the 2008 financial crisis, there was still no pick-up in volumes. Clearly price is not the problem  it is that we dont have enough world- class products.

One should not let the facts get in the way of a good story, however, and theres no denying there is something seductive and appealing in the idea that plucky Britain could and should go it alone, leave the EU and enjoy the freedom to make its own trade deals on its own terms with the rest of the world.Unfortunately romance is one thing, reality another.

A trade deal is a negotiation and in a negotiation size matters. If you are playing poker and you have 10 to bet while your opponent has 100, chances are you will lose, however good your hand and however much you bluff. A negotiation between Britain and, say, China, India, Brazil or Russia  assuming any of these countries would be interested  would turn on who needed a deal most, and whats in it for them.

The Chinese think our glory days as a country are long gone and that we are now of little consequence in the world, but they still owe us a humiliation or two for the Opium Wars, which set us up to grab Hong Kong. India has a 60-year record of reluctance to open its economy to any foreign influence, let alone the erstwhile colonial power.

Brexiteers might think that gives us the advantage in trade talks  others have doubts.

There are practical problems too. The Brexit camp talks as if trade deals are only about money  allowing business to flow back and forth without penal customs duties. In truth they are much more about the elimination of non-tariff barriers  among other things setting standards for product quality which, for example, might insist that the Chinese do not put lead paint on childrens toys for the very good reason that it poisons the toddlers who suck on them.

These things matter, they cannot be wished away, but because there are thousands of products which might flow back and forth between countries there are tens of thousands of specifications to be argued over and agreed upon. It is that what takes the time.

Fishing for Leave flotilla 1 /16 Fishing for Leave flotilla Boats from the 'Fishing for Leave' campaign group and boats from the 'In' campaign join a flotilla along the Thames Jack Taylor/Getty Images A boat from the 'Fishing for Leave' campaign group sprays a boat from the 'In' campaign with water during a flotilla along the Thames Jack Taylor/Getty Images Kate Hoey and Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, show their support for the 'Leave' campaign for the upcoming EU Referendum aboard a boat on the River Thames Jeff Spicer/Getty Image A boat carrying supporters for the Remain in the EU campaign including Sir Bob Geldoff shout and wave at Brexit fishing boats as they sail up the river Thames Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images A pro-Remain inflatable dinghy sails in front of a flotilla of fishing vessels campaigning to leave the European Union as it sails under Tower Bridge on its way up the river Thames in London Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Bob Geldof (centre) on board a boat taking part in a pro-EU counter demonstration, as a Fishing for Leave pro-Brexit "flotilla" makes its way along the River Thames John Stillwell/PA UKIP leader and Fisheries Minister George Eustice join Fishing for Leave flotilla of fishing trawlers travelling up the Thames to central London to campaign for the UK to leave the EU Lucy Young UKIP leader and Fisheries Minister George Eustice join Fishing for Leave flotilla of fishing trawlers travelling up the Thames to central London to campaign for the UK to leave the EU Lucy Young A pro-Remain inflatable dinghy sails in front of a flotilla of fishing vessels campaigning to leave the European Union as it sails up the river Thames Stefan Wermuth/Reuters UKIP leader and Fisheries Minister George Eustice join Fishing for Leave flotilla of fishing trawlers travelling up the Thames to central London to campaign for the UK to leave the EU Lucy Young Bob Geldof (right) on board a boat taking part in a pro-EU counter demonstration, as a Fishing for Leave pro-Brexit "flotilla" makes its way along the River Thames John Stillwell/PA A police boat chases pro-Remain campaingers in inflatable dinghies as they try to disrupt a flotilla of fishing vessels campaigning to leave the European Union as they sail up the river Thames Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

It applies to foodstuffs too. Do you want beef laced with growth-enhancing hormones or chlorine-bleached chicken from the US, without knowing what it is, or any of their other GM-modified foods? Currently, EU regulations keep them out of British shops. Outside the EU they will have to be re-negotiated, or the protection abandoned. We might, as the Brexiteers claim, be able to do a deal in a couple of years but only if our negotiating stance is one of abject surrender.

Note, too, what all these product standards mean to the British firms doing the exporting. They complain now about EU regulations but at least when these are met they cover Europe, and the EU has the clout to make them stick in many other countries too. This umbrella will disappear. After Brexit British exporters are going to have to be aware of and match the different requirements and regulations for every country they want to trade with  and to produce documentary evidence to prove at every border that they have done so.

EU referendum: All you need to know

Faced with these difficulties some such as economist Patrick Minford in the Brexit camp argue that we wont bother with trade deals after all but simply open our borders (to goods but obviously not people!) and rely on the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). This is unlikely to work for us either, for at least two reasons.

First, WTO rules state that if you strike a good deal with one country you have to offer the same terms to everyone else. That would seem to rule out getting a sweet deal with the EU, or indeed the EU giving a sweet deal to us  it would not stop there but would have to be offered to all comers.

Second, relying on WTO rules would have a devastating effect on the City, the earnings it makes and the taxes it pays because they do not cover trade in services. Financial firms in London would lose the right to trade freely across Europe. The entire regulatory system would be thrown into limbo because the EU rules which currently govern activity would cease to operate and until the UK legislated there would be nothing in its place. This would mean UK-based firms could be classed as unregulated financial-sector entities, making them uneconomic to deal with for any customer in Europe. Their business would dry up.

That is why banks and insurance companies based in London are so appalled by the idea of Brexit. They will have to leave or wither. And that is another reason why, outside the EU, the world will be a much chillier place.
T he findings of our significant national EU poll today, which shows a narrow lead  53 to 47 per cent  for Brexit makes alarming reading for the Remain side. Leave has pulled ahead, and the referendum is only a week away.

One reason for the swing is a palpable anti-establishment mood among voters and Brexit campaigners. The Leave side has almost made a merit of the fact that most big businesses, global financial institutions, think tanks, the Bank of England and Treasury experts have warned about the dangers of leaving the EU. It is a sign, they argue, that the establishment is looking after its own interests. Today, the Governor of the Bank, Mark Carney, responded angrily to criticisms of his warning that the economic consequences of a Leave vote could be severe. He rejected unwarranted political threats and declared that the Bank had a duty to promote economic stability. David Cameron, too, has described the attacks on the Bank as deeply concerning. He also had in mind the criticism from two former Tory leaders and two former chancellors about the Treasurys warnings against Brexit. Yet if experts are suspect, who should voters believe? Institutions such as the Bank, the Treasury, the IMF and the Institute for Fiscal Studies do have expertise and should be respected, even if they are not infallible.

In one sense there are grounds for public disaffection with the political and financial elites who enjoy a way of life remote from that of ordinary voters: the metaphor of the gravy train hurts because there is truth in it.

But anti-authoritarianism can mean that real arguments based on solid evidence and past experience can simply be dismissed and replaced by assertions and wishful thinking. That makes for poor public debate. It is not good enough for the Leave side to assert that they would say that, wouldnt they? when an institution warns about the economic consequences of leaving the EU. Instead the Brexiteers should stick to honest argument. There are important issues on both sides in this referendum but dismissing experts for being experts is dangerous.

A lost generation

Young Londoner Lewis Elwin was stabbed to death in Tooting in April; now his family has called on Sadiq Khan to make tackling knife crime a priority for his mayoralty. As Lewiss brother puts it, if the extreme violence seen on Londons streets is not stopped, we will end up with a lost generation. Indeed, last year 15 teenagers were fatally stabbed in the capital  worryingly, that was a significant rise on previous years, when violence appeared to be decreasing. It is vital, therefore, that Mr Khan addresses the issue as a matter of urgency.

One way to discourage the carrying of knives is effective use by the police of stop-and-search. It is a controversial tactic but Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe admitted last year that efforts to scale it back had contributed to the rise in knife offences. As the Mayor has already said, the key is to ensure stop-and-search is intelligence-led. Mr Khan clearly recognises the importance of reducing gang and knife culture  now he must work out how to achieve that aim.

Hats off to the duchess

One glamorous young royal at Ascot is good news for racing; two is fabulous. The spectacle of Princess Mary of Denmark and the Duchess of Cambridge at Ascot, both in wonderful hats, is just the fillip the racing industry needs. The Duchess is a new addition to Ascot; the organisers must hope it becomes a habit. Wonderful for the millinery trade too.
R ebecca is 10. Her brother Daniel is five, her little sister Lily is two-and-a-half. Their mother Sasha is a nurse. She is pregnant. Their dad is an architect. They live an hour-and-a-half away from London in a small, Seventies caravan, one room, no toilet. There are no hot water facilities where they live, and the queue for a cold shower can take up to two hours. The nearest toilet is a five-minute walk away. They share it with 500 people. Five minutes can feel very long in the dark if youre two-and-a-half, five or 10, and with rats to encounter. The children dont go to school. Rebecca misses it. There isnt one where they live. There is cholera, scarlet fever, dysentery and impetigo.

Ben, 17, is their neighbour. He was sleeping by candlelight when the nylon of his sleeping bag caught the flame and burnt 70 per cent of his body, leaving him in a coma. He awoke on Monday, alone in a hospital, to find his leg had been amputated below the knee. Nobody in the hospital could explain what had happened to him because he had just arrived and cannot speak the local language.

Richard is a civil engineer. He loves to bake. He speaks three languages fluently. He hasnt seen his wife and children for a year-and-a-half and he winces when he speaks their names. He does not know when he will see them next. His parents and brother are in Canada. He, like Sasha and her family, is living in limbo, waiting.

That limbo is the largest refugee camp in Calais. The names above are actually Syrian, Ethiopian or Afghan but the people and their stories are real. Richard applied for asylum in Canada in December. He qualifies for asylum, as do Sashas family. He is living under a tarpaulin. His wife and children are stuck in a refugee camp in Jordan; he is desperate to be reunited with them. Ben fled Ethiopia after his friend was shot during peaceful student protests. He also meets the criteria to receive asylum.

If you were to travel 90 minutes and sit face-to-face with these weary people and hear their stories youd want to do all you could to help. Youd look at Lily, Daniel and Rebecca, and be haunted by them afterwards as you tucked your children in. Youd think about their pregnant mother, what it must have been like for her, getting on a dinghy with her children, surrounded by sea and strangers, because that was her best option. Youd imagine Richard the baker from Daraa when he said, I loved my country. I didnt want to leave. This is not who I am.

The image of Ben, in his hospital bed, and the others, stick with you. You think about geographic lottery and these people when you shower in hot water, when you wash your clothes, when your kids are wet after the rain and can get dry and warm.

We are apathetic because can afford to be. Volunteer Ruth Elborn says. We watch it on telly and say, isnt it awful?, then dont do anything because we cant engage with the tragedy of it. People think someone else must be doing something. In this instance, few are. There are fewer than 100 volunteers looking after the needs of 5,168 people in Calais alone, mostly under the umbrella of a grassroots NGO called Help Refugees.

Britain was once known as a nation of compassion. We met wartime refugees with efficiency and kindness. Please help.

helprefugees.org.uk
Claire Danes's glow-in-the dark gown stole the show at this years Met Gala - but its designer, Zac Posen, has revealed he was worried it would go wrong.

Posen, who has known Danes since they were both teenagers growing up in New York, designed the pale blue fibre-optic dress to fit the balls theme of Manus x Machina.

The fabric was made of three microscopic fibre-optic threads, which is basically a clear plastic filament, and some silk fibres in between, so it was quite soft.

Celebrities wearing Zac Posen 1 /18 Celebrities wearing Zac Posen Noami Campbell Campbell walks the Zac Posen runway with the designer Neilson Barnard/Getty Doutzen Kroes Attending the Met Gala in 2010 Larry Busacca/Getty Lena Dunham At the Golden Globes in 2013 Jason Merritt/Getty Kate Winslet Attending the BAFTAs in 2009 Tim Whitby/Getty Heidi Klum At the Bambi Awards 2015 Clemens Bilan/Getty Kim Kardashian With the designer during the CDFA Vogue Fashion Fund Awards in 2010 Ben Gabbe/Getty Diane Kruger On the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival Sean Gallup/Getty Gwyneth Paltrow At the Oscars 2007 Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Reese Witherspoon At the 'How Do You Know' premiere in LA Kevin Winter/Getty Eva Longoria At the Golden Globes in 2011 Jason Merritt/Getty Rihanna Attending the first Annual Diamond Ball Jason Merritt/Getty Katie Holmes With Posen at the Met Gala in 2015 Andrew H. Walker/Getty Dita Von Teese At the Met Gala in 2014 Larry Busacca/Getty Demi Moore Attending the 22nd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards Getty Images

He confided his fears about the dress in a talk at the V&A, saying: [I thought] Oh no, what if her left hip goes out or all of a sudden her right boob is out.

The designer, 35, who came to London at 18 to study at Central Saint Martins, had originally planned a different idea for the fashion and technology theme.

For a while I wanted to do a fully 3D-printed gown but I didnt think it was appropriate for Claire, he said.

As for his rivals creations, many of which ignored the theme, he said: I really thought Id have more competition.
M arcus Davey has a tear in his eye as he tells me that it is exactly 10 years ago to the minute that he reopened the Roundhouse (literally, with a key handed to him by colleagues).

Having said that, the artistic director of the Camden venue also has tears in his eyes when he tells me about a marriage proposal that took place at the Radiohead gigs the week before we meet. Im in a bit of an emotional state right now, he admits.

Its the day of the anniversary (a snazzy shirt is hung on the back of the office door, ready for the party) and the start of a big year for the venue which is celebrating not one birthday but three: 10 years since refurbishment, 50 years as an arts venue and 40 years of punk.

Davey is running me through some of his favourite moments since the completion of the 30 million rejuvenation  watching James Brown rehearse; the electric half-hour before Bob Dylan performed; Prince playing two gigs in one day, and being terrified by Terry Gilliam bouncing on the tension-wire grid suspended across the Victorian ironwork.

But the most important thing for him? Seeing moments of transformation with young people. Theres nothing like it. How could there be?

Feel the passion: Marcus Davey admits being swept up in the emotion of the Roundhouse anniversary celebrations / Jonathan Birch

Seventeen years after Davey started at the Roundhouse with a team of five working basically in huts in a mudpatch and trying to make one of Londons most illustrious venues great again, the focus now is on working with a younger generation.

'The projects we run are with industry professionals... they are professionals in the space. They have to deliver like anybody else... nobodys being condescended to'

He believes the key is not to patronise anyone because of their age, whether they are a trustee (the Roundhouse has two young members on its board of trustees and a separate youth advisory board) or taking part in a creative scheme at the venue.

The projects we run are with industry professionals: young people are learning skills in a professional way. And theyre not only treated as professionals, they are professionals in the space. They have to deliver like anybody else... nobodys being condescended to. Nobodys being treated any differently.

Fifty five per cent of the 3,000 young people they work with each year are from disadvantaged backgrounds and Davey is frank that some people need more of a chance than others.

When talking about the importance of diversity, he apologises for sounding a bit preachy but is emphatic that there are extraordinary voices to be heard and if we shut the doors to those voices we are going to make society a less wealthy place for us all, both creatively and financially.

Part of the team: former youth trustee Dave Gamble, now programming manager at the Royal Albert Hall / Andy Paradise

He says a key target is to make careers in the arts both attractive to and attainable for young people from any background. He cites the challenges of competition for talent from creative digital industries such as app development and lack of spaces to rehearse, record and perform in London.

Despite describing himself as a dishevelled old bloke, Davey, 48, is hearing this from the kids themselves, whether its admiring their bass guitar only to find out its a loan from the venue because they cant afford one, or that for GCSE they must choose between art, music and drama.

He is excited about the poetry slam final taking place the following night because spoken-word poetry is really important for us because its bubbled up from young people. And its the new rock and roll.

On the referendum he is yet to meet a young person who wants to leave the EU: They cannot imagine why anyone would vote against it. They see their opportunities not just in this country but in other countries in Europe.

High flying: the circus summer project / Peter Schiazza

Those voices are not just being listened to in rehearsal rooms or backstage; they are at the very top of the organisation. Were trying to make our teams diverse, our boards diverse, our young people diverse  when you have diverse young people on the main board of trustees their views are going to be heard.

It is these board members who have been responsible for ensuring that cheaper catering options are available, discussing the London Living Wage and the needs of staff in lower salary bands, and speaking up about LGBT issues which led to the introduction of gender-neutral toilets.

When I ask if he thinks the current Government values the arts as it should, he chuckles and (very politely) volunteers: What I would say is that I work with organisations around the world and in different countries. The arts are championed in different ways and the other countries can never understand how little funding the arts receive here.

But he compliments George Osborne on holding his nerve with arts funding in challenging times, and minister Ed Vaizey, who absolutely loves it, absolutely loves the arts.

Davey is proud of the influence that Roundhouse schemes have had on young people: some now work as producers at BBC 1Xtra, one ex-youth trustee, Dave Gamble, is programming manager at the Albert Hall and one has even recently gone into the police, which for Davey was a moment of utter joy  thats a person who has an understanding of our world and theyre going into another profession and theyre happy doing it.

When Syriah Bailey, who now works on film festivals in Canada, was a young trustee her discussion of LGBTQ issues for young people led to her working on the venues diversity strategy and proved a catalyst for Puffball, a 2014 CircusFest production which encouraged people to confront their views and went on to tour the UK.

The mutual respect between the venue and its young beneficiaries was demonstrated in 2011 on the evening the London riots began. It was the opening night of Curtain Call by artist Ron Arad, and while Davey and his team were forced to lock in around 150 guests as the chaos unfurled outside, social media galvanised itself and a crowd of young people and families came to stand around the outside to protect the building from damage.

It was awful. I saw running battles. But all the young people and some of the parents were coming down and saying Do not touch the Roundhouse. Do not touch the Roundhouse. It was really just amazing. That was a really powerful moment for us.

In August, Arads installation will return to the Roundhouse as part of the celebrations, which will no doubt bring on a few more tears from Davey. I hope hes got tissues ready because its going to be an emotional year.

@littlewondering

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H isham Matar is the London-based author of two remarkable, autobiographical novels, In the Country of Men, 2006, which won many prizes, and Anatomy of a Disappearance, 2011, which recapitulates another version of his story and therefore appears slightly less original.

Both are about a boy growing up in Tripoli and Cairo, as Matar did, whose father is abducted, as Matars father, the prominent Libyan activist Jaballa Matar, was, from Egypt where he had sought refuge from Colonel Gaddafis regime, never to be seen again by his wife and sons.

They are novels about being unable to take possession of ones own life, burdened not just by exile but by never knowing what has become of such an admired and deeply loved father, searching for him everywhere, endlessly. How can one write under the weight of inconclusive grief? Matar asked in an essay.

Now, in this marvellously well-handled memoir, he drops fiction to present his own story openly. In March 2012, Matar, with his mother and his American photographer wife Diana, returned to Libya for the first time in 33 years, following the overthrow of Gaddafi, still hoping to find out what had happened to his father.

Hisham was just eight the last time he saw his homeland. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return? he asks at the start. But The Return offers no ultimate answers either, only traces.

It was in 1979 that the Matar family moved to apparent safety in Egypt and in 1986, aged 15, that Hisham himself then chose boarding school in England. He says he felt a correspondence with this strange place and now feels bound to England not so much by the length of time that I have spent here but by nature. He was in London, aged 19, when, in March, 1990, his father was kidnapped by Gaddafis thugs and taken to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, along with other members of his family who had remained in Libya.

The family had no news of Jaballa for three years, when a few letters were smuggled out. He wrote: The cruelty of this place far exceeds all that we have read of the fortress prison of Bastille. And: At times a whole year will pass by without seeing the sun or being let out of this cell. But he asserted: My forehead does not know how to bow.

The family also received an audio-cassette letter from Jaballa, recorded over a recital of the Koran the prisoners had been given, which ends with a low howl. Hisham had only previously heard him utter anything like this on learning of the death of his own father (at an advanced age). He says he has only managed to listen to this tape five times over the past 25 years.

Jaballa Matars fate has never been revealed, although in all likelihood he died, at the age of 57, in Abu Salim, on June 29, 1996, when 1,270 prisoners were executed in the prison yard. The bodies were buried where they fell, in shallow mass graves. Months later, they were exhumed. The bones were ground to dust and the powder poured into the sea.

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My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future, Hisham says. Yet he also maintains that this uncommon cruelty links him to a common loss. Even if I had held his hand and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.

The Return  which acknowledges that the unimaginable would happen: people would come to long for the days of Qaddafi  burns with anger at the frustration of Hishams attempts to find out what had happened to his father, including from the dictators son Seif el-Islam. Yet it is also remarkably composed and calmly written, its tone at times reminiscent of one of Kazuo Ishiguros puzzled, damaged narrators, at others of the skilful recovery of the past performed in Edmund de Waals The Hare with Amber Eyes. Although highly informative about what it is to be part of Libyas tormented history, it is even more valuable as an expression of both filial and paternal love.

To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a sons gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows. With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful  for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget  that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers. For Fathers Day.

11.99, Amazon, Buy it now
Y ou can never have too much pasta. We love it in every incarnation: fresh and simple with a plain tomato sauce, cheesy and baked, spicy, creamy, herby, meaty  whatever. Wed eat it daily if we could.

Weve both been lucky enough to visit Italy recently  Jemima was whisked away on a romantic weekend to Positano with her husband, Ben, as a final holiday before their first child is born (due any day now), while Lucy was taken to Venice for a late birthday treat from her boyfriend, Tom.

In Italy, farm to fork eating (that is, the idea of eating only seasonal local produce) isnt some new fashion  its a way of life. We feasted on the freshest seafood, home-made cakes and desserts, and local cheeses and meats. But the pasta was the highlight  whether the zucchini spaghetti, wild clam linguine or tagliatelli with prosciutto crudo, mortadella and porchetta.

This dish combines pasta with another of our favourite Italian dishes: Caprese salad (buffalo mozzarella, fresh sweet tomatoes and basil, sometimes with the added ingredient of the avocado, made to resemble the red, green and white Italian flag).

Key to its success is using the best tomatoes possible. In Italy they are as sweet as strawberries, and if you use fluffy, tasteless alternatives you will end up with a pale imitation. If youre avoiding gluten, dont worry  you can still enjoy this dish using a gluten-free option (Ocado does nice quinoa, corn and rice options). Serve with a bottle of ice-cold rose, and there you have it  a perfect summer lunch.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

2 shallots, sliced

1 large fennel, finely chopped

4 garlic cloves, finely sliced

1 tsp dried chilli flakes

1 glass of white wine

400g good-quality, sweet baby tomatoes, halved

2-3 balls of buffalo mozzarella, roughly torn

2 avocados, peeled and chopped into small squares

100g pine nuts, lightly toasted

Zest of 1 lemon

1 bunch of basil

1 bunch of tarragon, leaves picked and stalks discarded

Olive oil

1 handful of parmesan (optional)

500g spaghetti (if using gluten-free, wash well after cooking to stop congealing)

Method

Heat a drizzle of olive oil in a medium frying pan and add the shallots, fennel, garlic and chilli. Cook over a medium heat until caramelised  keep stirring so as not to burn the garlic.

In the meantime, bring a pan of water to the boil and add the pasta  cook according to the instructions on the pack. Drain, refresh, drizzle with olive oil and shake, then leave to one side.

Add the white wine to the pan and reduce for a minute or so then add the tomatoes  cook for about 5 minutes.

Add the cooked spaghetti back to the pan and combine with the tomatoes, then carefully stir in the mozzarella, avocado, pine nuts, lemon zest, basil and tarragon. Season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Divide between bowls and grate parmesan on top if desired.

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A teenage boy has been stabbed outside a pub in east London.

The 15-year-old was knifed in the street close to the Royal Star at the junction of City Road and Mora Street.

Police were called at about 3.45pm and taped off the pavement outside the pub.

The boy was taken to hospital but his injuries are not believed to be serious.

A Met Police spokesman said: "Officers from Islington CID are investigating.

"There has been no arrest at this early stage."
A retired Royal Mail engineer stabbed to death his estranged partner after she threatened to sell their family home, a court heard.

Ron Bacon, 64, lay in wait for 56-year-old legal sectary Tracy Goodwin before knifing her 13 times after she arrived home from work, it is said.

Afterwards, he dialled 999 and said: I lost it, I stabbed her, I couldnt help it, Snaresbrook crown court heard.

The couple, who had two children and two grandchildren together, shared a home in Kidbrooke, south London,for 36 years, but had been living separate lives since 1998.

Bacon allegedly murdered Ms Goodwin, who worked for international law firm White & Case, when she threatened to force through the sale of their home.

Prosecutor Zoe Johnson QC said Bacon retired from the Royal Mail 22 years earlier for health reasons and his incapacity benefit payments had recently stopped.

He lived in the constant fear of losing his home and had threatened to shoot himself, she told jurors.

The evidence suggests the defendant was lying in wait for Tracy Goodwins return from work that night, said Ms Johnson.

He stabbed her repeatedly as soon as she entered the house.

The killing happened as Ron Bacon was enraged because he was in imminent danger of losing his home.

It was approaching critical point, he was in an impossible position.

He did not want to move but could not afford to stay without Ms Goodwin.

He could ignore it no more.

Neighbours heard screaming just after 1am on February 24 last year, and when police arrived they found a bloodied Bacon crouched in the hallway next to Ms Goodwins lifeless body.

Ms Johnson said the victim had defence injuries showing she had tried to resist the attack.

Bacon denies murder and the trial continues.


D etectives are hunting two men after a spate of street robberies, including one incident where a woman in her 60s had the wedding ring torn from her finger.

All three attacks targeted people for their jewellery in the Golders Green area over a two-week period, police say.

In the first incident, on May 31, a couple were walking on Bigwood Road when they were attacked by the hooded pair.

The woman, in her 60s, had a wedding ring wrenched from her before the men fled just after 11pm.

In a statement afterwards, the couple said: We have been married for 43 years and this ring has a lot of sentimental value.

It means more to us than it could to anyone else and we are desperate for it to be returned."

Stolen: The couple say they are 'desperate' for this ring to be returned / Met Police

On June 10, the men struck again on Southway, grabbing a ring from another woman at around 6.20pm.

Their most recent attack took place three days later when a woman had her earrings stolen in Wildwood Road at 4.20pm.

The men are described as aged between 20 and 30, black and around 5ft 10ins tall.

Superintendent Paula Light from Barnet police said officers had upped their patrols in the area.

She said: Although these incidents are thankfully rare, I would urge people to be vigilant and report any suspicious persons immediately to police, we're asking the community to be alert but not afraid.

Anyone with information should call police on 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.


A group of eleven migrants were found crammed in the back of a lorry when it was stopped by police in east London.

Officers discovered the eight adults and three children inside the vehicle after they were called to reports of banging from inside.

The driver of the lorry had pulled up in Ashton Road, Harold Hill to ask for directions at about 11.30am yesterday.

Dan Attroll, who works on Ashton Road, told the Romford Recorder he had called the police after hearing banging from inside.

He said: I went to speak to the driver about where he had parked and the next thing I heard was bang, bang, bang.

We then heard people screaming and shouting inside which was when I rang the police.

The driver seemed genuinely gobsmacked that anyone was in his truck.

Migrants: witnesses were reportedly told the men, women, and children had come from Iraq / Tom Andrews/SWNS.com

The eight men and women were arrested on suspicion of illegal entry into the UK, while the children were taken into police protection.

The lorry, which appears to have Austrian branding, is thought to have travelled from Belgium.

The migrants reportedly told witnesses that they were from Iraq.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said Havering Police were called after receiving reports of banging came from the back of a lorry in Ashton Road.
C ampaigning for the EU referendum has been suspended today after MP Jo Cox was shot in her constituency.

Vote Leave suspended its battle bus campaigning for the rest of the day after the MP was attacked.

The 41-year-old mother-of-two is currently fighting for life in hospital after being shot in Birstall, West Yorkshire.

One witness claimed the gunman yelled "Britain first" during the attack.

Boris Johnson was scheduled to visit a business in Ipswich for the final stop of his East Anglia trip, but Vote Leave said this would no longer take place.

Mr Johnson said: "A colleague of ours, Jo Cox, has been attacked and very seriously injured today.

"We have decided in view of that to suspend all campaigning. The visit will not be going ahead."

He added: "Our thoughts are very much with Jo Cox and her family."

The Stronger In team said it was also putting campaigning on hold.

Its account tweeted: We are suspending all campaigning for the day. Our thoughts are with Jo Cox and her family.

The Prime Minister also announced he would not be going ahead with a Remain event in Gribraltar.

He said: It's right that all campaigning has been stopped after the terrible attack on Jo Cox. I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar."
P oliticians across the country have been sending out their best wishes to MP Jo Cox after she was shot in her constituency.

An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother-of-two, 41, was left lying bleeding on the pavement after the incident in Birstall, West Yorkshire, today.

Ms Cox is fighting for life in hospital after the attack, which happened near the town's library.

David Cameron wrote: "Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family."

Aftermath of the Jo Cox shooting

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: "Utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox.

"The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time."

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted : "Shocked to hear terrible news about brilliant MP and friend Jo Cox. Thinking of her and praying for her and family.

Boris Johnson tweeted: Just heard the absolutely horrific news about the attack on Jo Cox MP. My thoughts are with Jo and her family.

Yvette Cooper said: Terrible, terrible news. Thoughts and prayers with good friend Jo & with her family.

And Hilary Benn wrote: All our thoughts and prayers are with Jo Cox and her family.

Streathams Chuka Umunna wrote: Utterly awful news about an attack on a superb and wonderful colleague @Jo_Cox1 - hoping and praying for her and her family right now."

Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw branded the news absolutely ghastly and Tottenhams David Lammy called it truly horrific.

Labour's John Mann said Ms Cox is an "absolutely outstanding" MP and he was "totally shaken" by the attack.

He told the BBC: "She is one of the real stars of the new intake, not just on the Labour side but on all sides.

"She is hard working, eloquent, everyone likes her, she's one of the real stars of the future."
T he family of a student stabbed to death yards from Sadiq Khans front door today called on the Mayor to put knife crime at the top of the agenda or risk a lost generation of young Londoners.

Lewis Elwin, 20, who was training to become an electrician at South Thames College, was knifed by a gang who ambushed him on a Tooting street busy with parents on the school run.

He staggered a short distance before he collapsed and died in the road.

Lewis had arranged a one-on-one meeting with Mr Khan two years earlier after being knifed in the chest.

His eldest brother Byron, 31, an electrician, said Lewis had told the then-MP he needed to be moved out of the area as he no longer felt safe.

His widowed mother and five elder siblings got together at the family home in Southfields just two days before the murder to warn Lewis he was mixing with the wrong crowd.

Byron said: Im so glad we did it, as we are normally too busy. We now have a last family photo of us all.

He had convinced Lewis to return to college two years earlier to follow his footsteps and become an electrician.

He said: I tried to mentor him and let him see there is another path than hanging with friends on the street.

He was very caring, very family-orientated and wouldnt hurt a fly.

Nobody has been charged for the attack on April 18. Two 19-year-olds arrested in May have been released on bail pending further inquiries.

Mr Elwin added: Its not just about Lewis now, its about the next person that could be killed. There are a lot of potential witnesses but no snitching is the law on the street. People are too frightened of their reputation or what they look like to tell police anything.

We have got to do something  in five or 10 years we will have a lost generation who wont listen to us or share our values at all. Who else needs to be killed until knife crime is placed right on top of the agenda?

Mr Khan said: My thoughts and prayers are with Lewis Elwins family, and all those who have lost a loved one to this dreadful crime.

The rise in knife crime amongst our young people is deeply concerning. I have made it clear ... that tackling knife crime is a top priority. I will work to ensure our young people are given positive choices to deter them from carrying knives and joining gangs.

Police ask witnesses to call 020 8721 4005, or Crimestoppers, which is offering a 10,000 reward for details leading to a conviction, on 0800 555111 or at crimestoppers-uk.org.
T wo Muslims accused of plotting an Islamic State-inspired Remembrance Day beheading walked free from court today after being cleared of terrorist offences.

Yousaf Syed, 20 and Haseeb Hamayoon, 29, shared gruesome pictures of Westerners being murdered by IS fighters and joked about joining the extremist regime in a stream of WhatsApp messages uncovered by anti-terror police.

They told the Old Bailey although they were embarrassed about the conversations, they had no plans to engage in a real terrorist plot.

Both men stood trial late last year but a jury failed to reach a verdict. At the retrial, Syed was found not guilty and the jury again failed to reach a verdict on Hamayoon.

Mr Justice Saunders lifted reporting restrictions on the case when prosecutors said they would not seek to try Saudi-born Hamayoon a third time.

Syeds cousin, Nadir, 23, was found guilty at the original trial and will now be sentenced next Thursday for planning an attack to emulate the brutal murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

The British-born extremist, from Hounslow, used the PIN number 77911 on his phone  a reference to the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 and the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001  and was filmed stamping on a poppy in the street.

He had bought an 11-inch kitchen knife in preparation for the attack, and was arrested just days before the annual Remembrance Day commemorations in 2014.

Prosecutor Max Hill QC told the court the plot was inspired by a fatwa from IS leader Abu Muhammad al-Adnani calling for followers to carry out attacks in their home countries rather than travelling to Iraq and Syria to fight and "to kill civilians everywhere in the West.

Hamayoon, of Tudor Road, Hayes, and Yousaf Syed, of West Wycombe Road, High Wycombe, both denied preparing an act of terrorism.

Nadir Syed will be sentenced on Thursday 23.
T wo people smugglers have been jailed after an Afghan asylum seeker died in a shipping container as he and 34 others tried to reach Britain.

Lorry drivers Stephen McLaughlin, 36, and Martin McGlinchey, 49, from Northern Ireland, were convicted of conspiracy to facilitate illegal entry into the UK following a re-trial.

The Afghan Sikhs, including 15 children, were discovered on August 16 2014 after port workers at Tilbury Docks in Essex heard banging noises and cries for help.

When the container was opened, the asylum seekers were found crammed on top of plastic barrels full of liquid, with condensation pouring from the ceiling.

Among them was Meet Singh Kapoor, a 40-year-old who died during the overnight P&O ferry crossing from Zeebrugge, Belgium. A post-mortem examination found he died of natural causes.

Police said his family, who were travelling with him, watched him die and were powerless to seek medical help in the dark container that had just two air holes.

There were no toilets and the children were sick in carrier bags. At one point, the air holes were closed as other containers were loaded next to theirs, police revealed.

At Basildon Crown Court, jurors were told the asylum seekers were the "human cargo" of a "sophisticated international organisation" of people smugglers.

The court heard the asylum seekers had paid thousands of pounds to travel to the UK to escape persecution from radical Muslims in Afghanistan.

The men told how they paid around 28,000 per family for the crossing, raising the cash by selling their businesses, stock and family jewellery.

McLaughlin and McGlinchey were part of a team responsible for arranging the transport logistics of the people smuggling operation, the trial heard.

The pair organised for the container to be sent from Dover, Kent, to France so it could be picked up before being loaded with asylum seekers on a Belgian industrial estate.

On Thursday, McLaughlin, of Rose Park, Limavardy, County Londonderry, was jailed for eight years and McGlinchey, of Derryloughlan Road, Dungannon, County Tyrone, for nine years, Essex Police said.

A third man, Taha Sharif, 39, of High Cross Road, Tottenham, north London, was found guilty of the same offence following a trial last July. He will be sentenced on June 23.

Detective Chief Inspector Martin Pasmore, of Essex Police, said afterwards: "Vulnerable people seeking help were treated in an appalling way at the hands of these greedy criminals, which prevented any prospect of medical help for Mr Kapoor.

"My thoughts remain very much with his wife, children, family and friends, and the other surviving asylum seekers who endured such distressing and shocking conditions."
P olice are hunting three men after a man was seriously assaulted after a row in a pub.

The victim was attacked at The Old Fields pub in Replingham Road, Southfields.

He had a row with another man in a nearby supermarket before being attacked, police said.

As the victim returned to the pub, he was followed inside the pub by three men and was seriously assaulted, police said.

Fight: Police want to speak to the man pictured (image ref 204199) / Metropolitan Police

The three men ran from the scene towards Augustus Road and the victim was taken to a south London hospital with serious facial injuries.

Police have today released CCTV footage of three men they want to speak to in connection with the fight at 10.50pm on March 27.

One man involved in the fight was 6ft 1in tall, white, in his mid to late 20, with short dark hair, a trimmed black beard and tanned skin.

He was wearing a dark hooded puffa style jacket and dark blue jeans which were turned up at the bottom.

CCTV: Three men were thought to be involved in the fight (image ref 204201) / Metropolitan Police

The second man was 5ft 10in tall, white, in his mid 30s and was wearing a black hooded top and blue jeans.

Police said the third man involved in the fight was white, 5ft 11in tall, in his late 20s and had shaved had and stubble.

Appeal: Detectives have released CCTV of the assault (image ref 204202) / Metropolitan Police

He was wearing a grey hooded top, black t-shirt, blue jeans and black trainers.

Anyone with information should call police on 020 3276 2585 or 101, quoting the image reference numbers. Information can also be given to Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
P olice in south-west London have stepped up patrols around schools following a series of attempted child abductions.

Parents in Merton have been warned to be aware on school runs after three reports of attempted snatches in 10 days in Wimbledon and Raynes Park.

On Tuesday, June 7, a mother told police in Wimbledon Village a white minibus pulled up next to her son at the junction of Church Road and Burghley Road at 8am.

A man asked the child if he wanted a lift to Kings College School in Wimbledon and showed him a piece of paper with school names on it.

The boy repeatedly refused the invitation after the man tried to cajole him inside the empty minibus.

As he walked away, the driver said to him: I'll give you credit for soldiering on like that".

Police confirmed no pupils have been hurt in any of the incidents.

Officers in Merton said: We are aware of three reports of incidents of either attempted abductions or suspicious behaviour in the Wimbledon and Raynes Park areas of the borough since June 7.

There have been no people harmed during any of the reported incidents.

To date, the descriptions of the vehicles and drivers given by the children are different and involve both male and female drivers. We have increased patrols in the area.

We are working with local authority partners to ensure appropriate personal safety advice is available to schools in the area.

Elsewhere, parents in Sutton have been informed students have been approached by unknown adults twice in the space of a week.

In a letter, revealed on Facebook, staff at Overton Grange said a man, described as in his 40s or 50s, white, fat and bald approached a Year 8 girl and asked her to get into his black van in Devonshire Road.

The letter added extra staff have been deployed on roads near the school at the end of the day in response to the incidents.

One parent also claimed letters have been sent home to parents in Kingston following similar approaches in which children were offered lifts.

A Met spokeswoman confirmed a similar incident is being investigated in Kingston but added it was not believed to be linked.
E mergency doctors are being offered the chance to do shifts in one of the worlds top major trauma centres if they take a job at a crisis-hit north London hospital.

New consultants will be lured to North Middlesex University Hospital with the powerful incentive of gaining experience at The Royal London in White-chapel, under an innovative partnership between two NHS trusts.

Barts Health, which is the UKs largest trust and runs The Royal London, offered to help North Mid after the Edmonton-based site was threatened with the loss of its 26 A&E junior doctors because they were getting inadequate training. NHS leaders have launched an urgent rescue plan to avoid a catastrophe in north London if North Mid is forced to close its A&E, which sees up to 500 people a day.

At Prime Ministers Questions yesterday Catherine West, Labour MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, told David Cameron that the hospitals emergency department was in complete meltdown and demanded swift action.

He said Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt will continue to monitor this closely. North Middlesex has the poorest A&E waiting times in London. Only seven of 15 consultant posts and seven of 13 middle-grade emergency posts are filled.

Neither Barnet Hospital, The Royal Free in Hampstead nor Whipps Cross in Leytonstone has the capacity to cope with an influx of casualty patients displaced from North Middlesex.

Barts Health, which also runs Whipps Cross, said: All NHS emergency departments are affected by the national shortage of senior A&E doctors. Weve agreed an innovative arrangement with North Middlesex whereby their prospective new consultants can do stints in our major trauma centre at the Royal London. We hope this will act as a powerful incentive for our NHS colleagues to be able to recruit extra staff.

North Middlesex is also seeking help from The Royal Free to share expertise and provide mutual support.

North Middlesex said: We are looking at a number of initiatives to resolve staffing issues and relieve pressure on A&E. We apologise to patients who have had to wait for longer than we would like. Our waiting time performance is now starting to improve.
A private hospital today revealed an increase in the number of boys it treats for eating disorders.

The Nightingale Hospital in Marylebone recently relaunched its young persons unit after noting a 30 per cent rise in demand for services.

Adolescent girls continue to form the majority of patients seen for eating disorders  but the number of boys admitted for treatment rose from 15 in the first quarter of 2015 to 17 in the first three months of this year.

The figure was 12 during the corresponding period in 2013.

Clinicians said they had noticed a rise in orthorexic tendencies among male patients  boys and men who were concerned about body image and obsessed with a perfect body.

The revelation comes after Mayor Sadiq Khan banned Tube adverts that could put pressure on people, particularly the young, to conform to un- healthy or unrealistic body images.

The total number of patients seen by the eating disorder unit rose from 40 in the first quarter of last year to 41 in the same period this year. The hospital also helps young people suffering from depression, anxiety and self-harm. More than 50 per cent of mental illness develops in adolescence.

The Duchess of Cambridge has spoken out about the need for parents and teachers to support youngsters who have mental health issues and to be aware of the symptoms.

Dr Bijal Chheda-Varma, a psychologist and therapist at Nightingale Hospital, said: One general theme we have been looking at is the increase in the importance given to body image.

There is a perfectionist attitude, the wish to be very slim. The role of social media may be contributing to body image disorders.

Dr Alex Horne, lead child and adolescent consultant at the hospital, said: With the treatment programmes at our unit, children and young people have access to the highest standards of care in order to support recovery.

The hospital said its eating disorders unit was now at capacity.

Five of the six beds are currently in use and there are plans to increase the number of beds to nine next year to cope better with demand.
M ore than 170,000 extra diesel cars are driving on Londons roads since 2012 despite public health warnings about the dangers of air pollution.

Department for Transport figures show there are now 774,513 diesel cars in the capital, a 30 per cent increase.

Labour today criticised former mayor Boris Johnson for his lax approach to taking diesel cars off the roads. Assembly member Leonie Cooper said his Ultra Low Emission Zone plans had been too small in scale and ambition.

A spokesman for Mr Johnson described the claims as nonsense.

Ms Cooper also warned that the Government was running out of excuses for not bringing in a diesel scrappage scheme  where drivers of old, polluting diesel cars are offered cash incentives to trade them in for lower emission vehicles.

Mayor Sadiq Khan has asked Transport for London to look at the cost of implementing its own scrappage scheme as part of a government one. He is also considering a T-charge on cars, vans and lorries emitting toxic fumes in central London.

However, many blame the rise in the number of diesel vehicles on former Labour chancellor Gordon Brown, who slashed tax on diesel in 2001 in order to cut carbon emissions.

About 9,400 Londoners die prematurely every year from breathing the citys polluted air.

Labour said Mr Johnson had plenty of warnings about diesel, including the World Health Organisation classifying it as a definite carcinogen in 2012.

In 2014 Transport for London claimed the popularity of diesel was a contributing factor in Londons failure to comply with EU air pollution limits.

Ms Cooper said: Its beyond belief that the last mayor, presented with this evidence, didnt act more vigorously to reduce the number of diesel cars on our roads. His Ultra Low Emission Zone was too small in scale and ambition, betraying his lax approach to tackling air pollution in the capital.

But a spokesman for Mr Johnson said the former mayors administration had taken the most ambitious and comprehensive measures to address air pollution anywhere in the world.

He added: Far from failing to act, Boris Johnson led the way with emissions of NOx down 25 per cent while he was mayor. His proposal for an Ultra Low Emission Zone is a world first.

No one has proposed such tight regulation over such a large area. The ULEZ will reduce pollution emissions by around half in central London with profound impacts across the rest of the capital.

Labour omits to mention that Sadiq Khan was sitting as a minister in the Department for Transport when his own boss, Gordon Brown, encouraged people to switch to diesel hoodwinking motorists and adversely affecting air quality.

Perhaps Sadiq Khan should join his fellow former minister, Barry Gardiner, and apologise to Londoners and motorists for helping to drive people to diesel.

The Government is considering increasing diesel taxes to get the cars off the roads.
T he British Museum was today going to court to challenge a 720,000 tax bill from Camden Council, claiming it should get a reduced rate because it is a charity.

The council has argued that two restaurants and a gift shop inside the museum should be treated as separate entities liable for the full business rate.

Lawyers for the Bloomsbury museum, which is the most popular tourist attraction in the UK with 6.7m visitors a year, were due to challenge the tax bill at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court today.

The initial decision for the bill came from the Valuation Office Agency, part of HM Revenue and Customs, but an appeal by bosses at the museum was rejected by the council.

The Gallery Cafe and Great Court Restaurant are run by private catering firm Benugo. It signed a five-year deal in 2012, believed at the time to be worth around 40million.

The museum falls under the ultimate control of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

A museum spokeswoman said: The British Museum will be attending the magistrates court and will contest the case. As a charity which applies all of its funds for charitable purposes, the museum considers that charitable relief against business rates should be applied to the whole of its site.

A Benugo spokeswoman said: As food and drink provider for Gallery Cafe and Great Court Restaurant at the British Museum, Benugo is not liable for the payment of any property rates.

Town Hall finance chief Councillor Theo Blackwell said: We have to set aside a very large reserve each year to deal with business rate appeals, thats whether the amount charged by the government is right, or whether an organisation suddenly becomes a charity, in which case they are entitled to 80 to 100 per cent off.

That means we have to divert resources to cover potential losses, because we have to pay it back to the government. Thats why we need to be careful about what is a charity and what is not.
M Ps and colleagues comforted each other and laid tributes during an impromptu vigil in Parliament Square this evening following the murder of Jo Cox.

The 41-year-old was shot and stabbed in Birstall, West Yorkshire, this afternoon and later died from her injuries.

Tommy Mair, a 52-year-old man, has been arrested over the attack.

This evening, people gathered near Parliament to pay their respects to a Labour MP described by MP Stella Creasy as "one of a kind".

Loss: Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn stands during the vigil

Scores of flowers were laid in her memory, with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and deputy Tom Watson providing tributes.

The Union flag was also flying at half-mast over the Houuses of Parliament this evening.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman has confirmed The Queen will write privately to the MP's husband Brendan Cox.

Comfort: People hug each other at Parliament Square / Philip Toscano/PA Wire

Meanwhile, Stephen Timms MP, swho survivied a violent attack at his own East Ham consituency surgery in 2010 when he was stabbed twice in the stomach, also paid tribute.

He said: "I am shocked and appalled by the terrible news this afternoon. Jo was a wonderful MP, and a wonderful person. I - and everybody else - had been very impressed since her election last year.

Tribute: Flowers left at Parliament Square / Philip Toscano/PA Wire

"I would like to express deepest condolences to Jo's husband Brendan and their family.

"Although details remain unclear, it seems Jo was simply carrying out her job on behalf of her constituents. The circumstances appear very similar to those when I was attacked six years ago."

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
K en Livingstone has claimed he might be Jewish just days before he is due to appear in front of MPs over an anti-Semitism row.

The former Mayor of London told the Jewish Chronicle that he may have Jewish ancestors on his mothers side of the family.

He then went on to claim he had conversations about his possible Jewish ancestry with former Labour MP Lord Janner, who died before facing prosecution over alleged child sex offences.

Mr Livingstone said: Greville Janner used to drive me home from the House of Commons at night. We would chat away about the Middle East.

He would speculate about whether or not I was Jewish because my grandmothers name was Zona.

I have lots of Jewish friends and I always have. I have had members of the Board of Deputies round for parties.

Mr Livingstone, who was suspended from the Labour Party after claiming Hitler supported Zionism, also claimed that he had been stopped by Jewish supporters who agreed with his views.

He said: They tell me theyre Jewish. They say: We know what you said was true, dont give in.

The politician, who is a close ally of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, denied claims that he was obsessed with Nazi history and said he had not read Mein Kampf.

He said: I have never seen the Nazi manifesto. If I would have seen it, I would have read it.

If anyone actually wants to send me a copy of it

Mr Livingstones comments came after he appeared before the House of Commons select affairs committee on Tuesday for an inquiry into anti-Semitism.

Ahead of his appearance, he released a written statement stating: I detest racism and condemn anti-Semitism.

Livingstone on anti-semitism

Indeed my political career has totally opposed any such views concerning any religious or ethnic group."
T raders at Camdens street food market have launched a campaign to save their stalls, after they were served notice by management.

Camden Market Management has partnered with street food giant KERB, which runs pop-up style markets in Kings Cross and the City.

KERB plans to revamp the market and offer more restaurant-quality street food.

However, many stall-holders have vowed to fight the gentrification.

Traders were last week sent a letter which told them their last day of trading would be Sunday, July 10. The market is then due to close for renovations, before reopening on July 22 under KERBs management.

Existing stall-holders have been told they will be able to apply for a pitch  but many say increased rents make their position untenable.

Traders are also objecting to a centralised payment system which is reportedly due to be introduced.

Kimberley Duke, 23, who has run a stall with a business partner for two years, will leave next month.

She said: What KERB is trying to do is for it to become more like Borough Market or Spitalfields Market, more high end.

"I have got nothing against Borough Market, but its already there, we dont need to have it again.

"KERB already have their own traders, and theyve upped the rent Im heartbroken, Camden is so rich with culture, and I really feel that its losing a part of its heart.

She has launched an online petition asking KERB to at least allow stall-holders to continue through the summer.

Many other traders said they will seek pitches elsewhere in London  or wind up their businesses. One said: Some of the rents are doubling, some are tripling, so Im not going to apply.

Another said: To make a profit on their terms well have to double our prices and whos going to buy a sandwich or a kebab or whatever for 10?

In a joint statement, Camden Market and KERB said: We are pleased to say that the vast majority of West Yard food traders have expressed an interest in becoming part of KERB Camden Market and a number have already applied.

"Every single application received will be given careful consideration and we will be speaking to traders in due course about the outcome.
T he campaign to quit the European Union has surged into a six-point lead with exactly a week to go, a sensational Ipsos MORI poll reveals today.

In a dramatic turnaround since May, some 53 per cent now want to leave and 47 per cent want to stay, excluding dont knows.

It is the first time since David Cameron pledged the referendum in January 2013 that Vote Leave have come out ahead in the respected monthly Ipsos MORI telephone survey, which is exclusive to the Evening Standard.

Immigration has overtaken the economy as the most important issue to how the public will vote, which is a significant boost to Boris Johnson and the Leave campaign.

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The survey reveals massive distrust of claims made by politicians on both sides, but especially the predictions of doom after a Brexit made by Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, dubbed Project Fear by critics.

EU referendum: All you need to know

Among key findings are:

Only 17 per cent of people believe the Chancellors flagship claim that UK households will lose 4,300 and be permanently poorer after a Brexit, despite the analysis carrying the full weight of the Treasury. Some 70 per cent think it is a falsehood.

Almost half believe Boris Johnson is telling the truth when he says that Britain sends 350 million a week to the EU, even though it has been criticised as misleading by independent experts. The claim is believed by 47 per cent and disbelieved by 39 per cent.

More people think they will be better off in five years outside the EU than inside, despite Government warnings of lost jobs and lower incomes if Britain leaves.

Immigration is now the most critical issue, cited as very important to their vote by 33 per cent, up five points in a month, including just over half of leave supporters.

The economy has fallen to second place in the league table of important issues, down five points to 28 per cent.

A fifth of people say they might change their mind - which means the outcome is impossible to predict.

Overall the poll suggests a significant shift to the Leave camp in the past month, which coincides with the official Vote Leave campaign focusing more strongly on immigration.

Over half - 52 per cent - of people backing Leave list immigration as very important to their vote, while 41 per cent of remain backers cite the economy as very important.

Last PMQs pre-referendum

Strikingly, in the battle of claim and counter-claim it is Mr Cameron who is coming off worst.

Ipsos MORI tested public attitudes to some of the most bitterly contested claims made by both sides, and discovered markedly greater scepticism about what Remain were saying.

Remain campaigner Sir Bob Geldof was criticised for making this gesture at hard working fishermen / Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

For example, Mr Cameron listed six complete untruths by Vote Leave last week, including a claim that the UK is liable for future eurozone bailouts.

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However, the poll found 48 per cent think the claim is true, and just 40 per cent think it is false.

EU referendum campaign - in pictures 1 /45 EU referendum campaign - in pictures Boris Johnson (left) kisses a wild salmon as he is shown around Billingsgate Fish Market in London with porter Greg Essex, uncle of TV presenter Joey Essex, on the final day of campaigning Stefan Rousseau/PA A van displaying an advert saying 'Don't Wake Up With Nigel Next Friday' is driven through Westminster Jack Taylor/Getty Images Michael Gove speaks alongside Priti Patel (left) and Kate Hoey at a Vote Leave campaign event at Old Billingsgate market, London Dominic Lipinski/PA A passenger on a train reads the Evening Standard on the London Underground EPA Delia Smith during the Channel 4 EU referendum debate Dominic Lipinski/PA David Cameron appears on a special referendum edition of BBC One's Question Time, hosted by David Dimbleby Stefan Rousseau/PA Jayne-Anne Gadhia, CEO of Virgin Money, speaks to Sir Richard Branson about his views on the EU referendum Ben Pruchnie/PA JD Wetherspoon beer mats that have been printed by the pub chain with strong messages in favour of leaving the EU JD Wetherspoon/PA Ukip leader Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey on board a boat taking part in a Fishing for Leave pro-Brexit "flotilla" on the River Thames Stefan Rousseau/PA Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron greets supporters after arriving in the Liberal Democrat Vote Remain campaign bus in east London Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Boris Johnson MP visits Sam Cole Foods fish processing factory in Lowestoft, Suffolk, where he was campaigning on behalf of the Vote Leave EU campaign Stefan Rousseau/PA A boat carrying supporters for the Remain in the EU campaign, including Sir Bob Geldoff, shout and wave at Brexit fishing boats as they sail up the Thames Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images Yvette Cooper MP gives a helping hand to her husband and former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, as he gets up from a story time session, during a Vote Remain canvassing visit to Shadsworth Children's Centre in Blackburn. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images The Sun backs Brexit Daniel Sotrabji/AFP Getty Images Eddie Izzard campaigns for the Labour In campaign for the EU referendum Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage poses with the party's new EU referendum poster in Westminster Jack Taylor/Getty Images CBI director general Carolyn Fairbairn, Rohan Silva, Chuka Umunna, Sarah Sands, Munira Mirza and MEP Daniel Hannan at the Evening Standard Brexit Debate Nigel Howard The Vote Leave campaign bus passes a Vote Remain poster featuring Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson as it arrives for a visit to clothing and uniform manufacturers Simon Jersey in Accrington, Lancashire Stefan Rousseau/PA David Cameron makes a joint appearance with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan as they launch the Britain Stronger in Europe guarantee card at Roehampton University Yui Mok/Getty Image Prime Minister David Cameron recreates the famous Beatles Abbey Road album cover by walking across Abbey Road crossing with Tessa Jowell, former secretary of state for culture, media and sport, on May 20, 2016 in London, England. The Prime Minister is campaigning to 'Remain' in the European Union ahead of a referendum on June 23 to decide on whether or not to leave the European Union Jeremy Selwyn Leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage holds aloft a UK Passport as he speaks during an anti-EU campaign event in Birmingham AFP/Getty Images Campaigners wear clothing bearing the slogans "I'm Turning My Back On The EU", and "I Want To Leave The European Union, Do You?" as they attend a an Anti-EU (European Union) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) pro-Brexit campaign event, in Birmingham Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Image A British national receives her postal ballot paper AFP/Getty Images Boris Johnson MP takes to the wicket during a visit to Chester-Le-Street Cricket Club as part of the Brexit tour Ian Forsyth/Getty Images A campaigner with the pro-Europe campaign group called 'Irish4Europe', hands out leaflets to visitors to the London vs Mayo Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) football game at Ruislip GAA grounds in Ruislip, northwest London AFP/Getty Images Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn and former leader Ed Miliband (L) address supporters and members of the public in Doncaster town centre on May 27, 2016 in Doncaster, England. The Labour In campaign battle bus arrived in Doncaster today with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband MP to canvass for votes and hope to persuade UK citizens to stay in the European Union when they vote in the EU Referendum on the June 23 Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Secretary of State for Justice, Michael Gove, leaves after attending a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street Carl Court/Getty Images A Vote to Leave campaigner holds a placard as Leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Christopher Furlong/Getty Images The image of a sari-clad Asian woman exactly balanced on a see-saw with a shaven-headed "thug" was devised by advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi for the Operation Black Vote campaign. OBV said the poster - which features the slogan "A vote is a vote" and is due to be displayed on 37 digital billboards in London and Manchester - highlighted the "demonisation of foreigners and people of colour" in the campaign Two pumps of Fuller's London Pride are branded with 'IN' and 'OUT' labels in the Red Lion Pub in Westminster Dan Kitwood/Getty Images People walk past a graffiti mural of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson kissing, which is sprayed on a disused building in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol. The image, called 'The Kiss of Death' and painted by pro-EU campaign group We Are Europe, highlights the upcoming deadline for voter registration for the referendum on 7th June Ben Birchall/PA The front page of The Sun newspaper on 9th March The Sun London Mayor Boris Johnson addresses supporters during a rally for the 'Vote Leave' campaign on April 15, 2016 in Manchester, England. Boris Johnson is taking part in a 48 hour 'Brexit Blitz' of campaigning in Northern England. Britain will vote either to leave or remain in the EU in a referendum on June 23 Christopher Furlong/Getty Images John Whittingdale, Theresa Villiers, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel attend the launch of the Vote Leave campaign at the group's headquarters in London Stefan Rousseau/Getty Images

Opinion was split 45-45 on another contentious claim that Turkey will be fast-tracked to EU membership, giving free movement rights to 75 million.

But the public reject Ukip leader Nigel Farages claim that there is a higher risk of sex attacks by migrants from staying in the EU: Just 28 per cent thought it true, 62 per cent said false.

Mr Camerons claim that the peace and stability of Europe would be put at risk by a Brexit was rejected by 59-32.

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And the argument made by ex-premiers Sir John Major and Tony Blair that stability in Northern Ireland would be endangered was disbelieved by 61-21.

Even among Remain backers, more than half think the 4,300 figure is untrue.

Some 31 per cent thought their lives would be better in five years time if the UK leaves the EU.

Only 18 per cent thought they would be better off if Britain stays in the EU.

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Neither side is much trusted.

Overall, only 19 per cent think politicians from both leave and remain are mostly telling the truth during the campaign.

Over twice as many, 46 per cent, think politicians are mostly telling lies.

If there was a general election, the poll found the Conservatives on 35 per cent, with Labour on 34, Ukip on 10 and the Lib Dems on nine.

Gideon Skinner, head of political research at Ipsos MORI, said: The Leave campaign is getting their messages across, especially on the key public concern on immigration.

TODO: define component type apester

"But the Remain camp is finding it much harder to convince people that their core economic messages, both on the risks of Brexit and the benefits of staying, is going to have a personal impact on their lives.

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* Ipsos MORI interviewed 1,257 adults across GB by telephone from 11th  14th June 2016. Data are weighted. Full details at www.ipsos-MORI.com
C abinet minister Liz Truss today said she is championing Britain staying in the EU for her daughters future.

The Environment Secretary was among more than a dozen female ministers who launched an appeal to women to back Remain on June 23.

Ms Truss said part of the reason she was campaigning for the UK to remain in the EU was for the benefit of her daughters, aged 10 and seven.

I dont want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe; or where they are hampered from growing a business because of extortionate call costs and barriers to trade, she said.

She also argued that EU rules are vital to cleaning up toxic air in London as much of it is blown in from the Continent.

She said: Every parent wants their children to grow up in a healthy environment with clean water, fresh air and thriving natural wonders. Being part of the EU helps protect these precious resources and spaces.

With women voters seen as key to deciding the referendum outcome, Home Secretary Theresa May, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, Overseas Aid Secretary Justine Greening and Energy Secretary Amber Rudd were among 30 female MPs and peers who laid out their reasons for Britain staying in the European Union.

The Women for Remain campaigners said that up to 2.7 million women have not yet made up their mind which way to vote, and one in seven currently backing Remain or Leave may still switch sides.

Ms May argued that Britain was more secure against terrorism and other threats by remaining In.

In 2005, Hussain Osman  who tried to blow up the London Underground on 21/7  was extradited from Italy using the European Arrest Warrant in just 56 days, she stressed.

Similarly, the police will soon be able to check DNA records for EU nationals in just fifteen minutes. Under the old system it took 143 days.

Stressing that many economists fear if Britain quits there will be an economic shock, Ms Morgan added: It will undoubtedly lead to job insecurity and fewer opportunities for the next generation.

Ms Greening explained: In todays world, we fix things by working together. Thats the only way we can tackle issues like female genital mutilation, forced marriage, or violence against women.

While Ms Rudd claimed: The best way of keeping bills as low as possible is to stay in Europes energy market.

City minister Harriett Baldwin emphasised that a record one million women lead businesses in the UK, including successful entrepreneurs such as Alexandra Chong, Karen Jones, Anya Hindmarch, Baroness Martha Lane Fox and Baroness Karren Brady.

Five women who have all said they are voting in, she said.

There are one million more women than men in Britain. We have real power to shape the future of our country and be the decisive voice in this referendum.
A pro-Brexit poster showing a queue of migrants has been branded disgusting by critics after it was launched by Nigel Farage today.

Politicians from all parties accused the UKIP leader of xeonophobia and exploiting the Syrian refugee crisis in a "most dishonest and immoral way".

But Mr Farage, fresh from a flotilla rally on the Thames yesterday, dismissed critcisms of the poster, which is emblazoned with the slogan breaking point.

Labour's Yvette Cooper said: "Just when you thought Leave campaigners couldn't stoop any lower, they are now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way.

"Europe didn't cause the Syrian refugee crisis, and pulling out of the EU won't stop people fleeing conflict and persecution by Isis and the Assad regime."

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said: "Using the innocent victims of a human tragedy for political propaganda is utterly disgusting. Farage is engaging in the politics of the gutter.

"The refugee crisis has not been caused by the EU. It is a common challenge that all countries must deal with effectively and humanely - and that is far more possible inside the EU than out."

Conservative MP Neil Carmichael weighed in: "Distasteful propaganda like this can only make our immigration challenges worse, not better, and damage community cohesion in Britain."

TODO: define component type apester

But Mr Farage defended the poster, which he launched on a battlebus tour through Westminster today.

He claimed: "This is a photograph, an accurate, un-doctored photograph, taken on October 15 last year following Angela Merkel's call in the summer and, frankly, if you believe, as I have always believed, that we should open our hearts to genuine refugees, that's one thing.

Criticism: Farage defended the poster today / Philip Toscano/PA Wire

"But, frankly, as you can see from this picture, most of the people coming are young males and, yes, they may be coming from countries that are not in a very happy state, they may be coming from places that are poorer than us, but the EU has made a fundamental error that risks the security of everybody."

Told that the people shown were refugees, he replied: You don't know that - they are coming from all over the world.

"If you get back to the Geneva Convention definition, you will find very few people that came into Europe last year would actually qualify as genuine refugees."

He added: "When Isis say they will use the migrant crisis to flood the continent with their jihadi terrorists they probably mean it."

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
V oters are today heading to the polls in a by-election sparked by Sadiq Khan's victory in the mayoral election.

The new London Mayor secured a majority of 2,842 for Labour in Tooting at the general election but vacated the seat in May after heading to City Hall.

Labour councillor and junior doctor Rosena Allin-Khan is battling to hold the London constituency for her party against Conservative Dan Watkins.

The by-election will be closely watched by Jeremy Corbyn's critics in the Labour Party, but coming a week before the EU referendum, the contest has been overshadowed by the closing stages of the Brexit battle.

Born and raised in the area, Dr Allin-Khan works as an emergency doctor at St George's Hospital and is also deputy leader of Wandsworth Labour group.

Mr Watkins, a local businessman, gave Mr Khan a close fight at the 2015 general election.

The seat has remained a Labour stronghold since the 1974 General Election - though the Conservatives slashed Mr Khan's majority to just a few thousand in 2010 and 2015.

Mr Khan was elected in Tooting in 2005 after the previous Labour incumbent Tom Cox was succeeded by him after more than 30 years in the post.
L ondoners are set to head to the polls to decide on Britains future membership of the European Union.

The capital is expected to back the remain camp as voters turn out to have their say in the historic referendum.

But dramatic new polling for the Evening Standard shows Brits back leaving the EU by 53 per cent to 47 per cent, excluding don't knows.

The Standard ventured out to hear the views of some of the Londoners backing Brexit.

'A bunch of unelected bureaucrats'

Voting to leave: Steve Armstrong

Steve Armstrong, 29, told the Standard he wanted Britain to opt out for "a multitude of reasons".

The national account manager, from Uxbridge, said: "I believe that we're allowing our sovereignty to be governed by a bunch of unelected bureaucrats.

"The EU was something that was set up after the Second World War when it was needed, for example for trade laws.

"I don't agree with what the EU has become.

"And I think it's absolutely disgraceful that David Cameron and the government are scaremongering by saying that if we leave, they are going to put all our taxes up."

'We are just guinea pigs'

James Moore believes the EU has an 'unhealthy' hold over Britain

Ex-soldier James Moore, also 29, said he is opting to vote leave as he believes the EU has an "unhealthy" hold over Britain.

The London-based security worker, from Horsham, said: "We spend millions of pounds a day in the EU and it feels like we get nothing back.

"It's money that could be spent on the armed forces, schools and the NHS.

"We're better off out. We were once a great nation and now we are just guinea pigs."

'This is our one and only opportunity to take a stand'

Voting for Brexit: Frances Mantle

Accountant Frances Mantle, 53, who is originally from Wales, said: I feel that we have got to take back control of our country and our laws and regulations.

I feel that we need to leave and that this is our one and only opportunity to take a stand. Its very important that people turn up to vote whatever they decide.

'L aws and regulations are thrust upon us'

Backing Brexit: Michael Moore

Michael Moore, 44, a director at a software company is also backing Brexit.

He said: We dont have the power to repeal any of these laws and regulations that are thrust upon us, theres nothing that can be done. David Cameron tried to negotiate and he came back with ifs and maybes - nothing concrete.

My friends and family are 50/50 on the matter but I feel that that is only down to the uncertainty.

'W e are strong enough to stand on our own two feet'

Backing Brexit: Gillian Venning has already voted to leave the EU

Hotel consultant Gillian Venning, 54, said: Ive already voted no by post.

I understand the risk involved and I think either way we vote there could be an economic downturn but as a country I have a strong belief we are strong enough to stand on our own two feet.

I considered the long-term view and my childrens futures and I thought it would be better to have powers the EU have back with us.

' I want our own sovereignty back'

Backing Brexit: Anna Speed-Matthews said it was time for Britain to leave the European Union

Anna Speed-Andrews, 46, property management firm, said: I think the EU is going down the pan.

We need to take back control and the biggest concern I have is that I want our own sovereignty back. We cant do that while we are part of the European Union.

I believe we should be in charge of our own destiny.

' I dont think our Prime Minister has a backbone'

Voting leave: Ex-soldier Stephen Rowe said he is backing Brexit

Ex-Coldstreams Guard soldier Stephen Rowe, 54, said he was also backing Brexit.

He said: Ill be voting no. A lot of people wont remember what it was like when we werent part of the EU but I can.

There has been some scaremongering on both sides but I dont think our Prime Minister has a backbone. He should let people make their decision.

TODO: define component type apester

We have situations where our court can make a decision which is overturned in Europe, that cant be right.
A robotic employee will be deployed instead of human council workers to deliver frontline public services for the first time, it was revealed today.

Enfield council, hit with budget cuts and job losses, has bought an American artificial intelligence programme that can makes its own choices and track customers emotions.

The AI answers residents questions as a human would and can hold thousands of conversations at once.

It is the first time IPSofts model, called Amelia, has been used by the British public sector, with one survey suggesting robotic task automation is 60 per cent cheaper than every human worker. The AI, already used by professional services giant Accenture, will be deployed on the Labour-run councils website this autumn.

The cognitive agent also answers customer queries for banks and gas firms, helps on an IT service desk and advises mortgage brokers.

Amelia will diagnose and resolve problems for Enfield residents and sense whats happening through learning and actions. It will guide residents on-screen via a chat features, and is available in text and as a talking digital avatar.

Enfield plans to use Amelia to help residents with internet access find information and complete forms. But if Amelia cannot answer a question, it calls in a human colleague and learns from them.

But its purchase follows nearly 350 redundancies at Enfield council in the past year and has raised fears further jobs are at risk. Officials approved funding for the project under delegated powers but without discussion in the councils committees.

Enfield repeatedly refused to say how much was paid for the software. The council needs to save 56 million by 2020, after already suffering 118 million of government cuts.

Chetan Dube, president of IPsoft, has said Amelia was not about replacing labour with cheaper labour, but replacing labour with cognitive systems  to be able to answer a question as a human would understand it.

James Rolfe, Enfields director of finance, resources and customer services, said: The customer shouldnt see they are interacting with a digital agent, it should be a seamless experience.

Mr Rolfe added there were no plans to sack any of its 50 call centre workers but he gave no guarantees. Jo Laban, deputy leader of Enfields opposition Conservative Group, said: There has been no discussion about this whatsoever in Enfield and the implications could be enormous.

There looks like there will be a serious impact on service provision and potentially job losses.

Residents want interaction with real people who can empathise with concerns, not AI.
A smartphone app that nudges patients with alcohol-related liver disease away from their favourite drinking dens and off-licences is being trialled by a London hospital.

Sixty patients whose drinking has resulted in them being admitted to a ward at the Royal Free hospital, Hampstead, will be enrolled on the scheme.

The AlcoChange app uses GPS technology to send alerts if a patient is near a regular drinking area or shop selling alcohol. It can also measure intoxication levels when the patient blows into a breathalyser plugged into the phones headphone socket.

Dr Gautam Mehta, honorary consultant at the Royal Free and senior lecturer at UCL, said patients often needed help to prevent them returning to the bottle. More than one in three UK adults drinks to harmful levels, and 600 people a year with alcohol-related liver disease are admitted to the Royal Free.

Dr Mehta told the Standard: These people tend to come back into hospital. Forty-four per cent are re-admitted within 12 months. If they carry on drinking, 50 per cent will be dead within three years. But if they stop drinking, more than 80 per cent are alive after 10 years.
A 20 million pay-out to the secret wife of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has been quashed by the Court of Appeal because the High Court judge took a "short cut" while handling the case.

Palestinian-born Janan Harb, 68, was awarded 12 million in cash and two luxury homes in Chelsea from the late King's son, Prince Abdul Aziz, by Mr Justice Peter Smith.

However, the judge's decision was today thrown out by the Court of Appeal, which said he had mishandled the case so badly that it must be retried.

In the damning ruling, Lord Dyson, Master of the Rolls, sitting with Lord Justice Moore-Bick and Lord Justice McFarlane, said the judge had failed to examine the evidence properly and accused him of taking a "short cut" that undermined his final decision.

"In our view, the judge's approach to the evidence was unsatisfactory in a number of significant respects", they said in the scathing judgement delivered this morning.

"He failed to identify whether an agreement of the King alleged by Mrs Harb had been made.

"In addition he failed to carry out a proper evaluation of all the evidence in order to test its strengths and weaknesses."

Mrs Harb was awarded a large settlement last November after she told the High Court she had married the King in 1968, aged 19, in a secret ceremony under sharia law at the Al Sharafiya Palace.

She said he promised to support her financially for life, and Prince Aziz agreed to a "huge" settlement at a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel in June 2003 while his father was gravely ill.

She said the deal was to buy her silence over her relationship with his father, but the Prince denied striking the deal.

Mrs Harb was not liked by members of the Saudi Royal family due to her Christian Palestinian heritage, and she was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1970.

The Court of Appeal found that although Judge Smith had found aspects of Ms Harb's evidence "bizarre", he had not explained properly why he preferred her case to that of the Prince.

"We regret to say that in our view the deficiencies in the judgement are so serious that it cannot be allowed to stand", added Lord Dyson.

A retrial of the whole case has been ordered under a new judge on a date to be set.

Judge Smith was also accused of being biased against the Prince's barristers because of an extraordinary bust-up over his lost luggage.

He is already under investigation after complaining during an entirely separate hearing involving British Airways that his suitcase had gone missing on a flight back from Florence.

Barrister Lord Pannick QC subsequently called for the judge to be formally investigated in an article in The Times, prompting Judge Smith to retaliate by writing to Blackstone Chambers, where Lord Pannick is a member, saying he would "no longer support" its barristers.

Blackstone is the chambers which supplied barristers to the Saudi Prince, and Lord Pannick represented him in early hearings into the case.

In its ruling, the Court of Appeal did not find that Judge Smith had been biased but said the letter to Blackstone was "regrettable".

Judge Smith, who is the senior figure in the Chancery Division of the High Court, has agreed not to sit on cases until the investigation into his conduct has been resolved.

Neither parties attended today's hearing to hear the judgement being delivered.
B ank of England governor Mark Carney hit back today at four senior Tory Brexiteers who made an extraordinary attack on the Bank accusing it of peddling phoney forecasts.

The Bank criticised unwarranted political threats from Leave leaders and claimed they misunderstood the banks legal duty to warn of dangers to financial stability of quitting the EU.

David Cameron also said it was deeply concerning that former chancellors Lord Lamont and Lord Lawson and former party leaders Lord Howard and Iain Duncan Smith had accused the Bank of spreading scare stories about the risks of Brexit.

Mr Carney has warned that Britain faces suffering an economic blow from leaving the EU, at least in the short-term which could see it possibly tipping into recession. He said that City firms would without question cut back on business activity in London which could see jobs, business and company headquarters moving to other financial centres such as Paris and Frankfurt.

But the four senior Tories, writing in the Daily Telegraph today, said: There has been startling dishonesty in the economic debate, with a woeful failure on the part of the Bank of England, the Treasury and other official sources to present a fair and balanced analysis.

Mr Cameron tweeted: Its deeply concerning that the Leave campaign is criticising the independent Bank of England. We should listen to experts when they warn us of the dangers to our economy of leaving.
T he black box of doomed EgyptAir flight MS804 has been pulled from the Mediterranean a day after the wreckage of the plane was discovered.

All 66 people on board the Airbus A320 were killed when it crashed while flying from Paris to Cairo last month.

The cause of the disaster remains a mystery and no terror group has claimed responsibility.

The wreckage was spotted on Wednesday in the Mediterranean, nearly a month after the plane came down between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast on May 19.

Egypt's investigation committee today said the cockpit voice recorder has been retrieved.

The black box - one of the two on board the plane - was damaged but that the vessel searching for the wreckage managed to safely recover the "memory unit, which is the most important in the recorder", the committee said.

The voice recorder should contain a record of the last 30 minutes in the cockpit, and is equipped to detect even loud breathing.

Experts say that it takes nearly 48 hours to retrieve data from the recorder, unless it is damaged.

Thursday's announcement comes a day after the committee said a search vessel had spotted and obtained images from the wreckage.

After the crash, Egypt's civil aviation minister Sherif Fathi said he believed terrorism was a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event.

However, no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet.

Additional reporting by the Press Association.
T he mother of the toddler snatched by an alligator at a Disney World resort in Florida was frantic and screaming for help as her son was pulled under the water, a witness told today.

Bill Wilson said Melissa Graves, 38, was running up and down the shore as two-year-old Lane was dragged into the lagoon while playing at the Grand Floridian resort in Orlando.

Lanes father Matthew, 42, tried frantically to save him, but could not pry the toddler from the alligators grasp.

Mr Wilson was sitting on the balcony of his room at the hotel when he heard what sounded like a fight breaking out.

The mother was there and she was frantic, running up and down looking, he told the Orlando Sentinal. I looked over and there was a lifeguard shouting Everybody get out of the water.

An aerial view of the resort where the boy died / Reuters

The holidaymaker said the tragedy, which happened on Tuesday at 9.20pm local time, unfolded in less than 30 seconds.

He added that just minutes earlier he had seen a group walking near the waters edge and noted it was very dark.

They were not standing under a light, he added. Following a search operation throughout the night and into the morning, dive teams located Lanes intact body in the man-made Seven Seas Lagoon yesterday afternoon.

Wildlife officials search the Seven Seas lagoon at Walt Disney World / Reuters

A statement from the family thanked well-wishers for their thoughts and hope-filled prayers.

A friend of the family, from Elkhorn, Nebraska, said she was stunned and heartbroken.

Anna Shymanski, a colleague of Mr Graves, a data officer at tech company Infogroup who also has a four-year-old daughter Ella, said: Matts family is the light of his life. His familys anguish is our own.

Disney chiefs were facing questions today about a lack of warning signs at the five-star resort, which is popular with British visitors.

Walt Disney Company chief Bob Iger said he had called Lanes devastated family as he issued a statement offering his condolences.
T he gunman who killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub posted on Facebook about the filthy ways of the West and condemned US bombing raids on IS-held areas in Syria, it emerged today.

Omar Mateen used the social network before and after the attack on Pulse nightclub, posting terrorism-related content and searching for Pulse Orlando and Shooting, US senator Ron Johnson revealed.

In a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg requesting details of five accounts associated with Mateen, Mr Johnson, chairman of the Senate committee on homeland security, said the homegrown extremist apparently posted America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State.

Pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and asking may Allah accept me, the posts added: The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the West, You kill innocent women and children by doing US airstrikes... now taste the Islamic State vengeance, and In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the US.

Orlando shooting victims 1 /65 Orlando shooting victims Stanley Almodovar III Facebook Edward Sotomayor Jr Facebook Luis S Vielma Amanda Alvear Facebook/AP Luis Daniel Conde Facebook/AP Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera Facebook/Reuters Juan Ramon Guerrero Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20 Mercedez Marisol Flores Facebook/AP Peter O Gonzalez-Cruz, 22 Facebook Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez Facebook/AP Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez Facebook/AP Frank Hernandez Facebook/AP Angel L. Candelario-Padro Facebook/AP Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala Facebook/AP Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega Facebook/AP Tevin Eugene Crosby Facebook/AP Enrique L. Rios, Jr Facebook/AP Kimberly Morris Facebook/AP Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon Facebook/AP Jean Carlos Mendez Perez Facebook Jason Benjamin Josaphat Facebook/AP Antonio Davon Brown Facebook/AP Oscar A Aracena-Montero Facebook/AP Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosad Facebook/AP Leroy Valentin Fernandez Facebook Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez Facebook/AP Eddie Justice Facebook Christopher Andrew Leinonen Facebook/AP Shane Evan Tomlinson Facebook/AP Darryl Roman Burt II Facebook/AP Martin Benitez Torres Facebook/AP Juan P. Rivera Velazquez Facebook/AP Javier Jorge-Reyes Facebook/AP Miguel Angel Honorato Jose Honorato/AP Brenda Lee Marquez McCool Facebook Anthony Luis Laureano Disla Anthony Laureano/Reuters Deonka Drayton worked at Pulse Facebook Akyra Murray Facebook Jean C. Nives Rodriguez Facebook Joel Rayon Paniagua Facebook Alejandro Barrios Martinez Facebook Juan Chevez-Martinez Facebook Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan Facebook/AP Jerald Arthur Wright Facebook/AP Paul Terrell Henry Facebook/AP Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz Facebook Geraldo Ortiz-Jimenez Facebook Composite of Orlando shooting victims. AP

Mateen, 29, also used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists, who killed 14 in California last December, to search for a speech by al-Baghdadi and to check the locations of FBI and law enforcement offices.

The letter was released in advance of a visit today by President Obama to Orlando to meet survivors of the massacre, and as mourners gathered at the first pre-funeral wake for one of the victims.

Clinton Slams Trump Over Orlando Shooting Remarks

Last night, drag queens and motorcyclists were among hundreds of mourners paying their respects at a funeral parlour visitation for Javier Jorge-Reyes, a 40-year-old salesman and make-up artist, prior to his body being flown to his home country of Puerto Rico. One friend said Jorge-Reyes was the kind of person who would just make your day.

The FBU appealed for the publics help in reconstructing Mateens final movements as it tried to establish how much his second wife, 30-year-old US-born Noor Salman, may have known about the attack.

The three-hour rampage began at 2 am on Sunday and ended with Mateen being killed by a police SWAT team. The FBI said it was still gathering evidence at Pulse and analysing mobile phone location data. On Saturday night, Mateen visited Disney Springs, an outdoor restaurant and retail complex at Walt Disney World.

Despite Mateens professed loyalty to IS, the White House has said it has seen no evidence that the shooting was directed by the terror organisation.

President Obamas visit was aimed to comfort the victims of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. This will be, I think, an emotional trip, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. The President recognises that he is a symbol for the rest of the country. But it would be impossible for him not to be personally affected by these kinds of conversations.
A six-year-old girl is facing surgery in hospital after she was attacked by a shark off a beach in Texas.

Marin Melton was bitten as she floated in a pink rubber ring with her father and older brother near Pirates Beach in Galveston on Tuesday evening.

She was rushed to the University of Texas Medical Branch where she is said to be in a stable condition after reportedly being bitten on her left leg.

Her father, Matthew Melton, from Texas, wrote on Facebook that his 'sweet' daughter was recovering from the attack and was due to undergo surgery.

Mr Melton earlier told officials that the shark was around 3 to 4ft long and was a white-bellied shark.

Earlier this month, British grandmother Doreen Collyer died after being attacked by a 16ft great white shark in western Australia
A number of Broadway stars have joined forces to record a charity single in the wake of the Orlando shootings.

Hamiltons Lin-Manuel Miranda, who picked up a number of Tony Awards at the weekend, will feature on the new recording of What The World Needs Now Is Love.

Miranda will sing alongside the likes of Idina Menzel, Gloria Estefan, Carole King, Matthew Broderick, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Jessica Parker and Rosie ODonnell on the single.

The group will donate 100% of its profits to the LGBT Center of Central Florida and will be recorded in tribute to the 49 men and women who were killed at Pulse nightclub on Sunday.

The project, which is being dubbed Broadway for Orlando, will be available to digitally download on June 20 on BroadwayRecords.com and later on iTunes.

A music video for the single, featuring appearances by the Impressive roll call of talent, will also be shot and released.

SiriusXM host Seth Rudetskys, who announced the initiative, said: The Broadway community was so terribly shaken and devastated by the horrific tragedy in Orlando.

Everyone wanted to do something as quickly as possible that would truly make a difference.

James Corden pays tribute to Orlando shooting victims at Tony Awards

Speaking on stage at the Tony Awards on Sunday night, Miranda recited a sonnet to honour the victims of the horrific attack.

He said: We rise and fall and light from dying embers, remembrances that hope and love last longer. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.

I sing Vanessa's symphony, Eliza tells her story. Now fill the world with music, love and pride.


This page is archived. Data published after 5 April 2022 can be found on the renewed website. Go to the new statistics page

Published: 16 June 2016

Road traffic accidents claimed 18 lives in May

According to preliminary data of Statistics Finland, 497 accidents involving personal injury happened in road traffic in May. In them, 18 persons were killed and 585 persons injured. The number of persons killed was four lower and that of persons injured six lower than in May 2015.

Persons killed in road traffic accidents 1/1985 - 5/2016 Deaths in the past 12 months by month

Of the persons who were killed, eight travelled by passenger car, three by van and four by motorcycle. Cyclists killed in road traffic accidents numbered three. Among those who died, 16 were men and two were women.

A total of 1 622 road traffic accidents involving personal injury happened in January to May period. In them, 81 persons were killed and 2 035 persons injured. The number of persons killed was 19 lower and that of persons injured 127 lower than in the corresponding period of 2015. Of the persons who were killed, 59 travelled by passenger car, six by van, one by moped, four by motorcycle and one by lorry. Pedestrians killed numbered six and cyclists four.

Source: Transport and Tourism: Statistics on road traffic accidents. Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Irmeli Segerholm 029 551 3219, Matti Kokkonen 029 551 3770, liikenne.matkailu@stat.fi

Director in charge: Mari Yla-Jarkko

Publication in pdf-format (164.6 kB)

Updated 16.6.2016

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Statistics on road traffic accidents [e-publication].

ISSN=2342-3846. May 2016. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 26.10.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/ton/2016/05/ton_2016_05_2016-06-16_tie_001_en.html
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In order to cut steel overcapacity in China and circumvent trade sanctions imposed on Chinese steel products, China is planning to transfer 10 million mt of steel capacity to Brazil , with several large-scale steel enterprises in China having expressed their interest in the project, according to the World Steel Association (worldsteel).

In the first phase of the project, some large Chinese steel companies will come together and build steel production capacity of 3 million mt in Brazil . According to worldsteel, the project is supported by the Brazilian government with the purpose of boosting the economy and increasing jobs in the country, while the project is also expected to meet steel demand in Brazil , South America and North America.
Thursday, 16 June 2016 14:47:52 (GMT+3) | Brescia

In the January-April period this year, Italy's steel imports from non-European Union (EU) countries totaled 3.787 million metric tons, up by 11.8 percent, while its steel exports to non-EU destinations amounted 1.161 million metric tons, down 14.7 percent, both year on year, as announced by the Italian steel producers association Federacciai.

The details are presented in the following table, with units of measurement in thousand metric tons:

Products Imports non-EU Exports non-EU Balance Jan-April

2015 Jan-April

2016 Y-oY change (%) Jan-April

2015 Jan-April

2016 Y-oY change (%) Jan-April

2015 Jan-April

2016 Ingots and semi-finished products 1,060 1,176 +10.9 41 47 +14.6 -1,019 -1129 Long products 193 219 +13.5 736 642 -12.8 543 423 Flat products 1,939 2,219 +14.4 637 492 -22.8 -1,302 -1,727 1st manufacturing products (*) 169 149 -11.8 392 354 -9.7 223 205 2nd manufacturing products (**) 25 24 -4 82 75 -8.5 57 51 Total 3,386 3,787 +11.8 1,888 1,610 -14.7 -1,498 -2,177

(*) Seamless pipes, welded pipes, forged bars, cold drawn sections and bars, drawn wire, cold rolled strips, welded sections, drawn wire.

(**) Flanges, pipe fittings, mining sections, diamond plates, pig iron powder.
Thursday, 16 June 2016 13:33:12 (GMT+3) | Shanghai

Guangdong Province-based Chinese steelmaker SGIS Songshan Co., Ltd (SGIS Songshan), a subsidiary of Guangdong-based steel producer Shaoguan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd (SGIS), has announced that it has decided to terminate its major assets reorganization plan of selling all its steel business assets and acquiring financial business assets belonging to Chinese steelmaker Baosteel.

SGIS Songshan stated that the acquisition of Baosteels financial business assets involved in many restrictions from the financial industrys regulatory policies. Due to the difficulties involved, SGIS Songshan has decided to terminate its assets reorganization plan.
Thursday, 16 June 2016 15:16:04 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

In April this year, Turkey's pig iron imports amounted to 90,879 mt, falling by 30 percent compared to March and down 10 percent year on year, according to the data provided by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK). The total value of Turkey's pig iron imports in the given month decreased by 21.2 percent month on month to $21.5 million, down 35.2 percent compared to April 2015.

Meanwhile, in the first four months of the current year, Turkey's pig iron imports increased by 23.6 percent to 396,723 mt, while the value of these imports decreased by 25 percent to $86.2 million, both on year-on-year basis.



In the January-April period this year, Turkey imported 233,620 metric tons of pig iron from Ukraine, up 144.36 percent year on year. Ukraine ranked first among Turkey's pig iron import sources in the period in question, followed by Russia which supplied 143,828 mt, down 32.44 percent year on year.



Turkey's pig iron import sources in the first four months of the current year are as follows:

Country Amount (mt) January- April 2016 January- April 2015 Y-o-y change (%) April 2016 April 2015 Y-o-y change (%) Ukraine 233,620 95,605 144.36 41,878 29,536 41.79 Russia 143,828 212,890 -32.44 40,472 70,278 -42.41 South Africa 16,589 3,750 342.37 7,693 - - Brazil 2,609 1,215 114.73 783 405 93.33

Turkey's pig iron sources in the first four months of 2016 can be seen in the graph below:
By MARK EVANS mevans@stegenherald.com Bloomsdale will probably host a major fireworks display. The pyrotechnics will not take place until 2024, however. During the Oct. 12 board of aldermen meeting, Kevin Wehner and city officials again discussed the possibility of a July 4 fireworks display at the youth soccer fields on land leased by the city
Romania's joining the Schengen Area would strengthen the capacity of the EU to secure its external borders, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lazar Comanescu told a joint press conference in Bucharest on Thursday with French Secretary of State for European Affairs Harlem Desir.

In his turn, the French official said that the Schengen accession topic now comes in a difficult context, stating that the crisis of the migrants and the terrorist attacks have cast doubts on the area itself. I hope we can move forward to make the Schengen Area advance and create the conditions that would allow Romania to join the Schengen Area, added Desir.

He mentioned having visited on Thursday morning the Border Police Operational Coordination Center, which he said is highly impressive thanks to the tools it uses in order to duly exert control of Romania's land, sea and air borders.

The two officials were expected to leave together for Moldova, as part of the joint actions of Romania and France's chairmanship of the Group for European Action for Moldova.

Agerpres
Romania's President Klaus Iohannis on Thursday concluded an official visit to Bulgaria with a tour of the construction site in Ruse of a natural gas connecting pipeline from Ruse, in Bulgaria, to Giurgiu - Romania.

"I have come today to the construction site of the connecting pipeline because this is a highly important work for Romania and Bulgaria, and to the extent that the BRUA pipeline - meaning Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria - comes to be, the entire network will gain in European importance. I want to see for myself how works are going on, as I wanted to learn from those directly involved how things are going on, and I received assurances that this part of the pipeline undercrossing the Danube will be completed by the close of the year," said Iohannis.

Also on Thursday, Iohannis toured the towns of Plevna, Grivita and Pordim that are emblematic for the fight for Romania's independence and the freeing of Bulgaria. He laid wreaths at monuments to the memory of Romanian warriors killed in Bulgaria.

In Pordim, the place of a King Carol I memorial house, where the command offices of the Romanian and Russian armies operated during the 1878 Independence War, Iohannis watched a short artistic event staged by locals and children, who performed Romanian songs and danced to traditional Bulgarian tunes. "Preserving traditions is highly important to us all. Together with my retinue, I have visited memorial places in Plevna and Grivita, and now here. (...) These are the places where a very important page in the history of Bulgaria was written that was important to my country, Romania, as well. I am very happy to see that these places that are important to my nation, these commemorative spaces are well kept, and I want to extend my thanks to the state officials as well as private individuals involved for keeping the memory of Romanian heroes alive," said Iohannis. President Klaus Iohannis paid an official visit to Bulgaria Wednesday and Thursday.

Agerpres
HONOLULU  The fight over regulating genetically engineered crops and pesticides in three Hawaii counties will be back in a federal courtroom Wednesday as some agricultural giants look to protect their research farms from bans against modified food in the islands.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Honolulu on ordinances that seek to regulate or outlaw genetically modified products in Hawaii, Kauai and Maui counties.

Agrichemical companies and trade associations sued each county, and federal court rulings sided with the businesses. The counties and interested environmental groups want the 9th Circuit to overturn the decisions.

There has been little scientific evidence to prove that foods grown from engineered seeds are less safe than their conventional counterparts. But in the islands, some are still concerned, especially about the use of pesticides.

Lawyers representing the counties argued that state laws do not specifically address genetically engineered crops or pesticides relevant to the proposed regulations. The counties, which have policing powers to protect the health and property of their residents, therefore assert that they have the right and obligation to regulate the industry, they said.

They also argued that the Hawaii Supreme Court should have taken up the issue as there is no written opinion specifically on genetically engineered crops in the state.

"This matter should have been turned over via certified question to the Hawaii Supreme Court because it's an important issue for the entire state of Hawaii," said David Minkin, representing the county of Kauai at the hearing.

The state Department of Agriculture regulates harmful plants in Hawaii, however, and attorneys representing the agrichemical companies said the state could and would specifically regulate genetically engineered plants if they felt it was warranted. The department has not said genetically engineered crops are harmful.

"The issue in this case isn't whether pesticides or GE plants should be regulated or what those regulations should be. The only question here is who does the regulating. Under current Hawaii law, the answer is clear," said Chris Landau, representing the companies in the Kauai and Big Island cases. "The state has comprehensive schemes in place."

The state regulates harmful plants in general, and the islands have a rather high level of regulation compared to other states, Landau said. For example, when arriving in Hawaii, people must fill out forms that declare any plants they are bringing into the state, something other states do not do.

While the state gives counties some power to regulate issues on a local level, those ordinances cannot conflict with state laws.

In Kauai, the county wants to require the companies to report exactly where and what they are growing and seeks to ban the use of pesticides. Attorneys representing the companies argued that the reporting process in itself is a form of regulation, and the farms would risk both vandalism and espionage if that reporting were required.

Organic and natural farmers on the islands are concerned that cross-pollination from the genetically modified plants will contaminate their crops and cause them economic harm.

Alika Atay, 62, who is a certified natural Hawaiian farmer who has lived on Maui his entire life, said his major concern is the heavy usage of pesticides.

"Our ancestors from this island lived here not just hundreds of years, but thousands of years. And they gave us this place very pristine, organic, natural. In a very short period of time these people have come to our island and they have poisoned our island,"Atay said.

"They are killing the Hawaiian people... if they kill us  or kill our land, kill our water  where do we have to go? This is our home. We must protect our home,"Atay said.

Hawaii's year-round warm weather makes the islands a favorite research spot for companies that use genetic engineering to develop new types of corn and other crops. The weather allows researchers to grow more generations of crops and accelerate their development of new varieties.

Monsanto and Dow Chemical have research farms in Maui County.

A judge ruled last June that federal and state law pre-empts that county's ban on cultivating genetically engineered crops, making it invalid. She stressed then that her order addressed only the question of county authority.

"No portion of this ruling says anything about whether GE organisms are good or bad or about whether the court thinks the substance of the ordinance would be beneficial to the county," U.S. District Chief Judge Susan Oki Mollway wrote.

Two years ago, Kauai and Hawaii counties adopted measures regulating GMO crops and pesticides. U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Kurren struck them down, saying state law superseded them.

The issue has led to protests. Demonstrators planted coconut trees and waved signs across the state last year as part of an international day of protests against Monsanto.

The protesters complained about the effects that agribusiness companies have on the community when they spray fields with chemical pesticides. They want the companies to stop using Hawaii as a testing ground for pesticides and genetically modified foods.
Fueled by $57 million in venture capital investment, Varsity Tutors has moved into expanded office space in Clayton and is on a hiring spree.

The company is trying to fill 40 open positions, and plans to add 150 jobs over the next two years.

If it adds all the expected jobs, the state of Missouri would provide $1.31 million in incentives through its Missouri Works program.

The company, an online service which connects students with tutors, is now in 20,000 square feet of space at 101 South Hanley Road. It had occupied smaller quarters in another Clayton building.

Varsity Tutors was created by Clayton High School graduate Chuck Cohn while he was studying entrepreneurship at Washington University in 2007. It now connects 50,000 students with 20,000 tutors.

The company has attracted millions in investment, said marketing vice president Greg Stahl.

Among those investing in Varsity Tutors last year were Silicon Valley venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures, rock musician Adam Levine and Stuart Udell, president of Catapult Learning.

Varsity Tutors spent $5 million on leasing and preparation in its new offices.

The company has a strong desire to remain in St. Louis and support the startup ecosystem, said Chris Swenson, a Varsity Tutors vice president.
Should you find yourself in Glacier National Park in Montana this summer, and the driver of your shuttle bus looks a lot like former KSDK (Channel 5) reporter Mike Owens, there is good explanation:

It is Mike Owens.

Owens, who on Wednesday was minutes away from taking his Montana commercial driver's license test, laughed when asked about his adventure.

"I went hiking here last year and I struck up a conversation with one of the bus drivers," who gave Owens details on how to apply for jobs at national parks.

"So when we got home, I looked it up online and applied," said Owens, who is taking a break from a law practice he began after leaving KSDK in 2010.

Owens is in training right now. The gig, which pays a salary and includes (for $12.75 a day) three meals and a dormitory room, ends in mid-September.

"It's not all beer and Skittles; the roads out here are tricky and it takes some know-how to drive one of these" (buses, known locally as "jammers"), Owens said.

"She thought it was a great idea. And this was all before Mayor (Francis G.) Slay decided not to run for mayor, so we weren't thinking mayor's race," Owens said.

"I'll be back in St. Louis this summer for visits, and Lyda is coming out here later," Owens said. "But I figured if I didn't do this now, when would I?"
CLAYTON  Lawyers representing Ferguson in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Michael Brown Jr. have asked a judge to unseal any of Browns juvenile records.

The motion, filed June 7 and scheduled to be heard next week, seeks records concerning prior investigations and dispositions of juvenile court adjudications, informal adjustments, certifications, abuse and neglect investigations, or records of any alleged delinquent acts committed by or pertaining to Brown.

Peter Dunne, one of the lawyers representing Ferguson, declined to comment in detail. Were not sure if theres anything there and if there is, what it is. But I think we feel obliged to find out.

Dunne also represents former police Chief Tom Jackson and Darren Wilson, the former officer who fatally shot Brown on Aug. 9, 2014.

Lawyers for the Brown family could not immediately be reached for comment.

A St. Louis County family court judge in September 2014 rejected an effort by the Post-Dispatch to obtain Browns juvenile records after his death.

In comments to a Post-Dispatch reporter after a hearing in 2014, Cynthia Harcourt, a lawyer for county juvenile officer Kip Seely, said that Brown had not been found delinquent of the juvenile equivalents of Missouris class A and B felonies and had no pending cases of that type when he died.

A California-based blogger had claimed that Brown had a pending murder charge when he was killed. That blogger also sought the release of the records.

At the time of the hearing, Brown family lawyer Anthony Gray blasted the effort, calling it character assassination.

Joel Currier of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
COLUMBIA, Mo.  A man who posted threatening messages against black people on an anonymous social media app during racial protests at the University of Missouri last year has been sentenced to probation.

Hunter Park was a Missouri University of Science and Technology student on Nov. 10 when he posted the messages on Yik Yak.

Park, 20, of Lake Saint Louis, posted statements that he was going to shoot every black person he saw. They came the day after weeks of protests led to the ouster of University of Missouri President Timothy M. Wolfe and the reassignment of Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin.

The threats posted to social media included: Im going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see, and Well tomorrow Mizzou will really make national news.

Some of the wording  Some of you are alright. Dont go to campus tomorrow.  appeared to mimic wording used by a gunman who killed nine people at an Oregon college, charges said.

Authorities said no weapons connected to Park were found.

Park pleaded guilty in April to making a terroristic threat.

On Thursday, he received a three-year suspended sentence and was placed on five years of probation.
ST. LOUIS  A St. Louis man was sentenced Wednesday to nearly seven years in prison for recruiting dozens of people to open checking accounts and then obtaining more than $79,000 by making fraudulent transactions with the accounts.

Stacey Wilson, 32, pleaded guilty in March in federal court in St. Louis to felony counts of aggravated identity theft, wire fraud, and access device fraud. Prosecutors say that from 2013 through 2015, he and an accomplice, Candace A. Davis, recruited about 54 people to open checking accounts at U.S. Bank with nominal amounts of money, or convinced them to provide access to existing accounts.

Those people then gave Wilson and Davis debit cards and checks from the accounts, and they also got checks and debit cards from cars that had been broken into. They then drafted checks from those accounts and deposited them into different accounts, and then withdrew the money or made debit card purchases with it. The pair made more than 270 fraudulent transactions and drafted checks in amounts ranging from $195 to $2,300.

Wilson was also ordered to pay $44,325 in restitution. Davis' case is pending.
WASHINGTON  The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday approved a defense appropriations bill that would fund an additional 16 F/A-18E Super Hornets built by Boeing in St. Louis.

The final number will have to be decided between negotiators from the House and Senate. The Senate earlier this week passed a defense authorizing blueprint that included just two planes. But Missouri delegation members also pointed out that a Senate appropriations bill contains an additional 14.

Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin, said the Houses action is another step closer to securing additional Super Hornets for production and maintenance in St. Louis.

The defense spending bill was one of several actions by Congress as it approaches a July 4 break and a summer and fall in which the House is scheduled to be in session only another 30 days between now and election day, Nov. 8.

In other congressional action this week:

 The Senate Thursday passed legislation to combat opioid abuse that includes instructions for House-Senate negotiators to include provisions in a final bill that would make it easier for Missouri counties to apply for federal aid to fight prescription drugs and heroin abuse. The action, pushed by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., came in the wake of the Missouri legislature rejected establishing a Prescription Drug Monitoring Program in the state.

 The House Financial Services Committee Thursday sent to the full House legislation that would give Congress a more formal role in monitoring agreements that affect U.S. insurance policy holders and international insurance markets. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, and has bipartisan support. He said Republicans and Democrats agree on the need for more sunshine in this process.

 A bill shepherded by Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, that reforms how the government regulates chemicals used in commerce was sent to President Barack Obama for his expected signature.

The legislation modernizes a decades-old Toxic Substances Control Act to come more into accord with current uses of chemicals in manufacturing and other processes. It gives the Environmental Protection Agency more tools to ensure that chemicals used to make products are safe for consumers; streamlines and sets deadlines for the process EPA uses to make those evaluations; and sets standards on managing risk, protecting confidential business information.

The bill has been more than a year in the making.
JEFFERSON CITY  New figures show the number of poor people receiving temporary cash benefits in Missouri has plummeted in the past five years.

And, the number is expected to nosedive further in the coming months under a proposed new law that calls for the state to scrub the welfare rolls to eliminate people who arent eligible for the aid.

According to the most recent monthly statistics obtained by the Post-Dispatch, the total number of people receiving temporary cash assistance through April was 37,486. Thats down from 109,639 in March 2011, according to the Missouri Department of Social Services.

Although the economy has improved since 2011, advocates for the poor say the steep drop is not because more people are finding jobs. Rather, they are pointing to efforts by the Republican-controlled Legislature to tighten the path toward benefits.

Last year, for example, the GOP-led House and Senate overrode Democratic Gov. Jay Nixons veto of a bill that limited the length of time families could receive the benefits from a lifetime maximum of 60 months to 45 months.

In addition, they ramped up requirements for low-income parents to get job training, do volunteer work or complete high school and vocational education.

Under the work changes, recipients must sign a personal responsibility plan outlining their work activities before they are eligible for cash benefits. If they miss their work assignments, they must meet face-to-face with a caseworker. They would then have six weeks to get back on track. Initially they would lose 50 percent of their assistance. If the problem is not fixed, they lose the entire benefit.

As of May 2016, for example, the Department of Social Services said a total of 4,134 families failed to meet the work requirement and were cut off from cash benefits averaging about $224 a month.

In vetoing the bill last year, Nixon called the proposal cruel and warned lawmakers that it would hurt the states children.

The legislation is a misguided measure that punishes poor children in the Legislatures zeal to reduce reliance on government assistance, Nixon wrote.

The latest figures show thousands fewer children are receiving the benefit. When the legislation kicked in on Jan. 1, there were 43,154 children receiving the benefit. Through April, there were 27,432 kids in the program.

While the changes have reduced the cost of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the money isnt going back to taxpayers. Rather, state officials are putting the funding into other social service programs, such as the Alternatives to Abortion program and additional child care facility inspections.

Jeanette Mott Oxford, executive director of Empower Missouri, which advocates on behalf of low-income Missourians, said the changes have put up roadblocks that poor people often dont have the wherewithal to deal with.

The legislation should not have been approved to start with, said Mott Oxford, a former Democratic state lawmaker from St. Louis. People seeking the benefit are utterly desperate and dealing with the chaos of just trying to survive.

Given that the benefit averages less than $300 a month, she said people often turn to family and friends for assistance. Would you jump through all those hoops for that much money? Mott Oxford said. The rolls could shrink even more in the coming months under legislation requiring the department to hire a private company to review whether people are eligible for the benefits they are receiving. The measure is nearly identical to one in Illinois that flagged 300,000 people.

In addition to screening recipients of the TANF program, the company also will look at people receiving food stamps and who are participating in MO HealthNet, the states Medicaid program.

Although removing people from various state aid programs may initially save money, Mott Oxford said some of them will return after they correct the problems that led to their removal.

I think youre going to see quite a bit of churning, but not a large reduction in numbers in the end, Mott Oxford said.

The architect of the plan, state Sen. David Sater, R-Cassville, did not respond to repeated requests for reaction to the latest numbers.
UPDATED at 10 a.m. with all electric service downtown and AT&T wireless in eastern Missouri restored.

ST. LOUIS  Electricity and its vital summer corollary  air conditioning  were missing in many parts of downtown for a sweltering Thursday after a fire erupted in an underground utility vault.

Several downtown residences, including the Paul Brown Lofts and the Mark Twain Hotel, were without power from late Wednesday until Thursday afternoon. Workers brought ice and water to handicapped residents of the Mark Twain, at 205 North Ninth Street, and the adjoining Frisco Building opened some of its still-cooled areas to neighbors doing without.

Volunteers step up during power outage, make Stray Rescue founder 'proud to be a St. Louisan' Stray Rescue started the day with 200 dogs in kennels and no power. Thanks to volunteers, all but a dozen dogs had been claimed by foster parents by lunchtime.

The outage affected about 2,100 customers, from loft apartments near the Old Post Office to the Stray Rescue dog shelter at 2320 Pine Street. Service for all but a few customers was restored Thursday afternoon.

Until then, conditions were unpleasant.

I woke up about 2 a.m., hot, said Tasha Smith, who lives on the 11th floor of the Paul Brown.

It was pitch dark and scary. I kept thinking, Why dont we have a backup generator?

The pre-dawn low Thursday hovered at 79 degrees and the days high reached 99  one degree shy of the record for June 16 set in 1952. A break was expected with a high Friday near 90, slightly above normal for this time of year.

At Schnuck Markets Culinaria, 315 North Ninth Street, the main grocery for downtowns loft dwellers, workers hustled perishable items into refrigerator trucks overnight and restocked store coolers after electricity returned. A Schnucks spokesman said the perishables had been preserved.

Seniors make it through downtown St. Louis power outage  with a little help CityParc, 1531 Pine Street, was one of several housing areas downtown flagged by the St. Louis Area Agency on Aging as a place where seniors were in need of assistance.

At the CityParc at Pine Apartments, 1531 Pine Street, firefighters and Red Cross volunteers brought water to residents who spent Thursday morning outside. Residents who needed electric power for medical equipment went next door to Centenary United Methodist Church.

Property manager Mary Johnson said helpers fed the residents with burgers and hot dogs that had been purchased for a Fathers Day event this Sunday.

Other buildings werent affected, including the Wainwright State Office Building and the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse, where business was conducted as usual Thursday. City Hall and the circuit courts were closed Thursday, but were to reopen Friday.

AT&T, a major employer downtown, had power for its offices along Chestnut Street, but the outage disrupted some wireless service in eastern Missouri. A spokeswoman said Friday morning that service had been restored.

Heat, aging equipment blamed

Ameren Missouri said the fire broke out about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday beneath Seventh and Market streets, where black smoke poured from a manhole cover. A spokeswoman attributed the fire to a failed cable, brought on by heat and aging equipment.

The temperature Wednesday had risen to 99 and still was 91 when the fire broke out. Crews cut power to much of downtown by 11:30 p.m. to begin making repairs.

Firefighters extinguished the blaze about midnight Wednesday. Ameren workers spliced in temporary lines to bypass the damage to restore power by about 1 p.m. Thursday. They reconnected customer areas in stages to prevent overloads, a spokesman said.

Kevin Anders, an assistant vice president of operations at Ameren, said permanent repairs will continue through the weekend. The outage area generally was bounded by Sixth Street to the east, Olive Street to the North, 20th Street to the west and Spruce Street to the south, although it affected some customers beyond those streets.

Service on Thursday morning was a patchwork. The Westin Hotel near Busch Stadium and the Omni Majestic Hotel at 1019 Pine Street kept power, but the Park Pacific Apartments at 1226 Olive Street did not. Nor did Tim Hortons Cafe near the Park Pacific, nor the Downtown Urgent Care Center at 916 Olive. All got their power back.

Anders said the fire was in a major junction and damaged seven high-voltage cables. But he said downtown has three main networks of service, allowing for some areas to be spared the outage.

By 5 p.m., Ameren had restored service to all but one unidentified large customer. Work on that project continued Friday morning.
ST. PETERS  Mayor Len Pagano and his re-election committee have paid a $200 fine after the Missouri Ethics Commission found several errors and omissions on their campaign finance reports in recent years.

Among items cited in a consent order issued Monday was the committee's failure to report that it had made two direct expenditures to help the unsuccessful campaign of Matt Judkins, a Democratic Missouri House candidate in St. Charles County.

Those expenditures, totaling $5,684, were made in the weeks leading up to the November 2014 election Judkins was running in.

Judkins' campaign committee did list two donations from Pagano's committee adding up to the identical amount but they weren't cited on the Pagano reports.

The consent order also says the Pagano committee failed to report required information on employers of two donors to his campaign and mislabeled the source of a different contribution in 2014.

The commission said the latter donation, $4,023, was listed as from a Carpenters Union account instead of a campaign committee for a Republican House candidate, Michael Swyers, an official with that union.

Pagano said the errors on his reports were unintentional and that there was no intent to deceive anyone. Pagano was up for re-election in April of this year and easily won another term.

The ethics panel in its order imposed up to a $2,000 fine but said all but $200 would be waived if the smaller amount was paid within 45 days.
WASHINGTON  Republican Sen. John McCain said Thursday that President Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, because of the rise of the Islamic State group on the president's watch.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, made the comment Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday's attack and some of the survivors.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaida went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq," a visibly angry McCain told reporters in the Capitol as the Senate debated a spending bill.

"So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies," McCain said.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old Muslim born in New York made calls during the attack saying he was a supporter of the Islamic State. But he also spoke about an affiliate of al-Qaida and Hezbollah, both of which are IS enemies.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting U.S. enemies ahead of Americans. Trump also has suggested that Obama himself might sympathize with radical elements.

Democrats criticized Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves from his remarks.

McCain is seeking a sixth Senate term from Arizona and is locked in a tight race.

Questioned on his startling assertion, McCain repeated it: "Directly responsible. Because he pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked and there would be attacks on the United States of America. It's a matter of record, so he is directly responsible."

Democrats quickly pounced on McCain's criticism.

Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said McCain's "unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump."
Can we be assured that the plant will not pollute our land or water supply so that we are not discovering something decades later like so many areas in Missouri?
St. Louis long-standing cross-district racial integration program has been remarkably successful in improving student outcomes. But it faces a formidable new legal assault, and the programs sponsors are contemplating phasing it out. In order to ensure the programs continued success, it should be reinvented to emphasize integration by economic status rather than race.

Last month, St. Louis nationally recognized school integration program came under legal attack from lawyers representing an African-American student living in the suburbs who was barred from attending a city charter school based on his skin color. Under a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the explicit use of an individual students race is usually unconstitutional unless mandated by a court as part of a racial desegregation remedy.

The St. Louis program grew out of a federal desegregation lawsuit but was released from court supervision in 1999. In any event, David Glaser, executive director of the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation, notes, It is a legal requirement that the program cannot continue forever.

Giving up on school integration entirely would be an enormous step backward. The inter-district transfer program is associated with gains in high school reading and math scores for African-American students and substantially increased graduation and college-going rates. White suburban students have also benefited from attending schools that are more racially diverse than they otherwise would be. Yet continuing the program on a strictly racial basis is probably a legal impossibility.

There is, however, a third way for St. Louis: integrating students by socioeconomic status rather than race. This approach is increasingly embraced by school districts across the country. In 1996, two school districts educating about 30,000 students considered economic status (such as eligibility for free or reduced price lunch) as a factor in student assignment. Today, 91 districts, educating 4 million students, do so. These districts include Champaign Ill.; Chicago; Denver; Jefferson County (Louisville), Ky.; and Omaha, Neb.

Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court favor the socioeconomic approach because it does not allocate opportunity explicitly based on race. And liberals have also championed economic integration as a way of improving opportunities. President Obamas secretary of education, John King Jr., has proposed a $120 million Stronger Together program to support districts with strong voluntary, community-developed plans that increase socioeconomic diversity in their schools.

In an interview I conducted with King at a recent Century Foundation forum, he explained socioeconomic programs can achieve greater racial diversity, given the overlap between race and class in American society, but that socioeconomic diversity is independently justified as a way of promoting achievement.

Indeed, research going back 50 years has shown that the primary reason racial desegregation has benefited black students derives not from the pigment of classmates but from their generally higher socioeconomic status. The well-known 1966 Coleman Report, for example, found beneficial effect of a student body with a high proportion of white students comes not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on average, found among whites.

Socioeconomic integration can also be far more cost-effective than pouring extra resources into high poverty schools. A 2010 study conducted by Heather Schwartz of the Rand Corp. compared low-income elementary school students who were randomly assigned to two different educational approaches in Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington, D.C. Among families who applied for public housing, some were assigned to neighborhoods and schools in low-poverty areas of the county, while others were assigned to neighborhoods and schools in higher-poverty neighborhoods. Schools in the disadvantaged neighborhoods spent $2,000 more per pupil. Yet the low-income students who had the chance to attend middle-class schools, which spent less, did far better over time in math and reading.

St. Louis race-based integration program is a ticking time bomb. It is time to preserve and improve the policy with a new focus on economic status.
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LONDON MARKET MIDDAY: Sterling rebounds 10% to briefly top $1.16

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 - 12:41

The pound was continuing to enjoy its Rishi rise on Wednesday, shrugging off news of a delay to a costed budget statement to take advantage of a weaker dollar, as Rishi Sunak took part in his first Prime Minister's Questions.

Sterling was quoted at $1.1568 at midday, sharply higher from $1.1464 at the London equities close on Tuesday. The pound hit an intraday high of $1.1618 - up 10% from its post-mini-budget low of $1.0533 - before sliding back after news the UK has postponed its budget plan until November 17.

"Markets...see [Sunak] as a fairly steady pair of hands, particularly when it comes to stabilising the UK economy," said Matthew Ryan, head of market strategy at Ebury. "Sunak's leadership credentials are yet to really be tested, but investors seem to be of the view that his largely encouraging stint as chancellor should stand him in good stead."

Downing Street has said Chancellor Jeremy Hunt's planned Halloween budget to get the public finances back on track has been delayed until the middle of next month.

The medium-term fiscal plan now will be published on November 17 as an autumn statement, alongside a new set of economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Hunt informed ministers of the decision at the first meeting of Rishi Sunak's new cabinet in Downing Street on Wednesday morning.

Following the meeting, Hunt told broadcasters: "I want to confirm that it will demonstrate debt falling over the medium term, which is really important for people to understand. But it's also extremely important that that statement is based on the most accurate possible economic forecasts and forecasts of public finances."

Hunt said he discussed the move with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey on Tuesday night, saying the governor "understands the reasons for doing that and I'll continue to work very closely with him".

The FTSE 100 index was down 21.85 points, or 0.3%, at 6,991.66. The mid-cap FTSE 250 was up 125.41 points, or 0.7%, at 17,957.04, and the AIM All-Share was up 4.13 points at 803.57.

The Cboe UK 100 was down 0.3% at 698.46, the Cboe UK 250 up 1.0% at 15,374.95, and the Cboe Small Companies up 0.5% at 12,334.67

In European equities on Tuesday, the CAC 40 in Paris was 0.1% higher, while the DAX 40 in Frankfurt was 0.5% higher.

In London, housebuilders were enjoying a bout of optimism on the hope Sunak's government can avoid the deep recession analysts feared was around the corner if Liz Truss's economic plans were carried out.

Barratt was 1.6% higher, Taylor Wimpey 1.3%, Berkeley 1.2% and Persimmon 1.0%.

WPP gave back 3.3% despite lifting its annual top-line guidance after a strong rise in third-quarter revenue.

The London-based advertising agency said its third-quarter revenue rose 10% to 3.57 billion from 3.24 billion a year earlier, with like-for-like revenue up 2.7%. Its revenue less pass-through costs increased 13% to 2.99 billion from 2.64 billion.

Looking ahead, WPP upgraded its 2022 guidance for growth in full-year like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs to 6.5% to 7.0%, compared to a previously expected range of 6.0% to 7.0%. Less positively, it said it expects headline operating margin growth of between 30 to 50 basis points. It had previously guided for growth of 50 bps.

Consumer goods firm Reckitt Benckiser lost 4.2%.

It reported strong quarterly revenue growth as prices and sales mix improved, despite a decline in volumes. In the third quarter, the Slough, Berkshire-based Reckitt said total revenue grew 14% year-on-year to 3.74 billion, or 7.4% on a like-for-like basis.

Price and mix improvements of 12% helped to offset a volume decline of 4.6%. Reckitt noted "continued broad-based growth and momentum" during the period.

With a strong performance in the year so far, Reckitt reiterated its annual targets. However, for like-for-like revenue growth, it tweaked the range upwards to between 6% and 8%, compared to 5% and 8% previously.

Standard Chartered fell 4.0%.

The Asia-focused bank recorded a substantial increase in profit as it benefited from rising interest rates across the world.

In the three months that ended September 30, Standard Chartered recorded a 40% increase in pretax profit to $1.39 billion from $996 million a year before. On an underlying basis, profit rose 32% to $1.42 billion from $1.08 billion.

StanChart's income rose 15% to $4.33 billion from $3.76 billion a year before. In constant currency terms, it recorded a 22% increase.

Standard Chartered said its performance has been strong and that the "pace of economic recovery" in many of its footprint markets is "encouraging". Despite increasing recessionary pressures in western markets, the company expects income to grow by around 13% in all of 2022, in line with year-to-date growth.

The bank expects its credit impairment to be slightly above the year-to-date annualised loan-loss rate of 18 basis points.

Standard Chartered expects net interest margin progression to average around 165 basis points in 2023, which combined with continued strong business momentum and positive jaws ratio, means it "remains on-track" to deliver its 10% return on target equity target in 2024, if not earlier.

Looking ahead to the open in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is called down 0.1% and the S&P 500 down 0.7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is expected to open 1.6% lower.

The three indices had closed up as much as 2.3% on Tuesday, but the mood on Wall Street was hurt by disappointing tech earnings after the close. The figures from Alphabet and Microsoft appeared to confirm fears of a spending slowdown in the US.

AJ Bell head of investment analysis Laith Khalaf remarked: "All good things must come to an end, but it is still a jolt to see advertising revenue on Google-owner Alphabet's Youtube platform fall for the first time on record. While bad news for its parent company, the reversal in fortunes also says something less than encouraging about the state of the economy and is a negative omen for the wider digital advertising space.

"The results of the big technology firms were seen as a key determining factor in market sentiment going into the US third quarter reporting season and both Microsoft and Alphabet have given investors reason to worry."

Alphabet was down 6.0% in pre-market trading in New York, while Microsoft was 6.3% lower.

Similarly benefiting from the recent dollar weakness, the euro traded at $1.020 midday Wednesday, moving back above parity for the first time since the start of October, and up from $0.9963 late Tuesday. Against the yen, the dollar was quoted at JP147.14, down from JP147.77.

Gold was quoted at $1,669.20 an ounce midday Wednesday, higher than $1,655.96 on Tuesday evening in London. Brent oil was trading at $91.82 a barrel, soft from $91.91 late Tuesday.

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16 June 2016

Over US$28 billion invested in companies that produce internationally banned cluster bombs

Stop Explosive Investments

(Ottawa, 16 June 2016)  Despite the international ban on cluster munitions, 158 financial institutions invested more than US$28 billion in seven producers of the weapons between 1 June 2012 and 8 April 2016, according to a report launched today. The Cluster Munition Coalition calls on these financial institutions and governments to put an end once and for all to investment in producers of cluster bombs.

Phongsavath Manithong, Ban Advocate and cluster munition survivor, Laos  Handicap International Laos

The report Worldwide Investments in Cluster Munitions: a shared responsibility is published by PAX (the Netherlands), a member of the Cluster Munition Coalition.

Financial institutions must stop turning a blind eye to the lethal consequences of their investments, said Branislav Kapetanovic, Ambassador of the Cluster Munition Coalition who survived a cluster bomb explosion some 16 years ago. Cluster munitions are being used in Yemen and Syria, causing significant civilian casualties including among children and women. All banks and financial institutions must prohibit investment in companies that produce these indiscriminate weapons, Kapetanovic added.

China Aerospace Science and Industry, China Aerospace Science and Technology, Norinco (China), Hanwha and Poongsan (South Korea), Orbital ATK and Textron (United States) are reported as the cluster munitions producers which have benefited from the US$28 billion worth of investments.

It is an outrage that so many financial institutions have no qualms about investing in companies that make banned cluster munitions. However, a positive development is that the number of financial institutions with a policy comprehensively banning investments in such companies has gone up. We commend these financial institutions for halting their investments and encourage others to follow suit, said Suzanne Oosterwijk, co-author of the PAX report. In addition, Singapore Technologies Engineering publicly announced in 2015 that it has stopped producing cluster munitions.

One type of cluster munition produced by Textron has been used by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen since March 2015, according to research by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. On 27 May 2016, the United States government blocked the transfer of these CBU-105 Sensor Fuzed Weapons to Saudi Arabia because of concern at the use of cluster munitions in or near civilian areas.

In 2015 and 2016 ninety-one percent of all known cluster munition casualties in Yemen were civilians including deminers. Of the civilian casualties at least twenty-two percent were children.

The 158 financial institutions are from fourteen countries. The vast majority of the financial institutions (138) are from countries that have not joined the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Of these, 74 are from the United States, 29 from China and 26 from South Korea. However, 20 financial institutions that have invested in producers of cluster munitions are from countries that have joined to the convention: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

The core objective of the Convention on Cluster Munitions is to put an end to the suffering caused by these weapons, said Megan Burke, Director of the Cluster Munition Coalition. We urge all seven States Parties to the convention that are mentioned above to outlaw all investments associated with producers of cluster munitions and to fulfill their treaty obligations, Burke added.

To date, 10 countries have put in place legislation against investments in cluster munitions (Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Samoa, Spain and Switzerland). Spain is the latest country to have enacted a ban on the financing of cluster munitions, in mid-2015.

A total of 119 states have signed or acceded to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions, as well as assistance with any of these banned activities. The convention also requires clearance of areas contaminated by cluster munition remnants and assistance to victims of these weapons.

Members of the Cluster Munition Coalition in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Vietnam and the United States, among others, are taking action worldwide to Stop Explosive Investments.

-Ends-

Contact:

Firoz Alizada, Campaigns and Communications Manager, Cluster Munition Coalition (Geneva) -Mobile: +41 (0)78 657 7331, Email: firoz@icblcmc.org

Samantha Bolton, Media consultant for PAX (Geneva) -Mobile: +41 (0)79 239 2366, Email: samanthabolton@gmail.com

Further resources for the media

The complete press conference, held in Ottawa, Canada: https://youtu.be/1cg7Ys1jKgg

Download the full report Worldwide Investments in Cluster Munitions, a shared responsibility at http://www.stopexplosiveinvestments.org/report  Advanced copies and key findings are available under embargo upon request.

Key findings infographic available at http://bit.ly/1WIbEPj.

One-minute animation  Stop Explosive Investment available at http://bit.ly/25Nyb28.

Cluster munition casualties and stockpilers and suppliers of cluster bombs used in Yemen- infographic available at http://bit.ly/262vCWE

High-resolution images including cluster bombs, cluster bomb survivors and Cluster Munition Coalition campaigners in action available at http://bit.ly/1sx6GrS. Please credit all images used.

Cluster Munition Coalition Twitter - https://twitter.com/banclusterbombs

Cluster Munition Coalition Facebook  http://www.facebook.com/banclusterbombs

Notes to the editor:

For more information about the campaign to Stop Explosive Investments visit http://www.stopexplosiveinvestments.org.

The Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) is an international coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in around 100 countries to eradicate cluster munitions, prevent further casualties from these weapons and put an end for all time to the suffering they cause - http://www.stopclustermunitions.org .

A cluster munition, also known as a cluster bomb, is a weapon containing multiple explosive submunitions. Like landmines, these submunitions can remain a fatal threat to anyone in the area long after a conflict ends, for details visit http://bit.ly/1u1ijUb.

The CMC believes investing in producers of cluster munitions is banned under the Convention on Cluster Munitions because Article 1 of the Convention reads: Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: (a) Use cluster munitions; (b) Develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, cluster munitions; (c) Assist, encourage or induce anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention.

Further information on use of cluster munitions in Yemen and other countries visit http://bit.ly/St1YZW

Cluster Munition Monitor 2015 is available at http://bit.ly/1WGasvJ

Stop Explosive Investment 2016 infographic
THE stunning lakeside setting of Ragley Hall will once again play host to the final night of the UKs premier picnic concert series as the Battle Proms returns to Alcester on Saturday, 13th August - and you could be there if you win the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald's fantastic competition.

In 2015 the ever-popular picnic concert saw a record-breaking crowd of over 7,000 invade the grounds of Ragley Hall for an exceptional evening of sublime classical music, carefully choreographed Spitfire and cavalry displays, dramatic cannon fire and a stunning firework finale  all part of the Battle Proms experience!

Back by popular demand is compere Pam Rhodes, and The Rockabellas  todays answer to the Andrews Sisters  and are this year accompanied by their new horn section, The Rockafellas!

This year the ever-popular cavalry displays will be in full WWI regalia, as the Battle Proms commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. There will also be an evening gun salute from an original 13-pounder WWI field gun in honour of all those who fought at the Somme, which will herald the arrival of the Grace Spitfire, flown by Carolyn Grace, the UKs only female Spitfire Pilot.

Carolyn will perform a breath-taking display to the opening pieces of the orchestral performance, which this year will include Elgars Pomp and Circumstance No. 4 and will be performed by the New English Concert Orchestra, conducted by Douglas Coombes.

The Battle Proms will once again be raising funds for their charity partner Combat Stress: the UKs leading mental health charity for veterans.

Last summer the generous audience at Ragley Hall donated nearly 9,000 on the night and helped the Battle Proms to raise over 45,700 over the course of the summer.

The Proms has partnered with the Stratford Herald to offer four lucky readers the chance to be there. Our main winner will receive four tickets to the Battle Proms plus a bottle of Prosecco while three runners up will win a pair of tickets.

To find out how to enter, see page 10 of the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald of 16th June, 2016.
Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE: NUS) announced it has entered into an agreement for a $210 million strategic investment from Ping An ZQ China Growth Opportunity Limited. The firm consists of a consortium of experienced Chinese investors led by Ping An of China Securities (Hong Kong) Company Ltd. and a group of additional investors affiliated with ZQ Capital Limited.

"We are honored to have the support of Ping An and ZQ Capital as we look to accelerate our growth and development in China," said Truman Hunt, chief executive officer. "Ping An and ZQ Capital bring significant local market knowledge and valuable expertise that we believe will positively impact our long-term growth opportunities in this important region."

Ping An of China Securities (Hong Kong) Company Ltd. Chairman Le Lin said, "We are excited to become a strategic investor of Nu Skin and believe in the company's global business opportunity and specific growth potential in the Chinese market. Our relationship brings together our collective strengths that we believe will generate positive long-term results."

ZQ Capital Founding Partner Simon Shen noted, "This investment represents a meaningful step in our firm's continued commitment to the consumer story in China. We firmly believe that our resources and knowledge in China can add to Nu Skin's existing franchise and look forward to working together with the company to unlock additional shareholder value."

Nu Skin Chief Financial Officer Ritch Wood said, "We expect this investment will be accretive for Nu Skin shareholders. We plan to use the proceeds for repurchasing common stock throughout the remainder of the year and investing in our China operations.

"Over the next two days we will be hosting approximately 20,000 sales leaders and customers from throughout the Greater China region at our convention in Hong Kong. In conjunction with this event, last week we completed a very successful introduction of ageLOC Me, an innovative customized skin care system, selling out of a limited supply in China. Based in part on this success, we currently anticipate delivering second-quarter revenue at the high end of, or slightly above, our previous guidance of $560 to $580 million," concluded Wood.

Under the terms of the investment, Ping An ZQ China Growth Limited is purchasing $210 million in aggregate principal amount of 4.75 percent, four-year convertible senior notes with an initial conversion price of $46.50 per share. The convertible notes will be general unsecured obligations of Nu Skin. Nu Skin expects to complete the sale of the notes within five business days, subject to customary closing conditions. Additional information relating to these securities can be found in a current report on Form 8-K that will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP is acting as Nu Skin's legal counsel. Paul Hastings LLP is acting as legal counsel to Ping An ZQ China Growth Opportunity Limited and MagStone Law LLP is acting as legal counsel to ZQ Capital.
Under Armour, Inc. (NYSE: UA)(NYSE: UA-C) announced the final distribution ratio for its upcoming $59 million dividend to holders of the Company's Class C non-voting common stock in satisfaction of the previously announced settlement agreement entered into by the Company in connection with shareholder litigation related to the creation of the Class C stock.

On June 3, 2016, the Company previously announced that the Company's Board of Directors had approved the payment of this dividend in the form of shares of Class C stock, with cash in lieu of any fractional shares. The Company has determined that the final distribution ratio will be 0.007098 of a share of Class C stock for each share of Class C stock held.

The shares of Class C stock will be distributed on or about June 29, 2016, to stockholders of record of Class C stock on June 15, 2016.

For additional information, please visit the "Stock Info" section of Under Armour's Investor Relations website at www.uabiz.com/investors.cfm.
Moody's Investors Services ("Moody's") has downgraded the Corporate Family Rating ("CFR") of Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC) two notches to B1 from Ba2 following final regulatory approval for the acquisition of a majority equity interest in Cablevision by an affiliate of Altice N.V. ("Altice"). The transaction was approved by the NY State Public Utility Commission (PUC) on June 15, following approvals in May from the US Federal Communications Commission, US Department of Justice and New Jersey Public Utilities Commission. This rating action concludes the review for downgrade initiated on September 17, 2015.

The transaction to acquire Cablevision was announced on September 17, 2015 and valued Cablevision at $17.7 billion, or approximately 9x EBITDA. Moody's has downgraded CSC Holdings, LLC's ("CSC Holdings", a subsidiary of Cablevision) secured credit facility rating one notch to Ba1, unsecured rating three notches to B2, and the unsecured rating at Cablevision Systems Corporation two notches to B3.

In September of 2015, Altice issued approximately $8.6 billion of new debt through a financing escrow entity called Neptune Finco Corporation ("Neptune"). Neptune issued $4.8 billion of senior secured debt and $3.8 billion of unsecured debt which Moody's rated Ba1 and B2 respectively. At close the two classes of Neptune debt will be merged with and into CSC Holdings and rank pari passu with the similarly rated existing debt of CSC Holdings. Also at close, Neptune's B1 CFR and B1-PD PDR will be withdrawn.

Cablevision's speculative-grade liquidity ("SGL") rating is affirmed at SGL-2 reflecting its good liquidity. The outlook is stable.

A summary of today's actions follow:

Downgrades:

..Issuer: Cablevision Systems Corporation

.... Corporate Family Rating, Downgraded to B1 from Ba2

.... Probability of Default Rating, Downgraded to B1-PD from Ba2-PD

.... Senior Unsecured Regular Bond/Debenture, Downgraded to B3 (LGD6) from B1 (LGD5)

Affirmations:

..Issuer: Cablevision Systems Corporation

.... Speculative Grade Liquidity Rating, Affirmed SGL-2

Outlook Actions:

..Issuer: Cablevision Systems Corporation

....Outlook, Changed To Stable From Rating Under Review

..Issuer: CSC Holdings, LLC

Downgrades:

....Senior Secured Bank Credit Facilities, Downgraded to Ba1 (LGD2) from Baa3 (LGD2) (Ratings to be withdrawn)

....Senior Unsecured Regular Bond/Debenture, Downgraded to B2 (LGD4) from Ba2 (LGD4)

Outlook Actions:

..Issuer: CSC Holdings, LLC

....Outlook, Changed To Stable From Rating Under Review

Affirmations:

..Issuer: Neptune Finco Corp.

....Senior Secured Bank Credit Facilities, Affirmed Ba1 (LGD2)

....Senior Unsecured Gtd. Regular Bond/Debenture, Affirmed Ba1 (LGD2)

....Senior Unsecured Regular Bond/Debenture, Affirmed B2 (LGD4)

Ratings to be Withdrawn

.... Probability of Default Rating, B1-PD

.... Corporate Family Rating, B1

Outlook Actions:

..Issuer: Neptune Finco Corp.

....Outlook, Remains Stable

RATINGS RATIONALE

Cablevision's B1 CFR reflects its high leverage, parent company's aggressive financial policy, and significant business risk inherent in Altice's cost cutting strategy. Pro forma for the transaction and excluding any proposed synergies, Cablevision's leverage will be approximately 8x (debt-to-EBITDA, Moody's adjusted), which is very high relative to the B1 rating and amplifies risk for a company in a capital intensive, competitive industry. Management has proposed $450 million of annual run-rate cost savings, which Moody's expects to occur over an 18-24 month timeline. Pro forma for these savings, leverage would be in the mid 6x (Moody's adjusted) range. We believe that Altice will quickly reduce costs and realize meaningful savings which will result in falling leverage. However, if the cost cuts drive too fast a pace of organizational change and headcount reduction, this could result in disruptions to Cablevision's service quality and lead to market share erosion. This business risk, combined with the elevated financial risk from the debt raised to fund the transaction are reflected in the B1 corporate family rating.

Offsetting these limiting factors are Cablevision's strong market position with a quality base of network assets and favorable demographics within its footprint. Moody's expects leverage to fall to around 6x (Moody's adjusted) by the end of 2018 from around 8x (Moody's adjusted) at inception. Moody's projects free cash flow as a percentage of debt to remain in the low single digit range over this time frame, primarily as a result of the increasing interest expense offsetting a reduction in capital intensity and elimination of dividends. Cablevision competes head to head with Verizon's FiOS service in about half of its urban footprint. Moody's views FiOS as a competitive product offer and expects Verizon to gain market share if Cablevision stumbles operationally. However, Cablevision's industry leading market share reflects solid operating performance, despite weak overall industry video subscriber trends. Moody's expects broadband and small business segment results to remain strong and Cablevision to retain its current market share position.

The stable outlook is based upon Moody's expectation that leverage will decline towards 6x over the next 18-24 months. The outlook also reflects Moody's view that Cablevision will continue to generate positive free cash flow and maintain good liquidity. Moody's would consider an upgrade if leverage fell below 5x (Moody's adjusted) and free cash flow as a percentage of debt was above 5%, both on a sustained basis. Additionally, an upgrade would be dependent upon Cablevision maintaining or improving its market share and liquidity. Moody's would consider a downgrade if leverage is not on track to fall below 6x (Moody's adjusted) by year end 2018, liquidity were to become constrained, or market share materially erodes.

The principal methodology used in these ratings was Global Pay Television - Cable and Direct-to-Home Satellite Operators published in April 2013. Please see the Ratings Methodologies page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.
SAN FRANCISCO and SINGAPORE and NEW DELHI, June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Blueshift, the leader in Segment-of-One Marketing, has added two highly experienced executives to its Asia-Pacific (APAC) team as the company continues its expansion in the region. Dhruv Shanker joins Blueshift as Vice President & Head of APAC based in Singapore, and Nipun Bhatia joins as Vice President of Engineering to launch the company's operations in India.

San Francisco based Blueshift already serves several prominent customers in the APAC region, including Redmart, Singapore's largest online grocer, as well as India based companies like Snapdeal, Shopclues, Urban Ladder and Oyo Rooms.

"Blueshift has helped us drive targeted lifecycle marketing and improve our re-engagement rates dramatically," said Todd Kurie, VP of Marketing at Redmart. "With Blueshift, we are now able to launch personalized campaigns on email & mobile app push notifications, and drive a consistent message across different marketing channels."

As VP & Head of APAC, Shanker will lead Blueshift's expansion by establishing and developing relationships with brands and other leading marketers in the region. Prior to Blueshift, Shanker was the Head of Affiliate Marketing, Asia Pacific, for Groupon, based in Singapore. At Groupon, he was responsible for driving strategy, implementation and optimization for the company's highest trafficked region. Before joining Groupon, he worked for Yahoo!, Google and Dell in a variety of strategic management positions.

As VP of Engineering, Bhatia will oversee Blueshift's technology organization as the company continues to grow. Bhatia joins Blueshift from @WalmartLabs, where he was the Senior Director of Engineering, Smart Pricing, and led the team responsible for designing and executing the pricing platform that powers Walmart 's Global eCommerce. Prior to @WalmartLabs, Bhatia worked for Kosmix and Oracle in Silicon Valley, after graduating from Stanford University.

"As Blueshift continues its growth, we saw a great opportunity to introduce Segment-of-One marketing automation to the Asia Pacific region," said Blueshift's Co-Founder & CEO, Vijay Chittoor. "Dhruv and Nipun's impressive expertise and track records align perfectly with Blueshift's mission and we are happy to have them come aboard at this time of explosive growth."

"Having worked in the APAC region for a number of years, I'm excited to be joining Blueshift as we push to enter the ever growing Asia Pacific market," said Shanker.

"I'm thrilled to be joining Vijay and the rest of the team at Blueshift as we continue to grow and put our stamp on the global marketing automation landscape. I look forward to what's ahead as we combine machine learning and artificial intelligence to bring 'Rocket Science as a Service' to a whole new range of B2C marketers," said Bhatia.

About Blueshift:San Francisco based Blueshift is the leader in Segment-of-One marketing automation for B2C companies. Using the power of real-time segmentation and dynamic-content personalization, Blueshift enables marketers to automate individualized messages across multiple channels including email, push notifications, Facebook & SMS. Blueshift was founded by serial entrepreneurs with backgrounds at successful companies such as Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs) and Mertado (now Groupon Goods). The company is funded by prominent venture capital and angel investors, including Storm Venture Partners, Luma Capital Partners and Nexus Venture Partners.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380000

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blueshift-expands-asia-pacific-presence-hires-former-walmartlabs-and-groupon-execs-300285599.html

SOURCE Blueshift
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Brookfield Global Infrastructure Securities Income Fund (the "Fund") (TSX: BGI.UN) announces a distribution of C$0.15 per unit for the quarter ending June 30, 2016. The distribution will be paid on or before July 15, 2016 to holders of record on June 30, 2016.

Eligible holders of the Units ("Unitholders") may participate in the Fund's Dividend Reinvestment Plan ("DRIP"), where they may elect to automatically reinvest their dividends in additional Units. Details of the DRIP are available on the Fund's website at www.brookfieldim.com. Unitholders who wish to participate in the DRIP should contact their investment advisor for further information and to enroll.

Brookfield Investment Management (Canada) Inc., an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and an affiliate of Brookfield Investment Management Inc. (collectively "the Firm") is the manager and investment manager of the Fund.

The Firm provides real assets public securities strategies including global listed real estate and infrastructure equities as well as corporate credit and securitized credit. With over $16 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2016, the Firm manages institutional separate accounts, registered funds and other investment products for clients, including financial institutions, public and private pension plans, insurance companies, endowments and foundations, sovereign wealth funds and high net-worth investors. Headquartered in New York, NY, the Firm and its affiliates also maintain offices in Boston, Chicago, London and Toronto.

The Fund uses its website as a channel of distribution of material company information. Financial and other material information regarding the Fund is routinely posted on and accessible at www.brookfieldim.com.

The Firm is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global alternative asset manager with $240 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2016. For more information, go to www.Brookfield.com

For more information, please visit www.brookfieldim.com.

Source: Brookfield Global Infrastructure Securities Income Fund
ARLINGTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- On June 1, Dr. Mary Gromko, a long time science educator from Colorado began her one-year term as president of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the largest professional organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

We are thrilled to have Mary on board as president and we look forward to her applying her previous leadership and teaching knowledge, experience and expertise to help guide the association, said NSTA Executive Director Dr. David Evans.

Gromko has been a devoted teacher and dedicated leader in the science education community for more than 40 years. She began her career in education as a high school chemistry teacher in Connecticut. After moving to Colorado, she continued to teach for the Academy School District in Colorado Springs. During that time, Gromko also served as an instructor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and the University of Denver. In 1989, after 17 years in the classroom, Gromko moved on to accept a position as the state science supervisor for the Colorado Department of Education. In 1999, she began working as the K-12 science supervisor for a large school district in Colorado Springs. Most recently, Gromko served as a coordinator for teacher professional development at the University of Colorados Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education. As the coordinator, she worked to implement STEM programs in grades K-16.

An NSTA member since 1983, Gromko has contributed extensively to the association. She was elected to the NSTA board as director of coordination and supervision. She also served as a district director twice (1988-1991 and 1997-2000); was the program chair for the 1993, 1997, and 2007 regional conferences in Denver; worked on numerous committees; and presented several sessions at NSTA national and area conferences.

In addition to her work and commitment to NSTA, Gromko is extremely active with other local, state, and national organizations and STEM initiatives. She has served as president (1997-1999), president-elect (1995-1997), and an executive board member (1993-1995) for the Council of State Science Supervisors; served as president of the Colorado Association of Science Teachers (1986-1988); served as the western regional secondary education coordinator for the American Chemical Societys chemical education division (1984-1989); and chaired the western state science review team for the NAEP 2009 Science Frameworks. She has also worked on a number of advisory boards, including the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.

During her distinguished career, Gromko has received a number of honors and awards. Her accomplishments include receiving NSTAs Distinguished Service to Science Education Award (2014), American Chemical Societys Recognition Award (2008), University of Northern Colorados Recognition and Appreciation to Science Education Award (2000), Colorado Association of Science Teachers Friend of Science Teaching Award and Distinguished Service to Science Education Award (1999 and 1989), U.S. Department of Energy Award Appreciation for Service to Science Education (1998), the Sigma Xi Award (1989), the Governors Award (1987), and the Colorado Department of Educations Excellence in Teaching Award (1987), to name just a few. She was also named Professional Educator of the Year for the Colorado Springs School District 11 (2008), Colorado Department of Educations Employee of the Year (1991), and American Chemical Societys Colorado High School Chemistry Teacher of the Year (1985).

Gromko earned a B.A. degree in chemistry and a M.S. degree in science/chemistry and science education from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in curriculum and administration from the University of Denver.

About NSTA

The Arlington, VA-based National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) is the largest professional organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all. NSTAs current membership includes approximately 55,000 science teachers, science supervisors, administrators, scientists, business and industry representatives, and others involved in science education.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616006210/en/

NSTA

Kate Falk, 703-312-9211

[email protected]

Source: National Science Teachers Association
Brunswick, ME (PRWEB) June 16, 2016

Maine Energy Facts, Maine's 24/7 source for home heating advice, launches the Maine Energy Facts Do Not Disturb Contest that allows homeowners who are happy with home heating oil or propane to inform natural gas salespeople of their disinterest in switching products. The door hanger will be distributed through newspapers across Maine, and is also available to download and print at-home on the Maine Energy Facts website.

Participants can enter the contest by emailing a photo of their door hanger in place to Maine Energy Facts. Once submitted, they'll have a chance at winning a $25 gift card to Amazon.com. Maine Energy Facts is expected to give away four gift cards per week for six weeks in a row.

The campaign was born from homeowners' dissatisfaction with numerous house calls from natural gas sales teams during the summer months in Maine. "Summer is a time for relaxation and spending time with the family without any interruptions from a salesperson," said Jamie Py, President of Maine Energy Marketers Association. "Oil and propane prices have returned these heating fuels to their best value status for most of the last 30 years. There's really no real reason to switch. The door hanger will save you time on explaining your preference."

Maine Energy Facts encourages Maine homeowners who would like to keep gas salespeople away to download the door hanger from their website immediately. The door hanger is home printer-friendly, and can be accessed at: http://www.maineenergyfacts.com/contest.

The photo contest will begin on June 16th, 2016 and end on July 28th, 2016. Twenty-four (24) Grand Prize winners will be awarded and will receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Participants will have a chance to win by submitting a photo with the Maine Energy Facts' door hangers in place through email to photocontest(at)maineenergyfacts(dot)com. To access the official rules, go to http://www.maineenergyfacts.com/contest, and be sure to visit Maine Energy Facts' Facebook page for the latest contest updates.

About Maine Energy Facts

Maine Energy Facts is Maine's source for home heating advice, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sponsored by the Maine Energy Marketers Association, Maine Energy Facts aims to provide truthful information to Maine homeowners about their energy options. To get more facts about home energy, visit http://www.maineenergyfacts.com/

About Maine Energy Marketers Association (MEMA)

MEMA is a statewide association made up of more than 350 member businesses. MEMA members serve more than 415,000 Maine households in keeping nearly one million Maine residents warm and cozy. For more information on MEMA, visit http://www.maineenergymarketers.com/.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/06/prweb13491334.htm
Boulder, CO (PRWEB) June 16, 2016

Janet Thompson and Kirsty Daviau are a mother and daughter team and the founders of Thompson Daviau Realty, who have over 20 years' experience between them in the local real estate market. They recently announced they have a new office location. "Everyone should move at least every five years," said Thompson. "It's what we tell our clients; change as you grow."

In addition to the new address, 4450 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 100, Boulder, Thompson Daviau Realty has a new logo and new signs. As for the office, it is larger, has glass windows throughout and has majestic views of the foothills and Devil's Thumb. "That's what Boulder is all about," said Daviau. "The new office is in a great location and has state-of-the-art facilities for meeting our clients."

Prior to becoming Realtors and starting their own company, both Thompson and Daviau relocated from London, England, to Colorado in 1991, and have lived in Boulder County ever since. Both have earned the Certified Residential Specialist(CRS) designation, which is the highest and most prestigious designation awarded to sales associates in the residential sales field. Every CRS designee is required to maintain membership in the National Association of REALTORS and to abide by its strict Code of Ethics.To stay ahead in the competitive real estate industry, Thompson and Daviau continue to attend real estate seminars and classes.

"We are committed to working together with our clients to give them the best service and support in the business," said Thompson. "Reliable and trustworthy, we greatly value honesty and integrity. Our relationship with our clients continues long after the transaction has closed. 'For the professional advice you need and the personal attention you deserve,' that's our motto."

About Janet Thompson and Kirsty Daviau, Thompson Daviau Realty

Thompson Daviau Realty mainly services Boulder County and the surrounding areas of Broomfield, Adams, Jefferson and Weld Counties, CO. Janet Thompson and Kirsty Daviau are Accredited Buyer's Representatives (ABR) and Certified Negotiation Specialists (CNS). Janet also has a Cendant Mobility Relocation Specialist (CMRS) qualification. Both are members of the Colorado Association of Realtors, and Janet is a member of the Longmont Association of Realtors while Kirsty is a member of the Boulder Association of Realtors. For more information, please call (303) 564-8746, or visit http://www.thompsondaviaurealty.com.

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 NALA's 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.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/thompsondaviau/relocation/prweb13491564.htm
Smoke and flame rise after what fighters of the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) said were U.S.-led air strikes on the mills of Manbij where Islamic State militants are positioned, in Aleppo Governorate, Syria June 16, 2016. REUTERS/Rodi Said

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Air strikes hit rebel-held parts of Aleppo just hours into an announced 48-hour ceasefire and fighting carried on in and around the northern Syrian city, monitors and witnesses said.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the civil war with a population of more than two million people, has been divided for years into rebel and government sectors. Capturing the city is one of President Bashar al-Assad's key strategic objectives.

Russia, an ally of Syria, announced the truce there on Thursday but did not say which parties had agreed to it. There has been no public comment on the truce announcement from Assad's government or factions fighting his forces.

The Britain-based monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said aerial bombardments and rockets hit a number of neighborhoods in the opposition-held sector, killing seven people.

"There were strikes on a number of residential areas causing fires and damage. The truce was supposed to have come into effect at 12 midnight, but now there is no truce," Bebars Mishal, a civil defense chief working in rebel-held areas of Aleppo told Reuters.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said an air strike had put one of Aleppo's biggest hospitals out of service.

It was not immediately clear if strikes had hit the 64-bed MSF-supported Omar Bin Abdulaziz hospital directly or nearby, and the extent of damage was not known.

MSF condemned the continued attacks on healthcare facilities in Syria on its Twitter account and said it was "extremely worried about (the) potential impact on people's access to healthcare" in the city.

Two residents in Aleppo said there had been a number of barrel bombs dropped from helicopters and aerial attacks on Thursday within the city.

The opposition-held part of Aleppo has been cut off in the past two weeks from the outside world as an escalation in air and artillery strikes on the only road in has made journeys perilous and put hundreds of thousands of people under effective siege.

Despite the truce, fierce fighting between government forces and rebels took place overnight around this road, known as the Castello road, with heavy government shelling of the area, the Observatory said.

A Reuters witness said jets and helicopters have been continuously seen in the skies above the Castello road since dawn.

Rebels have since midnight also fired rockets into government-held territory in Aleppo, the Observatory said.

Fighting and air strikes continued in the countryside around Aleppo.

North of Aleppo, air strikes have hit the villages of Anadan, Hayan and Hariyatan. South of Aleppo, ferocious fighting went on between rebels and government and allied forces, which include fighters from Lebanese group Hezbollah. This area has seen territory lost and gained by both sides this week.

Humanitarian organizations said the fighting was making it impossible to deliver aid.

"The longer the fighting continues, the more people will suffer. In Aleppo the situation is already dire and it will get even more difficult," a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

(Reporting by Lisa Barrington and Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Peter Millership, Andrew Heavens, Toni Reinhold)
BANGUI (Reuters) - Lords Resistance Army rebels have kidnapped 17 people from a village in eastern Central African Republic, a senior local official said on Thursday.

The rebels are notorious for mutilating civilians and kidnapping children for use as fighters. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for the LRA's messianic leader, Joseph Kony, and other senior commanders.

The rebels struck on Monday, snatching three people in the morning and forcing them to carry their goods before releasing them in the evening, said Ghislain Kolengo, prefect of Haut Mbomou region.

"Very early (on Tuesday), they attacked Kadjema village and kidnapped 17 people who are still in captivity. I hope that our forces in the area and the Ugandans will find these people and bring them back," Kolengo told Reuters.

The population then fled the town, he said.

The LRA is from northern Uganda but was driven out by a military offensive a decade ago. Today, its fighters roam a poorly policed area straddling the borders between Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan.

All three countries have faced their own conflicts and Uganda, another regional neighbor, said last week it planned to withdraw by the end of the year its troops involved in an operation to hunt down LRA rebels.

The LRA has been weakened but its fighters still attack civilians. It has abducted nearly 350 this year, according to the LRA Crisis Tracker, which documents rebel attacks.

Meanwhile, at least 11 were killed in clashes in the north of the country involving former rebel group called the Seleka, according to a brigade commander in the town of Ngaoudaye.

The first clash happened on Sunday and led to the deaths of seven Seleka members who were leading cattle through the town en route for Cameroon. The former rebels took revenge, killing six civilians, said the commander, who declined to be named.

Central African Republic descended into chaos in March 2013 when the predominantly Muslim Seleka seized power, triggering reprisals by "anti-balaka" Christian militias who drove tens of thousands of Muslims from the south.

President Faustin-Archange Touadera took office in March after elections aimed at drawing a line under the crisis.

(Reporting by Crispin Dembassa-Kette; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Alan Crosby)
A customer exits the Macy's flagship department store in midtown Manhattan in New York City, November 11, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

(Reuters) - A union representing workers of Macy's Inc (NYSE: M) in New York said it reached a tentative agreement with the department store operator for a new four-year contract, averting a strike that was set to begin on Thursday.

Workers belonging to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had demanded a more affordable health plan, pay increases and changes to scheduling and commissions policies.

They had threatened to walk off the job if a deal was not reached by midnight on Thursday.

The labor union, which represents 5,000 workers at the company's flagship Herald Square store and at Macy's locations in the Bronx, Queens and White Plains, said in a Facebook post that it had reached a deal.

"We are pleased with the outcome of our overnight negotiations and happy to report that a tentative agreement between Macy's and Local 1S for our workers has been reached, therefore averting a possible strike today," Macy's said in an email to Reuters.

The retailer declined to provide any details of the agreement.

Macy's had placed newspaper ads seeking temporary workers to minimize disruption from a strike and the union had asked them to stop running the ads.

There has not been a strike at Macy's in New York for over 40 years, the union said.

Macy's shares were up nearly 2 percent at $32.50 in premarket trading on Thursday.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bengaluru, Editing by Anil D'Silva)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. government officials on temporary duty in Nicaragua were expelled this week, the U.S. State Department said on Thursday, adding the action was "unwarranted and inconsistent with the positive and constructive agenda" it seeks with Managua.

State Department spokesman John Kirby told a news briefing that three officials had only recently arrived in Nicaragua when they were expelled on Tuesday. He did not elaborate on what they were doing in the Central American country.

Nicaragua's government said that in an "unfortunate incident," it removed two U.S. officials from the country who were performing Customs security work tied to anti-terrorism, without the knowledge of local officials.

It was not immediately clear why Nicaragua and the United States had different figures for the number of U.S. officials in the country.

"Such treatment has the potential to negatively impact U.S. and Nicaraguan bilateral relations, particularly trade," Kirby told reporters when asked about the incident. "We've conveyed our strong displeasure," Kirby said, referring specifically to Francisco Campbell, Nicaragua's ambassador to the United States.

In a letter distributed to the press, Campbell said the U.S. officials' anti-terrorism activities "were carried out without the knowledge or the proper coordination with Nicaraguan authorities, which is ... very delicate and sensitive."

Nicaragua said it told the U.S. government "of the necessity to inform (them) about official missions that come to Nicaragua, and to coordinate their work."

Kirby did not say whether Nicaragua's ambassador had been summoned to the State Department or the U.S. sentiments had been conveyed in some other manner.

"We believe it was unwarranted and inconsistent with the positive and constructive agenda that we seek with the government of Nicaragua," he said of the expulsion.

(Reporting by David Alexander, Additional reporting by Ivan Castro in Managua; Editing by Tom Brown and Peter Cooney)








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





Date of Report (Date of earliest event reported): June 15, 2016





Blackbaud, Inc.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)





Delaware

(State or other jurisdiction of incorporation)

000-50600 11-2617163 (Commission File Number) (IRS Employer ID Number) 2000 Daniel Island Drive, Charleston, South Carolina 29492 (Address of principal executive offices) (Zip Code)

Registrants telephone number, including area code: (843) 216-6200









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:  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 5.02. Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers.

(e) At the 2016 annual meeting of stockholders of Blackbaud, Inc. (the "Company"), stockholders approved a proposal to adopt the Blackbaud, Inc. 2016 Equity and Incentive Compensation Plan (the "Plan").

A summary of the principal features of the Plan as well as the full and complete text of the Plan can be found in the definitive proxy statement for the Companys 2016 annual meeting of stockholders, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 26, 2016, under the headings Proposal 3 - Approval of the Blackbaud, Inc. 2016 Equity and Incentive Compensation Plan and "Appendix C - Blackbaud, Inc. 2016 Equity and Incentive Compensation Plan," respectively.

Item 5.07. Submission of Matters to a Vote of Security Holders.

The Company held its 2016 annual meeting of stockholders on June 15, 2016. The results of the matters submitted to a vote of the Company stockholders at the meeting are set forth below.





Proposal 1 - Election of Directors. Stockholders elected two Class C members to the Companys Board of Directors, each for a three year term expiring in 2019 as follows:

Member For

Against

Abstentions

Broker Non-Votes

Sarah E. Nash 42,861,468

106,340

145,169

1,261,866

Michael P. Gianoni 42,862,666

105,649

144,662

1,261,866







Proposal 2 - Advisory Vote to Approve Named Executive Officer Compensation. Stockholders approved on an advisory basis the 2015 compensation of the Companys named executive officers as follows:

Votes Cast For 42,230,905

Votes Cast Against 712,734

Abstentions 169,338

Broker Non-Votes 1,261,866







Proposal 3 - Vote to Approve the Blackbaud, Inc. 2016 Equity and Incentive Compensation Plan. Stockholders approved the Blackbaud, Inc. 2016 Equity and Incentive Compensation Plan as follows:

Votes Cast For 40,077,721

Votes Cast Against 2,935,933

Abstentions 99,323

Broker Non-Votes 1,261,866







Proposal 4 - Ratification of Appointment of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm. Stockholders ratified the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the Company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2016 as follows:

Votes Cast For 43,847,229

Votes Cast Against 382,295

Abstentions 145,319

Broker Non-Votes N/A



















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.

Blackbaud, Inc. Date: June 16, 2016 /s/ Anthony W. Boor Anthony W. Boor Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (Principal Financial and Accounting Officer)








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

Date of Report (Date of Earliest Event Reported): June 13, 2016

UPLIFT NUTRITION, INC.

(Exact Name of Registrant as Specified in its Charter)

Nevada 000-52890 20-4669109 (State or other Jurisdiction

of Incorporation) (Commission File Number) (I.R.S. Employer

Identification No.)

61 Larbert Road

Southport, CT 06890

(Address of Principal Executive Offices)

Registrants telephone number, including area code: 203-513-9822

500 W Hwy 316, Citra, FL 32113

(Former Address of Principal Executive Offices)

Check the appropriate box below if the Form 8-K filing is intended to simultaneously satisfy the filing obligation 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))

Section 5 - Corporate Governance and Management

ITEM 5.02 Departure of Directors or Certain Officers; Election of Directors; Appointment of Certain Officers; Compensatory Arrangements of Certain Officers.

On June 13, 2016, the Board of Directors (the Board) of Uplift Nutrition, Inc. (the Company) appointed David M. Baum as a Director, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of the Company.

Below is biographical information regarding Mr. Baum.

Mr. Baum, been a senior executive with proven performance record. He has twenty years of experience in all aspects of Cable Television, Broadband and VOIP operations, including acquisitions, divestitures, acquired capital, strategic business development, budget development & performance to budget. Mr. Baum is also a leader who provides inspiration, clarity, focus and direction to team members, and a creative thinker that relies on proven process to drive results. Mr. Baum is the Founder and CEO of Defensive Drivers Discount since 2011, Founder and Managing Member of Kleen N Green Carwash from June 2010 to August 2011, Founder and CEO of Helicon Cable Holdings LLC from 2005 to 2009, consultant to Cable Marketing Group from 1999 to 2003, Chief Operating Officer other executive positions of Helicon Cable Communications from 1989 to 1999. Mr. Baum attended Boston University School of Engineering from 1980 to 1984.

As of the date of this filing, the Company has not entered into formal employment agreement with Mr. Baum.

2

SIGNATURES

Pursuant to the requirements of Section 12 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended the Registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned thereunto duly authorized.

Date: June 16, 2016 UPLIFT NUTRITION, INC. By: /s/ Sean Martin Name: Sean Martin Title: Chief Executive Officer

3
Jiaxin Tu appeared in the High Court at Auckland for his murder trial. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

A jury is struggling to reach a verdict in the trial of a man accused of murdering a teenager with a hammer.

Jiaxin Tu, 36, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Shane Hawe-Wilson, 19, with a defence expert saying he was suffering from autism and psychotic symptoms at the time of the teenager's death.

The jury of 12 began its deliberations about 3pm on Wednesday and just before 1pm on Thursday it indicated members were struggling to reach a unanimous verdict.

SUPPLIED Victim Shane Paul Hawe-Wilson was allegedly struck with a hammer by Jiaxin Tu.

Justice Christian Whata told jurors that by law, after four hours of consideration, he could give them permission to consider a majority verdict instead - but only if there was no way they could come to a unanimous decision.

A majority verdict means 11 jurors agree, with one in disagreement.

The jury has been sent back to continue its deliberations.

Hawe-Wilson was killed at a Panmure, Auckland home in July last year as he slept in a bed with his girlfriend.

The court was told that although Tu admitted striking Hawe-Wilson with a hammer, he was suffering from psychosis, in conjunction with autism, at the time.

Crown prosecutors argued the killing occurred over jealousies of Hawe-Wilson's girlfriend, with whom Tu was infatuated.

Experts for the Crown said Tu knew right from wrong and could not be considered insane at the time of the death.
A Motueka man battling a rare neurological disorder has taken to protesting outside Nelson Hospital out of frustration as his condition deteriorates.

Jon Anda was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) in 2009, an incurable disease where his immune system attacks his peripheral nervous system.

Despite requests for assistance as his condition and symptoms have worsened, he said he had not been medically reviewed in the last four years.

Anda describes the pain he is suffering from as being like "electric shocks" that course through his hands, arms and feet when his nervous system short circuits.

READ MORE:

* All Jon wants is to walk on the grass

* Struggle against paralysis

* Pauly Fuemana's rare disease revealed

"In the last six months I have become extremely angry, because of the pain and suffering I have had to endure on my own," he said.

The former pilot and businessman said he was frustrated with the lack of care he had received and felt he has been pushed away by Nelson Marlborough Health despite requests for help.

In February 2008, aged 48, Anda felt the first weird signs of his condition prickling in his feet. As his condition deteriorated walking on grass felt like walking on gravel.

Now the shocks from his nervous system sometimes wake him from his sleep, and even going to the toilet can trigger the uncontrollable spasms that make his limbs jerk.

In 2011 he travelled to Chicago for a stem-cell transplant procedure, in the hope it would restore his health and halt the paralysis.

However his condition and symptoms have worsened in recent years and Anda said his situation has not been reviewed and he has not been offered further treatment from Nelson Marlborough Health.

Anda set himself up at the entrance to the hospital on Tuesday morning in a silent protest, hoping to achieve a change in his situation, and also to draw attention to the many others he has met in a similar position.

He said people stopped to talk to him about his illness and shown empathy. Some had bought him coffee and food, others slowed down to read his large sign describing his battle.

"As far as I am concerned, I have the right to talk to an expert who has some knowledge of my illness or my symptoms. If they are not in Nelson I should be able to travel to see them."

He did not think the request was unreasonable but in four years he said he had not been seen by anyone who knows about CIDP.

"You would expect with a rare illness you would have more resources available to you but the opposite appears to be true," he said.

Nelson Marlborough Health senior duty manager Hilary Exton said while she could not discuss exact details about Jon's case she confirmed he had a longstanding clinical record and history of treatments and referrals to other services nationwide.

"When Jon arrived at the hospital yesterday, a senior duty manager spoke at length with him to offer assistance. We continue to be committed to Jon's care and have assured him that we will listen to his concerns and work with him to find a way forward, if that is what he wants."

Exton said it was standard practice to refer patients to other DHBs and to appropriate specialists. The specialist would then schedule follow-ups as deemed appropriate.

People could also be referred to a DHB or specialist at any time, by the GP, if symptoms worsen.

Anda said he was approached by hospital staff on Wednesday morning who asked about what could be done to resolve the issues he had experienced.

"They asked if i would be prepared to go back to my GP and ask him to make a referral back to the hospital," he said.

"That's just ridiculous, I said I did that in January when I could see my situation deteriorating then and still the hospital did nothing about it but fob me off."

Anda said the problems of underfunding and staff being overworked affected all district health boards in the country but "neither of them should come at the expense of a patients health or concerns".

"I'm fighting for my life as far as I am concerned, the quality of my life and the length of my life," he said.
A South Taranaki woman accused of murder appeared in the New Plymouth District Court on Thursday.

The woman accused of the murder of a South Taranaki man has appeared in court and her name suppression has lapsed.

Helen Joyce Rose, 46, of Eltham, was charged after the death of Rex Karaitiana, who died two days after he was allegedly stabbed by Rose on June 1 in Eltham.

She appeared via audio-visual link in the New Plymouth District Court on Thursday.

Rose faces one charge of murder and is yet to plead. On Thursday a further charge of wounding with the intent to cause grievous bodily harm was withdrawn by the prosecution.

The woman was granted interim name suppression when she first appeared in court. A further suppression order was not requested by defence lawyer Jo Woodcock on Thursday.

Judge Garry Barkle remanded Rose in custody by consent and said she was to appear in the High Court at New Plymouth on July 4, at 9am, for call-over. Her appearance then will also be by audio-visual link.

Karaitiana, 50, died in Taranaki Base Hospital on June 3.

He was farewelled at a tangi held in Dannevirke on June 7.
Day three of the peace walk was emotional, especially as Andrew Judd led the group into Parihaka.

Standing up for Maori rights will be the legacy of New Plymouth's outgoing mayor, says New Zealand's race relations commissioner.

Dame Susan Devoy was among the more than 500 people who were welcomed to Parihaka on Friday after a three day hikoi to promote peace.

The peacewalk began in New Plymouth on Wednesday and was the vision of mayor Andrew Judd to begin a new conversation on how tough issues in the community - such as Maori representation - can be tackled.

ANDY JACKSON/FAIRFAX NZ New Plymouth mayor Andrew Judd leads the peace walkers into Parihaka.

Devoy said Judd deserved recognition, not retribution, for his staunch support of Maori representation.

"It's the right thing to do and he's very brave," she said.



READ MORE:

* Stories and experiences shared during Taranaki's peace hikoi

* Conversation a key part of the pathway to peace

* Hundreds join first day of Taranaki peace walk to Parihaka

* Peace hikoi to Parihaka presents new possibilities for partnership between Maori and Pakeha

Devoy said Judd's efforts would be remembered long after his time in office ended.

ANDY JACKSON/Fairfax NZ New Plymouth mayor Andrew Judd is welcomed to Parihaka by Whero Bailey..

"What he has done is create a space to have a conversation," she said.



"I think Andrew will go down in history for this."

The abuse and backlash Judd suffered from some people because of his support for a Maori ward made headlines last month and sparked a national debate about race relations.

In an effort to move the discussion away from division to unity, the peace walk was organised and hundreds of people accepted the invitation to walk from New Plymouth to Parihaka, the historic site synonymous with peaceful protest against widespread land confiscation in the 1880s.

Quadcam Drones A drone captured an aerial view of the walkers as they arrived in Parihaka on Friday.

The hikoi attracted a diverse crowd, including people from outside the region.

About 150 set off on the final leg of the walk from Okato, but numbers swelled considerably as the group approached Parihaka.

After the hikoi arrived at the settlement, Judd spoke passionately about the need for New Zealand to get on board with biculturalism.

ANDY JACKSON/Fairfax NZ Race relations commissioner Dame Susan Devoy meets Wharehoka Wano during Friday's powhiri at Parihaka.

He said there should be "no more" tolerance of the mis-treatment of tangata whenua and the denial of their rights under the Treaty of Waitangi.

Earlier in the day he said while he had been stunned by the support he received for the peace hikoi, he was "ashamed" of the way the New Plymouth District Council had "actively blocked bi-cultural development".

Judd said he expected whoever donned his mayoral chains next would be committed to ensuring all people were fully represented when decisions were made around the council table.

ANDY JACKSON/FAIRFAX NZ About 500 people are walked the peace hikoi on Friday.

Several community leaders joined the walk on Friday, including Dean Peter Beck, Archbishop Philip Richardson, Green MPs Catherine Delahunty and Jan Logie as well as Te Tai Hauauru MP Adrian Rurawhe.

Delahunty, the party's Te Tiriti o Waitangi spokeswoman, said the hikoi "challenges us to acknowledge historical and current injustices" .

She said she supported Judd's stance on Maori wards.

ANDY JACKSON/FAIRFAX NZ About 80 walkers made their way along State Highway 45 to Okato on Thursday's leg of the hikoi.

"We absolutely believe that local government should be a place that represents everyone especially mana whenua," she said.



"Andrew Judd was brave to call out the racism he was experiencing, and we all have a role to play to improve race relations in this country," she said.

Taranaki iwi leader Wharehoka Wano said Judd's actions had been greatly appreciated by Maori.



"We admire him because he has been our voice," he said.



He said he was "disappointed" in the no-show of other councillors, besides Howie Tamati who was present at the powhiri.

"It's almost a sign that maybe they are not interested and that's a concern from a tribal perspective," he said.

ANDY JACKSON/Fairfax NZ Conversation has been a key factor of the peace walk, Hundreds of people have taken part in talking about what needs to change since the walk began.

Wano said there was a definite expectation among iwi that the conversation about Maori representation would continue until it was resolved.



Judd said while he was still undecided about his next move after his term as mayor ends in October, he wanted to continue to advocate for change to ensure the voice of tangata whenua was included.

However, he would not be drawn on whether this could mean a move into national politics.

"Nothing is ruled out except the mayoralty," he said.
A Christchurch man's recording of mysterious, brightly coloured spheres in the night sky has prompted similar reports of sightings.

Building company managing director Oisin Lavelle said he thought he was losing his mind as he watched the objects from the deck of his Lower Cashmere home on three nights this week.

"I'm quite an open-minded person, but I'm not a UFO buff or a conspiracy theorist or anything. I couldn't come up with a logical explanation for it." he said.

OISIN LAVELLE/SUPPLIED The first mysterious sphere filmed above Christchurch.

He spent two hours filming the objects, which were brilliant with lights of different colours and rotating dark bands, until they shot away at speed emitting burst of orange light.



READ MORE:

* Man films mystery objects in night sky

* Mysterious bright sphere over Christchurch latest in record of unexplained Kiwi UFOs

When the footage was published many readers reported seeing similar phenomena. Some did not want to be named publicly for fear of people's reactions, but were adamant about what they had seen.

Others suggested the items were drones, lanterns, reflections, or stars.

OISIN LAVELLE/SUPPLIED The mystery objects kept changing colour.

One group said they were in the city's Botanic Gardens at about 8 pm on April 27 when they saw "a huge, orange-coloured spherical object" in the sky, producing flickering light. The object was spinning, and shot off suddenly into the distance, said one of the group, Clementine Page.

"My friends and I were very shocked and we thought we were going crazy," Page said.

Tracy Mckerchar and her sister were driving in North Canterbury when they saw a bright ball zooming across the night sky, too low to be a comet.

Andy Becker saw an object last Friday, which he now thinks is the same thing Lavelle recorded.

"It hovered in the sky and had some strange lights," he said.

"We thought there would be many reports of this Saturday morning, but were surprised to not find any reports of other people sighting this."

A woman at Coalgate reported a sighting back in March of spheres she said sounded like "the very same things" as this week's sighting.

"I thought at first I was dreaming but I got up and looked at it through my binoculars and could clearly see the colours, it was like looking through a kaleidoscope."

The Defence Force, Airways Corporation, and the Christchurch Adventure Park under construction on the Port Hills all said they had no knowledge of the mystery objects.

However, Graham Palmer from the Hawke's Bay Astronomy Society believed they were stars.

"The star Sirius is in the southwest sky for a couple of hours after sunset. It often flashes vivid colours due to turbulence in the atmosphere," Palmer said.

"The three objects seen the second night are probably the three stars that form the belt in the constellation Orion."

Lavelle said the star theory did not explain why the objects moved, or shot off and then reappeared.

"The way they were moving, the way they changed colour, it was like nothing I've seen or heard of before," he said.
The sharp 4.5 per cent fall in auction prices for Whole Milk Powder, has New Zealand First calling for the government to act with drought starting to grip parts of the country.

Fonterras 2016/17 forecast is immediately under pressure, which at $4.25 per kilogram of milk solids (kg/MS), is below a farmers breakeven, says New Zealand First Leader and Northland MP Rt Hon Winston Peters.

Farmers told us yesterday at Fieldays, that a National Party they traditionally supported is pro-urban and incapable of acting in the interests of Kiwi farmers.

Look at the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act. Instead of triggering sunset clauses with Fonterras South Island market share meeting the Acts 80 per cent threshold, National wants to revise it lower to 75 per cent in both islands. That only benefits the foreign processors.

But it isnt just dairying because drystock farmers in North Canterbury are in a bad way with an elongated drought. We can also add Hawkes Bay in its driest winter on record, while Gisborne and Wairarapa arent far behind in terms of falling soil moisture levels.

New Zealand First backs water storage with tax breaks for farmers to install smart water efficient irrigation and farm environmental works.

New Zealand First is the only party looking to help farmers in trouble with the Receiverships (Agricultural Debt Mediation) Amendment Bill. We also want to reform the Reserve Bank Act to create a dollar that favours exporters and not importers.

New Zealand First wants Closer Commonwealth Economic Relations, especially if the UK votes for Brexit next week, and to bring Russia back in from the diplomatic and trade cold.

National is refusing New Zealand Firsts help to fundamentally reform of the RMA in order to reduce costs and red-tape. National it seems has caved into its Maori Party mates, Mr Peters said.

Visit New Zealand First at Fieldays 2016 Site BLED60 in the Bledisloe Building.

SOURCE: Office of Winston Peters
A bid by New Zealands longest serving prisoner to overturn his sentence imposed nearly half a century ago has been rejected by Privy Council in Britain.

Pensioner Alfred Vincent, 78, has been behind bars since he was sentenced to preventive detention in September 1968 for seven indecent assaults against five boys, following two earlier jail stints in 1964 and 1966 for performing indecencies on boys.

In a written judgment on April 12, the Privy Council refused Vincents application for leave to appeal a November 1968 Court of Appeal decision "because there is no risk that a serious miscarriage of justice has occurred in the case".

Vincents lawyer, Dr Tony Ellis, said on Wednesday he would seek a judicial review of Vincents sentence and would consider complaining to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

He was disappointed at the councils rejection and believed the length of Vincents detention was "inhumane".

"I cant say Im surprised about the Privy Councils decision because it is trying to ascertain what happened 48 years ago."

The Supreme Court became New Zealands highest appeal court on January 1 in 2004, replacing the Privy Council, but offenders whose cases were decided prior to that date still had the right to appeal to the British law lords.

Court of Appeal records of Vincents failed attempt to overturn his preventive detention sentence in November 1968 stated Vincents then-lawyer "had the unenviable task" of trying to persuade the judges to substitute it for a finite sentence.

"We have listened to all he has said, but we are quite satisfied that the case was so bad that there is no question that the appellant has justified for a sentence of preventive detention, the sentence imposed on him by McArthur J," the 1968 court decision stated.

In 1968, an indecent assault conviction gained a seven-year maximum jail term. As a result, Vincent, who grew up in Kaiapoi in Canterbury, became eligible for parole 41 years ago and had appeared in front of the Parole Board almost every year since.

Last October, the board issued a three-year postponement order, meaning he must wait until 2018 for his next chance for release from Rolleston Prison in Canterbury, where he had spent most of his incarceration.



A Parole Board member heads into a parole hearing for Alfred Vincent at Rolleston Prison, near Canterbury, last August. DEIDRE MUSSEN/FAIRFAX NZ.

Vincent had become increasingly frail in recent years, had an artificial eye, wore hearing aids in both ears and suffered heart problems, the board was told.

However, its decision noted he remained a risk to public safety despite his age.

"He is New Zealands longest serving prisoner and sad as it may be, he remains a significant high risk sexual offender who, by his own admission... to the police, believed he would reoffend on release and pose a threat to young males."

The board said it would be "inhumane" to free Vincent because he was unable to function properly in the community after such a lengthy incarceration.

ALFRED VINCENTS CRIMINAL PAST

* October 1956: One charge of theft. Two years probation.

* July 1963: One charge of performing an indecency with an 11-year-old. Eighteen months probation.

* January 1964: Three charges of performing indecencies with boys aged 8-11. Jailed for a year.

* January 1966: Two charges of performing indecencies with a boy aged under 16. Jailed for 18 months.

* February 1968: Fined $60 on three dishonesty charges.

* September 1968: Seven charges of indecent assaults on five boys aged 12-14. Sentenced to preventive detention.

* November 1968: Court of Appeal rejects his appeal for a finite sentence rather than the indefinite preventive detention.

- Deidre Mussen/Stuff
Maori Development Minister Te Ururoa Flavell is today announcing the release of an insightful report into Maori use of information communications technology.

Speaking from an economic development hui in Gisborne, Mr Flavell says a key finding of the Maori me te Ao Hangarau 2015: Maori in the ICT sector report is that Maori, particularly those aged 15-24, are high users of mobile technology to access the internet.

We should be supporting our rangatahi into pathways where careers in ICT are a viable and exciting option. The sort of jobs Maori tended to rely on in the past have changed so we need to be looking to the future, he says.

Studying ICT is a pathway to high-paying careers for our young. The median salary of a Maori worker in 2013 was $36,500 whereas the average Maori ICT professional earned $60,000.

But we dont just want our young people getting into ICT careers, we want them in management and we want them owning their own businesses.

Boldness and innovation are what will make that happen, and that is something that Maori have in abundance.

While were looking to the future, we also need to address that only 68 percent of Maori households have access to the internet, compared with the national average of 83 percent. This report helps identify where we can focus on lifting our achievements, Mr Flavell says.

Todays He kai kei aku ringa Regional Economic Development Hui Te Tairawhiti is being held at the Quality Hotel Emerald in Gisborne and is being organised by Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). It is the third of eight regional hui to discuss and promote Maori economic development and to showcase home-grown initiatives.

The report was written by MBIE as part of He kai kei aku ringa  the Maori Economic Strategy and Action Plan.

To read the Maori me te Ao Hangarau 2015: Maori in the ICT sector report visit the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employmentwebsite.

For more information about the He kai kei aku ringa Regional Economic Development Hui visit: www.mbie.govt.nz/info-services/infrastructure-growth/maori-economic-development

SOURCE: Office of Te Ururoa Flavell
The launch of Facebooks new suicide prevention tools in New Zealand has been welcomed by The Mental Health Foundation.

The social media company has rolled out new tools allowing users to report content posted to Facebookby friends, family or strangers if they think that person is in danger of harming themselves or worse.

When users report suicidal content they are given a list of options to help that person, like reaching out directly to their friend with text suggested by Facebook to let them know they are concerned and are available to help.

MHF chief executive Shaun Robinson believes suicide prevention is a community effort.

But some of us scroll past when we see social media posts that suggest a friend might be suicidal out of fear of saying the wrong thing or a misguided belief that these posts are simply attention-seeking.

Posting about suicidal thoughts or feelings is a warning sign that someone may be at risk of suicide so its important to take the person seriously and do what you can to help.

One of the best things about social media is the social connection it provides, says Shaun.

Feeling connected to others, knowing they care and want to help can be really powerful to a person who feels alone and hopeless. Its easy to say if you see something, say something, but many of us dont know what to say or how to help, and were sometimes worried about making things worse.

Facebook can also send distressed people the numbers and information for New Zealand helplines or connect them with trained counsellors and volunteers who can help them work through their feelings and support them to get further help if they need it.

The tool also sends users suggestions for simple and relaxing activities, like going for a walk, taking a bath or looking at the clouds  small self-care strategies that have been proven to help people when theyre in distress, adds Shaun.

Even if you choose to remain anonymous, it can really help a distressed person if they know someone cares enough to send help their way. Youre not reporting them  youre supporting them.

We believe these tools are a fantastic addition to the suicide prevention work New Zealand is already doing and will help to save lives, says Shaun.

More information about suicide prevention can be found at: www.mentalhealth.org.nz/suicideprevention
Finance Minister Bill English has put the kibosh on the hopes of parents wanting to stay at home with their newborn for 26 weeks.

On Thursday the Deputy Prime Minister exercised his powers of financial veto ahead of the third reading of the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill.
Yes, we need to keep it under control

No, we need to learn to live with it
A $300 million, 600-home development on 40 hectares of Riccarton Racecourse land can proceed following todays passage of special legislation through its third reading, Building and Housing Minister Dr Nick Smith says.

Increasing supply is the most important component of the Governments programme to address New Zealands housing issues. We need to take every opportunity to facilitate new housing, particularly those developments that offer more affordable housing close to our city centres.

These pragmatic bills will enable 600 new homes to be built on land that is currently poorly utilised. The Government is requiring at least 30 per cent, or 180 homes, to be priced below the Governments $450,000 KiwiSaver HomeStart cap for Christchurch so as to ensure an increased supply of homes in a more affordable price range.

The amendments will be made through a cognate Bill  comprising the Riccarton Racecourse Development Enabling Bill and the Riccarton Racecourse Bill (Local Bill)  to revoke reserve status of part of the racecourse land. The Christchurch Racecourse Reserve Act is a Local Act and, under a long-established rule of Parliament, any amendment to such an Act must be promoted as a Local Bill by the relevant local authority  in this case, the Christchurch City Council.

This housing development is part of the Governments housing accord with the Christchurch City Council. The combination of this project and those already under way at Welles Street, Colombo Street and Awatea will deliver more than 1000 new houses for Christchurch, Dr Smith says.

The Racecourse Trustees will partner with Ngai Tahu to deliver new homes, and at the same time the racecourse will benefit financially from more effective use of this land. The Racecourse Reserve was created in 1878 - before the first cars arrived in New Zealand, and well before the city grew to surround the racecourse.

We are making great progress in increasing housing supply, with the annual build rate doubling from 13,000 per year to more than 28,000 during the past four years. Freeing up the supply of land at Riccarton Racecourse will help us maintain this strong momentum.

SOURCE: Office of Dr Nick Smith
Free movement of people and services is crucial for the internal market to function well. On March 8th, the European Commission presented its targeted revision of the posting of workers directive. The proposal is already one of the most controversial to be handled by the European legislators during 2016.

Photo : Robert Losavio

Proponents believe that fair wage conditions and equal remuneration between local and posted workers will provide for a level playing field, better protection for workers, more transparency and legal certainty.

Critics believe that the new rules will interfere in national wage setting, create uncertainties and administrative burdens, undermine competition and the provision of services and in the end risk putting an end to posting. And for the third time in history, a "yellow card" procedure is invoked, with eleven national parliaments requiring the European Commission to review its proposal.

To address this important issue the Swedish Society for Politics and Business (SPN) organised a seminar in Brussels.

Inge Bernaerts, Member of the cabinet of the European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility started the discussions by outlining the broad framework of the proposal.

 The European Commission wants to promote both mobility and posting of workers. But the Single Market does not work without rules. We need clear, fair and enforceable rules to protect the environment, consumers and workers. The directive on the enforcement of the posting of workers directive from 2014 is a tool for national authorities to target abuses. The original posting directive from 1996, which deals with the content, needs to be updated in order to better protect posted workers who work side by side with local workers. Problems exist in certain sectors and when people see that the existing rules are not fair they ultimately reject the Single Market. That is why we need to modify the directive to guarantee that posted workers are subject to the same rules and remuneration as local workers, said Bernaerts.

Martina Dlabajova, Member of the European Parliament and shadow rapporteur for the liberal ALDE Group underlined the need for policies based on facts and evidence.

 Posting is essentially about skills shortages and finding the right competence. It is unsatisfying that the commission has not assessed the extra costs involved in sending workers to another country. Studies in Poland and the Czech Republic estimate such costs to between 30 and 60 percent. It is obvious that requiring these companies to also raise the wages will impact very negatively on their readiness to provide services abroad. Also, we need to have more information about how the new concept remuneration is defined and interpreted and what the consequences will be for the future labour markets in Europe. For many people in the central and eastern European countries labour mobility was crucial for joining the EU. The old member states embraced the enlargement not just out of solidarity, but because of the economic benefits that it brought also in their own countries. The current proposal now risks undermining this mobility, she said.

Danuta Jazlowiecka, Member of the European Parliament for the Christian Democratic, EPP-group also believed that the proposal contributed to legal uncertainties and raising of costs for service providers.

 Posting is a very diverse phenomenon. Its wrong to believe it is just about firms in less prosperous countries providing services in richer countries. Each Member State has its own specific competitive advantages and differences in productivity. The proposal of the commission does not consider this and thus does not take the broader picture of the Single Market into account. It will considerably decrease the competitive edge of countries with many posted workers and, contrary to the intentions, it will raise more barriers, create more legal uncertainty, less investment and less social convergence. It also creates a division within the EU at a time when we need unity, she said.

Sverker Rudeberg, responsible for European Social Affairs at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise said that the proposal should be withdrawn.

 The intention of the commission is to create better protection for posted workers. But good protection needs clear and enforceable rules. Everyone knows what minimum wage means in the current directive, but no one, not even the commission, knows how the new concept remuneration should be interpreted. Since the term is imprecise, it gives room for various interpretations and will create legal uncertainty for a long time. Posting will be more risky, and as a consequence there will be less posting, at a time when we need more mobility. The rules regarding subcontractors are also highly unclear and risk having a very damaging impact on the internal market. The proposal makes lawful posting more difficult and hampers cross-border trade in services, competitiveness, growth and job creation, concluded Rudeberg.

Stephan Agger, Head of the international department of LO, Denmark criticized the proposal for deleting article 3(9) of the current Posting of Workers Directive. He also underlined that in principle Danish LO is in favour of equal treatment of national and posted workers and that the proposal of the commission was a step in the right direction.

 The new concept of remuneration is imprecise. Also, the commission has in its proposal deleted a provision that gives the Member States competence to lay down rules for posted temporary workers that go beyond the minimum rules which otherwise follow from the directive. The legal effects of deleting this provision are unclear. The Danish LO, together with the employers DA, reject giving the European Court of Justice the right to define the concept of pay in Denmark. Danish trade unions are involved in hundreds of collective actions against posting companies and a situation of legal uncertainty for years will have a devastating effect for us, said Agger.

The seminar was led by Gunnar Hokmark, Member of the European Parliament for the EPP-group and president of SPN Brussels, the Swedish Society for Business and Politics. It was held in the Renaissance Brussels Hotel in Brussels and gathered around 70 participants from European institutions, business organisations, trade unions, member states permanent representations and other stakeholders.

Christian Ardhe
Whole Foods

Whole Foods is under fire for "serious violations" in its Massachusetts kitchen.

(The Associated Press)

The Food and Drug Administration has sent Whole Foods Market a letter over "serious violations" at a Massachusetts kitchen, warning the grocer that food prepared there "may have been contaminated with filth."

The FDA's Public Health Service describes multiple inspections conducted during February at the North Atlantic kitchen in Everett, which had condensate from ceiling joints dripping onto work surfaces below. Another incident involved an employee spraying sanitizer on work surfaces near a coworker preparing food, resulting in the "sanitizer being sprayed onto an open colander of salad leafy greens." Other violations included employees not washing hands or changing gloves in between tasks, for example.

Whole Foods' previous reply in March was insufficient due to a lack of documentation on remedial actions, the FDA said. The latest letter dated June 8 gives Whole Foods Market 15 days from its receipt to specify what the company has done to correct the violations.

Representatives for the Austin, Texas-based retailer said they have addressed and corrected each of the issues listed in the FDA letter.

"The thorough and tangible steps that were taken in the North Atlantic Kitchen to address each of these points were not reflected in the FDA's follow-up letter, and we have contacted them to discuss the matter," Whole Foods Market Inc. said Tuesday.

The warning comes as Whole Foods faces growing competition from traditional grocers and big box retailers that have expanded their organic and natural food sections. Last month Whole Foods reported that sales at established stores -- a key metric of a retailer's health -- fell 3 percent during the quarter ended April 10. That marked the third straight quarterly decline. The company has been trying to shake its "Whole Paycheck" image by offering more affordable prices that help it appeal to a broader customer base. It's also opening a chain of "365" stores that will have a minimalist format and a smaller footprint.

Last December the company agreed to pay New York City $500,000 to settle allegations that it overcharged customers for prepackaged foods. The settlement with the city's Department of Consumer Affairs requires Whole Foods to conduct quarterly audits to ensure products are accurately weighed and labeled.
Salina, N.Y.  A developer has purchased the Le Moyne Manor banquet facility and inn on Old Liverpool Road and plans to redevelop the landmark property with a retail building and apartments.

David Muraco bought the vacant property at 629 Old Liverpool Road for $200,000 in May from Vesta Community Housing, of Albany.

Vesta acquired the property in 1998 and used its hotel up until about a year ago as a halfway house for people recovering from alcohol and drug addiction. It also operated the banquet facility for a number of years but discontinued that business in 2011 after years of losses.

Muraco said he plans to demolish the banquet facility and build a 20,000-square-foot retail building in its place. He said he has a tenant lined up for the building but cannot yet disclose its name.

Developer David Muraco plans to redevelop the landmark Le Moyne Manor banquet facility and inn in Salina into a mix of retail space and apartments. (Matthew D. Vredenburgh Landscape Architecture)

Muraco said he plans to enlarge the facility's hotel, either by adding a third floor or by expanding the building's footprint, and turning it into 64 "chic" apartments, some with views of Onondaga Lake.

Once a popular location for social events and business meetings, the banquet facility has fallen into serious disrepair, with significant damage from roof leaks and vandals.

"It's had its useful life," Muraco said. "It's over with."

As part of the redevelopment, Muraco wants to restore the little-noticed "Jesuit Well" between Le Moyne Manor and Onondaga Lake Parkway.

The replica well was built in 1933 to mark the spot reputed, but never proven, to be where Father Simon Le Moyne became the first European to discover the salt springs around Onondaga Lake in 1654. The well, which is owned by the Onondaga Historical Association, has fallen into disrepair and is hidden from view from the parkway by overgrown grass.

"I'd just like to see some type of connection," Muraco said. "Maybe a stone path. We just have to figure out how to get it maintained."

The Le Moyne Manor property itself has historical significance. It is believed that a portion of the property is the site where French missionaries built a fort and occupied it for a year before returning to Canada. (A replica of the fort was built in 1933 a short distance to the north and was recently redeveloped by the Onondaga Historical Association as a cultural center honoring the history of the Onondaga Nation and Onondaga Lake.)



In 1916, famed architect Ward Wellington Ward built a house on a 5-acre lot off Old Liverpool Road for himself and his wife, the former Maude Moyer, and called it Le Moyne Manor. His wife sold the home after Ward's death in 1932, and it was later developed into Le Moyne Manor Restaurant by

Frank Montanaro

.

Over the years, Montanaro greatly expanded the building, adding large banquet rooms and a separate building containing a hotel. He retired and sold the property in 1992.

Portions of the exterior of Ward's home can still be seen at the entrance to the banquet facility, but the interior of the facility retains little of the home's interior, except for a fireplace.

Muraco's son, Louis, who oversees commercial leasing at his father's company, Empire Management Co., is working with his father on the redevelopment of the property.

Muraco's other developments include Suburban Park Apartments in Manlius, the Applebee's restaurant in North Syracuse, the Aldi grocery store in Cazenovia and University Mall in Canton.

Contact Rick Moriarty anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148
Ann Morgan Gilbert

This image released by CBS shows Ann Guilbert in a scene from"Life In Pieces."

(The Associated Press)

Longtime TV star Ann Morgan Guilbert is dead, her daughter announced Tuesday. She was 87.

According to the Associated Press, she had been battling cancer at the time of her death. No other details were released.

Guilbert may be best known for playing Millie, the neighbor of Mary Tyler Moore's Laura on "The Dick Van Dyke Show." She also starred on '90s sitcom "The Nanny" as Grandma Yetta, the grandmother of Fran Drescher's character.

Ann Guilbert appears on season 3 of "Seinfeld" as Evelyn, a neighbor of Jerry's parents.

She also memorably played Evelyn, a neighbor of Jerry Seinfeld's parents in Florida, on two episodes of "Seinfeld."

Guilbert's 56 film and TV credits, some as just "Ann Guilbert," include roles on "My Three Sons," "I Dream of Jeannie," "The New Andy Griffith Show," "Modern Family," "Grey's Anatomy," "Home Improvement" (as Wilson's mother) and, most recently as GiGi on CBS' new comedy "Life in Pieces." She also appeared on Broadway in productions of "A Naked Girl" and "To Kill a Mockingbird."

People reports she is survived by two daughters, Nora Eckstein and Hallie Todd.
Samantha Edwards Miss North Dakota USA

The Miss USA organization shared these photos of Samantha Edwards, who was Miss North Dakota USA in 2003.

(facebook.com/missusa)

Former Miss North Dakota USA Samantha Edwards was found dead at age 37, according to Minneapolis police.

KARE-TV reports the Fargo, N.D., native was discovered unresponsive by a friend inside her home Tuesday morning. No obvious signs of trauma were found, but a police report does not say whether any evidence indicates anything besides a natural death.

Edwards, known as "Sami" to her friends, was crowned Miss North Dakota USA in 2003 and competed in the Miss USA beauty pageant that crowned Susie Castillo of Massachusetts. Edwards moved to Minnesota afterwards and became friends with Miss Minnesota USA 2004 Jessica Dereschuk, who stared a GoFundMe page to help pay for the costs of her funeral and other expenses.

"Sami was one of the most vibrant, crazy, compassionate, loyal balls of energy you could ever come across in life," Dereschuk recalled. "She was a spitfire and with Sami you never knew what she'd throw your way--but you ALWAYS knew she would be there for you. She was awesome like that."

E! News reports Edwards attended the University of North Dakota and the Aveda Institute, a cosmetology school in Minneapolis. Dereschuk said her "best friend" had been working as a freelance makeup artist.

KARE reports investigators are waiting for autopsy results to determine whether the cause of death will be pursued as a suspicious or criminal event.

"We are saddened by the sudden loss of Samantha Edwards, Miss North Dakota USA 2003," the Miss USA organization said in a statement. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family and friends. She will forever be a part of this organization."
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Water from Lake Okeechobee is discharged through the St. Lucie Lock and Dam on Feb. 11, 2016, in Martin County. The discharges began Jan. 30. (XAVIER MASCARENAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

By Ed Killer of TCPalm

An infamous milestone has been reached. Sometime Thursday, with no fanfare, and even less celebration, a dubious distinction will be earned.

The cumulative volume of water being discharged this year from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie River, the Martin County portion of the Indian River Lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean at the St. Lucie Inlet has surpassed the entire volume of water that was discharged in 2013.

In 2013, 136.1 billion gallons of dirty water poured forth over 166 days to create one of the most memorable summers ever, for the wrong reasons. So far, in a mere 138 days since Jan. 30, that much and more has damagingly entered the frail estuary. And the end date for the deluge to stop is, well, yet to be determined.

MORE | Follow our Lake Okeechobee discharge meter for daily updates

You read that right. This year, 2016, is WORSE than 2013, a discharge event so terrible that it was branded "The Lost Summer."

This summer has yet to begin. It doesn't even officially ring in until Monday, the first day of summer.

And it never had a chance. El Nino saw to that.

This winter, which is this region's dry season, unusually high amounts of rainfall fell over Florida. The rainfall that dropped in the area from the southern border of the city limits of Orlando to Okeechobee, and about 60 miles in east to west width, drained south into Lake Okeechobee, the "Liquid Heart of Florida." According to measurements provided by the Army Corps of Engineers, more than 2 million acre feet of rain found its way into the lake, plus another 1.1 million feet dropped from the sky into the 730 square mile lake.

Longtime residents of the southern Treasure Coast, and Florida's Gulf Coast in Fort Myers and its surrounding communities, were well aware what that meant long before the action took place: It meant there would be unfathomable amounts of Central Florida rainwater coming to the coastal estuaries. It meant that the spring fishing season in a huge chunk of Florida would be a virtual washout.

Now, kiss the summer fishing season goodbye. Anyone want to bet on the fall?

The Army Corps of Engineers began the process of letting water out of Lake Okeechobee on Jan. 30. To date, more than 136.1 billion gallons of water have flowed through the flood gates at Port Mayaca on the eastern shore of Lake O, made its way 27 miles to east-northeast along the C-44 Canal and through the flood gates at the St. Lucie Lock and Dam into the once natural, pristine and winding South Fork of the St. Lucie River.

But this waterway hasn't been pristine or natural in more than 80 years. In that time, countless tons of nutrients, minerals, silt, sediment, agricultural pollution, muck, ooze and, perhaps most damaging of all, freshwater has pounded the brackish estuary into submission. The St. Lucie gave up decades ago. It's been a zombie river ever since the ridiculous hurricane season of 1933.

During the Lost Summer of 2013, thousands in this community screamed bloody murder, protested, traveled to Tallahassee and Washington D.C., attended every kind of water management meeting there was, demanded the presence of the governor and elected officials at every level to stand up, be accountable and do something to stop the discharges.

What's sad is that it almost worked. We were so close. I could see the concern in the furrowed brows of our electorate. Some of them actually made motions to begin addressing the problem and working on a solution.

But the solution, which has been so obvious for so long, ever since the first canal was dug in the Everglades, long before the first mounds of dirt were pushed into what is now the hulking Herbert Hoover Dike that rings the gigantic lake, is unpopular with the wrong people. The solution, so simple on so many levels, is elementary.

Send the water south again.

Spare me the critical emails and ridiculous arguments on Facebook. Before you pen some point-counterpoint with inane suggestions to "finish the projects on the books," or "it's your septic tank fouling the water," or "we need more storage north of the lake," or, and I need to be held back by my colleagues on this one, "the Cape Sable seaside sparrow needs nesting grounds," before anyone does this, know I'm sending it right into my computer's trash can.

The Corps is full of genius engineers. They can accomplish a lot of great works if we give them the direction. But none of our spineless politicians will step forward and simply say "send the water south."

Don't wait for the next El Nino. Or the next active hurricane season. Or the next La Nina, whatever that is.

I know we're kind of focused on a lot of other issues right now. We have to figure out how to prevent another event like what happened in Orlando over the weekend. We have to choose the lesser of two evils for a president. We have to make sure our children are safe and our nest eggs are secure. Unsure times lay ahead.

But this isn't rocket science I'm talking about. Take water that Mother Nature never intended to come here or to the Caloosahatchee River, and make it go back to the Everglades, Florida Bay and Shark River. Don't even press "send" on your phosphorous criteria email to me. It's worth about as much as the ridiculous science that went into coming up with that unattainable 10 parts per billion.

Buy land from whomever owns it. Scrap the needless projects on the books. Make the water go south again.

Because we're going to have many more summers like 2013 and 2016 ahead of us. And this one is far from reaching rock bottom.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson and Sen. Marco Rubio visit the Pulse shooting victims memorial at Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Fla., on Thursday, June 16, 2016. (Joshua Lim/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

SHARE Florida Sen. Marco Rubio answers questions from the press after paying his respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting at Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Fla., on Thursday, June 16, 2016. (Joshua Lim/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

By Ledyard King, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON  The worst mass shooting in U.S. history might ultimately propel Marco Rubio to stay in the U.S. Senate.

Just a few weeks ago, the possibility Rubio would break his oft-repeated pledge not to seek re-election seemed remote. Even after returning to Capitol Hill with new energy following his unsuccessful presidential bid, he insisted a second term wasn't on the table.

Besides, Rubio liked to point out, his longtime chum, Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, was running for his Senate seat and he was not going to even consider jumping into the race as long as his friend was in it.

Then Orlando happened. Sunday's mass shooting inside a gay nightclub killed 49 people and sent the nation and Rubio's home state into shock. It also made the job of senator look a lot more weighty than anything Rubio might snag in the private sector.

In the wake of the tragedy, he began to pivot.

It began with a conversation between Rubio and Lopez-Cantera at the scene of the shootings later Sunday, according to a story in Politico that was confirmed by Lopez-Cantera.

"You should reconsider running for your seat," the lieutenant governor told Rubio as they sat in the senator's pickup, according to the story.

The next day, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Rubio whether "the horror" of Orlando had caused him to rethink his pledge not to seek re-election.

"You know, I haven't even given it a thought in that perspective other than to say that I've been deeply impacted by it," the senator responded. "And I think when it visits your home state, and it impacts a community you know well, it really gives you pause to think a little bit about, you know, your service to your country and where you can be most useful to your country."

Before the Orlando shootings, it was no secret Rubio, the son of working-class Cuban immigrants, wanted to make more money to support his family. He retained Washington uber lawyer Bob Barnett to field post-Senate job offers, some rumored to be well into seven figures.

He also had voiced open frustration with the plodding nature of the Senate, and expressed no regret at missing dozens of votes while campaigning for the White House. And he didn't appear persuaded by arguments from Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, that he should seek re-election.

But by Wednesday, he was no longer ruling it out.

"Obviously, I take very seriously everything that's going on  not just Orlando, but in our country," Rubio told Capitol Hill reporters . "I enjoy my service here a lot. So I'll go home later this week, and I'll have some time with my family, and then if there's been a change in status I'll be sure to let everyone know."

He'll have to make a decision soon. The filing deadline is noon June 24.

"I've been saying for weeks he's getting in," said Rep. David Jolly, R-Pinellas, one of five major GOP candidates seeking the nomination for Rubio's seat. Jolly, who's planning a Friday news conference to "clear the air" about his political plans, has said he'll drop out if Rubio runs.

"I think he clearly has a conviction for service," Jolly told reporters Wednesday. "I think he's rediscovered the job in some ways. He's clearly enjoying what he's doing right now. He's showing leadership in the Senate. This is somebody who's served the state for decades and he's realizing he might have more to contribute."

Of course, running for re-election doesn't automatically mean winning.

Even without Jolly or Lopez-Cantera to worry about, Rubio would still face a Republican primary field that includes tea party favorite Rep. Ron DeSantis and two self-funding businessmen: Todd Wilcox and Carlos Beruff. If he won the nomination, he would face either Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Orlando, or Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Jupiter, in November.

Republicans, even incumbents, have a tougher climb during presidential election years in Florida because turnout among minorities and younger voters  traditional Democratic constituencies  tends to surge.

And Rubio's last election in Florida didn't go so well. Trump trounced him 46 percent to 27 percent in the state's March 15 presidential primary, sending him out of the race.

But a recent Mason-Dixon poll found 49 percent of registered voters in Florida, including 77 percent of Republicans, believe Rubio should run. The poll, conducted by phone from May 31 through June 2, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

"If he decides to do so, he would clearly be the strongest candidate, as none of the current contenders appears to have caught fire with state voters," according to the poll.

Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said Rubio probably doesn't yet know himself whether he'll run.

"A lot of it is going to be contingent upon polling that I'm sure is being done and on fundraising calls and all of that because he didn't end his presidential race with high positives," she said. "Only he knows, and I think the dial hasn't stopped for the decision-making yet."

Contact Ledyard King at lking@gannett.com; Twitter; @ledgeking
A St. Lucie County Mosquito Control truck turns on its sprayer as it heads out from the compound in Fort Pierce on an evening run in St. Lucie County in 2002. (TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS FILE PHOTO)

By Ledyard King, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON  As if the threat of a Zika outbreak in Florida weren't harrowing enough, experts now say the primary insecticide used to kill virus-carrying mosquitoes isn't completely effective.

T. Wayne Gayle, executive director of the Lee County Mosquito Control District, told members of Florida's congressional delegation Tuesday that eradicating the Aedes aegypti mosquito will take time, money and the right combination of insecticides.

"These mosquitoes are very difficult to control and we're finding right now that we might have a resistance issue to the pesticides we use," he told the lawmakers. "There's active research going right now to determine the extent of the problem (but) that's a very significant concern right now that needs attention."

The comments from Gayle, who's also president-elect of the American Mosquito Control Association, adds to the alarm over Zika, which has been linked to birth defects and paralysis. He made his comments the same day Senate and House lawmakers began formal negotiations on a spending bill to combat the virus and the mosquitoes spreading it.

Last month, separate anti-Zika funding bills passed the House ($622 million) and the Senate ($1.1 billion). The bills fall far short of the $1.9 billion President Obama requested in February.

"Time is of the essence," House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers said at the start of Wednesday's negotiating session. It could take days to hammer out an agreement.

No state has been affected more by Zika than Florida.

State officials Wednesday reported two new travel-related cases of Zika cases, both in Miami-Dade County. The state now has logged 185 cases, including 38 pregnant women  by far the largest tally in the nation. All of the cases in Florida and the rest of the continental U.S. involve people who contracted the case elsewhere before being diagnosed, except for a handful of cases in which the virus was sexually transmitted.

That number is expected to grow as warmer, wetter weather brings an expected onslaught of mosquitoes. In addition, Florida is considered especially vulnerable to an outbreak, given its tropical climate, proximity to Latin America where the virus is rampant, and the volume of travelers constantly moving through its airports and seaports.

Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has urged lawmakers to approve the full $1.9 billion quickly because the CDC needs to attack Zika on a number of fronts: increased monitoring, better treatment, mosquito eradication and vaccine development.

Frieden, responding to a question from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio at Wednesday's delegation meeting, said it's possible  or even likely  that there's already been a mosquito-borne infection in Florida.

Calling the Aedes aegypti the "cockroach of mosquitoes" for its ability to survive, Frieden told lawmakers the species is difficult to track and eradicate, it can breed in only a capful of water, and its eggs can survive over the winter. That kind of resilience means Zika will probably become endemic in the southern U.S., similar to the increasing incidence of dengue fever, which is carried by the same mosquito.

"It is likely we will have isolated cases of local transmission (of Zika). I think it's certainly possible we will have clusters," the CDC director said. "Even if we have a vaccine, and I'm hopeful within a few years we will, we need better ways to control this mosquito."

That helped persuade Rep. Tom Jolly, R-Pinellas County, who had voted for the $622 million House bill, to support the president's request for $1.9 billion.

Zika-carrying mosquitoes are especially difficult to root out, Gayle said after the meeting. Unlike many other mosquitoes that can be attacked by spraying over a wide area, Aedes aegypti are found in small groups that require a much more targeted  and expensive  strategy.

That's assuming an effective pesticide is being used, something that turned out to be an issue in the Florida Keys during a recent dengue outbreak, Gayle said.

"We're just now starting to test and finding out a lot of areas have resistance that we didn't know about," he said. "So you could be spraying and not really know you're not affecting those mosquitoes."

Contact Ledyard King, at lking@gannett.com; Twitter: @ledgeking
Seddique Mir Mateen, father of Orlando nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, talks to the media Monday inside his Port St. Lucie home. Mateen was shocked by and apologized for his son's actions. Omar Mateen was the gunamn who opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, early Sunday morning. (MOLLY BARTELS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS) CQ: Omar Mateen, Seddique Mir Mateen Taken: Monday, June 13, 2016

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By Will Greenlee of TCPalm

PORT ST. LUCIE  Seddique Mateen's two corporations are dedicated to helping the citizens of Afghanistan.

"That's all there is to it," the father of 29-year-old Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen said Thursday in a private interview with TCPalm.com and Treasure Coast Newspapers.

The goal of the two corporations he's involved with relates to helping with issues in his native Afghanistan; to dissolve the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan, he said.

Seddique Mateen, 59, became a naturalized citizen of the United States on Nov. 17, 1989, in a district court in Brooklyn, New York, according to the certificate issued.

He is the sole board member of the Provisional Government of Afghanistan Corp., which became active in March. He's also involved in The Durand Jirga since 2010. Both are not-for-profit corporations, records show.

The Provisional Government entity, he said, has a goal of helping "the difficulties of Afghanistan."

When talking about The Durand Jirga, Mateen mentioned the Durand Line.

The line is the more than 1,500-mile border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which stemmed from an agreement reached between a secretary of the British Indian government and the ruler of Afghanistan, according to the National Geographic website. It has been the border for more than a century, but it has created controversy.

Most of the Durand Line follows rivers and other features, and not ethnic boundaries.

The purpose of many videos found on YouTube associated with Durand Jirga, in which Mateen is talking, is to "resolve the Durand Line, eliminate Durand Line," he said.

He said neither group contributes monetarily to Afghanistan.

"You have some money to send to Afghanistan?" he asked.

Mateen said he is "just barely making a living" and is a life insurance agent. According to state records, he has been licensed to sell life insurance since 1991.

He has put himself in the media spotlight daily since his son was identified as the Orlando gunman who killed 49 and injured 53 in a gay nightclub on Sunday, emerging from his Southwest Bayshore Boulevard home a few times a day to speak with groups of journalists.

He has said he came to the United States in the 1980s after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He moved to Port St. Lucie from Queens, New York, in 1991 "because of the weather."

MORE | Orlando shooting coverage
The Indian River State College campus in Fort Pierce.

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By Keona Gardner of TCPalm

FORT PIERCE  Omar Mateen was rejected when he applied to attend the Treasure Coast Public Safety Training Complex at Indian River State College in 2015. The program didn't tell him why, and even today, officials won't divulge their reasons.

"During the testing and/or review processes, information was discovered which caused your application to be denied at this time," wrote Lee Spector, Criminal Justice Training Institute director, in a March 2, 2015, letter obtained along with other documents by TCPalm.com.

Spector on Thursday declined to comment why Mateen was rejected.

Yet Mateen's application, including a 28-page personal-history questionnaire submitted Jan. 28, 2015, could offer answers why he wasn't admitted to the training, a requirement for becoming a law enforcement officer.

In his questionnaire, Mateen marked "yes" that he'd had criminal records sealed and expunged and that he had been a suspect in a criminal investigation.

In his IRSC application, he also divulged that he had participated in "undetected crimes," which the questionnaire defined as criminal acts for which you have not been caught, including underage drinking, petit theft, shoplifting, burglary, stealing from your employers or use of illegal substances.

He did not indicate which crime he committed.

Moreover, Mateen  who killed 49 people and injured 53 in an Orlando nightclub shooting rampage early Sunday  admitted using marijuana and steroids. He said he never had consumed alcohol.

In November 2014, he passed his physical-abilities test, which is composed of completing a 1-mile run/walk, 300-meter run, 1 minute of sit-ups, vertical jump and push-ups, all in less than 6 minutes 4 seconds. The 245-pound, 5-foot-11 Mateen clocked in at 5 minutes, 10 seconds.

While in college, Mateen earned a C in his deviant-behavior class, where students study "sociological perspective and theories of deviance. Emphasis is placed on understanding basic behavior patterns that are not part of traditional and conventional society."

After Mateen graduated in 2006, he enrolled in an 80-hour firearms training class at the college. He eventually withdrew from the class and earned 40 hours of firearms training through his security job with G4S Security.

MORE | Orlando shooting coverage
Seddique Mateen pauses while talking about his son, Orlando gay nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, while interviewing with news media in his home Tuesday, June 14, 2016, on Southwest Bayshore Boulevard in Port St. Lucie. (XAVIER MASCARENAS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

By Will Greenlee of TCPalm

PORT ST. LUCIE  The father of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen is involved in at least two active Florida corporations, including one filed this year called Provisional Government of Afghanistan, records show.

Seddique Mateen is listed as the sole member of the board of directors of that nonprofit corporation, and the address listed is the residence in the 500 block of Southwest Bayshore Boulevard.

The elder Mateen's Provisional Government of Afghanistan Corporation is "organized for exclusively religious, charitable, educational and scientific purposes.

"Specifically, the organization will mediate and attempt to resolve social and territorial disputes," records state.

The father has thrust himself into the media spotlight, talking sporadically with reporters outside and inside his home since Sunday after his son was identified as the mass shooter at Orlando gay nightclub Pulse.

He has declined to give his age and has not spoken much about himself or his businesses. He has objected to some inquiries that he said were political.

Police at times would show up and indicate those at the house wanted reporters off the property, but later, Seddique Mateen would exit his house and address the media.

Seddique Mateen is on the board of The Durand Jirga, Inc., paperwork for which was filed in 2010. The initial articles of incorporation also state it "will mediate and attempt to resolve social and territorial disputes." Current or former board members have been listed in California, Florida and Canada.

The Durand Jirga Inc., has published videos of Mateen talking about political relationships between the United States and Afghanistan. In one, he announced his candidacy for president of Afghanistan.

Seddique Mateen was the sole board member in a now inactive corporation filed in 1997 called Happy Beauty Salon, Inc. That business was at an address in the 6400 block of South Kanner Highway in Stuart.

"The purpose of this corporation is to engage in the business of owning and operating a beauty salon including but not limited to the cutting and styling of hair, manicures, and the sale of beauty related products," records state.

In Stuart, Seddique Mateen also is linked to the inactive Wonderworks Production, LLC, which was filed in 2010.

Another inactive corporation, initially filed in 2003, linked to Seddique Mateen is Fine Image Art Gallery Inc. The place of business was listed as Indian River Mall in Vero Beach with the purpose "including but not limited to the retail sale of fine art products."

Seddique Mateen, who said he has three daughters, has said he came to the United States in the 1980s after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which he said is his homeland. He said he moved to Port St. Lucie from Queens, New York in 1991.

He said he hoped his son, who has a 3 1/2-year-old son, would get a higher education and serve the United States.

In a brief statement Wednesday afternoon, he said: "My son sympathized with ISIS, not with me, not with the family, so he sympathized with terrorist group, so we are all victim. I wish he didn't do that."

He declined to take questions and went back inside his home.

At times, dozens of reporters, camera people and vehicles jammed the area of the home for much of the past three days.
Spectrum Junior/Senior High School in Stuart.

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By Andrew Atterbury of TCPalm

MARTIN COUNTY  Omar Mateen's pattern of misbehavior did not end in 1999, when he transferred from St. Lucie County schools to Martin County in eighth grade.

Mateen, who on Sunday shot and killed 49 people and injured 53 at an Orlando nightclub, was suspended a total of 48 days between 2000 and 2002 while he was in middle school and high school, according to school records obtained by TCPalm.com.

Most of the offenses were categorized as "other rule violations," while two suspensions in 2001 resulted from fights just days apart, according to records.

However, details of Mateen's behavior problems; discipline, including suspensions; and communications with his parents were unavailable. Martin County School District retains discipline records only for three years, school officials said Thursday.

Mateen transferred to Stuart Middle School in August 1999, and his first junior high suspension  for an unspecified infraction  came three months later, according to documents. As an eighth-grader, Mateen was suspended for 25 days  11 days out of school and 14 in school  between 1999 and 2000, records show.

In May 2001, toward the end of Mateen's freshman year, he was removed from Martin County High School and sent to Spectrum Junior/Senior High School  the district's disciplinary campus.

A week before he was admitted into Spectrum, Mateen was suspended three days for a fight, then five days for a second fight six days later, according to records.

Mateen explained he was sent to Spectrum for fighting a fellow student, according to a 28-page personal-history questionnaire that accompanied his January 2015 application for the Indian River State College police academy.

He initially was charged with battery, which was adjudicated, and disturbing a school function, which was dropped, according to Mateen's background check for the Florida Department of Corrections in 2006.

"It has been five years since the fight occurred and I have not gotten in any altercations ending up with physical contact," Mateen wrote in background check. "This was an experience of me growing up and I learned a big lesson from it."

He was suspended twice before those fights  in October 2000 and March 2001.

Only five days after he enrolled at Spectrum, Mateen was suspended again, this time for seven days, according to documents. His last suspension was for five days in September 2001.

Mateen finished his freshman year at Spectrum in 2001, and began his sophomore year at the disciplinary campus, according to records. He returned to Martin County High School in the spring semester, where he wrapped up his sophomore year in 2002, records show.

He remained there the first half of his junior year but left in January 2003 to attend the Stuart Adult Community High School. He graduated from the alternative high school in 2003.

MORE | Orlando shooting coverage
ST. LUCIE COUNTY  Omar Mateen donated blood about two weeks before the Orlando shooting, officials confirmed.

Mateen donated during a mobile blood drive in Fort Pierce on May 29, said Susan Forbes, OneBlood vice president.

Mateen killed 49 people and wounded dozens of others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando June 12.

On Sunday, about 5,500 people donated blood at OneBlood locations. Pat Michaels, OneBlood spokesperson, said OneBlood doesn't break down donations by geographic areas.

The numbers include people in Florida, portions of South Georgia, Alabama and other Southern states, Michaels said. On Monday, about 7,000 people donated at OneBlood centers. About 4,000 donated blood Tuesday.

'We have almost all of our staff working,' Michaels said, 'but the numbers have leveled off.'

MORE | Complete coverage on Omar Mateen and Orlando shooting
In the shadow of the Magic Kingdom, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation officers search for a young boy Wednesday, June 15, 2016, after the boy was grabbed Tuesday night by an alligator at Grand Floridian Resort at Disney World near Lake Buena Vista, Fla. Searcher later found the boy's body. (Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

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By Dave Breitenstein, Fort Myers News Press | USA TODAY NETWORK

Orlando-area officials confirmed Wednesday afternoon that a body has been recovered in a lake at the Grand Floridian Resort at Disney World.

It would be the 24th fatal alligator attack in Florida during the past 43 years.

Wednesday's discovery ended an exhaustive 17-hour search that began after 2-year-old Lane Graves, whose family was visiting from Nebraska, was dragged into the water Tuesday night by an alligator. The 7- to 8-foot reptile grabbed the boy as he was playing in about a foot of water at the Seven Seas Lagoon at Grand Floridian.

The toddler's death would be Florida's 24th caused by an alligator attack since 1973, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the fourth involving a child under age 5. According to FWC, there were 383 unprovoked alligator attacks between 1948 and 2015, categorized as follows:

Fatal attacks: 23

Minor attacks: 126

Major attacks: 257

There have been fatal alligator attacks in 15 of Florida's 67 counties. With three fatalities each, Lee and Charlotte counties on Florida's southwest coast have the most deaths caused by alligators.

FWC began tracking alligator attacks in 1948, and provides these snapshots of Florida's unprovoked fatal alligator attacks through April 2016:

1. Sharon Holmes, 16, female, was killed by an 11'3" male alligator while swimming at dusk in a lake at Oscar Scherer State Park, Sarasota County, on Aug. 16, 1973. The alligator was killed, and body parts from the victim were found in its stomach. The alligator had recently moved into the lake and was reportedly to have been fed by visitors to the park.

2. George Leonard, 52, male, was seized on the arm by an alligator while swimming in the Peace River Canal, Charlotte County, on Sept. 28, 1977, at 8:35 p.m. A 7 ft. alligator, which had appeared in the canal the day of the bite, severed the victim's arm at the elbow. Leonard died three days later of complications from the bite.

3. Phillip Rastrelli, 14, male, was killed while swimming across the Hidden River Canal off Bessie Creek in Martin County on Sept. 10, 1978 at noon. The alligator was an 11-foot healthy male.

4. Robert Crespo, 11, male, was killed while swimming in a canal in St. Lucie County on Aug. 6, 1984 at 4:30 p.m. The alligator was 12' 4", aged and in poor health.

5. Paul Mirabito, 27, male, disappeared while diving and harassing small alligators in the Wellington C27 canal near West Palm Beach on May 4, 1985. His body was recovered two days later with severe injuries to the neck and puncture wounds on the arm. The medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was drowning, but noted evidence of bleeding around the wounds, indicating the bites occurred prior to drowning.

6. George Cummings III, 29, male, was killed while snorkeling in the Wakulla River on July 13, 1987 at 2 p.m. The alligator was an 11-foot healthy male.

7. Erin Glover, 4, female, was seized and killed by an alligator while walking along the shore of Hidden Lake, Charlotte County on June 4, 1988 at 6:10 p.m. The alligator was a 10' 7" male.

8. Bradley Weidenhamer, 10, male, was killed while wading in the Loxahatchee River at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County on June 19, 1993. The alligator was an 11' 4" male.

9. Grace Eberhart, 70, female, was killed at Lake Serenity in Sumter County on Oct. 3, 1993. The circumstances surrounding her death are unknown, but she died of a broken neck caused by an alligator bite to the throat and head. Several alligators may have been involved in the incident. The largest measured 9' '7" long.

10. Adam Binford,3, male, was killed at Lake Ashby in Volusia County on March 21, 1997. The child strayed outside the roped-off swimming area in a county park to pick some lily pads when an 11-foot alligator attacked him. Splashing dogs in the area may have attracted the alligator. His body was recovered the next day about a mile from the site of the incident.

11. Samuel Wetmore, 70, male, was killed in a pond near his residence in Venice in Sarasota County. He was found on May 4, 2001, and the county medical examiner determined that he died from multiple trauma and loss of blood. An 8' 4" alligator was removed and destroyed.

12. Alexandria Murphy, 2, female, was killed at Lake Cannon in Polk County on June 23, 2001. She wandered 700 feet from her fenced backyard where she had been playing when last seen by her mother. A 6' 6" alligator was removed and destroyed.

13. Robert Steele, 82, was killed near his house on Rabbit Road in Sanibel on Sept. 11, 2001. Steele was walking his terrier on a narrow path that ran between two wetland areas close to J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge when a 10' 9" gator seized him and dragged him into the water, severing his leg. FWC officers destroyed the alligator. Another six-foot alligator was also removed.

14. Brian Griffin, 12, male, was killed while swimming near a boat ramp in the Dead River in Lake County on June 18, 2003. The male alligator that attacked and drowned Griffin was 10' 4" long and weighed 339 lbs. That alligator and several other large alligators were captured destroyed.

15. Janie Melsek, 54, female, was seized by an alligator while landscaping near a pond along Poinciana Circle, Sanibel on July 21, 2004. Melsek survived the attack, but died later of an infection related to the wounds. The alligator that attacked Melsek was a 12' 3" male, which was removed and destroyed.

16. Michelle Reeves, 20, female, was killed while swimming after midnight in a retention pond at the Lee Memorial Health Park in Lee County on Sept. 26, 2004. Reeves was visiting the area during a college break. The 7' 11" male alligator that attacked her was removed and destroyed.

17. Donald Ray Owen, 56, was found dead in Six Pound Pond near Lakeland in Polk County with multiple alligator bites and the left arm amputated below the elbow. The medical examiner determined that the victim was bitten prior to dying on March 11, 2005. Circumstances of the incident are uncertain because there were no witnesses. The 9' 8" male alligator responsible for the attack was caught and destroyed.

18. Kevin Murray, 41, male, was killed while swimming in a canal in Port Charlotte on July 15, 2005. The 12' 2" male alligator that attacked him was removed and destroyed.

19. Yovoy Suarez-Jimenez, 28, female, was killed by an alligator at the North New River Canal in Sunrise on May 10, 2006. Circumstances of the attack are uncertain because no witnesses were present. The 9' 6" male alligator that attacked her was caught and destroyed.

20. Judy Cooper, 42, female, was killed by an alligator in a canal in the East Lake Woodlands subdivision in Oldsmar on May 13, 2006. Circumstances of the attack are uncertain because of no witnesses. The 8' 5" female alligator responsible for the attack was caught and destroyed.

21. Annmarie Campbell, 23, female, was seized and drowned by an alligator in Juniper Run in the Ocala National Forest on May 14, 2006 while snorkeling. Campbell had separated from others in her party, and was alone when the attack occurred. Companions found her in the jaws of the alligator less than 30 minutes after the attack and forced the alligator to release her by assaulting its head. The 11' 5" male alligator was captured four days later and destroyed.

22. Justo Antonio Padron, 36, male was seized and drowned by an alligator as he was swimming across a pond at the Miccosukee Indian reservation in west Miami on November 8, 2007. Eyewitnesses watched as Padron disappeared under water, while trying to elude police. His body was later recovered at the bottom of the pond by divers. A 9'4" alligator and a 7'6" alligator were removed from the pond, the larger of which was believed to be responsible for the attack.

23. James Okkerse, 61, male, was killed while snorkeling in Blue Spring Run in Orange City on Oct. 19, 2015. The 12' " male alligator responsible for the attack was captured and destroyed.

Connect with audience analyst Dave Breitenstein on social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Vine.
An injured man is escorted out of the Pulse nightclub after a shooting rampage June 12 in Orlando. A gunman wielding an assault-type rifle and a handgun opened fire inside a crowded gay nightclub early Sunday, killing 49 people before dying in a gunfight with SWAT officers, police said. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. (AP Photo/Steven Fernandez)

In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shootings, the national spotlight has focused, yet again, on assault weapons.

With good reason: Omar Mateen, the Fort Pierce resident who killed 49 and wounded 53 in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, reportedly used two guns during his rampage. One was a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol. The other was a Sig Sauer MCX  a lightweight semi-automatic rifle originally developed for the U.S. Special Forces.

In other words, a weapon of war.

We see no legitimate reason for American civilians to own such weapons. They're not particularly useful for hunting  unless you're hunting humans. For those who desire personal protection, handguns are quite effective.

Poll: How should federal lawmakers respond to the Orlando massacre?

Assault weapons are sleek, powerful machines, specifically designed to inflict exactly the type of carnage that occurred in Orlando. Without the rifle, Mateen might have gotten off fewer shots. Fewer people might have died.

Yet, while it might be easy to make a moral case against these weapons, statistics show semi-automatic rifles are not uniquely lethal.

They're used in a small percentage of crimes  including mass shootings.

According to FBI statistics, rifles  a category which includes the Sig Sauer MCX and the more common AR-15  account for about 4 percent of gun murders where the type of gun is known. The left-leaning website Mother Jones published a database of mass shootings dating back to 1982: of the 81 incidents, semi-automatic "assault" rifles were used in 18.

Overall, the most common weapons used in these crimes are semi-automatic handguns.

The U.S. banned assault weapons once before, from 1994 to 2004. Studies on the efficacy of the ban were inconclusive. There was little evidence to suggest gun violence became less lethal or injurious during the period. While there was some evidence the ban reduced crimes committed with assault weapons, that was offset by the steady or rising use of other semi-automatic guns equipped with large-capacity magazines.

In this last sentence might lie the key to gun control legislation that could reduce shooting deaths, while being palatable to a broad enough coalition to actually pass:

Outlaw large-capacity magazines.

According to news reports, Mateen used 30-round magazines, meaning he could get off 30 shots without reloading. And it might have been even worse. Some large-capacity magazines can hold up to 100 rounds of ammunition, radically increasing a shooter's ability to injure and kill large numbers of people without reloading.

While usually associated with assault weapons, large magazines are available for handguns. Jared Loughner, who killed six and wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 12 others in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, used a semi-automatic handgun with a 33-round clip. His rampage was stopped only after he was tackled by a bystander when he stopped to reload.

Data from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence shows that large-capacity magazines have been used in 50 percent  half  of all mass shootings over a 20-year span, resulting in more people shot and more people killed.

These magazines are the common thread linking virtually all of the highest-profile mass slaughters in recent American history. As such, seven states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York) and the District of Columbia have seen fit to ban high-capacity magazines for all firearms, limiting clips for both semi-automatic handguns and rifles to 10 or, at most, 15 rounds.

It is time for the state of Florida to follow suit.

The Orlando shootings demand a response. We call upon the state Legislature, and specifically our Treasure Coast legislators, to craft, back and pass such a law at the earliest opportunity.

We call upon the gun lobby to accept that such a measure abrogates no one's Second Amendment right to buy any gun. Such a change would cost lawful owners nothing, while hindering the next Omar Mateen's ability to kill so many so quickly.

Limit magazine sizes and you make a shooter more vulnerable and give victims precious moments to fight back  which could help deter murderers in the first place.

Would this end mass shootings? No  no single step will. But polling has consistently shown a significant majority of Americans support a ban on large capacity magazines. A 2012 CNN poll, for example, showed 62 percent would back such a law.

In our era of hyper-polarized gun rhetoric, this might be as close a thing to bipartisan compromise as we can ever hope to achieve.

There are other measures we must consider. One such possibility is the so-called "no-buy" list, which would prevent people on the federal "no fly" or terror watch lists from buying firearms. Both Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, appear to support such a proposal  and so, we suspect, would the American people.

Treasure Coast Newspapers' Editorial Board also supports the idea.

Orlando demands that we do what we can, as soon as we can. Lives might literally depend on it.
Water from Lake Okeechobee is released Thursday into the C-44 Canal, which leads to the St. Lucie River, at the St. Lucie Lock and Dam near Stuart. As of June 16, the amount of Lake Okeechobee water passing through the locks surpassed 136.1 billion gallons, the total amount for 2013, or what was called the "Lost Summer." (LEAH VOSS/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)



By Editorial Board

Has anything really changed?

This is the question Treasure Coast residents are asking as they brace for a potential repeat of the Lost Summer of 2013.

It's increasingly clear that this summer could be as bad  or worse  than the environmental crisis we endured three years ago.

On Thursday, the cumulative volume of water discharged in 2016 from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie River surpassed the total volume discharged in 2013.

MORE | Follow our Lake Okeechobee discharge meter for daily updates.

What's most alarming is this milestone was reached in mid-June  before the official start of summer. In 2013, it didn't happen until October.

And the water is still gushing.

Let's recall 2013, when 136 billion gallons of Lake Okeechobee water, laden with phosphorus and nitrogen, poured into the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon. The deluge wiped out oyster beds and sea grass, triggering toxic algae blooms that necessitated health department warnings to avoid the water.

The massive discharges had devastating effects on marine, fishing and recreational businesses in our communities.

Three years later, our lagoon is ripe for a repeat. All the key factors  i.e., volume of the discharges, presence of blue-green algae, depth of Lake Okeechobee  portend another environmental disaster.

Lovers of the lagoon are trapped in a time warp.

To be fair, some things have changed since the Lost Summer of 2013. For starters, politicians talked about the plight of the lagoon with renewed vigor.

"I will work diligently to protect and preserve the lagoon ... blah, blah, blah," said EVERY candidate running for political office in the intervening years.

Elected officials made trips to the scene of the crime, peering into the tainted water and promising to do something about it.

We wonder: Would the likes of Gov. Rick Scott or U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson ever visit our region if we didn't have a river that provided such a compelling photo-op?

Since 2013, the plight of our waterways has garnered greater attention in Florida legislative meetings and the halls of Congress. The national media have reported on the issue.

Yes, some things have changed since 2013.

However, for the dad who wants to take his kid fishing in the lagoon, it's as if the calendar hasn't moved. For the family that wants to go tubing in the lagoon or anchor at the sand bar and lounge in the water, time is at a standstill. For the bait shop owner who has seen his sales plummet or the boat dealer who might have to lay off employees, nothing has changed.

This is the perspective that is lost on the talking heads in Tallahassee and Washington D.C.

For us, the lagoon is personal. It is so much more than an election issue. The lagoon  one of the most diverse estuaries in North America  is a priceless treasure that defines who we are.

It is the economic and recreational lifeblood for many people in our communities.

We're told to be patient. We're reminded by officials that there are no quick fixes to the problem.

No quick fixes? How much time do you require?

Discharges from Lake O have been fouling our waterways for 85 years. Herbert Hoover was president when the Army Corps of Engineers first began releasing water from the lake in 1931.

The tragic history of our lagoon is poised to repeat itself.

When will there be an end to this environmental catastrophe?
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By Katie Duke

The state of Florida's long-standing, expensive and unconstitutional battle in favor of a speech ban that prohibits physicians from simply asking patients about gun ownership could finally be nearing an end  and, in light of recent events, not a moment too soon.

The lawsuit, known as Wollschlaeger v. Governor of Florida, also known as "Docs vs. Glocks," pits the state against various physician and medical-rights groups that believe in the First Amendment.

The law containing the speech ban, passed in 2011 and in the courts ever since, makes little sense. Pursuant to the law, a physician could ask a patient about gun or ammunition ownership only if this line of questioning appears "relevant to the patient's medical care or safety." If a patient complains about the questioning and the state deems the information sought irrelevant to the medical treatment at issue, then the doctor could lose his license to practice medicine and could face disciplinary action.

Physicians frequently raise safety issues during routine examinations in certain fields of medicine, including pediatrics. Pediatricians might ask parents about safety issues like the fencing around family pools, the use of certain household cleaning products and other commonsense concerns.

Asking about gun safety in the home fits into that category of questions, yet family doctors facing the risk of professional discipline, suspension or fines will submit to the ban and eliminate questions about gun safety in order to avoid trouble.

For this reason, the court hearing the case should rule in favor of the First Amendment and find the law unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, whether the First Amendment will win remains in doubt. A panel of judges on the federal court hearing the case, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has written three separate opinions to justify the statute, and now all the members of that court intend to hear argument in the case on June 21. Hopefully, this fourth ruling will be the charm.

It is extremely rare for a panel of circuit judges to issue three decisions for the same case. With each opinion here, the three-judge panel modified its reasoning for ruling against the First Amendment rights of the doctors.

In its first decision, the panel claimed the law properly regulated professional conduct  not speech at all. After doctors called foul, the panel admitted in its subsequent second and third opinions that the law regulated professional speech  not conduct.

Although a step in the right direction, that third opinion still failed to account for the importance of freedom of speech for all Americans, including doctors. Instead, the 11th Circuit panel found the law passed constitutional muster because the patients' Second Amendment rights to own a gun could be infringed by the simple asking of these questions.

In other words, asking a question about guns violated the right to own guns, but banning speech altogether did not violate the freedom of speech.

Only a lawyer  or a judge  could even try and make that case.

This case might focus on doctors, but it affects all Americans. If the state can violate the freedom of speech of doctors for spurious reasons, then the state can violate your freedom of speech, too.

As a future member of the Florida Bar (fingers-crossed), I am particularly interested in the case's outcome. At a minimum, all professionals  lawyers, teachers, journalists and others  should take notice when the state says it can ban the topics about which a fellow professional can speak.

Bottom line: physicians, lawyers, veterinarians, advertisers and other licensed professionals beware.

Katie L. Duke, a summer law clerk with Pacific Legal Foundation, lives in Stuart and attends the University of Miami School of Law.
The FBI was out Sunday night at the residence of Omar Mateen in Fort Pierce. Mateen is suspected of killing 49 people and injuring more than 50 at a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning. (JEREMIAH WILSON/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

SHARE Media outlets from around the world converged Sunday at the residence of Omar Mateen in Fort Pierce. Mateen is suspected of killing 49 people and injuring more than 50 at a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning. (JEREMIAH WILSON/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)

By Michael Goforth

To the world: This is not who we are.

In 1995, we were stunned to learn that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's mother was a resident of Fort Pierce and McVeigh himself had visited here a few months before that awful attack that killed 168 innocent people and wounded more than 600 others.

This week, we have been stunned at the killing of 49 people and the wounding of more than 50 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando at the hands of Fort Pierce resident Omar Mateen.

What are the odds that the worst act of anti-government domestic terrorism in U.S. history by McVeigh and the deadliest shooting rampage on U.S. soil by a radicalized, homegrown Islamic terrorist in Mateen would each have such direct links to the small Florida city of Fort Pierce?

It's nearly impossible to comprehend.

And we should add to our terrible notoriety the name of Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha who, in 2014, became the first American-born suicide bomber as a terrorist recruit in Syria. Like Mateen, Indian River County resident Abu-Salha had attended Fort Pierce-based Indian River State College and had occasionally attended the same Fort Pierce mosque and at the same time as Mateen.

According to the FBI, Mateen said in a 911 call during his bloody rampage at the Pulse nightclub that his actions were in part in support of Abu-Salha.

What must the world think of us? That Fort Pierce is some kind of hotbed of political or religious extremism and a crucible for unspeakable violence? That we somehow nurture or promote those in our midst who would slaughter others with different beliefs?

I can hear those who don't know us: What's going on? What's wrong with Fort Pierce? Have its people abandoned civilized behavior?

I can understand such questions as troubling and disheartening as they may be. The name Fort Pierce for some may always be linked, though almost wholly coincidentally, to these violent episodes. We may never erase from recorded history this city's name. It is a terrible burden we shall have to bear.

But, while we bear the unfortunate associations, we must tell those willing to listen, and remind ourselves, that we are not the community others might believe we are. We are far, far different.

We are a quiet, seaside community built on fishing and farming, of families and festivals and easy fun that not only accepts diversity of cultures and beliefs, but embraces our fellow citizens with big hearts and open arms. We march together toward our future with compassion and understanding in the name of peace and love and a spirit of boundless generosity.

Yes, these murderers lived or visited among us prior to their awful violence that put our name on TV broadcasts around the world.

Yes, we didn't stop them, even though we may have had no idea what they were capable of doing.

Yes, we may feel some degree of guilt, even though such guilt may be totally unjustified.

Mostly, yes, our hearts are broken for those killed or hurt, maybe even more so than for most places that have had no associations with those who committed these crimes.

If there is anger within us, its focus is on those individuals like McVeigh, Mateen and Abu-Salha who happen to have ties to this place and who with their monstrous acts demean our good name and our character. If there is hatred within us, it's hatred in hearing our city associated in any way with such evil.

We did not ask for this attention, and we wish so much that it had never come our way. It hurts. But, it doesn't hurt nearly as much as the pain being suffered by those directly impacted by the gunfire last weekend. Yet, to a far lesser degree, the people of Fort Pierce are also victims.

No, we cannot undo what has been done. We cannot corner all those who hear our name and tell them the truth of who we are and what we believe and aspire to as a community. We cannot ask them how they would feel if it were their community that was thrust so undeservedly into the limelight.

Why Fort Pierce? I don't know. Some things don't make sense despite all we do to make sense of them.

But, I know Fort Pierce. I'm proud to be a member of this community. And, wherever I go, I will spread the word about this good place and its good people. I hope you feel the same way.

Michael Goforth is a former member of Treasure Coast Newspapers' Editorial Board who has lived in Fort Pierce for 22 years. He can be reached by email at michaelgoforth@outlook.com or on Twitter: @michaelgoforth2

MORE | Complete coverage on Omar Mateen and the Orlando shootings.


EDITOR'S NOTE:

The following is a Guest Editorial written by a member of Palm Beach North and the Jupiter area community.

I have had the great pleasure of inviting the Sacred Art Tour, a travelling group of eight exiled Tibetan Buddhist Monks, to visit the Lighthouse ArtCenter in Tequesta.

More than 3,000 people from our community have experienced the peaceful, inspiring and compassionate presence of the monks as they created sand mandalas, while sharing Tibetan traditions and culture.

From this experience came a deep curiosity to understand their homeland in order to truly feel compassion, we must come close to the suffering and embrace our role as loving beings in this world.

And so, I began the complex and nearly impossible task of planning a trip to Tibet. The following is my perspective.

 control of Tibet

The Chinese government seized control of Tibet, including all of the ancient monasteries, residents and artifacts, in 1959. During this time, and in the decades since, thousands of Tibetans have been killed, imprisoned and exiled to other countries.

Once exiled, they are unable to return to their homeland except under strict guidelines when providing monastic duties.

The Dalai Lama, and the current political leaders of Tibet, lead their country from Dharamsala, India. They maintain a peaceful approach to their situation although they one of the most oppressed countries on earth. Called the 'Middle Way approach,' it is a nonpartisan and moderate position that theoretically maintains peace through nonviolence, mutual benefit, unity of nationalities and social stability.

Despite this, I bore witness to constant Chinese policing of all monasteries, roads and checkpoints throughout Tibet. The Tibetan population has shrunk from 6 million to 2 million. The Tibetan flag no longer flies in Tibet. It is not allowed for foreigners to travel without a certified tour guide in Tibet, and the acquisition of Chinese Visas and Tibetan permits make it extremely challenging to travel there. Not to mention the 25 hours of flying time each way to reach this most exquisite, endangered and magical place.

 Son on my journey

In celebration of my son's graduation from University of North Florida, I invited him to join me on this journey.

Jackson, as many of you have seen during our days working together on paddleboard tours and Expedition Florida 500, is a gifted photographer an natural adventurer. So the trip unfolded with ease, as we travelled together around the world from sea level to the highest elevation on earth.

High altitude was a challenge for both of us, as we landed at 11,000 feet in Lhasa. And during our time in Tibet, we drove through the Himalayas to reach Everest Base Camp at 17,000 feet. This extreme altitude creeps up on you while you are sleeping, and the headaches that result from the diminished oxygen are severe. But with hydration, time and prescription altitude medication, the symptoms become simply a slower way of being and an heightened awareness of your physical limits.

 The honor of visting

We had the honor of visiting Potala Palace, the former home of the Dalai Lama, on our first day in Lhasa.

Built in the 7th century, the palace is a spectacular experience steeped in ancient Tibetan Buddhist history. Walking up the hundreds of stairs in the pouring rain, exploring the far reaches within the palace, seeing the Dalai Lama's abandoned throne and place of his childhood, and catching glimpses of the mountain views through the clouds, was a deeply moving introduction to an important world heritage site.

Visiting Tibet during the Buddhist holiday of Saka Dawa meant that we saw hundreds of devoted pilgrims circumambulating monasteries, and prostrating in front of the great buddha statues. Butter lamps were burning everywhere, while prayers and blessings were offered as people passed by with beads and prayer wheels.

We were forever grateful for the opportunity to experience the beauty of the Tibetan people and landscape, and to share their story in hopes of spreading awareness of the plight of millions of Tibetans who are unable to return to enjoy the vast and colorful treasures of their own home.

For more information on Tibet, visit www.savetibet.org, www.DalaiLama.com, www.ExploreTibet.com . For more information on the Sacred Art Tour, visit www.DrepungGomang.org.

 See PHOTOS, Page 31

Cynthia Trone

Director of Education at the Lighthouse ArtCenter School of Art

Mother of three, a writer and advocate for humanitarian, arts/environmental issues

cynthia@LighthouseArts.org
JACKSON BERGER/CYNTHIA TRONE/PROVIDED PHOTOS Cynthia Trone, at right, with her son Jackson on site

SHARE JACKSON BERGER/CYNTHIA TRONE/PROVIDED PHOTOS The beauty JACKSON BERGER/CYNTHIA TRONE/PROVIDED PHOTOS The palace JACKSON BERGER/CYNTHIA TRONE/PROVIDED PHOTOS Day to day life JACKSON BERGER/CYNTHIA TRONE/PROVIDED PHOTOS The mountain

By Cynthia Trone, Provided to The Courier Newsweekly

Exquisite, endangered, magical

EDITOR'S NOTE: This narrative from local resident Cynthia Trone relates her impressions of Tibet, with images taken there, in reference to this week's Guest Editorial, Page 14.

Built in the 7th century Tibet, the palace is a spectacular experience steeped in ancient Tibetan Buddhist history.

Walking up the hundreds of stairs in the pouring rain, exploring the far reaches within the palace, seeing the Dalai Lama's abandoned throne and place of his childhood, and catching glimpses of the mountain views through the clouds, was a deeply moving introduction to an important world heritage site.

Visiting Tibet during the Buddhist holiday of Saka Dawa meant that we saw hundreds of devoted pilgrims circumambulating monasteries, and prostrating in front of the great buddha statues.

Butter lamps were burning everywhere, while prayers and blessings were offered as people passed by with beads and prayer wheels.

Travelling southwest from Lhasa, the road took us into rural Tibet, as we visited monasteries and drove over numerous steep mountain passes. Villages were small, homes were painted with typical Tibetan colors and elaborate designs, and yaks were everywhere.

Our arrival at Everest Base Camp was met with a snow squall and then the sparkling appearance of the moon over the mountains. Mount Everest, looming above us, holds a spiritual and majestic power that is unlike anywhere else we have been.

Sleeping in a large tent at base camp, we could hear the icy wind and then the deep silence of night falling on the highest mountain in the world.

The sunrise brought clear skies, and a rare opportunity to see the mountain peak unobstructed by clouds.

For more information on Tibet, visit www.savetibet.org, www.DalaiLama.com, www.ExploreTibet.com.
Two groups of Russian hackers burrowed into the Democratic National Committees servers and spent months stealing information on Donald Trump, the Republican Partys presumptive presidential nominee, Crowdstrike reported Tuesday.

The DNC had called on the security firm for assistance after in-house IT discovered evidence suggesting a breach.

Crowdstrike identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network, noted CTO Dmitri Alperovitch, dubbed Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

They are some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis, he said. Their tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none, and the extensive usage of living-off-the-land techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter.

The hackers used advanced methods consistent with nation-state level capabilities, including repeatedly re-entering the network to change out their implants, modifying persistent methods, moving to new C&C channels, and performing other tasks to avoid detection, according to Alperovitch.

Both groups engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian governments powerful and highly capable intelligence services, he said.

Bears on Board

Cozy Bear, aka CozyDuke and APT 29, last year infiltrated the unclassified networks of the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the U.S., and has targeted a variety of business and government organizations, as well as academia, throughout the world, Alperovitch said.It uses a broadly targeted spearphishing campaign that delivers various sophisticated remote access tools, or RATs, to target machines.

Fancy Bear, aka Sofacy and APT 28, has been active since the mid-2000s. It has launched targeted intrusion campaigns against the aerospace, defense, energy, government and media sectors around the globe  particularly military sites that closely mirror the Russian governments strategic interests. It may be affiliated with Russian military intelligence, Alperovitch suggested.

Fancy Bear registers domains closely resembling domains of target organizations, and establishes phishing sites on those domains that have the look and feel of its victims Web-based email services, he noted.

Foreign state-backed operatives continue to refine techniques used in obtaining information, said Brad Bussie, director of product management at Stealthbits Technologies.

The user is the weak point, and as long as users are able to put themselves at risk, breaches will continue to happen, he told TechNewsWorld.

Cozy Bears intrusion goes back to the summer of 2015 and Fancy Bears to April of this year, Crowdstrikes Alperovitch said. Theres no indication the two colluded  both compromised the same systems and engaged separately in the theft of identical credentials.

No financial, donor or personal information was accessed, the DNC said, but it acknowledged the intruders were able to read all email and chat traffic.

As for the hackers purported target, the DNC cant really have anything on Trump that isnt already somewhere on the Internet, remarked John Gunn, VP of communications at Vasco Data Security.

Its hard to imagine that the hack would reveal anything more intriguing than what Trumps already saying almost daily, he told TechNewsWorld.

Questionable Security?

Neither the DNCs network nor their security is likely to be state of the art, [and] there are a lot of skilled hackers around the world, Lastline blogger Craig Kensek told TechNewsWorld.

Still, the DNC cant be the only target, suggested Bobby Kuzma, systems engineer at Core Security.

If I were running these operations, I absolutely would have targeted all the major parties, he told TechNewsWorld. Id be shocked if the GOP werent targeted  and, given the attackers resources, compromised as well.

The hackers reportedly have been expelled from the DNC network.

Cybersecurity is not enough, argued Yong-Gon Chon, CEO of Cyber Risk Management.

Companies should adopt a cyber risk strategy that assesses everything a company does that might impinge security, he told TechNewsWorld, including how it operates, who touches the data, and which third-party vendors are allowed access.
With more than 24,000 outlets in 70 countries, it's not surprising that Starbucks is such a popular venue when it comes to meeting people, be it for informal business deals or simply catching up with friends. Yesterday, Microsoft launched the Starbucks add-in for Outlook designed to make arranging appointments at one of the coffee company's stores quick and easy.

First announced at Microsoft's Build developer conference back in March, anyone who installs the add-in will be able to access the feature from the ribbon in Outlook. It lets you search for a Starbucks store and add its location to a message, along with links for directions and ordering ahead with Starbucks' mobile app.

Additionally, the add-in allows you to send Starbucks eGift cards directly through Outlook, though it does require the sender to have Starbucks account. You can choose the eCard's design and how much cash to put on it, and, for a limited time only, senders will be eligible to get a free $5 gift card for themselves.

The Starbucks add-in is available for free in the Office Store for Outlook.com, Outlook 2013 and 2016, and Outlook on the web for users who are using either Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, or Office 365. Microsoft said it will bring the add-in to Outlook's Mac and mobile versions in the coming months.

The usefulness of the add-in will, of course, depend on how much you enjoy meeting up in Starbucks, and whether you consider a coffee shop e-voucher to be an appropriate gift.

Image credit: HAKINMHAN / Shutterstock
The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has been ordered by a judge in Helsinki, Finland, to pay a fine totaling $395,000 to a collective of record labels as the result of a piracy lawsuit.

Sunde, who hasn't been associated with the file sharing site since 2009, said on Twitter earlier today that he was listening to some music and reading that he lost a court case in Finland he didn't even know about. He noted that record companies know he hasn't had any part of The Pirate Bay in ages yet they are still suing, adding that bullying is the new black.

Billboard points to a story from Finland's DigiToday which says the labels - Sony Music, EMI, Warner Music and Universal Music - hold Sunde responsible for pirated material found on the site belonging to 60 of their artists. The judgment is even said to include a million-euro fine if the content isn't taken down.

How exactly he is expected to do so after leaving the site seven years ago is anyone's guess.

As Torrent Freak notes, Sunde also owes large sums of money to other copyright holders as a result of earlier court judgments. None of those penalties have been satisfied and it's likely that this one will go unpaid as well.

Back on Twitter, Sunde asked his followers if they'd help him if he started a crowdfunding campaign to pay the legal fees. The response thus far has been positive although it's unclear if Sunde will actually go that route or just let the debt keep adding up.
The 2,100-year-old Antikythera mechanism, a system of interlocking gears and dials, is hailed as the world's oldest computer. It was discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of southern Greece in 1901.

Much about the device remains a mystery but after studying it using cutting- edge scanning equipment, researchers said they have inched closer to unveiling the secrets of the mechanism.

In a decade-long study, astrophysics professor Mike Edmunds, from the University of Cardiff, and colleagues were attempting to decipher the once hidden texts in the mechanism and confirmed that the device can track the paths and positions of planets, the sun and the moon.

The research also revealed the device may have been used to predict the future. Ancient astronomers used it to predict the color of eclipses, which may have been perceived as omens, suggesting the mechanism may have also been used for astrology.

"Certain colors might be better for what's coming than other colors," said Edmunds.

The Antikythera mechanism, which was housed in a wooden case as hinted by bits of woods found on its fragments, worked similarly to a clock. The wooden case would have had a circular face with rotating hands.

A knob or a handle on the side winds the mechanism and as the knob is turned, interlocked gearwheels drive at least seven hands to move at different speeds.

Unlike clocks whose hands represent hours, minutes and seconds, the ancient device was used to track astronomical positions and eclipses.

The hands of the mechanism represented the sun, the moon and each of the planets visible to the naked eye namely Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. A rotating black and silver ball revealed the phase of the moon.

The two dial systems at the back of the case each had a pin that followed its own spiral groove just like the needle on a record player. One of these was a calendar and the other showed the time of solar and lunar eclipses.

Researchers said the texts guide the viewers so they know the meaning of the different points and dials.

"The texts were meant to help the viewer to understand what was the meaning of all the different points and dials, what it would teach them about the cosmos that they lived in ... and about how, through cycles of time this related to their lives," said Alexander Jones, from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.

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Samsung Pay has finally reached Australia, aiming to provide a simple and convenient solution for payments so you can forget about your wallet.

The company teamed up with American Express and Citibank to launch Samsung Pay in Australia, the fifth market to get the contactless mobile payments service. These partnerships mean that Australian citizens can use their Amex or Citibank cards to tap and pay with their Samsung smartphone at contactless terminals. It's worth pointing out, however, that cards branded Amex, but issued by other banks, will not work with Samsung Pay.

Australia now follows Korea, the United States, China and Spain as the latest market to support Samsung Pay, while Singapore is the next in line.

For those unfamiliar with Samsung's mobile payments solution, here's what you need to know. Samsung Pay works with Galaxy smartphones running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or later.

To start using Samsung Pay, all you need to do is swipe up from the home screen, choose the card you want to use and hold your finger on the home button to verify your fingerprint. Once you complete that process, you will be able to tap your smartphone to a contactless terminal for quick, easy and secure payments. The technology also relies on tokenization, which ensures that merchants do not get access to your card details.

"Payments can only be authorized through your fingerprint scan. So only you can allow transactions with Samsung Pay  providing the highest level of security," Samsung points out.

"Samsung Pay protects payment information with several layers of security[,] keeping information separate and doesn't store or share it (other than a device-specific token)."

According to the company, Samsung Pay works nearly anywhere you can tap or swipe your card. Considering that NFC-compatible payment terminals and contactless chip cards are already widely used in Australia, Samsung Pay should have a strong debut in the country.

Rival Apple Pay has been available in Australia since October 2015, and Apple wants to expand its availability in all significant markets as soon as it can. It may have a notable head-start in Australia, but Samsung is catching up and is definitely competitive.

Samsung assured financial institutions and merchants that, unlike Apple, it will not bite a "clip" of interchangeable fees. The company just wants Samsung Pay to serve as many users as possible, potentially convincing more consumers to buy Samsung devices.

Samsung sees a "tremendous opportunity" in Australia, as there's already a strong demand for contactless payments in the country.

In addition to payments, Samsung Pay could also integrate with a range of partners, from retailers to ticketing companies or government departments, adds Samsung.

The company explains how its Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology allows for wider compatibility, allowing Samsung Pay to play nice with partners that use magnetic strips found on gift, loyalty and transit cards.

"It's our goal to one day replace wallets, by making every card accessible on Samsung smartphones," says Elle Kim, Samsung Pay Global Vice President.

Samsung has yet to announce any partners in the Australian public transport segment, but it could soon move in this direction. We'll keep you up to date with any new developments, so stay tuned.

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Coffee was listed as a possible carcinogen in 1991 but the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer agency on Wednesday said that there is no conclusive evidence that show drinking coffee can cause cancer.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) earlier listed coffee as possibly carcinogenic in its 2B category along with other substances such as lead and chloroform.

The IARS, however, made a reversal to its previous warning based on results of a new review which found no conclusive evidence for the carcinogenic effect of drinking coffee.

A working group of scientists convened by the IARC reviewed more than 1,000 studies in humans and animals.

In many of these studies, the researchers did not find evidence that drinking coffee can cause cancers of the female breast, pancreas and prostate. The evidence was likewise inconclusive for more than 20 other types of cancer.

In contrast to WHO's earlier warning, some studies even show that coffee may slash risks for developing certain types of cancer.

"(This) does not show that coffee is certainly safe ... but there is less reason for concern today than there was before," said Dana Loomis, from the Monograph classification department of the IARC.

Coffee, however, is still not in the clear if it is drunk at very high temperature.

The working group has found positive link between cancer and drinking very hot beverages. Scientific evidence suggests that drinking anything such as coffee, tea, and other beverages at around 65 degrees Celsius or above may cause cancer of the esophagus.

In China, Iran, Turkey and South America, where a traditional tea called mate is drunk at about 70 degrees Celsius, there were evidences that show the risk for esophageal cancer increases along with the increase in temperature the beverage is drank.

Experiments involving rats and mice also show that very hot liquids may promote the development of tumors.

IARC director, Christopher Wild said that these show that drinking very hot beverages can likely cause esophageal cancer. The drinks themselves, however, may not be responsible for the association but the temperature.

"The Working Group found no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect of drinking coffee," the IARC said in a statement. "However, the experts did find that drinking very hot beverages probably causes cancer of the oesophagus in humans."

One reason hot scalding drinks may cause cancer is that they can injure the cells that line the throat, which can set off the stage for cancer.

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Walmart is cutting hundreds of back-office work in approximately 500 stores across the United States. In the company's bid to increase efficiency, thousands of people will lose their jobs.

The majority of the job cuts are expected to occur in the West and will include employees who work in invoicing and accounting, said Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg. The company's bookkeeping activities will be done in its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. "Cash recycler" machines will replace the manual cash counting at the stores.

According to Mark Ibbotson, Walmart U.S.'s central operations executive vice president, the counting machine's current system is error-prone.

"We really want to pull our workforce onto the floor," said Ibbotson.

In Walmart's attempt to cut expenses, the company said that they want their employees to focus on customer service instead of the back-office work. The invoicing and accounting workers who are slated to lose their jobs will be offered opportunities in customer service.

However, this suggested they may not get the same wage. Lundberg added that these workers will earn an hourly rate of approximately $17.55 in the new customer service posts.

The cost-cutting plan had been tested at 50 Walmart stores earlier this year, with only 1 percent of the idled workers leaving the company, added Lundberg. The latest news is merely an expansion of the pilot program.

The company's sales at U.S. stores in operation for over a year increased by 1 percent in the quarter that ended on April 30. This marked the 7th consecutive quarter the company showed slight growth increase.

Walmart's executives shifted their efforts in simplifying the stores' operations during their discussions with investors. The executives noted that the company's 4,600-store operation is already too complex.

Is Walmart In Trouble?

In January, Walmart announced the closure of 269 stores globally. These include the 154 locations in the United States alone. The closures were expected to affect around 16,000 employees across the globe. About 10,000 workers in the United States faced losing their jobs. However, the retailer attempted to relocate affected employees to nearby Walmart locations that are still in operation.

The company also said in January that as they shift toward Neighborhood Markets and Supercenters in lucrative locations, they are opening about 405 stores globally in the upcoming fiscal year.

"Net net, we like these developments and see them as part of increasing focus on quality (versus quantity) of Wal-Mart operations," said analyst David Schick from Stifel Nicolaus earlier this year.

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French President Francois Hollande has officially ratified the United Nations (UN) climate change agreement, which was designed to reduce carbon emissions around the world in order to curb the continued warming of the planet.

With its ratification of the Paris accord on Wednesday, France becomes the second European country to formally adopt the environmental plan, following Hungary, and the first nation among the seven leading economies of the world. The French parliament officially authorized the approval of the deal this week.

According to the principles of the climate change agreement, nations are required to significantly reduce their carbon emissions to help keep global temperature well below the 2-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) mark.

The deal was signed by 195 countries at the climate change summit in the French capital last year, but it will only take effect after 55 of the signatory nations, or at least 55 percent of total global carbon emissions, have ratified the agreement.

"Signing is good, ratifying is better," Hollande said during the ratification ceremony at the elysee Palace. He was joined by French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, environment minister Segolene Royal and other leading government officials.

Before France's approval of the deal this week, 17 smaller countries, which represents less than 1 percent of global emissions, have already ratified the deal. This group is mostly comprised of small islands and low-lying coastal nations that are believed to be the most at risk of massive flooding if the effects of global warming continues.

Other larger countries, such as the United States, China and India, are yet to officially adopt the climate change agreement.

U.S. government officials said they are working toward having the deal ratified by the end of 2016 before President Barack Obama leaves office in January.

China, on the other hand, announced that it intends to have the deal ratified before the start of the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China in September. China and the United States are considered to be the top two carbon emitters in the world.

Based on the climate change agreement, the United States pledged to reduce its carbon emission by as much as 26 to 28 percent, from levels in 2005, by 2025.

Members of the European Union (EU), including France, vowed that they will work to have their greenhouse gas emissions cut by as much as 40 percent, from levels in 1990, by 2030.

Hollande urged other European nations to follow France's lead and have the climate change agreement ratified by the end of the year.

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Sanford Wallace, the famous spammer known to the internet as the "Spam King," is about to serve jail time after a court sentenced him for criminal contempt of court and electronic mail fraud.

The judge's sentence reads that Wallace has to spend two years and a half in prison and pay restitutions in value of $310,628.55.

The man faced accusations of creating Facebook accounts that allowed him to pellet users with 27 million spam messages between 2008 and 2009. The flood of messages was part of a PPC scam.

The contempt of court charges refer to Wallace's disregard for an anterior court order, which denied him access to Facebook, regardless of method. The order was issued after the social media company took him to court on the CAN-SPAM act.

The man has a vast history of using spam, which stretches to a time when the internet was a mere rumor.

The Spam King started his activity in the late 1980s, when he would send junk email faxes. He eventually stopped, as the practice was outlawed in 1991.

When technology became more versatile, Wallace started to pellet official emails from AOL and Compuserve, which resulted in lawsuits from both companies.

He then fed spam to MySpace users before fixing his gaze on Facebook.

Wallace pleaded guilty in 2015 to one count of fraud and related activity in connection with electronic mail.

According to a report from NBC News, Wallace owned more than 1,500 fake internet domain names and gained illicit access to about 500,000 Facebook accounts. Over a three-month period, he spammed said accounts with 27 million unsolicited ads.

In the ads, the targets were urged to log into a website that would force them to divulge their Facebook username and password. After it pulled the information from them, users were sent to an affiliate website that paid Wallace for the traffic.

One thing to keep in mind about Wallace's case is that the man was not short of luck. His maximum sentence read 16 years in prison and a stacked penalty of $1 billion in fines. There is a high chance that the sum will never be recovered by the authorities.

Sentencing a spammer as reputed as Wallace to jail time should discourage similar activity, at least in the United States.

Not only will the man have to serve 30 months in jail and pay the aforementioned restitution, but he was also ordered to undertake mental health treatment. What is more, he must spend five years of probation after his release.

A Symantec report from last year showed that the number of email spams, email-based malware and phishing attempts were on a downward trend. Read all about it in our coverage to see why.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Expected To Launch On August 2 | TechTree.com

Samsung is planning to unveil the next Galaxy Note earlier than usual to fend off iPhone competition this year, just as it did last year. Now, a fresh image leak further testifies to the rumour, and hints that the company may be holding an event as soon as August 2 to unveil the phablet in the market.

Samsung is also thought to be skipping the Galaxy Note 6 in order to bring the naming of its flagship phablet in line with that of its flagship smartphone family, the S series. Since it announced the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge earlier this year, it makes sense that it would also bring out the Note 7 in 2016.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is rumoured to pack 6GB RAM and might come along side an Edge variant. The phablet(s) is/are expected to include Samsung's new 10nm LPDDR4 6GB RAM, which was revealed month a month ago. A 4,000mAh battery is also rumoured, which is 1000mAh more than the battery of Galaxy Note 5.

Some of the previous rumours related to the unannounced Galaxy Note flagship hint at a 5.8-inch QHD display, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 32GB of in-built storage with an option to support microSD cards, and a 12MP rear camera with dualpixel tech.

The handset is also expected to have an iris scanner, in addition to being water resistant. As usual these devices will be larger devices than the S7 and S7 Edge, and come with Samsung's S Pen stylus.

[Image Courtesy: SamMobile]

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TAGS: Samsung, Samsung Galaxy Note 7
Google Puts The Spotlight On Indian Cinema Search Experiences | TechTree.com

Indias passion for cinema has inspired Google to create a range of immersive Search experiences especially for Indian cinema. If you ever wanted to try to wrap your head around the labyrinth of the Kapoor family? Or know more about the Bachchans? Now when you ask Google questions about films, actors, song lyrics, film trivia, trailers, screening times and more, youll get rich, contextual answers.

These Search experiences were highlighted at an event in Mumbai today featuring Director Karan Johar and Google Indias Marketing Head Sapna Chadha and Search Product Manager Satyajeet Salgar. With around 1 in 10 mobile searches in India related to Indian cinema, Google Search now gives local cinema enthusiasts an easy way to discover and explore everything they want to know about their favourite movies, stars, music, dialogues actors and more.

Google has a long history of building products for India, and we wanted to make sure that when these millions of Indian cinema fans pick up their phone and ask Google about their favourite films, actors or songs, they get a delightful, local experience explained Google Marketing Head, Sapna Chadha.

Google also released a video tribute to Indian cinema that showcases these Search experiences.

Highlighting the way Search has evolved, Satyajeet Salgar, Product Manager, Search showcased answers and carousels powered by the Knowledge Graph, movie showtime and featured snippets. So depending on the question, be it What movies are Anil Kapoor and Ranveer Singh in together? Or What are the showtime for Te3n? Or Show me Sunidhi Chauhans latest songs, Google Search now shows rich, contextual answers.

We hope that cinema fans enjoy exploring the wonderful world of Indian cinema with Google and we look forward to continuing to add even richer, immersive features to Search over time. Abhi toh Picture shuru hui hai!, added Salgar.

TAGS: Indian Cinema, Google search
An intensified smartphone war ahead between iOS vs. Android, as Windows phone exits the market

With Microsoft taking a backseat in its efforts to up the mobile sales over the last 12 months, the sales of its handsets has seen a dip of 73% year-over-year. The void left by them is nowhere seemed to be filled by their hardware partners. During the entire first quarter of 2016, sales of Windows phones from other companies amounted to just 100,000 units, according to Gartner. Therefore, the market share of Windows phone has taken a hit.

Last month, independent industry analysts Kantar Worldpanel ComTech disclosed that sales in Europes 5 (EU5) big markets including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Great Britain had come down  with overall EU5 market share at 4.8%, down from 9.3% last year and 4.9% last month as sales market saw a drop by more than half in three months.

According to Kantars latest report, the market share of Windows phones continues to decline. For instance, Windows sales market share went down from 9.0% in April 2015 (and 6.2% in March 2016) to just 5.8% by the end of this April in Great Britain.

On the other hand, Android increased its share of the British market to 58.5%, and according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTechs Dominic Sunnerbo, nearly 10% of new Android customers were Windows phone owners swapping to Googles mobile OS.

In the U.S., while Windows phone sales share fell by almost two thirds, Android share increased from 62.4% to 67.6% year-over-year. Definitely, the figures also show that Windows share of the U.S. smartphone market has reduced more than half in a single month, falling from 2.7% by the end of March 2016, to just 1.3% in April.

According to Kantars Lauren Guenveur, Android buyers in the U.S. are showing more loyalty to the platform:

While growth in other parts of the world has clearly been a result of movement either from the Windows ecosystem or a feature phone, Android gains in the US are powered by repeat customers. Among those replacing their smartphone, more than nine out of ten (91.4%) of Android buyers owned a previous Android device.

However, as much as Kantar Worldpanel ComTech is worried, Windows looks very much on its way out of the mobile market.

Guenveur said that in Europe and the US, the smartphone market is approaching saturation, and future successes for either of the two dominant ecosystems will come chiefly from drawing customers away from the other.

But she added that with Windows phones exiting the market, this battle will only intensify. She said that Android and iOS will now be left to compete head-to-head not only in new markets where smartphone penetration has not yet peaked, such as India, and Latin America, but also [with] new services and products.

However, Microsoft says that it is dedicated to supporting its mobile OS for many years in spite of its decreasing market share, and very little support until now from its hardware partners in releasing their own Windows 10 Mobile devices.
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.
According to regulations related to a "legislative act," however, the bill still has to undergo eight debates for its final approval. | Read More
Discussions on weak fiscal discipline began to pop up again after new data revealed that the government in 2014 did not just spend more than it had, but also broke an overspending cap imposed by legislators.

At a meeting with the Standing Committee of the National Assembly on Wednesday, Finance Minister Dinh Tien Dung reported a state budget deficit of more than VND260.14 trillion (US$11.5 billion) in 2014, or 6.61 percent of the country's gross domestic product, local media said.

That was an increase of 16.1 percent from the maximum deficit level approved by the National Assembly that year. Legislators wanted the deficit to stay below 5.7 percent of GDP.

Explaining the higher-than-allowed spending, Dung said many infrastructure projects had to be sped up and the government had to borrow more.

He urged the legislature to approve the spending figures so that the government can wrap up accounting work for the year 2014.

This practice of breaching expenditure limits is not rare in Vietnam. But this time, many top legislators demanded the government present a detailed report on its spending, otherwise official fiscal figures will not be accepted.

"Our finances are not transparent with many unaccounted expenses," Phan Trung Ly, chairman of the National Assembly's legal committee, was quoted as saying at the meeting.

"We need to abide by laws; there must be no leniency," he said, calling on the legislature to carefully consider the figures.

In 2013, the state budget deficit amounted to more than VND236.76 trillion, or 6.6 percent of GDP, exceeding the 5.3 percent cap set by the National Assembly.

Under existing rules, the government is allowed to borrow money to make up for its deficit. This year, for instance, it plans to borrow VND254 trillion ($11.23 billion).

Latest figures released by the government last month showed Vietnam's public debt was equivalent to 62.2 percent of GDP.

It will rise to 63.8 percent at the end of this year, and then 64.7 percent in 2018, or slightly lower than the threshold of 65 percent, according to the World Bank's projections.
A court in the southern province of Kien Giang on Wednesday handed down jail terms of up to six years to 10 former customs officers for tax refund violations that caused losses of more than VND92 billion (US$4.12 million).

Vo Van Toan, former head of Giang Thanh Border Gate Customs, got the heaviest term, the court ruled at the end of the three-day trial.

Toan and nine other officers did not conduct thorough checking when they granted the tax refund amount to two local businessmen, Tran Huu Tho and Huynh Van Trong, between 2010 and 2013.

In October 2015, Tho was sentenced to life in prison and Trong received 18 years on swindling charges.
The bullets found under a Da Nang house on March 31, 2016. Photo: Nguyen Tu

A man in the central city of Da Nang found more than 1,000 bullets apparently left from the Vietnam War under his house on Thursday.

Le Quang Liem, 59, said he hired some construction workers to fix a pipe. The workers found boxes containing the bullets around 50 centimeters underground.

Many boxes are still intact, Liem said.

He has been living in the house for 20 years but it was the first time he had discovered bullets.

He handed over the bullets to local police, who then send them to the military.

A police officer said investigation found the bullets were used for service pistols of the US army during the Vietnam War.
Bua May, 35 (L), and Bua Thoong, were caught with 35 kilograms of opium on June 15, 2016. Photo provided by border guards

Vietnamese border guards and Laos authorities conducted a joint operation on Wednesday and arrested two Lao men who were trafficking 35 kilograms of opium into Vietnam.

Bua Thoong, 38, and Bua May, 35, were stopped while they were riding two motorbikes, trying to cross the border from Houaphan Province to enter Vietnam.

The drugs were found inside their bamboo baskets.

Officials said this was the one of the biggest drug busts in the area.

Vietnam has some of the worlds toughest drug laws. Those convicted of possessing or smuggling more than 600 grams of heroin or more than 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine face the death penalty.

The production or sale of 100 grams of heroin or 300 grams of other illegal narcotics is also punishable by death.
Three people stand trial in Ho Chi Minh City on January 29, 2016 for smuggling 10 containers of goods worth over $1.15 million in December 2014. Photo credit: Tuoi Tre A dismissed customs officer in Ho Chi Minh City has received a three-year suspended sentence for allowing a man to smuggle 10 containers of goods worth over VND26 billion (US$1.15 million) in 2014.

Bui Anh Tuan, 39, was convicted of "lacking responsibility, resulting in serious consequences" by a local court on Friday.

Prosecutors said he failed to screen the containers imported from China by Ho Ba Chay, who is still at large.

Tuan's colleague Nguyen Phuoc Tuong, who died during the investigation, was bribed to clear the shipment, they said.

Chay's hired importer Lam Luong Quang, 52, who declared the goods as door knobs and screws with a total value of VND930 million ($41,300).

But more than 6.5 million items in the containers were actually alcohol, cosmetics and chemicals, and banned products such as used computer monitors and electronic firecrackers, according to the indictment.
Two experts from the British Mines Advisory Group (MAG) in Quang Tri Province remove a 1,000-lb MK83 bomb, which was found under a busy road intersection in the province on May 18, 2016. Photo: Nguyen Phuc/Thanh Nien

Vietnam, where incidents linked to unexploded ordnance kill more than 1,500 people and maim another 2,200 a year, is set to publish a map showing all the high-risk sites soon in an effort to cut the number of deadly blasts.

News website VnExpress on Wednesday cited Deputy Defense Minister Nguyen Chi Vinh as saying that the project is nearly completed after "many years of work."

The map, which will be updated every year, is expected to reduce casualties caused by UXO and help authorities tackle the problem effectively, according to the website.

Official figures show UXO threatens around 6.1 million hectares, or more than 18 percent of land in Vietnam.

Vietnamese agencies together with non-government organizations now deal with 30,000-35,000 hectares of contaminated land every year, according to data from the Ministry of Defense.

A file photo shows soldiers handling a war bomb in the central province of Thua Thien - Hue. Photo: Nguyen Phuc/Thanh Nien However, the government has been trying to speed up the job so that it can clear 100,000 hectares per year. The goal is to finish the challenging UXO mission in some 50 years instead of 300 years as previously estimated.

So far Vietnam has received support from the governments of Belgium, India, Japan, Norway, the UK, and the US in addition to the assistance of nearly 40 non-government organizations.

South Korea is the latest sponsor pledging around $20 million to clear sites in the central provinces of Binh Dinh and Quang Binh, VnExpress reported.
A Vietnamese coastguard plane, which was searching for a missing fighter jet and its pilot, disappeared off the radar on Thursday, local media and a military official said, the second such setback in three days.

The CASA C212 plane carrying nine people went missing off the northern town of Hai Phong about noon local time, local media reported, citing military and provincial sources.

The coastguard plane was joining thousands of people looking for a pilot who went missing with a Sukhoi SU-30 MK2 fighter jet on Tuesday along the central part of the country coastline.

A military official working on the rescue confirmed the plane was missing and the numbers on board but requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

He said the CASA plane was descending in order to approach objects the crew believed were the search targets.

A senior military official in charge of the search did not answer his phone when contacted by Reuters. A coast guard official in charge of media said he had no official information to confirm the news.

One of the two pilots flying the Sukhoi jet was rescued from the sea on Wednesday. Coastguards, border guards, navy, air force and fishermen have been searching for the aircraft and the second pilot for two and a half days.

Vietnam has suffered a series of mishaps in the past two years with ageing helicopters.

The country is recalibrating its defence strategy and overseeing its biggest military buildup in four decades, including buying more fighter jets and enlisting Japanese and U.S. help to strengthen Vietnam's coastguard through training, loans and aid for vessels.
A makeshift memorial for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, June 15, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. The shooting at Pulse Nightclub, which killed 49 people and injured 53, is the worst mass shooting in American history. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images/AFP

U.S. investigators have questioned the wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the FBI said on Wednesday, and a law enforcement source said she could face criminal charges if there is evidence of any wrongdoing.

Omar Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, knew of his plans for what became the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, said the law enforcement source, who has been briefed on the matter.

"With respect to the wife, I can tell you that is only one of many interviews that we have done and will continue to do in this investigation," FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper told a news conference. I cannot comment on the outcome or the outcome of that investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to hear from anyone who had contact or information about the gunman, Hopper said.

In Washington, Sunday's shooting in Florida stirred fresh debate on gun purchases in the United States, after it emerged that Mateen was legally able to buy an assault rile even though the FBI had investigated him in the past for possible ties to Islamist militant groups.

U.S. Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was briefed on the investigation into the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, told CNN it appeared Salman had "some knowledge" of what was going on.

"She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information," King said.

Salman could not be reached for comment.

U.S. Attorney Lee Bentley declined to say whether Salman or any other associates of Mateen's could face criminal charges, saying there was no timetable for such a decision.

"I am not going to speculate today as to any charges that may be brought or indeed whether any charges will be brought in this case," Bentley told the news conference. "It is premature to do so."

Salman was with Mateen when he cased possible targets in the past two months, including the Walt Disney World Resort in April, a shopping complex called Disney Springs and the Pulse nightclub in early June, CNN and NBC reported.

Father supports FBI

The gunman's father, Seddique Mateen, declined to comment specifically on the investigation on Wednesday, saying, "The FBI, they always do a professional job and to the maximum extent of my ability I will support them."

The younger Mateen, a New York-born U.S. citizen of Afghan heritage, was shot dead by police after a three-hour rampage through the nightclub. The attack was the deadliest on U.S. soil since the hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.

Seddique Mateen, the father of Omar Mateen, who attacked a gay night club in Orlando before being shot dead by police, poses for a photo after grabbing a photographer's lens outside his home in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, U.S. June 14, 2016.Photo: Reuters/Carlo Allegri Federal investigators have said Mateen, who was 29 and worked as a security guard, was likely self-radicalized and there was no evidence he received any help or instructions from outside groups such as Islamic State.

Salman's mother, Ekbal Zahi Salman, lives in a middle-class neighborhood in Rodeo, California, about 25 miles (40 km) north of San Francisco. A neighbor said Noor Salman visited her mother only once after she married Mateen.

Noor Salman's mother "didn't like him very much. He didn't allow her (Noor) to come here," said neighbor Rajinder Chahal. He said he had spoken to Noor Salman's mother after the Orlando attack and she "was crying, weeping."

The shooting raised questions about how the United States should respond to the threat of violence from militant Islamists at home and abroad. The FBI questioned Mateen in 2013 and 2014 for suspected ties to Islamist militants but concluded he did not pose a threat.

Sunday's attack followed a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in December in which a married couple inspired by Islamic State killed 14 people.

U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who joined Democrats in an unsuccessful push for gun control legislation after the killing of elementary school children in Connecticut in 2012, is now working on a bill to keep guns out of the hands of people on terrorism watch lists, a gun control group said on Wednesday.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would meet with the powerful National Rifle Association lobbying group, which has endorsed him, to discuss a similar idea for restricting gun purchases. That marked a break with Republican Party orthodoxy, which typically opposes any restrictions on gun ownership.

The NRA responded it believed that people listed on terrorism watch lists should face additional reviews before purchasing firearms.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has supported gun control efforts and said on Monday she was "bewildered" that congressional Republicans had blocked a Democratic effort to restrict gun sales to people on the watch lists.

The issue of changing gun laws rests "at the feet of Congress," which is controlled in both chambers by Republicans, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. "I would like to be optimistic that this unspeakable act of violence will sufficiently tug at the conscience of Republican senators," he told reporters.

Mosque surveillance

Trump has drawn vigorous criticism from President Barack Obama and other Democrats, as well as from some senior Republicans, for his proposal first aired last year and reiterated after Orlando, to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. On Wednesday, he also called for surveillance of mosques as part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Mateen made calls to 911 emergency services during his rampage, which he used to declare his allegiance to various Islamist militant groups, some of which are at odds with one another.

Autopsies have been completed on all 49 victims, and 35 bodies have been released to funeral homes, the Orange County Medical Examiner's Office said on Wednesday.

Orlando is one of the United States' most popular tourist destinations, with its theme parks helping to draw more than 60 million visitors a year. As the city mourned, a huge search was under way for the body of a 2-year-old boy who was dragged off by an alligator in a lagoon on Tuesday while visiting Walt Disney World with his family.
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Regulators support creation of 12 private banks Updated: 2016-06-16 09:14 By Jiang Xueqing(China Daily)

A Chinese clerk counts yuan banknotes at a bank in Huaibei city, east China's Anhui province, Jan 22, 2015.[Photo/IC]

Twelve privately owned banks have entered the project demonstration stage before getting final approval to begin operations, said the China Banking Regulatory Commission on Wednesday.

The CBRC has written detailed rules specifying the principles, policies, standards and procedures for the approval of the establishment of private banks. The market niche for these private banks includes internet finance and supply chain finance, depending on the backgrounds of their major shareholders and local government support. They will mainly target micro and small companies.

So far the CBRC has approved five private banks to start operation. As of March 31, total assets of the five private banks reached 95.94 billion yuan ($15 billion), up 21 percent from the beginning of this year. Their balance of loans increased by 51 percent to 35.65 billion yuan and balance of deposits rose 11.6 percent to 22.25 billion yuan during the same period, according to the CBRC.

"These banks keep improving in terms of corporate governance, internal control and risk management," said Qiu Xiaoqiu, deputy director of the city commercial banks supervision department of the CBRC.

China has been steadily promoting the entry of private capital into the banking sector through multiple channels, such as initiating the establishment of small and medium-sized banking institutions.

Statistics from the CBRC show that at the end of March, private capital took a 46 percent stake in joint-equity commercial banks, increasing from 39 percent in 2011.

The share of private capital exceeded 50 percent in city commercial banks and reached nearly 90 percent in rural cooperative financial institutions. Some city commercial banks are wholly owned by private companies. The number of non-bank financial institutions, excluding trust companies, of which private capital took a controlling or participating share was 78, accounting for 25 percent of the total.
The Auditor-General has warned caution over the government's cost-benefit analysis on the tram project, while highlighting the fast-changing calculations of costs and benefits in 2014.

The government calculated a cost-benefit ratio of 1.2, meaning $1.20 of benefits for every $1 spent. But auditor Maxine Cooper said almost 60 per cent of the "benefits" were wider economic and land benefits whose inclusion was debatable. The transport benefits amounted to just 49 cents for every $1 spent.

An artist's impression of the city interchange for the proposed Canberra tram.

The government had changed the figures significantly in versions of the business case in August and September 2014 before it was published in October. Transport benefits had been cut 26 per cent, land-use benefits boosted 17 per cent, and wider economic benefits boosted 17 per cent, with insufficient documentation to explain the rationale.

The audit also reveals the capital cost of the project was put at $1.01 billion in July 2014 by consultants Turner and Townsend. As a result, a "value-engineering workshop" was called "to allow Turner and Townsend an opportunity to clarify elements of the design for their costing assumptions" and to refine the design to reduce costs. In August 2014, Turner and Townsend revised the cost to $610 million, revising down costs, scrapping $100 million of "owners' costs" and scrapping a $227 million contingency.
Three Supreme Court judges from Victoria will begin hearing in October an appeal that could prevent David Eastman's retrial over the shooting death of ACT police chief Colin Winchester.

But first Mr Eastman's lawyers will have to summarise the lengthy grounds of appeal into 10 pages for the Victorian judges.

David Eastman is arrested in December 1992 in relation to the murder of Colin Winchester. Credit:Graham Tidy

Mr Eastman's stay application to permanently halt a retrial over Mr Winchester's murder in January 1989 was thrown out in April, meaning Mr Eastman is set to face a second jury over the killing.

His appeal against the decision not to stay his retrial came before the registrar's list in the ACT Supreme Court on Thursday.
A former CFMEU organiser who blackmailed a Canberra subcontractor will pay reparations of $70,000, but spend no time behind bars.

Justice John Burns gave Halafihi Kimonu Kivalu, 39, a total suspended jail sentence of two years and nine months but placed him under a good behaviour bond until 2019 in the ACT Supreme Court on Thursday.

Halafihi Kivalu was arrested after his appearance before the royal commission in July.

Kivalu was arrested after damning covert recordings were played to the trade unions royal commission last July, in which he told formwork subcontractor Elias Taleb to pay him so he could "get some people off your back".

Kivalu initially pleaded not guilty to two charges of blackmailing Mr Taleb and was set to fight the charges at trial, but later switched his pleas to guilty.
A former St Edmund's College brother has pleaded guilty to repeatedly molesting a child at a school in Wollongong, where he was allowed to teach despite prior complaints of abuse.

The first known complaint about John Vincent Roberts, now 73, was made in Christian Brothers schools in NSW at some point before 1978, when he moved to the order's ACT school, St Edmund's.

A former Catholic brother has pleaded guilty to repeatedly molesting a child in Wollongong, after his five-year stint at St Edmund's College in Canberra. Credit:Michele Mossop

He allegedly abused another student during his five-year stint in Canberra between 1978 and 1983.

Roberts was allowed to continue teaching, and he moved to Wollongong where he taught at the prestigious Edmund Rice College.
Households and businesses were charged $12.5 billion in bank fees last year, an increase of 3.5 per cent, according to new figures from the Reserve Bank.

An annual report on bank fees, published Thursday, suggests Australia's 8 million households spend an average of $515 a year on bank fees, and much of the recent growth in consumer fees has been in credit card fees.

Bank fees paid by households rose 2.9 per cent to $4.3 billion, the largest annual increase in four years, because of growth in the banks' balance sheets and fee hikes for some products, the RBA said.

Even so, household bank fees are still below their 2009 peak of more than $5 billion, and well below the fees banks charge their business customers.
The Monaco-based oil company at the centre of a global bribery scandal used a network of offshore accounts and companies to shift funds under the noses of authorities.

The movement of funds around the world by Unaoil - now at the centre of international police probes into allegations it paid bribes - provides a rare insight into what one Unaoil whistleblower has described as the "grey" world of international commerce.

A whistleblower with knowledge of Unaoil's operations says the company set up banking and company structures offshore to avoid detection as it paid bribes to public officials and private businessmen. The bribes helped Unaoil's clients win contracts in oil-rich nations.

Some of the offshore structures are reminiscent of those revealed in the Panama Papers expose by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Centuria Capital's metropolitan office fund has looked to knock rival bidders for the GPT Metro Office Fund out of the park, with a sweetened cash and scrip offer, valuing the target at about $320 million.

Centuria has now offered an indicative and non-binding $2.48 scrip and cash proposal to GPT Metro  a 4 rise in the cash component plus one Centuria metro office fund unit. Centuria has a 16.1 per cent interest in the GPT Metro fund.

GPT Metro Office Fund's new building at 3 Murray Rose Avenue at Sydney's Olympic Park is one of six assets it owns.

The independent board committee established by the GPT platform, which comprises John Atkin as chairman, Justine Hickey and Paul Say, said it would assess the new Centuria offer.

The two parties have also entered into a facilitation and property rights deed, with Centuria Capital, which includes a condition of Centuria reaching 50.1 per cent of the target.
A graduate of Melbourne University and Oxford, John Legge wrote initially on colonial government, with major books on Papua and British Fiji. The Papua project, on Australia's administration of the territory, arose from Legge's war-time work in the government's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, which recruited also the poet James McAuley and future Governor-General John Kerr. At the University of Western Australia in the immediate post-war period (1946-1960) Legge was also a pioneer in the teaching of Asian history  Fred Chaney, Sir Neil Currie and others spoke later of how his survey course changed their lives.

Through his international and Australian networks, and growing numbers of students, he influenced Australia's engagement with Asia. Internationally, Legge was especially recognised for his writing on Indonesia  and also as a theoretician in the discipline of history.

In the words of a former president of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Elaine McKay, John Legge more than any other was the founder of modern Asian Studies in Australia. In the great expansionist period of the Australian university system he was (as professor of history, and then dean of arts) a leader in the building of Monash University  and also in the vital interaction between academic analysts and government policy-makers.

These years in Western Australia were particularly happy ones for Legge. It was here that he met and married, in 1952, Alison Hale, a fellow Oxford graduate and the star of a local production of Shaw's St Joan. In 1956 John and Alison took sabbatical leave at Cornell University, the pre-eminent centre of South-east Asian Studies in the United States. Here Legge was impressed by the academic leadership of George Kahin, with his focus on modern Asia not Orientalism, his (often critical) engagement with Washington and his network of relations with the rising new elites of post-colonial Southeast Asia.

Born in Murchison, Legge had a particularly Australian style, shaped in part in Western Victoria (at Warrnambool High School and Geelong College). His father was a Presbyterian clergyman and his great grand uncle was the missionary James Legge, the translator of Confucius and first professor of Chinese at Oxford. In the midst of academic debate, John Legge's face  like that of his ancestor  could assume an expression of Protestant tenacity.

At Melbourne University Legge studied in the history department where influential professor R.M.Crawford, was questioning the nature of history as a process of inquiry, and also warning Australians that the age of European empires had ended, and that they must now come to terms with the societies of the new Asia Pacific. In future years Legge addressed these two themes himself as an academic leader, especially when he moved to the new Monash University as foundation professor of history in 1960.

Established in Melbourne with Alison and their three children  David, Catherine and Colin  Legge created a department of history which was soon regarded as one of the country's finest. He was also central in developing the Monash Centre of South-east Asian Studies  modelling it in some ways on the Cornell Centre, and achieving a wide international reputation for Australia as well as Monash. The first South-east Asia specialists who came to Monash  including Herb Feith, Cyril Skinner, Ian Mabbett, Michael Swift, Jamie Mackie and Milton Osborne  were renowned in their various fields. Monash also now contributed to the development of South-east Asian Studies in the region itself  Legge, for instance, spending 1969-1970 as director of Singapore's today-famous Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. One of his initiatives there was to institute weekend seminars where public servants, business people and journalists could interact with academics. As always, he believed an academic institution "should not be an ivory tower".

In his own academic writing following the Cornell sabbatical, Legge's principal focus was Indonesia  which he recognised as a country of the highest possible importance for Australians to understand. He was the first Australian historian to devote himself primarily to the study of Indonesia, his best-known works being a biography of Indonesia's founding statesman Sukarno (first published in 1972) and a general history, Indonesia (1964). This latter work combined Legge's desire to understand the historical processes that shaped Indonesia with his commitment to advancing the discipline of history. It is an achievement in inter-disciplinary collaboration, with the historian Legge reaching out to a range of social science writing. America's leading anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, acknowledged that it was Legge more than any other scholar who had brought the disciplines together in Indonesian studies.
Hotels, property catch Shanghai Disneyland fever Updated: 2016-06-16 09:31 By Shi Jing(China Daily)

Mickey waves at tourists during a train-themed parade in Shanghai Disney resort on May 13. [Photo/IC]

As many tourists are expected to visit Shanghai Disneyland, which opens on Thursday, local hotels, both budget and high-end ones, have prepared packages to receive them.

Pudong Shangri-La, which is only a 30-minute drive from Shanghai Disneyland, provides a special package that includes, among other things, park tickets and 100-yuan ($15) transportation allowance.

Similarly, Kerry Hotel Pudong, which is only a 20-minute drive from the park, has a partnership with Disney Resort to sell tickets at its Disney Ticket Counter, offering exclusive shuttle service to the resort.

Even though luxury hotel Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund does not have any specific offer for Disneyland, it has started to offer their summer sales with 25 percent discount from June 1. So, people travelling to Shanghai to visit the park can take advantage of that, said Fabio Berto, director of the hotel's business development department.

Budget hotels and mid- to high-end hotels adjacent to the park have seen their room rates double in the run-up to the park's opening, according to online travel agency Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd.

According to Shanghai Hong Que Information Technology Co Ltd, an information provider on hotel, catering and conference industries, Shanghai Disneyland will boost occupancy rates of local hotels by at least 5 percent in the second half of this year.

Starting from 2014, the resort started to train local talent. It rolled out its first recruitment in October last year. So far, the resort has more than 10,000 casting personnel. Experts estimated that the resort will help create up to 130,000 jobs.

"Hotels, tourism and catering are the three segments that will benefit the most. These three have already seen robust growth in Shanghai. What we will see is probably an increase from the current talent pool. Transportation and infrastructure talent will also be in high demand as more roads are very likely to be built to connect the theme park with many other transportation hubs," said Kang Yi, vice president of multinational human resources company FESCO Adecco.

Disneyland-related talk has caused neighborhood property prices to surge. Ever since the project was approved by the central government, housing prices in Chuansha area, where the theme park is located, have surged by more than three times to the 33,178 yuan per square meter, according to housing agent Lianjia.

"Some of the commercial housing projects have seen their prices surge above 40,000 yuan per sq m in 2015. A new wave of price increases can be expected with the opening of Disneyland. But the real increase will depend on the neighboring transportation and life support facilities," said Zhao Baogen, senior analyst at Lianjia.

Disney-driven consumption is foreseen within the park and in Shanghai. Analysts from CITIC Securities wrote in a note Shanghai Disneyland is likely to generate at least 20 billion yuan in sales for the local retail industry, among which jewelry, premium shopping segments and department stores will benefit the most.
Omar Mateen's emphatically brutal attack at an Orlando gay venue lends itself to multiple readings, depending on your politics and world view. At the time of writing I'm trying to get my head around a report the American-born Mateen, a father of one, had used a gay dating app and visited the Pulse nightclub about a dozen times. Apparently he reconnoitred for his lethal mission a little too thoroughly.

Maybe the deadliest mass shooting in American history stems from one man's repressed homoerotic desire and self-hatred. We cannot play amateur psychologist  precisely how dark forces coalesce in the mind of any individual is unknowable. But we must vigorously reject the gay-hating radical Islamist ideology in whose name he acted, by at the very least naming it ourselves without the exercise sounding like verbal torture, the words squeezed out like pellets.

This Islamist ideology has a pathological obsession with sex and what it regards as the West's decadent influence in all things carnal  sex slaves being sanctioned by scripture  with gay liberation among its most conspicuous targets. Such is the overt marketing pitch of Islamic State, whose hooded warriors don't simply toss gays from tall buildings, they boast of the fact by sticking the footage on the internet.

Ever the literalists, IS reportedly base this punishment on claims the Prophet Muhammad said gays "should be thrown from tremendous height then stoned". By contrast the more liberal regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia are occasionally content to swap the death penalty for a simple flogging.
The exhibition explores how history is written and scrutinises the politics that underpin this process. Andrew - well-known for his critiques of the colonial legacy - draws upon a large collection of archival photographs and images for his Space & Time exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington. However, his works present a markedly different vision of the past.

"It's like walking through a time vortex," Andrew says. "I'm trying to conflate time, stretch it, and bring different dominant and hidden narratives to the forefront."

The old and the new collide in artist Brook Andrew's latest exhibition Space & Time.

Blending a mix of collage, sculpture, screen-printing, painting, photography and neon lights, he splices images together to create surreal and abstract scenes. Seemingly random objects are pasted directly over archival images, creating a striking incongruity. In one artwork, a group of men in uniform have their faces replaced by a cloud, a toilet and a bong, and in another a mud-crab from the Northern Territory rides an elephant from the Bay of Bengal.

Brook Andrew's Guardians of the Galaxy: the Motherhood Number. Credit: Image courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

But all of these anachronistic pairings have a purpose. By composing such scenes, Andrew prompts the viewer to rethink the images and their associated histories.

"We're [all] the same people, and yet there seems to be this hierarchy still of history, of division," Andrew says. "I'm trying to  flatten it out and make an equal historical legacy."

This approach is clearly evident in Andrew's Revealing Distance, in which he pairs images from different sides of the globe. A portrait taken by Australian photographer Charles Kerry is imposed onto an unknown image of a man from Latvia. Despite the obvious geographical separation between the images, Andrew emphasises that both photographs would have been taken at the same time, just before World War One.
Australian screenings of Me Before You, starring Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke, are being picketed by activists who have labelled it a "disability snuff movie" because they believe it suggests the disabled are better off dead.

Protesters had been urged to turn up to cinemas an hour before screenings of the movie, which also stars The Hunger Games' Sam Claflin and which opens nationally today, wearing zombie costumes, carrying protest banners, or wearing T-shirts bearing a range of slogans that subvert the film's "live boldly" tagline.

Protesters were urged to download print-and-wear T-shirt designs with slogans such as "Disabled lives are worth living", "Live Boldly? We already do" and "Me Before You is a disability snuff movie".

The film tells the story of Will Traynor (Claflin), who becomes paralysed after a motorcycle accident and decides his life is no longer worth living. But he delays his plans to travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide for six months, during which time he meets and falls in love with his carer, Lou Clark (Emilia Clarke).
When Jimmy Page takes the witness stand, he does it in the most Jimmy Page way possible.

For the star-struck spectators gathered in a Los Angeles courtroom, it was exciting enough when the former Led Zeppelin axman walked in Wednesday, looking every bit like the aging rock legend he is - clad in a dark suit and tie, his long white hair drawn back into a ponytail, his guitar case in hand, according to reports from the trial. But then he was unexpectedly called to the stand, to defend himself against the claim that Led Zeppelin lifted the opening riff of its mega-hit song Stairway to Heaven from another band.

Page said on Thursday that the riff he is accused of stealing for the band's 1971 hit Stairway to Heaven is in fact a commonly used chord progression similar to a melody from the 1964 movie musical Mary Poppins.
The TV mastermind behind shows such as Gallipoli, Offspring and Puberty Blues is joining forces with Roadshow Films to head a new production arm to create a fresh slate of home-grown drama.

Producer John Edwards and Roadshow Films will launch production company Roadshow Rough Diamond along with his son, the former ITV Studios and Endemol executive Dan Edwards. The new company is aiming to produce miniseries, long-form dramas, feature films, docudramas and documentaries.

John Edwards long-list of credits include Offspring, featuring Asher Keddie and Matthew Le Nevez.

Edwards has previously voiced concerns over a decline in long-form drama in Australia, stating at an industry event last year that "the present state of the drama production industry is that we have run ourselves into a stagnant billabong".
The Greens have given in to days of pressure from members and supporters outraged at the party's decision to preference anti-gay crusader Reverend Fred Nile's party candidate above a Liberal Party candidate who is a gay, Indigenous lawyer.

Local Greens in the seat of Sydney met on Thursday and resolved to re-order the party's how-to-vote card and drop Mr Nile's Christian Democratic Party candidate, Ula Falanga, to the last spot.

The Greens' have been deluged with complaints and threats to vote elsewhere in Sydney after Fairfax Media revealed on Tuesday that the party had endorsed the party of Mr Nile, who has described homosexuality as a "mental disorder", above Liberal Geoffrey Winters, an Indigenous gay man who works in the native title area of the law.
When I first started trading shares as a young bloke 20 years ago, you could just about buy any technology company and make a quick buck. I thought I was a hero. Then the dotcom bubble burst. It was pure luck that I had cashed up my chips by then to buy property. Fortunes were made  and lost  in the speculation of the dotcom boom. When it comes to your superannuation, gambling should play no part. All too often I hear clients using the term "I just want to have a punt" or "a little play on the market". Superannuation is simply a concessionally taxed savings structure designed to fund retirement. While everyone's investment strategy needs to be tailored, super is not for "playing". Constructing the right portfolio for super starts at the foundation of asset allocation. On a basic level that means how much of your fund will be allocated to growth assets such as property, Australian shares and international shares and how much to defensive assets such as cash and bonds. Your decision around how much of your total fund to allocate to each of these five asset classes is paramount to the fund's success.

A typical industry balanced fund has about 70 per cent of its assets in growth assets such as shares and 30 per cent in defensive assets such as cash and bonds. These may be used as a good benchmark. Its key objective is to smooth returns over the long term. Your average self-managed super fund (SMSF) is typically overweighted to Australian shares and cash, according to the Australian Taxation Office's statistics on asset allocation. There has been a perception that SMSFs have been driving the recent property boom (alongside overseas investors), but empirical evidence suggests that this is simply not the case and SMSFs account for a very small proportion of property sales. For better or worse, SMSFs are heavy in bank shares that pay strong and recurring dividends and most of the top 100 stocks listed on the ASX owing to their strong income and modest price growth. SMSFs are also heavily over-weighted in cash which these days, is paying a miserly 2-3 per cent a year at best. Typically, my balanced client portfolios will consist of 30 per cent Aussie shares, 20 per cent international shares (via exchange traded funds), 10 per cent property securities, 10 per cent cash and 30 per cent bonds, although right now we are heavily overweight in cash as I feel the sharemarket both here and in the US may be a little overvalued. Once you've established some basic semblance of portfolio management then you can tailor your portfolio based upon your research and opinion of the values of each of the assets and asset classes in your portfolio. This is all part of the essential management process that will need to form your written investment strategy that is needed for every SMSF.
Nepean Hospital will receive $1 million in next week's state budget, but doctors say the hospital is in crisis mode and in urgent need of funding for frontline services.

The $1million is part of a $4 million election promise to fund planning for the redevelopment of the western Sydney hospital, and builds on $1 million allocated in the last state budget.

An estimated $360-$370 million will eventually be needed to rebuild the hospital, where doctors say a chronic shortage of emergency beds, huge waiting times for surgeries and overstretched staff have pushed it breaking point.

Dr Nhi Nguyen, an intensive care doctor and the chair of the hospital's medical staff council, said Nepean was "in crisis mode" leading into winter.
Tianjin pharmaceutical company focuses on medical wearables Updated: 2016-06-16 10:10 By Fan Feifei and Zhang Min(China Daily)

A smartwatch can pair with smartphones to alert the user of incoming calls, to tell time and allows users to change music. [Photo/IC]

Tianjin Chase Sun Pharmaceutical Co Ltd, a high-tech medicine and health industry group, has extended its lines of business from manufacturing traditional Chinese medicines to making wearable medical equipment.

These devices, such as pulse oximeters, sleep monitors and blood pressure monitors, are designed for family use. Wu Fen, president of the company, said that future focus will be on further developing medical wearables.

Established in 1996, the company's sales revenue reached 4.5 billion yuan ($680 million) in 2015. As of the beginning of this year, it had total assets valued at 6.4 billion yuan and a market value of 15 billion yuan, with more than 5,400 employees. Sales revenue is expected to reach 5 billion yuan in 2016, up from 260 million yuan in 2009, according to Wu.

The company's business strategy focuses on technical innovation and continuing to strengthen research and development capabilities.

In 2014, it implemented an equity incentive plan for 70 key members engaged in scientific research, to stimulate their creativity and vigor. Ten percent of its annual sales revenue is used for supporting the innovation team and for hiring senior talent.

"We always pay attention to the need to motivate talent to be innovative. We have attracted a batch of top talent to join our company through this mechanism," Wu added.

By 2020, the scale of our talent will double, and the core members will increase to 800 or 1,000," he said.

The State Council, China's cabinet, issued in February a guideline on developing the TCM during the period of 2016-2030. According to the plan, the output of the TCM industry will account for 30 percent of the nation's overall pharmaceutical industry.

Tianjin Chase Sun Pharmaceuticals has established industry clusters in a number of fields, including raw materials production, Chinese herbal medicine planting, modernized TCM preparation, TCM formula granules, synthetic drugs, medical apparatus, wearable medical products, and internet-based therapy.

Moreover, since the company was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2009, it has stepped up the pace of mergers and acquisitions to enter into more fields.

It has acquired and reorganized 28 enterprises by a variety of financing methods.

For instance, in 2012 it purchased Beijing Tcmages Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., which specializes in research and production of TCM herbal granules.

Last year, it bought Beijing Choice Electronic Tech Co Ltd, a medical monitoring equipment manufacturer, for 1.57 billion yuan, to tap into the wearable medical equipment field.
A former mayor of Auburn council has denied he spoke against a planning proposal to reduce the proposed new maximum height of a building because its owner, a local Lebanese group, supported his political rival.

Developer-politican Ronney Oueik, appearing before a public inquiry into the planning decisions of one of Sydney's most high-profile councils, denied he had shown favouritism in several planning decisions.

Former Auburn councillor Ronney Oueik arrives to testify at the inquiry initiated by the State Government. Credit:Peter Rae

"We tried to do the right thing for the community and now we're getting punished," he said, of questions raised during the ongoing inquiry under Sydney silk Richard Beasley.

Attention focused particularly on an unexpected change to a rezoning proposal passed by council that had the effect of lowering the proposed new maximum height of a building owned by the Bhanin El Minieh Association from 21 to 16 storeys.
Police hold concerns for a 14-year-old girl missing from the Gold Coast since Monday.

The teenager was last seen at 11.45am on Monday at a public library at Upper Coomera.

Police say this 14-year-old girl has been missing for three days. Credit:Queensland Police Service

Police said the girl had not contacted anyone since Monday and they were concerned for her welfare.

She is described as Caucasian in appearance with a slim build, blue eyes and long brunette hair and was last seen wearing a black and blue wind breaker and blue ripped jeans.
The rest of the youth justice measures will be debated and the bill which will standardise the age of consent should be introduced.

Parliament is on again tomorrow, with Tuesday dedicated to the budget. So we'll see you then for a shorter question time - Friday's business should be wrapped up in record time. Should be. Watch them prove us wrong.

Thank you to Cameron Atfield for wrangling the Internet and to everyone who played along sending through Dixers. We'll try and get through the ones we missed tomorrow.

And as always, the biggest thanks to you, the readers. Have a wonderful afternoon and stay awesome.
A Queensland man accused of a knife attack that caused a young mother to suffer a heart attack had his case adjourned in court.

Graham Michael Hughes, 22, allegedly stabbed the side of the car of a 21-year-old woman as she drove with her partner and two young boys at Rainbow Beach on Tuesday.

On Thursday, the 21-year-old's brother Daniel Martincevic-Bennett told Fairfax Media his sister had woken from a coma at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital.

"She has woken up and responding well. They have run test and looks like no perm (sic) damage but if it happens again we won't be so lucky," he said.
Crime is up in Victoria, again, with every offence type except one jumping by at least double digits in the past year.

The overall crime rate spiked 12.4 per cent compared with the same time last year, the latest crime statistics show.

There was a 16.1 per cent jump in thefts over the past year with a total of 171,531 offences recorded.

Even after taking population numbers into account, there was still a double digit increase in the number of offenders of 10.3 per cent.

It follows a rise in crime of 8.1 per cent in Victoria in the year leading up to March.
A man questioned over the death of his American partner is believed to have told police she had been shot accidentally before he allegedly dumped her at a Mildura hospital.

Tamara Turner, 49, from Missouri, was already dead when she was left outside the Mildura Base Hospital in Victoria's far north last Monday morning.

Tamara Turner was found dead outside the Mildura Base Hospital on Monday. Credit:Facebook

Her son, Chuck Smith, speaking from the US, said authorities had told him Ms Turner died as a result of a single gunshot wound to her thigh. The bullet had pierced a major artery.

Ms Turner's Melbourne-based partner, Steven Samaras, was arrested last Tuesday.
"Dollar Bill" is the nickname endearingly bestowed upon Bill Shorten in the east Perth suburb of Midland.

It might be Liberal territory, but the Labor leader received a warm welcome as he walked through Centrepoint Shopping Centre on Wednesday.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten views a lithium battery container during a visit to renewable energy manufacturer, Energy Made Clean, in Belmont, WA, in the seat of Swan. Election 2016 on Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's campaign.

"We love Bill," 45-year-old Wayne Farmer told AAP, after beckoning the Labor leader into Midland Chinese BBQ restaurant where he was eating lunch for a handshake and a photo.

"Dollar Bill we call him.
The Northern Territory chief minister's call for Western Australia to "take back" hundreds of homeless Aboriginal people who have moved to Darwin is "misplaced", Premier Colin Barnett says.

Adam Giles wrote to Mr Barnett in April, urging him to immediately repatriate indigenous people who had travelled across the border, saying they had put a strain on government resources.

The Northern Territory chief minister's call for Western Australia to "take back" hundreds of homeless Aboriginal people who have moved to Darwin is "misplaced", Premier Colin Barnett says.

Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation, which runs return-to-country programs to help get Aboriginal people back to their remote communities from urban centres, reported that last financial year 1800 clients were from WA, which Mr Giles said was "very disturbing".

He attributed it to the potential closure of remote indigenous communities in WA.
A tourist visits a beer museum in Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province, June 14, 2016. Tourist volume of the city's beer industry tourism projects reached 4.5 million in 2015. (Xinhua/Li Xiaoguo)
A massive police sting operation, which tracked drugs from Sydney to Perth, has ended with four men facing charges which could see them imprisoned for up to 25 years.

The WA Police announced the operation on their Facebook page.

Drugs seized during a police sting operation in Perth and Sydney. Credit:Police

The sting targeted an Asian organised crime syndicate allegedly trafficking drugs from Sydney to Perth.

Police say the gang sent two separate packages, containing a combined weight of five kilograms of methamphetamine, to Perth using a transport company.
The murder of an MP , the first in more than two decades, was a horrific event: an attack on a woman, a mother, a compassionate activist, a committed public servant. An assault on democracy.

British MP Jo Cox's dedication to the voiceless may have cost her her life. Credit:AP

London: According to contested eyewitness reports, the murderer of Labour MP Jo Cox yelled "Britain first" or "put Britain first" as he shot her in a West Yorkshire street.

But that little, fragile factoid has the UK's political world holding its breath.

Slain British MP Jo Cox in an image posted by her husband Brendan. Credit:Twitter

Cox was a passionate campaigner for refugees. And only the day before she had waved off her husband and their two young children as they took to a dinghy on the Thames in the 'Remain' cause for the EU referendum.

We do not yet know what was in the murderer's mind as he attacked Cox. He is alive. He may be telling police right now, though they may choose not to reveal it. We are likely to find out, sooner or later.

Britain First, a contemptible mob of anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-Islam troublemakers, deny any link. Other troubling details have since emerged.
Washington: US President Barack Obama met the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, at the White House on Wednesday despite a warning by China that it would damage diplomatic relations.

The meeting came at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and China over Beijing's assertive pursuit of territorial claims in East Asia.

US President Barack Obama greets His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the White House. Credit:Pete Souza

Mr Obama's fourth White House meeting with the Dalai Lama in the past eight years took place in the White House residence, instead of the Oval Office where the president normally meets world leaders.
"Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo's friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo." People arrive with floral tributes after the murder of Jo Cox. Credit:Getty Images "Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people." "She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous." Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, centre, lays a candle at an impromptu vigil at Parliament Square. Credit:AP

Suspect arrested by police after attack Ms Cox had been holding a regular 'surgery' of one-on-one meetings with constituents at the library. She was attacked by a man who "inflicted serious and sadly, ultimately fatal injuries", West Yorkshire police chief constable Dee Collins said. Forensic police examine shoes and a handbag at the scene. Credit:Getty Images The assailant then attacked another 77 year-old man, inflicting non life-threatening injuries.

An eyewitness told Press Association he heard screaming and saw "a guy who was being very brave and another guy with a white baseball cap who he was trying to control and the man in the baseball cap suddenly pulled a gun from his bag". "He was fighting with (Cox) and wrestling with her and then the gun went off twice and then she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding on the floor. "The man stepped back with the gun and fired it and then he fired a second shot, as he was firing he was looking down at the ground." Another witness told the BBC the attacker also lunged at Cox with a knife. A 52-year-old man was arrested nearby shortly after the attack, West Yorkshire Police said, adding they were "not looking for anyone else in connection with this incident at this time". The suspect was elsewhere identified as Tommy Mair.

'This should not happen in Britain' Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he and his wife Sarah had worked with Jo and Brendan on charity campaigns for women and children. "Whenever you talked to her, the compassion in her eyes and the commitment in her soul shone through." "She she went to some of the most dangerous places in the world. The last place she should have been in danger was in her home town." "People will say that this does not happen in Britain. This should not happen in Britain. And we must resolve that this will never again happen in Britain."

News of Ms Cox's death provoked a wave of sympathy from international leaders and politicians as well. Former US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived a shooting attack in 2011, was among those lending words of sympathy. "Absolutely sickened to hear of the assassination of Jo Cox," she wrote on Twitter. "She was young, courageous, and hardworking. A rising star, mother, and wife." Ms Cox had argued this week in a local newspaper that a "vote to leave is a risk that is simply not worth taking", and that a remain vote was "the patriotic choice". The Labour MP's colleagues have described her as an eloquent and effective lawmaker. She was due to celebrate her 42nd birthday next Wednesday, and had been spoken of as a potential future minister.
A photo of the station in the night under the glow of the aurora australis. Credit:Chris Danals, National Science Foundation Between February and October, only one type of craft can fly to, land at and take off again from the South Pole: the tiny Twin Otter. Two of these hardy, winter-proof bush planes, operated by Canadian polar service firm Kenn Borek, are now headed south, Falkner said, each of them carrying a pilot, co-pilot, engineer and a medic. Once they reach the British research station Rothera on Adelaide Island, one plane and its crew will remain behind to provide search and rescue capability should the main plane go down. The second Twin Otter will continue on toward the pole, flying into the deeper cold (current temperature at Amundsen-Scott is minus 60 degrees, or 76 degrees Fahrenheit) and impenetrable night. If all goes well, it could arrive as early as June 19, though that depends on whether the pilots can find a window in the brutal Antarctic winter weather to fly. AmundsenScott South Pole Scientific Station. Credit:WikiCommons "It's a 10-hour flight, and you only have 12 or 13 hours of fuel on board," said Alberta bush pilot Sean Loutitt. "You're monitoring the weather the whole time, but eventually you get to a point of no return. Then you're committed to the pole, no matter what."

Loutitt was the chief pilot for Kenn Borek during the mission to evacuate Shemenski in 2001. Before that rescue effort, no one had ever flown to Amundsen-Scott through the polar night. It was assumed that it couldn't be done. The IceCube observatory, the world's .largest neutrino detector, at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. Credit:New York Times That belief is part of the mythology of the pole, Shemenski said. "It was like a macho thing," he recalled. "At that point when the last plane left you were there for six months. That was it." But about a month and a half after the last flight out, in April 2001, Shemenski started suffering stomach pains and throwing up repeatedly. As the physician for the station, he diagnosed himself with pancreatitis. The National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station

The doctor was determined not to leave the pole, arguing that he could treat himself on his own (indeed, by the time rescuers arrived, he was on his way to recovery, he said). But a medical expert consulted by the National Science Foundation said that Shemenski had a 50 per cent chance of dying in the six months until regular flights to the pole resumed. Officials pointed out that, though Shemenski had a right to take his own chances, they couldn't risk the possibility that his 49 colleagues would be left at the station without a doctor. "It's like being in the military," Shemenski said. "I was ordered off. So I left." The initial call went to the U.S. Air Force, which began to assemble dozens of military personnel and three C-130 Hercules planes for the rescue mission. But the temperatures at the pole were already too cold for the C-130s. The mission was scrubbed and the NSF sought out an alternative: Kenn Borek's Twin Otters. The planes are certified to fly at temperatures as low as minus 75 degrees Celsius (minus 103 degrees Fahrenheit), according to Falkner. Their systems are a good deal simpler than the C-130's, and they require less fuel - essential when every ounce of fuel has to be warmed for flight. At the pole's low temperatures, petrol freezes into an unusable jelly. So does the grease in a plane's hinges and gears. Winter storms can flare up in a heartbeat. And if anything goes awry, pilots may need to land on unknown terrain in total darkness. All of this was on Loutitt's mind as he prepared for the mission south. He'd flown to Amundsen-Scott before, and had done countless flights into the Arctic Circle during the northern polar night. But this was different.

"You're the only plane flying on an entire continent," he said. "You have to be prepared to be totally self reliant if something goes wrong." Luckily, the trip was relatively smooth. After hours of flying in darkness, Loutitt and his crew finally glimpsed a glimmer of light below them: barrels of gasoline were burning along the makeshift runway the South Pole station workers had prepared. They'd reached the bottom of the Earth. The replacement doctor for the station disembarked, and the ailing Shemenski clambered onto the plane. But as they started up the engines, the crew realised they couldn't take off. The Twin Otter's skis had stuck to the ice beneath them, and the grease on the wing flaps had frozen them in the fully extended position. While the station workers hacked at the ice on the skis, the plane's mechanic jerry-rigged the controls to allow it to take off. It was one of the longest, slowest take-offs any of them had ever attempted, but eventually, they were in the air. The journey back to Rothera was unlike anything Shemenski had experienced. "During the initial part when you're in the darkness it's hardly a sensation of moving at all because you can't see anything," he recalled. "Everything's black."

But then a thin line of pink appeared - sunlight on the horizon. "It was really beautiful to watch it grow," co-pilot Mark Cary told Canadian broadcaster CTV for a documentary about the mission. "It was like a gift and a sign to say everything's going to work out and you guys are going the right way." Cary and Loutitt would repeat the flight two years later, when Barry McCue, an environmental health and safety officer employed by contractor Raytheon Polar Services, developed a serious infection in his gallbladder. This time, Shemenski was the medical director for Raytheon and helped coordinate the rescue. McCue and his rescuers made it off the frozen continent safely, and McCue recovered fully from a successful surgery to treat his infection. "You can tell they're getting better at the planning of it," McCue told the Antarctic Sun, a newspaper run by the National Science Foundation. "For me it was just take the plan off the shelf, blow the dust off and then just figure out what the people should do."
'Intimate terrorism' Domestic violence often follows a pattern in which an abuser seeks to control every aspect of a victim's life. The scope and intent of this are hinted at in one name experts use for it: "intimate terrorism." US-born Omar Mateen shot dead 49 people before being killed by police. "The perpetrator is engaging in a general pattern of control over the victim - her finances, her social contacts, the clothes she wears," said Deborah Epstein, who runs Georgetown University Law Centre's domestic violence clinic. Violence is the perpetrator's means of enforcing that control - and of punishing any attempts to break it.

Noor Zahi Salman, left, pictured with her husband, Orlando gunman Omar Mateen. Credit:Facebook Mateen's brief marriage to Sitora Yusufiy seems to fit this model. She has said that he forced her to hand over her paychecks to him, forbade her to leave the house except to go to work, and prevented her from contacting her parents. Even small perceived infractions were met with a violent response. "He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn't finished or something like that," Yusufiy told The Washington Post. Man Haron Monis terrorised his ex-wife before the Sydney siege. Credit:Fairfax Media Take this dynamic of coercive violence to its most horrible extreme, and it looks an awful lot like how the Islamic State treats women in its self-proclaimed caliphate. As Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi has reported, the group has created a vast infrastructure of rape and slavery in which women are held captive and bought and sold by its fighters. It is intimate violence on an industrial scale.

Domestic violence, experts say, is also often a way for male abusers to impose their view of "traditional" gender roles. Epstein said such "traditions" in the United States were rooted in the idea of men having control over women. Orlando shooter Omar Mateen. Credit:Myspace "That's our culture: It's all about men controlling women in their lives," she said. "Intimate terrorism stems from that desire to control." This bears striking similarities to how the Islamic State presents its treatment of women as a recruiting tool, promising young men abroad - particularly in Europe - that its caliphate will allow them to restore "traditional" gender norms of male dominance. This dominance is exercised in part through violence including systematic rape and the threat of rape. The group often presents this violence as a means to measure and protect men's honour. Omar Mateen who opened fire inside the crowded gay nightclub early on Sunday. Credit:AP

It seems natural, then, that the Islamic State might appeal to men who desire that sort of control over the women in their lives, separate from any ideological draw - the kind of men who might have domestic violence in their past. Nimmi Gowrinathan, a visiting professor at the City College of New York who studies women's roles in insurgent and terrorist conflicts, said that restrictive norms about gender and sexuality could be a "pull" factor for terrorist organisations - but that people who are drawn to them are also often "pushed" by their own pre-existing attitudes or desires. Sydney siege gunman Man Haron Monis. Personal and global grievances Terrorist attacks and mass shootings garner attention and frighten the public much more than episodes of domestic violence. But domestic violence has a much higher death toll in the United States.

According to the Violence Policy Centre, 895 women in the United States were murdered by their current or former intimate partners in 2013 (and this does not include those killed amid mass shootings). That single-year tally is more than nine times the 92 people the New American Foundation has counted as killed in jihadi attacks on US soil in the past decade. But there are striking parallels between the intimate terrorism of domestic violence and the mass terrorism perpetrated by lone-wolf attackers like Mateen seems to have been. Both, at their most basic level, are attempts to provoke fear and assert control. Domestic violence, experts say, often occurs when an abuser concludes that violence is the best tool to solve his or her grievances. That might mean a husband who perceives his wife's failure to do the laundry as a challenge to his rightful authority, leading him to try to reimpose his will through violence. Clark McCauley, a professor at Bryn Mawr College who studies the psychology of mass violence and terrorism, said he was not aware of research finding a causal relationship between domestic violence and terrorism. But he has found that a characteristic common to mass killers is a sense of grievance: a belief that someone, somewhere, had wronged them in a way that merited a violent response. Gender norms, gender panic

A domestic abuser's desire to impose, by force, supposed traditional gender roles also sometimes includes sexuality. Such abusers, experts say, may see homosexuality as a threat to their masculinity. "There is an idea that what it means to be masculine is to be vigilant of your sexuality, and hypervigilant towards keeping anyone from perceiving you as gay," said Gillian Chadwick, a fellow at Georgetown University Law Centre. Intimate terrorism, in that sense, rests on a broader spectrum of violence meant to preserve the traditional dominance of heterosexual men, and coerce those who are perceived as threatening that order. That spectrum, at the extreme end, includes mass shootings. This connection makes it somewhat easier to understand an apparent contradiction: that Mateen targeted a gay nightclub and that his father and ex-wife have said he had a history of homophobic remarks, but that he also had been seen visiting Pulse, the gay nightclub he targeted, and, according to some news reports, used a gay dating app. Could Mateen have been trying to use violence to reimpose rules about gender and sexuality that he himself was troubled about violating? If so, he would not be the first.
AUBURN HILLS, Mich., June 16, 2016 --

Jeep Wrangler Unlimited named best-in-class Entry SUV for third year in a row

Fiat 500 leads Micro Car segment in total quality for second consecutive year

Dodge Challenger captures back-to-back wins for total quality in Specialty Coupe segment

Jeep Grand Cherokee takes home first place in total quality among Mid-Size SUVs

FIAT ties for title of industry's best brand for total quality under $26,000

Four FCA US LLC vehicles led their respective segments in total quality and the FIAT brand tied for first among automakers for the best brand with vehicles under $26,000 in Strategic Vision's 22nd annual Total Quality Impact (TQI).

Four 2016 FCA US vehicles won their respective segments for total quality:

Jeep Wrangler Unlimited  Entry SUV

Fiat 500  Micro Car

Dodge Challenger  Specialty Coupe

Jeep Grand Cherokee  Mid-Size SUV

The Jeep Wrangler Unlimited won its segment for the third consecutive year while the Fiat 500 and Dodge Challenger both led their segments for the second year in a row.

TQI is based on responses from more than 39,000 owners of new 2016 model year vehicles. The quality study includes more than 155 specific aspects of the customer experience to form a unique and complete measure of the total ownership experience.

"We see time and again that for consumers, innovation does more to communicate quality than an absence of problems does," said Christopher Chaney, Senior Vice President  Strategic Vision. "Whether it comes in the form of breakthrough technology, re-engineering a vehicle or creating a new model, consumers feel the positive impact of bold new directions taken by manufacturers."

According to San Diego-based research firm Strategic Vision, the TQI score is a holistic measure that encompasses positive and negative product experiences. This includes reliability, actual problems, driving excitement and other measures that collectively are energized by the emotional response associated with the aggregate of all those experiences  hence Total Quality.

"The future of quality that is meaningful to buyers will reach beyond 'no squeaks and rattles' and reside in the successful deployment of engineering innovation and technology that is relevant, intuitive and impactful," Chaney said.

About the 2016 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

The iconic Jeep Wrangler  the most capable and recognized vehicle in the world  features a standard eight-speaker audio system and an improved sound bar, and an optional Premium Alpine Audio Package that includes nine Alpine speakers, a subwoofer and a 552-watt amplifier. Jeep Wrangler delivers unmatched off-road capability with legendary four-wheel drive and is produced with more than seven decades of 4x4 engineering experience. Wrangler continues to offer a body-on-frame design, front and rear five-link suspension system, live axles, electronic lockers, and is one of the few mid-size SUVs that offers a six-speed manual transmission, in addition to its five-speed automatic transmission  all at a starting U.S. MSRP of $23,895.

About the 2016 Fiat 500

Reminiscent of the original Cinquecento, the 2015 Fiat 500 builds on the vehicle's global popularity. Since its initial launch in 2007, more than 1 million Fiat 500 vehicles have been sold in more than 110 countries around the world. The model's unquestionable popularity is the result of the Fiat 500's great ability to deliver unmatched personalization options with advanced solutions in terms of quality, engine performance and passenger comfort. In addition to success on the sales front, the Fiat 500 has earned more than 80 international awards.

About the 2016 Dodge Challenger

The Dodge and SRT brands offer the most complete lineup of muscle cars in the market, including the 2016 Dodge Challenger SXT with its standard powerful and fuel-efficient Pentastar V-6 engine combined with the TorqueFlite eight-speed transmission that delivers 305 horsepower and an estimated 30 miles per gallon on the highway; the 2016 Dodge Challenger R/T with the high-torque 5.7-liter HEMI paired with the TorqueFlite eight-speed or six-speed manual transmission; and the 6.4-liter HEMI Challenger R/T Scat Pack that delivers 485 horsepower and 475 lb.-ft. of torque (the most horsepower and torque available for less than $40,000) with the TorqueFlite eight-speed or six-speed manual. The 2016 Dodge Challenger SRT 392 adds six-piston Brembo front brakes, adaptive damping suspension and SRT Drive Modes to the same 6.4-liter naturally aspirated HEMI powerplant, while the Challenger SRT Hellcat with its 707-horsepower supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V-8 engine is the most powerful and fastest muscle car ever.

About the 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokee

Jeep Grand Cherokee is the most awarded SUV ever and the vehicle that has long defined what a premium SUV should be. The Grand Cherokee Summit models receive added features, as well as a Summit California Edition appearance package that further enhances Summit's premium exterior aesthetics. A refined exterior design  complete with available bi-xenon headlamps with signature LED daytime running lamps (DRL)  provides a premium appearance. Interior luxury is achieved with premium amenities, including Natural leather, exotic open-pore wood trim and unique color offerings. Legendary Jeep capability comes courtesy of three available 4x4 systems, Jeep's Quadra-Lift air suspension system and class-leading Selec-Terrain traction management system. Grand Cherokee boasts best-in-class towing of 7,400 pounds, and a crawl ratio of 44.1:1. The Jeep Grand Cherokee is available in five trim levels: Laredo, Limited, Overland, Summit and SRT.

About FIAT Brand

The FIAT brand stands for discovery through passionate self-expression. That philosophy is embodied by the iconic Fiat 500 or Cinquecento  a small car that lives big. Italian at heart and rooted in a rich heritage, the 500 is sold in more than 100 countries and is synonymous with modern, simple design blending form, function, technology and a pride of ownership that is genuine. In North America, the Fiat 500 was introduced in March 2011 and was soon followed by the Fiat 500c (Cabrio), the high-performance Fiat 500 Abarth and Abarth Cabrio, the fully electric Fiat 500e, the five-passenger Fiat 500L and the all-wheel-drive 500X crossover. The FIAT brand continues to expand with the introduction of the Fiat 124 Spider, a revival of the iconic roadster that combines Italian style, performance and engaging driving dynamics. The all-new Fiat 124 Spider will arrive at FIAT studios in summer 2016.

About Strategic Vision

Strategic Vision is a research-based consultancy with over 35 years of experience in understanding the consumers' and constituents' decision-making systems for a variety of Fortune 100 clients, including most automotive manufacturers. Its unique expertise is in using ValueCentered Psychology to identify consumers' comprehensive, motivational hierarchies, which include the product attributes, personal benefits, value/emotions, and images that drive perceptions and behaviors. The newly enhanced Total Quality metric further incorporates the impact of problems with the vehicle as well as the drivers' analytical and emotional evaluations of quality. These aspects are inseparably connected and crucial to measuring the impact of quality on the overall new vehicle experience. For further information contact Alexander Edwards or Christopher Chaney at (858) 576-7141.

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."
Xi's visit to boost partnership projects Updated: 2016-06-16 03:41 By An Baijie(China Daily)

Collaboration on production capacity will enhance work along Belt and Road route

China Railway Express with the official unified brand departs from Yiwu, Zhejiang Province on June 8. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping's visit to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan will lead to more projects involving production capacity cooperation, Foreign Ministry officials said on Wednesday.

During the eight-day trip that will begin on Friday, Xi will attend signing ceremonies for cooperation documents in the three countries, all of which are along the route of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said Liu Haixing and Li Huilai, both assistant foreign ministers.

Liu told a news briefing that Xi will visit Serbia's Smederevo steel mill, which was founded in 1913 and acquired in April by Hesteel Group, China's largest iron and steel business group in terms of production capacity.

The deal is worth 46 million euros ($51.7 million).

Construction of Serbian power stations and highways in projects involving contracts with Chinese companies is going smoothly, he said.

In Serbia, the Zemun-Borca Bridge, newly renamed Pupin Bridge, was opened in 2014. The bridge over the Danube River is the first built in Europe by a Chinese company.

"The bridge is fondly known by the local people as the Chinese Bridge," Liu said.

The Chinese government is encouraging domestic companies to invest in Poland's nuclear power industry, Liu said.

Poland has been China's largest trade partner in Central and Eastern Europe for 11 consecutive years. It is also the only CEE country that has joined the China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Liu said.

Liu Zuokui, an expert at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that promoting bilateral cooperation with Serbia and Poland will play a positive role in propelling China-CEE relations.

To show support toward China-Uzbekistan cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi will attend a ceremony for the completion of a tunnel made by China, Li said.

While attending the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Xi will discuss with other leaders the applications by India and Pakistan to join the SCO as members, Li said.

Chen Yurong, a researcher of European and Asian studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said the SCO summit is expected to have a huge, positive influence on the growth of the organization, which marks its 15th anniversary this year.
Chinese, European leaders urged to set free trade timetable at summit Updated: 2016-06-16 21:11 By Fu Jing in Brussels(chinadaily.com.cn)

China Institute for Reform and Development from Hainan province and Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized a seminar on free trade talks between China and EU on Thursday in Brussels. Former Director General of the WTO Pascal Lamy attends the seminar. [Photo by Fu Jing/chinadaily.com.cn]

Chinese and European leaders are being urged to show courage and vision and set a timetable to start free trade agreement talks when they hold their annual summit in Beijing next month amid rising protectionism from European Union.

Two influential think-tanks, China Institute for Reform and Development from Hainan province and the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), have both published their own research reports after a two-year study, proposing that China and the EU take decisive actions in further releasing trade potential.

"Our research outcomes have evidently indicated that Chinese and European economies will greatly benefit from a free trade agreement if we tap on the potential timely and properly," Chi Fulin, president of the think tank of China told China Daily in an interview.

"I strongly suggest that the leaders of both sides should consider a timetable of talks at their upcoming meeting in Beijing next month and I propose that we should consider year 2020 as a deadline to conclude talks."

Chi's institute and the CEPS organized a one-day seminar in Brussels on Thursday, the first time that both sides could discuss the subject. Before the two sides officially launch negotiations, a joint feasibility study should be conducted, according to the procedure of starting such talks.

"At least, both sides should announce a feasibility study in July at summit," said Chi.

While launching his organization's report, Chi said the CEPS research was "highly technical, in-depth and thoughtful."

Introducing his team's report ``Tomorrow's Silk Road: Assessing an EU-China FTA'', Jacques Pelkmans, senior fellow of CEPS, said strong arguments backed the rationale behind the possible trade deal between the two sides.

"The potential of intensifying China-EU economic trade and investment cooperation is still enormous and such argument cannot be surprising," said Pelkmans.

Chi's team is more decisive in pushing trade talks, which could be combined with the continuing investment negotiations between China and the EU.

"If so, we could try to finish the talks by 2020," said Chi.

Chi's team listed six priorities in trade talks in which early results are possible, and they ranged from deepening customs cooperation, financial services, environment-friendly technologies, e-commerce, infrastructural investment and governmental procurement.

Lv Fengding, Vice-President of the China Public Diplomacy Association also said that politicians of both sides should set a timetable of free trade agreement, which could inject fresh air into the bilateral relationship between China and the EU, with both facing huge tasks of maintaining sound economic growth.

"Especially for the EU, it has faced multiple challenges right now and China is still willing to offer necessary help to assist the EU move out of difficulties," said Lv, who is heading a team of Chinese experts discussing trade talks in Brussels.

"And the leaders of both sides should be visionary to explore new tools for China and EU to deepen cooperation," he added.

In previous years, Lv said China had consistently offered help for the EU to exit its financial and sovereignty debt crisis. And some European Union countries have joined the Asia Infrastructural Investment Bank and the European Union has also responded by seeking a synergy between the Belt and Road Initiative and EU President Jean-Claude Juncker's investment plan.

"But the European Union has not always responded properly to China's consistent goodwill," said Lv.

Lv pointed out that the EU has blamed China as the scapegoat for excess steel capacity, which is a global problem. And the European Parliament has ruled in a non-binding resolution that the European Union will not give China market economy status.

"We are quite worried about the rise of protectionism in Europe and I hope both sides take notice of it," said Lv. "And in this context, discussing about free trade talks is meaningful."
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Creative Genius: Schitts Creek Producer Dead at 47

GONE TOO SOON

Ben Feigin, who has also worked on classics including Friends and ER, died Monday from pancreatic cancer.
UK Health Minister comes down firmly on remaining in the EU Updated: 2016-06-17 01:27 By Wang Mingjie(chinadaily.com.cn)

Jeremy Hunt [Photo by Wang Mingjie/chinadaily.com.cn]

Jeremy Hunt, Britain's Secretary of State for Health, says the departure of the UK from the European Union would be very destabilizing and could only have a bad impact on Chinese companies that want to export to the EU.

Hunt, who is also the Patron of Conservative Friends of the Chinese, was accompanied by his Chinese wife when he spoke at London Chinese Community Centre yesterday to support the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign.

Britons are due to vote on whether to remain in the EU in a national referendum on June 23.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman has in the past hinted at China's desire for the UK to remain in the EU.

Hunt said "Britain's relationship with China as strategically is very important for the UK and that is why we listen when countries like China say how important it is that we remain a member of the EU."

He thinks China sees Britain as a country that has always championed free trade and open markets and believes that China wants to see Britain's voice strong in Europe, not retreating from Europe.

"The EU is China's biggest trading partner and China thinks that it would be potentially very damaging for the EU if there was big instability," he adds.

Leave Campaign argues that a so-called Brexit would open the door to a Chinese trade agreement with Britain and it's a lot easier and quicker to negotiate trade deals between two countries that have got their individual interests to look after rather than doing it with 28 countries, all with 28 different interests and all with 28 different vetoes.

Hunt says that it takes longer to wrestle with the interests of 28 different countries rather than one, but the issue is not just how long it takes, rather how good the deal is at the end of it.
Governmental leaders from around the world have issued statements of sympathy for the LGBT community and condemnation of homophobia.

But not in Africa.

As in the United States, where Republican politicians have erased LGBT people from the Orlando narrative, only one African head of stateSouth African President Jacob Zumamentioned the victims predominantly queer identities.

The silence is perhaps unsurprising, as gay sex remains illegal in many countries on the continent. Indeed, adding further insult to injury, just four days after the Orlando massacre, the Kenyan High Court upheld the governments use of forced anal exams to ascertain whether men are homosexuala degrading and thoroughly ineffective procedure that has been condemned by all major international human rights organizations.

A small vigil in Nairobi stood in stark contrast to the massive gatherings held across the globe.

There, a place where gay sex is illegal and social stigma against queer expression remains high, a few dozen LGBTI activists and community members crowded into a walled-off courtyard at the end of a gated street to grieve and take stock.

The silence has been deafening, David Kuria, a local LGBTI activist and Kenyas first openly gay candidate to run for political office, said of the muted response from media, society, and government. It feeds into the narrative that this is one incident where perhaps the government agrees with the terrorists.

Immah Reid, who co-organized the vigil, said that not even our parents have called us [in the wake of the Orlando attacks]. Were now an easy target. This has shown others that its okay to kill and hate those you dont like.

U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Robert F. Godec stopped by the local vigil. Standing before a wall of messages to the victims, and in front of a Voice of America camera, he said that, in fact, Kenyan officials had expressed concernin private. Its been quite an impressive outpouring from Kenyan leadership, he told the courtyard.

Activists were not impressed.

Gays are considered another species in Kenya, a queer woman piped up from the darkened courtyard under the open sky after the cameras and U.S. officials had left. Theres an agreement that gays dont need compassion.

Kenyan media has also erased the Orlando victims queer identities. Some outlets have covered the attack without mentioning that Pulse is a gay nightclub. Others have included the LGBTI component by running newswire stories written from abroad. The Kenyan media blackout is real, a vigil goer said as the discussions somber mood shifted to anger.

Kenya is no stranger to homophobic attacks, and certainly no stranger to terrorism. In 1998, a bombing linked to Osama bin Laden took down the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, killing 224 people and injuring more than 4,000. Al-Shabaab attacks on the Westgate shopping mall in 2013 and Garissa University College in 2015 are still fresh in peoples minds.

Kenyas top officials often release multiple statements condemning mass shootings and bombings in the West, emphasizing in essence that such attacks could happen anywhere to deflect criticism from their own patchy counterterrorism record. But not this time. Reactions to the Orlando shooting have been vague or non-existent, not just in Kenya but across the continent.

In a short statement adapted for Twitter, Kenyas Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs Amina Mohamed offered her countrys deep condolences to the Government & people of the United States following gun attack at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Subsequent tweets expressed regret for the loss of 50 innocent civilians, heartfelt sympathies to those who lost loved ones, and unequivocal condemnation for the despicable act of violence but made no reference to the queer identities of those targeted and killed. Kenya stands in solidarity with the United States Govt in efforts to apprehend the criminals & strengthening the war on violent extremism, she concluded.

The African Union released a similar statement reaffirming the AUs strong rejection of all acts of terrorism and violent extremism by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes, while making no reference to the crimes homophobic nature.

The only exceptionas usualwas South Africa, which stands alone in the continent in recognizing same-sex marriage and supporting LGBT equality at the United Nations. The attack, which was targeted at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community, shows extreme levels of intolerance. South Africa fully recognises the rights of the LGBTI community and condemns in the strongest possible terms any violent attack targeted at the community, President Zumas statement read.

The Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK), a national umbrella organization that works with sexual and gender minorities, released on op-ed to be published next week in a Kenyan newspaper, stating When Westgate happened to us, the world stood with Kenya. When Garissa happened, the world, including Americans, was Garissa. When the Paris attacks happened, Kenyans were Paris  but now, we are silent  World leaders and most of humanity has weighed in. But we are quiet.

Back at the vigil, a rainbow array of cloth hung from cemented bottle shards protecting the courtyards perimeter. A sheet displaying the Orlando victims names grew dim as candles melted into the floor and extinguished, one by one.

We know we are at risk, and what this foul act of terror in Orlando has done is take that fear and make it concrete, Anthony Oluoch, who co-organized the Nairobi vigil, said.

The group then discussed security precautions for Nairobis queer-frequented bar and nightclub.

The current climate in Nairobi is that anything could spark violence. People will look for any excuse to attack based on tribe, gender, sexual orientation. Am I safe? one person asked.

The courtyard swelled as people came and went, smoke swirling around a communal pot of cigarette ash that served as its centerpiece.

The discussion then turned to a heated debate over whether Nairobi should host its own pride parade. What, right now, are we proud enough about to march? Oluoch asked the small circle. What is the point of marching if I cant hold the hand of the person I love?

As the last candles burned out and group consensus all but vetoed the idea of a pride parade in the near future, one proponent persisted.

We should parade, just to show we exist, he said.
Roman Catholic officials followed Pope Francis lead in decrying the terrible massacre that has taken place in Orlando. Violence toward who?

I see almost nothing in which the Church identifies the victims of the Orlando shooting as gay men and women. In this utterly heartbreaking moment, I am hurt and angered by the Churchs lack of care of the whole gay person, including the identification of the gay victims when it matters most: in their martyrdom.

The free world demands that Pope Francis come out and name the victims of the Orlando massacre and hate crime, and identify them as homosexuals born in the image and likeness of God. Until Francis comes out in support of LGBT people during one of their most vulnerable moments he contributes to that absurd and terrible violence that others their community and makes them the target of any extremist with access to hate, and arms.

Naming the victims as gay men and women is an important next step in a papacy some years removed from Pope Francis historic, off-the-cuff invocation, Who am I to judge?, uttered when he was asked what he thought about gay priests. That was a promise thats yet to be kept.

The LGBT community, many of whose members are spiritual and religious, demands a clear and direct response from Francis and the Church he leads about a murderer who deliberately targeted the gay nightclub Pulse, knowing full well that it would be packed on a Saturday night during Gay Pride month. They were murdered because a big chunk of the world still does not accept gays or their lifestyle.

That includes the Catholic Church, which still teaches that gays who pursue a gay lifestyle live in sin.

The Orlando Gay Massacre demonstrates that the world is far from safe for LGBT people; even in America where inroads like gay marriage are recent and welcomed , there are many people who remain intolerant about homosexuality.

Catholics and Muslims should examine their collective souls because they both view gays as sinners. If caught in a gay sexual act in certain Muslim countries, such persons can be put to death or sentenced to life in prison. Although the Catholic Church isnt as extreme in her treatment of gays, she clearly doesnt accept them; they arent allowed to receive the Holy Eucharist at Mass with other Catholics. If they have gay sex, the church views them as sinners, people no longer in a state of grace no longer in good communion with God.

Why doesnt Pope Francis address the gays of the world, tell them that they are accepted, that God loves them, the church loves and accepts them? Why doesnt he invite all gays throughout the world to come forward to the communion rail and receive the Holy Eucharist? Why cannot he echo the theologian Paul Tillich and say to all gays: You are accepted?

How sad it was to hear Pope Francis say only this after the Orlando tragedy, We all hope that ways may be found, as soon as possible, to effectively identify and contrast the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity.

Could he not have shared with the world the names of some of the men and women killed?

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops response to the Orlando tragedy was mixed to say the least. Archbishop Joseph Kurtz proclaimed that it reminds us life is precious. Whose lives? The Bishop of Orlando, Bishop John Noonan, begged for Gods mercy to be upon us. Which us? Be specific.

In the midst of the Orlando Gay Massacre, sexually active gay men could not donate life-saving blood. Sexually active gay men who are Roman Catholic cannot receive Holy Communion at Mass. These are holy actions denied to gay Catholics. Such irony! The donation of blood saves lives; the blood of Jesus Christ saves souls, as taught by the Church.

When Archbishop William Lori voices grief over the loss of the innocent, he doesnt acknowledge that these innocent gay people died because of who they are. Like his fellow prelates, misses the mark, and reaffirms their affirmation of the Churchs anti-gay theology and anti-gay rhetoric.

Pope Francis is known to be horrified at all violence, a horror he often discusses in his writings as he confronts violence and injustice throughout the world. The Church calls the world to solidarity with the victims, and to emphasize the dignity and worth of every person. But it is hard for me not to challenge the Church at this most crucial moment in gay ascendancy! Where are the gay Catholic seminarians, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals? Having been a Jesuit for ten years, I know that there are many gay religious within the church. Why not come out in an act of solidarity?

A papacy that once promised an historic welcome of LGBT people, is closing its arms. Friendship is based on love, and Pope Francis has yet to reveal his love. Now is the time to show it, and be an example to the world.
Sheikh Farrokh Bahram Sekaleshfar, a Shia cleric of Iranian descent, sits opposite a reporter from the Australian TV network ABC. He is about to be kicked out of the country over his views, but he insists he played no role in the June 12 Orlando massacre.

Sekaleshfars name appeared in the news this week after a U.S.-born Afghan-American, Omar Mateen, shot dead 49 people and injured 53 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Sekaleshfar is on record saying that death is the sentence for homosexuals and that executing them is an act of compassion, since earthly punishment will gain them leniency in the afterlife. He has spoken on the subject at least twice in the U.S., once in 2013 at the University of Michigan, and again in April at the Husseini Islamic Center north of Orlando.

It is not clear whether Mateen was ever in Sekaleshfars audience, but many Americans fear that clerics like Sekaleshfar may have influenced Mateens attitude toward homosexuality and his decision to kill gay men.

Sekaleshfar, 43, was born in Manchester, England, but has lived in Iran in recent years. He studied at Imperial College London and is a medical doctor. According to some reports, he moved to the Iranian seminary city of Qom after his graduation in 2000 and studied Islam there.

There are also reports that Sekaleshfar delivered a speech as an ethics scholar at Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences in Yazd.

Sekaleshfar preached frequently at the Imam Ali Mosque in Cardiff, Wales. He also worked with a number of Iranian media outlets such as The Call of Islam Radio and Sahar TV, an international branch of the Islamic Republic Of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). In recent years, he extended his preaching to YouTube and social networks.

Last week, just before the before the Orlando massacre, Sekaleshfar travelled to Sydney, Australia to deliver a speech at the citys Imam Hossein Islamic Center. While he was there, local media reported his anti-gay speeches. On Tuesday night, he left Australia abruptly. The Australian government announced that his visa had been revoked.

In his interview with ABC, Sekaleshfar said he had made his comments in an academic setting, and that he regretted that they had been made public. He said he advocated the death penalty only for homosexuals who have anal sex in public in a country that abides by Islamic law.

When does this question of death theoretically arise? he asked the reporter. It arises in a particular scenario that is such a small probability that Ive never even heard of such a scenario arising in such a country, with such a mandate, where the rule of law is Islam.

He denied that his speech could have led to the massacre.

Sydneys Imam Hossein Islamic Center is one of the oldest Shia Islamic centers outside Iran. Like many such centers, it has relations with similar institutions inside Iran.

Sekaleshfar speaks fluent English. Shia institutions often invite him to deliver speeches. Saba Islamic Center in San Jose, California, has published a collection of his speeches. Many of his speeches are also available on YouTube, including his speech about homosexuality at the University of Michigan.

Now it appears that the Orlando massacre may force Sekaleshfar to stay out of the spotlight for a while. But for many people appalled by the horror in Florida, the bigger question is whether he will change his views.
Damien Hirst has long been obsessed by drugs. They nearly wrecked his career in the mid 1990s, when he was consuming too many, and then became a recurring, profitable theme in his work.

In 2007, around the time he gave up drinking and drugs altogether, one of his glass medicine cabinets filled with rainbow-hued, bronze-cast pills sold for a record $19.2 million at auction.

That same year, Hirst launched a line of gold and silver pill charm bracelets that are still available on his online shop today, priced between $15,000 and $30,000and now, the source of a new lawsuit claiming Hirst copied a Canadian artist and jewelry designer named Colleen Wolstenholme.

Filed in Manhattan federal court last week, the suit alleges that the Wolstenholme has been making pill charm bracelets since 1996, and that the pill motif has figured in her other jewelry designs ranging from necklaces and earrings to cuff links.

Wolstenholme has asked that the court order Hirst to stop selling his pill charm bracelets, citing copyright infringement and unfair competition laws. Shes also seeking compensatory damages, including the total revenue generated from profits of Hirsts bracelets.

But experts say the Wolstenholme doesnt have a very strong case since the charms on both artists bracelets are mini sculptures of generic pharmaceuticals.

She doesnt own what the actual pill looks like, Robert Clarida, an intellectual property lawyer and author of the treatise Copyright Law Deskbook, told The Daily Beast.

There would be a stronger case for infringement if Hirst used Wolstenholmes pill casting to make his own bracelets, Clarida said, or if the specific charms were arranged in the same order, but the suit makes neither of those claims.

If the similarity between these bracelets is just the idea of a charm bracelet with pills on it, then theres no copyright issue, Clarida said, since only the expression of an ideanot the idea itselfis copyrightable.

June Besek, Executive Director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts at Columbia Law School, agreed that the designer could only claim copyright protection if the pill charms were arranged in a remarkably similar sequence.

If her work was copyrightable, the next step for the courts would be to look at fair use, as they have in recent copyright suits against Richard Prince and Jeff Koons.

I dont think this is a fair use case, because he doesnt need the plaintiffs work to comment on societys dependency on pills, said Besek.

She acknowledged that appropriation artists like Koons and Prince tend to think that everything out there is allowed to be their material, but noted that the courts have become increasingly tolerant of the kind of appropriation contemporary artists are doing these days.

NYU law professor Amy Adler argued that courts are still ill-equipped to discern fair use, because it requires them to get into the business of what art means.

So who is equipped to make that determination?

Arguably no one, but certainly it seems ridiculous that its now increasingly in the hands of courts.

A spokesperson for Science Ltd., Damien Hirsts company, wrote in an email to The Daily Beast: We refute the claim made by Colleen Wolstenholme. Damien Hirst signed his earliest pill work in 1988, long before Wolstenholme created her first jewelry. We will defend any action brought against Damien.
The Trump Foundation, Donald Trumps nonprofit organization, is under fire for allegedly operating as more of a political slush fund than a charity. The foundation is accused of violating rules prohibiting it from engaging in politicsprompting ethics watchdogs to call for public investigations.

On numerous occasions this year, Trumps campaign work and his foundation work have overlappedputting himself at risk for penalties and his charity at risk of being shut down.

Its the latest example of Trump courting controversy: not merely through inflammatory rhetoric, but also through private dealings that raise serious legal questionsall of which indicate how he might govern if elected president of the United States.

Trump is listed as the president of the foundation in the charitys annual disclosures, and his children Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump are all listed as directors. Foundations like theirs are exempt from paying taxes, and as such are barred from engaging in political causes.

A 501(c)(3) [nonprofit organization], like the Trump Foundation, is strictly prohibited from engaging in political activity. On its tax forms, the Foundation told the IRS that it does not, said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).

But in key early primary states this year, Trump handed out Foundation checks to charities at campaign rallies. This also calls into question whether the foundation provided the campaign with an illegal in-kind contribution by providing services for what was a campaign event. Under the campaign finance laws providing anything of value to a campaign for free or at less than fair market value is a contribution to the campaign, said Larry Noble, the general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

And in 2013, the Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to a political organization supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondian action the foundation is prohibited from taking, and which it failed to report on its disclosures.

The Trump campaign blamed this failure on clerical mistakes, but legal experts are sounding the alarm because at the time Bondi was reviewing complaints surrounding the businessmans controversial Trump University project.

Both the contribution to Bondi and the overlap between the Trump campaign and his charity should be publicly examined, government watchdogs said.

This should be investigated. There are troubling legal issues posed in both circumstances, said Richard Skinner, a money-in-politics policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation. There is definitely [use of] a charitable foundation in an inappropriate way.

Noble, the general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, added that the Federal Election Commission and the IRS should both open an investigation into whether any laws were broken.

Notably, Donald Trump has legal expertise at his disposal that would allow him to know better than to put himself at risk for these violations. Donald F. McGahn, a Trump lawyer who works for the firm Jones Day, is a former FEC chairman. McGahn did not respond to The Daily Beasts requests for comment.

Trump decided to skip the January Fox News GOP debate in protest of Megyn Kelly, whose question at a debate in August prompted an onslaught of criticism from Trump and his supporters. He held a charity event for veterans instead, during which he claimed to have raised $6 million. (After much prodding from reporters, and months of delay, he accounted for $5.6 million of the original figure.)

This money was disbursed gradually, and the involvement of the foundation was clear. At multiple campaign rallies this year, the businessman handed out Trump Foundation checks to veterans charities.

It would be one thing to raise money for the charity and send it to them. But if receiving the contribution was dependent on attending the campaign event, it looks like the purpose of the whole thing was to support the campaign, Noble said. It raises serious questions when you make a charity part of your campaign event. It could create legal problems for both the campaign and the charity.

On Jan. 30, with Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. by his side at a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa, Trump presented a $100,000 Trump Foundation check to Puppy Jake, a charity which supports veterans by providing service dogs.

Puppy Jakes executive director, Becky Beach, told The Daily Beast that the Trump campaign had been in touch with her about the Trump Foundations contribution.

They called me on the phone, Beach said, but she could not remember who on the campaign her organization had coordinated with to organize their rally appearance. It was likely an advance guy from the Trump campaign, she said.

The next day, the day before the Iowa caucuses, the founder of Support Siouxland Soldiers, another vets charity, appeared on stage with Trump at a Sioux City campaign rally to accept a $100,000 Trump Foundation check.

Support Siouxland Soldiers executive director Sarah Petersen told The Daily Beast that she had been in touch with a Trump staffer named Hope, and provided the phone number they used in order to discuss the donation. The phone number matches up with the campaigns listed number for Hope Hicks, the Trump campaigns spokeswoman.

In New Hampshire, those in Trumps orbit tried to organize a similar rally. They reached out to Keith Howard, the executive director of a local vets charity called Liberty House.

Earlier this year, Howard told The Daily Beast he received a call from a figure affiliated with the Trump campaign, who said that Trump would like to present them with a six-figure check at a Londonderry, New Hampshire, rally right before the Granite States primary.

Howard, concerned that being presented with money by a political candidate at a political rally might jeopardize his charitys nonprofit status, called an expert in the states attorney generals office, who confirmed his suspicions.

Howard declined to attend the rally, and Trump instead presented the check to a New Hampshire state representative who advised him on veterans issues. The state representative ultimately passed those funds along to Howards group, without the fanfare.

More recently, following pressure from the press to account for the $6 million he supposedly raised, the Trump campaign announced donations to 20 additional charities. Nine of them, all of which received checks from the Trump Foundation, responded to The Daily Beasts inquiries. Representatives for each organization said they were neither in contact with the Trump campaign nor were asked to appear at campaign rallies.

The Daily Beasts attempts to contact the Trump Foundation suggest that the charity exists largely on paper. A phone call to the number listed on the Trump Foundations annual disclosures led to a staffer for the Trump Organization, the umbrella group for Trumps business dealings. Multiple phone calls to the organization failed to yield contact with a foundation staffer.

At one point, a Daily Beast reporter was told that Hicks, Trumps campaign spokesperson, was responsible for media inquiries related to the foundation. During a second phone call, the reporter was told to contact Justin McConney, who supposedly handles the foundations account and donations. Calls and emails to McConneywhose official title is director of new media for the Trump Organizationwent unreturned.

McConney also works on the Trump campaign. A January report questioned whether he was being paid fair market value for his work, as he split time between the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign.

The Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump Foundation is already under a microscope.

CREW has filed a complaint against the Trump Foundation over the contribution to Bondi in March, claiming that the charity made an illegal political donation and failed to disclose it to the IRS; and Florida State Sen. Dwight Bullard has written to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, asking for the Justice Department to investigate the donation.

Trump apparently does not understand either [the Federal Election Campaign Act] or the tax code and seems to have encouraged both organizations to cross the line, said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at the consumer rights group Public Citizen.

When the foundations activity crosses over into politics, Holman said, it poses a potential violation of the FECA, which prohibits campaign coordination with outside groups that are not subject to political contribution limits and disclosure requirements.

Philip Hackney, a law professor who spent five years working for the IRSs chief counsel, said the apparent coordination between the foundation and the campaign was unwise because it could put his foundationand its tax-exempt statusin jeopardy.

The Bondi donation is probably sufficient evidence for the IRS to open an audit into the Trump Foundation, Hackney told The Daily Beast, adding that Trump himself could be subjected to extra taxes.

I dont know that theyll even audit him, Hackney said. I think its dangerous, particularly politically for them right now, to audit in this realm. That bothers me, given what I see in this particular case, but I dont know that the IRS has another choice in some ways.
Perhaps because hes now taking aim at an individual American citizen, Donald Trumps attacks on U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiels Mexican heritage finally made it impossible to rationalize away the fundamentally racist nature of his campaign.

Republicans have tried, in part by squinting hard, to view his plans to raise a wall across the Mexican border and to ban Muslims from entering the countrywhich Trump doubled down on following the tragic events in Orlandoas policies focused on security, rather than group identity.

Thats a luxury of lax thinking few black Republicans have, and candidate Trump is forcing a reckoning for many of them.

What are the Black Republicans supposed to do? said Donald Scoggins, a lifelong Republican and the president of the Republicans for Black Empowerment, to The Daily Beast. Donald Trump is really putting many Black Republicans in a terrible, terrible situation. We are basically a non-entity in the party right now.

Donald Trump wasnt my first, second, third, or seventeenth choice, said DeAndre Moore, a lifelong Republican.

For many black Republicans, who think its important that African Americans have a viable political alternative to the Democratic Party and want to apply the principles of fiscal and individual responsibility and accountability to impoverished segments of the community, Trumps candidacy represents a tipping point.

The rise of the birther movement and Trumps support of it could be dismissed as far-right radicals and a reality TV star talking nonsense and clogging up the airwaves, but not indicative of the mainstream GOP. New voter ID laws and voter suppression efforts could be rationalized as efforts to prevent (mostly imagined) voter fraud. Even the two attendees at the 2012 Republican National Convention who threw peanuts at an African American woman, while saying this is how we feed the animals, could be explained away as an outlier.

The RNCs inaction on their Growth and Opportunity Project, which investigated how the party could do better with minorities following Mitt Romneys 2012 drubbing, and the recent resignations of their black outreach staff, both frustrated the black Republicans I spoke with but after eight years of racially coded attacks, it is Trumps rhetoric that has been the final straw.

I dont want to be associated with anything that has anything to do with Donald Trump, said Hugh, one of several black Republicans I spoke with who didnt want to use their full names out of fear of being excluded from their political communities.

One woman I spoke with expressed her frustration with how the rise of Sarah Palin and then Trump coincided with the rise and fall of Michael Steele as Chairman of the RNC. To her, this all indicated that the GOP preferred inarticulate, unqualified white Americans over well-spoken, experienced African Americans.

In talking with these black Republicans, all felt as though they are being forced to choose between their race and their party. Each said they dont want to vote for Trump. Some have decided to vote for Hillary Clinton. Others may abstain from voting altogether. Several said that they intend to either purge this racist element from their party or leave it.

Unlike Speaker Paul Ryan, these voters see no way to denounce Trumps statements as the textbook definition of a racist comment while continuing to support him.

They find solace in moderate Republicans like John Kasich, who has thus far refused to endorse Trump, and Mitt Romney who has consistently voiced his dislike of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. But the fact that both have been marginalized and unable to pose a legitimate challenge to Trump only demonstrated to them how dire the situation has become.

Many of Trumps racist and dangerous comments are directed towards African Americans, but he couches these statements in coded language that encourages supporters to rationalize their racism away. Condoning his supporters beating up a protester who happens to be African American is not necessarily racist, but when he repeatedly encourages or tacitly endorses his supporters to violently confront and mistreat blacks and other minorities, its hard to miss the racism.

Youre saying that about Mexicans, youre saying that about me, said Hugh.

There is no way that you could even think about voting for someone with that type of language, said Michelle of Virginia, who does not intend on voting for Trump. Most Black Republicans behind the scenes will say no [to voting for Trump], and in front of the camera they will say yes.

Trump is a continuation of the exclusionary social conservatism that most Black Republicans shun.

Many Black Republicans identify as conservative, and may personally oppose gay rights and abortion, but they also approve of the Great Society-era statutes outlawing racial discrimination. Their individual conservative beliefs do not equate to active support of policies that discriminate, harm, and marginalize minorities.

The paradox of the black Republican perspective often runs counter to Republican electoral strategies and impairs the GOPs ability to appeal to minorities. Nixons Southern Strategy, which first won Republicans a virtual electoral lock on the South by using veiled, and not-so-veiled, racist attacks against minorities to appeal to white voters, remains a significant influencer in GOP electoral strategies, and Trump is clearly employing this playbook.

The black Republicans I spoke with see the rise of Trump as representing an era of hopelessness, and a return to the marginalization and social divisions that they aspired to overcome.

I think the GOP has just gotten comfortable with not having the black vote, said Moore. As a black Republican, Ill just say that this is a major embarrassment, total embarrassment. Im trying to find something to give me some hope, but it is just not happening, obviously.
When Evan Wolfson first saw reports that there had been yet another shooting this past weekend, he was about to board a flight back home from Australia, where he had spent the week trying to bring his ongoing campaign for marriage equality to that country. Watching the initial images out of Orlando he was disgusted and horrified that once again we were going to go through this. But it wasnt until Wolfson spoke to his husband that he learned where the shooting had occurred: a gay nightclub.

I started reading through the Twitter feed and all the different posts and got more and more heartsick at how awful this was, Wolfson, widely seen as the primary architect of the marriage equality movement, recalled during an interview with The Daily Beast just two days later. And of course once they began telling the stories and showing the pictures of the victims  so many of them were so young and so hopeful, and they were gay and non-gay people together, just all these beautiful people who had been killed. It is just heartbreaking, and infuriating.

This was supposed to be a celebratory time for Wolfson. A week from Saturday, the new documentary The Freedom to Marry will have its world premiere at the Castro Theater in San Francisco as part of the Frameline LGBTQ Film Festival. The films title shares its name with the national organization Wolfson founded more than a decade ago. In the story about last years Supreme Court victory for the marriage equality movement, Wolfson emerges as both its hero and its heart.

As Wolfson recounts, filmmaker Eddie Rosenstein called out of the blue one day and asked if he remembered him. It turns out his parents were old friends of Wolfsons family but the two men had not encountered each other since childhood. This was as we were really in the home stretch of what had obviously been a very, very long campaign, Wolfson says, adding that Rosenstein wanted to capture the ascent to the summit of marriage equality and use that last chapter to look back and tell the story of how they got to this point.

Despite the fact that viewers of the film will know how it ends, there is a still a palpable feeling of suspense that takes hold as the final Supreme Court decision approaches. But for Wolfson the real drama is not so much how we finished the job at the end, but rather how we got to the point where we had transformed the hearts and minds of the country.

The powerful story, the epic transformation, is how we won in the court of public opinion in order to then be able to win in the court of law, Wolfson continues. We felt the momentum, we believed we had gotten there, we saw that our strategy was working and it was clear that we had extraordinary momentum, but you never know for sure. So we were really committed to not taking anything for granted.

Throughout the documentary, various voices in the movement, including attorney and activist Mary Bonauto, who successfully argued the Obergefell v. Hodges case , express fear over the implications of a Supreme Court loss and how far it could set back the movement. Yet Wolfson never let himself embrace those doubts.

I always really did believe we were going to win, and I dont just mean in the last few months, I mean in the 32 years of working for this, he says. So I really believed going into this last stretch that if we had not won in June of 2015, we would have had to just pull ourselves together and keep working the same strategy to keep building that critical mass of states and get back in front of the Supreme Court.

At the very end of the film, we see Wolfson sit down behind his desk to read through Justice Anthony Kennedys decision and begin to cry. I realized two days later that the reason I was crying was just profound relief that even though I believed we would win, even though I always said we could keep going and would keep going, it was wonderful not to have to, he says.

In his speech following the momentous milestone , President Obama said, Progress on this journey often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back, propelled by the persistent effort of dedicated citizens. And then sometimes, there are days like this when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt. The killing of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida this week was the one of most devastating steps back the LGBT community has ever experienced.

Rather than merely be heartsick and throw up our hands in a feeling of helplessness, which is what the NRA would like us to have, Wolfson stresses that the LGBT community must really use this moment to push for some meaningful action to limit the horrible epidemic of guns that is causing so many Americans to lose their lives.

With that in mind, Wolfson has been attempting to share the lessons he learned in the fight for marriage with all kinds of movements, including the movement to prevent gun violence. Just as he built a critical mass of support for marriage equality state by state, they are also working in multiple states in order to create the building blocks that will help turn the corner in what has so far been a dysfunctional Congress, he says. And to create the climate, not just in the general public, but amongst experts and academics, in order to undo the damaging misinterpretation of the Second Amendment that prevailed narrowly in the Supreme Court a few years ago.

Meanwhile, Wolfson mostly dismisses the debate that aims to label the attack as either terrorism or a hate crime, emphasizing that the two are not mutually exclusive and even calling attention to reports that the killer himself may have been a closeted gay man . We dont know fully what was going on within him. he says. But what we do know, is that whatever motivated this killer, he wouldnt have been able to kill this many people had he been unable to access the weaponry. That we know.

And he is not prepared to give historically anti-gay public officials, such as Floridas Governor Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi , a pass on their post-shooting hypocrisy when it comes to the LGBT community.

The only real way to take that step forward it to connect the dots between anti-gay policy, anti-gay positions, anti-gay rhetoric that creates a climate that then invites anti-gay actions, including by some, who, like this shooter, may have their own internal wrestling with those anti-gay messages from society, Wolfson says. Obviously, its good to condemn anti-gay violence, but if you are also engaging in anti-gay rhetoric, anti-gay policy and anti-gay actions, you are contributing to a climate where some people are going to commit anti-gay violence.

Still, just as he did throughout his decades-long fight for marriage equality, Wolfson sees hope on the horizon after Orlando, praising the beauty and eloquence of the survivors and allies who have spoken out against homophobia. Ive been so proud of our movement and our community, Wolfson says. And also of how so many people have come to better understand who gay people are and move to our side, in a way that wouldnt have been true five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

To highlight this contrast, Wolfson recalls the 1973 arson attack that left 32 people dead at a gay bar in New Orleans . Obviously people condemned the violence, he says of the most comparable incident in American history to what weve seen this week, but there was great disdain and very little support for gay people who had been killed.

While he says we have seen some of that this time around, we have also seen a huge embrace of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the massive wrong that has been done here.

Updated 11:30 a.m., Thurs., June 16: A previous version of this article identified the filmaker as Andy Rosenstein, and since corrected to Eddie Rosenstein. We regret the error.
Whats his name? I asked my husband as he woke me to tell me of the carnage in Orlando. Its going to be a Muslim name.

I just knew it. I had never been one to racially profile my own community. But this time my premonition was right.

A few years ago, in Islamic year 1432, I was in Mecca on the hajj pilgrimage. I shared a meal with an older Yemeni at Al Baiq, the Saudi version of KFC. We discussed the monstrous Kingdom Tower looming over the Kaaba, the beating heart of my faith, where millions of Muslims converge every year to perform the rituals that make up Islams highest calling. The bin Laden family was responsible for its construction, along with the destruction of countless historic sites and artifacts of Islamic history to pave the way for resort hotels and other conveniences reserved for the 1 percent.

Its like King Abdullahs erection, I told the man.

But Sheikh Osama destroyed Americas largest penises, didnt he? the man replied with a chuckle. His casual joking about the slaughter of thousands chilled me.

And Sheikh Osama? I could not return his laughter. This man seemed to be able to tolerate my Americanness, but if hed had any idea that I was gay, he would have yanked his arm from my shoulder and walked away without a word.

The carnage in Orlando has shaken my very core, but after my experiences traveling throughout the Middle East as a gay man (open in some countries, fully closeted in others), I cannot say I am surprised. Any identity I have ever claimed now lies exposed as a wound that will never heal. Saying gay Muslim seems like a reason for damnation.

Ive spent the last decade of my life making two films. The first, A Jihad For Love, is about the lives of gay Muslims throughout the world. The second, A Sinner In Mecca, dealt with my own personal journey and my effort to reconcile my faith and my sexuality in Islams holiest places, surrounded by people who would sooner see me publicly beaten, thrown off a cliff or beheaded.

These are strange times. It is a season of Islamophobia in America, where Donald Trump whips up xenophobia with a tweet. What he doesnt realize is that hes attacking a religion thats already at war with itself. Muslims like me have fought hard not to become casualties. We have always had our Omar Mateens. In the U.S., they manifest as lone crazed gunmen. But in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, they are on the royal payroll.

A cursory look at the pages of ISISs glossy magazine, Dabiq, reveals the groups ideology. They gloatand show high-res photosabout throwing homosexuals off the tallest buildings that somehow remain standing in the wastelands theyve created.

The latest American news reports suggest Omar Mateen himself was a closeted gay Muslim who harbored an immense self-loathing. A few nights ago, he murderously redirected this loathing toward dozens of young brown gay men who were enjoying their first tastes of a profound freedom and acceptance that he probably felt he could never truly enjoy with the same carefree abandon.

The same defensive, apologist Muslims are called upon every time something like this happens. I, too, have been called several times, but have so far refused the TV parts because I am not sure what I have to say is palatable. Mateen, the homophobic gay Muslim, is not a new phenomenon. The Muslim religious elite is directly responsible for inspiring the guilt and self-hatred that this man must have felt, needlessly struggling with his sexuality. And then he became a mass murderer, whose actions can never be condoned.

What I do know is this. As a devout gay Muslim I am not going to make a claim that Islam is a religion of peace.

Growing up in a small Indian town with a large Muslim population, I heard young men talking about jihad in Kashmir and Palestine. I have even heard such matters discussed in hushed whispers at Manhattans 96th St. mosque, where I sometimes go and pray on Fridays and where subjugation of women is discussed in the open without the blink of an eye. The mosque was built largely with Saudi money, and its Imams often come equipped with the perversions of Wahhabi ideology.

A few weeks after September 11th, its Imam at the time, Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha resigned and left hastily for his native Egypt. He was quoted in The New York Times as having said amongst much else including the familiar deriding of homosexuality only the Jews were capable of destroying the World Trade Center and added that 'if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.

Calling Islam a religion of peace is dangerous and reductive. Like the other two monotheisms that precede it, it has blood on its hands. Its time we Muslims start looking inward at our own communities so that the bloodshed can stop. Im convinced that Mateens attitude is not fringe. It can be found everywhere from Mecca to my own mosque in New York City.

The vast canon of Islam that emerged after the Prophet Muhammads life has enough sanction for violence, if you know what you are looking for. And there is no lack of homophobic condemnation either. The Quran itself remains vague on the matter, lazily regurgitating the Old and New Testaments story of the Nation of Lot. And for the majority of 1.6 billion Muslims, many of them plagued by poverty and illiteracy, the debates going on amongst the Western Muslim pundits, will make no sense. What they listen to is Khutba (Friday sermon) after Khutba that talks about homosexuality as a sin amongst other matters of religious import.

Yes, most Muslims are muddling through life, putting food on their families tables just like everyone else. There are countless sectarian divisions within the vast faith. But if even a fraction of a percentage of this population believes gays should be put to death, we have a problem that cannot be dismissed so easily.

I, too, fear backlash from a fearful conservative America. I finally won an American passport last year and am officially an American citizen. Will I be singled out at the airport with increasing frequency? Will Muslims like me, desperate to get into the United States, be able to taste freedom here?

I went to my first gay bar almost 20 years ago in New York City. I had just landed in the United States. My cousin who hosted me on my visit swears that I kissed the ground (though I suspect hes embellishing). I lost myself in the music, the dance, and most importantly the love. There are millions of other gay Muslims in the world, desperate to experience such love.

In 2010, I stood outside a nightclub called Acid, perched on a Beirut cliff. It was Ramadan, and Acid was one of the precious few openly gay nightclubs in all of the Arab Middle East. I shared a cigarette with a friend called Babak as a car with Saudi tags rolled up.

Thats a rich Saudi prince! Babak said. He often comes here to cruise! You have no idea how many rich Saudi fuckers come here. We Beirutis must screw well! The Saudis? They walk around like they are so butch but once naked they are all bottoms.

Babak was the twentysomething founder of Bear Arabia who organized Bear tours of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan for western gay men keen to sample the delights of the region. Bears, for those unfamiliar with Western homosexuality, are the gay men who do not confirm to body fascist stereotypes and flaunt the hair on their bodies and the ample meat on their bones. Or as my husband Keith liked to say, They are just gay men who have given up.

I was in Beirut to do open screenings of my first film for the first time in an Arab capital. It felt like a special moment. Babak, who I would call an activist like any other, was furious at the time because a New York Times article had come out labeling the city the Provincetown of the Middle East. To me it seemed absurd. From our vantage point we were looking at the expanse of Dahiyeh, Beiruts southern suburb. That was Hezbollah land, bombed to smithereens in 2006. This remained a deeply divided city.

On that journey, I hooked up with a handsome man who later confided in me that he was a member of Hezbollahs social media division. Wed met on Manjam, a gay hookup website. He was married, with three kids. When we were finished, he performed the elaborate, obligatory post-sex cleansing ritual called the ghusl at almost 4:30 in the morning.

For a brief moment I wondered how the world might be different if these closeted Muslims, from Saudi princes to Hezbollah warriors, could experience the love that I now feel in the arms of my husband Keith. The best chance they have is coming to America, and Im now afraid that door is closing shut.

Parvez Sharma is the director and producer of A Jihad for Love and A Sinner in Mecca. He also writes for The Huffington Post and is a speaker on Islam and sexuality. His upcoming book on his Hajj to Saudi Arabia will be released next year by Ben Bella Books.
The keenest gauge of a work of art's greatness is the influence it wields long after its debut. Any genuinely groundbreaking effortthink Madame Bovary, The Rite of Spring, Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Iris III, the Stooges' Raw Powerwill spark praise, antipathy, even awe, while laying down a challenge to everyone, artist or otherwise, who follows: "You have to confront this. Love it or hate it, you can't ignore it."

By that measure, Ulysses remains the most influentialthe most unignorableEnglish-language novel of the past century. Allusive, earthy, impressionistic and, on every page, utterly original, James Joyce's signature work has earned avid admirers and head-scratching detractors ever since it first appeared in 1922. This year on June 16, as readers around the world celebrate Bloomsdaycommemorating a late spring evening in 1904 when Joyce first "went out walking" with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and the date on which the book's action unfoldslet's toast not just the novel itself, but a trial court opinion in a landmark First Amendment case that, in effect, set Ulysses free forever.

Written by Judge John M. Woolsey, who presided in the Southern District of New York from the late 20s until his death in 1945, the December 1933 opinion that lifted the ban on the printing and selling of Ulysses in the U.S. is not just a legal touchstone (although it certainly is that). Clocking in at fewer than 2,000 words Woolsey's decision in United States v. One Book Called 'Ulysses' is also that rarest of judicial writings: a momentous opinion that is succinct, humane, and terrifically readable in its own right.

Tracking down "Opinion A. 110-5" of the Southern District court, meanwhile, isn't too difficult. It's readily available online, of course, and is included in hundreds of thousands of copies of Ulysses published by Random House over the past nine decades, making it perhaps the most widely distributed legal decision ever written.

The bare-bones version of the obscenity case before Woolsey looks like this: Random House, as the claimant, was fighting the American government's position that 1) the novel was obscene under terms of the Tariff Act of 1930; that 2) as an obscene work, it was "not importable into the United States"; and that 3) all copies were therefore "subject to seizure, forfeiture, confiscation and destruction." If Woolsey found for the claimant, Ulysses would finally be legally available in the U.S., a decade after it was first published in Paris by the Maryland-born bookseller and champion of modernist literature, Sylvia Beach.

But as Kevin Birmingham noted in his lively 2014 study, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses', it would not be enough for Random House to merely win the case. "Their victory," Birmingham wrote, "would have to be resounding." With Woolsey's decision, it was. The government appealed, of courseeveryone knew it wouldand one year later duly lost again when a three-judge appeals panel affirmed Woolsey's opinion. (It's worth recalling that the panel's decision was not unanimous, and even the justice writing for the two-person majority felt compelled to hedge somewhat on the artistic merits of Joyce's novel: "It may be that Ulysses will not last as a substantial contribution to literature," wrote Augustus Hand, who joined with his cousin, the famed Judge Learned Hand, in upholding Woolsey, "and it is certainly easy to believe that, in spite of the opinion of Joyce's laudators, the immortals will still reign.")

What's especially striking, at first, about Woolsey's original decision is the incisiveness of his literary observations. (Woolsey read the novel "once in its entirety," he wrote in his opinion, "and ... those passages of which the Government particularly complains several times.")

After declaring that "in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist" in Ulysses, Woolsey explains that in writing the book, Joyce "takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year  but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

"Joyce," he continues, "has attemptedit seems to me, with astonishing successto show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious."

Entire books have been written about Ulysses that fail to capture Joyce's aesthetic intent as neatly as Woolsey manages in that one, short paragraph.

Judge Woolsey rounds off his discussion of the carnal daydreams and lyrical musings of the book's charactersincluding its cuckolded hero and Bloomsday namesake, Leopold Bloomwith what is likely the single most memorable admonition in the American legal canon: "In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of Joyce's characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring."

Woolsey's insights into Joyce's art, meanwhile, serve to bolster his decision that Ulysses may be admitted into the United States:

"[M]y considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac."

Louis Sirkin, a First Amendment attorney for more than 50 years (he famously defended Dennis Barrie against obscenity charges for displaying Robert Mapplethorpe photos in Cincinnati a quarter-century ago), recently told me that Woolsey's "very fortunate opinion" is noteworthy not only for its intellectual rigor, but because the judge's approach to the material in question was, in its own way, all-encompassing.

"Woolsey looked at Ulysses as a whole," Sirkin said, "not just at isolated passages. He appreciated that he had to consider the artist's work, and not his subject matter. It's important to pay attention to what people do and say, how they actually act, and record it. That's what Joyce did so brilliantly, and Woolsey understood that."

By all means, celebrate Bloomsday this year. But acknowledge, too, that the forces of censorship will always be with us, trying to tell us what we can and can't read, watch, think, and feel. If today we enjoy a bulwark against those forces, thanks are due in large part to a legal opinion crafted generations ago by an American named Woolsey; the genius of a self-exiled Irishman named Joyce; and the undimmed influence of a modernist masterpiece called Ulysses.
When it comes to surveilling its citizens, the United States is worse than China. So says Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson .

China has a much lower incarceration rate than the United States, they dont spy on their citizens like we do with the NSA, Johnson told The Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon and senior editor Andrew Kirell during a Facebook Live interview on Thursday.

Pressed further on that controversial point, Johnson pointed to the National Security Agencys widespread collection of metadata from private citizens. When told that the Chinese government monitors political dissidents, he replied: What do you call the NSA and the satellites that are trained on us and the fact that 110 million Verizon users are having everything we do on our cell phones being data-collected?

Bold claims like that undoubtedly are among the many things that set Johnson apart from the two presumptive big-party candidates in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The former two-term governor of New Mexico ran in the 2012 Republican primary until he realized his mix of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism had no place in the GOP.

There was not one social liberal on stage [for the GOP] in 2012, and guess what, today, 2016, not one social liberal on-stage for the Republican Party, he lamented. Republican social dogma rules at the end of the day.

And so he left the GOP and ran as the Libertarian nominee in 2012A giant ball and chain lifted off me, he recalledand garnered the highest total votes ever for the party. And this time around, several polls show him in the double-digits , and much media attention has focused on whether he and VP choice Bill Weld a fellow two-term governor play spoiler to either Trump or Clinton .

Much of the criticism of Johnsons beliefs (hes a former marijuana company owner and is pro-choice on abortion) come from conservatives desperate for an alternative to Donald Trump.

While open to voting for a Johnson-Weld ticket, Mitt Romney recently told CNN: "It would be hard to come to support someone that takes those kinds of views... Marijuana makes people stupid and it is just not a good idea to say let's have more people falling prey to that.

Are you any more stupid than the consumption of alcohol? Johnson fired back to The Daily Beast. Should anyone be denied to ability to get stupid for an hour or two, as long as that being stupid doesnt harm anyone else?

Johnson admitted that his preferred method of consumption is via edible marijuana goodsgluten-free brownies mostly, due to his celiac disease.

Republican Sen. Ben Sasse, also of the #NeverTrump mindset, has called Johnsons foreign policy ideas naive.

We inject ourselves in other countrys affairs, Johnson responded of U.S. dealings in the Middle East. If you analyze it after weve injected ourselves into that horrible situation, isnt it horrible or oftentimes worse?

I reject the label that libertarians are isolationist, he added. Were non-interventionist.

Asked how hed deal with ISIS in the wake of terror attacks in Orlando, Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino, Johnson said: Involve Congress in a debate and discussion over how we proceed. And then recognize that ISIS is really, regionally, its very contained The fact that we bomb them, the fact that we have this rhetoric, and the fact that we do have boots on the ground, we fly drones and kill thousands of innocent peoplethese are recruiting tools for ISIS.

However, when it comes to how hed directly address Omar Mateens rampage on an Orlando nightclub, conservatives may find more common ground with Johnson.

Asked whether he would support an assault weapons ban, Johnson said: If you restrict assault weapons, then only the bad guys are going to have assault weapons. And regarding a ban on terror watchlist suspects from purchasing firearms, he said: Any time the government has a list, its subject to error. There are active members of Congress on the watchlist.

He added: All of what were talking about right now would not have prevented this perpetrator from having did what he did.

What really interests me is to find out what transpired within the FBI and the fact that they interviewed this guy three times, he explained. Why was that a failure?
Description

National TV personality and legendary chef Emeril Lagasse will visit Stew Leonards first store on Long Island with a signing of his most recent cookbook, ESSENTIAL EMERIL: Favorite Recipes and Hard-Won Wisdom from My Life in the Kitchen (Oxmoor House; October 6, 2015) on Thursday, June 16, 2016 from 5:00  7:00 p.m. The book will be available for the special price of $19.99 during the event.

In ESSENTIAL EMERIL, Emeril shares 100 of his essential recipes updated and refined for todays home cook. Each recipe reflects a lifetime of lessons in technique and ingredients, showcasing the big flavors for which he is known. Some featured recipes include Crab and Corn Fritters with Fresh Corn Mayo, Turkey Roulade with Sausage Stuffing and White Chocolate Bread Pudding with Macadamia Caramel Sauce. Many of the recipes in the book can be recreated at home using Stew Leonards fresh meat, fish, vegetables, and more.

ESSENTIAL EMERIL also provides a look through an exclusive window into Emerils culinary journey from childhood, through his early career, to today. Throughout the book, Emeril shares personal glimpses into his friendships and those who inspire him, like the late Charlie Trotter, reflecting on his culinary legacy and including a recipe in his honor. He also includes the unexpected back story to his friendship with Roy Choi and his touching relationship with Julia Child, among others.
LONDON  A British lawmaker has been shot dead at close range on a street in northern England.

An eyewitness to the attack on Jo Cox, who was an MP of the left-wing Labour Party, claimed her attacker was shouting Britain first! as he kicked, stabbed and then fatally shot her.

Cox, 41, who had two young children, was a passionate immigration campaigner and an outspoken supporter of voting to remain in the European Union in next weeks referendum.

Police have arrested a 52-year-old suspect, who was named locally as Thomas Mair. A man with the same name, living in the same housing development in Leeds, previously subscribed to the magazine of a far-right organization which is campaigning for Britain to leave the EU because it has been invaded by millions of ethnically and culturally alien migrants and their descendents, thus threatening our national identity.

Detectives are investigating the suspect's background and the claims about what he shouted during the attack, but said they were not yet in a position to discuss the motive for Cox's murder.

Mair told a British newspaper in 2010 that he had suffered from mental health issues. In an interview about a volunteering project in a local park, he told the Huddersfield Daily Examiner: "I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world.

Neighbors described Mair as quiet, but said he often helped elderly locals with their gardens.

Campaigning for Britains referendum on membership of the European Union, which takes place next Thursday, has been suspended. Twenty-four hours before the assault, Cox's husband and children were on a boat on the River Thames campaigning for Britain to remain part of the union.

The horrific attack has stunned Britain, a country where there have been few political assassinations and gun crime is rare.

Brendan Cox, Jos husband, who was an adviser to Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, called on Britain to pull together in the wake of the devastating loss of his wifeand the mother of their two children, Cuillin and Lejla.

Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people, he said. She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesnt have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

Paul Golding, the leader of Britain First, denied that the alleged attacker had any connection to his radical right-wing party, which condemns immigration, multiculturalism and Islam.

She has been out campaigning to keep Britain in the EU and there are people in the area that are against it, he said in a video statement. I don't think it was one of our supporters. We stand in elections and organize protestswe don't encourage this kind of nonsense.

Eyewitnesses said Cox was approached by an older man who knocked her to the ground before firing at her at least twice with a makeshift, or antique, weapon. She was airlifted to a local hospital, but could not survive her injuries.

The attacker walked calmly away from the scene as local shopkeepers and residents rushed to help the popular Member of Parliament. Police officers arrested a 52-year-old suspect soon after the attack.

Hithem Ben Abdallah was in a cafe close to the attack when he heard screaming. He went outside to see a man attacking a woman as she lay on the ground.

He was kicking her and he was pulling her by her hair. A very courageous man from the dry cleaners tried to restrain him and he couldnt stop him because all of a sudden he pulled a gun, he told the Press Association. She was a standing still target for him when he shot her.

The man stepped back with the gun and fired it and then he fired a second shot, as he was firing he was looking down at the ground.

Once the attacker had walked away from the scene, Abdallah was stunned to discover that he knew the victim. He had helped campaign for the election of Cox, who became a Labour Member of Parliament last year.

Im absolutely shocked, because I know Jo very well. Its devastating, he said.

Another witness, Graeme Howard, 38, told The Guardian: He was shouting Britain first when he was doing it."

Sam Watson told Sky News that he arrived on the scene in time to see the attacker leave. [He] just walkedas if he wasnt panicking, he said.

Another witness, Clarke Rothwell, told the BBC he saw Cox being stabbed as well as shot. Three times she was shot, the initial time which then she dropped to the floor and two more times. The third time he got close proximity he shot her round the head area, he said. In the meantime he was stabbing her as well, he was stabbing her with his knife.

As news of the attack emerged, her friend Stella Creasy, a Labour Member of Parliament, wrote on Twitter: Jo Cox not only a fantastic MP, shes also a great mateplease, please, please God let her be ok!

Cox was attacked while on the way to her weekly public surgery, in which residents in her district are able to ask their MPs for help or advice. In 2010, Stephen Timms was attacked during one of these events by a woman wielding a 6-inch kitchen knife. He survived two stab wounds after emergency surgery.

Cox was not so fortunate. "The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children," said Prime Minister David Cameron.

Before entering politics, Cox was an executive for the humanitarian aid charity Oxfam, who made regular trips to war zones and some of the worlds most troubled regions.

"People will say that this does not happen in Britain. This should not happen in Britain. And we must resolve that this will never again happen in Britain, said former prime minister Gordon Brown. She she went to some of the most dangerous places in the world. The last place she should have been in danger was in her home town For those of us who were Jo's friends, this is a devastating day. And it is a devastating blow to our democracy."
In the wake of the Orlando massacre, a group of impassioned Senate Democrats launched a filibuster to pressure Congress on gun control. Led by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the effort to force a vote on a measure that would ban suspected terrorists from purchasing guns and expand background checks lasted more than 14 hours.

In all, more than 40 Senators, including Republican Sens. Ben Sasse (R-NE) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), joined the fight. Starting shortly after 11 a.m. Wednesday morning and lasting beyond midnight, in the end, they successfully got a vote scheduled.

But, as progressives cheered, many noticed that Sen. Bernie Sanders was missing from the fray. Sanders, who recently signaled that he would abandon his bid for the Democratic nomination, was reportedly back home in Vermont. He took to social media to show his support.

For skeptics and disillusioned supporters, it wasnt enough.

Sanders, they noted, is still a sitting U.S. Senator. His absence stirred up a mix of disappointment and outrage, leaving many to wonder openly if Sanders had not just abandoned his colleagues in the well, but also the movement his campaign ignited. It was not difficult to wonder about its future.

Where would it make its home? What issues would be prioritized? And, if not Sanders, who would lead it? Sanders, by staying in Vermont, appeared to abdicate that role.

It isnt unusual for a candidate to take some time off the campaign trail after a loss. Going home to Vermont must have felt right for the former mayor of leafy Burlington. Even so, with 50 dead and dozens injured in a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Sanderss decision to sit on the sidelines was a reminder thatat least on gun controlthe sidelines are arguably where he has always been.

During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clintonthe former cabinet secretary and once a senator herselfwas quick to point her opponents legislative record on guns. In various debates, Clinton repeatedly railed about his votes against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, commonly known as the Brady Bill, and his failure to stand up to gun manufacturers in the wake of Sandy Hooka mass shooting claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staffers an elementary school.

Over the years, Sanders has said that rural Vermont is different from urban areas where gun violence is more rampant. His state has some of the most lenient gun laws in the country. He did not, he explained, believe his constituents should be subjected to the same gun purchasing regulations as, say, those in New York, because Vermont residents were more often game hunters.

The truth is that Sanderss political revolution centered largely about economic disparities and paid scant attention to gun violence. His list of reforms, as enumerated on his campaign website, includes support for an assault weapons ban, and he has voted to close the gun show loophole. When accused of carrying the water of the gun lobby, Sanders quickly points out his D-minus rating with the National Rifle Association. He does not, however, support holding gun manufacturers or sellers responsible for the carnage.

If you are a gun shop owner in Vermont and you sell somebody a gun and that person flips out and kills somebody, I dont think its really fair to hold that person responsible, Sanders told an Iowa crowd in January.

Notwithstanding his track record on gun control, his absence was curious, given that his seat in the Senate is safe. He isby any measurein the final stretch of a decades-long political career. Its difficult to imagine any political strategist worth their salt advising Sanders against going to the Capitol Wednesday night. Doing so would have been political malpractice.

Sanders stands at a critical juncture. Right now, as the DNC convention looms, he and his team of advisors should be coalescing their support and deepening points of leverage if he wants establishment types and Hillary Clintons forces to go along with some of his proposals. As a Democrat, especially one who just mounted a campaign for the presidency, he must make sure that his colleagues know they can count on his voice and his action in the fight.

By skipping out on the filibuster on gun control, Sanders casted doubt on that. He cannot afford such questions now and neither can his movement.
ATLANTA  As Donald Trump was making a fool of himself at a rally in Atlanta, painting longtime American allies as deadbeats, suggesting hed host Kim Jong Un at the White House, and promising to chuck pricey state dinners for hamburgers on a conference table, Hillary Clinton gave a measured speech on the need to confront the challenge of lone wolf terrorism.

Its a classic contrast between the two presidential candidates: Trump spouting off about national security while Clinton inspires yawns through expertise.

Since Trumps Atlanta rally came on the heels of the shootings in Orlando, he took time at the top to warn supporters that just as hed predicted an attack like the Pulse nightclub massacre, there would be more if the country doesnt become smart and tough and vigilant. He again promised The Wall and expanded his proposed temporary ban on Muslim immigrants to include all immigrants from countries with a history of terrorism.

We have no idea where they come from. We have no idea who the hell they are, he said. Do not kid yourself.

Trump said it is time that people begin turning people in and that government begin checking, respectfully, the mosques, and other places. If we dont solve the problem, he warned, It is going to eat our country alive.

With the tough-on-terror portion of speech out of the way, Trump casually began proposing a total rewrite of 70 years of American foreign policy, toughening up against traditional American allies and opening the doors of negotiation to sworn enemies.

On Trumps list of dishonest and deadbeat nations around the globe, he pointed repeatedly to Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, some of the United States longest standing partners, as countries that are taking advantage of American security and generosity, and giving nothing in return.

Look at Japan, look at South Korea, look at Saudi Arabia, he said. We protect Saudi Arabia. We protect them and they pay us peanuts. They wouldnt be there and they pay us peanuts.

Instead of splitting the cost of American forces abroad, Trump suggested that the allies pay 100 percent.

Its amazing that our country can be abused so badly and continue to survive, he said. But its not going to continue to survive like this. It cant.

Trump again dismissed NATO as obsolete, complaining that like Saudi Arabia and South Korea, member nations arent paying their fair share compared to the security they get out of American treaties. Were supposed to defend that? he said. Were supposed to go into World War III to defend these people and theyre not even paying us.

Trump pointed to the U.S. relationship with Japan as an example of Hillary Clintons status as a rank amateur for assuring the Japanese that the U.S. will defend it if it is attacked. As a good negotiator, Trump said hed be willing to walk away. It could very well be that Japan will have to protect themselves, he said. Im not saying they will, maybe theyll use nuclear, maybe they wont. I dont know.

As for American adversaries, Trump offered respectful praise to Vladimir Putin for building up Russias defenses since the Cold War, especially compared to the United States.

Our nuclear is old and tired, and his nuclear is tippy top, from what I hear, Trump warned. We better be careful, folks, we better be careful.

In fact, the United States has more nuclear warheads deployed and in reserve than Russia does. (When counting retired warheads that are waiting to be dismantled, Russia has more.) And the Obama administration is spending up to $1 trillion over three decades to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

On North Korea, Trump said hed be willing to open a dialogue and host North Koreas Kim Jong Un at the White House. Why not? Who the hell cares? he said. Ill speak to anybody if I can talk them out of those damn nukes.

More than anything, Trump promised to get better deals for the American peoplein defense, in trade, in immigrationthan the big bad dummies in the Obama administration.

In comparison to Trumps rantings, Clintons military roundtable in Hampton, Virginia, was boring. It was capable. It was consideredall the things Trump is not. Clinton spent time listening to vets and military families. She spoke at length and with familiarity about defense budget cuts, predatory lending practices that ensnare young enlisted troops, VA wait times, and even sewer systems on naval vessels.

After the Twitter rants and conspiracy theories weve been hearing recently, its time for a substantive discussion about how to protect our country, Clinton told the assembled veterans and defense industry insiders, an obvious chiding of Trump.

He has been fixated on the phrase radical Islam, as if those are magic words that once uttered will stop terrorists from coming after us, Clinton said. Of course we want to keep our country safebut I want to underscore that we rely on partners in majority Muslim countries to help them fight terrorism. We need to build trust in Muslim communities to counter radicalization and the lone wolf phenomenon.

Flanked on one side by a single American flag and on the other by flags representing the five military branchesand with large, scale models of fighter jets hanging aboveClinton declared that stopping lone wolves like the Orlando nightclub shooter is a national priority and that she would assemble a working group to tackle this issue.

It is a sacrifice to try to keep us all safe. We have to be right 100 percent of the time. The terrorist only has to be right once, Clinton said, an apparent reference to the chilling note the Irish Republican Army left for former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher after an attempted assassination attempt.

Speaking in Hampton, the home of Langley Air Force Base, Clinton was clearly trying to appeal to military service members and veterans who feel alienated by Trumps rhetoric and unfamiliarity with national security issues. And she criticized defense budget cuts, something that would appeal to an industry that has been sounding the alarm.

For obvious reasons, as she seeks to corral the more liberal wing of the party, her interaction has been nonexistent. We provide little to no electoral support, and she doesnt need the monetary support the defense industry can bring to bear, a defense industry source told The Daily Beast. The industry would welcome interaction as she seems more and more likely to be victorious in the fall.
Weather Alert

Special Weather Statement issued October 26 at 5:42AM EDT by NWS Upton NY Fog continues across the region this, with patches of dense fog in spots. This has resulted in reduced visibilities down to a few miles, with localized areas of a quarter mile or less. Exercise caution if driving into early this morning and utilize your low beam headlights as visibilities may suddenly drop.
Irreverent and fun packaging refresh for beers

Camden Town Brewery, the AB InBev owned north London craft brewery, has launched a new look for its bottles and cans.

The refreshed product design is supported by a new website and an above the line campaign, with tube and bus advertising in London. In addition, the Camden team will be hitting the road in their Little Camden beer van to sample to 39 offices across London (reaching 12k people) to drive trial and awareness with the lure of beer!

This campaign comes at an exciting time of growth for Camden Town Brewery following brands acquisition by AB InBev, supporting its expansion through 2016/17, which includes the opening of a brewery in Enfield.

The new packaging design, which has been applied across the range of bottles, cans, boxes and tap badges, uses bold background colours and strong typography to give the name of the beer, the style of the beer and the all-important Camden name stand out. The bold and colourful design creates more consistency across products, whilst retaining Camdens playful and irreverent tone of voice.

The product copy is educational in an engaging and informative way, with fun illustrations. Camdens distinctive core roundel logo remains but in an updated form. Eagle-eyed customers will note two hands joining the back bottle label. Inspired by the Camden City Council logo - an oval shaped symbol with four pairs of clasped hands, it is a clever nod to the brands origins in the borough.

Mark Turner, Camden Town Brewerys MD, comments: This refresh is part of our wider strategy to bring great craft beer to more people. The bold branding will really stand out on shelves, with engaging product information that appeals to consumers, giving another great reason to purchase.

Camden Town Brewery worked alongside branding agency Studio Juice to develop these designs. Ross Stirling, the creative designer on this project adddds: Much like the Camden Hells Lager of today, the refresh is the result of tireless refinement. It was about making what worked, work harder. On their own, these beers scream from the tap rooms and bottle shops, but as a collection they come together to celebrate their irreverent fun nature and continued success.

The refreshed bottles and cans will be available nationwide in Waitrose, M&S and at Majestic wines, and in bars from June 10, 2016.

16 June 2016 - Felicity Murray The Drinks Report, editor
Pointing out that the ability of populations to adapt and mitigate against climate change is shaped by political and economic realities, civil society organizations mostly from the global South declared the Bali Principles of Climate Justice in 2002. It framed the climate crisis as a political and ethical issue, not simply an environmental and physical phenomenon. The countries of the global South demanded the rich Northern nations to pay their climate debt', that is, compensation for their historically disproportionate emission of greenhouse gases which has contributed to extensive environmental and societal damage in poor countries.

Given these on-going contentions, the U.S. China bilateral Climate Deal of November 2014 was welcomed as an important achievement by the two most polluting nation states. Unfortunately, however, this Deal is merely a statement of aspirational goals: it has no binding targets, no specific plans to cut emissions and no penalties for non-compliance.

According to this Deal, China will not begin reducing emissions until as late as 2030. While the US agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 is significant, it is not considered sufficient to reach the target of below 2 C increase in temperature by the end of the century. There is no guarantee that President Obama's successor who will have to implement the deal will do so.

Paris Climate Agreement

The Climate Treaty signed in Paris in December 2015 is hailed as an historic achievement in international consensus and a turning point in climate policy. Practically all countries in the world opted to sign agreeing to hold the increase in the global average temperature increase to 1.5 C.175 countries have already signed the Agreement which will go into effect in 2020. US Secretary of State John Kerry signed on behalf of the United States holding his little granddaughter in his arms.

Symbolism and rhetoric aside, the Paris Agreement, unlike the previous Kyoto Protocol, provides no detailed timetables or country-specific goals for emissions reduction. It leaves every country to decide its own cuts in pollution (so-called "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions") according to its own criteria. It provides no clear, measurable targets, no accountability no legal obligations. Each country that ratifies the agreement will be required to set a target for emission reduction, but the amount will be voluntary. There will be neither a mechanism to force, a country to set a target by a specific date nor enforcement measures if a set target is not met.

The Agreement was a victory for the United States given its opposition to mandatory emissions reduction targets and the Kyoto Protocol. It was, however, a failure for the smaller nations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which wanted to include stricter emissions targets and enforcement mechanisms. Apparently, the U.S. gained their compliance through backdoor diplomacy and offers of international funding for climate adaptation. The United States also succeeded in ensuring that the Agreement was not legally binding and countries were not open to litigation for non-compliance of the Agreement.

The Paris Agreement will not be binding on its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55% of the world's greenhouse gases ratify it. Thus far, only 17 countries - overwhelmingly vulnerable small island nations - have ratified the Agreement. There is doubt that given global economic competitiveness whether some countries, especially high polluters, such as, China, the US, India, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Indonesia and Australia will do so. There is also no guarantee that the developed countries will honor the pledge to mobilize $100 billion per year for climate financing for the poor countries starting in 2020.

The Paris Climate Agreement does not even mention fossil fuels let alone the need to leave 80% of it in the ground, which many experts consider a requirement to mitigate climate change. It does not address the need to cut government fossil fuel subsidies, military expenditures, air travel, shipping, etc. as keys to global de-carbonization.

Hardly anyone expects countries to do much for climate protection under this arrangement. No wonder fossil fuel companies were the financial backers of the Paris Climate Conference, which was dominated by market based solutions to climate change, notably emissions trading.

Carbon Trading

Carbon trading, which constitutes the bulk of emissions trading was introduced as the main mechanism for meeting emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Within this system, a country having more carbon emissions can purchase the right' to pollute more if it exceeds its cap by purchasing the permits of less polluting countries. As Carbon Trade Watch explains: "emissions trading partitions and privatizes the atmosphere and institutes the buying and selling of permits to pollute' just as any other international commodity". This strategy for commodification of emissions was pushed by the US in response to heavy corporate lobbying.

Critics argue that there have not been measurable reductions in carbon emissions attributable to the mechanisms established under the Kyoto Protocol. They point out that the two most important carbon markets, the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN's Clean Development Mechanism have essentially failed. They argue that the market-based cap and trade system, designed to reduce carbon emissions has actually aggravated the problem by giving unfair financial advantages to major polluters to continue polluting while putting the onus of climate protection and maintenance of carbon sinks on the poorer countries and inhibiting their economic development. Moreover, emissions trading' takes attention away from the search for less complicated strategies, such as a straightforward carbon tax on polluters and changes in patterns of economic production and energy use.

Despite these problems, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change still strongly supports carbon trading. International financial interests are now gearing up to expand carbon trading under the new Paris Agreement. They see a huge new market and business opportunity in carbon trading. The World Bank has established a Carbon Finance Unit to create an international system to price carbon. The World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim recently stated that there is an obvious consensus' among World Bank economists studying the problem, and that putting a price on carbon pollution is by far the most powerful and efficient way to reduce emissions' Christine Legarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund has called carbon pricing the crown jewel' of efforts to mitigate climate change.

Many environmental justice activists, however, are deeply concerned about the possible effects of this approach motivated by profit. They argue that carbon trading will lead to increasing financialization of nature', the commodification of everything that can be seen as a carbon sink, especially forests but also agricultural land and even the ocean's capacity to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) for photosynthesis via algae'. The Pope's June 2015 Encyclical also voices the grave concerns that many people have over the status quo's push for carbon trading:

Rather than upholding and extending the extremist growth oriented system through new strategies, such as, carbon trading, the world's economic structures must be transformed so that the exploitation of people and plunder of the Earth and the relentless pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are replaced by systems that honor environmental sustainability and social justice.

We have to be careful too that eco-fascist views and movements do not gain ground as economic conditions deteriorate and social and environmental dislocations worsen around the world. Change towards renewable energy has to be accompanied with changes in the control over resources and production and access of wider groups of people to economic opportunities.

In the face of dramatic recent acceleration in the warming of the planet, the failure of the Paris Agreement to address divesting from fossil fuel and the support of governments for new fossil fuel projects, climate action is intensifying around the world. There are thousands of organizations and people all around the world engaged in positive nonviolent and collective action. Indigenous people have been at the forefront of struggles to protect Mother Earth from the very beginning of their encounter with European colonization. We must believe that the larger goals of environmental sustainability and social justice can be achieved and that Another World is Possible' if we work together to Change the System, not the Climate'.

This article is excerpted by the author from: http://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-consciousness-and-social-change/55



Asoka Bandarage, Ph.D. is the author of Sustainability and Well-Being: The Middle Path to Environment, Society and the Economy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and many other publications.

She serves on the Board of the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate. www.bandarage.com
Henderson County has consistently been the state's top producer of soybeans and a reason for that was a processing plant that began operations 75 years ago. It was the nation's first soybean cooperative, according to the Soy Info Center.

The Ohio Valley Soybean Cooperative opened for business June 18, 1941, on Fifth Street, on property now occupied by Bakery Feeds.

As early as 1916 the local county agent was encouraging farmers to start growing soybeans as fodder for their animals, but that didn't really get started here until about 1920.

By 1925 the county had 6,905 acres planted in soybeans.

Tobacco, which had been Henderson County's main cash crop since the county's beginnings, began a long slow decline about the time of World War I. By February 1940 the problem had become so acute that the Henderson County Farm Bureau began looking into the idea of building a soybean processing plant.

Soybeans, you see, could not be a profitable crop locally unless growers could avoid transportation costs of getting their beans processed.

A Farm Bureau delegation visited Urbana, Decatur and Champaign, Illinois, to gather information about growing methods and general outlook for the crop, according to a Gleaner story from March 21, 1940. By the end of that month the Henderson Board of Trade, a predecessor of the Chamber of Commerce, had joined in the effort to build a processing plant.

The Farm Bureau agreed to buy "several hundred bushels of soybeans" and to extend credit to farmers needing it to buy seed for planting. According to a Gleaner story of April 6, 1940, a meeting of 75 farmers went on record favoring the project, and suggesting the mill be cooperatively owned by the contributing farmers.

An organizational committee of farmers was held at the Farm Bureau building, representing 14 counties in Kentucky and Indiana, according to the May 19, 1940, Gleaner. A few days later the farmers began organizing a drive to sign up additional farmers for the growing effort.

A minimum of 12,000 acres of beans was needed before the plant could become a reality. But that's where things stalled. By June 7, The Gleaner reported, blueprints for the processing mill had been completed, but only 7,000 acres of the 12,000 needed had been guaranteed; 4,000 of those acres were in Henderson County.

So the deadline was extended.

And then the organizational structure of the cooperative was revised to make participation by farmers less risky.

Actually, lots of soybeans were being grown in the Henderson-Evansville area at that time. The problem was that most of the growers had not committed to selling their crop to the proposed plant.

"More than 100,000 acres of soybeans are now growing for the 1940 crop" within 75 miles of Henderson, according to a letter by Charles B. Smith, chairman of the organizational committee, that appeared in The Gleaner Aug. 10, 1940. "Only about 10 to 12 percent of this quantity has been signed for the purposes of supporting a soybean mill."

The goal was met later that month. The Gleaner of Aug. 29, 1940, reported that 15,300 acres of beans had been committed to the mill effort, guaranteeing it would go forward. Work on the new complex  which was a renovation of the former A. Waller Grain Co. property  began in October 1940.

Stories about the construction appeared Nov. 3, Nov. 19 and Dec. 1. The last one said "the plant would probably be receiving beans sometime this week."

But it was not to be. A March 18, 1941, special edition of The Gleaner reported labor trouble had interfered.

"Everything is in readiness for the start, with the exception of three pieces of machinery, which remain tied up in the Allis-Chalmers firm's strike."

The May 14, 1941, edition reported that obstacle had been cleared: "The last piece of machinery has been received and is being installed at the present time."

But it was another month before the formal opening. "After many delays it is very gratifying to be able to announce the opening of this plant," The Gleaner reported June 15, the Sunday before the opening.

The same story said 364 farmers had committed to growing beans for the soybean cooperative.

Ben E. Niles, president of both the state and county Farm Bureau organizations, had provided much of the impetus for the mill project, and had been scheduled to speak, but illness prevented him.

According to Gleaner's story of June 19, 1941, a large crowd from Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Virginia attended the opening ceremonies.

The plant initially had two presses, exerting 125 pounds per square inch, built to operate around the clock. Processing capacity was 400,000 to 500,000 bushels annually.

And it wasn't long before the mill got up to speed. The July 13 issue of The Gleaner reported the mill was operating day and night, and that the first rail car of soybean oil was set to go out that week.

The Aug. 21 issue, about the co-op's first annual membership meeting, reported in the first two months of operation the mill had bought 19,368 bushels of beans at a cost of $21,154. After processing it into oil and meal, the cooperative had realized a return of $28,895.

"All the oil produced, more than two tank cars, was sold immediately, and car lot orders for meal on hand are being turned down in order to meet local demand."

A local market at hand greatly enhanced the growing of soybeans in this area, so much so that a third press was added in 1943. And in 1948 the presses were scrapped in order to use a petroleum solvent called hexane to extract oil from the beans. The solvent was recyclable.

Visitors from around the world came to Henderson to tour the plant during the 1950s to see the hexane extraction method in action.

The members voted to dissolve the cooperative June 19, 1962 and dissolution was completed by June 17, 1963.

100 years ago

A lightning bolt hit the house of L.M. Melton on Airline Road and struck a shotgun, ripping off its stock, The Gleaner reported June 22, 1916.

"Members of the family, who were eating their meal in an adjoining room, saw a large ball of fire strike the gun, then roll across the floor and out the door, without otherwise injuring the building."

50 years ago

Paul Hawkins, who had recently joined the Henderson Police Department, was churning out procedural manuals for the department, The Gleaner reported June 17, 1966.

They included "Role of the Police Officer in Court"; "Search and Seizure"; "One-man Car Patrol"; "Protecting the Crime Scene"; "The Preliminary Investigation" and "Police Public Relations."

25 years ago

The state Department of Highways was installing a traffic signal where the southbound ramp off the U.S. 41 bypass intersects Kentucky 351, The Gleaner reported June 22, 1991.

"We got a request from the city to take a look at it," said Bill Davenport, chief district engineer for the Highway Department's Madisonville office.

Frank Boyett can be found on Twitter at @BoyettFrank or reached at YesNews42@yahoo.com.
Monika and Jurgen Fox of Frankfurt, Germany, were sitting along the Henderson riverfront, but at times, they felt like they were also somewhere in downtown Chicago.

The W.C. Handy Blues & Barbecue Festival kicked off Wednesday night, with three Chicago blues bands taking the stage. It was the first year for the festival to have a Chicago-themed evening.

For out-of-town guests like Monika and Jurgen, the music and barbecue made up for the miles traveled.

'This is how blues festivals should be,' Monika said. 'We have to pay a lot of money in Germany for shows like this. These are great bands, great music, and it feels like we could be in Chicago right now.'

The married couple is traveling across the U.s. this month after visiting Monika's niece in Oklahoma City. While they were visiting Nashville, Tennessee, they heard about the festival and decided to make the trip to Henderson.

'This was worth the stop,' Jurgen said.

But it wasn't just world travelers who were enjoying themselves on Wednesday. Cloudy skies and threats of thunderstorms didn't deter the large crowd that gathered along the riverfront.

Brian Chinn, of Henderson, said adding an extra day back to the festival after removing it last year was 'a win-win for everyone.' He also said the Chicago bands were a big hit.

'I love it,' Chinn said as Studebaker John and the Hawks performed another song on their setlist Wednesday. 'This music is just awesome. There's not much else I can say beyond that.'

Mark Glover, also of Henderson, is also blues musician, and in years past has played on the riverfront stage during the festival.

He couldn't help but reminisce Wednesday night as he watched the different bands perform.

'It seems to me this year they're stressing the harmonicas this year,' Glover said. 'That's what the blues are all about. I have to tell you, I think this is the best lineup they've ever had. All of these bands are so talented, and they're all genuinely great musicians.'

Glover described himself as a life-long blues fan. For him, Handy Fest is his own version of paradise.

'This is hands down, the absolute coolest thing ever,' Glover said. 'I've been to a lot of festivals, and (Henderson) takes care of you. They know how to take care of their people.'

Glover also said following some of the violent events across the country in the last couple of months, the festival gives individuals an opportunity to forget and just enjoy the music and the company  even if it's just for a night or two.

'There's no violence and there's no hate,' Glover said, gesturing to the crowd. 'Everyone is here for the same thing, and they are all loving one another.'
SHARE Maxwell McMain

By Beth Smith of The Gleaner

A Union County man will remain jailed under a $1 million bond in a crash that killed a Webster County teen.

Wearing a neck brace, an orange inmate jumpsuit and handcuffed, 19-year-old Morganfield resident Maxwell McMain stood with his attorney, Dax Womack of Henderson, as counsel pleaded not guilty on his behalf to charges of murder, driving under the influence (third offense, aggravated circumstances), driving on a DUI suspended license (second offense, aggravated circumstances), first-degree wanton endangerment and failure to wear a seat belt. A kidnapping charge against him has been dropped because it did not meet the statutory requirements, according to court officials.

McMain's not guilty plea was entered during an arraignment Thursday morning in Union County District Court, at which time a preliminary hearing was scheduled for 11 a.m. on Thursday, June 23.

McMain was driving a 2013 Dodge Durango around 2 a.m. June 5 in the 1500 block of Kentucky 492 near Morganfield when the SUV crashed and rolled multiple times, according to Kentucky State Police.

Kaci Wood, 16, Sebree, a passenger in the SUV, was pronounced dead at Union County Hospital shortly after the crash, according to police.

Investigators said both teens were ejected from the vehicle. Neither was wearing a seat belt, authorities said.

During Thursday's arraignment, Womack filed several motions asking for preservation of evidence, seeking a gag order for himself as well as KSP investigators, prosecutors and anyone who might speak to the media, and also a reduction of McMain's $1 million bond to a sum closer to $100,000.

Among his reasons for wanting to see the bond reduced, Womack said, was McMain's injuries and his need for medical attention.

"He has fractured bones (in his back)" and suffered two collapsed lungs. His injuries require McMain to receive regular treatment, Womack said.

Union County Attorney Brucie Moore argued that the detention center has a nurse on staff available to inmates six days a week, and that McMain could be escorted to doctor's visits from the jail.

Moore also said McMain's bond amount relates to the seriousness of the charges and his criminal history, which includes two prior DUI offenses and one driving on a suspended license charge.

"With all of that, I'd ask that the bond remain at $1 million or he be given no bond," Moore said.

"His record is inherent in his past charges," Womack said. For the current offenses, he said, "We aren't privy to the facts. The charges are allegations. I think the bond should be adjusted accordingly."

"We do know there was a wreck," Moore said. "And a 16-year-old girl lost her life and was buried last week. We do know that."

Judge Heady denied the motion to lower McMain's bond.

"He's had multiple offenses of failure to appear in court, and his prior record was factored into the current bond decision," Heady said.

Then addressing McMain directly, Heady said, "I've seen you (in court) for some time Mr. McMain. I've preached to you in the past, and I'm not going to do that today because it won't do any good."

"I'm not comfortable lowering the bond," Heady added.

For his last motion, Womack asked the judge to issue a gag order for those who would speak to the media, particularly the Kentucky State Police, who he said was trying to "taint the jury pool."

Womack then cited interviews between the state police and members of the television media in which KSP made a comment that McMain "didn't help himself by not talking to us."

"They clearly commented on his right to remain silent," Womack said. "For them to taint a jury pool is wrong. I'm asking the court to issue a gag order to prevent them from talking to the press. The defendant has the right to a fair trial."

Moore said that if Womack was truly worried about a tainted jury pool, he wouldn't discuss this issue in open court.

"If he was truly concerned, he wouldn't be repeating the statements in open court, knowing the media is here," she said. "If he was concerned, he wouldn't do it."

Although Judge Heady granted Womack's motion and issued a gag order, he said with the type of charges McMain is facing, "it's going to be extremely difficult" to keep information out of circulation.

"The press has the right to be here," the judge said, before reminding Womack that he too would fall under the stipulations of the gag order, and just like anyone else connected to the investigation, would not be allowed to discuss the facts of the case publicly.
Juvenile arrested in connection with weekend shootings

A juvenile has been arrested in connection with a shooting that injured a 17-year-old and 21-year-old last weekend.
NORWALK  When Tish Gibbs and her husband, former Mayor Bill Collins, proposed the idea of making Nagarote, Nicaragua, a sister city and helping it 30 years ago, it wasnt well-received by the community.

When we first went down it was during the Contra war in Nicaragua, Gibbs said. We did not know at the time about the Iran-Contra scandal. While we went on the fact-finding tour while we were away the Republicans staged a protest on the steps of City Hall, they thought we were visiting a communist country on taxpayer dollars. But we were visiting a socialist country on our own expense  At the beginning we didnt have much of a profile in Norwalk and people were skeptical.

Three decades later, Gibbs said the perception of the sister city program is nearly the opposite, and with the support of current Mayor Harry Rilling, Norwalk will celebrate the first ever Nagarote Day this Friday.

With the change in government in Nicaragua and here, people are a little more receptive to the idea of helping children in Nicaragua now, Gibbs said.

Through the privately-funded, non-profit sister city program, Norwalkers have helped improve education, largely eliminate teen gangs by offering after school programs and helped start a small organic farm, all of which have had a huge benefit to the poorest boroughs of Nagarote, Gibbs said.

Gibbs said there are roughly 200 to 300 active participants in the program, most of whom donate money to the projects in Nagarote. At Norwalk schools, many students become acquainted with the program for the first time, only to get involved again later in life.

We find that the school kids are really interested and its always a nice thing for a community to be aware of whats going on in the rest of the world, Gibbs said. With our projects they can go back and see what they did a few years later and were always there and we can send them pictures. Theres a continuum and that makes our program really unique. What we have to offer is very nice  we have kids who went years ago and have gone again recently. Our board goes every year. We see the change and we get to know the people and we get to know the leadership.

Erika Folgar, 15, got involved with the sister city work after learning about it from her older sister, who is on the board of directors for the program. This year Folgar started a new project at Brien McMahon High School, where she is a student. It pairs girls at the school with girls in Nicaragua.

The groups would skype weekly, and Folgar said the girls at Brien McMahon even made videos for the girls in Nicaragua so they could see what life is like in Norwalk.

Wed just talk about things like family, daily life and stuff like that, Folgar said. And we started making videos we would send to the girls. We gave a tour of school and our lives in school, and the second one was about family. I just really like the relationship we have with the girls because theyre so kind.

Folgar said she hopes to travel to Nagarote to visit the girls, who are mostly 12- and 13-year-olds, next year.

Gibbs said the recognition from the city has proven the success of the program through the years.

Its very rewarding and were very pleased that Harry (Rilling) agreed to do that and that he recognizes the value of what were doing, Gibbs said. Hes been very supportive and its very rewarding to us that were beginning to have more presence in the community, and wed like to increase that of course.

kkrasselt@scni.com; 203-354-1021; @kkrasselt
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NORWALK  With its fastback rear end, fender skirts and racing engine with dual overhead camshafts, the black 1939 Alfa Romeo 6C-2500 fastback coupe by Touring is one of George Dragones favorite classic cars.

Its beautifully styled, said Dragone, co-owner of Dragone Classic Motorcars of Westport. The back just knocks me out and the fender skirts. This was completely restored in Europe by one of the leading Alfa experts.

On Sunday, the car will be among at least a dozen Alfa Romeos and up to 20 classic Model A Fords on display at Mathews Park as part of the Second Annual Fathers Day Car Show put on by the New England Auto Museum.

The Fathers Day Car Show is scheduled for Sunday, June 19, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at Mathews Park. Lockwood-Mathews Mansion will be open, giving visitors the opportunity to learn about Norwalks premier classic house.

Dragone also plans to bring a 1967 Exemplar 1 Concept Car  the only one of its kind  to the show.

The car was commissioned by Bridgeport Brass Co. and the Copper Development Association as a way to promote brass and copper automotive trim to the big American automakers. The car appeared in the 1968 and 1969 New York Auto shows. It later nearly went to the crusher before being restored by Dragone Classic Motorcars.

The goal of the show is to raise money for the non-profit organization to further its vision of establishing the first auto museum in Connecticut. New England Auto Museum is eyeing the former Riverview Plaza building on Belden Avenue as its future home.

Its to raise funds to make our dreams come true for the museum of having a permanent facility to display these cars and have an education center where kids can learn about cars, said Nicholas Ord, marketing director for New England Auto Museum.

The organization hopes create a first-class facility that preserves, interprets and exhibits automobiles and automotive artifacts. The museum would bring students and auto enthusiasts together to celebrate the automobile and educate visitors about its significant role in New England and the world, according to the website of New England Auto Museum.

Last June, the Norwalk Redevelopment Agency approved a $13,000 grant toward an assessment to determine whether such a museum would be viable in the Norwalk area. New England Auto Museum now must raise $52,000 as matching funds to move forward with the assessment.

Ord said New England Auto Museum plans to hire White Oak Associates Museum Planners and Producers of Marblehead, Mass. The firm is one of the premier museum planners in the United States and did similar work for Stepping Stones Museum for Children, The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk and the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford, he added.

Visitors to the Fathers Day Car show will also recognize a local legend in the antique car world. James Melton established one of the first collections along Route 7. On Sunday, the James Melton Award will be presented to the owner of the Outstanding Pre-War Car.
NORWALK  Triangle Community Center will host an interfaith vigil Thursday evening to honor those who lost their lives in the shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla., early Sunday morning.

The vigil is scheduled for 7-8:15 p.m. outdoors in front of Norwalk Concert Hall, 125 East Ave.

The event will include a reading of the names of those killed at the nightclub, remarks from local officials and leaders of LGBTQ community, music by the New World Chorus and the Sacred Heart University Brass Ensemble, and for Muslims in attendance a breaking of the days Ramadan fast.

It is a time that we need to engage in deep reflection in thinking of those that lost their lives under heinous acts of violence, said Mayor Harry W. Rilling, who plans to attend the vigil.

Prayer services will be led by the Revs. Kate Heichler, Daniel Schlorff, Frances Sink, Azra Asaduddin, Inni Kaur Dhingra and other local faith leaders.

The vigil also will focus on the experience of LGBTQ people of color with voices from the Latino community. Anthony Crisci, executive director of Triangle Community Centers, will represent the local LGBTQ community.

The event is arranged by the Interfaith Council of Southwestern Connecticut, Temple Sinai, Christ the Healer in Stamford, the Unitarian Universalist Church in Westport, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Stamford, First Church UCC in Fairfield, Wilton Presbyterian Church, St. Pauls on the Green, the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, Al Madany Islamic Center of Norwalk, Temple Beth El, Norwalk Gurudwara, the city of Norwalk, the city of Stamford, the Office of Congressman James A. Himes, state Sen. Bob Duff, the Fairfield-Westchester Coalition of Welcoming Congregations and Triangle Community Center.
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NORWALK  Speaker after speaker told the Norwalk Zoning Commission on Wednesday evening to reject AMEC Cartings plan to bring its contractors yard in South Norwalk into compliance with city zoning regulations.

Citing dust, noise and truck traffic, neighboring residents want the yard shut down.

Other neighborhoods get to have beautiful malls and beautiful apartments, said Georgana Rucker, a Chestnut Street resident. What do we get in South Norwalk? Always, we get this.

Rucker said the fact that city zoning regulations have allowed industrial uses on the site since 1929 doesnt make it right.

Martha Dumas, whose husband has led the charge to close the contractors yard, was among a number of speakers to note that AMEC Carting has been issued cease-and-desist orders by the Norwalk Department of Planning and Zoning.

Theyre still in violation and so apparently, excuse me, they dont give a damn about South Norwalk, Dumas said.

Ernie Dumas, her husband and chairman of South Norwalk Citizens for Justice, also spoke to the commission.

This is going on too long, Ernie Dumas said. For three years were complaining to the zoning about this company.

More than 50 residents attended the public hearing in the Community Room of City Hall. The hearing continued as The Hour went to print and the commission hadnt voted on AMEC Cartings plan to spruce up the contractors yard, which is bounded by Lubrano Place, Kossuth Street, Hemlock Place and Chestnut Street.

For updates to this story, visit www.thehour.com.

State Rep. Bruce V. Morris, D-Norwalk, and Common Council members Richard J. Bonenfant, an at-large Republican, and Bruce I. Kimmel, an at-large Democrat, also spoke against the plan.

Their answer to a cease-and-desist order is to come before you and ask to legitimize what theyre doing, said Bonenfant of AMEC Cartings approach to addressing the violations.

Kimmel, recalling recent debate over potential truck traffic resulting from the planned replacement of the railroad bridge over East Avenue, asked that Norwalk neighborhoods be treated equally.

The very notion of having that kind of situation in that area in East Norwalk was something that was shut down immediately, Kimmel said. Lets strive for consistency  that quality of life is improving all over the community.

Morris presented the commission pictures, which he took with a drone above the contractors yard on Tuesday afternoon. He said the images demonstrate that the site is being used as a transfer station rather than for storage.

You clearly see two receptacles, Morris said. One is filled with tires of all different sizes. The other one is filled with plastic, five-gallon containers.

AMEC Carting, a construction-demolition contractor, is based at 145 Main Ave. and runs a transfer station at 1 Crescent St. Guy Mazzola, AMEC Carting owner laid out in detail the companys plan for the contractors yard.

Mazzola said his company plans to use the interior of the former Pac-Kit building at 57 Chestnut St. to repair trucks. Thirty to 35 trucks and up to roughly 120 empty and clean containers would be stored outside; the containers would be stacked no more than 15 feet high. Trucks would leave the yard between 6 a.m. 8:30 a.m. and return between 4:30 and 7 p.m.

AMEC trucks will not head down Chestnut (Street) past the schools, Mazzola said.

The storage containers wouldnt be moved before 7 a.m., he said.

An eight to 10-foot tall concrete wall would be built behind fencing and landscaping to limit noise. Trucks would use a white noise back-up alarm rather than standard beeping alarms.

Its a broad-band noise, said Mazzola as an audio example was played. Your ear doesnt pick it up.

He said noise now attributed to AMEC Carting is actually emanating from an adjacent wood-processing company.

Mazzola said his company has invested nearly $11 million into Norwalk over the last 15 years.

We take great pride in what we do and want to be a good corporate citizen, Mazzola said.

He said AMEC Carting would make available to the neighborhood an outreach coordinator to arrange cleanups and other activities.

Christopher J. Smith, land-use attorney for AMEC Carting, described the storage yard as an accessory use to the companys transfer station on Crescent Street. He said quite a bit of misinformation has been circulated by those opposed to the plan.

Were looking forward to separating fiction from what is pure speculation, Smith said.

Smith said the various parcels, which AMEC Carting began purchasing in 2001, have been zoned for industrial uses since 1929. He displayed a contractors yard permit issued in 2001 for the parcel at 12 Lubrano Place.

When you hear this is being shoved down our throats  its been zoned for this quite a long time, Smith said.

Smith said the yard doesnt handle municipal solid waste or hazardous waste and poses no health or environmental risks as suggested by residents opposed to the plan.

Hazardous waste does not come through. AMEC does not deal with that, Smith said. The transfer station is approved by the Connecticut DEEP  and DEEP regulates it.
NORWALK  More than 1,000 worn American flags were interred in a vault in a ceremony at Riverside Cemetery on Tuesday, Flag Day.

VFW Post 399, American Legion Post 12, Riverside Cemetery, the Norwalk Police Department Honor Guard, soldiers from the Connecticut National Guard, Boy Scouts from Troop 19 Norwalk and Girl Scouts from Troop 50464 were on hand to inter the flags.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A Democratic senator frustrated with congressional inaction on gun violence led a nearly 15-hour Senate filibuster before yielding the floor early Thursday, making a pledge that he and his colleagues would press hard for more gun control three days after 49 people were killed at a Florida nightclub.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy ended a series of speeches with his Democratic colleagues at 2:11 a.m EDT after promising at the outset that he would remain on the Senate floor "until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together." At the end, he said he had won commitments from Republican leaders that they would hold votes on amendments to expand background checks and ban gun sales to suspected terrorists. It is unlikely that those amendments will pass.

Murphy evoked the Newtown school shooting in his state in 2012, and ended his long day with a story of a young boy who was killed in that massacre. Twenty children and six educators died in a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012. Murphy, 42 and the father of two young boys, said he cannot look into the eyes of those children's relatives and tell them that Congress has done nothing since.

"For those of us that represent Connecticut, the failure of this body to do anything, anything at all in the face of that continued slaughter isn't just painful to us, it's unconscionable," Murphy said.

Murphy's filibuster started Wednesday as presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would meet with the National Rifle Association about the terror watch list and gun purchases. The tragedy in Orlando, Florida early Sunday was in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The election-year fight over gun control in the wake of the shootings pits strong proponents of the Second Amendment right to bear arms against those arguing for greater restrictions on the ability to obtain weapons. Trump, who has the endorsement of the NRA, told a rally in Georgia, "I'm going to save your Second Amendment."

Attempts at compromise appeared to collapse within hours of surfacing in the Senate Wednesday, underscoring the extreme difficulty of resolving the divisive issue five months to the election. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who had been involved in talks with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said there was no resolution.

Murphy began speaking at 11:21 a.m., and he showed few signs of fatigue as it ended. By Senate rules, he had to stand at his desk to maintain control of the floor. When asked by another senator how he was feeling just before 7:30 p.m., Murphy said rehabilitation from a back injury in his 20s had helped him build up endurance.

As tourists and staff  and at one point in the evening, Murphy's two sons  looked on from the galleries, the senator maintained his filibuster to a mostly empty chamber, save for a series of Democratic senators who joined him and made their own speeches through the day. Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Cory Booker of New Jersey stayed with Murphy on the floor for most of the debate.

For those following from afar, Democrats gave updates on Twitter using hashtag "#enough."

It's been nearly a decade since Congress made any significant changes to federal gun laws. In April 2007, Congress passed a law to strengthen the instant background check system after a gunman at Virginia Tech who killed 32 people was able to purchase his weapons because his mental health history was not in the instant background check database.

Murphy is seeking a vote on legislation from Feinstein that would let the government bar sales of guns and explosives to people it suspects of being terrorists. Feinstein offered a similar version of the amendment in December, a day after an extremist couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, but the Republican-run Senate rejected the proposal on a near party-line vote. Murphy also wants a vote to expand background checks.

The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to co-workers. But he was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.

Trump said he would meet with the NRA to discuss ways to block people on terrorism watch lists or no-fly lists from buying guns. That wouldn't have blocked Mateen from buying a gun, however, since he'd been pulled from the watch list.

In a statement, the NRA said it was happy to meet with Trump and reiterated its support for a bill from Cornyn that would let the government delay firearms sales to suspected terrorists for up to 72 hours. Prosecutors would have to persuade a judge to block the transaction permanently, a bar Democrats and gun control activists say is too high.

Cornyn and other Republicans argue that Feinstein's bill denies due process to people who may be on the terror list erroneously and are trying to exercise their constitutional right to gun ownership.

Separately, Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said it was working on a compromise with Pennsylvania Sen. Patrick Toomey, a Republican in a tough re-election race this year who has sought compromise in the past on gun control measures.

By the end of the day, Toomey had introduced legislation that would direct the attorney general to create a new list of suspected terrorists who could be barred from buying weapons. But Democrats immediately rejected that idea, saying it would create too much of a backlog.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect filibuster lasted nearly 15 hours.

__

Associated Press writers Erica Werner, Matthew Daly and Andrew Taylor in Washington, Jonathan Lemire in New York and Jill Colvin in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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NORWALK  South Norwalk residents left City Hall cheering late Wednesday evening after the city's Zoning Commission unanimously rejected AMEC Carting's plan to legitimize and expand its demolition-and-debris container storage yard off Lubrano Place.

"I was glad to hear that and I know the community is glad," said Ernie Dumas, chairman of South Norwalk Citizens for Justice. "It was a lot of hard work to get this all done and, hopefully, no one else will come onto that property to the same thing."

AMEC Carting President Guy Mazzola, when asked afterward whether he planned to appeal the rejection, said he needed to speak to his attorney.

AMEC Carting, a construction-demolition contractor which is based at 145 Main Ave., had asked the commission to allow storage of the containers on the roughly four-acre site based upon the company's permitted operation of a transfer station at 1 Crescent St.

The commission rejected the request after noting that the Norwalk Planning Commission found the proposed expansion of the storage yard inconsistent with Norwalk's Plan of Conservation and Development.

Commission Chairman Adam D. Blank prefaced his comments by saying that he largely supported AMEC Carting's expansion of its transfer station on Crescent Street. He added that the company had taken some fair and unfair criticisms over its plans for the storage yard in South Norwalk. But Blank concluded that the expansion plan for the latter was not fitting for the South Norwalk parcels, which although zoned as Industrial No. 1, are surrounded by residential properties.

"We could probably argue forever over whether it was initially an industrial neighborhood or initially a residential neighborhood  who infringed on who," Blank said. "But at this point in time, there's a whole lot of residential development in and around where you've proposed this facility and it's clearly an incompatible use for those residential uses."

Blank said other permitted industrial uses exist in the neighborhood, but he added, "we should be looking to contract the (industrial) uses that are permitted in this neighborhood so that we have less conflict between industry and residents."

The vote to reject the plan came after a nearly four-hour public hearing in the Community Room during which speaker after speaker told the commission to reject AMEC Cartings plan to bring its contractors yard in South Norwalk into compliance with city zoning regulations.

Citing dust, noise and truck traffic, neighboring residents want the yard shut down.

Other neighborhoods get to have beautiful malls and beautiful apartments, said Georgana Rucker, a Chestnut Street resident. What do we get in South Norwalk? Always, we get this.

Rucker said the fact that city zoning regulations have allowed industrial uses on the site since 1929 doesnt make it right.

Martha Dumas was among a number of speakers to note that AMEC Carting has been issued cease-and-desist orders by the Norwalk Department of Planning and Zoning.

Theyre still in violation and so apparently, excuse me, they dont give a damn about South Norwalk, Dumas said.

Ernie Dumas, her husband, also spoke during the hearing.

This is going on too long, Ernie Dumas said. For three years were complaining to the zoning about this company.

More than 50 residents attended the public hearing in the Community Room of City Hall.

At issue was AMEC Cartings plan to spruce up its contractors yard, which is bounded by Lubrano Place, Kossuth Street, Hemlock Place and Chestnut Street.

State Rep. Bruce V. Morris, D-Norwalk, and Common Council members Richard J. Bonenfant, an at-large Republican, and Bruce I. Kimmel, an at-large Democrat, also spoke against the plan.

Their answer to a cease-and-desist order is to come before you and ask to legitimize what theyre doing, said Bonenfant of AMEC Cartings approach to addressing the violations.

Kimmel, recalling recent debate over potential truck traffic resulting from the planned replacement of the railroad bridge over East Avenue, asked that Norwalk neighborhoods be treated equally.

The very notion of having that kind of situation in that area in East Norwalk was something that was shut down immediately, Kimmel said. Lets strive for consistency  that quality of life is improving all over the community.

Morris presented the commission pictures, which he took with a drone above the contractors yard on Tuesday afternoon. He said the images demonstrate that the site is being used as a transfer station rather than for storage.

You clearly see two receptacles, Morris said. One is filled with tires of all different sizes. The other one is filled with plastic, five-gallon containers.

AMEC Carting, a construction-demolition contractor, is based at 145 Main Ave. and runs a transfer station at 1 Crescent St. Mazzola laid out in detail the companys plan for the contractors yard.

Mazzola said his company plans to use the interior of the former Pac-Kit building at 57 Chestnut St. to repair trucks. Thirty to 35 trucks and up to roughly 120 empty and clean containers would be stored outside; the containers would be stacked no more than 15 feet high. Trucks would leave the yard between 6 a.m. 8:30 a.m. and return between 4:30 and 7 p.m.

AMEC trucks will not head down Chestnut (Street) past the schools, Mazzola said.

The storage containers wouldnt be moved before 7 a.m., he said. An eight to 10-foot tall concrete wall would be built behind fencing and landscaping to limit noise. Trucks would use a white noise back-up alarm rather than standard beeping alarms.

Its a broad-band noise, said Mazzola as an audio example was played. Your ear doesnt pick it up.

He said noise now attributed to AMEC Carting is actually emanating from an adjacent wood-processing company. Mazzola said his company has invested nearly $11 million into Norwalk over the last 15 years.

We take great pride in what we do and want to be a good corporate citizen, Mazzola said.

He said AMEC Carting would make available to the neighborhood an outreach coordinator to arrange cleanups and other activities.

Christopher J. Smith, land-use attorney for AMEC Carting, described the storage yard as an accessory use to the companys transfer station on Crescent Street. He said quite a bit of misinformation has been circulated by those opposed to the plan.

Were looking forward to separating fiction from what is pure speculation, Smith said. Smith said the various parcels, which AMEC Carting began purchasing in 2001, have been zoned for industrial uses since 1929. He displayed a contractors yard permit issued in 2001 for the parcel at 12 Lubrano Place.

When you hear this is being shoved down our throats  its been zoned for this quite a long time, Smith said.

Smith said the yard doesnt handle municipal solid waste or hazardous waste and poses no health or environmental risks as suggested by residents opposed to the plan.

Hazardous waste does not come through. AMEC does not deal with that, Smith said. The transfer station is approved by the Connecticut DEEP  and DEEP regulates it.
Aldermen recommended the approval of two purchases for the Edwardsville Police Department at Mondays Public Safety Committee meeting.

Police Chief Jay Keeven submitted requests for the acquisition of 10 taser devices and two squad cars. Aldermen unanimously recommended the approval of both.

The two squad cars will be for $68,736. That includes the equipment and graphics for the Ford Explorers.

We typically order the vehicles from Landmark Ford, and then it is late fall before they usually come in, Keeven said.

The vehicles would replace high-mileage patrol vehicles in the patrol fleet. The older vehicles will be repurposed for officers assigned to schools, investigations or administrative duties.

It was budgeted for $72,800, and would come out of the annexation funds. The base bid for each Ford Explorer is $26,843, not including equipment, installation and graphics.

I budgeted a little high on this assuming we were going to have a 5 to 10 percent increase in cost, Keeven said. The patrol cars were up a little bit, but the equipment and installation we do through TrueLine held at last years price, and the company that does the graphics for the car held at their price as well.

ADgraphix, of St. Louis, is in charge of the graphics.

TrueLine, which is in charge of equipment and installation, is located in Jacksonville. Keeven said theyll be able to repurpose light bars, radios and patrol overheads for the new Ford Explorers.

Everything that we can repurpose, we will repurpose, Keeven said.

Aldermen Janet Stack, Will Krause and Craig Louer recommended approval of the resolution and moved it along to City Council on June 21.

Also on Monday, the aldermen recommended the approval of 10 X26P TASER devices for $9,870.66.

The purchase would also include battery packs, holsters and cartridges. Theres also an $880 trade-in of eight older tasers.

This is the last set of purchases, Keeven said, noting the roll-out plan. This would allow us to have a taser in the hands of all officers assigned to patrol and all school officers.

This was budgeted for $12,000 as a capital expense.

Krause asked how often tasers are used, and Keeven said the average usage per year is between eight and 12. Once an officer announces they have a taser, the suspect will back down a majority of the time, according to Keeven.

People typically dont like electricity, Keeven said.

The resolution will now move on to City Council.
It all started with an idea by Donna Sue Groves who wanted to honor her mother, a noted quilter. The first trail started in Adams County in 2001 and thus began the Quilt Barn movement that spread across the country.

Barn quilts are painted squares that are mounted on a barn or other building.

The original Quilt Barns were in Appalachia, but new trails developed throughout the state and country. Currently there are over 30 counties that have quilt barn trails, so no matter where you live in Ohio, there is surely a Quilt Barn Trail near you.

Many counties have their own names for their particular trails. Lorain County has the Patchwork Trails, Vinton County has a Stitch in Time and Carroll County displays it quilts in the Carroll County Quilt Square Park. Its 14 squares depict culture, history and landmarks in the county.

The quilt patterns are often applied to large sheets of plywood, painted in traditional quilt patterns that reflect something about the area or the artist. They grace barns old and new and provide a site that brings a smile to the faces of those who see them as they pass by. Whitebarnquilt Many of the quilt barns are set back off the roads and located on private property making close-up viewing difficult.

Some of the squares are projects of 4-H clubs, service groups, or artists, as is the case of Mexican folk artist Rafael Santoyo, who gave the Miami County quilt squares a look all their own through his bright color choices and freehand painting style.

Several counties have websites or brochures with the complete Quilt Barn routes marked out so that you can independently explore these works of art. Other counties offer themed routes for the quilt barns; some are even conducive to exploring by bicycle.

We focused our trip on Urbana and Champaign County. We settled in at the comfortable Scioto Inn and then did loop trips from there. The Quilt Barn route was perfect for introducing us to the area. We even traveled to an area that we had long forgotten but had visited 15 years ago when we researched our Bed, Breakfast and Bike Midwest book. That brought back pleasant memories for us. Serendipitously, we discovered on our route the Champaign Aviation Museum in Urbana, with a fun diner just next door and realized how close we were to the Ohio Caverns, which we had to explore.

If you love the patterns of quilts and need an excuse to plan a day or overnight trip, check out a nearby or faraway county and use the quilt barns map - http://barnquiltinfo.com/map-OH.html - as your guide.

For more information, visit www.ohio.org.
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Linkedin A. Bagus Laksana (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

It is a bit surreal to see the sudden rise of fear of communism in certain circles in our society recently. Several events related to the 1965 massacre and leftist topics, including academic events, were canceled due to intimidations.



This fear is rather odd, as communist ideologies and Marxist ideas have declined rather dramatically in the last two decades or so.



It is still fresh in our memory how Cuba has begun to open itself to the West. Just a few weeks ago, something unthinkable happened: The promenade of Havana was transformed into a capitalist space where Chanel, one of the icons of capitalism, staged a fashion show.



And Venezuela, earlier dubbed the socialist paradise, has been thrown into a deep economic crisis under socialist President Nicolas Maduro. Global terrorism seems to be posing a more demonic threat than communism or Marxism.



So what is really behind the recent surge of fear of communism in our midst? Undoubtedly, the rising number of activities and discourses on leftist ideas and movements in Indonesia recently has more to do with the need to heal the wounds of our shared national past than with communism as a rival political system. It is not a revival of communism, but an invitation to look into our troubled past.



However, there might be a genuine interest in leftist ideas today, especially among the young. But it is a bit presumptuous to call this a revival of communism.



This surge of interest perhaps signals frustration with the current economic and political system that is largely driven by neoliberalism. It is an expression of distrust, rather than anything else.



And this is rather normal in the political and intellectual dynamics. The popularity of Bernie Sanders, a socialist democrat, among young Americans in the current presidential campaign might indicate voters distrust of and resistance to the domination of the political establishment supported by the interest of the Wall Street.



According to a survey by Republican pollster Frank Lunts, 58 percent of young people in the US choose socialism over capitalism as the most compassionate system; 28 percent say the most pressing issue facing America is income inequality (usnews.com). It is hard to call these young people socialists.



They are interested in those alternative ideas, but not ideologically bound by socialism as a system.



They will not be ready to die for it. These labels do not matter that much anymore to them.



We might remember the Occupy Wall Street movement some years back. This movement died out rather quickly and did not change capitalism, but it is the voice of young people against inequality and income disparity. It is a longing for another world, for a new way of managing social and political life toward more tangible justice for all.



So, what is wrong is not the aspirations of the young, but the way we manage our society.



Unfortunately, in our society, leftist ideas have been imagined as a specter, a ghostly monster so menacing that it will ruin everything we cherish as a nation.



Communism and Marxism have been turned into a mystified category. It is shrouded in mystery, and no one is supposed to know what it really amounts to, even at the level of public, academic or scholarly discourse.



Therefore leftist ideas instil fear in most people, but they are turned ironically into something more appealing to others for the same reason. It is odd that the collapse of socialism and the communist regimes, as well as the crisis and declining appeal of Marxism as a system of thought among intellectuals, have failed to demystify the specter of communism here. As a nation, we are lagging behind the development of the larger intellectual discourse in this sense.



One of the dreadful things associated with communism and Marxism in the popular imagination in our society is its supposedly atheistic presuppositions and hence, its collision with religion.



Upon closer reflection, the relationship between Marxism, socialism and religion is much more complicated.



Marxist ideas have been put to use by certain religious thinkers and movements, but have also been criticized and transformed.



A case in point is liberation theology, a strand of Christian theology that drew major insights from Marxist analysis of social dynamics but without succumbing into its materialist (atheistic) ontology or fundamental view of things.



Recent scholarship shows that this theology is in crisis, after enjoying some popularity in the 1970s and 1980s.



One of its biggest lacunae lies in its reliance on the old-school Marxist analysis of social inequality and injustice.



This analysis has not been able to keep up with the most current and advanced development of capitalism, which has transformed itself from an economic system into a comprehensive program of human formation.



In the words of Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, capitalism presents itself more and more as an ensemble of technologies, skillful at molding human desire.



Capitalism does not work through the state, but it governs human desire through the mechanism, which surpasses the state. Thus, capitalism has penetrated our lives far more deeply than we normally think.



Unaware of this development, liberation theology put its revolutionary thinking rather ironically in the capitalist framework by relying on the state as a place and power for resistance against capitalism, as Daniel Bell wrote.



This eventually deems the resistance of liberation theology futile.



The point is that the obsoleteness of Marxist analysis is proved in public and scientific discourse.

The Catholic Church under John Paul II put liberation theology under suspicion and discipline due to its undue reliance on Marxism and its connection to political revolutionary movements that at times condoned violence.



But what made liberation theology reflect more seriously on itself is not so much the Churchs disciplinary actions against it, but rather its internal coherence as a system of thought and its accuracy vis-a-vis the development of social reality and problems that it tried to address.



Perhaps we will do better as a society if we offer public and academic space of discourse to leftist ideas.



The validity of these ideas should be put to rigorous intellectual and academic scrutiny, rather than collective fear and disciplinary politics.



Society at large will judge whether these ideas merit serious consideration. This way we would demystify these leftist ideas and see them for what they are.

***

The writer is a lecturer at Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta.

---------------

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 Haryo Budi Nugroho (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

As we get closer to the decision in the arbitration on the South China Sea, we hear numerous arguments from all sides, including the article by Ambassador Xie Feng in The Jakarta Post on June 8. Now, it is important to view the arbitration from an objective standpoint.



First, regarding the formation of the arbitration, it is indeed the case that the Philippines initiated the arbitration unilaterally.



However there is no stipulation within UNCLOS that bans a country from unilaterally launching arbitration. For instance Malaysia did so in the case of land reclamation filed against Singapore.



China declined to participate from the beginning, which other countries must respect as this is perfectly legal under international law, especially UNCLOS.



In the same vein, the non-participation by China does not prevent the arbitration from proceeding. It is also within the framework of international law that the arbitration can render its decision after it satisfies itself that it has jurisdiction and that the claim is well founded.



Refusal to participate has deprived China of opportunities to influence the decision-making process in the arbitration from within. Chinas attempt to explain its position, including the article by Ambassador Xie Feng, constitutes an effort to influence the decision from outside.



The effectiveness of this strategy is yet to be seen and would be a great academic research topic.



Second, regarding the competence of the arbitration. This matter concerns whether both parties have consented to the arbitration procedure and whether the dispute submitted falls within the scope of the UNCLOS dispute-settlement mechanism.



Parties to UNCLOS give their consent to the binding dispute-settlement mechanism when they become parties. Exceptions can be made for cases involving delimitation, military activities in the EEZ and disputes currently handled by the UN Security Council.



In the South China Sea, the dispute filed by the Philippines did not touch any of the exceptions.



In this regard the Philippines presented its arguments in the first round of hearing. China on the other hand indirectly delivered its arguments through its Position Paper issued on Dec. 7, 2015.



The Position Paper in principle questions the competence of the arbitration because the core of the Philippines submission relates to sovereignty and delimitation.



Indeed to some extent the dispute is connected to delimitation and sovereignty, but the arbitration has been very cautious.



In its award on jurisdiction last year it did not affirm jurisdiction to hear the case to all of the submissions, but reserved its right to determine jurisdiction after hearing the arguments on their merits. The arbitration has actually acted fairly and impartial.



The argument of Ambassador Xie Feng that the arbitration has disavowed the legally binding force of the declaration of conduct (DOC) on the South China Sea is legally flawed. The DOC is not a legal document; it is a political document.



Thus, the DOC does not have legally binding force. Furthermore the DOC aims to regulate conduct and manage the dispute, whereas the subject matter of the arbitration concerns interpretation and application of UNCLOS provisions.



Lastly, the DOC applies to the entire South China Sea area while the arbitration only concerns areas that relate to the Philippines claim.



Third, regarding the attitudes of the parties in complying with the decision of the arbitration.



Both China and the Philippines as parties to the dispute are under international obligation to obey the decision of the arbitration.



To date, China has expressed its strong opposition and it will not follow the decision of the arbitration. Such a move will surely create tension and instability in the South China Sea.



So much is at stake for China if it decides not to follow the ruling. It will set a backlash against the rule of law and show a negative example how a groundless unilateral action finds its place in the international community.



Such an example is not expected from a permanent member of the UN Security Council. China as a proponent of the international judicial system can be seen by the fact that there are always Chinese judges at both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.



Under the preamble of the UN Charter, we pledged to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligation arising from treaties and international law can be maintained.



As a permanent member of the Security Council, China should lead by example in upholding the rule of law. China should not, on the contrary, bail and withdraw from UNCLOS.



The ruling of the arbitration will carry significant importance, as it will become a source of international law. Such a stipulation is based on Article 38 of the ICJ Statute, that judicial decisions are a source of international law.



The substance of the award may also carry some fundamental elements of international law such as definition of the term human habitation and the term economic life of their own.



This ruling may be referred to by states as well as international courts in the future. At that point, it will be difficult for China to oppose the decision.



If China accepts the ruling of the arbitration, it will not forfeit its claim over the maritime features in the South China Sea. As a matter of fact, China can adjust its claims by simply drawing a maritime zone from all the features that it claims within the distance of 12 or 200 nautical miles in accordance with the decision of the arbitration.



With this position, China can ask the other claimants namely the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam and Malaysia to clarify their respective claims.



By accepting the arbitration and its ruling, China can overcome the difficulties it is currently facing, as the Chinese proverb goes In every crisis, there is an opportunity.

***

The writer holds a doctorate degree on ocean law and policy from the University of Virginias School of Law, and was a training fellow at the International Tribunal at the Law of the Sea in Hamburg.

---------------

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Linkedin Devina Heriyanto (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Philippines will have Rodrigo Duterte as their new president by the end of June. Known for his blunt speech, he is often compared to Donald Trump, both of who have often made the headlines as of late for controversial plans for their respective countries.

Perhaps it was his brashness and politically incorrect behavior that appealed to voters fed up with years of forked-tongued politicians.

What can we expect from Rodrigo Rody Roa Duterte, also dubbed as The Punisher and Dirty Harry or Duterte Harry? What issues will be inherited by the new president? Why exactly are so many people worried about his presidency?

Who is Duterte?

Duterte, 71, also known as Digong, was born in Maasin, Leyte, as a son of former governor of the undivided Davao, Vicente Rodrigo, during the 1950s. Duterte has three children from his ex-wife.

Duterte was a longtime mayor of Davao city, the largest city in southern Philippines. A former lawyer and prosecutor, he has held the mayoral office for seven terms, totaling more than two decades and will be succeeded by his daughter, Sara Duterte.

His most notorious legacy for the city would be the Davao death squad. With a zero tolerance policy against crime, Duterte encouraged a city-wide criminal purge, which is boasted to significantly reduced the citys crime rate. Duterte has also endorsed extrajudicial killings for drug-related crimes.

What are his plans for the Philippines?

Duterte built his popularity with radical pledges to eliminate poverty, and end corruption and crime. He will face challenges particularly on defense, security and international relations:

Moro

Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a secessionist group aiming for the liberation of the Moro people from southern Philippines, promptly rejoiced Dutertes victory. The MILF praised Duterte as a true son of Mindanao and was optimistic that he would carry with it our hopes and aspirations for peace and justice in Mindanao. Duterte hopes to be successful in peace talks with the MILF.

Abu Sayyaf

A more menacing threat is the Abu Sayyaf group. President Benigno Aquino III has stated Malacanang will use language of force to encounter the group, following the beheading of Canadian national John Ridsdel in May. Another Canadian, Robert Hall, was beheaded in June to embarrass Duterte.

The incoming national security adviser, Hermogenes Esperon, said Duterte would take stronger action against lawlessness in the south.

Sabah

Philippine has an overlapping claim with Malaysia regarding oil-rich Sabah, Malaysia's easternmost state on the island of Borneo. Sabah Chief Minister Musa Aman reaffirmed Sabah does not acknowledge Philippines claim and will continue to be a part of Malaysia. Duterte has stated that he would pursue the Sabah claim but only through peaceful means.

South China Sea/West Philippine Sea

The ruling on the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea dispute by a UN arbitration court is expected to be issued within the next several weeks. The case was submitted by the Philippines in 2013 centered on the applicability of Chinas vaguely drawn nine-dash line boundary under the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). China has refused to participate nor acknowledge the courts ruling.

Duterte had shown indication of being more flexible on the issue than current President Benigno Aquino III.

Duterte has said he'd negotiate directly with China on the dispute, but he would plant the Philippine flag on one of China's artificial islands if negotiations fail.

Communist rebels

The Philippines has faced communist insurgencies since 1969. Duterte has opened up initiatives for resuming dialog with rebels and both sides had agreed to continue peace talks.

Dutertes would-be social welfare minister, Judy Taguiwalo, was chosen from a list submitted by the communists. She will be responsible for the governments anti-poverty programs.

Will the Philippines keep its alliance with the US?

Duterte has described himself as a "socialist" with a "cold" relationship with America and will make Philippines more independent of the US, which raises questions regarding the future of defense relations between the two countries.

US defense minister Ash Carter has reaffirmed that the alliance remains ironclad. The US-Philippine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, signed in 2014, allows American forces access to five Philippine military sites. Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (Carat), a maritime joint exercise, was held from June 6-10. The joint exercise reaffirmed both the USs presence in the Asia-Pacific, particularly in the South China Sea (or West Philippine Sea), and the continuity of the US-Philippine alliance.

An expert from a US-based think tank says the US is watching Duterte very carefully, particularly his reaction to the upcoming ruling from the UN tribunal court on its border dispute with China.

What is the problem with Duterte?

Gender insensitive

The Philippine Commission on Human Rights stated on May that Duterte violated a law protecting women's rights by making a rape joke during his election campaign. Duterte joked that he wanted to be the first to rape an Australian missionary, who was killed after being gang-raped in a 1989 Davao prison riot. Aside from womens groups, Duterte was also criticized by Australian and US ambassadors to the Philippines.

Despite the case, Dutertes spokesman had insisted that his cabinet would be well represented and gender-sensitive.

And on several occasions, Duterte had referred to both outgoing President Aquino and Pope Francis as a "son of whore", a popular Philippine insult.

Problem with journalists

Duterte once again sparked controversies by his comment regarding the murder of journalists, by stating that "just because you're a journalist [doesn't mean] you're exempt from assassinations if you're a son of a bitch."

The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines quickly criticized Duterte, stating that playing the corruption card should not be used to justify murder. International media groups also condemned Duterte. Reporters Without Borders called for a media ban on Duterte until a formal apology is issued, and the Committee to Protect Journalists stated the remarks could further threaten journalists in the country.

International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said that the Philippines is the second most dangerous country for journalists  placing it just after Iraq. For the past 25 years, the IFJ noted that 146 journalists have been killed in the Philippines.

Vigilantism

One of the biggest concerns for human rights activists is Dutertes open endorsement for vigilantism, which dates back to his tenure as mayor in Davao City. As President-elect, Duterte encouraged vigilantism on a national level, where he had raised the bounty for killing drug lords from 3 million pesos (US$161,822 ) to 5 million pesos. Duterte said he would offer 2 million pesos as a reward for every slain illegal drug distributor and 50,000 pesos for small-time drug peddlers.

In the span of three days in early June, five men were killed, all suspected to be involved in the illegal drug trade. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that offering bounties could lead to widespread violence and chaos.

According a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report in 2009, the targeted killings in Davao City started concurrently with Dutertes second term as a mayor. The citys official website boasted that Davao successfully reduced its 3-digit crime rate to 0.8 cases per 10,000 people in 2005. However according to police statistics, annual crime incidents during this period rose from 975 to 3,391, or by 248 percent from 1999 to 2008. The HRW concluded the targeted killings had worsened crime rates in the city.

Democracy

Some have attributed Duterte as a "threat to democracy". In his final campaign, incumbent Aquino warned voters that Duterte could be a dictator in the making and urged them not to support him.

Duterte warned the congress not to investigate his anti-crime campaign. Ifugao district representative Teodoro Baguilat Jr. told the Philippine Star that Dutertes warning "threatens the countrys democratic system".
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Linkedin Barbara Ortutay (Associated Press) New York, United States  Thu, June 16, 2016

The father of a young woman killed in the Paris massacre last November is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter, claiming that the companies provided "material support" to extremists in violation of the law.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the Paris attacks, filed the suit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The suit claims the companies "knowingly permitted" the Islamic State group, referred to in the complaint as "ISIS," to recruit members, raise money and spread "extremist propaganda" via their social-media services.

The Gonzalez suit is very similar to a case brought against Twitter in January by the widow of a contractor killed in an attack in Jordan. It includes numerous identical passages and screenshots, although the lawyers in the cases are different.

In statements, Facebook and Twitter said Wednesday the Gonzalez lawsuit is without merit, and all three companies cited their policies against extremist material. Twitter, for instance, said that it has "teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate."

Facebook's statement read, in part, that if the company sees "evidence of a threat of imminent harm or a terror attack, we reach out to law enforcement."

Google, meanwhile, said it won't comment on pending litigation, but noted that that it has "clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users."

(Read also: Social media plays role in youth smoking, says expert)

Under U.S. law, internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides a legal "safe harbor" for companies like Twitter and Facebook; it states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

But it isn't clear if that legal defense will suffice in this case. Ari Kresch, a lawyer with 1-800-LAW-FIRM who is part of the Gonzalez legal team, said in an email that the lawsuit targets social media companies because of the behavior they enabled, not what they published.

"This complaint is not about what ISIS's messages say," he wrote. "It is about Google, Twitter, and Facebook allowing ISIS to use their social media networks for recruitment and operations." The Gonzales complaint also alleges that Google's YouTube shared revenue with IS from ads that ran with its videos.

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agrees that the legal "safe harbor" might not shelter social-media companies in such cases. Twitter may not succeed in quashing the similar lawsuit filed in January on those grounds, Wittes argues. But he said Twitter could still prevail because the causal link between its alleged support for extremists and the attack is very weak.

__

AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima contributed to this story from Los Angeles.
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Linkedin Masajeng Rahmiasri (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

In recent years, many Indonesians have started to wear the kaftan, a type of Middle Eastern tunic. The kaftan has been an acceptable attire to wear for various occasions, including wedding receptions and Idul Fitri gatherings. However, because of its unique cut, some are still hesitant to wear a kaftan.

The Jakarta Post met Khanaan Shamlan of Khanaan brand, and Novita Yunus of Batik Chic by Novita Yunus at the Galleries Lafayette department store, Wednesday. The two designers shared some tips for kaftan first-timers.

(Read also: Dear women, here are 6 tricks for always looking elegant and classy)

The cut

Khanaan addressed the main reason why people are hesitant to wear a kaftan: the fear of disappearing in the cloth. The designer said for those with petite figures, look for a kaftan with a slimmer cut in its lower part and opt for a sleeveless model.

Incorporate your personal style

Just like picking other type of clothes, choose a kaftan that reflects your personal style. For example, if you're more feminine, opt for softer colors. For younger kaftan wearers, batik kaftans with bright colors may be more suitable.

Mix and match

Mix and match your kaftan with other complimenting clothing elements. For example, Novita wore earthy-red jumputan (tie-dye batik) pants to match her bright yellow kaftan. She explained If [someone] were to wear black pants that could be seen as more formal.

(Read also: 6 local quirky bag brands on the rise)

Accessorize

Novita marked the importance to pick accessories that go well with the look that you intend to create. She said layered accessories are good to create a hip, chic look, while a choker-styled necklace would create a more elegant look.

Material

As we live in the tropics, it's best to pick a kaftan made from comfortable, airy material. Avoid materials that will make you sweat too much as it would be uncomfortable. One of the airy material that Novita uses is Sengkang silk, a type of silk native to Makassar, Sulawesi.

Motifs and occasions

It is also important to pay attention to the motif, as well as the occasion when you decide to wear a kaftan. For formal occasions, wear a kaftan that is minimalist in motifs but accessorize glamorously. For more relaxed events, you can opt for a colorful kaftan and vibrant accessories. (asw)
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Linkedin (Associated Press) New York, United States  Thu, June 16, 2016

To launch her own book imprint, Oprah Winfrey is releasing her first cookbook.

Winfrey's "Food, Health and Happiness: 'On Point' Recipes for Great Meals and a Better Life" is scheduled to come out Jan. 3 of next year, Flatiron Books told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Winfrey's imprint, currently unnamed, is part of Flatiron, a division of MacMillan U.S.

(Read also: Celebrities urge world leaders to fight for girls and women)

"In the past several months on Weight Watchers, I have worked with wonderful chefs to make healthier versions of my favorite meals," Winfrey said in a statement. "When people come to my house for lunch or dinner, the number one thing they ask is, 'How is this so delicious and still healthy?' So I decided to answer that question with recipes everyone can enjoy."

Winfrey isn't entirely new to the cookbook world. Her personal chef, Rosie Daley, published "In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah's Favorite Recipes" in 1994. Winfrey contributed an introduction to "The Oprah Magazine Cookbook," which came out in 2008.

In announcing the imprint last year, Winfrey had planned to start with a memoir, "The Life You Want." That book has been postponed to an underdetermined date, according to Flatiron. The imprint is expected to release several nonfiction works per year, all selected by Winfrey.
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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

With more than 100 million users, Snapchat is also popular among the rich and famous. Here are six recommended Snapchat accounts worth following on the multimedia messaging app.

Dian Sastrowardoyo

As one of the most famous Indonesian actresses, Dian Sastrowardoyo, better known as Dian Sastro, has a Snapchat account, @inidisas; allowing her fans to ogle her world when she is not in front of the camera. Her videos are usually filled with her daily activities showcasing her outfit for the day, photo sessions and family dinners.

Keenan Pearce

A young entrepreneur in the creative industries, Keenan Pearce has his very own, relatable way to post his activities on Snapchat. The brother of Indonesian celebrity Pevita Pearce often shoots the camera from his point of view, for instance when he walks or shakes someones hand. He also enhances his Snapchat account with great songs. You can follow him at @keenpearce.

(Read also: Snapchat introduces new voice, video chatting features)

Kylie Jenner

As a member of the Kardashian family, Kylie Jenner is a popular figure worth following on Snapchat. She usually posts snaps of her daily life, such as when she is playing with her dogs, singing karaoke or hanging out with her famous sisters. Also, she often shares portraits of herself and her beauty products. In short, Kylie's Snapchat account, @kylizzlemynizzl is always fun to watch.

Chiara Ferragni

Born in 1987, Chiara Ferragni is an Italian blogger and fashion designer. Her renowned website, The Blonde Salad, reportedly attracted 90,000 views daily less than two years after being launched; no wonder she was named the most influential personality in the international fashion world by The Business of Fashion. On her Snapchat account, @chiaraferragni, she often shares her daily activities and fashion items from shoes to awesome outfits.

Andori Andriani

Better known as Dorippu, Andori Andriani is a graphic designer who currently lives in Japan. On her website, she often presents insights into her interesting daily life and fun travel stories to destinations in Japan. Similarly, her Snapchat account, @dorippu, is filled with her busy schedule of activities in Japan.

(Read also: Indonesian foodies you should follow on Instagram)

Xia Xue

Wendy Cheng, better known as Xia Xue, is one of Singapore's most popular bloggers. She writes about her daily life, fashion and beauty. While sharing her views, she is considered to be honest; so much so that it can end in controversy. At her Snapchat account, @TheXiaXue, she usually posts aspects of her daily life, such as her job, beauty products, fashion and her family, which includes her adorable son Dashiel. (kes)
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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Mere weeks after her high-profile split with DJ Calvin Harris, pop star Taylor Swift has been caught on camera kissing British actor, Tom Hiddleston.

The pair were photographed near Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island close to Swift's mansion. They appeared to be enjoying a romantic afternoon together and were sighted getting cozy on the rocks at the beach. Swift was photographed resting her head against Hiddleston's shoulder.

EXCLUSIVE: Pics of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston's secret romance only in The Sun today https://t.co/4BNYxZDKLB pic.twitter.com/KrBPGAuNEA  The Sun (@TheSun) June 16, 2016

There are rumours that the romantic getaway was just a publicity stunt. The photo was sold exclusively to The Sun and the photographer's identity has yet to surface .

(Read also: Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris break up after 15 months)

Swift and Hiddleston became aquainted at the MET Gala on May 4. The duo were caught on camera dancing together at the event, and were sitting next to each other. In an interview with MTV, Hiddleston spoke highly of Swift, saying she's "charming and amazing".

A video posted by Carlos Souza (@carlossouza1311) on May 3, 2016 at 6:28am PDT

Various media outlets have reported that Swift's ex, Calvin Harris, has deleted every photo he ever took with Swift and unfollowed her on Twitter. The couple dated for 15 months and claim to have ended their relationship amicably, with no third party involved. (asw)
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Linkedin Khristian Ibarrola (Inquirer.net/Asia News Network)  Thu, June 16, 2016

The demonic nun who spooked everyone off their seats in Conjuring 2 has found a new film to haunt.

Coming of the success of the supernatural film over the weekend, the studio behind the Conjuring franchise, New Line Cinema, will be thrusting the malevolent villain into the limelight with her own feature film, entitled The Nun.

Orphan writer David Leslie Johnson will reportedly pen the nun-centric spin-off, while Conjuring alumni James Wan and Peter Safran are set to produce, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

(Read also: Exclusive: Patrick Wilson tells behind-the-scenes tales of The Conjuring 2)

Interestingly enough, the hostile nun, whose name was revealed as Valek in the latter part of the film, did not even exist up until bout three months before Conjuring 2 opened in cinemas.

I felt like I was still discovering it [the character]. And believe it or not, I always knew that I was going to do additional photography, Wan was quoted as saying in an earlier report with Inquisitr.com. So I was saving it because I was hoping Id discover what that thing would look like as I was putting the movie together in post-production.

The studio was ready to release the original version with a demonic entity with horns as its primary antagonist, up until Wan was struck by a revelation in the last minute. The director came up with a new concept involving a demon nun, which he then pitched to New Line.

Despite the sudden change, the studio approved and the art piece that Patrick Wilsons character is painting in one of the scenes was altered digitally from the horned fiend to the demon nun.

The frantic character played a large role in the sequel as a malicious being that attacked Vera Farmigas character Lorraine Warren several times, as well as the British family which the film is centered around.

(Read also: Director James Wan wants you to bring a date to 'The Conjuring 2')

The planned spin-off is not a first for the supernatural thriller franchise, as the 2014 worldwide hit Annabelle was born directly from the success of The Conjuring, where the demon-possessed doll played a central figure in the film. New Line has also slated an Annabelle sequel for 2017.

Meanwhile, the Conjuring 2 debuted as the number one film in North America over the weekend, while also topping internationally outside of China.

The movie has already grossed over $100 million worldwide in five days of release.
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Linkedin Mike Stobbe (Associated Press) New York, United States  Thu, June 16, 2016

Women infected with the Zika virus late in their pregnancies had babies with no apparent birth defects, according to a study in Colombia that seems to confirm that the greatest risk to infants comes early in pregnancy.

But the study also found troubling cases of severe birth defects in babies born to women who never realized they had contracted Zika.

"You're not out of the woods if you don't have symptoms," said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University infectious diseases expert who was not involved in the research.

Ever since a Zika virus outbreak in Brazil was linked to severe birth defects late last year, health experts have been trying to understand when developing fetuses are most vulnerable and whether fetuses are at risk if the mother is infected but never experiences symptoms.

Of 1,850 Zika-infected pregnant women the authors tracked, about a third caught the virus late in pregnancy, during the third trimester. Most of those women have given birth, and no cases of microcephaly or brain abnormalities were seen in any of their babies, the researchers found.

The Zika virus is spread mainly through the bite of a tropical mosquito. Most people infected never develop symptoms. Others get a fever, rash, joint pain, or red eyes, and recover within a week.

Brazil, which has suffered the largest outbreak of Zika, has had more than 500 cases of Zika-linked microcephaly, a severe birth defect in which a baby's skull is much smaller than expected because the brain hasn't developed properly.

Disease experts have been watching to see if the epidemic would play out in Colombia, Brazil's northern neighbor, in similar fashion.

(Read also: Still many questions about Zika's threat to pregnant women)

The study's authors call the report "preliminary" and most of the women followed by researchers were still pregnant at the time the report was completed. Researchers want to track both the pregnancies and the children who have already been born, said Margaret Honein, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was one of the authors of the study. It's possible, she said, that the babies may still develop problems.

And Colombian officials have only been reporting on live births. They have not said how many Zika-affected pregnancies developed birth defects but ended in stillbirth, miscarriage or abortion.

It's not surprising that infections later in pregnancy did not lead to apparent defects, because experts know that Zika and other viral infections early in pregnancy are more likely to cause defects like microcephaly, said Dr. Neil Silverman, a UCLA professor of obstetrics who has been advising the California Department of Public Health on Zika issues.

He said the total number of defects out of Colombia appear to be surprisingly low, however. Colombia saw only four confirmed Zika-related microcephaly cases between August and April, when the study was conducted. Two more have been reported since then.

The researchers don't know at what trimester the mothers of the four microcephaly cases were, because none of the women experienced symptoms, Honein said.

That means that while it is unlikely, a third trimester infection could not be completely ruled out in each of those cases.

It also "really heightens our concern" that even women who don't feel sick can pass a Zika infection to their babies, and the babies can develop defects, Honein said. Most Zika-caused birth defects have been reported in mothers who said they developed Zika symptoms while they were pregnant.

The study was conducted by Colombian and American health officials, tracking reports of Zika infections and of birth defects seen between early last August and early April. It was published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

___

AP reporters Cesar Garcia in Bogota and Jenny Barchfield in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) United Nations  Wed, June 15 2016

The UN General Assembly has elected three Indonesian diplomats for top positions in its major committees, the Indonesian permanent representative to the UN said in a release on Tuesday.

The 70th Session of the General Assembly, held on Monday at the UN headquarters in New York, named Indonesian permanent representative to the UN Dian Triansyah Djani as the chairman of the Economic and Financial Committee. Dian will lead the committee for a one-year tenure starting in September this year.

The assembly also agreed to appoint Kamapradipta Isnomo as vice chairman of the Disarmament and International Security Committee; and Masni Eriza as vice chairman of the Social, Cultural and Humanitarian Committee.

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Linkedin Hans Nicholas Jong (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, June 15 2016

Decades of uncontrolled urbanization has led to mounting problems in cities across the country as urban populations keep spreading, resulting in people being unable to reap the benefits of urbanization.

Indonesias urbanization is among the fastest in the world, increasing the size of its urban land from 2000 to 2010 by more than 1,100 square kilometers  second in size only to China.

In terms of population, Indonesias urban population grew 4.4 percent per year between 1960 and 2013, compared with 3.6 percent in China and 3 percent in India.

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Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, June 15 2016

Appearing on television mostly as part of violent brawls or chaotic evictions, Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) officers seem to have garnered a largely bad reputation.

What the public dont see is that we constantly receive various threats, as well as verbal and physical resistance, when carrying out our duties. This is what usually triggers the brawls, Tanah Abang Satpol PP unit head Santosa Manpol told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

The brawls are mostly caused by other parties, however the blame is always put on us he said.

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Linkedin David McFadden (Associated Press) Port-Au-Prince, Haiti  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Caribbean boasts two new shark sanctuaries as the Cayman Islands and St. Maarten on Wednesday declared their territorial waters covering some 49,190 square miles (119,631 square kilometres) closed to all commercial shark fishing.

During a three-day shark conservation meeting in the Dutch Caribbean country of St. Maarten, the popular diving destinations announced protected areas for the endangered marine predators along with officials from Pew Charitable Trusts and billionaire ocean advocate Richard Branson.

The two new protected areas for sharks in the Caribbean brings the global number to 14, according to Pew, a Philadelphia-headquartered nonprofit that has worked with governments around the world since 2009 to establish shark sanctuaries.

Half of the protected zones for sharks are now in the Caribbean. And the islands of Grenada and Curacao are vowing to pass legislation to create sanctuaries in their waters as well.

Virgin Group founder Branson applauded the Caribbean governments for creating new protected areas and he encouraged other nations and territories to follow suit to establish a region-wide shark sanctuary in the region of scattered islands that has 10 percent of the world's coral reefs and over 1,000 species of fish and marine mammals.

"The bold action taken by Caribbean governments to fully protect sharks in their waters is truly commendable," Branson said in an email.

Pew said other regional shark and ray sanctuaries have been created in the Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Honduras, Saba and Bonaire.

Luke Warwick, director of Pew's global shark conservation campaign, said sharks play a critical role in maintaining the health of marine ecosystems. He said catching the top predators for their fins, liver oil, cartilage and other parts can have serious impacts on "more commercially significant fish species and the overall health of the marine environment."

The slow-growing creatures are a far cry from the insatiable human-killing machines portrayed in some movies, he said.

"Sharks pose little danger to humans, but they do support profitable dive and snorkel tourism worldwide wherever they are still found in significant numbers," Warwick told The Associated Press.

Irania Arrindell, St. Maarten's minister of tourism and economic affairs, agreed. In a statement, she said the newly declared shark sanctuary will help to ensure that local shark populations "exist for future generations and continue to benefit St. Maarten's marine ecosystem and ecotourism."

Roughly 100 million sharks are killed every year and Pew states that without strong action worldwide species could vanish in coming decades.

It wasn't immediately clear precisely how Cayman and St. Maarten intends to enforce the rules of the sanctuaries. But Warwick said trainings for law enforcement, port officials, and customs personnel will be conducted "to ensure that these essential new laws are fully enforced."
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama on Thursday praised National Police chief candidate Tito Karnavian , describing Tito as a smart and brave police officer.

Tito has shown his quality through his ability to secure the capital. Tito is a suitable police chief. He has doctorate degree and his reputation is acknowledged overseas. I'm not even as smart as him," Ahok said at City Hall on Thursday.

Ahok, who called Tito his friend, also praised Tito's experience when he became Papua police chief in 2012. Tito was welcomed by Papuans and succeeded in handling a variety of conflicts in the region while he served there.

Tito and Ahok's friendship was visible throughout Tito's tenure as Jakarta police chief. Tito always backed up the city administration, including during the eviction of the Kalijodo red-light district in North Jakarta in February.

Thousands of police and military officers were sent to support workers to demolish state-land occupied houses that occupy. "I wouldn't have been brave enought to carry out that eviction without support from Tito," Ahok said back in March. (bbn)
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Linkedin Corry Elyda (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnamas move to hand over infrastructure projects, such as the development of low-cost apartments, parks, roads, embankments and pump houses for rivers, to private companies for committing violations has raised questions in terms of accountability.

The involvement of the private entities in public infrastructure projects varies, from the additional contribution of permits for reclamation projects in Jakarta Bay, the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, to constructing infrastructure for violating the building floor coefficient (KLB) regulation.

Many, however, have also lauded Ahoks action, self-proclaimed as Jakarta Preman Resmi (Official Jakarta Thug), for improving public facilities using funds from private firms.

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Linkedin Anggi M. Lubis and Ina Parlina (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

The ASEAN-China meeting, which was supposed to bring the two sides closer together, ended in disarray, with no joint statement issued at the end of the meeting, suggesting the associations unity is in peril.

The meeting was aimed at discussing preparations for the 25th anniversary of ASEAN-Chinese relations in September and at reviewing previous and ongoing initiatives to pave the way for broader cooperation.

However, the talks ended in confusion when they touched on the current tensions in the South China Sea. A press conference that was supposed to be held after the meeting, as is the custom at ASEAN ministerial meetings, was called off.

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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Publicly listed company Charoen Pokphand Indonesia voiced increasing confidence with regard to the 2016 business year, explaining that the stable rupiah will help to reduce the cost of importing soybeans from the US.

Charoen Indonesia finance director Ong Mei Sian said most of the companys revenue arose from its poultry feed business, which amounts to 76 percent of the companys annual revenue. Aside from corn, soybeans are the main raw material used by the company for its products.

"Half of our cost is due to foreign currency. We booked Rp 500 billion [US$37.32 million] in losses due to currency fluctuation. We are more positive this year as the rupiah has been stable," he told thejakartapost.com on Wednesday.

In the first quarter of the year, poultry feed contributed Rp 5.5 trillion of the companys Rp 9.2 trillion total revenue. Meanwhile the day-old chicks business, unaffected by currency fluctuation, contributed Rp 1.2 trillion during the period.

"Our food and beverage business is still small. It only contributed Rp 811 billion in sales. As this business started in October 2015, we estimate the contribution will continue to be around one percent for the first three-years," said Charoen Indonesia president director Tjiu Thomas Effendy.

The companys sales in the first quarter rose 22.7 percent (yoy) while net income increased 5.2 percent to Rp 946 billion. Charoen Indonesia targets 15 percent sales growth in 2016. (ags)
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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Publicly listed poultry firm Charoen Pokphand Indonesia has announced Rp 475 billion (US$35.46 million) of dividend, almost double last years payout of Rp 295.1 billion.

The dividend equals to Rp 29 per share, a 60 percent increase compared to the Rp 18 per share dividend in 2015. The dividend payout ratio also rose to 25.89 percent of net income, compared to last years ratio of 16.9 percent.

"We also announced Rusmin Riyadi as the new vice president commissioner and I, who was previously a commissioner, have been appointed president director," said Charoen Indonesia president director Tjiu Thomas Effendy on Wednesday during a press conference in Jakarta.

The previous vice president commissioner Jialipto Jiaravanon died in October 2015. Jialipto, an Indonesian citizen, is a member of the third generation of the Chearavanont family, which controls the Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand Group, as well as the nephew of the groups CEO, Dhanin Chearavanont.

The company has allocated Rp 1 trillion capital expenditure (capex) for this year, half of the 2015 capex, as the firm still had a carried-over capex from last years allocation.

"Our facilities are in good condition as well. In the first quarter, we spent Rp 200 billion of expenditure. The capex is fully financed by our internal cash," Charoen Indonesia finance director Ong Mei Sian told thejakartapost.com. (ags)
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Linkedin Dylan Amirio (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016





Time to redistribute: Poultry company Charoen Pokphand Indonesia director Eddy Dharmawan Mansjoer (from left to right), independent commissioner Suparman Sastrodimedjo, president director Tjiu Thomas Effendy, independent commissioner Herman Sugianto, director Ong Mei Sian and director Ferdiansyah Gunawan Tjoe chat after a press conference after the companys shareholders meeting in Jakarta on Wednesday. Charoen Pokphand Indonesia has given out Rp 29 dividend per share or a total of Rp 475.5 billion, up 16.9 percent from last year. (JP/Jerry Adiguna)

Animal feed producer and poultry firm PT Charoen Pokphand Indonesia plans to strengthen its presence in second-tier cities to tap new growth potential.



Charoen president director Tjiu Thomas Effendy said on Wednesday that the company would focus on markets outside of large cities to boost consumption.



Consumption of chicken in regional areas may still be relatively low compared to larger cities, but the economy is now more spread out rather than centered on cities. So we feel that the potential is there. People outside of large cities need protein, too, Thomas said.



Thomas was only named the publicly listed firms president director during the shareholders annual general meeting on the same day. He served as deputy president commissioner prior to Wednesdays announcement.



In addition to focusing on smaller markets, Charon will continue to diversify its business portfolio by strengthening its beverage sector. Charoen now manages the Fiesta brand, which primarily deals with processed chicken meat, but has recently entered the beverage market with a range of bottled teas.



Most of the companys beverages are produced at the companys central factory in Pandaan, East Java. Despite wanting to strengthen the beverage segment, Charoen has no immediate plans to construct a separate factory for the purpose.



Once the beverage segment is significant enough to our revenue, we may set up a plant. Maybe in the next three years, but I think even in three years, the contribution will still be minimal. After all, our entire food product segment still only contributed 9 percent in the last 10 years, he elaborated.



Charoens revenue still primarily relies on the sale of poultry feed and day-old chicks (DOC). In the first quarter of 2016, poultry feed contributed 59 percent to the companys revenue and poultry farming contributed 29 percent.



There are also no plans to build other factories, as the company wants to focus on improving the efficiency of existing operations.



It hopes that overall sales will rise by 15 percent year-on-year (yoy) to Rp 34.62 trillion (US$2.58 billion) in 2016. Net profits are seen to increase by 17 to 18 percent yoy to around Rp 2.16 trillion, thanks in part to an expected strengthening of the rupiah.



Charoen is looking to use 60 percent of its Rp 1.1 trillion capital expenditure in 2016 for maintenance, such as upgrading processing plants. The rest will be disbursed for the development of its recently established beverage segment.



As of June, the firm has invested roughly Rp 400 billion of the earmarked capex.

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Linkedin Anton Hermansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Salim Groups decision to enter the poultry feed business in Indonesia in a bid to expand has yet to deter publicly listed poultry firm Charoen Pokphand Indonesia -- whom currently holds 34 percent of the market share.

Charoen Indonesia voiced optimism that its parent company, Charoen Pokhand Group will support the company, especially in terms of technology. The Thailand-based conglomerate is currently one of the biggest poultry business players in the world.

"We have not prepared any special strategy to anticipate their entrance into the market. We welcome newcomers in the competition," said Charoen Pokphand Indonesia president Director Tjiu Thomas Effendy on Wednesday.

In December 2015, Salim Group purchased a controlling stake in Malaysia-based poultry firm CAB Cakaran Bhd. The conglomerate, through its shell company Plant Wealth Holdings Ltd, took 11.05 percent of shares in Cakaran.

It plans to form a joint-venture in Indonesia this year. "Our Malaysian partner will do the technology transfer, while Indofood will support the operations," Salim Group Chairman Anthoni Salim told thejakartapost.com recently.

While Charoen is strong in poultry feed and day-old chicks, its poultry-based food business is low. This opens a door for Salim, as the big player in food industry, to enter especially as Salim has 35.8 percent shares in Fast Food Indonesia, the license-holder for the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Indonesia. (ags)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Jakarta will kick off the construction of venues for the 2018 Asian Games  namely a velodrome and horse riding facilities -- on June 22, when the city celebrate its 489th anniversary.

We will carry out the groundbreaking of a velodrome and equestrian facilities as well as the light rail transit (LRT) on Jakartas birthday, Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat said at City Hall on Thursday.

The administration aimed to finish the construction of those venues in February 2018 as the Asian Games would take place from Aug. 18 to Sep. 2, Djarot said, adding that the construction of the equestrian facilities would finish earlier to accommodate the horses of the racers.

Djarot added that the arenas, which would be constructed by city-owned property developer PT Jakarta Propertindo (Jakpro), would meet international standards and be equipped with world-class facilities.

The racetrack will be constructed according to designs of British company ES Global, while the construction of velodrome will be monitored by Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI).

Currently, Jakpro is waiting for approval on the design for the horse racetrack from the Equestrian Federation of Indonesia (EFI) before continuing the construction. (bbn)
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Linkedin Words Ni Komang Erviani Photos Agung Parameswara (The Jakarta Post)  Thu, June 16 2016

The powerful and rhythmic beat from the Balinese marching band Ketug Bumi brightened the area around Renon field as soon as President Joko Jokowi Widodo hit the traditional wooden kulkul bell marking the opening of the much-awaited, greatest arts festival on the island  the month-long Bali Arts Festival.



A remarkable performance of the Siwa Natharaja dance by Indonesian Fine Arts Institute (ISI) Denpasar followed Ketug Bumi, bringing cheer to the thousands of people who flocked the area where the art street parade was taking place, seemingly without care for the bright sun overhead. The Siwa Natharaja dance is the official symbol of the annual Bali Arts Festival. According to Hindu mythology, the whole universe was created by Lord Shiva performing a dance, thus underlining the importance of arts in the Hindu belief system.



The ISI Denpasar performance was only the beginning of the festivities. The richness of Balinese arts and culture was well displayed in a colorful street presentation by thousands of artists from across Bali and beyond, all encircling the Bajra Sandhi monument, a museum built in the form of a giant genta  the sacred bell used by Hindu high priests.



Klungkung regency started the parade, displaying its signature double woven cloth from Nusa Penida islet, cepuk rangrang, while presenting the heroic history of the Klungkung people in a fragment from the 1849 Kusamba war against the Dutch. Other regencies followed in the street parade, all displaying their signature identities, from their best Balinese attire to dances and souvenirs.



In addition to participants from across Bali, the street parade also featured performances from other Indonesian provinces, such as East Nusa Tenggara, and overseas, including France and India.



The French delegation in this years 38th Bali Arts Festival also marked the closing of Printemps Francais 2016, a French art festival being held across Indonesia since last month, while performing a giant puppet show of Les Grandes Persones.



For me, the Bali Arts Festival is not solely a peoples party or an arts festival. It is also an event that has a cultural function, an educational function, and the function of driving the community economy, especially that of the Balinese community, Jokowi said in his speech.



The Bali Arts Festival was first held in 1979, when then Bali governor Ida Bagus Mantra decided the government should provide the space and funding to promote local culture and nurture an aesthetic community.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Customs and Excise Directorate General has announced that it managed to foil an alleged illegal import of seven containers, loaded with 163.5 tons of beef innards from Australia and New Zealand, at Tanjung Priok port in North Jakarta.

Heru Pambudi, the Customs and Excise director general, said importer PT CSUB attempted to deceive customs officers by submitting import documentation explaining that the containers they had imported contained monosodium phosphate, a substance usually added to cattle feed.

"They filed an import request on May 21. The information we collected and a tip-off led us to uncovering the containers actually having something else, Heru was quoted as saying by kompas.com on Thursday.

According to him, the company imported five types of innards: frozen beef heart, liver, neck trim, kidneys and lungs, worth Rp 3.5 billion (US$262,664).

Heru said PT CSUB claimed that it was the first time for the company to have had illegally imported goods.

"Currently, we are questioning five people involved in the case, Heru said. (dmr)
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Linkedin Farida Susanty (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Indonesias largest low-cost carrier, Lion Air, has confirmed that it has been given the green light to fly to Europe after almost a decade of being banned from the continent.

"It's true," Lion Air operational director Daniel Putut told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Similar confirmation was also given by the airline's general affairs director, Edward Sirait.

Indonesian airlines had been banned from European airports since 2007, the same year that US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) downgraded the country's aviation safety to category 2, stating that the country lacked regulations necessary to oversee air carriers in accordance with minimum international safety standards.

The ban on national flag carrier Garuda Indonesia was lifted years ago and it now flies to London, among other cities. (dmr)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

The government is bracing for the movement of around 26 million homeward-bound travelers in the lead up to Idul Fitri, which is expected to fall in the first week of July.

The Transportation Ministry, currently doing preparatory checks, said the travelers would use either private cars or public transportation including buses, railways, planes and boats.

Since June 1, we have had several officials conducting inspections at airports, train stations, bus terminals and ports to ensure all of transportation systems are ready for the Idul Fitri exodus, the ministrys special public information officer Hadi Mustofa Djuraid told The Jakarta Post in a telephone interview.

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Linkedin Fedina S. Sundaryani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

It seems like the significant fall in global energy prices does not only cause the authorities headaches. It also allows the government to improve budget efficiency through cutting fuel subsidies, a policy that could easily trigger a public outcry under normal circumstances.



But low global oil prices  with Brent crude currently trading near US$50 per barrel compared to US$110 per barrel in mid-2014  cannot be considered normal, giving the government a window of opportunity to shape up amid the revision of this years state budget.



In anticipation of continuing low oil prices, the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry has proposed to cut the subsidy for diesel, locally known as Solar, to Rp 350 (3 US cents) per liter from the current

Rp 1,000 per liter in the 2016 revised state budget.



The ministrys director general for oil and gas, IGN Wiratmaja Puja, told reporters that global experts predicted crude oil prices would remain stable for the rest of the year and were unlikely to experience a drastic increase.



Stable global prices, combined with the subsidy slash, are expected to maintain the price of diesel at

Rp 5,150 per liter for several months.



Solar prices will remain the same until September, he said on Tuesday.



As of Wednesday evening, crude of the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) type was traded at $47.84 per barrel, a 0.25 percent increase from $47.72 last month, according to figures from Bloomberg. Meanwhile, fellow benchmark Brent Crude was priced at $49.16 per barrel.



Since 2015, the government has a fixed subsidy for diesel of Rp 1,000 per liter. The subsidy for Premium-brand gasoline has already been reduced, resulting in a significant decline in the overall use of subsidized fuel.



The volume of subsidized fuel sales  mostly diesel and kerosene  now stands at 16.69 million kiloliters, much lower than the previous 46 million kiloliters, which includes Premium. In the proposed revised budget, the anticipated volume is expected to remain unchanged.



The total subsidy for fuel will be cut by 4.2 percent to Rp 97.8 trillion from Rp 102.1 trillion. Meanwhile, a drop by 36.2 percent to Rp 57.2 trillion has been suggested on the subsidy for diesel and 3-kilogram liquid petroleum gas (LPG) canisters.



However, the governments plans may still change, as the House of Representatives Commission VII, which oversees the energy sector, decided in a hearing on Monday that the subsidy for diesel should be capped at Rp 500 per liter. Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Sudirman Said was absent during the hearing.



Meanwhile, Pertamina has expressed doubts over the feasibility of the drastic subsidy cut. Marketing director Ahmad Bambang said the state-owned oil and gas company may experience losses if the subsidy was dropped to Rp 350 per liter while the price remained at Rp 5,150 per liter.



Due to the fluctuating crude prices, Ahmad noted it would be safer to cut the subsidy to Rp 500 per liter, as suggested by Commission VII.



However, the Indonesian Employers Association (Apindo) applauded the governments proposal. Apindo chairman Hariyadi B. Sukamdani told The Jakarta Post that the subsidy cut would not greatly affect companies logistics and transportation costs.



Apindo has always said that the subsidy must be cut gradually or it would continue to be a burden for our state budget, he said.



Even so, Hariyadi noted that the timing of the proposal was off, as news of a subsidy cut during the Ramadhan fasting month and the subsequent Idul Fitri festivities may cause unnecessary panic.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

Wearing helmets and carrying guns, four men robbed a money changer on Jl. Angsana Raya in Kebon Jeruk, West Jakarta, making away with Rp 40 million (US$3,000) and US$4,000 on Wednesday morning.

Kebon Jeruk Police chief Comr. Lambe Patabang Birana said the four perpetrators went to the premises by motorcycle.

Lambe said they burst into the premises wearing helmets and jumped over the counter to confront the cashier. At the time there were two workers  Sunarsih and Bagus  and four customers on the premises.

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Linkedin Matthew Barakat (Associated Press) Alexandria, Va., United States  Thu, June 16, 2016

Twenty-year-old Ardit Ferizi readily admitted his crime: hacking computers to obtain personal data of more than 1,300 US government and military personnel, then turning the data over to the Islamic State group. But he couldn't explain why.

"I don't know myself why I did it," Ferizi told a judge at a hearing Wednesday in US District Court in Alexandria, where he pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists and unauthorized computer access. "I ask myself the same question."

Ferizi, a native of Kosovo, was arrested in Malaysia in October at the request of US authorities, when he was linked to the online moniker "Th3Dir3ctorY." Ferizi's crimes occurred in the summer of 2015 while he was living in Malaysia.

Ferizi admitted hacking the records of a private company and providing names, email passwords and phone numbers of tens of thousands of customers. He then filtered the data to sort out those with email addresses that ended in .gov and .mil. He then gave the information to an Islamic State member named Junaid Hussain.

According to the statement of facts in his plea agreement, Ferizi was aware that the Islamic State would use the information to "hit them hard."

Indeed, in August, the "Islamic State Hacking Division" sent out a message on Twitter warning the "Crusaders" that it would "strike at your necks in your own lands." The tweet came with a 30-page attachment listing the personal data of those 1,300 service members and government workers.

The Justice Department said Ferizi's conviction is the first in which a defendant was convicted on both cyber hacking and terrorism charges.

"Ferizi endangered the lives of over 1,000 Americans," said Dana Boente, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, in a written statement. "Cyber terrorism has become an increasingly prevalent and serious threat here in America, both to individuals and businesses. However, cyber terrorists are no different from other terrorists: No matter where they hide, we will track them down and seek to bring them to the United States to face justice."

Ferizi will be sentenced in September and faces up to 25 years in prison.
(right) chats with his lawyer at the end of his prosecution proceeding in Jakarta on Wednesday. The Jakarta Corruption Court sentenced Nazaruddin to six years in prison and fined him Rp 1 billion (US$75,000) for money laundering and corrupt practices. Presiding judge Ibnu Basuki Widodo declared Nazaruddin guilty of laundering nearly Rp 600 billion. The judges also ordered that Nazaruddins wealth be seized, although several assets were to be returned to him. After hearing the verdict, Nazaruddin said he accepted the verdict and would not appeal. Nazaruddin was charged with accepting a Rp 40 billion bribe from two construction firms for several projects for the education and health ministries during his time as party treasurer and legislator. In April 2012, Nazaruddin was sentenced to four years and 10 months in prison for accepting Rp 4.6 billion linked to the construction of the SEA Games athletes village in South Sumatra.(JP/Wendra Ajistyatama)
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Linkedin Dewanti A. Wardhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

Indonesias latest trade reading reflects a lack of domestic economic activity, posing a threat to the countrys economic recovery.



In May this year, imports  which are an indicator of economic activity  continued to stagnate, according data published by the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) on Wednesday. Valued at a total of US$11.3 billion, imports in May were down 4.12 percent from the same month last year, even after rising 2.98 percent from April.



More concerning, consumer goods imports soared, while imports of raw and auxiliary goods as well as capital goods dropped.



Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) economist Latif Adam considered the drop in capital goods imports worrisome, because that indicator reflected the state of long-term investment and business expansion.



Latif said this proved the governments attempts to support business activity through 12 economic packages to cut red tape and spur investment had not been too fruitful.



Businesses are currently still in a wait and see mode despite the governments efforts. This means the government still has much work to do to prove its commitment to gain businesses trust to invest more, Latif said Wednesday when contacted after the trade data release.



Raw material imports have dropped 12.91 percent year-on-year (yoy) to $40.1 billion in the January-May period, while imports of capital goods plunged 16.68 percent to $8.7 billion. Meanwhile, shipments of consumer goods from overseas rose 14.15 percent to $5 billion in the same period.



Overall, the import figures continue to reflect relatively weak growth in the second quarter of 2016, albeit boosted by the Ramadhan effect, private lender Bank BCA economist David Sumual said in a research note.



Indonesia, which hosts the worlds largest population of Muslims who spend most during Ramadhan and Idul Fitri festivities, expects economic growth to rebound from a six-year low of 4.79 percent in 2015, with the government targeting 5.3 percent growth this year.



BPS deputy head of distribution and statistics Sasmito Hadi Wibowo explained that the increase in consumer goods imports was largely caused by frozen beef and cereal imports ahead of the fasting month to maintain supply and stable prices.



Ahead of Ramadhan, we saw an increase in imports of frozen beef and cereals, he told reporters at his office on Wednesday.



Big imports were also seen on electronics from China, from mobile phones to laptop and desktop computers, Sasmito added.



Wednesdays trade data also showed weakening exports, which dropped by 9.75 percent in May yoy to $11.5 billion.



The countrys trade surplus significantly decreased to $375.6 million in May from $667.2 million in April as imports grew faster than exports.



Indonesias trade with China and Thailand experienced a deficit in May. The deficit with China was caused by high imports in electronics, resulting in a $1.6 billion deficit.



Meanwhile, high sugar imports from Thailand in addition to automotive imports caused a $366 million deficit in bilateral trade. Indonesia also experienced a trade deficit with South Korea ($75.6 million), Australia ($60.5 million) and Germany ($28.7 million).



The government must pay attention to this [high imports] or else it could cause an overall trade deficit in the upcoming months, Sasmito warned.

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Linkedin Fedina S. Sundaryani, Ina Parlina and Prima Wirayani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

Despite the prolonged fluctuation in global energy prices, the government is showing confidence that oil prices will pick up in the following months, providing an opportunity for the countrys energy sector to contribute more to the state coffers.



In a hearing with the House of Representatives budget committee on Wednesday, the government put on the table Indonesian Crude Price (ICP) assumption for the proposed revision of the 2016 state budget at US$40 per barrel. The figure is higher than the $35 projected in the current draft revision and is lower than the $50 mentioned in the 2016 state budget.



ICP moved around $34.5 per barrel on average so far this year, or lower than the current budgets assumption of $50 due to plunging global oil prices, said the Finance Ministrys Fiscal Policy Office (BKF) head, Suahasil Nazara, in the session.



However, he expected the price to move upward in November and December after projected contraction in August to October.



Thus, we estimate that $40 is the realistic price assumption for this year, he said.



For the last two years, global oil prices have been in free-fall from around $110 per barrel of Brent crude in June 2014 to around $40 recently.



On Tuesday, a working meeting at the Houses Commission VII overseeing energy affairs concluded an ICP assumption of $45. However, the government was of the view that the figure was too risky, as it required the price to stay at an average $54 per barrel for the rest of this year. An over-optimistic assumption would pose risks to the countrys revenues target achievement, said Suahasil.



The government remains optimistic that it can pocket Rp 1.5 quadrillion ($109.5 billion) in tax revenues this year as stated in the revised draft 2016 state budget currently being deliberated at the House. The amount is Rp 19.6 trillion lower from the target set in this years state budget due to a lower assumption of oil prices at $35 per barrel, leaving oil and gas tax revenues to drop to Rp 24.3 trillion.



However, the new ICP assumption would cause an increase in the state revenues, Suahasil stated.



Every $1 increase in the ICP would bring an additional Rp 660 billion to state revenue, he told lawmakers.



Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro expressed a similar view, saying the increase in revenues would be decent.



The [oil price] situation will be secured [at $40 on average] until the end of this year, he said after a meeting at the State Palace on Wednesday.



Energy expert Pri Agung Rakhmanto of ReforMiner Institute applauded the governments proposal to increase the assumed crude price. He argued that there was a possibility that crude price could rebound to between $50 and $60 following the recent decision from Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil exporter, to push reform in the energy sector by replacing its longtime oil minister.



However, Pri Agung noted that a drastic increase in global prices was unlikely to happen soon, especially since the EUs economy was on fragile ground while it awaited the UKs decision on whether to remain or exit the economic-political union.



It seems the government does not want to set its sights too high in case it doesnt reach its goals, he said.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Semarang  Thu, June 16 2016

Hundreds of workers of the PT Nyonya Meneer jamu (traditional herbal medicine) factory in Semarang, Central Java, staged a protest on Wednesday, demanding the company pay their January to May monthly salaries.

They also demanded that management pay their daily wages for 13 weeks, meal allowance from February to June and overdue Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) fees from 2012.

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

National Police education and training division (Kalemdikpol) head, Comr.Gen.Syafruddin, has voiced support for his junior, Comr. Gen.Tito Karnavian, to serve as the next National Police chief.

Shortly after Tito was reported to have been appointed by President Joko Jokowi Widodo as the sole candidate for the National Police chief position, Tito visited Syafruddin at his office.

He came to my room. I straightaway saluted him. He is to become National Police chief, Syafruddin said as quoted by kompas.com on Thursday. I have been longing for him to become National Police chief, he went on.

Syafruddin was one of four names, alongside Comr.Gen. Budi Gunawan, Comr.Gen.Budi Waseso, and Comr. Gen. Dwi Priyatno, proposed as police chief candidates by the Rank and Promotion Council for High-Ranking Officers (Wanjakti) and the National Police Commission (Kompolnas). Titos name was not on the list of candidates submitted to President Jokowi.

Syafruddin said it was not difficult for him to salute Tito although Tito was two classes under him. Syafruddin, former adjutant of Vice President Jusuf Kalla, further said he was acquainted with Tito as the latter had been a Second Insp. officer. At that time, Syafruddin and Tito were still on duty with the Jakarta Police. Syafruddin explained that this is how he had become so well-acquainted with Tito, adding that Tito had always worked on his tasks well and was a smart junior.

I personally think Tito is a very reliable junior, very humble and intellectual. He is very eligible to lead the National Police, said Syafruddin.

Thats why I will support him. I will back him up. I really appreciate him, said Syafruddin.

Jokowi appointed Tito as sole National Police chief candidate to replace Gen. Badrodin Haiti who will retire in July. House of Representatives leaders are set to hold a consultation meeting with leaders of political party factions at the House on Thursday. House leaders are also scheduled to hold a plenary meeting to officially announce Titos nomination as National Police chief.

The Houses Commission III overseeing legal affairs will hold a fit and proper test for Tito next Wednesday. (ebf)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Jakarta city administration says it is checking the roadworthiness of intercity and interprovincial buses that would be used to transport people from Jakarta who want to celebrate Idul Fitri in their hometowns.

The inspections are being done to help achieve an ambitious target set by the central government of having zero accidents during the Lebaran exodus, locally known as the mudik tradition.

We have checked 867 of buses in the Pulo Gadung, Kalideres, Kampung Rambutan, Rawamangun bus terminals. The governor has ordered us to check all of the buses, not only samples. We will keep monitoring the buses' roadworthiness until June 24, Transportation Agency head Andri Yansyah said on Thursday.

There are 9,374 buses that will carry passengers during the annual homecoming tradition, Andri added.

The agency has warned bus companies that buses that fail the inspection cannot be used during the holiday season.

On June 24, we will prevent the unworthy buses from operating. We wont care if the buses are supposed to take a lot of passengers. We will ask the bus to stop and the passengers to step down from the bus, Andri said.

Previously, Transportation Minister Ignasius Jonan set the goal to have no bus accidents during the peak travel season from June 24 to July 17. The target is zero, he said in Bogor recently.

However, last year police recorded 2,346 accidents during Idul Fitri, with 497 people killed, 844 severely wounded and more than 3,000 sustaining minor injuries. (bbn)
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Linkedin Satoshi Sugiyama (Associated Press) Urayasu, Japan  Thu, June 16, 2016

A Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at tackling the nation's declining birth rate.

The Japanese city of Urayasu, about 14 kilometers east of Tokyo, is allocating 90 million yen (US$850,000) over three years to fund the research project conducted by Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital.

The hospital hopes that preserving the eggs would encourage women to give birth when they are ready instead of giving up having children.

Iwaho Kikuchi of the hospital said Thursday that using public funds to support this kind of study may be a first in the world.

The average cost of such procedure is around 500,000 to 600,000 yen ($4,700 to $5,700), but a woman will only pay 20 percent of the cost with the subsidy. Women between the age of 25 and 34 who live in Urayasu, also home to Tokyo Disneyland, are eligible to participate.

Kikuchi said 12 women are in the process of starting the freezing process, and about two-thirds of them or their husbands have some sort of health issue.

The success rate of pregnancy from frozen eggs is slim. If a woman freezes eggs at the age of 25, the chance of successfully giving birth is 30 percent. At the age of 34, it drops to 20 percent.

Japan has been struggling to boost the nation's declining birth rate, which would depress the working population and increase the financial burden on them as the baby boomer generation retires.

Urayasu mayor Hideaki Matsuzaki called the low birthrate a national problem.

"In general, pregnancy and childbirth is an individual issue. But when the situation has become this far, I consider it a social problem," Matsuzaki said. "I view using public expenditure as the right thing to do."
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo said on Thursday that the next police chief should focus on battling drug trafficking, terrorism and corruption.

The President has nominated Comr. Gen. Tito Karnavian, who is a highly educated officer, to lead the National Police.

Tito, who is currently the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) chief, has been proposed to replace current National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti. If Titos nomination is approved by the House of Representatives, the 51-year-old terrorism expert will be the youngest person to head the National Police in the past three decades.

The President sent a nomination letter on Wednesday to the House proposing the Ph.D. holder on terrorism studies replace the existing National Police chief.

"Before the nomination, I got feedback from many parties," Jokowi said. (dan)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Komunitas Kretek or the Clove Cigarette Community has rejected any call for ratifying the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), saying that Indonesia would lose its own cultural heritage if the government ratifies it.

Indonesia has its tobacco product called kretek, which has its own uniqueness with a blend of tobacco and clove. Ratifying the convention means that the government would deny its own cultural heritage, Alfa Gumilang, the general secretary of Komunitas Kretek said on Thursday.

Earlier on Thursday, the National Coalition of Civil Society for Tobacco Control called on President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to ratify the convention as a strategic step and argued that it was in the best interest of the nation. WHO FCTC ratification would be of benefit to Indonesia's future, said Ifdhal Kasim, a coordinator of the coalition.

The convention contains several provisions regarding smoke-free areas, packaging and labeling, pricing and taxing, and prohibition of advertising and promotions, including through sponsorship.

Alfa warned that the WHO FCTC also regulated the standardization of all tobacco products, including its ingredients and level of tar and nicotine.

One of the articles in the convention urges the government to implement tobacco diversification plans, which could damage the economic well-being of tobacco farmers across the country, he said.

Modifying agricultural traditions is also not easy, as it has existed for hundreds of years. Besides, it would affect farmers market access, Alfa said. (vps/bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) will probe recent information alleging that Teman Ahok (Friends of Ahok) received billions in funds from reclamation project developers, the KPK chairman said on Wednesday.

KPK received information alleging that Rp 30 billion was provided to Teman Ahok, KPK chairman Agus Rahardjo said. Teman Ahok is a group of volunteers helping Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama in his bid to run as an independent candidate in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election.

KPK plan to issue an investigation letter to confirm the information.

"We have already established the direction of [the investigation], who we will question to delve deeper into the allegation" Agus said on Wednesday as quoted by kompas.com.

KPK deputy chairman Laode M. Syarief also said the commission was taking the allegation seriously, adding that investigators were currently studying the information.

House of Representatives' commission III lawmaker overseeing legal affairs, Junimart Girsang, first announced that information had been received regarding allegations of cash flow from developers to Teman Ahok during a KPK hearing on Wednesday.

However, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) politician refused to mention his source of information, claiming to have documents proving the allegation. In the hearing Junimart told KPK that Rp 30 billion had been channeled to Teman Ahok from a developer through Ahok's aide Sunny Tanuwidjaja and political consultant firm Cyrus Network.

Sunny has been questioned as a witness several times by the KPK over the bribery case involving the discussion of reclamation bylaw drafts in the Jakarta city council. KPK had named city councilor Muhammad Sanusi, Ariesman Widjaja, president director of property giant Agung Podomoro Land, and his employee Trinanda Prihantoro as suspects in the bribery case. (rin)
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Linkedin Ayomi Amindoni (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti has supported the nomination of National Counterterrorism Agency head Comr. Gen. Tito Karnavian as his successor.

According to him, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's recommendation that Tito lead the force would not divide the institution, although at 51 years old, Tito was younger than other eligible police generals.

"I think everybody acknowledges his excellence [] I'm sure Tito's experience has been taken into consideration," Badrodin said at the State Palace in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Earlier, House of Representatives speaker Ade Komarudin confirmed that he had received Jokowi's letter nominating Tito as the sole candidate for the National Police chief position. The House will hold a plenary meeting to conclude the nomination process.

Tito has held the top position at the National Counterterrorism Agency since March this year.

He is the first among the 1987 police academy batch to hold a three-star police rank, which would make him the youngest ever chief of the National Police. (ags)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

The Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a death-row inmate on Wednesday by deciding that a law that limits clemency appeals to within a year after a verdict is invalid.

Article 7, paragraph 2 of the 2010 Clemency Law is not legally binding because it conflicts with the Constitution, Constitutional Court chief justice, Arief Hidayat, said while reading the ruling on Wednesday.

Article 14, paragraph 1 of the Constitution gives the president total prerogative to grant clemency and does not mention a time limit for clemency appeals.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Banda Aceh  Thu, June 16 2016

The Indonesian government has said it will not take in 44 Sri Lankan refugees who have been stranded in Aceh waters for the last few days.

Well pull their boat into international waters when the weather improves, Deputy Aceh Governor Muzakir Manaf said at the site of the stranded Sri Lankan boat on Wednesday.

The Aceh immigration office has refused to allow the refugees, who say that they are en route to Australia, to dock at the Aceh port.

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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Indonesia is committed to taking a holistic approach in its push for an immediate settlement of human rights cases in Papua, Coordinating Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said on Thursday.

Luhut, who flew to Papua on Wednesday night and will be in the province until Saturday, plans to meet with all stakeholders, including religious leaders, students, military and police personnel, and NGOs to prove the country's commitment to settling the issue.

"The government wants to show the world that we are serious and accountable and [will resolve these cases] without any deception," Luhut said in a statement.

An integrated team responsible for investigating and analyzing alleged rights abuse cases in Papua, formed in May by Luhut, has concluded that from the 22 cases that were investigated, three constitute human rights violations and those three are currently in the process of being settled, Luhut said.

The three are the 2014 Paniai shooting, the 2001 Wamena incident and the 2003 Wasior incidents.

Confirming a statement made by National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) commissioner Nur Kholis, Luhut said a plenary meeting of the commission had agreed to create a task force that included Komnas HAM commissioners that would assist the government in resolving the cases.

New Zealand Ambassador to Indonesia Trevor Matheson, Solomon Islands Ambassador to Indonesia Salana Kalu, Fijian Ambassador S.T. Cavuilati and Papua New Guinean Ambassador Peter Ilau also presented as witnesses of Indonesia's efforts in Papua, Luhut said.

The results of the investigation carried out by the integrated team will be submitted to President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) central executive board legal division head, Trimedya Panjaitan, has said that his party was surprised by President Joko Jokowi Widodos decision to appoint Comr.Gen.Tito Karnavian as sole candidate for the National Police chief position.

The lawmaker said Titos name was not on the list of National Police chief candidates proposed by either the Rank and Promotion Council for High-Ranking Officers (Wanjakti) or the National Police Commission (Kompolnas).

Titos name was not listed among the names they provided. Thats why we were surprised, Trimedya said as quoted by kompas.com on Thursday.

The deputy chairman of the House of Representatives Commission III overseeing legal affairs further said Wanjakti had proposed Comr.Gen.Budi Gunawan, Comr.Gen.Budi Waseso and Comr.Gen.Dwi Priyatno as National Police chief candidates.

Kompolnas agreed with the three candidates proposed by Wanjakti. However, as the Presidential Palace asked the commission to propose one more alternative candidate it sent one more name: Comr.Gen.Syafruddin.

Trimedya said he was surprised that, after the four names were submitted, Jokowi had selected Tito.

I know it is the prerogative right of the President [to select a police chief candidate]. But why then did Wanjakti need to conduct a selection process? For what reason did Kompolnas need to carry out a screening process? said Trimedya.

Regarding whether or not the PDI-P would accept Jokowis proposal, he said the party would first monitor Titos test results at Houses Commission III. If Tito could impress PDI-P through his vision and mission, the party would likely accept his nomination, he added.

However, if Tito failed in the fit and proper test, it was not an impossibility for PDI-P to reject his nomination and ask Jokowi to recommend a new candidate.

Earlier, National Police chief Gen.Badrodin Haiti admitted Jokowi had asked him for his input regarding police chief candidates. Badrodin said he had offered several names and one of them was Tito.

Jokowi showed interest in Titos achievements during his career with the National Police, especially in handling extraordinary crimes, Badrodin further explained.

House leaders are set to hold a consultation meeting with leaders of political party factions at the House on Thursday. The House leaders are also scheduled to hold a plenary meeting to officially announce Titos nomination as National Police chief.

The Houses Commission III is set to hold a fit and proper test for Tito on Wednesday. (ebf)
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Linkedin Ganug Nugroho Adi, Arya Dipa and Djemi Amnifu (The Jakarta Post) Surakarta/Bandung/Semarang/Kupang/Batam/Palu/Surabaya/Yogyakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

While most regional administrations threw their support behind President Joko Jokowi Widodos decision to annul over 3,000 bylaws considered to hamper investment, they also said they would keep protecting the interests of locals.

The administrations agree with efforts to lure more investment in a bid to drive the economy. But, they also require the central government to accommodate the interests of locals.

Surakarta Legislative Council (DPRD) member Putut Gunawan, for example, says the development of a factory in a certain area needs to be regulated with a bylaw because the presence of a factory would certainly have an environmental, social and economic impact on its surrounding community.

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Linkedin (Associated Press) Beijing  Thu, June 16, 2016

A Taiwanese report says Chinese organizers have canceled an invitation to a children's choir who performed Taiwan's national anthem at last month's inauguration of the island's new president.

The official Central News Agency said the Puzangalan Choir made up of children from Taiwan's native Paiwan aboriginal tribe were due to perform at a festival in southern China's Guangdong province on July 20.

It quoted the choir's musical director Wu Sheng-ying as saying the Chinese organizers informed the choir one week after they appeared at the May 20 inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen, the self-governing island's first female president.

China claims Taiwan as its own territory and regularly retaliates against artists whom it sees as backing the island's independent identity, along with other overseas artists with whom it is displeased.
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Linkedin Iis Gindarsah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

The Indonesian government recently published a new defense white paper. As a general practice, it is an instrument of defense diplomacy for confidence building and conflict prevention among countries. The strategic document is an important reference for the regional defense policy community to understand the future direction of a countrys defense policy and military development.

In that sense, the new white paper highlights four key issues of Indonesias defense policymaking. First, given the growing importance of peace and stability at sea, it incorporates the notion of the country being a global maritime fulcrum (GMF) in defense planning. One interpretation of the strategic concept suggests that the GMF represents a national aspiration to redefine the countrys geopolitical role as both a gateway and a gatekeeper of the increasingly interconnected Indian and Pacific oceans.

While rebuilding its maritime culture and archipelagic connectivity, repositioning Indonesias strategic role ultimately entails the development of maritime defense with a focus on green-water navy capabilities.

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Linkedin Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

A global higher education index has found Indonesia is lagging behind ASEAN neighbors in academic excellence as the country is represented by only two higher education institutions on the list of Asias 100 most reputable universities.

Conducted by education rating institution Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and released Tuesday, the QS University Rankings: Asia listed 11 Indonesian universities among the 350 best campuses in Asia this year.

Unfortunately, none came close to competing with institutions from Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, which all had institutions placed higher in the annual ranking.

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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Jakarta Anti-Corruption Court judges have ordered the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) to seize assets worth Rp 550 billion (US$ 41.3 million) from former Democratic party treasurer Muhammad Nazaruddin.

Presiding judge Ibnu Basuki Widodo told the court to confiscate Rp 550 billion in assets on behalf of the state after the court found Nazaruddin guilty of money laundering and sentenced the former politician to serve six years in prison and ordered him to pay a Rp 1 billion fine on Wednesday.

The decision is lower than the Rp 600 billion originally demanded by prosecutors. The judges decided to return Rp 50 billion in assets to Nazaruddin, including oil palm plantations in Riau, an apartment in Rasuna Said, insurance, a bank account, a watch, and a house at Alam Sutera, Tangerang. According to Ibnu, those assests did not relate to the corruption case and had been obtained by Nazaruddin before he served as a lawmaker, Ibu said.

Nazaruddin was charged with accepting kickbacks from construction firm PT Duta Graha Indah and PT Nindya Karya in relation to several projects for the education and health ministries.

Nazaruddin said after the trial that he would not file for an appeal. (rin)
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Linkedin Wahyoe Boediwardhana (The Jakarta Post) Malang, East Java  Thu, June 16, 2016

The search for a missing hiker from Switzerland continued on Thursday, on which day a search and rescue (SAR) team flew a drone over the areas of Mount Semeru suspected to be the last known positions of the man.

The drone, which was just brought from Jakarta, can fly for about four hours and it is equipped with infrared cameras, which can be used to take photos and videos, said Budi Mulyanto, an official from the Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park (TNBTS).

He said no sign of the Swiss hiker had been found in the search, which entered its eighth day on Wednesday. The results are nil. Divided into eight groups, the search officers have focused their operations at the Blank 75 area, Mount Boto, Ranu Kuning, Punuk and Tempuk waterfalls, the Coban Tompe area, Sumbermani, Watuklosot, Kalimati, and Arcopodo, Budi told thejakartapost.com.

He said the SAR headquarters in Jakarta had also dispatched a team of 10 elite personnel to back up the search. All search and rescue workers are optimistic they can find the hiker, but they are not sure of his condition. We continue the search operation based on a request from the Swiss Embassy, said Budi.

Swiss national Lionel Du Creaux, 26, was reported missing on Mt. Semeru on June 7. It was reported that Du Creaux initially climbed Semeru with a female friend, Alice Guignard, from France.

TNBTS head John Kenedie said earlier that about 50 personnel from various groups were involved in the search and rescue operation. All hiking trails on the mountain, which reaches 3,676 meters above sea level, were temporarily closed to any trekking.

John said the search operation started on June 9. We will carry out the operation without a time limit. It is hoped he can be found, said John.

He said that straightaway after Du Creaux was reported missing, TNBTS sent a letter informing the Swiss Embassy in Jakarta of the development. The Swiss Consulate in Surabaya, East Java, also directly contacted the TNBTS to coordinate the search for the missing hiker.

John said Du Creaux climbed Mt. Semeru illegally because he did not report to TNBTS officers at the Ranu Pane post, Lumajang, when he was about to start hiking, as per the required procedures.

According to information from Guignard, they departed from Malang to climb Mt. Semeru on June 3. Without reporting their climbing plans to the Ranu Pane post, Du Creaux and Guignard started climbing at around 7 a.m. local time.

They were separated during the climb. Around 10 p.m. on June 6, Guignard was found by Heri Sumantri, a climbing guide from the nature lover group Haspala, but her friends whereabouts were unknown. Heri took Guignard to the base camp. She filed a missing persons report to the Ranu Pane post on June 7. (ebf)
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Linkedin Pierre Marthinus (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

The worlds third-largest democracy will continue to reject any form of provocation and direct confrontation with China in the South China Sea. Despite repeated incidents in its exclusive economic zone and territorial waters off its Natuna Islands chain, Indonesia continues firmly on this policy path.

Six compelling foreign policy considerations shape Indonesias see no China policy.

First, Indonesias foreign policy priority puts a premium on economic diplomacy. Under Joko Jokowi Widodo, Indonesia consistently emphasizes its commercial interests, inbound foreign investments and future infrastructure assistance projects above pompous assertions of territorial sovereignty.

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Linkedin WORDS DESY NURHAYATI PHOTOS COURTESY OF KELAS INSPIRASI (The Jakarta Post)  Thu, June 16 2016

Hundreds of volunteers will organize a one-day teaching program for elementary school students in Nusa Penida, sharing inspiration through their respective professions.

In the nationwide program called Kelas Inspirasi (Class of Inspiration), the volunteers, who come from various backgrounds and regions across Indonesia, channel the positive spirit of education.

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Linkedin Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post) Tangerang  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Tangerang District Court has sentenced a 16-year-old to 10 years in prison for his role in the gang rape and sadistic murder of a 19-year-old woman at a dormitory of a company in Kosambi, Tangerang, last month.

The sentence was the maximum penalty that could be given to an underaged convict.

Indonesian law doesnt recognize the death penalty for children, said presiding judge Suharni.

Suharni said RA was proven guilty of premeditated murder without any mitigating factors that would have allowed the panel of judges to reduce the sentence.

"The traces of his saliva and bite marks on the victims chest and his fingerprints all are identical, while the kid kept giving inconsistent statements and hampering the court proceedings, said Suharni.

According to information revealed in the trial, the events of the murder started when RA went to a factory worker dormitory where EP, the 19-year-old victim, lived. RA, who had only been acquainted with EP for one month, reportedly asked EP to have sex with him, but she declined. Irked, RA went out of the room and met two other males, R and IH. The three forced their way into the room, gang raped EP and then used a hoe to kill her in a particularly brutal fashion. (dmr)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama has repelled the claim by a lawmaker that his volunteer group Teman Ahok (Friends of Ahok) received Rp 30 billion in donations from construction firms involved with reclamation projects in North Jakarta.

Ahok questioned the motive of Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) lawmaker Junimart Girsang who said in a hearing on Wednesday with the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) that he had information about hefty cash flows to Teman Ahok.

"As a lawmaker, Junimart has immunity, so we can't sue him. However, politically his statement is uncalled for," Ahok told journalists at City Hall on Thursday.

The former East Belitung regent said he was not involved in the daily operations nor establishment of Teman Ahok, who had helped collect identity card copies of Jakartans to support Ahok's independent candidacy in the 2017 Jakarta Gubernatorial Election.

Ahok suspected that some people were using an ongoing graft case related to the reclamation projects to create a public misconception of him. This is another possible public attack, besides that of the Sumber Waras land procurement case claimed by the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) to have caused state losses, which involved Ahok. The latter case was recently rejected by the KPK.

"I am clean. I dare officials to check my wealth," Ahok said.

KPK chairman Agus Rahardjo said on Wednesday his agency would look into Junimart's claim and prepare an investigation. (rin)
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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

A group of volunteers for Jakarta Governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama who operate under the Teman Ahok banner are denying accusations that they received Rp 30 billion from developers involved in reclamation projects and say they welcome an investigation by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

The accusations directed at the group were mere gossip, Teman Ahok spokesman Singgih Widyastono said, denying the information that was first announced by lawmaker Junimart Girsang.

"We don't know how he could say that kind of thing. We never received money from developers," Singgih told thejakartapost.com on Thursday, adding that the group would also reveal its financial statements to the public and to the KPK.

KPK chairman Agus Rahardjo had also said that the agency would follow up on the information it received and would start an investigation to look into it.

Junimart, who is with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) said on Wednesday that he has information and supporting documents that claim Teman Ahok received Rp 30 billion (US$ 2.3 million) from developers involved in coastal reclamation projects. The funds were allegedly distributed by Sunny Tanuwidjaja, one of Ahok's aides and a key witness in the KPK's investigation of possible graft case in the development project.

Teman Ahok had received Rp 500 million from Hasan Nasbi, the founder of political consultant firm Cyrus Network, as start-up capital, Singgih revealed. However, the group managed to repay the amount in several stages from funds collected from merchandise sales.

The group has earned Rp 5.6 billion from the sale of merchandise such as T-Shirts, bracelets and accessories, Singhih said.

Teman Ahok helped the outspoken governor to collect copies of the IDs of Jakarta citizens so that he could run as an independent candidate in next year's gubernatorial election. The group has so far collected more than 986,000 of their 1 million target. (rin)
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Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16 2016

While other youngsters spend their holidays going on vacation, Belinda Puspasari, 20, chose to volunteer at the Teman Ahok (Friends of Ahok) center in Pejaten, South Jakarta, where she sorts out around 500 forms every day to support Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama to run in the 2017 gubernatorial election on an independent ticket.



However, she was a little broken-hearted to find that Ahok, who she says is her idol, may contest the election with party support.



I want him to stay independent but who am I to tell him what to do? To me, the most important thing now is that Pak Ahok is reelected, she said at the center on Wednesday,



Belinda hopes that if Ahok wins the election, the city will have more green spaces and fewer shopping malls.



Ahok is reportedly considering running in the 2017 gubernatorial election with official party endorsement after the Golkar Party declared its support of him, in addition to the NasDem Party and Hanura Party doing the same.



Ahoks path to securing official party endorsement seems even more smooth as the countrys leading Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) is reportedly seriously considering endorsing him and his running mate Djarot Saiful Hidayat, who is a PDI-P member.



Responding to the political support, Teman Ahok said it would leave the decision to Ahok.



Since the beginning of the movement, we have only aimed to provide an alternative vehicle for Pak Ahok to run in the election, said Teman Ahok spokesman Singgih Widiyastono.



Hence, if he chooses the party route, we will continue to support him. We dont want to be a hindrance for him in the election.



He added that Teman Ahok appreciated the support of the parties, because it would increase his chances of winning the election.



However, should Ahok choose to run on a party ticket, he should provide a full explanation to supporters, who had submitted their IDs hoping he would run on an independent ticket, Singgih further said.



The relationship between Teman Ahok and the parties that had offered their support was positive, as could be seen in NasDem and Hanura assisting Teman Ahok to collect thousands of IDs, Singgih told The Jakarta Post.



In light of this, Teman Ahok welcomed any party to support the governor in the upcoming election, including the PDI-P.



Both the PDI-P and Ahok have both signaled their interest in uniting to contest the election.



House of Representatives lawmaker from the PDI-P Charles Honoris confirmed the report, saying that Ahoks chance of winning his partys endorsement was large.



Speaking about Teman Ahoks campaign, Charles said that If the PDI-P supports Ahok, I can guarantee that the supporting IDs certainly will not be useless.



Nonetheless, Ahok wants more time to consider the possibility of official party endorsement due to his responsibility toward Teman Ahok, which has already gathered 986,315 of the 1 million IDs he needs to meet independent candidacy requirements.



I dont know yet. Im waiting for Teman Ahok to reach a million IDs. Then, they [the volunteers] may talk about the issue, said Ahok on Wednesday.



However, Ahok added, regardless of the outcome, he would campaign for the election with Teman Ahok, as opposed to using the parties as a campaign vehicle.

______________________________________

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Linkedin Safrin La Batu (The Jakarta Post) Tangerang  Thu, June 16, 2016

About 100 people who claim to be friends of Enno Parihah, a 19-year-old victim of a sadistic rape and murder, are protesting the decision by judges to sentence an underage boy convicted of involvement in the crime to only 10 years in prison.

The 10 years in prison is too lenient. The defendants lawyers should also be punished for defending a murderer, a woman said in a high tone on Thursday.

The protesters hurled stones at police officers outside the court building to object to what they called an unjust sentence, causing injuries to at least one of the officers.

RA, 16, was convicted of raping and killing Enno, allegedly with two men who are both 24 years old, in Tangerang last month. Evidence unveiled in the trial includes RAs fingerprint that was found on a wall at the scene and his saliva found on the victims body.

The court convicted RA of committing premeditated murder and gave him 10 years in prison instead of the death penalty because he is underaged according to the criminal code.

Our child justice system doesnt allow a death penalty to be imposed on a juvenile defendant, presiding judge Suharni said while reading from the indictment, adding that the term was the maximum sentence that can be given to a juvenile. (dan)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post)  Thu, June 16 2016

We can call it a breakthrough that President Joko Jokowi Widodo has finally named National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) head Comr. Gen. Tito Karnavian the sole candidate for the National Police chief post and has submitted his name to the House of Representatives for confirmation as mandated by the Constitution.

Tito, if he wins the Houses hearts and minds, will be the youngest and could be the longest serving police chief the country has ever had. While normally a National Police chief, or Kapolri, serves two or a maximum three years, barring no other state assignment, Tito, who will turn 51 in October, will take office for the next seven years until 2023.

Touted as a rising star when he led the National Polices Densus 88 counterterrorism squad following the Bali bombings in 2002, Tito now fulfills the prophecy. His candidacy means he leapfrogs a pool of two- and three-star generals, some of whom were previously also in contention for the top-cop job.

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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Indonesian Military (TNI) has called on the House of Representatives to redefine the concept of terrorism in the draft revision of the 2003 Terrorism Law, saying terrorism should no longer be considered a crime so that the TNI could get involved in counterterrorism efforts.

TNI chief of staff Vice Adm. Didit Herdiawan said terrorism should be considered an act of aggression against the country, especially because terrorist groups had developed their own military organizations, recruitment and paramilitary training activities, which posed dangerous risks and threatened Indonesian territory.

"Terrorism should not be considered merely a general crime. It should be anticipated from the beginning by all parties, including the TNI [...] Military measures cannot be separated from counterterrorism," Didit said during a hearing with the House on Thursday.

The military's Strategic Intelligence Agency (BAIS) chief Maj. Gen. Yayat Sudrajat said combating terrorism should be the main task of the TNI.

He said the roles of BAIS needed to be optimized to allow the early detection of activities of terrorist cells that interconnected with an international network.

Yayat said with its strategic intelligence operation task force that had a presence in border areas such as Aceh, Papua, Poso (Central Sulawesi), and Ambon (Maluku), BAIS could strengthen coordination and information sharing with both internal and foreign intelligence agencies to detect the movement of terrorist cells.

"The TNI's involvement in counterterrorism should be made proportional and clear in the terrorism bill," Yayat said. (ebf)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Volkswagen is scouting for talent among young Indonesians with the "POLOisME Modification Contest".

"The contest is to encourage the public and the young generation, including university students, to show their creativity," Andrew Nasuri, president director of authorized dealer PT Garuda Mataram Motor, said during a fast-breaking gathering on Thursday.

"Design is an ultimate element of the VW Polo. Its dynamic and sporty design makes the car appeal to the younger generation," he said, referring to the new VW Polo 6 1.4 MPI and VW Polo 1.2 TSI, which were launched in April.

There are two categories: the Street Modification Contest and the Virtual Modification Contest. The theme is Sexy, Sporty and Elegant without compromising Volkswagen's three main aspects of valuable, innovative and responsible.

The contest qualification kicked off on June 1. Participants must submit their designs before July 16. The six best designs will be announced on July 17. Out of the six, the three best will be announced on July 31 and will be displayed at the Gaikindo Indonesia International Auto Show (GIIAS) in August.

Out of the three finalists, the winner will be announced on the closing day of the GIIAS, Aug. 21. The winner will have the chance to visit Volkswagens Headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, and see the world's largest carmaker.

Volkswagen has conducted a roadshow to campuses such as Swiss German University, Bina Nusantara University, Pelita Harapan University and Multimedia Nusantara University. (yan)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

With the Solar (diesel) fuel subsidy amount scheduled to be cut to Rp 350 from Rp 1,000 per liter, people have begun to worry that the policy may be a burden. Concerns have increased in spite of the government's explanation that the cut will not result in a price increase.

South Tangerang resident Bagus Hadikusuma, 29, believes the government should reconsider the plan. He argued that public transportation vehicles often use diesel, suggesting that the subsidy decrease may result in a fare increase, closely followed by a rise in commodity prices.

It will increase the daily living costs. I have a wife and a son to support, he told thejakartapost.com on Wednesday.

Likewise, Yogyakarta resident Tommy Apriando, 27, voiced his objection to the governments plan to cut the subsidy. Tommy said he was worried that the subsidy cut would increase public transportation fares. I often use public transportation and thus feel the burden when the fare is increased he said.

Many people in Eastern Indonesia, Tommy continued, still have no access to electricity and make use of the subsidized diesel as an alternative.

The government is considering cutting the solar fuel subsidy amount, aiming for a Rp 15 trillion efficiency in the state budget. Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM) Minister Sudirman Said explained that low-oil price allowed the government to cut the solar fuel subsidy without raising the consumer price.

Currently, the subsidized Solar price rests at Rp 5,150 per liter. (sha/ags)
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Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang, Nurul Fitri Ramadhani and Ina Parlina (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Comr. Gen. Tito Karnavian is one step closer to becoming the chief of the National Police, and earlier than anticipated to boot.



The current chief of the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) has been named by President Joko Jokowi Widodo as his sole candidate for the top police post.



Widely considered to be the least-eligible of a group of nine three-star police generals, Tito now has the chance to show his critics that age does not determine leadership skills, reportedly the rationale behind Jokowis nomination.



Titos nomination has raised optimism and doubt in equal measure, as he is the youngest of all three-star police generals touted to take the reins of the institution from retiring chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti.



Jokowis decision to pass the leadership baton from an incumbent chief to Titos generation constitutes a breaking of tradition. As a 1987 graduate of the police academy, Titos appointment over more senior police generals would also be a national first.



Badrodin himself acknowledged that although he had given Jokowi personal input on all of the nine three-star generals long before the polices high-ranking promotions and duty rotation council (Wanjakti) gave its recommendation, Tito was not even on Wanjaktis list after Tito requested that he wanted to focus on his BNPT duties.



Tito himself said that if it was possible, he should not be considered a candidate, Badrodin said. Thats why Wanjakti did not put his name on the list.



Badrodin claimed to not know the reason behind Jokowis decision, but said that in his opinion Titos outstanding experience would have been one of the Presidents considerations.



Unlike Badrodin, many are hesitant about the future of the National Police if Tito assumes the leadership.



His nomination is the result of a political game, and it poses a threat to the police institution, said Muradi, a political and security analyst of Padjajaran University.



According to Muradi, Tito will experience difficulties maintaining unity within the institution due to its strong culture of seniority that obliges individuals to respect and obey their seniors. Internal resistance will emerge and challenge his leadership. Thus, Pak Tito may not be able to carry out his job smoothly, he added



Muradi is apparently not the only one. Indonesian Police Watch (IPW) chairman Neta S. Pane said that Tito is considered a junior in the National Police. So, I think it is inappropriate for him to be the new chief because he will feel uncomfortable leading his seniors.



Titos nomination was made public following an announcement made by House of Representatives Speaker Ade Komaruddin that the House had received an official letter from Jokowi earlier on Wednesday that named Tito as the sole candidate to replace Badrodin, who will retire by the end of next month.



Besides Tito, the list of hopefuls includes National Police deputy chief Comr. Gen. Budi Gunawan and National Narcotics Agency (BNN) chief Comr. Gen. Budi Waseso  both have close links to the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).



Police educational institution head Comr. Gen. Syafruddin, a close associate of Vice President Jusuf Kalla, is also among the strongest candidates.



Although the government still needs the Houses nod, Tito, who is known as a highly educated officer and has close ties to Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, seems to have won the hearts of the majority of lawmakers.



Jowokis decision, however, reportedly caught many of them by surprise, with Budi Gunawan the assumed favorite to succeed Badrodin.



One thing we have to consider is its impact on the internal affairs of the police, because Jokowis nomination means Tito would not only overtake his seniors but also several generations in the force. If discontent is significant, it may affect the way he manages the police, Masinton Pasaribu of the PDI-P said.



But perhaps Jokowi has his own reasons and wants a fresh figure to lead and unite the police corps. Someone who has a longer serving time, he added.



The Golkar Party, which recently joined the coalition supporting the government, also expressed its support of Jokowis decision. Tito may be the youngest, but dont doubt his experience and professionalism, said Golkar lawmaker Bambang Soesatyo, who is also chairman of House Commission III overseeing legal affairs and laws, human rights and security.



The House will bring the Presidents letter to the Steering Committee (Bamus) meeting before the commission carries out a screening to measure Titos capability.



Tito was Jakarta Police chief before he was assigned to lead the BNPT. Before that, he led the National Polices Densus 88 counterterrorism squad. (wnd)

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Linkedin Tan Hui Yee (The Straits Times/ANN) Bangkok  Thu, June 16, 2016

The rising incidence of dengue fever in ASEAN has prompted health experts to call for a collective regional action to fight the fastest- growing mosquito-borne disease.

Given the scale of migration within the 10-nation bloc, the best efforts to curb the spread of the virus in one country can be undone by slow notice of outbreaks across the border, they said on the sidelines of a conference in Bangkok to mark the annual ASEAN Dengue Day Wednesday.

"It is a regional problem," said Pratap Singhasivanon, secretary- general of the South-east Asian Ministers of Education Organisation's tropical medicine network, who added that data sharing between ASEAN countries is too slow. "You need real-time information the data that is important today may be useless after three days."

Dengue, which spreads fast in dense urban spaces, causes nausea, fatigue, bleeding and even death. There is no specific treatment for the disease, which is spread by the Aedes mosquito.

An estimated 390 million dengue infections occur every year across the world, the bulk of them in Asia.

A study published in the Lancet in April says the disease imposed an economic burden of US$8.9 billion in 2013.

One of the hardest-hit countries last year was the Philippines, which saw a 64.8 per cent spike in suspected cases - to 200,415 - and 598 deaths. It has recorded 49,904 cases up to June 4. In April, it became the first ASEAN country to start mass vaccinations against dengue.

Infection figures so far this year continue to be cause for worry. Thailand, which had earlier warned of an outbreak exceeding 166,000 cases this year, recorded 18,337 cases and 16 deaths from Jan 1 to June 7.

Malaysia has recorded 46,856 cases up to May 14, an increase of 8.6 per cent compared to the same period last year. The fever has caused 109 deaths in that period.

In Singapore, where 8,575 cases have been reported, five people have died.

The region's health authorities had earlier warned that the hot weather brought on by the El Nino phenomenon may worsen dengue outbreaks by accelerating the breeding of Aedes mosquitoes.

Within medical communities, there are debates about a vaccine's efficacy, which varies according to the strains of dengue virus contracted. Data from trials shows an overall 65.6 per cent efficacy against the four strains of dengue.

Tikki Pang, a visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said the vaccine would benefit the region as a whole, and he urged ASEAN governments to consider pooling their purchases to negotiate for lower vaccine prices.

The region is home to 600 million people. The proportion of each dengue strain in a country can change over time, he said. "It's very hard to predict which will be the most prevalent serotype."

Nations like Malaysia and Singapore are still mulling over the potential use of the vaccine developed by French company Sanofi Pasteur.

To help spread awareness, the Asian Dengue Vaccination Advocacy has launched an online quiz and barometer on its website: http://denguemissionbuzz.org/
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Oslo  Thu, June 16, 2016

The Philippines peace talks appear to be back on track after two days of informal talks in Norway between communist rebels and the incoming government of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte.

Negotiators signed an agreement Wednesday to formally resume talks next month after Duterte assumes office.

The rebels have been fighting for a Marxist state since 1969 in one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies.

President-elect Duterte takes office June 30, so the delegation in Oslo has no authority to commit to anything officially. However, the mere presence of the Philippines delegation signifies a change in Manila's approach.

Both sides are aware that much remains to be discussed and that agreeing to talks will perhaps be the easiest part of this new dialogue. The talks involve implementing a cease-fire and amnesty on both sides.
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Linkedin (Associated Press) Bangkok  Thu, June 16, 2016

Thai police have entered a sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling US$14 million.

The operation at Wat Phra Dhammakaya, a monastery north of Bangkok, began before dawn Thursday and was broadcast live on TV, signaling a possible dramatic climax to a months-old standoff.

The abbot, Phra Dhammachyao, is accused of embezzling temple funds and of money laundering. He has brazenly rejected police demands to report for questioning and barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three summonses.

Police Maj. Suriya Singhakamol told reporters that police agents went in Thursday after negotiations with temple authorities, and will now serve the arrest warrant.
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Linkedin Intan Tanjung (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, June 16, 2016

Thinking of running away from the hustle and bustle of South Bali? Check out these three new destinations that boast laid-back atmospheres and great service quality.

Finns Canggu

Located on the western side of Seminyak, Canggu has slowly become the new playground for travelers seeking a laid-back holiday near the beach and now beach lovers going to Canggu can expect to enjoy beachfront luxury thanks to a newly opened club.

Like its sister, Finns Canggu boasts a rustic bohemian atmosphere and impeccable service. The building itself is unique and has a distinctive structure made from bamboo. Built facing the ocean, its highlights include a 30-meter infinity pool, a daily DJ session that starts at 4 p.m. to accompany guests while they are viewing the picturesque sunset and choices of classy cocktails on the bar menu that guests can sip while marveling at the ocean view and dark sandy beach.

(Read also: Six free things to do in Bali)

Menjangan Dynasty Resort

The northwest coast of Bali is the perfect place to look for an unspoiled environment. The surrounding area is especially famous for its pristine nature, both on land and underwater, that has attracted divers as well as nature lovers from around the world to stay in the area.

For those looking for a unique experience, Menjangan Dynasty Resort, Beach Camp and Dive Centre is set to offer a luxury laid-back atmosphere of glamping (glamorous camping) starting this August. In addition to providing 24 beach-camp African safari tents and four cliff tent-villas complete with flat screen TVs, minibars and hairdryers, the property also allows guests to reconnect with the surrounding nature and enjoy uninterrupted views of the ocean, Menjangan Island and West Bali National Park, as well as amazing sunsets with Mount Raung, Mount Ijen and Baluran as impressive backdrops.

(Read also: How to enjoy the long weekend in Bali)

Inside a luxurious glamping tent of the Menjangan Dynasty Resort.(Courtesy of Menjangan Dynasty Resort/-)

Le Pirate, Nusa Ceningan

A photo posted by Le Pirate Beachclub (@lepiratebeachclub) on May 30, 2016 at 9:31pm PDT

Nusa Ceningan is a small island that can be reached by crossing a yellow bridge from Nusa Lembongan. It is particularly famous for its fantastic golden sandy beaches that are hidden by the surrounding area.

Overlooking seaweed farms in Nusa Ceningan waters, Le Pirate offers a fantastic sunset view, soothing music and eclectic cocktails in a naval-inspired beach club. Guests can opt to stay all day to enjoy snorkeling, swimming and sunbathing, or simply observe the local seaweed farming. Those who love to hunt for a sunset will be rewarded with an amazing view of the sun setting behind the horizon, while morning people can stay over at Le Pirate's cute huts to wait for morning to arrive. (kes)
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Linkedin Seow Bei Yi (The Straits Times/Asia News Network) Singapore  Thu, June 16, 2016

Announcing the longest flights in its network, Singapore Airlines (SIA) is launching non-stop services between Singapore and San Francisco, starting Oct. 23.

They will be its longest flights until 2018, when a new variant of the A350-900 aircraft will enter service, enabling even longer flights between Singapore and both Los Angeles and New York.

This comes around two weeks after United Airlines started the only non-stop flight between Singapore and San Francisco.

SIA's Singapore-San Francisco flights will run daily on the Airbus A350-900 aircraft. Flying time will be between 14 hours and 35 minutes, and 17 hours and 45 minutes, depending on direction and time of the year.

Flights will depart Singapore in the morning, also arriving in San Francisco in the morning to enable onward connections to other destinations. Return flights from San Francisco will depart in the morning as well and arrive in Singapore in the early evening.

SIA will also add a second daily service to Los Angeles, in an expansion of its United States operations, and suspend services to Sao Paulo in Brazil.

The suspension of its three weekly flights to Sao Paulo via Barcelona were "a result of the sustained weak performance of the route", SIA said.

The last flight will be on Oct 20. Services between Singapore and Barcelona will continue.

Currently, SIA flies to San Francisco twice daily, with one flight operating via Hong Kong and another via Seoul.

(Read also: Women pilots for Singapore Airlines planes a first for airline)

The new non-stop service will see its Seoul route re-routed to operate as a Singapore-Seoul-Los Angeles service, also from Oct 23. This will result in a second daily service to Los Angeles, complementing an existing service that operates through Narita airport in Tokyo.

"Our customers have been asking us to offer more US services and we are pleased to be able to do so," said SIA's senior vice-president for marketing planning, Ms Lee Wen Fen.

"With new non-stop San Francisco flights and the increase in frequency to Los Angeles, customers will have two flights to choose from each day to both of these popular US West Coast destinations."

Senior vice-president of market development for Changi Airport Group, Mr Lim Ching Kiat, said SIA's moves "augment Changi Airport's position as the preferred gateway between South-east Asia and the US".

He added that Singapore has the "strongest connectivity to the US in terms of flight frequencies and city links" in South-east Asia, and that SIA's expanded operations will see the country connected to six cities in the US via 61 weekly services.
Consuelo Loera el chapo mom

On Saturday, 150 heavily armed men reportedly stormed into the community of La Tuna, the home of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's mother in Mexico's Sinaloa state, looting homes and leaving multiple people dead in what may be a salvo in a nascent cartel war.

At least three people from La Tuna and surrounding communities were killed, according to La Jornada en Linea, first spotted by British journalist Duncan Tucker.

Local news site Riodoce reports that as many as eight people were killed in the raid, but neither publication could confirm the number of deaths.

The raiding party also sacked the home of Consuelo Loera, the mother of "El Chapo" Guzman, who lives in a house built by Guzman in the community where he was born, which sits in the middle of the Golden Triangle, an area of heavy drug production solidly in the control of his cartel. They took two vehicles called Razers and at least three all-terrain motorcycles and cut telephone and internet lines.

The attackers also took vehicles from residents of nearby communities, prompting many inhabitants in the area to relocate to the municipal capital of Badiraguato and to the state capital, Culiacan.

La Tuna Sinaloa state

According to Riodoce, the attack was orchestrated by members of a criminal group formed by the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) and Fausto Isidro Meza Flores, aka "Chapo" or "Chapito."

The US government has considered "Chapito" Isidro a large-scale trafficker since 2000, running his operations out of Guasave, in northern Sinaloa state. When the BLO and "El Chapo" Guzman's Sinaloa cartel split in 2008, "Chapito" Isidro remained with the BLO, acting as a high-level hit man and leading a group called "Mazatlecos," according to Insight Crime.

"Chapito" Isidro is also believed to head a group called "Oficina," consisting of members of the Familia Michoacana, the Zetas, the Gulf cartel, and the BLO. The Oficina operates in Baja California Sur, according to Insight Crime, a state adjacent to Sinaloa, were Guzman's cartel has a considerable presence.

Story continues

DEA Mexico drug cartel map

In early 2013, the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the Meza Flores Drug Trafficking Organization, made up of "Chapito" Isidro, several family members, and three companies, under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.

The Meza Flores DTO, the Treasury Department said, "has been responsible for the distribution of large quantities of methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana, and cocaine to the United States" since 2000.

The US government said in its designation announcement:

The Meza Flores DTO is one of the primary rivals to the Sinaloa Cartel in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. As a result of this rivalry, the Meza Flores DTO has engaged in an extremely violent turf war with the Sinaloa Cartel which has resulted in the quadrupling of drug-war killings in the last four years and an increase in kidnappings and arson within the state of Sinaloa.

Fausto Isidro Meza Flores Chapito Sinaloa

Based in Guasave, "Chapito" Isidro's group has a strong grip on northern Sinaloa state. Banners taunting Guzman for his inability to take control of the area have appeared in Guasave as long ago as 2011.

According to the latest National Drug Threat Assessment from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the BLO  wracked by infighting and fragmentation in recent years  has maintained an enclave in northern Sinaloa, where "Chapito" Isidro is presumably in control.

A raid by "Chapito" Isidro's Mazatlecos on Guzmans hometown may be a sign that a struggle for control of lucrative drug-cultivation and trafficking territory in Sinaloa could be in the offing.

While "Chapito" Isidro has been a figure on the drug scene since the 1990s, he is believed to be younger than the current Sinaloa cartel leadership.

With Guzman imprisoned and other Sinaloa cartel leaders aging, "Chapito" Isidro may have decided that the time is right to expand his territory.

NOW WATCH: There's a terrifying reason why people are warned to stay inside at 5:45 p.m. in parts of Mexico





More From Business Insider


UK students what they think of the EU Referendum We've asked- so it's only fair that we give Europeans a chance to air their views too.

Who knows - maybe we'll find that they don't want to be friends in the first place. Now, wouldn't that be awkward...?

Sebastian Buchspies, 27, Berlin

Sebastian lives in Berlin (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Whats your opinion of the UKs role within the EU?

Basically, the UKs role within the EU is to provide the global political perspective that Germany often lacks while countering the drive for further sharing financial risks and burdens that France and some of the southern member states are often bringing to the table. Its also promoting the single market, which is in Germanys interest.

I admire what the British offer to the whole of Europe, e.g the inner dependency, the values of liberal democracy, the expressiveness of their arts. Id like the UK to continue being Europes cultural dynamo and start formulating a political vision for the EU.

How does that compare with the country you are from?

The past decade probably marks the shift in Germanys foreign and European policy from being bystanders to becoming the major policy setter in the EU. Think Greece. Think Russia. Her role is looked upon controversially across the continent.

I cannot help but think that the UK has become a bystander while it has been preoccupied with the Scottish referendum and the new referendum. This has saved it from a lot of controversy, but one wonders what role it wants to play on the international stage.

Do you think the UK should remain or leave the EU? Why?

I hope the UK votes remain. This might help to prevent the EU from becoming politically less stable and economically less sound. But a lot of the uncertainty should persist if the vote is nearly split.

Louisa Rogers, 21, Brussels

Louisa is Belgian but now lives in the UK (Louisa Rogers/PA)

Whats your opinion of the UKs role within the EU?

I have rarely thought about the role of the UK within the EU as separate from the role of other countries in the union, until the Brexit question came to the fore. I always relate the UK, in diplomatic terms, primarily with regards to the special relationship between the UK and the USA.

In real terms, the UK doesnt feel like the rest of Europe. They dont have the euro, we (the UK) arent a part of Schengen, barely anyone native to England is bilingual. While on the continent there is a sense of solidarity and of mobility across the countries, languages and cultures. In the UK they still see themselves as different and special and thats not always negative, but it can set them apart from the rest of the EU as a more outdated, protectionist and isolationist state.

How does that compare with the country you are from?

The European Commission in Brussels (Virginia Mayo/AP)

With Brussels being the heart of the EU, there is a much higher awareness of the European Institutions and the European mechanism than there is in the UK. I do feel that the most vocal Brexiteers have never even looked into how the EU functions before this referendum was announced, and I feel that many more simply do not know or care. I was shocked by my English counterparts lack of enthusiasm, or even criticism of the EU.

I think it is difficult for England to understand the importance of supranational issues because we (the UK) feel, as an island, protected from the problems and trends on the continent. If one good thing comes out of this referendum, it will be an increased level of engagement with political issues, and demonstrate the will of the British people to engage with these issues and debate them.

Do you think the UK should remain or leave the EU? Why?

I believe the UK should stay within the EU. No institution is perfect, and the EU is a completely unique mechanism in the world. It is important to remember that getting it right does not happen overnight, and a governing body so huge and complex will require ample time to adjust to the world it finds itself in. Real progress is made when countries band together, and the European values of secularism, democracy and collaboration are, in my opinion, well worth rallying behind.

With other countries on our side, we have more influence, more power, more neighbours we can call on for co-operation and trade. Brexit will mean consciously walking away from that, forgetting how the EU helped to build up our economy after the war and saying were giving up. And I would really hate to see that happen.

Max Markl, 24, Munich

Max is German but studies in Aberdeen (Matthias Schrader/AP)

Whats your opinion of the UKs role within the EU?

I think the UK has been a strong partner of the other European nations: London is the financial heart of the EU, it has the most powerful military in the EU and is a long term partner for the EUs arms development. The UK clearly has a leading role in the EU.

Now that the UK is holding this referendum the other EU nations have shown how far they are willing to go to keep the UK in Europe, even making concessions to the free movement rule by agreeing to restricted access to the welfare system.

How does that compare with the country you are from?

Generally speaking Germans identify as Europeans. Many young people have memories of travelling to their neighbouring countries in their childhood and being welcomed by the French, the Austrians, Italians or Croatians to name just a few. The physical closeness to those countries and the constant interactions with people from the rest of the EU fuel a European spirit in Germany.

The fact that for decades, taking pride in being German was inappropriate and frowned upon meant that people either chose to nurture a pride for their cities or regions or they chose to be proud of being Europeans. For Germany, the EU also meant that Germany could suddenly be friendly with former wartime enemies. I think being a partner nation in the EU showed many Germans that the country was forgiven. I believe many Germans find the idea of an ever closer union more appealing than the British do and they have fewer objections to the expansion of the EU.

Do you think the UK should remain or leave the EU? Why?

Remain campaigners (Will Oliver/PA)

I believe the UK should remain in the EU, the UKs markets are woven so deeply into the fabric that is the European economy I believe that it would be very damaging to all EU nations, including the UK, if Britain decided to quit the EU. The Eurosceptics in Britain raise valid points when it comes to EU bureaucracy, the democratic structure of the institution, but in the end the UK can help to shape and improve the EU further but this only works if the UK is part of the EU.

I would like for the UK to remain, however, not at all costs. If the remain of the UK meant we are further undermining the principle of the free movement of the people and the principle of equality, then I would rather see the UK leave. The EU has found plenty of compromises to its regulations to keep the UK satisfied with its membership, like rebates to the membership payments, special financial market rules or a Schengen-agreement opt-out, but these compromises to keep the UK happy cant make the EU a toothless tiger.

We need solidarity, friendship and equality, it is the foundation of peace and prosperity in Europe. This means giving an eastern European the same rights in the EU as a German or a Briton. If equality fails, the EU has failed.

Gabriela, 24, Greece

Gabriela lives in Greece (Petros Giannakouris/AP)

Whats your opinion of the UKs role within the EU?

My opinion about the UKs role within the EU is that firstly they are top dogs. They hold a different currency, (which is not really affected by the other European countries) in my opinion the EU itself is a massive joke. There is no alliance, the only thing that matters is how much money each country is making and how many people they keep out  e.g the refugee crisis and the way that the UK literally decided to outsource the problem, by giving money to France to keep them there or by being a part of the decisions in bordering up and keeping people in Turkey.

How does that compare with the country you are from?

The country I am from, Greece, also had a referendum and we voted to leave the euro as we are not a country with super power. We do not export anything really and we are limited in doing so by the EU measures. I believe Greece is literally being grabbed by the neck and whatever decision the EU makes the people suffer and have to go along with it. Even voting to leave in the first place.

Do you think the UK should remain or leave the EU? Why?

I think the EU as mentioned before is a faulty mistake. One can not have a universal system that is rubbish in reality. But right now I can not say if its better for the UK to stay or leave. I think every country needs to re-establish its values and really try and focus on the life that is being destroyed rather then the financial gain one might have.
Labour MP Jo Cox, 41, has died after being shot in the street outside her constituency advice surgery in Birstall, West Yorkshire Police said.

Cox was in a critical condition after she was shot and stabbed in her constituency by a man reportedly shouting Britain first.

The alleged gunman has been named locally as Tommy Mair, 52, who neighbours have described as a loner.

Jo Cox was in a critical condition (Yui Mok/PA)

Officers were seen searching his house in Birstall, near the scene of the brutal attack.

Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two, was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant shot and stabbed her outside her advice surgery in the West Yorkshire town. She was MP for Batley and Spen.

Police said a 52-year-old man was arrested in connection with the attack, which happened near the towns library.

Police at the scene (Nigel Roddis/PA)

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the country would be in shock at the horrific murder of Cox, who was a much loved colleague.

The whole of the Labour family, and indeed the whole country, is in shock and grief at the horrific murder of Jo Cox pic.twitter.com/obic5pOCS3  Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) June 16, 2016




Nigel Farage has unveiled a Brexit poster which looks uncannily similar to Nazi propaganda.

Brendan Harkin noticed the similarity first, and a subsequent tweet by Connor Beaton had more than 2,500 retweets.

.@StripyMoggie Can't help but make a Nazi comparison to this rhetoric. pic.twitter.com/W209C6HjLT  Brendan Harkin (@brendanjharkin) June 16, 2016

.@StripyMoggie Can't help but make a Nazi comparison to this rhetoric. pic.twitter.com/W209C6HjLT  Brendan Harkin (@brendanjharkin) June 16, 2016

The screenshots come from Episode 1 of the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and The Final Solution, which is available on Netflix.

The German propaganda video says: These are the type of Eastern Jews who flooded Europes cities after the last war  parasites undermining their host countries. Threatening thousand year old cultures and bringing with them crime, corruption and chaos.

(Philip Toscano/PA )

As the referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union draws closer, Farage used a fleet of vans to spread his message that Britain was at breaking point after being overrun by migrants.

The poster quickly came under fire on Twitter, with author and playwright Bonnie Greer quoting Hermann Goring, a leading member of the Nazi party during World War II, as saying: All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked. Works the same way in any country.

"All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked

Works the same way in any country"- Hermann Goring#Faragepic.twitter.com/iJShiBdeR9  Bonnie Greer (@Bonn1eGreer) June 16, 2016




Full disclosure before you read any further here: Im not qualified to talk about Brexit. What initially sounded like a breakfast cereal to me has now swept me up in a frenzy leading to the 23 June vote  I hear about it everywhere. Despite my observing protesters for (or against) it, reading news articles about it, and watching interviews on it, I dont fully understand the ins and outs of the debate. How could I, as a foreigner?

That said, I think its important to immerse oneself in another culture while abroad, so it seems only responsible to try my best to keep up with the Brexit debate. I initially didnt really understand all the implications staying or leaving the EU has. I mean, the UK is still the UK, regardless of whether or not its in the EU, right? That said, I think its important to immerse oneself in another culture while abroad, so it seems only responsible to try my best to keep up with the Brexit debate. I initially didnt really understand all the implications staying or leaving the EU has. I mean, the UK is still the UK, regardless of whether or not its in the EU, right?

But, of course, its so much more complicated than that. Leaving the EU would mean giving up a 40-year legacy, a bond between the UK and other European nations. It would mean no longer listening to the Anthem of Europe (do people actually listen to the Anthem of Europe?), no longer taking the short line at airport immigration checks and no longer enjoying the single-market system allowing free movement of goods and services that EU members are under today.

On the flip side, leaving the EU could mean improving political and fiscal autonomy for the UK, moving away from a union that is admittedly not without its flaws and having a more independent say in large-scale and hot-button issues like immigration.

As is with many political issues, its hard to know where the truth lies when looking at Brexit issue-by-issue. For example, Brexit supporters argue that remaining in the EU could lead to unmanageable spikes in immigration  records were nearly set in 2015  while those supporting remaining in the EU point out that fewer Britons left the country in that timespan, leading to misleading data. Others have taken the debate a step further and asserted that EU membership hasnt even had a major impact on immigration in recent years.

My biggest takeaway when trying to get a grip on the Brexit debate (and trying to form my own opinion on it all) was the utter uncertainty of it all. While Greenland left the European Economic Community in 1985 and Algeria pulled out upon becoming free from French rule in 1962, no country has left the EU in its modern form.

In 1975, the UK did hold a referendum in deciding whether or not it would remain in the European Communities, an organisation that became the first pillar of the EU. All but two counties in the UK voted to remain. Times and politics have certainly changed in the past 40 years, but who knows? Maybe this is foreshadowing for the upcoming referendum.

When all was said and done and it was decided that the UK would stick it out, eventually going on to be part of history in the 1993 formation of the EU as we know it today, eventually building and maintaining its reputation as a powerhouse continentally and globally, eventually building a strong economy and culture  Deputy Leader of the Labour Party Roy Jenkins said on the matter: It commits Britain to Europe; it commits us to playing an active, constructive and enthusiastic role in it.

I dont know what the final say in the 23rd June vote will be, but I find the UKs legacy in the EU too strong and too deep to throw away quite yet. No, the EU is not perfect, but I think internal changes  not a withdrawal  will help the UK find progress. The British people made a commitment, after all.
There is some serious crime going down on the usually idyllic islands of New Zealand.

According to New Zealand Avocado, which represents the countrys avocado growers, there have been around 40 large thefts of avocados this year, with up to 350 taken at a time due to an avocado shortage.

Yes, you read that correctly. Mass avocado theft is wreaking havoc on the nation.

Increased demand and a lack of supply following a poor harvest is to blame for the situation and has caused a black market to develop.

A black market. For avocados. That's a thing now. Keep your class A drugs, we don't need 'em.

#avocado prices prompt a new crime prevention sign at Superior Fruit and Wendy's Kitchen at Graceville in Brisbane. pic.twitter.com/iMcOoUHqUb  Brian Hurst (@hurstb) February 3, 2016





According to New Zealand Avocado, thieves have been stealing the crops at night and selling them to small fruit shops and pop-up stalls.

Apparently, in 2015 an additional 96,000 New Zealand households began purchasing avocados, and local growers have been unable to keep up with the surge in demand.

Sergeant Aaron Fraser from Waihi Police told the Guardian: These stolen avocados can carry risks.

(Matthew Mead/AP)

They are unripe, some have been sprayed recently and they may still carry toxins on the skin.

But with the prices so high at the moment, the potential for profit is a strong inducement for certain individuals.

Good grief. You heard him, pesky avocado thieves - return the 350 avocados you swiped and we'll say no more about it.
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DSI executes search warrant at Wat Phra Dhammakaya

PATHUM THANI: Department of Special Investigation (DSI) officials have arrived at Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Khlong Luang district with a search warrant in a bid to arrest Phra Dhammajayo, the temples abbot, on charges of money-laundering and receiving stolen property, media reports said.

crimepolicereligion

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 16 June 2016, 12:36PM

Officials from the Department of Special Investigation are seen talking with monks in Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Pathum Thani. Photo: Pattarapong Chatpattarasill

The DSI officials arrived at gate No. 7 of the temple at 9am.

Under the court warrant, they are authorised to search all buildings and structures in the 196-rai compound to look for and arrest Phra Dhammajayo.

After presenting the search warrant to temple staff, the officials went through the steel barricades in front of gate No 7.

They were reportedly led to a reception room for negotiations.

No reporters were allowed inside.

Earlier this morning (June 16), four companies totalling about 600 policemen of Region 1 Provincial Police were put on standby at Klong Luang district office to support the DSIs search of Wat Phra Dhammakaya.

Four fire trucks, four ambulances, four police paddy wagons, 15 vehicles for transporting police and a communications vehicle also arrived at Khlong Luang district about 4:30am.

Gen Srivara Rangsibrahmanakul, deputy national police chief, arrived at the meeting hall of Khlong Luang district office about 6am to inspect police readiness.

He was accompanied by Lt Gen Chaiwat Ketworachai, commissioner of the Region 1 Provincial Police, and Maj Gen Methi Kusolsang, the deputy commissioner.

Lt Gen Chaiwat said the police were on standby to support the DSI if requested.

It was initially believed the DSI would execute the search warrant and start moving into the temple between 8am - 9am.

Lt Col Somboon Sarasin, deputy director-general of the DSI, said yesterday (June 15) that, according to the plan, the DSI would enter the temple via gate No 7.

Gen Srivara said that, according to reports reaching him, there were about 8,000 Dhammakya disciples wearing white meditating inside the temple.

He said anyone who obstructed the operation would be arrested.

He also said that the search would be carried out under an operational plan codenamed Korakot 52.

There was also an alternative plan codenamed Kabil 59, just in case, he added.

At about 9:25am, Phra Sanitwong Wutthiwangso, director of communications for Wat Phra Dhammakaya, said he was willing to cooperate with the DSI to let officials search the compound.

The monk insisted Phra Dhammajayo was still receiving medical treatment at the temple.

Maj Suriya Singhakamol, deputy DSI chief, said after meeting Phra Sanitwong and another temple representative, that his team has already shown the search warrant to the temple representatives.

They had agreed to cooperate and allow officials to search for and arrest the suspect.

However, supporters of the monk were refusing to make way for DSI officials so they could search for him, television news reported.

The temple grounds were a sea of white, with seated praying devotees refusing to move.

Phra Dhammajayo is wanted under an arrest warrant. The 72-year-old abbot is accused of involvement in money laundering and receiving stolen property worth B1.2 billion in connection with the B12-billion embezzlement at Klongchan Credit Union Cooperative. He has denied the charges through spokesmen.

Read original story here.
History: Kingdom of the naked

Just one walk through Phuket Town leaves the lasting impression of how integral Chinese culture is to the local community, from the Taoist shrines to the little shops that seem to sell everything.



By The Phuket News

Thursday 16 June 2016, 08:00PM

Chinese culture is celebrated in nearly every fashion on the island, from the huge Chinese New Year celebrations to the upcoming Baba Wedding Festival, honouring the traditions of the Baba Nyongya, or Peranakan (Straits Chinese), who migrated along the Malay Peninsular.

Thanks to international media coverage of the annual Vegetarian Festival, even people who have never visited Phuket are aware of how deep Chinese roots run here.

Phukets Chinese heritage dates back much further than the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese migrant workers willing to try their fortune working in tin mines all across the island over a century ago.

Since their earliest written history, there have been Chinese records of trade with the Nan Yang (South Sea) and also Kun Lun, as the Malay Peninsula appears to have been known to the ancient Chinese.

They also called the region The Kingdom of the Naked.

By 500BC, the ideas of the Chinese philosopher Confucius had gained prevalence in the Han imperial court. Confucius was opposed to trade and commerce, seeing them as exploitative and corrupt: The mind of the superior man dwells on righteousness, the mind of the little man dwells on profit.

He was also very pro-family and decried overseas travel, stating that, While his parents are alive, the son may not take a distant voyage abroad.

The Han emperors created a raft of Confucian imperial laws banning overseas travel and unauthorised foreign trade. As a result, the few Chinese who did write about the Malay Peninsula in ancient times were mainly official emissaries or sanctioned religious pilgrims on their way to India or Sri Lanka.

These emissaries kept good records, which today form some of the only remaining written sources of early peninsular history. The problem is that scholars today are confused as to which ancient Chinese place names refer to which actual modern places.

The Chinese chronicle Liang Shu, or the Book of Liang, presumed to have been written in the first century AD, gives one of the earliest Chinese reports of the Nan Yang: Precious things come from the sea this way  thousands of varieties, all of which are coveted. Therefore the ships come in a continuous stream and merchants and envoys jostle with each other

All countries of the world came for purposes of trade as she projects into the sea more than 1,000 li. [A li was about 450 metres, so roughly 450 kilometres.] At this market east and west met together so that daily there were more than 10,000 people and precious goods and rare merchandise. There was nothing which was not there.

For the Chinese, where theres a will, theres a way. The sheer impossibility of effectively policing Chinas vast and remote southern coastline and the entrepreneurial nature of the Chinese meant that illegal trade and emigration to the Nan Yang did continue in a limited way despite the draconian imperial laws against it.

Independent Chinese traders and emigrants headed south to trade or find their fortunes in the Nan Yang and some, faced with severe punishment including beheading if they returned, stayed on and settled in the region.

Tchou Ta Kuan (Zhou Daguan), a Chinese emissary to Cambodia in the 13th century, made a report that still holds much truth for foreign visitors to the region and to Phuket today.

Chinese sailors note with pleasure that it is not necessary to wear many clothes and, since rice is easily had, women easily persuaded, houses easily run, furniture easily come by and trade easily carried on, a great many sailors desert to take up permanent residence.

The surge in Chinese tourists visiting Phuket in recent years has yet to result in another wave of migration, but these visitors can rest assured they are already following in their ancestors footsteps.

Adapted with permission from A History of Phuket and the Surrounding Region by Colin Mackay. Available from bookshops or from Amazon.com. See also historyofphuket.com
International School Samui reaches the stars

The International School of Samui (ISS) Science Club's near-space balloon project was a resounding success on June 3. The students, led by their science teachers, Mr Edmonds and Miss Mooney, built and launched a weather balloon to view the layers of the atmosphere as well as the curvature of the Earth. The launch point was from a Thai school playground on the mainland close to Surathani town.



By The Phuket News

Thursday 16 June 2016, 05:28PM

The balloon, capable of ascending 30kms into space, was fitted with a GPS to track it and GoPro Camera which recorded the footage. The path of the balloon was recorded throughout its journey and despite the best predictors the final destination was unfortunately way off track. Its final destination was the deepest jungle in Tai Rom Yen National Park and Mr Edmonds commented: The final landing spot was possibly the worst place for our balloon to land. However, with some luck and hard work it was finally recovered and the footage put together for this innovative launch never undertaken by any school in Thailand before.

The footage was entered into the Annual COBIS Schools Science Competition with the International School of Samui being awarded 2nd place overall for its near-space project. The personal message from the International Space Station (ISS) in Space, wishing ISS luck in their endeavours, from Major Tim Peake was a welcomed addition to the final project and ISS would like to thank Major Peake for his support. Congratulations to all the students who had the amazing opportunity to be part of this project and contributed to ISS achieving this incredible record and result.

The Council of International British Schools (COBIS) science competition is an annual worldwide science award aimed at strengthening pupils and schools commitment to science. The competition receives entries from International Schools on all 4 corners of the Globe. Last year ISS was awarded 1st place for Chemistry and 1st Place for KS2 entry for its project on Fireworks.

The video can be viewed by going to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIARBXqL8KM

Science at the International School of Samui is an integral part of the curriculum and is studied as soon as children join the kindergarten and throughout their primary years. In the Senior School, sciences studied include Chemistry, Physics and Biology which at iGCSE level count towards two iGCSE grades allowing students to access courses at A-Level, IB Level or equivalent, ultimately leading to careers in the fields of medicine, medical sciences, teaching, engineering, astronomy, aeronautical industry as well as environmental sciences. Pupils at the ISS benefit from two state-of-the-art, fully-equipped science rooms, one for Senior School students and one Primary School pupils where their passion of all sciences is honed and developed to a high standard.

The International School of Samui offers education from 2 years to 18 years in 3 distinct schools (Kindergarten, Primary & Senior). The school was founded in 2007 and is a licensed British Curriculum school, a certified Cambridge and Edexcel examinations centre, is fully accredited by the Education Development Trust and is a member of COBIS (Council of British International Schools) and FOBISIA (Federation of International Schools in Asia).

The International School of Samui offers education from 2 years to 18 years in 3 distinct (Kindergarten, Primary & Senior) schools. The school was founded in 2007 and to date has around 250 pupils enrolled. ISS is a British Curriculum school certified by the Cambridge and Edexcel examinations boards. It is an accredited COBIS (Council of British International Schools) and a Fobisia (Federation of International Schools in Asia) school. ISS is inspected regularly by the CfBT Education Trust (International inspection body similar to Ofsted) with its latest rating (May 2014) as very good. The International School of SAMUI is fully accredited and licensed as an International School by the Thai Government and Education Agencies (including OPEC).
Officials reconsidering 13-year-old Ao Phuket project

PHUKET: Officials are reconsidering plans for a project proposed 13 years ago which they believe will help boost the islands economy.

constructionlandtourism

By The Phuket News

Thursday 16 June 2016, 11:14AM

A computer-generated image made in 2008 images of what Ao Phuket could look like. Photo: LMG Marine

The Ao Phuket project, originally proposed back in 2003, would see two new islands created off Phuket using a budget of around B200 billion.

Discussions were held about reconsidering the Ao Phuket project at a meeting held by Governor Chamroen Tipayapongtada at Provincial Hall on Tuesday (June 14) together with a committee made up of government officials and the private sector aimed at solving economic issues on the island.

Also in attendance at the meeting were Vice Governor Prajiad Aksornthammakul, representatives from the Phuket Chamber of Commerce, Phuket Tourism Business Association, Real Estate Association Phuket National Farmers Council and others.

Gov Chamroen said, What was discussed most today was reconsidering the Ao Phuket project that was first brought to the table 13 years ago. The project was brought to our attention by the Department of Public Works Town & Country Planing.

The original plan for the Ao Phuket project was to create two new islands covering 2000 rai called MICE and Marina on reclaimed land off Phuket Citys Saphan Hin public park.

Back in 2003 the budget for this project was estimated to be around B63.5bn, but today it would be more in the region of B200bn, but we are now reexamining the project again because we believe that if completed, this project will benefit us all and help improve the islands economy. It will also bring a new landmark to Phuket, he said.

Officials discussed this project 13 years ago, but the idea was stopped because it was believed there would be many problems during the course of construction of the two islands.

Whether this project goes ahead or not, this time around we first need to get input from local residents on their thoughts on the project. If locals want it, we will send our proposal to the central government, he added.

Governor Chamroen also revealed that other topics discussed in Tuesdays meeting included road and tunnel constructions, the development of Phuket Gateway, and telecommunication organisation.

Many ideas which have been proposed by the Phuket Chamber of Commerce are being considered as most of them aim to help boost Phukets economy such as a speedboat organisation, vocational education project for business operators, a public water supply from Rachaprapa Dam and the issue of Chinese tour groups selling and dealing relics and souvenirs to tourists at the islands temples, he concluded.
Phuket Chinese tour companies busted for illegal nominees

PHUKET: The CEO of a major Chinese tour company in Phuket was arrested yesterday (June 15) while another key member of the company remains at large, as police closed in on the pair for allegedly using illegal nominees to register a slew of tour companies in order to avoid paying tax.

Chinesetourismcrime

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 16 June 2016, 01:58PM

Many companies shared the exact same registered address as Tranlee Co Ltd. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Tour boat company Insee Marine was one of many companies that shared the exact same registered address as Tranlee Co Ltd. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The Tranlee head office Rassada served as the home depot for the tour company's fleet of tour buses. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Phuket Provincial Police Deputy Superintendent Col Saman Chainarong called the Phuket media to the head office of Tranlee Travel Co Ltd on Sri Suthat Rd in Rassada at 4pm yesterday.

Today we arrested the Tranlee CEO, Krisakorn Rungmongkolnam, one of the two people behind these operations, explained Col Saman.

The other suspect is known as Weerachai Kampaipraphankul. He escaped arrest as he left before officials arrived. We already have a warrant out for him, he added.

Tourist Police officers and officials from the Phuket Department of Business and Development and the Revenue Office raided Tranlee after months of investigation, leading officials along a paper trail linking 18 companies in four locations, Col Saman explained.

Once we knew our targets, we obtained warrants from the Phuket Provincial Court and investigated these companies, he said.

These companies had Chinese or other foreigners using fake identification cards to register the businesses and had nominees using fake IDs to register as shareholders. The ID cards were obtained from a province in Northern Thailand, Col Saman said.

These companies have been registered in Phuket for over 10 years. They were registered illegally and more than 50% of their shareholders are foreigners. Their revenue each year was more than B150 million, but in total they paid only B200,000 in tax per year.

Krisakorn in particular was a prominent member of Phukets Chinese tourism industry, Col Saman said, noting that Krisakorn had served as a member of a tourism and business association in Phuket and was well known in the tour industry among Chinese tour operators.

Among the other businesses raided by officials carrying out the investigation were tour boat business Insee Marine Co Ltd, registered at the same address as Tranlee, and another business at Phoonphol Night Plaza in Phuket Town.

All these companies operated in the same network with one giant company, Col Saman said.
Pieces of EgyptAir plane found at bottom of Med

A deep-sea robot has located pieces of the missing EgyptAir plane at the bottom of the Mediterranean as investigators race to find the black boxes that could reveal the cause of the crash.

accidentstransportdeath

By AFP

Thursday 16 June 2016, 05:49PM

Pieces of the cabin from the missing EgyptAir plane which crashed into the Mediterranean last month have been found, Egyptian investigators said yesterday (June 15). Photo: Khaled Desouki/AFP

While the wreckage discovered may offer clues about why the Airbus A320 went down with 66 people on board nearly a month ago, its manufacturer said today (June 16) that the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery.

The first photos of the wreckage do not allow [us] to establish any scenario of the accident, an Airbus statement said.

Only the black boxes could contribute to a full understanding of the chain of events which led to this tragic accident.

Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo to crash on May 19, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.

The search vessel John Lethbridge, equipped with an underwater robot, arrived in Egypt last week to begin searching an area around 290 kilometres north of the Egyptian coast.

The robot discovered pieces of the fuselage at several sites, the Egyptian board of inquiry said late yesterday (June 15).

A source close to the investigation said that the robot, operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, had found small fragments of the plane.

Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the Mediterranean by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers.

The pings emitted by the black boxes were detected by French survey ship Laplace on June 1 but the flight recorders exact location has not yet been established.

The area where the plane crashed is believed to be about 3,000 metres deep and its flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder should have had enough battery power to emit signals for four to five weeks.

Investigators expect the signals to continue until June 24.

But the John Lethbridge has equipment capable of locating them even with no pings, according to the source close to the probe.

The black boxes of Air France Flight 447, which crashed in 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean, were located nearly two years later and recovered from a depth of almost 4,000 metres.

The flight data recorder gathers information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, while the cockpit voice recorder keeps track of conversations and other sounds in the pilots cabin.

Frances aviation safety agency has said the EgyptAir plane transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.

On Monday (June 13), Egyptian investigators confirmed that the aircraft had made a 90-degree left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the sea.

Investigators were able to narrow down the search site thanks to an emergency signal sent via satellite by the planes locator transmitter when it hit the Mediterranean.

The passengers on the plane were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a boy and two babies.

Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board.
Regime favours ending war on methamphetamine

BANGKOK: Justice Minister Gen Paiboon Koomchaya has proposed that methamphetamine (ya bah) be taken off the dangerous illicit narcotics list and put under the normal drugs category as current measures to suppress the drugs have failed.

drugspolice

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 16 June 2016, 09:15AM

Justice Minister Gen Paiboon Koomchaya shocked the country yesterday (June 15) with a proposal to stop criminalising methamphetamine. Photo: Pattanapong Hirunard

However, if and when the drugs are to be taken off the list, all agencies will have to work out measures to ensure that the distribution, sale and use of the drugs are strictly controlled, Gen Paiboon said.

He made the proposal yesterday (June 15) at a meeting which discussed the results of the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS), adapting the recommendations to deal with drug problems in Thailand. The Supreme Court president Veerapol Tungsuwan was a speaker at the meeting and he echoed Gen Paiboons opinion.

Addressing the meeting, Gen Paiboon said the world has fought a war on drugs over the past 28 years, but achieved little. Several countries have now changed their approach to dealing with drugs and have considered how to adapt and live with drugs, instead of continuing the traditional approach.

The world has now surrendered to drugs, and has come to think of how to live with drugs. It is like a man suffering from cancer and having no cure and he has to live a happy life with the cancer, Gen Paiboon said.

Numerous countries have discussed solutions to the drug problem in terms of looking after drug users and safeguarding their rights, the minister said.

Gen Paiboon said Thailand is among several countries which supports the idea of a proportionate punishment for drug offences involving the use of amphetamine-type stimulants, as well as alternatives to imprisonment.

Many countries have adopted such ideas, but Thailand has failed to implement them because the countrys drug laws still have certain limitations and need to be amended to accommodate these measures, Gen Paiboon said. A bill was drawn up to reform the system of drug laws and has received the endorsement of the cabinet. The bill will be tabled to the National Legislative Assembly for deliberation, Gen Paiboon said.

The bill would allow the courts of justice to determine whether a drug offender deserves punishments such as a jail term or a fine that is less severe than the minimum penalties stipulated by law. He said the status of methamphetamine or ya bah should be changed from a severe to a normal drug. Citing medical studies, Gen Paiboon said methamphetamine effects on health are less harmful than those of alcohol and cigarettes.

The Justice Ministry will hold discussions with the Public Health Ministry, the courts of justice and prosecutors, and other agencies to amend the law and find ways to take methamphetamine off the narcotics list.

Mr Veerapol told the meeting that Thailand has failed in its bid to use harsh legal measures against drug abuse and drug trafficking. Despite the harsh measures, the drug problem has continued unabated. More than half of about 270,000 legal cases pending in court are drugs-related, Mr Veerapol said.

The Supreme Court president also admitted that several agencies, including the courts of justice, have still failed to work together to address the drug problem.

Under the law, drug addicts are now treated as patients as part of a move to improve measures to deal with the problem, he said.

However, a drug user who possesses 15 ya bah pills or more is considered a drug dealer and is liable for the same punishment imposed on drug dealers, Mr Veerapol said.

Lt Gen Rewat Klinkesorn, chief of the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, said the police need to follow government policy.

Prateep Ungsongtham Hata, the Duang Prateep Foundations secretary-general, warned that if methamphetamine is removed from the narcotics list and put in the normal drugs category, there will be an increase in the drug supply and an increase in demand.

Their prices may drop due to higher competition, said Ms Prateep, who has been battling illicit drugs in the Klong Toey slum community in Bangkok.

Ms Prateep, a 1978 Ramon Magsaysay Award winner, said she wanted to see Gen Paiboon come up with plans to educate Thais about the dangers of methamphetamine abuse.

She also disputed Gen Paiboons claim that methamphetamine is less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes.

Read original story here.
Thai man arrested in Phuket as illegal Chinese tour guide

PHUKET: A bevy of officials arrived at Asia Marina Pier in Rassada yesterday (June15) and arrested a Thai man for working as an illegal guide.

Chinesetourismcrime

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 16 June 2016, 09:29AM

Police arrested 41-year-old Minson Saechaow as he led a group of 30 Chinese tourists at Asia Marina Pier yesterday (June 15). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Tourist Police, Marine Police and officials from the Phuket Tourism Registrar Office arrived at the pier at 9:30am. They placed under arrest 41-year-old Minson Saechaow, who had just led 30 Chinese tourists off a tour bus and was about to lead them onto a ferry heading for Phi Phi Island.

The arrest came after police received a tip off, said police.

Undercover officers were monitoring him for a while and when they saw him conducting a tour in the area they approached him and asked for his guide identification card, which he did not have, said Lt Eakchai Siri of the Tourist Police.

The tourists identified Minson as their tour guide, he added.

In his statement to police, Minson admitted that he had been working as tour guide in Phuket for more than four months and that most of his clients were Chinese because he speaks fluent Chinese.

Minson was taken to Phuket City Police to be charged with working illegally as a tour guide.
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Many South Dakota farmers expect below-average yields this year

Dry fields in the southeastern part of South Dakota and wet fields in spring in northeastern South Dakota could mean lower crop yields.
U.S. Senator John McCain arrives on a visit at a migrant center near the village of Adasevci, Serbia February 12, 2016. REUTERS/Marko Djurica

Sen. John McCain on Thursday delivered and quickly walked back comments saying President Barack Obama was "directly responsible" for the terrorist attack on an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, earlier this week.

The Republican senator from Arizona reportedly argued that Obama was to blame for the shooting that left 49 people dead because his administration's Middle East policy led to the rise of the terrorist group ISIS.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures," McCain said, according to The Washington Post.

McCain made the remarks to a small group of reporters in a Senate hallway, according to the Post. His comments were made in response to a question about gun control.

Later in the afternoon, McCain released a statement saying he "misspoke":

"I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obama's national security decisions, not the President himself. As I have said, President Obama's decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL. I and others have long warned that the failure of the Presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando."

The gunman who carried out the Orlando attack, a US citizen, pledged allegiance to ISIS in phone calls and Facebook posts made during the attack.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's office quickly issued a statement condemning McCain's comments.

"Senator McCain's unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump," said Adam Jentleson, Reid's deputy chief of staff.

Story continues

"This is the party of Trump," he added.

NOW WATCH: 'Hamilton' creator Lin-Manuel Miranda paid tribute to the Orlando shooting victims with a stirring speech





More From Business Insider


Potential Republican 2016 presidential candidate U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks at the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Conference in Nashua, New Hampshire April 18, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Sen. Lindsey Graham on Thursday warned that the Republican Party may be cutting its own throat by doubling down on hardline immigration rhetoric.

I worry a lot about the GOP, Graham told Fox & Friends.

The South Carolina senator continued: I worry that the GOP is cutting its own throat by doubling down on the idea that were gonna deport all illegal immigrants, including grandmothers who have done nothing but be here to have tried to earn a life.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly called for an indefinite ban on Muslim immigration and said the millions of undocumented immigrants who live in the US need to be deported.

In the interview, Graham also offered another reason he has yet to throw his support behind Trump.

Im gonna make a decision what I think is best for this country. He won 32% of the vote in South Carolina. Im not going support Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump because I dont believe either one of them has a plan to keep my country safe," Graham said, referring to each presumptive nominee's national-security plan.

Graham said he was so sorry we are where we are in the 2016 election.

The senator launched what ended up being a failed bid for president in 2016. He dropped out of the race in December, saying he hit a wall in the campaign.

NOW WATCH: TRUMP SPOKESPERSON: Why the Republican party has 'miserably failed'





More From Business Insider


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President Barack Obama hugs Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs upon the president's arrival at Orlando International Airport, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. Obama is in Orlando today to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and meet with families of victims of the attack. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel via AP)
If speculations are anything to go by, Google is not ready to taste the Malayali sweet Neyyappam this time. It seems, the software giant is likely to code-name the next upgrade of their Android operating system as Nutella.

The rumours started doing the round after Google's senior vice president of Android, Chrome OS and Play store, Hiroshi Lockheimer, tweeted a screenshot of his workstation, with one of the windows showing Nutella as the google search word.

Just testing some stuff out... pic.twitter.com/6KPTEgXl9K  Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) June 15, 2016

This was the first time Google had asked users to come up with a name for their next Android version. Since then, Malayalis across the world have been vigorously campaigning to get it named after one of their favourite desserts.

Nutella, a sweetened hazelnut cocoa spread from Italy, has been a favourite in the contest since the very beginning. If this Ferrero product is selected, it would be the second time Google is choosing a brand name for Android after Kit Kat.

>> Visit our Neyyappam special page
Johannes Hahn, the European Commissions Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, arrived in Israel on an official visit on Monday 7 Sivan. The purpose of the visit is to initiate a process of consultations with Israel ahead of the launch of the new Israel-EU bilateral cooperation program.

The Commissioner is responsible for the cooperation framework between the EU and the Mediterranean countries, including Israel.

During his visit, Commissioner Hahn met with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director General Dore Gold and opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog. Commissioner Hahn also visited Israeli projects that are supported by EU funding.

In his opening remarks, Dir-Gen Gold stated: Israel and the EU share a broad common denominator, which makes it possible to expand current cooperation.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem/Photos: Israel Foreign Ministry)
Vincent Mundy | Bloomberg | Getty Images. Russias VTB bank will be privatisedbut youll have to wait for 2017

The Russian government "wants some cash for its budget" and that is why it plans to sell some of its stake in VTB Bank, Chief Executive Andrey Kostin told CNBC on Thursday.

Currently the Russian government is the main shareholder in VTB, owning 60.9 percent of voting shares. VTB is Russia's second-largest bank by assets and was the subject of a $5 billion of state recapitalisation program last July, implemented as part of a wider state plan to help stimulate lending amid a wide economic slowdown.

Speaking from the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, Kostin said the privatisation would probably take place in 2017 rather than this year.

"It is very difficult to sell stocks nowadays because of sanctions," he told CNBC.

VTB is one of several Russian companies and individuals sanctioned by the West after Moscow's annexation of Crimea and its involvement in separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

The European Union will vote on whether to renew sanctions next month. Kostin said he hoped they could be "released" or eased. Those sanctions remain in place and the European Union has said that it is ready to reverse them once Russia "starts contributing actively and without ambiguities to finding a solution to the Ukrainian crisis."

Kostin added that the Russian state had expanded during the global financial crisis and that this should now be rolled back.

"The next step should be really a wide range privatisation," he told CNBC.

Among those companies Moscow is looking to privatize include oil giant Rosneft, diamond company Alrosa and airline Aeroflot, according to media reports. Like VTB, Rosneft is subject to international sanctions.

The Russian economy is set to shrink this year, but by less than in 2015  the International Monetary Fund forecasts a contraction of 1.8 percent in 2016, versus 3.7 percent last year.



The country is grappling with a spiralling budget deficit and government departments have been told to cut spending by 10 percent this year, according to media reports.

Story continues

In May, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said the deficit would come in at 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2016, assuming oil prices averaged $40 per barrel, according to media reports. In 2015, Russia reported a deficit of 2.6 percent.

With contribution from CNBC's Holly Ellyatt.





More From CNBC


Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has announced that beginning this week, the national flag and state symbol must appear in the nations Islamic courts in line with the Flag Law of 1949. This has not been the case to date.

Shaked explained the national flag and state symbol are significant and must appear in all state institutions including Jewish, Muslim and others.

In a related matter, Shaked this week signed off on the process to appoint additional judges to the nations Islamic courts including a woman. This in addition to seven appointments made a few months ago. The minister next week is also expected to sign an order permitting the opening of an Islamic court in Sakhnin. Shaked hopes to bring the number of Muslim religious justices from ten to twenty-two.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Vandals on Tuesday night 9 Sivan (Tuesday to Wednesday) targeted the Bnei Brak home of the head of the IDF enlistment program in the IDF. Family members on Wednesday morning realized the lock on the front door was glued and inoperable. In addition, paint and tar were thrown in front of their door.

A military source explains that the people who commit such acts represent a small minority in the chareidi community and the matter is being addressed by Israel Police. Officials add We hope police will bring an end to this shameful phenomenon and bring an end to the harassment by these fringe element extremists against those among the chareidim wishing to serve the nation.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
The mother of terror victim Danny Gonen HYD announced that foreign nations are funding the legal defense for the terrorists indicted for her sons murder.

Mrs. Devorah Gonen told members of the Knesset Law Committee in a tearful voice that the terrorists who murdered her son during a hike in the Dolev area are being represented by lawyers funded by foreign nations. She was addressing a session of the committee debating the Transparency Bill which compels NGOs to declare donations and sources of funding. This initiative was introduced by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in response to European funding for left-wing NGOs.

Mrs. Gonen explained to committee members that these funds encourage terrorism as the terrorists knew they would receive representation and his family would receive monetary compensation. The terrorist is alive, his family is funded and I have the honor of being a bereaved mother. Foreign countries are funding murder. Take the foreign funding into consideration. How can the attorney representing the terrorist justify the murder of my son?

Machane Tzioni MK Zouheir Bahloul responded I understand and feel your pain as well as feeling the pain of the tragedy you endured. However, the State of Israel receives billions in funding from foreign nations and funds are used for security and the military uses some of these funds as well to wage wars that claims lives.

During the heated discussion, committee chair, MK (Bayit Yehudi) Nissim Slomiansky called MK (Yesh Atid) Yael German three times and final ejected her from the session.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Omar Mateen drove around the Orlando area the night before the nightclub massacre, visiting several places, the mayor said Wednesday as investigators tried to piece together the killers movements and zeroed in on how much his wife may have known about the plot.

An official who was briefed on the case but insisted on anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation said authorities believe the wife, Noor Salman, knew ahead of time about the plans for the attack that left 49 victims dead, but they are reluctant to charge her on that basis alone.

Investigators have spoken extensively with her and are working to establish whether she recently accompanied Mateen to the Pulse club, said a second official who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. The official said investigators have not ruled out charging others, including Salman.

The FBI has recovered Mateens phone and will use location data to verify whether he previously visited the club, the official said. Orlando is nearly a two-hour drive from Mateens home in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said Mateen drove around on Saturday night before he opened fire at the nightclub about 2 a.m. Sunday in an attack that ended with the 29-year-old American-born Muslim being killed by a police SWAT team.

What I know concretely is that he was driving around that evening and visited several locations, Dyer said.

When asked exactly where Mateen visited, and whether the locations included theme parks as reported in news accounts, Dyer said, I think its been pretty accurately depicted on the news. He gave no further details.

A survivor of the massacre, 20-year-old Patience Carter, shed more light on Mateens thinking, saying he talked about wanting America to stop bombing my country  a possible reference to his fathers native Afghanistan.

A number of possible motives and explanations have emerged, with Mateen calling 911 to profess allegiance to the Islamic State group, his ex-wife saying he was mentally ill and his father suggesting he hated those living a Toeiva lifestyle.

On Tuesday, the picture grew more complex when a U.S. official said the FBI was looking into a flurry of news reports quoting people as saying Mateen frequented the nightspot. The official was not authorized to discuss the investigation and also spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some psychologists raised the possibility that Mateen was conflicted and lashed out, or else was casing the nightclub and trying to find potential victims online.

Mateens ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, said earlier in the week that he was mentally ill and abusive.

I feel like its a side of him or a part of him that he lived but probably didnt want everybody to know about, she said.

(AP)
The body of a 2-year-old Nebraska boy who was snatched off a Walt Disney World beach by an alligator and dragged underwater was recovered Wednesday, ending a ghastly search at one of the worlds most popular tourist destinations.

Divers found the body of Lane Graves about 16 hours after authorities first got the call that a reptile had taken the boy from the waters edge at Seven Seas Lagoon despite his fathers frantic attempt to save the child.

Sheriff Jerry Demings said it appeared the gator pulled the child into deeper water and drowned him, leaving the body near the spot where he was last seen. An autopsy was planned.

Of course the family was distraught, but also I believe somewhat relieved that his body was found intact, Demings told a news conference.

The boys parents were identified as Matt and Melissa Graves of Elkhorn, Nebraska, a suburban area of Omaha. A family friend released a statement on behalf of the couple thanking well-wishers for their thoughts and hope-filled prayers.

CEO Michael Iaccarino of Infogroup, a marketing company where Matt Graves is chief data officer, said Graves family is the light of his life.

In a statement from Disney World Resort President George A. Kalogridis, the company said it was doing what we can to help the family.

Disney World closed beaches around Seven Seas Lagoon during the search, and it was not immediately clear when they would reopen.

While no swimming signs are posted at the beach where the boy was attacked, no signs warn about alligators. A company representative said it would thoroughly review the situation for the future.

Demings said his agency and state wildlife officials would look into the issue of warning signs. The sheriff told The Associated Press that investigators would also review whether the boys parents should be charged, but its not likely.

There nothing in this case to indicate that there was anything extraordinary in terms of neglect by the parents, Demings said.

Wildlife officials said the attack was a rarity in a state with a gator population estimated at 1 million. But it still spooked visitors in a city built on tourism.

We have been to Yellowstone and encountered grizzly bears, but this is just freaky, said Minnesota tourist John Aho, who was staying at the park with his wife, Kim, and their 12-year-old son, Johnny.

The child had waded no more than 1 or 2 feet into the water around nightfall Tuesday when he was taken from a small beach, authorities said.

The boys father desperately tried to fight off the gator, suffering lacerations on a hand, but he could not save his son. Neither could a nearby lifeguard, officials said.

No other alligator attacks have been reported on the man-made lake, according to Demings.

Some visitors were surprised to learn the reptiles lived on the property.

My question is why are there alligators in there? said Michelle Stone, who lives near Detroit and was visiting Disney for 10 days with her two children.

The sheriff said the company has a wildlife management system and has worked diligently to ensure their guests are not unduly exposed to wildlife here in this area.

Nick Wiley with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said witnesses estimated the alligator was 4 feet to 7 feet long. Crews removed five gators from the lake during the search, and officials said one could have been the animal that attacked the boy.

The beach where the reptile grabbed the child is part of the luxury Grand Floridian resort, across the lake from Disneys Magic Kingdom theme park. The lake stretches over about 200 acres and reaches a depth of 14 feet. It feeds into a series of canals that wind through the entire Disney property.

Though Florida has grown to the nations third-most populous state, fatal alligator attacks remain rare. Since 1973, 23 people had been killed by wild alligators in Florida, according to data compiled by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The boy makes 24.

The grim news was only the latest for a city buffeted by tragedy in the past few days.

On Sunday, a gunman opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, leaving 49 people dead in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. On Friday night, Christina Grimmie, 22, a contestant on season six of The Voice, was fatally shot as she signed autographs after a show in Orlando.

(AP)


The Reform and Conservative Movements on Thursday 10 Sivan at 5:00PM, will be holding a mixed gender mincha at the Kosel Plaza. The event is not planned in the ezras noshim or the mens area, but the back plaza of the Kosel.

Some feel this is nothing more than revenge for Jerusalem Chief Sephardi Rabbi HaGaon HaRav Shlomo Moshe Amar davening shachris at the egalitarian prayer area earlier this week after setting up a mechitzah.

The head of the Conservative Movement attorney Yitzhar Hess accuses Rav Amar of breaking all the rules after they endured unprecedented slurs from chareidi Members of Knesset. He explains that negotiations were ongoing for three years and agreement was reached and then Rabbi Amar comes and tramples the agreement.

It is added the Women of the Wall will not be participating in the mixed gender event officially.

HaGaon HaRav Avigdor Nebenzahl Shlita, Rav of the Old City of Yerushalayim, is calling on the tzibur to come to the Kosel on Thursday evening 10 Sivan at 5:00PM, to gather near the Kosel Plaza. Rav Nebenzahl spoke with Kol Chai Radio and stated the tzibur must prevent the planned Reform prayer event at the location near the Kosel, stating there cannot be any compromise with the Reform.

Rabbi Nebenzahl

They just want to be mechalel Shem Shomayim and anger HKBH and they are not interested in davening. It is a disgrace. There can be no compromise with them and the current plan for the egalitarian area is unacceptable. The tzibur must come to prevent them from holding a prayer event.

Kol Chai

Should the tzibur come and confront police to block the prayer event?

Rabbi Nebenzahl

I cannot ask people to confront police.

Some of the commentary & background

Rabbi Yisrael Gellis told Kol Chai he does not understand why roshei yeshivos and others are not joining in the call. He is angered by the silence of chareidi MKs, questioning why Shas is willing to bring down the government over the appointment of Rami Sadan as Chairman of the Board of Channel 10 News and why when it comes to the kovod of HKBH and the Kosel there is a deafening silence. He also expresses criticism against Minister of Religious Services (Shas) David Azoulai, who refuses to be interviewed on the matter and is not speaking out to the media in protest as the head of the ministry.

He adds the same is true for all chareidi MKs, who for reasons that remain a mystery, remain silent and are not using their political might as the Reform Movement continues making advances in the area.

An urgent petition is being filed with the High Court of Justice Thursday morning to block the event, explaining it is not a prayer service but a protest rally at the Kosel.

Why Doesnt the Kosel Rav Stop the Event?

Complicating matters is the fact that the attorney general of the Ministry of Religious Services sent a letter to the Rav of the Kosel & Holy Sites Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz Shlita, informing him that while he had the authority to stop the Birkas Kohanos he does not have the authority to prevent a mixed-gender service.

Hence the Kosel ravs hands have been tied. In the interim, the letter has been given to Attorney General Dr. Avichai Mandelblit to render his decision regarding the scope of the authority of Kosel Rav Rabbi Rabinowitz.

Rabbi Rabinowitz now awaits to hear if the High Court rules before 5:00PM and/or if Attorney General Mandelblit issues his ruling before 5:00PM.

The Reform Movement is calling for a third designated area at the Kosel, one of equality at the actual Kosel [not the area designated at Robinsons Arch]. The announcement explains the mincha event is a first and ultimately, they too will be at the Kosel like all others, holding bar and bas mitzvah celebrations at the Kosel.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Attorneys representing former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel Rabbi Yona Metzger are playing down the case against their client. Attorneys Tal Gabbai and Yehuda Fried on Wednesday evening responded to the media regarding the indictment filed against Rabbi Metzger, stating there was a great deal of noise surrounding the case and talk of alleged major crimes but at the end, Rabbi Metzger did not accept bribes, did not breach the trust of his position and did abuse the authority of his office as was alleged. In fact, they say the rabbis actions do not constitute a criminal offense in practice, even if they [the allegations] were true.

As an example, they explain it is alleged Rabbi Metzger recommended to philanthropists regarding where to donate their money. They explain directing foreign residents is under the auspices of professional judgment by the Chief Rabbi of Israel and in the worst case scenario, one might say he took advantage of his position. Therefore, there is no fear of using his influence or his senior post as rav improperly.

The legal team expressed criticism over the decision not to probe the tycoons who gave the alleged bribes to the rabbi to get their version of the events that led to the alleged transfer of funds. Instead, they point out that the prosecutor was quick to sign an agreement with a state witness against the rabbi.

Persons close to the rabbi explain the international investigation has been ongoing for two years, including eavesdropping and utilizing other methods and to date, there is no concrete evidence against the rabbi despite the media reports against him. They add that there is not a single case in which the rabbi advanced any project to promote projects of persons close to him or other interested parties.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
BY Rabbi Yair Hoffman for the Five Towns Jewish Times



The halacha discussed in this column can place a number of people in an awkward situation. Nonetheless, it is an area of halacha that cannot be ignored.

But first, a brief introduction:

There was once a minyan for an aveil somewhere in Suffolk County. There were only ten people present; one of them was a rav. The rav realized that the minyan was barely a minyan and that one of those who were gathered was not qualified to be counted for a minyan. The rav announced that there are some 24 situations in which a minyan requires eleven men, not ten, and that this was one of those times. After trying for an eleventh for the next 15 minutes or so, the gathered people left.

Why was one of them not to be counted? One of the ten people was a member of Jews for J. The Mishnah Berurah rules that such a person is ineligible to be counted.



Of Spies And Heretics

I once had a remarkably fascinating conversation with my rosh yeshiva, Rav Henoch Leibowitz, ztl, regarding Rav Moshe Feinstein ztls understanding of the Gemara in Arachin (15a). Rav Moshes view is discussed in Igros Moshe Vol. I #23 (and other places too). The Gemara states that the spies said the words Ki chazak hu mimenu. The Gemara says, Do not read it mimenu, but render it as mimenoIt is greater than Him.

Rav Moshe understands this Gemara thatno ifs, ands, or butsthe meraglim, spies, were full-blown apikorsim, heretics. And still they are considered an eidah, congregation. From here, Rav Moshe Feinstein extrapolates that in order to be considered an eidah, it doesnt matter whether or not one is a kofer. A kofer could thus be counted for a minyan, writes Rav Moshe. There is another ramification as well. In order for a person to be considered a public Shabbos violator, there is no need for ten religious Jewish people to be the public. Any ten Jews will do.

The Concept Of Dakei Dakos

My rosh yeshiva disagreed with Rav Feinstein on his understanding of the Gemara. He explained that the sin of the meraglim was not true apikorsus, but rather within the parameters of the concept of dakei dakosinfinitesimally small and barely detectable. This being the case, there are two ramifications: (1) A true heretic may not be counted; and (2) in order to be considered a public Shabbos violator, it must be that he violated Shabbos in the company of ten Shabbos-observant Jews.

The yeshiva world has always understood the sins that are discussed about the great people in Tanach in a similar fashion, and that the Torah will exaggerate the sin of a great person. Regarding such a great person it is as if a much larger sin was committed. Thus, when Avraham Avinu says the words Bmah eida ki ershena es haaretz, he was not expressing doubt as to Hashem keeping His promise; he was just asking for the specific sign that Hashem would give him.

Why, then, was he punished? The Alter from Slabodka explains that he was not being sensitive enough to avoid using language that might connote doubt as to whether Hashem would keep His promise. It is this insensitivity to the proper use of language that caused the punishment and our exile into Mitzrayim. This is the concept of dakei dakos.



Support For Rav Leibowitzs Reading

The Chofetz Chaim, ztl (Shemiras HaLashon 2:19), great-great-uncle of Rav Henoch Leibowitz, ztl, has a different understanding of that Gemara than does Rav Moshe Feinstein ztl. He writes, in contrast to Rav Feinstein: Certainly, the spies did not deny the power of the Holy One Blessed Be He. Rather, they thought that since for a great matter such as this, to beat out a nation of warriors and giants like these, a miracle would be required, they did not believe that HaKadosh Baruch Hu would perform miracles for the nation of Israel after they had sinned. That which they said, Kvyachol, He cannot take out His keilim from there, their intent was: When does HKBH drive out a nation (take out His keilim)? When He finds a different one that is better than that one. But after we have sinned great sins regarding the Golden Calf and Basar Taavah, He will not have us overcome great nations like these. And that which Hashem promised to give us the land that was only if we merited it in the framework of being tzaddikim.

The Peninei Tefillah page 125 cites Rav Elyashiv, ztl, as disagreeing with Rav Feinsteins ruling of the Gemara in Arachin as well.

Who May Be Counted?

What follows is a listing of who may and may not be counted for a minyan of ten. The rulings may be controversial and perhaps insulting to some. However, they are based on the Mishnah Berurah and the rulings of contemporary poskim, and represent normative Orthodox Jewish law. Of course, one should check with his own moreh horaah for halachah lmaaseh.

I. The Basic Category

The basic requirement for being counted in a minyan is to be a male Jew of bar mitzvah age who is of sound mind.

Neither a woman nor a child may be counted for a minyan (SA OC 55:4).

An androgynous person may not be counted for a minyan (see MB 55:3). However, it might be necessary to further define what constitutes a true halachic androgynous individual. The Maharam Shik (Responsum OC 32) rules that under extreme situations (bshaas hadchak) an androgynous person may be counted in a minyan. When Rav Elyashiv, ztl, was asked by his son-in-law whether one may rely on the Maharam Shik (Shiurei Torah LaRofin, siman 265), he said that in extreme situations, such as when the minyan might fall apart otherwise, one may rely on it. A tumtum, a person with undeveloped or indeterminable genitals may not be counted for a minyan (SA OC 55:3).

A slave may not be counted for a minyan (SA OC 55:4), nor may one who is half-freedman and half-slave (MB 55:3).

A mute person who can hear but cannot speak may be counted for a minyan (see SA OC 55:8). Indeed, it would seem that even two mutes may be counted in the minyan (see Rav Shulchan Aruch).

A deaf person who cannot speak, even if he was born normal, may not be counted for a minyan (SA OC 55:8 and BH Hu).

One who can speak but cannot hear may be counted for a minyan, but he may not be counted for a minyan for the Torah and he may not be the shliach tzibbur (SA OC 55:8; see also BH siman 156 vLikros for his disqualification for shliach tzibbur). If he can hear through equipment then he may be counted for all.

A crazed person may not be counted (55:8). However, if he is sometimes normal and sometimes not, then when he is normal he may be counted. There are various views as to what is considered shoteh (crazed).

An intoxicated (drunk or drugged) person who cannot speak before the king may not be counted (MB 99:10).

There is a debate as to whether a sleeping person may be counted as one of the minyan of ten. The Mechaber holds that he can, but the Mishnah Berurah (55:34) cites opinions who rule otherwise. The Mishnah Berurah rules that for zimun and chazaras hashatz one should wake at least to the point where he is groggy. For Kaddish and Kedushah we can be more lenient but only if it is just one of them. If there are two people sleeping, they may not be counted. For Krias HaTorah and Megillah reading, all agree that a sleeping person does not count. For Birkas Kohanim it is unclear.

Someone still davening Shemoneh Esreih may be counted (MB 55:33).

II. Those Whose Actions Exclude Them

An apikores may not be counted for a minyan. This is whether he denies the written Torah or the oral law (See MB 55:47). A karaite may not be counted (MB 55:47).

What about people who have graduated from places where the denominational hierarchy has views that are in stark contrast to these principles? This author presented the issue to a number of Poskim. The answer was that there are certain institutions where there is a Chazakah that its graduates generally follow the thinking of the institution. Thus, they have ruled that unless one knows for a fact otherwise, the assumption is that the graduates follow the views of the institution.

One who is menudah, under a ban, because of monetary issues may be counted. One who is under a ban for sinning or for violating gezeiras tzibbur may not be counted. (BH 55:12 Menudah)

A mumar for avodah zarah may not be counted for a minyan (MB 55:46). Anyone who does not believe in the Oneness of Hashem is not to be counted for a minyan (Vilna Gaon on Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 21 page 42). Any Jewish believer in Christianity of any form may not be included in a minyan.

One who sins out of spite may not be counted (MB 55:46). However, one who sins because of desire may be counted (SA OC 55:11).

III. Shabbos Violators

A public Shabbos violator may not be counted (MB 55:46). Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, ztl, (Minchas Shlomo Vol. II 4:10) writes that one should avoid doing so. There are those who are lenient when the Shabbos violator would be embarrassed to violate Shabbos in front of a great man (Rabbi Ben Tzion Abba Shaul in Ohr LTzion Vol. II #5; see also MB 385:6). This may also be true if they are embarrassed to do so in shul itself.

The Chazon Ish (see Maaseh Ish Vol. II page 93) allowed a Shabbos violator an aliyah to the Torah as well. Rav Dovid Tzvi Hoffmann in Melamed LHoil (Vol I #29) writes that if it is known that the Shabbos violator believes in Hashem, one may rely on the ruling of the Binyan Tzion (Vol II #23) that he does not have the status of a gentile. He further writes, however, if one can avoid doing so by davening elsewhere without embarrassing the person one should do so and not rely upon this leniency.

A child who was raised in a manner where he did not know better and he does not observe Shabbos may be considered as a tinok shenishba, kidnapped child, and may be counted in a minyan, but only if he was not exposed to Torah. Thus, a yeshiva dropout may not be included in a minyan if he no longer observes Shabbos. But a Russian Jew, for example, who was not exposed to a yeshiva education can be counted (Peninei Tefillah citing Rav Elyashiv, page 127).

IV. Mourners

An onein may not be counted for a minyan if the burial arrangements have not yet been made (MB 55:24, 199:9). He is also not counted for zimun.

A mourner may be counted for bentching and for tefillah (see MB 55:24). Although some question whether he may be counted for a minyan for the reading of the Torahsince he is forbidden to learn Torahcommon practice is to allow it. He may hear the reading but not delve into it. 

The author can be reached at [email protected]
A pathologist testifying in the manslaughter trial of IDF soldier Elor Azariya told the court on Thursday, 10 Sivan, that if the soldier has not fired at the wounded terrorist he might be alive today. Dr. Hadas Gips told the Jaffa Military Court that Abdel Fatah al-Sharif would have survived his wounds had Azariya not fired at him.

Some feel this gives a boost to the defense, as the defendant has maintained he felt the wounded terrorist still posed a threat.

Azariya has already told investigators he saw the wounded terrorist moving and arm and his head and was wearing a heavy jacket, which led him to fear he was also wearing a bomb, which he could still detonate.

Azariya was the soldier who shot and killed the wounded terrorist at point blank range on Hebron, shortly after the terrorist wounded a soldier in a stabbing attack, which led to his wounds as soldiers fired at him.

Elors company commander, Major Tom Neeman also took the stand, explaining that during the eight months Elor was a subordinate under his command, he was a very good soldier, well-disciplined, and this led to the decision to select him to become the company medic. The commander added the knife was far from the terrorists hand and he could not have reached it. He added that regarding the claim he was wearing a jacket on a hot day, he explained many wear long sleeves in Hebron during the summer so he does not agree with Elors assessment fearing a bomb. When asked was the shooting of wounded terrorist justified the company commander responded no.

His trial many fear has become political as the military prosecutor seems adamant to get a conviction in the case, having PA (Palestinian Authority) photographers testify in the case against the soldier as well as presenting video footage from the BTselem left-wing human rights association which the defense maintains has been edited. The military prosecutor first announced the soldier would face murder charges but lacking concrete evidence to support the case, the charges were lowered to manslaughter.

Some opine this was the final straw that led to the chain of events compelling former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalons resignation as he backed the murder charges against the soldier, showing little or no support for him before the evidence in the case was in. Yaalon was quick to condemn the soldier in the media, even before the facts in the case became known.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Recently-appointed Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman is scheduled to leave Israel on motzei Shabbos for his first official trip to the United States in his new capacity. He will be meeting with his US counterpart, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carton to discuss matters of mutual interest.

From Washington he will travel to Texas to take part in a ceremony to unveil the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter, which is to become Israels next generation fighter plane.

The trip comes at a time when Israel and the United States are working to narrow differences pertaining to a ten-year US military aid package.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Online estate agent Purplebricks revealed plans to head Down Under as the recently-listed firm posted a fourfold rise in sales over its past year as Britons continue to shun high street agencies.

The Neil Woodford-backed firm said its annual revenues rose by 448 per cent to 18.6million as it sold and completed 2.8billion worth of property deals.

Losses ballooned from 5.4million to 10.5million for the full year to April 30, reflecting costs associated with its flotation last December, but Purplebricks said it will turn a profit by next year.

The company also said it will expand into Australia in 2016, where chief executive Michael Bruce hopes to tap a 3.3billion market.

Web boost: Online estate agent Purplebricks revealed plans to head Down Under as the recently-listed firm posted a fourfold rise in sales over its past year as Britons continue to shun high street agencies

Purplebricks said it had recruited an Australian management team and planned a maximum investment in the country of 10million over the next two years, funded from existing cash resources.

Mr Bruce said: In just our second full year of operation we are leading change in an industry that has long been stagnant and is only now waking up to the opportunities and threats posed by technological advance and changing consumer behaviour.

While others are following, we have retained our leading position, with 62 per cent of the non-traditional estate agency market and look to replicate this success in Australia.

Website visits at the Aim-listed firm rose by 208 per cent to more than 1.23 million per month in the last 12 months.

Purplebricks had 205 agents at the end of April, up from 165 before its float. The company said it expected to employ 245 agents by the end of this month.

Ian Osburn, analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald, said: We predict sustained rapid growth. Purplebricks has been outgrowing online peers, the company can sustain significant growth for years.

International markets offer further opportunities. We think Purplebricks prospects are strong and maintain our buy recommendation.

Purplebricks shares were up 5 per cent, or 6.8p to 138.0p in late morning trade, having floated at 100p a share at the end of last year which gave it an initial market value of 240.3million.

The stock  of which Woodford Investment Management has a 28 per cent holding - has had a volatile six months, hitting a low of 72.5p in January as global stock markets slumped at the start of the year, before rallying to a peak of 180.0p last month.

Online moves: Countrywide, the UKs largest residential estate, this month launched a fixed-fee, pared-back online service, while rival Savills has invested in Yopa, a fixed-fee hybrid agency that launched in January.

At the time of its float, Purplebricks said it was the market leader in the hybrid and online sector, with a market share of the top six national online competitors in excess of 60 per cent.

The group added that its site had approximately 4,300 residential properties for sale, which represented more than twice the number of properties on the next largest online agency.

Purplebricks, was founded by Mr Bruce and his brother Kenny in 2014.

Instead of the percentage-based fees charged by high street estate agents such as Countrywide and Savills, Purplebricks charges a fixed 798 plus VAT, or 1,158 plus VAT in Greater London, levied whether or not a home is sold.

Responding to the increased competition, earlier this month, Countrywide, the UKs largest residential estate launched a fixed-fee, pared-back online service.
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By Mark Hallum

The former home of U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis has made headlines in recent months because of backlash over renovations deemed more than excessive by neighborhood residents.

Now, the city Department of Buildings has ordered the owners to file for a new building permit before construction can continue at 218-15 40th Ave.

The original building plans showed that only the front of the house was to be renovated with additional construction.. But neighbors watched in despair back in April as the roof was torn off and the inside gutted, according to Bonnie Skala Kiladitis, who grew up across the street. Eventually the house was reduced to ground level.

Garaufis stately house is believed to have been built circa 1890 and was the one of the personal residences of the Lawrence family, influential members of the early Bayside community. A study conducted by historic preservation consultant Paul Graziano found the Lawrence Estate is eligible for the National and State Register of Historic Places, a recognition that carries no protection from demolition or alteration.

Kiladitis, in keeping with her father Frank Skalas legacy of neighborhood activism, appealed to Councilman Paul Vallone (D-Bayside), who wrote a letter to the DOB requesting that it investigate the matter and levy fines to the strictest degree.

Our community will not stand idly on the sidelines when homeowners and developers come into our neighborhoods and deceitfully try to circumvent building codes, Vallone said. This type of blatant disregard of building permit requirements and deliberate over-development will never be accepted in our community..

A notice to revoke on the building permit was issued to the owners at the end of April, which would force them to answer objections with the DOB for renovating beyond the limits of the alt-1 permit.

A DOB spokesman has since said the owners will be required to file for a new building permit before moving forward with their building plans, and not an alteration permit.

It is not immediately clear whether any fines will be levied against the owner, a recent New Jersey transplant who identified herself by the name Lisa, but a spokesman from Vallones office said the councilman is drafting legislation to prevent work on sites that have a notice to revoke on building permits to continue while waiting for an answer to objections.

We are currently drafting a piece of legislation that would make it so a developer/homeowner would not be allowed to continue work during the period between receiving a notice to revoke and answering the objections that warranted that notice. The bill will be introduced in the fall. We felt that receiving a notice to revoke is significant enough to warrant a stop of work. If you are allowed to continue work while awaiting to answer the objections, the notice to revoke is really more like a notice to finish your work as fast as possible. Our goal is to give the DOB as many tools as we can to address issues like these when they come up, the spokesman said. .
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By Lenore Skenazy

Sol Feuerwerker grew up as an alien. Not alien as in illegal immigrant. Alien as in someone from another planet.

That planet was Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

While many people in Williamsburg lead lives most of us can relate to, Sol was the youngest of 11 children in an ulta-orthodox Jewish family. The religious sect he grew up in, a group called the Satmar Hasidim, believes in large families and distrusts the modern world. Members wear distinctive clothingthe men are in black suits, white shirts and side curlsand speak the traditional Jewish language of Yiddish. They do not mingle with outsiders. They do not watch any media. Boys like Sol go to sex-segregated schools and are forbidden to study almost anything other than religion.

No algebra.

No biology.

No non-Jewish studies beyond what a fourth or fifth grader would get at public school.

Which is why it is all the more remarkable that about a week ago Sol stood up in front of a crowd of 300 and announced that he had been accepted to medical school.

The crowd went wild. This was the annual downtown gala sponsored by Footsteps, the organization that helped Sol and hundreds of others find their way out of ultra-Orthodoxy to lead lives of their choosing. Footsteps is not anti-religion, it is pro-freedom. Its slogan is Your life, your journey, your choice.

Our core value is choice, says Lani Santo, the executive director. We really help people think through the consequences of their various decisions.

Because people leaving ultra-orthodoxy are often shunned by the community they left behind, including their own families, Footsteps provides counseling, practical help, and a home base for those who lose their entire support system.

The gala was organized to celebrate the milestones in the lives of Footsteps participants, since few had family members to cheer them on. Instead, the audience of Footsteps supporters whooped for a member who just got her first tech job, and another who just became an Uber driver. Several members had become engaged, provoking joyous applause. Then Sol took the stage as the evenings keynote, and the audience sat in stunned silence as he told his story.

You need to understand just how insane it is for me to be here, the 26-year-old began. I grew up in a typically sized family in Williamsburg: I have 10 siblings. Exposure to the mainstream world is almost non-existent. Some people say Im an immigrant in my own country, but I prefer alien. An immigrant might know about science and history and politicsan alien doesnt. An immigrant has read books and watched televisionan alien hasnt. An immigrant has spoken to people of the opposite sex without feeling like the world is about to end. An immigrant might be culturally unaware, but at the same time be an informed citizen of the world. An alien is just an alien and let me tell you, if an alien is going to successfully transition to immigrant, they need Footsteps.

Sol heard about Footsteps through the grapevine as a teen. By then hed already been sneaking off to the DVD store in the Puerto Rican part of his neighborhood and voraciously renting action flicks. These taught him colloquial English, and gave him direction: He wanted to be a cop, just like the guys in the movies. But then he went on a tour of Hunter College sponsored by Footsteps and his life changed.

Classes in art and sociology! Laboratories! Students of every stripe talking, studying, laughing together. Footsteps was founded by a Hunter student, Malkie Schwartz, whod made her way out of ultra-Orthodoxy and wanted to help others who chose that path. Sol enrolledand immediately floundered.

I had never tackled the concept of the atom, or seen a periodic table of the elements, he later recalled. I did not even know that all living things were made up of cells.

He had to make up for lost time and at first, he couldnt. He was in danger of failing, but reached out for help. And by the next year, he rose to the top of his class in chemistry.

He continued to climb, getting As in his coursework while working part time, and becoming a mentor to others following in his, well, footsteps. He began volunteering at Morgan Stanley Childrens Hospital and doing genetics research.

And last year, he did it. He graduated with a degree in sociology. He put off applying to med school, however, to stay on for a year at Hunter teaching organic chemistry.

Now Sol is heading to Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Yes, he will be an immigrant from New York.

But not an alien.

Lenore Skenazy is a keynote speaker and founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids.
By Rob Okun

The massacre in Orlando was carried out as an act of rage. By a man. Who had access to military-grade weapons. And had unmet mental health and trauma needs.

Until or unless we make the murderers gender a central part of not just this story, but of the larger effort to prevent mass shootings (that have traditionally solely focused on gun control and mental health), we wont succeed in preventing such horrors in the future. We have talked about nearly all those other factors: access to guns, his mental health, his homophobic views. What about the manhood part?

Make no mistake; there is much to unpack in the Orlando tragedy, beginning with questions about Omar Mateens sexual orientation. Was he as confused about his possible gay identity as he was about supporting three competing terrorist organizations? Despite the complexity of this storythe achingly painful attack on both the LGBTQ and the Latin@s and Latinx communitieswe must not allow Mateens male identity to be obscured. Well before the Columbine murders in Colorado in 1999, like-minded colleagues and I penned dozens of columns underscoring the centrality of gender in mass shootings.

Its no secret that similarities abound among male shooters: lonely and isolated, disaffected and alienated; often failing to forge strong ties with their families and communities. Whether Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook, or James Holmes in Aurora, disturbed young men were the murderers. No one questions that fact. But not questioning doesnt mean ignoring the implications. Imagine if the shooter had been a woman; wouldnt that have been the headline in The New York Times; the lead on CNN?

Prevention strategies must continue to include a vigorous pursuit of stringent gun control measures and a call for increasing mental health servicesas well as sanding up to the NRA. Still, to ignore gender in mass shootings is like expecting a three-legged stool to stand on two legs.

In April I shared with an aide to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) my proposal that Congress appropriate funds for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to undertake a multi-year inquiry of a diverse cohort of preschool boys across the U.S. The goal? To cultivate boys emotional intelligence and to oversee a comprehensive effort that A) addresses the pressure boys feel to perform conventional masculinity; and B) articulates a new expression of maleness that emphasizes compassion and vulnerability, and collaboration and cooperation, over competitiveness and emotional stoicism. Its high time we teach boys a language most males have only a rudimentary awareness of: Emotionalese.

Now is the time for a PBS Frontlines investigation on a society regularly producing crops of psychologically damaged, angry, isolated men. Now is the time for clergy to deliver sermons about emotionally arid men, thirsting for waters of connection and the sunlight of compassion. Now is the time for school nurses to work with educators in tracking moody eight and nine year-old boys. Now is the time to train homeroom teachers to identify alienated middle-school boys. Now is the time for guidance counselors to reach out to shut down, high school-age young men. Now is the time for university health center staff to learn how to counsel loner male college students. Now is the time for community social workers and human resources staff to learn how to work with unemployed and underemployed 20-something at-risk men.

Imagine all of these groups working with doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals in a coordinated campaign overseen by the CDC. Isnt this strain of mens violence a public health crisis the CDC should confront as seriously as its addressing the Zika virus?

Even if we had taken all these steps years ago, we might not have been able to prevent Omar Mateens murderous rampage. But if we dont begin employing strategies like these, rest assured another mass shooting will happen again. And again. And soon.

The views expressed in this article are the author\s own and do not necessarily reflect The Times Of Earth\s editorial policy.
Egypt found wreckage including seats and luggage Friday from the EgyptAir plane that crashed in the Mediterranean, as investigators tried to unravel the mystery of why it swerved and plummeted into the sea.

Search teams spotted personal belongings of passengers and parts of the Airbus A320 about 290 kilometres (180 miles) north of Egypt\s coastal city of Alexandria, the military said.

The country\s aviation minister has said a "terrorist attack" was a more likely cause than technical failure for the plane\s disappearance on a flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board.

But French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said there was "absolutely no indication" of why the plane came down.

"We\re looking at all possibilities, but none is being favoured over the others," he said.

The tragedy raised fears of a repeat of the bombing of a Russian passenger jet by the Islamic State jihadist group over Egypt last October that killed all 224 people on board.

In Cairo, French and Airbus investigators were to meet their Egyptian counterparts to lay the groundwork for their probe.

A French patrol boat carrying equipment capable of tracking the plane\s black boxes was due to arrive Sunday or Monday in the area where the plane is thought to have crashed, the French navy said.

It came as the French embassy in Cairo said the black boxes can emit signals for only up to four to five weeks.

Relatives of some of the passengers and crew met EgyptAir officials and later gathered at a hotel near Cairo airport to exchange information.

"They haven\t died yet. No one knows. We\re asking for God\s mercy," said a woman in her 50s whose daughter had been on board.

The plane disappeared between the Greek island of Karpathos and the Egyptian coast in the early hours of Thursday, without its crew sending a distress signal.

It had turned sharply twice in Egyptian airspace before plunging 22,000 feet (6,700 metres) and vanishing from radar screens, said Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos.

A multi-national operation involving aircraft and ships has been launched to find the plane.

Kammenos said Egypt had told Greece that search teams had found "a body part, two seats and one or more items of luggage" north of Alexandria.

The European Space Agency said one of its satellites had on Thursday spotted an oil slick about 40 kilometres southeast of the plane\s last known location.

French President Francois Hollande had said that it was clear the plane had crashed, and authorities in both Paris and Cairo opened investigations.

Fifteen French citizens, a Briton and two Canadians were among 26 foreigners on the plane.

One of the Canadians was Saskatoon-born mother of three Marwa Hamdy who was returning home to Cairo after visiting relatives in Paris, a friend tweeted.

IS jihadists have been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and have claimed attacks in France and Egypt.

In October, an Airbus A321 operated by Russia\s Metrojet broke up over the Sinai desert after taking off from the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, killing all on board in an attack that IS claimed.

Greek civil aviation chief Constantinos Litzerakos said the pilot had mentioned no problem in his last communication before the plane disappeared, and the flight had not deviated from its course.

"The flight controllers contacted the pilot at a height of 37,000 feet (near Athens) he did not mention a problem," he said.

Neither the Greek coastguard nor the navy could confirm reports a passing ship had seen "a ball of fire in the sky".

Litzerakos said that if there had been an explosion, any debris would have been scattered across a wide area.

The passengers also included two Iraqis and one citizen from each of Algeria, Belgium, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, as well as 30 Egyptians, the airline said. They included a boy and two babies.

Seven crew members and three security personnel were also on board.

In October, foreign governments issued travel warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of security at its airports after IS said it downed the Russian airliner with a bomb concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled into the hold.

SOURCE: AFP
Some 200 intellectuals, scientists and artists from around the world urged the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Wednesday to save North America\s endangered migratory Monarch butterfly.

US novelist Paul Auster, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, British writer Ali Smith and India\s women\s and children\s minister Maneka Sanjay Gandhi were among the signatories of an open letter to the three leaders.

US President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will hold a North American summit in Ottawa on June 29.

The letter by the so-called Group of 100 calls on the three leaders to "take swift and energetic actions to preserve the Monarch\s migratory phenomenon" when they meet this month.

They urge the leaders to protect parcels of land containing milkweed, which is threatened by herbicides and feeds the butterflies on their 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) journey from Canada to Mexico\s wintering grounds.

The letter also called on Mexico to prohibit mining and end all logging in the pine tree reserve where the butterflies live during the winter.

In 2014, Obama, Pena Nieto and then prime minister Stephen Harper agreed to take measures to protect the orange and black butterfly, whose population has drastically dwindled in the past two decades.

The butterfly\s population rebounded this past winter season, but it is still far from its peak of 20 years ago.

In 1996-1997, the butterflies covered 18.2 hectares (45 acres) of land in Mexico\s central mountains.

It fell to 0.67 hectares in 2013-2014 but rose to 4 hectares this year. Their population is measured by the territory they cover.

They usually arrive in Mexico between late October and early November and head back north in March.

SOURCE: AFP
Times' Game of the Week Preview: Central Valley at Aliquippa

Central Valley and Aliquippa are set to face off in arguably the biggest game of the year in the WPIAL. Check out the Times' Game of the Week preview.
PLAYOFFS?! Breaking down postseason scenarios for local high school football teams

Who's in? Who's out? Who can clinch with a win? We break down the postseason scenarios for every local high school football district.
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Sometimes we see entertainers, politicians and others who seem to want to reinvent themselves. Through the years, I have seen wineries do the same thing, whether it be the vision of a new winemaker, an ownership change, or other things that mother nature takes care of, such as disease in the vines or droughts. Here are a few notes from a winery that is rocking it with their new philosophy.

Kenwood Vineyards in the heart of Sonoma has a new tier of wines called Six Ridges, which is named in honor of the mountain ridges that border the vineyards. Made with grapes from selected vineyards throughout the county, I found these wines to be very true to the characteristics from each terroir that produces these grapes.

2014 Kenwood Vineyards Six Ridges Chardonnay is 100 percent chardonnay with grapes coming from the cool, foggy region of the Russian River Valley of California. This wine is aged sur lie in small French oak barrels for eight months. The resulting wine is balanced and ripe, revealing layers of pear, white peach and vanilla, with hints of tropical and floral aromas, and finishing extremely smooth and elegant with a rich creamy texture. I give the 2014 Kenwood Vineyards Six Ridges Chardonnay a rating of 90 points and select it as a "Double Must Buy." This wine retails around $19.99.

2012 Kenwood Vineyards Six Ridges Cabernet Sauvignon is 95 percent cabernet sauvignon and 5 percent merlot, with the fruit coming from the Alexander Valley of California. Full-bodied and complex, this delicious red wine is loaded with ripe wild berry and spicy dark cherry characteristics, with hints of floral and spice notes such as clove or allspice. The rich, smooth finish is extremely balanced and will linger on the palate for some time, imparting touches of cinnamon and toasty vanilla. I give the 2014 Kenwood Vineyards Six Ridges Cabernet Sauvignon a rating of 91 points and select it as a "Double Must Buy." This wine retails around $20.99.
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By Patrick Johnston, patrick.johnston@gannett.com

A Wichita Falls man will serve prison time after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography Thursday morning.

Ronnie Wayne Deford, 55, entered the plea on 10 counts of the charge in the 89th District Court and was sentenced to 18 total years in prison with 462 days credited by Judge Charles Barnard, per a plea agreement.

The Wichita Falls Police Department's Crimes Against Children Unit executed a search warrant at the Corner Emporium Antique Mall in the 700 block of Indiana Avenue on Feb. 26, 2015 related to two cyber tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A search warrant was served to Microsoft Corporation because the company had made the cyber tips as required by law.

During the search warrant, multiple items were collected from the store, including Deford's computer and a storage media. Over 1,800 images of child pornography were found on the devices depicting men engaging in various sexual acts with female children ranging from infants to 10-year-olds.

Deford was interviewed the same day as the search warrant was served and he admitted to downloading and viewing the images.

On April 15, 2015, Deford was indicted by a Wichita County grand jury on 20 counts of possession of child pornography. Of those, 10 counts were dismissed per the plea agreement.

In previous Times Record articles on downtown businesses, Deford was listed as the manager of the Corner Emporium, which occupies the old First National Bank building at the corner of Eighth and Indiana.
Indictments

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By Times Record News

A former preacher in Young County has been arrested on charges of child pornography.

A news release from the Texas Rangers stated Dennis Harmon Bell was first arrested on March 17 on one count of possession of child pornography from his residence in Graham. On June 8, a Young County grand jury indicted Bell on five counts of possession of child pornography.

Bell was arrested Tuesday and charged with the four new counts. His total bail was set at $87,500 and he was not in Young County Jail on Wednesday afternoon.

The news release did not include Bells current occupation but said he was retired from preaching in Young County.
GLENVILLE  Twelve members of the New York Air National Guard's 109th Airlift Wing swam 100 meters in full uniform on Thursday to earn the German Armed Forces Proficiency Badge.

The swim was held at the Glenville YMCA.
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SCHENECTADY  Police said they were awaiting medical reports to determine if a city man hospitalized in critical condition since late Wednesday night had been shot or stabbed.

Initially, police said the man they later identified as Malik Zulu, 20, had been shot in the torso. They, however, did not find any shell casings and started looking into whether was stabbed.
Albany

A Time Warner Cable News debate between the two Democrats running for the 19th Congressional District seat on Wednesday was largely a showcase of similarities between the aspiring congressional representatives.

Will Yandik and Zephyr Teachout provided similar takes on the need for domestic protections against terrorism in the wake of the Orlando shooting massacre, the necessity for the federal government to protect LGBT rights, the need for farmworkers to be able to organize and even the person who most embodies New York values  former Rep. Maurice Hinchey.

While a spot of contention arose on public financing of elections (Teachout supports it; Yandik opposes it), largely the difference between the two is how they plan to achieve results on multiple policies.

More Information On TV Watch the NY-19 Republicans debate Thursday Republican John Faso and Andrew Heaney will face off in a 19th Congressional District debate of their own on Thursday at 7 p.m. on Time Warner Cable News Ch. 9. See More Collapse

Teachout brought questions of more affordable health care, solar energy and gun control back to the need to take on the big corporations that she sees as owning the discussion in Congress.

"The practical thing that we can do right now, if we are willing, to take on the corporate gun lobby is close what some people call the 'terror gap,'" she said of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen's ability to obtain an assault-style rifle used to carry out Sunday's mass killing. "Basically there is a no-fly list, but not a no-buy list, and we need a no-buy list. There is no way that this shooter should have ever had any gun."

Yandik took issues from a more personal place. On guns specifically, he emphasized his upbringing in a home where a firearm was an unemotional item while also pointedly saying that the country has a problem with gun violence.

"If we're going to get an assault weapons ban passed in the United States House, I think we need to make sure that that bill focuses specifically on the high-capacity elements of that law," he said. "I think in order to get that passed in the House of Representatives, which is a much heavier lift, we have to strip out the so-called cosmetic features, such as pistol grips and stock holes and other cosmetic features."

The two staunchly advocated for assistance for Hoosick Falls as that community grapples with a water contamination crisis and general protection of fresh water. Both called for hearings at the federal level, with Yandik saying state-level hearings  which have not yet happened despite a vociferous outcry  are most appropriate.

The debate was recorded Wednesday afternoon and aired Wednesday evening.

The primary is June 28.

mhamilton@timesunion.com  518-454-5449  @matt_hamilton10
Ogunquit, Maine, has been my summer home for the past 14 years. For as long as I can remember, driving by Ogunquit Playhouse to get to Meadowmere Resort was how I celebrated the start of summer.

Ogunquit is only a little more than four hours from the Capital Region, located on the southern tip of Maine. With summer camps starting in the last week of June, taking a weekend trip to Maine right after school ended seemed like the perfect weekend trip.

This walking-friendly beach town is great for families from all around, with visitors from upstate New York, Boston and Quebec. Two activities I must do when I go to Ogunquit are Perkins Cove and Ogunquit Beach.

During my weekend trip, I spend the first day getting pizza at La Pizzeria in the village of Ogunquit. The small downtown has art galleries, small boutique shops, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Harbor Candy Shop, a gay bar for men, a gay bar for women, little inns or resorts and various restaurants. There is always something for everyone in downtown Ogunquit, whether it be ice cream or candy or antique shopping or some good old Mexican food.

After the first night in Ogunquit, the second day is spent at the beach, either for part of the day or all of the day. Trip Advisor rates Ogunquit Beach among the top beaches in the United States. With its three miles of sandy beach connecting to the Ogunquit River, there is plenty of space for families to throw down their towels or umbrellas for the day. The main parking area at the beach requires a fee to park, but it is not too bad depending on the time of the day. There are a few different paths leading to the beach from the parking area.

After a couple days at the beach, my family takes a trolley or drives to Perkins Cove from the hotel. Perkins Cove is a cute little harbor nestled in the edge of Ogunquit. Always bustling with shop owners, tourists and lobstermen, Perkins Cove may seem like another village in itself. Perkins Cove is most famous for the seafood restaurants Barnacle Billy's and Oarweed. Around 2 or 4 in the afternoon, my mom and I board the Finestkind III cruise to go see Nubble Lighthouse, known for being one of the most-photographed lighthouses in America.

After the boat tour, the Finestkind III comes back to Perkins Cove, and I feast on a cheeseburger and New England clam chowder at Oarweed. Sitting on the patio, my family has a nice view of the crashing waves at Oarweed Cove. After dinner, my family enjoys a tradition that is an absolute must for any family visiting Ogunquit: walking along the Marginal Way. The path is great for seeing the sunrise early in the morning for early risers, for runners who are on vacation but need exercise, and for families who want to enjoy an evening stroll after a long day at the beach. The Marginal Way connects Perkins Cove and Ogunquit Beach, with exquisite views of the ocean. Over the years, I have seen many weddings on the cliffs of Marginal Way.

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For those who want something other than the beach, there is plenty to do in Ogunquit and the surrounding villages. For those who like hiking, families can hike or bike up Mount Agamenticus in York, which has a great view of New Hampshire and of the ocean. The beach in Kennebunk is smaller than Ogunquit Beach, but is still a great place to swim and get a tan in the summer. Nearby Kennebunkport is the summer home of the Bush family. York has an arcade, bowling alley, York's Wild Kingdom, a zoo, and a sandy beach. For those who want to see Nubble Lighthouse closer than from a boat, you can visit Sohier Park, where there is a restaurant and Nubble Lighthouse gift shop. In Ogunquit, there is a small cinema, and Ogunquit Playhouse puts on musical productions every summer.

When you drive into Maine, there is a sign that says "Welcome to Maine: The Way Life Should Be." After spending a few days in the southern coast of Maine, it is not hard to understand just what they're talking about.

phoganrao@timesunion.com  518-454-5420
Congratulations to Karen DiBella, winner of this year's Best of the Capital Region contest.

DiBella has lived in the Capital Region since birth and currently spends her time in Voorheesville with her husband. Her deep love for the area and all it has to offer has grown tremendously over her 60 years here, and she looks forward to many more exhilarating experiences to come.

"Every little town here has so many things going for it that you can participate in," DiBella explains. "I love the change of seasons and I like that it's close to big cities while still having a small community feeling. We built our house here for the school district which is unbelievably good. I love the suburban feeling and quick access to many places."

Among DiBella's favorite establishments are Cafe Calabria on Western Avenue and Tesoro in Hamilton Square. Recently, however, a new restaurant has sparked her interest.

"My husband and I love to go to The Villa Tuscan Grille in Rotterdam," she said. "The food is great and reasonably priced where a glass of wine doesn't cost you a whole week's salary.

In her free time, DiBella enjoys outdoor escapades and time with her three Chihuahuas. Animals hold a very special place in her heart and she loves playing with them. "I only have three dogs, but I wish I could have a hundred."

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She is also an avid kayaker and frequently visits Thacher Park as well as Saratoga Lake and Lake George. Her town of Voorheesville offers many outdoor adventure opportunities, including trails to hike and bike on.

"When it comes to summer," DiBella says, "there are so many things to do here. I like to go biking though I just do it for fun. I also love going to the Hudson River and taking the Dutch Apple Cruises. There's also Saratoga Performing Arts Center and the racetrack and so much more to do."

"Each town has their own little nuances," DiBella explains, making the capital region a phenomenal place to live in.
Around 10,000 years ago, an unknown artist engraved nude male figures  lithe, graceful, apparently dancing  on the walls of a cave in Sicily. The effect was immediate. Hailed as boundary-pushing by critics and tastemakers in the Mesolithic art world, the innovative piece shook up the prehistoric status quo and alarmed the conservative mainstream with its depraved anatomical frankness.

OK. That last bit never happened (not that we know of, anyway). But nudity in art has been around almost as long as art has been around, and indignant responses to it have been around for almost as long as that. Even Michelangelo took heat for "The Last Judgment," which he rendered on the Sistine Chapel with mobs of souls au naturel After objections from the church, a pupil painted over the Relevant Bits with strategically placed loincloths.

Nakedness has long had a power to shock, prompting successive generations to grapple over repercussions and all the reasons why. Think of the flap  and subsequent topless protest  over the student who sunbathed sans shirt in Troy back in April. The bare-chested photos that ran in the Times Union were feats of aesthetic discretion, conveying bareness without actually showing it  and reminding us that the female bosom, loosed in public to catch rays or feed infants, is one mighty and terrifying force.

Why? What is it about the unclad body that so alarms us? The opening of "Nudes from the Prado" at the Clark Art Institute last weekend only begs the question, as it suggests  with help from the Old Masters  that the human figure is much less scandalous when viewed from a distance of centuries.

More Information Promotional video, The Naked Magicians Promotional Video, "Nudes from the Prado" If you go "Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado" Where: The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown, Mass. When: Through Oct. 10 Admission: $20; free for members, children under 18 and students with I.D. Info: (413) 458-2303; www.clarkart.edu "The Naked Magic Show" Where: Proctors, 432 State St, Schenectady When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 29; 6 p.m. pre-show with psychic, shopping and cocktails Tickets: $25-$95 Info: 346-6204; proctors.org Contact Amy Biancolli at 518-454-5439 or abiancolli@timesunion.com or visit the arts blog at http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts See More Collapse

Most of the prim and proper among us are A-OK with large and artful folds of Renaissance flesh. Nothing about Titian's "Venus with an Organist and Cupid" is likely to scorch modern eyeballs  not the snowy expanse of saftig curves, not the pink-nippled bosom, not the brazen ogling of the young organist, who might be any 16-year-old snatching a glimpse. But it helps that the painting is around 460 years old.

Imagine if the same lazily erotic scenario were painted or photographed today. I'd be less willing to pull the image up on my computer at work  whereas I haven't hesitated a beat, while researching this story, to flash the Titian and other naked classics across my screen. Contemporary nudeness raises fear and prompts comparisons to porn. Vintage nudeness doesn't.

Is it the distance in centuries, zeitgeist, attitude? Some vestigial Puritan impulse in an age of sexting and naked Kardashian selfies? Why is Michelangelo's full-frontal David just fine for polite company  I've even seen the dude on barbecue aprons  but Robert Mapplethorpe's male nudes aren't? (No, I'm not talking about his more explicit S&M photos  I mean his portraits of male bodies so chiseled they might be carved from stone.)

The distinction between art and smut has been much discussed in the history of both, and it's a discussion that's only intensified since the advent of film. "I know it when I see it," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, defining obscenity in a 1964 decision that deemed a Louis Malle film non-smut and, therefore, constitutionally protected. Plenty of folks have said the same thing about art. But art, like erotica, has a way of changing over time. What's same-old now broke boundaries back then. What outrages now will prompt yawns in the future.

Ages ago, when my kids were little, we went on lots of family jaunts to museums around the region and beyond, including a trip to Belgium, Paris and London that exposed my offspring to lots of bare-butted people in oil and marble. Lots of old nudes, in other words. But old nudes aren't scary. Old nudes don't offend. It's the new nudes that worry parents and prompt warnings, a distinction that became clear when guards at contemporary art shows whispered admonitions: Just so you know, there's some nudity in this exhibit

It's possible, I suppose, that ancient Greek parents were warned away from nude statues of Apollo, but I doubt it. The Greeks revered and idealized the body, perfecting the youthful masculine image in early kouros sculptures and later erecting a cult of beauty around same. The first Olympians did, after all, compete in the buff, a tradition that would never fly with the modern-day church-lady demographic, not to mention the corporate sponsors. (What to do with the Nike swoosh? Tattoo it across the pecs?)

But here we are, millennia later, more obsessed with the human form than ever. London just opened its first nude restaurant. The annual World Naked Bike Ride will kick off June 25. And on June 29, clothing-deprived magicians will descend on Proctors with a show that promises a new brand of naked deception. ("Good magicians don't need sleeves," declares a promotional video, "and great magicians don't need pants.")

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In some ways, we're saturated with nakedness  so much so that Playboy, feeling redundant in an age of internet porn, has abandoned nude photos entirely. Bare bodies are everywhere these days, some more than others. "I truly was baffled when people still cared. They have seen me naked 500 times," protested Kim Kardashian, responding to a flurry of selfie-outrage.

In her own, Kardashianian way, she hit on a central paradox of the 21st century: Nudity abounds, but so does prudishness. Can't have one without the other. In 2011, Facebook caused its own flurry of outrage when it censored Gustave Courbet's "The Origin of the World," an 1866 painting of a woman's vulva and surrounding territory  legs apart, fully realized, no apologies. In response to that and other incidents, a group of artists declared Jan. 14 "Facebook Nudity Day," encouraging users to post images of art with nude figures.

Great idea, right? I thought so, too. I even marked my calendar. Then, hoping to learn more about the Courbet piece, I opened its Wikipedia page. Up popped the painting on my screen. It's a stunner. A masterwork. A challenge to established conventions of sex, power and the portrayal of same. No doubt about it: it's great art.

It's also a vagina.

Call me a hypocrite, but I'm at work. Down it went.

abiancolli@timesunion.com  518-454-5439  @AmyBiancolli
Greenwich (pronounced Green-wich, not Gren'ich) hasn't, until now, been on my radar beyond the agricultural charms of the Washington County Fair or cultural delights of Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, partway to southern Vermont. It's a solid hour's drive from Albany, and not a straight shot up the Northway before dog-legging east but a scenic route that makes the most of farmland flanking Route 40 or hugs the Hudson-Mohawk along Route 4, depending which side of the Hudson you start from.

Due west, Schuylerville is having its day in the sun with migratory spillover from Saratoga gussying up white-fenced horse farms (that smell more like money than manure), and splendid shows at the Laffer Gallery. But half an hour into the ride, I fret over the wisdom of reviewing a bistro so far out. How good can it be, and what if it's not?

After passing open fields, tractors slowing traffic, Aubuchon Hardware and Tractor Supply stores, we slide into Greenwich, on the Battenkill River, and gawp at the Stepford-pretty homes, tightly mown lawns, town park and bandstand  all the trappings of a beloved small town. We are clearly not the first to discover it. Main Street is proof of a community served: You can buy wool, insurance and tires, rifle through a thrift store and see a psychotherapist before stopping at Sweet Beet Bistro as your reward.

The number of Greenwich retreats  Soul Space retreat, Easton Mountain gay men's retreat and Christ the King Spiritual Life Center, offering inexpensive accommodations minutes from town  suggests there's energy stashed in the hills. That, and the fact that a fortune cookie galvanized Johanna Geldern, a Saratoga teacher living in Florida, to move closer to her daughter in Schuylerville and take over Dish, an available Greenwich bistro. It's where she met the outgoing chef-owner's kitchen assistant, Helen McIntosh, a Cambridge native, now her business partner and Sweet Beet's remarkably talented chef.

More Information Sweet Beet Bistro 93 Main St. Greenwich Phone: 692-0200 Web: sweetbeetbistro.com Reservations: Recommended (due to small staff and small space) Credit cards: All major Hours: Dinner, 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday, 5 to 8 p.m. Sunday. Lunch, noon to 3 p.m. Friday to Sunday. (Tuesday is 2-for-1 pasta night, Wednesday 2-for-1 wine night, Thursday local beer and burger night.) Parking: Street. Disabled access: Yes. Attire: Casual Prices: Appetizers, $5 to $15; salads, $5 to $9; entrees, $15 to $28; desserts, $6; kids' menu, $6. Food: (****) Impeccable execution of farm-to-table-oriented American fusion cuisine. Chef Helen McIntosh nails flavorful locavore classics with restrained West Coast sensibilities. Beverage: (***) Wine and beer only. Short, creative and modestly priced wine list (18 bottles) emphasizing organic and local wines. By the glass, $6 to $9; by the bottle, $25 to $65; plus six local Argyle Brewing beers ($6). Service: (***1/2) Relaxed and helpful. Ambiance: (***1/2) Casual, family-friendly bistro with an art-and-antique decor. Personality: (***) Eclectic little Main Street bistro in the midst of Washington County farm country. Overall Rating: ***1/2 See More Collapse

It's not lost on me that McIntosh lived on a sailboat while training at the Seattle Culinary Academy (the oldest cooking school on the West Coast), where she honed her passion for sustainability and an ingredient-driven cooking style. Her farm-fresh childhood and West Coast sensibilities breeze through a menu that for all the straight-talking simplicity common to small town restaurants (think ravioli, risotto and brisket), is as radical in its delivery as a pole-dancing farmer.

Here, vegetables shine: Crandell's Corner carrots, white radishes and parsnips ($5), chipped and whimsically stacked in asymmetrical star-shaped piles, are so gently pickled their flavors stay true beneath the brine. Meat for the grass-fed burger ($15), a steal with a free local beer on beer 'n' burger Thursdays, is from St. Croix Farm; the steaks, brisket and shanks are from a half animal reserved at Good Fence Farm, and that brisket is braised in beer from nearby Argyle Brewing. We dredge crusty Murray Hollow bread through chartreuse Saratoga olive oil, an Australian press that's so insanely good I snap a photo in misplaced excitement.

Chicken simmered in red wine with green olives, fresh chard, sweet figs and fennel ($23) is simply glorious, a simultaneous exercise in mind-blowing flavors and powerful restraint. To pair such infused flesh with the saltiness of feta, delicate honey-sweetened shaved carrots and anchor it with nutty brown rice is just brilliant. In this, McIntosh's creation, flavors are close to perfection on a plate.

Surprisingly, it's the polar opposite, a creamy risotto ($18)  something I both crave and routinely fear to order  that has us cooing over flavors so understated, the Parmesan cleverly hanging back and letting the homemade stock, lemon and young asparagus emerge with subtle fragrance. I want to say a Hail Mary over such supple arborio rice, and I'm not even Catholic.

Tall windowpanes thick with layered paint flung open over sidewalk tables spill chatter outside. So many young families and couples (of every combination) walk in or stroll down Main Street, it seems the entire town must be populated by the 20-to-45s. The 19th-century building, once a butcher, a gay bar and cafe-cum-bakery, has original high tin ceilings and a charming quirky style from inherited furniture, floral patterns on mismatched china, a piano I imagine anyone might play, trumpet jazz and walls bright with a local artist's vibrant art. The wine list is loaded with organic picks; our Cayuga white ($9/$28) from Amorici Vineyards in Valley Falls is perfectly crisp and light.

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The scene is refreshingly laid-back, a local place for an appreciative community that sustains them year-round with family dinners and couples' date nights. Sweet Beet Bistro may not be gunning for fine dining, and you can certainly grab a stellar burger here, but McIntosh not only has the creativity to capitalize on a year-round farmer's market but the chops to nail technical delivery.

If I can find any fault at all, it's only that the hearty dishes still seem a little winter-rich. But spring is awake in a local lettuce and pea-shoot salad dotted with feta and strawberries ($9), and simple flavors pop in a chilled carrot-ginger soup ($7) that kick-starts our meal. This is a chef who will turn out a lettuce-free salad in winter, cleverly using mache, tokya bekana cabbage, claytonia and sugarloaf chicory; and one who updates a classic Pavlova with chocolate meringue and ripe raspberry coulis; and she pulls out a fig preserve and frozen spring rhubarb midsummer, just because she can. The drive to Greenwich might be long, but Sweet Beet Bistro is a sweet spot that's well worth the trip.

Dinner for two  including four appetizers, two entrees, one dessert and two glasses of wine  came to $120 with tax and tip.

Susie Davidson Powell is a freelancer writer from East Greenbush. Follow her on Twitter, @SusieDP. To comment on this review, visit the Table Hopping blog, blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping.
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Green Island

Union members from across the state chanted and cheered Wednesday next to an inflatable rat to support the 42 union employees locked out of Honeywell Aerospace.

Speakers criticized temporary workers who have made airplane brake linings since the lockout began on May 9. The rally followed last week's failed negotiations between the company and United Auto Workers.

"The cheap labor doesn't know how to do what we do best," said Susan Brennan, a UAW Local 1508 member, to more than 100 people.

Changes to health care coverage and costs are sticking points, union members said. The union said the high-deductable plan will raise costs.

Mildred Nadeau of Troy has worked at Honeywell for nearly 30 years. Her husband, an independent contractor, has been on her health insurance, she said.

The lockout, she said, means the couple went from an income of $1,000 weekly to $400 a week, without dental or vision coverage. Seeing the support Wednesday, she said, "I got tears."

The typical Green Island worker makes about $55,000 a year. More than 300 Honeywell workers in South Bend, Ind., also rejected a contract offer.

Honeywell spokesman Scott Sayres said in a statement the company "will resume negotiations whenever the union is ready to do so." He called the most recent offer the company's "last, best and final offer."

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It says its proposal contains wage increases and offers comparable health care to other U.S. Honeywell employees. "Our salaried employees and trained, temporary workers continue to operate the site as normal to meet our customers' needs," he said.

John Niedbalec, who retired in March from Honeywell and is the UAW's recording secretary, said Honeywell's refusal to budge is "a sign of the times" as executives want to lower costs as much as possible.

Local, state and federal politicians expressed support through submitted statements and brief speeches.

Albany County District Attorney David Soares said the locked out employees had his backing. "It's your right to voice your concerns," he said.
Saratoga Springs

After the native tribes of the Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, tribal leaders made a vow: for the next 100 summers, no one will speak of the battle.

Perhaps that's why the dress first emerged nearly 100 years later, descendants speculate. Made by Northern Cheyenne women in the aftermath of the 1876 battle, the dress was allegedly sewn from the uniforms of enemies left dead on the battlefield and passed down through four generations of Cheyenne women.

It first appeared in public in 1975 at an old location of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane, Wash., and would later be forgotten as the museum changed locations and collections were retired  until one day in late 2015, when a particularly dogged SUNY Empire State College professor would track it down and design a whole course around it.

Clifford Eaglefeathers, an adjunct faculty member at the college and member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, had spent nearly three decades searching for the dress after stumbling on it in a Spokane museum in 1989. That encounter left him mesmerized, he said, because all the oral histories he'd heard from his elders never mentioned any such artifact.

"I kept looking at it and studying it and I could not believe it at first," he said. "I said, it can't be. It can't be. How could this dress last this long?"

He pulled out his camera, hoping to return to his elders with photos of the dress. If anyone would know the story behind the dress and the women who made it, it would be them. Perhaps an image would spark a memory. But the pictures were ruined by a glare off the exhibit case, and he put his fascination on hold.

Eaglefeathers would inquire about the dress in the years to come. Fellow tribe members all found it curious that the dress had remained underground for so long. An artifact like that would hold great significance among the nation, but few had heard of it.

"I often thought about that," Eaglefeathers said. "Why? Why wasn't this shared with anyone? And then I kept thinking, was it the 100-year silence? Is that why we've never heard about this or saw the dress? And now I tend to believe that. It was not to be discussed."

Eaglefeathers grew up near the battlefield in southeastern Montana, but was forbidden from visiting the site and instructed to cover his eyes whenever his family drove by. When he'd ask why, his grandmother would say only that "something terrible" had happened there. In 1973, just two years before 100 summers had passed, the American Indian Movement came to Little Bighorn and requested recognition for the native peoples who had lost their lives at the battlefield. And like that, the silence lifted, Eaglefeathers said.

In the decades after Eaglefeathers saw the dress, he tried contacting museum officials about the garment to no avail. A rebranded Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, a "new museum for a new millennium," opened in 2001 in Spokane, with more space for regional history, art and artifacts than ever before. Yet no one Eaglefeathers called knew of the dress he'd seen at the old museum  until he reached Lynn Pankonin, a curator of American Indian collections at the museum.

"She worked at the old museum for 12 years, and she immediately said, 'I know exactly what you're talking about, I remember,' " Eaglefeathers said.

With Pankonin's help, Eaglefeathers embarked on a massive research project around the dress and arranged to have it returned to the battlefield. Starting June 23, the dress will be on display at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument through Sept. 5.

Eaglefeathers said he can't confirm but has reason to believe the dress was made by a Northern Cheyenne woman called Susan Iron Teeth, who lost her husband and son to battles with U.S. forces in the months and years following Little Bighorn.

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SUNY Empire students will learn about the dress and the Battle of the Little Bighorn from the Cheyenne perspective, as part of a course designed by Eaglefeathers; Menoukha Case, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies; and Rhianna Rogers, assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies.

The living history course is being offered in part as a response to the growing desire for a more balanced view of American history, which has long left out the viewpoint and role of indigenous peoples, said college spokesman David Henahan.

The Battle of Little Bighorn is commonly known as Custer's Last Stand, and for a long time was romanticized as a deadly, but heroic fight by U.S. forces against native "savages." Custer was indeed courageous, Case said, and the Cheyenne perspective recognizes that. But it also recognizes his habits of rape, mutilation and using women and children as human shields in battle, she said.

"We'll specifically look at stories of historical trauma and intergenerational trauma," she said. "They'll get a sense from (Iron Teeth's) life of what historical trauma is, how it's affecting people today, and how bringing something like this dress home  can it help to heal this kind of trauma in some way or does it stir it up? Because there is still a lot of racism in this country, as we all know."

The 140th anniversary of the battle is coming up on June 25. The dress will be a focus of events at the battlefield that weekend, which SUNY Empire students will watch online.

bbump@timesunion.com  518-454-5387  @bethanybump
THE ISSUE:

Donald Trump's scorn for the news media reveals his disregard for the truth.

THE STAKES:

History offers another example of a politician who felt immune from accountability.

More Information To comment: tuletters@timesunion.com or at http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion See More Collapse

Persistent unfavorable coverage by The Washington Post of the Republican running for president draws sharp rebukes by the candidate and his staff, with accusations of bias and gross inaccuracy.

Fortunately for our democracy, it didn't stop the newspaper from doing its job, diligently following up on that strange burglary at the Democratic National Committee's office in the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972. The candidate then was incumbent President Richard Nixon, seeking the second term he would quit in disgrace.

Forty-four years later, the current GOP presumptive candidate for president, Donald Trump, is on the attack against the Post, calling it dishonest and labeling its coverage "incredibly inaccurate." This week he revoked the Post's campaign press credentials.

Mr. Trump had previously barred reporters for Politico, BuzzFeed and other outlets from campaign events over coverage he didn't like. Press bashing is a regular part of his schtick.

Post Executive Editor Marty Baron pledged the paper would continue to cover the Trump campaign "honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically and unflinchingly."

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Mr. Trump isn't the only politician with media issues. But few show the open hostility Mr. Trump displays for the news media. Mr. Baron is right when he calls Mr. Trump's actions "nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press."

And his disdain for the press is accompanied by an alarming disregard for the truth. Lies have been a routine part of the campaign he kicked off one year ago this week. He claims the plain-as-day bigotry he spouts is "misconstrued," and denies saying things even when they've been caught on tape. Unable to destroy or cover up the evidence as Mr. Nixon tried to do, Mr. Trump incredibly calls the facts lies  and his followers cheer.

We've seen lots of "-gates" since Watergate, scandals sometimes real, sometimes cynically fabricated by politicians. It's important, then, to remember just how serious Watergate was. A sitting president was actively involved in the cover-up of criminal activities. It's also important to remember Mr. Nixon's deep contempt for certain reporters, some of whom he included on his infamous enemies list. He grossly abused the power of his office, siccing federal regulators on journalists and others. This included the Federal Communications Commission challenging the license renewal of the Washington Post Co.'s broadcast stations, causing the company's stock price to plunge.

Fortunately, the truth came out after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered release of White House tapes, which documented the president's shameful, incriminating actions, all while he was lying to the American people.

Unlike the covert, paranoid Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump has shown for a year and a day now just how easily, openly, and unapologetically he lies, and how hostile he is to a free press. On this anniversary of one of the nation's most infamous scandals, voters should consider just where Mr. Trump could take America again.
[June 16, 2016] Andela Raises $24 Million Led by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to Mobilize Africa's Top Engineering Talent

NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Andela, a company that recruits the most talented software developers in Africa and embeds them into engineering organizations worldwide, is today announcing $24M in Series B funding. Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is leading the round, which marks its first lead investment to date, and they are joined by new investor GV (formerly Google Ventures) and existing investors including Spark Capital, Omidyar Network, Learn Capital, and Africa-based CRE Ventures. Founded by veteran entrepreneurs from both North America and Africa, Andela has grown into one of the most visible technology movements on the African continent by bridging the gap between skilled software developers and the companies that need them. Andela developers are currently working with a number of high-growth engineering organizations, which range from venture-backed startups like 6Sense and the Muse to industry leaders including Google and Microsoft. "We live in a world where talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. Andela's mission is to close that gap," says Mark Zuckerberg. "Companies get access to great developers, and developers in Africa get the opportunity to use their skill and support their communities. Priscilla and I believe in supporting innovative models of learning wherever they are around the world -- and what Andela is doing is pretty amazing."



In the past two years, Andela has received over 40,000 applications and accepted the top .7 percent. Once accepted, developers relocate to Andela's facilities in Lagos or Nairobi where they spend six months specializing in a specific technology stack and completing open source projects to gain exposure to the international developer community. Andela then pairs each developer with one of its vetted company partners as a full-time, distributed team member. "Identifying and securing technical talent is a pain point for organizations all over the world, and a problem that Andela is addressing by bridging the gap between the most promising developers in Africa and the companies that need them," says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela. "Based on the caliber of Andela developers and the increasing acceptance of distributed teams, we have seen exponential growth over the past year and expect this pace to continue."

Andela will use the capital to fuel growth on the African continent, giving global partners increased access to untapped technical talent. With nearly 200 engineers currently employed by its Nigeria and Kenya offices, Andela plans to announce a third African country by the end of 2016. About Andela

Andela is founded on a simple truth: While brilliance is evenly distributed around the world, opportunity is not. With offices in NYC, SF, Lagos and Nairobi, Andela recruits the most talented software developers on the African continent and embeds them into engineering organizations as full-time, distributed team members. About Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to advance human potential and promote equality. In support of this mission, CZI funds nonprofit organizations, makes private investments and participates in policy debates, with the goal of making the world a better place for future generations. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380066LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/andela-raises-24-million-led-by-chan-zuckerberg-initiative-to-mobilize-africas-top-engineering-talent-300285656.html SOURCE Andela

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[June 16, 2016] Berkshire Hathaway Group's Specialty Insurance Operation Opens German Office, Makes Executive Appointments in Northern Europe

Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance Company (BHSI) in coordination with its affiliate Berkshire Hathaway International Insurance Limited (BHIIL), today announced that it has established its office in Dusseldorf, Germany, and filled key executive roles in Northern Europe. "We are laying the foundation to provide customers throughout Europe with a full line of specialty insurance solutions, backed by BHSI's industry-leading financial strength and underwriting and claims expertise," said Gregor Koehler, President, Northern Europe, BHSI. "This is the beginning of our exciting journey to provide long term solutions for customers throughout the region." BHSI appointed the following executives to key posts in the Dusseldorf office: Jorg Bechert, SVP, Head of Executive and Professional Lines, Northern Europe. He was most recently Head of Strategy and Innovation at AON Germany and has almost 30 years of experience in the insurance industry.

SVP, Head of Executive and Professional Lines, Northern Europe. He was most recently Head of Strategy and Innovation at AON Germany and has almost 30 years of experience in the insurance industry. Ulrich Kutter, SVP, Head of Marine, Northern Europe. He joins BHSI with almost 25 years of insurance industry experience and was most recently Head of Marine, Central and Eastern Europe at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty SE.

SVP, Head of Marine, Northern Europe. He joins BHSI with almost 25 years of insurance industry experience and was most recently Head of Marine, Central and Eastern Europe at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty SE. Leander Metzger, SVP, Head of Property, Northern Europe. He joins BHSI with more than 20 years of insurance industry experience. Most recently he wa Director, AFM at FM Insurance Company Limited's Central European Operation. Leander is a Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute.

SVP, Head of Property, Northern Europe. He joins BHSI with more than 20 years of insurance industry experience. Most recently he wa Director, AFM at FM Insurance Company Limited's Central European Operation. Leander is a Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute. Robert Scherf, VP, Head of Human Resources, Northern Europe. He was most recently Head of Human Resources at Catlin Europe, and brings nearly 30 years of experience to the role.



Ute Huhmann as Executive Assistant, Northern Europe. "This latest strategic expansion reflects BHSI's commitment to growing both our global footprint and our worldwide capabilities," said Peter Eastwood, President and CEO, BHSI. "We look forward to delivering sound insurance solutions for companies throughout the UK and Europe, while continuing to deepen our global team of individuals with standout capabilities and character."

In March, BHSI announced its intention to offer a specialty insurance solution in Europe, pending regulatory approval. It named Gregor Koehler to lead the company's efforts in Northern Europe, and Tom Bolt as President, UK and Southern Europe, BHSI. The new BHSI office in Germany is located at:

Uerdinger Strasse 90

40474 Dusseldorf

Germany

Email: [email protected] In Europe, the specialty division will operate as part of Berkshire Hathaway International Insurance Limited ("BHIIL"), an incorporated England and Wales limited liability company, Registration Number 3230337 and Registered Office of 4th Floor, 8 Fenchurch Place, London EC3M 4AJ, United Kingdom. BHIIL is an affiliate of Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (www.bhspecialty.com) ("BHSI"), which provides commercial property, marine, casualty, healthcare professional liability, executive and professional lines, surety, travel, programs, medical stop loss, and homeowner's insurance programs. BHSI and BHIIL are part of Berkshire Hathaway's National Indemnity group of insurance companies, which hold financial strength ratings of A++ from AM Best and AA+ from Standard & Poor's. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005286/en/

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[June 16, 2016] Colorado Science Educator Begins Term as 2016-2017 President of the National Science Teachers Association

On June 1, Dr. Mary Gromko, a long time science educator from Colorado began her one-year term as president of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the largest professional organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all. "We are thrilled to have Mary on board as president and we look forward to her applying her previous leadership and teaching knowledge, experience and expertise to help guide the association," said NSTA Executive Director Dr. David Evans. Gromko has been a devoted teacher and dedicated leader in the science education community for more than 40 years. She began her career in education as a high school chemistry teacher in Connecticut. After moving to Colorado, she continued to teach for the Academy School District in Colorado Springs. During that time, Gromko also served as an instructor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and the University of Denver (News - Alert). In 1989, after 17 years in the classroom, Gromko moved on to accept a position as the state science supervisor for the Colorado Department of Education. In 1999, she began working as the K-12 science supervisor for a large school district in Colorado Springs. Most recently, Gromko served as a coordinator for teacher professional development at the University of Colorado's Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education. As the coordinator, she worked to implement STEM programs in grades K-16. An NSTA member since 1983, Gromko has contributed extensively to the association. She was elected to the NSTA board as director of coordination and supervision She also served as a district director twice (1988-1991 and 1997-2000); was the program chair for the 1993, 1997, and 2007 regional conferences in Denver; worked on numerous committees; and presented several sessions at NSTA national and area conferences.



In addition to her work and commitment to NSTA, Gromko is extremely active with other local, state, and national organizations and STEM initiatives. She has served as president (1997-1999), president-elect (1995-1997), and an executive board member (1993-1995) for the Council of State Science Supervisors; served as president of the Colorado Association of Science Teachers (1986-1988); served as the western regional secondary education coordinator for the American Chemical Society's chemical education division (1984-1989); and chaired the western state science review team for the NAEP 2009 Science Frameworks. She has also worked on a number of advisory boards, including the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. During her distinguished career, Gromko has received a number of honors and awards. Her accomplishments include receiving NSTA's Distinguished Service to Science Education Award (2014), American Chemical Society's Recognition Award (2008), University of Northern Colorado's Recognition and Appreciation to Science Education Award (2000), Colorado Association of Science Teacher's Friend of Science Teaching Award and Distinguished Service to Science Education Award (1999 and 1989), U.S. Department of Energy Award Appreciation for Service to Science Education (1998), the Sigma Xi Award (1989), the Governor's Award (1987), and the Colorado Department of Education's Excellence in Teaching Award (1987), to name just a few. She was also named Professional Educator of the Year for the Colorado Springs School District 11 (2008), Colorado Department of Education's Employee of the Year (1991), and American Chemical Society's Colorado High School Chemistry Teacher of the Year (1985).

Gromko earned a B.A. degree in chemistry and a M.S. degree in science/chemistry and science education from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in curriculum and administration from the University of Denver. About NSTA The Arlington, VA-based National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) is the largest professional organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all. NSTA's current membership includes approximately 55,000 science teachers, science supervisors, administrators, scientists, business and industry representatives, and others involved in science education. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616006210/en/

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[June 16, 2016] Coors Credit Union Announces 2016 Scholarship Winners

Coors Credit Union announced three winners for its 2016 scholarship program. Emma Hesse, Golden; Aili Miyake, Centennial; and Melissa Breathwaite, Arvada, each received $2,000 to be used for a college of their choice. According to Tracie Wilcox, president and chief executive officer, the credit union strives to help young adults achieve their goals through higher education. "We were delighted to receive so many applications from students who possess an enormous level of compassion and dedication to creating positive change in their communities," said Wilcox. "The drive and determination to make a difference demonstrated by the selected winners is truly outstanding." Emma Hesse plans to attend the University of Colorado Boulder to study integrative psychology in the fall. In addition to her outstanding academic records, Emma makes volunteer work a priority in her life. Through her efforts volunteering for a local Action Center that provides food and clothing to the community, Emma organized clothing drives throughout local schools to collect clothing options for the Action Center. Aili Miyake plans to attend University of Colorado Boulder, majoring in poitical science. Aili celebrates diversity, actively encouraging communication and understanding across cultures and social structures. She volunteers a significant amount of time with Building Bridges, a non-profit with the mission to equip young people with the communication and leadership skills necessary to address the root causes of hate, discrimination and conflict. She created a club at Arapahoe High School called Aspects of Society, which invites students to an open forum to discuss challenges facing our communities.



Melissa Breathwaite plans to attend Colorado School of Mines and major in chemical engineering. Melissa was part of Project UPLIFT, a team designing a solar-paneled irrigation system for developing communities. Through Project UPLIFT, Melissa worked to demonstrate the intersection of science and society, recognizing that economic and ecologic success and sustainability extends far beyond each town, and encompasses whole communities, states and countries. "We are extremely pleased to award scholarships to these extraordinary women to help them pursue their commendable personal and academic goals," said Wilcox.

About Coors Credit Union Coors Credit Union is a full-service cooperative financial institution serving people living and working in Jefferson, Denver, Boulder and Larimer counties. Founded in 1954, the credit union has $220 million in assets and more than 20,000 members, who are also owners of the organization. Coors Credit Union provides personal consultation and financial products including vehicle, mortgage and home equity loans, credit cards, insurance, savings and investment products, and financial guidance. For more information, please visit www.Coorscu.org. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005186/en/

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[June 16, 2016] DAT to Hold First User Conference for Brokers

PORTLAND, Ore., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DAT Solutions will hold its first annual User Conference designed to address common and uncommon problems brokers face in the course of their day. The DAT User Conference will be held October 17 to 19 in Portland, Oregon. Details are available at www.dat.com/user. Chad Boblett, a succesful owner operator and founder of the 5,000 plus member Rate per Mile Masters on Facebook, will be the keynote speaker, providing insight on what brokers need to know about the carriers they work with to be successful. Mark Montague, DAT's senior market analyst, who spent 35 years brokering freight and pricing trucks for various carriers will speak on market dynamics, in a year that has seen an excess of capacity for both spot and contract freight and the impact this has had on the relationships between shippers, brokers, and carriers.



"Our DAT User Conference is a deep dive into the effective use of DAT's services to elevate brokers' efficiency and productivity, whether they're new to the industry or have years of experience," said Don Thornton, Senior Vice President at DAT Solutions. "Our approach to developing the curriculum was uniquely focused on how to take advantage of DAT's technology and real time information to turn opportunities into wins." The DAT User Conference will provide materials and training techniques for the entire office, and covers the lifecycle of a load and the software that can accelerate many aspects of broker operations: bid responses, efficient tools to source and qualify trucks, collaboration techniques to optimize operations, data mining to develop and maintain rate cards, and paperless carrier onboarding and how to deal with the unexpected in real-time.

To learn more and register for the conference, visit www.dat.com/user. About DAT Solutions Based in Portland, Oregon, DAT Solutions provides actionable information to transportation professionals in North America. It operates the industry's largest network of load boards and is a trusted source of supply and demand trends, rate benchmarking, and capacity planning information. Related services include a comprehensive directory of companies with business history, credit, safety, insurance and company reviews; broker transportation management software; fuel tax, mileage, vehicle licensing, and registration services; mobile resource management; and carrier onboarding. Founded in 1978, DAT Solutions LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Roper Technologies, a diversified technology company and constituent of the S&P 500, Fortune 1000 and Russell 1000 indices. www.dat.com Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140227/CL73279LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dat-to-hold-first-user-conference-for-brokers-300285889.html SOURCE DAT Solutions

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[June 15, 2016] First 5 California Applauds Legislature's Approved Budget

Camille Maben, Executive Director of First 5 California, praised legislative leadership for passing the state budget today, which commits significant multi-year increases in early childhood education investments. "On behalf of First 5 California and the 1.5 million young children we serve, I am extremely pleased to see another year of continued strategic reinvestment in our state's early learning system. This year's focus on rebuilding the foundation of our child care and early learning system - the per child funding rate - with a multi-year commitment is a necessary step to help our system recover from the Great Recession," said Ms. Maben. "We look forward to working with the Legislature and Governor Brown in the months ahead to tackle outstanding issues within our existing programs, including family income eligibility and continuity of care, as addressed by AB 2150 (Santiago). We will continue to work diligently to establish additional resources in future budgets that address the still-desperate gaps inaccess low-income babies and young children face to high-quality child care.



"At First 5 California, we also look forward to working with the Speaker of the Assembly's Blue Ribbon Commission, and we hope this Commission will spur action toward a comprehensive, affordable, and high-quality early learning system for all our youngest learners, ages 0 to 5. "I want to thank the Legislative Women's Caucus and Legislative leadership for their ongoing commitment to our children and for finding a way to ensure the youngest Californians and their families benefit from our growing economy. I strongly urge the Governor to support this approved budget," said Ms. Maben.

About First 5 California First 5 California, also known as the California Children and Families Commission, was established after voters passed Proposition 10 in November 1998, which added a tax on tobacco products to fund education, health, childcare, and other services for children ages 0 to 5 and their families. Its programs and resources are designed to educate teachers, parents, grandparents, and caregivers about the critical role they play during a child's first five years - with the overarching goal of helping more California kids grow up healthy and ready to succeed in school and in life. For more information, please visit www.ccfc.ca.gov. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160615006603/en/

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[June 16, 2016]

Rising Media and 3DR Holdings' Inside 3D Printing Seoul Expects More Than 9,000 Visitors

NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Rising Media, Inc. and 3DR Holdings announced that more than 9,000 visitors from 18 countries are expected to attend the upcoming Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo in Seoul. The event takes place at the Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEX) from June 22-24, 2016 in association with KINTEX.

Fifty sponsors and exhibitors are confirmed for Inside 3D Printing Seoul, including Platinum Sponsor MakerBot, Gold Sponsor MarkAny, and Silver Sponsor HanilProTech.

The conference program, which takes place on June 22 and 23, features 30 sessions across four vertical tracks, focusing on 3D printing applications in manufacturing, medicine, business, and metal. Four keynote speeches are confirmed from industry leaders Jonathan Jaglom, MakerBot; Nikolai Zaepernick, EOS; Terry Wohlers, Wohlers Associates, Inc., and Tyler Benster, Asimov Ventures.

Inside 3D Printing Seoul will host for the first time the 3D Print Design Show and 3D Print Special Zone.

The 3D Print Design Show is a dedicated exhibition that explores 3D printing applications in art and design. The exhibition is organized by KINTEX and Digitalhands Gallery, the first 3D printing gallery in South Korea, and it will inclue a display of pieces from 18 artists and designers from diverse fields, including fashion, jewelry, home design, toys, and more.







The 3D Print Special Zone sponsored by Design Innovation Center for 3D Printing will also be launching for the first time at Inside 3D Printing Seoul. This exhibition area will showcase large-scale 3D printers and technology up to 6 meters high, designed for industrial or manufacturing production.

Inside 3D Printing Seoul will be co-located with Rising Media and 3DR Holdings' RoboUniverse Conference & Expo and Virtual Reality Summit.

Prices for the event increase on-site, so register before to save. For more information and to register, visit inside3dprinting.com/seoul, robouniverse.com/seoul, and virtualrealitysummit.com/seoul.

If your company is interested in sponsoring or exhibiting in Seoul or at an upcoming event, please contact [email protected].

About 3DR Holdings

3DR Holdings, LLC invests in media properties related to 3D Printing, Robotics and Frontiertech.

About Rising Media

Rising Media is a global events and media producer excelling in Internet and technology-related events and content. Events include Inside 3D Printing, RoboUniverse, Virtual Reality Summit, Data Driven Business, Building Business Capability, Predictive Analytics World, Text Analytics World, eMetrics Summit, Conversion Conference, AllFacebook Marketing Conference, Search Marketing Expo, Affiliate Management Days and Web Effectiveness Conference in the USA, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Dubai, India, China, Korea, Singapore, Australia, Brazil.

For more information, please visit www.risingmedia.com.

For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].

Christoph Rowen +852 9190 4412, [email protected]
[June 16, 2016] Systematic Review of 58 Publications of Real-World Use of GARDASIL Presented at EUROGIN Congress

Merck (NYSE:MRK), known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, announced today that in a systematic review conducted of the global impact and effectiveness of GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant], substantial reductions were observed in HPV 6/11/16/18-related infection, genital warts, Pap abnormalities and cervical pre-cancers. This evaluation of 58 effectiveness and impact studies published during the past 10 years examined the use of GARDASIL in routine vaccination programs in Australia, Europe, North America and New Zealand, and will be presented for the first time during an oral session at the European Research Organization on Genital Infection and Neoplasia (EUROGIN) congress in Austria. A paper detailing this review was also published online on June 14 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID). Following introduction of vaccination programs with GARDASIL, the earliest impact of the vaccine was seen in the reduction of genital warts. Reductions in genital warts were observed in all nine countries included in this review (based on 28 publications), with declines occurring as early as one year after vaccine introduction in Australia and Germany. Reductions in HPV 6/11/16/18 infection, assessed in 14 publications from five countries (Australia, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and the United States), were also observed shortly after vaccination; for example, reductions in HPV 6/11/16/18 infection were seen within four years in several studies from Australia and the United States. Subsequently, as successive birth cohorts began cervical screening, reductions in cervical pre-cancers were observed within 3-5 years of vaccine program implementation in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden and the United States. GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] is indicated for use in females 9 through 26 years of age for the prevention of cervical, vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers caused by HPV types 16 and 18; genital warts caused by HPV types 6 and 11; and precancerous or dysplastic lesions caused by HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18. GARDASIL is also approved for use in males 9 through 26 years of age for the prevention of anal cancer caused by HPV types 16 and 18, for the prevention of anal dysplasias and precancerous lesions caused by HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18, and for the prevention of genital warts caused by HPV types 6 and 11. GARDASIL is contraindicated in individuals with hypersensitivity, including severe allergic reactions to yeast, or after a previous dose of GARDASIL. The review identified 58 studies published from January 2007 through February 2016 that met the pre-specified criteria for assessment of the real-world impact of vaccination with GARDASIL on HPV-related disease. These studies were conducted in nine different countries (Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, France, United States, Canada and New Zealand) with varying degrees of HPV vaccination coverage, among populations of different ages, and used different study methods and disease endpoints. Studies reporting only on the bivalent HPV vaccine were excluded. GARDASIL was predominantly, but not exclusively, used in all publications reviewed. Short-term endpoints (reduction in HPV infection and genital warts) and medium-term endpoints (reduction in Pap abnormalities and cervical pre-cancers) were assessed. Cervical cancer, however, was not identified because most vaccinated cohorts have not yet reached ages when cervical cancer is typically diagnosed. Thus the anticipated benefit of vaccination on certain HPV-related cancer rates cannot be fully determined yet, because of the long latency periods following exposure to HPV. In this review of the studies, decreases in the prevalence of HPV 6/11/16/18 infections, genital warts, Pap abnormalities and cervical pre-cancers were observed among females in their teens and 20s subsequent to the introduction of GARDASIL. Decreases were generally highest in younger populations, reflecting a lower likelihood of pre-existing HPV infection at time of vaccination, supporting global recommendations for routine use of HPV vaccine in adolescents. "Based on this comprehensive review of studies published during the past 10 years since the licensure of GARDASIL, reductions in HPV infections as well as reductions in the prevalence of HPV 6/11/16/18-related diseases, as noted by decreases in Pap abnormalities, cervical pre-cancers, and genital warts, were detected within four years after vaccine introduction," said Professor Suzanne Garland, M.D., director of microbiological research and head of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases, The Royal Women's Hospital, Victoria, Australia, who will present these data at EUROGIN and is lead author on the CID publication. "Despite the progress we have made with Pap screening and vaccination, cervical cancer and other HPV-related diseases are still a public health issue in both developed and developing nations, which underscores the need for comprehensive HPV vaccination programs in adolescents before they're at risk of contracting the virus," added Garland. Results varied depending on the vaccine coverage (percent of the population who had been vaccinated), breadth of the immunization program (the age range of those vaccinated and whether catch-up vaccination was included), the number of doses received, the study design, and the disease outcome assessed. The overall impact on the population was greatest in countries that achieved high vaccination rates soon after the introduction of GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] and in the youngest cohorts. For example, in Australia, a country with 3-dose vaccination coverage of 73 percent among adolescent females, prevalent HPV 6/11/16/18-related infection decreased by 86 percent in females 18-24 years of age after three doses within six years of vaccine introduction, compared to unvaccinated women during the same timeframe. Furthermore, a 92.6 percent reduction in genital warts diagnosed among females <21 years of age was observed four years after the vaccine program was initiated. Within four years of vaccine introduction in Australia, reductions in cervical pre-cancers were seen in females 11-27 years old at the start of the vaccination program in 2007 and who received all three vaccine doses, with declines ranging from57 percent in females 15-18 years old to 5 percent in females 23-27 years old. Reductions in disease endpoints were generally lower in older individuals and in countries with lower vaccine coverage. For example, in the same Australian study where a 92.6 percent reduction in genital warts was observed in females <21 years of age, the reduction in genital warts in females 21-30 years of age was 72.6 percent. Reductions in genital warts were <50 percent in teens 15-19 years old in France and Germany where vaccine coverage was much lower than Australia.



"These data reinforce that GARDASIL is important in the fight against cervical cancer and certain other HPV-related cancers and diseases, however the full public health potential of HPV vaccination of males and females is not yet realized even after a decade of use," said Jacques Cholat, M.D., president of Merck Vaccines. "Increasing HPV vaccination rates and access to the vaccine has the potential to make an even greater impact globally." Systematic review of 58 peer-reviewed publications

This review synthesized available data assessed through a systematic search of PubMed and Embase for peer-reviewed manuscripts from January 2007 through February 2016. The search identified observational studies that reported on the impact or effectiveness of GARDASIL on HPV infection, genital warts, cervical abnormalities and pre-cancers. Both vaccine effectiveness and impact aim at evaluating 'real-life benefit' and are typically measured through observational studies. Vaccine impact denotes the population-prevented fraction of infection or disease and is assessed by comparing prevalence or incidence in the vaccine era to a comparable population from the prevaccine era or by measuring population-level trends over time. Vaccine effectiveness corresponds to the proportion of infection or disease prevented among vaccinated individuals, and is estimated by comparing the incidence in vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals within similar populations. After screening 903 papers, 58 publications from nine countries met the pre-specified inclusion criteria. Important information about GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] GARDASIL does not eliminate the necessity for women to continue to undergo recommended cervical cancer screening. Recipients of GARDASIL should not discontinue anal cancer screening if it has been recommended by a health care provider. GARDASIL has not been demonstrated to provide protection against diseases from vaccine and non-vaccine HPV types to which a person has previously been exposed through sexual activity. GARDASIL is not intended to be used for treatment of active external genital lesions; cervical, vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers; cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia (VIN), vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia (VaIN), or anal intraepithelial neoplasia (AIN). GARDASIL has not been demonstrated to protect against diseases due to HPV types not contained in the vaccine. Not all vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers are caused by HPV, and GARDASIL protects only against those vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers caused by HPV Types 16 and 18. GARDASIL does not protect against diseases not caused by HPV. Vaccination with GARDASIL may not result in protection in all vaccine recipients. Select safety information for GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] GARDASIL is contraindicated in individuals with hypersensitivity, including severe allergic reactions to yeast, or after a previous dose of GARDASIL. Because vaccinees may develop syncope, sometimes resulting in falling with injury, observation for 15 minutes after administration is recommended. Syncope, sometimes associated with tonic-clonic movements and other seizure-like activity, has been reported following vaccination with GARDASIL. When syncope is associated with tonic-clonic movements, the activity is usually transient and typically responds to restoring cerebral perfusion. GARDASIL is not recommended for use in pregnant women. The most common adverse reaction was headache. Common adverse reactions that were observed among recipients of GARDASIL at a frequency of at least 1.0 percent and greater than placebo were fever, nausea, dizziness; and injection-site pain, swelling, erythema, pruritus and bruising. Dosage and administration for GARDASIL GARDASIL should be administered in 3 separate intramuscular injections in the deltoid region of the upper arm or in the higher anterolateral area of the thigh over a 6-month period with the first dose at an elected date, the second dose 2 months after the first dose, and the third dose 6 months after the first dose. About GARDASIL GARDASIL is approved for use in 132 countries. To date, more than 208 million doses have been distributed worldwide. About HPV and related cancers and diseases In the United States, human papillomavirus (HPV) will infect most sexually active males and females in their lifetime. According to the CDC, there are approximately 14 million new genital HPV infections in the United States each year, half of which occur in people 15 through 24 years of age. For most people, HPV clears on its own, but for others who don't clear the virus, it could lead to cancers and other diseases in males as well as females, and there is no way to predict who will clear the virus. In women, HPV causes virtually all cervical cancer cases of which an estimated 70 percent are caused by HPV types 16 and 18. Each day another 35 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in the United States - about 12,900 women per year. HPV also causes approximately 70-75 percent of vaginal cancer cases and approximately 30 percent of vulvar cancer cases. HPV types 16 and 18 cause an estimated 65% of hpv-related vaginal cancer cases and 75% of hpv-related vulvar cancer cases. Additionally, there are an estimated 3 million abnormal Pap results, many of which are caused by HPV, that require follow-up each year in the United States. HPV causes approximately 85-90 percent of anal cancers in both males and females, and HPV types 16 and 18 cause an estimated 85% of those cases. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 2,600 men and 4,600 women in the United States will be diagnosed with anal cancer in 2015, and overall rates have been increasing. There is no routine screening recommended for the general population to screen for anal cancer. HPV causes approximately 90 percent of genital warts in both males and females. There are approximately 360,000 cases of genital warts each year in the United States. Treatment of genital warts can be painful, and they may recur after treatment, especially in the first three months. Approximately 3 out of 4 people get them after having genital contact with someone who has genital warts. About Merck For 125 years, Merck has been a global health care leader working to help the world be well. Merck is known as MSD outside the United States and Canada. Through our prescription medicines, vaccines, biologic therapies, and animal health products, we work with customers and operate in more than 140 countries to deliver innovative health solutions. We also demonstrate our commitment to increasing access to health care through far-reaching policies, programs and partnerships. For more information, visit www.merck.com and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Forward-Looking Statement of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA This news release of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA (the "company") includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of the company's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to, general industry conditions and competition; general economic factors, including interest rate and currency exchange rate fluctuations; the impact of pharmaceutical industry regulation and health care legislation in the United States and internationally; global trends toward health care cost containment; technological advances, new products and patents attained by competitors; challenges inherent in new product development, including obtaining regulatory approval; the company's ability to accurately predict future market conditions; manufacturing difficulties or delays; financial instability of international economies and sovereign risk; dependence on the effectiveness of the company's patents and other protections for innovative products; and the exposure to litigation, including patent litigation, and/or regulatory actions. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additional factors that could cause results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the company's 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K and the company's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC (News - Alert)) available at the SEC's Internet site (www.sec.gov). Please see Prescribing Information for GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16, and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] at https://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/g/gardasil/gardasil_pi.pdf and Patient Information for GARDASIL at https://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/g/gardasil/gardasil_ppi.pdf. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005242/en/

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[June 16, 2016] UnitedHealthcare Will Award up to $120,000 in Grants to Michigan Organizations Dedicated to Tobacco Cessation

UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Michigan is seeking proposals to fund programs that educate and encourage the public to quit smoking and avoid tobacco use, and help eliminate exposure to secondhand smoke. Michigan-based nonprofit organizations and Federally Qualified Health Centers may apply. Initial grants will range from $20,000 to $30,000. Qualifying organizations can receive the full Request for Proposal (RFP) by contacting [email protected]. Proposals are due July 29, 2016. Awardees will be notified by Oct. 30, 2016. The RFP was developed following community engagement sessions held in Detroit, Saginaw and Grand Rapids earlier this year. At these sessions, representatives from nonprofit and community-based organizations across the state and UnitedHealthcare discussed developing strategies to address tobacco use and cessation. "We welcome the opportunity to help organizations and nonprofits statewide deliver innovative, community-based programs and resources needed to help people quit smoking, and avoid tobacco and tobacco-related health challenges," said Dennis Mouras, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Michigan. Tobacco use is the leadig cause of preventable death in the United States. According to the 2015 America's Health Rankings report, more than 20 percent of people smoke in Michigan, compared with just over 18 percent nationally, and almost 12 percent of Michigan high-school students reported smoking cigarettes. In the state, 15,000 deaths are smoking-related each year, according to Michigan Health and Wellness 4 x 4 Plan.



UnitedHealthcare serves more than 815,000 people in Michigan enrolled in employer-sponsored, individual, Medicare and Medicaid health plans, with a network of 165 hospitals and more than 32,000 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).

Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005140/en/

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[June 16, 2016] Vernon College to replace legacy systems with Unit4 Student Management

Unit4, a fast growing leader in enterprise applications for higher education institutions, today announced that Vernon College is the latest adopter of the cloud-enabled Unit4 Student Management solution, adding to an impressive client list since the solution launched early-2016. Vernon College in Vernon, Texas chose Unit4 Student Management over Ellucian and the incumbent Jenzabar to support its 3,000 students. The college used a federal Title III Strengthening Institutions Grant to help pay for the new student information system. "Unit4 Student Management will give our students, faculty and staff the ability to interact with the college in all aspects of the student life cycle to maximize student success," said Dr. Dusty R. Johnston, President of Vernon College. "It will bring together registration from our five campuses and centers, enable students to see what courses they need to complete their credits, automate routine tasks for staff and enable faculty to evaluate students' needs." "We're already seeing great traction in the North American market as we're offering institutions a completely new user experience, but one that is more familiar and really adds value," said Jami Morshed, VP of the Global Center of Excellence for Education at Unit4. "We're enabling them to upgrade the student experience with true mobile design, providing institutions with a solution that adapts simply to their business processes enabling agility with no system handcuffs. It also helps relieve the iternal staffing challenges many face as they try to maintain dated student information systems. We've never seen such enthusiastic interest in a newly launched Unit4 solution as we have with Unit4 Student Management."



Early customers cite their ability to improve the faculty, staff and student experience as a key benefit. An intuitive interface built for today's mobile user applies the same concepts users have come to expect from their consumer technology, while a unique workflow engine automates manual, routine tasks in bulk, empowering staff to spend more time on higher-value activities. With built-in analytics, every administrative user can easily analyze and demonstrate improvement on key institutional metrics. About Vernon College

Vernon College is a fully accredited, comprehensive community college offering academic, career and technical education programs, as well as community classes to prepare students for employment or for successful transfer to a four-year college or university. Its campuses and centers are located in Vernon, Texas, Seymour, Texas, and Wichita Falls, Texas. It's been ranked as one of the top 10 community colleges in Texas.

About Unit4

Unit4 is a leading provider of enterprise applications empowering people in service organizations. Unit4 delivers ERP, industry-focused and best-in-class applications. Thousands of organizations from sectors including professional services, education, public sector, non-profit, real estate, wholesale, and financial services benefit from Unit4 solutions. Unit4 provides student management, ERP and research management solutions to over 1000 colleges and universities globally to help them accelerate growth, boost student success, improve institutional effectiveness and deliver research excellence. Clients include Oxford and Cambridge Universities, HEC Paris, University of Waterloo, American University of Paris, Robert Morris University, Baylor College of Medicine, Hult International, and University of Dubai. Unit4 is in business for people. For more information please visit the website at http://www.unit4.com, follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @Unit4global, or visit our LinkedIn page. US/CANADA WEBSITE: www.unit4.com/us

US/CANADA TWITTER: @Unit4_NA View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005630/en/

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[June 15, 2016] Free TV Viewing Options Increase With Suite Of 28 Clear Signal Over-The-Air Antenna Products From ANTOP

ONTARIO, Calif., June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ANTOP Antenna, a global leader in the manufacturing and marketing of digital indoor and outdoor TV antennas, will be offering a full suite of 28 different Over-The-Air digital TV antenna models allowing consumers multiple options to enjoy the freedom of no-cost broadcast TV. From their new Southern California-based headquarters, ANTOP will market Over-The-Air digital TV antennas to support consumers as they continue to "cut-the-cord." "We're focused on providing superior customer service and offering the best Over-The-Air TV signal reception solutions for consumer home, recreational vehicle, and marine antenna use," said Eric Jiang, ANTOP vice president. "Our 2016 line up of indoor and outdoor antennas illustrate why we've been a leader in the design, engineering, and manufacturing of TV antennas and signal distribution products for more than 36 years." Antenna styles from ANTOP include indoor and outdoor models to better suite user needs.

Indoor models The popular Paper Thin, featuring a lightweight, ultra-thin .02 of an inch design

Curved and Flat Panels models, sleek and elegant

And, the more traditional Ring model with telescoping antenna New Concept Outdoor Models The Wing, Butterfly and Flat Panel, feature slim compact designs and utilize innovative weather-resistant materials

Ideal for the Do-It-Yourself crowd, these outdoor models are engineered for easy installation.



China / Europe ) product engineers. From initial concepts to manufacturing and final testing, product engineers control all the variables in the development process cycle to ensure consumers receive the highest quality products. The ANTOP engineering team enables the company to quickly respond to changing technologies and consumer needs. Consumers can expect ANTOP to continuously release new innovative antenna products that will increase their HDTV viewing experience. In terms of innovations:

The Smart Pass Amplifier, an exclusive technology offered only by ANTOP, uses an all-in-one design to allow an easier connection and deliver the correct balance between short and long range reception.

4G LTE filter. ANTOP was the first antenna manufacturer to include a built in filter in all their products to block 3G and 4G wireless signals to ensure noise-free digital TV reception. Committed to providing superior customer service, the opening of ANTOP's Southern California headquarters will allow the company to better service trade customers and support consumers as the trend to "cut-the-cord" from cable and satellite pay TV services continues to grow. Sales and Marketing and Logistics and Customer Service functions will be directed from the new headquarters to support the company's North American growth objectives. With the new office in place and staff continuing to come on board, ANTOP is moving forward with plans on expanding its brand presence in the region by opening retailer, distributor and on-line sales channels to better service consumers. Currently consumers may purchase ANTOP antennas at various on line stores, but soon to be, available on shelves at selected retailers throughout the US. ANTOP has built a gold star reputation within a global industry by presenting a corporate culture of cooperation and respect while delivering mutually-beneficial high quality antenna solutions to business partners and consumers alike. Based on a commitment to quality, engineering, research, and customer experience, ANTOP indoor and outdoor antennas lead the way in product satisfaction and value. ANTOP combines aesthetically pleasing product designs suitable to match a wide range of home decor styles and the latest antenna technology to provide a crystal clear HDTV over the air TV reception. Providing innovative solutions leads ANTOP's future development. About ANTOP: Established in 1980, ANTOP is focused on providing superior customer service and offering the best Over-The-Air TV signal reception solutions for consumer Home, Recreational Vehicle, and Marine antenna use. ANTOP has also successfully developed, manufactured and marketed professional grade CATV, MATV and SMATV signal distribution products and telecommunication antennas. Visit www.antopantenna.com. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379797LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/free-tv-viewing-options-increase-with-suite-of-28-clear-signal-over-the-air-antenna-products-from-antop-300285276.html SOURCE ANTOP Antenna

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[June 15, 2016] US Unlocked and OPAS Announce Renewed Partnership; Creating Commerce and Shipping Solutions For Over 100,000 Global Consumers

PORTLAND, Oregon, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- US Unlocked and OPAS enable more than 100,000 consumers worldwide to reach US businesses by using the US Unlocked Virtual Visa Prepaid Card combined with an OPAS personal US package forwarding address. This combination of services enables global consumers to shop for US items and services they want and receive them in their country of residence. US Unlocked offers an approved virtual Visa account, designed specifically to allow non US citizens to buy increasingly popular US goods and services. A growing global middle class with increasing purchase power wants to shop and ship the goods to their homes, creating a demand for global commerce, shipping and payment solutions. Brion Bonkowski, CEO of Tern Commerce, said: "OPAS has been a great partner to US Unlocked for many years. We are pleased they are now a certified partner and are looking forward to growing our relationship  bringing our strategic strengths together to erve our foreign customers."



OPAS' customer service based approach results in straightforward membership levels that allow consumers to shop when they want, resting assured their packages are consolidated effectively and shipped at their request. OPAS cost saving package consolidation service combines multiple packages into one, saving members millions on international shipping charges. "We are able to offer competitive shipping rates to our customers due to the robust growth we saw in 2014 and 2015. We continue to offer first class customer service, great value and competitive international shipping rates for mail and package forwarding from the US for customers," said Toshiyasu Abe, CEO OPAS.

The solution

By making available a US based virtual debit card, coupled with an approved US package forwarding address as the card's billing address, US Unlocked and OPAS are able to offer customers unprecedented access to highly sought after goods and services they were never before able to purchase, creating substantial savings for global consumers. The goods

Popular brands such as Ralph Lauren, Williams & Sonoma, GAP and Victoria's Secret that are often either not available in certain geographies or cost prohibitive to buy locally are now possible to purchase from retailers such as Amazon, Zappos and Sephora. Our consumers purchase genuine big brand names, luxury goods, nutraceuticals, baby goods/formula, digital goods, auto parts, medical equipment and many other products are forwarded to happy consumers daily. The US Unlocked Virtual Card is issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa, U.S.A. Inc. "Metropolitan" and "Metropolitan Commercial Bank" are registered trademarks of Metropolitan Commercial Bank  2014.

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[June 15, 2016] Leading Multichannel Consultancy Practicology Opens Hong Kong Office to Service Growing Asia Pacific Customer Base

HONG KONG, SYDNEY and LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic multichannel consultancy Practicology is delighted to announce the expansion of the business into Hong Kong to serve Chinese clients and wider Asia Pacific markets. The UK-founded business has operated in the Asia Pacific region for three years through its offices in Australia. It's developed a reputation for offering consultancy, data and digital marketing services delivered by consultants with experience gained working for major retail and consumer brands around the world. This unique proposition has seen the business successfully compete against more established but traditional competitors, and develop an enviable client list of both domestic Australasian and international brands. Practicology has incorporated a business in Hong Kong  Practicology PTY Ltd  opened an office and is already working with several retailers, distributors and manufacturers in the region, including fashion jewellery brand Pandora. The relationship with the Danish jewellery brand includes Practicology providing end-to-end commercial consultation and platform selection services, to support the brand in successfully entering the ecommerce market in Greater China. The new office will support Practicology's growing Chinese customer base with their multichannel retail initiatives, and also assist global customers wishing to exploit opportunities in China and the wider region. Other recent engagements by the Hong Kong team include an ecommerce data analytics and optimisation project for the leading online electronic gadgets distributor Milkyway Distribution, and a regional ecommerce transformation project with King of Ginseng, a renowned traditional Chinese medicine brand. To lead Practicology's Greater China business Practicology has appointed Arthur Cheung, a Hong Kong-based ecommerce professional with moe than 20 years of experience in senior ecommerce and ICT consulting and clientside roles. Arthur will manage client relationships in Hong Kong and across China. He has recruited two Hong Kong consultants with demonstrated ecommerce and digital marketing experience, Beatrix Wong and Desiree Wong. He will also be supported by the rest of Practicology's Asia Pacific team based in Sydney and Melbourne; as well as our consultancy team based in London.



Arthur was previously a Partner Consultant with WiseSmart Consultants specialising in ecommerce business strategy and supporting digital start-ups, such as Vcare Company Limited. He has also worked as a Senior Consultant for the Hong Kong Productivity Council, and spent five years as Chief Operations Officer for fashion eyewear manufacturer OKIA Optical. He holds a Master of Arts degree specialised in Information Systems Development. Practicology's founder and Global CEO Martin Newman said of the development: "We've seen increasing demand for practical ecommerce and multichannel consulting services from Chinese businesses for some time, and so the decision to incorporate a business in Hong Kong and prove our commitment to the region was an easy one."

He added: "In addition, we are already supporting clients in the UK, North America and Australia with their internationalisation efforts, and in many cases a strategy for China and other developing markets in Asia Pacific is an important aspect of their development. We can now offer them exceptional local knowledge and practical advice on trading in the region." Practicology Country Manager for Greater China, Arthur Cheung, added: "I'm delighted to have joined the team, and am excited about what I can help our clients to achieve backed by the expertise and knowledge of the wider Practicology business. It's clear that the Chinese online market presents a huge opportunity for consumer brands of all kinds if they can get their operating model right. We can assist businesses and ensure they benefit from the lessons of the Chinese market that have already been learned." More details on Arthur's background can be found at www.practicology.com/about/our-team/arthur-cheung - ENDS - Further information For interview requests or high resolution photography please contact: Hong Kong contact  Beatrix Wong, Consultant at Practicology: T: +852 61581420 | E: [email protected] About Practicology Practicology is a strategic multichannel consultancy with offices in London, Sydney, Melbourne and Hong Kong, founded in the UK in 2009, and incorporated in Australia in late 2012. The 50-plus global team continues to grow, but our point of difference remains the same; every consultant has worked within retail and consumer brands and understands our clients' challenges. We deliver an end-to-end portfolio of services including strategic consulting, organisational change, platform selection, ecommerce data & analytics, conversion rate optimisation, digital marketing and content. Asia Pacific clients include Pandora, Nike, Seafolly, Adidas, Kathmandu, Esprit, Jeanswest, Country Road and Super Retail Group. www.practicology.com

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[June 16, 2016] Telstra Earns Triple Honours at the 2016 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards

SINGAPORE, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Telstra yesterday scooped up three awards at the 13th annual Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards banquet, held at Equinox Singapore. Telstra received the Managed Service Provider of the Year, Connected Industries Service Provider of the Year and M2M Service Provider of the Year awards. Mr. Avinash Sachdeva, Senior Industry Analyst, Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan said that Telstra has revolutionised the healthcare system with its vision to create a more sustainable system with a focus on wellness and prevention. "Over the past few years, it has acquired, invested in or partnered 18 strategic companies and solutions to offer the most extensive and integrated (interoperable) healthcare system. In 2015, it acquired Dr Foster, Anywhere Healthcare and EOS Technologies (ComCare) to further strengthen its portfolio in the area of health analytics, telemedicine and community care capabilities," he added. Mr. Sachdeva also said that by leveraging its strengths in connectivity and networks, and its collaboration with ecosystem partners, Telstra Health has emerged as one of the most strategic ventures from the telecom service provider. "This business unit, growing at almost 100% year-on-year, is expanding its geo-coverage in the Asia-Pacific region to become a billion dollar business over the next five years," he added. He also said that Telstra has been highly successful in delivering a wide array of M2M business solutions across multile industries in Australia. "In 2015, Telstra continued to monetise business opportunities by winning new clients specifically in the fleet management and logistic sectors, signing a multi-million dollar win with a leading construction equipment manufacturer to help them improve the fleet and production efficiency for their end-customers," he said.



Mr. Sachdeva said that as a result of increased traction from multiple industries, Telstra M2M SIOs deployment increased by 24%, while revenues grew by 22% year-on-year. Meanwhile, Mr. Sandeep Bazaz, Industry Analyst, Digital Transformation at Frost & Sullivan said that Telstra has demonstrated exemplary performance in the managed services market by putting together a compelling end-to-end value proposition.

He added that the company focused on three key areas in 2015 - continuing strategic acquisitions in the region, enhancing its managed services capabilities and making significant investments in the intelligent network. "To enhance its managed service capability, Telstra has developed a strong team of 1,400 highly qualified consultants, which has helped the company capture a lot of repeat business from its large enterprise clients," he added. "To enhance its network capability offering, Telstra launched a range of SDN products developed in strategic partnership with Cisco, which will help corporate customers deploy and configure software-defined network services on a consumption-based model. With the three-fold strategy, the service provider was able to increase its customer base in APAC and offer innovative solutions to its customers in the region," Mr. Bazaz said. Mr. Andrew Wildblood, Head of Global Enterprise, Global Enterprise & Services at Telstra said the company was proud to be recognised for its work in the managed services, connected industries and M2M categories in Asia-Pacific. "We accept the triple endorsement as evidence that we are on the right track in providing our customers with reliable and innovative solutions," he said. 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. 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 Us: Start the discussion

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[June 16, 2016] Valtronic Celebrates EPFL Innovation Park Office Opening

LES CHARBONNIERES, Switzerland, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Valtronic has officially opened its Innovation Office in the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) Innovation Park on June 6, 2016, in the presence of government officials, researchers, customers as well as academic and other partners. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/379693LOGO )

The office on the EPFL campus is Valtronic's fourth worldwide location, next to the corporate headquarters in Switzerland and the sites in Cleveland (Ohio, USA) and Casablanca (Morocco). "Our presence on campus and within the networks of Switzerland Innovation shows our commitment to innovation. Staying close to new technologies and research is key for our continued success as a partner of choice for our customers. Our presence here gives us access to technologies as well as talent in the MedTech field", said Dr. Rainer Platz, Valtronic CEO. Mrs. Corboud Fumagalli, EPFL Vice President for Innovation and Technology Transfer, welcomed Valtronic amongst the other companies active in Biotech, Medtech, Micro and Nano-technologies on campus. Mr. Raphael Conz, head of the Economic Promotion of the State of Vaud, praised Vatronic's contribution to the economic tissue as a high-tech company, active in the second sector within Switzerland and the Canton of Vaud.



Dr. Rainer Platz outlined in his presentation the vision behind Valtronic's innovation strategy and its contribution to the generation of value for Valtronic and its customers. "Continuously fortifying our foundations of technologies, people and experience is essential for remaining competitive in the future", he said. The following series of keynote speakers shared their visions and experiences regarding challenges and opportunities for innovation between the laboratory and finally economic success. Prof. Dr. Philippe Renaud, Professor in the Microsystem Laboratory at EPFL and the scientific director of EPFL's Center of MicroNanoTechnology (CMi) shared his experiences from having encouraged and accompanied the foundation of numerous start-ups by his students. He insisted on the fact that scientific standards and the university's primary mission of teaching could not be compromised and the entrepreneurial spirit needed to come on top. Mr. Sacha Cerboni, Chief Quality Officer of Sensimed AG gave an insightful talk about innovation and its challenges from the perspective of one of these startups, emphasizing the numerous hurdles to a finally successful market introduction, as well as Valtronic's contribution to overcome these. Finally, Dr. Abed Hammoud, CEO of Renishaw Mayfield, spoke about their impressive range of products and reminding the audience of the positive impact of Medical Device Technology on patients' quality of life.

For more information about Valtronic, visit http://www.valtronic.com. To find out more about Valtronic's new office in the EPFL Innovation Park, visit http://epfl-innovationpark.ch . About Valtronic We innovate & manufacture miniaturized and complex products and systems for our medical device partners. Our customers are leading global suppliers of Active Implants, Medical-grade Wearables, Portables and Medical Equipment as well as advanced industrial assemblies. For over 30 years, we have helped hundreds of companies develop and produce Class II & III medical devices and advanced miniaturized electronic assemblies. Valtronic Technologies SA

Route de Bonport 2

1343 Les Charbonnieres

Switzerland

http://www.valtronic.com



Media Contact

Marie Boissonnat

Valtronic Marketing

P: +41-21-841-01-19

E: [email protected]



SOURCE Valtronic

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[June 16, 2016] Military Communications Market Investments on LTE CIAB Worth Over $90 Million Revenue by 2020

PUNE, India, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The report on military communications market says LTE is being adopted by armed forces worldwide to provide wireless broadband communications in tactical environments. In fact, interest from armed forces worldwide has led several LTE vendors and system integrators to develop tactical CIAB (Cell in a Box) solutions. The CIAB form factor encompasses the antenna unit and eNB base station transceiver12 within a single box that can be rapidly deployed to provide a temporary LTE network. Considering both operational and capital expenditures into account, LTE can reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of legacy tactical networking technologies by up to 70%. In most cases a CIAB may also host the EPC mobile core, eliminating the need for backhauling to another mobile core deployment. In this case the CIAB is referred to as "System in a Box" or SIAB. The report on military communications market says share of military communication systems continues to mature in significance, with new tasks such as the control of automated vehicles and time-critical targeting heavily dependent on network connectivity. In spite of compressions on the total defense expenditure, a universal trend in the direction of network centric warfare combined with an unsteady geopolitical landscape is continuing to drive significant investments in military communications. The military communications market is expected to comprise of over $40 Billion in revenue by the end of 2020, with investments ranging from the integration of ad hoc networking platforms in unmanned vehicles to the adoption of multi-band and multi-mode tactical radio systems. Complete report military communications market spread across 321 pages, analyzing 272 companies and provides 74 data figures is now available at http://www.marketreportshub.com/military-communications-market-sns-telecom.html. The Military Communications Market: 2015 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts report presents the following key verdicts that are impending to theindustry. Driven by growing bandwidth requirements, it is estimated that military communication systems will route more than a 100 Petabytes of data on a daily basis in 2015 alone. Military satellite systems are gradually moving towards higher frequencies such as the Ka-band (26-40 GHz). It is projected that investments on tactical LTE CIAB (Cell in a Box) solutions will account for over $90 Million in revenue by the end of 2020, following a CAGR of 37% between 2015 and 2020.



The Military Communications Market: 2015 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts report provides answers to key questions like how big is the military communications market opportunity, or what trends, challenges and barriers are influencing its growth, or what will the market size be in 2020 and at what rate will it grow. Not only this, queries related to countries and submarkets with the highest percentage of growth; the prospects of COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) technology platforms, including LTE based tactical wireless broadband networks; the percentage of military satellite communications travel through private sector spacecraft have all been elaborately and realistically answered. Order a Copy of Report at http://www.marketreportshub.com/purchase?rpid=2733. The following companies and organizations have been reviewed, discussed or mentioned in the military communications market report - 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project), Acromag, ACS (Applied Communication Sciences), Adax, ADI (Analog Devices, Inc.), ADLINK Technology, Advantech Corporation, Advantech Wireless, Aeroflex Holding Corporation, Airbus Defence and Space, Airbus Group, Aitech Defense Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Allied Technology Group, Alvarion, Anaren, Antaira Technologies, APC (Antenna Products Corporation) and more.

Another related report is 'Military Drones Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2016 to 2022' which says the worldwide market for military drones at$4.4 billion worldwide in 2015 going to $6.8 billion by 2022. Multiple applications drive market growth, applications in surveillance and bombing terrorists. Lightweight military drones are used for visualization, attack drones are used in all manner of military maneuver, military drones are used for infrastructure surveillance, aerial mapping, and logistics delivery. Complete report available at http://www.marketreportshub.com/military-drones-market-2022-wintergreen-research.html. Explore other new reports on I.T. & Telecommunication Market. About Us: Market Reports Hub is your one-stop online shop for syndicated industry research reports on multiple categories and their sub-sectors. We bring to you to the latest in market research across multiple industries and geographies from leading research publishers across the globe. Connect with Us: G+ / Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/110654518968238222746/about Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarketReportHub Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marketreportshub/679736978808693 RSS / Feeds: http://www.marketreportshub.com/rss.xml Contact:

Ritesh Tiwari

UNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZ

Magarpatta city, Hadapsar

Pune - 411013

Maharashtra, India.

Tel: +1-888-391-5441

[email protected]



SOURCE Market Reports Hub

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[June 16, 2016] Fornova Experiences Accelerated Growth in the First Half of 2016 with its Supernova Product Now Serving More than 15,000 Hotels in 40 Markets

LONDON and NEW YORK, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Fornova's growth exploded in the first months of 2016, as its technology reached more than 15,000 hotels in 40 cities. Demand was strong for the company's Supernova platform, which helps hotels understand their position in the online market, allocate their marketing spends more effectively and lower the cost of customer acquisition. Supernova is based on Fornova's unique patented visual web analysis technologies for scanning, extracting and aggregating massive amounts of information from websites. Fornova now has more than 100 employees in offices in London, New York, Israel, and Ukraine. It recently opened a new office in Amsterdam to accommodate the accelerated growth in the number of European customers. "We are very happy to acknowledge our rapid growth so far this year and recognize the amazing team that makes it possible," said Dori Stein, Fornova's CEO. "In the first five months of 2016, Fornova's business has grown exponentially, as the hotel industry has embraced our web scanning technology and connectivity solutions. It is being recognized as an unmatched solution for regaining control of online sales, driving direct bookings and competing more effectively online. This is a tremendous moment for us, as we expand our offering to hotels across Europe and North America." Fornova offers a two-tiered suite of solutions for hotels : Its rate integrity and ranking tools allow hotels to collect and aggregate all the available information from the market, better understanding how hotels compete across the various online channels.





tools allow hotels to collect and aggregate all the available information from the market, better understanding how hotels compete across the various online channels. Its marketing campaign management tools translate this data into actionable feeds facilitating connectivity to specific marketing channels that drive direct traffic. This helps optimize brand visibility online, efficiently drive traffic to hotel's websites, improve occupancy where it's needed, and close more direct bookings. Offered as a single solution via an easy to use dashboard, the Supernova platform helps hotels optimize marketing spend. Fornova's solutions are already serving more than 15,000 hotels around the world, and have quickly been adopted by some of the hotel industry's best-known brands, including Hilton, Premier Inn, NH Hotels and others. The technology has its roots in the company's Goldenfeeds product, which helps drive conversion for dozens of the world's top retail, fashion and mobile companies  including Nike, Nordstrom and Gucci. For more information on Fornova, visit www.fornova.com. About Fornova Fornova provides a unique service for the online hospitality industry, gathering market intelligence and creating demand-based marketing campaigns through patented automated technologies. Based in Israel with offices in London, Amsterdam, New York and Ukraine, Fornova's Supernova solution is gaining rapid adoption in the travel industry, serving over 15,000 hotels worldwide, and have won recognition as the most cutting edge marketing and rate integrity tools available.







Contact: Michael Frenkel, MFC PR

for Fornova

(212) 808-6559/[email protected]

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fornova-experiences-accelerated-growth-in-the-first-half-of-2016-with-its-supernova-product-now-serving-more-than-15000-hotels-in-40-markets-300285431.html SOURCE Fornova

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[June 16, 2016] Chocolate by Vdopia teams up with Pixalate for Mobile video marketplace ifilter technology

FREMONT, Calif., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Chocolate by Vdopia, a global leader in mobile video advertising, today announced the launch of a deep partnership with Pixalate Inc., the leader in fraud protection and data intelligence, to assist its ifilter programmatic technology. The partnership focuses on Chocolate by Vdopia's proprietary ifilter technology and extends its functionality to include pre bid fraud prevention using Pixalate data. iFilter is the technology that actively filters auctions in the marketplace to match the active demand with quality supply. The benefits for demand partners include higher win bid ratios and reduced infrastructure costs. "Mobile video is one of the fastest growing areas in programmatic and it's important that everyone in the ecosystem takes active steps and innovates to prevent fraud," said Saurabh Bhatia, CEO, Vdopia. "We've enhanced our ifilter product to be able to integrate with industry leading partners like Pixalate to enable us to better serve our advertising partners and help our publishers," commented Martin Price SVP of Product. "Our ifilter technology allows us to maximize the performance of our marketplace and scale globally while keeping supply quality exceptionally high," added Giuseppe Di Mauro SVP of Engineering at Chocolate by Vdopia. "Pixalate's fraud protection technology suite was built from the ground up to combat mobile ad fraud head on, specifically to block non-human traffic in mobile apps and devices," said Jalal Nasir, CEO, Pixalate. "We're excited to see companies like Chocolate by Vdopia use our technology to block fraudulent mobile app impressions at the pre-bid level." Vdopia extended its product suite with its 'Chocoate Preferred' for advertisers & 'Chocolate Supply Side Platform' for publishers with the launch at Mobile World Congress in Feb 2016. The product release comes on the back of two high profile hires in 2015: Price joined Vdopia from OpenX where he was VP of Product, and Giuseppe Di Mauro, ex-Pubmatic, joined as SVP of Engineering.



About Chocolate by Vdopia Chocolate by Vdopia is a global programmatic buying and selling platform for mobile video advertising. Vdopia operates the industry's only mobile video-only programmatic platform, called Chocolate, which is powered by its proprietary .VDO technology. Powered by patent-pending, .VDO technology, Vdopia's programmatic platform, 'Chocolate', is a brand safe, viewable and transparent platform for complete planning, buying and measurement of mobile video ad campaigns.

Vdopia Inc. is a privately held, venture-backed company headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Fremont, CA, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, India & Australia. Media Contact Saurabh Bhatia for Vdopia +1 347-989-5080 [email protected] Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380008 Photo - https://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160223/336257 Logo - https://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160223/336258LOGO Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380009 Photo - https://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150708/233681 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chocolate-by-vdopia-teams-up-with-pixalate-for-mobile-video-marketplace-ifilter-technology-300285648.html SOURCE Vdopia, Inc.

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[June 16, 2016] Now Available from RS Components, Compact Dual- and Quad-Channel Hi-Speed USB Interface Chips from FTDI

BEIJING, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, today announced availability of a duo of compact dual- and quad-channel hi-speed USB interface ICs with accompanying hardware from FTDI Chip. These devices are new versions of FTDI's well-known FT2232H and FT4232H ICs, which are designed to provide engineers with a large range of I/O options and tackle common problems caused by limited board space. The devices provide a high-quality solution for many applications including upgrading peripheral legacy systems to integrate USB or modernising equipment in the field. They are also ideally suited for use in USB instrumentation, smart card readers, industrial control systems, barcode readers, USB flash-drive readers and writers, and interfaces for portable electronics goods such as MP3 players and digital cameras. The devices are configurable hi-speed USB 2.0 ICs that support 480Mbit/s operation and now come in 56-pin VQFN packages that complement the 64-pin LQFP package format. This makes them easier to place and route on circuit boards, in addition to saving board real estate in designs with significant space constraints. The devices are also avilable in mini modules (FT2232H-56Q and FT4232H-56Q), which are small dual-inline PCBs with integrated micro-USB connectors to provide easy interfacing with external infrastructure.



The FT2232H and FT4232H are designed to be as flexible as possible: incorporating two and four UARTs, respectively, both channels on the FT2232H and two of the four on the FT4232H can be configured independently via a wide variety of industry-standard serial interfaces. The use of a multi-protocol synchronous serial engine (MPSSE) allows emulation of JTAG, SPI, I2C, bit-bang and other synchronous serial modes. The highly integrated FT2232H/FT4232H range offers a wide range of features including a 1.8V LDO voltage regulator and an integrated POR and clock multiplier PLL that operates over the 12 to 480MHz frequency range. The baud rate generator also provides data transfer at both standard and non-standard speeds. Meeting the needs of a wider selection of design implementations, the operating temperature range of -40 degrees Celsius to +85 degrees Celsius also provides the necessary ruggedness for industrial deployment.

As the chips integrate the USB protocol, they do not require production of USB specific firmware, resulting in reduced development time. The devices are supported by a wide selection of USB drivers designed for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. The FT2232H and FT4232H USB 2.0 interface ICs from FDTI Chip are available to order now from RS components across EMEA and Asia Pacific regions. About RS Components RS Components and Allied Electronics are the trading brands of Electrocomponents plc, the global distributor for engineers. With operations in 32 countries, we offer around 500,000 products through the internet, catalogues and at trade counters to over one million customers, shipping more than 44,000 parcels a day. Our products, sourced from 2,500 leading suppliers, include semiconductors, interconnect, passives and electromechanical, automation and control, electrical, test and measurement, tools and consumables. Electrocomponents is listed on the London Stock Exchange and in the last financial year ended 31 March 2016 had revenues of GBP1.29bn. For more information, please visit the website at www.rs-online.com. Editorial Contacts: Vivian Zee

Public Relations & Advertising Manager

RS Components

[email protected]

+852 2610 6472

Matthew Keefe

Customer Marketing Manager

RS Components

[email protected]

+852 2610 6476 Further information is available via these links: Twitter: @RSComponents; @alliedelec; @designsparkRS RS Components on Linkedin

http://www.linkedin.com/company/rs-components Relevant Links: Electrocomponents plc

www.electrocomponents.com RS Components

www.rs-online.com DesignSpark

http://www.designspark.com Photo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20160616/8521603965

Logo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20150818/8521505364LOGO

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[June 16, 2016] Slic Networks Painlessly Upgrades Internet Service Customers in St. Lawrence and Franklin Counties

POTSDAM, N.Y., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Just in time for the summer holiday season Slic Network Solutions residential customers in St. Lawrence and Franklin counties have had their Internet speeds doubled, without any service calls, equipment replacements or price increases as part of a recent "silent" and painless upgrade. Slic's approach to the upgrade is a dramatically different experience for customers when compared to other Internet suppliers and underscores the company's "customer first" approach. Other providers often require customers to order new equipment, schedule an installation, or do a self-install, and then have them to call in to activate a new modem. Now with the speed boost, and depending on their service package, customers can receive blazingly fast, equivalent download and upload speeds of up to 100Mbps, or fast enough to download an entire music album in less than 10 seconds. "Our system-wide speed increase provides customers with the fastest and best Internet available to full-time and seasonal residents in the two-county region, at the same prices they were paying before," said Phil Wagschal, President, Slic Network Solutions. "The combination of the fastest speeds and low pricing are unique to Slic as cable, DSL, mobile Internet and satellite tecnologies currently offered in the area by the wired and wireless broadband providers, deliver significantly slower upload speeds."



The faster speeds were provided without any price increase and was made possible due to Slic's forethought to build an all fiber optic-based network. Fiber deployments are inherently faster, more economically maintained and efficiently upgradeable than networks based on older technologies. "Those are the benefits of building out a fiber optic-based Internet service," added Wagschal. "With the type of network architecture and physical deployment we have in place, Slic can increase speeds and make system-wide network improvements rapidly, at far lower cost than traditional last-mile broadband networks."

These benefits were echoed by SUNY faculty member and former St. Lawrence County administrator Karen St. Hilaire. "The upgrades made by Slic are typical of this company's commitment to always put the customer first. Slic has made it possible for people who have not had access to high speed Internet to not only have good service but, to have great service at no extra cost. Their efforts allow people to run businesses from their homes or, in my case, to conduct an online course from there. With a flick of a switch, they have made life and work easier for their customers." The increased download speeds provide customers faster reception of large files. They also receive the benefit of crystal clear streaming of live and recorded HD audio from Pandora, Spotify, and NPR and the growing number of HD video services like iTunes, CBS All Access, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, HBO, MLB, WWE, Amazon, YouTube, YipTV, and others. Slic's Internet service delivers razor-sharp HD video, without any additional buffering when streamed or any delays when downloading. The quicker upload speeds offer faster backups to the cloud, significant time savings when uploading photos to Facebook or other social media platforms, and the ability to have more computers, tablets, and smartphones connected without any slowdown in performance. Slic's stable upload speeds also enable crystal clear video and voice conferencing and calling, while network wide low latency provides a real benefit to gamers. "Sometimes I feel bad that I have such fast Internet available to me. I struggled for so many years with so many inadequate solutions. Satellite, long-distance Wi-Fi, and modem," wrote Russ Nelson, a Slic customer from Potsdam, NY on the company's Facebook page. "I remember the pain very well, so I can empathize with the people who don't have Slic." About Slic Network Solutions A wholly owned subsidiary of Nicholville Telephone Company, Slic Network Solutions delivers fiber optic based high-speed Internet, phone, and television services to 23 communities throughout northern New York. Media Contact:

Andy Abramson

For Slic Network Solution

+18585231800

[email protected] Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160527/373107LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/slic-networks-painlessly-upgrades-internet-service-customers-in-st-lawrence-and-franklin-counties-300285693.html SOURCE Slic Network Solutions

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[June 16, 2016] Webroot Marketing Director George Anderson to Present at DattoCon

BROOMFIELD, Colo., June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Webroot, the market leader in next-generation endpoint security and cloud-based collective threat intelligence, today announced that Webroot director of product marketing George Anderson will present "Crypto Ransomware: How Not to Be a Victim" on Wednesday, June 22 at 11:15 a.m. CDT during DattoCon 2016. This keynote presentation looks at the recent history of crypto ransomware, including its growth and iterations, as well as best practices and recovery strategies for keeping clients safe. Webroot is a Diamond sponsor at DattoCon, the conference that brings managed service providers (MSPs), value-added resellers (VARS), and IT solution providers together for technical training, best practices, and networking opportunities designed to help Datto partners dramatically grow their businesses. Visit Webroot (booth #100) at the event on June 20-22 in Nashville, Tennessee. "Crypto-ransomware is now a common and pernicious threat to IT infrastructure that can paralyze usinesses for days in minutes," said George Anderson, director of product marketing at Webroot. "Every business, regardless of size or industry, needs to have affordable, enterprise class access and protection from disasters and this vision is shared between Webroot, Datto and our partners."



Join the conversation, discover new threat stats from Webroot research, and view live coverage of DattoCon by following #NextGenMSP and Webroot activity on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. About Webroot

Webroot delivers next-generation endpoint security and threat intelligence services to protect businesses and individuals around the globe. Our smarter approach harnesses the power of cloud-based collective threat intelligence derived from millions of operational devices to stop threats in real time and help secure the connected world. Our award-winning SecureAnywhere endpoint solutions and BrightCloud Threat Intelligence Services protect tens of millions of devices across businesses, home users, and the Internet of Things. Trusted and integrated by market-leading companies, including Cisco, F5 Networks, Aruba, Palo Alto Networks, A10 Networks, and more, Webroot is headquartered in Colorado and operates globally across North America, Europe, and Asia. Discover Smarter Cybersecurity solutions at www.webroot.com.

Social Media: Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Facebook 2016 Webroot Inc. All rights reserved. Webroot, SecureAnywhere, Webroot SecureAnywhere, Webroot BrightCloud, BrightCloud, and Smarter Cybersecurity are trademarks or registered trademarks of Webroot Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20121016/LA94090LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/webroot-marketing-director-george-anderson-to-present-at-dattocon-300285475.html SOURCE Webroot

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[June 16, 2016] L&T Technology Services partners with Redknee to deliver IoT architecture for enterprises in transport, energy and insurance

IoT services monetization to be the core of the alliance value proposition for enterprises TORONTO, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - L&T Technology Services Limited ("L&T Technology Services"), announced its collaboration with Redknee Solutions Inc (TSX: RKN), a leading provider of real-time monetization solutions. The alliance will offer our clients a complete architecture for enterprises to enable connectivity, analytics and monetization for the Internet of Things ("IoT"). Over the coming decade, the Internet of Things will grow rapidly, with a recent Machina Whitepaper highlighting a USD $1.3 trillion opportunity for those with sophisticated monetization capabilities. By leveraging cutting edge technologies from both L&T Technology Services and Redknee, the partnership will enable easy billing and monetization for enterprises across the transport, energy and insurance markets, and support new business models and opportunities for those enterprises utilizing the IoT ecosystem. L&T Technology Services will integrate Redknee's Connected Suite to provide IoT end-point connectivity, advanced analytics and monetization in one integrated solution. The use case on a solution for Usage Based Insurance (UBI) was demonstrated by the firms in Paris on June 14, 2016 in an event organized by Sierra Wireless. L&T Technology Services has been deploying IoT solutions through its open frameworks which enable Digital Engineering of Smart Products, Manufacturing, Operations and Services. L&T Technology Services received Nasscom's recognition for 'Innovative Application of Analytics for Business Solution' in 2015. The Redknee Connected Suite provides all the necessary tools to monetize any enterprise application - in real time  including bundled offers, promotions and new offers with complex pricing models. Redknee's modular solution was builtwith the diverse requirements of IoT in mind, and its monetization capabilities already support emerging IoT demands.



Mr Amit Chadha, Chief Sales Officer and Member of the Board, L&T Technology Services said, "We have been collaborating with technology leaders to develop enhanced delivery systems that create opportunities and solves challenges for our customers. Our partnership with Redknee is another step in that direction. We will leverage IoT technologies to provide unique and differentiated solutions, offering Digital Engineering solutions to a number of industries." Mr Lucas Skoczkowski, Redknee's CEO commented: "The Internet of Things is disrupting markets with the emergence of new and innovative business models. Redknee is excited to partner with L&T Technology Services to offer an end-to-end IoT solution to provide connectivity, monetization and subscriber management solutions that support new and innovative monetization models as part of the IoT revolution."

About Larsen & Toubro:

Larsen & Toubro is an Indian multinational engaged in technology, engineering, construction, manufacturing and financial services with USD 16 billion in revenue. It operates in over 30 countries worldwide. A strong, customerfocused approach and the constant quest for top-class quality have enabled L&T to attain and sustain leadership in its major lines of business for over seven decades. About L&T Technology Services:

L&T Technology Services Limited is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro Limited providing pure play engineering research and development services to customers, including Fortune 500 companies globally. We offer innovative solutions in IoT and machine-to-machine across various segments such as transportation, industrial products, telecom and hi-tech, process industry and medical devices segment. With a multi-disciplinary and multi-domain presence, we challenge ourselves every day to help clients achieve an advantage through value-creating products, processes and services. Headquartered in India, L&T Technology Services has 9,406 employees, 12 global delivery centers and 31 research and testing labs in India as of March 31, 2016. For additional information about L&T Technology Services log on to www.lntTechservices.com About Redknee:

Redknee monetizes today's digital world. We provide a complete portfolio of mission-critical monetization and subscriber management solutions and services that allow communications service providers, utility companies, auto makers and enterprise businesses of all types to charge for things in new and innovative ways. Redknee's real-time billing, charging, policy and customer care offerings provide the agility and scalability to drive a unique user experience, increase profitability and support any new product or business model. Available on premise, cloud-based, or as a Software-as-a-Service, Redknee's low-risk, flexible solutions power more than 250 businesses across the globe. Established in 1999, Redknee Solutions Inc. (TSX: RKN) is the parent of the wholly-owned operating subsidiary Redknee Inc. and its various subsidiaries. References to Redknee refer to the combined operations of those entities. For more information about Redknee and its solutions, please go to www.redknee.com. SOURCE Redknee Solutions Inc.

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[June 16, 2016] ShipBob Closes Series A To Provide The Power of Amazon Logistics to Small Businesses Everywhere

CHICAGO, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- ShipBob announced today that it has closed $4 million in a Series A round of funding to empower more businesses around the world with better, easier, more affordable logistics and shipping. This round, led by Hyde Park Venture Partners (HPVP), will fuel ShipBob's growth as the company increases its geographic footprint, expands its team, and further develops the product. ShipBob was founded to optimize logistics for e-commerce companies to help them achieve the scale, speed, reach and efficiency of Amazon. The company participated in Y Combinator in 2014 and has since experienced double-digit growth month-over-month. It is operationally profitable in Chicago and New York, where it is currently active. This funding is a testament to the company's impressive traction and will support ShipBob as the company scales and continues to transform the entire fulfillment lifecycle for SMBs. ShipBob plans to launch another city later this summer. ShipBob's free online platform manages the entire fulfillment process from end to end, combining order management, inventory management, customer communication, and seamless shipping in one simple web dashboard. It integrates with the most popular online e-commerce platforms, including eBay, Shopify, Amazon, and Magento. When a merchant makes a sale, all they have to do is schedule a pickup and ShipBob takes care of the rest. ShipBob professionally packs items and optimizes savings for businesses by comparing USPS, UPS, FedEx & DHL for the lowest shipping rate. It will ship anywhere in the world and fill out all the customers' paperwork, so merchants don't have to worry about a thing. The company also offers warehousing, so customers can store inventory at the company's warehouse and ShipBob will package and ship out orders as they are placed. "My cofounder and I were running an e-commerce store ourselves and every time we got an order, we had to go to the post office and stand in line to mail our items," said ShipBob cofounder Dhruv Saxena. "We realized shipping was broken for SMBs and there were no good solutions out there. That's when we decided to start ShipBob. We've grown rapidly and this round of funding will enable us to scale up to meet demand, to take the pain out of shipping for more small businesses and help them scale as they grow."



Logistics for small businesses are complicated and painful. E-commerce platforms have simplified the process of selling online, but the fulfillment process remains antiquated. Most SMBs juggle multiple products and services for various steps of the fulfillment process and none of these systems talk to each other, which leads to inefficiencies and mistakes. Once they reach a certain volume, they also have to hire their own staff for packaging and shipping, which is also expensive. As a result, small businesses can spend 25 percent of revenue on fulfillment alone. ShipBob solves these problems with a single technology platform that integrates all the products and services SMBs need. ShipBob serves as their outsourced logistics arm, which is cheaper and allows small businesses to grow without worrying about their logistics infrastructure. Its software-first approach stands out in a stagnant market where incumbents take months to onboard customers. With ShipBob, merchants do not have to pay to use the platform, only for the services they use -- there are no minimums and no contracts.

"In an e-commerce world where shipping speed and cost efficiency matter, ShipBob has an innovative approach to helping small and medium e-commerce companies provide efficient and cost-effective logistics," said Ira Weiss, from Hyde Park Venture Partners (HPVP). "Merchants need better tools to take the pain out of fulfillment and ShipBob's platform makes the entire process simple and straightforward. The opportunity is huge and we are excited to see ShipBob realize its global vision." In addition to HPVP, other investors include Hyde Park Angels, FJ Labs, Recruit Strategic Partners, FundersClub, Startcaps Ventures, NFQ Capital, Network Ventures, Bluestein and Associates, Service Provider Capital, Russell Long, SV Angel and Y Combinator, which ShipBob went through in 2014. About ShipBob

ShipBob's goal is to make shipping effortless and efficient, businesses can skip standing in line at the post office and focus on what really matters in their business. Its online platform combines order management, inventory management, customer communication, as well as optimized shipping for e-commerce companies. The technology platform integrates into online ecommerce platforms such as eBay, Shopify, Amazon, Magento. Shipbob provides this technology platform for free so that any business can sign up and start using Shipbob's online platform within minutes. ShipBob offers value-added premium services built on top of its platform, allowing it to capture some of the savings provided to its clients. About Hyde Park Venture Partners

Hyde Park Venture Partners (HPVP) is an early stage venture fund focused on high-growth software startups across the Midwest. With offices in Chicago and Indianapolis and a network of deal sources and advisors throughout the Midwest, the firm invests in technology startups raising their first or second institutional round of capital. Example investments include Farmlogs, FourKites, G2Crowd, and Geofeeedia. Follow HPVP @hydeparkvp. To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shipbob-closes-series-a-to-provide-the-power-of-amazon-logistics-to-small-businesses-everywhere-300286080.html SOURCE ShipBob

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We now know when we're going to get our first official look at the next Galaxy Note. Samsung has set an Aug. 2 date for its next Unpacked event, with the Note 7 likely headlining the festivities. And we're getting a better idea of how a new iris scanner adorning the front of the Note will allow you to log into the device.



Galaxy 7 Note renders posted by @EvLeaks

The iris scanner is just one feature we're expecting to see on the next Galaxy Note, with Samsung's phablet getting everything from curved screens to a revamped name. Here's what's likely to be announced on Aug. 2.

A New Name

Samsung's current phablet is the Galaxy Note 5. You'd expect the phone coming this August would simply be the Note 6, but Samsung is apparently skipping that version and going straight to the Note 7. Samsung's invitation to its Aug. 2 event reveals as much, with the number 7 feature prominently next to the Unpacked event title.





Samsung's invitation to its Unpacked event on Aug. 2

Why the jump in number? Credit the success of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge. Calling its latest phablet the Galaxy Note 7 would allow Samsung to line up the numbers of its flagship phones while snuffing out the impression that the Note is a step behind Samsung's other devices.



If you need more evidence of the name change, look no further than images leaked by the usually reliable Evan Blass, who earlier this month posted what he says are the final marketing renders for the Note. Those images confirm the Note 7 name, while also revealing other features like a curved screen and iris scanner next to the front camera.



Likelihood: Samsung's invite make this all but a certainty.

Iris Scanner

Back in April, Dutch website GalaxyClub spotted an order for parts that would make up an "iris cam." Such a sensor could be used as an added security feature, letting you unlock your phone or authenticate transactions by scanning your eye. Because details were scarce, we weren't sold on that feature making its way into the next Note.

Seeing is believing, though, and the image posted by Blass seems to have an extra lens up front. And now a leaked video posted by Playfuldroid has filled in the details on how an iris scanner might work.

The brief clip shows a split-screen, with an eye-scan area on one part of the display and a password pattern box below that. Such a set-up would give you multiple ways to unlock the Note 7. The iris scanner could also play a role in authenticating mobile payments.

There will be some limitations if a leaked screenshot posted by Android Authority is anything to go by. That screenshot warns the iris scanner may not work if you're wearing glasses or contact lenses. The screenshot also suggests you'll have to hold your Note 7 a very specific way to successfully use the iris scanner.

Likelihood: We're confident this will be announced Aug. 2.

Dual-Edge Screens

Based on the leaked images of the Note 7, it looks like Samsung's upcoming phone will match the dual edge display of the Galaxy S7 Edge. That Edge screen won praise for its improved functionality tanks to another row of app shortcuts.

In a June report on Note 7 production, ETNews says a dual-edge OLED display will be used on the Note. And the fact that all three models in the leaked photo have curved screens seemingly confirms an earlier report in the Korea Herald that says Samsung wasn't planning to release an alternate model of the Note 7 with a flat screen.

Whatever shape the display takes, it's expected to be a biggie: earlier this year, SamMobile said the next Note would feature a 5.8-inch display. That would make it slightly larger than the 5.7-inch Note 5 as well as the 5.5-inch S7 Edge.



Likelihood: The leaked photo seemingly confirms that Samsung's committed to curved screens.

USB-C Port

Samsung's Galaxy S7 phones use microUSB, but that could be changing with the Note 7 if a report in Forbes proves accurate. Forbes contributor Gordon Kelly cites images from case maker Olixar that feature a USB-C port. (Olixar's cases also confirm an Edge display and extra lens up front.)

If true, it's a rather significant change for Samsung, particularly since the company's Gear VR headset uses microUSB to connect to Galaxy phones. Still, USB-C is becoming more widely adopted among smartphone makers  the LG G5, HTC 10, and OnePlus 3 are among the phones to feature it  and Samsung will have to take the plunge sometime.

Likelihood: We're not sold yet, but it could happen.

Water Resistance

Butterfingers, rejoice! Just like the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, the next Galaxy Note is likely to come in a water-resistant body so you never need worry about using your phone near the pool or in the rain again. SamMobile reported that the next Note will be rated IP68 for dust and water resistance, meaning it will survive dips in 1 meter (3.3 feet) or more of water for up to 30 minutes.



That's good news for fans of the Galaxy phablet, considering its larger size makes it harder to hold on to with one hand. Although water resistance has yet to be officially confirmed, we're pretty sure this feature will be coming to the Note 7.



Likelihood: Basically real.

Return of SD Card Slot

For some reason, Samsung had a brain fart last year and decided to remove microSD card support on its 2015 flagship models, upsetting plenty of power users. This year, the company brought back the microSD card slot in the Galaxy S7 devices, and it's expected to do the same thing on the Note 6.



Tech Times reported that Samsung is supposedly considering the return of upgradeable memory in the new Note, although the publication doesn't cite sources for that tidbit. However, Samsung has already demonstrated its ability to include a microSD card slot in a beautiful, water-resistant body with the Galaxy S7, so this is a fairly likely feature.



Likelihood: Almost certain.

More RAM

In addition to enhancements that we can generally take for granted, such as an improved processor and new operating system, some rumored specs sound particularly exciting. In its report on the expected 5.8-inch display SamMobile says the next Note will have a whopping 6GB of RAM. That would put it on par with the just-announced OnePlus 3.

Considering Samsung has reportedly been mass producing larger-capacity RAM components in 2015, the 6GB RAM rumor seems pretty plausible.



Likelihood: Pretty certain.

Other Specs

There's more to the Note 7 than just extra RAM. A report by GSM Helpdesk, helpfully translated by Android Authority, breaks down the other specs that are reportedly targeted for the new Note: an Exynos 8 CPU, a 4,000 mAh battery and a 12-megapixel rear camera that has a dual-pixel sensor. Those camera specs would match the ones that vaulted the Galaxy S7 Edge to the top of our best camera phones list.

But don't count your extended battery life before it arrives: SamMobile found a page of specs prematurely posted by South Korea Telecom that reportedly listed the features on the baseline model Note 7. That spec sheet suggests the phone will have a 3,500 mAh battery  an improvement over the 3,000 mAh power pack in the Note 5, but not quite what the S7 Edge offers. (On the bright side, that same spec sheet suggests the Note 7 will offer 4GB of RAM and 64GB of on-board storage with the ability to add another 256GB through a microSD slot.) Regardless of the battery size, we're eager to see if the new Note can top the Note 5's 9 hour, 35 minute battery life, which leaves it just outside our rankings of the longest-lasting smartphones.

In posting the photo of the three Note 7 models, Evan Blass also listed their colors. The Note 7 will reportedly be available in black onyx, silver titanium and blue coral. Leaked images at Sammobile also show a gold version of the Note 7.

We've heard very little about the Note 7's S Pen leading up to the Aug. 2 unveiling, but that could be changing. The same leak from Android Authority that included the list of limitations for the iris scanner also suggests a new Glance option for the S Pen. TechnoBuffalo suggests the Glance feature lets you specify parts of the Note 7's screen for capturing video.

Likelihood: The camera improvements seem particularly certain; we're not sure what to think about the conflicting battery reports.

Features We Want

We haven't heard about these potential goodies yet, but we'd sure like to see the Note 7 come with the same super cameras on the Galaxy S7, which are our current favorite smartphone cameras. The rumored USB Type-C port would go a long way in future-proofing the phone.



You'd hope that a new Note will run the latest version of Android. An Aug. 2 debut for the Note 7 could complicate that, but Google is promising a summer release for Android Nougat. If the timing works out, the Note 7 might be the first phone to ship with Nougat.



The Galaxy S7 handsets both came with larger batteries, and we're hoping for the same on the Galaxy Note 7. As we noted above, the Note 5's 9:35 battery life is ahead of most smartphones, but rivals such as the iPhone 6s Plus and the Nexus 6P clocked 10 hours and an epic 12 hours, respectively. Samsung has some catching up to do on the Note's endurance.
Remix Pro with keyboard cover

Jide Technology, the company known for creating the Android for PCs that Google shouldve made years ago, announced a new 2-in-1 tablet called the Remix Pro that comes with the Android Marshmallow-based Remix OS 3.0.

For many years, Android failed on PCs and notebooks because it didnt have an interface for the larger display format. Google also didnt seem to give this idea too much attention, possibly because it knew that if it did, it wouldve made Android a director competitor to Chrome OS.

Jide redesigned Android to have a better user interface for the desktop environment and to allow Android applications, whether optimized for phones or tablets, to work naturally in the Remix OS windows. This made Android, perhaps for the first time, an appealing solution for PCs. Earlier this year, Jide also partnered with the Android-x86 project so it could significantly expand the compatibility with other existing PCs.

Google recently announced that it has found a way to put the Android framework inside a container so that all Android applications can work inside Chrome OS, without any performance penalty and without developers having to significantly modify their apps to work on Chrome OS.

This makes the case for Remix OS more difficult going forward. However, so far the Chrome OS/Android integration is just a promise, and it remains to be seen how well Google executes on that idea.

In the meantime, Jide continues to launch new devices and create partnerships with other device makers to support Remix OS.

Remix Pro 2-in-1

The Remix Pro is Jides second-generation productivity tablet, as well as the first device to support the Android Marshmallow-based Remix OS 3.0. The Remix Pro is a high-resolution tablet with an eight-core Snapdragon processor, 3GB of RAM and dual-band Wi-Fi. It will be released on the Chinese market first, while its international availability will be confirmed at a later date.

Remix Pro CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 8-core processor GPU Qualcomm Adreno 510 GPU Memory 3GB LPDDR3 RAM Storage 32GB eMMC internal storage; microSD slot supports up to 256GB storage expansion Screen 12 Full-HD Retina IPS 10-point touch screen; 2160x1440p Cameras 5MP front/8MP rear Connectivity WLAN with 2.4Ghz/5Ghz duo frequency supports 802.11a/b/g /n/ac protocols, Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi Direct Dimensions & weight 207mm x 289.5mm x 6.9mm; 640g Power Supports quick charge; 9,000 mAh

Acer Aspire ES1-131

Acer is one of Jides first major partners, and together they will be working on porting Remix OS to the Intel-based Acer Aspire ES1-131 notebook. Jide believes that the work the two companies will do on porting the OS to this notebook will also improve Remix OS for other computers.

Acer Aspire ES1-131 CPU Intel Celeron N3150/4-core/1.60GHz Memory 4GB RAM Storage 500GB internal storage Screen 11.6 1366 x 768 Connectivity Gigabit Ethernet; WLAN 802.11b/g/n; Bluetooth 4.0 Dimensions & weight 291mm x 211mm x 21.2mm; 1.25kg

Remix OS PC Box OEM Solution

Jide also launched the second generation Remix OS PC box, which targets PC OEMs interested in selling their own Remix OS PCs. The key specifications can be seen in the table below:

Remix OS PC box CPU Amlogic S905/4-core/64 Byte/ARM Cortex - A53/2GHz Memory 1GB/2GB DDR3 Storage 8GB/16GB eMMC; microSD slot (up to 128GB memory expansion) Operating system Remix OS 3.0 (based on Android 6.0); OTA support Connectivity 802.11.b/g/n 2.4G Ports Ethernet (100Mps); BT 4.0; 2x USB Type A; HDMI 2.0 supports up to 4K @60fps Supported codecs & formats MPEG/VMA/WAV/AAC/AMR/MIDI; JPEG/BMP/GIF/PNG/WEBP Video output MPEG  1/2/4, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, MVC, VC-1, Motion JPEG/H.265 4Kx2K @60fps/H.264 4Kx2K @30fps/MVC, VP8 2160P@30fps

AOC Mars All-In-One

There will be three all-in-one PCs running Remix OS, with screen sizes of 22-, 24-, and 32 inches, respectively. The company had already unveiled the 24" version at CES Asia 2016.



AOC Mars All-in-One PC CPU Amlogic S905/4-core/64 Byte/ARM Cortex - A53/2GHz GPU 5-core/ARM Mali 450/750MHz Memory 2GB RAM Storage 16GB/64GB internal storage Screen 22/24/32 Full HD @60Hz Connectivity Ethernet; WiFi Ports 4 USB 2.0 (32 - 3 USB 2.0), 1 HDMI, Audio out, 2 built in speakers Weight 3.9kg

Android-x86 Founder Joins Jide

Because the Remix OS and Android-x86 projects got so close recently, it seems Android-x86 projects founder will be moving to work in-house at Jide Technologies as its x86 Technology Lead.

2016 has been an incredibly exciting year for Jide Technology, highlighted by the launch of Remix OS for PC and the several quality partners that we have been fortunate to announce, said Jide Technology CEO and co-founder Jeremy Chau. When we first started out more than 2 years ago, no one quite got what we were trying to achieve. Now, companies and brands that we have always admired are reaching out to us. Its a win-win situation as we continue to push the capabilities of Android PCs, he added.

Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware. You can follow him at @lucian_armasu.

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A NSW publican is taking a cue from the Whitlams 2000 Hottest 100-topping single and blowing up the pokies to replace them with live music. Cliff Wallis, a veteran of the industry, wants to bring about a revolution at the Tathra Hotel.

Wallis spent years running the Manly Vale Hotel, where bands like INXS first got their start, and has spent the past 25 years operating the Sundeck Hotel in the Perisher Valley, saving the venue from receivership.

Now, as ABC News reports, Wallis is looking to change things in the town of Tathra, which remarkably has 70 poker machines for a population of less than 2,000 people, with many residents gripped by an addiction to the machines.

Poker machines have destroyed hotels in many respects, Wallis told ABC News. People are relying on poker machines and forgetting about the traditional food and beverages theyre offering. Some hotels have become primarily poker machine venues, and they do best in the lowest socio-economic areas.

Half the money Wallis forked over for the Tathra Hotel went to purchasing licenses for its 12 pokies machines, but hes planning on selling the licenses and using that money to renovate the venue into a three-and-a-half star hotel with live music.

Despite some objections from the hotels regulars (including some whove decided to boycott the venue), Wallis said hes already seeing changes in the clientele, observing more retired people, professionals, and more women coming in.

The veteran publican said hes not doing it for the money, but for the challenge. Im doing it for the challenge of whether I can turn that place around, he said. I want it to be a place that the community is proud of, and if they are proud of it, it will be successful.
As we reported yesterday, the organisers of Canberras new Spilt Milk music festival recently issued a response to criticism of their first round lineup after it featured just one female performer amongst 16 total acts.

As we noted, its not the first time in recent memory that festival organisers have been criticised for under-representing female acts. The issue of gender parity on music festival lineups has been thrust to the forefront of the industry dialog.

Controversy was stirred after a mock-up of the Leeds and Reading festivals lineup with all of the male acts removed began making the rounds online. At the time, organiser Melvin Benn said he had simply booked the best lineup available.

Indeed, even KLP, who along with fellow triple j alum Nina Las Vegas hit out at the female representation on the Spilt Milk lineup, acknowledges that in many cases promoters have their hands tied when it comes to booking acts and the issue is systemic.

I think the promoters just dont think about it and talking about it may make them realise we could represent a more diverse line-up, she told News Corp. The more we can make it equal on those stages, the more young girls will see it and think I could do that.

We cant blame festivals and promoters; its everyone in the industry and comes down to labels signing more women and playing more women on the radio. In a statement, Spilt Milk organisers acknowledged the issue and promised more female acts on their second lineup.

Ironically, Ben Tillman, organiser of boutique Wollongong event Yours and Owls, booked an entirely 50/50 lineup of male and female acts for the festivals third instalment in October by following the same mantra as Benn and others.

Speaking to News Corp, Tillman said the gender split was not a conscious decision but rather the result of booking available acts whom the organisers all wanted to see. Though he acknowledged last years attendance was 55 percent female.

Am I reading this right? 1 female?  The young girl in me is feeling so uninspired to try be a musician in bro-town https://t.co/UIlKWaUlsB  KLP (@klpmusic) June 9, 2016

lol so backwards https://t.co/18dSmgPvOc  Nina Las Vegas (@ninalasvegas) June 9, 2016

Our process is I go out and hunt around for a lineup and come back to everyone with what Ive got and one of the guys pointed out it was half girls, Tillman said, reportedly unaware that hed created possibly the most gender-equal festival in Australia.

I was just trying to get the best line-up, these were the acts that were available and this is a testament to how much great music there is being made by women. I know a lot of festivals are copping a bit of flak for never having girls on the lineup.

I think I will definitely be conscious of it in the future but you dont want to put constraints on yourself when it comes to choosing acts. Among other festivals leading the way in female representation is Laneway.

As Tone Deaf reported last year, the 2015 festival featured female acts in more than half of the headlining slots and the majority of Unearthed artists added to the bill were female, though its not clear these were intentional choices either.

[include_post id=481417]

Katie Noonan, who now curates Queensland Music Festival, told News Corp that festival lineups should be booked based on merit and availability, but should still make room to address gender inequality.

Festivals are a wonderful opportunity to introduce audiences to a new artist they would not have discovered before, she said. I hope to put a lot of bad ass women from Queensland, the rest of Australia and international artists on this festival.

Noonan and KLPs manager, Jesse Flavell, agrees: This is a cultural issue globally but the music industry has a very visible platform from which to address gender equality.

The talent is there, more than ever in this country and its the role of the gatekeepers in this industry to showcase that amazing talent. The promoters, the music programmers at radio, the labels all need to check themselves because the industry is still largely a boys club.
KCPD Chief's Blog: KC NoVA is building foundation for change in urban core

KCPD CHIEF FORTE: "We know we have correctly identified the people who are responsible for the majority of Kansas Citys violent crime. So what are we doing about it? Everyone first must understand it has taken decades and generations for todays culture of violence in the urban-core to form. That is not going to change overnight or even in two years. With KC NoVA, we are building the foundation for change. The impact of NoVA might not be visible in the homicide numbers right now, but I am confident that the relationships and processes are finally in place to turn the tide of violence. At a recent meeting for the Byrne Project of KC NoVA  which focuses specifically on the Prospect Corridor  a resident stood up and said hed seen more positive changes in the neighborhood in the last few months than he had in all the years hed lived there . . ."

Amid what is a turning into an exceptionally turbulent Summer in Kansas City and across the nation, one of Kansas City's top law men advocates calm and patience for this town's crime fighting efforts.Here's the word . . .The most important passage in this note isn't a description of the. . . Two years ago the group was widely touted in the media for a historic drop in local murder numbers. Now that those figures are back to historic levels, what's important is this statement which endorses and doubles down on the strategy for better and worse.Checkit . . .You decide . . .
"A 20-year-old KC man has been charged in Sunday night fatal shooting near 66th and Park Avenue in Kansas City, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker announced today.





"According to court records, the body of the victim was found in the driver's eat of his vehicle in the 6600 block of Park Avenue. He was been hit by gunshots. Two other victims in the vehicle, including a 2-year-old child, were not hit by gunfire. One told police she was in her vehicle when a suspect vehicle pulled up, stopped abruptly and a suspect got out and fired shots at Fayne. The vehicle sped off with the shooter."

Today's newsflash from the Jackson County Prosecutor's office as authorities step up their response amid a steadily rising murder count . . .Developing . . .
At least 10,000 protesters of the Resign movement gathered at Syntagma Square demanding the Greek government step down. Photo Source: protohema.gr

At least 10,000 protesters of the Resign movement gathered at Syntagma Square demanding the Greek government step down. The favourite slogans were People dont want you, take your junta and leave.

The demonstration is reminiscent of the 2011 Indignados anti-austerity movement and the summer referendum protests. People started arriving at around 7pm and the protest ended peacefully at 9pm. The people opted to hold Greek and EU flags instead of flying partsan flags. The protesters gathered to vent their anger and their discontent against the Tsipras government and his policies.

A number of government officers have dismissed the demonstration as pointless and being organized by New Democracy under the guise of a popular protest. New Democracy on the other hand accuses the government of authoritarianism.

Despite claiming not to be associated with the demonstration, many officers and MPs from New Democracy, the Democratic Alignment (PASOK and Democratic Left) and the River support and attended the two demonstrations.

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
Changes are expected in Cyprus banking sector, as buy outs, consolidations, and alliances are coming to the forefront of the business agenda

Changes are expected in Cyprus banking sector, as buy outs, consolidations, and alliances are coming to the forefront of the business agenda, SigmaLive Greek was told by sources about new foreign investors.

Changes are expected at Piraeus Bank while Eurobank Cyprus and The National Bank of Greece in Cyprus are also in discussion about consolidating their businesses, the same sources said. There is also investor interest in the Cyprus Development Bank.

Alpha Bank Cyprus, the same sources said, is set to keep its position in Cyprus, but is running reorganisation processes in its ranks.

Piraeus Bank, the sources said, is about to be bought out by foreign investors. The same sources added that process and negotiations are already underway with both sides playing strong hands to come to an agreement on the new shape the bank will take.

Sources from the within the National Bank of Greece have also mentioned to SigmaLive Greek that although reports of Lebanese investors interested in the Cypriot branch had come to light, there is a Lebanese businessperson looking to involving his or her self in Cyprus.

Dynamic process

The same sources have said that the process is still ongoing and dynamic, with both sides still looking for an agreement, as the details are judging the outcome that is expected.

Among the people that have potential, other sources said, is Lebanese businessman Maurice Sehnaoui, who as is already know, is the President of the Board of Directors at USB Bank, and is looking for the same position at the new Piraeus Bank.

Barclays CEO Bob Diamond has been taken out of the picture, with this latest development, after he had been on the shortlist of candidates for Piraeus Bank.

The plans to sell off sister departments of Piraeus Bank, the same sources said, has been a part of the Restructuring Plan of the company, which had been approved by the European Commission and the Stability Crediting Fund last December. This plan involved a liberation from the ties with Greece.

The parameters that have been outlined by the bank are completely in line with the medium-term strategic and crediting goals of the banks.

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
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on Wednesday for closer business ties with Germany after talks with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier.



"The presence of German companies and banks in Iran, and more economic cooperation will help both countries," Zarif told reporters before a dinner to break the Ramadan fast with Steinmeier.



He said closer ties between the two countries would also promote peace and stability in the region. "No country will be hurt. Iran will be an advanced country and a very good partner for Germany," he said.



Earlier this week, Zarif said the United States should do more to encourage banks to do business with Iran following the lifting of sanctions.  Reuters
Flat6Labs, a regional start-up accelerator programme, has funded 46 projects worth $10 million between 2011 until now in Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, Daily News Egypt quoted a top official as saying.



The programme, which works to support entrepreneurs in the Middle East, provides selected projects that apply via the website with seed financing and vocational training to their owners, explained managing director Willie Elamein.



The programme is currently operating in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Jeddah, with plans to launch in Beirut, Lebanon soon, he added.



Selected projects in Egypt are supported with funding ranging between EGP100 ($11.2) and EGP150,000, for a stake of 10-15 per cent of the projects shares, said Elamein.



Flat6Labs has recently held a cooperation agreement with Barclays Bank Egypt, in order to support entrepreneurs in the field of financial technology in Egypt.



According to Elamein, the programme chose Barclays Bank for its interest in innovation, which is the same field of Flat6Labs work.
After decades of government-led growth, Saudi Arabia is handing over much of the responsibility for the economy to private firms - a prospect which both pleases and worries businessmen, who wonder how they can finance new projects in an age of austerity.



As more than a dozen Saudi ministers outlined the kingdom's economic reform plan in late-night news conferences last week, they praised the private sector in terms that would have suited right-of-centre Western politicians rather than those from a state-dominated economy.



The economy minister said removing obstacles to private firms was a priority. The health and education ministers called for flows of private money into their sectors. The minister of municipal and rural affairs said his officials would become "regulators, planners and controllers", leaving private capital to develop Saudi cities.



Such events would be a sea change for Saudi Arabia, which for decades has relied on lavish government spending of petrodollars for growth.



Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now promoting the reform plan on a visit to the US, compared it in a magazine interview early this year to the free-market revolution overseen by 1980s British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.



The prospect excites some Saudi investors - the share prices of several local companies that could benefit from opportunities created by the plan have jumped since last week.



"It will be a positive challenge and will bring a big change even if only 60 or 50 percent of the plan is achieved," Muhammad Al-Agil, chairman of major Saudi retail chain Jarir Marketing Co, told Reuters.



"For the private sector, it will multiply the opportunities where private capital and private sector resources will be deployed."



Others, however, worry about whether officials can make the regulatory environment for private firms attractive enough, the risk of waste and corruption as the government opens tens of billions of dollars of projects to the private sector, and private investors' ability to finance their projects.



"When it comes to the strategy I am optimistic about the opportunities that are being presented...But when it comes to implementation, this is where I am uneasy," said the chief operating officer of a Saudi conglomerate, declining to be named because of the sensitivity of his remarks.



Ihsan Bu Hulaiga, a prominent Saudi economist, said that until the government gave crucial details of the terms on which private companies would be invited to invest, it would be hard to tell whether the private sector push would succeed.



"The private sector is opportunistic by nature - it needs to be convinced that investments are worth the money. So far the opportunity the government is presenting is not clear," he said.



SPENDING



Saudi Arabia is turning to the private sector because the government can no longer afford to keep increasing spending rapidly in an era of cheap oil and shrunken state revenues. It posted a record budget deficit of nearly $100 billion last year.



The reform plan envisages state spending of around SR270 billion ($72 billion) in the next five years on projects to diversify the economy beyond oil, from industrial zones and power stations to housing, schools and communications. The private sector would provide 40 percent of funding for the projects, or about $48 billion.



This is not impossible in an economy where the private sector's output was $320 billion last year alone. But with domestic money market rates rising sharply because of reduced flows of oil money into the banking system, it is not clear that local firms can raise funding at economic rates.



Another Saudi economist, Fadl Alboainain, said the local private sector probably did not have the capacity to take on some of the biggest projects by itself.



"Looking at the local banking sector you will find it suffering from shrinking liquidity, which leads to high margins and tight lending conditions - this will limit private sector financing capabilities," he said.



That implies Saudi Arabia will have to rely much more heavily on foreign investment in coming years - one reason why Prince Mohammed's delegation will meet business leaders on its visit to the US.



The reform plan aims to more than double annual foreign direct investment to $19 billion by 2020 from $8 billion last year, partly by making it simpler to do business in the kingdom. That will depend on a shake-up of sluggish state bureaucracies.



Since last week's reform announcement, two models for private sector investment have emerged. One is the outright sale of state assets; Riyadh is likely to start privatising the postal system by early 2017, the communications minister said.



These sales may run into some of the same issues as Thatcher's privatisations. Saudi Postal Corp has over 10,000 staff; curbing employees' wages or staff numbers to make it attractive for privatisation could be politically sensitive.



The other model is a partnership with the government in which private firms would stump up money for projects and earn revenues from operating them. State utility Saudi Electricity Co said it was inviting expressions of interest from firms to build two solar power plants and sell the electricity generated by them to it under long-term deals.



Shares in major Saudi property developer Dar Al Arkan are up 14 percent since the company said it was in talks with the ministry on a partnership to build housing.



Public-private partnerships have been used successfully in neighbouring Oman for billions of dollars of power projects. But the Saudi projects are likely to be launched in a difficult environment as the government tries to balance its budget.



"The National Transformation Programme aims to raise non-oil revenues through fees, taxes and subsidy cuts. These are deterrents to the private sector," said Abdulwahab Abu Dahesh, another prominent Saudi economist. - Reuters
Diyar Al Muharraq, one of the leading urban developers in Bahrain, has broken ground on its new residential community project Deerat Al Oyoun.



The launch comes following the signing of a BD276-million ($726 million) agreement last year with Diyar Al Muharraq under which the housing minstry is committed to purchasing 3,100 residential units from the Bahraini developer to be enrolled in the ministrys social housing programme.



The ceremony was held under the patronage of Shaikh Khalid bin Abdulla Al Khalifa, the Deputy Prime Minister and chairman of the Ministerial Committee for Construction and Infrastructure.



It was attended by Minister of Housing Basim Al Hamer and other top government officials along with Diyar Al Muharraq chairman Abdul Hakeem Al Khayat and CEO Dr Maher Al Shaer.



An ambitious residential project under the umbrella of the Ministry of Housing, the Deerat Al Oyoun community will set aside a land area of 1.2 million sq m on the south side of Diyar Al Muharraq for its housing units.



The projects site is considered an ideal residential area with integrated community service centres and green park spaces. Besides, it also enjoys a strategic position due to its proximity to schools, shopping malls, public beaches, walkways, cycle paths, recreational facilities, mosques, medical clinics, public transport and the Bahrain International Airport.



The project will add 3,100 new units to Bahrains social housing capacity by the end of 2018.



Commenting on the venture, Shaikh Khalid said: "The launch today marks the culmination of the efforts exerted into developing a strategic framework between the public and private sector paving the way for greater co-operation between both sectors in developing real estate projects."



"Our main aim is to solve and tackle the issue of housing in Bahrain by providing suitable and convenient housing solutions for Bahrainis," he noted.



The residential units of Deerat Al Oyoun will be offered for sale under the social housing programme at a cost dictated by the financing granted by the participating banks.



Diyar Al Muharraq said the project will be constructed according to the standards and technical specifications applied by the ministry and will include all the related infrastructure and necessary utilities and community service centres.



Bahraini citizens registered on the ministrys waiting list who have satisfied all the qualifying conditions, will be eligible to purchase a residential unit in the project with financial assistance from both the participating banks and the government in terms of subsidised monthly instalments, it stated.



The residences will be constructed to the highest specifications to include thermal insulation, large living areas to allow the flow of natural light, car park space for two cars and provisions for future expansions.

The overall design of the project has been inspired by the Bahraini neighbourhood and aims to establish a close-knit community whilst maintaining the expected level of privacy.



Diyar Al Muharraq will undertake financing of all construction works for the project as well as the associated primary and secondary infrastructure and community centres with the support of Kuwait Finance House (Bahrain), a key shareholder in the project.



Diyar Al Muharraq is a unique masterplanned city offering a range of housing options and quality lifestyle. It offers a cohesive mix of residential and commercial properties with a strong line-up of projects aimed at creating a long-term and sophisticated township.-TradeArabia News Service
Hyflux, a Singapore-based specialist in water treatment, said its Omani subsidiary has achieved financial close for the non-recourse project financing of Qurayyat Independent Water Project in the Oman.



The $185-million facility is being provided to the Qurayyat Desalination by Mizuho Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Dubai International Financial Centre Branch and Singapore-based Clifford Capital Private.



A key feature of this facility is an innovative fixed-to-floating rate term loan provided by Clifford Capital Private, said the Singaporean group.



Qurayyat IWP is a seawater reverse osmosis desalination plant located in Qurayyat in the Muscat governorate and the groups largest desalination project in Oman.



Under the water purchase agreement, desalinated water from this project will be supplied to Oman Power and Water Procurement Company SAOC for a period of 20 years starting from 2017.



This will add another 200,000 cu m per day of drinking water to the countrys water supply, said the statement from Hylux.



The Qurayyat IWP was named the Best Water Deal Award at the annual EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Finance Project Finance Awards 2015.



Nominated by bankers and borrowers, and selected by the EMEA Finance team, the award aims to recognise the importance of financing that has been provided to the regions leading companies and sovereigns as well as projects which exemplify innovative efforts in the capital markets.



Singapore-listed Hyflux boasts operations and projects in Southeast Asia, China, India, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.-TradeArabia News Service
China is eager to cooperate in developing the third phase of Irans Pardis Technology Park, said a senior Chinese official in a report.



Speaking during a visit to Pardis Technology Park, China's National People's Congress (NPC) secretary general Wang Zhan noted the high standards and ranking of the park, added the Iran Daily News report, citing IRNA.



Based on a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between Iran's office of the vice president for Science and Technology and the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, Chinese firms possessing high technology will cooperate independently in developing the third phase of Pardis Technology Park, added the report.
Turkey aims to triple trade with Iran to $30 billion as quickly as possible after the lifting of economic sanctions made banking transactions with the country easier, Turkish Customs and Trade Minister Bulent Tufenkci said in an interview.



The US and Europe lifted sanctions on Tehran in January under the deal that curbed Iran's nuclear programme. But some restrictions remain, slowing Iranian hopes to reintegrate with world markets.



"Banking and financial transactions have become easier (for Turkey) after the sanctions on Iran were softened, already boosting our business with Iran," Tufenkci told Reuters in an interview in Ankara.



Trade volume between Iran and Turkey rose to $21.9 billion in 2012, then fell below $10 billion in 2015 with the effects of the sanctions.



The Turkish and Iranian central banks have re-opened their connection on the SWIFT global transaction network, an Iranian economy official said earlier this month, in a sign of normalising banking ties.



Tufenkci also said Turkey's targets of increasing its exports to $155.5 billion this year, from $144 billion in 2015, and of reaching 4.5 percent economic growth were achievable. It was targeting growth of above 5 percent in 2017, he said.



Tufenkci voiced optimism that relations with Russia, which has taken retaliatory economic measures against Turkey after the Turkish military shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border last year, would get back on track soon. - Reuters
Gulf Warehousing Company (GWC), a leading logistics provider in Qatar, has announced a special offer for its UPS clients on the occasion of the Holy Month of Ramadan.



The offer is valid until July 8, at any UPS location in Qatar, including the country office and UPS Express Shop on D-Ring Road, and UPS Express shops in the Qatar Financial Centre in Dafna, Street 15 in the Doha Industrial City, Rashid Street in the Ras Laffan Industrial City, and PA/54 in the Messaieed Industrial City, said a statement from the company.



Syed Maaz, head of courier unit of GWC, said: At UPS, our employees strive to connect the community we live and work with what matters to you. To us, its much more than just packages.



This connection is of the utmost importance when reaching out to your loved ones during special and dear occasions such as Ramadan, he said.



Both GWC and UPS are committed to enhancing the logistics infrastructure and solutions offered in the state of Qatar to enhance the customers shipping experience, he added.



UPS is the largest package delivery company in the world, in terms of both revenue and volume, offering an extensive range of services to enable the movement of goods, information and funds across the globe. With more than 444,000 employees worldwide, UPS delivers 18.3 million packages and documents to over 8.4 million customers each day, it added.  TradeArabia News Service
Nano Korea 2016 will focus on a wide range of innovations and technologies stemming from nanotechnology advances when it is held later this year at the Korea International Exhibition Centre in South Korea.

The event is being held from July 13 to 15, and is billed as the largest event of its kind, with 350 companies from 15 countries showcasing new technologies and applications.

There will be a special showcase on nano-materials such as functional coating fluids and pastes, including carbon-based nano tubs (CNT), and graphene applications. Nano powder, film heater technology based on nanotechnology, nano-filters and nanotechnology based energy reduction devices will also be on display at the exhibition.

The event will also have showcases of semiconductor processing equipment including sputters, evaporators, plasma etches, PECVDs and ALDs. There will be special booths for measurement, analysis, processing and manufacturing equipment that uses nanotechnology such as lasers for electronic and semiconductor devices.

This event will also mark the first time that the high functional material exhibition and smart sensor exhibition will be held jointly.

This year, keynote presentations will be held by Professor John Rogers of the University of Illionois, USA, and Dr Michiharu Nakamura from the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

An industrialisation session will be held to discuss the demand for nanotechnology commercialisation in industry. Companies such as 3M, BASF, Hanwha Chemical and LG Chemical will present their views.

Additionally, there will be over 20 symposia and workshops on future trends in various technologies including lasers, high-function materials and smart sensors. TradeArabia News Service
Omans government is in talks with Abu Dhabi to obtain authorisation for the passage of Iran-Oman gas pipeline over its territorial waters, a senior official was quoted as saying by Iran Daily.



"We hope that Muscat will receive the authorization from Abu Dhabi in the near future," Alireza Kameli, managing director of National Iranian Gas Exports Company (NIGEC) was quoted in the report, which cited Shana.



Kameli earlier told Shana that seven foreign companies have announced their interest in joining Iranian companies in laying the Iran-Oman undersea gas pipeline.



The pipeline will be laid within two years following feasibility studies and the signing of the contract, he added.



According to reports, the cost of laying the underwater pipeline is estimated at $1.5 billion.
Reports that Bahrain Airport Services (BAS) might no longer be the sole ground handler at the expanded Bahrain International Airport (BIA) have been dismissed as malicious rumours by a top official, reported the Gulf Daily News, our sister publication.



To read further, please visit GDNonline.


Turkish Airlines today launched flights to Kosice, the urban centre of Eastern Slovakia, from Istanbul.



Kosice becomes the 289th destination for the carrier, which will operate flights to the Slovakian city three times per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in both directions



Introductory trip fares are available from Istanbul to Kosice starting from $99 and from Kosice to Istanbul at $111, inclusive of taxes and fees.



Additionally, for the first six months of operation to the new destination, there is a special offer for Miles&Smiles members, with a 25 per cent reduction in the miles needed to redeem either award tickets or upgrades. - TradeArabia News Service


Blue Flags official award ceremony, Open School Day and Symbolic Beach Cleaning



(TRAVPR.COM) GREECE - June 16th, 2016 - On Tuesday, June 14, Creta Maris celebrated its Blue Flag award. The hotel was proudly awarded for the third consecutive year with this voluntary eco-label and celebrated it with an official ceremony. Blue Flag strict criteria include Water Quality, Environmental Protection & Awareness, Well-Maintained Coast, Safety and Other Services.



The Blue Flag-raising event was attended by the local pre-school Ta Zouzounakia. The 26 students, were firstly guided around the resorts facilities, and then watched an animated film. However, before, taking part in the Blue Flag ceremony, children got informed on how they can keep the coast and the sea clean and then participated in a symbolic cleaning of the beach.



The event was honored by the presence of Hersonissos Port Authority Chief, Mr. Vasilis Kapsis and the Head of the Regional Branch of Greek Tourism Organization, Mr. Aristides Stratakis. The institutions Representatives along with the hotel guests and the students welcomed the Blue Flag with a great enthusiasm and honor!

About Creta Maris Beach Resort:

Creta Maris Beach Resort belongs to Metaxas Group of Companies and has been operating since 1975. It has a capacity of 680 rooms, suites and bungalows, 6 restaurants, 7 bars, 7 swimming pools, gym, Hammam spa, Asterias Childrens Club, and a great space for outdoor and indoor activities.



About Blue Flag:

The Blue Flag is a voluntary eco-label awarded to more than 4000 beaches and marinas in 49 countries across Europe, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada and the Caribbean. The Blue Flag works towards sustainable development of beaches and marinas through strict criteria dealing with Water Quality, Environmental Education and Information, Environmental Management, and Safety and Other Services. The Blue Flag Programme is owned and run by the non-government, non-profit organisation the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE).

Please find pictures of the event on high resolution on the below link:

https://we.tl/sKtDgt0ffe

Please find pictures of Creta Maris Beach Resort on high resolution on our site:

http://www.maris.gr/media/image-library.aspx

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14th June 2016, Colombo, Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts in partnership with the national carrier SriLankan Airlines concluded yet another successful Cinnamon Travel Bloggers Conference-Cinnamon TBCasia on 7 June at Cinnamon Grand Colombo. The event was followed by a novel component introduced this year- the Cinnamon Travel Blogger awards. The gala awards night was the first of its kind to recognize the worlds leading travel bloggers for their invaluable contribution to the world of travel.



(TRAVPR.COM) SRI LANKA - June 16th, 2016 - 14th June 2016, Colombo, Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts in partnership with the national carrier SriLankan Airlines concluded yet another successful Cinnamon Travel Bloggers Conference-Cinnamon TBCasia on 7 June at Cinnamon Grand Colombo. The event was followed by a novel component introduced this year- the Cinnamon Travel Blogger awards. The gala awards night was the first of its kind to recognize the worlds leading travel bloggers for their invaluable contribution to the world of travel.

Over 700 submissions were received by the judging panel consisting of Jens Thraenhart Founder of Digital Innovation Asia (DIA); Mario Hardy - Chief Executive Officer at Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA); Jan Tissera  President of TravelClick International; Sally Davey Founder of Tripbod.com; Debbie Hindle  Managing Director of Four Travel and Dileep Mudadeniya  Head of Brand Marketing at Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts, who shortlisted 30 finalists for the 10 categories being awarded. 10 of the nominees will go on to be awarded in the categories of Travel Blog of the Year, Best Up-coming Travel Blogger, Best Travel Writing Blog, Best Travel Photography Blog, Best Travel Video Blog, Best Food Blog, Best Luxury Travel Blog, Best Airline Blog, Best Optimization of Social Media and Best Responsible Tourism Blog.

The gala awards night not only saw 12 elated Gold winners pick up their awards; the five course sit down dinner brought together a fusion cuisine with a Sri Lankan twist, while a selection of awe-inspiring fusion performances kept the entire audience thoroughly entertained.

This international awards ceremony was the first of its kind not only for Sri Lanka, but the global blogging community as a whole. As such Hon. Minister John Amaratunga, Minister of Tourism Development and religious Christian affairs also addressed the audience at the event.

The Gold winners for the Cinnamon Travel Blogger awards are:

1. Best Optimization of Social Media- Melvin Boecher of Traveldudes

2. Best Responsible Tourism Blog- Hal & Christina of Travel For Wildlife

3. Best travel photography blog- Adam & Hannah of Getting Stamped

4. Best travel video blog  Jordan & Jenna of Stoked for Saturday

5. Best Food Blog- Niamh Shields of Eat Like a Girl and Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads

6. Best Luxury Travel blog- Jayne Gorman of Girl Tweets World

7. Best Airline blog- Alvin Lim of Alvinology

8. Best writing in a Travel blog- Kristin Addis of Be My Travel Muse

9. Best Up-coming Travel Blogger- Marta Kulesza of In a Faraway Land

10. Best Travel Blog of the year- Dave & Deb of The Planet D and Kiersten Rich of The Blonde Abroad

Cinnamon TBC Asia was presented by Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts in association with the Professional Travel Bloggers Association (PTBA) and the national carrier SriLankan airlines, and is also supported by Sri Lanka Tourism, the Market Development Facility supported by the Australian Government, Uptown Kandy, International Finance Corporation (IFC), Sri Lanka Convention Bureau, Reap Digital, TravelClick, Revinate, Mobitel, Cvisit, PATA, Four Communications, Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, and E FM.

---ENDS---

For further information contact:

Pramukshi Kariyawasam-Assistant Manager, Public Relations at Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts | Email: pramukshi@cinnamonhotels.com |Mobile: +94 71 86 22917

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Though they are by no means mainstream, tiny houses are emerging as quite the cultural phenomenon, with entire television shows and blogs being built around this architectural genre, lifestyle and philosophy. While regulations in many places have yet to recognize them as legal places to live in full-time, some municipalities are catching up.

Another case in point is Dutch tiny houser Marjolein Jonker, the resident of this lovely tiny dwelling, who is also a "tiny house ambassador" and advocate. Jonker now has her home parked on a small plot of land on an "industrial estate", actually provided by the council of the town of Alkmaar, in the Netherlands. She's the first person in the area to have her tiny home given the legal go-ahead.

 Walden Studio

 Walden StudioThe modern design of this home was created by Lena and Laurens van der Wal, and Vincent Hofte of Buro Walden and built by Dimka Wentzel of Tiny-House.nl. The asymmetrical roof line is quite striking, and is used to bring more light and head room to the interior.

Inside, the roof's angles allows for one section to be opened up with operable, clerestory windows, letting lots of natural light and air to flood in. Here, there is one small loft at one end, and a built-in reading nook that also has some storage cabinets around it. As we can see, the layout is simple, but uncluttered so there's enough floor space to walk around comfortably, and to include a large refrigerator.

 Walden Studio

Looking at the other end, we see an enormous picture window to one side. There's an alternating-tread staircase going up to the sleeping loft, which is lit by a skylight. Below the loft is the bathroom, which has a composting toilet installed.

 Walden Studio

 Walden Studio

 Walden Studio

The home is solar-powered; here is a video of the electrical installation from Victron Energy.

 Marjolein In Het Klein

Jonker's home is but one of the several modern European tiny homes that we've seen popping up -- unique tiny homes that are on the more contemporary and stylish end of the spectrum. There may be soon more in the Netherlands, as other Dutch municipalities are apparently planning to legally recognize tiny dwellings.

[Via: Tiny House Talk]
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Vijay C Roy

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 16

Bank unions today called for a strike on July 12 and 13 to oppose the Cabinets decision of merging the State Bank of India (SBI) with its five associate banks.

The State Sector Bank Employees Association, representing employees of the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Travancore, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Mysore and State Bank of Hyderabad, has called for the strike on July 12. The strike will be supported by other unions and the clerical and subordinate grade of the subsidiary banks.

While on July 13, the All-India Bank Employees Association and All-India Bank Officers Association will observe the strike. The unions will also hold dharnas in state capitals on June 30.

Employees are apprehensive over downsizing, closure of branches and redeployment by the SBI on the pretext of relocating the branches. They are demanding recovery of bad loans and action against defaulters.

Rajesh Sondhi, organising secretary, All-India State Bank of Patiala Employee Federation, said, Instead of opting for a merger, the government should focus on controlling bad loans. The merger will not serve the purpose. It is against the interests of employees. Also, the five banks have contributed to the countrys growth and after the merger, they will lose their regional identity.
Tribune News Service

Patiala, June 15

On the occasion of World Blood Donors Day, the Department of Transfusion Medicine (Blood Bank), Government Medical College, Patiala, organised a competition on voluntary blood donation among future doctors to sensitise them to the importance of voluntary blood donation here today. Over 500 medical students took part in the competition.

Dr Kanchan Bhardwaj, Professor and Head, Department of Transfusion Medicine, said it was a unique effort by the department to sensitise medicos not only regarding voluntary blood donation, but also create awareness among them.

The winners of the competition were given away prizes by Dr BL Bhardwaj, principal of Government Medical College.

Harsmeet Kaur, Gaurav Dutta, Arjun Jindal, Saloni, Jessica Sekhon, Diksha Goyal, Namit Gupta, Pindervir Mann, Kushwpreet Kaur and Ripudaman Singh were declared the winners of this competition.
PPS Gill

The question is not whether Udta Punjab will have a bearing or not on the electoral prospects of the SAD-BJP in 2017. The question is why the Akali/BJP leadership is persistently rubbishing all talk of Punjab being high on drugs, calling it a conspiracy to defame the state, despite availability of numerous reports in print/online, based on surveys/studies, including by the government institutions/instrumentalities.

How long can the Deputy Chief Minister remain in denial mode on drug abuse? Obstinate and ostrich-like stand would not help. Sadly, despite his tall claims, the infrastructure/ apparatus of drug trafficking and consumption remains intact, notwithstanding registration of thousands of FIRs, across the state under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985. This shoddy cosmetic action (2014-15) against small-time carriers/ couriers or shoving petty addicts into ill-equipped de-addiction/ inhospitable rehabilitation clinics/jails is no proof of government's seriousness in tackling the situation.

The Deputy Chief Minister may, perhaps, remember that Punjab found a special mention for "drug abuse and trafficking" in the Prime Minister's Mann Ki Baat AIR talk-show (December 15, 2014), when he drew nation's attention to this serious disease, calling it drug-terror.

Drug abuse is a psycho-socio-medical problem. And, drug mafia operations are not possible without political, police patronage.

The latest report on drug abuse: Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey is by the Society for Promotion of Youth and Masses (SPYM) and National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, done in collaboration with Department of Health and Family Welfare, Punjab. Conducted in February-April, 2015, it is based on a field study in Bathinda, Ferozepur, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Moga, Patiala, Sangrur and Tarn Taran, which house about 60 per cent of the population; are representative of the entire state on many parameters: population, male: female ratio, urban: rural ratio, location at international or inter-state border, representing different regions. It says the most drug-dependent people use opioid group of drugs: heroin, opium, Doda, Bhuki, pharmaceutical opioid etc.

A comprehensive report, Substance abuse in Punjab (2001), commissioned by the Punjab Department of Planning and compiled by the Institute for Development and Communication is relevant. It links drug abuse to Punjab's culture. Punjab serves as transit route/conduit for illicit traffic of drugs (heroin, brown sugar, charas, ganja and opium), given its proximity to the golden triangle (Laos, Thailand, Burma) and the golden crescent (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan), which supply more than 70 per cent of the drugs to the world. In Punjab, smuggling, finding couriers, consumers is easy because here villages are close to the international border and land is cultivated right up to the fence, unlike in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

At the instance of the World Health Organisation, World Bank, the Punjab Health Department conducted a study (2001), which revealed that every third male and every tenth female student in the state has had drugs on some pretext or on one occasion or the other. A sample survey of nearly 5,000 students reported the highest prevalence of drug abuse in the 16 -25 year age group.

The state's own Department of Social Security Development of Women and Children's website draws attention to the alarming situation and talks of dark days ahead, given Punjab's drug epidemic. It says in the border-belt rate of heroin abuse among the youth (15 - 25 years) is as high as 75 per cent; the percentage for other rural areas is 73. Secondly, as many as 67 per cent rural households have at least one addict in the family; and each week sees at least one death in the region attributable to drug overdose. The listed recreation drugs on the official website include Bhuki (powdered opium) and bhang  both considered the gateway to drugs, as these give mild intoxication. Next is heroin. and then opium, its derivatives; and morphine. It says, several brands of tooth-paste in the region containing nicotine are a craze. There are reports of excessive use of these tooth-pastes, being relatively cheap and easily available and give a nicotine high. Also listed are poppy-husk, cocaine, bhang, smack, beedi, fortwin and morphine injections, alcohol, etc. The reasons for high drug abuse are easy availability and access to the substances and the green revolution. Since rural youth do not find off-farm jobs anywhere, it makes them vulnerable to drugs and also leads to crime. With the green revolution losing its steam, there appeared "technological fatigue. Income growth slowed down, employment opportunities shrunk and agricultural economy stagnated; while aspirations of the youth soared. Another reason for drug abuse is narco-terrorism.

Surveys reveal that 53 per cent males and 48 per cent females are prone to drug addiction. A Punjab Agricultural University survey showed that about three-fourths of the rural male adults were habitual drug takers in 22.83 per cent of the villages. Substance abuse was fairly widespread, across all three distinct regions: Doaba reported 68.6 per cent addiction, Malwa 64.69 per cent and Majha 61 per cent. Even the type and variety of drugs consumed varied in the three regions.

Ravneet Kaur and Jatinder K Gulati in their study, Drug abuse: trends and issues, (2007) attributed this problem to sub-culture in the society. It gives a long list of commonly used (abused) drugs prepared by the National Institute on Drug Abuse: canabinoids to stimulants to depressants; namely, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamine-mine, MDMA (street name Adam), barbiturates, benzodiazepines, heroin, LSD (hallucinogen), PCP (dissociative anaesthetics) inhalant, anabolic steroids. 'ICE' (methamphetamine, a synthetic drug), codeine cough syrup, ink-correction fluid, foils of psychotropic drugs and pain killers, as some other substances in use in the state.

Factors driving drug abuse in India's Punjab, a study by Rahul Advani (September 2013) reported that 60 per cent of all illicit drugs confiscated in India are seized in Punjab and that "injecting drug use" is of recent onset. Advani is a research assistant at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. According to Drug abuse and alcoholism in Punjab (2011) a report of the Union Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, 40 per cent youth (15 - 25 years) has fallen prey to drug abuse. The consequence: crime, broken homes, destroyed families and children's emotional, psychological and development problems.

The writer, a senior journalist, is a former Chief Information Commissioner, Punjab
Harish Khare

BETWEEN January 7, 2016, when Mufti Mohammad Sayeed passed away and April 4, 2016, when his daughter could take over her fathers mantle there were often many a time when men of goodwill and sound judgement in Delhi and Srinagar found themselves as exasperated with Ms Mehbooba as those nuns in the opening scenes of The Sound of Music. Let us recall that wonderfully magical Maria chorus, Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? Between January 7 and April 4 this year, many of us were exactly reduced to humming, even if off-keyishly, What to do with Mehbooba?

Two months later, judging from her words and actions, Ms Mehbooba can be said to have come of age, though this transformation has gone mostly unobserved, as also unappreciated, in the mainland. This transformation is all the more remarkable because it has come despite a cumbersome and demanding alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, an outfit that insists provocatively on a Hindutva-laced political agenda.

Now let us switch the narrative back to last Sunday. Just about the time the current and past presidents of the ruling party at the Centre were preening themselves at Allahabad for having invented a lie about a demographic offensive against the Hindus in western Uttar Pradesh, Ms Mehbooba was paying obeisance at the Kashmiri Pandits iconic temple at Kheer Bhawani in Ganderbal. There could not have been a greater or more meaningful contrast than between her making an offering at Kheer Bhawani and the BJP leaders calculatedly irresponsible inciting of emotions over Kairana. She was affirming a composite culture; they were instigating separateness.

Earlier in the week, the Chief Minister had shown remarkable political courage when she visited the BSF headquarters to lay a wreath at the coffins of two jawans who had got killed in Bijbehara in a terror attack. This was a bold statement. The symbolism involved in this gesture was both powerful and unambiguous.

In the past she had often been accused by her political detractors and the intelligence community in Delhi of being soft towards the separatists and the militants. This was the argument used in 2005 to ease Mufti Saheb out of the chief ministerial chair. She now appears ready to signal that she has evolved, both as a Kashmiri and as an Indian.

This last fortnight she has unveiled a new political persona. She is willing to challenge the idiom of violence. Kashmir has been having a romance with the gun and grenade. Militancy and violence had cast a spell all these years. The other day she herself readily conceded that post-1987 election (the Farooq Abdullah family was widely suspected of having heavily rigged the polls) there was a time when people in Kashmir got enamoured of the gun but today, she insists that the infatuation was over. It takes considerable courage to assert that the gun no longer enjoys acceptability; the inference is that the use of the gun is against the best interest of the Kashmiri people.

This fortnight she has also argued, cogently and courageously, that violence is a zero-sum game, which does not solve any problem, but gives rise to more complexities. A day later, she took the argument a step further, and asserted that it is not through the gun and grenade that political problems are solved.

This is a bold formulation, frontally challenging the efficacy of violence as a politically useful instrument in the Kashmiri peoples presumed struggle against the Indian state. In other words, she has joined issue with the entire separatist camp that believes that the only way India can be made to bend at the knees is by inflicting violence and mayhem on security forces and, if need be, on non-Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir.

Betraying a hitherto unsuspected hard-headedness, the Chief Minister attested that the security forces personnel and the policemen are performing difficult duties. After the Bijbehara attack on the BSF, she praised the security forces for showing restraint. Otherwise, there would have been a considerable loss to the civilian population, which in turn would have fuelled another cycle of anger and resentment, protest and demonstrations. Not only that, the Chief Minister is prepared to take the battle to the enemy camp. She chose to describe these attacks on the BSF as the ultras acts of desperation.

It should be noted that in all this gone is the earlier diffidence and hesitation. Responsibility invariably teaches circumspection.

She came pretty close to questioning claims of any special virtue in radicalism as being propagated and promoted in some parts in Islamic societies. No civilisational virtue or excuse for using terror. This is a subtle but firm rejection of all those who seek to appropriate the Kashmiri Muslims as part of a global jihad.

We have to ponder over the gory saga of death and destruction being perpetuated in most Muslim countries around the world, including the neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan, where even schools and hospitals are not spared by perpetrators of violence. And, then, she added that violence has no religion and it just consumes everybody. This is a very mature and very thoughtful exposition.

Nor does Ms Mehbooba appear afraid of Pakistan or its claims to have any consideration for the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Certainly, Pakistan cannot be a role model for any reasonably sensible Kashmiri. Pakistans advocacy of struggle (read violence and terror) is misplaced. Pakistan itself is fighting terrorism and their children are being killed but at the same time it is promoting terrorism in the state, which is not acceptable. Only a leader confident of her Kashmiri rootedness could take on Pakistan. She simply does not accept Pakistans claim to love for the people of Kashmir.

At the same time, the Chief Minister has made it absolutely clear that there could be no compromise on Kashmir: Article 370 is our strength and our honour. She has drawn a clear red-line for all those Hindutva hot-heads who occasionally succumb to the 370 fever. Only two days ago, she argued that to me, separatism and communalism are faces of the same coin. And, to her local detractors, she simply says that there is no threat to Jammu and Kashmirs special status. The long and short of it all: Do not keep raising this 370 bogey.

Nor is she oblivious of the ultimate cure: good governance. She posits herself as a counterpoise to the Abdullah family and to the political culture of habits and loyalties, cemented only by rites of kleptocracy.

The young Chief Minister has reassuringly reiterated three basic proposition: (a) Kashmiri nationalism does not mean separatism; (b) the separatist vocabulary of violence needs to be de-romanticised and challenged; and (c) possibilities in the Indian democracy ought to be explored. Next week Ms Mehbooba should get elected to the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly in the byelection to the Anantnag constituency. But she has already arrived.
Perceptions do matter and sometimes even win elections. No party realises it better than the Congress, now reduced to less than 50 seats in the Lok Sabha. When it set about setting its Punjab house in order, the Congress thought it had ticked all the boxes. Capt Amarinder Singh became the state party chief while the Punjab party in-charge, the ineffectual and ineffective Shakeel Ahmad was shown the door. But the Congress missed a trick by replacing him with Kamal Nath. With a reputation for ingenuity and resourcefulness, Kamal Nath was the right person for a gruelling, no-holds-barred battle of wits with the Akalis and AAP. The Congress has rapidly realised that Punjabs DNA is different. The albatross of Kamal Naths alleged involvement in the 1984 riots far outweighs his usefulness as a shrewd political operative.

Soon the Akali Dal and AAP targeted the Congress for picking a 1984 riots suspect to oversee polls in a state still awaiting closure on a dark chapter. It is a measure of the dissonance in the Congress that it did not sound out the Captain before replacing Ahmad with Kamal Nath. The upshot was a tempest in Punjab that put Congress poll preparations on the backburner while Amarinder Singh lamely defended the high commands choice. The former Punjab CM cut a sorrier figure when the Congress removed Kamal Nath hours after he had defended his appointment.

For a party short on confidence, luck and public support, the Congress can ill afford a slip-up. It currently has a narrow window of opportunity to prove it will be a worthy contender. AAPs claim to be purveyors of experimental politics is under challenge. The sword of disqualification hangs on 21 of its Delhi MLAs, half of its original lot of ministers has quit and the first scam under Arvind Kejriwals watch seems to be brewing. The Akali Dal is saddled with more than an incumbents disadvantages but is not throwing in the towel. Kamal Naths appointment is a distraction the Congress could have done without.
Parveen Arora

Tribune News Service

Karnal, June 16

Residents of Rasoolpur Kalan village, around 7 km from here, are facing a hard time because of swarms of houseflies.

Villagers said they were worried as the houseflies could lead to an outbreak of an epidemic. They said the unhygienic conditions in poultry farms situated near the village were responsible for the nuisance.

Sarpanch of Rasoolpur Kalan village Rameshwar Dass said despite approaching the authorities several times, no action had been initiated so far against the poultry farm owners.

The sarpanch said flies breed in the waste from the poultry farms, making the lives of the residents miserable.

I have been running from pillar to post since taking charge as sarpanch to eradicate this menace. I have approached the CM window, Deputy Commissioner, Sub-Divisional Magistrate and even the Pollution Control Board, Yamunanagar, but the authorities have taken no action so far, he maintained.

Dass said the villagers would protest at the Chief Ministers camp office on Friday in support of their demand. He alleged that the owners of the poultry farms were reaping profit and not taking steps to ensure cleanliness of their farms.

The sarpanch said swarms of houseflies could be seen in the village as a result of which the livestock were also badly affected. He alleged that the housefly menace was the reason for low milk production in the village.

A villager, Bittu, said they had given a representation to the authorities seeking action against the poultry farms that were allegedly dumping waste of the farms in an unscientific way, thereby, causing air pollution in the area.

Meanwhile, AAP leader Navin Jaihind visited the village on Tuesday and took stock of the situation. Villagers apprised him of the problems they were facing because of houseflies. The AAP leader extended his support to the villagers and promised to participate in the Friday protest to raise the issue.
Parveen Arora

Tribune News Service

Karnal, June 16

After witnessing a drastic fall in the rates of several basmati varieties in the last kharif season, distressed farmers of the karnal region, popularly known as the rice bowl, have preferred non-basmati varieties this growing season.

Farmers have not sown basmati varieties such as PB-1509, 1121, C-30 and have instead preferred several PR varieties of non-basmiti rice.

Farmers said they had spent a huge amount on the production of basmati paddy, but hadnt even got half of their investment back. They said they could not bear more losses due to the fall in the rates of basmati varieties and were sowing PR varieties of non-basmati rice for which they would at least get government rates.

The basmati experiment went bad for me in the last kharif season, said Joginder Singh, a farmer from Baldi village.

Joginder said he had cultivated basmati varieties such as 1509 and 1121 last year in around 15 acres but had replaced them with PR-14 variety this year. He said he had received Rs 1,300-1,400 per quintal for 1509 variety and Rs 1,500-1,600 per quintal for 1121 variety in 2015-16, while he had received Rs 2,500 for 1509 and Rs 2,300 for 1121 in 2014-15.

He said the basmati varieties remained a gamble for farmers as these were dependent on private traders.

The Baldi farmer said most of the farmers of the region had adopted non-basmati varieties such as PR-13, 14, 27, 45, 127 and hybrid varieties.

Balwan Singh, a farmer from karnal, said he had cultivated basmati 1121, 1609 and C-30 on around 20 acres in the last season, but they did not give him the desired results. He said he had preferred non-basmati varieties this season.

Ravinder, another farmer from Baldi village, said they were forced by traders to sell their basmati varieties at throwaway prices in the last season so they had sown rice varieties which give at least minimum support prices.

He said the cost of the production of paddy had shown a twofold increase as the land lease had become dearer at Rs 50,000 per acre from Rs 30,000 per acre two years ago.

He said the rates of diesel and fertilisers had also increased as compared to the last year.

Besides, transplanting cost has increased from Rs 1,500 per acre two years ago to Rs 3,000 per acre and the harvesting labour has increased from Rs 3,500 per acre last year to Rs 6,000 per acre this year, he said.

The government should keep keep a check and stop exploitation of farmers by private traders, the Baldi farmer added.
Tribune News Service

Shimla, June 16

The government today invoked the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) that forbids employees to go on strike after the HRTC ordered the dismissal of 30 members of the Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) of HRTC employee unions for observing strike on June 14 defying High Court orders.

The 44-member JCC refused to comment on ESMA and dismissal of its members, saying that the matter was pending before the High Court.

We have not received the order from the HRTC and the Transport Department. We are not aware about the dismissal of 30 employees. We respect the High Court order and seek justice for our genuine demands, said JCC members.

On the other hand, Principal Secretary, Transport, Sanjay Gupta said the ESMA notification had been issued and it had come into force today.

HRTC employees neither could go on strike, nor could they force others to do so as ESMA provides punishment for three-year jail, warned managing director, HRTC, Ashok Tiwari.

Transport Minister GS Bali said he met Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh and briefed him about the latest position that had arisen following the strike. The HRTC management has ordered the dismissal of 30 JCC members following the court order, he told mediapersons.

Bali said he was hurt that the HRTC had to dismiss 30 JCC members. The dismissed employees could seek justice from the High Court where they also faced contempt proceedings, he added.

Though Bali claimed the HRTC had redressed and paid most of the arrears, including pension, to its retired employees till May 2016, he remained non-committal about the payment of HRTC liability worth Rs 150 crore for 2008-12 and blamed it on the previous BJP government.

HRTC employees said the HRTC management was trying to run the transport by hiring drivers and contractors on contract and 6,500 employees are on contract. The contractual driver gets Rs 6,000 per month while conductor Rs 4,000. We demand Rs 8,310 for drivers and Rs 7,810 for conductors only while the state government has hiked salaries and perks of MLAs and ministers by 100 per cent at one go, they pointed out.

The HRTC should be upgraded to roadways as was the case in Punjab and Haryana because Himachal followed neighbouring states in pay scale for all government employees and HRTC employees should be treated on a par with them, said JCC members.

Bali said if these demands were accepted, the state would be put under high financial burden of Rs 1,000 crore.
Dipender Manta

Tribune News Service

Mandi, June 16

Dismayed over the slow response of the state government on providing road connectivity to the remote village of Chicham in Kaza, residents have decided to boycott panchayat (PRI) poll to be held tomorrow.

Panchayat Pradhan of Kiber Tanjin told The Tribune here today, The pending demand of the villagers to construct a bridge on the Spiti river and connect the village with a road is yet to be fulfilled.

He added that the Public Works Department had been insensitive about the inconvenience being faced by the people.

Locals rue that the bridge had been under construction for 17 years but the indifferent attitude of officials had delayed its completion, forcing people to walk six-km distance to avail the transportation facility.

Villagers lamented that they were facing difficulty in transporting their agriculture produce to the market, resulting in the crops rotting in the fields.

Nandyal, a local resident, said, We took up the matter with the state government several times in the past but the authorities turned a deaf ear to our demand and now we have decided to boycott the PRI elections in protest.

We urge the state government to look into the matter and ask the authorities concerned to construct the bridge within the stipulated time said Tanjin. Deputy Commissioner, Lahaul-Spiti, Vivek Bhatia, said efforts were on to persuade the villagers.
Bhanu P Lohumi

Tribune News Service

Shimla, June 16

Dr YS Parmar Government Medical College, Nahan, will start admitting the first batch of 100 MBBS students from this session. After conducting two inspections, the Medical Council of India (MCI) submitted its report to the Union Ministry of Health and family Welfare and got the approval.

However, the chances of other three colleges becoming operational this year are bleak as these lack adequate infrastructure and faculty as per the MCI norms.

Jawaharlal Nehru Government Medical College coming up at Chamba is still in the process of developing infrastructure and recruiting the faculty. Dr S Radhakrishanan Government Medical College in Hamirpur is awaiting environmental clearance while the Rs 800 crore infrastructure developed by the Union government for ESI Medical College at Nerchowk (Mandi) is yet to be handed over to the state although the decks have been cleared for the same after prolonged parleys between the state and the Union governments.

The government is facing faculty shortage. It has offered retiring medical teachers of the IGMC, Shimla, and Government Medical College, Tanda (Kangra), a three-year extension in case they were willing to join the new colleges.

Despite this, the faculty is not available for Chamba college and some unwilling teachers were shifted from the IGMC and Tanda medical college to the new colleges.

The state government had agreed to take over of Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) medical college at Nerchowk last month.

The matter had been hanging fire for about two years as the Labour Ministry had refused to run the medical college and asked the state government to take over the building and other infrastructure, but the latter was not ready to pay interest on liabilities amounting Rs 285 crore.

The Labour Ministry was pressing the government to pay 10 per cent interest on liability of Rs 285 crore, but it not only wanted the interest waived, but also sought to pay the amount in five instalments.

However, the Union government agreed to the terms of the state government at a meeting held recently and it was agreed that the amount would be paid in five instalments. The first instalment was to be paid in 2017-18 after the first batch was admitted.

Thus, it is clear that the classes in ESI medical college and other two colleges at Chamba and Hamirpur will not start this year. The two existing medical colleges in the government sector  IGMC and Tanda Medical College  have 100 MBBS seats each. With Nahan college becoming functional this year, the number of seats will increase to 300.

Health Minister Kaul Singh said the government would make all efforts to meet the requirements of the MCI to make the other three colleges functional at the earliest.
Tribune News Service

Srinagar, June 16

The Army on Thursday said it had neutralised an attempt by militants to sneak into the Valley by killing four militants in a gun fight near the Line of Control (LoC) in north Kashmirs frontier Kupwara district.

An Army soldier was also killed in the gunfight that is still underway in Tangdhar sector, some 140 kilometres from Srinagar.

The infiltration bid was foiled by the Army manning the LoC when they spotted a group of militants moving from across the border towards LoC at midnight. The gun fight broke when the militants were challenged and they opened fire which was retaliated.

In the operation that is still underway, four militants have been killed and one soldier has got injured, defence sources said. We also lost one of our soldiers, they added.

The slain soldier has been identified as Lance Havildar Prem Bahadur Reshmi Nagar of Nepal.

This is the second infiltration bid foiled by the Army in Kupwara district since Tuesday. A militant and a soldier were killed in neighbouring Machil sector in a gunfight when the Army intercepted a group of militants at Katwara forest area in the sector. Four soldiers were also injured in the Machil gunfight. The search operation in the Machil sector is still continuing to track the militants.
Suhail A Shah

Anantnag, June 16

Criticising the government for letting off rioters in Jammu way too easily, former Chief Minister and National Conference (NC) working president Omar Abdullah today said Nagpur (RSS) is calling the shots in Kashmir now.

Addressing a gathering at Krangsoo village on the towns periphery, he said that the people involved in rioting had been let off in Jammu on directions of Nagpur, implying RSS as its headquarters is in the Maharashtra town. So essentially Nagpur is calling shots in our state and Mehbooba is just a puppet, he added

Omar was in Anantnag to address public rallies in the build-up to bypoll in this south Kashmir Assembly segment on June 22 that has been necessitated by the death of former Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad

Sayeed. The NC has fielded Iftikhar Hussain Misger as its candidate.

We were assured in the Assembly that rioters in Jammu will be arrested and booked for appropriate offences. But not only they have been released but the cases against them have also been withdrawn, Omar said.

Comparing the situation in Jammu with the Kashmir valley, he said, had the rioters been Kashmiri separatists or for that matter common Kashmiri people they would have been booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA) by now. They (separatists) are not allowed to talk, leave alone burning a bus, Omar said.
Unlike the usual achievers, who cant stop raving about their awards and honours; Arushi, who emerged as the Tricity topper in the recently declared All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) entrance exam results, comes across as rather modest. She does not as much as drop a hint about her second splendid victory of securing all India second rank in the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) entrance exam, until you prod her to tell you! But there is one thing she can speak about without a pause, and that is- the power of dreaming.

Desire to inspire

Ask her what ceaselessly inspires her, and the meritorious girl instantly quotes the much-famed German organic chemist, August Kekule, who said- Let us learn to dream, gentlemen.

Moments later, she gets down to shedding light on her understanding of the oft-quoted line. I have firm conviction in the power of dreaming. If you do not dream, how will you complete the goals you have set for yourself? Arushi questions.

Creative leanings

Needless to say that the academically-inclined girl achieved great feats in class 10, with a perfect 10 CGPA, and cleared class 12 with an enviable 95.6 per cent aggregate. Her answers are short, and sweet, but the twinkle in her eyes tells you, that there is more than meets the eye!

The modest girl finally lets out, I cleared the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana exam (KVPY) in grade 11. I also contributed self-composed poems for my school magazine, quite frequently. I am passionate about creative writing.

Mind the flipside

Well, if day in and day out, you are busy paying attention in lectures and religiously devoting time to self-study, barely any leisure time is left at hand. That is true. I did not have any time to spend with my friends, admits Arushi, who is keen on joining AIIMS, Delhi.

Do your best, forget the rest

The one piece of advice that the dual achiever has for fellow dreamers is, Pursue your passion till the very end. Dont quit. Give it your best shot, and forget everything else!  Manika Ahuja
Jasmine Singh

How about starting from where and how you started your career, this one question takes the artiste Sardar Sohi back to Tibba village, Sangrur district, where he would watch Dilip Singh Mast, a comrade, an actor (who also found a mention in Punjabi writer Jaswant Kanwals novel) act on stage.

He wipes off the dust gathered on the pages of his school days; those days when he would light up the school functions with his kavisheri. As he moves to and fro, hypnotised, and left to unravel more from his childhood, Sohi recalls of an accident that forced him to quit studies and concentrate on acting. He still wanders in Bollywood actor Dharmendras house in Mumbai, where he stayed for a brief period during his struggling days, followed by the disheartened result. It is, however, the mention of a name, Harpal Tiwana, which makes him snap back into the present, even though it is still his past!

I was filling my admission form for Drama Department in Punjabi University, Patiala, when someone suggested that instead of wasting my time studying I should meet Harpal Tiwana, an NSD pass-out. This was the turning point of my life, shares Sardar Sohi, who tells us how Gurdas Maan and Girja Shankar joined Harpal Tiwanis group the same day as he did. Gurdas Maan left after 4-5 months, but I stayed on from 1975-87. Soon, I became Harpal Tiwanas blue-eyed boy. He started saying that I was his second Om Puri.

Sardar Sohi is a known character artiste of the Punjabi film industry, an actor who can give any leading actor a run for money, a mention that makes him smile. Punjabi cinema has changed in leaps and bounds, his tone takes on a serious track. I am more than a 100 per cent in my character when I am shooting for a film. But, I do not see this kind of dedication in others around. People on the sets discuss everything other than acting or films or talking about the role, something that disturbs me a lot.

Sardar Sohis role in films like Angrej, Ardaas, Nooran, Judge Singh LLB, and even Dulla Bhatti has been appreciated by the audience and the industry. To me, however, my roles in Angrej and Ardaas were the most challenging and satisfying ones. I felt alive, I felt like an artiste doing those roles.

Asked if he is getting his due as an actor now, Sohi bounces back to his old days when he was the talk of the town for his acting prowess. I have worked with Gulzar in Mirza Ghalib, and with Dev Anands brother in the serial Tehkiqaat. I received a lot of appreciation for my baritone and my acting. Adulation he is used to, but who minds some more, which simply means, Give me a challenge. For an actor to feel alive, challenge is important, which only comes with a good role, and ... he pauses, the second thing that challenges an actor is, theatre.

Sohi has also been appreciated for his role in Binnu Dhillons theatrical production Tension Nai Laini. I have decided to do at least one play a year, and I am going to stick to it, no matter what. Sardar Sohi who is full of stories and anecdotes, much more than his biography could contain, wants to name the person who has made his dream come true. My father, late Dr Shivdev Singh; he was a learned man. Once he asked me about what I wanted to do in life, and with my career. I said, I wanted to act, to which he replied, I know nothing about acting, why dont you try and figure out the way to get there, remembers Sardar Sohi, who for sure has figured out his way. But he doesnt want the destination to come anytime soon; he loves the journey and wants it to go on!

jasmine@tribunemail.com
Tribune News Service

New Delhi/Chandigarh/Mumbai, June 16

The controversial Bollywood movie Udta Punjab hit the theatres across the country on Friday with the Supreme Court and the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday refusing to stall its release.

Earlier, the Bombay High Court had given the green signal for its release with just one cut on a petition filed by the producer, challenging the cuts imposed by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

Punjab-based NGO Human Rights Awareness Association had approached the SC, challenging the Bombay HC verdict, while several PILs were filed in the HC at Chandigarh.

A Vacation Bench of the SC advised the NGO to withdraw its petition and await the outcome of the HC verdict in Chandigarh. Hours later, the High Court dismissed a bunch of petitions seeking to stall the movies release.

The CBFC has cleared the movie by giving it an adults only (A) certificate. The Supreme Court said the adults only tag had lost its relevance as most people watched movies on the Net.

Justice M Jeyapaul of the Punjab and Haryana HC refused to ground Udta Punjab, making it clear that the police were there to take care of the repercussions.

Will controversy boost Udta Punjab at box office?

According to trade experts, the controversy around the film will give a tremendous boost to its opening.

However, the films leakage two days before its release on the internet is being seen as a big blow to the films box office potential.

The online leakage has resulted in a huge dent in the opening collections. Anurag Kashyaps appeal to audiences not to watch the film online until Saturday is futile, said a marketing head of a leading multiplex chain.

Youngsters are eager to see Udta Punjab. They will see it online. We expected an opening of 70-80 per cent. It has now opened to around 50-55 per cent occupancy, he added.

Trade analyst Atul Mohan said: The curiosity surrounding Udta Punjab has only built up over the weeks. But unfortunately, for the makers, the film got leaked online and the response is very mixed.

So after this, it would be interesting to see how the film opens. Had it not come online, the opening expected would have been one of the biggest of this year. Trade pundit Amod Mehra feels the film will have a terrific weekend.

At least Rs 5crore-7 crore initially... Plus if the content is weak, it will not crash next day, and if the content is strong, then the skys the limit. Film critic Raja Sen thinks the movie will get a huge opening weekend, much more than it would normally have got.

There has been so much talk of Udta Punjab--the cuts, the banned words et al--that curiosity is very high. I just hope the film is consumed as a film and not as whatever people expect it to be based on the hype and the news cycles.

Relieved and rejuvenated, Madhu Mantena, a partner in Phantom Films--the co-producer of the movie, says: We fought a long and sleepless battle to get Udta Punjab into theatres on time and we succeeded.

Yes, the online leakage will affect our box office. But finally, even those who watch the pirated stuff on the internet would come to the theatres. We are sure of that. With IANS
Mumbai, June 16

The Central Government may consider creating a coastal police wing to come under the Central Armed Police Force  a suggestion made by some states, including Maharashtra.

Mooted by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis at a meeting of Home Ministers, Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police (DGPs) of Coastal States and Union Territories to review coastal security, the proposition entails creating a central marine police force to protect sea, coast, ports and vital institutions.

Fadnavis also suggested that all landing points and non-major ports be brought under tech-based e-surveillance. Both suggestions were supported by some states and UTs.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh said the central government would consider a police force for coastal security.

Singh also stressed on the need to safeguard not only industrial, commercial and strategic installations, but also the entire coastline from external threats through sea routes.

Steps have been initiated post 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, wherein Indian Coast Guard (ICG) is designated as the authority responsible for coastal security in territorial waters, including areas to be patrolled by coastal police, he said.

The meeting also saw discussions on expeditious implementation of the Coastal Security Scheme, institutional set up in states/UTs to review coastal security, constitution of State Maritime Boards, security of non-major ports and single point mooring, coastal mapping, security of islands, distribution of Biometric Identity Cards and Card Readers, colour coding of boats, monitoring of fish landing points and crossing of International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) by fishermen, an official release said.  PTI
Shahira Naim

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, June 16

The Congress revival would start from Uttar Pradesh just as it did during the Janata Party government of 1977 when it staged a comeback from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, said AICC general secretary and in-charge of UP Ghulam Nabi Azad.

Speaking to mediapersons after addressing a meeting of party workers soon after his arrival, Azad described the acceptance of communalisation of politics as the gravest challenge before the state, as well as the nation.

He claimed unlike before, communalisation of politics was part of state policy.

While the Congress was attempting to keep the country united, the BJP was adding fuel to the fire by highlighting non-issues such as Kairana and Kandla, he added.

If the country survives there will be elections which will be fought and won, he pointed out.

He said during the several debates on communalism inside Parliament, ministers and MPs had made provocative and communally disturbing statements, but the PM chose to remain mum.

Both inside Parliament and out in public spaces, BJP leaders have been making all sorts of communal and hateful statements. By not reacting, reprimanding or punishing these people, the BJP government is sending a clear message that this is now part of state policy, alleged Azad.

Azad did not comment on UPs chief ministerial candidate, new UPCC chief and the partys roadmap for the elections, but said strengthening the organisational structure was his top priority.

Refusing to speculate on the name of the next CM being a Brahmin, he said whoever would be chosen would be on the basis of merit and experience and not on caste.

On Priyanka Gandhi Vadra playing a bigger role in the state, he said he hoped she would take out time to campaign outside Rae Bareli and Amethi.
Thiruvananthapuram, June 16

The suspect in the April 28 brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman at Perumbavoor in Kochi is in police custody, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday said.

Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From yesterday onwards, the accused was under police radar, he said reacting to reports that the accused, Amir Ul Islam, a migrant labourer from Assam, had been nabbed by the Special Investigation team probing the murder.

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Police have received all information, he said.

The people of Kerala were waiting for such news, he said to a question.

The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police, the Chief Minister said.

A report from Kochi quoting police sources said that a Special Investigation Team probing the murder of the woman was questioning the suspect.

They said the 23-year-old Islams arrest is expected to be recorded today, after which his DNA samples will be taken.

The LDF government, after assuming power on May 25 had changed the investigation team and entrusted the probe to ADGP B Sandhya on its first cabinet meeting itself.

The rape and murder was in focus during the Assembly polls campaign with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for tardy progress in the investigation and failure to nab the culprits.

The woman was murdered in her home on April 28.

The attack, which took place at Perumbavoor in Ernakulam district, had been a major campaign plank of the LDF in the run up to the May 16 Assembly elections.  PTI
New Delhi, June 16

The Indian Air Force will finally get its hands on the first squadron of indigenous Tejas next month with the delivery of the fourth Light Combat Aircraft after a wait of more than three decades.

However, the first squadron will be made of up of just four Tejas aircraft, in stark contrast to at least 16 aircraft that usually makes up for one squadron globally.

State-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, manufacturer of Tejas, will hand over the fourth aircraft to the Air Force on July 1.

The four aircraft will be used for training and familarisation.

Rather than waiting for LAC Mk II, IAF had decided to go in with an upgraded version of the existing Tejas with over 40 modifications.

IAF currently plans to acquire 120 Tejas aircraft, with 100 of these having major modifications.

The force wants Active Electrically Scanned Array (AESA) Radar, Unified Electronic Warfare (EW) Suite, mid-air refuelling capacity and beyond the vision range missiles.

According to the production plan, six aircraft will be made this year (2015-16) and HAL will subsequently scale it up to eight and 16 aircraft per year.  PTI
Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 16

Pakistan today upped the ante as it reached out to the foreign ministers of Austria and Turkey over its own membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and also on Indias efforts to get into this elite nuclear club.

Apart from China, Austria and Turkey too are not very supportive of Indias NSG bid. Turkey has demanded that the applications of both India and Pakistan be considered simultaneously. Its a stand that benefits Pakistan and doesnt help Indias case at all.

China, on a parallel, kept up the momentum and said once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken. This was part of an extensive commentary run in the Global Times today, which is known to reflect the viewpoint of the Chinese leadership.

India, meanwhile, seems to be in for a photo finish. While it has managed to convince most NSG members of its credentials, the opposition by China and other smaller nations such as New Zealand, South Africa, Austria and Turkey could make the consensus difficult on June 24 when the NSG plenary meeting is held.

India, in its keenness to get into the NSG, has made it clear that it has no agenda as far as Pakistans membership is concerned.

US okays enhanced military ties with India

The US has approved a move to enhance military cooperation with India for developing threat analysis, military doctrine, force planning, logistical support and intelligence collection and analysis

China downplays transgression report

Downplaying reports of scuffles between Indian and Chinese troops during PLA troops' transgression into Arunachal Pradesh, China said it was committed to peace and tranquility in border areas
Windhoek, June 16

India and Namibia on Thursday decided to iron out issues that are impeding supply of uranium from this resource-rich African country as President Pranab Mukherjee held talks with his Namibian counterpart.

India will send a joint technical team of atomic energy experts to Namibia to resolve issues that are impeding supply of uranium to India from Namibia, the world's fourth largest producer of uranium.

The issue came up for discussion during bilateral talks between Mukherjee and Namibian President Hage G Geingob.

Mukherjee conveyed to the Namibian President that India, despite being a non-NPT signatory, has entered in nuclear fuel supply arrangements with 12 countries.

The Namibian side then expressed the desire to study those arrangements, Secretary Economic Relations Amar Sinha told reporters while giving details of the talks.

He termed it as a "positive move" that Namibia is ready to engage with India on the issue. India had signed a treaty with Namibia in 2009 for the peaceful nuclear energy use but it is yet to be implemented.

Sinha said Namibia expressed "strong wish" to implement it. The Namibian side said minerals in their mines do not get them revenue, according to Sinha.

The Indian team that will visit here will explain to Namibia the technical and economical details of the arrangements with other countries and how an agreement can be reached between the two sides regarding the supply of nuclear fuel for peaceful uses.

One of the suggestions given by the Namibian side was to let an Indian company mine the fuel but it is yet to be evaluated.

"We will have to see if in this arrangement, Indian company will be allowed to access the excavated uranium. It is too early," an official said.

Namibia despite being one of the largest producer of uranium and having a treaty with India for peaceful use of nuclear use does not supply the fuel to India because of Palindaba treaty among African Union countries that bars exports of the element to non-NPT signatories.

"Regarding uranium, there is a proposal which has been pending at their end basically because of African Union decisions. Whether we can move them along, in terms of becoming a supplier of uranium for us that is one of the key objectives that we have there," Sinha had said in Delhi.

Namibia strongly endorsed the candidature of India for the UN Security Council membership, saying the reforms in the UN are pending for 20 years and should now be brought in as early as possible.  PTI
Lahore, June 16

The Jaish-e-Mohammed militant who gave directions over phone to the terrorists during the attack on the Pathankot airbase has reportedly managed to flee to Afghanistan from Pakistan, an official said on Thursday.

"The alleged JeM handler who communicated by telephone more than two-dozen times with the terrorists in Pathankot before they carried out the attack on the airbase on January 2 has managed to cross into Afghan border," a member of the Joint Investigation Team probing the attack said on Thursday.

He said the JeM handler, who is in late 20s, was in the tribal area of Pakistan when he communicated about 18 times with the terrorists.

"The law enforcement agencies tried to trace him (in the tribal belt) but there are reports that he managed to escape to Afghanistan," he said, without disclosing the JeM leader's identity.

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Interestingly, during interrogation JeM chief Masood Azhar claimed that the handler of the Pathanokot operation had quit the organisation some time ago.

"Azhar disowns the JeM handler (to prove his innocence)," another source privy to the development said.

He said the investigation agencies have been under "great pressure" from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to investigate the case thoroughly.

Although the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab Police had registered an FIR against the alleged attackers of the Pathankot airbase and their abettors, nobody has been charged with the crime yet.

The FIR  registered in the CTD police station Gujranwala under provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code, and the Anti-Terrorism Act  says Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval told authorities that the four from Pakistan had entered country after they "probably crossed the border adjacent to the Pathankot general area".

The NSA says the terrorists made phone calls to cell phones and belonged to a proscribed organisation.

Four gunmen and seven Indian army personnel were killed in a gun battle at the Pathankot airbase.

The attack occurred just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a 'surprise' visit to Sharif on his birthday on December 25 and the occasion of his granddaughter's wedding  a move that appeared to promise better ties between the two countries in future.

Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz also confirmed that one of the mobile phone numbers linked to those who attacked the airbase had been traced to the JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur, some 400-km from Lahore.

JeM chief Azhar, who has been named by India as the mastermind of the airbase attack, had been under protective custody since January 14.

Aziz said that Azhar, along with a few other operatives of JeM, had been kept under protective custody and that some of the JeMs premises had been sealed.

He said action would follow against Azhar and others the moment evidence became available.

However despite the Pathankot visit of five-member JIT team of Pak Punjab government headed by CTD Additional Inspector General of Police (IGP) Tahir Rai, no progress has been made in the investigation so far.  PTI
Tribune News Service

Patna, June 16

Patna Senior Superintendent of Police Manu Maharaj on Thursday suspended 37 policemen after they were found guilty of dereliction of duty.

The SSP took action against the erring policemen after he carried out a surprise inspection on Wednesday night.

The state government had come under attack by the Opposition for falling law and order in Bihar. Police department was also in line of fire for the growing crime.

The suspension of 37 police personnel in Patna alone has exposed the negligence of duty.

Patna SSP said: Action was taken against the police personnel after they were found negligent of their duty.
Vijay Mohan

Tribune News Service

Windhoek (Namibia), June 16

President Pranab Mukherjee landed in the Namibian city of Windhoek on Wednesday evening on the last leg of his three nation tour, which included Ghana and Cote dIvoire.

He was received at the airport by Namibias Deputy Prime Minister Nandi-Ndaitwah Netumbo and Minister of Gender Equality and Child Welfare Doreen Sioka. The President will hold delegate level talks with his Namibian counterpart and sign several agreements to further bilateral cooperation in the fields of international diplomacy, trade and commerce and developmental issues.

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Earlier, before departing Cote dIvoire for Namibia, Mukherjee addressed a local business forum and sought new business opportunities in Africa.

Stating that business and economic activity had always been a major driver of Indias close and friendly ties with Africa, Mukherjee said Cote dIvoire was expected to grow at a rate of 9.6 per cent, making it a prime destination for investment in Africa.

He said that Indias foreign investment regime had been liberalised through simplified procedures and the removal of several restricting provisions, resulting in the country recording a 32 per cent growth in investments and emerging as one of the biggest global investment destinations.

Stating that a considerable amount of the capital generated in India sought new destinations outside the country, including in Africa, he said Indian investors were aware of the potential of Cote dIvoire with its large land mass, rich natural resources and human capital.

The President also addressed the Indian community based in Cote dIvoire, urging them to strengthen their bonds with their country of origin and further bilateral trade and open new avenues for investment and business.
New Delhi, June 16

Speculations were rife on Thursday about Congress planning to make three-time Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit the party's chief ministerial nominee for next year's assembly election in politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, once its stronghold.

Election strategist Prashant Kishor had recommended that Dikshit should play a major role in the party's poll campaign in the state, as she is a prominent Brahmin face and could help Congress regain support of the community which could determine the outcome in several seats.

The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress, shifted allegiance to BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of Mandir-Mandal politics. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawati's BSP in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community.

Dikshit is scheduled to meet Congress President Sonia Gandhi later in the day.

There was a buzz that 78-year-old Dikshit, who ruled Delhi from 1999 to 2014 before being thrown out of power by the AAP, could be Congress' Chief Ministerial candidate. Sheila Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Uttar Pradesh Congress leader Uma Shankar Dikshit, a former Union minister and governor.

The Congress is trying to regain the lost ground in the state where currently it has only 30 MLAs in the 403-member assembly. Congress won two seats in the general elections of 2014 Rae Bareli and Amethi, which party president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gadhi won, respectively.

The Brahmin community plays a significant role in election outcome in central and eastern Uttar Pradesh, where it is the dominant caste.  PTI
Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 16

A day after the Congress relieved Kamal Nath of his charge as Punjab general secretary, there was talk about the possibility of the party high command handing over the role to veteran leader Sheila Dikshit.

The former three-term Delhi Chief Minister, who met Congress president Sonia Gandhi and then party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, tried to put to rest all speculation, saying, There is nothing to report.

Congress sources, however, indicated that the 78-year-old Dikshit was being considered for the position of general secretary, Punjab. Simultaneously, she could be given charge of another state.

Sources close to Prashant Kishor, the partys election strategist for Punjab and UP, said there was a proposal to project Dikshit as the party face in poll-bound UP. Kishor had suggested that a Brahmin be projected as the Congress face in UP.

But insiders said it was unlikely that Dikshit would be sent to UP. The Congress has already appointed senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad as general secretary, UP.

Asked if Dikshit would be a good choice for Punjab, state Congress chief Capt Amari-nder Singh said, We would be delighted to have her.

Dikshit was born in Kapurthala though she entered politics after marrying the son of Uma Shankar Dikshit, a former minister in the Indira Gandhi Cabinet. Having once represented the Lok Sabha from UPs Kannauj, Dikshit has spent most part of her political career in Delhi, serving as state Congress chief and later as CM.

A source said Dikshit had been offered an option to choose between the roles in Punjab and UP. She suits both the states. She has to decide and get back to the leadership, said this leader.
New Delhi, June 16

Following a twitter tiff with Bihar Education Minister Ashok Choudhary over being addressed as dear by him, Union Human Resource and Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani has hit back at the former with an open letter signed as Aunty National on her official Facebook page while throwing light on the struggles faced by the feminine gender in the country.

So while many working women battle this challenge in confined working spaces, I spat it out on twitter for my office travels with me. But then there are some who say why talk about yourself at all, surely one day they shall realise the amount of work you have done, she writes.

Irani also laid emphasis on the initiatives taken by her after taking charge of the HRD Ministry.

The HRD Minister also threw light on her struggle in life and said that nobody can take away the hard work that she puts.

Growing up in a middle class environment (Lutyen's zone excluded), many girls who would walk to school/college and back home every day, go to the bazaar to get groceries and adequate sabzi in a given budget, would often be told if accosted by a boy or a bunch of them, don't look up and keep walking straight. Don't respond or retort no matter how humiliated you feel. But there would be those rebellious kinds (yours truly included), who would question why? Why not respond? Why zip it? The standard answer such a question begets is It is not worth it. Nuksaan tumhara hoga , ladke ka kuch nahi bigadega', writes Irani.

Cut to- you grow up and become a TV star. But while you still struggle to make a mark you are advised that if you go to parties and mingle enough, you shall get work. You stoutly refuse as you believe that your talent and hardwork are the only precursors to success, how full your social calender is should not matter. You are scoffed at and brushed off as naive. But lo and behold, you do succeed. You bag all the awards that matter, TRPs soar through the roof and all the naysayers grudgingly accept that you have arrived (though they do take occasional pot shots as their work profile demands), she adds.

Irani further writes, And then politics happens. Not when you are a fading star, not when you are unemployed but when you are at the peak of your success. You are given the hard battles to fight, you accept (Chandini Chowk & Amethi were no cakewalk my friends). You work from the grassroots up. Serve as Youth Wing Vice-President in State, become State Secretary, 5 times National Executive Member, 2 times National Secretary and once the National President of Women's Wing. You become possibly the youngest ever woman to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha, speak on issues ranging from the budget to women's security.

You represent your Nation in the International Parliamentary Union, get unanimously elected to represent the Asia Pacific region, become part of the drafting committee on the Syrian crisis and yet some intellectual says anpad the minute you are given the opportunity to serve as HRD Minister. And suddenly the rules change. You, the creature who on every podium exalts the right of women to speak their mind is told don't speak your mind. Ignore the trolls no matter how high they serve in their political systems. Ignore public attempts to humiliate you through sexual innuendos kyunki nuksaan tumhara hoga unka kuch nahi bigadega.

Ask any working woman, what do you do when your colleague does not finish their assignment on time brushes off your attempt at ensuring accountability and if push comes to shove is cocky enough to gang up with other boys in the club to paint you as either too wound up, to dumb or not competent enough; the successful women always tell you that they continue to crack the whip. For there will come a time when the colleague says Fine! I'll get the work done, she adds.  ANI
New Delhi, June 16

British national Christian Michel James  the suspected middleman who has been accused of having been involved the alleged corruption in the Rs 3,600 crore chopper deal  was keenly interested in details about certain government payments made to AgustaWestland for Sea King helicopters used by the Indian Navy, a report by the Enforcement Directorate has said.

The ED  which has filed a second charge sheet in which it delves deep into the role of Michel  also said that he was curious if certain documents had reached the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

According to the report, Michel was last dropped by his driver Narayan Bahadur on February 12, 2013, at the Indira Gandhi International airport after which he probably never returned to India.

The charge sheet mentions Michel's numerous visits and meetings with people in Delhi when the deal for supply of 12 AgusatWestland helicopters to the IAF was struck. It also refers to an incident that took place few years back in a hotel in Italy.

The report mentioned that Michel had offered about Euro 2,500 to a person Vimal Nagpal, Manager, of the helicopter firm's services division in India, to "offer lunch/dinner" to a Navy team that was also staying in the same hotel that time.

"The Indian Navy team declined the offer for lunch/dinner by him (Nagpal) and Chris Cornish. However, we insisted and paid the dinner bill once," Nagpal said in his statement to the ED.

He also told ED investigators that Michel "wanted to know details" of payments made by the Indian Government to AgustaWestland pertaining to Sea King helicopter and status of the VVIP choppers and other issues.

"On one such occasion, Michel wanted to check with him (Nagpal) whether the documents  approximately 9,500 pages of them were delivered to the CBI," the charge sheet said, adding Nagpal told him he would have to find out.

The records also mention an instance recorded by Bahadur in which he claimed that Sanjeev Tyagi  cousin of former IAF chief SP Tyagi  received three of Michels friends at a bungalow in the posh Sainik farm area in 2008 after the middleman asked him to pick them from a luxury hotel in central Delhi.

The driver  whose statements have been used extensively to help trace Michel's activities in India  also told investigators that the middleman once gave him Rs 5 lakh for purchasing a house that cost Rs 16 lakh in the Kalkaji area, where he also lives now. The driver had to pay the remaining sum.

According to, the charge sheet said, an embassy of an African country functions at the bungalow currently.

Nagpal had also told ED that Bahadur had once delivered him cash amounts sent by Michel as AgustaWestland had proposed to IAF to have "six-axis full flight simulators for training pilots on regular basis" for the AW-101 VVIP choppers.

He also told ED that Michel had assured him that he will get "approvals from higher officials of AgustaWestland" to allocate the simulator project to a chosen firm in India.

However, the plan never worked out as IAF "did not" approve the simulator programme.

The 1,300 page charge sheet of the ED was placed before a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court here last week.

The agency accuses Michel of having received around Euro 30 million (about Rs 225 crore) from AgustaWestland as "kickbacks" paid by the firm for sale of 12 helicopters to India in favour of the firm.

The court is expected to soon take cognisance of the supplementary charge sheet.

Apart from Michel, the agency has named Ms Media Exim Private Limited and its directors, RK Nanda and J B Subramaniyam in the charge sheet. The firm was created by Michel along with the two individuals.

Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, apart from Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the CBI. Both the agencies have asked for an Interpol red notice after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him.

A red notice is issued "to seek the location and arrest of wanted persons with a view to extradition or similar lawful action" in a criminal investigation.  PTI
Tribune News Service

New Delhi/Chandigarh, June 16

The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday dismissed the petitions seeking stalling the release of Bollywood film Udta Punjab on Friday, on the plea that it projected Punjabis in bad light.

The petition filed by a lawyer and other petitions failed to find favour with the court as Justice M Jayepaul dismissed the petitions after the amicus curiae argued that the film did not glorify the use of drugs in Punjab, there was nothing objectionable to Punjabis in it and it did not portray them in bad light.

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Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court had refused to entertain the plea by an NGO seeking stay on the release of the film. A vacation Bench of Justices AK Goel and LN Rao had advised the NGO petitioner to await the outcome of a similar case pending in the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

The NGO, Human Rights Awareness Association, had accepted the suggestion and withdrew its appeal against the Bombay High Court verdict allowing the release of the movie.

The NGO had moved the Supreme Court on Wednesday to stall the screening of the film, while another plea by it had prompted the Delhi High Court to direct the producer to modify the promos by adhering to the Bombay High Court order.

The plea filed before the apex court bench sought a direction to restrain the screening of the movie on the grounds that it depicted Punjab in a bad light.

On June 13, the Bombay High Court had cleared the decks for the release of Udta Punjab after ordering deleting of a urination scene and displaying a revised disclaimer as per which the makers would have to delete reference to Pakistan.

The Bombay High Court had also directed the film-maker to make additions to the disclaimer to the effect that the movie, its characters and the film-makers do not promote the use of drugs and abusive language, and the film is only attempting to depict the reality of drug abuse.

In the Bombay High Court, Anurag Kashyaps Phantom Films had challenged the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC) revising the committees order of June 6 directing a total of 13 changes in the movie.

The Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh-starrer delves into how a large number of youth in Punjab have succumbed to drugs. (With PTI inputs)
Ravi Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Batala, June 16

The police today nabbed a conman who claimed that he was an SP in the Punjab Vigilance Department.

Rahul Kumar, a resident of Green Avenue, Gurdaspur, was arrested from Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh) after an inquiry conducted jointly by the VB, Amritsar, and the local police. He is the son of Roop Rani, a former BJPMLA of Dinanagar.

The month-long probe revealed that the impostor used to masquerade as a senior IPS officer and had hoodwinked several Gurdaspur and Batala-based officials.

SSP (Vigilance), Amritsar, Patil K Baliram headed the team that conducted the inquiry after he received a written complaint from an aggrieved officer.

SSP Daljinder Singh Dhillon confirmed the arrest and added that the accused would be produced in a court.

The accused used a fake name  Vijay Kumar  to carry out his activities.

A case had been registered against him at the City police station, under Section 420 of the IPC (cheating) this year based on a complaint filed by Karanjit Singh Kler, an official of the Tarn Taran depot of Punjab Roadways.

The cops are not making public the names of officers deceived by the impostor, who used six SIM cards.

Sources claim that he had even tried to trick officials infiltrated in the Gurdaspur DCs office and had tried to trick officials into making them believe he was an IPS officer and was posted as SP (Vigilance).

SHO Narinder Singh, said that the accused used a novel modus operandi. He would call up officers and tell them that they were trapped in a vigilance net and then asked them what to do.

The officers were left with no option except to tell the accused to file the case. The accused would then ring them (officers) up after a day or two claiming that their case had been filed and they had nothing to worry about.

At the same time he would ask them to deposit money, thousands of rupees, in his bank account as he had to pay the hospital bills of some relatives, the SHO revealed.
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 16

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today demanded a probe against Congress senior leader Kamal Nath foe his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots while asserting that the SIT should register a case against him.

Briefing the media, AAP leader HS Phoolka said Kamal Nath had admitted in his affidavit before the Nanavati Commission that he was present at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj in Delhi when a mob attacked it and killed two Sikhs.

Kamal Nath is responsible for this and the police should ask him who were the people assembled there unlawfully. He was leading them and yet he hasnt been questioned. This is a mockery of law, Phoolka alleged.

Party leader Dilip Pandey said the Congress was forced to remove Nath due to political pressure. AAP MLA Jarnail Singh said the NDA government must ensure that the SIT should register a case against Kamal Nath. He alleged Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was still with the Congress even as party leader Amarinder Singh had named him as one of the accused in the riots case.
Kulwinder Sandhu

Tribune News Service

Moga, June 16

The local Municipal Corporation has allegedly given undue favour of Rs 30.52 lakh to a local businessman who reportedly enjoys the patronage of the top SAD leadership, it is learnt.

The MC authorities have waived the water cess and have given a huge discount on labour cess to approve the building plan of Orbit Mall and Infra Private Limited, a company owned by local residents Yogesh Goyal and his younger brother Ashwani Goyal. They are also running Orbit multiplex and a hotel in Moga city.

Yogesh was the chairman of Moga Improvement Trust in the previous term of the SAD-BJP government and has allegedly used his political influence to get financial benefits from the local body.

The Goyal brothers applied for the approval of the building plan of their project Orbit Citi Centre in 2014 requesting the MC to waive labour cess and water cess, which were at the rate of 1 per cent at that time, claiming that these taxes were not being charged in other cities of the state.

However, the MC made an estimate of Rs 55.32 lakh, which included water cess of Rs 21.13 lakh and the rest as labour cess.

But after negotiations, the MC completely waived the water cess and gave a discount of Rs 9.39 lakh on labour cess, resulting in the loss of Rs 30.52 lakh to the state exchequer.

The owners of Orbit Mall and Infra Private Limited also gave an undertaking in the MC that they would not use water supplied by the civic body for construction.

As a result, they are using underground water for construction, violating the orders of the apex court. Moga comes under the dark zone due to the depletion of underground water at a rapid rate of 1.65m per year.

Akshit Jain, Mayor of Moga city, said he has summoned the file of Orbit Mall and Infra Private Limited and would definitely look into the matter. However, he said that the MC has waived the water cess from April 1. But when the approval of the building plan was granted to Orbit Mall and Infra Private Limited, water cess was applicable on all commercial buildings.

Congress leader Dr Malti Thapar has alleged that widespread corruption was prevailing in the MC and has demanded a probe by an independent agency.

The incharge of the legal cell of AAP (Faridkot parliamentary constituency) Ramesh Grover said that he was looking at options to seek legal action against the MC authorities for causing huge loss to the state exchequer.
Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 16

Now that Congress president Sonia Gandhi has relieved senior leader Kamal Nath of the charge of party general secretary for Punjab, the question everyones asking is: Why did she appoint him in the first place?

Officially, Congress senior spokesperson Anand Sharma and Punjab unit chief Capt Amarinder Singh refused to acknowledge today that the resignation had anything to do with AAP and Akali-BJP pressure over Kamal Naths alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Kamal Nath sought to be relieved out of anguish. He was being targeted for something he has never been charged with. The right to reputation has been equated by the courts with the right to life. We had to respect his sentiment, Sharma said, describing the party leaders resignation as an act of his own volition.

Amarinder also trashed the AAP statement that Kamal Nath had to go because they had exposed his role in the riots and that his appointment reflected the Congress insensitivity towards the victims.

Thats not true. Kamal Nath called me yesterday and told me that he was tendering his resignation. He said he had self-respect and was opting out because he was being targeted most unfairly. It was gracious of him to have done so, the former Punjab CM said.

Posturing apart, insiders admit that the party grossly miscalculated the consequences of naming Kamal Nath, a nine-time MP from Chhindwara (Madhya Pradesh) as the Punjab incharge, considering that he had appeared before the Nanavati Commission to explain his alleged role in the riots. Though exonerated, he had faced accusations of involvement in the torching of Gurdwara Rakabganj and the killing of two Sikhs on November 1, 1984, in the aftermath of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhis assassination.

Party leaders said with the issue snowballing in Punjab, concerns about Kamal Naths safety also weighed on the Congress mind and was one of the reasons why he was relieved.

A senior Congress leader admitted, We did not anticipate this reaction, considering that 32 years have passed without Kamal Naths name being raked up in this matter. He was first named only in 2005 when he appeared before the Nanavati Commission, which let him off. Never before and after was he mentioned in the context of the riots. So, the party did not feel it was something to be worried about.

The leader added: Kamal Nath was seen as an important leader whose organisational skills would have helped the party in poll-bound Punjab. He was a natural choice for the Punjab role like Ghulam Nabi Azad was for Uttar Pradesh. We did not think his past would cast such a long shadow on his role. Also, continuing with him would have meant risking his safety.

After naming Kamal Nath on June 12, the party first adopted a wait-and-watch policy for a couple of days. Soon, it was clear that not only had the issue given AAP and the Akali-BJP combine a handle against the party but also some Congress leaders were upset with the move. Former minister MS Gill went public against the appointment and spoke the language of rivals, saying that it had rubbed salt into the wounds of Sikh victims.

With the anxiety taking root, the party decided to relieve Kamal Nath, who bowed out, saying that he did not want attention to be deflected from Punjabs real issues. The fiasco has, however, raised questions about the decision-making process in the Congress, with many leaders asking if the decision-makers even remembered that Kamal Nath was ever named in the anti-Sikh riots.
New Delhi, June 16

Senior Congress leader Kamal Nath rejected reports that he was asked to step down as the General Secretary in charge of party affairs in Punjab, saying he quit to ensure that attention was not diverted from the issues affecting the state.

He rubbished reports that said Congress president Sonia Gandhi asked him to quit.

"I called Rahul Gandhi and told him I am sending the letter...I read him the letter. He told me to send it to the Congress President...I called Sonia Gandhi and told her that this is in the interest of the party and we should not let them use this politics," he said, adding that Gandhi understood his motivations.

He also said he was willing to cooperate with investigations into his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

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"There has been SIT (Special Investigation Team) probe, the (Ranganath) Misra Commission inquiry, (GT) Nanavati Commission inquiry. I am ready to face any other probe, including that of the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation)," Nath said in an interview to a news channel.

"There was no mention of my name (in the anti-Sikh riots) for many years... no statement from any quarter or any individual accusing me of involvement... then someone approached the Nanavati Commission to probe my role. The commission exonerated me of all charges," Nath added.

The GT Nanavati Commission was set up by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 2000 to inquire into the 1984 anti-Sikh violence that broke out in Delhi after the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984.

On the charges levelled against him by senior lawyer and Aam Aadmi Party leader HS Phoolka, Kamal Nath said: "Where was Phoolka all these years? Why did he not file an FIR or a case against me? Why is he making the allegations now, despite the Nanavati Commission exonerating me of all charges?" The Congress leader elected to the Lok Sabha from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh said it was his own decision to quit as in-charge of the party affairs in Punjab and nobody asked him to.

"It was my own decision to quit in the party's interest. I did not want this inconsequential issue (of his alleged involvement in the anti-Sikh violence) to overshadow more important and relevant issues in Punjab today." Kamal Nath said, "The real issues in Punjab are misgovernance, drug menace, the flight of youth from the state for lack of opportunities and employment, et al. I resigned as Punjab in-charge lest public attention was diverted from these issues." On his presence outside Delhi Gurdwara Rakabganj on November 1, 1984, Kamal Nath said he has never denied it.

"I was present there because I was asked by my party to reach there. There was a mob outside the gurdwara. I tried to stop them from attacking it. The police had requested me to control the mob till their reinforcements arrived," the Congress leader maintained.

Respect his decision

Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh defended Nath and said it was unfortunate that rival parties tried to harm the Congress by raking up the issue.

Kamal Nath has taken his own decision. He felt hurt that his name was being dragged. He decided to resign as his image was being tarnished.

"I think he would have been an excellent general secretary as he has a lot of experience and is very decisive. It is a great shame for us that this issue has been raised by people only to harm the Congress party (by keeping Nath out)," he told reporters.

"I thanked him saying this is a very gracious thing that he has done by doing this. He would have made a very good general secretary for us, but these people are pointing fingers at anyone as they are desperate," he said.

Asked if this affected the party's prospects, he said, "Nothing". "Even if Kamal Nath would have been there as in-charge, there would have been nothing on the party. There would have been nothing. Things have changed," he said.

The opposition has, on the contrary, accused Kamal Nath of instigating the mob outside the gurdwara.

Leaders of rival parties demanded criminal action against the leader.

Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, the patriarch of the Shriromani Akali Dal patriarch, said Naths exit "vindicated" the stand of his party that 1984 Sikh carnage was a "deep rooted conspiracy" of Congress party to "butcher of innocent" Sikhs.

"Kamal Nath was reluctant to accept this post because of his guilty consciousness' owing to his role in massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs," Badal alleged on the sidelines of Sangat Darshan programme in Malout Assembly constituency.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is trying to make inroads into the state in the next year's Assembly elections, also joined the attack and demanded that an FIR be registered against Kamal Nath in the Gurudwara Rakabganj Sahib in which two Sikhs were burnt to death in 1984.

"Two Sikhs were killed in the incident. So Kamal Nath is also responsible for it as he was their leader. This is an insult to the law.

"By merely tendering resignation does not absolve Kamal Nath from the charges and he should be tried for murder and chargesheet should be filed at the earliest," said AAP leader and lawyer Phoolka, who has been fighting for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots victims, said, adding that Nath had never been investigated.  Agencies
Amaninder Pal

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 14

The Punjab Government has awarded crores of rupees as compensation for cotton crop loss due to whitefly attack by showing the quantum of damage even more than the total crop grown last year.

As per the records accessed by The Tribune, the cotton crop was grown over 8.35 lakh acres (3.39 lakh hectares) in eight districts last year.

However, revenue officials have awarded compensation for crop loss on 8.55 lakh acres (3.46 lakh hectares) in these districts.

Various farmer organisations have already alleged that compensation was given even to those farmers who didnt even grow the crop last year.

The department has assessed that 76-100 per cent crop was damaged on 7.94 lakh acres, while on around 60,600 acres, the damage was between 33-75 per cent.

Even if one assumes that the entire crop was damaged due to whitefly attack, figures reveal that the compensation was awarded for crop damaged on around 20,000 acres where the crop was never grown.

A senior officer said: The fact remains that the entire crop was not damaged. Even Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh had told Parliament in December last year that cotton on 3.32 lakh hectares was damaged. What is baffling us that how the Revenue Department has assessed the area affected due to crop damage even more than the area under cotton cultivation last year.

Karan Bir Singh Sidhu, Financial Commissioner (Revenue) said: There is no such issue. The process of disbursing compensation was completed following proper measures. Facts were checked at each level before awarding compensation to the affected farmers.

Dr JS Bains, Director, Agriculture, only confirmed that as per latest figures, cotton was sown on 3.39 lakh hectares in 2015.

Sukhdev Singh Kokri Kalan, general secretary, Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ugrahan), said: There are numerous such cases where compensation was awarded to ineligible farmers and denied in genuine cases. We had raised the matter in a meeting held with senior government functionaries a few months ago, but nobody paid any heed to it.

Ruldu Singh, president, Punjab Kisan Union, said: Ineligible farmers who were close to local Akali leaders were awarded compensation.

As crop damaged due to whitefly had snowballed into a political controversy last year following massive protests by farmer organisations, the Punjab Government had announced Rs669 crore compensation package for the growers. Ten per cent of the total compensation was meant for cotton pickers.

District Cotton grown Crop shown damaged

Barnala 12,355 13,245

Bathinda 2,76,758 2,77,454

Faridkot 14,826 14,620

Fazilka 2,12,510 2,31,738

Mansa 1,77,915 1,75,664

Moga 2,471 1,606

Muktsar 1,13,668 1,19,030

Sangrur 24,710 22,065

(Area in acres)
DHAKA, June 16

Police in Bangladesh were hunting on Thursday for two of the three suspected Islamists who attacked and seriously injured a Hindu college teacher in the latest assault on minority groups and liberal activists in the mainly Muslim nation.

Bangladesh has arrested more than 11,000 people in a weeklong crackdown on Islamists begun on Friday, as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has vowed to halt a wave of targeted killings.

Mathematics teacher Ripon Chakraborty was attacked on Wednesday night by three knife-wielding assailants when he answered the doorbell at his home in Madaripur, 70 km (44 miles) south of the capital, Dhaka, police said.

"The 50-year-old teacher was hacked in his head and neck," said district police chief Sarwar Hossain. "He is now out of danger and doctors have kept him under close observation." Police are questioning one of the attackers, a 22-year-old student of a college in Dhaka, Ghulam Faijullaha Fahim, who was caught by people who came to the rescue of the screaming teacher and his family, he added.

Under interrogation Fahim revealed the attack had been motivated by members of a banned militant group, the Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hossain said, adding, "He was told, 'This person is an enemy of Islam. He should be killed.'" Militants have killed more than 30 people since early last year, ranging from atheist bloggers and liberal academics to gay rights campaigners, foreign aid workers, members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups.

Islamic State or al Qaeda have claimed most of the killings, but the government denies either group has a presence in Bangladesh. Police blame homegrown militants from groups such as Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen and Ansarullah Bangla Team.

In the past week alone, an elderly Hindu priest, a Hindu monastery worker and a Christian shopkeeper were hacked to death, and the Muslim wife of a counter-terrorism police official was also killed.

Hindus constitute about 9 per cent of Bangladesh's population of 160 million.  Reuters
Paris, June 16

A man with links to radical Islam has been detained in southern France suspected of plotting possible attacks on American and Russian tourists and police, authorities said today, amid renewed fears about Islamic State threats to France.

A judicial official said today that the man, detained Monday in the medieval city of Carcassonne, is suspected of terrorism links and remains under questioning. The official said the man told investigators he wanted to attack tourists and later police.

A French security official called it a routine matter as police and intelligence services seek to avert a repeat of deadly Islamic State attacks on France last year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to be able to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The incident came the same day an extremist claiming allegiance to IS stabbed two police officials to death in a Paris suburb.  AP
Washington, June 16

Pakistans bid to purchase used F-16 fighter jets from Jordan might not be easy as it would require an approval from the US and be subject to end-use monitoring, officials here have said.

While we are not going to speculate on reports that Pakistan may look to purchase used F-16s elsewhere, we would note that under US law, any re-transfers of US-origin defence items to a third party require approval from the US Government, may require Congressional notification, and would be subject to end-use monitoring, a State Department official told PTI.

The official, who requested anonymity, was responding to a question on reports that Pakistan is considering buying used F-16 jets from Jordan after its plan to buy eight of them from the US at highly subsidised rates fell through because of the opposition from lawmakers in the US Congress who want Islamabad to take strong action against the Haqqani network.

The proposed terms and conditions of the Letter of Offer and Acceptance for this proposed sale of F-16 aircraft expired on May 24, the official said.

Pakistan did not accept the offer to purchase F-16s from the United States, and the terms of the sale have expired, another State Department official told PTI.

We are now going for a third-party transfer of F-16s and have an offer from Jordan, Pakistan Defence Secretary Alam Khattak had said last week.

We refer you to the Government of Pakistan to speak to their decision and future defence procurement plans, the US official said when asked about Khattaks statement.

The official was not aware if the US has received such a request from Jordan and Pakistan.

However, it is believed that there could be options for Pakistan to explore the possibility of procuring F-16 from the United States at its full price.

The earlier proposal of eight F-16s to Pakistan at an estimated cost of $ 699 million was heavily subsidised, to which the US lawmakers led by Senator Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had objected.

Informed sources argue that if Pakistan wants to pursue the sale, it could start a fresh talk with Lockheed Martin  the manufacturer  and negotiate a new full price for the F-16s it wants to buy.  PTI
Tarin Kot, June 16

The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of bacha bazipaedophilic boy playto infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults said.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where bacha bereeshor boys without beardswidely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook and Twitter @thetribunechd)

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacksat least six between January and April alonethat have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

The Taliban are sending boysbeautiful boys, handsome boysto penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen, Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai said, who was Uruzgans police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forcesbacha bazi, he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanais view saying its easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers.

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

The insurgents are using bachas as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

He said the attacker was the checkpoint commanders own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive. I pretended to be dead, said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: Everyone is dead. The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operationsall grown men with beards, a Taliban spokesman told AFP.  AFP
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Photo: U.S. Department of Transportation

The Department of Transportations Inspector General has initiated an audit of commercial motor vehicle loading and unloading delays in response to provisions of the Fixing Americas Surface Transportation (FAST) Act highway bill, which became law late last year.

The DOT IG said that the FAST Act directs the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to issue regulations on collecting data on loading and unloading delays. The law also directs DOT to report on the impact of loading and unloading delays in areas such as the economy and efficiency of the transportation system.

Accordingly, we are initiating this audit, said DOT IG in a statement issued June 16. Our objectives will be to (1) assess available data on motor carrier loading and unloading delays and (2) provide information on measuring the potential effects of loading and unloading delays.

DOT noted that while hours-of-service regulations limit the number of hours a driver can work per day to 14 hours, delays at shipping and receiving facilities during cargo loading and unloading may result in travel delays and lost wages for drivers. Truckers who experience these delays may then drive faster to make deliveries within hours-of-service limits or operate beyond these limits and improperly log their driving time, thus increasing the risk of crashes and fatalities.
LONDON  Of the fighting faiths that flourished during the ideologically drunk 20th century, anti-Semitism has been uniquely durable. It survives by mutating, even migrating across the political spectrum from the right to the left. Although most frequently found in European semi-fascist parties, anti-Semitism is growing in the fetid Petri dish of American academia, and is staining Britains Labour Party.

In 2014, before Naseem Naz Shah became a Labour member of parliament, she shared a graphic on her Facebook page suggesting that all Israelis should be relocated to the United States. She seemed to endorse the idea that the transportation cost would be less than three years of defense spending. When this was recently publicized, Red Ken Livingstone, former Labour mayor of London, offered on the BBC what he considered a defense of her as not anti-Semitic because a real anti-Semite doesnt just hate the Jews in Israel. Besides, Livingstone said, Hitler was a Zionist (for supposedly considering sending Europes Jews to Palestine) before he went mad. As mayor, Livingstone praised as a progressive voice an Egyptian cleric who called the Holocaust divine punishment.

Labours leader, Jeremy Corbyn, says he wants to cleanse Labour of such thinking. But Corbyn hopes to host at the House of Commons a Palestinian sheikh who calls Jews bacteria and monkeys and has been accused of repeating the blood libel that Jews make matzo using the blood of gentile children.

Leftist anti-Semites invariably say they hate not Jews but Zionism, and hence not a people but a nation. Israel was, however, created as a haven for an endangered people. Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, refutes the canard that hating Israel is not the same as hating Jews.

Criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist. When Sacks asks his audiences if Britains government can be criticized, everyone says yes. But when they are asked, Do you believe Britain should not exist?, no one says yes. Then Sacks tells his audiences: Now you know the difference.

It is very easy to hate, says Sacks. It is very difficult to justify hate. Anti-Semitisms permutations adapt it to changing needs for justification. In the Middle Ages, he says, Jews were hated for their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were hated for their race. Now they are hated for their nation. The new anti-Semitism can always say it is not the old anti-Semitism.

But it is. It remains, Sacks says, essentially eliminationist. It disguises its genocidal viciousness, insisting that it seeks the destruction not of a people but only of the state formed as a haven for this people that has had a uniquely hazardous history. The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, supported by many American academics, aims not just to pressure Israel to change policies, as South Africa was pressured to abandon apartheid, but rather to de-legitimize Israels existence as a nation.

Sacks says that when bad things happen to a healthy society, it asks: What did we do wrong? A fraying, insecure society asks: Who did this to us? Sacks notes that although Jews were never more than 2 percent of Germanys population, this did not protect them from becoming the explanation for Germanys discontents.

In a conversation with a supposedly moderate British Muslim leader, Sacks asked, Does Israel have a right to exist within any borders whatever? The leader replied: Your own prophets said that because of your sins you have forfeited your right to your land. To which Sacks responded mildly: But that was 2,700 years ago and surely the Jews have served their sentence.

After World War II, Western nations strove to develop what Sacks calls a cultural immune system against anti-Semitism with Holocaust education and other measures. The immune system is not weakening in Britain, other than among Muslim immigrants and leftists eager to meld their radicalism with radical Islam.

Labours leader before Corbyn, Edward Miliband, who led the party in the 2015 general election, is Jewish, as was the Conservative Partys greatest 19th-century leader (Benjamin Disraeli). Former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was educated at Eton, noted, perhaps regretfully, certainly indelicately, that Margaret Thatchers Cabinet included more old Estonians than old Etonians. This was not anti-Semitism, just a jest too fine to forgo.

Seven decades after the Holocaust, some European nations have, remarkably, anti-Semitism without Jews and Christian anti-Semitism without Christianity. Britain just has a few leftists eager to mend their threadbare socialism with something borrowed from National Socialism.
Skinner Trace which is off the S.S. Erin Road is experiencing major land movement which has 
this is really going to really backfire on the left. fukkin' twitter has also hassled him and his followers before.UPDATE: Milo is now back on Twitter as of 11.49 AM, but many of his followers were still missing Milo Yiannopoulos has been suspended from Twitter.The controversial conservative flame-thrower was booted off the social networking site Wednesday for reasons that have yet to be determined, though Milo has been under fierce attack from Muslims for his criticism of the left for choosing Islam over gays.Milo toldon Tuesday: I saw the shootings happen and realized this has been something Ive been speaking about for a very long time and although Im constitutionally opposed to saying, I told you so, this did strike me as an illustration of something Ive been warning against for quite some time.On Wednesday, the gay U.S.-based British outspoken Trump supporter and anti-feminist, who is currently on a 50-week, 60-date U.S. college tour and going viral on a regular basis, is scheduled to deliver a talk on Muslims and gays at a press conference in Orlando. He had been planning to speak at the University of Central Florida, but the campus police canceled his talk.In March, Milo wondered at a White House Press conference if he had been de-verified on Twitter for being an outspoken conservative.Milo, a gay journalist, defended the LGBT community and is now suspended by the homophobes at @twitter On Wednesday, June 15, Breitbart Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos delivered a press conference outside Christ Church of Orlando, calling Islam an enemy of freedom and offering a warning from Europe about the dangers of Islam.This is the reality that Europe is living through. Please dont make our mistakes. America is better than that, he said, offering statistics about the realities of sharia law in Europe. Most of this talk would get me arrested in Europe."Gay people need an end to the pointless pacifism of the left."The talk came a day after its originally planned date, following the cancellation by the University of Central Florida because of unspecified threats online.During his talk, Yiannopoulos accused the American left of creating an environment that was unsafe for gay people such as himself.The American left hates women, gays, and minorities, he said. It is a band of spoiled white liberals who dont care anything except feeling good and appetizing their own moral virtue on others.moIn December 2011, the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested $300 million in Twitter.twitter chairman
He may have had a bad experience with Live from Planet Earth on Nine all those years ago but Ben Elton is having the last laugh with his new sitcom Upstart Crow winning a second season in the UK.

The series which sees David Mitchell as aspiring playwright Will Shakespeare, launched in May to mark the 400th anniversary of the writers death.

BBC Two this week commissioned a six further 30-minute episodes plus a Christmas special for 2017.

Shane Allen, Controller of Comedy Commissioning, says: What with the brilliant response to Bens re-imagination of Will Shakespeares world and the uniquely entertaining cast, it would be madness not to bring Upstart Crow back for a second series.

Ben Elton says: Making a sitcom for the BBC is the holy grail of British comedy writing. I am absolutely thrilled that Upstart Crow has earned a second series and am sorry for some of the things I thought about the Bard while studying for my English Lit O Level.

An Australian broadcaster is yet to be announced.

Meanwhile Eltons production of We Will Rock You is also playing in Sydney.
On Mondays Four Corners, Ben Knight reports on The Deputy and the Dark Horse.

ABC cameras have been on the hustings in New England electorate with both Tony Windsor and Barnaby Joyce for a seat that could potentially bring down the Deputy Prime Minister.

Hes one of the best known politicians in the country with a gift for publicity and a unique way with words. In political parlance, he has cut through so much so former Prime Minister Tony Abbott praised him as the best retail politician in the country. Hes the member for New England, Barnaby Joyce.

Just five short months ago he fulfilled a lifelong ambition when he was anointed leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister. In country politics, it doesnt get any bigger and better.

But it could all come crashing down.

He will need an unbelievably strong primary vote in his own right. If he doesnt get it, the way the preference gaming goes on these days, he could lose it. Former National Party Strategist

With only two weeks to go in the Federal Election campaign, Barnaby Joyce is fighting to hang on to his seat.

The man getting in his way is the Independent, Tony Windsor. Hes been a thorn in the side of the National Party for 25 years and hes come out of retirement for one more crack at winning the seat. And hes in with a real chance.

This seat is winnable. It is winnable. I have absolutely no doubt about that. No-one has it won yet. Tony Windsor

Four Corners has spent weeks behind the scenes, on the campaign trail, with both men as theyve crisscrossed the electorate in one of the most hotly anticipated contests of the election campaign.

The only way you can do it at a time like this, is work flat out. And thats what Im doing. Barnaby Joyce

Its a very personal contest and the antipathy between both men is clear. And its a contest thats dividing the electorate and even families.

Monday 20th June at 8.30pm on ABC.
I know all about how many hours are required to keep up with TVs incessant output these days (its a double-edged sword, but first world problems).

So behold the folk who make up the Netflix Beetlejuice Project: people who are paid $10 a film or series to pick the best still images and videos to help its users figure out what they want to watch.

Now, two of these largely-anonymous people are suing Netflix for overtime, paid vacation, health insurance and more.

According to the Hollywood Reporter Long Beach resident Lawrence Moss and L.A. resident Cigdem Akbay claim they deserve higher pay after being allegedly misclassified as contractors instead of employees.

Both Moss and Akbay allege they worked closely with Netflix management and sometimes worked more than 40 hours a week. Theoretically, [Akbay] could set her own hours, but Netflix imposed deadlines for assignments that in effect imposed a rigid work schedule, states her complaint.

Netflix argues in court papers the employees signed agreements that require the dispute be handled privately in arbitration.

Netflix has previously advertised for Taggers who must deconstruct the films and programmes and describe them using objective tags.
Renowned producer John Edwards is partnering with Roadshow Films, to form Roadshow Rough Diamond, with his son former ITV Studios and Endemol executive, Dan Edwards.

The new production company will create original long-form television and feature film content for domestic and international audiences from July 1st.

The partnership sees Roadshow return to television production after a lengthy break, having previously produced Brides of Christ, GP, Law of the Land, True Believers, The Fremantle Conspiracy, and A Long Way from Home. Film credits include Mad Max: Fury Road, Red Dog, The Castle and Happy Feet.

Edwards formidable credits include Gallipoli, Offspring, Puberty Blues, Tangle, Rush, Love My Way, The Secret Life Of Us, Police Rescue, The Beautiful Lie, Beaconsfield, Howzat: Kerry Packers War and Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo.

John Edwards is without peer in the Australian television landscape  probably one of our countrys few brand name producers who creates benchmark series for every network. We are thrilled to have his expertise and eye steering our course as Roadshow re-enters the television production arena. We intend to bring the same level of quality and commitment to our TV productions as we do with our films, said Roadshow co-CEO Chris Chard.

The pedigree John brings is impressive and without parallel  he has crafted more than 600 hours of television drama, with 30 production credits to his nameas well as a string of Logie, AACTA and ASTRA awards. His TV series are beloved household names and we are greatly looking forward to collaborating with John and Dan on what will be an incredibly exciting and ambitious slate, Co-CEO Joel Pearlman added.

John Edwards said, In the collaborative world of television production, it is great to have found partners who share our vision of creating and celebrating unique Australian stories, with the aim of bringing them to the world. Both Roadshow and Rough Diamond are 100% Australian in our heritage and vision, so its thrilling that we can garner both our resources to create what we believe will be a true new powerhouse of Australian drama.

Meanwhile, Edwards is currently overseeing production on The High Road miniseries for Seven, a sequel to Blue Murder, through Endemol Shine.

Amended.
Sitting at the top table looking out over the assembled media, the Republic of Ireland's Robbie Brady and Jeff Hendrick exchanged a grin before recounting the story of their journey to UEFA EURO 2016.

Following Monday's 1-1 draw against Sweden, both players received praise for their efforts in a highly entertaining Group E game. Furthermore, starting together at the magnificent Stade de France represented the realisation of a dream for two players who once played for the same Under-8 team at Dublin club St Kevin's Boys.

"It's been an incredibly long road and we've been lucky to have taken it together," versatile Norwich City player Brady explained. "We were about six or seven when we played at St Kevin's and we've played all the way up [through the international ranks] to senior level today. During the qualifying campaign I said to Jeff it would be unbelievable to play together on the big stage. It's not every day something like that happens."

"We grew up very close to each other and we know the same people," Derby County midfielder Hendrick, 24, added. "We've roomed together on every trip [and although] we're not doing so on this one, Robbie still comes into my room to nick my toothpaste."

"We've lots of the same interests, so it's normal that we'd have chats," Brady  the elder by 17 days  continued. "Jeff was probably better when we were young, but then, as we progressed, we were neck and neck [in terms of ability]."

Hoolahan bemoans unlucky irish

Despite hearing their manager Martin O'Neill describe them both as "a revelation" against Sweden, the words haven't fully relieved the frustration of letting slip a 1-0 lead in Saint-Denis. "We were all working hard for each other and were unlucky not to get three points," Hendrick explained. "Jeff had a great effort [that hit the crossbar] which, had it been a foot lower, was in," Brady added.

Ireland next face Belgium on Sunday, opponents O'Neill believes have "possibly the most talented set of individual players at the tournament". Once a promising midfielder for another side dubbed 'The Red Devils', Manchester United academy graduate Brady is ready to be deployed in defence again at the Stade de Bordeaux on Saturday.

"I've played left-back for the last couple of years [and] I'm more comfortable with that now," he said. "I know what type of players the Belgians have; we know they are top class and they will be coming to win, just as we are."

Hendrick echoed those sentiments, saying: "Even though Belgium lost [to Italy], they will still be a dangerous side." For Ireland to come through this weekend's challenge, these lifelong friends must be on song once again.
Lightning has killed a 12-year-old boy and injured his friend, 12, who was hospitalized after a thunderstorm in Kharkiv Region, Kharkiv police spokeswoman Oksana Kalmykova told Ukrinforms local correspondent.

"The tragedy occurred yesterday in the village of Varvarivka in Volchansky district. Two boys, aged 12, were riding on a swing attached to a tree branch. The thunderstorm began suddenly, and the tree was struck by a bolt of lightning. As a result, one boy died, and the other was hospitalized," said Kalmykova.

She noted the deceased child was visiting his grandparents in the village whilst on vacation.

"As to the other child victim, he lives in this village. He is now being looked after in the clinic. As a result of the neurological shock he suffered, he cant walk on his own. His general state of health is stable," the spokeswoman added.

tl
The "DPR" is preparing for "general mobilization", leader of the Information Resistance group Dmytro Tymchuk wrote on Facebook page.

"It was announced that all "the citizens of DPR of military age must register with military district draft offices and the system for communicating warning should be tested. Those persons who avoid "military registration" are threatened with criminal liability," he writes.

Tymchuk draws attention to the fact that these measures in the "DPR" have also coincided in time with the call for the Russian reservists to appear for training.

"During the training that will be held from 14 through 22 June,the reservists will be trained in opening fire, tactical, and "public-state" drills under the supervision of the officers from the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces," he noted.

tl
The Washington Administration intends to allocate an additional $ 220 million to the Ukrainian government to support the process of large-scale reforms in Ukraine, according to the White House communique published after Ukrainian Prime Minister held a meeting with U.S. Vice President on Wednesday, Ukrinform reports.

"The White House plans to commit $220 million in new assistance to Ukraine this year in support of economic, political, and energy reforms," the document notes.

This aid package will continue U.S. commitment to Ukraine's efforts to "strengthen democratic institutions and the rule of law, reinforce the foundations for sustainable economic growth, and respond to humanitarian needs."

It is noted that these funds are also intended to support other key areas on the agenda of ambitious reforms by the Groysman government. In particular, it is intended to accelerate customs office reform, anti-corruption actions by supporting the reform of key sectors of justice, expanding decentralization reform throughout Ukraine and backing energy security.

tl
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has motioned Kyiv City Council to send a letter to Parliament to abolish the resolution adopted by the Cabinet of Ministers that raised natural gas prices for households, he told a briefing on Thursday, Ukrinform reports.

"Earlier, I appealed to the government and to the utilities rates regulation authority to review their new rates. We cannot almost double the rate now, we may face a problem when people are unable to pay bills calculated on the basis of these prices," said Klitschko.

He noted that Kyiv city council would address Parliament, "which should support us and use all mechanisms so that the government would abolish decree number 758 relating to raising natural gas prices for households."

tl
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko will pay a working visit to Mykolayiv Region on June 15, the press service of the Mykolayiv Regional State Administration reports.

Poroshenko will participate in the opening of the production and transshipment complex Bunge Ukraine  the Ukrainian branch of an international integrated company operating on the agricultural productsmarket. He also will meet students and instructors of the Mohyla Black Sea State University in the city of Mykolayiv.

tl
The book "The Emotionally Intelligent Manager" by David Caruso and Peter Salovey was presented in Ukrainian in Kyiv's Hilton Hotels New York meeting room on June 8, at 18.30.

A concept of emotional intelligence (EI) appeared in 1990 and became wide-spreading in Science Field of Western countries (UK, Germany and United States). It includes a number of skills in emotions perception, understanding and management which successful leaders must need to consider. The emotional intelligence is a component in the evaluation of leadership development along with the concept of IQ (intelligence quotient). The research authors have taught thousands of managers around the world to use the skills in their work. They, also, in collaboration with John Mayer, created a test that determines a level of emotional intelligence  Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT).

The authors of the book "The Emotionally Intelligent Manager" were cooperated about 30 years. David Caruso is a research affiliate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence as well as one of the founders of the EI Skills Group. On the other hand, Peter Salovey, a world-well-known scientist, is the 23rd president of Yale University

The Ukrainian edition is the first in the post-Soviet history. It was appeared as a result of a four-year authors collaboration with the teams of "MKD consulting" company which founded by Michael Prazian, foreign language center X-language which is headed by Elena Viktorova and partners of Crowdintel. In early 2015 the publishing house "-" and the Ukrainian League of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (ULIE) joined the project. Specially, the publishing houses director, Ivan Stepurin and vice president of ULIE, Denis Krasnikov dedicated in the project.

The presentation of "The Emotionally Intelligent Manager" Ukrainian edition is supported by the British-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce, the club of Yale University alumni in Ukraine and "MKD consulting".

Bate C. Toms, Chairman of the British-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and an alumnus of Yale University, was a presenter during the event. The presentations were attended by members of the British-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce, Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, the US-Ukrainian Business Council, the club of Yale University alumni in Ukraine, American Chamber of Commerce Ukraine, scientists, representatives of the Ukrainian business environment and civil society, parliament and government.

One of the book authors  Professor David Caruso  presented his work via video. His enthusiastic speeches had lasted more than an hour. Followed by David, Alexander Savruk, Dean of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Business School and his deputy, Eduard Maltsev who is studying the emotional intelligence issue in Ukraine, Yuriy Zelenin, Vice-President of the International Institute of Business, and Victor Halasiuk who chairman of the Commission for Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship of the Verkhovna Rada, also made a speech.

In particular, it could be noted that this book would be valuable not only for students teaching, but it also for get acquainted with it by Ukrainian business leaders

So, Yuriy Zelenin said that in Ukraine there is such a phenomenon, when sometimes the representatives of big business dont have the skills of correct contact with people, therefore the staff in their companies dont stay more than a few months. The participants of the event supported the opinion of Mikhail Titarchuk, Deputy Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, about the need to create a personnel reserve of the Ukrainian government on the basis of cooperation among the leading universities and organizations of Ukraine and the worlds big organizations like EI Skills Group and Yale University.

The discussion had continued during reception and dinner in the hotel Hilton restaurant with the members of the club from Yale University alumni in Ukraine even after the presentation.
The Day of the African Child is celebrated in recognition of June 16, 1976, when thousands of black school children in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest the inferior quality of their education and to demand their right to be taught in their own language. Over the course of that day and the two weeks of protest that followed, more than 100 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured.

Today, the June 16 commemoration also provides an opportunity to reflect on progress towards health, education, equality and protection for all the continents children. This years theme is Conflict and Crisis in Africa: Protecting all childrens rights.

Through U-report  an innovative SMS-based polling and communication tool  youth from nine African countries were polled on what they think of African leaders efforts to end conflicts and how conflicts can be solved.

If the leaders of Africa [want] to end conflicts they must build strong institutions, says Fode. Respect the principles of democracy through the establishment of rule of law and promote good governance, and conflicts will not have fertile soil.



A new tool for freedom of expression

Like their counterparts around the world, youth in Guinea are passionate about a wide range of issues that affect them, including conflict, employment, better access to health  especially in the wake of the recent Ebola outbreak  and education. Before U-Report was launched in Guinea, youth would take to the streets to get their voices heard. Now they have another option.

U-Report is helping young people in Guinea and neighboring countries to express themselves and interact with politicians and policy makers, Fode tells UNICEF.

With better internet connections and improved power grids, more people than ever before have internet access in Guinea. Part of Fodes motivation to use U-Report is his deep interest in technology, combined with his passion for youth participation.
The Southern Miss campus is now offering researchers new opportunities to conduct marine research via the New School of Ocean Science.

Set to house in the USM's College of Science and Technology, the new school also includes a Marine Science Division (Hancock County) as well as a consolidation of marine-related education programs, the Sun Herald reported. Aside from the Marine Science Division, the university's 5 research vessels, USM Gulf Coast Research Lab and Coastal Sciences Division (Ocean Springs) will also be part of the school's latest offering.

USM provost and senior VP for academic affairs Dr. Steven R. Moser expressed excitement over the Southern Mississippi campus' new School of Ocean Science and Technology. "Through the new School of Ocean Science and Technology, the university will position itself as a national leader in marine science research," according to Moser.

The school also composes a system of already existing programs which are geared towards increasing research productivity, and offer wider opportunities for outside funding. Dr. Monty Graham would be assigned director of the new school.

Dr. Graham is the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory interim director and the current chairman of the Marine Science Division at USM. Furthermore, the new School of Ocean Science would be the only school offering an undergraduate degree in the field of Marine Science, highlighting hydrographic studies.

Prior to the creation of the new school, the Coast embarked on the challenge of responding to natural disasters such as those of the 2010 oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, according to Dr. David Hayhurst. Hayhurst is the dean of USM's College of Science and Technology.

A San Diego-based non-profit organization extends its congratulations to USM's efforts in helping provide the Gulf Coast region's economic as well as environmental sustainability. Michael Jones of The Maritime Alliance said that the blue-tech cluster is already looking forward to working together with USM's School of Ocean Science in its marine science efforts.
Upon making it for the first time in America for academic reasons, Michael Kwan had since hit it hard on luxury cars and decides to speed that a bit into a profession for now!

In fact, Kwan has landed great for such trend that finds it worthy to cite him as a modern example for students, specifically the foreign students, to stand confident in achieving their own versions of the American dream, BBC reported,

But such feat by Kwan and many other Chinese luxury car owners or traders in America credit not the mere platitude of the rich and famous, but rather the value of smart thinking and academic discipline.

For the record, most of the Chinese car owners in America generally hold scholarship badges from a number of sophisticated Universities in America.

And looking at the success of Michael Kwan's career in the car trading business, one can see a very proud "University of Illinois" standing behind.

The story of Michael Kwan's healthy attraction to cars began when he was still a Chinese-mainland freshman in the University of Illinois who had practically no further idea on how to make a turnabout of the excess from the generous budget his parents allotted him.

What Kwan did was a very good move that led to speedy luxurious results.

And, the rest was history.

From the very first $80,000 "Cadillac Escalade" he bought, he now finds himself trading with "Nissan GT-Rs", "Maserati Quattroporte" and "2012 Mercedes SLS" with his co-collectors and traders in the "New York Auto Depot", Smile Politely enumerated.

It was an expensive lifestyle, that is-- but it also promises expensive turnabouts.

And such financial turnabouts have very less to zero drawbacks!

The New York Auto Depot currently remains one of the biggest Auto Trading business site in America to date, BBC reported.

As to the rest of the Chinese-mainland students in America, they must owe their current and future successes to three important wheel-setters in motion-- their Chinese entrepreneurial heritage, the glorious array of luxury cars available in the country and the motivating Universities they are enrolled at in America.
Tulsa Learning Center will be moving out and online enrollments will be limited. Courses offers by Phoenix University will be limited.

University of Phoenix Tulsa Learning Center in Oklahoma was closed last February 2013, says NewsOK. The said university which occupies an entire 15,197-square-foot space, announced last 2012 that the university will pull-out as part of its transition online services only in Oklahoma.

As for those students who are in a 'teach-out' situation, the university will provide necessary adjustments to accommodate the students until they finish their course on 2017, Tulsa World reported. "The learning center at 14002 E 21st likely will close in spring or summer 2017" said Rauzon,University of Phoenix spokesman. In Oklahoma City, students will attend classes in a conference room located at Crown Plaza Hotel, 2945 Northwest Expressway and the University of Phoenix is said to be renting an office space across the street in the Union Plaza Business Center.

President Timothy Slottow, the university president, sent a letter to the faculty and staff explaining the decision of moving out the university. Inside the letter, it was mentioned that all the campus and learning centers were assessed according to their total working adult population, job demand, employer trends, population density, student demand and preference, state education levels and the labor market. But this evaluation made it difficult to enroll students in their respective campuses but the president said that, the university will still accept online applications in these states.

Now, Oklahoma City only offers courses in information technology, business and management, criminal justice, and nursing. "The decision to control online enrolment was first decided last 2012", Rauzon, the university spokesman said.

The university spokesman also mentioned that, the best possible strategy to focus on fewer markets is to limit the enrolment and as of April, it was reported that, 162,400 students were enrolled and it was fewer compared to their past enrollment.
North Carolina court headed by James Denver, District Judge reportedly ended North Carolina State University's policy requiring Christian student groups to secure a permit before exercising any form of sharing their faith to any student in the campus.

The order was issued months after Grace Christian Life, a registered religious student group at the NC State University filed a lawsuit against the university administration. The lawsuit stated that Grace's freedom to join in religious expression have been suppressed because of fear of punishment.

The suit further stated that the policy violated the right of the student group to exercise the First Amendment's freedom of speech and to exercise religion.

The university administration on the other hand accepted the court decision.

Tyson Langhofer, Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel said that they welcome the court's decision to stop the NC State's policy as he believes that the First Amendment is the only permit required for free speech in a public university, Christian Today reported.

It was reported that in September 2015, the North Carolina State University ordered Grace to stop approaching students inside the campus unless they secured a permit.

Seeing the other students and student group activity's ability not being restricted from engaging in expressive activities, Alliance Defending Freedom allegedly believed that Grace Christian Life has been singled out.

The order came out when one University official sent an email to another Christian club concerned official. The email talks about a certain "Tommy," who allegedly solicits around the campus, opens a conversation about religion and ends up giving the students a card.

Grace Christian Life is a member of the Chaplain's Cooperative Ministry, an independent organization supporting individual campus ministries partnering with the university. But, after a meeting between the CCM and university official about the policy; the NC cut off its relationship with CCM in November 2015, Fox News reported.
When press reports hinting that two among the 50 victims of the weekend's fatal assault in an Orlando-based gay club were students surfaced online, it immediately sparked discussions in US Universities that have been on the vigil after the incident.

Vincent J. Intondi, a professor who until recently instilled knowledge in Florida, took to his Twitter handle Sunday to express his fears. Intondi was just one among several others from the academic community to think about the victims of Sunday morning mass assault at a gay club in Orlando, InsideHighered reported.

I am dreading seeing the victim list. I taught so many students at Seminole State, knew many more at UCF. #Orlando  Vincent J. Intondi (@VincentIntondi) June 12, 2016

Although only a few have been identified by the investigators, press reports indicated two among them were students: Juan Ramon Guerrero and Luis Velma.

According to Guerrero's family members, he had just started attending the University of Central Florida. His family members told the Associate Press that the 22-year-old was extremely happy to attend the university. Luis Velma, 22, on the other hand worked at Universal Orlando, and was attending Florida-based Seminole State College. He aspired to become an EMT, TheOrlandoSentinel reported.

In a statement released Sunday just before victims started to be identified, John Hitt, president of University of Central Florida described the attack on the club as extremely painful, frieghtening and provoking for many at the institute. He also pointed out in the statement that he expected many of the victims to have some sort of connection with the people at the university.In a bid to help those affected by the Orlando shooting, the university will be offering additional police services and consultation.

UCF police officers were quick to respond to the reports of shootings at the gay club in Orlando. Although the university noted in a statement that no threats have made against the institute yet, police presence will boosted. In addition, the university's LGBTQ Services office will remain open throughout the week for students seeking support after the Orlando shooting incident.While it seems that the attacker specifically targeted the LGBTQ community, investigators are still learning about the assault.

Several other Orlando-based colleges took to social media to announce extra support for students affected by the Orlando shooting.
The Academic institutions, common victims to mass shootings and other acts of terrorism initiate research and join the courts in making a conclusion to increase the ban on weapons.

Of all the domains that are bound to empathize with the victims of the recent massacre in Orlando, academics prove to be the most eligible.

For an arresting fact- there had been, since 2013, at least 188 school shootings in the country; averaging to almost 1 shooting incident in a week, Every Town reported.

And now, joined hand-in-hand by grieving families, political analysts, as well as religious and court figures, the academics confidently spew out implicit blames to the U.S. policies.

But instead of fanning the fire to inevitable blame-game shenanigans, the academics finally initiates legal research, delving deeper into the nitty-gritty of the "U.S. gun laws".

As expected, the courts are working on the best means of speeding up the legal process to attain genuine legal closure and, of course, direct implementation of the laws.

Since disputes are inevitable in legal proceedings and court investigations, academics thereunto plea for the volatile NRA denizens and other advocates to bear with the whole effort with an open-mind.

For instance, in the case of Pres. Obama's tag of the AR-15-style rifle used in curtailing 50 lives in Orlando as an assault weapon, many are actually dissing the statement, the Atlantic City Lab reported.

In the light of this matter, careful investigation and research is being pushed through by a specific group of Colombia University researchers and a few court representatives.

And the findings of this research are being highlighted by a conclusion that reveals decreased firearm deaths from increased implementation of laws targeting multiple firearms restrictions.

There had been mixed reactions from denizens, advocates and critics to this move. But as much as the academics are concerned, they are to do what they know is best for the country and its people.

For that noble cause, whether it is to amend or totally change the U.S. gun laws, the academics stand strong in uniting the country against terrorism.
Looks like an all-new iPad Mini is in the making and it is rumoured to follow the same release pattern as last year's device, and is slated to debut sometime within the next few months.

Several rumours doing rounds online hint Apple will take the wraps off the new iPad Mini along with the highly anticipated iPhone lineup in September and no prizes for guessing, these speculations have the fans going berserk.

The Cupertino-based tech firm unveiled its upcoming iOS 10 update during the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2016. While final version is rumoured to debut along with a slew of other Apple products in autumn this year, a beta version of the OS will be provided to the public in July, MacWorld reported.

The iPad Mini 4 was unveiled on September 9, at a press event hosted by Apple to announce the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, the new Apple TV, iPad mini and iPad Pro.

iPad Mini's September debut was a bit surprising taking into consideration that Apple debuted the original iPad Mini, iPad Mini 2 and iPad Mini 3 during October events, each time landing a month after a September iPhone release. Things apparently changed last year as Apple skipped the October event, and merged its new iPhone and iPad unveiling into a single night.

That being said, Apple did add a new date to its agenda in 2015; a March event where it unwrapped the new Apple watch and Macs.

During its March event, Apple also debuted a slew of other Apple products including iOS 9.3, iPad Air Pro 9.7, iPhone SE along with brand-new Apple Watch straps. However, the tech giant remained mum about the launch of the iPad Mini 5, and this sparked rumours hinting that Apple will probably unveil it in autumn this year - sometime in September.

In terms of specs, the purported iPad Mini 5 will sport a comparatively slimmer chassis made from 7000-series aluminium and as a result, it will be much more stronger than the previous iPad Mini devices, EecumenicalNews reported.

But that's not all, if rumours proved true, the new iPad Mini 5 will feature the 3D Touch technology which first made its appearance on iPhone 6's lineup in 2015. As far as software is concerned, the iPad Mini 5 is rumoured to run on the new iOS 10 operating system in collaboration with Dark mode.Citing the scheduled iOS device launches, its common for the product to hit the shelves more than a week after its original debut, but this didn't seem to be the case with Apple as it unwrapped the iPad Mini 4 at the same time it announced the device's retail launch.

As far as the UK release is concerned, it will probably be on the same date as the primary launch in the United States.
Union Pacific Plans to Invest $14.3 Million in its Washington Rail Infrastructure

Union Pacific plans to invest $14.3 million in 2016 to improve Washington's transportation infrastructure. The company's multi-million dollar private investment will enhance employee, community and customer safety and increase rail operating efficiency. Freight railroads like Union Pacific operate on track built and maintained without taxpayer funds. Union Pacific's private investments sustain jobs and ensure the company meets growing demand for products used in the American economy.

Union Pacific's planned investment covers a range of initiatives: $13.6 million to maintain railroad track and $741 thousand to maintain bridges in the state. Key projects planned this year include:

Almost $10 million investment in the rail line along the Ayer Subdivision north of Wallula to replace almost 19 miles of rail.

$475 thousand investment in the rail line in Spokane to replace almost 1 mile of curve rail.

This year's planned $14.3 million capital expenditure in Washington is part of an ongoing investment strategy. From 2011 to 2015 Union Pacific invested more than $31 million strengthening Washington's transportation infrastructure.

"We constantly evaluate our customers' needs to make targeted investments that enhance our efficiency and deliver the goods American businesses and families use daily," said Wes Lujan, Union Pacific vice president - Public Affairs, Western Region. "Continuing to aggressively invest in our infrastructure is an important element in Union Pacific's unwavering safety commitment."

Union Pacific plans to spend $3.75 billion across its network this year, following investments totaling approximately $33 billion from 2006-2015. These investments contributed to a 25 percent decrease in derailments over the last 10 years.

ABOUT UNION PACIFIC

Union Pacific Railroad is the principal operating company of Union Pacific Corporation (NYSE: UNP). One of America's most recognized companies, Union Pacific Railroad connects 23 states in the western two-thirds of the country by rail, providing a critical link in the global supply chain. From 2006-2015, Union Pacific invested approximately $33 billion in its network and operations to support America's transportation infrastructure. The railroad's diversified business mix includes Agricultural Products, Automotive, Chemicals, Coal, Industrial Products and Intermodal. Union Pacific serves many of the fastest-growing U.S. population centers, operates from all major West Coast and Gulf Coast ports to eastern gateways, connects with Canada's rail systems and is the only railroad serving all six major Mexico gateways. Union Pacific provides value to its roughly 10,000 customers by delivering products in a safe, reliable, fuel-efficient and environmentally responsible manner.

The statements and information contained in the news releases provided by Union Pacific speak only as of the date issued. Such information by its nature may become outdated, and investors should not assume that the statements and information contained in Union Pacific's news releases remain current after the date issued. Union Pacific makes no commitment, and disclaims any duty, to update any of this information.
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A vigil will be held Thursday, June 16, on the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point campus to mark Sunday's mass shooting in Orlando, Fla.

The community is welcome to join students, staff and faculty members at 4 p.m. in the Specht Sundial. In case of rain, the vigil will be held in the Noel Fine Arts Center courtyard.

The vigil is hosted by the universitys Office of Diversity and College Access.

It will include moments of reflection and respect to honor those who have lost lives and support those who are grieving, said Al Thompson, vice chancellor for student affairs at UW-Stevens Point.

Thompson and Chancellor Bernie Patterson will attend. Participants will have an opportunity to speak if desired and share in a moment of silence. The names of the 49 victims will be read.

The June 12 incident was the deadliest shooting spree in U.S. history.


Energy Summer Institute at UW Begins June 19

Cody DeBoer, a School of Energy Resources undergraduate student from Laramie; Skye Bensel, from Sheridan; Megan Holland, from Fort Collins, Colo.; and Taylor Delaney, from Casper, race solar cars they built during the 2015 Energy Summer Institute. (Samuel Mallory Photo)

Twenty students from Wyoming and two other states will engage in energy-related, hands-on activities during the Energy Summer Institute at the University of Wyoming June 19-24.

Sponsored by the UW School of Energy Resources (SER), the annual Energy Summer Institute offers experiences designed to fire students imaginations related to challenging energy issues facing the world. Participating students are incoming sophomores and juniors in high school.

The School of Energy Resources is committed to providing students with a well-rounded experience that provides opportunities for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning, youth development and increased energy literacy, says Sarah Ramsey-Walters, SERs K-12 energy education coordinator.

The Energy Summer Institute provides several energy-related sessions that guide students through hands-on learning activities. Instructors are graduate students from the departments of Physics and Astronomy, and Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences; and the departments of Chemical Engineering and Petroleum Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. In addition, the students will learn from specialists with the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute and SER.

The students will learn about electrical generation, combustion, solar energy, petroleum engineering and 3-D visualization.

Throughout the week, the students will learn about opportunities at UW and participate in extracurricular activities. They will learn to rock climb at Vedauwoo with instructors from UWs Outdoor Program, and they will explore the science behind geocaching with Alan Buss, an associate professor in the College of Education. To gain a perspective of electrical generation with a coal-fired power plant, the students will tour the Laramie River Station in Wheatland.

The Energy Summer Institute offers an exceptional and unique experience to students by drawing upon the expertise of faculty, staff and graduate students across campus, Ramsey-Walters says. Students can experience life at UW and engage in activities unique to this area.

Participating students, listed by their hometowns, are:

Brush, Colo. -- Nathaniel Miner.

Centennial -- Bethany Williams and Elijah Williams.

Cheyenne -- Joel Kelsey.

Fort Bridger -- Maddison Bindl.

Fort Collins, Colo. -- Elaina Martin, Nehal Patel and Pratik Patel.

Green River -- Jacob Angelovich, Samantha Hardin, Cruz Lucero and Josh Mattson.

Lafayette, Colo. -- Daniele Reardon.

Laramie -- Helena Bryant, Jordan De Young, Caitlin Huang and Megan McFate.

Lone Tree, Colo. -- Ngwena Mancho.

Richmond, Va. -- John Brennan.

Wheatland -- Cole James.
UW Trustees Back Plan for Budget Reductions

The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees has approved a budget that will reduce ongoing spending by about $19 million and internally reallocate about $6 million in one-time funding during the fiscal year that begins July 1.

In addition, the board today (Wednesday) endorsed a plan recommended by President Laurie Nichols to identify ongoing savings of at least an additional $10 million for the following fiscal year. Those reductions would include program cuts and restructuring following a review process that is underway this summer.

The boards actions are in line with the budget-cutting approach presented by Nichols to UW employees and students during a town-hall meeting on campus in May.

We have managed to avoid program cuts and layoffs in the fiscal year that begins next month, but those types of reductions will be unavoidable in the following year, Nichols says. With the initial round of cuts approved, well now move forward with a fair and open process to tackle the second round -- with a continuing commitment to student success, quality programs and excellence in research and service to the state.

Nichols says she will present a plan to achieve the necessary reductions in the second year of the biennium to the UW Board of Trustees in September. To accomplish that, she will declare a financial crisis under university regulations, triggering a process that will involve a university-wide meeting and consultation with a committee composed of administrators, faculty and staff members.

The reductions are a result of a drop in the universitys state block grant, driven by Wyomings economic downturn and loss of state government revenue. For the biennium that begins July 1, UW faces a loss of nearly $41 million in state funding. In addition, the university needs to reallocate dollars internally to cover costs related to a new financial and reporting system, increased utility expenses and other needs. For the biennium, that brings the total of necessary reductions to more than $50 million.

The budget approved today for the coming fiscal year includes a total of $7 million in cuts based upon allocations given to campus units when the Legislature mandated a 1.5 percent reduction during the 2016 session -- and as a result of a need for internal reallocations. Subsequently, Gov. Matt Mead directed that $35 million be reduced from UWs state appropriation for the 2017-18 biennium.

Under the approved budget, UW will reduce spending by about $19 million in the upcoming fiscal year -- cuts that will carry over to the second year of the biennium and likely beyond. The biggest piece of that reduction is eliminating at least 70 vacant positions across the university, which is expected to save about $5.2 million per year. Additional savings will come from standardizing the teaching load for faculty members and severely limiting temporary faculty appointments ($2.5 million); offering a retirement and separation incentive to some longtime employees ($3 million); not allowing part-time positions to be benefitted between half-time and full-time ($1.5 million); and eliminating overtime and overload pay (at least $100,000).

Separately, the board approved the details of the retirement incentive plan -- which is offered to employees who are at least 61 years old and have worked at least 15 years at UW, 10 of which must be consecutive -- and a separation incentive plan for employees 61 or older with fewer years of service to UW. Those wishing to participate in the plan must retire or resign between July 1 and Aug. 5, and among the incentives is a payment equal to the employees salary from the date of retirement/separation until Dec. 31, 2016.

Also, in the coming fiscal year, the university expects to identify about $6 million in one-time reallocations and savings to be used for immediate needs. That money will come from a number of reserve accounts across campus; unspent salary funding; and a voluntary program in which summer hours for certain full-time employees could be reduced to 32 hours (with pay for 32 hours).

The reductions that will be necessary in the following fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2017, will be more difficult, Nichols says. Reducing spending by at least an additional $10 million annually likely will require elimination of some programs, based upon the program reviews.

University (academic and non-academic) programs must be evaluated for reduction or elimination if the university is to be able to construct an FY2018 budget in light of the reduced revenues from the state of Wyoming, possibly reduced tuition revenue, the need to fund utility costs, and the need to ensure the universitys information technology operation meets the needs of the campus, the president wrote in her message declaring a financial crisis under university regulations. As such, immediate steps must be taken to identify those programs so that plans for implementing changes can be developed during FY 2017 in anticipation of implementation in FY 2018.

A general meeting for the university community to explain the financial crisis declaration is scheduled Wednesday, June 22, at 3 p.m. in UWs Arts and Sciences auditorium. UW employees unable to attend in person will be able to view the meeting on the WyoCast system.

The next step is the convening of a Financial Crisis Advisory Committee, composed of the vice president for academic affairs; the vice president for administration; two deans selected by the Deans Council; two faculty members each from the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, the Academic Planning Committee and the Budget Planning Committee; two Staff Senate members; and the president or designee from the Associated Students of UW. The president will consult with the committee in the creation of the plan to present to the Board of Trustees.

Nichols says she doesnt intend to declare a financial exigency, which denotes a financial crisis so severe that the termination of positions held by tenured faculty members is required. Before submitting such a request, she would have to inform the Financial Crisis Advisory Committee.

I believe there are actions UW can take when reducing or eliminating programs to avoid a recommendation of financial exigency, the president says. The declaration of a financial crisis is different than a recommendation to declare financial exigency. The declaration of the former does not mean that the latter is a foregone conclusion -- far from it.

No decisions have been made about reducing or eliminating specific academic programs, Nichols says. But the program review process that began this spring is continuing, focused on undergraduate programs with fewer than 25 graduates over a five-year period, and masters degree programs with fewer than 15 graduates over a five-year period.

Additional review will be performed on undergraduate programs with 25-50 graduates over a five-year period, and masters degree programs with 15-25 graduates.

While the Office of Academic Affairs began by looking at programs with low demand, the review process takes into account demand, quality and centrality to the UW mission. Review can result in retention because of critical need, retention with further review at a later time, consolidation or termination.

I understand the concern and uncertainty for those associated with the programs under review, but program reviews are a routine practice required by the universitys accrediting agency, Nichols says. Its just that the financial climate the university faces right now makes the review process especially important, because it will help inform the plan we present to the Board of Trustees.

Other potential cost savings starting in the second year of the biennium could come from reorganizing academic and non-academic units; reducing, eliminating or combining non-essential services and programs; reviewing all administrative appointments; analyzing all positions and moving as many as possible to nine- or 10-month contracts; studying opportunities to reduce staffing levels or task frequency; and evaluating opportunities to outsource some UW operations.

At the same time, the plan calls for the pursuit of new revenues for the second year of the biennium and beyond. That could be done by developing a plan to fully utilize private endowment and gift dollars; developing a plan for program fees and differentiated tuition for high-cost programs; and increasing enrollment of nonresident students.

For the long term, the administration proposes, among other things, to develop a strong strategic plan to include higher fiscal performance; diversify revenue sources, with less reliance on increases in state support; develop a plan for tuition and fees, along with enrollment growth; implement a responsibility-centered management budget model; develop a merit salary policy and ongoing plan for salary increases; incentivize external funding and grow technology transfer; and launch a capital campaign to support the strategic plan.

I have heard faculty and staff repeatedly express concerns about low morale. Declaring a financial crisis is a step that, by its nature, is unlikely to improve morale, Nichols says. The university must deal decisively with the reductions in revenues that affect both FY 2017 and FY 2018. But, as I will continue to emphasize, refocusing our efforts over the next two years will place UW in a far more favorable position for the future. That is the reason I accepted the position of president, and I remain committed to that as we move forward.
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THEATER

VENTURA COUNTY

"The Fantasticks": The Camarillo Skyway Playhouse presents the Broadway musical about a boy and girl and their scheming parents. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through July 10, 330 Skyway Drive, Camarillo. 388-5716; http://skywayplayhouse.org.

"Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance": Rubicon Theatre Company presents husband-and-wife duo Beverly and Kirby Ward as the fourth event of the 2015-2016 Janet and Mark L. Goldenson Broadway Musical Concert Series. The couple will perform dance numbers and American standards like "Isn't This a Lovely Day?", "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Being Alive." 2 and 8 p.m. June 18, 2 p.m. June 19, 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. $69.50. 667-2900; http://rubicontheatre.org.

"Henry V": The Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival kicks off its 20th season and honors the 400th anniversary of the Bard of Avon's death with this history play that was one of the most popular with original audiences. 8 p.m. Fridays through Sundays, June 24 through July 10, Kingsmen Park, CLU, 60 W. Olsen Road, Thousand Oaks. $20 general admission, free for children under 18. 493-3014; http://kingsmenshakespeare.org.

"The Mousetrap": Elite Theatre Company presents the long-running Agatha Christie murder mystery set in a country hotel. John Eslick directs and German actor Alexander Schottky stars in the production. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through July 3, 2731 S. Victoria Ave., Oxnard. $18 general admission, $15 seniors, students and military. 483-5118; http://elitetheatre.org.

"The Addams Family": High Street Arts Center presents this musical comedy based on the macabre television family from the 1960s. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through July 3, 45 E. High St., Moorpark. $20 general admission, $18 seniors, students, teachers and military, $16 children 12 and younger. 529-8700; http://highstreetartscenter.com.

"Figaro": Panic! Productions will close its season with Charles Morey's recent adaptation of the classic Beaumarchais farce exploring themes of love, deceit, mistaken identity and social class. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through June 19, Hillcrest Center for the Arts, 403 W. Hillcrest Drive, Thousand Oaks. $20 general admission, $17.50 seniors and students. 381-1246; http://hillcrestarts.com.

"The Wiz": Actors' Repertory Theatre of Simi presents the musical classic by Charlie Smalls and William F. Brown. Directed by Keenon Hooks, the production is an urbanized retelling of L. Frank Baum's novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and features a live orchestra. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through July 10, Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, 3050 Los Angeles Ave., Simi Valley. 583-7900; http://simi-arts.org.

Down South

"In Case of Emergency": Chalk Repertory Theatre presents Ruth McKee's comedy about a woman trying to sort through the emergency supplies that fill her garage and the issues that fill her personal life. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, through July 3, various private homes in Montrose, Atwater Village and Pasadena. $20-$30. 323-379-9583; http://chalkrep.com.

"42nd Street": Song, dance and the American dream play out on a Broadway stage in this Tony Award-winning musical. Through June 19, Hollywood Pantages, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 800-982-2787; http://hollywoodpantages.com.

CLASSES

VENTURA COUNTY

African drumming class: Malik Sow, an African master drummer from Senegal, and Solo Soro, from Ivory Coast, lead a weekly class in West African drumming from 7:30-9 p.m. Mondays at Lightning Ridge Screen Printing, 4435 McGrath St., Ventura. Cost is $20 per class, and a drum can be rented for $5. For information or to arrange a drum rental, call 650-7455.

COMEDY

Up North

Jerry Seinfeld: The comedian, actor and writer makes a rare stop along the Central Coast to perform his stand-up routine. 7 and 9:30 p.m. July 21, Chumash Casino Resort in Santa Ynez. For tickets or more information, visit http://www.chumashcasino.com.

Down South

Comics Support Their Own: An all-star benefit featuring Ray Romano, Brian Regan, Bill Burr, Dana Carvey, Louie Anderson, Bob Saget, Jon Lovitz and hosted by Arsenio Hall. June 20, Saban Theatre, Beverly Hills. For tickets visit http://www.sabantheatre.com.
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It's summer, time to indulge in books with the help of Three Good Reads. Every week for the next several months, four local librarians will recommend books for readers from preschool to adults. Have a book you would like to recommend? Click here or complete the form below.

 AUGUST 19 

In this week's Three Good Reads, we have another compelling mix of books for adults, this time touching on murder, mental illness and race. These recommendations come from Ron Solorzano, city librarian with the Ventura County Library System.

Next week we'll have recommendations for kids in elementary school.

Title: Speakers of the Dead

Author: J. Aaron Sanders

Plot: A work of historical fiction and Sanders' debut novel, "Speakers of the Dead" introduces readers to a young Walt Whitman as he wrestles with a gruesome mystery in 19th-century New York. The crime at the heart of the novel is murder, and the victim Dr. Abraham Stowe, co-founder of the Women's Medical College of Manhattan. Stowe died by poisoning, and the one accused of killing him is his wife, Lena. Both Abraham and Lena were friends of Whitman, and when she is convicted and hanged, Whitman vows to investigate further and clear her name. This leads the future author of "Leaves of Grass" to become embroiled in a web of politics, deceit, and grave-robbing  and earns him some dangerous enemies.

Why I Like It: Sanders doesn't shy away from the details in his first offering, which is heavy on descriptions of both grave robbery and dissection. This allows the reader to become genuinely immersed in the intrigue surrounding the politics of body-snatching by so-called Resurrection Men. A solid mystery built around an engaging protagonist, "Speakers of the Dead" is a truly compelling blend of fact and fiction that sheds light on the politics, journalism, and social trends of 1840s America, and specifically New York. It's an interesting take on the topic of medical research and the character of Whitman himself, who proves to be a compelling vehicle for Sanders and one he plans to revisit in future installments of this series.

Five words or less: A dark, gruesome historical mystery.

Title: Imagine Me Gone

Author: Adam Haslett

Plot: Haslett's "Imagine Me Gone" follows a family across decades, starting with the engagement of Margaret and John as they are faced with a difficult choice. John becomes hospitalized, suffering from depression, and Margaret finds herself grappling with whether to go ahead with the wedding. The two decide to stay together, and face the very real challenges that lie ahead as they build a life together and start a family. Their children  Michael, Celia, and Alec  grow up with their father's illness as a strong presence in their lives, and over time it becomes apparent that the firstborn Michael has inherited the same condition.

Why I like it: For families who have experienced mental illness, this novel will bring forward a lot of heavy emotions. Haslett deals with the complexity of the subject artfully and authentically, communicating to the reader just how pervasive and oppressive depression can be. As the chapters rotate between the points of view of each family member, we are given a sense of how each is affected by John's  and later Michael's  condition. The characters are richly developed and rendered with an incredible emotion that makes this an intense and devastating story of pain, anguish, and ultimately healing.

Five words or less: A heartbreaking, moving family saga.

Title: We Love You, Charlie Freeman

Author: Kaitlyn Greenidge

Plot: In this debut novel, Greenidge introduces us to the Freeman family  Laurel, Charles, and their daughters, Charlotte and Callie. The Freemans are selected to move to the Toneybee Institute in Massachusetts as part of a research experiment. Chosen for their fluency in sign language, the family is to raise a young chimpanzee named Charlie as one of their own, teaching him to communicate along the way. Charlotte in particular is unhappy with this arrangement, and this feeling is exacerbated by the increasingly apparent racial animosity in their new community, as well as the troubling history of the institute itself.

Why I like it: There is a lot going on in this novel, but the question of race and how we talk about it is front and center. We learn of the isolation that led a young Laurel to learn sign language in the first place, and the bigotry that she and her family still face on a daily basis. The greater themes of communication and burgeoning identity contribute to what is ultimately a compelling coming-of-age story for Charlotte and an intricate portrait of a family that gradually becomes unhinged by the stresses of the experiment they've been made a part of. Greenidge's first novel is sure to provoke thoughtful discussions on issues of race, culture, language, and family.

Five words or less: Thoughtful, sobering, and culturally relevant.

 JULY 29 

In this week's Three Good Reads, we have books for kids in elementary school. One involves two cats that are friends; another is about a girl's search for her lost dog. These recommendations come from Sienna Sydlaske, the youth librarian at the Ray D. Prueter Library in Port Hueneme.

Next week: books for young adults.

Title: Stick Cat: A Tail of Two Kitties

Author: Tom Watson

Plot: The first book in the new Stick Cat Series introduces the reader to Stick Cat and his self-absorbed friend, Edith. When an accident interrupts the daily routine Stick Cat and Edith share, the two cats are thrown into an uproarious adventure that has them soaring to new heights. Can the two cats work together to save the day?

Why I like it: Tom Watson's playful illustrations and humorous writing make this a great book for young audiences new to longer chapter books.

Age: 7-12

Title: Rain Reign

Author: Ann M. Martin

Plot: Rose has a difficult time connecting with other kids, but has her dog, Rain, to keep her company. When a hurricane strikes, and Rain gets lost in the storm, Rose begins looking for her lost dog. When Rain is found, Rose makes a startling discovery. Faced with hard decisions, Rose must challenge the social limitations she faces on a daily basis to seek the truth.

Why I like it: Ann M. Martin weaves a wonderful tale of friendship and courage and what it means to do the right thing  no matter how much it might hurt. Martin's effortless style connects the reader to Rose immediately, building both empathy and understanding.

Age: 8-12

Awards: 2015 Schneider Family Book Award Winner, American Library Association Notable Books for Children 2015, 2015 Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Title: Death By Toilet Paper

Author: Donna Gephart

Plot: Benjamin Epstein is a sweepstakes enthusiast. His father passed away from cancer about a year ago, and he and his mother have fallen on hard times. Ben hopes that a sweepstakes entry for a new slogan for toilet paper will result in a windfall that can change their financial situation until his mother can pass her accountant exam. No longer able to wait for his sweepstakes to pay off, Ben has to start a new and risky enterprise that will help him take care of his family  if he can avoid the trouble that follows him.

Why I like it: Gephart's story is punctuated with sad and poignant moments, creating a narrative with more emotional depth than is often typical. Ben is caught in bouts of grief, anger, and the trials of growing up with a tremendous loss looming over him.

Age: 8  12

Awards: 2015 Sydney Taylor Honor Book

 JULY 22 

We have three novels about families  specifically relationships among siblings, and between sons and fathers  in this week's Three Good Reads. Our recommendations for adults come from Ron Solorzano, a regional librarian with the Ventura County Library System.

Title: Shelter

Author: Jung Yun

Plot: College professor Kyung Cho, the child of Korean immigrants, has created a life for himself, his wife, Gillian, and their son in their suburban home. But the family's fortunes have taken a turn. His marriage is strained, and his house is worth less than they owe on it, creating a financial strain that has Kyung considering moving in with his parents. While a difficult childhood and violent family history make him reluctant to reconnect, he finds his mother and father thrust back into his life when they become victims of a violent home invasion. Forced to confront the issues in his past, Kyung must struggle with his family to find a way forward.

Why I like it: Jung Yun's debut novel paints a picture of an immigrant family dealing with issues of abuse, both physical and emotional, and explores the effects of that past on its protagonist. Kyung's attempts to manage his own foundering situation are disrupted by his parent's trauma, and being thrown back in contact with them brings back a flurry of long-buried feelings and behaviors that threaten the life he and his wife have tried to create together. This crucible of wild emotion may ultimately be the only path Kyung has toward gaining a greater understanding of his parents and himself. The story is riveting and told with a powerful sensitivity that will drive readers through its pages.

Title: The Past

Author: Tessa Hadley

Plot: A visit to their grandparents' house in the country puts siblings Harriet, Alice, Fran, and Roland back in contact with each other to decide what to do with the property. With their parents gone, they face the prospect of selling the house where they lived as children after their mother left their father. Joining them are members of their extended families: assorted teenaged children and stepchildren and Roland's latest wife. Over the following weeks the now middle-aged siblings wind up facing the ways their relationships have changed over the years, and the children are left to explore the expansive property  and their feelings for each other.

Why I like it: The plot is confined to the grounds of the estate, although it includes an interlude into the past that explores the reasons and emotions surrounding why the children's mother left their father. The rest of the story is similarly inward-looking, delving deep into each character's individual psyche while paying close attention to the interplay among them all. The mundane business of whether or not to sell the house is ultimately supplanted by an examination of the nuanced relationships and complicated histories that have battered and shaped this family. This depth is sure to keep readers going; there is a lot that happens and much that is revealed, despite relatively little action.

Title: This Census-Taker

Author: China Mieville

Plot: Elements of magical realism run through this story told by the narrator, a nameless child who lives with his parents in a house on a hill. The relationship between his mother and father ends violently when the boy witnesses a traumatic event that he cannot fully understand. His attempts to find help in the village below are fruitless, and he is left alone in the house with a father who is becoming increasingly unstable. Flash forward to years later, and the narrator reveals that he is a prisoner, under guard and writing his account in solitude. The arrival of a visitor, an official who comes to speak with the boy, could remove him from this dark situation, though it is unclear what will happen to him next.

Why I like it: The vagueness of the narrative contributes to its mystical feel, leading the reader through a haze where it is unclear what can be trusted  even the narrator's own recollections seem shrouded with doubt. This novella blends elements from multiple genres, emerging as part horror, part mystery and part fantasy. There is a certain minimalism to Mieville's style that makes the reader work to get to the book's core, but fans of this type of unconventional complexity will appreciate the questions raised about memory, stories, and meaning.

 JULY 15 

Recommendations for kids

This week in Three Good Reads, we have a bedtime story with crickets, owls and sea otters; a yellow dot leading kids on adventures; and some poetry by Langston Hughes. The recommendations come from Charlotte Burrows, children's and young adult services supervisor at the Thousand Oaks Library.

Next week, we'll have recommendations for adults.

Title: Cricket Song

Author: Anne Hunter

Plot: As crickets sing in the breeze, hunting owls watch over the bay, and sea otters doze on the tide, two children on different continents go to bed. Falling asleep in their beds on seemingly opposite sides of the world, these two children are dreamily connected through sounds and smells in this lyrical bedtime story featuring images of gentle animals prowling in the night.

Why I like it: A poignant and beautiful bedtime book, Cricket Song evokes the sounds and animals of the night and shows how two children on different continents are connected by all that is between them. Readers will love identifying various creatures portrayed in the book and watching what they are doing as the two children sleep. While differences between cultures may be obvious, ultimately this lovely story of sleep is a tale about connection.

Age: 4-7

Title: Let's Play

Author: Herve Tullet

Plot: An adventurous little yellow dot leads young children on a journey filled with color, motion and shape, while exploring a child's imagination. By the creator of "Press Here" and "Mix It Up!"

Why I like it: As in his previous books, Tullet engages readers in his innovative, interactive style by inviting them on an adventure with a simple yellow dot. The use of mostly primary colors set against white backgrounds allows little ones to focus on important details and involves them in the action. To go along with the physical interactivity, this delightful concept book also encourages a broad range of emotional responses and repeated sharing.

Age: 2-5

Title: Sail Away

Author: Poems by Langston Hughes; art by Ashley Bryan.

Plot: A collection of Langston Hughes poems about the majesty of the sea. Each celebration of mermaids, waves, creatures of the deep and the wild sea is paired with cut-paper collage illustrations by artist Ashley Bryan, who has won multiple Coretta Scott King awards.

Why I like it: This rich, poetic picture book skillfully presents Hughes' simple yet lush sea-themed poems, capturing his autobiographical adventures seeing the world while working as a seaman. Bryan used his mother's sewing scissors to make colorful double-page collages to depict these poems with stylized, exquisite interpretations. A vibrant pairing of poetry and art to be enjoyed in summer and the whole year through.

Age: 4-8

Awards: Parent's Choice Award for Poetry; School Library Journal Best Books of 2015  Nonfiction.

 JULY 1 

Recommendations for kids

In this week's Three Good Reads, we have a feline ballerina, two pairs of friends and a magical harmonica. These books, recommended by Sienna Sydlaske, youth librarian at the Ray D. Prueter Library in Port Hueneme, are for kids in elementary school.

Title: Ballet Cat: The Totally Secret Secret

Author: Bob Shea

Plot: Ballet Cat and her best friend, Sparkles the pony, are trying to decide what to play together. Ballet Cat manipulates the situation to her advantage, and the two friends decide on  you guessed it  ballet dancing. But Sparkles has a secret. A secret so powerful the revelation could shake the very foundations of their friendship. Will Sparkles risk everything and tell Ballet Cat the totally secret secret? Yes, yes she will.

Why I like it: Bob Shea's broad and high-contrast illustrations, paired with a vibrant color palette, engage the reader and match the whimsical tone of the story. The lesson of friendship and compromise is well-suited to young readers.

Age: 6  8

Awards: 2016 American Library Association Notable Children's Books list.

Title: A Handful of Stars

Author: Cynthia Lord

Plot: Lily lives with her grandparents and her blind, elderly dog, Lucky. When Lucky gets loose, Salma, a young migrant blueberry picker, rescues the dog. An unexpected friendship forms between the two girls, sealed by the lovable and helpless Lucky. As the girls get to know one another, Lily enlists Salma's help in raising money to pay for an expensive surgery for her dog. Salma decides to enter the Blueberry Queen pageant at the local festival to help pay for the surgery. Salma faces prejudice and discrimination as she challenges the local traditions of their small town.

Why I like it: Cynthia Lord's effortless and fluid style instantly connect the reader with Lily and Salma. The themes of friendship, bias, empathy and sacrifice anchor the story and provide it emotional weight.

Age: 8-12

Awards: Best of the Year list of the Children's Book Council, Boston Globe Pick of the Week.

Title: Echo

Author: Pam Munoz Ryan

Plot: This tale begins with the fable of a unique and powerful harmonica that carries the spirits of three sisters. The harmonica intersects with the lives of three musically gifted owners spanning critical events in the 20th century  the rise of Nazism in Germany, the Great Depression in Pennsylvania and the effects of World War II in California. The three story threads work independently, but the power of the harmonica draws them inevitably toward one another as their tales intertwine.

Why I like it: A fascinating mix of magic and historical fiction breathes new life into well-trodden territory. Cliffhangers and mystery keep the reader turning the pages, and Ryan's prose is smart and engaging.

Age: 10 and up

Awards: 2016 Newbery Honor Book.

 JUNE 24 

Recommendations for adults

Three Good Reads is bringing you something new this year  book recommendations for adults. Ron Solorzano, regional librarian with the Ventura County Library System, offers a rich mix of summer reading. One's a creepy psychological thriller. Another involves a dachshund.

Title: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Author: Iain Reid

Plot: The title of this debut novel captures the narrator's feelings regarding her newish relationship with Jake, a man with whom she shares an intellectual connection that is compelling but not enough to block out her doubts about their future. These doubts manifest at a particularly inconvenient time, as Jake is driving her to meet his parents at his childhood home. An awkward and disturbing evening eventually gives way to a tense return trip that Jake cuts short, taking a detour to a deserted high school and leaving the narrator stranded in a situation that becomes increasingly strange and terrifying.

Why I like it: Reid brings a lot to this novel, incorporating elements of mystery and horror to create a psychological thriller that challenges the reader's notions of relationships, consciousness and identity. The story is dark and difficult to read while being gripping enough to drive you forward to a conclusion that will remain with you for some time.

Five words or less: Creepy and compelling psychological suspense.

Title: Lily and the Octopus

Author: Steven Rowley

Plot: Ted and Lily have a special relationship. In many ways, Ted lives an isolated life, quiet and single in Los Angeles, but he opens himself up to his 12-year-old companion, a dachshund who loves ice cream, listens to Ted talk about the men in his life, and is slowly dying of a brain tumor. This prognosis is more than Ted can face, so he projects onto the cancer a surrogate identity  the titular octopus. The three of them are forced to share this final journey together, as Lily's health deteriorates and Ted struggles to help her, while coping with his own emotional exhaustion and sense of overwhelming loss.

Why I like it: Rowley draws on his own experience in producing the all-too-accurate heartbreak that comes with facing the inevitable loss of a beloved companion. In many ways, the narrative is upbeat, engaging, and even funny, but the subject matter draws the reader into a dark place where those elements of humor are often essential lifelines. Another debut novel, this one showcases the ways in which our greatest losses can help us understand the poignant purity of our emotional lives.

Five words or less: Raw, honest and powerfully bittersweet.

Title: Untethered

Author: Julie Lawson Timmer

Plot: Char Hawthorn, a college professor who is married and raising a stepdaughter named Allie, has created a stable life for herself that becomes upended when her husband is killed suddenly. The car accident that takes him away from Char and Allie also threatens the bond they share, as Char soon finds that she has little legal claim to her relationship with the 15-year-old. Conflicts between Char and Allie's biological mother increase the tension of the situation, causing Allie to struggle in school and at home. When Allie's one source of continuing stability  her relationship with a younger girl named Morgan  is threatened, she is pushed beyond her limit, and Char needs to figure out how to intervene when she isn't sure she has the right to.

Why I like it: Timmer examines how the connections we take for granted can be far more tenuous than they seem, and how traumatic events have the power to change our very identity. This story highlights the unique challenges that face blended families and the degree to which uncertainty and loss can affect adults just as powerfully as they do children, all while calling into question what it even means to be a responsible parent.

Five words or less: Thoughtful and intricate family drama.

Next week: Recommendations for grade-school kids.

 JUNE 17 

Recommendations for children

This week's Three Good Reads features recommendations for preschoolers, including a book about a bear who discovers a piano in the woods, finds fame in the big city and comes to understand the value of old friends. They come from Charlotte Burrows, children's & young adult services supervisor at the Thousand Oaks Library.

Next week, we'll have something new: book recommendations for adults.

Title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

Author: Jane Cabrera

Plot: In this takeoff on the familiar nursery rhyme, a black sheep graciously offers bag after bag of wool to Miss, who handicrafts mittens, a tea cozy, and more for her friends, then produces a sweater for the shivering sheep when all the wool is gone. Includes music for piano and guitar.

Why I like it: Cabrera's version of this familiar nursery rhyme is accessible and funny. I love how the colorful full-page spreads show how the wool gets used and include references to other nursery rhyme characters. This is a dynamic, shareable, singable book.

Ages: 2-5

Title: The Night World

Author: Mordicai Gerstein

Plot: A boy and his cat walk out to their yard and marvel at what they find in the moonlight  and what they see as dawn approaches. They're greeted by the shadows of roses and other flowers, and by nocturnal animals who whisper, "It's almost here."

Why I like it: Gerstein, who has received the Caldecott Medal, captures the moonlight mood through dark, shadowy illustrations that bridge to luminous spreads. This is a fun bedtime offering that can encourage conversations between adults and children about night and day.

Ages: 3-6

Awards: Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Books of 2015; Kirkus Reviews Best Children's Books of 2015; Booklist Editor's Choice 2015; 100 Notables Titles for Reading and Sharing

Title: The Bear and the Piano

Author: David Litchfield

Plot: A bear finds a piano in the woods, learns to play it, and travels to the big city to become rich and famous. Ultimately, though, he discovers that his old friends in the forest back home are still the best audience of all.

Why I like it: This debut picture book from author David Litchfield captures poignantly the bear's emotions of contentment, pride, uncertainty and relief. The moving story encourages readers to follow their dreams and pursue their unique talents

Ages: 4-7

 JUNE 10 

Recommendations for teens

This week, Kate Shumaker, teen services librarian at the Simi Valley Public Library, suggests three books for young adults, including one about a young German girl who tries to reunite her family after the Berlin Wall divides them.

Next week, we'll have recommendations for preschoolers.

Title: "A Night Divided"

Author: Jennifer Nielson

Plot: Gerta wakes up one morning to discover that her family has been divided by the Berlin Wall. She, her mother and her brother Fritz are trapped on the East German side. Her father and other brother are in West Germany. When Gerta receives a message from her father, she believes he is telling her to tunnel under the wall and risk everything to reunite her family.

Why I like it: Gerta is an ordinary girl thrust into an impossible situation. She rises to the occasion using all her resourcefulness and determination. I found her courage and fear both compelling and realistic. This is a book that will keep you turning the pages until the very end.

Ages: 12 and up

Awards: 2016-17 Tome Society List, Top 2015 Mighty Girl Books for Teen and Tweens List, 2015 Association for Mormon Letters Finalist, 2015 double Whitney Award winner for Best Middle Grade book and for Best Overall Youth Novel.

Title: "Unwind"

Author: Neal Shusterman

Plot: In a society where unwanted teens are "unwound," a process that takes unwanted teenagers and recycles their bodies for medical transplants, Conner, a problem child; Risa, a ward of the state; and Lev, a tithe (destined to be unwound from birth) are each fighting for their lives. Together, the three of them must do the impossible: save themselves and escape their dangerous world.

Why I like it: This fast-paced story draws you quickly into the world of Conner, Risa and Lev. As I read about these teens who had to run from the very people who should be keeping them safe, it was impossible not to root for them. The content was thought-provoking and the plot kept me guessing throughout.

Ages: 12 and up

Awards: 2008 American Library Association Top Ten Picks for Reluctant Readers, 2008 American Library Association Best Young Adult Book list, 2010-2011 California Young Reader Medal Nomination, 2011 Young Adult Library Services Association's Popular Paperback Award List.

Title: "Saint Anything"

Author: Sarah Dessen

Plot: Sydney's older brother, Peyton, has been put in jail for a drunken-driving accident that crippled a boy. After transferring to a new school, Sydney meets the Chathams, a welcoming family very different from her own. Because of them, Sydney's whole life changes and for the first time she feels seen and heard. Her journey of self-discovery helps her to find out who she really is and come to terms with her brother's actions.

Why I like it: Sydney's story is a realistic, slice-of-life story focusing on a girl dealing with a traumatic event. It will resonate with teens who feel invisible to the world or those overshadowed by an older sibling. Sydney's story personally connected with me, and I enjoyed celebrating her victories even as I understood her feelings of invisibility.

Ages: 14 and up

Awards: 2016 Young Adult Library Services Association's Best Books for Young Adults.

_______
Sunshine Johnston squeezes a bit of oil from a cannabis bud to smell for quality.

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By Tony Biasotti, Special to The Star

The Fillmore City Council voted 5-0 to place on the November ballot a measure that would allow the City Council to tax marijuana sales at a rate of up to 15 percent, and to assess taxes on commercial cultivation of as much as $30 per square foot of growing area for the first 3,000 square feet, and $15 per square foot thereafter.

Those taxes would be on top of the standard sales tax of 7.5 percent.

The council could choose to set lower tax rates, but state law requires voters to approve the maximum level of any new city taxes.

Fillmore is the first city in Ventura County to seek voter approval for marijuana taxes; a handful of other cities in the state have done so, and the measures have typically passed by wide margins.

Fillmore does not allow any cultivation or sale of marijuana, medical or otherwise, and the tax measure would do nothing to change that. Council members and City Manager Dave Rowlands said they wanted to get ahead of the curve and have a tax authorized in case Fillmore either chooses to allow dispensaries and grow operations, or is forced to allow them under state law.

The council has been discussing allowing some amount of cultivation and delivery of medical marijuana, and plans to revisit that topic at its Aug. 9 meeting.

It is also looking ahead to the possible approval in November of the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, a ballot measure that would legalize marijuana in California for nonmedical purposes and establish a 15 percent state tax on all sales.

If the measure passes, cities that don't have a tax authority in place would have to wait until the next general election, in 2018, to ask voters for one.

"We need to protect our right to tax these type of businesses," Rowlands told the council. "This is being proactive, in my opinion. You're not recommending to have cultivation or have dispensaries, but you have this on the books in case you're forced to have them, or if a city council in the future decides to allow them."

Tuesday's meeting drew medical marijuana users, patient advocates and representatives of dispensaries and delivery services from around Ventura County, some of them Fillmore residents. They urged the council to permit medicinal marijuana deliveries in Fillmore, and some of them said the tax levels in the city ballot measure are too high.

"The taxes proposed are dangerously high and will only prevent legitimate providers form entering your city limits, and will encourage black market activity," said Mari Scott, the CEO of the California Emerald Club, a dispensary that delivers medical marijuana in Ventura County.

The per-square-foot taxes on cultivation, she said, are "the highest I've ever heard of."

Scott is also the CEO of the Ventura County Cannabis Alliance, a local industry and patient group. After the council vote, Scott and other providers and advocates said they're pleased with the direction Fillmore is going, even if they weren't happy with the idea of extra taxes on medical marijuana.

Fillmore is the first city in Ventura County to discuss taxing legal marijuana. It is also one of six cities with complete bans on growing and selling medical marijuana, but it is the only one of those to seriously consider lifting its ban, said Chelsea Sutula, the CEO of Sespe Creek Collective, another local delivery service, and the chair of the Cannabis Alliance's industry committee.

"They've been very open to meeting with us and very open to learning more about the issue," Sutula said. "They've been a little more proactive than some other council members in other cities."
Star file photo Tom W. Coleman, an entomologist with Forest Health Protection, checks for infestation on drought stressed trees in Los Padres National Forest last year.

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By John Scheibe of the Ventura County Star

As California suffers through the fifth year of a punishing drought, Los Padres National Forest officials imposed a series of fire restrictions this week, including banning wood and charcoal fires throughout most of the 1.7 million-acre forest except for designated campfire sites.

The forest service has also restricted the use of portable stoves and lanterns powered by gas, jellied petroleum or pressurized liquid fuel outside of designated campfire sites to only those with a valid California campfire permit.

The restrictions come after yet another dryer than normal rainfall season that has left much of Southern California littered with dead or dying trees.

"Tree mortality is a huge issue not only in Los Padres but across California," Andrew Madsen, a spokesman for the Los Padres National Forest, said this week.

The issue led to Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency in October 2015. Brown asked for federal help in removing millions of dead or dying trees across the state as part of his declaration.

Brown said in a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack that "California is facing the worst epidemic of tree mortality in its modern history. A crisis of this magnitude demands action on all fronts."

The forest services estimates 40 million trees have been lost in California since 2010, despite a very strong El Nino this past winter.

The Los Padres National Forest recently announced a large-scale operation to remove dead trees from the forest.

The dead trees add significantly to the fire danger, Madsen said.

The operation will initially focus on looking for dead trees that are close to trails and campsites, he said.

Millions of native bark beetles are only adding to the problem.

Bark beetles are normally a sign of a healthy functioning forest ecosystem, he said. The beetles get their name because they reproduce inside a tree's bark. They play an important role in helping to renew a forest by killing older and weaker trees. Younger and healthier trees are normally able to defend themselves from the beetle through the tree's sap, Madsen said. Healthy trees do so by flooding the tunnels made by the beetle with sap, thereby stopping the beetle's advance.

But because it takes water to produce sap, many trees are unable to fend off the beetles advance, he said. The drought has also helped the beetles multiple by increasing the number of trees on which they feed.

Los Padres officials announced the closure of the Santa Lucia Ranger District southeast of Pismo Beach in early June because of the danger posed to visitors by dead and dying trees. Such trees are a lot more apt to topple over as their roots decay.

The forest service also temporarily closed Baja, Buck Springs and the Paradise campgrounds there as workers go in and take out dead trees.

Other Los Padres campgrounds could also be closed in the coming weeks and months.

"Assessments on which campgrounds should temporarily be closed are being updated regularly," Madsen said.

He also said it's impossible to know how long it will take to remove dead trees from Los Padres. Some of it depends on not only how many trees pose a threat but also on how much rain the area will receive this coming winter and in years to come.

While Southern California received less than the normal amount of rain this past season, enough still fell on the region so that a large amount of grass grew. Much of the grass is now dry, he said, and could serve as kindling and create a path for fire to spread to nearby trees, he said.

The forest service uses five levels to evaluate fire danger, beginning with low and ending with extreme.

Los Padres is now at a level 3 alert, meaning the danger of fires is high. Fires can easily grow with unattended campfires and brush fires easily spreading when there's a level 3 alert.

For more information on closures as well as fire alert levels at Los Padres, go to http://1.usa.gov/1UbeYgd
MEGAN DISKIN/THE STAR

This was the scene Wednesday evening at Tapo Canyon Road and Los Angeles Avenue in Simi Valley, where a motorcycle officer was injured in a crash.

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By Megan Diskin of the Ventura County Star

A Simi Valley police motorcycle officer suffered serious injuries and was taken to a hospital Wednesday after a crash with a pickup at a major intersection, authorities said.

The motorcycle and pickup collided about 4:50 p.m. near Tapo Canyon Road and East Los Angeles Avenue, Simi Valley police said.

Police said it appeared the officer was traveling south on Tapo Canyon and the pickup was going north and making a U-turn when the crash occurred.

The officer was thrown from his motorcycle, police said. He was taken to Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, where he underwent several hours of surgery Wednesday night, officials said.

The driver of the pickup was not injured, police said.

Police requested that the California Highway Patrol investigate the crash, said Sgt. Craig Dungan, a police spokesman. The Simi Valley Police Department had personnel at the crash site Wednesday night conducting measurements. Personnel from the patrol were there, as well.

At the scene, the motorcycle was in many pieces, with the debris spread about 15 feet.

Police said it appeared that drugs and alcohol were not factors in the crash and said it appeared to be nothing but an unfortunate accident, but added that any indication of fault would come after the investigation by the patrol.

Anyone who may have witnessed the collision is asked to contact the CHP at 553-0800.
SHARE JUAN CARLO/THE STAR The duck pond in Rancho Simi Community Park in Simi Valley is officially open, as Filemon Rosales of Cal-State Site Service removes the fence. It was drained last year. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR The duck pond in Rancho Simi Community Park in Simi Valley is officially open, as Raul Gonzales of Cal-State Site Service removes the fence. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR The duck pond in Rancho Simi Community Park in Simi Valley is now open. It was drained last year and the reopening was delayed due to wildlife and nesting issues. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR The duck pond in Rancho Simi Community Park in Simi Valley is now open. It was drained last year and has now reopened.

By Michele Willer-Allred, Special to The Star

Several dozen ducks, geese, and other water fowl gathered on the Rancho Simi Community Park lawn on Wednesday, unaware of the big change that was in store for them.

The birds seemed confused at first as workers from Cal-State Site Services removed the fencing around the 35-acre lagoon at the "Duck Park" off Erringer Road and Royal Avenue.

Then, several of the birds moved to the water, finally unencumbered by a barrier that kept them from the pond since early last year as renovations were being completed.

The Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District reopened the pond not only to the birds, but also to the public on Wednesday.

Several volunteers, who formed a group to care for the birds during the renovations, were on hand during the pond's reopening.

"I've been crying all morning. I'm so happy," said Simi Valley resident Allegra Reid, who founded the 14-member "Mother Geese" group.

Construction on the lagoon began in February 2015 with a completion date planned for September of last year. The nearly $2 million project included draining and cleaning the pond's water, relining the bottom of the lagoon, installing new water filtration pumps, and creating a concrete curb along the edges.

It was the first time in 40 years the lagoon was cleaned and renovated. Almost four-feet of "muck" was removed from the bottom.

Reid, whose children grew up visiting the lagoon, said it was starting to become "really toxic, dangerous, and smelly," and at first the group was happy about the plans.

"When we found out it would be a year to complete, we were devastated," said Reid, who helped the group feed pellets daily to the Chinese geese that stayed at the dry lagoon.

"It's been a long battle to complete this project," said Douglas Duran, the district's landscape manager.

He said having to conduct work around the bird's nesting season and working with wildlife agencies created many of the delays. Because of the drought, the park district also worked with the city to come up with a plan to fill the lagoon over several months.

Grass, picnic tables and benches will also be added.

Water tests will determine if the lagoon is suitable to be restocked with fish.

Duran said the opening of the lagoon is just in time for the park district's first summer concert in the park on Saturday. He asked the public not to throw bread for the birds or any other objects into the water.

Chris Beaty of Thousand Oaks brought his three sons, Caleb, 3, Nathan, 2, and 9-month-old Levi to the park on Tuesday, and they watched the birds as the fences were removed. Beaty grew up in Simi Valley and said he was happy to see the lagoon reopen since it was always a fun place to visit.

Group member Nancy Delong said they worked hard to keep the birds safe and protected during the closure. The lack of water made the birds literally "sitting ducks" for predators, with two geese being killed by coyotes.

"I think the birds are going to be a lot happier," said group member Jodi Serra.

Reid said it was like feeding the birds in "a jail cell over a fence."

"They haven't been able to come to us," Reid said of the birds. "This morning, this is the first time they've been able to get close to us. It's wonderful."
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It has been heartening this week to see the turnouts of support around the world, and in communities throughout Ventura County, for the victims of the Orlando shooting.

We have another opportunity Friday to exhibit that true support at the Festival of Grace, being hosted at Oxnard's Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The event has been planned for sometime to coincide with the first anniversary of the shooting deaths of nine people meeting in a prayer group at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. The Rev. Clyde Oden Jr. has organized the event to focus on the acts after the shooting where family members of the victims forgave the shooter.

"We want to celebrate that and other acts of grace  actions that bring forgiveness to the forefront," he told our reporter.

Now with the dead from the Orlando nightclub shooting as one more fresh wound to our national psyche, we have another reason to join together to recognize forgiveness, kindness and grace as qualities that will make us all better.

Within hours of the Orlando shooting, we once again saw our public discourse sink to its basest level with finger-pointing, recriminations, anger, retribution and hate as the core reactions. It has continued throughout the week, played out on the largest public stage possible, a presidential campaign.

That rhetoric seeks to blame individuals and groups for a lack of action or foresight that in their twisted logic would have prevented the crime. It seeks to place blame on large groups based on religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation. It fans the flames of hate in individuals that stimulated this act in the first place.

This was an individual act. As was San Bernardino. And Charleston. And Boston. And Newtown. And Virginia Tech. And Aurora. And Roseburg. And Isla Vista. And ...

We know that in some of those instances, the mind of the killer was warped by the hate-filled rhetoric preached by radicalists out of the Middle East. We support the military response against those groups who blindly preach the death to all Americans. But we will not win this battle if our response is to blindly blame all Muslims.

As these were individual acts, we must be willing to reach out individually to those we find who are sinking into intolerance, hate and violence. We must show that hate can be met with love. We can, through acts and words, show grace, forgiveness and kindness.

That is the message that will be on display beginning at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Bethel AME Church at 855 South F St. in Oxnard. We hope you bring an open heart and join the celebration.
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Re: Diana and Don Thorns June 14 letter, Wake up, America:

I agree with Diana and Don Thorn that it is time for America to face reality about our war with Islamic terrorists.

They say we're losing this war because of Barack Obama's policies, but the number of people killed in Islamic terror attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 (including the massacre in Orlando this past weekend) is 89, while according to CNN more than 26,000 ISIS fighters have been killed in Iraq and Syria by the U.S.-led coalition since airstrikes began in 2014. According to the FBI, in America more than 90 percent of all terrorist attacks are by non-Muslims. So it doesnt look like were losing to Islamic terrorists, but it does look like our focus on Islamic terrorism (as opposed to non-Islamic terrorism) is misplaced.

They say we need to "demand the truth about the risk we are facing. We already have that information. There are over 322,700,000 people in the United States and less than 100 people have been killed by Islamic terrorists in the U.S. in the 15 years since 9/11. That gives about a 1 in 3,227,000 chance of being killed by an Islamic terrorist (0.00003 percent chance). You can see the odds of being killed by a terrorist compared to other causes of death at GlobalResearch.ca

They say we need to elect leaders who will put Americas interests and safety first, in November. It looks like our current commander in chief is doing a pretty good job of putting Americas interests and safety first while protecting the rights of all Americans. I vote to stay with the team weve got.

Matty Park, Ventura
More than 260 future health professionals will receive their first white coat at Touro University Nevadas annual White Coat Ceremony on Sunday, October 17 at 3 p.m. inside of the Ballys Las Vegas Events Center.

The white coat is a symbol widely recognized in society, emblematic of an individuals education and credentials as a healer. The ceremony marks the beginning of a journey for 26 students of the inaugural physical therapy class of 2012, 40 physical therapy students of the class of 2013, 139 osteopathic medical students from the class of 2014 and 55 physician assistant candidates from the class of 2012, as they accept the responsibilities of a health care professional in front of family and friends.

We are pleased to celebrate this important step for Touros future graduates, said Senior Provost and CEO Michael Harter, Ph.D. With the increasing need for quality health care professionals in Southern Nevada, the white coat ceremony is a tangible demonstration of the accomplishments these students have made so far in their journey to becoming our communitys future health and wellness workforce.

About Touro University Nevada

Touro University Nevada (TUN) is a private, non-profit institution that was established to help address critical needs in health care and education and as a resource for community service in the state of Nevada. TUN opened its doors in 2004 with 78 medical students. Today, its home to more than 1,700 students, in a wide variety of degree programs in osteopathic medicine, physician assistant studies, education, medical health sciences, nursing, occupational therapy and physical therapy. The universitys Henderson campus includes a full-service patient health center and multi-disciplinary Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities. For more information on TUN, please visit www.tun.touro.edu or call 702- 777-8687.
By: Eugenia Lotova

With the signing of several free trade agreements, Vietnam is expected to see significant uptakes in trade with nations around the globe. In addition to presenting opportunities for investors and promising to increase wealth for Vietnams growing middle class, the ramping up of global interconnections is likely to increase strain on national infrastructure. Although presenting a salient risk for operations within the country, these issues have not gone unnoticed by officials, which have increasingly turned to the private sector as a source of funding.

This turn in itself presents investment opportunities for companies seeking to invest in Public Private Partnerships and bodes well for traditional manufacturing operations that will likely see improved logistics in the medium term. The key for successful short term investment, however, lies in the ability to identify where infrastructure is set to improve and the ability create strategies to capitalize on these emerging changes.

Presently, there are a number of infrastructure related challenges that investors should be particularly aware of. These include the railway connecting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City that is in desperate need of an upgrade, the threat that ports will reach maximum capacity in the face of increased trade volume, and the reality that just 20% of national roads are paved.

Despite these challenges, the current state of Vietnams national infrastructure is standard for a country at its stage of development; however, if Vietnam wants to remain competitive, it must develop quickly. According to the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report 2016-2017, Vietnam ranks 79th out of 138 in terms of overall quality of infrastructure, 89th in quality of roads, and 77th in quality of port infrastructure.

A quick look at the rest of ASEAN makes clear that improved infrastructure will be required if growth is to continue. Singapore for example, with its more substantial import and export volume, has risen to its current position as a result of seamless logistical support. The city state currently ranks second in overall infrastructure, and second in road and port quality.

The Vietnamese government is currently working to increase the efficiency and scope of infrastructure projects through foreign and private investment via public-private partnerships and equitisation. For the country to maintain its status as a manufacturing hub, the government is emphasizing transport and power projects in industrial zones. To decrease the traffic congestion in large cities such Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, major public transportation projects are also being undertaken.

In 2016, the leadership released a list of projects that have been opened for foreign investments including:

Upgrades and construction of roads, bridges, and railways

Expanding capacity and reliability of power grids in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City

Construction and development of industrial parks and complexes

Expansion of existing port capacity

A full list of specific projects currently calling for foreign investment can be found at http://vietnamembassy-usa.org/Projects/List.

Ports

Because international trade is conducted mainly via sea based transport, increasing the number of ports and the capacity of existing ports is critical for manufacturers seeking to speed up transport times and reduce costs. While plans to expand the nations current capacity are encouraging, Vietnam must also be strategic in port placement and consider the supply-demand of the specific region to ensure that the network of ports is well integrated and each port is appropriately utilized.

For companies considering investment in the near future, It should also be noted that industrial zones will likely benefit from better roads connecting operations to ports and large cities. Industries with extensive supply chains and complex sourcing needs will profit from these locations that are often well connected internally and internationally.

Based on current expectations, once the EU-FTA go into effect, at least one port in southern Vietnam will reach capacity in two years, showing the critical need for an upgrade in port infrastructure.

A major project intended to increase Vietnams trade capabilities has recently been revivedthe Van Phong Port. The building of the part initially began in 2007, but soon ran out of funds. Even though there are several technical challenges in its construction, for investors looking to finance major infrastructure projects, this can be a key investment. If completed, Van Phong would be the largest Vietnamese port.

Railways

Perhaps the most ambitious goal the government has undertaken is building the high speed North-South railway system, which will drastically cut down on the amount of time required to travel from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The project is expected to begin in 2030, but the tremendous amount of money required puts the feasibility of the task in question.

Although the North-South speed railway is an ambitious goal for the future, current projects involve upgrading the existent railway to better suit the needs of passengers and enterprises. In the present-day, there is a strong push to update the railroad system so that it can so that trains can go from travelling at speeds of 60-70 kph to 80-90 kph and add several new stations along the railway line by 2020. For corporations looking to invest in Vietnams infrastructure, this BOT project would improve the link between the two major cities.

Those companies that source textiles from China and have manufacturing facilities in the Ho Chi Minh City areas would benefit from a faster and more efficient railway system. With an express railway system connecting Vietnams two major cities, railroad travel time from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City would be reduced from 32 to 7 hours.

Infrastructure investment forecasts

According to the recent G20 Global Infrastructure Outlook 2017 report, Vietnam will be able to meet 83 percent of its infrastructure needs by 2040, if it maintains its current investment trend. The country will require US$605 billion for all infrastructure projects across all sectors, while according to current trends; investments will reach US$503 billion; an investment gap of US$102 billion.

Road sector will have the largest investment gap and will require an additional 70 percent funding. Investment gap is forecasted to be around US$55 billion. In second, water based infrastructure projects is forecasted to face an investment gap of US$23 billion by 2040.

Editors note: This article was originally published in June 2016 and incorporates recent data and information.



About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email vietnam@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight. 

Annual Audit and Compliance in Vietnam 2016

In this issue of Vietnam Briefing, we address pressing changes to audit procedures in 2016, and provide guidance on how to ensure that compliance tasks are completed in an efficient and effective manner. We highlight the continued convergence of VAS with IFRS, discuss the emergence of e-filing, and provide step-by-step instructions on audit and compliance procedures for Foreign Owned Enterprises (FOEs) as well as Representative Offices (ROs).

Navigating the Vietnam Supply Chain

In this edition of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the advantages of the Vietnamese market over its regional competition and highlight where and how to implement successful investment projects. We examine tariff reduction schedules within the ACFTA and TPP, highlight considerations with regard to rules of origin, and outline the benefits of investing in Vietnams growing economic zones. Finally, we provide expert insight into the issues surrounding the creation of 100 percent Foreign Owned Enterprise in Vietnam.

Tax, Accounting and Audit in Vietnam 2016 (2nd Edition)

This edition of Tax, Accounting, and Audit in Vietnam, updated for 2016, offers a comprehensive overview of the major taxes foreign investors are likely to encounter when establishing or operating a business in Vietnam, as well as other tax-relevant obligations. This concise, detailed, yet pragmatic guide is ideal for CFOs, compliance officers and heads of accounting who must navigate Vietnams complex tax and accounting landscape in order to effectively manage and strategically plan their Vietnam operations.
This years results reveal that Samsung comes out on top as the most desirable brand in Asia for the sixth year in a row, followed by Apple (jumping two places to second), Sony, Nestle, and Panasonic, in this order. The second half of the Top 10 remains unchanged: Nike comes in at the 6th place, followed by LG, Cannon, Channel, and Adidas.

The annual Asias Top 1,000 Brands survey is the biggest and most influential of its kind, revealing which brands consumers value the most across the region. The report incorporates consumer brand perception surveys from 13 key regional markets across Asia and encompassed 14 major brand categories, from alcohol to financial services, consumer electronics to automotives, and more than 70 sub-categories.

Despite the market volatility and taut battle of brands in Vietnam, local enterprises have successfully gained ground. According to the results, there are 10 Vietnamese brands that appear on the Asias Top 1000 list, including Vietjet Air (490), Viettel (501), Petrolimex (512), Vinamilk (558), Mobifone (605), Trung Nguyen (626), Hao Hao (654), Vietnam Airlines (708), Vietcombank (753), and P/S (807). (See chart 1)

I feel proud that local enterprises can now popularise their brands at the regional front. And if these enterprises continue to work on their brand reputation, keeping their promises, and offering the best products and services to customers, we believe that they will be able to grow from local heroes to regional giants, and eventually successful multinational contenders, noted Nguyen Huong Quynh, Managing Director of Nielsen Vietnam.
Photo: VGP/Thanh Chung

The Deputy PM said the visit has manifested Canadian corporations belief in Viet Nams business and investment environment, especially in the context that the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is being approved by the National Assembly.

Northstar Trade Finance expects to exchange and cooperate with Viet Nam and share experience in developing State-owned enterprises, said Northstar Trade Finance president/CEO Scott Shepherd.

He hoped his company could to facilitate Vietnamese businesses' imports of machines and other equipment from the U.S., Germany, France, Italia and Canada for domestic production.

The Deputy PM affirmed that Viet Nam plans to attract foreign venture capital funds, including ones from Canada to support start-ups in Viet Nam.

The Vietnamese Government will create favorable conditions for Canadian businesses and investors to make contributions to Viet Nams economy, Deputy PM Hue asserted.

Viet Nam-Canada trade turnover reached around US$5 billion last year. Canada was listed among top 15 largest investors in Viet Nam.
Photo : nasa.gov

The US space agency had already pushed back the launch by a day to Tuesday.

If technicians are able to finish their repairs as planned, Discovery and its six American astronauts will now launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center at 3:52 pm (1952 GMT) Wednesday, NASA test director Jeff Spaulding said.

The flight to the orbiting International Space Station is the fourth and final shuttle flight of the year, and the last scheduled for Discovery, the oldest in the three-shuttle fleet that is being retired in 2011.
Voice biometrics authentication has now been implemented in Singapore with Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan to follow in the upcoming weeks. It will be rolled out throughout the region in 2016 and 2017 to cover all 12 of Citis consumer banking markets in Asia Pacific, including Vietnam, that represent more than half of the banks 19 consumer markets globally.

Citi has around 15 million consumer banking customers in the region and the bank expects to have at least 1 million customers actively using voice biometrics authentication in the next 12 months. Within three years the bank expects the number of users to grow to 3 million.

Once available, customers who call into the banks contact centers will have their identity automatically verified within 15 seconds or less as they explain their reason for calling. This is a reduction from an average time of around 45 seconds currently or 66 per cent less time spent verifying their details currently.

Citi will be the first financial services institution to offer voice biometrics authentication across Asia Pacific, as the bank further expand its successful innovation in retail banking in the region.

The voice biometrics authentication facility identifies customers through their voice print, which, similar to a fingerprint, is unique to each person. Citi clients can opt to enroll by recording their voices, which the bank will use to generate and store their voice prints for matching subsequent calls to Citibank. Each voice print will be uniquely tagged and cannot be reversely engineered once stored.

The voice biometrics authentication capability underscores Citis focus on technology to better serve our customers. We know that remembering different PINs and answering multiple questions can make the process frustrating. With this new capability, we offer our customers a faster and more secure authentication for a better customer experience, said Anand Selva, Asia Pacifics head for Consumer Banking at Citi.

Biometrics will play a critical part in the future of banking and we are excited to be paving the way for Citi globally. Today, our call centers receive increasing numbers of calls annually, of which a large portion are manually verified. With voice biometrics authentication, we will make the verification process easier, faster, and more secure for clients, said Natasha Ansell, Citis country officer for Vietnam.

Asia is an important region for innovation at Citi. Six years ago the bank launched its new branch design  called Smart Banking - in Asia for the first time. The Smart Banking concept involves using technology, architecture and design and new retail channels to connect customers to their money and provide them with a better way of banking. Over 200 such branches have since been rolled out globally since the Asian launch.
LINCOLN  A familiar face in the Cass County legal world has been selected to one of the top judicial positions in Nebraska.

Judge Jeffrey Funke was named the newest member of the Nebraska Supreme Court Wednesday. Gov. Pete Ricketts appointed Funke to the Supreme Court of the Fifth Judicial District of Nebraska. Funke is the current District Court Judge for the 2nd Judicial District of Nebraska. The 2nd Judicial District includes Cass, Sarpy and Otoe counties.

Funke applied for the Supreme Court seat earlier this year. He was one of seven original candidates who appeared in front of members of the 5th District of the Judicial Nominating Commission.

Committee members chose him to be one of three finalists for the position. Ricketts selected Funke for the Supreme Court spot over Hall County District Court Judge Mark Young and Adams-based private attorney David Bargen.

From working over a decade in private practice and hearing 10,000 cases, Judge Funke brings a diverse legal background to the Supreme Court, Ricketts said in a statement. As Nebraskas new Supreme Court judge, his temperament and demeanor will be an asset to the court, the legal community and the people of Nebraska.

Cass County Attorney Nathan Cox and Chief Deputy County Attorney Colin Palm both said they felt Funke would make a positive impact on the Supreme Court. They said Funke, 47, would represent the Fifth Judicial District well on the states top bench.

He is an outstanding choice, Cox said. Hes been a great judge on the county and district court levels, and his demeanor is going to suit him very well on the Supreme Court. I couldnt think of a better person the governor could have chosen for the position. Hes going to do a very good job for the people of Nebraska.

Were all really sorry to see him go, because hes been an excellent judge here, Palm said. Weve been very fortunate to have someone like him here. I think hes going to do an excellent job on the Supreme Court.

The Nebraska Supreme Court is comprised of a chief justice and six associate judges. The chief justice, who represents the state at large, is appointed by the governor from a statewide list of candidates selected by a judicial nominating commission. Each of the other six judges are also appointed through the same system. However, instead of representing the state at large like the chief justice, they are tasked with representing one of six districts. Each of the six judicial districts are approximately equal in population.

The Fifth Judicial District of the Nebraska Supreme Court includes portions of Hall, Adams, Webster, Nance, Hamilton, Clay, Nuckolls, Polk, York, Fillmore, Thayer, Colfax, Butler, Saline, Jefferson, Saunders, Gage, Cass, Otoe, Johnson, Pawnee, Nemaha and Richardson counties.

Funke earned a Bachelor of Science in business administration from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1991. He entered the legal profession after receiving a Juris Doctorate with honors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law in 1994.

Funke served in private practice from 1994-2007 and also held several positions with Otoe County during that time. He was Deputy Public Defender for Otoe County from 1994-97 and was Deputy County Attorney from 1997-2005. He held the title of Otoe County Attorney from 2005-07 before becoming a County Court Judge for the 2nd Judicial District.

Funke served at the county court level until he assumed district court duties in August 2013. He was the second consecutive Nebraska City native to occupy the District 2 judgeship. Former District Court Judge Randall Rehmeier held the local seat for the previous 26 years.

Cox and Palm both said Funke enjoys a pristine reputation among lawyers throughout the state. They said Funke is respected by both prosecutors and defense attorneys for the way he has handled himself in every stage of his legal career.

I dont know of anyone who has ever had a bad thing to say about him, Cox said. Hes been in private practice, served as a county attorney, been a county court judge and now a district court judge, and Ive never heard anyone say anything bad about him at all. That speaks volumes about his integrity and his demeanor in court.

Hes been fantastic in the way hes treated people, Palm said. Hes always treated both sides very fairly and has always listened attentively to everyone. I think everyone whos ever appeared before him would say that hes everything you want to see in a judge.

Funke will begin his Supreme Court duties after former justice William M. Connolly retires Aug. 1. The selection process for Funkes soon-to-be-vacant position will begin immediately. If a successor is not chosen before Funke joins the Supreme Court, a series of local judges will handle district court cases in the interim.
Poster: Fete de la Musique 2016 - Photo idecaf.gov.vn

The concert has been held annually for more than 10 years. It will feature pop, rock, jazz, rap, electronic and classical music.

Performers from the Passion Music Club and IDECAhat Club will take part in the event, to be held from 7 pm to 9 pm at 28 Le Thanh Ton Street in District 1.

Sofitel Saigon Plaza will also host a concert performed by both professional and amateur musicians at Boudoir Lounge on June 21. The Fete de la Musique 2016 will feature classical music and other music styles.

The event will begin at 7 pm at 17 Le Duan Street in District 1.
Asia Frontier Capital (AFC), whose AFC Vietnam Fund invests exclusively in listed Vietnamese equities, yesterday announced that it is opening an office in Ho Chi Minh City by the second half of this year.

After a period of rapid growth at the AFC Vietnam Fund, we have decided to expand in order to capture future growth opportunities through having local presence in Vietnam, said the company in its May 2016 newsletter.

According to AFC, in the past two months it has seen significant inflows to its AFC Vietnam Fund. Including May 2016 subscriptions, the fund is now managing more than $26 million in assets.

Meanwhile, late last month Dragon Capital announced that it is looking to float its flagship fund Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited (VEIL), which has holdings in listed and pre-IPO companies, on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange next month.

Closed-end VEIL is currently listed on the Irish Stock Exchange. The London listing is expected to create a more transparent and liquid market in VEILs shares, thereby widening potential ownership, attracting greater analysis coverage, and narrowing the discount to net asset value (NAV) at which the shares currently trade.

Dominic Scriven, chairman of Dragon Capital, said the listing will address demand from a wide range of investors looking to benefit from Vietnams economic growth. Increased access and transparency will overcome barriers for a number of institutional and retail investors, he said.

According to the companys release, approximately half of VEILs NAV, currently $850 million, is represented by stocks which are at their foreign ownership limit and cannot otherwise be accessed by foreign investors.

In March, VinaCapitals Vietnam Opportunity Fund (VOF) also moved to the premium segment of the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange from the AIM. As of the end of April, VOF invested about 60 per cent of its assets in OTC and listed Vietnamese stocks.

According to Andy Ho, managing director of the company and chief investment officer of VinaCapital Group, the listing elevates the funds profile, putting it in a better position to improve liquidity and reach a broader investor base."

A GDP growth of above 6 per cent, strong FDI inflows, and a young, well-educated workforce have been cited as the selling points of the Vietnamese economy. Moreover, the country is expected to greatly benefit from the trade pacts Vietnam recently joined, including the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The Asiatic lion was listed as endangered in 2008, with 523 recorded in the latest census by India's Gujarat state government. (Photo: AFP/Sam Panthaky)

AHMEDABAD: Forestry officials in western India may have identified a man-eating lion suspected of a spate of attacks, they said on Wednesday (Jun 15), after finding traces of human hair and tissue in the animal's faeces.

Seven lion attacks in villages near the Gir wildlife sanctuary in Gujarat state have killed three people since March, while four victims have suffered serious injuries.

A pride of 17 endangered Asiatic lions, which only live in the forest in Gujarat, have been captured in the past month.

Officials have been monitoring the big cats' behaviour and examining their faeces to identify the culprits.

"The scat analysis, that is an analysis of lion excreta, has shown remains of human hair and tissue in at least one of the lions captured," U A Vora, a forest conservator, told AFP. "This lion has been isolated and will be kept in isolation in captivity forever," he said.

Vora said that even with the discovery of human tissue, the animal would undergo further investigations to establish whether it deliberately attacked humans.

He said forestry officials have undertaken a "massive" awareness drive to warn people living in villages about the lions, telling them not to sleep in open fields.

One wildlife expert told AFP the lions may have attacked because a rising human population had blocked their natural corridors - the route by which lions move from one area to another in search of prey.

"The government needs to come up with a long-term plan to open these blocked corridors to stop human-animal conflict," independent expert Divyabhanu Singh said.

In May a 14-year-old boy was killed by a lioness in a mango orchard in the district's Ambardi village, with his father also injured in the attack. In April a lion killed a 50-year-old woman in a nearby village as she slept in an open field.

Asiatic lions, slightly smaller than their African cousins and with a fold of skin along their bellies, have been increasing in numbers in Gir, with 523 recorded in the latest census.

Conservationists have suggested some of the lions be relocated to a different sanctuary, to reduce human-animal conflict and avoid their being wiped out by disease or natural disaster.

The Asiatic lion was listed as endangered in 2008, up from critically endangered in 2000, after numbers improved in the forest.
Pieces of the cabin from the missing EgyptAir plane which crashed into the Mediterranean last month have been found, Egyptian investigators said. (AFP/Khaled Desouki)

CAIRO: Pieces of the cabin from the missing EgyptAir plane which crashed into the Mediterranean last month have been found, Egyptian investigators said on Wednesday.

A French vessel taking part in the search discovered pieces of fuselage at "several sites", the Egyptian board of inquiry said in a statement.

The Airbus A320 which had been en route from Paris to Cairo disappeared on May 19, with the loss of all 66 people on board.

The "John Lethbridge" research boat, which made the find, arrived in Egypt last week to begin searching the Mediterranean for the wreckage with an underwater robot.

The discovery comes after investigators warned on Monday that signals from the plane's black boxes would stop operating by the end of the month.

The area of sea where it crashed is believed to be about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) deep and its flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder should have had enough battery power to emit signals for four to five weeks.

Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused the disaster although a terror attack has not been ruled out.

France's aviation safety agency has said the aircraft transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.

Investigators were able to narrow down the search site thanks to an emergency signal sent via satellite by the plane's locator transmitter when it hit the Mediterranean.

TERROR THREAT

The signals were picked up by French survey ship Laplace which uses acoustic detection systems to listen for the "pings" emitted by the flight recorders, France's aviation safety agency BEA said.

The passengers were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a boy and two babies.

Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board.

The crash comes after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula last October that killed all 224 people on board.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack within hours, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.

IS has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in both France and Egypt.

Some wreckage was retrieved from the Mediterranean last month, along with belongings of passengers on board flight MS804, but no bodies have been found so far.

The plane crashed between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast after disappearing suddenly from radar screens.

In October, foreign governments issued travel warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of security at its airports after IS said it downed the Russian airliner over Sinai with a bomb concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled on the plane.
Nguyen Ngoc Thuong, permanent vice chairman of the Trade Union under the Ba Ria-Vung Tau Industrial Zones Management Authority, said that when the strike started on June 11, representatives of the union attended a working session with company leaders to study the reasons as well as negotiate the workers demands.

Thuong said that the companys union has only been established two months ago and lacked the experience to effectively represent workers opinions, leading to the strike.

After the working session, the companys management board agreed to pay compensation for extra hours as well as payment of other allowance. Besides, the company will improve the quality of the food served at its cafeteria.

However, the companys management board refused to pay a 7 per cent bonus to skilled or good workers, because workers receive a minimum wage of VND3.48 million ($155.18), which is higher than the VND3.1 million ($138.23) paid by other companies.

Thuong added that these regulations will come into effect within a month. There are approximately 200 workers who have gone on strike for more incentives. However, the companys management board said that if the remaining workers do not agree with the above compromise, the company will recruit new workers.

Previously, on June 11, 1,000 workers started a strike to protest unreasonable working conditions.

According to workers, they work from 7.30am until 12am and have a one hour lunch break. They then resume work from 1pm to 4.30pm, officially. However, they were forced to work until 6pm without a light meal or rest. In addition, it is difficult to ask for a break or take leave for family emergencies.

The workers also complained about the quality of lunch provided, claiming VND10,000 ($0.45) per meal is not nutritious enough.

Furthermore, the companys management board broke its promise to pay a bonus to outstandingly skilful or good workers.
He called on RoK businesses to invest more in areas like the manufacturing industry, electronics, automobiles, finance &banking, high quality services, creative products development and infrastructure, as well as startup projects.



The Deputy PM expressed his hope that giant RoK corporations investment will encourage small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as high technology firms from the country to do more businesses in Vietnam.



Deputy PM Hue noted that the two countries are experiencing a peak development in their relationship in all fields, with the RoK being the second largest ODA provider of Vietnam.



Since 2014, the RoK has always been the largest foreign investor in Vietnam with a total investment of over US$49 billion in 5,300 projects, he said.



In the first five months of this year, the RoK was also the largest investor at US$3.4 billion in 420 projects.



This shows the confidence of the RoKs business in Vietnams economic prospects, he commented.



At the same time, the RoK is the third largest trade partner of Vietnam, with two-way trade reaching US$36.5 billion last year, he added.



Deputy PM Hue also pointed out that the Vietnam-RoK free trade agreement and the ASEAN-RoK free trade deal have laid the foundation for bilateral trade and investment ties in a win-win spirit.



Deputy PM Hue said he believes that two-way trade will reach US$70 billion in 2020 in a balanced direction. Vietnam wants to export more seafood, fruit, consumer goods, electronic products and accessories to the RoK, he said.



Together with efforts to complete its legal system, the Vietnamese Government is working hard to stabilise the macroeconomy and restructure the economy with the focus on State-owned enterprises and banking reform, alongside settling bad debts and public debts; thus creating a new status for the country to integrate into the world community and join regional and global production chains, stated the Deputy PM.



The RoKs Ambassador to Vietnam Lee Hyuk held that specific efforts should be made to seek ways to further boost bilateral ties, suggesting that a cooperation axis should be created across politics, diplomacy and security to match the sound bilateral economic ties.



He proposed that the two countries focus on partnerships in the manufacturing industry, infrastructure and information and telecommunication technology, health care, and science and technology.



Meanwhile, Kang Seong Cheon, a representative from the RoKs Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, said that it is necessary to expand investment affiliation activities to fully tap the advantages from free trade agreements, while continuing to create favourable business investment opportunities for enterprises from both countries.
Those who seriously violate land use regulations will be prosecuted, said Pham Khoi Nguyen, Minister of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE).



Between now and the years end, we will continue combining with the Government Inspectorate, the ministries of National Defense and Public Security and provincial and municipal peoples committees to launch big inspection groups to inspect the use and management of public land in many provinces and cities nationwide, including Hanoi, Haiphong, Danang, Can Tho, Khanh Hoa, Binh Duong and Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen said.

He said, in 2011, another four big land inspections would be made in Haiphong, Danang, Khanh Hoa, Binh Duong and Can Tho.



According to the MoNRE, the trouble over public land use at state-owned units was a long standing problem in Vietnam and its roots mainly lied in the states lax management systems, in which the state easily hands land over to state-owned units, but fails to withdraw it when it is misused or ineffectively used.



Over the past four years, the government has promulgated seven decrees and regulations requesting relevant agencies and local authorities to check for illegal use of public land and houses.



Nearly 144,500 agencies and organisations nationwide are being leased and allocated with 7.8 million hectares of public land lots free of charge. Of which, 9 per cent of the agencies and organisations are found to be misusing nearly 30,000ha.



Last year, Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee reported that local state-owned enterprises possessed more than 6.3 million square metres of public land but had failed to make best use of it. Nearly four million square metres of which had not been used effectively, and 140,000 square metres had been left fallow.



For example, five state-owned enterprises were found to be holding vast tracts of land in the city, including Vietnam Post and Telecommunication Corporation, Electricity of Vietnam, Vietnam Southern Food Corporation, Gia Dinh Textiles and Garments Corporation and the Saigon Real Estate Company, which were using the land ineffectively.



In 2008, the city withdrew more than 580,000 square metres of public land used for wrong purposes. It was intended for building parks, schools and hospitals. The city will confiscate another 40 large land lots in this year, Nguyen said.



In May 2009, Hanois authorities inspected some 8,355 public land sites within the city area and reclaimed 104 plots owned by state-owned enterprises. For example, Hanoi Agricultural Products Production and Export-Import Company topped the list with 50 misused land lots, followed by the Hanoi Food One Member State Company with 20 misused land lots.



Most land plots were extremely valuable because of their prime locations in the city.



Nguyen said Hanoi would confiscate at least 32,500 square metres misused and infectively used by 135 enterprises and agencies in this year.

Nguyen said these land areas would be put up to auction soon.

By Thanh Tung


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The government will launch a program to roll out electronic drivers license applications around the country by the end of the year.

Minister of Public Works and Transport Sun Chanthol said on Wednesday during the opening of a new drivers license center at Phnom Penhs Aeon Mall that a combination of new infrastructure and online registration would help Cambodians drive legally.

We are preparing the online system to provide a good service for the people as the government leader wanted, and it is the provision of effective, fast service, and transparent for the people, Chanthol said. The transparency is guaranteed. There are nine cameras in the room, every activity is recorded. No any extra money can be paid [in bribes to instructors].

In January, Prime Minister Hun Sen said motorbikes under 125cc would no longer require a license, meaning most drivers would be exempt from taking a test. The new licensing scheme comes amid public concerns and grumbling over the enforcement of the new Traffic Law after a year-long grace period. The legislation brings large increases in fines, including for unlicensed driving.

Processing new licenses at the centers will take up to 20 minutes, officials have said.

Pin Tith Nitha, 26, a student, said the new service offered an acceptable price, was fast and its convenient as its close to my house.

Leng Oun, 44, who renewed his license at the center this week, said it was a simple process. Unlike before, the process isnt complicated. It only took 20 minutes.

Cambodia is home to about 7 million vehicles, the vast majority of which are motorbikes and scooters, but there are only about 82,000 driving license holders, Chanthol said.

Ear Chariya, founding director of the Institute for Road Safety, welcomed the move to make it easier to renew and gain a license, but said more awareness-raising activities needed to be undertaken.
Its no secret that Carolyn Headricks favorite animal is a cat.

I love cats, she said.

Yet Headricks deep appreciation for felines hasnt kept her from loving and bonding with hundreds of dogs who have come through the doors of her long-running business.

On July 15, Headrick will hang up her clippers when she retires and closes Dogs-R-Us Grooming in Fremont. Headricks longtime employee, Cheri Frey, will retire as well.

More than a few tears have been shed as the women have begun bidding farewell to their customers  human, canine and feline.

Altogether, Headrick has been a groomer for 39 years, 30 of which shes spent in Fremont. She plans to retire to spend more time with family.

My husband, Don (Heuerman), has been retired for 10 years and its time we got to do some traveling together, Headrick said.

She beams when talking about the opportunity to spend time with their first grandson, Jack, who is a year old. And she plans to spend more time with her own dogs and cats.

Headricks retirement brings to a close a memorable career that began with a love of animals.

Cats were her first love.

We used to have barn cats and they were always the best-groomed cats in the country, because I would go and brush them all out. I was probably 10 (years old), she said.

Headrick grew up near Emporia, Kan., and went to college in Dallas for fashion merchandizing and accounting. While there, she took a part-time job in a kennel.

Kennel owner Peggy Boyd taught Headrick how to groom animals.

I loved working with the animals, Headrick said. I realized that accounting was never going to be my thing and the animals were exciting and fun.

Headrick worked for Boyd for a year. When Headricks father, R.B., died leaving her a small inheritance, she used the money to buy a dog kennel in Emporia, Kan. She ran the boarding kennel and groomed dogs before moving to Fremont in 1986.

She worked for a grooming shop in Fremont for a year before opening Dogs-R-Us Grooming on Main Street.

Fremont has been so great to me, she said. I was busy right from the start.

She worked solo for the first eight years.

It got pretty hectic and I realized I had to have somebody else to help me, she said.

Her first employee was Tammy Youngblood, who stayed three years. Headrick hired Cheri Frey, who has worked 17 years for her.

While still on Main Street, Headrick had her collie, Misty, with her in the shop.

Someone nabbed Misty from Headricks home. The dog was trying to get back home, when the collie was hit by a car and killed, Headrick said.

Headrick had a feline shop friend  a Maine coon named Oliver. The cat was the shop mascot for 14 years before his death.

One of the saddest days was when he passed away, Headrick said.

In 2006, Headrick moved her business to its First Street location.

The shop now has three groomers. Approximately 400 dogs are groomed here a month. That doesnt include walk-in customers who want to have their pets toenails trimmed.

Some clients have traveled long distances to bring their pets to Dogs-R-Us. Two customers brought their animals from Alaska. One was a former Fremonter, whod have her pet groomed when she returned for visits. The other was a man with a hunting dog, whod come in the fall and stay for two months.

For several years, one client drove from North Carolina, about five times a year, to have a pet schnauzer groomed.

Headricks smallest canine client has been a 4-pound Yorkshire terrier named Snickers.

Her largest canine clients have been St. Bernards, probably weighing between 150 to 175 pounds, and a Bouvier des Flandres, named Merlin.

He was a doll, Headrick said.

Headrick was in the will of Merlins owners, so that if anything happened to them, the dog would go to her.

Shes been listed in a couple of dog lovers wills.

Headricks stories of the animals shes groomed and their human owners might fill a book similar to those by the late veterinarian  and one of her favorite authors  James Herriot.

There was the Old English sheepdog named Mopsy.

I groomed her every two weeks and on Thursday nights shed sleep by her owners Bronco, Headrick said. She knew she was coming in for her beauty treatment. Shed lie on the table all day. I could put it low and she could see over the counter.

And while shes groomed animals who were only 7 or 8 weeks old, Headricks oldest client was a Lhasa-cocker mix named Kerby.

The dog lived to be 24 years old.

Kerby could be a cantankerous old soul, but he and Headrick had a bond.

I loved him and he loved me, she said. Kerby was a great guy.

One day while Headrick was grooming Kerby, she accidentally cut his ear. The dog began licking her face to try to make her feel better.

My husband said Im the only one who could cut a dogs ear and have the owners hugging me, trying to console me, because I was crying, she said.

Headrick and Frey have shed many tears over beloved canine clients whove become old and died. Headrick remembers the customer who brought in an older Scottish terrier to have him groomed one last time before his impending death. He died three days later.

We cry with the owners, Headrick said. Weve become very attached to our guys. Thats what we call them. Theyre part of us. Some of them we see every two weeks.

One recent afternoon, the women said goodbye to a little dog named, Tuffy, and his owner, LeRoy Rasmussen of Kennard. Rasmussen will have to find another person to groom Tuffy.

I didnt think it would bother me to have Tuffy and Leroy leave, Frey said wiping away tears. Thats the first one that has been that hard. Otherwise Ive told myself, its just another step.

Moving on to retirement may take a couple of steps.

I want to thank all of my customers, Frey said, wiping more tears. Theyve been so good to me  and to my boss of 17 years.

Frey recalls a friend and neighbor, who also was a client, whose dog needed to be put down. The neighbor asked if Frey would go with her to the veterinarians office.

The dog really didnt like me, Frey noted.

But Frey agreed to go.

I thought, This is going to be an easy thing. The dog hates me, Frey recalled. And I went and I cried, because obviously my heart is softer than I thought.

Frey cared for a bichon frise in her home while his owners traveled. When the dog was 18 years old and in declining health, the owner brought the dog into the shop a final time. Frey would spend the day in tears.

He came in for his last bath and I spent most of the day crying, Frey recalled. I thought Id gotten it all out of my system and his mom (owner) said, Well Casey, you wont see Cheri anymore and then I was on the floor with the dog in my lap, apologizing to the owner because I was crying again.

We get a little attached, Headrick said.

Headrick understands the unique bond between animals and humans.

Horses, cats, dogs all read us, our emotions, our personalities  They fill a part of our lives that another human doesnt, because they love us unconditionally, Headrick said. If youre having a bad day, theyll snuggle with you and make you feel better.

Headrick will miss the shop and her clients.

Theyve been wonderful, she said, appreciating their loyalty. Lots of them  Ive groomed their dogs, theyre kids dogs and their grandkids dogs. Im on the third generation.
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Activists and government officials from around Africa will gather Friday in Tanzania for the continent's first-ever forum on albinism. The event is sponsored by the United Nations, which sounded the alarm earlier this year about a spike in attacks on albinos in Malawi.

In nearby Zimbabwe, albino activists say community outreach is working to dispel dangerous myths and discrimination, but the battle is far from over.

Loveness Mainoti's husband divorced her in 2008 after she gave birth to her second child with albinism. She is now a member of the Albino Charity Organization of Zimbabwe, which offers encouragement to parents of albino children.

"I am now giving counseling to others, and courage to love their children and to accept their condition as they are, Mainoti said, adding that the group is trying to counter the myths surrounding albinism. It is not a misfortune. It is not a result of prostitution, neither is it a result of witchcraft.

Official statistics show Zimbabwe, with a population of 13 million, has about 39,000 people with albinism.

The condition is characterized by a lack of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. It is hereditary.

But albino Tapiwa Gwen Marange, 34, says more education is needed in rural areas.

"In Zimbabwe, traditional healers lie to HIV-positive men, [claiming] that if they sleep with a woman with albinism, HIV/AIDS is cured, Marange said. They also say women with albinism give more sexual pleasure than women who do not have albinism, which is a lie. And some people say we are a curse.  My parents are black and I am white. Some people say maybe the gods were cursing my parents."

Albinos have come under attack in neighboring Malawi and Tanzania, where some people falsely believe that charms made from albino body parts will bring good fortune or money.

"Honestly, I never knew that I was different, said journalist Candice Mwakalyelye, an albino who is half Tanzanian. Growing up in Zimbabwe, I was never treated any differently from other children I interacted with. I do not know whether I never treated myself differently or not. But I noticed that somebody noticed my skin color when I moved to Tanzania. That is when you would find someone down the street shouting muzungu, muzungu, which is Swahili for murungu [white person]."

She and other activists say education plays a key role in reducing discrimination and violence against albinos.
Progress is being made in the delivery of humanitarian assistance to tens of thousands of Syrians trapped in besieged areas. In Geneva, a senior United Nations official said 16 of Syria's 18 besieged areas soon will have been reached.



Jan Egeland, the special adviser to U.N. Special Envoy for Syria, said significant progress is being made. This, he said, comes after several weeks where virtually nothing was getting through to the thousands of people in Syria who have been without food and other aid for months or, in some cases, years.



Egeland said two convoys are loaded with food and other relief supplies ready to go to several areas including Al Waer, near the town of Homs, and Afrin in northern Aleppo.



"Today alone, we hope to reach 110,000 people in besieged and hard-to-reach areas with more than 100 trucks and vehicles," he said. "All of this happens while the fighting has gotten worse. The bombing is worse. The protection needs of the civilian population are being trampled upon across the Syrian map."



Egeland said it is a positive sign that a 48-hour truce was declared in Aleppo city to allow aid convoys to go through. He attributed the negotiated truce and the progress in reaching the affected areas to more effective diplomatic pressure from Russia and the United States.



"I really hope that this was a turning point for humanitarian access to besieged areas and also to hard-to-reach areas; but we should not be naive," he said. "The war is continuing, and in a war zone everything is fragile."



Special adviser Egeland said the United Nations is acutely aware that the access that exists today could end tomorrow.
As devout followers broke the daily Muslim fast at a Virginia mosque one evening earlier this week, talk turned to how the holy month of Ramadan was marred by Sunday's massacre in Orlando by an American Muslim shooter.

In a month devoted to inner religious reflection, families talked about how they can prevent their youth from turning to extremism and becoming radicalized by the plethora of virulent rhetoric on the internet and social media.

"We have a very active youth department here. We are trying to get the youth to come in and to be more interactive," Faazia Deen, the interfaith and outreach officer at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in suburban Washington, told VOA.

The center's youth department offers a variety of programs to help enrich their social and intellectual growth. It hosts summer camps and organizes speaker programs, and young people participate in interfaith programs where they reach out to other faith centers, such as churches and synagogues.

"Dar Al-Hijrah has a big role ahead of them to engage the youth," said Deen, who works closely with mothers who, according to her, influence their children the most.

"I, as often as I can, talk to mothers. I especially feel that mothers are important to get them in education," she said.

Message to youth

Not too far from Dar Al-Hijrah, worshippers at another mosque told VOA that engaging vulnerable youth is a priority.

"When such a bad incident like [Orlando] happens, it's important for parents to tell their children it is not Islamic," Khyber Kakar, a volunteer at the Madina Islamic Center in Springfield, told VOA.

"It's the mosque or Islamic center's role to let the youth know that, according to Quran and Islam, the life of a Muslim and non-Muslim is very precious," the young volunteer added.

The imam of the Madina center says its programs are specially designed for youth. He said the center plans to create a youth department to attract a larger number of young people.

WATCH: Mosques in Virginia Teach Dangers of Extremism

"We have weekend classes, as well as monthly gatherings, where we try to engage the youth," said Jamal Kakar, imam of the center. "We focus on them so that they contribute toward the community, and also help to not become victims of extremists' propaganda."

A worshipper at the center said parents also have a responsibility to sift through negative outside influences.

"I think we should not stay unaware of our children's activities," Saeed Khan told VOA.

Be who you are

Muslim leaders say they are trying to counter a message of Islamist extremism which portrays America as anti-Muslim.

"My message [to a young person] is be a proud American Muslim. There is no contradiction in being a Muslim and American," Nihad Awad, executive director of the U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told VOA.

"It might be difficult to be a Muslim when we hear these things, but this is the greatest time to be a Muslim, Awad said. Just be who you are. America provides freedom of thought and freedom of religion. This is also enshrined in Islam.
No video cameras or reporters were allowed into the White House Map Room on Wednesday to document the fourth meeting between Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and President Barack Obama.

But afterward a photo emerged, first on the Dalai Lama's Instagram account and then released by the White House, of the two men facing each other, locked in an embrace that spoke volumes about the warmth of their relationship.

In an interview with VOA, Myles Caggins, National Security Council spokesman for Asia, said the meeting was personal in nature.

"In this case, personal because the president, as he hosted the Dalai Lama in the Map Room of the residence, greets him as an individual who is a leader, who is internationally recognized as a leader for religion and a cultural leader of Tibet. But in contrast, an official visit or a state visit would include the normal trappings of the parade on the South Lawn, potentially a meeting in the Oval Office and a state dinner, potentially."

China warning

Earlier, China warned Obama against meeting with the Dalai Lama, saying it could damage mutual trust. China sees the Dalai Lama as a dangerous separatist.

Obama refers to the Dalai Lama as "a good friend." But China fears these meetings between the two send the wrong message to Tibetans.

"If such meeting goes through, it will send a wrong signal to the separatist forces seeking Tibet independence, and it will damage mutual trust and cooperation," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters Wednesday in Beijing.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president has "warm personal feelings" for the Dalai Lama, and thanked him for his letter of condolences to the families of those hurt and killed in Sunday's mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub. Earnest said the president also appreciated the spiritual leader's commitment to nonviolence and his efforts to reduce the impact of climate change.

White House statement

After the meeting, the White House released a statement saying: "The president and the Dalai Lama discussed the situation for Tibetans in the People's Republic of China, and the president emphasized his strong support for the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions and the equal protection of human rights of Tibetans in China. The president lauded the Dalai Lama's commitment to peace and nonviolence, and expressed support for the Dalai Lama's Middle Way approach."

The Dalai Lama has advocated for a middle way  not asking for independence from China for Tibet, but for more autonomy.

Asked about more autonomy for Tibet, NSC spokesman Caggins told VOA that the U.S. position on China has not changed.

"During the meeting, it is important to note that the president reiterated the U.S. position that Tibet is a part of China and that the United States does not support Tibetan independence. But both leaders, the president and the Dalai Lama, agreed that it is important for the United States and China to have a constructive and productive relationship. It is also important that the Dalai Lama and his representatives have a fruitful dialogue with Chinese authorities."

But dialogue between the Dalai Lama and China's central government stopped in 2010. Tibetans re-elected their prime minister in May, and they maintain hope that talks with China to give Tibet more autonomy can continue.
Brazil's interim president Michel Temer has been linked to one of the country's biggest corruption scandals in testimony by a key witness made public Wednesday.

Sergio Machado, former chief executive of state oil company Petrobras, said that Temer had asked for money from the company to fund political campaigns for himself and other members of his party.

The oil executive said that Temer had met with him to ask for $431,000 to finance the campaign of congressman Gabriel Chalita.

Machado also said he had arranged bribes for Temer and 10 other politicians, some of whom are members of Temer's center-right PMDB party.

Other witnesses have accused Temer of financially backing two corrupt Petrobras executives so they could oversee the scheme.

Temer has denied all involvement in the Petrobras scheme, a sweeping scandal in which contractors overbilled the company by some $2 billion. His office said Machado's testimony, a plea deal made public by the supreme court on Wednesday, "absolutely lacks truth."

Michel Temer's center-right coalition has ruled for barely a month following the impeachment of Brazil's former president Dilma Rousseff. The Brazilian Senate voted to impeach Rousseff on charges that she used accounting tricks to hide the Brazilian budget deficit when she ran for re-election in 2014.
The dramatic arrest in London this week of a prominent Romanian businessman's son is raising questions about the European Arrest Warrant, which obliges member states to carry out arrests on their soil on the orders of foreign governments.

Human rights advocates say the Romanian government's case against Alexander Adamescu is politically motivated, and critics argue British police should not be carrying out the dirty work of governments such as Romania, rated as one of the most corrupt in Europe.

The arrest came a week before Britain votes on whether to remain in the European Union, in which sovereignty is one of the key issues.

Adamescu, 38, was on his way Monday to deliver a statement to reporters at London's Frontline Club, a well-known gathering spot for journalists, when London Metropolitan Police officers stopped him and took him into custody.

Police officials told VOA they arrested Adamescu on a European Arrest Warrant issued by the Romanian government, which accuses Adamescu of bribery.

Denies charges

Adamescus wife, Adriana Constantinescu, later read a statement in which Adamescu denied the charges.

Reading from the statement, a tearful Constantinescu asked a visibly stunned audience at the club, "How can this happen in Europe?"

"I saw him in the car, I wanted to approach him and the officer came and said, 'Step back,' and I said, 'Why?'  she said in describing the arrest to VOA.

"You are in London. You think, we all know that [we are] in a democratic country where the rule of law is respected and you come to an event where the freedom of speech is a must, in the rule of law in a democracy, and your husband is taken away. So he cannot participate, so he cannot be seen by the people that he is not a criminal. He's a writer," Constantinescu said.

Adamescu, his wife and their two young children have been living in London where he studies at the prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Critics say Adamescu is being targeted by the Romanian government as retaliation for his father's activities.

Alexander Adamescu is the son of Dan Adamescu, a Romanian insurance magnate now imprisoned in Romania on corruption charges. Observers say Dan Adamescu was targeted after a newspaper he owns criticized the government.

"It's easy. His newspaper is a very conservative newspaper," said Radu Moraru, a prominent television opposition commentator in Romania. He said Dan Adamescu's newspaper criticized left-leaning politicians such as then-Prime Minister Victor Ponta.

"The prime minister, being socialist, he couldn't close the newspaper. He couldn't attack the journalists. He was upset at this guy and he destroyed his business," Moraru said.

A court in Romania sentenced Dan Adamescu to more than four years in prison after finding him guilty of bribing judges who handled insolvency cases involving his companies.

Romanian government officials said charges against Alexander Adamescu stemmed from the same case.

Critics accuse Romania's government of frequently using the country's National Anti-Corruption Directorate (DNA) to target the opposition.

EU membership

Neil Barnett, a corporate investigator with Istok Associates, a risk consultancy group retained by Alexander Adamescu, expressed outrage at the arrest and said Britain's EU membership is the underlying problem.

"A single internal arrest warrant is not suitable for mixing the judicial standards of Sweden, Britain, Germany with Romania and Bulgaria, and those countries in particular are the offenders," Barnett said.

"Their standards are radically different. And it's the same problem as the euro, just transferred from finance and economics into justice," he said, referring to the eurozone, in which troubled economies such as Greece are seen as a drag on those of richer members.

"The notion of pan-European standards of justice have been called into question," said Eeva Heikkila, a London human rights attorney and critic of the European Arrest Warrant treaties. She said it is difficult to forecast what improvements a British exit from the EU would bring.

"However, from my standpoint, things can only get better. The European Arrest Warrant expedited the procedures at the expense of human rights and justice," Heikkila said.

The younger Adamescu, who also holds German citizenship, appeared Tuesday before London's Westminster Magistrates Court, where a judge set bail at $568,000. He remained in jail Wednesday night as the family scrambled to wire the funds to the court.

Alexander Adamescu's case will be heard in November.
The shooting death of a British member of parliament a week before Britain votes on a hotly debated referendum on whether to quit the European Union stunned a country where gun attacks are rare and political violence is almost unheard of.

Some witnesses say the alleged killer yelled "Britain first" as he shot, stabbed and kicked Jo Cox, a junior Labour Member of Parliament. The 41-year-old mother of two and former aid worker was known for her advocacy for Syrian refugees, her pro-immigrant stance and, most notably, her opposition to a British exit from the EU.

She died after paramedics came to her rescue in her West Yorkshire district Thursday.

Police are investigating, and government officials were cautious not to qualify the killing Thursday as being politically motivated.

Police say they arrested one suspect and have not established a motive. They are not looking for any other suspects.

Britain's Home Secretary, Theresa May, said she would not comment on the case until the facts are fully established. She called the decision to suspend campaigning on the referendum "entirely appropriate."

'Unusual event'

Such violence involving a politician is very rare in Britain.

"It's a very unusual event within the confines of British politics," Tony Travers, a political science professor at the London School of Economics, told VOA.

Both opponents and supporters of Britain leaving the EU suspended their campaigns Thursday. Analysts say the decision was necessary, especially given the heated nature of the debate in the final days.

The debate has been bitter, pitting British voters against one another on issues of immigration, sovereignty and trade.

"This debate on EU membership shouldn't be embroiled in a situation like this. This has no place in any civilized society, and for it to be misplaced, maybe, into the debate would distort the fabric of the debate and do the debate injustice," said Rory Broomfield, director of The Freedom Association, a London pressure group that favors leaving.

Reaction

British Prime Minister David Cameron suspended campaigning in Gibraltar following the news of the attack on Cox. He called her death a "tragedy," and described her as a "committed and caring" member of parliament. Cameron said it was "absolutely tragic and dreadful news."

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn expressed shock at what he called "a horrific murder." Corbyn described Cox as having a "deep commitment to humanity," one who was "universally liked" at Westminster" and "who did her public duty right at the heart of our democracy."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said during a visit to Copenhagen that the attack on Cox is an attack on democracy. "It is an assault on everybody who cares about and has faith in democracy."

Shock waves spread through Europe, where the events leading up to the Brexit referendum are being closely watched.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he was "deeply shocked" by news of what he called a "terrible attack."

Cox had been vocal in her support for remaining in the European Union, posting many articles online, many of them in favor of continued immigration  one of the biggest and most contentious issues in the debate. In a recent appeal on Twitter, she invited readers to see a video on "why our great, proud nation should lead Europe  not Leave Europe."
A collection of U.S. political surveys this week shows Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is pulling ahead of Republican challenger Donald Trump five months before November's national election.

Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state seeking to become the country's first female president, holds an average 5.6-percentage-point lead in several polls over the real estate mogul who overtook a large Republican field of candidates, many of them current or former senators and governors, in his first bid for elected office.

All of the surveys were conducted after Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, became her party's presumptive nominee last week after a lengthy battle with her lone party challenger, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Trump, who joined the presidential race a year ago Thursday, also enjoyed growing support, at least for a time, when he became the presumptive Republican nominee in early May as his last challengers dropped out of the race.



Reactions to Orlando massacre

Almost all of the recent polling was conducted before an American-born Muslim carried out the country's worst-ever mass shooting early Sunday at an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53. It is not clear how the shooting might affect voters' perceptions of how Clinton and Trump would deal with such an attack as president. They responded in different ways after the extent of the carnage became known.

Trump, calling for the U.S. to be tough on terrorists, used the massacre to renew his call to temporarily block Muslims from entering the country for fear they might commit new attacks, although the Orlando shooter was a U.S. citizen and would not have been affected by his proposal. Authorities say the shooter, killed by police as they raided the nightclub, was radicalized by jihadist tracts he saw on the internet.

Clinton denounced Trump's anti-Muslim plan and his call to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to halt undocumented immigrants from entering the United States.

"I dont know how one builds a wall to keep the internet out," Clinton said. "So not one of Donald Trumps reckless ideas would have saved a single life in Orlando. Its just more evidence that he is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be commander-in-chief.

Muslim cooperation essential

Clinton, the top U.S. diplomat from 2009 to 2013, said, "We rely on partners in majority-Muslim countries to help us fight terrorists. We need to build trust in Muslim communities here at home to counter radicalization in the lone wolf phenomenon.

Numerous Republican establishment figures have given Trump tepid endorsements, even as they have often criticized his call for the Muslim ban and now his response to the Orlando mass shooting. Others, like 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have rejected Trump's candidacy, saying his views do not represent the party's traditional conservative policies and that his caustic comments denigrating women, war heroes, Mexicans, Muslims and others are unacceptable for a presidential candidate.

On Thursday, Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush, told the Politico news site that he is voting for Clinton, saying that Trump "doesn't appear to want to learn about issues."

Trump said this week that if key Republican officials do not support his candidacy, "I'll just do it very nicely by myself."

The latest CBS News poll showed Clinton ahead of Trump, 43 percent to 37 percent. With Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson added to the mix, Clinton polled at 39 percent among registered voters, with Trump at 32 percent and Johnson at 11 percent.

Also this week, a Bloomberg News survey showed Clinton with a 49 percent-to-37 percent lead over Trump, with Johnson at 9 percent. An NBC News/Survey Monkey tracking poll pegged Clinton's edge at 42-38 over Trump and Johnson at 9 percent, while a Guardian/SurveyUSA poll had the race with Clinton at 39 percent, Trump at 36 percent and Johnson at 6 percent.
It has been almost a decade since former Malawi President Bakili Muluzi was arrested on corruption charges, but his trial has made little progress. A judge will rule Friday on another request for a 30-day postponement.

Muluzi, 73, and his former personal secretary, Lyness Whiskey, are accused of stealing 1.7 billion Malawian kwacha ($12 million) during his 1994-2004 presidency. The funds came to Malawi as aid from Taiwan, Morocco and Libya.

The former president has always said the charges were politically motivated.

The lead prosecutor in the case recused himself a month ago, citing personal reasons. The trial was to resume Monday, but the new prosecutor said a key witness was not available and asked the judge for 30 days to review the charges.

Tamando Chokotho, the lead defense counsel, also said he would need more time to prepare.

You should realize that this is quite a bulky matter," Chokotho said. "It involved a lot documents and a lot of evidence. And if the case is changing in any way, we will need quite some time to prepare fully.

The trial opened in 2009 but has been subjected to several adjournments, partly because of Muluzis hospitalizations related to spinal problems. Both sides reject allegations that they have been deliberately delaying proceedings.

Political meddling?

Some see political interference in the delays. Muluzi is part of the opposition UDF party, but the ruling DPP party recently joined forces with the UDF in parliament, and Muluzis son, who is president of the UDF, is a cabinet minister.

Political analyst Vincent Kondowe said that "when cases are not given the impetus and the momentum which they require, you begin to question the political willingness that is there to prosecute people in public offices who are accused of plundering public resources.

State anti-corruption officials deny that political interference is responsible for the delays, but Malawians are getting impatient. Local press reports this month said the state had spent as much as $12 million on the case. The government did not respond to a request for comment on that figure.

Erick Matola, a teacher in Blantyre, said, "The funds which are being used to prosecute this case are public funds, to which I contribute through tax. Therefore, I see that its a waste of resources.

Malawi's anti-corruption enforcement has been under a microscope since 2013, when an audit revealed public officials had stolen $32 million in public funds.

The Cashgate scandal, as it was called, led to about 70 arrests and prompted the European Union and other foreign donors to cut aid. Malawi lost about $150 million in annual assistance. Much of that aid remains suspended pending reform of Malawis public finance system.
The World-renowned Pathfinder Chorus, Nebraskas premier a cappella chorus, will perform a Celebrate America concert on June 25 at Westside High School, 8701 Pacific St.

This will be a great concert for people in eastern Nebraska to kick off our Independence Day celebrations, said Don Bowen, chorus marketing and public relations vice president.

The chorus, which has been regularly ranked as one of the top choruses in the world in the Barbershop Harmony Society, will perform an array of music to celebrate America, including American Armed Forces Medley, So Many Voices, Harmony, Home on the Range, and Goin Home.

People will recognize Goin Home from the very beginning of the song, Bowen said. People may not know the words, but many people know the melody that was used for Dvoraks New World Symphony.

The Westside show will also feature guest quartet Premium Blend from Kansas City.

Were excited to have Premium Blend as our special guests, Bowen said. Our audience will love their energetic style.

The show begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 each at the door but can be bought at the chorus website, pathfinderchorus.org, for $13 each.

The Pathfinder Chorus is Nebraskas premiere a cappella chorus having ranked among the best choruses in the world with the Barbershop Harmony Society. Based in Fremont, Nebraska, the Pathfinder Chorus also includes members from Omaha, Lincoln, Blair and throughout eastern Nebraska. It is a 501  designation and rehearses each Monday night at First Lutheran Church in Fremont.
Croatia's parliament ousted the country's government Thursday after a no-confidence vote that went against Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic.

Of deputies present in the 151-member parliament, 125 backed the no-confidence motion while 15 were against and two abstained.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic will begin consultations with parliamentary parties on forming a new cabinet on Friday.

If a new government is not formed within the 30-day deadline, parliament will be dissolved and Kitarovic will call an early election in the European Union's newest member state.

Parliament's action was taken on a motion filed by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ  Hrvatska demokratska zajednica in Croatian), the senior party in the ruling coalition.

The conservatives have pointed out the inability of Oreskovic, a Canadian-educated financial expert, to lead the country amid deep economic and social problems.

Oreskovic, who has no party affiliation, lost the support of HDZ after clashing with its leader, Tomislav Karamarko, the HDZ head and deputy prime minister.

Karamarko has been accused of conflict of interest in a dispute over managing rights in an oil company jointly owned by the Croatian INA and Hungarian MOL, because of his links with a lobbyist for Hungary's MOL, which has been in conflict with the Croatian government.



Karamarko stepped down from his deputy prime minister post Wednesday, pledging to oust Oreskovic and win enough votes in the parliament to form another government with a new prime minister.



Oreskovic told the parliament Thursday that the real reason for his ouster was that he started resolving the dispute between INA and MOL, adding that someone was not pleased with it, a reference to Karamarko.
Dozens of people are feared dead after fighting broke out Wednesday between government forces and an unknown armed group in Raja town of the newly created Lol state. A church leader said more than four hundred civilians have fled to the local Catholic church compound in Raja. Sources in Raja said State Governor Rizik Zachariah Hassan and other senior state officials have fled the area.

Eyewitnesses in Wau said the armed group attacked Raja military base, a National Security Service office near Raja market, and the Governors house, killing several soldiers. Most of the other soldiers fled the town.

The early morning fighting forced scores of people to flee into the bush, while others sought refuge at Waus Catholic Church Compound, according to witnesses.

Raja Mayor Marodama James Benjamin was among those who fled the town.

The town is empty and I am moving with many civilians who are fleeing. The town is destroyed. The market, including the bank, is destroyed.

Benjamin said the situation remains tense. He believes many people have been killed but could not provide a casualty estimate.

SPLA spokesman Brigadier Lul Ruai downplayed the severity of the death toll, saying Wednesday's fighting is nothing more than attacks being carried out by local criminals and bandits.

These are people who took advantage of the problems that the country is going through. They have decided to take up arms and use the security vacuum to loot and rob. The initial reports we have received say they have already started looting in the morning when they entered, he said.

Ruai said his forces are working with forces loyal to First Vice President Riek Machar to defeat the attackers. He said its just a matter of time before they gain full control of Raja again.

As peace partners, the top SPLA-IO military leadership agreed to fight alongside SPLA forces against anti-peace elements. At this stage the SPLA would like to assure the people of South Sudan that it has the ability and capability to defeat armed criminals and bandits who are against the implementation of the peace agreement.

William Ezekiel, undersecretary of the National Committee for Information and Public Relations, denied the SPLA-IO forces are fighting alongside government army forces.

Given our forces are in their cantonment areas and by virtue of the agreement we are not supposed to go and help any side. We are just confined to our places of cantonment, he said.

Ezekiel said the SPLM-IO is still gathering information on what is happening in Raja.

Of course it has been blamed on unknown gunmen. And this issue of unknown gunmen is a new terminology in South Sudan. Every incident has been blamed on unknown gunmen attacking even here inside Juba. Of course it the government to verify this, not we.

Both Ruai and Ezekiel said the attacks will not hinder full implementation of the August peace agreement signed by President Salva Kiir, and First Vice President and former rebel leader Riek Machar.
More than 30 whales were stranded on a beach on Indonesia's main island of Java and 10 of them have died, an official said Thursday.



A mass rescue operation managed to pull most of the stranded whales into the deep sea, said Wahid Noor Azis, head of the local Fishery and Maritime management.



Wahid said the whales began stranding themselves during high tide Wednesday on the coast of Pesisir village in Probolinggo district in the province of East Java.



The whales, numbering about 32 to 35, are likely short-finned pilot whales, which live in tropical and subtropical waters, Wahid said.



Dozens of locals using two boats were trying to drive the last two stranded whales still alive into the deep sea.



The provincial Conservation and Natural Resources Agency will be conducting autopsies on the 10 dead whales to find out why they became stranded, Wahid said. The locals would bury the carcasses of the dead whales after the autopsies.



Pilot whales are among the largest of the oceanic dolphins, exceeded in size only by the killer whale. They are also among the most common cetaceans stranded.
Nasser Hammad, heading home for a family vacation in Egypt, disappeared without a trace last month when EgyptAir Flight 804 plunged into the Mediterranean Sea on a flight from Paris to Cairo. Discovery of the plane's wreckage and its cockpit voice recorder on the sea floor has raised hope that an explanation for the doomed jet's mysterious disappearance, and the loss of all 66 people aboard, eventually may be found

Hammad's brother Tarek said in a telephone interview, "We can't even prove he is dead until now to sort out post-death legal matters for his family and five children."

The friend of another crash victim, Mahmoud Elsayyad, who was traveling to Egypt to see his three children, complained that authorities have told the families little more than "wait and see what will happen."

"They are in heaven, I agree," said the friend, named Arafat. "But why are we being kept in hell?"

A research vessel with deep water search capabilities spotted "several main locations" of wreckage and photographed the discoveries, the committee investigating the Airbus A320's disappearance announced in Egypt. On Thursday, authorities announced that the cockpit voice recorder was located and pulled from the sea.

A research vessel with deep-water search capabilities spotted "several main locations" of wreckage and photographed the discoveries, the committee investigating the Airbus A320's disappearance announced in Egypt.

The M.V. John Lethridge, a British-built vessel capable of searching waters up to 6,000 meters deep, has investigators aboard who are mapping the wreckage sites, officials said. The 1,850-ton ship is owned by Global Marine Systems, based in Britain, and sails under a Panamanian flag (earlier reports said the ship was French).

No possible cause for the crash, including terrorism, has yet been ruled out.
Tina Meins talked to her father about terrorism and gun violence the weekend before he died.

"It sounds weird, but we really did that, Meins said, smiling through tears as she recalled talking to her father about ways of preventing mass shootings, just days before he was one of 14 people killed in the San Bernardino, California, shooting last December.

The gunman who killed Meins father reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group shortly before the attack  just as the shooter did in the Orlando attack Sunday.

I know exactly what those families were going through, said Meins of the moment she heard the news. The pain of knowing this was happening again in our country to so many families was too much to bear."

She thanked Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, and several other senators who participated in an almost 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor, demanding legislative action on gun control at a press conference Thursday.

The 40 Democratic senators who participated in the filibuster ended up winning a promise that legislation would come up for a vote, following a week of partisan congressional battles over ways to prevent future attacks like Orlando.

House Republicans countered that their vote Thursday on the Countering Terrorist Radicalization Act would do far more to address the threat of homegrown terrorism. That act consisted of three bills that had already passed the House and were packaged together to be passed along to the Senate in the wake of the Orlando shooting.

Senate Democrats legislation seeks to enhance background checks on gun sales and prevent individuals on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms.

Senator Dianne Feinstein  who sponsored one of those amendments  said she thinks the legislation can pass when it likely comes up for a vote next Tuesday. She said the Justice Department and the White House had called her to confirm their support for the bills.

White House spokesperson Eric Schultz said Thursday that Feinsteins legislation would make a substantive difference but the president was acutely aware of the political realities involved in passing it.

Terrorism or gun control?

Any legislation will first have to survive the partisan battles of the U.S. Congress, where the Orlando shooting has been framed in two very different ways: as a national security issue by Republicans and a gun control issue by Democrats.

Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, initially told reporters Thursday that Obama was directly responsible for the shooting in Orlando because he allowed the growth of IS during his presidency. In a later tweet, he clarified his statements to say the presidents national security decisions led to the rise of IS.

Former Republican presidential candidate Texas Senator Ted Cruz argued on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon that this is not a gun control issue. This is a terrorism issue.

"We saw a political show on the Senate floor. Democrat after Democrat standing on the floor, not incensed at ISIS, not incensed at radical terror, incensed that Americans have the right to keep and bear arms," Cruz said, using an acronym for the terror group. "This is a political distraction. This is political gamesmanship.

Senate Democrats countered Republican framing of the issue as terrorism, arguing gun control legislation would be the best way to prevent future lone-wolf attacks.

I think weve reached a tipping point, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts said at the news conference Thursday. I think everyone realizes the terrorists that we need to fear are not on the streets of Mosul or Aleppo or Fallujah. Theyre on the streets of the United States and they will have guns unless we pass tough laws.

On the House side, where members battled over a similar legislative proposal for gun control after a moment of silence Monday night, the conversation ran along the same lines.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin called for a balance between public safety and individual rights.

We want to make sure that something like this never happens again, everybody wants that, Ryan told reporters at a Thursday news conference.

As we proceed, we also want to make sure were not infringing upon peoples legitimate constitutional rights  thats important. We also want to make sure that somebody who is not supposed to get a gun, doesnt get a gun. We have to figure out how that works," he said.

But House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California argued that Democrats have the will of the American people on their side.

Eighty-seven percent of the American people say no fly-no buy, except for the Republican members of the Congress of the United States," Pelosi said.

"If they brought no fly-no buy and the background check bill to the floor, these would pass," she added.

Second Amendment concerns

But many Second Amendment supporters have expressed concern that the legislation would ignore the due process of the law and limit the rights of law-abiding gun owners.

Seizing firearms from individuals and their God-given right to defend themselves is not going to prevent horrific acts of terror, Representative Steve Russell, a Republican from Oklahoma, told VOA in an interview Wednesday. He owns a small rifle-manufacturing business.

Russell said the Democratic effort to enact gun control in the wake of the Orlando shootings was a knee-jerk reaction where people are wanting to get solutions that are not going to address the problems.

He said the nations connection to firearms goes back to its founding, when the colonists who fought for their independence made sure the right to bear arms was enshrined in the new Constitution.

But Meins, whose father was killed in San Bernardino, said it may be time to revisit those rights written hundreds of years ago, those were different times.

People dont understand that the ease of accessibility is really going to contribute to potential attacks, she told VOA.

Meins said the filibuster effort to closing the terror gap and enhancing background checks would make a difference in helping prevent future attacks.

People dont understand the risk, especially in cases like Orlando and San Bernardino. I dont think people understand the risk of homegrown terrorist attacks," she said.
The government of Eritrea says its forces killed more than 200 Ethiopian troops and wounded more than 300 during fighting Sunday and Monday in a contested border area.

There has been no independent confirmation of the figures, released by Eritrea in a government statement Thursday.

In an interview with VOA's Horn of Africa Service, Ethiopia's Communications Minister Getachew Reda suggested the figures are inaccurate but stopped short of denying them.

"A retreating army and an army in disarray under normal circumstances does not have a sense of what happened," he said.

He also said Ethiopia has no interest in disclosing its assessment of damages during the battle.

Both countries have claimed the upper hand in the fighting, which took place in the area of Tsorona, an Eritrean town that was a flashpoint during the border war the countries fought between 1998 and 2000.

Eritrea said Thursday that its forces "quashed" the Ethiopian attack and forced the troops to retreat beyond their starting points.

Ethiopia has said its force drove back an Eritrean attack and chose to withdaw from the site of the clash "once our objective was achieved."

US urges restraint



The U.S. Department of State expressed concern over the military action, calling on both sides to exercise restraint.

"We also urge both Ethiopia and Eritrea to cooperate in promoting stability and sustainable peace in the region," U.S. Department of State spokesman John Kirby said in a statement Tuesday.



Eritrea has appealed to the United Nations Security Council to condemn what it called a military offensive by Ethiopia.



The border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia killed an estimated 70,000 people. Since then, the two countries have fought periodic battles on their boundary, the most recent before this week coming in 2012.



Both governments accused the other of starting the latest battle to distract attention from political problems and internal opposition.
Ethiopian authorities have dismissed a 61-page report by Human Rights Watch that details the killings of more than 400 people over the past seven months in a crackdown on protests in the country's Oromia region.



Government spokesman Getachew Reda told VOA Thursday an organization so far from the realities on the ground could not have issued an accurate account of the human rights situation in Oromia.



The spokesperson said Ethiopia's national human rights commission issued its own report with death tolls that were significantly lower than the Human Rights Watch report and accused the organization of not checking its facts.



Human Rights Watch said soldiers have repeatedly fired live ammunition at Oromia protesters with little or no warning or attempts to use non-lethal crowd control measures. It said many of those killed were students, including children under the age of 18.



The rights group also said police have arrested tens of thousands of people since the protests began, and that many remain in detention without charge and access to lawyers or family members.



The protests were triggered by concerns about the government's proposed expansion of Addis Ababa's boundaries. Demonstrators feared the plan would displace Oromia farmers.



The government canceled the plan in January but protests continued due to what one Oromia resident called the "brutal crackdown."



Human Rights Watch noted that some of the protests turned violent, resulting in looting or destruction of government-owned property. The group, however, said its investigation found that most protests were peaceful.



Human Rights Watch said its report is based on interviews with 125 protesters, bystanders and victims of abuse.



It is calling on the government to free detained protesters, support a credible investigation into the killings and hold security force members accountable for the alleged abuses.
After a two-year break which felt more like a boycott, European leaders and chief executives of top multinational companies are back at Russia's top economic gathering in a sign of weariness about European sanctions against Moscow.

Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its support for separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine landed President Vladimir Putin in international isolation. The European Union and the United States imposed economic sanctions and kicked Russia out of the G8 group of nations.



Once Russia's showcase of its geopolitical weight and economic attractiveness, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum  dubbed Russia's Davos  was a sore sight the past two years: European leaders and heads of the major companies who once had lucrative long-term projects in Russia were nowhere to be seen.



This year's gathering, however, signals what could be an emerging movement within the EU to ease economic sanctions on Russia. The sanctions didn't only affect the Russian economy by closing long-term EU lending to Russian companies but also triggered a Russian import ban on meat, vegetable and dairy products from the European Union, dealing a heavy blow on agriculture-dependent nations such as Greece.



European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who is to address the forum later on Thursday, is the highest-ranking EU official to visit Russia since the Crimean annexation. Juncker's office, however, sought to downplay the significance of his visit, saying that it should not be interpreted as a sign that the EU will lift the sanctions when the time for review comes two months from now.



Another high-profile speaker is Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, whose country was badly hurt when Russia closed its food markets to Italians along with other EU producers.



Moscow has sought to maintain good ties with Rome. While Putin was shunned in other European capitals, he was welcomed to Italy last year, meeting with Italian officials and Pope Francis. During their meeting in October, Renzi greeted Putin as Russia's ``dear'' president and didn't voice any criticism against the country's actions in Ukraine.



Chief executives of major European companies who are either engaged in long-term projects in Russia or whose projects were affected by the sanctions are also coming this year, including the CEOs of oil company BP, the chairman of the board of Nestle S.A. and others.



Moscow is keen to spin the attendance as a sign that European politicians have failed to convince businesses to break ties with Russia.



``We don't go around trying to convince our European and American partners to lift the sanctions,'' Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. ``Those who imposed the sanctions, let them decide what should be done about this impasse they have created. But this impasse is slowly disappearing: the participant list of the St. Petersburg forum is a testimony to that.''



U.S. authorities, in their turn, were anxious to portray ExxonMobil's participation as an exception.



``We've been very clear on our engagements with U.S. companies that we believe that are clear risks, both economic and reputational, associated with top-level engagement with a government that is flouting the most fundamental principles of international rule of law by intervening military in a neighboring country,'' U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday. Those companies which are not going to St. Petersburg recognize, Kirby said, that ``attending this forum sends a poor message out there about the acceptability of Russia's actions.''
One of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing under mysterious circumstances last year spoke out Thursday, saying he had been detained for more than eight months by Beijing officials and that another of the five had been abducted from Hong Kong.

Lam Wing-kee, whose bookstore sold gossipy books about China's political leadership, told a news conference that his colleague, Lee Bo, who went missing from Hong Kong, had been abducted in "cross-border enforcement actions" by mainland Chinese police, who were out of their jurisdiction when they conducted the raid.

Lam, who was detained by Chinese police for more than eight months and returned to Hong Kong early Tuesday, discussed his ordeal at the Hong Kong Legislative Council, where he was accompanied by councilor Albert Ho, Chairman of the China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group.

Lam said he was detained at customs on October 24 while on his way to visit friends in mainland China, when about 10 Chinese security officials took him to a scrap yard in Shenzhen, where they confiscated his ID and other documents.

He was later taken to a police station and held overnight. The abductors gave him food, but refused to answer his question as to why he was detained.

Taken by train

The next morning he was taken by train to Ningbo, a city to the north in China's Zhejiang Province. During the 13-hour train ride, he was forced to wear dark goggles and a cap, presumably to obscure both his eyesight and identity.

Shortly after arriving in Ningbo, the goggles finally removed, he found himself in a dingy padded room on the second floor of a large building, where he was physically examined, asked to change clothes, and forced to sign a document promising to forfeit contact with family and waive the right to hire an attorney. After that, Lam said, he was watched day and night by six rotating pairs of guards.

Lam said he was interrogated at least 30 times in that building, during which he told his captors that he ran a decent bookstore that abided Hong Kong law. The Chinese police, however, accused him of violating domestic law by sending or delivering the banned books to customers on the mainland.

According to Lam, he was released in March this year but was not allowed to leave a specified area. Chinese officials finally allowed him to go home on the condition that he return to the bookstore to secure a hard drive containing buyer information and hand it over.

While detained, Lam said Chinese authorities asked him to identify buyers, but he refused, saying he didnt want to betray them. Lam also said Chinese police claimed to have information on "about five to six hundred readers and buyers, most of whom [reside in] mainland China.

Five other booksellers linked to Causeway Bay Books went missing late last year before surfacing in Chinese police custody. Lam was the fourth of the five to return to Hong Kong, and did so early Tuesday.

In a statement issued by Hong Kong police on Tuesday, Lam, upon his arrival, asked to have his missing person case canceled, explaining that he did not need any assistance from the government.

Won't return to mainland China

Lam said at Thursdays news conference that he planned to return to mainland China with the requested hard drive, but that he changed his mind after much internal deliberation. He was already bound for mainland China when he got off the subway and immediately sought contact with Hong Kong officials.

Lam said he changed his mind after reflecting on the thousands of Hong Kong residents who marched in the street to support the missing booksellers. As a lifelong Hong Kong native, he said, he felt compelled to speak out "or Hong Kong wont be saved."

"The Causeway Bay Books event touched the bottom line of Hong Kong people, he said. "I hate to see further repression of Hong Kongs freedom. It's not just about me or one bookstore, it's about fighting for freedom for the Hong Kong society."

Before Lam spoke out, many people in Hong Kong had suspected that mainland officials illegally abducted the five booksellers, sparking fears that China's domestic security apparatus was overriding the "one country, two systems" framework that protects the Hong Kong Basic Law, the guiding constitutional document of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which has been in place since Hong Kong's return to China from British rule in 1997.

Chinese authorities have declined to clarify key details of the disappearances, but one official told VOA that law enforcement officials would never do anything illegal.

Hong Kong lawmakers react

Shortly after Lam's remarks, some Hong Kong lawmakers called on the government to continue investigating the disappearances of the five booksellers.

Labor Party lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan said that even if Lam had asked police to close the case, the event remains full of "mystery" that the Hong Kong government is responsible to investigate.

Democratic Party lawmaker James To Kun-sun said that Beijing government must give a full account of the event, or Hong Kong people would worry about their own safety.

Ip Kwok-him, a pro-Beijing member of Hong Kong's legislative council, opposed calls for further investigation, claiming that Lam's return has brought the matter to rest. The fact that four of the five booksellers asked to have their missing person cases closed, he said, annuls grounds for a government-led probe.

While the other booksellers could follow suit by retracting their requests for case closure, Liu Ruishao, a Hong Kong News commentator, told VOA he doubted it was likely. People close to Lam, he said, suggest that he was the last of the four to be released because he had no family members living on the mainland for authorities to hold hostage to leverage his compliance.

Store closure

The Causeway Bay Bookstore closed after the five disappeared, with all its books sent to a paper mill, including 2017 China Changes, by Liu Lu, a U.S.-based Chinese writer-in-exile. Liu said he cannot secure another contract on the manuscript, as Hong Kong publishers are now afraid of reprisals.

"Sometimes the contents of these books may be no problem, but because of the publicity, publishers think it could be a problem, so they wont publish it," Liu Dawen, a Hong Kong-based publisher and president of "Sentinel" magazine, told VOA.

Similarly, a new book by a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who wrote about his repeated jailings and torture by Chinese police, has been unable to publish his new book, "2017, Stand Up China: The Story of Tortured Human Rights Lawyer Gao Zhisheng, which was released in Taiwan last Saturday.
Hillary Clinton is set to become the first major party female nominee for president, but voters in many U.S. states will also see another woman on their ballot in November.

Jill Stein, who like Clinton has not yet been formally nominated by her party, expects to be the Green Party's candidate.

Her policies have some similarities with Clinton's main competitor in the Democratic Party race, Bernie Sanders, including raising the minimum wage, reforming campaign finance and addressing climate change.

"The American people are tired of the rigged economy and the rigged political system that created it," Stein said Wednesday. "The presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees are the most disliked and mistrusted of all time."

The challenge for Stein, and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, is that in the U.S. national politics is dominated by Democrats and Republicans, and certain rules for presidential elections make it difficult for others to compete.

Stein and Johnson are both pushing for greater inclusion, particularly in the three presidential debates that Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump will have beginning in September. A special commission sets the rules for those events, requiring a candidate to appear on the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning and to receive 15 percent support in five national polls.

Johnson has said the system is set up to keep Democrats and Republicans in power, while Stein called the debates a "fraud."

"We are fighting to open up the debates, so the American people can know who their choices are," Stein said. "We're calling for a common sense rule for participation -- to include all candidates on enough ballot lines to win the presidency."

States have varying requirements to qualify a candidate for the ballot, mainly involving gathering a set number of signatures by a certain date.

The Green Party says it is already qualified in 20 states and is working on others, while the Libertarians say they are on 32 state ballots so far.

Polling agencies have also started including Stein and Johnson when asking people whom they would pick in an election that included Clinton and Trump. An assortment of national polls from the past few weeks show Johnson getting between 6 and 9 percent in a four-way race, with Stein around 5 percent. Johnson gets as much as 12 percent in polls that only include him, Clinton and Trump.

Johnson's campaign got a boost Wednesday when CNN announced it will air a town hall event next week featuring Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld. Clinton and Trump have already taken part in similar programs on the network during the battle for their party nominations.

Meanwhile, Stein could gain more support with Clinton's official nomination and the subsequent end of the Sanders campaign that had particular success with young people who rallied around his calls for a political revolution. Clinton is trying to pull in as many Sanders supporters as possible, but Stein said in a Huffington Post interview Wednesday that "if the [Sanders] movement gets absorbed inside the Democrats, that's the end of it."

Johnson and Stein are looking to improve upon their showings in the 2012 election when they came in third and fourth place. That year they got nearly 2 million votes combined, but that was well short of the 66 million people who gave another term to President Barack Obama.
OMAHA  The five days Timothy Clausen eluded authorities before being arrested in northeast Omaha Wednesday evening mark the longest of his three periods as an escapee from prison or jail.

Friday morning, Clausen rode out of the Lincoln Correctional Center in the back of a laundry truck with Armon Dixon. Dixon, 37, was caught in Lincoln Saturday afternoon and Clausen in Omaha just after 6 Wednesday evening.

Hundreds of cops, deputies, marshals and troopers spent hundreds of hours in Lincoln and Omaha chasing tips and racking up expenses in their efforts to capture them.

On Thursday, Gov. Pete Ricketts said the story is one of both villains -- the two sex offenders serving a combined 209 to 333 years in prison -- and heroes -- the two women who fought off Dixon in a northeast Lincoln apartment on Saturday morning and all of the members of law enforcement who spent long, hot hours on the search.

Clausen, 52, is from Omaha and has spent much of his adult life behind bars, doing time for manslaughter, sex assault, burglary and attempted escape.

He escaped from the Omaha Correctional Center on Feb. 18, 1985, and was caught three days later at a friend's home in north Omaha, according to newspaper archives.

In July 1995, he climbed over a fence at the Douglas County jail and jumped from rooftop to rooftop with four other inmates to get away. He was caught the next day in Omaha. At the time, Clausen was awaiting a new trial in a 1992 killing and eventually was convicted of manslaughter.

This time, an anonymous tip to Omaha Crime Stoppers led directly to his arrest at 3226 N. 26th St. Omaha police said the tipster will collect a $7,500 reward. They won't say what that person's relationship to Clausen is but said the tip came in a little after 4 on Wednesday afternoon.

"With the cooperation of multiple agencies, a perimeter was established around the residence and Clausen was ordered to exit the building," the department said in a news release Thursday afternoon. "Clausen emerged from an upstairs bathroom and was taken into custody without incident. A loaded handgun was located near where Clausen had been sitting."

MUGSHOTS: Inmates at the Lancaster County jail

Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said officers searched more than 60 Omaha homes between Saturday night, when the search for Clausen shifted from Lincoln to Omaha, and his capture.

"We felt Clausen was hiding in northeast Omaha," Schmaderer said, describing five days of nonstop work that went into finding him.

"Clausen was attempting to leave the city and would have done anything to get out," he said.

Omaha police weren't able to tally up how much the search for Clausen cost the department, but Lancaster County Sheriff Terry Wagner said his office incurred $4,816.26 in overtime during the time the manhunt for both men was centered in Lincoln.

"We held day shift over, called second shift in early and called in the Task Force deputies who were on their days off," he said in an email to the Journal Star. "Most deputies worked between 12-16 hours that day.

"We do not specifically budget for these types of events. Since they dont happen every year, if we budgeted an amount for extraordinary circumstances, we would just be padding our budget."

Lincoln Police Chief Jeff Bliemeister put the cost to his department at $12,361 but said that number remains fluid.

"Police work is filled with unknowns that require rapid deployment of additional personnel and supporting resources," he said in an email to the Journal Star. "Through careful analysis of past trends, we build projected overtime costs into our biannual expense budget. The safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln and the employees of the Lincoln Police Department remain the primary focus when dynamic events unfold requiring deployment of personnel."

The Nebraska State Patrol won't calculate its cost for the manhunt until next week, and the U.S. Marshals said they didn't use any overtime.

Schmaderer wouldn't go into detail about the people who were potentially harboring Clausen, and said part of the investigation will be determining if they knew who he was.

Clausen, 52, was serving a 51- to 55-year sentence at the Lincoln Correctional Center for sexually assaulting a child and tampering with a juror. When he was captured, he had shaved his beard and cut his hair.

Both Clausen and Dixon have been taken to Tecumseh State Correctional Institution pending arraignment on new charges. For Dixon, that likely will include charges for the alleged attack on two women in Lincoln Saturday morning. He already was serving 158 to 278 years for sexual assaults and for being a habitual criminal.

Now, the governor said Thursday morning, it's time to figure out how the escapes happened.

"Our attention now turns to investigating where the corrections system failed and rebuilding public faith in the ability of our prison system to protect Nebraskans."
In the wake of the Orlando mass shooting, the second deadliest act of terrorism in U.S. history, "soft target" attacks on places like the Florida nightclub where 49 people lost their lives Sunday may be a "new normal," according to an expert with a private strategic intelligence firm.



Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old who opened fire at the gay nightclub Pulse, appeared to have had limited ties to Islamic State (IS), said Scott Stewart, a counterterrorism expert at Austin, Texas-based Stratfor, in an interview with VOA.

The shooting, he added, seemed to fit into the terrorist group's larger strategy of encouraging "lone wolf" attacks for which it can claim responsibility after the fact.According to Stewart, the Orlando attack that also left 53 people wounded  is a classic example of remote radicalization that has turned the face of terrorism into the new so-called leaderless resistance with reduced risk.

There are few, if any, warning signs: no command structure, no communication system, no secret plan or formal organization. Symbolic figures can encourage attacks without ordering them, protecting themselves from prosecution and making surveillance useless, said Stewart.

He said "we've seen several of these before" in Chattanooga, New York; Little Rock, Arkansas; Fort Hood,Texas; San Bernardino, California.

"And this is really our new normal in the United States," he added. "We are going to have these sorts of attacks against soft targets because most of these grassroots jihadists, whether they are individuals or operating in small cells, just don't have the professional trade craft to attack hard targets like before."

Remote radicalization exploits the growing global interconnectivity, its ability to move money, share information, and manipulate modern technology.

That, said Stewart, creates surveillance hurdles for security agencies forced to track ever-larger groups of possible plotters.

"The potential universe is so broad under this new leaderless resistance model. [The U.S. government] just can't cover everyone 24/7," he said. "It takes a lot of resources to monitor someone's activities all the time. When you look at it across the country, the FBI nationally has maybe 10,000, 11,000 agents, and that's not too many."

The FBI is equally impeded by time constraints, Stewart pointed out.

"They will open an initial inquiry into a subject and then they have a certain time period in order to ascertain whether or not criminal behavior is happening," he said. "If they don't find any evidence of criminal activity, then they basically have to close the investigation. That appears to have happened here [with Omar Mateen]."

"The U.S. counterterrorism model, targeting hierarchy groups, has been effectively executed against al-Qaida, the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks. Stewart, however, admitted the model has become a victim of its own success.

"That's why we haven't seen al-Qaida launch attacks inside the United States in the post-9/11 world despite repeated threats they were going to do something bigger than 9/11," he said. "And that's specifically why the jihadists began promoting the idea of leaderless resistance."

Stratfor's analyst echoes many other anti-terrorism experts who say the solution perhaps lies in a cooperative effort between security agencies and the public, where citizens, if they see signs of terrorism, report it to local and state law enforcement.
Bernie Sanders, who won 23 state contests in his fading quest to become the Democratic Partys presidential nominee, was buoyed for months by supporters small average donations of $27. Conversely, Republican contender Jeb Bush flamed out in February despite his well-heeled connections.

Both experiences point to the limits of big money in U.S. politics, at least in the 2016 election cycle. But some political experts and most average Americans nonetheless see growing financial influence  which can vary with the primary or general election, increase further down the ballot and shape policies affecting daily life.

Americans of all stripes agree that money holds greater sway than ever, and the effects are mostly negative, a Pew Research Center survey found. The center reported in December that "large majorities favor limits on campaign spending and say the high cost of campaigning discourages many good candidates from running for president."

"Theres no country with longer and more expensive elections than the United States," said Ken Goldstein, a University of San Francisco professor and political advertising expert.

Campaigning for the presidency begins well over a year out; Republican Ted Cruz was the first to announce his candidacy in March 2015.

Spending in 2012  the election cycle that included the last presidential race  topped $6.3 billion, the watchdog Center for Responsive Politics calculated.

This election cycle is expected to set records in spending by campaigns, political parties and outside interest groups, the center has forecast.

As of late May, candidates and the super PACS (political action committees) backing them raised more than $1.2 billion, according to campaign filings. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's campaign alone generated nearly $85 million, and supporting super PACs raised more than $204 million.

Real estate magnate Donald Trump largely has self-financed his campaign, but last month made a joint fundraising deal with the Republican National Committee enabling rich donors to contribute up to $500,000 apiece. He initially said he needed to raise $1 billion for the general election, but he has since scaled back.



His aides are expected to meet in coming days with those of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, USA Today recently reported. The powerful Koch network of donors and policy developers may bypass the presidential contest  chafing at Trumps stated opposition to free trade deals, for example  to focus on helping Republicans retain Senate control.

Concerns down the ballot

Norman Ornstein, a political scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he doesnt look at presidential politics as the be-all and end-all of the campaign funding system.



Candidates for the nations top office already have an enormous amount of name recognition and extensive media coverage that lessen the impact of campaign spending on advertising.

More worrisome is what happens further down the chain  in congressional, legislative and local contests, he said.

Ornstein told VOA that a whole bunch of senators had privately divulged their fears about voting for legislation that could antagonize big donors.

The part that troubles me most is judicial elections, he added, noting heavy partisan spending aimed at tilting the composition of state Supreme Courts in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Ornstein speculated that a judge may think twice in deciding a case involving a giant corporation or wealthy individual whose support might be vital in future elections.



Landmark court decisions

Supreme Court decisions on Citizens United in 2010 and McCutcheon in 2014 relaxed campaign finance restrictions implemented in 2002.

The decisions have opened up "the wild West period of political spending," complained Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks greater curbs on special-interest lobbying.

Weissmans group is especially concerned about so-called dark money spent by politically active nonprofit groups that dont have to disclose all their donors. The Center for Responsive Politics Open Secrets project notes that such spending surged "from less than $5.2 million in 2006 to more than $300 million in the 2012 presidential cycle."

"By and large, the dominant corruption in the United States is not bribery. Its the shaping and influence of policy, and its done by and on behalf of the super-rich and the corporate class," Weissman said. "Those are the ones who make the political contributions and the ones to whom they [politicians] feel obligated.  Since the U.S. is the most powerful country, the corruption of our politics  the distortion of our politics  really affects everybody around the globe."

Candice Nelson, an American University government professor who heads the Campaign Management Institute, noted that, "compared to a lot of countries, the U.S. system is fairly transparent."

She, too, shared concern about dark money. "If any reform would be necessary, that would be it," Nelson said. "That said, I dont really see that happening."

Opposed to restrictions

Cleta Mitchell, a partner and campaign finance expert in the Washington law office of Foley & Lardner, represents conservative causes and clients. She argues against any restrictions on campaign fundraising.

You have to have money to get your message out. Thats just the truth, Mitchell said. Referring to a new report on campaign news coverage, from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, she noted that Trump "had more than $2 billion in free advertising. There was no way anybody, even poor Jeb Bush, could compete," she added.

I think candidates need to be able to raise unlimited amounts of money, Mitchell said, so they can compete with whatever the media corporations decide theyre going to spend.
Despite losing critical ground in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State terror group has no intention of slowly fading away, and instead it has been shifting its focus to ensure it remains the world's top terror organization, according to a top U.S. intelligence official.

CIA Director John Brennan painted a bleak picture for lawmakers Thursday on the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, warning that even a considerably degraded IS has the resilience, the manpower and the financial resources to strike at enemies both in the Middle East and in the West.

"Our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan said. "As the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda."

A key part of that effort will be additional attempts to strike at Western targets in the hopes of replicating the deadly plots that stung Paris and Brussels, as well as inspiring attacks like the shooting in Orlando, Florida, earlier this week.

"ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives," Brennan said, using an acronym for the group, and warning that its leadership in Iraq and Syria has a "large cadre of Western fighters" at its disposal for such infiltrations.

Dire warning

The CIA director underscored that even as the U.S. and its allies have managed to crack down on the travel of foreign fighters to join IS in places like Iraq and Syria, there are still plenty of avenues for fighters to return. He said likely options include joining the flow of refugees, taking advantage of smuggling routes and even sending terrorists back to the West using "legitimate methods of travel."

Brennan's stark warning comes even as other U.S. officials have been touting progress against IS, telling VOA the terror group "is at its weakest point" since rapidly advancing across Syria and Iraqi in 2014.

Military officials have also pointed to an IS fighting force visibly on its heels in its self-declared caliphate, having lost 50 percent of the terrain it once held in Iraq and upwards of 20 percent of what it once controlled in Syria.

There is no way you can look at ISIL today and look at the geographic territory they control, look at their leadership, look at their ability to communicate and judge they are in a better position today then they were a year ago, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters Thursday.

Defense Department officials have also pointed to diminishing financial resources and low morale among the IS ranks, highlighting reports of some IS leaders stealing gold and trying to flee.

IS forces themselves have also been increasingly depleted. Brennan himself told lawmakers the CIA estimates the group is down to 18,000 to 22,000 fighters, slightly lower than other recent estimates and down significantly from an estimated high of 33,000 fighters last year.

"This is an organization that has some very rocky roads ahead despite the adaptations," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has warned the group "could be looking at a death spiral that will destroy the organization."

Long-term threat

U.S. officials agree the self-declared caliphate is in trouble and that outside of Libya and Egypts Sinai Peninsula, IS branches have struggled to gain traction.

Yet the Pentagon acknowledges it may not be enough.

The military effort to defeat ISIL is absolutely necessary but it is not sufficient to deal with this threat in full, Cook said. Thats why we want to accelerate our efforts, he said.

And intelligence officials believe the group has more than enough resources to pose a long-term threat.

"This is a global challenge," said the CIA's Brennan. "The numbers of ISIL fighters now far exceeds what al-Qaida had at its height. We're talking about tens of thousands of individuals."

According to U.S. estimates, often criticized for being too conservative, there could be as many as 40,000 IS fighters and operatives in just Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And despite losses in Iraq, Syria and Libya, Brennan warned that the terror organization continues to attract new adherents, with terror groups in Southeast Asia specifically "increasing their interactions and connections with ISIL."

"I don't think strategically they're losing," said Jessica McFate, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer now with the Institute for the Study of War.

"The competition is literally global and literally extending to places where al-Qaida has been trying to penetrate, and ISIS is actually penetrating faster," she said. "ISIS has even more opportunity to demonstrate outsized effects just by starting operations in a new place."

Fertile recruiting grounds



U.S. intelligence officials also worry that continued instability in the Middle East and elsewhere is providing IS, as well as other terror groups, plenty of fertile ground for new recruits.

"More and more individuals, because of their feelings of being disenfranchised from their governments are now identifying with subnational groups, whether it be with an ISIL, or a [Jabhat al] Nusra or Boko Haram or others," said Brennan.

"They're not identifying themselves as Somalis, Nigerians or Yemenis," he said. "They're identifying themselves as part of a confessional group or a terrorist organization. That is a very, very disturbing trend."
Islamic State allegedly has been using child suicide bombers to target opponents in the Syrian civil war, officials and activists in Syria say.

Kurdish military officials this week in the region of Afrin in northern Syria captured two children who say they were trying to detonate themselves in a residential area.

"Their [IS] goal was for the children to be killed by our forces at a checkpoint," said Piran Shirwan, an official of the local Kurdish security agency.

The two children wore explosive belts that were hidden under IS military uniforms. They were stopped at a Kurdish checkpoint outside the city of Afrin before they were able to blow themselves up, the official told VOA.

"A guy named Ibrahim convinced us to join Daesh [IS]," one of the boys told VOA. He said he was from the central Syrian province of Hama, 150 kilometers from Afrin. Authorities said he was 11 years old.

His 10-year-old companion told VOA that they were armed and trained for conducting a suicide attack.

WATCH: Kurds Capture IS-trained Would-be Child Suicide Bombers

"We were given military uniforms and suicide belts," said the 10-year-old boy, who also is from Hama. "They ordered us to ride a bus and head to the Kurdish region."

VOA is not using their names or showing their faces because they are minors and have yet to be charged with any crimes. Kurdish officials are investigating.

IS dispatched at least 10 more child suicide bombers in areas under control of the Syrian opposition, according to the children and local news reports.

Since 2014, IS allegedly has used child suicide bombers throughout the areas it controls in Syria and Iraq. Recently, however, more children are being recruited in areas that are not controlled by IS to carry out suicide attacks, according to local activists in the region.

"Daesh has sleeper cells everywhere," said a well-known activist in Kafranbel, in the northwestern province of Idlib. The man spoke on condition of anonymity because he lives in an area controlled by the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria.

He told VOA that there have been attempts by IS underground recruiters to mobilize local children in his town to join the group.

"They indoctrinate them secretly and activate them whenever they feel weak," he said in a phone interview.

The two children who are now in Kurdish custody are set to be freed after their investigations are finalized.

"These are children, so we can't keep them here," said Shirwan, the Kurdish security official. "We have contacted their families to come and get them."
As forces backed by Libyas unity government press an offensive against Islamic States stronghold of Sirte, the U.S. is considering widening its engagement with the countrys fragile Government of National Accord, in a bid to oust the militants.

On Wednesday, U.S. lawmakers debated a proposal to train and equip a Libyan national security force, a move that would require a partial lifting of a U.N. arms embargo imposed on the country shortly after the 2011 ouster of leader Moammar Gadhafi.

There is broad international support for the partial lifting.

At a May meeting in Vienna attended by Secretary of State John Kerry, the U.S. was among 25 countries and world bodies that signed a communique saying they would support a Libyan request for the exemption.

The idea behind the exemption to the arms embargo is to provide a uniform set of weapons that can provide relatively integrated counterterrorism capabilities to address the threat from Islamic State and other terrorist forces, said Jonathan Winer, the State Departments Special Envoy for Libya.

He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that the goal would be to do so in a way that was trackable and traceable and subject to oversight.

Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, questioned whether the Libyan government is strong enough to control any arms that are supplied.

Libyas U.N.-backed General National Congress has been trying to extend its authority since moving into Tripoli in March. But it is still facing resistance from militias loyal to a powerful general, Khalifa Haftar.

I fear that if we are not careful, if we do not devote the same amount of time and resources to good governance, said Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, that we will simply be worsening the countrys division and repeating past mistakes that we have made elsewhere.

Continued IS threat

The United Nations estimates there are as many as 5,000 foreign terrorist fighters working for Islamic State in Libya.

As the terrorist group began to lose ground in Iraq and Syria, it moved to take advantage of Libyas political instability and establish an alternative stronghold.

A successful Libyan government effort in ousting Islamic State from the coastal city of Sirte is unlikely to end the terrorist groups drive for a Libyan stronghold, said Middle East Institute analyst Charles Lister.

In a Monday article, ISIS on Cusp of Defeat in Sirte, he said the terrorist group may conclude that Sirte is ultimately expendable within its long-term plan. ISIS is an alternate acronym for the group.

Serious attention should now be focused on preventing ISIS from regrouping further in Libyas interior, he said.

As the U.S. considers a plan to arm and equip Libyan forces, the U.N. has taken steps to clamp down on the spread of weapons into the hands of terrorists and other armed groups in the country.

On Tuesday, the Security Council authorized the interdiction of ships suspected of smuggling weapons into or out of Libya.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Junckers trip to Russia this week has raised further speculation that EU sanctions against Russia, over its actions in Ukraine, are wavering just ahead of a vote on whether to extend the punitive measures.

Juncker is the highest-level EU official to visit Russia since it annexed Crimea. His participation in the annual St. Petersburg Economic Forum, along with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, added weight to those calling for a return to business as usual in EU-Russia relations.

The EC presidents trip to the summit, which runs from Thursday through Saturday, has caused major unhappiness among EU member states and colleagues within the commission, said Fredrik Wesslau, director of the Wider Europe program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The timing  days before the expected extension of sanctions  could not be worse, he said in emailed comments to VOA. It sends mixed and confused messages about the EU's position on Russia over Ukraine and Europe's willingness to stick to that position.

Wavering in Europe

The EU sanctions against Russian officials, finance and defense are set to expire in July, and the 28-nation block will decide next week whether to extend them by another six months.

But, while the United States has been steadfast that sanctions should remain in place until a Minsk peace deal is implemented, cracks are beginning to show in Europes resolve.

The French parliament in April voted in a nonbinding resolution to lift the sanctions against Russia. Germanys Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in May voiced support for a gradual easing of sanctions as progress was made on the Minsk agreement.

And as far back as October, Juncker signaled the possibility of a trans-Atlantic gap forming on sanctions when in a speech he said relations between the EU and Russia should not be dictated from Washington.

Advocating dialogue

But, while Juncker on Thursday advocated building bridges and dialogue with Russia, he put a damper on the prospect of easing sanctions during a speech at the opening of the forum.

Russia is party to the Minsk agreements. It has made commitments and put them on paper, as have the other signatories. Therefore, the next step is clear: full implementation of the agreements. No more, no less, Juncker said in prepared remarks. This is the only way to begin our conversation, and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed.

And let me be clear, he added. On Minsk, the European Union is united. And so is the G-7.

Russia was kicked out of the G-8 group of major industrial nations shortly after it annexed Crimea.

Despite Junckers clear comments on sanctions, his very participation in the forum was controversial.

The problem with the visit is that it plays into Russia's efforts to split and weaken Europe, Wesslau said. Russia is trying to create a narrative that relations between the EU and Russia are normalizing and that Europe is coming around to accepting the annexation of Crimea and Russia's intervention in eastern Ukraine. Juncker is now becoming part of this narrative.

Split on Ukraine

At the forum Thursday, Juncker did not mince words in placing the blame for the deterioration in EU-Russia relations squarely on Moscows actions in Ukraine.

The illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol, and the conflict in and around eastern Ukraine, put the relations between the European Union and Russia to a severe test, he said. Russias actions have shaken the very principles of the European security order. Sovereignty, sovereign equality, the non-use of force and territorial integrity matter. They cannot be ignored.

But while Junckers speech underscored respecting a nations right to choose its future, and that having a stable and democratic Ukraine on its border would only benefit Russia, political analysts have long argued that Moscow wants instability to maintain leverage against Kyiv.

Moscow has no intention of living up to its obligations in the Minsk agreement, Wesslau said. Instead, it is trying to shift the blame onto Kyiv for the lack of progress.

The problem is that when Europe sends mixed messages to Russia  for instance, with Juncker's visit  the conclusion in Moscow is that European unity in sanctions will collapse, Wesslau said. This makes Russia even less inclined to implement the Minsk agreement and more inclined to hold out and wait for the collapse. But this, in turn, means no progress on Minsk and makes Europe even less likely to lift the sanctions."

Also at the forum Thursday, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose party members led the French vote to lift EU sanctions, gushed praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin. He urged Putin to show his strength as a leader by first lifting countersanctions against EU food imports. Russian officials quickly rejected the idea.
NATOs Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan says it is concerned about recent military clashes between Afghan and Pakistani border forces, and is urging both countries to resolve differences through diplomatic negotiations.

Afghan and Pakistani forces have intermittently exchanged heavy gunfire since last Sunday, leaving at least four soldiers dead and more than 40 wounded. The shooting has, however, stopped since late Wednesday when the two sides declared a cease-fire.

Risk of escalation



The potential for escalation worries the mission, said the coalition spokesman in Kabul, U.S. Army Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, on Thursday.

We continue to watch it very closely and we are concerned about it but believe, overall, that this has got to be a diplomatic negotiation, he added.

On Wednesday, the Afghan parliament urged the U.S.-led military coalition to honor its bilateral security agreement with Kabul and come to the assistance of Afghan forces in the conflict with Pakistan.

Cleveland, however, said the coalition is not mandated to undertake such actions.

From a Resolute Support standpoint, no. Again, remember our role is to conduct, train, advise and assist to help the Afghans as they are fighting the Taliban, he said.

Torkham crossing

The conflict erupted after Pakistan began construction of a new gate at the busy Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan as part of its plans to strengthen border management systems. Kabul defended its military retaliation, saying the facility was being built in disputed territory.

Sartaj Aziz, a foreign policy adviser to Pakistan's prime minister, told the parliament on Thursday the government is determined to complete construction of the gate and other such facilities at all established crossing points to stop the infiltration of terrorists and militants across the 2,600-kilometer border with Afghanistan.

This measure is also vital for our efforts to combat terrorism It is also important to dispel the impression being created by Afghanistan that Pakistan was violating any bilateral agreement or understanding. In any case, undertaking any construction work on our side is the prerogative of the government of Pakistan, Aziz said.

He told lawmakers he has discussed the issue with Afghanistan's national security adviser by phone and invited him along with the Afghan foreign minister to visit Pakistan for further discussions.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says it has issued an updated terrorism threat advisory taking into account this week's mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Wednesday that security officials are particularly concerned about "homegrown violent extremists who could strike with little or no notice," especially since the Orlando attacks.

"Increased public vigilance and awareness continue to be of utmost importance," the updated advisory said.

Recent attacks in San Bernardino, California; Paris; Brussels; and now Orlando indicate that terrorists "will consider a diverse and wide selection of targets for attacks," the Homeland Security notice said. It was labeled a "bulletin," the lowest of three levels of alert messages.

Terrorists' use of the internet as a recruiting tool "to inspire individuals to violence or join their ranks" remains a major concern, the advisory said.

The Department of Homeland Security also is concerned about threats and violence targeting particular communities and individuals, "based on perceived religion, ethnicity, nationality or sexual orientation."

The advisory was released just a day before a previous version issued in December was set to expire. It remains in effect until mid-November, when Homeland Security is expected to issue a new assessment ahead of the U.S. holiday season.
After every mass shooting, Americans ask themselves how it could have been prevented. Vigils are held; flowers are left at the scene. After Sunday's shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the mother of one of the victims tearfully spoke of her son's accomplishments and pleaded with the nation to "try to get rid of the hatred and the violence."

Even the leading U.S. presidential candidates weighed in. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump again called for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration. "The only reason the killer was in America in the first place is because we allowed his family to come here," Trump told supporters.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, called for stricter gun control measures. "I believe weapons of war have no place on our streets," she said. The weapon used in the mass shooting was a semi-automatic rifle.

Missing in the expressions of sorrow and shock and calls for peace is a plan to end gun violence.

Public health measure

Medical doctors, like Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, look at gun violence through a different lens. "I see the whole issue of people dying prematurely from firearms as a public health measure," Benjamin said.

The American Medical Association, or AMA, the largest association of physicians in the U.S., issued a statement saying, "The shooting in Orlando is a horrific reminder of the public health crisis of gun violence rippling across the United States."

The website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency charged with guarding the nation's public health, has nothing on gun violence or gun safety. CDC director Tom Frieden does not mention gun safety in his speeches or interviews.

When VOA asked Frieden for a comment after the Orlando shooting, the CDC sent an email saying, "Our thoughts are with the families and the community who mourn the loss of loved ones as a result of tragic shootings like those this past weekend. Every year there are more than 33,000 firearm-related deaths and 84,000 injuries in America. Research can help us understand why deaths and injuries from firearms happen and evaluate interventions to reduce or prevent them. The president has asked Congress each year for $10 million to build the evidence base of what works to improve gun safety."

Government studies

The issue of gun violence has turned political.

Congress has refused to fund any government study on gun violence since 1996 after the National Rifle Association accused the CDC of lobbying for gun control. Researchers say the lack of funding helps perpetuate the violence. The AMA has now pledged to actively lobby Congress to lift that ban.

"We certainly don't have as much research on gun violence prevention relative to the size of the problem," said professor Jon Vernick at the Johns Hopkins University.

The CDC keeps tabs on the causes of death, but there is no research on what prompts mass killings or other gun violence. Benjamin says it flies in the face of scientific research. Public health experts point to studies about car accidents and how this led to seat belts and other measures that have drastically reduced automobile deaths.

"What we do when we have most problems is we gather the data to find out what's happening, Benjamin said. What are the issues? What are the problems? And then we sit around a table with a multidisciplinary team and figure out what some of the reasonable solutions are. We put them in place and we test them and see if they work. And we do that until we dramatically, over time, bring down the health risk.
U.S. President Barack Obama "held and hugged" grieving family members in Orlando, Florida, Thursday but said he had no easy answers to their questions of why mass shootings continue to happen.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met privately with relatives of the 49 people killed and the 53 wounded at Pulse, a gay nightclub, last Sunday in the largest mass shooting in U.S. history.

He said the families' grief is "beyond description."

'Hearts are broken'

Obama called for solidarity in the face of the attack, saying those killed in the attack "could be our families," and telling those directly affected by the shootings that "our hearts are broken, too."

"If we don't act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this because we will be choosing to allow them to happen," he said.

Airborne on the flight from Washington to the southeastern U.S. city, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that Obama "feels there is no more tangible way to show support for Orlando than to go there."

Earnest said the president "wants to show [that] Americans stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Orlando."

The attack occurred in the early hours of Sunday when an American-born Muslim sprayed round after round of bullets at revelers who were dancing to Latin music and partying with friends.



WATCH: Obama consoles Orlando's LGBT community

The three-hour siege ended when police knocked holes into the Pulse nightclub and killed the gunman, Omar Saddiqui Mateen, in a shootout.

Obama and Biden also met with the first-responders, medical staff and law enforcement officials to thank them for their efforts, and the owners and staff of the nightclub where the attack occurred. They also laid wreaths at a vigil site.

Florida legislators Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Corrine Brown flew with Obama to Orlando aboard Air Force One, but they did not take part in his meetings with those affected by the shooting.

WATCH: Obama's remarks after meeting with families



I cant speak for [the president] or what he is going to do  but I hope it does bring some comfort to the victims that he is coming and to show that he does care," said Al New, standing in the front of the makeshift memorial that has become a gathering point for Orlando residents in the wake of the shooting attack.

The plaza in front of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts is full of flowers and other memorabilia for the victims of the attack.

Several vigils have been held here since the attack, and a steady stream of people pass by to pay their respects.

Josh Korshak stopped by Thursday morning in advance of Obama's visit.

"I mean a lot of people say Obama isnt  you know  he hasn't gone through it just as much as we have, and hes been acting almost indifferent to it as well," he said. "But, I think hes definitely going to try and talk to these people and tell them, 'Hey Im here for you.' What can you do, you know?"

Candice King-Palgut described herself as not a fan of Obama's politics, but had great respect for his humanity.

"He feels deeply, and I appreciate that," she said.

She summed up with her own post-shooting prescription: "No amount of trying to keep people out, thats not going to fix anything. We just have to love each other and be more mindful of each other. Be kinder, be gentler, be truer."

Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security committee is asking Facebook to provide whatever data it has on any account linked to the 29-year-old Mateen.

In a letter Wednesday, committee chairman Ron Johnson said his staff obtained information that Mateen made several Facebook posts Sunday, including pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and telling the U.S. and Russia to stop bombing the militants.

Mateen also said there would be more attacks in the U.S. in the coming days.

FBI probe

Other lawmakers want to know more about the FBI's earlier contacts with Mateen, whom investigators interviewed in 2013 and 2014 after he bragged to coworkers about ties to al-Qaida.

Agents could not verify the allegations and closed their probe.

"We know that the FBI had looked closely at him because of concerns from coworkers and others," Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow told VOA. "Id like to know more about their decisions. He was on a terror watch list and removed."

Illinois Senator Richard Durbin said, Not once but twice [the FBI was] warned that [Mateen] was a dangerous man. Their investigation concluded there was nothing more they could do. We wish there had been a different outcome  many people would be alive today."
The lush green landscape of Laos northeastern Xieng Khouang province masks what almost a decade of conflict left behind. Millions of cluster munitions, known in Laos as bombies, are scattered among the rice fields and mountains, many buried deep below the surface.

From 1964 to 1973, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos. The secret operation was part of an effort to cut North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran through Laos to the south of Vietnam.

An estimated one third of the 270 million bombies dropped failed to detonate. Their legacy continues to hamper agricultural development in the region, making construction of homes and infrastructure a complex and dangerous proposition, and taking thousands of lives since the war ended.

Tens of thousands of casualties

More than 20,000 people have been killed or injured since the bombing ceased. Some 12,000 people require support for debilitating injuries caused by unexploded ordnance (UXO), almost half of whom are children.

In 2004, in an ethnic Hmong village close to the provincial capital, Phonsavan, Ai Vue lost her son and two nephews when they discovered an unexploded bomb lodged in a tree stump near their home.

We dont know if they knocked it or if it just fell and hit the ground and exploded, she recalls.

They didnt know that the bomb was dangerous, because they had never seen one before, the mother of three said.

UXO education has improved since, which has helped account for a reduction in casualties  from 300 in 2008 to 48 in 2014  but children playing with the deadly ordnance is still among the most common causes of UXO-related accidents, according to government figures.

Bombs are often unearthed by villagers working in their rice fields, while fires lit above ground have triggered deadly explosions just below. The remains of the war are part of everyday life.

Cleaning up the mess

The government-affiliated UXO Laos is one of a handful of organizations in the country tasked with clearing the bombs. The process is a delicate one that sees clearers scouring the ground inch by inch to uncover the deadly ordnance and detonate those that are unexploded.

My family worry about my job, but I tell my family not to worry, because I have the training and the experience to clear bombs, said Kan Thalee, a UXO Laos bomb clearer with over a decade in the job.

With improvements in detection technology, the 12 teams at UXO Laos in Xieng Khouang have improved their productivity, clearing about 600 hectares a year. But it is still a drop in the ocean given the size of the area bombed.

When you compare that with the needs of the villagers, who ask us to clear the bombs in 5,000 to 6,000 hectares, we can only clear 10 percent, said Kingphet Phimmavong, the provincial coordinator for UXO Laos.

Less than one percent of the estimated 80 million unexploded cluster munitions across the country has been destroyed since the war ended some 40 years ago.

Kingphet, whose organization is the largest of the mine clearing operations in Laos, says that the Lao government is focused on clearing the land for agricultural development in the region.

People are living more safely and are have more confidence when they are farming, he says of the work completed to date.

But he acknowledges that there is still a lot of work to do. Funding for clearance efforts is limited, with much of it coming from international donors.

Technology upgrades and staff increases are needed to hasten clearance efforts, he said.

We need the organization to grow and bring in more people to work, but we dont have the budget, he said.

U.S. contribution

From 1995 to 2015, the U.S. has provided an average of $4.2 million annually to UXO clearance and service provision. This compares to $13.6 million spent per day (in todays figures) on bombing Laos between 1964 and 1973, according to the advocacy group Legacies of War.

The U.S.-based organization is recommending that the U.S. make a commitment of $25 million per year over the next decade.

After over 20 years of UXO clearance in Laos, the country is on the cusp of significant developments that could finally make life much safer for Lao villagers, said Channapha Khamvongsa the founder and executive director of Legacies of War.

What was once thought to be an insurmountable task now seems achievable in 10 to 20 years rather than a century, she said in an email. The next decade is critical, however, and it is necessary for the U.S. to commit to a long-term and sustained level of funding for UXO clearance and victim assistance in Laos.

Due to meet with Southeast Asian leaders in Vientiane in September, U.S. President Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos.

The U.S. Embassy in Laos confirmed that Obama would announce an increase in funding for UXO programs, although details are yet to be confirmed.

There are still ongoing discussions about the details of the UXO removal funding increase, a spokesperson said via email.
U.S. President Barack Obama is in Orlando, Florida, Thursday to comfort a city reeling from the country's biggest mass shooting ever and meet privately with the families of the people killed and wounded at a gay nightclub last Sunday.

Airborne on the flight from Washington to the southeastern U.S. city, a White House spokesman said that Obama "feels there is no more tangible way to show support for Orlando than to go there."

The spokesman said the president "wants to show Americans stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Orlando."

Obama is meeting with relatives of the 49 people killed and the 53 wounded at the club in the early hours of Sunday when an American-born Muslim sprayed round after round of bullets at revelers who were dancing to Latin music and partying with friends.

The three-hour siege ended when police knocked holes into the Pulse nightclub and killed the gunman, Omar Saddiqui Mateen, in a shootout.

Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, is also talking with those who survived the mayhem, as well as police, ambulance crews, nurses, doctors and surgeons who helped treat those who were shot.

"The president understands that he is a symbol of the country," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said before leaving Washington. "And when he travels to a community and meets with a family that has endured a terrible tragedy, he's offering a message of condolence and comfort on behalf of the American people.

"And the president takes that responsibility quite seriously," Earnest said.

He added that Obama's support will be a "powerful affirmation" for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community that was attacked.

WATCH: Orlando residents react to Obama visit

I cant speak for (the president) or what he is going to do  but I hope it does bring some comfort to the victims that he is coming and to show that he does care," said Al New, standing in the front of the makeshift memorial that has become a gathering point for Orlando residents in the wake of the shooting attack.

The plaza in front of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts is full of flowers and other memorabilia for the victims of the attack on Pulse nightclub.

Several vigils have been held here since the attack and a steady stream of people pass through to pay their respects.

Josh Korshak stopped by Thursday morning in advance of Obama's visit.

"I mean a lot of people say Obama isnt  you know  he hasn't gone through it just as much as we have, and hes been acting almost indifferent to it as well," he said. "But, I think hes definitely going to try and talk to these people and tell them, 'Hey Im here for you.' What can you do, you know?"

Candice King-Palgut described herself as not a fan of Obama's politics, but had great respect for his humanity.

"He feels deeply, and I appreciate that," she said.

She summed up with her own post-shooting presecription.

"No amount of trying to keep people out, thats not going to fix anything. We just have to love each other and be more mindful of each other. Be kinder, be gentler, be truer," she said.

Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security committee is asking Facebook to provide whatever data it has on any account linked to the 29-year-old Mateen.

WATCH: Related video on gunmen who target groups of civilians

In a letter Wednesday, committee chairman Ron Johnson said his staff obtained information that Mateen made several Facebook posts Sunday, including pledging allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and telling the U.S. and Russia to stop bombing the militants.

Mateen also said there would be more attacks in the U.S. in the coming days.

FBI probe

Other lawmakers want to know more about the FBI's earlier contacts with Mateen, whom investigators interviewed in 2013 and 2014 after he bragged to coworkers about ties to al-Qaida.

Agents could not verify the allegations and closed their probe.

"We know that the FBI had looked closely at him because of concerns from coworkers and others," Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow told VOA. "Id like to know more about their decisions. He was on a terror watch list and removed."

Illinois Senator Richard Durbin said, Not once but twice (the FBI was) warned that (Mateen) was a dangerous man. Their investigation concluded there was nothing more they could do. We wish there had been a different outcome  many people would be alive today."
An Islamist militant who is suspected of attacking a publisher last year was arrested late Wednesday, in what police described as an important breakthrough in their investigation into the recurrent horrific attacks plaguing Bangladesh.

Sumon Hossain Patwari, 20, is accused of being involved with a brutal attack on publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul and two writers who were shot and stabbed by three men in the office of the Shudhdhoswar publishing house in Dhaka last October.

Police say Patwari is a member of the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), a banned Bangladesh militant outfit.

"He admitted he himself hacked publisher Tutul three times during the attack," Monirul Islam, who leads the police's counter-terrorism unit, told reporters.

Islam said the arrest was an "important breakthrough" in taking down the leadership of the ABT.

Police have arrested thousands of people since Friday in a crackdown on the violence that has targeted over 30 victims in Bangladesh since early last year, including bloggers, gay rights activists, Christians and Hindus. Islamic State extremists have claimed responsibility for more than 20 of the killings.

In the past week, IS militants have claimed responsibility for the deaths of a Hindu monastery worker, an elderly Hindu priest and a Christian merchant. All three were hacked to death. The Muslim wife of a key counterterrorism official was also stabbed and shot dead.

Despite IS claims, Bangladesh authorities continue to insist there are no foreign terror groups operating in the country. Instead, they blame home-grown militants - and in some cases the political opposition - for the violence.
The sheriff of Orange County, Florida, says the body of the 2-year-old boy killed by an alligator Tuesday has been found.

Sheriff Jerry Demings told reporters Wednesday in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, that the body of Lane Graves was found intact near the area where the alligator dragged him into the water. Demings said the alligator drowned the little boy.

Demings said the Nebraska toddler was on vacation with his parents and siblings at a Disney World hotel. Tuesday night, Lane was wading in water near the shore of a man-made lake used mostly for boating when the attack occurred.

In a statement given to the sheriff, the Graves family thanked members of the public for their prayers in the hours following the attack.

Disney officials closed beaches at the resort after finding and euthanizing four other alligators in the lake during their search for the boy. There was no sign that any of the four was involved in the attack.

More than 50 law enforcement personnel searched the Seven Seas Lagoon, which reaches a depth of about 4 meters, outside Disney's Grand Floridian Resort in Orlando.

Demings said there have been no other recent reports of similar alligator attacks in the area.

Last October, a 61-year-old swimmer was the first victim killed by an alligator in Florida since 2007.
The September 11 Victim Compensation Fund is set enter a new phase in the way it will function, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.

Congress established the fund after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It operated for two years, giving $6 billion to victims' families and $1 billion to the injured.

The fund was reopened in 2011 after Congress authorized the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

Since then, it has paid out more than $1.52 billion to first responders, recovery workers and residents who suffered physical harm or were killed as a result of the attacks.

The fund is set to undergo changes to its claim forms and requirements. The Justice Department said the changes, which include an extended deadline for filing claims and amended definitions of health conditions that are covered, are now available for public review and comment at the VCF website.
The Somali parliament approved amendments to the constitution Wednesday that will allow the House to continue to function should the countrys leaders fail to meet the deadline set for the election of government institutions.

The parliaments move fuels anxiety that legislative elections scheduled for August and presidential polling set for September may not take place. The Somali leaders are already behind schedule for agreeing on details of the election procedures, the status of Mogadishu (whether it will be a capital or a federal state), and constitutional amendments that allow government institutions to function beyond the end of their current mandate.

Matt Bryden, director of Sahan Research and a leading regional analyst, said the leaders can still hold the elections on time to maintain the existence of the internationally recognized government institutions in the country.

It is still possible to hold an electoral process in Somalia whether or not that happens is going to be a question of political will on the part of the various actors concerned, he said. I think we have seen the federal government, the president, the prime minister and leaders of the federal member states committed to taking the electoral process forward. Parts of the parliament has objected to the process as its taking shape, they objected the lead role of the National Leadership Forum NLF, and I think we could anticipate attempt by some MPs to interfere with process, he said.

Bryden warned against delaying the elections or an extension as feared by many ordinary citizens. Some of the leaders though are privately accepting that there will be delays due to technicalities.

Missing the deadline and moving into the dynamic of a delay of an extension of any kind is extremely risky. It could trigger a political crisis, it could trigger a constitutional crisis, he said.

Beyond those dates there are opportunities for contestation to emerge for spoilers or even legitimate opposition to claim that the institutions are no longer legitimate. I think that is a risk that Somalia does not need to take, he said.

Earlier this year the leaders of the federal government and the heads of regional administrations, known as NLF, agreed that direct elections to be held in the country were not feasible this year, as promised four years ago. Instead, the leaders agreed to hold indirect elections. They have agreed that more than 14,000 delegates will elect the 275-member lower house of parliament and that regional administrations will directly nominate the 54-member upper house. The two houses will elect a president.

Somali leaders are again promising another one-person, one-vote system in 2020. Bryden said the current process is unconstitutional but added there is no other option. He said it will only improve current institutions.

For the first time the federal states or the interim regional admins will have representatives in the federal institutions, will participate in the legislative process, will be involved in the setting up of the transitional mechanism, and I think we are likely to see a much better relationship and cooperative relationship between the federal member states and the federal government in the next four years if this process is allowed to go forward.

The government accepts it was unable to hold popular elections primarily because of the security challenges with the radical Islamist group al-Shabab still controlling vast land in the countryside and continuously launching ambushes against government and African Union peacekeeper supply lines. Bryden said al-Shabab is not the only problem.

No, al-Shabab is not the problem. The elephant in the room I would say is not al-Shabab, its the failure of the government to exercise effective authority across Somalias territory, and al-Shabab is not the greatest impediment, the greatest impediment is the lack of capacity, its the failure to practice fully inclusive politics, he said.

Al-Shabab is disruptive but its no longer an existential threat to Somalia or to the States of the region but it thrives on local grievances, and its those grievance that the government has to work on reducing or eliminating if its effectively going to counter Al-Shabab," he said.

The Somali government says al-Shabab is more than disruptive and blames the group for almost most of the problems in the country. When VOA recently asked the Somali prime minister if he supports drone strikes against the groups leaders, Omar Abddirashid Sharmarke said the group is responsible for not only the security challenges but also for driving the Somali youth in despair.

What brought this problem is al-Shabab, we would have moved on from 25 years of troubles, our kids are dying in the seas, he said.

The problem was brought by the people who are committing suicide against hotels who are behind this radical ideology that is massacring the Somali people that is preventing the country from development and peace and our children to go to schools.

Sharmarke said al-Shabab brought the drones upon itself.

We would not have needed foreigners, blame lies with the people who are against peace, said Sharmarke.
A month ago, Democrats were fretting about the party unity challenges facing their presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Now Republicans are wringing their hands over their expected standard-bearer, Donald Trump.

Trump complicated his own unity efforts this week with divisive comments in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, doubling down on his proposed Muslim ban and suggesting that President Barack Obamas priorities were more with the terrorists than the American people.

Trump told a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, that the Orlando tragedy has made the threat of terrorism a central issue in the campaign. We are not going to let people take advantage of us. We are going to go to the movie theater. We are going to go on airplanes. We are going to lead our lives like we are supposed to lead our lives, Trump told enthusiastic followers.

May go it alone

But Trumps divisive rhetoric on Muslims and his attacks on Obama and Hillary Clinton have made some Republicans nervous, something Trump chose to address at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia. The Republicans, honestly folks, our leaders have to get tougher. This is tough to do alone, but you know what? I think Im going to be forced to. Trump added his own message for Republican leaders seeking to put distance between themselves and the presumptive nominee: Dont talk. Please be quiet.



Trumps comments in the wake of Orlando and previous controversial allegations of bias involving a federal judge of Mexican heritage have put Republican leaders in an awkward spot, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. We have plenty of issues, and my advice to our nominee would be to start talking about the issues that the American people care about and to start doing it now, McConnell told reporters a few days ago.



But when pressed to comment on Trump on Tuesday, McConnell curtly replied that he wouldnt be commenting on the partys presidential nominee this week.

Other Republicans have chosen to keep quiet, worried that any public defiance of Trump will anger his supporters and could spell political trouble for them.

If you repudiate Trump, you are going to alienate some specific portion of your Republican voting base, and you need them all in an election where you are going to have a headwind regardless, said analyst Norman Ornstein with the American Enterprise Institute. If you support Trump, then you are stuck with his policy positions. Ornstein spoke at an event hosted by the New America Foundation.

Trumps continuing troubles have made his Republican opponents hopeful that they can block him at the party nominating convention in July. Its sort of reignited this notion that we have to get somebody to step in at the convention and stop him from being president, said conservative commentator Fred Barnes on VOAs Issues in the News program. Barnes is editor of the Weekly Standard.

Most analysts said that was still a long shot and that many Republicans would be loath to try to take the nomination away from Trump, fearing a grass roots backlash.

Clinton, Obama go after Trump

The controversy over Trump and his comments has also given an opening to his expected Democratic opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton.



A ban on Muslims would not have stopped this attack. Neither would a wall. So not one of Donald Trumps reckless ideas would have saved a single life in Orlando, Clinton said at a campaign stop in Virginia Wednesday. Clinton added that we need leadership, common sense and concrete plans because we are facing a brutal enemy.

Clinton has work to do in unifying the Democratic Party. She remains intent on winning over rival Bernie Sanders and his supporters after a long and sometimes bitter primary campaign.

Sanders told reporters he is focused on making sure his key issues are recognized and supported at the party convention in July in Philadelphia. We are going to fight as hard as we can to create a Democratic Party that represents the working families and the low-income people in this country."

Clinton is also relying on President Obama to play a key role in helping unify the party. While there is vitriol between the parts of the party now, there is a good sense that will probably subside and it will be a relatively unified Democratic Party down the road, said John Fortier with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

Obama lent his voice to the anti-Trump effort with a verbal broadside blasting Trumps proposed Muslim ban earlier this week. The president said Trumps comments in the wake of Orlando were dangerous and that the Muslim ban would undermine U.S. efforts to secure the support of moderate Muslims around the world.

Further evidence that Clinton is making headway came in the latest public opinion polls that showed Clinton expanding her lead over Trump. The latest NBC News-Survey Monkey poll had Clinton in the lead over Trump by a margin of 49 to 42 percent.

A Bloomberg poll gave Clinton a lead of 49 to 37 percent over Trump, with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson getting 9 percent. Even though Clinton has gained in recent polls, many experts were cautious, predicting more ups and downs over the next four-and-one-half months in what is likely to be a very personal and nasty campaign.
The United Arab Emirates clarified Friday that its role in the war in Yemen is not over, contrary to a statement made the day before that was allegedly taken out of context.

The crown prince of Abu Dhabi had posted a statement from the state minister for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, on his official twitter that the war in Yemen is over for its troops after being a key ally in the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-backed rebels for over a year.

An Arabic version of the statement, however, read that the war is only "practically" over.

Gargash told state media Friday that the statement was taken out of context and is far from true.

"We are at war. I am appalled that my statement was taken out of context and misinterpreted for external agenda that seek to undermine the region and the GCC in particular," he told state-run WAM news agency.

Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan also serves as deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces.

Though Houthi rebels have been pushed out of Yemen's southern cities where President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi set up base on his return from exile, most of the northern and central highlands and the Red Sea coast are still controlled by rebels.

The Saudi-led and U.S.-backed coalition, made up mainly of Gulf nations, has been launching airstrikes against the rebels since March of 2015, part of an increasingly assertive military policy by the Saudis and the UAE.
United Nations investigators said the Islamic State (IS) militant group is committing genocide against the Yazidis, an ethnic Kurdish religious community.

The International Commission of Inquiry on Syria accused the militant group of seeking to destroy the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq by subjecting them to horrific atrocities.



On the basis of evidence it has gathered, the three-member commission said the abuse of Yazidi men, women, and children by Islamic State amounts to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.



Chairman of the Commission Paulo Pinheiro said the genocide is ongoing since the terrorist group first attacked the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq's Sinjar region on August 3, 2014.



"ISIS has permanently sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm," he said. "The infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death."



The commission said IS has reviled this minority group as infidels and forced Yazidis to convert to Islam or be killed on the spot.



Pinheiro said women and children were forcibly transferred from Sinjar in buses to locations in Syria and Iraq where they were sold in markets as chattel.



"More than 3,200 women and children remain today under ISIS captivity. Most of them are in Syria," he said. "Women and girls, some as young as nine are used as sex slaves.  Boys over seven are ripped from their mothers' care and taken to ISIS camps where they are indoctrinated and receive military training."



The U.N. investigators said there can be no impunity for crimes of this nature. They said both Syria and Iraq are parties to the 1945 Genocide Convention, which obliges them to prevent and to punish perpetrators of genocide.



The investigators are calling on the Security Council to quickly refer the case to the International Criminal Court.
The White House plans to commit $220 million to Ukraine in support of economic, political, and energy reforms, Vice President Biden said in a meeting with Ukraine's Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman Wednesday.

"The Vice President expressed strong support for the prime minister's ambitious reform efforts and commended him for the bold reform steps his Cabinet has already taken in its initial two months in office," the White House said in a statement.

The Vice President also expressed deep concern about the rise of separatists in Eastern Ukraine, supported by Russia, urging Ukraine to fully implement the Minsk agreements, a cease-fire accord designed to end fighting between Ukraines government and the countrys pro-Russian rebels in the east.

Biden also assured Groysman that sanctions against Russia would not be lifted until it fully implemented the accord.

Since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, the U.S. and EU have imposed several rounds of asset freezes, travel bans and other penalties on Russia.
Oupa Moloto says he will never forget the morning of June 16, 1976. Students at his school in the then-segregated Johannesburg township of Soweto had planned to protest against the government's insistence on teaching in the Afrikaans language.

He got to school just before 7 a.m. and joined the march to Soweto's Orlando Stadium. At first, he said, the mood was upbeat.

"When the shooting started, I was not sure it was a gun," said Moloto, who now works with a foundation dedicated to the Soweto student uprising. "It sounded like a cracker. Until I saw a boy was next to me bleeding from the hand."

Estimates vary on how many children were killed by police in those protests. Some go as high as 700. One of the first victims was 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, whose name today adorns a museum on the site of the massacre.

As President Jacob Zuma remarked at Thursday's 40th anniversary celebrations, South Africa will never forget.



The students' protest illuminated the unfairness of the racist apartheid regime. And the famous photo of Pieterson's prone, bleeding body helped mobilize the world against apartheid.

"Students revolted not only against the imposition of Afrikaans but against Bantu education because they knew it was inferior and that it was designed to prepare them to be drawers of water and hewers of wood," Zuma said in his speech Thursday. "The apartheid ideology espoused that whites were by nature superior and that blacks were inherently inferior."

South Africa has a long way to go, Zuma acknowledged, a fact illuminated by university students when they launched protests last year demanding free education.

Moloto and other struggle veterans agreed that apartheid-era divisions remain. For example, black students remain significantly poorer than their white peers. But none of them said they regretted their activism.



"My kids got education from multiracial schools," said Moloto, who is now 58. "To them, issues of color, issues of race, they are not entrenched like when I was growing [up]. Because when I was growing [up], issues of race were the key, they were determining."

Florence Kganye was also an 18-year-old high school student in 1976, and participated in student protests in the city of Bloemfontein.

"It was worth it," she said this week attempting to shepherd 200 excited, blue-uniformed students on a field trip to the Hector Pieterson museum. "Because what we fought for, what the other students that died fought for, at least we do have the freedom now that we were fighting for."

She says the police gave her a lasting reminder of her activism.

"Even now, I have a pain at my back," she said. "... It's from the beating. Because in those rooms where they locked us... they were beating us with something like a plank."

If anything, she says, the experience galvanized her. Today, she is the principal of a Catholic school in Johannesburg. She emphasized education with her own two children, she said, beaming as she told of her oldest, who is now a university student.

Today's youth say they have not forgotten their elders' sacrifices.

"Let us thank them for what they did for others, because we have freedom," said 15-year-old Wladeck Ndlovu. "We can do everything in this country."

He smiled shyly as he said he wants to become a lawyer when he grows up. For Moloto, and Kganye -- and even Zuma -- that was an impossible ambition in a nation where black students could not go to top universities, could not live where they pleased, could not look forward to voting or one day, becoming president.

But 40 years later, for Ndlovu and his friends, nothing seems impossible.
The sheriff of Orange County, Florida, says the body of the 2-year-old boy killed by an alligator Tuesday has been found.

Sheriff Jerry Demings told reporters Wednesday in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, that the body of Lane Graves was found intact near the area where the alligator dragged him into the water. Demings said the alligator drowned the little boy.

Demings said the Nebraska toddler was on vacation with his parents and siblings at a Disney World hotel. Tuesday night, Lane was wading in water near the shore of a man-made lake used mostly for boating when the attack occurred.

In a statement given to the sheriff, the Graves family thanked the public for their prayers in the hours following the attack.

Disney officials closed beaches at the resort after finding and euthanizing four other alligators in the lake during their search for the boy. There was no sign that any of the four was involved in the attack.

More than 50 law enforcement personnel searched the Seven Seas Lagoon, which reaches a depth of about four meters, outside Disney's Grand Floridian resort in Orlando.

Demings said there have been no other recent reports of similar alligator attacks in the area.

Last October, a 61-year-old swimmer was the first victim killed by an alligator in Florida since 2007.
Patience Carter hid in a bathroom with her friends during the shooting rampage early Sunday at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

She said she just wanted the shooting to end, even if it meant her own death.

So I was just begging God to just please take me, and I just wanted to close my eyes and just let him, just literally take the soul out of my body, Carter said Tuesday. I was begging for God to take the soul out of my body because I didnt want to feel more pain. I didnt want to get any more shots.

Carter, from Philadelphia, was shot in the leg and remains at a Florida hospital. She said she felt guilty for being alive.

Angel Colon also described the shots in the midst of chaos.

WATCH: Orlando shooting survivor details harrowing ordeal

Everyone started running everywhere," he said. "I got trampled over. I shattered and broke my bones in my left leg. By this time, I couldnt walk at all. All I could do was just lie down there while everyone was just running on top of me, trying to get where they had to be. All I could hear was the shotgun  one after another. And people screaming, people yelling for help.

Colon said he heard the shooter, Omar Mateen, returning, and as he did, he was shooting previous victims  people who were dead on the floor  to be sure they were dead.

He shoots the girl next to me, and I am lying there thinking, 'I am next, I am dead.' 

But Colon did not die in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. He faked being dead until he was taken out of the nightclub by a policeman, who dragged him across the floor littered with glass from the shooting spree.

Shot in the hand, the hip and several times in the leg, Colon was taken to the Orlando Regional Medical Center, along with many other victims of the shooting spree.

On Tuesday, he was still there, talking to reporters at a news conference that included the medical personnel who worked to save him and the others.

WATCH: Orlando hospital staff fight to save nightclub casualties

Expression of thanks

If it weren't for you guys, I definitely wouldn't be here, said Colon, sitting in a wheelchair. He thanked the policeman who saved him and the hospital's doctors and nurses who treated him.

The faces of nurses in green scrubs around the room lit up. But their smiles were more emotional than happy.

Initially, reporters in the room sat there with glassy faces. Then they started to shout over one another with questions.

Later, one of the doctors who was on the scene Sunday compared the mayhem at the medical center to the clamor at the press conference.

Dr. Tim Bullard told VOA that patients were crying out in pain and the hospital staff members were calling out to each other to get what they needed to treat patients.

People try to get louder and louder so they can be heard, so it escalates," he said. "But in the end, it was OK and we got everything done, but its very much, very loud.

Dr. Joseph Ibrahim, the hospital's trauma medical director, compared the situation to "a war scene. Trauma bay was very full. We had patients in every corner."

The Orlando Regional Medical Center staff members uniformly credited their training for allowing them to do their jobs under enormous pressure, but they were uncertain about how the experience would affect them in the long run.

Its been hard to sleep for the past few days, said one.

You keep reliving it, said another.

I dont know how this is going to affect me," a third staffer said. "We do see this [kind of trauma], we just dont see it in this magnitude.
A Zimbabwean based in the United States of America says youth should be innovative and productive in order handle some challenges they are currently facing.

Talented Natasha Bell, 21, has been staying in USA for the past eight years and started working at the age of 16. She holds two jobs - one at a childrens daycare center and the other in a restaurant in Washington DC.

I am always looking for something to do for myself, and trying out whatever new things like working at two different jobs or trying out to see if there is anything on the side to make money or gain more experience for myself.

Bell, who left Zimbabwe at the age of 13 years, says life and responsibilities in America as a youth is so different from the life in Zimbabwe.

As a young female (in Zimbabwe) I would work like cooking, laundry and do normal stuff but now I have to pay my own phone bills, buy my own clothes, but it also gets lonely at times in the sense of family and friends and the life you used to (live).

Bell adds that my life changed when I came to America  You can start working in some places working from 16 years. I cant start playing outside, outside playing is not some fun as back home in Zimbabwe.

People coming to America are people who travel abroad, they are not just giving to live for a luxury life or just want to get money, they are actually going because they have knowledge that it is not easy to come here but dedicated to work two or three jobs sometimes four just to help people back home and to build a better life for themselves here. The difference is I am having to work harder now than before.

She started pursuing her passion of making African jewelery by selling the products to friends and relatives. Her entrepreneurial abilities began when she came to America and in pursuit to live comfortably as a proud African girl, at the same time doing what she loves as an artist.

I always love being African. People think when you come to the USA that you forget where you came from.

She adds, I am an arts person and I am interested in arts and crafts. I love drawing and painting, and trying to design my own clothes in my head or trying to do something different with what someone else is wearing. I am trying to keep up with my roots and I am able to make jewelery and sale it to people and keep up with my Afro-centric style. It is a good thing. I always wear it because I add to what to wear. I want people to know I am African, a proud to show it.

Bell says her strong work ethic was imparted to her by her mum who used to perform with Oliver Mutukudzi and the Black Spirits.

My mum used to be part of Oliver Mutukudzi and Black Spirits. She used to travel around the world and travelled a lot. She would go for days, weeks, and sometimes months but I would not take it to heart because I knew she was doing it all for me. l was the only child then, and I know it was out of love, going out trying to build and live a better life for me. She would do anything for me. She never missed a birthday and I always had big birthdays.

Word for the youth!  In life you have to get up and go, you have to give yourself something to work with, whatever you feel you have to do, you have a learn to do it but it if it does not work out there, there is always something you can do or you can always try to do it again. Things dont and will not come to you, you have to go out and get them.

She adds, Do what you love, go to a job and do something you love, do something that make you happy.

If you have a story to share, send a message to the writer of this article, Chioneso Jani, to cjani@bbg.gov
United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Harry Thomas Jnr says America and Zimbabwe have good trade relations with the southern African country enjoying a trade surplus last year despite targeted sanctions imposed on President Robert Mugabe and his inner circle more than 10 years ago.

Responding to questions from the public at a function organised by social media enterprise, 263 Chat, Ambassador Thomas Jnr said last year Zimbabwe exported goods worth $65 million to the U.S.

Ambassador Thomas Jnr said he is working on improving trade between the two countries.

Zimbabwe is Americas 164th trading partner in the world. As for the targeted sanctions, Ambassador Thomas Jr said the United States president Barack Obama and the U.S Senate could only review them on the back of genuine economic and political reforms.

Ambassador Thomas Jnr, who earlier met the visiting IMF delegation, said it was Americas wish that the Zimbabwean government clarifies its economic policies and tackle corruption so as to attract meaningful investment.

He said the United States remained Zimbabwes biggest donor and had this year provided $55 million in food aid and security and was spending millions of dollars in fighting HIV/AIDS.

Ambassador Thomas Jnr said apart from Nigeria, Zimbabwe received more U.S scholarships than any other country on the African continent.

Ambassador Thomas Jnr also said he hoped the U.S government would continue the Mandela-Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders even after President Obama leaves office next January.

About 60 young Zimbabweans left the country today for the program. They will be attached to various universities and other institutions before meeting President Obama.
Zimbabwean police have running battles with youth calling themselves Tajamuka/Sesijikile demanding the immediate resignation of President Robert Mugabe, abandonment of plans to introduce bond notes, government to account for $15 billion in diamond proceeds which disappeared in Manicaland province and immediate release of abducted political activist Itai Dzamara, among many other issues.

Two political parties urge the International Monetary Fund to stop helping President Robert Mugabes government saying they are likely to prescribe wrong economic measures for a nation that is already on its knees. The parties want wide consultations with all stakeholders before the IMF releases any lines of credit to Zimbabwe.

The U.S ambassador Harry Thomas Jnr. says despite targeted sanctions, Zimbabwe and America enjoy good trade relations with Zimbabwe actually enjoying a trade surplus last year.

And we will give you a detailed analysis of the current debate on the Local Government Laws Amendment Bill seeking to give the minister of local government power to fire councilors and mayors.

Stay tuned for these stories and more coming up on Studio 7 at 7:30 pm on 9-0-9 Medium Wave and on the 4-9-3-0, 5-9-4-0 and 1-5-4-6-0 shortwave frequencies. We also broadcast on www.channelzim.net. Please check us out on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

This evening on Livetalk our hosts of the Womens Round Table Marvellous Mhlanga Nyahuye and Praxedes Jeremiah will be talking with women living in the diaspora. Participate by sending your messages on our WhatsApp number 001 202 465 0318. You can also post comments on this Facebook wall or send us your number so we can call you back. Please note that we are livestreaming on all Studio 7 Facebook pages. Stay tuned!!!!!!
Masvingo residents have rejected the proposed Local Government Amendment Bill saying it violates some provisions of Zimbabwes constitution.

Like people in other provinces, they told a committee overseeing the parliamentary outreach program gathering peoples views on the Bill that the proposed piece of legislation gives the Minister of Local Government too much power in running local authorities.

Masvingo United Residents and Ratepayers Alliance director, Anoziva Muguti, shot down the Bill saying it did not have the people at heart.

We are against the Bill as we have realized that it violates certain sections of the constitution relating to devolution of power in local governance. The right to a fair trial and right to administrative justice, furthermore it is not independent as required by Section 278(2) of the constitution.

Sungano Zvarebwanashe of Majange high density suburb added that the Bill is intended to bring back some of the local government ministers powers pruned by the Zimbabwe Constitution.

This Bill must be rejected because it is giving more powers to the Minister to appoint Tribunal members and also it doesnt stipulate a time frame for the reinstatement of mayors and councillors who will had been found not guilty of charged offenses.

Other residents, including Entrance Takaedza, said the Bill was a ploy by the ruling party to get rid of all opposition party councilors and mayors in urban areas.

The bill is giving the minister too much powers to nominate the chair and members of the tribunal and secondly as residents we are the people who voted for the councillors we know when they go wrong and it is us who should remove them.

Fannie Phiri, chairperson of the parliamentary committee which visited Masvingo, hailed local residents for attending the hearing in large numbers.

The turnout was good in Mutare and here it was quite good I urge organizations like residents association and political parties to make sure that their constituencies are well informed of such meetings.

The meeting was characterized by disruptions from Zanu PF youths who tried to defend the Bill and accused members of residents groups of carrying out awareness campaigns before the public hearing. They refused to talk to this reporter after the meeting.
Police in Zimbabwe on Thursday crushed a public demonstration staged by a group of youths from various political organizations calling themselves Tajamuka/Sesijikile who had gathered in central Harare to commemorate the Day of the African Child.

Youths from various opposition political parties and some civic organizations gathered in Harare to commemorate the Day of the African Child but the commemoration was short-lived after heavily armed police details pounced on them.

Before the commemoration was crashed, Tajamuka spokesperson Promise Mkwananzi, who also leads the Zimbabwe Informal Sector Organization, had told the gathering that President Robert Mugabe should step down immediately for failing to run the country.



Mkwananzi also castigated the sitting government for its alleged violation of the rights of the countrys citizens. He said the current cash shortages were an example that Mr. Mugabe had failed to grow the

countrys economy.



A few minutes into Mkwananzis address, heavily armed cops arrived in three trucks and started assaulting the youths without even saying a word.



The youths ran in different directions while some attempted to retaliate but to no avail. In the process, four youths, who were severely injured, were arrested. They were detained at Harare Central Police station.



One of the activists, Denford Ngadziore, was later assaulted by unknown assailants at public hearing that was organized by the Harare City Council. Ngadziore has since been taken to a local clinic where he is being treated.



MDC-T youth secretary, Lovemore Chinoputsa, who survived the police crackdown, criticized the heavy handedness of the Zimbabwe Republic Police saying their actions were unconstitutional.



Police spokesperson Charity Charamba told Studio 7 by phone that the police would be out in full force to ensure that there was peace in the country. She added that the Tajamuka youths did not seek police

clearance to commemorate the Day of the African Child.

But Mkwananzi issued a statement late this afternoon saying they have lined up a series of protests until President Mugabe leaves office. He said they would not seek police clearance, arguing that they would not do so in an independent Zimbabwe.

The Day of the African Child is celebrated annually on June 16th to honour South Africans, who participated and were brutalized by the colonial regime in the Soweto Uprising in 1976. Hundreds of youth were shot and some died in protests against the poor quality of education and the right to be taught in their own language instead of Afrikaans.

The theme of this year's Day of the African Child is Right to participate: Let Children be seen and heard.
Some political activists held a meeting with Zimbabwes central bank governor John Mangudya on Wednesday and Thursday to express their disatisfaction over the banks moves to introduce bond notes.

The activists, drawn from various organizations including Pastor Evan Mawarire of #ThisFlag movement, told Mangudya that the bond notes, designed to boost exports, would fuel recession in the country that is now set to grow by at least 1,5 percent this year instead of the initially projected 2,7 percent due to lack of foreign direct investment, fears over the countrys indigenization law, policy inconsistencies and other issues.

Maureen Kademaunga, a PHD candidate at Pretoria University, said they told Mangudya to use conventional ways of reviving the economy instead of introducing bond notes.

She said Mangudya wanted to avoid discussions on bond notes, an indication that he will soon introduce the bond notes.

At the same time, Pastor Mawarire said they pressed the governor to listen to peoples discontent over the bond notes, which are likely to devastate the Zimbabwe economy.

Meanwhile, opposition parties have urged the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to press for significant political and economic reforms before releasing any new lines of credit to Zimbabwe.

In a statement, the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai and former Finance Minister Tendai Bitis Peoples Democratic Party, said the IMF appears to be ignoring public discontent over the current deteriorating economic and political situation in Zimbabwe.

An IMF delegation is currently visiting Zimbabwe under a Staff Monitored Program. The Bretton Woods institution recently praised Zimbabwe for embarking on what it termed some visible financial reforms but noted that the economic situation is deteriorating fast in the country.

The IMF urged Zimbabwe at a meeting in Lima, Peru, a couple of months ago, to carryout major social, economic and political reforms before getting new lines of credit.

Critics say the government, which is saddled with an external debt of almost $9 billion, is dragging its feet on implementing these reforms.

Deputy spokesperson George Mkhwanazi of the Peoples Democratic Party said the IMF should consult all stakeholders before releasing any lines of credit to Zimbabwe.
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If youve ever watched an episode of a sitcom, youve seen human watermark Fred Armisen in a guest role. That kind of acting range requires an equally adaptable voice set, so it should come as no surprise that Armisen told Conan OBrien that he can do any accent  any small part of a town, any big city, I can do it all. Except  wait  thats a bananas big claim. To test it out, OBrien threw out regions that were completely, definitely, positively, for sure not rehearsed. Armisen seems to do pretty well, but of course, all great savants have their Achilles heel. The slippery foe that keeps Armisen up at night: Jamaica.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Here, three tactics for rescuing a floundering bit.

Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

The bit: A Darwinian comedy song.

The problem: We wrote this stream-of-consciousness song, says Bloom, where my characters enemy, Valencia, talks about how women have to compete to get the best sperm. It was too obvious.

The fix: The spirit of Valencias musical number was changed from negative to positive. She doesnt tell herself I hate other women. She tells herself I love other women  because a villain does not think theyre a villain.

The final version: Women Gotta Stick Together, a goofily sincere ballad. Its this hippie-dippie female-empowerment song, but the joke is that everything she says is disempowering. Shes singing with a big smile on her face, but what shes saying is terrible: Its my duty to tell this girl that shes fat. The contrast made it work.

Julie Klausner, Difficult People

The bit: A failed Saturday Night Live audition.

The problem: Originally, says Klausner, my character told [co-star] Billy Eichners character, Do impressions of all of Lorne Michaelss best friends. Just be like, Oh, Im Steve Martin, and pretend to shit in your own hand and eat it. But the joke just wasnt working.

The fix: The audition was relegated to an offscreen aside. We kept running into a problem with Billy sabotaging himself, and we figured out he doesnt have to. Billy and Julie live in a world that gets in their way. The characters are not crazy  its the world around them thats garbage.

The final version: Billy tells Julie the unseen audition went well but that he didnt get the job because hes pretty green. Its later revealed that the shows cast is entirely made up of children. If Difficult People takes place in a world where SNL casts 5-year-olds, then its a really unfair world. Its so funny.

W/Bob & David. Photo: Saeed Adyani/Netflix

Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, W/Bob & David

The bit: A parody of The Most Dangerous Game.

The problem: We dont do specific genre parody that often, says Cross about the initial humans-hunting-humans effort. Wed normally find some way to spin it. But it didnt grow.

The fix: The sketch clicked, Cross explains, when the hunter wasnt just giving an advantage to his prey but also debasing himself in the process.

The final version: The hunters method for leveling the playing field becomes increasingly absurd: from drinking cough syrup to putting scorpions on his face. It played so well, says Odenkirk. You could imagine it having been done in vaudeville.

*This article appears in the June 13, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
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Photo: Marc Brenner/Pinewood Films

Is there any profession less cinematic than book editing? I say that with enormous respect, given that my wife edits books (and damn good ones). But in all the years Ive watched her pore over manuscripts and wrestle over phrasing with authors both grateful and intransigent, and beam when that first printed book arrives in the mail (after so many hassles over covers and flap copy), Ive never thought, This would make a great movie!

But the new film Genius does a pretty good job of capturing the peculiar drama of the relationship between editors and writers, in this case some of the most revered in American letters: Max Perkins, an editor at of Scribners, and, in alphabetical order, authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Its the bond with Wolfe that occupies most of the movies running time. At the start, Perkins (Colin Firth) gets a fat manuscript plopped on his desk  a novel turned down by every other publisher in New York. He reads a few lines, then a few more. He reads on the train to his impressive Connecticut home and over dinner as his wife and kids visibly wilt from neglect. The book is the sprawling first draft of what would come to be called Look Homeward, Angel. Just as Perkins finishes, Wolfe appears at the door, uninvited and unannounced. As played by Jude Law, hes a disarmingly extroverted Southerner, high on his own persona. And Perkins is oddly smitten.

So how do the filmmakers make editing cinematic? Perkins and Wolfe go mano a mano over booze and cigarettes. They edit while hurrying down the street. They edit in bars. Other male characters in movies play increasingly fierce squash. These guys do increasingly fierce rewrites. A description of a womans eyes goes from a logjam of metaphors to the simple observation that theyre blue. And to be fair, Perkins worries aloud near the end of Genius that he has straitjacketed his authors, paring away the passionate excess that made them unique. The movie lets that self-doubt hang, which is a good thing. Editors  even great ones  should always cut with humility.

But if youre looking for something more than line editing, look elsewhere  perhaps to A. Scott Bergs 1978 biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. (The title, of course, is a double entendre.) You wouldnt know from the film what Look Homeward, Angel is about, much less its authors vision of the universe and the place of humans in it. The focus is firmly on length and on the emotional intensity of the haggling. Wolfes high-strung lover, Aileen Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), warns Perkins that he has been seduced and will be abandoned down the road, but Perkins  buttoned up, always wearing a hat  is not a man to worry about such a thing. It is beyond his purview.

Watching Genius, you might have the nagging sense that the most vivid stuff is occurring offscreen, when the other characters leave Perkins and go back to their messy lives. And while that might be the point  weve had plenty of self-destructive author biopics, but none that focused on people who tried to instill discipline in them  it makes for half-baked drama. It doesnt help that the first-time film director, Michael Grandage (the artistic director of Londons Donmar Warehouse), has gone the British-prestige route. Its terribly high-toned. And with the exception of Laura Linney in a minor role as Perkinss wife, a middlebrow playwright, the actors are all Brits and Aussies. Its as if Americans cant be trusted to play quintessentially American literary figures.

Firth isnt bad. In some ways, hes perfect  as beige as the part demands. Guy Pearce isnt a bad Fitzgerald, either, although hes a controlled actor and doesnt convey what a sniveling wreck the man was at the end of his talent. Dominic West is a solid Hemingway. Kidman gives a brittle, pungent performance as the Jewish costume and set designer who left her husband and two kids for Wolfe, but it seems as if her specialty has become getting by in parts in which shes totally miscast.

For better or worse, Jude Law carries Genius. Does he overact? Perhaps, but he does suggest that its also Wolfe whos overacting, putting on a grand show to keep his vulnerability at bay. Thank heaven Law gave up the leading-man game and went back to character parts, in which he always goes for broke. But neither he nor Genius is ingenious enough to make you think, We need more movies about editing!
Photo: K C Bailey/Netflix

We last saw the ladies of Litchfield enjoying their temporary freedom at the pond, and briefly, it felt as though time had stopped. But given how much weve seen them through these three seasons of Orange Is the New Black, it can be difficult to parse how much time has actually passed. To keep track, Vulture assembled a comprehensive list of where each inmate is at the start of season four: their crimes, sentences, and when theyll get out (provided their sentences arent extended). As for those still left unknown, season four will likely fill in a few blanks  well update this with any new information. (For those who are interested, this site breaks down what their sentences should be, according to New York state and federal law.)

Piper Chapman

Why shes in prison: Criminal conspiracy, money laundering. In prison, she was also charged with perjury. Piper smuggled $50,000 of Alexs drug money to Belgium. Though she herself didnt traffic drugs, she lived off of Alexs drug money comfortably.

How long is her sentence: 15 months.

Was her sentence extended: Its unclear if it was extended for perjury when she lies at Kubras trial.

How much time does she have left: Approximately months, depending on whether they gave her extra time for perjury.

Dayanara Daya Diaz

Why shes in prison: Drug-related charges. Its never officially stated, but presumably had to do with Cesars drug operation.

How long is her sentence: Approximately 44 months total.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Approximately 35 months left by end of season three.

Sophia Burset

Why shes in prison: Credit-card fraud. She stole credit cards to finance her sex-change operation, and her son Michael turned her in.

How long is her sentence: Between five and six years.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: About three-and-a-half years.

Alex Vause

Why shes in prison: Heroin trafficking, parole violation. She worked as a drug smuggler and dealer originally, and was given a plea deal when she named the prime drug lord (while convincing Piper to lie and commit perjury). She was later arrested for violating her parole when she told Piper she sleeps with a gun out of fear and is planning to skip town. Piper passes this info on to her parole officer.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: Yes, for violating her parole.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Nicky Nichols

Why shes in prison: Breaking and entering, possession of heroin. She broke into a womans house to sell her expensive books and was caught in the act, while also having heroin on her person. She previously also stole and wrecked a New York City taxi, but two of her friends were charged for the theft.

How long is her sentence: Five years.

Was her sentence extended: Yes. She was sent to maximum security for stashing heroin.

How much time does she have left: In season two, she had two years left, but its currently unknown how much time she has left since her sentence was extended.

Galina Red Reznikov

Why shes in prison: Organized crime and racketeering. The exact moment and reason for her arrest was never revealed, but we do know that Red and her husband were involved with the Russian mafia, and that she gave business advice to the mob boss.

How long is her sentence: Approximately 13 to 14 years. In season two, episode four, its revealed that shes been at Litchfield for at least 12 years.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: In season three, we know she doesnt have much time left, and she starts thinking about what shell do when she gets out.

Poussey Washington

Why shes in prison: Selling marijuana.

How long is her sentence: Six years.

Was her sentence extended: No

How much time does she have left: At the start of the series, shes been in for two years, with four years left. By end of season three, she has a little over three years left.

Lorna Morello (now Lorna Muccio)

Why shes in prison: Harassment, violating a restraining order, attempted murder. She stalked a man, Christopher, who she went on one date with, causing him to move several times and take out a restraining order. She eventually put an explosive in his car in an attempt to murder his girlfriend Angela. She also ran a mail-order scam, but its unclear if thats a part of her sentence.

How long is her sentence: 34 months.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Mid-season two, she had two years left, so a little less than two years.

Tasha Taystee Jefferson

Why shes in prison: Its never officially stated, but she was an accountant for Vees drug-trafficking ring, so its assumed to be for heroin trafficking.

How long is her sentence: Unknown

Was her sentence extended: Yes. She was released in season one, episode nine, and intentionally violated her parole to be placed back in Litchfield later in season one.

How much time does she have left: Unknown

Cindy Black Cindy Hayes

Why shes in prison: Felony theft. We never see the crime for which she is convicted, but while working as a TSA agent, she stole items from passengers luggage and food.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Sister Jane Ingalls

Why shes in prison: Trespassing on a nuclear-facility site and handcuffing herself to a flagpole as a form of protest.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Stella Carlin

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: Yes. She was sent to max security for criminal conspiracy after being set up with contraband by Piper.

How much time does she have left: She had two days left at the end of season three, now that her sentence has been extended, its unknown.

Leanne Taylor

Why shes in prison: Its unclear. Possibly for drug possession with intent to sell, or for breaking house arrest. She was using and dealing meth, which the cops found in her backpack after she decided to return to her Amish community. The police dont arrest her, but in exchange, she wears a wire and outs her drug-dealing Amish friends who are on rumspringa, which leads elders of the church to shun her and her family. To save her parents from the backlash, she runs away. We never discover why she was ultimately put in prison, but its probably because she started dealing again. Or she may have been on house arrest for dealing and violated probation by running away.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Norma Romano

Why shes in prison: Murder. She was a part of a cult and in love with the cult leader. He had many wives, but they ultimately all left him, except for Norma. Years later, he screamed at her and mocked her, saying that she wasted her life. She pushed him off a cliff.

How long is her sentence: At least 12 years. In season three, episode seven, Red says to Norma, Twelve years weve been in this kitchen together.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Carrie Big Boo Black

Why shes in prison: Unknown, possibly theft. She refers to herself as a thieving dyke and ran a gambling ring before she came to Litchfield. It could also possibly be due to assault, as we once see her assault a boy after he made homophobic comments.

How long is her sentence: Unknown. Shes been in for at least two-and-a-half years.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Janae Watson

Why shes in prison: Armed robbery. When she became romantically involved with a gang member, she helped him with armed robbery. As they were running away, she outran her boyfriend who told her to stop showing off, so she ran back and was caught by the police as her boyfriend ran on.

How long is her sentence: Unknown. She arrived on the same day as Piper, so shes also been in for nine months.

Was her sentence extended: Unknown.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Gina Murphy

Why shes in prison: Theft, embezzlement, and implied murder or accessory to murder. (She once said she may be a thief but Im not an embezzler, and that guy shot himself.)

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Gloria Mendoza

Why shes in prison: Food-stamp fraud. She tried to run away from her abusive boyfriend with the money she had saved, but an unsatisfied customer of the mystic shop called the cops on her.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Tiffany Pennsatucky Doggett

Why shes in prison: Murder. She shot an abortion-clinic nurse after she made snide comments about this being Pennsatuckys fifth abortion. She was hailed as a religious anti-abortion zealot by Christian pro-lifers, who gave her financial support.

How long is her sentence: Unknown. At the end of season two, its revealed that shes been at Litchfield for at least two years.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Yoga Jones

Why shes in prison: Manslaughter of a minor. She used to be a marijuana farmer and drunkenly mistook a young boy for a deer, shooting and killing him.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Marisol Flaca Gonzales

Why shes in prison: Fraud and endangerment. She sold fake LSD to kids in her high school, and one of the students jumped off a building when he believed he was really high.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Around 38 to 39 months. Daya has 36 months mid-season three and is planning a summer wedding since shell be out as summer is starting. Flaca asks her to wait until fall when she gets out, so she presumably only has a few more months than Daya.

Brook Soso

Why shes in prison: Illegal political activism. She protested logging by living in a tree so that it couldnt be cut down.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Suzanne Crazy Eyes Warren

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: Unknown.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Aleida Diaz

Why shes in prison: Drug-related charges. Her boyfriend Cesar formed a drug lab in their home, and she helped him cut and bag them. She took the fall for him.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Claudette Pelage

Why shes in prison: Human trafficking and potentially murder. She ran a maid service using illegal child labor. She also murdered a customer who attacked one of her cleaning girls, but its unclear if she was convicted for this crime.

How long is her sentence: Unknown, but at least least ten years.

Was her sentence extended: Yes, for choking CO Fisher. She was sent to max security.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Maritza Ramos

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Mei Chang

Why shes in prison: Unknown. We do know that she helped her brother run a Chinese medicine store that sold illegal animal parts, and she helped her brother with buying and delivering. She also had her business partner cut out the gall bladder of a man who once refused to marry her, so its possible she was incarcerated for one of these things.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Angie Rice

Why shes in prison: Unknown, but likely drug related as she is friends with a meth-head gang. She also escaped from custody, but wasnt charged as it was a mistake on the prisons part when they released her early. She came back willingly.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Lolly Whitehill

Why shes in prison: Unknown. Alex originally thinks she was hired by Kubra Balik (drug boss) to kill her, but its later revealed that shes insane and thinks the NSA is trying to frame her for terrorism.

How long is her sentence: Unknown, but she arrives at Litchfield from another facility and seems very familiar with prison life, so presumably a long time.

Was her sentence extended: No

How much time does she have left: Unknown. She says it depends on how well I do here.

Anita DeMarco

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: She came in on the same day as Red, so at least 12 years.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Maureen Kukudio

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Blanca Flores

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Maria Ruiz

Why shes in prison: Unknown.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.

Judy King

Why shes in prison: Tax evasion. She was arrested on television while the inmates at Litchfield followed her case.

How long is her sentence: Unknown.

Was her sentence extended: No.

How much time does she have left: Unknown.
The Real Purse Clutchers of Gucci Avenue was so memorable last year because all of the women were single, ready to mingle, down for a tingle, and eating a Pringle. This episode, strangely enough, is all about couples. There are dramatic realizations about romance, couples on the ropes, and one woman, one delusional Countess, ready to tie the knot at a drop of a crown. There are also very public extensions, but that doesnt seem to have anything to do with the theme.

Before we get started, I just wanted to say thank you to Ben Rimalower  vice-president of gift-shop sales here at the Real Housewives Institute and also the writer/director/star of Prostitution Whore: The Teresa Giudice Story at Maries Crisis every Wednesday and Sunday night  for doing such a great job filling in during my absence.

Okay, lets start with Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Asti Spumante Morgans, who says something in her very own dining room that has only been uttered by members of second-tier frats at state universities across the country: Im doing fat tipsy bitches! Im not doing skinny bitches! Its usually a line of complaint, but here it is one of explanation: Shes trying to differentiate her brand of Tipsy Girl Cough Syrup With Bubbles from Skinny Girl Lime-Flavored Booze Drank.

Sonja has a really good friend in Dorinda, who sits her down and tells her not only what all the women have been saying about her, but also that they were planning a trip to Mexico without her. Im sorry, but if I were in Sonjas position, Id much rather know that I was on the outs with everyone than just keep thinking that everything is okay. You can say a lot about Dorinda, but she does have a knack for candor.

The most devastating thing that Dorinda tells Sonja, however, is that Ramona chose sides in the fight and she did not choose Sonja, which is disastrous for Sonjas continued employment on this show. There is a very interesting rift this season  one that seems to be reminiscent of last season  and its that everyone who is on the outs with Bethenny gets fired. Last year, it was Heather (who resigned, but she definitely dodged a bullet) and Kristen. This year, it seems to be Sonja and Luann.

Speaking of Bethennys feelings, never in Real Housewives history have I seen a confab like the one Bethenny organized to vote on who they want to invite on the big group trip. First up is a vote on Housewives Bill 261: Sonja Morgan Invitation Termination and Extermination 2016, or SMITE 2016. It needs three votes to pass, but all of the present legislators vote nay with one abstention. Next up is Housewives Bill 262: Should Mexico Include Luann Either, or SMILE. It initially seems to pass the lower house of parliament, but it is suddenly vetoed by Carole Radziwill (D-NY), a member of the upper house. In response, Prime Minister Frankel declares her allegiance with Radziwill and the vote gets tabled, pending another vote by the Alcohol Appropriations Committee.

Even crazier is Luanns drinks with Bethenny, during which she essentially invites herself on the trip and then is like, Oh, Im so excited to go. This is going to be amazing. Thanks for inviting me. By the way, I have to leave now, Im going to see Tommy Tune at the Carlyle with my new fiance. Could you possibly pick up the check? I left my wallet at home. Sorry you are bleeding profusely out of your lady parts, one day youll remember how good that used to feel. Ha ha. Love you, mean it. TTFN. Air kiss. Ciao! Then she strides out of that weird wine bar in her immaculate white Armani suit and calls an Uber so that she can go cuddle with her man over $247 cheesecake in a hotel lobby while the worlds tallest homosexual tells anecdotes about Carol Channing.

Now, lets focus on Carole and her child bride, Adam, who I wish went to my gym so that I could stare at him naked in the locker room all the time. Thanks to a foster cat that she didnt get a chance to say good-bye to, Carole has the realization that everything in her life is set up to be temporary. She doesnt have a real mate, a real pet, a real job, or even a real set of kitchen knives to chop radishes in her own apartment. Its like Caroles whole life is a testament to the gig economy.

I love that she and Bethenny had this conversation on Bethennys immaculate bed with the Pinterest-ready upholstered headboard. Its like it was a Nancy Meyers movie and Bethenny was Meryl Streep and Carole was Diane Keaton and they are figuring out how they to enjoy the second chapter of their lives and, of course, a missing cat is the central allegory to the drama. It was a perfect rom-com moment come to real life. Now the question for Carole is if this little underaged lollipop that she brought home is ready for the real thing or if hes just a diversion toward real permanence. Ill let Carole figure that out on her own, but if she dumps him, please tell us which gym he goes to. You know, for research.

While Carole and Adam make all sorts of beautiful vegan chimichangas together, we get a fascinating look into the marriage of Jules and Pizza Box, especially considering the announcement just before the episode that Pizza Box filed for divorce and had been cheating on her. I think this is a blessing in disguise. If you come home from a long night with your ailing father in the hospital and the kids are crying for milk and your man makes you go get the milk, then you should dump his ass. If you have dinner plans at 7 p.m. and your man rolls up 15 minutes late and then wants to take a shower before leaving, you should dump his ass, cut off both of his arms, and feed them to the Disney World gators so that they stop feasting on small children. If you go out to dinner and your man spends all of his time on the phone, flirts with the coat-check girl, goes all Ben Affleck talking about how he wants to hire a hot nanny, and still doesnt care about your feelings, you should dump his ass, cut off both of his arms, feed them to the Disney gators, and then cut off both of his legs and give one to Aviva Drescher and use the other one to make the most amazing human-skin handbag that anyone has ever seen. Given how long Pizza Boxs legs are, though, it will actually have to be a change purse. ZING!!!

So, yeah. The dinner with Jules, Dorinda, Pizza Box, and John, a breed of turkeys made out of snot called Booger Ball, is absolutely excruciating. Its like having your pubic hair plucked out, one by one, by a bucktoothed goat that keeps missing and biting your gooch instead. The only person I really felt bad for was Jules. God, guys! I think I like Jules. Is there a cure for this?

Pizza Box and John, a milk jug full of rotting skunk corpses and dill weed, are gross, but Im starting to think that Tom, Luanns new paramour, is just as bad. Weve barely seen him on camera so I cant really judge yet, but he is giving me major red flags all over the place. First of all, shes moving in after three months, which seems a little bit odd, but Im willing to forgive it because if it was wintertime and I was living in the Hamptons and someone offered to let me move into their big, glamorous Manhattan apartment for free, I might do it even if they snored and liked to fart on me in bed and thought it was very, very funny. (For the record, it is.)

This dude boned like two of her friends, including one while they were supposedly dating and one right before they started dating. Also, he supposedly is texting his ex-girlfriend that he loves her and hes giving her presents. This whole thing is moving just a little too fast. If you say the words soul mate and you arent talking about a flavor of gelato, a Barrys Bootcamp instructor, or Rachel on UnREAL, then you are an absolute garbage person and should be thrown into a dumpster full of broken White Zinfandel bottles.

The other problem: Luanns justifications are total bunk. Sure, its fine to be friends with your ex, but giving her presents? He went on seven dates with Ramona  that is dating, whether Luann wants to think so or not. Sonja sleeping with him, well, whatever. If you narrowed your search to eligible straight men in Manhattan over the age of 45 whom Sonja hasnt slept with, the list would be shorter than Pizza Box. ZING!!!

Speaking of Pizza Box, after that exhausting dinner with Jules and Dorinda, he needed to get away for a few nights. He told Jules that he had some business in Baltimore, but he really just packed up their strange conversion van and drove off to his unfinished house in the Hamptons. When he arrived, the headlights cut through the black night, flickering across the bare trees that looked like towering calcifications or strains of shimmering ore in the black of the deepest cave.

He walked up through the garage and toward the kitchen. With all of the construction material scattered everywhere, it was hard to get around and he stepped on a sideways nail that got caught in his shoe. He stopped to pull it out and stared out the window, looking out in the darkness, thinking that the house would never be finished, that it was beyond repair. It was just like his relationship, in flux since it started, forever trying to transform ruins into a castle. He didnt know how to escape. He thought this was the dream house he wanted, with the indoor pool and the sounds of toys skittering across the wood floors, but was that really what he wanted? Did he want this responsibility or did he just want to splash around in that pool, making a mess and knocking over empty Champagne bottles as he went to get another cigar out of the closet that he turned into a giant humidor?

Then the lights snapped on and startled him. He turned around quickly, his heart galloping up into his chest as he feared for what might be behind him. But it was the greatest sight of all: a middle-aged redhead in frilly and lacy shapewear. As if she read his mind, she had a bottle of Champagne and two flutes held in one hand, while she seductively leaned on the door frame with her other arm. Its about time you got here, Jill Zarin said, as her kitten heels shallowly thumped over the half-finished floor.
In his monologue about the Orlando shootings on Monday, Seth Meyers announced that Donald Trump would not be allowed on his show until he allowed Washington Post reporters back at his campaign events. Trump, who has been no big fan of Meyers ever since Meyers insulted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner (and possibly even before that), responded to the ban with a statement: He has begged me to do the show for the last two years. I have told him emphatically no  I only like doing shows with good ratings, which as everybody knows, I only make better (by a lot). Trump has also gone after Meyers on Twitter several times in the last few years, the preferred insult being that Meyers has marbles in his mouth.

Last night on Late Night, Meyers stood by his ban, since, as he argued, Trump would never appear on the show in the first place. We instituted this ban despite the fact that hes never been here, or asked to be here, or would ever be caught dead here, and I just think that takes an amazing amount of courage on our part, Meyers said. Ball is in your court, Donald, either rescind your Washington Post ban, or you are not allowed to appear on a show that you have no interest in appearing on. Or maybe now that you cant have it, youre changing your mind. Damn, those mouth marbles can be pretty cutting.
What would you do if re-entry into reality came at the cost of imaginative worlds that brought joy and engagement? And how would you find love in such a rebuilt reality?

Johnna Adamss play World Builders, staged by Baylor Theatre this weekend, asks those questions and more in its tale of psychiatric patients Whitney (Kolby Jacobs) and Max (Noah Alderfer). Both have schizoid personality disorder and were forced into treatment by their parents, taking an experimental drug that, in effect, shrinks the elaborate fantasy worlds in which theyve lived.

Those mentally constructed worlds are different. Whitneys is a grand space epic; Maxs is darker and inwardly focused. As the medication brings them out of their internal, self-constructed worlds and into a wider reality, the two find themselves drawn to each other, which brings a new challenge: How does one fit love and a relationship into a world that lacks the thrill of imagination?

Baylor theater graduate student Josh Horowitz, director of the Baylor production, found the play thanks to a recommendation by Baylor theater faculty dramaturge DeAnna Toten Beard. Horowitz read it and found himself drawn to Whitney and her larger-than-life, lived-in fantasy.

As he got into the play, the Long Island, New York, native found more than the tangle of imagination and reality.

At its heart, its a love story of people learning to be vulnerable and let another person into their lives, he said. What do you do when worlds fall apart and youre learning to adjust to others?

Horowitz earned a bachelors degree in history from State University of New York at Geneseo in 2013 and a masters degree from Miami University in Ohio, and researching the Holocaust, which had directly affected his extended family in Poland, was a theme running through his work. He had a long-time love of theater, too, and working on a directing degree has broadened the story-telling ability that he enjoyed in history. Horowitz plans to pursue directing, then possibly teach on a collegiate level.

World Builders, which makes its collegiate debut in the Baylor production, offered both acting and directing challenges. Each actor has to make her and his internal worlds external and believable to an audience, for one thing, and on different scales: Whitneys over-arching fantasy universe and Maxs compressed, almost miniature world.

Then theres World Builders  near-minimal, in-the-round staging in Baylors black-box Theater 11, with action largely taking place in a hospital lounge.

Its a challenge and a gift, he said, noting that less time spent in costuming and set design left more for working on acting, blocking and pacing.
By the time many peoples drug addiction has gotten so bad that they fight for sobriety, they have burned bridges with family, employers and friends, leaving their upcoming journey a lonely one.

In the early days of sobriety, moving out of a rehab facility alone and with no support as the threat of relapse looms can be terrifying. Its a story Waco resident Summer Shine knows all too well.

With a lack of local womens sober homes, Shine; her husband, Ronnie Aletky; a landlord moved by the couples heart and drive; the Jesus Said Love outreach program, which serves women in the sex trades; and other volunteers are transforming a North Waco home to fill the need.

I feel very strongly that we were built to be in communion together. Its just our God-given responsibility to help, said Shine, owner of Luna Juice Bar. The saying, It takes a village to raise a child  we feel the same way about people in recovery.

Women leave a treatment facility after months of being embedded in a community focused on meetings, recovery and addiction, improvement and constant support. Then they are suddenly standing completely alone, said Shine, who has been sober for three years. She said the first six to nine months of sobriety are the hardest and most vital to recovery.

It is imperative that women are able to build an immediate support group, which the recovery house will provide along with rules and stability, she said.

John Barrett and Jill Mashburn Barrett bought the home that will serve as the new recovery house, dubbed Hospitaller 1.

We have some resources. Summer and Ronnie have energy and a heart and a desire for it, John Barrett said. Im going to pull resources together into facilities, and Im going to let people smarter and better than me manage it. These are somebodys daughters. I have three daughters I love dearly, and if one of them made some really bad choices and I couldnt be there to help, I would hope someone would step in. I had no idea how big the need was. These girls were couch surfing. It really disturbed me.

He said the name for the recovery house came from a Catholic monk group from about 1,000 A.D. that noticed a need to help the tired, injured and sick pilgrims coming to Jerusalem from Europe.

They took care of and they protected these pilgrims, he said. That always spoke to me. That was really honorable.

Shine said the women can look for a place of employment and start saving money while they are at the house.

Hospitaller 1, which will open in a month, will accept scholarships to help cover a womans first month at the home in case she cant afford it. The cost is $300. The recovery home also is using volunteers to help with yard maintenance and is accepting donations, including bedding or other support.

Community members already have offered to host Bible studies or other group activities. The women also will be encouraged to attend a 12-step program in the community.

This isnt Shine and Aletkys first run at a recovery home.

The couple operated a sober house in downtown Waco for 12 women at the Freeman Center, until it closed five years ago.

The Freeman Centers closing was the beginning of Shines last relapse, which she said was the darkest one she has had. She was homeless, in New Orleans, her husband was on the verge of leaving her, her son wouldnt take her calls, her mother was planning her funeral, and she had pushed everyone who loved her away, she said.

Members of Jesus Said Love convinced her to come back to Waco.

After nine months of sobriety, she said, she and her husband moved back in together.

A few months later, she opened Luna Juice, which she said has played a huge role in her recovery. Shine said she received a micro loan from the recovery home she was in at one point in Victoria, which allowed her to start that business.

Were the most risky population of people you could hand over a check to, she said. The crazy thing is I took that $5,000 and I spent it on exactly what I said Id spend it on. I didnt buy crack or go to New Orleans.

Shine has since paid off the micro loan and did it early. Now Luna Juice employs women in recovery and women straight out of Jesus Said Love.

Giving back

Were giving back in the same way I was given too, she said.

Shine and Aletky have been married for eight years. Shine said Aletky is good at holding her accountable. She said there is always a lingering fear of relapse, a tension, a dark side that never leaves. She said she stays connected to her Alcoholics Anonymous community and immediately tells her husband if she is having a hard day.

If you just hold on for like 15 minutes, that feeling goes away, she said. Especially past the first six to nine months of recovery. That feeling of uneasiness goes away. Thats why a recovery house is so great because it gets them past that uneasy part.

The women in the house will participate in a few programs similar to those a treatment facility would offer, including a weekly meal together and house meetings to review rules or any situations that arise. Basic rules will be in place for the women, including not stealing from others, quiet time once it gets late and cleanliness standards for the bathroom.

Theres no scenario where you put women together who are new to recovery and theres not drama, Shine said. Im married, and theres drama in our marriage. Its two people cohabitating. You do run into drama, but the drama, compared to what they were dealing with out in their addiction  women deal with problems with prostitution, stealing, breaking into homes, having to fight other women. Thats the drama of being in the addictive wold. The drama in the house will be nothing compared to the drama in the addictive world.

Shine said she hopes to have the home open in the next few weeks.

Its harder to be an addict when its 110 degrees outside, it really is, she said.

She said anyone interested in sponsoring a womans rent at the house, or donating services, can email her at msummershine@gmail.com.

Correction: This story previously misspelled the last name of Ronnie Aletky. We regret the error.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals lifted the gag order Wednesday initially issued by a McLennan County state district judge in the case of a biker arrested in the Twin Peaks shootout.

In a one-line opinion, written by Justice Cheryl Johnson, the court said, We deny mandamus relief and withdraw our order staying the proceedings.

The opinion lets stand an order by the Tenth Court of Appeals that overturned the gag order on Aug. 7, 2015, in the case of Matthew Clendennen, a member of the Scimitars Motorcycle Club who was arrested at Twin Peaks on May 17, 2015.

The intermediate appellate court held that 54th State District Judge Matt Johnson abused his discretion when he limited pretrial publicity in Clendennens case before the court issued a gag order on June 30, 2015, which remained in effect until Wednesday.

The Court of Criminal Appeals intervened at Reynas request on Aug. 13, 2015, ruling that the 10th Courts decision be stayed until it made a ruling.

This makes me feel somewhat vindicated, but I am sorry it took 10 months, said Clendennens attorney, Clint Broden. In some ways, the DAs office got what they wanted, but ultimately, I think the First Amendment prevailed.

McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to rule that Johnsons decision to issue the gag order was proper, because he said defendants rights to fair trials are in jeopardy because of a danger of prejudice from pretrial publicity, in reference to the Twin Peaks melee that killed nine people, primarily members of the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle gangs.

Clendennen was one of 177 bikers arrested on the day of the shootings, which also left more than 20 others wounded. A total of 154 bikers have been indicted on the charge of engaging in organized criminal activity.

The gag order was requested by the state to help preserve and maintain everyones right to a fair trial. I want to commend the judge on his effort in doing so by issuing the gag order, Reyna said in a statement. While we may not agree with the Court of Criminal Appeals, we respect their decision.

With that said, the McLennan County District Attorneys Office will continue to make every effort to preserve everyones right to fair trial by not commenting any further on this matter. In short, we will leave our talking for the courtroom.

Phone calls to Waco Police Chief Brent Stroman were not returned.

Before the gag order was lifted, local authorities repeatedly declined to speak about any of the Twin Peaks shootout cases, citing the gag order, which was placed only on the Clendennen case.

Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, the departments spokesman who spent hours speaking to media in the days following the shootout, said authorities have released all pertinent information, excluding information that might affect prosecution of the pending cases.

No real change

At this point, (the lifting of the gag order) doesnt really change anything for us, because there is not much more we could put out there at this point, Swanton said. Certainly, we would not want to do anything to hinder the prosecution of the case, but I dont know what else we could put out there.

Broden filed an emergency petition, arguing that the gag order violates Clendennens right to free speech and alleging that the finding to implement the gag order was insufficient to establish that any unidentified pretrial publicity in this case has risen to the level that it poses an imminent and severe harm to a fair and impartial trial.

It would have been one thing if they had sought the gag order from the very beginning, because then I would be hard-pressed to have any problems with it, but the real problem came when (Waco police) were holding press conference after press conference, Broden said. Then, when the media became aware of that most of these people are innocent, that is when they ran to court.

Broden said he was pleased with the ruling and said his focus remains on getting a speedy trial for his client.
Speaking in 2013, a few weeks after children were slaughtered in their classrooms in Newtown, Connecticut, and just after President Obamas second inauguration, National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre laid out the frightening challenge that Obamas presidency posed to gun owners.

He wants to put every private, personal transaction under the thumb of the federal government, and he wants to keep all those names in a massive federal registry, LaPierre said. There are only two reasons for that federal list of gun owners  to tax them or take them.

Just seven months away from the end of his second term, Obama still has not proposed, much less implemented, a federal gun registry. But LaPierre is in the gun business, not the honesty business. A diabolical slippery slope that begins with criminal background checks and snowballs from there into gun registration, confiscation and, finally, totalitarian tyranny is one of LaPierres favorite tropes. And in honor of the election calendar, the dangerous peaks of Mount Obama are rapidly transforming into the slippery slopes of Mount Hillary.

LaPierre shares space on his chosen declivity with others, such as Jesse Benton, a former campaign manager for Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. In 2013, Benton lamented Obamas thinly veiled national gun registration scheme hidden under the guise of background checks to ensure federal government minders gain every bureaucratic tool they need for full-scale confiscation.

Keep in mind that there are about 125 million households in the U.S. and perhaps almost three times as many guns. Now imagine, or try to, the futile mechanics and implausible politics of mass confiscation.

LaPierre relies on his formidable imagination to summon pictures of a gun-registration dystopia. Yet he neednt. A real-world example exists  in a remote, godforsaken Pacific atoll where every glint of human spirit is crushed. The natives call it Hawaii.

Basically every functioning, non-antique firearm in Hawaii is required to be registered with local police. The registration requires the names of the manufacturer and importer, model, type of action, caliber or gauge, serial number and the source from which the firearm was obtained, including the name and address of the prior owner.

According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence:

All registration data that would identify the individual registering the firearm by name or address are confidential and shall not be disclosed to anyone, except if required by a law enforcement agency for the lawful performance of its duties or as may be required by order of a court.

In other words, the information is confidential until, maybe, its not.

Awaiting Hawaii Gov. David Iges signature are two bills passed by the legislature that would further strengthen the states gun laws. One adds harassment by stalking and sexual assault to the list of offenses that disqualify one from gun possession, based on research linking domestic violence and gun violence.

The other authorizes county police departments to enroll firearms applicants and individuals who are registering their firearms into a criminal record monitoring service used to alert police when an owner of a firearm is arrested for a criminal offense anywhere in the country.

Presuming the second bill becomes law (Ige has a few weeks yet to act), Hawaii gun owners will have their names added to a federal data base in addition to their state data base.

Heres a bold prediction: If the bill is signed, life in Hawaii will go on pretty much as it has. Indeed, life will go on in a slightly safer, healthier fashion than it does elsewhere in the U.S. In 2015, Hawaii had the fewest gun deaths per capita of the 50 states.

Is gun registration the cause of Hawaiis safer society? Gun violence is too complex to depend on a single factor. But there is an encouraging correlation between stronger gun laws and lower rates of gun death. And unlike other states with relatively strong laws, such as California and New York, Hawaii is far removed from neighbors with slipshod laws written by NRA lobbyists.

Americans will no doubt be treated to much rhetoric about the slippery slope that sends rudimentary regulation skidding perilously down into totalitarianism. Unless Hawaii is your idea of hell on Earth, you can very safely ignore the hysteria.

Francis Wilkinson writes on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View.
Talk about your comedy of errors. The same week that Republican Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas was demonstrating his principled commitment to transparency and accessibility by helping steer toward passage a bill to improve access to public records under the Freedom of Information Act, his partys likely nominee for president was adding The Washington Post to his list of news media losing credentials to his campaign events. Thats like losing a lifetime pass to a three-ring circus with only one act  but a really big act.

In this one incident, you have a pretty good reflection of whats happening in the Republican Party: a presumptive nominee so toxic, so impulsive and so shortsighted that he runs counter to many rank-and-file Republicans  and only weeks before the Republican National Convention meets to crown him. And we say crown because its clear that entrepreneur Donald Trump tolerates little debate, even among his fellow Republicans. He views himself a benevolent but strong-armed monarch, entitled to rule as he so chooses  and without anyone questioning him.

The inclusion of The Washington Post on Trumps list of news media barred from his campaign events was apparently triggered by Post reports about Trumps suggesting on early-morning news shows Monday that President Obama was complicit in a Muslim extremists massacre of scores of people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Trump has also called on Obama to resign for not using the term radical Islam in his address to the nation Sunday.

For all the knee-jerk claims that The Post is a liberal newspaper without empathy for someone like Trump, its noteworthy that many of its columnists  George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Jennifer Rubin, all republished in the Trib  were not only fire-breathing conservatives long before Trump arrived on the political scene, they also view Trump as an obvious fraud who has hoodwinked many fellow Republicans. The list of other news media banned by Trump includes the fiercely conservative New Hampshire Union Leader.

Mainstream news organizations exist in part to investigate and fact-check the boasts and claims that politicians make, Trump included. For instance, if it hadnt been for The Washington Post, Americans might not have learned that Trump never made good on his pledge in January to donate a million bucks to veterans causes. He finally did so  but only after The Post discovered that he had not honored his pledge months later.

The Trump campaigns growing list of banned news organizations might be a good thing in the final analysis. It will allow investigative journalists less time to marvel at his trough of vitriolic, fanciful populism and more time to scrutinize his wild statements and rash claims before too many voters line up to buy a pig in a poke.
Benedictine College

Amy Havlat of Waverly graduated from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, on May 14. Havlat earned a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education.

Havlat was also named to the Presidents List for the spring semester.

Morningside College

Morningside College has announced that Kensly Schuelke of Greenwood was named to the Dean's List for the spring semester of the 2015-16 academic year.

A senior, Schuelke is majoring in biology.

Schuelke has also been named a Roadman Scholar. Roadman Scholars must be full-time students who have completed at least 45 credits of college work with a cumulative grade point average of 3.76 or above.

Northeast Community College

Officials at Northeast Community College in Norfolk have released the Presidents Honor List for the spring semester.

Cory Storm of Davey was named to the Presidents Honor List. To be named to the Presidents Honor List, students must earn a perfect grade point average of 4.0 and be enrolled for at least 12 credit hours.

Concordia University

Concordia University in Seward has named senior Taylor Huff of Eagle to its spring semester honors list.

The top 25 percent of all undergraduate students who complete at least 12 credit hours qualify for the honors list.

Kansas State University

Caitlin Ohnoutka of Valparaiso was among the 3,650 Kansas State University students earning semester honors for their academic performance in the spring 2016 semester.

Students earning a grade point average for the semester of 3.75 or above on at least 12 graded credit hours receive semester honors along with commendations from their deans.

Fort Hays State University

Callie Christensen of Raymond is among the 1,341 named by Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kan., to the Deans Honor Roll for the spring 2016 semester.

To be eligible, students must have enrolled in 12 or more credit hours and have a minimum grade point average of 3.60 for the semester.

Christensen is a sophomore majoring in International business and economics.

Northwest Missouri State

Northwest Missouri State University has announced that Bryn Matulka of Valparaiso has been named to the Presidents List.

To be named to the Presidents Honor Roll students must attained a perfect 4.00 grade point average for the trimester.

Hannah Brey of Raymond received her Master of Science degree in Education Guidance and Counseling from Northwest Missouri State University last month.

Peru State College

Peru State College has released the names of students who earned a place on the Deans List for the Spring 2016 semester.

To make the Deans List students must have a grade point average of 3.5 or higher for the semester.

Students named include Travis Carnahan of Ceresco, Theresa Durst of Greenwood, Hannah Chubbuck of Raymond, and Sophie Schmucker of Waverly.

Clarkson College

Clarkson College has announced that Meghan Meier has been named to the spring 2016 deans list.

Meier is pursuing a degree in Radiology Technology and Medical Imaging. She is the daughter of Rod and Cindy Meier of Waverly.

Rockhurst University

Rockhurst University has announced the dean's list for the spring 2016 semester. This honor recognizes students who have achieved a grade-point average of 3.5 or above.

Students named to the list include Max Vandenhul of Walton.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Trevor Lockard, a recent graduate of Lincoln Christian School, is among 43 students selected to join the College of Business Administration Honors Academy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln this fall.

Lockard, of Eagle, is a high-achieving student who has demonstrated leadership potential through involvement in school and community activities. He will be part of the fourth group to join the academy since its founding in 2013.

Lockard will be a business administration major at UNL. The cohort includes students from seven states who plan to study in nine majors within CBA. They will complete most of their foundation and core business courses together using an action-based learning style focused on the development of critical thinking, technical and communication skills.

South Dakota State University

Jason Scheffert of Valparaiso has been named to the deans list for the spring 2016 semester at South Dakota State University. To earn dean's list distinction, Scheffert had to complete a minimum of 12 credits and must have earned at least a 3.5 GPA on a 4.0 scale.

Scheffert is enrolled in the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering at SDSU.
EAGLE  Three Eagle brothers were members of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln quarter-scale tractor teams that took honors at the International Quarter-Scale Tractor Student Design Competition in Peoria, Illinois, June 2-5. Twenty-seven teams from the United States, Canada and Israel tested their skills at the event, which was hosted by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.

Micah Bolin was captain of the A Team, a team consisted of juniors and seniors, while younger brothers Jonah and Noah Bolin were members of the X Team, a team made up of freshmen and sophomores. The A Team took top honors at the competition with the X Team placing third overall.

The competition is unique among student engineering-design contests, providing a realistic 360-degree workplace experience. Teams are given a 31-horsepower Briggs and Stratton engine and a set of Titan tires. The design of the tractor is up to them and is perfected over the course of a year. Industry leaders judge each design for innovation, manufacturability, serviceability, maneuverability, safety, sound level and ergonomics. Teams also submit a written design report before the competition. At the event, they sell their design in a formal presentation to industry experts playing the role of a corporate management team. Finally, machines are put to the test in three tractor pulls, a maneuverability course and a durability course.

The competition gave team members an opportunity to experiment with complex technology that's becoming increasingly common in the industry. Many of the team members are agricultural engineering majors.

The UNL agricultural engineering program is one of the nation's top programs and emphasizes hands-on applications. UNL has had numerous top-10 and top-five finishes since the event's inception in 1998. The team finished out of the top 15 in 2015, but UNL earned most-improved honors this year.

This was the first win for the A team. The X team also won the design category.
Deutsche Bank Chairman Paul Achleitner has become the latest global banking leader to warn about the potential fallout if UK voters decide to leave the European Union.

A yes vote next week to so-called Brexit would be an "economic disaster for the UK and a political disaster for the EU," Achleitner said at a dinner on Wednesday in New York hosted by the American Council on Germany. During his speech, he drew a contrast between public opinion polls, which point to a vote to leave the EU, and gambling odds, which reflect a preference to remain politically and economically attached to the continent.

Achleitner also lamented the growing strains of populism in the US and Europe and the regulatory pressures, which he said are preventing many European banks from making loans and stimulating economic activity. But he reserved his strongest words for the Brexit vote.

"London bookies and the betting industry are still in the 'remain' camp," he said. "I hope they're right, because if it works the other way, it's an economic disaster for the UK and a political disaster for the EU."
But leaked documents from the Department of Health and Human Services show Andrew might have recently been allegedly involved in another recent, troubling, incident where a child suffered harm. Three-year-old Stevie* was drowsy and disorientated when his mum brought him into emergency at the Royal Children's Hospital on April 26 this year. Tests came back positive for methamphetamine. His mum told staff the drug might have been brought into her home by her "on again, off again" partner - the same Andrew - who she was trying to separate from. Stevie made a full recovery after a few days in hospital, and the matter is being investigated by police. No charges have been laid. The documents also show that in the months after Sam's death, Andrew was reported to police multiple times for allegedly breaching a family violence intervention order, and now faces a charge for this. ..the type of bruising Sam had 'could be an indicator of sexual assault' RCH forensic report

But he was not remanded. So Andrew remained in the community and formed a relationship with Stevie's mum. File pic: Daniel Valerio, baby beaten to death. Photo by Mark Wilson. First published 20-2-93. Credit:Mark Wilson WHY DIDN'T THEY ACT? On multiple occasions the hospital had the opportunity - even the mandatory obligation - to report concerns about Sam's wellbeing. . Andrew declined to comment on this story. He denied any suggestion of wrongdoing on his behalf relating to any child or children, in a statement through his lawyer.

Twenty-six years ago, the horrific murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio at the hands of his stepfather Paul Aiton prompted a public outcry and triggered the eventual introduction of mandatory reporting. Numerous public inquiries, including the recent Royal Commission into Family Violence and the 2012 Cummins inquiry into vulnerable children, have called for swift action on suspected abuse and slammed poor information-sharing between authorities. UNEXPLAINED BRUISING The file leaked from the Department of Health and Human Services signals three times that staff could have raised concern's about the little boy's welfare:

Sam was first taken to hospital in November 2014, when he allegedly choked on an object and stopped breathing while in the care of Andrew.

Andrew told staff he had been able to remove the object before the ambulance came. The Royal Children's social work team were involved over "concerns about one of the carers", but Victorian Child Protection were not notified.

On the two following occasions, Sam presented with intimate bruising and swelling. The first time he was diagnosed with oedema (swelling), prescribed medication, and no photos or further scans were done. On the second occasion, four days before he died, the hospital's specialist forensic team were involved. These specialists provide forensic evaluation and healthcare for abused and vulnerable children. Their report (only given to Child Protection a month after Sam died) found the cause of his symptoms was inconclusive, and could have been accidental trauma. But it said child maltreatment studies also showed the type of bruising Sam had "could be an indicator of sexual assault". A toddler was flown to the Royal Children's Hospital in a serious condition on Saturday night. Credit:Pat Scala

"ONGOING DISTRESS" The Royal Children's chief executive officer, John Stanway, said staff extended their sympathy to Sam's family and felt "deeply sad". "We are mindful that for staff who cared for Sam, to the best of their knowledge and ability, the child's subsequent death has been a source of ongoing distress," Mr Stanway said. A detailed internal review was conducted following the toddler's death. It would be inappropriate to make further comment because the matter was with the Victorian Coroner, he said. The hospital's own guidelines say staff must report to Child Protection if they form a reasonable belief that a child has suffered, or is likely to suffer, significant harm from physical injury or sexual abuse.

Victoria's newly-appointed Children's Commissioner, Liana Buchanan, said while she could not comment on these specific cases, successive inquiries pointed to the need for change to make sure children were protected. "There's an urgent need for better information sharing to prevent violence and abuse. We also need reform to ensure all services understand and respond to the connection between family violence and Child Protection," she said. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said Child Protection would intervene when children and young people were at risk of significant harm. *Names have been changed to protect privacy, or for legal reasons. Got a tip? mperkins@theage.com.au
Hundreds of passengers were evacuated from Perth Airport on Thursday morning in what has since been confirmed as a false alarm.

A spokeswoman for Perth Airport said terminals three and four were evacuated at 9.42am as a precaution - but could not confirm what had triggered the false alarm.

Passengers wait at the emergency evacuation area after an alarm went off at Perth Airport on Thursday morning.

One passenger, who contacted the Bunbury Mail, said he and his wife were about to board a flight to Port Hedland when they were asked to evacuate the airport.

The Bunbury man said multiple sirens began to ring and he noticed Australian Federal Police officers entering the airport.
Police searched a Golden Bay property as part of the investigation into Stephen Cookson's death. In 2012 Mr Coward's tenant in the Hay Street apartment sublet the unit to Cookson and then moved out telling him he would have to deal directly with Cookson in future. That would prove difficult. Cookson was a violent drug trafficker and wannabe horse racing identity who refused to pay rent and threatened Mr Coward when he asked for his money. Angle grinder mark in the bathroom floor where Aaron Carlino cut up the body of Stephen Cookson. Credit:Troy Coward "He tried standing over me. He phoned me up when he was off his head and threatened to kill me. But I didn't back down. I just kept telling him I wanted him out of the unit," Mr Coward said.

Eventually Cookson agreed to move out and told Mr Coward he would be gone by December 16, 2012. Filthy cleaning cloths from Troy Coward's attempt to clean unit after police forensic investigation Credit:Troy Coward Cookson lived in the apartment with Aaron Carlino but their relationship ended in the kind of nightmarish violence usually seen in horror movies. On December 15 Carlino used a rifle to shoot 56-year-old Cookson. He spent the next day cutting up the body and putting it into bags. Filthy dishwasher and walls after police forensic investigation in Troy Coward's apartment Credit:Troy Coward

In the middle of this grisly operation Mr Coward turned up at the apartment hoping the pair had moved out. But Carlino would not let him in and they had a shouted conversation through the closed door. "I asked him where Cookson was and he said he hadn't seen him for weeks. He said the unit was dirty and he was tidying up and told me to come back a few hours later," he said. "I guess I am lucky I didn't have a spare set of keys or I would have walked into the middle of a blood bath. God knows what might have happened then." Carlino used an angle grinder and a kitchen knife to cut up the body before he and his accomplices buried the body parts at a property in Golden Bay. Later they dug up the body parts and put them onto a boat and set out in the direction of Rottnest throwing the remains overboard in bags weighted with bricks.

But something went wrong and Cookson's head washed up on beach at Porpoise Bay on Rottnest. On January 6, 2013, it was found by an 11-year-old girl. By this time Mr Coward had managed to get Aaron Carlino out of the Hay Street apartment and he moved in to clean it up, intending to live there  not knowing that he was cleaning up a murder scene. "It just looked like it was dirty. Looking back there were no obvious signs of blood or any sign of violence although later I did notice that the carpets had been cleaned with some form of chemical," he said. Five days after Cookson's head was identified. WA Police had worked out who he was and his last address. The drove to the apartment in Hay Street and told Mr Coward he had to leave the apartment while forensic officers went through it. "They let me take my wallet and my car keys and that was it. I ended up sleeping on the floor at my office."

Looking back he realised that there was a time when the police suspected he may have been the killer. "I know how it looked. Cookson owed me money. I got the keys from a murder scene. I cleaned up the murder scene," Mr Coward said. "I think that because I was the number one suspect for a while that the police were just careless about how they treated the apartment because they thought I was going to end up in prison." The police even raided a second property owned by Mr Coward. "They went to the Lesmurdie house and took the fridge, the bed, washing machine, dryer and the microwave, and I never got those back either," he said.

But the police soon began to focus on Aaron Carlino as the likely murderer and eventually he was arrested and charged with killing Cookson. Major Crime detectives then met Mr Coward at the apartment to let him have the keys back. "I was gobsmacked with the state of the place. It was destroyed," he said. The apartment's wooden floors were all scratched and stained with chemicals used by the forensic officers. All the carpets were covered in various forensic inks and dusts. Luminol had highlighted blood spatter on the ceiling. Furniture was scratched. Skirting boards had been pulled off and mirrors ripped off walls and broken. Some plumbing pipes had been removed as had an air conditioning vent.

The officers pointed out two bits of damage they were not responsible for. One was a hole in a kitchen tile caused by one of the two bullets Carlino shot into Cookson. And the other was a mark on a bathroom tile caused by the angle grinder Carlino had used to cut up Cookson's body. The officers were apologetic about the damage cause by the forensic investigation. "They told me they needed quotes for the damage and they were happy to sign off on it," Mr Coward said. But WA Police's legal services department took a different view. They wrote to Mr Coward's lawyers saying there would be no compensation.

Their letter said that the confiscation of the unit and damage caused was the result of a lawfully justified investigation and that because the damage caused was not the result of malice the police were not financially responsible for the damage. "An action in tort does not lie against a member of the Police Force for anything that member has done, without corruption of malice, while performing the functions of a member of the police," the letter read. "This is crazy," Mr Coward said. "There needs to be some legislation which protects someone like me who is expected to clean, repair and pay for damage caused by a police forensic investigation. "I have been fighting for justice in this case for three years now  and I am still waiting."
A search has resumed on Thursday morning for a fisherman missing off the coast of Mindarie since Wednesday.

"Water police and volunteer marine rescue vessels have just left to resume the search," Seven News reporter Rebecca Picton-King told Radio 6PR from the scene.

"The Police Air Wing and other search aeroplanes have been circling off the coast.

"They say the search area is about 30 kilometres north; a large stretch."
Patrick Norman Pat Chapman is a 34-year-old, Caucasian male who was last known to be in Piedmont which is near the area of Greenville, Missouri on May 10, 2020.

Pat had stayed the night with a friend and his wife at their home. In the early morning when the friend woke to go to work.

Pat was gone in his own Burgundy color 1995 Ford Escort. That is the last anyone was known to have seen him. The vehicle was later recovered on May 29, 2020 in Mill Spring, Missouri.
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By The Associated Press Jun. 15, 2016 | 09:11 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

A Kentucky appeals court has ordered a Lexington clinic to stop performing abortions until it gets a license from the state.

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin says EMW Women's Clinic in Lexington has been performing abortions without a license. The clinic's owner says he is exempt from the licensure requirement because the clinic is a private physician's office. Bevin sued, asking a judge to force the clinic to close.

In March, a state judge denied Bevin's request. But Wednesday, a three-judge panel on the state Court of Appeals reversed that decision. The judges questioned whether the clinic would qualify as a private office because it has performed only abortions for the past year.

Scott White, the clinic's attorney, said the clinic's owner would probably appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Rita Redmond was a true lady who felt that every pupil had something to gift to the world
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This article was published 16/06/2016 (2323 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Florence Spence is ready.

But heres the question: Are you?

The local comedian readily admits her material often tends toward the raw and raunchy, but is quick to add that her standup is an honest reflection of who she is  a 30-something indigenous single mom and grandmother who is continuing to find her voice onstage and is eager to explore truth through comedy.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Local comedian Florence Spence, whos taking part in the Empow(HER)ment show on June 17 at The Park Theatre.

This is what feels natural to me right now, says Spence, one of the featured performers at Empow(HER)ment #3, an all-female comedy showcase that takes place Friday, June 17, at 9 p.m. at the Park Theatre. I am trying to work on some things that might be a bit more family-friendly, but at this stage, this is me, growing (as a comic).

Im thinking, Lets work at getting really funny first, and then we can work on writing other kinds of jokes. Im not necessarily trying to be vulgar onstage, but what I talk about is very real. And sometimes, people might not be ready to hear what I have to say.

Empow(HER)ment is a concept that was created last year by former Winnipegger Chantel Marostica, a stalwart on the local comedy scene before transplanting to Toronto in 2014. It was after her move to the Big Smoke that Marostica first came to the conclusion that Winnipegs funny women needed a stage to call their own.

When I first moved to Toronto, I had such a great experience with having a community of women around me, she recalls. There are so many female comics there, and it feels more welcoming and more positive. Back in Winnipeg, there had just been me, Dana (Smith), Melanie (Dahling) and a handful of other girls; when I realized how much (being part of Torontos female comedy community) affected me, I wanted something like that to happen for the girls back home.

I just felt that things were changing, and I wanted more women to be involved.

This third edition of Empow(HER)ment (tickets are $15, available at the Park Theatre or at www.ticketfly.com) is hosted by Smith and features performances by Spence, Marostica, Dahling, Jane Testar, Megan Riley, Ashley Burdett and Rebecca Henderson.

Marostica describes Spence as an important, fast-rising addition to the local comedy roster.

I think shes one of the most important voices on the scene, she says. Shes the only working (female) aboriginal comic, so she brings some diversity in that way, and she also has children, so she can talk about that. I see a lot of feminist comedians and a lot of diverse comedians, but her voice is unique  she pokes fun at herself, but she also pokes fun at women in a way that makes people comfortable.

Its hard to explain, but its empowering in a very different way.

For her part, Spence says she first started dabbling in standup about half a dozen years ago, but it wasnt until 2014 that she really began a focused effort at building an identity as a comedian. As an indigenous woman (Spence was born in Oxford House but raised in St. James, the oldest child in a family that also includes seven brothers), she had to chart her own course into comedy, since there were no identifiable role models for her to follow.

When I first started, there were very few women  only Chantel and a few others  so you kind of had to be one of the guys, she recalls. But because I grew up around guys, having only brothers, I kind of had an edge when it came to fitting in Im glad there are more female comics now, because it allows me to show my gentler side and maybe explore different jokes. Hearing them perform is, I think, making me more sensitive as a comedian  its like, Oh, yeah, I can talk about that  I do have kids and I do have those sensitive moments, and I do have these stories that I can recall and turn into jokes. Having other female comics around helps.

Spence, whose boyfriend is fellow comedian Paul Rabliauskas, says she has gained a lot of confidence during the past 18 months by performing as often as she can and spending more of her offstage hours thinking about comedy and refining her ever-in-development material.

It took a long time to find my voice, she says. I knew the jokes were funny, but I had a hard time letting my personality out onstage. That didnt happen until about a year ago, after I invited my son to a show at The Hub at the University of Manitoba; when I was onstage, I could see him laughing at the back of the room, and I suddenly was able to say all these other things that I usually only say when theres no crowd around. That was kind of my Aha! moment, and after that I started displaying who I really am.

And ever since then, Ive been much more comfortable onstage. Seeing him laugh and feeling that support gave me confidence that Im funny and that I can convey that, not just to family but also to regular people in a crowd.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @BradOswald

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POINT TUPPER, N.S.  A proposed liquefied natural gas export facility in Cape Breton has received federal approval for a licence to export liquefied natural gas.

Bear Head LNG Corporation, a subsidiary of the Australia-based Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd., says the government also approved a licence to import natural gas from the United States.

The company says the National Energy Boards approval of the licences was given in August 2015, but was subject to the approval of the Governor in Council.

The licences authorize the company to import up to 14.2 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year and are both good for 25 years.

Liquefied Natural Gas Ltd. bought the site in Point Tupper from Anadarko Petroleum Corporation in an $11 million deal that closed in August 2014.
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CALGARY  Key testimony chronicling the early years of a starved diabetic teen while he was living in British Columbia will be admitted as evidence in the first-degree murder trial of his parents.

Alberta Queens Bench Justice Karen Horner ruled Thursday the testimony can be included as part of the Crowns case.

Emil Radita, 59, and his 53-year-old wife Rodica Radita are charged in the 2013 death of their 15-year-old son.

Alex Radita is shown in a photo from his 15th birthday party, three months before his death. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Government of Alberta MANDATORY CREDIT

Alexandru, who was one of eight children, weighed less than 37 pounds and died of complications in Calgary due to untreated diabetes and starvation.

Court has heard evidence from medical officials and social workers who were involved with the Raditas from the time Alexandru was first diagnosed with diabetes in 2000 up until the family fled British Columbia while under the eye of child-welfare services.

The witnesses have testified that the parents refused to accept that their son had diabetes and failed to treat his disease up until he was hospitalized near death in 2003. One witness described the teen as nothing more than skin and bones.

Social workers apprehended Alexandru after his October 2003 hospital admission and placed him in foster care  where he thrived  for nearly a year before he was returned to his family.

In arguing against the admissibility of the B.C. evidence, defence lawyer Andrea Serink said it doesnt prove the crime the Raditas are charged with.

The evidence demonstrates problems all along with mismanagement, she said. Yes, were saying there was mismanagement  this is not murder.

Alexandru virtually fell off the map once the family moved to Alberta in 2008. Court was told he was enrolled in an online school program for one year but never finished. The boy never saw a doctor, although he did have an Alberta health insurance number.

The Crown, which wrapped up its case Wednesday, said although the evidence was prejudicial to the accused, it provided important background.

Its about his whole life. He didnt just arrive in Alberta as a blank slate, prosecutor Susan Pepper told the court.

The evidence adds context to the relationship between Alexandru and his parents, she argued. His parents fostered complete dependence by isolating their son from school and all other forms of community, she said.

This isolation was necessary to allow the Raditas to treat Alexandrus diabetes in an idiosyncratic and dangerous way, Pepper said.

The relationship between Alex and his parents is not unlike an abusive domestic relationship where the abuser isolates the abused in a bid to establish total control over the victim.

The trial has been adjourned until the fall, but a date for when it will continue wont be determined until Aug. 19.

Follow @BillGraveland on Twitter
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CALGARY  A doctor who treated a starved diabetic boy 10 years before his death thought the childs mother should undergo a psychiatric assessment.

Emil Radita, 59, and his wife Rodica Radita, who is 53, are charged with first-degree murder in the death of their 15-year-old son.

Alexandru, who was one of eight children, weighed less than 37 pounds when he died in 2013 of complications due to untreated diabetes and starvation.

B.C. pediatrician Paul Korn was recalled to the witness stand at the trial in Calgary on Wednesday for cross-examination.

After Alexandru was admitted to hospital in Surrey, B.C., in October 2003, his mothers odd behaviour in refusing to accept a diabetes diagnosis from three years earlier, as well as a failure to provide proper treatment, made Korn think a psychiatric assessment would be a good idea, he said.

The information that had been presented to me up until that time, in terms of what had happened in 2000, what had happened in 2001, what eventually ended up happening in 2003  and everything in between  was very unusual, Korn recalled telling an RCMP officer at the time.

Id been doing pediatrics for 20 years at the time and this was really, really odd. I thought a psychiatric assessment was something that should be considered.

Korn also suggested a parental capacity assessment for the Raditas, although he did say he didnt believe the mothers behaviour was intentional or malicious.

The doctor didnt believe the Raditas were targeting Alex or withholding nutrition from him per se, but was concerned about their bizarre understanding of how to manage his medical issues.

I dont believe she really had an understanding of what diabetes was or what it meant or what the outcome would be if he wasnt treated, Korn testified. I dont think she had an understanding that, untreated, this was a fatal condition.

The doctor recommended that Alexandrus mother be allowed to remain at his bedside, even though he was being turned over to childrens services.

He was in a very, very fragile state. The mother had been looking after him continuously  and my feeling was at that time (that) to separate mother from Alex could lead to a very bad outcome for Alex, Korn told court.

He was in a very tenuous state and we werent really sure that he was going to live in the first few days of his admission to the ICU.

Justice Karen Horner, who is hearing the case without a jury, has yet to decide if the evidence from British Columbia will be admitted.

Crown prosecutor Susan Pepper urged the court to accept the evidence because it provides background and narrative.

Its about his whole life. He didnt just arrive in Alberta as a blank slate, said Pepper, who argued the narrative is complete with near-death experiences and complete recoveries.

She also said it puts into context the relationship between Alexandru and his parents, who she says fostered a complete dependence on them by isolating their son from school and the community.

This isolation was necessary to allow the Raditas to treat Alexandrus diabetes in an idiosyncratic and dangerous way, Pepper said.

The relationship between Alex and his parents is not unlike an abusive domestic relationship where the abuser isolates the abused in a bid to establish total control over the victim.

 Follow @BillGraveland on Twitter

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version said Dr. Paul Korn saw the boy 13 years before his death.
Opinion

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This article was published 16/06/2016 (2323 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Three months ago, Air Canada announced an agreement with the Manitoba government, just before the provincial election, to establish a centre of excellence for certain aircraft maintenance activities.

The release of the announcement had a slap-dash feel to it in the first place, issued as it was very late that afternoon. At the time there were no details as to what the results would look like.

No one is denying it is a trade-off for the province to settle its dispute with Air Canada over whether the air carrier violated a federal act that it maintain airplane overhaul workers in Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec when it shut down its heavy maintenance operations in 2012 that wiped out about 400 jobs in Winnipeg.

A new bill is before Parliament that the new provincial government and federal opposition parties believe is getting rushed through.

And real information about what this centre of excellence will look like is still nowhere to be found.

Wendell Wiebe, the executive director of Manitoba Aerospace Inc., as well as senior officials in the industry in Manitoba, remain in the dark as to what is being proposed.

Don Leitch, the CEO of the Business Council of Manitoba, is as well-connected as anyone and represents the interests of the largest businesses in the province.

He says no one will fault Air Canada for doing what it has to do to remain efficient, but unfortunately the level of confidence and trust is a little low.

We know the long story around Air Canada, said Leitch. There is a huge challenge in the airline industry. They need to pursue paths to remain efficient. No one denies they need to do that. But the perception is that Winnipeg gets the short end of the stick with Air Canada. That is part of the consternation felt by folks in Winnipeg.

The general plan is Air Canada will renew its lease on those heavy maintenance buildings on Saskatchewan Avenue and then sublease them to three of its suppliers.

An industry source said Air Canada has until the end of the month to submit a proposal to renew that lease. Presumably, it would then have to work out sublease arrangements with the suppliers who would set up shop in Winnipeg creating about 150 jobs.

Senior officials of one of those companies, Cargojet Inc., were in Winnipeg this week hosting a reception. One source said it was part of a national tour the company was in the midst of.

He said it was an occasion for Cargojet people to look the provincial government in the eye to let them know their intentions.

There is no word on how successful the effort was. But clearly this process is exposing some old wounds.

Manitoba has the third-largest aerospace industry in the country, albeit a distant third behind Quebec and Ontario, and industry officials appear to be getting a little tired having to forever make that case.

Don Boitson, vice-president of North American operations for Magellan Aerospace Limited, and the chairman of the provincial aerospace association, said the industry works well together and has a human resource and training system that really works.

The fact is the sector generates about $2 billion in revenue, exports about 80 per cent of that and employs about 5,000 people, he said. We want to make sure that continues to grow.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
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OTTAWA  Quebecs finance minister says the official agenda for next weeks meeting with his federal and provincial counterparts is missing a pressing item: health-care transfers.

The gathering in Vancouver will be dominated by talks on Canada Pension Plan reform but Carlos Leitao warned the urgent issue of health funding is perhaps even more important.

He said provinces are staring at the possibility of a sudden and significant deceleration in federal health transfers in 2017-18.

As it stands, Leitao estimated next years Quebec budget will be up to $400 million short because the annual six-per-cent increase in transfers to the provinces is scheduled to end in 2017.

Thats significant  multiply that by the other provinces, Leitao said in an interview.

Clearly for the Vancouver meeting, all the attention has been focused on the retirement issue. But Im just raising the flag that we shouldnt forget the other one because it is equally, if not more, important.

Leitao urged Ottawa to extend the current formula for one more year while the negotiations on a new deal are underway, calling it the more efficient, pragmatic thing to do.

The last health accord expired in 2014 and, after refusing to renegotiate it, the previous Conservative government unilaterally declared that the six-per-cent escalator would end in 2017.

In their election platform, the federal Liberals promised to restart negotiations on a new health accord with the provinces, which have constitutional responsibility for delivering health care.

So far, the Liberals have yet to put a price tag on that pledge, nor have they specifically promised to reinstate the escalator.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau has said talks with the provinces will touch on home care, palliative care and mental health. But he has also noted the details were left out of the March budget because he expects the talks to help provide a clear sense of direction.

On Thursday, a spokesman for federal Health Minister Jane Philpott said Ottawa reached an agreement with provinces and territories in January on shared health priorities. The federal governments goal is to sign a deal with the provinces and territories by the end of 2016, Andrew MacKendrick wrote in email.

He did not immediately address questions about the status of the talks, nor did he respond to a question on whether Ottawa would extend the current health-transfer formula for another year to help provinces avoid a major fiscal hit.

Other finance ministers, however, didnt appear to show as much concern as Leitao over the potential shortfall.

Asked about a potential health-care funding hole in his budget, Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci said in an interview that he thinks its more of an issue for the federal and provincial health ministers.

I think its unofficially on our agenda because of these kinds of (budgetary) questions, said Ceci, who will be in Vancouver for the meeting.

But I dont know if the federal finance minister is in a position to go very far down the road of the health accord at this time, aside from listening to peoples views.

The gathering provides a forum for the ministers to raise different issues. Ceci said he plans to remind his counterparts about the big economic benefits of getting oilsands crude from pipeline to tidewater.

When asked about health transfers, Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa said while he expects other subjects to come up, his focus will be on trying to find consensus on CPP enhancement.

We have a federation that needs participation by the provinces and Ontario is a net contributor to the rest of Canada  always has been, even when we qualified for equalization, Sousa said in an interview.

We want to make certain that everyone gets their fair share.

On Thursday, the premiers of Quebec and Saskatchewan also put pressure on the federal government to boost health funding for the provinces.

After meeting Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall in Montreal, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said there are significant funding needs in health care, particularly for provinces looking to innovate.

Health remains the main subject of concern for citizens across Canada, Couillard said. Its good that were talking about other issues, but we must absolutely move forward on health financing.

Follow @AndyBlatchford on Twitter
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Manitobas population has been growing at a record-breaking pace, preliminary numbers released by Statistics Canada show.

The province gained 19,432 people in the 12-month period from April 1, 2015, to April 1, 2016  an increase of 1.51 per cent, second only to Albertas 12-month gain of 1.78 per cent.

It was well above the national increase of 1.12 per cent.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Manitoba gained 19,432 people from April 1, 2015, to April 1, 2016.

Both numbers  19,432 and 1.51 per cent  are modern-day records for Manitoba, said Wilf Falk, the provinces chief statistician.

Theyre the best since 1971, he said. Weve never seen this stuff before.

He said the previous record for population growth in Manitoba in a 12-month period was 16,706 people. That was set from April 2011 to April 2012.

So we really shattered the old record, Falk said.

But the good news doesnt stop there. Falk said Manitoba also set three other modern records between April of last year and April of this year.

In addition to the record population gain, the province added 16,135 new immigrants, 5,158 new non-permanent residents  mainly international students and foreign workers  and had 13,596 more people arrive from other provinces or countries than leave for other provinces or countries.

Falk said all three numbers were modern records for the most gains in any 12-month period.

He said theres no reason to think the recent surge in population growth will end soon.

Assuming the international migration flows will continue our population should be bouncing along fairly good in the future, he said.

He said due to the slump in the oil industry, Alberta isnt luring as many people from other provinces as it has in the past.

Although it gained 30,000 people from other jurisdictions in the past year, in the first quarter of this year, it recorded a net loss of 1,788.

And who knows what the next quarter is going to bring because of the Fort McMurray fire situation? People left, and who knows how thats going to play out. I would say that for at least 2016, theyre going to be in a negative-migration situation.

The Statistics Canada figures included population gains recorded during the first three months of 2016.

They showed Manitobas population was 1,308,912 as of April 1  a gain of 5,016 from the start of the year (when it was 1,303,896).

The gain maintains Manitobas status as the countrys fifth-largest province in terms of population, behind Ontario (13,920,499), Quebec (8,310,708), British Columbia (4,720,932) and Alberta (4,249,842).

Saskatchewan isnt far behind Manitoba, with a population of 1,146,655.

Nationally, Canada had its population grow by 106,966 to 36,155,487 during the quarter.

Statistics Canada said it was the highest first-quarter gain since 1989 and attributed it mainly to an influx of new immigrants.

It said 86,216 people arrived in the country during the first three months of 2016, a large number of whom were Syrian refugees.

It noted Canada had not received that many new immigrants in a single quarter since the introduction of the current system of demographic counts in July 1971.

Falk said Syrian refugees were also a significant contributor to Manitobas population gain in the last year.

He said an official with the Kurdish Association of Manitoba recently told him about 1,300 Syrian refugees have arrived in the province since Nov. 1.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca
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TORONTO  Canadas largest newspaper decided against an outside investigation into the circumstances around the suicide of a prominent reporter because it would have been too bureaucratic, according to an internal memo.

Instead, the Toronto Star did its own investigation, which resulted in two senior editors leaving the newsroom and an enhanced code of conduct, the memo to staff said.

An external legal investigator was not necessary or appropriate in the circumstances, Brian Daly, vice-president of human resources, said in the memo.

The Toronto Star building is shown in Toronto on June 8, 2016. Canada's largest newspaper decided against an outside investigation into the circumstances around the suicide of a prominent reporter because it would have been too bureaucratic, according to an internal memo. Instead, the Toronto Star did its own investigation, which resulted in two senior editors leaving the newsroom and an enhanced code of conduct, the memo to staff said. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Eduardo Lima

Such third-party investigations, by their very nature, follow formalized, legalistic protocols, with minimal if any transparency of findings or conclusions.

In a column last week, Star public editor Kathy English talked of the turmoil in the newsroom after Raveena Aulakh, 42, killed herself last month. The column stated that Aulakh had been in a relationship with a senior editor, Jon Filson.

In emails Aulakh had sent, English said, a clearly heartbroken Aulakh made allegations about a relationship between Filson and managing editor Jane Davenport. Filson had already left the company, while Davenport was reassigned within the company.

The Star said it would not discuss details of their departures given that it was an internal personnel matter.

The investigation by Daly and Alan Bower, the Stars executive director of labour relations, also concluded that Aulakhs immediate manager had provided outstanding and exceptional levels of support and assistance to her, the memo states.

Her co-workers should also be acknowledged for their support. Tragically, such extensive efforts by many individuals were not enough.

Daly also said he and Bower had recommended policy changes to spell out more clearly that a personal relationship between a manager and his or her staff constitutes a conflict unless appropriately declared and approved, and that even the appearance of a conflict is to be avoided.

We are also moving forward this year with revisions to the Stars respect-in-the workplace policy and related complaint procedures, to bring greater clarity on expectations in this area, the memo states.

In addition, the investigators recommended that newsroom staff should have better access to human resources independent of managers in the newsroom.

The memo concludes with Dalys assertion that the Star has investigated this matter thoroughly and objectively and taken appropriate and necessary actions.

The union representing the Star, Unifor, had called last week for a third-party probe. A union official could not immediately be reached for comment.

Torstar holds an investment in The Canadian Press as part of a joint agreement with a subsidiary of the Globe and Mail and the parent company of Montreals La Presse.
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TORONTO  Ontarios securities watchdog says July 14 is the launch date for its whistleblower program, which will pay up to $5 million for insider information about accounting fraud, insider trading and market manipulation.

The Ontario Securities Commissions whistleblower program  the first in Canada to pay for tips  will include protections for those who come forward, such as confidentiality and anti-retaliation measures.

The OSC originally planned to cap payments to tipsters at $1.5 million, but increased the upper limit after experts suggested that was too little to compensate senior executives who risk losing lucrative jobs and being blacklisted from their industries.

Payouts would still be capped at $1.5 million unless the securities regulator is able to collect at least $10 million in sanctions related to the case. In such cases, the whistleblower would receive between five and 15 per cent of the sanctions collected, up to a maximum of $5 million.

In the United States, whistleblowers can receive a 10 to 30 per cent payout, with no cap on the total payment amount, but only if the securities regulator is able to collect the money that its owed.

The OSC also announced Thursday the Chief of the Office of the Whistleblower will be Kelly Gorman, who has been deputy director of enforcement for the provincial agency.
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TORONTO  The Plaza Retail REIT is planning to redevelop three RioCan properties, including Northumberland Square in Miramichi, N.B.

The other two properties are in Ontario: East Court Mall in Cornwall and Timiskaming Square in New Liskeard.

Plaza Retail (PLZ.UN) paid $11.5 million to acquire a 50 per cent interest in the properties by forming a joint venture with RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust (TSX: REI.UN).

RioCan says the joint venture will allow it to focus on Canadas six major markets while Plaza Retail oversees redevelopment in the three smaller communities.
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Sci-fi authors have been predicting it for years, but it looks like robots may be taking over your job sooner rather than later.

Nearly 42 per cent of the Canadian labour force is at high risk of automation  the replacement of workers with technology  within the next 10 to 20 years, a report from the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship at Ryerson University states. The report defines high risk as having a 70 per cent or higher probability of being automated within that time frame.

The top five jobs at high risk of automation are retail sales clerks, administrative assistants, food-counter attendants and kitchen helpers, cashiers and transport truck drivers, the report states.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES A customer uses a self-serve checkout at a Home Depot. A new report says 42.6 per cent of the province's employed labour force is at high risk of being replaced by technology. The report, The Talented Mr. Robot: The Impact of Automation on the Canadian Workforce, was written by Brookfield Institute policy adviser Creig Lamb.

What surprised me the most is the number of administrative type jobs that are actually at risk, said Lamb.

These jobs do constitute a large portion of the Canadian labour force.

The report indicates administrative occupations employ approximately 329,000 Canadians and have a 96 per cent probability of automation.

Jobs will not necessarily disappear but will fundamentally change, Lamb said.

In some cases, it could be for the better. Instead of people doing dangerous jobs, robots could be doing them.

He added technology doesnt always replace labour, it can also complement it.

It increases productivity, which can result in a virtuous cycle that can increase the demand for more jobs.

What is frustrating is the impact of robotic automation hadnt been given much thought, said Prof. John Anderson, the head of computer science at the University of Manitoba, who runs the universitys robotics lab.

Theres a great deal of work being done, technically, which is very, very cool, he said. But theres very little (research) about what impact applying that technology is going to have.

We like to say that people are very adaptable and resilient, but the average 40- to 50-year-old losing their job is a very high-impact thing. Its difficult for us to picture how significant this could be.

Higher education appears to be the key for the 36 per cent of Canadas employed labour force at low risk of automation, the report states. The top five low-risk jobs include retail and wholesale trade managers, registered nurses (including psychiatric), elementary and kindergarten teachers, early-childhood educators and assistants and secondary school teachers.

The report shows 42.6 per cent of Manitobas employed labour force is at high risk of automation. Ontario has the lowest proportion of the labour force being high-risk, at 41.1 per cent. Prince Edward Island has the highest proportion at 45 per cent.

The report also found Canadians working in the lowest-risk positions are projected to produce almost 712,000 net new jobs between 2014 and 2024. Around 396,000 new high-risk jobs are also projected to be produced within that time period.

Lamb said the high-risk jobs are linked to the least-educated section of the Canadian labour force in terms of university education.

We know that low-risk jobs require more skills and higher wages. We think that in order to transition into low-risk occupations, there will be a bit of upscaling, job training and further and higher education, he said.

People that work in high-risk jobs are disproportionately younger, between the ages of 15 to 24. Its important that these individuals are able to acquire the skills necessary for the jobs of tomorrow.

Lamb said the intention of the report was not to create fear.

What we did want to do is start the conversation and get people to understand the impact of automation so people can plan for the future, he said.

Its useful for planning how the labour market will evolve and which jobs to start gearing towards. We dont think its a reason to be panicked, but we do think its important to start the conversation and begin thinking about the future.

alexandra.depape@freepress.mb.ca

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MONTREAL  Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall took his pro-Energy East road show into relatively hostile territory Thursday as he met with Quebec counterpart Philippe Couillard in a province where the proposed project has many detractors.

Pipelines arent perfect, but they are the safest and most efficacious way to move energy across the country, Wall told a news conference alongside Couillard.

But while pitching the pipeline as an opportunity for nation-building that could link the country much as the Canadian Pacific Railway did in the 1880s, Wall acknowledged Quebec has unique questions given most of the new construction for the $15.7-billion project would take place in the province.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, left, and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard chat during the photo op before their meeting Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

The fact remains that the new construction is almost all in this province and that does change things for this province, he said. The people of Quebec will have different questions, and rightfully so. And it is up to the proponent to answer those questions.

The most recent official opposition to the TransCanada (TSX:TRP) project surfaced Wednesday when the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador formally stated it was against it.

Couillard called the First Nations announcement a significant event that should not be downplayed.

In May, Canada officially adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Couillard pointed out includes obtaining free and informed consent when it comes to resource development.

Exactly what this means will have to be resolved and made explicit at some point, he said.

Consultation with First Nations groups is one of the provinces seven conditions that must be met before the project is approved, Couillard said.

Many politicians, environmentalists and other critics in the province also believe the ecological risks outweigh the economic rewards.

In the past, Wall has chosen to sharply rebuke the pipelines detractors, pointing out Quebec will receive about $10 billion in equalization payments this year.

When a group of Montreal-area mayors came out against the pipeline in January, Wall took to Twitter to suggest they politely return Quebecs share of those payments.

On Thursday, he struck a more conciliatory tone.

He admitted to feeling a certain frustration at the attempts to block his provinces efforts to bring its resources to market, but chose to acknowledge Quebecs concerns.

Im going to continue to make the case for the pipeline, but I want to do so respecting that, for Quebec, this pipeline is different, its new construction, its under the St. Lawrence (River), its through a very populous area, and it must meet a high standard, he said.

And I think it can.

Wall argued that transporting oil by pipeline is safer and better for the environment than moving it by rail or truck and would also reduce Canadas dependence on foreign imports.

Energy East would carry more than a million barrels of western Canadian oil a day to refineries in Eastern Canada and a marine terminal in Saint John, N.B.

Walls swing through Quebec followed a visit to Saint John on Wednesday and one a day earlier to Toronto, where he spoke to the Empire Club of Canada.

He and Couillard also discussed other topics, including carbon credits and federal health funding.

The two premiers announced an agreement to work together on developing carbon capture technology, which involves trapping carbon dioxide and transforming it for other uses.
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TORONTO  VerticalScope, a Toronto-based company that operates hundreds of websites and online forums, was the victim of a hacker earlier this year who stole millions of user records.

We believe that any potential breach is limited to user names, user IDs, email addresses, IP addresses and encrypted passwords of our community users, Jerry Orban, vice-president of corporate development, said in an emailed statement of the February data breach.

In addition, we are reviewing our security policies and practices and in response to increased Internet awareness of security-related incidents, including potential incidents on our communities, we are implementing security changes related to our forum password strength and password expiration policies across certain forum communities.

VerticalScope owns and operates hundreds of online forums and websites including AutoGuide.com, PetGuide.com, Motorcycle.com and ATV.com.

Torstar Corp. (TSX:TS.B), which publishes the Toronto Star, acquired a 56 per cent stake in VerticalScope Holdings last year for $200 million.

In a recent notice on its website, VerticalScope said it was implementing some security changes related to our forum password strength and password expiration policies.

The company said it had recently became aware of potential risks to community accounts on many online forums.

These changes include minimum password rules, and periodic reminders to our users on password safety tips, including avoiding the re-use of passwords across other social media platforms and communities, the notice said.

It is also implementing stricter password expiration rules, which will force our users to have to change their passwords on a more regular basis.

VerticalScope added that its internal security team is investigating information we have received about potential risks to communities and collecting and recording the findings for law enforcement agencies.
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OTTAWA  Four Canadian financial institutions invested $565 million in the companies that manufacture cluster bombs, a weapon that is banned under a UN treaty that Canada has ratified, says a report released Thursday.

The report was released in Ottawa by the Dutch peace group PAX, part of the international coalition against the indiscriminate weapons that have been widely linked to the deaths of civilians.

The companies are among 158 worldwide that invested $28 billion in companies connected to the weapons between June 2012 and April 2016, the report said.

Paul Hannon, executive director of Mines Action Canada, is calling on the Trudeau government to issue guidelines that would ban such investments by Canadian institutions.

Canada has ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and while it doesnt explicitly ban the investments, Hannon said they can be viewed as a form of assistance in the use of the weapon.

These are inhuman and indiscriminate weapons and no financial institution should be investing in them, said Hannon.

Whether its because they dont realize that theyre doing this, whether its because theyre such huge corporations, and one arm doesnt realize what the other arm is doing, thats fine. But they now need to understand.

The report names the Royal Bank of Canada, Manulife Financial, Sun Life Financial and CI Financial; CI says it no longer holds any shares in the U.S. company that is cited in the report.

The report says Royal Bank invested $132 million and Manulife $48 million in the U.S. firm Textron, a leading manufacturer of cluster bombs that have been linked to recent attacks in the ongoing conflict in Yemen.

In a statement, RBC said it takes pains to vet those operations to which it lends money, and is taking steps to broaden its policies.

RBC is a responsible lender and practices a high level of due diligence prior to lending funds, the bank said.

Our policy prohibits directly financing equipment or material for cluster munitions. We are currently working towards extending this policy beyond lending.

Neither Manulife nor Sun Life responded to a request for comment.

The rights watchdogs, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented the use of Textron-made cluster bombs in attacks that have injured or killed Yemen civilians, including children, by the Saudi Arabian-led coalition that is fighting Shiite Houthi rebels.

Last month, Amnesty reported 16 civilian casualties, including nine children after a Saudi cluster bomb attack. In February, Human Rights Watch also reported numerous civilian casualties in cluster bomb attacks in Yemen.

Suzanne Oosterwijk, the reports author, singled out Textron, noting that the report documents $12 billion worth of investment in the company by 49 global firms during the four-year time frame.

She said that really underlines the urgency of our call here today for financial institutions to stop these types of investments.

The vast majority of the firms named in report  138 out of 158  are from countries that have not joined the cluster bomb convention, including the United States, China and South Korea.

Oosterwijk said Royal Bank has taken positive steps to ban investments in cluster munitions, but their policy contains loopholes.
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OTTAWA  Conservative MP Candice Bergen is angry that the government has had dozens of web pages from Stephen Harpers days as prime minister deleted from Google search results, but the Liberals say its just a matter of keeping websites current.

The prime ministers website is not his own website to do with as he pleases, it belongs to the Canadian people, Bergen said in the Commons on Thursday. It cannot just be changed at the whim of the Liberals.

Documents tabled in the Commons in response to a written question from Bergen detail the deletion requests, showing that Privy Council Office requests for deletion from Google began last Nov. 4, the day the Trudeau government took office. They continued into January.

Outgoing Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrives at his Langevin office in Ottawa, Wednesday Oct. 21, 2015. The Liberal government has had dozens of web pages from Harper's days as prime minister deleted from Google search results. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

The Prime Ministers Office called it a technical matter; public servants wanted the change so that searches produced the latest material.

The government said the Harper material was neither deleted nor destroyed and remains available.

All of the previous prime ministers archived web content can be accessed via Library and Archives Canada along with other archived government materials, Treasury Board President Scott Brison told the Commons.

Canadians expect government websites to reflect the most up-to-date information and accurate information when they are searching on these sites.

No one wants Harper forgotten, Brison said, prompting guffaws of laughter from the Liberal benches: Our government hopes that the memory of the former Conservative prime minister lives in the minds of Canadians for a very long time.

Google said in a statement it just wants to ensure that its searches reflect the contents of websites.

We dont take a view on what is appropriate for site owners to feature on their own websites, it said. But, like any website owner, they can submit a request (via a form we make available to all website owners) to update our search results to include the latest, most recent version of their website.

The government search result requests covered Harpers daily posts and his 24-Seven video diary as well as news releases in both French and English.

On Nov. 9, the PCO asked Google to clear its index for any page published on the domain pm.gc.ca before Nov. 4, but Google did not offer such a service.

In January, requests were made for more deletions year-by-year through Harpers tenure and the government reply says pages no longer show up search results.

In all, the PCO asked Google 51 times to remove Harper material from its search results.

The office said, however, that Harpers website material was saved in its entirety in the archives.

This application went live in April and a link to it has been added to the PCO website, said Raymond Rivet, director of corporate and media affairs for the PCO.

A few other agencies made a handful of requests to Google asking that documents be removed from web searches.

For example, the RCMP asked that one news release be removed because charges had been dropped and that another be deleted because a publication ban had been imposed in a case.

National Defence asked Google to remove an older version of a document from its cache because it included personal information about a member of the Forces.

The Treasury Board asked for a change after finding that Google searches tied a photo of Bill Matthews, comptroller general of Canada, to biographical information for Bill Matthews, a former MP from Newfoundland and Labrador.
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A group of mayors from communities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border is calling for the rejection of a Wisconsin citys precedent-setting request to draw water from the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative spoke out on Thursday, ahead of a meeting in the U.S. next week where a decision is expected on the water diversion application from the city of Waukesha.

The group is urging the governors of eight Great Lake states  who will have the final word on the issue  to reject Waukeshas request, saying the application violates a regional agreement, sets a dangerous example and has been through a flawed consultation process.

If this starts to spread, how far is it going to spread? And its going to continue to spread, said Randy Hope, the mayor of Chatham-Kent municipality in southwestern Ontario, who is on the groups board of directors.

We live in those communities, we understand those communities, we work with the ecosystems, were doing our best to clean up the Great Lakes Basin and what we have is people saying well, I want some of that.'

Waukesha, a city of about 70,000 people, wants to divert water from Lake Michigan because its own aquifer is running low and the water is contaminated with high levels of naturally occurring cancer-causing radium.

Under a current regional agreement between eight U.S. states and Ontario and Quebec, diversions of water away from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River basin are banned, with limited exceptions that can be made only when certain conditions are met.

Waukesha wants to become the first such exception, arguing that although its located outside the boundary of the Great Lakes basin, it is part of a county straddling that geographical line. It also promises to return treated water to Lake Michigan.

Canadian and American opponents of Waukeshas plan have warned the citys request, if approved, could set a risky precedent for other communities facing water shortages.

But last month, the citys request received preliminary approval from representatives of the Great Lake states, Ontario and Quebec who said Waukeshas application would comply with the regional agreement if certain conditions were met.

Those conditions include service to a smaller area and an average limit of 31 million litres a day.

But the mayors from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative say the amended service area is still too large, the return flow of water to Lake Michigan through the Root River has not been analysed closely enough, and the approval process dealing with Waukeshas request has not allowed enough public participation.

This is drawing from a community resource, and the community resource is the Great Lakes Basin, Hope said, who argued that Great Lake communities werent adequately consulted. We have to speak up and let our voices be heard.

The group has suggested Waukesha treat the radium in its groundwater supply instead of taking water from Lake Michigan.

It also believes other cities are closely watching Waukeshas case and are ready with their own requests to divert water from the Great Lakes if the city succeeds.

We expect there to be a series of applications and all of those can and will have an impact on our Great Lakes, said John Dicker, mayor of Racine, Wis., through which the Root River that would carry Waukeshas return flow runs through.

We are here as 120 plus mayors to protect our Great Lakes.

Waukeshas application needs a unanimous vote of approval by eight states to get the final green light. Ontario and Quebec do not get a vote but they have submitted their views and recommendations on the issue.

Ontario had previously expressed concerns about Waukeshas request and found that the potential impacts of the proposed diversion on Great Lakes water quantity had not been sufficiently assessed.

Its review of the matter also acknowledged that Waukeshas proposal was likely just the beginning of similar requests.

The Great Lakes support 33 million people, including nine million Canadians and eight of Canadas 20 largest cities, according to the federal government.
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Premier Brian Pallister has defended a Manitoba letter warning Canadian officials involved in the bid for international recognition for the boreal forest in eastern Manitoba that a hydro transmission line could one day be built through the area.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Pallister said his government wanted to make sure the province was not misleading those considering the UNESCO designation for Pimachiowin Aki. A decision is expected on the designation next month.

We want to clear the air now and make sure accurate information is on the record, the premier said, referring to a letter penned by a provincial deputy minister to a Parks Canada official who is heading a Canadian delegation to the World Heritage Committee.

Pimachiowin Aki is in contention to be a UNESCO world heritage site.

The letter says the route of the Bipole III transmission line, currently under construction on the west side of Lake Manitoba, could change. It also mentions the possibility that a fourth transmission line from northern power dams to the south may one day be required.

It is currently illegal, under provincial law, to build a transmission line down the east side of Lake Winnipeg. The new Conservative government has made no attempt to change the law so far. By agreement between the parties, Wednesday was the last day a new bill could be introduced before MLAs take their summer break.

Pallister said Wednesday it would have been unwise to leave on the record, as the previous government had stated, that there was no possibility of an eastern transmission line along the east side of Lake Winnipeg.

Pallister has continued to say, as recently as last week, that there is still a possibility the current BiPole III transmission line, being constructed west of Lake Manitoba, could be rerouted to the east side of Lake Winnipeg. He added that a fourth line may also one day be required, increasing the possibility of an eastern line one day.

In respect of the possibility of a Bipole 4 line, one should not discount that possibility as this province grows, as its hydro needs grow, he reiterated Wednesday.

In the meantime, the government is seeking an opinion from Manitoba Hydros new Tory-appointed board of directors on whether the western route ought to be maintained  despite the fact $1.8 billion has already been invested in the project.

Crown Services Minister Ron Schuler said Wednesday the government has not set a deadline for the board to report back, but its understood it wants an answer fairly soon.

They know that these are timely issues, he said in an interview. I suspect they will have their own timeline in place and well respect their timeline.

NDP critic Rob Altemeyer called the governments pronouncements about a possible route change a smokescreen.

He said the Conservatives got caught making a really inappropriate, unrealistic promise during the recent election that they would consider changing the route, which theyve long said is too costly and inefficient compared to a shorter eastern one.

You would think a premier who wanted to do that would change the legislation (to allow for an eastern route), Altemeyer said. Today was the deadline for legislation and it never happened.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca
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Police turned to science in their bid to catch a killer  and a detailed analysis of evidence found near the scene produced some intriguing results.

Devin Hall, 30, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the September 2012 shooting death of 23-year-old Jeffrey Lau inside the Salisbury House restaurant, and the attempted murder of one of Laus five friends who was sitting at the table with him.

Witnesses to the attack were unable to identify the gunman, who had a white shirt pulled over his face. He also wore black gloves on his hands, which meant no fingerprints were left behind.

However, investigators were able to develop DNA profiles from the shirt and gloves that officers found discarded near the popular Pembina Highway eatery.

Michelle Scott-Mascioli, a civilian member of the RCMP biology lab in Ottawa, took the stand Wednesday to explain to jurors how seven different samples produced a compelling link to Hall.

Scott-Mascioli said the chances of another randomly selected person being the primary major source of the DNA found on the items ranged from one in 60 million on the low end, and one in 9.4 trillion on the high end.

Some of the items were then re-tested, at the request of Halls lawyer, using a more enhanced DNA system that has recently been put in place. In those cases, the new results suggested the odds of another source to range from one in 1.5 trillion on the low end, and one in 4.2 quadrillion on the high end.

A quadrillion is a one with 15 zeroes under it, Scott-Mascioli told jurors.

The Crown has told jurors that DNA evidence is a key part of their case. But defence lawyer Martin Glazer attacked that theory on Wednesday, suggesting these findings arent as damning as they might appear.

In cross-examination of Scott-Mascioli, Glazer suggested these dont prove who actually pulled the trigger.

When it comes to comparing DNA typing profiles, Im not stating anything about who committed the crime, the forensic expert admitted.

Glazer questioned whether theres any way of knowing when his clients DNA could have got on the items  especially since Scott-Masciolo said there were other minor mixed profiles of unknown contributors also on the gloves and shirt.

I cannot comment on how the DNA was deposited or when, she said.

VIDEO FOOTAGE Jurors have also watched a 15-second surveillance video from inside the restaurant which captured part of the September 2012 attack inside the Salisbury House diner on Pembina Highway.

Could it have been deposited on the shirt several days before the shooting? asked Glazer.

Its possible, Scott-Mascioli replied. She gave a similar answer when asked if someone else could have used the items after his client came in contact with them, and whether perhaps one of those unidentified minor contributors wore them last.

Yes, its possible, she said.

Jurors previously heard from Laus friend who was shot and wounded, along with the waitress who witnessed the attack. Both told court the gunman headed straight for the specific table and opened fire before retreating.

Lau was dead on arrival at hospital. The injured man spent more than three months in hospital. His name is banned from publication. He testified it was likely a targeted hit against Lau, who was a drug dealer.

www.mikeoncrime.com
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Trung Van Duong is paying a steep price for his role in a pair of separate drug-dealing ventures that were busted by police at nearly the same time.

Duong, 32, is already serving a seven-year prison term for running a Toronto-based meth lab. Five were added to that total Wednesday when he pleaded guilty to helping arrange large cocaine shipments into Winnipeg.

Desperation. I just wasnt thinking, Duong told Queens Bench Justice Chris Martin when asked to explain his involvement.

WAYNE GLOWACKI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES In the spring 2012 the Winnipeg Police Service Organized Crime Unit commenced Project Sideshow, targeting an Organized Crime Group that operates across Canada importing Cocaine, Methamphetamine and MDMA (Ecstasy) into Winnipeg for further distribution.

Duong was among the 14 people arrested in the spring of 2014 as part of Project Sideshow, one of the largest and most elaborate organized crime investigations undertaken by Winnipeg police. A series of court-authorized wiretaps revealed he was helping to facilitate the movements of three Ontario-based cocaine couriers.

Its pretty obvious you were the link between the suppliers and the delivery of this cocaine, said Martin.

During the Sideshow case, police say they documented 92 kilograms of cocaine with a street value of $5 million, 31/2 kg of methamphetamine (street value $192,000), one kg of ecstasy (street value $20,000) and more than $4.3 million in cash believed to be from proceeds of drug sales throughout the investigation.

Duong is an Ontario resident who was recently convicted and sentenced for the meth lab in that province. His Winnipeg sentence on the charge of conspiracy to traffic cocaine will be served consecutively and was the result of a plea bargain and joint recommendation from Crown and defence lawyers.

Duong had no criminal record prior to his involvement in these drug cases, court was told. He is the father of two young children.

I see people from all levels of society who have their lives ruined by cocaine, Martin told him Wednesday.

www.mikeoncrime.com
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SELKIRK, Man.  People whose basements flooded with raw sewage last week in Selkirk, Man., arent eligible for provincial or municipal compensation.

Selkirk got slammed with a torrential downpour on June 9 and the citys storm sewer drains couldnt keep up.

Between 37 and 40 millimetres of rain fell over 30 minutes, and 86 mm fell over a 24-hour period.

Mayor Larry Johannson says thats about half of what the city usually gets in the month of June.

Johannson says up to 130 basements were affected by flooding and some took in raw sewage.

Johannson says residents wont be eligible for compensation.

It doesnt look like therell be anything coming through, said Johannson.

The city of Selkirk said most home insurance companies offer options for sewer backup and basement flooding.

As sewer backup is an insurable event, citizens whove experienced such flooding would not be eligible for Disaster Financial Assistance, the city wrote on its website.

The city is offering free curbside pickup of flood-related waste.

(CTV Winnipeg)
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Justice officials are fighting a judges precedent-setting decision to toss a Winnipeg womans photo-radar ticket on the grounds she was the victim of an unreasonable delay.

Court records show a notice of appeal was filed last week in the case of Genevieve Grant. No date for a hearing has been set.

Provincial court Judge Mary Kate Harvie put the fate of thousands of outstanding traffic tickets in limbo last month when she ruled Grants trial date of April 27, 2016  18 months to the day after the offence allegedly occurred  was unreasonable and represents a violation of (the Canadian) Charter (of Rights and Freedoms).

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Winnipeg police have said the impacts of a judges precedent-setting traffic ticket decision could reduce the effectiveness of tickets and cost the department.

Harvie said it should only take four to six months for such a case to be heard in court because of the minimal amount of time for preparation and a minimal amount of actual court time.

Court was told Genevieve Grant was caught speeding Oct. 27, 2014, by a photo-radar camera and mailed an offence notice Nov. 4, 2014, giving her until Dec. 19, 2014 to decide whether to pay it or plead not guilty. When she decided to plead not guilty, the trial date was set for 18 months from the date of the offence.

Grant and her lawyer both declined comment on Wednesday.

Traffic-ticket fighter Todd Dube of Wise Up Winnipeg said before photo radar was implemented in Winnipeg, it took people about four to five months to get to court. But Dube said after photo radar came in, and with it the many tickets issued daily, the process slowed to a crawl.

On Wednesday, Dube said he was disappointed with the Crowns decision to appeal.

I thought the new government was going to take this opportunity to separate themselves from what was an NDP debacle in terms of unfair enforcement, he said. Yet theyre in to defend it, which , to me, means that it can be about nothing more than money, principles gone out the window.

Dube added he was surprised by the Crowns move, since Harvies decision was based on a Charter right.

Frankly, I just dont know how theyre going to go against something that is established in the Charter, he said. Itll be interesting to see what point of law theyre arguing in appeal. They have to identify an error or errors in the decision, which I dont believe is possible.

Winnipeg police have said the impacts of the judges decision could reduce the effectiveness of tickets, and cost the department.

In terms of the tickets being tossed, first and foremost the intention of the detection of the offence and the subsequent fine is to change driver behaviour, Insp. Gord Friesen told the Free Press in an email last month. Friesen is the commander of the Winnipeg Police Services community support division, which includes the central traffic unit.

If there is no fine associated with the detection of the offence, this will decrease the likeliness of changing the dangerous driving behaviour, he said.

As the photo enforcement program is part of the Winnipeg Police Service, any net surplus is incorporated into the budget to fund other policing activities, Friesen wrote at the time.

Figures he provided from the 2015 photo-enforcement annual report show the Winnipeg Police Service reported 2015 photo-enforcement program revenues as $17,252,999.39 with expenses of $5,517,736. Once all costs were added up, the surplus from photo-radar enforcement was $11,735,263.
Opinion

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This article was published 16/06/2016 (2323 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Orlando massacre has been called the worst mass shooting in United States history. Considering the fact there have been 132 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, thats saying something.

Early Sunday, 49 people were killed and another 53 wounded. The victims were members of or supporters of the LGBTTQ* community, many of them Latino. In terms of deaths, the massacre outpaces the horrific numbers at Viriginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012 (27 killed) and Lubys Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas in 1991 (23 people killed).

The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, as National Public Radio has observed, was actually perpetrated by U.S. soldiers on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in 1890. More than 250, possibly as many as 300, Lakota Sioux were killed. Those victims, a substantial number of whom were women and children, had been charged with no crime and were not engaged in combat.

The attack at the Orlando, Fla., nightclub left 49 dead.

There have been other mass killings, such as the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which 120 people (many of them women and children) were killed after a truce between Mormon territorial militia and newer settlers to Utah was broken, or the Tulsa Race Riot, in which white rioters attacked the black community and nearly 300 people were slain.

True, we tend to think of mass killings as the work of a single gunman on a shooting spree, and prior to the 20th century there werent many of those. But what is at issue here, is who was targeted: people who are marginalized.

This is not to make any particular atrocity seem less horrifying by comparing it with others, but rather to put it in context. The victims at Wounded Knee were already being forced off their land by a settler state; many in the black community in Tulsa were still familiar with the horrors of slavery.

If you limit the scope to single-gunman mass killings, the Sandy Hook victims were predominantly children, and the victims in last years mass shooting in Charleston, S.C., were attacked in their church by a white supremacist who specifically targeted them because of their skin colour. In both cases, they were marginalized and vulnerable.

So it isnt an act of random violence when a nightclub known as a safe gathering place for members of the LGBTTQ* community in Orlando is targeted by an angry man. Its an act perpetrated against people who are familiar with their rights being denied and facing hatred from others because of who they are. Its an expression of overt violence against people who face the non-physical but all-too-real misery of prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis.

This massacre wasnt an unfathomable aberration. It was yet another explosion of prevalent hatred.

The Muslim shooter in Orlando, who swore allegiance to Islamic State, has provided grist for the Islamophobes mill.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has received plenty of free ink for his broadsides at Muslims, Mexicans and immigrants, and one of his first reactions on social media to the mass shooting in Orlando was, Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I dont want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart! Trump was already trying to use a fatal expression of homophobia to fan the flames of Islamophobia.

The thing is, he wouldnt say those things unless he felt he had a receptive audience. Theres plenty of covert and overt hatred seeking expression, and an eruption of violence such as what happened in Orlando is built on it.

The horror in Orlando may force a new debate on gun control south of the border. It would be more helpful if it forced a real discussion on the roots of such violence: the intolerance and hatred that leads some to kill and the privilege that allows many others to ignore it  until the next massacre.
Despite all of the changes in the history of law enforcement in Winona County during the past 150 years, one thing hasnt changed: No matter how big city and county jails have been built, they just never seem to be big enough.

During the first 50 years of city and county law enforcement, local jails were blasted by the news media because so many people were so frequently able to escape from them.

And neither the city nor the county took any honors for sanitary conditions. One of the first city lockups was in the basement of the Winona County Sheriffs Department. Prisoners were placed in a cellar and chained to a wall.

Conditions in the jail became so unsanitary that in 1857, a grand jury ordered the city to build a jail that at least met minimum standards for human occupancy.

On March 11, 1861, the Winona County Board authorized the construction of a new courthouse and jail. The county budgeted $6,000 for what was said to be the first jail that actually had bars and segregated cells. The Winona City Council approved a support donation of $375 to help buy the land for the new jail, provided that the county would share some of the jail space with the city.

During those pioneer years, the sheriff, often assisted by a volunteer posse, tried to provide law and order inside of the city as well as in the countryside, which was often hard to distinguish from the city during the late 1850s and early 1860s.

The rest of the law enforcement in the city was left up to the constable, a one-man police force who operated pretty much according to his own rules until 1861 when the city council established a beat patrol system, hiring a few more officers and instilling a little more order. Some of the first city chiefs were also known as marshals, a designation also applied to federal law enforcement officials.

One of the most colorful law enforcement officers was Winona County Sheriff Lynch King. King was elected following a tie vote by winning a game of euchre against the other candidate.

One of Kings larger policing operations involved rallying a posse to chase Minnesota residents back to their home state after Wisconsin officials complained that the Minnesotans were crossing the Mississippi River and hacking out large quantities of firewood.

King drove the firewood bandits back to Minnesota. But the wood cutters rallied and drove King and his posse away long enough to recover their horses and sleighs.

The city police departments first decades were marked mostly by arrests for drunkenness, bawdy behavior and violations of saloon liquor laws. Many tavern operators had a hard time accepting licensing at a time when dozens of corner taps operated out of the front of homes.

On Dec. 3, 1874, Winona Special Police Officer Mathew Hamilton died in the line of duty.

As a special police officer, Hamilton was assigned to patrol the property of the Winona and St. Peter Rail road. Both the city and the railroad contributed to his salary.

On patrol about 12:15 a.m., Hamilton found a Polander by the name of Lorens Bambuch asleep on one of the benches at the Winona and St. Peter Railroad depot. According to a newspaper account, Hamilton roused Bambuch and ordered him to sit up, and when he declined, he, with the assistance of Officer W.W. Miller, got him on his feet and moved him outside. The situation degenerated, with Bambuch cursing and abusing Officer Hamilton, who then told Miller to take him off and lock him up.

Bambuch put up a staunch fight, holding his own against both officers and a baggage man drawn into the fray. Bambuch got Hamilton by the throat, and Miller applied his nightstick to the mans head to persuade him to release his grip.

The tactic was successful, and Bambuch was arrested and led off, but when Miller returned, Hamilton was lying on the platform, spitting blood. Miller, dont leave me. Im dying, the stricken officer said. Miller and several other men managed to get Hamilton to his home, where he died. The coroner ruled that Hamilton died of heart disease aggravated by overexertion.
I am writing to support a ban on silica sand mining in Winona County, with the hope that the language brought forth by the Land Stewardship Project be the standard passed and implemented.

Five years ago, my family moved to Winona after a hiatus of nearly 35 years. We came back to enjoy and be a part of an area that has indescribable natural resources.

It is the scourge of this frac sand issue that has brought me to write.

All of you have heard or read the negatives related to this topic, and I will forego the litany of these ills. However, there are two items that I feel need to be addressed again.

I ask the Winona County Board of Commissioners, what kind of legacy are you leaving if a ban, not regulation, is not implemented?

Each and every person who reads this letter has an obligation to preserve and protect the community we live in and the resources that we have.

Water quality is the other item that has come to the forefront with intensity and urgency. It's no secret that water quality across this state is in jeopardy, some areas more than others.

This past February, Deborah Swackhamer, an internationally renowned water quality expert at the University of Minnesota, spoke to a full auditorium at Winona State University.

Her hour-long presentation gave a "State of the State" on water quality and water quantity in Minnesota.

In regards to silica sand mining, air quality was a concern of hers, with water quality a close second.

Chemicals used in frac sand washing are a major health hazard. She stated that water quantity is becoming more of an issue with our aquifers being depleted faster than replenished. Her final comments centered not on the amount of water, but on clean drinking water. Is the fracking process a viable and intelligent use of our water resources? It is not!

Frac sand is the lead item in this horrendous process of hydraulic fracturing ... no one really wins except corporate interests.

The issue of banning frac sand mining is not, nor should be, an insurmountable task. We do not need this activity in our region. The science is there; the data is there. The question remains: Do we have the political will to make the responsible decision?
Wild River Studios opens on Main in St. Charles Wild River Studios in St. Charles was the site of last weeks Friday morning Chamber Coffee as the Chamber Ambassadors packed up the giant red scissors and hit the road for another ceremonial ribbon cutting....

WHS students selected to perform with OPUS Honor Choir Many students at Winterset schools were able to audition for the Iowa OPUS Honor Choir, which will perform at C.Y. Stephens Auditorium in Ames on Thursday, Nov. 17, at 4 p.m. The following Winterset students...

Winterset Stage presents Get Smart at the Iowa this week The Winterset Stage opens the curtain on their latest production, Get Smart, this Thursday evening. The cast of over two dozen local actors will give four performances of the play which is based on the...

2022 Harvest Gathering in Earlham The fourth annual Harvest Gathering Farm-to-Table Dinner served 129 guests on Sunday, Oct. 2, at Bricker Price Block in Earlham. The five-course meal was prepared by Proof Executive Chef Diego Rodriguez and his team, utilizing...
HORICON  Warm weather has arrived at Horicon Marsh, N7725 Highway 28, and a number of events will help people of all ages soak in the summer sun.

Upcoming events are listed below:

June 27, 7:30-9 a.m.Summer Bird Hike

Join bird club president Jeff Bahls in search for Horicon Marshs resident and nesting birds. Possible species include black tern, great blue heron, marsh wren, green heron, wood duck, oriole, common yellowthroat, and many more. Participants should gather in the upper lobby of the Horicon Marsh Education and Visitor Center.

June 28, 10-11 a.m.Wetland Exploration

Join DNR staff for wetland exploration and grab a net to explore the water inhabitants of Horicon Marsh. A giant water bug, damselfly larvae and tadpoles will all likely join the fun.

For more information regarding Horicon Marsh education programs contact Liz Herzmann, DNR wildlife conservation educator, at 387-7893.
WAUPUN  Waupun Police provided neighborhood notification about a convicted sex offender who will be living in the community.

According to Deputy Police Chief Scott Louden, officers went door to door Wednesday in about a three block radius of 327 S. Division St., to let residents know Timothy A. Falksen would be living at that location. Louden said they delivered a flyer and spoke to residents who were home.

According to the flyer Falksen served a prison sentence and is not wanted by police. He will be supervised by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections until 2018 and must register with the Wisconsin Sex Offender Registry.

The flyer said Falksen was convicted in Lake County, Illinois, in 2013 of aggravated criminal sexual abuse for assaulting a girl known to him from age 7 to age 12. Louden said Falksen is moving to Waupun because he has family in the community.

The flyer states, Sex offenders have always lived in our communities, but it was not until the Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Law was enacted that law enforcement was able to share the information with the community. Citizen abuse of this information to threaten, intimidate or harass registered sex offenders will not be tolerated.

Louden was part of the notification team and said the people he spoke with were grateful for the notification. He said the last such notification in Waupun was made in April 2013.

He said the goal of the Waupun Police Department is to keep the community safe and informed.

We know where all our sex offenders are (in the city), Louden said.

Anyone with questions may call the Waupun Police Department at 920-324-7911. The Wisconsin sex offender registry website is at http://offender.doc.state.wi.us/public.
On June 12, at 2 a.m. in Orlando, Florida, the JV Team struck on American soil. Within hours of the deaths of 49 people inside a gay nightclub, ISIS took credit for the attack that left another 53 people wounded. Our president blamed the gun.

Immediately President Barack Obama took to the national airways and called this an act of terror and an act of hate. He continued, So this is a sobering reminder that attacks on any American  regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation  is an attack on all of us and on the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country. And no act of hate or terror will ever change who we are or the values that make us Americans. He was right on message up until this point.

Obama continued by using this tragic moment to remind us all how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. Once again, this president has failed to keep America safe and wants to put the blame on the Second Amendment.

I would like to take this moment to remind the president that this is only the JV team he so famously diminished while distancing himself from the failed policies he, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, developed when it comes to national security. The JV team, ISIS, just scored against the Varsity team we call America.

The shooter was on the governments radar. He had close ties to a radical gang-leader who was known to assist his followers on how to obtain terrorism training. According to a report on www.FOXNews.com, a wiretap caught the gang-leader advising one follower to file fraudulent tax returns so he could obtain the money necessary to pay for travel to Mauritania to attend a terrorist training camp.

In the same article, the Washington Post was credited for reporting, The gunman was at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce with Imam Shafiq Rahman two days before the nightclub attack, according to The Washington Post. That mosque was frequented by American-born suicide bomber Monar abu Salha, who blew himself up in Syria in 2014, and the two knew each other, according to officials.

So here are the questions 102 victims and their families should be asking: During the federal background check to buy multiple guns this guy didnt ping in your system? No one thought to follow up on this guy before approving the sale? What is the point of a federal background check?

The system is rigged to keep the good guys in check while the bad guys work in the shadows. Despite this demand for continuing federal background checks, our government didnt bother to think a guy they had interviewed twice for having ties to known terrorists was someone this system should have caught?

When buying guns, millions of folks like you and I submit ourselves to federal background checks with the reasonable assumption the process will keep legal guns out of the hands of criminals. Weve even come to accept the fact that, on occasion, some people fall through the cracks. But terrorist affiliates? It seems this should have been a red flag.

In many ways, ISIS is a JV team. If the White House cannot provide the tools to protect Americans from these guys on American soil, what confidence should we have that they are capable of dealing with the threats of the big players like Iran, Syria, or even North Korea?

Our law enforcement officials most certainly dont mean for these things to happen, but the president has failed to give them the tools necessary to do the job right. He has failed to create an environment where it is even safe for cops to work.

We need to get serious in this war on terror by recognizing certain behaviors are suspect and certain suspects are potentially dangerous. Our technology systems should at least be proficient enough to put an ATF agent on a suspected terrorists front door steps before approving the sale of a gun to ask a few follow-up questions.

If the president wants to be serious, he needs to recognize our systems are yesterdays tools doing tomorrows work. We need technology that keeps up with evolving threats like this guy in Orlando. The gun is not the issue.
Evangeline Evey Johnson isnt an 8-year-old with ordinary goals, and shes on her way to California to prove it.

Evey, of Baraboo, is set to participate in the final round of the Braille Challenge Finals at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles on Friday and Saturday. Shes a self-taught piano player who wants to be a doctor, and shes proved herself to be an established competitor.

In February, she was a top-three finisher out of 99 contestants in a regional Braille Challenge held in Janesville, qualifying for this weekends national event.

Im not nervous because I know it will be fun, Evey said. I feel happy.

Braille Challenges are academic competitions for blind students who participate in reading comprehension, Braille speed and accuracy, proofreading, spelling and reading tactile charts and graphs. The 16th annual final round in Los Angeles involves top finishers in preliminary challenges held across the U.S. and Canada.

Evey has been blind since birth. She just finished second grade at John Muir Elementary School in Portage, where she has participated for three years in the visually-impaired program led by CESA 5 (Cooperative Educational Service Agency). Her mother, Kristin Johnson, called the program efficient and accessible  a program that has helped Evey establish an increasingly independent attitude.

This program, its really beneficial for her, said Johnson, who will travel to Los Angeles with Evey. Shes made a lot of progress in three years because of the people in the program.

The vision program housed at John Muir is bolstered by a staff that goes beyond what other schools do for students, Johnson said, taking the time to make most of Eveys homework tactile  and very quickly, too.

A lot of the things they do, they dont have time to plan for and is last-minute, Johnson said, noting vision students spend much of their time in traditional classroom settings at John Muir in addition to the one-on-one time they have in the vision room.

In other school districts I think she would still get services, but I dont know that they would be as frequent. Its just been great.

Eveys determination to get things done on her own stands out to Johnson and is why shes not surprised her daughter made the finals. She wants to do pretty much anything in life on her own, whether it be homework, things in school or even things at home. Its helped her get as far as she can  and her independence can be frustrating at times  but shes motivated to just know she can (do anything).

Shes made a lot of progress over the years because of that, and theres just a lot of things she gets her mind set on achieving  and then she does them.

Evey has been practicing piano for about eight months, Johnson said, a skill she picked up completely on her own. One day, Johnson said, she heard a recording of piano music and figured Evey was just listening to some music, which she often does. Evey, Johnson added, has been interested in music since she was 1.

That recording, though, was actually her.

It just blew me away, Johnson said. Nobody taught her to play it.

Evey has since memorized about eight songs, Johnson said.

Evey wants to be a doctor because of her favorite TV program  Doc McStuffins. Doc is a 6-year-old girl who fixes toys, her mother explained.

I watch it all the time, and that made me interested, Evey said.

Eveys trip to Los Angeles is sure to be memorable  its her first by plane since she was a baby, she said. Ive been on a plane, but this will be the first Ill remember.

Whats the young competitor looking forward to the most?

California, she said. California, and flying on the plane.  We get to stay an extra day so Mom can show me the ocean.
From tragedy to triumph

A confluence of happenstance, luck, skill and science allowed vet to get embryos from a beloved show Guernsey after having to euthanize her.
Newton-Blanchard Prize encourages creative writing across the disciplines

Two William & Mary students were recently recognized as the inaugural recipients of the universitys Newton-Blanchard Prize, which encourages creative writing by undergraduates across the disciplines.

Natasha King 16 received the non-fiction prize for her essay Connection is a Sea Urchin, and Alison Rodriguez 17 received the fiction award for her short story Girlhood. Each received $2,500.

The prizes were funded through an endowment created by Blake T. Newton III 64 and Belle Blanchard Newton. According to the proposal, the two annual awards are intended to be made to student writers from across the undergraduate spectrum who have curiosity, imagination, humor and a facility for clearly communicating their thoughts, discoveries and passions.

King, who majored in marketing and environmental science at William & Mary, said that her piece includes several topics but focuses overall on the fear of loss and the price of connection.

Through the different components  snorkeling, global warming, Siamese fighting fish, religion, coat pockets, the death of my grandparents  I was trying to explore my own personal fear of loss, and how it makes interpersonal connection and attachment difficult, as well as the idea of loss and losing things in general, King said.

Rodriguezs short story also includes themes related to interpersonal connections.

It's about a few young Hispanic women in Southern California, she said. I was more trying to explore the characters and their relationships than write a plot-based piece.

Rodriguez, who is majoring in English and film and media studies, was inspired by the S.E. Hinton novel The Outsiders, which she had initially read in middle school and read again this year.

When you're older I feel like it's a very different book, she said. There's a lot of subtext about how the group cares for each other, and I wanted to write something like that.

Both King and Rodriguez have long had an interest in writing and have taken advantage of opportunities at William & Mary to develop their skills.

W&M has given me so many amazing opportunities to practice and improve my writing, not only through contests like this one and the yearly Student Literary Awards, but also through classes, student literary publications and the Monroe research funding, said King, who also recently won the Virginia Outdoor Writers Associations college student essay contest.

Rodriguezs award-winning short story was born out of a creative writing class she took at the university in the spring  a class that she said was incredibly helpful in that it forced her to write and created the time for her to do so. She submitted Girlhood for the Newton-Blanchard Prize at the urging of the classs instructor, Visiting Professor of English M. Lee Alexander.

King said that Connection in a Sea Urchin came together bit by bit.

With creative nonfiction, I usually write on each disparate topic separately, and wind up with a lot of unconnected short pieces that I then move around and weave together, usually while gnashing my teeth in increasing frustration, in an effort to end up with something at least vaguely resembling a cohesive whole, she said. For this essay I decided to combine several ideas that I had been thinking about writing or rewriting for a long time.

Although King and Rodriguez took different paths to the creation of their works, they both found their efforts rewarded when they heard they had been selected for the prize.

I've had some recognition for my writing in the past, but never really submitted or won anything on this scale before, said Rodriguez. It was such a wonderful surprise. I'm living in Mexico City for the summer, and the Wi-Fi at my house is terrible, so I was running around the house with my laptop in one hand on the morning the Newton-Blanchard email arrived, trying to get it to load in my inbox. Then I called my parents  otherwise, I've tried to keep it on the down-low.

Getting feedback on writing is not always easy, said King, but being recognized through such awards as the Newton-Blanchard Prize is a confidence boost.

As I said [before], I have been fortunate enough to have a lot of opportunities at W&M to grow as a writer, and nearly all of my recent writing achievements have grown out of these opportunities, she said. So I was very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this new contest and to have my work recognized in such a way.




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Russia wins 'half' of compensation claimed in Belene lawsuit

16 June 2016

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The International Court of Arbitration has ruled in favour of Russia's Atomstroyexport (ASE) over its claim for compensation after Bulgaria cancelled the Belene nuclear power plant it had been contracted to build. The Bulgarian Energy Ministry has stressed however that the Court ordered the payment of half of the total sum the Rosatom subsidiary had sought to receive.

Bulgaria's National Electricity Company (NEK) awarded ASE the contract to build two 1000 MWe reactors at Belene, on the Danube River near the Romanian border, in 2006. The Bulgarian government scrapped the project in 2012 amid difficulties in attracting investors to the $10.5 billion project.

In a statement today, Bulgarian Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova said the Court had "only" ruled that ASE be compensated for the cost of equipment it had produced for the plant. All other claims, including damages and lost profits for related expenses incurred outside its contract with NEK, had been ignored, the minister said.

ASE's had claimed a total of 1.2 billion ($1.34 billion), but the Court has ordered the payment of "nearly half that", Petkova said, adding that NEK had learned of the Court's decision by email late yesterday.

But, citing a source at Rosatom, Nuclear.Ru reported that the Court had "satisfied the main requirements of JSC Atomstroyexport to pay for work performed and the equipment ordered, as well as compensation for interest and legal costs, including the attorneys' fees of Sidley Austin LLP". Non-payment will incur a penalty of 167,000 per day, the source reportedly said.

The Belene saga dates back to 2005, when the Bulgarian government approved construction of the plant and in October the following year, NEK chose ASE over a Skoda-led consortium to build the plant comprising two 1060 MWe capacity third-generation VVER-1000 (AES-92) units. ASE led a consortium including Areva NP, Siemens and Bulgarian enterprises in the project. The contract was signed in January 2008.

Russia offered a loan to finance construction activities until a strategic investor was found, but this offer was rejected by the Bulgarian government in 2010. In November that year, NEK signed a memorandum of understanding with Rosatom to establish a new project company - Belene Power Company - with initially 51% being held by NEK. For its part, Rosatom was to endeavour to arrange financing for the project, attract other investors, and facilitate ASE achieving commissioning of the reactors by 2016 and 2017.

The non-binding agreement called for Belene Power Company to be established before April 2011 and for construction to resume before October 2011. However, there remained several issues to be resolved, notably the cost of the project.

In March 2011 the government said equipment being built for Belene might be installed alongside similar units at Kozloduy instead. In July that year ASE took NEK to court for non-payment of $58 million for equipment supplied. In September, they signed a supplement to their agreement on the construction of the Belene plant, extending it until the end of March 2012. While NEK stalled as it sought Western investment funding, ASE said that work on the foundation pit for the first reactor at Belene had been completed and other preparatory infrastructure was in place.

In March 2012 the government said that it would pay for one set of VVER-1000 hardware which had already been manufactured and install it at Kozloduy as an AES-92 unit. This appeared to amount to about 500 million. However, ASE claimed a further 500 million in damages for the aborted project.

In February 2013, after the resignation of the Bulgarian prime minister and cabinet, parliament confirmed that the project would be abandoned in favour of building a new unit at Kozloduy. However late in 2014, following an election, the matter was again under consideration.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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Sad woman (illustration)

By: Wayne Morin

Womenas rights groups are angry after a woman in Qatar, who was raped, has been ordered to pay a fine and received a suspended prison sentence.

The 22-year-old woman from Holland, had her drink spiked at a hotel in Doha.

When she woke up, she realized that she had been raped in an apartment. The rapist claimed that the sexual encounter was consensual.

He was sentenced to 100 lashes for having sex outside marriage and another 40 lashes for drinking alcohol without a license.

The woman was arrested immediately after filing a complaint with the police. She told police that she was in the country on vacation.

She went with a friend for drinks at a hotel, where the sale of alcohol is legal.

She was dancing, but when she returned to the table and took a sip from her drink, she realized that someone had added something to her glass.

The woman was not feeling well, and later woke up alone in an apartment. The woman was ordered to pay a fine of $800 for having sex outside marriage.
The restaurant owners

By: Chan Yuan

(Scroll down for video) Two hard-working restaurant owners were happy to see that their satisfied customer gave a large tip to their employee.

The waiter was also overjoyed over the $1,088 tip on the $60 order.

The waiter said that he heard stories of customers leaving large tips but never $1,088. However, his joy did not last long, as the customer returned to the restaurant the next day, and asked for his money back.

Bee Anantatho and her husband Surachai Surabotsopon opened Thailicious, a restaurant in Edgewater, Colorado, a few years ago, and they have a lot of satisfied customers.

Many customers give nice tips, but when Anantatho saw the big tip, she told the waiter to hold on to it in case the customer returns.

She was right, as the customer returned and asked the owners for his money. He explained that he was drunk the night before and when he woke up in the morning, his wallet was empty.

Anantatho and Surabotsopon explained to the customer that he placed his money in the check and he left. The waiter found the check while clearing the table.

The customer apologized for his actions, and the money was returned to him. The customer left a $100 bill, $60 for his food and $40 for tip.
Bullets (illustration)

By: Wayne Morin

An elderly couple was found dead in their home in Austria.

Police in Vienna, said that the elderly couple was found dead in their apartment in an apparent suicide.

The elderly couple, both of whom suffered from cancer, had left a suicide note on their front door, explaining that they wanted to end their lives.

The note was discovered by a neighbor who called the police.

The married couple, who were only identified as a 74-year-old man and a 78-year-old woman, were found dead inside the home.

The couple both died from gunshot wounds. The exact time of death is still unclear, police said.

aIn the note, both explained that due to their difficult medical conditions, they wanted to end their lives,a police spokesperson Roman Hahslinger said.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  Alaska regulators were applauded Thursday as they approved the first licenses for legal marijuana growing and testing facilities _ another milestone for the fledgling industry.

Priority was being given to growing and testing operations to ensure that retail stores will have legal product to sell. The first retail licenses are expected to be issued later this year.

Thirty applications were on the agenda Thursday at a meeting of the Marijuana Control Board in Anchorage. Two were for testing facilities. The rest were for grow operations.

The first application approved c...
In these two conceptual renderings for Wrangell's Institute site, options are given for how to allocate space at the 134-acre property between residential, educational, and healthcare interests. At right, Concept 2 garnered a slight edge among attendees to Monday's meeting. However, due to the lay of the land and existing timber roads, it may be the most difficult to implement.

The planning team for future development at Wrangell's former Institute site returned this week for a second round of public discussions.

At a presentation Monday night, information gleaned from previous sessions in March had been narrowed down into three different concepts.

Project lead Chris Mertl of Corvus Design was joined by architect James Bibb of NorthWind Architects and analyst Meilani Schijvens of Rain Coast Data. A surveyor with R&M Engineering joined them the following day for open door design sessions with city staff and members of the public.

Mertl prefaced Monday's presentation with his condolences for Greg Scheff and Tom Siekawitch, two R&M employees who had previously been working on the Institute project team. The two were among those killed in a plane crash on April 8 on Admiralty Island.

"It was a huge blow to the community, it was a huge blow to our team," Mertl said.

Since the March meetings, the team had pared down seven concepts put together by Scheff into three, which reflected input from the public. All three partitioned the 134-acre property into multiple uses, allowing for between 50 and 60 single family residential lots, connecting greenspace, different iterations of multifamily housing and assisted living arrangements, and some small retail options.

"We want a self-supportive, standalone community," Mertl explained, due to the site's relative distance from town. Just south from Shoemaker Bay Harbor along Zimovia Highway, the property is about five miles outside of town, hemmed in by Mental Health Trust lands to the south and east and Rainbow Falls trail to the north. It is hoped that residential developments there would compliment potential industrial development further down the highway at the Silver Bay Logging Company mill site.

Attendees to Monday's meeting gave recommendations on the site plans, and the development team met with city staff and other parties through Wednesday to develop a single model. A new facet to the Institute plans since they were first conceived was the inclusion of a site for Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program.

ANSEP founder Herb Schroeder was on hand to introduce the program, along with two associates video-conferring from Anchorage. The program began 21 years ago, and was developed to fill a need Schroeder perceived to train up engineers from among the Alaska Native population. The idea developed into a scholarship program through the university system at first, though Schroeder acknowledged there were negative attitudes to overcome.

"But we pushed forward and kept working," he said.

ANSEP started with middle schoolers, focusing on preparing rural, primarily Native students for engineering positions. It has since encompassed summer programs for high schoolers and college students, directing them toward mathematical and scientific fields. The program now has 67 organizational partners and operates on a $3,000,000 annual budget. It has around 2,000 students engaged statewide, from middle school through the postgraduate level.

The wider program has now reached its capacity, with more applicants than it can take on. Schroeder believes the next step is a residential campus, open to any student in the state, with an emphasis on rural youth. The campus he is proposing would accommodate 400 to 450 high school students year-round, in an accelerated learning environment.

The pace of the program could shave a year or more off from high school, with the college credits being earned in the meantime likewise shaving a year from undergraduate studies. Schroeder estimated that timeline could save the state and families $5.9 million for 400 students, while putting young professionals into the workforce more quickly.

"In our experience so far these kids are more than ready in three years," said Schroeder. From eighth grade onward, students in ANSEP are exposed to a college environment, which he said better prepares students for that transition than Alaska's current public school system.

If successful, he expressed confidence the residential model could be replicated elsewhere, raising the bar for secondary education in the state and benefitting college-bound students.

"The school here is like the tip of the spear," said Schroeder. "Once we do it then everybody's going to want to do this."

If built in Wrangell, the school would become a part of its public school district, managed by its board and funded through its individual student allocation from the state. The campus could require around 50 faculty and staff to manage, with some opportunities for local employment. As ANSEP would like to establish the campus as soon as possible, its inclusion in the Institute redevelopment could also help spur other construction.

Submitted Photo Master Plan 3 of those presented on Monday would see a more spread out ANSEP campus along the highway, with the existing creek dividing the Institute property's residential neighborhoods. A walking trail and street would connect the two to the east.

An upper threshold for construction costs of the envisioned facility could run up to $50 million, according to Schroeder. From this point, he intends to seek out funding for the proposal through philanthropic sources, but an investment from Wrangell in terms of utility connections and land may be necessary to get the project off the ground.

ANSEP has looked at other sites in the state for a prospective campus, but in terms of size and availability, Schroeder said Wrangell's Institute "is the best one by far."

"What we want to know is if Wrangell wants the school here," he said.

"It's critical that we get input on that, because we have to set land aside," added Carol Rushmore, Wrangell's economic development coordinator.

Members of the community are invited to follow along with the planning process' progress online and submit comments at wrangellinstitute.blogspot.com, or check out its Facebook page.
The European Union (EU) is abandoning all pretense of human rights restraints in its refugee policy. A strategy paper published last week by the EU Commission outlined migration partnerships that will compensate nine states in Africa and the Middle East, both transit countries and countries of origin, for their cooperation in deterring refugees.

The goal of the agreementsdescribed as compactsis the combatting of causes of flight and a reduction of irregular migration to Europe, EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos declared in an interview with the German daily Die Welt. In fact, what is involved is a programme with which the refugees themselves are to be combatted. The EUs reactionary partners are to seal off escape routes, detain refugees and send them back to their countries of origin.

The list of countries with which agreements are to be concluded alone makes clear that the EU has no qualms about with whom it cooperates. In the interview, Avramopoulos named Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Niger, Mali, Ethiopia, Senegal, Nigeria and Libya. In addition, there is the Better Migration Management programme, with which the EU intends to provide technical assistance to the dictatorial regimes in Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea to combat refugees. These are the most important transit states and countries of origin for refugees in Africa.

The agreement the EU plans to conclude with each of these states is aimed at convincing each government to take back illegal migrants. In addition, we want to ensure that these countries deal firmly with people smugglers and effectively secure their borders, Avramopoulos told Die Welt. Describing refugees as illegal migrants has long since become accepted practice in the EU, so as to deny the desperate people fleeing war, poverty and persecution any right to protection in Europe.

To secure cooperation in combatting refugees, the EU intends to top up the financial assistance available to those states designated part of migration partnerships. The prospects of improved trading relations and relaxed visa requirements have also been raised. The EU Commission intends to make almost 8 billion [$US 9.01 billion] available for the program by 2020.

With utter cynicism, the chairman of the social democratic fraction in the European Parliament, Italian politician Gianni Pitella, praised the EU Commission. Africa could not be permitted to become a cage which refugees cannot leave and the EU member states had to make a financial contribution. Yet the EU Commissions plan is precisely to keep refugees stuck in Africa at any price. The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, spoke of a Copernican shift in the EUs policy.

It is breathtaking how savagely the EU is trampling its oft-repeated values and principles under foot. With the migration partnerships, the EU is effectively making clear that it no longer has any intention of being bound by international law as contained in the Geneva Convention on Refugees.

We want to try and bring order to the flows of refugees, said Frans Timmermans, EU Commission vice president, repeating a formulation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She set the goal in April of bringing order and managing the route from Libya to Italy as we have done in Turkey.

The EUs dirty deal with Turkey already systematically violated the rights of refugees. They are detained in Greece and even children are held under catastrophic conditions in internment camps. Turkey permits its forces to shoot at refugees on the Syrian border and ruthlessly deports them to their countries of origin.

Concluding such a deal with Libya, as the EU Commission proposes, would be a further crime. Since the US-led NATO intervention in 2011 to topple the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, the country has been dominated by a bloody civil war that has thrown it into economic and political chaos. There are three governments in the country, none of which controls substantial territory. A unity government recently imposed by the imperialist powers is to help, above all, to prepare a further military intervention by the US and its European allies.

Amnesty International recently published a report documenting arbitrary violence against refugees by the Libyan coast guard. Refugees intercepted at sea were beaten and shot, before being dragged to Libyan detention centres where they were abused and tortured. Despite this, the EU intends to deport refugees there.

Another partner of the EU is the Sudanese regime of Omar al-Bashir, who is sought by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for war crimes. Nonetheless, his regime is to receive vehicles, cameras, an aeroplane and additional technical equipment so as to strengthen the border infrastructure at the countrys 17 border crossings, as an EU Commission document states.

The German government has taken the lead in working out the deal with Sudan. Although Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Gerd Muller (Christian Social Union) rejected a report by the Guardian that the German government was financing the strengthening of the Sudanese security forces, he neglected to mention that the state-sponsored Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) has already assumed this role.

In Eritrea, the EU plans to expand the judicial system. The military regime of Isaias Afewerki is a brutal dictatorship and has been charged by the United Nations with crimes against humanity. A UN report came to the conclusion that crimes against human rights had been systematically practiced in the country for 25 years. Oppositional figures are arbitrarily detained, tortured and killed.

Things are little better in South Sudan, Ethiopia or Somalia, which the EU also hopes to secure as border guards to carry out the dirty work in its ruthless policy of sealing off its borders.

The other side of the EUs brutal external refugee policy is the further erosion of rights for refugees within Europe itself. The European Council for Justice and Internal Affairs issued a demand to the Greek government, which virtually coincided with the presentation of the African migration partnerships, to recognise Turkey as a secure third country and deport more Syrians there.

Austrian Minister for the Interior Wolfgang Sobotka also gave his backing to a proposal by Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz (both members of the right-wing Austrian Peoples Party) to intercept refugees in the Mediterranean and either deport them immediately or detain them on Mediterranean islands. He mentioned Australia as an example, which interns refugees on Pacific islands.

On Sunday, Bulgarias Foreign Minister Daniel Mitov told the Austrian newspaper Die Presse that the Geneva Convention on the status of refugees was obsolete. He claimed that the document was written basically for people escaping communist regimes. It was not about masses of people. This is a brazen lie. Mitov neglects to mention that the convention adopted in 1951 was primarily a response to the crimes of National Socialism. Hundreds of thousands of people, above all Jews, fled the Hitler regime between 1933 and 1945. With no country prepared to take them in, they were left in the murderous hands of the Nazis.

Today in Europe tens of thousands of refugees are once again kept in detention and denounced as illegal migrants or economic refugees. The human rights commissioner of the United Nations, Zeid Raad Al-Hussein, recently sharply criticized the EUs policy. The number of detentions are increasing alarminglywith even unaccompanied minors being imprisoned, declared al-Hussein at the opening of a new session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The hot spots set up by the EU were, essentially huge incarceration facilities. Al-Hussein called on the EU to monitor the detention of migrants statistically: I fear the numbers will be very shocking.
Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquans recent high-profile trip to Bangladesh further highlights the intensifying geo-political rivalry in the region.

Chang, who was accompanied by a 39-member delegation, met with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, President Abdul Hamid and senior defence officials, including the Bangladesh army, navy and air force chiefs.

The May 2830 visit followed indications that the Bangladesh government might be accommodating to economic and political pressures from India and Japan. In line with Washingtons pivot to Asia, India and Japan are attempting to undermine Chinese influence throughout the region.

China, however, remains Bangladeshs main supplier of military hardware, its largest trading partner and continues to make large investments in the country.

During his meeting with Prime Minister Hasina, Chang said China wanted to expand strategic relations with Bangladesh, including deepening bilateral cooperation and increasing military exchanges and personnel training in new equipment technology.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, since 2010 Beijing has supplied Dhaka with five maritime patrol vessels, two corvettes, 44 tanks, and 16 fighter jets, as well as surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles. Dhaka has also ordered new Ming-class submarines that will join the Bangladesh fleet later this year.

Hasina told Chang that Bangladesh wanted to strengthen its cooperation with China, especially in the fields of economy, agriculture, and infrastructure. She also said that her government would continue working with Beijing on the Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM) Economic Corridor, which aims to increase trade and economic activity in the region.

Dhaka is highly dependent on Chinese investment. China currently has a $705 million contract to build a two-lane under-water tunnel connecting Chittagong port and Karnaphuli River Valley. In early May, the Hasina government also approved the $4.47 billion Padma Bridge rail link project. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which was initiated by Beijing, recently granted a $66 million loan for two power distribution projects and the improvement of transmission lines in Bangladesh.

Chinese investors are also keen to shift labour-intensive industries, such as garment manufacturing, to Bangladesh in order to exploit its cheap labour. Bangladeshi wagesin manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectorsare less than one-fourth of those in China and half of that in India.

Under pressure from the US, India and Japan are attempting to undercut the relations between Beijing and Dhaka.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Bangladesh last year and signed a number of significant agreements, including a long delayed Land Boundary Agreement demarcating borders and river water sharing between the two countries. Modi also promised to provide $2 billion in loans.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited Bangladesh Prime minister Hasina to attend last months outreach meeting during the G7 Ise-Shima Summit in Japan. Abe promised Bangladesh Prime Minister Hasina that he would release $1.5 billion this year from a $5 billion loan agreed during his visit to Bangladesh in 2014.

Bangladesh industry has grown rapidly over the past decade but the country does not have a deep-water port. Recent years has seen intense competition between India, Japan and China for various seaport contracts in the country. A June 7 article in the Diplomat commented that Bangladesh lacked a deep-water seaport not because of a lack of options, a deficit of investors but because many powerful players are pushing for too many contending plans 

Bangladesh had previously agreed to assign the Sonadia seaport development to China. However, Hasina did not sign the scheduled agreement when she visited Beijing in 2014 because of pressure from the US and India.

One of the reasons given by the government was that Japan would build a new port in Matabari, a few kilometres away from Sonadia. Beijing said it wanted to develop another port at Payra. Last month Bangladesh, signed a contract with a Dutch company to build the Payra port.

In 2005, an internal report produced for the then US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said that Chinas plans for Chittagong harbour were part of Beijings string of pearls that also involved a Chinese-built port at Gwadar in Pakistan, and facilities in Myanmar, Cambodia and the South China Sea.

New Delhi, as a strategic partner of Washington and rival of Beijing, now claims that China is encircling India under its string of pearl strategy. And in line with Washingtons pivot against China, Japan is backing US provocations in the South China Sea and supporting the territorial claims of Vietnam and Philippines.

Under conditions of sharpening geo-political tensions created by Washingtons pivot, Dhakas ability to manoeuvre between the major powers to advance its interests is becoming increasingly limited.

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Indian power deal with Bangladesh highlights geo-political rivalry

[5 March 2016]
Canadas ruling elite has spoken out firmly in favour of the proposed deployment of a Canadian Armed Forces battalion to the Baltic states and Eastern Europe as part of a 4,000-strong US-led NATO force aimed at intimidating and encircling Russia.

NATO confirmed Tuesday that it is going ahead with the new force. Its creation marks a new high point in the sustained and ever-widening campaign of pressure and provocations aimed at Moscow that began with the US-backed, fascist-led coup in Ukraine in February 2014. It will place NATO soldiers directly on Russias borders, increasing the danger of an all-out war between nuclear-armed powers.

British Defence Minister Michael Fallon made no bones about the purpose of the deployment, stating, That should send a very strong signal of our determination to defend the Baltic states and Poland in the face of continued Russian aggression.

The presentation of the new force as defensive is a fraud. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991, the US, with Canadas strong support, has systematically expanded NATO to include all the former members of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltic states in violation of guarantees given to Moscow.

The new force will be permanent in all but name (replacement battalions will be rotated in on a regular basis), violating yet another pledge to Moscowthat NATO forces would not be permanently deployed to countries that border Russia.

The new deployment is to be backed up by the alliances highly mobile rapid reaction force, made up of 40,000 soldiers from NATO member states.

Announcement of the new force came as more than 30,000 troops were participating in Poland in NATOs largest war games since the Cold War, with Russia the explicit target. 220 Canadian troops, who have been deployed in Poland since 2014, are involved in Anakonda-16. It also came just three weeks ahead of a NATO summit in Warsaw at which the US-led alliance will further ratchet up tensions with Russia.

Britain, the United States and Germany, arguably NATOs most powerful members, have already announced their intention to make available 1,000 troops each for the new force, leaving a fourth core contributor to be found.

Reports indicate that Canadas participation has been discussed for several months, and was raised directly with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by Polish President Andrzej Duda during an official visit to Ottawa in May. According to the Ottawa Citizen, the Trudeau Liberal government will make its decision on Canadas role in the new force prior to the NATO summit.

Although the potential location of the Canadian troops is yet to be confirmed, reports from diplomats have suggested they could be sent to either Latvia or Poland.

NATO is also urging Canada to retain a war ship in Europe permanently, and to continue to contribute CF-18 fighter jets to air patrols over the Baltic Sea. These patrols have repeatedly resulted in close encounters with Russian warplanes. Canada previously deployed a frigate to the Black Sea, which also participated in NATOs mission in the Aegean Sea aimed at preventing refugees from reaching Greece.

Canada has been a critical part of the US-led anti-Russian offensive in Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe. It was a prominent funder of so-called opposition groups in Ukraine prior to the 2014 coup, and has been one of the far-right Kiev governments staunchest allies ever since. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper made global headlines when he provocatively told Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in 2014 to get out of Ukraine.

This did not change with the election of a Liberal government in Ottawa last year. Foreign Minister Stephane Dion has pledged to implement a free trade deal with Ukraine signed by the previous Conservative government, and Canada continues to have 200 soldiers in western Ukraine training members of the armed forces and National Guard for their civil war against pro-Russian separatists.

A recently-released analysis by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canadas premier spy agency, argued for Ottawa to take urgent steps against Moscow, which it claimed is mobilizing for war. Russia is not modernizing its military primarily to extend its capacity to pursue hybrid warfare, wrote CSIS. It is modernizing conventional military capability on a large scale; the state is mobilizing for war.

While the Putin regimes reactionary nationalist and militarist policies offer nothing progressive, the portrayal of Russia as the main aggressor turns reality on its head. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the US-led NATO alliance has pursued an offensive policy of isolating and encircling Russia.

The annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin followed the direct intervention by Berlin and Washington to bring about a similar development in Ukraine with the installation of a pro-western puppet regime in Kiev.

The call for Canada to deploy additional forces to Eastern Europe comes as the ruling elite is mounting a sustained campaign for a major hike in military spending and the purchase of a vast array of new ships and planes so as to enable Canadian imperialism to assert its interests more aggressively around the world.

The Liberal governments Defence Policy Review is being used to argue for increasing military spending from its present level of 1 percent of GDP closer to the 2 percent advocated by NATO, as well as to press for the purchase of armed drones and Canadas participation in the USs highly destabilizing anti-ballistic missile shield.

The NATO deployment is only one of a series of new overseas Canadian military interventions under discussion. According to press reports, the Liberal government is also considering: deploying CAF troops to Libya, as part of an imperialist-led operation to prevent refugees from reaching Europe; expanding a peacekeeping force deployed in Egypt because of increased activity by Islamist groups; participating in the French-led military intervention in Mali; and assuming the lead role in security operations in Haiti, where Canada intervened in alliance with the US in 2004 to overthrow the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

As soon as Canadas potential involvement in the new NATO force became public, the media went into overdrive to proclaim its full support. Canadas newspaper of record, the Globe and Mail, published an editorial June 9 titled Canada should be in the new NATO force in Europe.

The editorial cited the Liberals election platform, which called for an agile, responsive and well-equipped military force able to offer international deterrence and combat capability. It concluded, Canadas purpose in joining this long-term NATO mission would be to show our seriousness in standing with our allies, before citing the example of the thousands of Canadian troops deployed to Europe during the Cold War.

Canadas ruling elite is determined to militarily confront Russia not only in Eastern Europe, but also in other parts of the world. Earlier this year, the Liberals ordered a tripling of CAF Special Forces in Iraq and an increase in military personnel elsewhere in the Middle East in support of the US-led war for regime change in Syria. The removal of Bashar al-Assad is seen as essential to strengthening Washingtons geopolitical position in the worlds most important oil-producing region at the expense of its chief rivals: Russia and China.

Canada is also increasingly concerned about Russian activity in the Arctic, where Ottawa is determined to assert its claim to much of the resource riches of the Arctic Ocean under conditions where the region is opening up due to global warming.

In this context, sharp disputes have emerged between the Liberal government and leading sections of the military over plans to purchase a new fleet of fighter jets. The press reported last week that the government has decided to buy Boeing Super Hornet fighters as a temporary replacement for the current CF-18s, whose lifetime expires within the next decade.

Purchase of the Super Hornets would effectively scuttle any chance the government would follow through on the commitment of the previous Conservative government to purchase a fleet of F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighters from the US giant Lockheed Martin.

Matthew Fisher, the National Posts veteran foreign affairs correspondent who is well connected with the military, penned an angry denunciation of the Liberals plans. Purchasing the Super Hornets and forsaking the F-35 would mean that Canada will end up surrendering sovereignty of its Arctic air space to the United States Air Force in about 10 years, wrote Fisher. He claimed this would take place because, as Moscow deploys its own stealth fighters to bases in Russias north, the US Air Force would be compelled to take control of defending the approaches to the North American continent since Canada would have no stealth planes.

Fisher raged that the governments plan to buy Super Hornets had caused extreme disappointment and disbelief across the upper reaches of Canadas military community.

Fisher concluded his piece by making clear that the question of purchasing the F-35 was bound up with NATO plans to intensify the alliances aggressive moves against Russia.

Citing Denmarks recent decision to purchase the aircraft and the likelihood that Finland would follow suit, Fisher declared, If Finland follows Denmarks lead, it will become the 12th western-oriented air force in a row to choose the F-35 over the Super Hornet, with Canada the only exception.  Is everyone who made those decisionsincluding those confronting similar security challenges in the Arcticstupid? What is it that makes Canada so unique that it feels it can ignore the collective wisdom of all its allies and friends?
The past week has seen a sharp turn in the campaign for the July 2 double dissolution election in Australia, reflecting fears in the media and corporate establishment that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls decision to call the rare election for all members of both houses of parliament has backfired.

When Turnbull announced the election five weeks ago, it was a bid to break through a political impasse produced by the failure of successive governments, both Liberal-National and Labor, to fully impose an agenda of sweeping cuts to social spending and working conditions amid a deepening economic breakdown in Australia and internationally.

It was not just that key budget cuts had been stalled in the Senate since 2014, due to the election in 2013 of a range of independent and fourth party candidates who exploited the hostility toward the two major parties by professing to oppose key austerity measures. The underlying political crisis was reflected in the fact that not one prime minister had been able to see out a full term of office since 2007: the eve of the global financial crisis.

Now, however, there is the distinct possibility that the election could produce an even worse outcome for the financial elite. Not only could the government fail to secure control of the Senate but the result could be another hung parliament in the lower house, with no party able to obtain a majority, as occurred from 2010 to 2013, when the Greens propped up a minority Labor government.

Five weeks ago, Turnbulls political gamble was dressed up in rhetoric of promising exciting times and jobs and growth. Equally cynically, Labor sought to appease the anger and alienation among masses of people over deteriorating living standards and widening social inequality by pledging to deliver fairness that would put people first.

Two factors have combined to shatter these lies. One is the rapid deterioration in the economic situation confronting Australian capitalism and the other is the growing public disaffection and hostility towards the entire political establishment. Over the past week, the posturing by the two traditional ruling parties has been replaced by de facto bipartisan unity on a program of severe cuts to healthcare, family payments, pensions, education and social infrastructure.

First, in response to incessant demands by big business and the corporate media, Labor leader Bill Shorten began unveiling a series of policy reversals, abandoning Labors earlier populist claims to oppose the governments billionaires budget cuts to social spending. By one estimate, Labor has so far adopted $33 billion worth of cutbacks proposed over the next four years, plus the governments devastating $50 billion cut to hospital funding over the coming decadeall of which Labor had professed to strongly oppose when the election campaign began.

Then, last Sunday, Turnbull declared a so-called captains pick to direct his Liberal Party to allocate its second-vote preferences to Labor. He insisted this was essential in the national interest to avoid a return to unstable, chaotic minority Labor, Greens, independent government. Turnbull overruled leading Liberals who urged allocating preferences to the Greens, which were seeking to gain several inner-city seats at Labors expense on the back of Liberal preferences.

Clearly, the national interest, dictated by the concerns in the corporate elite, required bolstering the position of the Labor Party, in the hope that it could form a majority government in the event of the Coalition losing office.

Some inkling of the anxiety in ruling circles was revealed yesterday when Fairfax Media reported focus group research showing that voters are disgruntled with their lot, lack confidence in the future, have become increasingly disengaged with politics and lack belief in the political class. The opinions of both Turnbull and Shorten were negative, but support for Turnbull had fallen off a cliff since he deposed Tony Abbott as prime minister last September.

Both major parties are seeking to impose the dictates of the financial markets, which are driven by the slump overtaking global and Australian capitalism. Since the mining boom began to collapse in 2014, tens of thousands of full-time jobs have been destroyed and investment has plummeted, making many more job losses inevitable in the months ahead. With many parts of the country already in recession, a housing bubble in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane shows signs of bursting.

The most common refrain in the corporate media has become that Australia will lose its AAA credit rating, with dire consequences, because of its exposure to Chinas slowdown and depressed export prices, unless drastic action is taken to slash the almost $40 billion annual budget deficit.

The Australian Financial Review editorial on Tuesday welcomed the potentially-sensible political convergence but made it clear that the next government must impose even more savage measures, regardless of popular opposition. Whoever wins the July 2 election will need to do much more to both further deflate public expectations of what governments can deliver, it declared.

The air of economic and political volatility was underscored by feature article in the financial newspaper last weekend, under the headline: Warning! Danger ahead. It warned of an uncertain world out there threatening smug political forecasts and also threatening to burst the current Australian election campaign bubble.

The article listed shocks that could ricochet here and erode Australias financial security. They included a fiscal debt-generated threat to Australias AAA credit rating, Chinas precarious pump-priming balancing act, instability generated by the Brexit referendum in Britain and the US presidential election, the spectre of war in Eastern Europe and the global refugee crisis.

The depth of the economic crisis makes clear that the next government, whether led by Liberal or Labor, will be compelled to make far deeper inroads into public spending than are being discussed in the election campaign.

Behind the backs of the population, the Coalition and Labor are also both committed to participating in more disastrous US-led wars, particularly against China. While both parties agree on making the working class pay for the economic breakdown, declaring there is no money for essential social programs, they are equally united in allocating almost half a trillion dollars over the next decade to the military, including $195 billion for new submarines, ships and war planes.

This military expansion is integral to Washingtons pivot to Asia to confront China in order to assert unchallenged hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region. But these preparations are being kept from view, as much as possible, until after the election, for fear of arousing mass public opposition to war.

In response to the intensifying political crisis, the Greens, which currently constitute the third party of the political establishment, are seeking to channel the widespread discontent back into the parliamentary framework of capitalist politics by professing to oppose the most egregious cuts to social programs. In reality, they stand ready to again support a Labor-led government, as they did from 2010 to 2013, or to go further by joining a coalition government with Labor that would seek to implement the cuts pledged by Shorten.

While Greens leader Richard Di Natale voiced strong disappointment with the cuts embraced by Labor, he reiterated the Greens willingness to negotiate with either major party after the election to ensure that a stable government could be formed. Di Natale also accused the two main parties of striking a nasty deal on voting preferences to try to retain their political duopoly, but admitted that the Greens had sought similar vote-swapping agreements with the Liberals, as well as Labor.

Given the volatile political situation, further shocks and turns are quite possible before July 2still more than two weeks away. But it is already clear that whichever parties form the next government, it will confront workers and young people with social devastation, deepening attacks on basic democratic rights and war.

The only party committed to opposing this offensive and speaking for the independent interests of the working people is the Socialist Equality Party. Its candidates are advancing a genuine socialist and internationalist program to unite the working class in Australia, across the Asia-Pacific region and globally, against the source of war, social inequality and dictatorshipthe capitalist profit system itself.



To contact the SEP and get involved, visit our website or Facebook page.

Authorised by James Cogan, Shop 6, 212 South Terrace, Bankstown Plaza, Bankstown, NSW 2200.
Students at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) defied a court order and the university administration on Tuesday by refusing to return to classes. A group of 40 students circulated around the Waigani campus after daubing themselves with red earth in traditional haus krai mourning for two wounded colleagues still in hospital. The students have declared they will not return to classes until they have recovered.

Heavily-armed police opened fire on hundreds of protesting students with live ammunition and tear gas on June 8, injuring nearly 40, several critically. The students were preparing to march to the parliament to support plans by the official opposition to move a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Peter ONeill over corruption allegations.

The crackdown followed weeks of student protests, including widespread class boycotts, at UPNG and other tertiary institutions. The university, which has nearly 12,000 students, has been closed since police occupied the campus on May 17 to suppress the widening protest movement.

In the wake of the shootings, protests have been banned. A court order was obtained by the UPNG administration stopping the students from acting in any way contrary to their enrolment. Armed police remain encamped at the universitys two campuses in Port Moresby. The vice-chancellor, Professor Albert Mellam, declared last Friday that the first semester would resume this week.

Australian ABC Radio reported that while lecturers had been instructed to report for classes on Tuesday, no students turned up. Only a handful could be seen on the campus grounds. Students said they felt particularly aggrieved that there had been no explanation by the university regarding its response to the shootings or concerns expressed over student welfare.

The National Court yesterday blocked legal moves by the Student Representative Council (SRC) to have the police removed from the university. Separate applications to stop police arresting SRC president Kenneth Rapa, who remains at large, and to declare the police shooting as unconstitutional, were also dismissed.

The protests, now into their sixth week, are calling for ONeill to resign and face an investigation into allegations over payments worth $US22 million to a legal firm for unauthorised invoices. Behind the longstanding corruption scandal, however, lies a worsening social crisis produced by the precipitous collapse of global commodity prices. The PNG economy has gone into sharp reverse in the last twelve months. Severe government spending cutbacks have seen public servants not being paid and massive reductions to the health and education budgets.

Outrage over the shootings has deepened over the past week and is spreading throughout the countrys student populations, including into secondary schools. Discontent and tension has become particularly acute in the Highlands region.

Clashes between groups of students erupted at the University of Technology in Lae (Unitech) on Monday and the University of Goroka in the Eastern Highlands on Tuesday. At the Lae campus a fight broke out following a forum hosted jointly by the Unitech administration and SRC in an attempt to end the boycott of classes. While acknowledging that the dynamic has changed so much following the shootings, Vice Chancellor Albert Schram appealed to students to return to class to salvage the academic year.

The National reported that students determined to maintain the boycott were angered when Unitech SRC president David Kelma revealed the SRC had signed an agreement committing students to an immediate return to class. Kelma urged students to respect the leaders they had voted into office. As university students we must behave as elites and intellectuals, he said. We must behave properly and paint a good picture of ourselves to the public and potential future employers who want to employ us. Everything done at Unitech, Kelma added must be done for the good of the nation.

Police were called into the Goroka campus on Tuesday, ostensibly to control a group of more than 50 students who were fighting over whether to continue their boycott. Radio New Zealand reported a scene of chaos when simmering tensions boiled over. The local hospital took in dozens of injured students after fighting moved into the town. Police used tear gas to control skirmishes while shops, offices and schools were closed.

The University of Goroka suspended classes for two weeks and the provincial government evacuated students to their respective home provinces. According to the Post Courier, at least one police squad was mobilised to escort students home.

The SRC leaderships continue to tie the movement to the parliamentary opposition, which is working to confine the issue to the ONeill governments alleged corruption. Opposition parties have made four attempts to present motions of no-confidence, all of which have been thrown out for procedural reasons. They are now seeking to recall parliament, which is in recess until August, before a constitutional provision which bars no confidence motions within 12 months of a general election, takes effect.

Despite vague calls for a more equitable distribution of the countrys wealth, student leaders have not put forward any program to address the catastrophic social crisis. By making corruption the central issue, they are collaborating with the opposition parties, which are committed to imposing the burden of the worsening economic crisis onto the backs of workers and the rural poor.

Pressure is building on student leaders to wind up the protests. Governmental Chief Secretary Isaac Lupari met with the vice-chancellors of the four state universities on Wednesday to sort out student issues once and for all. He indicated penalties would be imposed on students who continued to defy instructions from their respective university councils.

The Post Courier declared that students should now consider their options and not jeopardise their studies. Returning to classes, it suggested, should be accompanied by awareness campaigns targeting voters in the lead-up to the 2017 general election. This could be a win-win for everyone including the institutions, the paper argued.

ONeill appears, for the moment, to have the backing of the Australian government which helped install him in 2011 in an effort to counteract growing Chinese influence. With PNG a vital strategic asset in the Obama administrations pivot to Asia, Canberra and Washington will be deeply concerned at the ongoing political instability. Australia has previously indicated that it would intervene, including militarily, in the event of a crisis.

In a conveniently timed show of force, a US naval vessel is to visit Port Moresby June 17-24 on a bilateral military exchange between the US Marine Corps and the PNG Defence Force. The USNS Sacagawea and its troop contingent will conduct security cooperation and interoperability exercises with several Pacific countries including PNG, Timor Leste, Tonga, and Fiji.
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan -- Captain Samir, an Afghan Army helicopter pilot in Helmand, is a busy man these days. Most of the time, he wears a black helicopter helmet in the scorching desert heat of Afghanistans southern Helmand Province.

Samirs typical workday consists of flying his aging Russian Mi-17 over the nearly 60,000 square kilometers of Helmand, where small army outposts scattered across its stony desert plains and crowded farming villages are frequently attacked by the Taliban. Some have remained besieged for months.

On this blazing hot day in June, his mission is to carry a shipment of arms, ammunition, and food supplies to a remote army base in Sangin district -- one of the many active front lines in Helmand, which borders Pakistan and is close to Iran.

We fly five to seven hours a day. Sometimes, we fly even longer, Samir said of a job that keeps him in constant danger of being shot down by the Taliban. This is because there are some besieged outposts that can only be supplied by helicopter.

Helmand, which comprises one-tenth of Afghanistan, has been testing the countrys fragile air force. The armys recent success in improving battlefield surveillance and combat support underscores the vital role of the air force, which has prompted many officials and experts to request additional modern aircraft. Kabuls NATO allies are expected to announce major multi-year funding commitments for Afghan security forces next month.

Abdul Rahman Sarjang, a former security chief in Helmand, says airpower plays a crucial role in dominating the battlefields of mountainous Afghanistan.

Eighty percent of the battle can be won by the air force. We are mostly unable to immediately supply or support our outposts when they are attacked, he told Radio Free Afghanistan. When we have enough aircraft, we can protect our borders and support our troops on the battlefield.

Nearly 32,000 Afghan Army and police soldiers in Helmand now rely on Mi-25 attack helicopters for combat support, Mi-17s for supplies and airlift, and small drones for aerial surveillance. The subsonic A-29 Super Tucano aircraft have yet to play a role in counterinsurgency or close air support capabilities since the United States donated them to the Afghan Air Force in April.

Lieutenant General Moeen Faqir, head of the Afghan Armys 215th Maiwand Corps in Helmand, is impressed by the U.S. drones. He says his troops intelligence capacities have improved significantly since they began operating the 10 small unmanned ScanEagle aircraft.

Faqir says the drones are helpful for verifying information from human and signal intelligence, and that his forces can now scan areas as large as 50 kilometers to target insurgents or preempt their attacks.

Earlier, I was dependent on reports from our outposts, he said. Now, I can check their information about impending or ongoing attacks by flying a drone over.

Raz Mohammad, a tribal leader in Helmands Khan-e Nashin district, however, finds the Afghan Armys modest air warfare capabilities lacking.

Mohammad says that after spending years observing insurgents fight government forces in his home district, he is convinced that surveillance drones alone cannot counter insurgents who live and hide out among civilians. For years, Khan-e Nashin has been contested by government forces and the Taliban.

The Taliban typically avoid trench warfare. They are always on the move, he told Radio Free Afghanistan. We need aircraft that can destroy the enemy once they are spotted.

Another Helmand tribal leader, Abdul Baseer, however, is not convinced. He says airpower should only be used if Afghanistan goes to war with another country.

I think consultations for reconciliation and pressuring insurgents through their tribes will have a much better, long-lasting impact toward restoring peace, he said.

Tucked under camouflage nets at the Afghan Armys sprawling Helmand headquarters in Lashkar Gah are two Mi-25 attack helicopters. These war machines have been a constant feature on Helmands battlefield since they were donated by India in late January.

Most recently, they provided vital air support to the Afghan forces in clearing the road to the strategic district of Sangin, an important Helmand crossroad north of Lashkar Gah.

Abdullah Samadi, a former Afghan military officer, says the Afghan forces will need robust airpower to regain territory lost to the Taliban. Over the past year, the insurgents have overrun or contested 11 out of Helmands 15 districts. The Taliban have now virtually besieged Lashkar Gah in central Helmand.

We share a 160-kilometer border with Pakistan, and we have active fronts in every district. This makes Helmand a very big battlefield, he said. We need to be able to constantly dominate this battle space.

Tens of thousands of NATO troops served in Helmand following the 2001 demise of the Taliban regime. Their superior airpower prevented the rebels from making a major comeback.

The departure of NATO troops in late 2014, however, exposed the vulnerabilities of the Afghan forces, who subsequently lost considerable territory to the Taliban. Afghan officials and military specialists now want more aircraft to make up for their weaknesses.

We really need a lot more aircraft than we currently have, Samadi noted.

Abubakar Siddique wrote this story based on Mohammad Ilyas Dayee's reporting from Lashkar Gah, Helmand.
As part of a tour of the US Midwest, Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Jerry White visited Rockford, Illinois. He spoke to workers in the city and nearby Belvidere about their conditions, and found opposition to both Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

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TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) - The Florida State Attorney's Office has filed a motion to seek the death penalty in the case against Dajuan Barnes for the murder of a 10-month-old child.

In a court document filed, the State of Florida issued a notice of intent to seek the death penalty in the first-degree murder case, citing aggravating circumstances. These circumstances include a reason to believe the capital felony "was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" and the victim "was a person of less than 12 years of age".

The notice comes a month after 10-month-old Jeffery Phillips III, nicknamed "Baby J", was pronounced dead due to a broken spinal cord.

Police first came in contact with Baby J after receiving a report of a baby who was not breathing. According to the official report, police say the child had been sick and running a fever when his mother left him with Barnes while she went to get medicine. Barnes called 911 and the child was taken to the hospital where he later died.

Barnes was charged with the murder of the infant after medical examiners cited "an extremely hard blow to the body of the infant" as the cause of death. Statements in the probable cause document filed on the case say that the baby was slammed against another object so forcefully that it broke the baby's back and caused the baby to bleed to death.

Last month Barnes pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder.
TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) - A vehicle crash has occurred in Leon County on I-10 resulting in blocked roadways east of the Thomasville Road exit, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

Troopers arrived at the scene near mile marker 205 at 12:58 p.m. As of 3:45 p.m., Troopers say eastbound lanes are still blocked.

This is a developing news story, continue checking WTXL for more details.
TALLAHASSEE Fla.-- Wednesday is World Elder Abuse Awareness day. It is an important time to learn tips on how to recognize and prevent elder abuse in our communities.

Twyla Sketchley, a certified elder law attorney joined us in studio to discuss the topic.

Sketchley has worked to get elder abuse legislation passed in Florida.
You are the owner of this article.
Israel's top intelligence official offered Saudi Arabia rare public praise on Wednesday for its efforts, under King Salman, to lead "pragmatic" Sunni Muslim states confronting Iran and to overhaul Riyadh's oil-dependent economy.

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The tribute by military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevy at an international security forum followed years of veiled references by Israel to back-channel contacts with Gulf Arab powers - despite their lack of formal bilateral ties.

Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, sees itself as a champion of Muslim rights, rejects recognition of Israel short of a wider settlement satisfying Palestinian demands for a state in the territories, and has always vehemently denied reports of any secret communications.

"This is not the same Saudi Arabia that we saw a year and a half ago. There is a different king, with a support network around him," Halevy told the Herzliya Conference, referring to Salman's accession.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz

"Saudi Arabia is much more proactive, aspiring to lead the Sunni camp in the Middle East. It is the country that has perhaps taken the strongest stand in the face of Iran in the Middle East, and it is carrying out very deep structural reforms whose bottom line is to bring about a Saudi Arabia in 2030 with a different economy that is not dependent on oil, etcetera."

Riyadh and other Gulf Arab states shared Israeli unhappiness with last year's US-led nuclear deal with Iran , saying it failed to sufficiently cap the Islamic Republic's capacity to build a bomb while granting it a windfall in sanctions relief that could be used to buy arms for its regional allies.

"There is an interesting phenomenon here: Some of these pragmatic Sunni countries are getting close to our interests," Halevy said. "This is an interesting matter. There is an opportunity here," he added without elaborating.

Israel has long talked about a "new horizon" in the Middle East, in which it has shared common ground with Sunni Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia in their wariness towards Iran. Israel has also talked recently about its openness to a 2002 Saudi initiative for a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians, although there appears to be little momentum in that direction.

Under Salman, Saudi officials still say they cannot work with Israel, pointing to its rejection of the Riyadh-sponsored peace plan offering normal relations in return for an end to occupation and solution to the Palestinian refugee problem.

In a separate address to the Herzliya Conference, Dore Gold, director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, said a dialogue was underway with Arab countries. However, he was unable to divulge which ones, given the interlocutors' worries about domestic public opinion.

"Under the ice, a lot of hot water is flowing," Gold said
The Obama administration is prepared to incorporate missile defense funds in a new long-term agreement on military aid for Israel, a US official said on Wednesday, accommodating in principle a key request by its ally in the ongoing talks.

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Disputes over the scope and fine print of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) have clouded already difficult ties between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama during the latter's final months in office.

The current MOU, signed in 2007 and due to expire in 2018, allocated to Israel around $30 billion in so-called foreign military financing. Israel has been seeking an increase of around $10 billion for the next decade hoping that the additional aid be earmarked for missile defense projects that were hitherto funded ad hoc by the US Congress.

US negotiators previously proposed a total of $3.5 billion to $3.7 billion annually for Israel under the new MOU, but did not say whether this might include missile defense funds. A senior US official was more forthcoming on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama (Photo: Reuters)

"We are prepared to make an unprecedented multi-year missile defense commitment as part of a new memorandum of understanding with Israel on military assistance," the official, who requested anonymity, said.

"This commitment, which would amount to billions of dollars over 10 years, would be the first long-term pledge on missile defense support to Israel, affording Israel robust support for its missile defense, as well as predictability and facilitating long-term planning."

US lawmakers have, in recent years, given Israel up to $600 million in annual discretionary funds for missile defense, well beyond the $150 million requested by the Obama administration.

On Tuesday, the White House opposed a proposal to include $600 million for Israeli missile defense to an appropriations bill for the fiscal year starting on Oct. 1.

Netanyahu came out with a rare statement on the MOU talks, in the face of Israeli opposition accusations that he is endangering American largesse by feuding with Obama over Iran's nuclear program and Palestinian peace talks.

Netanyahu's office said on Twitter that the White House's move on Tuesday was part of an "internal debate" with Congress about supplementary missile defense funding for Israel.

"There has been no cut in American assistance," it tweeted. "Prime Minister Netanyahu is working to anchor this supplement as part of the discussions on the assistance agreement for the next ten years. Not only will security assistance for missile defense not be cut, it will be increased."

Iron Dome missile defense system (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

However, Netanyahu's acting national security adviser, Jacob Nagel, made clear that an agreement had not yet been reached. Israeli officials have hinted that, if the disputes persist, they might await the next US president in hope of getting a better MOU.

Netanyahu's government was working to wrap up the talks with the Obama administration, Nagel told reporters. But he added: "When we conclude that we have arrived at the final (US) offer, we will decide if we want it or not."

Another sticking point has been a US demand to reduce the amount of aid money - now 26.3 percent - that Israel can spend on its own military industries rather than on American products.

Visiting Israel for strategic talks, US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday said it had received $8.5 million a day from the Obama administration in defense aid.

In a speech to the annual Herzliya Conference, Blinken did not give details on the MOU talks, but he said Washington was ready to give Israel "the largest single pledge of military assistance from the United States to any country in our history, cementing an unparalleled security relationship all the way to 2029".
Information has come to light suggesting that the two terrorists who carried out the terrorist attack at the Sarona Market , which left 4 dead and 16 wounded, may have a Jewish family member.

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An Israeli women who calls herself Yael Cohen, who now lives in Spain, claims that she lived for a few years with Abdullah Makhamra, the uncle of the Sarona Market terrorist Khaled and Mohammed Makhamra, and gave birth to two children with him. A source from Yatta, where the two terrorists lived, confirmed yesterday that he does, indeed, remember that a family member of Khaled was indeed married to a Jewish woman.

In a Facebook post two days after the attack, Yael spoke about her relationship to Abdullah Makhamra and wrote that she remembers the two terrorists as young children running around at my place, sitting in my lap and babysitting my two small children.

Yatta

Nice to meet you, I am Rizala, Khaled's and Mahmouds aunt, she says at the start of her long Facebook post. She writes that she was raised in Magala, Spain and moved to Jerusalem to study in a Haredi boarding school after her parents divorced. Before turning 16 years old, she met a Haredi boy at a convenience store, who introduced himself as Natanel Cohen with whom she fell in love.

Yael (she claims thats her Israeli name) also discussed how her father came to visit once and brought her to the minimarket to meet the aforementioned boy, who asked to be set up with her. Six weeks had passed, I found myself deeply in love with Natanel, who had been pretending to be a young Haredi man from a good home. She wrote.

His house was in Yatta. Natanel suddenly turned into Abdullah and his Haredi clothing became his work costume. I was still 16 years old and in the first month my first child appeared and (I thought) what should I do?

Yael claims that she was not married to Abdullah and changed her name to Rizala. Meanwhile, she preserved her Judaism, lighting candles on Shabbat and keeping kosher. She also said her husband turned out to be a violent man: My status was that of an abused slave, she wrote. The beatings and humiliations were daily. The house was my only world, cleaning, cooking, and sex slavery for a man who had become evil, disgusting, and violent. Hell on earth.

According to Yael, she succeeded in fleeing from her husband with her two kids, returning to live with them in Spain. There, the family still lives today. The attack at Sarona Market brought me back 14 years, she wrote. The Haredi suit that the two cousins wore caused me deja vu, a type of nausea and a bad and bitter memory. Thats a way of work for the family from Yatta.

A Palestinian source in the Makhamra family confirmed to Yedioth Ahronoth, Ynets sister publication, that he remembers that Abdullah Makhamra was married in the past to a Jewish woman named Rizala.

Nonetheless, he said that Abdullah is not Khaleds and Mohammeds uncle but rather he is related in a different way. He added that Abdullah had some issues with village leaders a number of years ago and fled to Beit Guvrin in Israel. It is possible that he left the village at the same time as Yael. Other sources in the village denied the story, but it is possible that they do not want to bring a problem of the past back to the surface.
A pathologist from the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, testified Thursday at Jaffa military court that the neutralized terrorist that Sgt. Elor Azaria shot last March, was alive when the fatal bullet hit his head.

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"Bleeding in the brain suggests that the heart of the deceased was still beating when the bullet hit his head, since blood was still flowing to that zone," Dr. Hadas Gips said.

Asked what the pathological findings reveal regarding the rest of the terrorist's wounds prior to Azaria's shooting, Gips replied, "The other wounds found on his body were not immediately fatal and if he had received appropriate medical treatment he would still be alive. Even without receiving medical attention he would most likely still be alive."

Sgt. Elor Azaria at court

Asked by the defense team about the potential consequences of the shootings which preceded Azaria's intervention, Gips noted: "Regarding the number of shooters I have no way of knowing, and it depends on the examination of shells in other laboratories. If it is a matter of a second or two between shots  it is not possible to determine their order. Even after a shooting to the head which paralyzes the brain centers, the heart continues to beat sporadically. So if the deceased was shot in the head beforehand in the head, I would not find the bleeding in other parts of the body that are not in the brain. Therefore the shot to the head was the last shot."

In response to the question of whether there could be movement in the limbs after brain's failure to function, Gips replied, "if the defense is asking whether the deceased was alive and the rest of the body was functioning then there could be small muscle cramps but I have reservations about this and this is the domain of neurosurgeons more familiar with this issue than I am."

Last week the court heard the testimonies of the Palestinian cameramen who documented the incident for left-wing NGO B'Tselem.

Among those providing testimony was Imad Abu Shamsiyah, who claimed that he did not edit the controversial video.

Azarias defense team has cast doubts in recent months regarding the credibility of the controversial videos and has suggested that they may have been "cooked up during editing."

The conclusions of an expert from the DIFS (Division of Identification and Forensic Science), which will consist of dozens of pages, will be brought before the military court on Wednesday. Its conclusions are expected to be that BTselems videos are authentic since they were forwarded to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) Military Police the morning of the incident, with the original memory card of the camera that documented the incident.
MASON CITY  Roy D. Biondi, a Columbus, Ohio, publishing executive, has been named publisher of the North Iowa Media Group -- which includes the Globe Gazette, Mitchell County Press-News, Forest City Summit and Britt News Tribune -- and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

He will begin work July 5.

He succeeds David Braton, who became publisher of The Bismarck Tribune in March.

Braton served as interim publisher of the North Iowa Media Group and then publisher for a short time following the death of longtime publisher Howard Query in September 2015.

In meeting Globe Gazette employees Thursday afternoon, Biondi described himself as a high-energy individual whose focus will be on culture, community and commerce. He said the emphasis of the newspaper will continue to be on local news.

Roy is a talented and experienced publisher with a proven record of performance, said Lee group publisher Chris White. He fully understands the power of the vast audiences our combined suite of products represents.

I am confident he can continue to grow that audience with strong local content and use it to help advertisers reach the communities of the Cedar Valley and Mason City.

Biondi, 54, is currently vice president and group publisher for Consumer New Services/ThisWeek Community News in central Ohio.

The Courier and the the Globe Gazette are outstanding local newspapers, Biondi said. Im eager to get to work meeting local leaders and business owners and begin the process of building relationships in the community.

I look forward to serving the readers and advertisers in Waterloo and Mason City.

Before joining Dispatch Media Group in 2007, Biondi was a publisher of newspapers, magazines and niche publications in Overland Park, Kansas; Olean, New York; and Ada, Oklahoma.

He has served as a corporate circulation consultant in Kansas City, Missouri, and as circulation director in several markets including: Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and Hanover, Pennsylvania. He held circulation positions in several markets including Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Biondi is a former board member of the Local Media Association. He has served as the president of the United Way of Olean New York and is a former board member of Ada City School Foundation.

Biondi is a native of Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. He and his wife, Dawn, have three children.
The British Embassy in Israel celebrated Queen Elizabeths 90th birthday in Raanana on Wednesday night, attracting hundreds of diplomats, military officials and distinguished guests.

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Speaking at the event were British Ambassador to Israel David Quarrey and Israel's Tourism Minister Yariv Levin, who furnished praise on their respective countries for their cooperative achievements and robust diplomatic ties.

Tonight we celebrate the Queens 90th birthday but we also, here in Israel, want to celebrate another year of the friendship and partnership between the two countries. We have seen remarkable successes in this last year, said Quarrey, before citing the expansion into Israel of large British companies such as Barclays, Rolls-Royce, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland and BT.

Royal Air Force band plays British and Israeli national anthems

Tourism Minister Levin and UK Ambassador Quarrey

He also addressed the BDS movement and stated Britains unequivocal stance against (them). But more important is what we stand for: a strong partnership between our two countries.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin

Birthday cake made by Israel's 'Bake Off' winners

For his part, Minister Levin expressed his gratitude for the British leaderships condemnation of anti-Semitic comments made by Ken Livingstone and former MP Naz Shah

Unfortunately we recently witnessed anti-Semitic expressions by British figures and we do appreciate the British leaderships strong condemnations of such expressions, Levin said. Prime Minister (David) Cameron deserves praise for his repeated expressions of friendship with Israel. The prime minister reiterated Britain's support on issues such as boycotts etc.

Beatles cover band rocked out

Following the speeches, the Royal Air Force band played the British and Israeli national anthems before guests were able to indulge in a lavish buffet of food and drinks while enjoying the popular music played by a Beatles cover band.

London calling...

Ynetnews also managed to catch up with the RAF band to ask how it felt to be playing for the Queens birthday in Israel. It feels absolutely fantastic," said Paul and Terry, adding that "Hava Nagila was fantastic to play."

"It is a fantastic country and we have been well looked after," they went on to say. "The thing we have noticed the most is how friendly the people are. That has been a knock-out for us. They have been so welcoming.
Once ISIS is defeated, Iraq should be divided into three separate entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed, with a state each given to Shi'ite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, a top Kurdish official said on Thursday.

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Iraqi troops have expelled ISIS from some key cities the militants seized in 2014, and are advancing on Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control. Its fall would likely mean the end of the group's self-proclaimed caliphate.

But even if ISIS was eliminated, Iraq would still be deeply divided. Sectarian violence has continued for years and a power-sharing agreement in Baghdad has only led to discontent, deadlock and corruption.

Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain "under one roof".

Kurdish soldiers in Iraq (Photo: MCT)

The Kurds have already taken steps toward realizing their long-held dream of independence from Iraq, which has been led by the Shi'ite majority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, following a US-led invasion.

They run their own affairs in the north and have their own armed forces, the Peshmerga, which have been fighting Islamic State militants with help from a US-led coalition.

Sunnis should be given the option of doing the same in the provinces where they are in the majority in the north and the west of Iraq, said Barzani.

"What we are offering is a solution," he said. "This doesn't mean they live under one roof but they can be good neighbors. Once they feel comfortable that they have a bright and secure future, they can start cooperating with each other."

His father has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence this year as the region is locked in territorial and financial disputes with the central government.

Baghdad has cut off payments from the federal budget to the KRG to try to force the Kurds to sell crude produced on their territory through the state oil marketing company and not independently. The Kurds also claim the oil region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, as part of their territory.

Barzani said that the Sunnis' feeling of marginalization by the Shi'ite leadership had facilitated the takeover of their regions by Islamic State militants.

Kurdish soldiers in Syria (Photo: AFP)

In addition, Iraq endured months of wrangling and chaos over a government reshuffle that was to curb corruption. In May, frustration over the delays culminated in the unprecedented breach by protesters of the Green Zone, which houses parliament, government offices and many foreign embassies.

Ahead of the battle for Mosul, Barzani said the city's different communities should agree in advance on how to handle the aftermath. Mosul's pre-war population of 2 million was mostly Sunni, but included religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis, Kurds and Turkmen.

Almost all non-Sunnis fled the ISIS takeover, along with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who could not live under the militants' harsh rule or could not endure Baghdad's financial blockade imposed on IS-held regions.

"I think the most important part is how you manage Mosul after Daesh is defeated," he said, referring to an Arabic name for ISIS. "We don't want to see the gap of liberation and then a vacuum, which probably will turn into chaos."

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that 2016 would be the year of "final victory" over ISIS with the capture of Mosul.

The army, counter-terrorism forces and Shi'ite Muslim paramilitary fighters backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition are also in a major operation to retake the mainly Sunni city of Falluja, an hour's drive from Baghdad.
Former defense minister Moshe Ya'alon leveled harsh criticism against the government on Thursday, once again expressing his plans to run for prime minister in the next elections.

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"Last month I resigned from my position as defense minister and Knesset member, and made it clear that I would return to public service. I intend to run for the leadership of Israel in the next elections," Ya'alon said at the Herzliya conference.

Ya'alon asserted that "The leadership in the State of Israel should stop scaring civilians and giving them the feeling that we are on the brink of a second Holocaust."

Former defense minister Ya'alon (Photo: Adi Cohen Tzadok)

Ya'alon resigned his post as defense minister and announced he was taking a break from politics after realizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to replace him with Avigdor Lieberman , who joined the coalition with his five-member party and rewarded for it with two ministries, among other things. Ya'alon said at the time he was resigning after having lost trust in the prime minister.

"If there is something that keeps me up at night and causes me to be anxious for the future of Israel, it's not the arms transports making their way from Lebanon," Ya'alon said. "It's the fractures being created in Israeli society, the systematic erosion of the quality of life."

He said he received "thousands of calls from Israeli citizens from across the political spectrumand certainly from members of Likud all across the countrywhich clarified to me that there is a desire for change, and that the State of Israel needs change."

"The State of Israel and its citizens," he went on to say, "deserve a stately leadership that stops cynically zigzagging (on its position) every other day. We deserve a leadership that doesn't choose (to rule through) the corrupt system of divide and rule."

"I can't stand the fact that the leadership in Israel of 2016 is busy fanning the flames, inciting, intimidating and dividing Jews and Arabs, the right and left wings, and different sectors of society. It does all of this just to survive, stay in government for another month or another year," Ya'alon continued.

"We needed a stately leadership that doesn't allow anyone to threaten Israeli judges and the Supreme Court. We could argue and disagree over judicial activismbut we must fight any attempt to hurt the rule of law," he added.

"We need a leadership that does not seek to enslave the media for its own survival purposes," Ya'alon said. "The media in Israel has to remain unthreatened and free, it should enable everyone to voice their opinion without fear."

"We are currently at a historical juncture in which we should each ask ourselves what kind of country do we want to live in, and what kind of country do we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in," Ya'alon continued. "We must not give up, or tell ourselves that someone else would deal with these issues. And that is why I'm planning to present an alternative to the current leadership, because we have no other home."

'Israel not facing existential threat'

He also asserted that Israel is not facing an existential threat. "The State of Israel is the strongest in the region. I can confidently say that at this time and in the foreseeable future there is no existential threat to the state of Israel," he said. "I say this as someone who knows every last detail of the security situation in Israel, and who knows the power and strength of the IDF and its intelligence capabilities."

"The Iranian nuclear project likewise does not pose an immediate threat to Israel and the countries in the region," Yaalon further charged, although he added that "the Iranian regime continues to be the number one destabilizing factor in the Middle East and the entire world."

Despite these assessments, he said Israel should know how to defend itself, "In the Middle East, there is no knowing what is going to happen and who is going to decide to try and challenge us. The events of the past week further prove that the war on terror is an international one."

Netanyahus Likud party was quick to respond to Yaalons criticism. It is amusing to see how fast he changed his skin, said a statement by the Likud. Just a few months ago he said that Iran poses an existential threat to Israel, and today he said there is no existential threat to Israel.
BRUSSELS- Iran's state airline, which has just reached an agreement with Boeing Co to purchase new jetliners, can resume flights in the EU, the European Commission said on Thursday.

Iran is dangling the prospect of significant business for Western planemakers as it emerges from decades of sanctions.

While the European Commission, the EU's executive, said Iranair could resume flights, some of the carrier's aircraft would remain on the EU's safety blacklist.
WASHINGTON- European Union countries "still have a ways to go" in sharing terrorism intelligence, CIA Director John Brennan said on Thursday, months after attacks that killed hundreds in Paris and Brussels.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the European Union's Counter-Terrorism Group have been discussing ways to improve the sharing of intelligence on terrorist threats in the wake of the attacks, Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

While EU governments have made important progress, "they still have a ways to go" in developing sharing mechanisms, he said.
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) aimed scathing criticism at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government on Thursday, berating and mocking senior ministers.

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Now there isnt even a single leftist polluting the government's agenda," Herzog said a the Herzliya Conference. "We finally have a rightist government  a rightist prime minister, a rightist defense minister, and a rightist education minister. I thought we got a bunch of superheroes, he said derisively. Instead we got SpongeBob SquarePants leaders."

There isnt a single left-winger you can blame for (the recent) terror attacks, the opposition leader continued. There are no Labor Party members preventing the IDF from winning, he added, referencing a popular right-wing bumper sticker.

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

"Now theres no Oslo criminal stopping the heroes of the right from beating terror, annihilating terror, thwarting terror, crushing terror, dismantling terror, he added, mocking the aggressive rhetoric of his right-wing rivals. And if you have any other strong words describing this agenda you may send them to the inbox of Naftali Batman Bennett and Popeye Lieberman.

On a more serious note, Herzog referred to a unique opportunity created by a shifting of regional alliances that put Israels interests in line with those of local Arab governments.

Moderate Arab nations are coalescing into a kind of informal Sunni Arab version of NATO in the Middle East that identifies the same threats that Israel does, Herzog said. Unlike the previous generation, today many of the Sunni leaders suffer less from what I call an Israel complex that their predecessors had.

The notion that a group of moderate Arab states are willing to politically engage with Israel by way of a regional initiative is a unique opportunity, Herzog added.

Herzog was followed at the conference by the Jordanian and Egyptian ambassadors to Israel, who both spoke out in favor of the Arab Peace Initiative, originally put forth by Saudi Arabia in 2002. The Arab plan proposes an Israeli retreat to the borders before the 1967 Six-Day War, along with the establishment of a Palestinian state and the normalizing of relations between Israel and the Arab world.

In our opinion, the Arab peace initiative stands as the master of all initiatives, Jordans ambassador to Israel, Walid Obeidat, said.

Herzog vowed to continue working for peace. I and my partners in the Zionist Union will continue our efforts to strive for and actualize the vision for the two-state solution based upon this regional opportunity, which can be started in the immediate future, he said. With daring and courageous leadership, we will be able to realize an opportunity for a better future for our children.

'Words can accidentally set a fire ablaze'

The opposition leader talked about his negotiations with Netanyahu to join the government: I decided to take an unprecedented risk on both the political and personal level. I understood that I may pay a heavy price and even sacrifice my seat and some of members of my party will not forgive me. But I decided that this is my job and belief.

"From this position," Herzog said, "I opened the door to Netanyahu, extended my hand and said 'you are the engine of the right, I am the engine of the left. Behind us are cars full of mothers and fathers, members of different sectors, teachers, a car of doctors and a car of nurses and many more cars that together constitute a full country, full of wonderful parts. However, none of us will move if we don't build one train that could lead the cars on a new journey of new hope and new opportunity.'"

But Netanyahu chose to ally himself with Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman, who was appointed defense minister upon bringing his five-member party into the government.

Netanyahu preferred considerations of political survival that are narrow and dangerous, and established a super right-wing government, Herzog said.

He also cautioned Israeli leaders to be wary of bombastic words, insinuations about the politics of our neighbors, explaining that words can accidentally set a fire ablaze.

The opposition chairman also discussed the defense aid negotiations with the United States in light of the White Houses statement that it will oppose adding hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel's aid package.

America, this governments biggest enemy after Iran, announces to the world that they are cutting military aid. So who will fund the air defense system protecting children in Sderot and Kiryat Shmona? And who will ship the ammunition for the emergency warehouses? And who will stop our enemies in the UN? Will (Israeli UN Ambassador) Danny Danon get help from (Likud MK) Oren Hazan?

'There's majority support for two-state solution'

Herzog's partner in the Zionist Union, MK Tzipi Livni, also spoke at the Herzliya Conference, saying she intended to present "a plan to form a central democratic bloc" in the coming months.

"The Zionist Union was the beginning of this move, and now we needed to take it further," she said.

MK Tzipi Livni (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

Livni declared that "our job now is to wake up the sleeping moderate camp and create a clear bloc to fight for Israel's Jewish and democratic nature, which is in favor of two nation states and against the path chosen by the right-wing coalition."

She asserted that "there is a majority that supports the two-state solution in Israel, and there is a need to have a large camp to give this majority a clear voice."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed criticism by former defense minister Moshe Yaalon on Thursday, saying "no importance should be ascribed to such political attacks."

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"Security is a serious matter. One cannot say at a conference in Munich four months ago that Iran is an existential threat to Israel and today at the Herzliya Conference say that Iran is not an existential threat to Israel, Netanyahu said, referring to Yaalons assertions. One cannot express full confidence in the leadership when one is part of it and then say the complete opposite when you are outside.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: GPO)

In his speech to the Herzliya Conference on Thursday afternoon, Ya'alon asserted that Israel is not facing an existential threat.

"The State of Israel is the strongest in the region. I can confidently say that at this time and in the foreseeable future there is no existential threat to the state of Israel," he said. "I say this as someone who knows every last detail of the security situation in Israel, and who knows the power and strength of the IDF and its intelligence capabilities."

"The Iranian nuclear project likewise does not pose an immediate threat to Israel and the countries in the region," Yaalon further charged.

Despite these assessments, he said Israel should know how to defend itself, "In the Middle East, there is no knowing what is going to happen and who is going to decide to try and challenge us. The events of the past week further prove that the war on terror is an international one."

Former defense minister Ya'alon (Photo: Adi Cohen Tzadok)

He also leveled harsh criticism against the government, saying he intends to run for office in the next elections and replace Netanyahu.

"The leadership in the State of Israel should stop scaring civilians and giving them the feeling that we are on the brink of a second Holocaust," he said.

Ya'alon resigned his post as defense minister and announced he was taking a break from politics after realizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to replace him with Avigdor Lieberman, who joined the coalition with his five-member party and rewarded for it with two ministries, among other things. Ya'alon said at the time he was resigning after having lost trust in the prime minister.

He said he received "thousands of calls from Israeli citizens from across the political spectrumand certainly from members of Likud all across the countrywhich clarified to me that there is a desire for change, and that the State of Israel needs change."

"The State of Israel and its citizens," he went on to say, "deserve a stately leadership that stops cynically zigzagging (on its position) every other day. We deserve a leadership that doesn't choose (to rule through) the corrupt system of divide and rule."
Sgt. Elor Azaria, who is on trial after shooting dead a neutralized attacker, told his company commander that the terrorist "needed to die," the commander told the court on Thursday.

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"I asked who fired their weapon," Maj. Tom Na'aman testified. "I didn't think it was one of my soldiers. I saw Elor walking with his rifle and asked him who gave him permission to fire and asked why he did it. He told me 'the terrorist was alive, and he needed to die.'"

In late March, two Palestinian terrorists armed with knives stabbed a soldier at an IDF post near the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron, moderately wounding him. The two were shot and neutralized by soldiers from the IDF's Kfir Brigade. A video filmed several minutes later by B'Tselem volunteer Emad abu-Shamsiyah shows one of the terrorists, Abed al Fatah a-Sharif, lying on the ground motionless, when an IDF soldier, Azaria, aims his weapon at him and shoots him in the head.

Major Tom Na'aman, Elor Azaria's company commander (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

A pathologist testifying earlier in the day determined that a-Sharif was alive when Azaria's bullet hit his head.

"Bleeding in the brain suggests that the heart of the deceased was still beating when the bullet hit his head, since blood was still flowing to that zone," said Dr. Hadas Gips of the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.

According to Company Commander Maj. Tom Na'aman, after the terrorist was first neutralized, he went over to the body. "I stood over him and looked at him and didn't feel that he posed a threat. His eyes were shut and appeared to have rolled into the back of his head. There was some movement of his head from side to side, but he didn't pose a threat," he said.

He also noted that "No one had called my attention to the fact there was a terrorist who posed a danger. There was no claim to this effect. I had no suspicions (the terrorist had) a bomb or a suicide belt."

"In our briefings, we talk about the dangers posed by shootings or by stabbings. There was no justification for Elor to discharge his weapon," Na'aman asserted.

Major Tom Na'aman (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Defense attorney Ilan Katz asked the company commander: "What was your understanding when Elor said 'he needs to die?' Was it for revenge?"

The company commander replied "I dont know if it was revenge, but what I understood this to mean was 'this is the terrorist who wounded my friend  therefore he needs to die.' He didn't say anything about any danger."

Describing how the incident began, the officer testified that "there was screaming in the neighborhood, so I ran to the location with the understanding that an attack had occurred. I saw a soldier sitting on the sidewalk and the division commander was holding a bandage to the soldier's shoulder."

The wounded soldier being treated at the scene of the attack (Photo: TPS)

"There was blood in the area, and one of the terrorists was lying next to them with a severe wound to his neck ... Ten seconds after I arrived to the location, Elor came (from the military post) and I told him to take care of the wounded soldier."

Na'aman then received an update from the division commander and was told that four or five bullets had been fired at the first terrorist, wearing a gray shirt, and three additional bullets were fired at the second terrorist, Abed al Fatah a-Sharif, who Azaria later shot as well.

"I knew at that moment that the terrorist in the gray shirt was dead, but I wasn't sure about the second one. The division commander told me that (the second terrorist) was also dead," Na'aman continued.
CARACAS- The number of Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States has soared as the oil-dependent economy crashes and more of the middle-class flees.

The most recent data from the US government's Citizenship and Immigration Services show that in March 2016, Venezuelans climbed to second place among nationalities submitting asylum requests, with 1,345 applications during that month. Only citizens of China made more requests, 1,441 of the total 10,345 submitted that month.

The South American country first cracked the top 10 asylum-seeking nations in February 2014 when a bloody, months-long street protest movement seeking to oust the socialist administration kicked off. But back then, amid the widespread jailing and harassment of opponents of President Nicolas Maduro, fewer than 100 Venezuelans per month sought asylum.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONEUS President Barack Obama will meet with Saudi Arabia's powerful deputy crown prince on Friday and the two are expected to discuss conflicts in the Middle East including the campaign against ISIS, a White House spokesman said on Thursday.

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman, is on a visit to the United States aimed at restoring frayed relations with Washington and to promote a plan to slash the kingdom's dependence on oil revenues. Friday's meeting will take place at the White House.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said the meeting would provide an opportunity to discuss issues including the conflicts in Syria and Yemen and "our cooperation with the Saudis in the campaign against ISIL," as ISIS is also known.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent more NIS 6.5 million ($1.67 million) of public funds on a six-day trip to New York , including $1,600 on a personal hairdresser, according to a newly released expense report.

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The trip to the UN General Assembly last fall also included $210 in laundry services, $1,861 in meals, $1,750 for a makeup artist, and nearly $20,000 to move furniture out of hotel rooms. In addition, $64.20 for wine, $1,750 for refrigirating services, $60.66 for Yedioth Ahronoth newspapers, $1,145 for refreshments in meetings, $175 in tips for porters.

Attorney Shachar Ben Meir obtained the expense report after suing Netanyahu's office and the Foreign Ministry. He said that he requested the information in late October from Netanyahu's office and was then referred to the ministry. After he was told to wait for three months, he sued both offices in a Jerusalem court.

"It's my money and I want to know what is being done with it," he said.

Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly last October (Photo: AP)

The report, which he shared with The Associated Press on Thursday, did not include charges for the prime minister's wife, Sara Netanyahu, on the trip. Police have already recommended that she be indicted for inflated household spending and misusing state funds on private meals and care for her ailing father.

Last month, a Jerusalem labor court awarded $30,000 in damages to a former employee of Mrs. Netanyahu who claimed he faced yelling and unreasonable demands.

In 2013, the premier was chided for spending $127,000 in public funds for a special sleeping cabin on a flight to London. He also ran up a $2,700 bill that year for ice cream, mostly vanilla and pistachio.

The court documents note that the trip also incurred a charge of $1.5 million for a flight, although it did not specify whether the flight was for the Netanyahus only or for staff as well.

"When the prime minister goes abroad, his office continues working from abroad," said officials in the Prime Minister's Office. "Meanwhile, the Shin Bet requires us to take up an entire floor (at the hotel) for security reasons, and some of the rooms are made into offices with computers, printers, security equipment and communication equipment. Another room is turned into a meeting room for the prime minister's entourage."

Regarding the hefty sum for a hairdresser, the officials said that "in New York terms, $1,600 for a hairdresser for five days is not a lot of money. If the prime minister has a meeting in the morning, he needs to put on makeup and have his hair done, and repeat that before evening meetings. He appears in front of people and cameras and gives interviews and at the end of the day, he represents Israel."
WASHINGTON -- Republican Sen. John McCain said Thursday that President Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, because Obama has allowed the growth of the Islamic State group on his watch.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, made the comment to reporters Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday's attack and some of the survivors.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old Muslim born in New York made calls during the attack saying he was a supporter of the Islamic State. But he also spoke about an affiliate of al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, both of which are ISIS enemies.
US President Barack Obama said Thursday it's going to take more than the military to prevent terrorist attacks like the ones that have occurred most recently in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando.

Obama spoke after meeting with families of those shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

He said the attacks were not conducted by sophisticated cells, but by deranged individuals. And while the motivation may have been different than what led to attacks in communities like Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, the instruments of death were similar.

The president went on to say that those killed and injured were gunned down by a single individual with a powerful assault weapon.
TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- Families, friends and Air Force Reserve leaders lined up June 11 to greet thirteen Citizen Airmen of the 507th Maintenance Group here upon returning home from a four-month deployment to Southwest Asia.

Master Sgt. Robert Mills of the 507th Maintenance Squadron here had a special guest waiting to meet him: his two-month old baby boy who was born during his deployment.

Mills wife, mother, and two sons anxiously awaited his arrival back from his third deployment, just one week before Fathers Day.

Roberts wife, Jordan Mills, said deployments come with many challenges. She said she relied on the tremendous support from her family.

My mom and mother-in-law got me through, Jordan said. I couldnt have done it without them.

Mills said he didnt let the distance keep him from being involved in his sons birth.

It was interesting going through the whole birth over the phone, Mills said. My mom gave the play-by-play.

When asked about their plans they had for the evening, Mills said he and his family planned to eat the one kind of cuisine that was not available at the dining facility: Mexican food.

Mills said he was also excited to get a good nights sleep and take his kids to the park.

Its going to be nice to get home and help out with little Luke," Mills said.

Jordan offered some advice for military spouses coping with a loved ones deployment.

Pray as often as you can, Jordan said. And watch a lot of Netflix.

Col. Travis Caughlin, 507th Maintenance Group commander, greeted the Airmen and gave them a warm welcome.

We are very proud of the great work that they did, Caughlin said. Were glad to see them back home.

The deployed team provided KC-135R maintenance in support of Central Commands combat operations, where Mills served as coordinator on the flightline.

The 507th Air Refueling Wing here employs more than 1,110 Citizen Airmen who operate and maintain eight KC-135R Stratotanker aircraft and provide worldwide aerial refueling to U.S. and NATO aircraft in times of peace, war and national emergency.

Following a deployment, Airmen are required to report in to complete paperwork, and then are allowed leave for about a month to recuperate and to reunite with family.

The Air Force Reserves Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program helps military members maintain resiliency during all stages of deployment, which is integral to the morale and welfare of Airmen and families.

Yellow Ribbon is a series of events designed to provide members and families with essential resources prior to departure, a level of stability and support during deployment, and successful re-integration techniques after the deployment cycle ends.

Many of the Citizen Airmen who returned on Saturday plan to use the program following leave.
MASON CITY  The first Friday Night Live concert of the summer kicks off at 6 p.m. June 17 on North Federal Avenue, across from Central Park in downtown Mason City.

Bring lawn chairs and the family for fun activities and free music from 6 to 10 p.m.

Performing will be Farm Rock, a high-energy Top 40 country band. The concert is provided by First Citizens and Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa.

There will be food vendors, a beer tent, MacNider Art Museum Imagination Playground, two bounce houses and an obstacle course. Craft vendors will be set up in the Central Park area.

Blue Zones project will provide bicycle racks for bike parking. This is not valet parking but will be in high-visibility areas.

Friday Night Live is presented by Main Street Mason City, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the betterment and preservation of downtown Mason City.

For information, visit Facebook MainStMasonCity or mainstreetmasoncity.org.
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.

As of 2020, Minuteman Review is now the proud owner and operator of Your Defence News, a website with a long history of breaking huge news stories and investigative journalism.

We hope you are equally as excited as us.

This means that now the teams of Minuteman can combine with the firepower of Your Defence News to stay at the absolute forefront for our readers.

Keep an eye. Big things are coming soon. We couldn't be more excited.

In the meanwhile, here are some of our most popular posts and categories to keep you busy.

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MASON CITY  The doggie dip at the Mason City Aquatic Center may be in jeopardy.

An extensive cleaning of the facilitys filtration system this week revealed that the approximately 300 dogs that participate in the annual event were leaving something behind.

Hair. Lots of dog hair.

Officials say that if dogs are going in the pool, someones going to have to pony up $3,000 for an annual deep-clean of the pools filters.

After talking to the professionals that deal with pool filters throughout the Midwest, their recommendation to me is any time we do a dog dip we would professionally clean the filters, said Mason City Recreation Superintendent Brian Pauly.

The Mason City Parks and Recreation Board was briefed on the situation Tuesday during its June meeting. It will discuss the doggie dips future at next months regular meeting on July 12.

Doggone fun

During Tuesdays Park Board meeting, Pauly recommended the board discontinue the doggie dip given the steep cost of an annual extensive filter cleaning.

Board member Troy Levenhagen agreed, but floated the idea of having a similar event somewhere else.

For three thousand dollars, I dont think its necessary, but thats just my opinion, Levenhagen said. Big Blue? Could we transfer it somewhere where its free?

That idea did not appear to gain much traction with city staffers present, who pointed out that dogs are not allowed to swim at Big Blue.

Theres a no-dog ordinance at the public pool, too but we open it for one day, dont we, Levenhagen said. Just an idea Im throwing out there.

Member Don Nelson also said he didnt think it was worth an annual $3,000-$4,000 filter cleaning.

No action was taken because the item wasnt on the agenda. Board members will take up the issue next month.

The dip, which allows dogs and their owners to play in the pool, has been held yearly since 2011 as a fundraiser for the Mason City Dog Park.

It also was held before 2011 but discontinued.

Approximately 300 people attended last year.

Filter failure

Officials didnt realize the doggie dip had created problems in Mason City until the pool water appeared cloudy or chalky this year, Pauly said.

When the water continually tested free of harmful bacteria or other contaminants, staff suspected the filters, he said.

Chemically, our water was fine, Pauly said.

It became clear the dip was the culprit when a professional cleaning crew found dog hair, human hair and dog-related residue in the pools seven sand-filled filtration tanks during a massive cleaning on Tuesday.

It was catching the big stuff but it wasnt clearing the water, Pauly said.

The crew shot water backward through the system to loosen debris from the sand and inserted a cleaning solution. Dirty water and gunk was then flushed from the system.

The water in the 900,000-gallon has been perfect since the procedure.

This was the first day we had a crystal clear pool this season, Pauly said Wednesday afternoon.

Pauly, who took over as city recreation chief in 2010, said it was the most extensive cleaning hes aware of the pool having done.

If no doggie dip is held, the pool will undergo this type of filter cleaning every three years.

Before Tuesday, the last time the pool underwent a major filter cleaning was in 2005, Pauly said.

Local dips

Mason City is one of only a few local pools to offer a doggie dip.

Staff in Manly and Northwood have considered opening their pools to the dogs, but havent held one yet. Officials at the new Nora Springs Aquatic Center also have considered it.

Clear Lake recreation officials considered a dog swim night, but decided against it.

Primarily because of the dog hair that gets lodged in the filters, which can create problems, said Clear Lake Parks Director Randy Miller. And, they just werent comfortable with the potential for bacteria in the water.

Garner also offers one at the end of its swimming season.

The 300,000-gallon pool filtration system undergoes an extensive cleaning afterward. It uses ACCO, the same company that cleaned Mason Citys system on Tuesday, to clear debris from Garners two sand-filtration tanks.

It would do the cleaning regardless of if theres a doggie dip, said Garner Parks and Recreation Director Sarah Swanson.

The 55-75 pooches that usually participate in the doggie dip do leave evidence in the pools basket filters, which catch debris before it enters the filtration tanks, Swanson said.

Youll definitely see after the doggie dip that those are pretty full of dog hair, she said.
In recent weeks Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland have all introduced some form of additional tax costs for foreign buyers of residential real estate by imposing higher rates of stamp duty and land tax.

All three governments announced the measures with a common message that the tax surcharges would provide additional revenue and would not impact demand for Australian real estate among foreign buyers.

But Gavin Norris, head of Australia for Juwai.com, an online portal that markets real estate to Chinese buyers, said the three states do run the risk of making other areas of Australia more popular to overseas buyers.

The east coast states do run the risk that buyers will move to locations with more affordable property and less red tape, like South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia, Norris told Your Investment Property.

This is certainly a great opportunity for agents and developers in those other states to more proactively make the case that their markets offer the same lifestyle at a better price, he said.

Norris also said the moves may make other international market more popular for foreign buyers, such as the United States where foreign buyers face no additional charges.

Norris, who has previously criticised the moves, said Juwai is keeping a close eye on what impact the tax changes have, however it may be up to a year before the full effect is seen.

Its too early to see any trend in the number of buyer enquiries that come into Juwai.com that we on-send to agents and developers. We have been watching Victoria, in particular, which was the first mover with the stamp duty, and we havent seen an impact yet, he told Your Investment Property.

Chinese consumers often come to Juwai.com about nine to 12 months prior to actually investing, and they use it to educate themselves.

While Norris has raised questions over the claims that the charges wont impact foreign demand, Rich Harvey, chief executive officer of propertybuyer.com.au, has questioned the amount of revenue the governments believe they will generate from the surcharges.

In particular Harvey raised doubts about the claim from NSW Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian that NSW would see an extra $1 billion in tax revenue over four years from the surcharges.

The question in my mind is why didnt they bring it in earlier in the boom, rather than at the end of the boom? Its a classic case of the government chasing the tail end of things and moving too late to really benefit, Harvey told Your Investment Property.

If [that $1 billion is] based on past projections theres no way theyll get to that number. If you look at the forward estimates of demand overseas buyers will have for property then theyre not going to get that.

Like Norris, Harvey also said its too early to judge the real impact of the extra changes; however he did say foreign investors often received unwarranted negative attention from policy makers.

They are used as a scapegoat and they are an easy target," he said

Its an issue thats always going to be up as an easy target and as much as youd like any debate to move beyond a certain point I think its always going to be like this because theres still some xenophobia and still a perception that foreigners are taking too much of our land.
As a homeowner, you probably already know that you should be working to maintain your home. But, chances are, you Read More
To start to do something about the horror of mass-murder terrorism in the United States, it would help if we focused more on real fixes instead of gun control. Some believe the instruments of evil are the evil themselves and here is what happens: President Obama advocates laws that would likely accomplish zip as his rhetoric puts record numbers of guns on the streets.

Fear of gun-buying restrictions has been the main driver of spikes in gun sales, far surpassing the effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks alone, said the New York Times in a data-driven story that quoted one financial analyst as echoing the sort of thing dozens of others have underlined  that Obama is the best gun salesman the country has ever seen.

Whenever this president speaks of guns, people rush out to retailers before new laws get in the way. Look at monthly tallies of firearm purchases and its easy to believe an estimate that 100 million guns have been sold during his administration.

He is not the only factor, obviously, but he has definitely helped, and even if each and every one of his gun-control proposals became law and were as effective as he dreams they would be, they would not begin to undo what he has done.

In fact, they would do next to nothing. For instance, he wants more and better background checks, and along with most Americans I am more than willing to go along. But we live in a country where there are 300 million guns and getting hold of one is not a taxing proposition despite the many laws that already exists at the state, local and federal level.

He would also like to forbid gun purchases by people whose names end up on a list of the worrisome. They, too, could get guns easily and the last thing we need is a precedent of denying rights because of a government list.

Obama wants a ban on assault weapons, and OK, go ahead, but this is a fraud. Assault weapons do get used in mass murders  one was used in Orlando  but there are other rifles with the same capacities. It is also the case that the number of killings by all rifles and shotguns, including assault weapons, are no more than the annual killings by swinging fists and kicking feet.

Guns obviously facilitate killing, but the overriding issue in gun homicides is culture; Russia, with far fewer guns per capita than the United States, has four times the murder rate.

Gun limits ordinarily have little, if any, effect. Some say Australia is proof to the contrary without noting a major part of its program was reimbursed confiscation. Were going to try that here? England banned handguns and saw homicides go up over the next five years. Finally it improved police protection and things got better. Here is where Obama should look.

From 1993 until today, gun homicides in America have dropped by half. Why? A major cause was almost certainly more cops on the beat and more sophisticated policing. Obama does not seem to have learned anything from that. He has, in fact, repeatedly castigated our cops as racist, and as analysts such as Heather Mac Donald of Manhattan Institute have shown, cops appear ever more worried about the consequences of proactive law enforcement with the consequence of violent crime in our cities going up again.

The Orlando shooting was horrific, and much can and should be done both in fighting radical Islam abroad and better protecting ourselves from it here, and in combating violent crime generally. But there are also ways of making things worse while achieving little.
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Washington, DC - The Federal Trade Commission today issued a report to Congress describing the agencys substantial work on fraud prevention, law enforcement, and consumer outreach and education in African American and Latino communities, and outlining a strategy to build on this prior work.

The report, Combating Fraud in African American and Latino Communities: The FTCs Comprehensive Strategic Plan, sets forth the agencys extensive efforts to combat fraud in not only African American and Latino communities, but every community with an emphasis on raising public awareness and encouraging more fraud reports.

As our extensive law enforcement and outreach efforts demonstrate, we have made protecting consumers from every community a top priority, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez said. As our population grows older and becomes more diverse, the agency will continue to develop strategies to ensure that our work benefits everyone, including the elderly, minorities, and low-income consumers.

Under its plan, the FTC will expand efforts to encourage people to talk about fraud within their communities, and to help the FTC by reporting suspected fraud. The FTC will continue to build networks with community organizations, visit areas with low rates of consumer fraud reporting, and further develop its law enforcement efforts to stop frauds affecting these communities.

The agency will also host a workshop on December 6, 2016 that will bring together researchers, legal services organizations, and other groups that serve the African American and Latino communities, and state and federal law enforcers to examine how the demographics of this country will continue to change and how these changes will continue to affect fraud prevention work. The workshop will examine prior research showing that African Americans and Hispanics were more likely than non-Hispanic whites to be fraud victims and yet research shows that there is serious underreporting of fraud from these communities.

For more information, read Every Community, 10 Ways to Avoid Fraud, Avoiding Online Scams and Common Online Scams.

The Commission vote to issue the report to the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees was 3-0.
The only reaction to Donald Trumps response on Monday to the slaughter at a gay nightclub in Orlando is: Really, you couldnt help yourself, with all the country is going through.

He couldnt. Even before he asked for a moment of silence for the 49 victims in Orlando, Trump was lighting into Hillary Clinton and how bad a president she would be. His authority on that is a former Secret Service agent, who has seen her under pressure and in times of stress, has stated that she lacks the temperament and integrity to be president.

A campaign is an imperfect vehicle for judging how a presidential candidate would lead the country. Its as likely to inflame as enlighten.

The presumptive Republican nominees reaction to Orlando, via Twitter on Sunday and in the speech Monday, gave a glimpse of how commander in chief Trump might behave in the face of a terrorist act. It wasnt encouraging.

First, in his tweets, he seized on the attacks as an opportunity to talk about his strength and prescience and others weaknesses. The shooting, he said, brought all kinds of praise for his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country: I had been receiving tens of thousands of tweets, literally, tweets and calls and letters and everything. Because Ive been the one that predicted it. Trump boasted. And Im the one that said what you should be doing. And I dont want the credit.

Trump is the master of taking in full daylight the thing he says he doesnt want. He went on to tear into Clinton for being too politically correct to call the enemy by its rightful name. When she uttered the phrase Islamic terrorism on Monday morning, Trump must not have heard because he didnt say the shift in language meant she was suddenly suited to be president.

His attacks on others at least were a little more fleshed-out than his proposals to prevent further terror strikes. His old hobby horse was dragged out.

The current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and to think and act clearly, he said Monday.

His other advice centered on tightening immigration laws so that not just Muslims would be banned from coming in but all citizens from any country that has experienced an act of terrorism.

Not only is that more impossible and inadvisable than his initial call to bar an entire religion but it would hardly be a solution for this horror. At times, he spoke as if the Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, wasnt born in the U.S. As for Mateens ability to obtain the AR-15 assault rifle that allowed him to shoot 100 people, killing 49, Trump said he would be speaking to the National Rifle Association, but not about changing the law.

Then Trump went back to his political beginnings. On Fox News on Monday morning he questioned the patriotism of President Barack Obama. who either is not tough, not smart, or hes got something else in mind. In case he wasnt clear, he suggested that the problem may be that the president is a sympathizer of radical Islam. Obama doesnt get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. Its one or the other.

The performance should give second thoughts to Republicans who cling to the hope that Trump, after some stumbles, will grow into the role of presidential nominee and maybe even president. Even in the face of immense tragedy and continuing peril, he could not stop aggrandizing himself and maligning others, and showed no interest in the complicated national security questions that any president might be called upon to confront.

Once a birther, always a birther, and so much worse.
IRVINE, Calif., June 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- American Healthcare Investors, a commercial real estate investment firm that specializes in the acquisition and management of healthcare-related properties, announced today that Brian Peay has joined the company as executive vice president and chief financial officer. The boards of directors of Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III, Inc. and Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV, Inc., which are co-sponsored and managed by American Healthcare Investors, have also appointed Peay to serve as their chief financial officer.



Peay joins American Healthcare Investors from Veritas Investments, Inc., a private real estate investment management company with more than $2 billion of assets under management, where he served as chief financial officer. While with Veritas, Peay was the principal financial executive with oversight of fund accounting, investor relations, and sourcing and structuring of debt, as well as financial planning, corporate budgeting, tax structuring and management of all accounting functions for the firm.

Brian Peay is an important addition to our executive team, bringing with him more than 28 years of experience as a financial professional, including extensive experience in commercial real estate investment, said Danny Prosky, a founding principal of American Healthcare Investors and president and chief operating officer of Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III and Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV. American Healthcare Investors is one of the largest managers of healthcare real estate in the nation with more than $8 billion in assets under management and one of the most successful sponsors of public non-traded REITs. The addition of an executive of Brians caliber and experience is a meaningful benefit to our company as we continue to grow and expand our platform. We couldnt be more pleased to have him join our management team.

Peay previously served in a series of management positions with Glenborough Realty Trust, Inc., a formerly New York Stock Exchange-listed REIT, ultimately as executive vice president and chief financial officer. During his 15-year career with Glenborough, Peay was a member of a four-person executive management committee responsible for the strategic direction of the company. He also played an integral role in the sale of the company to Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund V, after which it became known as Glenborough, LLC.

Peay began his professional career in 1988 with real estate public accounting firm Kenneth Leventhal & Company, which merged with Ernst & Young in 1995.

Peay received a bachelors degree in business economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and earned a CPA designation from the state of California, which is currently inactive.

About American Healthcare Investors LLC

American Healthcare Investors is an investment management firm that specializes in the acquisition and management of healthcare-related real estate. One of the worlds largest managers of healthcare real estate, the company oversees a 29 million-square-foot portfolio valued at approximately $8 billion, based on aggregate purchase price, on behalf of multiple investment programs that include thousands of individual and institutional investors. As of March 31, 2016, this international portfolio includes approximately 600 buildings comprised of medical office buildings, hospitals, senior housing, skilled nursing facilities and integrated senior health campuses located throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. The company and its principals have completed approximately $25 billion in aggregate acquisition and disposition transactions, approximately $15 billion of which have been healthcare-related. American Healthcare Investors is committed to providing investors with access to the potential benefits that healthcare-related real estate ownership can provide. For more information regarding American Healthcare Investors, please visit www.AmericanHealthcareInvestors.com.

About Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III, Inc.

Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III, Inc. qualified to be taxed as a real estate investment trust for federal income tax purposes beginning with our taxable year ended December 31, 2014, and intends to continue to be taxed as a REIT. Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III invests in a diversified portfolio of healthcare real estate assets, focusing primarily on medical office buildings, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior housing and other healthcare-related facilities. The REIT is co-sponsored by American Healthcare Investors and Griffin Capital Corporation. For more information regarding Griffin-American Healthcare REIT III, please visit www.HealthcareREIT3.com.

About Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV, Inc.

Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV, Inc. intends to elect to be taxed as a real estate investment trust for federal income tax purposes beginning with its taxable year ending December 31, 2016, or the first year in which it commences material operations, and it intends to continue to be taxed as a REIT. Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV intends to build a balanced and diversified portfolio of healthcare real estate assets, focusing primarily on medical office buildings, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior housing and other healthcare-related facilities. The REIT is co-sponsored by American Healthcare Investors and Griffin Capital Corporation. For more information regarding Griffin-American Healthcare REIT IV, please visit www.HealthcareREIT4.com.
New Delhi: India on Thursday downplayed the US Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as "global strategic and defence partner", saying it would be "premature" to speculate about its final content.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit there last week.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the US Senate.

"The preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

"The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

In a related development, the US Senate has moved to block USD 300 million military aid to Pakistan unless the Defence Secretary certifies that Islamabad is taking demonstrable steps against the Haqqani Network.

Swarup also noted that preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US government to recognise India as a major defence partner.

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US government.

"It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," he added.

The US Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

Top Republican Senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with America's closest allies.

NDAA was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13. But some of the key amendments including the (SA 4618) even though they had bipartisan support.
Vijayawada: A 2012 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, K Sasikumar, Thursday died of a bullet injury under mysterious circumstances inside his office chambers at Paderu in Visakhapatnam district, police said.

Sasikumar, who hailed from Tamil Nadu, was posted as Assistant Superintendent of Police at Paderu.

"We are not sure whether it happened accidentally or done intentionally. The Visakhapatnam (Rural) SP has rushed to the spot and we are examining the case," North Coastal Zone Inspector General of Police Kumar Vishwajeet told PTI over phone.

It is suspected that the officer, a bachelor, may have committed suicide but there is no clarity on it yet, police sources said.

A bullet sound was heard from his chamber in the wee hours today following which the sentry rushed in to take a look, they added.

The sentry found the officer in blood as a bullet pierced through his right temple. His service weapon was found on a table. The staff then tried to rush Sasikumar in a vehicle to a hospital but he succumbed to the injury midway, sources added.

This was Sasikumar's second posting after his first stint at Allagadda in Kurnool district. He came to Paderu in January.

Additional details are awaited.
Patna: The SIT probing the Intermediate Bihar toppers' scam on Tuesday recovered gold worth Rs 20 lakh from the principal of Bishun Roy College, Bachcha Rai's residence in Vaishali.

The SIT has also recovered cash worth Rs 1,32,000 and some documents.

It all began when a Class 12 arts topper from Bihar thought political science was about cooking and her classmate, a science topper, couldn't explain the connection between H2O and water.

These top scorers in the Bihar state board intermediate exams were exposed in media interviews soon after their Class 12 results were announced last month.

Following the furore over the Bihar Board examination toppers being unable to answer basic questions related to their stream, eventually leading to a re-examination, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said the guilty won't be spared, adding that investigation into the matter will be done with a criminal angle.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Bihar Police earlier on 9 June, arrested five persons in connection with the state board exams scam.
New Delhi: A 38-year-old businessman was strangled to death by robbers when he resisted them at his farmhouse here early on Thursday, police said. Five robbers have been arrested.

Investigators said the incident occurred between 1 and 2.30 a.m when the robbers barged into Rohan Gupta`s two-storey farmhouse in south Delhi`s Chhhatarpur area by scaling its wall.

In its preliminary investigation, police found out that the robbers first entered the ground floor of the farmhouse where Gupta`s parents were asleep.

"The robbers sedated the parents using chloroform and started collecting cash and jewellery. A few robbers went to the first floor where Gupta was sleeping," a police officer said.

The men attempted the same modus operandi on Gupta. But he woke up and started fighting back.

"In the scuffle, the culprits strangulated Gupta to death," the officer said.

One of Gupta`s neighbours called the police after he sensed something amiss at Gupta`s house.

Police personnel who rushed to the scene surrounded the farmhouse and caught five of the accused - Ajay, Vipin, Vinod, Shivnath and Vinod Kumar. One of the robbers is believed to have escaped.

Gupta`s domestic help and another staff along with the security guard who was deployed at the main gate of the colony were being interrogated to get information about a suspected insider who might have helped the robbers.

The arrested men told police that they had not intended to kill anyone.
New Delhi: The national capital was shamed yet again. A 25-year old woman was allegedly abducted and gang-raped in a moving car in Delhi's Vasant Vihar.

The Police have registered a case on victim's compliant and arrested three persons in connection with the case.

Delhi Chief Minister has time and again raised the issue of granting full statehood to Delhi in order to curb such incidents which "occur repeatedly".

Despite tougher laws enacted after the gruesome Nirbhaya gang-rape some three years ago, women in Delhi hardly feel safe, says a study that found 40 percent of the women surveyed in the national capital reporting sexual harassment in the past year.

About 40 percent of women surveyed in Delhi said they have been sexually harassed in a public place such as a bus or park in the past year, with most of the crimes occurring in the daytime, said the study published online in the journal International Criminal Justice Review.

The December 16, 2012, rape and murder of a woman by a group of men on a moving bus in Delhi brought about new laws that doubled prison terms for rape and criminalised voyeurism and stalking.

Nirbhaya became the pseudonym given to the gang rape victim whose death in 2012 brought worldwide attention to violence against women.
New Delhi: After a desperate search that clocked up 18 hours, the body of the two-year-old, who was dragged away by an alligator near Disney World Resort in Florida, has finally been found.

The boy was last seen playing at the edge of the man-made lake near the hotel on Tuesday, when the alligator caught the boy and dragged him away deeper into the water.

While the father fought to bring his son back, all he got were minor lacerations on his arm.

15 unsuccessful hours into the search for the child, the authorities and the search team were compelled to believe that the boy was dead, which led to a search for the body.

The recovered body has been identified as two-year-old Lane Graves. As per reports, the divers found the remains at 1:45 pm near the area where the boy was attacked.

The reports further say that the body of the boy is intact, except for a few puncture wounds.

The body will have to undergo an autopsy, however, Sheriff Jerry Demings believes that the child was drowned by the alligator.

Two-year-old Lane Graves was on a vacation in Disney World with his parents and two siblings from Nebraska.
Shimla: The Union Health Ministry has granted permission to Dr YS Parmar Medial College in Nahan to admit first batch of 100 MBBS students for the 2016-17 session.

An MCI team had inspected the College twice and the permission was granted on the basis of report submitted by the team, Union Health and Family Welfare minister JP Nadda said on Thursday.

However, the classes in other three colleges, including Jawaharlal Nehru College in Chamba, Dr S Radhakrishanan College in Hamirpur and ESI Medical College in Ner Chowk (Mandi) are unlikely to start from the current academic session as necessary faculty and requisite infrastructure were not in place.

The Infrastructure development work and recruitment of faculty is in progress in respect of Chamba College, Land clearance is awaited for Hamirpur Colleges while the Union Ministry of labour is yet to handover the infrastructure created for Ner Chowk College at a cost of about Rs 800 crore, even though the matter has been negotiated and settled between the state government and Union Labour Ministry.

The Chamba and Hamirpur colleges would have 100 seats each while the ESI College would be given 50 MBBS seats.

The two existing government medical colleges, the IGMC Shimla, started in 1966 and the Tanda medical College set up in 1996 also have 100 MBBS seats each and with all four colleges becoming functional, the total number of seats would increase to 550.

Himachal Pradesh Health minister Kaul Singh also confirmed that Nahan Medical College was allowed to go ahead with admissions for the first batch and the state government was making serious efforts to meet the requirements of the MCI to make other three colleges functional as soon as possible.

The Union government had given Rs 570 crore for building infrastructure for Nahan, Hamirpur and Chamba colleges and later released additional Rs 10 crore for Nahan College, he said.

An AIIMS is also coming up near Bilaspur and land had been identified for the mega project, Singh said.
LISLE, Ill., June 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Armour, the makers of great and convenient products including frozen meatballs, pepperoni and portable meal kits, continued their national campaign to recognize and honor Great Moms across the country on Wednesday. Armour held a special presentation to surprise Charlotte Steedly, an exceptional pediatric nurse, community advocate and mother of two children with special needs.



A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7dd71569-0146-4685-b37a-2ed9cdee259c

Serving as a pediatric nurse for over 10 years, Steedly has provided surgical and bedside nursing care to hundreds of pediatric patients at Novant Health Hemby Childrens Hospital located in Charlotte, N.C. Her care for other children only exemplifies her most important job, being the remarkable mother of her two wonderful children, Leah and Parker.

Steedly, along with her husband, Jamie, raise their two children. Due to health issues, both require ongoing care from medical specialists including physical therapists, specialty physicians and special educators. Because of her childrens needs, Steedly volunteers at the local Ronald McDonald House and participates in walks for St. Judes and the March of Dimes.

Steedlys love and dedication as a mother and pediatric nurse has had a lasting impact on her co-workers at Hemby Childrens Hospital.

Charlottes duties go above and beyond the normal motherly duties and she does it well, said Vicki Evans, a co-worker at Hemby Childrens Hospital. The smiles on her childrens faces are proof Charlotte is truly succeeding as one of the best moms ever. Their happiness is apparent in spite of the special challenges they encounter on a regular basis.

Co-worker and nurse, Danielle de Gorter added, As the mother of a special needs child, Charlotte has become a strong advocate for her daughter and other patients and parents. She will fight for everything her child needs and helps many others along the way. Charlotte is truly a Great Mom and person.

Steedly was celebrated during a presentation at Hemby Childrens Hospital in front of her family, friends and fellow nurses. Armour partnered with Publix to surprise Steedly with $2,500 in free groceries. Armour is a brand of Smithfield Foods.

We are pleased to honor Charlotte Steedly, said Chuck Gitkin, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Smithfield Foods. The Armour Great Moms campaign is dedicated to honoring and giving back to mothers, our everyday unsung heroes. Charlotte has proven time and again to be a Great Mom and were happy to reward her with $2,500 in free groceries at Publix.

The Great Moms campaign is a national program designed to highlight and reward everyday great moms across the country that go above and beyond each day and still take the time to provide their families with great meals. Great Moms often go without praise and Armour is helping to change that by showing its appreciation for these everyday champions.

The campaign includes monthly events across the country through November to surprise and celebrate unexpected Great Moms for their extraordinary efforts in their communities and at home.

I am totally shocked, said Steedly. There are a ton of Great Moms everywhere and I think everyone deserves that title. Its just so wonderful to be recognized by your peers and to be honored as a Great Mom by Armour is awesome.

For additional details about Armour and their products, please follow them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ArmourMeats.

To learn more about Novant Health Hemby Childrens Hospital, visit their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/HembyChildrens.

About Armour

With America's favorite frozen meatballs, LunchMakers portable meal kits, and pepperoni products, Armour is proud to be a trusted brand that provides convenient, delicious and affordable meal options for smart, sensible families since 1867.

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, Nathan's Famous, Farmland, Armour, Cook's, John Morrell, Gwaltney, 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 Novant Health

Novant Health is an integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient facilities and hospitals that delivers a seamless and convenient healthcare experience to communities in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. Named in 2016 by Beckers Hospital Review as one of the nations 150 best places to work in healthcare, Novant Health consists of more than 1,380 physicians and nearly 24,000 employees and provides care at 530 locations, including 14 medical centers and hundreds of outpatient facilities and physician clinics. Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the health system serves more than 4 million patients annually and in 2015 provided more than $706 million in community benefit, including charity care and services. Diversity MBA has recognized the organization as one of the 50 best places for women and managers of diverse background to work. Novant Health provides care in Virginia under the joint operating company, Novant Health UVA Health System.

For more information, please visit our website at NovantHealth.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
New Delhi: An NGO run by civil rights activist Teesta Stelvad, who has espoused the cause of Gujarat riot victims, was Thursday banned from receiving foreign funds, with the Home Ministry cancelling its FCRA licence.

The Home Ministry issued an order saying that the central government has cancelled the permanent registration of Sabrang Trust run by Teesta and her husband Javed Anand with immediate effect.

The government argued that the foreign funds received by the NGO under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence had not been used for the purposes meant.

The order said that during inspection, the Home Ministry found that foreign contribution has been "frequently used" for items of "personal expenses e.G. For dining in hotels, food takeaways ordered at their residences, cakes and sweets from premium outlets, purchase of purely personal items like ear-buds, wet wipes, clippers, sanitary napkins by both Teesta and Anand, which have been reimbursed to the trustees from FCRA account."

Sabrang Trust has spent an amount of Rs 50 lakh for Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt Limited (SCPPL), of which Teesta and Anand are working as directors, co-editors, printers and publisher, "clearly violating the mandate of the FCRA," the MHA order said.

"By this action, the NGO has not only unauthorisedly utilised the foreign contribution for the purposes of an unregistered entity but also that entity being a self-owned media and publication company, utilised that amount for activities totally prohibited by FCRA," it added.

The order said the NGO had transferred an amount of Rs 2.46 lakh from its foreign contribution designated account to Sabrang Trust domestic account, thus mixing of domestic and foreign funds and violating the rules.

Sabrang Trust has made direct payments of approximately Rs 12 lakh from FCRA designated account to Citi Bank and Union Bank of India on account of credit cards belonging to Teesta and Anand respectively.

The cards are issued in the name of the individuals and the above payments of the foreign contribution shall be treated to have been used for personal gain, the Home Ministry said.
Delhi: Chinese media said on Thursday that China could support India's bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) if it promises to comply with non-proliferation rules.

An opinion piece in the nationalistic 'Global Times' said that the "reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance... Against the backdrop of Washington's accelerated pace of promoting its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, it will be highly likely to keep supporting New Delhi's nuclear ambitions, in order to make it a stronger power to contain China."

It added - "However, as a country that has signed neither the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG. That's why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to India's membership... As a crucial defender of the international system against nuclear proliferation, China does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules."

The opinion piece further said - "So far, all NSG members have signed the NPT. So the question is, if any non-signatory of the treaty wants to join the group, under what condition can it be accepted? If such a standard is to be made one day, then it will be possible for both India and Pakistan to become part of the group. Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organization. As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG, and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhi's path toward the club.

The NSG looks after critical issues relating to nuclear sector and its members are allowed to trade in and export nuclear technology. Membership of the grouping will help India significantly expand its atomic energy sector.

India has been reaching out to NSG member countries seeking support to its membership. The NSG works under the principle of unanimity.

On June 13, China had said that the 48-nation body will have 'extensive discussions' about admission of new members ahead of its plenary meeting to be held in Seoul on June 24.

"As to how non-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) countries can join the NSG, the group shall have extensive discussions," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kong had told a media briefing in Beijing replying to a question whether the group is likely to take a decision at the Seoul meeting, as per PTI.

While the US and a majority of the 48 members back India's admission, China along with New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria are reportedly opposed to the entry.

China which is reportedly backing Pakistan's entry into the club maintains that there should be consensus about admitting non-NPT members into the grouping.

(With Agency inputs)
Beijing: Downplaying reports of scuffles between Indian and Chinese troops during PLA troops transgression into Arunachal Pradesh, China on Thursday said it was committed to peace and tranquility at the border areas.

"We have noted that the Indian official has clarified the situation saying that there is no transgression as reported in the media," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters here today replying to a question on reports of scuffles between the two forces.

"China's position on the East part of the border line is clear," he said in apparent reference to China's claims over Arunachal Pradesh as part of Southern Tibet.

"As I said it was a regular patrol by Chinese border troops and China is committed to the peace and tranquility of the border area," he said.

In his comments on the border transgression by over 200 Chinese troops into Arunachal Pradesh on June 9, Lu yesterday said that?China and India border has not yet been demarcated.

"It is learnt that China's border troops were conducting normal patrols on the Chinese side of the LAC (Line of Actual Control)," Lu said.

The big contingent of PLA soldiers stayed in the area for few hours and left for their base, the reports said.

On the issue of incursions, China has been maintaining the same stand whenever its troops crossed into the Indian side of the LAC stating that both countries have difference perception about it.

The LAC covers the 3,488 km long border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh, India asserts that the dispute covers the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war.

The two countries have so far held 19 rounds of boundary talks by Special Representatives.

The incursion into Arunachal Pradesh came at a time when China is opposing India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on the ground that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Asked about reports that Chinese vessel tailed Indian naval ships taking part in the Malabar naval exercises in the Pacific along with the US and Japanese navies, Lu said, "I am not aware of the details. It seems that some people are intent to linking this incident and everyone should be careful about their hidden motives."
New Delhi: India Thursday downplayed the US Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as "global strategic and defence partner", saying it would be "premature" to speculate about its final content.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit there last week.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the US Senate.

"The preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

"The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He also noted that preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US Government to recognize India as a Major Defense Partner.

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US Government.

"It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," he added.

The US Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

Top Republican senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with America's closest allies.

NDAA was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13. But some of the key amendments including the (SA 4618) ? even though they had bipartisan support.
New Delhi: Home Ministry official B.K. Prasad on Thursday dismissed the charge that he tutored a witness in the probe relating to missing documents in the Ishrat Jahan case.

Prasad in a statement said: "All officers inquired by me are or have been senior officers in the government and are fully capable of answering questions relating to the probe on their own and there is no question of the alleged 'tutoring'."

Prasad's assertion comes a day after the one-man inquiry committee which he headed submitted its report on untraceable documents in the Ishrat Jahan case.

A report in the Indian Express said Prasad tutored a witness on what answers he should give during the examination.

According to the report, a call by the India Express to Prasad was put on hold while he was having conversation on another telephone regarding the missing papers probe.

The report said it was evident from the conversation that Prasad was speaking to an officer who was scheduled to give his statement to the probe committee, and it was later found that the officer was Ashok Kumar, a Joint Secretary in Parliament's Hindi Division and nodal officer for monitoring the court cases in the Department of Commerce.

Prasad, however, denied the report and said that it was "unethical" to record his call without permission.

"No evidence has been produced establishing that Mr Ashok Kumar testified being 'tutored' during my alleged conversation," he said in the statement.

"First of all, it is unethical to record my conversation that also with another officer without my permission and knowledge. More importantly, the conversation had nothing to do with the point of query the journalist had. Secondly, what is he saying is only one side of the conversation, without being aware of what the other side, i.e., Mr Ashok Kumar, was asking or clarifying with me," he said.

"Thirdly, the officer with whom my conversation has been quoted was enquired by me on 26th April, 2016, and the questions which have been quoted from my alleged conversation were never asked from Mr. Ashok Kumar and the answer which is quoted by the newspaper was never given by him," he said.

Prasad, according to the report published in the paper on Thursday, told the officer: Aapko kehna hai ki Maine ye paper nahi dekha. Seedhi si baat hai (You have to say, I have not seen that paper. Its as simple as that).

He also told the officer giving a different reply would raise doubts about the officer having played a role in the disappearance of the papers.

Aapko itna toh kehna hoga ki ya toh woh file hi maine kabhi zindagi mein deal nahi kiya, kabhi file ko dekhne ka kabhi mauka hi nahi mila (You will have to say, at least, that either you have never dealt with that file in your life, or have never had a chance to see it)...I dont think you have seen that file at any point... Bas, that is what I want from you: I have not seen that file at all, Prasad told the officer to say, according to the report.

He also reported to have said: And another question will be, Did anybody give you these documents to be kept separately with you? Aap bologe, Nahi, mere ko kisi ne nahi diya. (You will say, No, nobody gave them to me).

Prasad led one-man inquiry committee and on Wednesday submitted its report where it said that four of the five missing documents in the case continue to be untraceable.

The Ishrat Jahan case refers to the gunning down of four alleged terrorists in Gujarat on June 15, 2004, which the CBI had alleged were killed in a staged encounter.

Later, several officials associated with the case, including those from the home ministry and the Intelligence Bureau, accused the then Congress-led UPA government of changing an affidavit for political gains.
Kohima: Nagaland Minister for PWD (National Highways), Mechanical and Elections, Nuklutoshi today said four-laning of Dimapur-Kohima National Highway-29 will commence by December 2016.

Compensation to all the landowners affected by the project has been cleared while order also issued for commencement of the work by the end of this year, the minister told reporters on the sidelines of a function here this evening.

Asked about the two-laning of NH-2 from KM 40 to KM 72, along Tseminyu to Wokha sector, Nuklutoshi said sanction of fund is expected to be accorded by the Centre within couple of weeks.

He said the detailed project report (DPR) has already been submitted to the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the same has been approved.

However, he said, the money to the tune of a little over Rs 400 crore is yet to be sanctioned due to technical problems.

He also said the Regional Officer of the Union Ministry from Guwahati recently made the physical inspection and further progress is expected within the next couple of weeks.
WILMINGTON, Del., June 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Andrews & Springer LLC, a boutique securities class action law firm focused on representing shareholders nationwide, is investigating potential breach of fiduciary duty claims against the Board of Directors of SciQuest, Inc. (SciQuest or the Company) relating to the sale of the Company to private equity firm Accel-KKR. On May 31, 2016, the two parties announced the signing of a definitive merger agreement pursuant to which Accel-KKR will acquire SciQuest in a merger worth only $509 million. As a result of the merger, SciQuest shareholders are only anticipated to receive $17.75 per share in cash in exchange for each share.



Our investigation so far has revealed that the consideration SciQuest shareholders are expected to receive is significantly inadequate. Tellingly, the consideration is well-below the $21.00 per share target price set by JMP Securities. Also, while the Company claims that shareholders will receive a premium for their shares, in reality this premium is below the average 51% premium in comparable mergers in the past three (3) years.

Andrews & Springer is investigating whether the SciQuest Board of Directors is breaching their fiduciary duties to shareholders and whether SciQuests directors have failed to maximize shareholder value.

If you own shares of SciQuest and want to receive additional information and protect your investments free of charge, please visit us at http://www.andrewsspringer.com/cases-investigations/sciquest-class-action-investigation or contact Craig J. Springer, Esq. at cspringer@andrewsspringer.com, or call toll free at 1-800-423-6013. You may also follow us on LinkedIn  www.linkedin.com/company/andrews-&-springer-llc, Twitter  www.twitter.com/AndrewsSpringer or Facebook - www.facebook.com/AndrewsSpringer for future updates.

Andrews & Springer is a boutique securities class action law firm representing shareholders nationwide who are victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty or corporate misconduct. Having formerly defended some of the largest financial institutions in the world, our founding members use their valuable knowledge, experience, and superior skill for the sole purpose of achieving positive results for investors. These traits are the hallmarks of our innovative approach to each case our Firm decides to prosecute. For more information please visit our website at www.andrewsspringer.com. This notice may constitute Attorney Advertising.
New Delhi: Ahead of the key plenary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on June 24 where its membership bid would be taken up, India got a boost with New Zealand softening its stand on the country's application for entry into the elite nuclear club.

As per a report in The Times of India, New Zealand is now pressing for a criteria-based approach for inducting new members as against giving one-time exception to any country.

New Zealand was among the countries including Turkey, South Africa, Ireland, Austria and China which had been opposing India's NSG membership bid ahead of the group's preliminary meeting in Vienna last week.

While New Zealand and some other countries have relented on their position following an appeal by US Secretary of State John Kerry, China and Turkey are continuing to maintain their hardened positions.

Turkey has clearly indicated that it would come aboard only when the NSG agrees to consider the applications of both India and Pakistan simultaneously.

China also maintains a similar position.

India's NSG membership application has been opposed on the ground that the country is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a key requirement for the membership of the nuclear club.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has thanked Turkey for supporting it on the issue and for taking a "principled" stand.

Sartaj Aziz, adviser to Pakistan's PM on foreign affairs, has already dialled foreign ministers of Turkey and Austria to discuss the issue.

"Adviser thanked Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for the principled position adopted by Turkey at the Vienna meeting that the membership applications of both India and Pakistan be considered together," a statement issued by the Pakistan government said.

Aziz, Pakistan's equivalent of foreign minister, had earlier also spoken to his counterparts in Argentina, Italy, New Zealand, Russia and South Korea to lobby for his country's application and highlight its "credentials for NSG membership".
New Delhi: The Central government has been asked by an affiliate of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to create a separate ministry for the welfare of cows.

The Bharatiya Govansh Rakshan Samvardhan Parishad has even given a deadline to the Narendra Modi government for the same while reminding it of its pre-poll promise to protect cows, considered sacred by Hindus.

A leader of the organisation told the Hindustan Times newspaper that the ministry was needed to ensure a complete ban on cow slaughter, consumption of beef and protection of Indian breeds, some of which are on the brink of extinction.

The demand comes at a time when consumption of beef has become a controversial issue and has even led to attacks by some fringe right-wing groups.

Dadri lynching incident is one such example.

Cow protection is one of the key areas on which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), parent organisation of the VHP as well as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, focuses on.

Already, laws on cow protection have been formulated by several states ruled by the BJP.
Jammu: One more temple was allegedly desecrated in Jammu on Thursday, leading to tension briefly in parts of the city which was recovering from the fallout of a similar incident three days back.

"A man entered a temple in the Nanak Nagar area and tried to vandalize it. The man has been identified and arrested," Deputy Commissioner of Jammu Simrandeep Singh told PTI.

A large number of people came onto the roads after news spread. Shopkeepers in the area downed their shutters and held a protest demanding action against the accused.

"Though some people held protest in the area, the situation is normal and under control. Adequate police personnel have been deployed to foil any untoward incident in the area," Singh said.

People called off the protest after the senior officials of the police and civil administration rushed to the spot and assured action against the accused, the DC said.

The incident took place even as normalcy had returned to Jammu following alleged desecretion of a temple in another area Roopnagar on Tuesday by a man who was described by police as "mentally disturbed". The city had witnessed violence and arson over that incident.

Singh said investigations have been started and authorities were looking whether there are any links between the two recent incidents of desecration of temples in the region.
Ranchi: The vehicle of Yogesh Kislay, press advisor of Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das, was hijacked in Ranchi capital city on Wednesday night, police said on Thursday.

Four unidentified goons forced the driver to stop the car round 8.30 p.m. on Wednesday, forcibly got into it and drove away.

The driver was allegedly beaten up and dropped near Ghagra river, police said. The assailants drove the stolen car towards Jamshedpur national highway, and vanished.

The vehicle has not been traced since then.

Police interrogated the driver of the vehicle. He said the assailants said that they had demanded a ransom of Rs 1 crore which was not paid.

However, Kislay has denied any ransom demand was made on him.
Kochi: Close to 50 days after Jisha was brutally raped and murdered at her home near Perumbavoor, an Assam native has reportedly confessed to having killed the law student.

As per reports, the man  who is said to be Jisha's former neighbour and friend  was nabbed from Kochi and taken to an undisclosed location for questioning.

Investigators are awaiting his DNA sample report before they formally link him to the gruesome crime that had shocked not just Kerala but the entire nation.

Reports added that the bloodstained chappal found at the scene of the crime has been conclusively proved to be belonging to the suspect now under the custody of police. The Assam native had, reportedly, bought the footwear from a shop in the locality and the shop owner has now identified the man.

Some other media reports claimed that apart from the main suspect, 3-4 of his accomplices are also under the custody of the police.

Jisha, who hailed from a poor family, was raped and brutally assaulted using sharp-edged weapons before being murdered at her house on April 28.

The murder was in focus during the May 16 Kerala Assembly poll campaigns with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for "tardy" progress in the investigation and its failure to nab the culprits.
Thiruvananthapuram: The suspect in the April 28 brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman at Perumbavoor in Kochi is in police custody, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday said.

"Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From yesterday onwards, the accused was under police radar," he said reacting to reports that the accused, Amir Ul Islam, a migrant labourer from Assam, had been nabbed by the Special Investigation team probing the murder.

Police have received all information, he said.

"The people of Kerala were waiting for such a news", he said to a question.

"The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police", the Chief Minister said.

A report from Kochi quoting police sources said that a Special Investigation Team probing the murder of the woman was questioning the suspect.

They said the 23-year-old Islam's arrest is expected to be recorded today, only after which his DNA samples will be taken.

The LDF government, after assuming power on May 25 had changed the investigation team and entrusted the probe to ADGP B Sandhya on its first cabinet meeting itself.

The rape-and-murder was in focus during the Assembly polls campaign with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for tardy progress in the investigation and failure to nab the culprits.

The woman was murdered in her home on April 28.

The attack, which took place at Perumbavoor in Ernakulam district, had been a major campaign plank of the LDF in the run up to the May 16 Assembly elections.
Jabalpur (MP): A 33-year-old man was killed and six others injured, five of them seriously in a clash between two camps in the early hours of the day over an objectionable photo of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in a WhatsApp messenger group, police said here.

Area City Superintendent of Police Inderjeet Balsavar said that one Umesh Verma who sustained injuries in the clash, succumbed to his wounds at a hospital here, while undergoing treatment.

According to Congress corporator Jatin Raj's group, knives were freely used by the rival group inside the Vijay Nagar Police station where they have gone to lodge a complaint - a charge denied by police who had to call their colleagues from other police stations to discipline the two groups after they turned violent.

Raj has created a group named 'Vijay Nagar Friends' on WhatsApp for people to stay connected in his locality.

Prashant Nayak allegedly posted a photo in the WhatsApp group, which showed Sonia "washing utensils" with a satirical caption saying (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi has reduced Congress President to such a position, CSP Balsavar told PTI.

The two groups gathered at Ahimsa Chowk little after last midnight and a heated argument took place between them over Sonia.

In the meantime, acting on a tip-off the police reached the spot and asked them to come to police station to sort out their differences, the CSP said.

When the two groups reached police station, an alleged altercation took place between them and one Umesh Verma was stabbed, who was rushed to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries, alleged Animesh, a member of the Congress corporator group.

He demanded police should make public the footage of CCTV camera at the police station to bring out the truth.

CSP Balsavar said to bring situation under control, police resorted to cane charge but denied that violence took place inside the police station.

The violence took place when the groups were en route to the police station, the CSP said.

Advocate Nayak was among those who sustained injuries and have been admitted to a hospital, he said, adding people of both the groups have been booked and further investigations are on.
ATLANTA, June 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HAVERTYS (NYSE:HVT) and (NYSE:HVT.A) today reported members of the company's senior management are scheduled to meet on June 16th in New York City and June 21st in Boston with institutional investors and discuss the companys operations. In anticipation of these meetings, Havertys released updated sales and share repurchase information.



Havertys sales for the second quarter to date of 2016 are up approximately 3.6% over the same period last year and comparable store sales are up 3.2%. Total written sales for the second quarter to date of 2016 are up approximately 7.0% and written comparable store sales rose 6.7% over the same period last year. Havertys' stores are closed for Easter and the positive impact on second quarter to date written sales from the holiday occurring in March this year versus April last year is estimated at 1.9%.

The company repurchased 1,149,042 shares of its common stock during the second quarter for approximately $21.0 million. The repurchases were made in accordance with announced authorizations approved by the company's board of directors. The company has a remaining authorization of less than $0.1 million for share repurchases.

"Our written comparable store sales in the second quarter reflect a very strong pace through the Memorial Day holiday sales period, partly offset by softer written business in early June," said Clarence Smith, chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We plan to continue returning value to our shareholders through opportunistic share repurchases, regular quarterly dividends and periodic special dividends," Smith concluded.

The Company plans to announce second quarter 2016 sales on Friday, July 8, 2016, before the market opens and second quarter financial results on Monday, August 1, 2016, after the market closes.

About Havertys

Havertys (NYSE:HVT) and (NYSE:HVT.A), established in 1885, is a full-service home furnishings retailer with 122 showrooms in 16 states in the Southern and Midwestern regions providing its customers with a wide selection of quality merchandise in middle to upper-middle price ranges. Additional information is available on the companys website havertys.com.

News releases include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risk and uncertainties. Factors that might cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, general economic conditions, the consumer spending environment for large ticket items, competition in the retail furniture industry and other uncertainties detailed from time to time in the Companys report filed with the SEC.
Mumbai: Hindu Mahasabha chief Swami Chakrapani has written to Home Ministry saying that he has received fresh threats from 'D-Company'.

As per a report in India Today, he has mentioned in his letter that he has received threats from a number supposedly belonging to Chhota Shakeel.

Chakrapani was in the news some time back for burning underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's car.

He has said that he has received fresh threats just few days after four persons were arrested for conspiring to eliminate him.

The report quotes an SMS received by him as follows - "Mein aapne target koh video game ki tarah khelta hu zyada khush hone ki jaroorat nahin. Wait."

Chakrapani has been provided Z-category security.

The report further says that as per sources he may be given Z+ security cover after these developments.

Chakrapani had bought Dawood's car at an auction and then had publicly burnt it.
Shillong: Eighteen more dead bodies were recovered on Thursday from the 500-feet deep gorge, taking to 25 the death toll in a bus accident in Meghalaya, police said.

"A total of 25 dead bodies, including 18 more on Thursday, were recovered from the deep gorge during the search and rescue operation which was suspended again this evening following the sunset," Spill Thamar, the district police chief of East Jaintia Hills, told IANS.

The accident occurred on Tuesday night at Sonapur in East Jaintia Hills district, about 150 km from Shillong, when the privately-owned bus was on its way from Silchar in southern Assam to Guwahati via Meghalaya. Earlier reports put the toll at 29.

On Wednesday, a combined rescue team of Meghalaya Police, Border Security Force troopers and the local people evacuated nine injured people from the deep gorge and retrieved seven dead bodies.

"The rescue team has searched the gorge to locate any survivor or dead body but as of today the body count stand is 25 and the injured people is 9," Thamar said, adding that a mopping operation will be conducted on Friday to locate if there are any survivor or dead bodies in the gorge.

Moreover, he said that according to the passenger list provided by bus operator indicated that there were only 34 people on board.

He said the dead bodies have been kept at Khiehriat government hospital for post mortem.

Thamar said the injured persons, who are in a critical condition, have been shifted to the North East Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (NEIGRIMS) in Shillong and Jowai Civil hospital in West Jaintia Hills district.

"We have not been able to ascertain the cause of the accident," he said.

Meghalaya Governor V. Shanmuganathan, Chief Minister Mukul Sangma and Home Minister Roshan Warjri have expressed pain over the tragic deaths in the accident.
Chandigarh: A day after Congress leader Kamal Nath was relieved of the charge of general secretary in charge of poll-bound Punjab, former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit has been appointed to serve in the post, a report said.

The Congress has not made any official announcement in this regard.

Born in Punjab, Dikshit had last served as Governor of Kerala.

Kamal Nath on Wednesday wrote to party president Sonia Gandhi requesting her to relieve him of the assignment.

In his two-page letter, he said that he had been hurt over the developments of the past few days during which "an unnecessary controversy has been created around the tragic 1984 riots in New Delhi".

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had termed the June 12 appointment of Kamal Nath as the general secretary in charge of Punjab a "shameful" move.

According to sources, even some leaders in the state Congress unit were not happy with the decision to appoint him.
Tarin Kot: The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- to infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults said.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where "bacha bereesh" -- or boys without beards -- widely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacks -- at least six between January and April alone -- that have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

"The Taliban are sending boys -- beautiful boys, handsome boys -- to penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen," said Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai, who was Uruzgan's police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

"They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forces -- bacha bazi," he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanai's view saying "it's easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers".

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

The insurgents are using bachas as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

He said the attacker was the checkpoint commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

"He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive. I pretended to be dead," said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

"As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: 'Everyone is dead'."

The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

"We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operations -- all grown men with beards," a Taliban spokesman told AFP.
Washington: The US has expressed concern over the recent clashes at the Torkham border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and asked them to take steps to de-escalate tensions.

"We're concerned by the recent clashes at the Torkham crossing point between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have gotten reports that casualties have been taken on both sides," State Department Spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

"We're also concerned about reports of the presence of heavy weapons at the border," he said.

Pakistan and Afghan forces exchanged fire on Sunday over construction on the Pakistani side of the border.

Torkham is the most frequently used crossing point at Pak-Afghan; most of the terrorists have been found using this gate for entry.

"We continue to encourage the governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan to resolve their disagreements at the crossing point and to de-escalate tensions," Kirby said.

Good relations between the two countries are key to the stability to the region, he said in response to a question.
Albany, NY, June 16, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A new market research study, titled Artificial Intelligence Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024, has been recently published by Transparency Market Research and made available on the companys website. The research study talks about the global artificial intelligence market for , focusing on its key drivers, barriers, product segmentation, current trends, major geographical segments, opportunities and challenges, and competitive landscape. According to the research study, in 2015, the global market for artificial intelligence was worth US$126.24 bn and is projected to reach a value of US$3,061.35 bn by the end of 2024. The market is anticipated to exhibit an impressive 36.10% CAGR between 2016 and 2024.

Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology that deals with the study and development of software and intelligent machines. The artificial intelligence technology is widely being used in diverse sectors as it offers in-build machines and software to operate like human beings, thereby allowing the devices to collect, analyze, and take decisions effectively. The increasing demand for artificial intelligence to enhance the productivity and improve customer satisfaction is a major factor estimated to drive the global market in the coming years. In addition, the growing applications of artificial intelligence is projected to propel the global artificial intelligence market.

Get Free PDF Brochure for more Professional and Technical insights: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=4674

The global market for artificial intelligence has been categorized on the basis of product type into expert system, artificial neural network, automated robotic system, embedded system, and digital assistance system. In 2015, the expert system segment dominated the scene with a 44% share in the market. The digital assistance system segment is projected to grow rapidly in the coming years, due to the increased usage of portable computing devices such as tablets and smartphones across the globe. In addition, the rising accessibility of these devices with cost-effectiveness and advanced features is anticipated to fuel the growth of the digital assistance systems segment in the forecast period.

Among the major application segments of the artificial intelligence market, in 2015, the deep learning segment led the market with a 21.6% share. This region is expected to remain in the topmost position throughout the forecast period, followed by the smart robots application segment. On the other hand, the image recognition segment is anticipated to grow at a fast pace due to developing technologies.

Browse Research Blog: http://www.tmrblog.com/2016/03/artificial-intelligence-market.html

By geography, the global market for artificial intelligence has been classified into Latin America, North America, the Middle East and Africa, Europe, and Asia Pacific. In 2015, North America dominated the market, accounting for a 38% share in the global market for artificial intelligence. This region is projected to remain in the leading position in the next few years owing to increased government funding. In addition, this region is considered to be a strong technological base, which is a key factor fueling the global artificial intelligence market. On the other hand, the Middle East and Africa is anticipated to register a promising 38.20% CAGR between 2016 and 2024. The rapid growth of this region can be attributed to the vast opportunities available in airport developments and several technological innovations such as robotic automation.

Browse Research Report with Analysis & Toc: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/artificial-intelligence-market.html

The leading players operating in the global market for artificial intelligence include IBM Corporation, IntelliResponse Systems Inc., Nuance Communications, eGain Corporation, MicroStrategy Inc., Brighterion Inc., Google, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Next IT Corporation, and QlikTech International AB.

The global artificial intelligence market has been segmented as below:

Global Artificial Intelligence Market, By Type

Artificial Neural Network



Digital Assistance System



Embedded System



Expert System



Automated Robotic System



Global Artificial Intelligence Market, By Application

Deep Learning



Smart Robots



Image Recognition



Digital Personal Assistant



Querying Method



Language Processing



Gesture Control



Video Analysis



Speech Recognition



Context Aware Processing



Cyber Security



Global Artificial Intelligence Market, By Geography

North America (NA)



Europe (EU)



Asia Pacific (APAC)



Middle East & Africa (MEA)



Latin America (LATAM)



About Us

Transparency 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.
Dhaka: Suspected Islamists claiming to be the ISIS followers have threatened to kill a Hindu priest of the Ramakrishna Mission here if he continues to preach in "Islamic Bangladesh", prompting authorities to beef up security around the area.

"The security of the (RK) Mission has been intensified as the priest filed a general diary with us," duty officer of the city's Wari police station told PTI.

The officer declined to disclose the name of the priest.

The mission officials were not immediately available for comments but police said the priest received the threatening letter last evening on a computer-composed IS letterhead with perpetrator identifying him as one AB Siddiqui.

"Bangladesh is an Islamic state. You can't preach your religion here. If you continue preaching, you'll be hacked to death with machetes between the 20th and 30th," the officer quoted the letter as saying.

The letter, he said, did not mention any month.

Last evening, a 50-year-old Hindu Mathematics lecturer at the Nazimuddin Government University College, was hacked with lethal weapons by the attackers who stormed his residence in Madaripur in southwestern Bangladesh.

The lecturer is the only Hindu victim to survive an attack by the Islamists, who have hacked to death four other members from the community in recent months.

Suspected Islamists have killed a number of secular activists, Hindus and other minorities across the country in recent months prompting authorities to launch a nationwide anti-militant clampdown since Friday.

Bangladesh authorities have detained nearly 12,000 people in a nationwide crackdown to halt a spate of deadly attacks. Some of those arrested were linked with outlawed Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh.

Though most of the attacks were claimed by the Islamic State or its affiliates and other similar extremist groups, the Bangladesh government has repeatedly dismissed the claims and said the attacks were carried out by homegrown outfits linked to the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
Mexico: Some 200 intellectuals, scientists and artists from around the world urged the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Wednesday to save North America`s endangered migratory Monarch butterfly.

US novelist Paul Auster, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, British writer Ali Smith and India`s women`s and children`s minister Maneka Sanjay Gandhi were among the signatories of an open letter to the three leaders.

US President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will hold a North American summit in Ottawa on June 29.

The letter by the so-called Group of 100 calls on the three leaders to "take swift and energetic actions to preserve the Monarch`s migratory phenomenon" when they meet this month.

They urge the leaders to protect parcels of land containing milkweed, which is threatened by herbicides and feeds the butterflies on their 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) journey from Canada to Mexico`s wintering grounds.

The letter also called on Mexico to prohibit mining and end all logging in the pine tree reserve where the butterflies live during the winter.

In 2014, Obama, Pena Nieto and then prime minister Stephen Harper agreed to take measures to protect the orange and black butterfly, whose population has drastically dwindled in the past two decades.

The butterfly`s population rebounded this past winter season, but it is still far from its peak of 20 years ago.

In 1996-1997, the butterflies covered 18.2 hectares (45 acres) of land in Mexico`s central mountains.

It fell to 0.67 hectares in 2013-2014 but rose to 4 hectares this year. Their population is measured by the territory they cover.

They usually arrive in Mexico between late October and early November and head back north in March.
Washington: US President Barack Obama on Wednesday met the Dalai Lama privately at the White House, a session that sparked anger among Chinese officials who accuse the Tibetan spiritual leader of sponsoring a separatist movement.

It was Obama's fourth meeting with the Dalai Lama, CNN reported.

Obama and the Dalai Lama met in the Map Room, on the ground floor of the White House residence.

Obama and previous presidents have avoided receiving the Dalai Lama in the Oval Office, a setting typically reserved for visiting heads of state or government leaders.

Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary, said the meeting's venue indicated that it was a personal greeting rather than formal bilateral talks.

A White House official said that ahead of the talks, the pair discussed a range of issues, including human rights, but declined to provide any further details about the meeting, which was not open to the media.

Later, the White House said the Dalai Lama extended condolences for Sunday's terror attack in Orlando, but declined to provide further details of the discussion.

The Dalai Lama officially retired in 2011 from his political role as the leader of the exiled Tibetan government, but remains the head of Tibetan Buddhists.

On Tuesday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman sharply criticised any decision that could lend legitimacy to the Dalai Lama's claims that Tibet should be independent from China.

"The US government made solemn commitments. It acknowledges that there is only one China, that Tibet is an inseparable part of China and will never recognise the so-called Tibetan government in exile," the spokesman, Lu Kang, said during a press briefing.

Lu said the Dalai Lama is not a purely religious figure, but a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion.

Chinese state-run daily, the Global Times said the meeting showed Obama's "mean side".

"While Obama often says he welcomes China's peaceful rise, his meetings with the Dalai Lama erode his sincerity and make him look more like he is helping the latter continue to make trouble with China," the daily said in an editorial.
London: A 41-year-old British woman MP from the opposition Labour Party was on Thursday killed after being reportedly shot and stabbed in her constituency in northern England, a week before the crucial referendum on UK's EU membership.

Labour MP Jo Cox was holding a meeting with constituents, in her local constituency when an altercation reportedly led to the attack.

Cox was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary, where armed police stood guard while medical experts tried to save her life inside.

Another man, in his 70s, was also injured in the attack and is also being treated for his wounds, which are said to be non-life threatening.

A West Yorkshire Police spokesperson said: "We are sad to confirm that Jo Cox died from the injuries she sustained in the attack today."

"We urge any eyewitnesses who were in the area to come forward and help us with our inquiries to establish factually what exactly happened," the spokesperson added.

West Yorkshire Police confirmed a 52-year-old man has been arrested. Weapons, including a firearm, have been seized from the man.

"We are not looking for anyone else in relation to this tragic incident," the spokesperson said.

The arrested man has been locally named as Tommy Mair but there is no confirmation on the motive or the exact nature of the attack, with some local witnesses describing hearing gunshots while others saying it was a stabbing incident.

Sanjeev Kumar, an Indian-origin shopkeeper from the area, told BBC: "She was lying on the pavement and bleeding a lot. Someone had already called for an ambulance by the time I got to the scene".

The local community is to hold a vigil in Cox's memory at the local church in Birstall.

She is survived by her husband and two children.

Cox retained the Batley and Spen constituency for the Labour party in the 2015 General Election and has been in Parliament for just over a year.

She was due to celebrate her 42nd birthday next Wednesday and had been spoken of as a future minister for the Labour party due to her reputation as a strong politician and plain speaker.

As a sign of respect, both sides campaigning for next Thursday's European Union (EU) Britain Stronger in Europe and Vote Leave ? announced they would suspend their campaign for today.
Sofia: The Bulgarian parliament has approved a bill that would ban the wearing of garments concealing the face entirely or partially in public places.

A total of 108 MPs voted in favour of the bill on Wednesday, proposed by the nationalist Patriotic Front (PF). Only eight lawmakers were against and none abstained from voting on the bill that would prohibit women from wearing naqabs and burqas, state run Novonite news agency reported.

The bill will be applicable to all official institutions and sites which provide administrative, educational or social services as well as places for public relaxation, sport, culture and communications.

Prior to entering the plenary chamber, the bill underwent approval by several parliamentary committees.

Bulgaria`s second largest opposition party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), proposed withdrawing the bill and including it in counter-terrorism legislation but that was rejected.

The law has already come into force in the municipal councils of Pazardzhik, Stara Zagora, Sliven and Burgas.

In May, the Dutch government implemented a partial ban on wearing veils in schools, hospitals and and while travelling in public transport.

In 2011, a law banning full face covering came into force in Belgium.

France has also banned veils and forbids head scarves and other religious accessories in schools and public buildings.
Manila: Chinese pressure was blamed Thursday for a stunning diplomatic U-turn by Southeast Asian nations that saw them retract a statement sounding alarm over Beijing`s island building in the South China Sea.

The chaotic events at the end of a meeting of foreign ministers from China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Tuesday have led to allegations of bullying by Beijing.

The document, released by ASEAN member Malaysia and described as a joint statement from the bloc, warned developments in the hotly contested South China Sea could "undermine peace, security and stability".

The statement specified "land reclamation" as a source of tension, a clear reference to China`s massive island building activities where it is trying to cement a claim to almost the whole sea.

But just hours later, Malaysia said the grouping was retracting the statement for "urgent amendments", but offered no reason. Various participants have since given conflicting explanations over what happened.

An ASEAN diplomat who was present at the meeting in the Chinese city of Kunming told AFP that China had put the screws on some Southeast Asian nations to get them to withdraw their support.

"The usual factor, pressure from China," said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, when asked why unity crumbled.

"I suspect the two countries that opposed the statement were Cambodia and Laos."Singapore`s Straits Times newspaper also reported on Thursday that the joint statement was "scuttled by the Chinese, who lobbied its friends in the grouping to block" it.

"Malaysia releasing it was a manifestation of the extreme frustration of the original five ASEAN members plus Vietnam at the particularly crude and arrogant behaviour of the Chinese," the Straits Times reported an ASEAN official as saying.

The Philippines also said Thursday that there had originally been unanimous support within ASEAN for the strongly worded statement.

"By the time the meeting ended, there was an agreement among ASEAN foreign ministers. They agreed on the text of the ASEAN statement and they agreed it would be released," Philippine foreign affairs spokesman Charles Jose told reporters in Manila.

Jose said the statement was then retracted after the meeting had ended and most foreign ministers, including the Philippines` Jose Rene Almendras, had left the venue to start returning home.

Jose would not be drawn on whether Chinese lobbying was to blame, but insisted Malaysia`s initial release had not been in error.

Asked why Malaysia gave the statement to the media, Jose said: "That was the point where there was consensus among ASEAN to have that statement. So by the time it was released, there was agreement."

Indonesia said on Wednesday the release -- titled "Media statement by the ASEAN foreign ministers" -- was issued by mistake, and that it was only meant to be a "media guideline".

China has responded to the controversy by insisting there had not been unanimous support for the original statement

"It is clear that if ASEAN wants to issue an official statement, such statement will be based on consensus," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Wednesday.The events have been widely seen as another example of ASEAN`s inability to present a united front toward China as it dramatically expands its presence in the waterway.

China claims nearly all of the sea -- home to some of the world`s most important shipping routes and of vast military importance.

ASEAN members the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as Taiwan, have competing claims to parts of the sea.

While the Philippines and Vietnam have been particularly critical, Laos and Cambodia have been generally regarded as preferring to side with their giant neighbour and benefactor.

In 2012, ASEAN foreign ministers failed to release a joint statement for the first time at the end of their annual gathering, with the Philippines blaming event host Cambodia for blocking criticism of China.

Laos this year has the rotating presidency of ASEAN, and will host a series of meetings over the coming months in which the South China Sea will inevitably be a hot talking point.
LONDON, June 16, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Serabi Gold plc (AIM:SRB, TSX:SBI), the Brazilian focused gold mining and development company, advises that at 11.00 am today (UK time), it will be holding its Annual General Meeting.

The following is the text of the statement that will be made by Mr. Mike Hodgson the Chief Executive of the Company. Highlights of the statement are:

Gold production for the second quarter of 2016 from the Company's Palito and Sao Chico Mines continues to follow the trend set by the first quarter of 2016.

Underground exploration programmes for production planning and resource extension are about to commence.

Geophysics programmes for Currutela, Piaui and new tenements located to the west of Sao Chico planned for the second half of 2016.

The Company has also released today a new video update of operational progress at its Palito and Sao Chico Mines. This update can be accessed by using the following link:

http://www.brrmedia.co.uk/broadcasts-embed/57612cb2e94e69ed4a4770a3/event/?livelink=true

"As I noted in April's first quarter operational update, gold production from our Palito and Sao Chico Mines continues to be excellent with the second quarter following the trend set by the first quarter of 2016 and our strong finish to 2015. The first quarter yielded gold production of 9,771 ounces, a record level since operations commenced in 2014. At this current time and barring any unforeseen circumstances, I anticipate that gold production for the second quarter will be at a similar level. This puts us well on target to achieving our guidance for the full year of 37,000 ounces.

"Mining at Palito continues to progress well. As I noted earlier this year we have expanded the mine horizontally and opened up two key new sectors being the Senna and Chico da Santa zones. In addition, we have also had success with some smaller zones within the deposit that can be accessed from existing ramp development. These are adding further improvement in the levels of gold production that we can achieve from each vertical metre. This in turn allows us to slow down the rate at which further deepening of the mine is required, meaning that we can replace vertical development with horizontal development generating cost and efficiency benefits, as well as helping to increase the potential life of the mine.

"At Sao Chico, we have found a very good solution to the geological complexity of the deposit that hindered the mining and extraction rates experienced in 2015. Mine production continues to focus on the central portion of the Main Vein where we have the greatest confidence in the down-dip extension and we are continuing to push the ramp down towards the 84mRL, some 150 metres below surface. From here we will establish underground drill locations to assess the further extension at depth, as well as the potential strike extensions to the east and west of the Central Zone. The short term plan at Sao Chico has been to secure production for up to eighteen months in advance, consistent with our successful approach at Palito. This establishes an adequate cushion to allow time for us to concentrate on assessing the potential strike extensions and parallel structures. These ensure that we can maximize the benefit of existing development in the longer term. Serabi has purchased an underground exploration drill rig which has now arrived at site and following commissioning will start on this work. A contractor operated underground drill rig is also now on site that will assist with accelerating the programme over the next four to five months.

"A similar programme will also be undertaken at Palito once the initial phase of work is completed at Sao Chico. Initially work will focus on the extension at depth of the Main Zone comprising the G1, G2 and G3 veins, but will also look for parallel structures which lie between the Main Zone and Palito West and Chico da Santa with the expectation that a number of small but viable veins will be identified that can be easily accessed from the existing mine development.

"During this second quarter we had anticipated to have a third ball mill commissioned and operating. However, the failure of a key component in one of the other mills has delayed this start up because, to keep production going we borrowed the trunnion bearing from the third mill. A new bearing has now been delivered and the commissioning of the third mill will start in the coming week. Despite this small setback, our recent production has not been impacted and illustrates the requirement for building contingency and flexibility when operating in the more remote locations, which in this instance has allowed the Company to maintain operations at close to maximum levels.

"The gold price has clearly been favourable over recent months, and whilst our focus for 2016 is to use cash flow to retire the borrowings that the Company has with Sprott, we have been able to set aside some funding for the start of the next stages of wider exploration activity at Palito and Sao Chico. This will involve a down-the-hole electromagnetic survey at Palito using the past drilling undertaken at the Currutela and Piaui prospects. The contractor is due to arrive on site during July and we anticipate the programme and subsequent evaluation of results taking some three to four months to complete. It is intended that this work will allow the Company to better plan the next stage of exploration drilling that is anticipated to be undertaken during 2017.

"At Sao Chico a surface Induced Polarisation programme will be undertaken over an area to the west of the original Sao Chico exploration tenement. Serabi has secured the exploration licences over this area and feels it offers excellent potential for hosting strike extensions of the current Sao Chico veins. Results are expected to be available towards the end of 2016. Both geophysical programmes are using well established techniques to identify conductive bodies and sulphide mineralisation as pathfinders to locating gold occurrences which are associated with these features.

"Whilst operations are going very well, and I remain optimistic for the remainder of 2016, being essentially a single asset entity and operating in a relatively remote region of Brazil, there will continue to be challenges. Whilst many economic commentators expected to see the Brazilian currency continue to decline during 2016, in the face of an uncertain political climate and a weakening economy, it has however confounded expectation and strengthened. It appears that there remain strong inflows of currency into the country, and whilst these may include investment from multinational companies having to support their local businesses, this will place pressure on our reported US Dollar costs should the situation continue. At this time it remains unclear how the political situation will resolve itself and how this will impact on the perceptions of Brazil. However, neither this, nor the concerns over Zika, are having any current impact on our operations.

"Palito is now in a steady state and Sao Chico, having entered Commercial Production in January 2016, is performing in line with our expectations. I am often asked what the next move is for the Company. I am far from complacent about our two existing mines, but I feel that we are now able to divert some time and resources to growing the Company. We have already implemented the first part of the potential for organic growth by starting to evaluate some of the potential within our existing tenement holdings. This is, however, a process that will take time but, if successful it will provide an opportunity for resource and production growth at a relatively low cost. We will also continue to look at the opportunity for potential acquisitions of other projects. The recent surge in gold prices has started to change seller expectations supported by the recent rally in valuations ascribed to Canadian listed junior development and exploration companies which appear to have out-paced the UK market. I am keen to grow the Company, as I believe that we will benefit from greater critical mass and runway to attract wider investor support and a concurrent re-rating of the Company's shares in due course. Nevertheless, I constantly reiterate that Serabi will only consider acquisitions that management feels will genuinely increase value for shareholders. Whilst a strong market is good for all of us and should be welcomed after the experience of the last few years, I have concern that some valuations and expectations may spiral and become unrealistic.

"Before closing I would like to acknowledge again the support and commitment of our major shareholder, Fratelli Investments and the Company's loyal and experienced management team. We have low staff turnover and I can only put this down to creating a work environment that, whilst challenging, is rewarding and has brought people together with a strong sense of common purpose."

Enquiries:

Serabi Gold plc

Michael Hodgson Tel: +44 (0)20 7246 6830 Chief Executive Mobile: +44 (0)7799 473621



Clive Line Tel: +44 (0)20 7246 6830 Finance Director Mobile: +44 (0)7710 151692



Email: contact@serabigold.com

Website: www.serabigold.com





Beaumont Cornish Limited

Nominated Adviser

Roland Cornish Tel: +44 (0)20 7628 3396 Michael Cornish Tel: +44 (0)20 7628 3396



Peel Hunt LLP

UK Broker

Matthew Armitt Tel: +44 (0)20 7418 9000 Ross Allister Tel: +44 (0)20 7418 9000



Blytheweigh

Public Relations

Tim Blythe Tel: +44 (0)20 7138 3204 Camilla Horsfall Tel: +44 (0)20 7138 3224

Copies of this release are available from the Company's website at www.serabigold.com

Forward-looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements regarding the estimation of mineral resources, exploration results, potential mineralization, potential mineral resources and mineral reserves) are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often identifiable by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will", "estimates", "expect", "intend", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts" and similar expressions or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, without limitation, failure to establish estimated mineral resources, the possibility that future exploration results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, the price of gold and other risks identified in the Company's most recent annual information form filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities on SEDAR.com. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement.

Qualified Persons Statement

The information contained within this announcement has been reviewed and verified by Michael Hodgson, CEO of the Company. Mr Hodgson is an Economic Geologist by training with over 25 years' experience in the mining industry. He holds a BSc (Hons) Geology, University of London, a MSc Mining Geology, University of Leicester and is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and a Chartered Engineer of the Engineering Council of UK, recognizing him as both a Qualified Person for the purposes of Canadian National Instrument 43-101 and by the AIM Guidance Note on Mining and Oil & Gas Companies dated June 2009.

Glossary of terms

The following is a glossary of technical terms:

"Au" means gold.

"assay" in economic geology, means to analyze the proportions of metal in a rock or overburden sample; to test an ore or mineral for composition, purity, weight or other properties of commercial interest.

"development" - excavations used to establish access to the mineralised rock and other workings

"DNPM" is the Departamento Nacional de Producao Mineral.

"grade" is the concentration of mineral within the host rock typically quoted as grams per tonne (g/t), parts per million (ppm) or parts per billion (ppb).

"g/t" means grams per tonne.

"granodiorite" is an igneous intrusive rock similar to granite.

"igneous" is a rock that has solidified from molten material or magma.

"Intrusive" is a body of igneous rock that invades older rocks.

"on-lode development" - Development that is undertaken in and following the direction of the Vein

"mRL"  depth in metres measured relative to a fixed point  in the case of Palito and Sao Chico this is sea-level. The mine entrance at Palito is at 250mRL.

"saprolite" is a weathered or decomposed clayrich rock.

"stoping blocks"  a discrete area of mineralised rock established for planning and scheduling purposes that will be mined using one of the various stoping methods.

"vein" is a generic term to describe an occurrence of mineralised rock within an area of non-mineralised rock.

Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange, nor any other securities regulatory authority, has approved or disapproved of the contents of this news release.
Probolinggo: Eight pilot whales have died after a mass stranding on the coast of Indonesia's main island of Java that sparked a major rescue operation, an official said today.

Thirty-two of the short-finned pilot whales came ashore during high tide early yesterday in Probolinggo, East Java province.

"At first there were just one or two whales swimming near the shore, and the nature of whales is that if they are sick they will come near the shore," Dedy Isfandi, the head of the local maritime and fisheries office, told AFP.

"But whales have such high social interaction -- when one fell ill, they approach the sick one to swim back to sea... when the tide fell all of them were trapped," Isfandi added.

Hundreds of local fishermen and government officials tried to take them back out to sea overnight, but in the morning eight whales had returned to shore and died, Isfandi said.

About 23 others were already out at sea while one disoriented whale was accompanied by some rescuers to make sure it did not return to shore.

Rescuers used tarps to wrap around the beached sea mammals and pull them out to sea while swimmers plunged into the water to drive others out of the area. Vets and scientists conducted autopsies on the dead whales to find out why they were stranded, but fishery officials said it could be due to turbulent waters in the Indian Ocean or they had eaten something poisonous.

Over the last decade or so, whale sharks and orcas were also found stranded in the area, Isfandi said.

Conservation group International Union for Conservation of Nature said there was insufficient data to classify the risk of extinction of short-finned pilot whales, which are found in warm temperate to tropical waters.
Addis Ababa: More than 400 people have been killed in Ethiopia since November in a crackdown on anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch said today, but the government immediately dismissed the claims.

"Tens of thousands" more were also arrested by security forces in "widespread protests in the Oromia region since November 2015," the US-based HRW said.

The protests were sparked by plans to expand the capital into outlying farmland.

The report, titled "Such a Brutal Crackdown", was based on over 125 interviews with protestors and those caught up in the violence.

It spoke of the "government's use of excessive and unnecessary lethal force and mass arrests, mistreatment in detention, and restrictions on access to information to quash the protest movement."

The demonstrations were triggered by a government plan to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa into Oromia. The project was dropped on January 12 but protests continued for weeks.

But government spokesman Getachew Reda dismissed the report, saying that HRW, "is very generous with numbers when it comes to Ethiopia" and attributed any violence on the part of security forces to "bad apples".

"The government feels regret that people are killed," he said.

Reda said the Human Rights Council of Ethiopia, a non-governmental organisation, had said 103 people died.

"Why couldn't they come up with others' names? Because those names don't exist," Reda said.

HRW however said it along with other organisations had "identified more than 300 of those killed by name and, in some cases, with photos", and it was not a case of isolated pockets of violence.

Some of those arrested and later released told HRW they were "tortured or mistreated" inside prison, with several women alleging they were raped.

"Some said they were hung by their ankles and beaten; others described having electric shocks applied to their feet, or weights tied to their testicles," HRW said.

With at least 27 million people, Oromia is the most populous of the country's federal states and has its own language, Oromo, distinct from Ethiopia's official Amharic language.

"Ethiopian security forces have fired on and killed hundreds of students, farmers, and other peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for human life," HRW's deputy Africa chief Leslie Lefkow said.

"The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation, and hold security force members accountable for abuses."
London: Tearful mourners laid flowers outside the British parliament Thursday in memory of pro-EU lawmaker Jo Cox, hours after she was killed in a shock attack at a meeting with constituents.

Dozens of people gathered next to a large picture of the 41-year-old former charity worker, who had campaigned in favour of Britain`s membership of the European Union ahead of next week`s Brexit vote.

"What`s happened is beyond appalling. We are here in silent memory of her loss," said Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Cox`s centre-left Labour party, as rain began to fall.

"This is a shocking occasion and I hope everybody realises hatred will never solve problems. Only people coming together will solve problems," he said.

Corbyn was flanked by fellow members of the Labour party, many of them shaking and tearful, as they lit candles and one by one laid them beside the photograph of a smiling Cox.

"We are suspending all campaigning activities until the weekend as a mark of respect for her," Corbyn said, referring to the tense run-up to Britain`s EU membership referendum on June 23.

Mourners left heaps of flowers in the lawmaker`s memory, who was the first British MP to be killed in office since Ian Gow was killed by a car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army in 1990.

She was left bleeding on the pavement after reportedly being shot and stabbed in the village of Birstall in northern England, according to witnesses quoted by media.Fatima Ibrahim, a 23-year-old campaigner with human rights group Avaaz, which helped organise the vigil, told AFP she was "devastated".

"She was a fearless campaigner, and a voice for the voiceless. We feel shaken by her loss, but committed to meeting the hatred that killed her with love."

"We feel shaken by her loss," she said.

Cox worked for charity group Oxfam before becoming a lawmaker in 2015, and several at the vigil recalled her tireless campaigning to help refugees from Syria.

Mike, a 55-year-old who works in the charity sector who did not want to give his surname, described Cox as "Someone who was utterly dedicated to the ideals of peace, love, justice on a global scale as well as in the UK."

"It is shocking. This kind of thing does not happen," Mike said.

Activists set up a white placard reading "We carry the banner of love for Jo" and invited others to add messages to it in coloured pens.

Tributes included "you can`t kill democracy" and "Thank you for all you did for Syria, for humanity. We will united against hatred."

Another message listed Britain`s main political parties, and insisted that for one day at least the country was not divided by the two sides of the EU referendum.

"We are not Remain, Leave, Tory, Labour or Lib Dem tonight. We are Britons with a belief in parliament and democracy," the message read.

In Birstall, a village of around 16,000 residents where eyewitnesses told British media they saw her being gunned down, mourners laid flowers at the foot of a statue.

Hundreds also gathered to pray at the local St Peter`s church.
Washington: Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would invite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the US, but not for an official state dinner.

The business mogul made the remark on Wednesday when he mocked his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton for her criticism of Trump`s willingness to speak with Kim, calling the former secretary of state a "rank amateur", Politico reported.

"She`s been doing it forever and she still doesn`t get it," Trump told supporters at a rally in Atlanta.

"What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? It`s called opening a dialogue. It`s opening a dialogue."

Trump, however, speculated that the meeting probably would never happen.

"But there`s nothing -- I wouldn`t go there," he said.
Geneva: Islamic State is committing the crime of genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq, seeking to destroy the ethno-religious group of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday.

Their report, based on interviews with dozens of survivors, said that the Islamist militants had been systematically capturing Yazidis in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, seeking to "erase their identity" in a campaign that met the definition of the crime as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

"The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing," it said.

Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the commission of inquiry, told a news briefing: "The crime of genocide must trigger much more assertive action at the political level, including at the Security Council."

Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn said it had "detailed information on places, violations and names of the perpetrators", and had begun sharing information with some national authorities, who were prosecuting foreign fighters.

The four independent commissioners urged major powers to rescue at least 3,200 women and children still held by Islamic State (ISIS) and to refer the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

"ISIS made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide," said another investigator, Carla del Ponte.

"Of course, we regard that as a road map for prosecution, for future prosecution."

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions.

Islamic State, which aims to set up a theocratic caliphate in Syria and Iraq based on a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam, systematically killed, captured or enslaved thousands of Yazidis when it overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014. Several mass graves have been uncovered.

The militant group tried to erase the Yazidis` identity by forcing men to choose between conversion to Islam and death, raping girls as young as nine, selling women at slave markets, and drafting boys to fight, the report said.

"No other religious group present in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq has been subjected to the destruction that the Yazidis have suffered," the report said.

"The scale of atrocities committed, their general nature, and the fact of deliberately and systematically targeting victims on account of their membership in a particular group, while excluding members of other groups, were other factors from which the Commission was able to infer genocidal intent."
Jerusalem: Israel's defense minister revoked on Wednesday the VIP entry permit of the Palestinian Authority's outreach liaison to Israeli society today, on charges that he committed "subversive political activities."

The Defense Ministry says Avigdor Lieberman revoked the permit of Mohammed Al-Madani because he tried to create a political party that included Arab citizens of Israel and Mizrahi Jews, or those of Middle Eastern descent.

The VIP permit allowed Al-Madani to enter Israeli territory without long waits at checkpoints.

Al-Madani said he met with hundreds of Israelis across the political spectrum in an attempt to reactivate the moribund peace process and reach a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He denied he was starting a party.

In an announcement issued in Hebrew, Al-Madani said the cancellation of his permit exposes the "racist character ... Lieberman brought to the Israeli defense ministry."

Moroccan-born Reuven Abergel, a longtime Mizrahi activist, called Wednesday's announcement "patronizing." He said he met with Al-Madani two years ago to discuss peace, but not to found a party.

"A democratic state doesn't shut its people's mouths and prevent them from creating dialogue," he said.

The firebrand Lieberman was appointed last month to replace Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief of staff who was forced out after siding with his commanders in disagreements with political hawks.

Lieberman lives in a West Bank settlement and is an outspoken skeptic of the peace process with the Palestinians. He has advocated shifting Israel's borders to incorporate West Bank settlements and exclude areas with large numbers of Arab citizens.

He also led a failed attempt to require Israel's Arab citizens to take a loyalty oath, and said Arab citizens who meet with members of the militant Islamic group Hamas should be executed.

He was appointed as Israel contends with a nine-month wave of Palestinian shooting, stabbing and vehicular attacks that have killed 32 Israelis and two Americans. Some 200 Palestinians have died in that time, the majority of whom Israel says were attackers.

Today, Israel's parliament approved a tougher anti-terrorism law. The law designates calling for an act of terrorism a criminal offense. Previous laws required law enforcement to prove there was a concrete possibility of an attack.
Washington: Republican Sen John McCain said today that President Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, because of the rise of the Islamic State group on the president's watch.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, made the comment Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday's attack and some of the survivors.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaida went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq," a visibly angry McCain told reporters in the Capitol as the Senate debated a spending bill.

"So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies," McCain said.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old Muslim born in New York made calls during the attack saying he was a supporter of the Islamic State. But he also spoke about an affiliate of al-Qaida and Hezbollah, both of which are IS enemies.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting US enemies ahead of Americans.

Trump also has suggested that Obama himself might sympathize with radical elements.

Democrats criticised Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves from his remarks.

McCain is seeking a sixth Senate term from Arizona and is locked in a tight race.

Questioned on his startling assertion, McCain repeated it: "Directly responsible. Because he pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked and there would be attacks on the United States of America. It's a matter of record, so he is directly responsible."

However, McCain later sought to clarify his comments, saying over Twitter: "To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obama's national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself."

Democrats quickly pounced on McCain's criticism. Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, said McCain's "unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump."
Ottawa: Canada's parliament today observed a minute of silence in memory of British MP Jo Cox, who was killed in a shock daylight street attack.

The gesture of respect was held at the opening of Question Period in the House of Commons, and was preceded by a tribute to Cox by opposition MP Nathan Cullen.

"A mom of two beautiful children, a friend, a dedicated Labour MP, a long advocate of human rights in Britain and around the world was murdered today," he said, fighting back tears.

"Jo used her voice for those who have none, she dedicated her passion to those who needed it most. She harnessed her love even for those who (allowed) hate to consume them."

The killing of Jo Cox, 41, in Birstall in northern England has thrown campaigning for the referendum on Britain's EU membership into disarray just a week before the crucial vote.

Cox was a campaigner for Britain to remain in the European Union.
London: A 41-year-old British woman MP from the opposition Labour Party was killed today after being shot and stabbed in her constituency in northern England by a man who shouted "put Britain first" twice before attacking her, a week before the crucial referendum on UK's EU membership.

Labour MP Jo Cox was holding a meeting with constituents, in her local constituency when an altercation reportedly led to the attack.

One eyewitness said they heard her attacker shout "put Britain first" at least twice beforehand, BBC reported.

Cox was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary, where armed police stood guard while medical experts tried to save her life inside.

Another man, in his 70s, was also injured in the attack and is also being treated for his wounds, which are said to be non-life threatening.

A West Yorkshire Police spokesperson said: "We are sad to confirm that Jo Cox died from the injuries she sustained in the attack today."

"We urge any eyewitnesses who were in the area to come forward and help us with our inquiries to establish factually what exactly happened," the spokesperson added.

West Yorkshire Police confirmed a 52-year-old man has been arrested. Weapons, including a firearm, have been seized from the man.

"We are not looking for anyone else in relation to this tragic incident," the spokesperson said.

The arrested man has been locally named as Tommy Mair but there is no confirmation on the motive or the exact nature of the attack, with some local witnesses describing hearing gun-shots while others saying it was a stabbing incident.

Cox is the first sitting MP to be killed since 1990, when Ian Gow was the last in a string of politicians to die at the hands of Northern Irish terror groups.

Tributes flooded in from politicians including David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn.

Cameron said Parliament had "lost a great star" while Corbyn said Cox had "a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity".

Both official EU referendum campaigns have suspended activity as a mark of respect.

The local community is to hold a vigil in Cox's memory at the local church in Birstall.

Cox is survived by her husband and two children.

Cox retained the Batley and Spen constituency for the Labour party in the 2015 General Election and has been in Parliament for just over a year.

She was due to celebrate her 42nd birthday next Wednesday and had been spoken of as a future minister for the Labour party due to her reputation as a strong politician and plain speaker.
VISTA, Calif., June 16, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Omnitek Engineering Corp. (OTCQB:OMTK) today announced it has appointed Hiller Truck Tech Inc., based in Ontario, Canada, as an authorized diesel-to-natural gas engine conversion center to address the increasing demand for natural gas powered heavy-duty engines in Canada.



Our EPA-approved diesel-to natural gas engine conversion technology offers fleet operators meaningful economic and environmental benefits. Hiller Truck Tech is well-positioned from a technical and capacity standpoint to accelerate fleet conversions in Canada, and we look forward to working with this highly regarded service organization, said Werner Funk, president and chief executive officer Omnitek Engineering Corp.

Funk noted that Hiller will offer fleet operators a choice of either a diesel-to-natural gas engine conversion of a customers heavy-duty truck, or the option of purchasing a new Glider built by Hiller with an overhauled and converted drop-in ready natural gas engine. He added that Ontario, Canada recently announced multi-year greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals: 15 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, 37 per cent in 2030 and 80 per cent in 2050.

Natural gas powered heavy-duty trucks will help in achieving these goals, and utilizing diesel-to-natural gas engine conversions rather than purchasing new more expensive trucks will substantially increase the percentage of natural gas vehicles in the truck population. Furthermore, converting a diesel engine to natural gas during the normal engine overhaul cycle of an engine with a 20-year service life is a compelling economic proposition, Funk said.

Recent industry reports indicate the Canadian government is expected to allocate up to $8.3 billion on climate change initiatives over the next five years, with Ontario expected to spend up to $100 million to help natural gas suppliers create more fuelling stations to encourage more trucks to switch from diesel or gasoline.

We are seeing renewed interest in diesel engine conversions from our customers, especially because of the environmental and economic benefits. The recently signed 200-nation Paris Agreement on Climate Change should attract further interest in the benefits of Omniteks technology and the utilization of natural gas, and we look forward to working with Omnitek to help Canada to meet its sustainability goals, said David Hiller, president of Hiller Truck Tech.

About Hiller Truck Tech

Based in Ayr, Ontario, Hiller Truck Tech is a full-service truck facility specializing in environmentally conscious fuel-saving trucking improvements  including general maintenance, certified safety inspection and anti-idle devices. Additional information is available at www.hillertrucktech.com.

About Omnitek Engineering Corp.

Omnitek Engineering Corp. develops and sells proprietary diesel-to-natural gas engine conversion systems and complementary products, including new natural gas engines that utilize the companys technology -- providing global customers with innovative alternative energy and emissions control solutions that are sustainable and affordable. Additional information is available at www.omnitekcorp.com.

Some of the statements contained in this news release discuss future expectations, contain projections of results of operations or financial condition or state other "forward-looking'' information. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the statements. The forward-looking information is based on various factors and is derived using numerous assumptions. Important factors that may cause actual results to differ from projections include, among many others, the ability of the Company to raise sufficient capital to meet operating requirements, completion of R&D and successful commercialization of products/services, patent completion, prosecution and defense against well-capitalized competitors. These are serious risks and there is no assurance that our forward-looking statements will occur or prove to be accurate. Words such as "anticipates," "expects,'' "intends,'' "plans,'' "believes,'' "seeks,'' "estimates,'' and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Unless required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Orlando: US President Barack Obama was set to visit Orlando on Thursday to meet with survivors and family members of the 49 people killed in a gunman's rampage at a gay nightclub as authorities weighed whether to charge the assailant's wife.

Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old US citizen born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents, also wounded 53 people in a three-hour-long rampage inspired by Islamic State militants that stands as the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has interviewed Mateen's second wife, Noor Salman, who knew of his plans, according to a law enforcement source, and prosecutors were preparing to present evidence against her to a federal grand jury.

Salman has not commented publicly since the attack, which began around 2 a.m. early Sunday.

"I can assure you that we're working with our law enforcement partners to find out everything that we can about what happened at the Pulse nightclub," Lee Bentley, the US Attorney for Florida's middle district said on Wednesday. "We are using all law enforcement and legal tools to reconstruct not only the events of that night but the events of the past several months."

Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, will travel to Orlando in the latest in a long list of trips he has taken to console victims of mass shootings during his 7-1/2 years in office. In December 2015, a married couple inspired by Islamic State shot dead 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

"This will be, I think, an emotional trip," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. "The president recognizes that he is a symbol for the rest of the country. But it would be impossible for him not to be personally affected by these kinds of conversations."

Mateen claimed allegiance to a variety of militant Islamist groups, including some at odds with each another, in a series of phone calls to 911 emergency services and a local cable television news channel during his rampage.

He appears to have self-radicalized and no evidence has emerged so far that his actions were directed by any outside groups, Obama has said.

Mateen carried out the slaughter with a legally purchased assault weapon and handgun despite twice being investigated by the FBI for alleged connections with terrorist groups.

The mass shooting renewed debate in Washington about gun control. Some Republicans including presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump and US Senator Pat Toomey suggested that people on federal watch lists who are banned from flying on commercial jets should not be allowed to purchase firearms.
New York: The father of a Paris terror attack victim has filed a lawsuit against Twitter, Google and Facebook for allowing Islamic State (IS) to use their platforms to spread terrorist propaganda, the media reported on Thursday.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in Northern California by Reynaldo Gonzalez, the father of Nohemi Gonzalez who was among the 130 killed in November in Paris, said these social media giants also allowed IS to raise funds and hire recruits, the International Business Times reported.

According to a Mirror report, IS leader Omar Hussain used the social networking website Facebook to recruit members for the Paris attacks.

The IS supporters have tweeted photos of dead soldiers with the hashtag #AmessagefromISIStoUS on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Several beheading videos have appeared on Google-owned video-streaming platform YouTube.

In January, a Florida-based woman filed a lawsuit against Twitter, accusing it of supporting the global spread of the IS by enabling its followers to recruit on its social media platform.

Tamara Fields, whose husband was killed in a lone wolf terrorist attack in Amman, Jordan, in November last year, sued Twitter for damages.

"Without Twitter, the explosive growth of IS over the last few years into the most-feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible," she wrote in her lawsuit.

Twitter has knowingly permitted IS to spread propaganda and recruit members, she added.

Twitter rejected the lawsuit`s claims.

"While we believe the lawsuit is without merit, we are deeply saddened to hear of this family`s terrible loss," a Twitter spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement.

"Like people around the world, we are horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by extremist groups and their ripple effects on the Internet. Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our rules make that clear," it added.
Katanga: Several people were killed in clashes between the army and former rebels at a military base in the Democratic Republic of Congo Wednesday, officials said.

Tension had been mounting for days at the military base in Kamina, in the southeast, where more than 2,000 former rebels from various groups are stationed as part of a government disarmament programme.

It was unclear how many had died in the bloody clashes, with one rebel source putting the number of dead at around 10 while an army source said at least 20 people had been killed.

Regional governor Celestin Mbuyu said one lieutenant from the Congolese army was among the dead, "killed with a machete by rebels... who were headed to the city centre to loot it".

More than 2,300 former rebels are stationed in the Kamina base, including members of the ethnic-based Mai-Mai militia and the M23 movement.

After the defeat of M23 in 2013, the government launched a programme to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate -- known as DDR3 -- more than 12,000 former rebels.

But the programme, the third of its kind since the end of the Second Congo War in 2003, has been hit by delays and funding problems.

Kamina has previously faced a mutiny from the disgruntled former rebels, who have complained about the living standards on the base.

A Western military source said the latest clashes exposes the limitations of the DDR3 programme and may deter other rebels from laying down arms and hamper the repatriation of former M23 refugees to Rwanda and Uganda.
Seoul: South Korea on Thursday kicked off a live-fire naval exercise near its disputed sea border with North Korea -- a move likely to fan already elevated military tensions with Pyongyang.

The three-day exercise in the Yellow Sea is aimed at practising responses to simulated incursions by North Korean vessels and aircraft, the South`s navy said in a statement.

The manoeuvres will involve 20 naval ships, including an Aegis destroyer, as well as 10 aircraft including anti-submarine helicopters.

"If the enemy commits provocative acts again in the Yellow Sea, we are prepared to act swiftly, precisely and sufficiently in order to turn the site of provocation into their own tombs," the navy statement said.

The two Koreas fought bloody naval battles near the sea border known as the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in 1999, 2002 and 2009.

The North refuses to recognise the NLL, which was drawn unilaterally by the US-led United Nations Command at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

In 2010, South Korea blamed North Korea for the sinking of one of its warships near the Yellow Sea border, in which 46 sailors died.

Live-fire drills in the area invariably spark an angry reaction from the North.

Cross-border tensions have been running high ever since North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month.
Brasilia: Brazil`s interim president Michel Temer lost the third cabinet member of his month-old administration to a swirling scandal when his tourism minister resigned Thursday after being accused of taking bribes.

Presidency sources told AFP that tourism minister Henrique Eduardo Alves had submitted his resignation after a key witness accused him of accepting 1.5 million reals (around $445,000) diverted from state oil company Petrobras.

Alves, a member of Temer`s center-right PMDB party, joins former transparency minister Fabiano Silveira and former planning minister Romero Juca, who were both forced to resign over leaked phone recordings linked to the scandal.

Temer and Alves were among some 20 politicians named in the latest batch of allegations to emerge in the explosive scandal.

Sergio Machado, the former chief executive of Petrobras subsidiary Transpetro, said in a plea deal with prosecutors that both men asked him for money from an illegal kickbacks scheme that diverted some $2 billion from the national oil giant.

Machado said Temer asked him for about $430,000 to fund an ally`s campaign for mayor of Sao Paulo, according to documents published Wednesday.

An irate Temer took to national television Thursday to deny the allegation.

Temer took over last month from suspended president Dilma Rousseff. She is facing an impeachment trial in the Senate on unrelated charges of illegally manipulating public accounts to hide the government`s budget problems.

Temer has repeatedly denied involvement in the Petrobras scheme, but the investigation remains a major threat to his administration.
Bangkok: Thousands of supporters of a wealthy and controversial Thai Buddhist sect gathered at the temple`s space-age headquarters Thursday as police made an attempt to arrest the movement`s elderly abbot on fraud charges.

The long-simmering spat between investigators and the powerful Wat Dhammakaya temple in northern Bangkok is the latest clash to reveal bitter political ruptures at the heart of Thailand`s national faith.

Historically, secular authorities have been reluctant to intervene in the affairs of the clergy.

But a series of recent scandals and corruption probes engulfing various temples -- including allegations of monks flying in private jets, having sex and trafficking animal parts -- has generated calls for greater oversight of Thailand`s monks.

The country`s equivalent of the FBI has been trying for months to question Phra Dhammachayo, the 72-year-old abbot of the Dhammakaya temple, over allegations he accepted embezzled funds worth 1.2 billion baht ($33 million) from the owner of a cooperative bank who was jailed.

The temple, famous for its main shrine that resembles a huge UFO, has denied its abbot conspired to launder the money, calling the charges "groundless and unconscionable".

Temple authorities say their leader is too ill to be questioned by police.

After weeks of stalemate, police obtained a court-approved arrest warrant and arrived at the temple on Thursday morning.

Investigators adopted a non-confrontational approach, holding talks with monks throughout the morning.

But it is unclear whether they will be able to charge the abbot or take him away.

Thousands of supporters dressed largely in white gathered under heavy monsoon clouds in a show of force.

One woman, wearing a white hat, face mask and sunglasses read out a statement to the media saying the abbot should only be questioned once democracy returns to Thailand, a direct rebuke to the military authorities who seized power in a coup two years ago.

"The lack of a democracy in a nation inevitably leads to an absence of civil liberties in the judicial process," she said.

Many of Thailand`s temples, including Dhammakaya, are tangled up in the country`s treacherous political scene.

Detractors accuse Phra Dhammachayo of promoting a buy your way to nirvana philosophy and being close to ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 military coup.

The administration of his sister Yingluck, who was also prime minister, was also toppled by the military again in 2014 after months of anti-government protests.

Ultra-nationalist monks, some of whom are key critics of Dhammakaya and the Shinawatras, played a major role in those protests.

Nonetheless the increased politicisation of Thai Buddhism remains a controversial issue especially under military rule.

The Foreign Correspondent`s Club of Thailand had planned to hold a discussion on the topic next week but has been asked by police to cancel the event on "national security grounds".
Washington: The US Senate has passed its draft of the National Defence Authorisation Bill, including a provision to set up a new fund to reimburse Pakistan for its efforts in the war against terrorism.

The Senate version authorised $800 million under a provision called the `Pakistan Security Enhancement Authorisation`, Dawn online reported on Thursday.

It also fenced $300m behind a similar Haqqani network provision that has existed in the annual defence authorisation acts since the fiscal year 2015.

The proposal for Pakistan was passed as originally initiated.

The proposed reimbursement mechanism for Pakistan replaces the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), which was used to reimburse both Afghanistan and Pakistan for their efforts to combat terrorism.

Pakistan has received a total of $3.1 billion since 2013 under the CSF. But this fund expires in the current financial year, ending in October.

While adopting the new provision, the Senate Armed Services Committee used the CSF model to restructure security support for Pakistan. But it focuses specifically on Pakistan`s own security needs instead of tying it to a broader coalition.

In doing so, the new provision delinks Pakistan from Afghanistan, by recognising it as a country with its own strategic value for US interests.

In a report filed with the draft Defence Bill, the US Senate Armed Services Committee called Pakistan "a long-standing strategic partner" and stressed the need to continue a strong relationship with the country.

Both houses of the Congress have passed their versions of the Defence Bill. A conference committee of both houses will now be formed to develop a consensus draft.

The procedure can be completed by July, although past bills have been passed as late as November.

Besides, the Haqqani restriction, the bill requires Pakistan to keep open ground communication lines to Afghanistan for receiving reimbursements from this fund.

Another bill, passed by the House of Representatives last week, linked $450m from a total of $900m proposed for Pakistan to take action against the Haqqani network.
BD1231 wrote:

Thanks for the chance to learn about Ouachita Baptist University! Rated #170 by US News and World Report for National Liberal Arts Colleges

Or it could be that if the school is in a big metro area it might not jump out as hugely positive but I see it at worst truly as a neutral. B schools like diverse classes and the biblical scholars piece could be a hook. But at end of day, you can't change it so I wouldn't worry about it. Focus on what you can control! Good GPA overall. And you could look at the Biblical studies two different ways- and it really depends on the opinions of the admissions counselor- which you can't control.... but one the one hand it will be on the unique side as you don't see biblical studies majors applying to b school every dayOr it could be that if the school is in a big metro area it might not jump out as hugely positive but I see it at worst truly as a neutral. B schools like diverse classes and the biblical scholars piece could be a hook. But at end of day, you can't change it so I wouldn't worry about it. Focus on what you can control!

All excellent! Good that you've taken these classes since major is not quant based.

Good to show results and growth under your leadership.

Good work experience, exposure to healthcare

You look like a strong candidate here

I think you have an excellent chance here too, and I know school well and healthcare is a great focus area here with concentration and excellent medical/healthcare in community

Also strong chances here and big medical center there too.

I think you have a good shot here too- and with medical centers in RTP area strong, coming from Texas also puts you in a less crowded pool

See this also as a strong possiblitiy

Your stats are right in there too

yes to all these

A school with excellent experiential learning opportunities like UNC could help you try some different experiences and help you tighten your goals

Don't apologize for your industry- just highlight your accomplishments and results. Make the WHY case for healthcare from some of the experiences you've had a work

The quant courses you mention above should suffice. I don't see that adding great extra value but learning is always a good thing- just not sure it will really help in this case. [color=#0000ff]Your 710 overall score might keep your quant score from getting overly scrutinized- at least as many of the schools you targeted as your GMAT right in the avg range for most of these schools.

If you plan to apply in next year, I would NOT change jobs. If you have 2 yrs more of work, then consider.

Don't overthink this-- be who you want to be and make a compelling case. B schools have great relationships with big 4 so lots of opportunities.

I've mentioned in the school section that you have picked many schools that I think are real options for you. I'd do some specific research at each school- try to reach out to students with healthcare interest and get a feel for where you feel best "fit" and plan visits and do your research so you can present a compelling Why for the schools on your list. I'd look at a place with active healthcare clubs, great medical/heathcare employers and focus, comfortable fit for family, a place where you feel valued. Hope this helps and best wishes to you! I think you have many great positives and your should feel great about your situation. If you'd like to talk more about how StratusPrep can really help present yourself in the best possible light, PM me or go to our website with link at bottom of this email for a free consult where you can get 1/2 hour of an expert's time and learn more about your profile and also how we help clients in a variety of packages/price points! Best wishes to you!

Hello!Thanks in advance for your response, it is greatly appreciated.Profile:- Age: 25 (27 @ matriculation)- Male- U.S. Resident- GMAT 710 (Q47, V42)- Undergraduate Institution: Ouachita Baptist University (liberal arts school in Arkansas)- Undergraduate Degree: Biblical Studies, 3.35 GPA. Graduated in 3.5 years.- Business coursework outside of major: Microeconomics (B), Accounting I (A), Accounting II (A), College Algebra (B), Personal Finance(A)- Extracurricular in college: president of fraternity which grew from 12 members to over 80 while I was a member. Various community service leadership opportunities.- W/E:o 2 years at one of the top 5 Health Insurance companies in the U.S. I was a Disability Analyst. Various leadership opportunities.o (Current) 2 years at a Insurance Brokerage and Consulting Firm as a Consultant (boutique firm likely never head of by admissions committee). Work with company executives to customize benefit program that will make them an employer of choice. Consult regarding Affordable Care Act compliance, as well as be the liaison between various other vendors. Various leadership opportunities, etc. Company size- around 20 employees.o Both positions held in a major metroplex. Would likely have great recommendations from management.- Community Involvement: Served as Associate Pastor for organization my wife and I started called Grassroots Christianity. Organization is focused on changing peoples perception of Church structure and function. Various community service events held.- Target Schools (I will likely declare a Healthcare concentration if available):o UT McCombs (in-state tuition. #1 choice)o UNCo Vanderbilt- Stretch Schoolso Duke- Fuquao Cornell- Johnsono Virginia Darden- Less Competitive Target Schoolso SMUo Riceo A&M- Timeline: I will apply in the fall of 2017 in order to matriculate in the fall of 2018 (class of 2020)- Career Aspirations: Healthcare Consulting (not on the insurance brokerage side), but to be honest it is a bit undecided. Im not completely aware of the paths available to me given my background.Concerns:- Undergraduate Degree: Will having a religious degree be the diversity that schools are NOT looking for? I know diversity is a big focus of MBA programs. The degree was from a Liberal Arts institution, thus I studied in multiple areas which allowed me to truly foster a passion for learning.- Work Experience: Ive definitely shown progression in both positions (both in salary and promotions), but Insurance is often seen as an industry anyone can walk in to. Not sure how my experience will be viewed by ADCOM at the programs I mentioned.Questions:- Given my somewhat low quant score (Q47), would you recommend I take a few business/math course prior to my application? Im thinking maybe Calc. for Business, Stats. for Business, and/or some other finance course.[/color]- My current company is somewhat small and the advancement opps are limited because of that. Im considering looking for another company to work for during the two years leading up to matriculation.o If Im right at 2 years before switching companies, would that look negatively to ADCOM(job hopping)?o I have a relatively large network, and my first thought is I would try to work for one of the big 4 consulting firms in an analyst type role. I think this would be a good opportunity for me personally, but would me taking a role like this hurt my diversity factor, since so many MBA applicants come from that background?- Are there other schools that you feel like my profile fits? My family (wife and 1 year old daughter) is flexible on location. Outside of the obvious stats(GMAT, GPA), do you feel like I would be a competitive applicant at the schools I listed?Thank you for your time.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. The Defense Ministry of Nagorno Karabakh informed ARMENPRESS that in some areas of the Nagorno Karabakh-Azerbaijan line of contact the Azerbaijani forces fired DShK heavy machine guns and sniper rifles.

The Ministrys announcement reads: Overnight June 15-16 the situation was relatively calm at the Nagorno Karabakh-Azerbaijan line of contact.

Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire agreement by mainly firing small arms, and in some areas DShk heavy machine guns and sniper rifles.

The Defense Army of Nagorno Karabakh is in full control of the frontline situation and continues confidently monitoring the border.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. U.S. President Barack Obama met the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, at the White House on Wednesday despite a warning by China that it would damage diplomatic relations, Reuter reports.

The meeting came at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and China over Beijings assertive pursuit of territorial claims in East Asia.

Obama's fourth White House meeting with the Dalai Lama in the past eight years took place in the White House residence, instead of the Oval Office where the president normally meets world leaders.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the choice of the residence emphasized the "personal nature of their meeting."

He said Obama thanked the Dalai Lama for his condolences for the victims of Sunday's mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Earnest added that Obama had in the past spoken of his "warm personal feelings" for the Dalai Lama, appreciation of his teachings and belief "in preserving Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions."

At the same time, Earnest said the U.S. position of considering Tibet part of China had not changed.

In an interview with Fox News later on Wednesday, the Dalai Lama said he and Obama talked about the current situation in Tibet.

He denied he was seeking independence and that it was in Tibet's interests to remain part of China, "provided we should have full right for preservation of our own culture, or rich Buddhist knowledge, knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, these things."

The Dalai Lama also noted in the interview that Chinese President Xi Jinping had said Buddhism was an important part of Chinese culture.

"So this is something new, for a leader of a Communist party, you see, mentioning some positive things about leader of Buddhism, wonderful."
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Turkey will miss an end of June deadline to meet the EUs conditions for securing visa-free travel to the bloc for its citizens, the Commission said, and Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration, refused to commit himself to a new timetable. But he said there were bright spots, Politico reported.

In March, Europe reached a deal with Ankara to hand over 6 billion in aid and grant Turkish citizens visa-free travel by as early as June, in exchange for Turkeys help to reduce the flow of refugees heading to Europe.

The June deadline will be missed as Turkey still has to fulfill seven criteria  so-called benchmarks  with a Commission official saying there were no major developments on the benchmarks. The next report on Ankaras progress is due in September.

One of the outstanding benchmarks is on anti-terror laws, which Turkey is refusing to change. The benchmark  number 65 on the list  includes a call for the right to a fair trial and freedom of expression. In Turkey that is increasingly a problem, especially after the government in March seized control of the countrys biggest newspaper, Zaman.

In a press release on Wednesday the Commission said that while there has been further good progress in its implementation, progress achieved so far remains fragile.

Visa liberalization isnt the only weak spot in the deal. In documents presented on Wednesday on the state of play of the deal, the Commission highlighted the slow pace at which refugees are returned to Turkey. It also said there were problems affecting how Greek courts deal with asylum claims, which illustrates the fragility of the implementation of the deal.

The other major migration headache is relocation. Last year the Commission introduced a relocation scheme that it said would involve 160,000 refugees, but it has fallen well short of its targets. The number of relocations has increased to 2,280, the Commission said, with the rate having almost doubled since last month. But despite these positive signs, progress is still too slow.

Avramopoulos on Wednesday threatened member countries reluctant to take in their share of refugees: Very soon I will be even more vocal and even name and shame the countries that dont comply, but we are not there yet.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway has been appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women, a role which will focus on addressing the unequal burden shouldered by women caring for children in the home, the U.N. organization said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

Women around the world face a so-called motherhood penalty, meaning when they have children, they lose pay and opportunity in the workplace, according to UN Women, which promotes gender equality and economic empowerment.

The U.N. body seeks to make raising children an equal responsibility for mothers and fathers, said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women.

"Stereotypes that make it hard for fathers to take time away from work to care for a child are outdated leftovers from the 'male breadwinner' model and have no place in today's mixed workforce," she said in a statement.

Hathaway, who won an Academy Award in 2013 for her role in "Les Miserables," is a long-time supporter of women's rights who will promote policies such as affordable childcare and parental leave, said Mlambo-Ngcuka.

"To make the case for how this will increase opportunities for women, we needed an advocate who had the intellect and passion to tackle this complex issue. Within moments of meeting Anne, I realized that we had found our woman," she said.

Known for her roles in "The Devil Wears Prada," "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Dark Knight Rises," Hathaway also co-hosted the Academy Awards ceremony with actor James Franco in 2011.

She has served as an advocate for Nike Foundation, traveled to Kenya and Ethiopia to raise awareness on child marriage and narrated "Girl Rising," a CNN documentary film on female education.

"I feel honored and inspired by this opportunity to aid in advancing gender equality," the actress said in a statement.

Other well-known actresses who have worked as Goodwill Ambassadors include Angelina Jolie, who represented the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Ashley Judd, who was recently appointed by the UN Population Fund.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. The extraordinary session of the Parliament has kicked off.

The session is convened by the Government of Armenia. 110 MPs have registered.

Previously debated issues will be put up to voting.

During the June 15 session, the Parliament discussed amendments on expanding communities in four Provinces of Armenia.

The Gyumri urban roads loan agreement signed by Armenia and the Bank for Reconstruction and Development was also discussed. The Bank will provide 14.6 million USD for reconstruction and improvement works in Gyumri.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Chairman of the Eurasian Economic Commission Tigran Sargsyan delivered a speech in the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 16 during which he said Singapore is interested in establishing free trade zone with the Eurasian Economic Union, reports TASS.

We have started a dialogue, during the talks Singapore Prime Minister suggested us to quickly start the discussions over the possibility of signing free trade zone agreement with Singapore. I am happy to inform you that the Prime Ministers of our EAEU states discussed this issue and also gave positive assessment to it, he stated.

The 20th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum kicked off on June 16. Guests of more than 100 states of the world are invited to attend the Forum. It will last 3 days.

The meetings of Russian President Vladimir Putin with Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Renzi, President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and others are scheduled.

Vice President of the Cuban Council of Ministers Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz, Vice-Chancellor of Austria Reinhold Mitterlehner, 11 Ministers from 10 foreign states, and 6 members of the governments of the CIS countries will take part in the Forum.

More than 10.000 representatives from nearly 1,1 thousand companies of the world, including from the US, France, Switzerland, Japan, the Great Britain, Germany, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, China, Kazakhstan, Denmark, Greece, the United Arab Emirates are expected to attend the Forum.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Based on the paragraph 16 of the Armenia-Czech Republic economic cooperation intergovernmental committees 2nd session, on June 13-15 working meetings were held between representatives of the Armenian Defense Ministry and the Czech Republic Defense Ministry.

The sides touched upon the process of the Armenia-Czech Republic military cooperation draft agreement, as well as assistance of military-technical enterprises of Armenia and Czech Republic.

Prospects of creating a working group on military cooperation within the framework of the Armenia-Czech Republic Committee were discussed.

The sides discussed issues related to future development of cooperation.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Former Defense Minister of Armenia, Lieutenant-General Vagharshak Harutyunyan says the joint Air Defense agreement between Armenia and Russia is in Armenias interest.

Due to the Armenian-Russian military-political relations we were able to maintain the anti-air systems in 1992 which we had, develop them to a pretty high level. And today we have such air defense systems, which dont have neither Azerbaijan nor Georgia, we even have systems which even Turkey doesnt have. This agreement is in the interest of Armenia, it ensures our security and strengthens our independence, Harutyunyan said.

Before criticizing the agreement first of all people should read it. The criticism says as if the Russian side will coordinate air defense activities. Whereas the agreement states that this concerns coordination of Armenian air defense systems between, for example Belarusian and Kazakhstani systems, he said.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. The 9th annual DigiTech business forum will take place in Yerevan on June 17, 18. The forum aims at finding paths to invest IT solutions in different directions of the economy.

The main goal of this event is to stimulate the Armenian economy, and contribute IT solutions to state areas. 70 % of Armenias IT production is being exported. Our goal has always been domestic contribution, Karen Vardanyan, Executive Director of the IT enterprises union said.

According to him, this years forum will focus on a variety of issues  Military industry, HR management and cyber security issues.

The forum is held under the patronage of Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan.

Alexander Yesayan, Director of the Union of IT Enterprises says after the April war it was decided to focus the forum on military industry issues.


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Hi there,Thanks for your post. Overall it sounds as though you've done a lot of self-analysis of your profile thus far, and I feel your analysis is right on-par..... I think your best chances will likely be in the approx 10-30 ranking (US News) give or take, given that you have a solid GMAT, grades, work experience, and from your description, leadership examples (though I don't know full context obviously). Top 10 (again give or take) could be tough just given that it's SO competitive and many applicants have that much stronger specific profile aspects, just a touch more memorable or outstanding etc.... but overall I support your school list. To your specific q's:- Undergraduate Degree: Will having a religious degree be the diversity that schools are NOT looking for? I know diversity is a big focus of MBA programs. The degree was from a Liberal Arts institution, thus I studied in multiple areas which allowed me to truly foster a passion for learning.**I do not feel that this will be a problem/concern; I'm sure the schools would all say they will not be biased for or against any particular religious affiliation or study. They do assess the academic rigor of each university and major etc, so there's always the chance that others rate slightly higher in that regard but that is separate from the religious aspect.- Work Experience: Ive definitely shown progression in both positions (both in salary and promotions), but Insurance is often seen as an industry anyone can walk in to. Not sure how my experience will be viewed by ADCOM at the programs I mentioned.**Again it's all relative; you may come out more competitive than some who do not have said progression or leadership, but less so from others with different paths.... all you can do is really emphasize what you DO have to bring to the class. And since you have time before you apply, continue to seek out ways to make an impact and go above and beyond what is expected on the job.Questions:- Given my somewhat low quant score (Q47), would you recommend I take a few business/math course prior to my application? Im thinking maybe Calc. for Business, Stats. for Business, and/or some other finance course.**Honestly, IMO I don't feel that is needed at your score level. You can always see if you can chat with an admissions rep at a specific school, say after an info session or online chat etc if you want to hear directly from them.- My current company is somewhat small and the advancement opps are limited because of that. Im considering looking for another company to work for during the two years leading up to matriculation.o If Im right at 2 years before switching companies, would that look negatively to ADCOM(job hopping)?**I don't worry as much about 2 years (vs 1 year).o I have a relatively large network, and my first thought is I would try to work for one of the big 4 consulting firms in an analyst type role. I think this would be a good opportunity for me personally, but would me taking a role like this hurt my diversity factor, since so many MBA applicants come from that background?**Think about what makes the most sense for your overall long-term story and career goals. If you can explain your rationale for the choices you make and how it fits in to the big picture, that is one of the more important pieces of the puzzle.- Are there other schools that you feel like my profile fits? My family (wife and 1 year old daughter) is flexible on location. Outside of the obvious stats(GMAT, GPA), do you feel like I would be a competitive applicant at the schools I listed?**I do feel your school list is appropriate, and if you were looking at others they'd be in that same competitive range. Of course you may want to narrow it down!! Most apply to 3-6 schools, and if more than that they would likely be spread over multiple rounds, keep that in mind (each app is quite time consuming).PS-- congrats on your 1 year old! I have one as well, so much fun.Good luck! Keep us posted on how we can help and further q's!_________________
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS.Head of the National Statistics Service of Armenia Stepan Mnatsakanyan assures the Statistics Agency has no fault in the issue of submitting false statistics on accounting documents of importers.

There is no such thing and cant ever be. What does the Statistics Service have to do with Tax violations? This is the Tax Agencys problem, Mnatsakanyan said.

Media reports claim false numbers have been presented in accounting documents of more than 100 importing companies, and this is why during this years April, a significant growth of imports was registered compared to last year, a miscalculation of around 110 billion AMD happened.

Vice President of the State Revenue Committee Armen Alaverdyan in his turn blamed the National Statistics Service for the miscalculations.

This is not the function of Statistics. We receive data, publish and present it to the public, Mnatsakanyan said.

Asked why the Vice President of the State Revenue Committee is blaming him, Mnatsakanyan urged to address this question to the Vice President himself.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Knesset members from nearly every political party were set to propose a new law on June 16 to halt arms sales to gross human rights violators around the world, Armenpress reports, citing The Times of Israel.

Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg has been leading the charge on that front, with help from activist attorney Eitay Mack and Professor Yair Auron of Israels Open University. Their proposals, however, have rarely gained traction, as Zandbergs left-wing party is in the opposition, putting a majority out of reach.

To help raise this issue out of the mire of partisan politics, freshman MK Yehudah Glick of the Likud party stepped into the fray, bringing with him another 16 members of Knesset.

The proposal was written by Mack, but is based on a similar American law, Zandberg told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. It is an amendment to the existing law that would require the Defense Ministry to reject export licenses for Israeli companies selling technology or services to human rights violators.

Behind Glicks push, theres a self-described concerned citizen named Eli Joseph, who joined the fight to halt arms sales to human rights violators over a year ago.

For decades, Israel has been accused of selling weapons and services to human rights violators around the world, including to Rwanda during the genocide there in the 1990s, though the extent has been largely unknown as those transactions have largely remain sealed  due to national security concerns, the government maintains  despite attempts by Mack to have them opened to the public.

Most recently, Israel has been accused of supplying South Sudan with advanced weaponry and training, despite a near-universal arms embargo in light of a bloody civil war there, in which both sides have been accused of human rights violations, including systemic rape, ethnic cleansing, and the recruitment of child soldiers.

Israel has since promised not to sell attack weapons to South Sudan, though the United Nations found in January that it had provided the African nation with surveillance technology.

Israels current law on defense exports requires considerations regarding the end-user or the end-use, but does not expressly forbid arms sales to human rights violators.

To address that, Zandberg and Meretz party leader Zehava Galon proposed new legislation in May 2015 that would require the Defense Ministry to reject an arms manufacturers export license to countries that commit gross human rights violations, including torture, inhumane punishment, kidnapping and rape for belonging to a political, ethnic or religious group, Zandberg told The Times of Israel last year.

The proposal to be presented Wednesday is virtually identical to the one put forth by Zandberg last year.

According to an advance copy of the bill seen by to The Times of Israel, it will be sponsored by 18 members of Knesset from the Likud, Meretz, Yesh Atid, Zionist Union, Jewish Home, Joint List and Kulanu parties.

The only parties without a single Knesset member sponsoring the bill are the plenarys ultra-Orthodox parties  United Torah Judaism and Shas  and Defense Minister Avigdor Libermans Yisrael Beytenu party.

During the April Karabakh-Azerbaijan the issue of Israeli arms sales to Azerbaijan was widely discussed and condemned in Armenia and Diaspora. Powerful protests were organized in several countries, including Israel, calling on the government to stop arms sales to Azerbaijan.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Armenia harshly condemns the deliberate and consistent bombardment of Armenian-populated districts in Aleppo, which have claimed dozens of lives only in Armenian-populated districts, causing great material damages, Head of Armenian Mission to the OSCE, Ambassador Arman Kirakosyan announced at the meeting of OSCE Permanent Council on June 16.

As Armenpress was informed from the press service of MFA Armenia, he expressed concern over the recent attacks on Aleppo by the Al-Nusra Front, claiming lives of numerous civilians.

The Armenian Ambassador stated that during the last years the Armenian mission has regularly raised the issue of terrosis organizations operating in Syria and Iraq, particularly, the Islamic State, the Al-Nusra Front and other groups linked with Al-Qaeda. It was stated that ethnic and religious minorities, including the Armenian community, are a primary target for those terrorist groups.

Ambassador Kirakosyan stated that the mentioned terrorist organizations are a serious threat for the security of OSCE area.

The Armenian Ambassador referred to the Ministerial Declarations of the OSCE Basel and Belgrade meetings, as well as the 2170, 2178, 2199 and 2249 resolutions of the UNSC, calling on all the state to implement their commitments for struggle against terrorism assumed by the mentioned documents. Arman Kirakosyan particularly called on Turkey to stop providing its territory to terrorist groups for launching attacks against civilians of Syria.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian National Assembly discusses the free trade agreement between the Eurasian Economic Union and Vietnam. Keynote speaker, Deputy Economy Minister of Armenia Garegin Melkonyan informed that the agreement was signed in May 2015 and is defines a free trade regime between the EAEU member states and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The agreement is quite large. It consists of 15 chapters, over 200 articles, extractions and protocols. A liberalized trade is to be established, Melkonyan said.

The Deputy Minister clarified that agreement refers only to goods produced in the territories of the parties. This means that the reduction of customs duties applies only the goods that have been produced in the EAEU member states or Vietnam, he said.

The Deputy Minister noted that there are three groups of goods regulated by the agreement. For 59% of the goods elimination of custom duties is expected, for 29% of goods a transitional period that can last until 2025-2027 is defined, while 12% of the goods will not be exempted from custom duties in the future.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker says the lifting of Russian sanctions by the EU depends on the "full implementation" of a peace deal with Ukraine

EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal.

"The next step is clear, full implementation of the agreement -- no more, no less," Juncker told Russia's main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

"This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed."

The Juncker-Putin meeting -- their first in Russia since the EU slapped sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine in 2014 -- had sparked Kremlin hopes it might signal the start of a return to business as usual with the bloc.

Putin is hosting Juncker as well as Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the three-day conference in Russia's second city just weeks before the expiry of EU sanctions that have helped plunge Russia's economy into recession.

Putin will also sit down with UN chief Ban Ki-moon alongside the world body's envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura, as he seeks to recast Moscow as a more stable partner for the West and bolster his country's flagging economy.

- EU 'united' -

The EU has tied the lifting of the punishing sanctions that have battered Russia's financial sector to the implementation of a deal brokered by the leaders of France and Germany in Minsk in February 2015 to end the pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine.

But the accord has stalled as the violence -- that Kiev and the West says is masterminded by Moscow -- rumbles on.

And despite some signs of cracks in the EU over extending the sanctions, Juncker insisted the bloc was "united".

Diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP that EU members could agree to renew the economic sanctions against Russia for six months as early as next week as they look to clear the schedule ahead of a summit at the end of the month set to be dominated by the fallout from Britain's EU referendum.

Despite the frosty relations with Moscow, however, Juncker insisted he had come to Russia to try to improve relations.

Story continues

"If our relationship today is troubled and marked by mistrust, it is not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it, and I believe we can," he said.

Putin's top foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov has described the Putin-Juncker encounter as "very important" and said the current difficulties between the EU and Russia would be discussed "frankly".

- Back to business? -

Despite the worst feud between Moscow and the West since the Cold War there are a host of top European business figures at the conference that Moscow has tried to pitch as its answer to Davos.

Putin met Royal Dutch Shell boss Ben van Beurden and the energy giant inked a memorandum of understanding with the Russian gas mammoth Gazprom on the potential construction of a major liquefied gas plant in the country.

The CEOs of major companies including France's Total, Societe Generale and JCDecaux and European multi-national Schneider Electric are also heading to the forum.

Businessmen say they are keen to bolster ties despite the sanctions -- which saw Russia slap a retaliatory embargo on most agricultural produce from the EU and the US -- and say Moscow is trying to repair its tarnished image.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who met Putin on Wednesday, said he had asked the Russian leader to unilaterally lift Moscow's embargo, to "launch a positive dynamic" that would see the EU remove its sanctions.

Russia's energy-driven economy -- hit by both the West's punitive measures and the drop in oil prices -- has slumped into the longest recession since Putin came to power some 16 years ago.

Despite claims from officials that the economy could return to limited growth soon, there are serious fears of a prolonged economic stagnation and the authorities are pledging much-needed structural reforms to attract investors.

"We need to change the structure of the economy to make it less dependant on external factors," Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told journalists.

"The strategic task is to generate higher rates of growth in the economy."
Profile Evaluation Request- THANK YOU! [ #permalink

Hello!



Thanks in advance for your response, it is greatly appreciated.



Profile:

- Age: 25 (27 @ matriculation)

- Male

- U.S. Resident

- GMAT 710 (Q47, V42)

- Undergraduate Institution: Ouachita Baptist University (liberal arts school in Arkansas)

- Undergraduate Degree: Biblical Studies, 3.35 GPA. Graduated in 3.5 years.

- Business coursework outside of major: Microeconomics (B), Accounting I (A), Accounting II (A), College Algebra (B), Personal Finance(A)

- Extracurricular in college: president of fraternity which grew from 12 members to over 80 while I was a member. Various community service leadership opportunities.

- W/E:

o 2 years at one of the top 5 Health Insurance companies in the U.S. I was a Disability Analyst. Various leadership opportunities.

o (Current) 2 years at a Insurance Brokerage and Consulting Firm as a Consultant (boutique firm likely never head of by admissions committee). Work with company executives to customize benefit program that will make them an employer of choice. Consult regarding Affordable Care Act compliance, as well as be the liaison between various other vendors. Various leadership opportunities, etc. Company size- around 20 employees.

o Both positions held in a major metroplex. Would likely have great recommendations from management.

- Community Involvement: Served as Associate Pastor for organization my wife and I started called Grassroots Christianity. Organization is focused on changing peoples perception of Church structure and function. Various community service events held.

- Target Schools (I will likely declare a Healthcare concentration if available):

o UT McCombs (in-state tuition. #1 choice)

o UNC

o Vanderbilt

- Stretch Schools

o Duke- Fuqua

o Cornell- Johnson

o Virginia Darden

- Less Competitive Target Schools

o SMU

o Rice

o A&M

- Timeline: I will apply in the fall of 2017 in order to matriculate in the fall of 2018 (class of 2020)

- Career Aspirations: Healthcare Consulting (not on the insurance brokerage side), but to be honest it is a bit undecided. Im not completely aware of the paths available to me given my background.



Concerns:

- Undergraduate Degree: Will having a religious degree be the diversity that schools are NOT looking for? I know diversity is a big focus of MBA programs. The degree was from a Liberal Arts institution, thus I studied in multiple areas which allowed me to truly foster a passion for learning.

- Work Experience: Ive definitely shown progression in both positions (both in salary and promotions), but Insurance is often seen as an industry anyone can walk in to. Not sure how my experience will be viewed by ADCOM at the programs I mentioned.

Questions:

- Given my somewhat low quant score (Q47), would you recommend I take a few business/math course prior to my application? Im thinking maybe Calc. for Business, Stats. for Business, and/or some other finance course.

- My current company is somewhat small and the advancement opps are limited because of that. Im considering looking for another company to work for during the two years leading up to matriculation.

o If Im right at 2 years before switching companies, would that look negatively to ADCOM(job hopping)?

o I have a relatively large network, and my first thought is I would try to work for one of the big 4 consulting firms in an analyst type role. I think this would be a good opportunity for me personally, but would me taking a role like this hurt my diversity factor, since so many MBA applicants come from that background?

- Are there other schools that you feel like my profile fits? My family (wife and 1 year old daughter) is flexible on location. Outside of the obvious stats(GMAT, GPA), do you feel like I would be a competitive applicant at the schools I listed?



Thank you for your time.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) meets with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF 2016) outside Saint Petersburg on June 16, 2016

EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal.

"The next step is clear: full implementation of the agreement -- no more, no less," Juncker told Russia's main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

"This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed."

During the meeting, part of which was broadcast on Russian state television, Juncker told Putin that "some in Europe weren't pleased" with him meeting the Kremlin strongman but stressed it was an opportunity to "exchange opinions".

The Juncker-Putin meeting -- their first in Russia since the EU slapped sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine in 2014 -- had sparked Kremlin hopes it might signal the start of a return to business-as-usual with the bloc.

Russia's ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, told Russian news agencies that Putin and Juncker had discussed energy issues but did not address the sanctions.

Putin will also host Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the three-day conference in Russia's second city just weeks before the expiry of EU sanctions that have helped plunge Russia's economy into recession.

Putin also sat down with UN chief Ban Ki-moon alongside the world body's envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, as he seeks to recast Moscow as a more stable partner for the West and bolster his country's flagging economy.

- EU 'united' -

The EU has tied the lifting of the punishing sanctions that have battered Russia's financial sector to the implementation of a deal brokered by the leaders of France and Germany in Minsk in February 2015 to end the pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine.

But the accord has stalled as the violence -- that Kiev and the West says is masterminded by Moscow -- rumbles on.

And despite some signs of cracks in the EU over extending the sanctions, Juncker insisted the bloc was "united".

Story continues

Diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP that EU members could agree to renew the economic sanctions against Russia for six months as early as next week as they look to clear the schedule ahead of a summit at the month's end that is likely to be dominated by Britain's EU referendum.

Despite the frosty ties with Moscow, however, Juncker insisted he had come to Russia to try to improve relations.

"If our relationship today is troubled and marked by mistrust, it is not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it, and I believe we can," he said.

- Back to business? -

Despite the worst feud between Russia and the West since the Cold War, there are a host of top European business figures at the conference which Moscow has tried to pitch as its answer to Davos.

Putin met Royal Dutch Shell boss Ben van Beurden and the energy giant inked a memorandum of understanding with Russian gas giant Gazprom on the potential construction of a major liquefied gas plant in the country.

The CEOs of major companies including France's Total, Societe Generale and JCDecaux and European multi-national Schneider Electric are participating in the forum.

Businessmen say they are keen to bolster ties despite the sanctions -- which saw Russia slap a retaliatory embargo on most agricultural produce from the EU and the US -- and say Moscow is trying to repair its tarnished image.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who met Putin on Wednesday, said he had asked the Russian leader to unilaterally lift Moscow's embargo, to "launch a positive dynamic" that would see the EU remove its sanctions.

Russia's energy-driven economy -- hit by both the West's punitive measures and the drop in oil prices -- has slumped into the longest recession since Putin came to power some 16 years ago.

Despite claims from officials that the economy could return to limited growth soon, there are serious fears of a prolonged economic stagnation and the authorities are pledging much-needed structural reforms to attract investors.

"We need to change the structure of the economy to make it less dependant on external factors," Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told journalists.

"The strategic task is to generate higher rates of growth in the economy."
The United States charged Tokai Kogyo and one executive with conspiring to rig bids and fix prices on automotive body sealing products for sale to Honda

The United States charged two Japanese auto-parts companies and five executives with price-fixing Wednesday in a long-running investigation into illegal competitive practices in the parts industry.

A federal grand jury in Ohio indicted Tokai Kogyo and Maruyasu Industries and their US subsidiaries on charges of participating in international conspiracies to rig bids and fix prices in the sale of auto body sealing products and steel tubing, the Justice Department said in a statement.

A total of five executives were also charged in the scheme.

"We will not be deterred from holding those involved -- both corporations and individuals -- accountable for their actions, and we welcome the opportunity to prove our cases to a jury," said Brent Snyder, deputy assistant attorney in the Justice Department's antitrust division.

The department charged Tokai Kogyo and one executive with conspiring to rig bids and fix prices on automotive body sealing products for sale to Honda for cars made and sold in the United States.

In a separate indictment, Haruyasu and four executives were charged with price fixing and bid rigging for automotive steel tubes sold in the US and elsewhere.

The charges are the latest in the US government's sprawling crackdown on illegal competitive activity in the automotive parts industry, which has mainly hit Japanese parts companies.

To date, a total of 64 persons and 44 companies have been charged and have agreed to pay more than $2.7 billion in criminal fines, officials said.
[Front desk clerk Mary Anne Guray working at the Franklin Hotel where business was already down over 50 per cent in Fort McMurray, Alberta in January. (Todd Korol/Toronto Star via Getty Images)]



Despite a less than rosy outlook for Albertas economy this year, the majority of Calgary businesses recognize the market has fundamentally changed and are ready to push forward with optimism.

Earlier this week, economic think-tank the Conference Board of Canada nodded to another year of recession for Alberta, with the provinces GDP contracting by two per cent.

Nearly all sectors of the economy are struggling and, if that was not enough, the wildfires in northern Alberta have added to the economic woes of the province, Marie-Christine Bernard, associate director of provincial forecast said in a release accompanying the findings. Wildfires in Northern Alberta temporarily shut crude oil production from the oil stands and hampered economic activity in the region.

But another study released this week paints a more optimistic picture.



Calgary Economic Development and the Calgary Chamber of Commerce teamed up, hiring market research firm Stone Olafson to survey 935 businesses between mid-April and May.

According to their survey results, 72 per cent of Calgary businesses say that theres no doubt the energy market has fundamentally changed. Even still, two-thirds (67 per cent) say theyre optimistic about the future.

Businesses have recognized that many of these are long-term changes, Adam Legge, President and CEO of the Calgary Chamber said in a press release highlighting the findings. As a result, businesses are also now clearly telling us they are facing a hugely challenging economic period  56 per cent of businesses say that they have slowed down in the past year.

While small and medium-sized businesses were hit exceptionally hard by the downturn, the provinces worst in 30 years, theyre also the most nimble and prepared to innovate their way through the changes, explains Chad Saunders, assistant professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at University of Calgarys Haskayne School of Business.

Story continues

In the times of turbulence this is where entrepreneurs start to reconfigure their business, he says. Stuff that might have not been possible a couple years ago even though they may have wanted to do it, now all of a sudden folks are willing to listen because in many ways they almost have to.

Saunders is referring to the move by bigger businesses, especially the energy sector, to absorb startups in order to fast track innovation and, in some cases, efficiency.

When oil is $100 a barrel, theres not really any incentive for these oil companies to innovate in key parts of their business, explains Saunders. Whereas now, those (innovative) folks are the stars of the company because theyre able to innovate around cost savings.

According to the survey by the Calgary Economic Development and the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, 51 per cent of businesses say they are pursuing more productivity and efficiency, while 39 per cent are investing in new lines of business. 29 per cent are going beyond just investing in new lines by exploring new markets altogether and 21 per cent are training their staff with new skills to keep nimble.



The optimism is also emulated in the Conference Board of Canadas study, which forecasts a return to positive territory in 2017 with a real GDP gain of 2.5 per cent fuelled in part by the rebuild effort in Fort McMurray.

But with that growth, Saunders sees a growing sense of urgency among small and medium-sized businesses.

Creative destruction opens up a window of opportunity that closes fairly quickly and I think thats why you see all these (startups) really rushing, he says. They know as the price of oil goes back up, a lot of these opportunities (to break into the market) arent going to be available to them.


Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta (L ) and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping stand together during a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2013.

Kenya secured a $600 million loan from China last week to help towards paying for a $6 billion budget deficit that the government expects this year. The loan, one of many China has given to the country over the years, helps Kenyas goal of bringing down its budget deficit to 7.9% of gross domestic product instead of the previously forecast 8.7%.

But it also raises the prospect of whether East Africas largest economy is growing too indebted to China. China is now Kenyas largest creditor, accounting for 57% the countrys total external debt (pdf, p.37) of $4.51 billion, according to the World Bank. That figure has grown quickly. Chinese loans to Kenya grew an annual rate of 54% between 2010 and 2014 while loans from other lenders like Japan and France fell.

Kenya still has a heavy debt burden and Chinas loans can bring debt to unsustainable levels. Some of Chinas loans are non-concessional, which can raise debt to GDP levels quickly, a World Bank report on Chinas impact in Kenya in May concluded.

Critics point out that Chinese loans, usually for infrastructure projects, are often contingent on a Chinese company being contracted to complete those projects. Others say that the terms are unfavorable to Kenya and that funding from the African Development Bank or the World Bank would be cheaper. If we leave these big projects to the corrupt elite and crafty Chinese contractors, they will bankrupt us, wrote a columnist in the Kenyan paper, the Daily Nation, in March.

Chinese loans to the African continent are often exaggerated. They amount to about $6.2 billon a year, a little less than the amount the United States has been spending on its HIV prevention campaign PEPFAR since 2009.

According to Apurva Sanghi, a lead economist for the World Bank and one of the co-authors of the report, it doesnt matter where these loans come from but whether the debt Kenya is accumulating is sustainable. (For instance, China has been Americas largest creditor for years now.)

Story continues

Although Kenyas debt burden compared to its gross domestic product has been over 50% since 2013, the International Monetary Fund declared Kenyas at low risk of debt distress in an assessment last year.

Sign up for the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief  the most important and interesting news from across the continent, in your inbox.

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(Reuters) - A union representing workers of Macy's Inc in New York said it reached a tentative agreement with the department store operator for a new four-year contract, averting a strike that was set to begin on Thursday. Workers belonging to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had demanded a more affordable health plan, pay increases and changes to scheduling and commissions policies. They had threatened to walk off the job if a deal was not reached by midnight on Thursday. The labor union, which represents 5,000 workers at the company's flagship Herald Square store and at Macy's locations in the Bronx, Queens and White Plains, said in a Facebook post that it had reached a deal. "We are pleased with the outcome of our overnight negotiations and happy to report that a tentative agreement between Macy's and Local 1S for our workers has been reached, therefore averting a possible strike today," Macy's said in an email to Reuters. The retailer declined to provide any details of the agreement. Macy's had placed newspaper ads seeking temporary workers to minimize disruption from a strike and the union had asked them to stop running the ads. There has not been a strike at Macy's in New York for over 40 years, the union said. Macy's shares were up nearly 2 percent at $32.50 in premarket trading on Thursday. (Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bengaluru, Editing by Anil D'Silva)
By Nia Williams and Julie Gordon CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - One man was killed and a woman was wounded on Thursday in a stabbing attack at a medical clinic in Calgary, Alberta, with the suspect now in custody, a police spokesman said. Police said the attack appeared to be domestic in nature and that the scene would remain closed while police investigated. "Early reports were multiple people stabbed. When we arrived we found one person deceased at the scene and two other people with non-life threatening injuries," a Calgary police spokesman said. The spokesman said one woman was taken to hospital, while the suspect, who was also injured, was treated at the scene. He did not have any further information on the suspect's relationship with his victims. A woman who answered the phone at the Olive Medical clinic in the Central Landmark building said the stabbing happened across the hallway from the medical center in an acupuncture clinic. "We called the police," she said, adding that the clinic had notified its patients to not come in for appointments as officers have closed the building for investigation. (Reporting by Nia Williams; Editing by G Crosse and Sandra Maler)
News

Duke Student Project Intends to Enhance Latino Students' English Skills

Led by their professors, a team of undergraduate students at Duke University is working on a project that aims to improve professional development for North Carolina elementary school teachers whose students lack essential English language skills.

The premise of the project, known as Developing Consultation and Collaboration Skills (DCCS), acknowledges that the most popular English as a Second Language (ESL) model in recent years has been the "pull-out" model, in which students are pulled out of their regular classes for additional English language instruction. The problem with that model, according to Assistant Research Professor Leslie Babinski of Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, is that students miss out on the classroom instruction others are receiving when they are pulled out.

At the same time, Babinski pointed out, the model ignores the fact that all students in kindergarten through second grade are language learners.

"Our idea was that you can leverage the work of what's happening in the regular classroom to support language learning," she said.

The DCCS professional development program, which was incorporated into four school districts  urban, suburban and rural  throughout North Carolina beginning in fall 2015, has four components:

A week-long Summer Institute for classroom teachers during which they can develop collaboration skills needed to increase the command of English for their students, incorporate Latino family culture into the classroom and learn about high-impact instructional skills;

Weekly collaboration meetings between ESL and classroom teachers;

On-site coaching sessions; and

Learning modules that the teachers can incorporate into their classrooms.

While it is too early to have data on the DCCS project's success, Babinski said, "It's really encouraging to see that people feel like they're getting a lot out of it."
Clinical Trials



Step 1: Identify the Question



The wording casts doubt on in the question stem indicates that this is a Weaken the Argument question.



Step 2: Deconstruct the Argument



Too few human subjs for clinical trials  new drugs cant go to market



New drugs needed for future gens.



 Drs dont encourage trial subjs (if no other treatment)  morally wrong



Step 3: Pause and State the Goal



In a Weaken problem, the right answer will make the conclusion less likely to be true. In this argument, the conclusion is that doctors are morally in the wrong if they do not encourage suitable patients to volunteer for clinical trials. This conclusion can be rephrased to state that doctors have a moral obligation to encourage patients to volunteer for trials. The right answer will suggest that this is not the casethat doctors are not morally obligated to encourage patients to volunteer. The right answer will most likely accomplish this by showing that there are negative consequences to encouraging patients to volunteer, and that these might outweigh the moral imperative.



Step 4: Work from Wrong to Right



(A) According to the conclusion, physicians are only morally required to recommend trial participation if there is no other effective treatment. This answer choice suggests that this will be the case for many patients. However, knowing that a doctor might be able to recommend trial participation to many patients doesnt clarify whether that doctor is morally obligated to do so.



(B) The answer choice states that everyone is morally obligated to alleviate suffering. This actually strengthens the conclusion, since if everyone is obligated to alleviate suffering, doctors should be no exception.



(C) This is a tempting answer choice because it relates to real-world concerns surrounding clinical trials. If a patient receives the control drug, he or she might not receive any benefit from participating in the trial. However, the argument specifically claims that physicians should recommend trial participation because of the benefit to future generations, not because of potential benefit to the trial patients themselves. Even though personal benefit is a concern to the patients, since the argument only deals with benefit for others, information about personal benefit does not affect the conclusion.



(D) This answer choice suggests that enrolling patients in a clinical trial is sometimes the only way for those patients to acquire necessary medication. However, the argument specifically claims that physicians should recommend trial participation because of the benefit to future generations, not because of potential benefit to the trial patients themselves. Even though personal benefit is a concern to the patients, since the argument only deals with benefit for others, information about personal benefit does not affect the conclusion. Even if the conclusion dealt with personal benefit, this answer choice would strengthen it, rather than weakening it, because it would suggest that doctors should encourage their sick patients to enroll in trials.



(E) CORRECT . The argument states that the purpose of clinical trials is to show that the drugs are safe and effective. Thus, if a drug is being tested in a clinical trial, it is not definitively known whether it is safe and/or effective. Taking these drugs, therefore, involves accepting at least some risk to health or safety.



The answer choice states that physicians have an overriding responsibility to care for the health and safety of their current patients. That is, the health and safety of their current patients takes precedence over moral imperatives that only relate to future generations. It follows that a doctor should not necessarily encourage a current patient to participate in a clinical trial solely for the benefit of future patients, since participation might cause some risk to the current patient, and that is more important than the health of future patients.



Argument Evaluation



Situation A shortage of human subjects for clinical trials needed to show that new drugs are safe and effective often prevents those drugs from being introduced into the market. The lives and health of future generations may depend on treatments that are now experimental.



Reasoning What would cast doubt on the judgment that doctors are morally obligated to encourage their patients to volunteer for clinical trials? Note that the argument's conclusion, unlike its premises, is a moral judgment. This judgment could be cast into doubt by a moral principle that would be likely to conflict with it under the conditions described. For example, a principle suggesting that it is sometimes morally unacceptable for doctors to encourage their patients to volunteer for clinical trials would also suggest that they are not morally obligated to encourage their patients to volunteer for clinical trials, since anything morally obligatory must also be morally acceptable.



(A) If anything, this highlights how important it is to ensure that these drugs undergo clinical trials to benefit future generations, so it supports rather than casts doubt on the argument's conclusion.



(B) This suggests that patients are morally obligated to volunteer for clinical trials to help prevent suffering in future generations. If anything, this supports the claim that doctors are morally obligated to encourage their patients to volunteer.



(C) The clinical trial will probably not harm any patients in the control group, yet their participation will benefit future generations. So, if anything, this supports the claim that doctors should encourage their patients to volunteer.



(D) This legal barrier makes it even more essential for the drugs to undergo clinical trials in order to benefit patients, so it supports rather than casts doubt on the argument's conclusion.



(E) Correct . Since the experimental drugs' safety is being tested during the trials, the drugs may prove unsafe for subjects in the trials. If doctors have an overriding moral duty to keep their current patients safe, then it may be morally unacceptable for them to encourage those patients to volunteer for the trials.
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One person was killed and another two injured in shootings Wednesday across Brooklyn.

At 6:20 p.m. a 29-year-old man was shot in the head outside of the Farragut Houses at the corner of Sands and Gold Streets in DUMBO. The Daily News reports that the man was shot by a woman who escaped by fleeing into an apartment building on Bridge Street.

According to an NYPD spokesperson, the man was rushed to Methodist Hospital in critical condition and was expected to die of his injuries. An investigation is ongoing and no arrests have been made.

Minutes earlier Robert Thomas, 46, was fatally shot in the head by a drive-by shooter near the corner of MacDougal Street and Thomas Boyland Street near his home in Bed-Stuy. Police confirmed that Thomas was found with at least on gunshot wound at 5:54 p.m. and rushed to Interfaith Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. No arrests have been made in connection to his murder.

Shortly after 10:30 p.m. Wednesday night, 26-year-old Andre Lane was shot in the torso and right arm on the corner of Ralph and East New York Avenues in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Lane was rushed to Kings County Hospital, where the Daily News reports he died of his injuries. However, an NYPD spokesperson disputed that report, telling Gothamist that Lane survived.

And in the Bronx, Sarisse Respass, 32, a mother of three, was fatally struck in the head inside her Wakefield apartment shortly before 7 a.m. yesterday. It was initially reported that she was shot, but the NYPD now says Respass suffered "blunt trauma" to the head.

Police arrested White Plains resident Sheldon Salmon, 35, Thursday in connection to the murder and have charged him with Second Degree Murder, Manslaughter, and Criminal Possession of a Weapon.
Last year it was the Man O' War who poisoned summer, heaving their multi-hued sack bodies all over our beloved beaches and hearts. Now, the clinging jellyfish are coming for usa number of people have spotted these teeny little blobs in New Jersey, and at least one person was hospitalized after getting stung. SUMMER IS OVER.

The clinging jellies in question are about the size of a dimethey tend to hang out in the Pacific Ocean, but having apparently grown tired of exasperatingly long hugs and defending their decision to grow chard instead of kale, they have migrated east, potentially having hitchhiked on a ship. Though they are quite small, they are very dangerous, and if stung, a person could develop kidney failure. Paul Bologna, the Director of Aquatic Science, Montclair State University, told ABC 7, "Small things can pack a powerful punch affiliated with their venom and their toxin," which coincidentally is the exact thing I wrote in my Tinder bio.

In addition to New Jersey, the sweet little pulsating bells have been spotted in Cape Cod and the Long Island Sound. They typically live in bay water, and feed at night.
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Free fishing for Fathers Day weekend

Whether youre tying on a salmonfly or threading a night crawler onto a hook, on Saturday and Sunday, June 18-19, everyone in Montana can fish for free.

It's a celebration of fishing and of taking advantage of Montana's great outdoors, so grab a pole and get outside, said Jeff Hagener, director of Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks in Helena. While its also a celebration of Fathers Day, these two free fishing days provide everyone opportunity to get out and enjoy Montanas great fishing.

While the promotion allows anyone to fish without a license on June 18-19, all other fishing rules and regulations are in effect and must be followed.

Hagener encourages all would-be anglers to be aware of boating and water safety on Montanas rivers and streams. Additionally, he reminds those with watercraft of any kind to remember to stop at all AIS inspection stations.

Enjoy being on the water and some of the things that make living in Montana special, he said.

For water and boating safety tips, click on the Recreation tab at fwp.mt.gov and choose your activity. For specific information on boating safety go to http://fwp.mt.gov/recreation/safety/boating.

Plan for wildfire situations, evacuations

The story begins in 2003 with a human-caused wildfire in southern California that burned more than 280,000 acres and 2,232 homes, but most importantly and tragically, led to the death of a young woman named Ashleigh Roach.

Helena residents will hear the story of Ashleigh and her family on Saturday, June 18, during the One-Third Mile to Safety: A Familys Story staff ride that will begin at 9 a.m. at the Neighborhood Assembly of God Church, 725 Granite Ave., in Helena. Allyson Roach  Ashleighs sister  and her husband and children will be at the event in Helena, as well.

The One-Third Mile to Safety staff ride is open to everyone and is free-of-charge; coffee/lunch will be available for purchase. Participants will take a guided, 1/3-mile walk along Le Grande Cannon Boulevard and Silverette Street, stopping at several stations to hear the evacuation story from the perspective of the Roach family members. After the walk, Allyson Roach will address participants with her first-hand accounts of that day and advice on how people can prevent this from happening to their own families. Afterward, Lewis and Clark County Sheriff Leo Dutton will discuss local evacuation procedures, and volunteer firefighters and emergency coordinators will discuss pre-season mitigation opportunities for homeowners.

For more information contact: Pat McKelvey at 459-8225, Kathy Bushnell at 495-3747, or Doris Davis at 422-6875.

Kayaking class at Spring Meadow

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks is offering kayaking classes for beginners at Spring Meadow Lake State Park on June 20 and 22 starting at 6 p.m.

Participants will have an opportunity to try out stable recreational style kayaks and learn basic paddle strokes. Please wear clothes that can get wet and water shoes or sandals.

The classes are open to adults and youth 10 years of age and older when accompanied by a parent or guardian.

Participants must register by calling 444-9944. The Montana Wild Education Center is sponsoring the classes.

Master naturalist course planned

Join instructors from FWP, Montana Discovery Foundation, Helena National Forest, and MT Land Reliance along with many others to become a certified Montana Master Naturalist June 20-24.

Course topics will include: field journaling, plant & animal identification, living with wildlife, interpretive and citizen scientist skills.

Classes will start from Montana WILD and conclude with an overnight trip to FWPs Beartooth Wildlife Management Area near Holter Lake. Participants will be required to complete a community service component to maintain their annual Master Naturalist Certification.

The cost of this course is $140 and can be taken for college credit through the Helena College for an additional fee. Class size is limited to 15 participants.

For more information please contact Montana WILD-Education Center; Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, 2668 Broadwater Ave. Call 444-9944 to learn more.

Polar bears and Arctic ecology

Join Dr. Frank Tyro on Thursday, June 23, at 7 p.m. in the Lewis & Clark Library, 120 S. Last Chance Gulch, for a presentation to learn why Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, is the polar bear capital of the world. Tyro has traveled to Churchill 37 times and is president of the board of the Great Bear Foundation with offices in Missoula and Haines, Alaska.

This multimedia presentation will honor Dr. Charles Jonkel, bear biologist and founder of GBF and the International Wildlife Film Festival. Learn about permafrost, Hudson Bay, bears, foxes, seals and many other animals that populate our planet and are so dependent on the snow and ice for survival. Learn how you too can visit Churchill with the most educational and ecologically small footprint. GBF has three trips this year to Churchill in August, October and November. The program is free and open to the pubic.

BLM seeks comment on Marysville report

The Bureau of Land Managements Butte Field Office is looking for public input on a recently-completed land health assessment report for public lands in the Marysville Planning Area near Helena.

The report contains initial recommendations developed by the field offices Marysville interdisciplinary team for issues encountered during the assessment process. These recommendations were developed during and after the completion of field assessments conducted by the team in 2013. Follow up visits were made in 2014.

The team's recommendations focus primarily on livestock grazing, timber and fuels management, noxious weed control, recreation activities, wildlife and fisheries habitat, travel planning, and road maintenance on 14,169 acres of BLM-administered lands, surrounding the town of Maryville and Great Divide Ski Area.

The assessment report can be found on BLMs ePlanning website at 1.usa.gov/1t28HMN.

Those who would like to provide comments should be as specific as possible with suggestions regarding resource issues, data sources, or alternatives to be considered. Send comments to Shawn Heinert, Butte Field Office at 106 N. Parkmont, Butte, MT 59701 or e-mail sheinert@blm.gov. To be considered, all comments must contain the name and address of the submitter.

For more information, call the Butte Field Office at 406-533-7600.

Insecticide spraying underway in forest

The Forest Service will be applying insecticides in recreation sites throughout the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest over the next few weeks. The need for this is driven by the current mountain pine beetle epidemic, which has heavily affected many areas throughout southwest Montana and has already impacted some individual trees within popular recreation areas.

If youre planning an outing on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, or if its your first venture to the 3.35 million acres of Montana woodland, you may note that many of the recreation sites will look different than seen in years past or in the pictures that may have prompted your destination.

Beginning mid-June and continuing through mid-July depending upon the weather, a Forest Service workforce and contract sprayers will be placing packets, SPLAT and spraying Carbaryl to protect individual pine trees from mountain pine beetles in recreation sites.

For more information contact the Dillon Ranger District 406-683-3900.

Garnet Day planned June 18

The sights and sounds of a 19th century mining town will come back to life during this years family-friendly Garnet Day 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 18.

The annual event, hosted by the Bureau of Land Management and the Garnet Preservation Association, brings a bustle of activity to the ghost town of Garnet.

Montana pioneer impersonator Jennie Pak will give a presentation called Underpinning and Other Things demonstrating the dressing process of the 19th-century women: from shift to ball gown. A nine-member band will provide gospel music from the 1800s by playing a violin, guitar, bass, auto harp and Cajun drum throughout the day.

Other activities throughout the day include a street dance, a quilt display, a wool-spinning demonstration, a watermelon-eating contest, a pie auction, gold-panning and old-fashioned childrens games.

The days events are designed to give families a fun, wild-west experience in one of Montanas most intact ghost towns, located 35 miles east of Missoula.

Visitors will be charged the standard usage fee of $3; no admission is charged for those 15 and younger. For more information on the event, contact the BLMs Missoula Field Office at 406-329-3914.
An East Helena man is accused of molesting a 4-year-old boy.

Authorities arrested Darrell Harry Dennis Jr. on a felony charge of sexual assault Thursday. The molestation is alleged to have occurred in 2005. Dennis, 41, admitted to the abuse and corroborated the boy's report of the assault on the day of his arrest, court documents state.

In October 2005, sheriff's deputies took a report after the boy's mother said her son told her someone had touched his genitals and kissed him on his buttocks, according to documents filed Friday in Lewis and Clark County Justice Court. The boy was spending the night at the suspect's house at the time of the abuse, which happened repeatedly. He told investigators the "bad man" gave him candy after touching him.

"The victim indicated to his mother he was told not to tell her because he was told he would have to go to jail, as well as the defendant," the documents state.

During a subsequent investigation, the boy told deputies he'd been molested but would not say the man's name or give other details, court documents note.

The suspect, Dennis, was questioned in December 2005. He denied the allegations. The documents say "the case was deemed inactive at that time."

In February 2016, a school counselor informed Helena police a student wished to disclose sexual abuse. An interview with the now 14-year-old boy was later conducted. Court documents say the boy said Dennis, a friend of the family, is the man who molested him.
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Domingo Leveque-Zapata, the white collar crimes detective with the Helena Police Department, estimated the actual number of senior financial fraud that occurs in the area is two to three times more than what goes reported. That's a low estimate, he added.

Many seniors are embarrassed they were victimized and don't want to tell anyone, especially authorities.

"The biggest part is speaking up," Leveque-Zapata said. "We've got to step above that shame to get your money back."

Reimbursement of funds lost in scams and other fraudulent activities is possible. In the last three years, more than $1 million in restitution assistance has been given out in Montana, according to Lynne Egan, deputy securities commissioner for the office of the commissioner of securities and insurance.

"When we turn over one stone...when we have one victim, there's usually 10," Egan added.

Leveque-Zapata and Egan were guests at a panel discussion on financial abuse of seniors hosted by the local agency on aging Wednesday. Those on the panel said awareness of the issue is key.

An estimated one in five seniors is a victim to financial fraud. The average amount taken in $150,000 per victim, officials said.

One of the most common scams targeting seniors has been making the rounds for years. Someone calls the senior pretending to be a grandchild who has been arrested in a faraway city and sometimes another country, Leveque-Zapata said. They first ask for bail money to be wired. Then the scammer calls again to ask for attorney fees.

Leveque-Zapata said the best reaction to any call like this is to verify the information before doing anything else.

Another ongoing scams are those stating you won a lottery in a foreign country. The culprit then says you need to send money in order to receive the jackpot.

Patti Renenger, regional supervisor for of Adult Protective Services, said seniors are especially susceptible because many are solitary and simply enjoy talking to others on the phone. Telephone scams are some of the most common that target seniors.

"It's people taking advantage of them because they are lonely," Renenger said.

Many times its family members, caregivers or friends who pray upon the elderly, panelists said. These types especially go unreported.

Rich Bruner, market president for First Interstate Bank, said training of employees is vital to being proactive against scams against seniors.

"There isn't a day that goes by that I don't have a case of fraud go across my desk," Bruner told the about 50 people in attendance.
Iranian flag carrier Iran Air has been taken off a safety blacklist and cleared to fly in the European Union, the European Commission said Thursday.

"Following my visit to Iran in April, a technical assessment was successfully carried out in May," EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc said in a statement.

"Based on this I am happy to announce that we are now able to allow most aircraft from Iran Air back into European skies," Bulc said.

Previously, only the carrier's EU-manufactured Airbus planes could operate in the bloc.

A Commission official said that while most of Iran Air's fleet was now cleared to fly in the EU, its Fokker 100 and Boeing 747 planes remained banned.

The company website says the airline operates 16 Fokker 100 planes, a short-haul aircraft dating back to the 1980s, and 5 Boeing 747 jumbo jets, all older versions.

Iran's commercial airlines were badly hit by US and EU sanctions imposed over its contested nuclear programme, denying them access to crucial spare parts for their aircraft.

An EU-brokered deal in 2015 ended years of deadlock between the two sides, with sanctions being lifted in return for Iran committing to not develop nuclear weapons.

As a result, Iran earlier this year was able to place a massive order for more than 100 Airbus planes and it is in talks with US aerospace giant Boeing.

Bulc also said the 28-member bloc had removed all Zambian airlines from the safety blacklist after "seven years of work and extensive European technical assistance."

In addition, three Indonesian carriers -- Citilink, Lion Air and Batik Air -- plus Air Madagascar were given the all clear to fly in the EU.

The Air Safety List is updated regularly and with Thursday's announcement, it names 214 airlines in 19 countries which fail to meet EU oversight standards.

Two other airlines are banned on safety concerns -- Iraqi Airways and Suriname's Blue Wing Airlines -- while another six are partially restricted in the aircraft types they can fly in the EU.

bmm/ser
Traveling internationally can be a great break for business owners. And sometimes, it can even be necessary for facilitating business growth. But theres a lot that goest into organizing and planning for international travel. Here are some international travel tips to help ensure that your next excursion runs as smoothly as possible.

International Travel Tips

Make Sure Your Passport is Up to Date

You likely already know that you need a passport in order to travel internationally. But even if you have a passport that youve used in the past, you need to make sure that its up-to-date. Passports obtained by adults are usually good for ten years. But make sure that yours isnt expired or even within months of the expiration date, as some countries wont accept travelers with passports that are about to expire in case there are issues during your trip.

Make Copies of Your Passport

When traveling internationally, your passport is your main source of identification. So its very important that you keep it safe. In fact, making color copies before your trip can be a good safeguard. Keep a copy in each of your bags and consider even leaving one at home with a family member just in case.

Get Any Necessary Visas

Some countries also require you to apply for a visa before entering. Youll need to look up the specific requirements of the country or countries you plan on visiting with the embassy or State Department when planning your trip.

Notify the State Department

It can also be a good idea to notify the State Department of your travel plans just so there are government officials aware of your whereabouts in case of emergency.

Bring an Outlet Adapter

Electrical outlets vary in different parts of the world. So you dont want to make it to your destination only to find that none of your electronics work. Instead, purchase an outlet adapter that will work with the outlets in the country or countries you plan on visiting.

Check the Voltage of Your Electronics

Some outlets also have different limits when it comes to voltage. So make sure that the electronics youre bringing are going to be able to work within those limits.

Invest in a Good Pair of Headphones

Whether youre waiting around in an airport, on a train or trying to work in a noisy coffee shop or hostel, headphones can be a necessary tool for international travelers. Find a pair that are good at canceling out noise and are also comfortable for long wear.

Look Up Monetary Conversions

When traveling between countries, conversion rates for money are likely to change. But while you might get different rates at different times or in different locations, its a good idea to at least look up the rates beforehand so you know if youre getting a good deal or if you should possibly try a different location.

Check Your Mobile Coverage

Even if you dont plan on calling many people during your travels, you should at least have access to a working phone in case of emergencies. So you need to make sure that your phone will work in the locations youre visiting. You may even need to sign up for an international calling plan that covers the area you plan on visiting.

Turn Off Your Regular Data

Its also likely that your regular data plan isnt set up for use overseas. Unless you have an international data plan, it can be a good idea for you to turn off your data and just use WiFi when its available.

Get Any Necessary Vaccinations

You may need to get certain vaccinations in order to travel to different countries. The Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have information about which vaccinations are necessary or recommended when traveling to various countries or regions.

Get a Letter from Your Doctor for Any Medications

If youre bringing over any prescriptions or medications, it can be a good idea to get a letter from your doctor in case you come across any issues while going through security in other countries.

Let Your Bank Know Your Travel Plans

If you head to a different country and start charging everything to your credit cards, your bank could see that and freeze your cards or accounts due to fraud concerns. To avoid this, just let your bank or card companies know your travel plans ahead of time.

Check Entrance and Exit Fees

Some countries have fees for entering or exiting that are separate from what you pay for flights. Check to see whether there are any fees involved for the countries you plan on visiting before you leave so that you can be prepared.

Have Some Currency Ahead of Time

Getting just a bit of currency from the countries you plan on visiting beforehand can also be a good idea. You likely dont want to get too much, because you dont want to have a lot left over and often credit card rates are better than conversion rates for cash anyway. But some places wont accept credit cards. And converting your money in airports isnt always cost effective.

Use Credit Cards When Possible

Its often more cost effective to use credit cards instead of converting all of your money to the currency of the countries you visit. And since U.S. credit cards are switching over to using chips, theyre more likely to be accepted in other countries than they were in previous years.

Set Up Automatic Bill Pay

While youre traveling, certain parts of your life at home will continue. Namely, youll still likely have to pay bills. So set up automatic bill pay or schedule all of the payments for a time before you leave in case you cant or dont have time to access your accounts while traveling.

Put Your Mail on Hold

You can also contact your local Post Office to have them put a hold on or forward your mail so that it doesnt just pile up in your mailbox while you travel.

Check Internet Coverage

Especially if you plan on getting some work done or being available during your international travels, youll likely need an Internet connection. Check with your hotel to see if they have WiFi available. Or you could search around for local connected cafes.

See Also: 20 Travel Etiquette Tips to Mind Your Ps and Qs

Grab Hotel Business Cards

Even once youve reached your destination, dont let unfamiliar surroundings get you turned around and lost in a strange city. In case you ever need to get back to your hotel and you cant find anyone who speaks English, having a business card for your hotel can help you communicate where you need to go.

Get an International Maps App

A maps app can also be invaluable when it comes to finding your way around different cities. Just make sure you use one that works in the countries you plan on visiting.

Consider Supplemental Insurance

Your regular health coverage may not cover you in the event that something happens while youre traveling internationally. But you can purchase supplemental coverage to cover you during your trip. You can even get insurance that will allow you to fly back home in case that becomes necessary.

Carry a Translator Guide

If youre traveling to countries where you arent fluent in the language, carrying a pocket translator guide with common phrases in that language can be a good idea.

Arrange for English Speaking Guides

You can also hire guides to show you around and answer any questions in the language that youre most comfortable speaking.

Make a List of Must Dos

There are so many ways to travel internationally. You can plan out every last minute, or you can be more spontaneous. But its a good idea to at least make a list of the main things that you want to see or accomplish. Then you can make plans to see those things whenever its convenient as long as they dont require you to book ahead of time.

Bring an Extra Set of Clothes in Your Carry-on

Losing luggage is never a good thing. But if it happens, you want to be prepared at least for the immediate future. A change of clothes and a few basic toiletries can help you make it through until your luggage gets found or you can get to a store.
Learning Platforms

Brainly Acquires OpenStudy

Brainly, a multinational social learning network for students and educators, has acquired OpenStudy, a similar, Atlanta-based, peer-to-peer study help platform. The combined companies are anticipated to offer students advanced online learning tools, for both inside the classroom and out.

Co-founded by professors from Emory University and Georgia Tech, OpenStudy features a real-time study platform in Q&A format that has reportedly attracted 54 million learners.

Brainly boasts 60 million monthly users across 35 countries and 12 languages. Primarily used by high school and middle school students, Brainly.com and the Brainly app offer platforms to ask and answer questions about math, history, English, biology, chemistry, physics, geography and other subjects.

Brainly is based in Krakow, Poland, with U.S. headquarters in New York City.

With the acquisition of the OpenStudy platform, Brainly has created the best peer-to-peer platform for students to follow their curiosity and gain a deeper understanding of a wide variety of subjects along their academic journey, said Brainly CEO Michal Borkowski in a prepared statement.

Both platforms will operate as separately branded entities with their own respective websites and apps, Brainly said in the statement. Knowledge and data will be shared, and the OpenStudy team will join Brainly, according to edsurge.com.

Last month, Brainly announced a $15 million Series B funding round led by Naspers, intended to accelerate Brainlys growth globally and expand its presence in the United States. Specific terms of this deal with OpenStudy were not disclosed.

Joining forces with Brainly was, excuse the pun, a no-brainer, said Preetha Ram, CEO and co-founder of OpenStudy, in a prepared statement. Our two brands have synergy around one common goal: to enhance the way students learn outside of the classroom.

OpenStudys other co-founder is Ashwin Ram, Preethas husband. Together, they created the Open Social Learning concept, with support from Learn Capital, the National Science Foundation and others.

OpenStudy features game mechanics and analytics, real-time interaction and skills assessment engines that provide users with credentials to apply for jobs and internships.
State Ed Tech Funding

Arkansas Spending $400K for Computer Science Program

Arkansas is spending $400,000 to offer an online program for middle school students around the state, according to the Associated Press. The program is aimed at raising interest in computer science and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson this week announced the grant from the state Department of Education to provide the Learning Blade program to middle school students during the upcoming school year, AP said. Hutchinson said hell ask the legislature to include the funding for the program in the budget for future years.

The Learning Blade program teaches students computer science skills through academic exercises. The lessons are self-guided, allowing the students to work on the activities in the classroom or during after-school programs. Last year, lawmakers approved Hutchinsons proposal to require public schools to teach computer science classes, AP said.
Ed Tech for Girls

Oracle and AOL Commit $3 Million to National Let Girls Learn Initiative

Oracle and AOL are committing more than $3 million to promote and support technological efforts by girls in the United States and around the world. The commitments are part of a broader Let Girls Learn initiative, which is receiving $20 million in new pledges, according to an announcement made this week by First Lady Michelle Obama at the United State of Women Summit in Washington, DC.

Oracle is investing more than $3 million in direct and in-kind funds over the next 12 months to promote and support educational opportunities for adolescent girls across the globe. Under the Let Girls Learn umbrella, Oracle Academy, Oracle Womens Leadership (OWL) communities, Oracles Diversity & Inclusion program and Oracle Volunteers will offer more than 65 direct educational events and support conferences, summer computing camps and codefests for girls. Oracle estimates these programs will reach more than 55,000 students across the world, inspiring them to explore and pursue opportunities in STEM fields.

The Oracle Education Foundation and Oracle Volunteers will teach girls coding, electrical engineering and project management through four immersive girls-only workshops. Oracle plans to expand the work of its Oracle Academy program in Egypt by making an additional investment of nearly $1 million in resources and services over the next four years, as part of a new partnership with Egypts Ministry of Education. Oracle and the education ministry aim to expand computer science education for girls in nine newly developed STEM schools. These schools, also supported by USAID, will provide three years of paid secondary education for each girl.

AOL is launching a Let Girls Build Challenge, powered by Citizen AOL and AOLs #builtbygirls platform. This initiative will encourage young women to use the power of technology to conceptualize tech-enabled solutions to the problems facing the 62 million girls without access to education.

Through the Let Girls Build Challenge, AOL and Let Girls Learn will provide the resources, funding and mentorship needed to empower the leaders of tomorrow and help open the doors to education on a global scale.

For more information on Oracles efforts, visit oracle.com or email [email protected].

For more information on AOLs challenge, visit builtbygirls.com/letgirlsbuild or email [email protected].
warren east rolls royce

Rolls Royce

Engineering giant Rolls-Royce has become the latest British company to warn employees about the danger of a Brexit, the BBC reports.

The company said in a letter to staff that if Britain left the European Union, it would "limit any company's ability to plan and budget for the future," and that the firm would lose out to American competition.

The aero-engineering manufacturer  which has 23,000 employees in the UK  joins telecoms giant BT in communicating directly with its workers to stress the dangers of a Leave vote in the June 23 referendum.

"We have taken the public position that as a company Rolls-Royce believes our customers, suppliers and employees benefit from the UK's membership of the European Union, and that it is in the company's interests to remain a member," says the letter

Rolls-Royce CEO Warren East told the BBC that a planned 65 million ($92 million) engine testing facility could be put in jeopardy if Britain voted to leave, and that it was "all about uncertainty and our position in Europe."

"We have a very interconnected operation around Europe," he said. "We're making investment decisions all the time about where to place various parts of our operation. And uncertainty created by Brexit puts a lot of those decisions on hold, and that pause is something that our US competitors don't have to cope with."

Rolls-Royce is a major player in Britain's European trade, accounting for 1/50th of all British exports, and says it supports about 200,000 jobs across the EU.

Referring to competition with American rivals like GE Aviation and Pratt & Whitney, East told the BBC that "it is like we are running a multi-lap race and with each lap we are giving the competitors a ten-yard head start."

The latest Brexit polls show that the Leave side has surged ahead this week, with a TNS online poll seven points ahead. YouGov and ICM polling show similar gaps. Chancellor George Osborne has suggested there will have to be significant public spending cuts to fill the 30 billion "black hole" if a Brexit goes ahead.

Story continues

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DON'T MISS: BREXIT: Osborne will raise income tax and cut NHS spending if we vote out
The Public Employees Retirement Board agreed to partially approve a request to release information about the benefits state retirees receive.

The board voted 4-3 last week to release the records of past employees who are receiving benefits, but not make public their names and not give out data on people who are paid by the system but did not work for the state, such as surviving spouses.

Board members Timm Twardoski, Maggie Peterson, Marty Tuttle and Pepper Valdez voted to release part of the information requested; Julie McKenna, Sheena Wilson and Mike McGinley voted no.

Lee Newspapers and the Independent Record had requested the information in March from the Montana Public Employee Retirement Administration, which administers the retirement plans for public employees, judges, highway patrol officers, sheriffs, game wardens, police, firefighters and volunteer firefighters for roughly 25,000 retirees or those who receive their benefits.

The papers requested the full name, employer, years of service credit, year of retirement and the gross monthly benefit amount for each retiree that received a benefit in January of 2016, 2015, 2014 and 2013.

Fulfilling its watchdog role, Lee Newspapers wants to be able to analyze the states retirement system to make sure that taxpayers are getting their moneys worth and that the state is fulfilling its responsibility to retirees equitably," said David McCumber, editor of the Montana Standard in Butte. "The information requested is clearly public under the law.

The board had sent out more than 25,000 letters telling recipients about the request and received about 170 calls and numerous emails in response. Of those, about eight calls were in favor of the release, six didn't care and the rest wanted the board to deny the request.

The board initially voted 6-1 not not release the records as requested. Board member Sheena Wilson was the only person to vote to release the records.

I am of the opinion the board simply cannot act in violation of what stands before us as law, Wilson said, referring to an Attorney Generals opinion, written by now Gov. Steve Bullock, which says the information being requested is public.

Wilson said when looking at the amount of money retirees are paid from the plan, its important to remember each employee is in a different situation -- some have put in their own money, some never had the opportunity to participate in Social Security, for example.

The numbers are simply that, numbers, she said. They don't tell the story of all of these retirees. ... I hope and urge the newspaper or whoever publishes this information, should that happen, to spend a little time telling that backstory of how that retirement system works for the thousands of Montanans relying on it.

Jerry Williams, executive director of the Montana Police Protective Association, said his organization wanted the board to deny the request.

He wants the Attorney Generals opinion to be challenged, all the way to the state Supreme Court if necessary.

He also believes elderly retirees or those who receive benefits could be the victim of fraud if the information is released.

The Montana Teachers Retirement System has also approved releasing part of the information requested, but wants to withhold names as well.
By Liz Hampton

HOUSTON, June 16 (Reuters) - U.S (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) . West Coast refiners have imported several cargoes of crude from Oman in recent weeks, marking the first arrivals of oil from the Arab country to the United States in nearly three years.

The imports of the medium sour crude blend started entering the United States in April, shortly after the price of crude from Oman became more competitive against other grades that typically feed West Coast refineries.

Roughly 2 million barrels of Omani crude were unloaded in April and May each, and in June nearly 1 million barrels have unloaded, mostly at Long Beach, California, according to Reuters Trade Flows data and sources.

Prior to this, the United States had not imported crude from Oman in nearly three years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, as pricing spreads between Middle Eastern crude and other global benchmarks did not make such imports economically viable.

The first cargo arrived in early April on a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) co-loaded with Kuwaiti crude, according to a source with access to bill of lading data, which details a shipper's cargo. Another VLCC discharged nearly 2 million barrels in May, and the tanker C. Freedom discharged roughly 870,000 in early June, according to trading sources and Reuters Trade Flows data.

Smaller parcels of Omani crude also discharged in Benicia, California, in April and May, the flows data shows.

The crude was transported from large ships in parcels to refiners including Valero Energy, Shell (LSE: RDSB.L - news) and BP , according to the flows data.

Tesoro Corp was also involved with the deals, sources said, but the company declined to comment.

Sources familiar with the matter said the cargoes were booked earlier this year when the arbitrage opened. From January to late March 2016, the Brent-Dubai Exchange of Futures Swap (EFS) (DUB-EFS-1M), which is among the indicators traders eye to detmerine arbitrage windows in and out of Asia, traded above $2.70 a barrel, its widest spread since July 2014.

Story continues

The wider spread makes grades from the Middle East more attractive than those priced on Brent.

It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) was not yet clear whether additional cargoes would be booked for this year, but one trading source noted that Alaskan North Slope (ANS) crude, which is almost exclusively fed to West Coast refiners, has been pressured lower to compete with global imports, such as shipments from Oman.

This week, August ANS (CL-ANSW) differentials fell to a $2.60 a barrel discount to CMA WTI, versus a 50 cent premium in April. (Reporting by Liz Hampton, additional reporting by Florence Tan in Singapore; Editing by David Gregorio)
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.
There has been a significant increase in the number of GP-led transactions reviewed by LPs over the past 12 months, according to a study by Capstone Partners focused on GP-led Secondaries.
YEREVAN, JUNE 15, ARMENPRESS. Despite the Electoral Code has already been adopted, the Government continues discussions with different political forces aimed at reaching a broader consensus, Minister-Chief of the Government Staff of Armenia Davit Harutyunyan said during a discussion. We believe the new Electoral Code was adopted by the National Assembly with a broad consensus, but on the other hand we believe that the broader the consensus is, the better will be, and that is why we continued the discussions, Armenpress reports Harutyunyan mentioning.

Davit Harutyunyan clarified that the suggested amendment is about including electronic fingerprint registration system into the Electoral Code. We will organize an electronic fingerprint pre-registration prior to the elections so that during the elections one can register without any documents, but by fingerprints. In order to be able to easily organize that pre-registration, we will do that with the precondition that the citizens will get a free of charge ID card after the pre-registration. The pre-registration will be over 20 days before the elections Harutyunyan said.

Referring to the demand of opposition of promulgating the voter lists, Harutyunyan noted that the newly adopted Elevtoral Code defines a mechanism which allows to get acquainted with the lists without breaching the Venice Commission principles.

The authorities also agree with the demand of the opposition of live broadcasting the entire electoral process. Harutyunyan clarified that the authorities are ready to include this proposal of the opposition in the Electoral Code. This means that cameras will be installed in all the polling stations of the republic. Harutyunyan concluding saying that in this case it is necessary to apply to international donor organizations jointly, since it is impossible to solve those issues without serious financial means.

The political forces and civil society representatives present at the discussion expressed satisfaction over the proposals, stating that the proposals can serve as firm basis for relaunching discussions over amendments in the Electoral Code.
YEREVAN, JUNE 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan received the participants of the 15th conference of young leaders organized by Blobal Bridges. The meeting was attended also by the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Germany to Armenia Matthias Kiesler, the chairman of Global Bridges Hans Albrecht and vice chairman Beate Lindemann.

As Armenpress was informed by the press service of Republic of Armenia Presidents Office, Serzh Sargsyan highlighted the fact that the participants of the conference got an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Armenian history to some extent and see the places of interest in Armenia and recommended them to visit Nagorno Karabakh in the future in case of possibility. I am informed that during your discussion you also touched upon Nagorno Karabakh conflict. I am convinced that visiting a country is the best way to form an opinion about a country, its people and leadership, since Azerbaijan spares no efforts to keep the Nagorno Karabakh theme closed, tries to prevent the entry of political or cultural figures of other countries to Artsakh so as to be able to conduct its propaganda easily, the Armenian President said.

The President of Armenia expressed readiness to answer the questions of the participants referring to both Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement phases and integration within the EAEU.

The President of the Republic wished success to the conference organized by the Global Bridges at the end of the meeting.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. Armenian National Assembly (NA) Speaker Galust Sahakyan received the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the Republic of Armenia Timur Urazaev on June 16.

As Armenpress was informed from the press service of the National Assembly, welcoming the newly appointed Ambassador, Galust Sahakyan congratulated him and wished him effective work, expressing hope that with his activity he will promote the further deepening of the political, economic and inter-parliamentary relations between the two countries. In the NA Speakers word, the contacts of the parliamentarians of the two countries, as well as the cooperation in different international parliamentary structures will boost the activation of the dialogue between the parliaments.

The Speaker of the National Assembly highlighted the positive progress existing in the economic relations, which can be used for the benefit of the two countries.

Galust Sahakyan assured that the Armenian National Assembly will cooperate with the Embassy of Kazakhstan and promote the implementation of the new programmes.

Thanking for the reception, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Kazakhstan to Armenia Timur Urazaev noted that he is glad to begin his diplomatic mission in Armenia. He also emphasized the further deepening of the inter-parliamentary relations and the development of cooperation in all spheres.

The interlocutors also attached importance to the close contacts between the Friendship Groups of the parliaments of the two countries.
There have been many news articles lately on Montana gubernatorial millionaire candidate Greg Gianforte and his stand on stream access and the transfer of our public lands. The candidate in most cases is very elusive with his answers.

When Gianforte made an appearance at the Metals Bank in Butte some time ago, several people heard him say that public lands should be transferred to the states. A couple of my Republican friends who were there were surprised at his comments, and because they are believers and users of public lands, they are not going to vote for him.

In another recent news story, Gianforte was accused of being against stream access along the Gallatin River on a purchased easement along his property. This issue was glazed over by an apparent mistake in the wording of the easement. In my opinion, this sounds similar to our 13-year court battle with billionaire James Cox Kennedy and the Ruby River. Kennedy also gave $100,000 to elect Justice Laurie McKinnon to the Montana Supreme Court.

If Dirk Sandefur loses his bid for Montana Supreme Court justice seat No. 3, his opponent, Kristen Juras, would win. She is not for stream access in my opinion.

Gianfortes latest remarks about the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks shows his lack of understanding of the years and years of work that volunteers, organizations and recreational groups have put in, working with landowners and the Legislature to solve wildlife issues. He also doesnt realize the effect wildlife harboring has on adjacent landowners. Hes similar to some folks on the right who would like to totally defund the department and terminate its employees.

Gianforte seems to be riding the coattails of a dysfunctional Congress, which has steadily defunded not only wildlife agencies, but the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The BLM and Forest Service budgets have been cut 10 percent per year for the next three years -- so we are losing our public lands with each passing year -- even though surveys show over 70 percent of the taxpayers are not in favor of losing any public lands.

As the public lands disappear, our stream access opportunities will soon follow. Extreme wealth by a few individuals seems to be dictating the future of our public lands and waters in Montana.

Montana has been very fortunate with Gov. Steve Bullock as our governor. His political service has proven his strong commitment to retaining stream access and the public ownership of our fish and wildlife and public lands. He has never wavered on these issues.

Big money is endangering our heritage and way of life in Montana -- so voters, beware.

Tony Schoonen of Butte is president of the Montana Coalition for Stream Access.
Modified On Jun 28, 2016 01:48 PM By Nabeel

The world has a few exclusive cars which make you stand out in a country, let alone in a crowd. But, when it boils down to Dubai, the situation changes and we take a huge leap from logic and enter a world of bizarre creations. In an attempt to do the same, a Dubai-based company called Z Tyres have made a special tyre which is decorated with 24-carat gold and specially-selected diamonds. Crazier than the idea of this tyre is the thought of the chap who purchased them for a sum of about four crore rupees ($600,000). This deal has landed up the set of tyres in the Guinness Book of World Records. For that amount of money, one can get their hands on the Lamborghini Aventador or the Ferrari 488.

This special tyre was decorated by an Italian artisan jeweller. Moreover, the gold leafing on the tyre is done by the same craftsmen who have worked on the new presidential palace in Abu Dhabi. A statement from the company read, With the special set of four tyres recently sold for $600,000, Guinness World Records has independently valued and duly recognised them as the World's Most Expensive Set of Car Tyres.

The best part of this story is that Z Tyres will donate all the profits of this deal to the Zenises Foundation, which works for improving access to education around the globe. Zenises CEO, Harjeev Kandhari said,Weve always treasured the outstanding skills and dedication involved in developing our tyre range so we thought what better way to celebrate this achievement than with a record-breaking special set of tyres especially commissioned for a unique buyer. In keeping with the spirit of the holy month of Ramadan, Z Tyres will donate all profits from the $600,000 sale to the Zenises Foundation which focuses on improving access to education across the world.

The fate of this tyre is still unknown as it could end up being an ornament in someone's exotic collection or could actually taste tarmac. Whatever it might be, the record is set and we don't think it will be broken anytime soon.

Also Read: Petrol And Diesel Prices -- On A Constant Rise
On 9/11, America was attacked by faceless radical Islamic terrorists, or rather cowards.

These cowards hijacked four planes and took innocent human beings hostage. Then those planes were crashed into the World Trade Center, taking down both towers. A third plane hit the Pentagon. The fourth planes passengers overpowered the hijackers, forcing the plane to go down and crash into a farm field in Pennsylvania. That plane was headed for the White House. Three thousand people died on 9/11.

Being as we were so vulnerable at the time, why didnt the terrorists just ask for the keys to the buildings? Why did they waste four good planes?

Today, Obama and the Democrats would just invite these faceless cowards to dinner and then hand them keys to any building that they want. All the Republicans would do is grumble and moan a little about it. Then do nothing to stop it from happening. Because Republicans are cowards.

See, when it comes to Democrats and Republicans I think of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels and the movie "Dumb and Dumber." Because dumb and dumber is who the Democrats and Republicans are.

This letter was written by a conservative.

Joe Morgan

Helena
Matt Maguy, partner in James & Matthew, Boston, a digital advertising agency specializing in CUs, suggests outsourcing lower-level creative and media placement. The less immersed you need to be in a particular role to make the right decision, the more you can outsource that function, says Maguy.

With the explosion of digital marketing, he also sees credit unions trailing their competitors in digital and video production capabilities which can lead to outsourcing opportunities. Start learning about video production, social media, and how these mediums can impact your credit union, even your own professional growth. Outsource when needed, he advises.

So much (financial marketing) looks the same, adds Jim Pond, another partner in James & Matthew. Its hard to track, and many institutions dont incorporate enough analytics into their initial development of creative and subsequent tracking process.

In-house marketers should understand marketing data and have the expertise to analyze spreadsheets, he says.

Pond has worked amidst a range of marketing team hierarchies and believes there is no right structure for successful execution. Having a group of open-minded individuals that parallels the marketing world and functions as an ad agency is most efficient, he says.
The Guardian reports:

David Cameron has stood aside from active campaigning in order to make way for a push by Labour , as the partys MPs admit that the response on the doorstep in its heartlands suggests leave campaigners warnings about immigration are making significant inroads.

Speaking at an event in central London, Corbyn will issue an appeal to the whole labour movement and Labour supporters across Britain to support a remain vote in next weeks referendum. The leaders of 11 trade unions are expected to join Corbyn, including Len McCluskey from Unite, Tim Roache from GMB, and Dave Prentis from Unison. There are fears that voters do not realise that the vast majority of Labour MPs support staying in the EU.

The planned intervention comes after a pair of Guardian/ICM polls suggested that support for leaving the EU is strengthening, with phone and online surveysshowing a six-point lead for Brexit. Leave now enjoys a 53%-47% advantage once dont knows are excluded, according to research conducted over the weekend, compared with a 52%-48% split reported by ICM a fortnight ago.

In other polling today, a YouGov poll for the Times puts leave on 49% and remain on 39%, while an ORB poll for the Telegraph found that among those certain to vote, support for the Brexit campaign is on 49%, compared with 48% for remain.
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, PA. (June 15, 2016) (Press Release) Attorneys Steven Lupin, Lisa Shearman, and Joseph Catuzzi of the Montgomery County law firm Hamburg, Rubin, Mullin, Maxwell & Lupin secured a significant legal victory for Kathryn V. Ward (Ginny), the surviving spouse of a same-sex relationship. Following an evidentiary hearing to determine if the requirements of common law marriage were satisfied, Judge Lois E. Murphy of the Montgomery County Orphans Court issued an Order that, Kathryn V. Ward and Elaine M. Brim entered into a valid and enforceable marriage under the common laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania . . . and Kathryn V. Ward, as surviving spouse is entitled to all the spousal rights and benefits that are afforded to legally married individuals under the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Elaine passed away four months after same-sex marriage became legal in Pennsylvania following the Whitewood v. Wolf decision. Due to the advanced stage of her cancer, Elaine and Ginny were incapable of reaping the legal benefits of that historic case by obtaining a marriage license in Pennsylvania. Lacking such license, the Department of Veterans Affairs denied Ginnys application for Elaines benefits. This also precluded Ginny from applying for her Social Security benefits.Hamburg, Rubin, Mullin, Maxwell & Lupin filed a Petition for Declaratory Judgment and supporting Brief with over 150 pages of supporting documentation showing that the relationship indisputably constituted a marriage dating back to October 3, 1990. Since common law marriage in Pennsylvania was eliminated in 2005, evidence was presented to surpass this legal hurdle. While the accompanying legal argument was grounded in the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the United States Constitution, the heart of the argument was based in fairness. The attorneys argued that it would be illogical and unjust to ignore certain social realities that uniquely affected the relationship.Specifically, the attorneys argued that the couples life together demonstrated that marriage is not a piece of paper, but rather a commitment and a way of life. In light of the substantial evidence which established that the couple exchanged vows, co-mingled all of their assets, took financial and legal advice to protect their relationship, and were perceived by family and friends as being married, Judge Murphy declared their common law marriage as valid and enforceable and issued an Order affording Ginny all the rights and benefit of a spouse.Upon delivery of the Judges opinion, Ginny was elated, stating, I didnt think that I would see it in my lifetime - I always hoped, and today my hopes were realized. I wish that Elaine had been here to share this moment, but she is always with me in spirit. Steve Lupin, the managing partner of Hamburg, Rubin, Mullin, Maxwell & Lupin, said, We believe that this is a groundbreaking case. Ginny and our firm hope that, in the future, this decision will help others similarly situated.Hamburg, Rubin, Mullin, Maxwell & Lupin is one of the leading law firms in Eastern Pennsylvania providing legal counsel to businesses, municipalities and individuals in such areas as business law, litigation, real estate matters, municipal law, trusts and estates, family law, criminal law and personal injury matters. The firms singular focus is on achieving the best possible result for its clients. For more information, please go to www.hrmml.com.
The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed House Resolution 343 on June 13, which expresses concern regarding persistent and credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience in the People's Republic of China, including from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups, including Christians, Tibetans and Uighurs.

The resolution further states that it calls on the regime to immediately end the 17-year persecution of Falun Gong, and release all Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience. It calls for a credible, transparent and independent investigation into the Chinas organ transplantation system.

Falun Gong is an ancient Chinese self improvement practice that follows the principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. It was banned by the Chinese regime in 1999 because of its popularity, and practitioners are arrested, tortured and sometimes killed for their belief. It is now practiced by over 100 million people throughout the world.

The resolution garnered strong bipartisan support with 185 co-sponsors from congressmen throughout the country. Thanks to Rep. Zinkes office for voting for this resolution.

Katherine Combes

Kalispell
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- About 69 air passengers almost lost their lives after their plane caught fire in India

- The plane was forced to make an emergency landing soon after taking off from Bengaluru airport

- Activities at the airport were put on hold for a while due to the emergency landing

Jet Airways airlines said on Wednesday, June 15 said its passenger plane, Flight 9W 2839 was bound for Mangalore from Bengaluru but returned to the airport minutes after it took off after smoke was detected in its cabin.

File photo: Plane engulfed by fire makes emergency landing just after take-off in India.

The airline's statement further stated that the 69 passengers and 4 crew members aboard its flight were safe.

Flight 9W 2839, with 65 passengers and four crew members aboard, took off from Bengaluru airport at 10 a.m. (local time) and returned at 10.20 a.m. (local time).

The precautionary evacuation of the passengers and crew was carried out immediately on landing. All 64 passengers and four crew members are safe, it said.

An Indian aviation official said Bengaluru airport was closed briefly for landing and take-off in the morning due to the emergency landing by the Jet Airways flight.

The official also said that a probe had been ordered into the incident.

Meanwhile, a ship searching for the wreckage of the missing EgyptAir jet has identified several main locations of the wreckage in the Mediterranean Sea.

READ ALSO: Ten years after plane crash, read what survivor is up to (photos)

Express UK reports that the Egyptian investigation committee confirmed the find as the search continues to find the black boxes, which could detail exactly what happened to the jet, before their signal runs out.

The deep ocean search vessel John Lethbridge identified the main locations of the wreckage and provided the first images of wreckage to investigators.

A search team on board the ship, contracted by the Egyptian government, will draw a map of the wreckage's distribution spots.

The committee said in a statement the ship "had identified several main locations of the wreckage, accordingly the first images of the wreckage were provided to the investigation committee."

Flight MS804 plunged into the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board after taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on route to Cairo on May 19.

Investigators are now examining photographs taken of the wreckage from the seabed.

It was not immediately known which parts of the plane had been found, nor whether the two black boxes were nearby.

Source: Legit.ng
Montanas top political regulator on Thursday found the embattled Cascade County Republican Central Committee violated state campaign finance law when it filed late reports and failed to disclose all of its expenditures.

A 14-page decision issued by Commissioner of Political Practices Jonathan Motl found the committee -- now embroiled in a trio of pre-primary lawsuits and campaign finance complaints -- neglected to report the cost of state fair campaign booths and advertisements it provided to some GOP candidates, as well as the value of tickets handed out to a statewide fundraising dinner.

The Montana legislature has declared the importance of transparency through electronic filing whereby campaign finance information and data is easily and promptly made available to the public, Motl wrote in the decision. There is no legitimate reason for the Central Committee to fail to file electronically when so many other candidates and committees have cooperated and complied with Montana law.

The first-term commissioner, appointed by Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, took no action on other allegations raised in separate March and May complaints against the committee, including charges that it made false statements on a campaign filing and, by apparently favoring some Great Falls-area Republican candidates over others, failed to function as a political committee under state law.

The committee has been locked in a much-publicized leadership dispute between hardline Republican statehouse hopefuls and a more moderate faction of office seekers, a feud that culminated in state Senate candidate J.C. Kantorowiczs widely-reported remark that a bullet might prevent his primary opponent from attending the Montana GOP delegate convention.

Kantorowicz lost by a wide margin in his June 7 primary fight against Rep. Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls.

Great Falls Rep. Wendy McKamey, one of those candidates the complaint alleged was opposed by the committee, also prevailed in her race against Rep. Randy Pinocci, R-Sun River.

Thursdays administrative ruling found the committee engaged in selective actions in supporting Cascade County Republicans, but that such actions were protected by the partys association interest -- or speech rights.

Motl has used similar reasoning to defend a so-called "loophole" that allows candidates to benefit from unlimited, potentially special interest-funded "personal services" provided by party committees.

He expects the committee will negotiate and pay a fine to settle the matter out of court.

Most rulings issued by Motl are resolved through a settlement, though his office has litigated a handful of high-profile campaign finance cases against a host of conservative politicians and dark money groups.

A Montana District Court judge on Friday is expected to settle the penalty phase of one such case against state Rep. Art Wittich, who could be removed from office after a jury in April determined he underpaid for campaign services.
- The Senate marks 2016 International day of the African child

- It is internationally recognised all over Africa and is marked annually

- The Senate urged the federal and state governments to ensure the implementation of the child rights act

African children

As the country celebrates the 2016 International Day of the African child, the Senate on Thursday, June 16, called on the federal government for budgetary allocation for programs that deal with children's nutrition and education in the relevant ministries.

This was disclosed in a motion titled conflict and crisis in Africa, protecting all children's rights. The motion was sponsored by Oluremi Tinubu representing Lagos Central senatorial district.

The Senate urged the federal government not to relent in their effort to key into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that provide a framework for government program to key into globally agreed development outcomes.

It also urged the federal and state governments to ensure the implementation of the UBE act and the domestication and implementation of the child rights act in stats that are yet to do so.

READ ALSO: Children's day: Senate directs committees to visit IDP camps

The Senate also congratulates the Children of Africa and Nigeria in particular on the celebration of the 2016 international day of the African child.

Senate president, Bukola Saraki in his contribution urged the lawmakers to play their role in the support of the children.

"I think this is a straight forward motion. I congratulate the children of Africa and the children in Nigeria.

"We must find ways to work with the states in the child rights act. We must do our bst to protect our children to give them a great future and protect them at all time," he said.

Thirty million of the world's 57 million children who are out of school are in Sub-Saharan Africa and 10 million of them are in Nigeria which happens to be the highest in Africa.

READ ALSO: Senate discovers shorfall of N5 billion in education ministry

One in six children born in Sub-Saharan Africa do not live to their fifth birthday . Though a campaign to end child marriage across Africa was launched in May 2014 by the African Union (AU).

However, attempts have also been made to stop harmful practices such as female genital mutilation.

Source: Legit.ng
MISSOULA -- Anita Green had plenty of other things on her mind when she woke up Sunday morning.

In the exhausting rush of her historic Saturday in Helena, when the 25-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter from Missoula was elected an at-large delegate to next month's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Green received a text message on her cellphone. It said something terrible had happened in Florida.

As she learned more about the mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando, my heart just sank, Green said this week.

Like most of America and the world, she struggled to understand why someone like Omar Mateen, who became the 50th victim after hed gunned down 49, could do something so heinous, she said.

But Green also felt confused. The day before she had become Montanas first openly transgender national delegate, elected in part on an emotional one-minute speech in which she invoked Sanders support of gay rights dating back to 1983, when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

It seemed as though America was making a lot of progress within the queer community, Green said. When this happened in Florida it felt like we took one step forward and two steps back.

In her undergraduate years Green served on the University of Montana student senate, and last year she made an unsuccessful bid for a Ward 2 seat on the Missoula City Council. Shell speak this weekend at the 2016 Big Sky Pride celebration in Great Falls.

Im not going to lie. There is a little bit of fear, she said. But its far more important to be strong and to be who you are in the face of fear.

Its that courage and passion that first struck Teresa Jacobs, a longtime Missoula activist wholl be going to the Philadelphia convention as a Western Montana delegate for Sanders.

Like many of the 21 pledged Democratic delegates for Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Jacobs and Green hadnt met until the campaign began. They were selected as state delegates last Thursday at the Missoula County Democrats meeting in Hellgate High School.

I was impressed by Anita not because of her transgender status but because of who she is, Jacobs said. I could see that shes committed and shes dynamic and articulate, and thats what we need on our team.

Anita is not a single-issue voter, agreed Debbie Orozco of Arlee, another Sanders western Montana delegate. One of the major issues shes worked on in the Bernie campaign is public lands.

There are so many issues, Green said. I feel as though Bernie is creating a revolution, and he is really going to make a significant difference in politics. Hillary Clinton has flip-flopped on many issues, and Im afraid that if she does get elected president she will flip-flop again on her stance on the Keystone pipeline.

I think that would be devastating for Americas public lands, and I believe it is incredibly important to preserve and conserve our public lands. I believe that Bernie Sanders will do that.

***

Shes blazing a new trail for Montana, but Green wont be the only openly transgender delegate in Philadelphia July 25-28. News outlets report that Iowa and Florida will send their first ones, and if recent conventions are indications therell be several others.

According to the website transunitedforobama.org in 2012, Jane Fee of Minnesota was the first national delegate to represent the transgender community at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Georgia, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania sent people who identify as transgender in their delegations in 2004, and seven states, including Arizona and Oregon in the West, had such delegates in 2008, when gender identity was included in the Democratic platform in Denver.

In 2012, one superdelegate  Barbra Casbar Siperstein of New Jersey  and 13 pledged delegates identifying as female or male transgenders went to the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

***

Greens election speaks to the diversity in the Montana Democratic party, said Nancy Keenan, the state partys executive director.

Democratic National Committee rules call for equal representation of men and women at the convention. Representatives at the state convention each voted for up to two men and two women. The national committee also instructs state parties to adopt and implement programs to achieve full participation of members of the LGBT community, people with disabilities and youth.

Its basically an affirmative action outreach and inclusion plan, Keenan said. When we are choosing our delegates, thats something thats very much part of the conversation that we are inclusive of the variety of the people who live in the state. We talk about that at the opening of the convention.

Some from under-represented communities, be they disabled, gay, Native American or transgender, self-identify in one-minute speeches, as Green did on Saturday, Keenan said.

Green delivered a similar address in Missoula last Thursday, talking about Sanders proactive stance on gay rights that began before she was born. The one in Helena didnt go as smoothly.

I broke down crying, Green admitted.

She was embarrassed, but Jacobs said her passion was unmistakable. So is her resolve.

Montanas Sanders delegates bristle at news accounts that call Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. They say their candidate has the better chance of defeating Donald Trump in the November election.

Sanders did not concede when the primary season wrapped up Tuesday in Washington, D.C., and his backers say the 714 superdelegate votes can still change their minds to swing the nomination in his favor at the July 25-28. Montana has six superdelegates  those who decide for themselves how they cast their vote rather than being pledged to one candidate. Jean Lemire Dahlman, a national committeewoman and superdelegate from Forsyth, has said shell back Sanders, but Jorge Quintana of Helena, party chairman Jim Larson of Billings and vice party chairwoman Jacquie Helt of Helena have not tipped their hands. Neither has Gov. Steve Bullock or U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.

Were really concerned that the superdelegates take into account the 16 1/2 million independents that didnt even get to vote in the primaries because of closed primaries in 14 states, Jacobs said. Thats why its important were talking about who we are, and what we represent and whos out there thats going to be voting in the general election. Its different than the primary.

For Green, it's also a different landscape after the shootings in Orlando.

I dont want people to be afraid of who they are because of this tragedy that took place, she said. Im speaking up now because I want to remind people that its OK to be who you are. Dont let fear control you and drive you back into the closet. Be proud of who you are."
- New militant group declares readiness to fight for economic balance

- Label the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, (NPDC) and ND Western as enemies of the people

- Extends invitation to people within host community to join its ranks

Niger Delta militants have carried out wave of attacks on oil and gas installations in the Niger Delta region.

There is tension in Delta state following a threat from a new militant group, the Utorogun Liberation Movement (ULM) to destroy the Utorogun gas plant in Ughelli which supplies gas to Egbin Power Station, Lagos, and other facilities under Oil Mining Lease, OML 34 in Ughelli south local government area of the state.

READ ALSO: Government wants to induce militants to fight others - Ijaw

Vanguard reports that the leader of the group Gen K Omoudu in an address to the host community in a statement on Thursday, June 16, said the ULM was working in collaboration with another group, the Outgas Force.

Omoudu said the awareness of things happening in the environment of the host community had necessitated agitation for economic balance.

"We have a common enemy, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC and ND Western who hate your progress and wish you died in poverty.

"They threaten our stability, disregard us. This area is the heart of hydrocarbon industries in Nigeria and other countries responsible for a huge chunk of the nations oil earnings. The question concerning how many barrels of oil and gas this our field produces remain unanswered, our hopes far from what we are witnessing, the group said.

The militants told the communities that if they failed to fight, they will face a precarious future.

READ ALSO: New militant group warns FG over pipeline vandalism

It also extended an invitation to people within the community who wanted to join its ranks.

"The door is widely open for anybody within this region to join the exercise, text your names and community to these numbers -08029936321, 08074237107. Do not call; you will receive text of days of meetings few days from now, the group stated.

Meanwhile the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) have launched another attack on an oil installation in Akwa Ibom state.

In the early morning of June 16, Thursday, the militants announced they have attacked the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) pipeline located in Oruk Anam local government area of the state.

This latest attack comes as the move to negotiate with militants in the Niger Delta region suffered a set back as Henry Ajumogobia rejected the position of negotiator.

Source: Legit.ng
NorthWestern Energy is asking Montana to pull the plug on solar projects, at least until the utility can get better terms from the state on ones it legally cant refuse.

The utility, which provides electricity to half of Montana, told Montanas Public Service Commission on June 9 that the mandated price it must pay to small commercial solar projects of 3 megawatts or less is too high and hurting consumers. The projects, known as qualifying facilities, or QFs have been popping up like dandelions because Montanas guaranteed rate is too generous, according to the utility.

For each 3 megawatt project, the differential between the QF rate and the rate we propose is about $5 million per solar contract, said John Alke, NorthWestern Attorney. The contracts run 25 years.

The utility wants the current rate cut in half and the contracts shortened, but until that happens, it wants out of its decades old obligation for accept solar QFs.

The Montana Consumer Council, which represents ratepayers in regulated utility cases, sided with NorthWestern, arguing the price promised to solar farms was more than utility customers should pay.

At issue is a 48-year-old federal law promoting alternative energy projects. The Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, or PURPA, requires utilities to buy power from QFs, under price and contract terms set by state governments. Montanas rate is $66 per megawatt hour, coincidently similar to the price NorthWestern gets for its own hydroelectric power.

The solar projects are small, each capable of powering about 540 homes at most, but there have been several proposed, more than 80 on the current docket, NorthWestern said, with many more casual inquiries, according to testimony.

However Jenny Harbine, of Vote Solar, told the PSC there really wasnt a crush of solar projects as the utility suggested. Few of the applications would actually become solar farms.

NorthWestern offers no support for its apparent belief that all or most of the current interconnection request will make it through the end of the process, Harbine said.

Most wont.

Suspending PURPA for NorthWestern both violates the mandate and harms solar companies invested in Montana projects, Harbine said. The projects arent cheap.

North Carolina-based FLS Energy told the PSC it would spend roughly $100 million developing its 14 Montana projects during the next 18 months.

The PSC is likely to establish a new price and contract terms for solar in the next six months, Harbine said, during which time it should have to use the current rate.

But NorthWestern isnt just shutting down solar projects, Alke said. The company has nine solar farms under contract now, mostly with Cypress Creek Renewables, of California. It also has agreed to terms with FLS Energy, for its projects not yet under contract. The locations for the solar farms, each roughly 40 acres in size, are scattered across Montana from Hardin to Missoula.

A third company, Pacific Northwest Solar, of Oregon, has 21 projects to which NorthWestern will accept, Alke said. Combined, the 44 solar projects account for 135 megawatts, more energy than offered by the original phase of Judith Gap Wind Farm.

The Public Service Commission will meet Thursday to decide whether to block the PURPA requirement. If it doesnt, NorthWestern will have to keep adding solar projects.
This elections consistent comedy candidate is Liberal hopeful Chris Jermyn, a former Young Liberal heavy hitter who is gunning for the seat of McEwen.

Without putting too fine a point on it, its safe to say that the bloke has done well. The seat was considered a marginal before a series of Jermynesque blunders which may confirm it as a Labor hold until the heat death of the universe. First, he failed spectacularly in trying to ambush Bill Shorten at a presser. Then it was revealed he was the mastermind behind a multi-million dollar online photography competition which crashed and burned like the Hindenberg.

Now, The Sydney Morning Herald has revealed that he may have broken electoral laws by claiming he lived in the electorate of McEwen in 2013 when he actually lived in Melbourne, in the electorate of Melbourne Ports. The property he claimed to live in as per the electoral roll was an empty block of land, and remains so.

According to the SMH, ASIC documents also show Mr Jermyns father, businessman Peter Jermyn, sold the 99-acre property on July 26, 2013, about six weeks before the federal election.

How did the sleuths at the SMH work out where he lived? Well, Jermyn at some point was a fan of expressing his displeasure for the myriad failings of his local food outlets via Facebook.





In 2013, Jermyn was allegedly living out in McEwen. So whys he complaining about a midnight wagyu beef pizza in Prahran? Thats what got the regular Sherlocks over at Fairfax thinking.

The SMH also referenced his post on the wall of a restaurant called Focaccia as evidence, but it looks like they fell short here  the restaurant is actually in the Philippines. That said, its an extremely funny comment so you should read it anyway:

Lying or making false statements on the electoral roll is a criminal offence with a maximum penalty of 12 months in prison. Let this be a lesson to you all: never post.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: Facebook.
The alarming upward trend in fatalities in organized violence, witnessed over the last few years, was broken in 2015. This is evident from new data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), Uppsala University. The number of armed conflicts involving states continued to increase, however, going from 41 in 2014 to as many as 50 in 2015.

Since 2011, peace researchers have witnessed a worrying increase in fatality numbers in organized violence. The highest number since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda was reported for 2014, with more than 130,000 people killed in the three categories of organized violence that the UCDP registers: armed conflict involving a state, conflicts between non-state actors, and one-sided violence against civilians. This trend appears to have been broken in 2015, with the number of fatalities decreasing to less than 118,000. In the last few years, the trend has by and large been driven by the civil war in Syria.

'The fact that we don't see a continued increase is of course encouraging project manager at the UCDP. However, we need to remember that the level of violence remained high and that 2015 was one of the three most violent years since 1989', says Therese Pettersson project manager at the UCDP.

Although the number of fatalities decreased, the number of conflicts continued to increase, both those involving a state and those between non-state actors. The non-state category witnessed an increase from 61 conflicts in 2014, to 70 in 2015; the highest number during the entire 1989-2015 period. Also conflicts involving a state witnessed a dramatic development, with the number increasing from 41 in 2014 to 50 in 2015.

'The increase is mainly due to developments relating to the expansion of the Islamic State (IS) to a growing number of countries', says Lotta Themner, project manager at the UCDP.

In 2014 the group was active in conflicts against three different states, a number that increased to as many as 12 in 2015. This is a result of new IS wings being created around the world, for example in Afghanistan and Russia, as well as entire groups pledging allegiance to IS and being integrated into the latter, which is what happened in Nigeria and Egypt. IS was also active in a large number of conflicts against other rebel groups during the year, mainly in Syria.

'IS constitutes a serious threat against people in many parts of the world. However, compared to other rebel groups in modern history IS does not come across as an especially successful group, at least not yet. There are many examples of armed groups that have managed to win wars or gained important concessions in peace agreements, which IS has not yet done. We also need to understand that an exaggerated focus on IS and its allies risks drawing attention from other very serious situations that require international action', says Erik Melander, UCDP Director.
Scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU) have developed a new method of predicting disease progression in gliobastoma patients who have undergone standard treatment. Their findings, published in the journal Oncotarget, show that four miRNAs may hold the vital clue. An application for the corresponding patent has already been filed.

Roughly one fifth of all brain tumors diagnosed by doctors are gliobastomas. This aggressive and most common type of brain tumor continues to present doctors with huge challenges. However, molecular markers could help them to make the right treatment decision. A team of researchers led by Dr. Kristian Unger, Deputy Head of the Radiation Cytogenetics Research Unit (headed by Prof. Dr. Horst Zitzelsberger) at the Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen, and Prof. Dr. Claus Belka, Director of the Clinic and Policlinic for Radiotherapy and Radiation Oncology at the University of Munich's Grosshadern Hospital (member of the DKTK cancer research consortium), has now succeeded in identifying specific miRNAs that could serve as biomarkers for disease progression.

miRNAs indicate a poor prognosis

In collaboration with the Institute of Neurology (Edinger Institute) at the University Hospital Frankfurt, researchers examined the composition of miRNAs in samples from 36 patients from whom tumor material had been removed during treatment, and whose subsequent course of treatment had been well documented. "We repeatedly detected four miRNAs in tumors that had a particularly poor prognosis," explains PD Dr. Karim-Maximilian Niyazi, senior physician at Grosshadern, and first author of the study. Based on their data, the scientists calculated a risk score to distinguish two patient groups who were undergoing standard treatment and whose life expectancy varied by about five months. In order to corroborate their findings, they used data obtained from a further 58 independent samples. Here, too, they found that the composition of the miRNAs altered, the worse the prospects of a successful treatment outcome were.

Patent already applied for

The scientists are confident that their observations will have more than mere theoretical implications. For this reason, they have already filed an application for the corresponding patent. "To date only few prognostic and predictive factors for glioblastoma have been identified," says research team leader Unger. "Our method could be used to identify candidates for alternative or intensified treatment options, as it is highly unlikely that patients with a high risk score would benefit from standard therapy." Since tumor tissue would generally be removed immediately, a corresponding analysis would be relatively easy to conduct and would not require any additional time or expense, the researchers note.

Whether the miRNAs have a malignant function in the cancer cells themselves or are merely an indirect marker remains to be clarified. In initial studies, however, the scientists have shown that miRNAs could possibly even play a role in various processes of tumor development.
A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that older people struggle to remember important details because their brains can't resist the irrelevant "stuff" they soak up subconsciously. As a result, they tend to be less confident in their memories.

Researchers looked at brain activity from EEG sensors and saw that older participants wandered into a brief "mental time travel" when trying to recall details. This journey into their subconscious veered them into a cluttered space that was filled with both relevant and irrelevant information. This clutter led to less confidence, even when their recollections were correct. Cluttering of the brain is one reason older people are more susceptible to manipulation, the researchers say. The study appears online in the journal Neuropsychologia.

Researchers showed older adults (60 years and up) and college students a series of pictures of everyday objects while EEG sensors were connected to their heads. Each photo was accompanied by a color and scene (e.g., living room). Participants were told to focus on one and ignore the other. An hour later, they were asked if the object was new or old, and if it matched the color and the scene.

Neither age group was very good at recalling what they were told to ignore. Both did well remembering the object and what they were supposed to focus on.

"But when we asked if they were sure, older people backed off their answers a bit. They weren't as sure," said Audrey Duarte, the associate professor of psychology who led the Georgia Tech study.

She and the researchers noticed differences in brain activity between the young and old. Older adults' brains spent more time and effort trying to reconstruct their memories.

"While trying to remember, their brains would spend more time going back in time in an attempt to piece together what was previously seen," she said. "But not just what they were focused on -- some of what they were told to ignore got stuck in their minds."

Duarte uses a cocktail party as an example. Two older people are talking to each other. And even though they're only concentrating on the conversation, their brains absorb the other noise in the room.

"When it's time to remember the conversation, they may struggle a bit to recall some details. That's because their brains are also trying to decipher the other noises," she said. "What music was playing? What was the couple next to them saying? That extra stuff shouldn't be in their memories at all, but it is. And it negatively impacts their ability to clearly remember the conversation."

Younger people were quicker to recall details and used less brain power. The irrelevant information was never stored in the first place, which kept their memories relatively clutter-free. And that's why they were more confident than the older participants when remembering relevant details.

A lack of confidence, Duarte said, can lead to manipulation.

"If someone tells you that you should remember it one way, you can be more easily persuaded if you lack confidence," she said. "This memory clutter that's causing low confidence could be a reason why older adults are often victims of financial scams, which typically occur when someone tries to trick them about prior conversations that didn't take place at all."
It was a dark and stormy night in the laboratory, and jagged bolts of lightning lit the sky as Dr. Kaplan and his assistant Bianca stitched the pieces of the lifeless creature back together.

Actually, it was a sunny day on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, but recent sea turtle research by Assistant Professor David Kaplan of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and graduate student Bianca Santos easily brings to mind the classic tale of Dr. Frankenstein and his makeshift monster.

Santos, a master's student in William & Mary's School of Marine Science at VIMS, is working with Kaplan to reduce sea turtle mortality by trying to pinpoint where the hundreds of dead loggerhead sea turtles that wash up on Chesapeake Bay beaches each summer may have succumbed. With that knowledge, researchers could hone in on likely causes of sea-turtle death, while wildlife authorities could map out safe zones for these imperiled marine reptiles. One of Kaplan's research specialties is the spatial management of marine ecosystems.

The pair's approach to the problem is ingenious if somewhat morbid: obtain dead sea turtles (from the Virginia Aquarium's Stranding Response Program), replace the turtles' inner organs with buoyant Styrofoam, "sew" their shells back together with zip ties, and then attach GPS units to track the path of the "Frankenturtles" as winds and currents disperse them from a mid-Bay release site.

"It might seem sort of gross, but it's a good way to reuse a dead turtle that would otherwise be buried," says Kaplan. "And hopefully, the deployment of our two Frankenturtles will ultimately help lower the number of turtle deaths in the future."

Santos explains that the team is actually releasing three different types of drifters: the two Frankenturtles, two wooden-Styrofoam turtle models, and a pair of bucket drifters. By observing how the wind differentially affects the highly buoyant, sail-like wooden models; the partly emergent Frankenturtles; and the mostly submerged buckets, the researchers hope to better understand how a wind-driven carcass might deviate from the more predictable current patterns traced by the Bay's surface waters. Sea turtles initially sink after dying, but quickly float back to the surface buoyed by gases from decomposing tissues.

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"Our plan is to deploy the drifters on several different occasions--under a variety of wind and wave conditions--and in locations where mortality events could occur during the spring peak in strandings," says Santos. "We'll then use the separation rate between our bucket drifters, which closely track water movement, and our turtle carcasses to determine the amount of wind forcing to apply to simulated carcasses in our computer model."

They initiated their field trials on June 13th, deploying the drifters in open Bay waters about halfway between the mouth of the York River and Cape Charles on Virginia's bayside Eastern Shore. One Frankenturtle comprises the remains of a 15-20 year old loggerhead killed by a boat strike. The other is a younger turtle whose mode of death remains a mystery despite a necropsy. Deploying these creatures wasn't an easy job: in addition to the unforgettable and growing aroma of thawing turtle, the creatures are both heavy and unwieldy. The larger Frankenturtle weighs in at 150 pounds, the smaller at 70 pounds.

Once data from the Frankenturtle trials have allowed the researchers to properly configure their "turtle carcass drift model," they'll feed the model with historical records of stranding locations provided by the Virginia Aquarium's Stranding Response Team. The team is the Commonwealth's official entity for responding to reports of dead and injured sea turtles and other marine life in Bay and nearby coastal waters.

"If our model can accurately simulate how winds and currents act on a dead sea turtle, we should be able to backtrack from a stranding site to the place where the turtle likely died," says Santos. "By knowing the 'where,'" she adds, "we can better look at the 'why.'"

The researchers plan to track the Frankenturtles and other drifters released on June 13th for 3-4 days before retrieving the GPS units for future use. Earlier experiments by Santos show that's about how long dead turtles remain intact before they are dismembered and consumed by waves, birds, crabs, and fish. The public can view the motion of the drifters in real-time via the VIMS website at http://www.vims.edu/frankenturtle. In the unlikely event that someone encounters a drifter in Bay waters, they should simply leave it be. A drifter encountered on shore should be reported to VIMS at 804-684-7986.

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Mortality of loggerhead turtles in Chesapeake Bay is of continuing concern. "Strandings peaked in the early 2000s at around 200-400 per year," says Kaplan. "Modifications to the pound net fishery likely reduced the number to the current 100-300 per year, and it is these we're trying to understand." He adds that scientists don't really don't have a good idea what percentage of dead turtles these strandings represent. "The actual number could be much higher," Kaplan says.

Evidence that strandings may represent only a small percentage of actual deaths comes from Santos' decay experiments as well as the low odds of finding every dead turtle. "Bianca's decay study shows that turtles remain intact for only 3-5 days after death, decreasing the likelihood that they might last long enough to wash up on a beach," says Kaplan. "And of those that do wash ashore, many probably strand in remote or marshy areas where they are unlikely to be observed and reported by a beachgoer."

Potential sources of mortality in the Bay include accidental capture in fishing gear, strikes by boat propellers, entanglement in plastic trash, and sudden drops in temperature.

Although loggerheads are the most common sea turtles in the Chesapeake, with 5,000-10,000 entering Bay waters each summer to feed, they are listed as "threatened" in U.S. waters under the Endangered Species Act due to the perils they face across their range, including loss of nesting habitat, disorientation of hatchlings by beachfront lighting, nest predation, and incidental capture in dredges and coastal fisheries. Measures to protect against these threats are enforced by NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sea turtle research in the Kaplan lab is supported by grants from the Dominion Foundation, Virginia Sea Grant, and Green Fee Funding from William & Mary.
In recent years, mackerel have appeared in Greenland waters, and in their wake new and economically important fisheries have emerged.The first mackerel were caught in Greenland in 2011. And already three years later, in 2014, mackerel fishing had grown to make up entire 23 per cent of the Greenlandic export earnings (78,000 tonnes of mackerel).

"The mackerel's arrival in Greenland is the most extreme example of how climate change can impact the economy of an entire nation," says Senior Researcher Teunis Jansen, DTU Aqua and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.

Together with colleagues from DTU Aqua and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, Teunis Jansen is behind the first study of the mackerel's arrival and spread in Greenland waters. The results have just been published in the recognized journal Ecological applications.

"We have mapped the occurrence of mackerel in Greenland's economic zone on the east coast from the Denmark Strait and to the south to Cape Farewell. And we more or less found mackerel everywhere in mid-summer. We found the largest quantities in warmer waters at a temperature of more than 8.5 degrees Celsius," says Senior Researcher Teunis Jansen.

And it is precisely the warm surface water which is an important key to understanding the mackerel's distribution in Greenlandic waters, assesses Teunis Jansen, based on the knowledge gathered. For in the same period, record-high temperatures have been measured in the ocean currents from the mackerel's spawning grounds west of the British Isles and toward the north-east of Iceland and Greenland.

When mackerel have spawned in the spring, they normally follow the Norwegian Current toward the north-east where they feed during the summer. But from around 2007, large quantities of mackerel suddenly appeared around Iceland in the Irminger Current -- the north-western branch of the Gulf Stream. Year by year they extended their migrations in this new direction, and in 2011 they were caught in Greenland for the first time.

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"One explanation for this is that where they used to turn right to follow the Norwegian Current, they have also kept left and followed the Irminger Current to the north-west. In recent years, record-high temperatures have been measured in the Irminger Current, and thus the mackerel have been able to use it as a 'motorway' while the population has grown and food availability has decreased in the east, so it has been attractive for them to find new feeding grounds," explains Teunis Jansen, DTU Aqua.

Mackerel-friendly temperatures

Whether a few mackerel have been in Greenland in periods before 2011 is uncertain because these East Greenland regions are deserted without much summer fishing.

"Our results suggest that the local conditions have been acceptable for short periods of time, but compared to the present situation and the expected future scenarios, it has been insignificant. The areas with temperatures that are suitable for mackerel have doubled in the Greenlandic zone in recent years, and our forecasts indicate that they will expand and stretch for longer periods," assesses Teunis Jansen.

However, he stresses that the catches in the fishing industry in 2015 were, in fact, less than in 2014 when the study was carried out:

"Perhaps because the spring of 2015 was a little colder and because there were plenty of plankton to eat around Iceland many mackerel did not need to seek further to the east to become full -- so there is some variation from year to year. We are currently studying this variation, and in a few years, we may be able to provide fishermen with mackerel forecast a couple of months in advance."

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Challenging agreements

For the Greenlandic economy, the mackerel have been a welcome visitor at a time when the traditionally important shrimp fishing has been declining due to a diminishing population.

Other species have followed in the wake of the mackerel, e.g. the Bluefin Tuna which have been caught as bycatch in the mackerel fishery. The mackerel's arrival could, however, become a problem for some of the current species when the mackerel eat their food, and higher temperatures can make life hard for cold water species.

"Climate change is a huge challenge and even if there will be more of these kinds of local positive stories, it is important that we do not use them as an excuse not to implement structural and technological changes. Globally, the disadvantages of climate change are still totally dominant," emphasizes Teunis Jansen, DTU Aqua.

Internationally, the mackerel's journey north has challenged the old agreements on the management of the species that were made at a time when it was not found in abundance in the waters around Iceland and Greenland. This means that the mackerel stock in the north east Atlantic, according to assessments made by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), in total by all countries is fished 48 per cent more than the recommended level. Economically, mackerel are the most important fish species in the EU. And the species is also very important for Danish fishermen. Mackerel are fished by Denmark's largest fishing vessels in the autumn and winter in the northern North Sea and to the west of Scotland. It constitutes one of the Danish fishery's most important species.

The study of mackerel in Greenland was financed by the Danish and Greenlandic governments.
Summer blockbuster season is upon us, which means plenty of fast-paced films with lots of action. However, these aren't new releases from Hollywood studios; they're one type of new "movies" of atomic-level explosions that can give scientists new information about how X-rays interact with molecules.

A team led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory used the high-intensity, quick-burst X-rays provided by the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to look at how the atoms in a molecule change when the molecule is bombarded with X-rays.

"The LCLS gives us a unique perspective on molecular dynamics because of the extremely brief X-ray pulses that we can use," said Antonio Picon, an Argonne X-ray scientist and lead author. "We're able to see how charge and energy can flow through a system with amazing precision."

By using a new method called X-ray pump/X-ray probe, the researchers were able to excite a specifically targeted inner-shell electron in a xenon atom bonded to two fluorine atoms. After the electron was excited out of its shell, the unbalanced positive charge in the rest of the molecule caused the molecule to spontaneously dissociate in a process known as "Coulomb explosion."

"The new X-ray pump/X-ray probe technique is so powerful because it allows us to shake the molecule at one point, and look at how it changes at a second point," said Argonne X-ray scientist and study author Christoph Bostedt.

The xenon difluoride molecule is only a first step for the technique. In the future, the same X-ray pump/X-ray probe method could find a broad range of applications, such as following the ultrafast structural changes that occur in light-sensitive molecules or the flow of energy in molecules. By understanding intramolecular energy flow, researchers can better develop novel materials to harness the sun's energy, such as photovoltaics and photocatalysts.

The new technique could also help researchers address challenges relating to the protein structure determination. For pharmaceutical studies, X-rays are often used to figure out the structures of proteins, but during that process they can also damage parts of them.

"This technique lets you see how neighboring atoms are affected when certain regions interact with X-rays," said Stephen Southworth, an Argonne senior X-ray scientist.

By using an X-ray pump to excite one of the innermost electrons in the molecule, the researchers were able to target one of the electrons that is most central to and characteristic of the molecule. "This technique gives us the ability to take a series of quick snapshots to see what happens when we change a fundamental part of a molecule, and what we learn from it can inform how we approach the interactions between light and molecules in the future," said Picon.

The research, which was funded by the DOE Office of Science, involved a collaboration between Argonne, SLAC, and Kansas State University. "For these kinds of studies, you really need a team that combines world leaders in X-ray sources, particle detection and sample manipulation," Southworth said.

An article based on the study, "Hetero-site-specific X-ray pump-probe spectroscopy for femtosecond intramolecular dynamics," appeared in the May 23 online edition of Nature Communications.
Unemployed people were more likely to land a job if they used skills commonly taught as part of cognitive therapy for depression, a new study found.

These skills included identifying negative thoughts and countering them with more positive responses and planning enjoyable activities to improve mood.

This study is the first to show that cognitive behavioral (CB) skills not only predict changes in depression symptoms, but also real-life functioning, said Daniel Strunk, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

"Searching for a job is difficult in any circumstance, but it may be even more difficult for people who are depressed," Strunk said.

"But we found that there are specific skills that can help not only manage the symptoms of depression but also make it more likely that a person will receive a job offer."

Strunk conducted the study with Benjamin Pfeifer, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State. Their results appear in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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The study involved 75 unemployed people, aged 20 to 67, who participated in two online surveys taken three months apart.

The participants completed a variety of questionnaires that measured depressive symptoms and a variety of psychological variables, such as dysfunctional attitudes, brooding and a negative cognitive style. They also completed an instrument that measured how often they used CB skills such as countering their own negative thoughts.

About a third of the sample reported symptoms that would put them in the moderately to seriously depressed category, although they were not formally diagnosed. The remaining two-thirds had scores that ranged from mild depression to no symptoms.

The results showed that participants who reported more use of CB skills were more likely to show an improvement in depressive symptoms in the three months between the surveys -- and were more likely to report they had received a job offer.

Many of the skills taught by cognitive behavioral therapy involve rethinking one's negative automatic thoughts, which are maladaptive thoughts that often pop into one's head without effortful reflection. Other skills focus on behavior, like breaking up daunting tasks into smaller parts in order to help a person get started.

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"The people who got jobs in our study were more likely to be putting into practice the skills that we try to teach people in cognitive therapy," Strunk said.

The researchers didn't ask specifically if participants were receiving therapy, but it is likely that few if any of them had received any training in cognitive behavioral therapy, he said.

"Some people just naturally catch themselves when they have negative thoughts and refocus on the positive and use other CB skills. These are the people who were more likely to find a job."

Strunk said most job seekers probably feel some discouragement as they look through job ads and get rejected for jobs. But those who keep persisting and use CB skills to boost their mood were the ones who were most likely to succeed.

"Rejection is so much a part of the process of job seeking. Using cognitive behavioral skills are an important way one can deal with that."

The other variables that the researchers studied, such as dysfunctional attitudes and negative cognitive style, did not predict improvement in depressive symptoms or higher odds of receiving a job offer. Strunk said this was surprising, but it will take further research to figure out why.

But the results do offer a way for job seekers -- especially those who are depressed -- to improve their chances of finding work.

"Using cognitive behavioral skills, people can overcome some of the negative thinking that may be holding them back and making it less likely to succeed in their job search," Strunk said.
When it comes to the most beneficial cover crops farmers can use to suppress weeds and increase production values, University of New Hampshire scientists have found that forage radish is at the top of the list, according to new research from the NH Agricultural Experiment Station.

Cover crops are plants that are grown before or after cash crops are planted and harvested, Cover crops are used to protect soil from erosion, improve soil fertility, suppress weeds, and/or provide additional habitat for pollinators and other beneficial organisms. Because they minimize erosion and can help to keep nitrogen and other nutrients from leaching to ground waters or being lost via other pathways, cover crops can be important tools for reducing pollution and other negative environmental impacts associated with agricultural activities.

"Control of weeds and improvement of soil quality and soil health are issues that every farmer struggles to deal with. Cover crops are tools that farmers can use to address these issues simultaneously; however, not all cover crops are equally capable of suppressing weeds or contributing to soil enhancement, particularly under the climatic conditions that are typical of our region. This research is aimed at determining which cover crop species might be most useful for farmers in our region," said Richard Smith, assistant professor of agroecology.

The research is presented in the article "In-Season and Carry-Over Effects of Cover Crops on Productivity and Weed Suppression" in the journal Agronomy Journal. In addition to Smith, the research was conducted by Elisabeth Hodgdon, doctoral student with the University of Vermont who is a former UNH graduate student in biological sciences; Nicholas Warren, UNH graduate student; and Becky Sideman, a researcher with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station and extension professor of sustainable horticulture production.

Researchers examined the performance of eight different cover crops intended to fill the late summer and fall fallow period that occurs between crop harvest in the summer and the following springtime planting of a subsequent cash crop. This fallow period would typically follow the harvest of vegetable crops such as snap beans, broccoli, sweet corn, and spinach, or corn silage.

Researchers planted cover crops at the experiment station's Woodman Horticultural Research Farm either as monocultures (one cover crop) or bi-cultures (mixture of two cover crops). Crops planted include annual ryegrass, winter rye, alfalfa, crimson clover, white clover, hairy vetch, soybean, and forage radish. Researchers also included a control in which no cover crop was grown. Some of these species, such as winter rye and hairy vetch, are quite common in our region, while the rest are less commonly used as cover crops.

The two-year study allowed scientists to determine not just the average values for each cover crop but also the consistency of each cover crop's performance. "Based on our research, we found that forage radish was consistently among the highest biomass-producing treatments in the fall, provided excellent fall weed suppression, and resulted in some of the highest production values in the test-crop," Smith said.

"We were particularly surprised with how well the forage radish performed, both in terms of fall growth and fall weed suppression, and how much of an impact it had on the subsequent test-crop despite the fact that it died in the winter," Smith said.

There is growing interest in using cover crops to improve soil health and sequester carbon in the soil. "Here in New England, many farmers are already using some of these cover crops. For example, on some vegetable farms in our region, it is not uncommon for as much as 50 percent of a farm to be in cover crops during the growing season. That said, there is a relative lack of information about how well different cover crops perform in our region, particularly in regard to weed suppression, given our short growing season and relatively intense winters. This is especially true for cover crop species such as forage radish, crimson clover, and soybean," Smith said.

This study is part of a larger research effort that aims to provide New England's farmers with science-based information about agricultural practices that reduce the need for economically and environmentally costly agrichemicals and other external inputs. The goal is to develop biologically based practices that are appropriate for their operations and that improve their bottom line.

"Agriculture continues to be an important component of our regional economy and therefore implementation of practices that benefit agriculture, such as the use of cover crops, should be of interest to not just farmers, but anyone who enjoys eating locally and regionally produced food or who values seeing a vibrant and sustainable agriculture on the landscape," Smith said. Future research will assess a wider range of cover crop species and their performance under different types of growing conditions and when planted at different times during the growing season. Scientists also will continue to conduct research on the potential benefits of planting cover crops as mixtures and in inter-cropping systems, and will assess a wider range of services that cover crops provide to agroecosystems.
The Mars Camera CaSSIS on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captured its first images of the Red Planet this week. The pictures are a part of the mission's preparations for arriving at its destination in October.

CaSSIS (Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System) has been developed by a team led by the University of Bern. It was launched with the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) in March and has already travelled just under half of its nearly 500 million km journey.

While the orbiter's 'first-light' image of a star field was successfully acquired within the first month following launch, it has now set sights on its destination.

The orbiter and Mars were 41 million kilometres apart on 13 June when the new image was taken. Although it does not compare to the high-resolution scenes that will be returned once the spacecraft is finally at Mars, it is an important milestone for the camera team.

Camera is working well

"The images have confirmed the sensitivity of the instrument and are sharp," says Antoine Pommerol, co-investigator of the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern. "CaSSIS seems to be well-focussed and the signal level seems to be close to prediction."

"Telescopes on Earth and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around it can still do far better than us at present, but we are still a long way away from Mars," says Nicolas Thomas, the camera's principal investigator at the CSH.

"If the instrument continues to perform well, the indications are that we should begin to exceed what is achievable from Earth in the second week of October, and then the improvement in resolution will happen rapidly."

With another four months of journey time ahead, the team will continue to look at the data they are collecting en route. "Everything we do now helps us to understand and calibrate the instrument," adds Nick. "There's a lot to prepare for."

Observing dynamics on Mars

CaSSIS is a high resolution imaging system designed to complement the data acquired by the other payload on TGO and other Mars orbiters while also enhancing our knowledge of the surface of Mars. The camera is a cooperation between the University of Bern, the Astronomical Observatory of Padua, and the Space Research Center in Warsaw with the support of local industries and funded by the Swiss Space Office (SSO), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Polish Space Agency (POLSA). The instrument will obtain stereo images of the surface in colour at a resolution of better than 5 m.

It is now known that Mars is more dynamic than previously thought. Of particular interest to the 25-strong science team from 9 countries (incl. US and Russia) is the chance CaSSIS offers to study changes that occur over the day and over the Martian seasons. Further studies of recently discovered liquid water on the surface will be one of the main aims.
In summer 2011, University of Colorado Cancer Center investigators Joaquin Espinosa, PhD, and Matthew Galbraith, PhD, taught a summer symposium on gene expression at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York. As part of the three-week course, one of their students, Joel Perrez-Perri from Dr. Pablo Wappner's lab at the Instituto Leloir in Buenos Aires, Argentina, presented data from experiments on fruit flies describing the role of the histone acetyl-transferase TIP60 (aka KAT5) in regulating the expression of genes controlled by a protein known as HIF1A. Now five years later, in summer 2016, studies resulting from this seemingly obscure finding have resulted in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports showing the role of TIP60 in allowing human colorectal cancer cells to survive at the oxygen-poor centers of tumors.

"Tumors often can't grow the new blood vessels needed to supply themselves with the oxygen that most tissues would need to grow. In order to survive in low oxygen -- in conditions of hypoxia -- tumors produce the protein HIF1A. In human tumors, hypoxia and high expression of HIF1A are both predictors of bad outcomes," says Galbraith, now an Instructor of Pharmacology at the CU School of Medicine.

If it were possible to silence HIF1A, many cancers would succumb to hypoxia. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find drugs that inhibit the function of HIF1A. To circumvent this problem, scientists around the world are performing research to identify auxiliary proteins inside the cell required for HIF1A activity -- referred to as cofactors -- that could be more amenable to pharmacological inhibition.

At the time of the serendipitous summer encounter, the labs led by Espinosa in Colorado and Wappner in Buenos Aires were employing vastly different approaches to identify HIF1A cofactors. While Galbraith and Espinosa used human cancer cells grown in petri dishes, Perez-Perri and Wappner employed fruit flies, an organism frequently used as a model due to ease of genetic manipulation. Efforts in the Espinosa lab led to the identification of an enzyme known as CDK8 that is required for much of HIF1A activity in cancer cells. Efforts in the Wappner lab led to the identification of TIP60, also an enzyme, required for HIF1A activity in flies. The power of these discoveries resides in the fact that enzymes are a type of proteins whose activities can be more easily manipulated with medicines (unlike the action of the gene HIF1A itself). In fact, such drugs are already available to shut down the activity of CDK8 and TIP60.

In 2013, Galbraith and Espinosa published their findings in the journal Cell and embarked on a collaboration with the scientists in Buenos Aires to investigate whether TIP60's role in the response to hypoxia in flies was conserved in human cancer cells.

"It was a nice coincidence and a great opportunity to collaborate with fellow scientists in Argentina, the country where I was born, raised and received my education," Espinosa says. "I invited Joel to come to our lab in Colorado to spend a few months learning how to work with human cancer cells."

What they found is that the role of TIP60 is conserved in human colorectal cancer cells, which require HIF1A, CDK8 and TIP60 to form small tumors in the lab.

"By depleting CDK8 and TIP60 in colorectal cancer cells, we shut down more than 60 percent of the cellular activity of HIF1A, and this suffices to block their tumor-initiating ability," Galbraith says.

As with much basic research, Perez-Perri's stay in the Espinosa lab generated as many questions as answers, many having to do with molecular mechanisms by which TIP60 promotes HIF1A activity. This line of study was pursued in the Espinosa lab by graduate student Veronica Dengler. Dengler's work showed that HIF1A and TIP60 work together to turn on many genes inside the cell nucleus, including key genes required for the cellular adaptation to hypoxia. In collaboration with scientists from Madison, WI, led by Dr. Danette Daniels at the biotech Promega, the team demonstrated that HIF1A and TIP60 interact physically with each other inside cells.

"What I love about this project is that it illustrates the power of collaboration and training efforts. In order to make these important discoveries, we assembled a team of scientists from Buenos Aires, Colorado and Wisconsin, in academia and industry, to work with two graduate students located 6,000 miles apart," Espinosa says.

"This study absolutely demonstrates the importance of basic research," Galbraith says. "Here we had something in a fruit fly that didn't have any obvious connection to cancer and it turns out to be an important player in one of the most critical networks of cancer survival signaling."

The researchers hope their work will stimulate additional interest in exploring the function and possible inhibition of TIP60 and CDK8 in the context of cancer.
When a German shepherd fell off a truck speeding along California's Highway 99 in early April, the driver didn't seem to notice. Others did and made panicked calls to the Galt Police Department near Sacramento. But by the time officers arrived, the dog had disappeared.

In the weeks that passed, these missed opportunities would become a sad refrain: The dog was spotted, police were called and then she seemed to vanish again. The dog was nicknamed Frida the Freeway Dog. "How do you not realize your dog is gone and how do you not go back and try to find her?" Randy Prudhel of the Greater California German Shepherd Rescue tells The Dodo. "That's the question of the hour." But few were more frustrated by the search for this elusive dog than Sylvia Coelho. The Galt County police officer fielded countless calls from people who thought they spotted the dog. Again and again, police responded to find no sign of the phantom Frida.

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"Last week, when we stopped getting calls, I thought something happened, she, you know, died," Coelho told KCRA 3 last month. But weeks later, Frida was spotted again. And Coelho came looking. "I'm like, 'OK. We're going to find this dog,'" Coelho told the LA Times. "I never work weekends. It was meant for me to work that Saturday." After another exhaustive search, Coelho found Frida cowering on a highway median. "We're saying, 'It's all right, it's all right,'" Coelho told the LA Times. "And those big brown eyes just staring up at me ... She didn't fight us after that at all." Frida had been on her own for five weeks. And it showed. At just 44 pounds, she was dangerously underweight. Her leg was broken. "I don't know how you sit on a freeway island for five weeks and not get creamed," veterinarian Mike Johnson of VCA Bradshaw Animal Hospital told the Star-Telegram. "I guess she was eating garbage. I'm not sure where she was getting water."

Those big brown eyes must have said so much more than words to Coelho. Because the police officer plans to adopt Frida as her own if the dog's original owners don't claim her by next week. In the meantime, she's visiting Frida at the hospital, where the dog is currently recovering, every chance she gets. During one visit, as reported by the Star-Telegram, Frida limped toward her and gave the police officer a paw. "Hello, sweet girl!" Coelho reportedly said. "I can't wait to get you home."
A helicopter pilot with the Royal Navy got out of his BMW after making a 300-mile trip across England - and discovered a tiny kitten holding on for dear life under the back bumper of his car. Lieutenant Nick Grimmer was traveling from Birmingham Airport to the Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose, and somewhere along the way, the little hitchhiker somehow found his way into Grimmer's car.

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It wasn't until a day after he arrived at his destination that Grimmer heard faint meowing - and enlisted some of his coworkers to help dismantle the car and investigate. "He must have had a long journey but remarkably is unharmed," Grimmer said on the Royal Navy's website. "I am never late for work and was left with no option but to take my new friend in with me." Grimmer's squadron immediately fell in love with the little kitten, and named him Tigger, because he has tiger-like stripes. Oh, and the helicopters the squad flies are referred to as Flying Tigers.

Tigger loves to sleep in Grimmer's flying helmet, and so far, seems to like being an honorary member of the Royal Navy.
Visa and Walmart Canada are embroiled in a dispute over fees charged to merchants. But what does it mean to you?

Why did Visa take out newspaper ads about Walmart on Wednesday?

Visa and Walmart are in a battle over credit card fees charged to merchants. Walmart wants a better deal from Visa. Visa said it offered a lower rate, but Walmart wants an even deeper discount. Visa claims Walmart is asking for a rate lower than the one paid by charities and schools.

How many customers are potentially affected by this?

Visa is the biggest credit card company in Canada, with 54 million cards issued, according to Rob Livingston, president of Visa Canada. But a majority of Canadians have more than one credit card, making it easy for them to a card other than Visa if needed.

Also, the phase-out of Visa cards at Walmart is scheduled to begin in Thunder Bay in July, not in the GTA, which is the largest retail market in the country. So there is still time for the parties to go back to the table and hammer out an agreement before it begins to affect millions of people.

Why is this happening in Canada?

In Canada, Visa and Mastercard charge merchants fees that are as much as five times higher than fees charged in dozens of other countries, including those in Europe and Australia. In some cases, governments have stepped in to regulate lower fees. In other cases, government regulators similar to the Competition Bureau have set caps on fees.

The fee in Australia is 0.5 per cent, according to Karl Littler, vice president, public affairs, Retail Council of Canada (RCC). In many European countries, its 0.3 per cent.

A year ago in April, credit card companies in Canada agreed to bring the average rate charged merchants down to 1.5 per cent, but the Retail Council says thats still not low enough.

Gary Sands, spokesperson for the Small Business Matters Coalition, says retailers are waiting on the results of a third-party audit to report on whether the credit card companies are in fact meeting this target

Canadian retailers pay about $5-billion a year in credit card fees, according to the Council.

Why do the credit card companies charge so much more in Canada?

Visas Livingston says Canada has one of the most developed and secure digital payment sectors in the world, due to the investments credit card companies have made using the proceeds from fees. That includes tap-and-go services and payment systems that reduce the need for less secure payment methods, like personal cheques.

Do other big retailers get preferential treatment?

Yes. Although the terms of the exclusive deal between MasterCard and Costco in Canada are not public, Sands believes it could be as low as zero percent, with MasterCard benefitting in other ways  increased use, more customers (who use the card outside of Costco too) and publicity when Costco promotes the card.

How do these deals affect other retailers?

There is not a small business in Canada that has the negotiating power to move Visa or MasterCard, says Sands. As a result, he believes, small businesses are subsidizing big businesses, which they can ill-afford to do.

What do credit card companies provide for this fee?

The credit card companies provide certainty of payment; they allow consumers to make larger purchases without having to apply for loans or save up cash, and if the consumer cant pay the bill each month, they are providing an unsecured  and expensive  line-of-credit to consumers. By offering incentives, they also help drive spending, which is good for merchants.

So if the fees go down, will consumers benefit?

Perhaps, but only marginally. There is no independent study in Canada that has looked at whether retailers keep the difference or pass it on to consumers. Walmart is promising to pass it on to consumers, but while the overall savings to Walmart could be huge, it will mean pennies to consumers on most individual purchases.

If Im paying cash, can I get a discount?

Typically not. The system is based on the assumption that some transactions will be cash, so if you hold a super premium credit card with many rewards and benefits, you are doing better in this system than someone who is paying cash or debit, says the Retail Councils Littler.

How unusual is it for two companies to get in a public fight like this?

There have certainly been lots of companies that have sued their credit card companies in the U.S. over the rates that they charge. But Littler says its the first time hes seen it played out in media.

Could this set a precedent?

I suspect this is a test, and the outcome in Canada will be demanded for the American operations, which are 10 times the size, says Marvin Ryder, an assistant professor of marketing and entrepreneuship in McMasters DeGroote School of Business.

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Retailers might be struggling to lure shoppers through their doors because consumers are too busy ordering online. But shippers arent complaining.

Demand for parcel delivery keeps rising, and even companies like DHL Express Canada, which specializes in overseas deliveries, are seeing an increase in shipments.

The business is growing dramatically in Canada. We are quite bullish on Canada, said DHL Express Canada president Andrew Williams, who declined to share detailed sales figures but said company revenues here have grown at about 15 per cent a year in the past two years.

Williams cited the weak loonie as a factor, which has helped increase the export market. Theres also surging e-commerce demand, whether its single items being sold on Amazon or eBay, or Canadian retailers selling overseas.

The company, which is owned by Deutsche Post DHL, will open a retail store at the Scarborough Town Centre in July. In Toronto this fall, the company is also looking to add Packstations, giant yellow lockers where consumers can collect parcels at any time  a common sight in Europe.

In Germany, 90 per cent of residents live within a 10-minute walk of these type of lockers. Williams said the company is still negotiating locations, which could include retail stores, gas stations or transit stops. A one-time pin code is given to customers to release their shipments. Initially, the lockers will be used only to retrieve items, though DHL may consider adding outgoing shipping down the road, as it does in Europe.

Williams said the key is flexibility, so consumers have the option to have an item delivered to their home, office or even a neighbour, or to a Packstation.

Consumers have different behaviour patterns  some want to wait for their delivery at home and sign for it, but others might be prepared to waive a signature. Others want to go to a retail store to collect the item on their schedule, he said.

Craig Calvert, director of customer solutions at UPS Canada, agrees that consumers want choice, with control over delivery including dates and times.

Maybe you ordered an item online and you notice its going to be delivered on Friday, and youre planning a getaway for the long weekend. You can change the date for delivery from your phone, computer or tablet, Calvert said.

Consumers can also request items to be delivered and held at one 900 UPS store or affiliated access points such as drug or convenience stores, and get discounts on shipping costs as a result.

Even Canada Post, which is grappling with a steep decline in letters and bills, credits the parcel business for helping to generate profits in the first quarter.

The crown corporation opened a post office of the future concept in Richmond Hill last October, which will roll out in other cities soon including Edmonton and Vancouver. It includes drive-thru parcel pick-up and a fitting room to try on items purchased online.

If it fits, wonderful, you take it home, said Danielle Doiron, Canada Posts director of parcels market development. If it doesnt, you return it right away.

Like other shipping companies, Canada Post has also set up Flex Delivery, alternate addresses where items can be delivered. As well, it has offered Delivered Tonight, a premium service in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal; if purchases are made before 1 p.m., they will be delivered that night for certain retailers including Indigo, Sephora, and Best Buy.

In some cases, the retailer may cover the delivery costs as a way to surprise consumers with a quick turnaround on a purchase. But Doiron concedes that most times, Its a motivated buyer who is willing to absorb the cost because there is an urgent need.

Canada Post says it is seeing increased online consumer shopping go beyond traditional peaks like Christmas or Black Friday. It raises the question about whether delivery should extend beyond the usual five weekdays.

While Doiron expects to see a surge in August for back-to-school shopping, she said Canada Post wont do weekend and evening deliveries this summer, though its planning to extend deliveries in November, as it did last winter.

For all shippers, one of the biggest challenges is undelivered items, with the added cost of making multiple trips to try to deliver a parcel.

Canada Post has begun to install parcel lockers in apartment and condominium buildings where there are high volumes of parcel shipments and high rates of recipients who are not at home to receive the items.

It expects to have 2,700 of these six-unit lockers installed by years end, and Doiron says the units spur even more business for Canada Post. In buildings where lockers are installed, there is a 25 per cent increase in online shopping, she said.

The future of shipping

High for drugs: Theres been much buzz about Amazons plans to deliver goods by drone. DHL has also been testing drone delivery in some remote mountainous regions of Germany. DHL Express Canada president Andrew Williams says the company has used drones to get high-value goods, such as prescription medications, to far-flung locations. For the Canadian market, we can imagine that has a practical use here. We are less sure how it plays out in a dense urban environment, he said.

Found at sea: Maersk, one of the worlds largest shipping companies, reported in March that it used a drone to get a box of cookies to a tanker ship, which was carrying flammable materials like crude oil, in Denmark. The cookies were a stand-in for getting potential spare parts to the ship. Usually, when Maersk needs to get parts or mail delivered to a tanker, it has to dispatch a barge to get goods there, a costly proposition.

Digital paperboy: Some e-commerce experts have suggested retailers might want to team up with newspapers, which make daily door-to-door deliveries to get the news to doorsteps every day. Newspapers are desperate at finding ways to expand their traditional revenue base. The New York Times has teamed up with a meal delivery startup called Chefd to get exact ingredients to readers who want to try recipes featured on the NYT Cooking website.

Magical groceries: Imagine getting groceries magically delivered to your home, even neatly put away in your fridge, when youre not home. In Sweden, courier company PostNord and supermarket chain ICA AB are testing this service for 20 households in Stockholm. The key is an add-on lock that messengers,  who promise to take their shoes off  can open with a smartphone. Residents can decide remotely when to permit access to these add-on locks.

Whats in the back: Also in Sweden, Volvo Cars Corp. is testing ways to deliver items to the trunks of Internet-connected automobiles. Of course, getting such a service to scale is finding part-time delivery staff, who will go to stores to collect pre-ordered items, and then deliver to cars, all within two hours. But the key is using a digital key to unlock the trunk  for one-time-only access. A bonus: theres no need to look for your car keys thanks to a digital key.

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A U.S. media monitoring group has unearthed what has been labelled a kill list, linked loosely to Daesh and brandishing the names of about 150 Canadian targets.

The list, while likely an empty threat and apparently compiled almost at random, could serve as inspiration to lone wolf attackers and offers the latest example of a cyber-terror tactic by hacker groups loosely tied to the Syrian-based militant group, experts say.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) first spotted the list on social media sites, including the Telegram messaging app, on June 7. The Star has since obtained a copy of the list.

Featuring mostly womens names, it appears to be compiled by the pro-Daesh hacker group United Cyber Caliphate and two affiliate groups.

Elliot Zweig, the Washington-based NGOs deputy director, said he passed on the list  8,300 names in full from multiple countries  to authorities in the U.S. and abroad.

Whats rare is the size of it, Zweig said, noting past kill lists often included the names of government officials, drone operators and FBI agents. These may be mainly civilians, according to MEMRI.

Theres no rhyme or reason. Sometimes its just random people, added executive director Steven Stalinsky.

There are about 20 people listed with GTA addresses. There are also targets with postal codes from across the country.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at the George Washington University program on extremism, said the link between the hacker umbrella group and the leadership of Daesh (also known as ISIS and ISIL) remains murky.

The fear is that some lone actor might take these lists and do something with them, he said.

The mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., last December and in Orlando last weekend, which claimed 63 lives in total, were both carried out by American-born young men.

You dont need individuals to have any real links to ISIS leadership, said Amarasingam.

Still, most people dont take (pro-Daesh hacking groups) too seriously, he added. Theyre just a bunch of fanboys with computer skills.

In the past four months, hacker groups, including the United Cyber Caliphate, have released about nine kill lists containing thousands of names in total.

Kill lists have long been released officially by jihadi groups, but it wasnt until recently that self-proclaimed hacking groups began releasing their own kill lists, according to a June report by the U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group.

While we do not comment on allegations, specific threats or operations related to national security, we can say that the Government of Canada monitors all potential threats and has robust measures in place to address them, said Public Safety Department spokesperson Scott Bardsley.

The RCMP did not respond by press time to questions about whether it was alerting targeted Torontonians.

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London, Ont., is feeling a sense of deja vu with news that Mayor Matt Brown is temporarily stepping aside after admitting a brief inappropriate personal relationship with the deputy mayor.

Brown, who took office in 2014 along with a mostly fresh-faced city council, ran on a promise to restore integrity to the embattled southwestern Ontario city hall.

His win came after a string of mayors became embroiled in various controversies, most notably his immediate predecessor Joe Fontana, who was convicted on fraud-related charges.

Brown said Tuesday in a statement that during a period of intense workload, he developed a close working relationship and ultimately an inappropriate personal relationship with Deputy Mayor Maureen Cassidy.

Cassidy resigned as deputy mayor on Tuesday, but will remain as a city councillor. She used a news conference to appeal for privacy as she worked with her family to rebuild the trust that has been broken.

Brown also asked the media and community to respect the need of my wife and children for some privacy as we work through this difficult time.

Both Brown and Cassidy said they regret the pain and embarrassment they have caused their families.

I intend to spend more time with my children and my wife in the coming weeks. Im taking some time away over the next little while and I will return to my other duties when were ready, Brown added.

Cassidy said she could never apologize enough to her family for allowing her relationship with the mayor to cross a professional boundary.

Corrine Rahman, Browns chief of staff, stepped down in light of the news, Councillor Tanya Park (Ward 13) told CBC News.

Martin Horak, a political science professor at Western University and expert in local government, says the perception that this forms part of an unfortunate pattern does a disservice to the current city council.

Of the 14 councillors elected in 2014, only three incumbents from Fontanas term found their way back to city hall.

Theyve been a much more collegial, professional, thoughtful and productive council than the previous one, he said.

Among the achievements of the current city council, Horak counts its implementation of multi-year budgeting and the recent vote to appoint an integrity commissioner to enforce the code of conduct.

One of the first cases for newly appointed Gregory Stewart could be to delve into this incident.

Brown has asked Stewart to advise on the matter. No official investigation has been launched and Stewart told the Star it was too early to judge what might come of the meeting, set for Thursday.

It sounds trite, Stewart said of the story, which he had only learned about in media reports at that point.

Brown said in a statement he will abide by any decisions or recommendations made by the commissioner, though he doesnt believe his relationship with the deputy mayor breached any professional responsibilities.

I nonetheless want to obtain his opinion to ensure that there are no issues, Brown said.

In July 2014, Fontana was sentenced to house arrest and probation after a judge found him guilty of forging expense documents related to his sons wedding while he was a federal Liberal cabinet minister. The Ontario ombudsman also probed the mayors backroom meetings with select councillors.

Theres no question its been an unfortunate string of events for London, Phil Squire, city councillor for Londons Ward 6, said Wednesday.

Its a very bad sequence, he said. That is always going to hurt a city  because the mayor is our leader.

Unlike the criminal convictions against Fontana, Squire said the fallout from Brown and Cassidys announcement will be primarily political.

Clearly people expect better out of politicians and I think both Mayor Brown and Deputy Mayor Cassidy have expected better of themselves, he said.

Deputy Mayor Paul Hubert has been called on to serve as acting mayor, a role he anticipates to fill for several weeks, though the period is officially undetermined. He called the affair a short-term distraction.

Then we will refocus on the work that we have ahead, Hubert said.

Calling Brown and Cassidy friends first, colleagues second, and politicians third, Hubert said the news caught him off guard but he doesnt believe the deeply personal matter should derail city business.

The City of London, its reputation, the good work that council and administration are doing does not rise and fall on the personal issues of any one member of council, be it the mayor or anyone else, he said.

Horak said while its an unfortunate situation, its not in the same category of the most-recent iteration of city hall.

The problem comes more with image and with public trust, at least at this stage as far as we know, rather than with any breach of ethical or conduct rules.

He says the news may erode public trust, but he credits that more to the publics general lack of attention paid to municipal politics.

The less attention they pay the more theyre going to tend to see this as a sign of some broader systemic problem rather than a one off indiscretion.

With files from The Canadian Press

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A man who pleaded guilty in an impaired driving crash that killed a university student in London, Ont., was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday, as the victims family called for harsher penalties for the crime.

Jared Dejong had more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood when he was arrested in the October 2015 collision that claimed the life of 18-year-old Andrea Christidis of Scarborough.

The first-year student had been walking back to her residence on Western Universitys campus when Dejongs vehicle jumped a curb and hit her. She died of her injuries in hospital two days after the crash.

At his sentencing hearing in April, Dejong, who had been out on bail, said he was haunted by the memory of what he had done.

The Crown had sought a five-year prison sentence for Dejong, while defence lawyers had called for two years behind bars and three years of probation.

Dejongs lawyer said Thursday that the five-year sentence came as no surprise and said his client  who had pleaded guilty to over-80-mg blood-alcohol causing death  was determined to make something positive from the tragedy.

It is a sad case for both the Christidis family as well as the Dejong family. And I can speak for my client and his family when I say that they are truly sorry for the loss of Andrea, Jim Dean told The Canadian Press.

We can only hope that this will make someone else think before getting behind the wheel after drinking and possibly prevent the destruction of more families.

Members of Christidiss family, however, said Dejongs sentence didnt go far enough, adding that drunk driving was treated too leniently by the courts.

No sentence handed down today could be fair or just so long as the penalty does not match the crime, said Soula Koutlemanis, Christidiss aunt, who read a statement outside court on the familys behalf.

(Dejong) will return to his family and continue his life. We, on the other hand, have been sentenced to a life sentence of pain and suffering.

Dejong chose to drink and drive without any considerations for the consequences, Koutlemanis said, wondering aloud if harsher penalties would have resulted in him making a different decision.

We are living a nightmare, as are other families in similar situations. Something must change, she said. The first step in our opinion is harsher sentences for those who drink and drive.

An agreed statement of facts heard in the case revealed that Dejong was on Western Universitys campus drinking with friends at the campus pub for three or four hours. He was not a student at the school.

Witnesses said road conditions at the time were perfect and that Dejongs vehicle was seen travelling very fast and at one point cut in front of a bus. Video from the bus also showed him driving on the wrong side of the road.

The car went through two intersections without stopping, causing other drivers to take evasive action, before it jumped the curb and struck Christidis, throwing her 10 metres.

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For more than a year, Algie Parucha, her sister and sister-in-law dreamed of running a business together.

Just eight weeks after the dream became reality, a nightmare shattered their family: the 38-year-old mother of two was struck and killed by an SUV that crashed into their market stand across from the Rogers Centre.

We are saddened. We are shocked, Karen Parucha told the Star. She was just starting her life.

Working part-time as an independent travel agent, Algie was in the midst of transitioning to work full-time on the family company, JamCo Boutique, where the three would create and sell homemade hair accessories for children.

She was so creative, Karen said. Everything she did, she did with passion, and you saw it in her craft.

Tuesday afternoon, Algie and her sister Allane were working at their stand at the City Place Urban Market when the vehicle mounted the sidewalk and crashed through the stand  killing Algie instantly. Allane suffered only minor injuries, but her family says she is traumatized.

Their family is such a close-knit family that I was blessed to be a part of it, another sister-in-law wrote on Facebook. Algie was the main person who keeps all of us intact.

The Urban Market has been postponed until Saturday, according to Gary Pieters, a moderator for the City Place Toronto community on Facebook.

My condolences are extended to loved ones and everyone affected by Tuesday's tragic event, he wrote in a post Wednesday afternoon.

Mayor John Tory also expressed his sympathy, saying I am deeply saddened by the death of a 38-year-old woman today in a press release Tuesday evening.

As mayor, I am committed to ensuring that all those who use our roads  pedestrians, cyclists and drivers  are safe, Tory said. As a city, we will do more to prevent these tragedies and keep each other safe.

Jeime Bernette, Algies sister-in-law, wrote: Thank you for being my business partner in a dream that we will do our best to keep alive, in a Facebook post. Thank you for showing me how creative we can be.

Police are investigating, but have not said if charges will be laid.

With files from Brennan Doherty

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On first blush, the Transformational Task Force on Policing has delivered a significant set of recommendations that will change, if not transform, policing in Toronto.

If the thrust of the report is not thwarted by amendments that blunt its impact, the city will slow the steady growth of the police budget, now a staggering $1 billion a year.

Thered be 300 to 450 fewer officers three years from now  a reduction through attrition as no new officers would be hired. As many as six divisions could be merged or closed. TAVIS, the controversial anti-violence intervention strategy, is toast after this summer. Management of the parking enforcement unit and crossing guards gets passed on to the city, as it should be.

The changes are supposed to deliver budget savings of $100 million over three years. That is a drop in the bucket on such a massive spending envelope, the largest single draw from property taxes. But Torontonians are used to the police demanding more money, more officers, more, more, more. As such, a hiring freeze  the kind of reasonable pause that most businesses and several government departments see as the norm  seems like a monumental achievement.

In reality, this is a modest proposal.

The surprise is that it is being contemplated by the leaders of a regime so rooted in the status quo. And if that doesnt surprise, the calm acceptance by the police chief and the senior officers and the police association is unprecedented.

Maybe that was the deal Mayor John Tory struck with the police brass when he masterminded a favourable new contract for the police union and his political ally Mike McCormack, the union president; when he delivered them the chief they wanted in Mark Saunders; and when he made his political confrere Andy Pringle the chair of the police services board, despite his toothless tenure on the board.

Maybe Tory had them promise to play ball with the reforms critics had said would be inevitable, if policing costs were to be contained.

Maybe, because such a conclusion requires one to believe that Tory had a master plan on policing when evidence suggests the opposite. When he first ran for mayor he proposed more police in a tough-on-crime platform  one that pushed the police union to officially endorse him. Now hes talking social programs and a reduction in police officers.

A year ago Tory was in crisis over his embrace of carding. Rebuffed and rebuked, he flipped, leaving Chief Saunders defending the indefensible. Now, both men are prepared to disband TAVIS  a source of many complaints for too-aggressive policing that led to less community co-operation when the goal was more co-operation with the ever-present TAVIS cops on bikes.

Changing Pringles mind on any of this must have been the easiest. Only Pringle knows what he thinks on most policing policy issues.

Torys best move on the policing file was to strike a task force of tough-minded people who had a laser focus on achieving some change. Their reputations were on the line. They include David Soknacki, a former Toronto city councillor and budget chief and mayoral candidate. He knows a thing or two about police spending.

Former city auditor Jeff Griffith has been critical of police spending in more than one audit of the police department. And the sleeper might have been Michelle DiEmanuele: president and CEO of Trillium Health Partners, with expertise in large-scale change and cultural transformation. She is a former senior provincial servant and deputy minister.

Reports from inside the task force deliberations say DiEmanueles experience at downsizing hospitals was crucial in convincing the police brass that change is possible.

But however you slice it, the report is a key step forward for Chief Saunders. Six current members of the police service sit on the task force, chaired by Pringle and Saunders. The chief has had to steer the changes through the force  managing the raised eyebrows, outright skepticism and opposition.

In presenting the changes to his officers, Saunders apparently has told them of a future where Toronto police will have to do less with less. Maybe its Saunders way of getting buy-in. There will be fewer of you, but we are taking away some of your responsibilities so everything will be fine.

So, change is coming to Toronto police. But dont call it a transformation. That would hurt a little. Transformation demands radical change and conjures up something revolutionary or a recasting or major modification. It requires doing the same with less; or doing more with less. Doing less with less is tinkering around the edges, despite movement on many fronts.

That said, Saunders is starting down a road his predecessors avoided. That alone earns him credit  his first positive draw after a lukewarm and unspectacular year on the job.

Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca

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In the moment after their plane was hit, there was no time to think, let alone radio their position. The four Royal Air Force crew members ditched their broken bomber and dropped into the North Sea. It was February 23, 1942  and it should have been their last day on Earth.

Floundering in the frigid water between England and Norway, the pilots released their last hope: a tiny, bedraggled carrier pigeon named Winkie. She had been inside a container the whole flight and was covered in oil from the crash. It wasnt clear whether she would survive the 120-mile flight home, or know how to get there.

But a few hours later, Winkie showed up at the home of her owner, who notified British authorities in time to launch a rescue mission. Without her, the four men might never have been found in the vast ocean.

So how did she do it?

We think they are using quantum mechanics to navigate, said Daniel Kattnig, a researcher in the chemistry department at Oxford University. Kattnig works in a lab that studies radical pairs  a phenomenon in which atoms acquire extra electrons that are entangled with one another, each affecting the others motion even though theyre separated by space. Its a field of science that is difficult to understand under the best of circumstances; imagine trying to figure it out with a bird brain.

But according to an increasingly popular theory, birds and other animals use a radical-pair-based compass to see the Earths magnetic field, allowing them to undertake great migrations without getting lost. Its still unproven, but Kattnig and his colleagues just verified a key component: In a study in the New Journal of Physics this month, they reported that the timing of these subatomic interactions makes them a good candidate to explain avian navigation.

There are still many steps before we can say this for certain, Kattnig said. But this is one step along the way.

People have been trying to understand how living things know where theyre going for more than 100 years. In a letter to Nature magazine in 1873, Charles Darwin speculated that a sense of dead reckoning might allow everything from migratory birds to nomadic tribes in Siberia to keep a course in rugged or unfamiliar terrain.

Since then, scientists have proposed animal compasses based on the sense of smell, memorized landmarks, the direction of the sun, polarization of light and even the positions of the stars. Its even been suggested that dung beetles plot a path back to their burrows by following the Milky Way.

In the early 1960s, a German graduate student named Wolfgang Wiltschko set out to prove that birds navigated based on radio signals from the stars. During his experiments, he locked robins in a steel room with a Helmholtz coil  a device that produces a uniform magnetic field  and found that the birds were reorienting themselves in response to it. He had accidentally demonstrated that magnetism, not radio waves, was at the heart of animal navigation.

Those results sent scientists on a frenzied search for animals magneto-receptors. They discovered iron particles in the beaks of pigeons and hens, magnetite in the noses of trout and other magnetic molecules in birds ear hairs.

Subsequent research found that some of those iron molecules were in immune cells rather than sensory ones, shaking up the migration-by-magnetic-molecules theory. But animal-navigation scholars already had another possible mechanism: the radical pairs that Kattnig studies.

When the idea was first proposed by biophysicist Klaus Schulten, then of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, a reviewer at the journal Science wrote to him, A less bold scientist would have designed this piece of work for the wastepaper basket, he recalled in a history published four years ago by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

But there are lots of behavioural experiments that show this is actually a good fit, Kattnig said.

Its thought that light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes  which have been found in the retinas of birds, butterflies, fruit flies, frogs, humans and other creatures  are at the centre of the mystery. When light strikes the proteins, it creates radical pairs that begin to spin in synchrony. In other words, theyre entangled.

The chemical reaction lasts for only a few microseconds, but Kattnigs research shows that its long enough for the Earths magnetic field to modulate the quality and direction of the electrons spin. He also found that the radical pairs become more sensitive to the magnetic field as they relax  that is, as they transition back to equilibrium  once outside factors such as ambient temperature are taken into account.

This suggests to Kattnig and his colleagues that sensors in birds eyes survey the spin state of various radical pairs and then signal the results to the brain, allowing birds to more or less see the Earths magnetic field as they fly through it.

There are still years of work to be done, Kattnig acknowledged. We need to locate the spot where the cryptochromes are responsive to magnetism, he said. And then we need to find the interaction partners  the cascade of signals which is then following up and giving rise to the visual impression.

Lots of things are unknown, he concluded.

To scientists, maybe. The birds are finding their way just fine.

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Having learned tragic lessons from the deadly Walkerton catastrophe, the province of Ontario is offering to help troubled Flint, Michigan with its water contamination disaster.

After a meeting with Michigan Governor Rick Snyder on Wednesday in Detroit, Premier Kathleen Wynne said she has pledged Ontarios aid to the state.

We have offered if theres any expertise that we can lend through the Clean Water Agency in Ontario were going to put the governor in touch with our folks in Ontario, the premier told reporters.

Snyder, whose administration is being blamed for the Flint crisis, said he appreciated Wynnes assistance  especially given Ontarios know-how after the May 2000 Walkerton bacterial outbreak that killed seven people and left 2,500 seriously ill.

The premier has an interest in helping Michigan and the people of Ontario do, the embattled governor said.

So I thought that was wonderful saying they would provide their key people, make them available, so we could have a dialogue with them, said Snyder.

Ontario is willing to help, were going to take them up on it in terms of looking at how their water systems are installed and how theyre managed, the materials they use. Those are all things we can learn from, he said.

We tend to find the same answer across all the United States, lets look to our smart neighbours to the north.

The water in hard-scrabble Flint was contaminated in April 2014 after the city was switched from the Detroit waterworks to the Flint River while a new pipeline to Lake Huron was being built.

Due to Flints financial problems, a Snyder appointee was running the municipal government at the time.

Two state regulators and a city employee have been slapped with criminal charges in the wake of the contamination.

Improperly treated water from the polluted Flint River was so corrosive that it caused lead to leach from aging pipes, which can lead to kidney problems and other ailments.

An outbreak of Legonnaires disease in the area that killed 12 people and left 91 sick may have been caused by Flints contaminated water.

After health official found elevated lead levels in thousands of children last summer, the city returned to the Detroit water system in October, but there is concern that lead is continuing to contaminate tap water.

The state of Michigan has yet to deem Flints tap water safe for consumption though filtered tap water is being drunk in the city.

After the Walkerton tragedy, Queens Park imposed new legislation safeguarding drinking water and launched the Ontario Clean Water Agency.

A judicial inquiry blamed the e.coli bacteria outbreak on cuts imposed by the then Progressive Conservative government and two criminally negligent brothers who ran the towns waterworks.

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SACRAMENTO, CALIF.Forty years ago, kids rode their bikes unsupervised through suburban bedroom communities bracketed by Air Force bases east of Sacramento, Calif. Families rarely locked their doors at night.

It was a time of innocence. And then in June of 1976, that all changed, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert recalled about growing up in the area. A community was taken hostage.

The tranquility was shattered by an elusive, violent attacker who authorities say committed at least 45 rapes in the region along with at least 12 homicides and dozens of burglaries across California over the next decade.

He was initially dubbed the East Area Rapist after beginning his crimes in Northern California. He later became known as the Original Night Stalker for a series of slayings in Southern California before investigators realized he was one and the same person.

Now called the Golden State Killer, he has been linked through DNA and other evidence to scores of crimes.

This serial offender was probably one of the most prolific, certainly in California and possibly within the United States, said Sacramento County sheriffs homicide Sgt. Paul Belli.

A generation of investigators has grown old and retired since the hunt began. Four decades of frustration later, the FBI on Wednesday announced a $50,000 reward and a national media campaign to track down the killer who would now be 60 to 75 years old.

Authorities decided to publicize the case in advance of June 18  the 40th anniversary of his first known assault in Sacramento County. Belli said investigators are looking for clues concerning other crimes in California and elsewhere that he may have committed.

A telephone recording released by the FBI through its website, provides a chilling verbal glimpse of the killer: Im gonna kill you. Gonna kill you. Gonna kill you, he breathes to one of his rape victims in a message she recorded sometime after the attack.

The masked rapist, armed with a gun, would break into homes while single women or couples were sleeping. He would tie up the man and pile dishes on his back, then rape the woman while threatening to kill them both if the dishes tumbled.

He often took souvenirs, notably coins and jewelry, from his victims, who ranged in age from 13 to 41.

One victim recalled waking up with a hand over her mouth before she was hit, blindfolded, gagged with a sock and bound at her legs and hands. The rapist put me back in bed and said, if you move, Im going to kill you,  she said in a recorded interview released by the FBI.

Youre laying there thinking youre going to die, she said. Her name was not released.

Investigators believe the rapes and dozens of burglaries that were often used to scout neighbourhoods escalated in 1978, when the killer fatally shot U.S. Air Force Sgt. Brian Maggiore and his wife Katie as they walked their dog.

The rapes were committed near military bases, so investigators said some people who might be able to provide clues likely moved elsewhere long ago. Authorities believe the killer might have had an interest in the military or law enforcement, in part because he was proficient with firearms.

They suspect he moved on from suburban Sacramento to commit several rapes in the San Francisco Bay Area before heading to Southern California.

It wasnt until 2001 that new DNA testing linked him to at least six homicides there between 1979 and 1986. In each case, the killer broke into a house at night, then raped and killed a female victim.

The Southern California killer had been called the Original Night Stalker to distinguish him from Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, who died of cancer in 2013 before he could be executed for committing 13 mutilation killings in 1984 and 1985.

The killer now being sought was also briefly known as the Diamond Knot Killer for an elaborate knot he used to tie up a Ventura couple before they were beaten to death with a fireplace log in 1980.

The killer was described at the time as white, about 5 feet 9 inches with blond or light brown hair.

The victims and their families deserve justice, said Monica Miller, special agent in charge of the FBI region. The victims and families ... still bear emotional scars from this horrific experience.

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WASHINGTONDonald Trumps latest accusation against President Barack Obama  that hes putting U.S. enemies ahead of Americas own people  is thrusting him into uncharted territory for the presidential candidate of any major political party.

Trump spent the first days following the Orlando nightclub massacre hinting Obama was sympathizing with or even supporting terrorists. Some of those times he said he was repeating what many people believe  one of the presumptive Republican nominees favourite ways to sprinkle conspiracy theories into the presidential campaign.

By Wednesday, Trump abandoned the innuendo and embraced a more pointed accusation against Obama.

Media fell all over themselves criticizing what Donald Trump may have insinuated about @POTUS. But hes right, Trump posted on Twitter. The message included a link to a story by Breitbart News, a Trump-friendly website, that claimed to have proof the Obama administration backed a terror group in Iraq.

It was unclear whether Trump wrote the message himself or was retweeting someone elses words. But in either case, it was an effort by the GOPs White House pick to explicitly link the sitting Democratic president with those seeking to harm Americans, just days after 49 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Florida.

Trumps comments regarding the president crossed every line, said John Weaver, who managed Ohio Gov. John Kasichs failed Republican presidential campaign. He cast Trump as a peddler of lies, fantasies and half-baked conspiracy theories.

For years, Trump has been the most high-profile proponent of the birther movement that falsely claims Obama is a Muslim who was born outside the United States, when in fact he is a Christian born in Hawaii. The businessman has also floated debunked conspiracy theories about former rival Ted Cruzs father being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton playing a role in the death of former White House aide Vince Foster.

For Republican officials already struggling with whether to fully embrace him, Trumps willingness to engage in stories usually limited to supermarket tabloids is only making their options more complicated.

I dont go for these conspiracy theories and the birtherism nonsense, said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa. The congressman, who has not endorsed Trump, said that while its fair to criticize aspects of Obamas approach to combating terrorism, I part company with those then who want to get into these conspiracy theories.

In a statement to The Associated Press on Tuesday, Trump said Obama continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies, and for that matter, the American people.

Clinton, who will face Trump in the November election, quickly challenged Republicans to either stand up to their presumptive nominee or stand by his accusation about our president.

Trumps suggestions about Obama come as the president takes a more active role in the White House race. In a blistering speech Tuesday, Obama said Trump was a dangerous threat to national security and was putting Americas religious freedoms at risk by calling for a temporary ban on foreign-born Muslims entering the U.S.

But the White House has avoided commenting on Trumps attempts to link Obama to terrorism, calling the matter small.

Trump has offered no verifiable information to back up his assertions. His theory was not supported by the document cited in the report he linked to Wednesday  a secret 2012 Defence Intelligence Agency analysis. The Breitbart story, citing that document, suggested that the United States was in league with Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to Daesh, also known as the Islamic State group.

Instead, the document states generally what was widely known at the time  that the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition to the government of Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

The U.S. backs several anti-Assad rebel groups but does not include Al Qaeda in any negotiations or material or financial support, even as it fights Assads government. Whether the U.S. co-operated with figures from that group is not addressed in the document.

Trump did not mention the report or his broader accusations during a rally Wednesday in Atlanta. But some of those in the crowd said they were on board with the candidates assertions.

I think hes dead on the money, said Brad Butler, a 45-year-old Trump supporter from Dallas, Georgia. So this is Islamic terror and this is his religion. Why would he (Obama) be mad at it?

Diane Gurganus, 70, from Jefferson, Georgia, said she, too, believed Obama was a Muslim whose religious beliefs were affecting the way he has responded to Daesh militants and the Orlando attacks.

Its like his agenda is to destroy America in everything hes done, she said.

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Inside the swirling cloud of gas and dust that surrounds a newborn star, scientists say theyve found an organic molecule thats a very early ingredient for life.

Its the gaseous form of methanol, a relatively large and complex organic compound that is needed to make things like amino acids, which in turn are used to build proteins. And that swirling cloud isnt just any old mess of mass  its a protoplanetary disc, the cluster of matter from which planets form, surrounding a star that looks very much like our own Sun would have in its youth.

The discovery proves theres definitely complexity that we can see around a very young star . . . and its some of the same chemical components we see in our solar system, said Ryan A. Loomis, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-author of a report on the find in the Astrophysical Journal.

The newborn star in question, TW Hydrae, is of particular interest to scientists because its so nearby and so closely resembles a 4-billion-years-younger version of the Sun. The orange dwarf star is about 176 lightyears from Earth and roughly 10 million years old  a mere infant in cosmic terms.

That makes it an excellent window into the early stages of our own solar system, Loomis explained. As it stands, the vast majority of what we know about the solar system 4 billion years ago comes from comets and meteorites, which act as geological time capsules from that era. Their composition attests to the molecules that were around at the time.

What we know right now . . . is kind of like paleontology, Loomis said. By comparison, examining TW Hydrae is like traveling back in time.

Working with the worlds most powerful telescope  the Atacama Large Milimeter/submillimeter Array, in Chile  Loomis and his colleagues parsed the microwave emissions coming from the protoplanetary disc around TW Hydrae in search of a particular frequency characteristic of methanol molecules. They found it, in spades.

Its not coming from just one or two molecules, its coming from a very large collection of them, Loomis said.

This is the first time methanol has been detected in a protoplanetary disc.

Because the molecule can only form as a solid, rather than in the gas phase, the researchers believe that the molecules must be forming in the ice that coats the very tiny dust particles making up the protoplanetary disc. If they found signatures of a great deal of methanol gas in the disc, then there must be even more of those molecules locked up in the ice.

Thats really important, because these dust grains are going to be the particles that collide and come together to form the planetesimals and comets, he said. And we know from comets in our own system . . . theyre going to have methanol as one of their components.

Thats significant, the researchers say, because it helps connect the dots of comet and planet formation, linking this very early dust cloud stage to what we see in our solar system today. It also indicates that the chemistry of our corner of the universe isnt unique when it comes to creating the early ingredients for life.

The detection of methanol is still a very long way away from finding living things outside our solar system, Loomis cautioned.

These arent prebiotic molecules, he said. But the precursors are there. And thats a start.

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LONDONA lawmaker who campaigned for Britain to stay in the European Union was killed Thursday by a gun- and knife-wielding attacker in her small-town constituency, a tragedy that brought the countrys fierce, divisive referendum campaign to a shocked standstill.

Jo Cox, a 41-year-old Labour Party legislator who praised the contribution of immigrants to Britain and championed the cause of war-scarred Syrian refugees, was attacked outside a library in Birstall, northern England, after a regular meeting with constituents.

Police would not speculate on the attackers motive, but Clarke Rothwell, who runs a cafe near the scene of the slaying, told the BBC and Britains Press Association that the assailant shouted Britain first! several times. Police did not confirm that account.

Witnesses described a man shooting Cox several times and then stabbing her as she lay on the pavement. Police said they had arrested a 52-year-old man and were not looking for anyone else.

Our working presumption . . . is that this is a lone incident, said Dee Collins, acting chief constable of West Yorkshire Police.

British security officials said the shooting didnt appear to be related to international terrorism, but domestic terrorism has not been ruled out.

Residents identified the suspect to the BBC and other media as Birstall resident Tommy Mair. Neighbours said Mair was a quiet man who did gardening jobs for local people.

Violence against British politicians has been rare since Northern Irelands late-1990s peace agreement. Cox was the first serving member of Parliament to be killed in a quarter-century, and figures from all parts of the political spectrum expressed deep shock.

Both the Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe campaigns suspended activity ahead of next weeks vote over whether Britain should remain a part of the 28-member bloc. Prime Minister David Cameron cancelled a speech and rally in Gibraltar, and flags on British government buildings were lowered to half-mast.

This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news, Cameron said. We have lost a great star. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the whole of the Labour Party and Labour family  and indeed the whole country  will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve, he said.

It was unclear whether the attack was directly related to the referendum campaign, which has stirred deep passions as Britons argue over their place in Europe, the scale of immigration and the future of their country.

The rival sides have been canvassing feverishly ahead of what is expected to be a close vote and Cox had been campaigning for the remain camp.

It wasnt clear whether Cox had been deliberately targeted. A 77-year-old man was also wounded, though it was unclear how he sustained his injuries.

Britains Press Association news agency quoted a witness, Hithem Ben Abdallah, as saying Cox got involved in a scuffle between two men in Birstall, a small market town some 320 kilometres north of London.

Abdallah said one of the men was fighting with Cox and then a gun went off twice and she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding on the ground.

Rothwell, the cafe worker, told the BBC he believed Cox had been shot and stabbed multiple times.

Three times she was shot, the initial time which then she dropped to the floor and two more times, he said. The third time he got proximity, he shot her around the head area.

In the meantime he was stabbing her as well. He was stabbing her with his knife, Rothwell said.

He was shouting, Put Britain first! He shouted it about two or three times.

Shopkeeper Sanjeev Kumar told the BBC he saw a woman lying on the ground bleeding from the mouth and nose, with two women trying to help her.

Cox spent many years working for aid groups including Oxfam and Save the Children, visiting problem-plagued areas, including Darfur and Afghanistan. She was elected to the House of Commons in the May 2015 general election and headed Parliaments Friends of Syria group.

She was one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the subject of the Syrian civil war, and was critical of Britains reluctance to deepen its military involvement against Daesh, also known as the Islamic State group, as part of efforts to end it. But she abstained last year when Parliament voted to launch airstrikes on Daesh targets in Syria, saying a more wide-ranging solution to the conflict was needed.

In her first speech to Parliament last year, Cox spoke of how the area she represented had been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan.

While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us, she said.

Immigration has been a flashpoint in the referendum campaign, with many leave supporters eager to curb the number of migrants to Britain by leaving the EU, which operates on the principle of free movement of people between member states.

Cox was an enthusiastic supporter of the remain cause in the referendum, and on Wednesday campaigned on the River Thames in London with her husband and two young children. Her husband, Brendan Cox, posted images on Twitter of the family in an inflatable dinghy, waving a flag supporting continued British EU membership.

Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love, Brendan Cox said in a statement after the slaying.

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her, he said. Hate doesnt have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

Canadian MP Nathan Cullen teetered on the edge of tears as he paid tribute to Cox in the Commons today.

The New Democrat MPs voice broke several times during his brief comments, on the Labour politician, who was shot and stabbed on the street outside a meeting in her constituency.calling the Labour politician a friend and a mother of two beautiful children, saying she spoke for those who had no voice.

Cullen described Cox as having devoted her passion to those who needed it most.

He called her an advocate for human rights around the world.

Her husband Brendan said it beautifully: She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, that our children are bathed in love and that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her, Cullen said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the killing was an assault on everyone who cares about and has faith in democracy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the incident tragic, while French President Francois Hollande sent condolences and compassion to Coxs family and loved ones, and expressed his full solidarity with the British people.

No serving U.K. member of Parliament has been killed since 1990, when the Irish Republican Army killed Conservative lawmaker Ian Gow with a booby-trap bomb placed under his car outside his English home. A former lawmaker, Donald Kaberry, was injured in an IRA bombing in 1990 and died the next year.

In the past two decades, two other British lawmakers have been attacked during their surgeries, regular meetings where constituents can present concerns and complaints.

Labour legislator Stephen Timms was stabbed in the stomach and injured in May 2010 by a female student radicalized by online sermons from an al-Qaida-linked preacher.

In 2000, Liberal Democrat lawmaker Nigel Jones and his aide Andrew Pennington were attacked by a man wielding a sword during such a meeting. Pennington was killed and Jones injured in the attack in Cheltenham, England.

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MOUNT ZION -- With a new location prominently placed in front of the Mount Zion Convention Center, the Hidden Lair does not exactly live up to its name.

But with spacious areas set for retail and for up to 100 gamers to gather, store Manager Andy Still is not too concerned.

After two years in a tiny, 1,300-square-foot facility just a few miles south, the Hidden Lair has unveiled its new, 3,000 square feet of space off Illinois 121 that serves as a calling to all those interested in games that span the board, card and role playing types.

That extra space not only allows for 700 square feet to be dedicated to retail items, but also an area that, once fully set up, will allow up to 102 people will be able to play, Still said.

Its a nice change of pace from the previous location, where customers and regulars could almost get too close for comfort.

Some of the regulars tell me, I remember when you could be standing at the counter and talk in a normal volume and I could hear you, Still said.

While that was a fun memory, the tight space was not as enjoy when it began to affect business.

With an area that could barely squeeze more than 40 people into the store, Still said it was not unusual to see potential customers stand at the door and soon walk out after seeing the sheer number of people during gaming events.

They would come back a couple of days later when the store was not as busy and say, We came in on Sunday, but it was just hard to come up to the counter,  Still said. So we just wanted to alleviate that.

When inventory began to overtake the store as well, Still said it became time to move.

So after purchasing its new location at 1460 N Ill. 121, it became time to smash their way through the original infrastructure. Where before the longtime customers would come to play games such as Yu-Gi-Oh! or Warhammer 40k, the put their electrical and demolition skills to good use.

We had a few players help with the demo and the wiring, Still said. It was very much a family affair.

The new location has been a nice change of pace for those such as Andrew Tempel, who was among more than a dozen who came out on a Wednesday night for a Yu-Gi-Oh card game. After playing at the last location, Tempel said the new one was more convenient.

Its a lot better gaming, more space here than before, he said. I was happy to see this for the first time. It could get crowded to game in the last space.

As Hidden Lair has helped give a face lift to the northern entrance of Mount Zion, as the corridor of Ill. 121 also has welcomed the Ruff-Inn-It suite hotel for cats and dogs.

Aside from the positive presentation of new businesses on the highway through the village, the boom of businesses creates a "fever" to the existing businesses to improve themselves, Village Administrator Julie Miller said.

When a new business comes in and turns an old, dilapidated area into something bright, new and shiny, even the existing businesses get excited, she said. They start putting up new signs and looking at the exteriors of their businesses and thinking, I want to make this look better. 

As they put the final touches to settle the Hidden Lair into its new home, Still said they hope to make the Lair a location where regional tournaments can be hosted and games can regularly be rotated in to give gamers variety. With its proximity, Still said he has had conversations with the Mount Zion Convention Center about hosting major tournaments.
LONDON  British Prime Minister David Camerons high-stakes decision to let the British public decide whether the country stays in the European Union looks increasingly like a bad bet, with his party veering into civil war, the polls pointing toward an exit and the Conservative leaders job appearing ever more precarious.

Just a week before Britain votes, the prime ministers hope of settling once and for all the countrys long-simmering European question with a resounding vote to stay in the European Union may be out of reach. Surveys show the country is almost exactly divided, with momentum in recent days for out.

If Britain does vote to leave  a scenario popularly known as Brexit  analysts say that Cameron would probably be forced to resign, perhaps within hours of the result.

Even if British voters heed Camerons call to stay in the European Union, a narrow victory could leave him vulnerable to a vengeance-fueled coup by pro-Brexit politicians in his party who think the prime minister has played dirty in his no-holds-barred campaign to keep Britain in.

The fragility of Camerons position marks a stunning turnabout for a politician who won a commanding electoral victory just a year ago, and who called the EU referendum as a way to unify his fractious party behind his leadership.

This has turned out worse for Cameron than he ever conceived it could have, said Roger Mortimore, a politics professor at Kings College London who directs political analysis at the polling firm Ipsos Mori. I dont think anyone really saw this coming. Its very clear that David Cameron didnt see it coming.

Among the prime ministers gravest misjudgments, Mortimore said, was that he could rely on the small clique of Oxford-educated politicians who with Cameron form the upper echelon of Conservative Party politics. Instead of loyalty, several have jettisoned the prime minister and one  the shaggy-haired, populist former London mayor Boris Johnson  has all but declared his intention to topple the man who has led Britain for the past six years.

Johnson and other pro-Brexit dissidents, said professor Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London, form a pop-up government in waiting that is prepared to seize power if the Brexit vote does not go Camerons way. That dynamic, he said, has made for a particularly nasty campaign.

Given the division in the party over Europe, there was always going to be some friction, said Bale, who has written books on the Conservatives. But its been made worse by the fact that there are an awful lot of personal ambitions at stake here as well.

In recent weeks, as polls have revealed an electorate stubbornly divided on E.U. membership, both sides have resorted to personal attacks of a sort rarely seen within the highest reaches of a British governing party.

Johnson and his allies have accused Cameron of misleading the public with scary stories about the devastating effect Brexit would have on the countrys economy. In campaign appearances, the voluble Johnson has attacked the prime ministers case for staying in the European Union as propaganda and a hoax.

Cameron and his allies have returned fire by calling Johnson out on what they regard as his naked ambition. In a nationally televised debate last week, Cameron loyalist Amber Rudd noted pointedly that the only number Boris is interested in is the one that says Number 10 a sly reference to the door number on the prime ministers Downing Street residence.

Although the acerbic and personalized tone of the debate is new, the profound split within the Conservative Party is not. It dates at least to the 1980s and the reign of Tory icon Margaret Thatcher. Her views on Europe were decidedly mixed, and both sides in the current debate have claimed her backing from beyond the grave.

The question of whether Britain should be part of the European Union cuts across the countrys left-right political divide. Among Tories, staying in the union appeals to pro-business politicians who favour the benefits of low trade barriers with continental economies. But the party also has a deep nationalistic tradition, and the idea that Britain can only be truly sovereign outside the European Union resonates with the Conservative grass roots.

So, too, does the pro-Brexit camps claim that leaving Europe will allow the United Kingdom to significantly reduce immigration.

When Cameron gambled and promised voters a direct say on the European Union in January 2013, Conservatives faced a sharp challenge from the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party.

By offering a referendum, Cameron thought he could outflank the UKIP and mend the long-standing rift within his party. The first part worked, with Conservatives winning an unexpected majority in last years general election while UKIP remained marginalized.

But the second part appears to have backfired.

Its come at the price of creating these very public divisions within the party, and possibly setting off this chain of events that is spiraling out of control for him, said Thomas Quinn, who teaches politics at the University of Essex.

If Britain votes to leave the European Union next Thursday, despite Cameron putting his full weight behind the case for staying in, Quinn said the prime ministers odds of keeping his job would be slim to nonexistent.

He just wouldnt have the authority, Quinn said. He could be offering his resignation within a few days  if not on the day.

But even if Cameron pulls out a close victory, he could still be in peril, with pro-Brexit Tories blaming him for undermining their long-awaited chance to break free of the European Union.

Andrew Bridgen, a Tory member of Parliament who favours Brexit, said in an interview that unless Britain votes to stay in the European Union by a wide margin, Cameron should step down.

The prime minister has led a very disingenuous campaign on the most crucial question our country will face in my lifetime, he said. Hes blown his credibility with the electorate.

Others in the party say that Conservatives need to get beyond the damaging clash of personalities and start focusing on the substance of sorting out Britains place in the world. That will be a challenge regardless how the public votes, said Phillip Lee, a Tory member of Parliament who favours staying in the European Union.

What kind of country do we want to be going forward? Lee said. I hope that post-referendum, the debate doesnt stop. Within the Conservative Party, we need to come to terms with what Britains role in the world ought to be.

But at least in the short term, the struggle for power could drown out any broader discussion.

If Cameron doesnt step down, all it will take is for 50 Conservative members of Parliament  out of a total of 330  to force a no-confidence vote.

His ouster would trigger a leadership contest in which the Tory faction in Parliament selects two candidates from among its ranks to vie to become the next prime minister. The winner would be chosen by Conservative Party members nationwide. The general public would not get a vote.

Quinn, who has written a book on British party leadership contests, rated Johnsons chances of becoming prime minister by the end of the year at 40 per cent.

That is despite the fact that Johnson has alienated parliamentary colleagues and foreign leaders with his over-the-top comments during the campaign.

The publicity-hungry Johnson has drawn comparisons to U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump for his suggestion that the EU and Hitler both had the same goal, and his insinuation that President Obama is hostile toward Britain because of his part Kenyan heritage.

Nonetheless, Johnson remains popular with the Conservative rank-and-file members who would ultimately pick the prime minister if Cameron steps down.

He has that x-factor that other politicians dont seem to have, said Bale, the Queen Mary University professor. But hes hardly a safe pair of hands. Im not sure hes seen as someone who can lead the party  or indeed, the country.

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WASHINGTON  Donald Trump is a danger to Canada and the world, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said in Washington on Thursday in an unusual foray into a foreign election.

I think that a candidate for the presidency of the United States who is intent on being divisive, who is intent on ignoring the realities of the global economy, and doesnt see the benefit of an inclusive, pluralistic society  I think its very dangerous for Canada, and I think its dangerous for the world, Wynne said in an interview at the Canadian embassy.

A Trump presidency would be destabilizing for the continent, she said, but it would go well beyond the continent.

It is uncommon for premiers to criticize candidates in other countries, especially during visits there. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to respond directly to a flurry of Trump-related queries during an official visit to Washington in March, saying repeatedly that he had faith in the American electorate.

Wynne, also a Liberal, did not utter the Republican nominees name. But she portrayed him as an ignoramus on the economy and a malice in his approach to Muslims.

I think anyone who pretends that unrealistic protectionism is going to be helpful to any of us doesnt understand the realities of the 21st century, she said when asked about his vow to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement. I think we need to find ways of working together, not being hostile to one another.

She added: Pretending we can separate ourselves from each other, its just not realistic.

Trump has offered a steady stream of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy. Among his signature policies is a temporary ban on all foreign Muslims entering the country.

That kind of rhetoric that is, again, so divisive, and so out of touch I think with the reality of our combined population. And it really is a very different tone than weve heard before in American elections, Wynne said. And I do think  well, I know  it causes me anxiety in terms of what the outcome could be.

Wynne met Thursday with high-profile Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a vocal Trump critic who is reportedly being vetted by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-presidential pick.

Wynne declined to endorse Clinton, but she has left no doubt about her preference. A president who understands how the world works, and works toward global co-operation, is going to advance the cause both of the United States and the world much better than dividing and creating hostility, she said when asked about the former secretary of state on Thursday.

Wynne said the focus of the visit was to reconfirm how important our trade relationship is.

She also met with Labor Secretary Tom Perez, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. She gave a speech, closed to the media, at an embassy luncheon on innovation and climate change.

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Dr. Joao Goulao, national drug co-ordinator for Portugal

In the 1980s and 90s, heroin was Portugals public enemy No. 1  and now its not. What changed is simple: the country decriminalized drugs. So, as Canadians await Ottawas plan to legalize, regulate and restrict marijuana, what can we learn from Portugal? Dr. Joao Goulao, Portugals drug czar, is speaking at of a national conference on the future of Canadas drug policy in Toronto Friday. He spoke to the Star on the lessons of decriminalization.

What has happened in Portugal since possession of illegal drugs was decriminalized in 2001?

We had a devastating situation back in the mid-1990s with a huge level of HIV and Hepatitis C infection among intravenous drug users. So we changed our system and looked at those using drugs not as criminals but as addicts. We decriminalized all illicit drugs from heroin to cocaine.

How does the system work?

If police catch someone doing cocaine, for example, the person is issued a summons to appear before the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction. You are evaluated by a social worker, a psychiatrist and an attorney. They look at the history of your consumption. Are you an occasional or recreational user, or are you an addict? How is your family support? Then you are offered treatment.

Its not compulsory. But you are registered in a system and tracked if you are caught again using drugs. You may, in some cases, be issued a fine.

What has been the impact?

One of the most impressive indicators today is the decrease in new infection rates of HIV and Hep C among IV drug users. Weve also had a decrease in drug overdoses, from 94 in 2008 to 33 in 2014.

Do you attribute this to decriminalization?

No. Its multifactorial. The results weve had are thanks to a complete package of policies that focus on treatment, prevention, harm reduction, reintegrating drug addicts into society, offering methadone treatment and other therapies.

Any change in legal framework must have behind it an increased availability for treatment and intervention to help users. Changing the framework alone doesnt lead us to any kind of improvement.

Do people agree to treatment?

Yes. In the 1980s, the No. 1 public enemy in our society was heroin. Today, heroin has faded and we have more people seeking help for programs related to marijuana addiction. The biggest group seeking treatment are people addicted to alcohol. The next biggest category is marijuana.

There is a broad consensus in our country about our approach. It is not controversial.

Canada and the U.S. have a widespread problem with the abuse of prescription drugs such as fentanyl and others. Is that going on in Europe?

No. We dont have a problem with opioid addiction. We do prescribe opioids, but very strictly. We dont have an imported black market of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

The prescription rules must be carefully evaluated in other jurisdictions.

Has your approach allowed police to target dealers and traffickers?

Yes, the police have improved their efficiency in terms of arresting large-scale traffickers.

Once they got rid of the small fish, with whom they used to spend a lot of energy and time on, they could address the criminal organizations. More drugs have been seized.

Has marijuana use gone up since Portugal decriminalized it?

No. While cannabis is by far the most common illicit drug, the number of users has remained stable. In Portugal, we see a delay in the age of first-time users as well.

Is Portugal a model for Canada?

We have been a social laboratory for a few years. We are happy to inspire other countries, especially in Europe. But we are now happy to learn from the experiences of other countries as they reform drug laws.

It is our turn to follow the experiments taking place in other parts of the world.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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WASHINGTONThe slaughter in Florida and an attention-grabbing filibuster in the Senate did little to break the election-year stalemate in Congress over guns Thursday, with both sides unwilling to budge and Republicans standing firm against any new legislation opposed by the National Rifle Association.

Democrats renewed their call to action after Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., held the floor along with colleagues in a nearly 15-hour filibuster that lasted into the early hours Thursday.

"We can't just wait, we have to make something happen," said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., at an emotional news conference where Democrats joined family members of people killed in recent mass shootings. "These are people bound by brutality, and their numbers are growing."

But Republicans were coolly dismissive of Democrats' demands. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., derided Murphy's filibuster as a "campaign talk-a-thon" that did nothing but delay potential votes.

Noting that a few Democrats had skipped a classified briefing on the Florida nightclub shooting to participate in the filibuster, McConnell chided: "It's hard to think of a clearer contrast for serious work for solutions on the one hand, and endless partisan campaigning on the other."

Democrats spoke of the need for new gun legislation. Republicans cited the threat posed by Daesh, also known as the Islamic State or ISIS, to which Orlando gunman Omar Mateen swore allegiance while killing 49 people in a gay nightclub early Sunday. But the two sides mostly talked past each other, and efforts to forge consensus quickly sputtered out. As a result, the Senate faced the prospect of taking dueling votes beginning Monday on Democratic and GOP bills, all of which looked destined to fail.

The back-and-forth came as President Barack Obama visited the victims' families in Orlando, and called on lawmakers to act.

"Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense," Obama said.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined Senate Democrats' call for action. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump weighed in with a tweet suggesting he would meet with the NRA and support efforts to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. Exactly what he would support was unclear.

It's the same exercise the Senate has engaged in time and again after mass shootings. Even after the Newtown, Connecticut, shootings of schoolchildren, the Senate could not pass a bipartisan background checks bill. Moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine criticized the state of affairs as "Groundhog Day."

After the shooting in San Bernardino, California, last year, the effort was downgraded to trying to pass a bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to keep people on a government terrorism watch list or other suspected terrorists from buying guns, but that too failed.

This time, Feinstein is seeking a revote on her bill. Republicans will offer an alternative by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would allow the government to delay a gun sale to a suspected terrorist for 72 hours, but require prosecutors to go to court to show probable cause to block the sale permanently.

Votes were also expected on dueling background check bills. All were expected to fail.

Collins said she was working with other Republicans, as well as talking to Democrats, on a bill that would prevent people on the no-fly list  a smaller universe than targeted by Democrats  from getting guns. But her bill had not been blessed by GOP leaders and it was unclear if it would get a vote.

Polls show large numbers of Americans agree with the need for at least some limited gun measures such as background checks. But Democrats have been unable to turn the tide of public opinion to their purpose because the NRA is able to mobilize and energize voters who will threaten to vote lawmakers out on the gun issue alone.

This past week, the NRA made robo-calls in Pennsylvania urging people to contact their senators and "express their strong opposition to any new gun control laws."

In the GOP-controlled House, Republicans had no plans to act on guns and Democrats were unable to force any action, given House rules less favourable to the minority party than in the Senate. Instead the House passed a bundle of previously approved counterterrorism bills and sent them to the Senate again.

"The question is, is going after the Second Amendment how you stop terrorism? No. That's not how you stop terrorism," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

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Tomorrow marks 10 years since one of the worst days of our life. It also marks 10 years since our daughter, Sarah Beth Therien, changed organ and tissue donation in Canada.

Sarah Beth was only 32 when she collapsed suddenly, following a cardiac arrest. It was a terrible shock to everyone who had known our healthy and happy girl, and within a few days we found ourselves facing the decision to withdraw life support. Our family wouldnt wish this circumstance on anyone, it was heart wrenching and devastating.

During that dark time however, there was one light that shone through. Our Sarah Beth was a giving and generous soul, she lived to help others. We knew she believed strongly in organ donation. We wanted to help her give that final gift.

It may come as a surprise to most to learn that the opportunity for organ donation is quite rare. Ten years ago in Ontario, donation was only an option when someone had been declared brain dead, which happens in only 1 to 2 per cent of hospital deaths. Although Sarah Beth was no longer with us she didnt technically meet the criteria for brain death, so it seemed to all that donation was not an option. Of course we had always known never to underestimate our Sarah Beth, so we should have guessed that something remarkable was in the works.

At the time, Ontario was close to adding a second form of donation. Referred to as donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD), the protocol allowed for donation after life support was removed, rather than a patient having to have died while on a ventilator. We knew something about this and we took a chance, asking the hospital if we could make this happen for Sarah Beth.

Sarah Beth was not brain dead, but she was not coming back to us. With the support of Trillium Gift of Life Network and the Ottawa Hospital, our daughter became Canadas first DCD donor. Two people received her kidneys and have been able to lead productive lives since that time, and dozens benefitted from the gift of her tissue.

Sarah Beths legacy continues. In the 10 years since her death, 1,067 transplants have been performed in Ontario with organs from DCD donors  thats more than 1,000 lives saved because of something that started with our

daughter. More than 1,000 families who have had their loved one returned to them.

Today, almost one third of the deceased donors in Ontario are DCD. This knowledge has sustained us, has helped us through the difficult years we have had to live without her. We know, because Sarah Beth told us, that this is exactly what she would have wanted. We are comforted in knowing we were able to make that happen for her.

Death is an uncomfortable subject, it isnt easy to talk about and it isnt easy to think about in connection with our loved ones. We understand that, better than most. We ask that today you think about it a bit differently. Think about the things you can do now, to help make that sad, inevitable moment a little bit easier for your family. Register your consent as an organ and tissue donor. Then have the conversation, tell your family this is important to you, ask that they do the same.

Our Sarah Beth is gone, but she lives on. We thank her every day for the gift she left us, the assurance, and the peace of knowing her wishes. In the 10 years since we lost her weve gained a passion, to educate people on the importance of donation, and to ensure that every family facing a loss like ours has the same opportunity to make a life-saving choice. Now, 10 years later, there are thousands of Ontarians living because of one thoughtful conversation. Will you have yours?

In Ontario, you can register your consent to be an organ donor at: www.beadonor.ca . It will take someone all of two minutes.

Beth and Emile Therien are the parents of Sarah Beth and are passionate advocates in favour of organ and tissue donation. They volunteer with the Trillium Gift of Life Network, the organ and tissue donation agency of the Ontario Ministry of Health and with the Canadian Blood Services, organs and tissues division.

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On the surface, it seemed like unfortunate political timing. On May 30th, Kathleen Wynne apologized for historic abuses toward indigenous peoples as part of her official response to the Truth and Reconciliation commission. We do not approach reconciliation as something we need to get over with  we approach it as something we need to get right, she said.

And yet, just an hour later, she was getting heat in Question Period for getting it very wrong in her response to an environmental crime-in-progress on indigenous land that has been going on for almost 60 years.

It just so happened that week was the biennial Grassy Narrows River Run, when community members from the First Nation travel 1,700 km to Toronto to press the government for action on the disaster of mercury in their lakes and rivers. Their struggle has been continuous since 1970, when the vast industrial dumping of the toxin into the English-Wabigoon river system first came to light.

This time, the folks from Grassy came armed with a game-changing scientific report  commissioned by a working group set up by Wynne herself when she was aboriginal affairs minister  that makes an irrefutable case that the mercury poisoning can and must be cleaned up.

When I was a kid, growing up in Scarborough in the early 1970s, I heard a lot about Grassy Narrows. Thats because my father Stephen Lewis, the leader of the Ontario NDP at the time, was battling the government of the day to respond to the mercury emergency.

We had a book of photographs at home by the legendary Life magazine photographer Eugene Smith. It was called Minamata, and it shaped my political consciousness. The heartbreaking portraits of the victims of severe industrial mercury contamination in Japan were made all the more powerful by the fact people in our province were suffering the same impacts.

I couldnt believe kids my age  for the simple act of eating fish from the lakes and rivers  could suffer such agonizing consequences. And yet when doctors from Japan travelled to Grassy Narrows to conduct tests, the government refused to accept their diagnosis of Minamata disease. To this day, the Ontario government cannot bring itself to call the disease by its name.

Recently, I went back and read some of the transcripts from the legislature in the 1970s. There was one incident that jumped out for me.

After the mercury poisoning came to light, commercial fishing was banned in the area and most recreational fishing lodges shut down. At the stroke of a pen, the entire economy of the region was gutted, with unemployment exploding from 5 per cent to 95 per cent virtually overnight. Even today, unemployment remains 80 per cent in Grassy Narrows.

Rather than cleaning up the river, the government of the day  in a revealing gesture of hopelessly colonial charity  constructed a building-sized freezer in Grassy Narrows and filled it with processed frozen fish. This was supposed to be some kind of solution.

The cultural gap is breathtaking. Of course, the people didnt eat the weird frozen fish and to this day this incident gets rehashed as proof that Grassy Narrows has been offered remediation in the past and refused it.

But the symbolism is rich: what better image than a concrete bunker full of rot to tell us that paternalistic solutions are way past their best-before date? And yet the shelves seem perennially stocked full of them.

Until we as settlers really get the centrality of living off the land for indigenous peoples, we will never get it right.

And governments across this country need to understand that attempts at reconciliation will fail until we deal with the fundamental issue of land rights from the Energy East pipeline in Quebec to the Site C dam in British Columbia.

It may be that Premier Wynne is starting to learn that lesson. On May 30th, the premier had never heard of the scientific report calling for remediation of the river system. By the end of the week, her environment minister said the government was just deciding which of the remediation approaches to fund. Then last week, the government announced a delegation of cabinet ministers and scientists to Grassy Narrows.

This issue is back on the agenda in Ontario in a way it hasnt been since I toddled along behind my dad on those endless red carpets in Queens Park. But this time, the frame has changed, and the message is as clear as the water in Grassy Narrows Lake: the conversation about reconciliation can begin when the fish are safe to eat again.

Avi Lewis is a filmmaker and journalist. He directed the documentary This Changes Everything.

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Re: Hillary's big day trivialized, Letter June 13

Hillary's big day trivialized, Letter June 13

I do not get all the excitement over Hillary Clinton as a female leader. To hear some, like letter writer John Nazareth, we should be celebrating Margaret Thatcher day!

Being a woman is not enough: been there, done that. I will celebrate Hillary when she proves, despite her fealty to Wall Street, that she even cares about other women more than money.

Bill Livingstone, Toronto

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Re: Act now on Grassy Narrows, Letter June 11

Act now on Grassy Narrows, Letter June 11

It is imperative that we Canadians arouse ourselves and stop poisoning our indigenous people. For goodness sake lets take concrete action to redeem ourselves, strive to correct historic wrongs. Where to begin?

Clean up the Wabigoon river bed. Mercury levels are on the rise again according to the latest reports. We can fly to the moon, yet we still havent a project underway guaranteed to put this dreadful mercury problem to bed, once and for all.

The chief of the Grassy Narrows Reserve, Simon Fobister Sr., recently wrote a poignant article for the Star in which he graciously acknowledged the apologies of federal and provincial leaders for past wrongs designed to destroy the First Nations peoples culture and identity.

The chief rightly deplored the display of pussy footing now underway respecting Wabigoon river mercury clean-up procedures.

Mercury poisoning is deadly. In the seventies I was part of a federal-provincial delegation which visited Minamata, Japan, where a mercury poisoning outbreak had been underway for several years. This outbreak had remarkable similarities to what was then occurring in Grassy Narrows, northern Ontario.

I visited the local hospital where the poisoned children were being cared for. What a terrible sight. Brain-damaged, misshapen children in their mothers arms, the mothers beseeching us for news of a cure. They thought, wrongly, that we, the wealthy, high-tech North Americans, surely were bringing news of a cure. Regrettably, not so! We were information gathering, thats all.

Visions of those malformed children remain with me. The stable food of poor fisher folk children had been poisoned. Not too many people cared. Those responsible for the mercury pollution were slow to admit fault. Those affected were very poor people, with little voice to protect themselves.

Like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Kathleen Wynne is a good-hearted person. Ontarians were moved by her recent apology to the First Nations people for the horrific past wrongs inflicted upon them spanning over a century. But now the real work must begin. With respect to the mercury in the lakes and river bed, our two levels of government need to get it done, institute measures to prevent the poisoning of our Canadian indigenous people. Thats what Canadians want.

Equally concerning is the fact that drinking water supplies on a large number of reserves across Canada are contaminated by highly dangerous levels of infectious bacteria. This has been the case for decades, and government authorities have done little to correct this dreadful situation.

Words of sorrow concerning past wrongs are not enough. These words must be matched by actions.

Grassy Narrows Reserve families who use the Wabigoon river as one of their traditional sources of food, are being poisoned again by mercury contaminated fish. The children are in danger of being brain damaged.

Our political decision makers should not further shame the people of Ontario, of Canada, with lame excuses as to why the Wabigoon river cannot be cleaned up post haste, or why safe drinking water cannot be assured for our indigenous people. In the name of all decent Canadians, do it. Just do it.

Gerard C. Ronan, former assistant deputy minister, Ontario Ministry of the Environment

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Re: Och! Our MPs toast with a drink from across the ocean? June 11

Och! Our MPs toast with a drink from across the ocean? June 11

How extremely unsettling it was to learn that House of Commons Speaker Geoff Regan had opted to select Aberlour Single Malt Scotch whisky over a Canadian Whisky (of which we have so many historically great ones) as the new official Scotch of the House of Commons.

Am I missing something  is this the preferred Whisky or is there also a preferred Canadian Rye Whisky that will get precedence over this one? If Im not missing something, then this is a disgrace.

Ive been involved in the Canadian whisky business since 1967. Canadian whisky is made in Canada and has a history and tradition in our country dating back hundreds of years with a reputation around the world as being amongst the finest spirits money can buy.

Canadian whisky is to Canada what oil is to Saudi Arabia. If Mr. Regan cant clarify or rectify this situation he should be shown the door.

Marty Fruchtman, Toronto

House Speaker Geoff Regan, from Halifax, needs an update. Shame on them for not considering the famous one from Nova Scotia. The famous Glen Breton Rare is North Americas first single malt whisky. Produced by the Glenora Distillery of Cape Breton. A unique Canadian product that should be mandatory serving for those Parliamentary functions.

John Lupien, Toronto

So the members of the House of Commons chose a $65 bottle of single malt for official functions, eh? How do I get invited to one of these functions?

Alan Pellettier, Scarborough

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Up until now, Angela Kennedy has been an outspoken critic of the provinces new sex-ed curriculum.

But, devastated after recently learning her son had been sexually abused as a child, the chair of the Toronto Catholic board has changed her mind.

After whats happened with Brian, I asked him: What can I do? And he said: Support the sex-ed curriculum,  Kennedy said of her son, who is now 30 and a teacher.

He said, Children need to know those facts  you cant have a dialogue without those facts. This is what you can do. So I took a look at it, went through every grade, went through it thoroughly, and thought, You know what, this is all good information. 

When asked if she had read the curriculum back when she argued it was out of step with Catholic values, she responded: I had read it, but this time I read it with a different perspective, a different feeling, a different lens. Maybe (this time) I read it less with the lens of a trustee, and was now reading it with the lens of a parent, and one whose own son had disclosed abuse. I had, maybe, a bigger purpose.

Ontarios updated health curriculum has caused controversy in some pockets across the province, in particular among parents who have argued the information is age inappropriate and includes things they should teach their own children at the time they choose.

In Grade 1, children learn the proper terms for genitalia; in Grade 3, about accepting differences, which can include talk about families with two moms or two dads; puberty in Grade 4, sexual consent in Grade 6, and abstinence and sexually transmitted diseases in Grade 7.

Angela Kennedy is a mother still reeling from her sons revelation, and shes not sure if it would have made a difference if he had had such information. He in no way blames his parents for the abuse a man in the neighbourhood inflicted on him when he was growing up.

However, she said, the fact is, he said he didnt have all the information. I dont know if having it would have protected him or not, but its better to have the information than not.

The sex-ed curriculum issue was one that she, husband Alistair and their seven sons had debated, especially last fall when it was first introduced in Ontario schools. (She had earlier tried to get the Catholic board to pressure the province to delay its implementation.)

It was not an enjoyable conversation around the kitchen table, Brian Kennedy recalled. I tend not to speak about politics with my mom, and this was one thing where I kind of really had to stand up for it . . . especially around September, when it was implemented, there was so much fear-mongering and misinformation around the curriculum, and parents were pulling their kids out of school.

At some point, my anger with that fear-mongering and miscommunication resonated with her, he said, adding that she really began to see the importance of the curriculum after she read a detailed and moving story he wrote about the abuse, and published online in February.

He only told his parents this past summer about the abuse he suffered at age 11. He arranged a lunch meeting but felt ready to tell them only when they were in the parking lot afterwards. They were the hardest people to tell, he said, knowing it would be a horrifying feeling to find out what he went through, and he didnt want them to feel responsible in any way.

Like his friends who also grew up in a Catholic household, he didnt hear about sex from his parents. I learned about sexuality from TV and older kids in the neighbourhood, which is not a safe and positive space, Brian Kennedy said. Its much more exploitative; its not a space where you could ask questions.

Angela Kennedy said she doesnt remember sitting each and every one of them down to talk about sex, but that she and her husband were always available to their sons, and she does recall some conversations. But when she, too, was growing up, it was pretty taboo . . . Im a nurse, and I thought I was open, but with a big family the days were busy, and, anyway, sex talk is pretty difficult in a Catholic family.

Working in the health field, she saw the value of sex education, but I couldnt figure a way where I could still protect the Catholic faith and Catholic values . . . but it was plain to me after discussions with the boys that I can. You just teach the facts, and then as parents you can give a Catholic perspective or give whatever religious perspective you want, after you have the facts.

Brian Kennedy, who is on leave from the Catholic board, has seen a therapist and joined a male survivor group after realizing that the more he talked about what happened to him, the more I felt better about it. Im an educator and a person who believes, and who has seen the positive effect of telling people and talking about it. He decided to go public with his story not only for himself, but for other survivors.

We want our students to be courageous in how they go through their life, and its important we are an example of open communication, he said.

As he wrote in his story: Im a living example that we need more dialogue around sexual health, not less. We need to encourage boys and girls to ask questions, or risk that theyll bury them, like I did.

I believe that if I were exposed to this dialogue, to this curriculum, that I would have had a chance at identifying, addressing and confronting my abuse much earlier than I did. Perhaps it would have helped my abuser as well.

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TUSCOLA  A Douglas County judge said Wednesday that he will rule next week on whether Alan Beamans lawsuit against three retired Normal police officers will move forward.

If Judge Richard Broch Jr. denies a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by lawyers for three former officers and the town of Normal, Beaman would return to the McLean County Law and Justice Center for a trial involving accusations that he killed a Decatur woman in 1993. The case would focus on the Normal Police Department and its handling of the murder case that sent Beaman to prison for more than 13 years, before he was released.

The judge set a July 28 pretrial hearing, where motions from both sides to exclude certain evidence may be heard.

Beaman, now 43 and living in Rockford with his wife and two children, is seeking more than $50,000 in damages from the town of Normal and retired police officers Tim Freesmeyer, Dave Warner and Frank Zayas.

In 2009, the Illinois Supreme Court vacated Beamans conviction in the death of Jennifer Lockmiller, a 22year-old Illinois State University student who was found strangled and stabbed in her apartment in Normal in 1993. The McLean County states attorneys office later opted to dismiss the murder charges that were, according to the Supreme Court, based on weak and tenuous evidence.
Revlon (REV) announced after the markets closed Thursday that it would acquire fellow cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden (RDEN) for about $870 million in cash.

Under the terms of the deal, Revlon will pay $14 per Elizabeth Arden share, a premium of roughly 50% over Elizabeth Arden's close of $9.31 on Thursday. Elizabeth Arden has 29.95 million shares outstanding, implying an equity value of about $419 million. Including refinancing existing debt, the purchase price yields an enterprise value of about $870 million.

The companies expect cost synergies of $140 million through "the elimination of duplicative activities, leveraging purchasing scale and optimizing the manufacturing and distribution networks." Assuming those cost savings materialize, Revlon expects leverage of 4.2 times net debt to adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Revlon said in the statement that the addition of Elizabeth Arden will improve its presence in growing regions such as Asia Pacific and diversify its offerings in high-growth categories, including licensed prestige fragrances and branded skincare.

Activist hedge fund Rhone Capital holds 14% of Elizabeth Arden shares and 20% of its voting power. After urging the company to explore a sale, Rhone in August 2014 made a strategic investment in the Miramar, Fla., company, boosting its stake from about 7.6% via a tender offer valued at up to $159.5 million.

Elizabeth Arden Chairman and CEO E. Scott Beattie owns a 4% stake in the company. Following the close of the merger, which the companies anticipated by year's end, Beattie will join Revlon's board of directors as nonexecutive vice chairman and senior adviser to Revlon CEO Fabian Garcia during the transition period.

On closing, New York's Revlon said its expected 2016 net sales will increase to about $3 billion from a range of $2 billion to $2.1 billion, with adjusted EBITDA increasing to $560 million from a range of $400 million to $420 million.

Revlon is controlled by Ron Perelman, who through his MacAndrews & Forbes vehicle owns a roughly 77% stake. MacAndrews & Forbes announced on Jan. 15 that it had retained Adam O. Emmerich and DongJu Song of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to advise on a review of strategic alternatives, shortly after which then-CEO Lorenzo Delpani stepped down for "personal reasons."

Last fall, ratings agencies Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's downgraded Elizabeth Arden, both citing an unsustainable capital structure. Moody's downgraded the company's corporate family rating to Caa1 from B2 and S&P to CCC+ from B. S&P analysts warned at the time that Elizabeth Arden's core product market, the "celebrity brand fragrance market, is oversaturated, and the company lacks product innovation," but it did not forecast default for the following 12 months.

Elizabeth Arden shares jumped nearly 50% to $13.96 in after-hours trading Thursday. Revlon shares were up 0.5% to $31.30.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup Global Markets committed financing of $2.6 million to fund the acquisition and to refinance Elizabeth Arden's debt and Revlon's existing bank term loan and revolving credit facility. The buyer's existing senior notes will remain outstanding.

Dan Motulsky and Ben Axelrod of Moelis served as lead financial advisers to Revlon, which also took financial advice from BofA and Citi. Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy's David Zeltner and Scott Golenbock and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison provided outside counsel to the buyer.

Elizabeth Arden took financial advice from Jack Levy of Centerview Partners and legal advice from Michael Aiello and Howard Chatzinoff of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. Aiello and Chatzinoff previously advised Elizabeth Arden on Rhone's tender offer.
Boeing could hardly step into a more sensitive, touchy deal than the imminent agreement to sell about 100 passenger jets to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

With the sale, Boeing faces unique political risks here in the United States  with potential blowback among Americans opposed to last years agreement to limit Irans nuclear program and possible snapback of international sanctions if Iran violates the nuclear pact.

Already, members of Congress are denouncing the deal. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) said institutions that consider financing the sales should ask whether it is in their long-term interests to profit from doing business with the worlds foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Its not American jobs that are on the line, but potentially American lives.

In Iran, feelings remain raw, too. Some Iranian leaders still complain about the great Satan and question the U.S. commitment to ease trade restrictions as promised under the nuclear accord.

Iran, meanwhile, shows little sign of once-hoped-for moderation and remains firmly on the opposite side of the United States in the civil war in Syria. In an example of how it can be deaf to American sensitivities, its government has filed a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice to recover $2 billion worth of frozen assets the U.S. Supreme Court awarded to victims of a 1983 bombing in Lebanon and other attacks linked to Iran.

The risks are many, said Cliff Kupchan, a Middle East analyst for the consulting firm Eurasia Group. There is a post-deal, hard-line backlash in Iran. There has been no change in Irans foreign policy. And while Iranian non-nuclear-related behavior was not part of the deal . . . rewarding Iran while it is still repressive domestically and aggressive on the foreign policy front is bad optics.

Yet for Boeing, the lure of Iran remains great. An Iranian minister told reporters this week that an accord would be announced within days. One person familiar with the details, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agreement is not yet public, said it could be worth more than $17 billion.

And if Boeing obtains the licenses it still needs from the Treasury Department, it would crack open the door not only for itself but for hundreds of parts suppliers  all of whom will need licenses as well.

Its a massive deal, and for a global company to secure a very large deal of this nature with any potential counterpart is potentially a great business investment due to the size of the deal, said Elizabeth Rosenberg, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a D.C.-based think tank that focuses on national security. Not every airline is in the business of buying 100 planes at a go routinely. From Boeings perspective, theyre interested in the size of the market, and theyre very keen not to be on the sidelines when competitors are interested in moving in.

That competitor, in this case, is Airbus, the French aerospace company that agreed earlier this year to sell Iran 188 planes for about $27 billion.

For more than three decades, the United States has sought to keep American companies from selling goods to Iran  above all, replacement parts for Irans aging airplanes for fear that the parts would end up in military aircraft or that passenger planes would ferry troops ready to join battle in places like Syria.

Yet negotiators on the nuclear accord inserted a special carve-out in last years deal to make it easier for airplane makers to sell planes to Iran.

If confirmed, Boeings deal with Iran would be historic and would lead to enhanced air safety for the Iranian people and for the thousands of Americans who travel to Iran each year and currently must travel on an aging, and potentially dangerous, aircraft fleet, said Lawrence Ward, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney.

Kupchan said U.S. strategy should not be based on depriving commercial airlines of parts.

Making Iranians ride in unsafe planes for years because of sanctions was in my view a blight on U.S. policy, he said. Joining Airbus in providing relief, helping ensure the safety of Iranian air passengers is the right thing to do. It sends a message to Iran that despite differences, were taking the moral high ground in this instance.

Boeing is no novice at navigating partisan turbulence in Washington. The company played a key role in lobbying Congress not to kill the Export-Import Bank, which has backed a large share of Boeing sales abroad.

The company ran a full-page ad in Politicos print edition on Tuesday with the words safe and secure, as it should be with a beautiful landscape of flowers in the foreground and snow-capped peaks in the distance. The ad describes the companys military defense system that is on alert around the clock protecting the homeland.

In an interview Wednesday, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeings chief executive, wouldnt confirm the Iran deal but said the company has had discussions with Iranian purchasers that were under the umbrella of the government-to-government agreements and following the licensing approval we have from the U.S. government. Those have been productive conversations. But we make it our policy not to comment on specific agreements, and let our customers take the lead on any announcements.

He said any sales would be very tightly controlled, from a regulatory and licensing standpoint, and that the licenses would dictate the specific types of airplanes that it could sell and their uses.

Meanwhile, Iran has its own ambitions. It wants to improve the safety of its aging fleet of planes starved for parts. Its leading airlines  Iran Air, Mahan Air and Iran Aseman Airlines  aspire to be in the international category of the United Arab Emirates or Qatars airlines. Irans domestic flights, meanwhile, are heavily used because fuel subsidies have kept ticket prices low.
1 of 21 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Battling a pipeline View Photos In Virginia, one womans fight to save her land Caption In Virginia, one womans fight to save her land Heidi Cochran on her farm in Nelson County, Va., west of Charlottesville. She is fighting a proposed natural gas pipeline that would go through her property. Jay Westcott/For The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

Glass Hollow Road is a stretch of black asphalt in Virginias rural Nelson County, just west of Charlottesville. Ringed by lush green mountains, it runs for a mile or two before being swallowed by the forest. Its lined with an occasional house, an occasional cow, and nothing is optional about waving to an oncoming driver.

A short way down the road is a little white, single-story house and a not-so-little white barn, along with a dozen rusty vehicles slowly becoming one with the earth.

For this house, there have been two pivotal moments in recent memory.

The first occurred in December 1977, when a 19-year-old Virginia native named Heidi Cochran first laid eyes on the home and its four acres. The view was so lovely she didnt even go inside before telling the real estate agent theyd take it. She and her husband then got to work on a back-to-the-land homestead executed with countrified flair.

The second pivotal moment occurred 36 years, six months, two husbands (and two separations), four children, 29 horses, 19 dogs and seven cats later on a sunny afternoon in May 2014, when Cochran walked down the long gravel driveway to her mailbox.

Cochran, 55, had become a self-employed electrical contractor. Her skin was now chapped from the sun, her hands calloused, but her braided hair still hung to her waist. She called herself the old fat lady back in the hollow.

Over the years she had purchased two adjoining plots, bringing her slice of paradise to 16 acres, enough to hope one of her four children might one day build a home next door. She didnt know it yet, but that fantasy was in great peril.

In the mailbox she found a letter from Dominion Energy. She read something about a natural gas pipeline, then tossed it aside. What do I need with natural gas? she thought. She heated with a wood stove. But Cochran misunderstood: Dominion wasnt offering her anything. It wanted something from her.



Volunteers paint No Pipeline on Heidi Cochran's barn to show her opposition. (Jay Westcott/For The Washington Post)

If it made it through the arduous approval process, Dominions proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline  560 miles long from the hills of Harrison County, W.Va., to the red clay of Robeson County, N.C.  would carry natural gas to southeastern power plants that are phasing out coal. Dominion, Duke Energy, Piedmont Natural Gas and AGL Resources are partners in the project. Construction would begin in late 2016, the operation coming online two years later. Richmond-based Dominion would construct it.

At 42 inches in diameter, the pipeline would be part of a new generation of American mega-pipelines built to transport our dizzying windfall of natural gas. At full pressure, it would move 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. It would be almost as large as American pipelines come.

There are four large natural gas pipelines underway in the Eastern United States, what some energy experts have described as a natural gas race to bring gas to the East Coast. Energy companies are being incentivized by Environmental Protection Agency regulations championed by the Obama administration called the Clean Power Plan . The plan would essentially regulate coal-fired power plants out of existence, replacing them with gas-powered facilities. The goal is a dramatic overhaul of Americas energy grid and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

The pipelines champions say it will significantly reduce carbon emissions while creating jobs along its route. Detractors say the $5 billion project will lead to more methane emissions (themselves a highly potent greenhouse gas) from the controversial natural gas drilling technique known as fracking, violate private property rights and disrupt fragile ecosystems when it passes through some of the more intact wilderness of the southern Appalachians.

What isnt argued is whether the United States needs a replacement for coal. Coal-fired power plants generate 33 percent of the nations electricity but 71 percent of our carbon emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). This gives coal the distinction of being the nations single largest contributor to climate change.

One out of every 15 tons of carbon dioxide emissions that goes into the atmosphere anywhere in the globe is from the United States power sector, says Susan Tierney, a former assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Energy. [Thats from] us plugging in our iPhone chargers. Weve got to do that more cleanly, got to do it much more efficiently.

Opponents wondered: Why not simply convert to a system powered by renewables?

Renewables cant meet demand, says Tierney, now an adviser at Analysis Group, a consulting firm. To replace coal with wind, solar and geothermal infrastructure (which supply just 5.7 percent of the nations electricity, according to the EIA), you have to put in a whole lot more resources, making it much more expensive to replace a coal plant. One of her biggest concerns, Tierney says, is that opposition to a natural gas plant will mean coal plants stick around longer.

Climate change is occurring, she says, and decommissioning coal plants cant wait.





Heidi Cochrans best guess, based on Dominions route maps, was that the pipeline would come 100 feet behind her house, running through a field, then making an abrupt right turn before her pond, traversing instead through a patch of large locust trees to Glass Hollow Road.

According to Dominion spokesman Aaron Ruby, roughly 2,700 total landowners were making calculations like those, pondering how the pipeline would affect their property. They were told the pipeline required a permanent clearing, a 75-foot-wide right of way on which nothing but small plants could grow. According to Dominions literature, the right of way could still be used for most agricultural endeavors such as planting crops and grazing livestock, but landowners couldnt grow trees or build houses on the land, and new road constuction would be limited.

The restrictions were devastating for Cochran: There will be no building sites left, she said. And its really hard to even hope my children would come back and live on a piece of property that they will die in if theres ever an explosion. Ill protect them with everything Ive got.

Coming from Cochran, everything Ive got could feel daunting. She had become an electrician at 22 because a male electrician told her it wasnt a job a woman could do. Once, she fell from a ladder and impaled her jugular vein with a screwdriver. Doctors told her she should have died; today the scar runs almost from ear to ear.

She was raised on Virginias Fort Monroe, then an Army base at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. At 17, Cochran ran away for the West Coast with her soon-to-be-husband, a man one year her senior named Doug Griffin. One day she told her parents she was taking the dog for a walk, then she and Griffin hit the road. She brought only two possessions: her dog and her riding saddle. Why take the saddle if she wasnt taking the horse? It was a really nice saddle, she says.

After extended travels in California and New Mexico, and a brief residence in Dallas (where Cochran gave birth to their daughter Sage at home), the couple decided to move closer to family. Soon they were looking at a Nelson County property on a road with a curious name: Glass Hollow.

Cochran divorced Griffin in the mid-80s, then in 1990 married a friend of her ex-husbands named Wiley Cochran. Wiley brought another daughter into the family, Erica. In 1991 they had Emily, and in 1997 a son, Mickey. Despite having four children underfoot, says Cochran, they were known for having outrageous houseguests and massive bonfires, and for a proclivity to shoot clay pigeons packed with gunpowder.

They bought a third contiguous plot in the area known as Glass Hollow, which meant the property now had a large field, two horse pastures, a small fishing pond and half a hill covered in hardwoods.

Cochran says she and Wiley separated in 2010, but they remain legally married and share ownership of a plot Dominion wanted for the pipeline.

(The Washington Post)

At the beginning of 2015, Cochran was keeping up with the pipeline and was moonlighting as a waitress after her day job while also keeping tabs on her family. Mickey, a 17-year-old high school senior, lived at home; Emily, 23, lived at home and worked as a fledgling wealth management analyst in nearby Charlottesville; Sage, 38, was a mother of two in Tennessee; and Erica, 35, lived three hours to the east in Gloucester, Va., and often spent weekends in Glass Hollow with her toddler son.

Cochran was down to sleeping just two or three hours a night, the other hours occupied by worry. She had lost the nerve to even go to the mailbox. The task was relegated to Emily and Mickey, who sorted pipeline mail into two piles: one of correspondence advertising the pipeline as A PATHWAY TO PROSPERITY and the other a save pile containing more-important letters, which almost always asked permission to survey her property. So far, Cochran had ignored those letters. But she noticed near the bottom of the page was often a reminder that Virginia law gave Dominion, a public utility, the right to enter her property whenever it wanted.

Dominions statements to the media said surveyors wouldnt enter any property unless granted permission, which might have been for the best since Cochran had instructed a neighbor armed with an assault rifle to watch her land. And, as she reminded Dominion employees, she had dogs and they all have teeth.

In Dominions communication to landowners  at public meetings or in interviews  the company insisted surveys were the best way for it to avoid anything of value that wasnt obvious from satellite images: wells and family burial plots, for example. Along the entire route, 85 percent of landowners had allowed surveys, Dominion said, but in Nelson County the percentage was less than 40.

If the pipeline was approved, which was expected, Dominion could seize rights of way with eminent domain. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency responsible for approving interstate pipeline applications, could also reject the proposal, but even anti-pipeline activists considered this unlikely.

NO PIPELINE yard signs proliferated through the county, and informal networks sprung up to spread information. Several anti-pipeline groups organized, each with a slightly different flavor of resistance: One group was led by wealthy, well-connected transplants from Washington and held invitation-only meetings. Another espoused a familiar Sierra Club-esque environmentalism. And another group, which spoke more to Cochrans ideals, took a more adversarial and creative intransigence; its tactics included correcting statements on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline Facebook page and offering a unique babysitting service: Volunteers would watch your house while you were away to prevent Dominion from surveying. The D.C. transplants, several of whom had built careers as lobbyists, claimed to have the most pragmatic stance: not objecting to the pipeline on the whole but trying to get it re-routed away from their pristine county.

These connections have to go through private property, Susan Tierney says. People feel like their constitutional rights are being taken away.

As Cochran spent her days driving to job sites, she pondered what was going on inside her community.

Weve been telling everybody all along, you dont know where this is gonna go, she said. Everybody needs to stay united and fight the pipeline.

No other location along the route was putting up even close to the same level of fight as Nelson County. News outlets began referring to it as the epicenter of resistance.



Heidi Cochran at home with her son, Mickey, 17. She refused to allow Dominion to survey her property and instructed an armed neighbor to watch her land. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

One of Dominions employees who had to face an exasperated Nelson County was Brittany Moody, manager of pipeline engineering.

At public events, Moody talked with landowners and poked an iPad tethered to her palm. She was among those who had chosen the pipelines route through Nelson County.

She was from the fracking boomtown of Buckhannon, W.Va. Her property had a fracking well; her home was within eyesight of where the pipeline might be built.

Moody was a certified coal miner whose first job was to investigate the 2006 Sago Mine explosion that trapped 13 miners, killing 12. Part of the mine was beneath her property.

[Where] I grew up as a kid, my farm had a 36-inch pipeline right behind the house, she said. So Ive just grown up around them.

She tried to be understanding. Im good with trying to explain what all goes into it because I design them, she said. But that didnt necessarily make the process easy. One man at a pipeline open house whispered in her ear, You know youre not safe here, right?

While she acknowledged Nelsons angriest landowners had legitimate concerns, she also acknowledged that Getting yelled at all the time and being called a liar is no fun.

When we begin planning the route we draw a straight line, Moody said. Im looking for structures, topography. If its going to destroy your way of living, well shift it and we will try to work with you. But the thing is, its got to go somewhere.

Of the 245 lawsuits Dominion had brought or was planning to bring against landowners to get survey access, half were in Nelson County. Cochran knew her turn was coming. She began to compulsively check the county clerks website for the official posting.

On a January evening in 2015, Cochran traveled a short way to a session on how to oppose the pipeline, which was held in an old elementary school. She happened to enter at the same time as Rick Cornelius, one of the lawyers who was presenting that evening.

So how do we stand with this, you think? she asked him.

How do we stand, my dear? he asked. We stand very early in the process. We still have two more years to go.

Cochrans chin dropped to her chest.

The first lawyer to speak advised them to choose an attorney wisely: Youre gonna be through hard times together, he said. Make sure you get one you like.

Next, Cornelius told the crowd that when writing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission , property owners should say they would never willingly allow the pipeline on their land  that property would need to be seized through eminent domain.

The more of you that are willing to say that, the better, he said, because thats going to weigh heavily on FERCs decision about whether or not this is, quote, in the public interest.

Cochran wrote that down on scrap paper.

A man with a ponytail and a white beard down to his chest stepped up. He had a guitar and told the crowd he was going to teach them an anti-pipeline folk song to sing at Dominions next info session  as disruptively as possible.

I was at [Dominions] last meeting, he said. They talked down to us. No one listened to us. So we need to teach them a lesson, and Im hiring you all to be in my chorus.

Sheets of lyrics were passed out, and he shouted at the crowd to Sing!

We dont want your pipeline, we dont want your pipeline

Well take the sunshine, the water and the wind.

Were gonna put a stop sign on Dominions pipeline

Go tell your neighbors, go tell your friends.



Cochran's 16-acre property includes a large field, two horse pastures, a small pond and a hay barn. She hopes to build homes on the land for her children one day. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

The expansion of pipeline infrastructure is what Susan Tierney calls a big, tough situation for places like Nelson County.

People start moving to the corners of the room, says Tierney. What we have, she says, becomes a lot of people opposing things.

So where were the diviners of reasonable common ground?

They existed, she says, but out of the public eye in conference rooms where theyre trying to negotiate some calm or rational middle ... [helping to] site the energy facilities in a way that is gentle on the environment.

It turned out a pipeline whisperer was already on the Dominion payroll.

Bob Burnley is the former head of Virginias Department of Environmental Quality, the states EPA equivalent. Partially retired, hes now an environmental consultant. In the past, he says, he has opposed projects like the pipeline.

But he was going to help build this one.

In May 2015, Burnley was touring one of the companys new natural gas power plants in Waynesboro, Va., the facility so new it sparkled in the sun. Burnley marveled. I grew up professionally with big, nasty coal-fired power plants, he said. This is a huge step in the right direction. Replacing [coal] with gas is the only thing that makes sense right now.

Dominion had contracted him, he said, to help them understand what the environmental issues are and why the opponents are so opposed.

After visiting the Waynesboro plant, Burnley hiked the Appalachian Trail a few miles south, stopping at an overlook in George Washington National Forest. The rock outcrop was close to where the pipeline would cross the trail while it traveled more than 30 miles through national forest. These areas, he said, had inspired him to take the pipeline as a client.

Its going through some incredibly special places, untouched lands, he said. Dominion and its partners are going to have to do a very, very good job at making sure that there is no permanent impacts to any of those things.

The trees below were a carpet of springtime green.

My instincts tell me that this pipeline is going to be built, he said. I think its more productive to work on the side of those who are trying to do a good job with it rather than wasting energy trying to keep it from being built.

The morning after the anti-pipeline meeting, Cochran drove to Charlottesville in her pickup. A large project she was wiring had to go before the countys Planning and Zoning Department, and after pulling into the parking lot of Eck Supply Co., she went in to chat with the staff.

They talked about the looming lawsuits. She had yet to check today to see if Dominion had officially sued her, she told them. Then she stepped into the managers office and quickly unfurled blueprints on his desk.

Normally, she said, an engineer would have designed this, okay? But I dont have that luxury.

They were interrupted by a call from her son, Mickey, who wanted to know where to find parts for his pickup truck. It was in need of repair after a recent bout of hooking, an activity meant for seeing who has the baddest truck. This involves tying the rear bumpers of two trucks together, then driving them in opposite directions until one is either pulled backward or comes apart catastrophically. Cochran told him to call a neighbor and returned to the schematics. When she was satisfied with the design, she headed out to the parking lot, pulling her phone from her pocket to scan the county clerks website.

Yeah, she said, her face clenched with hurt. Yep, they got us today. Son of a b----.

Now I cant even think, she said.

The litigious circle widened before her eyes. Gary Bryant got it, Pat Beasley got it, I got it, Sammy got it. ... Im pissed. Somehow this doesnt feel real American, you know that?

She went back inside to find her friend Mark, an employee shed spoken with on her way in. She held up her phone. They got me, she said.

He leaned in close. There you are, he said.

I just found out, she said, her voice cracking.

Youll be okay, he said and put his arms around her. Youll get through this, honey, I promise. Its all a part of life, okay?

She couldnt hold back the tears.

Well get stronger, he said, hugging her close. Imagine that. Through all this well get stronger.



Visitors to the farmers market in Nelson County sign a petition to prevent Dominion Energy from installing the pipeline. (Jay Westcott/Jay Westcott/For The Washington Post)

Dominions website focuses on the relative safety of gas pipelines, pointing out the number of incidents nationally is very small given the more than 300,000 miles of natural gas pipelines in the country.

Pipeline operators are required by the U.S. Department of Transportation to self-report incidents. Incidents involving hospitalization or death are trending downward toward fewer fatalities (53 deaths in 1996, 9 deaths in 2015) and fewer injuries (127 to 50). But when that parameter widens to include oil spills, fires, explosions and economic damage of $50,000 or more in 1984 dollars  ($115,000 today), the trend goes the other direction. Over 20 years the department has recorded 5,670 such events, with 324 reported in 2015, compared with 252 in 2012.

Cochran knew about what happened in San Bruno, Calif. In September 2010, the San Francisco suburb had a 30-inch pipeline explode beneath it, igniting a fire that destroyed a neighborhood block. West Coast utility Pacific Gas and Electric was fined $1.6 billion for shoddy maintenance. Fifty-one were injured, and eight were killed.

(The Washington Post)

As part of the pipeline approval process, Dominion was required to hold public information sessions. At one, Cochran found a Dominion employee and got right to the point: Whats the kill zone of a 42-inch pipeline? she asked.

He told her the proper term was potential impact radius, and that it was 1,100 feet on either side of the pipe.

The odds of survival if there was an explosion? she asked.

He said the potential impact radius wasnt about certain death; it was about flying debris, rocks and all that.

And flames?

Could be. But probably not, he said. Flames will typically go straight up. But if theres a building or something within that, it could get hot enough to catch fire.

So with my house 50 feet from there? she said, hands outstretched.

He nodded but didnt answer.

What do you think the impact to my house would be? Heavily impacted?

Could be.

And if my children were home? Heavily impacted? she said.

Could be, he said again.

Next she walked to FERCs table.

Do you ever look at situations like this, she asked a FERC representative, where a pipeline would be so close to a home?

The representative told her they would fly the route, look at maps, make the best decision possible. Cochran handed over maps of her property along with a letter she had written that made clear the personal costs of the pipeline. Other people wanted to tell their own stories and started to push in from behind.

Please look at it seriously, she told him. My heart and soul is in this. My family is in this. And Im not the only one. Emily stood at her mothers side and cried.

As she walked away, a group on the other side of the room began to clap rhythmically  the anti-pipeline protest song was starting.

Were gonna put a stop sign on Dominions pipeline

Go tell your neighbors, go tell your friends.

FERC held scoping meetings along the pipelines path. Members of the public took turns giving three-minute speeches, their words becoming part of the data FERC would use to make their decision. When Cochran arrived she went directly to the table designated for signing up to speak. Hundreds did. Far too many to fit into the allotted time.

When the speakers began, 19 of the first 20 were pro-pipeline. Many wore Dominions pro-pipeline stickers that read Energy Jobs for Virginia. Anti-pipeline people shouted them down. Some angrily accused FERC staff of giving Dominion early access to the sign-up sheet, so theyd speak before the TV crews left.

People were signed up at the time they arrived at the facility and put their names on the speakers list, the FERC representative said into the microphone. (Dominion had, in fact, front-loaded the meeting with pro-pipeline speakers, according to Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle.

In an email, he wrote that interns had signed up pro-pipeline speakers: It should surprise no one that we decided we could not let one side dominate the debate.)

The string of pro-pipeline speakers continued.

Oh, my god, said Cochran as one after another came to the podium. This is unreal.

One pro speaker noted Nelson County needed the jobs, prompting a man to yell: Is there anyone who needs a job in here? I will hire them right now!

Silence the interruptions, warned a FERC employee.

When Cochran spoke an hour later, she read from notes that trembled in her hand.

The odds, they say, would be small for any explosion. I am not a gambling person, but I believe the odds are better of no explosion if a pipeline did not exist.

When the event finally finished, sheriffs officers escorted the FERC employees outside. Cochran knew one of the deputies and asked why.

Someone made a death threat against them, he told her.

Cochran knew that if they succeeded in pushing the pipeline out of Nelson County, it would only mean it would be built in a different county and routed through different back yards.

It bothers me that I only cared about this when it was in my back yard, that I never got involved when it was happening to someone else, she said. It may be a done deal with me, but thats who Im doing this for now: for the next person whos going to have a pipeline built in their back yard.

The pipeline also made her aware of where the gas would be coming from, something she hadnt considered before. She had been reading about fracking and the possible dangers it sometimes posed to drinking water, and had decided to see it for herself. She had also been tracking an anti-FERC protest group called Beyond Extreme Energy, or BXE, which had formed simply to attack FERC and the growth of energy infrastructure. The group was planning protests at FERC headquarters in the District that May.

The next morning, Cochran and a fellow pipeline resister named Marilyn Shifflett drove 150 miles to Buckhannon, W.Va., in an area known as the Marcellus Shale; these were to be the headwaters, of sorts, of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

A local activist acted as their tour guide. From the back seat he directed Cochran down the countys endless gravel roads.

Cochran and Shifflett were stunned by all the fracking wells and protruding sections of natural gas pipe. There were flare stacks, devices that burned excess gas high in the air.

They rounded a bend, and on the other side of the ravine was a hill about the size of Cochrans own hill. But this one looked much different.

So thats what a 100-foot right of way looks like? she gasped. Oh, my god!

She pulled over and leapt from the truck. I gotta see this, she said.

A wide swath of mature hardwoods had been cut, the trees left where they fell. It ran from the top down into the valley. This clearing, the activist told them, was a right of way for a 36-inch pipeline.

While her companions talked, Cochran just stood and stared at the sight before her in disbelief.

(The Washington Post)

In spring 2015, Cochran was pleasantly surprised by two incidents. The first was Mickeys high school graduation.

I honestly didnt think he was going to, she admitted afterward. Mother and son were in the school parking lot, talking with friends and leaning against the hood of his Toyota pickup. A bumper sticker between them read NO PIPELINE.

Im proud of you, bud, she said and hugged Mickey. He had been studying to be an auto mechanic. Since February hed been working at a garage, so close to home that he sometimes drove a riding lawn mower to work.

But the bigger surprise had come four days earlier: Dominion announced it was championing a route that would require the company to drill a tunnel under the Appalachian Trail because it would have less impact to environmental, historic and cultural resources than the initially-proposed route, a statement read.

When she heard the news that Dominion wanted to relocate the pipeline off her property, Cochran dismissed it as a ruse.

I still think they want us to drop our guard and have division, she said. She knew Dominion had yet to submit its application to FERC. Until then, Dominions preference was not absolute. I dont trust them.

Moreover, this newest route called for the pipeline to pass within 100 yards of the Wintergreen Resort, the economic engine of not only the county but Cochrans own wallet  many residents were her clients.

Wintergreens homeowners association wrote FERC that the pipelines route would be much better if it was returned back to the route that would run through Glass Hollow, a suggestion that outraged Cochran.

Despite this development, Cochran still planned to attend the Memorial Day protests in Washington. It had been 40 years since she had attended a protest of this scale and at least a decade since she had been to the District.

Cochran gathered the bed linens she would need to sleep on the floor of St. Stephen Church in Columbia Heights. She was getting a ride with a local woman, Vicki Wheaton.

Wheaton arrived in a Hyundai hatchback overflowing with protest paraphernalia. Cochran stuffed her things in between.

Well, this is an adventure, Cochran said, taking a last look around. Im definitely gonna miss my mountains.

Less than 24 hours later, Cochran and about 50 other protesters were marching four or five blocks from Union Station to FERC headquarters, where they were going to blockade the agencys parking garage.

The protesters were an assortment of young and old; some wore lanyards and carried walkie-talkies used to orchestrate the event from a non-arrestable distance.

Our government, came the start of a call-and-response chant, is under attack! Presumably the attackers were the nations major energy companies. Whatre we gonna do?!

Stand up, fight back! yelled Cochran. She carried a poster that read: PROTECT OUR TOWNS.

Organizers eventually directed everyone to the middle of North Capitol Street. There a small group of protesters had formed a tight circle around a strangely shaped object. When Cochran got close she saw it was a large metal tepee, known as a tripod in the theater of civil disobedience. In morning traffic, the protesters had managed to erect three 15-foot metal tubes whose apex held a woman hanging by a rock-climbing harness. The design was predicated on the fact that if she came down any way but voluntarily, the structure would collapse and injure her and anyone underneath it.

Soon the protesters bullhorn came out, and BXE organizers tracked down people they thought would be compelling voices.

Cochran was one of the first. Say who you are and where youre from, said a middle-aged man with the bullhorn. Cochran became nervous.

(The Washington Post)

My name is Heidi Cochran, she began. Im from Afton, Virginia, in Nelson County. They want to put a pipeline through our county. Just last week we became the alternate route, but Im not trusting of Dominion.

You go, girl! someone yelled.

In Nelson County, 69 percent of impacted landowners have denied the right to survey for Dominion, she said to cheers. Then she told her story: the lost building sites, the saga of challenging Dominion over the past year, reasons she thought more fossil fuel infrastructure was a bad idea. As she reached her conclusion, her voice was resolute. I will continue to fight, I will not let them on my property. And then: And Ive painted a nice big sign on my barn that says, No pipeline. 

She lowered the bullhorn, returned it to its owner, turned and walked away.

Twelve hours later at St. Stephen, Cochran, Wheaton and a woman from Nelson County named Arlene Hueholt sat on an inflatable mattress set up in the nave of the church. They all wore their pajamas.

Hueholt felt the day had been somewhat ineffective and lamented that they werent able to stop FERC employees from entering their building.

Cochran was surprised. I thought they did really good today.

Hueholt shook her head. Were gonna have to occupy that building eventually.

In September, Dominion formally filed its certificate of application. The 30,000-page proposal made it official: The company preference was to use the route under the Appalachian Trail eight miles from Cochrans home.

Dominions proposal allowed affected parties such as the U.S. Forest Service to perform in-depth analyses of the exact path. Within months the Forest Service twice forced Dominion to change the route in both the Monongahela and George Washington national forests to avoid endangered salamander habitats. That meant 249 new landowners receiving notice.

Sometimes when I think about the people who are just starting to go through all this, said Cochran, it brings me to tears.



Sometimes when I think about the people who are just starting to go through all this, Cochran says, it brings me to tears. (Jay Westcott/Jay Westcott/For The Washington Post)

On a morning in late February this year  one year and nine months since finding Dominions letter in her mailbox  Cochran was up before dawn to feed the animals. The land was soft with rain and snowmelt.

When this all started, 2016 was to be the year pipeline construction began. Now FERC was expected to render its verdict in the beginning of 2017.

Cochran was pushed to waitressing four to five nights a week to support her eldest daughter, Sage, who was out of work and living in Nelson County again.

As a result, Cochran had had to scale back anti-pipeline activities of late, though she was still lobbying at the state Capitol in Richmond and attending court proceedings of holdout landowners sued by Dominion. She was also planning to attend more BXE protests of FERC headquarters.

And there was another addition to the household: Emilys boyfriend had moved in with them. Cochrans 1,300-square-foot house was feeling smaller than ever. Mickey needed to move out. Cochran had a trailer hauled onto the field out back. And there were two other homes to build: one for Emily and one for Erica. Everyone, it seemed, was moving home.

Mickey joined her in the field.

If we put the trailer over there, said Cochran, pointing toward the pond, we can combine the septic systems.

She and Mickey walked toward two of their horses as the horses walked toward them.

A delicate mist rolled in, much as it had the first time she stood here. But she was different now. The pipeline fight had taken her far beyond Glass Hollow and returned her back again.

She was more resilient, and also more hardened  though she still couldnt bring herself to go to the mailbox. Above all, she had never felt more connected to the promise of her land.

I finally feel a little better, but Im still afraid, she said. Its not a done deal.

The sky grew suddenly dark  in a few minutes it would be raining as hard as rain can fall. Still, she turned and said with a smile, But isnt that a pretty view?

Brad Horn is a former Washington Post video

journalist who lives in Madison, Wis. His website is BradHornMultimedia.com. To comment on this story, email wpmagazine@washpost.com or visit washingtonpost.com/magazine.

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Clockwise from top left: The Chicago-style Dog, the banh mi dog, the half-smoke and the lobster roll and at Haute Dogs & Fries in Alexandria. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Washington may be a two-party town, but when it comes to hamburgers and hot dogs  the perennial front-runners of American junk food  the District unabashedly supports patty fascism.

Just look around. Burger joints dominate our landscape: Shake Shack, Five Guys, Z-Burger, Bareburger, Good Stuff Eatery, Bobbys Burger Palace, Rays Hell Burger, Holy Cow and countless other patty peddlers, large and small. These places may throw a bone to salad eaters  so to speak  but most customers who darken the meat markets have likely been daydreaming about hot, juicy beef for hours.

Who other than Joey Chestnut, that dog-eating machine, contemplates the frankfurter during regular working hours? Sure, you can find plenty of dogs worth hunting, but you can almost count on one hand the number of shops that base their business on the lowly link. Not even Bens Chili Bowl and Weenie Beenie trust their dogs enough to let them run the place.

[Where to find the best hot dogs in D.C., but classic and gourmet]

Many, of course, have tried to put on the dog. The owners of Amsterdam Falafelshop opened MDawg Haute Dogs in Adams Morgan in 2007. The business didnt survive two years. ChiDogOs 14th Street location closed a year after debuting on the mean, burger-infested streets of Washington. Even the mighty Matchbox Food Group couldnt keep all its dogs barking: The company recently shuttered its wiener-centric DC-3 on Barracks Row.

If anyone understands the difficulties of living a frank life, its Lionel Holmes, co-founder of Haute Dogs & Fries in Alexandria. Last fall, he and co-owner Pamela Swanson had to close down their original shop in Purcellville after lease renewal negotiations broke down. The landlords asking price was just too steep for Holmes and Swanson, partners in business and life, who fully understand that diners will pay only so much for a hot dog.



Lionel Holmes and Pamela Swanson co-founded Alexandrias Haute Dogs & Fries in 2009. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

The cost of the lease makes it very difficult to sell the hot dog at the price point that the general consumer is willing to pay, Holmes says. It seems 7-Eleven  where those roller dogs perpetually spin in their grave  has set the ceiling on what consumers are willing to pay: about $2 per dog, give or take some spare change.

The only way to stretch consumers beyond their price comfort zone, Holmes and Swanson realized, was to create gourmet dogs. The owners started with the buns. They ditched the traditional squishy torpedo, which provides a soft, sweet landing zone for anything tucked into it. They didnt bother with pretzel buns, either, a trendy roll that turns everything into a carny snack. They opted for top-split, New England-style buns, the kind with squared-off sides, perfect for slathering with butter and browning on a griddle. You know, the buns used for lobster rolls.

Every morning, Ottenbergs Bakery drops off fresh top-split rolls at Haute Dogs. The buns make a strong first impression. Literally the first thing you taste  before sinking your teeth into the all-beef frank from the Fields of Athenry Farm in Purcellville (you can order chicken or veggie dogs, too)  is the buttery roll, at once soft and toasty. It provides the same pleasures that come from biting into a golden grilled cheese sandwich on Texas toast. You want to repeat that high forever, a junkie looking for his next fix of fat and crunch.



The banh mi dog at Haute Dogs & Fries in Alexandria. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Fortunately, the pleasures are not skin deep. Holmes, a former front-of-the-house guy at various restaurants, has morphed into a kitchen rat. He has developed the menu, and his line of dogs ventures way beyond the classics. Holmes has engineered a dog that performs a neat trick: It impersonates a Vietnamese banh mi sandwich, or at least one thatll pass inspection in Alexandria, if not Falls Church. The same goes for Holmess dog-based interpretations of a New York Reuben or a Peking duck wrapped in pancakes with hoisin sauce: The toppings hint at their inspirations, while providing an experience all their own.

Holmes struggles a bit on dogs that have no blueprint to follow. The District D.C. Dog is a yellow mustard-heavy bite with barbecue sauce buried deep within the bun. I thought it a bold  and borderline bizarre  choice to feature the sticky sauce on a dog named for the District, a town without a barbecue culture. Still, I chowed down on the sucker all the same. By contrast, I couldnt finish the signature Haute Dog, its dark, acidified onion sauce too sweet for my palate. It also nearly bored through the roll.

Chicagoans may balk at the sight of their signature dog tucked into a New England-style roll, but you know what? I didnt miss the poppy seed bun, with its nutty little nuggets forever playing hide and seek between my molars. Likewise, Texans may desire a few more alarms from the house-made chili atop the Tex-Mex Beef Bratwurst, but I liked its mild burn, as if it were the sausage equivalent of ground-beef enchiladas. I definitely wanted more spice with the shops half-smoke preparation, but even without it, the dog was a delight, as it rolled around in yellow mustard and onions.



The half-smoke at Haute Dogs & Fries in Alexandria. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Haute Dogs provides you the opportunity to go off leash, too: You can skip the hot dogs in favor of a market-priced lobster roll, an admirably underdressed specimen that would fare better with sweeter, less-wooden meat. Or you could try the cheeseburger sliders, these gooey mini-burgers topped with cheese and sauteed onions. They reminded me of why I used to love White Castle. Order them with the hand-cut, skin-on Idaho fries, which trade on their deep earthy flavor, not a double-fry crunch.

But, really, why go to a hot dog shop for sliders? It runs counter to the spirit and purpose of the place, which is dog-centric in more than one way. There are framed photos of family pooches along one wall: a profile of a hungry beagle (which is redundant, I know). A sweet portrait of a walleyed chihuahua. A silly snapshot of a dog in librarians glasses.

Yep, Im going to say it: Theyre so many good dogs here.
Markus Batchelor is a candidate for D.C. State Board of Education (Ward 8). (Andre Chung/for The Washington Post)

Markus Batchelor, 23, is an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Washington and a candidate for D.C. State Board of Education (Ward 8).

What are you going to do to fill the hours until 2028?

When?

When you can be president of the United States.

President? Ive witnessed for eight years how the presidency can age someone, and 

Oh, you dont want to get old.

I dont necessarily want to look 80, eight years after 35.

How much does the Advisory Neighborhood Commission pay?

None.

So you have to have a day job?

Im a community and family liaison at the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative.

What are your duties with the ANC?

ANC really runs the gamut. Zoning to liquor licensing to approving developers, city services, public safety, improving the citys responsiveness to service requests. Getting a pothole filled.

Is it weird that you come from a long line of Batchelors?

Yes! I get that all the time.

Sorry. Whats your first local political memory?

I was 10 or 11. That was the year of a Ward 8 council election. A guy was holding an election barbecue on my block, and his name was Marion Barry. Free hot dogs  I was over there anyway. I got to meet him. I was just amazed by how folks just gravitated toward him. Because youll see politicians and public figures get the opposite reception in a lot of communities. Seeing how people just gravitated toward him amazed me.

My earliest memories as to how I got involved started when I was in student government at my high school, Thurgood Marshall Academy, my freshman year. A local activist and community organizer named Philip Pannell asked me to be the emcee for  it was some holiday celebration for the Ward 8 Democrats. And I never stopped going to the Ward 8 Democrats meeting since then.

Eventually I was volunteering on campaigns, and the rest is history.

There are old episodes of something called The Markus Batchelor Show podcast that I found online from 2009. What was that about?

I was probably, geez, I might have been in high school when we started that. We had some pretty cool guests on. Congressional candidates, experts in whatever field we were talking about.

The one I listened to had somebody called President Robert. He had a British accent.

Oh yeah!

Thats someone you went to school with?

It was actually this online group back then. Pretty much a bunch of nerds like me who simulated a U.S. government online. We took different roles in government and played around with creating policy. It was fun. Nerd stuff.

Uh-huh. What kind of policies did you create?

Oh, man. Im sure we changed the form of the U.S. government probably like 30 different times.

Did it work better?

No. No. Nope, it sure didnt.

More Just Asking

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Rachel Gardner, left, and Pia Carusone are co-owners of Republic Restoratives, a new distillery in Ivy City in the District. Women are relatively rare in the distilling industry. (Dayna Smith For the Washington Post)

Pia Carusone and Rachel Gardner, the owners of Republic Restoratives Distillery, are bringing diversity to Ivy Citys busy craft liquor corridor.

In May, the two officially opened the citys first women-owned distillery, where theyre producing vodka and working on a line of bourbon. Although women are increasingly launching distilleries and breweries across the country, it remains somewhat of a rarity in the physically demanding and male-dominated industry.

When its you thats doing it, youre not always so conscious of how different that is  the reaction were getting is, Wow, its just you two,  says Carusone, who concedes, We still get called girls all the time.

The opening of the distillery (1369 New York Ave. NE) comes amid an alcohol production renaissance of sorts across Northeast Washington. In recent years, the Ivy City neighborhood, off New York Avenue NE, has attracted luxury apartments, retailers and several craft liquor businesses, including New Columbia Distillers, One Eight Distillingand Jos. A. Magnus & Co. Distillery, along with Atlas Brew Works, which makes beer.

Breweries have set up shop in other Northeast neighborhoods, too, driven in part by zoning restrictions and the need for affordable warehouse space. Hellbender Brewing and 3 Stars Brewing are between Fort Totten and Takoma, while DC Brau Brewing is on Bladensburg Road NE. In December, Right Proper Brewing Company, which operates a restaurant and brewpub in Shaw, opened a production and tasting facility in Brookland.

All of the activity has led to a sense of community, not competition, says Justin Cox, who co-founded Atlas in 2013. When the brewery recently ran out of plastic wrap while preparing an order, he knew where he could turn for help.

I called One Eight and they said, Oh, weve got some plastic for you. So I drove over there and got their plastic wrap, Cox says. Its a communal atmosphere in that way.

Atlas (2052 West Virginia Ave. NE) is innovating, too. It recently unveiled a new taproom on-site that will be open to customers seven days a week, and in December it took an environmental leap, installing solar panels on the roof. The move has cut the electricity bill in half.

The Republic Restoratives owners located their building about three years ago. Before opening their distillery, Carusone worked in politics and served as chief of staff for former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), while Gardner has a background in sustainable natural resource development. Carusone says they have received a warm welcome in the neighborhood. I think were going to have an awesome distillers district thats going to be the envy of the country, Carusone says. Its really unusual to have all of us located in that one neighborhood.

The clustering is attractive for customers, too. Many of the businesses offer weekend tours and invite food trucks to stop by. The craft scene is blowing up here, so its a fun, less touristy thing to do with family members, says Ally White, an Atlas patron who lives in Columbia Heights.

Lets just say it can be a different kind of tourist experience. Republic Restoratives wants visitors to fully understand its process and plans to offer tours along with tastings.

Says Carusone, We want people to experience how bourbon is made.
Director Brian De Palma is the subject of a new documentary by his longtime friend Noah Baumbach, along with Jake Paltrow. (John Carucci/Associated Press)

In the new documentary De Palma, 75-year-old filmmaker Brian De Palma reflects on a half-century career, offering frank observations on such subjects as his signature split-screen technique and his legendarily fraught relationship with the Hollywood establishment. Although two of his films have been nominated for Oscars  Carrie and The Untouchables  and several others are highly regarded, De Palma himself has been singled out five times as worst director by the Golden Raspberry awards, for Dressed to Kill, Scarface, Body Double, The Bonfire of the Vanities and Mission to Mars. Although De Palmas youthful inner circle  Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola  has been lionized, De Palma remains a polarizing figure.

[Read Ann Hornadays 3-star review of De Palma]

His films have been called sexist and violent, as well as technically groundbreaking. Through it all, he has worked, cranking out 29 features since 1968s Murder a la Mod. After walking away from a planned HBO drama about the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno scandal in 2014  They were sending me too many notes, he says  De Palma is now deep in pre-production for Lights Out, a China-set thriller about a blind woman that he describes as Mission: Impossible meets Wait Until Dark.

De Palma called from Manhattan, where he has lived for 40 years, to continue the conversation that the documentary, directed by longtime friend Noah Baumbach, along with Jake Paltrow, has started.

Q: Is it fair to say that you have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood?

A: Yeah. I basically started making political films in the 60s, very antiestablishment. I got brought out to Hollywood to make what they thought was an antiestablishment movie  Get to Know Your Rabbit, with Tommy Smothers  which ultimately I got fired from and Warner Brothers took over. This put me in the wasteland for a couple of years. So, yeah, Ive been in and out of the system. I think the system is basically very corrosive. The values it has  like repeating yourself and making big, star-oriented vehicles in which the casting doesnt make any sense, except to the financiers  I was always battling that, and also the ratings board, in terms of nudity and violence.

Q: After 29 movies, do you still see yourself as antiestablishment?

A: Absolutely. I just had a knock-down drag-out with HBO, considered the  how shall I call it?  the gold standard in contemporary . . . I dont know what you call it. Filmmaking?

Q: Is it such a bad thing to repeat yourself?

A: No. It makes a lot of sense economically. But it does nothing for you aesthetically.

Q: What did you think of Kimberly Peirces 2013 remake of Carrie?

A: I thought I was at the right time, with the right cast, and had the right instincts about the book. Theyve remade Carrie on television. Theyve made four-hour versions of it. Theyve made sequels. They all pale in relationship to the original, so I must have gotten it right. Theres no way to duplicate that.

Q: What was the motivation behind your remake of the original 1932 Scarface?

A: A remarkable script by Oliver Stone. I originally worked on the project where we were going to make it into a period gangster picture, which is a tired genre. Then I walked away because I didnt think I had the kind of controls I needed. It came back to me a year later with Olivers script. It was so visceral, and such a good idea using these Cuban refugees that came over and started the drug trade. I said, This is great. Ill be happy to do this.

Q: Watching clips of some of your most violent films, they seem almost quaint compared with todays film violence. What do you think about contemporary horror?

A: Times change. I was making movies in the height of the womens liberation movement. Anything that you did in relation to a woman in a movie was considered, politically, bad news. I always felt that a woman in peril was a lot more interesting  to me  than a guy in peril. Time will shake out those pictures. How much are we going to be watching Saw IV in five or 10 years?

Q: What are some of Hollywoods other bad habits?

A: They never really understand choreography in relation to action sequences. Its very important to lay out where everything is, to do it very slowly, so the audience is oriented, so they know whos shooting at who, where they are, where the peril is. I did it in Carrie at the prom, where I very carefully laid out where everybody is before the bucket of blood and the nightmare begins. Hitchcocks crop-duster sequence in North by Northwest is instructive. He takes a tremendous amount of time to orient you to the space youre in just before Cary Grant gets shot at. Most movie action sequences are just noise.

Q: How has your background as a former physics student  a self-described science nerd  influenced the way you make movies?

A: Film is so visually oriented. You have to go to the space. I used to lay out sequences with architectural programs. I could design complete sets and figure out where everybody was, like the poolroom shootout in Carlitos Way. I spent months and months looking at that set and changing the dimensions and moving the furniture until I had an idea how to lay the sequence out. That is basically because of my scientific training. Im not intimidated by all these complicated computer programs.

Q: Your films are known for the recurring theme of voyeurism. Whats another cinematic fascination of yours that we may have overlooked?

A: Megalomania. Where you create a world thats an extension of your reality. I saw it, personally, with the success of the people around me, where you create your own castle and your own court, and you isolate yourself from reality. You go from your home to the limousine to get to where youre going, and then you get into the limousine to get back. It leads to madness, basically. It leads to Scarface. Youre surrounded by people telling you youre a genius, and you do excessive, crazy things.

Q: As a teenager, you stalked your own own father, who was cheating on your mother, hoping to document him in the act of infidelity. How does the theme of the voyeur manifest itself in your films?

A: One of the primary elements of movies is the point-of-view shot. Its in no other art form except video games. Youre giving the audience the same information that the character is seeing. It works very well for following people. If youre watching a woman, its very engrossing to be following her. Needless to say, beautiful women are something that cinemas been using since its inception. The history of cinema could be called the history of men photographing women.

Q: Whats the legacy that you would hope to leave?

A: There was a candidness to the book that was written about my adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities [The Devils Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco y, by Julie Salamon]. With most of movie journalism, youre listening to spin and to people telling you how wonderful everybody I worked with was. You get the most honest reviews from people who are in the Hollywood old-age home. I remember there was an interview once  maybe with [actor] Cameron Mitchell  and he was being interviewed in the old-age home. The question was, What was it like working with X? And Mitchell said, That son of a b----, he was a maniac.

Q: Are you saying this entire interview is premature? Youre not in the old-age home yet.

A: Im very close.

De Palma (R, 107 minutes), at Landmarks E Street Cinema. Contains violent images, graphic nudity, sexual content and some profanity. 107 minutes.
Dear Amy: My fiance and I are getting married soon. Weve already decided on choosing a new last name together and using our previous surnames as a middle name. The names were pondering are from our family lines, so its something with history.

Im wondering when (and how) to tell certain members of our family about the change? Since Im the girl in the relationship my family was already expecting me to change my name (which is so sexist, but I wont even get into that now), but my fiances grandparents might be a little upset, knowing hes taking a new name.

Thoughts?

New Name in New Jersey

New Name in New Jersey: Steel yourself for the possibility that your name change will be greeted with reactions ranging from bewilderment to contempt. Its okay  we chose something from history is just not going to cut it with Grammy. Your family members might also wonder what the heck youre thinking, because if you are choosing a surname from a family line, then why not keep the family surname you already have, and ask your fiance to adopt it?

Dont discuss this with anyone until you and your guy choose your new name and thoroughly research the reality of assuming a new identity. States seem to differ on what is required to change your name; legally it is quite easy, but changing all official documents and financial accounts can be a time-consuming hassle.

Marrying is a mark of mature adulthood. Choosing to change the surname by which you will be known for the rest of your life is a momentous decision. It is absolutely within your rights to make this choice, and you should greet every query with a very simple explanation. Prepare yourselves to answer questions, some of which might seem intrusive and rude. Family members should eventually adjust to your choice.

If they refuse to adjust, its their problem, not yours.

Dear Amy: My best friend and I work across the street from each other in a city that has food stands in the skyways that connect the buildings.

We are able to meet for lunch only occasionally because of hectic schedules.

Each time we meet my friend complains that she has to bring back food for her co-worker.

This means we have to cut our lunch short to go stand in line at a second food stand to pick up food for the co-worker.

Yesterday, the co-worker wanted food from a food stand a block further from where we were getting our food. We decided to pick up the co-workers food first. When we got there, the line was 20 people deep and I said, I dont want to wait in line on my lunch hour.

My friend looked hurt. I convinced her to get food for her co-worker from the food stand we wanted to eat at. Was I wrong to finally put my foot down?

Hungry

Hungry: Please give my name (and lunch order) to your friend. She seems like a truly soft touch, and . . . she delivers.

Your friend seemed hurt when you challenged her because her sense of self seems to rest on pleasing her co-worker (I notice that she doesnt seem quite so interested in pleasing you). Your choice to push back, even a little bit, is forcing her to face this reality.

If she chooses to pick up food for her co-worker every time she is with you, you should suggest that she do so at the end of your lunches. She will have to budget her own time (and presumably leave your lunch early) in order to accommodate her friend. You should bring along a book, so that you can spend some of your valuable lunch time mentally regrouping for the afternoon.

Dear Amy: Your response to Uneasy was ridiculous. The poor girl was worried about a visit from her Nazi sympathizer cousin, and you wanted to force her to tolerate the intolerable.

You need to rethink and apologize for this recommendation.

Disgusted

Disgusted: Scores of readers on both sides of the political spectrum hated my response to Uneasy, where I urged the writer to consider tolerating the objectionable cousin, who was coming to visit.

Several points: I believe the person who wrote the question was a young man, not a woman. I further assumed that the writer was young, and perhaps unsure about the cousins actual political views (There was no report of any conversation or direct knowledge).

I wondered if these two cousins might both be laboring under misconceptions about the other. They would only find out if they met.

Amys column appears seven days a week at washingtonpost.com/advice. Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@tribpub.com or Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611.
DECATUR  Melissa Denardo is no stranger to operating in a state with budgeting crises.

Her home state of Pennsylvania has been without a budget for a year with no end in sight, much the same situation as Illinois is in, and at the Community College of Beaver County, where she is provost, they've had to tighten their belts.

Denardo is one of two finalists for the position of president of Richland Community College and was the subject of a community forum on Wednesday at the Decatur Club to allow the public to meet her and ask questions. Cristobal Valdez was interviewed on June 14. The third candidate has withdrawn due to family obligations.

The board of trustees will meet Friday and may decide on a candidate then, Chairman Bruce Campbell said.

Denardo said one of her goals as president of Richland would be to help find ways to be more independent of state funding, so that riding out trying times won't be as much of a challenge. The Beaver County college held a campuswide meeting and laid out the finances for the entire faculty and staff and asked for ideas to address the issue. One way they increased revenue was to get each student on a payment plan to keep tuition dollars coming. They also developed an aviation academy with the high schools in their area, where students can take dual-credit courses and earn a private pilot's license by graduation, with a chance to get a bachelor's degree afterward on the Beaver County campus.

I'm very excited about all of the new programs and the buildings that are going on, Denardo said. Not just the buildings, but what we're doing as far as the initiatives. The new business area is certanly exciting."

Her biggest priorities include student success and having the programs that fit with the needs of the business community so that students will have job opportunities.

She meets with the area's school superintendents monthly to work on increasing enrollment and creating programs that will serve their students, including instituting tracks in the schools to prepare students for careers in specific fields, but allowing them to change their minds if they decide to pursue a different field.

Her background is as a high school business teacher. She moved into higher education as an assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and was named faculty member of the year at Colorado Mountain College. She said Wednesday that her goal had not been administration, but a significant hearing loss made teaching difficult. Filling in for a dean at her college showed her that administration was something she could enjoy doing.

Her doctoral dissertation was on critical thinking, and she believes in problem-based learning, she said.

What increases critical thinking skills is working on real-life projects, she said, citing a school she studied while working on her doctorate. Those students worked with NASA on a project to get information on moon rocks to Earth without bringing the rocks themselves.
Our readers share tales of their rambles around the world.

Who: Andrea Lee Negroni of Arlington, Va.

Negroni took this shot on the hiking trail near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. "It took about 6 hours to reach this point from the start of the hike at Menton," she wrote. "On the way down, I took a swim in the Mediterranean Sea." (Courtesy of Andrea Lee Negroni )

Where, when, why: I went hiking for one week, from Menton, France, solo along the French Riviera. After my retirement from a law practice and 33 years of sitting in office chairs, conference rooms and airplane seats, I was determined to get outdoors. My busy work schedule was an excuse to avoid the gym, and I wanted to enjoy a healthful lifestyle in retirement. I also wanted to test myself physically and see if I could still move, walk, hike, climb and swim.

[Interested in sharing your own What a Trip story? Apply here.]

Highlights and high points: The words French Riviera conjure up images of bronzed jet-setters on their yachts, but I assumed these were exaggerated stereotypes. In reality, the Mediterranean Sea was bluer than I had imagined, the yachts were bigger than I had expected and the insouciance of the wealthy holiday-makers and residents reinforced the stereotypes. Once I made it to an altitude of 3,000 feet on a 90-plus-degree day, the view really did make my eyes pop.

Cultural connection or disconnect: I connected with another hiker from New Zealand, who had lost her glasses in the sea. Her vision was really terrible and she couldnt continue without new glasses, so I loaned her a pair of mine. They werent the right prescription, but at least she could go on. We are both lawyers (she practices in Australia) so we had a lot to talk about as we hiked, and we became fast friends.

Biggest laugh or cry: Menton is called the city of lemons and limes, because the citrus trees grow year-round in southern France. Its a charming seaside town, only three kilometers from the Italian border. I took a day off from hiking, rented a bicycle and rode across the border into Italy. What I saw there really did bring tears to my eyes. Hundreds of African immigrants were sitting around the parks, the beach and the roadside in the scorching heat, with very little clothing and no apparent source of food or water. Most were very skinny and almost none of them spoke English, French or Spanish when I tried to converse. The Italian border guards were out in force, preventing them from crossing into France. (The French border guards were present in smaller numbers, and their weapons were less obvious.) We are reading so much about the migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, but seeing these desperate people waiting for who knows what  and for who knows how long  was really heartbreaking.

How unexpected: This destination was completely new to me. I chose the hiking trip because it promised a week outdoors and strenuous exercise in a country I love  France. I have been to Paris many times, but never to the Riviera. But the French (and quite a few Germans and Swiss) love Menton and vacation there regularly. Its only an hour to Monte Carlo, Monaco, and less than two hours by bus to Nice (Bonus  the bus fare is less than 2 euros.) The restaurants line the seawall in Menton, so every night the smell of salt air mixes with the fragrance of fresh fish being grilled or fried. I loved the way both locals and tourists paraded back and forth along the seawall every night, and the fact that couples of all ages, from teens to senior citizens, held hands during their evening walks.

Fondest memento or memory: For me, the realization that I could rejuvenate myself and appreciate a physical workout was a huge gift. I went to Menton unsure if I could keep up with a 42-kilometer hike with altitudes as high as a mile above sea level, and walks as long as 10 hours in a single day. It was brutally hot, but I powered through, with only one day off. When I got back home, I committed to an exercise program and have stuck to it. I am going to make up for lost time in the future, and work exercise and outdoor activity into every vacation, and every day.

Clarification: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Andrea Lee Negroni traveled solo. She traveled with a small group of strangers. The story has been updated.

To tell us about your own trip, go to washingtonpost.com/travel and fill out the What a Trip form with your fondest memories, finest moments and favorite photos.
We made a packing pact for our around-the-world trip: carry-on bags only.

With nearly a dozen flights on five carriers, lost luggage seemed as certain as a snuffling baby on a red-eye. So we packed like Snoopy.

Jabin used a Think Tank Airport International LE Classic roller bag, which meets most airlines overhead storage dimensions, and a Patagonia backpack.

His main priority was his camera gear, though he carved out space for some comfort items, such as an REI self-inflating travel pillow, a Sawyer Squeeze Water Filter Plus (for locales with questionable tap water) and Bose QuietComfort 20 headphones, his pick for Most Valuable Player.

I was able to strip down [the devices] to the minimum without losing quality equipment, he said. I spent a lot of money at REI, mostly on clothes that were made for hiking and were quick-dry. The shorts all doubled as bathing suits.

1 of 26 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  Washington Post reporter View Photos Andrea Sachs and photographer Jabin Botsford set out on a trip around the world. Caption Reporter Andrea Sachs and photographer Jabin Botsford set out on a trip around the world. They have made it to the first two stops: Iceland and Sweden. Check back for updates from the trip. In Grindavik, Iceland, a woman floats in the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa. Read more about the trip here. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

[Around the world in 20 days]

His clothing list borrowed a page from the Eagle Scout catalogue: three pairs each of pants and shorts, two T-shirts, four collared shirts and six pairs each of socks and underwear. For cameras, he brought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100, a GoPro and a Nikon D5, plus several lenses. His kit of electronics included two iPhones, a power strip, a world outlet converter and a 13.3-inch Apple MacBook Pro Retina. In hindsight, he would have eliminated one pair of pants and upsized his backpack to fit souvenirs.

My packing strategy was less businesslike, more homey. I threw into a Re-Sails square duffel bag a two-season wardrobe (winter/summer) and a small pharmacy including malaria pills, bug spray, sunscreen and meds for every conceivable stomach ailment. For my personal item, I filled an L.L. Bean canvas tote with a mobile library, in-flight toiletries and an emergency canteen with miso packets, ramen, Wasa crackers, tea bags and a spoon. Since I am the Nesting Doll of Packing, I also tossed in a foldable backpack for hiking, a cross-body satchel for urban touring and an extra wallet for local currencies. My post-trip revelation: Scale back the reading material by 75 percent.

One of our greatest challenges was dressing for the extreme temperatures. In Iceland and Stockholm, we piled on the layers but still shivered. In Africa, India and Asia, we shed pieces to a respectable minimum but still sweated. For footwear, we brought sneakers and sandals (Chaco for him, Minnetonka for her) and wore them on sandy beaches, urban streets, rain forest floors and volcanic rock formations. Jabin suffered only one shoe mishap, when he slid into a muddy lake while trying to take a photo of a dragonfly. He waddled around in soggy sneaks for the remainder of the day.

[How to plan a trip around the world]

My biggest misstep was forgetting hiking pants, which Jabin remembered. (Trekking in jeans in Madagascar will definitely get me evicted from the REI club.) Jabin was also the bearer of brilliant ideas, such as placing a bar of soap in his laundry bag to fend off evil odors and bringing packets of Tide detergent for the tub-o-mat. I kept our faces from melting off with cucumber-scented face towelettes.

So did our carry-on-only pact succeed? Sadly, no. In fact, our contract fell apart before we even left the States. At Dulles International Airport, the Icelandair agent judged our bags by weight, not size. Most of the other airlines also cared more about kilograms than centimeters.

Booking around the world travel doesn't have to be hard. Learn how to maximize the value of your next trip by making multiple stops while circling the globe. (McKenna Ewen,Osman Malik/The Washington Post)

From Madagascar onward, we started to willingly hand over our bags, which was partly an act of preservation: We didnt want the ticket agent to snatch our equally heavy second carry-ons. We also reversed policy and began to add items to our luggage. In Mumbai, we snapped up shirts, dresses and a pair of shoes, behaving as if we were traveling with an extra steamer trunk and a valet. By the time we reached New York, my once-saggy duffel resembled an overstuffed sausage.

[The arduous but worthwhile pursuit of Madagascars lemurs]

We returned home wiser about packing. Weigh your items in advance, for instance. Repeat wearings, even of socks, is not a fashion crime. Leave room for souvenirs that you never imagined buying. Airlines dont always lose bags. And never skimp on the face towelettes.

Jabin packed for business; I packed for comfort. Here is a peek into the bags we carried around the world.

Jabins List

3 pairs of pants

3 pairs of shorts

2 T-shirts

4 collared shirts

6 pairs of socks

6 pairs of underwear

1 pair of Chacos

1 pair of tennis shoes

1 maroon hoodie

North Face rain jacket

Eddie Bauer down jacket

World outlet converter

Power strip

2 iPhones

1 AT&T wireless card

1 GoPro

1 Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100

1 Nikon D5 camera body

1 Nikon GP-1A GPS adapter

1 Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4G ED VR lens

1 Sigma 20mm f/1.4 DG HSM art lens

1 Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4G lens

3 memory card readers

1 13.3-inch Apple MacBook Pro Retina

Toiletries

1-liter collapsible water bottle

Back-up batteries

Chargers for everything

2 three-pack Tide detergent travel sink packets

Flashlight

REI self-inflating travel pillow

Sawyer Squeeze Water Filter Plus

Bose QuietComfort 20 headphones

Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2TB external USB 3.0/2.0 portable hard drive

Andreas List

6 dresses

2 skirts

4 T-shirts

1 pair of jeans (left in India)

Patagonia fleece

1 denim jacket

1 polka-dot raincoat

1 sweatshirt

2 long-sleeved shirts

2 sweaters

1 pair of shorts

1 tennis skirt

2 tank tops

8 pairs of socks

20 pairs of underwear

New Balance sneakers

Minnetonka sandals

Baseball cap

Foldable backpack

Crossbody satchel

3 packets of miso soup

6 packets of instant ramen noodle soup

1 sleeve of Wasa crackers

1 six-pack of raisins

Assorted tea bags

1 spoon

1 plastic container/soup bowl

5 New Yorker issues

3 paperbacks

Stack of newspapers

Pink headphones

Toiletries, divided among two bags

Travel Smart All-in-One Adapter

Virgin Atlantic eye mask

Large scarf (doubles as blanket and eye mask)

Roll of Zip-loc bags

Head lamp

More from Travel:

The pain and perks of traveling while tall

Exploring Mumbai, a financial center bedazzled by Bollywood

The restorative power of 24 hours in Singapore
Southwest has a sale on nonstop flights around the country, plus the Caribbean and Mexico. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

This weeks best travel bargains around the globe.

Land

LAuberge de Sedona, a luxury resort on Arizonas Oak Creek, is offering a summer special with discounted rates based on the thermometer. With the Cooler by Nature package, guests receive a discount based on the temperature difference between the airport and the hotel on their arrival day. For example, if the thermometer reads 100 degrees at the airport and 85 degrees at the resort, guests earn $15 off the starting rate of $325 a night, plus $25 in taxes. Two-night minimum stay required. Valid through Aug. 31. Info: 855-702-0063, www.lauberge.com.

Orbitz is turning 15 and is celebrating with a birthday sale. Reserve by July 3 and receive 15 percent off thousands of select hotels that the third-party booking site has already discounted by up to 50 percent. For example, in mid-July, the Humphreys Half Moon Inn & Suites in San Diego starts at $234, including taxes and the 15 percent savings; normal price is from $460. Also in mid-July, the Tide South Beach in Miami Beach, Fla., starts at $238, down from $375. Travel by Dec. 31. Use promo code BIRTHDAY15. Info: www.orbitz15.com.

Nolitan Hotel in Manhattans Nolita (North of Little Italy) neighborhood is offering its Hello Summer deal, with savings of up to 25 percent through Sept. 5. Rates vary. For example, a Friday night stay in mid-July starts at $287, with taxes  a savings of $94. Book by June 30. Info: 212-925-2555, www.nolitanhotel.com/special-offers-en.html.

Sea

Paul Gauguin Cruises is offering $500 shipboard credits per stateroom on South Pacific sailings aboard the m/s Paul Gauguin. Travel by April 15. Cruisers can combine the promotion with several other deals, including half-off brochure rates, free cruise for a third passenger sharing a stateroom (2016 departures only) and free airfare from Los Angeles. Prices vary. For example, the 11-night Cook Islands & Society Islands cruise sailing round trip from Papeete, Tahiti, on Oct. 22 starts at $6,045 per person double, plus $185 taxes. Air from Los Angeles typically costs about $1,450. Book by July 30. Info: 800-848-6172, www.pgcruises.com.

Air

Southwest has launched a sale fare on nonstop flights to domestic cities and destinations in the Caribbean and Mexico. For example, the round-trip fare from Reagan National Airport to Indianapolis starts at $98; fare on other airlines starts at $185. Restrictions vary by destination. For most domestic travel, sale fares are available on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, from Aug. 23 to Dec. 17. Book by June 23 at www.southwest.com.

La Compagnie, the all-business-class airline, is celebrating its second anniversary with promotional fares from Newark to London and Paris. With the deal, two travelers pay $2,990 round trip to Pariss Charles de Gaulle airport and $2,790 to Londons Luton Airport  a savings of 15 percent. Taxes included. Book June 21-July 31. Info: www.lacompagnie.com/en.

Package

Apple Vacations is offering an all-inclusive package to Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic, from $919 per person, double occupancy. The deal, which applies to select September departures, includes round-trip air from BWI Marshall on Xtra Airways; six nights at the adults-only Riu Republica, a beachfront resort that opened June 4; food and beverages; and taxes. Priced separately, the package costs at least $222 more per couple. Info: 800-517-2000, www.applevacations.com/hotels/riu-republica.html.

 Carol Sottili, Andrea Sachs
Former D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray speaks with reporters after casting his ballot at Precinct 113 in Ward 7 in Washington. (J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post)

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser will face a more independent-minded and combative city council starting in January, which could threaten both her agenda and her reelection.

Three of the mayors most reliable allies on the D.C. Council lost their seats in Tuesdays Democratic primary, delivering a major setback to Bowser (D) about halfway through her first term in office.

One of the likely incoming council members poses a particular threat to Bowser: former mayor Vincent C. Gray, who returns to public office as a critic and counterweight to Bowser and has not ruled out the possibility of running against her in 2018.

The election has rattled the political hierarchy in a city that has seen dramatic economic and demographic shifts in the past decade. Young, affluent residents have poured into the District, and real estate prices have soared, while homelessness has reached crisis levels and violent crime has surged.

Gray handily beat D.C. Council member Yvette M. Alexander (D) Tuesday, but that outcome was widely expected, given Grays long-standing popularity in the citys easternmost ward. The bigger surprise for Bowser was the defeat of two other incumbents who consistently backed her on the council: veteran lawmaker Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large) and newcomer LaRuby May (D-Ward 8).

D.C.s former mayor Vincent C. Gray beat incumbent Yvette M. Alexander by a wide margin in the primary for the Ward 7 council seat on June 14. I feel so excited that the people of Ward 7 have given me the opportunity to once again represent them, Gray said. (WUSA9)

[Vincent Gray wins D.C. Council race, makes political comeback.]

While the city will still hold a general election in November, because 3 out of 4 voters in the District are registered Democrats, the partys primary is tantamount to a general election.

Tuesdays results also ended a winning streak in city elections for Bowsers political operation, the vaunted Green Team. The election exposed vulnerabilities that could encourage candidates other than Gray to consider challenging Bowser for mayor. Two officials weighing a bid are said to be council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5) and Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D).

The loss of three near-certain votes for Bowsers policies resulted in part from dissatisfaction among voters in less-affluent, predominantly African American neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.

Voters there said in interviews at the polls that they were not necessarily hostile to Bowser, even if they voted for candidates whom she opposed. But they said they wanted her to deliver better results in reducing crime and unemployment and providing affordable housing.

Andrea Murphy, 52, a Ward 7 voter who supported Gray, praised Bowser for being a people person but added, I want her to step up on the things shes promising, including increasing wages and creating jobs.

Douglas Brooks, 47, urged Bowser to spend more time east of the river. Shes making a rack of promises, he said. She needs to come to these areas where the violence is.

D.C. Ward 8 Council candidate Trayon White talks with voter Jackie Davis outside a polling site at Turner Elementary School in Washington. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Voters also appeared to send a message that they wanted a more independent-minded council, rather than members who routinely backed the mayor.

[D.C. Council head blasts Bowser over obfuscation over shelters; she fires back with expletive.]

Its a good thing for the city, said council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who often opposes Bowser. We want people up there thinking on their own. Ive never liked rubber stamps.

Analysts said Bowser will probably have to work harder to cooperate with the council and shed what some see as a highhanded approach reminiscent of her mentor, former mayor Adrian Fenty.

Relations have been frosty at times, such as when Bowser used an expletive to describe council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) after the council made major changes to her plans for creating new shelters for homeless families throughout the city.

Bowser said she respected the voters decision but believed the primary winners agree with her vision for the city, even if she supported their opponents.

All the people that were elected share the view of how we make the city better  investments in affordable housing, and making neighborhoods safer and stronger, Bowser said in a telephone interview.

When the voters speak, everybody should listen, she added.

Other winners besides Gray included two candidates named White, both of whom worked previously for Racine, the attorney general.

One was Robert White, who beat Orange for the nomination for the at-large seat. The other was Trayon White, who beat May in Ward 8 in a race where the Green Team made a particularly big effort in a losing cause.

Marion Barrys mantle on the line as early voting nears in D.C.]

Bowsers lone victory was in Ward 4, her home ward and springboard of her political career, where her ally, D.C. Council member Brandon Todd, was victorious.

Although the results sharply diminished Bowsers sway over the council, both analysts and voters said they did not spring from a generalized antipathy to the mayor similar to one that arose against Fenty in the second half of his term. Instead, Bowsers three allies were defeated because of different circumstances.

Each race had its own dynamics, D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) said. What it does mean is having the support of the mayor isnt enough to win.

Grays victory drew the most attention partly because he is expected to use his council seat as a platform to assail Bowsers policies and prepare to run against her in 2018.

Gray, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, said Wednesday on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU-FM (88.5) that the election results represented a popular rejection of some of Bowsers policies.

He faulted her handling of the homeless shelter plan and criticized her for what he said was horrifically high overspending on snow removal.

The election is a repudiation of some of the things that have occurred over the last year and a half, Gray said.

He added, however, that he would work on the council for the good of the city rather than to attack the mayor. I dont have any intention to simply use this [position] as an opportunity to throw rocks or poke at Mayor Bowser, he said.

Tension between Gray and Bowser is long-standing. Bowser was closely allied with Fenty when Gray unseated him as mayor in 2010. Then Bowser ousted Gray in 2014 in a primary that took place three weeks after the U.S. attorneys office was widely seen as predicting that Gray would be indicted for illegal funds related to his successful 2010 campaign for mayor.

Six of Grays campaign aides and associates pleaded guilty to felonies in the scandal, but he was not charged. Gray and his supporters blame his loss that year to what they see as irresponsible action by the U.S. attorneys office and unfair treatment by local media, particularly The Washington Post.

While many observers expect Gray to run for mayor in two years, some doubt he could win citywide. His support is considerably weaker in more affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods.

William Lightfoot, who chaired Bowsers mayoral campaign and continues to advise her, said Oranges loss was also a bad sign for Grays citywide prospects. Robert White beat Orange by dominating wards with white majorities, which were skeptical of Orange partly because of an ethics violation.

In a changing city, Gray would lose to the same electorate that rejected Orange, Lightfoot said. Theyre both ethically challenged.

Gray made it clear Tuesday night that he is trying to anchor the campaign scandal to the past, calling it an unfortunate part of history.
Sandra Morgan, a D.C. statehood advocate, attends a meeting Monday to write a constitution, should D.C. be allowed to become a state. (Aaron Davis/The Washington Post)

In an air-conditioned city building in Anacostia under the glare of cameras, the delegates gathered to hammer out the nitty-gritty details of self-government at a constitutional convention.

The live-streamed event was a far cry from the powdered wigs and candlelight of 1787 Philadelphia, but D.C. political leaders and activists meeting this week share a similar goal: crafting a framework for democracy.

They are writing a state constitution for the District, a pivotal step in the citys renewed push to become the 51st state. At meetings that began Monday and continue Friday and Saturday, D.C. leaders are collecting ideas about the best way to organize a new state.

And theyre doing it 2016 style.

The city has posted the draft constitution and allowed any resident to annotate it.

No, D.C. doesnt live off of federal funds, and no, its not necessarily Congresss job to manage our budget. Washingtonian staff writer Benjamin R. Freed dispels some misconceptions about control over the District. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

The New Columbia Statehood Commission, the body running the convention, has catalogued tweets, emails, online comments and even Skype video testimony in its official record.

Were far from the quill pen  and even from the typewriter, said Paul Strauss, a commission member and the Districts voteless shadow senator who lobbies for D.C. voting rights. Were going to make the nations first modern  and model  constitution, he said.

The last time a territory held a constitutional convention that led to statehood was 66 years ago, when Hawaii wrote its state constitution before it was admitted to the union.

D.C. officials want the constitution to be ratified by D.C. voters in November, in the hope that the next president and Congress will take up the question of whether to grant the District statehood.

In the nations capital  where nearly every resident has an opinion about government  lawyers, lobbyists, gay rights advocates, environmentalists and others are weighing in on how they would create a state government from scratch.

Constitutional Convention Voting is closed on this poll User Poll Results: If the District is granted statehood, what should the 51st state be named? New Columbia -- This is the name that D.C. officials chose in the early 1980s after more than a year of debate. The legislation for D.C. statehood that supporters have submitted in Congress for decades since has assumed the 51st state would be called New Columbia. Douglass Commonwealth (D.C.) -- A movement is afoot in the constitutional convention to drop New Columbia and name the would-be state after the 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave in Maryland and lived most of his life as an author and public servant in D.C. Washington, D.C. -- D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has said keeping the District's full current name - although grammatically unusual compared to other states - would cause the least disruption. Postal addresses could remain the same, and Congress might object less, she said. None of the above. We need something better. Pardon the interruption! We need to verify that you are an actual person. New Columbia -- This is the name that D.C. officials chose in the early 1980s after more than a year of debate. The legislation for D.C. statehood that supporters have submitted in Congress for decades since has assumed the 51st state would be called New Columbia. Douglass Commonwealth (D.C.) -- A movement is afoot in the constitutional convention to drop New Columbia and name the would-be state after the 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave in Maryland and lived most of his life as an author and public servant in D.C. Washington, D.C. -- D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has said keeping the District's full current name - although grammatically unusual compared to other states - would cause the least disruption. Postal addresses could remain the same, and Congress might object less, she said. None of the above. We need something better. View Results This is a non-scientific user poll. Results are not statistically valid and cannot be assumed to reflect the views of Washington Post users as a group or the general population.

Although only D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and the commissions four other members will approve the final version of a constitution, the mayor has encouraged every resident to participate as a delegate and have a say in the future of the new state.

In the heavily Democratic city, thats produced hundreds of suggestions with a decidedly progressive slant.

With global warming a concern for some, they said Monday that the District should write protections for air and water quality into its constitution. Others want to exempt civil rights laws from ballot referendums  preventing local versions of such measures as North Carolinas vote on transgender bathroom privileges. And in the wake of the mass shooting this week in Orlando, many want to delete any mention of the right to bear arms, saying the District should not tacitly endorse gun ownership by inserting the Bill of Rights into the state constitution, as most states have done.

Let that blood be on someone elses hands, a delegate to the citys first convention meeting this week stood up and yelled.

Bowser, who chairs the commission, wants a rather generic document. She said she doesnt want the constitution to include social policy statements that could incite conservative Republicans in Congress to quash their effort.

Thats what happened in the early 1980s, the only other time the District attempted to draft a constitution, under then-Mayor Marion Barry. Some Republicans called the final document a liberal manifesto, with provisions that the state provide jobs to all city residents, and a guaranteed right to strike for any worker, including firefighters. Congress never acted on the bill.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, has promised to be a vocal champion for D.C. statehood if elected to the White House. But Republican Donald Trump has said statehood is a tough thing to envision.

Indeed, two centuries of American politics show that the District is facing a herculean task in getting Congress to take up the issue  or, for that matter, a president to invest in more than rhetoric.

D.C. residents have chafed at their lack of voting rights in Congress since the land comprising the District was deeded to the federal government in 1790.

Congress has allowed limited self-government since 1973, permitting residents to elect a mayor and a city council. But the federal government maintains control over its courts and its budget, and conservatives in Congress sometimes prevent the city from spending local tax dollars on programs they oppose, such as abortion funding for low-income women or full legalization of marijuana.

In 1978, Congress passed a constitutional amendment to award D.C. voting representation in Congress, but it failed when the required three-fourths of states did not ratify it. An effort to give the District just one voting member of Congress collapsed in 2009, when Republicans attached a provision that would have required the city to jettison its tough gun laws.

Bowser is now pushing for the District to follow a different strategy, one modeled after Tennessees. That requires D.C. residents to write a state constitution, win approval from city voters and then apply to Congress to approve its admission as the 51st state without ratification by the states.

The draft constitution Bowsers office largely drafted with input from legal experts would keep the District functioning mostly as it does now, although the nomenclature would change. The mayor would be known as the governor, and the D.C. Council would become the legislature.

The District would limit the legislature to just 13 members  the size of the current council but smaller than the 180 elected representatives in Vermont or 90-member legislature in Wyoming, two states with fewer residents than the District.

It would also retain the post of chief financial officer, one Congress required after the city nearly fell into bankruptcy in the 1980s. Under the document, the District would reclaim control of its courts and criminal justice system.

More than a dozen residents who spoke at Mondays convention meeting denounced the idea of a small legislature, saying it would concentrate power in the hands of too few.

Residents also said the District must allow for a process to amend its constitution in the future, as most states do.

Laura Fuchs, a teacher at H.D. Woodson High School, was among those dissatisfied by the process, saying a true constitutional convention should include elected delegates and not leave decisions to politicians who could be trying to protect their own interests.

This is sending the wrong message to our children about how to run a democracy, said Fuchs, who wants the commission to hold a traditional convention within five years of the District being granted statehood.

The commission plans to vote on a final draft by the end of June and send it to the D.C. Council, which would have to approve it by early July in order for it to be placed on the November ballot.

No process is going to be perfect, said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the Districts nonvoting House member, who spoke Monday night, But this is urgent, and we have to go on the offensive with Congress to demand our rights.

[The 51st State: D.C. is about to declare its independence  from Congress]

[D.C. mayor calls for vote on D.C. statehood]

[District leaders commit to a constitutional convention]

[House Republicans deal a blow to D.C. autonomy]
A Maryland boy, now 11, had his suspension upheld for chewing a pastry into the shape of a gun. School officials have said that was one of several issues in a pattern of misbehavior. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

A Maryland judge has upheld the suspension of an elementary school boy who chewed his breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and pretended to shoot classmates, supporting a finding that the boy disrupted his class and that his family was not denied due process as it appealed what has become known as the Pop Tart case.

Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Ronald A. Silkworth ruled that the school system could reasonably consider that the boys actions in March 2013 were disruptive and that a suspension was appropriately used as a corrective tool to address this disruption, based on the students past history of escalating behavioral issues, according to his 11-page ruling. He upheld an earlier ruling that supported the two-day suspension from the Maryland State Board of Education.

Silkworths opinion comes in a case that has attracted national attention and inspired legislative efforts to limit punishments for certain kinds of school misbehavior. Florida passed a bill in 2014 to limit zero-tolerance practices at schools, including discipline for brandishing partially consumed pastry, or other food items, to simulate a weapon.

The case started less than three months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., at a time of heightened sensitivities about guns in schools. A string of D.C.-area children were suspended around the time for imaginary or toy guns.

[Finger guns, toy guns and threats: The fallout of Sandy Hook]

The father of the suspended boy in Maryland said he is considering next steps but remains interested in clearing his sons record. The boy, who was 7 at the time of the incident, is now 11 and is completing fifth grade this week.

Its a mark on his record for something that doesnt need to be there, said William B.J. Welch, the boys father, who voiced concerns about lasting consequences of the disciplinary measures. Theres just a lot of unknowns, and I dont want something that could potentially debilitate his future.

The boy was suspended when he was a second-grader at Anne Arundels Park Elementary School. According to school officials, the child nibbled his breakfast bar into the shape of a gun and exclaimed: Look, I made a gun! He then allegedly aimed the pastry at other students at their desks and in a nearby hallway.

But county school officials have long maintained that the suspension was not about guns or pastries. They say the boy was disciplined for repeated disruptions and that his two-day punishment was a last resort after a series of behavioral problems.

The state board agreed in February 2015.

The student in this case had a long history of behavioral problems that were the subject of progressive intervention by the school, the state board wrote at the time. He created a classroom disruption on March 1, 2013, which resulted in a suspension that was justified based on the incident in question and the students history.

[Md. state board upholds boys suspension in pastry gun case]

Anne Arundel County school officials said the judges decision to uphold the suspension again shows that the school system acted appropriately in the case.

We have believed from the outset that the actions of the school staff were not only appropriate and consistent with Board of Education policies and school system regulations, but in the best interests of all students, said Bob Mosier, a school system spokesman. It is unfortunate that the character of those staff members has been called into question throughout this long process, but we are grateful that Judge Silkworth reaffirmed the validity of their actions.

Robin Ficker, the familys attorney, said the court ruling was disappointing and he continues to see the suspension as an overreaction.

There was no physical injury, and I think they should be able to deal with a 7-year-old in-house, he said. I hope the school system will think twice about putting kids out of school instead of dealing with minor discipline problems. It would be different if this was a 17-year-old and he was threatening physical harm.

Ficker said he has handled 10 student discipline cases involving toy or imaginary guns since Sandy Hook. All except for the Anne Arundel case have led to school officials clearing student records, he said.

The family has maintained their attorney should have been able to cross-examine the assistant principal who met with the boys father on the day of the suspension. Welch has said there was no mention of ongoing problems at the meeting but rather a focus on the child pointing the pastry at others as if it were a gun.

The judge ruled that because the matter was an administrative proceeding, the school principals testimony and other evidence were sufficient.
Leo Fisher said he has endured a sense of loss in his personal life since he and his wife, Susan Duncan, were attacked and held hostage in their McLean, Va., home by a revenge-seeking lawyer in 2014.

Theres just a rage, and Ive never been a rageful person, Fisher said Thursday in front of a jury in Fairfax County Circuit Court, pausing at times to fight back tears. Like anyone else, I get angry from time to time, but theres just a rage for me.

Fishers testimony came before the jury sentenced the couples assailant, Andrew Schmuhl, to two life sentences plus 98 years in prison for the brutal home invasion. The same jury last week convicted Schmuhl, who held Fisher and his wife hostage, slashed their throats, and left them for dead.

Prosecutors said Schmuhl, 33, and his wife, fellow attorney Alecia Schmuhl, sought revenge against Fisher because he had fired Alecia Schmuhl from his Arlington, Va., law firm a couple of weeks earlier. Prosecutors also said the unemployed Andrew Schmuhl was having financial difficulties and wanted to extract money, gold or valuable information from Fisher.

At Thursdays sentencing hearing, Fisher spoke about the impact the attack has had on him and his wife.

He said Duncan, a normally private person, has become more reserved, and lost her desire to leave their home. Fisher said his wife often spends her days in her sewing room with her two pet cats, with no interest in seeing anyone. Duncan, who was in the courthouse but not the courtroom, often wakes in the middle of the night screaming from nightmares of strangers attempting to kill her, Fisher said.

Thats her life now, he said.

Fisher made it clear that he wanted Andrew and Alecia Schmuhl, who is set to stand trial in September, to face the full consequences for the attack.

I just dont want this guy and his wife  these two monsters  to ever do this to anyone else again, he said. These are human beings who did this to other human beings, and I dont want anybody to have to go through this.

Andrew Schmuhls father, Donald Schmuhl, urged the jury to be lenient with his son, who he said was a Cub Scout in their small Wisconsin town. He said the trial has placed a microscope over Andrew Schmuhls life that strips away the dignity Andrew gained in school accolades and as a military veteran.

My son was brought up in a family where we help people, Donald Schmuhl said, taking occasional sips of water as his voice began to break.

Andrew Schmuhl was a former Army judge advocate and military magistrate. He left the military in 2012 after suffering a back injury two years earlier.

The defense had conceded that Schmuhl carried out the attack but said he was so intoxicated by painkillers and other drugs prescribed for the back injury that he could not judge right from wrong. Attorneys said Alecia Schmuhl may have given him an extra dose of fentanyl, a powerful opiate, to purposely cloud his judgment.

Prosecutors said the Schmuhls assembled an abduction kit in the days after Alecia Schmuhls firing, bought a Taser and got temporary cellphones that are hard to trace.

Then, on a quiet Sunday night in November 2014, the Schmuhls drove to Fisher and Duncans home. Alecia Schmuhl remained outside and Andrew Schmuhl rang the doorbell and then forced his way inside, prosecutors said.

Andrew Schmuhl used the Taser on Fisher, bound him with zip ties and then subdued Duncan. The incident was as bizarre as it was frightening. Schmuhl claimed he was from the Virginia SEC, flashed a novelty badge and made nonsensical claims. At one point, he queried Fisher about his role in a supposed murder-for-hire plot involving a Mexican drug cartel.

Eventually, Schmuhl asked Fisher where he kept cash or gold bars. Fisher offered to take Schmuhl to a bank to get money. Schmuhl then leapt on Fisher, put a pillow over his face and slashed his throat with a knife.

Duncan burst into the room and Schmuhl opened fire on her. The bullet grazed her head before lodging in the ceiling. Schmuhl began stabbing her and also cut her neck, until she played dead.

Duncan eventually hit a panic alarm, sending Schmuhl fleeing from the home. Police stopped both Schmuhls about 30 minutes later, finding Andrew Schmuhl wearing nothing but a diaper in the passenger seat of a car. At trial, Schmuhl testified that he remembered nothing of the attack.

Fairfax County Deputy Commonwealths Attorney Casey Lingan told the jury that Andrew Schmuhl had shown no mercy toward his victims and the jury need not show him leniency.

He literally had all the opportunity in life to make something of himself. He has no excuse, Lingan said.

A judge set the final sentencing hearing for Aug. 26. The judge can accept the jurys sentence or decrease it but cannot increase it.
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D.C. police on Thursday charged a man suspected of helping a gunman who authorities said opened fire at a busy Northwest Washington intersection last week, striking a person he was aiming at and wounding three bystanders.

Kevin Antonio Cole, 26, was charged with four counts of assault with intent to kill. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said detectives are still looking for the gunman in the shooting that occurred about 4:20 p.m. on June 8 in front of Big Ben Liquors at New York Avenue and North Capitol Street.

Authorities would not comment on a possible motive. Police said the gunman struck the man he was aiming at several times and the victim remains hospitalized, upgraded from critical to serious condition. The three bystanders suffered minor wounds to arms and legs and have been released from hospitals.

[Four people shot at New York Avenue and North Capitol Street]

As they announced the arrest, Lanier and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) acknowledged an increase in daylight shootings this year. The police chief described the shooter as brazen enough to open fire at New York and North Capitol  one of the citys busiest intersections and a major route for commuters.

We have seen an increase in people willing to use a gun to settle minor disputes, Bowser said. Of the shooting on New York Avenue, she said the victim was a targeted individual. That is evident by his injuries. The message I want our residents to take is that our police conducted a swift and thorough investigation. Now we need the publics help in finding the person we believe is responsible for actually firing the gun.

The shootings raised concerns among residents of historic Truxton Circle, where houses have increased in value in the past several years but are near the corner where dilapidated storefronts attract loiterers conducting illicit business.

[Police describe corner where shooting occurred as open-air drug market]

At a community meeting after the shootings, William Fitzgerald, the Fifth District police commander, told residents, Obviously, that corner is a long-term open-air drug market. He also said it was fortunate that more people werent hurt, given the number of bullets he said were fired.

In an arrest warrant, police said Cole, who was listed with no address, was captured on several private surveillance cameras parking in an alley near the corner where the shooting occurred. He was driving an older-model black Ford Explorer with no front license plate, an open sun roof and a rear wiper blade stuck up at a 90 degree angle.

The warrant application said video shows the gunman get out of the vehicles rear passenger side, walk to the alley and take out a gun from his waistband. After the shooting, police said he went back to the vehicle, which sped off.

Police said that later that night officers found the Ford Explorer near the intersection with Cole inside. He was questioned and freed, and then arrested Wednesday night after police gathered additional evidence.
The D.C. Superior Court has a new top judge.

Judge Robert E. Morin was selected late Thursday as the courts chief judge in one of the most hotly contested judicial races the courthouse has seen in more than a decade.

Morin, 63, was selected over current Chief Judge Lee F. Satterfield, who was seeking an unprecedented third term. Three other judges from the courthouse  Judith Bartnoff, Erik Christian and Hiram E. Puig-Lugo  also vied for the position.

Morin was appointed judge in 1996 by President Clinton and previously served as presiding judge of the courts criminal division, where he helped oversee management of calendars for judges who handle criminal cases. He also has worked representing death-penalty clients at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta and with the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.

Morin is presiding over the high-profile retrial of Ingmar Guandique, the man charged with the 2001 death of Washington intern Chandra Levy. The trial is scheduled to begin in October.

[Meet the judges who ran for top spot at D.C. Superior Court]

Morin was selected by the seven-member Judicial Nomination Commission. The Commission is composed of chairman and U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, four D.C. attorneys, a local minister and a representative of the AFL-CIO. The commission met with the candidates for a round of separate interviews on Thursday. The commission also obtained numerous letters from lawyers, judges and court users regarding the candidates.

Earlier this month, four of the candidates met for a question-and-answer session at the University of the District of Columbias Law School, sponsored by the Districts Council for Court Excellence. Satterfield did not attend the forum, sending word he had a prior commitment that evening in California.

Satterfield, 57, has served as the courts chief since 2008. In 2012, Satterfield ran for a second term. In April, Satterfield surprised many within the Districts legal community by seeking a third, four-year term.

Satterfield had several health issues during his most recent term, including suffering a stroke in the courthouse and then undergoing a heart transplant. He told commission members that his health challenges were behind him and that he was able to serve as chief judge again.

While several judges and court employees have voiced support for Satterfield, a few judges have called his management style divisive and harshly critical. Satterfield attributed his demeanor to his previous poor health.

Morin, however, has been seen by some as more collegial. At least one attorney organization, the Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association, wrote letters to the commission expressing support of Morin.

[Courts chief judge battles health challenges, including heart transplant]

The chief judge is often the public face and voice of the courthouse, assigning judges to cases and court calendars and setting leadership initiatives for the courthouses operations.

Morin will begin the job Oct. 1.
Police in Prince Georges County said they have arrested a man in a fatal shooting in the Hyattsville area.

[Man is found shot to death in Hyattsville-area townhouse]

About 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, officers were called to the 3500 block of 55th Avenue for the report of a shooting, police said in a statement. When they arrived, they found 29-year-old James Albert Haywood of Hyattsville suffering from a gunshot wound inside his home, the statement said. Haywood was taken to a hospital, where he died a short time later, according to the statement. A second person in the home was not hurt.

Late Wednesday, police arrested 35-year-old Jason Timothy Herring of the 9900 block of Mallard Drive in Laurel in connection with Haywoods killing, the statement said. Officials believe the fatal shooting stemmed from an ongoing dispute between the two men, according to the statement.

Herring was charged with first- and second-degree murder, as well as attempted murder, the statement said.
June 20, 2016 Riders board a shuttle bus at Minnesota Avenue Metro station at the start of the morning rush. J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post

What it looks like on the D.C. Metro at the beginning of year-long maintenance

What it looks like on the D.C. Metro at the beginning of year-long maintenance

Tens of thousands of subway riders will soon feel the brunt of Metros long-term maintenance overhaul as the transit agency, starting Saturday, closes a heavily traveled stretch of three rail lines for 16 days. The shutdown will result in major service reductions in downtown Washington and force Blue Line commuters from Virginia to take more cumbersome routes into and out of the city.

I would stress very strongly that people telework or carpool into their jobs, Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld said at a Thursday news conference.

Like D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and Prince Georges County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D), who appeared with him, Wiedefeld implored commuters in the shutdown area, near the D.C.-Prince Georges border, to refrain from using Metro if possible.

This is going to put a tremendous stress on residents coming into the District from Prince Georges, Baker said. So we want people to start thinking now. . . . We want people to start making plans for other alternatives for coming into the city.

The 16-day project is the second of 15 maintenance surges scheduled to be carried out in Metros months-long SafeTrack rebuilding effort. Officials are trying to revitalize a subway that has fallen into dangerous disrepair because of decades of maintenance neglect, resulting in chronic breakdowns and safety problems.

Here's what Blue Line riders need to know about how the second phase of Metro's maintenance plan, known as SafeTrack will affect them. The second phase runs June 18-July 3 on the Blue Line. (Claritza Jimenez,Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)

[Metro releases significantly revised SafeTrack plan.]

The first SafeTrack project, scheduled to be finished Thursday, caused service delays on the Orange and Silver lines for two weeks, with trains traveling in both directions forced to share one track between the East Falls Church and Ballston stations.

But that single-tracking on the subways western side was a relatively small aggravation compared with the next disruption, which will be centered on the systems eastern side. From Saturday through July 3, rail service will be halted from the Eastern Market station, on the Orange, Silver and Blue lines, to the Orange Lines Minnesota Avenue station and to the Benning Road station on the Silver and Blue lines.

For people who have no choice but to use the subway, Metro will provide shuttle buses to ferry them past the Stadium-Armory and Potomac Avenue stations, which will be shuttered for 16 days. However, there will not be nearly enough buses to carry the tens of thousands of rail commuters who normally ride in that area, transit officials warned.

They should allow well over an hour of additional travel time, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said of shuttle bus riders. Expect crowding. Expect it to be hot. Expect it to be frustrating. Its not going to be a pleasant experience.

Four partial rail-line shutdowns in other areas of the system  two in July and one each in October and December  also are scheduled as part of the SafeTrack effort.

[Metro sank into crisis despite decades of warnings.]

While Metro riders who live in Prince Georges or in the Districts eastern corner and work downtown will bear the worst of this months inconvenience, the ripple effects of the shutdown will be felt all along the Orange, Silver and Blue lines, especially by Blue Line commuters who travel into the city from the Alexandria area.

For example, to ease train traffic in downtown Washington, Blue Line trains will run only between the Franconia-Springfield station and Arlington National Cemetery, and only during the hours that the cemetery is open, Wiedefeld said. From April to September, the cemetery is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., according to its website.

Riders headed downtown on Orange Line trains that originate at the New Carrollton station will have to get off at Minnesota Avenue. On the Silver Line, trains that start at the Largo Town Center station will terminate at Benning Road.

From Minnesota Avenue and Benning Road, shuttle buses will carry riders to Eastern Market, where they can board trains again and head downtown. For eastbound riders headed out of downtown, shuttle buses will be available from Eastern Market to Minnesota Avenue and to Benning Road.

But Metro warned that the buses will be able to accommodate only about 30 percent of the tens of thousands of riders who normally use that part of the system in rush hours.

For this to be successful, we need 7 out of 10 people east of Eastern Market to do something different, or crowding [on shuttle buses] is going to be quite severe, Stessel said. The message is, if you live east of Eastern Market, and you dont have a plan yet, then you need to get one now. . . . The reason for the bus service is for customers who have absolutely no other option.

He said: Theres no way for buses to replicate the capacity of three rail lines. In rush hours, trains move through this section every two minutes and 20 seconds, and the trains have up to 800 people on them. So do the math. A bus holds roughly 50 people. So every two minutes and 20 seconds, youd need 16 buses, and thats only one direction. And there arent enough buses in the region to handle that.

[What SafeTrack will mean for weekend riders.]

Riders who get off trains at Minnesota Avenue or Benning Road and get back on at Eastern Market, or vice versa, will be charged for a single continuous trip and not assessed the added fare associated with leaving and reentering the system, Metro said.

Between the Rosslyn and Stadium-Armory stations, the Orange, Blue and Silver lines share tracks across downtown Washington. Normally, trains arrive at stations along that stretch at a rate of about 26 per hour during the morning and evening rush hours and about 16 per hour during the midday periods, according to Metro.

With no Blue Line service beyond Arlington Cemetery during the 16-day surge, and Orange and Silver line service reduced, trains will arrive at a rate of about 11 per hour at the stations from Rosslyn to Stadium-Armory, the transit agency said. That translates to a rush-hour service reduction of more than 50 percent.

All told, Metro said, closing the Stadium-Armory and Potomac Avenue stations, reducing service along the rest of the Orange and Silver lines and limiting the Blue Line to a short route in Virginia will disrupt about 293,000 rush-hour train trips per day.

And that will make for crowded platforms and trains. How crowded they will be depends on how many people heed Metros warning to avoid the subway.

Were just asking everybody to think about their commutes ahead of time and think about alternatives, Bowser said. We want people to carpool if youre going to be in a vehicle to get to work. And there are many options for telework certainly.

Wiedefeld and other officials also urged people to stay away from the subway and shuttle buses by commuting on regular Metrobuses or smaller bus services.

[Prince Georges Countys plan for dealing with SafeTrack.]

With Blue Line trains from Franconia-Springfield running only as far as Arlington Cemetery, and not running at all when the cemetery is closed, riders headed downtown will have to take a route that will be much less convenient for many of them.

Yellow Line service will be expanded to include the Franconia-Springfield station, in place of Blue Line trains. But the Yellow Line, after crossing the Potomac River well south of Rosslyn, makes its first stop in the District at the LEnfant Plaza station, There, commuters who normally have a single-seat ride on the Blue Line will have to switch to the Orange or Silver lines to travel east or west to their destinations.

Metro said it plans a massive overhaul in the shutdown area, including replacing rails, rail ties, electrical insulators, cables and cable connector assemblies, as well as clearing trash, cleaning drains, upgrading lights and fixing water leaks.

In addition to the five partial rail-line shutdowns that are part of SafeTrack, the months-long effort includes 10 projects, somewhat less disruptive, that will require single-tracking so that crew will have space in which to work. The first of those 10 projects, between Ballston and East Falls Church, was due to wrap up Thursday night.

And no SafeTrack work is scheduled for Friday.

There will be normal service, Stessel said, calling it a one-day reprieve before the shutdown starts Saturday and riders truly feel the pain in the Monday morning rush hour.
Maurice Jones, left, speaks as then-Virginia Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe introduced him as nominee for state secretary of commerce in January 2014. (Mark Gormus/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP)

Virginias commerce secretary announced Thursday that he is leaving his post, a move that follows the recent exit of another top economic development official.

The planned departure of Commerce and Trade Secretary Maurice Jones will leave vacancies in two leadership slots critical to Gov. Terry McAuliffes chief goal as governor: expanding and diversifying the states defense-heavy economy.

Jones will leave in September to become president of the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a nonprofit that invests in struggling U.S. communities. Joness announcement came three months after Martin Briley abruptly left as president of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the states economic development arm.

McAuliffe (D) praised Joness efforts in a statement issued after LISC put out one of its own announcing the hire.

He has been a strong partner as we worked together to build a new Virginia economy that is diverse and capable of withstanding future fiscal and political headwinds, and I will miss his thoughtful and strategic approach to economic development and workforce policy, McAuliffe said.

Jones has been at the center of several controversies, including one over his decision to take the Washington Redskins up on an offer to watch a playoff game from the teams luxury box. He also faced criticism after a Roanoke Times investigation found that the state had awarded a $1.4 million grant to a Chinese firm that had not been properly vetted.

[Alarms were raised before Va. officials accepted use of Redskins box]

Jones has justified use of the Redskins box as an economic development tool and has said that amid many successful economic development projects launched with his help, the Chinese deal was one of a very few to go sour. He said neither controversy prompted his departure.

Im not running away from anything, said Jones, who previously served as publisher of the Virginian-Pilot and deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Im definitely running to what I think is a great next chapter. Frankly, its bittersweet. Im going to miss this work.

Jones moves to an organization that combines corporate, government and philanthropic resources to help struggling communities, according to a news release announcing Joness hiring. Since 1980, LISC has invested more than $16 billion to build or rehab housing, retail and educational space, the release said.

Jones, who worked at the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, remained in the Clinton orbit under McAuliffe, a close friend and political ally of former president Bill Clinton. The same will be true at his new job at LISC, where the board chairman is Robert Rubin, who was treasury secretary under Clinton.

Appointed at the start of McAuliffes term in January 2014, Jones becomes the second member of McAuliffes Cabinet to depart. The first was Levar Stoney, who left his role as secretary of the commonwealth in April to run for Richmond mayor.
Gov. Terry McAuliffes sweeping order to restore voting rights to ex-felons may have had another unintended consequence: giving the right to vote to at least 132 sex offenders who have finished their sentences but remain locked up because they have been deemed too dangerous to release.

In Virginia, such individuals can be sent through a civil court proceeding to the Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation in Nottoway County, southwest of Richmond.

Nottoway Commonwealths Attorney Terry J. Royall said Wednesday that 176 of the centers 370 residents have regained the right to vote, run for public office and serve on a jury.

She said she was told by the facility director that there are 176 residents who meet the governors criteria for restoration . . . Today his staff ran those 176 names through the database and 132 came up as having actually been restored.

[The race-infused history of why felons arent allowed to vote in 12 states]

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe made a decision to allow convicted felons to vote ahead of elections in November. Heres how the executive order works and why it has lead to a legal fight. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

The facility director, Jason Wilson, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. But Royall said she looked up the name of one VCBR resident on a state website and was able to confirm that his rights had been restored.

In a letter to county supervisors, she noted that such residents are civilly committed because they have been adjudicated to be sexually violent predators by a circuit court judge. Moreover, they will have to be transported at taxpayer cost when they choose to exercise their Constitutional rights to vote and/or serve on a jury.

But McAuliffe spokeswoman Christina Nuckols said that the governors executive order does not cover residents at the facility. She accused Royall, an independent, of joining a Republican effort to demagogue this issue.

The governors restoration order specifically excludes individuals who are under any form of supervised release, and offenders in this facility are clearly under 24-7 supervision by the state, Nuckols said. None of them had their rights restored, plain and simple. This is yet another partisan attempt to spread misinformation and hysteria.

[In Virginia, a rush to register 200,000 felons]

Royall and others pushed back, noting that the residents in question are not under supervised release  even though they are under tight supervision. The governors order makes no explicit provision for excluding people who have been civilly committed.

Civil commitment is not part of a criminal sentence, even though they are still in custody, said Steve Benjamin, a prominent Richmond defense attorney.

Del. Robert B. Bell (R-Albemarle), who is running for attorney general in 2017, described the continued confinement of the residents deemed dangerous as a post-sentence civil procedure.

I understand his desire to go to the wayback machine and modify his order yet again, Bell said of McAuliffe. But this happened.

With great fanfare, McAuliffe in April restored voting and other civil rights to more than 200,0000 felons who had completed their terms of incarceration or supervised release, including probation and parole.

He said the order would help offenders fully rejoin society and help Virginia move past the Jim Crow era, since African Americans have been disproportionately affected by felon disenfranchisement.

[Republicans blast McAuliffe over errors on clemency]

Republicans called the move a political favor to McAuliffes close friend and political ally, Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. They filed a lawsuit questioning McAuliffes constitutional right to restore rights en masse, instead of on a case-by-case basis as previous governors had done.

In recent weeks, Republicans and some law enforcement officials have said that the governors rights-restoration process was rushed and riddled with mistakes. For example, McAuliffe mistakenly restored voting rights for several violent felons in prison or on supervised probation. He also has acknowledged that he did not consider that the restoration order would make it easier for felons to apply to have their gun rights restored.

McAuliffe has said some errors were unavoidable with such a large undertaking and pledged to correct them.
A firefighter battles flames Thursday from the Sherpa Fire northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif., which ignited Wednesday and has caused officials to evacuate 400 homes and businesses. (Mike Eliason/Santa Barbara County Fire Department via Reuters)

CALIFORNIA

Double blazes displace hundreds in Southwest

Hundreds of people have evacuated to escape a wildfire in coastal Southern California and a larger blaze in rural New Mexico as hot weather feeds the flames, raising health concerns in other regions, officials said Thursday.

Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown said in a news conference that his deputies had asked occupants of 400 homes and businesses to evacuate structures in areas threatened by flames from the California fire. Campers and ranch horses have also been forced out, officials said.

The blaze, which ignited Wednesday in a wilderness area northwest of Santa Barbara, has consumed chaparral and tall grass in the Los Padres National Forest, blackening some 1,200 acres, according to tracking website InciWeb.

About 500 firefighters were trying to hold the Sherpa Fire, named after a ranch near where it started, from exploding out of control as airplane tankers and helicopters dropped water, officials said.

Video from social media shows a brush fire in Arizona and New Mexico that has grown to approximately 8,000 acres, according to reports. Officials have called for residents in the affected areas to evacuate. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

In New Mexico, the so-called Dog Head Fire, which broke out Tuesday about 6 miles northwest of the town of Tajique, has forced evacuations as it has grown to more than 12,000 acres.

It has burned through timber in central New Mexico, pushing heavy smoke toward cities more than 100 miles away as flames spread through a largely unpopulated area, fire information officer Peter DAquanni said. The Torrance County Sheriffs Office said it was evacuating about 200 people.

 Reuters

VERMONT

Sex charges dropped against state lawmaker

A day after a former aide acknowledged changing her story about alleged sexual assaults committed by a Republican state lawmaker, a prosecutor dismissed charges that could have brought the politician two life sentences.

It was a stunning conclusion to suspended Sen. Norman McAllisters trial.

Based on some information that came to light last evening that Ive shared with the defense and with the court, the state is in the position to have to dismiss, Deputy States Attorney Diane Wheeler told Judge Robert Mello.

Mello then dismissed the charges and said the court would inform jurors their services would no longer be needed.

McAllister, who has pleaded not guilty in the case, still faces a second trial on sex offenses involving two other women. He declined to comment Thursday.

His first trial began Wednesday with the 21-year-old woman, who also worked at McAllisters farm in Franklin and later at the State House, telling jurors of repeated forced intercourse and oral sex by the state senator.

During his cross-examination, defense lawyer David Williams got the woman to acknowledge numerous instances in which she told strikingly different stories in her initial interviews with police, her later sworn statements in pre-trial depositions and her testimony to the jury.

The 64-year-old lawmaker from Franklin County has maintained his innocence since his arrest outside the State House in Montpelier on May 7, 2015, a week before the end of last years legislative session.

 Associated Press

Chicago man live-streams own shooting death on Facebook: Chicago police said theyre investigating the killing of a gang member who appears to have captured his own fatal shooting in a real-time video post on Facebook. The Cook County Medical Examiners Office identified the man as Antonio Perkins, 28. He was shot Wednesday in the North Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago. Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said detectives discovered the video on the mans Facebook page and believe its authentic. The video shows a man recording himself standing outside and looking from side to side. Shots ring out, and the camera falls into blood-spattered grass. Guglielmi said Perkins had served two years in prison for making heroin.

 Associated Press
Mourners embrace outside the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes on June 15, 2016, in Orlando. (David Goldman/AP)

The mourners had not made it to the door of the funeral home before the tears and sobs began.

Friends and relatives of Javier Jorge-Reyes fell into each others arms in the parking lot, rocking one another as they took the next few steps to the foyer together.

It would be the first of many memorials to come for the victims of Sundays massacre at Pulse nightclub, where Jorge-Reyes, 40, was a regular.

Longtime friend Dagmaris Maldonado helped organize the viewing and service that brought hundreds of people to honor Jorge-Reyess memory before his body is flown to Puerto Rico, where he was born.

Jorge-Reyes came to Florida more than a decade ago and, most recently, was working at a Gucci store at the luxurious Mall at Millenia in Orlando. His friends say he was outgoing and passionate about life.

He would always say, Thank you for coming, as if it was his party, whenever we all went out, said Domingo Meza, 40.

Mezas husband, Elbano Chacon, said Jorge-Reyes was the kind of person who would just make your day.

We still dont understand, Meza added.

Jon Jon Clark, 7, had a special friendship with Jorge-Reyes, said his mother, Tiffany Clark. The little boy arrived at the funeral home carrying a rainbow-colored teddy bear wrapped in a red, white and blue bow. Jorge-Reyes used to cut Jon Jons hair and tried to teach him Spanish.

He wasnt just a regular type of guy, Tiffany Clark said. He was an amazing guy.

Asked whether he would miss Jorge-Reyes, Jon Jon said: Like for 20 years or 100.

And while those who loved Jorge-Reyes streamed in and out of Family Funeral Care grieving, sentries ringed the parking lot to protect them.

1 of 90 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  How people are reacting to the shootings in Orlando View Photos National and international reaction to the mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando. Caption National and international responses to the mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando. June 18, 2016 Visitors at a makeshift memorial in downtown Orlando mourn the victims of the Pulse massacre. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via Associated Press Wait 1 second to continue.

Those standing guard included tattooed bikers, sheriffs deputies, young members of the LGBT community and local allies, who didnt know Jorge-Reyes personally but wanted to help. They used posters and rainbow-colored sheets as shields to block the view and prevent potential disruption by anti-gay protesters.

Jessica Wright-Maynard helped arrange the human chain, as the organizers called it, after rumors circulated that members of Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, who protest at gay and military funerals, had planned to demonstrate outside Jorge-Reyess memorial service. Nearly 100 people joined the human chain. No Westboro protesters showed up.

The families deserve respect, said Diana Mitchell, 33, a college professor from nearby Polk County. This is their time to mourn.

The next few days will bring more somber remembrances, and members of the human chain plan to be present wherever a threat arises, organizers said.

Jorge Bustamante was inside the funeral home but joined the crowd on the sidewalk outside when he could no longer bear the sadness inside.

I couldnt walk up to him, said Bustamante, who previously worked with Jorge-Reyes at Gucci. This was a tough experience.

On the remembrance cards attendees carried away from the service was a note in Spanish that accompanied a stylish photograph of Jorge-Reyes.

Dont suffer for me because now I am free, the card said. God wants me now. He has placed me in liberty.
Charles Koch speaks in his office at Koch Industries in Wichita, Kan., in 2012. (Bo Rader/The Wichita Eagle via Associated Press)

Regarding the June 12 Technology & Innovation article Koch on climate: Trust the market:

The Post treated this subject very nicely. What came through most clearly in Mr. Kochs rather fuzzy collection of ideas was his ideological fantasy world of free-market economic theory. Modern economic theory identifies many impediments to the workings of a free market. The key impediment Mr. Koch did not acknowledge is the market impact of negative externalities. For example, if one industry pollutes a river, many industries and towns downstream must spend money to clean up the water before they can use it, raising the cost of their products to consumers; it usually is cheaper for the first industry to avoid that pollution, but it has no incentive to do so.

Climate-change-inducing greenhouse-gas emissions are the heart of that problem. The free market simply has inadequate incentives to overcome that impediment. As Mr. Kochs nemesis Al Gore aptly put it, climate change is an inconvenient truth, and social scientists are well aware of the human tendency to go into denial about inconvenient facts.

Richard Ball, Annandale

The writer is the sustainable energy chair of the Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club.

The Posts interviewers must have misheard Charles Koch. He doesnt want a Republic of Science wherein money goes to advance the best scientific ideas. We have that, today, in our rigorous processes for grants, publications and academic advancement.

Mr. Koch wants Republican Science: politicized science purchased by Mr. Koch and his business allies. His donations to candidates, conservative think tanks, front groups and academic institutions spread his ideology and defend his economic interests in free markets, in which polluting is free for the polluter.

Permission to profit while harming others, without costs or regulation, is corporate welfare at its worst. Without rules and charges to protect the public, markets cannot be trusted.

Sadly, his investments work.

The Republican Party has become the anti-science party. Republican leaders threaten to block regulations, harass scientists and defund research that might hurt donors interests. They are supported (perhaps intimidated) by a web of conservative organizations that spread disinformation about climate risks and other pollution harms. As shown in the recent primaries, no Republican can advance by speaking scientific truth.

William Penniman, Reston
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post.

Will the Republican Party that made Donald Trump its prospective nominee protect us from Trump when he is president? Even as they call him a textbook racist and acknowledge his scant regard for the rule of law, Republican leaders assure voters that the U.S. system of checks and balances will contain their candidates authoritarian impulses. Congress and the judicial system will keep Trump under control.

History and recent events suggest that is a risky proposition. Inflamed popular passions and overreaching presidents have at times not been checked. Presidents have ignored Supreme Court rulings; and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and 1918, Jim Crow, the mistreatment of German Americans during World War I and of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, and the investigations of Sen. Joseph McCarthy all showed how a frightened, angry or simply bigoted majority could deprive individuals of their rights despite the Constitutions checks and balances. That those rights were eventually restored is no cause for satisfaction: The damage done was permanent.

Nor is it reason for complacency, especially now. Never before has a presidential candidate given more reason to fear that he will run roughshod over democratic institutions and abuse the vast powers of the presidency for personal ends. Not a week goes by without Trump providing fresh evidence that he neither understands nor values our political and legal systems but rather sees them as tools to be manipulated or obstacles to be overcome. He threatens to change libel laws to go after media outlets. He attacks federal judges as unfit on grounds of ethnic background. He promises, if elected, to have his attorney general launch investigations of his political opponents. In the past, Americans did not know as they voted that their presidents would seek to abuse their executive powers. This time, and indeed for the first time ever, they do.

As for the Republicans, after being unwilling to stop Trump from clinching the nomination, and being unwilling to abandon him after deciding that he is a racist, they want us to trust that they will be willing to fight him once he becomes president. More likely the opposite will be true.

Consider the reasons Republicans support Trump today. The first is party interest. Trump was chosen by the voters in a legitimate race and according to the rules of the Republican primary process. To abandon him, they fear, would destroy the party. Moreover, it would hand a victory to the Obama-Clinton-Sanders Democrats, who some Republicans insist would be an even bigger disaster. Finally, Republicans up for election fear that if they oppose Trump and anger his supporters, they will face dangerous primary challenges or lose in the general election.

Which of these motives will disappear once Trump becomes president? He will still be the Republican Partys legitimately chosen leader, as well as the legitimately elected president. The election cycle doesnt end in November. To oppose Trump as president will be even more contrary to the partys interests than it is now. Will Republicans line up with Democrats to vote against Trump-inspired legislation  to ban Muslims from entering the country, for instance, or to deport 11 million illegal immigrants? To do so would only hand the opposition major political victories, setting the stage for Democratic congressional gains in 2018. Party interests will require that the party support its president.

Even in the unlikely event that some brave Republicans did act in ways contrary to the interests of their party, what would their constituents say? Two years ago, Republican voters threw out the House majority leader because he was, in their view, too willing to compromise. Would they feel differently if Republicans voted with Democrats against the Republican in the White House? And imagine how a President Trump would respond to a rebellion in the ranks. Trump already has a record of vindictiveness against those who resist him, including within his own party  would he forget the person who said he engaged in textbook racism?  and Republicans already have a record of caving.

In short, anyone looking to Congress to curb the excesses of a President Trump will have to count on the Democrats. Is that the Republican message: Dont worry about Trump, Democrats will protect you?

To hope that the judicial system will check Trump may be equally fanciful. The courts have historically been reluctant to challenge the president on actions they deem related to national security. Trump himself has noted that he will have the authority to close the borders to certain groups. And as Brookings Institution legal scholar Benjamin Wittes points out, the Justice Department is always vulnerable if a president wants to manipulate it for his or her own purposes. Trump has already said that if elected he will have his attorney general look into the matter of Hillary Clintons emails. Republicans and conservatives may delight to hear it, but what Trump can do to Democratic opponents he can also do to Republicans who defy him.

Wittes makes the point that what keeps the attorney general and the Justice Department from abusing power is not the law so much as a respect for norms and human and institutional decency. In fact, this is true of our entire constitutional system. The checks and balances do not automatically snap into action whenever a president overreaches. The people and their representatives have to make the system work. It is a never-ending battle. As the political scientist Edward Corwin once put it, the Constitution is an invitation to struggle, but our system relies on all three branches waging that struggle in a democratic spirit. No one knew better than the founders that the system they designed was neither foolproof nor tyrant-proof. The people had to make good decisions, including choosing political leaders who respected the system and the rights it safeguards.

Here are five GOP lawmakers who have taken issue with the ways their party's presidential candidate has reacted to the massacre in Orlando. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

As Benjamin Franklin said, a Republic, if you can keep it. Today, Americans cant simply rely on the system to save them from the possibility of a fascist president. And they certainly cant count on the Republicans who produced this threat in the first place. They will have to shoulder that responsibility themselves, in the voting booth.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), right, before the Celebrate Israel parade in New York City on June 5. (Kathy Willens/Associated Press)

I was dismayed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomos June 12 op-ed, If you boycott Israel, New York will boycott you, justifying his blatantly unconstitutional executive order creating a blacklist of supporters of Palestinian rights. The Democratic governor compared the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to terrorism. The call for BDS was instituted by Palestinian civil society leaders in response to decades of human rights abuses that governments and leaders have not been able to abate.

This was a hyperbolic attack on a constitutional right to boycott and a chilling attack on free speech. Criticizing and protesting a foreign government is not discrimination.

Furthermore, Mr. Cuomos statements represented sheer hypocrisy, as he saw nothing wrong with discriminating against the state of North Carolina by instituting a state nonessential-travel ban after it enacted a law restricting public-restroom use by transgender people.

Mr. Cuomo should remember that he was elected to serve the people of New York, in the United States, where freedom of speech and protest are constitutional rights.

Jenn Gorelik, Arlington

The writer is a member of the D.C. chapter of

Jewish Voice for Peace.
Tinatin Khidasheli does not hide her impatience with NATO. As defense minister of Georgia, she has spent the past several months lobbying NATO members to grant her country a membership action plan, or MAP.

In practical terms, this would amount to putting Georgia on an irreversible path toward joining the U.S.-led military alliance. It would also end Georgias security vacuum, which was fully exposed when Russia invaded the country in August 2008 .

Yet when NATO holds its summit in Warsaw on July 8-9, Georgia can expect little. A Georgian MAP will not be on the agenda.

There are many NATO countries that favor giving Georgia MAP, a senior NATO official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. It was agreed that all enlargement decisions would be settled in December to avoid a divisive debate in the run-up to Warsaw, he said. But even in December its still not certain that Georgia will be given MAP status.

What is particularly galling for those countries supporting Georgias NATO membership is that in Warsaw, Montenegro will officially become the alliances 29th member. Forget the fact that this western Balkan country is still highly corrupt, has contributed, compared with Georgia, the minimum to NATO missions and has not matched the big structural defense reforms undertaken by Tbilisi.

Leading the opposition to Georgia getting MAP status and ultimately joining NATO is Germany and France. They believe it would provoke Russia, which has already warned that there will be consequences if Georgia (or Ukraine) were ever to join the alliance. They also believe that Georgia is not defendable. NATO, they believe, would not go to war against Russia.

Khidasheli is more than frustrated by these views. They imply that Russia can impose a veto on Georgias security and strategic direction. There is too much talk of Russia. There is too much concern about what Russia says, what Russia thinks and too little about what NATO wants, she said in an interview. This is about NATOs credibility in being able to keep to its membership promise to Georgia.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in March 2008, Germany and France vetoed granting MAP status to Georgia, although the alliance didnt rule out Georgia joining at some stage. Five months later, Russia invaded. It left some NATO countries asking whether the Kremlin would have desisted had Georgia been given MAP status or been invited to join the alliance.

Khidasheli has no doubts that this continuing strategic blindness by NATO is shortsighted for Georgia and for the security of the neighborhood. The failure to give Georgia MAP status will be an encouragement for Russia and for any other player for that matter that they can get away with blackmail, she explained.

At least in another part of Brussels, where the European Unions institutions are based, Georgia has had a predictable relationship. Until now.

In 2014, the E.U. and Georgia signed the landmark Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) agreement. As a result, in 2015, imports from Georgia were up 12 percent.

The DCFTA agreement was supposed to be followed this summer by Brussels extending Georgia visa-free travel to E.U. countries. But Germany, France and Italy have now blocked this, even though the European Commission said that Georgia had met all the conditions.

Germany claims that Georgian Dream, the governing coalition that is rife with internal feuds, hasnt done enough to stop mafia and criminal gangs from entering Europe, even alleging that the groups carried out the most burglaries in Germany. German police authorities have rebutted such allegations.

The real reason for Berlins opposition to the visa waiver is internal politics.

German Chancellor Angela Merkels Christian Democratic Union party is alarmed at the rise of Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and Eurosceptic party. It is chiseling away at support for Merkels conservative bloc and the Social Democrats, her coalition partners. The last thing Merkel wants is for AFD to make hay over granting a visa-free regime to Georgia.

Yet this is precisely what she has negotiated with Turkey. Merkels decision to push E.U. members into agreeing to allow Turks to travel to European countries without a visa in return for Turkey tightening its borders, taking back refugees stranded in Greece and meeting other conditions has led to a backlash in Germany.

Look at what is happening in Turkey to human rights, to press freedom, to the opposition, said Claudia Roth, a German legislator and member of the opposition Green Party. We are throwing away our values.

When it comes to Georgia, besides opposition from some member states, the European Parliament is also divided over the visa issue.

We should give Georgia the visa-free regime, said Elmar Brok, chairman of the parliaments foreign affairs committee and a leading member of Merkels Christian Democratic Union party. But first there must be safeguards agreed such as the possibility of being able to suspend the arrangement if the system is abused.

But Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a Polish deputy who belongs to the same conservative grouping in the European Parliament as Brok, is staunchly against giving Georgia a visa-free regime. Georgian Dream party is trampling on fundamental rights, he said.

Saryusz-Wolski added that the media were coming under huge pressure from Georgian Dream to toe the government line. It had taken over the Rustavi-2 television station that had been associated with the opposition United National Movement, led by former president Mikheil Saakashvili. Indeed, many analysts argue that since taking power in 2012, Georgian Dream has has waged a vendetta against former UNM ministers.

The European Commission is closing its eyes to all these things, Saryusz-Wolski said.

With parliamentary elections due in October, Georgian Dream desperately needs something from the West. Its popularity is falling as it tries to spur growth and employment.

Combined with dithering by NATO and the E.U., disenchantment with the West is growing.

According to opinion polls, between November 2013 and August 2015, support for integration with the E.U. decreased from 85 percent to 61 percent (while opposition rose from 10 percent to 21 percent). Support for NATO dropped from 81 percent to 69 percent.

These trends play into Russias hands. In Georgia, pro-Russian movements, political parties, oligarchs and Russian TV warn Georgians that they are being betrayed by the West. The message: Better to switch direction.

All this time spent in the waiting room leads to much frustration, Khidasheli said. Undeliverable Europe and NATO are the main cards used by the pro-Russian forces in Georgia. The pro-Russian parties will be able to exploit this situation.
In his June 12 Local Opinions essay, Scalia Law School is a win for free thought, Thomas Wheatley applauded the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for being courageous when it voted to allow George Mason University to rename its law school to honor the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. Mr. Wheatley contended that it resisted the culture of fear and intimidation that has choked the life out of academic freedom.

Despite Scalias reputation as a funny but acerbic writer of opinions, many of us considered his judicial philosophy of originalism to be cover for a much darker view of the Constitution that disfavored the poor, the nonpowerful and people who were otherwise not like him. In his concurring opinion in Herrera v. Collins, Scalia opined that after a criminal conviction, an individuals innocence became irrelevant because nothing in the Constitution offered the wrongly convicted person further review. Hundreds of DNA exonerations have demonstrated the frailty of that belief. He saw Citizens United as an opportunity for those more like him to expand control of the political process.

Opposition to the renaming of the George Mason University School of Law to honor Scalia came from lawyers and academics who felt that reflexive adoration of the justice was misplaced. He had a dark side. He was consistently inconsistent about embracing originalism. We opponents thought we were engaged in critical thinking and exercising free speech, as even an originalist would have understood.

Robert T. Hall, Sterling
Asra Q. Nomani a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of Standing Alone: An American Womans Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement.

The massacre of partygoers at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, took me back to the late summer of 2005, when an African American woman, wearing a tight headscarf over her staff uniform, stormed out of the kitchen and into a conference room at an Atlanta Holiday Inn, shouting: Youre all going to burn in hell!

I froze. Around me were about 50 brave souls from Al-Fatiha, a gay American Muslim organization, many of them young men secretly at the organizations annual conference while their parents attended a meeting of the conservative Islamic Society of North America. That weekend, I prayed shoulder to shoulder with them  a gay man leading us in prayer, a transgender Muslim beside me.

Im a straight Muslim feminist, but, like my friends at Al-Fatiha, Im a criminal, too, in the view of many Islamic clerics today. My crime under conservative sharia law: giving birth to a baby boy 13 years ago while single.

A strict strand of Islamic law metes out an unforgiving approach to straight sex outside of marriage, called zina, and gay sex, called liwat when it involves men, from the Biblical and Koranic story of Lot. As leaders of American Muslim groups rush to condemn the carnage in Orlando, it is important to note the persistence of these sex laws in Islam and to support Muslim reformers trying to repeal them.

At D.C. Pride on Sunday, the LGBTQ community expresses sorrow and stands in support with the victims of the deadly mass shooting that took place at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

We are never going to see a real cultural shift in the Muslim mind-set about sex and homosexuality until we call out and repeal these scarlet-letter sex laws, and instead choose an interpretation of Islam that values compassion, privacy, acceptance and love over judgment and bigotry.

J ust one day after the Orlando massacre, a Dutch woman in Qatar was convicted of the crime of illicit sex  for coming forward with the complaint that she had been raped. Several years ago, a Norwegian woman faced similar charges in the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile, the Islamic State is throwing men accused of homosexuality off rooftops, and the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia have executed gay men.

Of the 57 states that belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a quasi-United Nations for countries with large Muslim populations, at least 23 have zina laws and 38 criminalize consensual adult same-sex, according to data from human rights groups and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. These governments are promoting an interpretation of political Islam, or Islamism, that feeds this culture of punishment for even consensual sex.

Puritanical Islamic sex laws feature a hierarchy of punishment, based on the Koran and the sunnah, or sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, of stoning to death for those who are married and have sex outside of their marriages and 100 stripes, or lashes, for premarital sex.

The punishments are even worse for gays. Influential Saudi cleric Muhammad Saalih Al-Munajjid, following the rigid interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism or Salafism, condemns zina as a crime and calls homosexuality the most abhorrent of deeds, calling for execution of homosexuals, from having them burned with fire, stoned to death and thrown down from a high place then have stones thrown at them.

As in the West, cultural attitudes are closely intertwined with legislation. Babies born out of wedlock, gay sex, transgender relationships and other forms of allegedly illegal sex are shamed, stigmatized or punished  whether by court of law or by vigilante justice, as we saw in Orlando last weekend.

As I see pictures of the fresh-faced partygoers at Pulse, their lives cut short by the homophobia that reflects Islamic scarlet-letter laws, I remember nights at gay clubs everywhere from Manhattan to my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va. Early last year, at Vice Versa, on an alley off High Street in downtown Morgantown, I sat off-stage with my niece and my mother, Sajida Nomani, who had to wear a full face veil growing up in India in a conservative Muslim family, to protect her from the threat of zina.

Strobe lights flashing around us, we cheered the transgender beauty queens competing in the Miss Vice Versa Large and Lovely contest. It was my mothers first time in a gay club. In a symbol of our efforts to take back our Muslim religion from the apostles of intolerance, it wont be our last.
THE VAST majority of Americans talk the talk about organ donation: Ninety-five percent say they support it. But only 50 percent walk the walk as registered donors. At a summit Monday, the White House announced measures that could reduce the gap.

The White House and the universities, nonprofits and other organizations that participated in the summit hope to increase the number of yearly organ transplants in the United States, which last year surpassed 30,000 for the first time. More than 120,000 people remain on the waiting list  almost 100,000 for kidney transplants  and 22 die every day.

The efforts unveiled Monday, which include campaigns to promote donor registration as well as private and public pledges toward research to preserve and repair organs once they have been donated, are smart steps forward: Potential donors should not be deterred by complicated and confusing registration processes, and patients should not go without transplants because of inefficient matching procedures or organ expiration. Funding for tissue-fabrication research and efforts to ensure donors declare their intent to donate online are particularly promising.

But the White Houses announced actions raise additional questions about how to work through the wait list. For example, though efforts to ramp up registration should help, potential donors still have to opt into donation with their states departments of motor vehicles. Opt-out policies like those in countries such as Spain and Austria can yield registration levels six times those of opt-in countries. Critics say it would be wrong to presume a patients consent, but education around such a change could give everyone the opportunity to shed donor status and still save lives.

Then theres the question of how to encourage living donors without exploiting them. Many say monetary compensation, banned in 1984 under the National Organ Transplant Act, could lead to a marketplace for organs and drive the poorest among us to donate in desperation  maybe even concealing their medical histories.

But if increasing incentives to donate poses problems, what about at least decreasing disincentives? For the majority of donors today, giving a kidney ends up costing more than just the organ  whether its the wages lost during time off from work, the price of transportation to doctors appointments or the risk of higher insurance premiums down the road. Legislation is pending in Congress that would offer donors protection against insurance discrimination and require that their jobs grant them unpaid leave. Another bill proposes allowing pilot programs that reward donation. Its hard to draw the line between expense-covering and compensation  but donation should be cost-neutral at a minimum.
Jean Dasilva, left, is comforted by Felipe Soto on Tuesday, as they mourn Javier Jorge-Reyes at a makeshift memorial for the victims of Sunday's mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. (David Goldman/Associated Press)

THE WEEK after the Orlando terrorist attack, we are told, is no time for a debate on gun control. Expanding the list of people who cannot legally own guns or tightening background checks would not have stopped this particular tragedy. Omar Mateen, an American citizen inspired by some combination of radicalism, hate and despair to kill 49 people at a gay nightclub, was not on a terrorist watch list. Better background checks may not have stopped him. If assault weapons were banned, he might have used other kinds of guns. If the government mandated smart guns, Mateens fingerprints would still have allowed him to pull the trigger, because he was the legitimate owner of the weapons he used for his slaughter.

The National Rifle Association and other extremists use a form of this jujitsu every time a mentally ill person or a hater uses the efficient killing machines known as guns to inflict mass death. But in an era of lone-wolf radicalization, the aftermath of a homegrown terrorist attack is exactly the time to talk about sensible limits on gun ownership. After Sandy Hook would have been the right time. After Umpqua would have been the right time. Headline-grabbing mass shootings remind us of how good guns are at killing people. They also remind us  or should  that a rational government would regulate such dangerous products, just as it regulates cars, pharmaceuticals and other more useful things.

Of course the government cannot legislate an end to gun violence. But it can take measures that would reduce gun violence without infringing on constitutional rights.

Congress is debating ways to end gun sales to suspected terrorists, a policy that lawmakers realize must come with due-process protections for those under suspicion. Even if it would not have prevented Orlando, this reform might force the next homegrown terrorist to work harder to find his firearms, raising attention as he does, or to give up. Another proposal would deny guns to people who have misdemeanor hate-crime convictions, which poses fewer due-process issues.

But these ideas are hardly the only, or the most important, gun-control reforms that lawmakers should be considering. Research increasingly shows that universal background checks could help cut gun violence; without them, merely adding to the list of people who cannot legally own guns is not as effective. Requiring safeguards such as fingerprint readers, meanwhile, would stop children and suicidal family members from shooting themselves or others with a weapon stored at home. Banning high-capacity magazines would at least force mass murderers to reload more often. If Congress unleashed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study gun violence, the government would have the data to know which set of policies would work best and which ideas would less usefully restrict gun ownership.

After the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, mourners in Orlando tell leaders and lawmakers in the nation's capital what the country needs to stop the next tragic event. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)

Tragedies would still happen, and the NRA would still argue that the rules are useless. But, over time and on average, fewer people would die. That is a legitimate goal.
IN TEXAS, a Yale-bound valedictorian stood before her high schools graduating class recently and, without naming Donald Trump, illuminated the bankruptcy of his worldview. At age 11, said Larissa Martinez, she was nothing more than a girl with an abusive and alcoholic father who had to depend on her mothers strength. Her mother took the children and fled Mexico for the United States, landing in McKinney, Tex., north of Dallas, where, this month, Ms. Martinez courageously told her classmates a secret she had harbored since grade school: She is undocumented.

Nervous at the lectern, her graduation medals clinking around her neck, she delivered a 9-minute speech to the graduating seniors and their families that was brave, forthright and true. Undocumented immigrants, she said, are people like me  people who have become a part of the American society and way of life and who yearn to help make America great again without the construction of a wall built on hatred and prejudice.

As it happens, Ms. Martinez was one of two Texas valedictorians in recent days to reveal her status as an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico; the other, Mayte Lara Ibarra, did so via Twitter just after delivering her own commencement address, thereby triggering a venomous backlash on social media that prompted her to deactivate her Twitter account.

Its useful to put faces to the people Mr. Trump wants to round up and deport. Ms. Martinez, who earned a full scholarship to Yale, intends to study medicine, hoping for a career as a neurosurgeon. Ms. Lara, who graduated from high school in Austin, will enroll this fall at the University of Texas at Austin, which, by state law, will grant her at least two tuition-free semesters  the same scholarship extended to all valedictorians from Texas public high schools, regardless of immigration status.

Ms. Lara, brought to the United States at about age 2, is eligible to live and work in the country safely for now, shielded from threat of removal by the Obama administrations policy of deferring deportation for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children. Ms. Martinez, who apparently arrived too late to benefit from that policy, says she applied for citizenship upon coming to the United States; shes still waiting to hear, she said.

Mr. Trump wields his nativist demagoguery, heedless of the cost to lives, to families, to communities, to the labor market and to promising futures like Ms. Laras and Ms. Martinezs. He would strive to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, turning government agents loose on shops, businesses, neighborhoods, schools  maybe even graduation ceremonies in border states such as Texas. Perhaps he could catch some future valedictorian just as she led her classmates in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, as Ms. Lara did.

The Trumpian theory of the case is that illegal immigrants  Mexicans, in particular  are criminals and carriers of infectious disease. There is no evidence of the latter. As for the former, the evidence suggests the opposite: Young immigrant males are incarcerated at roughly half the rate of native-born Americans.

Of course, facts are not the currency in which Mr. Trump trades; his specialties are fear, xenophobia and lies. But young people may be more receptive to the truth, and to a generosity of purpose. Upon delivering this peroration, Ms. Martinez received a standing ovation from her classmates:

In those moments when you need a reason to continue moving forward, close your eyes and picture yourself in the future saying, They told me I couldnt, so I did. 
The Supreme Court decided Thursday that the Department of Veterans Affairs must set aside more contracts to be filled by veteran-owned small businesses.

The court was unanimous that the department has not fulfilled its obligation to steer more business to small companies owned by veterans or service-disabled veterans simply by meeting its annual goal.

The decision is likely to help more veteran-owned businesses compete for the billions of dollars in contracts the department awards.

The court was considering a law passed by Congress  and then amplified after the legislation failed to produce enough results  to give preference to small businesses owned by veterans. It came up with a Rule of Two.

That means that competition for contracts should be limited to veteran-owned small businesses when the contracting officer concludes that at least two such businesses would bid on the contract and the award can be made at a fair and reasonable price that offers best value to the United States.

A company called Kingdomware Technologies charged that department officials ignored that mandate when they bought a service that sent emergency information to personnel at four medical centers.

The Court of Federal Claims dismissed the suit, and a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the decision. The judges did not read the law as requiring the department to use the Rule of Two for all contracts; the judges said this was mandated only to the extent necessary to meet the goal of awarding 12 percent of contracts to veteran-owned businesses.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, said that was wrong. The law says the department shall award contracts to the veteran businesses under the Rule of Two process, Thomas wrote.

Unlike the word may, which implies discretion, the word shall usually connotes a requirement, Thomas wrote.

That directive does not change just because the department meets its goal, the court decided.

The courts ruling means that more veterans will have the opportunities that Congress wanted them to have to build their business through competition before the VA, Luke McLoughlin, who filed briefs on behalf of veteran-owned business associations, said in a statement.

The case is Kingdomware Technologies v. U.S.

Thomas also wrote the courts unanimous decision in another case involving business and the government. The courts ruling gave something to both sides in interpreting the False Claims Act, which imposes penalties on those who defraud the government.

On one hand, the court vacated and sent back for further review a decision by an appeals court that the parents of Yarushka Rivera could sue Universal Health Services under the False Claims Act for services provided her though Medicaid.

But in a move that pleased plaintiffs, the court also settled a dispute in the lower courts by saying that omissions count the same as outright misrepresentations in imposing liability under the act.

Half-truths  representations that state the truth only so far as it goes, while omitting critical qualifying information  can be actionable misrepresentations, Thomas said.

Rivera died at 19 after she suffered a seizure at a mental health facility in Massachusetts. Her mother and stepfather, Carmen Correa and Julio Escobar, charged that supervision was minimal at the facility and that employees were not licensed to perform the duties that were represented in the payment forms submitted for reimbursement.

For instance, they charged, the teenagers medicine was prescribed by a nurse, not a doctor.

The parents still have a chance to pursue their lawsuit, Thomas said, but lower courts must consider whether the alleged misrepresentations were material to the governments decision to pay the claim. He said lower courts should apply a demanding standard.

Correa and Escobar may have met that standard, Thomas said. They have alleged that Universal Health misrepresented its compliance with mental health facility requirements that are so central to the provision of mental health counseling that the Medicaid program would not have paid these claims had it known of these violations, he wrote.

But he said that is for lower courts to resolve.

The case is Universal Health Services v. United States ex rel. Escobar.
Diane Clarke Jack of Orlando raises her hand in prayer during a memorial service at First Baptist Church for victims of the shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub, that killed 49 people. (Adrees Latif/Reuters)

In the wake of the terrorist massacre at a gay nightclub here, there have been prayers and pledges of solidarity with the gay community from many people who have actively fought against gay rights.

But despite the outpouring of emotion, few think it will change hearts or minds in a state that has waged a long and bitter battle over equality for gay men and women.

Of course not. Of course not, said Terry DeCarlo, executive director of the GLBT Community Center of Central Florida. Everybody is, LGBT, oh, we love our LGBT; oh, were there for our LGBT community. Theyre there now because theres a tragedy. Will they be there next week or the week after or a month from now or two months from now?

The fight over gay rights in Florida has been contentious for a decade and flared anew earlier this year. For months after the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Floridas law barring it remained on the books and the heavily Republican legislature failed to take up legislation to ditch it. A federal judge declared two laws and provisions of the state constitution that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman unconstitutional in March.

Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, the states largest gay rights advocacy organization, said the shooting has laid bare the fact that many elected officials still do not support equality for gay men and women.

Javier Antonetti went to Pulse with his younger brother to hang out with friends on Saturday night. After the attack it took nearly a day before he found out if his brother survived. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)

People say there are stages of grief, Smith said. Today I am feeling angry. The question has now been called upon the people of Florida: Will you uproot this toxic dehumanization of the LGBT community, or will you, by action or indifference, allow us to be treated as inferiors in laws that protect our basic rights?

[The new norm: When tragedy hits, Americans stand divided]

Since 2009, gay rights groups have lobbied lawmakers to pass the Florida Competitive Workforce Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations. The bill failed to pass again this year.

Smith, who has been director of Equality Florida for two decades, says the state continues to undermine federal legislation passed to ensure non-discriminatory policies for LGBT people. After the Supreme Courts same-sex marriage ruling, Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed the Pastor Protection Act, a 2016 law that shields religious entities and individuals from lawsuits if they refuse to administer same-sex weddings.

They wanted to insult us and deliver the message that even if you get what we have, we are going to put an asterisk by it, Smith said.

Scott has been criticized for offering thoughts and prayers after years of doing little for the gay community, and for waiting several days before explicitly noting that the attack on the Pulse nightclub targeted gay people.

We pray for our LGBT community. Our Hispanic community. Our state. Our nation. This was an attack on every American. We are #OrlandoStrong, Scott, who wept as he visited a memorial here, tweeted on Tuesday. His office did not respond to a request for comment.

View Graphic Since 2013, state legislatures have introduced 348 bills that aim to limit LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights, according to data collected by the American Civil Liberties Union and analyzed by The Washington Post.

In a contentious interview this week, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R), who defended the states ban on same-sex marriage in court, if it was hypocritical for her to call herself a champion of the LGBT community after the shooting.

Bondi noted that some gay partners of shooting victims were having trouble getting information because they were not married. Isnt there a sick irony that you for years were fighting that very idea? Cooper asked.

[Orlandos Latino community hit hard by massacre at nightclub]

Bondi said she was defending the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, which voters approved in 2008. In a statement Thursday, Bondi said she visited with people at a homeless shelter that serves LGBT teens this week and learned that they may be targeted by human traffickers, something she raises awareness about and is trying to prevent.

I question the motives. Where was she months ago? said Bryan Douglas, a 39-year-old real estate agent who lives in Orlando and is gay. There was really no recognition of the community before what happened at Pulse.

But Douglas remained optimistic that Bondi and other politicians may have a sincere change of heart. In Utah this week, the states Republican lieutenant governor gave an emotional speech saying his heart had changed and apologizing for being unkind to gays and lesbians.

This could be the catalyst for change, Douglas said. Thats the hope.

But some who have witnessed the fights over gay rights up close in at the Capitol in Tallahassee are skeptical.

People have been arguing about these types of things for a decade and have dug in, said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican strategist. Probably did not change their attitude in any significant way because of the Pulse shootings.

Nelson Diaz, the former chair of the Miami-Dade GOP, said he is supportive of gay rights but doesnt believe that the Pulse shooting has anything to do with the issue. Instead, he said, it was an act of terrorism and a human tragedy.

I dont think this is going to turn any kind of tide because its not really a gay issue, per se, Diaz said. Had it been at an African American club, would that necessarily improve race relations? I dont think so.

[Obama visits survivors: Our hearts are broken, too]

But in some places here, the shooting has led to changes. At First Baptist Church in Orlando, a congregation that spent years loudly fighting against expansions of gay rights, a pastor and an LGBT activist invited those in the audience who were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning to come on stage and be prayed over.

Dozens from the crowd of more than 1,000 came forward, joining a host of clergy from several faiths who gathered to pray. A Pentecostal minister said he was praying for LGBT people because its what Jesus would have done.

The Rev. Joel Hunter of Northland Church noted his own inability to empathize with those who were attacked and invited a gay rights activist, Victoria Kirby York, the national campaigns director of the LGBTQ Task Force, to lead a prayer in his place.

Ive never been a part of a vulnerable community, Hunter said.

DeCarlo was skeptical that long-term support would come out of the vigil. The prayers were felt and he thanked those who offered them, he said, but he wants more.

Its nice to have that done, he said, But how about standing with us throughout the rest of the year in the non-tragedy times?

Amy Moshier, a 30-year-old student, agreed.

Everyone who is using this to further their own agenda, its kind of annoying, said Moshier, who is a lesbian. Forty-nine people lost their lives. It makes me sad.

Thalia Ainsley, a 67-year-old transgender woman who retired from the Army, said anti-gay politicians who offered thoughts and prayers were phonies. She wanted action and was upset because they use the LGBT all the time as a whipping boy, a political thing, to get their career going with hatred. Once a tragedy happens they come running  I support you. 

But Ainsley called this central Florida city one the most welcoming places for LGBT people she has ever been, and she said she thinks the shooting could spur a shift in attitudes both in Florida and around the nation.

A lot of times great change comes out of great tragedy, she said.

Anne Hull and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who led a 15-hour filibuster this week, spoke at a press conference on gun-control legislation on June 16 on Capitol Hill. (Win Mcnamee/Getty Images)

An effort to pass new gun-control legislation in the wake of a deadly mass shooting in Orlando is poised to end in a familiar impasse in the coming days  and potentially pit Republican lawmakers against their presumed presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who called for congressional action.

The long-contentious issue quickly gripped Capitol Hill anew this week after a shooter killed 49 people at a nightclub early Sunday in Orlando. The 29-year-old assailant had been on the FBIs terrorist watch list, but he was removed in 2014 because of a lack of evidence that he would commit an immediate crime.

Trump said this week that lawmakers should find a way to bar terrorism suspects from obtaining guns and that he planned to meet with the nations top gun lobby to build support. At the same time, some Republicans and Democrats jumped at the chance to renew their efforts to reach compromise. But the effort didnt go far.

Gun rights advocates in Congress quickly made clear that they were unlikely to be swayed by Trumps decision to jump into the debate.

Theres nothing wrong with him trying to energize the discussion on it and work out something that would be healthy and that we can all agree on. I think thats positive, said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), one of Trumps earliest supporters on Capitol Hill.

The Fix's Amber Phillips breaks down why Congress is unlikely to pass major gun control legislation, despite Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) filibustering for 15 hours on June 15. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

But Sessions said that gun control is not the greatest issue in the world and that congressional Republicans shouldnt take cues from Trump on the subject.

Were a co-equal branch of government, he said.

Additionally, several delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland next month warned that they would take steps to bolster the party platforms language on Second Amendment rights if legislation passed the Senate. Some delegates said this week that they might withhold support for Trump at the convention if he continued to call for new laws.

Wendy Day, a GOP convention delegate from Michigan, said that many of her party colleagues were startled to see Trump turn left when it came to the Second Amendment. I think that surprised and angered a lot of people.

Democrats have long wanted to prevent terrorism suspects from acquiring guns or explosives and to impose mandatory background checks for firearms sold at gun shows and through online dealers. Republicans have offered bills that would keep guns away from terrorism suspects, but only if authorities can prove probable cause within three business days of the attempted sale.

To jump-start action on the issue, Democrats launched a nearly 15-hour Senate filibuster on Wednesday that concluded early Thursday. Hours later, leaders from each party announced plans to hold votes Monday on a series of bills.

But the four measures  two from Democrats, two from Republicans  have all been rejected in the past and are expected to fail again this time, highlighting the continuing divide between Democratic and Republican senators on guns.

[Why it makes perfect sense that Chris Murphy is leading a gun-control filibuster]

Signs that lawmakers would retreat to their usual party positions in Mondays planned votes prompted complaints that both parties had rushed to politicize the mass killing.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) dismissed the GOP proposals as a way for them to say theyre doing something when they are doing nothing.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) lamented, Instead of trying to find a solution that would work and still protect peoples constitutional rights, were going to battle to a draw on Monday night.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed Democrats for using the Senate floor as a campaign studio to score political points. He faulted several Democrats for skipping a closed-door briefing led by top national security officials on Wednesday so that they could continue their talk-a-thon.

Its hard to think of a clearer contrast for serious work for solutions on the one hand, and endless partisan campaign on the other, McConnell said Thursday.

Trumps decision to jump into the gun-control debate, long an emotionally fraught issue in Washington, further clouded the atmosphere. He has neither detailed how Congress should proceed nor scheduled his meeting with the National Rifle Association. Even Trumps strongest congressional allies  all ardent gun rights advocates  struggled to explain his position.

Some GOP senators declined altogether to discuss Trumps remarks, claiming they were too focused on the gun-control votes at hand.

Members who want to be legislators are actually looking for solutions, said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who is in charge of the Senate GOPs 2016 election operation.

Even if senators pass a gun bill, its unclear how the legislation would be received in

the more conservative House. Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday told reporters: If you have a quick idea in the heat of the moment that says, Lets take away a persons rights without their due process, were going to stand up and defend the Constitution.

Plans for the series of votes were announced as President Obama, Vice President Biden and a gaggle of Florida lawmakers including Sen. Marco Rubio (R) traveled to Orlando to meet with the families of shooting victims and survivors of the massacre. After placing a bouquet of white roses among the balloons and other flowers at a makeshift memorial at a downtown arena, Obama urged lawmakers to act.

I truly hope that senators rise to the moment and do the right thing. We can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives, Obama said. If we dont act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this.

Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-Conn.), who led the Senate filibuster, marveled Thursday that his decision to hold the Senate floor had pressured Republican leaders to commit to holding the votes.

We still have to get from here to there, but we did not have that commitment when we started, he said early Thursday. But he added that there was no guarantee that those amendments pass.

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
President Obama, center, salutes as he arrives with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) in Orlando to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

June 16, 2016 President Obama, center, salutes as he arrives with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) in Orlando to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel via AP

The president said that a military campaign against terrorism abroad wont be enough to prevent lone wolf attacks like the Pulse nightclub shooting and offered condolences and support to families of the victims.

The president said that a military campaign against terrorism abroad wont be enough to prevent lone wolf attacks like the Pulse nightclub shooting and offered condolences and support to families of the victims.

The president said that a military campaign against terrorism abroad wont be enough to prevent lone wolf attacks like the Pulse nightclub shooting and offered condolences and support to families of the victims.

President Obama had delivered some version of this address at least nine times before  a fact he made clear in Orlando on Thursday.

This time Obama, in remarks that were brief, blunt and starkly political, focused on what all of those killings had in common.

This was a president who was fed up. His goal was not to inspire, but to demand change.

Those who were killed and injured here were gunned down by a single killer with a powerful assault weapon, Obama said. The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown. But the instruments of death were so similar.

Obama, with Vice President Biden at his side, hit many of the same themes that characterized earlier speeches following mass shootings, which have become a grim and recurring part of his presidency. He spoke of the evil that drove the shooter to kill 49 innocent people and injure 53 others. Some are still fighting for their lives, Obama said of those wounded in attack on Orlandos Pulse nightclub.

He talked of broken hearts, resilience, love and his determination to destroy terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Our resolve is clear, he said.

But this time Obama was focused on the assault rifle  in his words a weapon of war  that the killer used in his attack. Obamas remarks, which he delivered in an even but impatient tone, were aimed at shaking up a gridlocked political order in the final months of his presidency.

Obama and his aides have searched for different ways to impose limits on firearms in the face of congressional inaction  most recently, in January  and have become largely resigned to idea that lawmakers are unwilling to take additional steps before he leaves office. But a handful of recent events, including Senate leaders agreement to hold votes on gun safety proposals after a nearly 15-hour filibuster by Democrats this week, has given administration some hope that a modest bill might make it to the presidents desk this year.

Obama seized that unlikely sliver of an opening in Orlando and made it the focus of his remarks. The attack in the nightclub had been carried out by an American citizen who had been inspired by the Islamic States online propaganda.

The U.S. military alone couldnt stop such lone-wolf attacks, Obama said.

The bulk of his remarks seem designed to put pressure on Republican lawmakers who blocked his efforts at gun legislation following the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

After the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, mourners in Orlando tell leaders and lawmakers in the nation's capital what the country needs to stop the next tragic event. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)

I truly hope that senators rise to the moment and do the right thing, Obama said. If we dont act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this.

He also spoke directly to voters in the upcoming presidential election, delivering a particularly scathing critique of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trumps suggestion that more guns would have stopped the nightclub tragedy. Such calls, Obama said, defy common sense.

Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense, Obama continued. They should meet with the Newtown families, some of whom Joe [Biden] saw yesterday, whose children would now be finishing fifth grade.

In recent days Trump has reaffirmed his call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants, casting it as a move needed to protect the country and defend women and gay Americans from discrimination.

The president, without naming Trump, recast the business moguls call as destructive xenophobia.You cant break up the world into us and them, and denigrate and express hatred toward groups because the color of their skin or their faith or their sexual orientation, and not feed something very dangerous in this world, he said.

For Obama the big speeches and brief remarks after mass shootings have become without doubt the most somber ritual of his presidency. After one the first major mass shootings of his presidency in Tucson, which killed six and wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D), Obama made a plea for comity, calling on a divided country to shout less and listen more.

Lets use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, he said.

After the shootings at a church in Charleston, S.C., that killed nine church members he turned to soaring words and Scripture in an effort to uplift.

On Thursday the president was no longer interested in inspiring. He had come to demand action.

Before he spoke, Obama and Biden visited a makeshift memorial at the Phillips Center, adjacent to city hall, and laid bouquets of white flowers. Smiley-face and heart-shaped balloons from the memorial bobbed behind Obama as he spoke. Their cheerfulness served as a poignant and discordant reminder of grief left in the latest shootings wake.

They dont care about the politics, Obama said of the mourners in Orlando. Neither do I. Neither does Joe. And neither should any parent out here.

This debate needs to change, he said.
Just two days after Donald Trump implied that President Obama sympathized with terrorists, provoking a backlash that included members of his own party, the presumed Republican presidential nominee declared himself right, based on a published report claiming administration support for the Islamic State.

In a post to his Twitter account early Wednesday, Trump said Media fell all over themselves criticizing what Donald Trump may have insinuated  about Obama. But hes right, it said, linking to a story published by the conservative website Breitbart News.

The story was based on a declassified 2012 cable written by a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, addressed to about two dozen military and national security agencies and officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Labeled as information report, not finally evaluated intelligence, it refers to the general situation in Iraq and Syria in the early days of the armed insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

It describes al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Islamic State precursor, as part of the anti-Assad opposition, and notes that opposition forces fighting in eastern Syria are backed by Western countries, the [Persian] Gulf states and Turkey.

But the document appears to be an initial intake of spot intelligence from the early days of the Syrian civil war. That intelligence had not yet been vetted or verified. Trumps embrace of Breitbarts interpretation of the cable fits a pattern of careless handling and circulation of facts, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Such missteps have piqued concerns among foreign policy experts and Republican strategists about Trumps understanding of complicated policy issues and his fitness for office.

The day after the Orlando shooting, GOP candidate Donald Trump railed against the president and warned Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S., while Democratic rival Hillary Clinton called for changes to gun laws. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

[Republicans join Obama in condemning Trumps words]

The main worry by those folks that I talk to in the national security and foreign policy universe is that hes just winging it. And winging it . . . at this period in time is clearly dangerous, said Kevin Madden, a veteran GOP strategist and former adviser to 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Some days I expect him to come out and say, Im not an expert on national security, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night. Let me tell you what I think,  Madden said.

There has been hesitation among foreign policy experts to join the Trump campaign or his transition team, at least partially born out of fear that aligning themselves with Trump could damage their professional reputations.

Its kind of frightening to me if the Trump foreign policy people cant distinguish between a spot intelligence report and a finished report. Thats scary, said former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who left the State Department in 2012 and has been sharply critical of Obamas Syria policy. They should know better.

Clinton, who like Trump will begin receiving CIA briefings on world hot spots once the two parties nominations are official, has aggressively sought to brand Trump as erratic and uninformed on issues of global consequence. At a campaign event Wednesday in Hampton, Va., she called him temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be commander in chief.

Obama, without mentioning Trump by name, had emphasized the same theme Tuesday in criticizing Trumps response to the weekend terrorist attack in Orlando. On Monday, Trump had said Obama should resign over his refusal to utter the words radical Islamic terrorism and suggested that the president had an ulterior motive in relation to the Orlando attack. Theres something going on, Trump said.

Donald Trump called for a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the U.S. in December. But since then, his commitment to a "total and complete shutdown" has wavered repeatedly. Here's how. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

Trump subsequently withdrew The Washington Posts credentials to cover his campaign after the newspaper said he suggested that Obama was complicit in the attack. In his Twitter post Wednesday, however, Trump appeared to agree that that was, in fact, what he had insinuated, and he asserted that he was right.

[Trump revokes Post press credentials]

Ford, currently a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said the cable, which Breitbart said had been obtained by Judicial Watch in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, has been circulating on the Internet for years.

Ive seen it several times. . . . Assad government apologists and people connected to the Maliki government in Iraq have posted it and linked to it, he said. It has been used as evidence to show that the Americans are really working with the Islamic State against Assad.

Ford said he was 90 percent sure the cable was a report by a U.S. military official in Baghdad of a briefing by the Iraqi military. To be really cynical, he said, its the Iraqis giving the Iranian line.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraqs prime minister at the time, was close to Iran, which continues to be among Assads leading backers along with Russia.

Fred Hof, who served as the administrations special adviser for Syria until he resigned in 2012, said, Ive had a lot of problems with the administrations Syria policy, but the suggestion that its ever supported al-Qaeda in any form or any manner is purely ludicrous.

Not every participant in Syria policymaking in 2012 questioned the import of the declassified cable. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, then-director of the DIA, said that it was written by a professional intelligence officer with DIA and . . . I stand by its accuracy.

Flynn, who has advised Trump on foreign policy and has been rumored in some news outlets as a potential running mate, said in an email that the information in the cable was accurate and it was very timely but it didnt meet the political narrative at the time  especially reports such as the one in the Breitbart News article. AQ was never on the run, then or now.

By withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, Flynn said, this administration decided, for purely political reasons not to sustain our victory over AQI and therefore we now face an even stronger global jihad movement of radical Islamists.

The August 2012 cable, which Breitbart said stated that the Obama administration was actively supporting al-Qaeda in Iraq, offers an Iraq-centric scenario of what was happening on the ground at the time but leaves out much detail and connective tissue in what subsequently became a complicated, multi-player battlefield.

Most of its initial paragraphs, indicating who composed it and the circumstances under which it was written, are redacted. Instead, it begins by saying that events were taking a clear sectarian direction and that the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria. . . . The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support the opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime.

At the time, moderate opposition forces called the Free Syrian Army had driven the Syrian army out of towns in the eastern part of the country, near the Iraqi border. They were soon dislodged by Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaedas Syrian affiliate. Al-Nusra, initially allied with a resurgent al-Qaeda in Iraq  the Sunni extremist group largely vanquished by U.S. forces before 2011, whose remnants had gone underground or fled into Syria  later split with AQI after it declared itself a caliphate and in early 2014 renamed itself the Islamic State.

By the summer of that year, Islamic State forces were fully in control of much of eastern Syria, had burst across the border into Mosul, Iraqs second largest city, and were headed toward Baghdad.

Two years earlier, at the time of the cable, U.S. military aid to the moderate opposition was largely rhetorical. The CIA was training and otherwise assisting a small core of vetted fighters, and pushing for the opposition elements to organize themselves into a political force. To the extent they were receiving assistance, most was from the Persian Gulf states and Turkey
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British Prime Minister David Cameron, left, speaks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during a round table meeting at an EU summit in Brussels on March 17. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP)

British Prime Minister David Camerons high-stakes decision to let the British public decide whether the country stays in the European Union looks increasingly like a bad bet, with his party veering into civil war, the polls pointing toward an exit and the Conservative leaders job appearing ever more precarious.

Just a week before Britain votes, the prime ministers hope of settling once and for all the countrys long-simmering European question with a resounding vote to stay in the E.U. may be out of reach. Surveys show the country is almost exactly divided, with momentum in recent days for out.

[Whats a Brexit?]

If Britain does vote to leave  a scenario popularly known as Brexit  analysts say that Cameron would probably be forced to resign, perhaps within hours of the result.

Even if British voters heed Camerons call to stay in the E.U., a narrow victory could leave him vulnerable to a vengeance-fueled coup by pro-Brexit politicians in his party who think the prime minister has played dirty in his no-holds-barred campaign to keep Britain in.

On June 23, Britain faces a fateful decision: whether or not to leave the European Union. And the world will be watching. (Daron Taylor,Jason Aldag,Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)

Politics were put on hold Thursday afternoon by the death of Jo Cox, a 41-year-old member of Parliament who was shot and stabbed to death after a meeting with constituents near the northern English city of Leeds. The killing shocked Britain, and both sides of the referendum debate said they would suspend their campaigns until at least the weekend.

But when they resume, Cameron will be on tenuous ground, with just a few days to pull his country back from the brink of Brexit.

The fragility of Camerons position marks a stunning turnabout for a politician who won a commanding electoral victory just a year ago and who called the E.U. referendum as a way to unify his fractious party behind his leadership.

[Cameron pleads with unhappy voters to back away from Brexit]

This has turned out worse for Cameron than he ever conceived it could have, said Roger Mortimore, a politics professor at Kings College London who directs political analysis at the polling firm Ipsos Mori. I dont think anyone really saw this coming. Its very clear that David Cameron didnt see it coming.

Among the prime ministers gravest misjudgments, Mortimore said, was that he could rely on the small clique of Oxford-educated politicians who with Cameron form the upper echelon of Conservative Party politics. Instead of loyalty, several have jettisoned the prime minister, and one  the shaggy-haired, populist former London mayor Boris Johnson  has all but declared his intention to topple the man who has led Britain for the past six years.

Johnson and other pro-Brexit dissidents, said professor Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London, form a pop-up government in waiting that is prepared to seize power if the Brexit vote does not go Camerons way. That dynamic, he said, has made for a particularly nasty campaign.

Given the division in the party over Europe, there was always going to be some friction, said Bale, who has written books on the Conservatives. But its been made worse by the fact that there are an awful lot of personal ambitions at stake here as well.

[What would Britain look like post-Brexit? Here are four possibilities.]

In recent weeks, as polls have revealed an electorate stubbornly divided on E.U. membership, both sides have resorted to personal attacks of a sort rarely seen within the highest reaches of a British governing party.

Johnson and his allies have accused Cameron of misleading the public with scary stories about the devastating effect Brexit would have on the countrys economy. In campaign appearances, the voluble Johnson has lacerated the prime ministers case for staying in the E.U.as propaganda and a hoax.

Cameron and his allies have returned fire by calling Johnson out on what they regard as his naked ambition. In a nationally televised debate last week, Cameron loyalist Amber Rudd noted pointedly that the only number Boris is interested in is the one that says Number 10   a reference to the door number on the prime ministers Downing Street residence.

Although the acerbic and personalized tone of the debate is new, the profound split within the Conservative Party is not. It dates at least to the 1980s and the reign of Tory icon Margaret Thatcher. Her views on Europe were decidedly mixed, and both sides in the current debate have claimed her backing from beyond the grave.

The question of whether Britain should be part of the E.U. cuts across the countrys left-right political divide. Among Tories, staying in the union appeals to pro-business politicians who favor the benefits of low trade barriers with continental economies. But the party also has a deep nationalistic tradition, and the idea that Britain can only be truly sovereign outside the E.U. resonates with the Conservative grass roots.

[How would a Brexit vote affect your life? ]

So, too, does the pro-Brexit camps claim that leaving Europe will allow the United Kingdom to significantly reduce immigration.

Britains world role

When Cameron gambled and promised voters a direct say on the E.U. in January 2013, Conservatives faced a sharp challenge from their right by the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party.

By offering a referendum, Cameron thought he could outflank the UKIP and mend the long-standing rift within his party. The first part worked, with Conservatives winning an unexpected majority in last years general election while the UKIP remained marginalized.

But the second part appears to have backfired.

Its come at the price of creating these very public divisions within the party, and possibly setting off this chain of events that is spiraling out of control for him, said Thomas Quinn, who teaches politics at the University of Essex.

If Britain votes to leave the E.U. on June 23, despite Cameron putting his full weight behind the case for staying in, Quinn said the prime ministers odds of keeping his job would be slim to nonexistent.

He just wouldnt have the authority, Quinn said. He could be offering his resignation within a few days  if not on the day.

But even if Cameron pulls out a close victory, he could still be in peril, with pro-Brexit Tories blaming him for undermining their long-awaited chance to break free of the E.U.

Andrew Bridgen, a Tory member of Parliament who favors Brexit, said in an interview that unless Britain votes to stay in the E.U. by a wide margin, Cameron should step down.

The prime minister has led a very disingenuous campaign on the most crucial question our country will face in my lifetime, he said. Hes blown his credibility with the electorate.

Others in the party say that Conservatives need to get beyond the damaging clash of personalities and start focusing on the substance of sorting out Britains place in the world. That will be a challenge regardless how the public votes, said Phillip Lee, a Tory member of Parliament who favors staying in the E.U.

What kind of country do we want to be going forward? Lee said. I hope that post-referendum, the debate doesnt stop. Within the Conservative Party, we need to come to terms with what Britains role in the world ought to be.

But at least in the short term, the struggle for power could drown out any broader discussion.

If Cameron doesnt step down, all it will take is for 50 Conservative members of Parliament  out of a total of 330  to force a no-confidence vote.

His ouster would trigger a leadership contest in which the Tory faction in Parliament selects two candidates from among its ranks to vie to become the next prime minister. The winner would be chosen by Conservative Party members nationwide. The general public would not get a vote.

Quinn, who has written a book on British party leadership contests, rated Johnsons chances of becoming prime minister by the end of the year at 40 percent.

That is despite the fact that Johnson has alienated parliamentary colleagues and foreign leaders with his over-the-top comments during the campaign.

The publicity-hungry Johnson has drawn comparisons to U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump for his suggestion that the E.U. and Hitler both had the same goal, and his insinuation that President Obama is hostile toward Britain because of his part Kenyan heritage.

Nonetheless, Johnson remains popular with the Conservative rank-and-file members who would ultimately pick the prime minister if Cameron steps down.

He has that X-factor that other politicians dont seem to have, said Bale, the Queen Mary University professor. But hes hardly a safe pair of hands. Im not sure hes seen as someone who can lead the party  or, indeed, the country.

Karla Adam contributed to this report.

Read more

Brits look to Norway for post-Brexit model. Norwegians urge Brits to look again.

As polls tighten, Cameron pleads with unhappy voters to back away from Brexit

A British vote to leave the E.U. could shatter the United Kingdom

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

The bizarre Brexit flotilla battle that rocked London, explained
The pace of the CIAs drone campaign has plunged this year as part of a renewed push by the Obama administration to shift responsibility for lethal counterterrorism operations to the Pentagon, current and former U.S. officials said.

The agency has carried out at most seven strikes in 2016, putting the spy service on course to take fewer shots from remotely piloted aircraft than in any year since 2007, two years before President Obama took office and made the agencys drone program a pillar of his counterterrorism approach.

U.S. officials said several factors have contributed to the sharp drop in the number of strikes, including the staggering depletion of al-Qaedas ranks in Pakistan, where in 2010 the agency launched 118 attacks. By comparison, the CIA has fired missiles from remotely piloted aircraft only twice this year.

But the decline also has been driven by White House decisions to curtail the CIAs lethal role in Yemen and restrict it from even flying armed drones over Syria  instead handing the unambiguous lead for such operations to the U.S. militarys elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Officials at the CIA and the White House declined to comment.

U.S. officials emphasized that the CIA has not been ordered to disarm its fleet of drones, and that its aircraft remain deeply involved in counterterrorism surveillance missions in Yemen and Syria even when they are not unleashing munitions.

Still, the changes appear to mark a significant turning point for an agency that was fundamentally transformed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, from a conventional intelligence-gathering service to a paramilitary force.

The sharp drop in CIA strikes comes as the White House is preparing to release data about the drone program for the first time, including the total number of strikes taken while Obama has been in office, as well as estimates of the number of militants and civilians killed. The administration also is expected to issue rules requiring periodic updates of those numbers.

The White House has repeatedly signaled its desire to shift control of such lethal operations to the military, in part to enable greater transparency and end an often awkward charade in which the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge its role in strikes that are abundantly covered by news organizations and tallied by watchdog groups.

In a speech in Chicago in April, Obama said, I dont want our intelligence agencies being a paramilitary organization. Thats not their function. As much as possible this should be done through our Defense Department so that we can report, Heres what we did, heres why we did it, heres our assessment of what happened. 

But White House efforts to accomplish that have been repeatedly derailed by factors including logistical problems and intense bureaucratic opposition. The plan began to gain traction, one U.S. official said, only over the course of the past year.

In the most visible sign of the shift, the U.S. military began publicly acknowledging drone strikes on al-Qaeda targets in Yemen earlier this year  a step that the Pentagon had refused to take in previous years largely out of concern that identifying its own operations but remaining silent on others would indirectly expose those carried out by the CIA.

The latest Pentagon release, posted two weeks ago, not only confirmed a May 19 drone attack on suspected al-Qaeda operatives in central Yemen, but also acknowledged that it was the ninth this year. The release also disclosed details about a series of previously unannounced counterterrorism strikes dating to February.

The CIA has not taken any corresponding steps toward greater transparency about its drone campaign. But U.S. officials said that the agency has launched four strikes in Yemen in 2016, and that there is now a clear preference in that country  the only nation where the CIA and the military both fly armed drones  for JSOC to pull the trigger whenever possible.

White House spokesman Ned Price declined to comment on specific purported intelligence matters, but said that Obama has been clear that we must be more transparent about both the basis of our counterterrorism actions and the manner in which they are carried out. He added that the administration will increasingly turn to our military to provide information to the public about our efforts.

JSOC was denied full control over drone operations, but the revised rules bolster the authority of a secretive military command that was barred from launching drone strikes by the Yemeni government after a series of mishaps, including the reported deaths of civilians in an assault on militants traveling in a wedding party.

That episode triggered dueling investigations involving the U.S. military, the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center, inquiries that fueled skepticism among key members of Congress, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that JSOC was as capable as the CIA of avoiding civilian casualties.

That opposition has since been eroded by a series of developments. Among them is the removal last year of the former head of the CIAs Counterterrorism Center, a surly figure who had presided over the agencys drone program for eight years and fought off perceived encroachment by the Pentagon.

I suspect that has an awful lot to do with it, said a former senior U.S. official who was involved in CIA and Pentagon discussions about collaboration in Yemen, and described Michael DAndrea, the former CTC chief, as an obstacle.

DAndrea was replaced by Chris Wood, a longtime CIA officer who is widely considered more collegial and willing to compromise with U.S. military officials. Both sides have since overcome logistical and technical barriers, setting up a new system in which the agency yields control of its aircraft to JSOC in the moments before missiles are launched.

Other factors include the collapse of the Yemeni government that had ordered the JSOC ban, as well as agency blunders that undercut its ability to depict its drone program as superior to that of the Pentagon. In a particularly grievous mistake, the CIA killed U.S. and Italian civilians being held prisoner by al-Qaeda in Pakistan  civilians that the agency did not know were present at the compound when the strike occurred.

Current and former officials also cited fatigue in maintaining an artificial aura of secrecy around a program whose broad outlines are well known even to residents of the most remote villages of Pakistan.

Who is it secret to? the former official said. Are we just providing a benefit to the host country of deniability? And is that something we should be doing? Whats the benefit to us for allowing a host country to talk out of two sides of their mouth?

The CIA had for more than a decade been given sole authority to carry out strikes in Pakistan, largely to enable Islamabad to shield from the public secret agreements that allowed the agency to patrol Pakistans tribal belt.

But the administration upended that rationale last month when it authorized the U.S. military to launch a drone strike that killed the leader of the Taliban in the Baluchistan region of Pakistan. The U.S. government quickly took responsibility for the strike in a move that seemed aimed in part at exposing Pakistani duplicity in sheltering the Taliban.

We took a strike at a fairly high target and it was [carried out by the U.S. military] and the world didnt end, the former U.S. official said, adding that the muted response from Pakistan has pierced the case for continued secrecy.

Julie Tate and Missy Ryan contributed to this report.
On Wednesday, an individual going by the handle Guccifer 2.0 claimed credit for the hacking of the Democratic National Committees network, though a cybersecurity firm investigating the breach stood by its conclusion that Russia was behind the breach.

Guccifer 2.0 posted to a website some of the allegedly stolen documents. They included a file titled Donald Trump Report, dated Dec. 19, 2015, and a list of what was purported to be million-dollar-plus donors to the Democratic Party.

The DNC acknowledged the intrusion Tuesday.

And CrowdStrike, the firm that investigated the breach, said Wednesday that it had no reason to change its assessment.

CrowdStrike stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016, said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike.

Alperovitch suggested that the posting may be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

We are exploring the documents authenticity and origin, he said. Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian governments involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.

The moniker Guccifer 2.0 is an apparent reference to Guccifer, the nom de guerre of a Romanian hacker who is in jail awaiting prosecution in the Eastern District of Virginia for a series of high-profile intrusions. His targets included former secretary of state Colin Powell and family members of former president George W. Bush.

Read more:


Tires burn in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, on June 8. The fire was started by disgruntled Haitians who were upset about not receiving payments from the immigration department after a change in the administration. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

 Last years presidential election fell apart amid cries of fraud. An interim government named in February was supposed to organize a new one. Now, no one is sure who is really in charge here.

Political transitions always make for volatile times in Haiti. But the latest political crisis is whittling away whatever is left of the dream that Haiti could come back better and brighter from its devastating 2010 earthquake.

The 120-day mandate of the interim president, Jocelerme Privert, expired at midnight Tuesday. Haitis parliament has not extended his tenure, nor appointed another caretaker figure. Priverts opponents say his term has clearly ended; he and his supporters insist he remains Haitis de facto president unless lawmakers vote him out. The head of Haitis lower house has not been able to get lawmakers to decide on it.

This sort of standoff is the last thing Haiti needs, producing an all-consuming distraction from its many other problems: economic stagnation, a tanking currency, drought, cholera, the Zika virus, food shortages and a three-month-old strike by public-health workers.

Six years after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that killed 200,000 and left more than a million homeless, the heady talk of rebuilding a stronger Haiti has given way to a sinking sense that the countrys political class is cracked beyond repair.

Foreign governments that largely financed Haitis failed elections last year, to the tune of $100 million, are running out of patience but seem to be wary of destabilizing the country any further. They have reluctantly embraced the plan to redo the October presidential vote.

U.S. Ambassador Peter Mulrean in Port-Au-Prince on June 9. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Haiti cant afford to go without its democratically elected leaders, and those democratically elected leaders need to get to work, U.S. Ambassador Peter Mulrean said in an interview. For us as a government, its not the same thing dealing with a provisional president. We need a full-time partner in the government of Haiti, and that means both a president and a parliament who we can work with to deal with immediate crises and get development off the ground again.

[Haitian voters try to turn page on period of political turmoil]

Since the end of authoritarian rule more than 30 years ago, Haiti has struggled to stage orderly elections, a problem often explained with the observation that politics here is a business. That does not quite capture the nature of the problem.

Politics in Haiti is more like an industry in a country that lacks other ways to make a living. With so few formal jobs, a struggling economy and a seasoned culture of corruption, getting into power and staying there is one of the few ways to secure regular employment and a decent salary.

This makes electoral defeat something that is less likely to be publicly acknowledged than privately negotiated.

Priverts opponents, led by the Tet Kale (Bald Head) party of former president Michel Martelly, who left office when his term ended Feb. 7, said they will mobilize street protests to force Privert out. The party  which appears to have enough backing in the Chamber of Deputies, Haitis lower house, to block an extension of Priverts mandate  says Prime Minister Enex Jean-Charles should be recognized as Haitis interim leader.

Ann Valerie Timothee, Martellys former chief of staff and now the leader of the Bald Head party, said in an interview that Haiti is not facing a political crisis but something far worse.

A crisis is something that has a beginning and end, Timothee said. We have a systemic problem. Elections, she said, are always contested by the loser.

Timothee said Priverts attempt to stay in power without an electoral mandate will drag Haiti back into an era of undemocratic rule. People have died for Haiti to have democracy, Timothee said.



A vendor pushes past heaps of garbage in downtown Port-Au-Prince on June 10. The area is home to a busy marketplace that was once occupied by brick-and-mortar businesses that were not rebuilt after the earthquake in 2010. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

The country is mostly calm for now. Campaign posters and political graffiti blanket the crowded streets of the capital, and recent pro- and anti-Privert demonstrations have been relatively small and peaceful by Port-au-Prince standards. But it is a city with a notoriously short fuse.

On Tuesday, Priverts supporters from the Fanmi Lavalas party, founded by deposed former leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide, marched through the streets calling for Privert to stay. Although Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in 2011, he has remained out of public view. Privert was a key cabinet member in Aristides government and spent two years in prison on charges that he was involved in the massacre of government opponents during a 2004 coup while serving as interior minister.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, with 80 percent of the population living in poverty. U.N. troops patrol the streets in blue helmets and body armor. Foreign doctors and aid groups keep the health system from collapse. Aside from a few apparel plants and agricultural exports, money sent home by Haitians working abroad is what mostly provides a lifeline.

Much of the rubble from the 2010 earthquake has been cleared. But the latest crisis has reinforced the view that the country is stuck in a kind of externally managed poverty, in which foreign governments and aid organizations try to keep a lid on the place and ameliorate the worst suffering.

Theres no investment. Tourism is dead. The political parties have no plan whatsoever. They may talk about ideology, but the bottom line is power, said Robert Fatton Jr., a political scientist at the University of Virginia who was born and raised in Haiti.

Fatton said U.S. officials and other foreign donors have grown tired of Haitis political class and its seeming inability to work on behalf of Haitians trapped in misery. He said donors have increasingly become resigned to an approach in which two overarching goals are political stability and no boat people.



Worn posters from political candidates line a wall that shields a construction site for a church in Port-Au-Prince on June 10. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Many Haitians, for their part, have come to see foreign governments and donors cynically, especially after international observers put a stamp of approval on last years disputed presidential election, calling it flawed but essentially fair. The losing candidates did not agree, and their allegations of fraud forced the cancellation of the runoff vote that would have given Haiti a president by now.

Martelly was ineligible for reelection, and when he left office, Privert was appointed as a caretaker president by Haitis National Assembly. He formed a commission to investigate what happened during the first round of voting, and its lengthy report concluded that the election  featuring 54 presidential candidates  was so dirty that the results should be tossed out.

The commission has recommended a new election for Oct. 9, with a runoff Jan. 8. Privert would be ineligible to run in that contest, but his opponents do not trust him to organize a fair election. Martellys Bald Head party has not accepted the new timeline.

Its candidate, Jovenel Moise, a farmer nicknamed Banana Man,won the highest number of votes in last years contest. But second-place finisher Jude Celestin refused to participate in a runoff, because he said the first round was so tainted, and his campaign has welcomed the plans for a do-over.

The new elections for president and a portion of Haitis parliament will cost an estimated $60 million more.

Read more:

Did the Clinton Foundation raise hundreds of millions for a hospital in Haiti that was never built?

How the U.S. peanut glut could undermine the work of the Clintons

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Peter Schwarz, Secretary of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and a leading member of the Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit (Socialist Equality PartyPSG), spoke in London Tuesday night on the subject of socialism versus left nationalism.

The meeting was one in a series held by the Socialist Equality Party (UK) as part of its campaign for an active boycott of the referendum on UK membership of the European Union (EU) on June 23.

Schwarzs presentation was listened to attentively by an audience of students, workers and retirees. The meeting was live-streamed over the internet, with listeners from India, Sri Lanka, America and various countries in Europe including Poland, Germany and France.

Opening the meeting, Chris Marsden, SEP National Secretary, explained that both the official camps in the referendum campaign were headed by right-wing Tories, committed to austerity, militarism and nationalism. He attacked those in the pseudo-left who claimed that either one of these camps would provide a progressive way forward for workers and youthwhether through a supposedly reformed EU or a Leave vote leading to the downfall of the Conservative government and the coming to power of Labours Jeremy Corbyn to implement a socialist agenda. Each side was setting out deliberately to stir up nationalism and xenophobia, Marsden explained, in a conscious effort to divert social antagonisms and break up the emerging threat of a unified class struggle across national borders.

In his remarks, Schwarz explained that the referendum marks a major political watershed not only for Britain but for Europe as a whole.

The implications of a Leave vote by the second-largest economy in Europe, he said, were incalculable. A Brexit [British exit] would speed up an international trendthe growth of economic nationalism, the break-up of the global economy into trade blocks, and the development of currency and trade wars.

However, Brexit would not be the cause of these developments, but was itself a manifestation of underlying tendencies bound up with the breakdown of the capitalist profit system, which, just as in the 1930s, was the driving force for a new world war.

Schwarz reviewed the panicked response of the European bourgeoisie to this development. In particular, he drew attention to the German press, including Der Spiegel, whose latest magazinewritten in English and Germanwas headlined Please dont go.

The editorial stated that withdrawal would accelerate the disintegration of Europe into hostile and competing national states, warning that the referendum was about nothing less than the future of the peace project started in 1946 by erstwhile enemy nations on a devastated continent

Setting out its broader implications, it continued, Britain is a bridge between Europe and the US. If Britain leaves the EU on this side of the Atlantic while Donald Trump becomes president on the other, then seemingly permanent alliances will wobble.

In a remarkable passage, it stated, Following Brexit, Germany would lose an important ally and, as a large central power on the continent, it would be definitively condemned to take on the leadership role it never wanted.

Though expressed politely, this must be read as a threat by the German bourgeoisie, Schwarz said, which had twice sought to conquer Europe by military force.

A Remain vote would not prevent these processes. While the repercussions might be less immediate, they would be no less dramatic. The referendum will accelerate all the tendencies which have made the European Union the most hated institution on the continent, he said, continuing and intensifying its role as the driving force of social attacks and deregulation, speeding up the transformation of EU into a police state and a military fortress. Indeed, the few benefits that the EU broughtthe elimination of border controls, the possibility of working and studying in the country of ones choice, a guarantee of certain democratic rightsare being done away with in the name of combating terrorism and deterring refugees.

Within this context, Schwarz dealt with the politically criminal role of the pseudo-left in lining up behind one or another bourgeois camp in the referendum. In particular, he dealt with the role of those such as George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party who were promoting a Leave vote as a progressive and even left-wing alternative to austerity and militarism.

Schwarz noted their assertion that a Leave vote would lead to the replacement of Prime Minister David Cameron by the leading euros-sceptic Boris Johnson, deepening divisions in the Tory party and creating the basis for the fall of the government and its replacement by a Corbyn-led Labour government. This type of criminal political opportunism based on narrow, nationalist and pragmatic calculations had enormous implications, he warned. The struggle for socialism cannot be delegated to factions of the bourgeoisie, he said. An independent political movement of the working class cannot be replaced by tactical manoeuvres and playing hide-and-seek with right-wing factions of ruling class.

This was the lessons of the German workers movement, Schwarz explained. The Left Leave espousal of After Boris, Corbyn brought to mind the slogan of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the 1930s, After Hitler, then us.

The disastrous consequences of the KPDs position, which was the consequence of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracys rejection of world socialist revolution in favour of building socialism in one country, led to Hitlers coming to power without a shot being fired and to world war and the Holocaust.

The transcript of Schwarzs remarks will be made available soon. His presentation was followed by a lively question and answer session, including what conditions are necessary for revolution in Britain; the relationship between objective conditions and the subjective role of revolutionary political leadership and how to ensure against a betrayal of workers aspirations similar to that carried out by the Syriza government in Greece.
The nationwide strike called on May 15 by the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in opposition to Mexicos 2012 regressive federal education law continues, along with protests and other militant actions. These are being met with increased repressions and threats by the government.

On Monday the CNTE announced routes for protest marches in Mexico City and said that it would block certain transit routes there and in other parts of the country. In response, the head of the National Security Commission, Renato Sales Heredia, warned that force would be used to keep roadways open to traffic.

In defiance of this threat teachers marched in 22 municipalities in Michoacan state on Wednesday, and blocked access to the commercial center of the Michoacan capital, Morelia.

As part of the strike thousands of teachers have set up encampments in central locations in major cities in the poor southern states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas and Michoacan, which have long histories of militant teacher action. Sales Heredia also threatened today to use force to break up any unauthorized encampments.

Teachers vow to continue with work stoppages until federal officials sit down with them at the negotiating table without any preconditions and hear their demands, including salary increases and changes to the new national teacher evaluation process.

The federal Secretary of Public Education, Aurelio Nuno Mayer, has taken a hard line across the board with the teachers. He has insisted that dialogue with teachers will only occur if they first return to classes and respect the Constitution, that is, that the education reform implemented by the ruling class is the binding law of the land. In other words, the federal government insists that teachers adhere to and not challenge any aspect of a law that subordinates education to the profit needs of big business, seeks to privatize education, and singles out and slanders educators for the supposed failures of the public education system.

Nuno Mayer on Monday warned that administrative proceedings to deregisterthat is, effectively fire4,300 teachers who have missed at least four days of classes, and to deduct the pay of others who missed work to join protests, were already in process and would formally commence in two weeks. This is meant to cow the teachers into ending their work stoppage.

Nuno Mayer has also claimed that his office has evidence of widespread illegal, outrageous and improper pressure to keep teachers from showing up at schools and parents from bringing their children to schools, particularly in Michoacan, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas. He threatened criminal action in response. This is a thinly veiled call to authorities to ramp up repression.

It should be apparent by now that the CNTEs call for a dialogue with the federal government and Nuno Mayer is a pipe dream.

On Tuesday, contingents of telephone workers and professors from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the largest university in Latin America, who belong to the National Union of Workers, joined CNTE members in marching in the capital city.

At a press conference after the march, these protesters and CNTE leaders in Chiapas and Guerrero denounced the jailing of Ruben Nunez and Francisco Villalobos, leaders of section 22 of the National Union of Education Teachers in Oaxaca (SNTE), a dissident faction of the SNTE controlled by the CNTE. They called the SNTE leaders political prisoners, and said their arrest was part of a strategy on the part of the federal government to wear the teachers down in order to force an end to their resistance.

Tuesday morning teachers and supporters from popular social organizations set up around 15 barricades in the main square of the city of Oaxaca in response to threats of eviction that teachers of section 22 mentors have received from state and federal forces because of the sit-in.

Early in the morning, hooded men set the offices of the National Confederation of Popular Organizations on fire. They then fired a rocket towards a police line. The latter was almost certainly action on the part of provocateurs. It recalled the use by the Oaxaca state government of civilian vehicles with hooded and armed people who were engaged to shoot at the barricades installed throughout the city during the 2006 Oaxaca uprising.

There is evidence that some in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) are becoming concerned that Nuno Mayers hard line cost the PRI in the state elections on June 5, and will only whip up more resistance. The PRI has historically employed violence and the brutality of the police and military forces to crush social discontent. While such repression continues unabated under the current regime of President Enrique Pena Nieto, many think a more nuanced public face is required to take into account the social mood.

For the ruling elite more generally, if discontent threatens to spin out of control they may look to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his fake left party the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) to contain the situation.

But it is precisely with such bourgeois political currents that the CNTE and other pseudo-left organizations have sought to ally themselves.

Mexican workers must reject all such illusions, along with the straitjacket of the politics of the union leaders. The education struggle in Mexico can only succeed through a united political offensive by teachers and the entire working class of Mexico, independent of all of Mexicos bourgeois political parties.

Such a movement would find allies among teachers in the US and throughout Latin America who are facing the same attacks. Ultimately a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist profit system in Mexico, and throughout the Americas, is required.
Growing spontaneous working class demonstrations, road blockades, food warehouse break-ins and a national strike of bus drivers have raised the specter of social revolution in Venezuela.

The first five months of 2016 have seen an average of 19 protests per day over food scarcities and the breakdown of basic social services. Three demonstrators were killed during demonstrations last week as the Chavista government of President Nicholas Maduro ordered police and the national guard to break up demonstrations with force. Another demonstrator was killed on Tuesday, and videos showing the armed forces firing indiscriminately into crowds of civilians chanting We want food are being widely circulated on the Internet.

Conditions increasingly resemble those that erupted into the bloody caracazo of 1989, when masses of workers and urban poor descended on Caracas and other major cities in an outpouring of rage over an IMF austerity package imposed by the government of Carlos Andres Perez. Then, as now, oil prices had plummeted reducing the ability of the capitalist government to ameliorate the immense class tensions that pervade Venezuela, one of the most socially polarized countries on the planet.

It was fundamentally the caracazo that gave rise to the Chavista movement, which emerged first as a dissident faction of junior army officers, disgusted by the governments use of the armed forces to shoot down thousands of Venezuelans in the street.

In 1992, the late Hugo Chavez, then a paratroop lieutenant colonel, led an abortive military coup. Under conditions in which all the major parties as well as the existing trade unions had been completely discredited, the uprising captured the popular imagination, and, after a brief imprisonment, Chavez was elected president in 1998 on a populist and left-nationalist platform.

The pro-capitalist, bourgeois nationalist policies of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) have produced a social catastrophe for Venezuelan workers. For-profit corporationsboth foreign and nationalhave shut down operations, throwing tens of thousands into destitution. A total absence of planned economic development has left the economy entirely dependent on oil exports and vulnerable to price fluctuations on the international capitalist commodity markets.

The private foreign and domestic banks remain in firm control of the commanding heights of the economy, while the Venezuelan government continues to slash desperately needed imports of food and medicine in order to continue funneling tens of billions of dollars to meeting interest payments to Wall Street bondholders.

Throughout 17 years of Chavez/Maduro rule, pseudo-left groups worldwide have heralded the PSUV as a model of 21st century socialism. In reality, under the Chavistas, a new ruling class layer of financiers, politically-connected businessmen and contractors as well as top government officials has enriched itself at the expense of the Venezuelan masses. The minimal social assistance programs implemented during this period have proven woefully incapable of preventing roughly 80 percent of the population from living in poverty and 51 percent in extreme poverty.

Leading politicians in the right-wing opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) have warned that the country is on the verge of social explosion, and that society will erupt as a result of the growing daily tension. They are seeking a recall referendum, not only to remove Maduro, but to provide an escape valve for the increasing social tensions.

Washington attempted to overthrow Chavez in a failed 2002 coup and has since designated the Venezuelan government as an extraordinary threat to US national security. For his part, Maduro only weeks ago was invoking a supposedly imminent US invasion to justify mobilizing the military in the face of mounting popular unrest.

Yet on Tuesday at a meeting of the Organization of American States in the Dominican Republic, Secretary of State John Kerry announced the US will be hosting high-level negotiations to mediate the political conflict in Venezuela and hopefully alleviate social tensions. After meeting with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez, Kerry said Washington was determined to improve the relationship and overcome the old rhetoric.

For his part, Maduro called for the immediate exchange of ambassadors and voiced enthusiasm for the new talks with Washington. I very much like President Obama, he said Tuesday night. He is a nice person ... Why cant I say that?

What brings the two sides together is their mutual fear of and hostility towards the Venezuelan working class. While US imperialism has long viewed the Chavez-Maduro government as an irritant that it would like to eliminate, it has no interest whatsoever in achieving this aim by means of a mass revolt from below.

The US ruling class, as well as the Latin American bourgeoisie, are well aware that the grievances of Venezuelan workers are shared by workers throughout the hemisphere. In Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and across Central America and Mexico, strikes and protests are growing in frequency and intensity. Latin America today is the most unequal region of the world, a social powder keg waiting to explode.

The emergence of the class struggle, moreover, is not limited to Latin America. It is a global phenomenon, marked by the French movement against the Khomri Law and the strike wave in Belgium, as well as the strikes of telecommunication workers in the United States and the millions of votes for a self-proclaimed socialist presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.

The Venezuelan working class is at a crossroads. It faces hostile enemies in the Maduro government, the military, the right-wing official opposition, the trade unions, and in the form of US imperialist intervention. The Venezuelan pseudo left, epitomized by groups like Marea Socialista and the International Marxist Tendency, blames the working class for the crisis of the Venezuelan bourgeois government and seek to bolster waning illusions in the PSUV.

Seventeen years of PSUV rule shows that workers can trust no section of the bourgeoisieno matter whether they clothe themselves in radical phraseologyto represent their class interests. The brutal suppression of the caracazo in 1989 points to the stark dangers in the present situation. Today, just as then, the Maduro government ultimately relies on the military to drown a revolutionary uprising in blood. US imperialism, for all its democratic and human rights pretensions, will support whatever measures are required to uphold private property and profit interests.

Workers and youth can rely only on their independent mobilization to meet the need for food, healthcare, and other basic necessities of life that the capitalist system is unable to provide.

The International Committee of the Fourth International calls on workers and youth to form neighborhood and workplace committees to seize food warehouses from private hoarders, black marketeers, and the ruling party-controlled food distribution committees (CLAP), and to distribute food to all those in need.

Factories and workplaces must be seized from private and state owners and placed under the democratic control of the working class so that production can be directed to meet the basic needs of the population. Strike committees must be formed to coordinate work stoppages in key industries across the country.

Workers must prepare to defend themselves from PSUV paramilitaries and from the police and military. But most importantly, workers must arm themselves theoretically with an independent, internationalist socialist program. The World Socialist Web Site encourages workers and youth in Venezuela to contact us today and fight for the establishment of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
In what became the tightest election in Perus history, 77-year-old economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (widely known as PPK) defeated right-wing populist candidate Keiko Fujimori by just 41,438 votes.

The result was unexpected, as Fujimori, the daughter of Perus former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimorinow jailed for his part in death squad massacres, repression and corruptionwas leading the polls for more than a year. A drug-related scandal and massive protests against the return of fujimorismo undermined Fujimoris campaign in the last weeks.

However, the biggest boost for PKK in political terms came from the Broad Front of the Left (Frente Amplio de la Izquierda, FA), a coalition of the pseudo left, which decided to unconditionally support Kuczynski in order to defeat Fujimori.

While Kuczynski managed to get elected, his party Peruanos Por el Kambioa personalist political vehicle and not a real partywon only 18 seats in Congress. In comparison, Fujimoris party, Fuerza Popular, has overwhelming power over the legislative branch, with 73 of their candidates elected to the 130-member legislature.

Born in Lima in 1938 to a German-Polish father and French mother (French filmmaker Jean Luc Godard is his first cousin), Kuczynski had a privileged education both in Peru and abroad. He received a scholarship to attend Oxford University and then another to study at Princetons Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he got a doctorate in economics at the age of 22. Back in Peru in 1966, he started his public career in the National Reserve Bank (NRB) under the auspices of Carlos Rodriguez Pastor, who belonged to one of the countrys richest families.

In 1968 the military, under the command of Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, launched a coup against the right-wing government of Fernando Belaunde Terry and implemented nationalist measures, including expropriations of foreign businesses such as the International Petroleum Company, owned by Standard Oil.

Velascos government accused Kuczynski and his colleagues of stealing US$115 million from the NRB in order to give it to Standard Oil as compensation for the expropriation. Kuczynski escaped to Ecuador hidden in the trunk of a Volkswagen.

Exiled in the US, Kuczynski was rewarded with senior posts in the World Bank and IMF and obtained US citizenship. Starting from this period, his resume shows the avaricious rise of an ambitious businessman. He became chairman, partner and founder of various banks (including First Boston), private equity firms, companies and multinationals. According to opensecrets.org, he has made donations to both Republicans and Democrats.

He returned to Peru after the collapse of the military dictatorship (1968-1980) and became minister of energy under Belaundes second government, imposing what became known as Kuczynskis law, under which large foreign oil companies were handed tax breaks worth US$500 million.

In 2001, after the collapse of the dictatorial government of Alberto Fujimori (Keikos father) he entered the government of his successor, Alejandro Toledo, whichlike all those that have come to power since the fall of Fujimoricontinued and deepened the US-backed free market measures that Fujimori introduced in the 1990s.

Under Toledo, Kuczynski was instrumental in renegotiating a deal that would divert natural gas for export rather than needed domestic consumption. The company that benefited the most from the deal was Hunt Oil, for which he would later work. A WikiLeaks cable from August 2005 defined him as an influential government ally.

In 2006, Kuczynski showed his own personal racism, declaring before an annual gathering of major businessmen: This thing of changing [economic] rules, changing contracts, to nationalize [property] its more or less an idea of [the people of] the Andes, a place where the altitude obstructs the oxygen from reaching to the brain, this is fatal and terrible.

Kuczynski ran for president for the first time in 2011. He was the favorite of the business class. When the run-off became one between Keiko Fujimori and current president Ollanta Humala, he threw his support to Fujimori.

At the beginning of the latest elections, there was no reason to suspect that Kuczynski would advance from the third or fourth position to which he had been relegated in the polls. However, things began to change after the National Jury of Electionsthe state organ that oversees the electoral processbarred both Julio Guzman and Cesar Acuna from the ballot. Both candidates, in different ways, fit the electorates desire for options outside of traditional politics and had, at different times, occupied second place in the polls. Kuczynskis standing begin to increase by default, along with that of Veronika Mendoza, the FAs candidate, who managed to achieve third place.

Kuczynski has won the election through a series of fortunate events, and political analysts have unanimously warned that his government will have a weak and isolated character unless he establishes alliances with fujimorismo, the foremost power in the legislative branch. As the Peruvian daily El Comercio put it: The new president has been left with a minimum representation and without significant allies in a Congress dominated by his adversary as well as without a real party organization and with no real representation whatsoever in the countrys regions.

It is probable that Kuczynski will carry out an earlier campaign pledge to pardon Alberto Fujimori (or grant him house arrest) as a gesture aimed at gaining the support of Fuerza Popular.

Neither Kuczynskis past as a Wall Street banker nor any of the corrupt measures he backed under former administrations was a deterrent to the FAs endorsement of him as the lesser of two evils.

On a video seen by 2 million people on Facebook, FA presidential candidate Veronika Mendoza looked into the camera and declared: I dont want for my children a country of corruption, drugs and violence [in reference to Fujimori and a drug-related scandal that damaged her campaign] or where to kill, lie and steal becomes the norm; because of that I am going to vote against Mrs. Fujimori. [...] The only thing left is to vote for PPK. Mendoza added that casting null or blank ballots in protest against the two right-wing candidates would only strengthen Fujimori in the final vote count.

The FAs decision to support Kuczynski is, in fact, an extension of the main objective of its own campaign: sustaining Peruvian capitalism by tying workers and youth to bourgeois politics and suppressing any independent movement of the working class.

Mendoza and her colleagues in FA will bear political responsibility for the inevitable attacks on the working class that are to come under Kuczynski, whose victory was hailed as more good news from Latin America in a Wall Street Journal editorial titled, Peru Keeps Driving Right.

Kuczynskis spokesmen declared the incoming governments interest in establishing alliances even with the left FA, which has 20 seats in Congress. Pedro Francke, one of the FAs leaders, declared that they would evaluate participation with his government and that they would support any good policy it proposes.

The countrys main union federation, CGTP, and the teachers main union, SUTEP, also threw their support to Kuczynski after he signed a list of vacuous promises such as respecting certain labor benefits and increasing the meager salaries of teachers. This, from a man who personally reaped millions from the destruction of workers living standards on an international scale.

With Mendozas support, Kuczynski was able to enter in Limas poorest neighborhoods and in the countrys south where he wouldnt have any strength by himself. First data shows that he won in Lima and in the south, precisely thanks to Mendozas votes, stated a report by the Spanish daily El Pais.

Right-wing novelist and former Peruvian presidential candidate (who lost to Fujimoris father in 1990) Mario Vargas Llosa praised the FAs decision in his weekly El Pais column. The Peruvian left, acting in a responsible way, saved democracy and has assured the continuation of a policy that has given the country a remarkable economic progress, he wrote.

Vargas Llosas column has long served as a vehicle for sanctifying right-wing governments that cooperate with the Western powers and financial institutions, while demonizing others that defy them even minimally. All of this all wrapped up in a self-righteous intellectual pose. In his latest columns he congratulates right-wing president Mauricio Macri of Argentina for his brave (i.e., unpopular) economic measures attacking the working class.

With the China-led commodities boom severely weakened and the disappearance of big foreign investments in Peru, ruling circles are pushing for the next government to impose even more deregulation for big business, to make it easier to fire workers and accelerate the privatizations of water and oil that have already begun, in order to make the country more friendly to the multinationals and foreign investors.

This will be the focus of Kuczynskis agenda, which will inevitably trigger an upsurge in the class struggle in Peru.
Shortly after the close of polls in Washington, DC, the final contest in the Democratic presidential primary process, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders met for two hours Tuesday evening with the partys presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. As expected, Clinton won by a wide margin, capturing 78.7 percent of the vote.

The meeting was the latest indication that Sanders is planning to wind down his campaign and throw his support behind Clinton. Last week, he went to the White House to meet President Barack Obama, who officially endorsed Clinton shortly afterward.

Despite losses in last weeks primaries in California and New Jersey, Sanders has yet to formally concede to Clinton and may not officially drop out of the race until the Democratic National Convention at the end of July. However, he has sent clear signals that he is no longer challenging Clinton for the nomination.

In recent days, Sanders has stopped talking about lobbying superdelegateselected officials and party operatives, who overwhelmingly support Clintonto switch their allegiance in order to overcome her lead in pledged delegates and achieve an upset victory at the convention. He has also virtually dropped his criticisms of the former senator and secretary of state. When we started this campaign, I told you that I was running not to oppose any man or woman, but to propose new and far-reaching policies to deal with the crises of our time, Sanders declared in an email to supporters sent out on Tuesday.

The email announced a live Internet meeting to be held Thursday night at which Sanders is to discuss with his supporters the next stage in his political revolution. The hollow and cynical character of this euphemism is becoming increasingly clear. Sanders political revolution is revealed to be nothing more than a means of channeling popular opposition to the economic and political system back behind the Democratic Party. The next stage of this revolution will begin with support for Clinton, a corrupt defender of the status quo who is widely despised for her Wall Street ties and war-mongering. She will be portrayed as the lesser evil in the ensuing anybody but Trump campaign.

Following Tuesdays meeting with Clinton, press releases from both campaigns declared their mutual support for party unity in the general election. The Clinton camp described the meeting as a positive discussion about their primary campaign, about unifying the party and about the dangerous threat that Donald Trump poses to our nation. It noted that the two agreed to continue working on their shared agenda, including through the platform development process for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton met in Washington on Tuesday evening and had a positive discussion about how best to bring more people into the political process and about the dangerous threat that Donald Trump poses to our nation, the Sanders campaign statement read.

It continued: Sanders congratulated Secretary Clinton on the campaign she has run and said he appreciated her strong commitment to stopping Trump in the general election. Noting their common ground on issues such as the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, health care and higher education, the statement added, Sanders and Clinton agreed to continue working to develop a progressive agenda that addresses the needs of working families and the middle class and adopting a progressive platform for the Democratic National Convention.

This love note to Clinton came less than a day after Sanders held a news conference and pledged to fight for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic Party at the convention and beyond. In the course of the primary process, Sanders won wide support from young people and workers who were attracted by his talk of democratic socialism and his denunciations of social inequality and the billionaire class. But now, as he prepares to complete his political mission of smothering social opposition and anti-capitalist sentiment and blocking the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class, it is increasingly impossible to conceal the dishonesty and cynicism of his enterprise.

Many workers and youth who rallied behind Sanders will come to see his campaign as proof of the impossibility of transforming the Democratic Party, one of the two main parties of Wall Street and the military/intelligence establishment, into an instrument of progressive change, and the essentially reactionary role of all those who claim otherwise.

As indicated by the reference in the Sanders campaign statement on the meeting with Clinton to bringing more people into the political process, a major consideration in Sanders withholding of a formal endorsement of Clinton and his pledge to fight for progressive planks in the party platform to be adopted at the convention is a desire to promote the illusion that the convention, and the party itself, can be shifted to the left by pressure from below.

In this connection, Sanders has called for the resignation of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and reform of the anti-democratic superdelegate system, which gives unelected officials a huge say in the selection of the partys presidential candidate. In fact, such procedural and personnel debates are meaningless sideshows, as is discussion on the partys platform. As Sanders well knows, it has been many decades since the official campaign platforms adopted by the conventions of the two big business parties had any bearing on the policies actually pursued.

Sanders enjoys considerable support within the Democratic Party establishment for these maneuvers. Earlier on Tuesday, he attended the weekly luncheon of the Democratic caucus in the Senate for the first time in months. He addressed his fellow Democratic senators and was greeted with standing ovations.

I have total confidence that Bernies going to be on board, doing the right thing, saying the right thing, putting all of himself into this campaign, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown told the media afterwards. Of course, everybody wants him to do it sooner, rather than later, but the timetables up to him.
ANNECY  During the Balkan War, Swiss journalist Christian Wurtenberg was murdered in mysterious circumstances. Twenty five years later, his 15-years-younger cousin tries to clarify the real facts behind his death in a journey into both her own past and the memory of the conflict, a journey told by young Swiss helmer Anja Kofmel, Wurtenbergs cousin, in a mix of animation and live action.

Chris the Swiss includes interviews with famed terrorist Carlos the Jackal, a Spanish mercenary and journalists.

Wurtenberg had apparently joined an extreme right and ultra Catholic paramilitary group called The First International Platoon of Volunteers (PIV) that was fighting for Croatia, Kofmel said. On top of that, the PIV was said to be financed by arms trading and drug money and supported by Opus Dei, she added.

Budgeted at $3.3 million, Chris is co-produced by Zurich-based Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion, Zagrebs Nukleus Film and Leipzigs MA.JA.DE Filmproduktion. Chris the Swiss producer is writer-director Samir who helmed Switzerlands 2016 Oscar entry Iraqi Odyssey.

He calls Kofmel Switzerlands next star-director, adding: Anja is putting her craft and imagination [to the service of] a story of relevance, mixing animation and documentary in a new way.

Educated at Lucernes School of Design and Art and Paris Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs (ENSAD), Anja Kofmel has certainly sparked expectation over her feature debut Chris the Swiss, which follows on from graduation short Chrigi. Other early Kofmel shorts include Boxer Box and Strichcode.

Kofmel completed her documentary training working as assistant director for actor-director Eric Bergkraut, who made Letter to Anna, the Story of Journalist Politkovskayas Death.

I decided to mix animation and live action in Chris because of the nature of the story, Kofmel explained. Despite intense research, many aspects of Wurtenbergs death still remain obscure. At the same time, the film deals with themes such as personal perception, cover-ups and fading memories, she added.

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Chris the Swiss will finish post-production in November.

What fascinates me are stories which explore the thin border between reality and fiction, experiment with the thin line between inner perception and outside reality, says Kofmel.

In her Her next project, currently titled Hello Isabel, is a fictional story with an again toon-docu format about a blind girl whos suddenly able to see, thanks to new technologies.

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From Good Housekeeping

1. Your heels are too high.

Okay, this isn't so surprising, but let's just get it out of the way. Your fave stilettos can cause a host of issues, including stress fractures, bursitis, sprained ankles and neuroma (an inflammation of the nerves between your foot bones that feels like you're walking on a rock.) "Anything over 2.5 inches can cause seven times the pressure on the ball of the foot," explains podiatric surgeon Dr. Marlene Reid. Her guideline is to stick to 3-inch heels or lower for any activities other than special events - and wear stacked heels instead of thin ones whenever possible.

2. You love a pointy toe.

Sorry, but that leg-elongating style may be irritating a bunion. And while these hereditary joint protrusions naturally get worse over time, your tight-toed look isn't do them any favors, explains Dr. Carly Robbins, a podiatrist in Marysville, Ohio. But you can get bunions removed. "It's best to have surgery early on rather than to wait because as the bunion worsens, the surgery becomes more invasive," says Dr. Reid. "Fortunately, if you have them removed and then wear proper footgear, they usually don't come back."

3. You're wearing the wrong shoes altogether.

When shoes are too tight, too narrow, or too high, your little toes get bent into hammertoes. Even worse? Because the toe isn't flat, it can rub against your shoes, causing irritation and pain. Dr. Robbins suggests finding shoes that don't put pressure on the raised part of the toe.

4. You don't stretch enough.

Did you know you can - and should - stretch your feet on a regular basis, especially if you exercise a lot? If not, you risk plantar fasciitis, which is a fancy way of saying the tissue on the bottom of the foot gets irritated and inflamed. "Stretching the foot before any physical activity can help to alleviate symptoms, as well as icing after," says podiatric surgeon Dr. Bela Pandit. Over-the-counter arch supports can also help.

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5. Your lost (or gained!) weight.

Wait, what?!?! This is the reward for losing a few pounds. Unfortunately, yes. "For every 10 pounds that you gain or lose, the muscles in your feet either expand or contract, so the shoes you were wearing before may now be giving you too little support or too much," explains Pandit. (A tip: Orthotics can help alleviate the discomfort.)

6. You hurt your hip (or your knee or back)

 and it's making you walk crooked. When you put too much weight on one side, this triggers bursitis, an inflammation of the joint (often on the back of a heel), Pandit explains. (Being off-kilter can also cause neuromas and stress fractures.) Anti-inflammatory medication, ice, and rest usually fix the issues, but to really solve them, you need to treat the original injury.

7. You just got a pedicure.

"If you try to cut into the corner of your nail but leave a little piece, that piece can grow and dig into the skin causing an ingrown nail," Robbins explains. (It also happens when you squeeze into a too-small pair of shoes or stub your toe.) Ouch! Soaking in warm water with Epsom salts or white vinegar will soften the skin, decrease inflammation, and draw out any drainage. But if you truly want to avoid getting them at all, gently round your nails or cut them straight across.

8. You have diabetes.

The autoimmune disorder can lead to circulation issues, nerve pain, muscle and joint problems, and infections. If the pain is severe, check your blood sugar - and speak to your doctor.

9. You signed up for a new fitness class.

Moderate and lingering pain (as opposed to shooting) might mean a stress fracture, explains Pandit. These tiny fractures are usually caused by abnormal stress or normal activity on a weakened bone. "I see them when people try new, high-intensity workouts and aren't wearing proper shoes," she says. The best thing to do is just slow down and stay off your foot as much as possible for about a week.

10. You've got flat feet - or a high arch.

Bad news: The natural shape of your foot can, in itself, cause discomfort. "If you have a really flat foot you're going to strain the ligaments on the inside of your ankle. If you have a really high arch then you're going to strain the ligaments on the outside of your ankle," Robbins reports. Blame this one on your parents, and then make sure you buy shoes with the right kind of support, like arch supports or custom orthotics.

11. You stand at work.

Well, there goes that request for a standing desk. (We're not kidding.) Because the reality is spending 10 hours or more on your feet can cause soreness and even swelling. If your profession keeps you on your toes all day, try nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, such as naproxen or ibuprofen, to help with inflammation. Expert tip: Rolling a cold or frozen water bottle or ice pack under your foot for about 20 minutes is a great pain-reliever, too. You can do this up to three or four times a day, says Dr. Pandit.

12. You're pregnant!

Just add this to the other joys (morning sickness, back strain, tiredness) of pregnancy. A few months in, your body starts secreting hormones so that your ligaments in your hips can relax. Great for giving birth, but really bad for your feet. Add swelling on top of that and your bunions, hammertoes, and more will really give you trouble. The good thing is the swelling will eventually go down, but once your ligaments stretch out, they'll stay that way, says Robbins. One sure-fire fix? New, bigger shoes!
On June 9, a 20-year-old trans woman became the fourteenth transgender person killed in the United States in 2016 when her body was found in a burning car in New Orleans, reported Autostraddle on Tuesday.

The woman, called "Goddess Diamond" by trans poet and writer Venus Selenite  "We use 'Goddess' in substitution of a trans woman's dead/government name," Selenite explained in a tweet  is the latest victim in what has already proven to be a deadly year for the trans community.

Source: Frank Franklin II/AP

The disproportionate violence against trans people is hardly limited to this year. According to the Anti-Violence Project, an LGBTQ advocacy group, in 2013, 72% of the victims of hate violence homicides were trans women, and trans people "experience violence at alarmingly high rates."

According to the Advocate, 2015 was "the deadliest [year] on record for transgender Americans, with at least 21 trans women killed in the U.S. alone."

Many have drawn parallels between the extreme rhetoric surrounding anti-trans legislation  like the bathroom restrictions enacted with North Carolina's controversial House Bill 2  and violence against trans people.

when you teach society that trans women are predators and men and worthless and non-human TRANS WOMEN OF COLOR GET FUCKING MURDERED

Diamond worked at a New Orleans Wal-Mart, reported Autostraddle. Her coworker and friend, George Melichar, told the New Orleans Advocate that Diamond was "very loved."

"That's what makes this more difficult," said Melichar. "In addition to losing a friend, we lost an LGBT leader."
Continuing to play with its 144-foot OceaNemo Sport Utility Yacht concept, MC Yacht International has recently announced exclusive partnerships with some of the worlds leading water-toy manufacturers for what promises to result in a lavish floating fun house. Being touted as the first sport-utility yacht, the vessel will be outfitted with action-oriented amenities for land, sea, and air.

Among the array of recreational possibilities will be: an inflatable rock-climbing wall, a giant waterslide, and aquatic trampolines from Texas-based FunAir; multifunctional lounging platforms by British-based NautiBuoy; an electric hydrofoil craft from Quadrofoil in Slovenia; and private submersibles from the California company Seamagine Hydrospace Corporation.

Terrestrial transports will include another Golden State contribution, the WaterCar (able travel up to 38 knots on the ocean and 55 mph on the ground) and two Marlin hovercraft from the British Hovercraft Company. But recess really takes off with Italian innovator SeaMax Easys amphibious sport aircraft with folding wings.

Onboard storage is provided by a waterline garage that extends the full width of the aluminum-hulled yachts 30-foot beam. And the ample space will come in handy, as the Italian boatbuilder has more partnerships planned. (oceanemo.com)

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What It Is: A small collection of fully camouflaged new compact Jeep crossover vehicles being trailered about somewhere in Europe. Known internally as the C-SUV (compact SUV) and nicknamed the Compatriot by the Jeep cognoscenti, the as-yet-unnamed compact vehicle is slated to replace both the Jeep Patriot and Compass. Even the swirly camo pattern cant disguise the Jeep-ness of these vehicles: See the shape of the wheel openings, the kicked-up body line in front of the C-pillar, and the baby version of the Grand Cherokee fascia. The finished appearance of the twin exhaust tips and the way they are integrated into the rear skid plate and cosmetic bodywork indicates that the vehicle is nearly ready for prime time. Which is good, since the current Compass and Patriot have been around so long that many people have probably forgotten that they are still available.

One big point of contention in the current pair is their subpar interior layout and materials. While these images dont reveal much in that regard, we are at least glad to see the easy-to-use corporate dials and buttons in their familiar positions. A typical FCA screen for access to Uconnect functions resides in the center of the dash, and USB and 12-volt power ports are clearly visible in the console.

Why It Matters: The Patriot, which for a time held the dubious title of offering the lowest base price of any SUV sold in America, and its Compass sibling were largely answers to questions that no one had asked. They looked Jeepy and offered at least some off-road capability but didnt excel in any particular measure. Besides lacking distinction, their size landed between segment norms, so many consumers simply chose a larger vehicle such as the Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V or, more recently, had the option to move down into a crossover in the burgeoning subcompact class, such as the Mazda CX-3 or Jeep Renegade. While that may sound unfortunate, it also represents opportunity. Should Jeeps new C-SUV deliver the goodsprimarily capability, style, and fuel economyfor a competitive price, it could score big on the showroom floor. Even though these models are nearly invisible to the enthusiast community, Jeep managed to peddle 185,162 of the pair (118,464 Patriots and 66,698 Compasses) in 2015, so there is definitely still some action to be had.

Platform: FCA is no stranger to squeezing numerous models from a limited number of platforms, and we expect this nameless Jeep to ride on an extended version of the Small Wide 4x4 platform that also underpins the Jeep Renegade, the Fiat 500X, and the 500L. Jeep will undoubtedly cook up several trim levels, including at least one with a Trail Rated badge or even a Trailhawk edition.

Powertrain: While its a good bet that the corporate 2.4-liter four-cylinder and 2.0-liter turbocharged four paired with either the six-speed manual or a nine-speed automatic will be on tap, recent rumors suggest that the still-in-development, turbocharged Hurricane four-cylinder slated for the next-generation Wrangler may make an appearance in this model at some point, as well.

Competition: Fiat 500X, Jeep Renegade, Mini Cooper Countryman, Nissan Juke,Subaru Crosstrek.

Estimated Arrival and Price: Originally scheduled to debut at the 2016 New York auto show, this vehicle was MIA. Expect to see a Jeep Compass/Patriot replacement arrive in late 2016 or early 2017 as a 2017 model. With the Renegades base MSRP currently hovering around the $19,000 mark, which is actually lower than the current Compass and close to the Patriot, Jeep will have to decide if it wants to price the ComPatriot similarly. The top end of the range (call it the Jeep Whatever Trailhawk) no doubt will invade the territory of the Cherokee, which currently starts at $24,490.
"Se by," "Best by" and "Eat before" are the phrases food manufacturers use to indicate freshness  and they are crazy confusing for consumers. Can you eat a yogurt if its "sell by" date was yesterday? Will your insides shrivel up if you chow down on unopened cereal that supposedly expired in 2015?

"I think a lot of people look at the date and throw a food directly in the trash," Emily Broad Lieb, Director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, said over the phone.

Checking the date on a food and immediately tossing it in the garbage is a costly habit, though. According to the Food Date Labeling Act of 2016, a federal bill introduced in May 2016, Americans waste an estimated every year because they're confused over the meaning of food date labels. This staggering amount is based on research from ReFed.com.

"Honestly, it could be more," Broad Lieb said.

Here's the kicker: Expiration dates have nothing to do with food safety.

"Contrary to popular belief, expiration date labels often don't indicate whether food is still safe to eat," Dana Gunders, scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Fast Company. Expiration dates are really meant to indicate freshness, and they aren't regulated by the government  manufacturers are the ones scaring consumers into dumping still-good yogurts.

So pipe down, hypochondriacs.

OMG NO I JUST FUCKING ATE THIS MAC AND CHEESE & ITS NEARLY A YEAR AFTER ITS EXPIRE DATE SEND HELPpic.twitter.com/0TgUYivK3g https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CkPIyN-UkAAdErN.jpg:large

Roughly 20% of the food consumers waste is because of these hard-to-understand labels, and the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that the this confusion leads the average American family of four to throw out roughly $1,500 worth of food every year

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Luckily, lawmakers are finally wising up to this expensive mess. In May 2016, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) introduced the Food Date Labeling Act, which aims to standardize labels.

Instead of three ambiguous phrases (sell-by, best by, and use before), the Food Date Labeling Act proposes replacing them with two new phrases. Each food product that requires a date label will have one of the two phrases below.

1. "Best if used by"

This label will be used to indicate a "quality date" on groceries and ready-to-eat-food, the bill stated.

2. "Expires on"

This reflects the date when the food product is no longer safe to eat. Broad Lieb noted that it will be up to the Federal Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine which products need the safety-based "expires on" label.

For foods that currently carry "sell by" dates, the "expires on" label could be a game changer when it comes to helping consumers avoid unnecessary waste.

"This common sense legislation will provide consumers with clarity that will help them save money on their grocery bills and prevent perfectly safe food from going to waste," Senator Blumenthal said in a press release.

Broad Lieb said over the phone that if all goes well in Washington, consumers will seethese labels in two to five years.

"With the election coming up, it's hard to tell how fast something will happen," she said, noting that food manufacturers will have two years to comply once the

While you wait for these new labels come to fruition, consider changing a few of your current habits.

In the meantime, you shouldn't blindly throw out foods based on sell-by dates. The USDA's FoodKeeper app, which provides information on the actual shelf life for roughly 400 products, can help you figure out which foods are still A-OK to eat.

Get this: Even that funky-smelling milk in the back of your fridge doesn't necessarily need to be tossed. Y

But that fridge crisper drawer that's a graveyard of weeks-old vegetables? Yeah, you probably want to compost those bad boy .
More than 1.1 million people  half of whom came from Syria  fled to Germany last year, seeking shelter in a nation widely believed to have one of the most liberal asylum policies in the West. But it turns out Germans are not as welcoming as initially thought.

A new study released by the University of Leipzig reveals a dramatic rise in Islamophobia among Germans since last year. More than 40 percent of the public thinks the government should forbid Muslims from immigrating to Germany  double the number of whom believed so in 2009.

The study, released Wednesday, also revealed deep skepticism of Berlins liberal stance on migrants, and of the humanitarian grounds for its asylum policy.

Roughly four-fifths of the nearly 2,500 respondents said the country should pursue a less generous refugee policy. Nearly 60 percent said they believed asylum seekers are not really at risk of any persecution in their home country, according to AFP.

Native Germans are also feeling increasingly alienated: Half of those interviewed said they sometimes felt like a foreigner in their own country due to the presence of Muslim immigrants, up from 43 percent two years ago.

The findings may portend well for the anti-Islam Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party. Over the past year, the party has made swift gains in regional elections and national polls on a platform that calls for banning mosque minarets, veils for women, and the Muslim call to prayer. A poll from May showed support for the party hovering at 15 percent, making it the third most popular party in Germany.

The xenophobia that has fueled the AfDs rise has a darker side as well. As of this past April, authorities estimated that right-wing Germans were responsible for 319 attacks on refugee homes since 2015.

Such attacks show no signs of abating. In the first four months of 2016, police reported 37 arson attacks, and the study found that far-right fanatics are more willing to use violence to uphold their beliefs.

Perhaps wary of further blowback to her immigration policies, German Chancellor Angela Merkel led the EUs negotiations with Turkey to drastically limit the number of migrants allowed into the continent. Under the terms of the agreement, all migrants who have arrived in Europe after March 20 are deported to Turkey if their claim for asylum is rejected. For each Syrian migrant turned back to Turkey, the EU must take in another whose claim to asylum it deems as legitimate.

Image credit: MEHMET KAMAN/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The World Wide Web has changed quite a bit since the graphical internet was born in the mid-90s -- and since many of today's parents may have been searching for money for college.

Today, students can conduct a free scholarship search and acquire information on scholarship and grant opportunities from myriad sources in a matter of minutes.

Scholarship databases are larger and more efficient than ever, because they are managed by people who personally vet opportunities, check details and compile information into a user-friendly format. Students can do away with the tedious scholarship manuals and enormous books their parents may have used and instead receive an individualized list from their computer, cellphone or tablet.

Here are some ways these online scholarship resources make the hunt for money for college different from in parents' days.

[Avoid making four common scholarship search mistakes.]

1. Accessibility: Students are on the move today, and most scholarship search sites are keeping up with them through mobile sites and apps. However, the websites' desktop versions are typically more robust than the mobile apps, which provide a faster but often less comprehensive search.

With greater technological convenience, life can be a little easier, and some scholarship providers even offer scholarships -- such as the $5,000 Experian Data Quality Scholarship -- for students who write an essay about how tech and data have improved their lives.

Security and privacy rights go hand-in-hand with the internet. Students can weigh in on the importance of internet security and earn up to $2,500 through The ExpressVPN Future of Privacy Scholarship.

[Know what to do before, during and after the scholarship search.]

2. Immediacy: Students can get scholarship information and opportunities at lightning speed. Within moments of completing a personal profile, students are matched to scholarships that coincide with their background, demographics and interests.

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Although they can apply more quickly, students should bear in mind that scholarships have strict deadlines and providers will almost certainly discard late applications. Take time over the summer to begin applying for scholarships.

If you want to become more financially literate and also enter for a chance to win one of five $5,000 scholarships or one $20,000 scholarship, apply for the U.S. Bank Scholarship Program and complete their Financial Genius tutorials by Sept. 30. If you have interest in and can write an essay on alternative medical treatments, apply for the monthly $1,000 James "Rhio" O'Connor Memorial Scholarship.

3. Compatibility: A good scholarship search engine will only generate scholarships that match a student's profile. This means the site uses an algorithm to display only the most relevant information and not general or random scholarships.

Scholarship forms usually should have a clear and concise description of the scholarship -- including but not limited to the deadline, award amount and a direct website address for applying. Scholarships are also often targeted to a very specific audience, rather than open to every single student attending college. This means if you qualify that your chances for winning are greater.

For example, scholarships like the Endowment for South Asian Students of Indian Descent Scholarship Fund are specifically designated for South Asian Indian medical students who are also Pennsylvania residents. For the artistically inclined, the We The Future Contest allows students of all ages, from elementary school through college and grad school, to create a marketing plan, speech, video, song or technology project on topics surrounding the U.S. Constitution.

[Check out other high-dollar scholarship opportunities.]

4. Tech-savvy friendly: Since many people, especially young adults, spend several hours a day on their phones, why not apply for social media-related scholarships? Although parents may not be quite up to date with technology, millennials definitely are.

Use your time on your phone to voice an end to cyberbullying via the Delete Cyberbullying Scholarship. Or if you have solid design skills, create an infographic showing how apps are helping students learn outside of traditional classroom settings and apply for the AT&T Internet and Education Scholarship.

5. More resources: Students and parents should never pay for a scholarship search. And many scholarship search tools offer additional resources beyond scholarships.

Whether it is college and high school news, financial and federal aid information, grants and college tips or any number of related topics, students can look to these reliable sources to help them prepare for or continue a successful college education as well as stay aware of current events in higher education.

Susan Dutca is the head content writer at Scholarships.com, one of the most widely used free college scholarship search and financial aid information resources online. The organization also formed RightStudent about five years ago, a company that has built relationships with colleges and universities across the U.S. to provide students with the opportunity to not only interact with prospective colleges, but to also be recruited by them. Follow Scholarships.com on Twitter and Facebook.
Medical costs are rising across the U.S., and patients are left paying a bigger percentage of the bill. Most Americans, whether their health insurance is provided through an employer, the Affordable Care Act exchange or the open market, are paying a higher share of their medical care costs than ever before through increased copays and deductibles.

Pharmaceutical costs are rising drastically as well, as consumer are paying a greater share of those costs and some insurers are providing no coverage for high-priced drugs.

With medical and drug costs rising so significantly, Americans who experience a serious illness can find themselves facing thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills that aren't covered by insurance. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average cost-sharing amount for those covered by employer plans rose 77 percent from 2004 to 2014. Among patients using Affordable Care Act Marketplace plans, Kaiser found that the average deductible for medical care and drugs was $5,765 for Bronze plans and $3,064 for Silver plans in 2016.

[See: 10 Medical Services Medicare Doesn't Cover.]

"A lot of consumers ... are getting surprised by some of the bills," says Torben Nielsen, a senior vice president at HealthSparq.com, which provides cost estimates, comparison shopping and other tools to employees of more than 70 companies that have signed up for the program. "We try to take that surprise out of the equation by allowing members to see prices upfront based on their benefits. The more they can educate themselves about prices and plan ahead, the lower the prices they'll see."

Many health care consumers don't have access to comparison-shopping tools, and even some who do can find themselves facing large medical bills for their share of treatment.

Consumers who can't afford to pay large medical bills can occasionally receive some help, especially with drug costs. But assistance is limited with out-of-pocket costs, and it's up to the patients to do the research.

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While it's hard to do comparison shopping when you're presented with a cancer diagnosis, it is important to find out prices ahead of time when you can. You wouldn't renovate you house without getting several estimates, and consumers should learn to look at expensive medical procedures, especially elective ones, the same way.

"You can do the very same in health care. We really encourage users to get several opinions," Nielsen says. "We really encourage people to do a little more planning upfront when possible."

You might be surprised by what you find when you survey your options.

"Not all facilities charge the same price for each procedure," says Christie Hudson, vice president of Medical Recovery Services, which helps patients dispute medical billing errors. She also encourages patients to explicitly state in advance that they want their entire care team to be within their health care network. "We tell them to be proactive ahead of time," she says. "Make it very clear that you want all in-network doctors."

It can also save you money if you ask doctors point-blank whether a procedure is actually necessary, or whether a less expensive medication will do just as well for you.

[See: 10 Easy Ways to Pay Off Debt.]

While it's easier to negotiate prices before the procedure, another way to cut medical costs is to scrutinize your bills afterward. Hudson says that 80 percent of the bills her company reviews contain errors, including charges for bed linens and hospital gowns, which aren't supposed to be charged for separately.

"It's always important to make sure that you are only paying what's due," she says. "Request detailed, itemized statements. ... We're even seeing office visits charged at higher rates than they should," Hudson says. "There are some items that are not billable at all."

For pharmaceutical costs, especially for treatment of chronic illnesses, drug companies provide patient assistance programs, which pay all or part of the costs of necessary medications. Patients who pay out of pocket for medications can benefit from pharmacy discount cards and their online coupon equivalents, which provide coupon codes that can discount medications up to 80 percent, says Dr. Richard Sagall, president and co-founder of NeedyMeds.org, which lists discount coupons for prescription medications, pharmacies that provide free or cheap generic drugs and other information about finding lower cost drugs. "It can be a full-time job to find the cheapest drugstore, the best cards," he adds.

Here are eight ways to get help paying or cutting your medical bills and drug costs:

Apply for pharmaceutical assistance programs. NeedyMeds.com is one of a number of websites that link to drug assistance programs, which all have different rules and qualifications. Patients usually apply on a drug-by-drug basis, and rules change frequently. "Each program is different," Sagall says.

Check with disease organizations. Some chronic disease funds have information about medical assistance programs or nonprofit organizations that help cover treatment costs.

Know your insurance plan. Most insurance plans have a maximum amount you are required to pay out of pocket per person or per family. Following the rules and choosing in-network providers is an easy way to cut costs. Knowing your plan also helps you realize when you're not receiving the benefits to which you're entitled.

Ask your hospital financial aid office for discounts and referrals to aid programs. Hospitals will sometimes discount what you owe in exchange for quicker payment or offer a payment plan. Financial aid officers may also know of government aid or private assistance programs for which patients may qualify.

Scrutinize your bills. Stories of medical billing errors abound. Ask for detailed, itemized bills, and go through them line by line to make sure all the charges are valid. Dispute any charge you don't think you owe with an official dispute letter. "It's always better when you send it in writing," Hudson says.

Hire a medical billing advocate. Most companies charge a percentage of what they save the customer for their services -- Hudson's company charges about 25 percent. "We don't want to add any expense to any consumer," Hudson says.

[See: 11 Expenses Destroying Your Budget.]

Do a fundraising campaign. Online campaigns to help pay medical bills are becoming more common, and friends also sometimes do fundraisers to pitch in. Popular sites for this kind of fundraising include GoFundMe.com, YouCaring.com and even PayPal.

Ask for a discount in exchange for paying cash now. Many medical providers will write off a portion of the bill if you agree to pay a certain amount of cash upfront. Medical bills are negotiable, so you shouldn't hesitate to discuss your bill if it means getting a better deal.

Teresa Mears writes about personal finance, real estate and retirement for U.S. News and other publications. She's also written for MSN Money, The Miami Herald, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. She publishes Living on the Cheap and Miami on the Cheap. Follow her on Twitter @TeresaMears.
Jim Sherrell: Paul Ryan's constituents can give up Social Security and Medicare, but not rest of us
GQ Magazine just released a feature on the one and only Kim Kardashian West, which has the reality television celebutante candidly spilling the tea on everyone from hubby Kanye West to former friend and future sister-in-law Blac Chyna and even addressing Taylor Swifts beef with Kanye West. Seeing as how the interview clocks in at over 5000 words, weve rounded up the 10 most memorable (and outrageous) highlights from the revealing article.

Kimye is a match made in heaven: The interview includes a phone conversation with Kanye, who denies that Kim has any faults besides not forwarding e-mails of sketches that designers send her, which is probably the most Kimye problem to have. All my friends and my sisters say, You guys are so perfect for each other. Theres no one that would want to sit in your closet for hours with you and try on clothes. 

Despite Kanyes feelings about George W. Bush, Kim still has some affection for the former president: Although Kardashian once identified as a liberal Republican, she now identifies as a Democrat and will be supporting Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential election. However, her new political allegiances dont prevent her from professing affection for George W. Bush, someone that her husband once denounced on national television. I love George, though, I just think hes cute. Like a cute little president.

Kim is next-level organized: Described as frighteningly organized, Kardashian says she deletes every single text message and e-mail from her phone before bed, unless she needs to respond to it later.

Despite what the Internet would have you believe, shes Team Blac Chyna and Rob: Kim made sure to relay that the family supports the future Angela Renee Kardashian. Were all on board. We definitely see that my brother is happy and getting healthy, and whatever gets him to that place, you know, were happy for him. Chynas a sweet girl, and I think we all have so many things going on in our lives that we just want my brother to be happy. Has there been so many crazy things that happened? Yes. Is the whole situation, you know, just? I think people want to feel like were all beefing and have this crazy fight, and were really not. I think the drama naturally follows us.

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Her neighbors are just as famous as she is: Kim counts Gordon Ramsay and Stevie Wonder as neighbors; in fact, the latter crashed the baby shower that she hosted for Chrissy Teigen and John Legend. Casual.

Kim is the relative breadwinner in the Kardashian-West household: Kim nabbed #33 on Forbes highest-paid celebrities list, while Kanye didnt even make the top 100.

She had an idea about Caitlyn Jenner early on: Kardashian relayed a story of how she walked in on Caitlyn (then Bruce) Jenner wearing womens clothing in the familys garage. I went over to Kourtneys, and Kourtney was the only person that I told. We had no idea what it meant. So we went and Googled stories and found this, like, Oprah episode of this girl who had gone through a transition. But we still didnt know a lot.

Kim loved The People v. O.J. Simpson, but she took issue with the portrayal of her and her siblings: While Kim thought David Schwimmers portrayal of her father, Robert Kardashian, she didnt think the series interpretation of her and her siblings was accurate. I think our ages were off and our looks were off[The show] said [O.J.] tried to kill himself in my bedroom and it was Khloes bedroom, not my bedroom.

According to Kim, Taylor Swift totally approved Kanyes controversial line about her in his song, Famous: She totally approved that. She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didnt. I swear, my husband gets so much shit for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approvedI dont know why she just, you know, flipped all of a sudden. It was funny because [on the call with Kanye, Taylor] said, When I get on the Grammy red carpet, all the media is going to think that Im so against this, and Ill just laugh and say, The jokes on you, guys. I was in on it the whole time. And Im like, wait, but [in] your Grammy speech, you completely dissed my husband just to play the victim again.




Pictures have emerged that show Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston cuddling on the beach in Rhode Island, and our hearts are bursting with emotions. (Mostly FOMO.)



For reference, here's them getting down at the Met Ball in May:





TAYLOR SWIFT & TOM HIDDLESTON GETTING DOWN #MET #DANCE #FUNFUN #PRINCE #NYC #tomhiddleston A video posted by Carlos Souza (@carlossouza1311) on May 3, 2016 at 6:28am PDT









Before HiddleSwift  their couple name, duh  progresses any further, here are nine things that the British actor, 35, should know about dating Swift, 27.





9 Pieces of Advice for Tom Hiddleston on Dating Taylor Swift| Couples, People Scoop, Taylor Swift, Tom Hiddleston











1. You have to love her cats.





Just a little cat in a big world. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on May 14, 2016 at 2:11pm PDT





And not feel threatened when she prioritizes them over you.





Meredith is allergic to joy. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Oct 4, 2015 at 12:34pm PDT





2. You have to be down with her squad.





just look at these two. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Aug 31, 2015 at 1:32pm PDT







After the after party is.. Well.. This. @haimtheband A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on May 3, 2016 at 3:41pm PDT





And festive onesies, of course.





This is what you came for. @gigihadid @lilyaldridge A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Apr 29, 2016 at 1:25am PDT





3. You must, must, must enjoy animal-shaped pool floaties.





Happy Birthday, @marhunt I have too many incredible memories with you to count, and I'm so thankful for every one of them. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Apr 27, 2016 at 4:15pm PDT





4. You have to be cool with her hanging out with a lot of sexy fellows.





Thank you @dwyanewade for giving me a 13 jersey and for welcoming us to Miami What an incredible evening, spent with incredible people. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Oct 28, 2015 at 12:25am PDT







That crowd went CRAZY when @pitbull walked out! We sang 'Give Me Everything'. So much fun. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Oct 28, 2015 at 12:19am PDT





5. You have to love love.





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Third wheel A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jun 4, 2016 at 5:34pm PDT







Congratulations Max and Kenya!! A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jun 4, 2016 at 5:33pm PDT





And basically re-enact "Love Story" IRL.



6. You have to grab your passport and her hand.





Me: Please love me. Kangaroo: No. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Dec 5, 2015 at 9:16pm PST







Swift family road trip! South Island, NZ A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Nov 30, 2015 at 1:43pm PST







Sunbathing in San Diego. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Aug 30, 2015 at 11:15am PDT





7. You have to like babies.





Meeting my boy. @jaime_king @kyle_newman A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jul 28, 2015 at 2:39pm PDT





Swift is an MVP godmother.



8. You are required to be a goofball.





When Ed shows up in a red coat for the 4th of July because he just can't let it go. @teddysphotos A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jul 4, 2015 at 11:20am PDT







Meredith has been mad all day. A video posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jun 9, 2015 at 4:33pm PDT





This may be the most important pre-req.



9. You have to respect and support her career, rather than be intimidated by it.





Trouble Trouble Trouble #1989TourCologne Night 1 of 2 A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jun 19, 2015 at 6:07pm PDT







The Trinity, Frostbyte, Slay-Z, and Lucky Fiori brought the Bad Blood video to life tonight at #1989TourEastRutherford. Wonder what's in store tomorrow night.. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Jul 11, 2015 at 1:29am PDT







Great crowd last night in Singapore, see you again tonight guys A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Nov 7, 2015 at 9:06pm PST







Hero status, friend status, all time fav status. @justintimberlake thank you for absolutely everything. A photo posted by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Apr 3, 2016 at 11:47pm PDT






Seth Meyers banned Donald Trump from his Late Night talk show on Tuesday, setting up the GOPs presumptive nominee for an easy insult this afternoon: I only like doing shows with good ratings, the former Celebrity Apprentice host said.

Theres just one problem with The Donalds latest blowhard-y statement: Meyers TV ratings are actually pretty good.

Year-to-date, Late Night is actually up 5 percent in total viewers (1.58 million from 1.51 million), and flat in the three main demographics: 18-49, 25-54 and 18-34.

Those may not sound like huge numbers, but remember, this is 12:35 a.m. ET were talking about.

Also Read: Donald Trump Says 'Ask the Gays,' Gays Make Him Immediately Regret It on Twitter

Plus, Meyers is still beating his main competition, James Cordens Late Late Show, despite that guys move from unknown to beloved.

Here are Trumps full remarks: He has begged me to do the show for the last two years. I have told him emphatically no. I only like doing shows with good ratings, which as everybody knows, I only make better (by a lot).

Seth Meyers and his executive producer Lorne Michaels did not immediately return TheWraps request for comment.

For some more things Trumps been wrong about this week, click here for four misstatements on the Orlando shooting.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Donald Trump Says 'Ask the Gays,' Gays Make Him Immediately Regret It on Twitter

4 Things Donald Trump Got Factually Wrong About the Orlando Shooting

Seth Meyers Helps Hillary Clinton Supporters Finally 'Come Out' (Video)
By Kieran Guilbert DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Power-hungry politicians are the main driver of conflicts across Africa and leaders are not doing enough to stop the violence, according to tens of thousands of young Africans polled by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Up to 86,000 Africans from Cameroon to Central African Republic and Mali to Nigeria took part in the survey via their mobile phones. The poll targeted people aged between 15 and 30 for their views on the continent's conflicts and crises. "It is so crucial, and even urgent for the leaders to heed the voices of the youth, if we are to silence the guns," said African Union Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma in a statement responding to the UNICEF poll findings. Two in three of those who responded to the multiple choice questions sent by text message said African heads of state must do more to end conflicts, while more than half cited politicians fighting for power as the main cause of unrest, UNICEF found. Respondents said having a strong economy, having a more independent foreign policy and investing in education were the best ways for leaders to stop conflicts, according to the survey published on Thursday on the annual Day of the African Child. "The conflict in Central African Republic (CAR) is rooted in frustration and the mismanagement of public affairs," 17-year-old Davilla Andjidakpa, a student from CAR's Ouaka region, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The country spiralled into crisis in early 2013 when mainly Muslim Seleka fighters toppled the then president. Christian militias responded by attacking the Muslim minority. A fifth of the population fled their homes due to violence and the country remains largely divided along religious lines and controlled by warlords, but experts hope the recent election of President Faustin-Archange Touadera will help end the unrest. "Regarding the state's reaction, I am already encouraged by the political will they have shown to play the card of peace," said Yann Ningatoloum, a 23-year-old student from CAR's capital Bangui. "This approach is especially effective if there is to be a gradual return to calm and restraint," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation after responding to the UNICEF survey. The results of surveys carried out by the messaging service, known as U-Report, are collected and mapped out online, so that the results can be shared with the community, UNICEF said. (Reporting By Kieran Guilbert, Editing by Katie Nguyen; 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)
Experts believe we should be striving for two shorter sleeps a day [Photo: Rex Features]

Woken up tired again? Us too! *yawns * But it turns out there could be a very good reason we always feel zonked, even after getting the golden eight hours. Experts believe that actually sleeping once a day at night isnt actually beneficial to us. Instead we should hitting the hay twice a day.

Afternoon nap anyone?



Experts claim the idea that we should all be sleeping for a continuous eight hours is a recent invention and in fact our body clocks are much better suited to two shorter bursts of sleep ever day.

In an article published in the Conversation, Dr Melinda Jackson, a psychologist who specialises in sleep disorders at RMIT University, and Siobhan Banks, sleep researcher at the University of South Australia suggest that so-called segmented, or bi-modal sleeping was actually par for the course way back when.



Dear employer experts said I need two sleeps a day, so Im off for my afternoon nap! [Photo: Rex Features]

Anthropologists have found evidence that during pre-industrial Europe, bi-modal sleeping was considered the norm, they explained before referring to a concept of first and second sleep often mentioned in old literature.



The researchers argue that in the olden days peoples bedtime wasnt determined by the time of day (or whether youve caught up on Peaker Blinders), but by what they had to do and when.

Interestingly, the appearance of sleep maintenance insomnia in the literature in the late 19th century coincides with the period where accounts of split sleep start to disappear, Jackson and Banks go on to explain. So perhaps striving for eight hours could go someway to explain why 25% of us suffer from some sort of sleep disorder.



This isnt the first time a two sleeps a day regime has been suggested as an alternative, potentially more beneficial sleeping pattern. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted a month-long experiment to test the theory.



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A group of people were left in darkness for 14 hours each day, as opposed to the standard eight hours. By week four, a distinct new two-phase sleep pattern had emerged. The participants would sleep for four hours, wake for one to three hours and then fall into a second four-hour sleep. Wehr concluded that people were much better suited to a split sleep pattern.



Time for sleep number 2! [Photo: Rex Features]

Experts argue the research suggests segmented sleeping suits our body clocks better. And it could even make the 3 o clock flop a thing of the past because it provides two periods of increased activity, creativity and alertness across the day, rather than having a long wake period where sleepiness builds up across the day and productivity wanes.



So next time you fancy a sneaky little afternoon nap, go ahead and do it. Science said you should!



Would you like to have two sleeps a day? Let us know @YahooStyleUK

This Is Probably Why Youre Struggling To Fall Asleep

New Research Reveals Exactly How Much Sleep Your Child Needs
Experts believe we should be striving for two shorter sleeps a day. (Photo: Rex Features)

Woke up tired again? Us too! But it turns out there could be a very good reason we always feel zonked, even after getting the golden eight hours. Experts believe that sleeping once a day at night isnt actually beneficial. Instead, we should be hitting the hay twice a day.

Afternoon nap, anyone?

Experts claim that the idea of sleeping for a continuous eight hours is a recent invention, and, in fact, our body clocks are much better suited to two shorter bursts of sleep ever day.

In an article published in The Conversation, Melinda Jackson, a psychologist who specializes in sleep disorders at RMIT University, and Siobhan Banks, a sleep researcher at the University of South Australia, suggest that so-called segmented, or bimodal, sleeping was actually par for the course way back when.

Photo: Rex Features

Anthropologists have found evidence that during preindustrial Europe, bimodal sleeping was considered the norm, they explained before referring to a concept of first and second sleep often mentioned in old literature.

The researchers argue that in the olden days, peoples bedtimes werent determined by the time of day, but by what they had to do and when.

Interestingly, the appearance of sleep maintenance insomnia in the literature in the late 19th century coincides with the period where accounts of split sleep start to disappear, Jackson and Banks go on to explain. Maybe striving for eight hours explains why 25 percent of us suffer from some sort of sleep disorder.

This isnt the first time a two-sleeps-a-day regime has been suggested as an alternative, potentially more beneficial sleeping pattern. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted a monthlong experiment to test the theory.

A group of people were left in darkness for 14 hours each day, as opposed to the standard eight hours. By week four, a distinct, new two-phase sleep pattern had emerged. The participants would sleep for four hours, wake for one to three hours, and then fall into a second four-hour sleep. Wehr concluded that people were much better suited to a split sleep pattern.

Experts argue that the research suggests segmented sleeping suits our body clocks better. It could even make the three oclock flop a thing of the past because it provides two periods of increased activity, creativity, and alertness across the day, rather than having a long wake period where sleepiness builds up across the day and productivity wanes.

So, the next time you want a little afternoon nap, go ahead and do it. Science said you should. Sadly, your boss may have other ideas.
Geneva (AFP) - A large aid convoy is ready to go to Al-Waer, a besieged area in Syria's Homs governorate, and is expected to bring in desperately needed aid Thursday, the UN said.

"We are ready loaded with a large convoy to go to the besieged town of Al-Waer," Jan Egeland, who heads a UN-backed international humanitarian taskforce for the war-ravaged country, told reporters.

If the aid convoy does get through, it would be of "great significance", he said, pointing out that the rebel-held town in Homs governorate, encircled by government troops, had been "without supplies for more than three months."

"Conditions in Al-Waer... are terrible. People have died in Al-Waer because of lack of humanitarian supplies of late," he said.

Last week, aid finally reached the besieged town of Daraya for the first time since 2012 and Douma for the first time since 2014.

The UN says some 588,000 Syrians live in 18 besieged areas across the country, most surrounded by government forces.

The list until recently included 19 areas, but Zebdin, with its some 5,000 inhabitants, was removed after the government forces encircling it took control of the town, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency, told AFP.

- Sustained access crucial -

Egeland said that if the delivery to Al-Waer goes through as planned Thursday, after all permits were finally granted, the UN will have delivered aid to 16 of Syria's 18 besieged areas since mid-February.

And he hoped deliveries to the remaining two areas, Arbin and Zamalka in the rural suburbs of Damascus, could take place in the "coming days".

Egeland said the UN estimates there are about 39,000 people trapped in the two areas, but said the Syrian government "claims there are far fewer there."

While celebrating the prospect of partially or fully reaching all of the besieged areas in Syria this year, after reaching only two during 2015, Egeland acknowledged that the increased access "could end tomorrow."

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"We cannot continue this stop-go... We have to have sustained access and the sieges on the civilian populations have to be lifted," he said.

In addition to the planned delivery to Al-Waer, Egeland said large convoys were headed Thursday to the besieged aread of Kafr Batna in rural Damascus, and to Afrin, which is not besieged but considered hard to reach, in northern Aleppo.

"So today alone, we hope to reach 110,000 people in besieged and hard-to reach areas, with more than 100 trucks and vehicles," he said.

Egeland also hailed a 48-hour truce that took hold Thursday in Syria's war-torn Aleppo city, urging all sides "to use this window of opportunity" to try to cement a broader and more long-lasting halt in the violence.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in a war that has killed more than 280,000 people, but there is deep scepticism that the latest halt to fighting in the northern city will last.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and the February 27 countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.
Ascot (United Kingdom) (AFP) - Master Irish trainer Aidan O'Brien brought up his 50th winner at the Royal Ascot meeting on Thursday as Evensong won the Ribblesdale Stakes.

The 46-year-old O'Brien -- whose first success at the meeting came 19 years ago -- handled the landmark success with his usual humility.

"It is unbelievable but it is a great team effort," O'Brien said.

Kate Wachman, representing the owner, her mother Sue Magnier, was more effusive.

"It is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve. He is a fabulous trainer," said Wachman, whose husband David trained the winner of the race last year.

Winning jockey Ryan Moore, who rode O'Brien's other winner of the week so far on Tuesday, was asked how special his employer was in getting to a half century.

"He'll be even more special when he gets to 100," joked the normally poker-faced English jockey.

O'Brien is favoured to make it 51 in the feature race of the day, the Ascot Gold Cup, with hot favourite Order of St George.
Book a flight anytime today until June 19, and you could score a free seat with AirAsia and AirAsia X. This low-cost carrier is offering up to three million seats, for a zero-dollar base fare, on both domestic as well as international routes. With taxes included, flights could be as cheap as $3.00.

Heres the catch: all of the flights originate in cities across Malaysia. But the destinations range from Auckland to Beijing, Taipei, Singapore, Sydney, Bali, Bangkok (a perfect starting point for a tour of some of the world's best beaches), Phuket, and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. Consider it your excuse to take a life-changing trip across Asia, or an epic tour of Australia and New Zealand.

Travel dates range from January 4, 2017 to August 21, 2017, and flights must be booked directly with AirAsia on their website or mobile app.

If youre willing to splurge (think: $204 U.S. dollars) you can even travel in luxury in one of AirAsias premium flatbed seats.

Basically, nows a great time to take a trip abroad. With three million free seats up for grabs, there's never been a better excuse to plan a trip of a lifetime.

Melanie Lieberman is the Assistant Digital Editor at Travel + Leisure. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @melanietaryn.
ALGIERS (Reuters) - A court in Algiers ruled on Wednesday that a takeover by the country's richest businessman of its largest Arabic-language newspaper and an affiliated TV channel should be halted. The case was brought by the Algerian communications ministry against Ness-Prod, a subsidiary of the agribusiness group Cevital, after it acquired a 80 percent stake in the private media group El Khabar. Cevital's founder and chief executive, the billionaire Issad Rebrab, has said the attempts to block the takeover are politically motivated. The ministry rejects that accusation. Rebrab is not directly involved in politics, but he has taken positions critical of the government. In addition, El Khabar is one of the more independent voices in the Algerian media, and critics see the government's effort to block the takeover as a threat to press freedom. The ministry's case is based on a law that bans ownership of more than one newspaper. Rebrab already owns the French-language newspaper Liberte. After announcing the verdict, Judge Mohamed Dahmane said both sides had one week to respond. "This judgment is not final because we will appeal to the state council," Sadek Chaib, a lawyer for El Khabar, told reporters outside the court. Lawyers for the ministry expressed satisfaction. "Our efforts were fruitful," said lawyer Nadjib Bitam. (Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; Editing by Aidan Lewis, Larry King)
Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN is reportedly adopting a new pricing strategy to handle threats from the ePacket program that benefits its competitors like Alibaba Group Holding Limited BABA, eBay Inc. EBAY and Wish.com.

According to a report from Bloomberg on Wednesday, Amazon is bringing down the fees that it charges merchants who sell a particular category of items through the companys Fulfillment By Amazon Small and Light program.

Amazons expansion efforts in China didnt go as well as it would have liked. This was primarily due to fierce competition from local company, Alibaba. It appears that Amazon has therefore decided to take on Alibaba in a different way.

The Revised Rates

According to Bloombergs sources, Amazon will now allow merchants to pay 67% less for three, flat, 1-ounce packages, bringing down the payable amount to $1.61. The revised rate, which takes effect from Jul 1, will cover small, flat items such as mobile phone accessories and stickers that can fit into envelopes.

Small and Light versus ePacket

Fulfillment By Amazon Small and Light, a program introduced last year, offers free shipping for a large number of popular small items. The offer is funded by the charges that Amazon receives from third party merchants for handling, storage, packaging and delivery from fulfillment centers.

The ePacket program, on the other hand, is an agreement between the U.S. Postal Service and China Post that offers China-based merchants a fast and low cost shipping option on small packages and provides cheaper access to U.S. shoppers.

The program is undoubtedly frustrating for U.S. sellers like Amazon who find their hands tied while trying to stay competitive. U.S. sellers often raise their voices against this program claiming that it offers unfair competitive advantage to Chinese merchants.

The recent move appears to be Amazons way of lowering costs compared to ePacket so that the Small and Light program becomes more attractive to Chinese sellers.

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AMAZON.COM INC Price

AMAZON.COM INC Price | AMAZON.COM INC Quote

Expected Advantages

The e-commerce giant recognizes the value of pricing, so thats what it is offering customers and now suppliers. Lowering costs for China-based merchants will help the company to source goods directly from the country and sell them to the rest of the world especially the U.S. and Europe through its fulfillment centers.

It appears that the company will continue to support this group of merchants and wont mind incurring losses initially to expand its inventory and get a price advantage over its competitors in the long run.

Currently, Amazon is a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock. A better-ranked stock in the wider technology sector is CommVault Systems, Inc. CVLT sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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Amber Heard was spotted in Los Angeles on Wednesday, photographed driving a car just two days before her scheduled restraining-order hearing against Johnny Depp.



The actress, 30, was seen wearing a pair of sunglasses while behind the wheel, and headed to meetings at the Palihouse in West Hollywood, a source tells PEOPLE.



In the estranged couple's latest legal maneuvers, Depp's legal team filed a motion to keep witnesses from taking the stand at Friday's hearing. In court documents, Depp's lawyers claim that Heard's lawyers violated protocol by failing to provide a witness list beforehand. They request that "the Court refuse to receive live testimony from Amber's non-party witnesses."



Depp's attorneys are also requesting that all declarations previously provided by Heard's witnesses  including her friend iO Tillet Wright and neighbor Raquel Pennington  "be stricken and not considered by the Court because they are inadmissible hearsay."



This comes just days after a judge denied Depp's lawyer's request to depose Heard and Pennington, ruling that the original notice of deposition failed to give Heard the required 10-day notice.





VIDEO: Amber Heard Withdraws Request for Temporary Spousal Support



A hearing has been scheduled for Friday in Heard's domestic violence restraining order case against the actor. Heard was granted a temporary restraining order on May 27, claiming that the actor had abused her throughout their relationship.



In a response, Depp's lawyer, Laura Wasser, claimed in court filings that Heard "is attempting to secure a premature financial resolution by alleging abuse."
Anderson Cooper spent a good chunk of his show tonight responding to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who this morning accused Cooper of editing an interview with her in the wake of the shooting death of 49 patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Bondi told talk-radios WOR she thought they were going to talk about helping victims, price gouging, and donation scams. But Cooper also asked Bondi whether she was a champion for gay and lesbian citizens in the state despite her stance on gay marriage.

She accused him of cutting out all discussion warning people about donation scams when the interview was subsequently posted online.

Theres a time and place for everything, but yesterday wasnt the time nor the place, in front of a hospital, when we could have been helping victims, Bondi said today. Bondi called Cooper the champion for the LGBT community and said he could have been helping people, but instead encouraged anger and hate.

Ms Bondis big complaint seems to be that I asked, in the wake of massacre that targeted gay and lesbian citizens, about her new statements about the gay community and about her old ones, Cooper said tonight on AC360.

In the radio interview Bondi complained shes been getting horrible hatred emails and texts now, based on Andersons story which she described as filled with anger.



For the record, my interview was not filled with any anger. I was respectful before the interview, I was respectful during the interview and I was respectful after the interview, Cooper insisted on his show.

Its my job to hold people accountable. And if on Sunday a politician is talking about love and embracing our LGBT community, I dont think its unfair to look at their record and see if they have actually ever spoken that way publicly before. Which I never heard her say.

The fact is Attorney General Bondi signed off on a 2014 federal court brief that claimed married gay people would impose significant public harm. Harm. She spent hundreds of thousands in taxpayer money, gay and straight taxpayer money, trying to keep gays and lesbians from getting the right to marry.

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Cooper said good people can and do disagree on that issue because everyone has a right to their own opinion, thank goodness.

But, he noted, Bondi is now championing her effort to help the gay community, including attack survivors, with the very right which allows gay spouses to bury their dead and loved ones which he said, is a right that would not exist if Ms. Bondi had had her way. I think its fair to ask her about that. There is an irony in that.

He said he did not condone sending angry, mean messages to her, or anyone else.

He said the interview first aired live on CNN, then did air in a cut-down version on CNNs web site, but was posted in its entirety on the site after hearing from Bondi, where it runs in its entirety now.

And then, Coopers show re-ran the entire interview (see video above).

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Anne Hathaway will be joining Nicole Kidman and Emma Watson as the latest celebrity to team up with the UN Women, the United Nations agency promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women, as the agency announced via press release on Wednesday.

WATCH: Barbara Streisand Sings 'At the Ballet' With Anne Hathaway and Daisy Ridley

According to UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngucka, the 33-year-old actress will be taking on the cause of gender equality, with a focus on increasing parental leave for new parents.

"The appointment of Anne is timely because this year UN Women is driving hard to foster more positive mindsets and practical arrangements around workplaces that build and support equality for women," Mlambo-Ngcuka said in a statement.

The Oscar-winning actress has been a long-standing supporter of women's rights, previously serving as an advocate for the Nike Foundation, supporting programs to empower adolescent girls in the developing world, and making trips to Ethiopia and Kenya to raise awareness on child marriage. In 2013, Hathaway lent her voice to the CNN documentary, Girl Rising, which focused on the power of female education.

As for her involvement with the UN, Hathaway said she was "honored and inspired by this opportunity to aid in advancing gender equality."

"Significant progress has already been made but it is time that we collectively intensify our efforts and ensure that true equality is finally realized," the Intern star stated in Wednesday's press release.

See Hathaway's official UN portrait below.

PRNewsFoto/UN Women

WATCH: Anne Hathaway Reveals the Horrible Post-Baby Gym Encounter That Made Her Cry

As a new mom herself, Hathaway will surely bring valuable insight as she aims to support new parents in the workplace. In fact, the star recently opened up to ET about how her life has changed since welcoming her son, Jonathan Rosebanks Schulman, in March.

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See what she had to say in the video below.

Related Articles
CineZebra, the Stuttgart-based prodco run by thesp-producer Peter Ketnath, is teaming with Brazils Anaya Producoes Culturais to co-produce Tania Anayas Nimuendaju, an adult animated feature project based on the story of German-Brazilian ethnologist Curt Nimuendaju.

Selected to be pitched at Annecy 2016s Mifa market, Nimuendaju combines animation with live-action, shot in both studio and location.

Covering 25 years in the life of Curt Nimuendaju, the film begins in 1906, when the 22-year-old German Curt Unkel, whos just come to Brazil, goes to Sao Paulo to live among the Guarani people and is baptized by them as Nimuendaju  who has found his place in the world, in Guarani.

The film will reveal Nimuendajus journey through the indigenous villages of the interior of Brazil and how he crosses the border between white and the indigenous worlds and suffering the latter communities conflicts, such as the attempt to take their ancestral lands.

Our narrative centre on the journey of a man who is implacable, unswerving in purpose, pics director-producer Tania Anaya told Variety.

Aware of the evil and fire-power of his opponents  the landowners, the Brazilian government, public prejudice about indigenous peoples  he looks for a closer relationship with his object of study, she added.

Movie is scheduled for a 2019 release. Producers are currently working on the storyboard and the animatics of the film, and the animation bible. In November, they plan to shoot in the Guarani lands of Mato Grosso do Sul.

Pre-production is slated to finish this year. Animation production, final artwork and soundtrack composition will be completed by 2017-2018.

Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele is a main stylistic reference.

Rio Grande do Sul-based studio Atoon, whose credits include Otto Guerra and Ennio Torresans Annecy 2013 player Till Sbornia Do Us Apart, will also be involved in stages of Nimuendaju preparation.

Germanys Peter Ketnath, whos previously worked with the Brazilian industry on titles such as Marcelo Gomes Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, will play the role of Curt Nimuendaju in the live-action parts. In Latin America, Ketnaths outfit CineZebra co-produced last year Butterflies, directed by Colombian-Brazilian director Juan Zapata.

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Nimuendaju marks several firsts. It is the feature film debut of Belo Horizonte-based Anaya Producoes, after a long career producing indie and institutional medium and short-length pics. It also represents a pioneering animated feature for the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.

With a R$2.4 million ($700,000) budget, the project has already snagged some $300,000 after winning script development and pre-production prizes from Minas Gerais states Filme em Minas program, plus production and post-production backing from Brazils Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Economico e Social.

We can say we are the first results of an incentive policy of the Brazilian government, which has been boosting animation in our country in an incredible way, said Anaya, who produces Nimuendaju along with Bruno Hilario and Kleber Gesteira.

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Annecy: Sanchez Jorge and Hopcraft Talk About 'The Jan & Rai Show'
Directed by Lluis Sanchez Jorge and produced by Bes Animations Jessica Hopcraft, who co-wrote the scripts with Sanchez Jorge, The Jan & Rai Show is one of the buzzed-up projects being pitched at this years Annecy Fest Mifa market. Variety talked to Sanchez Jorge and Hopcraft on the eve of Annecy.

How would you describe the show?

Hopcraft: The Jan and Rai Show is about a determined adventurer whose quest is hijacked when she must accept the help of two squabbling brothers and their lazy dog.

How did you come up with this idea and characters names?

Sanchez Jorge: The idea came up from the earth in a bubble. The characters names blew in through the window and we picked them as they flew past.

Can you describe the protagonist?

Hopcraft: Indiana Jones if he were a teenage girl.

How did you and Lluis come to collaborate on the show?

Hopcraft: I was brought in during the development stage and our senses of humor and imagination seem to work in sync. Lluis would have an idea for a weird new character or scenario and I would turn it into an episode idea and we would work it out together. We are lucky that the collaboration process is really smooth and super fun for us.

What are some of the hardest aspects about putting together an animated show?

Hopcraft: Time & money. Is that a boring answer? It takes such a long time to get things done which can only be made easier with more people which relies on more money. I think Lluis wishes he could just bunker down and make the whole series but we calculated that would take about 20 years. Haha

Why did you decide on an animated show? Had either of you worked on animated work before?

Hopcraft: Lluis is an animator and I work for Bogan Animation Studio so thats what we both do, thats our wheelhouse for sure. I cant imagine working in anything else. I really love animation.

How did you decide on the type of animation? How did you choose an animator or designer?

Hopcraft: Its all Lluis, its his style, design and animation. He did everything, so it was just a matter of his coming to Bruce our company director with some characters and they started to nut out a concept. No-one else has worked on the design/animation aspect of it.

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How will audience be able to identify with the main character?

Hopcraft: I personally love her. She is someone who is wholly capable and determined but has to deal with a real obstacle with Jan & Rai in tow. What she soon realises is that a little bit of chaos, spontaneity and company on her journey makes things a lot more fun.

What are some animated shows that inspired your style and content?

Hopcraft: I love anything weird and silly. The 90s Nickelodeon stuff is particularly close to my heart. Angry Beavers, Cat Dog, Rockos Modern Life, Aaaah! Real Monsters, Rugrats. My little brother and I used to mimic the Angry Beavers talking style when we were kids. We thought we were hilarious. I think its important kids today still see those shows, theyre fantastic and hold up so well. New stuff, I love Regular Show and Rick & Morty. Oh, and I almost forgot Spongebob. Spongebob is everything.

Sanchez Jorge: There are so many to name The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, Ren & Stimpy, Betty Boop, Mighty Mouse, Popeye, Tex Avery cartoons, the Beany and Cecil show, UPA animation. and the list could go on. Also nonanimated shows from Buster Keaton, Mighty Boosh, Black Books, Seinfeld among others.

Can you give me a brief bios?

Hopcraft: I studied screenwriting and I always wanted to make cartoons. I did a placement with an animation production company and realised I really enjoyed that side of things. Then I got a job at Bogan around two-and-a-half-years ago and I work as a production coordinator, writer and on development. Its really great understanding the process inside out and it really helps the writing process. I really love my job and the company I work with because they pride themselves on creating interesting, beautiful and funny projects and whats better than that?

Sanchez Jorge: I left high school in 1996 and moved to Valencia, Spain, where I made a living in the fine arts but I loved animation so much I taught myself to animate, I then become a cartoonist/illustrator making artwork for international rock n roll bands. Ive slowly shifted away from that and now mostly work as a freelance animator/cartoonist.

Are you working on any other projects in the near future?

Hopcraft: We have a lot of things going on at Bogan and we are moving into pre-production on a series called Kitty is Not a Cat towards the end of the year, which is super-exciting.

Sanchez Jorge: I have a couple of ideas floating around my head but at the moment Im mainly focusing on The Jan & Rai Show.

What are your plans for The Jan & Rai Show?

Hopcraft: We really would love to get someone on board to help us progress into series. We have had funding from the ACTF (the Australian Childrens Television Foundation) to create the teaser, pilot script and and bible, plus we have over 30 episode ideas under our belt with the scope for many more. Ideally, we want to steam forward on writing and production, I believe the world needs The Jan & Rai Show.

Anything youd like audiences to know about yourself or the show that I havent asked about?

Hopcraft: In the teaser I am the voice of Jan and 3 out of 4 of The Bearded Ladies. Im not sure Im any good but it was really fun.

Sanchez Jorge: Id like the audience to know that its never too late run!

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A Madison mans nearly three-year legal battle over a number of charges including first-degree attempted homicide ended Tuesday in Columbia County Circuit Court.

Russell Troka, 34, was arrested early in the morning on July 22, 2013, when according to court documents, officers with the Columbia County Sheriffs Office arrived at Crystal Lake Campground in the town of West Point, where a woman said that Troka had tried to kill her.

She told officers she had woken up at 3 a.m. that day to Troka hitting her and choking her, before she got away and locked herself in a car and called 911 while Troka threatened her from outside the car.

Troka was charged with first-degree attempted homicide, strangulation and suffocation, substantial battery and disorderly conduct, all as domestic abuse, and a fifth count of misdemeanor bail jumping. Troka was jailed in lieu of a $10,000 cash bond with a potential 40-year prison sentence if convicted on all charges.

The case went to trial in June 2014. Over the first day, there was jury selection, opening arguments, and testimony by the alleged victim. On the second day, five law enforcement officers testified and two medical witnesses called by the state as well as two medical witnesses called by Trokas defense attorney, and the beginning of testimony by a third medical expert for Troka.

The third medical witness for Troka, Dr. Richard Tovar, had not examined the woman, but testified on the plausible causes of the womans injuries according to his own analysis of the medical records.

District Attorney Jane Kohlwey objected to the witness, given that her office had not been provided with any summary of the planned testimony and hence would be at a disadvantage in cross-examination.

After discussion, defense attorney Ruby Cole agreed to withdraw Tovars testimony, saying that it was a non-essential part of the defenses argument.

Kohlwey then requested a mistrial, arguing that proceeding without Tovar would give an appearance of prejudice against the defense and lend the trial to reversal in a later appeal, based on ineffective counsel.

Judge Daniel George granted a mistrial.

On Oct. 9, 2014, Troka was freed on bond and on Oct. 29, before a second trial could begin, filed an appeal, arguing that it would be tantamount to double jeopardy and therefore unconstitutional.

On April 22, a three-judge Appeals Court panel ruled that there was a lack of manifest necessity to call for a mistrial, dismissing four of the five counts against Troka.

Troka returned to Columbia County Circuit Court on Tuesday for a sentencing hearing on the misdemeanor bail jumping charge.

Kohlwey briefly reviewed the situation for Judge Todd Hepler, explaining an agreement in which Troka entered a plea of no contest based on records that he had acknowledged violation of a no-drink (alcohol) bond requirement.

Hepler sentenced Troka on Tuesday to nine months in jail, though having spent 434 days in jail, he was cleared with time served and sufficient bond received to cover court costs, with the rest of the bond to be returned to the party who posted it for his release.
On Thursday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals issued a long- and eagerly-awaited opinion in a case brought by major record labels against the video-sharing site Vimeo. The decision will be cheered by those in the tech community by providing some immunization from copyright liability.

Capitol Records and others sued the Barry Diller-owned Vimeo in 2009 - a virtual generation ago in the digital world. At the time, Viacom was fighting with YouTube over how to interpret the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows ISPs to escape copyright claims so long as they remove infringements expeditiously and not have actual knowledge of infringements on their networks. The since-settled YouTube controversy slowed the Vimeo case, which dealt with videos posted of the "lip dub" variety, showing users who choreographed elaborate lip-synching spectacles to popular music. Ultimately, Capitol Records et. al. v. Vimeo figures to be just as important as Viacom v. YouTube.

On summary judgment, U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams gave Vimeo a pass on liability on 144 videos while denying a safe harbor defense with respect to 55. One of the things that the judge examined was evidence that some of Vimeo's employees looked at or uploaded some of the infringing videos in question.

On appeal, the case raised a few significant issues.

First, whether to apply safe harbor to sound recordings created before 1972. Those works are protected by state law, so it was argued that federal law -  512(c) of the DMCA - couldn't provide immunity. The 2nd Circuit disagrees.

"A literal and natural reading of the text of  512(c) leads to the conclusion that its use of the phrase 'infringement of copyright' does include infringement of state laws of copyright," writes 2nd Circuit judge Pierre Leval. "To interpret  512(c)'s guarantee that service providers 'shall not be liable ... for infringement of copyright' to mean that they may nonetheless be liable for infringement of copyright under state laws would be, at the very least, a strained interpretation - one that could be justified only by concluding that Congress must have meant something different from what it said."

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Given that lower courts have recently emboldened owners of pre-1972 sound recordings in asserting protection over their works under state law, this development figures to represent a substantial relief for digital services. (Of course, other appellate courts in different parts of the nation haven't yet ruled on this issue.)

Next, the 2nd Circuit examined red flag knowledge of infringements, and specifically, the district court's denial of summary judgment based on Vimeo employees who had seen infringements on the video network. That decision by Abrams is overturned.

"The hypothetical 'reasonable person' to whom infringement must be obvious is an ordinary person - not endowed with specialized knowledge or expertise concerning music or the laws of copyright," writes Leval. "Furthermore, as noted above,  512(m) makes clear that the service provider's personnel are under no duty to 'affirmatively seek' indications of infringement. The mere fact that an employee of the service provider has viewed a video posted by a user (absent specific information regarding how much of the video the employee saw or the reason for which it was viewed), and that the video contains all or nearly all of a copyrighted song that is 'recognizable,' would be insufficient for many reasons to make infringement obvious to an ordinary reasonable person, who is not an expert in music or the law of copyright.."

The 2nd Circuit judge adds that when it comes to misconduct or disqualifying knowledge potentially barring a safe harbor defense, it becomes a burden for plaintiff to prove.

"In sum, a showing by plaintiffs of no more than that some employee of Vimeo had some contact with a user-posted video that played all, or nearly all, of a recognizable song is not sufficient to satisfy plaintiffs' burden of proof that Vimeo forfeited the safe harbor by reason of red flag knowledge with respect to that video," writes Leval.

Finally, the 2nd Circuit addresses how willful blindness factors into safe harbor.

The record companies argued that Vimeo monitored videos for infringement of visual but not audio content, demonstrating willful blindness related to music. The plaintiffs also argued that Vimeo had awareness of facts suggesting the likelihood of infringements and encouraged users to post infringing matter. Rather than investigate, Vimeo chose to close its eyes, contended the record companies.

Here, the appellate court decides to affirm Vimeo's victory by a district judge and reject the record companies' argument that the decision in Viacom v. YouTube was misapplied.

"If the service provider knows of the infringement, or learns of facts and circumstances that make infringement obvious, it must act expeditiously to take down the infringing matter, or lose the protection of the safe harbor," states the opinion. "But we can see no reason to construe the statute as vitiating the protection of  512(m) and requiring investigation merely because the service provider learns facts raising a obvious. Protecting service providers from the expense of monitoring was an important part of the compromise embodied in the safe harbor."

The case is now remanded back to the district court to sort out, but the decision may save Vimeo tens of millions of dollars in liability, and more importantly, become a new guiding post for copyright owners and digital service providers. Here's the full opinion.
Premium industrial equipment company Applied Industrial Technologies, Inc. AIT acquired Seals Unlimited for an undisclosed amount.

Burlington, Ontario-based Seals Unlimited is a popular distributor of hose, fastener and sealing products. The company also provides premium consulting and engineering support services to various industries such as water filtration, power generation, aerospace, plastics and steel.

The Seals Unlimited takeover is expected to strengthen Applied Industrials power transmission and bearings business in Eastern Canada. Post acquisition, Seals Unlimited would operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Industrial but will retain its current name.

As on Jun 15, 2016 the share price of Applied Industrial stood at $45.41. We expect this buyout news will manage to boost investors confidence in the stock.

APPLD INDL TECH Price and Consensus

APPLD INDL TECH Price and Consensus | APPLD INDL TECH Quote

Growth Prospects

Applied Industrial Technologies, which holds more than 560 business facilities, sells roughly five million industrial equipment parts annually to customers across all industries. Additionally, the company offers services like integration, designing and engineering of fluid power applications. It is also a popular customized mechanical and fluid power store services provider. This apart, the company offers specialized storage management solutions. The company constantly endeavors to augment its customer value with better products and services. The Seals Unlimited buyout would thus be accretive to the companys offer value-added services and solutions in the domain of sealing market applications and products.



Stocks to Consider



Applied Industrial presently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the same industry include Gorman-Rupp Co. GRC, Kadant Inc. KAI and Nordson Corporation NDSN. All three companies currently hold a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



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By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Women who turn to the internet and mobile apps to sort out the best time of the month to try getting pregnant may receive bad advice, a study suggests. Researchers tested 20 websites and 33 apps designed to help predict whats known as the fertile window, the days before ovulation when having sex is most likely to result in conception. Typically, a woman with a standard 28-day menstrual cycle will ovulate around day 15, which would also be the last day of a six-day fertile window. When researchers asked these apps and websites to give a fertile window for a woman with a 28-day cycle, most of them reliably predicted the day of ovulation, the study found. But only four provided the correct fertile window. Before using any website or app, women need to understand that the actual fertile window consists of the day of ovulation plus the preceding five cycle days, said lead study author Dr. Robert Setton, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Presbyterian Hospital. They can use the app or website to help them predict their ovulation date and then use that as a guide for the rest of the fertile window, Setton added by email. Setton and colleagues tested all of the websites and apps with the same case: a woman with a 28-day menstrual cycle and four days of menses whose last period started January 1. In this test case, 80 percent of websites and 87 percent of apps that predicted the day of ovulation correctly said it would occur on January 15, the study found. But just one website and three apps correctly predicted a fertile window of January 10-15. The only accurate website for the fertile window was babymed.com, Setton said. Among the apps, the ones that got it right were iPeriod, My Days and Clue. The findings suggest that women should be cautious about relying only on websites and apps to predict the best days each month to try to conceive, the authors conclude in Obstetrics and Gynecology. Couples using an incorrect fertile window from an app or website to time intercourse may end up having sex too soon or too late in the month to conceive, the authors note. One limitation of the study is that researchers only included free apps and websites, the authors acknowledge. The study also didnt examine how often couples decide to have sex based on the fertile window suggested by these tools, or explore how often couples conceived. Even so, the findings suggest that women may want to rely on alternatives to determine their fertile window each month, said Deborah Lupton, a researcher at the University of Canberra in Australia who wasnt involved in the study. Women can do this by tracking some changes in their bodies that occur around ovulation, including a slight spike in body temperature and an increase in vaginal discharge as the cervix releases thin, clear mucus. Once women do this for a while, they should get a good sense of where in their cycle they ovulate, Lupton said by email. These apps and software tools are not likely to be effective for women who either are trying to conceive or using these tools to avoid conception, Lupton added. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1sxjq1H Obstetrics and Gynecology, online June 6, 2016.
The family of the man who invented the AR-15 assault rifle says he never intended for the weapon to be used by civilians.



Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47, the Stoner family told NBC News in a statement late Wednesday.



Stoner, who designed the AR-15 and the M-16 in the 1950s, died of cancer in April 1997. He was 74.



He died long before any mass shootings occurred, the family said. But we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.



According to his New York Times obituary, Stoner, a Marine veteran, had the idea to develop a rifle that would fire repeatedly with a single pull of the trigger because because military studies showed that soldiers under the pressure of combat  were not pulling the trigger on the weapons.



He designed the original AR-15  and a .223 caliber bullet capable of piercing a metal helmet at a distance of 500 yards  in his garage.



Stoner, an avid hunter, was then contracted by the U.S. Army for his work developing the automatic rifle, which was renamed the M-16 for the battlefield. But family members said he never fathomed theyd be used by citizens to kill.



After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle, Stoners family said. [He] focused on making the most efficient and superior rifle possible for the military.



After his death, copycat versions of Stoners creation surfaced, and a semi-automatic version of the AR-15  dubbed by the National Rifle Association as Americas gun  became a civilian bestseller.



AR-15-style guns and ammunition have been used in at least 10 recent mass shootings, according to NBC News, including the massacres in Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and San Bernardino, Calif.



On Sunday, the gunman that opened fire inside the Pulse Orlando nightclub used an AR-15 spinoff, the Sig Sauer MCX, to kill 49 people and wound 53 others in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, reigniting calls for gun law reforms.



But the family stopped short of wading into the gun control debate.



What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free market system, Stoners family said. Currently, a more interesting question is Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?

______

Story continues

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Theres an upside to getting killed off on Chicago P.D.

Arrow has tapped Josh Segarra  who recurred on the NBC drama as Justin Voight before meeting his demise in last months finale  to play the series-regular role of Star Citys new district attorney, Adrian Chase, our sister site Deadline reports.

RELATEDMatts Inside Line: Person of Interest Series Finale Scoop, Plus Arrow, Orphan Black and More

The character serves as an ally to Mayor Oliver Queen and aims to clean up the streets through the legal system.

As TVLine first reported, Chase is described as an irrepressibly charming contemporary of Olivers and a man on a mission  out as he is to avenge a tragic, violent loss from his own, years-ago past. He is someone who could just as easily shake your hand as your best friend or break your neck as your worst enemy  and you never know which one is coming. Either way, hes more than capable of having a good time as he does it.

In the DC Comics canon, Chase was a New York City D.A. whose family was killed by mobsters, prompting him to seek justice in his own way under the name Vigilante. He also had strong ties to Deathstroke, who is portrayed by Manu Bennett on the CW series.

Other Season 5 additions include Rick Gonzalez (Reaper) as the vigilante Wild Dog and a yet-to-be-cast ruthless crime lord loosely inspired by Idris Elbas Wire drug kingpin Stringer Bell.

Arrow returns to The CW this fall, airing Wednesdays at 8/7c.

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EXCLUSIVE: Oliver Queen is getting a new ally. The CWs Arrow has cast Josh Segarra (Chicago P.D.) as a new series regular for Season 5. He will play Adrian Chase, Star Citys new district attorney and an ally of Mayor Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), who aims to clean up the streets through the legal system.

Adrian Chase and his alter ego the Vigilante first appeared in the 1983 New Teen Titans Annual #2. A New York City district attorney whose family was killed by mobsters, Chase sought justice in his own way. In the comics, there are several characters operating under the name Vigilante. One of them has narrative ties to Deathstroke, who was a major character during Arrows second season, and the CWs DC shows have tended to mix and match material from various DC comics sources in adapting characters for these shows.

Segarra is joining fellow new Arrow regular, Echo Kellum, who is being promoted from recurring. The show is beefing up its roster after recently bidding farewell to series regular Katie Cassidy.

A graduate of NYUs Tisch School of the Arts, Segarra is starring as Emilio Estefan on Broadways On Your Feet. He was seen in Judd Apatows feature Trainwreck and as Billy Cepeda in Sirens on USA. On stage, he starred as Boland in Second Stage Theaters Dogfight, and as Mick in the off-Broadway and Broadway runs of Lysistrata Jones. On TV, he also had a major recurring role on Chicago P.D.

Segarra is repped by Abrams Artist Agency, ATA Management and attorney Ryan LeVine.

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Mexico City (AFP) - Some 200 intellectuals, scientists and artists from around the world urged the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada on Wednesday to save North America's endangered migratory Monarch butterfly.

US novelist Paul Auster, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, British writer Ali Smith and India's women's and children's minister Maneka Sanjay Gandhi were among the signatories of an open letter to the three leaders.

US President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will hold a North American summit in Ottawa on June 29.

The letter by the so-called Group of 100 calls on the three leaders to "take swift and energetic actions to preserve the Monarch's migratory phenomenon" when they meet this month.

They urge the leaders to protect parcels of land containing milkweed, which is threatened by herbicides and feeds the butterflies on their 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) journey from Canada to Mexico's wintering grounds.

The letter also called on Mexico to prohibit mining and end all logging in the pine tree reserve where the butterflies live during the winter.

In 2014, Obama, Pena Nieto and then prime minister Stephen Harper agreed to take measures to protect the orange and black butterfly, whose population has drastically dwindled in the past two decades.

The butterfly's population rebounded this past winter season, but it is still far from its peak of 20 years ago.

In 1996-1997, the butterflies covered 18.2 hectares (45 acres) of land in Mexico's central mountains.

It fell to 0.67 hectares in 2013-2014 but rose to 4 hectares this year. Their population is measured by the territory they cover.

They usually arrive in Mexico between late October and early November and head back north in March.
Brandon Lee in The Crow (Photo: Everett)

Update 8/10/16: According to Mashable, Jason Momoa is the latest star to circle Relativity Medias reboot of The Crow. The Aquaman and Game of Thrones actor fueled the speculation about his advanced talks for the lead role by posting a new Instagram of himself with would-be Crow director Colin Hardy. See the photo below, and beneath that see our timeline dating back to December 2008 to track the ups and downs of the long bid to re-do The Crow:

Original article: Its not unusual for Hollywood projects to go through several different directors, screenwriters, and actors during pre-production. Few, however, have gone through as many twists and turns as The Crow since late 2008.

Related: Avatar Sequels ComingWhen? A Timeline of James Camerons Updates Since 2010

Three directors, three screenwriters, and at least eight actors have been reported to be connected to the bid to bring the franchise back to the big screen. And yet, despite all the false starts, the project stays alive  witness the latest report from Deadline that director Corin Hardy, who exited the most recent attempt to revive The Crow in March, might be open to a return. Hardy is currently set to direct Hell Bent, an action film about murdered mercenaries on their way to hell when they are recruited on a mission to kill Satan.



The Crow, based on the graphic novel by James OBarr, received critical acclaim and won a slew of loyal fans when released as a feature film in 1994. Tragically, the films star, Brandon Lee, was killed in an accident on the set eight days before filming was scheduled to end.



Related: But Wheres Kristen Stewart? A Brief Timeline of The Huntsman: Winters War

Follow the timeline below to see all the hoops The Crow has had to jump through in its so-far unsuccessful bid for a new big-screen version.

December 2008: Stephen Norrington (Blade) signs on as director.

July 2010: Nick Cave (The Proposition, Lawless) joins in to revise Norringtons script.

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October 2010: Mark Wahlberg is reported to have been offered the lead.

October 2010: Stephen Norrington leaves as director.

November 2010: Mark Wahlberg acknowledges discussions about The Crow, but says were not committed to making the movie.

April 2011: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) signs on as director.

April 2011: Bradley Cooper reported to be in early talks for the lead role.

April 2011: The Weinstein Company files a lawsuit against Relativity Media over the rights to The Crow remake.

June 2011: Alex Tse (Watchmen) brought in as the latest screenwriter.

August 2011: Cooper bows out due to scheduling conflicts.

August 2011: Wahlberg and Channing Tatum are reported to be on the wish list.

October 2011: Fresnadillo exits to direct Highlander (which he would exit in November 2012).

January 2012: Relativity Media and The Weinstein Company settle their legal issues and team up.

January 2012: F. Javier Gutierrez (Before the Fall) attached as director and Jesse Wigutow (It Runs in the Family) as screenwriter.

February 2013: James McAvoy is rumored to star.

April 2013: Tom Hiddleston is rumored to star.

May 2013: Alexander Skarsgard is rumored to star.

May 2013: Luke Evans signs on.

November 2013: Cliff Dorfman (Warrior) is the latest screenwriter attached to the film.

July 2014: Gutierrez exits to direct The Ring 3.

October 2014: Producer Ed Pressman says he hopes production will start in spring 2015.

December 2014: Corin Hardy (The Hallow) signs on as director.

January 2015: Luke Evans exits the film.

February 2015: Jack Huston (American Hustle, Kill Your Darlings) signs on to star.

May 2015: Andrea Riseborough (Birdman, Oblivion) reported to be in negotiations to star as the villain.

July 2015: Jack Huston drops out due to scheduling conflicts.

August 2015: The Crow creator OBarr says another movie will happen.

September 2015: Relativity Media files for bankruptcy.

November 2015: Pressman says The Crow set to film in 2016.

March 2016: Corin Hardy exits as director.

April 2016: Relativity Media formally emerges from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

June 2016: Reports say Hardy might return as director.

August 2016: Jason Momoa is reported to be in talks for the lead role in The Crow reboot, with Hardy back on board as director for the Relativity Media production.

Watch a trailer for the Blu-ray release of The Crow starring Brandon Lee:
A Racine man faces a misdemeanor hate crime charge after allegedly making anti-gay slurs to a group of male patrons at the Marcus Renaissance Theater in Sturtevant early Wednesday.

Nicholas A. Sabala IV, 18, of the 3000 block of 21st Street, Racine, appeared in Racine County Circuit Court on Wednesday facing charges of disorderly conduct-hate crime, disorderly conduct-domestic abuse, and three counts of misdemeanor bail jumping.

The incident shortly after midnight Wednesday came mere hours after a nearly 200 people gathered at Racines North Beach on Tuesday night to remember the victims of Sundays shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., that left 49 dead and 53 wounded  the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

According to the criminal complaint, the Mount Pleasant Police Department was called to the theater, 10411 Washington Ave., Sturtevant, at 12:05 a.m. Wednesday to assist with an unruly patron.

The theater manager told police that Sabala had engaged in a verbal altercation with a group of male homosexual patrons, calling them faggots and using other inflammatory words, the complaint said.

The manager also told police that Sabala threatened the group by saying he had a firearm in his car, the complaint said.

The manager told police he asked Sabala to speak with him to distract him, and when Sabala refused to stop his insults, asked him to leave the theater, the complaint said.

The manager told police that Sabala appeared to be impaired in some way, the complaint said.

Sabala then apparently chased a female patron, who turned out to be the mother of Sabalas child, into a womens restroom, the complaint said. The female was screaming, so officers went into the restroom and found Sabala in a stall, the complaint said.

Police threatened to use a Taser unless he came out of the stall, the complaint said.

Thought he was being ogled

The female told police that she and Sabala were celebrating an anniversary and that Sabala had consumed alcohol before going to the theater, police said.

The female told police that she believed Sabala got upset because he thought the group of males was checking him out, the complaint said.

A theater official reached Wednesday late afternoon declined to comment on the incident.

Sabala has pending misdemeanor cases of possession of marijuana and domestic disorderly conduct, the complaint said. As a condition of being released on bond, Sabala was ordered not to commit any new crimes or possess or consume alcohol, the complaint said.

Sabala was in Racine County Jail on Wednesday, jail records showed. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for June 23, court records showed.
The Cedar Creek fire had burned through more than 5,200 acres by Thursday, June 16, near Show Low in eastern Arizona since starting on Wednesday afternoon.

Navajo County officials called for the evacuation of Forestdale and warned of possible evacuations in Show Low, Pinetop-Lakeside, McNary, Fort Apache and Hon Dah.

Hot shot crews and air tankers were on hand to battle the blaze, which forced officials to shut down a stretch of US 60. The crews must contend with high winds and dry conditions.

The Red Cross has set up a shelter for evacuees in Snowflake High School on Street West, Snowflake, Arizona. Another shelter is due to open at Round Valley Middle School in Eagar.

This video is described as showing ash raining from the sky in smoke clouds over Show Low. Credit: Facebook/Nohelani Graf
One of the few redeeming qualities of the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history  which left 50 people dead and 53 others injured at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Sunday morning  is the tremendous showing of support and solidarity the victims have attracted from around the world.

This open letter, written by a group of Asian-American parents of LGBTQ children, is one of the more touching statements to emerge.

It was published online Tuesday, and signed by representatives from the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance  described on the group's website as a nationwide federation of LGBT Asian and Pacific Islander organizations.

"We, the Asian American Parents Who Love Our LGBTQ Kids, are heartbroken about the Orlando tragedy," it begins  and goes on to make very clear what a globally felt, cross-cultural tragedy Sunday's massacre truly was.

Here are some of the key quotes from the letter:

Source: Mic/Getty Images

Source: Mic/Getty Images

Source: Mic/Getty Images

Source: Mic/Getty Images

"We wanted to write this letter, because we know that many of our LGBTQ community members are hurting, and many of their parents are scared for their safety," the authors of the letter told Mic in a joint statement via email. "We thought that hearing from parents of LGBTQ children would be comforting to them."

"I wanted to support others who might be going through as hard a time as I was, including my son," Clara Yoon, one of the authors, added.

"When I see the young people who have died, I can't help but think of my son," said Mayeno, another author. "When I see the mothers mourning for their children, I can imagine their pain. I want to be there for them."

"We thought that hearing from parents of LGBTQ children would be comforting to them."

Part of what makes the note so powerful is its refusal to deny the victims their intersectional identities.

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Such showings of support highlight how this tragedy has reverberated throughout queer communities worldwide  and the multitudes of allies and others who stand with Orlando in the wake of this tragedy.

It openly acknowledges these were not just victims, but primarily queer victims. And not just queer victims, but Latino queer victims  the massacre occurred at Pulse nightclub on Latin night, and according to reports, a majority of those who lost their lives were Hispanic.

Read the full letter below:
Heres what we know:

Prosecutors formally charged 52-year-old Thomas Mair with the murder of Jo Cox on Saturday. When asked by the judge to give his name, he replied, My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.

West Yorkshire Police say they are investigating Mairs mental health, as well as possible links to extremist group.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn appeared together in Bristall on Friday, where Cox was killed Thursday.

Follow the developing story below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time.

Updated on June 18 at 10:41 a.m.

British prosecutors formally charged Mair with Coxs murder on Saturday at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, as well as a charge of inflicting grievous bodily harm and two weapons-related offenses.

When the judge asked Mair to provide his name, Mair responded, My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.

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The Guardian has more:

Mair was not required to enter a plea and his lawyer Keith Allen said there was no indication of what plea would be given. He also told the court that legal aid had been applied for. The deputy chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot ordered that Mair be remanded in custody until his next appearance, at the Old Bailey on Monday. He will be held at Belmarsh prison, and Arbuthnot suggested that a psychiatric report be prepared, saying: Bearing in mind the name he has just given, he ought to be seen by a psychiatrist.

Updated on June 17 at 1:15 p.m.

West Yorkshire Police says the mental health of the man who killed Jo Cox as well as his alleged right-wing links are clear lines of inquiry into the fatal attack on the Labour Party MP. Heres more from Dee Collins, the temporary chief constable:

We are aware of the speculation within the media in respect of the suspects link to mental health services and this is a clear line of enquiry which we are pursuing. We are also aware of the inference within the media of the suspect being linked to right wing extremism which is again a priority line of enquiry which will help us establish the motive for the attack on Jo.

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Collins also said the attack on Cox appears to be an isolated, but targeted attack. She also provided a timeline of the events that led to the attack on Cox:

We have now confirmed that just before 1pm yesterday (Thursday 16/06/16) Jo arrived in a vehicle in company with two colleagues outside the Library on Market Street and whilst enroute to the library where she had a scheduled constituency meeting, she was attacked and sustained serious injuries from both a firearm and a knife and despite assistance from passers-by, the ambulance service and police officers who were quickly on the scene, she sadly died of her injuries. During the course of the incident a 77-year-old man bravely intervened to assist Jo and in doing so sustained a serious injury to his abdomen and although now stable he remains in hospital.

9:03 a.m.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says Thomas Mair, the 52-year-old man arrested in connection with Coxs death, was a longtime supporter of the National Alliance, a U.S.-based neo-Nazi group. Mair allegedly shot Cox, a rarity in a country where gun crimes are traditionally rare (though last year saw a 14 percent rise). Heres more from the SPLC:

Mair purchased a manual from the NA in 1999 that included instructions on how to build a pistol. Mair, who resides in what is described as a semi-detached house on the Fieldhead Estate in Birstall, sent just over $620 to the NA, according to invoices for goods purchased from National Vanguard Books, the NAs printing imprint. Mair purchased subscriptions for periodicals published by the imprint and he bought works that instruct readers on the Chemistry of Powder & Explosives, Incendiaries, and a work called Improvised Munitions Handbook." Under Section III, No. 9 (page 125) of that handbook, there are detailed instructions for constructing a Pipe Pistol For .38 Caliber Ammunition from components that can be purchased from nearly any hardware store.

There were reports Thursday that the killer had shouted Britain first while attacking Cox. This has not been officially corroborated.

Updated on June 17 at 8:49 a.m.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, appeared together in Bristall, just feet away where Jo Cox was killed on Thursday.

David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn lay flowers near where Jo Cox was attacked in #Birstall. https://t.co/NzWPb4VAMu pic.twitter.com/sjMAeu9FyG  BBC Look North (Yks) (@BBCLookNorth) June 17, 2016

Meanwhile, the U.K.s Parliament, which is on a break, is being recalled Monday to pay tributes to the slain Labour Party MP, as tributes continue to pour in for her, and flags flew at half-staff over City Hall and Number 10 Downing Street, the prime ministers residence.

Updated on June 16 at 9:33 p.m.

Recommended: Why the Stanford Judge Gave Brock Turner Six Months

Krishnadev has a longer look at Coxs life and legacy:

The activist was elected to Parliament for the first time last year and quickly made a name for herself on matters such as immigration, Syrian refugees, and Britains membership in the European Union. Prior to that, she spent a decade working at Oxfam, the British aid agency, in various senior capacities in the U.K., U.S. and Brussels. Immediately before she was elected to Parliament in May 2015, she worked at the Freedom Fund, an anti-slavery organization, and at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to a biography on her website.

4:26 p.m.

Tributes are being paid in Bristall and London to Cox.

Floral tributes as Birstall remembers Jo Cox pic.twitter.com/tzHk1V7cgH  Katie Spencer (@SkyKatieSpencer) June 16, 2016

Jo Cox's houseboat neighbours pay moving nautical tribute to MP hours after she was killed: https://t.co/pZK7pL7DVw pic.twitter.com/eV9BjKs7LY  delcrookes (@hairydel) June 16, 2016

Jeremy Corbyn lead a moving vigil for #JoCox outside the parliament she joined a year ago https://t.co/TDPNQ7Ewrt pic.twitter.com/cVF4eQjGnQ  LBC (@LBC) June 16, 2016

3:07 p.m.

British news reports have identified Coxs attacker as Thomas Mair. Heres the starts of The Telegraphs story on him:

The man arrested in connection with the death of MP Jo Cox was named as "loner" Thomas Mair, 52, who lived in a small semi detached house on the Field Head council estate in Birstall. The neat semi in Lowood Lane was cordoned off and under police guard as neighbours spoke of the "very quiet but very helpful" suspect. Neighbours said that Mair had lived in the house for 40 years and was living with his grandmother until she died about 20 years ago. Since then he has lived on his own and has never had any full time employment.

Neighbors said they had never heard him express any views about Europe or anything like that.

3:01 p.m.

British publications are reacting to the fatal attack on Cox, and were including a few editorials and op-eds:

A day of infamy (Alex Massie in The Spectator). The piece appears no longer appears to be on the magazines website, but heres an archived version.

An attack on humanity, idealism, and democracy (The Guardian)

Well update this list as more editorials emerge.

2:32 p.m.

Watch Jo Coxs maiden speech to Parliament in 2015:

2:07 p.m.

Oxfam and Save the Children said:

All @oxfamgb are devastated at the loss of our much loved and admired former @Oxfam colleague Jo Cox MP. Deep condolences to Jo's family  Oxfam (@oxfamgb) June 16, 2016

Our heartfelt thoughts are with the family of Jo Cox. We're shocked and saddened by this horrific news. https://t.co/7o7RsIoe4F  Save the Children UK (@savechildrenuk) June 16, 2016

1:47 p.m.

Gabrielle Giffords, the former Democratic congresswoman, who was shot and wounded in 2011, tweeted her condolences, as well:

Absolutely sickened to hear of the assassination of Jo Cox. She was young, courageous, and hardworking. A rising star, mother, and wife.  Gabrielle Giffords (@GabbyGiffords) June 16, 2016

1:21 p.m.

Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, and his wife, Sarah Brown, with whom Cox worked closely, have both responded to her death. The former prime minister said: Our memories will be for ever scarred by this moment. Our hearts will always be hurt at our countrys loss. Sarah Brown added:

I am heartbroken. Jo had a truly remarkable spirit and passion that shone through in her work with Oxfam and with me on our countless campaigns for women and children. Jo cared about everybody but she reserved a special place in her heart for the most vulnerable and the poorest citizens of the world. She was fearless, she was endlessly upbeat and she reached out to so many to join her cause. Her mission was to make the world a better place. But above all else Jo had utter devotion to her husband Brendan and their two children Cuillin and Lejla.

1 2:57 p.m.

Brendan Cox, the husband of the late MP, said in a statement he will fight against the hatred that killed her. He added:

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesnt have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous. Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.

1 2:47 p.m.

As our colleague Matt Ford notes, Cox is the first MP to be assassinated in office since Ian Gow, a Conservative lawmaker who was killed in a car bombing by the Irish Republican Army in 1990. Irish republicans targeted members of Parliament from time to time during the Troubles, the spasmodic violence that wracked Northern Ireland for a half-century, but British legislators rarely faced security threats from elsewhere.

1 2:43 p.m.

Prime Minister David Cameron reacted to the death of Cox on Twitter:

The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

1 2:36 p.m.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, said he was in shock following the announcement that Cox died from the attack. He said in a statement:

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all... In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

1 2:25 p.m.

Cox has died from her injuries, multiple news sources report. Dee Collins, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, said the MP was declared dead at 1:48 p.m. GMT by a doctor working with paramedics.

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, Collins also said a 77-year-old man was also attacked during the incident. However, details about the victim are still unknown.

Collins says police believe this was a lone incident and not part of a broader plot.

1 1:25 a.m.

Heres more background on Cox: She was born in Batley, part of the area she represents in Parliament, and graduated from Cambridge University in 1995. Before becoming an MP, she worked as a policy analyst for Oxfam, the aid agency, and also was an adviser to Sarah Brown, the wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. After her election in 2015, she was one of three-dozen Labour MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the partys leadership. In the end, though, she voted for Liz Kendal, Corbyns rival for the position, and later said she regretted nominating Corbyn, who now heads the party. She also strongly supported accepting 3,000 child refugees from Syria.

11:07 a.m.

Brendan Cox, Coxs husband who previously worked with Save the Children, tweeted this image of his wife:

10:54 a.m.

Initial eyewitness accounts of such incidents often vary from the final version, however multiple British news organizations are reporting that a witness at the scene heard Coxs attacker shout: Britain first. The Guardian is reporting that local police are talking to at least one witness who heard those words being shouted. Britain First is the name of a far-right U.K. nationalist party. The partys response:

Media desperately try to incriminate Britain First in shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox ... - https://t.co/1rENtmI7he pic.twitter.com/lGhohrf0RL  Britain First (@BritainFirst) June 16, 2016

That image on the left, which was first tweeted by the BBC, reportedly shows Coxs attacker being apprehended.

10:33 a.m.

David Cameron, the British prime minister, says hes canceling his visit to Gibraltar where he was scheduled to campaign for Britain to remain in the EU.

It's right that all campaigning has been stopped after the terrible attack on Jo Cox. I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

10:16 a.m.

Both of the main groups in the Brexit debate have suspended their campaigns in response to the attack on Cox.

We are suspending all campaigning for the day. Our thoughts are with Jo Cox and her family.  Stronger In (@StrongerIn) June 16, 2016

Vote Leave also said it is suspending its campaign.

In a recent monthly column, Cox had explained why she would vote to remain. An excerpt:

I know for many people that this is a tough decision, that the debate has been highly charged and the facts difficult to pin down. But I believe that the patriotic choice is to vote for Britain to remain inside the EU where we are stronger, safer and better off than we would be on our own. Whats more a vote to remain is a vote for certainty. The EU may be imperfect and definitely needs reform but risking all the current advantages of being inside Europe to take a leap in the dark doesnt feel very patriotic to me.

And in a recent article she wrote that while immigration to the U.Ka reason often cited by backers of Brexitwas a legitimate concern, it wasnt a good enough to reason to leave the EU.

10:09 a.m.

Wed earlier said it was unclear whether Cox had been attacked during or after her meeting with constituents at the Birstall Library. Her website says she was scheduled to meet with constituents from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. GMT (9 a.m. to 10 a.m. ET). Police says they were called at 12:53 p.m. GMT, which suggests she was attacked prior to her meetings.

10:05 a.m.

Cox, in an op-ed last month in The Times, criticized the U.S. and U.K.s approach to Syria, but noted:

I am a huge President Obama fan. I worked on his first campaign in North Carolina in 2008, I admire the leadership he has shown on everything from the financial crisis to climate change and the good advice he gave us recently on Europe. But on Syria both President Obama and the prime minister have been a huge disappointment.

10:01 a.m.

The BBC adds: An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying and bleeding on the pavement [sidewalk] after the incident.

9:54 a.m.

Politicians from across the political spectrum are reacting in horror to the attack on Cox. Heres a sampling:

Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family.  UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) June 16, 2016

Utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox. The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time.  Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) June 16, 2016

@BorisJohnson Early reports suggesting she was attacked by a Leave voter. Great company you keep.  mchawk (@mchawk) June 16, 2016

Shocked to hear terrible news about brilliant MP and friend Jo Cox. Thinking of her and praying for her and family.  Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) June 16, 2016

9:39 a.m.

Cox broke with her Labours party leadership and supported military action to end the Syrian civil war. She is also a campaigner for Britains continued membership in the European Union. (Britons vote in a June 23 referendum on whether to remain in the bloc.)

She isnt the first British MP to be attacked. In 2010 Stephen Timms, also a Labour MP, was stabbed twice by a woman for his vote to support the Iraq war.

9:36 a.m.

The West Yorkshire Police have issued a statement on the attack and the arrest. Here it is in full:

At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition. A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries. Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area. There are no further details at present. Police presence in the area has been increased as a reassurance to the community.

9:33 a.m.

Heres more on Cox from her website:

Jo  spent a decade working in a variety of roles with aid agency Oxfam, including head of policy, head of humanitarian campaigning based in New York and head of their European office in Brussels. Jo then went on to work closely with Sarah Brown to galvanise international action to stop mums and babies dying needlessly in pregnancy and childbirth. ... Immediately prior to standing for Parliament Jo was working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and The Freedom Fund, a charity working to end the scourge of modern slavery. She was also in the process of launching UK Women, a new research institute dedicated to better understanding the views and needs of women in the UK.  Jo is married and has two young children. She divides her time between her home on a boat on the River Thames and her home in Batley & Spen.

9:30 a.m.

The BBC is now reporting that a 52-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the attack.

9:28 a.m.

The latest from Sky News:

Here's what we know so far about the shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall https://t.co/A5zwPZtsol pic.twitter.com/NpastUBFH1  Sky News (@SkyNews) June 16, 2016

9:24 a.m.

Cox was reportedly stabbed either during or afterthis is still unclearmeetings with constituentswhich in the U.K. are called advice surgeriesThe Telegraph reported. Cox, 41, is an MP for Batley and Spen. She was elected for the first time in 2015.

9:20 a.m.

The Yorkshire Post is reporting that Cox was attacked on the steps of Birstall Library.

9:16 a.m.

Jo Cox, a Labour Party member of Parliament, was reportedly shot and stabbed in Birstall, near Leeds, British news reports say.

Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, injured & taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary pic.twitter.com/8ZrcGnohyu  BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) June 16, 2016

Her condition is said to be serious and authorities have launched a manhunt for her attacker.

This is a developing story and well update it as we learn more.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Vietnamese abattoir workers have been filmed using sledgehammers to bludgeon Australian cattle, activists said Thursday, prompting some exporters to stop supplying livestock to some slaughterhouses in the southeast Asian nation.

Undercover investigators working for Animals Australia filmed footage last month of one worker clubbing a cow over the head five times with a sledgehammer before it fell to the ground beside the bodies of two other cows.

The man then hit it another four times before it finally died.

The activist group said it visited 13 slaughterhouses in North and Central Vietnam, home to a multimillion dollar industry and one of Australia's biggest live cattle export markets, in what it said was "their most dangerous operation ever".

"Only two met Australian requirements for approved abattoirs," campaign director Lyn White told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which aired the footage on national television Thursday.

"I thought I'd seen it all, and I haven't," she said.

Animals Australia said ear tags were removed from cattle so they could not be linked back to exporters and that the killings took place in "filthy, unhygienic conditions".

It is the second time the group has exposed alleged abuses in Vietnamese abattoirs, claiming thousands of Australian cattle have been slaughtered in facilities not approved by Canberra, as required by export controls.

White said Animal Australia chose not to publicly release video it shot last year, but instead supplied it to the Australian Livestock Exporters Council (ALEC).

She claims the industry body promised a response within six weeks, but nothing happened which was why she went public.

ALEC chairman Simon Crean said the procedures that were filmed were "inexcusable".

"No animal should have to go through the fear or the pain," Crean told broadcaster ABC. "We've determined that... we should stop the supply of animals to all of the facilities that are under investigation."

Story continues

ALEC added in a statement it had suspended abattoirs in Vietnam's Bai Do region and a feedlot in Haiphong from receiving Australian livestock.

It said it would also review management and oversight of cattle control and traceability to determine how some could end up in non-approved facilities.

The Department of Agriculture and Water Resources ordered a probe and said the animals depicted in the footage were likely exported from the nation.

"Exporters were immediately informed of the complaint so that urgent action could be taken to protect the welfare of cattle currently in Vietnam," it said in a statement.

Australia's live cattle export trade has been under the spotlight before, notably in 2013 when shipments to Egypt were suspended for months after abattoir footage showed "horrific" mistreatment of cows.

Trade to Indonesia was also temporary halted in 2011 on cruelty concerns.

Overall, the government estimates the live export trade is worth about US$800 million a year to Australia and employs thousands of people.
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian lawmaker Bob Katter drew online complaints on Wednesday after posting a campaign video in which he shoots dead political opponents just days after a gunman killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub. The video, uploaded to his social media channels, features two men wearing shirts for Australia's major political parties, the conservative Liberal Party and center-left Labor Party, putting up an "Australia for sale" placard. Seconds later the video cuts to a smiling Katter, blowing smoke from the barrel of a gun as the camera pans down to the two men apparently lying dead on the ground. But the timing of the ad, just three days after gunman Omar Mateen shot dead 49 people in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, drew sharp rebukes on social media. Katter, whose minor Katter's Australia Party focuses on issues related to rural Australia, denied that he was attempting to be deliberately controversial with the video. Australia is set to hold national elections on July 2. "I'm not giving an explanation. You can go and watch the advertisement because it's an anti-selling off Australia advertisement," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "It was just for humor value. But it was humor getting a message across." That argument did not seem to gain much traction on Twitter, where users savaged Katter. "Wouldn't be a real election without Katter doing something weird or borderline insane," Twitter user Samuel McAuliffe wrote. "So Bob Katter decides that now would be a really good time to release a video showing him shooting people dead," tweeted @GordonlKnight. (Reporting by Matt Siegel; Editing by Nick Macfie)
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Australia's consumer watchdog has filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court against the country's largest private health insurer, Medibank Private Ltd, alleging it failed to notify customers in advance about a move to limit benefits for pathology and radiology services while in hospital. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said Medibank decided not to give advance notice about the policy change in 2014 because its members might have opted to switch to other providers and that might have hurt its initial public offering. "Consumers are entitled to expect that they will be informed in advance of important changes to their private health insurance cover," ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said in a statement. "These changes can have significant financial consequences at a time when consumers may be vulnerable," Sims said. Medibank shares fell as much as 7 percent while the broader market was up 0.7 percent. The company said it "refutes claims by the ACCC related to activities that took place in 2014", adding in a statement that it had cooperated with the commission throughout its investigation. The company declined to comment further given the matter was now before the court. The insurer faces potential penalties of A$1.1 million ($816,000) per breach of Australian consumer law, a commission spokeswoman said, however it was too early to say what the maximum fine would be if the consumer watchdog won its case. (Reporting by Sonali Paul; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)
SYDNEY, June 16 (Reuters) - Shares of Australian casino company Crown Resorts Ltd posted their biggest intraday jump in seven years on Thursday as investors cheered plans to split the company along geographic lines, ringfencing its struggling Macau assets.

Crown shares rose 15 percent to A$12.95 in morning trading, taking the stock to its highest in 10-months, although it remains well below its 2015 high above A$16.

Australia's No. 1 casino operator, which has a market capitalisation of A$9.3 billion ($6.9 billion), said on Wednesday it may split most of its domestic assets off into a new listed entity to cushion those operations from a slide in business at Asian gambling hub Macau.

The proposal ended months of uncertainty about Crown's future ownership after local media reported the company's billionaire 53 percent owner, James Packer, was in talks to take the entire company private in concert with private equity interests.

The split would help the market better value the company's Australian business after the stock fell 20 percent in the 12 months leading up to the breakup proposal, said CMC Markets chief strategist Michael McCarthy.

"Macau is the problem, so splitting the business I'd say is a direct result of feedback from private equity players, that they're not interested in financing a privatisation of the Macau business," he said.

In a statement issued by Crown, Packer, who quit the board in 2015, said he fully supported the board's decision to split the business.

The new structure "positions Crown for the next decade as we continue to grow our business and meet the needs of the emerging Asian middle class," he added.

In a note to investors, Citi upgraded its target price of Crown to A$14.70, from A$14.50.

"Whilst there are still many unknowns at this stage we view the proposals as a positive for shareholders," said Citi analyst Rohan Sundram in a note.

($1 = 1.3524 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Byron Kaye and Swati Pandey; Editing by Richard Pullin)
(Recasts, updates shares, adds analyst quote)

By Byron Kaye

SYDNEY, June 16 (Reuters) - Australia's No. 1 casino firm Crown Resorts Ltd won support from investors and analysts on Thursday for a plan to split the business, reigniting speculation billionaire owner James Packer may take part of the company private.

Ending months of speculation, Crown said late Wednesday it plans to spin off its overseas assets to protect Australian investors from the effects of a Chinese gambling crackdown that has ravaged Macau casinos for two years.

Shares in Crown, which has a market capitalisation of about A$9 billion ($6.6 billion), jumped 13 percent to A$13.23 in a flat overall market, hitting a 10-month high and posting their biggest one-day rally since 2009.

Analysts said the reaction reflected relief that Crown's shareholders may soon benefit from fast growing turnover at its Australian casinos in Melbourne and Perth, with another due to be added in Sydney, without a drag from Macau.

The proposal could also signal that Packer, who owns 53 percent of Crown, could reconsider taking the company private in concert with private equity interests, a prospect which has been the subject of speculation for months.

"Macau is the problem, so splitting the business I'd say is a direct result of feedback from private equity players, that they're not interested in financing a privatisation of the Macau business," said CMC Markets chief strategist Michael McCarthy.

CLSA analyst Sacha Krien said investors were also drawn to a proposed listing of a 49 percent stake in Crown's Australian hotel assets, which was part of its plan to split the company.

"There's some genuine excitement about what sort of value can be generated, given some of the hotel deals out on the market," Krien said. "The share price reaction is probably more a reflection of the property IPO."

In a statement issued by Crown, Packer, who quit the board in 2015, said he fully supported the board's decision to split the business.

In a note to investors, Citi upgraded its target price for Crown to A$14.70, from A$14.50.

"Whilst there are still many unknowns at this stage we view the proposals as a positive for shareholders," Citi analyst Rohan Sundram said. ($1 = 1.3607 Australian dollars) (Addition reporting by Swati Pandey; Editing by Richard Pullin)
The FBI on Wednesday announced they were offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the capture of one of California's most elusive alleged serial killers, who has by turns been known as the East Area Rapist, the Golden State Killer, and the Original Night Stalker.



The suspect, who was linked through DNA evidence, is believed to have committed 12 murders, 45 rapes and 120 residential burglaries between 1976 and 1986 from Sacramento to Orange County. His victims ranged in age from 13 to 41 and included women at home alone or with their children or husbands.



The FBI set up a website about the elusive killer, which includes audio recordings by survivors and victims' families and videos by agents and police talking about the case.



"The answer is out there somewhere," Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert tells PEOPLE. "It is a case that needs to be solved because these women and these families deserve the answers and the person if alive needs to be brought to justice. It has been 40 years of this."



Schubert adds, "We have a profile. We just need to put a name to that profile, and so even though it may seem like a needle in a haystack, someone can find the needle. But you have to be persistent and we need the communities help."



"You might get 1,000 tips and maybe one is the answer. You can find the needle," she adds.



The attacks began in Sacramento in 1976 with the June 18 rape of a woman in the Rancho Cordova-Carmichael neighborhood. Authorities are publicizing the search nationally in advance of the 40th anniversary of his first attack.



"If you grew up in Sacramento in the 70s or later, everybody knows this case because it took the community hostage," says Schubert. "People were terrified. People went out and bought guns. People went out and got dogs. It was a time before this happened when we were just innocent kids that would ride our bikes around, and then it just changed."



 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.





A 'Distinctive' Method

The attacker wore a ski mask and would pry open windows and doors of homes of single women or couples. Once inside, he would enter the bedroom and shine a flashlight into his victims' eyes.



Schubert describes the suspect's distinctive, meticulous method:



"He wore a mask and he was very good at what he did. He would pick out more affluent communities. There were claims he would target homes that were up for sale. Oftentimes it was a husband and wife at home. He would come prepared. He would have shoelaces and a mask.



"He would bring the shoelaces with him and then he would tie up the husband and put him on his stomach, and put teacups or plates on his back and take the woman off and rape her. He did that with the man because he could then hear the guy if he moved. It was very distinctive."



It is believed by many that the suspect may have been a member of the military or law enforcement. "Sacramento County had two very robust air force bases here at the time," says Schubert.



"There was a belief he was potentially either in the military ... or there was some suspicion that back in the day he could have been associated with law enforcement because they felt he was very good with guns."



The suspect, who was described as a 5-foot-9 white male with blond or auburn hair, eventually moved to the Southern California area where he committed at least ten homicides between 1979 and 1986.



If still alive, law enforcement believes he is between 60 and 75 years old.
Represents the 4th Banner Expansion within the >2,778 Store Kroger Group

Includes Distribution to Eight New States for Bucha Live Kombucha

TORRANCE, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Bucha, Inc. (formerly American Brewing) (ABRW), the California-based owner of the Bucha Live Kombucha brand today announced that it has expanded its distribution with Smith's Food and Drug in their eight state market area across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, and Tennessee. The expansion chain-wide represents the fourth major banner expansion within the Kroger Company that recently posted sales of $109.8 Billion across 2,778 grocery stores and 784 convenience stores.

The new distribution with Salt Lake City based Smith's includes some of Bucha Live Kombucha's leading flavors including Raspberry Pomegranate, Yuzu Lemon, Grapefruit Sage, Blood Orange, and Guava Mango. The products are 100% organic and all have an industry leading 9 months of shelf life emanating from Bucha's proprietary production process. Founded in 1911 in Utah, Smith's merged with Fred Meyer in 1997 and was acquired by Kroger in 1999. Smith's will be rolling out the Bucha Live Kombucha brand in time for the peak summer season, in complement sales already happening in other Kroger banners including Ralphs, Fry's and Kroger stores in various regions of the country.

The Bucha Live Kombucha brand has recently been expanding distribution nationally and leading the growth of the overall Kombucha category, one of the fastest growing beverage segments worldwide. A key reason behind Bucha's success is its trending and mainstream appealing flavors, recently ranked superior in taste by 43% vs. major competitors. The Hartman group also recently ranked the Bucha Live Kombucha brand as a breakout brand for 2016.





Bucha Inc. recently signed a definitive agreement to purchase the $50 million plus New Age Beverages Group, including their XingTea brand in the RTD Tea category, the new XingEnergy in Energy Drinks, and Aspen Pure in Functional Waters. The transaction is expected to close on or about June 30th, after which the company will be renamed The New Age Beverages Corporation.

Brent Willis, Chief Executive of Bucha Inc. commented, "Smith's is a strong leader in its market areas, is a new flagship account for us, and a world class retailer. We are very pleased and appreciative to be part of their offerings, and will work diligently to drive category sales and profits for them. Smith's provides us excellent penetration to eight new states that will enable more consumers to choose healthier and organic beverages, that just happen to also taste great."

About Bucha, Inc. (ABRW)

Based in Torrance, California, Bucha, Inc. was created in May 2016. It was originally founded as two separate companies in 2010, American Brewing and B&R Liquid Adventure. In 2014 American Brewing became a public company trading under the symbol ABRW, and in 2015, the Company acquired 100% of the assets of Bucha Live Kombucha from B&R. American Brewing then sold their brewing assets to focus on the new business. The Company is the owner of the Bucha Live Kombucha brand, one of the fastest growing and leading brands in the rapidly growing Kombucha (fermented tea) category. Immediately following its recently announced acquisition of the New Age Beverages Group, the Company will be renamed The New Age Beverage Corporation and will be relocated to Denver. The Company's websites are www.mybucha.com, www.xingtea.com, and www.aspenpure.com.

Safe Harbor Disclosure

This press release contains forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions 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. Forward-looking statements are any statement reflecting management's current expectations regarding future results of operations, economic performance, financial condition and achievements of the Company including statements regarding American Brewing's expectation to see continued growth. The forward-looking statements are based on the assumption that operating performance and results will continue in line with historical results. Management believes these assumptions to be reasonable but there is no assurance that they will prove to be accurate. Forward-looking statements, specifically those concerning future performance are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. American Brewing competes in a rapidly growing and transforming industry, and other factors disclosed in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission might affect the Company's operations. Unless required by applicable law, ABRW undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

For investor inquiries please contact:

Name: Julie Anderson

Phone: (408) 605-9449

Email: Julie@mybucha.com

Website: www.mybucha.com

SOURCE: Bucha, Inc.
The Taliban are accused of using child sex slaves to attack police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the cultural practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- for military gain.

The subculture of keeping boys for personal servitude and sexual pleasure is a centuries-old practice in Afghanistan, which observers call one of the most egregious violations of human rights in the country.

How widespread is it?

"Women are for child-rearing, boys are for pleasure" is a common saying across many parts of Afghanistan.

The ancient custom, banned under the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule, has seen a resurgence in recent years. It is said to be widespread across southern and eastern Afghanistan's rural Pashtun heartland, and with ethnic Tajiks across the northern countryside.

Powerful warlords, commanders, politicians and other members of the elite often keep "bachas" as a symbol of authority and affluence.

Bachas, dressed as women, are widely used by these men as dancers at private parties and are sexually exploited.

Bacha bazi is not widely seen as homosexual behaviour -- popularly demonised as a deviant sexual act, prohibited in Islam -- and is largely accepted as a cultural practice.

How has it been allowed to flourish?

Tight gender segregation in Afghan society and lack of contact with women have contributed to the spread of bacha bazi, rights groups say.

Several other factors such as an absence of the rule of law, corruption, limited access to justice, illiteracy, poverty, insecurity, and the existence of armed groups have also resulted in the spread of bacha bazi, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said in a report in 2014.

AIHRC points out that Afghanistans criminal law prohibits rape and pederasty, but there are no clear provisions on bacha bazi.

"There is a gap and ambiguity in the laws of Afghanistan regarding bacha bazi and the existing laws do not address the problem sufficiently," the report said.

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"Many of the perpetrators have connections with the security organs and by using power and giving bribes they get exempted from punishment."

Where do the boys come from? And what happens to them afterwards?

Bachas are typically aged between 10 and 18. Sometimes they are kidnapped, says AIHRC, but often desperate poverty drives their families to sell them to abusers.

"The victims of bacha bazi suffer from serious psychological trauma as they often get raped," AIHRC's report said.

"Such victims suffer from stress and a sort of distrust, hopelessness and pessimistic feeling. Bacha bazi results in fear among the children and a feeling of revenge and hostility develop in their mind."

In turn, many adolescent victims are said to grow up to have boy lovers of their own, repeating the cycle of abuse.

"In the absence of any services to recover or rehabilitate boys who are caught in this horrendous abuse, it's hard to know what happens to these children," said Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International.

"We have heard anecdotal reports that many grow up to keep their own bachas, perpetuating the revolving door of abuse."

How is bacha bazi impacting Afghanistan's security situation?

Bacha bazi is having a detrimental bearing on the perpetual state of conflict in Afghanistan, helping the Taliban to infiltrate security ranks in provinces such as Uruzgan, officials say.

The abusive practice in security ranks also undermines support for NATO-trained Afghan forces.

"To date, the US has provided over $60 billion in assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), including nearly $500 million to the Afghan Local Police," the US Congress said in December.

"Predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police could undermine US and Afghan public support for the ANDSF, and put our enormous investment at risk."

The practice also continues to embolden the Taliban's desire to reassert sharia law in Afghanistan and is fuelling their insurgency.

"Such wild abuses of the predatory mujahideen forces in the early 1990s drove the popularity of the austere Taliban, helping them sweep to power across most of the country. Similar behaviour of the government forces after 2001 is also helping to inspire the insurgency," a Western official in Kabul told AFP.
An Islamist militant suspected of attacking a publisher last year has been arrested, Bangladesh police said Thursday, in what they described as an important breakthrough in their investigations into a spate of horrific attacks.

Suman Hossain Patowari, 20, was arrested in Dhaka late Wednesday over a brutal attack that wounded publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul and two others at his office in the capital in October.

The arrest comes amid a nationwide police anti-militant crackdown that has seen more than 11,000 people, including 176 suspected Islamist militants, detained since Friday.

Police said Patowari belonged to banned Bangladesh militant outfit, Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT).

"He admitted he himself hacked publisher Tutul three times during the attack," said Monirul Islam, who leads the police's counter-terrorism unit.

Islam told reporters that the arrest of Patowari represented "an important breakthrough" in smashing the leadership of the ABT, a group suspected of carrying out several attacks.

Three assailants wielding machetes and meat cleavers attacked Tutul, together with a secular blogger and a poet, at his publishing firm in the capital, leaving them in a pool of blood.

Tutul had published books by a controversial Bangladeshi-American atheist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered outside a book fair earlier in the year.

On the same day Tutul was attacked, another secular publisher was slaughtered at his office near Dhaka University.

A group named Ansar al-Islam, which claims to be a Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), claimed responsibility for both attacks.

However in a new development, police said Thursday that ABT and Ansar al-Islam were the same outfit.

"Ansar al-Islam and Ansarullah Bangla Team are the same people," Dhaka police spokesman Masudur Rahman told AFP.

Moreover, officers said that neither ABT nor Ansar al-Islam had any proven link to the international jihadist network Al-Qaeda.

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Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of killings of religious minorities and secular and liberal activists that have spiked in recent weeks.

On Wednesday a Hindu lecturer was left seriously wounded after being attacked in a southern district.

Earlier this month, an elderly Hindu priest was found nearly decapitated in a rice field, a Hindu monastery worker was hacked to death and a Christian grocer was murdered near a church.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has vowed to catch "each and every killer" as her government comes under mounting international pressure to end the attacks.

Nearly 50 people have been murdered over the past three years.

The Islamic State group and AQIS have claimed responsibility for many of the murders. But the police and the government say international jihadist groups have no presence in the country.
During a visit to Los Angeles in early June, Barry Diller addressed UTA agents and talked up the future of his streaming platform Vimeo. Just a few days later, on June 7, Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor stepped down after four years building the service.

Trainor's Vimeo exit, which comes amid general executive turnover at Diller's IAC, opens the door to bring fresh blood into a business built mostly to serve filmmakers that now wants to lean toward a consumer subscription service. It's a moment of inflection for 12-year-old Vimeo, considered the No. 2 user-driven streaming service behind YouTube, that observers say is indicative of a larger question about how to compete in the age of Netflix. "IAC is looking at, ultimately, what's the bigger opportunity," says Oppenheimer internet analyst Jason Helfstein.

For his part, Trainor, who will stay on as an adviser, calls Vimeo's consumer effort "an incredible evolution for the company," adding that "it felt like it was the right time to step back and pass the reins on to the senior team."

IAC is chasing a piece of the $120 billion paid content market to go along with its ownership of dating sites like Match.com and Tinder. And there have been big changes across its video division: CollegeHumor co-founder Ricky Van Veen revealed June 8 that he will jump to Facebook to oversee creative strategy for its fast-growing video business. And earlier this year, Ben Silverman, chairman of IAC-backed production company Electus, made his departure official as Chris Grant took over.

Read more: IAC Video Unit Loss Narrows, Vimeo Hits 697,000 Paying Subs

Amid the turnover, IAC tapped former NBC exec Garth Ancier to consult on strategy for its media businesses. But execs insist they're committed to investing: "We have tremendous ambition for our video segment and no plans to sell anything," says CEO Joey Levin, who will serve as interim chief at Vimeo. Levin has been vocal about the opportunity he sees in Vimeo, even after conceding in a May 4 shareholder letter that IAC's video business hasn't grown enough "to match the opportunity."

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Vimeo's user base has expanded by 300 percent since 2012, but its 280 million monthly users are a fraction of YouTube's 1 billion. And as Vimeo begins to explore a paid video offering, it has a way to go to build its 710,000 industry pro subscribers to anywhere near Netflix's 47 million U.S. members.

Vimeo won't compete in what Levin calls the "multibillion-dollar war on content" dominated by the likes of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. Instead, he hopes to appeal to niche audiences.

Changing course won't be easy, notes Helfstein: "How do you convince somebody to give you another $3 to subscribe to Vimeo?"

This story first appeared in a special Emmy issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
UPDATE: (Aug. 4, 2016) Intel-owned Basis has recalled all Basic Peak watches, urging owners to return the wearable device due to safety concerns. After receiving reports about the watch overheating, the company had advised customers to stop wearing it. But after trying for weeks to correct the problem with a software update, Basis has decided to offer full refunds instead.



The company also announced that it will be shutting down its Basis Peak services on December 31, 2016. Once that happens, the watch will be rendered nonfunctional, which means you will no longer have access to the data on it. You can visit Basis support site for more information on how to return your device.

If you're wearing a Basis Peak watch, you might want to take it off. After receiving reports about the wearable device overheating, the company has halted sales and advised customers to refrain from wearing it.



According to Basis, a "small number" of people have said their watches overheated, "and in some cases caused discomfort, blistering, or burns on their wrist under the watch body."

The company says it has also received reports of charging cradles overheating, though it can't yet confirm whether those cradles were manufactured by Basis or a third-party.

The company is working on a software update that will shut the Peak down if it starts to overheat. No word yet on when that update will be ready.

We want you to be delighted with our products, and we are disappointed whenever we fall short of that goal," the company says on its website. "We apologize to all Basis Peak watch users.

Consumer Reports recommends the Peak, but we will add an alert to the ratings chart about the overheating issue.



If you own a Basis Peak, which also acts as a fitness tracker, and you'd like to return it, you can fill out a request form on Basis support page, ship the device back, and receive a refund. For more info, call Basis Support at 844-622-7472.





More from Consumer Reports:

Top pick tires for 2016

Best used cars for $25,000 and less

7 best mattresses for couples





Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
Chart-topping British group Bastille have been confirmed as the headline act for the annual Jeep on The Rocks concert.

This year's event, which commemorates 75 years of the Jeep brand, will also feature Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness and will be held in the great outdoors, at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in the US state of Colorado on October 7.

When tickets go on sale, Friday, they will cost between $39.50 and $59.50, and those planning to drive to the concert in their Jeep will also get priority parking.

"We are beyond excited to have Bastille and Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness playing Jeep on the Rocks this year. This concert has always been a thrilling evening for the Jeep brand and we look forward to celebrating the 75th anniversary of both Red Rocks and the Jeep brand this October," said Steve Yandura, Director of the Denver Business Center, FCA US LLC.
Whats next for Bernie Sanders? The Democratic Party will eat him.

Well, not really. But the party has already begun to gobble up Sanders' supporters, message, and energy. And the Vermont Senator wants it to.

Sure, Sanders on Tuesday vowed to keep pushing his populist economic message through the Democratic National Convention next month, demanded concessions from his party, and lectured fellow Senate Democrats about how to appeal to his supporters. But he took those steps to get Democrats to appropriate his views. He has made it clear that he views Democrats' desire for him to unite behind Hillary Clinton and release his convention delegates as leverage to force concessions.

Sanders reached the end of the Democratic primary fight on Tuesday when Hillary Clinton drubbed him in Washington D.C.'s primary fight, putting a cherry on top of her wins last Tuesday in California, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota.

But Sanders made demands, not concessions, on Tuesday. The time is long overdue for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic Party, he said at a news conference on Tuesday morning near Capitol Hill.

Sanders urged for the replacement of Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who he said is not focused on expanding the party. He demanded the elimination of superdelegates and "the most progressive platform ever passed by the Democratic Party," at the convention.

Sanders met on Tuesday night with Clinton in Washington for more than two hours. His goal was reportedly to win Clinton's pledge to take up his call for a a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, infrastructure spending designed to create jobs, and tuition-free public colleges and universities.

"The American people are hurting, and they are hurting badly," Sanders said earlier on Tuesday. "They want real change, not the same old, same old."

Sanders met on Tuesday with Democratic senators at their weekly luncheon. Other senators said Sanders got a warm welcome and gave a lengthy speech urging colleagues to do more to show they understand Americans' economic concerns.

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"He really challenged us and said the question is whether or not the Democratic Party is going to be responsive to those issues." Senator Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, said.

Durbin called Sanders' message "a long one," but "a "good one. Even if some are privately irked at Sanders' presumption, other Democrats, including Clinton, are likewise striving to pull him into the fold.

They want to put his juggernaut of a fundraising network, which has netted record amounts from small donors, to work, and they want his young supporters to get behind Clinton and the party's congressional candidates.

In the end, though, Sanders and Democrats may look like they are fighting, but they are mostly negotiating. Their mutual interests are too great to prevent a rapid reconciliation. To advance his policy goals in the coming years, Sanders will need the support of fellow Democrats, who, according to recent polls, are in good shape to win the White House and Senate majority.

Clinton, who has already offered partial support for a $15 minimum wage and sided with Sanders by opposing a free trade deal with Asian nations, is likely to emphasize those areas of agreement to win Sanders over. Clinton is also working to try to appeal to Sanders' backers by publicly considering progressive favorite Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, as a running mate.

Montana Sen. John Tester, who heads the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, told reporters that Sanders will campaign for Senate Democratic candidates at Tester's request.

Sanders has already noted the importance of defeating Donald Trump in the general election, signaling he will fall in line with Clinton sooner or later. Durbin said on Tuesday that while Sanders did not use his remarks to Senate Democrats to proclaim his allegiance to Hillary Clinton, his decision to challenge his colleagues to change showed that he has long served as part of the team, not as an adversary.

"For those of us who have listened to Bernie's speeches for a lot longer than this last campaign, Durbin said, it was totally consistent with what he has told us over and over again.

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.com
From Delish

Lately, there has been study after study praising the health benefits of coffee. Coffee can allegedly counteract the damage from a night of heavy drinking, and it can help your erections, too. A panel of scientists even asked the federal government to recommend drinking moderate amounts of the stuff.

But for decades, the conventional wisdom was the opposite: that coffee actually caused cancer. Now, the World Health Organization, 25 years after declaring coffee as a possible carcinogen, has reversed its course, joining the conventional scientific wisdom that coffee is good for you.

A panel of 23 scientists reviewed more than 1,000 studies and found "no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect of drinking coffee," according to a WHO press release. Coffee was previously classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," but is now "not classifiable as to its carcinogenity to humans." In fact, some studies they reviewed showed that cancer was linked to reduce risks of liver and endometrial cancer. The scientists published their findings in The Lancet Oncology

To be clear, the New York Times points out, much of these studies are based on observational evidence, not a lab study, so it's hard to exactly pinpoint any cause and effect. But there are just so many studies out there with the same results that major bodies of researchers tend to agree that a cup of joe can do you some good.

But the WHO researchers did find drinking very hot beverages, above 65 degrees Celsius/149 degrees Fahrenheit, "probably causes" esophageal cancer. So it's not the coffee itself that causes cancer, but the temperature of it. Studies in countries like China and Iran, where drinks are served extra hot, found that the risk of esophageal cancer went up the hotter drinks were consumed.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the National Coffee Association recommends brewers keep their water between 195 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit, then let the coffee reach a "comfortable temperature" before serving. So let your drink cool off a little bit before you sip, and it'll likely taste better and be better for you.

Follow Delish on Instagram.
Billboard will soon expand into the Philippines.

In partnership with AlgoRhythm Communications Inc. - a Manila-based communications syndicate involved in the content, curation and data analysis for multiple media platforms - Billboard will bring to the Philippines access to print and mobile publishing, music conferences, licensed shows for radio, internet and television, as well as a new website, Billboard.ph, and the first-ever local Billboard chart for the Philippines.

The new international addition to Billboard stems from the growing industry within the Philippines, which is rapidly making its mark in the music industry. "The Philippines has always been a market where the Billboard brand has been incredibly popular; our online traffic in the region is consistently over-indexing," Billboard co-president John Amato said Wednesday in a statement.

Jonathan Serbin, head of Asia for Billboard, calls the music culture in the Philippines "vibrant" and the mass following behind it the impetus for Billboard's next step in global reach. The goal of the expansion is to provide direct access of Billboard to the Philippines audience so fans can immerse themselves in a wide range of great music and to discover new artists.

"Billboard has long resonated in our country as an industry leader, and now the Philippine audience has the ability to experience this brand directly. We are thrilled to partner with them," said AlgoRhythm chairman Jun Sy.

Billboard Philippines comes quickly after other recent Billboard international expansions. The first-ever co-branded Billboard China chart, in partnership with YinYueTai, launched early this year, while Billboard Thailand took off in March. The expansions are a result of recent brand-licensing initiatives for Billboard products, conferences and shows across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

This story first appeared on Billboard.com
Nick Jonas says he's the one who broke up his family band the Jonas Brothers in 2013.

Appearing on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live Tuesday, Jonas admitted he had been the one to initiate the conversation that led to the boy band's demise.

"It was a very tough conversation and it left the family kind of shaken up for a little while," he said. "I mean we were about to start a tour. We were two days from starting a tour."

Watch Nick Jonas Serenade Eva Longoria & Compete in a Rap Battle on 'Maya & Marty'

Things are alright now, though, he clarified.

"We're good now. I have a beautiful niece. My brother has a family. Joe's band DNCE is doing very well," the youngest Jonas continued. "It's good for everybody and it's good that it happened because I think we all grew from it, but it was very challenging for a little while."

As E! News points out, this isn't exactly the first time that Nick has taken responsibility for the split.

Nick Jonas Talks Increased Concert Security After Christina Grimmie Murder

Shortly after the band broke up in October 2013, the brothers appeared on Good Morning America where Kevin Jonas said, "I think it was time, and for us it took some time getting there, but we feel like it's time that the Jonas Brothers come to an end."

Nick added that he had "initiated" the conversations explained that they had been fighting for a little while. He said then, "In a nutshell, I said, 'Look, I feel like we've had some complications within the group for a long time without addressing them. I think this train will fall off the tracks without really getting real about some of the concerns and some of the limitations that we may feel as individuals in the group.'"

Watch the Watch What Happens Live conversation here:
On a drizzly Thursday morning in Shanghai, Walt Disney Co. Chairman Bob Iger and a phalanx of Chinese Communist Party officials cut the ribbon on the $5.5 billion Shanghai Disney Resort.

"This is one of the most exciting and important moments in the history of the Walt Disney Company," Iger said.

He then drew gasps of surprise from the mostly Chinese crowd, as he began reading a letter from U.S. President Barack Obama, who offered some thoughts on the significance of the joint venture mega-resort's launch.

"Blending a U.S. business with the beauty and rich cultural heritage of China, this resort captures the promise of our bilateral relationship," Obama said in the letter.

"With the opening of Shanghai Disney Resort, Disney is providing the people of China with family entertainment for all of China and its Mainland."

Obama added that the resort "reflects the growing relationship between our nations."

"It promotes further cultural exchanges and underscores the importance of China continuing to make itself more attractive to investment from around the world, that is mutually beneficial to both our countries," Obama wrote.

Read More: Toddler's Body Recovered After Gator Attack at Disney Resort in Orlando

Chinese president Xi Jinping also sent a letter of congratulations to Disney and its local partners. The Xi letter was read by Wang Yang, the vice premiere of China. The Chinese president said he was a "strong supporter and advocate of this cooperation project," congratulating Disney and the Shanghai government on the successful completion of the resort.

"By adding to the classic Disney style a stroke of Chinese characteristic, and by blending international standards with best local practices, the resort demonstrates our commitment to close cultural cooperation and our innovation mentality in the new era," Xi stated.

Shanghai party secretary Han Zhang and Bob Iger cut the ribbon jointly with the vice premiere. Fireworks then exploded over the Shanghai Disneyland Castle, Disney's "largest and most technologically advanced castle in the world."

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Noting the grey skies over the Disney castle, Wang told the crowd that he had reassured Iger that rain signifies an auspicious start in Chinese culture. "Rain is also a signal of good fortune, so I would like to call this a rain of U.S. dollars and Chinese RMB," he joked.

The Shanghai Disney Resort, the result of 26 years of negotiations, planning and development, is a joint venture between Walt Disney Co. and a consortium of Chinese state-controlled companies called the Shanghai Shendi Group. Disney holds a minority 43 percent stake in the theme park, an arrangement that was crucial in getting the local backing to build. (Disney did retain operational control, however, owning 70 percent of the management company created with Shendi to run the resort.)

Along with six themed "lands," including one devoted to Pirates of the Caribbean, the Shanghai Disney Resort includes a Broadway-style theater, live entertainment venues, two hotels, a shopping district with over 50 retailers, a 123-acre recreational park and Disney's "tallest, largest and most interactive castle."

Iger has said the Shanghai park is as important for Disney today as the establishment of Walt Disney World in Florida was for the company in the 1970s.

Read More: Walt Disney Co. Already Expanding Shanghai Disney Resort, Says Bob Iger
La Paz (AFP) - Bolivia's government turned up its nose Thursday at US billionaire Bill Gates's initiative to donate 100,000 chickens to people living in poverty worldwide, including Bolivians.

"I find it rude, because unfortunately some people, especially in the empire (the United States), still see us as beggars. We don't depend on chickens. We've advanced," said Rural Development Minister Cesar Cocarico.

"Our people have dignity and they know how to work," he told journalists.

Gates, the man ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest person in the world, announced plans last week to donate chickens to poor nations in an effort to fight extreme poverty.

The Microsoft co-founder says chickens are better than computers or the Internet for reducing poverty, because they are inexpensive, reproduce and supply food and revenue sources with both their eggs and meat.

The plan is a joint initiative between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the charity Heifer International.

The chickens were supposed to go to two dozen developing countries, but Bolivia snubbed the offer.

Such programs "always see us as miserable Third World countries, and that point of view deserves a general protest by the people," said Cocarico.

Bolivia's economy has grown rapidly under the left-wing government of Evo Morales, who took office as the country's first indigenous president in 2006.

But the landlocked South American country remains one of the world's poorest, with nearly 40 percent of the population living in poverty.
Brasilia (AFP) - Brazil's interim president Michel Temer said Thursday a former oil executive's allegations that he was involved in a massive corruption scandal shaking the country were "frivolous, lying and criminal."

Temer took to national television to defend himself after Sergio Machado, the former chief executive of Transpetro -- a subsidiary of state oil company Petrobras -- told prosecutors the interim president personally asked him for money from an illegal kickbacks scheme.

"I want to address Sergio Machado's irresponsible, frivolous, lying and criminal statement," said a visibly irritated Temer.

"I'm not going to let this pass. I am speaking out with indignant words to register yet again that this frivolity cannot prevail."

Machado, who is cooperating with investigators under a plea bargain, said Temer asked him for 1.5 million reals ($431,000) in diverted Petrobras cash for an ally's campaign for mayor of Sao Paulo in 2012.

The oil executive told prosecutors Temer met with him to ask for "illegal resources from companies that had contracts with Transpetro" to finance the campaign of then-congressman Gabriel Chalita, according to court documents published Wednesday.

Machado said he arranged bribes for Temer and more than 10 other politicians, including Senate speaker Renan Calheiros and Tourism Minister Henrique Eduardo Alves, both members of Temer's center-right PMDB party.

Temer took over last month from suspended president Dilma Rousseff, who is facing an impeachment trial in the Senate on unrelated charges of illegally manipulating public accounts to hide the government's budget problems.

He has repeatedly denied involvement in the Petrobras scheme, in which contractors colluded with the company to overbill it by some $2 billion, bribing politicians and their parties along the way.

But the Petrobras probe remains a major threat to his administration.

Two of his ministers have already been forced to resign over corruption allegations, including his transparency minister.
In June 1992, the unlikely presidential candidacy of a brash young governor from Arkansas was gaining strength, and after the Democratic convention that July gave Bill Clinton an enormous bounce in the polls, he and running mate Al Gore never looked back.

The Democrats faced incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush, and two factors proved decisive: the state of the economy and the third-party candidacy of businessman Ross Perot, who in the spring of 1992 was ahead of Bush, with Clinton in third place.

Related: How a Ban on Tea Kettles Could Drive Britain to a Brexit

After the smashing victory of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Bush had an 89 percent approval rating. Two years later he lost his bid for re-election in the face of a weak economy. Although the 1990-91 recession was mild by historical standards, unemployment remained stubborn and reached its peak of 7.8 percent in June 1992.

The mantra of the Clinton campaign was as simple as it was effective: Its the economy, stupid.

Now, 24 years later, its the economy that could threaten the election of Hillary Clinton.

If Britain votes to abandon membership in the European Union next week, the impact on the global economy could be severe and threaten Americas already anemic growth. The Brexit poll tracker at the Financial Times, updated today, shows 47 percent support in the UK for leaving the EU and 44 percent for remaining. World markets are jittery.

The Brexit vote on June 23 will come on the heel of a weak U.S. employment report for May, with only 38,000 new jobs created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while the unemployment rate is down to 4.7 percent, revised job numbers showed almost 60,000 fewer job were created in March and April than previously reported, and the number of full-time-job seekers who had to take part time work rose by 468,000, according to the Financial Times.

With capital spending either flat or being cut in a range of industries from fast food to pharma, according to a Reuters report early this year on capex plans for 2016, and with the oil industry slashing U.S. investment by 50 percent, companies reluctance to hire would likely get even more pronounced if uncertainty in global markets led to further caution. According to a Manpower survey of 11,000 hiring managers released Tuesday, 71 percent already plan to keep workforces unchanged in the third quarter, and there was a net weakening of the employment outlook for three of the four regions of the country surveyed.

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Related: Experts Warn Trump and Clinton of a Big Threat to the Economy

More pronounced weakness in the job market sparked by Brexit would play directly into the hands of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, who has made the economic battering of the American worker a centerpiece of his campaign with calls for a crackdown on illegal immigrants who undermine wages and a renegotiation of free-trade deals that move jobs overseas.

A CNBC survey of money managers, investment strategists and economists released yesterday found that 80 percent believe Clinton is most likely to win the presidential election, with just 15 percent picking Trump as the winner. The results narrowed on who would be best for the stock market: 38 percent for Clinton, 25 percent for Trump and 38 percent unsure or didnt know.

However on the question of who has the best economic policies, Trump came out on top with 45 percent, vs. 30 percent for Clinton and 25 percent unsure or didnt know.

Of course, who Wall Street thinks would improve the economy doesnt decide elections. But faltering growth and an even weaker job market brought on by a global economy in disarray might lead to the sentiment of the financial class and the anger of the working class coinciding at the ballot box, much to Clintons distress.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
What is Brexit?

Brexit, a portmanteau of the words Britain and exit, refers to Britain leaving the European Union.

Why do I keep hearing about it?

On Thursday, June 23, the U.K. will hold a referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU. The question to be voted on will be: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? The Remain and Leave supporters have been waging a fierce campaign to sway voters.

Related: How a Ban on Tea Kettles Could Drive Britain to a Brexit

Who can vote in the Brexit referendum?

British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens who live in the U.K., along with British citizens living abroad who have been on the U.K. electoral register for the past 15 years will be able to vote. Other EU citizens living in the U.K. (besides those from Ireland, Malta and Cyprus) will not be able to vote.

Why is Britain holding a referendum? Why now?

Before Britains last election in May 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron promised a referendum on membership in the EU. While Cameron supports Britain remaining in the EU, many of his Conservative members of Parliament do not.

Cameron decided to hold the referendum to settle a long-held rift between pro-EU and anti-EU factions of his party and pacify his critics on the far-right, notably the U.K. Independence Party.

Whos leading the Remain and Leave sides?

Cameron is leading the remain side, while Conservatives Boris Johnson, a member of parliament and former mayor of London; Justice Secretary Michael Gove; and U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage are leading the leave side.

Related: Markets May Be Too Complacent Over Brexit Risk, BlackRock Says

What are the arguments for leaving?

Leave campaigners argue that the costs and excessive regulations that come with EU membership outweigh the benefits. They claim that the U.K. could save 350 million ($490 million) a week that could be used for the U.K.s own programs. If Britain leaves the EU, Brexit supporters say, it could take back control of employment laws, health and safety.

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On trade, Brexit supporters claim leaving the EU would allow Britain to negotiate its own trade agreements free from interference from Brussels. The leave side also complains that that by being a part of the EU, Britain must allow EU citizens to live and work in the U.K., unnecessarily burdening the governments health and social services programs. Instead, Brexit campaigners say they would like to set up a points-based, skills-driven immigration system that does not give preferential treatment to EU citizens.

On the international stage, Brexit supporters complain about being outvoted by other EU countries within the EU decision-making structure, and that by leaving the EU, the country would have more influence internationally.

Whats the case for staying?

Anti-Brexit advocates claim that the 340 ($477) a year cost per household for membership in the EU is small compared to benefits worth 3,000 ($4,200) per household each year. They note a key perk of being part of the EU is that U.K. businesses can trade with other EU countries without tariffs and barriers, while leaving the EU could harm businesses and threaten jobs.

Anti-Brexit campaigners also say that EU regulations protect British people by ensuring environmental standards, stability of the banking system, worker protections and anti-discrimination rules. They argue that immigration wouldnt stop if Britain left the EU, noting that some European countries that are outside of the EU have greater per capita immigration levels. And they warn that Brexit could actually increase migration to the U.K. once immigration checkpoints have shifted from France to Dover.

On international relations, anti-Brexit supporters argue that being part of the EU allows Britain to be part of the decision-making process in Brussels, giving it additional clout in multilateral organizations such as the UN and the WTO.

Related: Investors Add Brexit Clauses to British Property Deals Before EU Vote

How long would it take for Britain to leave the EU?

A Brexit vote would trigger a series of negotiations that would last at least two years before separation from the EU could take place.

How close are the polls?

The Financial Times Brexit poll tracker shows a very narrow gap between the stay and leave sides, with the pro-Brexit side gaining ground in recent weeks.

How do businesses feel?

The latest poll conducted in May by the British Chambers of Commerce shows 54 percent of businesspeople prefer staying in the EU while 37 percent supporting leaving, with the rest undecided or would not vote. The May poll shows a drop in the remain campaigns support among businesspeople, as a similar poll in February showed 60 percent supporting the remain side.

What would Brexit mean for the U.S.?

According to Census data, the U.K. is Americas seventh biggest trading partner and fifth biggest export market, with year-to-date exports totaling $18 billion. The U.S. is also the U.K.s biggest trading partner, with British exports to the U.S. in April 2016 alone valued at 4.4 billion ($6.17 billion) according to U.K. government trade statistics. With Britain out of the EU, President Obama has warned that it could take 10 years for Britain to negotiate a new trade deal with the U.S.

Related: How a Brexit Could Sink Clinton and Hand the Election to Trump

Many American banks use London as a base to carry out business throughout Europe. Brexit could disrupt that. In fact, Fox Business News reported that Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup together have contributed to the anti-Brexit campaign.

Tamim Bayoumi, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Marketplace.org that Brexit could cause complications for U.S. companies with U.K. operations.

U.S. multinationals, for example, which have manufacturing in the U.K., might find it much more difficult to export to the European Union, Bayoumi said. He added that U.S. companies would also have to deal with changing trade, immigration and labor rules.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
(Reuters) - Britain holds a referendum on whether to stay in the European Union on June 23. Following are details of how the ballot count will work on the night. All times in GMT. WHEN WILL RESULTS COME? Votes will be counted by hand starting as soon as polls close at 2100 GMT. Each of 382 local counting areas will tally the number of ballot papers cast and announce local turnout figures (including spoiled ballots and postal votes) in each of the areas. The Electoral Commission watchdog has estimated that most turnout announcements at counting-area level will come between 2230 on June 23 and 0130 on June 24. The last turnout figure is expected at around 0400. Then each area will count the votes and announce totals for REMAIN and LEAVE in each of the 382 areas. The majority of counting areas are expected to declare between around 0100 and 0300 on June 24. The last declaration is expected around 0600. These local totals will be collated into totals for 12 regions, and then a final, national, result. The final result will be announced in Manchester by Jenny Watson, who is the Chief Counting Officer. WHEN CAN PEOPLE VOTE? Polling stations open at 0600 on June 23 and close at 2100. WILL THERE BE AN EXIT POLL? There are currently no plans by broadcasters for an exit poll as the margin of error is deemed to be too large. THE QUESTION Voters will be given one piece of paper with the question: "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" They will be asked to put a cross beside either: "Remain a member of the European Union "Leave the European Union" WHO CAN VOTE? All those who are entitled to vote in a UK parliamentary general election can vote in the referendum, including British, Irish and qualifying Commonwealth citizens over the age of 18 who are resident in the UK. UK nationals resident overseas who have appeared on a parliamentary election register in the past 15 years will also have the right to vote, as will Irish citizens who were born in Northern Ireland and registered to vote in Northern Ireland in the last 15 years. In addition, peers and citizens of Gibraltar who were able to vote at a European parliamentary election can vote. REGISTERING TO VOTE Britain extended the voter registration period for the referendum to midnight on June 9 after a late surge in applications crashed a key website shortly before the original June 7 midnight deadline. CAN THE COUNT AND VOTE BE CHALLENGED? The electoral commission says this: "The referendum rules do not provide for a national recount to be carried out in any circumstances. Any request for a recount of votes will be at local count level and is for the Counting Officer to determine. We expect local recounts to be granted if a specific issue has been identified with the process in that counting area, rather than simply when the local totals are close. "The national referendum result is only subject to challenge by way of judicial review. "An application for judicial review would need to be lodged within six weeks of the certification that is being challenged being made." Sources: Electoral Commission, Reuters reporting (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Alistair Smout, Kylie MacLellan, William James and Freya Berry; Editing by Estelle Shirbon)
ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports

Sam Ehlinger officially becomes the starting quarterback of the Colts. If he fails or gets injured, Nick Foles will take over. And if Foles gets injured, the quarterback will be anyone but Matt Ryan. Ryan is done. Hes out. He wont play again, for reasons rooted in his contract. Put simply, once the team decided [more]
British lawmaker Jo Cox killed in Birstall, England Labour member of Parliament Jo Cox poses for a photograph on May 12, 2015. (Yui Mok/PA via AP)

A British lawmaker was shot to death last Thursday in a small town she represents, a tragedy that brought to a standstill the fierce campaign over whether Britain should leave the European Union.

Labor Party legislator Jo Cox was attacked just before 1 p.m. in Birstall, northern England, said Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of the West Yorkshire Police. She was pronounced dead by a doctor less than an hour later.

A 77-year-old man was also injured in the attack.

A 52-year-old man has been arrested, and Collins said police believe that it is a lone incident and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack.

Police would not speculate on a motive for the shooting. Collins said officers had recovered some weapons but did not give more details.

Violence against politicians is rare in Britain, as are gun attacks, and people from all parts of the political spectrum expressed deep shock. (AP)

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Jo Cox, a rising star in the Labour Party known for her work on humanitarian and international issues, died on Thursday after being shot and stabbed in her district in northern England.

Cox is the first British lawmaker killed in office since 1990, when a Conservative lawmaker was assassinated in a car bombing by the Irish Republican Army. Two decades later, in 2010, a Labour lawmaker was critically injured in a stabbing by an Islamic extremist angered by his support for the 2003 Iraq invasion.

According to British media reports, the attack occurred when Cox stepped into an altercation between constituents at a library near the city of Leeds. A man has been arrested as a suspect, and police are investigating reports that the attacker shouted Britain first! as he shot and stabbed her. Cox died later in the hospital of her severe injuries.

Authorities believe it was an isolated incident and not part of a broader plot.

Last fall, Cox abstained from a heated vote in Parliament over whether Britain would take greater military action in Syria. In a May op-ed, she called the U.S. and British response to the Syria conflict nothing short of a foreign policy disaster.

I dont believe that either President Obama or the prime minister tried to do harm in Syria, she wrote, but, as is oft said, sometimes all it takes [sic] for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

She also worked with Oxfam, an anti-hunger charity, and on reducing infant mortality and combating modern slavery.

Cox supported European integration, writing last week on Twitter: Immigration is a legitimate concern, but its not a good reason to leave the E.U.

Britain holds a referendum next week for whether to remain or leave the 28-nation European Union.

Brendan Cox, her husband, said in a statement she would not have wanted her death to divide.

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her, he said. Hate doesnt have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous. Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.

Photo credit: YUI MOK/EPA
British lawmaker Jo Cox died after being shot and stabbed in her constituency in Birstall, West Yorkshire.

Dee Collins, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, said that the Labour Party member was pronounced dead by a paramedic crew attending to her.

The 41-year-old Cox was attacked near Birstalls library where she holds advice surgeries, Sky News reports. According to the BBC, she has been taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary where armed police are outside the hospital.

Her husband, Brendan Cox, tweeted this photograph of the MP by the barge where she stayed in London.



Speaking to Sky News, witness Hishem Ben Abdallah says a man pulled a gun out of his bag, which looked like a First World War or a makeshift, handmade gun, before attacking Cox. He was fought off by a local man who may have been injured in the scuffle. The assailant is reported to have shouted Britain First during the attack.

Speaking to the BBC another eyewitness said: He shot this lady and then shot her again. He lent down. Someone was wrestling with him and he was wielding a knife and lunging at her. Three times she was shot. People were trying to help her. Then he ran off down a one-way street. Me and my mate drove round to try and find him.

A statement by the local West Yorkshire Police says that a 52-year-old man has been arrested in connection to the incident. The BBC tweeted an image of the arrest of a man nearby:

Cox wrote a pro-E.U. comment piece in the Yorkshire Post on June 10, saying a vote to leave the political bloc was not a way to deal with concerns about immigration.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Sadiq Khan have tweeted their concern.





The mother of two was elected to represent Batley & Spen constituency in 2015. She is co-chair of the Friends of Syria All Party Parliamentary Group, and broke with her party in abstaining in a vote on military action in Syria. She has also expressed regret for nominating Jeremy Corbyn during last years Labour leadership contest.

The MP is married to former special advisor to Gordon Brown, Brendan Cox. Vote Leave and Vote Remain have suspended both their campaigns in light of the incident.
American Family Mutual Insurance Co. is seeking to broaden its corporate footprint on paths that may lead to expansion into non-insurance products and services, the company announced Thursday.

To do that, the Madison-based American Family, the nations 13th-largest mutual property/casualty insurance group  meaning it belongs to its customers  wants to convert to a mutual holding company, a move that the company says will provide more flexibility to pursue customer-driven initiatives.

The plan has been filed with the states Office of the Commissioner of Insurance for review and approval. It also requires the approval of American Family Mutual Insurance Co.s 4 million policyholders.

The proposed change would allow the company to meet customer needs in an age of automated cars, smart homes and other advanced technologies, Chairman Jack Salzwedel said in a statement.

Policyholders of American Family Mutual Insurance Co. would exchange their membership rights for similar membership rights in the mutual holding company, American Family said.

Some membership rights would also be extended to policyholders of other American Family group subsidiaries, preserving what the company called the concept of mutuality.

Any such change would not affect existing insurance policies, the company said. The board of directors and officers of a holding company would be the same as the current board and officers of American Family Mutual Insurance Co., and they would not get additional compensation, stock or benefits from the change. In addition, this would allow some subsidiaries to be formally re-domiciled in Wisconsin, for regulatory purposes, said Ken Muth, company spokesman.

Promising no change in traditional, existing insurance policies, the company in a statement said the insurance company would become a stock subsidiary of the holding company.

Dave Holman, American Familys chief strategy officer, said we are not selling stock, which would in any case require regulatory and policyholder approval.

Holman said a tentative timeline would put the proposal up for policyholder approval by late November, following review and back-and-forth with the OCI.

We provide a proposed plan, they can review and make suggestions on how to modify. We have had some preliminary discussion with (OCI) and have filed most of what they are looking for, Holman said.

He said the idea for the change came via discussions within the board of directors, not as a reaction to a particular event or prospective purchase, for example.

We looked at it as a possibility as early as 2012, he said, with the primary impetus being we wanted to enhance our status and preserve a strong mutual member base.

If the company changes to a mutual holding company, American Family Mutual Insurance Co. becomes a subsidiary of that company, he explained.

American Family today has a number of stock subsidiaries that underwrite other property and casualty products.

The move to a holding company would expand the companys ability to acquire consumer products adjacent to insurance, such as smoke alarms for houses, for example, he said.

Already American Family has made investments in what Holman described as strategic reconnaissance, or small investments in a variety of small technology companies, start-ups. They might include a way to connect auto-owners with mechanics, Wi-Fi opportunities, noise monitors and the like.

American Family-brand products are sold in 19 states.

Moving to a mutual holding company does not historically come without potential for disagreement. One UW-Madison insurance expert was willing to point out positives and negatives of the strategy in general, not specifically to the American Family plan.

Peter Carstensen, emeritus professor of law, said forming a holding company makes diversifying the company easier and allows the mutual to make acquisitions, he said.

The question, he said, is how good are they at figuring out what other product lines they may want to be in? The risk to the individual insured is that the company makes some bad investment decisions and jeopardizes the value of the company.

On the good side, currently the industry is getting moderately strong supervision from insurance commissioners. They have been bitten enough by bad investments, and even though they are acting as good administrators, they tend to be very industry-supportive.

Another risk of setting up a holding company, he said, is that you create a self-perpetuating oligarchy ... with little chance of an inside check on decisions. The point is, except for the (regulators) looking over their shoulders, nobody is there to question what is going on.

Muth, of American Family, noted that there will be many opportunities for policyholders and others to examine the companys proposal.

American Family in 2015 had assets of $21.5 billion, equity of $7.4 billion and revenue of $8.1 billion. It had $93.6 billion in life insurance in force.

The company contracts with 3,100 independent agents and employs about 7,900 people.
London (AFP) - Jo Cox, a British member of parliament who campaigned for the country to stay in the EU and for more aid for Syrian refugees, was killed in a brutal attack on Thursday.

A 52-year-old man is in police custody after Cox was shot and stabbed numerous times in her constituency in northern England.

Campaigning for the June 23 referendum has been suspended through Saturday out of respect.

This is what we know so far:

- Who was Jo Cox? -

The 41-year-old mother-of-two was elected last year as an opposition Labour party MP for Batley and Spen, a constituency in West Yorkshire, where she grew up.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge, she helped set up a pressure group, Britain in Europe, and spent two years working in Brussels.

She was policy chief for aid agency Oxfam and after entering parliament, was a prominent campaigner for refugee rights.

Cox co-chaired the parliamentary group on Syria and spoke out in favour of immigration in a powerful first speech in the House of Commons.

- What happened? -

Cox was on her way to a scheduled meeting with constituents at the library in Birstall, a large village in Yorkshire, when she was attacked.

Police were called at 12:53 pm (1153 GMT), a few minutes before the 1:00 pm meeting. She was pronounced dead at 1:48 pm by a paramedic team.

"She was attacked and sustained serious injuries from both a firearm and a knife," West Yorkshire Police Constable Dee Collins said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses said she was shot two or three times and repeatedly stabbed as she lay on the pavement, in what Collins said was "an isolated, but targeted attack upon Jo".

There were reports that the suspect shouted "Britain first" or "put Britain first", although this is disputed and police have made no mention of it.

A 77-year-old man who tried to help Cox sustained a "serious injury to his abdomen" and is currently in a stable condition in hospital, police said.

Story continues

The only suspect, a 52-year-old man, was arrested nearby shortly afterwards. Weapons including a firearm were recovered from the scene.

- Who has been arrested? -

British media named the suspect as Thomas Mair, described by those who knew him locally as a loner with mental health problems, including obsessive compulsive disorder.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a US advocacy group, said it had records showing Mair had bought copious reading material from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organisation.

The Guardian said police were believed to have found Nazi regalia and far-right literature in their search of his house.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper also reported that Mair was a subscriber to S. A. Patriot, a South African magazine published by the pro-apartheid group the White Rhino Club.

Police said they were treating both the suspect's alleged mental illness and reports of his links to right-wing extremism as key lines of inquiry.

Detectives have up to 96 hours to question the suspect before they must charge or release him, according to government guidelines for serious crimes such as murder.

- Who were Cox's family? -

She was married to Brendan Cox, a former adviser to prime minister Gordon Brown who also worked at the Save the Children charity.

They had two young children, Lejla and Cuillin, and lived on a converted barge near Tower Bridge in London.

Her husband said: "She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now: one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her."

- Who else has reacted?

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said the nation was "shocked" by the murder.

On a visit to Birstall Friday, he said: "Where we see hatred, where we find division, where we see intolerance we must drive it out of our politics and out of our public life and out of our communities."

Standing alongside him, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn described Cox as "an exceptional, wonderful, very talented woman".

US Secretary of State John Kerry expressed his "deep sorrow" for Cox's death, adding: "It is an assault on everybody who cares about and has faith in democracy."

- How rare are MP killings? -

Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed in the stomach in 2010 by an Islamic extremist but survived the attack.

The Irish Republican Army paramilitary group killed Ian Gow in a car bomb in 1990, Anthony Berry in the 1984 Brighton bombing and shot dead Robert Bradford in 1981.

Former Northern Ireland secretary Airey Neave was killed in a car bomb in 1979 that was claimed by the Irish National Liberation Army.
London (AFP) - A British lawmaker was critically ill on Thursday after reportedly being shot in her constituency in northern England, in a broad daylight attack that caused campaigning for next week's EU referendum to be suspended.

Jo Cox, 41, a mother-of-two who represents the opposition Labour party, was shot three times and also stabbed by a man in his 50s in the village of Birstall in Yorkshire, a witness told the BBC.

Another witness, Hichem Ben Abdallah, told the Press Association she had been shot twice.

Police confirmed that a woman in her 40s was in a "critical condition" but by convention did not name her. A spokesman said that a 52-year-old man had been arrested.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Twitter that he was "utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox. The thoughts of the whole Labour party are with her and her family at this time".

Clarke Rothwell, a cafe owner in Birstall, told the BBC that he was alerted to the incident by a "loud popping noise that sounded like a balloon burst -- a loud balloon".

"When I looked round there's a man stood there in his 50s with a white baseball cap on and a jacket with a gun, an old-fashioned looking gun in his hand," he said.

"He shot this lady once and then he shot her again, he fell to the floor, leant over shot her once more in the face area.

"Somebody tried to grab him, wrestling with him and then he wielded a knife, like a hunting knife, just started lunging at her with a knife half a dozen times.

"People were screaming and running from the area."

Channel 4 News quoted Cox's office as saying that the MP had been shot and stabbed. Her staff could not be immediately reached when contacted by AFP.

The BBC said she was flown by air ambulance to a nearby hospital.

Prime Minister David Cameron said he was "very concerned" about the attack and cancelled a rally he had planned in Gibraltar as part of his campaign for Britain to stay in the EU on June 23.

Story continues

Cox is in favour of the "Remain" campaign, which also suspended all other campaigning Thursday, although it was unclear whether the attack was related to the referendum.

Sky News television quoted unconfirmed reports from witnesses that Cox's shooter shouted "Britain first" -- possibly a reference to British sovereignty, although there is also a far-right party called Britain First.

A spokesman for the rival Vote Leave group, which is backing a so-called Brexit, said that its 'battle bus' had stopped campaigning for the day.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted his condolences, saying he was "deeply shocked".

- 'What is happening?' -

"At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition," West Yorkshire police said in a statement.

"A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries.

"Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area."

The attack took place near the town's library where she regularly held meetings with constituents.

Fellow MPs took to twitter to express their horror at the attack, with Labour MP Andy Burnham writing: "What is happening to the world?"

Most British MPs have little or no security but such incidents are extremely rare.

Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed twice in the stomach by a 21-year-old student in 2010 because he voted for Britain's 2003 invasion of Iraq. His attacker was jailed for life for trying to kill him.
A British lawmaker has died after being shot and stabbed in an attack near where she regularly meets constituents.



Jo Cox, 41, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen and a married mother of two, was found bleeding in the street at about 1 p.m., local time, close to where she held twice-weekly meetings with voters in Birstall, a city near Leeds about 200 miles north of London.



West Yorkshire police said Cox died less than an hour later.



Expressing deepest sympathies to her family, Temporary Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police Dee Collins said in a statement, "Jo was attacked by a man, who inflicted serious and sadly, ultimately fatal injuries. Subsequently there was a further attack on a 77-year-old man, nearby who has sustained injuries that are non life threatening."



The statement continued, "Shortly afterwards, a man was arrested nearby by uniform police officers. Weapons including a firearm have also been recovered."





British Politician Jo Cox Dies After Being Shot and Stabbed in the Street| Crime & Courts, Death, True Crime

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Cox was pronounced dead by a doctor working with the responding paramedic crew at approximately 1:48 p.m.



Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, of which Cox was a member, called her a "much loved colleague."



British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a statement, "The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP."



Only yesterday, Cox had been campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union; a referendum vote takes place next week. Her husband Brendan tweeted pictures of her and her family joining a flag-waving flotilla on the River Thames.



Brendan issued a statement in the wake of his wife's death, saying, "Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love," according to the Telegraph.



"I and Jo's friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.



"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.



"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."



He concluded, "Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full."
By Rory Carroll

SAN FRANCISCO, June 15 (Reuters) - The California legislature agreed on Wednesday to a $122.5 billion spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 and sent it to Governor Jerry Brown, who is expected to sign it.

The budget directs $2 billion to the state's rainy day fund, a priority for Brown, a Democrat and fiscal moderate who has warned that an economic downturn could lie ahead for the nation's most populous state.

Lower-than-expected income tax revenues in April caught state officials by surprise, and Brown said the state could take in $1.9 billion less than anticipated in taxes over the coming fiscal year.

Democratic leaders in the state Senate praised the budget for making investments in the social safety net and early childhood education.

The budget included a repeal of the state's maximum family grant rule, which prevents people on welfare from receiving additional public money if they have more children.

Without the rule, households would receive an additional $122 a month for a newborn child. The change is expected to cost the state about $220 million a year.

"Our expenditure plan funds anti-poverty programs, child care and education," said Mark Leno, Democratic state senator and budget chair.

"It also includes resources to combat homelessness, support low-income working families and improve college readiness and enrollment," he said.

Republicans and some Democrats complained the spending increase of $6.9 billion from the prior fiscal year set California on a path of billion-dollar deficits down the road.

"Californians deserve a responsible and sustainable state spending plan," said Senate Republican leader Jean Fuller.

"Unfortunately, this record spending budget paves the way for future deficits and increases fees that make living in California even more expensive," she said.

Some of the spending increases were attributed to an increase in the minimum wage and increased benefits for the disabled.

In a tweet, Brown said: "Good work from the state legislature: we're building reserves and investing in CA. Thanks."

Brown has until the end of the month to sign the budget.

(Reporting by Rory Carroll; Editing by Peter Cooney)
A wildfire in Santa Barbara County exploded from 250 acres to 1,200 acres overnight. The fire shut down a 15-mile stretch of Highway 101 on Wednesday, June 15, and was re-opened on Thursday, though firefighters continued to battle the Sherpa Fire in the mountains of Los Padres National Forest.

The fire prompted the evacuation of Refugio, Venadito and Las Flores canyons north of Santa Barbara, according to reports. No building damage or injuries had been reported. Credit: Twitter/Santa Barbara County Fire Department
The New Zealand Department of Corrections unveiled a new ankle monitor. They touted the upgrade as uncuttable, and they were so confident, they showed it off on the New Zealand program Story. Reporter Dan Parker tried to cut through the bracelet with scissors, but was thwarted. It seemed as though the DOC had made strides in technology, that is until cameraman Billy Weepu came in and gave it a try. Using the same scissors, Weepu cut through the bracelet with ease.

While Parker admitted that Weepu was much stronger than he is, when the anchors asked Rachel Leota, deputy DOC commissioner, why the bracelet was so easily cut, she replied with total silence. After collecting herself, Leota defended the ankle bracelets, saying that this test wasnt indicative of how one would cut off the bracelet in real life. That may be true, but DOC had insisted on using their own scissors for the demonstration, and Corrections Minister Judith Collins did describe the ankle bracelet as almost impossible to remove without taking off your leg. Leota tried to backtrack, but this device may need a recall.

WATCH: Michigan News Anchor Takes a Hard Fall at Sand Dunes

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(Adds strategist comment, details; updates prices to close) * Canadian dollar at C$1.2961, or 77.15 U.S. cents * Loonie touched weakest since June 3 at C$1.3086 * Bond prices lower across the maturity curve * 10-year yield touches lowest since Feb. 12 at 1.052 pct By Fergal Smith TORONTO, June 16 (Reuters) - The Canadian dollar ended lower against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday but bounced off its weakest levels in almost two weeks as markets gyrated globally with the shooting death of a British lawmaker who backed Britain remaining in the European Union.

Sterling advanced and the greenback pulled back after British Member of Parliament Jo Cox was killed in the street in her constituency in northern England.

Investors are broadly cautious ahead of the June 23 vote, with economists warning that a so-called Brexit could trigger financial market volatility and weaken the outlook for the global economy and commodity prices.

"Money is already reducing exposure to risk, out of stocks worldwide, commodities are following suit, bonds are being hoovered up, pushing yields to unprecedented levels, and commodity currencies are getting crushed," said Michael Goshko, a corporate risk manager at Western Union Business Solutions.

"The real question is how far the trend continues and how disorderly it becomes," he said.

British support for leaving the bloc in a June 23 referendum has risen to 53 percent, a telephone poll showed on Thursday, the highest support recorded by the pollster for the "Leave" or "Brexit" campaign in more than three years.

The Canadian dollar settled at C$1.2961 to the greenback, or 77.15 U.S. cents, weaker than Wednesday's close of C$1.2926, or 77.36 U.S. cents.

It had touched its weakest since June 3 at C$1.3086 during the session, while its strongest level was C$1.2897.

Oil prices slid 4 percent for a sixth straight fall and European shares hit a four-month low, weighing on Canada's risk-sensitive commodity-linked currency.

Story continues

Canadian growth is likely to be flat or slightly negative in the second quarter due to the impact of the Alberta wildfires before an outsized recovery takes hold in the third quarter, the Bank of Canada said on Wednesday.

Foreign investors bought a net C$15.52 billion ($11.94 billion) in Canadian securities in April, the fourth straight month of relatively significant purchases, Statistics Canada said.

Canadian government bond prices were mixed across the maturity curve, with the two-year price down 6 Canadian cents to yield 0.512 percent and the benchmark 10-year fell 25 Canadian cents to yield 1.107 percent.

The 10-year yield hit its lowest since Feb. 12 at 1.052 percent.

(Additional writing by Alastair Sharp; Editing by Diane Craft)
Chris Rickert | Wisconsin State Journal Urban affairs, investigations, consumer help ("SOS") Follow Chris Rickert | Wisconsin State Journal Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today

When Madison schools officials revamped the districts discipline policy two years ago in an attempt to reduce the disproportionately high rate at which students of color were being expelled and suspended, they probably werent thinking their reward would be a federal civil rights complaint.

But I guess when you try to do as many good deeds as socially active Madison does, its inevitable that some of them will be punished.

The complaint filed by student Dereian Brown, who is black, and his parents alleges the district acted in a racially discriminatory manner when it punished the then-sixth-grader for allegedly bringing a BB gun to school last fall.

The policy under which Dereian was disciplined also creates a disparate impact on racial minorities generally, his attorneys argue, and restricts school officials ability to take the specific circumstances of a students case into account.

No doubt, the policy has a one-size-fits-all feel. Thats because its hard for race to play a factor in discipline if the penalties for breaking school rules are spelled out in advance and adhered to in practice.

Or as School Board member Ed Hughes put it in his blog: I believe that one way to avoid unwarranted disparities is to apply our expulsion standards uniformly and consistently. The districts overwhelmingly white leadership doesnt trust itself to know its biases well enough to keep them in check, in other words, and hopes a policy will do it for them.

And maybe it does.

The districts discipline policy is based on progressive discipline and restorative practice  so that we can keep more students in school learning, said the School Boards black president, James Howard, who also led the committee that rewrote the policy.

As a result, weve seen a dramatic reduction in suspensions and recommendations for expulsion, he said, and regained approximately 1,600 days of lost instruction due to suspensions last year, about 1,200 of those days for African-American students.

Its probably worth noting that despite recommendations for long expulsions, the districts behavior policy was still flexible enough for the School Board to essentially let Dereian off with time served. In the end, he served a 15-day suspension and spent one day out of school completing a re-entry plan, according to his attorneys. If he stays on the straight and narrow, he could also have the expulsion expunged from his record.

None of this is to say that the Madison schools arent racially discriminatory. A 12-week-long summer slide-inducing summer break, for instance, is no help to poor students of color. Personnel policies that value seniority and degree attainment over diversity and ability mean that not only can it be harder for teachers of color to move up, students of color in need of the most effective teachers dont always get them.

Dereians lawyers told me Dereian and his family are not asking for money, and simply want students in the district to be treated well.

Making a federal case out of Dereians experience wont do that. Addressing the real sources of structural racism in the schools just might.
By Allison Lampert and Allison Martell TORONTO (Reuters) - The Canadian government is preparing to announce new regulations to ensure commercial pilots throughout the airline industry get enough rest, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said in an interview on Thursday. Garneau offered few details, but said the rules would apply to commercial flights of a variety of sizes and be based on scientific evidence on fatigue. "It's all about safety," Garneau said in a phone interview. "We want to make sure that pilots are well rested when they are going to fly." A spokeswoman said details would be announced within a couple of weeks. Some Canadian pilots, especially those working for small airlines, can be scheduled to work for up to 14 hours, while in the United States, Australia, the European Union and India, shifts range from 9 to 13 hours depending on time of day. Major airlines typically have stricter limits on flight time than what Transport Canada requires, but the Air Transport Association of Canada, which represents small and mid-sized airlines, has argued in the past that new rules could sharply increase its members' costs without improving safety. Transport Canada has been studying the issue since 2010. In August, the regulator outlined a tentative plan that would have limited shifts to nine to 13 hours for carriers that operate planes with 20 or more seats. The plan was a partial victory for smaller operators that had lobbied hard against the rules. But the government never formalized new regulations, and in October the ruling Conservative government was voted out, replaced by the centrist Liberals. Garneau said his government's proposal would not be limited to large planes. "We're looking at it not just for big airplanes, but we're looking at it across the spectrum," he said. Even so, without details of the new regulations, it was not immediately clear how they might affect Canadian airlines. In August, Air Canada said its practices far exceeded Transport Canada's proposals. Garneau also said Canada is planning to introduce new regulations by year's end for drones under 25 kilograms aimed at recreational users. He said he would not seek to harmonize drone regulations between Canada and the United States. "We want to take our own approach here in Canada," he said. (Reporting by Allison Lampert; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Ottawa (AFP) - A Canadian woman who fought insurgents in Afghanistan became the country's first female combat officer to rise to the rank of general on Thursday.

Colonel Jennie Carignan, 47, was promoted to brigadier-general (one star) and put in charge of the Canadian army's day-to-day operations including training and deployments, the military announced.

Other female generals have previously risen from non-combatant disciplines such as intelligence, medicine and development aid.

Carignan enlisted in 1986, three years before Canada allowed women in combat roles.

Training as a combat engineer -- a role in which soldiers clear bombs and erect and destroy battlefield structures -- she rose quickly through the ranks, shattering preconceptions about women warriors.

However, she was beaten to the punch by one month in becoming the first woman to lead a military combatant command by American General Lori Robinson.

Robinson made history in May, when she was appointed to lead the US Northern Command, tasked with securing North America's aerospace and coastal waters, as well as supporting the US civil defense authorities.

US Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth, who praised Robinson, was quoted at the time by ABC News as saying that "in the military, a combatant command is the ultimate job. It's the pointy tip of the spear, overseeing the people carrying the rifles and flying the aircraft."

The United States dropped its official ban on women in combat in January 2016.

Women make up 14.8 percent of the Canadian military, and just 2.4 percent of its combat forces, according to government figures.

Carignan grew up in the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec, the daughter of a policeman and a teacher.

She served in a United Nations mission in the Golan Heights, between Syria and Israel, and in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

"She can wear a dress or a bulletproof vest," Barbara Maisonneuve, chief fundraiser for the Royal Military College of Canada and a general's wife, told Maclean's magazine.

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"Brigadier-General Jennie Carignan continues to be a trailblazer for women in the Canadian Armed Forces," Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said in a statement.

Married with four children, Carignanhas been a pioneer in juggling motherhood and a high-level military career.

At age 27 in 1995, she was ordered to deploy to Bosnia-Herzegovina at the end of the war that broke up the former Yugoslavia, but unexpectedly became pregnant.

Her bosses were supportive.

A year later, she brought her still breastfeeding son on a military training exercise, along with relatives who babysat the two-month-old while she trained.

She got another opportunity to deploy to Bosnia in 2002.

In 2009-2010, Carignan found herself in one of the world's deadliest war zones, exchanging fire with insurgents in Afghanistan while on patrol in Kandahar province.

She also narrowly avoided a suicide bomber during the mission as well as an improvised explosive device that mangled a vehicle in her convoy.

Following in their mother's footsteps, her eldest son Zack, 20, is in his second year at the Royal Military College of Canada and daughter Amelie is starting basic training in July.
Barcelona (AFP) - The vivid red and yellow Catalan separatist flag is a familiar and colourful sight on balconies across Barcelona, though many have become faded and torn over the years.

But scores of Catalonians are getting weary of political infighting over the region's independence drive which has dragged on for years -- even those who back secession.

"One starts to get tired, it has been a long time and there have been few advances," said 70-year-old Josep Cuspinera at his small shop which sells pots and pans in Barcelona's strongly pro-independence Gracia district.

Further north in the Nou Barris district, Barcelona's poorest and least separatist district, Rosa Martinez, 54, echoed the feeling.

"I'm sick of the topic," she said, after the pro-independence coalition that rules the region fell apart last week when its most radical component -- the anti-capitalist CUP party -- refused to back the regional government's budget.

The development dealt a blow to the coalition's planned 18-month roadmap for independence from Spain by 2017, which it announced after winning a parliamentary majority in regional elections last September.

Without a budget the head of the Catalan regional government, Carles Puigdemont, is not able to take steps to put the roadmap in place, such as setting up a tax system and state structure for Catalonia.

He has called a parliamentary vote of no confidence for September, which could trigger fresh elections if it goes through -- the fourth since 2010.

Spain's Constitutional Court that year watered down a statute giving the wealthy, 7.5-million-strong region more powers, sparking an upsurge in Catalan separatism.

Spain's economic downturn prompted renewed debate over how Catalonia -- a region with its own widely spoken language and distinct culture -- is funded by the central government in Madrid which collects most taxes.

Many Catalan nationalists argue the region pays out more than it receives.

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- 'Exhaust and demotivate' -

Since 2012 hundreds of thousands of people have flooded the streets of Barcelona on September 11, the region's national day, calling for the right to vote on a potential split from Spain.

In November 2014 the region held a symbolic independence referendum.

Over 80 percent voted in favour of independence -- but just 2.3 million people out of a total of 6.3 million eligible voters took part in the ballot.

"I see independence very far off, I would even say I barely see it," said Cuspinera at his shop in Gracia, where 60 percent of voters cast their ballots for pro-independence parties in the last regional polls.

"Here many people want independence but all these fights between politicians exhaust and demotivate them," he added.

Catalans have dealt with infighting among politicians over separatism for years now.

Artur Mas governed Catalonia between 2010 and 2015, when his conservative nationalist Convergence and Union (CIU) party dissolved due to divisions over independence and graft scandals.

The pro-independence camp united in an alliance, "Together for Yes", for the September regional election in Catalonia, winning 62 seats in the 135-seat assembly.

The far-left separatist CUP party got ten seats, giving the pro-independence camp a parliamentary majority. But divisions over budget policy have revived the split among secessionists.

- 'Nothing changes' -

"We have protested 50 times and we vote every two years but nothing changes," said Gemma Boix, a 39-year-old administrative assistant who backs independence for Catalonia.

Puigdemont acknowledged that without the backing of the CUP "we can't continue".

But for Martinez, who opposes independence, this is good news.

"We have other more serious problems here. I clean houses all day and my husband works a thousand hours a month but we can barely make ends meet," she said.

"And they only talk about independence!" she added, repeating the arguments of Mas' critics who accuse him of fuelling the separatist drive to hide corruption in his party and his economic mismanagement.

Santiago Lapa, a 44-year-old insurance salesman, points out that 52 percent of all Catalan voters did not pick a separatist party in the last regional election.

"A lot of time and money lost for something that many people don't want," he said.

"This has gone on for five years and in five years everything will be the same. We will be part of Spain, paying taxes to Madrid and with Barcelona playing in the Spanish league," he added.
Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart in Central Intelligence

By Owen Gleiberman, Variety

The words action comedy go together not just because the movies they describe combine action and comedy. They go together because, in a machine-tooled lark like Central Intelligence, each one becomes the other. The dialogue, as quick and aggressive as a punch to the face, really is a form of action; the gun battles, car crashes, and hurtling bodies are staged with a more-mayhem-the-better lightness that turns violence into something to giggle at, as if it were all transpiring in a Road Runner cartoon. At least, thats the idea.

Related: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart Bro Out at Central Intelligence Premiere

In Central Intelligence, when Calvin Joyner (Kevin Hart), a mild-mannered accountant coerced into becoming the partner of a rogue CIA agent, jabbers on, for the opening act or two, about how he wants nothing at all to do with this scheme (Im not in! he keeps wailing; he just wants out), Hart lets his voice creep up into high Eddie Murphy dudgeon, and the words tumble out so fast that it almost stops mattering what hes saying. Its the comedy of controlled hysteria  the verbal equivalent of madly flailing fists. And when Dwayne Johnson, as the agent in question, gets out of a jam by slamming some guys head with an office refrigerator door, setting off water sprinklers and a smoke bomb, and pushing a mail cart (that contains Kevin Hart) through the plate-glass window of what must be the 20th floor, its all just a joke: slapstick with extra pain. Of course, the downside of the action-comedy recipe is that it risks having almost no consequence. The danger of the form is that action and comedy, instead of adding something to one another, just cancel each other out.

Thats sort of what happens in Central Intelligence, though you couldnt accuse the movie of not hurtling along. It delivers  on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. Its an action-comedy utensil, like Rush Hour crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of Romy and Micheles High School Reunion. Its the sort of movie that, in its highly formulaic way, reveals a lot about what audiences are seeking today. A scabrous buddy comedy like The Nice Guys appeared to have a lot going for it, but it didnt have the right action-to-comedy ratio (there wasnt a spatter of gunfire every eight minutes), and the characters were a tad too quirky for the genre. Central Intelligence goes back to basics: Kevin Hart, as talented a funnyman as he is, squawks and rails and goes scaredy-cat on cue, while Dwayne Johnson, as the undercover agent, plays a pumped-up friendly giant whos too sensitive for his own good. The joke of both characters is right on the surface, and it stays there for an hour and 45 minutes. The movie, in other words, serves up just enough of the standard microwaved meat and potatoes of action comedy to have the potential to be a medium-size hit.

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Related: Kevin Hart Says He May Be Done With Stand-Up Touring

The opening flashback strikes the films only note of over-the-top nuttiness: In a high school gym in 1996, we see Johnsons Robbie Weirdicht as the blobby loser he was  a dork who looks like Rob Schneider in a fat suit, and who gets humiliated by being tossed, naked, into the middle of a year-end pep rally. Calvin, the class superstar, is the only one who doesnt laugh at him, and 20 years later, Robbie  now under the pseudonym Bob Stone  contacts him on Facebook and arranges a reunion. As Calvin discovers, Bob, after two decades of six-hour-a-day workouts, now looks like Dwayne Johnson, but hes the same girly-man inside (sort of). He prizes hugs and unicorns, his favorite movie is Sixteen Candles, and whenever the subject of high school comes up, he looks like he wants to crawl under a desk. But, of course, hes also a tattooed bruiser who will kick the butt of anyone he has to, especially bullies. Johnson draws, as much as he ever has, on his ironic courtliness  the side of him that doesnt just look like Barack Obama on hulk serum but talks like Obama, with the articulate civility that has made Johnson into a gently disarming screen star. Bob gets tough when he needs to, but hes always much sweeter than we expect, and in Central Intelligence thats Johnsons version of the Schwarzenegger shuffle.

Hart is a good match for him, but he doesnt get enough good lines. After a fight, when he says to Bob, You were like Jason Bourne, man  but with jorts! the moment has a snap to it. But though his delivery is ace, hardly any of Harts dialogue surprises you; its mostly rote fear and ranting. Theres a halfway funny scene in which Bob pretends to be a couples therapist who keeps slapping Calvin, and Jason Bateman, in an unbilled cameo as Bobs old high school tormentor, has a high-style nastiness that momentarily steals the movie out from under the two stars. Its just enough to make you disappointed that Central Intelligence turns into a kind of straight-up thriller, mostly out of laziness. Its easier to do variations on the same cloak-and-dagger crapola than it is to elevate horn-locking irritability into true banter.

Related: Dwayne Johnson Confirmed for Doc Savage

Bob is out to nail the Black Badger, a mystery agent who, it seems, has murdered his partner and plans to sell U.S. satellite encryption codes to the highest bidder. But Bobs boss, played with brusquely appealing heartlessness by Amy Ryan, thinks that Bob is the Black Badger, and the way this plays out is just competent enough on a spy-game level to make you momentarily forget that you didnt buy a ticket to Central Intelligence to watch a third-rate Bourne film in jorts. You bought that ticket to laugh. You will not do it quite enough.

Central Intelligence: Watch the trailer:


Robert Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, speaks at the 2014 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California April 28, 2014. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Walt Disney Company chairman and CEO Bob Iger on Wednesday spoke with the family of the 2-year-old boy killed in an alligator attack at a Walt Disney World resort.

Iger, who is in Shanghai for the opening of the new Shanghai Disneyland, also issued a statement shortly after authorities recovered the child's body.

"As a parent and a grandparent, my heart goes out to the Graves family during this time of devastating loss," Iger said in the statement. "My thoughts and prayers are with them, and I know everyone at Disney joins me in offering our deepest sympathies."

The police recovered the child's body on Wednesday after an overnight search involving as many as 60 sheriff's deputies and wildlife officials. The body was "completely intact," Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings told reporters. The child most likely drowned, he said.

The child was playing by a lagoon Tuesday night when the alligator dragged him into the water. The child's father sustained minor injuries trying to fight the alligator off.

Disney closed all of its beaches at the resort as a precaution, a spokesman said.

Walt Disney World president George Kalogridis said he was "heartbroken" by the attack.

"There are no words to convey the profound sorrow we feel for the family and their unimaginable loss," Kalogridis said in a statement. "We are devastated and heartbroken by this tragic accident and are doing what we can to help the family during this difficult time. On behalf of everyone at Disney, we offer our deepest sympathies."

NOW WATCH: Scientists figured out why so many labrador retrievers are fat





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A man was shot and killed during a live streaming video on Facebook in Chicago's West Side on Thursday, Fox 32 Chicago reported.

Antonio Perkins, 28, was reportedly using Facebook Live  a new feature that allows users to share live videos with their network on the social media platform  when multiple gunshots were heard in the live video and Perkins fell to blood-soaked grass while screams were heard in the background.

Perkins was reportedly shot in the neck and head before being transported to Mount Sinai hospital on the West Side, where was declared dead. He had three children; ages eight, six and two.

Fox provided the video on their broadcast.

(Editor's note: This link contains disturbing footage. View with discretion.)

Source: Facebook

The incident occurred on the 1600 block of South Drake Avenue around 8:45 p.m., authorities told the Chicago Tribune.

The Tribune transcribed dialogue heard in the video after Perkins was shot. In it, people can be heard describing the extent of his injuries, and a woman is heard saying "he's choking on his blood."

Perkins' father told Fox that Antonio "was a good guy and not involved in gangs." The police told Fox that he was a documented gang member. According to the station, Perkins had recently purchased a car and was starting a new job at McDonald's.
An armed Fitchburg man was killed Wednesday by Marinette County sheriffs deputies after he presented a deadly threat, the Sheriffs Office said.

Madison police, who issued an alert to law enforcement agencies Wednesday afternoon about the man, said he was a 38-year-old resident of Fitchburg and a native of Marinette County. Marinette authorities identified him Thursday as Michael D. Rasmussen.

The bulletin warned of a man armed with a gun who had made threats of harm and was possibly headed to Marinette County.

Sheriffs deputies spotted Rasmussen driving in the town of Pembine on Wednesday evening. Deputies tried to negotiate with him by phone until he stopped his vehicle in the road and, armed with a loaded shotgun, approached the deputies. Authorities said Rasmussen didnt respond to commands to drop his weapon and three deputies responded with deadly force.

Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said the department alerted Marinette authorities and family members that he was suicidal and a potential danger to law enforcement.

We confirmed he had purchased a firearm in the county, DeSpain said.

The state Department of Justices Division of Criminal Investigation will investigate the fatal shooting.

State law requires an outside agency to investigate officer-involved deaths. Since May 2014, DCI has been the lead investigative agency in 21 such deaths, 12 in the past year, including the Marinette death, according to DOJ figures.

In six of those deaths, the investigation is either ongoing or a district attorneys decision on whether to file charges is pending, according to DOJ spokesman Johnny Koremenos.
(Reuters) - Chinese car-hailing app Didi Chuxing Technology Co said it raised $7.3 billion in its latest round of funding, including $4.5 billion from new and existing investors, as it battles to fend off Uber's march into China.

In addition, China Merchants Bank has committed to become the lead arranger for a syndicated loan facility to Didi of up to $2.5 billion, the company said.

China Life Insurance Co Ltd also added a long-term debt investment of about $300 million.

Didi intends to use proceeds from the funding round for technology upgrades, big data research and to explore new lines of business.

The latest round of funding includes $1 billion from Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and $600 million from China Life.

The funding round values the company at more than $25 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Didi says it now has $10.5 billion in disposable funds after the closing of the round. Its U.S. rival Uber [UBER.UL] has $11 billion.

(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan and Nikhil Subba in Bengaluru and Liana B. Baker in San Francisco; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Bill Rigby)
Beijing (AFP) - Chinese appliance firm Midea on Thursday said it had begun a cash offer for at least a 30 percent stake of German industrial robotics supplier Kuka, a tender which has stoked controversy in Europe.

Midea -- best known for selling washing machines and air conditioners -- offered 115 euros ($130) per share for Kuka, one of the worlds leading manufacturers of industrial robots, in the voluntary takeover offer.

The deal would make Midea Kuka's biggest shareholder, a possibility that has raised concerns in Europe about the transfer of high-end technology to China, an issue that cast a shadow over a visit to the country this week by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

China has made easy money available to companies, pushing them to invest in foreign targets to increase their know-how and improve their balance sheets as economic growth slows at home.

A growing list of German companies, such as Kion, Putzmeister and KraussMaffei have come under Chinese ownership in recent years.

The ruling Communist party has been encouraging the country's manufacturers to use more robots to make production more efficient as labour costs rise.

The world's second-largest economy is already the leading market for industrial robots, accounting for a quarter of global sales, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

Kuka shares closed at just over 106 euros in Frankfurt trading on Wednesday. They have gained about 26 percent since the deal was first proposed in May, Bloomberg News reported.

Midea stock was suspended from trading mid-day Thursday. The company said its offer ends July 15, with no ceiling on the percentage of shares it could buy.

Midea said when it launched the deal it did not intend to end up in a position of "domination" over the German company.

- 'Saturated market' -

Kuka, based in the German city of Augsburg, describes itself as one of the worlds leading manufacturers of industrial robots and also offers automated systems for manufacturing.

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European media reported that officials in Brussels and Berlin oppose a Chinese takeover bid of Kuka, allegations denied by Berlin.

Merkel told reporters in Beijing this week: "We are looking into a solution which can satisfy both sides".

Midea's global turnover was more than $22 billion last year, according to its website.

Analysts said the investment could give the firm, based in the southern province of Guangdong, technological know-how in an area with growth potential in China while expanding Kuka's customers in the world's workshop.

"As a traditional producer of durable consumer goods, Mideas domestic market is almost saturated," Huang Fusheng, an analyst at China Securities, told AFP last month.

The company "needs to expand industries and transform, so this (investment) is a necessity", he added.
China's total borrowings were more than double its gross domestic product (GDP) last year, a government economist said, warning that debt linkages between the state and industry could be "fatal" for the world's second largest economy.

The country's debt has ballooned as Beijing has made getting credit cheap and easy in an effort to stimulate slowing growth, unleashing a massive, debt-fuelled spending binge.

While the stimulus may help the country post better growth numbers in the near term, analysts say the rebound might be short-lived.

China's borrowings hit 168.48 trillion yuan ($25.6 trillion) at the end of last year, equivalent to 249 percent of the economy's GDP, Li Yang, a senior researcher with top government think tank the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told reporters Wednesday.

The number, while enormous, is still lower than some outside estimates.

Consulting firm the McKinsey Group has said that the country's total debt was likely as high as $28 trillion by mid-2014.

CASS in a report last year said China's debt amounted to 150.03 trillion yuan at the end of 2014, according to previous Chinese media reports.

The most worrying risks lie in the non-financial corporate sector, where the debt-to-GDP ratio was estimated at 156 percent including liabilities of local government financing vehicles, Li said.

Many of the companies in question are state-owned firms that borrowed heavily from government-backed banks and so problems with the sector could ultimately trigger "systemic risks" in the economy, he said.

"The gravity of China's non-financial corporate (debt) is that if problems occur with it, China's financial system will have problems immediately," Li said.

He added that the problem will also affect state coffers because Chinese banks are "closely linked to the government".

"It's a fatal issue in China. Because of such a link, it is probably more urgent for China than other countries to resolve the debt problem," he said.

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Speaking earlier this week, David Lipton, first deputy managing director with the International Monetary Fund, also singled out China's corporate borrowing as a major concern, warning addressing the issue is "imperative to avoid serious problems down the road".

Despite the concerns, China is having difficulty kicking its credit addiction. On Wednesday, the People's Bank of China announced that new loans extended by banks jumped to 985.5 billion yuan last month, up from 555.6 billion yuan in April.

The country's economy grew 6.9 percent last year, the slowest rate in a quarter of a century, and weakening economic figures have signalled the slowdown has continued this year.
A lesbian woman in China has successfully moved to sue the government over textbooks that describe homosexuality as a psychological disorder, with a court reportedly accepting her case against the countrys ministry of education.

The 21-year-old woman, who goes by the pseudonym Qui Bai, discovered the textbooks at Guanghzhous Sun Yat Sen University while looking for information on homosexuality in 2014, the BBC reports. She filed the first of what would be three lawsuits against the ministry soon after, telling Chinese news site Sixth Tone, I dont want discrimination permeating the school I live in and the materials I use every day.

But she was persuaded to drop the suit and file a complaint with the ministry instead; her letters went unanswered. Her second suit in April this year was rejected on the grounds that the ministrys failure to address her complaint did not impede her rights. On Tuesday, Quis third lawsuit  which states, as a current university student, the plaintiff has a direct interest in the textbook materials  was accepted by the First Intermediate Peoples Court of Beijing.

Although China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997 and removed it from the countrys official list of mental disorders in 2001, gay people are still often stigmatized. In another lawsuit filed earlier this week, a 37-year-old man said he was beaten and drugged at a mental hospital as part of forced conversion therapy after revealing his sexual orientation to his family and seeking a divorce from his wife.

[BBC]
The U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State is failing to limit the extremist groups ability to carry out terror attacks around the world, CIA Director John Brennan admitted Thursday. Despite presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trumps demands, Brennan said that does not justify bringing back so-called enhanced interrogation techniques  the CIAs euphemism for torture.

In the wake of deadly Islamic State attacks in Paris and Brussels and massacres inspired by the group in Orlando and San Bernardino, Trump has called for removing limits on the interrogation methods available to the CIA. They can chop off heads or drown people in heavy steel cages and we cant waterboard, Trump said in the aftermath of the March 22 bombings in Brussels. We have to change our laws so we can fight at least on an almost equal basis.

When asked Thursday how he would respond if he was ordered by a future president to bring back interrogation methods that amount to torture, Brennan said he would flatly refuse. The question from Democratic Sen Ron Wyden of Oregon seemed to clearly be about Trumps pro-torture stance, but neither Wyden nor Brennan explicitly mentioned the mogul by name. I certainly, while I am director of CIA, have no intention of bringing such a program back and would not engage in EITs such as waterboarding and other things  ever, Brennan told Wyden.

Immediately after taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama banned the use of torture in interrogations. The policy reform was shaped in part by Brennan, who worked on the incoming presidents intelligence transition team and then served as his top homeland security aide in the White House.

Earlier this week, the CIA declassified a series of transcripts that describe in graphic detail the agencys interrogation methods.

But nearly 15 years after the 9/11 attacks, the politics on torture may be shifting amid a resilient terrorist threat in the Islamic State. During his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan said the Islamic State is likely plotting additional attacks against the West.

Story continues

We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks, he said, using an alternate name for the extremist group based in Syria and Iraq. ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West. And the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel.

While the U.S.-led campaign has won territorial gains against the Islamic State and has reduced its income, that effort has not reduced the groups terrorism capability and global reach, Brennan said.

The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower, and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly, Brennan said. In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.

Echoing statements by other administration officials, Brennan said his agency has found no evidence that a foreign terrorist group helped direct last Sundays attack on a gay club in Orlando that killed 49. The gunman, identified by authorities as Omar Mateen, reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic States leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, before carrying out the massacre.

As the United States and its allies have stepped up pressure on Baghdadi and his group, Russia has moved to bolster its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, by deploying troops and planes to Syria. Brennan said Thursday that Syrian and Russian forces have in the last two weeks carried out airstrikes in and around Aleppo at a pace that exceeded totals seen before a February cessation of hostilities agreement. That agreement, Brennan said, is holding by a thread.

Russia has put in place a two-day ceasefire in Aleppo and on Thursday called for a long-term end to hostilities there. Humanitarian groups have urgently called for an end to fighting in the city, which is the site of what they describe as a humanitarian disaster plagued by indiscriminate violence.

Amid this intense unrest in the Middle East, the United States has struck a landmark nuclear agreement with Iran. Asked on Thursday whether the CIA judges that Iran is complying with that deal, Brennan said, So far, so good.

And asked whether a September agreement between China and the United States has ended the theft of intellectual property through hacking, Brennan was blunt in his answer: No. But, he said, the Chinese government is showing signs it is following through on its commitments in that agreement.

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
A beekeeper contacted Grant County Sheriff's Office last week when a couple of suspicious travellers on a remote Jamestown road claimed to be state bee inspectors.

The two white males driving a black Chevrolet SUV stopped at a residence on Plum Hollow Road in the town of Jamestown, west of Highway 61, according to sheriff's reports.

They were there to inspect the resident's bee hives, they said. The resident had sold the hives two years earlier, however. The former beekeeper contacted other beekeepers in the area, who reported no inspectors.

The Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, which regulates beekeeping and has a state apiarist, said its inspectors were not in the area, according to Deputy Vance Vankirk. Nor do they make unannounced inspections, Vankirk said.

"They don't go out to inspect bees, beekeepers have to call them to get inspected," he said.

According to the DATCP, the agency "offers voluntary apiary inspection services as requested by the beekeeper. We also offer inspections for migratory beekeepers needing permits for out-of-state hive movement. Inspections go from May - mid/late June, break during honey flow, then start up again for fall inspections mid-August - October 31."

The bee industry is threatened by a number of environmental influences, but theft is a relatively new one. According to Bee Culture, the magazine of American beekeeping, bee hive theft is on the rise nationally, but especially in California, where hives are rented to, among other farmers, almond growers to aid in pollination.

Vankirk released an alert via the sheriff's office seeking information on the two men. He can be contacted at 608-723-2157.
BANGKOK, June 16 (Reuters) - CIMB Thai Bank Pcl is targeting 20 percent growth this year in fees from underwriting bonds, merger advice and investment products, in a strategic shift towards non-interest income as appetite for credit in Thailand wanes, its CEO said.

Thailand's economy is underperforming regional peers as consumers and small firms pay off debts accrued under a populist government toppled by the military in 2014. Growth is forecast at just over 3 percent for 2016, up from 2.8 percent in 2015.

"The economy will continue to be quite sluggish," CIMB Thai Chief Executive Subhak Siwaraksa told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. "We have adjusted our business strategy. You have to recognise that as a bank now we do more than loans."

CIMB Thai Bank, a unit of Malaysia's CIMB Group Holding Bhd , is Thailand's ninth-biggest lender by assets.

Revenue generated from the non-interest side of the business accounted for about 40 percent of the firm's total, Subhak said. The firm is one of Thailand's top-two bond underwriters and has about 50 percent of the market in structured products, he said.

CIMB Thai still expected to grow its retail loan portfolio 10 percent this year, and corporate loans by 10-15 percent, he said, even with relatively slow economic growth.

The bank's bad loan portfolio should peak in 2017 at around 4 percent, he said, up from below 3 percent now. (Reporting by Khettiya Jittapong and Simon Webb; Additional reporting by Manunphattr Dhanananphorn; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
The target price of Cisco Systems, Inc. CSCO was recently cut by more than 8% to $32 from $35 by investment firm Goldman Sachs. In addition, analysts downgraded the stocks rating to Neutral from Buy.

Following the downgrade, Cisco was down 1.07% to $28.65.

Why the Downgrade?

Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski remains concerned that Ciscos earnings growth might slow down in the near term. Jankowski believes that increasing competition from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks will lower Ciscos earnings growth.

Jankowski said, we believe HPE now has a much more rounded networking portfolio with the Aruba asset, as well as a much stronger focus on enterprise IT infrastructure. Also HPEs leadership in servers and significant presence in storage (where Cisco only participates through partnerships rather than directly) can give it a competitive advantage in situations where the customer is looking for bundled solutions. In the data center segment, we see Juniper as a more meaningful competitor.

In addition to increased competition, the analyst remains concerned about the significant increase in management turnover over the last few months. This could lead to execution risks, which could hurt the profits for the company.

Though Cisco's shift to a more recurring revenue model and its increasing market share in the Internet of Things market remain positives for the long run, the analyst does not expect any tangible earnings growth in the near term.She expects the company to continue to struggle in the near future due to competitive pressure and poor execution.

CISCO SYSTEMS Price

CISCO SYSTEMS Price | CISCO SYSTEMS Quote

Bottom Line

Cisco Systems is the leading IP-based networking company. It also offers other products and services to service providers, companies, commercial users and individuals.

Despite intensifying competition from several smaller players, Cisco remains strong in its domain. Though we continue to believe that a certain amount of market share erosion is inevitable as competitors start making aggressively priced products of similar quality and customers think about second sourcing, it will take a lot to make a significant dent in Ciscos revenues. On the other hand, expansion into relatively under-penetrated markets will continue to drive Ciscos growth.

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Stocks to Consider

Some stocks that have been performing well in the same space are Netgear Inc. NTGR, Radcom Ltd. RDCM and Digi International Inc. DGII. While Netgear and Radcom sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Digi International has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

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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Traders positioning for more possible declines in Citigroup.



optionMONSTER's monitoring program shows that 10,000 Weekly 41 puts expiring on July 1 were purchased for $1.16 to $1.23. Volume was more than 360 times open interest at the strike, which indicates new money was put to work.



Long puts lock in the price where a stock can be sold, so they make money if shares decline. Investors use them to hedge long positions or to speculate on a drop. (See our Education section)



C is off 1.5 percent to $41.38 in morning trading and is down 8 percent in the last week. The banking giant's last quarterly report on April 15 was bullish, and its next earnings numbers are scheduled for release before the market opens on July 15.



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By Kate and Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - There is no conclusive evidence that drinking coffee causes cancer, the World Health Organization's cancer agency said on Wednesday in a reverse of its previous warning, but it also said all "very hot" drinks are probably carcinogenic. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) had previously rated coffee as "possibly carcinogenic" but has changed its mind. It now says its latest review found "no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect" of coffee drinking and pointed to some studies showing coffee may actually reduce the risk of developing certain types of cancer. "(This) does not show that coffee is certainly safe ... but there is less reason for concern today than there was before," Dana Loomis, the deputy head of IARC's Monograph classification department told a news conference. At the same time, however, IARC presented other scientific evidence which suggests that drinking anything very hot - around 65 degrees Celsius or above - including water, coffee, tea and other beverages, probably does cause cancer of the oesophagus. Lyon-based IARC, which last year prompted headlines worldwide by saying processed meat can cause cancer, reached its conclusions after reviewing more than 1,000 scientific studies in humans and animals. There was inadequate evidence for coffee to be classified as either carcinogenic or not carcinogenic. IARC had previously put coffee as a "possible carcinogen" in its 2B category alongside chloroform, lead and many other substances. The U.S. National Coffee Association welcomed the change in IARC's classification as "great news for coffee drinkers". The Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee, whose members are six of the major European coffee companies - illycaffe, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Lavazza, Nestle , Paulig, and Tchibo - said IARC had found "no negative relationship between coffee consumption and cancer". LET IT COOL In its evaluation of very hot drinks, IARC said animal studies suggest carcinogenic effects probably occur with drinking temperatures of 65 Celsius or above. Some experiments with rats and mice found "very hot" liquids, including water, could promote the development of tumours, it said. The agency said studies of hot drinks such as mate, an infusion consumed mainly in South America, tea and other drinks in several countries including China, Iran, Japan and Turkey, found the risk of oesophageal cancer "may increase with the temperature of the drink" above 65 Celsius. "These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of oesophageal cancer and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible," said IARC's director, Christopher Wild. Oesophageal cancer is the eighth most common cause of cancer worldwide and one of the main causes of cancer death, with around 400,000 deaths recorded in 2012. The WHO's official spokesman in Geneva, Gregory Hartl, stressed that smoking and drinking alcohol were among the most serious risk factors for oesophageal cancer and urged people to focus on reducing these as a priority. He said IARC's evaluation of hot drinks was based on limited available evidence in humans and animals and more research is needed. "We say: be prudent, let hot drinks cool down," he told Reuters, adding that the WHO's advice was to "not consume foods or drinks when they are at a very hot - scalding hot - temperature". Drinking very hot beverages is now classified as probably carcinogenic in IARC's group 2A category, alongside red meat and nitrogen mustard. But David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said he was concerned that IARC's review would confuse people. "Last year the IARC said that bacon is carcinogenic, but it became clear that when eaten in moderation it is not very risky. In the case of very hot drinks, the IARC concludes they are probably hazardous, but can't say how big the risk might be," he said in an emailed comment. "This may be interesting science, but makes it difficult to construct a sensible response." (Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Pravin Char)
(credit: Senator Claire McCaskill)

(credit: Senator Claire McCaskill)

The case of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer recently found guilty of sexual assault, has brought renewed attention to the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. Turner was prosecuted in California criminal court for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on Stanfords campus. The jury found him guilty of three felony offenses, and the judge sentenced him to a controversial six months in prison.

But not all cases on college campuses become criminal cases; some are handled by schools. And recently, the U.S. Department of Educations Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has scrutinized over 100 universitiesincluding Stanfordfor mishandling sexual assault cases. As a result, OCR issued new guidelines for schools to follow, and many revised their procedures accordingly. Overall, these efforts, combined with improvements in reporting under the Clery Act, have helped change attitudes toward sexual violence and protect victims. But some argue that these new systems now over-correct and fail to safeguard the rights of students accused of sexual assaulta serious accusation with often devastating consequences. This post explores some of the legal issues underlying these controversies.

Sexual assault as sex discrimination

The OCR enforces civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in programs that receive federal funding, including universities. Sex discrimination is prohibited by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Alexander v. Yale (1980), and the U.S. Supreme Court, in cases like David v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), established that acts of sexual harassment or violence constitute sex discrimination under Title IX.

Adopting this interpretation, OCR issued guidelines for Title IX schools to follow to maintain their federal funding. In 2011, OCR issued an updated guidance reiterating that schools must take immediate and effective steps to end sexual harassment and sexual violence if a school knows or reasonably should know of student harassment creating a hostile environment. But without providing opportunity for notice or comment, OCR mandated several procedural requirements, such as a preponderance of the evidence standard for adjudicating cases. The guidance did state that schools must provide due process to the alleged perpetrator. Whether that happens in practice, though, is the subject of debate.

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Due process issues in campus sexual assault cases

In a criminal trial, constitutional provisions such as the Fifth Amendments protection against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendments right to a speedy and public trial ensure the rights of the accused and the integrity of the criminal justice process. Most constitutional protections for criminal defendants also have been incorporated to apply against the states.

During a school investigation, however, constitutional protections may not apply with full force. Procedural protections often depend on the particular situation. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) explains: In general, the more serious the charge and potential penalty, the greater the protections that must be given to you. This sliding scale explains why students in campus disciplinary hearings dont have the same rights as criminal defendants. But other protections do come into play. For instance, public schools students are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and may not be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.

The Supreme Court, in Goss v. Lopez (1975), held that public school students must be afforded due process before being deprived of their education. States do not have to provide a free public education, but those that do grant to students a legitimate entitlement to a public education that constitutes a property interest. That interest is protected by the Due Process Clause and may not be taken away for misconduct without adherence to the minimum procedures required by that Clausenamely, notice and an opportunity to be heard. Due process also forbids arbitrary deprivations of liberty, and as the Court held in Wisconsin v. Constantineau (1971), a person has a liberty interest in protecting his good name and reputation. As Goss noted, disciplinary action brought by a school can damage students reputation, their standing with their fellow pupils and their teachers as well as interfere with later opportunities for higher education and employment. In Goss, a ten-day suspension from public school was not a de minimis punishment and could not be imposed without due process protectionwhich meant that the student must be given oral or written notice of the charges against him and, if he denies them, an explanation of the evidence the authorities have and an opportunity to present his version. (Private schools, by contrast, have more leeway to conduct investigations and to suspend or expel students.)

Some warn that the dangerous procedural short circuits initiated by the OCR guidance can violate these due process rights. The case of Drew Sterrett at the University of Michigan is one example. Sterrett had a sexual encounter with a fellow classmate who later accused him of sexual assault. In investigating the claim, the school did not provide him with any notice of the charges in writing and did not allow him to question his accuser or know the details of any witnesses against him. He was suspended for several years. Sterrett sued the University for violating his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. After mandatory mediation with the school, the finding was overturned and his transcript was cleared of all disciplinary action.

As Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet has argued, by denying the accused basic due process protections, these policies can create a backlash against the very cause they are fighting for. Bartholet and other faculty members objected to Harvards issuance of a new sexual harassment policy in 2014 after an OCR investigation. In an op-ed, the professors urged Harvard to rethink the policy, arguing that the new procedures lacked the most basic elements of fairness and due process and were overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.

Yet others support the tough approach. As Dana Bolger, founding co-director of Know Your IX, a student campaign against gender violence, explained at a Senate hearing: This intolerable status quoin which survivors of gender-based violence are still unable to access their right to educationdemands a strong federal response.

Other options

A pending bill in Congress, the Safe Campus Act, proposes an alternative solution: requiring schools to refer all cases to the criminal justice system. Schools instead could focus resources on working to prevent sexual assault.

But even in criminal court, sexual assault cases are complicated, often involving conflicting stories, little evidence, and no witnesses. (In the Turner case, there actually were eyewitnessestwo graduate students who intervened.) Janet Napolitano has argued that, [r]ather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system, policymakers should ask if more work should be done to improve that systems handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases. Others point out that campus adjudication is not necessarily a substitute or a parallel to the criminal justice system, but rather a separate antidiscrimination right protecting students access to educational opportunities at their schools.

In either respect, both courts and universities must try to decide each case fairly, to balance the rights of the accused with the rights of the victim.

Lana Ulrich is associate in-house counsel at the National Constitution Center.

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MEDELLIN, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombia's leftist FARC rebel group is prepared to return to the battlefield, especially in urban areas, if peace negotiations with the government fall apart, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Thursday. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have been holding peace talks for three-and-a-half years in an effort to put an end to more than five decades of war in the Andean country. "We have ample information that they are prepared to return to war and urban war, which is much more destructive than rural war," Santos said at the World Economic Forum's Latin America meeting in Medellin. "That is why it is so important we reach a deal," the president said, adding he was confident a peace accord would be ready soon. The FARC declared a unilateral ceasefire nearly a year ago and the government has halted bombings on rebel camps while the talks continue. The two sides last week announced a deal on joint eradication of illicit crops. (Reporting by Nelson Bocanegra,; Writing by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by James Dalgleish)
C ado res nts who prefer their Sour Patch Kids and gummy bears laced with a little marijuana may want to to load up on the little candies Supermarket Sweep style.

Colorado governor John Hickenlooper recently signed House Bill 1436, which will make weed-infused gummies illegal starting July 1, High Times reported.

We're getting sober.

Hickenlooper, who's been working to shed the reputation of "stoner governor," approved the bill in order to prevent children from accidentally ingesting the candies. Not all gummy shapes will be banned, however  just ones that are "shaped in a manner to entice a child," the bill states.

"While common shapes like bears and fish that mimic mainstream candy will be banned, cannabis gummies shaped like stars, weed leaves or other geometrical shapes are still OK to produce," High Times wrote.

Then again, who's to say rhombus-shaped candy won't pique the interest of a little toddler? Is this basically a call for edible makers to get more creative?

Colorado legalized the commercial sale of cannabis edibles in 2014, according to the Denver Post. Since the move, the state has issued a number of regulations to curb accidental ingestions. Manufacturers must ensure a cannabis product is properly marked with a "THC" label, and if the item can't be physically marked, it cannot contain more than a single serving (10 mg) of THC, 9 News reported.

House Bill 1436 is the state's first official ban on a specific cannabis edible, however. Critics of the new legislation may argue that the bill is a bit too harsh: In 2014, the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center received 45 calls related to kids under the age of eight being accidentally exposed to cannabis, Alternet reported. Consider that in 2011, 1,495 calls were made to the same poison control center in regards to children being exposed household cleaning products.

The bill is significant for any edible gummy lover: Many states take cues from Colorado when crafting their own cannabis-related legislation. If all goes according to past patterns, this bill will likely impact the way places like California and Washington regulate edibles.

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While the whole shape thing seems a bit arbitrary, creating legislation around candy-colored products may be the smart move when it comes to preventing curious kids from putting them in their mouths. Colorful laundry detergent pods, for example, have become a serious risk for children. One children's hospital in Alabama has received more than 700 phone calls regarding kids ingesting this product since 2012, the Alabama Medical Group reported.

Maybe Colorado should just require the THC-filled candies to come in less eye-catching colors. O
A search warrant unsealed on Wednesday confirmed that police got a hit that tentatively matched DNA from the body of a UW student who was stabbed to death in her apartment in April 2008 to a man who was reported to be in the area that day.

The apparent DNA match from clothing worn by Brittany Zimmermann to David Kahl then led police to interview a friend of Kahl, who claimed that Kahl had confessed to him that he killed Zimmermann, according to the search warrant, filed in Dane County Circuit Court.

Zimmermanns parents, Kevin and Jean Zimmermann, stated in February that police had gotten a DNA match in the case but declined to identify the person whose DNA was the match.

They said Wednesday that they hadnt seen the search warrant and didnt know what was in it.

At this time the only comment we have to make is that we pray this information brings someone forward with information that will allow the Madison Police Department to file charges regarding Brittanys murder, the couple wrote in an email.

Kahl, 50, was interviewed early on by police after Zimmermanns April 2, 2008, death at her apartment at 517 W. Doty St. Neighbors reported that on the day Zimmermann, 21, was killed, a person later identified as Kahl had gone door-to-door asking for money to repair a non-existent tire.

According to the search warrant, police received a report from the state Crime Lab on Dec. 9, 2014, indicating that a DNA profile taken from the right sleeve of a shirt worn by Zimmermann on April 2, 2008, had hit the DNA profile of Kahl.

The warrant doesnt state what sort of material comprised the DNA sample  whether it was blood, skin cells or something else  and it doesnt state how strong of a match there was between Kahl and the sample.

The same day they received the report, police interviewed Kahls mother, the search warrant states, and learned that one of Kahls close friends was a man named Andrew Scoles. Investigators located Scoles at the Gilmer Federal Correctional Institution in Glenville, West Virginia, where he was serving a 20-month sentence for gun possession by a felon that was issued in U.S. District Court in Madison.

During an interview on Dec. 17, 2014, Scoles told police that he was close to Kahl, calling him his brother. Scoles said that Kahl had told him what happened to Zimmermann, but Scoles refused to provide details, saying that he didnt want to provide any more information without getting some kind of deal in exchange.

I can tell you that Dave broke down in tears one morning and confessed to me what all happened if I can remember right, Scoles told police. Hypothetically he broke down and told me what all happened.

The search warrant sought emails in Scoles account at the prison, including any he sent or received, along with deleted and draft messages and any messages Scoles had saved. It also sought data related to telephone calls Scoles made from prison, and any and all recorded conversations.

The warrant was signed in February 2015 and filed in court under seal after the requested records were received by police in March 2015. The warrant has been resealed twice.

In an affidavit seeking the continuation of the seal, filed in December, Detective Sergeant David Miller wrote that Scoles was released from prison in October and that Miller had been contacted by Scoles on Dec. 4, 2015. In that conversation, Scoles said he was willing to provide information he had regarding Kahl if Miller could meet some conditions. The process of determining whether the conditions could be met was ongoing as of December.

Madison Police spokesman Joel DeSpain said he could not comment on where the situation with Scoles stands now. He would only say that the Zimmermann case is an active, ongoing investigation and that police remain committed to bringing those responsible for her death to justice.

Scoles lawyer, federal defender Joseph Bugni, also said he couldnt comment on the case. Scoles remains on supervised release after serving his prison sentence, but federal prosecutors are seeking revocation of his supervised release after Scoles arrest in May on an unrelated matter.

Kahl is currently at Dodge Correctional Institution. He had been living in Madison after serving a two-year prison sentence for his sixth drunken driving offense, but was sent back to prison after he was arrested on March 31 for his seventh offense. At the time, he was still serving the extended supervision portion of his sentence.

Interviewed by WKOW-TV in February, Kahl admitted being at Zimmermanns apartment on April 2, 2008, but he said he did not kill her.
Just days after Disney announced that it was donating $1 million to the OneOrlando fund for Orlando shooting victims, Comcast NBCUniversal revealed that theyre following suit.

NBCUniversal will also be donating $1 million to the fund, which was set up by Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer to help those affected by the shooting at Pulse nightclub on Sunday that left 49 people dead. In a note to staff, NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said they had given a lot of thought to what we could do as a company to honor and support the victims and acknowledge this profound loss.

Burke also added that this donation was to support non-profits that are providing services to the victims and families, as well as working with the LGBTQ, Hispanic and other affected communities.

Tom Williams, CEO of Universal Parks and Resort, took to the Universal Orlando blog to acknowledge the partnership with OneOrlando and address the recent decision.

Like so many other organizations and families in Orlando, those of us at Universal Orlando have lost people who were close to us  team members and members of our extended family. We are doing everything we can to take care of the families of those we lost and of all our team members as they grieve, he wrote. In fact, we will be holding a private remembrance event tonight that will involve Universal theme parks across the globe.

Williams also urged readers to keep all the victims of this tragedy in your thoughts, prayers and actions.

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modern family parents

If you've ever wondered what to say to a child whose eating habits could use a bit of improvement, consider this:

Commenting on a child's weight probably isn't going to help. If anything, some recent research highlighted on Thursday by the New York Times suggests it tends to make things worse.

For their study, researchers asked 501 young women between the ages of 20 and 35 questions about their body image. They also asked them to remember how frequently their parents made comments about their weight.

The women who said they remembered their parents' comments were more likely to say they also felt they needed to lose a significant amount of weight  regardless of how much they actually weighed.

The finding is striking in part because it isn't so much about how frequently a parent made comments about weight or even about how critical or harsh their comments were. What mattered the most was whether or not the young women remembered that their parents had many such comments at all. An occasional comment, made by a mother at a particularly vulnerable time in a child's life, for example, appeared to be no less significant than daily disparaging remarks from a father.

"A parent's comment about their daughter's food intake and weight, however well-intended, may have longterm repercussions," the authors of the study write.

woman eating at beach

Women, food, and body image

As with any study, this one has its limitations. For starters, the researchers only looked at women. This was in part, the researchers write, because other studies suggest that women still play the role of "nutrition gatekeeper" in most American households. (Research also shows that overall, women are exposed to more media-driven messages about thinness and body weight than men.) The paper also only included women whose families had lived in the US for more than two generations.

But its findings about negative comments from family members seem to square with other studies.

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girl eating hot dog ketchup food

For example, a nine-year-long, 2014 study of thousands of 10-year-old girls published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that close to 60% of the participants had already been told they were "too fat" by age 10. Nine years later, those girls were more likely to be obese than those who had not been labeled "too fat," regardless of how much they actually weighed at age 10. When the remarks came from family members, they appeared to have stronger effects than when they came from outsiders.

More than just what you say

And while the current study looked at parents' comments about body weight, research suggests that other factors  from what parents eat to how they talk about food  may play an equally strong role in how young people feel about their bodies.

Findings from a 2012 study, for example, suggested that parents' own eating and fitness behaviors can strongly influence those of their children. Similarly, a 2003 study found that the children of parents who ate more fruits and vegetables  and had them in the home  tended to also eat more of these foods.

NOW WATCH: The simplest way to get  and stay  happy, according to psychologists





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Brazzaville (AFP) - General Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko, who ran unsuccessfully against Congo's President Denis Sassou Nguesso, has been charged with breaching state security, his lawyer said Thursday.

Mokoko was in custody in Brazzaville after being charged with "breaching internal state security and the illegal detention of weapons of war and munitions", Yvon Eric Ibouanga told AFP.

The general, who was military chief of the oil-rich African nation from 1987 to 1993, won less than 14 percent in a March election which returned Sassou Nguesso to the presidency with more than 60 percent of the vote.

He was detained on Tuesday by security services for questioning and was seen by several witnesses arriving handcuffed at the prosecutor's office Thursday.

He had quit as a peace and security advisor to Sassou Nguesso in February in order to challenge the strongman's 32-year grip on power, and has been living under surveillance at his home in central Brazzaville since the vote.

"The arrest of general Mokoko is a troubling and very embarrassing matter", said Clement Mierassa, president of the opposition Social Democrats party (PSDC).

Mokoko "has been harassed since ran a good campaign and did well at the polls during the last presidential election," Mierassa added.

Mokoko has been accused of discussing plans to remove Sassou Nguesso from power with a man presenting himself as a French intelligence agent in a video filmed in 2007.

He told AFP in March that he had been "trapped" but had resolved the video charges "inside the family" with the head of state and was therefore surprised it had come up again.
A spinoff movie of "The Conjuring 2" is confirmed to be in the works reports The Hollywood Reporter.

Entitled "The Nun", the spinoff will see the team behind "The Conjuring 2" reunite for the project. David Leslie Johnson will again be working on the script, with director James Wan and producer Peter Safran joining him.

The news comes following this week's opening success of "The Conjuring 2", which has already grossed over $100 million worldwide in just five days of release.

The movie was the No. 1 film in North America and internationally this past weekend outside of China. It was also the biggest opening weekend ever for a horror film in 30 markets including Australia, Mexico, Brazil, all of Latin America and most markets in Asia.
Which came first  the chicken or the cop?

Even though a Texas police officer was hot on this chicken's tail, it appears the winged perp may have gotten away this time.

Read: Seagull Turns Bright Orange After Falling Into Open Vat of Chicken Tikka Masala

Captain Garivey at the Freeport Police Department told InsideEdition.com Officer Curtis Land was called in after a chicken was spotted running loose downtown, and animal control officers were already off for the day.

Though the police department still doesn't know how the fowl got there, Garivey joked that it's no wonder the chicken scurried after being found near a Church's Chicken.

"Some of my detectives, they're making fun that it was probably running away from the Church's Chicken," Garivey said.

Read: Man Miraculously Wakes Up From 48 Day Coma and Immediately Says, 'I Want Taco Bell'

In a video posted by the Freeport Police Department, Land could be seen running after the bird as it clucked itself across the gas station.

Read: Married Couple Arrested For Having Sex in Hardee's Parking Lot During Breakfast Rush

The cop chased the chicken for four or five minutes before the bird disappeared into the night, and became yet another suspect "missing in action," Garivey said.

Despite the classic joke, Garivey assured that the chicken was not running across the road: "People would have called concerned if it had been."

Watch: Man Sees Pink Elephant in South Africa... And He's Not Hallucinating

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Gov. Scott Walker on Wednesday attributed his low job approval rating to the medias focus on negative news.

The latest Marquette Law School Poll found those who viewed his job performance favorably dipped below 40 percent again after it had climbed above that threshold in March.

Respondents also viewed the states direction and budget situation more negatively than positively, though the trend is moving in a positive direction.

Asked about why that might be during a phone call with reporters from Mexico where he is leading a trade mission, Walker blamed the media.

The headlines are always about negative and bad things so its no wonder that people feel that way in the polls, Walker said.

The latest poll found 39 percent approve of Walkers job performance, returning that rating to where it was for most of the past year during his short-lived run for president before it bumped up to 43 percent in March.

Half of respondents said the state was headed in the wrong direction while 46 percent said it was headed in the right direction, a slight improvement from February when 52 percent said it was headed in the wrong direction.

About 37 percent said the state budget is in worse shape than a few years ago, compared with 31 percent who said its in better shape and 25 percent who said its about the same. Thats almost identical to the average of polls over the past year.

Walker has been traveling around the state extensively since dropping out of the presidential race in September, conducting dozens of private, invite-only meetings with local elected officials and members of the public.

Generally we hear good things (about the direction of the state) at the listening sessions, Walker said.

The media have not been allowed to attend the private meetings.

Poll director Charles Franklin said more polling data over the next several months will better indicate whether the March approval bump for Walker was an anomaly.
The reconciliation continues!

Courteney Cox responded to her former fiance Johnny McDaid's sweet birthday wish for her 52nd birthday -- "Wishing my beautiful @CourteneyCox the happiest birthday!" -- via Twitter on Wednesday, writing, "Thank you my love!"

WATCH: Courteney Cox Steps Out With Ex-Fiance Johnny McDaid for First Red Carpet Appearance Since Reconciling

The Friends star and her music producer beau, 39, ended their engagement in late 2015, but have been spotted out showing affection for each other since April, leading some to believe the couple has reconciled.

"They really care about each other and they're spending time together," Cox's rep told ET in April, after the pair was seen kissing in London's Heathrow Airport.

PICS: Courteney Cox and Former Fiance Johnny McDaid Spotted Out on Easter -- Are They Back Together?

Later, in May, the pair attended the BMI Pop Awards in Beverly Hills, California, together, arm in arm.

Watch the video below for more on the couple's possible rekindled romance.

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By Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Tatiana Bautzer

SAO PAULO, June 16 (Reuters) - Credit Suisse Group AG said an internal investigation has found no evidence that a former banker, Sergio Firmeza Machado, used his position at the bank to help his father funnel illicit campaign donations to Brazilian politicians as part of a sweeping corruption scandal.

Firmeza Machado's father Sergio, a former senior executive at state oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA , has told prosecutors he helped raise at least 100 million reais ($29 million) in legal and illegal funding for political parties as head of Transpetro SA, the company's ship leasing and gas transport unit, between 2003 and 2015.

The older Machado avoided jail after signing a plea deal in the so-called "Operation Car Wash" probe, which is investigating political kickbacks, money-laundering and graft at state firms that began in 2003.

The banker and his two brothers also cut similar plea deals, helping shed light on how their father funneled payments to ruling coalition parties and senior politicians.

In excerpts of a plea deal made public by the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Firmeza Machado admitted opening an account at HSBC Holdings Plc's Swiss unit around 2006 to help his brother Expedito receive "donations" from their father that came from bribes paid by Transpetro contractors.

Firmeza Machado also said his brother sought his advice on how to reinvest money that contractors wired to the account. He acknowledged maintaining occasional contact with members of the companies that paid bribes.

However, Firmeza Machado testified that none of the events under investigation were related to his job at Credit Suisse.

Red flags popped up inside Credit Suisse about a year ago when Firmeza Machado, 38, discussed with senior staff the legal situation of his father, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

After months of checks in which Firmeza Machado's emails, personal investments and activities were analyzed, Credit Suisse staff in Brazil found no sign of wrongdoing, the source added.

Story continues

In a statement to Reuters on Wednesday, Credit Suisse said it conducts regular compliance checks on all employees. Such checks found no evidence of wrongdoing or any sign of conflict between Firmeza Machado's work and the bank's internal rules.

Efforts to contact media representatives for Firmeza Machado were unsuccessful. Rio de Janeiro-based Tortima, Tavares & Borges Advogados, the law firm representing Machado and his children, declined to comment beyond the plea deal.

HSBC did not comment on Firmeza Machado's Swiss account.

ROSE THROUGH RANKS

Sergio Firmeza Machado, who joined Credit Suisse in 2000 when he was 22, left in April as part of a global restructuring of its fixed-income activities.

After starting as a junior analyst, Firmeza Machado rose through the ranks, joining the fixed-income desk in 2004 and becoming an executive director at Credit Suisse's local unit in 2012.

The banker formed part of a team that helped underwrite dozens of loans to companies bracing for Brazil's initial public offering boom between 2005 and 2008.

Staff at Credit Suisse had full knowledge of Firmeza Machado's ties to his father and the Machados were not Credit Suisse clients, the source said.

In the plea deal made public on Wednesday, his father accused interim President Michel Temer of seeking campaign donations stemming from the kickback scheme at Petrobras, as the state oil company is known, for one of his party's mayoral candidates four years ago.

Temer has adamantly denied the older Machado's accusations.

Temer was vice president until last month, when President Dilma Rousseff was suspended from office to face trial in the Senate on charges of breaking budget laws.

Newspapers leaked part of the older Machado's testimony after the Supreme Court validated it in May. His accusations rocked the incoming Temer administration, forcing the early departure of two cabinet ministers.

($1 = 3.4721 Brazilian reais)

(Editing by Daniel Flynn and Tom Brown)
ZURICH (Reuters) - Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) already plans to bring its capital stock in line with new Swiss too-big-to-fail (TBTF) bank rules, it said on Thursday.

In its annual financial stability report, the Swiss National Bank wrote UBS (UBSG.S) and Credit Suisse will likely each need to raise an extra 10 billion Swiss francs (7.32 billion pounds)in capital to meet new leverage requirements. This could come by issuing high-trigger contingent convertible bonds, the SNB said.

In a statement, Credit Suisse said: "We have already announced that, as part of our debt capital programme between now and 2024, we will align our existing contingent capital stock from 18.5 billion Swiss francs (13.56 billion pounds)of high and low trigger instruments to around 15 billion Swiss francs of fully-compliant AT1 (additional tier 1) high-trigger instruments, in line with the SNB's comments today."

(Reporting by Joshua Franklin)
Below is a picture of Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo. Omar, as his friends and family called him, was a Latino man gunned down at an LGBTQ bar in Orlando last weekend. He was 20-years-old.

Today my dear friend Melinda and I had the sad privilege of attending to his grandmother on our flight as she made her journey to Orlando to join her family during this unspeakable time.

Knowing she was making this hard journey alone, JetBlue employees made sure to be at her side every step of the way. Melinda stood quietly by her wheelchair while we waited until it was time to board. Kellie, the gate agent, boarded with her and helped get her settled. Melinda and I gave her a blanket, a pillow, a box of tissues and water so she could be as comfortable as possible. She was understandably distraught, but met us with kindness and gentleness. And gratitude.

But heres where our flight got truly inspiring. I had the idea to pass around a piece of paper to everyone on board and invite them to sign it for this grieving grandmother. I talked it over with Melinda and she started the process from the back of the plane. As we took beverage orders, we whispered a heads up about the plan as we went.

Halfway through, Melinda called me, Kel, I think you should start another paper from the front. Folks are writing PARAGRAPHS. So I did. Then we started one in the middle. Lastly, running out of time on our hour and fifteen minute flight, we handed out pieces of paper to everyone still waiting.

When we gathered them together to present them to her, we didnt have just a sheet of paper covered in names, which is what I had envisioned. Instead, we had page after page after page after page of long messages offering condolences, peace, love and support. There were even a couple of cash donations, and more than a few tears.

When we landed, I made an announcement that the company had emailed to us earlier in the morning to use as an optional addition to our normal landing announcement, which states JetBlue stands with Orlando. Then with her permission and at the request of a couple of passengers, we offered a moment of silence in Omars memory.

As we deplaned, EVERY SINGLE PERSON STOPPED TO OFFER HER THEIR CONDOLENCES. Some just said they were sorry, some touched her hand, some hugged her, some cried with her. But every single person stopped to speak to her, and not a single person was impatient at the slower deplaning process.

I am moved to tears yet again as I struggle to put our experience into words. In spite of a few hateful, broken human beings in this world who can all too easily legally get their hands on mass assault weapons  people ARE kind. People DO care. And through our customers humanity today, and through the generosity of this wonderful company I am so grateful to work for, I am hopeful that someday soon we can rally together to make the world a safer place for all.

I will never forget today. #Orlandoproud
LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - The cost of insuring exposure to debt from Croatia rose to its highest level in more than two months on Thursday ahead of a no-confidence vote that could spell the end of technocrat Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic's government.

Data from Markit showed five-year credit default swaps (CDS) for Croatia rose 7 basis points (bps) from Wednesday's close to 277 bps - the highest level since April 11.

Croatia's Deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Karamarko resigned on Wednesday and said his HDZ party, the biggest in the ruling centre-right coalition, aimed to form a new government after a scheduled vote of no-confidence set for Thursday.

Parliament is expected to back the motion of no-confidence filed by the conservative HDZ.

(Reporting by Karin Strohecker, editing by Sujata Rao)
(Adds details, analyst comment)

By Igor Ilic

ZAGREB, June 16 (Reuters) - Croatia's parliament ousted the government on Thursday in a no-confidence vote put forward by the ruling coalition's biggest party, meaning a snap election will be called if a new cabinet cannot be formed within 30 days.

The party that called the vote, the conservative HDZ, helped install technocrat Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic five months ago but fell out with him over a conflict of interest case involving the HDZ leader, Deputy Prime Minister Tomislav Karamarko.

The HDZ plans to propose Finance Minister Zdravko Maric as prime minister. President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic will start consultations with parliamentary parties on forming a new cabinet on Friday. If no government is formed by the 30-day deadline she must call a snap election.

While the HDZ says it can muster a new majority of at least 76 of parliament's 151 deputies, analysts are sceptical. The HDZ says it has support of 68 at the moment.

"There is just a slight possibility for the HDZ to find a new majority, but I think such a government would be rather unstable and just postpone a snap election, maybe until the end of the year," said political analyst Zarko Puhovski.

At the same time the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats, and its allies say they hope to gather signatures of a majority of deputies to demand parliament be dissolved to pave the way for an election.

Croatia has one of the weakest economies in the European Union, with high unemployment and public debt. A snap election would slow reforms necessary to fix fragile public finances, improve the investment climate and spur growth that has just started to recover after six years of recession from 2009 to 2014.

Next year Croatia faces a tough financial challenge when it has to repay almost 30 billion kuna ($4 billion) in maturing bonds and interest. ($1 = 6.7542 kuna) (Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Zagreb (AFP) - Croatia's government fell Thursday after Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic lost a confidence vote in parliament, in a serious blow to the country's nationalist rulers after only five months in power.

The vote will delay planned reforms in the European Union's newest member, whose economy -- which only last year emerged from a six-year recession -- remains one of EU's weakest.

Cobbled together after indecisive November polls, the fragile coalition has been beset by internal disputes, amid concerns over Croatia's shift to the right.

Speaker Zeljko Reiner said that of those present 125 deputies in the 151-member parliament backed the no confidence motion while 15 were against and two abstained.

If a new government is not formed within 30 days, parliament will be dissolved and the president will call snap elections.

Oreskovic, a former pharmaceutical executive with no party affiliation, came to power pledging to undertake badly-needed economic reforms.

"Initially we all arrived with a common goal to get the economy going," Oreskovic, 50, told reporters after the vote voicing regret over its outcome.

The political crisis, deepened by constant squabbling between the main HDZ party and its junior partner, Most, escalated last month with a conflict of interest affair involving Tomislav Karamarko, the powerful HDZ head and deputy premier.

Most demanded his resignation, while the prime minister called for both Karamarko and Most leader Bozo Petrov -- another deputy premier -- to quit as the coalition descended into chaos.

Oreskovic also rejected a call by HDZ for his own resignation, and the party filed the no confidence motion shortly after, accusing the premier of trying to boost his own political power, instead of dealing with economy.

But, Oreskovic rejected the accusations, saying the motion was tabled as a result of "interests of individuals" -- meaning Karamarko.

"I tried to prevent that. That's my only guilt," he told lawmakers.

Story continues

- Snap elections -

Considered a key figure in government, Karamarko stepped down on Wednesday saying the government's "disfunction is unsustainable".

His resignation came just hours after a national ethnics watchdog ruled he had a conflict of interest due to a business deal between his wife and a lobbyist for Hungary's oil group MOL.

MOL is currently in arbitration with Croatia over its national oil group INA, where it is a major shareholder.

Oreskovic accused HDZ of toppling him because he wanted to resolve the dispute and protect the national interest.

The conservative government, which took over after a four-year rule by the Social Democrats, has come in for strong criticism from local activists over a growing climate of intolerance.

Critics say the authorities have turned a blind eye and even contributed to concerns over a far-right surge, including nostalgia for a pro-Nazi past, which has seen increased pressure on ethnic minorities and the media.

The HDZ, whose popularity ratings have been hit by the oil affair, has expressed confidence it would be able to form a new parliamentary majority, although analysts estimate this could be difficult.

"If by a miracle HDZ succeeds to form a new one it will last only through the summer and there will be snap elections in November," political analyst Zarko Puhovski told AFP.

The opposition was on Thursday pressing for elections to be held as soon as possible and collecting backing among MPs for an immediate dissolution of parliament.

Opinion polls showed that around 60 to 70 percent of Croatians backed an early vote.

Meanwhile, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic was on Friday due to open talks with parliamentary parties to name a new prime minister-designate.

HDZ said earlier their candidate would be outgoing Finance Minister Zdravko Maric, an independent. But, analysts warn that the former top executive with food retailer Agrokor, Croatia's biggest private firm, like Oreskovic lacked political experience.

Earlier this month Croatia suspended the issuing of its eurobonds, with the finance ministry citing "domestic political uncertainties" as the reason.

Also, political risk consultancy Eurasia Group said it was downgrading Croatia's short-term trajectory to negative because the government was likely to collapse in coming weeks, which would lead to a new election in September.
These California dads were prepared to talk about their jobs at the school's career fair, but it was their kids who would give an emotional speech about the most important job of all: Being a father.

Read: Like Father Like Dog? Check Out These Daddy-Doggy Portraits In A Special Father's Day Photoshoot

Firefighters, police officers and investment bankers marched into Pierra Linda School in Camarillo earlier this month with speeches to be presented at a school career day.

Imagine the shock on their face when it was actually their sons and daughters who would be presenting the real speeches.

Principal Robert Waggoner explained to InsideEdition.com that with the help of the students and moms, they invited each dad to join the classroom individually. They each began their speech, but were interrupted within 5 minutes by a teacher.

"We turned it toward the kids, and the kids then made the speech as to why their fathers were so special to them," Waggoner said.

In an emotional video by Kleenex, kids in first to third grade can be seen joining their dads at the front of the room, and reading speeches they prepared, honoring their fathers.

"Dad, you are special and I hope you know that," one boy read. "You have the best job ever and that job is being a dad."

"I miss him when he's at work," one boy read to his dad in uniform.

"He always teaches me a lot, like how to take care of myself and how to be a mighty good man," one boy said with his older sister beside as their dad wipes a tear from his eye. "I feel so special because my dad picked me and my sister to adopt us."

"We had a gentleman that was a police officer," Waggoner later told InsideEdition.com. "Just to see him cry in uniform, I thought that was really touching."

Read: Japanese Boy Who Survived Days in Woods Forgives Father for Leaving Him: 'You Are a Good Dad'

Waggoner explained that the students wrote the speeches with the help of teachers, and moms were the driving force behind keeping the event a secret from their fathers.

Story continues

"One thing that really resonated with me is that small moments are so important in our kids lives," Waggoner said to InsideEdition.com. "I have two kids, and I walked away from that day trying to be a little more cognizant of the small moments."

Watch: Newborn Smiles as She's Placed in Late Father's Gloves: 'He Will Always Be With Us'

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Over the past few decades there has been a slow shift in power away from white males towards other groups of people. That isnt to say that white males are lacking in power at all  because we arent  but conversations about white men and their status have become normal. This coming election season should be an interesting one because the rise in contempt of white male voters has apparently been on the rise, something that many are blaming for the rise of Donald Trump. It seems like Trump is simply taking advantage of these pro-white counterculture movements more than anything, but it is working. Do some research on your own, look at the comments on sites like this on articles about women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people.

Everybody is angry and if the internet could convey shouting beyond just caps, wed all have blown eardrums by now. While you might not be watching The Daily Show anymore (shame, really), they still have their fingers on the pulse of whats going on and this episode of The Daily Show really honed in on the medias obsession with talking about how coveted white voters really are. Youre right, Jordan, Desi Lydic said. 2016 is the year that white people have a voice.

The media is telling everyone that white people are not only important, that they are vital to this years election cycle because they feel like they dont matter. Thats right. Opting for two white people in Jordan Klepper and Desi Lydic to anchor tonights show over the South African Trevor Noah makes an incredibly strong point even stronger. Trevor Noah coming out to end their white power chant really was just the cherry on the top of the whole, ridiculous segment.
Days after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, more than 3,500 people gathered to pray for the countrys future Wednesday at the state Capitol during a rally led by the Rev. Franklin Graham.

Many of Grahams recent posts on social media have addressed the weekend shooting in Orlando, Florida, but he spent only a small portion of the rally directly addressing the attack.

Graham, the son of the Rev. Billy Graham, is on a 50-state tour of capitals called Decision America. His visit to Madison was the the 28th stop on the tour, following a Tuesday event in Springfield, Missouri, that was the first since the shooting.

At the Madison rally Graham said the attack was the result of the country becoming a godless nation and asked the crowd members, many of them clutching American flags, to pray for the victims.

In a Facebook post published a few hours earlier, however, Graham criticized President Barack Obama after he denounced presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumps calls to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S.

A Muslim can murder 49 innocent people in a gay club, and you still defend the religion of Islam, Graham wrote. But a Christian who refuses to bake a homosexuals wedding cake endures prosecution, financial ruin, and nationwide shaming because of their faith, and you stay silent!

It is incomprehensible that you will not acknowledge the dangers of Islams teachings in order to protect the American people under your watch, he wrote.

But the majority of Grahams message at the rally centered around encouraging Christians to participate more actively in the political process.

Graham said he has no hope in the Democratic or Republican parties and urged his listeners to instead put their faith in God. He encouraged the crowd to vote for leaders that stand for biblical truth or to run for office themselves.

I wont tell you who to vote for, he said. God will tell you who to vote for. Im just telling you to go out and vote.

Donna Spake traveled with a group from Calvary Community Church in Williams Bay to hear Graham speak.

He wasnt anti-anything. He was for this country, for praying to save this country, she said. He was for getting out and voting no matter what political party you support.

Still, Grahams presence at the Capitol wasnt without contention. Some attendees held signs calling Grahams audience bigots, while others waved gay pride flags in response to some of Grahams previous comments about the gay community.

Calli Miller, who works for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, said the group protested the rally in order to support the LGBT community and advocate for the separation of faith and politics.

We do not believe politicians should be voting according to their religion. They should be voting according to the needs of their constituents, she said.

Protesters did not interrupt Grahams speech.

Just a few blocks away, roughly 200 people gathered at Grace Episcopal Church for a gathering promoting religious diversity organized in response to Grahams event. The Rev. Paula Harris, pastor of St. Lukes Episcopal Church in Madison and the events moderator, said Grahams views are Islamophobic, xenophobic and homophobic.

The gathering included speakers representing Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Rabbi Jonathan Biatch of Temple Beth El in Madison, said it allowed other community members to respond to Grahams message in a non-confrontational way.

Religious diversity is healthy and its part of the lifeblood of our nation, he said. Religious exclusivity is disabling and it is much more helpful ... to celebrate diversity, to accept diversity and to live with that mindset.
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f117966%2fdaniel_radcliffe_cursed_child

LONDON  Thousands of people will be queueing up to watch Harry Potter and the Cursed Child  the official eighth story in the saga  when the play opens in London's Palace Theatre on July 31  but Daniel Radcliffe won't be among them.

During a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the Harry Potter film actor explained why he might give the show a miss  at least for the time being.

SEE ALSO: 6 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' clues that won't spoil the story

"I want to see the show," said Radcliffe. "I genuinely am intrigued and I've heard it's fantastic... I just feel like sitting in an audience of what for the most part  for the near future  will be very enthusiastic Harry Potter fans, might be... not a relaxing way to see a show, I guess. So not for the time being."

Radcliffe went on to say that he thinks Jamie Parker  who'll be playing an older version of Harry in Cursed Child  is a wonderful actor.

"I'm very, very happy to see him playing me," Radcliffe said. "And maybe a lot of the questions can shift to him now  he can do all the Harry press!"

Watch the clip here (skip to 4.45 for the bit about Cursed Child).
By Dominique Vidalon

PARIS (Reuters) - Darty Plc (DRTY.L), recently the target of a fierce takeover battle, reported a 24 percent rise in annual operating profit before exceptionals on Thursday helped by a turnaround plan.

Like larger rivals Metro's (MEOG.DE) Media-Saturn and Dixons (DC.L), London-listed Darty has also been battling weak consumer spending and competition from online retailers.

Europe's third-largest electrical goods retailer said its "retail profit", or operating result before taxes and exceptionals, rose to 93.1 million euros (74.14 million pounds) in the year to April 30 from 74.9 million.

Operating profit slipped to 53.8 million euros from 60.3 million hurt by 36.5 million euros in exceptional items stemming from asset write-offs, restructuring costs in France and costs tied to a new IT system in the Netherlands.

Darty, which has some 400 stores in Europe, has exited loss-making operations in Italy, Spain, Turkey and the Czech Republic to and focus on France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

In France, where it makes 70 percent of its sales, the rollout of a franchise business, acquisition of multimedia website Mistergoodeal and more stores offering kitchen equipment have helped improve performance and cash generation.

Darty said it had cut its net debt by 115 million euros and reported an improvement in cash flow of 150 million.

"These actions created the circumstances that led to the interest in Darty from third parties, culminating in the recommended offer from Fnac," said Darty Chairman Alan Parker.

Last month Darty's board recommended that its shareholders approve a 170 pence per share offer from French book and CD retailer Fnac (FNAC.PA), valuing it at about 900 million pounds.

Darty had also received a bid from French furniture retailer Conforama, owned by South Africa's Steinhoff (SNHG.DE), but it said it would go no higher than 160 pence.

The takeover battle helped double Darty's share price.

Having paid an interim dividend 0.875 cents per share, Darty said that given the terms and timing of the Fnac offer it would not recommend a final dividend.

Darty said it expected to complete Phase 2 competition clearance in France regarding Fnac's bid in July and for the offer to be declared unconditional on or before August 5.

(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; editing by Jason Neely)
The average recent college graduate with a psychology degree barely earns more than someone with a high school diploma. But as tuition rates rise and total student loan debt grows, whats a prospective student whos interested in psychologyor social work or artto do?

Dont borrow $75,000 for a $30,000-a-year job. Dont think you can become a social worker and drive a Mercedes. Dont think that if you get a masters in fine art that you will be moving out of your mothers basement pretty soon, Mark Schneider, vice president and institute fellow at American Institutes for Research, told TakePart.

RELATED: How Much Is a College Degree Really Worth?

Schneider is on a crusade to give students a realistic picture of what their employment prospects will beand ensure they know what theyre getting into financially before they embark on a course of study. Last week in Denver, his team at the nonprofit group revealed Launch My Career, a free website they created with Gallup and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But critics of Launch My Careers approach disagree with making such an explicit connection between college and employmentan argument thats at the heart of disagreements about the purpose of college in the 21st century.

RELATED: Employers Are Most Eager to Hire Students With This College Major

Launch My Career is an excellent example of the corporatization of higher education, Nikhil Goyal, an education activist and the author of Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice, wrote in an email to TakePart. As opposed to producing free thinkers, the task of higher education has deviated to satisfying the needs of industry, corporations, and the capitalist global economy.

The interactive website allows users to explore majors, higher education institutions, jobs, or a general industry. It includes information on programs at two- and four-year institutions and is designed for three audiences: high school juniors or seniors, college students who are changing their major, or a 30-year-old person who is out in the world and needs a skill because theyre having a hard time meeting their bills, theyre bored with their job, or need a better job, said Schneider. After users input information on their desired major or job, the website reveals the return on investmentaverage first-year wages, the number of jobs available in that field, and the median earnings someone can expect to take home over 20 years.

Story continues

RELATED: This State Wants to Help Recent Grads Pay Back Their Student Loans

Users can also input information on what kind of lifestyle they hope for: Do they want to own a home or rent an apartment? Do they want to get married or have children? Do they plan to take public transportation, or do they hope to drive a luxury car? Once that information is gathered, the website spits out a baseline amount that a graduate would need to earn to achieve that lifestyle.

If you want students to understand whats going on here, you need a metric that they can grasp: How long is it going to take me to get to the life that I want? Five years? Ten years? This degree is going to earn me like $500,000 more in the next 20 years over that degree. They can understand that, said Schneider.

Goyal doesnt have a problem with a database for students with information about jobs and majors. Hes concerned that the site plainly links higher education to the workforce and earnings potential. Obviously, at a time where students are burdened with enormous student loan debt, they are looking for jobs that will help alleviate their economic situations, but the purpose of higher education is not to obtain a healthy return on investment, he wrote.

RELATED: When It Comes to College Costs, Middle-Class Kids Are Still Screwed

Instead, colleges should help raise the political consciousness of young people, wrote Goyal. We need individuals who will refuse to passively accept the unjust social order and work to radically change it.

But the purpose of college, said Schneider, has come a long way from the days when universities educated a small number of elites in Latin and Greek. State legislatures investing heavily in public universities also want a return on their investment. They want well-paid citizens. They want a talented workforce. One way or another we have to deal with that, Schneider said.

At the kickoff event for the website in Denver, Schneider said, he spoke to a young woman who was considering becoming a music major until she used Launch My Career.

The woman looked at the return on investment for music. She said, You know, I am the first person in my family to go to college. My parents have sacrificed an enormous amount for me to go. I have younger brothers and sisters, so Im opening the way for them,  Schneider recalled.

Then came the moment of reconsideration he hopes others who use Launch Your Career can reach: The young woman told Schneider, If I major in music, these numbers tell me that Im not going to be able to fulfill my obligations.

RELATED: Now Rappers Are Rhyming About Paying Off Student Loan Debt

The woman decided to minor in music and told Schneider she would choose a major that would have a greater return on investment.

I think we want more people to think about that: What are your obligations? What are the things you need to do; what are the things you want to do? Can you really afford them if youre majoring in early childhood education, the lowest-paid major? said Schneider.

Schneider acknowledged that some people who use Launch My Career could decide to avoid traditionally lower-salaried careers such as teaching. It doesnt take a viewing of the robot-like workers in the 1927 silent film Metropolis to know that a career you feel passionate about tends to be more satisfying.

You have to follow your passions, but you also have to feed yourself and your family. So follow your passions, but be prepared never to reach your life goals, Schneider said.

The website only has Colorado-specific data right nowfor example, how much people who major in education and attend the University of Colorado Boulder will earn. Additional state-specific versions of Launch My Career will debut in Tennessee, Texas, and Minnesota in the next few months, and Schneider hopes students nationwide eventually will have access to it.

For the person deciding between a lucrative STEM major or studying a subject that leads to other traditionally low-paying fields, Goyal has some advice. Our society needs critical thinkers, engaged citizens, activists, scholars, and public servants and we should be working to ensure that all jobs offer a decent living wage, he wrote. We need to examine these issues systematically, not just individual to individual.

Sign the Petition: Make College Affordable: Support College Cost Reforms

Related stories on TakePart:





 When It Comes to College Costs, Middle-Class Kids Are Still Screwed

 Will Americas Promise Mean College Is Only for White Kids?

 Even in Elite College Towns, Black Students Cant Catch a Break

Original article from TakePart
Deckstar announced two new signings this week. Gary Richards, who DJs and produces as Destructo and recently appeared on Billboard's Dance Power list, will join the management company's roster of electronic musicians, which includes Steve Aoki and Porter Robinson.

"We've watched Gary Richards grow Hard, Holy Ship and Destructo into global music brands," Lawrence Vavra, who co-founded Deckstar, told Billboard in an email. "Given the opportunity to work with him, we jumped at the chance and we're looking forward to what we can collectively accomplish in the future."

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MiyaviCourtesy Photo

"As music continues to evolve into an international experience, and as the major music platforms set their sights on reaching a new global audience, we at Deckstar believe it will become increasingly important to help develop great artists from all over the world," Peter Katsis, Deckstar partner, added. To that end, the company signed the Japanese guitarist Miyavi, whose Afraid To Be Cool EP debuted at No. 1 on the iTunes sales chart this year. "His exceptional musicianship and unique style has already attracted international attention," Katsis noted. "We are honored to be working with him."

Listen to Miyavi below, and stay tuned for the next Destructo release, which is slated to featurePusha T, Ty Dolla $ign, iLoveMakonnen, Problem, and E-40.
Devon Energy Corporation DVN announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its existing Midland Basin non-core assets for $858 million. This did not come as a surprise as the company had given clear indications of selling off its Midland Basin assets. Year to date, the company has announced asset sale of nearly $2.15 billion.



Assets to be Sold



Two asset sale transactions in different locations of the Midland Basin will sum up to nearly $858 million. In a $435 million deal, Devon Energy will sell its working interest across 15,000 net acres in Martin County, TX along with 13,000 net acres in eight surrounding counties, situated in the northern Midland Basin.



In a separate agreement, the company agreed to sell its assets in the southern Midland Basin for $423 million, which is producing nearly 22,000 Boe per day.



Other Assets Queued Up for Sale



Devon Energy had plans to divest non-core assets worth $2 billion to 3 billion in 2016. The company is currently in talks with interested parties to sell its 50% interest in the Access Pipeline in Canada.



Devon Energy now expects sale proceeds from the Access Pipeline in Canada to not only help it to achieve its divesture target for the year, but also to exceed it.



Utilization of Proceeds



One of the initiatives adopted by energy companies in the wake of tough market conditions was to divest non-core assets. Their focus was also on maintaining investment grade credit rating.



Devon Energy will utilize nearly 67% of the proceeds from asset divesture to lower its existing debts and use the rest to make strategic investment in high-quality resource plays.

DEVON ENERGY Price

DEVON ENERGY Price | DEVON ENERGY Quote

Ups 2016 Capital & Production



Devon Energy raised its 2016 capital expenditure guidance by $200 million at both ends to a range of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion. The company will deploy the additional funds in the Delaware Basin and the Oklahoma STACK play during the third quarter.



Devon also raised its 2016 total production expectation from core assets to the range of 540,000560,000 boe per day by 7,000 boe per day.



Earlier Divesture



Earlier this month, Devon Energy entered into a definitive agreement to sell nearly $1 billion of non-core upstream assets situated in east Texas, the Anadarko Basin and an overriding royalty interest in the northern Midland Basin (read more: Devon to Sell $1B Assets; Plans $2-3B Divesture in 2016).

Bottom Line



Oil prices have recovered to some extent in the last two months and there are indications of further recovery ahead.



At Devon Energy, oil comprised 44% of the total production in the first quarter of 2016. The company increased its production of oil and indicated more investments in oil-rich basins, which point toward strong revenue generation in the second half of 2016.



Another oil-focused company, WPX Energy WPX, recently raised its oil production expectation by 5% from its earlier projection to 39,000 to 41,000 barrels of oil per day for 2016.



Zacks Rank



Devon Energy currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A couple of better-ranked stocks in the oil and natural gas space are Synergy Resources Corporation SYRG and Eclipse Resources Corporation ECR, both carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report >>



Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report



DEVON ENERGY (DVN): Free Stock Analysis Report



SYNERGY RES CP (SYRG): Free Stock Analysis Report



ECLIPSE RESRCS (ECR): Free Stock Analysis Report



WPX ENERGY INC (WPX): Free Stock Analysis Report



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Discovery Networks International president JB Perrette has extended his contract with the company through June 2019.

The deal calls for the London-based exec to earn a base salary of $1.6 million, in addition to bonuses and stock grants. The new pact, disclosed Thursday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, replaces the contract set in January 2014 when Perrette was promoted to his current post.

Perrette joined Discovery as chief digital officer in 2011, after 11 years with NBCUniversal. He is a key player within Discovery Communications, which is banking on most of its future growth coming from overseas markets.

Discovery Networks International encompasses channels in more than 220 countries, giving it one of the largest international footprints of any U.S. major. Perrette also steers the operations of Discoverys Eurosport TV and SVOD services.

In 2014, international revenue surpassed domestic revenue for the first time in the companys 30-year history.

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The first time I saw Ali Khan in action, we were both much younger, and perhaps more idealistic. The year was 1995, the place  a remote village down the Kwilu River from the equally remote city of Kikwit, in a nation formerly known as Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was sweltering hot, we were atop the equator, and the center of the village was denuded of shade-providing trees. The village elder, shouting in Kikongo, was putting out as much angry heat as the sun boring down upon us: He was enraged that Khan and other foreigners were trying to remove an ailing resident of the village to a quarantine site.

Tempers rise during epidemics. Every culture, whether African or American, has beliefs and taboos that clash with efforts to stop the spread of disease. In my experience, few diseases elevate raw emotions and fear like the hemorrhagic virus Ebola. I sat on the periphery, trying to follow as the Kikongo, Zairois, French, and Parisian patois barked back and forth among the locals and their American, Belgian, and WHO visitors. But I was distracted by Khan, who stood off to the side, pen and paper in hand, wearing no hat or sunglasses and decked out in what I recall as a starched white shirt, dark tie, dark pants and loafers  as if he were in downtown Atlanta, not stifling hot, red-dust-coated central Africa. When a moment allowed, I sidled up and asked whether it was wise for him to wear a tight tie and warm clothing in such conditions.

A bit miffed at a then-reporters intrusion into his thoughts, Khan sneered. I smiled, and he condescended to answer, saying: I must show full respect for the people I encounter. This is respectful attire at the CDC, so I wear it here to honor these people.

Thats Ali Khan in a nutshell, one of the most valuable and influential disease detectives working at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is tough, yet modest; driven by science, yet always aware of the social and cultural events around him. What Khan lacks in humor, he more than makes up for with irony. And no passage in his new book, The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankinds Gravest Dangers, is more laden with irony than his description (crafted with co-author William Patrick) of heading into the anthrax mess on Capitol Hill, following contamination of the Hart Senate Office Building:

On October 15, 2001, I was coming back from a conference when I was detained at OHare International Airport by the FBI. Special Agent Don Duffy took one look at my brown skin and my passport with stamps from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Pakistan, and must have thought, Uh-oh.

For several hours, Khan was detained and grilled by the FBI under the watchful eyes of armed Chicago police. Ali is among the most common male names in the Islamic world, and Khan is to Pakistanis what Kim is to Koreans or Smith to the English  so it was perhaps not surprising that Ali Khan was on the FBIs post-9/11 no-fly list. But the FBI ought to have taken note of Khans official U.S. government employee passport, badge, and CDC travel documents. They did not, insisting that all of the IDs could be fakes. Khan was allowed to fly home to Atlanta only after many hours of detention: The FBI finally called the CDCs after-hours line and, by great luck, the person who happened to answer knew physician Ali S. Khan  born and bred in Brooklyn  as New Yawk as they come  and verified his identity.

In my case, the offense was FWM: flying while Muslim. In the fifteen years (and counting) since, Ive gotten used to the Red Muslim folder at immigration, and the room off to the side to await my judgment, Khan writes. Hed barely staggered into his Atlanta home when the CDC called to order him back to the airport, to handle anthrax, released from a mailed letter in the office of Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader. He hit the ground running in Washington, trying to figure out how widespread the anthrax exposure was, where it came from, and how best to protect the U.S. Senate and its staff. The brown-skinned Khan worked with CDC microbiologist Sherif Zaki (with that name, you wonder how long he was detained at airports, Khan quips) and team leader Rima Khabbaz (obviously, another real American from solid and trustworthy Anglo-Saxon stock, he writes in sarcasm-laden prose).

Many epidemic fighters from the CDC and other government and academic institutions have written memoirs of their microbial detective days, and a few of the books have proven good reads. The best of the lot manage to take the reader inside the disease detectives head, learning how the individual processes everything from infection rates of transmission to screaming baby noises, reaching decisions that solve outbreak mysteries and stop microbes spread. The Next Pandemic ranks among the best, taking readers to every epidemic Khan has worked in, from SARS to hantavirus, bird flu to Ebola, MERS to salmonella, and offers wonderful insights into the authors problem-solving skills and even his own personal anxieties. In 1997, for example, Khan returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo just two years after fighting Ebola in Kikwit to confront another deadly virus, monkeypox. A close genetic cousin to one of humanitys greatest historic scourges, smallpox, the monkey virus had jumped from rainforest primates to people, presumably through animal hunters, and was then spreading rapidly from one person to another. Smallpox had been eradicated two decades earlier, and vaccination for the virus had long stopped all over the world.

The real question for us was  had we called it wrong? By discontinuing smallpox vaccination, had we opened the door to monkeypox infection? Khan writes. To answer that vital question, the American disease detective flew directly into a bloody Congolese civil war and hunted down a pilot willing to take a dilapidated, old cargo plane into the dense rainforest region where the epidemic was unfolding. A few months after Khans trip, I also flew into the region, strapped onto a shipping crate in lieu of seats in the back of a 1950s military cargo plane, all the while thinking, Is any story worth this risk? Once aboard his similar flying Congolese claptrap, Khan turned to his fellow passenger, and said, Dyings not that big of a deal.

Insisting that he isnt a courageous sort, Khan added:

Im not foolhardy but, at the same time, if youre going to go out and help in those kinds of situations, you cant do the job if youre too concerned about your own safety. How can you tell others not to be scared if youre too scared to take action? Not fearing death has always given me clarity of thinking about what to do, because I dont have to deal with my anxiety before getting down to problem solving.

And often, Khan writes, the most vital problem-solving exercise has little to do with science, and everything to do with social customs. In 2015, Khan was involved in an out-of-control moment in the Ebola epidemic of Sierra Leone. Long after neighboring Liberia had its outbreak down to a handful of cases, the military-run campaign in Sierra Leone was losing the support of the people by imposing mass quarantines, shutting down entire regions of the country for long periods. Out of the discontent over loss of business, food, and trade arose false leaders claiming witchcraft practiced by the foreigners and magic were spreading the Ebola  not intangible things few could comprehend, like viruses. Khan realized that arguing scientific principles of germ theory would be pointless, especially in the absence of genuine partnerships between the national disease-control leaders and local communities. I think it was that lack of partnership that explains why the outbreak went on for so long, he opines. The central issue in any environment where there is an outbreak  is fear of the unknown, and this fear remains irrational regardless of anyones level of scientific understanding.

Trust is, then, the key ingredient of success in battling outbreaks. Where corruption leads to hiring family and friends, rather than competent individuals, into key epidemic jobs; where money disappears in outbreaks to fatten political leaders bank accounts; where well-educated people decide movie stars have greater credibility in deciding the safety of vaccines than trained physicians and scientists; where incompetence sends the FBI off on a two-year wild goose chase only to realize millions of dollars were wasted identifying the DNA of one of its own agents rather than an anthrax culprit  in such situations, Khan writes, trust is eroded, and outbreaks persist.

I was reminded of several passages of my own book, published 16 years ago, Betrayal of Trust, in which I described episodes all over the world of diseases spreading where the trust between public health leaders and the citizenry had collapsed. Khan tried to engender U.S. citizens trust in disease-control leaders by imagining an epidemic of a virus that spread by one person touching another  turning the touched victim into a zombie. His Zombie Apocalypse has proven the No. 1 draw to the CDCs website, and is used by the American Red Cross and other disaster response groups to teach the public how diseases spread, and can be stopped.

In the end, Khan argues  and I fully agree  preparedness is the key to human survival against the microbes. There are no quick-fix technologies, instant cures, or miracle vaccines to use in the equatorial Congolese village, and no smartphone app can stop a lethal virus in its tracks. Every country, every province, every city and town must have strong public health systems in place, ready to spot threats and react swiftly, Khan insists: The time has come for us to move beyond seeing public health as the ax in the display case, where the sign says, In Case of Emergency Break Glass, and into the realm of flame-retardant building materials with fire extinguishers and sprinkler systems. In other words, we need to build preventive measures directly into the infrastructure of our communities and make them resilient.

Amen to that, Brother Khan. Inshallah.

Photo credit: MOHAMMED ELSHAMY/Anadolu Agency/Gett Images
On Tuesday night, an alligator attacked and killed 2-year-old Lane Graves at a lagoon at a Disney hotel near Orlando. The frantic search that followed dominated news coverage on Wednesday, including an afternoon press conference that revealed that the boys body had been found.

"As a parent and a grandparent, my heart goes out to the Graves family during this time of devastating loss," Disney (DIS) Chairman and CEO Bob Iger said in a statement Wednesday. "My thoughts and prayers are with them, and I know everyone at Disney joins me in offering our deepest sympathies.

For Iger, this horrible tragedy is just one of many incredibly stressful matters that seem to be hitting him and his company all at once.

The alligator attack came just days after the worst mass shooting in US history, which also took place in the town of the companys flagship theme park. For many American families, Orlando was almost synonymous to Disney World, a safe and fun place to vacation with your kids.

Now, Orlando will also be remembered as home to the tragic shooting at Pulse nightclub, which left 49 dead and 53 wounded. Reports also showed that the shooter scouted a Disney shopping complex in the week before the attack. And that event came just days after the killing of former Voice contestant Christina Grimmie, who was also shot in Orlando.

Uncertainty inside Disney

Internally, Disney has already been facing many challenges.

The stock had already been plagued this year by uncertainty around who will take over after Iger leaves in mid-2018 when his contract expires. Succession fears have been an overhang on the stock since COO and Iger's heir-apparent Thomas Staggs stepped down in April. Igerwho has been credited with the successful acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and Lucas Filmsleaves big shoes to fill, adding to uncertainty.

Concern over declining subscribers at its cable networkswhich make up almost 50% of the companys profithas re-ignited as star columnist Bill Simmons has spoken out in recent days about the cable properties crown jewel, ESPN. His ugly divorce last summer with the network and the closure of his website Grantland was followed by a mass exodus of talent from ESPN.

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Hope in China

Meanwhile, the $5.5 billion Shanghai Disneyland opened on Thursday, which was supposed to be the panacea for the woes plaguing Disneys stock. Nomura analyst Anthony DiClemente called it Mickeys Mandarin Magic. But as the park debuts, Iger has found himself in the middle of a multi-pronged public relations nightmare.

Igers solution thus far? It seems to be to put all his focus on the new Shanghai park. Iger has been in Shanghai, speaking with investors ahead of the official opening, saying he sees more expansion ahead.

"There is actually construction going on this week. When we open we will continue the construction to expand what's on the opening day menu," he said.

Analysts expect Shanghai Disneyland to become the world's most-visited theme park, attracting up to 50 million guests a year, compared with about 19 million people for Disney's flagship Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

But the slew of problems and questions marks surrounding the company remain for Disneys shareholders and Iger. For now, all Iger can do is do his best as he juggles these issues.
Disney Parks has ordered castmembers working on its classic Jungle Cruise attraction not to tell a dark joke about crocodiles eating children. The order comes in the wake of Tuesday's tragic mauling death of a 2-year-old boy by an alligator at a Walt Disney World Hotel.

The one-liner - part of a Disney-approved script filled with pun-heavy patter that many park fans know by heart - involves the Jungle Cruise skipper warning parents to "watch your children, or the crocodiles will."

Lane Graves, a toddler from Elkhorn, Neb., on Tuesday was pulled into a lagoon by an alligator while playing in shallow water at the Grand Floridian Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. A diving team recovered Graves' body, still intact but suffering from several puncture wounds, at 1:45 p.m. on Wednesday - the same day the joke was ordered stricken from the Jungle Cruise script.

"As a parent and a grandparent, my heart goes out to the Graves family during this time of devastating loss," Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement following the discovery of the boy's body.

The tragedy came on what was supposed to be a magical moment for the company, with Shanghai Disney Resort welcoming the public and Finding Dory set to land in theaters.

Instead, the death caps off a nightmarish week, arriving on the heels of the massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in nearby Orlando, Fla., and the shooting death just one night before of The Voice contestant Christina Grimmie by a deranged fan in that same city.

The timing could not be worse: This was to be the first summer travel season in which Disney, which has 30,000 hotel rooms to fill, moved to an on-demand pricing system, charging visitors as much as 18 percent more for single-use park tickets than a year prior. Annual passes also have increased in price this year.

Inspired by jungle riverboat cruises of the 1930s like the one depicted in the 1951 movie The African Queen, the Jungle Cruise is a water tour through a simulated jungle that brings visitors face-to-face with a large menagerie of Audio-Animatronic animals - a robotic technology developed by Walt Disney Imagineering.

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The first incarnation - at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. - made its debut on June 17, 1955, the day the original Disney theme park opened its doors. Reportedly one of Walt Disney's favorite attractions, it has been functioning uninterrupted ever since.

The ride features a retro adventure vibe, transporting parkgoers into a melange of African settings such as the Nile River and Congo River, where they encounter rhinos and hippos and headhunters along the way. There's an Amazon River section featuring piranhas and, yes, crocodiles - one named Old Smiley and the other Ginger - that hiss at visitors as the steamer boat passes them.

The idea of the ride's skipper telling corny jokes was introduced in 1962, replacing a dry, pre-recorded, documentary-style narration. Certain jokes began to stick and a script eventually emerged. Skippers are known to throw in their own gags, as well.

The ride was replicated at Walt Disney World's Adventureland in Florida, where it was lengthened to a seven-minute ride time and more sight gags were added. That version premiered at that park's opening day on Oct. 1, 1971. Versions have since sprung up at Tokyo Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland - but Disneyland Paris and the new Disney Shanghai have no Jungle Cruise.

In August 2015, a Jungle Cruise movie was announced after several years in turnaround - a previous version was set to star Tom Hanks and Tim Allen - in the hopes of launching another Pirates of the Caribbean-style franchise. This version will star Dwayne Johnson.

Given the tragic nature of the child's death, it remains highly unlikely the crocodile gag will ever return to the attraction script. The news was first noted by Disney news service WDW News Today, which reported that Walt Disney World "cut all jokes related to children and crocodiles from the Jungle Cruise attraction at the Magic Kingdom."

As for another popular attraction featuring a menacing and hungry crocodile - Tick-Tock the Crocodile in Peter Pan's Flight - that ride remains unchanged. However one Disney news blogger, DisneyConnects, noted on Wednesday that the Tick-Tock float did not appear in the Florida park's Festival of Fantasy.

Disney did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this story.
U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Black Earth, Thursday endorsed Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

In a news release, Pocan said "I am proud of the way in which Hillary has taken on progressive issues such as universal child care, debt free college and a ban on military style assault weapons.

"Democrats face a dangerous, racist fear mongerer this election and Hillary Clinton is more than up to the task of soundly defeating Donald Trump."

Pocan praised Bernie Sanders' role in the campaign as helping "thrust progressive issues into the public discourse, with very positive results."
The day after a 2-year-old boy was dragged to his death by an alligator at a Disney World resort, crowds of visitors  including parents with children in strollers or toddlers dressed as little princesses  appeared unaffected by the tragedy.



That may be because Walt Disney World officials did little to call attention to the lightning-fast attack that occurred at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Disney World Tuesday night.



Lane Graves of Elkhorn, Nebraska, was found some 16 hours after he disappeared into the murky water of the resort's Seven Seas Lagoon. His parents, identified as Matt and Melissa Graves, witnessed the attack as the boy reportedly waded in a foot of water.



Authorities found five alligators in the lagoon before they ultimately located Lane near the shoreline on Wednesday afternoon.





Disney World Guests Were Kept in The Dark About Deadly Alligator Attack: 'Why Not Tell Us?'| Animals & Pets, Death, Walt Disney World, Around the Web, Real People Stories

Tammy and Louis Rosales of Dallas recalled hearing a helicopter flying low over the scene late into the night Tuesday and dismissed it as aerial tours of the Magic Kingdom.



They were in town for five days with their three granddaughters and were surprised that no one told them of the potential dangers lurking in the water.



"We didn't hear anything about what happened last night," Louis Rosales, a Dallas real estate attorney, tells PEOPLE.



"You'd think the guy with the goofy grin saying, 'Hey welcome to our park,' you would think, they would say, 'Just as a warning to all of our visitors, letting you know that there was a gator attack last night. Please be aware of the gator issue in this area.' Why not tell us that? Especially if we've got small kids?"



A spokesperson for Disney did not have an immediate comment about whether they informed visitors of the attack.



Shopkeepers at the resort, who are not employed by Disney, also found it curious that Disney failed to discuss what happened.





Disney World Guests Were Kept in The Dark About Deadly Alligator Attack: 'Why Not Tell Us?'| Animals & Pets, Death, Walt Disney World, Around the Web, Real People Stories

One shop clerk, who asked not to be identified, recalled how a couple of customers wanted to know what had happened and said that they felt so sad for the parents.



Disney did not openly address the alligator attack  with neither the guests who were staying at the resort nor the people who worked in the shops.



Some visitors learned of the child's death through family members who called or texted to see if they were all right. Others caught radio and TV news accounts of the tragedy.



Jenifer Williams, who has a 12-year-old daughter, learned about the tragedy from news reports.



"When I woke up this morning I was just laying in bed just checking the news and seeing what all went on last night," Williams says. "I saw it and I started crying. It was really just upsetting. It could have been anybody's child. It was just awful."





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Disney World Guests Were Kept in The Dark About Deadly Alligator Attack: 'Why Not Tell Us?'| Animals & Pets, Death, Walt Disney World, Around the Web, Real People Stories

Eric and Brittany Wilkinson were in town from Coral Springs, Florida with their two young children, 4-month-old Ryker and 2-year-old Elowyn.



Lane's death hit home for the couple who have a 2-year-old daughter.



"We had family members calling because they were worried about what happened," Eric tells PEOPLE. "We got a text in the middle of the night. We watched the fireworks and went to bed and we didn't know until this morning when we woke up."



Those living in Florida may be aware of the alligators prowling waterways, but those living elsewhere may not know of the dangers, he said, adding, "But still, you wonder where the parents were, if they weren't keeping an eye on the child."





Disney World Guests Were Kept in The Dark About Deadly Alligator Attack: 'Why Not Tell Us?'| Animals & Pets, Death, Walt Disney World, Around the Web, Real People Stories

Although there are "no swimming" signs outside the lagoon, there are none that forbid wading or warn of alligators in the area. One woman tells PEOPLE that she saw a small alligator on the premises when she stayed at the resort a year ago.



"I saw a little alligator last year," she says, noting that she was visiting the resort from Ohio with her 2-year-old daughter. "I don't blame Disney. This is wildlife."



Kelli Haddox, who was visiting from Oklahoma with her 5-year-old son, placed no blame.



"I just think it's a tragedy, just an accident," Haddox said. "I don't know that it's necessarily the parents' fault or Disney's fault."



Tammy Rosales echoed the sentiment that many felt.



"We're just worried about the parents," she said. "It's a sad situation. I have to just mentally just keep pushing it back. I'm tearing up now. I can't. It's terrible."



With additional reporting by ROSE MINUTAGLIO
DJ Khaled took to Instagram to thank Beyonce and her loyal Beyhive for their love and support as he ends his run opening for Queen Bey's Formation World Tour.

Drake & DJ Khaled Vibe Out on 'For Free'

"They told me I would never tour. Well I just finished touring with the biggest artist walking the planet," Khaled wrote. "I want to thank Beyonce for putting me on stage in front of a stadium full of loyal fans ... Dreams come true. Momma I made it!!! Fan luv we did it."

A THANK YOU LETTER TO @beyonce and --hive and fan luv ... Dreams come true Don't ever let "they" tell you you can't do it. They told me I would never tour. Well I just finished touring with the biggest artist walking the planet. They told me I would never touch a stage in a high school arena. Well I just finished touching the stage in every stadium in every major city in America. Dreams come true. But you have to work hard, you gotta work very hard!!! In order to stand beside the icon @beyonce You gotto work hard for over 25 years and dedicate your blood sweat and tears to making your dreams a reality. I want to thank Beyonce for putting me on stage in front of a stadium full of loyal fans of the -- Hive and Fan luv! Dreams come true. Momma I made it!!! Fan luv we did it. We showed THEY that nothing can stop us if we move with a clean heart and a clear purpose. Beyonce I want to say thank you for allowing me to bring my energy and passion on stage every night. Thank you for allowing me to bring on all the artists who jumped on stage with me to bring the fans a special energy called Major Key Alert!!!! Beyonce I want to say thank you for providing me and the millions of millions of fans across the globe your amazing talent and music and performance. You're the queen!!!! Fan Luv this is just the beginning!!! I'm up to something!!!! Oh u thought I was gonna quit???!!!! Never!!!! It's We The Best!! It's Roc Nation!!! It's PARK WOOD !!!It's Epic Records!!!! I will never stop!!!!! Bless up. @beyonce thank u so much I have tears of joy ! God is the Greatest!!!! #MAJOR-- the album it's coming!! @wethebestmusic !!! I have more to say @beyonce thank u again!! --hive and fan luv please get this letter to Beyonce !! Thank u in advance !! -------- OH YEAH IM POST THIS 2 times wit 2 pics I have to not everyday u get take ICONIC PICS WIT @beyonce !!!!!!! -------- photo credit @kodaklens

A photo posted by DJ KHALED (@djkhaled) on Jun 15, 2016 at 9:47am PDT

Khaled finished his opening stint on the tour in Detroit, bringing Motor City rapper DeJ Loaf onstage to perform "Try Me" and "Back Up" and Young Jeezy to perform "Who Dat" and "Out Here Grindin'."

The Formation World Tour has been one of many highlights for DJ Khaled this year. Khaled originally announced this #majorkeyalert after signing with both Epic Records and Roc Nation.

10 Keys to Success From DJ Khaled's Snapchat

Beyonce and her crew are now taking two weeks off before heading to Europe for the second part of her tour.
In terms of measuring a film's impact, few made in recent years can top Blackfish.

Gabriela Cowperthwaite's documentary about killer whales in captivity almost brought SeaWorld to its knees, with the resort's stock plummeting as sponsors pulled out and crowds and revenue dropped. Last year, it announced it was ending the controversial orca shows at its San Diego theme park, while in March it revealed it would end its killer whale breeding program altogether, a remarkable achievement for a low-budget 83-minute film.

While SeaWorld isn't the primary target, The Hollywood Reporter has learned that reps for another major aquarium have been keeping a close eye on a new doc that hopes to do what Blackfish did for orcas for another aquatic mammal popular among oceanariums.

Described as "Arctic dolphins" or "sea canaries," beluga whales are instantly striking creatures, almost ghostly white and with a distinctive swelling at the front of their heads. Most live around the Arctic Ocean and the seas and coasts of Russia and Greenland. But given their unique appearance, intelligence and chirpy, chatty, almost humanoid behavior, a growing number have found themselves living in captivity in aquariums around the world and performing for crowds. Estimates suggest there are just around 150,000 left living in the wild.

Born to Be Free, which had its world premiere at the recently concluded Sheffield Doc/Fest, focuses on the plight of 18 belugas. Captured off the coast of Russia, the 18 were originally intended for the U.S., with the vast Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta due to receive at least two (others were bound for Shedd in Chicago, SeaWorld and Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut). But new legislation in the U.S. regarding the import of sea mammals saw the NOAA fisheries agency deny the aquarium's request for a permit, leaving the animals in administrative limbo land.

In the doc, director Gayane Petrosyan, together with freedivers and filmmakers Tatyana Beley and Yulia Petrik (who just happens to be a former free dive champion), managed to locate these 18, who were living in cramped pools in a secretive enclosure by the Black Sea as they waited for the results of an appeal by Georgia Aquarium.

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By the time the three found the belugas, some of whom have been in captivity for up to six years, one had already died, while others were showing signs of severely ill health.

But despite the aquarium reluctantly announcing in November 2015 that it wouldn't appeal the decision, the future still isn't rosy for the animals.

Read More: SeaWorld to End Orca Shows in San Diego

"[The aquarium] is now looking for other buyers," Petrosyan tells THR. "I would say there are no wishes to release them. It's a question of money. They put in a lot of money and of course they now expect this back."

Petrosyan claims Georgia Aquarium is hoping to sell the 18 (the dead beluga is believed to have been replaced) to other international facilities - ones outside the remit of the U.S.'s NOAA - having already had discussions with some in Japan.

And with legislation clamping down on marine mammal importation into America and - thanks to Blackfish - the tide slowly turning on U.S. public perception of captive animals in facilities such as SeaWorld, the focus is now on these international resorts.

Indeed, Born to Be Free highlights how numerous oceanariums have been springing up in Russia and, in particular, China, fueling a growing demand for captured dolphins, seals, orcas and belugas. The film claims that China is now the biggest importer of marine mammals from Russia, where research facilities turned to such trade after the fall of the Soviet Union saw their funding pulled.

Blackfish's most seismic impact was in a country with an already strong animal rights scene, influencing opinions of killer whales in captivity to the point where enough people turned their backs on resorts with live shows that they were forced to react.

But in China and Russia, changing public perception is going to be a bigger struggle. "People really don't understand and many, when we told them the information, said it was something new for them," explains Petrosyan, adding that the reaction in Russia to any pressure from the West is likely to be the opposite to intended effect.

"When things come from the U.S., unfortunately in Russia it goes the other way," she says, adding that NOAA had recently attempted to protect depleting reserves of belugas in Russian seas by saying they should be protected.

"How will [Russian] officials react? I'm sure they will say, 'it's our country, our animals, once again the U.S. wants to destroy our culture,' something like this."

As highlighted in Born to Be Free, the main argument from Georgia Aquarium and other resorts for keeping belugas in captivity is that there is much about the creatures still unknown, and with declining numbers in the wild such research is therefore vital for understanding and helping them. But this is something the filmmakers - backed up with evidence from several scientists - reject.

Read More: 'Blackfish' Director Calls SeaWorld Ending Killer Whale Breeding "Paradigm Shifting"

"The techniques for studying animals in the wild have improved enormously," adds producer Mike Lerner, Oscar-nominated for Hell and Back Again and The Square. "Maybe there was an argument in the 1950s that there were certain things you could learn if you had one and were to study it. But there are lots of programs now studying belugas in the wild."

As the film highlights, not only are the facilities themselves detrimental to the welfare of the animals (it asserts 49 belugas have died prematurely in the U.S. since 1992, with five in Georgia Aquarium alone), but the methods of capturing the animals, alongside their transportation and holding, see a far higher percentage lost before they even make it there.

A shocking video from a former capturer showed the brutality of one such beluga bagging expedition. Vast nets are used to trap an entire herd of the animals, with the still grey, younger (and thus trainable) belugas separated from their mothers and dragged back to shore in small boats. Along the way, one dies after drowning in its net. Not to worry: The men simply go out to capture another one to ensure the order is met.

Born to Be Free estimates that as many as half the belugas captured in the Okhotsk Sea on Russia's East coast, where many of the animals are found, died during the capturing process, the transportation or in the holding pens. In one of the most disturbing scenes, the filmmakers are shown the makeshift graves that are dug-in garbage dumps where the deceased belugas are unceremoniously buried.

While the filmmakers hope they can use Born to Be Free to galvanize international support and show the public the real story about the beluga whale not shown in aquariums, there is still hope for the 18 languishing in captivity by the Black Sea.

"We want to raise money to buy them," says freediver Beley. "There is a lot of will to do that."

Lerner estimates that the cost of each of the belugas has dropped from "about $100,000 to $20,000," meaning a simple campaign could help free them.

"I would have thought that if you came up with a relatively small amount of money, they would take it, they just want rid of them. More than they're value, it's the cost of keeping them," he says.

From there, a rehabilitation process would be needed; a piece of coastline where they could be introduced back into the wild after so long in holding pens. "We have huge support from experts, who are ready to help," Petrosyan explains, adding that one of the chief marine mammal trainers featured in the doc is willing to lead the charge.

But there is significant downside from such a proactive approach to ensuring the belugas' release. "If we buy them, it gives [their capturers] money, so they will just go out and catch more," Beley says. "We need to stop that cycle."

Read More: The 'Blackfish' Effect: California's Proposed Orca Ban, Artists Canceling Theme Park Concerts
Washington (AFP) - After years of research on dolphin behavior and under pressure from animal rights groups, the National Aquarium in Baltimore has decided to move the marine mammals to a sanctuary, officials said Wednesday.

It will be the first sanctuary for dolphins in North America.

The transfer from the aquarium in the Atlantic coast port city will not be done before 2020, they said.

The venue for the dolphins will be a protected coastal habitat, where the animals will continue to live under human care.

"We now know more about dolphins and their care, and we believe that the National Aquarium is uniquely positioned to use that knowledge to implement positive change," said John Racanelli, chief executive officer of the National Aquarium.

"This is the right time to move forward with the dolphin sanctuary."

Management and the board of directors at the aquarium in Baltimore, near Washington, started working on a strategy for the dolphins five years ago.

Many ideas were floated, including rebuilding the existing marine mammal facility, which is 25 years old, to create a more natural-style setting.

Transferring the dolphins to other licensed facilities was also considered.

But officials ultimately decided to set up a coastal refuge with National Aquarium staff continuing to take care of the dolphins and interacting with them.

"This is a special time in history concerning evolving attitudes about treating all forms of life with dignity and respect -- other humans very much included," said Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist, explorer and author.

"The idea of providing sanctuaries for elephants, chimpanzees, big cats -- and now dolphins -- is a sign of a maturing ethic of caring unthinkable in past millennia, centuries and even decades."

The venue, in a tropical or subtropical location, will also contain natural stimuli for the dolphins, such as fish and sea plants. Its location was not immediately announced.

The National Aquarium is seeking donations to fund the sanctuary.
After Seth Meyers opted to ban Donald Trump from appearing on Late Night, the presumptive Republican nominee fired back in expected fashion: insulting Meyers' program, and insinuating that he's been asked to appear on the show for a while, but has resisted.

"He has begged me to do the show for the last two years," Trump said in a statement, according to Variety. "I have told him emphatically, 'No.' I only like doing shows with good ratings, which as everybody knows, I only make better (by a lot)."

Meyers originally imposed the ban Tuesday during one of his "Closer Look" segments on the Trump's response to Sunday's mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. In addition to piling on his anti-Muslim rhetoric, Trump took exception to some of the headlines from publications such as the Washington Post, when he seemed to draw a connection between terrorist groups like the Islamic State group and President Barack Obama during a radio interview.

Trump then banned the Washington Post from receiving press credentials for campaign coverage.

Thus, Meyers' ban was a form of solidarity with the publication more than anything else.

"Trump's vague innuendo is no accident," Meyers said Tuesday on his show. "This is a strategy he uses to try to appeal to the outer fringes while also avoiding accountability ... as long as the Washington Post is banned from Donald Trump's campaign, Donald Trump will be banned from ever coming on this show."

"To be fair, he wasn't coming on anyway," Meyers jokingly concluded. "He had no interest in being here."

You can check out Meyers' full breakdown of Trump's response to the Orlando shooting below:
Donald Trump has just two words for GOP leaders who have refused to rally around him: "Be quiet."



"Just please be quiet. Don't talk, please be quiet," he said at a campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday evening, adding that if top Republicans aren't going to support him they should "let me just do it by myself."



"We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself. I'll do very well. I'm going to do very well. Okay? I'm going to do very well. A lot of people thought I should do that anyway, but I'll just do it very nicely by myself," he continued.



Trump's words come after House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans joined President Barack Obama in condemning Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. and his anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of the attack that killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday.







"I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country's interest. I do not think it is reflective of our principles, not just as a party but as a country," Ryan told reporters on Tuesday, calling for "a security test, not a religious test" for immigrants.





Related Video: Does Donald Trump Rattle You?





Other Republicans, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, criticized Trump's apparent suggestions that Obama was somehow sympathetic to terrorists. Trump "seems to be suggesting that the president is one of 'them.' I find that highly offensive," Graham said. "I find that whole line of reasoning way off base."



Ryan told reporters Thursday that he had no plans to revoke his endorsement of Trump, saying it's only natural for the two men to "agree to disagree on some things."



Asked to respond to Trump's suggestion that GOP leaders "be quiet," Ryan simply said, "You know, you can't make this up sometimes."
Tom Laskin, a former Madison journalist and musician whose career here was marked by clear and confident writing on diverse topics, especially music, has died.

Laskin wrote for the Isthmus weekly as a staffer from 1990 to 2008, when budget cuts put him on the freelance writing circuit. He was a versatile writer and reporter, and had been living in France. The cause of death was not available.

According to his LinkIn biography, Laskin earned B.A., M.A. and MLS degrees from the UW-Madison in English Literature, Library and Information Science.

A notice in Tone Madison Thursdasy said he died in his sleep in the early morning June 15. Laskin and his wife had been living in Paris and Amsterdam for the past several years.

As lead vocalist of Madison band Appliances-SFB, Laskin made a significant contribution to the Midwests fertile 1980s and early-90s boom of punk and noise-rock, Tone Madison reported. He also worked for 18 years as a journalist and music critic at Isthmus. Tone reporter Scott Gordon wrote Laskin "contributed thoughtful, engaged criticism and reporting on local and touring music, as well as other corners of arts and culture."
If crowdsourcing is any indication, sentiment on health care stocks is bearish, no matter who wins the presidency.

As part of an attempt to democratize investor opinions about the stock market, a New York company called CrowdInvest launched the CrowdInvest Wisdom exchange-traded fund (WIZE) in April. Mobile app users express bullish or bearish opinions on U.S.-traded stocks, and those votes determine which equities are included in the CrowdInvest Wisdom index, which the ETF tracks.

Participants voted for health care stocks to make up 17.8 percent of the index during the month when the ETF launched, but now they are saying they want only 8 percent, says Martin Mickus, chairman and founder of CrowdInvest. That compares with about 15 percent for the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index.

[See: 11 Stocks That Donald Trump Loves.]

Mickus says users are expressing worries for drug companies ahead of the presidential election in November, which will be the first since Americans have been required to have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

Implications for drug makers. The stocks of prescription drug companies such as Pfizer (PFE) and Merck & Co. (MRK) may not fare particularly well under either Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, as both camps say there isn't enough competition and that drugs cost too much, says Joe Ellis, senior vice president with Pennsylvania financial services company CBIZ Benefits and Insurance Services.

Both candidates support importing drugs from other countries to lower costs. Such a move would bring more competitive pressure on the drug companies, Ellis says.

Additionally, Ellis sees a likelihood that the prohibition on the federal government negotiating drug prices with companies being lifted in a Trump presidency. It's less likely with a Clinton administration, but she would at least face some pressure to do so, he says.

Such a move could open up competitive bidding for government contracts like Medicare, which could pressure prices.

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Mickus says investors are fearing fewer customers for drug companies such as Amgen (AMGN), Celgene Corp. (CELG) and AbbVie (ABBV) under a win by Trump, who has called for repealing Obamacare.

"The drug companies could end up being the loser under either administration," says Joe Heider, founder and president at Cleveland, Ohio-headquartered Cirrus Wealth Management.

[See: The 9 Best Investors of All Time.]

Insurance companies and Obamacare. "It's been a great ride for the insurance companies," Ellis says, noting companies such as Cigna Corp. (CI), UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Anthem (ANTM) and Humana (HUM) have had significant growth in their shares because of an influx of customers since 2010, when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law.

But even though insurance companies stock prices have risen, their profits have been under pressure as they have had to insure sicker patients, Ellis says.

If Clinton is elected and Congress remains in the hands of Republicans, Heider expects very little changes with Obamacare. Even though Republicans will continue to try to get rid of Obama's health care law, Heider doesn't think they will be successful.

However, if Clinton wins and she gets more Democratic support in Congress, Obamacare may be expanded to try to get those still uninsured on board, he says. That would mean more customers for insurance companies, but they might also get sicker people, he says.

Heider says that would be a net gain for insurance companies and their stocks would rise.

Trump, however, is more of an unknown because while he has said he wants to repeal Obamacare, he also has said he supports universal health care. "It's almost a crapshoot," Heider says.

Even if Trump wins and Republicans remain in charge of the Senate and House, Heider doesn't see Obamacare being totally eliminated because millions are now signed up under the program and it would be a political disaster to kick them out.

Ellis also says a total repeal is unlikely, but says Trump could have some success in getting rid of the mandate that everyone have insurance and that employers with more than 50 full-time workers have to offer insurance or face a penalty.

That could open up the doors to less expensive coverage that wouldn't currently meet Obamacare rules, which might bring in new insurance buyers who are currently healthy but sitting on the sidelines, he says. That would boost the profitability of insurance companies with new customers as well as fewer payouts.

If Trump becomes president, the stock market in general and health care stocks in particular will become more volatile, Heider says. People supporting Trump favor him as a change agent, he says.

[See: 9 Ways to Harness the Growth of Latin America.]

"Wall Street does not like uncertainty," Heider says.

Top-Performing Managed Health Care Stocks

Stock information correct as of June 16, 2016.







More From US News & World Report


It's a plan so crazy that it just might work  or it might not be that crazy at all.

Badly in need of moderate and independent voters' support in November, on Thursday, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump made an all-out play for union members' backing.

The billionaire's pitch to the working man and woman came as Democrat Hillary Clinton, unsurprisingly, scored the support of the AFL-CIO, the labor umbrella group representing some 12.5 million members.

Trump pointedly invoked Clinton primary rival Bernie Sanders in a lengthy statement arguing that he, not Clinton, would be a better choice for union voters.

"Hillary Clinton and her husband have made hundreds of millions of dollars doing favors and selling access to Wall Street, special interests and oppressive foreign regimes," Trump's statement reads.

"As Bernie Sanders said, 'Why, over her political career, has Wall Street been the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton?'" Trump continued, clearly trying to capitalize on Clinton's enthusiasm gap with so-called #BernieOrBust voters. "They own Hillary Clinton and she will do whatever they tell her to."

The trade deficit rose to a 7yr high thanks to horrible trade policies Clinton supports. I will fix it fast- JOBS!http://apne.ws/28HjJYz

It's far from clear that union members would flock to the presumptive Republican nominee in a big way, despite Trump's somewhat protectionist views on trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But New York City Councilman Joseph Borelli, a Staten Island Republican and co-chairman of Trump's campaign operation in New York, says the real-estate magnate's team is smart to present a sharp contrast with Clinton to workers in Rust Belt swing states. If Trump could peel off states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, his path to victory would be much clearer.

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"You [saw] Bernie Sanders making a significant dent in Democratic support in those states," Borelli said in an interview. "And a lot of union members are moderate Democrats: They're Democrats by enrollment, but perhaps not Democrats by ideology."

Source: Alex Brandon/AP

He continued: "If you're someone in a swing state who has seen an economic downturn mostly as a result of the economic policies of both establishment Democrats and Republicans, yeah, I think you might strongly consider voting for Donald Trump  despite what your union might say."

Fear factor: The union did speak up after Trump ominously suggested a Clinton presidency would "economically destroy poor communities, African-American and Hispanic workers on trade, immigration, crime, energy, taxes, regulation and everything else."

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the Republican out on Twitter, suggesting Trump's attempts to woo labor didn't square with his apparent past disinterest in the travails of union workers.

@realDonaldTrump isn't happy w/ our endorsement but didn't seem worried a year ago when he refused to answer workers' questions.

Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and executive vice president of the 1.3 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, is also unconvinced Trump will have real appeal to labor voters.

"When union members look at this race seriously and think about the things Donald Trump has said that would impact their work lives, they will be running to the voting booths to vote for Hillary Clinton," Appelbaum, a Clinton superdelegate from New York, said in an interview.

Source: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Trump "says he admires Scott Walker, who took a sledgehammer to unions in Wisconsin. He rails against trade deals  but then claims that outsourcing creates jobs. His Trump-branded products are made overseas in places like Mexico and China," Appelbaum said.

"People may be angry, but Trump's approach would make things worse for working people. And as working people understand who Trump is and what he's about, they will not support him  because he does not support them."

Nothing to lose but the White House: There's no question Trump  who's been attacked as a union-buster by critics of his career in real estate  may have an uphill battle in convincing traditionally Democratic labor voters to come his way.

And even as the GOP hopeful tries to persuade moderates and disaffected Sanders supporters to vote for him, pro-Clinton union forces are making their own deliberate attempt to pull Trump voters across the aisle.

Upshot: Trump's courtship of labor may not end in a true romance. But the fact that his team is putting up a fight for those voters at the very least signals a realization that primary season is over and it's time to think outside the traditional GOP box.
Amden (Switzerland) (AFP) - Pieter Weening of the Roompot team won the Tour of Switzerland sixth stage on Thursday while Dutch compatriot Wilco Kelderman snatched the yellow jersey from French rider Pierre Latour.

Weening led a late escape of 15 riders on the final climb before breaking free, mastering the tricky wet conditions as the rain fell over the 162.8 km stage.

Latour, of the AG2R team, had taken the yellow jersey 24 hours earlier but Kelderman is the new leader with a 16-second advantage over another Frenchman, Warren Barguil.

Spaniard Gorka Izagirre looked poised to take the race as he cruised four minutes ahead of the peloton, but his challenge collapsed in the final climb.

Weening, among the breakaway group, maintained his advantage to finish 2min 37sec ahead of Argentine Maximiliano Richeze.

The favourites crossed the line four minutes later and Kelderman, second overall before the stage, got the better of Barguil with Slovenian Simon Spilak, the 2015 Tour of Switzerland winner, seventh.

Latour finished less than a minute behind Kelderman but had to hand over his yellow jersey, as he now sits sixth overall at 0.51sec.

Friday's seventh stage, the longest and most difficult in the race, covers 224.3km from Amden to Soelden in Austria with the final climb to the Rettenbach Glacier.
(Reuters) - Dow Chemical Co said it became the first foreign company to receive a trading license from Saudi Arabia as the kingdom plans to diversify its economy and free its dependence on oil exports amid a slump in global oil prices. Saudi Arabia's powerful deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman held a full day of meetings with U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, part of a visit aimed at restoring frayed ties with Washington and promoting his plan to wean the kingdom away from oil revenue. The trading license will give full ownership in the country's trading sector, the No. 1 U.S. chemical maker by sales said on Thursday. The world's top oil exporter announced in April a reform plan, a package of economic and social policies designed to raise non-oil revenue to 600 billion riyals ($160.04 billion) by 2020 and 1 trillion riyals by 2030 from 163.5 billion riyals last year. A plunge in oil prices since mid-2014 made the Vision 2030 reform, which relies on an expanding private sector, selling shares in the Saudi state-owned oil company and reducing government subsidies, urgent in the kingdom. (Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
The Cedar Creek fire had burned through more than 5,200 acres by Thursday morning, June 16, near Show Low in eastern Arizona since starting on Wednesday afternoon.

Navajo County officials called for the evacuation of Forestdale on Wednesday and warned of possible evacuations in Show Low, Pinetop-Lakeside, McNary, Fort Apache and Hon Dah.

Over 300 firefighters, two air tankers a some smaller planes and helicopters took to the scene to battle the blaze on Thursday.

The Red Cross has set up a shelter for evacuees in Snowflake High School on Street West, Snowflake, Arizona. Another shelter is due to open at Round Valley Middle School in Eagar.

This drone video is described as showing the smoke spreading over Arizona, filmed from a cabin on Cedar Ridge. Credit: YouTube/Blaine Wiggins
Three young photographers and 15,000 miles of open road. Its a straightforward premise that yields unexpected results for the makers of The Journeymen, the South African documentary selected to open the 37th Durban Intl. Film Festival.

Two years ago, photographers Wikus de Wet, Sipho Mpongo, and Sean Metelerkamp hit the road to chronicle South African life on the 20th anniversary of the end of apartheid  what Metelerkamp, who also directed the pic, describes as three guys from different cultural and racial backgrounds, united simply by a duty to set out and discover truly authentic South African stories.

With the help of a Kickstarter campaign and a host of generous donations  including GoPro cameras and the van that logs thousands of dusty miles onscreen  the trio embarked on an exhaustive journey across the rainbow nation. They chose a pivotal time in the countrys history, as the so-called born free generation prepared to vote for the first time, and South Africans reflected on the life and legacy of their first black president, Nelson Mandela, who died in December 2014.

But what was meant to be a photo project evolved as the trio pored over 12 terabytes worth of material from their epic, cross-country trip. After seven months of shooting, GoPros strapped to their chests, they realized that their day-to-day interactions with a diverse range of South Africans offered a startlingly candid snapshot of a nation at a crossroads.

It was, says Metelerkamp, footage that needed to be seen by South Africans.

With distribution and exhibition woes plaguing the South African film biz, though, bringing that footage to local audiences would be a challenge, says executive producer Dylan Voogt, forcing the films producers to think outside the box.

The goal is to disrupt the traditional cinema model  one that only serves urban centers in the country  and take the film to the people on a national roadshow, says Voogt. Along with a book and a traveling exhibition of the groups photography, there are plans for The Journeymen to screen in town halls, schools and villages, he says.

Story continues

Its a campaign that works hand in hand with the movies guerrilla filmmaking style, according to producer Jolynn Minnaar, who along with the filmmakers wants to start pushing the boundaries of the traditional documentary form.

In a country whose movie industry is still experiencing growing pains, Minnaar says access, funding and transformation remain a huge handbrake on independent filmmaking and authentic, creative storytelling.

Addressing those challenges, she says, is necessary to sustain a healthy, vibrant home for filmmaking that provides logistical, financial and training support for young, emerging filmmakers.

In a country thats celebrated for its diversity, such support is a vital stepping stone toward bringing more new voices to the screen.

For Metelerkamp, whos making his feature debut, he hopes The Journeymen will spark a spirit of possibility in the next generation of South African helmers.

The goal is to create a sustainable model whereby a new set of storytellers can venture out into the country every few years, he says. We are merely the portal this time around, and we look forward to what is to come in the future.

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(ST. PETERSBURG, Russia)  After a two-year break, which felt more like a boycott, European leaders and chief executives of top multinational companies are back at Russias top economic gathering in a sign of weariness about European sanctions against Moscow.

Russias annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its support for separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine landed President Vladimir Putin in international isolation. The European Union and the United States imposed economic sanctions and kicked Russia out of the G8 group of nations.

Once Russias showcase of its geopolitical weight and economic attractiveness, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum  dubbed Russias Davos  was a sore sight the past two years: European leaders and heads of the major companies who once had lucrative long-term projects in Russia were nowhere to be seen.

This years gathering, however, signals what could be an emerging movement within the E.U. to ease economic sanctions on Russia. The sanctions didnt only affect the Russian economy by closing long-term EU lending to Russian companies but also triggered a Russian import ban on meat, vegetable and dairy products from the European Union, dealing a heavy blow on agriculture-dependent nations such as Greece.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who is to address the forum later on Thursday, is the highest-ranking E.U. official to visit Russia since the Crimean annexation. Junckers office, however, sought to downplay the significance of his visit, saying that it should not be interpreted as a sign that the E.U. will lift the sanctions when the time for review comes two months from now.

Another high-profile speaker is Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, whose country was badly hurt when Russia closed its food markets to Italians along with other EU producers.

Moscow has sought to maintain good ties with Rome. While Putin was shunned in other European capitals, he was welcomed to Italy last year, meeting with Italian officials and Pope Francis. During their meeting in October, Renzi greeted Putin as Russias dear president and didnt voice any criticism against the countrys actions in Ukraine.

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Chief executives of major European companies who are either engaged in long-term projects in Russia or whose projects were affected by the sanctions are also coming this year, including the CEOs of oil company BP, the chairman of the board of Nestle S.A. and others.

Moscow is keen to spin the attendance as a sign that European politicians have failed to convince businesses to break ties with Russia.

We dont go around trying to convince our European and American partners to lift the sanctions, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. Those who imposed the sanctions, let them decide what should be done about this impasse they have created. But this impasse is slowly disappearing: the participant list of the St. Petersburg forum is a testimony to that.

U.S. authorities, in their turn, were anxious to portray ExxonMobils participation as an exception.

Weve been very clear on our engagements with U.S. companies that we believe that are clear risks, both economic and reputational, associated with top-level engagement with a government that is flouting the most fundamental principles of international rule of law by intervening military in a neighboring country, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday. Those companies which are not going to St. Petersburg recognize, Kirby said, that attending this forum sends a poor message out there about the acceptability of Russias actions.

___

Bradley Klapper in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report. to ease economic sanctions on Russia.
(Adds detail)

By Balazs Koranyi and Lefteris Papadimas

FRANKFURT/ATHENS, June 16 (Reuters) - The European Central Bank is almost certain to reinstate Greek banks' access to its cheap funding operations next week, two sources familiar with the situation said, allowing lenders to come off an expensive emergency lifeline after more than a year.

Greek banks lost their access to the ECB's cheap funding mechanism early last year when Athens came to the brink of being ejected from the euro zone. Regaining the funding would be a big step in normalising an economy still weighed down by capital controls and adjustments related to its bailout.

While Greece's debt is rated "junk" by credit agencies, the ECB is very likely to waive its investment-grade credit rating requirement at its June 22 Governing Council meeting, provided that the next 7.5-billion-euro tranche of bailout funds is disbursed on schedule early next week, the sources, who asked not to be named, said on Thursday.

The ESM euro zone bailout fund is scheduled to agree on Friday to disburse the next tranche of loans and the money is set to be paid early next week, EU officials said on Wednesday.

The ECB declined to comment.

The waiver would also be the first step to including Greece in the ECB's asset purchase programme, though that will require further deliberations and may not happen until September, one of the sources added.

Including Greece in the ECB's 1.74-trillion-euro asset purchase programme will be discussed after Greece makes a debt payment to the ECB due in late July and once the ECB completes a debt sustainability assessment.

The ECB discussed reinstating the waiver at its June 2 meeting but said further progress was needed before it could decide.

The waiver does not automatically solve Greek bank's funding problems as they will still have limited eligible collateral so they can only switch a minor part of their 64.8 billion euros worth of Emergency Liquidity Assistance to the ECB's regular funding operations.

Including Greece in the asset purchases would also be just a small boost for the country, as the ECB could only buy small amounts, less than 3 billion euros now, given various eligibility requirements.

(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi and Eleftherios Papadimas; Editing by John Stonestreet and Andrew Heavens)
Value investing is always a very popular strategy, and for good reason. After all, who doesnt want to find stocks that have low PEs, solid outlooks, and decent dividends?

Fortunately for investors looking for this combination, we have identified a strong candidate which may be an impressive value; EDP-Energias de Portugal, S.A. EDPFY.

EDP-Energias de Portugal in Focus

EDPFY may be an interesting play thanks to its forward PE of 10.4, its P/S ratio of 0.7, and its decent dividend yield of 4.3%. These factors suggest that EDP-Energias de Portugal is a pretty good value pick, as investors have to pay a relatively low level for each dollar of earnings, and that EDPFY has decent revenue metrics to back up its earnings.

But before you think that EDP-Energias de Portugal is just a pure value play, it is important to note that it has been seeing solid activity on the earnings estimate front as well. For current year earnings, the consensus has gone up by 2.4% in the past 30 days, thanks to 1 upward revisions in the past one month compared to none lower.

This estimate strength is actually enough to push EDPFY to a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), suggesting it is poised to outperform. So really, EDP-Energias de Portugal is looking great from a number of angles thanks to its PE below 20, a P/S ratio below one, and a strong Zacks Rank, meaning that this company could be a great choice for value investors at this time.

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While most middle school graduation speeches are far from remarkable, a Chicago-area student has become an Internet sensation after impersonating four of the presidential frontrunners in his eighth-grade commencement address.

Jack Aiello took an unorthodox route for his speech to the graduating class of Thomas Middle School in Arlington Heights, Ill., 45 minutes from Chicago. He mimicked business mogul Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, throwing in President Obama for good measure.

His father, John, recorded the video and put it on YouTube, where it has gotten over 93,000 views as of Thursday afternoon.

Let me just tell you, Thomas has been a great school, quite frankly, its been fantastic, Aiello said as Trump. Were learning languages from Spain, from France, from Germany and China. You know, people say I dont like China, I love China.

He then moved on to Cruz, extolling God bless the great school of Thomas in the tone of the former presidential frontrunner.

The Democrats came next, as Aiello copied Obama, Clinton and Sanders.

Let me start with the lunches  they are delicious, Aiello said, copying the hand gestures and cadence of Sanders. We have some of the best cinnamon rolls Ive ever tasted. I do have one improvement though: We need to make them free. Why should students have to pay for the whole cinnamon roll? It doesnt make any sense, we need a cinnamon roll revolution.

The 14-year-old has long been impersonating those around him, his mother, Carla Aiello, told a local news station.

Hes been doing them since he was very young  family members, teachers, he even makes up his own silly voices, and hes been doing that for a very long time, Aiello told NBC 5 in Chicago. And then with the election, he watches the news clips and he just absorbs everything.

According to the report, each member of Thomas 350-person graduating class submitted an essay draft of a graduation speech and Aiellos was selected as the winner.

He was hands down No. 1 because it was going to speak to the kids, his principal, Brian Kaye, said.

Judging by the standing ovation Aiello received, his audience agreed.
Through rapidly evolving technology and performance levels, electric motorcycles are eclipsing their initial perception as docile alternative transportation. Entering the fray, and reinforcing this more aggressive and spirited attitude, is Energica, Italys first supersport electric motorcycle manufacturer.

Energicas Eva is an upright, naked street fighter, designed as an easy-handling and maneuverable urban-jungle commuter that doubles as a sure-footed, highly responsive weekend sport machine. Equipped with a permanent magnet AC, oil-cooled motor, the Eva produces 95 hp with a torque rating of 125 ft lbs, available instantaneously from the initial turn of the throttle. No clutch, no gearsjust a throttle and brakes makes operation exceptionally uncomplicated.

There are four preprogrammed riding modes to tailor performance and battery use: Urban, Eco, Rain, and Sport. Energica claims the Eva has a range on full charge of up to 125 miles in Eco mode, and a top speed of 125 mph in Sport mode. A steel tubular-trellis frame with a beefy cast-aluminum swing arm is married to stylishly wedged bodywork, imbuing the Eva with a chic presence indicative of designs from other iconic Italian motorcycle manufacturers.

What separates the Energica from other electric motorcycles is its integrated fast-charge system. The under-seat outlet is fully compatible with commercial recharging stations, or the bike can be charged at home with a traditional wall outlet. The advantage of the fast-charge system is the greatly reduced time required to recharge the battery (versus slower times ... often the bane of electric vehicles) with the 4 DC system restoring up to 85 percent of battery power in just 30 minutes.

Evas 17-inch, five-spoke, cast-aluminum wheels are supported by 1.7-inch Marzocchi upside-down, gold-anodized forks (with adjustable rebound, compression damping, and spring preload) on the front and a Bitubo mono shock (with adjustable rebound and spring preload) on the rear, mounted directly to the frame and swing arm without linkage. Massive, dual 9.4-inch floating discs mated with Brembo 4-piston calipers handle braking duties on the front end, providing superb stopping power, while a single 9.4-inch disc and 2-piston Brembo caliper handles the rear. Brakes are augmented with Bosch switchable ABS. A chain final drive delivers torque to the wheels.

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Evas comfortable ergonomics provide an ease of reach to the handlebars, control levers, and foot pegs. Handling is intuitive and responsive, belying a weight of 550 poundswhich is carried low in the chassis. Providing protection for the rider, a bikini fairing sits atop a dual-headlight arrangement. The Energica Eva starts at $34,000 and is available in electric green or dark blue. (energicamotor.com)

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UPDATE: This story has been updated with video from the concert.

The murder of 49 people at Pulse in Orlando has spurred an outpouring of grief, anger, love and calls for change across the globe. At his concert in Liverpool on Tuesday night, Elton John took a moment to talk about all those emotions, but also about how he sees a glimpse of hope out of the horrible tragedy, which experts speculate could have been both an act of terrorism and homophobia.

Lady Gaga Shares Story of Strength After Meeting With Orlando Victim's Friend

"When a horror like this massacre in Orlando comes along, great agony crashes across the world like a tsunami. And great grief. We feel shocked, angry and feel devastated inside for the victims and the loved ones who are mourning them," John said.

John told the crowd at ECHO Arena that he's been busy in recent months working with Lady Gaga on the Love and Bravery project that's about "having love to accept everyone for who they are. Especially people who are different from you and the bravery to show it." And while the reportedly self-radicalized madman behind the spree that also injured 53 appeared unable to accept the patrons at Pulse, John said he was able to find a sliver of light in the darkness.

Paul McCartney, Demi Lovato Pay Tribute to Orlando Pulse Victims

"What I find extraordinary and what really gives me strength and hope is that immediately behind that devastation came a different wave. A rainbow colored wave of love, from Istanbul to Tel Aviv, from Sydney Opera House to the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building and the White House," he said of the many international landmarks that lit up in rainbow colors in honor of the victims and their families.

Lady Gaga and Elton John Partner for Macy's Clothing Line

John, a longtime LGBTQ rights supporter who has raised more than $349 million for HIV prevention and education via his Elton John AIDS Foundation since 1992, added, "so tonight, while I would like to honor and mourn the LGBT community's loss in Orlando and the loss of everyone who has been a victim of hate and stigma and dogma, I would like to say tonight we are winning the fight against prejudice. The rainbow around the world tells me we can and we will win against these people."
The massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., has spurred an outpouring of grief, anger, love and calls for change across the globe. At his concert in Liverpool, England, on Tuesday night, Elton John took a moment to talk about all those emotions, but also about how he sees a glimpse of hope out of the horrible tragedy, which experts speculate could have been both an act of terrorism and homophobia.

"When a horror like this massacre in Orlando comes along, great agony crashes across the world like a tsunami. And great grief," John said. "We feel shocked, angry and feel devastated inside for the victims and the loved ones who are mourning them."

John told the crowd at ECHO Arena that he's been busy in recent months working with Lady Gaga on the Love and Bravery project that's about "having love to accept everyone for who they are. Especially people who are different from you and the bravery to show it." And while the reportedly self-radicalized madman behind the spree that killed 49 (and himself) and also injured 53 appeared unable to accept the patrons at Pulse, John said he was able to find a silver of light in the darkness.

Read More: Adele Dedicates Concert to Orlando Victims: "The LGBTQA Community, They're Like My Soulmates"

"What I find extraordinary and what really gives me strength and hope is that immediately behind that devastation came a different wave. A rainbow colored wave of love, from Istanbul to Tel Aviv, from Sydney Opera House to the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building and the White House," he said of the many international landmarks that lit up in rainbow colors in honor of the victims and their families.

John, a longtime LGBTQ rights supporter who has raised more than $349 million for HIV prevention and education via his Elton John AIDS Foundation since 1992, added, "So tonight, while I would like to honor and mourn the LGBT community's loss in Orlando and the loss of everyone who has been a victim of hate and stigma and dogma, I would like to say tonight we are winning the fight against prejudice. The rainbow around the world tells me we can and we will win against these people."

Story continues

Watch the full video below.

This article originally appeared on Billboard.com.

Read More: Beyonce Dedicates "Halo" to Victims of Orlando Shooting
A version of this story first appeared in the print edition of TheWrap Magazines Miniseries/Movies Emmy Issue.

When Jay Roach decided to make an HBO movie from Robert Schenkkans Broadway play All the Way, he wasnt exactly thinking about how the events of President Lyndon Baines Johnsons first year in office would reflect on todays political climate.

But at some point, the director of the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents movies and of the HBO political films Recount and Game Change realized that Johnsons struggle to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 spoke powerfully to voter suppression, to racial divides in the South and to other currents playing out today.

Also Read: Review: Bryan Cranston Is Riveting as LBJ in HBO's 'All the Way'

I was interested in aspects of the story because of my own anxieties about the political process, Roach told TheWrap. But in the middle of it, you cant help but realize, Oh wow, some of this is going on now. Voting rights issues and civil rights issues are not resolved in our civilization. Its interesting that you can tell a story set in the past and have it seem to be as much about now as then.

He paused. One of the other things I found interesting about this film and this character is the kind of old-fashioned political experience and strategizing that LBJ demonstrated. Political experience wasnt a dirty word back then  you see a guy who believes in the power of government to do good, and he fulfills that promise. So much of what were seeing now is promising people that government is the problem, not the solution.

Also Read: Bryan Cranston Talks Going 'Out on This Limb' to Play Eccentric Writer Dalton Trumbo (Video)

With Bryan Cranston reprising the role he played on Broadway, Roach said he knew from the first time he saw the play that it would work on screen. The story itself was epic and cinematic, he said. He wanted to be president his whole life, and he got to be president in the worst way possible, when JFK was assassinated. He could have folded under pressure, but he took on the challenges and he got it done.

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A version of this story about Kerry Washington first appeared in the print edition of TheWrap Magazines Miniseries/Movies Emmy Issue.

Audiences know Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope, the heroine of ABCs Beltway drama Scandal.

But the 39-year-old actress landed in a different type of Washington drama with HBOs made-for-TV movie Confirmation, about the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. Washington plays Anita Hill, the law professor who accused Thomas of sexual harassment in an earlier job.

Also Read: 'Confirmation' Fact Check: What HBO's Anita Hill Movie Got Right and Wrong (Photos)

How much did you know about the Anita Hill case when you started working on Confirmation?

When the hearings happened, I was about 13, so most of my memories of it are through the eyes of my parents. At the time, it had a really profound impact on me because my dad was really pulled compassionately in the direction towards [Thomas], this very successful black man who was having his reputation and his career maligned publicly in front of this panel of white men.

My mom was very compassionately pulled in the direction toward Anita Hill, this professional black woman who was was being re-victimized after coming forward as a victim. Usually, my parents were on the same page politically, but this was kind of the first moment where I was aware of my identity as an African-American and as a woman and how that might be more complicated than I thought beforehand.

What did you learn about the case that you didnt know before?

We tend to think about the hearings and about that time as a he-said, she-said story. The more research we did, the more we realized it was much more complicated than that. That this was really a story about access and power and control and political agenda.

Also Read: Kerry Washington Signs Overall Deal With ABC Studios

Why do you think the Anita Hill case became such a flashpoint?

Two of the things that are most difficult for us to talk about, as a society, as a culture, are gender and race. The hearings were this absolute collision of race, gender and power. You had the most important seat on the Supreme Court  this icon of justice, this African-American man, Thurgood Marshall, was retiring, and who was going to fill that seat? The Republican White House had to fill that seat. There was a political agenda from the beginning.

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And then you throw in accusations of sexual harassment, at a time when sexual harassment were not words that we used the way we use them today. Sexual harassment was this vague legal term that was only used in very few circles.

Suddenly you had an entire nation not only questioning itself on issues of race and power and access, but also asking itself, Is it not OK to talk that way in the office? Can I not treat my secretary that way? Are we really going to have to deal with gender in the workplace? Are we really going to have to deal with gender in America? Are we really going to have to deal with sex and talk about pubic hair in the Senate hearing room?

There was so much about it that was shocking to Americans. You couldnt turn away from it.

Also Read: 'Confirmation' Review: Kerry Washington Performance Makes the Ordinary Powerful

Usually you play fictional characters. What were the challenges in playing a real person this time?

Its hard because Anita Hill is somebody that I respect enormously, and at the same time, I wanted to make sure we werent making a film for her approval. As an executive producer, I wanted to tell a story that was complicated. I wanted you to be pulled in the way that I was at 13. I wanted you to be pulled compassionately toward Joe Biden, and toward Clarence Thomas and toward Anita Hill.

I wanted you to jump into this story and see how much more complicated it was than what we knew at the time. That was my goal as the producer: It was to be very well-rounded and even-keeled and even-handed. As an actor, my job was to completely devote myself to her, and really honor her, and yet not try to please her. I wanted to make sure I showed the parts of her that maybe she doesnt identify with.

The hearings were extensively covered. Did you go back and watch them?

I watched all of her press conferences and all of the hearings again and again, because I wanted to understand the rhythm of how she spoke, and how she made the choices about what she said, and how she held her body. Even our posture says so much about who we are and how we think about ourselves and our circumstances. I really try to lean into the raw footage as an artist and as a social scientist in a way to try to really uncover who she was.

Also Read: Kerry Washington Warns of 'Shocking' News in HBO's 'Confirmation' Teaser (Video)

Youre already busy working on ABCs drama Scandal. How were you able to balance that schedule with making Confirmation?

The preproduction period was complicated. As we were researching and developing and casting and hiring costume designers, we were literally meeting with the directors in my trailer at Sunset-Gower [Studios]. At my lunch hour from shooting Scandal, we were interviewing different directors for the film. The same with cinematographers and costume designers. A lot of them were phone calls that I would do at my lunch hour, on my way to the set, on my way home. Then we broke in time for me to really jump into casting. I threw myself in.

HBO was really supportive of me being a hands-on producer. They understood that I didnt want to be a figurehead producer, that I really had a voice and really wanted to be part of the vision of how this film unfolded and was created. They also were like, OK, its time for you to take the producing hat off, and get into her shoes.

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Hillary Clinton is now the first woman to be nominated by a major party for the U.S. presidency. And now that she has secured the Democratic Party nomination, speculation on the impact of her potential victory is ringing loudly on Wall Street.

As of June 15, Clinton had 43.4% chances of winning while her opponent Donald Trump had 38.3%, according to Huffpost Pollster. And as per PredictWise, the Democratic Party will see a sweeping win to the White House with chances as high as 76%, as of June 15. Needless to say, ears turned to what Clinton is saying in her election campaigns. Investors are examining the investing areas that are to surge if Clinton makes it to the office.

Below we highlight a few of Clintons economic view and their impact on the ETF world.

Hike in Minimum Wages

Clinton seeks to hike the minimum wage from $7.25 to at least $12 per hour. This will hit several consumer discretionary ETFs. For example, the restaurant sector is a great example, as it employs a lot of such lower-income workers. On the wage hike issue, the ex-CEO of McDonalds (MCD), Ed Rensi, said that it would be a better option to purchase a robotic arm for $35K than paying an incompetent employee $15 an hour, a level another Democratic candidate Sanders was viewing as must-have.

As a result, Restaurant ETF (BITE) will likely be hurt by the implementation of minimum wage. While consumer staples ETFs like Vanguard Consumer Staples ETF VDC should benefit from this government move, one should note that restaurateurs bearing the brunt of higher minimum wages will eventually pass on this hike to increased menu prices and will turn more tech-savvy. All in all, consumer staples ETFs may not gain as much as they should (read: Consumer Face Off: Wal-Mart versus Amazon ETFs).

Banks to Face More Stringent Regulations?

Clinton seeks to restrain extreme risk-taking tendencies among big financial institutions and curb risks lying underneath the shadow banking system. Clinton is in favor of levying a tax only on high-frequency traders who terminate a lot of orders.

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While these stringencies are targeted at bringing about stability in the banking system, many of the profit generating corners of big banks will be hard bit due to this defensive sentiment. ETFs like SPDR S&P Capital Markets ETF (KCE) and iShares U.S. Broker-Dealers & Securities Exchanges ETF (IAI) may suffer from such moves.

Spending on Infrastructure

Clinton intends to boost infrastructure spending by a minimum of $275 billion. This should favor utility ETFs like PowerShares S&P SmallCap Utilities Portfolio PSCE).

Defense Outlays to Rise

Clinton has always been seen as a supporter of a strong U.S. military. Moreover, since defense and aerospace stocks gained considerably even in the days of sequestration, the future of this sector looks bright.

So, defense and aerospace ETFs includingiShares US Aerospace & Defense (ITA), SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF (XAR) and PowerShares Aerospace & Defense ETF PPA) should get a lift(read: Upbeat Aerospace & Defense Results Lift ETFs).

Pharma and Healthcare Sitting on the Fence?

Hillary Clintons tweet raised concerns over the pricing on life-saving drugs in September. Questions over biotech pricing came on the heels of a 5,455%price hike (in about two months) of a drug called Daraprim, used to treat malaria and toxoplasmosis. This gigantic leap in pricing action was taken by a privately held biotech company Turing Pharmaceuticals (read: How Hillary Clinton Crushed Biotech ETFs with One Tweet).

This makes it clear that pharma ETFs may come under pressure during Clintons presidency. The above-said comments and tweets may make pharma ETFs edgy. PowerShares Dynamic Pharmaceuticals Portfolio ETF (PJP) may be a victim.

On the other hand, Clinton plans to push Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act higher. Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLV) may get a boost from the expected surge in healthcare providers and services.XLV has only 39% exposure in the pharma sector while other corners of the healthcare sector make up the rest.

New Regulations on Fracking: Winning or Losing Proposition?

She is expected to embark on new regulations on fracking, the key cause of the U.S. energy sector boom. Clinton proclaimed that she would not back fracking in states or local communities that are against it because of pollution issues.

While this move may go against ETFs like VanEck Vectors Unconventional Oil & Gas ETF (FRAK), and SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP), environmentally friendly ETFs like The SPDR MSCI ACWI Low Carbon Target ETF LOWC or SPDR S&P 500 Fossil Fuel Free ETF SPYX should get a boost (read: Eco-Friendly ETFs to Commemorate World Environment Day).

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Brussels (AFP) - The European Union on Thursday launched an investigation into Polish logging in its ancient Bialowieza forest, a protected UNESCO World Heritage site which includes some of Europe's last primeval woodland.

"The commission has launched an infringement procedure against Poland... the commission is in contact with the Polish authorities to make sure that any measures are in line with EU law," a spokesman said.

"Polish authorities have one month to provide the information requested and once received, the commission will carefully assess this to decide whether further action is necessary."

The probe comes with Brussels and Warsaw already at loggerheads over changes to Poland's constitutional court which the EU has warned could merit sanctions as a "systemic threat" to the rule of law.

The Bialowieza forest straddles Poland's eastern border with Belarus and is home to unique plant and animal life, including a herd of some 800 European bison, the continent's largest mammal.

The vast woodland includes one of the largest surviving parts of the primeval forest that covered the European plain ten thousand years ago.

The Polish government began logging last month, saying it was clearing dead trees to prevent damage caused by the spruce bark beetle, in line with EU regulations.

Environmentalists argue that the entire Polish part of the forest should be designated as a nature park, meaning logging would be forbidden.

They took their complaint to the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.

The coalition of seven environmental NGOs said Thursday the infringement procedure "could result in Poland being taken to the European Court of Justice for breaching the EU Habitats Directive."

Poland's environment ministry meanwhile denied any wrong-doing, insisting that its Bialowieza policy was entirely legal and in line with EU directives.

Backed by many Polish scientists, the NGOs insist that large-scale logging and particularly the removal of spruce bark beetle-infested dead wood threaten a multitude of plant and animal species.

"It is estimated that around 50 percent of biodiversity within the Bialowieza Forest is dependent on dead wood," said the groups including ClientEarth, WWF, Greenpeace and Birdlife.
(Repeats story published late on Wednesday)

* Passport system allows UK-based banks to sell services across EU

* French minister says "No passport" if Britons vote to leave

* Partners would demand high price for "crown jewel" EU benefit

* Loss would hit UK-based foreign banks, including U.S., Japanese

By Paul Taylor and Francesco Guarascio

BRUSSELS, June 15 (Reuters) - Britain's partners are stepping up warnings that if it votes next week to leave the European Union, banks and financial firms based in London could lose their money-spinning EU "passports".

The City of London vies with New York as the world's biggest financial centre in part thanks to the automatic right to sell services across the 28-nation bloc with low costs and a single set of rules under a system known as passporting, industry and European officials said.

Asked by Reuters what would happen in case of a Brexit after the June 23 referendum, French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said: "There will be no passport, or that would have to be negotiated against a lot of reciprocal concessions."

Sapin said aloud what many EU officials and diplomats are saying privately. Unfettered access for financial services is widely seen as the "crown jewels" of British membership benefits, and London's partners would charge a high price for keeping it, if they were willing to do so at all.

Germany, France, Luxembourg and Ireland would all be vying to pick up business from London in areas such as investment banking, clearing and settlement and fund management.

EU membership gives Britain access to what effectively is a "financial Schengen zone" - a single set of rules that allows banks, including many U.S. and other non-European institutions, to operate freely across the bloc's borders.

Just as the 26-nation Schengen area, which Britain has never joined, permits citizens to travel without border formalities, the single market allows lenders, fund managers and investment firms to operate EU-wide without different national rules and controls.

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Britain is the biggest beneficiary as UK-based banks and investment firms play a key role in European financial markets for derivatives, foreign exchange, cross-border bank lending, asset management and insurance services.

A passporting system allows British-regulated banks to open branches in EU countries simply with a notice to the British supervisory authorities.

Financial services account for 8 percent of British national income, according to the Bank of England. The sector accounts for almost a quarter of all EU financial services income and 40 percent of EU financial services exports. Eighty of 358 banks operating in Britain are headquartered elsewhere in Europe.

"A key concern of many UK banks and investment firms is that the exit of the UK from the EU would mean that they would no longer benefit from the passport and would be subject to similar restrictions as non-EU firms," banking lobby AFME said in a report that raised doubts about the future of London as a hub for continental financial services.

The impact would be as severe on American, Japanese and other non-European banks that have their European headquarters in London. Many are already considering giving up parts of their business in Europe, or moving them to inside the euro zone, in the event of a Brexit.

OPTIONS

Banks would still be able to set up subsidiaries, as opposed to branches, in European countries where they seek to operate, but a banking industry official said "this implies bigger commitments and higher costs". Subsidiaries have to be capitalised separately and are subject to national regulation and potentially to national ring-fencing of liquidity.

The EU treaty provides for two years to negotiate a divorce once a country decides to leave. That period could only be extended by unanimous agreement. When exactly the countdown starts would depend on when a British government formally notified EU partners of its intention to leave.

EU officials say it is unlikely that Britain would give notice at a summit on June 28-29 if next week's referendum vote produces an "Out" result, but they want the process started by the end of the year.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has said Britain would have to negotiate withdrawal terms first and become a "third country" before it could reach agreement on any new relationship.

Britain could theoretically keep the passport system if it became part of the European Economic Area of which Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein are members.

But this would mean applying all EU rules automatically without its existing power to influence the legislation. It would also mean paying a contribution to EU coffers for market access and fully implementing the so-called "four freedoms" or movement for capital, goods, services and people.

Since putting an end to the automatic right of EU citizens to work in Britain and stopping net transfers to Brussels are two of the key goals of the Leave campaign, it seems hard to imagine a post-Brexit government accepting such terms.

Yet German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said last week Britain would not be able to continue benefiting from the single market unless it did.

"For that, the country would need to stick to the rules of the club that it now want to quit," Schaeuble told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. "In is in, out is out."

Alternatively, Britain could try to negotiate bespoke deals with the EU, as Switzerland has done. But this would take much longer than two years, even if the two parties were in full accord, EU financial services commissioner Jonathan Hill told the European Parliament on Tuesday, citing past examples.

(Additional reporting by Emmanuel Jarry in Paris; Editing by Pravin Char)
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Former European Commission President Jacques Delors, the father of modern European integration, said in a statement to Reuters on Thursday that British membership is positive both for the United Kingdom and for the European Union. Delors, 90, who clashed frequently with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during his decade at the head of the EU executive from 1985 to 1994, said he would respect the British voters' decision in next week's referendum on whether to remain in the EU. "I consider the UK's participation in the European Union to be a positive element both for the British and for the Union," the French elder statesman said. His statement was emailed through the Jacques Delors Institute to dispel what it called inaccurate rumors that he favored a Brexit to enable the remaining EU members to move ahead with deeper integration. (This story has been refiled to correct Delors' age to 90) (Writing by Paul Taylor)
Matthew McConaughey's 7-year-old son, Levi, had a lot of fun visiting his dad on the set of his upcoming Civil War movie, Free State of Jones, but he also learned an important lesson.

"He was there a lot," the 46-year-old actor told ET, adding that his son was first excited by all the classic machinery and props used in the movie. "He got to press the buttons to explode a lot of the things, or at least he thought it was him doing it."

EXCLUSIVE: 'West Texas Investors Club' Star Rooster McConaughey Reveals the Time He Almost Got Brother Matthew Fired

However, upon being exposed to some of the tragedies that go with war, Levi had an honest moment with his father.

"They had made a bunch of dummies that looked very, very real," said McConaughey, discussing a battle scene from the film. "I stood beside him and for about a minute he just stared [at them]... He goes, 'Papai, I don't want to go to war.' I was like, 'Yeah I hear you.'"

The actor also shared plans for his Father's Day celebration with Levi and his two younger siblings, 6-year-old Vida and 3-year-old Livingston, admitting that he didn't realize the holiday was coming up this weekend.

WATCH: Matthew McConaughey Looks Almost Identical to Someone's Great-Great-Grandfather -- See the Pic!

"I had to be reminded Father's Day is coming up," he revealed, adding, "But you're damn right I knew when Mother's Day was."

Smart man!

Free State of Jones is set to hit theaters on June 24.

WATCH: Matthew McConaughey Auditions for 'Star Wars'

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Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM) on Wednesday asked a federal court to toss out a subpoena requesting decades of internal data in a case brought against the oil and gas company by a team of state attorneys general.

According to Reuters, the subpoena claims Exxon executives essentially contradicted papers published by their own company scientists regarding climate change effects and threats. The angle of the case is to paint any intentionally misleading representation on the part of executives as securities fraud.

Related Link: Energy ETFs Are Soaring, But Some Investors Lack Enthusiasm

Earlier this year, Benzinga.com reported on investigations by attorney generals from both California and New York based on similar suspicions of climate change research suppression by the company.

"Exxon said in Wednesdays filing that the subpoena seeks documents outside of the statute of limitations and that activist groups encouraged opening inquiries," according to Reuters. Republican members of congress have urged the prosecutors in this case not to treat a policy issue as a matter for law-enforcement.

Exxon shares were up 0.19 percent at $90.31 Thursday late morning after having experienced some steady declines earlier in the day.

See more from Benzinga

 2016 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
F1s chief, Ecclestone, (R) likes his new race site. (Getty Images)

Bernie Ecclestone sure loves the site of Formula 1s newest grand prix.

Formula 1 is making its first trip to Azerbaijan for the European Grand Prix this weekend. The new track goes through the streets of the countrys capital, Baku. Its a race a week and halfway around the world from the last F1 race, the Canadian Grand Prix held at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal.

Why is that important? Well, Ecclestone, the chief executive of the Formula 1 Group, thinks the Baku track makes North America look like a bit of a s***hole. Really. Heres his full quote from F1i.com:

I didnt walk it but went around it  when I laid it out in the first place I was told I was mad. Trying to get the old city and the new city together, but it looks like it has worked out alright. We just left the greatest place in the world North America  and compared to here, it is a bit of a s***hole isnt it?

Ecclestone, 85, is known for saying peculiar and downright offensive things. His propensity for controversial quotes makes it amusing when you see graphics saying Bernie says dont drink and drive during Formula 1 broadcasts.

Its hard to take common sense advice from a guy who once said that women should be dressed in white like all other domestic appliances.

Ecclestones word choice for North America aside, its also hard to see how Azerbaijan makes North America look bad. Heres the first paragraph about the country from Human Rights Watch:

Azerbaijans government has escalated repression against its critics, marking a dramatic deterioration in an already poor rights record. In recent years , dozens of human rights defenders, political and civil activists, journalists, and bloggers have been arrested or imprisoned on politically motivated charges, prompting others to flee the country or go into hiding. Bank accounts of independent civic groups and their leaders have been frozen, impeding their work, or in some cases forcing them to shut down entirely. New legal regulations make it almost impossible for independent groups to get foreign funding. While criticizing the increasing crackdown, Azerbaijans international partners have failed to secure rights improvements.

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The country recently released a journalist who had been imprisoned for over 500 days; a journalist who had gone after the countrys human rights record. Perhaps the situation is similar to the Russian Olympics in 2014  a lot of things looked great for TV, but many underlying societal problems werent addressed.

F1 also now races in Sochi, where the Olympics were held.

And if youre wondering if Ecclestone is concerned about Azerbaijans treatment of people, hes not. He said he absolutely has a clear conscience about F1s trip to the country.

The minute people tell me what human rights are, you can look at how, why and when it applies. Does anyone know what human rights are? he said to F1i.

The Azerbaijan government is subsidizing the construction and financing of the race and a member of the government said he hopes the race will turn a profit in 2017. The country has a five-year deal to host the grand prix.

The race begins at 9:30 a.m. ET Sunday.

      

Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
W don't have retinal scanners or chips under our skin to tell advertisers and stores where we are, and what we want to see. Instead we have our cell phones, and that's all advertisers need.

Facebook added new measurement tools on Tuesday that allow companies to track people who are entering stores and deliver ads directly targeted to people in the surrounding area.

Facebook is building the most sophisticated, surveillance-fueled advertising business in the world. But, as Facebook points out on its blog, 90% of retail shopping still happens in physical stores, so it's looking for ways to combine the real-life experience of shopping with the fact that 45% of people have their phone out while shopping to help them browse.

In order to build this advertising business, Facebook will have to track the stores all of its users enter.

Last summer, Facebook handed out "beacons" to some retailers  little devices that sensed when smartphones were nearby and could push ads to those phones.

The social network's new ad-targeting system only works for those who have location services turned on. Many services either require location services or surreptitiously ask you to turn them on when you first open the app.

You could always turn your location services off, but then you'd miss out on the ubiquitous surveillance  er, sweet deals.
By Julia Edwards (Reuters) - As facts emerge about Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday, questions have arisen about how well-known he was to U.S. intelligence agencies. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said on Monday that Mateen was on a watchlist between May 2013 and March 2014 while he was under investigation after claiming a connection to or support for multiple Islamist extremist groups, including al Qaeda, Hezbollah, al-Nusra and Islamic State. The FBI maintains three watchlists and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence runs one database. People are placed on a watchlist according to the threat level they are believed to pose. Comey did not specify which watchlist named Mateen. Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton has supported stricter gun laws and said on Monday she would push for laws that would prevent people on a no-fly list from buying guns. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has embraced gun rights, said he would meet with the leading U.S. gun rights group about preventing people on a government watchlist from buying guns. The U.S. government maintains the following databases: Terrorist Watchlist or Terrorist Screening Database (about 420,000 names): Established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Terrorist Watchlist is intended to positively identify known or suspected terrorists trying to obtain visas, enter the U.S, board aircraft, or engage in other activity. Prior to 2001, intelligence agencies maintained dozens of individual lists. The Terrorist Watchlist is run by the FBIs Terrorist Screening Center with the goal of consolidating the U.S. governments watchlists into a single database. No-Fly List (about 16,000 names): A subset of the Terrorist Screening Database, the No-Fly List prohibits people known or suspected of terrorism from boarding a plane that departs from or arrives in the United States. Selectee List (about 16,000 names): A subset of the Terrorist Watchlist, the Selectee List includes individuals who are permitted to fly, but receive more intensive screening. In addition to the thousands of records updated daily from federal, state and local law enforcement, the Selectee List provides an additional level of screening for individuals thought to present a greater threat. Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, database (about 1.1 million names): Run by the National Counterterrorism Center, part of the Office of the National Director of Intelligence, the TIDE Database shares information with the FBI's watchlists. As of December 2013, it contained about 1.1 million people, about 25,000 of them U.S. citizens. Unlike the FBI's database, TIDE is viewable only by counterterrorism professionals in the U.S. intelligence community and is not shared with local law enforcement. Federal agencies propose people for inclusion on the TIDE database based on an evaluation of the threat they pose. Reasons someone may be added to the TIDE database include committing terrorist activity, preparing or planning a terrorist activity or providing support, such as funds or housing, for a terrorist organization. (Reporting by Julia Edwards in Washington; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Peter Cooney)
From Woman's Day

The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history killed 49 people early Sunday morning, and left Americans shaken, wondering what they can do to help. That has led to record-breaking charitable donations-but sadly, also a lot of scammers preying on people's good nature.

Give.org, the charity arm of the Better Business Bureau, released a warning to people who want to give a charitable donation to those affected by the shooting. "The best way to help the victims, their families, and the people of Orlando is to make sure that donations end up where they belong," H. Art Taylor, president & CEO of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, said in a statement. "We are already hearing about click-bait schemes and questionable solicitations, and we expect there will be numerous scams and frauds. We urge those generous donors to give wisely so their gifts can do the most good."

How can you avoid getting scammed? Make sure you thoroughly research the charity before you donate your money. Most U.S. states require charitable groups register with the government, so check to see if an organization is registered. According to the Orlando Sentinel, you can check out Florida-based charities by calling 1-800-HELP-FLA to see if it's registered. The Better Business Bureau also says you should be a little suspicious of start-up-type organizations, because they might not have the experience or management to get funds where they need.

Once you've checked out the charity, make sure it's behaving in a respectful and transparent way. Check that they have received permission to use the photos of victims and their families, ensure that they are extremely clear and specific about how the funds will be used, and if tax deductions are important to you, search this IRS website to find out if your donation will be deductible. And of course, avoid clicking on unfamiliar links sent to you in text messages or emails.

Looking for a place to start? Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer has set up the OneOrlando fund, which will end up distributing donations to more than 400 charities. The Walt Disney Company has already contributed $1 million to that cause. A GoFundMe campaign by Equality Florida has raised a record $4.2 million dollars, and will go to the National Compassion Fund, which has also worked with victims of the Chattanooga and Aurora shootings.
Stocks swing from red to green in volatile trading after the Fed and Bank of Japan, fail to reassure concerned investors. Catch The Final Round at 4 p.m. ET with Jen Rogers and markets correspondent Nicole Sinclair.

Winners and losers

Stocks slipping in todays trading include automaker Fiat Chrysler following a Citi downgrade to sell; American Airlines dropping on a downgrade, this one courtesy of BofA/Merrill Lynch; and Korn Ferry, the talent consulting firm tumbling after issuing current quarter guidance that disappointed the street.

Stocks bucking the tough tape higher today include network equipment maker Q-Logic on its merger with chipmaker Cavium; fellow chipmaker AMD surging on an upgrade from Canaccord Genuity; and Kroger, the nations largest supermarket chain climbing after reporting an earnings beat, citing expanded organic offerings and new e-commerce services like online ordering.

Misbehaving with Richard Thaler

Noted behavioral economist Richard Thaler discusses his new book, Misbehavior, on the origins of behavioral economists, and reveals some insight on whats happening in todays frenzied markets.

Looking ahead
A federal judge dismissed a Texas lawsuit Thursday, in which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton challenged the Obama administrations process for resettling Syrian refugees in the state.

The lawsuit  filed in December with the backing of Governor Greg Abbott  pressed federal authorities to block Syrian refugees from entering Texas, as well as for more information on refugees already slated for resettlement. U.S. District Judge David Godbey was urged by both the Obama administration and the International Rescue Committee, which had also been sued by Texas, to dismiss the lawsuit, the Austin American-Statesman reports. The order officially dismissing the legal action was signed Wednesday.

Godbey had previously denied Texas request for a temporary restraining order against Syrian refugees after determining that there was no substantial threat of immediate injury.

In November, following the Paris attacks, Abbott wrote in a letter to Obama that Texas cannot participate in any program that will result in Syrian refugees  any one of whom could be connected to terrorism  being resettled in Texas.

Jennifer Sime, Senior Vice President of US Programs with the International Rescue Committee, released a statement celebrating the ruling. Todays decision upholds and affirms Americas proud history in providing refuge for the worlds most vulnerable, Sime said. Refugees are fleeing violence and persecution and want nothing more than to live a safe and peaceful life.
Fedor The Last Emperor Emelianenko, one of the best heavyweights in MMA history, is slowly returning from his retirement. He beat Jaideep Singh during RIZINs 2015 New Years Eve extravaganza show, and now hes fighting in Russias Eurasia Fight Nights Fight Nights Global 50 later this month. His opponent is former UFC competitor, Fabio Caipira de Aco Maldonado. Maldonado, whos nickname roughly translates to The Iron Hillbilly is also a professional boxer, sporting a 24-0 record with 23 knockouts in the sweet science.

As is the protocol for Russian MMA, especially bouts involving the Emelianenkos, the hype video for this contest is insane. Fabio, in his BJJ gi and surrounded by his Brazilian pals, angrily punches the ground, cracking it. This act of foreign aggression causes a number of statues to explode, revealing the Russian men trapped inside. They quickly put on their kurtkas, the traditional sambo jacket, and gather around Fedor. Both groups grab flags and angrily walk towards each other, which looks a little awkward since the sambo uniform eschews pants (Well, in reality, the first uniform had pants, but they were eaten by timber wolves, but the stoic Russians trained anyway).

Related Links:





The video ends with a face off, and Im way more into this conflict that Captain America Civil War. Team Fabio, by the way. You can watch Fedor take on Fabio on Fight Nights Global 50 on June 17, most likely on UFC Fight Pass.
Jo Cox, a rising star in Britain's Labor Party, was killed on a public street Thursday by a man who shot her three times and stabbed her with a 12-inch knife, police said.

Cox, 41, was attacked after a meeting with constituents by a 52-year-old man who shouted "Britain First"  a possible reference to a far-right political party of the same name  outside a library in West Yorkshire, according to local reports.

The suspect was identified as local resident Thomas Mair, who was described by neighbors as a quiet loner.

Read: World Mourns 'The Greatest' Fighter of All Time Muhammad Ali Dead At 74

She was pronounced dead by a doctor and paramedics at 1:48 p.m. local time. First responders found the mother of two lying on the pavement, bleeding.

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it everyday of her life with an energy and a zest for life that would exhaust most people," her husband, Brendan, said after her death. "She would have wanted two things above all else the happen now  one, that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."

He posted this photo of his wife on Twitter Thursday, showing her next to the converted barge the family lives in on the Thames:

Witness Clarke Rothwell told the BBC: "He shot this lady once and then he shot her again, he fell to the floor, leant over shot her once more in the face area."

Rothwell added: "Somebody tried to grab him, wrestling with him and then he wielded a knife, like a hunting knife, just started lunging at her with a knife half a dozen times. People were screaming and running from the area".

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Tributes immediately poured in from politicians throughout Britain.

"The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy," said Prime Minister David Cameron. "She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children."

Read: Hillary Clinton Celebrates Historic Win As Bernie Sanders Vows to Stay In The Race

Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn said the country is "in shock at the horrific murder" of a "much-loved colleague."

Campaigns on both sides of next week's European Union referendum suspended their activities for the day in honor of Cox. At issue is a vote on whether Britain should remain in the 28-nation bloc.

Cox was at the forefront of efforts to accept more children from war-torn Syria. Before she was elected to Parliament in 2015, she was head of policy at the Oxfam charity and also worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

She was the first person in her family to go to college and she graduated from Cambridge in 1995.

Watch: President Obama Joins Long List Of Politicians Who Have Shed A Tear

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David Farrier specialized in news of the bizarre. As a reporter for New Zealands TV3, Farrier once interviewed a man in Florida who had a 9-month sexual relationship with a dolphin. The telejournalist was also fascinated by survivalists he profiled, people who were prepared to go bush once the world inevitably melts down.

Then, just over two years ago, Farrier found the subject that would change everything for him. People kind of try to outdo me with weird stuff theyve found, he told us recently over tacos in West Hollywood. A friend sent Farrier a video from the Web of a fully grown man being mercilessly tickled in what was called competitive endurance tickling.

As Farrier remembered, I had never seen anything that strange. This, from the guy who specialized in strangeness. So he started blogging about the videos, as did Dylan Reeve, a post-production supervisor on New Zealands long-running soap Shortland Street. The posts went viral, the pair teamed up, and the documentary Tickled was born.

Related: Fascinating Documentary Tickled Exposes Real-Life Tickle Monster

The film  codirected by Farrier and Reeve  tickled the fancies of critics and sold-out crowds when it premiered at Januarys Sundance Film Festival in Utah. While on the surface it appears to be a quirky doc from a pair of good-humored Kiwis, Tickled is a twisty piece of investigative filmmaking that unveils an endless string of shadowy figures, intimidation tactics, and shocking revelations from the world of tickling fetishism.

Watch an exclusive clip from Tickled:

While digging into their subject, Farrier and co-director Reeve found ads luring young, fit men from all over the world to Los Angeles on all-expenses paid trips to engage in competitive endurance tickling videos. Shortly after inquiring about the videos, Farrier received strongly worded messages that were apparently from the company behind them, Jane O'Brien Media, which objected to Farrier being gay. (Farrier says hes actually bisexual.)

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It started so extreme, Farrier said. A couple of weeks in, I get a letter from a lawyer in New York telling me to stop [inquiring about the videos]. And I thought, 'Its got to ease off. And then suddenly theyre sending three people from New York first-class to New Zealand And it just kept [escalating].

Farrier quit his job at TV3 as the documentary became all-consuming (Suddenly I found doing two-minute stories on the news became repetitive and a bit boring, he said). He and Reeve faced constant legal threats, which only made them more obsessive. They knew there was a bear, and that they were poking that bear, and that they would ultimately need to confront that bear. Theres a level of intrigue and enjoyment that comes from finding things out, Farrier said. When you get push-back, you typically know that theres something there to uncover. Fun is maybe the wrong word, but it becomes interesting. Its the curiosity. They launched a Kickstarter campaign and ended up raising $27,000 to finance the film, which would eventually take them to L.A. and around the U.S. on the tickling trail as they documented the bizarre world of these videos and the people who produced them.



Tickled codirector David Farrier (Magnolia Pictures)



Tickled premiered at Sundance on Jan. 24. A festival screening featured an uninvited guest: One of the men whod flown from New York to New Zealand to attempt to talk Farrier and Reeve out of the film. (While the co-director cant say much about the legal action filed against the movie, Farrier applauds the films distributor, Magnolia Pictures, and HBO, which bought television rights, for being pretty ballsy and really supportive.) A month-and-a-half later, at the True/False Film Festival in Missouri, two men had to be escorted out of a screening when they were caught attempting to record Tickled with a camera hidden inside a coffee mug. These two guys looked out of place, Farrier recalled. They looked like hardened New Yorkers. They stood out.



Farrier has been shocked by the response to the documentary, which has emerged as one of the years most talked-about independent films. When we started it we thought itd be a half-hour Vimeo docu that wed upload, he said. Its mind-blowing.

The filmmaker says that some viewers have found the movie stimulating in a different sense. A couple people have discovered that theyre turned on by tickling, that they like it and didnt know it. Most people, their reaction seems to be, 'That was a bit uncomfortable watching those people tickle each other. But a couple people have been like, 'I loved it. And I didnt know this about myself, but now I do. So thats been pretty wild.

Tickled opens in select theaters Friday. Watch the trailer:
The words action comedy go together not just because the movies they describe combine action and comedy. They go together because, in a machine-tooled lark like Central Intelligence, each one becomes the other. The dialogue, as quick and aggressive as a punch to the face, really is a form of action; the gun battles, car crashes, and hurtling bodies are staged with a more-mayhem-the-better lightness that turns violence into something to giggle at, as if it were all transpiring in a Road Runner cartoon. At least, thats the idea.

In Central Intelligence, when Calvin Joyner (Kevin Hart), a mild-mannered accountant coerced into becoming the partner of a rogue CIA agent, jabbers on, for the opening act or two, about how he wants nothing at all to do with this scheme (Im not in! he keeps wailing; he just wants out), Hart lets his voice creep up into high Eddie Murphy dudgeon, and the words tumble out so fast that it almost stops mattering what hes saying. Its the comedy of controlled hysteria  the verbal equivalent of madly flailing fists. And when Dwayne Johnson, as the agent in question, gets out of a jam by slamming some guys head with an office refrigerator door, setting off water sprinklers and a smoke bomb, and pushing a mail cart (that contains Kevin Hart) through the plate-glass window of what must be the 20th floor, its all just a joke: slapstick with extra pain. Of course, the downside of the action-comedy recipe is that it risks having almost no consequence. The danger of the form is that action and comedy, instead of adding something to one another, just cancel each other out.

Thats sort of what happens in Central Intelligence, though you couldnt accuse the movie of not hurtling along. It delivers  on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. Its an action-comedy utensil, like Rush Hour crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of Romy and Micheles High School Reunion. Its the sort of movie that, in its highly formulaic way, reveals a lot about what audiences are seeking today. A scabrous buddy comedy like The Nice Guys appeared to have a lot going for it, but it didnt have the right action-to-comedy ratio (there wasnt a spatter of gunfire every eight minutes), and the characters were a tad too quirky for the genre. Central Intelligence goes back to basics: Kevin Hart, as talented a funnyman as he is, squawks and rails and goes scaredy-cat on cue, while Dwayne Johnson, as the undercover agent, plays a pumped-up friendly giant whos too sensitive for his own good. The joke of both characters is right on the surface, and it stays there for an hour and 45 minutes. The movie, in other words, serves up just enough of the standard microwaved meat and potatoes of action comedy to have the potential to be a medium-size hit.

The opening flashback strikes the films only note of over-the-top nuttiness: In a high school gym in 1996, we see Johnsons Robbie Weirdicht as the blobby loser he was  a dork who looks like Rob Schneider in a fat suit, and who gets humiliated by being tossed, naked, into the middle of a year-end pep rally. Calvin, the class superstar, is the only one who doesnt laugh at him, and twenty years later, Robbie  now under the pseudonym Bob Stone  contacts him on Facebook and arranges a reunion. As Calvin discovers, Bob, after two decades of six-hour-a-day workouts, now looks like Dwayne Johnson, but hes the same girly-man inside (sort of). He prizes hugs and unicorns, his favorite movie is Sixteen Candles, and whenever the subject of high school comes up, he looks like he wants to crawl under a desk. But, of course, hes also a tattooed bruiser who will kick the butt of anyone he has to, especially bullies. Johnson draws, as much as he ever has, on his ironic courtliness  the side of him that doesnt just look like Barack Obama on hulk serum but talks like Obama, with the articulate civility that has made Johnson into a gently disarming screen star. Bob gets tough when he needs to, but hes always much sweeter than we expect, and in Central Intelligence thats Johnsons version of the Schwarzenegger shuffle.

Hart is a good match for him, but he doesnt get enough good lines. After a fight, when he says to Bob, You were like Jason Bourne, man  but with jorts! the moment has a snap to it. But though his delivery is ace, hardly any of Harts dialogue surprises you; its mostly rote fear and ranting. Theres a halfway funny scene in which Bob pretends to be a couples therapist who keeps slapping Calvin, and Jason Bateman, in an unbilled cameo as Bobs old high school tormentor, has a high-style nastiness that momentarily steals the movie out from under the two stars. Its just enough to make you disappointed that Central Intelligence turns into a kind of straight-up thriller, mostly out of laziness. Its easier to do variations on the same cloak-and-dagger crapola than it is to elevate horn-locking irritability into true banter.

Bob is out to nail the Black Badger, a mystery agent who, it seems, has murdered his partner and plans to sell U.S. satellite encryption codes to the highest bidder. But Bobs boss, played with brusquely appealing heartlessness by Amy Ryan, thinks that Bob is the Black Badger, and the way this plays out is just competent enough on a spy-game level to make you momentarily forget that you didnt buy a ticket to Central Intelligence to watch a third-rate Bourne film in jorts. You bought that ticket to laugh. You will not do it quite enough.

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RADNOR, PA / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP reminds Alere Inc. (ALR) ("Alere" or the "Company") shareholders that a class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of purchasers of Alere's securities between May 9, 2013 and April 20, 2016, inclusive (the "Class Period").

FINAL REMINDER : Investors who purchased Alere securities during the Class Period may, no later than June 20, 2016, petition the Court to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class. For additional information please visit https://www.ktmc.com/new-cases/alere-inc#join.

Shareholders who wish to discuss their legal rights or interests with respect to this action are encouraged to contact Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check (Darren J. Check, Esq., D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq. or Adrienne Bell, Esq.) at (888) 299 - 7706 or (610) 667 - 7706, or via e-mail at info@ktmc.com

Alere provides point-of-care diagnostics and services for infectious disease, cardiometabolic disease, and toxicology in the United States and internationally.

According to the complaint, during the Class Period Alere and certain of its executive officers made false and/or misleading statements, and failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Company's business, operations, and prospects, including the following: (1) that the Company improperly recognized and reported revenue in violation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles; (2) that, as a result, the Company's quarterly and annual SEC filings would be delayed; (3) that, as a result of the foregoing, the Company's planned merger with Abbott Laboratories would be thrown into doubt; (4) that the Company lacked adequate internal controls over accounting and financial reporting; and (5) that, as a result of the foregoing, the Company's financial statements, as well as defendants' statements about Alere's business, operations, and prospects, were false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.

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On February 1, 2016, Alere and Abbott Laboratories ("Abbott") announced that Abbott would acquire Alere for $56.00 per share. On this news, shares of Alere's stock increased $16.91 per share, or more than 45%, to close at $54.11 per share on February 1, 2016.

On March 15, 2016, Alere disclosed that it was unable to file its 2015 Annual Report with the SEC because it was "continuing to conduct an analysis of certain aspects of the timing of revenue recognition." On this news, shares of the Company's stock declined $4.14 per share, or 7.7%, to close on March 15, 2016 at $49.32 per share.

Finally, on April 20, 2016, Abbott's Chief Executive Officer refused to reaffirm Abbott's commitment to the previously announced acquisition of Alere. On this news, shares of the Company's stock declined an additional $6.11 per share, or 12.3%, to close on April 20, 2016 at $43.36 per share.

Investors who purchased Alere securities between May 9, 2013 and April 20, 2016 may, no later than June 20, 2016, petition the Court to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class.

A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. Members of the purported class may petition the Court to be appointed as a lead plaintiff through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. In order to be appointed as a lead plaintiff, the Court must determine that the class member's claim is typical of the claims of other class members, and that the class member will adequately represent the class in the action. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff.

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check is a driving force behind corporate governance reform, and has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of institutional and individual investors from the United States and around the world. The firm represents investors, consumers and whistleblowers (private citizens who report fraudulent practices against the government and share in the recovery of government dollars). The complaint in this action was not filed by Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check. For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, or for additional information about participating in this action, please visit www.ktmc.com.

CONTACT:

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

Darren J. Check, Esq.

D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq.

Adrienne O. Bell, Esq.

280 King of Prussia Road

Radnor, PA 19087

(888) 299-7706

(610) 667-7706

info@ktmc.com

SOURCE: Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP
It's a well-known fact you cannot be a racist if you have sex with a racial minority.

At least that's the logic J Holding seemed to be counting on when he brought his black girlfriend to an arbitration hearing this week.

Source: CBS Miami

Source: CBS Miami

Holding, who is white, was fired from the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Police Department in March 2015 for exchanging racist text messages with three of his fellow officers.

He and another officer, James Wells, filed for arbitration  a form of private legal resolution where an independent third-party decides the outcome  to try to get their jobs back. Wells lost his arbitration case in May.

The texts sent among the four officers referred to black people as "niggers." They included a fake film trailer  edited, poorly, by one of the other officers on the force, Alex Alvarez  that called President Obama a "nigger," featured a doctored photo of the president wearing gold grills on his teeth and depicted black people being menaced by white men with guns and German shepherds. A hooded Ku Klux Klan member also makes an appearance. The fake film trailer was titled The Hoods.

Source: YouTube

W it here at your own peril:

Now, after all that, Holding is fighting for his old job back  and he's going to cringeworthy lengths to get it.

Source: CBS Miami

Holding showed up at an arbitration hearing Tuesday with a character witness he claimed proved he wasn't racist: his girlfriend, Perpetua Michel, who is black.

According to CBS Miami, Holding and Michel began dating about a year ago after the text scandal broke.

"There are people that make mistakes," Michel said in the hearing. "There are people that say things that they didn't mean."

"He's a cop, he shouldn't have said that word, correct," she conceded, after questioning.

Source: CBS Miami

Holding went on to claim he'd become desensitized to the word "nigger" because he'd patrolled black neighborhoods, where he allegedly heard black people say it all the time.

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Holding hasn't gotten his job in Fort Lauderdale back, though he is still licensed to be a police .

None of the officers involved had their policing licenses revoked  though it's a safe bet most local black folks wouldn't be too happy to see them on the streets again.

"This is pure hatred and racism," Marsha Ellison, President of , told CBS News. "It is obviously morally repugnant, and we cannot have this in our community."
-

Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen cursed and flippantly discussed the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in a clip from a documentary about the Deepwater Horizon disaster that emerged on Wednesday. Mateen was filmed secretly by the makers of the documentary, The Big Fix, as he worked as a security guard at a beach at night in Pensacola, Florida where the clean up was taking place. In the video, he disparages workers who were cleaning up the spill saying: No-one gives a shit here. Like, everybodys just out to get paid. Theyre, like, hoping for more oil to come out and more people to complain so theyll have the jobs. (Be)cause once people get laid off here its going to suck for them. They want more disaster to happen. Because thats where their money making is, he added in the roughly 40-second clip. The film-makers, Josh and Rebecca Tickell, said in a statement that they had turned the footage over to authorities. We do not want to add any more undue attention to the shooter. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims of the massacre, we grieve with you, they said. Mateen opened fire on Sunday in a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people and wounding dozens more in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Mateen was shot dead by police after a three-hour rampage through the nightclub. Investigators have questioned Mateens wife, the FBI said on Wednesday, and a law enforcement source said she could face criminal charges if there is evidence of any wrongdoing. (Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Alistair Bell)
London (AFP) - Tearful mourners laid flowers outside the British parliament Thursday in memory of pro-EU lawmaker Jo Cox, hours after she was killed in a shock attack at a meeting with constituents.

Dozens of people gathered next to a large picture of the 41-year-old former charity worker, who had campaigned in favour of Britain's membership of the European Union ahead of next week's Brexit vote.

"What's happened is beyond appalling. We are here in silent memory of her loss," said Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Cox's centre-left Labour party, as rain began to fall.

"This is a shocking occasion and I hope everybody realises hatred will never solve problems. Only people coming together will solve problems," he said.

Corbyn was flanked by fellow members of the Labour party, many of them shaking and tearful, as they lit candles and one by one laid them beside the photograph of a smiling Cox.

"We are suspending all campaigning activities until the weekend as a mark of respect for her," Corbyn said, referring to the tense run-up to Britain's EU membership referendum on June 23.

Mourners left heaps of flowers in the lawmaker's memory, who was the first British MP to be killed in office since Ian Gow was killed by a car bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army in 1990.

She was left bleeding on the pavement after reportedly being shot and stabbed in the village of Birstall in northern England, according to witnesses quoted by media.

- 'United against hatred' -

Fatima Ibrahim, a 23-year-old campaigner with human rights group Avaaz, which helped organise the vigil, told AFP she was "devastated".

"She was a fearless campaigner, and a voice for the voiceless. We feel shaken by her loss, but committed to meeting the hatred that killed her with love."

"We feel shaken by her loss," she said.

Cox worked for charity group Oxfam before becoming a lawmaker in 2015, and several at the vigil recalled her tireless campaigning to help refugees from Syria.

Story continues

Mike, a 55-year-old who works in the charity sector who did not want to give his surname, described Cox as "Someone who was utterly dedicated to the ideals of peace, love, justice on a global scale as well as in the UK."

"It is shocking. This kind of thing does not happen," Mike said.

Activists set up a white placard reading "We carry the banner of love for Jo" and invited others to add messages to it in coloured pens.

Tributes included "you can't kill democracy" and "Thank you for all you did for Syria, for humanity. We will united against hatred."

Another message listed Britain's main political parties, and insisted that for one day at least the country was not divided by the two sides of the EU referendum.

"We are not Remain, Leave, Tory, Labour or Lib Dem tonight. We are Britons with a belief in parliament and democracy," the message read.

In Birstall, a village of around 16,000 residents where eyewitnesses told British media they saw her being gunned down, mourners laid flowers at the foot of a statue.

Hundreds also gathered to pray at the local St Peter's church.
PHILADELPHIA, PA  JANUARY 09: R.J. Umberger #20 of the Philadelphia Flyers skates against the New York Islanders. (Photo by Len Redkoles/NHLI via Getty Images)

R.J. Umberger waived his no-movement clause and accepted a buyout from the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday, an indication from both sides that their reunion two years ago simply never worked.

Umberger was signed as a college free agent in 2004, and joined them in 2005. He played three seasons for the Flyers until 2008, when they traded him to the Columbus Blue Jackets. The Ohio State product found his game there, with four straight 20-goal seasons. That resulted in a 5-year, $23-million contract that started in 2012.

The Flyers reacquired him in June 2014 after Umberger was a healthy scratch several times during the previous season. Going the other way was Scott Hartnell, a tremendously popular Flyer but one whose contract ran two years longer than Umbergers. It was the first big trade for new Flyers GM Ron Hextall.

But Umberger showed that the decline in his output near the end in Columbus wasnt an anomaly. He scored 15 points in 67 games last season, and just 11 in 39 games this season.

From CSN Philly:

Hextall admitted the trade didnt work for the Flyers. There were two parts to the trade essentially, Hextall said. The one was the space. I felt like two or three years for then it was going to be good for us, and I feel the same way now. Hartsys been a good player in Columbus. We need space, weve got guys that are coming up like Ghost (Shayne Gostisbehere) and (Brayden) Schenn and (Radko) Gudas. We need space. Hartsy played well for Columbus, and were essentially going to be out of it. So Im fine with it.

Umberger had one year left on his deal at $4.5 million. According to General Fanager, the Flyers will be on the hook for $1.6 million against the cap next season and $1.5 million in 2017-18.

Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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Following the recent atrocity at a Florida nightclub, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy led a 15 hour filibuster in the U.S. Senate trying to force a vote on "no fly, no buy" gun control measures.

Read: Orlando Gunman's Wife May Be Charged as Footage Shows Her Going to Gun Shop With Husband

The processes would bar anyone on a terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms.

He passionately said: "When you attack one American, you attack us all!"

He added: "We don't want terrorists to be able to walk into a gun store and buy a gun!"

Murphy took office a month after the Sandy Hook massacre, which occured in his state. Since begining his term in January 2013, he has pushed for harder gun control measures.

The senator closed the filibuster by saying: "I have been furious since those days following Sandy Hook. I have been so angry that this Congress has mustered absolutely no response to mass shooting after mass shooting, in city after city that is plagued by gun violence."

Murphy stopped speaking when Republicans agreed to allow a vote.

Read: Orlando Gunman Called Newstation During Attack

The senator announced the news at almost 2 a.m. Thursday morning.

I am proud to announce that after 14+ hours on the floor, we will have a vote on closing the terror gap & universal background checks  Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 16, 2016

When he woke up, he was back at it again, tweeting:

15 hrs on the floor. 2 hrs of sleep. And I'm back on my (tired) feet, ready to keep pressing Congress to end its silence on gun violence.  Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 16, 2016

Murphy may have an unlikely ally in Donald Trump, who tweeted: I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.

Story continues

Watch: How to Use a Folding Chair to Barricade the Door During a Shooting

Related Articles:
- By Mayank Marwah





Ford Motoras (NYSE:F) sales in the worldas largest car market dropped 2.5% in May as the company sold 88,248 units.

Last year the automaker sold 90,553 units in China. This is the carmakeras second straight month of falling sales. The companyas retail sales were decent but not good enough to compensate for the poor sales in the commercial vehicle market.





However, Fordas sales have been decent year to date as it sold 479,542 vehicles during the period, representing a 5% sales rise as compared with the same period last year. Another positive sign for the company despite the sales slump is solid performance by the all-new Taurus sedan in China. Ford sold almost 2,500 units of the sedan in the previous month.

Hereas a comprehensive look at the companyas monthly and year-to-date sales in China.

China sales slump

Ford operates through two joint ventures in China, namely Changan Ford AutomobileA and Jiangling Motors (SZSE:000550). Changan is primarily known for selling Ford passenger vehicles while Jiangling manufactures commercial vehicles, mainly the companyas Transit vans. Changan sold 67,055 units during the last month, up 11%, while Jiangling witnessed a 4% sales decline to 19,692 vehicles in May.

Year-to-date sales for Changan amounted to 370,268 vehicles. Jiangling, on the other hand, delivered 102,163 units, representing a 9% sales slump as compared to the same period last year. The companyas environmentally friendly vehicle, Ford Ecosport, witnessed a mammoth 31% sales hike, thereby crossing the 300,000 mark for the first time.

Commercial vehicles sales were down

The company kicked off the month on a joyful note. However, sales were down for the last two months, mostly on account of the slump in the sales of commercial vehicles. Commercial vehicles forms an integral part of Fordas offerings and business operations in China.

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The decline in commercial vehicle sales has hampered sales at Jiangling. However, Changan somewhat helped the company compensate for the weakness in commercial vehicles sales, thanks to the robust performance of the companyas crossover SUV.

Looking ahead

Fordas key to success in the Chinese market is establishing a strong SUV lineup, a segment that is increasingly growing popular with the countryas population. For the first time ever, total sales of Ford Edge, Explorer, Everest, Kuga and Ecosport exceeded 250,000 units in the last year.

Moreover, Ford will soon launch hybrid versions in China, the plug-in hybrid version of the midsize sedan that is expected to boost the companyas sales. As for now, there is intense pressure on the commercial vehicle market. Thereas no doubt that this is going to be a challenge for the Blue Oval for some time in China.

Apart from this, the company is also building strategy to capitalize on the rising demand for luxury vehicles in China. Apparently, Ford is working to widen its luxury offerings under the Lincoln brand. The Detroit automaker is intending to manufacture the luxury car locally and is said to be in talks with Changan Automobile. The company was in conversation with Changan Automobile regarding manufacturing the brandas vehicles in Chongqing. Mark Fields, the companyas CEO, said that China can soon replace U.S. as Lincolnas largest market by the end of 2020.

China is the worldas hottest car market. It has emerged as a highly lucrative market for automakers across the globe. If Ford builds the Lincoln locally, it would save as much as 25% of import tax, giving it an edge over Mercedes-Benz, AudiA (NSU)A and BMW (BMW). It would be interesting to see how this plan shapes up and how Fordas sales in China would trend over the next few months.

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This article first appeared on GuruFocus.






In the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, Donald Trump seemed to suggest that President Obama was somehow sympathetic to the suspected gunman, telling Fox News that theres something else going on since his actions were not tough or smart.

Later, he told the Associated Press that Obama continues to prioritize our enemy over Americans. Finally, on Facebook and Twitter he posted comments that spelled out more clearly what he was suggesting: Hillary Clinton received a classified intelligence report stating that the Obama administration was actively supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State.

But top military and Middle East experts, including vocal critics of the Obama Administration, condemned Trumps suggestion as ignorant, willfully ill-informed and ridiculous in a half-dozen interviews with TIME. Several described it as a conspiracy theory.

As evidence for his claim, Trump linked to an article on the Trump-friendly conservative website Breitbart.com, which referenced a classified memo written by an intelligence source in August 2012 that was released last year.

The memo describes the general situation on the ground in Syria and notes that the terrorist group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, parts of which later joined ISIS, is one of the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.

The Breitbart article then makes what Perry Cammack, an expert on the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls a logical leap of faith: It claims that the memo proves that Obama administration, by providing assistance to Syrian rebels, actively supported what would become ISIS.

Trumps social media posts suggest that the article and the memo amounts to a smoking gun. But experts say its all smoke and no fire.

Story continues

More than a half-dozen top U.S. military, Middle East, and foreign policy experts who have worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations described Trumps allegations as absurd.

The U.S. has never tried to support ISIS. The U.S. had a common goal with ISIS in removing the Assad regime, said Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The idea that Clinton or Obama cooperated with ISIS is insane. 

He added that such an argument is the result not a lack of understanding but a willful disregard that these are hard problems and have hard solutions.

Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington who has served as an adviser on the Middle East under both Republican and Democratic administrations, called Trumps allegations pure fantasy.

Barry Pavel, a vice president at the Atlantic Council and former special assistant for defense policy to Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, called Trumps statements absurd and not credible, adding that such allegations are disturbing.

Its incumbent upon those making these claims to show the evidence or be quiet, he said.

Michael OHanlon, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, dismissed Trumps insinuations as hogwash. There are some issues where I might acknowledge Trump to have at least half a point, he added, but on this one hes simply wrong.

Several experts pointed out that there was no information in the classified memo that Breitbart posted that hasnt been generally public knowledge for years.

Since shortly after the civil war in Syria began in March 2011, top military and foreign policy experts in the U.S. regularlyand publiclyreferenced the complexity of opposition factions on the ground in Syria when debating whether the U.S. should intervene on behalf of moderate rebels.

It was well known by all parties that moderate rebels battling the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were joined by extremist groups linked to al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist factions. The question was whether, and how, to aid a potential ally without inadvertently arming an enemy.

You never have full knowledge. You cant always choose angels as allies. Do we have unsavory allies in the Middle East? Yes, said Alterman of CSIS. But to then take the leap and say that amounts to cooperation with ISISabsolutely not.

Many Republican and Democratic officials, including Obama, expressed concern that U.S. support in the form of training and weapons shipments intended for moderate rebels would end up in extremists hands.

But others, including Clinton, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey and former CIA Director David Petraeus argued the U.S. had an obligation to support the moderate rebels and civilians, who stood very little chance against the well-armed Assad regime. New research indicates that more than 470,000 Syrians have been killed since the fighting began.

In 2012, top Republican leaders, including Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, began urging the Obama administration to arm moderate Syrian rebels. The Iranians and the Russians are providing Bashar Assad with weapons, McCain said at the time. People that are being massacred deserve to have the ability to defend themselves.

In 2013, top Pentagon officials again united to encourage the Obama administration to support moderate rebels in Syria.

Clinton has regularly acknowledged the dangers of arming rebels. Wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next. Increasingly thats how Syria appeared, Clinton later wrote in her memoir, adding that the risks of both action and inaction were high. Clinton said that she disagreed with Obamas reluctance to arm the Syrian rebels.

When the Obama administration eventually decided to arm and equip moderate Syrian rebels, the Pentagon focused on the difficult task of vetting recipients.

Critics of the Obama administration have argued for years that U.S. efforts to single out certain rebels for support may have inadvertently benefited other Islamic extremist groups, including al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda operation, but that was in no way a goal of the Administration.

Randa Slim, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told TIME that Trumps suggestions that Clinton and Obama actively supported terrorist groups is not borne out by any evidence on the ground.

She says that, if anything, the criticism from Syria watcher is most often the oppositethat Obama was too focused on destroying ISIS, at the expense of supporting pro-democracy groups on the ground in Syria. There is a consensus among Syria watchers, even among critics of the Obama policy in the region, that Obama has been laser focused on dealing a mortal blow to ISIS, she said.

The classified memo was obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch using the Freedom of Information Act to request emails that Clinton sent and received during her time as a public official.

Miller of the Wilson Center, who has served for six secretaries of State since the 1980s, described Trumps allegations as unprecedented.

I have never seen a candidate either by omission or commission engage in such a willful and purposeful distortion of truth and reality, he said. The bottom line on these comments, and so many others, is that Mr. Trump is a man who really doesnt know what he doesnt know and hes not in a hurry to find out.
Forgiveness is key to maintaining your mental health, according to this new study

Forgiveness is key to maintaining your mental health, according to this new study

You know deep down in your heart that old grudge youre white-knuckling is doing you no good. Now our dear friend science has come out with proof that grudges do our health real harm and forgiveness may just be the best medicine on the market.

As Time reports, a study recently published in the Journal of Health Psychology measured the effects of grudge-holding by asking 148 young adults questions about their abilities to forgive and forget via questionnaire.

Heres what the researchers found out  if you live la vida stress, that anxiety and pressure is going to take a toll on your physical and emotional well-being. Thats not too surprising, I mean, have you met a truly stressed human? Theyre not exactly a glowing picture of health.

Now heres where things get most interesting  if youre a person who is extremely forgiving of both yourself and other people for all flaws and mistakes, that saintly quality basically erases any effect of stress on your mental health. So not only is forgiveness medicine, its straight up magic.

Forgiveness takes that bad connection between stress and mental illness and makes it zero, study author Loren Toussaint, an associate professor of psychology at Luther College in Iowa told Time. I think most people want to feel good and it offers you the opportunity to do that.

Of course, this is all easier said than done. We lead complicated lives and we live in a complicated time and so many things happen in the world and within our own lives that feel difficult, if not impossible to forgive. That said, remember that the more kindness and empathy you can muster up, the healthier youll be.

The post Forgiveness is key to maintaining your mental health, according to this new study appeared first on HelloGiggles.
Former Viacom chief Tom Freston is adding to the chorus of critics calling for Philippe Dauman to be replaced as chairman-CEO of Viacom.

Preston gave a lengthy interview Wednesday to CNBC in which he didnt hold back on his assessment of the state of the company he helped build during his more than 25 years at MTV Networks.

Theres been a series of pretty serious errors at the company, Freston said Wednesday during an appearance on CNBCs Fast Money.

Freston was unceremoniously fired by Viacom controlling shareholder Sumner Redstone in 2006 and replaced by Dauman, a lawyer and longtime lieutenant of Redstone. But for the past five weeks Redstone have engaged in a public battle for control of the company.

The fight went nuclear on Wednesday when Redstone issued a statement directly stating that he no longer trusts Dauman and the Viacom board members who support. The statement is the strongest evidence to date that Redstone is preparing to oust Dauman as CEO.

The corporate drama involving Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari and their battle against Dauman and the board has been an extraordinary sideshow that has weighed heavily on morale at Viacom. That appeared to be Frestons motivation for going public with unvarnished criticism of Dauman and the decisions, such as its protracted legal fight against YouTube, which ended in 2014 settlement after seven years with no damages paid to Viacom.

I dont think hes been the optimal leader for the company, Freston said. The right guy for a job like that in a company thats steeped in the popular culture with young audiences, the person who owns that chair should be somebody who is turned on, attracted to and somewhat knowledgeable about the popular culture and whats going on there.

When pressed by the host if he agreed with criticisms that Dauman was arrogant and elitist, Freston said yes. And he added that the exec has a reputation of not being a great listener.

Story continues

Freston emphasized that he had no designs on replacing Dauman as CEO.

Ive moved on in my life, he told CNBC. Its hard to go back again despite the affection I have for the place. He said the company needed a leader with passion for content and the creative process.

In a statement, Viacom defended Daumans track record since he took the reins from Freston in September 2006.

Viacom is significantly bigger, more global and generates far more profits today than when Philippe Daumans predecessor left office in 2006, Viacom said. Philippe has doubled the amount of investment in creative programming over his tenure to more than $6 billion annually, and has grown Viacom to be the number one family of cable networks and the number one destination on all of television for reaching younger audiences. Philippe has overseen substantial and consistent growth in the companys international business, which is now on track to generate $1 billion in revenues by 2020. Viacom is making more global hits than ever before, exemplified by recent successes such as Lip Sync Battle now airing in 96 countries. Philippe has also brought in new creative leadership to reposition key networks, which is now driving ratings turnarounds, and has overseen an overhaul of the companys advertising sales engine to deliver innovative data-driven products. The company has generated billions of dollars in new distribution revenues from emerging digital platforms while at the same time more than doubling affiliate revenues since 2006.

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Alexis Borisy

What won Alexis Borisy over was the idea of software bugs.

Borisy, now a partner at Third Rock Ventures, along with four scientists affiliated with MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute who were leaders in cancer genomics got started back in 2008 working on what would soon become Foundation Medicine (No. 62 on the BI 100: The Creators), a company that sequences the DNA in cancer cells to get a better idea of what's going on.

That's where the software bugs come into play: The way Borisy sees it, cancer is a "disease of the human programming code." If you can read through a person's source code (aka genetic sequence), you can potentially figure out what "bugs" (mutations in the person's genes), then you'd have a better chance of figuring out better ways to fix that glitch.

But turning that concept into reality wouldn't be easy.

"The sequencing cost at that point was millions of dollars," Borisy told Business Insider about the original conversations in 2008. "But, they could see how powerful it was going to be in affecting lives of patients. "We need to figure out how to get this done in high quality way so it can be used day in day out in the practice of oncology," he remembers the conversations going.

Building the team

The company got its start on the fourth floor of Third Rock, which was Foundation's founding member. Borisy served as the company's first CEO, eventually becoming a partner at Third Rock in 2010, where he's gotten the chance to build up other biotechnology companies. In his place, he brought in Michael Pellini. At that point, Pellini had just sold his previous company to General Electric, so Borisy called him up.

When he first got on the phone, he later told Borisy, Pellini was prepared to say no. But after that conversation, Pellini hung up and cursed. "It was his dream job, he knew he wasnt going to say no," Borisy recounted. It wouldn't be an easy dream job  Pellini currently commutes to Foundation's offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts from his home in California  but it's a position he's held since May 2011. Borisy stayed on as chairman at Foundation.

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A couple years later, Steve Kafka, Foundation's president and chief operating officer joined the team, adding expertise about the pharmaceutical industry "Steve was so the right person to go get as we began to scale. It's been a great partnership," Borisy said of Pellini and Kafka's roles.

Along the way, Foundation picked up backing from Google Ventures and Bill Gates before going public in 2013. Swiss pharma giant Roche also holds a majority stake in the company.

Finding the bugs and creating value

Foundation Medicine tries to help patients and doctors facing seriously hard-to-treat cancers by looking at the genetic makeup of that cancer (for example, the genetic mutations in a breast cancer patient could actually look more like a patient with colon cancer and thus those types of treatments could work better).

To do that, Foundation collects samples from cancer patients. The biopsy tests take a piece of cancer tissue (or sample of blood for blood-based cancers) and sequences the cancer's genes to really understand what makes the cells tick. In May, the company also launched its liquid biopsy test called FoundationACT, which looks for circulating tumor DNA in the blood.

From there, the data that's been collected goes into Foundation Medicine database where it can be used for everything from other doctors who want to know how to treat a certain rare cancer, or pharmaceutical companies interested in finding the patients who will respond the best to a drug that's in development.

Foundation is also preparing to vigorously protect its intellectual property. In May, the company received a patent that protects its cancer genomic sequencing process and later that day sued rival liquid biopsy company, Guardant Health.

But overall, the way Foundation is creating value is by identify these bugs, or genetic mutations, that could effectively streamlining the way oncologists approach cancer, not just in leading cancer institutes, but in local communities that see the majority of cancer patients.

"Foundation is using that information and connecting the dots so that oncologists can get that patient onto that clinical trial, and it can make huge difference," he said. "If it's game-changing for patients, the returns will follow that."

NOW WATCH: Watch science writer Carl Zimmer explain CRISPR in 90 seconds





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Blake Mycoskie

When it launched 10 years ago, TOMS Shoes was one of the first companies to employ the buy-one-give-one model.

For every pair of shoes a customer purchased, the company promised to donate another pair to a child in need.

But TOMS quickly became the target of criticism, specifically the accusation that by giving away shoes in developing parts of the world, it was disrupting local markets.

I recently spoke with TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and asked him to address this criticism. His response? "We 100% agree."

He went on:

We are incredibly diligent to make sure that our shoes are being given in very, very rural areas where families are having to choose between shoes for the uniform or food on the table, and they're choosing food on the table. By no means do we ever want to disrupt a local market.

Mycoskie also pointed out that "TOMS itself does not put the shoes on people's feet." Instead, they work with charities and nonprofits who are "really focused on improving the quality of life in the people that they serve. So they have the utmost interest in making sure that we're not disrupting anyone in the market."

In recent years, TOMS has also worked to create jobs in the areas it serves. Mycoskie told me that the company has moved 40% of its supply chain to countries including Kenya, India, Ethiopia, and Haiti.

To date, TOMS has given away over 60 million pairs of shoes, and it has expanded into bags, eyewear, and coffee.

Read the full interview with Mycoskie 

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Chuck Schumer

Four gun-control bills are set to receive a vote on the Senate floor on Monday, as the demand for gun-control legislation reaches a fever pitch in the aftermath of the Orlando, Florida, terrorist attack  the deadliest mass shooting in US history.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the votes late on Thursday afternoon. Two of the bills were sponsored by Republicans, while two were backed by Democrats. All will need 60 votes in order to pass, and each is being proposed as an amendment to the commerce, justice, and science appropriations bill before the Senate.

The announcement came after a 15-hour filibuster initiated by Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, on Wednesday. Along with fellow Senate Democrats, Murphy is backing a bill to enhance universal background checks, which would close the so-called gun-show loophole, and a bill to ban suspected terrorists on terror watch lists from buying weapons.

That second Democratic bill, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, failed on a party-line vote in December, just one day after the San Bernardino, California, attacks. It was voted down by a 54-45 margin, and just one Republican  Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois  voted in favor of the bill.

During a Monday conference call, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said that if the bill were passed when first brought before the Senate in December, then the Orlando terrorist attack would have been avoided.

"We're just asking for people to come into this country and go out and buy a gun," Feinstein said during that call with reporters, later adding, "Even if you're a suspected terrorist, you can go out and buy a gun. And that's just not right. So I hope there will be a change."

chris murphy

Opponents to the Feinstein bill say that, since you can be placed on a terror watch list without being found guilty of a crime, then it could cause US citizens on the list to be erroneously stripped of their Second Amendment right without due process.

Story continues

"Is going after the Second Amendment how you stop terrorism? No," House Speaker Paul Ryan said during his Thursday press briefing. "That's not how you stop terrorism."

Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Cory Booker of New Jersey, among others, have insisted that due process elements will be "baked into it."

The lead Republican proposal was reintroduced by Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Thursday. It's a slightly altered version of the SHIELD Act, which was shot down late last year.

If passed, the attorney general can delay a weapons purchase by any person who is either a known or suspected terrorist, or has been subjected to a terrorism-related investigation within the past five years for three days. Law enforcement would need to get a court order within that three-day window in order to stop the sale, should probable cause be shown before a judge. The bill also allows for the attorney general to take the buyer into custody if a judge determines probable cause.

Cornyn said in the release:

It would not only stop terrorists from getting guns, but it would take them off the streets, and it would do so in a way that's consistent with our Constitution. Every single Senator wants to deny terrorists access to guns they use to harm innocent civilians, but there's a right way to do things and a wrong way.

My legislation actually does what we need to do to give law enforcement first the notice that this individual is trying to buy a weapon, and then the opportunity to take them off the streets and deny them access to a firearm. We need a robust response to protect American citizens but one that doesn't infringe on constitutional rights.

John Cornyn

McConnell came out in favor of the legislation, calling it a "serious solution" in a release. The National Rifle Association  soon after presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday about meeting with the organization to discuss potential terror-watch-list-related gun control with the organization  announced its support of the legislation.

The second Republican proposal came from Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. He crafted legislation that would direct the attorney general to create a new list of suspected terrorists who could be barred from buying weapons.

"We don't want terrorists to be able to walk into a gun store and buy a gun, and we don't want innocent, law-abiding citizens to be denied Second Amendment rights because he's wrongly on the list with a bunch of terrorists," Toomey said during a Wednesday speech on the Senate floor.

The Pennsylvania senator's bill is not up before the Senate on Monday.

Democrats roundly rejected both pieces of legislation.

Pat Toomey

Booker said during a CNN interview:

The Cornyn bill, which is the last version that I saw, creates a really impossible hurdle for the FBI. If they have someone under investigation, they're going to have three days to mount a court challenge to block them, expose their investigation, and create an environment where that terrorist, now being notified, will say, "You know what? Instead of going to that brick-and-mortar federally licensed gun dealer, I'm just going to go buy off the internet." That's where it falls down.

He added that the legislation is a front to ensure that "no legislation passes."

Schumer called the proposals "wolves in sheep's clothing" during a Thursday press conference, adding that under Cornyn's proposal "every terrorist will get a gun."

"If the FBI had that evidence, they would've arrested them in the first place," he said. "It's a fake. It's a way to say they're doing something when they're doing nothing."

A "whole court case in three days?" he continued. "Who would think that would make any sense!"

He said that Toomey's proposal "was even worse" because it would force the government to rebuild a new terror watch list.

"We'll be here for decades!" he said.

Another gun-control proposal set to go before the Senate on Monday is backed by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley. It would ensure that the FBI is alerted of terrorism suspects who purchase a weapon without barring them from doing so. Anyone being investigated or who had been investigated for terrorism-related activities within five years would be entered into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System and the FBI would be notified if one was buying a weapon.

The recent push for added gun control came after 49 people were shot dead at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando by a gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS.

NOW WATCH: FILIBUSTER IN THE SENATE: Democrats block spending bill to debate gun control





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Despite his unfortunately extensive experience in mass shootings, Fox News Channels Bill Hemmer says the picture remains unclear in the Orlando nightclub siege for several reasons, including an unusual lack of transparency by law enforcement.

I was at Fort Hood, I was in Boston, I was in Paris, I was at Sandy Hook and I was in Orlando, so Ive been to a lot of these, the Americas Newsroom co-host told TheWrap. Normally you get the authorities in a pattern where they would brief, lets say every three hours. Sometimes theyd come out and just give a little bit of information and then take some questions. That did not happen here and I dont know why.

Hemmer noted that since Mondays briefing by the FBI there has been very little information from law enforcement aside from a hospital briefing on Tuesday.

Also Read: Orlando Shooter Checked If He Was Trending on Facebook During Attack

That has been a significant difference as a reporter trying to cover a story of this magnitude, he said, adding that he hasnt gotten an explanation yet for the lack of access.

[Gunman Omar Mateen] calls 9-1-1 to get attention and take credit? And pledges allegiance to the ISIS leaders? And hes tied to this suicide bomber who was from Florida  and, apparently, they had a much closer relationship than we had known before  who blew himself up in Syria, Hemmer said.

I find the motivation here confounding  I think as Americans, we deserve to know the answers.

One difference between the Orlando massacre and other mass shootings Hemmer has covered is that the LGBT angle combined with the lack of media access makes finding those answers extraordinarily difficult. He observed that FBI director James Comey demonstrated exactly how conflicted the killer was when he detailed Mateens sympathies with both Sunnis and Shiites.

Also Read: After Orlando, Gays Take Aim at Guns: 'The NRA Should Be Very Worried'

That doesnt fit the pattern when they look at ISIS terrorists, Hemmer said. Thats just one consideration. I think the consideration that it was a gay nightclub has [also] certainly struck a cord. I mean, thats a story about American culture.

Story continues

Hemmer says speculation that the killer was gay himself only adds to the layers of mystery surrounding the tragic event. He still has a ton of questions about the killers wife, father and why Mateen was taken off FBI watch lists.

I dont know what the truth is with this killers family. I dont know what the truth is with his father, Hemmer said. As a reporter, this is what Im trying to figure out.

Even when we do figure out the story, the journey Orlando will take toward healing is just beginning.

Also Read: Why Saying the Words 'Gay' or 'Guns' Matters in the Post-Orlando Debate

As reporters, we have the benefit of leaving. We can get on an airplane and fly out once the headlines evaporate. But the communities, and the victims, and the families of the victims have this awesome, personal human burden of figuring out life when the cameras are gone, Hemmer said.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Donald Trump Is Same Guy Off Camera As He Is On, Reveals Fox News Host Jesse Watters

Why Fox News Is Putting 'The Five' Co-Hosts on a 2-Week Bus Ride

How Donald Trump Made Fox News' Carl Cameron Ditch His Red Bull Habit
A new frog mating position, only the seventh type ever observed, has been discovered in the monsoonal forests of India.

Bombay night frogs (Nyctibatrachus humayuni) mate by having the male straddle the female without grasping her, and releasing sperm over her back. The female then lays her eggs, allowing the sperm to run down her back and fertilize the eggs.

"Species such as the Bombay night frog, which are endemic to small regions (most often outside protected areas and threatened with anthropogenic activities), definitely require conservation prioritization," study leader Sathyabhama Das Biju, an amphibian researcher at the University of Delhi, told Live Science in an email. "Therefore, natural history studies not only provide necessary information for planning effective conservation strategies, but also highlight unique frogs, such as the ancient night frogs that exhibit highly diverse reproductive behaviors." [See Photos of the Bombay Night Frogs in Mating Positions]

Wet and wild

Bombay night frogs mate only during monsoon season nights, and only in the vegetation overhanging flooded forest streams in India's Western Ghats. This made fieldwork a "very challenging experience," Biju said. Researchers had to find the male frogs by listening for their calls and then standing in the fast-flowing streams with infrared camera equipment, trying to keep the electronics from getting rained on while they documented the frog sex.

Often, the frogs' attempts would end with the amphibians falling into the water. They usually returned to their original spots to finish mating, Biju said, but these interruptions stretch out the mating encounter by several wet, uncomfortable hours. "Various venomous snakes" share habitat with the frogs as well, Biju said.

The research team spent 8 hours a night for about 40 nights between 2010 and 2012 documenting the Bombay night frog nightlife. They successfully recorded 13 complete breeding sequences and multiple partial sequences to reveal the new mating position.

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New straddle

Before these observations, researchers knew of six types of amplexus, the name for frog mating behavior. Very few frog species reproduce via internal fertilization; rather, most use the amplexus position (a male-female embrace) to release sperm and egg in close proximity for external fertilization. Most species use either inguinal amplexus (the male grasping in front of the female's back legs with his front legs) or axillary amplexus (the male grasping behind the female's front legs with his front legs).

Other options include "straddle" (the male's pelvis over the female's head), "glued" (the male stuck to the female's rump with abdominal excretions), "cloacal apposition" (male and female rear-to-rear, facing away from one another) and "cephalic" (male on top of female, front feet grasping her throat).

Researchers dubbed the new position the "dorsal straddle." It isn't clear whether this mating position offers advantages over any others; fertilization rates of inguinal amplexus (which evolved very early in frogs) and axillary amplexus are similar, Biju said, and more research is needed to determine the pros and cons of various positions.

"Since genus Nyctibatrachus represents an ancient group of frogs with [the] presence of several interesting forms of reproductive behavior, it would be all the more interesting to study how such diversity may have evolved within this group," Biju said.

In another first, the researchers videotaped snakes eating frog eggs  a phenomenon not before observed in India.

The researchers reported their findings today (June 14) in the open-access journal PeerJ.

Original article on Live Science.

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Rapper Freddie Gibbs will be released on $55,000 bail in France as he awaits an extradition request from Austrian authorities in connection with an alleged rape that took place in Austria in 2015. According to Gibbs' U.S.-based lawyer, the Indiana MC (born Fredrick Tipton) -- who was arrested in Toulouse, France, on June 2 -- is expected to be freed either Thursday (June 16) or Friday while the court decides what to do with an extradition request from Austrian authorities.

Freddie Gibbs Arrested for Alleged Rape in France

Lawyer Scott Leemon said that Gibbs will be required to turn in his passport and check in with authorities three times a week while awaiting the court's decision. Upon his arrest, Gibbs' representatives denied the allegations. "Freddie Gibbs adamantly denies the allegations that have been levied against by Austrian authorities," Leemon said. "It makes you wonder why it took almost a year for Austrian officials to bring these charges."
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The head of the European Union's foreign service, French diplomat Alain Le Roy, has resigned after differences with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, EU diplomats said. Le Roy's departure "for personal reasons" just 16 months after he took the job of secretary-general of the European External Action Service was disclosed in a brief statement on Wednesday evening announcing the appointment of his successor. Mogherini named Helga Schmid, 55, a German diplomat who has been political director of the EEAS in charge of issues such as the Iran nuclear negotiations for the last six years, to succeed Le Roy from Sept. 1. Le Roy was the second senior official in Mogherini's entourage to be eased out within weeks after her first chief-of-staff, Stefano Manservisi, a career heavyweight in the European Commission, was moved to run the EU's international development department in May. He was replaced by Italian Socialist Fabrizia Panzetti, a long-time personal friend and political associate of Mogherini. An EU diplomat familiar with the situation said both changes reflected a drive by Mogherini, who was Italian foreign minister before moving to Brussels, to take personal charge of policy and leave others to run the bureaucracy. Le Roy, a seasoned French, EU and United Nations troubleshooter, had been frustrated because he sought to have a greater input on policy but was expected to "run the machine", the diplomat said. (Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
French manufacturers on Thursday decried as "slanderous" comments by e-commerce giant Alibaba founder Jack Ma that Chinese knock-offs are better quality than branded originals.

After giving the impression that Alibaba was combatting counterfeiting, Ma's comments "run counter to efficient cooperation given that they are misleading, even slanderous," said the Unifab association that includes luxury houses LVMH, Kering and Hermes.

"The problem is that the fake products today, they have better quality,a better price than the real product, than the real names," Ma said in a speech at Alibaba's investors day in the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou on Tuesday.

"They're the same exact factories, the same exact raw materials, but they do not use that (brand) name," he added.

Alibaba has come under fire in recent years for the ease at which knock-off goods are available to consumers on its online Taobao marketplace.

Taobao is estimated to hold more than 90 percent of the domestic consumer-to-consumer market, while the company's Tmall platform is believed to have over half of China's business-to-consumer transactions.

China's factories have traditionally churned out products for branded companies at low cost, but with the rise of e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, they are increasingly finding opportunities to market their own goods online directly to consumers.

Senator Richard Yung, who heads up France's national anti-counterfeiting committee, said that "Jack Ma's irresponsible comments, which appear to be a provocation, justify Alibaba's suspension from the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC)".

Alibaba has been collaborating with the IACC to remove an average of 10,000 listings of counterfeit goods from Taobao and Tmall per month, according to the IACC's website.

Indicam, Italy's anti-counterfeit association, said "a statement comparing fake and real and putting them on the same level is out of line."
Okerenkoko (Nigeria) (AFP) - Two years ago, when Nigeria's former president Goodluck Jonathan held a ceremony breaking the ground for a new university in the Niger delta, the impoverished region rejoiced.

The Nigerian Maritime University -- the first of its kind in the area -- was designed to give young people a chance to escape the dog-eat-dog life in the oil-rich but underdeveloped river lands.

Instead of picking up assault rifles, bombing oil pipelines and fighting soldiers in the humid mangrove creeks, education now seemed possible.

But construction of the university has ground to a standstill.

Yellow bulldozers lie idle at the site in the swamp forest of Okerenkoko, a village 30 minutes by boat from the southern city of Warri in Delta State.

The temporary home of the university -- a diving school in the nearby village of Kurutie -- also stands empty.

Today the Nigeria Maritime University has become a symbol of frustrated dreams, uniting delta fishermen and militants alike in discontent with President Muhammadu Buhari's government.

The "immediate" start of classes at the university is one of the top demands from the Niger Delta Avengers, an armed group which has claimed a recent series of damaging attacks on oil infrastructure.

"The former president (Jonathan) flagged off the university but the new administration said this school should stand still," Chief Antoni Ayebibode, from Kurutie village, told AFP.

"That's the Nigerian problem: when another administration comes, the past one's work will be wasted."

- Robin Hood -

At the diving school campus, complete with high-rise housing for student accommodation and a cavernous 12-metre-deep (40-feet) diving tank, Ayebibode said classes could start tomorrow.

"It's just waiting for the government," he said, passing classrooms furnished with whiteboards, desks and air conditioners. "Everything is ready."

But this week, lawmakers in Abuja squabbled over the cost, arguing it was cheaper to upgrade an existing maritime school.

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The reason for the sudden loss of momentum is partially linked to the militant kingpin-turned-businessman, Government "Tompolo" Ekpemupolo.

A decade ago, Tompolo was a leading commander in the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which carried out devastating attacks on the country's oil industry.

But following an amnesty programme brokered by the government to end the violence in 2009, Tompolo became a security contractor, protecting the pipelines he once destroyed.

With his non-profit organisation the Tompolo Foundation, he cemented his reputation as the Niger delta's Robin Hood. It was his idea to build the diving school.

He also operated a hospital in Okerenkoko serving communities in the Gbaramatu Kingdom, a region of snaking waterways stretching from Chevron's Escravos terminal on the Atlantic Ocean coast to Warri.

"Charity begins at home, he started it at home," said the administrator of Tompolo's health project, Agagha Clarkson, showing a picture of an injured man in combat fatigues on a stretcher.

"Even the Nigerian soldiers came to the place."

In 2014, the Nigerian government bought Tompolo's diving school to use it as a temporary site for the planned university.

But by December 2015, Tompolo was charged with money laundering in connection with the diving school deal and his assets were frozen. A court issued a warrant for his arrest.

Tompolo went into hiding and hasn't been seen publicly for months. The hospital is shut down and the university on hold.

- 'Going through hell' -

It's a state of affairs that has fuelled animosity in a region where Buhari's government was perceived as an enemy even before Tompolo's arrest.

The largely Christian south had warned unrest could resume if Buhari, from the predominantly Muslim north, defeated Jonathan at last year's presidential elections.

"If anyone falls sick we have to rush down to Warri," complained Evangelist Maware, a 40-year-old fisherman in Okerenkoko.

Most people can't afford the 30,000-naira ($150, 130-euro) trip to the emergency room, he said.

"You pay the speedboat or you lose the person. The suffering is too much," he added.

In their hunt for the elusive Tompolo the Nigerian military has occupied towns in the region, forcing many to flee their homes.

For some, a university diploma -- one of the only ways to escape poverty -- has never felt so far away.

That has resulted in widespread sympathy towards Tompolo and the militants fighting for the region's interests.

"The military invasion has made our primary schools shut down, our secondary schools shut down, this government has said the Gbaramatu Kingdom doesn't have the right to school," Chief Godspower Gbenekama, of the Gbaramatu Kingdom, said.

"We are going through hell."
Lens (France) (AFP) - Gareth Bale declared himself "proud" of his Wales team-mates despite the huge disappointment of Daniel Sturridge's stoppage-time goal giving England a 2-1 victory on Thursday.

For the second game running at Euro 2016, Bale put Wales ahead from a direct free-kick, but England substitutes Jamie Vardy and Sturridge struck in the second half to give England victory.

"Obviously it is massively disappointing, but I am very proud of everybody," Real Madrid forward Bale told the BBC after the match in Lens.

"We gave everything like we always do and I have said before, if we go out but have given 100 percent, then we can't do any more."

Had Wales held on for a draw, they would have preserved their grip on top spot in Group B, but Sturridge's 91st-minute strike meant they slipped to second ahead of their final group game against Russia on Monday.

"We are disappointed at the moment, but we are strong inside and the tournament is not over yet," Bale said.

"We will go into the next game with even more strength. We keep fighting all the way. We will keep fighting to qualify."
By Ahmad Ghaddar and Libby George

LONDON (Reuters) - Just as drivers hit the road for summer holidays, refiners are turning the taps down on gasoline as a global excess cuts into their profits.

Refiners in Europe, Asia and the United States, from the mighty ExxonMobil down to smaller players such as Italy's Saras, amped up the proportion of gasoline they churned out to cash in on record driver demand.

But now they are moving back to the diesel, jet fuel and heating oil that for more than a year had become a "by-product" they did not want.

"The pendulum of profitability between gasoline and diesel is set to swing back toward the latter during the next 12 months," ESAI analyst John Galante said in an annual forecast. "Tightness in the global gasoline market has run its course."

Already, Europe's refineries are moving towards diesel, traders said, while Asian units are maximising jet fuel. In the United States, Husky Energy in Lima, Ohio, is making more diesel, while Delta Air Lines is considering switching its Trainer, Pennsylvania refinery to maximise diesel.

The shift is due in part to the success of their own efforts to do everything they could  from choosing different crude oil to tweaking the way they ran their units  to capitalise on booming gasoline and naphtha demand.

Most can only shift a small amount of production from one product to another  less than 5 percent, even in a best-case scenario  but the worldwide effort had a big impact.

Physical supply of so-called light-end products built quietly on ships, at refineries and in storage tanks, with even China exporting gasoline to the United States. The figures are now showing up in official data.

According to Euroilstock, gasoline inventories in Europe clocked a counter-seasonal build of 3 million barrels from April to May, while even the U.S. Energy Information Administration has shown some builds in gasoline stocks despite record demand from drivers.

"It has become clear that this is really not 2015 anymore and that the effects of yield-shifting exercises across the globe have more or less taken care of what we assume to still be strong demand growth for gasoline," analysts at JBC wrote.

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At the same time, an unexpected shortfall in diesel and jet fuel crept in, buoyed by strikes that closed four French refineries and extreme heat from El Nino that boosted distillates burned in power generators in India, Pakistan and Vietnam.

Last week, premiums for gasoline over ultra-low-sulphur diesel fell to flat on a per-barrel basis for the first time since March, in Europe, and November, in Asia, according to JBC. U.S. gasoline traded at a discount to diesel on Wednesday for the first time seasonally in three years.

Still, the shift could prove to be only a short-term profit aid. One trader said the change "makes little sense historically", while analysts warned it could simply crush diesel margins.

"If they are forced to make more diesel it will undermine those economics, particularly as August is typically a slow period for demand," said Robert Campbell, head of oil products with Energy Aspects.

(Additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Devika Krishna Kumar in New York and Seng Li Peng and Roslan Khasawneh in Singapore; Editing by Dale Hudson)
By Gina Cherelus NEW YORK (Reuters) - Qais Munhazim woke up on Sunday to reports that an Afghan-American gunman had rampaged through a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in an attack apparently motivated by support for militant Islamist groups. Tearful and disconsolate, Munhazim, a gay Muslim man who is originally from Afghanistan, made plans to attend the University of Minnesota's vigil the following day for the victims. The Orlando shooter killed 49 people and injured 53: the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and also the worst attack in America on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. "The moment I introduced myself to someone who is also part of the (LGBT) community, she asked me what my nationality is and I said I am Afghan," said Munhazim, a doctoral political science student at the university, on Tuesday. "Immediately her answer was, 'this is not the right time or place for you.' I went there trying to be among my own community, to grieve together with them. Even my grieving was questioned because of my identity." Munhazim's experience illustrates the isolation some Muslims in the LGBT community in the United States are feeling. "Coming (to America) I found that freedom but at the same time I definitely always found myself marginalized and discriminated because of my faith, because Islamophobia has been propagated by a lot of politicians in the U.S.," Munhazim said. This referred to remarks by some politicians, most prominently Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, following the Orlando shootings and previous such attacks, that have cast a shadow of suspicion on Muslims in America. While Islam has a wide variety of laws and customs across the world's more than 1.6 billion Muslims, gay sex is illegal in many Muslim-majority countries. In some countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, homosexual acts can be punishable by death. According to Hussain Turk, a Pakistani-American Muslim lawyer from Los Angeles, what makes it difficult for Muslims to be both gay and religious is the idea that Islam is a monolithic faith with a single set of rules stemming from the Koran, the religion's holy book. But he argues, "What Ive learned is that Islam is a dynamic religion at its core. Islam wasnt meant to be this anti-progressive monolith." Nonetheless, Turk, a gay Muslim man who also served as editor-in-chief of the University of California, Los Angeles' Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law, said there are Muslims, gay and non-gay, who say Islam's resistance to change is what gives it its appeal as a religion. There are about 3.3 million Muslims of all ages living in America, according to a Pew Research Center study in 2015. There are no statistics on how many LGBT Muslims are in the country. Mona Siam, a Jordanian Muslim woman who is also lesbian, was granted asylum in the United States in 2011 after she said she was hit by a stray bullet fired by police who were attempting to scare off guests at a gay-friendly bar in Beirut, Lebanon. Despite coming to the United States, Siam said that she still feels some animosity from Americans because of her religion and her sexual orientation. "I feel conflicted in the U.S. because I came here for safety and I feel like every part of my identity is being attacked," Siam said on Tuesday. "We are afraid of being Muslim in public or queer in public in a country where that shouldnt be happening. Its open-minded; you have thousand of cultures and identities. Its America." Seeking to help Americans conflicted about their religion and sexuality, the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity has hosted the Retreat for LGBTQ Muslims and Partners annually since 2011, attracting nearly 100 guests for a weekend of spiritual building. Tynan Power, a representative for MASGD, said that gender identity has had substantial support in both the Sunni and Shi'ite branches of Islam. "There are Muslims who believe that the Koran forbids homosexuality, just as there are Christians who believe the Bible does," said Power. "There are also Muslims who believe that honoring their God-given capacity to love is a form of worship. Ultimately, no one perspective can define a religion for all other people of that faith." Garrett Fugate, a Greek Muslim man who identifies as queer - a multi-faceted word that describes Fugate as someone who dates people of various sexual orientations - said that the MASGD Retreat allowed him to find his home as a Muslim. "When I was coming out I went from being very accepted to being very ostracized from the Muslim community," said Fugate, a graduate student at Boston University in Boston. "When I think of community I think of that retreat." (Story corrects 19th paragraph, deleting erroneous reference to diverse sexual orientation.) (Reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Frances Kerry)
As if children and young adolescents didn't already have enough things  like bullying or just homework  to deal with in school, uniforms have remained an unnecessary aspect of educational systems that box students into two categories: female and male.

In an effort to support students no matter the gender with which they choose to identify, The Guardian reports that 80 state schools across the U.K., 40 of which are elementary schools, have adopted gender-neutral uniform policies.

"Children are expected to wear [a] uniform, but they can wear whatever part of that uniform they want," Paula Weaver, headteacher at Allens Croft Primary School in Birmingham, England, one of the first to adopt these dress codes, told the publication. "We believe that children have the right to express their own identity in a way that is most comfortable for them."

This policy is part of a larger government-funded push for the support of students within the LGBTQ community.

"The money we have allocated is specifically to target homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools? to ensure no child has their lives blighted by bullying and can reach their full potential in school," a spokesperson for the Department for Education told Mashable.

Source: Mic/Flickr

T e 80 schools are following the lead of Brighton College, a private day and boarding school in Brighton, England, that began to allow its students to choose between a blazer and trousers or a skirt and jacket back in January.

This is not isolated to the U.K. Last month, after an Australian mother started a petition that would let her daughter wear pants as part of her school uniform, the school began to allow girls to do so. In February, another Australian school let its students "cross gender" its uniforms. A few months prior, Puerto Rico's department of education stated its students would be allowed to wear either pants or skirts depending on their gender identity.

Story continues

Although gender lines have begun to blur in the fashion and beauty industry within the United States, the country lags behind the gender-neutral uniform curve. It might not be out of the ordinary to see a celebrity like Jaden Smith or a high-fashion male model in a skirt, but in the classroom, where uniforms are enforced, it isn't acceptable ... yet.

"We still have more trouser-wearing across the board than boys wearing skirts. But that's about what's seen as acceptable in society, and you know what? We need to work on that, too," Weaver told The Guardian.
The resort can rake in $145 million in profits per year.

Genting is eyeing deep-pocketed Chinese gamblers and property buyers with its newest integrated development Resorts World Jeju.

According to a report by CIMB, the resort could add $145m per annum to Genting's bottomline. RWJ will be the first integrated resort in Jeju, a South Korean resort island which received almost 3 million Chinese visitors in 2014.

CIMB expects RWJ's foreigners-only casino to draw Chinese gamblers, particularly as Jeju is only a 2-hour flight away from major cities in northeast China. The development's 1,518 residential units are also expected to be a hit with wealthy Chinese, as Jeju has a policy that grants permanent resident status to foreigners who

purchase property worth at least W500m (US$0.4m) in Jeju.

Resorts World Jeju is a US$1.8bn development built on 2.5 million square metres of land in Southwest Jeju. It is a 50-50 joint venture between Genting and Landing International and will feature a 10,000 sq m foreigners-only casino, a Myths & History Theme Park and a 70,000 sq m retail complex.









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BERLIN (Reuters) - German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told a newspaper that doctors were handing out too many certificates to migrants who face deportation saying they were too ill to travel. More than a million migrants arrived in Germany last year, a record influx that has boosting support for anti-immigrant groups and raised concerns about security. New arrivals have slowed this year. "Doctors are still issuing too many certificates where there is no real health reason not to deport someone," de Maiziere told regional newspaper Rheinische Post's Thursday edition. "It can't be true that 70 percent of men under the age of 40 are declared sick and not fit to travel before deportation. Experience suggests this is not the case," he said. De Maiziere also said migrants should have their benefits cut if they do not cooperate on establishing their identity or if they do not leave the country if their asylum application is rejected. The legal framework for that was established last year and needs to be applied more consistently, he said. (Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
Grace Wales Bonner was awarded the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers for 2016. (Photo: LVMH)

Grace Wales Bonner of Wales Bonner is one to watch  and arguably the most major fashion corporation in the world knows it. Just awarded the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers for 2016 from the conglomerate, she received a 300,000 ($334,425) grant and a year-long mentorship. Bonner  who also won the British Fashion Councils emerging menswear designer award in 2015  was bestowed the honor by executives at the French fashion company following a vote by her peers, including Jonathan Anderson, Nicolas Ghesquiere, Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, Humberto Leon, Carol Lim, Phoebe Philo, and Riccardo Tisci.

Grace Wales Bonner of Wales Bonner impressed the jury with her soulful work on refined shapes, creating hybrid forms that marry European and African style. I congratulate her for this outstanding achievement, said Delphine Arnault, director and executive vice president of Louis Vuitton.



Though its one of the newest international fashion awards, the LVMH Prize has quickly picked up quite a bit of recognition for itself, having selected designers  including Jacquemus, Marques Almeida, and Hood by Air, among others  just before they became household names.

Heres everything you need to know about the emerging brand and the brain behind it.



1. Grace Wales Bonner is a woman.



Its a good year for female visibility. From the first major party presidential nominee to the inaugural State of Women conference in Washington, D.C., glass ceilings are being shattered all over the world. And the fashion industry is no exception to this trend. Following the announcement that Bouchra Jarrar was named the artistic director of Lanvin, making her one of a handful of female designers at the helm of luxury brands, Bonner has made history as the first solo female winner of the LVMH Prize.



The news is heartening, as historically in fashion women have been closed off to the top opportunities in the industry. To see that the LVMH Prize is recognizing diverse talent (it should be noted Delphine Arnault, who spearheaded the creation of the prize, is also a woman) is more than a step in the right direction.

Story continues

Look from Ebonics collection A/W 15.

2. Wales Bonner is a menswear brand.



Just because youre a woman doesnt mean you have to design dresses. Bonner has been building her business by creating African-inspired suits and sportswear since she graduated two years ago. Her pieces explore the ideas of masculinity and black sexuality. Just last week at London Collections: Mens, the designer showed a collection of muscle-hugging knits, velvet suits, and feminine tailoring.

FKA Twigs wearing Wales Bonner. (Photo: Getty Images)



3. She already has celebrity fans.



Its common knowledge in the industry that getting your pieces on the right celebrities can make your business. Sure, having the right product assortment and quality is key, but getting a garment on the right star can bring a watershed of press that kicks off a bump in sales. Bonners celebrity fans include the current faces of Dior, A$AP Rocky and Rihanna. She even released a collaboration with FKA Twigs, which the singer regularly wears. Not too shabby!

Look 17 from the Spring/Summer 2016 runway. (Photo: Getty Images)



4. The brand champions models of color on the runway



While it might seem like a no-brainer for designers of color to champion models of color, thats not always the case. At her Spring 2017 presentation, Bonner cast a variety of men and women of various colors and shades to wear her designs.



Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.


Dove Cameron and fiance Ryan McCartan's latest project is an especially personal one.



The engaged Disney Channel duo  who record and release music under the moniker The Girl and the Dreamcatcher  just dropped their infectious new single "Make You Stay," and PEOPLE has an exclusive first look at the track's love-fueled music video.



"We as a songwriting collaboration, a musical partnership and as a couple continue to dance around very real images and conversations that have happened between us," the pair told PEOPLE, adding the single's lyrics hit especially close to home for them.



"'What've I gotta do to make you stay?' is a real feeling we've had for each other. When we were first getting together. When she leaves for Vancouver to do a movie. When he leaves for New York to do a play. We're so deeply ingrained in each other's lives, and yet we're constantly being pulled apart by a varying degree of things. This song captures that desperation we have for each other in a fun and zany way."









The Girl and the Dreamcatcher (Dove Cameron and Fiance Ryan McCartan) Debut Adorable 'Make You Stay' Music Video| Music News, Ryan McCartan





Cameron, 20, and McCartan, 22, began dating after costarring on the Disney Channel show Liv and Maddie before McCartan popped the question this spring.



"We want to do it right, and planning a wedding is no small feat, and we don't want it to be something that we have to squeeze in between jobs, so we're going to wait until the right moment," McCartan previously told PEOPLE of their impending nuptials. "We're going to do it the way we want to and take our time  we have plenty."
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Golden Predator Mining Corp. (GPY.V) (the "Company") announces, further to its news release of June 1, 2016, that it has returned to treasury 10,312,154 common shares of the Company pursuant to two Option to Purchase Agreements with Till Capital Ltd. Following this cancellation of the shares a total of 53,501,201 shares remain issued and outstanding. The shares being cancelled represent 16.2% of the issued shares of the Company prior to the cancellation.

The Option to Purchase Agreements were entered into between Till Capital and Mr. Sheriff as part of a separation agreement, as announced by Till in September of 2015, and were subsequently assigned by Mr. Sheriff to the Company for nominal consideration.



Golden Predator Mining Corp.

Golden Predator Mining Corp., a Canadian gold mineral exploration company, is focused on advancing the 3 Aces Project and Brewery Creek project in Canada's North. The Company has undertaken a bulk sampling at the 3 Aces project, focused on high grade native gold bearing quartz veins, to define the distribution and grade of gold in the veins. The Company's Brewery Creek Project is a past producing heap leach gold mine.

For additional information:

Janet Lee-Sheriff

Chief Executive Officer

(214) 304-9552

info@goldenpredator.com

www.goldenpredator.com

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. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein.

SOURCE: Golden Predator Mining Corp.
Lucasfilm, the Disney-owned movie production company behind Star Wars, announced Thursday a new partnership with Magic Leap, a startup working on so-called mixed reality technology.

The two firms announced the arrangement during the Wired Business Conference, presenting the video above as a demonstration of what might be possible when fusing Lucasfilms intellectual property with Magic Leaps technology. The footage, while rudimentary in terms of plot, offers an idea of the kinds of storytelling that might be possible with mixed reality.

Instead of virtual reality, which offers users a completely digital environment, mixed reality gives viewers the illusion that computer-generated images are inhabiting their real-world physical surroundings.

Magic Leap has yet to announce a consumer version of its product or many details about how it might work beyond demonstration videos like this one. But CEO Rony Abovitz said Thursday that his goal is to get all-day, every day computing, meaning any eventual device might be a head-worn device that he would like users to wear as frequently as many people carry a smartphone today. Lucasfilm Chief Technology Officer Rob Bredow floated that the device might allow users to skin your world, adding visual elements from the Star Wars saga, for instance, to the real world around you.

Based in Florida, Magic Leap has raised nearly $1.4 billion in funding from high-profile investors like Google and Andreessen Horowitz. This new partnership, meanwhile, is sure to fuel speculation that may be interested in acquiring the company for its technology and talent.

Still, there are reasons for skepticism about Magic Leap. Google Glass, the most high-profile effort thus far to get consumers to wear a gadget on their face as they go about their day, failed in part because people rejected the idea as too weird. Others have worried that mixed reality could blend the real world and the digital one to an uncomfortable degree. Another concern: a mixed-reality world could offer brands the chance to cover users environments in digital advertising.

Abovitz, however, said he views mixed reality as a sacred space. We dont want this dystopian view of [alternative reality], he said, using an alternate term for mixed reality.
It never hurts to mind ones Ps and Qs. A grandmothers unusually polite Google search has charmed thousands of social media users  and even the search engine company itself  after her grandson posted a photo of the 86-year-olds laptop to Twitter.

The internet was delighter after seeing that May Ashworth had searched Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you.

Ben Eckersley, 25, of Wigan, England, was visiting Ashworth, his grandmother, to use her dryer when he found the search on her open laptop, the BBC reports. (The answer to her search, by the way, is 1998.) He quickly tweeted an image of the search, which has garnered more than 24,500 retweets and close to 36,000 favorites since it was posted June 9.

She thought that by being polite and using her manners, the search would be quicker, Eckersley told the BBC.

Ashworth said she was hoping to figure out when a book of nursery rhymes was published.

I feel a bit stupid really cause I did it that way, Ashworth told CBC News from her home in Greater Manchester, England. I thought, well somebodys put it in, so youre thanking them.

Googles UK Twitter account replied to Eckersleys tweet with the answer to Ashworths question, adding that in a world of a billion searches, yours made us smile. Googles main Twitter account also responded with Dear Grandma, no thanks necessary.
ATHENS, June 16 (Reuters) - Greece's jobless rate rose to 24.9 percent in January-to-March from 24.4 percent in the last year's final quarter, data from the country's statistics service showed on Thursday.

The highest unemployment rate was recorded in the first quarter of 2014, when joblessness hit 27.8 percent. About 70.3 percent of Greece's 1.19 million jobless are long-term unemployed, meaning they have been out of work for at least 12 months, the figures showed.

Athens has already published monthly unemployment figures through March, which differ from quarterly data because they are based on different samples and are seasonally adjusted. Quarterly figures are not seasonally adjusted.

The debt crisis and a six-year austerity imposed by the EU/IMF lenders in exchange for Greece's bailouts have wiped out about a quarter of the country's economic output, driving the jobless rate to record highs.

Greece's economy shrank by 0.5 percent in the first quarter, at a slightly faster pace than previously estimated, weighed by weaker consumer spending and net exports.

The country's central bank expects the economy will contract 0.3 percent this year.

(Reporting by George Georgiopoulos)
boss

Starz

Weve known for a few months that among Netflixs plans to branch out into more original, animated programming, horror auteur Guillermo del Toros Trollhunters would be involved. Del Toros project, which, like the rest of Netflixs slate, will be overseen by DreamWorks Animation, finally has a few names we can now tack on to it.

Variety reports that Kelsey Grammer  Frasier himself is on board to do a voice, as will be Del Toro regular Ron Perlman  Hellboy himself. Both actors will play trolls (remember, this title of the show is Trollhunters), with Grammer getting into the kindly one and Perlman, naturally, sliding into the role of the villain, described by the makers of the project as a sinister troll who targets Jim and his friends for battle.

Related Links:





Jim, by the way, will be voiced by Anton Yelchin, Mr. Chekhov in the current Star Trek franchise, the next of which is set to arrive at multiplexes this summer. Also per Variety, in a joint statement via DreamWorks and Netflix announced Wednesday that broke this casting news, the Trollhunters plot was also unveiled.

Trollhunters will be set in the fictional suburb of Arcadia, where Jim, and his two best friends make a startling discovery that beneath their hometown lies a hidden battle between good trolls and bad, the outcome of which will impact their lives forever, the statement read.

No premiere date was mentioned for what is being referred to as an epic family event series. Hopefully, Netflix and DreamWorks Animation will hurry up and let us know.

(via Variety)
The 17th annual power lunch with Warren Buffett was recently won by a mystery bidder for $3,456,789, matching the record price paid back in 2012.

The anonymous winner will get to bring up to seven guests to have lunch with Buffett at Smith & Wollensky's Midtown Manhattan location.

While it might seem like a hefty price to pay for a steak lunch, all the proceeds go to a worthy cause, GLIDEa charitable organization focused on alleviating poverty. For those who have won in the past, it's absolutely worth it too.

Value investor Guy Spier, who won the lunch in 2008 bidding alongside his friend Mohnish Pabrai, recounted the experience in his book "Education Of A Value Investor." Spier, the founder of Aquamarine Fund, wrote that meeting Buffett had a life-changing impact on how he lives his life and invests.

Just a year prior, Pabrai convinced Spier that they should team up to bid in a charity auction on eBay. A young fund manager with a third child on the way at the time, Spier was good for contributing up to $250,000. The duo won the eBay auction on their second attempt for $650,100.

Call me 'Warren'

On June 25, 2008, Spier, Pabrai, their wives, and Pabrais two daughters joined Buffett at the iconic steakhouse.

"I was very nervous beforehand," Spier told Yahoo Finance. "I wanted him to like me. I knew he didn't have to like me, he was there to have lunch with me. I didn't sleep very much or well. I arrived a bit like showing up for a really important exam."

Guy Spier, the founder of Aquamarine Fund, with Warren Buffett at Smith & Wollensky's.

Buffett immediately put the group at ease, telling them to call him "Warren" and even joking with Pabrai's young daughters that he eats only things he would've as a five year-old.

Over medium-rare steaks, hash browns, and Coca-Colas (a Cherry Coke for Buffett, of course), they spent three-hours engaged in a wide-ranging conversation. It wasnt just the pearls of wisdom that Buffett would drop, but rather the subtleties that would stay with Spier.

Being in a room with Buffett, Spier explained, you realize he has this "prodigious intelligence, incredible intensity, and amazing simplicity." Just being in a room with Buffett was a lesson itself.

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"I think the air vibrates differently around some people," Spier said, adding, "Leadership is the way you make people feel when they're in a room with you."

One takeaway was to surround yourself with the right people. It not about trying to be that person, but rather learning from them.

Buffett told Spier and Pabrai: "Hang out with people better than you, and you cannot help but improve."

The 'Inner Scorecard'

Perhaps the most profound takeaway from their discussion with Buffett was the importance of measuring yourself by an inner scorecard as opposed to an outer scorecard" the need for public approval and recognition.

To make his point, Buffett asked the table: Would you rather prefer to be considered the best lover in the world and know privately that youre the worstor would you prefer to know privately that youre the best lover in the world, but be considered the worst?

An anonymous bidder agreed to pay $3,456,789 for lunch with Warren Buffett.

Spier found this to be the greatest lesson, and it also applies to investing.

Its hard to overstate the importance of Buffetts insight. After all, how many of the self-serving excesses and moral compromises that caused the financial crisis of 2008-2009 would have been avoided if mortgage brokers, bankers, and others had lived by an inner scorecard? As Warren helped me to understand, people too often justify their improper or misguided actions by reassuring themselves that everyone else is doing it too, he wrote.

He continued: One of Buffetts defining characteristics is that he so clearly lives by his own inner scorecard. It isnt just that he does whats right, but that he does whats right for him. As I saw during our lunch, theres nothing fake or forced about him. He sees no reason to compromise his standards or violate his beliefs.

While there's many ways to emulate Buffett, there's one that's impossible to replicatehis mind. According to Spier, it can be exhausting being in a room with him because you also realize the speed at which his brain operates.

"I felt the sheer intensity of his mind and simply knew that he was operating at a much higher clock speed than I was," Spier wrote.

"In the past, having come top of my class at Oxford, I'd somehow convinced myself that I had the mental capacity to compete with him, and I had hoped that I might one day learn to perform equally well. Seeing him in person that day, I was left with no doubt at all that I could ever hope to match him."

Spier realized that he couldn't beat Buffett's brainpower. And that's OK.

"This became my goal: not to be Warren Buffett, but to become a more authentic version of myself. And he taught me, the path to true success is through authenticity."

A Buffett 'lifeline'



The charity power lunch wasnt the first time Spier had been in a room with Buffett. The famed investor spoke at Harvard Business School in 1991 during Spier's first semester. Admittedly, the younger Spier was more interested in a female classmate than what Buffett was talking about. Even today, he cant remember anything that Buffett said.

Michael Douglas' character 'Gordon Gekko' from Oliver Stone's film 'Wall Street.'

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Spier made a "spectacularly foolish" decision to join D. H. Blaira third-tier firm that was eventually shut down by regulatorswhere he was exposed to a "snake pit" of Gordon Gekkos and bankers that pushed boundaries.

He was miserable.

When I discovered the world of Warren Buffett, it was as if I had found a lifeline, Spier wrote.

It happened during his lunch break when he popped in a bookstore just off Wall Street. He read Benjamin Grahams "The Intelligent Investor," which had a preface written by Buffett. After that, he read "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist" by Roger Lowenstein.

He found Buffett to be the antithesis of the Wall Street that he had encountered while at D. H. Blair. He wanted to make a change.

"I had to go through the depths of despair to be open to someone like Warren Buffett," Spier said, adding, "Failure, if it's big enough, has the ability to unhinge you and loosen you up and make you open to new things."

When Spier left D. H. Blair, he had trouble finding another job on Wall Street because of the firm's reputation. During that time, he continued to read essays and reports from Buffett. He also made the trip out to Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting.

In 1996, Spiers father called him to suggest managing some of his money. He gave him about $1 million to start and eventually two of his businesses associates invested. The Aquamarine Fund, which is inspired by the original 1950s/60s Buffett partnerships before Berkshire Hathaway, began trading on September 15, 1997 with around $15 million in assets.

Initially, Aquamarine, at the suggestion of advisers and lawyers to follow the hedge fund industry standard, began charging a 1-and-20% fee structure, which is still modest compared to the traditional 2-and-20% that's charged. Spier, however, really wanted to charge no management fees like Buffett.

People will always stop you doing the right thing if its unconventional, Buffett told him over their lunch.

For Spier, meeting with Buffett for lunch was transformational. Soon after, he stopped charging management fees to new investors. Also taking a page from how Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway operates far away from Wall Street in Omahas Kiewit Plaza, Spier moved his family and fund to Zurich, Switzerland to escape the New York hedge fund vortex. In addition, he began using his Bloomberg terminal less, no longer checking stock prices at every moment.

And if he could do it all over again, he wouldn't have accepted a vice president position at a "sleazy bucket shop" after business school.

"I really would have done it straight from Warren Buffett's playbook: 'Go work for someone you really admire."

--

Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.

Read more:

John Burbank: This time of peril may herald the beginning of 'the liquidation'

Raoul Pal: The stock market is behaving the way it did back in 2000

Hedge fund titans warn of financial crisis-like market signals

Billionaire Rubenstein: These 6 traits will help you succeed on Wall Street

Druckenmiller: These 2 charts show how 'unproductive' and 'reckless' companies have been
Tupac Shakur would have been 45-years old today if the legendary rapper hadnt been gunned down in Las Vegas in September 1996. To celebrate the California Love artists birthday, the Benny Boom directed and long- in-the-making biopic All Eyez On Me dropped its first teaser today.

Just 1-minute long, the first look pulls no punches with Tupacs mothers voice heard warning him like all black men, you have a bullseye on your back. The Danai Gurira played Afeni Shakur adds, they are going to give you the tools you need to destroy yourself. A rapper, an actor and a poet, Tupac in life and death is considered one of the most important hip hop artists ever  and, as the trailer shows, All Eyez On Me is aiming to capture the full range of that appeal.

All Eyez On Me stars Demetrius Shipp, Jr. as Tupac and The Walking Deads Gurira as his influential mother, who passed away in real life in early May. Fellow Walking Deader Lauren Cohan is in the Morgan Creek film, along with Jamie Hector and Kat Graham. With its title lifted from Tupacs 1996 acclaimed fourth album, which featured California Love, the Jeremy Haft and Ed Gonzalez penned film is expected to be released on November 11.

Morgan Creeks James G. Robinson, David Robinson and LT Hutton are producing the pic. Long the protector of her admired sons copyrights and legacy, Afeni Shakur will be getting an executive producer credit on All Eyez On Me.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16P-tQWLFCM&w=970&h=546]

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hillary clinton donald trump

Voters who hold unfavorable views of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump provided their chief reasons in a new poll released Thursday.

In the poll, conducted by Morning Consult, the top reason voters looked negatively upon Clinton was because they believed she was untrustworthy. Nearly half  47%  of respondents who held an unfavorable opinion of her listed "is not trustworthy" as one of their top two reasons.

For Trump, those who disliked him said they believe he is racist. Of respondents who hold a negative view of Trump, 25% offered that reason as one of the top two reasons they view him in negative light.

Respondents who disliked either Trump or Clinton were given a list of a dozen possible choices to select from.

Clinton's results were concentrated on six responses  each receiving more than 10% of total answers. The second most popular choice for holding an unfavorable view of Clinton was that she "is corrupt." That answer was followed by "changes her positions when it's politically convenient," "is out of touch with average Americans," "says one thing byt does another," and "does not share my values."

Respondents who disliked Trump selected a wider-array of choices with greater frequency, as the Manhattan billionaire earned 10 responses that garnered more than 10% of total answers. The second most popular choice for why a respondent viewed Trump negatively was because he "does not have the right experience to be president," which was selected by 20% of those surveyed. That was followed by "is not trustworthy," "does not know enough about the issues," "changes his positions when it is politically convenient," "has extreme political views," "is corrupt," "is out of touch with average Americans," "lacks experience," and "is sexist."

Morning Consult surveyed 2,001 registered voters for the survey, which was completed between May 27 and May 30.

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Here are the full results:

ClintonOverall

TrumpOverall

And here are those same results broken down by political affiliation:

ClintonByParty

TrumpByParty

NOW WATCH: Golf legend Greg Norman reveals the truth behind US President Bill Clinton's late-night 1997 injury





More From Business Insider


Project Veritas' second video of the undercover teachers union series shows how teachers dont practice what they preach and could potentially get away with drug abuse on campus, courtesy of the union. In OKeefes video, Robert Klein, a middle school health teacher in New Jersey invites PV journalists to his room at the Borgata Hotel to party. While in his room, Klein offers the undercover journalists cocaine and tells them about his drug use as a teacher.
From Cosmopolitan

Sometimes the universe sends you a perfect angel when you need it most, and right now, that perfect angel is the budding relationship between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston.

I talked to Celebrity Oracle/Your Favorite Character on The Hills, Spencer Pratt, about exactly what the hell is going on with Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston. As anyone who has breathed air in the past 24 hours will tell you, the two were spotted kissing on the beach outside her Rhode Island house, and the entire internet exploded with confusion, panic, and - dare I say it? - happiness.

Spencer is one of the many who are approving of this seemingly odd-ish pairing, but he's pretty sure those beach photos were staged nonetheless. And he's speaking from experience. After all, he and his lovely wife Heidi Pratt were among the first wave of famous folks selling pics to the paps for cash, and he spoke to Cosmopolitan.com about what he thinks is really happening with Hiddleswift.

So, can you even believe it?!

I feel like I'm still dreaming. I think the whole world needed something like this. After all the horrible news lately, we needed something good. I was gonna unplug my Wi-Fi; I was gonna go dark. But Taylor, you know, she brought us out of the woods.

We saw your initial reaction on Twitter, of course, but really walk us through it: What did you think when you saw these pics?

I was binge-watching The Night Manager [Ed. note: This is an AMC/BBC miniseries starring Tom Hiddleston, and it's SO GOOD] and I just finished a day ago, and I was going through withdrawals and was gonna start a petition to make [Tom Hiddleston] the new James Bond. So I took a nap and when I woke up, I saw the news about Tom and Taylor and I thought, at first, someone hacked into my brain and then Photoshopped it. Because I've been trying to figure out who T-Swift should rebound with ever since before she even broke up with Calvin; I knew he wasn't good enough for her. I never liked his smug attitude; the whole time he was with her, he always seemed like it wasn't anything special to be with Taylor Swift. I didn't like it from the jump. So I was always like, "Who can Taylor Swift do better with?"

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And [Hiddleston] is so out of my fame loop, he didn't even come to mind. He's such a hardcore, serious actor. He's not trying to jump into tabloids with Taylor. And so I started doing a little research, I saw that photo of them dancing at the Met Ball, and I thought, This good-looking guy is way better than that Adam Harris, Calvin Harris, whatever guy! This is who you should be with, Taylor. That dance was way more than just a dance.

He said in some interview that he saw a few of her videos and he thought she was charming and, I was like, "A few of her videos?!" A guy like that is not watching, with all due respect, music videos on set between takes unless he really fancies her, as the Brits would say. I think it's 100 percent real.

I've been trying to figure out who T-Swift should rebound with ever since before she even broke up with Calvin; I knew he wasn't good enough for her.

What about the pap shots at her house?

I think someone on one of their teams may have tipped off the paparazzi, and I think it may have been his team since it was The Sun, a British tabloid, that got the exclusive. [Ed. note: Spencer emailed us later to let us know that Tom is actually half Scottish!] Then again, she's Taylor Swift and there have to be people who see her walking to the beach and call a tabloid. But, if that's the case, we haven't seen any fan pics, and that's what makes me think it's an exclusive [to the paparazzi]. We would see more parking lot shots from fans, and stuff like that. And somebody said he was dressed like he was going to get his photo taken, but I don't know, guys like him at that level always dress pretty smart. It's definitely a staged photo, don't get me wrong, the question is: Which camp did it? Was it a mutual agreement? I put out my feelers trying to figure out who's behind this and if I get more intel, I'll keep you posted.

And then I don't know what's up with Calvin-Adam-Harris-DJ-guy's tweet with the skulls and the "shit's gonna hit the fan." I was like, "Bro, nobody cares what you say anymore."

As far as the staging of the photos, those photos were pretty freaking good. Were they taken with a long lens? They seem high-quality, right? How close do you think the paps were - and does that mean she let them onto her estate?

No, these lenses are so good. They've got these lenses that go out, like, 800 millimeters and cost $40,000. Let's see, I have a 500-millimeter lens, and I can get a closeup on someone's face from a beach away, so if you're the person who's getting the photo of Taylor Swift and you're up on a bluff, you'll get the shot. The key when you're doing a paparazzi shoot at that level is that as long as you're not smiling up at the camera, you had no clue the camera was there. That's Angelina-Brad Pitt 1998-type shit.

Do you think there's any chance that they didn't know the paparazzi were there?

I mean, I'll say, yeah; a 0.5 percent chance, maybe. At that level of superstardom - I don't want to judge T-Swift; maybe she didn't know, but I think one of them did it. It actually might be Taylor Swift. They're special humans; aliens, maybe. Maybe a UFO got a shot of them.

That's Angelina-Brad Pitt 1998-type shit.

Calvin's reaction - is it staged or is he straight-up pissed?

Oh, he's straight-up pissed. I don't know what his deal is - he never looked giddy enough to be [with] T-Swift. He always acted like, "Ugh, I'm a superstar DJ. I perform for big shows. Untz untz untz." Even Jake Gyllenhaal seemed happier when he was out with Taylor, and that's Jake Gyllenhaal; I mean, he's in a whole 'nother league. To me, I always wondered what was up - maybe she asked him to always look like he wasn't into her? I don't know, but I think now, he's seeing that she went to where she belongs, in A-list category, and he's like, "Now I look like I did get dumped," no matter what his publicists leaked about how he wasn't into all the glitz and the glamour. All these little source quotes I'm reading are just ridiculous. Famous people love famous stuff! Otherwise he wouldn't be a famous music DJ, he'd be making tracks in his basement for fun. Come on.

So the truth has come out now, and he doesn't like that?

Yeah, I think he thought he had a couple more weeks, but no. I, as a Swiftie fan, was reading all these things, and I didn't like how it was making her look like she got dumped, or they decided it was better to be friends. No, no, no; that's now how it happened. She met the next James Bond with his British accent, and he was talking all smart to her, doing his special dance moves, and then she came home to Calvin being all, "Untz untz untz, can't talk right now; I'm making a beat," and she was like, "Uh, this isn't working. Don't touch my cats."

So you don't think all their reactions on social media are staged?

No! Calvin does not want Taylor Swift, with her 80 million followers on Instagram, deleting him. That tells you right there that they're not friends. The fact that tweets are being deleted means everything is not cool.

She came home to Calvin being all, 'Untz untz untz, can't talk right now; I'm making a beat,' and she was like, 'Uh, this isn't working. Don't touch my cats.'

Do you think that Tom and Taylor could actually last?

I think so! When I saw them together, I was like, "Here we go!" This is somebody who can keep her interest. He could go win an Oscar. He doesn't look too old and he doesn't look too young; he looks like husband-type material to me. I just feel like that's the level; she needs to be going to the Oscars with him, and not iHeartRadio with Calvin.

Here's my dream: He's the new James Bond, she does the new James Bond theme song. She wins a Grammy and an Oscar for that song; he wins Best Actor for James Bond. Super power couple - boom, done.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Follow Laura on Twitter.
Hillary Clintons presidential campaign is on the airwaves in eight states with ads that highlight her work helping children, dating back to the 1970s.

Aides rolled out a 30- and 60-second version of the message early Tuesday morning, which will soon be seen by voters in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. The ads are part of a six-week, eight-figure ad buy meant to start making her case as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Clinton aides have said for months that Clinton is the most famous woman in the world, yet voters dont know her resume well. Shes been in the public eye since the 1980s, when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, but votersespecially young onesare unfamiliar with her trailblazing career.

She would grow up to be one of most recognizable women in the world, a male narrator says in the minute-long version of the ad. But less well known are the causes that have been at the center of her life.

The ads detail her work with the Childrens Defense Fund right after graduating from Yale Law, reforms in the Arkansas schools as the states first lady, and her help writing a bipartisan national health care law that helps 8 million kids. There is also a nod to her work as Secretary of State combating human trafficking.

For Hillary, its always been about kids, a female narrator says in the shorter version of the ad.

The ads never mention Republican rival Donald Trump by name, but the message is not subtly implied: Clinton is fighting for kids, while Trump only works for personal enrichment. Clintons team is also running an explicitly anti-Trump ad already.
The largest federation of labor unions announced on Thursday it is endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, signaling the end of a long primary campaign against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The vote by the board of the AFL-CIO, which represents 12.5 million workers, comes two days after the final Democratic primary and nine days after Clinton was declared the presumptive nominee of the party.

Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. Throughout the campaign, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to the issues that matter to working people, and our members have taken notice.

Clinton thanked the AFL-CIO for itsendorsement, saying that [m]embers of the AFL-CIO know, as I do, that we are stronger together. She reiterated a campaign promise to invest in infrastructure spending, raise the minimum wage and guarantee paid family leave.

There was some internal dissent last year within many of the major unions over which candidate to support. Much of the rank-and-file of the AFL-CIO unions supported Sanders, while union leaders often leaned toward Clinton. There was vocal anger among some members of the American Federation of Teachers when the union endorsed Clinton in July, with many arguing the endorsement came to early.

But the political landscape has changed in the last year and many more unions have moved to back Clinton. She has opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which has earned her support from unions. Workers will always have a seat at the table and a champion in the White House, Clinton said in her statement thanking the AFL-CIO.
Barreling down Route 101 in San Francisco, Nicole Harvat met her future mortgage loan officer. High above the freeway stood a billboard with these words: 10% down, 100% yours  an ad from lending startup SoFi, which approves mortgages for homes worth up to $3 million. I remember thinking, Yeah, right, says Harvat, 43. But at that point, we had pretty much given up on buying a home and had been renting for seven years.

A few days later, Harvat was on the phone with the lender. Within weeks she and her husband had been approved for a $2.15 million mortgage for a three-bedroom home in Burlingame, for which they put down $215,000. And, after consulting with several banks and loan brokers who told her she would need to put down at least 20 percent, or closer to a $430,000 down payment, Harvat is now enjoying the wisteria blooming over the pergola outside her new front door.

A growing group of startups  including Sindeo, an online brokerage that operates in a handful of states; Lenda, an online lender focused on refinancing mortgages in California, Washington state and Oregon; and SoFi, or Social Finance  are part of a burgeoning sector that seeks to streamline and modernize the mortgage-application process. Theyre automating significant steps and tracking the approval progress online, without the additional processing fees, mountains of paperwork and drawn-out meetings with loan officers at banks. It sounds simple enough, but its part of a recent innovation to move lending away from big banks  which have been slow to make the lending transition online  and on to your smartphone.

Online lenders have continued to grow, in part by touting their mortgage-approval speed as a selling point.

Unlike a bank, these startups tend to raise money for loans through private investors, then often repackage those loans and sell them back to other investors so the companies can issue more loans. This may sound like another subprime meltdown in the works, though for their part, the startups promise a finely tuned and carefully selected book of loans  not the free-for-all that caused the financial crisis. The problem, says Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager and author of the book Eat People, is that lenders must keep their risk management in check so that good loans are made, but, more importantly, actually be repaid. Because they typically dont meet their customers face to face, Kessler argues, theyre only as good as their data and algorithms. That will separate those who do well from those who fail, he says. Hopefully, many fail early before too many third parties buy up packages of bad loans.

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These lenders arent regulated like regular banks, in part, because they dont take deposits  they underwrite, meaning theyre supposed to check the risk of all mortgages and the potential for a borrower to default. Its when the loans are securitized (or repackaged and sold) that problems have arisen in the past. In May, Renaud Laplanche, the chief executive of a personal lending startup, Lending Club, was ousted after an internal probe claimed the company had falsified documentation when selling $22 million of loans to an investor. (Laplanche couldnt be reached for comment and Lending Club declined to comment.)

For borrowers, one of the main draws of startups in this space is that these companies are usually able to accept a smaller down payment on jumbo mortgages  loans that are higher than the government-backed limits of $417,000 in most areas and $625,500 in some high-priced places. Down payments can start at 10 percent, or sometimes lower, compared to the average rate of nearly 15 percent for traditional retail banks, according to RealtyTracs latest available report on the countrys average down payments. Harvat and her family, for example, were able to put down just over 10 percent with the remaining financed by SoFi, whereas competitors were asking for as much as 40 percent in similarly competitive areas.

Gettyimages 124083339

So long, Laplanche. It was fun while it lasted.

Source: David Paul Morris/Getty

That kind of flexibility, though, can come at a cost. While online lenders tend to undercut traditional mortgage brokers on rates and fees by offering interest payments as low as 2.6 percent compared to around 3.5 percent at traditional banks, there are all these stipulations, says David Weliver, founder of Money Under 30, a financial resources site for young professionals entering the home-buying market. Mortgages are a custom product, but in these cases they are for the ideal situation: someone with perfect credit, the right down payment, the right income, he says. The online format of applying for a loan has also led to certain scandals. In 2014, a class action suit accused SoFi of conducting unauthorized credit checks on prospective borrowers, which damaged their credit scores. The company ended up paying out $2.5 million in a settlement in April, though SoFi spokeswoman Laurel Toney declined to comment on the settlement.

Still, online lenders have continued to grow, in part by touting their mortgage-approval speed as a selling point. Traditional banks usually require an average of 46 days to approve a mortgage, according to a report from Ellie Mae, a mortgage data company. By plugging into myriad data sources, SoFi, Lenda and Rocket Mortgages, a spin-off of industry veteran Quicken Loans, can do so in as little as 30 days, on average, from application to funding, with applications across all these lenders completed within minutes online. Instead of requiring potential borrowers to upload key documents, Rocket, for example, links directly to public and private data sources  with customer permission  such as bank accounts and tax returns to verify a persons information, in under 10 minutes.

But experts such as Weliver expect online lenders to loosen requirements for prospective borrowers and potentially face heightened scrutiny, especially given the subprime mortgage crisis that hit Americans not that long ago. If they want to grow as a mortgage lender, that [high-income] market is going to become saturated, he says. Are they going to relax their standards a bit and start lending to people who are lower on the income tier?

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If youre selling a home, theres pretty much nothing worse than seeing your beloved place sit on the market with no offers in sight. And the longer it remains, the more youre apt to worry: Is something truly wrong with your home? When the weeks turn into months, it may be time to admit that something is amiss.

Were here to help you figure it out! Here are four common culprits and how to correct them.

But first: Maybe its all in your head

For starters, dont exclude the possibility that youre just worried for nothing, and your home will indeed sell in due time. According to one study by data-gathering company Graphiq, a home stays on the market for an average of 73 days in the United States, but realistically, theres a wide range. Houses in the metro area of Birmingham, AL, sit on the market for an average of 144 days while homes in the San Francisco metro area last only 54 days.

Take a look at your local market and compare the average days on market for a comparable home, says John Steele of Steel San Diego Homes in San Diego. If youre in an area where the average days on the market is 100 and youre only at 50, you might not have to worry about it. All you may need to do is sit back and wait!

Reason No. 1: Your listing pics are subpar

In the digital age, home buyers start looking onlinemuch like with modern dating. So photography is key to making a great first impression, with the most flattering pictures possible. If buyers arent coming around to see your place and your pics leave a lot to be desired, hiring a photographer could help. Professional photographs drastically improve the online presence of a listing and can immediately create more attention, says Patti Michels, a Realtor in Hinsdale, IL.

Costs vary, but a general ballpark for a standard shootinterior and exterioris around $250 to $500 or more, not including any extras like video.

Reason No. 2: Your home isnt prettied up

Were not saying your home doesnt look nice, but are there cracks in your driveway? Does your kitchen scream 1970s? If so, then youre sending out all the wrong signals.

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Think of it like dating, says Nicole R. Wilhelm of Sothebys International Realty in Berkeley, CA. When you go the first time, you expect your date to have showered and be dressed in their best. In home terms, that amounts to staging by a professional who arranges your home for maximum appeal.

Staging can help your home sell faster, tooabout 20% quicker than a home that isnt staged. Costs vary depending on the service. To give you a general idea, the National Association of Realtors found the median cost of staging a home to be $675. And once its staged, do your part and keep it clean.

Reason No. 3: Your home is too  you

Hey, were not judging youbut buyers might. Your flamingo-pink porch and painted black bedrooms might be a bit, um, much for the typical home shopper. Its time for a candid talk with your Realtor about whether theres anything around the house you could do to make it more of a neutral backdrop for other peoples home dreams.

You should also make yourself scarce, if not absent, when the property is being shownno matter how lovely and helpful you are, your presence can make sellers feel self-conscious or pressured to politely ooh and ahh rather than speak their minds.

Finally, make sure to make your house available for showings at times convenient for buyersnot just for you. So expect to give up a few weekends for property browsers.

Reason No. 4: You priced it too high

If youve tried all of the above and still cant get a buyer, then whats wrong with your home may be the price youre asking for it. When it comes to homes that are stagnating, Alex Bracke, owner of the Alex Bracke Real Estate Group in Sterling, VA, says he makes one point clear to sellers: I dont set the value of their home; they dont set the value of their home, Bracke says. The market sets it.

Translation: The home is worth no more than what someone is willing to spend for it. So to stir up interest, reduce the price. And dont be coyslash it.

In order to make a splash and get buyers excited, the price reduction must be significant, says Danny Batsalkin, CEO of TBG Homes Worldwide in Beverly Hills, CA. Reduce the price by at least 5%, and 10% is even better.

A price cut doesnt even mean youll take a huge hit.

Just because a homes price is reduced does not mean thats the maximum it can sell for, says Michels. Youll hear from new buyers because your house will be in a new price range, and you might even get a bidding war that will bring the price back up to where you started.



Watch: Do You Need to Remodel Before You Sell?

The post Home Wont Sell? Heres What Youre Doing Wrong appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.





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By Stella Tsang and Clare Baldwin HONG KONG (Reuters) - One of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing in mysterious circumstances last year said on Thursday he had been detained for more than eight months by Chinese authorities and that another of the five had been abducted from Hong Kong. Lam Wing-kee told a news conference that his colleague, Lee Bo, who went missing from Hong Kong in late December, had been abducted, and said "cross-border enforcement actions" by mainland Chinese authorities in Hong Kong were "not acceptable". Following months of speculation about the circumstances surrounding the disappearances, Lam called a surprise press conference just two days after being released. Lam said he was arrested last October in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and then taken on a 14-hour train journey to the eastern city of Ningbo. There, he was kept in a small room by himself, and repeatedly interrogated about the selling of banned books on the mainland. Causeway Bay Books, the store at which the five men worked, had specialized in publishing and selling gossipy books about China's leaders, including President Xi Jinping. "At the time I was terrified ... I didn't know how they'd treat me," he told a roomful of reporters in Hong Kong. "I couldn't believe this was happening." The disappearances have prompted fears that mainland Chinese authorities may be using tactics that erode the "one country, two systems" formula under which Hong Kong has been governed since its return to China from British rule in 1997. Four of the men, Gui Minhai, Lui Por, Cheung Chi-ping and Lam, gave details of their alleged offences to China's Phoenix Television in February, saying they'd been detained for "illegal book trading" in mainland China. But Lam said this interview had been "scripted" by Chinese agents and that he'd been forced to say what they demanded. Chinese authorities have declined to clarify key details of the disappearances but have said previously that law enforcement officials would never do anything illegal. Wang Chaoye, an official with China's main representative office in Hong Kong, declined to comment on Lam's testimony when contacted by Reuters. Lam said he was barred from calling his family or contacting a lawyer during his detention, while being monitored 24 hours a day. He was later transferred to Shaoguan, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. The bespectacled Lam, who appeared tired after deliberating for two days on whether to go public, said the case had "clearly violated Hong Kong's rights", and that he needed to speak out no matter what the risks to his personal safety or that of his mainland Chinese girlfriend. "I hope the central government will not ... do something against my friends." Lam said he was asked by the Chinese officers who detained him to return to Hong Kong to retrieve records of customers who'd ordered banned books from his bookshop. But Lam said he would never return to China. Pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho urged the Hong Kong government to follow up on the case with Beijing, saying it remained of great concern internationally. Lee Bo is a British national and went missing in Hong Kong, while Gui Minhai is a Swedish citizen and went missing while in Thailand. The Hong Kong government said in a statement that the police were reaching out to Lam and would take appropriate action. Amnesty International said in a statement that Lam had "exposed what many have suspected all along: that this was a concerted operation by the Chinese authorities to go after the booksellers." Only Gui Minhai remains in Chinese custody, though the precise nature of his charges have not yet been clarified. (Reporting by Clare Baldwin, James Pomfret and Stella Tsang; Writing by James Pomfret; Editing by Catherine Evans)
From Cosmopolitan

Sara Brooks was sure Cabo would be the perfect place for her destination wedding this coming November. The desert landscape reminded her of her Arizona hometown, and Will had always loved to surf the coast of Mexico. Plus, she and Will had their first Tinder conversation in Spanish, so it seemed like a special gesture to get married in a Spanish-speaking country. But that was December 2015, when no one had even heard of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne illness that can cause severe birth defects, which was spreading northward from South America.

Five months into planning my dream wedding, my maid of honor called to tell me she was pregnant and didnt feel safe traveling to Mexico, Brooks says. Her other best friend also said it was highly unlikely shed attend, saying she plans to be pregnant or actively trying by November. I had what I can only describe as a mini nervous breakdown in my office.

Brooks, 33, called her fiance and told him they had to cancel the wedding because there was no way she was getting married without her best friends there. I had visions of the entire wedding party in mosquito net dresses, she says. She embarked on a 48-hour tailspin of planning three alternate weddings in other locations and tried to convince herself she was all right with losing the nearly $35,000 that canceling the Mexico wedding would mean. The venues in Cabo told her they werent giving any deposit refunds as there hasnt yet been a case of Zika in the region.

But after a few days of mediation and an attempt at return to logic, Brooks decided that she wasnt going to cancel the wedding. I realized that by November, no one knows where Zika could be, she says, thinking it might be affecting most of the U.S. by then. Her fears of Zikas spread werent unfounded: The CDC is currently reporting 691 travel-associated cases in the United States as of June 8.

Many couples are now faced with the same decision Brooks had to make. In 2015, Destination Weddings Travel Group found that 24 percent of couples chose destination weddings, and the top four destinations are Jamaica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Hawaii. The top emerging destinations are Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia, and Grenada. Of those eight locales, seven are in areas the CDC has now placed under alert for active Zika transmission. The CDC and many OBs advise pregnant women or anyone thinking of conceiving - i.e. a lot of engaged couples and wedding guests - against traveling to Zika-affected territories to avoid the risk of microcephaly, a birth defect where the brain and head develop smaller than normal. (There have been 1,326 confirmed cases of Zika-caused microcephaly in Brazil alone.) Its an unusual and unpleasant dilemma: Cancel your wedding and forfeit many thousands of dollars, or dont cancel and accept the absence of some of your closest friends, plus the risk of you or someone you love contracting a virus that has no cure.

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The wedding planning process is stressful enough. If someone were to get sick, god forbid, the guilt just wouldnt be worth it.

The choice to cancel might seem like the easy one - and when the news of Zika really started to break in February, there was a higher-than-average rate of cancellations. Jennifer Doncsecz is president of VIP Vacations, a travel agency that plans about 115 to 200 weddings a year, mostly in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean. This year, Doncsecz saw guests cancel in almost all 50 destination weddings she planned between March and June. In February we had three or four weddings with contracts in hand who backed away, she says. And that month, at the height of everything, we also had three weddings planned for this summer that canceled entirely.

Karrah Pieper, 27, and her fiance Zach, 33, who live in Austin, had just sent out their save-the-dates in February when they decided to cancel their plans for a November wedding in Puerto Rico. The wedding planning process is stressful enough as it is, Pieper says, and if someone were to get sick, god forbid, the guilt just wouldnt be worth it. Since they were set on a beach wedding, the couple switched their nuptials from an island in November to Vancouver in August, losing about a third of their guests due to the date and location change. Thanks to a good lawyer and a natural disaster clause in their Puerto Rico cancellation policy, they were able to get back their $2,250 lodging down payment. But other couples venue contracts arent so forgiving.

Just eight weeks out from her June wedding in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, Joanna Cella, 30, and her fiance Kevin made the tough call to cancel and plan a whole new wedding near their home in New York. We were like, OK, wait, Cella says, theres so little known about this virus. Theres no cure, theres no vaccination, theres nothing saying that we would be able to get help if one of us was infected. But their venue in Mexico, the Fairmont Mayakoba, initially refused to give back more than 16.7 percent of their deposit, and 13.8 percent in credit - but only to use in 2017 at that specific location. Cella points out that the whole point of the cancellation is that she and her husband wont be traveling to Mexico any time soon, rendering a credit useless. (Later, the Fairmount offered to issue a 30 percent refund of the deposit). She made paying for two weddings work, but it wasnt easy.

For most couples, abandoning a fully paid-for wedding is just not a realistic possibility. Of the six wedding planning professionals I spoke to, who collectively plan about 300 weddings a year, they report that theyve only had seven destination weddings in Zika-affected countries cancel between them (and three relocate or reschedule for next year).

Because Zika is also sexually transmitted, Brooke added condoms to her gift bags.

Brooke (who prefers to be identified by her first name only), 36, lives in New York City, and says calling off her spring wedding in Jamaica never really felt like an option. By the time Zika made the news, her wedding was only two months away. The resort was so wonderful to us in the planning, she says. It would have been devastating to them if we canceled. We were like, 'No, were not pulling our wedding. But the decision was fraught with the concern that their friends and family would be at risk in attending. Were in our mid-30s, so were at a really critical age for people planning families, Brooke says. After researching Zika transmission, she and her now-husband confirmed that their venue, the Round Hill Hotel and Villas in Montego Bay, was taking every precaution: There was no stagnant water on the property, they were spraying three times a week instead of one, and supplying mosquito nets to all the rooms. Because Zika is also sexually transmitted, Brooke even added condoms to her gift bags.

Precautions aside, though, she says the lead-up to the wedding was emotionally grueling, and they had to make peace with the fact that about 10 of their close friends decided not to come. Much of the anxiety, she says, stemmed from wading through speculative media reports. The CDCs inability to provide much definitive information about the virus has made it difficult to realistically evaluate risks. Despite having issued travel warnings since January, a link to microcephaly in Zika-infected women was only acknowledged by the CDC in April, and Zikas capacity for sexual transmission only began to be widely reported in early February - with the specifics on how long it can stay in the body uncertain. (The CDCs official recommendation now is that women wait eight weeks before unprotected sex, and men abstain for six months because the virus stays in semen longer.)

We didnt give too much thought to it because I wasnt pregnant then, but then we started hearing that it could stay in your system for up to six months, says Corrin Browne, 30, who married her husband Isaiah in Jamaica this April. Its become a bit of an issue now because we were planning on trying for kids in the next few months. So were putting that on hold until the fall, or until theres more conclusive information.

'We were going to use this wedding to start planning our family. Now were talking about storing some of my fiances semen before we go.

Jessica Lynn, who is 35 and lives in D.C., says the scariest part of moving forward with her August wedding in Puerto Rico has absolutely been how few answers about the virus are available. I dont think of myself as being particularly fear-motivated, she says, but we were going to use this wedding to start planning our family. Now were talking to my gynecologist about storing some of my fiances semen before we go. The decision didnt only affect her; a few weeks ago, a member of her bridal party told Lynn she was pregnant but still planning to attend. I didnt even know how I was supposed to feel about that, Lynn says. I dont want her to put herself in danger because of my wedding.

While couples are wrestling with the potential effects of keeping their wedding plans, their turmoil is not commonly reflected by destination wedding planners. Our wedding planner was just completely astonished that we care, Lynn says, the attitude there is that its overblown. Doncsecz, while acknowledging that Zika is a very real concern, thinks the media distorts how dire the situation really is. Those baby head pictures have freaked out society, she says. I think its important not to paint brush an entire country when we say Zika is there. There are how many cases versus how many people? Im just trying to be realistic.

Catalina Angulo, a wedding planner in Cartagena, Colombia, also says its been difficult for her to address her international brides concerns honestly without seeming biased. My friends here are getting pregnant and having babies, Angulo says, theyve all been perfect. This is not to downplay the serious effects of Zika, Angulo says, but to call into focus the fraction of people who get Zika versus those who dont. Colombia has been hit the second-hardest outside of Brazil, with 72,000 cases of Zika infection on last report - a huge number, but a very small one next to the countrys population of 48.6 million.

But statistical odds offer hollow comfort when applied to the health of you or your future children. I put myself in a situation to be at risk, says Brooke, reflecting on the ramifications of her wedding in Jamaica. I have to be OK with that. But Ill tell you, six months from our wedding date, Ill be thinking: Should we wait another four days [to have sex]? That uncertainty is the real lasting impact.

Follow Frances on Twitter.
Howard Stern went on a long rant about gun rights on Wednesday on his SiriusXM show in the wake of the killing of 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, during which he said the "sheep" need to arm themselves against the "wolves."

The vocal Second Amendment supporter spent a portion of all three of his shows this week railing against the 29-year-old perpetrator of the incident and the horror of the mass shooting. Stern made his point with a number or references to the controversial 2014 film American Sniper. In the movie, the lead character played by Bradley Cooper discusses the different types of people in the world, breaking them down into predatory wolves, sheep who don't believe evil exists in the world and sheepdogs, who are "blessed with the gift of aggression."

Melissa Etheridge Releases 'Pulse,' Moving Tribute to Orlando Victims: 'Love Will Always Win'

"I'm so upset about Orlando and what went down," he said. "But I can't believe these people who come out afterwards and their answer to Orlando is to take away guns from the public. It's f---ing mind-blowing to me." Stern posted a link to the Sniper "sheep" speech on his official site and referred to the analogy several times during Wednesday's conversation (which you can hear below).

"I hate the world that has been created," Stern said, admitting that he's anti-violence and could likely not even "hurt a fly" if confronted. "[But] there are such horrible monsters in our world."

Stern came out strongly against limiting Americans' access to guns, both pistols and semi-automatic rifles, saying, "Do you want a fighting chance or not?" The segment led to a number of gun-rights-supporting sites praising Stern's position, with such headlines as "Howard Stern Just Dropped a Lot of Truth About Gun Control" on the Federalist and "Howard Stern Dismantles Calls for Gun Control After Orlando Attack With Chilling 'Sheep' and 'Wolves' Analogy," on The Blaze.

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"I'm just a sheep; I'll admit it," he said, labeling most people as sheep, the military and police officers as sheepdogs, and those who would harm them as wolves, while pointing to the terror attack on 9/11 as another example of his Sniper analogy. "I'm gonna tell you about the most gun-free zone on the planet," he said, referring to the planes used as weapons during those terror attacks. "So what did the wolves do? They said, 'This is great. We'll just kill the sheep with boxcutters.' They went on the plane with boxcutters and all the sheep went, 'Baaaa.'... See, the wolves are always plotting. They'll use boxcutters. They'll use an airplane to fly it right into a building. They don't need AR-15s." A spokesperson for Stern declined further comment.

Surviving the Orlando Shooting: A Pulse Bartender Shares His Experience

Stern said he doesn't like or condone violence but knows that he's a sheep himself and that, unlike politicians who have security to protect them, the rest of us are "sitting duck[s]."

"I'm not for taking away people's rights," he concluded. "I think the answer doesn't lie in taking any kind of ability of the sheep to protect themselves from the wolves. I wish it was that simple."
By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) - A unit of HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA.L) said on Thursday it will pay $1.575 billion to end a 14-year-old shareholder class action lawsuit stemming from the Household International consumer finance business that the British bank bought in 2003.

HSBC Finance Corp expects to take a roughly $585 million pre-tax charge in the second quarter for the settlement, which requires court approval. It said it could have faced liability as high as $3.6 billion.

The accord averts a second trial in the litigation, which had been expected to begin last week in the U.S. District Court in Chicago before being put on hold.

"We are pleased to resolve this 14-year case that's based on events that took place before HSBC acquired Household," HSBC spokesman Rob Sherman said in a statement.

Michael Dowd, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In litigation that began in 2002, Household shareholders accused that company of inflating its share price by concealing its poor lending practices and loan quality.

The share price fell more than 50 percent from mid-2001 to October 2002, when Household agreed to pay $484 million to settle predatory lending claims by U.S. state regulators.

HSBC began defending against the shareholder claims after buying Household for roughly $14.2 billion.

In October 2013, the shareholders won a $2.46 billion judgment against HSBC, believed to be the largest in a U.S. securities class action that went to trial.

But in May 2015, the federal appeals court in Chicago threw out that award and ordered a new trial to determine whether "firm-specific, nonfraud factors" contributed to the drop in Household's share price.

HSBC's purchase of Household eventually soured, and led to tens of billions of dollars of writedowns for bad loans. The bank shut much of its U.S. consumer finance business in March 2009.

The case is Jaffe et al v Household International Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois, No. 02-05893.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Diane Craft and Dan Grebler)
Hulu continues its aggressive push in the kids programming arena, looking to gain ground on its competitors in the streaming space, Netflix and Amazon, who both have established a strong kids foothold. On the heels of Hulus deal with NBCU for the popular Curious George franchise, the streaming service has hammered out a pact with another of its co-owners for kids-oriented programming. Marking their biggest kids programming deal to date, Hulu and Disney-ABC Television Group have inked an exclusive licensing agreement that gives Hulu exclusive SVOD rights to top kids titles from Disney Channel, Disney Junior and Disney XD.

Under the agreement, Hulu will become the exclusive subscription video-on-demand home to a total of seven programs, including all past season episodes of the Disney Channels hit spy comedy K.C. Undercover starring Zendaya, as well as Disney XDs highly-rated animated series Gravity Falls and Star vs. The Forces of Evil. Hulu also acquires the exclusive SVOD rights to all episodes of former Disney Channel series Dog With A Blog and Austin & Ally.

Additionally, the agreement includes the exclusive SVOD rights to a catalog of programming from Disney Junior, including Sheriff Callies Wild West and Henry Hugglemonster. All will be available for streaming on Hulu later this month, and subsequent seasons will be available in their entirety after the last episode of each season airs.

As our biggest content licensing agreement with the Disney brand, this deal further demonstrates our commitment to offering popular, high-quality kids programming on Hulu, said Craig Erwich, SVP, Head of Content, Hulu. These new SVOD exclusive Disney titles mark yet another way Hulu is building an irresistible content destination for families.

In addition to full seasons of library programming for kids, over 20 Disney Channel Original Movies will become available to stream on Hulu for the first time ever. The new titles join Disney Juniors animated series Doc McStuffins and Bunnytown, already available on Hulu.

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BUDAPEST, June 16 (Reuters) - Foundations launched by the National Bank of Hungary have bought four properties in Hungary worth a combined 25.2 billion forints ($90.16 million), shifting funds from government debt, the head of their asset management group said.

"The goal of these investments is to produce returns for the foundations," Zoltan Fekete, chief executive of Pallas Athene Domus Optima told a news conference on Thursday.

The foundations bought three office blocks in Budapest and one in the eastern town of Debrecen. Fekete said the foundations planned to scale down their government bond holdings over the next one or two years. ($1 = 279.5000 forints) (Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; Editing by Louise Ireland)
four seasons restaurant nyc

Talk to restaurateur Julian Niccolini, and the way he tells it, it's almost as if it's the right time for him to take a break from the world of fine dining.

"People don't have as much fun anymore," he told me as we sat in a quiet corner at a table in his landmark restaurant, The Four Seasons Restaurant on 99 E. 52nd St. in Manhattan.

Well, what is "fun?"

For the Wall Streeters and CEOs, the fashion executives, publishers and political power players who've been dining at The Four Seasons since 1959, fun  if you're looking at the serene, cathedralesque dining room at lunch  seems like it could be a quiet, measured conversation about fiscal responsibility.

Maybe a very civilized discussion on fiduciary duty.

But that's not really what Niccolini means. An example; Once upon a time, in the 1980s, an unnamed Wall Street banker called the restaurant and said that while, sadly, he wouldn't be able to come for dinner, he would be sending some of his close lady friends.

"They ended up naked swimming in the pool," said Niccolini. "That was fun."

Fun, apparently, was also private performances from, say, Aretha Franklin and Elton John. It was various birthdays and corporate gatherings and engagement parties of the 0.01%. It was hosting presidents and celebrities and dignitaries. It was lunches with Charlie Rose and Zac Posen and Barry Diller (at his center table).

"It's a canteen for a lot of this town's power elite," Jason DeSena Trennert, CEO of Strategas Research Partners, told Business Insider. "The food was great, but the company was better. Aesthetically, it's one of the most interesting restaurants in the city, and it's evocative of a time when businesspeople weren't seen as bad guys."

But the fun is over, at least for a while. The exact date when Niccolini and his decadeslong business partner, Alex von Bidder, will open another iteration of their restaurant down the street is as of yet unknown. What we do know is what will happen to the space they once occupied.

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It's getting a full dining in New York City in the year 2016 treatment.

Off the wall

The Four Seasons Restaurant was made a landmark in 1989 by the City of New York for its glorious interior space. That, however, did not make it untouchable. The restaurant is located in the Seagram Building, which is owned by real-estate tycoon Aby Rosen.

And something like two years ago, he started showing signs that he was not happy with his arrangement with von Bidder and Niccolini. The first sign was that he took down "Le Tricorne," a Picasso wall hanging that had been in The Four Seasons for 55 years. Art experts told Rosen, a contemporary collector, that if it were taken down it might break.

picasso le tricorne four seasons

But it's gone now. Rosen had it taken down, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, its owner, gave it to the New-York Historical Society so it could hang next to John Audubon watercolors of geese, or maybe some dioramas.

After that, Rosen announced that he would raise Niccolini and von Bitter's rent from $20 per square foot to $105 per square foot.

There's reason to believe it just wasn't about the money, too. About a year later, he gave The New Yorker the impression that he wanted the clientele in the restaurant's two massive dining rooms to change. I say impression, but perhaps that's too gentle.

"You want to have the guy coming to The Four Seasons who has the ripped jeans and a T-shirt equally as much as you want the guy with the Tom Ford suit," Rosen said. "Because the guy with the jeans, I promise you, has a lot more money."

This was after he referred to himself in the third person during the interview.

The new kids

In keeping with his contemporary sensibilities, Rosen has hired Major Food Group, the hottest restaurant group in New York City, to take over his 587-seat dining experience. (The deal includes a separate restaurant  The Brasserie, the Wall Street power-breakfast spot  downstairs.)

Major Food Group is run by four New York City natives whose sensibilities have generated massive hits like Carbone and Dirty French, to name just two. Their restaurants are loud. You cannot get a reservation. And the staff does not know you  not if you're in the industry, not if you're a downtown kid, not if you're a Wall Streeter willing to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a private party. Maybe if you're Woody Allen.

Otherwise, no.

According to a prospectus that has been making its way around the New York City fine-dining community, Rosen plans to raise $30 million to revamp The Four Seasons and The Brasserie. Half of that will be used for construction. The restaurants are projected to generate over $52 million in revenue the first year.

Kanye West, Aby Rose

This, if you read the charts correctly, is contingent upon packing the place and on every diner walking away spending $150 to $180 on dinner in one of The Four Seasons' dining rooms. (The Brasserie is less ambitious.)

The biggest challenge I see [is] in late-night dining. Its a lot of seats to fill for two full turns," said Rocky Cirino, managing director at Altamarea Group, the company that owns Marea and other favorites of the Four Seasons crowd. "Additionally, the possibility that all staff would be at union wages (I believe its a union house) would make labor costs daunting, to say the least.

That said, if you decide to contribute to this crusade you become a "member," which is a status we're certain many in New York City would like to take up. It's all defined in the prospectus:

The members (investors) would receive 100% of the distributable cash until they receive an amount equal to 120% of their initial equity.

Once all members have received 120% of their initial equity, distributions will be made as follows: 40% to members, 60% to Ginger Ale LLC.

Members will have a 40% interest in 375 Park Food LLC.

This project will be managed by Major Management TCZ LLC. There will be a 5% management fee.

"We estimate total first year revenues, under a relatively conservative case scenario, to be over $50M and to generate an operating profit of $8M. In this scenario, investors will receive approximately 120% return on their original investment within 4 years, and an IRR of 19%."

Schadenfreude

Cirino is a gentleman; he doesn't talk much, and especially not about other people. What's more, two of his company's restaurants  Marea and The Four Seasons' neighbor, Vaucluse  will likely see their customers more often once The Four Seasons is closed for business for a while.

But others in his community are whispering that Major Food Group has taken on more than it can chew. It ostensibly plans to turn the two dining rooms in The Four Seasons, the Pool Room and the Grill Room, into two separate restaurants.

More from the prospectus:

1. "The Grill Room will be classic. It will pay homage to the historic food of The Four Seasons and of America through the years. Every element of the experience will be upgraded and improved, but the soul will be something familiar. There will be duck and there will be Dover sole, but there will also be a newly restored outlook on what this upscale restaurant can truly be."

2. "The Pool Room will be a fantastical adventure in fish and seafood. It will be innovative. It will be extravagant. It will aim to create the greatest dining experience in the world that is full of fun and that exhibits unparalleled levels of quality. From the beginning to end, this restaurant will be like no other."

According to Major Food Group's discussion of this in The New York Times, there will be a tasting menu, specially designed trolleys for food display, and tons of other budget-busting extras.

And so the industry is talking. Part of this is naturally upstart envy. But another part is the reality of the two different worlds colliding with this project. It's an uptown vs. downtown thing. Uptown, clients want the quiet  they want to be remembered, they want to be served. Downtown, they think, is noise. And so many of them have rallied around the ringmasters of their hushed circus.

"People went to The Four Seasons because they felt there was an unquestionable dedication to the clientele," said Alexandra V. Preate, CEO of CapitalHQ, a communications firm that straddles the intersection of Wall Street and conservative politics. "The staff could sense needs before they happen, and 'no' was not even a part of their vocabulary."

Time was

Four Seasons

There was a time when restaurants were extravagant affairs  when Wall Street was wilder with its wads of cash. Back then, at least I'm told, the parties were crazier, and no expense was spared on any lunch or dinner. Eating was an event.

"That's over," Niccolini told me.

Now, he says a lot of restaurants are doing too much of the same. And it's a staid same  a lukewarm version of the fun that was.

People always say that, but, of course, they're usually not talking about anything special. They're talking about an atmosphere that can be replicated in some other location, given the right people and the right time. Usually, though, they're not talking about the end of a place that's been around for 57 years. They're talking about a place that can be replaced.

Every now and then, you get an outlier.

NOW WATCH: Why this Instagram star withdrew $1.2 million in cash  then deposited it the next day





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(Updates to add link to Breakingviews story)

By Karen Pierog and Dave McKinney

CHICAGO, June 16 (Reuters) - Illinois' long-running budget impasse stung the state on Thursday in the U.S. municipal market where buyers of its $550 million bond issue demanded bigger yields over the market benchmark.

The pricing was "surprisingly soft," considering a strong rally in muni bonds on Thursday, said Greg Saulnier, a Municipal Market Data analyst. The results demonstrate that the market is increasing its penalty due to the state's worsening fiscal and political problems, leaving Illinois unable to take full advantage of the historically low borrowing rates.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch won the tax-exempt general obligation deal in competitive bidding, pricing bonds due in 2026 with a 5 percent coupon to yield 3.32 percent, which is 185 basis points over MMD's triple-A yield scale. The spread was 175 basis points ahead of the bond sale, according to MMD, a unit of Thomson Reuters.

It was also wider than the 154 basis-point spread in 10 years for Illinois' $480 million GO bond sale in January.

Illinois is poised to be the only U.S. state since at least the 1930s to end a fiscal year without a complete budget.

Its Republican governor and Democratic-controlled legislature have so far failed to reach a deal on fiscal 2016 or 2017 spending plans. That leaves unaddressed the growing structural budget deficit and huge $111 billion unfunded pension liability in the fifth-biggest U.S. state.

The bond issue itself was seen as a weapon in the political war to pressure Democrats to cave in to Governor Bruce Rauner's demands, while losing money for the cash-strapped state.

ILLINOIS SELLS INTO MARKET RALLY

Muni yields have been hitting new record lows on MMD's scale in recent days, driven by cash-heavy investors chasing low supply of debt.

Rauner's office said the true interest cost for the bonds, which carry maturities from 2017 to 2041, was 3.74 percent, down from 3.99 percent in the January sale, and the lowest ever for similar general obligation bonds issued by the state.

Story continues

"It's clear from today's bond sale that investors realize Illinois now has a governor that is trying to turn the state around and right its fiscal ship," Rauner spokeswoman Catherine Kelly said in a statement.

Some market participants thought Illinois' so-called credit spread should be even wider.

"It's odd to me," said Nicholos Venditti, a portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management. "Illinois has proven time and time again they can't get anything done."

Heading into the deal, Illinois' credit ratings, which were already the lowest among the states, were downgraded by Moody's Investor Service and Standard & Poor's.

The governor's office also revealed on Wednesday that the state lacks appropriations to actually spend all the proceeds earmarked mainly for road construction and mass transit projects due to the impasse.

State Treasurer Michael Frerichs, a first-term Democrat, predicted the bond issue could be a net money-loser for Illinois if the borrowed funds go unspent and must be invested short-term.

"We'll make far less in interest than we'll be paying in interest to the bondholders," Frerichs said in an interview. "I think we need to make these investments in infrastructure, but we're going about it in the wrong order. It seems backwards issuing the bonds and hoping they get an appropriation to spend them."

On Wednesday, Rauner administration officials warned of the imminent shutdown of transportation projects and the loss of 25,000 construction jobs without a budget deal.

Spokesmen for House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton, both Democrats, declined to speculate on the chances of either legislative chamber granting the Rauner administration the spending authority it needs to fully tap the bond issue.

(Editing by Daniel Bases and Matthew Lewis)
RADNOR, PA / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP reminds DeVry Education Group, Inc. (DV) ("DeVry" or the "Company") shareholders that a class action lawsuit has been filed against DeVry on behalf of purchasers of the Company's securities between February 4, 2011 and January 27, 2016, inclusive (the "Class Period").

Important Deadline Reminder: DeVry shareholders who purchased their securities during the Class Period may, no later than July 12, 2016, petition the Court to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class. For additional information please visit https://www.ktmc.com/new-cases/devry-education-group-inc#join.

DeVry provides educational services worldwide through a number of subsidiaries, including DeVry University, one of the largest degree-granting higher education systems in the United States.

The shareholder class action complaint alleges that during the Class Period DeVry and certain of its executive officers made a series of false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose to investors that: (i) 90% of DeVry University students from a specific year (e.g., graduates from 2011-2016) who were actively seeking employment did not in fact land or obtain new jobs in their field of study within six months of graduation; (ii) 90% of DeVry University students since 1975 who were actively seeking employment did not in fact land or obtain new jobs in their field of study within six months of graduation; (iii) one year after graduation, the average or median salary of DeVry University graduates with bachelor's degrees was not in fact 15% higher than the average or median salary of graduates with bachelor's degrees from all other colleges and universities; (iv) as a result, DeVry overstated its growth, revenue, and earnings potential by concealing the true employment prospects of DeVry University graduates to investors and potential students; and (v) as a result of the foregoing, the defendants' statements about DeVry's business, operations, and prospects were false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.

On January 27, 2016, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") filed suit against DeVry and DeVry University accusing them of deceptively advertising the benefits of obtaining a bachelor's degree at DeVry University.

Also on January 27, 2016, the U.S. Department of Education issued DeVry University a Notice of Intent to Limit its participation in programs authorized pursuant to Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, after finding that DeVry was in violation of federal law.

Following this news, shares of DeVry common stock declined $3.65 per share, or over 15%, to close on January 27, 2016 at $20.09 per share, on unusually heavy trading volume.

If you wish to discuss this action or have any questions concerning this notice or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check (Darren J. Check, Esq., D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq. or Adrienne O. Bell, Esq.) at (888) 299-7706 or (610) 667-7706, or via e-mail at info@ktmc.com.

Members of the class may, no later than July 12, 2016, petition the Court to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. In order to be appointed as a lead plaintiff, the Court must determine that the class member's claim is typical of the claims of other class members, and that the class member will adequately represent the class in the action. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff.

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check is a driving force behind corporate governance reform, and has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of institutional and individual investors from the United States and around the world. The firm represents investors, consumers and whistleblowers (private citizens who report fraudulent practices against the government and share in the recovery of government dollars). The complaint in this action was not filed by Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check. For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, or for additional information about participating in this action, please visit www.ktmc.com.

CONTACT:

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

Darren J. Check, Esq.

D. Seamus Kaskela, Esq.

Adrienne O. Bell, Esq.

280 King of Prussia Road

Radnor, PA 19087

(888) 299-7706

(610) 667-7706

SOURCE: Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP
MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has agreed to resume formal peace negotiations with Maoist-led rebels in Oslo next month, one of Duterte's senior advisers said on Thursday, after the talks stalled four years ago. The Philippines began talks with the communist National Democratic Front in 1986 to resolve one of the world's longest-running insurgencies, which has killed more than 40,000 and stunted growth in the Philippines over almost 50 years. Jesus Dureza, Duterte's peace adviser, said the agreement came after two days of informal talks with Europe-based exiled rebel leaders in Norway. "We will recommend the release of all political prisoners to Duterte once he assumes the presidency and both sides will work for an interim ceasefire to boost the formal resumption of peace talks in the third week of July in Oslo," Dureza told reporters. The tough-talking Duterte formally takes office on June 30. A former mayor of Davao City, he is the first president from the southern Philippines, where the rebellion has been fought, since the late 1960s. Dureza said the two sides were "very optimistic" the talks would succeed after Duterte agreed to appoint to his Cabinet two left-wing members supported by the rebels, with another two positions promised. There was no immediate comment from the communist rebels. Brokered by Norway, the peace talks stalled four years ago when outgoing President Benigno Aquino declined to free political prisoners, including members of the rebels' negotiating team who had been arrested. Renato Reyes, secretary-general of left-wing group Bayan (Nation), said his group hoped Duterte would approve the release of sick and elderly prisoners on humanitarian grounds. More than 500 political prisoners are being held, including 19 members of the rebels' negotiating team. Duterte promised during the presidential election campaign to end all insurgencies in the Philippines, including a more violent conflict with Islamist rebels that has killed more than 120,000 people and displaced 2 million over the past 47 years. Dureza said the resumption of peace talks would be formalized once Duterte took office. The two sides also agreed to adhere to all previous agreements and to discuss social and economic reforms, he said. (Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Paul Tait)
By Julia Fioretti

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Iran's state airline, which has just reached an agreement with Boeing Co (BA.N) to purchase new jetliners, can resume flights in the EU, the European Commission said on Thursday.

Iran is dangling the prospect of significant business for Western planemakers as it emerges from decades of sanctions.

While the European Commission, the EU's executive, said Iranair could resume flights, some of the carrier's aircraft would remain on the EU's safety blacklist.

"I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from Iranair back into European skies," said EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc. The Commission said the decision followed a visit to Iran by the EU executive in April.

The Commission also removed Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air, a major buyer of Airbus (AIR.PA) and Boeing (BA.N) jets, from its safety blacklist.

Iranair will be allowed to fly all of its planes in the EU except the Boeing 747-200s, Boeing 747SPs and Fokker 100s, the Commission said.

Iran needs an estimated 400 jets to renew its fleet and prepare for projected growth, according to Iranian and Western estimates.

Tehran said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with Boeing for the supply of jetliners, reopening the country's skies to new U.S. aircraft for the first time in decades.

The Iranian flag carrier also agreed in January to buy 118 jets worth $27 billion from Airbus and is discussing further orders with Boeing.

The decision to remove Lion Air from the EU blacklist could also potentially lead to the Indonesian carrier buying more planes, analysts have said.

Lion's five airlines operate a combined fleet of more than 200 aircraft, mostly Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s. The company, which plans a stock exchange listing possibly early next year, has around 500 more aircraft on order, and expects to take delivery of 40 aircraft this year.

The EU executive also removed Indonesia's Citilink, Batik Air, Air Madagascar and all Zambian airlines from its blacklist.

(This version of the story corrects ninth paragraph to show also discussing purchases with Boeing)

(Reporting by Julia Fioretti; Editing by Susan Fenton)
By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Iran's state airline, which has just reached an agreement with Boeing Co to purchase new jetliners, can resume flights in the EU, the European Commission said on Thursday. Iran is dangling the prospect of significant business for Western planemakers as it emerges from decades of sanctions. While the European Commission, the EU's executive, said Iranair could resume flights, some of the carrier's aircraft would remain on the EU's safety blacklist. "I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from Iranair back into European skies," said EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc. The Commission said the decision followed a visit to Iran by the EU executive in April. The Commission also removed Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air, a major buyer of Airbus and Boeing jets, from its safety blacklist. Iranair will be allowed to fly all of its planes in the EU except the Boeing 747-200s, Boeing 747SPs and Fokker 100s, the Commission said. Iran needs an estimated 400 jets to renew its fleet and prepare for projected growth, according to Iranian and Western estimates. Tehran said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with Boeing for the supply of jetliners, reopening the country's skies to new U.S. aircraft for the first time in decades. The Iranian flag carrier also agreed in January to buy 118 jets worth $27 billion from Airbus and is discussing further orders with Boeing. The decision to remove Lion Air from the EU blacklist could also potentially lead to the Indonesian carrier buying more planes, analysts have said. Lion's five airlines operate a combined fleet of more than 200 aircraft, mostly Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s. The company, which plans a stock exchange listing possibly early next year, has around 500 more aircraft on order, and expects to take delivery of 40 aircraft this year. The EU executive also removed Indonesia's Citilink, Batik Air, Air Madagascar and all Zambian airlines from its blacklist. (Story corrects ninth paragraph to show also discussing purchases with Boeing.) (Reporting by Julia Fioretti; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Former Ink Master contestant Tyler Nolan was arrested in Florida on Monday on gun and drug possession charges.

Nolan was stopped while driving by Cocoa Beach police on Monday. Upon approaching the car, the officers smelled marijuana, which prompted a search, per TMZ.

Upon searching the car, officers found two bags of marijuana, six pills of ecstasy, and less than a gram of cocaine. They also found three firearms, including a shotgun and 900 rounds of ammo.

Also Read: Spike Renews 'Ink Master' for Season 7, Adds Spin-off

Nolan claimed he had the stash of weapons because he was visiting shooting ranges in the area, TMZ reported, noting that he was charged with three felonies in connection with the incident and released Wednesday on bail.

Nolan appeared on Season 6 of the Spike reality series in 2015. He made it through to episode 13 out of 16 in the tattooing competition, but was eliminated after struggling to tattoo someone with darker skin.

On Nolans official website, he lists himself as a specialist in mostly Neo-Traditional, some realistic black and grey, many different forms of geometry tattoos and other various blackwork.

Also Read: 'Ink Master' Winner Scott Marshall Died From Heroin Overdose, Coroner Finds

In October of last year, Ink Master Season 4 winner Scott Marshall died of a heroin overdose in an Illinois hotel room.

Marshalls wife Johanna said that he spent the night in a hotel near his studio after calling to say he wasnt feeling well enough to drive home. Two police officers came to her home the next to inform her that her husband died in his sleep.

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The body of the 2-year-old boy snatched by an alligator at a Disney resort in Orlando has been recovered, authorities announced Wednesday.

The body of Lane Graves, who was visiting the resort with his family from Nebraska, was "completely intact" when it was found by a dive team Wednesday afternoon, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said at a press conference.

Read: Alligators Are Found Feasting on Dead Body in Florida Canal

"At about 1:45 today, members of the Sheriff's Office dive team located what is believed to be the remains of the deceased 2-year-old," Demings said. "At about 3:30 today, we recovered the remains from the water, and that body has now been turned over to the Medical Examiner's office."

Police and a Roman Catholic priest delivered the heartbreaking news to the boy's parents, Matt and Melissa Graves, who were visiting the resort with Lane and their 4-year-old daughter from Elkhorn, Nebraska.

"The family was distraught, but also I believe, somewhat relieved that we were able to find the body of their son with his body intact," Demings said.

"I am absolutely stunned and heartbroken to learn of his family's unspeakable loss," said Anna Shymankski, a friend of the father, in an email to the Orlando Sentinel. "Matt's family is the light of his life and his family's anguish is our own."

Little Lane was standing in six to 12 inches of water at the Seven Seas Lagoon at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa around 9 p.m. Tuesday when the 4- to 7-foot gator attacked him and dragged him into the water.

The reptile lunged in a matter of seconds, police said.

As the family grieved, questions arose about safety at Disney resort hotels surrounding the man-made lagoon, where gator sitings have been made in the past, according to local reports.

The water line is posted with 'No Swimming' signs, but there are no warnings about gators in the lagoon, the paper reported.

Story continues

Grand Floridian janitor Mike Hamilton said he was so worried about gators swimming close to the shore of the Seven Seas Lagoon, he told managers they should fence off the area, the paper reported Wednesday night.

Alfred Smith of Charleston, South Carolina, said he told a Grand Floridian employee Tuesday night about a gator he saw in the lagoon, the Sentinel said.

San Diego attorney David Hiden told the paper that he had to whisk his son to safety last year after an alligator approached the 8-year-old as he stood in calf-deep water at Disney's Coronado Springs.

"If I hadn't gone down there, in another two seconds my kid would have been killed," he said.

Disney officials say they monitor the resorts for alligators, but the sprawling amusement park and hotels, circled by marshes and canals, span more than 40 square miles.

"They're surrounded by (a) quintessential alligator habitat," conservationist and TV personality Jeff Corwin, who hosts "Ocean Mysteries," told the Sentinel. The show runs on ABC, which is owned by The Walt Disney Co.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, the park runs its own alligator abatement program, relying on private wranglers and staff to round up reptiles.

The paper quoted an unidentified employee as saying there is a problem with guests feeding the gators as if they were pets. Alligator experts say that is dangerous because the creatures then come to associate humans as sources of food.

Alligators have been spotted in the park itself, with a former Disney World raft operator telling the Sentinel that he once had to delay opening Tom Sawyer's Island because a family of gators had camped out on the raft.

A tourist posted this video of a gator she said she saw in a Walt Disney World parking lot:

Alligator casually walking over disney's parking lot pic.twitter.com/CNc1qz94cM  Marianna (@mary_r99) May 1, 2016

On Wednesday, the sheriff described how Matt Graves tried to save his little boy. "The father entered the water and tried to grab the child from the gator, but was not successful," he told reporters.

Dozens of officers from multiple rescue agencies swarmed the lake and used sonar technology to look for Lance after the family alerted a lifeguard about the attack.

Bill Wilson of Indiana said he watched from his hotel balcony and heard screams and splashing. "I thought someone got in a fight," he told the paper. "I looked over and here comes one of the lifeguards ... The mother was there and she was frantic, running up and down looking."

Wildlife workers have taken five alligators out of the lake to be euthanized and analyzed.

Read: Florida's Alligator Encounters Have Led to a Loss of Limbs, but Rarely Death

"Everyone here at the Walt Disney World Resort is devastated by this tragic accident. Our thoughts are with the family. We are helping the family and doing everything we can to assist law enforcement." Jacquee Wahler, vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts, said in a statement.

Watch: Gator Bites Off Man's Arm After Mental Breakdown Near Lake

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Intan Ladyana wants to start a business featuring her own brand's products.





16 Jun  Actress Intan Ladyana has expressed her wish to explore the business world, following the footsteps of other artistes that have products under their own branding.



However Intan Nurladyana Mohamad Yahaya has still not decided what business she would want to get herself into.



"Looking at all my fellow artiste friends who have their own ventures has made me think of plans to start my own one as well, but at this point I'm still not sure what I would like to do as I would not want to do the same thing as others," she was quoted as saying to Malaysian Digest.



As for her acting career, the "Banglo Berkunci" actress said that it has been almost a year since she last acted, as she wanted to rest and have routines that weren't allowed in her schedule before this.



In fact for this Ramadhan, Intan is planning to remain free and will only attend iftar and prayer events.



As for her love life, Intan is still keeping mum, but the 34-year-old did say that if she really is in a relationship with someone she won't be revealing his identity until they are ready to get married.



(Photo Source: Intan Ladyana Instagram)
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / In early June, Wall Street Journal published a highly-circulated article stating that the number of international students caught cheating in U.S. colleges and universities in the 2014-15 school year was 5.1 in 100, while the number of domestics students was 1 in 100. The article then went into a list of reasons why international students are more likely to cheat, cheating tactics and strategies, and why schools are turning a blind eye. However, these numbers are problematic, as WSJ touches on in their article, and this statistic is not representative of international students in general, which this article will explain shortly.

First, let us take a look at how this survey got its numbers. Over a dozen U.S. colleges and universities were involved in this survey. The survey's results are based on institution-reported rates of cheating. The reason the number of participating institutions is not higher is because many of the schools approached do not track cheating in such a way because it would not be reflective of those who cheat and get away with it, and the actual chore of collecting and interpreting this data is overwhelming. Why is this? According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, about 60% of all U.S. college and university students report having cheated at least once in the last academic year. This number includes both foreign and domestic students. This means schools cannot track actual rates of cheating because it is so rampant. It also means that while schools are catching international students cheating at higher rates than domestic students, the fact of the matter is who they catch does not reflect the rates of who actually cheats.

The second problem is that schools quantify cheating in different ways, a crucial difference in measurement that WSJ indicated was not taken into account in the cited survey. Some schools quantify cheating by the number of incidents, while other schools quantify by the number of students involved. Since many of the incidents of students getting caught included clusters of students all having the same wrong answer on a test raising a big, red flag, the number of incidents and the number of students involved yield vastly different rates of academic dishonesty.

Story continues

WSJ delved into the reasons as to why rates of cheating were so high amongst international students. High pressure to do well to keep their visa status, trouble with the English language, and misunderstanding of U.S. academic integrity were all on the list. Another factor indicated is that schools have been accepting more and more international students without taking into consideration the extra socialization these students need to fully integrate into the U.S. academic atmosphere and be successful. These students face high pressure to succeed in a new culture and in a non-native language and are targeted by entrepreneurs offering test-taking and custom paper writing services that have been discovered on college and university campuses across the country. It is also believed that the high rate of international students caught cheating means that since these students feel that everyone else is being academically dishonest anyway they might as well join in and ease the pressure. Meanwhile, WSJ reports that international students caught cheating do not get expelled because schools depend on the high tuition rates they pay to offset in-state tuition and decreased state subsidies.

While it is true that international students have kept colleges and universities in the U.S. financially healthy, it is not true that there is a culture of cheating among these students. It is true that international students are targeted by services offering to take tests, write papers, and even take on a student's entire course load - for an ample fee, of course. However, the vast majority of international students do not buy into these services, and could not afford them even if they wanted to. It is easier to catch cheating when a student who does not speak English very well turns in a beautifully written paper, or an impersonator shows up to take a student's test, however, the rates of who gets caught cheating does not accurately reflect the rates of all of those who cheat.

While WSJ interviewed professors and administrators of college and universities, they overlooked a group of professionals that works very closely with international students from all over the world: foreign credential evaluators. Foreign credential evaluators are international education experts who understand academic infrastructure, norms, and ethics around the world. Evaluators work closely with these students to evaluate their foreign education in terms of U.S. academic standards for the purposes of admission to undergraduate and graduate programs in the US, as well as employment and visa status.

Sheila Danzig, international education expert and Executive director of prominent credential evaluation agency TheDegreePeople do not agree that there is a culture of cheating among international students. In fact, she sees quite the opposite.

"The 5.1 in 100 ratio does not accurately reflect the reality of academic integrity in U.S. colleges and universities," explains Danzig. "International students tend to be incredibly honest and hardworking, and greatly appreciate the opportunity to earn a degree in the United States."

Sheila Danzig

sheila@thedegreepeople.com

954-445-0107

SOURCE: TheDegreePeople.Com via Submit Press Release 123
Port-au-Prince (AFP) - The international community voiced concern Thursday after Haiti's parliament allowed interim president Jocelerme Privert's term to lapse amid national political crisis.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on Haiti's National Assembly to "determine a viable arrangement for provisional governance that can ensure the completion of the electoral process," in a statement released by his spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.

Privert was appointed in February for a six-month term, filling in after former President Michel Martelly stepped down following contested elections.

The 120-day term ended Tuesday but the Haitian parliament was unable to convene and decide on a new provisional government plan.

That decision drew ire from Haiti's main foreign donors, including the United States, which paid $33 million to help organize the previous elections.

"We get to make our choice about how the US taxpayers' money is spent on elections in Haiti," said State Department Special Coordinator for Haiti Kenneth Merten, adding that the "US will have to examine its further support for another round of presidential elections in Haiti."

Meanwhile, Ban in his statement urged "all stakeholders to act responsibly in the interest of their country and people, including by refraining from any incitement or resort to violence."

Haiti's opposition refused to recognize Privert's presidency, accusing him of attempting to secure power illegally.

The lack of executive power is the latest political crisis plaguing the impoverished Caribbean country, whose government last week canceled the disputed first-round election results, setting a new election date for this October 9, with a second round to follow on January 8.
As Brexit fears mount, investors are looking for ways to safely put away their money. Many fear that banks will undergo a financial collapse if a Brexit takes shape. A leave from the EU invites uncertainty, and with that comes higher levels of volatility in the market, especially for the UK.

This has the potential to cause a ripple effect which will result in reduced amounts of liquidity for the global financial system. A Brexit stands to hit the bottom line of many UK and EU corporations rather quickly. Many speculate that banks will be among the first to get hurt by a Brexit, and it is possible that equity markets will panic; resulting in a huge asset sell-off which could trigger a global financial crisis.

Negative Yields

Investors are aware of this possibility, so theyve fled to government bonds in order to keep their money safe. A high demand for government bonds have caused the debt of some countries to go into negative territory on the yields front. These bonds are often thought of as the safest way to invest because they are backed by the confidence of the government. When folks are putting their money into bonds with negative yields, they are willing to invest that money, even though they expect to get back even less than the principal amount invested. They are willing to do this because little else looks safe right now.

Hedge Against Risk

If turmoil does ensue because of a Brexit, people will continue to flee towards safe investments, perhaps at an even higher rate than we see now. If such a thing happens, then gold stands to see higher levels of demand, resulting in investors pushing the price per ounce even higher than it already is. Gold has traditionally been thought of as being a truly valuable commodity, and that logic seems to be prevailing after five dismal years for the commodity. Take advantage of the trend by utilizing the power of these leveraged gold ETFs.

Story continues

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Paris (AFP) - A surge in support for Brexit has sent investors racing for financial shelter a week ahead of a referendum that could redraw the political map of Europe.

Many people were taken by surprise when a clutch of polls this month showed support for a British pullout taking the lead in the runup to the tightly fought June 23 vote, analysts said.

The polls triggered a rush to offset the risks of a possible British breakaway from the European Union, they said, with incalculable consequences for a project born out of a determination to forge lasting peace on the continent after two world wars.

Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday even raised the prospect of a Brexit vote eventually leading to the "disintegration" of the bloc, ending a decades-long effort to forge closer relations across Europe.

With no historic precedent, investors found it difficult to assess the risks, said Pascale Seivy, head of investment advisory services at Pictet in Paris, France.

Investors are trying to position themselves to profit in case Britons vote to remain in the EU while at the same time buying "massively" in instruments that will protect them against market declines in case Brexit prevails, Seivy said.

Some speculative funds have ordered their own exit polls on the day of the referendum so as to react before the official results.

- 'Inconceivable' -

"Just a few weeks ago, an exit was inconceivable for many investors," said Renaud Murail, manager at Barclays Bourse brokerage.

But after the latest British opinion polls, European stock markets had declined by seven-to-eight percent on average, Murail said.

"The economic stakes that should be at the centre of the debate in the United Kingdom have been swept away by purely emotional thinking," he said.

Investors had been relaxed about the impending referendum until this month when polls began to show significant gains for the Brexit camp, said Maxime Alimi, economist at AXA Investment Managers.

Story continues

"The readjustment has been fairly drastic," he said.

On Tuesday, investors for the first time ever accepted negative returns for the privilege of holding Germany's rock-solid benchmark 10-year government bonds, one of the safest investments.

The British pound swooned meanwhile as bookmakers put the chances of Britain leaving the EU at about 42 percent, a sharp rise from just a few weeks earlier.

"It is a classic phenomenon that involves avoiding any risky position," said Franck Dixmier, global director of bond management at Allianz GI.

- 'Harm has been done' -

In any case, Britain's decision to hold a vote on EU membership had in itself had broken a taboo, Dixmier warned. "The harm has been done."

Polls ahead of the British referendum have now become masters of market sentiment, said Greg Jones, managing director at Henderson Global Investors.

"As we come closer to the referendum vote, market reaction really depends on where the polls go with volatility likely rising on any prospect of a leave outcome," he said.

Markets are likely to be volatile throughout 2016, he said, as concern over a Chinese economic slowdown are overtaken by Brexit concerns and later the uncertainty prompted by US presidential elections.

Investors are avoiding risk across Europe, he said.

"People are also expecting a rally if the outcome to the referendum is to remain within the European Union," Jones said.

"I personally do not see that."

Rather, a British vote to remain the European Union is likely to mirror the reaction to the Conservative Party's election victory in Britain last year, he predicted.

"The effect of the general election outcome was that markets rose for half a day and then settled again. There was far less 'feel good' factor from the result than anticipated. Instead, there was the realisation there are a number of issues affecting markets at global level."
Fallujah (Iraq) (AFP) - Iraqi elite forces battled Islamic State group jihadists Thursday in their bastion of Fallujah, where an aid group says nearly four weeks of fighting have ensnared civilians in a humanitarian disaster.

Forces from the counter-terrorism service (CTS) pushed into the Nazzal neighbourhood, consolidating their grip on the southern part of the city and working their way up to the centre.

"Our troops are operating in Nazzal, where just today we were able to destroy 15 car bombs driven by Daesh (IS) terrorists," Raed Shaker Jawdat, Iraq's federal police chief, told AFP.

Iraqi forces launched an operation to retake Fallujah, which lies only 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Baghdad, last month.

The advance of pro-government forces has since been slow, with Fallujah's status as a emblematic IS stronghold and a tight siege by Iraqi forces ensuring holdout jihadists have few options other than fighting to the death.

In the southern neighbourhoods, once densely-populated and now completely empty of civilians, every home bore the pockmarks of the battle.

CTS units parked their Humvees on the sandy streets and organised the logistics of new positions they were setting up inside the city.

"With this heat, this dust and all the things we have to wear, sitting in the Humvees all the time, I just couldn't fast," said a fighter who gave his name as Ali, as he offloaded huge pots of beans and crates of fruit from a pick-up truck.

The holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan started nearly two weeks ago but very few among the government forces on the Fallujah battlefield went without at least water.

"Our advance is excellent so morale is high. We don't care what Daesh throws at us, we know we will win this battle," said Jamal Abdullah, a federal police captain.

Besides the crackle of sniper fire, the whizz of rockets and the occasional thunderous air strike, the days are paced by controlled explosions of the thousands of bombs IS laid across the city.

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- Relief drying up -

What has also slowed the advance of Iraqi troops is the presence of thousands of civilians in the city centre, most of them now concentrated in the northern neighbourhoods still firmly controlled by the jihadists.

They are facing the double danger of being used by IS as human shields and, in the case of young men in particular, of being detained by government forces on suspicion of collaborating with the jihadists.

Fallujah and the areas around it are Sunni Muslim while the paramilitary forces fighting alongside the government are dominated by Shiite militias, some of which are supported by Tehran.

Their involvement in the operation had raised fears the battle would see collective revenge against Sunni civilians and allegations of torture have mounted in recent days.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has vowed to investigate allegations of abuse.

For the families filling the displacement camps set up around Fallujah, basic supplies were also getting dangerously low, the Norwegian Refugee Council warned Thursday.

"Thousands fleeing the cross-fire after months of besiegement and near starvation deserve relief and care, but our relief supplies will soon be exhausted," NRC chief Jan Egeland said.

"Those who flee IS-controlled areas and manage to make it to safety will soon find out there is very little we can offer them: we are running out of food, drinking water and medical services," the NRC said.

The aid group said it can only offer survivors three litres (six pints) of water a day -- well under the 10 litres needed in temperatures nearing 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit).

According to the International Organization of Migration, at least 48,000 people have managed to escape since the offensive was launched more than three weeks ago.
Islamic militant group Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines is threatening to behead two more hostages, a Norwegian man and a Filipino woman, if it does not receive a ransom of 600 million pesos  almost $13 million.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports that the threat follows the brutal beheading of two Canadians, Robert Hall and John Ridsdel, after their government did not meet ransom demands. Hall, 68, was killed on Tuesday, and Ridsdel, 68, was killed on April 25. The two current captives, Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad and Filipina Maritess Flor, were kidnapped alongside the two murdered Canadians on Sept. 21, 2015 from a marina and resort on Samal Island in Davao del Norte province.

Founded in the 1990s with al-Qaeda funding, Abu Sayyaf  meaning bearer of the sword in Arabic  is a radical Islamic group based in the southern Philippines that has pledged allegiance to ISIS. It is notorious for kidnapping, and was responsible for a 2004 ferry bombing that killed 116 people.

We will upload a new video soon for our new ultimatum, Abu Raami, the Abu Sayyaf spokesperson, told the Inquirer. No ransom, another beheading.

The Philippines has a no-ransom policy when it comes to dealing with criminal groups, but outgoing President Benigno Aquino III said that private negotiators have been in touch with Abu Sayyaf for the Norwegians return. He has flown to Jolo Island to meet with military and strategize their safe return, Agence France-Presse reports. He has also reportedly considered imposing martial law on Sulu.

If we pay ransom, it would only worsen the problem and encourage others (to engage in kidnapping), he told local media.

All I can say is the demand has to be met, Sekkingstad told the Inquirer by phone on Wednesday morning. Otherwise, we will be executed.

President Aquino meanwhile apologized to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the two Canadian deaths on Monday, and briefed Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Tuesday.

According to regional security firm Pacific Strategies and Assessments, Abu Sayyaf currently has eight hostages.

[Inquirer]
By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday. Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognized genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf. The U.N. report, based on interviews with dozens of survivors, said the Islamist militants had been systematically rounding up Yazidis in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, seeking to "erase their identity" in a campaign that met the definition of the crime as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. "The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing," it said. The 40-page report, entitled "They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis", sets out a legal analysis of Islamic State's intent to wipe out the Kurdish-speaking group, whom the Sunni Muslim Arab militants view as infidels. The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. "The finding of genocide must trigger much more assertive action at the political level, including at the (U.N.) Security Council," Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the commission of inquiry, told a news briefing. "Almost two years since the attack on Mount Sinjar, nothing has been done to save those people," he said, referring to the heart of the Yazidi region in northern Iraq stormed by Islamic State in August 2014. Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn said it had "detailed information on places, violations and names of the perpetrators", and had begun sharing confidential testimony with some national authorities aiming to prosecute militant citizens. The independent commissioners urged major powers to rescue at least 3,200 women and children still held by Islamic State (IS or ISIS), mainly in Syria, and to refer the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution. Iraq and Syria also have a duty to prevent, punish, and prosecute genocide, having ratified the Convention, they said. Historical victims of genocide include Armenians in 1915, Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. "ROAD MAP FOR PROSECUTION" "ISIS made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide," said another investigator, Carla del Ponte. "Of course, we regard that as a road map for prosecution, for future prosecution. I hope that the Security Council will do it because it is time now to start to obtain justice for the victims," added del Ponte, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor. The five permanent members of Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - have agreed on the need to fight ISIS, "so it should be no problem at all to have a decision that a prosecution can be done," she said. Islamic State, which has proclaimed a theocratic caliphate - based on a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam - in areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, systematically killed, captured or enslaved thousands of Yazidis when it overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014. At least 30 mass graves have been uncovered, the report said, calling for further investigations. Islamic State has tried to erase the Yazidis' identity by forcing men to choose between conversion to Islam and death, raping girls as young as nine, selling women at slave markets, and drafting boys to fight, the U.N. report said. Yazidi women are treated as "chattel" at slave markets and some are sold back to their families for $10,000 to $40,000 after captivity and multiple rapes, according to the report. Militants have begun holding "online slave auctions", using the encrypted application Telegraph to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls, "with details of their age, marital status, current location and price"," it said. "No other religious group present in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq has been subjected to the destruction that the Yazidis have suffered," the report added. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Jerusalem (AFP) - Former Israeli defence minister Moshe Yaalon on Thursday declared his intention to run for prime minister, accusing the incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu of using scare tactics to stay in power.

Yaalon, forced out in May to allow Netanyahu to expand his coalition by bringing in a hardline nationalist party, has repeatedly criticised the government since leaving office.

"The current leadership must stop scaring citizens as if we are on the verge of a second Holocaust," Yaalon told a security conference in Herzliya, stressing threats were being exaggerated.

Israel "deserves a leadership that stops zigzagging and encouraging hate between different groups in Israeli society to remain in power at any price," he added.

In the remarks broadcast online, Yaalon said "my intent is to run for the leadership of Israel in the next elections" which are due to take place in 2019 at the latest.

Netanyahu dismissed the remarks of his former defence minister.

"These statements have no importance whatsoever," the prime minister told reporters.

"Security is a real issue and Israel cannot ignore threats."

There has been speculation that a new centre-right party could be formed, with polls showing that one including Yaalon could pose a challenge to the Likud party, to which he and Netanyahu belong.

When he resigned last month, Yaalon warned of a rising tide of extremists in the country as well as in Likud.

Yaalon, also a former armed forces chief, had repeatedly clashed with far-right members of the coalition before resigning.

One high-profile dispute saw Yaalon and top military brass strongly condemn a soldier who was caught on video shooting a Palestinian assailant in the head as he lay on the ground posing no apparent threat.

Far-right politicians and protesters defended the soldier, who is currently facing a military trial for manslaughter.

Yaalon was replaced as defence minister by Avigdor Lieberman, a hardliner who has spoken of harsh actions against Palestinian "terrorists".

Yaalon was seen as a counterweight to religious nationalists who hold key positions in Netanyahu's right-wing cabinet, though he has in the past voiced opposition to a Palestinian state.
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's new Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman is to visit the United States this weekend for talks with his US counterpart, his office said Thursday, after Washington raised concerns over the hardliner's appointment.

Lieberman's trip will be his first abroad since being sworn in on May 30, though he is familiar to US officials from an earlier stint as foreign minister.

It comes with the United States and Israel in the process of negotiating a new 10-year defence aid pact to replace the current one, which expires in 2018 and grants the Jewish state more than $3 billion per year.

Lieberman leaves on Saturday and is set to meet US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter on Monday.

He will also attend a ceremony in Dallas next Wednesday marking the development of US defence firm Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet, which Israel is purchasing, and tour a factory of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

Israel is to take delivery of its first two F-35s in December.

Following Lieberman's nomination, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner, in a rare comment on Israeli internal politics, said the Jewish state's new ruling coalition raised "legitimate questions" over Israel's commitment to a two-state solution in its conflict with the Palestinians.

Lieberman's appointment tilted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, already seen as among the most right wing in Israeli history, even further to the right.

He has in the past spoken of harsh measures against Palestinian "terrorists".

Both Netanyahu and Lieberman have however sought to allay concerns over the appointment, saying they are committed to peace and the two-state solution.

Netanyahu himself has also had a rocky relationship with US President Barack Obama's administration, but the two leaders have sought to move past their disagreements in recent months and negotiate the new defence deal.
Village Roadshow Pictures Asia and Chinas Heyi Pictures will co-produce and co-finance Jackie Chans sci-fi epic Bleeding Steel. The pic is expected to be the biggest budget Chinese film to shoot in Australia. Leo Zhang (Chrysanthemum to the Beast) writes and directs. The news was announced today at the Shanghai Film Festival.

Chan leads the all-star cast about a veteran special forces agent who protects a young woman with whom he feels a bond from a ruthless gang. The film will start shooting in July in Sydney. Chan is a real globalist when it comes to staging productions. Last year, he shot Kung Fu Yoga in Dubai.

We are thrilled to be working with Heyi Pictures on Bleeding Steel, said Ellen Eliasoph, President and CEO of Village Roadshow Pictures Asia. Given Village Roadshows deep roots in Australia, the films concept resonates strongly with us; and naturally we are thrilled to be a part of a Jackie Chan production.

Heyi Pictures is the film production company of Youku Tudou, the Chinese online video company, acquired by Jack Mas e-commerce titan Alibaba Group last year for $4.8 billion.

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Japan says it spotted a Chinese reconnaissance ship sailing through its territorial waters on Wednesday at around 3:30 am local time.

The Japan Times reports that the vessel was seen near Kuchinoerabu Island at the edge of the East China Sea, and authorities say it is Chinas second naval infiltration since World War II.

The purpose of Beijings intrusion remains unclear, the Times says. Japanese Defense Minister General Nakatani said Japanese defense forces warned off the Chinese ship, which departed around 5 a.m.

Less than a week ago, a Chinese naval frigate was also seen in waters off the Senkaku Islands. Known in Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands, they are also claimed by China and Taiwan.

China has long been claiming the Senkaku Islands, sending its patrol ships into the contiguous waters, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told the press Wednesday. The Chinese ship entered the territorial waters this time, but we are evaluating what this Chinese action means in the context of international law.

The incident comes against the background of Chinas increasingly aggressive claims to large parts of the South China Sea, where tensions have skyrocketed with both the U.S. and Southeast Asian countries over maritime borders.

[Japan Times]
The show must go on, according to The Tonight Show's Jimmy Fallon.

After he "pulled something" during his monologue, Fallon called for someone to "tag in" for him. Luckily for him, former host Jay Leno was on the night's guest lineup.

During his monologue, Leno wasted no time in taking down the presidential candidates. "The most popular baby names of 2016: Noah and Emma," Leno said. "Least popular baby names: Donald and Hillary."

Neil Young to Donald Trump: 'F-ck You'

"I've been enjoying Donald Trump's new reality show, The Amazing Racist," he continued, adding that Trump is now threatening to have the judge he spoke out against deported "back to Indiana."

Turning to Bernie Sanders, Leno joked: "Bernie Sanders is still upset because he says his fundraising dinners didn't raise as much money as Hillary Clinton's ... well, of course they didn't, nobody wants to eat dinner at 4 o'clock in the afternoon! How much cream of wheat can you eat?"

Orlando Shooting: Trump Sees Backlash Over 'Congrats' Tweet; Clinton Calls Attack an 'Act of Terror'

The comedy duo ended the monologue with a "The economy is so bad..." joke session.

Watch the full monologue below.

This article originally appeared on THR.com.
Jay Leno returned to The Tonight Show on Wednesday night, stealing the opening monologue from host Jimmy Fallon.

After Fallon said he mightve pulled something [in his leg], he tagged in Leno, who left nothing untouched regarding the 2016 election cycle.

Hillary Clinton says she is the most transparent candidate in modern history. How many can see right through her? Leno joked.

He didnt take it easy on Clintons opponent, either.

Ive been enjoying Donald Trumps new reality show, The Amazing Racist,' he said about the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. Trump is still refusing to take back what he said about the judge with the Mexican surname. In fact, Trump is now threatening to have the judge deported back to Indiana.

He continued, According to a political science professor, all of Donald Trumps speeches are given at a fifth grade level or below. And today Trump said the professor who did the study was doody head.'

He even had a few words for Bernie Sanders, mocking the Vermont senators age. Bernie says he is the most anti-fossil fuel of any of the candidates. Well, of course he is. Thats because hes the only candidate who is an actual fossil, Leno joked.

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In the aftermath of this weekend's shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, JetBlue said it will offer free seats to immediate family members and partners of victims on flights to and from Orlando. On Tuesday, Alaska Airline announced a similar initiative.

Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones, said JetBlues blog post about the program. The airline also declared its aid on Twitter, with #WeStandWithOrlando.

Alaska Airline said they "are broken-hearted by the horrific events that unfolded in Orlando."

Additionally, JetBlue announced a fee waiver for customers traveling to or from the Orlando area who want to make last-minute changes. The company also plans to make a charitable contribution to support the victims and their families, and Alaska Airlines has already specified that they will pledge $25,000 to the OneOrlando Fund.

To speak with JetBlue about booking or changing a ticket, please call 1-800-JETBLUE.

To speak with Alaska Airlines about booking a flight to or from Orlando, call 1-888-327-2755.

Melanie Lieberman is the Assistant Digital Editor at Travel + Leisure. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @melanietaryn.
British member of parliament Jo Cox has died after being shot and stabbed multiple times during a meeting with constituents Thursday, days before Britons are due to cast ballots in a contentious referendum on whether to remain in the European Union. Cox was a vocal supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union.

Before embarking on a career in politics, Cox was head of policy with the humanitarian group Oxfam, a major anti-poverty organization worldwide. After graduating from Cambridge in 1995, Cox also worked for Save the Children, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and as an advisor to the Freedom Fund, an anti-slavery group, reports the BBC.

The mother of two was married to Brendan Cox, also a humanitarian campaigner. On Thursday in the wake of the shooting, Brendan Cox posted a simple tweet including a photo of his wife with no accompanying text.

Cox isnt the only MP to have been attacked in recent years but Cox is the first to have been assassinated while in office in a generation.

In May 2010, British MP Stephen Timmslike Cox, a member of the Labour Partywas stabbed twice by 21-year-old Roshanara Choudhry, a woman who said she wanted to punish Timms for his support of the Iraq War. Choudhry said later she was inspired by videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen and Al-Qaeda member killed in a 2011 drone strike. Timms survived the attack and Choudhry was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison.

Before that, in January 2000, Liberal Democrat MP Nigel Jones was attacked with a samurai sword by a Robert Ashman, a mentally ill man who believed the government was persecuting him. Jones survived with only lacerations on his hands but his assistant, Andrew Pennington, was killed in the attack.

All three were attacked during constituent surgeries, regular clinics where lawmakers meet the people they represent to hear their concerns in person. After the Timms stabbing, Harriet Harman, then acting leader of the Labour Party, suggested more should be done to protect MPs during such meetings.

Story continues

One of the great strengths of the British political system is the every day accessibility of MPs to their constituents but we cant have a situation where MPs are at risk, she said. Parliament needs to consider how best to ensure MPs can carry out their responsibilities safely.

Cox, 41, died Thursday afternoon after being shot and stabbed multiple times. A 52-year-old man whose name has not been confirmed by authorities has been arrested in connection with the attack.

Campaigning around so-called Brexit referendum has been suspended in the wake of the attack.
Jo Cox, a Labour party member of the British Parliament, is dead after being shot and stabbed multiple times during a visit to her constituency in West Yorkshire.

Labour MP Jo Cox has died after being shot and stabbedhttp://trib.al/97KxA6i

The Guardian reported witnesses seeing Cox involved in an altercation between two men before being airlifted by helicopter to a nearby hospital. Police are investigating whether the suspect, named locally as Tommy Mair, shouted "Britain First" before firing at the politician. Another man was reportedly injured in the attack.

Britain First is a nationalist group that calls itself a "patriotic political party and street defense organization."

U Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party David Cameron responded to the news on Twitter, calling Cox a "committed and caring MP."

The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.

Police arrested a 52-year-old man in the area who might be linked to the attack, CNN reported. "At 12:53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition," a police statement said.

It isn't the first time someone from Cox's party has been attacked: In 2010, Labour MP Stephen Timms was stabbed while in London.

Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn expressed his sadness for Cox on Twitter Thursday.

"Utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox," Corbyn wrote. "The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time."

Utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox. The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time.

Cox was voted to represent Batley and Spen in Yorkshire in May 2015. She supported the U.K. remaining in the European Union  a referendum going up for a vote next week, CNN reported. Her last tweet from Friday stated, "Immigration is a legitimate concern, but it's not a good reason to leave the EU."

Story continues

Immigration is a legitimate concern, but it's not a good reason to leave the EU @yorkshirepost #Remain #StrongerIn http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/jo-cox-brexit-is-no-answer-to-real-concerns-on-immigration-1-7956822#ixzz4BA42bFd8http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/jo-cox-brexit-is-no-answer-to-real-concerns-on-immigration-1-7956822 ...

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people," her husband said in a statement. "She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't ave a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."

Here's the statement from Jo Cox's husbandpic.twitter.com/6Aoa1avpVN https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClFuDHzXEAExW4R.jpg:large

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British Member of Parliament Jo Cox was killed in her constituency of Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire Thursday afternoon. According to eyewitness accounts, suspect Thomas Mair yelled "Britain First!"  the name of a far-right political party  as he repeatedly shot and stabbed her. Britain First has condemned the attack in a video on Facebook.

The 41-year-old mother of two was reportedly leaving her weekly open "office hours," where constituents were free to stop by and discuss their concerns.

In the wake of Cox's death  and the potential political motivation for her apparent assassination  here is a look at where the MP stood on the big issues of her time:

Cox was one of the more progressive MPs of the U.K.'s left-wing Labour Party. Before becoming a politician, she was an Oxfam policy analyst and advisor to Sarah Brown, the wife of then-Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

She fiercely advocated for the British government's acceptance of 3,000 Syrian child refugees. And she encouraged her constituents to vote against the "Brexit"  the upcoming referendum on whether or not the country should remain in the European Union.

"I believe that the patriotic choice is to vote for Britain to remain inside the EU where we are stronger, safer and better off than we would be on our own," she wrote on May 26 in her monthly columns for local newspapers Batley News and the Spenborough Guardian.

"Remaining gives us far more stability and security. We benefit from a stronger economy," she continued. "Three million British jobs are linked to our trade with EU countries. We benefit from investment of 24 billion a year and families benefit from lower prices. The Confederation of British Industry says being in the EU is worth 3,000 a year for every family, a return of almost ten to one on what we pay in."

She's also been a vocal critic of the ruling Conservative Party's efforts to reduce funding of and dismantle the National Health Service, which provides free health care to everyone. The Conservative Party has facilitated piecemeal privatization of the country's health care.

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Cox appeared in Parliament on June 8 to express her outrage at the subsequent reduction in the quality of healthcare her constituency has suffered.

"Staff morale is rock bottom and there have been serious staff shortages  patients have suffered from long waiting times and inadequate care," she said during her address. "Staff numbers and the morale and well-being of staff is inextricably linked to patient experience and clinical outcomes. If you get the former right, the latter will follow."

"It must get fixed and making sure it get[s] fixed is my number one priority," she added.

In a similar vein, this week, she supported the Macmillan Cancer Support mobile information center's visit to Batley and Spen, available to those who might otherwise have limited resources or knowledge of cancer.

"This is a great initiative by Macmillan and I am very pleased to support the important and valuable work they do," Cox said in a statement on the initiative released Monday. "I was delighted to meet up with the team when they came to Batley and Spen and to see so many local people popping in for information and advice."

On Thursday afternoon local time, her husband simply tweeted a photo of her, which, as of this writing, has received more than 14,000 likes and 8,500 retweets.

June 16, 2016, 1:53 p.m. Eastern: This story has been updated.
London (AFP) - Jo Cox, who was killed in her constituency on Thursday, was considered to be a rising parliamentary star.

The 41-year-old, who leaves behind a husband and two young children, represented the area she grew up in and had the plight of refugees close to her heart.

Before standing for parliament, Cox had been the Oxfam aid agency's policy chief and her killing ends what looked to be a promising political career.

Weapons, including a firearm, were recovered from the scene of her killing.

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron led tributes, describing her as a "bright star, no doubt about it".

On Twitter, Cox described herself simply as: "Mum. Proud Yorkshire Lass. Labour MP for Batley and Spen. Boat dweller. Mountain climber. Former aid worker."

She was due to celebrate her 42nd birthday next Wednesday.

Her husband Brendan Cox was an adviser to prime minister Gordon Brown and they lived with children Lejla and Cuillin on a converted barge on the River Thames in London.

- 'Our country's loss' -

Cox, who was the member of parliament representing the constituency of Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire, northern England, herself hailed from Batley, a textile town with a large South Asian Muslim population.

Her father Gordon worked in a toothpaste factory and her mother Jean was a school secretary.

She graduated in 1995 from the University of Cambridge, where she first got interested in politics.

She went on to help launch the pro-European campaign organisation Britain in Europe, and spent two years with European Parliament member Glenys Kinnock in Brussels.

She then spent a decade working for Oxfam in New York, Brussels and war zones as the head of policy and of humanitarian campaigning.

Cox was also the national chair of Labour Women's Network for four years and worked with Brown's wife Sarah on galvanising international action to stop babies dying during pregnancy and childbirth.

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In a tribute, Gordon Brown said his memory would be "forever scarred" by her killing.

"Our hearts will always be hurt at our country's loss," he said in a statement.

"Whenever you talked to her, the compassion in her eyes and the commitment in her soul shone through.

"She went to some of the most dangerous places in the world. The last place she should have been in danger was in her home town."

- Concern for Syrian refugees -

Cox also worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation before standing for parliament in the May 2015 general election.

In her maiden speech in parliament last year she said was proud of the ethnic diversity in her constituency.

"Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir," she told MPs.

"While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us."

Cox co-chaired the recently-formed cross-party parliamentary group on Syria.

She abstained in last year's contentious vote on allowing British military action in Syria, insisting a more wide-ranging attempt at a solution to the conflict was needed.

The MP was among the 36 of Labour's 232 lawmakers who nominated veteran socialist Jeremy Corbyn to get on the ballot paper in last year's Labour leadership contest.

He won by a landslide but she personally voted for Liz Kendall, the most centrist of the candidates on offer, who finished fourth and last.

Like the vast majority of MPs in the left-of-centre party, she was campaigning for Britain to stay in the European Union in the June 23 referendum.

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it everyday of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people," her husband wrote.

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now: one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her."
Amber Heard and Johnny Depps restraining order hearing that was set for Friday has been postponed, ET can confirm.

The hearing has not been rescheduled, and no reason was given for the postponement. ET has reached out to both Heard and Depps lawyers. However, Heards rep tells ET that the actress will be in court on Friday.

According to TMZ, Depps lawyers requested that the hearing be postponed so that the estranged couple can settle. Sources close to Depp reportedly say the two are discussing a mutual agreement to both stay away from one another, and also an agreement on property settlement and spousal support. Heard previously asked for $50,000 a month in spousal support.

WATCH: Amber Heards Monthly Expenses Revealed in Court Docs

However, on her end, Heard does not want to settle the domestic violence case, TMZ also reports. Heard is reportedly still ready and willing to go to court on Friday, and take the stand.

Though on Monday, before the postponement, Depps lawyer, Laura Wasser, filed a motion with the court to prevent Heards witnesses from testifying. In court documents obtained by ET, Wasser says Heards counsel declared that four or five witnesses would be called, but claims that Heards lawyers did not timely or otherwise file and serve a non-party witness list.

Wasser also claims in the documents that the actress and the witnesses she refers to in her [Domestic Violence Restraining Order] Request all conveniently made themselves unavailable to be deposed ahead of the planned June 17 hearing.

The latest legal move comes after Heards lawyer filed a declaration withdrawing the actress request for temporary spousal support earlier this week, claiming the initial move was being misinterpreted.

Its being used against me to distract and divert the public away from the very serious real issue of domestic violence, Heard, 30, claims in court documents obtained by ET. In light of the coordinated false and negative media campaign falsely depicting my attempts to attain a CLETS Domestic Violence Restraining Order as being financially motivated, I am hereby withdrawing the requestfor spousal support.

Story continues

WATCH: Amber Heards Friend Recounts the Alleged Abuse That Led to Him Calling 911 on Johnny Depp

Heard was granted a temporary restraining order against Depp on May 27, after alleging that Depp was both emotionally and physically abusive towards her throughout their relationship. The 53-year-old actor has not directly responded to the allegations, though in previous court documents, Wasser claimed that Heard is attempting to secure a premature financial resolution by alleging abuse.

Heard kept her head down amid all the legal back and forth when she stepped out at an office building in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Splash News

Watch the video below for a timeline of Heard and Depps troubled relationship, divorce, and domestic abuse allegations.

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Chicago (AFP) - Texas has lost its bid to keep Syrian refugees out, after a federal judge dimissed the state's lawsuit over resettlements from the wartorn Middle Eastern country.

US District Court Judge David Godbey ruled Wednesday that the state failed to make "a plausible claim for relief" in its lawsuit against the federal government and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a charity that aids refugees.

"I am disappointed with the court's determination that Texas cannot hold the federal government accountable," state Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a written statement.

Texas officials argue that they should be consulted by the federal government before refugees are relocated there, and that the state should be provided with specific information about individual refugees.

But the judge ruled that existing US law does not support the state's petition, a ruling that was cheered by the plaintiffs.

"The court is unequivocal in validating the lawfulness of the refugee resettlement program," said Jennifer Sime, senior vice president of the IRC's US Programs.

The non-profit group said Syrians are the most vetted of the refugees it settles in Texas. A number of intelligence agencies are involved in background checks, and only those with the most well-founded cases ultimately qualify for resettlement.

"There's absolutely no reason to assume that any of the refugees coming into the US pose any risk whatsoever," Donna Duvin, executive director of the IRC in Dallas, told AFP in an interview.

She said 13 children and 13 adults from Syria have so far been resettled in the Dallas area.

"People who are registering as refugees are leaving their homes because they are fleeing persecution and violence," Duvin said.

"They are seeking a haven and a safe new home."

After last November's Paris attacks, Texas was one of numerous US states saying they did not want Syrian refugees resettled within their borders.

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State officials said after the ruling that they are considering their next moves.

"Just today, the CIA director warned Congress that ISIS may use refugee programs to smuggle in terrorists, so it is critical that our state remains vigilant in ensuring the safety of Texans," Bryan Black, a spokesperson for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, told AFP in an emailed statement Thursday.

He was referring to Capitol Hill testimony in which CIA Director John Brennan warned that ISIS "is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel."
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge narrowed but refused to dismiss a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc programmer's malicious prosecution lawsuit against FBI agents in connection with his two criminal convictions, both since reversed, for stealing computer code.

Wednesday's decision by U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty in Newark, New Jersey adds to a convoluted seven-year odyssey for Sergey Aleynikov, beginning with his first arrest in July 2009.

Prosecutors accused Aleynikov of having stolen computer code from Goldman, as he prepared to join a Chicago high frequency trading startup.

In his 32-page decision, McNulty dismissed claims over the first arrest, saying the FBI agents reasonably believed they had cause, though a federal appeals court later found otherwise and in February 2012 voided Aleynikov's first conviction.

McNulty also declined to rule on similar claims arising from Aleynikov's August 2012 rearrest, at least until a New York state appeals court decides whether last July's voiding of Aleynikov's second conviction was proper.

Aleynikov said the FBI at the time should have known of problems with the state case, but McNulty said: "It is too early to say whether its resolution in Aleynikov's favor will stick."

The judge also said Aleynikov, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, can sue the agents for allegedly seizing his passports and personal property illegally, but also put that part of the case on hold.

Aleynikov spent 11 months in prison on his first jury conviction before the federal appeals court voided it, saying prosecutors misapplied federal laws on corporate espionage.

In a surprise move, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. later charged Aleynikov with state crimes based on the same alleged misconduct.

Another jury convicted Aleynikov in May 2015, only to have the trial judge overturn that verdict two months later, saying prosecutors did not prove Aleynikov violated the law under which he was charged. Vance is appealing that ruling.

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"We are confident that once the Manhattan district attorney's appeal is decided, we will be permitted to move forward with our very significant claims against the FBI agents," Kevin Marino, Aleynikov's lawyer, said in an interview.

The U.S. Department of Justice, representing FBI agents Michael McSwain and Eugene Casey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Aleynikov has racked up millions of dollars of legal bills. His lawsuit against the FBI agents seeks compensatory and punitive damages, among other remedies.

The case is Aleynikov v. McSwain et al, U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey, No. 15-01170.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Andrew Hay)
A federal judge in Los Angeles has ruled that Paramount Pictures was not the producer of the upcoming film Same Kind Of Different As Me and did not violate its contract with the American Federation of Musicians when the film was scored overseas with nonunion musicians.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit the union filed against Paramount in its ongoing battle to stem the flow of outsourced music in American films, many of which are now being scored, as this one was, by musicians in Slovakia. On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee granted Paramounts motion for summary judgment dismissing the unions breach of contract claim.

The film, an adaptation of the memoir by Denver Moore, Ron Hall, and Lynn Vincent, originally had an April 29, 2016 release date, but in March the studio pushed it back to February 2, 2017. Renee Zellweger, John Voight and Greg Kinnear star.

Paramount, which put up 40% of the films budget, is signed to the unions contract, which requires producers to use AFM musicians when scoring films shot in the U.S. The judge, however, ruled that the definition of producer is so vague in Article 3 of the AFMs contract that Paramounts role in the making of the film did not fit the definition.

The AFM argued that it has long understood a studio is the producer of a film under Article 3 if it financed at least 25% of the production costs of the motion picture. The judge, however, ruled that this 25% threshold appears nowhere in Article 3, and that the union offered no evidence of past practices by the parties that demonstrate that they interpreted Article 3 in this way during the course of their decades-long relationship.

In ruling against the AFM, the judge also noted it was not Paramount, but Skodam Films, the movies production company, that had entered into contracts with vendors and negotiated deals with other unions whose members were involved in the films production including the DGA and SAG-AFTRA.

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Comparing the day-to-day activities of Skodam Films and Paramount, the judge ruled, Paramounts involvement in the making or shooting  during principal photography  of the motion picture pales in comparison to Skodam Films exhaustive work.

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In Bill Cosby's latest attempt to get his sexual assault case dismissed, a Pennsylvania judge has scheduled a hearing for July 7, according to court documents.



Judge Steven T. O'Neill also ordered prosecutors to file a response to Cosby's arguments that the case should be thrown out because at his preliminary hearing last month, his accuser, Andrea Constand, was not present, which would have allowed Cosby with "an opportunity to confront and cross-examine" her, according to court papers.



Instead, a detective read Constand's statements she gave authorities in January 2005.



 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.



This is the latest in Cosby's many efforts to get a criminal sexual assault case against him dropped.



A judge ruled in May that Cosby will stand trial for the alleged 2004 drugging and sexual assault of Constand, a former Temple University employee.



Cosby denies her allegations (as well as similar ones from more than 50 women) and says the sexual contact was consensual. But Constand, who is gay and was in a relationship with a woman at the time, says it was not.



O'Neill also scheduled a September 6 pre-trial conference for the case, according to court documents.
Houston-based technology, engineering, procurement and construction company KBR, Inc. KBR secured a Bankable Feasibility Study (BFS) contract by ECOWAS Refinery Liberia Limited. The contract calls for the development of a 100kbbl/day refinery in Buchanan, Liberia.

Per the agreement, KBR will conduct refinery configuration development, a market study and an Environmental, Social and Health Impact Assessment study for the project.

The task will be performed over a period of five months. Revenues associated with the task, which were kept under wraps, will be booked into second-quarter 2016 backlog for the KBR's Technology & Consulting business segment.

KBR will design the optimal refinery configuration and build the financial model, which will incorporate capital and operational cost estimates. China Huanqiu Contracting and Engineering Corporation will provide support to KBR on the project, and is advising on the tailoring of the product for the potential future phase of Chinese investments.

Just last week, KBR secured a contract extension with Qatar's Expressway Program, wherein it will continue its role as a program management consultant for the project for the next three years. The extension, awarded by Qatar's Public Works Authority's (Ashghal) program management contractor, is valued at over $185 million.

KBR INC Price

KBR INC Price | KBR INC Quote

KBRs Technology & Consulting business has been performing strongly, with revenues soaring 34.7% year over year in the last reported quarter. Solid sales of increased proprietary equipment and top line contribution from previously completed acquisitions have been adding to the momentum of the unit.

Such deals will propel growth in KBRs business and will boost its operations significantly.

KBR currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the broader industrial products sector include Eaton Corporation plc ETN, Powell Industries, Inc. POWL and ESCO Technologies Inc. ESE, each holding a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

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By Steve Bittenbender

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (Reuters) - A Kentucky appeals court on Wednesday granted Republican Governor Matt Bevin a temporary injunction against a Lexington abortion clinic his administration said was not properly licensed.

In a 3-0 ruling, the Kentucky Court of Appeals overturned a March decision from a lower court judge that denied the governor an injunction against EMW Women's Clinic.

In Wednesday's order, the judges said the state's Cabinet for Health and Family Services had the right to regulate how abortions were performed and how clinics were licensed.

Bevin said in a statement: "Today marks an important victory for the rule of law in Kentucky. We are pleased by the Court's recognition that an unlicensed abortion clinic is prohibited from performing abortions."

Scott White, an attorney for the clinic, said in an interview it would appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

A decision on whether the clinic will stop operations will likely take place on Wednesday, he added. If the clinic closes, White said there would only be one clinic in the state that could perform abortions.

Bevin ran on an anti-abortion platform before his election last year and signed an informed consent law in February that requires women to consult with a doctor before having an abortion.

State attorneys argued the clinic did not perform any services aside from abortions and as such required a specific type of license. White said however, that the clinic was, in essence, a physician's office and as such did not need approval from the state health agency.

(Reporting by Steve Bittenbender; Editing by Curtis Skinner and Peter Cooney)
Nairobi (AFP) - A Kenyan court on Thursday threw out a bid to outlaw rectal examinations on people suspected to be gay, a practice condemned by rights campaigners as "abhorrent".

The case was brought by two men who challenged police use of rectal inspections after undergoing the procedure when being investigated for homosexuality, which is illegal in Kenya.

Being gay can carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years in the East African country, although prosecutions are rare.

"There was no other way evidence could have been obtained to ascertain that they are gay without carrying out anal analysis," Judge Anyara Emukule said in a ruling at the High Court in the port city of Mombasa.

The men were expected to appeal the decision.

International rights group Amnesty International condemned the ruling, saying it was "shocking in its disregard for international human rights obligations".

"Forcible anal examinations of men suspected of same-sex relationships is abhorrent, and violates the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment under international law," said the group's East Africa director Muthoni Wanyeki.

"It is also absurd as the government has no business proving or disproving consensual homosexual activity. It's a violation of the right to privacy."

Homophobia is on the rise in Africa, and taking an anti-gay position while espousing evangelical Christian values is a major vote winner in many countries on the continent.

Gay rights activists have warned of rising intolerance in Kenya, including attacks on homosexuals and alleged cases of lesbians being raped to "cure" them.

Human Rights Watch wrote in a recent report that discrimination against homosexuals in Kenya "remains a major problem", and that the authorities' "response to mob attacks and other forms of anti-gay violence has been limited".
Copenhagen (AFP) - US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday described the killing of British MP Jo Cox, just days before Britain votes on its EU membership, as an assault on democracy.

"I join you in expressing my deep sorrow that a young parliamentarian, who obviously was a young woman with an enormous talent, has been killed in the conduct of her duties with her constituency," Kerry said in Copenhagen.

"It is an assault on everybody who cares about and has faith in democracy," he added.
Orphan Black star Kevin Hanchard has booked a supporting role opposite Tim Roth and Christina Hendricks in Sky Atlantics miniseries Tin Star. The crime drama takes place in a remote mountain town filled with migrant oil workers. At the heart of it is a police chief forced to confront a rising tide of crime, in so doing becoming a victim of an unspeakable act of violence. The aftershock of that event leads the police chief on a self-destructive path, culminating in the appearance of a ruthless alter ego. Hanchard will play Father Gregoire. Hanchard currently plays the lead role of Detective Art Bell on BBC Americas Orphan Black, and he recently recurred on FXs The Strain, SyFys The Expanse, and DirecTVs Rogue. Blanchard is repped by AMI Artist Management and The Green Room.

Janeane Garofalo (Wet Hot American Summer) has booked a recurring role on TNT and Channel 4s Foreign Bodies. Created by actor-writer Tom Basden, the comedic drama centers on a group of young adults venturing across China, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The series is scheduled to launch on E4 in early 2017, followed later in the year by its U.S. debut on TNT. Garofalo will play Sam, a seasoned traveler who, after 20 years working in tourism and visiting exotic places, has very much had her fill. Cynical, streetwise and permanently unimpressed, Sam is a counterpoint to the excitable, wide-eyed young travelers she meets, and shes quick to dispel them of their romantic and idiotic assumptions about the world and the value of travel.

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Warner Bros.

In acting, as in life, commitment counts for a lot and few actors understand this as well as Dwayne Johnson. Just by virtue of being Dwayne Johnson  a hulking, comically handsome mountain of muscle  hes never going to be able to play roles open to a lot of other actors. Dress him up as a nebbish and hell still look like The Rock underneath it all. But as anyone whos followed Johnsons career as hes transitioned from wrestling to acting knows, Johnson not only has the charisma to match his size but a willingness to give each character his all. He could get by just showing up, but Johnsons not one for just showing up.

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Take Central Intelligence, Johnsons latest, an action comedy co-starring Kevin Hart. The film opens in a flashback to 1996 and finds Johnson, his face CGId on to someone elses body, dancing naked in the shower to En Vogue as he plays the obese teenager Robbie Weirdicht. (Say it out loud.) Hes then humiliated by a bunch of bullies who throw him in the middle of the gym in front of the entire school, whove assembled to heap praise on Calvin Joyner (Kevin Hart), a homecoming king, star athlete, master actor, and all-around BMOC. The effects make the scene play a bit like a nightmare descent into the uncanny valley, but the agony on Johnsons face is real. He conveys the humiliation of a kid whos never had it easy experiencing a moment that suggests his life is set to get harder still. And he conveys the gratitude he feels when Joyner, a kid from the opposite end of the popularity spectrum, loans him his lettermans jacket so he can cover himself.

Flash forward 20 years: Joyners now an accountant grinding away in a small office in an anonymous building. Hes happily married to his high-school sweetheart Maggie (Danielle Nicolet), but happiness eludes him elsewhere, and with his 20th high-school reunion looming, hes started to wonder whats become of the life he imagined for himself. Enter, or re-enter, Robbie Weirdicht, now calling himself Bob Stone. Hes traded fat for muscles and hes extremely happy to see Calvin. (True, well soon find hes working a hidden agenda, but the enthusiasm isnt faked.) Meeting for drinks at a bar in their Maryland hometown, Bob shows up wearing a unicorn shirt and rocking a fanny pack. A lovely waitress cant keep her hands off him and he wows the bar by beating up some tough guys looking for a fight, but hed rather explain his shirt to Calvin  hes really into corns  and catch up while geeking out to 90s songs.



Thats Central Intelligences best, and most poignant joke: That despite growing up to look like Dwayne Johnson, Bob is still just a dorky kid inside. (Other action stars would wink to let the audience know that theyre much cooler than this sort of character but that doesnt seem to bother Johnson.) That remains true even after Calvin gets drawn into the dangerous world where Bob lives after he helps his old classmate hack into an auction site dealing in state secrets. Yet when the CIA, led by the no-nonsense Agent Pamela Harris (Amy Ryan), shows up looking for Bob and calling him a traitor, Calvins not sure who to believe.

Co-written by The Mindy Projects Ike Barinholtz, his writing partner David Stassen, and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball, Were the Millers), Central Intelligence plays a bit like a cross between Spy and Romy and Michelles High School Reunion, mixing loud, busy action scenes with moments of buddy comedy between Johnson and Hart. Theres nothing especially groundbreaking here. The action is cartoony and mostly bloodless, which feels right, and the jokes are more competent than inspired. But Hart and Johnson are an inspired and charming pairing. Just seeing them standing next to each other makes for a natural site gag and they play off each other nicely, with Hart dialing back the volume a bit to play straight man to Johnson without sacrificing any laughs in the process.

Sincerity helps, too. Though theres nothing particularly complex about the way it handles the subject, Central Intelligence never forgets that, for all the rapid-fire quips and flying bullets, its a movie about bullying and the way childhood trauma can stretch deep into adulthood. Throw in some surprise cameos  including one that had the audience I saw this with gasping in delight  and it all adds up to the sort of breezy, undemanding comedy that fits nicely into the summer months, and plays beautifully in endless cable repeats. It commits to its silliness but, following Johnsons lead, it takes its characters, silliness and all, seriously, worrying about Bobs feelings and Calvins early-onset mid-life crisis. In other words, it commits, and that makes a difference.
If you invite a Kardashian, they will come.

Such was the case on Tuesday night with the launch of the U.S. flagship of London's House of CB in West Hollywood. And who better to fete the store opening of the brand synonymous with figure-hugging body-con dresses than the queen of curves herself, Khloe Kardashian.

Read More: Kim Kardashian Finally Lands a U.S. 'GQ' Cover

Ahead of Khloe's arrival, fans crammed into the newly opened Melrose boutique, rubbing shoulders amid racks of plunging dresses and form-fitting skirts, tables laden with glasses of pink champagne and tiers of custom pink-and-white cake-pops and cookies (though this was hardly a dessert-eating crowd). Others waited dutifully outside to be granted entrance until the crowd dissipated, as eager photographers and paparazzi spilled into the street.

A Keeping Up With the Kardashians camera crew heralded the reality star's arrival, capturing her entrance in the brand's svelte Martinique frock in tangerine, which longtime stylist Monica Rose paired with nude pumps. Khloe then proceeded to a rose-bedecked step-and-repeat for photos with brand founder Conna Walker.

Read More: Rag & Bone's David Neville Exits Company

Greer Grammar, Morgan Stewart and Charlotte McKinney also turned up to fete the label, which Walker founded in 2010 as an online business at age 17. Since then, the brand has become a staple amongst some of the most famous bodies in Hollywood, from J. Lo to Gigi.

And Khloe herself is no stranger to retail on Melrose; in 2013, Dash - the RTW boutique she co-founded with her equally famous sisters - made its debut in 2012 on the tony shopping stretch, a stone's throw from the new House of CB location.

@houseofcb founder @connawalker with @khloekardashian last night for our launch party. Khloe is wearing the Martinique dress and Conna's dress will be released soon.

A photo posted by House Of CB (@houseofcb) on Jun 15, 2016 at 11:31am PDT
Your exciting summer travel plans are being ruined by a not-so-little thing called rent. All your souvenir buying and delicacy food eating will be seriously brought down by that monthly payment to your landlord. But what can you do about it? You'll only be gone three months, and you need your apartment once you're back.

Traveling isn't the only reason to sublease your apartment. Whether you're touring Europe, moving to a new city for work or simply planning to get a new place before your lease is up, finding a temporary subtenant is an effective way to reduce the cost of living for an otherwise empty space or avoid paying a penalty for breaking a lease early.

A sublease is an agreement between a tenant and another individual, known as the subtenant, to temporarily occupy a space or part of one. Sublet apartments and houses are particularly common in college towns, where students scatter across the globe each summer for travel, study opportunities and internships, while others attending classes and working on campus in the summer need a place to stay.

[See: The 20 Most Desirable Places to Live in the U.S.]

If you sublet an apartment or house, know the responsibility you take on: By renting out the place you rent, you're taking on the role of a landlord, while still being liable for costs to your own landlord if something goes wrong.

It's also imperative to follow local subleasing laws to maintain a positive relationship with your landlord. Like most other real estate dealings, sublet laws vary by state, and they often defer to the wording in the lease you signed.

"Usually on a residential lease it just basically says there shall be no subleasing or assignment, period," says Perry A. Phillips, a commercial real estate attorney who also works with residential landlords in Marietta, Georgia. "And sometimes it's just silent on it."

When in doubt, talk to your landlord about your intentions, and follow his or her preferred procedure to ensure you're not only in the right legally but that you maintain an amiable relationship. No landlord would be pleased to find out about a secret subtenant when it comes time to repair a faucet or lock.

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Following proper procedure to stay in good standing with your landlord is only half the battle. You also need to find a trustworthy subtenant who will pay rent in a timely manner and respect the space, the neighbors and the rest of the property. Here are six things you can do to successfully sublet your home.

Check your lease. Before you even think about putting an ad on Craigslist, read through your lease to know the extent of your landlord's policy on subleasing. He or she could require notification, approval of the subtenant or outright refuse sublets.

Subleasing could be prohibited because of the type of ownership or rent. Homeowners associations or rent-controlled apartment buildings often don't allow subleases because of resident approval regulations, explains Christopher O. Stanton, an attorney specializing in landlord-tenant issues at the law firm of Deming, Parker, Hoffman, Campbell & Daly in Atlanta.

"You find [prohibitions on subleasing] a lot in condos or HOA-protected communities, where every tenant has to be vetted by the controlling board of the community," Stanton says.

[See: The 20 Best Affordable Places to Live in the U.S.]

Check state laws. When a lease doesn't specify a policy on leasing, defer to state law, though "It's almost always addressed," says James Newell, an attorney in Boulder, Colorado.

Statutes on subleasing vary from state to state and can give more power to either the landlord or tenant, depending on the language of the law. While some states like New York require the landlord's permission to sublet an apartment, Maryland and other states dictate a landlord must provide just cause for refusing a subtenant.

Other states have a noted lack of rules on the matter. Stanton says Georgia has no laws on subleasing, making any landlord rules on subleasing "a matter of contract."

Talk to your landlord. Regardless of what your lease or state law requires, you should always communicate with your landlord when you intend to sublease your apartment.

Property owners are particular about what they will allow in homes they lease to tenants, so just like any painting or home improvements you want to add, tacking on or replacing a tenant isn't going to go over well as a surprise.

"That is very likely going to result in some problems, just because of the almost universality of the provisions in leases that require the tenant get approval of the landlord," Newell says.

Check out the subtenant. The most important thing to remember about subleasing your space is that you remain responsible for the home, even if you're no longer living there. If your subtenant stops paying the rent, you still owe it to the landlord. Don't think a sublease gets you off the hook completely.

"If your subtenant damages things, the landlord is going to look to you and the subtenant," Stanton says.

Act like a landlord yourself and conduct a credit check, ask for referrals and require proof of employment. You want to be sure the sublessee will respect your home and hold up his or her end of the bargain when it comes to rent. You can also require a security deposit or first and last month's rent prior to the subtenant moving in, to reduce your costs if payment becomes an issue.

Get everything in writing. As an additional measure, act like a landlord again and have the individual sign a formal sublease agreement before handing over the keys. Your landlord may have a preferred set of forms for a sublease agreement, but you can also find free sample and customizable forms online at sites like Rocket Lawyer.

Even if the subtenant is a close friend or family member, you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario, which would be legal action for rent nonpayment. Stanton explains a signed contract will hold up far better than an oral agreement and handshake that each party remembers differently.

"What could you show them other than you standing up and swearing under oath, saying, 'This is what it is,'" Stanton says.

To further protect your own security deposit with the landlord, take detailed photos of your apartment and any of your belongings that will remain in the space prior to the subtenant moving in. If damage occurs during the sublease, you have evidence to support your reason for taking the money out of the subtenant's security deposit.

[See: The 20 Best Places to Live in the U.S. for Quality of Life.]

Hold up your end of the bargain. Regardless of who's living in your home and who your landlord is, the most important thing you can do is maintain your responsibility to the property -- because you're still on the lease.

"There are times when subtenants have paid their landlord -- the tenant -- but then the tenant doesn't pay the landlord," Phillips says.

If you've established that the subtenant will pay you directly, be sure you continue to make on-time payments to your landlord. If the landlord has agreed to take payments from the subtenant, confirm that the landlord is able to reach you if there is a problem with the new resident.

Subleasing isn't a relief of responsibility but the acceptance of a whole new set of responsibilities as a temporary landlord. Few things could ruin your summer travel plans like your sublet suddenly skipping town. "The landlord can still go against you" Stanton notes. "It'll not only be on your credit; it'll be on the public record."
South Korea said Thursday it would resume salvage operations on the Sewol ferry next week, but underlined the enormous challenges posed by raising the vessel that sank in 2014 with massive loss of life.

The Sewol was carrying 476 people when it went down off the southwestern island of Jindo, leaving 304 -- mostly school children -- dead in one of the country's worst maritime disasters.

Nine bodies still unaccounted for are believed to remain trapped inside the sunken ship, and raising it intact was a key demand of the victims' families.

The 6,825-tonne ferry lies more than 40 metres (130 feet) below the surface and the process of actually lifting it off the seabed began on Sunday -- only to be postponed a day later due to adverse weather conditions.

The bow was raised about five meters but part of the deck was damaged by underwater wires in the rough conditions.

"The operations will resume around June 24 when the currents slow," the ministry said in a statement.

The salvage effort is expected to cost around $72 million and is being led by a Chinese consortium.

The initial schedule envisaged bringing the ferry to the surface by late July, but the ministry said Thursday that the more likely timeline was now August or even later -- depending on conditions during the July monsoon season.

"The Sewol salvage project is a work against nature, as it is being staged in an area known for strong currents," said Kim Hyun-Tae, a senior maritime ministry official, told reporters.

The effort to raise the vessel in one piece, without dismantling it first, was "unprecedented," Kim said.

Investigations into the Sewol disaster concluded it was largely a man-made tragedy -- the cumulative result of an illegal redesign, an overloaded cargo bay, inexperienced crew and a questionable relationship between the ship operators and state regulators.

Captain Lee Jun-Seok was sentenced to life in prison for "murder through wilful negligence" and sentences ranging from two to 12 years were handed down to 14 other crew members.
South Korean swim star Park Tae-Hwan launched an appeal against his Rio Olympics ban on Thursday as officials refused to lift the suspension, which was imposed for doping.

Park's legal team said they would ask the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to immediately start an arbitration process after the Korean Olympic Committee rejected the swimmer's plea.

"And if the KOC fails to respond to a decision by the CAS, we would file a lawsuit in South Korean court," Park's lawyers said in a statement.

The multiple Olympic medallist completed an 18-month drug suspension in April after testing positive for an anabolic steroid in out-of-competition controls before the 2014 Asian Games.

But he remains barred from competing in Rio de Janeiro under a KOC rule which prohibits athletes from representing South Korea for three years after the expiration of any doping ban.

"We've decided not to amend the protocol," Han Jong-Hee told reporters earlier, following a meeting with fellow members of the KOC board of directors.

"The spirit of this protocol is to make sure that national athletes be armed with high morality.

"Doping runs against the spirit of fair play and it must be sternly dealt with, especially for the sake of educating young athletes," Han said.

Park has argued that the KOC regulation is unfair and he pre-emptively filed an appeal with the CAS back in April.

The KOC said it would inform the Lausanne-based court of its decision and would respond to any subsequent mediation efforts.

Park has repeatedly begged for a chance to compete in what would be his third, and probably last, Olympics -- at one point getting down on his hands and knees during a press conference.

The 26-year-old was once the poster-boy of South Korean swimming -- courted by advertisers and idolised by fans.

He won 400m freestyle gold and 200m freestyle silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and two silver medals at the 2012 London Olympics, as well as 400m world titles in 2007 and 2011.

On his competitive return to the pool last month, he easily won the 100m, 200m, 400m and 1,500m freestyle events at the 88th Dong-A meet, which doubles as a national trial.

His positive doping test was only revealed in January last year, and was initially blamed by Park's management team on the incompetence of a doctor at the hospital where the swimmer was receiving treatment.
The dystopian future society of Equals is a peaceful place, because everyones emotions are suppressed at birth. So what happens when someone starts to feel again? Its called switched-on syndrome, or SOS, and its what Silas (Nicholas Hoult) describes in this clip from Drake Doremus new sci-fi film (premiering exclusively on DirecTV and in theaters July 15). His friend Nia (Kristen Stewart) plays it cool, but she is also experiencing an awakening  and its only a matter of time before these two beautiful people figure out what to do with all those pent-up emotions. Watch our exclusive clip above.

Related: TIFF 2015: Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult Heat Up the Chilly Sci-Fi Romance Equals

Equals, distributed by A24 (the studio behind last years sci-fi sleeper hit Ex Machina), premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Early reviews have frequently compared the movie to genre classics Gattaca, Logans Run, and THX 1138. In addition to Stewart and Hoult, the films cast of photogenic future citizens includes up-and-coming actresses Bel Powley (Diary of a Teenage Girl) and Kate Lyn Sheil (Queen of Earth).
Shares of The Kroger Co. KR gained about 2.3% in morning trading Thursday after the retail grocery giant posted an impressive first quarter earnings report. Despite tough market conditions, Kroger was able to beat earnings expectations and post its 50th straight quarter of same-store sales growth.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2016, Kroger reported earnings of 70 cents, which beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by a penny and gained 12.9% year-over-year. The grocery chain saw revenues of $3.4604 billion, which came in just short of our estimated $3.4663 billion, but did grow 4.7% compared to the prior-year quarter.

The company now expects its full year earnings to come in at the mid to low end of its previously announced range of $2.19 per share to $2.28 per share. Excluding fuel, Kroger expects same-store sales to grow by 2.5% to 3.5%.

KROGER CO Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth)

KROGER CO Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) | KROGER CO Quote

Krogers successful earnings report comes as a surprise for the Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) ranked stock. Based on the companys latest results, the ranking may move in the coming weeks.

Kroger has been a bastion of growth over the years, even in the face of tough retail conditions like we have seen this year. For investors, this poses a very important question. Is Krogers growth consistent with the rest of the industry, or should we stay away from grocery stocks for now?

Big Names, Mixed Signals

Kroger is the second largest grocery retailer behind only Wal-Mart WMT. The industry leader currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) ranking and is showing great earnings estimate revision activity over the past month.

In that time frame, we have seen six positive revisions against just one negative revision for Wal-Marts current-quarter earnings. Furthermore, we have seen 12 positive revisions against zero negative revisions for the companys full-year earnings.

On the other hand, one of the more recognizable names in the domestic grocery industry, Whole Foods Market WFM is not seeing very positive estimate activity. In the past 60 days, Whole Foods has seen 11 negative revisions for its current-quarter and full-year earnings. We have not seen any positive revisions for the company recently.

Story continues

Even still, Wal-Marts earnings are only expected to grow by 1.17% this year, which falls behind the pace set by Kroger, and also falls short of Whole Foods expected earnings growth of 2.5%.

Industry Outlook

Taking a step back, the supermarket industry is showing some good signs right now. The segment falls into the top 27% of the Zacks Industry Rank, and several large brands hold solid Zacks ranks at the moment. Interestingly enough, many of these top brands are international ones.

For example, Jeronimo Martins JRONY currently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). This retail and wholesale food distributor is based in Portugal and has operations in Poland and Columbia. Another Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) stock right now is Tesco TSCDY. This U.K.-based chain is one of the largest retailers in the world and operates across Europe and Asia.

The Dutch retailer Koninklijke Ahold N.V AHONY, commonly known as just Ahold, also has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) rank. Ahold is also performing well in our Style Scores system and currently holds an A grade in the weighted average VGM category.

Finally, the top ranked company in the industry right now is Delhaize Group DEG, a Belgium-based company with operations throughout Europe and in the U.S. The companys Americas division operates the Food Lion and Hannaford brands. Delhaize currently has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

Bottom Line

With a strong position in the Zacks Industry Rank and a number of companies showing solid metrics, the grocery industry looks solid right now. This may come as surprise to some, as uncertainty surrounding global economic conditions has plagued many other retail and consumer sectors.

Nevertheless, Kroger showed us that grocers can still make money in these current market conditions. As always, investors will want to stick to the companies with impressive Zacks metrics and solid earnings data.

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Birmingham (United Kingdom) (AFP) - Petra Kvitova, the two-time Wimbledon champion who has been hoping to build her grass court momentum for a third tilt at the oldest Grand Slam title, instead became the latest big name to lose at the rain-hit Birmingham WTA tournament on Thursday.

Moving gingerly on the lush surface, Kvitova subsided to a 6-4, 4-6, 6-3 second round loss to Jelena Ostapenko, the world number 38.

Erasing a 0-2 deficit in the decider visibly encouraged the 19-year-old Latvian, who pressed harder, hit flatter, and often played the big points better.

It was difficult to put the pressure on her, said Kvitova, who played with her right thigh strapped.

When she dropped serve she became more dangerous. And I wasnt moving very well today.

At the beginning (of the grass court season) it is really difficult for the body. I dont know that I did anything wrong. But at least I played two matches here, and I hope to get more at Eastbourne (next week).

Neither player was helped by a slightly late start and a 40-minute interruption in the middle of the match, both caused by incessant showers which have blighted the tournament for four days.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it was the younger player who proved more resilient in dealing with it all.

The most crucial moments came immediately after Kvitova had broken serve to level at a set all, and then surged into a 2-0 lead in the decider.

She followed it with a poor game, failing to land her first serve frequently enough and then playing an even more disappointingly in the seventh game, delivering a double fault and dropping her serve to love.

She earned a break back point in the following game but was denied by a brilliant forehand from Ostapenko and after that the match ended swiftly.

Id beaten her before, said Ostapenko, referring to a victory on hard courts in Doha in the first week of the year.

So I thought I could do it again.

She next plays Madison Keys, the top 20 American for a place in the semi-finals.

Story continues

Kvitova was followed to the exit door by Caroline Wozniacki, the former world number one, was who beaten 6-4, 6-7 (5/7), 6-2 by Yanina Wickmayer, ranked down at 49 but a former finalist in Birmingham.

Wozniacki has also been struggling with injuries in recent weeks, and had moments when she appeared concerned not to aggravate them in a match that was interrupted three times by the weather.

Two other seeds, Angelique Kerber, the Australian Open champion, and Carla Suarez Navarro were also struggling when rain ended play early for the fourth day in a row.

Kvitovas and Wozniackis exits followed those on earlier days of Agnieszka Radwanska, the top seed, of Belinda Bencic, the youngest world top ten player, and Karolina Pliskova, the eighth-seeded Czech who won the title on the Nottingham grass last week.
We have updated a research report on L-3 Communications Holdings, Inc. LLL on Jun 14, 2016. The companys endeavor in transforming its business portfolio to defense electronics, communications and ISR markets is partly being offset by its over dependence on government orders and budget volatility in the U.S.

L-3 COMM HLDGS Price and Consensus

L-3 COMM HLDGS Price and Consensus | L-3 COMM HLDGS Quote

Business Transformation



L-3 Communications is gradually transforming its business portfolio to bring more focus to defense electronics, communications and ISR markets where it has leading positions.



To that effect, the company completed the sale of its National Security Solutions (NSS) division to CACI International CACI for $550 million in cash earlier this year. It had also offloaded Klein Associates, a small side scan sonar business, earlier. Late last year, L-3 Communications acquired a Nashville-based company  ForceX, Inc.  that specializes in ISR mission-management software and geospatial application technology. The acquired entity, renamed L-3 ForceX, was merged with L-3s Integrated Sensor Systems (ISS) unit within the Electronic Systems business segment. It expects the acquired business to add $30 million to sales in 2016.



International Focus



A steady flow of foreign military sales contracts will help counter the volatile defense budget impact. L-3 Communications international and commercial sales represented about 30.3% of its consolidated net sales in 2015 compared with 29% in 2014. The company has expanded its international sales by more than 30% since 2011. Although the company expects international sales growth to stall in 2016, it expects growth to resume after next year.



Shareholders Reward



L-3 Communications strong balance sheet provides financial flexibility in matters of incremental dividends, ongoing share repurchases and earnings accretive acquisitions. Free cash flow at the end of the first quarter of 2016 was $84 million compared with $73 million a year ago. The company expects to generate free cash flow of $825 million this year.



A commitment to deliver value to its shareholders will serve L-3 Communications well over the long haul. In the first quarter, the company repurchased $198 million of its stock and paid $58 million in dividends, returning in aggregate almost $256 million in cash to shareholders (compared with $158 million in the year-ago quarter).



Risks



A large percentage of L-3 Communications business is generated from the U.S. government, which represented about 70% of total 2015 sales. Yet, sales from the U.S. government declined 2% year over year in 2015. The company expects sales from the U.S. government, including the DoD, to be down 2% organically in 2016. The final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan this year will hurt sales by about $135 million.



Although the company is expanding its international presence, the strong dollar will act as a hindrance to non-U.S. growth. The company expects international sales to decline about 15% in 2016 from 2015 levels.



Zacks Rank



L-3 Communications currently holds a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



A couple of other well-ranked stocks in the broader aerospace and defense space include Leidos Holdings, Inc. LDOS and Engility Holdings, Inc. EGL, both with a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



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jack dorsey

If someone sat you down in a room, blinds drawn, and whispered an acquisition pitch in your ear, would you take it? No? Then you and Jack Dorsey have something in common.

In a new Vanity Fair piece, writer Nick Bilton describes a meeting between Larry Page, former Google CEO, and Jack Dorsey, Square CEO and former and current CEO of Twitter. Here's how the  admittedly very creepy  meeting went down:

In 2011, when Google was working on Google Plus, Larry Page, its C.E.O. at the time, invited Twitter co-founder and current C.E.O. Jack Dorsey to the colorful Google campus to discuss a deal. Dorsey showed up and was escorted into a large conference room where, after a few minutes, Page emerged only to draw the blinds, sit eerily close to Dorsey, and whisper his acquisition pitch into his ear.

Apparently, Page wanted to acquire Twitter in order to integrate tweets into Google search results. Dorsey didn't bite.

The anecdote is part of a larger piece speculating about the possibility of Facebook or Google buying Twitter. So if Google does attempt to buy the troubled social media company  and Bilton doesn't think it will  it wouldn't be Google's first attempt.

Read the full story over at Vanity Fair>>.

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The United States Calls for Restraint on the Ethiopia-Eritrea Border

Washington, DC - The United States is gravely concerned about the military action that took place on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, June 12 and 13. As both Ethiopia and Eritrea are party to the 2000 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement and there cannot be a military solution, we call for both sides to exercise restraint and engage in political dialogue.

We also urge both Ethiopia and Eritrea to cooperate in promoting stability and sustainable peace in the region.
From Redbook

Lauren Conrad has planned your next party. It's going to be awesome and stress-free-and, if you follow her rules for entertaining, it just might make your marriage better. Not bad, right?

After having successfully conquered the fashion world (with two collections, Paper Crown and LC Lauren Conrad for Kohl's), the publishing business (nine books, including eight New York Times best sellers), and social media (nearly 10 million followers combined on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook), Lauren is moving her lifestyle empire into a cozier locale: your house. With the launch of The Little Market, her online fair-trade retailer, and her book Celebrate, Lauren may be turning into the millennial Martha Stewart.

"Those are some big shoes to fill, and I really don't see myself doing that,"laughs Lauren at the notion.

The next Martha or not, Lauren's party-planning tips will turn you into a happier hostess. The key? Stop worrying about perfection.

"I always try to make sure that the party I'm putting together isn't perfect. Anything that looks too put-together is too fussy for me. If it feels fussy, then people might not be comfortable. A successful party is about comfort and making people feel welcome."

That whole putting others at ease thing also extends to her husband, William Tell, of course.

"Now that I'm throwing parties with my husband, William, I have to keep in mind that he prefers-how do I say this-easier themes than what I've done in the past. He doesn't like to feel that he's asking friends to go out of their way. So now we do a birthday hoedown because everyone owns a pair of cutoffs and a plaid shirt. I'm learning how to compromise," she says.

The other thing Lauren and her hubby didn't initially see eye to eye on? Collectibles.

"I have a collection of teacups I display in my dining room. My husband doesn't get why I love them so much. To be fair, I don't share his passion for guitars. I mean, I guess I can understand why he might not see the beauty in a gorgeous, hand-painted teacup. [Laughs] We each have our own things, and that's healthy."

Story continues

Teacups and hoedowns aside, Lauren says the most important thing to remember when you're planning a party, big or small, is to have fun.

"You can dream up the most beautiful tablescape and food, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is that you are having as much fun as your guests and enjoying each other's company. The point is to celebrate-and that means everyone."

For more of Lauren's tips on tossing together an elegant, stress-free soiree, plus killer recipes (you won't be able to stop sipping her tequila berry lemonade!), pick up the July issue of REDBOOK on newsstands June 21.
The Gambian asylum seeker on trial for killing American nanny Lauren Mann was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison by a court in Vienna on Wednesday.



Mann, a 25-year-old student from Colorado working as an au pair while studying, was discovered dead and half-naked in her apartment in the Austrian capital in January. An autopsy revealed she had been suffocated.



Mann's accused killer, a Gambian national identified only as Abdou I. because Austrian law precludes his name from being made public, was arrested in February at a Swiss refugee camp and returned to Austria to face charges.



 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.



"It was a relatively short trial because there weren't a lot of witnesses," court spokesperson Christina Salzborn tells PEOPLE.



Abdou I denied killing Mann, according to case reports, while prosecutors maintained he was driven into killing her by jealousy after finding her in bed with someone else.



Immediately following the verdict, Abdou I's attorneys announced their intention to appeal his conviction and sentence.



Under Austrian law, he will remain in custody. His appeal will likely take place in front of Austria's Supreme Court in the Fall, Salzborn says.
Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT has received a $331.8 million contract from the U.S. Army for the Lot 11 Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rockets for domestic as well as international customers.

LOCKHEED MARTIN Price

LOCKHEED MARTIN Price | LOCKHEED MARTIN Quote

Per the contract, Lockheed Martin will produce GMLRS Alternative Warhead rockets, GMLRS Unitary rockets and Reduced-Range Practice Rockets for the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps.



This contract also covers Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to Israel, Finland, Jordan and Singapore.



The production work under this contract will be carried out at Lockheed Martin facilities in Camden, Arkansas, and Dallas through Mar 2018.



GMLRS, an all-weather rocket, is designed for quick deployment, offering a precision strike beyond most conventional weapons. Lockheed Martin also added that the alternative warhead was the first munition developed to service area targets without the effects of unexploded ordnance, complying with the Pentagon's cluster munitions policy.



Moreover, the reduced-range rocket allows users to train with realistic, full-motored rockets with limited flight range. This makes them suitable for smaller test ranges.



Lockheed Martin is the largest U.S. defense contractor with a platform-centric focus that guarantees a steady inflow of follow-on orders from a leveraged presence in the Army, Air Force, Navy and IT programs.



This defense giant not only reported better-than-expected first-quarter 2016 earnings in spite of incurring severance expenses, but also boosted its full-year outlook for earnings, revenues, operating profit and cash flow.



Also, in a volatile defense budget scenario, international contracts are more than welcome. Lockheed Martin generated 21% of total sales from international customers in 2015 (up from 19.4% in 2014), including FMS.



Zacks Rank



Lockheed Martin carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).



A few better-ranked stocks in the aerospace and defense space include Leidos Holdings, Inc. LDOS, Engility Holdings, Inc. EGL and CAE Inc. CAE, all with a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



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(Reuters) - A "lone hacker" has taken responsibility for a cyber attack on the U.S. Democratic National Committee, which the DNC and a cyber-security firm have blamed on the Russian government. The DNC and cyber firm CrowdStrike disclosed the attack on Tuesday, saying that hackers working for Russia broke into the DNC's computer network, spied on internal communications and stole research on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. A Russian government spokesman responded by saying that Moscow had not been involved. On Wednesday, an individual using the moniker Guccifer 2.0 took responsibility for the attack in a post on the blogging site WordPress.com, saying the DNC was "hacked by a lone hacker." The DNC did not respond to a request for comment late on Wednesday evening on Guccifer 2.0's claim. CrowdStrike said it stands by findings that the Russian government was behind the attacks. Guccifer 2.0's blog includes images of documents it claims were stolen from DNC servers, including one titled "Donald Trump Report," which was dated Dec. 19, and spreadsheets purportedly containing information about party donors. Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the documents, which the blog said were among "thousands of files and mails" removed from DNC servers that would soon be published on WikiLeaks. CrowdStrike issued a statement saying it "stands fully by its analysis" that two groups affiliated with Russian intelligence were discovered in the DNC's network last month. The company said it was reviewing the documents published by Guccifer 2.0 to determine whether they were authentic. (Reporting by Jim Finkle. Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Nick Macfie)
MONTE CARLO, Monaco  Tackling an emerging fiction format, Lucy helmer Luc Besson has created Killers School, a premium mobile-native scripted series that will be part of a new digital platform called Blackpills.

Written by Besson, the series will shoot in English and be co-directed by Pascal Sid, the director of Behind The Walls and producer of Julien Seris Night Fare, and Olivier Schneider, the fight choreographer of Spectre.

Comprising 10 episodes of 10 minutes, Killers School will boast an international cast of European and American talent. Casting is underway.

Described as a mix of Nikita and Kick-Ass, Killers School (working title) turns on teenagers who are trained to become professional killers. Shooting is set to start this summer in Paris and its suburbs.

Killers School will be part of the initial offering of high-end mobile-native international series showcased on Blackpills, an upcoming platform created by two high-profile entrepreneurs: Xavier Niel, founder and majority shareholder of the French Internet service provider Free, and Daniel Marhely, creator of music streaming giant Deezer, according to a source close to the venture.

Aside from directing big-budget action and sci-fi pics such as Lucy and the upcoming Valerian, Besson has been increasingly involved in TV drama over the last few years. Hes been involved in series based on his movie franchises, notably Taken and Nikita, and hes also recently created Artificial Intelligence, a science-fiction action drama that has been picked up by TNT.

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A big event this Father's Day weekend at the Maryland State Fairgrounds in Timonium will draw thousands from all over the state to honor the region's Vietnam War veterans. LZ Maryland, which stands for landing zone, is part of a multi-year project by Maryland Public Television to tell stories about the war through the heroes who served. In the air, it made one of the most recognizable sounds of the war, and as it sits in the rain at fairgrounds, a Vietnam era Huey will surely bring back memories.
June 16 (Reuters) - The largest local association representing workers of Macy's Inc said it reached a tentative agreement with the department store operator for a new four-year contract, averting a strike that was set to begin on Thursday.

Workers belonging to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had threatened to walk off the job if a deal was not reached by midnight on Thursday.

The workers are demanding a more affordable health plan, pay increases and changes to scheduling and commissions policies.

The labor association, which represents workers at the company's flagship Herald Square store and at Macy's locations in the Bronx, Queens and White Plains, said in a Facebook post that it had reached a deal.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bengaluru, Editing by Anil D'Silva)
(Adds Macy's statement, shares)

June 16 (Reuters) - A union representing workers of Macy's Inc in New York said it reached a tentative agreement with the department store operator for a new four-year contract, averting a strike that was set to begin on Thursday.

Workers belonging to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had demanded a more affordable health plan, pay increases and changes to scheduling and commissions policies.

They had threatened to walk off the job if a deal was not reached by midnight on Thursday.

The labor union, which represents 5,000 workers at the company's flagship Herald Square store and at Macy's locations in the Bronx, Queens and White Plains, said in a Facebook post that it had reached a deal.

"We are pleased with the outcome of our overnight negotiations and happy to report that a tentative agreement between Macy's and Local 1S for our workers has been reached, therefore averting a possible strike today," Macy's said in an email to Reuters.

The retailer declined to provide any details of the agreement.

Macy's had placed newspaper ads seeking temporary workers to minimize disruption from a strike and the union had asked them to stop running the ads.

There has not been a strike at Macy's in New York for over 40 years, the union said.

Macy's shares were up nearly 2 percent at $32.50 in premarket trading on Thursday.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bengaluru, Editing by Anil D'Silva)
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Never in our "Wildest Dreams" did we see this one coming...

As if recent evidence of a possible relationship between Taylor Swift and actor Tom Hiddleston was not mind-blowing enough, we are now struggling to deal with the fact that a fan fiction writer predicted this relationship two years ago.

Apparently a fan fiction author by the name of jenniiichristine totally called this Hiddleswift thing back in the days of 2014.

SEE ALSO: Tom Hiddleston's butt is so glorious that it has its own hashtag

On Wednesday, the world was taken aback after The Sun published a series of photographs showing Swift and Hiddleston canoodling at a Rhode Island beach. While the new pairing came as a surprise to most fans, one special, magical, possibly psychic fan  Jennifer Stanley  saw it coming.

Her fan fiction post entitled "Widest Dreams" is summarized by the following: Taylor Swift x Tom Hiddleston (A.K.A. Hiddleswift as my friends and I call this pairing), one-shot smut, split into five chapters. Written to 'Wildest Dreams from Taylor Swifts 1989 Album. Tom and Taylor bump into each other in New York at the Met Gala in 2015, and who knows where the night just might take these two?



While Tom and Taylor didn't bump into each other in New York at the Met Gala in 2015, they did dance the night away at the 2016 Met Gala  to Beyonce's "Crazy in Love."

So Stanley was technically off by one year, but who cares, this is still unbelievable.

Stanley explained how and why she was inspired to write the fan fiction in the first place via Tumblr, and let everyone know that she's just as confused by this act of fate as we are.

She wrote, "When I learned about him [Hiddleston] loving '80s music, singing, dancing and how positive he is I was like MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN LETS COMBINE MY TWO FAVES INTO ONE."

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After a Google search, she knew the two were destined to meet at the Met Gala, and she began crafting their romantic tale.

http://my-achillesheel.tumblr.com/post/145985661875/this-is-crazy-what-compelled-you-to-write-a-fanfic

If you're desperate for more of Hiddleswift fan fiction, you read the full fan fiction piece here.
A majority of Americans support presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, according to a new poll  a finding that comes amid mounting fears of terrorism following Sunday's deadly attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

The NBC News-SurveyMonkey poll found 50% support for Trump's proposal, with 46% of Americans opposing his call for a "total and complete shutdown" of foreign Muslims entering the United States. Trump first floated the idea in December, after Islamic State-inspired terrorists staged a mass shooting at a San Bernardino, California, social services center, and doubled down on the proposal this week, after gunman Omar Mateen killed at least 49 and injured 53 in Orlando.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has blasted Trump's proposal, noting that the ban wouldn't have affected Mateen, a Queens-born son of Afghan immigrants.

But the ban appears to have become increasingly popular with voters over the past half year. A December poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal found that 57% of Americans opposed the proposal, with polls in recent months showing voters more divided.

A new race: The NBC-SurveyMonkey poll also found terrorism rising on Americans' list of top priorities.

According to the poll, 24% now rank terrorism their top concern, just behind jobs and the economy at 29%. In last week's NBC-SurveyMonkey poll, only 12% said terrorism was their chief concern, behind jobs and the economy at 37% and health care at 17%.

The poll's not all good news for Trump, however.

For starters, it's unclear that a greater focus on terrorism will redound to his benefit, despite support for the Muslim ban and some polls showing voters prefer him over Clinton on the issue. Take Trump's response to the Orlando attack, which included a tweet boasting that he "called it" and insinuations that President Barack Obama may be sympathetic to terrorists. It isn't sitting well with voters, who disapprove of his response by a two-to-one margin, according to a CBS News poll this week,

NEW CBS Poll: Approve/Disapprove of Orlando response - Obama: 44/34 (+10) Clinton: 36/34 (+2) Trump: 25/51 (-26)http://www.cbsnews.com/news/orlando-mass-shooting-poll-trump-obama-clinton-reaction/ ...

What's more, the NBC-SurveyMonkey poll also found 61% support for tougher gun laws in the wake of the Orlando massacre. Trump, who has signaled openness to banning people on the terror watch list from buying guns, asserted this week that the Orlando attack would have been less deadly if more victims had been armed.
KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 (Reuters) - The Malaysian government signed an agreement on Thursday to take over 1Malaysia Development Berhad's (1MDB) remaining stake in a multi-billion dollar development project, as the troubled state fund seeks to cut its debts.

The shareholder agreement will put the finance ministry in control of 1MDB's 40 percent holding in the Bandar Malaysia project.

1MDB sold the other 60 percent in Bandar Malaysia - a major development project in Kuala Lumpur that will include a public transport hub - to Malaysian tycoon Lim Kang Hoo's Iskandar Waterfront Holdings and its partner, state-run China Railway Engineering Corp (CREC) for $1.7 billion in December.

This was part of a land and power asset sale plan aimed at cutting 1MDB's debt, which totalled about 50 billion ringgit ($12.20 billion) in January, and putting a lid on its problems.

The 1MDB fund, founded by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in 2009, is being investigated for money-laundering in at least six countries, including the United States, Switzerland and Singapore.

Malaysia's finance ministry said in May it would dissolve 1MDB's advisory board, chaired by Najib, and take over its remaining assets.

A Malaysian parliamentary committee in April identified at least $4.2 billion in irregular transactions by 1MDB. Both 1MDB and Najib have denied any wrongdoing.

The Malaysian attorney general's office cleared Najib in January of any criminal offences, saying that $681 million deposited into his personal bank account was a gift from Saudi Arabia's royal family.

Najib said on Thursday the agreement effectively places control of the Bandar Malaysia project in Malaysian hands, as Iskandar Waterfront Holdings (IWH) is partly owned by the Johor state government.

"This is very much a government project, with strong support of our partners," he said at the signing ceremony.

Najib also announced a Bandar Malaysia Fund, a special financing scheme supported by a consortium of Chinese, Malaysian and London-based banks with a total asset base of $12 billion, to support the project's projected 25-year development plan.

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He added the government will provide incentives for companies involved in developing Bandar Malaysia, including a 10-year tax exemption, eight years free of stamp duties, real property gains tax and removal of import duties for construction materials not available locally.

The Bandar Malaysia deal had earlier caused confusion after 1MDB and China Railway Engineering Corp (CREC) - a member of the consortium that bought the stake - gave conflicting figures on the value of the sale.

CREC later clarified that it valued the land at $1.2 billion but would assume portions of liabilities and costs that come approximately to $500 million. ($1 = 4.0990 ringgit) (Reporting by Joseph Sipalan; editing by Praveen Menon and Adrian Croft)
Paris (AFP) - A radicalised convert to Islam has been arrested in France for allegedly planning to attack American and Russian tourists at a popular medieval site, legal sources said Thursday.

News of the arrest came as the country reeled from yet another terror attack, after an extremist pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group killed a policeman and his partner at their home in the Paris suburb of Magnanville on Monday.

A judicial source said the 22-year-old suspect was arrested on Monday night in southern Carcassonne where he had gone to carry out "a violent act, in particular targeting Americans and Russians".

He had in his possession "a knife and a small mallet", the source said.

The suspect comes from the southern French town of Lunel -- notorious for the number of residents who have left to wage jihad in Syria -- but had been living in the nearby Tarn region.

France has been under a state of emergency since Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers struck Paris in November, killing 130.

And terror fears have been heightened by the presence of hundreds of thousands of fans for the month-long Euro 2016 football championship.

- Silent march for police couple -

In Monday's assault, 25-year-old Larossi Abballa, who had served time for links to jihadist networks, killed 42-year-old police commander Jean-Baptiste Salvaing outside his home in Magnanville.

He then entered the house, taking Salvaing's 36-year-old partner Jessica Schneider and the couple's three-year-old son hostage, before slitting her throat.

Schneider was an employee of the police station where her partner worked.

Abballa was later killed in a police raid on the house, where officers found the little boy traumatised but unhurt.

Just before the raid, Abballa streamed a live video on Facebook of himself inside the house with the toddler, urging "other surprises" and pledging to "turn the Euro into a graveyard".

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Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said police had found a hit list at the scene of the attack naming police, rappers and journalists.

Abballa, from Mantes-la-Jolie, told police negotiators before his death that he had sworn loyalty to IS three weeks earlier.

A crowd of some 2,500 people -- including officers in plain clothes -- marched in silence on Thursday to honour the slain couple, many weeping openly.

- Three others in custody -

Three associates of Abballa were arrested over the attack, and their detention was on Thursday extended for another 48 hours, a legal source told AFP.

Two of the suspects, aged 27 and 29, were convicted alongside Abballa in 2013 over ties to a network recruiting jihadists for Pakistan.

At the time, Abballa was sentenced to three years in prison.

The French attack came a day after another lone wolf pledging support to IS gunned down 49 people in Orlando, Florida, highlighting the difficulty in tracking those inspired by the jihadists from afar.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Wednesday that a lone wolf attack was hard to prevent and more attacks were likely to follow.

"More innocent people will lose their lives. It's very hard to say this... but unfortunately it is the truth," he said.

French President Francois Hollande will on Friday preside over an official memorial service in honour of the murdered couple.
A man who threatened to come back Orlando-style at a gay bar in New York City was arrested on Monday night, the day after a gunmans rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando left 49 dead.

Im going to shoot this place up and get my 50 just like Orlando, Florida, said Justin Rice, 40, when a bouncer removed him from Happyfun Hideaway, a bar in Brooklyn, DNAinfo reported. Im going to come back Orlando-style.

On the same night, in Manhattan, thousands gathered outside the historic Stonewall Inn for a vigil in honor of the Orlando shooting victims.

Rice  who also yelled homophobic slurs and threw a metal bucket at the bouncer  was charged with aggravated harassment, attempted assault, making a terrorist threat and menacing as a hate crime, according to DNA Info. His bail has been set at $10,000.

The best thing you can do to show the world that we believe in love is to continue to support us and all of our queer and artistic communities, the bar posted on Facebook on Wednesday night, thanking customers for their support and expressing bewilderment at what an odd world we live in.
By Romeo Ranoco MANILA (Reuters) - For Manila's struggling police, the June 30 inauguration of Philippines President-elect Rodrigo Duterte cannot come soon enough. Duterte, known as "Duterte Harry" for his tough stand on crime, swept to election victory last month on a single policy campaign - wiping out crime in six months by killing criminals, improving policing and increasing pay in the forces. That was welcome news to police in the Philippine capital who say they are so under-funded that they often have to buy their own bullets and get lifts to murder scenes in funeral service cars because they have no vehicles of their own. Dhondie Bayaban, inspector of the Philippine National Police (PNP), said the police had recently received a base pay rise to 14,000 pesos ($300) a month but welcomed Duterte's pledge of further salary increases. "Its not that low, but not enough either to sustain a family," the 41-year-old told Reuters. As the police struggle for funds, reported crimes in the Philippines have more than doubled over the last five years to 675,816 last year, according to national police data. About half of those are deemed serious, but police say the rise can be attributed to increased reporting of offences. Reported rape cases have jumped 120 percent over the same five-year period, while drug-fuelled crime is also on the rise. In 2012, the United Nations said the Philippines had the highest rate of methamphetamine use in East Asia, with the U.S. State Department adding that 2.1 percent of Filipinos aged 16 to 64 were using the drug. With low pay and pressured work, many officers had left the police force, according to Aurea Jane Manalaysay of the PNP Special Reaction Unit. The 26-year-old single mother was considering emigrating before Duterte, 71, was voted in as the 16th president. Her hopes are fueled by Duterte's success in tackling crime in Davao, the once-lawless city in the south, where Duterte was mayor for 22 years and where hundreds of criminals were killed in execution-style encounters. Human rights groups have documented at least 1,400 killings in Davao since 1998 that they say were carried out by death squads. Duterte, who has vowed to bring back the death penalty, has denied any involvement in the murders but repeatedly condoned them. During the election campaign, he promised the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat on the bodies "pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings" dumped there. Manalaysay said she welcomed the help in tackling crime. "I'm in favor of the death squad because the number of bad people doesn't decrease," she said. (Writing by Patrick Johnston)
Before Maren Morris' debut album Hero was even released on June 3rd, she'd already been bestowed with a double dose of one of America's most distinguished cultural honors: the televised singing competition cover.

How Maren Morris Became Country's Breakout Star

As the 15th and final season of American Idol was getting up to speed, contestant Jenna Renae offered up her version of Morris' breakthrough single "My Church" for judges Keith Urban (who is, perhaps not coincidentally, bringing Morris on his tour), Jennifer Lopez and Harry Connick Jr. Then in May, contestant Marah Sarah offered up her version of the song as a member of Team Blake on The Voice. Both performances, while vocally accurate, had a stiff formality and vocal forcefulness that's nowhere to be found on Morris' breezy original. Even still, it's a milestone that Morris appreciates for both its appraisal of her commercial talents and a little bit of delicious irony.

"I think about all of the freaking talent shows I've tried out for in my life and I'm so glad I didn't make any of them," says Morris, seated on a couch in a small demo studio situated behind the Nashville home of her last-name-only producer, busbee. "It's full circle, because I was rejected from The Voice. I was rejected from American Idol  and I'm happier for it now."

As the chart-topping first week sales of Hero indicate, things have worked out quite well with Morris never having to listen to Blake Shelton's advice. But the co-signs from two of America's most popular singing competitions, where the songs performed tend to be both recognizable and showy with range, are important because they point to Morris' savvy with melody and groove. "My Church," which Morris wrote with busbee, employs a familiar (though not copied) melody for its depiction of finding peace with the radio blaring, blooming into its instant-classic gospel-derived chorus, "Can I get a hallelujah? Can I get an amen?" that puts Morris at the high end of her range.

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"That was originally going to be the bridge," explains Morris. "But at one point I just realized that sort of encapsulates what I'm trying to say about getting to this hook of music being a sanctuary and it was just too catchy to put in the song just once so we wanted to make it the chorus. Sometimes it hits you later on, like, duh, that's the chorus, so why do we keep fighting it?"

That explanation alone should be evidence enough that Morris is woman who works at harnessing the craft, rather than embodying the more romantic narrative of the lone songwriter plucking inspiration out of the sky. There's a studiousness to Hero's hooks that makes them feel worn-in, rather than half-baked. And more than a ring-kissing offering to the radio gods, "My Church" contends that radio listening is Morris' classroom as well as a sanctuary.

"I love listening to the radio because there's something about that discovery, that platform still being the main medium," she says. "And it is changing with streaming services, but I like to listen to what people are listening to and figure out why is this song so catchy. What is it about it? I really break it down to a science and try to figure out what makes a song particularly memorable. And it's usually repetition and simplicity. At least with catchy pop songs that take on a life of their own and become huge smashes."

One key to her melodic inspiration certainly lies in the oft-maligned, globally-minded teen pop of the Nineties. When Swedish mastermind Max Martin wrote hits for Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, his scalpel-like precision with hooks made them impossible to shake. She cites the Backstreet Boys song "Shape of My Heart" as an example, where the line "Looking back on the things that I've done" is applied to one melody in the chorus and then another, entirely different one toward the song's end. Morris and her co-writer Laura Veltz appropriated the idea for slinky album opener "Sugar," flipping the chorus lyrics later in the song with a different melody and rhythm.

"I don't know if we did that out of laziness that day or what," she says. "And that's one of my favorite parts of that song because it's so catchy and fun."

Morris' embrace of her voice as another instrument in the mix results in multiple thrilling moments on Hero, where she casually tosses in repeated wordless hooks on "Rich," "Drunk Girls Don't Cry" and "80s Mercedes" that make them immediately identifiable. She looks to Rihanna in a couple cases, mining her signature tics for a swaggering delivery of lines like "me and Diddy dripping diamonds like Marilyn" on "Rich." They're hard to even say with a straight face, which is precisely why Morris thinks they work.

"I've found every time I think something is stupid or overreaching or so silly, [it] is usually the right idea," she says. "Because that came out of a part of your brain that was being unhinged. This is why sometimes it's good to write hungover because it gets rid of your filter. You come out with stuff that you can't overthink because you're hungover. I've written some really good songs that I love hungover because I wasn't overthinking it."

Though a friendship with fellow Texas native Kacey Musgraves brought Morris to town, the closest she gets to Musgraves' affinity for retro stylings is on the piano and acoustic guitar-driven cynics' anthem "I Could Use a Love Song." She's just as likely to reference the bluesy soul of Bonnie Raitt as on "I Wish I Was" and the slow-burning album closer "Once," or the moody atmosphere of Nineties trip-hop in the sexy grooves of "How It's Done." While country radio's hesitation to play women is an issue worth discussing, she agrees, it also affords her the freedom to stretch out stylistically because there isn't some neat formula she has to fit.

"There are so many times I turn on the radio and I hear a guy and I have no idea who it is because it sounds like four other people," she says. "But girls, because there's less of us, I can't compare Cam to Kelsea Ballerini. I can't compare Kacey Musgraves to me. We're both from Texas, cool, we play guitar. I can't compare myself to Mickey Guyton or Kelleigh Bannen or whoever else."

But one of the biggest influences for Hero is undoubtedly Sheryl Crow's landmark debut Tuesday Night Music Club, which was released in 1993 when Morris was three years old but she heard through her parents' CD collection. Amid the sea of angst-ridden grunge and new jack swing, Crow's mixture of pop, rock, country and California cool stood out from the pack. Hero sounds less like a sonic copycat than spiritual ancestor for its all-embracing attitude toward outside sounds and defiance of easy classification.

"I am so inspired by her because she knocked down all the genre lines," admits Morris. "She was a pop artist, because it just spanned over so many different things. [But] it was just good music. And it was fresh. It was catchy and it had these sounds on it that were reminiscent of everything. She sort of created her own genre in that way."

And like Crow, Morris' sense of melody is equally intuitive, conjuring up earworms that linger long after the final tracks and tempering them with the discerning ear of an active fan.

"I feel like when I get into most rooms, melodies come really easily to me and they sound good in my head. I never really know until I hear the song back and it's finished if it actually is good," she says, laughing. "You can get into to something and you repeat it to yourself a few times and if it feels catchy it's sort of just an instinctual thing for me."

Maybe it's for the best Morris never made it on The Voice  she's much better at coming up with the hooks they'll be trying to imitate next season.

Related
The men and women of the Orlando Police Department are receiving a collective pat on the back this week from their counterparts in Aurora, Colorado, who are familiar with the horrors of mass shootings.



In a new video posted online, members of Aurora's police praise Orlando's officers in the wake of Sunday's mass shooting that killed 49 people and injured 53 inside a nightclub, the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. Among those giving praise in the video are Lt. Stephen Redfearn, who was among the first to respond in 2012 during a mass shooting inside a movie theater that killed 12 people.



"We want you to know that whether you were one of the brave men and women who heroically rushed to the scene and saved countless lives or took fire while confronting the suspect, we stand with Orlando," Redfearn says in the clip.



Police in Aurora decided to record the video message of support to assist the Orlando officers who'll be dealing with the trauma of Sunday's attack for years to come. Similar messages were created for Aurora's police force soon after the 2012 shooting spree.



Patrol men and women as well as detectives, crime scene specialists and support staff appear in the video, which represents the entire 787-member department's response.









 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.



Aurora's Chief of Police, Nick Metz, says that upon learning of the violence inside Pulse, the members of his department "felt an enormous sense of sorrow for the Orlando community and a great sense of empathy and connection to the men and women of the Orlando Police Department."



The Aurora officers collaborated on the video as a way of lending support to Orlando's cops, Metz explains in the clip.



"It goes without saying that the Orlando Police Department stepped up," Metz says. "You all did an incredible job in protecting and saving lives that horrific night and for that, we salute you and we are incredibly proud to call you our brothers and sisters in blue."



Officer Tomas Campagna adds: "We know what you're going through. And while at the moment it may seem hopeless, we know you're going to get through this as a community and as a police department."



Aurora Policewoman Natasha Cabouet tells the camera that "even though we are separated by thousands of miles, we wear the same badge, the same uniform and share the same grief and sorrow."



Aurora Police Commander Mike Dailey says the Colorado officers "are here for you and we grieve with you."



The gunman in last Sunday's shooting, Omar Mateen, was killed during the attack.



Next month, Aurora will mark the fourth anniversary of the theater shooting perpetrated by James Holmes.



Last summer, jurors convicted Holmes following a lengthy trial during which police officers and others described the vicious attack.



Holmes was sentenced to life in prison without parole for 12 murders and more than to 3,200 additional years for attempted murder and an explosives conviction.
ODA 574 Karzai

If you believe that the current political climate in Afghanistan is inconceivably complicated, imagine what the clandestine operatives behind the scenes during the onset of the war endured. Consisting of 11 members, Special Forces A-Team ODA 574 was one of these groups.

Having deployed with a mission to escort the future Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, this elite team, specializing in free-fall operations, neared Kandahar, the countrys second-largest city. Karzai, who was at the time an exile, had been raising a Pashtun militia to overtake the Taliban while ODA 574 provided protection by calling in precision airstrikes.

JDAM

One day, disaster struck when a 2,000 pound joint direct attack munition (JDAM) accidentally struck the team. Amidst the chaos, ODA 574 Captain Jason Amerine sent a mass casualty evacuation request which was acknowledged by the nearest base, Camp Rhino  a 45 minute flight by helicopter.

Besides the Marines located at Camp Rhino, the closest support that 574 had was in Uzbekistan and Pakistan, some three hours away. A Special Forces liaison informed General Mattis, commander of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, of the situation.

Author Eric Blehm describes the tense scene in his New York Times bestseller, The Only Thing Worth Dying For:

Mattis asked if they were still in contact and wanted more specifics, which Cairnes did not have. Well, if theyve taken fire, said the general, and you cant tell me definitively how they got all scuffed up, Im not going to send anything until you can assure me that the situation on the ground is secure. Mattis went on to explain that there were nearly a thousand Marines at Camp Rhino for him to worry about, and he was not willing to dilute base security and risk sending his air squadron on a dangerous daylight mission just to assist an unknown number of casualties.

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Later, members of the Special Forces team discussed the situation amongst themselves:

They could understand why Mattis wouldnt send all of his helicopters, but no one in the tent could fathom why he wouldnt do something to help their guys. Wheres the love from the Marines? said another member of the team. Theyre supposed to be frothing at the mouth for this kind of s***. These helicopters outside would be airborne already if it were Marines that were bleeding, said the B-teams communications sergeant. You know what, said Lee, who had watched the Marines endure abysmal conditions at the base since theyd arrived. Its not the Marines. Its Mattis.

AP110201148779

Twenty minutes after being denied by Mattis and hearing that there was at least one confirmed American KIA, the soldiers decided that the situation was dire and the Marine general needed to be persuaded for the second time:

Inside, the expressions on the faces of Mattis staff showed their frustration and embarrassment. One Marine glanced away as they walked past, unable to meet their eyes. Mattis greeted the two Green Berets at the heavy wood door that led into his spartan concrete-floored office. He held a military-issue canteen cup filled with coffee in his left hand and gestured them inside with the other. After closing the door to a crack, he sat down at a small writing desk where a map was laid out. Lets hear it, said Mattis Sir, said Lee, weve got reports of mass casualties, and word is they expect the numbers to continue to rise. You are the closest American with the ability to respond. Do you have an update on how they got all scuffed up? Are they still in contact? With all due respect, said Leithead, we think thats irrelevant. I hear you, but no, Im not sending a rescue mission, Mattis said. We. Dont. Know. The situation. The situation, sir, said Lee, is that Americans are dying. And they need your help. Look, when I have fighters over the scene so that Ive got air superiority, then Ill send choppers. That, or we wait till nightfall. Exchanging a look with Leithead, Lee said, Thats not good enough, sir. Standing up, the general cleared his throat. Sergeant, Mattis called to his sergeant at arms, positioned outside the office. Were done. Escort these men out of here. Without another word, Lee and Leithead walked out of the office toward the door to the command post, again passing Marines who wouldnt make eye contact. Behind them, they heard Mattis say, Nobody gets into my office.

Eventually, the teams in the far away regions of Uzbekistan and Pakistan launched rescue efforts in broad daylight. When the dust finally settled, three members of 574 were killed, along with several of Karzais forces.

Blehm explained to Business Insider that after several attempts, Mattis agreed to be interviewed about the incident, however, by the time he did, the book had already been published.

As far as ... those guys were concerned, it didn't matter. Americans were wounded, dead, or dying and Mattis was the closest with the ability to respond  and they refused, Blehm said.

Black Hawk Down Super 61

Just like the developing situation in Afghanistan, an answer of exactly who was at fault here would be, at best, complicated. As a career Marine educated in the art of war, Mattis would have undoubtedly recounted the harrowing events that unfolded during the Black Hawk Down Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, where several members of a rescue team were killed.

Conversely, leaving any servicemember unattended for would not only be against policy, but would tarnish the reputation of the US military. This is even confirmed by the resounding mottos of the military, such as the 9th Cavalry Regiments, We can, We will. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that a delay in rescue operations may lower the chance of survival for injured servicemembers.

As most veterans know, a general rule of thumb in the military is to expect the unexpected, and to develop a contingency plan for the worst. However, when time is of the essence and lives are on the line, there may be instances where years of military training cannot prepare oneself, or indoctrinated protocols may have to be compromised.

In any case, the only thing permanent is that that the fateful day will probably be analyzed by military tacticians for years to come, and that the lives of Master Sergeant Jefferson Davis, Sergeant First Class Daniel Petithory, and Staff Sergeant Brian Prosser were abruptly cut short.

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Sen. John McCain charged on Thursday that President Obama is directly responsible for the mass shooting in Orlando because his policy toward Iraq and Syria set the stage for the rise of the so-called Islamic State. Not long after, the former GOP presidential nominee watered down his startling accusation.

I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible, McCain said in a written statement issued by his office. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the president himself.

The Associated Press and other news outlets reported the Arizona senators initial accusation, which came even as Obama met in Orlando with relatives and friends of the nearly 50 people killed at a gay nightclub over the weekend.

Since losing the 2008 race to Obama, McCain has been one of the chief critics of the presidents foreign policy, notably accusing him of abandoning Iraq to deadly chaos by not fighting harder to leave a residual force there. The White House blames Iraqi politicians who refused to grant U.S. troops immunity from local prosecution, effectively forcing them out. The Administration also blames former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for plunging the country into renewed sectarian tensions while hollowing out its military. The administration says this set the stage for the Islamic State to push almost to the gates of Baghdad. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has since lost considerable territory but remains enormously potent.

Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaida went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today, thanks to Barack Obamas failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq, McCain told reporters in a Capitol hallway. So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies, McCain said.

The senator largely stuck with that analysis in his written statement.

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President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL, he said. I and others have long warned that the failure of the presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.

White House officials declined to comment on the record.

McCain has a bit of a history of saying impolitic, unusual or straightforwardly incorrect things when he faces a reelection fight, as he does this year.

The senator said in April that this may be the race of my life because of Hispanic voter anger at presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to a recording of remarks obtained by Politico.

During his 2010 reelection race, McCain attempted to jettison years of making political hay from his image as a straight-talker willing to buck his party when his principles demanded it.

I never considered myself a maverick, he told Newsweek. I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities. It fell to fact-checkers at PolitiFact to point out that McCain had, in fact, very publicly considered himself a maverick.

In that same campaign, McCain abandoned his previous support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul. He shifted to favor a distinctly Trump-sounding attack on people who immigrated to the U.S. illegally, whom he blamed in a political ad for drug- and human smuggling, home invasions, murder.

Complete the danged fence, McCain said in the commercial, referring to a border barrier.

Democrats immediately exploited McCains latest comments to tie him to Trump, whose first reactions to the Orlando shooting included dark insinuations about Obama.

Senator McCains unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump, said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

Tying him to Trump could be bitterly ironic for McCain, who bears the scars of the torture he suffered after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War. It was nearly a year ago that Trump attacked the former naval aviators military career.

Hes not a war hero, Trump said at a conservative forum. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who werent captured.

Trump, too, soon backtracked on the provocative claim.

______

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By Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senator John McCain said on Thursday that President Barack Obama was "directly responsible" for attacks on Americans like the one in Florida because of policies that contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. But the Arizona Republican later said he misspoke. McCain, who is in a tough re-election race, made the comments after reporters chased him down a marble stairway and into a hallway of the U.S. Capitol. They asked what he was hearing from constituents about gun control issues being debated in the Senate after Sunday's shooting rampage by a gunman who claimed allegiance to Islamic State militants. "I'm hearing a lot from my constituents about what happened and of course I am making them realize that Barack Obama is directly responsible for it," McCain said. "Because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures, utter failures," McCain said. "So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies." After media reports began to appear about his comments, McCain, who lost the White House to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, posted a clarification on Twitter and then issued a statement that said he meant to blame Obama's policies, not the president personally. I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the president himself," McCain said in the statement. Forty-nine people died in the shooting in Orlando, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The gunman was U.S.-born Omar Mateen, 29, whose parents immigrated from Afghanistan. McCain, 79, faces multiple opponents in a Republican primary race in August, and some analysts say he is in danger of losing the Senate seat he has held for three decades. Earlier this week, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to suggest Obama may have been complicit in the Orlando attacks. "Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind," Trump told Fox News. "And the something else in mind  you know, people can't believe it ... There's something going on. It's inconceivable. There's something going on." (Editing by Doina Chiacu and Tom Brown)
Washington (AFP) - Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the massacre at a Florida nightclub, US Senator John McCain said Thursday, a startling accusation that the Republican elder statesman quickly walked back.

The condemnation by the straight-talking national security hawk McCain came with the US president in Orlando for a meeting with relatives of some of the 49 victims of Sunday's attack, the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

McCain told reporters in a Senate hallway that Obama's failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State extremist group helped bring about the Florida violence.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures," McCain said when asked about the gun debate prompted by the shooting, according to The Washington Post.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 White House race, quickly issued a clarification to say he "did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible."

"I misspoke," McCain said in a statement.

"I was referring to President Obama's national security decisions, not the president himself."

He went on to say he and others have long warned that Obama's failure to deny Islamic State extremists a safe haven "would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe, as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando."

His remarks come after Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made statements Monday that seemed to suggest a connection between Obama and the Orlando attack.

Trump then retweeted an article Wednesday by a conservative website which claimed that Democratic White House hopeful Hillary Clinton "received a classified intelligence report stating that the Obama administration was actively supporting Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State."

McCain, 79, is locked in a fierce re-election battle back in his home state of Arizona as he seeks a sixth US Senate term.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sumner Redstone said he "no longer trusts" Viacom Inc's (VIAB.O) board or Chief Executive Philippe Dauman to act in the media company's best interests, according to a spokesman for the 93-year-old mogul.

The comments from Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Viacom and CBS Corp (CBS.N), are the latest in a spat with Viacom which will likely affect the direction of the company after Redstone dies or becomes incapacitated.

Last month, Redstone ejected Dauman and another director from the board of National Amusements Inc, which controls 80 percent of the voting shares of Viacom. Dauman filed a legal challenge to that maneuver and questioned Redstone's mental competence.

Redstone responded on Wednesday to a letter sent to him a day earlier by Fred Salerno, Viacom's lead independent director, who pleaded for a meeting with Redstone and warned of further court battles if he remained inaccessible to the board.

"I no longer trust Philippe or those who support him," Redstone said in a note addressed to Salerno and released by Redstone's spokesman.

"I am being sued by my fellow board members and my wishes are being ignored," said Redstone. "I am determined to act in the best interests of the company and all of its shareholders. I do not trust you or the current board to do the same."

Salerno and Viacom's other independent directors have vowed to fight any attempt to oust them from the board, saying they found "inexplicable" the assertion that Redstone was mentally competent.

"We could clear a lot of this up if Sumner would share his thoughts with me face-to-face," Salerno said in a statement on Wednesday.

Dauman has argued in court papers that Redstone was being manipulated by Shari Redstone, his daughter. For her part, Shari Redstone has said she is spending more time with her father but that he makes his own decisions. She also has clashed with Dauman over the company's management.

A spokesman for Dauman had no comment.

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Bill Rigby)
From Cosmopolitan

I was flipping through brochures in the conference room at Stanton Healthcare in Boise, Idaho, when its founder, Brandi Swindell, cracked the door open. "Want to talk to a patient?" she asked, her blonde hair framing the joyful smile on her face. "She just found out she's having twins!"

I followed Swindell into the exam room, where the nurse practitioner was moving the ultrasound machine away from the table and back into the corner. Brandy (she asked her last name not be used), 26, was sitting up on the exam table, her glance moving constantly to me, to Swindell, to the nurse, and repeatedly back to the large monitor on the wall where her ultrasound image was being projected. There, the image of two small sacs - the very first visual clue of a baby growing -was clear and undeniable.

"I'm shocked. I kind of want to cry a little bit," Brandy told me, her eyes wide. "I just didn't really expect any  I expected one. You know, like a normal appointment. When I saw two, it was a shock. I'm still in shock."

Brandy and her husband had been trying to have a baby since they got married 18 months earlier, but all three previous pregnancies had ended in miscarriage. After experiencing what she believed was an unusually light period four weeks earlier, then missing her next one, she took a home pregnancy test to see if there was any possibility that she might be pregnant again, then waited before seeking out an ultrasound to be certain she could see something in the image. The waiting paid off, and Brandy was able to determine she was now five weeks pregnant and likely to be the mother of twins.

For patients like Brandy - pregnant, uninsured, and without medical care - Stanton Healthcare provides a lifeline for getting health services that they may otherwise be unable to access in the state, and Swindell has an ambitious goal for her network: She hopes it will become the pro-life movement's replacement for the entire Planned Parenthood organization.

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"We will not just COMPETE. We will not simply EXPOSE. We will not only DEFUND. It's time to REPLACE Planned Parenthood," reads one set of marketing materials that promotes what Swindell has called the "Stanton Revolution," while another has the simpler "Replace Planned Parenthood" as its motto.

With a personality that switches between earnest confidante and hard-hitting businesswoman, Swindell, 39, believes she has the political connections, activist background, and business plan to make replacing the Planned Parenthood network a reality, even without providing any basic contraception methods at all. While Stanton clinics intend to offer a full range of women's reproductive health services that address pregnancy, sexual health screenings and STI testing, and gynecological issues like ovarian cyst diagnostics or annual pelvic exams, not one Stanton affiliate will be offering contraception - either hormonal or IUDs, or even simple barrier methods like condoms. For women's health advocates, especially those hoping to reduce the nation's unintended pregnancy rate, the concept leaves them concerned. Increasing women's options for accessing no or low-cost health care is always a positive, they say, but some worry about the effect of leaving birth control out of the equation.

"There Has to Be Something Better Than Abortion"

The foothills and mountains that run through Idaho are part of what draws Swindell to her home state - and are also what makes the issue of women's health care access one that resonates with her so soundly. Like other rural, conservative states, it becomes increasingly difficult to get to a health-care provider once you move outside the biggest metro areas.

Swindell, a self-proclaimed "snow bunny" who adores snowboarding, hiking, and fishing, said it was an experience in the woods that led her to pro-life work. While Swindell was working at a national park during the late 1990s, a friend she met at the camp became pregnant and went to a clinic 2.5 hours away for an abortion. Swindell said when she saw her after the procedure, it was like seeing a completely different person.

"I could feel it in the air and I could see it in her limp body, she was lying in the fetal position and she had had the abortion," Swindell said. "That experience changed her. She wasn't the same vibrant girl that she was before."

(The American Psychological Association determined in 2009 that there is no evidence that having an abortion causes mental health problems for most women.)

Swindell had always considered herself pro-life, but she said that incident was a turning point. Soon she moved to the East Coast and met national activists who helped her find her own place in the movement. She worked with Rock for Life, an anti-abortion music ministry, and Christian Defense Coalition, and even did some international work in Ireland with Youth Defense, an Irish anti-abortion organization. She helped launch Generation Life, a youth action group meant to help recruit younger people to the anti-abortion cause.

Swindell was working with national and international activists, but at heart she considered herself an Idaho girl. By 2002 she had moved back to Boise and immersed herself and Generation Life in local activism. In 2004, she made headlines again when she and Bryan Fischer, a vocal far right social conservative, sued the city to block the removal of a statue of the Ten Commandments that was on public park property. Their effort failed, however, and Swindell, then just 28, ran for a seat on the Boise city council in 2005 in order to try to change the city from the inside. She lost to incumbent Democrat Maryanne Jordan.

Meanwhile, Swindell was shifting her focus from Generation Life in favor of her new passion project, Stanton Healthcare, which she named after suffragette and women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. "I wanted a special name. I wanted a name that conveyed what I was feeling in my heart about women," said Swindell. "Elizabeth Cady Stanton, when her first son was born, on the day she delivered him, she raised a flag outside her house announcing [the birth], which was a really big deal. It was countercultural, to be like, 'I just spread my legs and had a baby, everybody.' I just kind of love that about her."

Swindell's first Stanton center opened in 2006, operating in a building provided to her by her local church. It opened as a basic small-scale crisis pregnancy center, offering physical resources and emotional support to pregnant women in order to persuade them to continue their pregnancies and not have an abortion. "I realized that we didn't have a clinic or center here in Boise doing ultrasounds and we have the highest percentage of abortions in Idaho," Swindell said. "I was like, 'How is there no center here?' So I went, 'OK, I guess I better roll up my shirt sleeves and start it.'" Soon she grew out of that space and into what is now Stanton Boise.

"They Treat You Like a Friend"

At first glance, Stanton Healthcare may not look much different from the approximately 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers operating in the United States. Most of its services are through its Boise location, but Stanton also uses a mobile ultrasound clinic to get to underserved, rural populations and refugee communities in the state - many of whom have no access to any local health care or transportation to travel to an appointment. Stanton Boise is located directly next door to the Boise Planned Parenthood clinic, in a building that Swindell was able to purchase for $250,000 - $170,000 of which she had to raise in just one year in order to receive an $80,000 grant to pay for the rest. Inside, the reception area smells of lavender essential oils and a stone fireplace dominates one wall. The hardwood floors lead to exam rooms, a "baby boutique," and even a "spa" room for prenatal massage.

For Stephanie Reyes, a 24-year-old uninsured mother expecting her third child, Stanton's services are the only care she has been able to receive during the first 23 weeks of her pregnancy. Reyes found out about the organization when trying to find support for a family member who was unexpectedly pregnant. Little did she realize she would need similar services a few weeks later when she, too, was expecting a baby.

"They treat you like a friend," Reyes said, holding her nearly 4-year-old daughter in her lap as we spoke. The young girl, big-eyed and with a small shy smile, soon wiggled free to play with the toys in one corner of the exam room while Stephanie met with Stanton's nurse. "The resources have been good. They help you with maternity clothes, baby clothes. They do free ultrasounds, which is amazing," she said.

Reyes was one of three Stanton clients I saw when I was at the clinic, all of them pregnant and none of them conflicted about giving birth, not surprising since Stanton is very open about being a "life-affirming medical clinic" that will not offer abortions. In each case, the patients turned to Stanton to access ultrasounds, pregnancy confirmation, and some basic prenatal care they could not obtain due to lack of insurance, a problem for newly pregnant women in Idaho, where a lack of Medicaid expansion leaves all but the very poorest unable to qualify for subsidized coverage on the federal insurance exchange.

Brandy, the woman who had just learned she was pregnant with twins, already had an appointment set up with a local doctor for prenatal care, but her health insurance policy wasn't going to go into effect for another six weeks. In order to have it cover her pregnancy as a preexisting condition, she needed to have medical proof of the pregnancy. For Brandy, having her pregnancy covered by her insurance was especially important since, with a history of miscarriage, her pregnancy would be considered high-risk and require more medical appointments and support. Plus, waiting an additional six weeks to find out whether this pregnancy would be viable would have been torture.

Reyes said that without Stanton, she wouldn't have had any prenatal care. Reyes was visiting the clinic for her fourth appointment, where they both helped her with her Medicaid application and gave her an ultrasound. In it, she learned she was having another boy. "I feel embraced here," she said. "I would tell everyone if they can't afford somewhere to go and check how their pregnancy is going, Stanton is here to help them."

Helping newly pregnant patients is a specific role that Stanton Healthcare plays in the community, and one that is more urgent in a state like Idaho, where the legislature has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. While lower-income uninsured women will often be eligible if they are pregnant, the process for coverage can take time and assistance, and only after she has been accepted into the program will her medical expenses retroactively be covered. At Stanton, a pregnancy can be verified at no cost to the patient, and staff will also help an expectant mom to fill out the paperwork to get her Medicaid application underway.

And then there is the "baby boutique," the overflowing shelves with bins of baby goods, from clothing to baby carriers, bottles and bouncers, even breast pumps, all for mothers who need assistance.

Bambi, 32, was already the mother to four boys ages 4 to 16. She didn't think she could conceive again after a doctor told her that her chemotherapy treatment for cancer a few years earlier likely made her eggs infertile. But after she went into a hospital for severe ovary pain, she learned she had a cyst that had ruptured - and she was pregnant. Bambi said she was told she'd likely miscarry because of the cyst, and the entire family was struggling financially, so she never followed up with a doctor. She arrived at Stanton 28 weeks pregnant and wearing her boyfriend's T-shirt and sweats because none of her own clothes fit and she couldn't afford new ones.

"This has been the first smile I've had for months now," Bambi told me as she sorted through pink and white onesies. She had just learned she was having her first girl. "The boys are going to be excited because we weren't having no more babies, so now to find out we're having a baby sister, they're going to be super stoked."

Because Bambi's other children were so much older and she didn't think she could have more babies, she hadn't kept anything from the boys in their tiny home. After spending time in the baby store, however, it was clear that Bambi would have a substantial pool of supplies to start her out. And as she left carrying a tub of clothing, two Stanton volunteers followed, each with their arms full of baby necessities too. "We are going to go get her some maternity clothes next," Swindell told me after Bambi drove off.

Going beyond pregnancy tests and baby booties is characteristic of Swindell, according to Promise Salwei, who is not only her assistant but was once a client. Salwei, who volunteered with Generation Life when she was a teen, had been living in Alaska when she got pregnant unexpectedly at age 25. She originally decided to have an abortion, but the nearest clinic was four hours away and she couldn't get in for a week. After a few days of waiting and a conversation with a friend who also was pregnant, Salwei decided to tell her mother about her own pregnancy, and shortly after, she called Swindell to see if she could get services through Stanton. Salwei moved back to Boise and started getting prenatal care at the clinic when she was 5.5 months along. Less than a year after Salwei gave birth, Swindell asked her to come work for the organization as her assistant.

As both a patient and employee at Stanton, Salwei has been able to witness firsthand how Stanton has evolved from a pregnancy center to a women's health center, and why that change has been so necessary to the reproductive health care landscape locally. "Can I share about the cysts?" Salwei asked Swindell.

"Oh yeah, you can," Swindell responded.

Salwei told me about a time the nurse practitioner at Stanton was performing practice ultrasounds on the staff as a way to train, and she decided to offer to play "patient" since she had been experiencing severe pain but had put off seeing a doctor because it would be expensive. The nurse saw what she believed was a cyst and suggested Salwei follow up to take care of it. "It saved me a lot of money coming here, and even though they couldn't diagnose me, I was able to go to my doctor and I ended up having surgery and having five cysts taken off my ovary," said Salwei.

"But we can diagnose now," Swindell added. "We have a medical person that specializes in women's care."

"We Hope to Be Like Margaret Sanger"

Upgrading staff to be able to provide direct medical care - STI testing, diagnostic ultrasounds not just for pregnancy but issues like cysts and even mammography if a partnership with a local hospital in the works for the fall comes to fruition as Swindell hopes - are all key components for Stanton to be more than a pregnancy center, but a fuller women's reproductive health organization.

"We hope to be much like Margaret Sanger was, a revolutionary of her time," Swindell said, referring to the founder of Planned Parenthood, whom most of the pro-life movement vilifies. "I know, can you believe I'm using her?" she said, pointing to the irony. "We want to be that revolutionary. We want to be that almost countercultural. Once this headquarters is built in Meridian [a Boise suburb], it will become the primary flagship."

Her Meridian, Idaho, "flagship," which is expected to open in spring 2017, will be located on one of a set of two plots of land, both purposefully bordering the current Meridian Planned Parenthood clinic that opened in 2013. "I came out here and was looking at things and looking at space and this and that," Swindell said. "I started praying, a group of us started praying, and we realized that this lot was for sale. We thought, Man, would it be that someday we would have a center here? Our whole approach is again accessibility, making sure that women have access, and so it makes sense." On one lot, Stanton is preparing to break ground for a 7,000-square-foot building to house their medical care center, their parental education center, and their 18-month "Wellness Program" for new mothers and their babies. The other lot's use is yet to be determined.

The Meridian site will be the model for Stanton's upper-tier medical centers, the ones that offer ultrasound, pregnancy confirmation, uterine and ovarian diagnostics, STI testing and treatment, prenatal care and postnatal follow-up, and occasional mammography. It will also be the meeting place for developing new affiliates like the Detroit center currently looking for a space to purchase. There are already affiliates in Idaho, North Carolina, and Alabama, and an international Stanton in Belfast, Ireland, just down the street from a Marie Stopes, an international abortion and family planning agency. Based on their plans for growth, Swindell expects to have 30 Stanton affiliates operating within 18 months of the Meridian flagship's opening, and add 15 to 20 new clinics per year afterward. While some of the Stanton clinics opening their doors will be the full-fledged medical models like the Meridian and Boise sites, others will be able to identify as a Stanton clinic on a smaller scale, either with more limited medical services, by launching mobile centers in remote areas, or even as a doctor taking referrals and using his or her own office as a part-time clinic so patients can access care.

Obtaining any hormonal contraception or condoms will be off the table at all of them, however. According to Swindell, who believes many forms of birth control may be abortifacients that interfere with allowing a fertilized egg to implant, hormonal birth control and especially the birth control pill may be less appealing to a new generation of women and girls more interested in natural and holistic ways to address their health. If so, that would be a dramatic shift. According to the CDC, which has tracked birth control usage for decades, hormonal birth control popularity has always remained essentially unchanged.

Rather than hormonal birth control and barrier options, Swindell and her staff instead plan to offer fertility-tracking classes and promote "sexual integrity," an updated version of abstinence-only that is meant to be less negative and "shame"-based toward sex and instead promotes a "personal, positive and pro-active life-style that empowers the recipient to make well informed decisions in sexual matters now and in the future."

"There's this pressure that women have to go on the birth control pill. I have to tell you, it's a very empowering when you realize, 'I don't have to put that synthetic hormone in my body. I don't have to be chained to the birth control pill,'" she said. "There's a movement of people for whom the birth control pill isn't organic, it's not green, it's not holistic. We think we're going to fill another niche or a gap that's lacking, actually, at clinics like Planned Parenthood."

But fertility tracking and abstinence can't be the only options, says Ginny Ehrlich, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "Where we would probably have common ground with this group is we want to reduce teen births. But the data shows the way to do that is to make contraception available to teens and young women," Ehrlich said. "Our position is that women should have access to the full range of contraceptive methods within 60 minutes of where they live. A part of that full range of methods is natural family planning. But natural family planning in and of itself is not full range."

Still, Swindell says if a person really feels she must use contraception, there are plenty of places to get it besides at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

"Our position is clear, we don't think women should be going to Planned Parenthood for any reason," Swindell said. "I really think that it's a myth that people think that Planned Parenthood is the only place to get that. It's not. Our recommendation is that women should not be going to Planned Parenthood for any of their health-care needs whatsoever."

"We Don't Have Enough Health-Care Providers"

Hannah Brass Greer, Idaho legislative director at Planned Parenthood Votes Northwest and Hawaii, tells me she agrees with Swindell that there is a crisis in access to health care for the low-income and uninsured in the state. Where she disagrees is the idea that Planned Parenthood isn't needed in order to address it.

"We don't have enough health-care providers in general, and that includes family-planning providers," Brass Greer said as we sat together at the table in a conference room at Planned Parenthood's Meridian affiliate. Through the window, I could easily catch a glance at some of the land that Stanton now owns.

Like Stanton, Planned Parenthood is also seeing patients who remain uninsured because Medicaid wasn't expanded in the state. These uninsured and often low-income clients need not just a variety of services, but financial assistance they cannot get from a regular doctor or medical center. "There are about 80,000 patients [in Idaho], at least, that fall into that gap," Brass Greer explained. "We have funds to help them. That's not available at all the other providers in this state, even the ones that do offer family planning. Closing Planned Parenthood would jeopardize the over 7,400 patients [our Idaho clinics] saw last year, but also the people that we're getting to now through our online health services."

While Stanton Healthcare may see closing Planned Parenthood as a goal for their organization, Rebecca Poedy, chief operating officer of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and Hawaiian Islands, does not feel the same about Stanton. Rather, she believes that more centers offering reproductive health services benefit everyone, as long as those services meet professional, high standards. "We want to bring people in our doors because we know we give high-quality, nonjudgmental health care. I think that's why people pick Planned Parenthood," she said. "With that said, we are not in every small town across this state. If there are other health centers that are providing the same quality care that is nonjudgmental, I am happy to have other health centers in this state. If Stanton meets those standards, fantastic. I don't think Planned Parenthood is in the business of trying to shut down any health centers that are providing access to health care around the state when we desperately need it."

Ehrlich, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, also sees benefit to new options for women's health care, especially in rural and remote areas like Stanton is addressing, but she says women need access to contraception as well and ideally should be able to get it in one visit.

"What we know is that women who are living on limited incomes and perhaps are working one or two jobs probably have a time and a financial barrier for going to multiple places for their health care," said Ehrlich. "Women having access to the full range of contraceptive methods, whereby they could make a decision about what's best for them, would be the most optimal choice."

Though Swindell is setting her organization up as the alternative to Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood currently does not have to worry about Stanton as a threat to its funding, at least, not at a local level. In Idaho, no state funding goes to Planned Parenthood anyway. And Title X, the federal program that has provided funding for family planning and preventive health services since 1970, requires anyone who receives federal dollars offer a range of FDA-approved birth control methods, something Stanton chooses not to do.

"We are not competing in the state of Idaho, specifically, for any other state funding," said Planned Parenthood's Poedy. "We don't get any other state funding. We are a provider of services to Medicaid patients. We get reimbursed for those services and that's it. There is no funding pool that we are fighting over."

"Planned Parenthood Is the Goliath"

This doesn't mean Swindell hasn't found ways to raise money for her organization on her own. With roughly $960,000 in donations, grants, and other income during 2014 and 2015, and a business plan to have as many as 100 new centers globally by 2025, Swindell believes she could very well eventually squeeze out and replace Planned Parenthood.

In reality, however, it may not be so simple. With more than 700 Planned Parenthood health-care centers in the United States alone, serving approximately 2.8 million patients each year, even if Stanton did grow at a rate of 20 a year, it would take 35 years to grow its network large enough to replace the organization on its own. Meanwhile, it must also compete with other burgeoning new pro-life medical centers hoping to vie as non-abortion alternatives for women's reproductive health care. One major competitor is California's Obria Medical Clinics, which has now partnered with The Guiding Star Project - another newly launched pro-life, natural-fertility-embracing health-care organization - in an effort to expand their own affiliated "holistic" women's health centers across the country.

Situations like this partnership or other pregnancy centers efforts to revamp themselves as medical centers highlight the biggest struggle facing the pro-life movement's effort to replace Planned Parenthood - the inability to coalesce around one "brand" to build. Lucky for Swindell, some movement leaders believe Stanton Healthcare could be one of their best options.

"What Brandi is doing is creating an actual alternative. Not just resources, but a medically viable alternative, and that's really what we need," Tina Whittington, executive vice president of Students for Life of America (SFLA), said. The country's largest anti-abortion youth group, SFLA has been aggressively targeting Planned Parenthood with their "Women Betrayed" bus tour, with anti-Planned Parenthood actions on college campuses, and by organizing local Planned Parenthood protests across the nation.

"We know that Planned Parenthood is the Goliath of the other side," Whittington said. "We need to look at what they offer that we can, too, and I think that's really what Brandi's done. She has the model down, she has the business plan, she is smart, she is savvy, and she's high-passion. She has created something that has longevity and is replicable, and I think that's the big thing."

It took just 10 years for Brandi Swindell to grow Stanton Healthcare from one small-scale crisis pregnancy center into a flourishing network of centers and affiliates in five states plus Northern Ireland, and her ambitious goal to be the pro-life movement's Planned Parenthood alternative is well underway. Will she actually replace the nation's largest reproductive health-care provider? It seems highly unlikely, but even if she doesn't, she will make it clear that the Stanton "Revolution" cannot be ignored.

"When we say Stanton Revolution, we really believe it," Swindell said "This model and this approach is working. It just makes sense and the timing's right. People are hungry for it."

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

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While many celebrities have reacted to the shocking murder of 49 people at Orlando's gay nightclub Pulse with thoughts, prayers and love, Melissa Etheridge did what comes naturally to her: she wrote a song. The out rocker released "Pulse" on Wednesday, an urgent, emotional anthem with a simple, powerful message that seeks to find unity where some would look to divide: "I am human, I am love/ And my heart beats in my blood/ Love will always win, underneath the skin/ Everybody's got a pulse."

Commenting on an act that has been tagged as both terrorism and an attack on the LGBTQ community, Etheridge's song falls firmly in the tradition of such folk forebearers as Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie by taking events ripped from the headlines and putting a universal, human face on them.

Paul McCartney, Demi Lovato Pay Tribute to Orlando Pulse Victims

"Everybody's got a pain inside/ Imaginary wounds they fight to hide/ How can I hate them, when everybody's got a pulse?," Etheridge sings in her signature rasp on the song you can listen to on Rolling Stone. She told The Advocate that she penned the track while on tour because she was moved by both the tragedy and people's reaction to it.

From my window @FreedomTowerNY is lit up rainbow as I am writing a song ... #Pulse #Loveislove #Orlando pic.twitter.com/wu2PnSGVac

- Melissa Etheridge (@metheridge) June 13, 2016

"I found myself roaming around my apartment," she told the gay publication. "I knew that would make me feel better, and I just started writing... I get so moved by so many things, not just the sadness of tragedy. I also get moved by how we react. Unfortunately, it takes a hideous event like this, but sometimes it brings people together and moves others who might have been like, 'That gay thing is not anything I'm concerned about.' It moves them and they think, I have to stand on the side of love and peace."

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Audra McDonald, Lin-Manuel Miranda & More Broadway Stars Recording Song to Benefit Orlando Victims

At one point in the four-and-a-half minute track she appears to address the 29-year-old shooter, who also injured 53 during the hours-long spree on Sunday, asking, "Who you gonna hate now?/ When there's no one left but you?/ Who you gonna gun down?/ If you can't kill the truth that it's inside of us/ Inside our blood, inside our pulse."

After recording the song Etheridge said she found out that one of the women killed in the shooting, bouncer Kimberly Morris, was from Torrington, Connecticut, where the songwriter was slated to play on Wednesday night. At the show, she dedicated "Pulse" to Morris.

Etheridge will offer the song for sale soon, with proceeds going to Equality Florida.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican billionaire telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim launched a program on Wednesday to collect used smartphones and donate them to schools, in order to provide students free access to educational materials.

Slim, who controls telecoms giant America Movil, said at an event the firm would offer free wireless broadband access to whoever accessed contents on its website Aprende.org, whose offerings range from elementary math to university courses.

The businessman said he was looking to create a secondary market for smartphones used for a year or two, "giving them an economic value," and then passing them on for free to public schools.

The firm plans to offer its clients a 500-peso credit ($26) for each smartphone returned in good condition, Slim said.

He added that he hoped his competitors in Mexico, which include Spain's Telefonica and U.S.-based AT&T, followed his lead in offering free access to educational materials.

(Reporting by Tomas Sarmiento; Writing by Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Ottawa (AFP) - Canada's parliament on Thursday observed a minute of silence in memory of British MP Jo Cox, who was killed in a shock daylight street attack.

The gesture of respect was held at the opening of Question Period in the House of Commons, and was preceded by a tribute to Cox by opposition MP Nathan Cullen.

"A mom of two beautiful children, a friend, a dedicated Labour MP, a long advocate of human rights in Britain and around the world was murdered today," he said, fighting back tears.

"Jo used her voice for those who have none, she dedicated her passion to those who needed it most. She harnessed her love even for those who (allowed) hate to consume them."

The killing of Jo Cox, 41, in Birstall in northern England has thrown campaigning for the referendum on Britain's EU membership into disarray just a week before the crucial vote.

Cox was a campaigner for Britain to remain in the European Union.

Sky News television quoted unconfirmed reports that the shooter shouted "Britain first."
A Hong Kong bookseller known for selling titles critical of Beijing told Thursday how he was blindfolded, kept in a cell and interrogated by Chinese authorities after going missing eight months ago.

Lam Wing-kee is one of five booksellers who published salacious titles about leading Chinese politicians and disappeared at the end of last year in a case that heightened fears Beijing was tightening its grip on Hong Kong.

He said that although he was not physically harmed, he had suffered mentally in detention and was unable to contact a lawyer or his family. He was kept in confinement, unable to walk outside and repeatedly interrogated.

The booksellers' case has sparked international condemnation.

Lam is the only bookseller to have spoken openly and said the case had "violated the rights of Hong Kong people".

He described how a confession he gave to Chinese state television about trading banned books was forced.

"I acted in front of the camera, I needed to. There was a director. I had to recite the script," he said.

"I was in fear. I felt helpless. I didn't know what they would do to me."

He was supposed to return to the mainland Thursday after being released to Hong Kong on bail Tuesday, he told reporters.

However, he decided not to go back and instead to speak out about his case after learning of the support the booksellers had received from the Hong Kong public.

Pro-democracy campaigners announced they would demonstrate against the detention of the booksellers on Friday morning outside mainland China's office in Hong Kong.

Lam said he had spent two sleepless nights making the decision to speak.

"If I don't speak up Hong Kong will be hopeless. It's not just a personal matter," he said.

"I dare not go back."

He added that while in custody he had been told that his case was being dealt with by a "special unit" which he believed was not part of the ordinary police or military.

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- Fear of selling out -

The condition of his bail was to bring back a list of 600 customers, the majority of them from the mainland, who had received books from the Causeway Bay Bookstore that he managed.

Lam said he did not want to comply for fear that it would be seen as selling out the readers.

He struggled to contain his emotions as he gave a detailed description of his detention and how he was forced to sign a document giving up his right to a lawyer or to speak to his family.

Lam said he was arrested after crossing the border from Hong Kong into the southern mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen in October to see his girlfriend, but was not told why.

He was blindfolded and taken by train to the city of Ningbo, where he was kept in a 200-square-feet room for five months under guard. He was then moved to an apartment.

It was only some time after he was first detained that he was told his detention was related to bringing banned books into the mainland.

All but one of the booksellers have been allowed to return to Hong Kong on bail but have swiftly gone back over the border, apart from Lam.

The case of bookseller Lee Bo caused the greatest outcry as he was the only one to disappear from Hong Kong, leading to accusations that mainland law enforcement agents were operating illegally in the city.

Lee has insisted he is a free man just helping the authorities with their investigation.

But Lam said Lee had told him he had been brought to the mainland against his will.

The men all worked for the Mighty Current publishing house, which produced books about political intrigue and love affairs at the highest levels of Chinese politics.

Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997 and enjoys far greater liberties than in mainland China, but there are fears these are being eroded.
(Adds transaction details, statement from Monsanto, byline)

By Karl Plume

June 16 (Reuters) - U.S. seed and agrochemicals company Monsanto Co said on Thursday it is selling its U.S. sorghum production assets to Remington Holding Co LLC and will roll its sorghum breeding business into a joint venture with the privately held company, in transactions valued at about $169.5 million.

Monsanto's global sorghum breeding business will be a part of the joint venture called Innovative Seed Solutions LLC, which will initially be focused on sorghum, a drought-tolerant grain crop that is used as animal feed and to produce ethanol biofuel. Remington will contribute cash to the venture.

The move comes in a period of heightened dealmaking in the agricultural seeds and chemicals industry. Monsanto last month rejected an unsolicited $62 billion takeover bid by Germany's Bayer AG, but the companies have since met to try to negotiate a deal.

The sorghum transaction is Monsanto's first spin-off of an entire crop space since the sale of its sunflower seeds unit to Syngenta in 2009, a Monsanto spokesman said.

It is unclear how the deal could impact any negotiations with Bayer. Monsanto declined to comment on how long it had been negotiating the sorghum deal with Remington.

A Remington subsidiary will take full ownership of Monsanto's U.S. sorghum production facility in Dumas, Texas. Monsanto will assume a 40 percent stake in the joint venture, with Remington owning the remaining share.

"We recognize that our sorghum business has great potential to expand and grow both domestically and internationally," Mike Frank, Monsanto's chief commercial officer, said in a statement. "We believe by partnering with Remington in the joint venture, we can bring an increased level of focus, investment and resources into this crop space."

Remington could not be immediately reached for comment.

Innovative Seed Solutions LLC will be governed by an operational board including senior executives from both companies, with Monsanto veteran Dan Zinck as its chief executive.

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Monsanto will continue to sell sorghum seeds via its Asgrow, Dekalb and Channel seed brands and through regional seed dealer networks.

The company said it expects the deal to close after regulatory approval.

Monsanto shares were up about 0.9 percent on Thursday at $108.61 a share.

(Reporting by Karl Plume in Chicag, additional reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Andrew Hay)
By Nidhi Verma

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's monsoon is expected to dump above-average rainfall on the South Asian nation after two years of drought, cutting its use of diesel for irrigation pumps and generators over the third quarter and potentially rejuvenating exports of the oil product.

India is a net exporter of diesel - which accounts for about 40 percent of its oil demand - but a jump in imports by state refiners since April helped erode an Asian surplus of the fuel, lifting its regional profit margins to the highest for the year so far at the end of May.

The state refiners ramped up diesel imports in the second quarter after supplies from private oil processors Reliance Industries and Essar Oil became too expensive in the absence of discounts on taxes and shipping.

Now, as the rains come and domestic demand drops, diesel imports could halt and exports rebound.

"During the monsoon demand for diesel sees a blip (down) because industrial activity slows, transport movement gets affected and demand from agriculture also reduces," said Tushar Bansal, a Singapore-based senior consultant at energy consultancy FGE.

India's weather office has forecast above-average rains in the four-month season from June. The monsoon rains are crucial for India's farmers, which otherwise use diesel-powered pump-sets to draw water to irrigate their land.

Officials at Indian state refiners, which dominate the local retail fuel markets, said they also see diesel demand softening during the monsoon season.

"Major construction activities including road construction virtually stops during rains, so there is bound to be an impact on diesel demand," said Y. K. Gawali, head of marketing at Hindustan Petroleum Corp.

More rain also boosts hydropower generation alleviating electricity shortages and reducing demand for diesel to power small diesel generators to keep lights burning.

"We have seen very high diesel demand in April-May. In June also it is rising. But I expect diesel demand (in the third quarter) to be 50 percent of the April-June quarter," Gawali said.

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A sustained rise in diesel prices as oil markets recover this year is also putting further pressure on diesel demand.

Diesel-fuelled vehicles - which were supposed to one of the driving forces behind rising consumption in India - are as well faced with court bans over pollution concerns, prompting some automakers to redraw engine production strategies.

Lower diesel consumption means state refiners will take less from private and standalone refiners such as Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd and Chennai Petroleum Corp Ltd to meet demand.

"To that extent diesel exports will go up. Refiners normally don't take maintenance shutdown during rains so output is normally higher and that also boosts exports," Gawali said.

Last year, India's diesel demand grew at an annual 8 percent during the July-September quarter, according to data posted on a government website.

This year, FGE estimates, annual diesel demand for the third quarter could grow just around 1 percent from a year ago to about 1.4 million barrels per day.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma in NEW DELHI; Additional reporting by Florence Tan in SINGAPORE; Editing by Tom Hogue)
(Adds background on Sherk, Morgan Stanley's commodities business)

By Olivia Oran

June 16 (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley global commodities group co-head Peter Sherk is leaving the firm, the bank said Thursday in a memo.

Nancy King, who co-heads the business, will become sole head. A Morgan Stanley spokesman confirmed the contents in the memo.

Sherk's departure comes as Morgan Stanley is moving away from riskier parts of the commodities business, like owning and storing oil. Post-crisis regulations and a desire to take less risk have shifted the bank's commodities operation into a more traditional trading business in which the bank stands between buyers and sellers. It is also lending to energy companies and issuing derivatives that allow clients to hedge market risk.

Morgan Stanley is in the process of moving the commodities group, which had been housed in Purchase, New York for more than a decade, to its Times Square headquarters where it can be more connected with the rest of the firm's fixed income unit.

Sherk and King were named co-heads of commodities in January 2015 after former co-head Simon Greenshields left the firm and his counterpart Colin Bryce moved to a senior advisory role.

Sherk joined Morgan Stanley in 1999 as a natural gas trader. He helped build the bank's North American power and gas practice, rising to become head of natural gas trading in 2006 and head of North American power and gas trading and origination two years later.

King, who joined Morgan Stanley in 1986 as an oil and natural gas trader, will become part of the fixed income operating committee in her new role.

Separately, commodities chief operating officer Martin Mitchell is also leaving Morgan Stanley, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Last November, Morgan Stanley completed the sale of its physical oil business to commodity trading firm Castleton Commodities, after the U.S. Federal Reserve pressured Wall Street banks to get out of that type of business.

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The transaction ended Morgan Stanley's three-decade history as a major player in physical oil markets.

Morgan Stanley also sold its controlling stake in oil storage business TransMontaigne to NGL Energy Partners LP in 2014.

(Reporting by Olivia Oran in New York; Editing by Andrew Hay)
Its election season in Australia, and the 71-year-old independent parliamentarian Bob Katter seems very keen on propounding his nationalist views. So keen, in fact, that hes willing to kill for them, or so he suggests in a new campaign ad that was meant as a joke but has nevertheless deeply disturbed the Australian electorate.

The ad begins with two masked men  one representing the right-leaning Liberal Party of Australia, which is currently in power; the other representing the Australian Labor Party, its opposition  planting in the earth a sign declaring Australia for Sale. Cut, then, to Bob Katter, in a 10-gallon hat, crudely painting the word Not on the sign, then blowing smoke from the muzzle of a pistol and leering to the camera.

We then pan out and see that Katter has shot the two other men dead.

The conservative Katter is a notorious figure in Australian politics, one who believes there are no homosexuals in his home district and who thinks the best shelf space in the countrys supermarkets should be reserved for Australian goods. His new ad has drawn the ire of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who said it was in the worst of taste, according to the BBC. Katter says he thinks its brilliant and screamingly funny.

Many Australians say the ad is abhorrent, coming so soon after the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., that made headlines around the world  but Katter says he didnt hear about the atrocity.

I dont know whats going on the media, he said in a television interview quoted by the Guardian. I dont watch television. I get to bed at midnight every night. I dont read newspapers.
In May, we wrote about 13-year-old Ali Chaney of Texas, who was reprimanded by school officials for proudly wearing a T-shirt that read, Some people are gay. Get over it! While the school deemed the message disruptive, Chaneys mom vocally supported her lesbian daughters right to express herself, as did a slew of commenters on social media, as well as Lambda Legal.

And now comes this twisted update: an antigay Facebook message sent to Chaneys mom, Cassie Watson, apparently from the account of a local elementary school teacher, warning that the teen could be the next victim of an Orlando-style massacre.

In light of the Orlando incident wear all gay people were openly slaughtered, I wonder if youd still let your daughter wear the t-shirt to school that caused public controversy and may have subjected her to possible harm by others? read the message, which was sent to Watson at 4:53 a.m. on Monday. Being gay isnt a crime but publicly forcing your opinion upon others, and to do it through your child at school, will always be offensive to others.

The message  which referenced the tragic June 12 massacre in which a gunman killed 49 revelers at the LGBT nightclub Pulse  came from the account of Janice Williams, an elementary teacher in the neighboring Killeen, Texas, school district, about 10 miles away from Chaneys middle school in Copperas Cove. After the message was reported by KCEN, however, Williams provided a statement to the news station claiming that her Facebook account had been hacked.

My FB account was hacked yesterday and I was not responsible for the message sent to the lady causing her to believe that her child would be harmed. It took several attempts to delete the account after notifying FB that my account had been hacked. I have lived my life protecting the rights of others and being an advocate for ALL children. Im saddened that a hacker can cause such negativity and division among so many people. Please give my sincerest apology to this woman and her child. Thank you.

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Williams did not return an email request for comment from Yahoo Style.

A Facebook spokesperson told Yahoo Style that the company does not comment on individual accounts  nor would he comment on any general characteristics of what a hacked account would look like.

Watson, who posted a screenshot of the message on her own Facebook page on Monday, did so along with the caption Interesting to wake up to. Then KCEN reported Williamss claim that her account had been hacked, which Watson posted, inspiring commenters to chime in with thoughts including Total BS, You have got to be kidding,  she realized she messed up and is now scared as hell, and She is just trying to save her job!! As for Watsons take? She told KCEN the following: I would hate to ruin somebodys career over a simple message. But if this is how she truly feels, and there is a possibility that she could be teaching our young kids these lessons, then I absolutely believe that she may need to find a new profession.

Read this next: How the Orlando Shootings Affect the LGBT Community

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By Alan Baldwin BAKU, June 16 (Reuters) - Formula One will race in Baku with a clear conscience this weekend, the sport's commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone said on Thursday in response to questions about human rights in Azerbaijan. "Absolutely. 100 percent," he told reporters ahead of the European Grand Prix, the first to be held in the former Soviet republic. Various European bodies and human rights groups have accused Azeri President Ilham Aliyev of muzzling dissent and jailing opponents, charges that Baku denies. Rights groups including Amnesty International have also urged Ecclestone to call publicly for the freeing of all prisoners of conscience. "The minute people tell me what human rights are, then you can have a look at them and see how and when and where it applies. Do any of you know what human rights are?," said Ecclestone. After reporters raised some of the issues, also mentioning corruption, Ecclestone replied: "I tell you what we ought to do. As far as we are concerned, not have any races where there is corruption in the country. Can you tell me where we are going to be racing?" Senior members of Formula One management, but not Ecclestone, met campaigners in London last week and the Briton said the Azerbaijan authorities had given an assurance that "they are looking into all these things. "Certainly while we are here none of you guys will be in trouble and you can write what you want," he added. Known for flippant and sometimes incendiary remarks, Ecclestone had responded to an earlier question about journalists being imprisoned for criticising the government by saying: "So they should. Depends what they say. You say they write negative things. Depends what they write." Baku's street circuit has won positive reviews from teams and drivers who were inspecting it on Thursday, some even running in the heat. The layout incorporates the medieval walls of the old fortress and a long high-speed blast along the shores of the Caspian Sea. "I think they've done a fantastic job," said Ecclestone. "When I laid it out in the first place I was told I was mad, trying to get the old city and the new city together. It looks like it's worked alright." He said the promoters had a seven year deal, with options. Asked whether they would see it out, with Azerbaijan suffering from the slump in oil prices, he replied: "I think there's more chance of them doing seven years than me doing seven years." (Reporting by Alan Baldwin; Editing by Toby Chopra)
Pouring cold water on high hopes,MSCI Inc. MSCI, the key provider of global equity indexes, announced that it would hold the addition of Chinese A shares in its emerging market index due to persistent concerns pertaining to the Chinese economy and lack of accessibility.

This is not the first time that MSCI has rejected A-Shares. Last year the index provider had done the same. MSCI surprised the market before when it denied the entry of China A-shares to its emerging market index in 2015 and 2014 (read: Emerging Market ETFs in Focus on MSCI Index Review).

What Are AShares?

Investors should note that A Shares are defined as the common stocks issued by companies based in mainland China and are traded in renminbi (RMB) on the Shenzhen or Shanghai Stock Exchanges.

Initially, the China A-Shares market was not allowed to many foreign investors, but it is slowly beginning to open up. The launch of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program, which allows direct trading of Shanghai shares by investors outside mainland China, boosted the appeal for China-A shares in recent times.

What Keeps MSCI from Including A-Shares?

MSCI intends to see more accessibilityof the China A shares market before the inclusion. MSCI said"in keeping with its standard practice, MSCI will monitor the implementation of the recently announced policy changes and will seek feedback from market participants."

The index provider also indicated that investors need to judge the efficacy of the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor program (QFII) investment quota allocation, capital mobility policy changes and the effectiveness of the new trading suspension policies, as noted by CNBC.

In 2015, issues overthe allocation of investing quotas for large investors and limits in capital mobility led MSCI to not add A-Shares. Prior to that, MSCI found the quota was too limited to deserve an insertion into the conventional index.

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Is There Hope?

However, MSCI also noted that it will continue monitoring China A-shares market and keep them on hold for consideration in the 2017 review. Moreover, it gave hints of the possible off-cycle inclusion if major positive developments happen before June 2017, per CNBC.

Goldman Sounds Relatively Bullish on A-Shares

First of all, Goldman Sachs upped its estimated probability for MSCI inclusion from 50% to 70% a few days back, as per barrons.com. Also, Goldman is hopeful of the launch of a new stock trading link between Hong Kong and Shenzhen as soon as in 4Q16. Goldman even believes that a special review is possible before June 2017. However, Goldman agreed that there are issues raised by MSCI yet to be sorted out at the Chinese regulators end (read: China ETF Investing: Will it Buoy up or Dip Down in 2016?).

HSBC also calls the MSCI decision a negative surprise. Citigroup had projected a 51% chance of A-Shares getting a nod from MSCI and finally was caught off guard. And BlackRock Inc. has brought about its first U.S.-listed exchange-traded fund to offer investors exposure to A shares, just a day after MSCI put it down.

Market Impact

According to investors, now that MSCI has rejected A-Shares, the Chinese government would act fast to get the eligibility next time. So, shrugging off initial jerks received by the MSCI, A-Shares recovered on hopes that whatever loopholes there are in A-Shares market now, will be fixed soon to get an elite status.

A-Shares ETFs in Focus

Foreign investors can access this market through the ETF form. Deutsche X-trackers Harvest CSI 500 China-A Shares Small Cap ETFASHS, VanEck Vectors ChinaAMC SME-ChiNext ETF CNXT, Deutsche X-trackers Harvest CSI 300 China A-Shares ETF ASHR and VanEck Vectors ChinaAMC CSI 300 ETF PEK are some of the A-shares ETFs that scored gains in the last two trading sessions (as of June 15, 2016). ASHS, CNXT, ASHR and PEK added about 3.4%, 3.3%, 1.54% and 1.3% in the last two trading sessions (as of June 15, 2016) (see all Asia-Pacific (Emerging) ETFshere).

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Jo Cox, the member of British Parliament who was killed Thursday, was an outspoken humanitarian, who advocated for refugees and for the U.K. to take a more active role in the crisis in Syria.

On May 3, Cox called an Urgent Questio in Parliament, and made a moving speech in favor of protecting Syrian civilians. Watch the speech in the video above to see her urge British lawmakers to hold Syria, Russia and the U.K. itself accountable for their actions.

On refugees, given the escalation of the violence violence in Aleppo and lack of medical care available there now, what further can the U.K. do to get the most vulnerable people out of harms way? Cox asked. And surely, given what we know about the horror that many of the refugee children in Europe have fled, isnt it time to end the governments shameful refusal to give 3,000 unaccompanied children sanctuary here in the U.K.?

She also asked why Britain could join forces with other European countries to airdrop food to starving civilians, as well as whether the U.K. should impose sanctions on Russia for its role in the violence.

I dont believe that either President Obama or the Prime Minister tried to do harm in Syria, but as is said Mister Speaker: Sometimes all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.'
Lyon (AFP) - Northern Ireland beat Ukraine 2-0 in a Group C at Euro 2016 on Thursday thanks to a powerful header just after half-time from Gareth McAulay and an injury-time goal from Niall McGinn.

The result in a match interrupted by a hailstorm on Lyon gives the Northern Irish fresh hope of reaching the last 16, although they face world champions Germany in their final group match.
Rhapsody/Napster

Years after it pulled the first block out of the music industrys Jenga tower, Napster is coming back. But if you think this means were all going to be downloading mislabeled reggae songs (these cant all be Bob Marley, they just cant be) at blistering 56K speeds, think again. The Napster mantle has merely been snapped up by the somehow still-operational streaming service Rhapsody.

The OG streaming platform announced the name change, which comes with Napsters iconic creepy cat logo, in a blog post on their website.

Related Links:





No changes to your playlists, favorites, albums, and artists. Same music. Same service. Same price, they wrote. 100% the music you love. Stay tuned!

To most people, the move is a bit like VHS rebranding as BetaMax  or more accurately, Walkman rebranding as a boombox used to rip songs off the radio  but they forget that Napster did attempt to go legit once before. The notorious piracy platform morphed into an online music store in the mid-00s and was the iTunes to Samsungs line of mp3 players for quite a while.

Rhapsody purchased the platform all the way back in 2011 and hopes that the rebrand will lead to better name recognition worldwide. Surprisingly, the service still has 3.5 million subscribers and actually grew its subscriber base by 35 percent last year.

(Via The Verge)
BERLIN (Reuters) - NATO may react to future cyber attacks by deploying conventional weapons, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview published by Germany's Bild newspaper on Thursday.

"A severe cyber attack may be classified as a case for the alliance. Then NATO can and must react," the newspaper quoted Stoltenberg as saying. "How, that will depend on the severity of the attack."

The NATO chief told the newspaper that the alliance needed to adjust to the increasingly complex series of threats it faces, which is why NATO members have agreed to defend against attacks in cyberspace just as they do against attacks launched against targets on land, in the air and at sea.

NATO members are expected to agree at their upcoming summit in Warsaw to designate cyber as an official operational domain of warfare, along with air, sea, land and space.

Individual members have already made similar announcements, including the United States, which said in 2011 that it would respond to hostile attacks in cyberspace as it would to any other threat.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Dan Grebler)
On Jun 15, 2016, we issued an updated research report on Navistar International Corporation NAV. The company continues to gain from its cost-saving initiatives and new product launches. However, economic uncertainties prevailing in Brazil are likely to impact its profits.



Navistar reported second-quarter fiscal 2016 (ended Apr 30, 2016) earnings of 5 cents per share, as against adjusted net loss of 57 cents per share recorded in the year-ago quarter. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the reported quarter was of a loss of 18 cents per share. Results benefited from continued progress in business operations and initiatives to effectively manage costs, partially offset by lower Class 8 truck volumes.



Navistars revenues fell 18% year over year to $2.19 billion in the quarter, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.24 billion. The decline in the top line can be attributed to lower volumes in the company's Core U.S. and Canadian markets, and lower engine volumes in Brazil.



Navistar expects adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization), excluding pre-existing warranty and one-time items, for fiscal 2016 in the band of $550$600 million, higher than $494 million recorded in fiscal 2015. Further, sales volume of the medium-duty trucks, school bus and severe service segments are expected to improve. Navistar is also poised to benefit from cost-saving initiatives like engine restructuring and reductions in discretionary spending and employee headcount. In fiscal 2016, the company targets $200 million reduction in structural and product costs.



Additionally, Navistar is benefiting from the launch of new products, which boast improved quality and performance, together with its expansion strategies. In Jun 2016, Navistar signed an agreement with General Motors Company GM per which it will produce the cutaway model of the latters G Van at the Springfield, OH plant from the first half of 2017. It will also recommission its second line at the plant.



However, Navistar projects Class 68 retail deliveries in the U.S. and Canada in the range of 330,000360,000 units for fiscal 2016, down from the previous forecast of 350,000380,000 units as well as 388,600 units recorded in fiscal 2015. Class 8 deliveries should be in the range of 220,000250,000 units, down from the previous estimate of 240,000270,000 units, and 279,000 units in fiscal 2015. As a result, revenues are expected in the band of $8.2$8.6 billion for fiscal 2016, lower than both the previous projection of $9$9.25 billion and the fiscal 2015 level of $10.1 billion. Given the current market conditions, the company no longer expects to be profitable for the full year. In addition, Navistars results are being adversely affected by lower volumes in Brazil, resulting from economic uncertainties.

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NAVISTAR INTL Price and Consensus

NAVISTAR INTL Price and Consensus | NAVISTAR INTL Quote

Zacks Rank



Currently, the company carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).



Some better-ranked automobile stocks include Lear Corp. LEA and Superior Industries International, Inc. SUP. Both the stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).



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Housewives have each other's backs.



Despite reports that Real Housewives of New Jersey star Joe Giudice is having a difficult time in prison, Leakes shares that his wife Teresa Giudice, who completed her own 11-month prison sentence in December, is staying positive.



Leakes, 48, went out to dinner with Teresa recently when she was visiting Atlanta, but Joe, 44, seemed to be doing well three months into his 41-month prison sentence for fraud.



"Her spirits were very good," Leakes tells PEOPLE. "In fact, while we were together, Joe called. So she talks to Joe all the time, so if he's having a hard time, I'm surprised."









A photo posted by NeNe Leakes (@neneleakes) on May 14, 2016 at 12:22pm PDT



Teresa's lawyer, James J. Leonard Jr., exclusively told PEOPLE that Teresa, 44, and the couple's four daughters haven't been able to visit Joe as much as they wish.



"Where he is, you get a certain number of points every month and each visit counts as a point. Weekend visits are considered more points," Leonard explained. "So because he also has his mother and sister coming to visit, and Teresa can't go during the week because the girls are in school, they're having to do it every other weekend."



Leonard previously said after a visit with Joe early in his sentence that he was "doing as well as can be expected."



"I know that he misses Teresa and their four daughters immensely, but Joe will get through this, just like Teresa did," he said.



With more than two years left in prison for Joe, the only advice Leakes had for Teresa and her family was to pray.



"I feel like prayer changes things," Leakes says. "I've never been through what they're going through, and I can only imagine that must be super tough."





RELATED VIDEO: NeNe Leakes Dishes on Her Role in the Next Season of Real Housewives of Atlanta

Real Housewives of Atlanta" data-ad-channel="peoplenow" data-ad-subchannel="sharethisnow" data-auto-play="no">



As for Leakes, there are rumors that she'll be returning to The Real Housewives of Atlanta full-time.



Although she admits she isn't allowed to spill on her status next season, she isn't going far.



"I try to tell people that I will always be around," she says. "I'm always here for Bravo."



Leakes admits that when the ladies of the reality hit are getting along, they have a great time. However, there are some parts she is happy to leave behind: "I don't miss the bickering."



The Real Housewives of New Jersey returns to Bravo on July 10.
By Joseph Ax (Reuters) - Since his 7-year-old son, Daniel, was gunned down in his elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, 3-1/2 years ago, Mark Barden has been an outspoken advocate for gun control. Time and again, he has watched with disappointment as Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Senate blocked gun control measures, saying they infringed on the right to bear arms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Congress has not passed major gun control legislation since 1994. But in the aftermath of Sunday's rampage in which a U.S.-born gunman claiming allegiance to various Islamist militant groups killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Barden is encouraged the Senate is moving toward a vote on two modest gun control laws next week, even if they fail to pass. "One of the hard lessons I've had to learn in this is that you have to accept any forward motion as a victory," he said in a phone interview. "Even if it's not a 'win,' in terms of legislation that's passed, but if it's generating more conversation - it's agonizingly slow, but the needle is moving." Several family members who lost relatives in the December 2012 Newtown attack, in which a gunman killed 20 young children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, said they were cautiously optimistic the debate over gun control measures had shifted following the Orlando massacre, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S history. Many have spent the years since the Newtown shooting pressing Congress to restrict access to dangerous assault rifles of the type used in mass shootings in Newtown, Orlando and San Bernardino, California. On Thursday, the Senate moved close to a vote on two bills favored by Democrats that would expand background checks for buyers and block individuals on U.S. terrorism watch lists from purchasing firearms. The movement came after U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and fellow Democrats talked on the Senate floor for nearly 15 straight hours to demand that Congress act on gun control. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would meet with the powerful National Rifle Association gun rights lobby to discuss prohibiting people on watch lists from acquiring guns. About 71 percent of Americans, including eight out of 10 Democrats and nearly six out of 10 Republicans, favor at least moderate regulations and restrictions on guns, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from Monday to Thursday. That was up from 60 percent in late 2013 and late 2014. 'CHANGE IS ALREADY HERE' Some Newtown relatives said the mere fact the Senate took up the legislation so quickly after the Orlando attack was a victory. "It took us four months to get to this point after Sandy Hook," said Erica Lafferty Smegielski, whose mother, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School and died in the attack. "It took us four days after Orlando. No matter the outcome, the change is already here." Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed at Sandy Hook, said she believed common-sense gun control was "inevitable" given the growing sense of outrage among Americans following a string of mass shootings. But she acknowledged that progress would be slow and that even the bills currently under consideration were "low-hanging fruit." "Sandy Hook was the start of this change," she said. "I very much believe that Orlando will be the culmination of it." Other families affected by mass shootings have added their voices to the debate. At a news conference on Thursday with Senate Democratic leaders, the Rev. Sharon Risher, whose mother and two cousins were killed in June 2015 by a gunman at a Charleston, South Carolina, church, said gun control could prevent future tragedies. "Hate becomes deadly when we make it far too easy for those intent on causing harm to get their hands on a gun," she said. (Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Additional reporting by Ginger Gibson and Alana Wise in Washington; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Nicole Kidman is in talks to join Colin Farrell in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the psychological thriller from The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Variety first reported during the Cannes Film Festival last month that Farrell had been set to reunite with Lanthimos in the Greek helmers latest project.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is expected to begin shooting in August with Lanthimos re-teamed with co-writer Efthymis Filippou and producers Element Pictures and Film4. Hanway Films was shopping the title to foreign buyers in Cannes.

Farrell will play a successful surgeon who attempts unsuccessfully to integrate an increasingly sinister teenager into his family. Kidman will play Farrells wife.

A24 is the domestic distributor. Producers are Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element Pictures.

The Lobster, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2015, has generated more than $5 million in limited release in a month for A24.

Kidman stars with Colin Firth in Genius, which Roadside Attractions released last weekend, and in the upcoming Lion, with Rooney Mara and Dev Patel. TWX is releasing Lion in November.

Kidman is repped by CAA, Media Talent Group and Shanahan Management.

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Abuja (AFP) - Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari will stay in London for several more days despite being expected back in the country after health checks, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said Thursday.

"The president will be back on Sunday. I spoke with him yesterday (Wednesday) evening and I think it is just the best that he takes the weekend off," Osinbajo told reporters in Abuja.

Buhari, 73, left Nigeria on June 6 for tests on what the presidency described as a "persistent ear infection" that forced him to pull out of a series of engagements. He had been due back on Thursday.

The presidency has said the recommendation to see an ear, nose and throat specialist in the British capital was "purely as a precaution".

Osinbajo said Buhari was "in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning", adding: "Mr President is in good condition, he is fine, he is very well."

The Nigerian presidency has historically reticent about disclosing health matters of the head of state and rumours have swirled about the seriousness of Buhari's condition.

Speculation mounted after Buhari withdrew from a planned visit to Lagos, the launch of an oil spill clean-up operation in the delta region and a meeting of the West African regional bloc ECOWAS.


Nora Danish at the launch of "Jurassic World" Bahasa Malaysia for

HBO Asia at Le Meridien, KL.

16 Jun  Actress Nora Danish denied that she had to close down her new cafe, Kopi & XoXo in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur because she couldn't afford to pay the rent, in fact, she explains it was because of the building's regulations.



"It's not that we [Nora and her partners] couldn't pay for it, but we are just not allowed to sell food at the location due to it being a residential building," said Nora Danish.



After closing her cafe, Nora went on to open two new cafes, one in Bangi and the other at Taman Tun Dr Ismail, and according to her, business is doing really well.



Nora also said that she plans to open a third cafe soon and will also look into franchising.



"Fate has allowed us to open two new cafes at the same time. InsyaAllah we are also planning to open a third, but at this time we would like to rest first. We will look into franchising next, maybe," she added.



For the month of Ramadan, Nora said that she spends a lot of time at her cafes, but they will be closed for Hari Raya Aidil Fitri and will reopen a week after.



Nora Danish is one of the big names who are lending their voices for the Bahasa Malaysia dubbed version of "Jurassic World". She plays the role of Claire Dearing in the film.



"Jurassic World" Bahasa Malaysia premieres for the first time on television in Malaysia on HBO (Astro Ch 411 / 431) this Hari Raya Aidil Fitri, Wednesday, July 6 at 9pm.
Hades claims are contiguous with the Zeus claims the initial surface samples returned lithium values ranging from 196ppm to a high of 760ppm with an average value of 530ppm lithium

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Noram Ventures Inc. (TSX-V: NRM and Frankfurt: N7R) ("Noram" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has engaged Harrison Land Services (HLS) to perform additional surface and sub-surface sampling on its Hades lithium brine/clay claims (Figure 1). The sampling is expected to be completed by the end of June 30, 2016. Assays samples will be sent to ALS in Reno, Nevada, for MS-ICP analysis.

Leading the Harrison team will be Gavin Harrison, president of HLS, who has over a decade of mineral exploration experience; and Bradley Peek, MSc and Certified Professional Geologist, who has over 40 years of global experience within the exploration sector.

Mark Ireton, President of Noram, said, "The analytical results from this next sampling program will assist us in identifying potential target areas for core drilling during our Phase II exploration program."

The Hades claim group forms part of the South Block Extention recently acquired by staking through Noram's wholly owned subsidiary, Green Energy Resources. The South Block consists of 550 claims in three contiguous claim groups (Zeus, Hades and Spartan) and covers approximately 10,740 acres. For additional information, see news releases of May 26, 2016, June 7, 2016 and June 9, 2016.

Noram has amassed one of the largest land packages in Nevada's Clayton Valley. Its non-contiguous North and South Blocks now total 738 claims covering 14,738 acres and are positioned both north and south of Albemarle's Silver Peak mine, North America's only lithium producer.

Michael Collins, P.Geo., and independent Qualified Person as defined in National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release on behalf of the Company.

About Noram Ventures Inc.:

Noram Ventures Inc. (TSX-V: NRM Frankfurt: N7R) is a Canadian based junior exploration company, with a goal of becoming a force in the Green Energy Revolution through the development of lithium and graphite deposits and becoming a low-cost supplier for the burgeoning lithium battery industry. The Company's primary business focus since formation has been the exploration of mineral projects that include the lithium projects in Clayton Valley in Nevada and the Jumbo graphite property in southeastern British Columbia. Noram's long term strategy is to build a multi-national lithium-graphite dominant industrial minerals company to produce and sell lithium and graphite into the markets of Europe, North America and Asia. Please visit our web site for further information: www.noramventures.com.

Story continues

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

/s/ "Mark R. Ireton"

President & Director

This news release contains projections and forward-looking information that involve various risks and uncertainties regarding future events. Such forward-looking information can include without limitation statements based on current expectations involving a number of risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance of the Company. The following are important factors that could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward looking statements; the uncertainty of future profitability; and the uncertainty of access to additional capital. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results and the Company's plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information. Actual results and future events could differ materially from anticipated in such information. These and all subsequent written and oral forward-looking information are based on estimates and opinions of management on the dates they are made and expressed qualified in their entirety by this notice. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking information should circumstance or management's estimates or opinions change.

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: Noram Ventures Inc.
Do you have a question about history? Send us your question at history@time . com and you might find your answer in a future edition of Now You Know.

Though hair fashions may change season to season, the association between women and long hair is an ancient one.

It dates back at least to ancient Greeks and Romans, and according to archaeologist Elizabeth Bartman, even despite the Ancient Greek ideal of a bearded, long-haired philosopher, women in that society still had longer hair than men regularly did. Roman women kept their hair long and tended to part it down the center, and a man devoting too much attention to his hair risked scorn for appearing effeminate. The Bible carried on the tradition. Anthony Synnott, a sociologist who has written that hair is a personal symbol with immense social significance, found these implications in, for example, St. Pauls letter to the Corinthians: Doth not nature itself teach you that if a man have long hair it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her.

[It is] almost universally culturally found that women have longer hair than men, says Kurt Stenn, author of Hair: a Human History.

But the reasons why that tradition started outand why it has enduredare harder to pin down.

Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter

Hair is highly communicative, says Stenn, allowing individuals to send messages of health, sexuality, religiosity, power on first glance. It can be an expression of individual and group identity, and the the more attention a person (often a woman) is expected to devote to it, the more it can say. The scholar Deborah Pergament has written that hairs cultural and historic implications can be legally significant. Inferences and judgments about a persons morality, sexual orientation, political persuasion, religious sentiments and, in some cultures, socio-economic status, she notes, can sometimes be surmised by seeing a particular hairstyle.

Story continues

Stenn, a former professor of pathology and dermatology at Yale who was also the director of skin biology at , believes that health is perhaps the root cause of hairs significance. In order to have long hair you have to be healthy, he says. You have to eat well, have no diseases, no infectious organisms, you have to have good rest and exercise.

Stenn also notes the practical difficulties of long hair: In order to have long hair you have to have your needs in life taken care of. So long hair is also a status symbol, especially when it comes to complex hairstyles that require someone else to help you do them, which implies you have the wealth to do it. Its no coincidence that short hairstyles like the bob came into fashion during the 20th century, in regions where women were beginning to push back against the idea that they needed to be taken care of.

And, the implications of hair go the other way too. Men (especially highborn men, who likewise had the time to care for it) have sometimes worn their hair long, and free Gothic warriors in Italy in the beginning of the last millennium were known as capillati or long-haired men. But, in general, their hair was expected to be shorter than the hair of women in their societies. Historian Robert Bartlett has noted that in 1094 Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury refused to give ashes or his blessing to those young men who grew their hair like girls unless they had their hair cut. Even in the mid-20th century, after women with short hair were less surprising, American men and boys had to fight for the right to grow out their locks.
Gwyneth Paltrow has long ago surpassed her career as actress, instead morphing into a lifestyle mastermind with taste that runs toward the minimalist, expensive and super-health-conscious. (Remember the $200 fruit smoothie?) So it follows that her real estate and interior design sensibilities are of a similar ilk: painstakingly sourced, exceedingly artisanal and full of glamorous (or needless  your call) touches.

Her loft penthouse in Manhattans exclusive TriBeCa neighborhood, co-owned with consciously uncoupled ex-husband Chris Martin, has been on the market since March. It was first listed for a hefty $14.25 million, but has been reduced to $12.85 million. (The family has since decamped to Los Angeles.) But its only now that were getting a peek inside the 4,000 square feet of designed-to-the-nines space  with accompanying commentary from the designers themselves.

Her website, goop, describes the penthouse as an artisanal space that floats above the cobblestone streets like a pale, dreamy cloud. Some other choice details: the all-white aerie has a swing in the living room made of an antique Indian door topped with silk pillows, a master bed so enormous that sheets had to be custom-made and fuzzy nap zones throughout.

As designer Robin Standefer explains: Its the classical marble Chesneys fireplace paired with a Venini light fixture, the hand-painted wallpaper in one room with the hand-embroidered wallpaper in the next, its paper and fabrics and flowers. We worked carefully together on the palette and the textures to create the sense of refinement.

Yes, there is a critical difference between hand-painted wallpaper and hand-embroidered wallpaper.

And what about the kitchen, where Paltrow surely spent time perfecting her healthy recipes? The kitchen is so modern and so specialthe marble counter is intense and strong, yet somehow it works as this sensual piece, Standefer says. Just the spot to whip up that breakfast smoothie.

Theres no denying, though, that the apartment really does look impeccably dreamy. Just dont go spilling a juice near that white shag carpet.
Nucor NUE sees higher profits in the second quarter of 2016 on improved prices and favorable impact from reduced steel imports.



The steel giant sees earnings for the second quarter to be in the band of 65 cents to 70 cents per share. That is an increase from 39 cents a share it earned a year ago and 22 cents per share recorded in the previous quarter.



Nucors second-quarter guidance include an estimated LIFO expense of $19 million or 3 cents per share versus an expense of $27.5 million or 5 cents per share in the first quarter of 2016 and a LIFO credit of $95.5 million or 19 cents per share in the second quarter of 2015.



The news sent the Charlotte-based companys shares up around 2.3% in the trading session yesterday, closing the day at $50.45.

NUCOR CORP Price

NUCOR CORP Price | NUCOR CORP Quote

The company expects improved performance in its Steel Mills division in the second quarter vis-a-vis the first quarter on increased prices and higher volumes. Profitability of its sheet, bar and plate mills is expected to improve sequentially in the quarter. The sheet mills, which is benefiting from lower inventory levels in the supply chain, is expected to see the biggest improvement in profitability. Average sheet product prices also increased significantly in the second quarter. While Nucor is seeing continued momentum in the automotive market, weakness persists across energy, heavy equipment and agricultural markets.



Nucor also expects better performance in its Downstream Products unit in the second quarter compared to the first on improvement in non-residential construction markets. For the Raw Materials segment, the company expects improved profitability in the second quarter on higher pricing in its scrap processing businesses and direct reduced iron (DRI) facilities.



Steel market conditions in the U.S. have somewhat improved of late, thanks to favorable rulings (leading to levy of tariffs on imports) on steel trade cases in the recent past that have resulted in a decline in steel imports in the first four months of 2016.



The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), in May 2016, slapped final anti-dumping duties on imports of corrosion-resistant steel from China, India, Italy, South Korea and Taiwan including a staggering anti-dumping duty rate of 209.97% on imports of these products from China. The regulator also levied a hefty final anti-dumping duty rate of 265.79% on imports of cold-rolled steel from China in May.



According to American Iron and Steel Institute ("AISI"), an association of North American steel makers, total steel imports for the first four months of 2016 dropped 34% from the same period a year ago. The decline reflects the punitive actions (in the form of duties) taken by the U.S. trade regulators to repel the tide of steel imports.



Domestic steel makers including Nucor, U.S. Steel X, AK Steel AKS and Steel Dynamics STLD continue to actively press the U.S. regulators to stop unfair trade practices and enforce new trade laws to rescue the crisis-hit U.S. steel industry.

Nucor is a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).



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By Curtis Skinner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The city of Oakland, California, appointed its third police chief in less than a week on Wednesday as an investigation into sexual misconduct roils that department.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told a news conference that interim Police Chief Ben Fairow would be replaced by Assistant Police Chief Paul Figueroa on an acting basis but she declined to provide specifics. She said a search was being conducted for a permanent police chief.

A representative for the Oakland Police Department could not be reached for comment.

The mayor did not provide details about the ongoing investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against the department.

The local East Bay Express newspaper reported last Friday that as many as 21 officers from the Oakland police department and other area law enforcement agencies had sex with a teenage sex worker, including some while she was underage.

The newspaper based its report on interviews with the woman, elected officials, Oakland police sources as well as documents.

Former Oakland Police Chief Sean Whent, who headed the department since May 2013 and has been heralded by Schaaf for recent declines in shootings and murders, resigned last Thursday. Schaaf declined to elaborate on the move aside from saying in a statement that Whent made the "personal choice."

"With the abrupt resignation of Sean Whent last week, we sought to have seamless leadership of the Oakland Police Department and selected an individual who understood the dynamics in Oakland and who...could hit the ground running," Schaaf said in a statement.

"However, I have just received information that has caused me to lose confidence in Ben Fairow's ability to lead the Oakland Police Department at this particular moment in time," Schaaf's statement said.

A representative for Bay Area Rapid Transit police, where Fairow was serving before being tapped for Oakland, could not be immediately reached for comment.

When questioned at Wednesday's press conference, Schaaf said California law barred her from discussing personnel matters and could not provide information about the sexual misconduct investigations because it could impede the probe and possible charges.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Diane Craft)
The police department for Oakland, Calif. lost its second police chief in less than a week on Wednesday, amid a scandal involving allegations of statutory rape of a sex worker by multiple officers.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced the removal of interim police chief Ben Fairow on Wednesday. Schaaf had appointed Fairow to replace former chief Sean Whent, who stepped down last week, the Guardian reported.

I have just received information that has caused me to lose confidence in Ben Fairows ability to lead the Oakland Police Department (OPD) at this particular moment in time, Schaaf said in a statement, but did not give details about the information. I made the decision to appoint Ben Fairow, I also own the decision to remove him. I firmly believe that when you make a mistake, you need to own it, and act quickly to correct it.

The leadership shake-up comes after a few high-profile scandals have plagued the department and raised questions about widespread misconduct in the citys police force. The sexual misconduct scandal follows accusations that late officer Brendan OBrien killed his wife in 2014 and got away with it. OBrien left a suicide note last year that led to investigations into sexual misconduct in the department.

[The Guardian]
US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden paid respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in a visit to Orlando on Thursday, June 16. Both men met with the families of the 49 people who were gunned down early Sunday morning in the gay nightclub. They also visited the memorial that was started for the victims in front of the Dr. Phillips Center for Performing Arts, which can be seen in this video.

This video was taken by someone in a building across from the performing arts center as most people were kept away from the site during the visit.

On Sunday, a gunman walked into Pulse and opened fire. Forty-nine people died and another 53 people were injured, making it the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. The gunman also died in a shootout with police. Credit: Instagram/wesmessss
Washington (AFP) - US President Barack Obama hosts youthful Saudi Arabian Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House on Friday, underscoring his guest's meteoric rise and increasingly pivotal role in strained US-Saudi ties.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama would meet the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, who has become the driving force behind economic reform and a more activist Saudi foreign policy.

King Salman's son, who is his country's defense minister, has met the very biggest of Washington's big hitters during a week-long visit.

He held talks with the CIA director, the secretaries of state, defense and treasury, as well as leading members of Congress.

The White House said Prince Mohammed's meeting with Obama will take place in the Oval Office -- a rare honor for a non-head of state, one not afforded to the Dalai Lama earlier in the week.

Little is certain about the inner workings of the House of Saud, but the prince's high public profile has led many to speculate that he could be the next on the throne, rather than designated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.

"He is notionally number three in the hierarchy, but effectively he's number one," said Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute, a think tank focused on the Middle East.

"The King prefers his son and wants his son to be king," said Henderson.

For the White House, Mohammed bin Salman is a relative unknown, while Mohammed bin Nayef -- as interior minister -- has been the go-to royal on counterterrorism for years.

Prince Mohammed "wants to be known on the US side," said Gregory Gause, head of the international affairs department at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. "It's an effort by him to be recognized."

The meeting comes as ties between the US and Saudi Arabia have been strained over how to approach Riyadh's arch-enemy Iran, the war in Yemen and the seemingly imminent release of a dossier about Saudi Arabian links to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

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- Economic reform -

High on the agenda will be Prince Mohammed's efforts to overhaul Saudi Arabia's state-dominated and oil-dependent economy, bringing in the private sector and creating jobs for the country's young population.

"Given their huge investment in education over the last decade, if they are not able to move away from a state-run economy and develop a private sector, you are not going to have the jobs that young people need to have hope," said former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Smith.

Amid disagreements over the US nuclear deal with Iran, economic reform appears to be a much-needed issue that could bring Riyadh and Washington together.

Obama's White House has repeatedly argued that Saudi Arabia's most pressing security task is internal reform to put the autocratic state on a more stable and sustainable footing.

Effectively reforming the economy is likely to require the easing of tough rules on female participation in the workplace.

After Prince Mohammed met top US economic policymakers on Wednesday, including Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, the White House "underscored the United States' desire to be a key partner in helping Saudi Arabia implement its ambitious economic reform program."

Prince Mohammed is also sure to address another of his signature policies -- Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, which has been a point of deep contention between the White House and the royal court.

The United States has aided and publically backed the operation to push back against Iranian-backed Huthi rebels who took over the capital Sanaa.

The war signaled Saudi Arabia's willingness to tackle Iranian influence in the region.

But Obama's administration has been repeatedly embarrassed by the killing of civilians and worried that while the war has dragged on, Al-Qaeda has been allowed to grow.

More than 6,400 Yemenis have been killed since the intervention started 15 months ago, the majority of them civilians.

The Huthis remain in control of most of the central and northern highlands as well as the Red Sea coast.

The United Nations had blacklisted the Saudi-led coalition after concluding in a report that it was responsible for 60 percent of the 785 deaths of children in Yemen last year.

But the world body later reversed its stance, with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon citing "undue pressure" from Saudi Arabia and its allies who had threatened to cut off funding to UN aid programs over the blacklisting.

There are signs that the war may be winding down and Saudi Arabia and its allies may be shifting focus to tackling Al-Qaeda.

The United Arab Emirates on Wednesday announced its "war is over" in Yemen, although left open the prospect of a continued counterterrorism role.
Obama visits families of the Orlando massacre victims President Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, speaks at a memorial in Orlando, Fla., June 16, 2016, in memory of those killed in the shooting at a gay nightclub. (AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

As political leaders bicker over guns and terrorism, President Obama tried to help a distraught community heal during a solemn visit Thursday, June 16, 2016 to Orlando, Fla.

Obama planned no major speech or call to action during his trip to a community after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, as he has after other tragedies. Instead, the president planned to spend much of his time privately consoling the families of the 49 victims and meeting with doctors, paramedics and other first responders.

The low-profile visit reflected the presidents challenge to find something meaningful to say when the causes of the attack seem to grow murkier by the day. Even as the families of 49 victims bury their loved ones, its unclear what led a 29-year-old Muslim born in New York to open fire in a gay nightclub where he may have been a frequent patron.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama would deal with the ambiguity in the Florida shooting by focusing on the victims.

The presidents visit to Orlando has nothing to do with the individual who perpetrated this terrible attack, Earnest said Wednesday. He said Obama intended to tell residents that theyre not alone, even as they endure what surely have been several dark nights.

The White House released few details in advance about Obamas visit, which aides said was hurriedly arranged in a fraction of the time usually required to plan a presidential trip. But Obama planned to use the visit to make clear that the country stands with the people of Orlando, stands with the LGBT community in Orlando, as they grieve for their loss, Earnest said.

Vice President Joe Biden was joining Obama in Orlando. (AP)

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Late last year, residents of Washington, D.C. got some good news as they shopped for health care insurance through the Affordable Care Act. The premium for the highly popular and lowest-cost silver plan for the 2016 season had dropped by four percent from the previous year.

Health care insurance shoppers in Seattle received similar good news. The premium on the second-lowest cost silver plan for 2016 fell by 10 percent from the previous years level, providing consumers with a minor windfall.

Related: Get Ready for Huge Obamacare Premium Hikes in 2017

Six months later, as federal and state regulators and major insurers begin setting new premium levels for the coming year, millions of Americans including consumers in Seattle and the nations capital will be in for substantial sticker shock.

Stretched by rising drug and health care costs and fast-changing market dynamics, the nations health care insurers have been warning since April about the likelihood of double-digit increases in premiums next year. State regulators are just now reviewing and approving new rates for the coming year. The enrollment season for 2017 is scheduled to begin Nov. 1.

A new preliminary Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of Obamacare insurance markets in about a third of all major metropolitan areas projects that premiums on the most popular subsidized plans will rise by an average of 10 percent next year  or twice the rate of increase approved last fall.

The analysis of insurance companies initial filings in 13 states and the District of Columbia highlights substantial variations in premium costs, depending on the region, demographics and competition among insurers.

Related: More Bad News for the Remaining Obamacare Co-ops

D.C. residents, for example, could incur a premium increase of 21 percent next year for the lowest-cost silver plan, according to the analysis, while the premiums in Seattle for the second least expensive silver plan could rise by 6 percent.

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Other metropolitan areas likely to see a substantial rise in premiums for the lowest-cost plan include Portland, Oregon, up 26 percent; New York City, up 16 percent; Denver, 14 percent and Hartford, Connecticut, 13 percent. Only Providence, R.I., and Indianapolis are likely to see declines in the monthly premiums for the lowest and second lowest cost plans.

Premium costs of the two lowest-cost silver plans are highly significant because they are the most common plan choices in the marketplaces, with nearly 70 percent of Americans selecting one of them. Moreover, the second lowest-cost plan is used as a benchmark in calculating government premium subsidies.

The study provides only a partial picture of the rising costs of another year of Obamacare. However, it strongly hints at a new problem for the Obama administration and the Democrats in defending the program during a tough campaign season, when presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and other Republican leaders vow to repeal the program with an enrollment of roughly 12.7 million people.

Related: How Small Ideas Are Helping to Bend the Health Care Cost Curve

The program has been racked by previous hikes in premiums and out of pocket costs for patients, the collapse of roughly half of the 23 experimental, non-profit co-ops and the recent decision by several major insurers including giant UnitedHealthcare to pull out of Obamacare exchanges.

Premiums nationwide for the popular silver-level plan surged 11 percent on average in 2015, but that didnt account for rising deductibles or out of pocket costs that in some states jumped by as much as 76 percent.

While we cannot generalize to all states until more data become available later this year, in most of these population centers, the costs for the lowest and second-lowest silver plans are, in fact, increasing faster in 2017 than they have in previous years, according to the Kaiser Foundation report.

Department of Health and Human Services officials caution that states are still in the process of setting new premium rates for the coming year. Also, many low and middle-income consumers actually will pay considerably less than the sticker price for new coverage because they qualify for refundable tax credits that reduce the overall cost.

Related: Drug Company Profits Soar as Taxpayers Foot the Bill

For example, according to the new Kaiser study, the monthly low-cost silver premium for a 40-year-old non-smoker living in Colorado will rise from $223 in 2016 to $304 in 2017, a 14 percent increase. However, offsetting Obamacare tax credit for low-income people could negate much of that increase.

A similar person residing in Baltimore will see his or her monthly low-cost silver premium rise from $243 to $267, or a 10-percent hike. But the enrollee would pay far less than that if he or she qualifies for a sliding-scale tax credit that is based on income.

Moreover, consumers are encouraged by the government to shop around for the best bargain they can find on line in the insurance exchanges. Still, insurance industry representatives have warned that substantial rate increases are inevitable next year, as many companies are attempting to recoup their losses after grossly underestimating the costs of covering sicker people.

Larry Levitt, a senior president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, told The Washington Post this week that insurers are treating 2017 as a market correction year, as companies struggle to position themselves to make more money from Obamacare in the long run.

The biggest things going on here are that insurers initially guessed wrong . . . and now insurers are playing catchup, he told the newspaper.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Ascot (United Kingdom) (AFP) - Master Irish trainer Aidan O'Brien won his seventh Ascot Gold Cup on Thursday with Order of St George, his third win of this year's Royal Ascot meeting.

The 46-year-old Irishman, who had brought up his half century of Royal Ascot winners in the preceding race, would have been a bit nervous seeing his favourite entering the finishing straight lengths behind long-time leader Mille et Mille.

However, once Order of St George's jockey Ryan Moore got a clear run he ate up the ground and eased to a three length victory ahead of Mizzou and Sheikhzayedroad with the gallant Mille Et Mille in fourth.

O'Brien said Order of St George -- whose orange and blue colours were inadvertently sported by Queen Elizabeth II who presented the trophy to winning owner Michael Tabor -- could emulate his four-time Ascot Gold Cup winner Yeats.

"He has a lot of class and he loves his racing so there is every chance he will be back," said O'Brien.

"It was a tough race, a little bit messy and rough but Ryan did well to switch him off as he hadn't run this distance before."

Moore, who rode a modern day record nine winners at the meeting last year, said it had been an extremely tough race to ride in with the 17 runners apart from runaway leader Mille et Mille bumping each other incessantly.

"It was a nightmare all the way," said Moore. "However, he's a class horse and class horses win races."

Earlier Evensong had brought up O'Brien's half century in the Group Two Ribblesdale Stakes.

O'Brien, whose first success at the meeting came 19 years ago, handled the landmark success with his usual humility.

"It is unbelievable but it is a great team effort," O'Brien said.

Kate Wachman, representing the owner, her mother Sue Magnier, was more effusive.

"It is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve. He is a fabulous trainer," said Wachman, whose husband David trained the winner of the race last year.

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Moore was asked how special his employer was in getting to a half century.

"He'll be even more special when he gets to 100," joked the normally poker-faced English jockey.

The Godolphin Operation bandwagon continued apace as they had a 1-2 in the Group Three Tercentenary Stakes with Hawkbill prevailing under William Buick ahead of Prizemoney for their fourth win in two days.

The Dubai-owned powerhouse -- the brainchild of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohamed bin al-Maktoum -- brought a record 50 horses to the five-day meeting and have their sights on breaking their record haul of six winners.

Buick riding his 16th winner at the Royal meeting displayed a rare moment of emotion passing the post punching the air in delight.

"This is huge! There is such a big team behind it," said Norway-born Buick.

"It is nice to be able to reward them," added the 27-year-old.

Luke Morris got the day's action off to a memorable start as he guided home Prince Lir to record his first win at Royal Ascot in the Group Two Norfolk Stakes.

"You sacrifice so much for this job," said Morris.

"This is what makes it worth getting up so early every morning."

Morris had little time to celebrate as he had to make his way to the rather less glamorous confines of Chelmsford racecourse for further rides but winning trainer Robert Cowell was able to soak up his prestigious win.

"I did say I'd like to win a two-year-old race somewhere this year and to do it at Royal Ascot is beyond one's wildest dreams," said Cowell, who previously had won two editions of the Kings Stand stakes at the meeting.
In the off-Broadway play Incognito, Daredevil star Charlie Cox plays six characters, and all of them have their eyesight.

"It's been really fun to look people in the eye," Cox, who plays the blind lawyer-turned-superhero in the Netflix series, laughs to The Hollywood Reporter. "I had gone to an audition - one of those things that are super secretive and they don't tell you, but I'm pretty sure it was for the Han Solo reboot - and halfway through it, the casting director stopped me and said, 'Why aren't you looking at me?' I realized I had gotten into a habit of not making eye contact, because the only thing I had done for two years is play someone who is blind. I never got invited back, probably because they couldn't figure out why I was acting like a complete idiot."

After a few days of rehearsing for the Manhattan Theatre Club's brain-teasing play - penned by Constellations' Nick Payne, staged by Doug Hughes and running through July 10 at New York City Center - "I was fine, since I of course use my eyes in my everyday life. The interesting thing now will be if it's hard to go back to playing blind again."

Read more: 'Incognito': Theater Review

Cox, 33, goes Off Script to talk losing his memory onstage, playing an Englishman again and indulging in his new pre-show superstitious.

What drew you to Incognito?

I've been looking for an opportunity to do a play; I last did one in 2010. It's such a wild journey - you spend almost the entire time being utterly confused, and then suddenly, it all makes sense. As an actor, I saw it as such a challenge.

What have you given up to play this role?

Eating. I'm just not hungry before 7, and by the time I get home, it's too late to eat, so I just won't.

What time do you wake up on a show day?

For a matinee day, I get up before 9, make breakfast and get on the subway as fast as I can; it takes me 40 minutes to get to the theater from Williamsburg. If I get here ten minutes early, there's a really good coffee shop across the road called Tisserie.

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Charlie Cox in 'Incognito.' Photo credit: Joan Marcus

What's something special in your dressing room?

Someone sent me an Irish keyring, and I thought it was strange. I'm not Irish. But the next day, the keyring that holds my keys broke.

Any pre-show rituals?

I share a dressing room with Morgan [Spector], and I had been having knee pangs during the first two weeks of the show. He showed me how to use a foam roller, and though I'm fine now, it's become a superstition.

You're onstage the entire show. What goes through your mind when you're "sitting out" of a scene?

It's really annoying when you need to pee. There were a couple of shows where I sit down after the first two scenes, and I'm like, "Oh shit." And what's happening now is, because I know the play so well, I've noticed I've started mouthing their lines. I've gotta stop doing that.

Read more: Pushy Parents to Loud Talkers: Broadway Stars Reveal Their 35 Biggest Audience Pet Peeves

What do you do on your day off?

My one rule is to not go into Manhattan. I really don't want to take the subway on my day off, but I can totally meet up for brunch if it's in Brooklyn.

What's your toughest scene?

I find Henry, who is losing his memory, so endearing. When he has to 'reset' - suddenly he's not there, and he acts like he's seeing the woman he loves for the first time in a long time - I want those moments to be truthful. He's based on the real Patient H.M. and the English pianist Clive Wearing who would greet his wife like he hadn't seen her in twenty years, and she had to go along with it because it was the best way to not confuse him even more. Cumulatively, we get the sense of how much this man loves his wife, which makes his story quite heartbreaking. And it's nice to play an Englishman again; I've been playing an American for the last two years. I get a lot of his speech patterns and mannerisms for free.

Charlie Cox and Heather Lind in 'Incognito.' Photo credit: Joan Marcus
I am 13 years old, and I've spent my whole life drinking and fishing from the Missouri River in North Dakota. After school, when I'm not babysitting for my auntie, I go to the One Mile Creek right below my grandma's house to fish for creek minnows. In the summer, I  like my mother and grandmother before me  go to the river to swim with friends.

As members of the Standing Rock Tribe, my family has lived here for generations. Today our lives on the reservation are still defined by the river.

But now an oil company wants to build a pipeline that will cross the river a mile away from our reservation, carrying 570,000 barrels of crude oil across each day. We're terrified that it could leak into our water, but the company doesn't seem to care.

Yet again, the oil industry is putting its profits over the health and safety of people, but we, the youth of the Standing Rock Tribe, refuse to let them risk our water without a fight. And so far over 130,000 people have signed our petition asking the Army Corps of Engineers to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In spite of safety assurances from the Energy Transfer company, anyone who reads the news knows that pipelines leak and break  a lot. In May, a Shell oil flow line spilled 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In April, South Dakota saw its worst spill ever when a pipeline spewed out almost 17,000 gallons of crude oil. Pipelines leak all the time here in the Dakotas: From 2012 to 2013, there were 300 oil pipeline breaks in North Dakota alone. Oil spills have become routine for us, yet companies are facing very little regulation or sanctions for the damage they cause.

It's not a matter of if this newest pipeline will leak, but when.

Workers build Dakota access pipeline in North Dakota in 2015.

Our people have lost enough. I'm fighting for my great-grandparents who were forced to abandon their house in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, when the Army Corps of Engineers built a dam that flooded their lands. They left behind burial sites, sacred grounds and their home.

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In Dakota/Lakota, we say "Mni Wiconi," which means water is life. Native American people know that water is the first medicine for all human beings living on this Earth. Water also makes up an important part of our cultural traditions. Some families that reside by water that runs into the river even refer to themselves by their creeks. They are from the Big Lake Family, the Four Mile Family and the Porcupine Creek Family, all tributaries of the Missouri River. I can't imagine how we will complete our yearly Sun Dance if the Missouri River has been poisoned.

The youth of Standing Rock refuse to stand by while we lose our water to corporate greed  and we're not alone. A long list of celebrities have endorsed our campaign: Artists and activists like Leonardo DiCaprio, Shailene Woodley, Bill McKibben, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Cameron Russell and Nelson Mandela's grandson Ndaba Mandela.

A photo posted by Leonardo DiCaprio (@leonardodicaprio) on May 9, 2016 at 6:17pm PDT

A photo posted by Jason Momoa (@prideofgypsies) on May 4, 2016 at 11:13am PDT

But even more importantly, we have the support of our elders and the whole Standing Rock community. My grandmother is the person who convinced me to start this petition; my sister encouraged me when I had doubt; my teacher asks me every day how the petition is going. And of course my mother is by my side with each new step we take on the campaign.

Our campaign is one piece of a massive movement to stop the pipeline. Across the reservation, young people have gotten creative to make their voices heard, from protests on horseback to spirit camps. Bobbi Jean Three Legs, a young mom and activist, organized a 500-mile relay race to bring attention to the proposed project. Zaysha Grinnell, 15, started her own petition against the Dakota access pipeline and lead a march demanding that her tribal council rescind support for seven oil pipelines which cross or would cross the Missouri River.

Across the reservation, young people are acting as defenders of Mother Earth and saying no to Big Oil. We know that we can live without electricity, we can live without oil, but we can't live without water. No one can.

We demand "rezpect" for our water, our land and our voices. Join us and together we can stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The mass killing in Orlando has given the anti-gun movement a powerful new ally: gays.

The gay community is well organized and extremely resourceful, Dave Garcia, political director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, told TheWrap. Theres that expression: Dont wake a sleeping dog. I think they just woke up the gay dog.

Garcia was one of many gay leaders who signed an open letter this week calling for a renewed commitment to the fight for stricter gun laws. Organizers managed to get representatives of 122 LGBT centers  which together serve 2.2 million people  to sign the letter in less than 24 hours.

Also Read: Guess How Many Republican Senators Said 'Gay' or 'Guns' After Orlando

More than ever we must raise our voices and be heard, the letter read. We as the community of LGBT centers call for our communities, our allies, and our friends to demand action to hold our elected officials accountable for passing laws that limit access to assault weapons.

The killing of 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub has mobilized the gay community against gun violence  giving the anti-gun movement, which stalled in its fight with the National Rifle Association, an infusion of new blood.

The question now is whether LGBT activists will be able to re-create the incredible success they had fighting for gay marriage.

Also Read: Donald Trump Says 'Ask the Gays,' Gays Make Him Immediately Regret It on Twitter

Yes, the NRA should be worried, UCLA law professor and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, Adam Winkler told theWrap. The gay community is politically active and politically engaged. Theyve proven successful in changing policy.

Dr. Scout, director at CenterLink, an association of the countrys leading LGBT centers, said the new alliance between anti-gun and gay activists could be a watershed moment in this fight.

A lot of us have been involved in gun control in the past but now its a primary point in the agenda of our joint leadership, said Scout, who is transgender and no longer uses a first name.

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In less than five decades, the gay community has been able to accomplish what few others minority groups have. The 1969 Stonewall riots spawned the gay liberation movement, and ACT UP  the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power  helped force recognition of the AIDS crisis.

Gays achieved their greatest victory with the legalization of gay marriage last year  something that once seemed as unlikely as new gun control legislation.

Now the gay community is offering its vast infrastructure and know-how to the gun control advocates.

In an op-ed article published in The Daily Beast Tuesday, actor and gay activis t George Takei wrote, if there is one group in this country with more will, more experience, and more tenacity than the NRA, it is the LGBT community.

Also Read: 4 Things Donald Trump Got Factually Wrong About the Orlando Shooting

The L.A. LGBT Center has already added gun safety to its weekly policy agenda. The center has also reached out to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Californias Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom (whos pushing an initiative to strengthen California gun laws in the state) and Everytown For Gun Safety, a group formed formed after 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting that claimed 26 lives.

Gun control activists have made some important inroads on the local and state levels but theyve lost badly on the national stage, AIDS activist Peter Staley, who was featured in the 2012 Oscar nominated film How to Survive a Plague, told TheWrap. This is a whole new ball of wax.

Who would have imagined a week ago that the NRAs biggest threat would be the gay community? Staley added. The NRA should be very worried.

Gun-control advocates say they welcome their new allies.

The marriage equality movement was extremely effective, Everytown deputy press secretary Taylor Maxwell told TheWrap. We modeled in part our success after it. There is a lot to learn from the gay community.

This community has exceptional organizing skills, Wayne McNeil, a gay Everytown volunteer and gun violence survivor, told TheWrap. They know how to mobilize themselves around an issue and find creative ways to solve problems.

The Sandy Hook shooting renewed the debate about gun control, and invigorated the fight for universal background checks and assault weapon bans. But the movement suffered a crushing defeat when every major proposal President Obama championed fell apart on the Senate floor in April of 2013, four months after the tragedy. And just one day after the 2015 San Bernadino shooting, 54 senators, almost all Republican, rejected a bill to block suspected terrorists from legally buying guns.

Also Read: Orlando Shooter Was Definitely 'Homosexual,' Pulse Regular Says (Video)

The new partnership between the gay community and gun safety advocates comes as Democrats try to revive their push for gun control legislation following the Orlando massacre. On Wednesday, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy waged a filibuster into the night to force a vote on gun control legislation. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump also weighed in on the debate, signaling hed be open to new restrictions that would ban people on the no-fly list from buying guns.

Gay activists say theyre already planning their next step, warning that underestimating a group that has had to fight its entire existence would be ill-advised.

You should never ignore the LGBT people, said Dr. Scout. We have these legislators on speed dial.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Orlando Shooting: New Video Shows Hostages Hiding in Pulse Bathroom (Video)

Guess How Many Republican Senators Said 'Gay' or 'Guns' After Orlando

Orlando Shooting: Did Self-Hatred Drive Omar Mateen?
From Cosmopolitan

Hundreds of people have lined up to give blood in the wake of the Orlando massacre that left 49 dead and another 53 injured. ABC News reports gunman Omar Mateen donated blood to an Orlando mobile blood bank less than two weeks before he attacked and killed so many people.

"OneBlood has learned that Omar Mateen donated blood at a mobile blood drive in Ft. Pierce, Florida, on May 29," OneBlood vice president Susan Forbes told ABC. "All facets of the donation were in our normal parameters for blood donation, including screening questions and post-donation blood testing. A staff member recognized Mateen's face from media photos and told their supervisor."

Additionally, OneBlood confirmed Mateen's donation in the system's database, but they did not comment on whether or not his donation has been used to help someone he attacked or otherwise.

Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33, a lab supervisor at OneBlood, was one of the people killed in the shooting. The center told ABC he'd recently been promoted to platelet supervisor and was "passionate about saving lives."

OneBlood encourages people to please continue donating blood but asked people to make appointments so employees are not overwhelmed at this time. A GoFundMe for the victims, survivors, and their families has raised more than $4.4 million since Sunday. You can donate here.

Follow Tess on Twitter.
While he held hostages for hours in a nightclub methodically killing patrons, the gunman in last weeks deadly Orlando shooting searched to see if news of the attack was going viral, according to a lawmaker.

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, disclosed gunman Omar Mateens social media activity in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Johnson asked for the companys help in getting information associated with Mateens accounts.

It is my understanding that Omar Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post-terrorism-related content, Johnson said in the letter. I appreciate Facebooks support of the law-enforcement investigation into this attack and previous attacks. While Facebook is not a target of the Committees inquiry, I respectfully request your assistance with the Committees inquiry.

Johnson, citing information obtained by his staff, said there were five Facebook accounts associated with Mateen, which he used to post and search for information about his attack, as well as information about the San Bernardino shooting and about local law enforcement offices. Johnson said that during the attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub, the shooter apparently searched Facebook for the terms Pulse Orlando and Shooting. Mateen, Johnson saod, also posted status updates.

America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic StateI pledge my alliance to abu bakr al Baghdadimay Allah accept me, he said in one, referring to the leader of the militant group ISIS.
Orlando (AFP) - When mourners filed in to a prayer vigil in Orlando this week, they hit a friendly roadblock: a team of golden retrievers sent to help soothe a community in shock with their calm, reassuring presence.

As people knelt down to pet and nuzzle the gentle creatures, burying their hands in their soft yellow coat -- many breathed more easily, taking a moment to forget the horror gripping their city.

In the wake of the Pulse club massacre that left 49 dead and 53 injured, a pack of therapy dogs were flown from Illinois to the Florida city to offer comfort to traumatized victims and their families.

On Wednesday night the dozen golden retrievers were stationed outside Trinity Downtown church.

Shelby Gerber, a bubbly young girl who attended the vigil, lives right near the crime scene.

"My anxiety level is pretty high right now," she said. "Sometimes you are too overwhelmed to say anything."

"I didn't realize how much it really was nice to sit after service and just pet them for an endless amount of time. It just alleviates the pressure off your chest."

For nearly a decade -- ever since a February 2008 shooting stunned Northern Illinois University -- so-called "comfort dogs" have become a familiar sight in the aftermath of major tragedies throughout the United States.

The Illinois team have become famous on social media for the therapy they provide: Phoebe, for one, has her own Twitter account.

- 'Scared to leave house' -

In Orlando the dogs, accompanied by 20 volunteer handlers, were visiting three hospitals treating patients wounded in the Pulse attack.

As well as visiting survivors the dogs have consoled emergency caregivers, paramedics and doctors, as well as many families of victims and Pulse staff members.

"People will talk to us and ask if we can visit a family," said Tim Hetzner, president of Lutheran Church Charities, the group that sponsors the dogs' work.

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"There's some individuals that lost somebody and they're just scared to go out of their house. So we're going to bring comfort dogs to them."

"Dogs show unconditional love," Hetzner said. "They don't take notes or keep track of wrongs."

The "comfort dogs" owned by the Lutheran Church are distinct from those managed by the Therapy Dogs International program, which brings together about 25,000 dogs volunteered by their owners to provide therapy without special training.

Hetzner's dogs belong to the parish and are subject to training with multiple handlers that sometimes lasts over a year.

He said the training includes teaching the golden retrievers -- a breed known as gentle and affectionate -- not to bite, lick or bark while providing therapy.

- 'Comfort rugs' -

Jennifer Blackwood, who also came to the Orlando vigil, was comforted to see her three daughters fussing over the dogs outside.

"There's a lot that has happened over the last week," she said. I have three kids so that's been a lot of discussion. Hard growing up talks."

Hetzner explains the dogs are taught to lie down like "comfort rugs."

It may seem trivial, but for the traumatized, the simple gesture of petting them can have surprising benefits.

"People feel more relaxed when they have a comfortable dog they can pet," he said. "They calm down, their heart rate goes down, actually, and they're more willing to talk."

Hetzner originally conceived of the idea after a mission to New Orleans in the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As he worked on the search-and-rescue effort, he noticed the "tremendous bond" those his team rescued had with their pets.

"People would die rather than part with their pet."

The Lutheran church program funds itself with donations, and owns about 120 Golden Retrievers in 23 states.

Three dogs from the organization still reside at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 young children and six staff in December 2012.
At the behest of his defense team, Oscar Pistorious walked around a South African courtroom without help of his prostheses during his sentencing hearing for the 2013 murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Wednesday, according to multiple reports.



Removing his artificial legs, Pistorius moved  mostly without aide  across the room on only his stumps in an effort by the defense to show how difficult it would have been for the amputee to confront an intruder, according to Reuters.



Pistorius was initially charged with manslaughter for Steenkamp's February 2013 death, but an appeals court overturned the conviction and changed it to murder last year. Pistorius has continually said that he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder when he fired four shots through a bathroom down in his home, killing the model.



"The accused was vulnerable because of his disability," his defense lawyer Barry Roux said in court, Reuters reported. "His failure to conduct a rational thought process does not negate his vulnerability."









Oscar Pistorius Removes Artificial Legs in Court to Demonstrate He 'Was Vulnerable Because of His Disability,' Lawyer Argues| Crime & Courts, True Crime, Oscar Pistorius, Reeva Steenkamp

 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 scene marked the end of three days of testimony and arguments in Pistorius's sentencing hearing in Pretoria, reported the Associated Press. Judge Thokozile Masipa will make a final sentencing decision on July 6.



Pistorius  who already served one year in prison on the manslaughter charge and is currently on house arrest  is facing up to 15 years in jail.



Pistorius's lawyers have argued that the former Paralympian was confused when he shot Steenkamp, according to the New York Times. Prosecutors charged, however, that Pistorius has not shown genuine remorse for the crime.



Also on Wednesday, Judge Maspia agreed to release photographs of Steenkamp's body taken by crime scene investigators, the Times said. The images include a photo of Steenkamp's severe head wound and were only released after a request from the victims' father.
The promised legal challenge to Sumner Redstones move to replace five Viacom board members takes hard aim at Shari Redstone, accusing of her acting as the puppet master of her mogul father.

The suit filed Thursday in Delaware Chancery Court calls the decision unveiled Thursday by Sumner Redstones National Amusements an invalid exercise that runs counter to Redstones long-standing plan for the transfer of his estate after his death.

Frederic Salerno, Viacoms lead independent director and one of those to be replaced, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the ousted directors. The suit asks the court to invalidate National Amusements five new board appointments and to bar Shari Redstone from taking further wrongful actions under the direct or indirect authority of Sumner M. Redstone.

The complaint casts the dispute as entirely a power play orchestrated by Shari Redstone at the expense of her father, who no longer has the mental capacity to make such significant decisions about the company. The elder Redstone has iron-clad control of Viacom and CBS Corp. through his ownership of nearly 80% of the voting interest in both companies.

Shari now seeks to become Mr. Redstones puppet master, pulling his strings behind the scenes to improperly seize control of Viacom, according to the complaint. In doing so, Shari is attempting to use her fathers control to dismantle his own estate plan to serve her personal interests. Her attempt to do so, however, is based on exercising undue influence over her defenseless father and/or manipulating him to purportedly exercise authority when he was not mentally competent to have done so.

Moreover, the suit accuses Shari Redstone of breaching her fiduciary duty as a director of Viacom by pursuing her agenda at the expense of shareholders.

These actions have affirmatively harmed the public stockholders, who collectively hold an approximate 90% equity interest in Viacom, the complaint states. This is precisely the type of harm Mr. Redstone, through his longstanding estate plan, sought to avoid.

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A rep for Shari Redstone did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Related stories

Shari Redstone Complains About Lack of Information on Paramount Deal

Viacom Shares Climb Nearly 7% In Wake of Boardroom Struggle

Viacom Shakeup: Sumner Redstone Moves to Replace Five Board Members Including CEO Philippe Dauman
Panera Bread PNRA declared that it will give up using non-natural flavors, sweeteners, preservatives and colors from synthetic sources in its Panera at Home products.

Panera plans to remove its so called No No List of additives from its entire Panera at Home portfolio of nearly 50 grocery products by the end of this year.

Notably, under its Panera 2.0 program, the company expects to remove all artificial ingredients, including colors, flavors, preservatives and sweeteners, from its food across its 2000 bakeries/cafes by 2016-end. Panera has already removed artificial ingredients from 90% of its food items, and expects to reach 100% by the end of 2016. These menu offerings should maintain the companys popularity among health-conscious customers.

PANERA BREAD CO Price

PANERA BREAD CO Price | PANERA BREAD CO Quote

Notably, in January, the company said that it has removed all artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and preservatives, which were present on its 'No No List', from its soups in all restaurants in the U.S.

In order to increase shelf life, the packaged goods industry relies heavily on synthetic additives and preservatives. Preservatives play a vital role in maintaining the texture and color of frozen food though they are not good for health. Panera has tried to simplify the ingredients and use natural ingredients like rosemary extract for maintaining the texture and flavor of frozen food. In fact, the company has also improved its overall ingredient quality, which includes changing the conventional bleached flour to unbleached wheat flour.

The Panera at Home business focuses on selling Panera branded products to other retailers, including refrigerated soup, mac & cheese, pasta, and salad dressings along with artisan frozen bread, sliced sandwich bread and coffee. With this transparency about ingredients in its system, the company is trying to provide consumers with quick meal ideas that are less dependent on synthetic preservatives and are good for health.

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Panera currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Stocks to Consider

Some better-ranked stocks in the restaurant industry include Carrols Restaurant Group, Inc. TAST, Famous Dave's of America Inc. DAVE and Restaurant Brands International Inc. QSR. All these stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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From Cosmopolitan

When The Sun released photos of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston kissing (or "snogging"), the question on everyone's mind was, Was this staged? (Also, Tom Hiddleston? Really?) To get a better understanding of how the shady world of pap setups work, Cosmopolitan.com spoke to New York City paparazzo and creator of Stupid Famous People, Justin Steffman:

Do you think the Taylor and Tom pics are staged? Why or why not?

Taylor Swift is a celebrity that won't walk outside without perfect makeup and great fashion, and she smiles at every paparazzi to make sure they all get beautiful pictures. There is an unspoken deal between Swift and paparazzi, and her bodyguards make it clear. If we act professionally and listen to their instructions, then she will give it up and everyone gets what they want. We get nice pictures, and she looks great in the magazines. She takes an entirely different approach to paparazzi than most celebrities do. It's all about business for her. Every time she steps outside is a new opportunity for her to look good in the magazines. Certain celebrities, like Taylor, not only accept that paparazzi are a part of the business, but they actually go out of their way to use us as a tool for publicity.

My first instinct when seeing the pictures of Taylor and Tom is that they are definitely staged. But I'm friends with the paparazzo who is credited with those images and he is one of the best in the business when it comes to capturing sneaky pictures. Taylor loves to have control, and I'm sure she absolutely hates that someone was able to catch her sharing an intimate moment with her new love interest. But like I said ... if it's a huge news story, you always have to wonder, don't you?

Why would a celebrity ever set up and stage photos?

The biggest reason is money. But they also release photos because they want to have control of their own image.

Many setup photos include a paid product endorsement, where a photo agency works as a middleman between a celebrity and a company who has a product to sell. It could be the latest cell phone that was just released, or a food or beauty product, or something as simple as them being seen shopping at a certain retail outlet. Certain photo agencies specialize in these types of fake paparazzi photos. They usually try to make the photos look natural and candid, but in reality, the celebrity and the photographer are working together. It's a paid photo shoot and the celebrity gets a big check. The readers of tabloid magazines and blogs have no idea!

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Control is another big reason for staging photos. There are certain celebs who hate being photographed by paparazzi and they will do anything to avoid it. When your image is such an important part of your career, the last thing they want is to be photographed looking badly. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are a good example of a celebrity couple who hates paparazzi, but you will see nice photos of them released on a regular basis. Those photos are totally set up. When they see paparazzi in real life, they put their heads down and hide their faces - unless they are promoting something.

Another example is when there is high demand for a certain photo. When Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's daughter Apple was first born, they worked directly with an infamous paparazzi photographer in New York. Together, they staged the first baby photos and made them look like candid pictures, then they sold the shots to a major magazine. The pictures were rumored to sell for upward of a million dollars. The paparazzi got a cut, and they took the rest.

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are a good example of a celebrity couple who hates paparazzi, but you will see nice photos of them released on a regular basis. Those photos are totally setup.

Kim Kardashian is the biggest example of a celebrity who releases fake paparazzi photos. Kim has a personal paparazzi who she texts regularly. This man flies around the world, going wherever she asks him to be, and they work together to produce the latest fake paparazzi pictures of her. She reviews every image before they start selling them to magazines. If they shoot on a beach, these images are heavily Photoshopped and she chooses her favorites to sell.

How frequently does this happen?

Very often. I can't remember the last time I flipped through a tabloid or browsed a gossip blog without seeing setup shops in the mix.

How much would a staged pic like the Taylor "first official BF/GF pics" get?

Enough to put a down payment on a very nice house. Most paparazzi have heard rumors that the first shots of Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal looking cozy together on a sidewalk in Brooklyn were staged. They were shot with a long lens from a great distance, and the photographer had to put time into the job. But many people believe that his tip came from inside Taylor's own camp.

Have you ever staged pics? Explain?

The most interesting celebrity I've ever worked with directly to do staged pictures was Amanda Bynes during her very public mental breakdown. She asked me to meet her at an IHOP restaurant in Harlem, of all places, and the first staged shots with her happened on the sidewalk outside. She talked a lot about how the magazines always published photos of her looking ugly and how she wanted to look beautiful. After the shoot, she deleted all of the pictures she disliked and I sent the other ones out to the magazines. A few days later, she was having a small party and wanted to do another staged shoot. Those images ended up on the cover of a tabloid as well, but it backfired when they ran them alongside a very negative (although honest) story about her unhealthy lifestyle at the time.

What are telltale signs of a staged shot?

Most of the staged shots look silly and are very obvious to a trained eye. If it's a huge news story, you always have to wonder, don't you?

Related: Is HiddleSwift Real or Fake? Spencer Pratt Gives His Verdict!

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From Harper's BAZAAR

Pat Cleveland was 16 years old when she was told she would never make it as a model.

It was the late Sixties, and Cleveland, who had just signed with Ford Models, was sitting nervously in a large leather chair in the agency's intimidating Manhattan office. Co-founder Eileen Ford had requested to see the lanky teenager for some "real" talk.

"Patricia, we have very few colored girls in our agency. And do you know why?" Cleveland remembers Ford saying. "Because there is no work for colored girls. The only reason I took you is because [photographer] Oleg Cassini recommended you. But I really think you will never make it in the modeling business."

Clearly the late Ford, known as the grande dame of the modeling industry, was wrong. Cleveland went on to become one of fashion's most prolific models-and as Andre Leon Talley described her in his 2003 memoir A.L.T.: A Memoir: "The first black supermodel, the Josephine Baker of the international runways." (Cleveland did, after all, start out before Beverly Johnson, and long before Iman.)

Despite Ford's skepticism, Cleveland stayed with the agency. Now 65 and striking as ever, Cleveland details the deeply entrenched racism and discrimination she faced throughout her career in a new memoir, Walking with the Muses.

"It really bothered me because I would sit there and watch these black girls be rejected because they weren't good enough," she told HarpersBAZAAR.com, referring to a specific "go-see" she had with photographer Patrick Lichfield, who had told her: "Tell that agency not to be ridiculous. This is not the type of girl I want to photograph."

"I would sit there and watch these black girls be rejected because they weren't good enough."

Two years before that meeting with Ford, Cleveland had been spotted by a fashion editor on her way home from her Manhattan high school.

"My mother said to me, 'If you don't wear makeup, nobody's ever going to look at you and you'll die lonely,'" admits Cleveland. "So I put on that eyeliner and I put on the clothes I'd made. I went to school. And that was the day I was discovered."

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She pauses for a few seconds, before breaking into her famous, wide smile: "It was the eyeliner!"

Though Cleveland says she shrugged off the editor's interest, her mother convinced her to take the meeting.

"All you need is one person to believe in you. And my mother thought that I could do that and I thought I couldn't do that because I looked at the magazines and I didn't see anybody who looked like me," she reveals.

After taking calls with photographers, Cleveland was cast for the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling runway show featuring African-American models that first started in 1958. Cleveland describes it as a show that brought high fashion to middle-class black women around the country.

"Sometimes we'd do shows in a restaurant or a hotel and the runways were a little shabby but the ladies were always elegant," she says. "They were dressed in gloves and furs and hats, and they were somebody even if the prejudice poison was in the air."

The show took the girls deep into the South. Cleveland grew up in New York-her father was a saxophonist from Sweden; her mother an artist who grew up in the Jim Crow South. There, the young models experienced run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan. They were also told they weren't allowed to use the restrooms at a diner.

"We went for a walk, my girlfriend and I, and people threw rocks at us," Cleveland recalls. "We were attacked by people when we tried to use the lavatories. Just being black in the South was a very horrible experience-horrible in contrast to all the beauty we were trying to bring to the world."

Soon after, she went to model for Essence-the first glossy for black women. But Cleveland found she didn't fit in there, either. For the first time, she wasn't "black enough." She writes in her memoir:

"[Photographer Anthony Barboza] wasn't convinced that I fit in with its mission. He would kid around, saying, "I only photograph black girls" or "You're not black enough." That hurt my feelings. I just wanted to be photographed no matter what color I was While blacks were often denied opportunities because of their skin color-and believe me, I lost plenty of jobs because I didn't have the conventional all-American looks that higher-ups at fashion magazines considered pretty-I also got passed over for jobs that went to models who were a deeper shade of brown."

Despite Barboza's hesitation, Cleveland did appear in the first issue of Essence. After that, she switched agencies to Wilhelmina, where an agent told her that she needed to become a success abroad to make it big in America. So in 1971, Cleveland set out for Europe where she connected with models like Donna Jordan and artists like Andy Warhol.

"I looked at the magazines and I didn't see anybody who looked like me." - Pat Cleveland

"They're used to different kinds of cultures there, you know?" she says. "We went to Paris and showed our colors like peacocks. We let those feathers just come right out. My friend Karl [Lagerfeld], he knew how to live very well and he knew how to dress well. It was such an education. He knew what fork to use, what time to come and what time to go. He was our meter and he was our guide. We taught him how to be free and American, and he taught us how to be European and royal. We just exchanged our cultures, basically. It was like, 'ooh taste this, ooh that's yummy, ooh you taste this now!'"

Cleveland found immediate success. By day, she was modeling for magazines in both Europe and the U.S., regularly walking the runway for brands like Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent and Kenzo. By night, she was dancing in nightclubs with the likes of Mick Jagger, who she dated on-and-off.

"He's so playful and such a lovely person," she reveals. "The time when that was happening, I think he was between everything. He was going to be married to this one and that one. I was always sort of in between somewhere."

She also caught the eye of artist Salvador Dali, who she met through her friend Juan Fernandez, one of Dali's muses.

"He said, 'I want you to pose for me. Can you get up on the table? Now pretend you're a dog and get on all fours and throw your derriere up!' I posed for him many times. He became a friend." Here, she he pauses, deciding whether or not to go on. Finally she adds slyly: "He told me one thing, he said, 'The most beautiful art that a woman can make is to have a child. And I didn't know where he was going with that!'"

Still, Cleveland was much more than a muse. She participated in the legendary Battle of Versailles fashion show during her time in Paris. The 1973 event pitted French designers against their American contemporaries. Of the 36 models used by the American designers, 10 were African-American-a monumental shift from the mindset she left behind in the US years earlier.

"I think the designers began to understand the cultural changes. In order to fit in you have to go with the flow or else you're out in the cold," she says, gazing at an old modeling shot of herself on the cover of her memoir. "Everything started changing. I was lucky because I was surfing right on the top of the wave."

Diversity, she says, is "so international now!" When she started modeling, things were "black and white with no middle ground. The world has changed-we're all part of one world now. Fashion has to be for everyone."

Cleveland, who moved back to America in 2006, continued to model over the next several decades. She recently walked the runway for H&M at Paris Fashion Week. And now her daughter Anna Cleveland is a successful model in her own right. Cleveland says despite what she experienced starting her career, she encouraged her daughter to follow in her footsteps.

"Modeling is just in her DNA. She's got it and I say if God gives you something, use it," she says. "She's having as big a love story with fashion as I had with some of the same people."

Go back in time with Pat Cleveland as she takes us through her favorite outfits from the Seventies:
Since first arriving in Los Angeles from his home state of Iowa, Love co-creator Paul Rust has arguably been an overnight success. He was one of the first Los Angeles alums out of the Upright Citizens Brigades Hollywood outpost after they opened in 2005. There, along with his writing partner Neil Campbell, they developed a reputation for churning out vaudevillian-gross out sketches, in both the late-night stage show Not Too Shabby and with their sketch group A Kiss From Daddy. Soon after, Rust was catapulted into motion pictures, starring in Chris Columbus I Love You, Beth Cooper and Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds.

Recently, Rust has been part of Netflixs creative stable, writing on the fourth season of Arrested Development and co-writing the streaming services movie Pee-wees Big Holiday with the pics star Paul Reubens. That film marked the first of Rusts collaborations with Judd Apatow. As explained here by Rust at the Awardsline Emmy screening of Love, the series, which takes a close-up of young couple Gus (Rust) and Mickey (Communitys Gillian Jacobs), initially started as a movie pitch to Apatow by Rust and his wife, Lesley Arfin. In this clip, Rust expounds on Loves early roots, while Jacobs and Australian co-star Claudia ODoherty explain how they made their way to the project.

Stand-up comedian John Mulaney guest-moderated our Love post-screening Q&A. His stand-up special The Comeback Kid is currently available on Netflix.

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Netflix Confirms Deal For Ricky Gervais' 'The Office' Spinoff Movie

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House Speaker Paul Ryan talks to reporters at the Republican National Committee headquarters on Capitol Hill on June 14, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., issued a stern warning Thursday about the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump about the way government should work.

We will lose our freedoms in this country, including all of the Bill of Rights, if we dont robustly defend the separation of powers, Ryan said at his weekly press conference inside the U.S. Capitol.

Ryan was asked by reporters numerous times about Trumps recent conduct. Just this week, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee questioned whether President Obama actually wants to stop terrorist attacks, accused many American Muslims of sheltering terrorists and said he could act unilaterally as president to prevent any type or class of people from entering the country. Trump made the last claim despite the fact that Article I, Section 8, clause 4 of the Constitution entrusts Congress with the power to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.

And on Wednesday night in Atlanta, Trump issued a rebuke to Republican leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Ryan, who leads the lower chamber of Congress, and the many others who have criticized Trump over the past days and weeks for a merry-go-round of offensive, controversial and erroneous statements.

Our leaders have to get a lot tougher, and be quiet. Just please be quiet, Trump said. Dont talk. Please, be quiet. Just be quiet, to the leaders, because they have to get tougher, they have to get sharper, they have to get smarter, and we have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.

At Ryans Thursday press briefing, he was asked first if he would ever rescind his endorsement of Trump. Ryan noticeably did not rule out the possibility, saying only, Thats not my plan. I dont have a plan to do that.

Ryan was then asked how many more times he would have to repudiate something said by Trump, as he did again Tuesday in rejecting Trumps proposal to temporarily bar all Muslims from entering the U.S.

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I dont know, Ryan said.

Does that bother you that you have to keep doing this? a reporter asked.

Ryan chuckled. Hes a different kind of candidate, he said of Trump. This is a different kind of year.

He talked about defending conservative principles and then, almost as an afterthought, tried to remind himself of why he was doing all this in the first place. I do, though, believe that the last thing we want is a Democrat in the White House, like Hillary Clinton, Ryan said.

Ryan was then asked about Trumps rescinding of the Washington Posts access to his political rallies, which Trump announced this week after complaining about the papers coverage. Thats a new one, Ryan said. In an act of solidarity with the press, he gave the last question of the day to a Post reporter, who asked about Trumps be quiet statement.

How do you have any confidence that this is the guy that is going to have respect for separation of power? the Post reporter asked.

Ryan laughed again. You know you cant make this up sometimes, he said.

Ryan noted that he and the other Republican congressional leaders had just that morning introduced a new set of plans to reduce and restrict the power of the president. Republicans have complained for years that Obama has overreached the power of the executive branch through executive orders and agency rule-making that replaces laws made by Congress.

Ill just say we represent a separate, but equal, branch of government. We just spent the morning talking about how valuable the separation of powers is and how were trying to restore the entire principal of self-government of government-by-consent, Ryan said.

We will lose our freedoms in this country, including all of the Bill of Rights, if we dont robustly defend the separation of powers, and were going to fight for those rights on behalf of our citizens so that we remain a self-governing people, he said.
June 16 (Reuters) - Pembina Pipeline has shut its Western Pipeline in British Columbia, Canada, after wet weather and erosion exposed a portion of the line, according to a notice sent to customers on Thursday.

The company's Peace Pipeline is currently at full capacity and cannot accept additional crude, and Pembina expects its Boundary Lake (ACR) outage duration to continue as a result of the situation, the notice said.

The company cannot speculate on when it will resume service on the line, the notice said.

(Reporting by Liz Hampton in Houston and Catherine Ngai in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Smi

The ongoing search for quiet hangouts has led intellectuals and history buffs to Smi, where there's been an uptick in colorful hotels.

Getting There

Fly in to Rhodes (there are nonstop flights from multiple European cities), then take a one-hour express ferry.

Home Base

The atmospheric Old Markets hotel (doubles from $942) is a registered national monument with 10 antique-filled suites.

Photo Op

Travel specialist Elena Papanicolaou of Fly Me to the Moon recommends hiking up to the top of the old town of Horio to see the crumbling remnants of a castle built by the Knights of St. John.

Hydra

The bohemian and fashion sets (Leonard Cohen, Chlo Sevigny) have alighted here, joining forces to create a happening art scene.

Getting There

Take a two-hour hydrofoil from Piraeus, which is only a 20-minute drive from Athens.

Home Base

Hydra is either about simple, charming guesthouses like Orloff (doubles from $160) and Cotommatae Hydra 1810 (doubles from $181) or villa rentals. Five Star Greece can help.

Photo Op

The Deste Foundation, a cutting-edge gallery in a former slaughterhouse, is a must-visit.

Pros

Despite its great beaches, easy access, and a variety of watersports, Pros remains off the radarwhich is why families head here to avoid the crowds.

Getting There

Take a 40-minute flight from Athens or a three- to four-hour boat ride from Piraeus.

Home Base

Pros has plenty of hotels, but big broods are better off spreading out in a villa. White Key Villas offers all types of rentals, including the brand-new, five-bedroom Villa Iro (groups of 10 from $15,146 per week).

Photo Op

Look out for the weathered blue furniture spilling from low-key tavernas to the waters edge in the harbor.

Folegandros

Thanks to an increase in nonstop flights to neighboring Santorini, this unsung Cycladic island is on the verge of wider discovery.

Getting There

Fly to Santorini, then take a 90-minute ferry (between May and October); or take a four-hour ferry (year-round) from Piraeus.

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Home Base

The simple but lovely Anemomilos apartments (doubles from $281) have

sensational views thanks to their cliff-clinging setting.

Photo Op

Local fashion designer Christina Economou suggests hiking up to the church of Panagia. Its the islands biggest religious building, and it looks out across the archipelago.

Related Articles
Brazil's state-run energy giant Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. or Petrobras PBR is reportedly planning to divest an 81% stake in a natural gas pipeline network to a group led by Brookfield Asset Management Inc. The value of the transaction is approximately $6 billion and is expected to be finalized by next month.

Citing unnamed sources, the Bloomberg report says that the consortium of buyers also includes the Singapore sovereign-wealth fund GIC Pte; the Chinese sovereign-wealth fund China Investment Corp.; and the Greenwich, CT-based private equity firm First Reserve Corp.

Petrobras, with more than $130 billion in long-term liabilities, is the most indebted energy company in the world. Hence, the company is focusing on massive asset divestitures to reduce its debt and strengthen its balance sheet. To this end, the company is trying to sell the network of gas pipelines  Nova Transportadora do Sudeste SA  to address issues such as deteriorating net income, high debt management risk, disappointing return on equity and weak operating cash flow.

The company, which is knee-deep in a corruption scandal, had entered into a 60 day period of exclusive talks with Brookfield, which is the largest alternative asset manager in Canada, regarding the sale of the gas pipelines. Notably, the negotiations can be extended by 30 more days.

PETROBRAS-ADR C Price

PETROBRAS-ADR C Price | PETROBRAS-ADR C Quote

The transaction, if completed, could be the only divestment in Brazil for Petrobras this year. The companys other two divestment deals, namely BR Distribuidora and Transpetro, are not expected to close by this year given their complexity and slow pace.

Given that the last few years were extremely challenging for oil companies worldwide, Petrobras is taking initiatives to stabilize its financial performance. The oil giant plans to raise roughly $15.1 billion through asset sales by the end of 2016. The company has already sold about $2.1 billion in assets since last year, mainly by spinning off its assets in Chile and Argentina.

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Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Petrobras is one of the largest energy players in Latin America. Currently, the company carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), implying that it will perform in line with the broader U.S. equity market over the next one to three months.

Some better-ranked players from the broader energy sector are PBF Logistics LP PBFX, McDermott International Inc. MDR and Sasol Ltd. SSL. All these stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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New York (AFP) - Philadelphia on Thursday became the first major US city to vote to tax sugary drinks, fighting off a multi-million dollar challenge from the beverage industry.

At about 50 cents a liter, the tax will apply to sweetened drinks, including those with artificial sweetener. It covers not only sodas but also sports drinks, flavored water, energy drinks and presweetened coffee and tea, the mayor's office said.

The only exceptions are for drinks comprised of at least 50 percent milk, fresh fruit or fresh vegetables.

Berkeley, California, with a population of about 120,000 residents, is the only other city in America to tax soft drinks.

Philadelphia's city council approved the tax by 13 to four votes on Thursday, after months of deliberation. It is set to go into effect in January.

Supporters say the measure will improve the health of the 1.5 million people who live in Philadelphia, America's fifth-largest city.

More than 68 percent of the city's adults and 41 percent of children are overweight or obese.

Opponents predict it will spell catastrophe for small businesses, forcing some to go under if their customers leave town to stock up elsewhere.

Dozens of attempts to pass similar legislation in other US cities have failed and it was the third attempt to get the tax imposed in Philadelphia, where city council members threw it out twice under pressure from the drinks industry.

Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney this time sought to win support by saying the tax would raise $91 million a year to help fund prekindergarten education, community schools and recreation centers.

"Today was a big win," Kenney tweeted after the vote. "It'll be an even bigger victory for our kids who get pre-K, community schools and rebuilt parks, rec centers and libraries," he added.

There was a lively debate before the City Council voted in favor of the measure. Several people complained about the financial burden on poorer families in a city where 26.7 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

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The tax would "create the worst black market for non-alcoholic beverages since prohibition" in the 1920s and 1930s, said a man identified by the local ABC television channel as Coca-Cola employee Chris Hunter.

But cardiologist Ken Margulies praised the council's courage, saying they were doing the right thing to help reduce diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

"You are acting boldly to deal with very real concerns and needs of Philadelphians and our country as a whole. Thank you," he said.

The soft drink industry spent millions of dollars in a bid to head off the legislation.

"Discriminatory taxes send the wrong message to consumers," said the American Beverage Association, which includes Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

"The government shouldn't be focused on demonizing certain products," it added, insisting it was "doing its part" in tackling obesity by providing "more beverage options with fewer calories and in smaller portion sizes."

The consumption of sugary and fizzy drinks has steadily fallen in the United States for the last 11 years.
Caracas (AFP) - Venezuelan police arrested 400 people after the country's food crisis erupted into looting this week, a pro-government official said Thursday, blaming the rioting on the political opposition.

Dozens of shops were broken into and looted on Tuesday in the eastern city of Cumana, the latest flashpoint in a crisis that has killed at least four people so far.

The governor of Sucre state where Cumana is located told state television channel VTV that "more than 400 people" were arrested including three suspected leaders of the looting in the city.

"We will follow the investigation until it leads us to the masterminds" of the disturbances, Governor Luis Acuna said.

Acuna is a member of the ruling Venezuelan Socialist Party of President Nicolas Maduro.

The opposition blames Maduro for an economic crisis in which Venezuelans are suffering shortages of basic foods and goods.

Maduro blames the crisis on an "economic war" by the business elite.

He has vowed to resist his center-right opponents' efforts to remove him from office and warned he will not tolerate violence.

His ally in Sucre, Acuna, on Thursday accused the opposition of "sowing paramilitary values, such as hate and crime, in some citizens."

He said Cumana "has been returning to normal" since Tuesday's outbreak of looting, which erupted during a protest against food shortages.

Elsewhere on Wednesday a 17-year-old boy died after being wounded at a similar protest in the western town of Lagunilla, authorities said.

"There must be no impunity," Acuna said of those arrested in Cumana.

"This is a situation that must not be repeated here or anywhere else."

The South American oil state is suffering an economic crisis brought on by the plunge in global crude prices over the past two years.

At least four people have died in disturbances in recent days, according to the state prosecution service.

Human rights group Provea puts the death toll from the latest wave of unrest at five, including a man who it says died during the disturbances in Cumana.
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Internet sensation Grandma May has finally received a polite response to her equally polite Google search.

The saga started when her search inquiry  "Please translate these roman numerals mcmxviii thank you"  was shared by her grandson Ben John, who was amused at his nan's minding of her manners online, and the world has been in love ever since.

SEE ALSO: Coolest grandma in the galaxy makes 'Star Wars' quilt for her grandson

Turns out, the folks at Google loved it too. On Thursday, Google told Grandma May via Twitter that no "thanks" were necessary when it came to her search request, while Google UK said Wednesday that in a world with billions of searches, her's made them smile.

John told the BBC that he came across the search when he was at the home of his 86-year-old grandma, May Ashworth, while he was doing his washing.

"I live with my boyfriend and we don't have a dryer at our house, so I usually go over to my nan's to do our washing," he said. "While I was waiting I thought I'd go on the internet and that's why I opened her laptop."

Upon opening the laptop, John found the very proper search his grandma had made. Amused at the sight, he snapped a photo and put it on Twitter where it went viral.

Grandma May doesn't use her laptop that much, apparently. When he asked why she was so polite, she said she thought it would make the search go faster.

"I asked my nan why she used 'please' and 'thank you' and it seemed she thinks that there is someone  a physical person  at Google's headquarters who looks after the searches," he told the outlet. "She thought that by being polite and using her manners, the search would be quicker."

John has also shared a photo of himself and his "famous Nan" on Thursday. Total sweethearts.
Sitting at a waterside restaurant in Porto, Portugals second-largest city after Lisbon, Andre Mendes looks me steadily in the eye when he says, If what you drink next is not the best port youve ever had, Ill kill myself. A little extreme for an apres-dinner dessert wine, but Mendes, all calm exterior, is paradoxically prone to certain extremes. And if you cant get good port in Porto, nothing in the world makes sense.

Like the fact that back in 2006, Mendes and a few friends who had gotten tired of making the jaunt into Spain or down to Lisbon for festivals featuring music that, like all good art, is decidedly challenging decided to put on their own festival, with a grand total of zero cash. Ten years later, with a back pocket full of sponsors, tickets going for between 37.50 and 89 euros (about $42.50$100) and, in a stroke of right-time-genius, Porto being pegged as the best European destination as recently as 2014, Mendes is looking at another sold-out Amplificasom festival this summer and sitting pretty while doing so.

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Andre Mendes

Source: Photo courtesy of Claudia Andrade

This is not just a music festival, and it isnt a hipster festival for whiskered guys, says Gabriele Girolamini of Italys Drome magazine. Its a real, deep and cultural experience. Standing backstage at the main stage of Portos Hard Club, a grand, stately manse right off of Palacio da Bolsa, watching the Canadian band Godspeed You Black Emperor and waiting to go on, I could see this. (Total disclosure: My band Oxbow has a stripped-down acoustic duo act that we peddled as a way to get a ticket to Amplificasom.) The almost 1,000 people in attendance pressed up against the stage as the atmospheric post-rock rumbling of the band started could also see this and were clued into the fact that for the nine-piece collective to have come all the way from Canada to do one show, large amounts of juice had to be brought to bear. And were not talking about just cash, necessarily.

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Andre is ultimately a committed man who never gives up, says Scott Kelly, guitarist and founder of the masters of dark heavy Neurosis, which is playing Amplifest, a festival subset of Amplificasom, in August. And hes a pretty visionary promoter  [one] with ethics who totally believes his ears. Ears that have pulled in a whos who of modern music  free-jazz saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, the creepy-crawly Bohren & der Club of Gore, the more metallic Godflesh  along with way-beyond-edge films, talks, exhibitions and, in a special twist, actual records and recorded music in an open-air-bazaar-type deal.

There was a lot of talk about failure when people were thinking about whether or not this would work, Mendes says, spinning his SUV into Portos nighttime traffic as we head back to the hotel. But I could not think of a single reason why it wouldnt work.

Possibly key No. 367 to why Mendes is where he is and why the rest of us are just trying to get tickets.

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PPG Industries PPG celebrated the completion of its $10 million coatings center at its facility in Tianjin, China. The center is aimed at serving automotive plastics and decorative accessories customers in the region. It is the companys first Chinese facility catering to consumers in this part of the automotive supply chain. The facility currently provides OEM coatings as well as industrial coatings to customers in the Asia Pacific region.

The center brings PPG Industries technological expertise and innovation for the producers of automotive decorative parts, providing enhanced color consistency and reduced lead times. The company will be able to help customers gain competitive advantage by improving yield rates on painting lines as well as lowering the cost of painting plastic parts. The target customer base includes Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, along with auto manufacturers.

PPG Industries is optimistic about the Chinese auto market. The sector is expected to continue growing at a fast pace, proving beneficial for the company. The construction of the new center in China is aimed at further strengthening PPG Industries presence in the country. The company first established a coatings plant in the nation at the Tianjin site in 1994 which has now become its largest coatings production base in the world.

Earlier in the year, PPG Industries announced the completion of its $20 million on-site electrocoat coatings blending center at its resin manufacturing facility in Zhangjiagang, China. This enabled the company to cater to the growing demand from automotive manufacturing and industrial customers seeking environmentally friendly coatings like waterborne e-coat products which abide by the Chinese environmental norms.

PPG INDS INC Price

PPG INDS INC Price | PPG INDS INC Quote

PPG Industries saw higher profits in the first quarter of 2016, aided by its cost-management initiatives and contributions from acquisitions. Adjusted earnings for the quarter beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate while revenues missed the same. The company raised its quarterly dividend by 11% and also reaffirmed its plans to deploy $2$2.5 billion cash over 20152016 toward acquisitions and share repurchases.

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Revenues from the Industrial Coatings segment of PPG Industries rose 2% year on year to $1.37 billion in the first quarter. The upside was driven by an improvement in sales volume as well as acquisition-related sales, partly offset by currency headwinds. Segment income rose almost 9% from the prior-year quarter to $265 million, backed by manufacturing cost efficiencies and benefits from restructuring and acquisitions. The company is taking steps toward its goal of developing and commercializing customer-driven technologies and consumer branding strategies.

PPG Industries currently holds a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Some other favorably ranked companies in the chemical space include Akzo Nobel N.V. AKZOY, BASF SE BASFY and Innospec Inc. IOSP, all sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

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Clad in dark suits with their brows furrowed, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden laid 49 roses  one for each of the Pulse nightclub shooting victims  at a makeshift memorial on Thursday afternoon at the Phillips Center, adjacent to Orlandos City Hall.

President Obama has been here before, addressing the families of victims and survivors in the aftermath of a deadly mass shooting. But here he was again, traveling to Orlando almost a week after 49 were shot dead and 53 others were wounded at the Pulse nightclub. The presidents trip to Orlando was his 10th visit to the scene of a mass shooting.

During the presidents remarks, after meeting with families of victims and survivors, the poignancy of the visit rung true. He described the families grief as beyond description. Obama again called the shooting an act of terror and an act of hate. The shooting, he said, was an attack on the LGBT community.

Today, once again, as has been true too many times before, I held and hugged grieving family members and friends and they asked why does this keep happening. They pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage, Obama said Thursday. They dont care about the politics. Neither do I. Niether does [Vice President] Joe [Biden].

Obama added, the notion that the answer to this tragedy would be to make sure that more people in a nightclub are similarly armed to the killer, defies common sense, recalling some arguments by pro-gun activists.

President Obama said though the city was shaken by an evil, hateful act. The worst of humanity reared its evil but the best of humanity came roaring back, he said.

President Obama traveled to Orlando with the Vice President, Congresswoman Corrine Brown and Sens. Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio of Florida. Rubio and Brown traveled via Air Force One with the President, while Sen. Nelson flew with the Vice President. Before meeting with families at Orlandos Amway Center, President Obama had an opportunity to thank Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and first responders for their response to the shooting. During a press conference on Monday, authorities said the actions of officials who took down the shooter saved many, many lives. The president also met with staff members from Pulse nightclub, which lost two staff members during the attack.

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Though the president visited Orlando to meet with families, he waded into what has become a contentious debate about who and what is to blame for the attack. He called on all levels of government to do more to prevent terrorists from attacking Americans, saying his administration would continue working to destroy ISIS. Shortly before the president spoke, the Arizona Sen. John McCain blamed the administrations policies for the rise of ISIS and, in turn, the attack itself. Earlier this week, likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said the president claims to know our enemy, and yet he continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies, and for that matter, the American people.

Obama blamed U.S. politics for Omar Mateens ability, despite having been interviewed by the FBI on three separate occasions due to suspected ties to terrorism, to purchase a firearm. He said though the motives of shooters in Aurora, Newtown, and San Bernardino, and now Orlando may have differed, the instruments of death were so similar. Now, he said, another 49 are dead and some 53 will have scars that will last a lifetime.

Unfortunately, our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or just a disturbed indivual like those in Aurora or Newtown to buy extraordinary powerful weapons and they can do so legally, Obama said. This debate needs to change.

He said the families he met with in Orlando dont care about politics and urged the Senate, where a 15 hour filibuster urging gun action wrapped early Thursday, to do the right thing and save some lives.

Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families, Obama said.
June 16 (Reuters) - 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

The Financial Conduct Authority has caved in to banks over payment protection insurance compensation by backing the banks' call for a two-year deadline for new claims, against the view of its own experts. (http://bit.ly/1rqR744)

Berkeley Homes, one of Britain's most upmarket house builders, has reported a 20 percent fall in reservations for the past five months and added that it had launched no new schemes in London this year amid uncertainty over the European Union referendum. (http://bit.ly/1rqSn74)

The Guardian

Rolls-Royce has written to staff to say the company wants Britain to stay in the European Union. (http://bit.ly/1rqRcVt)

Areva, one of the French companies at the heart of the controversial Hinkley Point C nuclear project, has unveiled plans to break itself up into three parts in a bid to stem huge losses. (http://bit.ly/1rqSuQ2)

The Telegraph

Heathrow has sought to pressure the government into giving a controversial third runway the go-ahead by warning that ministers' much-heralded "Northern Powerhouse" idea is "at risk" if the airport if not expanded. (http://bit.ly/1rqSz6o)

Hollywood Bowl, the operator of bowling lanes, plans to float in London next month in a deal that will value the business at around 280 million pounds ($397.54 million). (http://bit.ly/1rqSxeT)

Sky News

South African retailer Steinhoff has confirmed it is considering a possible takeover bid for discount chain Poundland. (http://bit.ly/1rqR9sJ)

Sir Philip Green has apologised for the sale of BHS and its "sad" collapse, telling an MPs' inquiry he is finding a solution to the 571 million pounds ($810.71 million) pension deficit - pledging "we'll sort it". (http://bit.ly/1rqQxmX)

The Independent

Heads of Unilever, Airbus and General Electric have accused the official 'Leave' campaign of "deliberately" attempting to "mislead" voters by using their logos on a taxpayer-funded leaflet making the case for Brexit.

($1 = 0.7043 pounds) (Compiled by Shalini Nagarajan in Bengaluru; Editing by Bill Rigby)
LONDON (Reuters) - Pro-Brexit former Conservative party leaders and finance ministers said on Thursday the Treasury and Bank of England had failed to provide balanced analysis in the campaign ahead of next week's EU membership referendum.

Former Conservative leaders Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, and former finance ministers Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, said the economic authorities had failed to present a fair case of the consequences of leaving the European Union.

Both the finance ministry and Bank of England have said Britain could lapse into recession if it leaves the EU, and that sterling could fall sharply.

Advocates of Britain leaving the EU say these analyses fail to take into account the positives that might result, with Britain relieved of burdensome EU regulation and able to forge its own trading relationships.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney sent a barbed response to a letter from another "Leave" campaigner, Conservative Member of Parliament Bernard Jenkin, saying all public comments by Bank officials were in line with the central bank's duties.

Jenkin said Bank officials were prohibited from making further public comment on the referendum. Carney said Jenkin's letter "demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of central bank independence".

Chancellor (finance minister) George Osborne's warning on Wednesday of an emergency budget in the event of an EU exit was "born of desperation", the former leaders and finance ministers said in a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

"No responsible Chancellor would seriously propose any such thing," they said.

"This is a shocking and cynical attempt by the Leave campaign to try to muzzle independent expert opinion, which is rightly warning of the serious dangers of Britain leaving Europe," Stronger In Europe campaigner and Labour MP Wes Streeting said in a statement.

The rival "Leave" and "Remain" camps are campaigning ahead of the June 23 vote, with opinion polls suggesting the result will be close.

(Reporting by Freya Berry and Andy Bruce; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
LONDON (Reuters) - Pro-Brexit former Conservative party leaders and finance ministers said on Thursday the Treasury and Bank of England had failed to provide balanced analysis in the campaign ahead of next week's EU membership referendum. Former Conservative leaders Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, and former finance ministers Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, said the economic authorities had failed to present a fair case of the consequences of leaving the European Union. Both the finance ministry and Bank of England have said Britain could lapse into recession if it leaves the EU, and that sterling could fall sharply. Advocates of Britain leaving the EU say these analyses fail to take into account the positives that might result, with Britain relieved of burdensome EU regulation and able to forge its own trading relationships. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney sent a barbed response to a letter from another "Leave" campaigner, Conservative Member of Parliament Bernard Jenkin, saying all public comments by Bank officials were in line with the central bank's duties. Jenkin said Bank officials were prohibited from making further public comment on the referendum. Carney said Jenkin's letter "demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of central bank independence". Chancellor (finance minister) George Osborne's warning on Wednesday of an emergency budget in the event of an EU exit was "born of desperation", the former leaders and finance ministers said in a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper. "No responsible Chancellor would seriously propose any such thing," they said. "This is a shocking and cynical attempt by the Leave campaign to try to muzzle independent expert opinion, which is rightly warning of the serious dangers of Britain leaving Europe," Stronger In Europe campaigner and Labour MP Wes Streeting said in a statement. The rival "Leave" and "Remain" camps are campaigning ahead of the June 23 vote, with opinion polls suggesting the result will be close. (Reporting by Freya Berry and Andy Bruce; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
An undated photo from a social media account of Omar Mateen, who Orlando Police have identified as the suspect in the mass shooting at a gay nighclub in Orlando, Florida, U.S., June 12, 2016. Omar Mateen via Myspace/Handout via REUTERS

The gunman who carried out the deadliest mass shooting in US history reportedly posted messages in support of the terrorist group ISIS on his Facebook page during the attack.

Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday and said he did it in the name of ISIS, the group also known as the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh.

Mateen, 29, who was shot dead by the police during the attack, was on a terror watch list in the US after authorities questioned him in separate 2013 and 2014 investigations. He was known to authorities because he had expressed sympathies for other terrorist groups, including the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the Shia militant group Hezbollah.

CBS News obtained one of Mateen's Facebook messages, which reportedly read:

You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance [sic]

In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the usa.

Fox News reports that he posted other messages after the attack started. Ron Johnson, the Senate homeland security chairman, shared the messages with Fox. They reportedly read:

I pledge my alliance to [ISIS leader] abu bakr al Baghdadi..may Allah accept me

The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west

Mateen also searched for the terms "Pulse Orlando" and "shooting" on Facebook during the attack, according to Fox.

Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, sent a letter to Facebook on Wednesday asking the company to assist in the investigation of the shooting.

Mateen died in a shootout with the police hours after the attack began. He also pledged allegiance to ISIS in a 911 call during the attack. An FBI source told Fox that Mateen made 16 phone calls from inside the club.

A local TV station in Orlando reported taking a call from someone who claimed to be the nightclub shooter while the attack was ongoing. The caller said he was the shooter and then added: "I did it for ISIS. I did it for the Islamic State."

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Despite Mateen's pro-ISIS statements, his motives most likely go beyond just terrorist ideology. Some of the people closest to Mateen have hinted at psychological issues, and witnesses have come forward saying Mateen frequented the nightclub he attacked.





More From Business Insider


(Adds details of autopsy, paragraphs 6-7)

By Barbara Liston

ORLANDO, Fla., June 16 (Reuters) - The probe into the death of a 2-year-old boy killed by an alligator at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, is not criminal in nature, the local sheriff's office said on Thursday.

Police divers recovered the body of Lane Graves on Wednesday from the man-made lake where he had been snatched by the alligator as he played at the water's edge the night before.

The investigation is continuing, said Orange County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Rose Silva, adding, "It's not criminal in nature at this time." She did not provide further details.

A Disney spokeswoman said the company would review the posted signs that ban swimming in Seven Seas Lagoon but do not specifically warn about alligators.

The boy was grabbed by the reptile at about 9:15 p.m. local time on Tuesday while his family, on vacation from Omaha, Nebraska, relaxed on the shore nearby, authorities have said. His parents, Matt and Melissa Graves, tried to save the child but were unable to free him from the alligator's grip.

A complete autopsy was conducted on Thursday afternoon on the body of the boy, which was found intact underwater.

"The cause of death was ruled as a result of drowning and traumatic injuries," the Orange County Medical Examiner's Office said in a brief statement. It did not elaborate.

The aquatic predators often roll their larger prey beneath the surface until their victim stops breathing, experts say, and then stash the body away to eat later.

Walt Disney Co Chief Executive Bob Iger spoke with the family by phone on Wednesday and expressed his sympathies, the company said.

Disney spokeswoman Jacquee Wahler said on Thursday that resort beaches that were closed after the attack would be off-limits to guests until further notice.

"All of our beaches are currently closed, and we are conducting a swift and thorough review of all of our processes and protocols," Wahler said in a statement. "This includes the number, placement and wording of our signage and warnings."

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SIXTH GATOR CAUGHT

The alligator was believed to be between 4 and 7 feet (1.2 and 2 meters) long.

Trappers remained at the lagoon on Thursday after removing a sixth alligator from the water late on Wednesday in an effort to find the one that snatched the child, said Greg Workman, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The commission's executive director, Nick Wiley, has said there is a good chance they have already captured the alligator in question. But officials said the search would go on until that was proved by forensic tests such as DNA studies, teeth measurements and comparison of bite marks.

Workman said the commission also has wildlife officers on the scene around the clock, including three last night. He said they are searching all day, but especially at night when alligators are more active because of cooler temperatures and less human activity.

Disney shares gained 11 cents to close at $98.38 on Thursday. Its Orlando resort is the most-visited theme park in the world, drawing more than 20 million visitors last year.

The incident came ahead of Thursday's opening of the company's first theme park in China, a $5.5 billion project in Shanghai that boasts Disney's tallest castle.

The attack happened on a beach by Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, an upmarket property just one stop from the Magic Kingdom on Walt Disney World's monorail.

The hotel's website - rooms start at $569 a night before taxes - says guests can enjoy diversions such as "bask on the white-sand beach." (Additional reporting by Laila Kearney in New York and Letitia Stein in Tampa, Fla.; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Matthew Lewis)
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Prophecy Development Corp. ("Prophecy" or the "Company") (TSX: PCY, OTC: PRPCD, Frankfurt: 1P2N) is pleased to announce that it has commenced its sampling program at the Paca deposit within its Pulacayo silver-zinc-lead project in Bolivia. The Pulacayo project is located in southern Bolivia, close to major silver mining projects operated by Coeur Mining Inc. (San Bartolome), Pan American Silver Corp. (San Vicente) and Sumitomo Corporation (San Cristobal). Pulacayo is fully permitted for mining and processing up to 560 tonnes of ore per day.

Paca Sampling Description:

Samples were obtained at one meter intervals from near surface drifts within the Paca mine which appears to have limited historic development. The area of sampled drifts has an estimated dimension of 90 metres length (east to west) and 75 metres width (north to south) and occurs at an average depth of 100 metres. Mineralization mainly consists of silver sulphides (mostly tennantite), galena and sphalerite in the pores of the sedimentary rocks and in breccias. The sampled area is within the Paca resource boundary, but was not included in the block model used to estimate the resources recently disclosed according to National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101"). Approximately 90 samples are expected to be obtained and analyzed in an accredited chemical laboratory with results expected in July.

Paca Mineral Resource Statement - Effective September 9, 2015 Ag Eq. Cut-Off (g/t) Category Tonnes Ag (g/t) Zn (%) Pb (%) Ag Eq. (g/t) 200 Inferred 2,540,000 256 1.10 1.03 342 300 Inferred 1,260,000 363 0.98 1.02 444 400 Inferred 650,000 462 0.90 1.00 538 500 Inferred 330,000 558 0.79 1.04 631

Inferred resources do not have demonstrated economic viability, are speculative, and are not to be relied upon.

The mineral resource estimate was prepared by Mercator Geological Services Limited ("Mercator") under the supervision of Michael Cullen, P.Geo., who is an independent Qualified Person as set out in NI 43-101. The Paca mineralization starts from surface, with approximately 95% of the resource existing at the cut-off value of 300 g/t Ag Eq. occurring within 100 metres of surface (refer to the Company's news release dated September 21, 2015).

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Please refer to the maps at: www.prophecydev.com for plan and cross section views of the drift sampling area.

Pulacayo Underground Project Update:

Further to the Company's news release dated November 24, 2015, Prophecy is pleased to provide the following update on other progress at its Pulacayo project:

After Mercator produced the technical report compliant with NI 43-101 disclosing the resource estimate for the Pulacayo deposit prepared according to the CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Reserves (the "CIM Standards") and filed by the Company on July 31, 2015 which outlined 1.27 million tonnes of indicated resource grading 530g/t Ag, 2.51% Pb and 3.63% Zn and a further 350,000 tonnes of inferred resource grading 419g/t Ag, 2.47% Pb and 4.58% Zn (refer to the Company's news release dated June 18, 2015), the Company has undertaken studies (for production scenarios ranging from 200 to 500 tonnes per day) with the aim to bring Pulacayo into production at minimum capital expense given the current challenging metals market.

During 2016, Prophecy continued its discussion with concentrate off-takers based on the results of the 2013 Pulacayo trial mining and has received updated term sheets, possibly reflecting the potential tightening of future zinc-silver and lead-silver concentrate supplies. Prophecy has also received an improved term sheet from a custom milling and processing facility in Potosi, approximately 180km from the Pulacayo project and that is connected by a recently paved highway which is in excellent condition.

The Company continues to study optimal mining production and processing scenarios and intends to announce a production decision at the conclusion of the study in conjunction with a financing plan should a positive production decision be reached.

Management Comment:

A recent Reuters article noted that zinc was the best performing metal this year, with zinc prices climbing to a fourth successive peak over the previous 10 months based on persistent concerns about declining supplies. Zinc is by far the best performing metal tracked by the London Metal Exchange this year, rallying 25% on forecasts that tightening supplies may cause shortages.

Recently during March, at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention in Toronto, Prophecy met with Bolivia's Mining Minister, Mr. Cesar Navarro Miranda who expressed full support for the start-up and development of the Pulacayo mine. The Company continues to maintain good relations with the Pulacayo Mining Cooperative, with both parties sharing the common objectives of bringing the Pulacayo mine back into production, and employment and prosperity to the town of Pulacayo.

Qualified Persons

The technical content of this news release was reviewed and approved by Christopher M. Kravits, CPG, LPG who is a Qualified Person within the meaning of NI 43-101. Mr. Kravits is a consultant to the Company and serves as its Qualified Person and General Mining Manager.

About Prophecy

Prophecy Development Corp. is a Canadian public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that is engaged in developing mining and energy projects in Mongolia, Bolivia and Canada. Further information on Prophecy can be found at www.prophecydev.com.

PROPHECY DEVELOPMENT CORP.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"JOHN LEE"

Executive Chairman

For more information about Prophecy, please contact Investor Relations:

+1.604.563.0699

+1.888.513.6286

ir@prophecydev.com

www.prophecydev.com

Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts, are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations regarding Prophecy's future growth, results of operations, performance, business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These estimates and assumptions are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive and other uncertainties and contingencies, many of which, with respect to future events, are subject to change and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made by Prophecy. In making forward-looking statements as may be included in this news release, Prophecy has made several assumptions that it believes are appropriate, including, but not limited to assumptions that: there being no significant disruptions affecting operations, such as due to labour disruptions; currency exchange rates being approximately consistent with current levels; certain price assumptions for coal, prices for and availability of fuel, parts and equipment and other key supplies remain consistent with current levels; production forecasts meeting expectations; the accuracy of Prophecy's current mineral resource estimates; labour and materials costs increasing on a basis consistent with Prophecy's current expectations; and that any additional required financing will be available on reasonable terms. Prophecy cannot assure you that any of these assumptions will prove to be correct.

Numerous factors could cause Prophecy's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, including the following risks and uncertainties, which are discussed in greater detail under the heading "Risk Factors" in Prophecy's most recent Management Discussion and Analysis and Annual Information Form as filed on SEDAR and posted on Prophecy's website: Prophecy's history of net losses and lack of foreseeable cash flow; exploration, development and production risks, including risks related to the development of Prophecy's mineral properties; Prophecy not having a history of profitable mineral production; the uncertainty of mineral resource and mineral reserve estimates; the capital and operating costs required to bring Prophecy's projects into production and the resulting economic returns from its projects; foreign operations and political conditions, including the legal and political risks of operating in Bolivia, which is a developing jurisdiction; amendments to local Bolivian laws which may have an adverse impact on the Company's operations; title to Prophecy's mineral properties; environmental risks; the competitive nature of the mining business; lack of infrastructure; Prophecy's reliance on key personnel; uninsured risks; commodity price fluctuations; reliance on contractors; Prophecy's need for substantial additional funding and the risk of not securing such funding on reasonable terms or at all; foreign exchange risks; anti-corruption legislation; recent global financial conditions; the payment of dividends; and conflicts of interest.

These factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on Prophecy's forward-looking statements. Prophecy believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements contained in this news release and the documents incorporated by reference herein are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. In addition, although Prophecy has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Prophecy undertakes no obligation to release publicly any future revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as expressly required by law.

Paca Mineral Resource Statement - Effective September 9, 2015.

Tonnes are rounded to nearest 10,000.

The resource estimate cut-off value is 300 g/t Ag Eq. and resource estimate values are presented in bold type.

Inferred resources do not have demonstrated economic viability, are speculative, and are not to be relied on.

"The best performing metal in the world just hit a new peak" Eric Onstad, Reuters, June 6, 2016 2:18 PM ET.

SOURCE: Prophecy Development Corp.
Like the Massachusetts seaside town that serves as its host, the Provincetown Intl. Film Festival has been a beacon for independent-minded artists who seek to showcase and discuss their work with a diverse and appreciative audience. The 18th iteration of the festival, which takes place June 15-19, is no exception, as evidenced by its lineup of feature films and special programs.

This years schedule includes the Viggo Mortensen starrer Captain Fantastic, fresh off winning Un Certain Regards director prize at Cannes, as its opening night presentation. It closes with the New England premiere of the documentary Strike a Pose, about the dancers who backed Madonna on her Blonde Ambition tour. The festival will also honor Ang Lee and Cynthia Nixon and offers a restored presentation of long-time festival supporter John Waters rarely seen sophomore feature, the 1970 cult film Multiple Maniacs, in addition to many other films, panels and presentations.

COD COMMUNITY

According to the festivals organizers, PIFFs popularity is informed by the Cape Cod town itself, which over the course of three centuries has counted a Portuguese-run fishing industry, an array of artists, writers and actors, and a significant LGBTQ community among its residents.

Theres something very unique about Provincetown, says filmmaker Christine Walker, who is also the festivals executive director. Theres a camaraderie among the filmmakers and the audiences because we all feel like were in this inspirational place together. It doesnt feel like youre running around trying to secure a deal  it feels like youre meeting colleagues and people who love film.

Waters, whom festival artistic director Connie White describes as PIFFs guru, says the town and the festival draw eclectic crowds because its still a beatnik place  a place for Bohemians, a gay fishing village thats also hetero friendly. [And festival] audiences are passionate and crazy and accepting of almost anything. Who wouldnt want to go to Provincetown?

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HONOREES AND KEYNOTES

In addition to Lee, who will receive this years Filmmaker on the Edge award from Waters on June 18, and Nixon, who will be honored with the festivals Excellence in Acting Award that same day, the lineup will feature a keynote speech by producer Effie Brown [Dear White People] at the Evan Lawson Filmmakers Brunch on June 19. Actress-director Illeana Douglas will speak about her memoir I Blame Dennis Hopper at a PIFFtalks panel discussion June 16, while authors David Ebershoff and Lisa Genova will speak at a June 18 panel about the transition of their books  The Danish Girl and Still Alice, respectively  into feature films.

In addition to interviewing Lee as part of the Filmmaker on the Edge Award  a duty hes handled since the first PIFF in 1999  Waters will also be present to offer up a newly restored print of Multiple Maniacs, which he describes as training wheels for Pink Flamingos. Directed in 1970 and featuring the late Divine as the owner of a homicidal carnival act called The Cavalcade of Perversion, the film originally played Province-town when Waters summered there, as he has for the last 50 years. It played there before it had a distributor, says Waters. I worked at the [Provincetown] Bookshop, and the owner let me turn the display windows into advertisements for the film.

Waters decided to revisit the film after appearing with the Baltimore Symphony for a production of Hairspray, the family-friendly musical based on his 1988 film.

I was the onstage narrator, and I thought that the audience loved it for all the right reasons, he says. But what if they saw Multiple Maniacs? They would be horrified!

After working out some music rights and sound issues, Waters says that the film will enjoy a brief theatrical run following its debut at PIFF on June 17.

SCREENINGS

Were always looking for films that are edgy and [of] quality, says White. We want something crowd-pleasing to kick off the festival, that will engage the town, and Captain Fantastic [June 15 and 19] sets the right tone. Closing night is something that people can build up towards, and Strike a Pose [June 16 and 19] had the right flavor to end the festival  its touching and very interesting.

Other films screening include Jonah Markowitz and Tracey Wares documentary Political Animals, the drama Indignation, which director James Schamus adapted from the Philip Roth novel, and Susanna Whites film version of John Le Carres Our Kind of Traitor with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Harris. Todd Solondzs new comedy Wiener-Dog will also screen.

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'Captain Fantastic,' 'Girl Asleep' Win Big at Seattle Film Festival

'Olli Maki,' 'Captain Fantastic' Win Big in Un Certain Regard at Cannes
From Esquire

The June 16 issue of Watermark, Orlando's LGBT newspaper, was all wrapped up when Billy Manes, its editor-in-chief, went to sleep on Saturday night. The paper's staff reports on a large portion of Florida-the center of the state from the east coast to the west-so that week's cover was on the upcoming Pride Parade in St. Petersburg. They were ahead of schedule, with the front page designed and story written.

Then, at 5:00 Sunday morning, Manes woke up to his husband, Tony, tapping him on the shoulder, telling him firmly, "Billy, don't look at your phone."

Of course, he did anyway. That's when he learned there had been a mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub two blocks from their home. At that point, national news outlets were reporting a hostage situation, along with dozens already dead. In disbelief, Manes called the managers and owners of the club, who are friends of his, to see if they were safe. Then he began calling his staff of 10. They got straight to work, and by 7:08 a.m. they had a post about the shooting published on their site, which they updated as the death toll eventually grew to 49.

Watermark prints 20,000 copies every other Thursday, which are distributed for free around the city in restaurants, bars, and newspaper racks, and maintains an active site and social media pages. Their Facebook audience is small but passionate. On a post on Monday about where readers could donate blood, one woman commented, "Watermark is the first place I'm going for all my info."

For the past few days, Manes has played the role of editor, community point person, and spokesman. After he got his staff working on a brand-new 72-page June 16 issue, he went on NBC to talk about how his community was mourning. Visibly shaken, he told host Tamron Hall, "It's been a very difficult time for those of us in Orlando's LGBT community. I don't even know if my friends are alive or dead. My parents called me this morning to see if I was alive. And then I was at the press conference this morning and someone asked me if her brother was alive. It's very personal."

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Manes says this week's shooting is just one example that shows why dedicated resources are important for the LGBT community.

"There have been a lot of conversations over the past year as to whether there's relevance to any of this any more-even gay bars, because of the internet and the phone [dating] apps. But this is the backlash that we were all afraid of and this is the backlash that we're going to have to fight," he says.

"It's absolutely important that we have singularly gay voices talking to gay people who trust them. It's important today more than ever."

Manes became editor-in-chief of Watermark almost exactly a year ago, after working for alt weeklies in Tallahassee and Orlando. His first issue was the newspaper's all-time largest, celebrating the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage.

"I've been a gay advocate and an anti-gun advocate in Orlando for a very long time," he says. "I won awards for a documentary I did two years ago about my former partner shooting himself. So it was doubly distressing to wake up to news of gun violence against the gay community."

The paper covers everything from events to human-interest stories to crime against LGBT people. Manes says he's been in awe of what his staff has done in the last few days, writing, reporting, editing, designing, as well as constantly updating online resource guides for the community.

"It's been a whirlwind," he says. "It's been me being the figurehead on television but also having to edit the paper. My news editor has done an amazing job. We've had our interns working with us as well and they've been amazing. We're just pushing through as fast as we can."

In between filing stories, they've made time to attend vigils for the victims. But Manes says he thinks the magnitude won't fully hit him and some of his staff until their work is done and they can take a step back.

"A lot of us are giving ourselves until the end of the week to process this because we have to get a paper out," he says. "We really have to focus on getting our job done. Our biggest feelings are for the community, and that's what we're here for. We were formed more than two decades ago to do exactly this."
June 16, 2015: Donald Trump and his ex-model wife, Melania, glided down an escalator in his Manhattan skyscraper as Neil Young's "Keep On Rockin' in the Free World" blared through the gleaming lobby.

He railed against what he called the "big lie" of Obamacare. He slammed America's political elites as the "stupid" puppets of lobbyists.

But he said he had the answer to the nation's many grave ills: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States and we are going to make our country great again."

Many people scoffed at Donald Trump and his lofty promises.

"I can't tell if this is politics, or if this is just PR from a celebrity," sneered MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.



"Ignore him," advised Republican strategist Karl Rove.

But a year later to the day, the bombastic real-estate billionaire has surfed a wave of American rage to capture enough delegates to win the GOP nomination.

Over the course of a controversial and seemingly seat-of-the-pants campaign, he laid waste to more than a dozen primary opponents, and is squaring off for a general election duel with Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The campaign has featured moments never before seen  or possibly even imagined  in U.S. electoral history, from Trump's early denunciation of some Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and drug pushers to later debate exchanges about the size of his private parts.

Some in the GOP are still struggling to get behind their presumptive nominee. Others are simply wondering what the hell happened.

And many more are wondering what America would look like under a President Donald J. Trump.
Saint Petersburg (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin will look to refashion himself as a more reliable partner for the West as Moscow struggles to come in from the cold at its flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg.

Putin will host European Union Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker and Italian premier Matteo Renzi at the conference starting Thursday just weeks before the 28-nation bloc is set to vote on extending sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis that have helped push Russia's economy into recession.

The Kremlin strongman will also meet United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon alongside the world body's envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura, as Moscow remains at the centre of the conflict due to its military support for ally Bashar al-Assad.

Juncker has warned that his visit is not "an occasion for the European Union to announce any sort of change in our attitude towards Russia" over its March 2014 annexation of Crimea and alleged masterminding of a separatist rebellion in Ukraine.

The EU insists it is still linking the lifting of sanctions to the total fulfilment of a floundering peace deal to end the conflict in Ukraine and that the current failure to make headway on the agreement should see sanctions extended when they run out at the end of July.

- 'Bridge-builder' -

"Juncker has devoted his political career to dialogue. When relations between neighbours are most strained, he believes they should keep talking," European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas wrote this week.

"He will travel to Saint Petersburg in that spirit -- as a bridge-builder not a negotiator -- and anyone who interprets his visit as anything else will be disappointed."

But the Kremlin -- desperate to boost its struggling economy -- appears to be harbouring hopes that it can play on divisions within the EU over the issue and has made some conciliatory gestures to Ukraine including the release of detained pilot Nadiya Savchenko last month.

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In the run-up to the meeting with Juncker, Putin's top foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov said that the encounter was "very important" and said that current difficulties between the EU and Russia would be discussed "frankly".

Despite the frosty relations there will be a host of top European business figures at the three-day conference in Russia's second city that Moscow has tried to pitch as the country's answer to Davos.

Putin is set to ink an important contract for the construction in Russia of a major liquefied gas plant with the head of Royal Dutch Shell.

The CEOs of firms including France's Total, Societe Generale and JCDecaux and European multi-national Schneider Electric are also headed to the forum.

Businessmen say they are keen to bolster ties despite the sanctions -- which saw Russia slap an embargo on most agricultural produce from the EU and the US -- and say Moscow is trying to repair its tarnished image.

Russia's energy-driven economy -- hit by both the West's punitive measures and the drop in oil prices -- has slumped into the longest recession since Putin came to power some 16 years ago.

Despite claims from officials that the economy could be set to return to limited growth soon, there are serious fears of a prolonged economic stagnation and the authorities are pledging much-needed structural reforms to attract investors.
Presentation Scheduled for Tuesday, June 21

SANTA ANA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / QuantumSphere, Inc. (QSIM), a developer and manufacturer of advanced catalyst materials designed to increase process efficiencies and production output in commercial-scale chemical plants, today announced that it will be presenting at the National Investment Banking Association (NIBA) 138th Investment Conference on Tuesday, June 21. The conference will be located at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel in New York, NY.

Kevin Maloney, CEO of QuantumSphere, and Gregg Hrncir, its Chief Strategy Officer, will be giving the presentation and meeting with investors.

Mr. Maloney stated, "We are excited to participate at NIBA and share our company's progress, specifically our 10-year commercialization agreement with our Swiss partner Casale, near-term opportunities and strategic vision. We expect to be integrated within a mid-scale ammonia plant by the end of the year, and generating revenue in the first half of 2017. Given our commercial validation via JH Group in China and our close partnership with Casale, we are excited about our prospects in the $100 billion ammonia market over the next few years. We continue to lay the groundwork with additional chemical opportunities in methanol and olefins and are enthusiastic about our longer-term potential in each market."

About QuantumSphere, Inc.

QuantumSphere (QSI) is a developer and manufacturer of advanced catalyst materials designed to increase process efficiencies and production output in commercial-scale chemical plants. Leveraging 12 years of know-how and unique core competencies, QSI's patented technology increases performance of existing commercial catalysts, is seamlessly integrated, and has the potential to reduce energy costs and deliver greater profits for plant owners and operators. QSI's compelling value proposition is applicable to hundreds of ammonia and other chemical plants globally, representing billions of dollars in annual output. QSI common stock is quoted on the OTCQB under the ticker symbol QSIM. For more information, please visit www.qsinano.com.

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About National Investment Banking Association (NIBA)

National Investment Banking Association (NIBA) is a national trade association of regional and independent brokerages, investment banking firms, fund managers and related capital market service providers. The mission of NIBA is to add value to its members, their client companies and investors, and the securities industry at large by continuing to be the premier forum for quality micro-cap/small-cap companies seeking access and exposure to the financial community and to enhance the financial environment for small companies. NIBA Conferences are must attend events providing unique opportunities to make valuable industry connections while gaining new perspectives on critical market challenges, issues and trends redefining today's dynamic and ever-evolving capital formation markets. Each event showcases private and public companies actively seeking access to the financial industry. Companies first present formally to hundreds and then have the opportunity to meet privately and have in-depth discussions with interested parties. NIBA member firms have completed over 1,500 equity offerings totaling approximately $12 billion in new capital for emerging growth companies. The member firms of NIBA represent over 8,800 registered representatives with an estimated $86 billion in assets under management, and are responsible for 90% of all initial public offerings under $20 million. For more information, please visit our website www.nibanet.org. You can also follow NIBA updates on Twitter @NIBAnet.

Contact Information

Hayden IR

hart@haydenir.com

917-658-7878



Safe Harbor Statement

All statements included or incorporated by reference in this News Release, other than statements or characterizations of historical fact, are "forward-looking statements." Examples of forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning projected sales, costs, expenses and gross margins; our accounting estimates, assumptions and judgments; the prospective demand for our products; the projected growth in our industry; the competitive nature of and anticipated growth in our industry; and our prospective needs for, and the availability of, additional capital. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, estimates, approximations and projections about our industry and business, management's beliefs, and certain assumptions made by us, all of which are subject to change. Forward-looking statements can often be identified by such words as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "predicts," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "may," "will," "should," "would," "could," "potential," "continue," "ongoing," similar expressions and variations or negatives of these words. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, our actual results could differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, some of which are set forth in the "Risk Factors" section of our Report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2015 filed on September 28, 2015 and updated on our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended March 31, 2016 filed on May 19, 2016, which could cause our financial results, including our net income or loss or growth in net income or loss to differ materially from prior results, which in turn could, among other things, cause the price of our common stock to fluctuate substantially. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this News Release. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statement for any reason, except as otherwise required by law.

SOURCE: QuantumSphere, Inc.
Its hard to put a finger on exactly what it is, but theres a strange allure to an unused car of an age past. Whether it be a DeSoto left to rot in a barn, or a Beetle driven only on Sundays. Car fans like a genuine time capsule, and this familiar sight appears to be one such car.

In 1990, after two decades of absence from the British market, the Rover Group decided to bring the iconic and sporty Mini Cooper back to life. A scant 1,050 were built for the UK market and immediately became a sales hit, rekindling the Coopers racing heritage and jump-starting a new production run the following year.

This is said to be one of those cars, a rarity in its day, and even more so now. Thats because since 1991 it has been hibernating in storage, untouched, and showing just 292 miles to its name. Best of all, its recently woken up, and now its up for sale.

RELATED: Mini Might Go Mainstream with a New Sedan for 2018

While commonly referred to as the limited edition, the official term for these cars is RSP, for Rover Special Products. When Rover reintroduced the Mini Cooper for 1990 (once a hallmark of the 60s Mini lineup), it did so by also bringing back its big A-series engine as well, the 1,275cc four-cylinder. With 60 horsepower it was no slouch, however John Cooper, who had played a big part of the famed cars revival, also offered a more powerful S conversion which turned up a zesty 78 horsepower.

The Mini Cooper RSP cars came in only three colorsFlame Red, Black and British Racing Green (seen here)and tacked on sporty looks courtesy of white stripes with John Cooper signatures, Cooper badges, a vibrant chrome grille, chrome bumper, a pair of driving lamps, and Minilite wheels. Inside, the RSPs featured black leather seats, red carpets, and a red leather steering wheel. An additional 650 Mini Coopers were also exported to Japan.

RELATED: Check Out the Rugged Mini Paceman Adventure Truck

Said to be a one-owner car, this 292-mile Mini Cooper will likely need some liberal TLC before it becomes roadworthy again, but for 25 years left cooped up wed gander it looks pretty impressive.

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According to the UKs Classic Car Auctions, the first owner originally paid 7,417 for the special edition Mini. Now, even in barn find status, its expected to gavel for upwards of 14,000 (about $20,000).

RELATED: Someone Turned this Mini Cooper into an Airplane
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Most of the 29 whales trapped in an Indonesian mangrove swamp on Thursday managed to free themselves or were gently helped out to sea as the tide rose, fisheries officials said. Villagers on the east of Java island helped fisheries staff free the pilot whales that became trapped at low tide. "Today, of the 29 beached whales, seven died, four were helped back out to sea and 18 were able to swim back themselves," the World Wildlife Fund said in a statement. Officials said they did not know why the whales ventured into the mangrove swamp. Residents said whales were rarely seen in the area. Whale beachings, while unusual, have been seen in other parts of Indonesia. This year, a four-tonne, 16-metre (52 foot) sperm whale was found dead on a beach on the resort island of Bali. (Reporting by Angie Teo; Writing by Kanupriya Kapoor; Editing by Nick Macfie)
In an explosive press conference shortly after his return to the city on Thursday, a Hong Kong bookseller held in mainland China since late October described his capture, detention and mistreatment at the hands of Chinese authorities over the ensuing eight-month period.

Lam Wing-kee also revealed that he had only been released by his captors so that he could come back to Hong Kong to collect a database of customers who had purchased titles from the store where he worked, which specialized in scandalous tomes about the lives of Chinas communist leadership.

However, he said that he was refusing the return to the mainland Thursday with the database as he had been instructed. Of course I dare not return, he said.

One of five booksellers from Hong Kongs Causeway Bay Books believed to have been abducted by Chinese authorities late last year, Lam looked notably fatigued as he spoke for over an hour about his ordeal to a room packed with international and local media.

His detention, and that of his colleagues, is regarded in Hong Kong as the most serious breach of the citys autonomy since 1997, when China resumed sovereignty over the former British colony on the proviso that it would preserve its freedoms and way of life for 50 years.

According to Lams account, he was apprehended by agents at the border between Hong Kong and Chinas southern city Shenzhen, following which he was transported by train to the eastern port city of Ningbo. I was handcuffed and my eyes were covered, he said. I noticed I was taken to Ningbo because I glimpsed the station when we got off the train.

Over the ensuing months, the 61-year-old recounted, he was held in solitary confinement without access to legal representation or, for that matter, anyone from the outside world. While in custody, he was repeatedly interrogated, kept under constant surveillance and on a suicide watch.

Although Lam was not told what his crime was until his arrival in Ningbo, he referred specifically to the fact that he was arrested for mailing books to mainland China from Hong Kong, where his freedom of speech is putatively protected.

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He also said he was forced to sign a statement confirming his guilt.

It was a blatant violation of one country, two systems, Lam told TIME, referring to the constitutional framework that is supposed to preserve Hong Kongs autonomy under Chinese sovereignty. I think it shows that Hongkongers should be concerned for their security.

Lam spoke at length about the companys publisher, British citizen Paul Lee, also known as Lee Bo, whose disappearance from Hong Kong in late December led to widespread speculation that he had been abducted by mainland agents. Lee later gave an interview on mainland television in which he said he went to China of his own accord  a claim his fellow detainee vehemently dismissed on Thursday night.

Albert Ho, a pro-democracy lawmaker who accompanied Lam on Thursday night, said it didnt appear that the bookseller had committed any offense across the border. He did everything in Hong Kong, where it was perfectly lawful.

Ho stressed the mainland governments noncompliance in the Hong Kong governments investigation of the disappearances, citing its repeated refusal to specify details on why the five had been detained.

We are still very concerned about Lee Bo, Ho said. We have to pursue further until a satisfactory explanation is given.

The co-owner of Causeway Bay Books, Swedish national Gui Minhai, remains in Chinese government custody after disappearing from his holiday home in the Thai resort town of Pattaya in mid-October.

Speaking on CNN on Thursday night Hong Kong time, Guis daughter Angela said, I hope [the Chinese authorities] know theyve overstepped a boundary. What they need to do is release my father.

She said that after her fathers abduction, she had been advised not to travel to Asia at all.

 With reporting by Yenni Kwok / Hong Kong
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Many people have been waiting for the perfect way to make a mockery of the Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, and here is their shining moment.

YouTuber, musician and meme creator Mike Diva uploaded a Japanese-influenced "commercial" for Trump on Wednesday, and it is as weird and over the top as you would expect.

SEE ALSO: Donald Trump rapping Mac Miller's 'Donald Trump' is way better than it should be

The clip starts with a young woman admiring Trump just as he wins the presidency. From there, the clip turns into a full-blown acid trip, complete with a field of Trump trees, a Trump animal and even some Trump war propaganda.

Eventually, the woman in the clip embraces Trump, who turns into a transformer which builds a wall and eventually destroys earth. You know, what one may expect if Trump becomes president.

The digital effects, combined with the music and pure originality of the clip are all incredibly impressive, whether you love to hate Trump or not.

Of course this isn't the first time Diva has used his editing skills and imagination to create an odd rendition for YouTube. Back in February, Diva released a trap remix of the You On Kazoo meme, which has since racked up over 10 million views.

Mashable has reached out to Diva for more information and comments.
San Francisco-based virtual reality (VR) startup River Studios is expanding to Los Angeles with some key hires to run VR productions and work with both Hollywood and YouTube and social media talent. River Studios Los Angeles is being led by its new executive director Jonah Loop, and members of his team have previously done work for Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, YouTube, Maker Studios and Jaunt.

Los Angeles is the center of the world for storytelling and content creation, said River founder and CEO Mike Rothenberg in an interview with Variety this week. Loop, who previously did visual effects work for movies like Collateral and Bad Country, agreed: For rapid production, L.A. really is the place to be.

River Studios was spun out of Rothenberg Ventures last May. The VR-focused venture capital company has been doing some early stage investments in virtual reality startups like Wevr, Jaunt, AltspaceVR and FOVE for some time and was experimenting with an accelerator program for virtual reality companies. Through that work, Rothenberg frequently got contacted by partners looking to produce VR content, which led to the founding of River Studios.

The studio has since worked with NBC Universal, Coldplay, the Denver Broncos and the Sacramento Kings. Recently, it made headlines with producing a virtual reality experience for Icelandic pop icon Bjork. Loop said that the studio has been focusing on music and sports: Those two spaces have such engaged, vivid fan bases.

Loop is joined in Los Angeles by YouTube personality Sam Macaroni, who more recently also produced some VR content for Jaunt, and now is joining River Studios as executive producer. My goal is to blow peoples minds, Macaroni said, explaining that hes fascinated in virtual reality in part because of the ability to be a pioneer in a new medium. I feel like we are a bunch of Charlie Chaplins, he said.

River executive director Andy Stack also comes from the world of YouTube videos, albeit with a slightly different perspective. Stack used to be the head of creator technology at YouTube Space Los Angeles, where he also oversaw YouTubes first 360-degree video productions. My mind was blown at the interactive possibilities of virtual reality, Stack told Variety.

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Also part of the River Studios Los Angeles team are RYOTs former director of digital content Stash Slionski and Brinton Bryan, who has been working as assistant director with the likes of Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and Richard Linklater.

The Los Angeles team is working closely with Rivers San Francisco-based animation director Ewan Johnson, who previously worked at Pixar and Dreamworks on movies like Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and Penguins of Madagascar. Together, theyre looking to produce both animated and live-action content, with several new projects in the works to be released later this summer.

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Luxury automotive brand Rolls-Royce has unveiled its first ever concept car at a special event in London.

"The grand arrival of the Rolls-Royce Vision Next 100 boldly points to a bright future for our marque where our patrons' individual demands for complete and authentic personalization will be met through an exquisite fusion of technology, design and hallmark Rolls-Royce craftsmanship," said CEO Torsten Muller-Otvos at the concept's launch.

It has taken the company 105 years to build a concept car, but the wait was worth it. The car's exterior form is completely otherworldly yet instantly recognizable as a Rolls-Royce.

The brief was to imagine what a luxury automobile would be in 100 years from now and the design team, led by Giles Taylor identified four key ingredients -- personal vision; an effortless journey; a grand sanctuary and; the grand arrival.

As technology advances and transport in general becomes more utilitarian, the demand from the world's most successful and demanding clients for a vehicle that is truly bespoke will never be greater. So the car's exterior could be as customizable as its interior. "The Rolls-Royce patron will continue to be a famous figure in the future," said Taylor. "I envision that the Rolls-Royce Vision Next 100 will play a key role in these people's lives."

Genuine luxury is the ability to do nothing; to save time. And this effortlessness has been captured in putting a virtual personal assistant at the heart of the concept based on Eleanor,' the spirit of ecstasy that adorns the hood of each Rolls-Royce. She will drive, make recommendations, juggle appointments and ensure that nothing disturbs the car's owner.

As for sanctuary, the interior is designed as a cocooning lounge space with fine wool, leather, woods and a sofa, blending seamlessly with high-tech features such as OLED screens.

"Rolls-Royce design today is the epitome of elegance," Taylor explains, "And this elegance is achieved through simplicity of design under which lies the technology that makes our patrons experience effortless."
Having roommates is a great way to save on rent, at least in theory. But youre also trusting them to shoulder their share of the financial burden. So what if, one day, your roommate cant pay the rent? One weak link could also drag you downruining your credit, draining your finances, and worse.

So even if you know and trust your roommates, your financial future is too important to leave up to that. Heres how to ward off roommate money mishaps at every stagefrom the moment you decide Hey, lets live together! to the moment your roomie tells you he cant ante up.

Ask to check their credit report

While potential roommates may insist they always, always pay the bills on time, thats not worth much more than a lot of hot air. The only way to get a real grip on their reliability is to check their credit reportwhich reveals any history of late payments (or no payments) in excruciating detail. This is why landlords always check the report of anyone they consider renting to. However, heres the rub: Landlords may be all too willing to rent an apartment to a group of tenants as long as one of them has great credit. Of course, thats the one wholl have to pick up the slack if the others dont come throughor else his credit will go straight down the tubes, too.

So take a tip from your landlord and ask to see your prospective roommates credit reports, available on sites like MyFico.com for less than $30. Some credit cards, like the Discover it card, provide free credit scores if youre a member. Your roommates dont need perfect numbers (at least 660 will do). You just need to know that the person youre getting entangled with wont drag down your finances.

Put it in writing

This may seem like overkill, but delegating who is going to pay whatand having it written into your rental contractcan help protect you from being responsible if someone flakes. Decide early on which person will pay for which expensesor what portionfor everything from rent to internet to electricity. Then consider asking your landlord to add language to your rental contract reflecting those commitments.

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Jocelyn Baird, a credit expert with NextAdvisor.com, says, It is definitely possible to request this in writing, especially if youll be living with people you dont know.

Pay your landlord directly if possible

Its scary that its considered normal to hand a huge chunk of money to someone who presumably then hands it over to the landlord. This middleman approach works until it doesntand when it doesnt, it really doesnt. Just ask Pat Coffey, 22, of San Francisco.

I paid almost $600 a month worth of rent to my roommate in the assumption that he would give it to the landlord. Little did I know that he had taken out a loan from a loan shark he hadnt paid back. You can probably see where this is going. He had been taking my money and paying the insanely high loan every month and hiding the eviction notices. The landlord eventually sued us for a few thousand dollars that needed to be paid, and my credit was subsequently trashed.

The only surefire way to avoid this awful outcome is to make your payments individually by check to the landlord, says Baird. For added measure, request receipt for the monthly bill to be sure that your money is getting where it needs to go.

Never, ever pay your roommates rent

Loaning your roommate money for rent is a terrible idea. Dawn Rossetti, 23, of Long Beach, NY, learned this the hard way: I gave my roommate the rent for the month because she was short on cash after losing her job. I figured she would pay me back, but after two months of receiving nothing and seeing that she started buying herself tons of frivolous things, I knew something was up. It took me cornering her in the hallway to get the cash back.

Speak up at the first sign of trouble

If your roommate is missing rent or not keeping up with the utilities, talk to himand your landlordto figure out the next step. Playing it safe and waiting until it fixes itself is the worst possible choice, because it rarely does.

Samantha Fischer, 20, of Chicago took a drastic strategy to get her roommate to finally pay the bills.

After two months of paying his share of the rent, not wanting my credit to fall, I finally had enough. While he was away I changed the Wi-Fi password. He came up to me furious, but I stood my ground and told him that once he paid the rent he would get the Wi-Fi. It was like dealing with a child, but it worked, and I did this every month with no problems.

If you want to protect yourself even further, you can read your lease agreement thoroughly and [consult] your local city/state tenant laws, says Baird. Each state has different laws for renters and landlords. And hey, it never hurts to have the law on your side.



Watch: Is It Smarter to Rent or Buy?

The post Roommate Cant Pay Rent? Heres What to Do appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.





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Hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons wants to continue the discussion on police reform during All Def Digitals first Town Hall. The event, which is set to take place in Los Angeles on June 23, will honor victims of police brutality such as Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Michael Brown.



Please come and join us in pledging to use our collective social influence to help end any more senseless deaths by reforming and reframing police officers practices, policies, and procedures, Simmons wrote in an announcement on Facebook.

This isnt the moguls first time issuing a call to action. In 2014, he and Jay Z urged New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign an executive order to assign special prosecutors to future cases of police violence.

To attend All Def Digitals upcoming Town Hall, RSVP for entry here.
Berlin (AFP) - Moscow is seeking to create a "zone of influence through military means", NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday, adding that the alliance has observed major and aggressive manoeuvres on the Russian side.

"We are observing massive militarisation at NATO borders -- in the Arctic, in the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea," Stoltenberg told Germany daily Bild in an interview.

"Russia is trying to build up a zone of influence through military means," he said.

"We are registering aggressive, unannounced, large-scale manoeuvres on the Russian side. Therefore we must act," said Stoltenberg, justifying the alliance's decision to deploy battalions to the Baltic states and Poland.

"What we are doing is defensive, we do not want to provoke conflict, rather, we want to prevent conflict. We want to show our partners that we're there when they need us," added the NATO secretary-general.

Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and its support for separatists in Ukraine has jolted NATO out of a post-Cold War complacency and forced it to bolster its eastern flank.

NATO defence ministers on Tuesday approved sending four battalions of between 800 to 1,000 troops each to the three Baltic states and Poland just weeks before a landmark summit in Warsaw endorses a major build-up to counter a more assertive Russia.

Russia bitterly opposes NATO's expansion into its Soviet-era satellites and last month said it would create three new divisions in its southwest region to meet what is described as a dangerous military build-up along its borders.
Saint Petersburg (AFP) - EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal.

"The next step is clear: full implementation of the agreement -- no more, no less," Juncker told Russia's main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

"This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed."

During the meeting, part of which was broadcast on Russian state television, Juncker told Putin that "some in Europe weren't pleased" with him meeting the Kremlin strongman but stressed it was an opportunity to "exchange opinions".

The Juncker-Putin meeting -- their first in Russia since the EU slapped sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine in 2014 -- had sparked Kremlin hopes it might signal the start of a return to business-as-usual with the bloc.

Russia's ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, told Russian news agencies that Putin and Juncker had discussed energy issues but did not address the sanctions.

Putin will also host Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the three-day conference in Russia's second city just weeks before the expiry of EU sanctions that have helped plunge Russia's economy into recession.

Putin also sat down with UN chief Ban Ki-moon alongside the world body's envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, as he seeks to recast Moscow as a more stable partner for the West and bolster his country's flagging economy.

- EU 'united' -

The EU has tied the lifting of the punishing sanctions that have battered Russia's financial sector to the implementation of a deal brokered by the leaders of France and Germany in Minsk in February 2015 to end the pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine.

But the accord has stalled as the violence -- that Kiev and the West says is masterminded by Moscow -- rumbles on.

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And despite some signs of cracks in the EU over extending the sanctions, Juncker insisted the bloc was "united".

Diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP that EU members could agree to renew the economic sanctions against Russia for six months as early as next week as they look to clear the schedule ahead of a summit at the month's end that is likely to be dominated by Britain's EU referendum.

Despite the frosty ties with Moscow, however, Juncker insisted he had come to Russia to try to improve relations.

"If our relationship today is troubled and marked by mistrust, it is not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it, and I believe we can," he said.

- Back to business? -

Despite the worst feud between Russia and the West since the Cold War, there are a host of top European business figures at the conference which Moscow has tried to pitch as its answer to Davos.

Putin met Royal Dutch Shell boss Ben van Beurden and the energy giant inked a memorandum of understanding with Russian gas giant Gazprom on the potential construction of a major liquefied gas plant in the country.

The CEOs of major companies including France's Total, Societe Generale and JCDecaux and European multi-national Schneider Electric are participating in the forum.

Businessmen say they are keen to bolster ties despite the sanctions -- which saw Russia slap a retaliatory embargo on most agricultural produce from the EU and the US -- and say Moscow is trying to repair its tarnished image.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who met Putin on Wednesday, said he had asked the Russian leader to unilaterally lift Moscow's embargo, to "launch a positive dynamic" that would see the EU remove its sanctions.

Russia's energy-driven economy -- hit by both the West's punitive measures and the drop in oil prices -- has slumped into the longest recession since Putin came to power some 16 years ago.

Despite claims from officials that the economy could return to limited growth soon, there are serious fears of a prolonged economic stagnation and the authorities are pledging much-needed structural reforms to attract investors.

"We need to change the structure of the economy to make it less dependant on external factors," Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told journalists.

"The strategic task is to generate higher rates of growth in the economy."
Moscow (AFP) - Russia on Thursday floated out a new nuclear-powered icebreaker, said to be the world's biggest and most powerful, to be used for hauling liquefied natural gas from its Arctic terminal.

Arktika, ordered by Russia's Rosatom state nuclear agency, was built at the Baltic Shipyard in Saint Petersburg, and will be ready to use by the end of next year.

"There are no icebreakers like it in the world," said Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko at the ceremony, according to a company statement. "The Arktika icebreaker presents truly new opportunities for our country."

Arktika is the first vessel in a project aimed at allowing year-round navigation in the Northern Passage, and in particular ship Russian energy products from the Arctic to Asia.

Kiriyenko said that contracts have already been signed for the Arktika to accompany shipments from the Yamal liquefied natural gas terminal that Russia is developing on the Yamal peninsula together with France's Total and China National Petroleum Corporation.

"In 2018 we have to ensure exports of liquefied natural gas from Yamal" Kiriyenko said. "There are already contracts for shipping 18 billion tonnes of liquified natural gas."

The Arktika is the "biggest and most powerful nuclear icebreaker in the world," Rosatom said. It can cut through ice of up to 2.8 metres (nine feet) thick.
Thanks to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy and his allies, Wednesday evening in Washington, D.C. became one of the most talked about topics on social media. Thats because Murphy, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and many other Senate Democrats held the floor with a seemingly endless gun control filibuster that came to an end around 2 a.m. ET. Why? To close a legal loophole exposed by Saturdays mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando that allows suspected terrorists to purchase firearms in the United States. Their efforts worked in the end, and the team behind Full Frontal with Samantha Bee followed every step of the process with a fantastic live tweet.

Bee made waves earlier this week on Monday, when her passionate (if not vitriolic) take on the immediate partisan response to the Orlando attack went viral. So it should come as no surprise that the C-SPAN dorks behind the scenes at Full Frontal were all over Murphys filibuster as soon as it began.

Many of their first tweets concerned Murphy himself:

Sorry, Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2017  Looks like youre getting full-on Murphied! #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

Sen. Chris Murphys stance on gun violence is as unflappable as his immaculate hair. #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

If this goes on long enough, Murphy may become the first Senator to piss himself in Congress since Orrin Hatch did like an hour ago. #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

ALERT! Sen. Murphy has a hair out of place!  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

FALSE ALARM! It was just a stray cat hair on our TV screen. MURPHY COIF INTACT!  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

Yet they also highlighted many of the Connecticut politicians fellow senators, including potential Hillary Clinton VP pick Warren:

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I yield my panties to Sen. Warren. Passionate oration is the new sexy. #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

Sen. King you can talk to us all night. #LoveThatVoice #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

Is Booker/Murphy the best bromance of the year? #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

And offered other viewers ideas for a filibuster drinking game:

Filibuster drinking game rules:

1. Drink any time anyone says distinguished gentleman.

2. Call an ambulance.  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

Filibuster drinking game rule #3: Finish your drink if someone says President Pro Tempore." #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

Yet it was the Full Frontal teams snark that stole the show. Most of it was directed either at the media:

.@MSNBC making cable news history by using a never before seen count-up clock. #Enough pic.twitter.com/KYVFN4RucI  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

.@CurtisHouck Transcription is the sincerest form of flattery. Kisses. https://t.co/xlvF2PK9V4  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

If a filibuster demands common sense gun laws for 5 hours, but CNN is just airing aerial shots of parking lots, does it make a sound?  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

If CNN's staff mentions us covering the filibuster, does that count as CNN covering the filibuster? #Enough https://t.co/3NDB84ym2D  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

Or gun advocates, like that guy who used to play for the Amboy Dukes:

NRA holds emergency meeting to see if theres a grade lower than F they can give Gillibrand. G minus? #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

9 out of 10 Americans are for tighter gun laws? Here's that douchebag holdout: pic.twitter.com/Mzjwh88v2I  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

I hope whichever bar the Republican senators are in right now has the TV tuned to C-SPAN2. Cuz this WILL be on the fucking quiz. #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 15, 2016

Sorry you missed class today, @SenateGOP, but you can borrow our notes. #Enough pic.twitter.com/Ch247YUQnC  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

Lotta empty chairs. Where are the absent senators? #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

Though the definitive highlight of Full Frontals live tweet came when they tried to order pizza for the filibustering senators just before 10 p.m. ET:

.@SenateDems Called Cloakroom, they said no thanks to pizza. Well check again at breakfast time. #Enough  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

Hey, at least they offered!

Hour 11. How do the Democrats keep going? #Enough pic.twitter.com/V4aOgqFKCT  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

(Via Zap2It)
Just days after a gunman opened fire in a gay club in Orlando, Florida, a complex and sometimes contradictory picture of his motivations is emerging. He called 911 during the attack to pledge allegiance to the jihadist group ISIS and its rival, the al-Nusra Front, according to the FBI. He was known to spew hatred against women, Jews, black people and gays, but apparently used gay dating apps and visited Pulse (the nightclub he would later attack) regularly for years, according to multiple people who knew him before the shooting.

As bizarre as these facts are, mixed and murky motivations are standard for so-called lone-wolf attackers, regardless of whether they are defined as terrorists, experts say. There is no template for the path to violence, and rarely can a single cause explain any one atrocity.

What that means is that researchers and others trying to prevent these attacks are focusing less on ideology and more on behavior. One study of lone terrorists of all stripes found that 83 percent had hinted to others about their plans before becoming violent, said Mia Bloom, a professor of communication at Georgia State University who researches suicide terrorism. The Orlando club shooter was reportedly no exception: NBC has reported that his wife told the FBI that she knew of his plans and tried to talk him out of attacking.

No template for violence

The revelation that the Orlando shooter used gay dating apps and frequented Pulse has led to speculation that closeted self-loathing played a role in the shooting. There is some scientific evidence that self-hate can be outwardly destructive. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with implicit same-sex desires (revealed by word-association tasks) who identified strongly as heterosexual were more likely than those who were more in touch with their sexual desires to show hostility toward gay people.

Parenting also played a role in this association. In the 2012 study, people who grew up in authoritarian households  those with strict, harsh parents  showed larger gaps between their implicit sexual desires and their outward sexual orientation than people raised by more accepting parents. [5 Myths About Gay People Debunked]

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The problem with understanding lone-wolf terrorists or mass shooters, however, is that anger or hate alone doesn't predict violent action.

"There is no template," Bloom told Live Science. In the past, many scholars looked at terrorism as a destructive, but basically logical, decision. People born to Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, for example, might have absorbed political messages from a young age about British oppression and then joined a paramilitary group that matched their ideology, Bloom said.

"What we're seeing more and more is that the logical, normal sequence is out of whack," Bloom said. Jihadist groups such as ISIS recruit in prisons, luring people who have checkered pasts with the promise of personal reinvention or greater meaning in life. Lone actors may use political causes as a veneer of respectability to cover for personal rage or despair, she said.

"You can have multiple, overlapping motivations," Bloom said.

Personal or political?

Some researchers think that even people who seem like straightforward terrorists  suicide bombers, for example  are driven by personal mental-health problems. In his book, "The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters and Other Self-Destructive Killers" (St. Martin's Press, 2013), University of Alabama criminal justice professor Adam Lankford argues that mental-health problems are common in suicide attackers. In a sample of 130 suicide terrorists, he found that 44 showed signs of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental-health issues; 104 had dealt with a crisis event before the attack; 12 had serious physical injuries or disabilities; and 66 had previously lost a loved one unexpectedly. [Mass Shootings: Why It's So Hard to Predict Who Will Snap]

Lankford's analysis goes against the mainstream view of suicide terrorists, which holds that most are psychologically normal, he said. The debate hints at the challenges of understanding motivations across time and culture, especially when a suicide attacker's family or fellow terrorists have a vested interest in making him or her seem sane and devoted to a righteous cause.

Lone-wolf terrorists are less likely to be suicidal than public mass shooters in the U.S., Lankford told Live Science, but many lone wolves suffer from mental-health problems or personal crises that echo those seen in public mass shooters. A terrorist is defined as someone who uses violence in pursuit of political aims, whereas a public mass shooter is generally driven by more personal motivations.

However, these categories can blur and overlap, said Lankford. For example, the shooter who killed African-American congregants at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, ultimately was not charged with terrorism but rather a hate crime. That was a controversial decision, as many saw his desire to start a "race war" as a political motivation.

It can also be difficult to tease out who is ideologically motivated. For example, the shooter who carried out an attack on Virginia Tech in 2007 referred to martyring himself "like Jesus Christ," but isn't usually seen as having religious motivations.

"We just tend to dismiss such claims because we 'know' that Christianity isn't really the explanation for the [Virginia Tech] killer," Lankford wrote in an email to Live Science.

A final complication is that terrorist organizations are constantly changing and adapting. When Israel's security forces started to catch male suicide bombers, Bloom said, terrorist groups started sending women strapped with explosives to checkpoints. In Nigeria, the Islamic militant group Boko Haram has even used children to carry out attacks. ISIS has, at various points, tried to recruit everyone from violent prisoners to do-gooders who feel the urge to help war orphans, Bloom said. The group also exhorts loners with no real connection to ISIS to commit attacks in its name.

"The moment there is a profile, you know what they do? They switch it up, and they change the operative," Bloom said.

Mass shooting intervention

With no consistent profile to use as a guide, researchers and threat-assessment professionals are working to figure out who, among the unstable and rage-filled, might progress to violence. This is not an easy task.

"You can't measure the dogs that don't bite," Bloom said.

Standard measures for violence risk in extremists often fall short. Scientists reporting in a paper published in March in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management attempted to use a standard risk checklist called Identifying Vulnerable People to determine if that list could have predicted people who committed violence under a host of ideologies, including radical Islam, animal-rights activism, far-right ideology, militant Sikh ideology and the Irish Republican Army. School shooters were also used for comparison.

The checklist turned out to be somewhat reliable in screening Irish Republicans and Islamic terrorists, the researchers found, but it didn't do well at detecting those who committed violence for animal rights, or nonideological school shooters. The screening tool was best used for screening conventional violent extremists, the researchers concluded. Even then, the predictive power is modest, given that violence is a relatively rare outcome.

Another method is to look for red flags in online missives. A study published online in January in the Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention found that automatic text analysis can detect linguistic patterns that predict self-harm or violence toward others. The researchers analyzed suicide notes and legacy videos from active shooters and compared them to writings by typical college students. Red flags from online rhetoric could provide justification for law-enforcement sting operations, Lankford said, though sting operations themselves can be controversial.

Perhaps the best hope for stopping terrorists and active shooters before they kill is to recruit bystanders, Bloom said. By studying the cases of 119 lone-wolf terrorists, scientists found that in 82.4 percent of cases, people around the terrorist knew of his or her grievances prior to the plot; in 63.9 percent of the cases, the attacker actually told at least one other person that he or she planned to take violent action. In nearly a quarter (22.7 percent) of cases, the person issued a direct pre-attack warning, the scientists reported in 2013 in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

In almost 54 percent of cases, friends and family described the lone-wolf terrorist as angry. Of those, 62.5 percent noted that the person had been increasingly angry leading up to the attack.

In that sense, the Orlando shooter is very typical. Former co-workers and his ex-wife have described him as angry and violent. His father reported that the shooter had flown into a rage after seeing a gay couple kissing. He had been reported and investigated by the FBI in 2013 and 2014 because of talk about terrorism, but those investigations were closed. Though his wife apparently knew of his plans and even accompanied him to buy weaponry, authorities didn't know of the final planning phases of the attack. That's where bystanders could have mattered, Bloom said.

"We need to get rid of the bystander effect," Bloom said. "We need to find a way that if someone says they are planning to do something, that there are safe mechanisms for the individual to report without themselves becoming a suspect or a person of interest. We need to come up with a way of separating the wheat from the chaff as far as people who are serious."

Original article on Live Science.

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Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity has a family connection to the Orlando terror attack: His second cousin sold weapons to gunman Omar Mateen.

Ed Henson owns the St. Lucie Shooting Center in Port St. Lucie, Fla. Mateen purchased the hand gun and assault rifle used in Sundays massacre from the store during two separate visits in early June.

Ed Henson, a highly decorated retired NYPD detective, who was also a 9/11 and Flight 587 first responder, is a second cousin of mine, Hannity told Adweeks TVNewser blog.

Henson has been cooperating with the ATF to determine how Mateen was able to legally obtain the weapons.

Also Read: Orlando Shooter Posted Anti-American Messages on Facebook During Massacre

An evil person came in here and legally purchased two firearms from us  and if he hadnt purchased them from us, Im sure he wouldve gotten them from another local gun store in the area, Henson said earlier this week during a news conference. He added, I am sorry he picked my place. I wish he picked no place.

Mateen murdered 49 people and injured another 53 on Sunday morning at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Police killed him during a shootout after a lengthy standoff.

All indications are that he followed the Florida state law as a licensed dealer and the ATF has also acknowledged that no laws were broken, Hannity said in his cousins defense. As I have been saying for days, my prayers and condolences go out to the families and loved ones of all of the victims.

Also Read: Orlando Shooter Scouted Disney World for Potential Attack (Report)

Hannity hosts the popular show, creatively named Hannity, weeknights at 10 p.m. on Fox News. He recently interviewed Mark Allen Bando, a father of a victim of the nightclub attack.

He lived down there and I lived up here and I never got a chance to teach him how to handle firearms, Mr. Bando told the Fox News host. I think if wed have lived in closer proximity, he would have become proficient. He probably wouldve gotten a [concealed weapon license] and carried a gun and that couldve made a difference last night.

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Related stories from TheWrap:

After Orlando, Gays Take Aim at Guns: 'The NRA Should Be Very Worried'

Orlando Shooting: New Video Shows Hostages Hiding in Pulse Bathroom (Video)

Orlando Shooter Checked If He Was Trending on Facebook During Attack
The price of profits banners_Sears

The American corporation has been transformed by globalization and new technology. But equally powerful is the belief that on Wall Street and in boardrooms the sole responsibility of a corporation is to maximize profits for shareholders. Starting this week, Business Insider teams up with public radio's "Marketplace." Our series, "The Price of Profits," tells the story of how this idea changed the US and our lives.

Sears has survived two world wars and the Great Depression. But after a decade under the control of a former Goldman Sachs executive turned hedge fund manager, the 123-year-old retailer is imploding.

Sales have fallen by half since 2007, and the company is burning through cash, closing stores, and slashing jobs in an attempt to stanch the bleeding. Even after it raised $3 billion by spinning off assets last year, it ended 2015 with less cash than it started with.

The man in charge of Sears, Edward S. Lampert, has blamed the company's decline on shifts in consumer spending, the rise of e-commerce, and unseasonably warm winter weather. And while other retailers are also struggling, analysts take the demise of Sears, which owns Kmart, as a matter of when, not if.



What sets Sears apart from other suffering retailers is something that's not as easy to understand: Lampert's obsession with putting shareholders before everyone else, which has been attributed to his dual role as the company's chief executive and its largest investor. But in that position, Lampert has suffered along with other investors.

Eddie Lampert Sears



When Sears was flush with cash, it took the form of billions of dollars of share repurchases, even if it meant the stores suffered years of underinvestment. Repurchases, or buybacks, are common among cash-rich companies, but also derided in some corners as a waste of a company's resources as they only serve to create the appearance of improving earnings.

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In the early days, Lampert was unapologetic about this. According to an executive at the company then, Lampert was genuine in his belief that Sears could be run differently than other retailers and that the shares were being acquired at a bargain price.



"Unless we believe we will receive an adequate return on investment," he wrote in a 2007 letter to investors, "we will not spend money on capital expenditures to build new stores or upgrade our existing base simply because our competitors do. If share repurchases or acquisitions appear to be more productive, then we will allocate capital to those options appropriately."

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And for years Lampert concluded that share buybacks were the best use of the company's money. They continued even through the financial crisis, and totaled $5.8 billion between 2005 and 2010, sometimes at prices as high as $170 per share. Sears' earnings in the same period were $3.8 billion.

Now that Sears is short on cash and faces mounting debt, Lampert has turned from buybacks to dismantling what was once America's largest and most successful retailer, says David Tawil, president of New York-based Maglan Capital. Tawil has spent his career working in corporate restructuring and bankruptcy proceedings. Sears spun off its Lands' End brand to investors in 2014 and is exploring "alternatives" that could include sales of Kenmore appliances and Craftsman tools.

"Eddie has orchestrated for himself, and for the benefit of shareholders, the most protracted liquidation in history," Tawil said in an interview with Business Insider.

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A Sears spokesman, Howard Riefs, said the spinoffs were meant to create shareholder value and to fund Sears' turnaround.

We believe separating businesses from Sears Holdings would allow them to pursue their own strategic opportunities, optimize their capital structures and allocate capital in a more focused manner while enabling Sears Holdings to focus on its own business and provide additional flexibility to execute our transformation. Since 2012, we have generated $8.9 billion of liquidity from a combination of asset monetization and financing activities within the framework of sustainable shareholder value creation. These transactions have provided liquidity to help fund our transformation, and enabled us to focus on our best stores, best members and best categories. Our critics are entitled to their opinions, however we think theyre missing some very key points when it comes to our business. Sears Holdings is highly focused on restoring profitability to the company. We continue to make progress as we transform from a traditional, store-network based retail business model to a more asset-light, member-centric integrated retailer.

Wall Street superstar

Lampert got his start at Goldman Sachs, working in the New York-based bank's risk-arbitrage department. He left the bank after four years and in 1988 started a hedge fund, ESL Investments, at 26 years old.

For a time he was a Wall Street superstar. BusinessWeek compared him with Warren Buffett. That's because Lampert had an incredible track record as an investor. ESL Investments generated annualized returns of more than 20% per year for 20 years, marking one of the strongest long-term investment records in history, according to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article.

Through ESL, Lampert gained control of Kmart in 2003 and he combined it with Sears in 2005 to create Sears Holdings in an $11.5 billion deal. ESL, long one of Sears' largest shareholders, now owns about half of the company.

It was soon after he took the reins at Sears, first as chairman, that Lampert began the share buybacks. In his annual letters to Sears shareholders, Lampert defends buybacks as a way to provide "liquidity" (or a buyer) for shareholders who are looking to sell, and increase ownership of the company for investors who hold on.

But to critics, they are simply a financial maneuver to drive up per-share earnings and create the illusion that a company is doing better than it really is.

With the buybacks came cuts in spending on the retailer's stores, as well as reduced promotions and advertising, despite Lampert's promises to revive the company.

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Lampert "had a perspective that the retail industry as a whole was too sales-oriented and not enough profit-oriented," one former high-level Sears executive told Business Insider. The executive asked not to be identified discussing private matters.

"He wanted to demonstrate to the world that you could reduce advertising and inventory investment  and yes, sales would fall to some new normal  but you would have a more profitable business," the former executive said.

At the time, Lampert believed in the long-term success of Sears, according to the executive. When he was buying the stock at $170, more than $150 per share above where it is today, he thought it was a better capital investment than store upgrades, because it was his theory that the stock would never be cheaper. Lampert had high hopes for himself and for Sears.

"I want to be known as a great businessman," he said in 2006, shortly after the Sears acquisition. His greatest fear, he said, was that he wouldn't live long enough to complete all his goals.

"He was completely confident that he was going to be the next Warren Buffett," the former executive told Business Insider. "He felt that he had created a long-term winner in Sears and it would be his Berkshire Hathaway."

That is not how it has worked. The focus on investors, and the decision to spend on buybacks while cutting back on stores, has meant the company has been unable to keep up with shoppers.

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"The retail industry is predicated on serving the customer, valuing the customer, listening to the customer, and ultimately giving the customer what she wants  and its the employees who deliver this. Anything less is a recipe for terminal illness, if not suicide," says Robin Lewis, a 40-year retail consultant and CEO of industry publication The Robin Report. "Clearly, in the case of Sears, Eddie Lampert has turned a completely blind eye to this truism, and has been bleeding the company to a long and slow but well-managed death for the sole benefit of major investors and himself."

Under Lampert, Sears failed to invest in major capital improvements, such as store maintenance or new store concepts. Fortune recounted a 2005 strategy session between Lampert and the top two-dozen executives of the company:

Once their presentations started, Lampert also began poking holes in virtually every idea. 'What's the benefit of that?' he asked again and again. 'What's the value?' He shot down a modest $2 million proposal to improve lighting in the stores. 'Why invest in that?' He skewered a plan to sell DVDs at a discounted price to better compete with Target and Wal-Mart. 'It doesn't matter what Target and Wal-Mart do,' he declared.

As Lampert slashed spending in-store improvements, "the stores began going down," a 41-year Kmart store employee who was laid off in February told Business Insider.

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When Lampert took over, company executives visited stores and told workers they were no longer allowed to discuss any problems the stores were having, according to the employee.

"When they quit asking and started telling you how it should be run according to corporate standards, the stores began to go down," the employee said. "There is no morale in any of the stores."

An employee of a Sears store in Elyria, Ohio, told Business Insider that his store is falling apart.

"The walls and floors in my store are all beat to hell ... the roof leaks, the escalator and the elevator break down frequently, but 'Fast Eddie' doesn't want to spend money on the stores," the employee said.

Sears spokesman Howard Riefs denied that employees are discouraged from giving feedback.

"One of our cultural beliefs as a company is to embrace feedback," Riefs said. "We have a variety of ways that associates can give authentic feedback  even anonymously, so we would disagree with that suggestion."

Lampert has defended his decision to spend billions on share buybacks and other financial maneuverings over store reinvestments.

"I was criticized for not investing enough in the stores," Lampert said in 2013. "My point of view is we couldn't invest in everything."

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Investors bought into his strategy, at first. In 2006, Sears' stock rose roughly 45%, to $156.

Then quarterly sales started declining in early 2007, and the stock followed suit.

Many Sears executives were expecting Lampert to eventually refocus on investing in stores and advertising. When that didn't happen, some employees began to grow concerned.

"There was a feeling of, 'OK, now we have to invest and compete,' through some combination of advertising and promotion," the former Sears executive said. "But it became clear that he either didnt know how or didnt want to spend the money."

At that point executives began leaving the company. "He had an enormous amount of turnover at all management levels," Tawil said. Since March 2007, Sears' shares have dropped 90%. Over the same period, sales have been cut in half, from $50.7 billion in 2007 to $25.1 billion in 2015.

Retail Stocks



To raise money, the company started selling its real estate and spinning off brands like Sears Hometown and Outlet stores. So far, Sears' most iconic brands, like Kenmore and Craftsman, have been spared. But even those may now be sold, the company said in May.

In one of its biggest real-estate transactions to date, Sears launched and spun off a real-estate investment trust, Seritage Realty Trust, to execute sale/lease-back agreements for 266 Sears and Kmart stores. The deal helped Sears raise about $2.7 billion, most of which was quickly burned through to pay off debt.

Meanwhile, Sears has been cutting costs by closing hundreds of stores and laying off hundreds of thousands of employees. In 2007, Sears had 3,418 stores and 315,000 employees in the US. The company now has 1,672 stores and 178,000 employees.

Lampert's strategy of underinvesting in stores and selling off assets "starved capital and management resources from the retail business, leaving it unable to respond and adapt to the needs of the evolving consumer and marketplace," Lewis said.

The stores are now shells of what they once were.

"The majority of stores now border on disgraceful and show a complete lack of retail standards and proper store management," said Neil Saunders, the CEO of retail consulting firm Conlumino. "The impression is of a retailer that has completely given up, and this is something consumers notice."

But there was one party that was benefiting at least for some time from this strategy: shareholders.

"All of this adds up to a big cash-in on any leftover financial value  thats being squeezed out of declining consumer value  for Eddie and his investors, who are the only ones that count," Lewis said.

Bruce Berkowitz of Fairholme Capital Management told The New York Times in 2013 that Lampert's spinoffs had helped deliver about $10 a share in assets to Sears shareholders, even as the stock price was tanking. At the time, Fairholme owned about 20% of Sears shares.

IMG_7066.JPG

But not all Lampert's investors bought into the strategy. Many investors fled his hedge fund, ESL Investments, between 2007 and 2013, according to The Times.

"Investors are heading for the exits, discouraged by the declining fortunes of Mr. Lamperts signature stake in Sears Holdings," The Times wrote in 2013.

The fund managed more than $15 billion near its peak in 2006. Last year, the total was less than $3 billion, according to a company filing. A spokesperson for ESL declined to comment.

At this point, it seems as if Lampert has all but given up on trying to turn sales trends around at Sears, and instead he's trying to extract every last bit of value out of the business through financial maneuvers.

In the most recent quarter, Sears' sales dropped 8.3% to $5.39 billion. Kmart same-store sales dropped 5%. In announcing earnings, the company revealed that its chief financial officer, Robert Schriesheim, would be leaving Sears to "pursue other career opportunities."

Lampert said the retailer had a rough start to the year because of warmer than expected winter weather.

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"The weather conditions had a cascading effect on many retailers, leading to reduced spending and heavy discounting on winter clothing and related items," he wrote in a letter to shareholders in February.

Lampert also said the retailer has been unfairly criticized.

"Because of Sears and Kmart's longstanding history and cultural impact, we are targeted for criticism when our results are poor," he wrote.

But analysts say a turnaround is impossible at this point and that Sears' has lost its most loyal customers.

The department store has traditionally attracted female shoppers age 55 and older, but that demographic is now choosing to shop elsewhere, according to a study by Prosper Insights & Analytics. Most women would now rather shop at Goodwill than at Sears, the survey found.

In women's clothing alone, the share of shoppers who prefer Sears dropped 53% from January 2006 to January 2016, according to the same survey. Sears has also lost considerable ground in categories such as sporting goods, linens and bedding, home improvement, and electronics.

IMG_7057.JPG

Perhaps most concerning is Sears' losses in home-appliance sales, which has traditionally been one of the company's strongest categories and biggest opportunities for growth.

"This was one of the main areas contributing to the decline  in spite of the fact that across retail as a whole this category grew strongly over the first part of this year," Saunders wrote in a note to clients in May. "That Sears is unable to make gains in categories which are growing, and in which it has a more established presence, highlights its main issue: it has fallen out of favor with American shoppers who continue to abandon the chain at a fairly alarming rate."

It's a "dire" situation for Sears, according to Goodfellow. As older shoppers left Sears, the company failed to attract new, younger customers.

The end for Sears is now "very, very near," according to Lewis. That Sears still exists is "a tribute ... to Lamperts genius at extracting value while keeping the patient alive."

Said Tawil:

"Normally businesses like this fail and get sold off in pieces in bankruptcy," Tawil said. "This has been the greatest out-of-court liquidation in the history of our nation."

Listen to an interview about this story on the Marketplace Morning Report:

"The Price of Profits," our series with Marketplace, looks at what happens when profits become a company's product. For more, visit priceofprofits.org.





More From Business Insider


By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday accused a former SAP SE (SAPG.DE) executive and three others of insider trading based on a tip he supplied about an impending merger.

The SEC alleged that Christopher Salis, then a global vice president at the software company's SAP America unit, received thousands of dollars in kickbacks for tipping off a friend ahead of its acquisition of Concur Technologies in 2014.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Hammond, Indiana, the SEC said Salis' friend, Douglas Miller, then told his brother, Edward Miller, and a mutual friend, Barrett Biehel. They then made trades before the merger's announcement.

The SEC also said Salis, 39, in 2007 told Douglas Miller, who co-owns a cash wash in Indiana with his brother, to non-public information in advance of a tender offer by SAP for Business Objects, Salis' then-employer.

The tips resulted in more than $545,000 in trading profits for Douglas Miller, his family, Biehel and another friend, the SEC said.

Kickbacks to Salis included at least $10,400 in cash, the agency said. A startup company he owned later received approximately $80,000 from Miller and his family, the SEC said.

SAP, in a statement, said Salis left the company in October 2015. SAP said it has cooperated fully in the investigation and was not a target.

Lawyers for Salis and Biehel did not respond to requests for comment. Thomas Kirsch, a lawyer for the Millers, said his clients had not committed any insider trading and looked forward to their day in court.

The case is Securities and Exchange Commission v. Salis et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Indiana, No. 16-00231.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York and Mohammad Zargham in Washington; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Dan Grebler)
Metros first phase of surge safety repairs were completed on Thursday, June 16, but the next phase will have a bigger impact on the Washington regions residents. Metro is spending a year on SafeTrack repairs after multiple safety issues on the system, including fires. One such fire lead to one person dying in 2015.

The next phase of the project will shut down several Metro stations on the blue, orange and silver lines on the east side of the city. Additionally, a stretch of the blue line in northern Virginia between Arlington Cemetery and Rosslyn will be shut down. The second phase is scheduled to last 16 days. There will be shuttle buses to replace service.

Metro officials warned that commuters should plan their commutes and have a game plan ahead of the shutdown. Officials were expecting crowding. Credit: YouTube/Metro
24 hours before it was due to return from whence it came, the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat woke me up at three in the morning. It wasnt the howl of the exhaust, the whine of the supercharger, or the thump of the stereo system that drew me out of my fitful slumber, but rather, the very idea of the Hellcat itself.

Id had the car for six days already, and through circumstances beyond my control, hadnt had the time to really let the beast off the leash. Sure, Id taken it up through some twisties, done some burnouts, and a few highway speed pulls, but it wanted to be set free, and there was only one place where I could oblige it without fear of reprisal from law enforcement.

El Mirage is a dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert thats just over six miles long and two miles wide. Its the place to go for wide open speed (remember?). And surprisingly, having lived in Los Angeles for nearly nine years, I had never been until that day. But it was a matter of getting there first.

RELATED: See More of the Dodge Challenger Hellcat

After two hours of wrestling with the decision to drag myself out of bed, or try to fall back asleep, I eased the Hellcat out of my garage and into a misty California morning. I didnt really have a plan, other than to go up to the Angeles Crest and hopefully get some photos.

As I merged onto the freeway at five in the morning, I thought about everyone in the cars around me, who they might be, where they might be goingthat curiosity soon reflected back onto me. Where was I headed? What I was doing? Feelings of guilt and shame immediately washed over me. Here I was at the helm of a $68,000 car that people obsess over, on my way to go take photos because I felt like it, with no particular schedule, and no one to answer to. The Hellcat had suddenly become a mirror that I was afraid to look into for fear that I wouldnt like what I saw.

RELATED: Dodge Charger Scat Pack vs El Mirage

Reprieve from my dark thoughts came in heartwarming fashion, kids pressing their faces up against the windows of a school bus as I passed. Nothing drives gloom from the mind like witnessing children in a state of joy, and at that moment, on the 118 Freeway in San Fernando, the Hellcat had made a few kids really, really happy.

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I slowed and drove alongside the bus for a moment so they could get a good look at the pearlescent red paint, and hear the rumble of the exhaust before I waved and took off. Sharing that little moment of course made me feel better, but more importantly, it restored a sense of purpose within me. I wasnt going to drive around aimlessly and take photos just because I felt like it, I was going to do it because it was my job, my responsibility, and because to not do so would be a slight to all the people that wish they could.

RELATED: Dodge Challenger Hellcat X is an 800-Horsepower Tribute

I remember being the age of those kids on that school bus. I had no idea what an automotive journalist was, and quite frankly, I still dont. The label automotive journalist is both vague and specific, and using it frequently leaves me at a loss when trying to explain to people what I do for a living. For the most part I avoid it, primarily because I dont think of myself as an automotive journalist.

Instead, I recognize that I am someone with such a deep rooted passion for automobiles and the experiences that they offer, that Im compelled to share those experiences through words, photos, and films. Ive lost sight of that before, and Ill surely lose sight of it again. But as long as there are cars like the Challenger Hellcat to remind me why Im in this racket, Ill be alright. More importantly, as long as there are cars like the Challenger Hellcat on the market, theres a reason to be enthusiastic about automobiles, whether youre a little kid on a school bus, or a big kid with a family, a mortgage, and a 401(k).

But like I said before, it wasnt the Hellcat itself that woke me up, but rather the idea of the Hellcat.

Though I have no doubt that the exhaust note could snap me out of a light coma, the noise pales in comparison to that which is in your head. The physical feeling of being shoved back in your seat by 650 lb-ft of torque is positively addictive, and the mind races with thoughts of all the scenarios where you could best enjoy such unbridled power. A two lane road in rural Montana at dawn, a drag strip in Virginia on a summer night, a tunnel in Manhattan in the wee hours of the morning. Once the Hellcat gets its claws into your imagination it doesnt let go, not that youd want it to anyway.

Thoughts still racing, I covered ninety five miles, and shot photos both in the clouds and above them. I arrived at the intersection of Angeles Crest Highway and Big Pines Highway with the intention of turning left and heading home. I was groggy, my stomach ached, and I felt like I had already accomplished something.

So I turned the car left, and pointed it towards hometowards what would be another predictable and likely uneventful day. And then I remembered El Mirage. Something compelled me to pull over that day and Im glad I did,because I was only 36 miles from El Mirage, the only place where I could legally look for the limit of a car which has a limit unlikely to be found by most in the drivers seat.

The decision to go wasnt difficult at all, I had to make the kids on that school bus proud, I had to embrace the ridiculousness of a relatively old platform stuffed with 707-horsepower being a street legal car that anyone can buy. I had to try and go 200 mph before noon.

RELATED: 900-Horsepower Dodge Challenger Hellcat Has a Flair for the Unique

Prior to El Mirage, the fastest I had every gone was 176 mph. And not knowing the statute of limitations on speeding in the state of Arizona, I wont get into the details of that little adventure. What I will say is that it was on pavement, and in a car with a chassis in which I have the utmost confidence.

This was an entirely different situation. The Challenger team didnt benchmark contemporary German Bahnstormers during development, and although it does share some bits with the Mercedes-Benz W220 S-Class and W211 E-Class, the car is primarily a throwback piece of American muscle. Itll happily crush a quarter-mile strip, delightfully destroy tires, and keep you comfortable as hell with ventilated leather seats, but will it go 200 mph on dirt? I was sure that it wouldunder the right conditions.

Unfortunately for me, those conditions werent there. Apart from the right environment and the right car at the right time, it also needed the right driver. Given that this was my first trip out to El Mirage, I had no idea what to expect. So I spent a bit of time driving around the lake bed getting the lay of the land. Without a spotter on a radio to let me know what was in front of me, I was apprehensive to keep pushing.

The best I could muster was one run up to 180 mph before I decided that I should quit while I was ahead. I repeatedly ran between 150-165 with ease. The Hellcat has no problem getting there even on a loose surface, but above 165 mph, that sense of confidence disappears into the desert sky.

The 180 mph run was the result of perfect shifts, and breaking the rules of common sense. Was falling short of my speed goal by 20 mph disappointing? A little, but I enjoyed the way the whole morning had just happened so much that the last thing on my mind as I pulled off the lake bed was Gee, I wish Id gone faster.

On the way home I drove conservatively, limiting my speeds to heavy fine instead of jail time. I soaked in the audio experience offered by the 18 speaker premium sound system and Harmon Kardon GreenEdge Amplifier, enjoyed being able to adjust volume and climate settings with my hand resting on top of the shifter, and contemplated what a used Hellcat will cost in five years.

After a week with the car, after Id gotten used to the heavy clutch, the notchy shifter, and the lack of visibility, my BMW felt like a soft, little toy. None of the Hellcats peccadilloes had bothered me, but I could understand how they could bother some people. In fact, I suppose thats the easiest way to sum up the Hellcat in general: for some, not for everyone. Damn, maybe Im an automotive journalist after all.

Specs

Engine: Supercharged V8

Horsepower: 707

Torque: 650 lb-ft

Price: $62,495 (base) $68,280 (as tested)

Photo Credit: Visual Vocab for BoldRide
Leading Equity Research Firm Attributes Success to Innovative and Value-Added Business Model

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / SeeThruEquity, a leading independent equity research firm and host of acclaimed investor conferences for smallcap and microcap public companies, announced that it has surpassed research coverage of over 200 companies. The achievement of this milestone closely followed SeeThruEquity's 5th annual investor conference held last month in New York City.

"We are proud to have reached this significant milestone of 200 companies under coverage," stated Ajay Tandon, Chief Executive Officer of SeeThruEquity. "We started SeeThruEquity five years ago with the mission of discovering underfollowed public companies and delivering impactful research to the investment community, and now have become one of the largest research firms covering smallcap and microcap equities." While many research firms have downsized or exited the market, SeeThruEquity continues to thrive and grow. "We are very thankful to our companies, sponsors and partners as well as our audience of investors who follow our research and attend our investor conferences," Ajay Tandon further remarked.

For more information, please visit our website at http://www.seethruequity.com.

Next Investor Conference on October 17, 2016 in New York City

Our next investor conference will be held in New York City at Convene Grand Central, located at 101 Park Avenue near Grand Central Station on October 17, 2016. Please click HERE for more information.

About SeeThruEquity

Since its founding in 2011, SeeThruEquity has been committed to its core mission: providing impactful, high quality research on underfollowed smallcap and microcap equities. SeeThruEquity has pioneered an innovative business model for equity research that is not paid for and is unbiased. SeeThruEquity is the host of acclaimed investor conferences that are the ultimate event for publicly traded companies with market capitalizations less than $1 billion.

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SeeThruEquity is approved to contribute its research reports and estimates to Thomson One Analytics (First Call), the leading estimates platform on Wall Street, as well as Capital IQ and FactSet. SeeThruEquity maintains one of the industry's most extensive databases of opt-in institutional and high net worth investors. The firm is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan in New York City.

For more information, visit www.seethruequity.com.

Contact:

Ajay Tandon

SeeThruEquity

info@seethruequity.com

SOURCE: SeeThruEquity
In a sign of Republican desperation to retain control of the Senate this fall, GOP leaders are encouraging Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to change his mind and run for reelection.

Rubio spent more than a year on the presidential campaign trail trashing the Senate as a legislative wasteland while missing countless votes and committee hearings. He tried to make a virtue of his absence during his unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination, to the point that critics in Florida denounced Rubio for drawing a government paycheck without meeting his basic duties as a lawmaker.

Related: Trump to GOP Leadership: Sit Down and Shut Up

However, with growing signs that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is imploding in the polls and may be taking vulnerable Republican candidates down with him, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is begging Rubio to change course and enter the August GOP primary contest, according to various reports.

McConnell told The Huffington Post this week that even without Trump leading the ticket, Republicans were facing a challenging cycle anyway, especially in purple swing states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Colorado. As for Florida, he added, We hope our candidate will end up being Marco Rubio.

Although McConnell endorsed Trump for president after he wrapped up the nomination in early May, the majority leader privately has voiced alarm that the billionaire businessmans candidacy could lead to the demise of the GOPs control of Congress and the election of Democrat Hillary Clinton as president.

McConnell has quietly advised vulnerable Senate GOP incumbents to distance themselves from Trump in the general election campaign to try to save themselves from defeat.

The GOP currently holds a 54 to 46 vote advantage over the Democrats and independents. With the Republicans defending 24 seats this year and the Democrats only 10, there is a better than even chance the Democrats can pick up the five seats they would need to reclaim control of the Senate.

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Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, far and away the most vulnerable Republican incumbent, on June 7th became the first incumbent Republican to announce that he would not endorse Trump for president. Other Republican incumbents facing tough reelection battles and who likely will steer clear of Trump include Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Rob Portman of Ohio, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and whoever ends up defending Rubios seat in Florida.

Related: Trump, the Gift That Keeps on Giving to Democrats

Veteran Sen. John McCain of Arizona is also facing a tough reelection, but for now at least he has endorsed Trump for fear of further alienating Tea Party conservatives in his state.

On the Democratic side, Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is retiring at the end of the year, and his seat may be vulnerable to a Republican candidacy.

Its too early for a definitive list of endangered seats, said University of Virginia political scholar Larry J. Sabato, whose Crystal Ball blog handicaps congressional and presidential campaigns. But obviously, Trump isnt going to help the GOP candidates in most of these states.

Senate map

Source: Sabatos Crystal Ball

Today, 70 percent of Americans say they disapprove of Trump, and Clinton is leading the race by 12 percentage points in the most recent national poll. Moreover, relations between congressional Republicans and Trump couldnt get much worse.

Related: Is Trumps Style Wearing Thin? 70% of Americans View Him Unfavorably

McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and scores of other prominent Republican leaders have publicly distanced themselves from Trumps more controversial and outrageous statements, including his repeated calls for barring Muslims from this country, his racist attacks on a federal judge of Mexican heritage and his suggestions that President Obama somehow was connected to the terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando last weekend that killed 49 people and wounded 53 others.

Trump apparently is furious with GOP leaders for refusing to get in line behind him. In a speech in Atlanta on Wednesday, the likely Republican standard bearer said that top Republicans need to toughen up and be smarter and sharper, or else he may have to go it alone in leading the party this fall. He also admonished GOP leaders to be quiet ... Dont talk ... Just be quiet.

Rubio, 45, who ran unsuccessfully against Trump promising to bring a new generation of conservative leadership to the White House, would by no means be a shoo-in if he were to run again. Two Democratic representatives, Alan Grayson and Patrick Murphy, are seeking Rubios seat and both have performed well in hypothetical matchups against the five current Republican challengers for the seat.

Related: Obama to GOP Leaders -- Do You Actually Agree with Trump?

Whats more, a recent Public Policy Polling survey found that Rubios job approval rating among Florida voters is only 32 percent, as many Floridians bridled at Rubios cavalier dismissal of his Senate post.

Last year, Trump repeatedly criticized Rubio on the campaign trail as an absentee senator. The Tampa Bay Times calculated in February that Rubio had missed 68 percent of all hearings held by the Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Small Business committees since taking office. The Sun Sentinel of South Florida even wrote an editorial in October demanding that Rubio resign from the Senate, declaring that You are paid $174,000 per year to represent us and You are ripping us off, senator.

Rubio told reporters on Wednesday that he is rethinking his decision to retire from the Senate after only one term, following a conversation he had over the weekend with his friend Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, a Republican who is running to succeed Rubio. Cantera told Rubio that he would stand aside if Rubio decides to seek a second term.

I enjoy my service here a lot, Rubio said at the Capitol, according to The Washington Post. So Ill go home later this week and Ill have some time with my family, and then if theres been a change in our status, Ill be sure to let everyone know.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
By Richard Cowan and Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. senators signaled on Wednesday a new willingness to consider restrictions on the sale of guns after the Orlando nightclub massacre, with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others in his party ready to discuss limited gun control measures.

With Republicans and the National Rifle Association gun lobby under pressure to respond to the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Trump said he would meet with the NRA to discuss ways to block people on terrorism watch or no-fly lists from buying guns.

Emotions have run high in Congress since Sunday's mass shooting with Democrats stalling Senate proceedings on Wednesday in a bid to push for tougher gun control legislation. Democratic senators planned to speak on the Senate floor well into Wednesday night.

The Senate began discussions on legislation to ban firearm sales to the hundreds of thousands of people on U.S. terrorism watch lists after a gunman who had been on such a list killed 49 people at a gay nightclub on Sunday.

But following a full day of wrangling, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said that negotiations "were little more than a smokescreen by Republicans trying to give themselves political cover while they continue to march in lock-step with the NRA's extreme positions."

Reid said there were no Republican proposals "that come close to attracting Democratic support."

Earlier on Wednesday, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged senators to offer ideas on how to prevent another attack like the one in Orlando.

I do not believe this was some random act of violence," McConnell said. "It seems clear this was cold-blooded murder committed by a terrorist who picked his targets with deliberate malice." On Tuesday, McConnell said that "nobody wants terrorists to have firearms."

Earlier in the week, some Democrats in the House of Representatives interrupted a moment of silence for the victims, with shouts of "Where's the bill?" to protest the Republican-led chamber's refusal to consider tougher gun laws.

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If Congress was to pass a gun control measure, it would mark the first time in more than 20 years that lawmakers agreed on how to address the hot-button issue. A ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, such as the one used in Orlando, had gone into effect in 1994 and expired 10 years later.

Republicans over the years have blocked gun control measures saying they step on Americans' right to bear arms as guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

Senator John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican, confirmed that he and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein were holding private talks on a possible compromise bill stopping weapons sales to those on watch lists.

OPPORTUNITY CITED

Another Republican, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, also is working on a bill that would keep guns from people on watch lists, a gun control group said.

Toomey, who is in a possibly difficult re-election bid this year, took to the Senate floor urging compromise.

So theres an obvious opportunity here guys, to work together and find a solution, he said, adding, "This is not rocket science to figure this out."

A spokeswoman for Toomey, E.R. Anderson, said the senator was seeking bipartisan support for an approach that he had tentatively agreed on with gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, which is backed by ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Everytown spokeswoman Erika Lamb said the group was encouraged by the discussions but added, "We are not there yet and our support for any compromise legislation is contingent on support from both Republicans and Democrats."

Toomey's bill would allow the U.S. attorney general to create a new list of "likely terrorists" and block any person on the list from buying or selling a gun. If someone was denied a gun, he or she would be entitled to a swift court hearing where the attorney general would have to turn over the evidence against the person.

Democrats were dubious. One problem, a Democratic aide said, was that under the proposal officials would just have three days to try to block sales to anyone not already on the new list.

Congressional Republicans and the NRA have thwarted previous gun control measures backed by President Barack Obama and other Democrats after other mass shootings, and supporters of new restrictions remained cautious about the moves.

"The Cornyn bill is outlandish and is worse than nothing. From what I'm told all of the compromises proposed by Cornyn and Toomey are not at all acceptable," said Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York.

Feinstein, speaking to reporters following a closed briefing from the Obama administration on the Orlando massacre, held out little hope her talks with Cornyn would bear fruit. "I don't think it's going to work out," she said, but added she was still engaged in talks.

NRA HAPPY TO MEET WITH TRUMP

Trump said on Twitter he would meet with the NRA "about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns." His campaign did not specify what he might support legislatively, and a spokeswoman declined to give details about the timing or nature of the meeting.

The NRA, a politically influential lobbying group that claims more than 4 million members, said in a statement it was "happy to meet" with Trump, whom it endorsed for president on May 20.

The group said in a statement that anyone on a terrorism watch list who tries to buy a gun "should be thoroughly investigated" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and any sale to that person delayed, a position the lobby group has long held.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who has supported gun control efforts, on Monday said she was "bewildered" that Republicans in Congress in December had blocked a Democratic effort to restrict gun sales to people on the watch lists.

The U.S. government maintains two terrorism watch lists: a no-fly list barring people from flying to and from the United States and a larger one that subjects travelers to greater scrutiny at airports and border crossings.

An FBI official said in 2014 there were 64,000 people on the no-fly list and 800,000 on the broader list. The Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, the U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants, was on the broader list at one time.

NRA Executive Director Chris Cox also voiced backing for legislation offered in December by Cornyn, who proposed to put gun sales on hold for 72 hours for people on watch lists. Critics have said such background checks could take longer to complete.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was too soon to tell if Republicans would support "common sense" steps like blocking firearm sales to people on the no-fly lists.

(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey and Susan Cornwell; Editing by Howard Goller and Leslie Adler)
Lubumbashi (DR Congo) (AFP) - Several people were killed in clashes between the army and former rebels at a military base in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said.

Tension had been mounting for days at the military base in Kamina, in the southeast, where more than 2,000 former rebels from various groups are stationed as part of a government disarmament programme.

It was unclear how many had died in the bloody clashes, with one rebel source putting the number of dead at around 10 while an army source said at least 20 people had been killed.

Regional governor Celestin Mbuyu said one lieutenant from the Congolese army was among the dead, "killed with a machete by rebels... who were headed to the city centre to loot it".

More than 2,300 former rebels are stationed in the Kamina base, including members of the ethnic-based Mai-Mai militia and the M23 movement.

After the defeat of M23 in 2013, the government launched a programme to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate -- known as DDR3 -- more than 12,000 former rebels.

But the programme, the third of its kind since the end of the Second Congo War in 2003, has been hit by delays and funding problems.

Kamina has previously faced a mutiny from the disgruntled former rebels, who have complained about the living standards on the base.

A Western military source said the latest clashes exposes the limitations of the DDR3 programme and may deter other rebels from laying down arms and hamper the repatriation of former M23 refugees to Rwanda and Uganda.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC notifies investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against of Gerdau S.A. ("Gerdau" or the "Company") (NYSE: GGB) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in United States District Court, Southern District of New York, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons or entities who purchased or otherwise acquired Gerdau securities as American depositary receipts ("ADRs") between June 2, 2011 and May 15, 2016, inclusive (the "Class Period").

Gerdau produces and commercializes steel products worldwide. The Company operates through Brazil Business Operation, North America Business Operation, South America Business Operation, and Special Steel Business Operation segments.

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) the Company was engaged in a bribery scheme in collusion with Brazil's Board of Tax Appeals ("CARF"); (ii) Gerdau had defrauded Brazilian tax authorities of roughly $429 million in taxes; (iii) Gerdau's Chief Executive Officer ("CEO"), Defendant Andre Bier Gerdau Johannpeter ("Johannpeter") and other directors and employees of the Company had engaged in bribery, money laundering, and influence peddling; and (iv) as a result of the foregoing, Defendants' statements about Gerdau's business, operations, and prospects were false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.

On or about March 26, 2015, Brazilian authorities announced that a Federal Police investigation, dubbed Operation Zelotes, had uncovered a multibillion-dollar tax fraud scheme at the Ministry of Finance ("Finance Ministry"), reporting that as many as 70 companies had bribed members of the CARF, a body within the Finance Ministry that hears appeals on tax disputes, to obtain favorable rulings that recused or waived the amounts that the companies owed. On or around March 29, 2015, it was reported that Gerdau was among the companies under investigation.

On December 4, 2015, the Brazilian publication Jornal do Comercio reported that a report by a committee of the National Congress of Brazil had named Gerdau, along with other companies, as a beneficiary of a tax evasion scheme.

On this news, Gerdau's ADR price fell $0.11, or 6.96%, to close at $1.47 on December 4, 2015.

On or around February 25, 2016, post-market, Brazilian police raided Gerdau offices in connection with Operation Zelotes, as police carried out some 20 court orders for testimony and 18 search warrants in Recife, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Brasilia. Gerdau's CEO, Defendant Johannpeter, was among the individuals ordered to testify by day's end. In an e-mailed statement, Gerdau stated that the Company had never authorized the use of its name in illegal negotiations and that the Company abided by rigorous ethical standards.

On this news, Gerdau's ADR price fell $0.03, or 3.16%, to close at $0.92 on February 25, 2016.

On February 29, 2016, Gerdau announced that it would delay the release of its fourth-quarter financial results as the Company "analyze[d] the case records involving Gerdau in the recent phase of [the] Zelotes Operation."

On May 16, 2016, various news outlets reported that Brazil's federal police had accused Gerdau of evading $429 million in taxes and indicted a total of 19 Gerdau personnel, including Defendant Johannpeter and some of the Company's executives, directors and lawyers, on corruption-related charges including bribery, money laundering, and influence peddling.

On this news, Gerdau's ADR price fell $0.13, or over 7%, to close at $1.72 on May 16, 2016.

No Class has yet been certified in the above action. If you wish to review a copy of the Complaint you may contact Peretz Bronstein, Esq. or his Investor Relations Coordinator, Eitan Kimelman of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC at 212-697-6484 or via email info@bgandg.com. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address and telephone number. If you suffered a loss in Gerdau you have until July 25, 2016 to request that the Court appoint you as lead plaintiff. Your ability to share in any recovery doesn't require that you serve as a lead plaintiff.

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC is a corporate litigation boutique. Our primary expertise is the aggressive pursuit of litigation claims on behalf of our clients. In addition to representing institutions and other investor plaintiffs in class action security litigation, the firm's expertise includes general corporate and commercial litigation, as well as securities arbitration. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact:

Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC

Peretz Bronstein or Yael Hurwitz

212-697-6484 | info@bgandg.com

SOURCE: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Levi & Korsinsky announces it has commenced an investigation of Legg Mason Inc. (LM) concerning possible breaches of fiduciary duty by the board of directors of the company. To obtain additional information, go to: http://zlk.9nl.com/legg-mason-lm or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at jlevi@zlk.com or by telephone at (212) 363-7500, toll-free: (877) 363-5972.

Levi & Korsinsky is a national firm with offices in New York, New Jersey, California, Connecticut and Washington D.C. The firm's attorneys have extensive expertise in prosecuting securities litigation involving financial fraud, representing investors throughout the nation in securities and shareholder lawsuits. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

CONTACT:

Levi & Korsinsky, LLP

Eduard Korsinsky, Esq.

30 Broad Street - 24th Floor

New York, NY 10004

Tel: (212) 363-7500

Toll Free: (877) 363-5972

Fax: (212) 363-7171

www.zlk.com

SOURCE: Levi & Korsinsky, LLP
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / June 16, 2016 / Levi & Korsinsky announces it has commenced an investigation of Office Depot, Inc. (ODP) concerning possible breaches of fiduciary duty by the board of directors of the company. To obtain additional information, go to: http://zlk.9nl.com/office-depot or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at jlevi@zlk.com or by telephone at (212) 363-7500, toll-free: (877) 363-5972.

Levi & Korsinsky is a national firm with offices in New York, New Jersey, California, Connecticut and Washington D.C. The firm's attorneys have extensive expertise in prosecuting securities litigation involving financial fraud, representing investors throughout the nation in securities and shareholder lawsuits. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

CONTACT:

Levi & Korsinsky, LLP

Eduard Korsinsky, Esq.

30 Broad Street - 24th Floor

New York, NY 10004

Tel: (212) 363-7500

Toll Free: (877) 363-5972

Fax: (212) 363-7171

www.zlk.com

SOURCE: Levi & Korsinsky, LLP
Josh Brolin (front) and Benicio del Toro (rear seat, at right) in Sicario (Lionsgate)

For those who couldnt get enough of the Mexican drug cartel-related action delivered by last years Sicario, theres good news  according to the projects new director, youll be getting two more films in its universe.

Related: Sicario Cast on Stumbling Around in the Dark for That Tense Tunnel Scene

In a recent chat with Jacob Stolworthy at The Independent, filmmaker Stefano Sollima (best known for his Italian crime drama TV series Gomorrah, based on the acclaimed 2008 film of the same name) reveals plans to follow up Denis Villeneuves 2015 thriller with both his upcoming Soldado as well as a third film. Moreover, neither will focus on Emily Blunts government agent protagonist (who may appear in the third movie, albeit in a peripheral role), but rather will revolve around Benicio Del Toros hitman Alejandro Gillick and Josh Brolins CIA chief Matt Graves.



As Sollima sees it, each of the three movies ultimately will share some characters, but otherwise stand on its own. Of Soldado he says:

Its absolutely a standalone movie  a completely different story with just two of the characters that you met in Sicario. Its not a real sequel. The antagonists are now absolutely the main characters.

Related: Sicario Star Emily Blunt on Ditching the Movies Nude Scene

Sollimas idea of what constitutes a sequel (and antagonists) seems a bit fuzzy  and further comments about his approach to the film (written by Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan) contain praise, as well as a not-so-subtle dig, regarding the first film, which was acclaimed for its gorgeous Roger Deakins-shot widescreen style:

"I loved Sicario. I feel the movie was quite similar to my approach so, to me, Im just shooting another movie. Soldado will be much more cinematic than Sicario was; its got an incredible amount of huge action sequences in there. It will be a different journey in the same world. Even the theme is different  its not drug dealing, its more on immigration."

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Whether that new thematic angle will prove fruitful wont be known until Soldado arrives in theaters some time in the unspecified near future. For now, you can click over to read all of Sollimas interview here.

Sicario: Watch a trailer:
On Friday, Sim Group Hollywood is hosting the opening of its new 66,000 square-foot facility on the former Eastman Kodak site in Hollywood. Representatives from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce will be on hand for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The newly renovated building - which will serve as Sim Group's West Coast headquarters - brings under one roof its Hollywood-based Sim Camera rental services business, Chainsaw postproduction business and Bling Digital workflow services brands.

Citing California's tax credits, chief strategy officer James Martin said, "We see an increase in production in Los Angeles and this is a commitment to elevating our service offierings."

Sim Camera includes a prep and test area for cinematographers and loading zone. The second and third floors include 60 editing rooms that can be configured to meet the needs of productions and seven color grading rooms, plus a 10-set digital intermediate theater. A sound room and workflow facilities also are available. Grading rooms can accommodate Blackmagic's Da Vinci Resolve or FilmLight's Baselight.

Connecting the floors is 130 miles of cable, allowing images to move from camera through finishing. "For instance, a cinematographer could shoot a hair and makeup test in the private prep room on the camera floor and by the time he goes to the second-floor color bay, his footage is there with the colorist to grade the test," said Chris Parker, Sim Group's chief business development officer.

The second and third floors have open break areas with views of the Hollywood sign; the third floor also has an outdoor deck.

At press time, the company was starting to offer services for the upcoming seasons of FX's American Horror Story and Amazon's Just Add Magic. Recent work included postproduction on HBO's Game of Thrones and The Leftovers and Freeform's Pretty Little Liars. For Legendary and Universal's Warcraft, the company provided camera, grip and lighting gear, as well as Avids and postproduction workflow services.

SIM Group is headquartered in Toronto and also operates in New York, Vancouver and Atlanta. Additional Sim Group brands include PS Production Services, Post Factory NY, Tattersall Sound & Picture and Pixel Underground.
By Yiming Woo SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A Singapore design team claims to have come up with a solution to coping with aches and pain in the office - a jacket that massages your muscles and attempts to correct your posture. Controlled by a mobile app and able to run for around three hours after a USB charge, 'Aira' uses air pressure devices inside the jacket which expand to target pressure points and produce the sensation of a massage. Lin Wei Liang, the CEO of designers TWare, said the jacket was a practical office aid for people who had developed posture problems from sitting at a desk for lengthy periods or spent too long hunched over a mobile device. "What we have here is much more invisible, discreet, something that you can wear just like a normal hoodie or jacket, and yet you can get that massage without people noticing," he told Reuters. Lin said his company was in the process of securing a patent for the jacket, which retails at $119 and has been developed with more than $75,000 of funds raised using crowdfunding website, Kickstarter. However, not everyone is convinced. Physiotherapist Michelle Tong agreed it could be used to de-stress but was unsure about its ability to treat pain. "You question whether the person would develop a tolerance to it," she told Reuters. "Each time they're using it, they end up having to apply a high pressure each time, just to get the same effect, as you would if you were taking painkillers for the long-term." (Writing by Patrick Johnston in Singapore. Editing by Nick Macfie)
On back of recent corporate governance lapses.

Moving to strengthen the corporate governance culture in the firm, Singapore Post introduced a code of business conduct for its board directors establishing new policies governing directors' conflicts of interest, and Board renewal and tenure.

According to a media release by SingPost, compliance with the code will be monitored by the nominations and corporate governance committee.

The terms of reference of this committee have been amended to include the oversight, development and review of SingPost's corporate governance practices, the press release said.

According to SingPost chairman Simon Israel, the new code sets the tone and will help frame the Board's discussion of the recommendations from the Corporate Governance Review.

The Code of Business Conduct and Ethics serves to guide directors on areas of ethical risk and sets a framework for an environment where integrity and accountability are paramount, the media release said.

It contains enhanced directives on identifying and disclosing conflicts of interest; maintaining confidentiality; compliance with laws, rules and regulations; fair dealing; and setting a framework for reporting illegal and unethical behaviour, it added.





More From Singapore Business Review


(Getty Images file photo)



Residents of Block 203 Ang Mo Kio Ave 3 have been asked to go for a health screening for tuberculosis after six cases of the same strain of tuberculosis were discovered in a four-year timeframe.

Media reports said that of the six cases, three were from the same household and diagnosed in February 2012, May 2012 and October 2015. Two cases were diagnosed in April 2014 and October 2015, and the sixth was diagnosed in May this year. All of them had the same strain of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB). The patients  five men and a woman who are all Singaporean  from the different households did not interact with each other.

Doctors described the cluster as highly unusual.

Tuberculosis is an infection caused by bacteria, and is most often found in the lungs. It is spread when an infected person breathes out air that has tuberculosis bacteria in it. MDRTB is transmitted after continuous contact with an infectious person and can take weeks before it surfaces.

The Ministry of Health (MOH) says the six have either completed treatment or are receiving treatment and are not a public health risk.

The health screening for residents of Block 203 is free and takes place from Thursday (16 June) to Sunday (19 June).
When billionaire businessman Warren Buffett drove around MBA students from the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management earlier this year, the school didn't just high-five the students when they returned to campus. It made sure the larger Owen community online could get an up-close view of what was happening as it unfolded.

Before the excursion, Owen turned its Instagram account over to a student to capture the event and share the experience. The account now has almost 1,400 followers.

The school also let a student post on Snapchat parts of a question-and-answer event with Buffett.

[Gain an admissions advantage with social media.]

Snapchat -- a social media site that, like Instagram, is primarily used for sending and receiving photos and videos -- is becoming a more popular space for Owen to connect with applicants.

"It's a place where the next generation of students are," says Brett Israel, the director of business news and communications at Owen.

As more video-based social media sites emerge, and schools join these sites, applicants can use the platforms to become more informed, learn about the institutions and interact with business school communities they hope to join, experts say.

"We primarily use social media to showcase student life," says Erin Town, director of MBA admissions at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.

A student managing the school's Instagram account, for example, may use it to capture students climbing the state's Mount Rainier, she says.

[Impress business school recruiters on social media.]

Periscope, which lets users live stream video content, is also a part of the social media strategy at some MBA programs.

"We are using Periscope and Facebook Live to live-stream talks and events featuring Stanford GSB faculty and guest speakers. This allows anyone around the world to watch, experience, and engage with the event as it's happening," wrote Karen Lee, the associate director, digital and social, for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, in an email.

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When the University of Kansas School of Business opened a new facility for business students, the school held three separate Periscope tours, says Austin Falley, director of communications, for the school.

Business school applicants are also gravitating to social media in droves to learn about graduate education.

Of the 96 percent of prospective students who use social media, "67 percent use it for activities related to the pursuit of graduate management education, such as getting program information, learning about upcoming events, connecting with current students, alumni, or faculty, and researching graduate management education," a May report from the Graduate Management Admission Council states.

Even as video platforms emerge, experts say Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages are also heavily used to share information about schools.

If applicants want to connect with MBA programs in ways other than liking, retweeting and commenting on content the schools post, experts recommend they keep three things in mind.

[Give yourself a social media makeover as a b-school applicant.]

1. Follow hashtags: Applicants interested in the Owen Graduate School of Management can learn about the school by following the hashtag, #owenlife, on different platforms, says Israel.

"They're going to get a real engaging social media experience that shows off all the school has to offer," says the Owen spokesman. "Students will use it when they're out on the town, when they're at a job interview, when they're traveling."

2. Watch videos to gauge how much you'll like a school's community: "Social media is a really great way for candidates to assess their own fit for a school," says Town from Foster.

Seeing snapshots of students learning and networking can help prospective students get a better understanding what it's like to attend a specific program.

When discussing Snapchat, Israel says, "It just shows off the students' personality and the personality of the school."

Smart applicants will also use social media to learn about a school's culture, says Luke Pena, director of MBA admissions at Stanford.

"A school's social media content reflects what is considered important and valuable within that community; take care to notice the words, voices, topics, and tone that emerge, and evaluate whether the underlying values align with the learning community you seek," he wrote in an email.

3. Use videos to form sharp questions: "I would encourage students to take advantage of social media interactions to gain unique perspectives and substantive knowledge," says Rob Schickler, associate director of admissions with the full-time MBA program at Owen and a 2014 MBA graduate of the school.

Applicants can ask about something they saw on social media when speaking with admissions staff or during an admissions interview to show that they've thoroughly researched a school, experts say.

"Demonstrate to us that you have some level of knowledge about either our school or a program and use it to ask substantive questions," Schickler says. "That's going to make a much more positive impression on the admissions team than someone who just reaches out for reaching out sake."

As an MBA applicant, Schickler used LinkedIn to connect with business school alumni and learn more about recruitment and career services.

"It was pretty hit or miss," he says, but "it was a place to start."

Searching for a business school? Get our complete rankings of Best Business Schools.

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.
By Heather Somerville

SAN FRANCISCO, June 16 (Reuters) - Software company LogicMonitor said on Thursday it raised $130 million, marking its largest funding round by a wide margin and setting up the California company for an Asia expansion.

LogicMonitor, a software-as-a-service, or SaaS, company that helps businesses monitor their data centers and flag possible problems, raised $130 million from Providence Strategic Growth, an investment arm of Providence Equity Partners, the company said in an interview.

Prior to this funding, LogicMonitor, founded in 2007, had raised $21 million, a relatively small sum compared to some other high-growth software companies.

"We had been flying kind of low and fast under the radar," said Kevin McGibben, company president and chief executive.

He attributed the company's cautious fundraising and spending habits to its location in Santa Barbara, a beach town roughly 300 miles south of Silicon Valley.

"Because we are out of the Silicon Valley bubble ... it has been easier for us to look at our business and say we want to build the leading company in our space, but let's do so prudently," McGibben said.

He declined to provide the company's new valuation, but said it is "not in the range of being a unicorn but we are content to not be so," referring to the name given to venture-backed companies worth $1 billion or more.

LogicMonitor helps companies monitor their data center operations, both in physical data centers and in the cloud, and keep tabs on how applications are performing. If a problem appears, the software sends text messages and email alerts to the company's IT team.

LogicMonitor has about 160 employees and more than 1,000 paying customers, including JetBlue, Citrix, National Geographic and Trulia, according to a company statement.

McGibben said the company's revenue has on average doubled each year for the past five years. He declined to provide specific numbers.

The fresh funding will be used for research and development, engineering, marketing and an expansion into Asia and the South Pacific next year. McGibben said it is likely the financing will be the company's last private round before an IPO, but he is not planning to join the public markets for at least a couple more years.

(Reporting by Heather Somerville; Editing by Andrew Hay)
Production is set to begin on Five Fingers for Marseilles, a South African thriller set in the rugged badlands of the Eastern Cape. After seven years and 5,000 miles of research and development across the countryside, writer Sean Drummond and helmer Michael Matthews have attracted an all-star cast of local talent for their Western-inspired tale of an outlaw who returns home after years on the run, and finding a chance at redemption.

By putting a contemporary spin on Western themes, Drummond says, The time is more right than ever before for this film.

Socially and politically, a lot of the themes we explore are resonating now, he says, noting that the good Westerns always had socio-political undercurrents running through them.

Thesp Vuyo Dabula heads an ensemble cast that includes Thishiwe Ziqubu, Kenneth Nkosi, Mduduzi Mabaso, Lizwi Vilakazi, Kenneth Fok, Anthony Oseyemi, Dean Fourie, and Jerry Mofokeng. Cast by acclaimed casting director Moonyeenn Lee, pic will also use members of the local Eastern Cape communities for supporting roles.

The film was awarded Best South African Film in Development at the Durban FilmMarts finance forum in 2013. Produced by Drummond and Matthews Be Phat Motel Film Company and Yaron Schwartzman and Asger Hussain of Game 7 Films (Academy Award-winner Precious), in association with Stage 5 Films (DIFF 2016 opener The Journeymen) and Above the Clouds, it was also made possible with the support of South Africas National Film & Video Foundation and the Dept. of Trade and Industry, with additional services from Dupa Films.

Five Fingers is slated for an early 2017 release in South Africa. Indigenous Film Distribution will release in South Africa, and XYZ Films represents North American sales.

Game 7s Schwartzman says, Five Fingers is a testament to the power, freshness and ingenuity of new narratives coming from across the world. Stories that need to be told and whose time has most definitely come. Were proud to be associated with it.

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According to Drummond, the collaboration with foreign partners has been integral to the production from the early stages. Were carving a new model here in many senses: a fully local film in local language, with fully local cast, financed through a combination of S.A. and international funding, for a world audience, he says.

Weve been conscious from the start of developing this film for an international audience as much as a South African one, and we were lucky to meet Game 7 Films early in development, he adds. The advice, experience and expertise of XYZ Films, too, when it comes to taking international genre films to the U.S. market, has been invaluable.

Drummond notes that as the South African industry has grown bolder, audience tastes have evolved, allowing filmmakers to take more risks. Despite tough times for the local economy, he says, its exciting to be making films here now. The S.A. new wave weve all talked up for years is really in its stride, and were honored to be part of it at this time.

Related stories

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Durban: Pitches Welcome at Africa's Top Film Market
COLUMBIA  After a slow, four-year march toward ethics reform, the South Carolina General Assembly late Wednesday adopted two bills requiring lawmakers to disclose sources of independent income and also creating an independent investigation commission to oversee lawmaker conduct.

They now go to Gov. Nikki Haley for her signature.

Lawmakers in a compromise committee reached an agreement that will require elected officials who file a statement of economic interest  from the governor down to locally appointed boards  to include sources of private taxable income.

Members of the House and Senate voted unanimously for approval.

This is just one of the elements of ethics reform that weve looked at, said Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens, who has led the charge for reform in the Senate all year. Its not a big element, but its an important element. Its a start.

Last fall, the Capitol Gains series published by The Post and Courier and The Center for Public Integrity spelled out problems with income disclosure requirements and an ethics system in which lawmakers police themselves. The series found that some lawmakers used their campaign war chests like personal ATM machines, profited off business deals with government and failed to disclose key sources of income while policing their own behavior through internal ethics committees.

South Carolina had earned a D- in the Center for Public Integritys State Integrity Investigation in November, ranking 36th worst in the nation in part for its minimal disclosure laws and the not enough independence in its ethics enforcement agencies.

Related story: South Carolina gets D- grade in 2015 State Integrity Investigation

Related story: Capitol Gains: S.C. politicians use office to pad pockets

This story is part of Whos Calling the Shots in State Politics?. The Center exposes the powerful special interests that drive elections and policy in the states. Click here to read more stories in this series.

Don't miss another Politics investigation: Sign up for the Center for Public Integrity's Watchdog email.

Some lawmakers said the bill that passed was not truly reform because it does not require elected officials to disclose how much money they make. Others were upset the Legislature did not work to regulate campaign spending by outside groups, so-called dark money.

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Weve debated ethics for how many years now? said Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, as he held up a sheet of paper signifying the measure. Its not even a whole page. Thats what weve got. What I dont want anybody to leave here thinking is weve done ethics reform.

This is a step in the right direction. But if there was a baby step, this is the babiest of baby steps, Hutto said.

Elected officials will be required to list the source and type of all private income on their statements of economic interest filed with the election commission, including the income of their spouse and anyone they claim as a dependent.

Lawmakers also unanimously passed a bill creating an eight-member ethics commission to investigate when elected officials are accused of wrongdoing.

Currently, lawmakers lack such independent oversight. The state Ethics Commission has the power to enforce laws for everyone but them. House and Senate lawmakers each have their own separate ethics committees to take complaints and police themselves.

The independent commission called for in the bill would add more oversight. If the commission finds probable cause, it would make a recommendation to the House or Senate ethics committee. If the committee agrees there is probable cause, the investigation will become public. If the legislative committee disagrees with the commissions findings, it can send it back to the independent panel for a second look before the investigation becomes public.

Public disclosure had been a sticking point for the two bodies, but lawmakers were able to reach a compromise late Wednesday.

Im pleased, said the bills author Rep. Tommy Pope, R-York. If you had asked me 10 times during this day, I would not have told you that it were possible.

Haley praised the lawmakers on social media shortly after the votes, thanking them for their work on ethics reform and bringing this home.

This story was co-published with The Post and Courier.

Related story: Capitol Gains: Vague terms cloak S.C. lawmakers' expenses

Related story: Capitol Gains: S.C. lawmakers profit from government connections

This story is part of Whos Calling the Shots in State Politics?. The Center exposes the powerful special interests that drive elections and policy in the states. Click here to read more stories in this series.

Related stories

Copyright 2016 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
"Making parents out of our patients," reads an ad in Madrid's metro for one of Spain's many fertility clinics that have opened their doors to husbands and wives, same-sex couples and single women thanks to lenient laws.

Every year, more than 5,000 people walk through the glass doors of the Madrid IVI clinic, where couples sit in a hushed atmosphere, English, Spanish and French wafting through the waiting room to help foreign customers, 20 percent of all its patients.

Sitting in his office behind the reception, where black-and white photos of babies' hands hang on the wall, director Juan Antonio Garcia Velasco says that Spain has become a "reference point" for fertility treatment.

He points for instance to "being able to provide treatment that is banned in many countries."

- Up to 50 years old -

A law that came into force in 2006 allows women aged 18 or over -- be they single, in heterosexual or same-sex couples -- to access assisted reproductive technology such as artificial insemination or in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

By contrast, the legislation in neighbouring France bans single women or same-sex couples from undergoing such treatment.

The identity of sperm and egg donors is also kept secret in Spain.

And unlike in other countries such as Britain or France, there is no shortage of eggs in Spain, which already has a strong tradition of organ donation.

Last but not least, Spanish clinics accept women wanting to conceive aged up to 50.

As such, in the latest figures available, some 15,600 treatments took place in Spain in 2011, compared to 3,300 in the Czech Republic, 2,100 in Britain and 1,100 in Belgium, according to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Emmanuelle Lino, whose name has been modified as have those of other women who would only talk on condition of anonymity, is one such satisfied customer in Spain.

The 45-year-old Frenchwoman has only just given birth to a little boy conceived in a Barcelona clinic thanks to an egg donation.

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Married, she had tried IVF in Paris, to no avail.

And by the time she wanted to try again, she was unable to as she was older than the 43-year-old age limit fixed by the French social security system. Egg donations in France are also rare.

She had initially thought about going to Belgium, another prized destination for women with fertility problems, but "I was told there would be a huge wait."

So she settled for Spain, where her treatment cost nearly 7,000 euros ($7,800), excluding travel costs.

- Mother tongue -

Many of the Spanish clinics' foreign customers are women in their forties, in relationships with men, who come for egg donations and associated IVF treatment.

Others ask for their eggs to be frozen -- a technique that allows them to conceive later in life.

And Spanish clinics make it as easy as possible for potential foreign customers, with services in their mother tongue.

"I filled in the contact form online and they called me back the very next day, in German," says Silke Khrause.

This 46-year-old single woman who lives near Dusseldorf in Germany had initially thought about going to Denmark for an egg donation, but "everything was in English, it was really complicated."

So she chose Barcelona.

The clinics are also competitive price-wise.

Maria Smith, a 46-year-old British woman, said she had been quoted 7,000 euros for an egg donation in Spain, compared to 13,000 euros in London.

But she eventually settled for her home country, where unlike Spain the donors' identity can be revealed to children born from this procedure once they turn 18 -- an option she wanted to have for her future son or daughter.

- 'Uphill struggle' -

Spain has some 200 gynaecological centres, more than any other European nation.

According to research firm DBK Informa, the sector is doing well, helped by a general trend of Spanish or foreign women wanting to get pregnant later in life, lenient legislation and foreign demand.

The sector earned 365 million euros in 2014 -- a turnover that is expected to increase five to six percent a year, it says.

As a result, Spanish fertility clinics have expanded abroad.

IVI for instance has clinics in Portugal and Italy as well as Spain.

But French gynaecologist Joelle Belaisch-Allart warns that allowing pregnancies for older women carries many risks, such as diabetes, premature birth and miscarriages.

"For me it's 45 years old maximum," she says, pointing out that once a woman gets treated abroad and comes home, she and other doctors are left having to follow their potentially-risky pregnancies.

And far from being a walk in the park, such procedures are difficult, and not always successful.

"For patients, it's an uphill struggle," says fertility expert Jacques de Mouzon.

So it was for Sabrina Ferrant, a single French woman who resorted to crowdfunding to collect some of the 5,500 euros she needed for IVF.

Suffering from endometriosis, a condition that can lead to difficulties in getting pregnant and even infertility, she did it in Spain as France only allows such treatment for couples.

And it was worth it. Now 33, she is pregnant with twins.
The mastermind behind a spam campaign that sent 27 million messages through Facebook servers in about a four-month period has been sentenced to 30 months in a federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud and criminal contempt, the website Law360 reported Wednesday.

Related: In 10 Years Facebook Could Control Much of Your Life

Federal prosecutors in California said 47-year-old Sanford Wallace gained access to 500,000 Facebook accounts in 2008 and 2009 to send the messages, some of which drove traffic to phishing websites.

Wallace, who turned himself in to the FBI in 2011, went by the names The Spam King and Spamford, among others, Law360 said.

Facebook won a $711 million verdict against Wallace in a 2010 civil suit, the website said.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Tom Holland's Spider-Man isn't going to have an easy time of it in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

After mixing it up with fellow superheroes in Captain America: Civil War, the teen superhero will have to deal with not one, but two, supervillains in his first solo outing now that it's been revealed that Logan Marshall-Green is in talks to join Michael Keaton as the troublemakers in the 2017 release.

Keaton will play the primary wrongdoer in the second big screen reboot for Marvel's friendly neighborhood wall-crawler - long rumored to be the Vulture, although neither Marvel nor Sony has commented publicly on the subject - while Marshall-Green's character remains a mystery for now.

Given the likelihood that Homecoming is likely going to want to stay away from the previous incarnations of Spider-Man's cinematic career, it's safe to say that the villains who've appeared in earlier movies will remain on the shelf this time around - goodbye, then, to Marshall-Green playing the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Venom, the Lizard, Rhino or Electro.

That doesn't exactly limit the possibilities of Marshall-Green's role, however; Spider-Man as a comic book property is renowned for the depth of its rogues gallery, rivaled only by DC's Batman franchise; in the first 25 issues of the original Amazing Spider-Man comic book series, 14 new villains were created, with a further nine following by the time the series reached its 50th issue, and new threats consistently appearing in the issues and years after. With that in mind, who could Marshall-Green be playing? Here are some possibilities.

The Tinkerer

Phineas Mason has the distinction of making his first appearance in the same issue as the Vulture - Amazing Spider-Man No. 2, back in 1963 - although the two debuted in different stories within the same issue. A technical genius with the aptitude to repair and improve almost any electrical device, he's ideally suited to be the villain behind the villain: He can create or fix the super-suits that give the more active bad guys their gimmick.

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Pros: He's got the technical know-how that makes him an ideal henchman.

Cons: Could the behind-the-scenes aspect be too low-key for Marshall-Green?

The Chameleon

The very first supervillain that Spider-Man fought way back in 1963's The Amazing Spider-Man No. 1, the Chameleon was originally "just" a Soviet spy and master of disguise, but he later became a literal man without a face after swallowing a serum that made his face permanently malleable, allowing him to assume any identity (within reason, obviously). A sociopath obsessed with ruining the life of Spider-Man, he makes for a great comic book villain, but perhaps too intense for a secondary threat in a movie?

Pros: A master of disguise sowing seeds of distrust and discontent could make for a great, manipulative threat.

Cons: A master of disguise pretty much means that Marshall-Green would have to spend the movie in disguise in order to be effective.

Kraven the Hunter

A former Russian aristocrat who hunts the world's deadliest game - Spider-Man - Kraven is a wonderfully cartoonish concept who has gone from a fun, if violent, threat who debuted in 1964's The Amazing Spider-Man No. 15 to something altogether more grim and disturbing in recent years. The turning point was the 1987 storyline "Kraven's Last Hunt," in which the villain believed that he had killed Spider-Man, taking his place as a violent defender of New York City before committing suicide because his life's work was over. Surprisingly, that wasn't the end of his story; he was later resurrected by his family using magic, only to then kill them for failing to live up to his legacy.

Pros: His gimmick is easily understandable and appealingly physical for a movie villain.

Cons: A villain like this really shouldn't be wasted in second position behind any other bad guy.

Mysterio

A fan-favorite villain often rumored to show up in the movies, Mysterio - real name Quentin Beck - has a Hollywood connection: he's a former stuntman and special effects wizard who decided to use his talents for personal gain, creating massive illusions for the purposes of getting rich and messing with Spider-Man's mind wherever possible. He first showed up in 1964's The Amazing Spider-Man No. 13 before going on to plague the web-slinging hero and many others - including Daredevil, in a storyline written by Kevin Smith - for years. Others have tried to take his place across the decades, but there's really only one master of illusion.

Pros: Just think of the onscreen pyrotechnics Mysterio would allow director Jon Watts to use!

Cons: Like Kraven, he runs the risk of overshadowing Michael Keaton's character.

Someone all new

It is, of course, possible that Marshall-Green will be playing a character who is original to the movie - something that might disappoint comic book purists, but remains true to the spirit of those first Stan Lee/Steve Ditko issues. While fans might worry that any new villain might not match up to the iconic comic book threats, it should be remembered that not all of those early bad guys were ideal themselves: Very few people are clamoring for the return of the Living Brain, the Looter or the Big Man and his Enforcers these days.

Read More: Logan Marshall-Green in Talks to Join Michael Keaton in 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' (Exclusive)
Penny Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, speaks to anti-abortion activists in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building, June 2014. (Photo: Reuters/Jim Bourg)

Penny Nance was one of the most outspoken evangelical critics of Donald Trump last December when the Republican presidential candidate first said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.

Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America, argued then that our Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves right now. She said the ban was wrong but also expressed concern that at a time when evangelical Christians are viewed less and less favorably, any targeting of an entire religion was a slippery slope and could become a precedent for use against Christians themselves in the future.

Six weeks later, she was one of 10 female anti-abortion leaders to sign a letter urging Iowa Republicans to support anyone but Donald Trump. The letter said Trump cannot be trusted to appoint conservative judges and added, as women, we are disgusted by Mr. Trumps treatment of individuals, women, in particular.

America will only be a great nation when we have leaders of strong character who will defend both unborn children and the dignity of women, Nance and the other women wrote. We cannot trust Donald Trump to do either.

But now, Nance is one of the chief organizers of a meeting next week between Trump and what she says will be 800 evangelical leaders and activists in New York City.

Nance is working with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and former presidential candidate Ben Carson, who has endorsed Trump, to convene the meeting. Trump will speak to the group and then take questions, Nance told Yahoo News. For some, it will be a moment to decide whether or not to support Trump, Nance said. Others will be deciding whether they can volunteer and try to persuade others to vote for Trump.

Though Nance noted in an interview with Yahoo News that she has not endorsed Donald Trump at this point, her new role is still a dramatic reversal for her.

She explained her change of heart not by defending Trump, but by arguing that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is simply worse.

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On the dignity of women, Nance said that Trump still has work to do in gaining the support of American women, but I would strongly suggest that Hillary too has a complicated history with women.

She was part of the Clinton machine that demeaned and defamed victims of sexual harassment at the hands of her husband, Nance said.

Nance continues to strongly disagree with Trumps proposal to ban Muslims from the U.S.

What I said all along was that was extremely short-sighted for Christians to say that, considering our values are becoming more out of fashion and our religions freedoms are being threatened. Its extremely shortsighted, Nance said. But at the same time I want my country to be safe. After Orlando, weve got a problem.

She admitted that Trump hadnt said much about what he would do to stop terrorism. I dont know until he gets in there what all he can do, she said. But what were doing now isnt working. I havent heard one thing Hillary has said to think shes going to do any better.

And as for Trumps threats against public figures who have criticized or opposed him, and concerns that he would use government power to penalize or censure foes, Nance said she thought Clinton would do that too. I think that should be a concern for Hillary Clinton as well and has been a problem for this administration, she said, pointing to the controversy over the IRS targeting conservative nonprofit groups in 2013, which the Department of Justice chalked up to mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia.

And even though Nance is now organizing the meeting between evangelicals and Trump, she was at pains to maintain a distance from him.

I dont think hes our standard-bearer. I dont labor under any illusion that hes some bible-banging evangelical. I think I have very little in common with him, Nance said.

But Trumps list of judges that he said he would pick from to appoint a Supreme Court nominee, Nance said, gave her some assurances. Even so, her confidence that Trump would stay true to past promises was shaky.

I think the more that we can do to get to know Donald Trump, to help him understand us, and hope that he is somewhat accountable to people he respects, I hope we can influence who he appoints to his administration, she said.

Nance expressed admiration for evangelical leaders like Russell Moore, the head of the Southern Baptists public policy arm, who have steadfastly opposed Trump.

I respect Russell Moore and certainly agree with much of what he says, Nance said. But again, theres two options.

We only get to have one president. Hes got amazing power and authority, and weve got children and grandchildren to think about it. We can take our toys and go home, but Atlas is not ready to shrug, she said, referencing Ayn Rands famous novel, Atlas Shrugged.

We dont have an island to retreat to, she said.
Despite a 14.1% rise in tourist arrivals.

Tourists are definitely flocking to the city-state, but Singapore is having a little trouble urging them to stay.

According to a report by OCBC, Indonesian arrivals increased 3.8% YoY (vs. 12.7% YoY in March), while Chinese arrivals were up 74.3% YoY (vs. 84.3% YoY in March).

In contrast, visitor days appear to be more muted, only rising by 5.4%.

We believe it is the case that tourists are choosing to stay for shorter periods of time, and/or that an increased amount of transit traffic is passing through immigration, OCBC said.

Nonetheless, the figures reported seem to indicate a decent Q2 and we expect that mid-tier players continued to pursue a strategy of higher occupancy and lower ARR for the quarter, OCBC added.







More From Singapore Business Review


A longtime fashion industry rumour was just confirmed  and we can all relax, because it has nothing to do with a designer reshuffle. It's Stella McCartney: The British designer is growing her business by officially launching menswear later this year, The New York Times reports.

The designer announced the new category expansion in Florence at Pitti Uomo, one of the most important menswear trade shows in the world. (Raf Simons is also there, presenting his first post-Dior venture  which, unfortunately for his devoted female fan base, won't include womenswear for now.) Rumours of McCartney's impending move into menswear have been swirling since the fall '16 shows, according to WWD. McCartney herself acknowledges that it's been a long time coming: "The desire to marry the Stella woman to a man has been inside me since the very beginning," she told the Times.

The Central Saint Martins grad actually got her start on London's legendary Savile Row before moving on to become creative director of Chloe in 1997. McCartney's tailoring background is certainly felt in her women's suiting, a staple offering of her namesake brand. However, unless you were Stella's father, husband, the British Olympic team, or the late David Bowie, you weren't getting hands on the designer's menswear looks, which, per The Times, tended to be one-off or special-occasion creations.

This new customer base can expect the same commitment to great fit and timeless silhouettes, as well as to ethical fabrications. (Stella McCartney the label bills itself as "a vegetarian company," and is known for its leather-free and "fur-free fur" collections.) There will be some differences between the men's and women's lines  specifically in terms of presentation style. The mens' threads show alongside Stella McCartney pre-seasons bi-annually, but without thematic ties to a specific season. The clothes will also be sold shortly after they hit the runway, according to a statement from the brand. (And you thought we were just about done with all that "see now, buy now " talk...) Its big debut is set for November 10.

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There's no official imagery of McCartney's first official dip into menswear (outside of the few bespoke ensembles from the past that fueled speculation in the first place), so we'll have to be patient  or, at least, keep refreshing Instagram.

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

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Steve Cohen SAC Capital

Visium employees, take note: Steve Cohen doesn't want you.

Point72 Asset Management, the investment firm led by Cohen, is not hiring from Visium Asset Management, the controversial hedge fund that on Wednesday saw some of its employees charged with insider trading, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Cohen is concerned about reputational risk from hiring from a hedge fund under fire, the people said.

The policy predates the announcement of the investigation at Visium from earlier this year, one of the people added.

Point72 put Visium on a "no-fly-zone list" as soon as rumors about a potential investigation began to circulate, the person said.

That spells bad news for workers at Visium. Employees have been looking for havens since the firm came under investigation, according to several people familiar with the situation. They are having more trouble finding new jobs now that charges have become more serious and public, one person said.

Cohen is no stranger to controversy surrounding insider trading. His SAC Capital Advisors at its peak ran $16 billion before the Securities and Exchange Commission shut it down, banning the hedge fund from managing outside money in 2013 after settling insider-trading claims. SAC pleaded guilty in 2013 to securities fraud and Cohen later launched Point72 Asset Management as a family office to run his personal fortune.

Since then, Point72 seems to be gearing up to open up as a hedge fund again  meaning it will take outsiders' money  even if it officially is staying mum.

Cohen has steadily been rebuilding his brand, hiring communications consultants and building out an investment research training program for college students and recent grads.

Over the past year, Point72 reps have also taken up the hedge fund conference circuit, with Cohen himself speaking last month at the Milken conference. He said there that it was proving difficult to find talent for the firm.

Story continues

Point72 says it employs about 1,000 people worldwide, and it has said it won't necessarily accept outside money when a Cohen-led organization is allowed to do so in 2018.

NOW WATCH: Here are some incredible toys hedge fund boss Steve Cohen has bought with his billions





More From Business Insider


As the national debate over gun control rages in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., the Boston Globe has published a powerful Thursday front-page editorial calling for a ban on assault weapons.

The headline: Make It Stop.

Greed, legislative cowardice, advanced technology  that is how we got here, the papers editors wrote in an op-ed. The United States has been pummeled by gun violence since the assault weapons ban expired in 2004. This year, mass shootings have already claimed 61 lives. One class of gun, semiautomatic rifles, is largely responsible. But this nation cannot be a hostage of fear. We can make it stop.

On Sunday, 50 people, including the gunman, were killed and 53 others wounded at the Pulse Orlando nightclub in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, reigniting calls for gun law reforms. The Globe pointed out more mass shootings are inevitably going to occur during the next presidents tenure.

We do not yet know who will be the next president of the United States, the op-ed continued. But theres nearly a mathematical certainty that the person to hold that office will be called on to console a grieving nation after another mass shooting. It is so expected that you could draft the speech today, predict the response, and anticipate the legislative paralysis that would surely ensue.

In 1994, Congress voted to prohibit the sale of certain assault weapons anywhere in the United States, but the ban expired in 2004. Since then, there have been 47 mass shootings in which a total of 411 people were killed, according to the paper, while there have been no successful attempts to reinstate it.

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Online, the Boston Globes Twitter account began tweeting out the names of those killed in mass shootings since the ban was lifted. The accompanying hashtag  #MakeItStop  was soon trending on Twitter.

Julia Pryde, 23 years old. Shot 4/16/2007, Blacksburg, Va. #MakeItStop  The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) June 16, 2016

Erin Peterson, 18 years old. Shot 4/16/2007, Blacksburg, Va. #MakeItStop  The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) June 16, 2016

Lillian Dunn, 89 years old. Shot 3/29/2009, Carthage, N.C. #MakeItStop  The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) June 16, 2016

The digital version of the papers op-ed included a counter illustrating how many shots a person could have fired from a semi-automatic rife since you began reading this article.

The AR-15 assault rifle has the speed, accuracy, and power of no prior civilian weapon, shooting up to 45 rounds per minute, the paper said.

It also included the names and contact information for six U.S. senators  five Republicans and one Democrat  who stand in the way of gun reform.

The op-ed came a day after Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy launched a surprise filibuster on gun control on the Senate floor, which lasted more than 14 hours.

I am prepared to stand on the Senate floor and talk about the need to prevent gun violence for as long as I can. Ive had #Enough  Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 15, 2016

Murphy, who was elected to the Senate a month before the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was joined by Senate Democrats  including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren  and a pair of Republicans in calling for such reforms as closing the so-called terrorist loophole and expanded background checks at gun shows.

For those of us that represent Connecticut, the failure of this body to do anything, anything at all, in the face of that continued slaughter isnt just painful to us, Murphy said on the Senate floor. Its unconscionable.

I am proud to announce that after 14+ hours on the floor, we will have a vote on closing the terror gap & universal background checks  Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 16, 2016

The Globe editorial focused its attention on the weapon favored by most mass shooters:

There is nothing more American today than a mass shooting, the quickest way for the wicked among us to join the ranks of the reviled. Their motives are many, but their opportunity is limited only by their gun and ammunition magazine brand preference. In this country, the federal government limits duck hunters to weapons that carry only three shells, to protect the duck population. But you can buy an assault weapon in seven minutes and an unlimited number of bullets to fire with it.

According to a new CBS News poll conducted after the Orlando shooting, 57 percent of Americans support a nationwide ban on assault weapons, up from 44 percent in December.

The Globe editorial concluded: Unless this nation wants to see more mass killing in our schools, churches, theaters, nightspots, and office buildings, we must address the casualty quotient, which vastly increases with the use of semiautomatic assault arms. The idea of restricting unfettered access to assault weapons is only considered radical when it comes out of the mouth of a modern U.S. president. To most Americans, and every other democracy on the planet, it is rightly considered common sense.
Jared Leto as the Joker (Twitter)

Every tattoo tells a story about the person it adorns. That goes double when that person is the Joker. Although past incarnations of the Clown Prince of Crime  from Cesar Romero to Heath Ledger  have been tattoo-free, the latest actor to play Batmans grinning nemesis, Jared Leto, is virtually covered in ink. Thats the distinctive character look that Suicide Squad director David Ayer hit upon for his highly-anticipated Aug. 5 superhero movie, which unites some of the DC Universes most formidable bad guys, among them Deadshot (Will Smith), Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie).

But Letos Joker isnt just adorning his body with tattoos as an artistic statement. As Ayer tells Yahoo Movies UK, each of those images represents a key to the grinning psychopaths past. The tattoos tell a very specific story. And eventually people will decipher them and understand whats going on, but obviously theyre contentious, any time you do something new its contentious. Theres very specific stories and Easter eggs in those tattoos. Its putting his history on his body.

One such Easter egg is the Ha ha ha ha tattoo prominently displayed on Letos upper chest and arm (see photo above), a likely reference to an iconic image of the Joker featured in Alan Moores 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke. (That controversial one-shot story is being turned into an R-rated animated film set for release later this summer.)

The Joker in The Killing Joke (DC Comics)

Might another tattooed Easter egg explain the Jokers past beef with Batman? As hinted in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he is the most likely reason why the Dark Knight doesnt have a Robin anymore. And the new Batman, Ben Affleck, will make an appearance in Suicide Squad, in full pursuit of the Joker, whom Ayer likens to a drug lord. If a guy like him really existed today, where would he come from? Ayer said. How would he do business? Who would he know? What would he look like? I took a lot of inspiration from drug lords on Instagram. Its a great way to understand the lifestyle of a villain.

Story continues

Related: Suicide Squad Mega Photo Gallery, Including All Four Empire Covers

Robbie giving David Ayer a tattoo on set (Twitter)

As a faithful disciple of the Jokers insane preachings, it stands to reason that Margot Robbies Harley Quinn would also apply a copious amount of ink to her own body. Robbie directed the attention of the Yahoo Movies UK reporter to the Joker face and I Heart Puddin tattoos (Puddin being Harleys pet name for her partner-in-crime) scratched on her leg. She did these herself in prison. Theyre stick and poke tattoos, prison-style tattoos, that you do when you dont have a tattoo gun. As Robbie told Stephen Colbert earlier this year, she kept up the habit even when she was out of character, personally gifting one crew member with a unique tattoo. While everyone else got ink that read S-K-W-A-D, this lucky guy got a Robbie special: Everyone was spelling it as S-K-W-A-D. But I went straight from the S to the W. Just imagine telling the full story behind that tattoo. Watch the video below:
All this week, were celebrating the great movies that hit screens 30 years ago in 1986. Go here to read more.

In a summer of Top Gun, the convention-defying romantic comedy About Last Night managed to find daylight. It was one of five movies to open on the Fourth of July (up against Big Trouble in Little China, The Great Mouse Detective, Psycho III, and Princes Under the Cherry Moon); it was the only one of those releases to hang on for a solid month in the top 10. In the end, About Last Night grossed $38.7 million domestically, representing the biggest box-office hit of the 1980s for stars Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, who play a yuppie couple embarking on a relationship after a one-night stand.

But to me, it just sounded different.



Released during the Brat Pack era, and starring Brat Pack stars, 1986s About Last Night was by design not another Brat Pack movie." Youd be forgiven if you thought otherwise, especially from a 2016 lens: The film is set in Chicago, like the John Hughes movies that gave birth to the Brat Pack epithet; its about young people and their relationships; it stars Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. Like St. Elmos Fire before it  which also starred Lowe and Moore  About Last Night could be a John Hughes movies older sibling.

The cast (from left): Elizabeth Perkins, Demi Moore, Jim Belushi, Rob Lowe (Sony Pictures)



But see the movie as 1986s critics did, and you get an insightful look at the singles bar scene that might not have pushed boundaries, but was likable and maybe even special. Roger Ebert even gave the film a full four-star rating, gushing that "it has an eye and an ear for the way we live now, and it has a heart, too, and a sense of humor and pronouncing it one of the years best movies. Sure, the words brat and pack were thrown around too, but they were there to distinguish About Last Night from the Young Hollywood films that preceded it.

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The two words that above all separated About Last Night from the Pack: David Mamet. The film was based on the Oscar-nominated, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers 1974 one-act play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

I didnt want the movie to have that [Brat Pack] stigma, director Edward Zwick said in 1986, but I knew the material was strong enough that it wouldnt.

To prove the point, Zwick opens About Last Night with only the sound of Mamet as performed by Lowe and James Belushi.



Watch the opening sequence of About Last Night:

So, Lowe begins.

So, what? Belushi counters.

So, tell me

What?

About last night

Are you kidding me?

Yeah?

With the next Belushi line, the first F-word of our R-rated relationship comedy is uttered, and were not even off the first title card. We havent seen Belushi. We havent seen Lowe  and the then-22-year-old Lowe was not something to be concealed. (Let it be noted, the now-52-year-old Lowe is likewise a vision worth sharing.)

But Zwick, on his first feature-film assignment, is in no hurry. He lets Belushi and Lowe riff on Mamet (as interpreted by screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue) for a solid 30 seconds before we see anything but blue-on-black credits.

Even when Zwick finally lets us have a look at the movie, he keeps the focus on the words. Theres no sweeping establishing shot. Theres no frenetic Steadicam. There are no exposed Lowe biceps, a la the actors eye-candy character in the previous summers St. Elmos Fire. There are just blazer-clad, sales bros Bernie (Belushi) and Danny (Lowe) walking and talking along Chicagos waterfront, and hashing out Bernies (alleged) sexcapade with a woman who may or may not have been a pro.



(The 2014 Kevin Hart remake, About Last Night  no ellipsis  offers its own take on this approach: It opens with James Browns spoken intro to Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.)

In Zwicks version, the filmmaker is so devoted to Bernie and Danny, and, in turn, Mamet, that he lets the men banter their way around town, on the L train, on the downtown sidewalk, in the local bar, and through the rest of the opening credits, a cappella.

There is no Simple Minds song. There is no Tangerine Dream score. There is no saxophone.

Why, its as if were not really in the 1980s at all.

No, About Last Night was not another Brat Pack movie. It sounded different because it was different.

Read more:

Summer of 86: 'Stand by Me Takes on Life, Death, and One Epic Barf-o-Rama

Summer of 86: The Terrifying Madness of Manhunter  and Our First Introduction to an Infamous Serial Killer

Summer of 86: Ferris Buellers Day Off Let John Hughes Graduate from Teen Movies With Honors

Summer of 86: The Wild, Wacko Genre Mashup of Big Trouble in Little China

Summer of '86: The 'Top Gun Music Editor Remembers How He Took Audiences Right Into the Danger Zone


The internal conflicts at Viacom VIAB between Sumner Redstone and board members have reached a boiling point, as Mr. Redstone has removed 5 members of Viacoms board. One of these members includes CEO Philippe Dauman, who has been Redstones biggest target for months. Their relationship took a turn for the worse when Dauman elected to sell a minority stake in Paramount Pictures.

The other four directors removed include George Abrams, Fred Salerno, William Schwartz, and Blythe McGarvie. Redstone is 93 years old, and many speculate that he has grown too senile to be able to make decisions for the company. There are also rumors circulating that Shari, Mr. Redstones daughter, is using her father so that she can take over control of Viacom.

New board members include Kenneth Lerer, co-founder of the Huffington Post, Nicole Seligman, a former executive at Sony, Judith McHale, former head of Discovery Communications, Ron Nelson, who used to work at Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Studios, and Thomas May, chairman of Eversource Energy.

Some of Viacoms directors have voiced their disapproval of the board reshuffling, saying that Shari Redstone is going against her fathers wishes by undermining the boards ability to manage Viacom in a way that is reflective of the best interests of shareholders. The ousted directors plan on contesting their removal from the board in court.

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(Adds Suncor, Bank of America declining comment, paragraph 4)

By Mike Stone

June 16 (Reuters) - Suncor Energy Inc has launched an auction of its Petro-Canada lubricants division, whose white mineral oils are sprayed on gummy bear candy to make it shiny and prevent sticking, people familiar with the matter said.

The sale could fetch around $800 million and help Canada's biggest energy company pay down debt incurred by recent acquisitions, the sources said this week.

Calgary, Alberta-based Suncor, which merged with Petro-Canada in 2009, is working with Bank of America Corp on the sale process, said the sources, asking not to be identified because the matter is confidential.

Representatives for Suncor and Bank of America declined to comment.

Petro-Canada is the world's largest manufacturer of white mineral oil, which is used in health and beauty products, pharmaceuticals, adhesives, plastics and elastomers.

Suncor has been acquiring companies during the two-year slump in oil prices. It spent C$4.24 billion ($3.32 billion) to purchase Canadian Oil Sands in March. In April, it agreed to pay about C$937 million to buy an additional 5 percent stake in its Syncrude oil sands joint venture from Murphy Oil Corp's Canadian unit.

Petro-Canada purchased its lubricants business in 1985 from Gulf Canada. The unit, based in Mississauga, Ontario, near Toronto, produces more than 350 advanced lubricants for industries ranging from beauty to heavy manufacturing.

Over the past nine months, as the price of crude oil has languished, Suncor has spent about $7 billion (C$9 billion) on acquisitions and development, giving it a production capacity of about 164,000 barrels of oil per day.

Last week, Suncor announced plans to raise about $1.9 billion (C$2.5 billion) in equity by selling 71.5 million of its shares. The offering is expected to close on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Mike Stone in New York; Editing by Richard Chang and Peter Cooney)
LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Six years after an Irishwoman rode the waves off Iran's coast to the bemusement of locals the country has become the 100th member of the International Surfing Association (ISA) federation. Easkey Britton's visit to the country in 2010 inspired a local surf movement on Iran's Baluchestan coast, so much so that the Iran Surfing Federation was formed this year and even women are participating, fully covered and wearing hijabs. The unlikely rise of the sport in the Islamic country has been welcomed by the ISA who describe Iran's membership as a landmark moment in the global growth of surfing. "This decision is rich in symbolism for us, both in terms of the milestone of recognising the ISA's 100th member, but also in showing surfing's ability to help bring unity through sport," ISA president Fernando Aguerre said in a statement. Other nations to join the ISA are Haiti, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh. Britton founded the website Waves of Freedom after returning to Iran in 2013 to surf with local women -- a trip that led to acclaimed documentary Into the Sea featuring Britton surfing with Iranian snowboarder Mona Seraji and swimmer Shahla Yasini. "Witnessing the birth and rapid emergence of surfing in Iran has shown me how the sport can be a unique lens to facilitate a deeper understanding of the world around us and each other," Britton said in a statement. "Ultimately, it can be developed to create a space and opportunity for connection across cultures and a positive relationship with the marine environment." Surfing is poised to become an Olympic sport for the Japan 2020 Games with the IOC set to ratify its inclusion in Rio de Janeiro in August. (Reporting by Martyn Herman; Editing by Toby Davis)
By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sweden is conducting tests to put the country's land registry system on blockchain, the underlying technology supporting the digital currency bitcoin, the Swedish Land Registry said on Thursday.

The Scandinavian country is working on the project with Swedish blockchain company ChromaWay, consulting firm Kairos Future, and telecommunications service provider Telia, the registry said in a statement.

Together, they have come up with a framework or the so-called "proof of concept" through a white paper and technical demonstration of how the Swedish land registry would work on blockchain.

The blockchain technology works by creating permanent, public "ledgers" of all transactions that could potentially replace complicated systems such as clearing and settlement with one simple database.

"In the first phase of the technology, we have tested the process with some banks," Magnus Kempe, director of retail and finance at Kairos Future, told Reuters in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Now we're on the second phase of the project where we will test in a full-sized environment."

Kempe believes the project could go live in the fall this year.

The plan is to put real estate transactions on blockchain once the buyer and seller agree on a deal and a contract is made, Kempe said. From there all the parties involved in the transactions -- the banks, the government, brokers, buyers, and sellers -- are able to track the progress of the deal once it is completed.

Currently, it takes months to complete a real estate deal in Sweden from the time the parties agree until the contract is completed.

"Digital documentation of property transfers and good technology will enable the confirmation for all parties in a real estate transaction (with) the highest level of security," said Mats Snall, head of development of real estate registration, at the Swedish Land Registry.

"Being able to assign pending title deed is also something of value for all parties. Everyone will benefit from this," he added.

(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Sandra Maler)
* Banks could cover the bulk of capital with CoCos -SNB

* Credit Suisse says already has programme underway

* UBS says nothing materially new in SNB report (Adds detail, comments from UBS and Credit Suisse)

By Joshua Franklin

ZURICH, June 16 (Reuters) - Switzerland's two largest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, are likely to need to raise billions of Swiss francs in bonds to meet new capital rules, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) said on Thursday.

Regulations aimed at preventing Swiss banks becoming "too-big-to-fail" (TBTF) and requiring taxpayer bailouts in the event of failure means large lenders must hold capital equivalent to 5 percent of their total assets while healthy by the end of 2019.

Solving the TBTF problem has been a priority for U.S. and European regulators after several banks, including UBS, were rescued by the state during the financial crisis.

The leverage ratio aims to curb bank risk-taking by putting a cap on debt levels, and at least 3.5 percentage points of this leverage ratio must be made up of high-quality Tier 1 common equity (CET1), the SNB said.

It warned UBS and Credit Suisse in its annual financial stability report that this means they could need additional going-concern capital of around 10 billion Swiss francs ($10.3 billion) each.

Tier 1 capital is loss-absorbing on a "going concern" basis, when the financial institution is solvent.

"The big banks could cover the bulk of this capital requirement by issuing high-trigger CoCos, as both of them already almost meet the 3.5 percent CET1 capital requirement," the central bank wrote in the report.

Contingent convertible bonds, known as CoCos, can be converted into a bank's equity in a crisis.

UBS and Credit Suisse, which the SNB considers systemically important to the Swiss economy, must also meet a 5 percent "gone-concern" leverage ratio, which applies where a bank must be wound down following insolvency.

For this the pair could also each have to issue instruments totalling 20 billion to 25 billion Swiss francs or replace debt that falls due with bail-in instruments, the SNB said.

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Credit Suisse said it already had a programme underway to replace some of its existing capital stock with higher-quality assets that would meet the new rules.

Meanwhile, UBS said in a statement that it disagreed with a number of depictions in the SNB report, which it said "does not point out anything materially new".

The SNB said the new national requirements made Switzerland one of the leaders internationally for imposing a "regulatory loss-absorbing capacity" on its banks.

Switzerland prides itself on having more stringent rules than other countries and will often gold-plate international rules with a "Swiss finish", which helps it to sell itself, and its banks, as a safe haven for the world's wealthy.

The SNB said UBS and Credit Suisse had improved their capital situation further over the past year on both the risk-weighted capital ratio side and the leverage ratio side.

Under Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam, Credit Suisse raised around 6 billion francs in fresh capital last year.

($1 = 0.9673 Swiss francs) (Editing by Michael Shields and Alexander Smith)
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) together with fighters from the Manbij Military Council continued besieging the Islamic State (IS) stronghold of Manbij on June 16 . Heavy clashes between SDF and IS continued around Manbij while the US-led coalition carried out airstrikes on Islamic State positions in the city, local reports said.

The forces have recaptured a huge amount of territory and killed and injured 1,000 IS fighters since the beginning of the offensive, according to pro-Kurdish media.

These videos were shared by a Kurdish news agency and are described as showing SDF troops entering Hamdon village and besieging Manbij as well as heavy clashes with IS. Credit: YouTube/ANHA
Taiwanese lawmakers urged the government Thursday to investigate local conglomerate Formosa's possible role in mass fish deaths in Vietnam, as activists said industrial pollution from its multi-billion dollar steel plant could have caused the environmental disaster.

If Formosa is behind the tonnes of dead fish that began washing up along Vietnam's central coast two months ago, it could jeopardise new President Tsai Ing-wen's signature policy of promoting investment in Southeast Asia in a bid to reduce Taiwan's economic reliance on China, lawmakers said.

"There will be no end of trouble", for the so-called Southbound Policy if Tsai's new government doesn't carefully address widespread concern among the Vietnamese public over the incident, said senior lawmaker Su Chih-feng of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

The fish deaths have devastated local fishermen and caused public anger in communist Vietnam, including rare public protests which were violently broken up by authorities, who arrested scores of activists.

Vietnam's state-run media initially pointed the finger of blame at Formosa's steel plant in central Ha Tinh province, but has since back-peddled.

The authoritarian communist government has carried out tests but not yet announced an official verdict on the causes of the fish deaths, prompting many activists to allege a cover up.

- Poor track record -

Formosa has a poor track record of environmental scandals spanning the globe, from Texas to Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

It has also been accused of causing pollution in Taiwan, including a petrochemical complex in southern Yunlin where Su used to be county chief.

Authorities in Taiwan need to step in and ensure the company meets "international environmental, human rights and labour standards", said Chang Yu-yin, chief of the Environmental Jurists Association, a Taiwanese organisation.

Peter Nguyen, a Taiwan-based Vietnamese priest, said Tsai's government must ensure Formosa -- if proven responsible -- clean up the environmental disaster and fully compensate victims.

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"Vietnam wants foreign investment but it should be win-win," he said.

"If our environment and our people suffer, it will pose major challenges and problems" for future Taiwanese investments in Vietnam, he added.

Taiwan and Vietnam do not have formal diplomatic relations but maintain close trade ties. Around 250,000 Vietnamese live in Taiwan, either because of work or due to marriage.

David Wang of Taiwan's department of investment services, said the island had offered to assist the Vietnamese government's own probe into the fish deaths but the help was declined.

Hanoi will release the results of its probe -- conducted with international experts -- by the end of June, he added.

Formosa fanned the flames of suspicion in April when one of its employees in Vietnam told state media the country had to "choose whether to catch fish and shrimp or to build a state-of-the-art steel mill".

The employee was subsequently removed from his post and apologised for his remarks.

"I couldn't catch a fish since March," 29-year-old Vietnamese fisherman Le Guang Dung told AFP, adding he'd been forced to move to Taiwan to find work.

"I hope Formosa's plant will shut down so we can get our clean ocean back again," he said.
The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- to infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults told AFP.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where "bacha bereesh" -- or boys without beards -- widely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacks -- at least six between January and April alone -- that have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

"The Taliban are sending boys -- beautiful boys, handsome boys -- to penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen," said Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai, who was Uruzgan's police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

"They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forces -- bacha bazi," he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanai's view saying "it's easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers".

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

"These bacha attacks have fuelled deep mistrust within police ranks," Seddiqullah, a police commander at a checkpoint near the provincial capital Tarin Kot, told AFP.

The insurgents are using boys as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

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He said the attacker was the checkpoint commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

"He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive. I pretended to be dead," said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

"As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: 'Everyone is dead'."

- 'Addiction' to boys -

The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

"We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operations -- all grown men with beards," a Taliban spokesman told AFP.

The insurgents have long denied using children in combat, a claim repeatedly debunked by rights groups and the government.

Survivors of insider attacks who spoke to AFP, including Matiullah, suggest the Taliban are exploiting the institutionalisation of bacha bazi in police ranks for military gain.

Practically all of Uruzgan's 370 local and national police checkpoints have bachas -- some up to four -- who are illegally recruited not just for sexual companionship but also to bear arms, multiple officials said.

Some policemen, they said, demand bachas like a perk of the job, refusing to join outposts where they are not available.

Horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys, many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment -- often because there is no other escape from exploitative commanders.

Many who have tried to escape have been dragged back with trumped up charges of Taliban links, two senior provincial judges told AFP.

Boys have also spurred a deadly rivalry between policemen, with officials reporting incidents such as a public gunfight this year between two commanders in Gezab district as one of them angrily accused the other of "stealing" his bacha.

"To restore security in Uruzgan, we will first have to separate policemen from their bachas," one of the judges said.

"But if they are told to reform their ways, a common reply is: 'If you force me to abandon my boy lover, I will also abandon the checkpoint'. The Taliban are not blind to notice that this addiction is worse than opium."

- 'Male rape' -

Bacha bazi, which the US State Department has called a "culturally sanctioned form of male rape", peels away the masculine identity of boys in a society where the sexes are tightly segregated.

In conservative areas women are mostly invisible in public -- and often unattainable due to steep bride prices. Bachas supplant the role of women, adopting a feminine gait and sometimes wearing makeup and bells on their feet.

Many in Uruzgan see bacha bazi neither as paedophilia nor homosexuality, which is forbidden in Islam. If social norms had a pecking order, violating boys would be seen as far more ethical than violating women.

"Bacha bazi is pervasive sexual slavery of children, seen widely as a cultural practice and not a crime," Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International, told AFP.

"Since it is mostly practised by those in positions of power -- warlords, commanders, politicians -- it is hard to stamp out. It appears sustained partly by the fact that access to women is limited."

Insider attacks by child slaves have also been reported in recent years from neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar provinces, where bacha bazi is prevalent.

But the tactic appears more deep rooted in Uruzgan, where the boys are widely flaunted as a totem of affluence, with some officials openly displaying cellphone images to AFP of their "handsome bachas".

"Come see my beautiful bacha," said Naqibullah, a police commander in Dehjawze village near Tarin Kot, boasting that he had been holding the teenager for two years.

With a touch of kohl on his eyes, and bleached blond curly hair poking out of his embroidered hat, the boy sat in a corner of the checkpoint surrounded by opium farms, quietly refilling tea glasses for Naqibullah's guests.

- 'Predatory behaviour' -

"Commanders prowl neighbourhoods for young boys. We are scared of dressing up our children or buying new clothes that will make them attractive," said Nader Khan, a tribal elder in Dehrawud.

Khan's 13-year-old nephew was taken captive earlier this year by Naqibullah, a local commander not related to the Dehjawze official, when his family sent him to deliver bread for policemen. He was released only after angry tribal elders besieged the governor's office in Tarin Kot.

Governor Mohammad Nazir Kharoti told AFP he ordered Naqibullah's arrest but he was released in less than a month because he was needed for combat duty.

"It is difficult to implement the law 100 percent when we are faced with a war situation," Kharoti said, without elaborating on the case.

Afghanistan's interior ministry refused to confirm or deny that bachas were being used in insurgent attacks, but said it was committed to police reforms and acknowledged that "bacha bazi within the ranks of police is a serious crime".

The practice has put the United States and its NATO allies, who have spent billions of dollars to build Afghan forces, in a precarious position.

The US Congress last year voiced concern over "predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police", prompting watchdog agency SIGAR to launch an investigation that is still ongoing.

The head of a government-affiliated agency in Uruzgan showed AFP two letters from the attorney general in Kabul, one last year and another dated January, ordering a separate probe into sexual abuse and the illegal recruitment of child conscripts.

"We haven't been able to visit even one checkpoint to investigate," he said, speaking in hushed whispers in his own office.

"Do you think police commanders will leave us alive if we probe their crimes?"
The gun used by the shooter Omar Mateen early Sunday morning at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., was a Sig Sauer MCX rifle and not an AR-15, contrary to early reports.

The MCX was described by the Orlando Police Department as an AR-15-style rifle, but the Sig Sauer, released in 2015, has capabilities different from those of the more traditional AR-15. Although the MCX uses an AR-15-style magazine and ammunition, other similarities extend only to outward appearance and destructive capability.

According to the Sig Sauer website, the MCX is built from the ground up to be silenced, light and short and uses a broad array of accessories, enabling you to build a complete weapon system for any scenario or environment.

The MCX was built to fire such rounds as the .300 Blackout, 5.56 NATO and 7.62 x 39mm. The 5.56 NATO round, which is often compared to similar but not identical .223 ammunition, is primarily used by AR-15 rifles. This feature makes the MCX as quiet as a pistol but as deadly as a rifle, according to the Washington Post.

The modular gun can easily adjust to different calibers and barrel lengths, due to the MCXs quick change-barrel system. Weighing just 6 pounds, the MCX is compact and has interchangeable, customizable features.

This weapon is categorized as a piston gun because when the rifle is fired, the excess gas is pushed into a piston. The piston expedites reloading the weapon and is an improvement on the springs used in the direct impingement style of the AR-15.

The piston-style firing and the MCXs 30-round magazine capacity make the assault rifle particularly lethal.

Guns traced in #Orlando shooting: .223 caliber AR type rifle and 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Similar to those pictured pic.twitter.com/Ao5pcLtwBg  ATF HQ (@ATFHQ) June 12, 2016

The MCX was not the only weapon Mateen used  he was also carrying a Glock 17 9mm semiautomatic pistol that has a standard 17-round magazine capability.

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It is unknown how many magazines of ammunition Mateen carried with him on Sunday morning, but survivors accounts and Snapchat videos recall a near-constant stream of bullets throughout the shooting.

Despite having been on a federal watch list, Mateen easily passed a background check and was able to purchase the Sig Sauer MCX rifle and the Glock 17 9mm semiautomatic pistol within a week. Florida has a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases. However, when buying firearms from federally licensed dealers, the purchaser must pass a background check.

Mateen, who worked as a security guard, had a concealed carry license in Florida.

The controversy over the weapons used during the Orlando nightclub shooting has reignited a national debate about gun control. In 2004, Congress allowed the 1994 assault weapons ban to lapse. Efforts to reinstate the ban, which would prevent the sale of weapons like the Sig Sauer MCX and the AR-15, were discussed on the Senate floor Wednesday during a nearly 15-hour filibuster led by Senate Democrats.

AR-15-style rifles have been used in at least 10 recent mass shootings, including the 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., and at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. Eugene Stoner, who designed the first AR-15 in the late 1950s, did not intend for the military-grade weapon to be used by civilians, his family members told NBC News.



Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47, the Stoner family told NBC News on Wednesday. He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.

______

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Theyre fleeing war, sectarian conflict, and oppression in their homelands. But in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Orlando, Muslim immigrants and refugees may find it tougher to start a new life in the United States.

Thats the worry of Robert McCaw, director of government affairs for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. McCaw told TakePart that Islamophobia can increase after a mass shooting or other violent act of terrorism because people associate one extremist with an entire group of people who dont share the same beliefs.

RELATED: After Orlando, Standing Together Against a Specter of Hate

American Muslims share the same dreams as all Americans: finding economic opportunity and a better life for their children, McCaw said.

But with 49 lives lost in the horrific terrorist attack at a gay nightclub by American-born Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old who pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State, McCaw is concerned about Islamophobic rhetoric.

Anti-immigrant activists are grabbing events from the headlines carried out by a despicable few and applying them to the vast majority of Muslim immigrants, he said.

Corey Saylor, the director of CAIRs Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, said Muslim refugees face two barriers to immigration.

In the wake of violent extremist incidents, people are operating from a place of fear rather than from a place of rational American values, and as a result, what we see is vilification of immigrants, Saylor said. [Syrian refugees are] looking for a place where they can be safe and secure. Instead of our hearts going out to them, we see them being classified as security threats, he said.

These worries arent unfounded. In the aftermath of 9/11, Islamophobic attacks increased 1,700 percent in 2001, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks, a Pew Research Center survey found that 55 percent of Muslims said that life had become more difficult for them after the attacks.

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Typically what happens is you do tend to see an uptick in verbal abuse of those who might look or sound different, Saylor said.

RELATED: Two Comedians Are Fighting to Show That Being Muslim Doesnt Have to Be Political

Refugees also find the immigration process changes in the wake of acts of terrorism. After 9/11, the goal of immigration policy became round people up; prevent this from happening again; prepare for new attacks, Rick Swartz, the founder of the National Immigration Forum, told U.S. News & World Report in 2011.

When members of Congress debate how many Muslim refugees to allow into America, CAIR and other immigrant rights groups are responsible for reminding representatives that the federal government has an 18- to 24-month vetting process to ensure that refugees are coming to America with good intentions. This vetting process is conducted by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other national security intelligence agencies, including the CIA, McCaw said.

He added that in the wake of terrorist attacks, refugees immigrating to the U.S. and Europe are more likely to face discrimination not only in attitude but in state policy.

RELATED: Subway Posters Brilliantly Use Humor to Combat Major Muslim Stereotypes

Weve seen a slew of state governors direct states not to work with the federal government in resettling refugees and attempt to deny them resources as they settle in, McCaw said. On top of that, weve seen a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes that target refugees and citizens alike.

Hostility toward immigrants has been exacerbated by the 2016 election cycle, in which a number of candidates have tried to magnify that fear for political advantage, Saylor said.

What many Americans may not realize is that refugees who are fleeing countries where there is significant violence may come to the United States and operate as translators for American troops, Saylor said.

Despite the challenges, the U.S. is still regarded as an oasis of safety and stability for thousands of Muslim refugees trying to escape the violence rattling their home countries. These refugees are fleeing terrorism. Theyre not coming here to conduct it, said McCaw.

Take the Pledge: Protect Refugees Fleeing Violence and Persecution

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Original article from TakePart
By Marice Richter

FORT WORTH, Texas (Reuters) - A Fort Worth man was sentenced to 45 years in prison on Thursday for sexually assaulting two of his children and forcing them to watch him have sex, court officials said.

A jury in Fort Worth found the man, who had faced up to 99 years in prison, guilty of sexually assaulting the children, now 9 and 10 years old, multiple times in 2013 and 2014, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

The children testified during the four-day trial that their father had demonstrated to them how to have sex because he did not feel that sex education was properly taught in school, the newspaper reported.

The man's wife also has been charged with sexually assaulting the children. According to court officials, the couple are parents of four children and are in the process of divorcing.

(Reporting by Marice Richter; Writing by Jon Herskovitz)
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fcard%2fimage%2f117890%2f69421ce0d46d4d32904d10fdc4b312a1

What do you do when you witness your house being broken into by a freakishly huge monitor lizard? Record the whole incident down of course.

Attanai Thaiyuanwong was in for a rude surprise on Sunday when he arrived back at his home in Nonthaburi, Thailand, to find an unwelcome visitor trying to get into his house.

The intruder was a giant monitor lizard, that looked as tall as an adult human, was standing upright on its hind legs with its mouth around the door knob.

SEE ALSO: Chinese village under siege by wild monkeys after tourism plans backfire

In Thai tradition, monitor lizards are believed to bring good fortune to those who encounter them. Known as "Tua Ngern Tua Thong", Thais also call the reptiles "Hia!" which apparently means "F**k!".

Thaiyuanwong also posted a video on his Facebook which documented how he and his family tried to handle the situation.

According to a translation by Coconuts Bangkok, a man can be heard shouting in Thai, "Hia is in our house. It's f**king huge!", while a dog barked in the background.

A woman then said: "They say if you throw a coin at it, it will go away!"

The group continued to debate off-camera on what to do until the giant reptile wagged its tail, and everyone screamed.

Later, an unidentified man was seen trying to lure the lizard away with some rope.

It remains unclear if the monitor lizard was successfully removed, but seeing as Thaiyuanwong has been updating his Facebook page, we're assuming he's unharmed and the lizard returned to where it came from.
By Andrew R.C. Marshall and Patpicha Tanakasempipat BANGKOK (Reuters) - Hundreds of meditating supporters of an influential Buddhist abbot in Thailand blocked investigators on Thursday aiming to arrest him on corruption charges in his temple north of Bangkok. The controversy over the abbot, Phra Dhammachayo, 72, in part reflects more than a decade of divisive politics in Thailand, which has permeated all aspects of life, including Buddhism. The abbot is accused of conspiring to launder money by accepting cash stolen from a credit union. But many of his supporters suspect he has been targeted because of perceived links to political opponents of the military-dominated establishment. Officials from the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) turning up at the abbot's Wat Dhammakaya temple complex found rows of followers sitting silently in the rain. "The temple is being partly cooperative, but when we went inside we were blocked by a group of devotees," DSI deputy chief Police Major Suriya Singhakamol told reporters. The DSI is a department of the justice ministry that deals with investigations of high-ranking officials. The failed bid to enter the wealthy and influential temple was broadcast live on national television. Scores of riot police, who carried no weapons or batons, waited at a nearby government office but were not deployed. Suriya said a police search warrant was only valid until 6 p.m. (1100 GMT) on Thursday. He said he was "confident" the abbot remained inside the temple. "This mission is not over," he said before leaving. Citing ill health, the abbot failed to appear at a police station to answer graft charges in May. [nL3N18N2HF] His followers reject the accusations against him saying the charges are politically motivated because of the temple's perceived links with populist former premier Thaksin Shinawatra. A former telecoms tycoon, Thaksin was overthrown in a 2006 coup and has lived in self-exile since 2008 but remains influential. The ruling junta, which in 2014 overthrew a government led by Thaksin's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, has not commented on the attempted raid and appears reluctant to take sides on a religious issue. Revered Buddhist monks are often seen as untouchable and many Thais would frown upon police entering a temple by force. But others say the repeated failure to arrest the abbot is further proof of Thailand's culture of impunity - the ease with which the rich and powerful can get away with nearly anything. (Additional reporting by Amy Sawitta Lefevre, Aukkarapon Niyomyat and Panarat Thepgumpanat; Writing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre; Editing by Paul Tait, Robert Birsel)
Brasilia (AFP) - Brazil's interim president Michel Temer lost the third cabinet member of his month-old administration to a corruption scandal when his tourism minister resigned Thursday after being accused of taking bribes.

Tourism minister Henrique Eduardo Alves announced his resignation after a key witness accused him of accepting 1.5 million reals (around $445,000) diverted from state oil company Petrobras.

Alves, a member of Temer's center-right PMDB party, said in an open letter he was stepping down to avoid "creating problems for the government."

He joins former transparency minister Fabiano Silveira and former planning minister Romero Juca, who were both forced to resign over leaked phone recordings linked to the scandal.

Temer and Alves were among some 20 politicians named in the latest batch of allegations by Sergio Machado, the former chief executive of Petrobras subsidiary Transpetro.

Machado said in a plea deal with prosecutors that both men asked him for money from an illegal kickbacks scheme that diverted some $2 billion from the national oil giant.

Machado said Temer asked him for about $430,000 to fund an ally's campaign for mayor of Sao Paulo, according to documents published Wednesday.

An irate Temer took to national television Thursday to deny the allegation.

He branded the allegations "frivolous, lying and criminal."

- President indignant -

Temer took over last month from suspended president Dilma Rousseff. She is facing an impeachment trial in the Senate on unrelated charges of illegally manipulating public accounts to hide the government's budget problems.

Temer has repeatedly denied involvement in the Petrobras scheme, but the investigation remains a major threat to his administration.

"I'm not going to let this pass," he said on Thursday of Machado's allegations.

"I am speaking out with indignant words to register yet again that this frivolity cannot prevail."

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The Senate is due to vote on whether to impeach Rousseff around mid-August, when Brazil will be hosting the Olympics in Rio.

If Rousseff is impeached and Temer survives the scandal, he would see out the current presidential mandate to the end of 2018. Elections are due to be held that year to choose a successor.

Brazil is in its worst recession in decades. The economy shrank 3.8 percent last year, according to official figures.

Temer's government on Wednesday announced plans to limit public spending to strengthen the public finances of Latin America's biggest economy.

Political analyst Andre Cesar of the consultancy Hold in Brasilia saw Alves's resignation as a sign of "political fragility."

"Temer's government is walking on thin ice that could break at any moment," he said.

For it to survive, Temer will have to avoid being directly implicated himself as well as fighting the economic crisis.

Aside from the recession, Brazil is struggling through a turbulent year of sharp political divisions. Various pro- and anti-Rousseff protests broke out in the weeks leading up to her suspension.

"If the government does not provide quick answers to the economic problems weighing on people's wallets, people will lose patience and take to the streets again," Cesar said.
Marseille (AFP) - A French court on Thursday jailed three Russian football supporters for up to two years for their role in violence in Marseille before the England-Russia Euro 2016 match.

Alexei Yerunov, Nikolai Morozov and Sergei Gorbachev were among 43 Russian supporters detained by French police in southern France on Tuesday after the pitched battles which left more than 30 people injured.

Yerunov, 29, who is supporters' liaison officer at Lokomotiv Moscow according to the club's website, received the longest prison sentence of 24 months.

He admitted he was at the scene of an attack on an English supporter who was left in a critical state after being beaten around the head with an iron bar. He denied being responsible.

"I apologise. I recognise that I was there but I didn't hit anyone. My hands are clean," he told the court.

Gorbachev, who leads a supporters' club at Russian second division club Arsenal Tula, was jailed for 18 months.

Morozov, 28, received the shortest sentence of 12 months.

Prosecutor Andre Ribe described the Russians' behaviour in the chaotic scenes in Marseille on Saturday: "It was a hunt. They ran off together, staying in a group and keeping enough energy for what they call 'the fight'."
Plans with friends  and generally, the thought of sunlight  needs to be put on hold this weekend: Orange Is the New Black is returning to Netflix for its fourth season. Being a Netflix original series, the entire season will be available in full once its released. But when exactly will that be?

The show returns on Friday, though the streaming service has declined to give a specific time. However, some users should have a timer on their Netflix homepage counting down the hours. It should be at Friday 3 a.m. Eastern time. Regardless of the exact time, OITNB season four is expected to be available come Friday.

Freedom is just around the corner. #OITNBpic.twitter.com/VCFyTMRyo7 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClBzju9UsAA7Vhw.jpg:large

Binge-watchers though, have been waiting for nearly a year to find out what happens next, and whether Alex Vause survived her assassination attempt. Those on Twitter, naturally, are tweeting about their patience and excitement in droves.

SO EXCITED FOR SEASON 4 of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK. @OITNB on @Netflix !!! Tomorrow. Yay! #Orange

When " #Orange is the new black " comes on tomorrow but you know your about to finish the whole season that nightpic.twitter.com/xEkDcIeWmc https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ck86WiYUoAA-5u1.jpg:large

OITNB comes out tomorrow, im getting my life back

OITNB dropping tomorrow. And its father's day weekend. Thank you @netflix. Best Fathers day gift.

One more day... #Daya #OITNB @oitnb @netflixpic.twitter.com/HIEbCc0hUh https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClFtmQHWYAAyhBl.jpg:large

Though the narrative for this season is still vaguely defined in the likes of teasers, trailers and photos, the series does plan to tackle modern societal movements  namely, Black Lives Matter  as a prison culture war will envelop Litchfield and its new influx of inmates. In turn, it could end up being the show's darkest season yet, per its actors.

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"You've seen the tsunami when it swept through Japan, right?" Kate Mulgrew, who plays Red, said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. "Not many people survived, but it's how they do it that is so absolutely captivating. That's season four."

While you wait for Friday, you can check out the trailer for the fourth season below:
The Cedar Creek fire had burned through more than 5,200 acres by Thursday, June 16, near Show Low in eastern Arizona since starting on Wednesday afternoon.

Navajo County officials called for the evacuation of Forestdale and warned of possible evacuations in Show Low, Pinetop-Lakeside, McNary, Fort Apache and Hon Dah.

Hot shot crews and air tankers were on hand to battle the blaze, which forced officials to shut down a stretch of US 60. The crews must contend with high winds and dry conditions.

This video shows a timelapse of orange smoke emanating from the fire, through the sky in Pinetop, Arizona. Credit: Instagram/ordinarymiraclesphoto
(Photo: Bryan Huang/Yahoo Singapore)

Hollywoods nice guy Tom Hanks has worked with many actors throughout his career, but he reserved some high praise for his Inferno co-star Felicity Jones.

She is a delight, Hanks told Yahoo Singapore on the red carpet in Singapore when asked about working with the English actress.

She weighs about nine pounds. I think shes 14 years old She is a taskmaster, joked the actor, who returns as Robert Langdon in the film.

She is a very accomplished artist and professional, Hanks gushed.

He spoke about meeting Jones before filming started, and how he had said theyd be joined at the hip for two and a half months and seeing each other day in, day out.



You reach a point quickly with someone like her, where you have shared intelligence and you work as a peer with her, Hanks said of Jones, who plays Sienna Brooks, a doctor who helps Langdon in the show after he wakes up with amnesia.

Hanks also had a laugh when he was asked how Jones compared with his previous Langdon ladies co-stars, Audrey Tautou and Ayelet Zurer, saying they were fabulous in their own separate ways.

The Langdon ladies are more intelligent than the Bond girls, therefore I think theyre more sexy and beautiful, he said.

Hanks was in town with Inferno director Ron Howard and fellow actor Irrfan Khan, who plays the mysterious Harry Sims, as part of the Sony Summit at Marina Bay Sands.

Inferno is the third Dan Brown novel to be adapted for the big screen after The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels and Demons (2009).

Inferno opens in Singapore on 27 Oct.


mark ruffalo bernie sanders

Environmental groups are taking a step closer to uniting behind Hillary Clinton  but not before they push the Democratic party to adopt a more aggressive agenda for tackling climate change.

On Friday, several top environmental groups and activists will present their official policy recommendations to Democratic National Committee's party platform drafting committee.

The meeting will seek to bridge the gap between supporters of Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who many said had more aggressive proposals for tackling climate change.

Notably, several high-profile Sanders supporters, including "Gasland" director Josh Fox, actor Mark Ruffalo, and Friends of the Earth Action's President Erich Pica, will address the party platform committee in a closed-door meeting, according to a schedule of the events provided to Business Insider.

A source familiar with the meeting also said that a representative will attend from from the Democracy Initiative, a progressive activist supergroup that includes the National Education Association, the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Communications Workers of America, and the NAACP, among others.

Despite optimism among environmental activists that climate change would be a more central issue in the 2016 election, many environmental activists groups found themselves embroiled in heated internal debates about whether to back Sanders or Clinton. Some climate groups like FOEA backed Sanders, who was lauded by activists for labeling climate change as the most pressing issues facing the US, while others like the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund supported Clinton despite protests from its members.

Despite Sanders loss in the Democratic presidential primary, his relatively unexpected strength and full-throated support for a number of climate policies has emboldened some environmental groups to push for a more forceful progressive agenda.

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In an interview with Business Insider last week, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune noted that while the group is enthusiastically backing Clinton, it still plans to challenge her to take more drastic actions to curb climate change.

"We are going into this eyes wide open. We firmly believe that Hillary Clinton has a very strong environmental platform, and we also accept that we will need to challenge her and push her to go even further," Brune said. "We're prepared to do that."

bernie sanders

Indeed, at the party platform committee meeting on Friday, environmental groups will push for much stronger measures that go further than many of the steps that President Barack Obama has taken to curb the effects of climate change.

Several of FOEA's proposals were key aspects of the Sanders campaign platform.

FOEA's suggestions for the party platform include a wide array of goals, including a nationwide ban on hydraulic fracturing, and a tax on Wall Street speculation, both proposals championed by Sanders

According to text of his prepared testimony tomorrow morning, Pica will push the Democratic party to adopt a more aggressive climate agenda than the Obama administration has pursued over the last seven years.

Friends of the Earth appreciates that in previous Democratic Platforms, the party has endorsed the urgency to act on climate change. The problem in previous platforms, however, is that the solutions offered did not match the rhetoric of climate change, let alone the needs for action.

For example, the inclusion of the 'all of the above energy' platform in 2012 directly contradicted and worked against solving climate change. And under the Obama Administration, the USs lack of ambition and global leadership was crystallized in the December 2015 with Paris Climate Accord, which will put the world on a path to 3C warming, at a time when climate impacts are already being experienced and the climate science is clear that breaching 1.5C poses an unacceptable risk of crossing irreversible tipping points and further impacting billions of people. While the agreement is perhaps a necessary first step, unless we substantially increase our ambition and leadership, hundreds of million of people around the world will be forced to relocate.

Some other groups that have already lined up for Clinton also pushing the DNC to include proposals aimed at tackling climate change.

A copy of the Sierra Club's platform proposals obtained by Business Insider advocated ending fracking, rejecting permits for new tar sands drilling projects, and ending fossil fuel extraction on public lands, among a litany of other goals.

The Sierra Club, on behalf of our 2.4 million members and supporters, advocates inclusion into the platform of: A commitment to power America with 100% clean, renewable energy sources like solar and wind; a recognition of the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and under the ocean, especially on our public lands; a pledge to halt the polluterfriendly TransPacific Partnership, given that it would undermine climate and environmental protection, and to build a new model of trade that supports workers, communities, and our environment.

NOW WATCH: 9 people who may be on Donald Trumps 'short list' for vice president





More From Business Insider


Tributes have flooded in for British MP Jo Cox, who has died after being shot and stabbed while in her constituency in northern England.

The Labour Party politician, 41, was taken by air ambulance to a hospital in the nearby city of Leeds after the attack. According to West Yorkshire Police she was pronounced dead at 1.48pm GMT.

The mother of two was elected to represent Batley & Spen constituency in 2015. She is co-chair of the Friends of Syria All Party Parliamentary Group, and broke with her party in abstaining in a vote on military action in Syria. She has worked with anti-hunger charity Oxfam, advised the wife of Gordon Brown, Sarah, on womens and childrens health campaigns, and was heavily involved with the Labour Womens Network.

Tributes poured in from across the British political spectrum. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn described Cox as a person dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne shared their condolences on Twitter. Cameron called her death a tragedy, sending condolences to her husband, Brendan Cox, and two children. He had previously announced that campaigning to remain in the E.U. would be suspended in light of the incident.

Vote Leave campaigner Boris Johnson said it was appalling that a minister should lose her life simply doing her best for constituents.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon called Cox a brilliant young MP.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan posted a recent photo of the young lawmaker:

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls also tweeted, in French, the words Sadness for Jo Cox and the British people. Through her, our democratic ideals have been targeted. Never accept it!

In the U.S. Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who was herself seriously injured in a mass shooting during a constituent meeting, paid tribute:

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Others outside of the world of politics reflected on the killing, which is without precedent in modern British politics:
Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Barrel bombs and air strikes hit Syria's Aleppo on Thursday hours after a temporary truce announced by regime ally Russia came into effect in the northern war-torn city.

An AFP reporter said regime helicopters dropped the crude explosive devices on the city's rebel areas after residents had headed to markets for their first morning shopping in weeks.

In the evening air strikes hit the eastern part of the city controlled by the rebels, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that the insurgents retaliated by firing rockets into the regime-held west.

At least four civilians were killed in the fresh violence, three on the eastern side of Aleppo and one in the west, added the Britain-based monitor.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in a war that has killed more than 280,000 people, and there is deep scepticism that the latest halt to fighting in the battered city will last.

The two-day truce came hours after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Moscow that Washington's patience was running out over breaches of a nationwide ceasefire.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and a February countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.

"There is no progress in the political process," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, referring to Syria.

He accused Washington -- which broadly supports the opposition -- of being "unable or unwilling to put pressure on its allies in the region".

Nevertheless, direct contact between Russia and the United States about Syria have taken place "without any hysteria", he added.

There have been repeated violations of the February 27 truce in Aleppo, with rebels pounding regime-controlled neighbourhoods with rocket and artillery fire and the regime hitting rebel areas with air strikes.

- 'Artificial and fruitless' -

The new ceasefire was announced by Moscow late Wednesday in a bid to halt violence in the city, split since 2012 between a regime-held west and a rebel-controlled east.

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"On Russia's initiative, a 'regime of silence' has been introduced in Aleppo for 48 hours from 00:01 16 June (2101 GMT Wednesday) with the goal of lowering the level of armed violence and stabilising the situation," Russia's defence ministry said.

A source close to the regime said the truce had been decided "in connivance" with Washington.

Residents in Aleppo's rebel-held east had headed out to the markets to buy meat and vegetables on Thursday morning, the AFP correspondent said.

After weeks of air strikes, it was the first time they had shopped in the morning since the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

A Syria analyst, Karim Bitar, described the latest Aleppo truce as a "ceasefire of convenience, which is not linked to a real political process".

"Syrians are increasingly sceptical about these brief ceasefires, which seem to have become as artificial and fruitless and the negotiation sessions -- which each time revive hopes then end in bitter disappointment."

- 'Rest for the killers' -

The Observatory, which relies on sources inside Syria to gather information on the war, agreed.

"This temporary truce of a few hours doesn't aim to end the bloodshed, but to give some rest to the killers -- those who massacre the people of Aleppo and Syria -- before they resume their crimes," it said in a statement.

A US-led coalition has been bombing the Islamic State group -- which is not included in the February ceasefire -- since 2014.

CIA chief John Brennan said on Thursday that IS has suffered major losses as a result, but that it retains the ability to conduct attacks around the world.

UN-backed Syria peace talks in Geneva came to a deadlock in April after the opposition walked out over increasing violence and lack of aid access to besieged areas.

The United Nations says nearly 600,000 Syrians live in besieged areas, most surrounded by government forces.

An aid convoy was ready to go to one of these areas in the central province of Homs and was expected to ferry in desperately needed aid there Thursday, the UN said.

"We are ready loaded with a large convoy to go to the besieged town of Al-Waer," said Jan Egeland, who heads a UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria.

If the convoy entered, it would be of "great significance", he said, adding the rebel-held area had been "without supplies for more than three months."

"People have died in Al-Waer because of lack of humanitarian supplies of late," he said.
By Rich McKay

ATLANTA (Reuters) - A truck driver and the trucking company he worked for were indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday in connection with a 2015 crash that killed five Georgia nursing students, according to court records and local media.

Driver John Wayne Johnson and Mississippi-based trucking company, Total Transportation, were indicted on five counts each of first-degree homicide by vehicle, along with other charges, according to court records as well as a copy of Johnson's indictment which was posted online by local broadcaster WFXG.

Georgia State Police said Johnson was driving a Total Transportation tractor-trailer on Interstate 16 near Savannah when he failed to stop, causing a wreck involving five cars and another tractor-trailer.

Johnson later admitted in court depositions that he was texting while driving, broadcaster WSAV-TV said.

Five nursing students from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro were killed. They were in their first year of nursing school and were traveling to a training session in Savannah, according to university officials.

Those killed were Abbie DeLoach, Caitlyn Baggett, Emily Clark, Catherine McKay Pittman and Morgan Bass, all of Georgia.

Total Transportation representatives could not immediately be reached for comment. Johnson also could not be reached on Wednesday evening.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Curtis Skinner and Andrew Hay)
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump famously kicked off his seemingly improbable presidential campaign by calmly riding down an escalator in Trump Tower.

He then launched into a freewheeling speech in which he accused the Mexican government of sending its rapists and criminals across the U.S. border. The resulting national firestorm would have doomed most campaigns, and business after business severed ties with the Manhattan developers organizations.

But Trump doubled down.

It was a reaction that would be constantly repeated over the next 12 months as Trump sparked controversy after controversy. He didnt back down after questioning Sen. John McCains status as a war hero. He didnt back down after saying Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who grilled him during the first GOP debate, had blood coming out of her wherever. And on down the list.

Trump, buoyed by his fame and The Apprentice brand, waged a scorched-earth primary campaign against his GOP rivals, belittling them and attacking the elites whom any other candidate would consider crucial. He insulted low-energy Jeb Bush, Liddle Marco Rubio and Lyin Ted Cruz, among many others.

At the end of last year, terror attacks rocked Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Trump seized the moment by announcing a proposal called dangerous, unconstitutional and immoral by its critics: A wide-ranging ban on Muslim immigration and tourism to the U.S. until Islams supposed hatred is figured out. Trump would double down on the plan in the aftermath of this months mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub, which left 49 victims dead.

But while Trumps proposal was popular among Republican primary voters, polls show that it faces far more resistance among the the larger pool of voters who will cast ballots in November. Trumps shoot-from-the-hip campaign is also facing increasing headwinds and much of the Republican establishment seems deeply uncomfortable with its presumptive nominee.

Trump has almost five months left to continue to shake things up, however. And those five months are certain to be a political roller coaster.
As the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Donald Trump is now the de facto leader of the GOP, even if he hasnt officially been handed the nomination. And in his capacity as head of the party, he delivered a message to other GOP leaders on Wednesday: Sit down, and shut up.

Trump cant fire elected Republican lawmakers as though they were contestants on his old reality television program, but he definitely gave them a taste of the disdain in which he holds people who disappoint him.

Related: Trump--The Gift That Keeps on Giving to Democrats

In an angrier-than-usual speech, he suggested that the partys leaders are too weak to help him in the election, and that it would be better if they would stop talking. Dont talk, he directed them. Just be quiet.

Trump appeared in Atlanta, two days after delivering a speech and multiple interviews in the wake of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando by a man claiming to be allied with the terror group ISIS. In his remarks, which were broadly criticized, Trump reiterated his call for a ban on Muslim immigration to the US, and effectively accused American Muslims -- as a group -- of willfully protecting what he said were thousands of shooters hiding in the US population. He called for surveillance of mosques and suggested that President Obama might be tacitly allowing terrorists to strike in the US.

The speech earned immediate pushback from Obama and Trumps likely Democratic opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. Both described him and his policies as a danger to the countrys tradition of religious pluralism and its history as a beacon for immigrants.

And even senior Republicans distanced themselves from the billionaire former reality television star. House Speaker Paul Ryan directly criticized Trumps proposed Muslim ban, saying it is not in our countrys interest.

Related: Obama to GOP Leaders -- Do You Actually Agree with Trump?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell simply refused to address Trumps speech at all, telling reporters on Tuesday, Im not going to be commenting on the presidential candidates today.

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Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip in the Senate went his leader one better, telling Politico that he had decided to stop commenting on Trump until the general election is over -- in November.

On Wednesday, Trump let the crowd in Atlanta know just how much respect he has for the GOPs congressional leadership.

You know, the Republicans, honestly, folks, our leaders  our leaders have to get tougher, he said. This is too tough to do it alone. But you know what? I think Im gonna be forced to. I think Im going to be forced to.

Related: Is Trumps Style Wearing Thin? 70% of Americans View Him Unfavorably

He added, A lot of people thought I should do that anyway...But Ill just do it very nicely by myself. I think youre gonna have a very good result. I think well be very happy.

In fact, he eventually seemed to warm to the idea of getting GOP leadership out of the picture entirely.

Our leaders have to get a lot tougher, and be quiet. Just please be quiet, Trump said. Dont talk. Please, be quiet. Just be quiet -- to the leaders -- because they have to get tougher, they have to get sharper, they have to get smarter, and we have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.

It doesnt seem like it will be much longer before Republican lawmakers decide, en masse, to take him up on that offer.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
Washington (AFP) - Donald Trump has had tense ties with reporters since launching his presidential campaign one year ago Thursday, but he took it a dramatic step further this week by banning The Washington Post from his events.

The presumptive Republican nominee's campaign has banned at least a dozen news organizations, a disturbing trend that media groups say highlights his disdain for free speech enshrined in the US Constitution's First Amendment.

Trump assails newspapers that anger him as "failing" enterprises that are "pure scum."

At rallies during primary season, he lashed out at journalists as "dishonest" and "sleaze." Some were threatened by Trump supporters, others manhandled by security personnel or Trump staff.

When a reporter crosses an invisible line, he yanks their credentials.

"If people don't cover me fairly, or if they actually make things up, I don't know why anybody should be allowed" into his events, Trump told The New York Times, which wrote that the White House hopeful "casts himself as punisher in chief."

Trump's ban on the Post apparently stemmed from his disapproval of its story -- reported after the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida by a radicalized gunman -- stating that Trump seemed to suggest that President Barack Obama sympathized with terrorists.

The action against the award-winning newspaper could be considered just the latest in a string of vengeful responses by a thin-skinned candidate, but it was met with incredulity and alarm by some.

- Beyond Nixonian? -

"Even Saddam Hussein didn't revoke the @washingtonpost press credentials," tweeted former national editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who covered the Iraq war for the newspaper.

Others noted how president Richard Nixon never barred the paper from the White House, even at the lowest points of his presidency after the Post historically broke the story about the 1970s Watergate scandal.

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Trump himself sounded gleeful about the ban during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on Tuesday.

"I love it! We just took the press credentials away from the dishonest Washington Post," he boomed, to cheers and laughter.

Trump has routinely assailed news outlets in his Twitter posts, ranting about their liberal bias and poor editorial decisions.

"I predict that dying @UnionLeader newspaper, which has been run into the ground by publisher "Stinky" Joe McQuaid, will be dead in 2 years!" he wrote in December, speaking of the New Hampshire paper.

He denied credentials to the Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper, after its editorial board urged him to quit the race.

In one of the most notable clashes, Trump had Jorge Ramos of Univision, the best-known Hispanic reporter in the United States, ejected from a press event last year when Ramos repeatedly questioned his immigration policies.

"Go back to Univision," Trump seethed.

Ramos, who has interviewed several US presidents and Latin American leaders, was eventually allowed back inside. But the incident highlighted Trump's penchant to tangle with journalists he dislikes.

Politico has repeatedly incurred Trump's wrath. It said its reporter Ben Schreckinger was prevented from entering a Trump press conference in March and "escorted off of the property" even after he was granted campaign credentials.

Similar bans have been placed on reporters from Buzzfeed, the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Gawker, Huffington Post, Mother Jones and others.

"If the goal is to squelch independent journalism about Trump it certainly won't work," Politico editor Susan Glasser said in a statement.

The Standing Committee of Correspondents who cover Congress said Trump was engaging in "troubling pattern" by punishing journalists who seek to hold public officials and candidates like him accountable.

"Candidates should respond to such scrutiny with facts and arguments, not by banning the messenger," the committee said.

Post opinion writer Dana Milbank suggested a more direct approach by the media.

"There is, happily, a just and appropriate response to Trump's blacklist: a Trump blackout," he wrote on the Post's website, urging an end to wall-to-wall live coverage of Trump rallies and Trump call-ins to television shows.

"For those journalists and media executives who still don't share the view of Post Executive Editor Martin Baron that Trump's action 'is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press,' it won't be long before Trump comes for you, too," Milbank added.
By Mark Hosenball (Reuters) - The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has opened an investigation of the cyber heist of $81 million from Bangladesh Bank's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a law enforcement source said. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is investigating the February crime, in which criminals used the SWIFT fund-transfer network to steal money from Bangladesh's central bank. Bharara's office declined to comment. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. The investigation by the federal prosecutor comes as the FBI and other government agencies are seeking to guard against other cyber thefts. The Federal Reserve and other financial regulators last week told banks to review cyber-security protections against fraudulent money transfers in the wake of the Bangladesh Bank heist. The FBI last month privately urged banks to look for signs of attempted cyber thefts. Last week, an FBI official speaking in Washington said the agency is investigating "a number of different tentacles" but does not yet know who committed the Bangladesh crime. The Bangladesh police and other law enforcement agencies also are investigating the largest known cyber heist from a bank. A U.S. congressional committee has launched a probe into the New York Fed's handling of the heist. Thieves in early February hacked into the Bangladesh bank's interface with the SWIFT network and peppered the New York Fed with fraudulent payment instructions. The New York Fed transferred $81 million held by Bangladesh Bank to accounts in the Philippines, where it went missing. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball in Zurich; Additional reporting by David Ingram in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
By Bernie Woodall and Roberta Rampton

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - President Barack Obama met survivors of a gay nightclub massacre and relatives of the 49 people killed on Thursday and said the United States must act to control gun violence and fight what he called homegrown terrorism.

"The last two terrorist attacks on our soil - Orlando and San Bernardino - were homegrown," Obama told reporters. "We're going to have to do more to prevent these kinds of events from occurring. It's going to take more than just our military. It's going to take more than just our intelligence community."

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Orlando, Florida, four days after a U.S.-born gunman claiming allegiance to various Islamist militant groups carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The United States has made it too easy for disturbed or wrathful people to legally acquire high-powered weapons like the assault rifle used in the attack on Sunday, Obama said.

"I held and hugged" grieving family members before laying flowers at a memorial for the victims of the attack on the Pulse nightclub, he said. Police killed the gunman, Omar Mateen, 29, a U.S. citizen born in New York to Afghan immigrants.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack but U.S. officials have said they do not believe Mateen was assisted from abroad. CIA Director John Brennan told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday that the agency had "not been able to uncover any direct link" between Mateen and militants abroad.

A married couple also claiming allegiance to Islamic State shot dead 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December.

ORLANDO MOURNS

Orlando mourned the dead after what was also the worst attack in America on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Wakes were under way for at least three victims: Kimberly Morris, Anthony Luis Laureano Disla and Roy Fernandez.

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Twenty-three of the 53 wounded remained hospitalized, six in critical condition, according to Orlando Regional Medical Center.

During his attack, Mateen also posted messages on Facebook.

One message, apparently referring to air strikes against Islamic State by the United States and its allies, said: "You kill innocent women and children by doing us air strikes ... now taste the Islamic State vengeance," according to a letter to Facebook from the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

The attack sparked a fresh debate over how the United States responds to Islamist militant violence at home and abroad, with Republican Senator John McCain telling reporters on Thursday he viewed Obama as "directly responsible" for the Orlando attack due to his failure to prevent the rise of Islamic State.

Shortly afterward, McCain said on his official Twitter feed that he was referring to Obama's national security decisions, "not to the President himself."

Mateen carried out the slaughter with an assault weapon and handgun that had been legally purchased although he had twice been investigated in the past by the FBI for possible connections with militant Islamist groups.

CONGRESS UNDER PRESSURE

Obama, who has denounced the attack as both an act of terrorism and a hate crime, reiterated his frustration over the easy availability of guns in America and the failure of Congress to pass any gun control measures in more than two decades.

The massacre put pressure on Congress to act.

After a marathon of speeches by Democrats on Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday, a Democratic senator said Republicans had agreed to hold votes on measures to expand background checks and prevent people on U.S. terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

No formal deal between the parties for votes was announced, and it was unclear exactly when and how the Senate would proceed with the votes, which would be amendments to an appropriations bill funding the Commerce and Justice departments. Even if votes are now scheduled, it is unclear whether any of the bills can gain enough support to pass the Senate.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said the chamber will most likely vote on four gun control measures on Monday.

Republicans, who currently hold a 54-person majority in the 100-seat Senate, have blocked a number of Democratic-backed gun control measures over the years, saying they infringe on Americans' constitutional right to bear arms. Some Republican gun control measures - deemed insufficient by Democrats - have also failed to pass.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also joined the gun debate, announcing on Wednesday he would meet with the National Rifle Association to talk about barring people who are on terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

Any new legislative action would be the first in the United States in more than 20 years, evidence of the difficulty of changing the minds of Americans who want ready access to firearms based on the U.S. Constitution's right to bear arms, considered sacrosanct by gun advocates.

(Additional reporting by Julia Harte and Peter Eisler in Orlando, Patricia Zengerle and Jonathan Landay in Washington and Zachary Fagenson in West Palm Beach, Florida; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Frances Kerry, Leslie Adler and Howard Goller)
By Kristina Cooke and Joseph Ax (Reuters) - Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week. "They don't report them," Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. "For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this." But FBI director James Comey said, "They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim. Its at the heart of the FBIs effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks, Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings. Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington field office, told Reuters on Wednesday that the agency has a robust relationship with the local Muslim community. FBI agents operating in the area have received reports about suspicious activity and other issues from community members. Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said the city's Muslim community has been cooperative in reporting "red flags." I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things, Downing told Reuters. What we say to communities is that we dont want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behavior. Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has conducted several studies on Muslim-Americans and terrorism, disputed Trump's criticism. To claim there is no cooperation is false and defamatory to the Muslim-American community, Kurzman said. Kurzman said a January 2016 study by himself and colleagues at Duke Universitys Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that many law enforcement agencies had made progress in establishing trust with local Muslim-American communities. But the study also found some tensions. In one focus group described in the study, Muslim-American participants debated when to report activity when they were unsure how to detect imminent violence. The group participants expressed concern that police would be more likely to encourage a plot in order to make an arrest," the authors wrote, "rather than to divert people onto a nonviolent path that community members and family members would prefer. One imam interviewed for the project told researchers he felt that his trust is not being reciprocated by U.S. government officials. The imam told the researchers that after he attended a meeting with federal law enforcement officials designed to increase cooperation, he went to the local airport, was held for hours at security and missed his flight, the study said. A Reuters review of court records also produced examples of Muslim-Americans informing law enforcement of possible radicalization within their families. Suspecting that her then 17-year-old son, Ali Amin, was radicalizing, Amani Ibrahim followed the advice of a local imam and reported her fears to law enforcement officials, according to court records. In August 2015, Amin was sentenced to 11 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State after he helped a schoolmate travel to join the extremist group. In 2014, the sister of Abdi Nur contacted Minneapolis police to report her younger brother missing. She later showed federal agents messages she received, in which he said he had gone to join the brothers and promised to see her in the afterlife. Nur has been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group, but is still at large. And in 2014, Adam Shafis father, Sal Shafi, told officials in the U.S. embassy in Cairo that he was worried his son was radicalizing after Adam went missing during a family trip in Egypt. Adam Shafi soon rejoined his family, but was arrested in July 2015 after trying to board a flight to Turkey from San Francisco airport. He was charged with attempting to provide material support to al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked group in Syria. (Additional reporting by Julia Edwards; Editing by David Rohde and Leslie Adler)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will give Ukraine $220 million in new assistance this year, the White House said on Wednesday. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman of the new aid in a phone call on Wednesday in which Biden expressed strong support for Groysman's reform efforts and commended him for steps his Cabinet has already taken in its first two months in office. (Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Eric Walsh)
Abu Dhabi (AFP) - The United Arab Emirates has said the "war is over" for its troops in Yemen after a nearly 15-month intervention as part of a Saudi-led coalition that cost the lives of around 80 Emirati soldiers.

The announcement by a government minister, which the crown prince of the UAE's richest emirate Abu Dhabi then posted on his official Twitter account, came with large swathes of the country, including the capital Sanaa, still in the hands of Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels.

"Our standpoint today is clear -- war is over for our troops, we're monitoring political arrangements (and) empowering Yemenis in liberated areas," said state minister for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash.

His comments came in a speech late on Wednesday to foreign ambassadors and senior Emirati officials, including Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

Sheikh Mohammed is also deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces.

But Gargash appeared to clarify that his country's forces were still committed until the coalition decides to end combat operations altogether.

"Our armed forces ... have performed their combat duty bravely and professionally. This role continues, along with sisterly (kingdom of) Saudi Arabia, until the coalition announces an end to the war," he wrote in a tweet posted late Thursday.

The UAE was a mainstay of the Saudi-led coalition which intervened in Yemen in March 2015 as the Huthi rebels threatened to overrun the whole country, prompting President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi to flee into exile.

The coalition succeeded in pushing the rebels out of southern cities, where Hadi's government has set up base, but the rebels remain in control of most of the central and northern highlands as well as the Red Sea coast.

Eight weeks of UN-brokered peace talks in Kuwait have made no major breakthrough in the face of deep mistrust between the warring parties.

It was the first time in the UAE's history that it had deployed ground troops beyond its borders.

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In March, UAE special forces also played a major role in driving Al-Qaeda out of the southeastern provincial capital of Mukalla, which it had held for a year.

The jihadists had taken advantage of the conflict between Hadi loyalists and the rebels to seize several cities in the south and southeast.

The intervention cost the lives of UAE air crews as well as ground troops.

In March, a Mirage jet crashed in Yemen killing both its crew. And this week alone, two UAE helicopters crashed with the loss of their four crew.

More than 6,400 Yemenis have been killed since the intervention started, the majority of them civilians.
DUBAI (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates' involvement in more than a year of war in Yemen is "practically over", a top diplomat was quoted as saying on Wednesday. The UAE is key member of a Saudi-led military coalition which intervened in Yemen in March 2015. It backs the exiled government against the armed Houthi movement, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE fear is a proxy for their regional arch-rival, Iran. "Our position today is clear: the war is practically over for our troops," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash was quoted as saying in a closed-door speech by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed's official twitter account. "We are looking at political arrangements and our political role now is to empower the Yemenis in the liberated areas." A Houthi missile killed more than 60 Gulf Arab troops stationed in central Yemen in September, including 52 Emiratis, the worst loss ever suffered by the UAE military. UAE troops led a Yemeni government offensive against al Qaeda fighters in April, expelling them their base in the southern port city of Mukalla. While Saudi Arabia is backing a push on the Houthi-held capital Sanaa in Yemen's northwest, the UAE has focused on stabilizing the southern city of Aden which has suffered repeated attacks by al Qaeda and Islamic State militants. (Reporting by Noah Browning; Editing by Nick Macfie)
LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - British police said they had arrested a 52-year-old man after an attack on Thursday which left a woman in a critical condition in Birstall, near Leeds in northern England, following media reports that a lawmaker had been attacked in the area.

"At 12.53 (1153 GMT) today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition," West Yorkshire Police said in a statement.

"Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area. There are no further details at present," police added.

(Reporting by David Milliken; editing by Stephen Addison)
(Adds background, more quotes)

By Martinne Geller

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Unilever Chief Executive Paul Polman and his three predecessors have expressed support for Britain remaining in the European Union, saying the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant would be "negatively impacted" by Brexit.

"We therefore hope that in the interests of Unilever, the UK, Europe, and indeed the wider global economy, the UK will choose to remain and thereby continue to play a central role in Unilever's long-term growth and prosperity," the executives said in a letter sent on Thursday to some 100,000 UK employees and pensioners of the company.

Britons vote on June 23 on whether to stay in the 28-member EU, with polls suggesting a tight race.

Engineering group Rolls-Royce on Wednesday joined other big companies, including telecoms group BT and airline easyJet, in throwing its weight behind the campaign to remain in the bloc.

The Unilever letter is signed by Polman, who is Dutch, as well as Patrick Cescau, Niall FitzGerald and Michael Perry. The four have run the maker of Dove soap, Lipton tea and Knorr soups for the past 24 years.

"We feel a responsibility to point out that Unilever in the UK, with its thriving operating company, international research centres, factories and global headquarters would, in our considered opinion, be negatively impacted if the UK were to leave the European Union," they added.

Cescau is a Frenchman, FitzGerald is Irish, while Perry is a Briton.

CEO Polman, who has been in the top job since 2009, told Reuters in January that a possible Brexit was similar to a messy, costly and ultimately regrettable divorce.

Unilever is the second-biggest company in Britain's FTSE 100 index with a market value of 91 billion pounds ($129 billion). It has 168,000 employees worldwide, 7,500 of whom are in the United Kingdom. ($1 = 0.7060 pounds) (Reporting by Martinne Geller; editing by David Clarke/Keith Weir)
LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Unilever Chief Executive Paul Polman and his three predecessors have expressed support for Britain's membership of the European Union, saying the consumer goods giant would be "negatively impacted" by Brexit.

"We therefore hope that in the interests of Unilever, the UK, Europe, and indeed the wider global economy, the UK will choose to Remain and thereby continue to play a central role in Unilever's long-term growth and prosperity," the executives said in a letter sent on Thursday to some 100,000 employees and pensioners of the Anglo-Dutch company.

The letter is signed by Polman, Patrick Cescau, Niall FitzGerald and Sir Michael Perry.

(Reporting by Martinne Geller; editing by David Clarke)
By Martinne Geller

LONDON (Reuters) - Unilever (ULVR.L) (UNc.AS) Chief Executive Paul Polman and his three predecessors have expressed support for Britain remaining in the European Union, saying the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant would be "negatively impacted" by Brexit.

"We therefore hope that in the interests of Unilever, the UK, Europe, and indeed the wider global economy, the UK will choose to remain and thereby continue to play a central role in Unilever's long-term growth and prosperity," the executives said in a letter sent on Thursday to some 100,000 UK employees and pensioners of the company.

Britons vote on June 23 on whether to stay in the 28-member EU, with polls suggesting a tight race.

Engineering group Rolls-Royce (RR.L) on Wednesday joined other big companies, including telecoms group BT (BT.L) and airline easyJet (EZJ.L), in throwing its weight behind the campaign to remain in the bloc.

The Unilever letter is signed by Polman, who is Dutch, as well as Patrick Cescau, Niall FitzGerald and Michael Perry. The four have run the maker of Dove soap, Lipton tea and Knorr soups for the past 24 years.

"We feel a responsibility to point out that Unilever in the UK, with its thriving operating company, international research centers, factories and global headquarters would, in our considered opinion, be negatively impacted if the UK were to leave the European Union," they added.

Cescau is a Frenchman, FitzGerald is Irish, while Perry is a Briton.

CEO Polman, who has been in the top job since 2009, told Reuters in January that a possible Brexit was similar to a messy, costly and ultimately regrettable divorce.

Unilever is the second-biggest company in Britain's FTSE 100 (.FTSE) index with a market value of 91 billion pounds. It has 168,000 employees worldwide, 7,500 of whom are in the United Kingdom.

(Reporting by Martinne Geller; editing by David Clarke/Keith Weir)
Mike McCormack has been appointed managing director U.K for Universal Music Publishing Group, with immediate effect.

McCormack succeeds UMPG stalwart Paul Connolly, who is stepping-down from his position as president of Europe and managing director U.K.

Connolly departs after an illustrious career leading the major music publisher in the United Kingdom and Europe. The British exec joined the company, then MCA Music, in 1988 as an A&R scout. He rose to A&R director in 1991 and became managing director in 1994. After a string of promotions, he was appointed president of Europe and managing director, U.K., for UMPG in 2005. Connolly was named ASCAP Publisher of the Year in 2012 and in 2014 appeared in Billboard's International Power Players List.

Universal Music Publishing Group, Ole Pulling Production Music Catalogs From ASCAP

Jody Gerson, chairman and CEO of UMPG, thanked Connolly for "all of his many contributions through the years." She added, "During Paul's tenure, Universal Music Publishing signed enormously talented songwriters across many musical genres and became a creative force in the U.K. He also assembled an industry-leading creative team that will continue to achieve great things for UMPG and our songwriters."

McCormack joined UMPG's U.K. business in 1999 as deputy managing director and has served in an advisory role to the company for the past three years. Previously, McCormack worked at Simon Fuller's 19 Music Publishing, and he served as director of A&R at RCA Records before that. Earlier in his career, McCormack led the A&R team at Virgin Music Publishing that signed The Verve and The Prodigy, among others.

Universal Music Publishing's Royalty Portal Now Allows Writers to Request Advance

"We're thrilled to have an executive with Mike's experience, creativity, and deep artist relationships leading our U.K. company," comments Gerson, to whom McCormack reports. "Mike has been responsible for bringing to UMPG some of the U.K.'s most successful and influential songwriters, and I'm confident that in his new role, he will build upon UMPG's stature as the industry's best home for songwriters."
The first time audiences are introduced to Ursula, the villain in the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid, she's slinking around in her cove, bemoaning her woes.

In her cave, after she pops a worm into her mouth as a snack, the former sea witch floats through the air, weightless, revealing a jet black dress with a sweetheart neckline that shows off her pudgy arms and a low back that hugs her many curves. Her stomach protrudes.

She wears two large shell earrings, a necklace with a gold nautilus and heavy eye makeup with blue eyeshadow that extends far up to her eyebrow. Her lips are smacked with red. Her hair is styled in a sleek, waterproof bouffant.

Source: Rebloggy

Source: Deviant Art

Yes, she is an octopus (who actually has six tentacles instead of eight because of budget concerns), but that doesn't stop her from wearing one of the most iconic gowns in Disney history and creating a style all her own in a size rarely seen in Disney movies.

She is the Mae West of the deep sea.

Before her, sure, there were characters who were not thin  like Snow White's dwarves  but Ursula stands as the first notable female Disney character (albeit a villain and not a princess) that could be seen as plus size while also being sexy, cool, stylish and just a tad bit crazy.

Source: Tumblr

How Ursula came to be, and the real inspiration behind the character, makes her story all the more interesting. Ursula's mannerisms and much of her look  the eyeshadow, the swivel, the humor  was inspired by Divine, a Baltimore drag queen who frequently teamed up with filmmaker John Waters, playing notable characters in his films Pink Flamingos and the original Hairspray, and thusly became an infamous actress and queer icon.

According to an in-depth article from Hazlitt, the man responsible for bringing a trash-talking drag queen into a Disney movie is playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman. He grew up in Baltimore's gay scene, during a time when Divine was a central figure, before taking a job with Disney, where he would be in charge of writing songs for original movies.

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(L-R): Divine, Ursula and Divine

By the time he got to work on The Little Mermaid in the '80s, Ashman was a producer on the project, as well as a writer of the music and dialogue. Thus he had a lot of say as to how the film would look and sound. Ursula, being the key villain in this film, went through many different incarnations of dangerous sea life, from a manta ray inspired by Old Hollywood actress Joan Collins to an alluring scorpion fish.

The first drawing of the Ursula we all know today had a pink mohawk and a shark tail, which would eventually become slithering tentacles.

None of them seemed right until an animator named Rob Minkoff drew a, as Hazlitt wrote, "vampy overweight matron who everyone agreed looked a lot like Divine." There was the exaggerated makeup, the jewelry and the body type  and most of all, the glamour.

Source: Tumblr

Source: Tumblr

To Ashman, the resemblance between Ursula and Divine was uncanny, and that wasn't a mistake. Since he was already a big fan of Divine, he understood that having such a theatrical character, with such an enormous presence, would work for a kids movie. So much so that while creating the music for the film, he began to incorporate Divine's notable growl into a number of Ursula's own musical numbers, like "Poor Unfortunate Souls," which sees Ursula using two eels like a feather boa.

Source: Tumblr

"Larger than life characters give voice to our own rebellious impulses," Hazlitt wrote. "Divine was funny, sure. But, as anyone who's smiled after realizing Ursula stole Ariel's voice in order to bag Prince Eric for herself knows, it can feel really good to watch someone behave this badly. Like Ursula, who has an eye on King Triton's throne, Divine and the roles she played are equal parts aggrieved and aspiring."

So, this growling, seductive, rebellious drag queen-turned-six-legged sea witch fit right into the film, and thus Disney gave us the first  and still to this day, the only  plus-size style icon in Disney history.

One of the most revolutionary things about her existence is that she showed girls and boys and those in-between that a woman who isn't as tiny as Ariel still has some self-worth. Having a few back rolls doesn't stop her from doing a damn thing. And that's an important aspect of her character, especially considering that we're still in a day and age (27 years later) when actresses from Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson are constantly being defined by their weight, and forced to comment on plus-size issues. Meanwhile, Ursula never had to comment on her size or shape or the way she carried herself to be considered a valuable and important character and being.

In that sense, Ursula is just as subversive now as she was in 1989.

Although there is plenty of subtext to a jealous, plus-size woman being the villain to a petite young girl, Ursula alone wasn't defined by her looks. She was defined by her style, her swivel, her wit and her confidence.

In a company like Disney, that has so praised things like thinness and beauty in young women, Ursula broke the mold, her influence carrying over some 27 years later.

Blake Lively channeling Ursula

And it may be because of this revolutionary presence that she is still embraced by fashion to this day. In just the last month, actress Blake Lively, the most unassuming suspect, posted a photo to her Instagram showing that Ursula was her fashion inspiration that night.

In the photo, Lively's eyes are crossed, which is supposed to mean... something. But she is wearing a black gown, and she is wearing that blue eyeshadow that Divine made her signature nearly 30 years ago.

"Everyone thinks I was inspired by the princesses," she wrote. "If they only knew..."

So, what is it about Ursula's style that has managed to endure? Is it the simple sexiness? The easy of the satin, curve-hugging dress still deeply beloved by red carpet starlets? Is it the allure of overdrawn eyebrows and eyeliner that can make anyone's eyes pop? Maybe it's the fact that tips and tricks from drag queens (see: contouring) have finally drifted down to the mainstream, but it seems like everyone kinda really wants to look like Ursula. And given the confidence with which she carried herself, that's certainly not a bad thing.

If anything, what she taught us is to be proud of whatever body we may have, and whatever makeup we want to wear. And unlike stars even today, she proudly existed without justification. There's just no shame in that at all.

Feel free to ignore those poor, unfortunate souls who tell you otherwise.
From Cosmopolitan

Florida police are currently searching for a 2-year-old boy who was attacked and taken by an alligator at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa late Tuesday night.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, the toddler's family was visiting from Nebraska and were relaxing by the shoreline when the alligator suddenly took the boy and dragged him into the water. The 2-year-old's father jumped into the water and attempted to grab him, but was unsuccessful. The family immediately alerted the lifeguard on duty.

As of early Wednesday morning, multiple emergency groups - including the Reedy Creek Fire Rescue, Orange County Police Department, and Florida Fish and Wildlife - are searching the Seven Seas Lagoon to try and find the toddler, to no avail. A representative for Disney told The Orlando Sentinel that they were "devastated" by the news.

Disney's website describes the Grand Floridian as "Victorian elegance meets modern sophistication" that "evokes Palm Beach's golden era." It is one stop away from the Magic Kingdom on the Monorail. While there are no signs at the resort that explicitly warn about alligators in the water, the Sentinel says there are notices warning patrons against going into the lake.

Update 6/15 12:50 p.m.: Disney has closed all beaches in its Grand Floridian Resort & Spa area "out of an abundance of caution," CNN reports. Search and rescue operations for the missing toddler are continuing, but Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings has announced in a press conference that "it certainly is not survivable at this point for [the missing toddler] to be submerged for this period of time." "Our ultimate goal is to try to bring some closure to the family by recovering their loved one," Demings explained.

Follow Gina on Twitter.
Toulouse (France) (AFP) - A French court on Thursday ordered the release of American rapper Freddie Gibbs, accused of rape in Austria, on bail of 50,000 euros ($56,000), his lawyer said.

Gibbs, 34, whose real name is Fredrick Tipton, was arrested on June 2 shortly before a planned concert in the southwestern French city of Toulouse, one of a string of European tour dates.

He was the subject of a European arrest warrant for an alleged rape in Austria in 2015 and the court will rule on his extradition on June 23, said his lawyer Michael Malka.

"He categorically denies the allegations made against him by Austria and is even very surprised that Austria is taking this on a year later, just as he is on tour in Europe," Malka said after a court appearance last week.

Gibbs cancelled shows in Marseille, Strasbourg and Portugal last week and was meant to be performing in Canada on Friday.

Born in the gritty, poverty-stricken city of Gary, Indiana, Gibbs has made no secret of his past selling crack, working as a pimp and robbing freight trains.

"I've gotten arrested for gun possession, drug possession," he said in a 2012 interview with Vice.

"Never no rape, no assault or battery, I ain't like that, I ain't never assaulted no woman," he added.

Gibbs was touring Europe promoting his new album "Shadow of a doubt", after his 2014 record "Pinata" received critical acclaim.
Paris (AFP) - A sketchbook of drawings by Dutch post-Impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh has been discovered and will be published in November, the French publisher Seuil announced Thursday.

"This sketchbook was known only to the owners, myself and the publisher," Seuil official Bernard Comment told AFP, calling the discovery "stunning, dazzling".

The artwork will be released under the title "Vincent Van Gogh, Le Brouillard d'Arles" (The Fog of Arles), he said.

The prolific painter lived in the French town of Arles, in southern Provence, in 1888 and 1889.

It will be published first in France, the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan, and in other countries at a later date, Seuil said in a statement.

The publisher did not give details of the sketchbook's provenance or the planned price of the publication.

"No further information will be divulged until the world press conference to be held in Paris in mid-November 2016 on the eve of the book's arrival in bookstores in the various countries," Seuil said in a statement.

Comment said he had known of the sketchbook for "a little over a year" and that it contained more than 10 drawings.

Experts have confirmed the authenticity of the drawings, he said.

Van Gogh, who suffered from alcoholism and mental illness, committed suicide on July 29, 1890, dying poor and unknown.

His paintings now sell at auction for tens of millions of dollars.

Around 1,000 of his drawings are known to exist.
It is common knowledge that Varun Dhawan is one of the most sought after and popular stars in Bollywood today. In merely four years, the young actor has made quite a name for himself thanks to his captivating performances, strong personality and charming screen presence.

Moreover, the 29-year-old actor has also won over several loving fans courtesy his bindass attitude and elegant style statement. Now, he is in the news for a rather exciting reason.

Recommended: Ranbir Kapoor-Gauri Khan Go Shopping in London, Pick Up Artefacts for His New House!

As it so happens, Varun may soon replace Ranbir Kapoor as the brand ambassador of a leading snack brand. However, it seems he will be paid less than the Saawariya star. As it so happens, Ranbir had been signed on by the brand merely two years ago.

On a related note, both stars have a pretty busy year ahead. Varun will soon be seen in the action-drama Dhisoom. On the other hand, Ranbir is currently gearing up for his next release Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.
(Adds details on case)

By Nate Raymond

June 16 (Reuters) - A Venezuelan businessman pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges stemming from what the U.S. Justice Department called a large, ongoing investigation into bribery at Venezuela's state oil company.

Roberto Rincon, 55, pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to two counts including conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act over his role in a scheme involving officials at Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA).

Rincon, who was president of Texas-based Tradequip Services & Marine, was arrested in December along with another Venezuelan businessman, Abraham Jose Shiera Bastidas, for conspiring to pay bribes to PDVSA officials to secure energy contracts.

The guilty plea, ahead of a trial set for next week, was the sixth in what the Justice Department said was an ongoing probe involving PDVSA, the exclusive operator of oilfields in the economically struggling OPEC country.

An indictment filed against Rincon in December alleged that five PDVSA officials received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes made through wire transfers, mortgage payments, airline tickets and, in one case, whiskey.

From 2009-14, more than $1 billion was traced to the conspiracy, with $750 million to Rincon, a Venezuelan citizen who lives in Texas, according to court documents.

In pleading guilty, Rincon admitted that he and Shiera agreed to the pay bribes to ensure their companies were placed on PDVSA bidding panels, enabling them to secure lucrative energy contracts, prosecutors said.

In his plea agreement, Rincon also admitted to failing to report on his 2010 federal tax return over $6 million in foreign dividend income he received from a Venezuelan corporation he owned, prosecutors said.

Shiera, who lives in Florida and owned multiple U.S.-based energy companies, pleaded guilty in March. Four other individuals have also pleaded guilty in the case, including three former PDVSA officials.

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Rincon, who has been in custody since his arrest, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 30.

Caracas-based PDVSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has previously said it was the target of a smear campaign by opponents who are trying to link it to corruption.

The case is U.S. v. Rincon-Fernandez, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, No. 15-cr-654.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; editing by Alan Crosby and Tom Brown)
By Siva Govindasamy

SINGAPORE, June 16 (Reuters) - Vistara and AirAsia India, airline ventures of India's biggest conglomerate Tata Group, aim to boost their fleet sizes to 20 planes within a year and launch international services after the country overhauled aviation rules, two people familiar with their strategy said.

The Indian government revised on Wednesday its so-called '5/20' policy, removing a restriction that domestic carriers have to operate for five years before they can fly abroad. They must, however, still deploy 20 aircraft or 20 percent of total capacity in India, whichever is higher.

Vistara and AirAsia India, which began operations in January 2015 and June 2014, respectively, will prioritise services to the Gulf and flights to Southeast Asia to connect with their investors Singapore Airlines and AirAsia, added the sources, who declined to be identified as they were not authorised to speak to the press.

Singapore Airlines has a 49 percent stake in full-service carrier Vistara, while Southeast Asian low-fare pioneer AirAsia owns 49 percent of budget airline AirAsia India. Tata Group has a 51 percent stake in Vistara and 49 percent in AirAsia India.

AirAsia India CEO Amar Abrol said on Wednesday that the airline will increase its fleet from six to 20 aircraft "as soon as possible".

These will come from Malaysia-headquartered AirAsia, which supplies Airbus A320s from its large orderbook to affiliates around Asia. AirAsia declined to comment.

Vistara has 11 A320s and will get two more this year, and it originally planned to have 20 planes by June 2018. All of these are from leasing firms, and it will turn to them for more planes, said a source familiar with the company's plans.

Widebody aircraft could also be on the cards for Vistara, but that is not a priority, added the source.

Singapore Airlines referred questions to Vistara, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Vistara has a three-class configuration with business, premium economy and economy cabins. This is geared towards the higher-yield international segment, where executives believe they can compete against Gulf carriers such as Emirates , Etihad and Qatar Airways which dominate the market for travel to and from India.

International services by AirAsia India and Vistara may not significantly hurt incumbents such as Air India, Jet Airways and InterGlobe Aviation's IndiGo, some analysts said.

"We don't really see this as a negative for the competition because in today's global environment, the airlines also need to compete with carriers from abroad and they do not just face the local competition alone," said Pankaj Sharma, Head of Equities, Equirus Securities. (Additional reporting by Aditi Shah in New Delhi; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
As the equities markets continue to slide on ongoing concerns, exchange traded fund investors may look to strategies that track the CBOE Volatility Index and bearish play on stocks.

U.S. stocks broke even after falling off for most of the session Thursday as global stocks weakened in response to Japans central banks decision to push off additional monetary easing.

The upcoming U.K. referendum on European Union membership, or so-called Brexit vote, has fueled the recent bout of uncertainty, with both the Bank of Japan and Federal Reserve both pointing to upcoming vote as part of the reason for delaying their monetary policies.

Related: Yen ETF Jumps as BOJ Stands Pat, Brexit Concerns Mount

Were close to peak uncertainty, Neil Robson, portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, told the Wall Street Journal. Brexit is adding to this really low interest-rate, really low growth malaise.

New U.K. polls have added to concerns as surveys showed an increasing percentage of British voters leaning toward a break from the European Union.

The market is clearly showing us today how we would react to an exit, Philippe Gijsels, chief strategist at BNP Paribas Fortis, told the Wall Street Journal. The question is how much [Brexit uncertainty] is already priced in. Were telling our clients that the summer might be volatile

Consequently, investors have increasingly turned to VIX-related and inverse stock ETFs as tactical, short-term trades to hedge the market risks.

For instance, over the past week, the REX VolMAXX Long VIX Weekly Futures Strategy ETF (VMAX) surged 24.0%, iPath S&P 500 VIX Short Term Futures ETN (VXX) jumped 23.5% and ProShares VIX Short-Term Futures ETF (VIXY) increased 23.3%, with the VIX now hovering around 20.9, its highest level since February.

Related: VIX ETFs Surge as Fear Grips Market

More aggressive traders have turned to the leveraged ProShares Ultra VIX Short-Term Futures (UVXY) , which has gained 49.5% over the past week. UVXY has also been among the highest volume securities on the NYSE over the past week, according to ProShares.

Story continues

Related: Inverse ETFs Step into the Limelight

For those who were wary of a pullback in the S&P 500 index, there are a number of bearish or inverse ETF options with varying levels of leveraged exposure to capitalize off a weakening S&P 500 as well. The ProShares Short S&P500 (SH) takes a simple inverse or -100% daily performance of the S&P 500 index. Alternatively, for the more aggressive trader, leveraged options include the ProShares UltraShort S&P500 ETF (SDS) , which tries to reflect the -2x or -200% daily performance of the S&P 500, the Direxion Daily S&P 500 Bear 3x Shares (SPXS) , which takes the -3x or -300% daily performance of the S&P 500, and ProShares UltraPro Short S&P 500 ETF (SPXU) , which also takes the -300% daily performance of the S&P 500. Over the past week, SH was up 2.2%, SDS was 4.4% higher, SPXS gained 6.7% and SPXU rose 6.7%.

For more information on the markets, visit our current affairs category.
Volkswagen AG VLKAY announced investments worth $11.3 million in California. Of the total investment, it will spend $4.5 million for a new training center in Eastvale, which is a small city near Riverside. The center will be opened early next year. It will provide technology, collision repair and sales training for Volkswagens three brands including VW, Porsche and Audi. For the first time, personnel from all the brands of Volkswagen will be receiving training at the same location.



The remaining $6.8 million was utilized for a distribution center in Rocklin, northeast of Sacramento. The facility spreads across 140,000 square feet. It is the 7th Volkswagen center in the U.S. It will serve 94 VW and Audi dealers in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. It is expected that around 30 people will be working at the Rocklin facility. This center has been officially opened.



The automaker is making investments in an attempt to recover from the software emissions scandal. Last year, Volkswagen found itself in troubled waters after the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the company had developed a software algorithm to deceive U.S. emission tests.



Following the scandal, the automaker has been trying to rebuild its reputation through small and larger changes. It plans to invest around $7 billion in North America through 2019. This $11.3 million investment is part of the companys $7 billion investment plan.

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The Islamic States international appeal has become untethered from its military performance on the ground. Sundays terror attack at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which left 49 people dead, could be an example of this growing disconnect.

The rampage, committed by a man who pledged allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before opening fire, came amid near-consensus that the Islamic State is in sharp decline. For the first time since U.S.-led coalition operations began two years ago, almost all of the groups vital strongholds in Syria, Iraq, and Libya have come under serious pressure. In a recent statement, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the groups spokesman, even alluded to the fact that followers should be prepared for losses, from Sirte to Mosul.

But while the groups performance has hit an all-time low, its appeal does not seem to have diminished. CIA Director John Brennan recognizes this fact: Despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield  our efforts have not reduced the groups terrorism capability and global reach, he told the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 16, using another term for the Islamic State. [A]s the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.

Brennan also confirmed that the CIA had found no direct link between Omar Mateen, the gunman in Orlando, and the Islamic State. This is no surprise, as Mateen does not seem to fit familiar patterns of dogmatic support for the group. In the space of three years, he had supported Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State. His profile suggests that he belongs in the category of sympathizers who are only superficially influenced by the organizations ideology, but who nonetheless can be inspired to carry out attacks in its name.

Such sympathizers are not driven by the Islamic States military successes, such as the takeover of Mosul in the summer of 2014. The group built its narrative around Sunni victimization, an idea that both predates its establishment of a caliphate and continues to exert a strong pull on many in the Middle East. The Islamic State has also tapped into the rampant political stagnation and popular grievances to gain popular support beyond the number of people who actually joined its ranks.

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Consider, for example, the ongoing offensives against the Islamic State in Fallujah, Raqqa, and Manbij. While Washington insists the onslaughts include forces that represent the Sunni Arab communities that dominate the three cities, the prominence of Iranian-backed sectarian militias and Kurdish groups has triggered outrage in groups that are otherwise hostile to the Islamic State.

Two examples stand out. As the Peoples Protection Units advanced on Raqqa, the activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently warned that civilians in the city were drifting toward the Islamic State due to their hatred for the Kurdish group. Meanwhile, Arabic media like al-Arabiya and al-Hayat  which last year described the offensive on the Islamic State-held city of Tikrit as a liberation  called the war on Fallujah a sectarian conflict, led by Iranian spymaster Qassem Suleimani.

Many observers throughout the region see Washington turning its back on Sunni civilians in order to cozy up to Tehran and Moscow. Reports in Arabic media have accused the United States of deliberately backing a sectarian war against Sunnis. This narrative invokes old patterns that could again help the Islamic State convert territorial losses into legitimacy among certain segments of the Sunni world. Even ideologically confused people like Mateen, who supported the Shiite militant group Hezbollah in 2013, might be led to support the Islamic State even as they do not follow its strict religious ideology.

U.S. officials, however, are publicly making the case that the war against the Islamic State is an unqualified success. In a news briefing two days before the attack in Orlando, Brett McGurk, the presidential special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, pointed to eight indicators to argue that the group was suffering on almost every front, from its fighters morale to its sharply reduced finances. He credited the Iraqi government with making impressive strides in dealing with the humanitarian situation in the country, and asserted that the forces leading the attacks in Fallujah and northern Syria are Sunni locals and the Iraqi Army. There had been isolated atrocities committed by militias, he said, but everybody is saying and doing the right thing to make sure that anyone who commits a human rights violation is held to account.

This assessment, however, understates the political and social issues that led to the rise of the Islamic State in the first place and overstates factors that played little role in that rise. The Iraqi government today appears even more dominated by sectarian forces than the period before the Islamic States capture of Mosul in 2014. The narrative prevalent throughout the region that the continuing battle in Fallujah is a nakedly sectarian war belies McGurks hopeful  if not misleading  assessment.

Political grievances are the beating heart of the Islamic State. The way the Fallujah battle has been conducted, regardless of how American officials present it, has caused some Sunnis who would otherwise oppose the Islamic State to see it as the enemy of their enemies. More people, not fewer, might start to see the group as their champion if it is defeated by the wrong forces. Such grievances could not only fuel insurgencies in Syria and Iraq, but also inspire future lone wolves in the United States.

The appeal of the caliphate might similarly survive territorial losses. In his briefing, McGurk pointed to the idea of a caliphate as the key driver of foreign fighter recruitment. Ive traveled now all around the world, and the common denominator when I asked leaders in various capitals what is it thats driving your young people to this movement  the common denominator is this notion of a historic caliphate, he said. So we have to shrink the core, and were doing that.

But shrinking the core works only if the war effort simultaneously addresses the underlying grievances of communities from which the Islamic State draws support. It is imperative to enable Sunni forces to fight and defeat the Islamic State, and thus portray the fight to Muslims across the world as an extremist group slaughtering its fellow Sunnis, and not a sectarian war. However, the bulk of the effort against the Islamic State so far seems to be focused on defeating the organization militarily, while the political, sectarian, and social mess created in the process is left for another day  a classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

The war against the Islamic State is heading in two directions. The group is clearly weakened on the ground, but the nature of the losses it is suffering has strengthened its legitimacy among certain segments of the Sunni world. This is a trend that should be of grave concern to U.S. officials, as the groups continuing support could lay the groundwork for its eventual resurgence  and more lone wolf attacks like the one in Orlando.

More focus should be given to allowing the political track to catch up to military advances. But as the situation stands today, the military campaign might be creating the circumstances that will enable the groups appeal to survive its territorial demise.

Photo credit: Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images
To demonstrate the Discovery's Sport's immense towing capabilities the car has taken to the railway tracks in Switzerland.

The Land Rover Discovery Sport is the most basic of the Land Rover range -- it doesn't even come with a low ratio gearbox. The 2-liter diesel engine-powered model that performed the stunt -- towing three luxury train carriages with a combined weight of 100 tonnes for 10km -- was completely stock save for a set of special rail wheels so that it could drive on the tracks.

Karl Richards, Lead Engineer for Stability Control Systems at Jaguar Land Rover, said: "Towing is in Land Rover's DNA, and despite Discovery Sport being the smallest model in the range, it has proved its exceptional towing capabilities."

However, the car does have an intelligent terrain and tow assist system that can ensure a car can grip on every slippery surface and can maintain a set speed without undue acceleration or braking when hauling.

"Over the years, we have introduced game-changing towing technologies to take the stress out of towing for our customers. I've spent most of my career travelling to the most punishing parts of the world to test Land Rovers in grueling conditions, yet this is the most extreme towing test I've ever done," said Richards.

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/l8rQEQAeET8
From Popular Mechanics

Update 10:58 a.m. ET: The two Boeing satellites were successfully launched into geostationary orbit, but SpaceX crashed the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket this time. Video of the crash should be available soon.

SpaceX will launch yet another Falcon 9 this morning at 10:29 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral. This time the Falcon is carrying two communications satellites built by Boeing to geostationary orbit, and you better believe the Hawthorne, CA-based aerospace company will be going for another first-stage landing on the autonomous floating barge "Of Course I Still Love You."

The Eutelsat 117 West B sat will provide Latin America with commercial video, data, and mobile services, as well as serving as a government communications satellite. ABS 2A is going to provide a number of utilities to Russia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, including maritime communications services, mobile connectivity, and direct-to-home television.

This is SpaceX's sixth launch this year as the company has really been letting the Falcon fly. At this point, we have come to expect that they will stick the landing yet again. Musk announced last week that SpaceX will attempt to reuse a successfully landed rocket for the first time in October or September. When that happens, the world will truly be watching.
The historic Watergate Hotel, whose legacy involves one of America's biggest political scandals, has reopened following a $125 million renovation that aims to write a new chapter for the iconic property.

This week The Watergate Hotel opened its doors for the first time since 2007 after years of renovations and restoration efforts led by designer Ron Arad and Italian design brand Moroso.

Bold curves and mid-century modern design went into the remaking of the hotel, while original structures such as the staircase and indoor pool were restored.

The hotel's name has become synonymous with one of the biggest political scandals in US history, following the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee which was then housed at the Watergate complex.

The events led to the resignation of then-president Richard Nixon.

The hotel first opened in 1965 and was originally conceived by Italian architect Luigi Moretti to look like a sail on the Potomac.

It's the latest attempt, steered by Euro Capital Properties, to resuscitate the spot to its glory days when The Watergate Hotel was a luxurious urban resort, where actors and models hobnobbed with congressmen.

Past owners include luxury cruise liner Cunard, Swisshotel, Blackstone and Monument Realty.

The hotel is comprised of 336 guestrooms that feature marble bathrooms, granite vanities and La Bottega amenities.

Retro staff uniforms are designed by Mad Men costume designer Janie Bryant. Other features include a whisky bar, rooftop lounge and spa.

The Watergate Hotel isn't the only hotel property loaded with political significance to open in the US capitol.

The GOP's presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump is set to open his $200 million Trump International Hotel Washington DC in September, months before Americans head to the polls to vote.

Originally scheduled to open in 2018, developers have been steamrolling ahead to finish the hotel in time for the November election.

The luxury hotel is located on Pennsylvania Avenue.
ALMATY, June 16 (Reuters) - Celebrated weightlifter Ilya Ilyin has denied taking banned substances after he was named among four Kazakh gold-medal winners from the 2012 London Olympics to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in their reanalysed samples. Ilyin, the men's 94kg champion, and female lifters Zulfiya Chinshanlo (53kg), Maiya Maneza (63kg) and Svetlana Podobedova (75kg) all failed tests, the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) said on Wednesday. "I think we will be able to prove the complete absurdity and inconsistency of the allegations against me," the 28-year-old Ilyin wrote on his Instagram page, describing the IWF announcement as "a thunderstorm on a sunny day". Kazakhstan's Weightlifting Federation said in a statement that while it was the responsibility of athletes to adhere to anti-doping regulations, it would help them appeal the charges. The four Kazakh lifters and six from other countries, including seven medal winners from London, were expected to be contenders at the Rio de Janeiro Games in August but have all been provisionally suspended. Ilyin, who also won gold at the 2008 Beijing Games, tested positive for dehydrochloromethyltestosterone and stanozolol when the International Olympic Committee reanalysed samples from the last Olympics, the IWF announced. Among the other titles on Ilyin's list of achievements are four world titles and two Asian Games gold medals. (Reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by John O'Brien)
* VTB CEO sees signs Western investors keen to return

* Says hearing EU may lift sanctions next year

* Says sees lending improving in H2

* Says current capital enough for 2-3 years (Recasts, adds new quotes)

By Katya Golubkova and Christian Lowe

MOSCOW, June 16 (Reuters) - Western investors are once again taking an interest in Russia after a long hiatus over the Ukraine crisis, VTB Chief Executive Andrei Kostin told Reuters, saying he expected investment to come back strongly once sanctions were lifted.

Kostin knows first-hand what a chilling effect Russia's falling out with the West has had on business. VTB, Russia's second-biggest bank by assets, is under Western sanctions over Moscow's role in the Ukraine crisis, prohibiting U.S. and European investors from helping it raise any new capital.

The sanctions also complicate the Russian state's desire to divest itself of a 10.9 percent stake in VTB, though Kostin said he thought the shares might interest long-term investors with the patience to wait for sanctions to be rescinded.

"There are positive political signals about foreign investment," Kostin said in an interview.

"(Foreign business) wants to invest. We see the desire of financial institutions to cooperate with us. Business is always more pragmatic (than politicians) and has its own interests."

He said he interpreted the fact that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi were attending a showcase economic forum in St Petersburg this week as a good sign.

Kostin said he was hearing from European sources that the EU might dilute or lift its sanctions on Russia next year, an event he said would boost the country's struggling financial sector.

EU diplomats say the bloc is due to extend its economic sanctions for six months next week, though this stance could be softened later on. The United States shows no signs of wanting to relax its own sanctions on Moscow.

CLOUD OVER PRIVATISATIONS

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Sanctions make life harder for the Russian government, which plans to launch a big privatisation drive later this year to try to fill holes in the state budget and curb the deficit.

A sale of the VTB stake would not be covered by sanctions because any proceeds would go to the state not the bank, but Kostin said he still viewed any sell-off as "doubly hard."

"The question is not the price but rather making this deal happen. But we are working for this deal to materialise. I believe our shares may be of interest for long-term investors ... ready to wait for sanctions to be lifted."

He added that the deal might happen next year.

Sanctions have compounded an economic crisis fuelled by low global oil prices and have hit the banking sector hard, cutting off lenders' access to Western capital markets.

VTB loans to corporate borrowers tumbled by 11 percent in the first quarter compared to the last quarter of 2015, although Kostin said he thought lending might improve in the second half.

VTB had a Tier 1 capital adequacy level of 13.9 percent at end-April due to weak lending, he added, enough for a couple of years of operations.

"If it were possible to restore lending at around 10 percent (per year), which is not too high a level for the Russian economy at all, then we have enough capital for two to three years.

"After that we would have to think anyway. During that period of time, I think, we could tap the market (for new capital)," he said.

(Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Catherine Evans)
ZARA

It's tough to be a retailer right now.

But one company has managed to buck all of the ugly trends in the market.

That's Zara  which is beloved by young, fashion-forward women.

It's almost like it built itself to operate successfully among today's millennial and teen shoppers that are frugal, value-minded, and demanding quick, speedy, on-trend fashion.

The company does so well because it has a phenomenal operating supply chain and manages its inventory well, creating great value for customers and shareholders alike.

It helps set it apart from other fast-fashion retailers like H&M, Forever 21, and the frighteningly cheap Primark.

"If I had to condense the foundations for Zara's success, I would say it comes down to agility and flexibility," Neil Saunders, CEO of retail consulting firm Conlumino, said in an e-mail to Business Insider in December. "From these things flow a number of advantages: quickly picking up on new fashion trends, accurate forecasting of stock requirements which reduces markdowns, quick turn of stock which keeps customers coming back for new product, good responsiveness to external factors like the weather, and margin maximization."

A report Suzy Hansen in The New York Times Magazine revealed how Zara doesn't stock a lot of clothes, and the company updates what's in stores regularly. That benefits the company in two ways: one, it doesn't have to resort to excess sales to rid itself of inventory, and two, it encourages consumers to shop with a sense of urgency  something that consumers don't have when it comes to shopping at a Banana Republic or J. Crew, when they have been conditioned to buy everything on sale.

It's incredibly swift at adapting, too, since it operates on a fast-fashion basis. This make Zara immune to sudden changes, like unseasonable weather or a sharp detour in fashion trends.

"This is a significant point of difference to most other apparel retailers which usually commit in advance of each season and have no capability to change volume or introduce new styles mid-season," Saunders wrote. "Zara has always been this way, but in today's market where trends change rapidly and where the weather seems to fluctuate more, this has become a major source of competitive advantage."

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Zara also seems well suited for today's Instagram and Snapchat-obsessed era; today, consumers have a front seat to the runway and want the styles they see immediately, and at a sweet price point, too. Zara is able to do that thanks to its team that sources style rapidly; this helps hose who operate on that basis.

"Unlike fast-fashion retailers, which have buying teams sourcing current trending fashion from third-party vendors, traditional specialty retailers have design teams creating product they believe is going to be trending 12 months out," Goldman Sachs researchers wrote.

Its spurred change in the fashion industry  which is a unique observation, considering how Zara sources trend from the runway.

"They broke up a century-old biannual cycle of fashion," an analyst told Hansen. "Now, pretty much half of the high-end fashion companies"  Prada and Louis Vuitton, for example  "make four to six collections instead of two each year. That's absolutely because of Zara."

Zara also has an internal data center that helps it track but customers want and don't want, which is a huge boon to help it outlast others in the current retail environment.

This business model has proven to be so successful, that Zara's parent company, Inditex, has seen continual spikes in profits.

Amancio Ortega

"We believe that Inditex has the best business model in apparel and expect Inditex to deliver double-digit earnings growth per year over the next five years," Bernstein analysts told The Wall Street Journal.

The ingenuity of Inditex stems from its founder, Amancio Ortega, who is currently the second-richest man in the world with a net worth of $69.2 billion, according to Wealth-X. That makes him even wealthier than Warren Buffett.

Ortega's wealth has led him to lead a life characterized by an air of mystery. He's extraordinarily private  Reuters notes that he very infrequently gives interviews  and despite his massive wealth lives frugally, wearing the same simple outfit each day (blue blazer, white shirt, and gray pants) and eating lunch with employees in the Zara headquarters cafeteria.

He's come a long way, though. According to Reuters, he grew up as the son of a man who worked in the railway industry, and at fourteen, he was a delivery boy. His biographer wrote that he sometimes couldn't afford food when he was growing up, and that he dropped out of school when he was a teenager.

His biographer also notes that Ortega didn't even start working on Zara until he was 40 years old. The idea has blossomed into the most successful clothing company in the world in the four decades since.

NOW WATCH: The one reason Zara is dominating the fashion industry right now





More From Business Insider


Batley and Spen MP Jo Cox is seen in an undated handout image. (Photo: Press Association via Reuters)

Jo Cox, a member of Britains Parliament, was killed Thursday afternoon in Birstall, England, in a violent attack; initial police reports say she was shot and stabbed.

Cox, 41, was a promising social justice activist in the Labour Party and was known for her campaigns to open the United Kingdoms borders to Syrian refugees and for her push for Britain to remain part of the European Union. Before entering Parliament in 2015, she was a dedicated public servant, working for international campaign groups like Oxfam, an anti-hunger charity.

It is not yet known to what extent politics played a role in the shooting, but police have said that they are investigating reports that the alleged shooter, Thomas Mair, yelled Britain first after the assault, a reference to a right-wing party in the U.K. that has advocated against increased immigration, arguing that it harms traditional values.

Slideshow: British lawmaker Jo Cox killed in Birstall, England

Cox served as an aide to Joan Walley, a member of Parliament who pushed for integration with the EU. Cox also worked to combat infant mortality and slavery.

Cox, who is survived by her husband and two young children, had a zest for life that would exhaust most people, according to a statement released by her husband, Brendan Cox.

The statement from Jo Coxs husband, Brendan, is extraordinary in its dignity and compassion https://t.co/IBPQ99aUGR pic.twitter.com/1vpJGtj5LW  Stuart Millar (@stuartmillar159) June 16, 2016

Cox was one of the leading voices calling for the U.K. to admit more refugees from Syria and used her 15 months in office to organize a parliamentary group on the issue. She was vocal in debates on a measure that would have allowed more than 3,000 child refugees to enter the U.K.

Who can blame desperate parents for wanting to escape the horror that their families are experiencing? Cox said in a speech, which has been shared on social media after her death. These children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness, and I know I personally would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hellhole.

She was also a staunch advocate of remaining in the EU, as a national referendum on the U.K. leaving the international body looms.

The overall benefits of EU membership are huge, Cox wrote in an editorial in the Yorkshire Post just six days before she was killed. I very rarely agree with the Prime Minister but on this hes right: We are stronger, safer and better off in [the EU].
By Stephen Guilfoyle

Good Afternoon,

Its pretty safe to say that we havent seen the end of this period of increased volatility. All markets seem poised to overreact to whatever the outcome of next weeks Brexit vote might be. Ive seen that if the referendum passes, the target for the exit is actually sometime in 2019. Nevertheless, there will be an oversized collapse in common sense in our immediate future that seems unavoidable.

How about gold, gang? The precious metal has skyrocketed to levels well above $1,300 an ounce. The VIX is trading above 22. Treasurys are very strong, as we see the 10-year approach yields of about 1.5%. The utility sector is way ahead of the pack  again, and trading volumes are poor again. We really havent had sizable trading this week except for Wednesday afternoon. Technically, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) has held the 2050 level today. I thought that we might squeeze a couple extra points out of that sell-off, but the tape is the judge, and the tape is never wrong.

Lets check on todays victims, shall we?

1) The Swiss 30-year moved into negative territory today. The global debt supercycle will feed off itself forever  until it doesnt. (Whos that guy who doesnt sell gold, but has been telling folks to buy it for a while now?)

2) The US dollar is strong today against a basket of global currencies, despite yen strength. This is putting a further hurt on crude and energy stocks and really puts an exclamation point on golds move.

3) After the energy sector, the Ugly Stick also paid a visit to the transports, the techs, and of course  the financials.

4) Are markets absurd right now? Of course. Youre not wrong. Do we even need to have a central bank? I dont think so, but thats a fight for another day. One that I will never win.

5) Yes, health food.
Laura Kimpton

On nice days, Apple plans to open the 25-foot high doors at the back of its new "global flagship" store in San Francisco, letting customers bask in a sunny public plaza while they get their iPhones and Macs fixed.

In the center of that plaza is a sculpture called "Love," by San Francisco-based artist Laura Kimpton. You can't miss it from Apple's new "Genius Grove," which is replacing the traditional Genius Bar. The 10-foot high rainbow letters really stick out.

To any "burners" visiting the store the sculpture might look familiar  because Kimpton's been making large word art at the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock, Nevada, for years.

"Apple and Hyatt are having conversations with me, so these very large organizations are no longer scared of Burning Man. It's an art festival," Kimpton told Business Insider.

Here's the story of how a piece of San Francisco outsider art found a place at Apple's most important store in years.

Born on the playa

Love sculpture

Kimpton first went to Burning Man, the multi-day desert festival known for its mix of artists, nudists and partiers, in 2002 and it blew her mind.

The next year she returned to create large scale art. "It had like fourteen things on fire, a projected flame of methanol and propane and a crew of sixty people," Kimpton said. "But after three years of doing that, I just thought I needed to come up with a simpler concept."

She settled on big words. First, she made a 10-foot high sculpture that said "MOM."

"I thought that people at Burning Man would be mad at me that I reminded them of their mom. Instead it was the complete opposite. People were like 'oh I'm so happy I saw MOM, I just decided to cut it back a little bit and not party so hard,'" Kimpton said.

The next year she decided to make a giant "LOVE" sculpture  and although she thought it was a little "too obvious," the rest of the Burners loved it. " And now every time Burning Man is represented in a magazine they use the word 'love,'" Kimpton said.

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Since then, she's done several commissions for large words sculptures  but the new rainbow-colored Love at Union Square is arguably the most high-profile yet.

"Big words are everywhere now, it's so funny and I've been doing it for ten years. I've never seen it in a gallery situation, but big words are in every place on TV," Kimpton said.

Enter Apple

Love Sculpture

As the Apple press release about the Union Square store notes, Hyatt Hotels originally commissioned the piece.

Apple says that a key part of of its new "global flagship" concept is that it integrates public spaces into the store. And the courtyard between the store and the Hyatt next door was perfect.

Before Apple got involved, Hyatt came to Kimpton and wanted to commission some art from native San Francisco artists. "We were talking about an idea and we're like 'wow, what if we did a rainbow Love' in San Francisco," Kimpton said.

"We chose rainbow because San Francisco is the city of love, and acceptance of loving whomever you want to," Kimpton said.

Apple got involved in January  just months before the store officially opened this past May. Kimpton was thrilled, partially because she uses Apple products to help create her art.

"Apple believes that the courtyard is where you're going to be able to meet with the geniuses in outdoor areas so you're not stressed," Kimpton explained. "So for Apple to accept art from Hyatt was a little conflicted in the beginning, but they also thought it was really good for them too, and they also thought it was beautiful, so it ended up being a wonderful conversation."

Birds

Apple ended up paying a rush fee so that the 10-foot high sculpture would be done and installed by opening day.

Even from inside the Apple Store, the Love sculpture is hard to miss. There's a hedge around it so discourage people from climbing on the sculpture, but looking on Facebook and Instagram, people are already climbing over all of it  just like people did on the "playa," or the desert where Burning Man takes place.

You might be able to take the art out of Burning Man, but you can't extricate the Burning Man from the art.

"I've got to tell you, I knew people would go crazy over words, but I never knew they would go this crazy," Kimpton said.

Love sculpture

NOW WATCH: How to find Netflixs secret categories





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In the wake of the Orlando mass shooting, many point to Australia's outlawing of guns as a policy that the U.S. should emulate  but not all Australians agree.

Australia placed a complete ban on guns in (Orlando g the shooter, and 53 injured). The vote to outlaw the sale and ownership of the weapons was unanimous among both political parties.

A policeman responsible for collection of guns holding a shotgun in a room full of collected guns before they were melted in Sydney, Australia on July, 28, 1997.

In a Reddit thread that asked Australians who were around in 1996 to share their experience with what was then a new law, some Aussies pointed out several differences between the U.S. and Australia that they said make it more difficult for the U.S. to accomplish a complete ban on guns than it was in Australia.

User Smileedude thinks there's not as much of a need for guns in Australia:

We have much less crime, violent robberies are almost unheard of.

Australian culture also doesn't identify with guns like people in the U.S. do, user AbandoningAll believes:

Australia never had a strong culture of gun ownership outside of farmers or hunters.

Reddit user Limberine added that they think A , so Australian hunters didn't have a strong enough argument to prevent outlawing guns:

The truth is that we just don't have the large dangerous carnivores that some countries have.

I wouldn't want to be in close quarters with an angry kangaroo but avoiding getting into close quarters with an angry kangaroo is pretty easy and you don't need the sort of stopping power you would need if you were facing a black or grizzly bear or a cougar or a pack of wolves.

Source: Giphy

One user compared the U.S. gun control situation to a scrambled egg:

Gun control is like a scrambled egg. I'm glad our egg never got scrambled and we don't have a situation like the U.S., however I am really unsure if the U.S. can ever unscramble the gun egg.

Story continues

Piggybacking on some points in the thread, one user suggested the U.S. find a solution "in the middle." But another user offered an explanation to why it's impossible to negotiate a solution on gun laws in the U.S.:





"Eve g?"





Donald Trump speaks at an NRA leadership forum during the NRA convention at the Kentucky Exposition Center on May 20, 2016 in Louisville, Kentucky.

Many Australians said that when they hear about tragic mass shootings in the U.S. they take comfort in knowing massacres like that likely won't happen in their country.

It's nice knowing only the cops and farmers have guns. It'd be an awful thought knowing every dickhead on the block has a handgun, and considering most Aussies are morons it'd get ugly pretty fast.

User Ecl1pse is thankful for Australia's stringent gun law:
The madman who attacked Orlandos Pulse nightclub picked his spot carefully. Not any bar would do, not even any gay bar. He chose a safe space he knew well, filled with youth like him. The soon-to-be-victims danced beneath pink lights on Latin night, all smiles in the pictures they sent friends. Celebrating at closing time.

The 29-year-old killer came to send a message, as all terrorists do. He murdered 49 people and declared his allegiance to a grab bag of radical Islamists as he stood in a bloody bathroom. But the United States of America has a tradition more discriminating than the pipe bomb, more powerful than the long gun. The Klansmen who killed four girls in 1963 at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., were answered with the Civil Rights Act, which their crime helped make law. The hijackers of 9/11 brought out firefighters who raced up stairs as buildings collapsed. Charleston, S.C., responded last year to the murderous rampage of a white supremacist with a miles-long chain of brotherhood, while maimed runners on prosthetic legs returned to Boston to rekindle the spirit that bombers had tried to destroy. Unity and hope swamped fear and hate each time.

So after Orlando the resistance began, shared on and broadcast on national television: stories of friends who shielded friends from bullets, long lines of spontaneous volunteers to donate blood and rainbow colors splashed on cityscapes from Nashville to Sydney, Minneapolis to Tel Aviv. The next steps seemed easy to predict: national mourning, bipartisan shows of unity and a redoubling of resolve.

But somehow the script went sideways, and the country veered off track. It was not just that these murders struck at the tender inflammation of three long-divisive topics: guns, God and gays. The killer attacked in a season of turmoil as voters considered an election that was fast becoming a national referendum on the countrys very identity, its commitment to pluralism and its role as a beacon in the world. The terror this time did not unite. It tore.

As with anything else these days, you could divine your own meaning from the wreckage of unsatisfying facts, and plenty of Americans did just that. For some, the worst mass shooting in U.S. history was primarily the act of a homophobic young man struggling with his own sexuality, while armed with unforgivable access to endless ammunition and a weapon of war. Others saw the latest ambush through a religious prism, a clash of civilizations that Western leaders have been too scrupulous to win. For much of the country, the choice was black and white, one or the other. Ban the guns and ban the Muslims quickly became blame one another.

This was a national test, more raw and dangerous than the typical bouts of outrage and recrimination. In Congress, Democrats walked out in protest when Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan called for a moment of silence. Now do something! an angry voice called from the room. The ensuing uproar about gun control ended only when the Speaker banged his gavel, ruling the Democrats, his governing partners, out of order. Even in Orlando, unity was elusive. When Equality Florida, a gay-rights group, organized the largest public vigil in Orlando, with nearly 10,000 people, not a single Republican statewide official attended.

Then there was the presidential arena. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is either a symptom or a cause of todays division, depending on whom you ask. But there was no mistaking his unseemly haste in congratulating himself on Twitter shortly after the attack for having called it when he proposed a ban on Muslims entering the country. (In fact, the killer, just like Trump, was a U.S. citizen born in Queens.) Victims were still in surgery when Trump called for President Barack Obama to resign for failing to use the words radical Islam in a speech.

Look, were led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or hes got something else in mind, Trump declared a day later, his insinuations recalling his bizarre and bogus obsession with Obamas birth certificate in 2011. He doesnt get it, or he gets it better than anyone understands. Major-party nominees have never acted this way, at least not since the advent of television. When the Washington Post wrote that Trump had suggested Obamas involvement in the Orlando attack, the candidate announced he was cutting off the newspapers credentials to cover his campaign.

In Trumps view, the mass murder in Orlando could be pinned on an overconcern with ethnic and religious inclusion. The current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and to think and act clearly, he said in a speech after the massacre. Trump reiterated his call for an immigration ban based on nationality and religion, and blamedwithout evidenceAmerican Muslim communities for failing to tell authorities he claimed they knew about beforehand.

Trumps theory of governance, which appears to be supported by perhaps as much as 40% of the voting public in polls, is zero sum. Pain in, pain out, preferably directed at something foreign. A crude attack demands an even cruder response. Targeting the families of terrorists. Torture worse than waterboarding. If the Orlando killer poked at our sore spots, Trump applies a searing heat. And it has been working. He grabbed the Republican nomination while falsely accusing New Jersey Muslims of cheering on rooftops after the 9/11 attacks, and his support spiked after the terrorist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.

A furious Obama had heard enough. Flanked conspicuously by his national-security team at the White House, he charged Trump with threatening the very greatness of the country. Where does this stop? Obama demanded. The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killerthey were all U.S. citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith?

Its too soon to tell. But all of those options are now squarely on the table. They have been pushed by fear and frustration and a billionaire celebrity candidate from the fringes of debate to the central choice of the general election. Score another point for the grim genius of the modern jihadi strategists. On 9/11, they turned our airplanes into their bombs, and our News Feeds into propaganda. In Iraq, they leveraged the smug overconfidence of our leaders into a classic insurgency. At Fort Hood, in San Bernardino and now in Orlando, they have weaponized our most unstable citizenry. They have turned our worst instincts inward. It is likely to happen again. All we control is our response.

Consider the sad state of this terrorist and the impalpable challenge he presents. Omar Mateen was not a formidable person, not a foreign fighter and hardly an intellect. He had a fitful career, dropping out of criminal-justice school and working as a salesclerk, prison guard and security officer. He had a long record of sympathy for radical jihad. For this new way of war, he made a perfect recruit, if you could call him that. Federal officials say they have no evidence he ever received direct orders or training from overseas. In fact, there were signs that he didnt fully understand the cause he claimed to support.

When he paused his massacre on the morning of June 12 to call 911, he pledged allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But he also expressed support for another Florida man he had known who had died in Syria as a suicide bomber for the Nusra Front, a rival of the Islamic State. This was a surface radicalism, more against the West than for any explainable alternative.

He had previously caught the attention of the FBI after spouting similar contradictions in 2013. Mateen told co-workers at a courthouse security job that his family had ties to the Sunni group al-Qaeda and that he belonged to the Shiite group Hizballah, its sworn enemy. He admitted making the statements that his co-workers reported, but explained that he did it in anger, says FBI Director James Comey, because he thought his co-workers were discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.

Social victimization was far from his only problem. Four years earlier, the parents of his first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, had flown to Florida and rescued her from his arms, she says. She says he was mentally unstable, deeply disturbed and traumatized. I dont know how to describe someone who is laughing one minute and then the next his fists are clenched, she tells TIME. Once in their four-month marriage she fell asleep on the floor while watching TV, and he started beating her as she slept. He yanked the pillow out from under her, pulled her by her hair and then choked her. Hours later, when she asked him what had happened, he claimed he was angry that she hadnt finished the laundry. Later, he revealed that hed had a fight with his father. Omar was always trying to impress him and be the perfect son, she says.

That father, Seddique Mateen, rushed to the cameras after his sons bloodbath, neatly dressed in his best suit, holding multiple press availabilities day after day. He said he was horrified by what Omar had done, and forcefully condemned his actions. This has nothing to do with religion, he told NBC News. Instead he suggested that his son was probably angered by gay men after seeing two men kissing in Miami a few weeks earlier.

But Seddique, who lives in Port St. Lucie, Fla., is a compromised character witness. Seddique, who says he has been a citizen since the 1980s, has a hobby of making sometimes delusional YouTube videos that he hopes are watched in Afghanistan. In some, he criticizes the Taliban, and in others he credits them for bringing Pashtuns together, slamming their division by the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Occasionally he has dressed in green camouflage, an outfit he says he bought for $100 for a Halloween costume. Once he declared he was the rightful President of the country, instructing all Afghan government employees to obey his orders. We want to find a hero to take the turban off Ashraf Ghani and slap him a few times very hard, he once said, speaking about the countrys actual President.

Just hours after the attack, Seddique posted an image on his Facebook page of a green T-shirt imprinted with his own face and a campaign slogan, presumably for his next Afghan presidential campaign. It shows our popularity, he explained in an interview inside his home, saying a supporter had sent him the image. Others had a different interpretation. Hes a megalomaniac, and according to all of my Pashtun contacts, hes totally unknown and totally irrelevant, says Barnett Rubin, a New York University professor and expert on Afghanistan.

Seddique recorded a video the day after the attack saying his son had done wrong, because humans do not need to punish gays: God will punish those involved in homosexuality. And there is emerging evidence that Omar may have been failing on that last point. It definitely popped up in my head whether he was totally straight, Yusufiy says now. Its just making more sense in my head from my personal experience that this was probably it. Once she said she heard Seddique call his son gay in Farsi. The future killer laughed off his father.

But there is now little doubt that Omar lived some kind of double life. After remarrying and becoming a father, he appears to have established himself as a shadowy fixture of Central Floridas gay scene. The Orlando Sentinel interviewed four regulars of Pulse who said they had seen Omar show up at the club multiple times before his murder spree, over a series of years, sometimes drinking heavily and alone. Another Pulse regular told the Los Angeles Times that Omar had messaged him, on and off for a year, on a gay dating app, and there was evidence that Omar frequented online chat rooms for gay men. The Palm Beach Post found a former classmate who said that they would go to gay bars together and that the killer had once propositioned him romantically. Asked about these claims, Seddique responded wearily. Dont ask me those questions, he said. My son is not gay.

It may be months before the life of Omar Mateen is fully understood, but the ultimate details will not change his storys vexing crux: that a disturbed outcast, clearly angry and largely powerless, had found a way to destroy far more than can ever be allowed. Yet this is the way it is. In the clinical terminology used by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last summer, I think our more proximate threat are the so-called lone wolves.

There are proposals to change the rules of this game, but none will fully remove the danger. Obama has renewed his calls for bans on sales of assault rifles, like the one Mateen bought days earlier to accomplish his mayhem. He also called for Congress to ban gun sales to suspected terrorists who are placed on the federal no-fly list, a designation that does not appear to have been given to Mateen. (Trump, for his part, has pledged to discuss this issue with the National Rifle Association, which has long resisted the move.) Some at the FBI have been seeking more power to maintain investigations of suspects even if they show no early signs of criminal intent.

But others in the Justice Department, stubbornly deferential to the nations founding fear of expansive police powers, warn against overstepping the bureaus primary mission of investigating crimes and arresting people who commit them. As far as we know, Mateen broke no laws before he committed mass slaughter. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees American citizens the right not to be arrested just because someone thinks they might break the law in the future.

When Mateen first came on the FBIs radar, agents opened a preliminary investigation, which allows them to conduct limited surveillance and searches but not to use their most aggressive tools, like foreign intelligence warrants. The bureau used the authority it had to run undercover sources against Mateen, search his transactional records and record his conversations, Comey says.

Preliminary investigations of terrorist suspects can run for six months to find evidence the person is a member of a terrorist group or is planning a specific terrorist attack. The agents on the case can get a six-month extension if they think there might be more to find. And if theres an indication the suspect really is planning an attack, the probe can be converted to a full investigation.

In Mateens case, the FBI got one extension, then closed the case after a total of 10 months. Comey says he saw nothing in the FBIs handling of the Mateen case that should have been done differently. People like their freedoms, says one former senior Administration official. How would you like it if someone said something bad about you and the FBI took a look, didnt turn up anything, but then decided to keep monitoring you day and night for the rest of your life?

Some former senior officials disagree. Tim Murphy, the FBIs retired No. 2 who worked to revise the bureaus investigative guidelines, says the current rules discourage agents from monitoring potential terrorists over the long term. Those guidelines retained the requirement that any preliminary investigation that did not find evidence of possible criminal or national threat activity must be closed after six months. Someone should have been monitoring his social media 24/7, Murphy says, but under the guidelines that is not allowed. He says the bureau should also have been alerted when Mateen bought weapons. One former Justice Department official who served in two administrations said the FBI would likely be able to use the incident to gain greater power in the future.

The presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton, has responded by trying to contrast herself with Trump, using muscular rhetoric to call for incremental shifts instead of rash transformations. Clinton promised to assemble a team from across our government and check off a to-do list: better law-enforcement funding, closer work with American allies to stop money and weapons from moving around the world, tighter gun laws and more information sharing. We are not a land of winners and losers, she said. This has always been a country of we, not me.

Trump has no interest in continuity. The premise of his campaign is that Americas experts and leaders are stupid. If elected, he says, he will suspend immigration from areas of the world where theres a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies. Then he will study the problem and present a new policy to the country. His early rhetoric suggests his final views will paint with a broad brush. In a speech after the attack, he described Afghanistan, a country the U.S. has spent 15 years of blood and treasure to salvage, as a lost cause with a dangerous population. According to Pew Research, 99% of the people in Afghanistan support oppressive Sharia law, he said, ignoring the broad range of opinion in the same polls about what Sharia law means. This could be a better, bigger, more horrible version than the legendary Trojan horse.

Shortly after the shooting began at 2 a.m., David Ward went out to his apartment balcony across the street from the club. Patrons were streaming out in panic. Then he noticed something else. A number of them turned back around when they realized that their friends that they came with werent with them, he says.

One of those was 20-year-old Patience Carter, who was in town on a friends family vacation. She had come to the club with two friends. When only one made it out, they decided to go back. Soon they were trapped in the bathroom. The missing friend would be O.K., and Carter survived, with bullet wounds to both her legs. But the friend she returned with, Akyra Murray, was killed. Before she died, the 18-year-old called her parents from the bathroom. Mom, Ive been shot in the arm, help me, please. Im scared. I am bleeding so bad, Natalie Murray remembers her daughter saying. Long after the shooting stopped, the cell phones of the fallen victims continued to ring in the club, as loved ones reached out.

Other survivors described the evil calm of the killer as he systematically checked his work, executing the wounded. At one point Carter heard him ask, Are there any black people in here? When a man responded, Mateen said, I dont have a problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.

Mateen killed blacks anyway, along with Mexican citizens and Puerto Ricans. Most were gay and lesbian, working in the service sector at amusement parks, and McDonalds. They were pharmacy technicians, accountants, travel-company operators. Some were still going to school, scheduling auditions to jump-start careers. They were single, planning to be married, in love. They ranged in age from 18 to 50. Many of their friends and relatives emphasized to reporters how much they loved Latin night at Pulse.

The ingredients are all here for the country to behave as it has in the past. All I want for people to take away from this situation is this is literally a war we are fighting, between love and hate, says Aryam Guerrero, whose brother Juan Ramon Guerrero was killed with his boyfriend Christopher Drew Leinonen. I just need everybody to love. Just give so much love. The two men will have a joint funeral service. If its not a funeral, they were going to have a wedding, Guerrero explains.

That is how modern democracies have held together in times of trial. In exchange, they agree to embrace some risk, to endure some measure of future pain. They tinker with TSA screening procedures but dont pull people out of line for the color of their skin or the writing in their holy book. They debate surveillance laws, not the right to speak freely. They hope that in the next assault, the damage isnt so bad that they have to turn on one another or give up what they value. Its an imperfect system, a vulnerable one. It depends on some measure of trust in strangers. And it can always be replaced with something else. With reporting by David Von Drehle/Kansas City; Massimo Calabresi and Elizabeth Dias/Washington; Melissa Chan/New York; Charlotte Alter and Ilene Prusher/Fort Pierce; Zeke J. Miller/Orlando; and Philip Elliott/Cleveland

Mass Shooting Victims in the United States
Jo Cox, a Member of Parliament for the Batley and Spens constituency in the north of England was shot and stabbed to death on Thursday, shocking Britain. and provoking an outpouring of sympathy from citizens and politicians from across the globe.

The killing, which police are still investigating, would have been jarring anywhere in the world. But in Britain, where guns are tightly controlled and gun violence is a rare event, the attack is all the more appalling.

Read More: The Orlando Shooting Is a Haunting Reminder of Just How Many Guns Are in America

Even by European standards, Britain is something of a gun-free zone. The Small Arms Survey estimated that there are just 6.2 guns per 100 peoplefigures were only available for England and Wales, not Scotland. Thats far less than Germany, Italy, Spain, Franceand of course, the U.S., which leads the world with more than 88 guns per 100 people.

One of the reasons for Britains low rates of gun ownership is the countrys strict gun laws, dating back to the Firearms Act of 1920, which empowered local law enforcement to deny gun licenses to citizens at their discretion. Today, Britons looking to purchase a shotgun or rifle must sit for an interview with police and provide a good reason for ownershipself defense is not considered a valid answeramong other restrictions. Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, which left 18 dead, civilians were effectively banned from owning handguns, and even Britains Olympic pistol shooters were forced to practice outside the country before 2008.

Read More: Orlando Shooting: Mass Shooting Victims Names

Likely as a consequence of its low number of guns, Britain also enjoys an extremely low gun homicide rate. According to GunPolicy.org, a pro-gun control website that promotes a public health approach to reducing gun violence, there were 0.06 gun homicides per 100,000 people in the U.K.(Britain and Northern Ireland) in 2011 (the most recent data provided by the site). That compares to 3.55 gun homicides per 100,000 people in the United States in the same year.
Mark your calendars for "One Short Day" in the Emerald City: Wicked fans finally know when the hit Broadway musical is hitting the big screen.

The musical phenomenon WICKED comes to the big screen. In theaters 12.20.19.pic.twitter.com/rFojgh56oH https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClFe3XBUsAAKTOw.jpg:large

Universal Pictures' official Twitter account tweeted out the news Thursday afternoon: "The musical phenomenon Wicked comes to the big screen." The release date in question  December 20, 2019.

That's still a ways away, but it's remarkable that the adaptation is finally moving forward. Producers have been in talks for over a decade now. For every bit of news  Stephen Daldry directing; original musical book writer Winnie Holzman penning the script  came another period of waiting. Promises that the musical was coming "soon" never materialized.

Now, finally, Wicked devotees can be confident: The movie is coming. News of who will play Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba and her rival-turned-best friend Glinda, is likely the next major update fans will get. The producers will need that time, too: Hollywood will have to search far and wide to find a pair like original stars Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel.
Ever since the absolutely atrocious Orlando nightclub shooting on Sunday, there has been an outpouring of support from all corners of the world towards the victims and their families. That has meant everything from Senate Democrats filibustering for gun reform to tearful, passionate pleas from late night television hosts and more. Whats clear is that people want to help and that a lot of the early politicizing and speculating has slowed down in lieu of actual support. That is really the backbone of America and what makes it a strong nation; not being divided and arguing petty points, but coming together for its people.

The losses in Orlando have impacted a lot of people, including, according to EW, a team member from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter attractions at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Luis Vielma was a team member at one of the rides and also one of the victims from Sunday and, needless to say, the whole team at Wizarding World of Harry Potter felt that blow.

Luis Vielma worked on the Harry Potter ride at Universal. He was 22 years old. I can't stop crying. #Orlando pic.twitter.com/Nz2ZCWxNsS  J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 13, 2016

The crew at Wizarding World of Harry Potter held a tribute for the fallen 22-year-old where they all raised their wands in honor of Vielma and wow, is it difficult to watch. If the impact of this shooting hadnt reached you yet and you have even a small affinity for Harry Potter, this could be that moment where it hits you.

(Via EW)
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A woman who entered the yard of an Austin-area home was mauled to death by several dogs on the property, the Travis County Sheriff's Office said on Thursday.

The body of Erin McCleskey, 36, was found by a caretaker who went to the property to feed the dogs, the Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

McCleskey, a process server, appears to have been at the property on a business-related matter, according to the statement.

Six dogs on the property were impounded, including ones that appeared to be retriever and Great Pyrenees mixes. The Sheriff's Office said the dogs were being be held in rabies quarantine.

Local media has reported that the Sheriff's Office said it does not believe it will bring charges against the dogs' owner, who was not at the residence at the time of the incident.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz)
Two things that you probably hate shopping for most: bathing suits and jeans. Facebook user Ruth Clemens was at H&M on a hunt for the latter, but was discouraged when she wasn't able to zip up the store's biggest size. That size being a mere 16.

"I'm normally a size 14 on my hips (occasionally 16 if buying trousers) so I thought I'd try them on," Clemens explained in an open letter to the clothing store on Facebook that has so far been shared over 10,000 times. "It did not go well."

In an interview, Clemens explained that in the United Kingdom, H&M carries jeans up to a U.K. size 16 (which is about a United States size 10-12.) Everything above a 16 is considered part of its plus-size range, which has very limited quantities in stores. "In most clothes  especially the fashionable/revealing clothes  they only go up to a 16," she said.

She ended the open letter on Facebook saying that, although it shouldn't matter, she is not overweight and her body is pretty average shape-wise.

"It's already difficult enough for me to find clothes that fit well because of my height, why are you making jeans that are unrealistically small?" she asks in the post. "Am I too fat for your everyday range? Should I just accept that accessible and affordable high street and on-trend fashion isn't for people like me?"

This Woman Penned a Powerful Letter to H&M Calling Out Its

Clemens received thousands of comments on her post, with women offering their own complaints and experiences with the store's sizing.

"So glad it's not just me. I don't ever buy bottoms from H&M as they are TINY sizes!!!!! It's quite disheartening to fail fitting into a pair of trousers two sizes above what you normally wear," one person wrote. "I've recently lost a bit of weight and very proud. However, a recent shopping trip to H&M made me feel sh*t when a size 12 wouldn't come close to fitting and I had to buy 14," said another.

Story continues

Source: Facebook

H&M responded to the post writing, "Hi Ruth, thank you so much for your feedback. We are sorry to hear about your experience in store recently. We always want our customers to have an enjoyable time when shopping in store and to leave feeling confident in themselves. At H&M we make clothing for all our stores around the world, so the sizing can vary depending on the style, cut and fabric. We value all feedback and will take on board the points you and other customers have raised."

Many people of late have taken to Facebook to voice the issues they've faced with different clothing stores' sizing. Last month, Facebook user Missy Rogers showed how a current size 10 pair of shorts has the exact same waistline and width as a size 4 pair she bought two years back.

And it's not just women pointing this out. In May, Facebook user Benjamin Ashton Cooper's post went viral after he was "pissed" that his girlfriend's XL large shirt fit his relatively petite frame. "I am not an extra large man, and, more importantly, a woman my size is NOT an extra large woman," he wrote. A few weeks later, Michael Jammer did the same thing and asked why women's clothing was so small, writing, "Do I look extra large to any of you? NO, either is she, so why do these companies continue to shame women and their weight?"

H&M sells a limited amount of plus-size clothing in its U.K. stores, but that does not make up for the fact that its version of "plus" is a U.S. size 10. (The average clothing size for women in the U.S. is said to be between size 12 and 14.)

Thankfully, there are people  and body-positive brands like ModCloth and lingerie company Neon Moon  who have dropped numbers or merged bigger sizes with smaller ones and spoken out to combat these size issues.

As for H&M, like Clemens says, "Sort it out, would you?"
GENEVA (Reuters) - A computer technician at the Geneva office of the law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers leak was detained several days ago on suspicion of recently removing large amounts of data, Swiss newspaper Le Temps reported on Wednesday, citing a source close to the case.

A spokesman for the Geneva prosecutor's office confirmed to Reuters that it had opened an investigation following a criminal complaint by the law firm, Mossack Fonseca, but declined to comment further.

Panama-based Mossack Fonseca, which specialises in setting up offshore companies, has denied wrongdoing and said it was the victim of a data hack.

In a statement late on Wednesday, Mossack Fonseca said it had filed complaints in several places against people who might have been involved with breaching its data.

"We are confident that the authorities in each of these countries will carry out the corresponding processes transparently and effectively in every case," it said.

The paper said the suspect detained in Geneva had denied any wrongdoing but was accused of theft of data, unauthorised access and breach of trust following a complaint lodged by Mossack Fonseca.

The newspaper said there was no evidence the detained man was responsible for the massive Panama Papers data leak in April, which embarrassed several world leaders and shone a spotlight on the shadowy world of offshore companies.

The paper said the prosecutor had searched the company's office and seized computer equipment, and checks were underway to see if the detained man had stolen data and, if so, how much and when.

The prosecutor's spokesman declined to comment on that information.

The Geneva prosecutor's office began a criminal inquiry in early April, shortly after the leaks that revealed many offshore companies set up by lawyers and institutions in the Swiss financial centre.

(Reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay; Additional reporting by Eli Moreno in Panama City; Editing by Larry King and Bill Rigby)
GENEVA (Reuters) - A computer technician at the Geneva office of the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers leak was detained several days ago on suspicion of recently removing large amounts of data, Swiss newspaper Le Temps reported on Wednesday, citing a source close to the case. A spokesman for the Geneva prosecutor's office confirmed to Reuters that it had opened an investigation following a criminal complaint by the law firm, Mossack Fonseca, but declined to comment further. Panama-based Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in setting up offshore companies, has denied wrongdoing and said it was the victim of a data hack. In a statement late on Wednesday, Mossack Fonseca said it had filed complaints in several places against people who might have been involved with breaching its data. "We are confident that the authorities in each of these countries will carry out the corresponding processes transparently and effectively in every case," it said. The paper said the suspect detained in Geneva had denied any wrongdoing but was accused of theft of data, unauthorized access and breach of trust following a complaint lodged by Mossack Fonseca. The newspaper said there was no evidence the detained man was responsible for the massive Panama Papers data leak in April, which embarrassed several world leaders and shone a spotlight on the shadowy world of offshore companies. The paper said the prosecutor had searched the company's office and seized computer equipment, and checks were underway to see if the detained man had stolen data and, if so, how much and when. The prosecutor's spokesman declined to comment on that information. The Geneva prosecutor's office began a criminal inquiry in early April, shortly after the leaks that revealed many offshore companies set up by lawyers and institutions in the Swiss financial center. (Reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay; Additional reporting by Eli Moreno in Panama City; Editing by Larry King and Bill Rigby)
An IT worker at Mossack Fonseca  the offshore law firm at the center of the Panama Papers  has been arrested in Geneva as part of an effort to trace the document leak.

The law firm accused the IT worker of information theft and breach of trust. That worker has not been publicly identified, the Guardian reported.

It was a person under the alias John Doe who offered the internal files from the law firm to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung last year. But the newspaper said the person who was arrested is not John Doe.

A lawyer for Mossack Fonseca said data were taken from the workers computer.

Its on this basis that we have filed a complaint for data theft and breach of the law firms trust, the lawyer, Thierry Ulmann, said, according to the Guardian. Very detailed investigations are being undertaken by Geneva police to analyse the digital traces and shed light on this theft of data.

The workers lawyers have denied all accusations, the Guardian reported.
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If you're want to make a style statement with your car, there's nothing quite like a set of shiny wheels.

Someone certainly thinks so. A company from Dubai has set a new record for the world's most expensive tyres according to Guinness World Records. The wheels are encrusted with gold and diamonds, with a set of four being sold for an exorbitant $600,000 (2.2 million dirhams).

SEE ALSO: The worlds most expensive flight costs $38,000  one way

The tyres have been designed by Dubai's Z Tyre and produced by a Chinese tyre factory, but their staggering price tag comes from their glittering embellishments. The tyres are decorated with 24-carat gold leaf work, done by the same craftsmen who are working on a new presidential palace in Abu Dhabi. Finally, Joaillier Prive, an artisan jeweller in Italy, has added specially-chosen diamond stones to the tyres.

The profits from the sale will be donated to a charity that focuses on improving access to education across the world.

The previous record for the world's most expensive tyres was held by Michelin's Bugatti Veyron tyres, which were priced at 10,000 pounds for a set of four tyres. Unlike these however, the Michelin tyres were valued for the Veyron rubber.
WWE signed an exclusive multi-year content distribution agreement with Chinas PPTV n Wednesday, TheWrap has learned.

Starting June 28, for the first time ever, fans in China will be able to stream all three hours of Raw and two hours of SmackDown on demand exclusively on PPTV and PPTV Sports.

Fans can download the PPTV App and watch Raw and SmackDown on Smart TVs, set-top boxes, mobile devices and tablets, as well as on PPTVs website.

Also Read: WWE Star Luke Harper Cast in Horror Movie 'Mohawk'

WWE short-form content will be available on PPTVs digital platforms and PPTV will use popular digital and social platforms, including WeChat and Sina Weibo, to share WWE content with fans throughout China. PPTV will also launch and manage a new WWE website in China.

In addition, Bin Wang (pictured above with Paul Triple H Levesque) has officially become the first-ever Chinese talent signed to a developmental contract. At 6-foot-3, 220 pounds, the 22-year-old from Anhui has been training for the past two years in Japan at Inoki Genome Federation (IGF), a wrestling and MMA promotion founded by WWE Hall of Famer Antonio Inoki.

Wang will relocate to Orlando, Florida, where he will begin training out of the state-of-the-art WWE Performance Center.

Also Read: How Live WWE 'Smackdown' Will Take Show's TV Ratings to the Top Turnbuckle

Todays historic announcements further demonstrate WWEs long-term commitment to China, WWE chairman and CEO Vince McMahon said. Partnerships with PPTV and Expo Group, as well as the signing of Bin Wang, will enable us to engage our fans in China like never before.

WWE will return to China with its first live event in more than three years with WWE Live 2016 China on September 10. WWE Superstars scheduled to appear include current WWE World Heavyweight Champion Roman Reigns, current WWE Womens Champion Charlotte and WWE Superstars John Cena, Seth Rollins and Sasha Banks.

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WWE Dumps Brooklyn Brawler After 30 Years
For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  June 16, 2016  Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include Royal Dutch Shell plc (RDS.A), BP plc (BP), Eni SpA (E), Statoil ASA (STO) and TOTAL SA ( TOT).

Today, Zacks is promoting its ''Buy'' stock recommendations. Get #1Stock of the Day pick for free.

Here are highlights from Wednesdays Analyst Blog:

Is Iran the Worlds Next Big Oil Story

Iranian oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said that the countrys oil output has now gone above 3.8 million barrels per day, of which about 2 million barrels are exported.

Production Up Significantly from Sanction Days

The current production marks a considerable jump from an average of around 2.8 million barrels per day in 2013 when Tehran was under international sanctions for its nuclear program. Exports languished at about 980,000 barrels per day.

On November 24, 2015, Iran reached a temporary accord with six world powers  the U.S., Great Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany  to restrict its nuclear activities in return for the Persian nations relief from international sanctions on oil, auto parts, gold and precious metals. Ultimately, the embargo was lifted in January this year after certification from the UN nuclear watchdog.

Is Iran the Next Big Oil Destination?

Despite oils massive recovery since February, its still under $50 and far below the breakeven price for many energy companies. The commoditys collapse has threatened the industrys creditworthiness by hurting cash flows, drying up liquidity and pummeling producers profit margins.

Consequently, multinational oil producers have been looking at opportunities to explore/produce oil in a way that is less capital intensive and requires low operational cost. With an estimate saying that a barrel of crude in Iran can be produced by shelling out just $12 as compared to around $36 in the U.S., the country is a prime candidate to become the next big destination for oil biggies.

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Oils-Energy Sector Price Index

Oils-Energy Sector Price Index

A Head Start for European Companies

With the U.S. still maintaining certain bilateral sanctions, domestic companies cant enter into physical partnerships with their Iranian counterparts. However, some U.S. firms have been trying to bypass this by approaching the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)  the Treasury Departments sanctions administrator  for licenses in specific sectors including oil and gas, provided these do not hurt U.S. policy interests.

However, there is no such problem for European and Asian companies, who have already started negotiating with local players to expand and fortify their presence in the Iranian market. Biggies from across the pond like Royal Dutch Shell plc (RDS.A), BP plc (BP), Eni SpA (E), Statoil ASA (STO) and TOTAL SA ( TOT) are currently in talks with the OPEC members policy makers regarding investment of as much as $25 billion in the countrys upstream sector till 2020.

Upcoming Oilfield Tenders Eyed

In order to restore the health of its energy industry following years of crippling sanctions, the Iranian government plans to solicit bids for oilfield development rights from foreign operators starting June 21. If reports are to be believed, as many as 70 different fields could be on offer for joint venture with foreign partners.

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About Zacks Equity Research

Zacks Equity Research provides the best of quantitative and qualitative analysis to help investors know what stocks to buy and which to sell for the long-term.

Continuous coverage is provided for a universe of 1,150 publicly traded stocks. Our analysts are organized by industry which gives them keen insights to developments that affect company profits and stock performance. Recommendations and target prices are six-month time horizons.

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Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978. The later formation of the Zacks Rank, a proprietary stock picking system; continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Register for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.





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ROYAL DTCH SH-A (RDS.A): Free Stock Analysis Report



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ENI SPA-ADR (E): Free Stock Analysis Report



STATOIL ASA-ADR (STO): Free Stock Analysis Report



TOTAL FINA SA (TOT): Free Stock Analysis Report



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For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  June 16, 2016 - Stocks in this weeks article include: Dycom Industries Inc. (DY), QVC Group (QVCA), Retrophin, Inc. (RTRX), Facebook, Inc. (FB) and Gener8 Maritime Inc. ( GNRT).

Screen of the Week of Zacks Investment Research:



5 Profitable Stocks for Enhancing Your Portfolio Returns

The profitability of a company primarily indicates its ability to generate surplus sales revenue to not only meet all its expenses but also create stable returns for its investors. However, it is not necessary that a profitable company will succeed in generating favorable returns. Thats because such a company might have certain fundamental weaknesses, which may hamper its stock price.

But, several studies indicate that a company with high profitability generally produces attractive returns.

Here, we have used profitability ratios to arrive at a detailed understanding of a companys profitability position. From a variety of profitability ratios we have selected net income ratio, as it is the simplest and most effective profitability metric.

Net Income Ratio

Net income ratio shows the bottom line of a company. It reflects the percentage of net income to total sales revenue. Using net income ratio one can measure a companys effectiveness to pay all its operating and non-operating expenses from its sales revenue. A higher net income ratio normally implies a companys ability to generate ample sales revenue and successfully manage all its business functions.

Screening Parameters

Net income ratio is not the only indicator of future winners. As such, we have added a few additional criteria to arrive at a winning strategy.

Zacks Rank equal to #1: Only Strong Buy stocks are allowed. With the Zacks Rank proving itself to be one of the best rating systems out there, this is a great way to start things off.

12-Month Trailing Sales and Net Income Growth Higher than X Industry: Stocks that possess higher sales and net income growth in the last 12 months showcase better financial performance.

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12-Month Trailing Net Income Ratio Higher than X Industry: High net income ratio indicates a companys solid profitability.

% Rating Strong Buy greater than 70%: This indicates that 70% of the analysts covering these stocks are optimistic.

Here are 5 of the 12 stocks that qualified the screen:

Dycom Industries Inc. (DY) is a leading provider of specialty contracting services throughout the United States. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.08 last quarter, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 75 cents. Dycom Industries also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of 19.6%.

QVC Group (QVCA) markets and sells various consumer products primarily through live televised shopping programs, websites and other interactive media. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported EPS of 36 cents last quarter, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 18 cents. QVC Group also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of more than 40.3%.

Retrophin, Inc. (RTRX) is a pharmaceutical company that focuses on the development and commercialization of drugs in order to treat serious diseases. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported EPS of 14 cents last quarter, in contrast to the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a loss of 25 cents. Retrophin also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of more than 100%.

Facebook, Inc. (FB) operates a social networking website worldwide, where users connect, share and communicate with each other. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported EPS of 57 cents last quarter, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 44 cents. Facebook also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of 11.8%.

Gener8 Maritime Inc. (GNRT) offers marine transportation services. It is involved in the transportation of crude oil and petroleum products. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported EPS of 76 cents last quarter, outpacing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 69 cents. Gener8 Maritime also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of 1.4%.

While backtesting over a two-year timeframe (June 06, 2014 to June 03, 2016), a portfolio following this strategy provided a total return of 20.3% compared with the S&P 500s return of 6.8%. Thus, this strategy may prove profitable for those looking to beat the markets.

Get the rest of the stocks on the list and start putting this and other ideas to the test. It can all be done with the Research Wizard stock picking and back-testing software.

The Research Wizard is a great place to begin. It's easy to use. Everything is in plain language. And it's very intuitive. Start your Research Wizard trial today. And the next time you read an economic report, open up the Research Wizard, plug your finds in, and see what gems come out.

Click here to sign up for a free trial to the Research Wizard today .

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance .

Zacks Restaurant Recommendations: In addition to dining at these special places, you can feast on their stock shares. A Zacks Special Report spotlights 5 recent IPOs to watch plus 2 stocks that offer immediate promise in a booming sector. Download it free 

Sign up now for your free trial today and start picking better stocks immediately. And with the backtesting feature, you can test your ideas to see how you can improve your trading in both up markets and down markets. Dont wait for the market to get better before you decide to do better. Start learning how to be a better trader today: https://at.zacks.com/?id=111



Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.



About Screen of the Week

Zacks.com created the first and best screening system on the web earning the distinction as the "#1 site for screening stocks" by Money Magazine. But powerful screening tools is just the start. That is why Zacks created the Screen of the Week to highlight profitable stock picking strategies that investors can actively use. Each week, Zacks Profit from the Pros free email newsletter shares a new screening strategy. Learn more about it here https://at.zacks.com/?id=112

About Zacks

Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978. The later formation of the Zacks Rank, a proprietary stock picking system; continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Click here for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros.

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zacksresearch

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZacksInvestmentResearch

Zacks Investment Research is under common control with affiliated entities (including a broker-dealer and an investment adviser), which may engage in transactions involving the foregoing securities for the clients of such affiliates.



Contact: Jim Giaquinto

Company: Zacks.com

Phone: 312-265-9268

Email: pr@zacks.com

Visit: www.Zacks.com

Zacks.com provides investment resources and informs you of these resources, which you may choose to use in making your own investment decisions. Zacks is providing information on this resource to you subject to the Zacks "Terms and Conditions of Service" disclaimer. www.zacks.com/disclaimer .

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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DYCOM INDS (DY): Free Stock Analysis Report



LIBERTY M INT-A (QVCA): Free Stock Analysis Report



RETROPHIN INC (RTRX): Free Stock Analysis Report



FACEBOOK INC-A (FB): Free Stock Analysis Report



GENER8 MARITIME (GNRT): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  June 16, 2016 - Stocks in this weeks article include: Lear Corp. (LEA), Air Methods Corp. (AIRM), DST Systems Inc. (DST), Express Scripts Holding Company (ESRX) and Whirlpool Corp. ( WHR).

Screen of the Week of Zacks Investment Research:



Invest in These 5 GARP Stocks for Solid Returns

Growth at a reasonable price, or GARP, is an effective investment strategy for investors interested in building up a portfolio that offers characteristics of both value and growth investing. Investors following GARP seek to acquire stocks that have solid growth prospects, but are available at discounted prices. Unlike a blend strategy, a portfolio, which is using GARP investing, is expected to have stocks that offer the best of both value and growth investing rather than investing in both value and growth stocks.

GARP Metrics  Mix of Growth & Value Metrics

Growth Metrics

Both strong earnings growth history and impressive earnings growth prospects in the coming years are the main concepts that GARP investors borrow from the growth investing strategy. However, they choose stocks with a more stable and reasonable growth rate instead of choosing those with extremely high growth rates. Growth rates between 10% and 20% are considered ideal in GARP strategy.

Another growth metric that is considered by both growth and GARP investors is return on equity (ROE). GARP investors look for strong and higher ROE compared to the industry average to identify superior stocks. Moreover, stocks with positive cash flows get precedence in GARP investing.

Value Metrics

GARP investing gives precedence to one of the popular value metrics  price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. Though this investing style chooses stocks with higher P/E ratios compared to value investors, they avoid picking companies with extremely high P/E ratios.

Moreover, price-to-book value (P/B) ratio is another value metric that is considered in GARP investing.

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Using GARP principles, we have run a screen to identify stocks that should offer good returns in the near term.

Screening Parameters

 Zacks Rank less than or equal to #2

(Only Strong Buy and Buy rated stocks can get through.)

 Last 5-year EPS & projected 35 year EPS growth rates between 10% and 20%

(Strong EPS growth history and prospects ensure improving business.)

 ROE (over the past 12 months) greater than the industry average

(Higher ROE compared to the industry average indicates superior stocks.)

 P/E and P/B ratios less than X-industry average

(P/E and P/B ratios less than that of the industry indicate that the stocks are undervalued.)

Using these criteria weve narrowed down the universe of over 7,700 stocks to only seven.

Here are five of the seven stocks that met these criteria:

Lear Corp. (LEA) is a leading global supplier of automotive seating systems, electrical distribution systems and electronics. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported earnings per share (EPS) of $3.40 last quarter, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.83. LEA also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of more than 13.1%.

Air Methods Corp. (AIRM) provides air medical emergency transport services and systems throughout North America. This Zacks Rank #1 company reported EPS of 50 cents last quarter, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 42 cents. AIRM also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of more than 11.3%.

DST Systems Inc. (DST) provides sophisticated information processing and computer software services and products. This Zacks Rank #2 company reported EPS of $1.61 last quarter, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.46. DST also has an average four-quarter earnings surprise of more than 3.2%.

Express Scripts Holding Company (ESRX) is one of the largest pharmacy benefit management companies in North America. This Zacks Rank #2 company has a last five-year average EPS growth rate of 17.8% and expected next five-year growth rate of 11.6%.

Whirlpool Corp. (WHR) provides sophisticated information processing and computer software services and products. This Zacks Rank #2 company has a last five-year average EPS growth rate of 10.4% and expected next five-year growth rate of 17%.

The Research Wizard is a great place to begin. It's easy to use. Everything is in plain language. And it's very intuitive. Start your Research Wizard trial today. And the next time you read an economic report, open up the Research Wizard, plug your finds in, and see what gems come out.

Click here to sign up for a free trial to the Research Wizard today .

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance .

Zacks Restaurant Recommendations: In addition to dining at these special places, you can feast on their stock shares. A Zacks Special Report spotlights 5 recent IPOs to watch plus 2 stocks that offer immediate promise in a booming sector. Download it free 

Sign up now for your free trial today and start picking better stocks immediately. And with the backtesting feature, you can test your ideas to see how you can improve your trading in both up markets and down markets. Dont wait for the market to get better before you decide to do better. Start learning how to be a better trader today: https://at.zacks.com/?id=111



Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.



About Screen of the Week

Zacks.com created the first and best screening system on the web earning the distinction as the "#1 site for screening stocks" by Money Magazine. But powerful screening tools is just the start. That is why Zacks created the Screen of the Week to highlight profitable stock picking strategies that investors can actively use. Each week, Zacks Profit from the Pros free email newsletter shares a new screening strategy. Learn more about it here https://at.zacks.com/?id=112

About Zacks

Zacks.com is a property of Zacks Investment Research, Inc., which was formed in 1978. The later formation of the Zacks Rank, a proprietary stock picking system; continues to outperform the market by nearly a 3 to 1 margin. The best way to unlock the profitable stock recommendations and market insights of Zacks Investment Research is through our free daily email newsletter; Profit from the Pros. In short, it's your steady flow of Profitable ideas GUARANTEED to be worth your time! Click here for your free subscription to Profit from the Pros.

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zacksresearch

Join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZacksInvestmentResearch

Zacks Investment Research is under common control with affiliated entities (including a broker-dealer and an investment adviser), which may engage in transactions involving the foregoing securities for the clients of such affiliates.



Contact: Jim Giaquinto

Company: Zacks.com

Phone: 312-265-9268

Email: pr@zacks.com

Visit: www.Zacks.com

Zacks.com provides investment resources and informs you of these resources, which you may choose to use in making your own investment decisions. Zacks is providing information on this resource to you subject to the Zacks "Terms and Conditions of Service" disclaimer. www.zacks.com/disclaimer .

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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



LEAR CORPORATN (LEA): Free Stock Analysis Report



AIR METHODS CRP (AIRM): Free Stock Analysis Report



DST SYSTEMS (DST): Free Stock Analysis Report



EXPRESS SCRIPTS (ESRX): Free Stock Analysis Report



WHIRLPOOL CORP (WHR): Free Stock Analysis Report



To read this article on Zacks.com click here.
Two new releases took over the two top spots on the national home video sales charts the week ended June 12, led by Walt Disney Studios Zootopia, the animated buddy cop film about a rabbit cop and a red fox con that earned $338.4 million in U.S. theaters.

Zootopia, from Walt Disney Animation Studios, is the 55th film in the studios celebrated Disney Animated Classics line, which dates back to 1937s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The film outsold second-ranked 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, from Paramount, by a margin of nearly six to one, according to NPD VideoScan data.

The Michael Bay-helmed 13 Hours, a docudrama that follows six members of a security team who fight to defend the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, debuted at No. 2 on both the VideoScan overall disc sales chart and the dedicated Blu-ray Disc sales chart. The film racked up a domestic theatrical gross of $52.9 million.

The previous weeks top seller, Lionsgates Gods of Egypt, slipped to No. 4 on both charts its second week of release, one spot behind 20th Century Foxs Deadpool, the superhero super-hit that spent three weeks at No. 1 before getting dislodged a week ago by Gods, an action movie about feuding Egyptian deities that grossed just $31.1 million in U.S. theaters.

Rounding out the top five on both charts was Disneys Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which has now spent 10 weeks in the top five.

Zootopia generated 60% of its total unit sales from Blu-ray Disc, compared to 63% for 13 Hours.

Home Media Magazine market research shows that for the first five months of this year, Blu-ray Disc sales are up 3% in units sold and 6% in revenue.

On Home Media Magazines rental chart, Deadpool rose to No. 1 now that its 28-day holdback from Redbox is over, while 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi debuted at No. 2.

Gods of Egypt slipped to No. 3 after having bowed at No. 1 on the rental chart the previous week.

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Rounding out the top five are Universal Pictures Ride Along 2 at No. 4 and another Universal film, the horror flick The Boy, at No. 5. The Boy also is a month-old release that just became available at Redbox last week.

Thomas K. Arnold is Editorial Director of Home Media Magazine, http://www.homemediamagazine.com.

Top 20 NPD VideoScan First Alert, powered by Nielsen, chart for the week ended 6/12/16:

1. Zootopia (new)

2. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (new)

3. Deadpool

4. Gods of Egypt

5. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

6. Risen

7. Hail, Caesar! (new)

8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

9. The Revenant

10. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

11. The Martian

12. Dirty Grandpa

13. The Good Dinosaur

14. How to Be Single

15. Triple 9

16. Now You See Me

17. The 5th Wave

18. Rick and Morty: Season 2 (new)

19. Jarhead 3: The Siege (new)

20. Finding Nemo

Top 10 Home Media Magazine rental chart for the week ended 6/05/16:

1. Deadpool

2. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (new)

3. Gods of Egypt

4. Ride Along 2

5. The Boy

6. Dirty Grandpa

7. Joy

8. The Revenant

9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

10. Zoolander 2

For complete sales and rental charts, visit HomeMediaMagazine.com.

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Narcos is one of Netflix's best original series, and fans of the first season were undoubtedly left wanting more. Luckily for them, the second season of Narcos is coming soon and Netflix released the first teaser trailer for it. There isn't every much there in the way of action, but you'll instantly be reminded how much you love this show.

DONT MISS: Leaked iPhone 7 photo shows a major change we never saw coming

Narcos season 2 debuts on Netflix on September 2nd, but we have no idea what's going to happen. The short trailer doesnt offer any hints either. It only shows Wagner Moura, who plays Pablo Escobar in the series, with three dates flashing on the screen. December 1st, 1949, or Escobars birthday; December 2nd, 1993, which is when he died; and September 2nd, 2016, which is when Netflix will make the new season of its hit show available for online streaming.

Just like the first season, Narcos season 2 has 10 episodes. In addition to Moura, youll be happy to see Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal return to the show. They play DEA agents Steve Murphy and Javier Pena, who went after Escobar in real-life.

If you havent seen the first season of Narcos, just head over to Netflix right now and start binging. Theres plenty of time until the next season premieres to catch up on this drug drama inspired by actual events.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2m7bPax-00

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This article was originally published on BGR.com
BERLIN (Reuters) - A major cyber attack could trigger a collective response by NATO, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview published by Germany's Bild newspaper on Thursday. "A severe cyber attack may be classified as a case for the alliance. Then NATO can and must react," the newspaper quoted Stoltenberg as saying. "How, that will depend on the severity of the attack." He spoke after a decision this week by NATO ministers to designate cyber as an official operational domain of warfare, along with air, sea, and land. In 2014 the U.S.-led alliance assessed that cyber attacks could potentially trigger NATO'S mutual defense guarantee, or Article 5. That means NATO could potentially respond to a cyber attack with conventional weapons, although the response would be decided by consensus. The NATO chief told Bild that the alliance needed to adjust to the increasingly complex series of threats it faces, which is why NATO members have agreed to defend against attacks in cyberspace just as they do against attacks launched against targets on land, in the air and at sea. The United States and other NATO states have become increasingly vocal about cyber attacks launched from Russia, China and Iran, but officials say it remains hard to determine if such attacks stem from government bodies or private groups. Recognizing cyber as an official domain of warfare will allow NATO to improve planning and better manage resources, training and personnel needs for cyber defense operations, said a NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official stressed that NATO's cyber activities would remain purely defensive. "We have no offensive cyber doctrine or offensive cyber capability. And there are no plans for NATO as a body to use such capabilities. NATO's core cyber defense task is to defend NATO's own networks," said the official. Individual members have already declared cyber an operational warfare domain, including the United States, which said in 2011 that it would respond to hostile attacks in cyberspace as it would to any other threat. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Dan Grebler and Mark Heinrich)
From GM (GM) and Audi to Lyft and Google (GOOGL), there's no shortage of companies pouring money into self-driving car research.

Yamaha, however, is taking a different approach by combining autonomous driving with humanoid robots.



Motobot is an autonomous motor-cycle riding robot, being researched and designed by Yamaha and SRI International.



Robot-related research has made strides in artificial intelligence in recent years, but physical advancements have been limited. While some robots can now move seamlessly and find balance and others are learning to use staircases, Motobot is riding motorcycles.



But don't expect much more from it.



"Robots should have a very specific purpose," Hiroshi Saijou, Yamaha's Motor Ventures CEO and Managing Director told CNBC. "He cannot walk, he cannot speak, he cannot listen, but once he rides on a motorcycle, he's [more] superior than humans."



The idea was conceived to help the Japanese company evolve safety and design of its motorcycles, while simultaneously investing in artificial intelligence.



There isn't an immediate goal for Motobot's function in daily life, as it's still learning from the project, but Saijou said, it could eventually serve as a delivery method to homes or be used in large fields for manufacturing.





According to Sajiou, the human robot could even eventually be used to operate other forms of transit, including marine transportation and aviation.



Yamaha presented Motobot in Singapore at Echelon 2016, a gathering of thousands of tech entrepreneurs. Southeast Asia is currently Yamaha's biggest motorcycle market, which is why Saijou attended from Silicon Valley, where the company's labs are located, to spread awareness and potentially collaborate with other companies.



"If we're working in Japan, we should follow traditional Japanese style," Sajiou said. "But if we're looking at disruptive innovation, we should have an open innovation approach, so Silicon Valley is the best place for us to execute that."



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Motobot can currently ride up to 100 kilometers peer hour and next year, is expected to move at twice that speed.



By the end of 2017, the goal for Motobot is to race againstand beatValentino Rossi, the nine-time world champion in Grand Prix Motorcycle Racing.

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(credit: ^ndrew)

In 2012, the online news site Gawker published a two-minute excerpt of a sex tape involving Terry Bollea, known more famously as Hulk Hogan. In response, Hogan brought lawsuits in federal and Florida state courts, citing an invasion of privacy and an inflection of emotional distress, among other claims. The case eventually went to trial, where Hogan was ultimately awarded $140 million in damages.

In recent weeks, this story has been complicated by two developments. In May, PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel revealed his financial support for Hogans fight against Gawker, swearing to fight back against the outlet. And on June 10, Gawker Media announced that it is filing for bankruptcy and going up for sale.

Joining We the People to discuss Gawker, Hulk Hogan, and the First Amendment are two leading experts on press freedom and privacy.

Jane Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she is also the Director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law.

Amy Gajda is Professor of Law at Tulane University Law School. She is also the author of The First Amendment Bubble, which she discussed at the Center in February 2015. You can watch that program on constitutioncenter.org or listen to it on We the Peoples companion podcast, Live at Americas Town Hall.



Download this episode (right click and save)

Attention, We the People listeners!

Become a Member of the National Constitution Center at the $125 Constitution Framer level or higher by July 31 and you will receive a signed complimentary copy of Jeffrey Rosens new book, Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet. Make your gift today! Please email membership@constitutioncenter.org and let Jeff know how you would like him to sign your complimentary book!

The National Constitution Center is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt nonprofit, nonpartisan private organization.

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This show was engineered by David Stotz and produced by Nicandro Iannacci. Research was provided by Josh Waimberg and Tom Donnelly. The host of We the People is Jeffrey Rosen.

Get the latest constitutional news, and continue the conversation, on our Facebook page and Twitter feed.

We want to know what you think of the podcast! Email us at editor@constitutioncenter.org.

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Despite our congressional charter, the National Constitution Center is a private nonprofit; we receive little government support, and we rely on the generosity of people around the country who are inspired by our nonpartisan mission of constitutional debate and education. Please consider becoming a member to support our work, including this podcast. Visit constitutioncenter.org to learn more.

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The last week looked like a bad spell for the telecom sector as most of the major telecom stocks lost value. Although we did not find any sector specific reason for the downtrend in stock price was in line with the broader market movement as S&P 500 index was also down 2.25% in the same time frame. The Federal Open Market Committee policy meeting and concerns regarding Brexit vote continued to weigh on investor sentiment. Despite this, the sector witnessed a number of important events.

In a landmark judgment last week, the federal appeals court in Washington D.C. upheld the net neutrality rules proposed by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). This came as a major setback for the U.S. Internet service provider (ISP) industry. Several large ISPs and industry groups questioned the legal validity of the newly adopted net neutrality rules.

Immediately after the court ruling, major ISPs including AT&T Inc. T, Verizon Communications Inc. VZ, Comcast Corp. CMCSA and CenturyLink Inc. CTL together with leading ISP industry groups, such as, National Cable & Telecommunications Association and United States Telecom Association made it clear that the next round of legal battle will be fought in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Notably, the FCC had approved net neutrality rules, on Feb 26, 2015, after a majority vote. The new laws reclassified high-speed broadband (Internet) as a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act instead of section 706 of the 1996 Telecom Act.

Importantly, these regulations will be applicable to both mobile and fixed broadband networks. The reclassification of the Internet called for a radical change in the way the government treats high-speed broadband service. This will now give the FCC stronger control over the ISPs.

In the meantime, U.S. telecom behemoths Verizon and AT&T have reportedly submitted bids for the third time for the struggling web-portal operator Yahoo! Inc. YHOO.

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In addition, a consortium led by Quicken Loans Inc. founder Dan Gilbert and backed by Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett, TPG Capital LP, Advent International Corp. and a partnership of Sycamore Partners and Vector Capital Management are also reported to have submitted bids for Yahoo. All of the offers value Yahoo from about $4 billion to $6 billion except for Verizon. Verizons bid was lower -- from $3.75 billion to $4 billion -- because it doesnt include Yahoos non-core assets of patents and real estate.

According to a recent report by Light Reading, leading cable MSO (multi service operator) and media company Comcast is seriously thinking of acquiring certain useful assets of Icontrol Networks Inc., a major developer of smart-home products. The report stated that Comcast is eyeing Icontrols Zigbee-based smart home products and the majority of its patents. Moreover, Alarm.Com Inc., a competitor of Icontrol, also has an eye on a minor part of the Z-wave product portfolio together with a handful of patents and the Piper home monitoring assets that Icontrol acquired in 2014.

Meanwhile, soon after its launch of the Sling TV app for Apple Inc.s AAPL Apple TV, DISH Network Corp. DISH announced the addition of 12 Viacom, Inc. VIAB channels to the Sling TV portfolio. The satellite TV giant has been focused on expanding its Internet TV service ever since its core pay TV business started suffering due to cord cutting. The newly added 12 channels include popular ones like Comedy Central, Nick Jr., BET, NickToons, TeenNick, MTV, Spike, MTV2, Logo, CMT, TV Land and VH1. All these channels were launched a la carte at $5 per month. This will allow Sling TV subscribers to choose and pay as per their needs.

From a macro perspective, a recent research report published by the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) stated that the number of LTE (Long Term-Evolution) subscribers worldwide has crossed 1.29 billion in the first quarter of 2016. In the first quarter alone LTE subscriptions grew around 182 million. At this rate, 4G LTE is set to outnumber 3G (all forms of 3G technologies) subscribers globally by 2020. GSA further stated that in the last one year, 4G LTE generated over 645 million subscriptions worldwide, reflecting a whopping 100% improvement year over year.

The GSA report in May 2016 stated that 503 operators have commercially activated LTE networks across 167 countries. The LTE networks are expected to reach 550 by the end of 2016. Currently, there are approximately 168 LTE-A (LTE  Advanced) active networks, which constitute more than 30% of total LTE networks worldwide.

Read the last Telecom Stock Roundup for Jun 9, 2016.

Recap of the Weeks Most Important Stories

1. Net neutrality implies an open-Internet atmosphere which will prohibit ISPs, especially the telecom and cable TV operators, from discriminating against applications. In order to control the flow of bandwidth-consuming applications such as video streaming, the ISPs had been discriminating against several web-based contents and applications. In such a scenario, content developers have had to pay heavy sums to ISPs for accelerated data transfer. The new law, if implemented, will ban common ISP practices such as data traffic blocking, slowing any data traffic and paid prioritization. (read more: FCC Wins First Round of Legal Battle on Net Neutrality Rules.)

2. Yahoo has reportedly received more than 10 initial bids including several private equity firms. At present, Verizon and AT&T appear to be best suited to merge Yahoo into their online platforms. Internet-based information service provider giant Yahoo is currently struggling with its core businesses namely mail service, online sports, financial and general news sections and its vital online advertising technology, which includes the video advertising platform, BrightRoll. (read more: Will Verizon and AT&T Submit Third-Round Bids for Yahoo?)

3. Icontrols smart-home product platform has a strong clientele in the North American cable MSO market. However, in recent years, the company has been facing a lack of demand for its products. There are two reasons for this setback. Firstly, competition in the market has intensified and, secondly, Comcast, its major customer, has decided to develop some of the smart-home products in-house. Hence, Comcasts acquisition of the core assets of Icontrol will boost the existing product portfolio of the company. (read more: Is Comcast Mulling to Partially Acquire Icontrol Networks?)

4. Over the last couple of years, internal dynamics of the U.S. pay-TV industry have been gradually shifting from cable and satellite TV operators to low-cost, Over-the-Top (OTT) service providers. Moreover, a growing presence of online video streaming providers like Netflix and Hulu is posing a significant threat to the existing pay-TV business model. In order to check customer churn, DISH Network forayed into the OTT video delivery market with the commercial launch of Sling TV across the U.S. (read more :DISH Network Adds New Viacom Channels to Sling TV Service.)

5. LTE, the most sought after, next-generation (4G) super-fast wireless communications technology, is gaining rapid momentum worldwide. 4G wireless networks primarily aim to cope with the substantial rise in demand for high-speed wireless data services and mobile video. Wireless network standards are continuously evolving around the globe to offer faster speed. Following significant deployment of 4G LTE networks, LTE-A wireless networks are gradually finding a solid foothold globally. (read more: 4G LTE & LTE-A Network Deployment Gain Strong Momentum.)

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 2.56% 18.66% T 1.08% 22.35% S -0.79% 7.37% TMUS -5.12% 9.17% VOD -7.86% -0.23% CHL -4.85% -2.21% AMX -8.69% -20.64% CMCSA -1.38% 8.93% DISH -5.66% -9.38%

Over the last five trading sessions, share price movement of the major telecom stocks was negative. In particular, America Movil (8.69%) and Vodafone Group Plc. (7.86%) depreciated substantially. However, over the last six months, the price performance of most of the key telecom stocks showed a mixed trend. Among the stocks that gained significantly were AT&T (22.35%) and Verizon (18.66%). On the contrary, America Movil (20.64%) and DISH Network (9.38%) saw their shares depreciating in value.

Whats Next in the Telecom Sector?

Neither do we foresee any significant change in the telecom industry, nor do we see any macroeconomic factors affecting the industry in the coming week. Therefore, we expect stocks to trade in line with the broader market.

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For many people, there comes a time in life when you need a camera. A high-end camera. Not the one inside your smartphone.

Maybe you've just graduated from college and you're planning to take a vagabond tour through Asia before settling on a career path. Maybe you've just welcomed your first child into the world and you want to record every breath-taking moment of her infancy. And maybe you've reached retirement age and, at long last, purchased that RVand now you want to capture each glorious sunset you see in the U.S. national park system.



The point is, you want high-quality photos and you don't mind spending a little extra money to get them. A few years ago, you would have been shopping for an SLRone of the big, heavy cameras with interchangeable lenses that pros have used for decades. But now there are more choices, and you might even want (gasp) a point-and-shoot. Yes, really.

Let's say you have some budget for a high-end cameraaround $1,000. At that price, you'll find good options in three flavors: SLR (or single-lens reflex), mirrorless, and advanced point-and-shoot. The first two types let you swap in a variety of lenses, which improves versatility. The third type has a single non-detachable lens, but you can get all the manual controls that were once restricted to SLRs.

The most important thing is that in each category you'll find models with large image sensors and high-quality lenses, which are the key features needed to produce great pictures. And all three camera types each offer advanced features such as high dynamic range technology, which can help you capture crisper images in tough lighting situations, and 4K video recording.

But high-end cameras have their differences, too. Here's what you need to know to make a great choice.



SLRs

For decades, film SLRs set the standard for performance and operation in the camera world, and in recent years digital SLRs have taken on that mantle.



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One big advantage of an SLR is that it lets you change lenses, switching from, say, a zoom to a wide angle to a telephoto. Many digital SLRs can accept a large number of lenses from the original manufacturer and others, so if you want to build up a collection of lenses, an SLR could be for you. Another advantage of SLRsand their defining characteristicis that they use a mirror-and-prism system to let you see through the lens to compose your shot, instead of relying exclusively on an LCD. They also generally have more physical controls, like buttons, levers and knobs, which allow you to quickly access a setting on your camera. Most other cameras force you to dive into the camera's menu system.

While these cameras used to be very pricey, you can now buy an SLR camera body for $700 or less, thanks to a highly competitive market. Entry-level models usually come with a single-kit lens, but I suggest looking for a two-lens kit. The standard combination is an 18-55mm zoom and a 55-200mm zoom. You can find other options, though. The Canon Rebel T5i, for example, is available at a few retailers with an 18-55mm zoom and a 75-300mm zoom. I've seen similar deals for the Nikon D3300.

If you're looking for an SLR with a rugged build, consider the Canon EOS 70D, a camera that also excels at autofocus. For about $1,200, you can buy it with a two-lens kit (18-55mm and 55-250mm).

Mirrorless

These cameras are very popular among consumers, especially travelers, because they resemble SLRs in both their look and their capabilities, but they can be much smaller and lighter. In fact, a mirrorless camera was used to capture the rich color and the dramatic depth of field in the guitar picture (see below). As you can see, the strings and the wood grain at the very tip of the head are the only elements in sharp focus. It takes a quality lens with a wide aperture (f/2.8 or f/2) to create such stunning effects in low light. So, in many ways, mirrorless cameras very much match the quality you'll get with an SLR.

Mirrorless cameras don't have a through-the-lens viewfinder system, like SLRs. Instead, many models come with a high quality, electronic viewfinder that provides an accurate view of what the lens will see when it captures the shot. And you can still swap lenses to greatly boost the versatility of your camera system. However, there aren't quite as many lenses (yet) to choose among, largely because mirrorless cameras haven't been around as long.

The top professional-quality cameras on the market are still SLRs, but mirrorless cameras are quickly catching up in the image quality they can produce. And virtually any amateur shooter should get be able to get all the camera he or she wants from the right mirrorless model.

Some of the top models are quite pricey. For example, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 is $2,200. However, we found it worth the high price, since it has very good image quality for photos and excellent video quality. And it's fast, firing off 12 frames per second in burst mode, and has an excellent quality swiveling, touchscreen LCD that allows you to set focus and shoot by touching the display.

But you can find some bargains, as well. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G7K, for example, sells for $800, but also has very good image quality for photos and video. It also has an excellent quality LCD, though our testers found it wasn't quite as easy to use as the GH4.



Advanced Point-and-Shoots

Many consumers will find it easy to understand why a mirrorless camera can compete with an SLRthey both have interchangeable lenses, for one thing. Point-and-shoots can be a tougher sell for someone who wants a great camera. But if you're not planning to change lenses, you should really consider buying an advanced point-and-shoot. These cameras are portable, versatile, and easy to use. And, some point-and-shoots now deliver better picture quality than many SLRs and mirrorless models (when tested with a kit lens). And, two models from Sonythe $1,200 Cyber-shot DSC-RX10 II and the $950 Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 IVoffer better video quality than most SLRs.

Of course, with an advanced point-and-shoot, you have to be satisfied with the one lens you'll be using. And that goes not just for the quality of the glass, but for its other characteristics. The RX10 II, for instance, has a decent 8.3x optical zoom, which helps make it a good travel camera.

Another feature we like on that camera is that you can open up the aperture to a wide f/2.8 no matter how close you zoom in on your subject. This means you can take a shot with shallow depth-of-field even at the telephoto end of the zoom, to produce more professional-looking photos (like the two images in this article of the gymnast and fan). In contrast, the apertures with most cameras' zooms get smaller as you increase the zoom. The bottom line? In some measures of quality, a great point-and-shoot can beat many SLRs and mirrorless models.





More from Consumer Reports:

Top pick tires for 2016

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Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright  2006-2016 Consumers Union of U.S.
Former Miss North Dakota USA Samantha Edwards was found dead in her Minneapolis home on Tuesday.

John Elder, the public information officer from the Minneapolis Police Department, told TheWrap that police were called to her residence at around 7:45 a.m. and discovered her body. Investigators are waiting on the Hennipin County Medical Examiners Office to determine the cause of death.

Edwards was 37 years old and was crowned Miss North Dakota USA in 2003. She also competed in the Miss USA pageant in 2003.

Also Read: Miss USA Pageant Sparks Outrage for Asking Contestant Her Presidential Pick

The Miss USA and Miss Teen USA organization sent out a joint statement regarding Edwards death, writing, we are saddened to hear of the passing on one of the most vibrant, energetic, and full-loving titleholders we have had the honor to meet from our state pageants  Sams smile and her energy will be terribly missed.

Edwards friend, Miss Minnesota USA 2004 Jessica Dereschuk, set up a GoFundMe page to help with funeral costs. As of Thursday morning, the page had raised $18,138 dollars from 205 people.

Also Read: Fox Grabs Rights to Miss Universe, Miss USA Pageants

Samantha Edwards, affectionately known by most as Sami was one of the most vibrant, crazy, compassionate, loyal balls of energy you could ever come across in life, wrote Dereschuk. A conversation with her could either leave you full of adrenaline or utterly exhausted. She was a spitfire and with Sami you never knew what shed throw your way  but you ALWAYS knew she would be there for you. She was awesome like that.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Donald Trump's Miss USA, Miss Universe Pageants Need 'Ownership Change,' Says Reelz Chief

Donald Trump's Miss USA Crowns Olivia Jordan, Miss Oklahoma, 2015 Winner
Colombias Caracol TV and Netflix have inked an exclusive licensing pact for a couple of new series produced by Caracol. In this landmark deal, Netflix has the exclusive first window and SVOD rights to the Colombian broadcasters series Surviving Pablo Escobar (aka Popeye) and La Nina.

La Nina is currently a primetime ratings hit on Caracol in Colombia while Surviving Pablo is still in development. Both skeins will start streaming exclusively on Netflix in Latin America, the United States, Canada, Spain, Portugal and Andorra in the next few months.

Its a big deal for the Hispanic market; Netflix continues to give more importance to local content, said Caracols international sales VP Lisette Osorio.

The streaming giant is also in talks with Caracol to acquire the SVOD rights to Caracols epic telenovela The White Slave, which has aired on NBCUs Telemundo and sold across the world. Caracols 2006 telenovela hit Sin Tetas no hay Paraiso and its mega-production Pablo Escobar, el Patron del Mal have been streaming on Netflix for some time.

Surviving Pablo Escobar is based on the autobiography of John Jairo Velasquez, alias Popeye, who was the leader and commander of Escobars squadron of hitmen and gave himself up to prevent the murder of the woman he loved. Escobars death changes the dynamics within the prison where Popeye is forced to readjust his alliances.

La Nina, based on real life events, tracks a young girl who was abducted by guerrilla fighters and experienced the horrors of Colombias decades-long insurrection first-hand.

Touting cinematic production values, the 60-episode period telenovela The White Slave traces the life of a white woman raised by slaves, who years after being separated from her family, comes back to America to avenge the death of her biological parents, free her adoptive family and reunite with the love of her life.

Related stories

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Story continues

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Eicher Polaris has introduced a a unique roadside assistance program that will be available for free under the warranty timeline of one year.

By India Today Web Desk: Eicher Polaris Pvt Ltd., (a 50:50 joint venture between Eicher Motors Ltd and Polaris Industries Inc. of USA), has commenced 'Multix 24X7 Support' a unique on - road assistance program for Multix's consumers. The program will offer Multix consumers speedy and hassle free service in the event of a breakdown at any time and at any place. Under the '24X7 Support' program, customers will be covered for free under the warranty timeline of one Year.

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The program will be accessible through a nationalized toll-free number (1800 - 208 - 3775 ) providing on - site assistance.

'Multix 24X7 Support' will be available in 3500 locations spread across the country. The authorised service providers are well equipped in terms of tools, trained manpower, parts and vehicles to attend to repairs on site. And will attend to customers and tow the vehicle to the nearest workshop in the event of a breakdown.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Radhesh C Verma, Chief Executive Officer, Eicher Polaris Private Ltd. said, "Consumer satisfaction is the foundation of Eicher Polaris Private Ltd, and we want them to completely enjoy the ownership Multix. As we are committed towards our consumer the new Roadside Assistance programme, will set a new benchmark in after-sales service and customer support in the country. We are confident that our consumers will truly appreciate our new offering".

The 'Multix 24X7 Support' programme covers services such as: wheel change through spare wheel, arrangement of fuel, opening the vehicle in the event of a key lock-out, rectifying electrical problems related to the battery and fuse, on-spot repairs for complaints that can be attended to on site, and car to Multix towing or winching and towing.

The 'Multix 24?7 Support' programme will be automatically available to all new Multix purchased including existing Multix customers. Roadside Assistance services have been made popular by premium auto makers in the country and Multix is the latest to join. Eicher Polaris Private Ltd's road side assistance program is first of a kind initiative in the Personal Utility Vehicle segment that it has created and identified, the service will set new standards in the Indian automotive market.



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Durga Kami, a 68-year-old Nepali, decided to re-join his school as his wife passed away.

By India Today Web Desk: It is rightly said: there is no age to complete your education and it's never too late to go back to school. Here is an inspiring story of Durga Kami, a 68-year-old Nepali, who has decided to re-join his school as his wife passed away.



Studying at Naharay Primary School in the state, Durga lives on a hilltop in Syangia village about 250 kilometers away from Kathmandu in Nepal.

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Taking almost an hour to go to school, Durga walks down to his school, with a 14-year-old classmate, using his walking stick.

After being a father of 6 and grandfather of 8, Durga wants to become a school teacher once he finishes his education.

Details of various schools attended by Durga Kami:

At first, he went to Kaharay Primary School where he learnt the art of writing and left after completing Class 5

After seeing his enthusiasm to study, he was then invited to Shree Kala Bhairab higher secondary school by D.N Koirala, Shree Kala Bhairab's teacher

Also, the school presented him its uniform and stationery items

Presently, Kami studies in Class 10 and attends classes six days a week.

Moreover, Durga Kami has made a promise to his fellow classmate Sagar Thapa that once he passes Class 10, he will definitely cut his beard off.

In an interview to the Reuters, Kami said, "If they see an old person with white beard like me studying in school, they might get motivated as well."

Gelling up with the students of the class, 20 children in his class have nicknamed him Kami 'Baa' which means 'father' in Nepali.

He gave a motivating message that he wants to study until his death, and he hopes it would give him the confidence to ignore age obstacles.



Read: Student checks his own paper, gives 100/100 in board examination

Click here for more education related news

To get more updates on education related news, send in your query by mail to education.intoday@gmail.com



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Norway has become the first ever country in the world to ban deforestation.

By India Today Web Desk:

With Global Warming becoming a common phenomenon around the world, Norway has stood up and become a deforestation-free country. It is the first ever country in the world to issue a blanket ban on deforestation.

The Norwegian Parliament had pledged to make it a reality based on official recommendations of Norwegian Parliament's Standing Committee on Energy and Environment. The country will no longer be using products encouraging deforestation. Companies practicing deforestation won't be getting any further contracts from the government. A separate biodiversity policy will be framed soon increasing the biodiversity protection in the country.





Here are 10 steps towards environmental conservation:

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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 to education.intoday@gmail.com

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The Election Commission internal report, available exclusively with India Today, suggests that there is no provision of appointing a Parliamentary Secretary to a minister currently applicable in Delhi.

By Kapil Sharma: Is it going to be the end of the road for 21 Aam Aadmi Party lawmakers in Delhi in the office-of-profit controversy? In what is a major escalation in trouble for the Arvind Kejriwal-led party, the Election Commission has found the appointment of the 21 AAP MLAs as parliamentary secretaries invalid.

The Election Commission internal report, available exclusively with India Today, suggests that there is no provision of appointing a Parliamentary Secretary to a minister currently applicable in Delhi.

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Here are the latest updates:



India Today has accessed the internal report of the Election Commission, which examined the representations made by the 21 AAP MLAS in the office-of-profit controversy. The report clearly states that the Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi has examined the updated version of the Delhi Members of Legislative Assembly (Removal of Disqualification) Act 1997 along with all the amendments that have been made to the act so far. This means that after having examined the responses filed by the 21 AAP MLAs to the petition filed by RTI activist Prashant Patel, the EC has come to the conclusion that the appointments made by the Kejriwal government are invalid. Accusing the BJP and Congress of double standards, Kejriwal on Wednesday took on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the issue, saying it was "legal" when they did it and "illegal" when his government did so. "I request Modiji with folded hands," Kejriwal told reporters, literally folding his hands. "Your fight is with me. Beat me if you wish, do whatever you want to me but do not harass the people of Delhi. Don't try to stop the good work being done in Delhi." The AAP leader said that the 21 AAP legislators appointed as Parliamentary Secretaries by the Delhi government were its "eyes, ears and hands". Kejriwal also asked why the BJP and the Congress were questioning his government for appointing MLAs as Parliamentary Secretaries when they themselves did so when they ruled Delhi. Kejriwal's outburst came after President Pranab Mukherjee rejected a proposed legislation by the Delhi government to exempt the post of Parliamentary Secretary from the purview of "office-of-profit". On March 13, 2015, the Delhi government had passed an order appointing the 21 party MLAs as Parliamentary Secretaries. The 21 are Alka Lamba, Praveen Kumar, Sharad Kumar, Adarsh Shastri, Madan Lal, Shiv Charan Goel, Sanjeev Jha, Sarita Singh, Naresh Yadav, Jarnail Singh (Tilak Nagar), Rajesh Gupta, Anil Kumar Bajpai, Som Dutt, Avtar Singh, Vijender Garg, Jarnail Singh (Rajouri Garden), Kailash Gahlot, Manoj Kumar, Nitin Tyagi, Rajesh Rishi and Sukhbir Singh Dalal.

Also Read

Office of profit row: Target me, not people of Delhi, Kejriwal tells PM Modi

Parliamentary secretaries are the eyes, ears and hands of the AAP: Arvind Kejriwal



Big blow to AAP: President withholds Delhi govt's 'dual office bill', Kejriwal hits out at PM Modi











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The deceased, identified as Dhillu, hailed from Nalanda in Bihar.

By Indo-Asian News Service: A 22-year-old man was kidnapped from Delhi and later shot dead in Gurugram, today.

The deceased, identified as Dhillu, hailed from Nalanda in Bihar.

KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED



Sandeep Kumar, chief of the Palam Vihar police station, said that three men abducted Dhillu from Delhi's Kapashera area where he lived with his family and shot him in the fields of a Gurugram village.

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The victim was rushed to nearby hospital where he succumbed to injuries.

No one has been arrested.

ALSO READ:

Woman among six held for kidnapping, assaulting man

Man kidnapped on pretext of job





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By PTI: Kochi, Jun 16 (PTI) In a breakthrough in the brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman law student at Perumbavoor, a migrant labourer from Assam was today arrested, 50 days after the gruesome murder that had become a major issue in the recent Kerala Assembly elections.

"We have got the accused in the murder case," Additional Director General of Police, B Sandhya IPS, heading the Special Investigating Team in the case, told reporters here after the accused was brought to Aluva.

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Refusing to produce the accused Ameerul Islam before media, Sandhya said police wanted to build a strong case against him.

"We will collect more evidence, including identification parade, to build a strong prosecution," she said.

Police said 23-year old Islam, hailing from Dholda Gramam in Assams Nauga district, was taken into custody from Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu. He had left Perumbavoor soon after allegedly committing the murder on April 28.

He was brought to Aluva Police Club for interrogation with his face covered amid tight security.

The man was allegedly under the influence of alcohol when he committed the crime, police said, adding he had a "pervert" mindset.

The woman, who hailed from a poor family, was raped and brutally assaulted using sharp-edged weapons before being murdered at her house on April 28.

The rape and murder was in focus during the Assembly polls campaign with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for tardy progress in the investigation and failure to nab the culprits.

The LDF government, after assuming power on May 25, had changed the investigation team and entrusted the probe to ADGP Sandhya in its first cabinet meeting itself.

Police said the investigation would be completed after conducting the DNA test of the accused.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said in Thiruvananthapuram that the suspect in the murder of the Law student was in police custody.

"Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From yesterday onwards, the accused was under police radar," he said.

"The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police", he said.

Police said a blood stained chappal (footwear) found from a canal near the victims house was one of the key evidences in identifying the culprit.

A DNA test conducted earlier on the saliva found from the bite mark on her back, the blood found on the chappal and the lock of her room had revealed that it was only one person who committed the crime, police said.

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Over 100 police personnel, who had launched a scientific investigation into the incident, had questioned over 1,500 people. They examined finger prints of over 5000 people and went through over 20 lakh telephonic conversations before reaching the culprit, police said. PTI TGB VS SRY

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By Ananya Bhattacharya: Aamir Khan is every bit the perfectionist people know him to be. Battling the sweltering June heat, somewhere in the deepest bowels of Punjab, the superstar is shooting for his upcoming film Dangal. There are buffalo roaming around the sets with more ease than humans. After all, the tight security can do zilch when it comes to reining in the animals.

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ALSO READ: Aamir Khan's young Mahavir Singh Phogat look from Dangal

ALSO READ: Aamir Khan's Dangal kicks off with Mahavir Singh Phogat and motichoor laddoos



When we get to the sets of Dangal, some hour-and-a-half from Ludhiana, the sun is overhead and Aamir and his crew are nowhere in sight. A bus-and-Innova-ride later, we reach the sets.

An akhara (wrestling pit) stares at us, with several langot-clad pehelwans flexing their muscles in full glory. There are buffalo and cows tethered to their posts and extremely burly bouncers at the akhara-gates. Director Nitesh Tiwari and his technicians scrutinise the area well before Aamir is asked to come.

When the director screams 'Rolling,' two wrestlers wrestle their hearts out in the sand-filled akhara. Soon, Aamir walks in, a blue striped shirt and trousers and a gamchha to keep the heat at bay.

After one shot, a brief hiatus follows. Aamir comes back, dressed in a brown striped shirt and trousers now. He speaks to the people around, most of whom are visibly in awe of the PK star.

A short wrestling sequence follows, till the director yells, 'Cut!'

Some people, meanwhile, have scaled walls and climbed trees to get a better view of the star. After all, it's not every day that they see an Aamir Khan filming a big-budget film in a near-godforsaken part of the country.

(Photos: Ananya Bhattacharya)



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Many woke up to ruthless rumours about Rajinikanth's demise on Thursday morning. However, his publicist has quashed the rumours saying Thalaivar is fine and has asked his fans to wait for his tweet.

By India Today Web Desk: While the intriguing soundtrack of Kabali is making headlines in national media, certain section of social media was abuzz speculating the health condition of superstar Rajinikanth. Some online publications even went onto spread false reports suggesting that the actor has succumbed to a heart attack.

However, reliable sources - including superstar's publicist - rubbished all such rumors. They claimed that the actor is indeed in good health.



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As reported earlier, the 65-year-old actor is actually spending the vacation with his family in the US after an exhausting shooting schedule. He was also reportedly undergoing makeup tests for the mega-budgeted Enthiran 2.0.



ALSO READ: Rajinikanth takes a break from busy schedule, jets off to US on a family vacation

ALSO READ: Kabali music launched, Soundarya Rajinikanth receives the first copy of the album

According to his publicist, Rajinikanth is expected to tweet about his health condition anytime today.

Also, this marks the 30th tweet of Rajinikanth, who joined the social media in the mid of 2013. Now, he has over 3 million followers.

Clarifying all the rumors, the official confirmation from Rajinikanth's office brings a sigh of relief for the ardent fans of superstar, who were jittery about the actor's health.

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The actor also said that it was an honour to work with the superstar and that he is looking forward to working in more south films.

By India Today Web Desk: Akshay Kumar during a brand promotional even in Chennai said that there is only one superstar in the country which is Rajinikanth, according to Deccan Chronicle.

ALSO READ: Did Akshay Kumar just charge more than Rajinikanth for Shankar's Enthiran 2.0?

When the host of the event addressed the actor as "superstar Akshay Kumar', he reverted back by saying that he is not a superstar and there is only one in the country which is Rajinikanth.

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"The lady here announced my name as Superstar. But there is only one Superstar in the country - and that is Rajinikanth sir", Akshay Kumar said. Undoubtedly, the crowd went into a frenzy after hearing the statement from Khiladi Kumar.

The actor then added that it was 'dream come true' for him to work in a direct Tamil film and he is looking forward to working in more south films.

Akshay Kumar is playing the antagonist in Shankar's upcoming project 2.0, which has Rajinikanth in the lead role. Amy Jackson is playing the lead lady in the film which has music by two-time Academy Award winner AR Rahman.



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A seven-day programme, titled Arya Virangana Charitra Nirmaan Evam Atmaraksha Shivir, involves alerting participants to "cynical Muslim ploys to trick them into marriage", the organisers said.

The campaign is likely to revive the 'love jihad' controversy that reared up during by-elections in the state two years ago.

By Pankaj Sarawat: Radical right-wing groups in pollbound Uttar Pradesh's Aligarh city have announced a bid to protect "Hindu virtue" with a drive against so-called "love jihad" - what they consider a plot by Muslim youths to woo and convert Hindu women to Islam.

The campaign is likely to revive the "love jihad" controversy that reared up during by-elections in the state two years ago, driving a wedge between communities and adding accelerant to flames of religious tensions flickering since the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots.



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WHAT IS Arya VIRANGANA CHARITRA NIRMAAN EVAM ATMARAKSHA SHIVIR?

A seven-day programme, titled Arya Virangana Charitra Nirmaan Evam Atmaraksha Shivir, involves alerting participants to "cynical Muslim ploys to trick them into marriage", the organisers said.

Critics say the concept of "love jihad" infantilises Hindu women, assuming that they are incapable of thinking for themselves.

In the camp, women are also being trained in martial arts, sword fighting and other self-defence techniques.

Acharya Dharamvir, state secretary of the Arya Vir Dal, said his group's efforts to combat "love jihad" involve convincing the trainees that there's a conspiracy to convert Hindu women to Islam.



WHERE WILL THE CAMP BE HELD?



The camp is being held on the compounds of the Arya Samaj temple at Aligarh's Achal Talab area.

Nearly three dozen Hindu women are undergoing training in these classes.

While police investigations in several states have found no evidence of an organised "love jihad", some Hindu activists have stepped up what they see as necessary defensive measures, such as arms training for men and women as well as converting others "back" to Hinduism through "ghar wapsi" campaigns.

The Acharya said his organisation teaches female participants to stay on guard against Muslim men disguising themselves as Hindus to woo them.

"We have to protect our culture," he observed. His group, he said, staunchly opposes co-education, which he blamed for interfaith relationships between Hindu women and Muslim men.

Also Read

Patna police arrest 2 after Hindu woman complained of forced conversion to Islam by Facebook friend



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The deceased jawan has been identified as Signalman Ajay Singh Chaudhary, he was a member of the army's Quick Reaction Team that was the first to intercept the infiltrators on June 14.

By Ashraf Wani: Four armed terrorists were killed in an on-going operation against infiltrators on LOC in Thangdhar and Machhal sector of Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir. An army jawan lost his life in the crossfire, five others were injured.

This is the second time this week that the army foiled an infiltration bid. On Wednesday, the army killed an infiltrator in Machchal. The recent maneuver was a part of their operations to track other infiltrators.

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The deceased jawan has been identified as Signalman Ajay Singh Chaudhary. An homage was paid to Chaudhary at a ceremony at Badami Bagh cantonment in Srinagar. He was a member of the army's Quick Reaction Team that was the first to intercept the infiltrators on June 14.

Chaudhary displayed rare courage as he fought relentlessly despite being grievously wounded. Although he was evacuated from the encounter site, he succumbed to his injuries later.

COMRADES REMEMBER BRAVEHEART

According to his comrades, Chaudhary was a braveheart and was both professional and poised in his approach. He was a native of Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan and is survived by his 10-month-old son and wife Meena Devi.

"Such exemplary acts always serve as an inspiration not only to uniformed community but also to the entire nation," said Chinar Corps Commander, Lt General Satish Dua while remembering Chaudhary.

Dua further added that Chaudhary's family would continue to remain a part of the service fraternity and that the organisation and the whole country stood by them in their grief.

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Aryan Khan and Navya Naveli's friends have extended their vacation in Mumbai. Aryan took to Instagram to share the picture.

By India Today Web Desk: Aryan Khan and Navya Naveli graduated from Sevenoaks School. They attended their Graduation ceremony along with their parents. And after the ceremony, Aryan, Navya and their friends have been holidaying. They first headed to Thailand and now their friends have extended their vacation in Mumbai.



ALSO SEE: Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan and Amitabh Bachchan's granddaughter Navya are now graduates

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Aryan and Navya are taking their friends in and around the city. Shah Rukh Khan's son took to Instagram to share the picture. And it seems like they are enjoying Mumbai's nightlife.

Rumours are rife that both Aryan and Navya are eyeing a Bollywood career. Karan Johar has always said that he will launch Aryan and has grand plans for that. In an interview, Karan had said, "Aryan is like my son. So, if anyone has to launch him, it has to be me. But when that will happen, who knows."

On the other hand, Navya has already made her fashion debut at Parisian Le Bal des Debutantes.



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A three time MLA from Amguri constituency, Dutta took over as the president of Assam Pradesh Congress Committee in December 2014.

By Indrajit Kundu: Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president Anjan Dutta passed away today morning following a cardiac failure. Dutta, 64, was undergoing treatment at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi since May 18. He has been admitted in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) following a severe chest infection.



ANJAN DUTTA'S PROFILE

A three time MLA from Amguri constituency, Dutta took over as the president of Assam Pradesh Congress Committee in December 2014. Known to be a close associate of former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Dutta has served in several important positions like the state's transport minister.

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PARTY CONDOLES HIS DEATH

Reacting to the senior Congress leader's demise, party President Sonia Gandhi in statement expressed deep shock and grief over the untimely demise. "Not only the Assam PCC but the entire Congress Party as indeed the state of Assam had lost a leader committed to the people," the statement quoting Gandhi said.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi too condoled Dutta's demise. "Extremely saddened by the untimely demise of Shri Anjan Duttaji, Assam PCC President. His passing away is a big loss to @INCIndia & to Assam," tweeted his office. Gandhi had also visited Dutta when he got admitted in hospital last month.

His mortal remains will be taken to Assam on Thursday evening where state party leaders are expected to pay their respects. The last rites will be performed on Friday morning. Dutta is survived by his wife and three daughters.







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According to Livehindustan, Pooja was in town for the promotion and press conference of her television lifestyle show 'Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai', which was to be followed by a photo shoot.

By India Today Web Desk: Model Pooja Misrra, who shot into the limelight by featuring in Bigg Boss 5, has filed a case against three persons for allegedly gangraping her in a hotel in Jaipur's Moti Doongri.

According to Livehindustan, Pooja was in town for the promotion and press conference of her television lifestyle show 'Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai', which was to be followed by a photo shoot.

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THE INCIDENT

Sources say Pooja hired 3 videographers - Mosim, Suhaan and Harish from Jaipur for the shooting of her show.

After wrapping up the shoot, she invited them for dinner on June 13, when she claims she was gangraped. The model also claims that she was given food laced with drugs and later molested.

CASE REGISTERED

Police said a case under section 376 (rape) and 384 (blackmail) of IPC has been registered and they are investigating the matter.

POOJA MISRRA AND CONTROVERSIES

This is not the first time Pooja is in the news. A video showing her misbehaving with hotel staff had gone viral earlier. In August last year, she had alleged that she was raped in a guesthouse in Noida by an unidentified man for three days.

Also Read



Pooja Misrra assaults Delhi store staff

Big Boss fame Pooja Misrra assaulted in Udaipur





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Jo Cox, 41, a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party and vocal supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union, was attacked as she prepared to hold a meeting with constituents in Birstall near Leeds.

Jo Cox, a Cambridge University graduate, was an aid worker before becoming Labour lawmaker for Batley and Spen in 2015. Known for her work on women's issues, she has worked with several charities. (Photo: Reuters)

By Reuters: A British member of Parliament was shot dead in the street in northern England on Thursday, causing deep shock across Britain and the suspension of campaigning for next week's referendum on the country's EU membership.

Jo Cox, 41, a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party and vocal supporter of Britain remaining in the European Union, was attacked as she prepared to hold a meeting with constituents in Birstall near Leeds.

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Media reports said she had been shot and stabbed.

West Yorkshire Police said a 52-year-old man was arrested by officers nearby and weapons including a firearm recovered. The motive for the attack was not immediately known.

Women's shoes and a handbag lie on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds. (Photo: Reuters)

"The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family - and indeed the whole country - will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today," Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said in a statement.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the killing of Cox, who was married with two children and had worked on US President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign, was a tragedy.

"We have lost a great star," the Conservative prime minister said in a statement. "She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion, with a big heart. It is dreadful, dreadful news."

British lawmakers are not in parliament ahead of the June 23 referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU.

REFERENDUM CAMPAIGNS SUSPENDED

The rival referendum campaign groups said they were suspending activities for the day and Cameron said he would pull out of a planned rally in Gibraltar, the British territory on the southern coast of Spain.

One eyewitness told Sky News that Cox had intervened in a scuffle between two men, one of whom had pulled a gun from a bag which had then been fired twice. (Photo: Reuters)

It was not immediately clear what the impact would be on the referendum.

"It's fairly clear no one is quite sure what has happened," said John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde. "Until it's clear who was responsible and what their motivation was or it might have been, all it does is stop the campaign when the 'Remain' side probably would not want it to be stopped."

The pro-EU Remain campaign has fallen behind the Leave camp in pre-referendum polls.

The last British lawmaker to have been killed in an attack was Ian Gow, who died after a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) exploded under his car at his home in southern England in 1990.

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 15 (PTI) The Union Cabinet today approved agreement between India and Saudi Arabia on Labour Cooperation for the recruitment of the general category of workers.

The pact benefits Indian emigrant workers, especially in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled categories.

"The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given its ex-post facto approval for the Agreement on Labour Co-operation between India and Saudi Arabia," a press release said.

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According to statement, the Agreement was signed in Riyadh on April 2-3, 2016 during the visit of the Prime Minister to Saudi Arabia. PTI KKS SA

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Two groups clashed inside a police station in Jabalpur over an objectionable photo of Congress president Sonia Gandhi being shared on WhatsApp.

By PTI: A 33-year-old man was killed and six others injured, five of them seriously in a clash between two camps in the early hours of the day over an objectionable photo of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in a WhatsApp messenger group, police said here.

Area City Superintendent of Police Inderjeet Balsavar said that one Umesh Verma who sustained injuries in the clash, succumbed to his wounds at a hospital here, while undergoing treatment.

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According to Congress corporator Jatin Raj, knives were freely used by the rival group inside the Vijay Nagar Police station where they had gone to lodge a complaint - a charge denied by police who had to call their colleagues from other police stations to discipline the two groups after they turned violent.

Raj has created a group named Vijay Nagar Friends on WhatsApp for people to stay connected in his locality.

PHOTO SHOWED SONIA WASHING UTENSILS

Prashant Nayak allegedly posted a photo in the WhatsApp group, which showed Sonia "washing utensils" with a satirical caption saying (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi has reduced Congress President to such a position, CSP Balsavar told PTI.

The two groups gathered at Ahimsa Chowk little after last midnight and a heated argument took place between the over sharing of the picture.

In the meantime, acting on a tip-off the police reached the spot and asked them to come to police station to sort out their differences, the CSP said.

CLASH INSIDE POLICE STATION

When the two groups reached police station, an alleged altercation took place between them and one Umesh Verma was stabbed, who was rushed to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries, alleged Animesh, a member of the Congress corporator group.

He demanded police should make public the footage of CCTV camera at the police station to bring out the truth.

CSP Balsavar said to bring situation under control, police resorted to cane charge but denied that violence took place inside the police station.

The violence took place when the groups were en route to the police station, the CSP said.

Advocate Nayak was among those who sustained injuries and have been admitted to a hospital, he said, adding people of both the groups have been booked and further investigations are on.

Also Read:

What is AgustaWestland chopper deal? Why is Sonia Gandhi under attack for it?



EXCLUSIVE: Never met Sonia Gandhi, can't say there were no kickbacks, says Christian Michel



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The Congress usually doesn't disclose a chief minister candidate, but things might change come UP polls in 2017.

By Amit Agnihotri: Desperate to improve its footprint across Uttar Pradesh, which goes to polls in 2017, the Congress is grappling with factors like getting the caste equation right while deciding whether or not it should announce a face for the chief minister's post.

While the party has traditionally refrained from announcing chief ministerial face before polls, the issue has gained significance after the remarks of newly-appointed AICC incharge of UP affairs Ghulam Nabi Azad.

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POPULAR FACE

Noting the party may come up with a popular face ahead of the polls, Azad acknowledged there was overwhelming demand from state leaders that Priyanka Gandhi should be the face of the UP Congress or at least she should campaign for the party.

PRIYANKA'S ROLE LIMITED?

Priyanka, who has refrained from active politics so far while extending full support to brother and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, has limited herself to the parliamentary constituencies - Rae Bareli of her mother and party chief Sonia Gandhi and Amethi of Rahul.

Strategist Prashant Kishor, roped in by the Congress to tilt the scales in its favour, too has suggested Priyanka along with Rahul to attract voters but the idea has not found favour with the central leadership.

Kishor's second idea, of reverting to the Congress' traditional Brahmin vote has generated buzz within the party with names of veteran Sheila Dikshit and younger Jitin Prasada are doing the rounds as potential state unit chiefs. Rajya Sabha member Pramod Tiwari may be made the chief of the campaign committee.

BRAHMIN VOTE BANKING

The section which supports this line of thought within the party believes that winning over the Brahmins, who constitute around 13 per cent of the voters, may help the Grand Old Party shore up its electoral fortunes in an election where the BJP is aggressively trying to polarise voters.

The issue of having a new state unit chief has gained momentum after the sudden induction of Azad, who replaced Madhusudan Mistry as the state incharge.

For the past few years, Nirmal Khatri, a sober and noncontroversial leader has been holding the fort as UP Congress chief but has not been able to curb infighting among state leaders.

However, doubts remain if a new person in the saddle would be able to perform a miracle when the party has yet to address the issue of strengthening the organisational muscle.

RAHUL'S DALIT COMPETITION

Another challenge is to deal with the pro-Dalit image of Rahul that has been projected in the state to counter the BSP supremo Mayawati who would be a force to reckon with.

Another section in the party believes the Congress should opt for an OBC face keeping in mind their voter percentage and the need to counter the SP but it may in turn put off the upper caste voters.

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The move to regroup the state unit comes amid six party lawmakers getting expelled for voting against party nominee Kapil Sibal in the Rajya Sabha polls.Also read:

Assembly Elections in UP may be advanced by six months: SP

RSS' welfare projects helping BJP ahead of 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections



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By PTI: Los Angeles, Jun 16 (PTI) A chilling post on free advertisement website Craigslist has threatened an Orlando- style massacre in Californias San Diego city, saying, "youre next", in an eerie warning that has prompted an FBI probe.

A KGTV news station viewer saw the post in the men-seeking-men section of the Craigslist San Diego personal advertisements. He took a screenshot and sent it to the TV station before the post was flagged and removed.

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The post was titled, "We need more Orlandos (sic)," and it was accompanied by a photo of a hand firing a revolver with a bullet coming out of the barrel.

"Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name...San Diego you are next...," the post read.

The screenshot was then sent to the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) and the FBI. SDPD Lt Scott Wahl emphasised that police have had extra officers on patrol in places where people gather in the wake of the Orlando shooting.

FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth was quoted as saying that the bureaus Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the Craigslist posting.

"This is something thats very serious, very concerning to all of us, especially given whats happened recently in Orlando," said Foxworth.

"We are going to use all lawful means available to us, so if we have to go out and get a search warrant, we will do that. If it doesnt require a search warrant, were going to do whatever it takes to do it in a lawful and legal matter," Foxworth said.

Foxworth said there are no known credible threats to San Diego right now, but they are always keeping watch.

The post comes days after Afghan-origin Omar Mateen carried an assault rifle and a pistol into a gay club in Orlando in the wee hours of Sunday and killed 50 people while injuring 53 others. He was later shot dead by the police. PTI ASK AKJ ASK

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By PTI: Bengaluru, Jun 16 (PTI) Global outsourcing and technology services specialist VFS Global today launched the Czech Republic Visa Application Centre here to serve the needsof the growing number of Indian visitors to the country.

With the opening of this centre, applicants no longer have to travel to Mumbai or New Delhi to apply for Schengen visas if the main country of their travel to Europe is the Czech Republic, and can submit applications in Bengaluru itself, VFS Global said in a release.

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Bengaluru is the third city in India where VFS Global has set up a visa application centre for the Embassy of the Czech Republic, enabling greater accessibility to visa application facilities, it said.

VFS Global, the outsourcing and technology services specialist for governments and diplomatic missions worldwide, said that in the coming months it would launch more such centres for the Czech Republic in Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, in a phased manner.

"This step is yet another example of the importance the Czech Republic attaches to the case of expanding people-to- people contacts between our two great nations. It also testifies the Czech authorities readiness to take appropriate measures to facilitate sustainable tourism exchanges," Ambassador of the Czech Republic to India Milan Hovorka said. PTI KSU RA VS SAI

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The US Senate, however, did pass a legislative amendment as part of the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) 2017 that proposes to bring defence sales with India at par with America's close allies and NATO members.

By India Today Web Desk: The United States Senate has passed its draft of the National Defence Authorisation Bill, including a provision to set up a new fund to reimburse Pakistan for its efforts in the war against terrorism.

The Senate version authorised $800 million under a provision called the 'Pakistan Security Enhancement Authorisation', Dawn online reported today.

It also fenced $300m behind a similar Haqqani network provision that has existed in the annual defence authorisation acts since the fiscal year 2015. The proposal for Pakistan was passed as originally initiated.

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This came a day after the Senate refused to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

The US Senate, however, did pass a legislative amendment as part of the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) 2017 that proposes to bring defence sales with India at par with America's close allies and NATO members.

How does the money help Pakistan?

The proposed reimbursement mechanism for Pakistan replaces the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), which was used to reimburse both Afghanistan and Pakistan for their efforts to combat terrorism.

Pakistan has received a total of $3.1 billion since 2013 under the CSF. But this fund expires in the current financial year, ending in October.

While adopting the new provision, the Senate Armed Services Committee used the CSF model to restructure security support for Pakistan. But it focuses specifically on Pakistan's own security needs instead of tying it to a broader coalition.

In doing so, the new provision delinks Pakistan from Afghanistan, by recognising it as a country with its own strategic value for US interests.

In a report filed with the draft Defence Bill, the US Senate Armed Services Committee called Pakistan "a long-standing strategic partner" and stressed the need to continue a strong relationship with the country.

Both houses of the Congress have passed their versions of the Defence Bill. A conference committee of both houses will now be formed to develop a consensus draft.

The procedure can be completed by July, although past bills have been passed as late as November.

Besides, the Haqqani restriction, the bill requires Pakistan to keep open ground communication lines to Afghanistan for receiving reimbursements from this fund.

Another bill, passed by the House of Representatives last week, linked $450m from a total of $900m proposed for Pakistan to take action against the Haqqani network.

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By PTI: From Jaishree Balasubramanian

Bangkok, Jun 16 (PTI) Thai police today failed to arrest an influential Buddhist abbot, accused of embezzling USD 40 million, as thousands of his followers gathered at a Buddhist temple complex, preventing them from detaining the monk.

The police raided the powerful Wat Dhammakaya temple in northern Bangkok to arrest its 72-year-old abbot, Phra Dhammachayo but the devotees from the controversial Buddhist sect camped outside the sprawling temple complex forcing police to withdraw from the area.

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The devotees claimed that the abbot, who leads the largest religious sect in Thailand and has a cult-like following, was too ill to be taken into custody.

Department of Special Investigation (DSI) officials said they could not arrest the abbot because of strong resistance put up by his followers.

The failed bid to enter the wealthy and influential temple was broadcast live on national television.

DSI deputy chief Suriya Singhakamol admitted to reporters that the operation to enter the temple to bring the abbot to hear embezzlement charges at the Criminal Court failed because the abbots staunch followers did not allow the officials to go inside.

The abbot is accused of conspiring to launder money by accepting stolen cash from a credit union.

He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three police summonses and an arrest warrant. He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he was too ill to report to police for questioning.

Though police withdrew for the day after the fruitless raid, Suriya said the operation to arrest the abbot would continue but he did not give a time frame.

"Our operation has not ended. The (arrest) warrant is still valid so we will have authority to carry out the operation. According to our information, he is still inside," he said.

Temple spokesman Phra Sanitwong, said the abbot did not flee from the temple but he was too ill to come out to meet officials.

He said the temple had already cooperated with the DSI.

The abbot and his followers have denied the corruption allegations, claiming they are politically motivated.

Earlier this morning, 600 policemen were put on standby at Klong Luang district office to support the DSIs search of the Dhammakaya temple.

Police said there were about 8,000 Dhammakya disciples inside the temple.

Several scandals, including trafficking animal parts, in recent years have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand. PTI JB PMS AKJ PMS

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Sabrang Trust today expressed regret over the governments decision of cancelling its FCRA registration but said it was "no surprise" and the order was imminent.

The NGO said it plans to challenge the Home Ministrys decision to bar it from receiving foreign funds.

In a statement, the NGO said the allegations levelled against it showed a complete non-application of mind and that the trust had responded "point-by-point and para-by-para".

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"That the cancellation order was imminent was apparent from the mere show of a personal hearing granted to Sabrang Trust on April 11, 2016. The hearing was over in less than 10 minutes.

"The trustees regret to note that todays order of the Home Ministry is simply a mechanical reiteration of the very same allegations made earlier, in total disregard to the detailed and reasoned explanations and arguments put forward by the trust," the statement said.

Sabrang Trust will actively explore all legal options to challenge the Home Ministrys order cancelling its FCRA registration, it said. PTI AKV SKL ZMN

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Rating agency Fitch has affirmed BBB- rating to NTPC, indicating a low default risk on debt. "Fitch Ratings has affirmed NTPC Limiteds long-term issuer default rating at BBB-. The outlook is stable," the agency said in a statement. The BBB rating indicates that expectations of a default risk are low. The capacity for payment of financial commitments is considered adequate, but adverse business or economic conditions are more likely to impair this capacity.

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According to the statement, NTPCs ratings benefit from its dominant market position and regulated business model, which provides certainty of cash flows. The agency has also affirmed NTPCs senior unsecured rating of BBB- and the BBB- on its USD 4 billion medium-term note programme. The company has managed its counterparty risk well with 100 per cent collection efficiency for the past 13 years despite a weak financial position of many of its customers. The companys high capex requirement is likely to lead to negative free cash flows over the next 3-4 years. "Fitch assesses that the linkages between NTPC and the Indian state (BBB-/Stable) are moderate," it said. Based on the parent and subsidiary linkage criteria, Fitch will provide a one-notch rating uplift to NTPCs ratings if the companys standalone ratings were to be lower than that of the sovereign, provided the linkages remain intact.

The company has long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) for all of its plants, which allow pass-through of fixed costs as well as fuel costs.

NTPC plans to bid for ultra-mega power plants - of 4 GW capacity each - as and when these are offered and acquire state-owned thermal power plants.

"Fitch has not factored either of these events into its ratings and will analyse the impact if and when they materialise," the agency said. PTI SID KKS JM ARD

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"Listen to your enemy," says former CIA officer Amaryllis Fox as she talks about working undercover on counter-terrorism and intelligence

By India Today Web Desk: There's more to an undercover CIA or RAW officer's life than portrayed on the glitzy silver screen. The television may bring to us secret service agents as muscular as Sunny Deol, as slick as Homeland's Claire Danes, but reality is mostly different.

So, what is an undercover agent's life like in real? What do they go through living a secret life, and what do they emerge as from it? And most importantly, what do they learn from being undercover?

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Former CIA officer Amaryllis Fox, in her interview with Al Jazeera, talked about how people in power manipulate the larger population: while people in Muslim countries believe Americans hate Islam, Americans think Islamic terrorists hate their freedom.

Fox explains that these theories are made "by a really small number of people on both sides who amass a great deal of power and wealth by convincing the rest of us to keep killing each other."

Fox, whose cover is still being rolled back, used to work undercover on counter-terrorism and intelligence with the Clandestine Service

"If I've learned one lesson from my time with the CIA, it is this: Everybody believes they are the good guy," she says in the video.

Take a listen what else she has to say about terrorism and how to deal with it:









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By PTI: Mumbai, Jun 16 (PTI) Actress Freida Pinto will join US First Lady Michelle Obama to promote a global girls education initiative in Liberia, Morocco and Spain.

Pinto, the First Lady, her daughters Sasha and Malia, their grandmother Marian Robinson will travel to Liberia, Morocco and Spain from June 27-July 1 as part of the "Let Girls Learn" initiative.

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The initiative is aimed at helping girls obtain quality education.

In Liberia, Pinto, 31, and Obama will take part in a discussion, which will cover the educational barriers girls face in the country. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will meet with the First Lady and Pinto.

In Morocco, Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep will join them to discuss the challenges women in the African country deal with on a regular basis, said a spokesperson for the actress. PTI BK PSH PSH

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By Siraj Qureshi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi may be trying to improve the state of girl child in India through his campaign "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao", but there are several roadblocks in the realisation of his dream of bringing women at par with men in the country, the biggest hurdle being the black sheep in the medical fraternity, who are running covert sex-determination rings all over the nation.

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Recently, a police team from Bikaner raided an ultrasound center in Agra that was being operated by a senior radiologist Dr Amit Kumar. The raid was conducted following a sting by the police to determine the involvement of Dr Amit in sex-determination test. Interrogation revealed that pregnant women were being brought from as far as Bikaner in Rajasthan to this ultrasound center in Agra, where Dr. Amit used charge a hefty fee.

CHARGE FOR SEX DETERMINATION



The Indian Medicos Association (IMA) Agra chapter has expressed its shock and concern over the possible involvement of Dr Amit in this sex-determination racket and in an official statement, the medical community has dissociated itself with the said doctor, who is currently in custody of the Bikaner Police. Interrogation has also revealed that the agents that brought these pregnant women to the center were paid as much as Rs 7000-10000 as commission.

According to Indian Radiological and Imaging Association Agra chapter chairman Dr. Bhupendra Ahuja, there are a total of 275 ultrasound machines registered in Agra and all radiologists have to conform to the regulations against sex-determination as the sex of a foetus can only be determined through an ultrasound machine when the foetus is at least 12 weeks in age and after that age, aborting a pregnancy could be dangerous for the woman. Also, any abortion of more than 4 weeks in age needs a doctor's recommendation under the current legal guidelines governing abortions.

CODE LANGUAGE

When India Today spoke to Dr. Amit, he confessed that he was involved in sex-determination and code words were used instead of written report to announce the sex of the child. Male child was called Ganesh, while female was called Laxmi. If someone requested a written report, 'B/6' denoted 'Boy' while G/9 denoted 'Girl'.

IMA Agra chapter President JN Tandon said that the IMA will soon setup a Whatsapp Helpline against sex-determination where complaints could be filed with proofs against the black sheep of the medical community, who were involved in this horrid practice.

Agra District Magistrate Pankaj Kumar said that the administration is conducting surveys of all registered ultrasound clinics through various means and such surveys will now become a regular feature instead of being occasional, so that the administration maintains a firm check on such practice. The Chief Medical Officer of Agra has been instructed to mark all suspected clinics and double the vigil, which will hopefully bring positive results soon.

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Senior physician Dr SK Kalra said that Agra ranks 4th in Uttar Pradesh, in such cases of sex-determination and it was in full knowledge of administrative officials, but large sums of money exchanged hands to prevent such centers from being shut down. As a result, Agra had become the hub of sex-determination for people from Rajasthan, who were coming to Agra for ultrasound, when Rajasthan had cheaper and better health services than UP.

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A recent census has revealed that the lion population in this national park is set to rise. Here's why.

By India Today Web Desk: India has enough places to explore for someone who travels for the love of wildlife. But Gir National Park is special. This forest in Gujarat is the only one where one can see Asiatic lions.

No wonder wildlife enthusiasts love revisiting this place. But here's some good news for them--soon, travellers will be able to spot more lions in this forest than ever before.

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Also read: Wildlife tourism: 8 budget stays in Indian national parks



According to a report by the Indian Express, more than 100 lionesses are pregnant in this sanctuary.

As per a census conducted by the forest department last year, the lion population has seen a healthy increase. The total number of felines in the Park grew from 411 in 2010 to 523 in 2015.

Located at Sasan in Junagadh district, the Gir National Park attracts tourists from all parts of the country and the world. As many as 5.2 lakh Indian tourists and close to 7,000 foreigners have visited the forest since last October, fetching a revenue of Rs 10.71 crore.

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) A month since Supreme Courts directive to central and state governments to ensure food security and release funds for works under MGNREGA in drought-hit areas, some outfits today accused the ruling dispensations, particularly the Centre, of non-compliance with the apex courts instructions.

Describing the alleged "bleak" response from governments as "drought of political will", the organisations, including Swaraj Abhiyan, on whose petition the SC had issued the directive, said they will now submit a report to SC on the issue.

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"The country has passed through an unprecedented drought. To tackle it, the SC had given a historic order. But the governments, especially the Centre, dont intend to follow the order.

"... on one hand there is severity of drought, on the other there are bleak responses from the governments. This is not only drought of water, but political will, too, which we are witnessing," Swaraj Abhiyan leader Yogendra Yadav told reporters here.

Yadav, in a statement, called the alleged non-compliance of the SC order as "wilful disobedience" by the governments.

He also claimed that field visits by the organisations in parts of 13 drought-hit states showed that none of them has provided foodgrains to affected people in accordance with National Food Security Act.

The SC directive of implementing mid-day meal scheme during summer vacation has also not been complied with by them in letter and spirit, he claimed.

"Orders have been issued by most states for providing mid-day meal, but compliance is only on paper," he said.

The organisations, including Swaraj Abhiyan, Ekta Parishad, Jal Biradari and National Alliance of Peoples Movement, noted that in Haryana, Maharashtra, Odisha, Jharkhand and Bihar no meals were served during vacations, while other states were "very irregular" at it.

On the direction to Centre on releasing adequate funds for implementing MGNREGA, the organisations observed that central government is yet to release fully the first tranche due in first week of April as per Master Circular.

In the statement, the outfits said the government has released only first instalment so far, of which, Rs 3,047 crore is available for this financial year after meeting pending liabilities of last year.

The second instalment of the first tranche, at least Rs 17,000 crore has not been released yet. Pending liabilities have risen to Rs 2,563 crore as of today, the statement reads. (MORE) PTI ENM KIS SK KIS

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Is it ethical to target specific species like the Nilgai, the wild boar, and the rhesus monkey to mitigate human-animal conflict?

By KC Archana: The Supreme Court will hear a plea this week filed by animal rights activist Gauri Maulekhi to reverse the 2015 ruling by the Centre declaring the Nilgai in Bihar, wild boar in Uttarakhand and Rhesus Macaque monkey in Himachal Pradesh as vermin and allowing their culling.

Powers conferred by Section 62 of the Wild Life Protection Act, 1972 allows the central government to declare certain animals as vermin and allow their killing.



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What is wildlife culling?

Culling is basically selective killing of a species, usually as a population control measure. Though in animal breeding, it is known as the process of removing or segregating animals from a breeding stock based on criteria like immunity, disease, etc.

Why is culling carried out?

Animals that are believed to be harmful to crops, or which carry diseases are tagged as 'vermin' and their culling is allowed for a certain period.

India, for example, has often culled lakhs of chickens after a bird flu outbreak.

Declaration of an animal as vermin under the Wildlife Protection Act allows the state forest departments to permit citizens in the affected areas to selectively kill the animal.

The ethical debate

Animal rights bodies expressed "shock" over the Environment Ministry's stand, saying such killings will not help mitigate human-animal conflict.

Wildlife protection lobbyists argue that decisions to cull animals is not in harmony with the Indian ethos of living in consonance with the nature.

In an open letter to Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations expressed distress over the rising trend of declaring species such as wild boar and Nilgai as vermin.

They insist on time and effort to come up with 'non-invasive' measure to tackle to the crisis.

The 'No kill' solutions include application of bio-pesticides with a mixture of cow urine, planting neem and dry chilli around croplands to avoid foraging, creating buffer areas to human-wildlife conflict.

They feel 'quick-fix' solutions will only prove harmful in the long run and aggravate the situation by affecting the ecological balance.

The Maneka- Javadekar clash

With protests against culling of Nilgai in Bihar gathering steam, Union ministers Maneka Gandhi and Prakash Javadekar have locked horns over culling.

Prakash Javadekar had said, "As per the law, we must help the farmers whose crops get ruined. The state government sends us a proposal and only then do we initiate a step for a specific region and for a specific period of time, keeping the scientific facts in mind."

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But this statement was criticised by Maneka Gandhi, a vocal animal rights advocate. She said, "The Environment Ministry has asked states to come forward with proposals for killing elephants in West Bengal, wild boars in Uttarakhand, peacocks in Goa, Nilgai in Bihar. I don't understand this lust for killing." The ministry however denied the allegations.

Meanwhile, farmers continue to be severely affected by damage caused by wild animals. While slaughtering animals does seem extreme, policy makers are yet to come up with a concrete solution for the ages old man-animal conflict.

The only way to mitigate this crisis will be long term measures like relocating animals to protected sanctuaries, but all of this takes time and effort.

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By PTI: Mumbai, Jun 16 (PTI) Government is now also planning to set up a reverse Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in Mozambique mainly for the fertiliser and petrochemical sector, while it is already in talks with Iran for a proposed SEZ there, Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers Ananth Kumar said.

"It is our endeavour to establish reverse Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in oil and gas rich countries with dedicated exports back to the country. After Iran, now we are also considering setting up SEZ in Mozambique," Kumar said at the launch of India Chem 2016 here today.

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He said the talks on setting up SEZ in Iran are progressing especially after the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the country.

Government is in talks with Iran for setting up a natural gas-based petroleum plant-cum-petrochemicals complex there.

"Modis visit to Iran, and bilateral talks with the topmost leadership of the country have strengthened the move (setting up of SEZ). I think, our Iran engagement will continue on the same lines and we are going to have engagement with Mozambique as well," Kumar said.

The minister said that when India is able to set up the reverse SEZs in oil and gas rich countries, feed stock and intermediaries -- considered to be building blocks -- are required to be made available at affordable prices so that the petrochemicals industry will become globally competitive.

He further said the talks with Mozambique are at preliminary stage and therefore, it will be difficult for quantification of amount of gas required and determine its pricing. "Once the talks are fructified, we will be able to give the details," Kumar added.

"The way Chabahar port SEZ in Iran will be a huge gateway of opportunity for bilateral trade between the two countries, we will develop similar ties with Mozambique," he said. PTI PSK DK BAL MKJ

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By PTI: From Abhishek Shukla

Windhoek, Jun 16 (PTI) India today offered "any assistance" that Namibia may require in improving its socio-economic objectives enshrined in "Harambee Prosperity Plan" floated by its present government.

Addressing the Joint Session Parliament of Namibia today, President Pranab Mukherjee, who is first Indian Head of State to visit the country since 1995, said India would also be happy to partner with Namibia in the implementation of "Vision 2030" through inclusive development and capacity building.

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"Both our nations seek to address complex governance issues in our own ways. But it will be through empowerment of the disempowered - and by ensuring that in the Harambee house, no section is excluded, that we will succeed," he said.

Recalling strong ties between Namibia and India, Mukherjee said his visit takes place at a time of excellent bilateral relations between the two countries.

"India believed that her own independence was incomplete so long as her brethren in Africa continued to suffer oppression by foreign masters. India was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leaders and people of Namibia in their liberation struggle," he said.

Mukherjee said India-Namibia relationship has been built on the firm foundation of mutual trust and understanding.

"Our two nations are bound by our common experience of colonial rule and the struggle of our people for freedom," he said.

The President said the first-ever SWAPO (South-West Africa Peoples Organisation) Embassy abroad was established in New Delhi in 1986 and it was this move by India that started the chain of diplomatic recognition by other countries and the inevitability of Namibias independence.

"We appreciate the vision of President (Hage) Geingob in introducing the Harambee Prosperity Plan. India stands ready to extend any assistance that Namibia may require for achieving the Harambee Prosperity Plans socio-economic objectives. India would also be happy to partner with Namibia in the implementation of Vision 2030 through inclusive development and capacity building," he said.

The President said founding President and Father of the Namibian Nation, Sam Nujoma, and a respected Leader of the SWAPO Party is greatly admired in India as a world leader and friend of the Indians

"India had conferred upon him the prestigious Indira Gandhi Peace Prize for Disarmament and Development for the year 1990 in recognition of his outstanding contribution in leading the people of Namibia to freedom," he said. MORE PTI ABS UZM

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By PTI: From Abhishek Shukla

Windhoek, Jun 16 (PTI) Describing Namibia a beacon of hope and motivation, President Pranab Mukherjee today said India will provide "any assistance" that the country may require in improving its socio-economic objectives.

Addressing the Joint Session Parliament of Namibia today, Mukherjee, who is first Indian Head of State to visit the country since 1995, said India would also be happy to partner with Namibia in the implementation of "Vision 2030" through inclusive development and capacity building.

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"Both our nations seek to address complex governance issues in our own ways. But it will be through empowerment of the disempowered - and by ensuring that in the Harambee house, no section is excluded, that we will succeed," he said.

Recalling strong ties between Namibia and India, Mukherjee said his visit takes place at a time of excellent bilateral relations between the two countries.

"India believed that her own independence was incomplete so long as her brethren in Africa continued to suffer oppression by foreign masters. India was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leaders and people of Namibia in their liberation struggle," he said.

Mukherjee said India-Namibia relationship has been built on the firm foundation of mutual trust and understanding.

"Our two nations are bound by our common experience of colonial rule and the struggle of our people for freedom," he said.

The President said the first-ever SWAPO (South-West Africa Peoples Organisation) Embassy abroad was established in New Delhi in 1986 and it was this move by India that started the chain of diplomatic recognition by other countries and the inevitability of Namibias independence.

Mukherjee said it is the people of Namibia, their unity and their efforts that have made Namibia what it is today: a beacon of hope and motivation, not only on the African continent but in the world.

"It is a bright spot in the realm of democracy and rule of law; a nation progressing rapidly on the path of development and contributing to peace and stability in Africa and beyond," he said.

"We appreciate the vision of President (Hage) Geingob in introducing the Harambee Prosperity Plan. India stands ready to extend any assistance that Namibia may require for achieving the Harambee Prosperity Plans socio-economic objectives. India would also be happy to partner with Namibia in the implementation of Vision 2030 through inclusive development and capacity building," he said. MORE PTI ABS UZM

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: From K J M Varma

Beijing, Jun 16 (PTI) Indias entry into the NSG will "shake" the strategic balance in South Asia and make it a "legitimate" nuclear power, leaving behind Chinas all-weather ally Pakistan, Chinese official media said today as it kept up its strident stand against Indias inclusion in the grouping.

In a second article in as many days, state-run Global Times highlighted Chinas vocal opposition to Indias entry into the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and concerns that its all weather-ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a legitimate nuclear power".

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Indias entry into the NSG will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", the article said.

It, however, said China could support Indias inclusion in the nuclear club if it "played by the rules".

"The major goal for Indias NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," said the article written by Fu Xiaoqiang, research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article.

At the same time, the article said, "New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month."

"However, as a country that has signed neither the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG," it said.

"Thats why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to Indias membership," it said.

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that Indias admission into the NSG would "jeopardise" Chinas national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by Peoples Daily. PTI KJV NSA AKJ NSA

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The Shipping Ministry officials said that a Bangladeshi ship carrying around 1,000 tons of corrugated iron sheets, which is supposed to go to Tripura, will arrive at Ashuganj port on Wednesday afternoon.

By Sahidul Hasan Khokon: The transshipment between Bangladesh and India begins formally from Friday, and shipping minister Shajahan Khan and prime minister's economic affairs adviser Mashiur Rahman will inaugurate the consignment for transshipment at Ashuganj in Brahmanbaria district.

The Shipping Ministry officials said that a Bangladeshi ship carrying around 1,000 tons of corrugated iron sheets, which is supposed to go to Tripura, will arrive at Ashuganj port on Wednesday afternoon where the goods will be unloaded. The goods will then be loaded on Bangladeshi trucks, which would cross the Indo-Bangladesh border in Akhaura for Indian state Tripura.

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TEESTA WATER SHARING ISSUE

The Teesta water sharing issue between Bangladesh and India has not been resolved yet. However, this has not stopped Bangladesh from responding to India's request and providing transit facilities with the arrival of 1,000 tons of goods.

Commodore (Navy) M Mozammel Huq, Chairman of Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA), said, "All preparations have already been completed to make the transshipment fully operational."

According to the Chairman, the government has fixed the transshipment fee at Tk 192.25 a tonne for carrying goods. Apart from the regular transit fee, India will have to pay other charges, BIWTA Chairman said. He also said that India has to pay fees to NBR and Roads Department as well.

The Indian side has to spend an additional Tk 50 per tonne for transport of goods from Ashuganj to Akhaura, if Bangladesh side provides security for their consignments," BIWTA Director (Traffic) Mofizur Rahman said.

He said India would have to pay Tk 10 per ton for shipment of goods through two Bangladesh's canals - Mongla-Ghashiakhali and Gabkhan Canal. The government has also fixed the labor handling and other charges, Rahman said.

"Users have to pay Tk 70 per ton as handling charge at Ashuganj port. Besides, Tk 2,100 for piloting charge and minimum Tk 250 per consignment as berthing charge are to be paid," he added.

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By PTI: Vijayawada, Jun 16 (PTI) A 2012 batch Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, K Sasikumar, today died of a bullet injury under mysterious circumstances inside his office chambers at Paderu in Visakhapatnam district, police said.

Sasikumar, who hailed from Tamil Nadu, was posted as Assistant Superintendent of Police at Paderu.

"We are not sure whether it happened accidentally or done intentionally. The Visakhapatnam (Rural) SP has rushed to the spot and we are examining the case," North Coastal Zone Inspector General of Police Kumar Vishwajeet told PTI over phone.

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It is suspected that the officer, a bachelor, may have committed suicide but there is no clarity on it yet, police sources said.

A bullet sound was heard from his chamber in the wee hours today following which the sentry rushed in to take a look, they added.

The sentry found the officer in blood as a bullet pierced through his right temple. His service weapon was found on a table. The staff then tried to rush Sasikumar in a vehicle to a hospital but he succumbed to the injury midway, sources added.

This was Sasikumars second posting after his first stint at Allagadda in Kurnool district. He came to Paderu in January.

Additional details are awaited. PTI DBV NRB DIP

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It is suspected to be a case of suicide though first reports suggested the revolver went off when he was reportedly cleaning the weapon at about 6 am.

By Amarnath K. Menon : A young IPS officer K. Sashi Kumar, of the 2012 batch, working as Assistant Superintendent of Police, Paderu, in Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh died shortly after daybreak on Thursday of a bullet wound from his service revolver.

CASE OF SUICIDE?

It is suspected to be a case of suicide though first reports suggested the revolver went off when he was reportedly cleaning the weapon at about 6 am. A bullet pierced his head, he was severely wounded and doctors declared him brought dead when he was rushed to a local hospital.

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PROBE IS ON

Post mortem analysis at the King George Hospital, Visakhapatnam and further investigations underway will establish the manner and cause of death. Kumar hailed from Tamil Nadu and his first posting was at Allagadda in Kurnool district from where he moved to Paderu six months ago.







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Only one paper out of the five documents related to the alleged Ishrat fake encounter case that went missing from the home ministry was found.

By Mail Today: The files related to the Ishrat Jahan case had disappeared in September 2009 when P Chidambaram was home minister, a oneman inquiry panel probing the mysterious vanishing of the documents has concluded, stating that the papers were removed "knowingly or unknowingly or misplaced".

Sources said one of the joint secretaries, who was examined by the probe committee, disclosed that when the file reached him the documents were missing.

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Only one paper out of the five documents related to the alleged Ishrat fake encounter case that went missing from the home ministry was found, said Additional Secretary in the ministry B K Prasad in his inquiry report submitted to Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi.

"DOCUMENTS WERE REMOVED"

"It is evident that the documents were removed knowingly or unknowingly or misplaced," the inquiry committee has concluded. The inquiry panel, however, made no reference to Chidambaram or anyone in the then UPA government. Congress leader Chidambaram was the Home Minister then.

Based on the statements of 11 serving and retired officers, including the then home secretary G K Pillai, the 52-page report said the documents went missing between September 18 and 28, 2009. The second affidavit, which was different from the first one, and filed before the Gujarat High Court on September 29, 2009, had said there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that Ishrat was an LeT operative.

WHAT WERE THE PAPERS ABOUT?

The papers which went missing are the office copy of the letter and enclosure sent by the then home secretary to the attorney general on September 18, 2009, office copy of the letter sent by the then home secretary to the A-G on September 23, 2009, draft further affidavit as vetted by the A-G, draft further affidavit amended by the then home minister on September 24, 2009 and office copy of the further affidavit filed with the Gujarat High Court on September 29, 2009.

The paper which was retrieved from a computer hard disk was the letter sent by the then home secretary to A-G on September 18, 2009. Ishrat, Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in the encounter with Gujarat Police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

The Gujarat Police had then said those killed in the encounters were LeT terrorists and had landed in Gujarat to kill the then chief minister Narendra Modi.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh had disclosed in Parliament on March 10 that the files were missing.

Also read:

Probe report on Ishrat Jahan missing file nears completion



This is what has happened in Ishrat Jahan case since 2004



--- ENDS ---

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By PTI: Dhaka, Jun 16 (PTI) Bangladesh authorities have arrested an Islamist militant of outlawed Ansarullah Bangla Team who was involved in the attack on a secular publisher, whose works were deemed blasphemous by extremists, police said today.

Md Sumon Hossain Patwari, 20, was arrested here yesterday for his involvement in the attack on Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul, the Dhaka Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

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Tutuls publishing house Shuddhashar, whose publications were deemed blasphemous by extremists, had published writings of local secular writers.

He had also published books by a controversial Bangladeshi-American atheist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered outside a book fair in Dhaka last year.

In a near simultaneous attacks on two publishing houses in Dhaka in October, suspected Islamists hacked to death publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan, critically injured Tutul along with writer Ranadipam Basu and blogger Tarek Rahim.

Ansar Al Islam, also known as Ansarullah, claimed responsibility for the attacks calling themselves as the Bangladeshi branch of al-Qaeda.

Patwari "admitted to taking part in the attack and hitting the victim thrice with a meat cleaver," the statement said, adding the suspect has divulged important information about Ansarullah.

Police had placed a Tk 200,000 (USD 2556) bounty on his head last month.

His arrest comes amid a nationwide police crackdown to halt a spate of deadly attacks. Authorities have detained nearly 12,000 people. Some of those arrested were linked with outlawed Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh.

Suspected Islamists have killed a number of secular activists, Hindus and other minorities across the country in recent months prompting authorities to launch a nationwide anti-militant clampdown since Friday. Nearly 50 people have been murdered over the past three years. PTI ZH AKJ ZH

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Karisma Kapoor and Sunjay Kapur are officially divorced now. And Randhir Kapoor is happy that it's a closed chapter now.

By India Today Web Desk: The Kapoors can now heave a sigh of relief as Karisma Kapoor and Sunjay Kapur are officially divorced. After months of mudslinging and media circus, the legal battle between the two is over as the estranged couple were granted divorce by family court in Mumbai on Monday (June 13).

ALSO READ: Karisma Kapoor and Sunjay Kapur are officially divorced now

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ALSO READ: Karisma Kapoor wins the custody of her children



While the 41-year-old actor won the custody battle, Sunjay has been granted the visitation rights. In fact, financial exchanges between the estranged couple have also been agreed upon.

Karisma Kapoor at family court in Mumbai

It has been reported that a house in Mumbai owned by Sunjay's family has been given to Karisma. Moreover, the monthly interest from bonds of Rs 14 crore bought by Sunjay for their children will be used to pay their expenses.

When Karisma's father Randhir Kapoor was contacted by Times of India on the divorce verdict, he said, "I don't want to comment on this. It's a closed chapter for our family."

However, the veteran actor has been quite vocal about the bitter legal battle all this while. In an earlier interview to TOI, Randhir said, "I don't know if it is a good or a bad thing, but it is certainly a sad moment for our family. The only silver lining in this is that the children will spend most part of the year with us. Karisma has been through a rough time in the last few years. It has been emotionally draining for her. So, I hope the verdict offers her some respite."

Sunjay Kapur at family court in Mumbai

Sunjay and Karisma had filed a mutual consent divorce petition in 2014. But Karisma took a complete U-Turn when she withdrew her consent from divorce in November 2015 due to their disagreement on some financial issues. Later Sunjay made heads turn with his statement that Karisma married him on a rebound after her break-up with Abhishek Bachchan. But it was only recently that the two decided to settle things amicably.

Karisma tied the knot with Sunjay in 2003. But soon things began to turn sour. Despite efforts from both sides, Karisma left Sunjay's home in 2010 and permanently shifted back to Mumbai. The couple has two children- Kiaan Raj Kapoor and Samiera Kapoor.



--- ENDS ---
The Bajrang Dal traced down two relatives, belonging to different religions, staying in a lodge in Karnataka and decided to teach them a 'lesson'.

By Mail Today: Two days after activists of the Bajrang Dal barged into a hotel room near Mangaluru where two relatives were staying the police ordered a probe into the incident to rein in on the miscreants.



CAN'T INTERACT WITH RELATIVES OF DIFFERENT RELIGIONS?

A Puttur-based girl, who had completed her MBA in Manipal, had gone to Mangaluru for a job interview. After her interview, she went to a lodge in Deralakatte on Mangaluru's outskirts where her relative was staying.

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The local activists of Bajrang Dal received information that girl and the man in lodge belonged to two different religions. They decided to teach the two a "lesson" and barged into the hotel.

The management of the hotel informed the police, who arrived in time and rescued the two. Later, the girl and her relative left for Puttur. The police did not pursue the case, as the girl and her relative did not file a complaint.

However, Mangaluru City Police Commissioner M Chandrashekar directed the jurisdictional police to submit a detailed report on the incident, as they had let off the Bajrang Dal activists with a warning.

--- ENDS ---
Siddaramaiah is struggling to carry out the Cabinet reshuffle, as some senior leaders who are being asked to quit, are upset about it.

By Mail Today: Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is heading for New Delhi today, as the number of ministerial aspirants swelled to 15 whereas he can accommodate only 10 of them.



SENIORS LEADERS CLUTCHING TO FORMER GLORIES



The Cabinet reshuffle was discussed in a meeting yesterday where Siddaramaiah told some of the ministers that they have to quit as per instructions from the High Command. However, senior Congress leaders, such as Shamanur Shivashankarappa V Srinivasa Prasad and Qamar-ul-Islam are said to have expressed their reservations on the CM's decision.

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"It is becoming difficult for the CM to carry out the reshuffle, as some of the senior Congress leaders, who are being asked to quit, are upset about it. The CM wants the party High Command to directly instruct these senior leaders to quit," sources in the Congress said.

All the three Congress leaders have health issues and there is a demand in the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee to replace them with youngsters. Siddaramaiah is expected to sack 10 ministers and appoint new faces.

Also read:

Karnataka: Siddaramaiah announces Cabinet reshuffle



--- ENDS ---
The Kenyan women who edited herself into fake travel pictures is now touring China. Yes, for real!

By India Today Web Desk: Remember the Kenyan woman who became a viral sensation for posting hilariously Photoshopped pictures of herself on holiday? She had her dreams answered and is now on a two-week trip to China.





Sevelyn Gat turned into an overnight online sensation in March after her eye-wateringly funny travel pictures (thanks to her Photoshop skills) went viral.

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The Internet went on a massive trolling spree about her delightful travel-themed photo series which chronicles her fake Asian vacation. The hashtag #WhereIsSeveGatsNow started trending on Twitter, and soon people took Gats' images and edited them into other photographs.



But now, Miss Gats has finally accomplished her dream vacation to China. Her most recent picture on Facebook shows her in a cabin seat with the caption"I am so excited to be in a plane."

First time to the airport, first time in an aeroplane. All smiles. #Sevegats pic.twitter.com/awaI1sQc28 Sam Gichuru (@SamGichuru) June 13, 2016



On Monday she posted pictures on her Facebook profile after landing in Beijing International Airport, all set to tour China, and this time, we hope, the pictures will not be Photoshopped.

All thanks to this kind Nairobi businessman, Sam Gichuru, who came across Gat's photos when it went viral and actually raised money for her to go on holiday to China.

Yesterday I went to China. Thank you @SamGichuru for making my dreams come true pic.twitter.com/BQIXQk5eyx Seveline Kinya (@sevekinya) June 14, 2016

--- ENDS ---
The Assamese man, identified as Amiyur ul Islam, was picked up from Tamil Nadu near the Palakkad border two days ago.

By Indo-Asian News Service: A 23-year-old Assamese man has been arrested in the rape-murder of a Dalit woman law student in Kerala that grabbed national headlines for the sheer brutality of the April 28 crime and became a hot political issue during the state assembly elections.

The Assamese man, identified as Amiyur ul Islam, was picked up from Tamil Nadu near the Palakkad border two days ago. According to police, forensic and other evidence has shown the man's involvement in the crime, that was being compared to the December 16, 2012 Delhi gangrape.

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B. Sandhya, Additional Director General of Police, who headed the probe in the Jisha murder case, on Thursday said the arrest of the accused has been recorded.

"It was through an extensive probe that the accused was tracked down and finally taken into custody," Sandhya told reporters at the Aluva Police club, where the accused was brought.

Reacting to news of the arrest, the woman's mother Rajeshwari said: "He should be dealt with in the manner in which he assaulted my daughter, and after that he should be hanged to death."

"Not a single woman in the country should ever be made to undergo what my daughter underwent," said Rajeshwari.

Earlier in the day, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, announcing the arrest, said in Kochi: "This is going to be a feather in the cap of the police probe team."

Sandhya led the police questioning of the suspect at Thrissur.

On Thursday evening, Islam was brought to Aluva where all the top police officers, including Sandhya, were present.

CLINCHING EVIDENCES

According to police, two vital clues turned out to be the clinching evidence for nailing him - the footwear which was left near Jisha's home and a photo of Islam and Jisha taken at a local studio near her house.

The footwear shop owner and the studio owner identified the man, even as police concluded, from the evidence, that the crime was committed by someone known to Jisha.

REASON OF MURDER

Islam had taken part in the construction of Jisha's home, and they were in touch and had some verbal duel over the construction.

According to the information, the Assamese man had come to her home on the morning of April 28 and they had a fight. He came again in the afternoon when he was drunk and committed the crime.

Police zeroed in on Islam after his DNA samples, checked against the saliva and blood samples found on Jisha's body, matched when the results came in on Thursday.

Director General of Police Loknath Behra, who is in Mumbai, told reporters there that things are going well in the case and expressed happiness at the Chief Minister's praise of the police force.

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CASE HISTORY

Jisha, 27, was found dead on April 28 at her home in Perumbavoor in Ernakulam by her mother Rajeshwari, who works as a casual labourer. Her body bore injuries in a way that gave rise to suspicion that she was raped before being killed.

POLITICAL ATTENTION

The murder attracted national headlines and became a hot topic in Kerala's election season. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) said it reflected the slide in law and order that the then ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) had allowed, and promised to book the culprits within hours, if elected to power.

Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said when the probe began (he was then Home Minister), and the probe team came out with a report that crucial evidence of a pair of footwear is going to be the clinching evidence, the media looked at it with disdain.

"See, now the same footwear has turned out to be the crucial evidence; so it means what happened during our time was on the right track," said Chennithala.

The LDF government, which assumed office on May 25, changed the entire team probing the case and replaced Director General of Police (DGP) TP Senkumar with Behra.

--- ENDS ---

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Making its first headway in the case, Kerala Police have detained the prime suspect and have sent his blood samples for examination.

30-year-old Jisha was found in a pool of blood in her residence by her mother, when the latter returned home from work. Photo: PTI

Kerala Police today detained the prime suspect in the rape and murder of a Dalit law student in Perumbavoor near Kochi on April 28.

"The investigating team now has all details regarding the suspect. This will soon be revealed by them. It is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police," Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan confirmed.



Making its first headway in the case, police have sent the key suspect's blood samples for examination. The suspect is now being questioned at an undisclosed location. The investigating team is yet to ascertain the motive behind the crime and whether there are more people involved in the crime.

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Investigating officials have also recovered a footwear from the scene of crime. Police are probing several locals and migrant workers in the area.



Welcoming the move, Jisha's sister said that it was a happy moment for her family.

"The culprit must be brought before the law. This is a happy moment for us. Please tell this to my mother. She needs to hear this," said Deepa, Jisha's sister, who was provided a job by the government after Jisha's murder.



Jisha, 29, was found brutally raped and murdered in her house at Perumbavoor, just 30 kms from Ernakulam city. The case sparked widespread outrage after post-mortem report revealed horrific details into the manner in which Jisha was possibly killed. She was stabbed at least 30 times and the culprit had used a sharp weapon to pull her intestines out. It was also revealed that she was strangled to death.



A change in the investigating team was the first decision announced by the CPM-led LDF government which took office on May 25 and the investigation was handed over to a team led by ADGP B Sandhya.

The Kerala police had earlier questioned hundreds of people, taken the fingerprint and bite marks of several suspects but was mocked and criticised for not having made any breakthrough in the case. The police had even kept a drop box in the locality for the residents, to provide any information they had regarding the case.



Kerala police chief DGP Loknath Behra, who is presently in Mumbai, is expected to fly to Kochi following which the details of the suspect will be revealed.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Colombo, Jun 16 (PTI) India-Sri Lanka relations have moved ahead from "being focussed on the past" after President Maithripala Sirisena took over from his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa in January 2015, the Indian envoy here said today.

Indian High Commissioner YK Sinha said bilateral ties have become robust and entered a new phase with highest-level engagements.

Recalling a flurry of high-level visits between the two South Asian neighbours across the Palk Strait, Sinha said ties entered a new phase since Sirisena took over from Rajapaksa.

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He said relations have moved ahead from being focused on the past.

After Sirisenas ascent to power, there have been several high-level visits between India and Sri Lanka starting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2015, which marked the first visit to the island-nation by an Indian leader since 1987.

Sirisena has twice visited India since January 2015. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe also made his first overseas visit to India, Sinha said.

Delivering a lecture on India-Sri Lanka relations in the 21st Century at the Bandarnaike Centre for International Studies, Sinha said bilateral trade between the two nations have formed the cornerstone in the growing relationship.

Contrary to perceptions, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries have been most fruitful, he said.

Sri Lankan exports have grown 13 times since the FTA was signed in 1999. This will show who has benefited most, the Indian ambassador said.

Sri Lanka and India enjoys a robust partnership and New Delhi is Colombos largest partner in defence training, he said.

On the fishermen issue, Sinha said it was a humanitarian issue with implications on the livelihoods of those involved.

Negotiations are continuing to try and resolve the issue of fishermen of the two countries crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), he said.

He said Sri Lankas security is in Indias interest.

India stresses the need for reconciliation in Sri Lanka through a negotiated political settlement where all communities can agree. This must be within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, Sinha said.

Sirisena has taken steps to reconcile with the Tamil minority.

Several confidence-building-measures such as the release of Tamils-owned lands, lifting of travel restrictions to the North and de-escalating the military presence have been taken since January as part of efforts to ensure reconciliation after three decades of civil war with the LTTE that claimed more than 100,000 lives. PTI CORR ABH ZH ABH

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: followed: Guv

Kanpur, Jun 16 (PTI) The Mathura clashes could have been avoided if the Akhilesh Yadav government had followed the high court order in a timely manner, Uttar Pradesh governor Ram Naik today said.

Voicing concern over the clashes that left two policemen among 29 dead the Governor said whatever happened in the district was unprecedented.

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"Whatever happened in Mathura was unprecedented. The death of two police officers besides the other people is a matter of grave concern," he told reporters here.

Naik said that if the Allahabad High Courts order for removing encroachment at Jawahar Bagh had been followed, the clashes could have been avoided.

"We saw what happened when the state government could not implement the Allahabad High Courts orders for removing encroachment at Jawahar Bagh. If the courts directions had been followed in a timely manner, we could have avoided such an incident," he said.

Naik, who had directed the government to issue a status paper on illegal encroachments in the state yesterday, said that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had apprised him of details of the Mathura incident.

Naik said the government should take back possession of such properties and get the illegal occupants evicted in order to ward off recurrence of Jawahar Bagh-type incidents anywhere in the state.

In various districts, illegal occupants have grabbed government land and local courts have also issued eviction order from time to time but to no avail, Naik had said in a release yesterday.

In a letter to the chief minister, Naik had asked the state government to issue a white paper on illegal encroachment on land of parks, grazing grounds, ponds and public buildings by individuals or organisations, a Raj Bhawan release said yesterday.

In the clashes, 29 people, including two police officers were killed and a large number of people injured. PTI CORR BSA DV BSA

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 15 (PTI) Looking to attract investment from Indian companies in Mauritius and other African nations through its shores, the island nation today said it will organise a partnership summit next month.

The first-ever India-Mauritius Global Partnership Summit 2016 will be organised in Mauritius on July 24-27.

The summits express objective is to encourage the business community from India to invest in Mauritius and other African countries.

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According to the India-Mauritius Trade and Cultural Friendship Forum, 250 Indian delegates are estimated to attend the event.

"We have a lot of investment opportunities in Mauritius for Indian entrepreneurs. Besides, we have a simple tax regime and favourable business climate," said Seewraj Nundlall, Country Head-India, Board of Investment, Mauritius.

"We are also a gateway to opportunities in African markets and we have access to 26 per cent of the worlds population."

Mauritius is seeking investment in sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, education, technology, smart cities, financial services and realty.

The Board of Investment (BOI) is the national investment promotion agency of the Mauritius government.

One of the most prosperous countries in Africa, the scenic island nation has a population of about 1.2 million while GDP per capita is estimated to be around USD 9,200.

Promoting the summit across India through roadshows, Director-Conference Deven Maulloo said "the summit will be direct meeting of the business community". PTI SP ADI ARD

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Jaipur, Jun 16 (PTI) The mortal remains ofSignalman Ajay Singh Choudhary who was killed in Kashmir today was consigned to flames in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan.

The body of Choudhary reached Jhunjhunu in the evening by helicopter from Delhi.

The body was cremated with full military honour, defence spokesperson said.

Choudhary was killed in a gunbattle while foiling an infiltration bid in Machhil sector of Kupwara district in Kashmir. PTI SDA TIR RG TIR

--- ENDS ---

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Delhi Police today gave clean chit to BJP MP Maheish Girri and NDMC vice-chairman Karan Singh Tanwar saying the investigators have not come across any evidence against them in the probe into the murder of NDMC estate officer M M Khan.

On May 16, Khan was shot dead a day before he was scheduled to pass the final order on the lease terms of hotel The Connaught which was functioning on a property leased by the civic body. Police arrested the owner of hotel, Ramesh Kakkar, and five others in connection with the murder.

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"In the investigation so far we have not come across any evidence against Kanwar Singh Tanwar and Maheish Girri," Special Commissioner of Police (Law & Order/South) P Kamraj said.

A senior official added that their names had emerged during the course of investigation, but there was no evidence against them.

This was met with sharp criticism from the AAP saying the Delhi Police should not act as "spokesperson" for the BJP leaders. The partys Delhi unit convenor Dilip Pandey demanded Tanwar and Girri should first be arrested and their call records probed.

"Till now the Delhi Police has probed the role of extortion very well. But you (police) dont have to give the BJP leaders a clean chit from your side. Karan Singh Tanwar does not become innocent if the Delhi gives him a clean chit," Pandey said.

"A cover letter to LG office was also forwarded by Maheish Girri, who had also taken Ramesh Kakkar (the main accused in Khans murder) to the LG office," Pandey claimed.

In response to AAPs allegations, Girri had challenged Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for a public debate over his allegations in Khans murder. He dared Kejriwal to prove the charges or quit politics.

Today, Tanwar also threatened to sue AAP leaders over the allegations.

"AAP has played dirty politics to trap me in M M Khans murder and polices clean chit has proved that. I will file civil and criminal cases against those who have conspired to defame me and my party," Tanwar said.

Kejriwal, in his letter to Delhi Lt Governor Najeeb Jung, had accused him of "saving" Girri and Tanwar in connection with Khans murder case. The Delhi CM went on to allege that Jung has "beautifully" saved the two from questioning by police which, he said, must have "pleased" Modi. PTI DEY GJS PR DEY RCJ ZMN RCJ

--- ENDS ---
A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

By Press Trust of India: Acknowledging that India is "inching closer" to get membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), Chinese official media today said if New Delhi is admitted into the elite grouping, "nuclear balance" between India and Pakistan will be broken.

Stating that India's entry into NSG will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", an article in the state-run Global Times however said China could support India's inclusion in the 48 member nuclear club if it "played by rules".

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Written by Fu Xiaoqiang research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the article a second in as many days by the same daily highlights China's strident and vocal opposition to India's entry into NSG and concerns that its all weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a legitimate nuclear power."

"New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month," the article said, mentioning for the first time India's progress in getting support from Mexico and Switzerland.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article titled "Beijing could support India's NSG accession path if it plays by rules".

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by Peoples Daily.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," it said.

"As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region," it said.

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

"It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office," it said.



US RECOGNISED DELHI AS A "MAJOR DEFENCE PARTNER"

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The US recognised New Delhi as a "major defence partner" during Modi's recent visit, meaning that the White House has given India the treatment as a US military ally, it said.

The article said that over the years, the US has been "bending the rules" to back India's nuclear projects.

"Against the backdrop of Washington's accelerated pace of promoting its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, it will be highly likely to keep supporting New Delhi's nuclear ambitions, in order to make it a stronger power to contain China," it said.

The attitude of the US has had and will undoubtedly have an impact on some other nations. For those countries which also wish to put a finger in the pie of India's market, many of them begin to back India's NSG membership, or at least not oppose it, the article said in apparent reference to majority of the countries in the NSG supporting India's entry.

"However, as a country that has signed neither the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG," it said.

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"Thats why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to India's membership," it said.

The article made no mention of problems faced by Pakistan in getting into the NSG due to its past record of proliferating the nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, where as India is seeking entry into group based on clean non-proliferation record.

"As a crucial defender of the international system against nuclear proliferation, China does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules," the article said without referring to Beijing's own nuclear power cooperation with Islamabad in supplying a number of nuclear reactors, including two 1100 mw reactors currently under construction in Karachi.

"For those countries that are developing nuclear technology without the acceptance of the international community, perhaps counting them into the non-proliferation mechanism will better safeguard nuclear security," it said.

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But at the same, the article said China backs India's entry if a fair and just principle is worked out through consensus.

"Yet before that, a fair and just principle must be made through common consensus of all current members of the NSG, rather than the US and India's reckless pushing at the cost of rule-breaking".

"So far, all NSG members have signed the NPT. So the question is, if any non-signatory of the treaty wants to join the group, under what condition can it be accepted? If such a standard is to be made one day, then it will be possible for both India and Pakistan to become part of the group," it said.

"Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organisation," it said.

"As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhis path toward the club," it said.

Also read: India's NSG membership will touch raw nerve with Pak: China



--- ENDS ---
Omar Abdullah fiercely attacked J&K CM,PDP Chief Mehbooba Mufti over 'betraying her people' and claimed she had abandoned all her promises to hang on to power.

By Naseer Ganai: National Conference working president Omar Abdullah Thursday said Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti was at the forefront of PDP's "shocking betrayal" with the people of Kashmir.



MEHBOOBA SCRIPTED PDP-BJP ALLIANCE

"Mehbooba Mufti scripted the PDP-BJP alliance and it was none other than Mehbooba Mufti who took part in the first formal meeting between PDP and BJP in New Delhi", Abdullah said.

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"She has abandoned all her promises to hang on to power. We still remember her election speeches about how it was important to vote for PDP to keep BJP out of J&K. Today the greatest irony is that she heads the PDP-BJP Alliance in J&K", Abdullah said addressing two public rallies in Anantnag, which is going to polls on June 22.

IDEOLOGY OF KASHMIR VS NAGPUR

Abdullah said Anantnag by-polls was a battle between the ideology of Kashmir and the ideology of Nagpur. "Today the State's remote control lies in Nagpur and Mehbooba Mufti gets her day-to-day directions from the RSS headquarters. The same Mehbooba Mufti who used to jump into the well of the Assembly to seek AFSPA revocation and return of power projects has gone completely silent on these issues after becoming the Chief Minister", he added.

TWO MONTH LONG TANTRUM"

She is frightened to even mention AFSPA in the legislative assembly. After the demise of Late Mufti Sahab she promised the people of J&K that she would not take over as the Chief Minister until and unless New Delhi announces some CBMs for J&K. Where did those CBMs go Mehbooba Ji? What convinced you to take over as the CM after a two month long tantrum? Mehbooba Mufti cannot be trusted - she has proved that beyond an iota of doubt. She has backtracked on everything she has ever said", Abdullah said.

"What happened to PDP's 'Battle of Ideas' promise? ?All these voices are being selectively targeted for their open and stinging criticism of PDP's sell-outs and U-turns. Mehbooba Mufti has become paranoid about her growing unpopularity", Abdullah added.



BUCKLED UNDER PRESSURE

Abdullah said it was distressing how Mehbooba Mufti was pressurized by the BJP and RSS into releasing those responsible for violence and breaking the law recently in Jammu despite FIRs and despite concrete proof. "This State is being run by the RSS and Mehbooba Mufti has handed over her mandate to the right-wing and also compromised on the sanctity and integrity of the office she holds", Abdullah added.

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ANANTNAG BY - POLLS

The Anantnag by-polls are scheduled to be held on June 22 as the seat fell vacant after Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's death on January 7 this year.

In 2014 Assembly elections, late Chief Minister and Mehbooba's father Sayeed had won elections from here by securing 16983 votes and the Congress candidate Shah stood at second place getting 10955 votes.



LEGACY OF HER FATHER

Mehbooba herself held road shows at different villages here on Friday last week. She, however, sought votes to carry forward what she said "legacy of her father. "

"PDP has established clear political priorities and we would continue our struggle to seek resolution of the multiple problems faced by Jammu and Kashmir on political, economic, developmental, administrative and financial fronts," Mehbooba said.

"We would continue to work towards accomplishing the vision of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed to create a space of dignity, opportunity and prosperity for the people of Jammu & Kashmir, especially our emancipated youth," she said.

Also Read: Mehbooba meets Army Chief, seeks minimum troops in civilian areas

--- ENDS ---
The present policy of granting funds to unaided institutes depending on their performance has resulted in educational institutions engaging in malpractices.

The toppers who were clueless about their subjects.

By Sujeet Jha, Rohit Kumar Singh: After the shocking expose of the Bihar education scandal, the Bihar government is mulling over "operation cleanup" with regards to its policy towards unaided educational institutions in the state.

PRESENT POLICY

The state government grants funds to unaided institutes on the basis of their performance as of now. This means that an institute which churns out good results year after year, is given more funds.

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"This policy was performance based when it was introduced but later it started being misused. We are conducting investigations and are waiting for a detailed report. If the report concludes that that 95 per cent things are wrong, we will start operation clean up", said Ashok Chowdhary, Bihar Education Minister.

Chowdhary added that the educational institutions are hand in glove with the Bihar board.

INSTITUTES INDULGE IN MALPRACTICES

Experts maintain that the condition of more grants being provided to better performing educational institutes has generated a tendency among schools and colleges to indulge in malpractices.

The dubious Bishun Rai college, which is under scanner in Hajipur, performed brilliantly in the last few years with hardly any student getting even a second division. This, despite of a lack of proper teaching staff.

Nageshwar Sharma, former Chairman of Bihar School of Examination Board, revealed how these students secured top positions without regular classes.

"Ever since the government decided that more funds would be given to those institutes which perform better, more and more colleges started to mushroom in the state. This was done in connivance with the college mafia and the politicians," he said.

Sharma added that these colleges started minting money in two manners - making money from the students by luring them with first division and massive funds from the government.

NUMBER OF INSTITUTES INCREASING

Interestingly, there were only five government colleges and 22 private colleges in 1932 which received funds from the government. But since 1982, the year a new policy came, the institutes began mushrooming.

It was in 2008 that the state formulated the new policy to provide financial assistance to unaided educational institutes after which a huge number of institutes came into being.

WHAT THE NEW POLICY STATES A student who passes 10th with 1st division receives Rs 3500, with 2nd division gets Rs 3000 and with 3rd division receives Rs 2500. For 12th, a student receives Rs 4500 for passing with 1st division, Rs 4000 for 2nd division and Rs 3500 for 3rd division. In degree colleges, scholarship of Rs 8500, Rs 8000 and Rs 7500 is given for securing 1st, 2nd and 3rd division respectively. There are around 600 unaided educational institutions in the state and the government spends Rs 300-500 crore on them.

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Also Read:

Not only in Bihar: Ahmedabad student checks his own paper, gives himself full marks

#MarksForMoney: Bihar's lucrative exam-fixing industry exposed

--- ENDS ---
Oscar Pistorius removed his prostheses and hobbled on his stumps in a South African courtroom, part of his defense team's attempt to show that he is a vulnerable man who deserves leniency when he is sentenced.

Oscar Pistorius' prosthetics lay on the floor as he walks on his stumps during the hearing in the High Court in Pretoria, South Africa. (AP Photo)

By Reuters: Oscar Pistorius shuffled through a Pretoria court without his prosthetic legs to show how vulnerable he is as the Paralympian seeks to avoid prison for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

The 29-year-old faces a minimum 15-year jail term for the Valentine's Day killing in 2013 in a case that has attracted worldwide interest and divided South Africa. He will be sentenced on July 6.

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Pistorius has always said he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder when he fired four shots through a locked toilet door in his Pretoria home, killing her almost instantly.

During his closing arguments, defence lawyer Barry Roux asked the gold medallist, known as the "Blade Runner" for his carbon-fibre prosthetics, to walk on his stumps to show the difficulty he faced dealing with the threat of an intruder.

The lower part of his legs were amputated when he was a baby.

His body shaking with emotion, Pistorius removed his prosthetics and stood on his stumps for about five minutes in front of the court television camera, wiping away tears with a tissue.

"The accused was vulnerable because of his disability," Roux said. "His failure to conduct a rational thought process does not negate his vulnerability."

The defence says Pistorius did not deliberately kill model and law graduate Steenkamp and was "a broken man", calling for a non-custodial sentence that includes community service.

A state prosecutor argued that Pistorius - who did not take the stand himself - had shown no remorse or told the court why he fired the shots, and asked the court jail the athlete for the prescribed minimum sentence of 15-years.

The athlete originally received a five-year sentence for a manslaughter conviction, that was upgraded to murder on appeal. The original trial judge, Thokozile Masipa, was presiding at the hearings at the Pretoria High Court.

FIERCE DEBATE



Roux asked the judge to consider that his client was vulnerable because of his disability and that the prescribed 15-year minimum sentence should give the court "unease".

"The fact is that a disabled person in jail has a more difficult time," Roux said.

The case has prompted a fierce debate in a country beset by high levels of violent crime against women and still dealing with the legacy of decades of apartheid race-based rule.

Some rights groups have said Pistorius, a wealthy white man, has received preferential treatment.

Pistorius reached the pinnacle of his fame in London 2012 when he became the first double amputee to run in the Olympics, reaching the 400 metres semi-finals, before taking two golds in the Paralympics.

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Roux said the publicity surrounding the case led to it being portrayed as an incident of gender-based violence, despite the facts showing it was not. Pistorius had now "become the face of gender violence", he said.

Shortly after Roux asked Pistorius to walk without his prosthetics, prosecutor Gerrie Nel requested that the judge allow photos to be shown of Steenkamp's bloodied head and torso.

Masipa ruled that the photos be made available to the public upon request. She said the photos had been banned to protect the Steenkamp family, who had now agreed to lifting the ban.

The victim's father Barry Steenkamp said on Tuesday that Pistorius must pay for his crime.

Prosecutor Nel said Pistorius had failed to show remorse.

"There's a chasm between regret and remorse," Nel said. "Real remorse would have been the accused taking the court into his confidence, telling the court why I fired that shot, why I did what I did. We don't have that."

Johannesburg-based criminal law attorney Zola Majavu said the judge could only deviate from handing out the minimum sentence if Pistorius had demonstrated exceptional circumstances to warrant such a deviation.

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He said Pistorius' decision not to speak in court could prove central: "It was a perfect opportunity to show the court that he does take responsibility for his actions."

Pistorius has given an interview to British television, which will be aired next week.

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The AAP government's 21 parliamentary secretaries were assisting the minister in ensuring ground level work in various fields like education, healthcare, Wi-Fi, ration shops and road and water projects.

By Mail Today: Terming parliamentary secretaries as eyes, ears and hands of the AAP government, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal came out in their support and said that they are highly qualified people who have been tasked with important duties.

The AAP government's 21 parliamentary secretaries were assisting the minister in ensuring ground level work in various fields like education, healthcare, Wi-Fi, ration shops and road and water projects.



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These secretaries claim that they were working as volunteers using their own resources so that they can address public grievances.



PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARIES SHOWCASE THEIR WORK



"I am 68 per cent disable and ride pillion on a scooter in my constituency. I look after all the health related grievances that the residents of east Delhi have. We have taken patients to hospitals even after midnight. We have worked really hard in ensuring treatment of EWS patients at private hospitals," said Anil Kumar Bajpai, MLA from Gandhi Nagar.

Bajpai's family lives in a small rented flat in Geeta colony paying a rent of Rs 8,000. He has an office in Kanti Nagar for which he pays a rent of Rs 15,000.

His biggest achievement is starting the first poly-clinic in his area which earlier lacked basic health facilities.

Similarly Kondli MLA Manoj Kumar, Jangpura MLA Praveen Kumar and Wazirpur MLA Rajesh Gupta showcased the work they have been doing in their respective constituencies.

"All MLAs send grievances of supply at ration shops from there area to us and we take up the issue with officers. Sudden inspection of ration shops, ground check and working on modern technology to bring more transparency is part of my work. We have introduced smart cards and are installing high-tech devices at rations shops for transparency," said Manoj Kumar Parliamentary Secretary to food and supply.

KEJRIWAL DEFENDS APPOINTMENT OF PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARIES

Kejriwal strongly defended the appointment of 21 parliamentary secretaries.

"They are highly qualified people in different fields, starting from MBA to engineering and not illiterates like in other parties. Mohalla Clinics are product of their hard work so is the mapping of schools," Kejriwal said. Dwarka MLA Adarsh Shastri who assists information and technology minister is taking care of AAP's ambitious project of providing free Wi-Fi services. His team is working on avenues to generate money from the project.

Also Read

Parliamentary secretaries add to AAP woes, were added to ease ministers' work



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By PTI: From Aditi Khanna

London, Jun 16 (PTI) Prince William will become the first British royal to feature on the cover of a popular gay magazine in the UK to make a strong stand against bullying people because of their sexuality.

The Duke of Cambridge, who is second in line to Britain?s throne, will appear of the cover of the July edition of Attitude.

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The 33-year-old posed for the magazine after inviting its team of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and other sexual minority groups to his Kensington Palace home here to listen to their experiences of bullying and its effect on mental health.

"No one should be bullied for their sexuality or any other reason and no one should have to put up with the kind of hate that these young people have endured in their lives," he said.

He added: "The young gay, lesbian and transgender individuals I met throughAttitude are truly brave to speak out and to give hope to people who are going through terrible bullying right now. Their sense of strength and optimism should give us all encouragement to stand up to bullying wherever we see it.

"What I would say to any young person reading this whos being bullied for their sexuality: dont put up with it ? speak to a trusted adult, a friend, a teacher, Childline, Diana Award or some other service and get the help you need. You should be proud of the person you are and you have nothing to be ashamed of."

His front-page modelling comes after his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was unveiled in April as the cover girl for the centenary issue of Vogue.

The July issue of Attitude went to press on June 8, days before Omar Mateen killed 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and the issue will hit the stands on June 22. PTI AK AJR AKJ AJR

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Congress which announced on Wednesday that it will meet Home Minister to apprise him about the law and order situation in Punjab draws a flack as Rajnath Singh refuses to meet Captain.

By Manjeet Sehgal: Punjab Pradesh Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh on Thursday criticised the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh for turning a 'blind eye to the anarchy prevailing in Punjab'. He warned that Punjab's law and order problem will not be restricted to the state as it can have nationwide repercussions.

Amarinder had sought an appointment with the union Home Minister to lead a party delegation to meet him and apprise him about the deteriorating law and order situation in the state. However, he regretted, there was no response from the Minister apparently for the reason that he did not bother about what was happening in Punjab or he did not want to annoy his Akali partners by meeting the Congress delegation.

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The former Punjab Chief Minister warned that the lawlessness and anarchy prevailing in Punjab is a matter of national concern which everyone must take seriously. "However, I am sorry to say that the government of India, for the reasons best known to it, was not prepared even to listen to us", he said, while warning, "we have seen the darkest era not long ago and we don't want the same situation to arise once again".

GOVERNMENT INACTION

Giving details, he disclosed that the mother of the Namdhari Sect Guru Mata Chand Kaur was shot dead and there was no clue of the culprits even after three months of the murder. Only last month, he added, a prominent religious leader Sant Ranjit Singh Dhadarianwale was attacked in broad day light and 40 rounds were fired at his car in which one of his associates got killed. "Everybody knows who is the culprit as the police have traced the cars and still the Badal government was not taking any action", he said.

The former Chief Minister disclosed that kidnappings had become a routine and people were abducted for ransom. He said, there were reports that the abducted persons were securing their release after paying the ransom and police was not doing anything. A couple of months ago, he added, an abducted boy was killed in Kapurthala when his parents could not pay the ransom to the kidnappers.

In the same context, Captain Amarinder revealed that two persons close to the Deputy Chief Minister, Sukhbir Badal, who happens to be the state's Home Minister also, while breaking all rules went inside Fazilka jail to help one of their associates, to force another jail inmate to handover his properties to them. He identified them as Rozy Barqandi and Satinder Manta, both close to Sukhbir who are running a criminal empire of their own.

He said, another henchman of the Akalis, Daya Singh Kolianwali was acting on behalf of the Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and had duped hundreds of people of crores of rupees promising them jobs. He said, he will be leading a protest dharna against the corruption of the Chief Minister through Koliawali, at Badal's native village on Saturday. "While Sukhbir operates through Barqandi and Manta, the senior Badal is operating through Kolianwali", he said, adding, it is matter of few months more when they will have to face the law after Congress forms the government there.

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By Akshaya Nath: Rapper Sofia Ashraf who hit the headlines for her song 'Kodaikanal Won't, Kodaikanal won't ' highlighting the mercury poisoning caused in the hill station, is now back with another song 'Dow Vs Bhopal: A toxic rap battle,' this time for Bhopal gas victims.

"When you write your own content, you write stuff that you are passionate about. These are subjects that angers me a lot and that is how I wrote it. I wrote it in 2008 and there was a window of hope for this issue and that is why we were able to revive it," said Sofia

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More than 500 families in Kodaikanal have been compensated for the mercury poisoning. Now her awareness video that aims at urging people to sign a petition by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB) has got over 1.20 lakh signatures. "We don't know what effect a song will have on the public. Some get really good response, while some don't. The main aim is to highlight the cause and when we get a good feedback it feels great," said Sofia, who is a freelance content creator.

She is also working on a children's book.

SUPPORT FOR THE PETITION

After the 'We the people' petition put forth by ICJB didn't get much attraction, they decided to approach Sofia hoping that it would creates a similar buzz like the Kodaikanal song. "We didn't have much time in hand so we thought we can revamp a song that I wrote eight years back. I met Director Subbu, a feature film maker, discussed the concept a whole day and the following day we completed the shoot as well," said Sofia.

Demanding Dow chemicals to be made accountable for the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, 'Dow vs Bhopal: A Toxic rap battle,' is a rap going back and forth taking sides of Dow and Bhopal. At one point Sofia raps "What's all this fuss about?We bought UC, not its liabilities," while Bhopal says that the victims were given a very meagre compensation.

APPROACHED BY ICJB

When Sofia was approached by ICJB they were in need of a minimum 90,000 signature so as to meet the required one lakh signatures for the 'We the people' petition. Now, with the basic requirement completed, Sofia and team can happily wait for a response from the White House, a significant factor of the 'We the people' petition.

According to government figures, approximately 5,200 people died and thousand others have suffered permanent or partial disabilities. Thousands are still facing the effect of 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas from a pesticide factory owned by US multinational Union Carbide Corp. 'Whose side are you on?' Questions Sofia in her song.





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Praveen Shinde, who is a Zila Parishad member, and his friends thrashed a Central Bank of India staff in Yavatmal district of Maharashtra.

In yet another incident showcasing Shiv Sena's hooliganism, a local leader was caught on camera slapping and abusing a bank employee in Yavatmal district of Maharashtra.

The video released by ANI shows, Praveen Shinde, who is a Zila Parishad member, and his friends thrashing and abusing a staff of the Central Bank of India. The incident took place on Wednesday (June 15).

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Shinde is seen talking to the employee and then suddenly slapping him. One of Shinde's associates then showered a series of slaps on the employee who is seen evading the attack.

WATCH (15/6/16): Local Shiv Sena leaders slap a bank employee in Yavatmal (Maharashtra)https://t.co/oQOPEEaToa ANI (@ANI_news) June 16, 2016

A senior bank staff, who is seated nearby, is seen trying to prevent the Sena men from attacking his staff.

In February, a Siv Sena functionary Shashikant Kalgude was arrested for assaulting a female traffic constable after she pulled him up for talking on the phone while driving at a busy junction in Thane.

In another such incident Mahim MLA Sada Sarvankar slapped a person filming him attending people's queries on January 15. Sarvankar who is usually known as Sena's 'Cool Man' hit one of the mobile phone holder.



Also Read:

Shiv Sena man assaults woman traffic constable in Mumbai's Thane

Caught on camera: Shiv Sena goon abuses, slaps woman traffic cop in Thane

Raj Thackeray cuts Asaduddin Owaisi into pieces of cake



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The villagers from Pandarahalli in Karnataka stripped a young boy, adorned him with flowers and paraded him around to appease the rain gods.

Photo of villagers pouring cole water over the child during his walk in Pandarahalli in Karnataka's Chitradurga

By Rohini Swamy: Villagers of Pandarahalli in Karnataka's Chitradurga district have paraded a young boy naked to appease rain gods and get some relief from the drought situation.

Chitradurga was one of the districts affected by acute drought this year and for months drinking water was being supplied through tankers here.

Here's What Happened

1. The villagers stripped the young boy and adorned him with flowers.

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2. They made him carry an idol of Lord Ganesha and walk through the streets of the village.

3. The child had no idea what he was doing and merely followed the instructions of the villagers in this superstitious practice.

4. The child carried the idol to a river on the outskirts of the village where he immersed the idol and dirtied his feet with the mud.

5. During his walk, pots of cold water were poured on his head.

6. He returned the same way with the villagers chanting special mantras invoking the rain gods.

7. The child was later dressed in new clothes once the ritual was complete.

8. While the entire village was involved, the child rights commission has called it exploitation of the child's rights, asking for an immediate halt to the ritual.

9. This whole event was caught on camera and the Karnataka State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (KSCPCR) has taken cognisance of the incident.

10. The KSCPCR will be taking action against those involved in the ritual and have also sought a report from the local district authorities.

Interestingly, the incident has come at a time when Karnataka under the leadership of the CM Siddaramaiah is trying to garner support for the anti-superstition bill.

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By PTI: Hyderabad, Jun 16 (PTI) Telangana government today decided to continue with the existing policy of letting shops and other commercial establishments function on all the days for another three years.

Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao gave orders to this effect, a release from his office said here.

The shops and other establishments used to remain closed on Sundays and other holidays earlier, but they were allowed to remain open and transact business throughout the year after the formation of Telangana (in June 2014), it said.

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The policy was implemented for a year on experimental basis and it came to an end yesterday, it said.

Rao held a review on the policy and decided to continue the policy for another three years as positive feedback was received, the release said.

As per Raos directives, the Labour Department issued orders to protect the rights of workers.

Accordingly, the shops should function only from 9 AM to 11 PM and a worker should work for a maximum of eight hours a day and 48 hours in a week, it said.

Workers are entitled for one holiday per week. Other measures for the welfare of workers, including women, have also been announced. PTI SJR RSY IKA BAS

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By PTI: Srinagar, June 16 (PTI) Four militants and a soldier were killed as Army today foiled an infiltration bid, the second such attempt in three days, in Tangdhar sector near the Line of Control in Kashmir.

"Army foiled an infiltration bid in Tangdhar sector of Kupwara district near the LoC this morning. Two militants were killed in the initial exchange of firing while a soldier was injured," an army official said.

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He said the soldier, who was injured in the ongoing operation, later succumbed to injuries.

The official said two more militants were killed in the counter-infiltration operation.

This is second infiltration bid foiled by the security forces along the LoC in Kashmir.

On Tuesday, an infiltration bid was foiled in Machhil sector of Kupwara district.

The two-day operation left one militant dead while one soldier laid down his life.

Four other jawans were also injured in the operation.PTI MIJ DV

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BJP MP Subramanian Swamy has accused Raghuram Rajan and other officials of the RBI of money laundering.

By India Today Web Desk: BJP MP Subramanian Swamy has launched a fresh attack on RBI governor Raghuram Rajan.

In a letter to PM Modi, Swamy has accused Rajan and other officials of the RBI of money laundering and has sought the formation of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to investigate the charges.

Swamy even says that a case under prevention of corruption act should be registered adding that those close to former financial minister P Chidamabaram benefited from the decisions.

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He further claimed that RBI granted licenses to small financial banks allegedly for money laundering purposes. He added that those who who were granted licenses are controlled by foreign entities.

This is not the first time when Swamy has attacked Rajan. Earlier also, he had written to PM Modi urging him to sack Rajan because he was 'deliberately' trying to "wreck the Indian economy", and was also "mentally not fully Indian".



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By PTI: Mumbai, Jun 16 (PTI) A special court today remanded to NIA custody till June 23, Mohsin Sheikh, who had left him his home in suburban Malwani here, allegedly to join ISIS.

Sheikh and two others had gone missing in December last year after another youth Ayaz Sultans disappearance in October. Sultan had reportedly reached Syria and joined ISIS.

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Sheikh was arrested from Delhi in February by the local police and the case was transferred to NIA.

A case was registered in Mumbai NIA against Sheikh and the local court issued production warrant against him, after which he was brought from Delhi.

In the court, NIA today said that Sheik was involved in instigating and influencing Muslim youths in suburban Malwani in Mumbai on the instructions of a Syria-based handler.

NIA also said that he provided logistical support to another accused Rizwan during his Mumbai visit, arranged accommodation and SIM card.

The remand application said that Moshin visited Hubli in Karnataka, Hyderabad and Chennai.

He also took two persons with intention to make them join jihadi organisations in India having affiliations to ISIS.

The court accepting the NIAs request remanded him to the agency custody for eight days. PTI VI NP RG BAS

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Thailand today invited Indian companies to invest in Thailand as trade between the countries is quite low and there is room for more cooperation.

"Trade between two countries is quite low and there is room for more cooperation between Thailand and India," Thailand Board of Investment Deputy Secretary General Chokedee Kaewasang said here.

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"Thailand and India are in unique position to help each other. Thailand will help India in getting access to ASEAN," he added. Kaewasang said over USD 200 million has been invested by Indian companies in Thailand in last two years.

The Deputy Secretary General said by 2022, the Thailand government will invest USD 53.4 million in improving infrastructure.

"The government has identified so called next generation industries to enhance our competitiveness," he said.

Stressing that the Thailand government is focusing on digital infrastructure as well, Kaewasang said his government plans to invest USD 12 billion in digital infrastructure.

Speaking at the same occasion, Thailand Board of Investment Executive Director Bonggot Anuroy said if Indian companies will import material into Thailand then the Thailand government can exempt import duty.

She further said if any foreign company will establish international headquarter (IHQ) in Thailand then they will get special tax incentive up to 15 years.

Meanwhile, Thailand Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-Cha arrived India today on a three-day visit with an aim to deepen bilateral cooperation in areas of trade and investment, defence, security and tourism.

Chan-o-Cha will have extensive talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow during which both sides are likely to explore ways to expand maritime security cooperation, deal with threat of terrorism and boost trade.

Issues related to the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the two countries are likely to figure in talks. The volume of current annual bilateral trade between the two countries is nearly USD 8 billion and both sides are keen to expand it further. PTI BKS SRK MR

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Talking to India Today, Singh attacked Nitish Kumar government for not issuing arrest warrant against Lalkeshwar Singh and his politician wife Usha Sinha.

BJP MP R K Singh blamed Bihar CM Nitish Kumar for giving enough buffer time to the BSEB chairman to escape abroad.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP R K Singh has slammed the Bihar government for their failure in tracing the main accused in the toppers scam, former Chairman of Bihar School Examination Board Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh.

Talking to India Today, Singh attacked Nitish Kumar government for not issuing arrest warrant against Lalkeshwar Singh and his politician wife Usha Sinha until yesterday. FIR was filed against the duo on June 8, while arrest warrant was issued a week later on June 15.



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BUFFER TIME

Singh blamed Bihar CM Nitish Kumar for giving enough buffer time to the accused to escape abroad. Lalkeshwar and his wife reportedly fled away to London soon after the FIR.

"I have heard that they have fled to London. Govt gave them opportunity to flee. Police could have got arrest warrant earlier and posted lookout notice so that they did not flee abroad", said Singh.

Singh asserted that the entire controversy has ruined the future of several Bihari students who go out of the state to pursue higher education.

FAKING IT

He went on to lambast Nitish for 'deliberately' allowing Lalkeshwar Prasad to continue as Chairman of the BSEB even after knowing about the fake marksheets were awarded to students.

"It was an open secret that fake mark sheets were being given by BSEB but still Lalkeshwar Singh was allowed to remain Chairman for so long. Nitish is responsible for bringing education in Bihar to the lowest level. Nitish has done great disservice to Bihar", said Singh.

ALSO READ:

Police step up investigation on the Bihar topper scam



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Defending his willingness to speak with Kim, Trump said that there nothing wrong in opening a dialogue.

According to recent polls, 51 per cent expect Clinton to secure the presidency in November, while only 35 per cent expect the same for Trump.

By India Today Web Desk: Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would invite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the US, but not for an official state dinner.

Trump's remark came after his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton criticised him for his willingness to speak with Kim.

OPENING A DIALOGUE

The business mogul went further to mock Clinton and called her a "rank amateur". "She's been doing it forever and she still doesn't get it," Trump told supporters at a rally in Atlanta.

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Defending his willingness to speak with Kim, Trump said that there nothing wrong in opening a dialogue.

"What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? It's called opening a dialogue. It's opening a dialogue," Trump said.

However, Trump later went on to suggest that the speculated meeting probably would never happen. "But there's nothing -- I wouldn't go there," he said.

TRUMPED IT

According to a latest national poll conducted by CBS News, Clinton has maintained a 6-points lead over opponent Donald Trump after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee last week.

The survey highlights that while 51 per cent expected Clinton to secure the presidency in November, only 35 per cent expect the same for Trump.

The poll also brings out the choices of Democrats, independents and Republicans. On one hand where Democrats and independents expect Clinton to win, Republicans have pinned their hopes on Trump.

However, both Clinton and Trump scores levelled when people were asked about the interpersonal traits of both candidates. Sixty-three per cent of those polled answered "no" to whether they think Trump is honest and trustworthy, while Clinton scored only one percentage point lower at 62 per cent for the same characteristics.

However, on overall judgment, Clinton pulls ahead of Trump, earning 43 per cent of support from those who believe she shows good judgment, compared with Trump who comes in at 25 per cent among those who view his judgment favourably.

The poll was conducted from June 9 to June 13 among 1,280 adults, 1,048 of whom were registered voters. A margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points was kept for the entire sample.

With inputs from Agencies .

ALSO READ:

Trump calls Clinton 'rank amateur', says nothing wrong in meeting Kim

5 times media trumped Trump and Trump trumped media



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From Shahid Kapoor to Alia Bhatt to Arjun Kapoor, many Bollywood stars came out in support of Udta Punjab and requested the audience to boycott the pirated copy doing the rounds on internet.

By India Today Web Desk: Udta Punjab has seen the worst in the recent weeks, with their battle in High Court against CBFC's 89 cuts, to the objection to the mention of Punjab in the title. The makers were really flustered until Monday (June 13), which is when the Bombay High Court cleared the Abhsihek Chaubey directorial venture with just one cut.

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ALSO READ: Yo censor board so angry, it leaks Udta Punjab on torrent sites?

ALSO READ: 5 reasons to watch Udta Punjab (minus the controversy)



Happy with the decisions the makers started preparing for the Friday release and just then the censor copy of the film was found to be leaked online. This happened very conveniently a day after CBFC lost the battle against the makers of the film in court. Some people are insinuating that the leak must have come from the CBFC, however, there is no way to confirm it.

Bollywood was furious with the leak, with actors coming out on Twitter and pledging their support to the film, and requesting the audience to boycott the leaked copy. #PiracyDiMaaDi was trending last night. Here's what they had to say:



Movie theatres r filled with dreams and entertainment,don't kill them ! say no to piracy #UdtaPunjab at a theatre near u ???? Sidharth Malhotra (@S1dharthM) June 16, 2016

Films are made with the hard work & passion of everyone involved in creating them. Please don't support piracy. Shraddha Kapoor (@ShraddhaKapoor) June 16, 2016

Shocking how #UdtaPunjab has been leaked online. That too a censor copy. A lot of hard work goes into making a film pls say NO to piracy! Sonakshi Sinha (@sonakshisinha) June 16, 2016

Viruses in the Udta Punjab online leaked links that crashes systems !!!What a way to fight this disgusting menace !!! #PiracyDiMaaDi' Arjun Kapoor (@arjunk26) June 15, 2016

First 'Sairat' & now 'UdtaPunjab' - what's with the censor copy leaks???? Riteish Deshmukh (@Riteishd) June 15, 2016

A big #dishoom to the Pirates. Go watch #UdtaPunjab only in the theatre https://t.co/kdB13kaaVe Varun JUNAID dhawan (@Varun_dvn) June 15, 2016

It's the worst feeling to know that your film has been messed with before hand & your computer will be attacked with a virus if you do try.. Alia Bhatt (@aliaa08) June 15, 2016

It's a genuine request from the bottom of my heart. That's all I can say. Until then see you at the theatres #piracydimaadi Alia Bhatt (@aliaa08) June 15, 2016

It's a film from the heart made for you all. And now it's in your hands. #piracydimaadi make it count you all. love and gratitude.#letitfly Shahid Kapoor (@shahidkapoor) June 15, 2016

However, the leaked copy was taken down from the Internet a few hours later, but, it is difficult to say how much it might have circulated and how many illicit copies of the film are still doing the rounds. How it affects the business of the upcoming film is yet to be seen.

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Reports said the main accused behind the alleged leaking of Udta Punjab on the internet and the subsequent making of its DVDs has been identified and likely to be arrested soon.

By India Today Web Desk: The Punjab and Haryana High Court today rejected a petition challenging the release of Udta Punjab, due tomorrow. This came shortly after the Supreme Court also rejected a plea filed by an NGO seeking stay on the release of the Abhishek Chaubey film.

Meanwhile, reports today said the main accused behind the alleged leaking of Udta Punjab on the internet and the subsequent making of its DVDs has been identified and likely to be arrested soon.

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Here is everything you need to know on the Udta Punjab controversy: With only a day to go for the release of the controversial film on Punjab's drug problem, reports said the DVDs of the film were leaked in Mumbai. Udta Punjab was leaked online allegedly by a member of the Central Board of Film Certification, forcing its makers to allege that the film was being sabotaged by Pahlaj Nihalani's men. An offence under the sections of the Copyright and Information Technology Act have been registered by the Mumbai Police. Nihalani, meanwhile, rejected allegations of a CBFC member behind the leak of the film. "The leaked copy is not the one submitted to the censor board for examination. We will cooperate with the investigation," he said. The film's lead actors Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt have appealed to their fans to not watch the pirated version of the film online. "Blood and sweat of many in this film. It's been your battle as much as ours. Now is the time you can show it. Watch UdtaPunjab in theatres," Kapoor tweeted. Alia said, "It's the worst feeling to know that your film has been messed with beforehand & your computer will be attacked with a virus if you do try." Earlier, the Supreme Court also refused to entertain the plea of an NGO seeking stay on the release of the film and asked it to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court. On June 13, the Bombay High Court had cleared the decks for the film's release after ordering the deleting of a urination scene and displaying a revised disclaimer.

Also Read: Udta Punjab leaked online: B-Town urges fans to watch the film in theatres, says piracy di maa di



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The long battle between the makers of Udta Punjab and Censor Board members has ended and the film has finally got the censor certificate in hand on Wednesday (June 15) evening.

By India Today Web Desk: The long battle between the makers of Udta Punjab and Censor Board members has ended and the film has finally got the censor certificate in hand on Wednesday (June 15) evening. The film is all set to hit the screens on Friday (June 17).

ALSO READ: Udta Punjab leaked online, B-Town urges fans to watch the film in theatres

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A post on the official twitter handle of Balaji Motion pictures, one of the co-producers of Abhishek Chaubey's film, read: "And UdtaPunjab finally gets the UdtaCertificate!! Let's fly high in 2 days!"



The certificate bears the names of the two judges who ruled on the petition: S C Dharmadhikari and Dr Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi. It also says: "Passed by Hon'ble High Court, Mumbai."

Meanwhile, Manoj Desai, Executive Director of Gaiety Galaxy and Maratha Mandir Cinema, told IANS that the certificate came "at around 7 in the evening and now the advance booking will open from tomorrow (Thursday) morning".

The pre-release buzz of Udta Punjab is immense given the legal war that followed the Central Board of Film Certification's (CBFC) order for a whopping 89 cuts to make the movie fit for release.

The censors brought down that number to 13 later. Eventually, however, the Bombay High Court ruled it could release with just one scene cut.

The film, co-produced by Phanton Films and Balaji Motion Pictures, features Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh.

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Udta Punjab is all set to fly high this Friday as the Supreme Court removes the last hurdle in front of the film posed by a Punjab-based NGO.

By India Today Web Desk: The skies are clear for Udta Punjab now as the Supreme Court has refused to stay the screening of the film, that will now release on Friday, June 17, as was planned earlier.

ALSO READ: Five reasons to watch Udta Punjab (that don't include the controversy)



The court was hearing a plea by Human Rights Awareness Association, a Punjab-based NGO, to stop the film from being screened. The vacation bench of Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and Justice L. Nageshwara Rao presided over the plea.

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ALSO READ: Supreme Court moved to halt release of Udta Punjab



Senior Counsel Meenakshi Arora, appeared for Phantom Films, in the court.

The film focuses on the rampant drug abuse problem in Punjab and has been in the vortex of controversy for the past few weeks. While the CBFC choked the film by recommending 89 cuts, including removal of all mention of the word "Punjab" from the scenes as well as the title of the film, the Bombay High Court cleared the film on June 13 with just one cut, after the producers moved the court against the CBFC recommendations.

A large section of the film fraternity has asked for the removal of CBFC chairman Pahlaj Nihalani who is allegedly acting in interest of the SAD-BJP government in Punjab. Interestingly, after the High Court decision, Nihalani called the HC verdict a "victory of democracy".

However, the NGO moved the Supreme Court to put a stay order on the film's release on Wednesday (June 15), which the apex court refused to do.

The film starring Shahid Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Alia Bhatt and Diljit Dosanjh is set to release countrywide in over 2,000 screens this Friday.

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By PTI: New Delhi, Jun 14 (PTI) Scientists from India and the UK will release underwater robots in Bay of Bengal to monitor how ocean conditions influence monsoon, which can help in better predictions of the rainfall.

The Bay of Bengal Boundary Layer Experiment (BoBBLE) is led by two UK varsities, University of East Anglia (UEA) and University of Reading in collaboration with the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton.

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Collaborators in India include the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS), the Indian National Centre for Climate Information Services (INCOIS), the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT).

Ministry of Earth Sciences Secretary M Rajeevan said the Indian Research Vessel Sindhu Sadhana carrying scientists will sail from Chennai on June 24.

"Once out in the ocean, they will release seven underwater gliders to measure ocean properties such as temperature, salinity and current," he said.

Meanwhile, collaborators from a partner project led by the University of Reading with collaborators across the UK and India will use a state-of-the-art aircraft to take atmospheric measurements at the same time.

It is hoped that the combined results of this large-scale scientific campaign will help forecast the arrival of the Indian monsoon more accurately than ever before.

Forecasting the precise timing and location of the rains is vital to the regions economy, which is dominated by farming, and for managing its increasingly pressured water resources.

Lead researcher Prof Adrian Matthews, from UEAs School of Environmental Sciences, said "The Indian monsoon is notoriously hard to predict. It is a very complicated weather system and the processes are not understood or recorded in science.

"We will be combining oceanic and atmospheric measurements to monitor weather systems as they are generated. Nobody has ever made observations on this scale during the monsoon season itself so this is a truly ground-breaking project".

Matthews said, they are aiming for a better understanding of the actual physical processes. "What we have now are imperfect models for predicting monsoon rainfall when it hits land, so this will create better forecasts."

He said they hope it will also help "to mitigate international disasters caused by extreme rainfall and flooding and better understand how the southern Asian monsoon affects the whole worlds climate." (MORE) PTI PR RCJ RG RCJ

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By PTI: partner: Cong

New Delhi, Jun 16 (PTI) Congress today sought to take the sheen out of Prime Minister Narendra Modis recent address to a joint session of US Congress, wondering why the American Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner".

Partys senior spokesman Anand Sharma also accused Modi of attempting to mislead the country on the issue of Indias entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

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Talking to reporters, he wondered as to why the US Seate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" when the Prime Minister had claimed his visit to America a success and his address to US Congress being hailed by his admirers.

Sharma claimed that not even 50 Congressmen were present when Modi addressed the US Congress and a "lot of invitations" were given to NRIs for the function. "Let US Congress publish the names of those who attended...", he said.

Reports from Washington had it that the US Senate has failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modis recent address to a joint session of Congress, top Republican Senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with Americas closest allies.

On the issue of Indias entry into the NSG, he said Modi should "not mislead" the country as there is a "long list" of countries which have fully endorsed Indias entry to the group much earlier. PTI SPG SMJ ZMN SMJ

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A CCTV footage shows a cyclist being run over by a speeding Ford Mustang. Reports say the man's girlfriend was behind the wheels and the incident was her reaction to finding out that he's HIV positive.

By India Today Web Desk: In a bizarre incident, a speeding red Ford Mustang ran over a cyclist flinging him into the air and doesn't stop.

It seems the woman behind the wheels was the cyclist's girlfriend and she tried to kill him after she figured that he is HIV positive.

Yeah, that's how insane people can be!

The incident which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, on April 29 was captured on a surveillance camera and was posted on YouTube by a channel named Blue Horse Solutions.



Warning: Disturbing video. Viewer's discretion adviced.







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The video shows the car slamming into the cyclist and tosses him into the air, several feet above. Despite the crash, the man manages to get up and walk away. He seems lucky enough to be alive, but sure sustained injuries.

According to 12news, Misty Lee Wilke, the driver of the car is the man's girlfriend.

A Maricopa County grand jury indicted Wilke on charges including attempt to commit second-degree murder, fleeing the scene and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon (Mustang sure is deadly!).

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The suit claims the companies "knowingly permitted" the Islamic State group, referred to in the complaint as "ISIS," to recruit members, raise money and spread "extremist propaganda" via their social-media services.

By AP: The father of a young woman killed in the Paris massacre last November is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter, claiming that the companies provided "material support" to extremists in violation of the law.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the Paris attacks, filed the suit on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. The suit claims the companies "knowingly permitted" the Islamic State group, referred to in the complaint as "ISIS," to recruit members, raise money and spread "extremist propaganda" via their social-media services.

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The Gonzalez suit is very similar to a case brought against Twitter in January by the widow of a contractor killed in an attack in Jordan. It includes numerous identical passages and screenshots, although the lawyers in the cases are different.

In statements, Facebook and Twitter said Wednesday the Gonzalez lawsuit is without merit, and all three companies cited their policies against extremist material. Twitter, for instance, said that it has "teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate."

Facebook's statement read, in part, that if the company sees "evidence of a threat of imminent harm or a terror attack, we reach out to law enforcement."

Google, meanwhile, said it won't comment on pending litigation, but noted that that it has "clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users."

Under U.S. law, internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides a legal "safe harbor" for companies like Twitter and Facebook; it states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

But it isn't clear if that legal defense will suffice in this case. Ari Kresch, a lawyer with 1-800-LAW-FIRM who is part of the Gonzalez legal team, said in an email that the lawsuit targets social media companies because of the behavior they enabled, not what they published.

"This complaint is not about what ISIS's messages say," he wrote. "It is about Google, Twitter, and Facebook allowing ISIS to use their social media networks for recruitment and operations." The Gonzales complaint also alleges that Google's YouTube shared revenue with IS from ads that ran with its videos.

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agrees that the legal "safe harbor" might not shelter social-media companies in such cases. Twitter may not succeed in quashing the similar lawsuit filed in January on those grounds, Wittes argues. But he said Twitter could still prevail because the causal link between its alleged support for extremists and the attack is very weak.

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DuPont Denmark goes CO2-neutral

From next year, the DuPont Nutrition & Health (formerly Danisco) plant in Grindsted, Denmark, will become virtually carbon dioxide neutral when the plant's large coal boiler is retrofitted to burn wood chips.

From next year, the DuPont Nutrition & Health (formerly Danisco) plant in Grindsted, Denmark, will become virtually carbon dioxide neutral when the plant's large coal boiler is retrofitted to burn wood chips.

To fire with wood chips instead of coal is a huge win for the environment, said Plant Manager Martin K. Madsen, DuPont in Grindsted. Not only will we remove 45,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide currently produced using non-renewable energy, but we will also increase the amount of waste energy that we sell to the local district heating network."

A reduction of 45,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide is equivalent to removing 20,000 average Danish cars from the road for a year, the company said. The energy consumption at Grindsted, which is claimed to be one of the world's largest emulsifier plants and also produces other ingredients for the global food industry, is said to correspond to the heat consumption in a city with about 10,000 residents.

DuPont says it is committed to sustainability at its plants and has been investing in energy efficiency as well as strong interaction with the local district heating supplier for many years providing excess heat to the local district heating network in Grindsted since November 2011, covering about 8% of consumption. The green transition will bring a further benefit to the 3,600 district heating consumers. DuPont will expand its delivery to cover about half the heat consumption by harvesting the excess heat in the flue gas that is emitted from the wood chip boiler.

The Danish Agency Energy has agreed to financially support DuPont in its sustainability energy measures at Grindsted with up to DK 61 Million.

Troels Ranis, branch director of the energy group in the Confederation of Danish Industries, said the project is a good example of how companies can contribute to the green transition.

We are experiencing an increasing interest from companies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions," he said. The project in Grindsted can show other companies that conversion to renewable energy and focusing on sustainability goes hand in hand with commercial interests today.

DuPont has worked with the project for a few years and expects to start construction in August, so the plant will be operating by the first half of 2017.

Plant Manager Martin K. Madsen points out that the project not only improves energy efficiency, it also makes the plant more competitive.
Brazil generates US$26 million at Expo Riva Schuh

Brazil

Over 100,000 pairs of Brazilian shoes were sold during the three-day footwear event in Riva del Garda, Italy.

A total of 41 Brazilian footwear brands participated at Expo Riva Schuh on June 11-14, compared with 23 brands in June 2015, generating an estimated US$26 million in sales.

According to Ruisa Korndorfer Scheffel, Commercial Promotion Analyst at Abicalcados, the Brazilian Shoe Manufacturers Association, about US$2 million was generated directly during the event, representing about 100,000 pairs of shoes.

Buyers from 70 different countries are said to have visited the Brazilian brands, particularly from Italy, Russia, England, Portugal, Poland and Israel.

In terms of timing positioning of the trade fair, Scheffel says that it is correct to meet distributors and develop the products according to the market.

Despite the lower number of visitors felt by the Brazilian exhibitors, the number of orders are more important for this edition. It seems the clients are more cautious in terms purchase assertiveness. They evaluate the negotiations more carefully to be sure there will be a retail success, said Scheffel.
The AmeriKat trying, and failing, to solve

a Rubik's cube

"() the cubic grid structure gives no indication as to its function , or even if it has any structure, and [i]t is impossible to conclude that it may impart some technical advantage or effect in the domain of three-dimensional puzzles." (contested decision at [28]).

"() possible rotating capability, or even any other possibility of moving certain elements of the cube in question, () " (judgment under appeal at [54])

"83. As I understand it, in order to carry out a proper analysis of the functional features of the shape the General Court should have first taken account of the function of the goods concerned, namely the three-dimensional puzzle, that is to say a brain-teaser consisting of a logical arrangement of movable elements. Had the General Court taken account of that function, it could not have rejected the appellants claim that the cube in question will be perceived as consisting of movable elements divided by black lines."



"106. The shape at issue represents the shape of a three-dimensional puzzle. In the assessment of the shape at issue, account must be taken of the function of the goods concerned, which consists in the logical arrangement of the movable elements of a brain-teaser. "



"107. That function is confirmed by the well-know (paragraph 28 of the contested decision) features of the represented  Rubiks Cube brain-teaser, in which the movable elements, arranged in vertical and horizontal lattices, can be rotated ."

rotating capability

" 67. () that i dentification of the essential characteristics of a sign and also the assessment of whether or not they are functional in nature certainly feature among the findings of fact () " which cannot be reviewed on appeal, with the exception of a plea alleging distortion of the facts or evidence."



"68. However, establishing the c riteria for assessing functionality and the extent of the information to be taken into account is a question of law reviewable on appeal."



"69. In this case the General Court found, in paragraph 47 of the judgment under appeal, that the shape of the cube (essential characteristic no. 1) and the grid structure on each surface of the cube (essential characteristic no. 2) are the essential characteristics of the sign concerned. Those are findings which are not reviewable on appeal. Moreover, the appellant expressly stated that it does not challenge those findings." (emphasis added)

"78. Firstly, the General Court, although identifying the essential characteristics of the sign, failed to assess them in the light of the technical function inherent in the goods concerned ."

" There is therefore no essential lin k between (i) such a possible rotating capability , or even any other possibility of moving certain elements of the cube in question (test 1), and (ii) the presence, on the surfaces of that cube, of bold black lines or, a fortiori, of a grid structure of the type set out on the graphic representations of the contested mark. (test 3)" (judgment under appeal at [54]) (emphasis added)

...

...it is clear that that capability cannot result from the black lines in themselves or, more generally, from the grid structure" (judgment under appeal at [58])"

"108. As the appellant correctly points out, t he puzzle must, in order to perform that function, represent the shape of a polyhedron assembled from elements consisting of vertical and horizontal columns . "



"109. Consequently, contrary to what was found by the Board of Appeal in paragraph 28 of the contested decision, the essential characteristics of the contested sign  th e shape of the cube and the grid structure dividing the vertical and horizontal columns of evenly spaced elements, and the movable parts of the puzzle  are necessary to perform a technical function inherent in the goods concerned ."

, the AmeriKat missed Advocate General Szpunar's opinion in Case C 30/15 P - Sat the end of May. But Adam Gyorgy of Hungarian firm SBGK was keeping tabs. Adam reports with his view on the opinion as follows:"The opinion of Advocate General Szpunar inis unusual. It is one of the few opinions where an Advocate General (AG) has argued for the reversal of all previous instances - EUIPO Cancellation Division, the Board of Appeals , as well as the General Court - so as to find against the registration of the shape of the Rubik's Cube. This decision is even more noteworthy as it follows the precedent-settingdecision. In, the EUIPO and General Court held the same view that that the "Lego brick" is dictated by technical function (and thus ineligible for registration), which was supported by the AG and accepted by the CJEU. Inthe AG took the opposite view of all three previous decisions.According to statistics published in 2016 the AG's opinion has significant influence on the final judgment of the CJEU. The statistics show that the Court follows the same reasoning and gives its judgment based on AG's opinion "only" in approximately 70% of the cases. That is to say it is possible that the CJEU rules contrary to the opinion of the AG, but that is the exception not the rule. This case is the exception.This blog post focuses on the technical functionality issue of the opinion and the AG's findings on this point:The first step in assessing technical functionality is to define "the function of the product" that has to be performed by the sign applied for.The definition of the function of the product depends on the facts of the case. The finding of fact was undertaken by Board of Appeals, but in a cursory fashion, without defining any function at all. The Board of Appeals held:The General Court, while concurring with the findings of the Board of Appeals, tended to accept the argument of the Appellant (see Appellant's argument in judgment under appeal at [50]) that the function of the product can be construed as follows:Contrary to the above findings of fact, the AG provided a "new" (broader) definition:Thus, the AG created and relied on a definition of function, which had never been raised and analyzed by the preceding forums. Even if a merged definition of the cited paragraphs of the AG's opinion can be formulated and accepted as prevailing over the General Court's definition of "", it must be first be(explicitly mentioned) by the GC and the assessment of functionality (further tests below) must be assessed according to that definition.After defining the function of the product under assessment of functionality the second step is to identify the essential characteristics of a sign. The AG's Opinion stated:Because this finding was not contested by the either of the parties, the AG did not go further.The final step is to assess whether or not the essential characteristics are functional in nature. As a finding of fact, the third step cannot be subject to appeal unless there has been a distortion of the facts or evidence. Although argued by the Appellant, the AG did not say that there was distortion of the facts or evidence by the General Court. He said:Contrary to the AG's view, the General Court did assess the essential characteristic of the sign, but restricted its assessment to the grid structure on each surface of the cube (essential characteristic no. 2)Therefore, it is difficult to understand on what grounds the AG is alleging that the General Court failed to assess the essential characteristic of the sign or distorted any facts or evidence.As to the substance of third test the AG found that:In elementary geometry, a polyhedron is a solid in three dimensions with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. ( Wikipedia The below examples, while are not polyhedron shapes, still perform the possible function of rotating capability or even the completely new definition of function adopted by the AG. Therefore, it seems that the puzzle does not have to, in order to perform that function, represent the shape of a polyhedron.It is difficult to accept that the cube shape (essential characteristic no. 1) is necessary to obtain the technical result. It plainly is not in light of the above pictures. In thecase all forums found that the overall shape, "the brick shape" (essential characteristics no. 5.) was necessary to obtain the technical result of "brick shape for building; size for children to hold" (at 54.). Such finding most certainly does not apply for the RUBIKS CUBE, since the cubic shape is not necessary to build anything, nor for rotation.What is more interesting, even if any above defined functions of the product is used to conduct the third step, the cube shape (essential characteristic no. 1) was never examined by any previous instances. That is to say the third test, as a finding of fact, at this stage of the proceedings must have been first performed by the General Court.It is now for the CJEU to consider whether the state of the proceedings - according to Article 61 of the Statue of the Court of Justice - permits it to give a final judgment. It is unlikely that such a lack of finding of facts by the General Court as set out above would allow the court to render a final judgment."
Previously, Iran and the France-based manufacturer Airbus had announced that they concluded an agreement of the same type. Iran is set to purchase 118 Airbus jets, and the existence of this deal has been widely regarded as a source of additional pressure on Boeing as it weighed the costs and benefits of reentering the Iranian market alongside its competitor, and risking the consequences of falling afoul of outstanding American sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

As of Wednesday, Boeing had not confirmed the Iranian claim about a finalized deal. But CNN quoted a Boeing official as saying that it is the companys policy to allow customers to take the lead in making such announcements. But while this lends credence to the Iranian claim, Boeings further comments suggested that the completion of any such agreement is by no means a foregone conclusion. That is, the American company cautioned that an agreement would be entirely dependent upon American approval, and perhaps other, related factors.

However, there is considerable evidence that this approval will be forthcoming. After all, the Obama administration has been criticized by many of its detractors in the Republican-dominated Congress for acting as a personal sales representative for the Iranian investment market. And in spite of these criticisms, the Associated Press quoted Secretary of State John Kerry as saying that the administration would be open to even more discussions with potential investors regarding the extent to which they will be permitted to do business with Iran without facing consequences from the US.

More than that, Kerry even went so far as to say that he thinks there are places where the United States could give confidence where there is doubt, in order to make sure that Iran sees the benefit of ongoing enforcement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was implemented in January as the US and the European Union lifted economic sanctions related to the Iranian nuclear program.

Speaking from Norway, the secretary of State appeared to come close to acknowledging his critics notions that he has gone too far in selling European businesses on the investment opportunities implicit in the nuclear agreement. I have personally gone beyond the absolute requirements of the lifting of sanctions to personally engage with banks and businesses and others who have a natural reluctance after several years of sanctions, he said.

Numerous recent reports have emphasized, however, that this arguably excessive salesmanship has so far been insufficient to convince international banking institutions of the long-term viability of the Iranian market. Consequently, many Western businesses retain their reluctance. In fact, a Bloomberg report last week quoted some European executives as saying that they were still dissatisfied with the work that the US has done to clarify the lingering dangers of enforcement of banking restrictions and sanctions on Irans human rights violations and support of international terrorism.

On the other hand, Reuters reported on Wednesday that while major international banks were still keeping their distance from Iran, numerous small banks have taken advantage of the situation by entering the Iranian market and conducting transactions in various local currencies, while continuing to steer clear of transactions that involve the US dollar and violate restrictions on connections between the American and Iranian financial systems.

Iranian officials themselves have claimed that there are 200 such banks currently operating in the country. And Reuters adds that their presence has apparently helped to facilitate the slow but steady growth of European trade with the Islamic Republic. Figures for that trade increased by approximately 22 percent over a period of four months.

On one hand, this seems to undercut recent, recurrent Iranian complaints that lingering American threats have slowed the pace of Irans recovery. But on the other hand, it still represents a volume of trade that is far below pre-sanctions levels, in spite of the fact that Iran claims to have already recovered its average daily oil output to levels not seen since 2011.

While European businesses and the Obama administration are apparently engaged in a project to further raise this trade statistics, Irans adversaries both within the US government and in the Middle East region are working to hold that recovery back. However, much like the US is divided on this issue between the White House and the Republican Congress, the Gulf Arab states are apparently divided over the extent to which they will act against the Islamic Republic in the midst of current political and economic tensions.

Analysts have pointed out that many of these states, or many elements within them, have significant need for economic collaboration with Iran, regardless of their stronger allegiances to regional rival Saudi Arabia. This apparently held a number of those countries back from completely following the Saudis in severing ties with Iran in January after Iranian mobs attacks the Saudi embassy and consulate. Most of Saudi Arabias close allies went so far as to downgrade their diplomatic relations with Iran, but now Gulf News reports that these gestures have been largely, albeit conditionally reversed.

The report quoted Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Khalid al-Jarallah as saying, We look forward to the ambassadors of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) returning to their posts in Tehran. However, this matter is directly linked to Irans policy in the region and its commitment to the essential principles of the United Nations Charter with regards to the non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries and the respect of their sovereignty.

It is not clear what change in Irans behavior Kuwait may have been responding to in reestablishing ties with Iran, considering that the Islamic Republic remains deeply involved in the defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, continues to wield considerable influence over Iraq through a number of Shiite militias, and continues to fight a proxy war with Saudi Arabia through its support of Houthi rebels in Yemen.

One possibility is that the Gulf Arab states have seen positive signs in Irans latest comments on a possible internationally negotiated truce in Syria. However, at the same time that the Iranians have expressed newfound interest in such a truce, they have also warned against an agreement that strengthens terrorists. As terrorist has been used by Tehran as a catch-all term for any opponent of the Assad regime, this commentary seems to suggest that Iran remains committed to securing a solution only on its own terms.

Even Secretary of State Kerry spoke out against the apparent duplicity of Iran and its Russian allies over the Syrian situation, in his comments on Wednesday. The United States is not going to sit there and be used as an instrument that permits a so-called cease-fire to be in place while one principal party is trying to take advantage of it to the detriment of the entire process, he said.

The danger of continuing Iranian aggression in the region could harm the prospects for reconciliation between Iran and its traditional regional adversaries at a time when relations among them are already particularly strained. Whats more, if anxiety continues to build among those adversaries, it could even foster unlikely alliances against the Islamic Republic. On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli Foreign Minister Dore Gold had expressed the opinion that Israel and the Sunni Arab states could have common cause in their fight against Iranian regional influence.

In a larger sense, if anxiety about that influence continues to grow, it could also further undermine Western confidence regarding the possibility of newfound investment in the Islamic Republic. These prospects are already dimmed by the perception of contrasting Iranian and Western interests in the Middle East; they are made worse still by the apparent possibility of a return to open hostility between Iran and the West.

As a matter of fact, that hostility has never quite evaporated on the Iranian side. Despite last summers nuclear agreement  or perhaps because of it  there has been a significant increase in anti-Western propaganda coming from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials. In some cases, this propaganda has been directed against citizens and permanent residents of Western countries who have been arrested in Iran. The growing list of these arrests has contributed to severe concerns about the dangers faced by foreign investors should they travel to Iran, thereby diminishing the attractiveness of that market.

And the propaganda against those arrestees continues to expand. On Wednesday, Agence-France Presse reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had released a statement alleging that the British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was arrested in April after visiting her family in Iran, was involved in the soft overthrow of the Islamic Republic through her membership in foreign companies and institutions.

The statement went on to suggest that the program coordinator for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, who was traveling with her two-year-old daughter when she was arrested, is one of the heads of foreign-linked hostile networks. Her British husband was quoted as calling the allegations complete nonsense, and he noted that Thomson Reuters does not even do work in Iran, much less provide its employees with opportunities to carry out missions directed by foreign media and intelligence services.

The IRGC statement seems to clearly ascribe guilt to Zaghari-Ratcliffe based solely on her association with Western entities. Previous arrests, both of dual nationals and native Iranians, have given markedly vague descriptions of the aforementioned hostile networks even going so far as to say that arrestees could be prosecuted for performing missions on behalf of foreign entities without knowing that they were doing so.
[June 15, 2016] Fitch Rates $234MM Virginia College Building Authority Ed Facilities Rev Rfdg Bonds 'AA+'

Fitch Ratings has assigned a 'AA+' rating to the Virginia College Building Authority (VCBA) Educational Facilities Revenue Refunding Bonds (Public Higher Education Financing Program) Series 2016A Bonds. The bonds are expected to sell competitively on or about June 21, 2016. In addition, Fitch has affirmed the 'AA+' rating on the VCBA's outstanding Public Higher Education Financing Program, educational facilities revenue and revenue refunding bonds. The Rating Outlook is Stable. SECURITY Public Higher Education Financing Program (pooled financing program) bonds are limited obligations of the VCBA, payable from a pledge of public higher education institutions' general revenues under institutional notes with VCBA. The VCBA assigns its rights to the notes to the trustee for the bonds. A statutory intercept enhances the credit quality of the bonds and is the basis for the rating. KEY RATING DRIVERS RATING BASED ON (News - Alert) COMMONWEALTH INTERCEPT: The 'AA+' rating, one notch below the Commonwealth of Virginia's 'AAA' Long-Term Issuer Default Rating (IDR), reflects the statutory requirement to intercept available commonwealth appropriations to individual public higher education institutions. Virtually all revenues of the public higher education institutions are appropriated and therefore available for intercept, including commonwealth direct aid and student tuition and fees. STRONG COMMONWEALTH APPROPRIATIONS COVERAGE: For each public higher education institution participating in the pooled financing program, historical interceptable commonwealth appropriations covers maximum annual debt service (MADS) by no less than 10x. The scope of appropriations available for intercept is extremely broad. Intercepted appropriations for one institution are not available to satisfy obligations for another institution. STRUCTURAL TIMING PROTECTIONS FOR INTERCEPT: Under the indenture, the authority's rights in the notes are assigned to the trustee for the bonds. The due dates for the notes are set at least 15 days in advance of debt service. This provides sufficient time for the intercept mechanism to provide for debt service on the VCBA bonds. RATING SENSITIVITIES COMMONWEALTH CREDIT QUALITY: The rating is sensitive to changes in Virginia's IDR, to which this rating is linked. INTERCEPT PROGRAM MECHANICS: The rating is also sensitive to changes in the statutes or administrative procedures governing the commonwealth public higher education intercept program and trends in public higher education appropriations. Additionally, each institution's interceptable appropriations must continue to provide adequate coverage of its own note payments. CREDIT PROFILE Virginia Code section 23-30.29:3 establishes the intercept mechanism. Appropriations due to public higher education institutions must be redirected to bond paying agents or trustees to cover note payments used to pay debt service on pooled financing program bonds. The statute and interagency documents between the VCBA, the public higher education institutions, and the trustee require that the trustee notify the governor of any failure of an institution to make payments on its institutional notes. These payments are assigned to the trustee under the indenture and due no later than 15 days before the debt service payment dates. The governor shall immediately investigate whether there has been a default on the notes. If default is confirmed, the governor immediately shall order the state comptroller to intercept appropriations for that institution and remit them to the trustee to cover any missed institutional note payments. All institutional notes for any defaulting institutions are paid directly by the state comptroller from appropriations goin forward.



Virtually all of an institution's revenues are available for the intercept, including both state aid and tuition and fee charges. Only gift and endowment income are excluded from interceptable appropriations. Appropriations are either commonwealth general fund (direct aid) or non-general fund. General fund revenues are distributed on an equal semi-monthly basis for the largest institutions, while other institutions receive distributions based on historical spending patterns. Non-general fund revenue are either collected directly by the institutions, or transferred to institutions as collected by the commonwealth. Revenues collected directly by the institutions are not held by the commonwealth but still considered appropriations and therefore subject to the intercept mechanism until they are spent by the institutions. Historical state appropriations provide ample coverage of MADS for the bonds. Each institution's appropriations are available solely for its own debt service payments and provide robust coverage. Estimated pro-forma MADS coverage from the five year average of state appropriations (fiscal 2011 - 2016 [budgeted]) ranges from approximately 10x - 269x. Coverage will improve following the series 2016A financing which is a refunding for debt service savings and no maturity extension.

For local school district intercept enhancement programs, Fitch views 1.25x as the minimum MADS coverage to apply the enhancement. The commonwealth has significant responsibility for higher education, but has also occasionally cut its direct aid for higher education more drastically than local school aid. Accordingly, Fitch views 1.75x - 2x as the minimum level of pro-forma MADS coverage from historical appropriations for the credit enhancement to apply for pooled financing program bonds issued for Virginia public higher education institutions. Institution note and debt service dates are aligned to ensure sufficient available interceptable revenues. The August 15 note due date and September 1 principal and interest payment date is shortly after tuition and fees are due to public higher education institutions, providing a sizable coverage cushion from both general fund and non-general fund appropriations. The February 15 note due date and March 1 interest only payment date comes four months before the fiscal year end with generally one third of general fund appropriations still available for intercept, in addition to any unspent non-general fund appropriations. For background on the commonwealth's general credit, please see Fitch's press release 'Fitch Rates $300MM VA Commonwealth Transportation Board Revs 'AA+'; Affirms 'AAA' Commonwealth GOs,' dated April 21, 2016 and available at 'www.fitchratings.com'. Additional information is available at 'www.fitchratings.com'. In addition to the sources of information identified in the U.S. Tax-Supported Rating Criteria this action was additionally informed by information from CreditScope. Applicable Criteria U.S. Tax-Supported Rating Criteria (pub. 18 Apr 2016)

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/reports/report_frame.cfm?rpt_id=879478 Additional Disclosures Dodd-Frank Rating Information Disclosure Form

https://www.fitchratings.com/creditdesk/press_releases/content/ridf_frame.cfm?pr_id=1006115 Solicitation Status

https://www.fitchratings.com/gws/en/disclosure/solicitation?pr_id=1006115 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 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/20160615006500/en/

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[June 15, 2016] Vodien Wins the Prestigious Managed Service Provider of the Year Award From Acronis

SINGAPORE, June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Acronis, a global digital technology firm, awarded Vodien with the Managed Service Provider Award at the recently concluded Acronis VIP Partner Summit 2016 held in Singapore in May 2016. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160614/378976 The prestigious award recognises Vodien's commitment to integrating Acronis' solution for comprehensive data backup and protection to more than 25,000 of their managed hosting clients, and 180,000 end-users worldwide. Unlike conventional hosting solutions that may or may not include reliable backups, Vodien ensures that its customers get the reassurance that their data in their web hosting accounts is safe, by investing into Acronis' enterprise-grade backup solutions. Established since 2002, Vodien quickly grew to become the market leader in the managed hosting and domain name registration space in Singapore. Vodien is accredited by both ICANN and SGNIC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Info-communications Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). , Vodien's CEO, said: "Vodien is in the business of providing reliable managed hosting solutions to our clients. While providing fast access speeds is one thing, another important thing for us is to ensure that our clients have the assurance that their data is safe and protected when they are with Vodien. With Acronis' data backup services, we can seamlessly backup all of our clients' data, and recover any data easily whenever unforeseen circumstances, such as equipment failures or catastrophes, happen."



About Acronis Acronis sets the standard for hybrid cloud data protection through its backup, cloud storage, disaster recovery, and secure file sync and share solutions. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and set apart by its image technology, Acronis delivers easy, complete and affordable data protection of all files, applications and operating systems across any environmentvirtual, physical, cloud and mobile. Founded in 2003, Acronis protects the data of over 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses in over 145 countries. With more than 100 patents, Acronis products have been named best product of the year, and cover a range of features, including migration, cloning and replication. Today, Acronis solutions are available worldwide through a global network of service providers, distributors and cloud resellers.

About Vodien Established since 2002, Vodien is Singapore's leading 24/7 managed hosting provider. Well-known for providing consistently secure hosting service at blazing fast speeds, Vodien offers a wide range of hosting solutions for personal and business needs. Their award-winning services include web hosting, email hosting, dedicated and virtual server hosting, domain name registration and cloud backup services. To get in touch with their SuperSupport team, contact them via email: [email protected], chat: www.vodien.com or 24/7 Hotline: +65 6288 6264. Related Images image1.jpeg image2.jpg This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vodien-wins-the-prestigious-managed-service-provider-of-the-year-award-from-acronis-300284955.html SOURCE Vodien Internet Solutions

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[June 16, 2016] Dialog Semiconductor Announces Director Appointment

Dialog Semiconductor (News - Alert) plc (FWB:DLG), a provider of highly integrated power management, AC/DC power conversion, solid state lighting (SSL) and Bluetooth(R) low energy technology, today announced the appointment of Nick Jeffery to the company's Board of Directors, effective July 1, 2016. Mr Jeffery has been CEO, Vodafone (News - Alert) Global Enterprise since 2006. "Nick will bring to Dialog a wealth of relevant international business experience, having operated for many years at the highest level of some of Europe's largest mobile communications companies," said Rich Beyer, Dialog Chairman of the Board. "During the course of his career, he has launched and scaled new enterprise focused business units and successfully led multiple acquisition and integration projects, and we are very pleased he is joining our board as a non-executive director," added Beyer. Joining Vodafone Group plc in 2004, Mr. Jeffery has held a position on the Executive Committee since April 2013 and undertaken numerous roles including that of CEO of the Group's acquired Cable and Wireless Worldwide operations, from 2012 to 2013. In his most recent role, Mr. Jeffery has proven his ability to grow the business through the launch and successful scaling up of new service lines, both organically and in-organically, including M2M, Cloud, Security and Group Carrier Services. Having begun his career at Cable & Wireless (News - Alert) plc (Mercury Communications) in 1991, where he rose to lead the company's UK and international markets business units, Mr. Jeffery then founded and led Microfone Limited in 2001, whilst serving as Head of Worldwide Sales and Europe Managing Director at Ciena Inc. from 2002 until 2004. Mr. Jeffery has also served as a non-executive Director at FairFX Group plc since August 2014. He is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and gained a BSc in Economics from the University of Warwick (News - Alert). -ENDS- NOTES Dialog, the Dialog logo are trademarks of Dialog Semiconductor plc or its subsidiaries. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners. (c) Copyright 2016 Dialog Semiconductor All rights reserved. Note to editors Dialog Semiconductor provides highly integrated standard (ASSP) and custom (ASIC) mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs), optimized for smartphone, computing, IoT, LED Solid State Lighting (SSL) and smart home applications. Dialog brings decades of experience to the rapid development of ICs while providing flexible and dynamic support, world-class innovation and the assurance of dealing with an established business partner. With world-class manufacturing partners, Dialog operates a fabless business model and is a socially responsible employer pursuing many programs to benefit the employees, community, other stakeholders and the environment we operate in. Dialog's power saving technologies including DC-DC configurable system power management deliver high efficiency and enhance the consumer's user experience by extending battery lifetime and enabling faster charging of their portable devices. Its technology portfolio also includes audio, Bluetooth(R) low energy, Rapid Charge(TM) AC/DC power conversion and multi- touch. Dialog Semiconductor plc is headquartered in London with a global sales, R&D and marketing organization. In 2015, it had approximately $1.35 billion in revenue and was one of the fastest growing European public semiconductor companies. It currently has approximately 1,660 employees worldwide. The company is listed on the Frankfurt (FWB: DLG) stock exchange (Regulated Market, Prime Standard, ISIN GB0059822006) and is a member of the German TecDax index.







Language: English Company: Dialog Semiconductor Plc. Tower Bridge House, St. Katharine's Way E1W 1AA London United Kingdom Phone (News - Alert): +49 7021 805-412 Fax: +49 7021 805-200 E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Internet: www.dialog-semiconductor.com ISIN: GB0059822006, XS0757015606 WKN: 927200 Indices: TecDAX Listed: Regulated Market in Frankfurt (Prime Standard); Regulated Unofficial Market in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart; Terminborse EUREX; Luxemburg

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[June 16, 2016] Electronic Nose Using CMOS Integrated Circuits Analyzes Breath

Researchers at the Texas Analog Center of Excellence (TxACE), a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)-funded research effort centered at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas), are working to develop an affordable electronic nose that can be used in breath analysis for a wide range of health diagnosis. While devices that can conduct breath analysis using compound semiconductors currently exist, they are bulky and too costly for commercial use, said Dr. Kenneth O, one of the principle investigators of the effort and director of TxACE. The UT Dallas researchers and collaborators at the Ohio State University and Wright State University determined that using CMOS integrated circuits technology will make the electronic nose affordable. CMOS is the integrated circuits technology that is used to manufacture the bulk of electronics that have made possible the smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices used in daily life. Their research on the CMOS electronic nose was presented today in a paper entitled 200-280GHz CMOS Transmitter for Rotational Spectroscopy and Demonstration in Gas Spectroscopy and Breath Analysis, at the 2016 IEEE (News - Alert) Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Hawaii. "Smell is one of the senses of humans and animals, and there have been many efforts to build an electronic nose," said Dr. Navneet Sharma, the lead author of paper. "We have demonstrated that you can build an affordable electronic nose that can sense many different kinds of smells. When you're smelling something, you are detecting chemical molecules in the air. Similarly, an electronic nose detects chemcal compounds using rotational spectroscopy."



The rotational spectrometer generates and transmits electromagnetic waves over a wide range of frequencies and analyzes how the strength of waves are attenuated to determine what chemicals are present as well as their concentrations in a sample. The system can detect low levels of chemicals present in human breath. "Think about where breath comes from," said Professor Philip Raskin, M.D., of University of Texas, Southwestern. "Parts come from gases in your stomach, so this involves the digestive system. Molecules in breath also come from the blood when it comes into contact with the air in the lungs. The breath test is really a blood test without taking blood samples. Breath contains information about practically every part of your body."

"This is the really opportune moment for the development of these breath sensors, rooted in enabling confluence of semiconductor innovation and system designs rooted in molecular spectroscopy," said Professor Ivan Medvedev of Wright State University, another member of team. "The device can detect gas molecules with far more specificity and sensitivity than currently used breathalyzers, which can confuse acetone for ethanol in the breath. The distinction is important, for example, for patients with Type 1 diabetes who have high concentrations of acetone in their breath." "If you think about the industry around sensors that emulate our senses, it's huge," O said. "Imaging applications, hearing devices, touch sensors - what we are talking about here is developing a device that imitates another one of our sensing modalities and making it affordable and widely available. The possible use of the electronic nose is almost limitless. Think about how we use smell in our daily lives." The researchers envision the CMOS-based device will first be used in industrial settings and then in doctors' offices and hospitals. As the technology matures, they could become household devices. The need for blood work and gastrointestinal tests could be reduced, and diseases could be detected earlier - lowering the costs of health care. The researchers are working toward construction of a prototype programmable electronic nose that can be made available for beta testing sometime in early 2018. The Texas Analog Research Center and this work are supported in large part by SRC and Texas Instruments. Additional support was provided by Samsung (News - Alert) Global Research Outreach. "SRC and its members, including Texas Instruments, Intel, IBM, Freescale, Mentor Graphics, ARM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES, have been following this work for several years," said Dr. David Yeh (News - Alert), SRC senior director. "We are excited by the possibilities of the new technology and are working to rapidly explore its uses and applications. It is a significant milestone, but there is still much more research needed for this to reach its potential." TxACE, created in 2008 under the umbrella of the SRC, is the largest analog circuit design research center based in an academic institution. The center focuses on analog and mixed signal integrated circuits engineering that improve public safety and security, enhance medical care and help the U.S. become more energy independent. The research team includes UT Dallas doctoral students Navneet Sharma, Zhong Qian and Jing Zhang; Dr. Mark Lee, professor and head of physics; Dr. David Lary, associate professor of physics; Dr. Hyunjoo Nam, assistant professor of bioengineering, Dr. Rashaunda Henderson, associate professor of electrical engineering; and Dr. Wooyeol Choi, assistant research professor. Other team members include Prof. Philip Raskin, M.D. of UT Southwestern, Professor Frank C. De Lucia, C. F. Neese, and J. P. McMillan of Ohio State University, and Professor Ivan R. Medvedev and R. Schueler of Wright State University. About SRC Celebrating more than 30 years of collaborative research for the semiconductor industry, SRC defines industry needs, invests in and manages the research that gives its members a competitive advantage in the dynamic global marketplace. Awarded the National Medal of Technology, America's highest recognition for contributions to technology, SRC expands the industry knowledge base and attracts premier students to help innovate and transfer semiconductor technology to the commercial industry. For more information, visit https://www.src.org/. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005188/en/

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[June 16, 2016] Mobile Labs Talks Security in the Era of Mobility at Cloud and DevOps World 2016

ATLANTA  June 16, 2016  As demand rises for speedy mobile application development and testing, developers are expected to meet tighter turnaround times without sacrificing data security or application performance. For this reason, more and more teams are seeking a solution that allows them to keep data secure and behind their corporate firewall while mobile testing.







Fortunately, leaders attending Cloud and DevOps World in London can gain an inside track on solutions to keep corporation information secure. Dan McFall, Mobile Labs vice president of mobility solutions, will join a panel discussion to educate attendees on security in the era of mobility, including:  The security benefits of testing via private cloud  Creating a culture to ensure your data stays where it should be  The balance between keeping corporate information secure and within the IT departments control while providing employees flexibility and mobility in their roles Mobile Labs will also will demonstrate deviceConnect, its tool-agnostic mobile testing solution at Cloud and DevOps World. deviceConnect allows distributed enterprise IT teams to efficiently test mobile apps across various devices and operation systems in the security of a private device cloud that keeps information safely behind the corporate firewall.



Mobile Labs deviceConnect continues to receive industry acclaim. It has been named a finalist for Best Enterprise Mobility Solution for the 2016 Cloud and DevOps World Awards. Winners will be announced at the show at 5 p.m. on June 21.





The panel session, Is secure possible in the era of mobility? will take place at Cloud and DevOps World on Tuesday, June 21 at 1:20pm in the Theatre E. Learn more: https://cloudanddevopsworld.com/agenda/day-1-2/ To schedule a meeting with McFall, or for more information on the Mobile Labs deviceConnect solution, contact Jo Morsberger at (404) 929-0091 x211 or email [email protected]



About Mobile Labs Mobile Labs provides enterprise-grade mobile device clouds that improve efficiency and raise quality for agilebased, cross-platform mobile app and mobile web deployments. The companys patented device cloud, deviceConnect, is available in both public and on-premises configurations. deviceConnect provides affordable, highly-secure access to a large inventory of mobile devices across major mobile platforms to developers, test engineers, and customer support representatives, among others. At the heart of enterprise mobile app deployment, deviceConnect enables automated continuous quality integration, DevOps processes, automated testing, and manual app/web/device testing on managed devices. deviceConnect supports all major integrated app development environments (IDEs), such as Xcode, as well as automated app and web testing on real mobile devices using a wide variety of mobile UI test automation tools. For more information, please visit www.mobilelabsinc.com. As a community-building service, TMCnet allows user submitted content which is not always proofed by TMCnet editors. If you feel this entry is of inferior quality or wish to report it for some reason, please forward the URL to "webedit [AT] tmcnet [DOT] com" with your comments.

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[June 16, 2016] SolidGear Introduces Verification Tester for "Works with GoPro" Program

SolidGear Corporation, an expert of testing flash memory cards, today introduced SGDK355Pro, the SD Card performance validation tester for Works with GoPro (News - Alert). SGDK355Pro is based on SGDK350A, the SD Card tester, and adds to the features of SGDK series, which are simple and straightforward user interface, easy to use application software, compact size and light weight to carry. This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005477/en/ SGDK355Pro (Photo: Business Wire) "We are proud to offer SGDK355Pro as a part of the test suite for the Works with GoPro verification program," said Hiroto Okada, CEO and President, SolidGear Corporation. "We jointly developed SGDK355Pro with GoPro to mulate GoPro cameras' access to microSD Card in the tester, which can save evaluation time and provide a comprehensive test suite."



Works with GoPro is a verification program for products that work with GoPro cameras. Once verified, products have the option to feature a Works with GoPro logo. MicroSD Cards are subject to this program. SGDK355Pro itself is not a Works with GoPro product, but can verify a microSD Card if its performance meets the requirements for GoPro cameras to capture video and picture data. "We worked with SolidGear to develop a performance verification tester for the Works with GoPro program. A microSD Card vendor who wants to use the Works with GoPro logo on their products will need to conduct verification tests with SGDK355Pro and submit result reports to GoPro for approval," said Adam Silver, Director of Strategic Product Partnerships at GoPro.

Pricing & Availability SGDK355Pro is only available for applicants of Works with GoPro program. Unit price is USD 13,000 excluding tax. Shipping cost may be requited depending on area. Features of SGDK 355Pro. [Supported Card] SDSC, SDHC and SDXC

[Transfer mode] Default, High Speed, UHS-I

[Recommended Control PC] Windows 7/8 (32bit/64bit), 4GB RAM (News - Alert), USB2.0 About SolidGear SolidGear is a leading provider of test tools for SD Card, eMMC. The SolidGear SGDK tester series have been used by more than 50 industrial-leading companies worldwide.

SolidGear also provides industrial semiconductor storage products and solutions that are based on deep knowledge and experience of the industry in fields such as telecommunications, robots, medical and in-vehicle devices. SolidGear Corporation Shin-Yokohama Kaneko Bldg. 8F, 2-3-9 Shin-Yokohama, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa

222-0033 JAPAN View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005477/en/

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Technavio Announces Top Eight Vendors in the Education Data Security Tools Market in the US Until 2020

Technavio has announced the top eight leading vendors for the education data security tools market in the US in their latest research report. To identify the top vendors, Technavio's market research analysts have considered the top contributors to the overall revenue of this market. To calculate the market size, it considers the revenue generated by vendors through the following product segments:

On-premise data center security tools

Cloud data storage security tools

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Advances in technology have enabled access of information from any device, anywhere, and at any time possible. Thanks to the additional workload deployments for both, physical and virtual environments complexity of network infrastructure has increased. Education institutions consist of both, on-premise and cloud-based storage facilities. However, on-premise data centers, compared to cloud-based platforms, are prone to cyber-attacks. Most of these attacks are made by taking complete control of the physical infrastructure such as the server, storage, and networking appliances installed in an on-premise data center.

"The active adoption of cloud computing, offered by vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and many others, by education institutions has also led to the increasing focus on cyber-crimes toward cloud-based storage facilities. The increase in cyber-crimes have made it imperative for the education ecosystem to use data security tools in the form of applications and software, for storing data and enabling faster processing of business-related critical information," said Jhansi Mary, one of Technavio's lead analysts for education technology.

Top eight leading vendors in the education data security tools market in the US:

Cisco (News - Alert)

Cisco in the education data security tools market in the US provides secure learning environment by protecting students, staff, and the campus against threats. It helps in identifying and preventing incidents and also integrating disparate systems for effective response. The company offers several solutions to improve safety and security. These solutions improve communications and collaboration; enhance visibility; minimize legal, regulatory, and financial liability; improve mobility; and provide secure network access.

McAfee (News - Alert)

McAfee develops proactive data security tools and offers proven security solutions and services which helps in protecting systems, mobile devices and networks of both enterprise and individual use. The company also provides product trainingand security education courses. This helps professionals in effectively deploying solutions and gain knowledge involving endpoint protection, security information and event management, network security, and data protection products. It also runs Security Certification Programs. This involves product and assessment certifications for the effective installation, configuration, and administration of products.







Symantec

Symantec provides threat protection and cyber security services. The company's portfolio of services ranges from incident monitoring and response to threat intelligence. Its IT security constitutes a network of over 500 cyber security experts and nine global threat centers. In addition, the company also offers training and education services to help businesses maximize a company's product knowledge and investments. It provides instructor-led training, training courses, e-library, certification programs, and private trainings.

Trend Micro (News - Alert)

The company has taken strategic initiatives to strengthen its position in the market. In March 2016, the company announced the finalization of the acquisition of TippingPoint, which provides next-generation intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and integrated network security solutions. This acquisition aims to establish its presence in network security and enhance its advanced threat protection across the enterprise.

IBM

IBM offers security solutions that are built on hardware, software, and services frameworks. Its security solutions help organizations manage IT security risks and advanced threats by addressing compliance requirements. It offers a broad range of security solutions such as access management, security network intrusion prevention system, security app scan, application security, advanced security and threat protection, and security intelligence and compliance analytics.

Fortinet (News - Alert)

Fortinet provides cyber security solutions for organizations across different industries. The company was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Fortinet's physical and virtual appliances products provide security and networking functions. These include firewalls, intrusion prevention software, anti-malware mechanisms, virtual private networks, application control systems, web filtering mechanisms, anti-spam software, and wide area network acceleration modules.

Panda Security

The company provides SaaS (News - Alert)-based protection of endpoints, e-mail, and web traffic. The company was established in the year 1990 and is based in Spain and also has additional offices across the globe, with headquarters in Florida, US. The solutions offered by the company automatically analyze and classify malware samples. In addition, with a minimum impact on system performance, the company guarantees users with protection against Internet threats.

Sophos

Sophos provides IT security and data protection solutions for protection against threats and data loss. The company offers server protection solutions, which include an antivirus solution for virtualization security, malware protection and content control solution; and solutions to defend against any spam and advanced threats on Exchange and Unix.

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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.

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[June 16, 2016] Veriato Wins Best Computer Forensics Solution in SC Awards Europe 2016

User behavior analytics and activity monitoring company Veriato today announced that its Veriato Investigator has been honored as the Best Computer Forensics Solution at the 2016 SC Magazine Awards Europe, hosted in conjunction with InfoSecurity Europe 2016. Veriato Investigator, previously named Spector CNE Investigator, is forensic-grade employee investigation software that reduces the risk of insider threats by performing temporary investigations of employee activity with fast, accurate, and efficient data collection and playback for quick decision making using reliable, actionable evidence. "It's more important than ever to recognize the tireless efforts of the men and women across the globe who work to combat these threats and provide cyber security," said Tony Morbin, editor-in-chief, SC Magazine. "Veriato Investigator is a significant achievement, and one that shows Veriato's dedication to innovation and protecting against the ever-changing threat landscape." Easy to install and use, Veriato Investigator captures all employee computer and Internet-related activity, from basics like websites visited and emils sent and received, to powerful screen capture that can be replayed as if watching a video recording of exactly what was done. Users report significant reductions in the cost of investigations-often up to 50 percent-while achieving better results because of the solution's unbiased, easy to understand presentation of facts. This strong value is the reason why more than 15,000 organizations around the world have trusted Veriato Investigator to get the answers they need.



"Being honored as the winner of this prestigious award validates the increasing need to know what is happening within the perimeter of an organization to reduce the risk of insider threats," said David Green, chief security officer, Veriato. "By automatically and privately recording all computer activity, including emails, application use and even instant messages, the security teams can confirm suspicions of any illegal activity, see who else might be involved and even determine how much damage has been done to their organization. With Investigator's ability to record the data, the company can make quick decisions on what needs to be done, and if necessary, use the data as evidence in civil or criminal litigation." Each year, hundreds of products are entered in SC Magazine Europe's Excellence Awards. Each product is judged by a panel representing a cross-section of SC Magazine readership, which is comprised of large, medium and small enterprises from all major vertical markets, including financial services, healthcare, government, retail, education and other sectors. Entrants are narrowed down to a select group of finalists before undergoing a rigorous final judging process to determine the winner in each category. The winners were announced on June 7 in London.

About Veriato (formerly SpectorSoft) Veriato is an innovator in actionable User Behavior Analytics and a global leader in User Activity Monitoring. More than 36,000 companies, schools, and government entities worldwide utilize Veriato to gain insight into the user activity on their network and enjoy the security and productivity increases that come with it. Veriato's product line includes the world's leading employee investigation tool (Veriato Investigator), award-winning User Behavior Analytics (Veriato Recon), enterprise-grade User Activity Monitoring (Veriato 360), powerful server management software (Server Manager), and robust Event and Security Log Management (Log Manager). For more information, visit the company's website at www.veriato.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616006063/en/

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[June 16, 2016] Technavio Announces Top 16 Vendors in the Global Automotive LiDAR Sensors Market Until 2020

Technavio has announced the top 16 vendors for the global automotive light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors market in their latest research report. In terms of automotive applications of LiDAR sensors, the report covers ADAS and autonomous driving. Request sample report: http://bit.ly/24uZoRv "The global automotive LiDAR sensors market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34.22% during the forecast period. The LiDAR sensors deployed in automobiles cater to the autonomous driving needs and the ADAS offerings. The majority of these will be attributed to high-end cars throughout the forecast period. It is certain that the autonomous driving capabilities will be enabled only in the high-end segment during the forecast period. In addition, a predominant share of LiDAR-enabled ADAS will be equipped only onto the high-end cars segment," said Siddharth Jaiswal, one of Technavio's lead analysts for automotive electronics. Additional Insights: Why LiDAR technology is truly necessary Top four leading vendors in the global automotive LiDAR sensors market: Continental Continental offers 3D Flash LiDAR in the ADAS business segment of chassis and safety business unit, under passenger car vehicle category. The product is a portfolio extension of continental's automated driving offerings. LeddarTech The company's technology enables LiDAR-based ADAS and autonomous driving solutions for both passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles (buses and trucks). Leddar detection and ranging technology, because of its compact and flexible Leddar modules, enables the development of low-cost LiDAR solutions that can be integrated into automotive components such as rear lamps, head lamps, and side view mirrors. Quanergy Systems Quanergy Systems is a privately held company that develops smart sensing solutions for real-time 3D mapping and object detection, tracking, and classification. It was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in California. The start-up raised a total of over USD 30 million through venture capital funding as of 2014. Quanergy Systems has offices in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), China, and Japan. Velodyne LiDAR Velodyne is a leader in the global automotive LiDAR sensors market. The company excels in autonomous vehicle technologies and is recognized worldwide for developing high-definition LiDAR sensors forautonomous vehicles, 3D mapping, and surveying. The company's LiDAR sensors are used by almost all car manufacturers and Tier-I suppliers worldwide in their research and integration with self-driving cars.



The 12 other prominent vendors in the global automotive LiDAR sensors market are: Bosch

Bosch is one of the largest suppliers of automotive components. The company has announced that it would sell laser-based radar known as LiDAR by 2020 to meet market demand for high-tech sensors. Delphi (News - Alert) Delphi is a leading global supplier of technologies for the automotive and commercial vehicle market. The company is working with Quanergy to develop solid-state LiDAR systems designed for self-driving cars priced less than $1,000 per car. Denso Denso is a leading supplier of advanced automotive technologies, systems, and components for the world's major automakers. The company has developed in-vehicle LiDAR for automotive applications. First Sensor Develops and produces customer-specific solutions for applications in the industrial, medical, and mobility target markets. Develops products such as chips, components, sensors, and entire sensor systems. Hella The company develops and manufactures lighting and electronic components and systems for the automotive industry. Hella's numerous ADAS are based on camera, ultrasonic, infrared LiDAR, and 24 GHz radar technology. Ibeo Automotive Systems Ibeo develops combined laser scanner and software systems for ADAS applications. The systems are installed on-board a vehicle and support a driver in certain driving situations. Ibeo. ADAS products generate real-time knowledge of the current driving situation and can suggest specific actions or perform an action. Novariant Provides precision positioning technologies, intelligent sensor and control systems, advanced steering hardware, and applications software that combine to deliver integrated machine control solutions. The company caters to agriculture, automotive, and construction markets, among others. Phantom Intelligence Develops LiDAR technology sensors aimed at anti-collision applications. Phantom Intelligence is among the finalists of TU Automotive Awards 2016 for the category "Newcomer of the Year". PulsedLight PulsedLight has developed LiDAR-Lite 2 as a LiDAR solution that has a 40-meter range capability with 1 cm resolution. Its small size, low-power consumption, and lightweight combine to offer superior performance when integrating with sUAS. Cost for the total system is only USD 115. Teledyne Optech Designs, develops, and manufactures advanced LiDAR instruments The company's Optech Lynx MG Mobile Mapper generates rich mapping-grade LiDAR and image data from a vehicle at cruising speeds. Trilumina TriLumina is a semiconductor laser technology company that develops, manufactures, and integrates semiconductor laser solutions. TriLumina infrared emitters are capable of high power illumination for laser radar (LiDAR) depth sensing. Valeo Valeo is a multinational automotive supplier. It has developed a LiDAR sensor that offers an aperture angle of 140, enabling it to use in automated driving schemes like a parking lot assistant that autonomously drives the vehicle to a parking lot. Browse related reports: Global Anti-Collision Sensors Market 2016-2020

Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) Market in North America 2015-2019

Global Environmental Sensing and Monitoring Market 2015-2019 - Market Analysis Do you need a report on a market in a specific geographical cluster or country but can't find what you're looking for? Don't worry, Technavio also takes client requests. Please contact [email protected] with your requirements and our analysts will be happy to create a customized report just for you. 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/20160616005042/en/

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[June 16, 2016] The Clinical Trial Undertaken by Genomic Vision and Reims University Hospital to Validate a New Test for the Early Detection and Treatment of Cervical Cancer Was Chosen for an Oral Presentation at the Eurogin Congress in Salzburg

Regulatory News Genomic Vision (Paris:GV) (FR0011799907 - GV), DNA molecular combing specialist that develops tests for the diagnostics market and tools for the life sciences research market, today announces that the IDAHO clinical trial launched at the end of 2015 in France, which aims to validate the integration of the oncogenic, i.e. high-risk, human papillomavirus (HPV-HR) as an indicator of the severity of cervical lesions and the risk of developing cervical cancer, was presented by Professor Christine Clavel, project coordinator, via an oral presentation at the Eurogin (EUropean Research Organisation on Genital Infection and Neoplasia) Congress held in Salzburg, Austria, from June 15 to 18, 2016. The integration of HPV-HR DNA in a host's genome is considered to be a key stage in the progression of precancerous lesions into cancerous lesions in the cervix. The aim of this study is to determine whether the integration of HPV-HR DNA in patients' genomes is a sufficient diagnostic (severity of lesions) and prognostic (risk of progression of lesions) indicator. Genomic Vision's molecular combing technique is currently the only one that allows the frequency of the integration of high-risk HPV-HR to be detected, in a direct and high resolution manner. The IDAHO clinical trial comprises two phases: The first phase began in December 2015, and aims to show that the integration of HPV is a biomarker for diagnosing high-risk precancerous lesions that require appropriate treatment to be defined. The number of patients to be included in this study has been able to be reduced from 3,500 to 1,550 thanks to the new technical developments of the HPV test by molecular combing, which now detects 14 high-risk HPV instead of the initial 5.

During the second phase, women who test positive for HPV infection with no declared lesions or with low-grade lesions will be monitored for 3 years. This will make it possible to validate the integration of HPV DNA as a prognostic biomarker. Professor Christine Clavel, molecular biologist in the Biopathology laboratory at Reims University Hospital, who presented the study at the conference, says: "This innovative approach should enable us to better understand the integration of high-risk HPV in thehost's genome, notably in terms of the frequency of the integration. Indeed, HPV infections being frequent but often temporary, current HPV tests are sensitive but not specific enough to detect high-grade lesions. Searching for new biomarkers, identifying among HPV-positive women those who will actually develop a precancerous lesion, remains crucial. If the results of this study are conclusive, we will then be able to consider viral integration to be an efficient diagnostic and prognostic tool enabling cervical cancer screening to be optimized and the best course of treatment for the patient to be determined."



Upcoming financial publication

2016 half-year results, Tuesday, July 26, 2016* (before trading)

* indicative date, which may be subject to change ABOUT GENOMIC VISION

Founded in 2004, Genomic Vision is a DNA molecular combing specialist that develops tests for the diagnostics market and tools for the life sciences research market. Using its innovative technology that allows the direct visualization of individual DNA molecules, Genomic Vision detects quantitative and qualitative variations in the genome that are at the origin of numerous serious pathologies. The Company is developing a solid portfolio of tests that initially target breast and colon cancers. Since 2013, the Company has marketed the CombHelix FSHD test for identifying facioscapulohumeral dystrophy (FSHD), a myopathy that is difficult to detect. It is marketed in the United States through a strategic alliance with Quest Diagnostics, the American leader in diagnostic laboratory tests, and in France directly by the Company. Genomic Vision has been listed on Compartment C of Euronext Paris since April 2014.

ABOUT MOLECULAR COMBING

DNA molecular combing technology significantly improves the structural and functional analysis of DNA molecules. DNA fibers are stretched over glass slides, as if "combed", and uniformly aligned over the entire surface. It is then possible to identify genetic anomalies by locating specific genes or sequences in the patient's genome using genetic markers, a technique developed by Genomic Vision and patented under the name Genomic Morse Code. This exploration of the entire genome at high resolution via a simple analysis enables the direct visualization of genetic anomalies that are undetectable by other technologies. For further information, please go to: www.genomicvision.com ABOUT THE REIMS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL In keeping with public service values, the Reims University Hospital ("Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Reims", or "CHU de Reims") strives to meet one goal: to provide, through its 15 medical departments, excellent care and high-quality treatment to all patients in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France. The Reims University Hospital also works hard to maintain its positioning as a university hospital and to promote the involvement of its medical staff in innovative research projects. Professor Christine Clavel and Doctor Veronique Dalstein, molecular biologists in the Reims University Hospital's Biopathology laboratory, headed by Professor Philippe Birembaut, have for many years been involved in research into HPV infections and use of the HPV test in clinical practice, notably in cervical cancer screening. This area of research is part of the Eastern France Cancer Research Cluster's virus and cancer focus. Their research work in this field has received domestic and international acclaim. For further information, please go to: www.chu-reims.fr Member of CAC Mid & Small, CAC All-Tradable and EnterNext PEA-PME 150 indexes View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616006095/en/

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CHARLESTON  Craig Cunningham, a financial advisor with the Charleston Wells Fargo Advisors' office, has been named vice president, investments.

Craig is a great asset to our team at Wells Fargo Advisors. His strong work ethic and dedication to his clients make him very deserving of this promotion. Complex Manager Gary Swearingen said.

Cunningham holds a bachelors of arts from DePauw University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and majored in economics. During his time at DePauw, Cunningham was named Phi Betta Kappa and the Senior Economics Student of the Year.

Additionally, Cunningham holds a law degree from the University Of Illinois College Of Law, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and in the top 10 percent of his class. Cunningham also earned the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certification in 2015. He is a member of the Charleston Rotary Club, board member of the Charleston Public Library, Mentor Chair of the ClassE Leadership Program, and attends Salisbury Church.

Cunningham lives in Charleston with his wife, Rachael. They have one son, Griffin, and another child on the way.
CHARLESTON -- Providing care for someone with memory loss can be a labor of love, but it can also be exhausting and stressful. The Family Caregiver Resource Center and the Alzheimers Association will be providing an educational presentation titled Caregiver Stress -- Relief, Acceptance and Empowerment at the LifeSpan Center on Tuesday.

This program will introduce participants to the causes, signs and symptoms of stress, and will provide participants with stress-reduction strategies.

The presentation will be given by Elizabeth Wells of the Alzheimers Association. A complementary brunch will be provided and served through a partnership between the Family Caregiver Resource Center and Arbor Rose Memory Care Homes. Information about all three programs will be shared in addition to the scheduled program.

The doors of the LifeSpan Center, 11021 E CR 800 N, Charleston, open at 8:30 a.m. with registration beginning at 9 a.m. Brunch will be served at 9:30 a.m. The presentation will follow. You must register for the event. There is no charge to attend. Caregivers of all ages are welcome to attend. Please register by calling 217-639-5168. Seating is limited.

The Family Caregiver Resource Center is funded by the Federal Older Americans Act, the East Central Illinois Area Agency on Aging, the Illinois Department on Aging and client contributions.
SPRINGFIELD -- Summer fun and high temperatures are in full swing and the American Red Cross has six simple tips to help keep your family and pets safe this summer.

Never leave children or pets alone in vehicles. The temperature inside can reach a dangerous level within a few minutes.

Slow down, take frequent breaks and drink more water than usual -- even if you are not thirsty.

Wear loose-fitting, lightweight, light-colored clothing.

If working outdoors, take frequent breaks and use the buddy system.

Check on family, friends and neighbors who do not have air conditioning, who spend much of their time alone, or who are more likely to be affected by the heat.

If possible, bring animals inside. If not, frequently check to ensure they are comfortable and have water and a shady place to rest.

In addition, always wear sunscreen, and if you are likely to be affected by heat, the best advice is to remain in an air-conditioned location.

The free Red Cross Emergency App provides instant access to expert heat safety tips. Users also have the option of receiving alerts for excessive heat watches, warnings and heat advisories. The free Red Cross Pet First Aid App has steps pet owners should take to help keep their furry friends safe during hot weather. People can find the apps in their app store by searching for American Red Cross and at redcross.org/apps.

People can learn how to prevent and respond to heat-related and other emergencies by taking a Red Cross First Aid and CPR/AED or Advance Child Care Training course. A variety of online and in-class options are available. Course and registration information is available at redcross.org/takeaclass.

The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters; supplies about 40 percent of the nation's blood; teaches skills that save lives; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. The Red Cross is a not-for-profit organization that depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission. For more information, please visit redcross.org or visit us on Twitter at @RedCross.
CHARLESTON (JG-TC) -- A sewage problem at the Charleston Wal-Mart store has been remedied and the store is again selling food items, a Coles County Health Department official said Thursday.

The department received a report Wednesday morning that sewage was coming out of the floor drain in one of the store's restrooms, according to Gloria Spear, the department's environmental health director.

A health department inspector went to the store and verified the situation, Spear said. The department then suspended the store's permit to sell some food items, mostly those that require refrigeration, she explained.

However, store managers opted to stop sales of all food items, including those not covered by the health department permit, Spear said. The sewage problem was fixed and the department reinstated the store's permit Wednesday afternoon, she said.

Health department officials couldn't be reached when the situation first became known on Wednesday. At that time, a Wal-Mart representative said only that the problem had been addressed.
100 years ago, June 16, 1916

ARCOLA -- Illinois broomcorn seed is a scarce article. Some dealers could have sold considerably more seed if they could have obtained it. Yesterday, a telegraph order for more seed came from Lindsay, Okla. Planting continues in the Arcola area and the acreage will be a little larger than last year. Broomcorn prices are stable and depleted stocks everywhere is the general rule. Broom business is good with most manufacturers... ST. LOUIS -- The Democratic National Convention completed the national ticket just before midnight last night. The renomination of President Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey was accompanied by a demonstration that was kept going for 45 minutes. Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana likewise was made the choice of the convention for vice president.

50 years ago, 1966

MATTOON -- The Eastern Illinois Area Junior College District steering committee has set a tentative date of Oct. 22 to hold a referendum vote on the proposed junior college in this area. Clem Phipps of Mattoon, chairman of the steering committee said the Illinois Board of Higher Education must approve the formation of a junior college district and a public hearing also must be held before a vote on the district may be held. The next meeting of the Board of Higher Education is set for July 12. The proposed junior college districts is composed of 13 school districts in East-Central Illinois... CHARLESTON -- Anybody with $20,000 in his pocket may soon be able to buy the world's tallest statue of Abraham Lincoln. Rights to the 62-foot tall fiber glass statue, which are held by the nonprofit Lincoln Heritage Corp. of Charleston, will expire in approximately two weeks. Bill Browning, secretary of the Charleston Area Chamber of Commerce, said widespread criticism of the project was only part of the reason to cancel the plan. Browning said the tourism committee was having difficulty finding a location for such a large statue.

25 years ago, 1991

Sunday. No paper.

100 years ago, June 17, 1916

MATTOON -- Owen Wisely, age 9 years, and his 6-year-old brother, children of C.W. Wisely, a Western Union lineman, broke into the Mattoon Implement & Buggy Company's place of business on Western Avenue Wednesday night and robbed it of two revolvers and a number of cartridges. Until Friday evening when the boys were found with the stolen property, police were on the lookout for grownups. The father this morning gave to police custody of Owen, hoping that officials can discover some way of breaking the habits of the child, he being under the age for commitment to the St. Charles School for Boys. Chief Lawson locked the boy in a jail cell, the youngster entering the jail with a smile on his face. Owen Wisely, according to police, has committed several other robberies, including one at Toledo. Numerous times have taken the boy home at night, once as late as 2 o'clock... WINDSOR -- The cry of "Wolf! Wolf!" that has been heard during the past year between Shelbyville and Windsor proves not to have been an idle one as a large specimen of the wolf family was caught Wednesday night in three steel traps that had been set near the F.D. Hennigh sheepfold. When it was discovered in the morning it was shot by Roy Tull. Hennigh, in common with other farmers, has lost a number of lambs. The wolf is 4 feet 6 inches from tip to tip, of the gray timber variety and a male.

50 years ago, 1966

TUSCOLA -- A raccoon that had bitten a 9-year-old boy led Tuscola Fire Department personnel and volunteers on a 2 1/2-hour search Thursday before it was found. Scott Flesor, son of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Flesor, was bitten in a school yard and later treated by a local physician. The animal that bit the boy was found in a hollow tree about 8 p.m. in the north section of town. Authorities sought the animal to determine if it had rabies... MATTOON -- Harold G. Griffith had his hands full Wednesday when he landed a 16 3/4-pound catfish from Lake Paradise. Griffith, manager of the Paradise Lake Store, was fishing near the store with a 12-pound test line when the giant catfish struck. It took him 20 minutes to land the fish which is 34 inches long.

25 years ago, 1991

CHARLESTON -- Two of the nations top-ranked drum and bugle corps will perform at the second Lincolnland Drum and Bugle Review. The Rosemont Cavaliers and the Canton, Ohio, Bluecoats both will return to the June 29 competition at Eastern Illinois Universitys OBrien Field. An officially sanctioned Drum Corps Midwest contest, it will feature the Cavaliers, ranked second in the world, and the Bluecoats, the eighth-highest ranked drum corps in the world. Five other drum and bugle units also will be competing CHARLESTON  A fire that did about $10,000 in damage to a house near the Eastern Illinois University campus is being investigated as an arson. Firefighters responded at 1:25 a.m. Saturday to a fire at 1903 Ninth St., just east of campus. The living room and front porch were damaged in the fire. Fire Chief Tom Watson said no one was home at the time of the fire. The house is used for EIU student rental housing.
The Rock Island Social Club opens Friday, with an emphasis on social.

Thats how Andrew Fuller describes the new venture at 2110 Winthrop Road, where he used to own and operate the full-service restaurant Henrys on South.

Fuller, who holds the lease to the location, closed Henry's in February with hopes of finding a buyer.

Instead, hes reopening it with silent partners as a multi-use facility and nightclub.

(My partners) dont want it to be labeled as a bar, Fuller said.

Rock Island will serve craft beers, boutique wines and specialty cocktails. Hours are from 4:30 to 10 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday and from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday. No food will be available other than cheese and meat boards, Fuller said.

However, since the location has a kitchen, Rock Island is open to local chefs and cooks as a pop-up kitchen or as a home to culinary classes and other food-oriented events and activities.

Rock Island also can be used for meetings, special events, receptions, and -- get this -- is free to nonprofits. Flatwater Shakespeare Company, for instance, used it in May during Give to Lincoln, Fuller said.

Were really hoping for community involvement, Fuller said.

Other ideas include Food Truck Fridays, with trucks parking and selling food that can be enjoyed inside Rock Island; Turntable Tuesdays, in which patrons can play and rate entire albums; and collaborative events with Iron Tail art gallery, which provided the train mural inside Rock Island.

For more information, go to rockislandsocialclub.com or Facebook.

First Bite is Thursday

The Lincoln Journal Star's First Bite Event, the precursor to Lincoln Restaurant Week (June 24-30), will run from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday at the Cornhusker Marriott, 333 S. 13th St. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the door. VIP tickets are $40. For reservations, go to lincolnrestaurantweek.com.

Brewskys serves breakfast

Brewskys in the Haymarket is serving breakfast from 8 to 10:45 a.m. Saturdays in conjunction with the farmers market. The restaurant at 201 N. Eighth St. has 11 menu items, ranging from an egg/sausage/potatoes classic breakfast to Brewskys original yogurt pancakes. Breakfast is available only at the Haymarket store.

Peytons Best closes

I received a few emails inquiring about Peytons Best, the restaurant selling Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago-style hot dogs at 17th and Q streets. Yes, its closed. Owner Jason Ables was sentenced to 1-3 years in prison for selling marijuana.

Hurts Donut opens Monday

The new Hurts Donut, located in the Grand Manse at Ninth and P streets, will open Monday. From pictures on Facebook, several specialty doughnuts are likely to be available, including one covered in Froot Loops.

Jeffs Top Five: Chinese

The next Jeffs Top Five: Second Edition will feature my favorite Chinese restaurants in Lincoln. You can vote in our survey, which will be posted Friday at JournalStar.com. There will be many to choose from because Lincoln is home to a variety of Chinese eateries.

Heading on vacation

Ill be gone for the next two weeks, so there will be no dining reviews, Jeffs Top Fives, stories or columns. When I return, Ill begin my annual July road trips to restaurants outside of Lincoln. If you have any to suggest, drop me an email at jkorbelik@journalstar.com.
A special legislative committee has asked Gov. Pete Ricketts for emergency funding to hire and train additional corrections officers for Nebraska's prisons.

"Between numerous recent incidents of violence against correctional staff, along with high staff turnover and the regular use of mandatory overtime, action needs to be taken immediately to assure Nebraskans that these lapses of security will not be tolerated -- not one more day," the 11 members of the Department of Correctional Services Special Investigative Committee said in a letter sent to the governor Thursday afternoon.

The letter followed a morning meeting between the committee and prisons Director Scott Frakes, and some moments of frustration with him by two members: Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus and Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers.

Senators have been trying to get Frakes to say how much money is needed to fix the system, and he continues to put them off while doing analyses and studies.

In their letter to Ricketts, committee members said the state employees union blamed the June 10 escape of two inmates from the Lincoln Correctional Center on understaffing there.

High levels of turnover have led to large amounts of overtime and have overextended prison staff, putting them and the community at risk, senators said.

Ricketts' office is reviewing the letter, said spokesman Taylor Gage.

"As Director Frakes said earlier this week, the fugitive convicts were able to escape because Corrections staff failed to follow procedure, not because of overtime or staffing," he said.

The prison was fully staffed at the time of the escape, and neither of the two employees that officials said failed to follow procedure was working overtime, Gage said.

The director is preparing his first two-year budget request since taking office and is looking at the department's needs, he said.

At the committee meeting, Ombudsman Marshall Lux gave senators an email his office received from a prison employee, saying the prisons have been critically understaffed for at least six years. Very little has been done to solve the problem, said the employee, who Lux did not name.

Lack of staff allows inmates to pay attention to gaps in security and then take advantage of them, the employee said.

A large problem is the department's failure to pay correctional officers for experience, the email said.

"We need to have pressure from everyone to have the governor reopen the contract with the union immediately to give corrections step raises ...," which reward employees for longevity, additional education, etc. "We cannot wait until the new contract to solve this problem."

Overtime and lack of experience contribute to the problems, the employee said.

"Guess how attentive employees are on the second half of a double shift," the employee told the ombudsman.

"It is time for a change in thinking before we become so short of help we have to lock down institutions."

At the Thursday meeting, Schumacher said the cost of fixing problems in Nebraska prisons could take $100 million -- or much more -- for staffing, programming, facilities and parole needs.

But senators are still in the dark as to exactly what the department needs. And Frakes, who has been in the director's position 16 months, continues to tell them he'll let them know about budget needs in September, when analyses and studies are complete and the request is due.

"We should have all the metrics, all the numbers that we need at this point  to bring our prison system up to snuff," Schumacher said. "We're not getting that."

Someone wants to delay the budget information because it would have a significant impact on spending, and any lowering or raising of taxes, he said.

Presumably Schumacher was talking about Frakes' boss, Ricketts.

Omaha Sen. Bob Krist told Frakes he expected to see a budget that detailed how the department was going to fix each problem. And he hoped the director was in charge of his own budget, he said.

Frakes was hired to fix the state's prisons, said Schumacher.

"You've got a lot of training, a lot of experience. You came with high expectations, the endorsement of many of us who are on the committee, because you knew your stuff," he said.

It's time now to give the Legislature straight talk, he said. Still, Frakes said he's not prepared.

"I hear the word 'stall,'" Schumacher said.

Chambers got up and left the committee meeting upset that Frakes was leaving after about 25 minutes, apparently because he had to go to a budget meeting.

"I'll come back after this part of the charade is over," Chambers said after telling Frakes he and others should be fired over the escape incident.

But Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks told Frakes many people at the meeting feel positive about him.

"I think you're in a tight spot," she said. "My feeling is your hands are tied."

Lincoln Sen. Kate Bolz said she feels the recent escape was related to a stressed system in which there is overcrowding, understaffing, inexperience.

All systems have weaknesses and flaws that will be discovered and exploited, Lux told the committee. And stress on those systems can lead to catastrophic failures.

"I do not believe that reassigning a warden and firing a few overworked employees at LCC is going to address the real problem," Lux said. "The real problem is much bigger than that."
The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services will use money provided by lawmakers to retain employees primarily for training and professional development opportunities, Director Scott Frakes announced Wednesday.

The $1.5 million was allocated by the Legislature during the past session to retain quality staff in workforce shortage areas. It originated with a bill (LB733) introduced by Sen. Dan Watermeier of Syracuse that would have appropriated $2.5 million in fiscal year 2016-17.

The Appropriations Committee reduced the amount to $1.5 million.

"Do I think that's the most efficient use (of the money)? No," state employees union Executive Director Mike Marvin said of Frakes' plan. "But they gave him enough leeway he could use it however he felt.

"I would have put it out as bonus money to retain people."

The union contract allows for merit increases and bonuses for employees.

In a memo sent to Corrections employees Wednesday, Frakes said the most successful and enduring organizations devote time, energy and money to retaining employees.

The $1.5 million retention plan includes training and professional development opportunities for all levels of staff, resources to help cope with challenges and stress unique to prison work, wellness amenities and a commuting bonus for people who work at Tecumseh State Correctional Institution. Behavioral health staff also will get additional educational benefits.

Frakes said he has listened to feedback from staff, lawmakers and others on how to use the money, adding that it will help with goals to transform the Corrections Department.

Gov. Pete Ricketts brought Frakes to Nebraska in early 2015 to lead the department after a series of problems that included the accidental release of hundreds of prison inmates earlier than intended. The Legislature formed a special investigative committee to look into that and into an array of Corrections issues including mental health treatment for inmates, the case of Nikko Jenkins, who killed four people within days of his release from prison, and the state's purchase of lethal injection drugs.

On Wednesday, Frakes said the retention plan will help with the growth and promotion of staff. A professional development bonus would cover the cost of courses and provide additional money to those who complete selected online classes. It would pay for continuing education requirements for licensed health care employees, to help behavioral health staff get drug and alcohol counselor certification, and for other training.

It would also provide for resiliency training and access to exercise equipment to address the long-term effect of prison stress on overall health and functioning of staff.

Getting more pay for Nebraska Corrections workers, in particular security staff, has been an issue for a while. A recent culture study showed more than 60 percent of them were dissatisfied with their wages.

Starting wages are not competitive with private employers in Nebraska or government pay in surrounding states, workers said. Long-term workers often make the same wages as those newly hired. And that affects morale.

Watermeier said it was hard to accomplish what the Legislature wanted, which was to give workers more pay, because collective bargaining requirements limit what lawmakers can do.

If the Legislature could have provided an ongoing appropriation for base pay, he said, he would have felt more comfortable putting his foot down and saying the $1.5 million had to be spent on bonuses.

"I kind of suspected this would happen," he said. "And I guess I'm willing to say they're using it to the best of their ability. But to just give somebody a bonus, and then not give it to them next year, that's going to be hard to do."

Lincoln Sen. Colby Coash wanted the Legislature to raise the workers' baseline salaries as well.

"I 100 percent support paying Corrections officers what they are worth," he said during debate last session.

Lincoln Sen. Matt Hansen introduced a bill (LB896) that would have required pay increases for state employees based on longevity, on top of other increases. It would have started with an increase of 6.25 cents per hour on the fifth anniversary of date of hire and increase in five-year increments until it reached 50 cents per hour on their 40th anniversary.

That bill died in committee.

Watermeier said he wants to come back next year and continue to work for more money for Corrections staff.
OMAHA  The five days Timothy Clausen eluded authorities before being arrested in northeast Omaha on Wednesday evening mark the longest of his three periods as an escapee from prison or jail.

Friday morning, Clausen rode out of the Lincoln Correctional Center in the back of a laundry truck with Armon Dixon. Dixon, 37, was caught in Lincoln Saturday afternoon and Clausen in Omaha just after 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Hundreds of cops, deputies, marshals and troopers spent hundreds of hours in Lincoln and Omaha chasing tips and racking up expenses in their efforts to capture them.

On Thursday, Gov. Pete Ricketts said the story is one of both villains -- the two sex offenders serving a combined 209 to 333 years in prison -- and heroes -- the two women who fought off Dixon in a northeast Lincoln apartment on Saturday morning and all of the members of law enforcement who spent long, hot hours on the search.

Clausen, 52, is from Omaha and has spent much of his adult life behind bars doing time for manslaughter, sex assault, burglary and attempted escape.

He escaped from the Omaha Correctional Center on Feb. 18, 1985, and was caught three days later at a friend's home in north Omaha, according to newspaper archives.

In July 1995, he climbed over a fence at the Douglas County jail and jumped from rooftop to rooftop with four other inmates to get away. He was caught the next day in Omaha. At the time, Clausen was awaiting a new trial in a 1992 killing and eventually was convicted of manslaughter.

This time, an anonymous tip to Omaha Crime Stoppers led directly to his arrest at 3226 N. 26th St.

Omaha police said the tipster will collect a $7,500 reward. They won't say what that person's relationship to Clausen is but said the tip came in a little after 4 p.m. Wednesday.

"With the cooperation of multiple agencies, a perimeter was established around the residence, and Clausen was ordered to exit the building," the department said in a news release Thursday afternoon. "Clausen emerged from an upstairs bathroom and was taken into custody without incident. A loaded handgun was located near where Clausen had been sitting."

Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer said officers searched more than 60 Omaha homes between Saturday night, when the search for Clausen shifted from Lincoln to Omaha, and his capture.

"We felt Clausen was hiding in northeast Omaha," Schmaderer said, describing five days of nonstop work that went into finding him.

"Clausen was attempting to leave the city and would have done anything to get out," he said.

Omaha police weren't able to tally up how much the search for Clausen cost the department, but Lancaster County Sheriff Terry Wagner said his office incurred $4,816.26 in overtime during the time the manhunt for both men was centered in Lincoln.

"We held day shift over, called second shift in early and called in the Task Force deputies who were on their days off," he said in an email to the Journal Star. "Most deputies worked between 12-16 hours that day.

"We do not specifically budget for these types of events. Since they dont happen every year, if we budgeted an amount for extraordinary circumstances, we would just be padding our budget."

Lincoln Police Chief Jeff Bliemeister put the cost to his department at $12,361 but said that number remains fluid.

"Police work is filled with unknowns that require rapid deployment of additional personnel and supporting resources," he said in an email to the Journal Star. "Through careful analysis of past trends, we build projected overtime costs into our biannual expense budget. The safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln and the employees of the Lincoln Police Department remain the primary focus when dynamic events unfold requiring deployment of personnel."

The Nebraska State Patrol won't calculate its cost for the manhunt until next week, and the U.S. Marshals said they didn't use any overtime.

Schmaderer wouldn't go into detail about the people who were potentially harboring Clausen and said part of the investigation will determine if they knew who he was.

Clausen, 52, was serving a 51- to 55-year sentence at the Lincoln Correctional Center for sexually assaulting a child and tampering with a juror. When he was captured, he had shaved his beard and cut his hair.

Both Clausen and Dixon have been taken to Tecumseh State Correctional Institution pending arraignment on new charges. For Dixon, that likely will include charges for the alleged attack on two women in Lincoln Saturday morning. He already was serving 158 to 278 years for sexual assaults and for being a habitual criminal.

Now, the governor said Thursday morning, it's time to figure out how the escapes happened.

"Our attention now turns to investigating where the corrections system failed and rebuilding public faith in the ability of our prison system to protect Nebraskans."
Not long after investigators brought Ada JoAnn Taylor back to Nebraska in 1989 to face charges for a 68-year-old woman's murder four years earlier, the Gage County Sheriff rang up Dr. Wayne Price, a part-time deputy.

Taylor was in "emotional distress" and asking to see Price, who had been her clinical psychologist a few years earlier.

"But you weren't there to be JoAnn Taylor's psychologist, correct?" attorney Maren Chaloupka asked Price on a federal court witness stand Wednesday.

Chaloupka is representing Taylor and five others who would come to be known as the Beatrice 6.

The six -- Taylor, Joseph White, Tom Winslow, Debra Shelden, James Dean and Kathy Gonzalez -- spent 77 years behind bars for a rape and killing later tied by DNA to another man.

Now, they are suing Gage County, former Sheriff Jerry DeWitt, Burdette Searcey, the deputy behind the arrests, and Price over the investigation that put them there and asking a jury to compensate them for it.

A first trial ended in a mistrial in 2014 and the second started last week in U.S. District Court in Lincoln.

On Wednesday, Price found himself defending not only his work with Taylor, but also his questioning of two others who denied having anything to do with the killing until after meeting with him and "remembering" through dreams that they had been there when it happened.

But first, he acknowledged that when he went to see Taylor soon after she was arrested, and on other occasions, he went as a sheriff's psychologist.

Chaloupka asked if he could see how Taylor, whom he had earlier diagnosed and treated for a severe personality disorder, might have been confused about his role at that moment.

Price said he didn't think she was confused, "because I was always honest with her." He said he told her he was with the sheriff's office and that there would be no confidentiality to the interview.

Chaloupka asked if he told Taylor he was participating in the investigation into Helen Wilson's murder and had questioned her co-defendant, Joseph White, or if he ever asked the county attorney to send someone else because Taylor had been his client or suggest she see an independent psychologist.

"Since she asked for me to see her, because of my past contact with her, I thought it would be inappropriate for me to reject that," Price testified.

Asked if there was a conflict in his working for authorities trying to prosecute Taylor and also trying to comfort her, he said that wasn't his intent.

Chaloupka also asked Price about how Shelden and Dean started having dreams about the murder after he went to talk with them.

She said Dean repeatedly denied knowing anything about the crime, pacing in his jail cell, until Price met with him to deliver the news that he had failed a polygraph examination and a witness put him at the scene.

Price didn't tell Dean that the witness was Taylor, a mentally ill woman known to hallucinate in stressful situations.

After talking with Price, Dean said he must have been blocking the memory of being in Wilson's small Beatrice apartment during the killing.

As for the way Shelden's story had changed, Price would testify that she had just forgotten "relatively insignificant stuff."

But Chaloupka pointed out one of the things she had forgotten was Gonzalez, and another was Dean. Price agreed.

Both of them were charged based on Shelden's statement.

"Have you ever imagined what it might be like to find yourself suddenly under arrest because someone dreamed about you?" Chaloupka asked Price.

No, he answered.
A senior member of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln administration was named interim dean of the College of Engineering on Thursday.

UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green appointed Lance Perez, the associate vice chancellor for academic affairs and dean of graduate studies, to a three-year stint leading the college.

Perez, who will replace Dean Tim Wei at the end of this month, also holds a tenured faculty position within the college's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Green chose not to reappoint Wei to the position after concluding a customary five-year review of the dean. Wei is expected to return to the faculty as a full-time tenured professor.

"As dean, Tim has moved the College of Engineering forward and has established a strong strategic vision," Green said in a statement. "I am confident that Lance Perez will build upon this work and take the college to the next level."

On Monday, Green said he believes the College of Engineering "needs a strong period of interim dean leadership to further advance on its strategic plan," which includes unifying its UNL and University of Nebraska at Omaha campuses, developing faculty growth in signature research areas, building strong relationships inside and outside the university and planning for facility renovation and expansion.

Perez, who is responsible for faculty and leadership development, promotion and tenure, instructional technology and classroom facilities improvements as well as graduate education at UNL, has led several campus-wide initiatives, including the university's entry into the Big Ten's Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

He has led efforts to implement $30 million in improvements to academic facilities at UNL, and has been involved in more than $15 million in federally funded research on campus.

Perez is also responsible for helping lead UNL's diversity review.

"The College of Engineering plays a critical role in the advancement of the state of Nebraska, and it is a priority at UNL to continue to enhance and expand engineering education and research," Perez said. "I am eager to help the college achieve its teaching, research and engagement goals as it continues to establish itself as a Big Ten college of engineering."

Perez, who holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Notre Dame, joined UNL in 1996.
A state regulator chided the owner of Lincoln's most familiar cab company Thursday, accusing him of showing a "flagrant disregard" for Nebraska law.

The comments by Public Service Commissioner Crystal Rhoades of Omaha were aimed at Kirby Young, owner of Lincoln-based Servant Cab, which also operates as Yellow Cab and Capital Cab.

"This guy's a bad actor, he's a menace, and he's dangerous. And we've done nothing," Rhoades told fellow commissioners during their weekly meeting.

The Public Service Commission regulates Nebraska's taxi companies as well as pipelines, utilities and other services.

On Thursday, commissioners were discussing how to respond to a complaint that Servant Cab had salvaged five of its taxis without removing their logos or other door displays, a violation of commission rules. Two of the cabs also still had their PSC-issued license plates, which must be returned when vehicles are sold, said Commission Transportation Director Mark Breiner.

Those rules are intended to protect retired cabs from being used for fraudulent purposes, he said.

Commissioners voted 3-1 to send Servant Cab a formal warning letter.

Rhoades, who dissented, likened Young to a habitual criminal and said his history of service complaints and other issues merits prosecution and punishment, not a warning.

Young, who didn't attend Thursday's meeting, defended his company when reached by the Journal Star.

"I believe that we do a good job," he said.

Servant Cab was Lincoln's only taxi service until 2012, when the commission voted to allow other cab companies to operate here. The decision followed complaints about long wait times, high rates and poor customer service by Young's taxis.

Lincoln now has five cab companies operating under various names.

None has experienced the same ongoing issues as Servant Cab, Rhoades said Thursday.

"The transportation department spends more time addressing performance problems with Mr. Young and his companies than all other carriers combined," she said in a prepared statement.

Young declined to react specifically to Rhoades' comments.

"She says what she says," he said.

Rhoades has gained a reputation as a fiery presence on the commission since her election in 2014. The only Democrat on the five-member board, she regularly votes counter to her fellow commissioners during public meetings.

And her ire frequently focuses on Servant Cab and Young.

At Rhoades' urging, commissioners voted within the past year to open investigations into service-related issues complaints about Servant Cab and another of Young's companies, Golden Plains Services, or GPS.

Questions surrounding GPS also inspired a separate investigation into whether less-regulated open-class carriers  a category designed to serve state Health and Human Services clients  should be allowed to solicit riders off the street like traditional taxi companies.

And in December, commissioners ruled that Servant Cab and other taxi services were wrong to take on multiple passengers at once when the first rider didn't approve, even if the rides are paid for with Medicaid dollars and arranged through Health and Human Services.

Young said his cabs have since halted the practice, known as multiloading.

Other commissioners defended Thursday's warning letter as an appropriate response to the cab disposal issue, given how the commission handled a similar complaint with an Omaha taxi company about five years ago. Regulators gave that company a verbal warning.

Commission Chairman Tim Schram of Gretna said enforcement should be equal, fair and consistent for all carriers, and Commissioner Frank Landis of Lincoln said regulators can prepare to "drop the hammer" on Servant Cab if it breaks the rules again.

Commissioner Rod Johnson of Sutton also supported the letter. Jerry Vap of McCook wasn't present.

Young said the cabs his company sent to salvage were intended to be crushed, so no one could buy them to use for fraudulent taxi rides.

Once they learned of the commission's concern about the identifying marks, he said, "we went right out and took them off."
It is the most famous ducktail in America today, the hairdo of wayward youth of a bygone era, and it's astonishing to imagine it under the spotlight in Cleveland, being cheered by Republican dignitaries. The class hood, the bully and braggart, the guy revving his pink Chevy to make the pipes rumble, presiding over the student council.

This is the C-minus guy who sat behind you in history and poked you with his pencil and smirked when you asked him to stop. That smirk is now on every front page in America. It is not what anybody -- left, right, or center -- looks for in a president. There's no philosophy here, just an attitude.

He is a little old for a ducktail. By the age of 70, most ducks have moved on, but not Donald. He is apparently still fond of the sidewalls and the duck's ass in back and he is proud as can be of his great feat, the first punk candidate to get this close to the White House. He says that the country is run by a bunch of clowns and that he is going to make things great again and beat up on the outsiders who are coming into our neighborhood.

His followers don't necessarily believe that -- what they love about him is what kids loved about Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, the fact that he horrifies the powers that be and when you are pro-duck you are giving the finger to Congress, the press, clergy, lawyers, teachers, cake-eaters, big muckety-mucks, VIPs, all those people who think they're better than you -- you have the power to scare the pants off them, and that's what this candidate does better than anybody else.

After the worst mass shooting in American history on Sunday, 50 persons dead in Orlando, the bodies still being carted from the building, the faces of horror-stricken cops and EMTs on TV, the gentleman issued a statement on Twitter thanking his followers for their congratulations, that the tragedy showed that he had been "right" in calling for America to get "tough."

Anyone else would have expressed sorrow. The gentleman expressed what was in his heart, which was personal pride.

We had a dozen or so ducktails in my high school class and they were all about looks. The hooded eyes, the sculpted swoop of the hair, the curled lip. They emulated Elvis but only the look, not the talent. Their sole ambition was to make an impression, to slouch gracefully and exhale in an artful manner. In the natural course of things, they struggled after graduation, some tried law enforcement for the prestige of it, others became barflies. If they were drafted, the Army got them shaped up in a month or two.

Eventually, they all calmed down, got hitched up to a mortgage, worried about their blood pressure, lost the chippiness, let their hair down. But if your dad was rich and if he was born before you were, then the ducktail could inherit enough wealth to be practically impervious to public opinion. This has happened in New York City. A man who could never be elected city comptroller is running for president.

The dreamers in the Republican Party imagine that success will steady him and he will accept wise counsel and come into the gravitational field of reality but it isn't happening. The Orlando tweets show it: the man does not have a heart. How, in a few weeks, should Mr. Ryan and Mr. McConnell teach him basic humanity? The bigot and braggart they see today is the same man that New Yorkers have been observing for 40 years. A man obsessed with marble walls and gold-plated doorknobs, who has the sensibility of a giant sea tortoise.

His response to the Orlando tragedy is one more clue that this election is different from any other. If Mitt Romney or John McCain had been elected president, you might be disappointed but you wouldn't fear for the fate of the Republic. This time, the Republican Party is nominating a man who resides in the dark depths. He is a thug and he doesn't bother to hide it. The only greatness he knows about is himself.

So the country is put to a historic test. If the man is not defeated, then we are not the country we imagine we are. All of the trillions spent on education was a waste. The churches should close up shop. The nation that elects this man president is not a civilized society. The gentleman is not airing out his fingernail polish, he is not showing off his wedding ring; he is making an obscene gesture. Ignore it at your peril.
After the Islamic State began releasing videos of American citizens being beheaded, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett reportedly told President Obama that Americans were worried that they would soon bring this violence here to the United States. Obama was unfazed.

"They're not coming here to chop our heads off," the president promised.

Now a terrorist pledging allegiance to the Islamic State has murdered 49 Americans in Orlando. What inspired him? CNN reports that "analysis of Mateen's electronic devices showed searches for jihadist propaganda, including ... ISIS beheading videos."

Obama dismissed Omar Mateen as a "homegrown" terrorist who had announced his allegiance to the Islamic State "at the last minute" and declared that "there is no evidence so far that he was in fact directed by ISIL." That distinction (if it turns out to be true) is irrelevant. Last month, the Islamic State commander responsible for external attack plotting, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, gave a speech calling on supporters to carry out killings in the United States during the holy month of Ramadan. "The smallest action you do in the heart of their land is dearer to us than the largest action by us, and more effective and more damaging to them," he said.

Mateen answered al-Adnani's call, Orlando is awash in blood, and the Islamic State claimed credit for the attack and declared Mateen "one of the soldiers of the caliphate."

He was an Islamic State terrorist. This was an Islamic State attack. And Obama's stubborn refusal to see this is part of a larger pattern of downplaying or dismissing terrorist dangers.

According to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who spent hours interviewing Obama about his foreign policy doctrine, the president "has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates" and "frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do."

That's right, our commander in chief sees the mass shooting of 49 people in Orlando as akin to a slip in the tub.

In his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama blithely dismissed the Islamic State as "fighters on the back of pickup trucks" who he said, in typical strawman fashion, "do not threaten our national existence." In a 2015 BBC interview, he said, "If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100." In other words, no big deal.

After his anti-Islamic State strategy came under withering criticism following the Brussels terror attacks in March, Obama said "my top priority is to defeat ISIL." But he has admitted elsewhere that is untrue. Obama has openly declared that climate change is a much higher priority for him than terrorism because "ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States. Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don't do something about it." Indeed, Goldberg writes, Obama "gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda" and "his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its 'proper' perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people."

The truth is that for Obama, winning the battle against terrorism is not really his "top priority" but a distraction from his top priorities. He did not come to office to be a war president. He came to office to end George W. Bush's wars, and "turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

But, as we just saw in Orlando, the page has refused to turn. The tide of war is not receding, as Obama promised. The wave of terror is growing stronger and is now reaching our shores. And to the commander in chief, that's no more worrisome than a car accident.
Public utilities can make a case for keeping some information secret on their costs for generating electricity, but they should be very careful where they draw the line.

They should withhold only absolutely essential information from the public. To withhold anything more would distance the governing boards and executives from their owners  the public.

A transparent relationship is crucial for public utilities to retain public support over the long-term, particularly when rates become volatile.

The issue of confidentiality on the costs of generation has become high-profile recently because Gary Aksamit, a Bruning native who heads First Security Power, an energy marketing company based in Dallas, has gone to court to get more information from the Omaha Public Power District, Nebraska Public Power District and Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska.

Aksamit last year also claimed at an energy symposium that Nebraska ratepayers could save $250 million a year by opening the states retail market to outside competition. Nebraska is the only state where all electricity is delivered by publicly owned utilities.

Last year Aksamit said his company plans to build three wind farms in southeastern Nebraska with an investment of $725 million. He has filed a request with the Southwest Power Pool to connect to power transmission lines from a wind farm in Saline County.

So far Aksamit has not filed a legal action against the Lincoln Electric System, LES Vice President Shelley Sahling-Zart said LES staffers spent hundreds of hour gathering information requested by Aksamit, who paid $4,215.50.

Sahling-Zart said LES did not provide information about the rates at which it buys electricity from some renewable energy facilities owned by private developers. She said that information is owned by the private developer and subject to nondisclosure agreements.

In 2014 after signing a contract with the Arbuckle Mountain wind farm in Oklahoma, LES officials said LES officials say that the contracts for electricity from renewable sources will save more than $420 million over the next 25 years, based on a comparison of the cost of the contracts with the projected price of energy in the Southwest Power Pool market.

Kevin Wailes, CEO of LES, said the utility has discussed continuing to provide aggregate rate information, but not a facility-by-facility breakdown.

Whenever the issue of secrecy arises, LES and Nebraskas other publicly owned utilities should be very careful to give the public enough information to judge whether the utility is being managed properly and efficiently. Public trust and confidence are at stake.
The June 11 article, "Activist: Death penalty incompatible with faith, humanity," about Shane Claiborne states that he believes, "the death penalty has survived not in spite of Christians, but because of them..." Mr. Claiborne needs to study the issue more thoroughly. My research tells me that the following large Christian denominations in the US all have statements opposing the death penalty: Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Unitarian. There may be others. Mr. Claiborne's analysis appears to have left out a large portion of Christians and I believe is therefore incomplete and skewed.
The Air Force has approved more than $50 million in targeted repairs of Offutt Air Force Base's deteriorating runway, and Offutt's military aircraft will be diverted to the Lincoln Airport for mission operations during construction in 2018.

The announcement was hailed Wednesday by Gov. Pete Ricketts and members of Nebraska's congressional delegation as evidence of the Air Force's continuing commitment to the sprawling military base in Bellevue, which has an estimated $1.3 billion annual economic impact on the state.

Funding falls short of the estimated $84 million to $117 million required to replace the runway, but the Air Force said the extensive repairs will secure it for about 20 years while directing "tens of millions of dollars in the infrastructure funding program to other critical requirements."

The funding commitment of $50 million to $55 million assures that Offutt's flying mission remains operational, Air Force Lt. Col. Laurie-An Lanpher, congressional budget and appropriations liaison, told the congressional delegation in a message.

The Air Force estimated the runway will be closed for five to nine months while Offutt flying missions operate primarily out of the Lincoln Airport.

"This is a big win for the Greater Omaha area and all of Nebraska," Ricketts said in response to the announcement. "Offutt Air Force Base is one of our state's largest employers and it is key to growing Nebraska."

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Lincoln, whose congressional district now includes Offutt, said he is pleased that military leaders have decided to commit "the necessary resources to protect Offutt as an important part of our national security infrastructure."

Fortenberry is vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on military construction and veterans affairs and he formed a task force composed of Nebraska's three House members and the governor to conduct oversight of the runway process.

Sen. Deb Fischer said the decision provides "much-needed certainty to Offutt" and will allow the base to continue to play a critical role in the nation's defense for decades to come.

Fischer is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Brad Ashford of Omaha said the project will ensure that Offutt "maintains its role as a crucial piece of our national security apparatus."

Offutt hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command and the 55th Wing, which conducts a global reconnaissance and intelligence mission.

StratCom appears to be tethered to Offutt with construction of its new $1.2 billion headquarters complex at the base.

Extensive runway repair was viewed as a vital element in efforts to secure the 55th Wing and its 5,500 military and civilian jobs.
Sen. Deb Fischer said Thursday she will consider pending gun control proposals with an eye toward preventing terrorists from acquiring access to weapons while protecting 2nd Amendment and due process rights.

On Monday, the Senate is expected to vote on a number of proposals, including ones designed to prevent suspected terrorists from acquiring guns and imposing mandatory background checks for gun purchases through online dealers and at gun shows.

Those votes come in response to a Senate filibuster mounted this week by Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

On other topics, Fischer said that Donald Trump has "tapped into the frustration and anger" that she also hears when she is traveling throughout Nebraska.

Trump has "a pretty good understanding where people are," the Republican senator said during a telephone conference call from Washington.

Fischer said she will support Trump as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but that does not mean she always will agree with him.

"You don't have to agree with everybody all the time," she said. "I have supported (candidates) that I have not fully agreed with."

In the wake of the terrorist attack that left 49 people dead at a gay bar in Orlando, Fischer said "the focus should be on terrorism," and specifically on home-grown terrorists who are inspired by the Islamic State.

The Obama administration needs to "step forth with a plan and a strategy" that deals with radical Islamic terrorists, she said.

Asked about Trump's rhetoric in the wake of the Orlando attack, including his comments on Twitter that prompted some criticism from Republican leaders in Washington, Fischer said she wishes the media would pressure presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to be more open.

Clinton has not held a formal press conference for almost 200 days, she said, and ought to be available "when she is not so scripted."

On another topic, Fischer said she would hope that this week's Air Force decision to allocate more than $50 million to construction of extensive runway repairs at Offutt Air Force Base would secure retention of the 55th Wing at the base at Bellevue.

"I certainly will do my best to make sure they remain there," she said.
A company that wants to continue managing health care plans for Nebraska Medicaid recipients is taking the state to court after losing its bid.

Aetna Better Health of Nebraska claims state officials unfairly withdrew its initial contract award in exchange for a different managed care organization that shouldn't have qualified in the first place.

State officials said they are in the best position to determine what's good for Nebraskans, calling the selection process impartial and designed to benefit taxpayers, not individual bidders.

Aetna wants the decision reversed, its lawyers say in a complaint filed Tuesday in Lancaster County District Court.

The company is fighting for a share of nearly $1 billion in long-term contracts to serve some 230,000 Medicaid recipients  possibly the state's largest-ever contract procurement.

Those contracts will determine which plans are available to Medicaid and Childrens Health Insurance Program participants under Nebraska's new managed care program, called Heritage Health. The program launches next year and is designed to cover each patient under a single plan, rather than separate plans for physical and behavioral health.

Six managed care organizations, including Aetna, applied last year to make their options available in Nebraska. When the state Department of Health and Human Services selected three winners this year, Aetna didn't make the list.

The company has operated in Nebraska for five years and already manages plans for about 105,000 Medicaid recipients here.

It earned the state's initial recommendation in February, but the Department of Administrative Services, which helps oversee state contracts, rescored the proposals following complaints by losing bidders. That caused a different managed care provider, WellCare, to come out ahead.

"Heritage Health is an important and exciting transformation of our Medicaid delivery system, and we understand that Aetna was disappointed in the outcome of the competitive process," HHS spokeswoman Kathie Oesterman said in an email. "We are confident that the process was fair and hopeful that the facts support a quick dismissal of this lawsuit so that our resources can be focused on improving our programs that serve Nebraskans."

In an emailed statement, Aetna questioned why the state would ultimately pick a less-familiar company over a "highly qualified" managed care organization that already has relationships with patients and providers in Nebraska.

The decision "jeopardized the state of Nebraska's ability to satisfy the basic needs of hundreds of thousands of its most vulnerable citizens," Aetna's attorneys wrote in their complaint.

State officials have dismissed that argument.

"Incumbents are not entitled to favoritism or preference," Bo Botelho, deputy director for Administrative Services, wrote to Aetna's lawyers after they challenged the decision through an internal process in March.

Aetna's complaint lists Administrative Services and HHS as defendants, along with HHS CEO Courtney Phillips, state Medicaid Director Calder Lynch, Botelho, Administrative Services Director Byron Diamond and Attorney General Doug Peterson.

Aetna contends the state's rescoring process was flawed, ignored standard procedure and violated the law. The company also claims state officials infringed on its constitutional due process rights by contracting with WellCare and two other organizations before Aetna could fully protest the decision.

Among Aetna's complaints about the scoring process:

* The five-person committee chosen to determine the new scores included a pair of Administrative Services employees who had no experience with Medicaid managed care and had never reviewed bids for state contracts before.

* That committee was given just 48 hours to review and rescore 1,500 pages of proposal materials, when the original scoring took a different committee nearly three weeks.

In addition, Aetna says WellCare shouldn't qualify for the contracts because of legal issues it has encountered in other states, and because it will use subcontractors in India to process claims.

A WellCare representative couldn't be reached for comment late Wednesday.

The state already rejected many of Aetna's arguments after it protested to Administrative Services in March.

State policy gives agencies discretion in awarding contracts, Botelho wrote in an April letter to Aetna's lawyers. He said only contractors themselves must be within the United States.

Aetna's argument that the rescoring committee didn't have enough time to do its job correctly is merely "their perception," Botelho told the Journal Star on Wednesday.

"We believed it was sufficient time," he said.
YORKVILLE  Four people  including three Racine County teenage girls  were seriously injured Wednesday night in a two-vehicle crash at the intersection of Two Mile Road and Highway U at the Yorkville/Raymond town line, the countys sheriff said.

Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said an SUV driven by a 58-year-old Kenosha man was heading west on Two Mile Road at about 6 p.m. Wednesday when the vehicle collided with a small yellow car traveling south on Highway U. That smaller car was carrying three female teenagers from Racine County, Schmaling said.

All four sustained serious injuries, Schmaling said.

One occupant  Schmaling did not identify which person it was  was transported to Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa via Flight For Life helicopter.

The other three victims were transported via ambulances to area hospitals, Schmaling said. All of them were seriously injured, he said.

After the collision, parts of the small yellow car ended up in the yard of a resident who lives near the intersection.

The cause of the crash and any factors related to that cause were being investigated Wednesday night, Schmaling said.

We dont know if a traffic signal was missed, if alcohol was involved, or anything like that, he said. Were not ruling anything out at this point.

Intersection a concern

Both Two Mile and Highway U are rural, two-lane roads that travel through large stretches of farmland and wooded patches. The intersection is controlled by stop signs on Two Mile, but apparently has had its share of problems in the past, Schmaling said.

We spoke to residents who told us that there have been accidents there before, he said. It seems to be a pretty rough intersection. Something might need to be done there.

Fire and rescue crews from Raymond, Union Grove-Yorkville and Wind Lake were called to the scene, as well as the Wisconsin State Patrol. Schmaling did not know for sure if fire crews had to extricate anyone from the wreckage, but he did say that no one was ejected from either vehicle.

Sheriffs Office deputies closed Highway U between Three Mile Road and 50th Road, and on Two Mile west of 68th Street to 96th Street.

Accident reconstruction teams from the Sheriffs Office and the State Patrol were expected to work at the crash site through Wednesday night, Schmaling said.

In the aftermath of another serious car crash, Schmaling once again urged drivers to stay safe.

I want to remind everyone to use due diligence when driving, he said. We hope that this doesnt become a worse tragedy than it already is.
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y.  Ahead of the final vote on Waukeshas proposed lake diversion, a group of mayors from around the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Basin reiterated their opposition Thursday.

The group included Racine Mayor John Dickert, who said in a statement, there is clear evidence that Waukesha has reasonable alternatives to provide safe drinking water to its citizens, and I do not want to see their effluent contaminate the Root River in Downtown Racine.

Representatives of all eight Great Lakes states are set to decide on Waukeshas application Tuesday. Dickert said local governments are calling on states to reject Waukeshas application and protect these vital waters we cherish.

Waukesha is proposing to divert Lake Michigan water due to problems with its water supply and returning treated wastewater to the lake through the Root River. Waukesha officials argue lake water is their only reasonable alternative and say the diversion would help, not hurt, the Root River.

The group of 123 mayors met as part of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiatives annual meeting and conference, according to a news release. Mayors also worked to collectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and approved a strategy to reduce phosphorus entering the Thames River, according to the release.

Preliminary approval received

Officials from Great Lakes states and provinces have already given Waukeshas application preliminary approval.

The Great Lakes St. Lawrence River Water Resources Regional Body voted 9-0 last month to issue a declaration of finding that the application complies with the Great Lakes protection compact if certain conditions are met. Minnesotas representative abstained from the vote.

Conditions include an average limit of 8.2 million gallons of lake water per day.

The decision is now in the hands of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Council, which consists of governors (or their designees) from all eight Great Lakes states.

The application must be approved unanimously to move forward.

Racine officials have lobbied states to reject it, in large part because the water would be returned to the lake via the Root River. Waukesha says its water utility would have to meet strict standards and that more clean water would be discharged into the Root, improving the rivers health.
Gov. Scott Walker is blocking the state Department of Public Instruction from seeking outside counsel in a lawsuit filed in federal court  a move that comes after the state Department of Justice dropped the education agency as a client in the suit.

DOJ attorneys at the end of May dropped their representation of state Superintendent Tony Evers in a lawsuit brought by a private religious school and the parents of students there against a Washington County school district and DPI over a decision to refuse to provide the students transportation to the school.

DPI subsequently asked Walkers office to allow the agency to seek outside counsel, but that request was denied, Walker spokesman Tom Evenson said late Wednesday.

At issue is how DPI officials determine the religious denomination of a private school in applying a state law that requires public school districts to provide transportation for private school students. The law only requires districts to offer free transportation to one private school per religious denomination in a given attendance area.

DPI attorneys were relying on DOJ attorneys because the lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, in which DPI attorneys initially were not allowed to argue cases, according to DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy. One DPI lawyer has since been qualified in the district, he said.

McCarthy said he was not aware of the governors decision until the Wisconsin State Journal notified him late Wednesday.

Evers in an interview Tuesday said DOJ lawyers dropped his agency as a client with little explanation. DOJ lawyers withdrew from the case on May 31. It was originally filed in Washington County Circuit Court on April 12, and later moved to federal court.

I think this is the first time in my history that the attorney general decided not to support us in a case, said Evers. When the former attorney general (J.B. Van Hollen) was here, I know he took cases that politically didnt work well for him, but he always took them, he always represented us. This kind of treatment is beyond the pale, frankly.

Van Hollen and Attorney General Brad Schimel are Republicans. Evers holds an officially nonpartisan office, but is backed by Democrats.

DOJ spokesman Johnny Koremenos said Tuesday state attorneys are not representing DPI because the DOJ believes that DPI does not have a legally defensible position in the case.

Evenson said late Wednesday. Walkers office denied DPIs request for outside counsel following DOJs decision to deny representation.

Koremenos said last week that based on the agencys legal analysis of DPIs position in the lawsuit, DOJ believes different representation was appropriate.

Koremenos denied a State Journal request for DOJs legal analysis, saying conversations between DOJ and DPI are protected under attorney-client privilege.

Evers said his agency is always in litigation, and is concerned the decision to not represent the agency may begin a trend.

Former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, a Democrat, said DOJ choosing not to represent a state agency in a lawsuit happens occasionally, at most, but only when the AG either believes the agencys action or challenged statute to be unconstitutional  that no case can be made in defense  or when there is a legitimate conflict of interest, which is very rare.

St. Augustine School in Hartford and parents of students who attend the school are suing DPI and the Freiss Lake School District.

The parents, who are represented by conservative legal group Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, allege in their suit that the Freiss Lake School District and DPI are denying the parents First Amendment rights and are violating their right to exercise religion by not providing transportation for their children to school.

State law requires public school districts to provide transportation to private school students, but only to one school per religious denomination in an attendance area.

Friess Lake school officials denied the children transportation because they live in the attendance area of another Catholic school that already receives state transportation, and is affiliated with the Milwaukee Roman Catholic Archdiocese. Under state law, a school district isnt obligated to provide transportation to children who attend a school within the same attendance area as another school of the same religious denomination.

After the parents appealed to DPI to challenge the districts decision, DPI sided with the school district in March.

CJ Szafir, an attorney representing the parents, said based on a former Supreme Court decision, the law requires the DPI to only look at a schools articles of incorporation to determine a schools affiliation. Those articles describe the school as a private school governed independently of any denomination. He said its against the law for DPI to define Catholic because the articles of incorporation do not describe the school that way.

This case will come down to what kind of inquiry the government can use to determine whether two private schools are affiliated with one another, said Szafir.

The schools website offers a more precise description of the school  an independent and private traditional Roman Catholic School.

DPI contends the same Supreme Court decision does not prohibit DPI or the school from looking beyond the articles of incorporation to determine whether attendance area of schools within the same religious denomination overlap.

In essence, legal precedent asks DPI in these situations to determine whether a school is Catholic, Lutheran or based in other religions, which is what the department did, said McCarthy.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that a Department of Public Instruction lawyer has qualified to work in the Eastern District of federal court.
MILWAUKEE  Republican state lawmakers say they want to increase funding for Wisconsins urban schools, but a Democratic critic counters that recommendations in a GOP-led task force report ignore the most pressing issues.

Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos created the task force with the goal of improving educational outcomes at urban schools. Among the priorities listed in its final report include expanding summer school and early childhood programs and improving access to mental health care for students.

Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Darienne Driver called the report encouraging and evidence that urban educators have been heard. But Democratic state Rep. Sondy Pope said the task force was a waste of time and taxpayer money because it doesnt begin to scratch the surface of the issues facing our urban schools.

Pope, who said she wasnt given a copy of the report until just before it was released Wednesday, said the task force heard about the inadequate resources, barriers to attracting new teachers and the need to address mental health issues  but none was addressed in the report.

The 13-member task force heard testimony from urban educators around the state from September to March. They focused on a key areas, including teacher recruitment and retention, and strategies for addressing truancy, poor academic performance and low graduation rates.

The recommendations included:

Encourage teacher education programs to provide instruction in how to teach in an urban setting and how to teach reading to all teacher license applicants.

Expand access to mental health care in schools through Medicaid reimbursement, and investigate whether state law inhibits communication between physicians and mental health care professionals about students mental health.

Clarify in state law the definitions of truancy and habitual truant and clarify the procedures for addressing truancy.

Review state funding for summer school programs and consider a special state categorical aid program to better fund summer school.

Review state funding for 4-year-old kindergarten and explore additional options for investing in early childhood education.
38 injured in Truck-Bus collision

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APF men accused behind gang rape of mute woman

The people of Shivaraj VDC in Kapilvastu staged a demonstration at Chandrauta on Wednesday, demanding stern action against the men involved in the recent gang rape of a speech-impaired woman.
Blake Lively didn't want to become an actress

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Cabinet endorses constitution implementation action plan

A Cabinet meeting on Thursday passed the Constitution Implementation Action Plan to be concluded within the second week of January 2017.
Cheer for householders as veggie prices drop

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Former queen mother admitted to Norvic

Former Queen Mother Ratna Rajya Laxmi Devi Shah has been admitted to Thapathali-based Norvic hospital on Thursday.
Gathabandhan seeks govt commitment to its demands before talks

A meeting of Sanghiya Gathabandhan has urged the government to come up with a clear strong basis for addressing their demands before sitting at the talks table.
Gathabandhan weighs up PMs talks offer

Leaders of Sanghiya Gathabandhan, an alliance of Madhesi and Janjati parties, are discussing whether to accept or reject Prime Minister KP Sharma Olis offer for talks.
Lawmakers fight over verification process

Lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties were involved in bitter altercation in the Legislature-Parliament on Wednesday, blaming Health Research and Social Developed Forum (HERD) International, an NGO tasked with verifying the data of earthquake victims, for missing to include the genuine earthquake victims in the verification process.
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Maa Initiative to create an artistic haven in Dolakha

He was terminally ill, artist and art critic Umesh Shrestha said with admiration in his eyes. He was undergoing an operation for a tumor. Even then, he did not stop painting this masterpiece.
Mars crater officially named Langtang to honour quake-ravaged region

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved a proposal to name a Martian crater as Langtang in an honour to the region ravaged by a devastating earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015.
Ministry bans HP Gas from importing LPG

The Ministry of Supply has decided to instruct Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) to ban Himalayan Petrochemicalsbottler of HP Gasfrom importing Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) following an incident of explosion of the companys cooking gas cylinder, in which three people were killed.
Nepal-China secy talks next week

Nepal and China are set to hold foreign secretary level talks in Kathmandu on June 22.
Nepal Police restructuring: Officials express strong concerns over provisions

The Nepal Police has voiced strong reservation over transfer and promotion provisions in the proposed organisational restructuring of the security agency under the federal set-up.
NHRC instructs Nepal Police to probe gang-rape of mute woman and report

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No discussion on House rules as NC seeks 4 days

The Legislature-Parliament on Wednesday did not discuss the parliamentary regulations after the Nepali Congress sought four days to resolve the dispute relating to the size of the Parliamentary Hearing Special Committee (PHSC). Discussion on parliamentary regulations was, however, earlier incorporated in the schedule.
Orlando alligator: Body of boy seized by alligator found

Police searching for a young boy seized by an alligator at Walt Disney World in Florida have recovered a body.
Over 700 war crimes reported in Banke

As the deadline draws near, the number of complaints on war-era cases has increased, with the Local Peace Committee registering over a dozen cases every day. The committee has registered more than 700 cases over the past two months.
PM presses for propagating Buddha's teachings

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has urged the Lumbini Buddhist University (LBU) to disseminate the teachings of Lord Buddha in such a manner that it is delivered at the doorstep of each and every public.
Pokhara-Uttar Pradesh bus service from July

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Spanish team working to generate electricity from wind in Mustang

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Thai police raid influential Dhammakaya temple over corruption claim

Police in Thailand are raiding an influential temple to arrest its abbot, who is wanted on corruption charges.
WB says Nepal could face slowdown in remittances

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Four of the five Members of parliament who were involved in a fatal accident yesterday are out of Danger.

Last evening the group of legislators from West Nile region was involved in an accident at Namasuba along Entebbe road as they travelled back to Kampala from State House Entebbe.

The legislators are Adjumani Woman MP Jessica Ababiku, Isaac Etuka for Upper MadiOkollo County, TomAza for Moyo West, Yumbe Woman MP ZaitunDriwaru and the Arua District NRM Chairman

The Director for communications at Parliament Chris Obore says the four are doing well apart from Jessica Ababiku who sustained serious injuries.
The top diplomat of Bulgaria has reaffirmed his country's support for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, vowing to fully implement the latest sanctions slapped on North Korea following its nuclear and long-range missile tests, the foreign ministry here said Thursday.



South Korea's Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and his Bulgarian counterpart, Daniel Mitov, held talks in Sofia on Wednesday (local time) on an array of issues.



During the meeting, Mitov underlined the country's continued support for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and condemned Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests earlier this year. He promised to "thoroughly" implement not just the U.N. Security Council resolution but also its own sanctions against the reclusive country, the ministry said in a press release.



The pledge came in response to Yun's explanation of the international community's recent stepped-up efforts to punish the North for its fourth nuclear test in January followed by a long-range missile test in February.



He highly praised Bulgaria for supporting Seoul's stance and asked it to carry out sanctions on the communist country, the ministry said.



Earlier this week, Yun held a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, where both also agreed to cooperate on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.



Yun's visit to Bulgaria is the first of its kind by a South Korean foreign minister since both countries established diplomatic ties in 1990. In May last year, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev agreed to cooperate in economics and many other areas.



In a follow-up move, Yun and Mitov concurred on the need to expand cooperation in areas ranging from energy, infrastructure, military and farming to the environment. South Korea's top diplomat, in particular, called for Bulgaria's continued support for Korean companies doing business there going forward, the ministry said.



The two also exchanged views on the latest situations in Northeast Asia and Europe, while sharing perspectives on such international issues as refugees and terrorism. They agreed to increase cooperation through regional platforms such as the Asia-Europe Meeting, according to the ministry. (Yonhap)




ANGOLA  The YMCA of Steuben County began with Chuck and Tusie Sheets and a handful of other area benefactors.

The Sheets remain active at the Y, and this year are serving as honorary chairs of the nonprofit organizations capital campaign. CEO Krista Miller said their story shows the passion that went into creating a YMCA in Steuben County, which carries on today with the board of directors, trustees, staff, members and community.

Chuck Sheets remembers the first meeting on Nov. 30, 1994, with Chuck Nedele and John Pichon.

The real start came with John Pichon, said Sheets. Pichon, who now lives in Fort Wayne, was an Orland area native who enjoyed sports. He and the late Earl Ford McNaughton, owner of the First National Bank of Fremont, had been discussing how to do something for Steuben County, and McNaughton suggested calling Chuck Sheets.

The team grew to include Sheets, Pichon, Mike Heroy, Oren Skinner and Nedele, who tapped the Cole Foundation for financial backing for a feasibility study.

We had many meetings in the community, said Sheets, remembering well attended gatherings at Angola High School. One of the main supporters of the effort was the Wavemakers swim team, which had been using the pool at Tri-State University.

Angola had never had a Y. We had no facilities like that, said Sheets, where the kids could go and be off the streets and do things.

The first board of directors included Dr. Joe Weaver and Jim Ingledue. Ingledue, who runs a construction company, was a contractor plus a life saver, said Sheets. Ingledue built the Y, and let the fledgling organizations debt hang in the balance for more than a decade while the organization continued to raise funds.

Due to his generous contributions, the Y was named after Dan Breeden for a number of years. It was a donation by Breeden, a Fremont factory then called Rittal, which allowed the Y to become debt-free when the building was sold to Koester Metals.

The Trine family was a notable donor in getting the Y off the ground. First Federal Savings Bank of Angola and its president George Gilbert also did a lot to help the Y.

All the people we surrounded ourselves with, said Sheets, all had a mission in mind for us.

During the early years, the Y was stationed at Country Fair Shopping Center, in a suite supplied by the shopping centers owner  Sheets.

The Y was built at 500 E. Harcourt Road, on 14 acres owned and donated by Sheets. He purchased the plot, formerly the Sutton family farm, in the mid-1990s, adding to a significant swath of northern Angola that he owned and developed. He retained several acres in front of the Y, which he and Tusie recently gifted to the YMCA to expand its offerings to the community. Miller said planning for future uses of the space will be done with input from members and the community.

From the beginning, Sheets personally kept the area around the Y neatly mowed, along with some other municipal property that he regularly mows that includes the RISE Inc. grounds. He enjoys the work, he said, and he and Tusie said they are happy to have added to the Y now that it is on sound financial footing.

There were times the Y struggled to make ends meet. The founding fathers continued to step in where needed, sometimes covering the paychecks of employees when there was no money in the Ys checking account.

Members of the trustees laugh about those calls, and remember making quips like Whos turn is it this week? But all of them hung in there with the Y, which is now solvent and 4,100 members strong.

Over the years, it was used basically as a gym and swim, noted Miller. The mission of the Y has expanded into health issues.

The YMCA continues to work to meet the needs of the community. Sheets mentioned Cameron hospital as a major partner over the years, notably cooperating with the Y to operate a day care at the YMCA that was closed in 2010.

During those years, Jeff Peters served as CEO and Roy Meyer was president of the board. The pair put us back on a financial basis where we were able to keep going, said Sheets.

The first director was Craig Adolph and there have been a series of directors that each lent their hand in making the Y what it is.

All the employees that weve had have been just super, said Sheets, adding that the board and the staff are now at their pinnacle, with Miller at the helm, Mark Cowen as chief volunteer officer, assistant chief volunteer officer Joe Hysong and past president Phil Roe. An annual meeting will be held to elect board members on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. at the Y. Those interested can read more about the event on the Ys website at ymcasteuben.org; registration is required.
ANGOLA  A Texas couple was killed in a Tuesday wreck on Interstate 69, south of the Pokagon State Park exit, the Steuben County Sheriffs Office reported in a news release.

The couple died of blunt force trauma, Steuben County Coroner Bill Harter ruled.

At about 5:10 p.m. Steuben County communications received a call of a crash on I-69 near the 352 mile marker in the southbound lane.

When emergency personnel arrived they found a 2010 Ford F250 along with a 30-foot camper travel trailer rolled in the median. Emergency personnel also located Jimmy D. Hord, 71, Wimberley, Texas, lying on the ground in front of the vehicle dead and Sherry B. Hord, 67, in the passenger seat, also dead.

Witnesses told police the vehicle was traveling south on I-69 around a curve when the trailer started to sway back and forth in the lane. It appeared that Jimmy Hord over corrected, causing the trailer and truck to slide sideways in the road and then roll into the median.

Jimmy did not appear to be wearing a seatbelt and was ejected from the vehicle. Sherry was wearing a seatbelt and was pinned in the vehicle. Both were pronounced dead at the scene by Harter. Jimmy had head and chest injuries and Sherry had a head injury.

The highways southbound lanes were closed for 2.5 hours while the crash was being investigated and northbound was closed for 45 minutes.

The crash remains under investigation by the Steuben County Sheriffs Office. Alcohol is not believed to be a factor.

Assisting were the Angola Police Department, Indiana State Police, Fremont Police, Steuben County Emergency Medical Service, Angola Fire Department and Indiana Department of Transportation.
Fears over drug issues in the Coulee Region led to a discussion among Bangor village leaders last month over drug education and prevention in the schools.

At the meeting, Bangor Village President Gary Althoff met with police chief Scott Alo and Bangor Superintendent Dave Laehn to discuss what is being done to keep kids off drugs.

You dont have to read the paper or watch the news much to know there are drug problems, Althoff said.

He said he decided to hold the meeting to determine what is being done in the community to help educate kids and to find out if there are any areas for improvement.

As a result of the meeting, Laehn said he would urge the districts teachers to take advantage of the Bangor Police Department as a resource.

Althoff had suggested integrating a curriculum that would focus on drug education and prevention in an effort to scare kids away from drugs.

Laehn, however, said that adding a course on the problem wouldnt be possible because the districts curriculum is already jam packed.

He was open to taking advantage of the police departments resources to help augment existing classes.

He said that drug education is already a part of the curriculum for students of all ages.

Again, Alo suggested the school district take advantage of the police department.

Why dont we look at certain classes that would focus on social issues? he said.

He said up until recently, he had helped teach various units in classes such as criminalistics.

Next year, I really see it being reincorporated,  Alo said. Lets do it again.

He said there are so many variables that lead to drug use that have to be taken into consideration, including living conditions, poverty and bullying.

Drug prevention and education starts in elementary school through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program.

All fifth grade students take part in the D.A.R.E program, which serves as the first step toward prevention.

Laehn said in middle school and high school, drug education continues in students health education courses.

He said in addition to drug and alcohol awareness in class, the school hosts guest speakers throughout the school year.

Id like to think our school is drug free, but Im not naive enough to believe that, Laehn said.

He said the school district has drug dogs come in occasionally during the school year, and one student was caught with marijuana during the past school year.

He said he would be happy to have the police department in the schools more, and officers are welcome to walk the halls any time.

Alo was clear that Bangor doesnt have a drug problem. He said a drug problem would imply a greater set of social issues.

He said what Bangor does have is drug issues, ones the police department has been working tirelessly to quash.

We have drug locations that have been squashed out by law enforcement, he said.

He said so far this year, Bangor has had between four and five drug busts of various sizes.

Marijuana is one thing, but when you start seeing heroin and meth that really raises an eyebrow, he said, adding that harder drugs are unusual for Bangor.

Althoff said he was impressed by the response he received from both Alo and Laehn.

I was very happy and very impressed with Dave and Scott, he said.

He said if they are able to stop one more kid from becoming addicted to drugs, it will be worth it.
Would-be patrons of Old Country Buffet in Onalaska found the doors locked Tuesday, with most voicing surprise as the chains closure of nearly 100 restaurants this year hit home.

Im shocked, Joan Nelson of La Crosse said when she saw the CLOSED sign on the front door shortly after 12:30 p.m.

Friends were coming here for a birthday party, and I was going to meet them, Nelson said, scanning the lot for any signs of the other part-goers, who were driving about 40 miles from Ferryville for the 1 p.m. celebration.

Nelson said she had enjoyed Old Country because she could choose what she wanted. Byron Richason, also of La Crosse, who was with Nelson, said he had relished the variety.

Nelson and Richason were not alone in being left with hunger pangs.

Nearly 20 would-be customers dropped by within a 15-minute period during the lunch hour, finding all the lights on but nobody home, the door locked and the sign posted. The 10,850-square-foot restaurant, known for its variety of offerings at several self-serve stations, opened at 9417 Hwy. 16 in 1996.

In full, the sign said: To our valued guests, this location is now CLOSED. Thank you for your business and we hope to serve you at another location very soon. Please visit oldcountrybuffet.com to find your nearest location.

The website lists Eau Claire, at 63.29 miles, as the closest, with Greenfield, Wis., at 206.5 miles, as the only other one in Wisconsin. The closest in Minnesota is in the Twin Cities suburb of Burnsville, 147 miles away.

Thats a shame, said an older man who asked not to be named as he walked away from the Onalaska buffet. Ive been coming here since 97. Its a nice place to eat and take what you want.

It could not be determined whether workers had much more notice than the customers, although they probably didnt, if the parent company followed the pattern it set in closing nearly 100 of the all-you-can-eat restaurants nationwide this year.

The company is getting pushback, as four former employees of an Illinois Old Country recently sued Food Management Partners, alleging violation of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act because it did not give workers 60 days notice. Texas-based Food Management acquired Old Countrys South Carolina-based parent company of Ovation Brands last year.

The Onalaska restaurants vendor door, posted with a sign declaring that it was closed and not accepting deliveries, was unlocked, and a few workers appeared to be removing and/or dismantling kitchen equipment and loading it onto a truck.

Asked the restaurants status, a worker said he would summon someone to talk, and a woman came into the kitchen.

Asked whether the restaurant had closed, she said, Closed  out of business. Asked for comment about why, she snapped, That was my comment: Closed  out of business.

Parent company officials could not be reached for comment.

The Onalaska facility joined the list of eight Old Country closings in the Twin Cities area, one in Green Bay and one each in Rochester, Minn., and St. Cloud, Minn., this year.

Old Country, which was founded in Minnesota in 1983 and was based in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan until 2012, had shuttered more than 400 buffets during the past eight years before the wave of closings began in February.

Buffets in general  and Buffets LLC in particular, with three Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings under its belt  have fallen on hard times in recent years. Restructuring experts jokingly refer to the relatively rare record of three Chapter 11 filings as Chapter 33.

Industry observers cite changes in eating habits are one of the main reasons buffet businesses have faltered. The trend toward fresh, healthier fare and smaller portions rather than exercises in gorging also has siphoned off buffet fans, analysts say.

Other brands in the Old Country chain are Country Buffet, HomeTown Buffet, Ryans, Ryans Family Steakhouse, Grannys, Tahoe Joes, Tahoe Joes Famous Steakhouse, Soup N Salad Unlimited and Roadhouse Grill, among others.
Just about every Wisconsin town has a summer celebration of some kind and Rockland  the village of roughly 600 just east of Bangor  is no exception. Still, Rocklands annual Park Progress Day tends to draw much more of a crowd than might be expected for such a small community.

This years celebration is Saturday, June 18. The event kicks off at Gaylord Park with a mens one-pitch softball tournament at 9 a.m. and, as always, ends with a surprisingly lengthy display of fireworks beginning around 10 p.m.

New this year is the first annual ALS Walk. Its a 5-kilometer walk that begins at 10 a.m at Gaylord Park and will go out on the bike trail before ending back at the park. It was begun by Shari Axelsen, librarian at the Bangor Public Library, in memory of her brother, Scott Herman. He passed away in the fall of 2013.

Onalaska used to do an ALS walk for their Legion Days, so when they stopped doing that, my mom and I decided to pick it up, Axelsen said. So far, weve got 70 people lined up with others likely to sign up that morning. Im real happy with the numbers so far.

Axelsen added that while any donation is welcome, those donating $25 or more will get a free T-shirt.

Also, for anyone who wants to stick around afterward, well be marching in the parade, she said. Were trying to get as much exposure as we can.

As always, the parade begins at noon and ends up at Gaylord Park. Once everyone reaches the park, there will be a 1 p.m. dedication ceremony at the Veterans Memorial at the park.

There were three fallen soldiers originally from Rockland and well be installing a plaque with their names on it, said Rockland Village Clerk Stephanie Rowell.

Food and beverages will be available all day on the grounds and the fare will include pork chip sandwiches grilled on site by the local Lions Club. Other activities planned include a belly dancing demonstration at 1:30 p.m., bingo from 2 to 4 p.m., and kickball at 4 p.m.

For the younger kids, face painting will be available from 1 to 3 p.m. and there will also be a penny pile from 3 to 4 p.m. Rowell explained that, while there wont be any raffles this year, there will be plenty of pick-a-prize baskets with prizes offered by local businesses.

All the money we raise goes to the park association for maintenance and improvements to the parks, Rowell said.

Live music will be provided from 6 p.m. until the fireworks start by Johnny O. According to Rowell, the fireworks have always been provided by the Beron family.

Its probably our biggest draw, Rowell said. Its a really good show  especially for a town our size.
Is Wisconsins economy stumbling, crawling or charging ahead? Crawling along. Its certainly trailing Minnesota as numerous articles have shown. But here is the important thing: Our economy could be far better than it is.

Imagine if we had taken the $810 million in federal money for high-speed rail. Imagine as many as 10,000 more jobs. The angriest man I have met in the last 10 years was a Republican businessman who was going to put a lot of people to work with that money. Some thought it was dirty money, but remember it was our tax dollars that instead went to California.

Gov. Scott Walker also rejected federal dollars (recycled Wisconsin tax dollars) to expand the growth of high-speed internet. The expansion would have created jobs for technicians installing it, and it would have expanded the capacity of local small businesses.

Repeatedly, our governor also rejected millions of dollars in Medicaid expansion funds. This federal money would have hired thousands of medical employees and lightened the load of our medical system. And each of those employees would have created more jobs as they spent their wages. As John Greenleaf Whittier said, For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.

Thomas Krajewski,

Onalaska
When the smoke clears at the Holmen Rotary and the La Crosse Valley View Rotary clubs Rock n Ribs Barbecue contest on Saturday, there will be backyard chefs who can claim nationally sanctioned bragging rights. This years second annual competition, in conjunction with Celebrate Onalaska, will be conducted under Kansas City Barbeque Society rules.

Being a KCBS-sanctioned event, to be held in Onalaskas Van Riper Park, means a panel of certified judges will determine placings. A total of $4,500 in prizes will be awarded in the chicken and pork ribs categories, with the grand champion winner receiving $1,000 and the reserve champion winner $500.

Competitors also can compete for prizes in two non-sanctioned categories  mystery ingredient and a knuckle-sucking sauce.

The clubs also are sponsoring a pulled pork competition held as a fundraiser for area charitable organizations. Each team representing a nonprofit organization supplies at least one full roaster of pulled pork cooked by the organizations team or supplied by a local business or a chef theyve recruited.

On the day of the event, visitors can buy a ticket for $10 that allows them to go to all nonprofit organizations booths between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. and sample the pulled pork offerings, voting with for their favorites with monetary contributions. The Peoples Choice Award goes to the entry with the most donations.

VIP (Very Important Pig) teams also will vie for a Peoples Choice Award for best ribs for VIP ticket holders. Visitors picking up a $50 VIP ticket will be able to visit 12 barbecue teams and vote for the Peoples Choice in ribs and sauce. Theyll also get to sample the pulled pork.

VIP tickets can be purchased at JRM CPAs at 2511 E. Main St., #101, Onalaska; Optical Fashions at 2104 Hwy. 16, La Crosse; and Fleis Insurance at 1824 E. Main St., Onalaska.

More information about the barbecue competition can be found at www.rotaryrocknribs.com.
Two roadways will be turned back to Hokah Township.

Houston County Engineer Brian Pogodzinski and Surveyor Richard Walter appeared before the Houston County Board of Commissioners at its June 7 meeting with a recommendation to turn back Kreibach and Peterson drives to Hokah Township. The move comes after extensive meetings with the township.

Kreibach Drive used to be part of CTH 7, Pogodzinski said.

Hokah Township would like to have the county remove an old culvert thats been buried, he said.

Although plugged, the township would like the culvert removed, the road crack-filled and the seal coated. Its currently a paved road.

Peterson Drive is gravel, Pogodzinski said, with a few homes along it. The township would like gravel added it to, then wait to see how it holds up until the spring. Eventually, the road would be seal-coated. He said the statutory obligations have been met giving the county authority to turn the roads back to Hokah Township, which means both roads meet county standards (comparing them to other like roadways), but they dont necessarily meet the townships standards. Pogodzinski estimated 90 percent of Hokah Townships roads are sealcoated.

Thats why the township would like to have these roadways improved to that same point, he said.

The cost to update Kreibach Drive will be $8,000. Peterson Drive is estimated to cost at least $20,000 to $30,000.

The turn back would include vacating part of Peterson Drive that used to be part of CTH 18, which was abandoned a long time ago, but never officially turned back to its landowners.

Pogodzinski estimated $1,200 each winter is paid to Hokah Township to plow the road for them, and Peterson Drive is likely a similar cost.

No one is going to argue that these should be county roadways, he said. When you look at them, theyre both dead-end roadways. They should be township roadways.

The county doesnt get any state aid for maintaining the roadways, Pogodzinski said, but Hokah Township could if they were to take them over.

It just seems to me, said Commissioner Steve Schuldt, you know, if were going to turn it back, it should be in a decent state of repair.

Commissioner Teresa Walter said Hokah Township was very willing to work with the county to see both roads turned back, as well as negotiating what should be done to repair them, and she said agreed with Schuldt.

County attorney Sam Jandt told the board that, if they choose to turn back the roadways, the county is still obliged to maintain the roads for a two-year period. If a road is in good repair, the two-year timeframe starts from when the vote is taken. If, however, the plans are to seal-coat a road, the two years dont start until that sealcoating is complete, even if that takes a year or more to complete.

Thats when your two-year period starts, Jandt said.

Pogodzinski said any improvements to the roads would need to be as soon as possible, and on that note, Walter agreed. She motioned to turn both roads back to Hokah Township and proceed with bringing them up to the agreed standards of their roads. For Kreibach, that would mean taking out the culvert and resealing it, and for Peterson, it would mean graveling it for one year, or possibly two.

We agreed to gravel it for a year, Walter said, and then reassess it next year.

Pogodzinski reminded her that the township would like Peterson seal-coated within two years. Walter amended her motion to include graveling Peterson Drive for up to two years, but leave it at that.

Schuldt agreed, and Commissioner Justin Zmyewski did too, and he seconded Walters motion.

The vote was unanimous, and it also included vacating the older portion of Peterson Drive.

In other news

Pogodzinski, Schuldt and Zmyewski will continue discussions as a subcommittee on the issue and specifications of a new county maintenance shop. Walter asked if it would be possible to get more land near the current shop site in Caledonia. Schuldt said the discussions are still open, but the family who owns land, the Schultes, appear to him to have been sabotaged.

My feeling is that the family was basically inundated with, Dont do it, Schuldt said. It was sabotage, so to speak.

He found landowner John Schultes reasoning scripted, he said, and Schuldt felt the family had been pressured not to make a land exchange with the county.

Meetings on a possible expansion, as well as a land exchange, could continue, Pogodzinski said, but the board needs to figure out its ultimate goal for the both the shop and the site.

Zmyewski said it was important that predominant members of the community buy into whatever the board plans to do.

Those are the people that we to convince, Zmyewski said.

The board unanimously approved two conditional-use permits, one for Travis and Naaren Kingsley and another for Margaret Erkel-Thorson, both of Sheldon Township, to build existing dwellings on less than 40 acres in an agricultural district. In Erkel-Thorsons matter, the parcel would be created by a parcel split in an agricultural district.

The board also approved 14 zoning permits which were issued.

Jandt said he filed in small claims court for a judgment on an EDA loan made to Lolas LLC for a restaurant in Houston. He was able to receive a judgment in the amount of $15,065 out of a total owed of approximately $18,000. Going through small claims court, Jandt said, was less expensive than going to district court.

Public health director Mary Marchel was named temporary interim human services director until June 26, as current human services director Linda Bahr is on a requested leave until that time. Marchel will earn $45.61 per hour, effective immediately, until the temporary status ends. The vote was unanimous.

The board also unanimously approved a $50 monthly mobile computing device stipend for attorney Jandt.

The personnel policy regarding collecting data on mobile devices by county workers was also unanimously approved. The policy amendment included data collection practices such as the requirement of downloading all data onto county-owned equipment, and removed from employees personal devices, within 48 hours.
Dont flush your Swiffer disposable mop heads down the toilet.

That was the word at the Hokah City Councils June 7 meeting. Chris Oliver, with the citys maintenance department, gave an update on the citys annual sanitary and sewer cleaning by the company RCT. They jetted 5,113 feet of sanitary sewer and root sawed 1,729 feet, as well as videoed 4,913 feet. The total cost amounted to $10,697. While RCT charges less than other companies the city has used in the past, Oliver said, the total bill looks higher because of all they were asked to do.

The reason why its twice the cost is I had him televise it, Oliver said. I like to do the whole town once through so we know where our trouble spots are and what weve got to look for.

He said one-fifth of the town is done every year. RCT, he said, has been asked to look at each section annually to better understand the sewer system.

So the next four years after this year, well televise everything, he said.

They even found a manhole no one knew existed, Oliver said.

Minnesota Pump Works came back with quotes for needed lift station pumps.

I would like to buy a brand new one for right now, Oliver said, and then that way, well have another one on hand, and then down the road we can either rebuild or replace the impeller and the wearing on the other one.

Oliver said two pumps need to be rebuilt; one of them is only running at 40 Hz, and it should be at 60 Hz. He said the impellers are worn back and theres not cutting to them. In part, its blamed on Swiffer disposable mop heads, which are being flushed down toilets.

Were having to pull the pumps about once a week to unclog them, he said.

While the packaging on the Swiffers say its flushable, he said, the mop heads dont break down  inside, theyre causing an enormous amount of wear on the citys pumps. The council had been thinking about including a note on residents water bills asking them not to flush the mop heads down into the system.

Well, they are flushable, said resident Barb Bissen, who was in the audience. Theyre just not impeller-able.

Theyre working with Congress right now to get that changed, Oliver said. Its not just us. Its wreaking havoc everywhere.

The cost for the new ABS pump is $6,388.

Oliver said parts can be bought for the pumps that need repair, and its possible the maintenance department could do the repairs themselves.

The council approved the cost of the new pump, as well as the cost of the parts for the existing pumps that need repair or rebuilding.

In other news

City administrator Rod Blank said he will ask Jennifer Johnson, of Nelson & Associates, the accounting firm who does the citys audit, to attend a future council meeting, likely next month, to present the annual audit and answer any questions, as well as to share her recommendations. Johnson, he added, had completed the in-office portion of the audit; it will likely be available in a weeks time.

Oliver said he talked with Scott Construction about chip sealing the south end of Fifth Street, as was previously reported. The cost totaled $1,500, and Oliver said he asked them to include the work to their list of work in Hokah.

Resident Chris Peterson sent a letter asking the city to look at the bridge, on city property, owned by the Sno-Gophers snowmobile club. The bridge has a deteriorating rubber tracks in the center of the bridge, Blank said by way of summarizing Petersons letter, and theyre not only a hazard, but unsightly.

The bridge was installed via a grant from the Sno-Gophers through FEMA, Blank said, and he thinks its mostly owned by the club. But because its on city property, it should be looked at.

The city probably could be liable for anything, Blank said.

He suggested having Oliver inspect the bridge and come back to the council with a recommendation, which would likely include asking the Sno-Gophers to assume the responsibility of taking care of it, along with another bridge they own within the city.
HOKAH, Minn.  Wm. Kenneth Kenny Eglinton, 77, of Hokah, went to be with his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, June 11, 2016.

He was a teacher, farmer, and construction worker at different points in his life.

Ken was born Nov. 2, 1938, in La Crosse. He grew up on a dairy farm on Mound Prairie, between Hokah, and Houston, and graduated from Houston High School, in 1956. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in Aug. of 1956, serving two years of active duty, and the rest of his enlistment as a member of the La Crosse Naval Reserves. While on active duty, he served as a boiler tender on a destroyer, the U.S.S. Stribling. Ken participated in two cruises to the Mediterranean, as a part of the 6th Fleet. Upon his discharge from active duty, he began attending classes at Winona State College, Winona, Minn., and graduated in June of 1966. He was always grateful to Mathy Construction Co., for giving him a job each summer that provided the money that he needed to complete his college education.

Ken married Sally Schubert, June 13, 1964. They had two children, Shannon (Robert) Krause, of Mukwonago, Wis., and Casey (Keri) Eglinton, of Hokah. Ken and Sally were also blessed to have four grandchildren, Emma, Beckett, McKenna, and Kenzi.

Ken taught Industrial Arts at Onalaska High School for fifteen years while he and Sally farmed a small farm North of Holmen, Wis. In 1978, they bought a 280 acre farm on the ridge above Brownsville, Minn., and in 1980, Ken began teaching at Caledonia High School. He taught shop there until his retirement in 2001. His teaching career had spanned 36 years.

Ken was a member of Zion Evangelical Church, Brownsville, a lifetime member of LeRoy D. Holzwarth VFW Post #6801, Brownsville, past member of Houston Co. Pork Producers, past member of Houston Co. Cattlemans Assoc., and also past member of Teamsters Union, and Minnesota Operating Engineers.

Memorial services will be held 10:30 a.m. Friday, June 17, 2016, at Zion Evangelical Church, Brownsville. Pastor Jason Brannan will officiate. Burial will follow in Brownsville Veterans Cemetery, with military honors by Brownsville VFW Post #6801. A visitation will be 4 to 8 pm. Thursday, and 9:30 a.m. until the time of service, Friday, both at the church.

Memorials may be given to American Diabetes Assoc., American Heart Assoc., Zion Evangelical Church, or a charity of your choice.

Special note to Kens former shop students, The Old Shop Teachers retirement fund has been officially closed.

Jandt-Fredrickson Funeral Home and Crematory, Caledonia Chapel, is in charge of arrangements.

Online condolences may be sent at www.jandtfredrickson.com.
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U.S. Rep. Ron Kind has issued a plan to boost Wisconsin's flagging dairy industry that highlights his stances on two highly charged issues: immigration policy and global trade.

The plan calls for opening international markets to Wisconsin dairy products and overhauling the U.S. immigration system. It also calls for boosting dairy research, streamlining federal dairy programs and encouraging more young people to become dairy farmers.

Kind, D-La Crosse, represents Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District in the state's western and central regions, where the dairy industry is an economic pillar. A release from his office announcing the plan says it comes in response to problems plaguing the industry, including low milk prices and rising input costs.

The 10-term Kind is a longstanding supporter of creating a path to legal status for those living in the U.S. illegally. That position is shared by most of Kind's fellow Democrats but not by all Republicans, some of whom -- such as the party's presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump -- have made their fierce opposition to it a signature issue.

An estimate provided by Kind's office said more than 40 percent of Wisconsin dairy labor is provided by immigrants. It does not say what share of those immigrants are living in the U.S. illegally.

"The loss of immigrant labor would have a devastating impact on the industry, creating job loss beyond the dairy farm that would harm local communities," a summary of Kind's plan reads.

Broadening global trade for Wisconsin dairy farmers also is part of Kind's plan. It says "the United States needs to be working to open new markets for our dairy farmers to sell their products."

Kind has been a staunch supporter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a proposed global trade deal between the U.S. and other Pacific Rim nations. Although it was crafted by President Barack Obama's administration, the partnership is deeply contentious among Democrats. Kind's support for the measure is being touted by his Democratic opponent in the Aug. 9 primary election.

Kind spokeswoman Amanda Sherman noted the plan does not specifically reference TPP.

"We're generally referring to a number of different ways we could expand access to more markets, including reducing barriers like the Indian dairy import ban and Canadian pricing changes," Sherman wrote.

The summary notes that, while many federal programs exist to aid dairy farmers,"they frequently do not reach the right audience and are inefficient." It calls for expanding loan programs for small farmers, increasing access to nutrient and energy management programs and reducing fees and other "bureaucratic excesses" connected with the programs.
MADISON  After years of complaints about tainted drinking water and weed-choked waterways, proposals for tighter state restrictions on industrial-scale dairy operations are in the works, the Department of Natural Resources disclosed in a letter appended to a 124-page audit report that was released earlier this month.

But clean-water advocates werent celebrating. They were still digesting the audit findings, which raised new doubts about Wisconsins ability to enforce laws protecting its drinking water, lakes and streams from the manure the dairy industry generates.

One leading lawmaker is worried that without adequate law enforcement, the state could slide back toward the polluted conditions that existed before enactment of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972, and hes not sure the Legislature is prepared to make needed changes.

State Sen. Robert Cowles, who initiated the audit in his role as co-chairman of the Legislatures audit committee, wants laws changed so more of the fee revenue the DNR collects from polluters stays with the department to pay for more enforcement staff.

The Green Bay Republican said Wisconsin residents have a right to be upset about the report compiled by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau that detailed shortcomings in the DNRs enforcement of laws limiting water pollution.

My constituents who saw the story wondered, What the heck is going on? Cowles said. The people of this state believe in water quality. We brag about our lakes and rivers and having great places to fish in and swim in.

The audit provided the clearest picture to date of deficiencies raised previously by conservation advocates and the federal government about DNR environmental enforcement, inspections and the writing of permits aimed at limiting pollution from sewage treatment plants, large farms and private manufacturers.

Inadequate staffing and heavy turnover appeared to contribute to the problem, auditors said.

Cowles said more money for staff is needed and it could come from fee revenue. But its far from clear that Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans who have controlled the Legislature since 2011 will agree.

Agency full-time staffing has been in a general decline since at least the 1990s under both parties. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle oversaw reductions in full-time staff in water pollution regulation programs after the 2008 recession hit. Staffing levels increased in 2011 when Walker and his fellow Republicans took control of state government, but two years later cuts resumed.

DNR leaders said they are currently reorganizing in response to elected officials who want the department to focus on an unspecified core mission.

The DNR collects $5 million to $7 million annually in fees from concentrated animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs, municipal sewer plants and private industry, but it typically keeps less than $90,000, with the rest going to the states general fund.

Cowles said lawmakers are giving their attention to fall elections, and he hasnt been in contact with the Legislatures top leaders about the audit. He said he would like the Legislature to provide the DNR with more enforcement funding as soon as possible, but he isnt confident.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, hasnt read the audit and wasnt available for comment, his spokeswoman last week. A spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, didnt respond to emails.

Any specifics related to the DNRs budget will be presented in the governors budget proposal next year, said Walker spokesman Tom Evenson.

DNR spokesman Jim Dick said that after the audit was completed, department employees were able to find documents indicating the agencys performance in assuring that permit holders were in compliance with regulations may not have been as poor as it appeared in the audit report.

Auditors found no documentation that the DNR took enforcement action for months or even years in five incidents in which monitoring wells showed CAFOs were contaminating groundwater with substances harmful to human health.

Auditors found violations were issued to private industry and sewage treatment plants in just 33 of 558 instances serious enough for such citations under DNR policies over the last 10 years. Thats a paltry 5.9 percent.

Municipal and industrial dischargers submit monthly electronic monitoring reports that DNR uses to identify violations, but auditors said when it came to CAFOs, problems with DNR record-keeping made it impossible to determine how often violations led to enforcement action.

CAFOs are expected to notify the DNR if they spill manure or apply it to fields in a way that endangers groundwater or threatens to run off into streams and lakes where it can cause beach closings and unnatural growths of weeds and algae. Violations also can be discovered through citizen complaints and DNR inspections.

The DNR has increased the number of CAFO inspections it conducts, but often their value was questionable because they were performed far in advance of  or in some cases after  a permit was renewed, auditors said.

And even after average annual inspection numbers peaked from 2010 to 2014, fewer than half of the large livestock feeding operations were being inspected twice during each five-year permit term, the goal the state set for itself.

In a letter responding to the audit findings, DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp said the department is reducing that goal to once every five years to mirror the less stringent national standard recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The change may mean fewer opportunities for the department to have contact with permit holders and, when there are problems, learn about them early enough to informally obtain compliance with regulations without formal enforcement action, Dick said.

A law firm that has challenged the DNR said low enforcement standards were an open invitation to polluted water.

Safe water is too important to bet on industries maintaining compliance even when its well-known that the responsible regulatory agency is inspecting less, enforcing less and charging fewer fines when violations do come to light, said Tressie Kamp of Midwest Environmental Advocates. Particularly for industries like CAFOs where the permitting system is set up for self-regulation and self-reporting, add decreased state monitoring on top of that and it becomes clear that were just not doing enough to protect our states water resources.

Stepp also disclosed a series of changes the DNR has begun aimed at better protecting the aquifer that supplies drinking water to many people in places such as Kewaunee County, where a shallow layer of topsoil and porous bedrock can allow manure to taint groundwater.

Pollutants associated with animal waste have been found in 30 percent of wells tested in the county, which has a high concentration of CAFOs. Last summer, after citizens groups and conservationists complained to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the DNR formed a series of work groups  made up of farmers, other residents, conservation advocates and government officials  to study the problems.

The DNR has adopted a recommendation to set tighter restrictions on spreading of manure in places like Kewaunee County, Stepp said in the letter. Farm operators have been asked to follow the restrictions voluntarily while the department begins its rule-making process, she said. The process can take months or years, depending upon several factors, including how long the governor and lawmakers take to review the changes.

The department hasnt decided if it will use emergency rule-making authority to speed up the process, Dick said.

Acting on other work group recommendations, the DNR has already begun to perform more audits of manure-spreading practices, has reallocated staff to fill CAFO program vacancies and formed internal teams to consider changes in the way the department responds when new contamination of drinking water is discovered, Stepp said.

Several recommendations from the Legislative Audit Bureau regarding CAFO enforcement noted DNR employees didnt have time to adequately review annual reports submitted by CAFOs or plans describing how they will spread manure without polluting.

Stepp said in the letter the equivalent of 10.5 full-time employees in regional offices handle permitting and compliance duties that auditors said needed improvement. Currently, there are 31 CAFO permits for each staff member. The ratio needs to be reduced to 20-to-1 for required work to be accomplished, Stepp said. She didnt include an estimated cost.
A man was arrested early Thursday in Fillmore County after attempting to steal a car, then driving into a police cruiser during a brief pursuit, according to the Fillmore County Sheriff's Office.

The office received a theft report about 10:40 p.m. and arranged to have the suspect bring the property to the office. But later that night, two people arrived at the office empty-handed and told deputies that a third person, Dylan Bathke, 19, of Preston, Minn., refused to return the property, threatened them with a gun, and then jumped out of the vehicle they were traveling in, according to the office.

Sheriff's deputies, along with assistance from the Preston and Chatfield police departments and a Houston county police dog, searched the area unsuccessfully. At 12:30 a.m. Thursday, Bathke was reported to have been found near the area of the theft, and deputies and officers responded and set up a perimeter.

Just before 1 a.m. an officer observed Bathke driving away with no lights on in what was later reported to be a stolen pickup, the office said. He drove south of Preston on Hwy. 52, and at one point rammed a Preston Police Department cruiser, then drove off the highway near County Road 16.

Bathke was taken into custody and no officers nor Bathke were injured during the pursuit, the office said.

Charges of second-degree assault, fourth-degree assault of a police officer, theft of a motor vehicle, fleeing a police officer in a motor vehicle, reckless driving, and drunken driving have been referred to the Fillmore County Sheriff's Office.
Malia Obamas plan to take a year off after graduating from high school Friday and then attend Harvard University in 2017, reminded me of my older brothers plan nearly 45 years ago.

The difference between Malias folks reaction and ours shows how the world has changed. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were supportive of their older daughter.

Harvard encourages students whove been admitted to defer their studies for a year to broaden themselves with travel, pursue a special project or activity, work or spend time in another substantive manner. Malias parents are both Harvard Law School graduates.

Malia, 18, has spent nearly half her life under a magnifying glass. Neither she nor her 14-year-old sister, Sasha, has the luxury of being a typical teen.

With a year off and the Obamas out of the White House, Malia could let her hair down, run free and be herself. The Obamas plan to stay in the Washington area so Sasha, who heads into her sophomore year, can finish high school.

The support the Obamas showed Malia was different from my folks reaction to my brother, David, announcing in 1972 after his freshman year as a Harvard pre-med student that he planned to take a year off to backpack in Europe. David was the oldest and the brightest of four kids.

Doing well his first year at Harvard gave David the confidence to tell our folks his plan. Mom and dad were college-educated. There was never a doubt that their kids would go to college, too. As the oldest, David led the way. Failure was never an option.

David is a year older than I am; our sister, Renee, is a year younger than me; and our brother Vincent is six years my junior. While David was away in college, we were going to school in St. Louis and working at dads chemical company.

I will never forget moms reaction to Davids plan: Boy, have you lost your mind! Weve worked too hard and raked and scraped and saved to send you to college  Harvard of all places  for you to take a year off gallivanting around Europe for a year like youre rich!

Dad was just as emphatic and blistered David with the worst of his native Virginia accent. Our folks knew that a lot of black people then didnt have the opportunity to go to college.

Those teens who did had to concentrate on their studies and avoid the party life and other entanglements of being away from home. They had to manage their time and money wisely and stay focused on getting good grades. The best way to get through college was to do it without interruptions. David, who is a physician now in New York City, wanted to disrupt that, and Mom and Dad would not tolerate it.

Our folks also knew that if they permitted David to do it, that would open that door for the rest of us to follow, and that definitely wasnt happening. Our folks saved so each of us could go to college. We got jobs on campus to pay for books and incidentals. The goal was to graduate debt free.

I did the same for my daughters, and my siblings did it for their kids, too. It was part of our folks legacy of parenting. They provided that head start for us just as their parents did for them, insisting on an education beyond high school. That was a lot harder for mom and dad as African-Americans in the early to mid-20th century than it was for us. It was easier still for our kids to make it through college.

Now for Malia the playing field is even more level, especially for the presidents daughter. Lets hope its that way for other African-Americans pursuing a higher education, and their folks wont react the way mine did when a kid announces that she wants to take a year off.
With less than five months to go before the November presidential election, a new poll out Wednesday found Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and Trumps pending nomination could be depressing Republican voter enthusiasm.

The Marquette Law School Poll also found more respondents said they would describe Trump as honest than Clinton, but that Clinton was more prepared to be president.

Both had historically high unfavorable ratings for presidential candidates going back to the 1970s, according to poll director Charles Franklin.

Clinton led 42-35 among registered voters, though among likely voters her lead grew to 46-37.

Franklin, a Marquette political science professor, said the divergence between registered and likely voters was noteworthy, particularly because only 78 percent of Republicans said they were absolutely certain they would vote in November, down from 87 percent in March and 90 percent in June 2012. Among Democrats, 84 percent said they were certain to vote, up from 81 percent in March.

That is a substantial fall-off (among Republicans), Franklin said. What weve seen over these last two months is a pretty sharp drop-off in Republican likelihood of turning out.

Franklin cautioned that the results could change in the coming months as attitudes about voting change, and that the likely voter measure doesnt typically become the focus until late summer and early fall.

Asked if they thought each candidate was honest, more respondents described Trump that way (32 percent) than Clinton (28 percent). But more respondents agreed Clinton was more empathetic (42-27), better able to handle a national crisis (48-31) and more qualified to be president (56-30) than Trump.

Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 58 percent of registered voters, while Trump was viewed unfavorably by 64 percent. Among Republicans, Trump was viewed unfavorably by 35 percent, which Franklin described as historically bad.

Also, 55 percent said they would be very uncomfortable with Trump as president, compared with only 42 percent who said the same about Clinton.

The poll was the first presidential poll in Wisconsin since Trump and Clinton became their partys presumptive nominees.

The last Marquette poll in late March found Clinton leading Trump by more than 10 percentage points among registered voters. That was consistent with other national polls in Wisconsin that have been taken since then, the last of which was released a month ago.

The Marquette poll was conducted June 9-12. It involved 800 registered voters with a margin of error of +/-4.4 percentage points. The likely voter sample was 666 respondents with a margin of error of +/-4.9 percentage points.The majority of responses came in before Sundays terrorist attack at an Orlando gay club that left 50 dead, including the killer, and 53 wounded. Franklin said an analysis of the results that came in Sunday did not show a statistically significant difference from earlier results.
After a nearly 15-hour filibuster, U.S. Senate Democrats relinquished the floor early Thursday with a reported agreement from Republicans to allow votes on two gun control proposals.

Unsurprisingly, Wisconsin's senators have different opinions on what should be done in the wake of last weekend's mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando.

Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay member of the Senate, was one of several senators to join Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, in his efforts to clinch the votes.

On the Senate floor, Baldwin spent 25 minutes reading the names and life stories of the 49 people  mostly LGBT and people of color  killed at the Pulse nightclub on Sunday.

Baldwin also noted that she'd been at Milwaukee's PrideFest two days before the attack in Florida. Before attending the opening ceremonies, Baldwin said she had reflected on how things have changed for the LGBT community since she was first elected to local office in 1986.

The community has seen progress, Baldwin said, but to wake up on Sunday to learn of the massacre was "unspeakable."

"I can't tell you how many times I have penned the words, 'You are in my thoughts and prayers' and spoken the words, 'You are in my heart, in my thoughts, and in my prayers,'" Baldwin said. "I can't tell you how many times I have joined  either in my former service in the House of Representatives or here in the Senate  in a moment of silence. Silence is not enough. Thoughts and prayers are important, but they are not enough. We have to act."

Baldwin voiced her support on the floor for an amendment to ban people on the government's terrorist watch list from purchasing guns and one that would expand required background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and on the internet.

"In the political world, we also, regrettably, fall into our  I don't know what to call it  comfort zone," Baldwin said. "Let's only talk about this as a terrorist incident, or let's only talk about this as a hate crime, or let's only talk about this in terms of gun violence. This is all of the above. We have to come together. We have to be united. We have to be strong in order to respond."

Versions of the two amendments Democrats hope to pass were given Senate votes in December, after the deadly shooting in San Bernardino, California. Both measures failed.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said Wednesday he thinks lawmakers can reach an agreement in an effort to prevent terrorists or would-be terrorists from obtaining firearms.

"I dont know any American  no Republican that I know  wants to see a terrorist or would-be terrorist be a able to purchase a gun. So, we agree on that," Johnson told MSNBC's Chuck Todd. "So lets make sure we concentrate on that area of agreement and then lets find a way to protect Americans constitutional rights to due process and their Second Amendment rights as well."

But Johnson pushed back on the notion that there is a "gun show loophole," arguing that the "vast majority" of firearms sold at gun shows are done with background checks.

He said he's concerned the proposal, originally introduced in 2013 by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, could lead to measures preventing the transfer of guns between family members.

"We have so many gun control laws. I think we have enough on the books," Johnson said. "Why dont we start basically enforcing the laws already on our books?"
With less than five months to go before the November election, a new poll out Wednesday found Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and Trumps pending nomination could be depressing Republican voter enthusiasm.

The Marquette Law School Poll also found more respondents said they would describe Trump as honest than Clinton but that Clinton was more prepared to be president.

Both had historically high unfavorable ratings for presidential candidates going back to the 1970s, according to poll director Charles Franklin.

Clinton led 42-35 among registered voters, though among likely voters her lead grew to 46-37.

Franklin, a Marquette political science professor, said the divergence between registered and likely voters was noteworthy, particularly because only 78 percent of Republicans said they were absolutely certain they would vote in November, down from 87 percent in March and 90 percent in June 2012. Among Democrats, 84 percent said they were certain to vote, up from 81 percent in March.

That is a substantial fall-off (among Republicans), Franklin said. What weve seen over these last two months is a pretty sharp drop-off in Republican likelihood of turning out.

Franklin cautioned that the results could change in the coming months as attitudes about voting change, and that the likely voter measure doesnt typically become the focus until late summer and early fall.

Asked if they thought each candidate was honest, more respondents described Trump that way (32 percent) than Clinton (28 percent). But more respondents agreed Clinton was more empathetic (42-27), was able to handle a national crisis (48-31) and qualified to be president (56-30) than Trump.

Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 58 percent of registered voters, while Trump was viewed unfavorably by 64 percent. Among Republicans, Trump was viewed unfavorably by 35 percent, which Franklin described as historically bad.

Also 55 percent said they would be very uncomfortable with Trump as president, compared with only 42 percent who said the same about Clinton.

The poll was the first presidential poll in Wisconsin since Trump and Clinton became their partys presumptive nominees.
Bernie Vann recalled cutting down a tree at a Tomah residence with his friend Stan Zdrojowy. Vann was concerned that the tree would crash into the mailbox or strike another tree next to the house.

Zdrojowy, however, threaded the needle.

That tree fell exactly where he wanted it to, Vann said. He must have been quite the lumberjack in his time.

Zdrojowy, who died Sunday at age 86, is remembered as a businessman who put his skills to work giving back to the community. His carpentry skills were on display every year with a nativity scene he displayed in front of his business. Vann said it was an ambitious undertaking with 19 wood pallets, a two-piece wood roof, three spotlights, numerous smaller lights and 12 statues.

Sometimes it would go up in one day if the weather was warm enough, Vann said. Other years we would work for an hour and then go into the lumber yard to warm up.

In 1959 Zdrojowy opened South Side Lumber in Tomah and owned the business for four decades. He was also an active member of the Tomah Chamber of Commerce, Tomah Lions Club, Habitat for Humanity and Knights of Columbus. He also wrote columns for the Tomah Journal.

Don Nelson rented an apartment on Lake Tomah from Zdrojowy during his second year as a Tomah Junior High School band teacher. Nelson suggested that a pier be built despite not knowing Zdrojowy very well or expecting a response.

Stan said, Tell me what you need, and Ill give you the boards and the posts, Nelson said. I dont remember who built it.

Nelson and Zdrojowy later served together in the Lions Club. Nelson said Zdrojowy was always good for a silly or corny joke.

He was always quite cheerful  I remember him whistling a lot, Nelson said. He was never afraid to take the microphone and do five or 10 minutes of standup. He was always good for a story.

Nelson said Zdrojowy was more than talk.

He was always a hard worker, Nelson said. You could always count on Stan to be there.

Zdrojowy served in the Marine Corps from 1948 to 1952, and Vann said Zdrojowy was a Marine through and through. He was an American Legion member for 55 years and organized an annual dinner that commemorated the birth of the corps.

You could tell he was a Marine by the way he ran up a ladder, Vann said.

Zdrojowy, a native of Waukegan, Illinois, endured good-natured ribbing about his name that was a challenge for acquaintances to spell and pronounce. During Tuesdays Tomah City Council meeting, Alderman Eric Prise expressed gratitude for Zdrojowys years of community work and noted that everyone knew Stan as Stan Murphy.

Vann, most of all, remembers Zdrojowy as a very good friend.

Stan was a heck of a guy and a really good companion, Vann said. It will be hard to replace him.
The 2015/2016 crop of cable news political pundits and op-ed writers for major newspapers have opined that the reason so many people have voted for Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders) is because they see their government as too establishment-oriented ... only looking out for themselves and big business and leaving the little man out in the cold. Being a life-long Republican, I cannot comment on the rapturous Feel the Bern rally attendees, but I have a different opinion of the popularity with primary voters of Donald Trump: Birds of a feather flock together. Although he loves the poorly educated, who may be dominating the crowds at his campaign stops (how could an educated person embrace his nastiness?), he is relying more on a part of our society that is racist, misogynistic and just generally bigoted.

When the raucous crowds that Trump drew before the end of the primary season roared their approval as he insulted and demeaned individuals and whole groups of people, it was plain to see that the cheering masses felt the same way. (I take a little heart in reading that his last two rallies, in Richmond and Tampa, were held in less than half-filled venues. And one of his campaign memes that he cannot brag about right now is his leading in the polls.)

Peter Behner, in the June 10th edition of the New York Times bears out my belief that the Republican primary voters agree with Donald Trumps often nasty and always ill-thought-out, illogical and unconstitutional ways to make America great again.

Mr. Trump is what he is  a malicious, malignant figure on the American political landscape. But Republican primary voters, in selecting him to represent their party, and Republican leaders now rallying to his side, have made his moral offenses their own. He correctly notes, Republicans have not changed Mr. Trump for the better; he has changed them for the worse.

One could argue that the three Wisconsinites who are dominant in the Republican party are proof of Mr. Behners assertion. Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, has wholeheartedly endorsed the presumptive nominee; Paul Ryan is reluctantly going to vote for a man he declared has been making racist comments; and though Gov. Scott Walker has stated that he will not decide whether to endorse Trump until the convention (and indeed, says that Trump should apologize for his racist attack on Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in the Trump University lawsuit), I fear that he will go the way of all Republican leaders who will do anything to defeat Hillary Clinton. I am ashamed of Reince Priebus and disillusioned about my once-hero, Paul Ryan. Will Gov. Walker make me proud or ashamed of him?

I am already ashamed of the Republican party, a once-valid but now tarnished American institution. I used to be proud to call myself a Republican. But no more. I fear that the Republican party has now, unless it rights itself by denying a place on the ballot to Donald Trump, committed its future to be an embarrassing footnote in the history books of our country.

If I could have my druthers in this election (or have a dream come true), I would be displaying a Mitt Romney for President sign in my front yard and be looking forward to his debates with Joe Biden. (Joe Biden being Joe Biden made for clumsy, often awkward but forgiven stump events, once shouting to the man in a wheelchair to stand up so everyone could applaud him. Donald Trump being Donald Trump reveals a dangerous ego-maniacal sociopathic personality who spends his free TV time and once-crowded rallies denigrating anyone who does not believe he is the smartest, richest, best-looking and least racist person on the planet.)

But my dream will not come true unless Republicans become disillusioned when Trumps released (will he be forced to release them?) tax returns reveal a mere millionaire who has paid no taxes and given not a penny to charity. Or if the party becomes outraged if he commits the ultimate campaign faux pas and insults Jesus Christ or, God forbid, the memory of Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan, the partys iconic Republicans. And of course, if Hillary is indicted.

But some Republican voters may never be convinced that he is unqualified to be our Commander in Chief. Perhaps Ed and Emma J. of Sparta, who were ardent supporters of Donald Trump when they responded to my December article about the Republican party going bonkers by embracing him, in a letter without a return address so that I could answer their charges personally remain, through all of his egotistical, nasty comments, his ardent supporters. But I must correct their opinion that as an enemy of Trumps, all Im accomplishing is helping Hillary Clinton. Make no mistake: it is not I who is helping Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is helping Hillary Clinton.

So to Ed and Emma and all the Republicans who support Donald Trump and to those who do not: Get used to calling Hillary Clinton Madame President. Will she win my vote? I have until November to decide whether I will vote for her, for the Libertarian Gary Johnson or write in Mitt Romneys name. You may already have gathered who I will not be voting for. Never Trump!

Sandra Humphrey is a resident of Tomah.
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James Wesley Howell, the Indiana man arrested Sunday morning hours ahead of the L.A. Pride parade and found with a large arsenal of guns, is now accused of child molestation.

The AP reports that prosecutors in Howell's home state of Indiana have charged him with felony child molestation of a 12-year-old girl. Howell is accused of driving the girl into Indiana's Clark State Forest on May 31 and sexually assaulting her.

The victim's mother told IndyStar that the girl considered the 20-year-old Howell as her boyfriend and did not consider herself the victim of sexual abuse. "At the park, they crawled in the back seat and did things they should not have been doing," said the girl's mother.

Howell was interviewed by a police detective in the case on June 7. Five days later, he was arrested in Santa Monica, where police found explosives and three assault rifles in his car. According to KTLA, police also found a knife, Taser, handcuffs, a black hood and a security badge. He told police he was on his way to the L.A. Pride parade in West Hollywood.

That same morning, 50 people were killed in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Police say they are unsure of any connection between Howell and the Orlando shooting.

Authorities say it is likely that Howell was trying to flee investigators. "He understood that this child molesting investigation was ongoing and he was in imminent danger of being arrested," Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull told IndyStar.

In the days after the sexual assault incident, Howell threatened to kill himself, members of the victim's family and any police if they tried to arrest him, reports the IndyStar. In one message, Howell called himself a "sociopath with an automatic."

Howell's past includes several violent run-ins with the law. He had previously pointed a gun at an ex-boyfriend with a gun also threatened to shoot up his ex's workplace. The day after threatening his ex, Howell also pointed a gun at his neighbor, to which he plead guilty to a charge of intimidation in April. As part of his probation, he was supposed to give up his weapons.

Howell was arrested early Sunday morning when neighbors notified police that a man was carrying a gun and knocking on doors. TMZ reports that Howell was trying to meet up with a man he met on the internet and that police have cleared the unidentified man of any wrongdoing.
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The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California announced Wednesday they will definitely have enough water to meet demands for the next three years, thanks to local conservation efforts. Nice work, everyone! We reached out to some of L.A.'s most notorious celebrity water wasters to see if any of them were to thank, but first, a little more on what this news actually means.The Metropolitan Water District is basically where the people who give us our water (likely DWP, for most of you) get their water from. The public agency acts as a regional wholesaler, providing water to 26 other public agencies, including 14 cities, 11 municipal water districts and one county water authority, who then in turn fill the taps for 19 million people.

So what is this about the next three years? As some of you may remember, when the State Water Resources Control Board ended its mandatory conservation program last month, they also asked local agencies across the state to assess their own supplies for a future three-year period. As Brandon Goshi, manager of water policy and strategy for MWD, told LAist, the so-called "stress test" looked at just that, assessing if MWD would have sufficient water supplies to meet the demands of their members if the drought were to extend for another three years. Andgreat news!we passed!

In even rosier news, that analysis looks at worst-case extended drought conditions (i.e. MWD isn't saying we only have enough water for the next three years; just that we definitely have enough water for said time period). As MWD representative Rebecca Kimitch explained to us, "We have water reliability for many, many years... This was just to look at a particular three year period, assuming continued drought conditions."

"It's just a small capture of a much larger water reliability plan that Metropolitan is consistently evaluating," she continued. Sounds good! Now onto the really important questionshow exactly did this conservation happen?

We know our lovely readers have obviously been turning off their faucets while brushing their teeth, browning their lawns and showering with their neighbors, but what about the celebrity water wasters? Is it possible that they are the ones we should be thanking for these positive developments?

We tried to get in touch with notorious developer Geoff Palmer, who had been fined by the City of Beverly Hills (yes, Beverly Hills is an MWD customer) for using more than 12,000 gallons of water a day over a two-month period last year, which he also blamed on "a leaky pipe." For context, 12,000 gallons of water is about two-thirds of what it takes to fill the average swimming pool.

So, has that pipe been fixed? Should we now turn our gratitude to Geoff Palmer, despite the ugly havoc his faux-Italian fortresses have wreaked across downtown Los Angeles? The nice lady who answered the phone at his office told us she would have to check in with the property manager at the house and call me back. We have yet to hear back, but will keep you updated.

Director Brett Ratner had also blamed the excessive water use at his Beverly Hills home on leaky pipes. Had those leaks been fixed? A representative for Ratner told LAist that yes, "all of Brett's previous leaks have been fixed!" Mazel tov and thank you, Brett Ratner! Rush Hour 3 may not have been anything to write home about, but I still knew we could count on you when push came to shove.

We also left word for Amy Poehler, who remains our personal favorite of the Beverly Hills water wasters, and are still waiting to hear whether she is now a part of the solution.

We turned back to our friends at the Metropolitan Water District to see if they had any intel on whether possible water conservation efforts by the boldfaced names among L.A.'s profligate water users could have had an effect on our positive three-year report. Did they have any thoughts? After a very long silence, Goshi did address the question, telling us it was far too specific "for an agency like Metropolitan to answer."

"When we are talking about conservation," he continued, "we're talking about conservation that we have been able to accomplish as a whole across Southern California." Finally, someone who thinks there is more to Southern California than just celebrities!
CAI MENG/CHINA DAILY

Sexual harassment cases have been on the rise, with most victims being women. But it's not unusual to hear comments that women should dress properly and behave themselves to avoid sexual harassment.

In the recent past, Henan provincial police even posted a message on its micro blog, a twitter-like service, that women who dress inappropriately, or like dating, drinking or smoking are easy targets, sparking a heated public debate. The storm of criticism the micro blog raised forced the police to withdraw it.

Such comments and wrong assumptionsblaming the victims instead of the perpetratorsshow that we have to change our way of thinking on sexual harassment. They wrongly suggest offenders' actions are pardonable because the victims have done something wrong.

Also, such opinions and assumptions indulge wrongdoers to some extent. They could encourage offenders to cause more serious damage to their later victims by tacitly implying that the victims' behaviors induced the sexual assaults. Worse, such a social mindset could force the victims to not report sexual assault cases to the public security bureau in order to avoid further harassment.

It is also wrong to suppose the best way to avoid sexual harassment is self-respect, self-esteem, self-improvement and self-reliance. When somebody claims that "potential woman victims should realize what will happen when they get drunk in a bar", he/she only adds credence to offenders' actions. Why should a victim take the blame for not being aware of an insecure situation?

To reduce the risk of sexual harassment, we have to improve the social order and supportive network under the framework of the rule of law, and cultivate a healthy gender culture in which men and women respect each other. We cannot build a harmonious society by ordering potential victims to "behave themselves".

Such anti-women views reflect the patriarchy-oriented traditional concept and gender bias, which promote male domination in society and tend to defend men even if they break the law by blaming their actions on women's behavior, attitude or clothes.

But the rule of law says no one should be sexually harassed no matter how they dress or behave. So the authorities should encourage people to report sexual harassment cases to police immediately after coming to know about them. And victims should seek police help and medical attention as soon as possible; they should also try to preserve evidence.

The media, on their part, should promote a healthy gender culture to help reduce sexual harassment cases.

The author is a professor of law at China Women's University.
Many people in Europe see Islamic State (IS) militants as the biggest threat to their nations, a Pew Research Center study finds.

Climate change is the second largest concern of Europeans. The arrival of refugees from Iraq and Syria in Europe is the third most important issue, the center says.

Researchers spoke with people living in 10 European countries. Only 17 percent of those questioned feel the self-declared Islamic State is a minor threat. Only 3 percent said the group is no threat at all to their nation.

Terrorist attacks in France and Belgium over the past year have put terrorism at the top of the list of concerns of Europeans. Security remains high across the continent since the attacks.

Thirty-two people were in March when bombers attacked the airport and a train station in Brussels, the Belgian capital. The Islamic State said it carried out the attacks. The group also claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks in and around Paris last November. A total of 130 people were killed.

The new study found most Europeans do not feel that military spending should be increased. Many fear that increasing military force to fight terrorism only leads to more hate, which will increase violence, the Pew Center said.

The study also found that a majority of Europeans want the EU to become more active in world events. Close to 74 percent of Europeans think the EU should have more influence.

Even in Britain, 55 percent of respondents said the EU should take a more active international stance in the coming years. British voters will decide in a special election next week whether the country should continue as an EU member.

Other studies, including one released by the Pew Research Center last week, show that many Europeans may want to follow Britain's example and possibly leave the EU.

Im Pete Musto.

The staff at VOA News wrote this story. Jim Dresbach adapted it for Learning English and VOANews.com. George Grow was the editor.

Is there a future to the European Union? Is terrorism the biggest concern in Europe? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section or visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

respondent  n. someone who answers something, such as a public opinion survey

stance  n. a publicly stated opinion


Investigators in the Orlando mass shooting say the killers wife knew about his plans for the attack.

Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who remain unnamed say the wife of gunman Omar Mateen had some knowledge of her husbands plans to attack Pulse, a popular gay nightclub.

Mateen was shot dead by police Sunday morning after the attack that left 49 people dead and 53 injured.

One investigator said the wife, Noor Zahi Salman, also went with her husband on a reconnaissance mission to the nightclub between June 5 and 9.

Authorities said Salman is cooperating in the investigation and could provide important information about the reasons Mateen might have carried out the attack.

According to a law enforcement official quoted by the New York Times, she was also with her husband when he bought ammunition. Investigators found video footage from a store showing the couple buying ammunition together, CBS News reported.

Authorities say Mateen, 29, legally bought the weapons earlier this month that he used in the massacre, including a semi-automatic assault rifle.

Noor Zahi Salman, 30, was born in the United States to parents who came from Palestine. She was Mateens second wife and the mother of the couples 3-year-old son.

At a press briefing Wednesday, FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper confirmed that Salman had been interviewed as part of the investigation. But he did not comment about whether she had prior knowledge of the attack.

With respect to the wife, I can tell you that is only one of many interviews that we have done and will continue to do in this investigation, Hopper said.

Salman could face charges if it is found that she did not notify authorities of any prior plans for the attack. But U.S. Attorney Lee Bentley said Wednesday it is too early to speculate on any charges that might be brought.

Law enforcement officials are telling U.S. news outlets that Salman warned her husband not to carry out the attack as he left home for Orlando on Saturday night.

FBI Agent Hopper said the investigation of the shooting is large and complex. He asked the public to contact the agency with any details about the shooting or any information related to the killer.

In Orlando, officials opened an assistance center to offer families of victims grief counseling, funeral support and free legal services.

On Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama will travel to Orlando to pay his respects to victims of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Obama would meet with families affected by the tragedy, as well as with first responders, doctors and nurses who treated the wounded.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for Learning English based on reporting from Ken Bredemeier of VOA with additional reports from the Associated press and Reuters. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

reconnaissance  n. a military activity in which soldiers find out information enemy forces

speculate  n. to make a guess about something 

counseling  n. assistance and guidance given to someone to help them deal with problems

first responders  n. people designated to respond quickly to emergency situations
Witnesses say a man shouted Britain first as he shot and killed a member of the British Parliament on Thursday.

Jo Cox was a 41-year-old member of the British Parliament. She opposed Britains exit from the European Union. The former aid worker was known for her support of immigrants rights and Syrian refugees. She was the mother of two children.

Jeremy Corbyn is the Labor Partys leader. He called the attack a horrific murder.

Cox was shot, stabbed and kicked on a street in her home district of West Yorkshire after she left a town meeting at a library. Gun attacks are rare in the United Kingdom.

A 52-year-old man was arrested nearby. Police say they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the murder.

British citizens will vote on the countrys status in the European Union on June 23. Politicians and voters have been debating the merits of leaving or remaining in the European Union for months.

The issue is known as Brexit, for Britains exit. Both sides agreed to suspend their campaigns after hearing news of Coxs death.

British Prime Minister David Cameron was in Gibraltar when he heard the news. Gibraltar is a British territory on the south coast of Spain. He called Coxs murder absolutely tragic and dreadful news.

Cameron wants Britain to stay in the EU, but the BBC says British citizens are evenly split on the issue.

Cox was elected to her position in 2015.

Im Dan Friedell.

VOANews.com reported this story. Dan Friedell adapted the story for Learning English. Additional information for his report came from the BBC. Hai Do was the editor.

How do you feel about the murder of Jo Cox? Write to us in the Comments section and on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

district  n. an area or section of a country, city, or town

status  n. the official position of a person or thing according to the law


The planet Mars has gone through an ice age and is now warming up, scientists say.

The findings are based on detailed radar measurements of ice caps on Mars.

Isaac Smith studies the physical qualities of Earth and other planets -- or geophysics -- at the University of Texas. He told VOA about new research from scientists at universities in Texas, Colorado and Missouri.

Their findings were published in the journal Science.

Smith said Mars has ice ages, just like Earth has had.

The last ice age would have been about 600,000 years ago, he told VOA. And the next [ice age on Mars] is 500,000 [years] in the future.

Mars is often called the red planet. But, a few hundred thousand years ago, the scientists said, the planet was not so red. Their research suggests that Mars has been warming for the past 370,000 years.

Smith said ice may have built up to a thickness of several meters around Mars during its ice ages. This would have made the red planet look more white than red.

Smith told VOA an ice age on Mars would be different than an ice age on Earth. He said, during Martian ice ages, the north and south poles would be warmer than they are now, and they would have less ice.

Warmer poles, he said, mean there would be more water in the atmosphere. The tilt and orbit of Mars and its thin atmosphere also would have a big impact on its ice ages.

Scientists are attempting to understand how Mars has changed over long periods of time. The information they gather will help scientists look for evidence of life beyond Earth.

One of the keys to life is water. The scientists said their evidence suggests Mars could have been a watery place.

Im Mario Ritter.

Kevin Enochs wrote this story for VOANews.com. Jim Dresbach adapted it for Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or visit our Facebook page.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

ice age  n. a time in the distant past when a large part of the world or a planet was covered with ice

pole  n. either end of the imaginary line around which something such as the earth turns

ice cap  n. a very large and thick sheet of ice that covers the North Pole, the South Pole or another region

tilt  n. the state of having one side higher than the other
LEXINGTON, Neb.  A dispute between a mosque and city officials here may be resolved without a court battle or intervention by the U.S. Justice Department.

Attorneys for the Islamic Center of Lexington and the City of Lexington said this week that a tentative agreement had been reached to settle a dispute over expansion of the mosque in downtown Lexington.

The agreement, subject to approval of the Lexington City Council, would limit the occupancy of the expanded mosque to 200 people.

The mosque also agreed to not oppose any special liquor licenses in the area, such as those issued for an annual town festival held on a public parking lot next to the mosque. The Islamic Center also agreed to adhere to all city building ordinances.

If approved, the settlement would lead to dismissal of a lawsuit the city filed against the Islamic Center and probably would end a federal civil rights investigation into the December denial of a conditional-use permit for the expanded mosque.

I would describe it as a win-win situation for the City of Lexington as well as the Islamic Center, Claude Berreckman, the attorney for the Islamic Center, said Tuesday. I dont think anything (the mosque) is doing now or in the future will have a negative impact on the commercial area.

Brian Copley, the citys attorney, declined to comment except to confirm the proposed deal.

The Islamic Center had been hosting prayers for eight years in two small storefronts on the edge of downtown Lexington until last year, when it purchased a closed laundromat next door and expanded into the new space.

But the city and several townspeople objected when the center sought a conditional-use permit to allow the worship center in a district zoned for commerce.

City officials said the expanded mosque could deter commercial development. Concerns were raised about a lack of parking spaces owned by the mosque, even though it sits next to at least two public parking lots.

There also were complaints that the mosque was not following city requirements for building permits and inspections.

The city ultimately sued the Islamic Center for ignoring the denial of its conditional-use permit.

ACLU of Nebraska intervened on behalf of the Islamic Center, and the Justice Department began investigating whether the city was discriminating against the centers right to worship.

Then the city and the Islamic Center began talking about a compromise. They recently reached agreement on the wording of a conditional-use permit.

I think weve opened up the lines of communications so there wont be any misunderstandings, Berreckman said.

The citys planning commission will review the proposal July 6. The City Council is scheduled to take up the compromise July 26.
These days there are smartphones with big screens and less big screens. There are models with glass that wraps around the edges, and models that have modular components. But most smartphones look pretty much the same: a rectangle with a glass display.

Monohms Runcible breaks the mold. Its designed to look more like a pocket watch than a smartphone and in fact, you cant even hold it to your head to make calls (youll need to pair a Bluetooth headset if you want to use the Runcible as a phone).

Monohm introduced the Runcible in early 2015, and now the company is raising funds for the project on Indiegogo in hopes of shipping the first units to backers in September.

Theres been at least one major change since the project was first unveiled: it was originally expected to run an operating system based on Firefox OS. But Mozilla has been backing away from development of Firefox OS for mobile devices, so Monohm decided to develop an Android-based operating system called BuniOS.

The Runcible features a 2.5 inch, 640 x 640 round display with 256 pixels per inch, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, 802.11b/g/n 2.4 GHz WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, and 4G LTE  although that last spec is listed as hopefully, on the Indiegogo page, suggesting that mobile data isnt a done deal yet.

Other features include a 7MP rear camera, a headset jack, and a USB port.

The device is also open source and hacker friendly, with easy access to the I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO pins. Monohm says the Runcible is also designed to be easy to open up and repair, allowing you to keep the device for a long time, much as you would a pocket watch assuming youll still want a mobile device with a Snapdragon 410 chip in 5 years.

Another a key selling point for the device is what it doesnt do: the Runcible is a connected device thats designed not to bug you with notifications or alerts, but which lets you view them at a glance when you feel like it.

Monohm says the company is also focusing on sustainability and transparency: the Runcible is designed and built in California, and the case is made from sustainably harvested wood.

All told, the Runcible is basically an artisanal phone or tablet-type thing and it kind of has the price to match. In order to reserve one, youll need to make a pledge of $399 or more to the crowdfunding campaign.

Interestingly, a lot of early backers seem to be making pledges of $314 which isnt enough to actually request a Runcible as a reward. Looks like someone may be trying to inflate the backer count to make the project look popular?

Update: Actually, it looks like folks who had signed up for Monohms mailing list got a chance to save some money by reserving one of a limited number of Runcible devices for a pledge of $299. Add $15 for shipping, and that explains all the $314 orders.

via /r/Android
French media conglomerate Vivendi this week opened a 300-seat cinema in Cameroon's capital Yaounde, the first of 100 it plans to build across Africa.

Image by 123RF

Cameroon's cinemas have all shut down, as is the case in many African nations, but a second is planned within months in the economic capital Douala, with another to be opened in Yaounde, said the chairman of the Vivendi supervisory board, Vincent Bollore.

The idea "is to have 100 across Africa", said Bollore at the opening that was also attended by Prime Minister Philemon Yang.

The cinema is powered by solar energy, provided by 720 square metres of solar panels, using batteries developed by the powerful Bollore group, which has Africa-wide interests in transport, logistics and ports.

The cinema will be used not only to screen movies but also as a venue for music and comedy shows and can be converted into an open-air site massing thousands of people.

Source: AFP
The trial in the alleged sexual scandal of Tarun Tejpal is yet to start but a Bollywood film could soon revive memories of the case involving the veteran journalist and founder-editor of Tehelka.

Though the director, Shailendra Pandey, asserts the movie has no resemblance to Tejpal, Tehelka or the alleged case of sexual harassment, the film JD  it expands as Journalism Defined  actually revolves around a powerful editor tainted by charges of sexual harassment.

When work on JD started, it was thought that the movie would be about J Dey, the Mumbai-based investigative reporter who was gunned down by the underworld. But now, it emerges that the film is actually structured around Tejpal, a writer and former editor of what was Indias finest investigative news magazine.

Pandey still argues that it is not. I neither know Tejpal, nor anyone involved in the case, he said in a brief interview.

He did not mention that he had once worked as a cameraperson in Tehelka and was eventually promoted as the chief cameraman of the weekly.

The protagonist of the movie is Jai Dwivedi, a role essayed by actor Lalit Bisht, who starts his career from 'Prabhat Kranti' newspaper in Lucknow and eventually travels to Delhi to work for various publications before launching a feisty news magazine, 'Journalism Defined'.

The editor JD and the magazine, JD, are as synonymous as Tejpal and Tehelka. The movie shows how the editor was once a firebrand, honest writer who would hit out at corruption without fear, fight court battles, go without food, with his staff going without salaries but united for a cause.

But then success goes to his head, he becomes powerful and starts compromising at virtually every step. Top investigations are dropped, cash earned and greed takes over everything, claims Pandey, before repeating, But this is not about Tehelka, its about a corrupt editors life. He (JD) was not corrupt when he started, the system corrupted him. He had to play ball because he could not work out of the system.

The movie shows the editor working very closely with a female colleague, Arhiba Noor (essayed by Vedita Pratap Singh), who supports JD and his cause, especially during the crisis-ridden days after a sexual harassment charge is leveled against him by a female colleague. The hint at Tejpals former colleague, Shoma Chaudhury, is very apparent.

The movie has all the ingredients of a typical Bollywood potboiler. It has the editor and his sting-camera journalism that sank a top politician (aren't we talking about Bangaru Laxman here?) and his flashy pool parties with colleagues during site outs, a common feature at Tehelka.

Interestingly, the movie uses many real life people as actors. Politician Amar Singh is actually a neta in the film trying to find for himself, a larger role in Indian politics; retired Justice PD Kode, who delivered the historic verdict in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case and convicted actor Sanjay Dutt in the Arms Act case, is a judge; and journalists Sharat Pradhan, Subhas Shirke, Ratnamani Lal and Sunanda Dixit play editors and scribes. Tanu Sharma  the former IndiaTV anchor who shot into the news for alleging that she was mentally harassed by her seniors at the channel  is the anchor in the film, who breaks the news of JD being charged with sexual harassment.

The interesting twist in the movie is that it shows JD being charged with sexual harassment because he wanted to expose a top politician. Who is that politician? Pandey says it is for the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

The director said he will not comment on the future of the editor. The judgment, claims Pandey, is the biggest climax of the film.
Following the worst mass shooting in modern American history, the debate on LGBT rights has come into focus across the world.

While the candidates of the US presidential election are contemplating their stance on the issue, support has been pouring in from across the world on social media. India lags behind with shadow of section 377 looming above its head.

And so, to cut out to negativity with some good old cinema, here is a list of movies that tried to bring into focus the controversial LGBT issues throughout the years:

Different From The Others (1919)

Possibly the worlds first outright gay movie, Anders als die Andern, made in 1919, is a silent black and white German masterpiece. Paul Korner(Conrad Veidt), a successful violinist is trying to woo his young charge Kurt Sievers(Fritz Schulz). A blackmailer confronts Korner. Things take an ugly turn when Korners homosexuality come to light, and he is jailed because of his past homosexual liaisons (it was a crime in Germany back then).

Though he is freed, Korner ends up committing suicide because of the shame, and Kurt Sievers, his lover, vows to fight paragraph 175 (equivalent to our nefarious Section 377) and fight for justice. The film uses science to explain that being gay was a part of human nature and was one of the first movies to have a sympathetic view on homosexuality.

The copies of the film were destroyed in the Nazi regime of Germany, save a few, thanks to gay rights advocate and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who had yanked some of the films' footage to make his own film and inserted them into his own feature.

The Childrens Hour (1961)

Audrey Hepburn teams up with Shirley MacLaine for this 1961 drama, set in a private school for girls. Audrey Hepburn as Karen, and Shirley MacLaine as Martha, are two friends who run a private school for girls. All is well till a student accuses them of having an unnatural relationship. Tried in court, and shamed by the parents for their alleged affair, the accusation changes their lives irrevocably.

The Children's Hour was released at a time when it was illegal for the word homosexuality to be mentioned on stage or screen, but because of the success of the movie, coupled with the star billing, the law wasnt enforced.

The implied relation between the two women managed to draw in a huge audience and fan fare. The movie was based on Lillian Hellman's play of the same name, which was inspired by an incident involving two Scottish headmistresses. The play, though not overtly promoting homosexuality, was banned in a few famous theatre communities and cities: leading with London, Boston and Chicago.

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)

Funeral Parade of Roses is Toshio Matsumoto first feature-length work, and it is a highly stylized film mixed with numerous camera styles.

The plot of the film has a heavy oedipal theme to it. It follows Eddie (Pita), a transvestite who is an entertainer at Genet Bar, who is in love the owner of Genet, Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), the hostess of the bar is Eddies competitor for Gondas affections. The movie hovers between the fictional story and reality of a documentary where drag queens and drug users are shown the film and asked questions about their lives.

The movie was heavily censored during its limited release in Japan. This avant-grade flick packs a punch and has inspired the likes of Stanley Kubrick to create his masterpiece A Clockwork Orange.

Umbartha (1982)

Smita Patil, plays the role of the titular character Sulabha in Umbartha (The Threshold). Sulabha leads a comfortable middle class life with her lawyer husband (played by Girish Karnad) but a chance to be the warden of a womens home makes her rethink her priorities. She is unconventional in her role as a warden which leads to friction with the management.

The highlight of the movie is a lesbian relationship, which is showcased between two inmates, that turns into a scandal that is widely discussed by the press and local government.

The movie is one of the first to hint at a homosexual relationship in its plot line. Though the context in which the relationship is discussed is negative, Umbartha takes a step in the right direction by discussing taboo subjects way ahead of its time.

Bomgay (1996)

Bomgay is a 1996 Indian anthology of short films directed by Riyad Vinci Wadia. The movie stars Kushal Punjabi and Rahul Bose. It consists of six vignettes, each on a poem by Indian writer R. Raj Rao. It throws a spotlight on the sub gay culture of 'Bombay' in the post liberalised metropolis of the 90s.



Fire (1998)

Deepa Mehta's Fire, starring Nandita Das and Shabana Azmi hardly needs any introduction. The story of two sisters-in-law who find love and solace in each other when shunned from their husbands has been the subject of controversy since the time it released. Shiv Sena compared lesbianism to a sort of social AIDS and right-winged groups wanted the protagonists name changed to 'Nita' from 'Sita' because of the film. All of this lead the film to be banned but nonetheless it still shines as one of India's most well made films.

The Pink Mirror (2003)

This quirky story is a sneak peak into India's gay and transgender scene. Bibbo (Ramesh Menon), fashion designer, and Shabbo (Edwin Fernandes), a dancer are two drag queens that have a love-hate relationship with each other. They both start to compete for Samir (Rufy Baqal), an aspiring actor's love. Mandy(Rishi Raj), Shabbo's apprentice adds a plus one to the complicated love triangle when she admits her attraction to Samir.

The sensitive subject matter was handled brilliantly with a dose of humor that helped people empathize with the protagonists. But as the fate of Indian movies goes, it was banned as soon as it was released in 2003. Though widely lauded in festivals, the movie never saw the light of day in mainstream cinemas that it was meant for.
New Delhi - The civil aviation policy will be a turning point for the sector in attracting more players and will help take flying to the masses, stakeholders and experts on Wednesday said as they welcomed scrapping of the 5/20 international flying norms for local airlines.

"Though a 0/0 or 0/10 would have been more than welcome, the amendments that have been made to the policy are encouraging," AirAsia India CEO Amar Abrol said referring to the scrapping of 5/20 rule which also benefits the carrier.

The policy gives the airline a clear direction to ramp up our operations in India and grow our business in the domestic segment before we scale our operations to fly international," he said.

He also said the airline would focus aggressively in India and expand the fleet size.

Another startup carrier Vistara also said it would have preferred a complete abolition of the 5/20 norm to ensure that Indian aviation achieves its full potential.

"It is very encouraging to see that the government has established a policy which promotes the overall growth of the industry. We would have preferred, of course, that the 5/20 rule be completely abolished to ensure that Indian aviation achieves its full potential," Vistara Chief Executive Officer

Phee Teik Yeoh said.

He also said that as a domestic carrier Vistara was committed to its expansion plans in the country and now looking forward to providing connectivity to travellers to/from India.

Industry body Assocham said the policy is a turning point for the country's aviation sector as it frees the operators from the shackles of 5/20 rule for flying overseas.

Under this norm, only those domestic carriers having at least five years of operational experience and a minimum fleet of 20 planes were allowed to fly overseas.

Assocham also said that capping of airfare would propel the regional connectivity but it should be ensured the operators are not made to suffer losses on short haul routes.

The national civil aviation policy would help take flying to the masses through a slew of policy initiatives and fiscal and monetary support, said Amber Dubey, Partner and Head, Aerospace and Defence, KPMG in India.

"The highly illogical and anti-competition 5/20 rule has been replaced with 0/20, which effectively translates to 3/20 as it will take at least 3-4 years to have a 20 aircraft fleet," he noted.

Dubey, however, said the policy is unfortunately silent on issues like formation of an independent Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), privatisation of Air India and listing of AAI.

Officials of International Air Transport Association (IATA), which had expressed reservation on some provisions of the draft policy including the 5/20 rule, said they would come out with a detailed response soon.

However, they pointed out that the levy for the regional connectivity fund has been limited to domestic air travel and not on international flights.

IATA's CEO and Director General Tony Tyler has expressed apprehension that "this levy is going to increase the cost of air travel. It will dampen demand. It is against ICAO principles."

AirAsia Berhad chief Tony Fernandes said it was almost an end to vested interests, referring to the government doing away with the 5/20 norm.

"Almost an end to vested interests. Power to the people. Well done @narendramodi . You kept your word," Fernandes, who has been vocal against the 5/20 rule, tweeted.

His airline is a key stakeholder in no-frills carrier AirAsia India.

Former Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said the policy is a welcome step. "5/20 replaced by 0/20 is continuity with change as the sector has grown exponentially," he tweeted.

"How will air and land and regulatory infrastructure handle the phenomenal growth in future not properly addressed," Patel said, adding that the opening of the sector in 2004 has led to the phenomenal growth being witnessed

today.

The Rs 2,500 cap on fares for one hour flights is also conceptually welcome, he said.

There are, however, going be lot of challenges in execution and implementation but certainly a beginning has been made, Patel said.

AirAsia India's former CEO Mittu Chadliya said the policy is a step in the right direction.

However, KPMG in India's Amber Dubey said the policy is unfortunately silent on issues like formation of an independent Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), privatisation of Air India and listing of AAI.

Bradra International India Pvt Ltd's Director Hiyav Bajaj said that illegal non-entitled entities would not be allowed to operate, since the policy bars contract employees from carrying out ground handling on behalf of the airlines.

"With the announcement of the National Civil Aviation Policy, the Ministry has now consolidated its policies and intended actions on various sub-sectors providing directional guidance to the industry. The Ministry has sought to provide a fillip to the sector through putting in place a mechanism for

providing transparent viability gap funding for regional connectivity, as well as proposing measures for a segment like MRO," Peeyush Naidu Partner at Deloitte India said.

Commenting on the policy, industry body FICCI said that it will pave way for a balanced growth in the aviation sector.

"It (policy) is a progressive policy-framework towards ensuring a safe and sustainable development of the aviation sector in India. The comprehensive, well thought out policy will pave the way for a balanced aviation growth in the country," FICCI civil aviation committee co-chairman Palash Roy Chowdhury said.

According to PwC India's Partner for aerospace and defence, Dhiraj Mathur, amending the 5/20 rule and measures for improving the regional connectivity are the two key takeaways of the new civil aviation policy.

"There are two clear key takeaways from the new policy. The first is a focus on increasing competition in the market by amending the 5/20 rule. The second is on improving regional connectivity through a slew of measures that include the Regional Connectivity Scheme (RCS), improving infrastructure and building low cost airports, involving state governments through commitments on providing free services and low taxes to these low cost airports and lower level of taxation on MRO," he said.

As far as amendment to 5/20 rule is concerned, it should attract new entrants, he said adding the requirement of 20 aircraft is reasonable.

"As far as capping of domestic fares to Rs 2500 per hour on only the RCS routes is concerned, this is a welcome decision. To increase penetration of aviation in India, cost competitiveness is important," he added.

The long-awaited new civil aviation policy has some path breaking changes that should unlock regional connectivity as well as open up opportunities for carriers entering the Indian market, Sharat Dhall, President, Yatra.com, said.

"By subsidizing the shorter domestic routes for the airlines, the government has given a strong push to regional connectivity by capping fares and thereby expanding the market," he said.

According to global strategy consulting firm Roland Berger India, the policy is a significant step forward in ensuring the interests of all stakeholders.

"The policy will go towards making India an aviation friendly regime and help in broad-basing the coverage and network," Rahul Gangal, Partner (Aerospace and Defence) at Roland Berger India said.
New Delhi: The government and the Reserve Bank of India are assessing the possible fallouts if Britain votes to leave the European Union, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said on Thursday.

Global policymakers have raised alarm over the 23 June British referendum as fears of a Brexit has rattled financial markets.

The pound and the euro have lost value on fears a Brexit could tip the 28-member bloc into recession.

Mr Sinha said the RBI was trying to ensure sufficient liquidity in local markets as a defence against Brexit.
India's economy was perceived to face a cul de sac last year with respect to the progress on big-ticket reforms. The BJP-led NDAs majority in 2014 polls failed to give it the desired advantage owing to the party's weak numbers in Parliaments upper house. Bad politics, poor reform-drive and lack of foresight on key economic issues were often highlighted as the reasons for the dead end. After two years in power, the government seems to have finally broken the jinx and is showing encouraging signs on reforms front.

The NDA governments renewed push to get the Goods and Services Tax (GST) puzzle solved, passage of crucial legislations such as bankruptcy law and Aadhaar Bill, efforts to clean up the stressed assets in the banking system and subsidy reforms reinforce the government's reforms intent.

Most recently, the cabinet nod on national civil aviation policy and SBI-associate merger, shows the the decision making process is happening in the government, as opposed to the prolonged policy paralysis during the UPA-regime. If the current reforms momentum continues and shows results, the government can actually put the mojo back in the economy.

At this stage, what is most critical is clearly GST. This is where Modi and his backroom political strategists should give their best and push for the constitutional amendment in the approaching monsoon session. This is critical to meet the April 2017 deadline (already delayed by one year). Also, the actual GST roll out would take much more time to happen even after Parliament clears the amendment since it has to go through state assemblies and processes. There is a lot of paper work involved for states to put in place the systems for the final implement the unified tax regime.

The Modi-government, which is already in the third year of its term, has very short time to do all this. Any government will prefer to spend the final year of its term to please the electorate not to bring about radical reforms that might cause near-term negative impact.

Even in the case of GST, not all will be dancing to the same tune. A high GST rate will initially push up costs of some services and, thus hurt some sections. Too low rate will hit those states who bet big on manufacturing. Hence, certain short-term issues are to be foreseen when the GST kicks in. But that is an unavoidable risk the government has to take to salvage the larger reform goal. Its better to do it now than later.

There are few more reasons why this is the opportune window for the BJP to do that. The Congress party, the main opposition that has been opposing the Bill, is at its weakest point now after setbacks in recent state polls and Rajya Sabha biennial polls. The Congress-party is also structurally weak on account of lack of strong leadership and revival strategy in place.

Also, most of the regional parties, including Trinamool Congress, have flashed the green light for the GST in the larger national interest. If one goes by the comments of finance minister Arun Jaitley after the a recent meeting of GST council, all states but Tamil Nadu, have agreed in principle. This includes the Left-ruled Kerala. Even AIADMKs broader attitude seems to be favorable.

If Modi use his personal charm to convince the regional parties and force the Congress on a consensus path, itll be a major victory for him politically and a big boost for the economy. In the House of 245, the NDA has raised its tally to around 74 members post the recent biennial polls, while the UPA has around 71 members. If the BJP manages the support of regional parties too such as Trinamool Congress (12 seats) and AIADMK (12 seats), BSP (10 seats) and JDU (13 seats), GST looks like a bigger possibility.

The BJP has already agreed in principle upon two of the demands raised by the Congress party on GST waiving of 1 percent inter state levy and joint dispute resolution mechanism. The GST council meeting has also agreed that issues of dual control and revenue neutral rate should be dealt by the Empowered Committee. As far as capping the GST rate in the Bill is concerned, the Congress and its crown price Rahul Gandhi is actually asking for the moon.

If the GST rate is included in the Bill, if the GST rate needs to be modified in the event of an exigency, parliament's approval will be required. This is a foolish thing to do in a vast country, where multiple states have different geo-political conditions. If Gandhi blackballs the Bill for this reason, hell find no supporters anywhere. As the projected revival agent for the Congress party, it will be a politically disastrous move for him to do.

The smart thing for Gandhi to admit a temporary defeat on this point and play it up as a political sacrifice made for the larger economic cause. Modi should exploit the Congress partys weak position and put pressure for an early consensus. With all states falling in line, the Congress doesnt have a strong case to make to prevent the Bill.

The larger point here is that clearance of GST will silence Modis critics on the lack of reforms progress. Multilateral agencies, including International Monetary Fund, have cautioned time and again that maintaining reform pace is critical for India to retain its advantage among emerging market peers. In this context, GST passage is critical.

It is also time for Modi to radically rethink his stance on privatization of PSU assets. Modis stated view that the government has no business to be in business doesnt go well with his actions after he took over as PM. There has been no serious intent to privatise the entities in the banking sector and the likes of Air India, which every year return to the government with a begging bowl to seek money.

This is particularly true for the banking sector, where the huge pile-up of non-performing assets (NPAs) has necessitated substantial chunk of additional capital, which the government has to provide in the case of state-run banks. A fiscal constrained government cannot keep feeding PSBs. Modi should privatise these entities in phases and let the private capital come in. He should announce the governments intent and prepare a roadmap to initiate the privatisation drive.

The governments disinvestment process has largely been a failure, evident from the gap between its ambitious targets and final achievements. NITI Aayogs recommendation for disinvestment in companies, including Air India and immediately winding up 26 state-run firms and leasing out several loss-making hotels, is a step in the right direction.

The short point is this: Modi is ruling the Centre at the most opportune time. Lower global commodity prices, improved domestic fiscal situation, a reformist RBI governor and BJPs gaining strength in the upper house are Modis big advantages. Its time for him to give the final reform push.
NEW DELHI India has imposed a 20 percent tax on sugar exports to keep a lid on domestic prices, the government said on Thursday, a move that is likely to boost global prices of the sweetener.

Food minister Ram Vilas Paswan said this week the government plans to introduce a 25 percent tax on sugar exports to maintain local supplies.

Sugar output in India, the world's no. 2 producer behind Brazil, is expected to decline this year due to a drought in major growing regions, while global prices have risen to two-and-a-half year highs.

(Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj; editing by Adrian Croft)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New Delhi: A 25-year-old woman returning home after watching a movie was abducted and gang-raped in a moving car by three men, police said on Thursday. All three accused have been arrested.

The woman, accompanied by a female friend, was returning home after watching a movie at PVR Priya in Vasant Vihar in south Delhi around 3.15 a.m. on Wednesday when she was abducted.

In her police complaint, the woman said the accused raped her inside the moving car before dumping her near Poorvi Marg in the Vasant Vihar area.

The woman's friend made a call to the police control room immediately when the woman was kidnapped. She later told police that the two of them were walking towards Munirka when the three men riding a car approached them.

"One of the men pulled my friend inside the vehicle and drove away," the police officer quoted her as saying.

The car was traced since the victim's friend had noted down its registration number.

"With the help of its registration number, we traced the car owner in Geeta Colony (east Delhi). The accused were arrested within hours after the medical examination of the woman confirmed rape," the officer said.

The accusedidentified as Udit, 30, Vineet, 23, and Rajveer, 22 were later sent to judicial custody by a local court on Wednesday.

Police said that Udit is a driver by profession while the other two culprits are jobless. All the accused are the residents of Nangal Dewat area in south Delhi.

"The accused are first time offenders. We could not find any past criminal records against them," Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Nupur Prasad told IANS, adding the whole operation was completed within an hour after the accused were tracked down to a location in Geeta Colony.

In a similar incident last week, a woman had alleged that she was gangraped in a moving car and was dropped in south Delhi's Hazrat Nizamuddin area nearly two-hours after a drive. However, the case was later found to be fake and the woman was arrested along with his brother for extorting Rs. 10 lakh for withdrawing the gangrape complaint.
Kochi: The Centre would do everything possible to reach an amicable understanding between Kerala and Tamil Nadu on the inter-state Mullaperiyar Dam issue, BJP National General Secretary Ram Madhav said on Thursday.

His remarks assume significance in wake of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's stated position that a new dam in the downstream more than a century-old existing structure could be achieved only with the support of the Tamil Nadu and the Union governments.

"Mullaperiyar has been an issue that has been there simmering between two states for a very long time. Our government...will certainly do everything possible for both these sides to come to an amicable understanding on this issue," Ram Madhav, flanked by Union ministers Suresh Prabhu and Sanjiv Kumar Balyan, told a press conference in Kochi.

He said BJP wanted to see that the issue between the two neighbouring states was settled amicably.

"We are in favour of finding an amicable solution for the Mullaperiyar dam issue between the two states," he said, when asked whether the party-led Union government would step in to find a solution to the problem.

The two states are at loggerheads over the Mullaperiyar dam, located in Idduki district of Kerala but is under the administrative control of Tamil Nadu as per a 999-year lease agreement and caters to irrigation requirements in southern districts of Tamil Nadu.

While Kerala had been pressing for a new reservoir on the ground that the existing dam was in a dilapidated state and weak, Tamil Nadu is opposing it saying the structure was safe.

Noting that both Tamil Nadu and the Supreme Court have not agreed to Kerala's demand, the Kerala Chief Minister had recently said that he wanted an internationally acclaimed panel of experts to study the strength of the dam.

Vijayan had also said that the neighbouring state's support was essential to resolve the matter.
Beijing: Acknowledging that India is "inching closer" to get membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Chinese official media on Thursday said if New Delhi is admitted into the elite grouping, "nuclear balance" between India and Pakistan will be broken.

Stating that India's entry into Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", an article in the state-run 'Global Times' however said China could support India's inclusion in the 48 member nuclear club if it "played by rules".

Written by Fu Xiaoqiang research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the article a second in as many days by the same daily highlights China's strident and vocal opposition to India's entry into NSG and concerns that its all weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'."

"New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month," the article said mentioning for the first time India's progress in getting support from Mexico and Switzerland.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article titled "Beijing could support India's NSG accession path if it plays by rules".

A commentary in the same daily on 14 June had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan. "If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," it said.

"As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region," it said.

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

"It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office," it said.
Srinagar: Four militants and a soldier were killed in a gun battle near the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday, officials said.

The troops engaged a group of infiltrators who sneaked into the state early in the morning in the northern district of Kupwara.

Military sources told IANS here that two militants were killed initially and two more guerrillas were gunned down later.

A soldier injured in the initial exchange of fire died.

The army noticed suspicious movement on the LoC at Tangdhar.

"When challenged, the infiltrating group fired at the soldiers, triggering a gun battle," a source said.

"The operation is still on but the infiltration attempt by the terrorists has been foiled," the source added.

On Wednesday, a solider succumbed to his injuries and a terrorist was shot dead by the army after militants infiltrated into Kupwara district, near Macchil sector.

Five soldiers were also reportedly injured in that operation.
The teacher is the fulcrum around which school education revolves; it is rightly said that an education system is as good as its teachers observes the National Policy on Education 2016. The report highlights the problem of teacher management that poses a serious challenge to robust education system. The report states, "While many initiatives have been taken in the last few decades to improve the process of teacher recruitment, transfers, deployment, and competencies, the system, by and large, continues to be chaotic, and not capable of providing good quality school education."

There are more than 80 lakh teachers in elementary schools, and more than 20 lakh in secondary and higher secondary schools in the country. Around 59 percent of elementary teachers are in government schools; and yet, around 8 percent of all elementary schools in the country are single teacher schools. Indian society and culture has traditionally accorded a position of great respect to teachers. They were respected for their knowledge, wisdom and commitment to their students. Unfortunately teachers have, during the last 30-40 years, have lost that respect, and are not now seen in very favourable light. The committee believes there is no possibility of improving the quality of our school education unless we restore the credibility of our teachers.

Teacher Shortages

It is estimated that there is a shortage of more than 5 lakh teachers in elementary schools; nearly 14 percent of Government secondary schools do not have the prescribed minimum 6 teachers. Typically teacher vacancies are more in tribal areas and far off villages where teachers are reluctant to be posted due to inadequate facilities.

Teacher Absenteeism

Teacher absenteeism has plagued our school system for many years. Teachers are unionised and politically influential as a result of which there is neither political will nor administrative initiative to remedy the situation. Some states are trying to address the malaise by strict vigilance and monitoring, and use of mobile phones and bio-metric attendance recording, but the situation is far from satisfactory.

Teacher Recruitment and Transfers

Teacher recruitment and transfers have become a major source of corruption in many parts of the country. Some states are trying to address the problem by introducing transparent and merit-based processes but elsewhere this remains a blot on the school education system.

Teacher Grievances

There are thousands of cases filed by teachers and pending in courts, mainly concerning their service conditions. Lack of efficient systems to address teacher grievances has affected teacher morale. There is also resentment among teachers against their deployment for several non-academic activities in spite of injunction of the RTE Act.

School Leadership: Role of Headmaster/Principal

Till recently most states did not have an independent position of Headmaster in primary schools; one of the teachers was given additional responsibility of Headmaster. While Government secondary schools did have the post of principal, many remained vacant for years due to delays in recruitment, litigation and administrative apathy. Lack of effective leadership in Government schools has contributed to indiscipline among students and teachers and falling academic standards.

Teacher Education and Training

This has been discussed in another section of the report; suffice to say here that majority of teachers lack adequate subject knowledge and required teaching skills which has resulted in poor quality of classroom transaction and learning levels. Committees recommendation in this regard states, The Committee is convinced that unless there is a competent and committed cadre of teachers, quality of school education cannot improve. The committee feels there is an urgent need to address the above major issues relating to teacher shortages, absenteeism, recruitment and transfers, teacher grievances, and professional development of teachers in a comprehensive and effective manner.

Teacher Education, Deployment and Professional Development

The poor quality of school education is a direct result of poor quality of teacher education and teacher training. Teaching which was at one time considered a noble profession is no longer the career choice of our youth, particularly in urban India. Students with better scores at higher secondary and graduate level prefer engineering, medical, management, and commerce courses and generally those who do not get admission in any of these courses join B.Ed. as a last resort.

In their interactions in different parts of the country, the committee was told time and again of the poor quality of our B.Ed. courses. The one year programme did not equip the future teacher either with subject knowledge, nor teaching skills. For many years B.Ed. degrees could be obtained by correspondence courses until these were shut down. The quality of most other colleges offering B.Ed. programmes was far from satisfactory. State Governments and NCTE became partners in proliferation of such colleges which were nothing but degree shops.

The condition of Primary Teachers Training Colleges has been no better. For many years eligibility for admission to such course was 10th pass and after one year diploma these teachers could teach students of Class 7 and even Class 8. Even today the entry level eligibility for a primary school teacher is only 12th pass, graduation is required for teaching in upper primary level. The rapid expansion of primary education and demand for teachers led to mushroom growth of substandard diploma colleges, and many teachers certified by these colleges became teachers in Government primary schools.

For the last 3-4 decades, Government schools have employed teachers with low academic achievement, and inadequate pre-service training. It is only recently that RTE Act has laid down graduation as entry level qualification for teachers of upper primary sections, and NCTE has prescribed compulsory 2 year B.Ed. course which would result in Government schools getting better quality teachers in future; till then the system will have to depend on in-service training of lakhs of not-so-proficient existing teachers for improving learning standards in Government schools.

Our education system has paid a heavy price for neglect of teacher education. The committee feels that some drastic, even unpopular measures will need to be taken to improve the quality of teacher education and teachers.
Bengaluru: The inaugural flight of India's indigenous basic trainer aircraft, Hindustan Turbo Trainer-40 (HTT-40), would be undertaken on Friday in Bengaluru and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar would witness it.

The inaugural flight of HTT-40, designed and developed by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, is likely to take place at 9.15 am at the HAL Airport in the city.

The sortie is expected to take place for about 25 to 30 minutes, HAL officials told PTI.

Aimed at being used for the first stage training for all flying cadets of the three services, HTT-40 had made its maiden flight after much delay on 31 May.

Officials said detailed design phase of HTT-40 was launched in August 2013 with HAL's internal funding and was completed in May 2015 and from there it has taken 12 months to fly the first prototype.

Indian Air Force is expected to procure seventy HTT-40 aircraft.

HAL has said that the programme aims to achieve its operational clearance by 2018, and towards this the company will be manufacturing three prototypes and two static test specimens.

Designed to meet the current demands of the Air force, there is also a provision to include weapons for the trainer aircraft.

According to officials, the indigenous content on HTT-40 is close to 80 per cent with about 75 plus systems out of the total 90 on the aircraft sourced from local players and sister divisions of HAL.

HTT-40 aircraft weighs about 2,800 kg and has Turbo Prop engine of 950 shp class.
In a major breakthrough in the Jisha murder and rape case, the Kerala police have made their first arrest two days ago in Kochi. According to OnManorama, the suspect, who is a migrant worker from Assam, has confessed to committing the gruesome murder of the law student in Perumbavoor.

Reacting to reports that the accused, Amir Ul Islam, a migrant labourer from Assam, had been nabbed by the Special Investigation team, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, "Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From Wednesday onwards, the accused was under police radar."

Praising the efforts of the Kerala police, he said, "The people of Kerala were waiting for such a news. The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police."

The Chief Minister also tweeted:

One suspect has been taken into police custody in connection with the Kerala student rape and murder case, says Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan  ANI (@ANI_news) June 16, 2016

Sources stated by The New Indian Express, said that four friends of the suspect have also been detained.

Even as OnManorama reported that the DNA results have confirmed that Islam is Jisha's killer, PTI says that the 23-year-old's arrest is expected to be recorded on Thursday, only after which his DNA samples will be taken.

Reports by CNN News18 said that Jisha had rejected sexual advances from the suspect, earlier on the same day that she was killed. According to a report by Manorama Online, Jisha tried to resist the accused's attempts to rape her, after which she sustained injuries. Later, when she asked for water, the accused gave her alcohol.

Last week, police had secured CCTV camera details from a shop from the victim's neighbourhood, which reportedly showed the suspect following the law student in the neighbourhood of her residence, hours ahead of the incident on 28 April.

"We have secured the CCTV camera details from the shop hoping that it might have captured visuals of the suspected killer," a senior police official probing the case said.

According to the reports, CCTV evidence secured from the fertiliser depot showed a man wearing a yellow T shirt following a woman, believed to be the victim, who was on her way home after getting down from a bus at Vattolippady near Perumbavoor around 1.30 pm that day.

"It is not sure whether the people found in the footage are related to the incident," the official had told PTI.

Meanwhile, the owner of the fertiliser depot, Shibu, had told reporters that the police probing the case took the hard disc of the CCTV footage on Wednesday.

Newly appointed Kerala police chief Loknath Behera, while visiting the house of the 30-year-old woman on Sunday, had said a scientific probe has been launched to nab the culprits involved in the crime.

Noting that the probe into the sensational case was progressing well, he had said it might take some time to nab the criminals.

The case is being investigated by a team headed by ADGP B Sandhya.

The newly sworn-in LDF government in one of its first decisions had appointed the senior woman IPS officer as head of the new team to probe the case.

The Kerala High Court had last week rejected the plea for a CBI probe into the case, noting that the new Special Investigation Team had been set up in the case.

The woman, who hailed from a poor family, was allegedly raped and brutally assaulted using sharp-edged weapons before being murdered at her house on 28 April.

The murder was in focus during the 16 May Kerala Assembly poll campaigns with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for "tardy" progress in the investigation and its failure to nab the culprits.

With inputs from PTI
Jabalpur: A 33-year-old man was killed and six others injured, five of them seriously in a clash

between two camps in the early hours of the day over an objectionable photo of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in a WhatsApp messenger group, police said.

Area City Superintendent of Police Inderjeet Balsavar said that one Umesh Verma who sustained injuries in the clash, succumbed to his wounds at a hospital, while undergoing treatment.

According to Congress corporator Jatin Raj's group, knives were freely used by the rival group inside the Vijay Nagar Police station where they have gone to lodge a complaint - a charge denied by police who had to call their colleagues from other police stations to discipline the two groups after they turned violent.

Raj has created a group named 'Vijay Nagar Friends' on WhatsApp for people to stay connected in his locality.

Prashant Nayak allegedly posted a photo in the WhatsApp group, which showed Sonia "washing utensils" with a satirical caption saying (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi has reduced Congress President to such a position, CSP Balsavar told PTI.

The two groups gathered at Ahimsa Chowk little after last midnight and a heated argument took place between them over Sonia.

In the meantime, acting on a tip-off the police reached the spot and asked them to come to police station to sort out their differences, the CSP said.

When the two groups reached police station, an alleged altercation took place between them and one Umesh Verma was stabbed, who was rushed to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries, alleged Animesh, a member of the Congress corporator group.

He demanded police should make public the footage of CCTV camera at the police station to bring out the truth. CSP Balsavar said to bring situation under control, police resorted to cane charge but denied that violence took place inside the police station.

The violence took place when the groups were en route to the police station, the CSP said.

Advocate Nayak was among those who sustained injuries and have been admitted to a hospital, he said, adding people of both the groups have been booked and further investigations are on.
Windhoek: President Pranab Mukherjee arrived in Namibia on Wednesday for a two-day state visit during which key negotiations on Uranium supply for civil nuclear use will take place besides other bilateral issues.

Namibia despite being one of the largest producer of Uranium and having a treaty with India for peaceful use of nukes does not supply the fuel to India because of Palindaba treaty among African Union countries which bars export of the element to non-NPT signatories.

"Regarding uranium, there is a proposal which has been pending at their end basically because of African Union decisions. Whether we can move them along, in terms of becoming a supplier of uranium for us that is one of the key objectives that we have there," Secretary (Economic Relations) Amar Sinha had said.

The treaty signed in 2009 with India sets the framework for long term supply of uranium but it is pending ratification by Namibian Parliament.

"Namibia as you know is the fourth largest producer of uranium, but they have an African Union Agreement which sort of impedes the implementation of agreement. Namibia has not been able to break that unity, the binding commitment that they took, it's called the Pelindaba Treaty," Sinha had said.

During talks, India might raise the issue of uranium supply impressing upon Namibia.

"And the fact is because this MoU which we thought will kick in quickly has not happened and we have had been looking in signing agreements with other countries like Kazakhstan, Australia and few others. So eventually if we actually meet our requirements from non-Namibian sources, it will be a loss for the Namibian industry," he said.

The strength of Namibian economy is mineral with mining sector which contributes around 11 per cent to the GDP and it fetches 50 per cent of their foreign exchange earnings making them highly dependent on that.

Another material in abundance is diamond but the mining works through long-term contracts, monopolies and cartels so despite being largest users of diamonds, it does not reaches Indian shores directly from Namibia.

"We are one of the largest users of the diamonds in terms of the polishing and finishing but it doesn't comes directly to us and I don't think there is possibility right now because they have a long term commitment with DeBeers. Indian diamond merchants based outside in Antwerp source it from DeBeers and then it gets shipped to India," he said.

India will offer assistance to Namibia in setting up Mining Engineering trading set up.

Four MoUs will be signed during the trip which include Deputation of Indian Army for training purposes to Namibian Defence Forces, Centre of Excellence in Information Technology.

"Then there will be a MoU between Namibian Institute of Public Administration and Management and our own IIM Ahmedabad and also between their Public Administration and our Lal Bahadur Shashtri Academy which trains civil servants because they are focused on developing their own capacities," he said.

Mukherhjee's visit which is the third and final leg of his three-nation tour is first by an Indian Head of State to Namibia in the last 21 years.

"Here in Namibia, the last visit of Head of State was made 21 years ago in 1995 and then Prime Minister (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee had visited in 1998. At that time legendary Sam Nujoma used to head Namibia and he was particularly beholden to India and was a very close friend to India politically," he said.

The visit of Mukherjee is also seen as "renewing political contact" with Namibia which has emerged as a country where democracy has firmed its roots, he added.

Besides crucial talks with President Hage G Geingob, Mukherjee will also address Namibian Parliament, besides visiting Independence Memorial Museum, Heroes Acre Memorial, addressing students and faculty of Namibia Institute of Science and Technology, a visit to Okapuka ranch and addressing Indian community.
What do we Indians call thee,

Our Twitter-happy Mantri ji?

Dear makes her ears red,

Mata ji is cruelly inept,

For aunty, her hair isn't gray,

See, already not many in fray.

What do we Indians call thee,

Our anger-on-nose Queen Bee?

Bengal has a patent over Didi,

UP says there's just one Behenji,

Punjabis would object to Bibi,

That's just Jagir Kaur, unfortunately.

So, what do we call thee,

The one with a Yale degree?

Smriti would not make you happy,

And Irani could just be geography.

No first name, no surname,

Oh, what a terrible linguistic shame!

What do we Indians call thee,

Dear saas that kabhi bahu thi?

You deserve, nee, demand a salutation,

That won't lead to a silly situation,

Where, imagine our sorry plight,

You perceive a non-existent slight.

Since we tried all options in Hindi,

From history, across Geography,

Amma, Bibi, Behenji and Didi,

Saas, bahu.. everything that could Be,

Let's see if we can find for thee,

Something suitable in Queen's Angrezi.

Would you mind, Her Excellency,

If, out of bewildered awe and fear,

Instead of epistolary niceties like Dear,

We called you just Her Petulancy?

For, since you joined Modi's Cabinet,

We have seen you regularly fulminate.

Woe betide the one who asks a question,

Seeks a clarification or asks for action.

For everything you have just one formula,

Treat them all like poor Rohith Vemula.

Deny, discard, humiliate, grind them to dust,

In the end, accept defeat they all must.

For everything you have just a steely glare,

Bellicose words with which you declare:

"Will chop off my head, if I am wrong,"

This war cry has been your standard song.

That's why, Her Excellency of HRD,

Her Petulancy we'd love to call Thee.
The Ministry of Home Affairs on Thursday cancelled the registration of activist Teesta Setalvad's NGO Sabrang Trust under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), reported CNN News 18.

In its order, the Home Ministry said various irregularities were found in the Sabrang Trust during inspections, and that after careful examination of the NGO's response, its registration was cancelled.

Teesta and her husband Javed Anand work as chief functionaries of the trust.

"... In exercise of powers conferred by clauses (b), (c) and (d) of sub-section (1) of Section 14 of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act 2010, the central government hereby cancels the permanent registration of Sabrang Trust with immediate effect," the order said.

According to the Home Ministry, Teesta and Anand are also working as directors, co-editors, printers and publishers in a company named Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt Limited (SCPPL) and publish a magazine called Communalism Combat.

The home ministry has claimed that Sabrang Trust has spent an amount of Rs 50 lakh for SCPPL, violating the mandate of the FCRA. By this action, the NGO has not only unauthorisedly utilised the foreign contribution for the purposes of an unregistered entity but also utilised that amount for activities totally prohibited by FCRA, it said.

The order said the NGO has transferred an amount of Rs 2.46 lakh from its foreign contribution designated account to Sabrang Trust domestic account, thus mixing domestic and foreign funds and violating the rules. Sabrang Trust has made direct payments of approximately Rs 12 lakh from FCRA designated account to Citi Bank and Union Bank of India on account of credit cards belonging to Teesta and Anand respectively.

"Sabrang Trust spent foreign funds to buy sanitary napkins and wet wipes for Teesta Setalvad and earbuds for her husband Javed Anand," The Times of India quoted from a press statement issued by the MHA.

The statement further said that the Sabrang Trust paid credit card bills of Teesta and husband Javed Anand.

According Firstpost, the government had earlier ordered a CBI probe into the transfer of funds by US-based Ford Foundation to SCPPL and even froze a bank account of the firm on 26 June, 2015.

SCPPL was allegedly in violation of rules of Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) in accepting a donation of $2.9 lakh from Ford Foundation without getting clearance of the Home Ministry.

According to the rules, an organisation or a private firm can accept donations from overseas only after it is registered under FCRA.

The Gujarat government had earlier asked the Home Ministry to take action against Ford Foundation, alleging that the US-based organisation was "interfering in internal affairs" of the country and also "abetting communal disharmony" through an NGO run by Setalvad.

The home ministry headed by Rajnath Singh has cracked down on a number of NGOs which have got foreign funding in the past couple of years, but controversy and criticism have marred many of his ministry's decisions, reported Firstpost.

The government in all cancelled the foreign funding licences of nearly 9,000 charities last year.

The Prime Minister has criticised what he calls "five-star activists" and a government intelligence report in 2014 reportedly said they were working with foreign powers to undermine India's economic growth.

Teesta has pursued the cases of post-Godhra riots victims in Gujarat when Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of the state. Another NGO run by Teesta and Anand -- Citizens for Justice and Peace -- has already been put under prior permission category, thus making it mandatory for the organisation to take permission from the Home Ministry before accepting or utilising any foreign contribution.

With inputs from PTI
Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Almost all homebuyers wish to buy an abode that they feel like going back to after a days hard work. Besides the basic amenities and glamorous provisions homes offer today, your home is the place where you want to live, grow and be at peace.

Not too long ago with the hasty development of city life, more and more people were growing fond of the speedy lifestyle amidst the commotion of the city. Mid city skyscrapers were every homebuyers aspiration. Life was quickly morphing into something more mechanical and it was rapidly replacing the slower lifestyle.

An increasing number of homebuyers opted to live right in the middle of the busiest streets to experience the 21st century style of life. However, in recent times, homebuyers have surprisingly shown a drastic difference in preference. From what it looks like, they have hit the rest period with an increasing proclivity towards the more relaxed lifestyle while maintaining their active participation in their day-to-day routine activities.

The present home buying fad shows residential projects that proffer secured, calm and up-to-date residential facilities while being centrally located in an urbanized milieu have a growing demand.

'Godrej Properties' Flagship Project' The Trees as a residential project is a new multiple-use urban locality positioned on the developing and well-connected eastern brink of the city. The Trees project is a judiciously designed strong plan of residential, retail and commercial uses on a 34-acre site all centered on a large four-acre landscaped park. This project provides the best aspects of city life while being close to nature at a pace suited for its residents.

The Trees is an unprecedented mix of developments and practices that guarantees the growth of a potential vibrant community. It flaunts skillful architectonics using the latest technologies. The construction is spread across 34 acres of land in Vikhroli with greeneries all around till your eyes can reach. Accessibly located in Vikhroli, Mumbai, the residential project enjoys close proximity to all social facilities.

The Trees allows you to lead life positively in the most comfortable manner experiencing the global level facilities. There are tree lined walkways, an experience centre, urban farms and more. Godrej Properties seeks to offer its residents a commercially vivacious, visually attractive and an everyday place to live and work. If you are someone who is looking for a relaxed life close to nature yet banded with the madness of the city, you are meant for the experience that The Trees has to offer.

This is a sponsored post.
Home Ministry official B.K. Prasad on Thursday dismissed the charge that he tutored a witness in the probe relating to missing documents in the Ishrat Jahan case.

Prasad in a statement said: "All officers inquired by me are or have been senior officers in the government and are fully capable of answering questions relating to the probe on their own and there is no question of the alleged 'tutoring'."

Prasad's assertion comes a day after the one-man inquiry committee which he headed submitted its report on untraceable documents in the Ishrat Jahan case.

A report in the Indian Express said Prasad tutored a witness on what answers he should give during the examination.

According to the report, a call by the India Express to Prasad was put on hold while he was having conversation on another telephone regarding the missing papers probe.

The report said it was evident from the conversation that Prasad was speaking to an officer who was scheduled to give his statement to the probe committee, and it was later found that the officer was Ashok Kumar, a Joint Secretary in Parliament's Hindi Division and nodal officer for monitoring the court cases in the Department of Commerce.

Prasad, however, denied the report and said that it was "unethical" to record his call without permission.

"No evidence has been produced establishing that Mr Ashok Kumar testified being 'tutored' during my alleged conversation," he said in the statement.

"First of all, it is unethical to record my conversation that also with another officer without my permission and knowledge. More importantly, the conversation had nothing to do with the point of query the journalist had. Secondly, what is he saying is only one side of the conversation, without being aware of what the other side, i.e., Mr Ashok Kumar, was asking or clarifying with me," he said.

"Thirdly, the officer with whom my conversation has been quoted was enquired by me on 26th April, 2016, and the questions which have been quoted from my alleged conversation were never asked from Mr. Ashok Kumar and the answer which is quoted by the newspaper was never given by him," he said.

Prasad, according to the report published in the paper on Thursday, told the officer: Aapko kehna hai ki Maine ye paper nahi dekha. Seedhi si baat hai (You have to say, I have not seen that paper. Its as simple as that).

He also told the officer giving a different reply would raise doubts about the officer having played a role in the disappearance of the papers.

Aapko itna toh kehna hoga ki ya toh woh file hi maine kabhi zindagi mein deal nahi kiya, kabhi file ko dekhne ka kabhi mauka hi nahi mila (You will have to say, at least, that either you have never dealt with that file in your life, or have never had a chance to see it)...I dont think you have seen that file at any point... Bas, that is what I want from you: I have not seen that file at all, Prasad told the officer to say, according to the report.

He also reported to have said: And another question will be, Did anybody give you these documents to be kept separately with you? Aap bologe, Nahi, mere ko kisi ne nahi diya. (You will say, No, nobody gave them to me).

Prasad led one-man inquiry committee and on Wednesday submitted its report where it said that four of the five missing documents in the case continue to be untraceable.

The Ishrat Jahan case refers to the gunning down of four alleged terrorists in Gujarat on June 15, 2004, which the CBI had alleged were killed in a staged encounter.

Later, several officials associated with the case, including those from the home ministry and the Intelligence Bureau, accused the then Congress-led UPA government of changing an affidavit for political gains.
As the politician mumbled apologies and explained his position regarding the twitter spat to my state leader on the mobile while our contingent drove back from Bhagalpur last night; I watched his supporters trend a hashtag in my name, irrespective of their netas public apology. As those who scream murder and whip themselves up into a feminist frenzy at the drop of a hat tried to endear themselves to me on Twitter, I reflected on the near Jerry Maguire like moment that was upon me.

Growing up in a middle class environment (Lutyens zone excluded), many girls who would walk to school / college and back home every day, go to the bazaar to get groceries and adequate sabzi in a given budget, would often be told if accosted by a boy or a bunch of them, dont look up and keep walking straight. Dont respond or retort no matter how humiliated you feel. But there would be those rebellious kinds (yours truly included), who would question why? Why not respond? Why zip it? The standard answer such a question begets is It is not worth it. Nuksaan tumhara hoga , ladke ka kuch nahi bigadega.

Cut to- you grow up and become a TV star. But while you still struggle to make a mark you are advised that if you go to parties and mingle enough, you shall get work. You stoutly refuse as you believe that your talent and hardwork are the only precursors to success, how full your social calender is should not matter. You are scoffed at and brushed off as naive. But lo and behold, you do succeed. You bag all the awards that matter, TRPs soar through the roof and all the naysayers grudgingly accept that you have arrived (though they do take occasional pot shots as their work profile demands).

And then politics happens. Not when you are a fading star, not when you are unemployed but when you are at the peak of your success. You are given the hard battles to fight, you accept (Chandini Chowk & Amethi were no cakewalk my friends). You work from the grassroots up. Serve as Youth Wing Vice-President in State, become State Secretary, 5 times National Executive Member, 2 times National Secretary and once the National President of Womens Wing. You become possibly the youngest ever woman to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha, speak on issues ranging from the budget to womens security. You represent your Nation in the International Parliamentary Union, get unanimously elected to represent the Asia Pacific region,become part of the drafting committee on the Syrian crisis and yet some intellectual says anpad the minute you are given the opportunity to serve as HRD Minister.

And suddenly the rules change. You, the creature who on every podium exalts the right of women to speak their mind is told dont speak your mind. Ignore the trolls no matter how high they serve in their political systems. Ignore public attempts to humiliate you through sexual innuendos kyunki nuksaan tumhara hoga unka kuch nahi bigadega.

Ask any working woman, what do you do when your colleague does not finish their assignment on time brushes off your attempt at ensuring accountability and if push comes to shove is cocky enough to gang up with other boys in the club to paint you as either too wound up, to dumb or not competent enough; the successful women always tell you that they continue to crack the whip. For there will come a time when the colleague says Fine! Ill get the work done.

So while many working women battle this challenge in confined working spaces, I spat it out on twitter for my office travels with me. But then there are some who say why talk about yourself at all, surely one day they shall realise the amount of work you have done. To them is dedicated the following checklist which is otherwise drowned in the noise:

 Over 4 lakh 17 thousand school toilets made in one year  check

 First time ever all NCERT school text books from classes 1 to 12 available free online - ePathshala- check

 First time ever all Kendriya Vidyalayas are providing SMS to alert parents of student attendance and lesson details- Shala Darpan- check

 First time ever benchmarking of student performances in CBSE schools-Saraansh- check

 First time ever, school evaluation system focused on learning outcomes-Shaala Siddhi- Check

 First time ever, a mentoring and scholarship program to send our girls to technical institutes- UDAAN- check

 First time ever, all teachers trained in inclusive education to facilitate students with special needs- check

 First time ever, 10,000 undegraduate scholarships and exposure visits for students from the Northeastunder Ishan Uday and Ishan Vikas- check

 First time ever, focused interventions to improve Math and Science levels- Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan- check

 First time ever, focused interventions to improve reading and writing levels- Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat- check

 First time ever, the UGC Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal of Sexual Harassment of Women Employees and Students in HEIs to protect women employees and students- check

 First time ever, a portal dedicated to Indian languages- Bharatvani-check

 First time ever, collaborated effort to focus research on the development goal posts of the country- IMPRINT- check

 First time ever, SAARC Declaration on Education check

 First time ever, Aryabhatas bust installed at UNESCO headquarters to acknowledge Indias contribution in mathematics and astronomy-check

 First time ever,IIT fee waivers for economically weaker sections- check

 First time ever, collaborations with Standford, University of Pennsylvania and MIT to strengthen HEIs in India- check

 First time ever, focused effort to bring high quality international faculty to teach in India through GIAN - check

 First time ever, a credit framework to pursue formal education and vocational training- SAMVAY- check

 First time ever, a national institutional rankings framework- check

 First time ever, a grassroots based consultation on developing a national policy, including over 2 lakh village education committees-check..

.... and the list goes on...

So to those girls walking with their heads down, look up and speak up; those women cracking the whip in their offices and asking their counterparts to finish the work assigned in the time frame prescribed, lead on. As for me, next time you blog  remember the sagely advice given when you joined politics, till you dont have your own coterie of journalists, dont expect support to come pouring in through editorials kyunki nuksaan tumhara hoga unka kuch nahi bigdega

Regards,

Aunty National
Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh BJP chief Keshav Prasad Maurya on Thursday alleged that besides law-and-order problem, it was the "terror of a section of the society" which led to alleged Hindu migration in Kairana.

"Besides law-and-order problem, the exodus has happened because of the terror unleashed by a particular section of the society in Kairana," he told reporters.

He also alleged that the district administration failed to check migration because of "government pressure".

Maurya said the report of the probe team sent by BJP to conduct an on-the-spot assessment of the "large scale migration" will be handed over to Governor Ram Naik on Friday.

Regarding the state government yesterday suspending SSP, Gorakhpur Anant Dev after a Samajwadi Party leader's son was reportedly beaten up in the police custody there, Maurya accused the SP of adopting "double standards".

"The Gorakhpur SSP was immediately suspended, but no action was taken against the Mathura SSP, despite large scale violence at Jawahar Bagh there," he said.

Asked about some Congress leaders' demand of bringing Varun Gandhi into the party fold and projecting him as the Chief Ministerial candidate, Maurya said Varun Gandhi is a BJP MP and such a demand by some Congressmen points towards their "mental bankruptcy". The BJP leader said a two-day state working committee meeting of the party will be held in Moradabad, beginning 9 July.

Indicating that the working committee will be reconstituted before the meeting, Maurya said a new team will take part in it.

He also said BJP national president Amit Shah will soon attend meetings of booth-level presidents at four places in the state.
Arni: Punjab Congress in-charge Kamal Nath resigned as he did not want the "genuine issues" plaguing the poll-bound state to get diverted amidst the politically-motivated allegations levelled by the opposition parties, AICC general secretary Digvijaya Singh said on Thursday.

Nath, who was assigned the responsibility as the General Secretary in-charge of Punjab as well as Haryana only four days back, quit last night in a clear bid to control damage in the coming Assembly polls as rivals have been raking up his alleged role in the riots which followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

"Kamal Nath had no role at all during the 1984 (anti-Sikh) riots. The opposition parties have suddenly woken up to the allegations against him in the view of ensuing Assembly elections and started accusing him of something he had no role in," Singh told reporters.

He said Nath stepped down as he did not want the "genuine issues", including drug menace etc, get diverted.

He also criticised AAP convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Earlier in the day, Singh addressed a protest rally of farmers against "non-fulfilment" of promises made by BJP in run up to 2014 polls.
New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Kamal Nath resigned "on his own volition" as party in-charge of Punjab, anguished over the "mischievous" campaign against him by opponents regarding the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the party said on Thursday.

Talking to media, Party's senior spokesman Anand Sharma dismissed suggestions that the Congress buckled under pressure to replace him and insisted that the "dishonest, perverse, and mischievous" narrative by opposition against him was done with an eye on elections.

Replying to questions, he, however, made it clear that Kamal Nath continues to be the AICC General Secretary in charge of Haryana. On Sunday, he was appointed to the post and given charge of both Punjab and Haryana. Punjab goes to polls next year.

Reports earlier quoting party's chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala had it that Nath had resigned as General Secretary of the AICC.

Asked about the AAP's charges against Nath, Sharma said AAP has "no credibility and has an opportunistic agenda" and was targeting the Congress leader with an eye on polls.

"The demand to reopen cases is ridiculous because there is no case ever. You cannot reopen which does not exist," he said when asked about the AAP demand.

Claiming that Kamal Nath is the senior-most member of the Lok Sabha, who has also been party General Secretary and Union Minister, Sharma said that he decided to quit "out of his anguish" after being "condemned day in and day out despite being not guilty".

Noting that Kamal Nath's resignation letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi is "very clear," he said that the Congress leader has "never been accused of anything and even 32 years after the incident there has never been a case against him."

"He resigned on his own volition. He requested that this situation has been created to deflect attention from the real issues of corruption, misgovernance, drug mafia, syndicate and lawlessness and we have to respect his sentiment", Sharma said.

"For us, this is a non-issue...Congress rejects with contempt that it has buckled under pressure.This has been done for narrow political gains with an eye on elections. Congress has not buckled under pressure"

Targeting the detractors of Congress, he said "You cannot just assault the reputation of any person. In our law, Supreme Court says right to reputation is equal with right to life and you cannot recklessly and irresponsible manner hurl accusations at somebody."

"It was a dishonest, mischievous and perverse narrative being built against Nath."

The former Union Minister had said in the letter to Gandhi that he was "hurt by the developments of the past few days wherein an unnecessary controversy has been created around the tragic 1984 riots in New Delhi."

His action came as Akali Dal, BJP and AAP had kept up attack on him and the Congress over his alleged role in the anti-Sikh riots which followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
For decades, BJP general secretary Anil Jain was an accomplished surgeon who wielded a scalpel to remove malignancy from the human body. But of late, he has graduated from his profession to become a politician, and has assumed the role of justifying the unjustifiable.

In a recent NDTV news segment, Jain came out with a weird logic on the forced migration from Kairana  a Muslim-dominated town in western UP. In his view, though, a group of Hindus migrated from the town due to lawlessness, the fact that most of criminals belonged to a particular community (Muslim) could not be ignored.

For a doctor wedded to the Hippocratic oath that sets the moral and ethical standards for a medical practitioner, such a diagnosis of social malaise is worse than any disease, to say the least.

Anil Jain completed his medical degrees from the prestigious King George's Medical College (KGMC) and was an active member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). In the late eighties and nineties, he led many student agitations in KGMC and was assisted vigorously by many of his Muslim colleagues.

Jain, in his heart of heart, knows too well that his logic is perverse in Uttar Pradeshs context. As residents of Uttar Pradesh, criminals owing allegiance to a community or caste are hardly beholden to filial loyalties.

Did the Brahmins from Uttar Pradesh feel more protected because of the dominance of a formidable gangster from Gorakhpur  Harishankar Tiwari? Were the Thakurs of eastern UP getting protection from BJP-sponsored gangsters such as Brajesh Singh and his loyalists? Can we say that Muslims of Ghazipur, Varanasi and Allahabad feel more secure because of the stranglehold of gangsters such as Mukhtar Ansari and Atique Ahmed?

Those aware of Uttar Pradeshs political history would confirm that the induction of criminals into politics in UP cut across party lines. In the seventies, former UP Chief Minister Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna protected a formidable gang known as the Buxi-Bhandari gang. Harishankar Tiwari was promoted as a Congress leader by another former Chief Minister of UP, ND Tiwari. Tiwaris successor in UP, Bir Bahadur Singh promoted a Thakur gang led by Virendra Shahi  who was later bumped-off by his rivals.

But this traditional political-criminal nexus gave way to an utterly communalised underworld in wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

One of the most powerful warlords of eastern UP, Braj Bhushan Sharan Singh, became the most prominent cheerleader of Advanis rath yatra. In Gonda, Basti and Bahraich, where Muslims constitute a large part of the population, the narrative about looking at the underworld with a Hindu/Muslim binary worked wonders. Munnan Khan, a parliament member from Gonda, was projected as a villain for the riots in the district in which Muslims were at the receiving end.

After the emergence of BJP in 1991 as a ruling party in the state, the Hindutva forces embraced in its fold, a large section of the underworld. For instance, Ramakant Yadav, who figured as a formidable gangster of Azamgarh in the police records joined the BJP with much fanfare and won the Azamgarh Lok Sabha seat. Similarly, in western UP, criminals exploiting caste cleavages have often found religion as an easy camouflage to hide their criminality.

But there is little doubt that as compared to Hindu gangsters, Muslim gangsters heading crime syndicates in the state are far fewer in number and thrive mostly on the support of Hindu criminals.

Perhaps the underworld in the Hindi heartland appears quite secular in its approach to crime and persecutes Hindus and Muslims in equal measure. If Anil Jain would jog his memory, he would recall the bemoaning of his colleague and now Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi over the induction of a shady Muslim leader from Bihar and when he (Naqvi) had asked, Will the BJP induct Dawood Ibrahim next?

Jain and other leaders of his ilk have been deliberately twisting the narrative in Kairana, and it appears to be highly exaggerated out of context to suit the BJPs determined attempt to mobilise the electorate on religious lines  a strategy bound to fail in UP.

That Jain, a professional surgeon, chose to persist with lies to further his own political ambition is only indicative of how politics tend to infect even doctors. But Jain is not alone  he has an example to emulate from his own profession  Dr Pravin Togadia of the Vishva Hindu Parishad.
A day after Kamal Nath's resignation as the party-in-charge of Punjab, Sheila Dixit, the former Delhi Chief Minister is expected to take over the now vacant post, reported India Today.

While there has been no official announcement from Congress, Dixit's appointment as the Congress in-charge of Punjab is supposed to happen within the next two days.

Dikshit, a veteran leader of the party was born in Punjab and is said to enjoy a considerable amount of support in Punjab, reported India.com. She had last served as Governor of Kerala.

The report further said that the Congress came under attack for Nath's appointment as party in-charge of Punjab and Haryana. Kamal Nath has been accused of playing an instrumental role in the 1984 Sikh riots in Delhi.

Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal referred to Naths appointment as the ultimate insult to Sikhs, reported The Indian Express.

"The Congress is rewarding Kamal Nath for obeying (then Prime Minister) Rajiv Gandhi's orders during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi," AAP leader and eminent lawyer HS Phoolka had said at a press conference on 13 June. Citing documents, AAP leader and an advocate fighting for the victims of the 1984 riots, HS Phoolka, had claimed that Nath was a part of the mob that attacked the Rakab Ganj Sahib Gurudwara in Delhi on 1 November, 1984

In his defence Nath said he had been "absolved" of all charges by the Nanavati Inquiry Commission.

Responding to attacks Nath claimed the charges to be "political" and said that these were intended at expanding AAP's base in the state that goes to polls next year. "Since the party is contesting Assembly polls in Punjab I think the perception again is very clear. This is politics." said Nath.

Nath in his resignation letter expressed his gratitude to Sonia Gandhi for his appointment and wrote, "I am practitioner of Nehruvian politics and maligning of the Congress party using false accusations is unacceptable to me."
Bangkok: Thai police raided a Buddhist temple complex Thursday to arrest a popular abbot accused of accepting $40 million in embezzled money but were thwarted by thousands of his followers who said he is too ill to be taken into custody.

The raid at Wat Dhammakaya, a monastery north of Bangkok known as one of the wealthiest in Thailand, began at 5 am and was broadcast live on TV, in a tense showdown following a months-old standoff. But hours later police couldn't arrest the abbot, Phra Dhammachayo, after searching all the areas in the complex but one.

"There is a last area we could not enter because the followers would not allow us," said police Maj. Suriya Singhakamol, the deputy chief of the Department of Special Investigations.

Dhammachayo's case has enthralled the nation with its twists and turns and the conflict between law and religion it has posed. Several scandals in recent years have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand.

Although the police withdrew for the day after the fruitless raid, Suriya said "our operation has not ended. The (arrest) warrant is still valid so we will have authority to carry out the operation. According to our information, he is still inside."

Dhammachayo is accused of money laundering and links to embezzling 1.4 billion baht ($40 million) from a now-defunct credit union. He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three police summonses and an arrest warrant. He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he was too ill to report to police for questioning.

Outside of Thailand it may seem odd that a monk should be able to defy law-enforcement officials so brazenly. But a law which forbids arrest of a monk in his robes, for fear it would mar the sanctity of the clergy, has repeatedly put police in an awkward position. Authorities are also reluctant to force a showdown with the monk's thousands of supporters, fearing violence.

Buddhism is the national religion and one of three core pillars of Thai society along with the monarchy and nationhood. Monks occupy a privileged position and are granted many concessions, including not paying taxes and being exempt from arrest until they are defrocked.

Their position in Thai society was reflected in the police operation  they paused the raid to allow the monks to eat their once-a-day meal at 11 am.

"Since this morning, we have given full cooperation to the police," temple spokesman Phra Sanitwong Wuttiwangso told an afternoon news conference on the temple grounds. But he said groups of followers were refusing to let police enter certain areas. "A number of followers, no matter what we tell them, they will not listen. They are asking (police) for consideration, because the abbot is ill. He has not fled the temple."

The main gates to the temple, a futuristic construction resembling a golden UFO-like dome, were blocked with shuttle buses brought in by the monk's followers. Police still managed to enter in as thousands of devotees held up signs condemning the police for what the devotees say is a politically motivated investigation.

Dhammachayo leads the largest religious sect in Thailand and has a cult-like following. He first got into trouble two years ago when it became known that the former head of the Klongchan Credit Union Cooperative, a Dhammakaya devotee, had donated such large sums to the temple that it sent his business into insolvency.

The official was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
That Pakistan is going hyper on developments in spheres of defence and security in India is becoming increasingly noticeable.

There could be multiple reasons for this  one being a joint China-Pakistan strategy to hype the negatives of rising India, another being of Pakistan deflecting from her own black deeds of promoting terror and shifting focus of the public from selling away Pakistan to China.

But then there also appears to be some genuine fears that are freaking out the Pakistani establishment.

Making a policy statement in the Pakistani Senate on the deployment of nuclear-armed missiles on submarines in the Indian Ocean, Sartaj Aziz, Adviser to Nawaz Sharif on Foreign Affairs, said that Indias nuclear-armed missiles deployed on nuclear-powered submarines pose a threat to the maritime security of the Indian Ocean Regions (IOR) 32 littoral states, besides upsetting the strategic balance in South Asia. He added that Pakistan was considering a proposal for tabling a resolution at the UN General Assembly session later this year, calling for making the Indian Ocean a nuclear-free zone.

This is truly laughable as Pakistans Shaheen-III nuclear missile itself covers areas of Middle East and West Asia, including Israel. Besides, Pakistan is going ahead with deploying tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) on her naval vessels. Making Indian Ocean a nuclear-free zone is a poor joke of Sartaj Aziz. Is Pakistan going to tell Chinese nuclear submarines to leave the nukes at home before docking at Gwadar and Karachi?

Aziz also said, We are planning to highlight the dangerous implications of Indias plans to nuclearise the Indian Ocean at all relevant international fora. but what about Pakistan nuclearising terrorist outfits? Pakistan appears to be squirming because of India's recent nuclear-capable test of K-4 (SLBM) from INS Arihant, as part of the efforts to develop second-strike capability  a relevant reaction to Pakistans perpetual nuclear sabre rattling and first-strike nuclear policy. This was followed by India testing Ashwin, its advanced AD missile as part of the upcoming Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system.

The Ashwin missile firing was conducted as part of developmental trials. The interceptor was launched nearly three minutes after the target mimicking an enemy missile was fired from a warship anchored in the Bay of Bengal. The missile successfully demonstrated its killing capability, this being the 12th test of Ashwin. The Pakistani media stated that it was not known what the capability of the tracking systems linked with the Indian BMD are, but that it was a cause for concern for Pakistan as an effective system would to a certain degree negate Pakistans strategic strike capability. It will compel the armed forces to counter it, a solution which would prove to be both expensive and time consuming, adding that India has once again contributed to an unhealthy arms race between the two countries.

Significantly, the F-16s are capable of carrying the B-83 nuclear bomb in toss bombing mode; entails pull up to a 45 degree climb angle 12 kms short of target, release the bomb and then roll off the top in the opposite direction for getaway  a fighter flying at tree-top height is almost impossible to intercept.

As per media reports, Pakistan has dumped the idea of getting F-16s from the USA now because of the costs involved, but it is reportedly considering buying used F-16s from Jordan  this may be a first in the used fighter jets market, akin to used cars. That ISRO too is a major cause for Pakistan getting shivers is obvious. India's GSLV Mark III project aimed at carrying four ton payloads, including future manned missions, got a boost with ISRO successfully test-firing on ground CE-20, the first indigenous high-thrust cryogenic rocket engine for more than its full duration. The engine design was totally indigenous and the fabrication of major subsystems of the engine was carried out through Indian industries. GSLV-Mk III is expected to make its first flight by the end of 2016.

Indian scientific advances, particularly of this nature, are anathema to Pakistan that has been bristling with jealousy all these years. Pakistan has declined Prime Minister Modis offer to SAARC nations to benefit from NAVIC  India's satellite navigation system. It is amusing to note that Pakistan complained to the UN that Indias draft of the Geospatial Information Regulation Bill is a violation of UNSC resolution on Kashmir. But then Kashmir is not part of Pakistan by the latters own Constitution. But more importantly, the UN is aware that the entire state of J&K was acceded to India by the then ruler of J&K, Maharaja Hari Singh through an Instrument of Accession signed on 26 October, 1947, post massive Pakistan infiltration. Also, the Cease-fire Line (CFL) drawn under the 1949 Karachi Agreement was under aegis of the UN Commission. So, Pakistani objections have no basis.

Significantly, India did not object to Pakistans 2014 Mapping Law that also regulates geospatial data, although some digital activists had raised objections on the side. Pakistans ministry of foreign affairs issued a statement citing serious concern it expressed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the UNSC President about the proposed Indian law. India has already clarified that the draft Geospatial Information Regulation Bill is applicable to Indians.

The latest of course is Pakistan crying hoarse that India, if given the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) membership, will fuel an arms race, while China, mothering Pakistan, supports the Pakistani stand, saying it would touch a raw nerve (Pakistan's) and start a nuclear arms race.

China, of course, is furious that India has become a member of MTCR, which has been denied to China. Besides, China must pay back gratitude to Pakistan for letting PLA deploy on Pakistani territory. The US has already snubbed Pakistan on the issue with State Department Deputy Spokesman Mark Toner stating, This is not about an arms race and its not about nuclear weapons. This is about the peaceful civil use of nuclear energy, and so we certainly hope that Pakistan understands that.

But getting back to the main issue, as Indian economy flourishes and India makes R&D advances in defence, Pakistan is likely to go broke or trying to keep pace especially when China doesnt dole out free lunches. The alternative of course is to become another Chinese province.

The author is veteran Lieutenant General.
Dhaka: Suspected Islamists claiming to be Islamic State followers have threatened to kill a Hindu priest of the Ramakrishna Mission in Dhaka if he continues to preach in "Islamic Bangladesh", prompting authorities to beef up security around the area.

"The security of the (RK) Mission has been intensified as the priest filed a general diary with us," duty officer of the city's Wari police station told PTI.

The officer declined to disclose the name of the priest.

The mission officials were not immediately available for comments but police said the priest received the threatening letter last evening on a computer-composed IS letterhead with perpetrator identifying him as one AB Siddiqui.

"Bangladesh is an Islamic state. You can't preach your religion here. If you continue preaching, you'll be hacked to death with machetes between the 20th and 30th," the officer quoted the letter as saying.

The letter, he said, did not mention any month.

Last evening, a 50-year-old Hindu Mathematics lecturer at the Nazimuddin Government University College, was hacked with lethal weapons by the attackers who stormed his residence in Madaripur in southwestern Bangladesh.

The lecturer is the only Hindu victim to survive an attack by the Islamists, who have hacked to death four other members from the community in recent months.

Suspected Islamists have killed a number of secular activists, Hindus and other minorities across the country in recent months prompting authorities to launch a nationwide anti-militant clampdown since Friday.

Bangladesh authorities have detained nearly 12,000 people in a nationwide crackdown to halt a spate of deadly attacks. Some of those arrested were linked with outlawed Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh.

Though most of the attacks were claimed by the Islamic State or its affiliates and other similar extremist groups, the Bangladesh government has repeatedly dismissed the claims and said the attacks were carried out by homegrown outfits linked to the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
Brandenburg an der havel: The foreign ministers of Germany and France on Wednesday cautioned against a Brexit vote, with Berlin's top envoy warning it could eventually lead to the "disintegration" of the European Union.

"It would be a shock for the EU that would require mutual assurances that the EU continues to stick together and that a very successful decades-long process of integration doesn't in the end turn into disintegration," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Speaking at a joint press conference with French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault ahead of the 23 June referendum, he added: "We can both say that we want the majority in Britain to make the right decision, and the right decision from our point of view can only be to remain in Europe."

"Europe would be lacking a lot if Great Britain decided to leave."

The 'remain' camp, led by conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron, has been set back by a series of polls putting the Brexit supporters in the lead in recent days.

"The British are facing a choice," said the head of French diplomacy, during a joint visit with Steinmeier to Brandenburg near Berlin.

A vote that would leave Britain as an outsider to the EU is "a reality which we don't want".

He added that "polls go up and down and it is normal and this will happen, I think, to the very end".

Ayrault promised eurosceptics that the bloc would keep evolving with the times.

"Europe can't be static, it must keep moving," he said. "Today it faces contradictions, slow-downs, difficulties, anxieties and fears. We want to give Europe a new dynamism."
Toronto: Canada's House of Commons has voted to render the country's national anthem gender neutral.

The legislation to change "O Canada" still requires the approval of the Senate. The bill changes the second line of the anthem from "true patriot love, in all thy sons command" to "in all of us command."

It passed 225-74 on Wednesday in the House of Commons.

The change was proposed by ailing Liberal lawmaker Mauril Belanger, who was diagnosed last November with Lou Gehrig's disease and may not live to see it become law.

As the vote began, Liberal lawmakers stood and applauded Belanger, who sat in the House in his wheelchair. Belanger's disease is a particularly aggressive version of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS.

The opposition Conservatives opposed the bill.
Beijing, Jun 16 (PTI) Downplaying reports of scuffles between Indian and Chinese troops during PLA troops

transgression into Arunachal Pradesh, China on thursday said it was committed to peace and tranquility at the border areas.

"We have noted that the Indian official has clarified the situation saying that there is no transgression as reported in the media," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said replying to a question on reports of scuffles between the two forces.

"China's position on the East part of the border line is clear," he said in apparent reference to China's claims over Arunachal Pradesh as part of Southern Tibet.

"As I said it was a regular patrol by Chinese border troops and China is committed to the peace and tranquility of the border area," he said.

In his comments on the border transgression by over 200 Chinese troops into Arunachal Pradesh on 9 June, Lu on Wednesday said that China and India border has not yet been demarcated.

"It is learnt that China's border troops were conducting normal patrols on the Chinese side of the LAC (Line of Actual Control)," Lu said.

The big contingent of PLA soldiers stayed in the area for few hours and left for their base, the reports said.

On the issue of incursions, China has been maintaining the same stand whenever its troops crossed into the Indian side of the LAC stating that both countries have difference perception about it.

The LAC covers the 3,488 km long border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh, India asserts that the dispute covers the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war.

The two countries have so far held 19 rounds of boundary talks by Special Representatives.

The incursion into Arunachal Pradesh came at a time when China is opposing India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on the ground that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Asked about reports that Chinese vessel tailed Indian naval ships taking part in the Malabar naval exercises in the Pacific along with the US and Japanese navies, Lu said, "I am not aware of the details. It seems that some people are intent to linking this incidents and everyone should be careful about their hidden motives."
Beijing: India, China and Myanmar should establish a joint dialogue mechanism to restore the Stilwell

Road connecting the three countries to revitalise trade in the region, Chinese media said on Thursday.

"The Stilwell Road was called the Ledo Road, but renamed after Stilwell at the suggestion of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. Ledo, a small town in northern India, is the starting point of this legendary road," an article in the state-run Global Times said.

From Ledo to Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan province, the road is 1,800-km-long.

It is obvious that the road that connects China, India and Myanmar bears economic significance for South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, it said.

"Driven by the economic potential and the need to reinforce transport network in the region, an increasing clamour of voices in China, India and Myanmar is calling for the restoration of the road. It is time for the three countries to deliberate over project," it said.

"The road is not intact. China has completed the reconstruction of the section from Kunming to the

Sino-Myanmese border and connected the road to China's well-developed road system," it said.

"With China's help, Myanmar has also accomplished the section from the Sino-Myanmese border to Myitkyina. However, the sections from Myanmar to India and within India are barely usable. Some parts have already been deserted due to bad conditions," it said.

"Myanmar has started to renovate part of the road, but the reconstruction is not smooth due to lack of funds and technologies and the presence of Indian and Myanmese ethnic insurgents in the area," it said.

"India is worried about the reconstruction of the road for two reasons. First, the road starts from Assam, a state where local militants have become increasingly active. Second, China-made products can flood into the Indian market through the road," it said.

"But India has toned down the two concerns because New Delhi has adopted a Look East policy, and the process of advancing the strategy requires the stability of northern India, in which a well-functioning road system matters a lot. Thus, recently Assam has started to fix part of the road," it said.

China as a "more developed country" should play a major role in the reconstruction work, it said.

"All three countries should set up a joint dialogue mechanism, in which their concerns and problems can be put on the negotiating table, including how to make peace with ethnic insurgents, and the three countries can find out solutions together. China can be the initiator of the communication

mechanism," it said.

"The restoration of the Stilwell Road will revitalise the promising path, which will interconnect Southwest China, South Asia and Southeast Asia, and merge the region into an emerging market. The ethnic groups living in this area can seize the chance and prosper," it said.
BALTIMORE A Maryland medical examiner twice told investigators that the death of black detainee Freddie Gray from a broken neck in a police van was an accident, a Baltimore detective testified on Thursday.

Taking the stand for the defence in the van driver's murder trial, Police Detective Dawnyell Taylor said Dr Carol Allan had contradicted her official report that Gray's death in April 2015 was a homicide.

"She said that it was a freakish accident, and that no human hands had caused his injury," she said as the defence for Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. began presenting its case in Baltimore City Circuit Court.

Goodson, 46, is accused of second-degree depraved heart murder, manslaughter and other charges. Gray's death triggered protests and rioting in Baltimore and fuelled a nationwide debate on police treatment of minorities.

Prosecutors have argued that Goodson caused Gray's death by giving him a "rough ride." But his lawyers say Gray caused his own injuries.

In a sometimes-testy exchange, prosecutor Michael Schatzow accused Taylor, whose investigation led to charges against Goodson and five other officers, of not sending progress notes to prosecutors about Allan's comments.

Taylor answered that she was initially not the lead detective but had noted everything later when it was typed up. Referring to another prosecutor in the Gray case, Janice Bledsoe, she said: "I had a problem with her integrity."

Schatzow responded that Bledsoe had made allegations about Taylor's own integrity. Judge Barry Williams, who is hearing the high-profile case in a bench trial, then called up both sides for a conference.

Gray, 25, was arrested for fleeing officers unprovoked. He was bundled into Goodson's van shackled and was not seat belted, a violation of department protocol.

Allan, an assistant medical examiner, has stood by her judgement that Gray's death was a homicide.

Another defence witness, Donta Allen, who was transported with Gray in the van but separated from him by a metal partition, said he recalled nothing about the ride.

"I don't know nothing," Allen, who is imprisoned for a probation violation, told defence lawyer Matthew Fraling.

Police have said Allen told investigators that Gray was thrashing around in the van. Allen has recanted that statement and said he only heard a faint tapping, according to court documents.

Goodson is the third officer to be tried in Gray's death. One of the earlier trials ended in a hung jury, while the other ended with an acquittal.

(Writing by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Alan Crosby)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would invite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the US, but not for an official state dinner.

The business mogul made the remark on Wednesday when he mocked his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton for her criticism of Trumps willingness to speak with Kim, calling the former secretary of state a rank amateur, Politico reported.

Shes been doing it forever and she still doesnt get it, Trump told supporters at a rally in Atlanta.

What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? Its called opening a dialogue. Its opening a dialogue.

Trump, however, speculated that the meeting probably would never happen.

But theres nothing  I wouldnt go there, he said.
Cairo: The cockpit voice recorder of the doomed EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board has been found and pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt's investigation committee said on Thursday.

The development raises hopes that investigators would find clues as to the cause of the 19 May crash.

The Egyptian committee said the so-called black box  one of the two on board the plane  has been damaged but that the vessel searching for the wreckage managed to safely pull the "memory unit which is the most important in the recorder."

The recorder was retrieved in "several stages," the committee said, and is currently being transferred from the vessel, the John Lethbridge, which pulled it out, to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. Once on shore, it will be handed over to the members of the committee who will unload and analyze the data.

Thursday's announcement comes a day after the committee said the vessel John Lethbridge, which is operated by US company Deep Ocean Search that was contracted by the government to join the search for the plane debris and flight recorders, has spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was en route to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on 19 May between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast, killing all 66 people and crew.

The cause of the crash remains unclear. No terror group has claimed responsibility for bringing the plane down.

The aircraft has two black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, which has yet to be found.

On Sunday, Egyptian investigators said time was running out in the search for the black boxes and that nearly two weeks remain before the batteries on them expire and they stop emitting signals.
Clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan border guards started on 12 June when Afghan forces prevented the Pakistani border guards from installing a gate at Torkham. For the last few days, the situation has been tense. Any construction near Torkham (no mans land or zero point) is a violation of bilateral agreements between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The build up to this conflict started when Pakistan stopped allowing movement of people without visas from crossing Torkham to the Pakistani side of the Durand Line, not recognised as the international border by Afghanistan.

Pakistan Today reported that the Pakistani government was claiming that it took the step to crack down on terrorism but Pashtuns insist that curbs are placed on the travel of common people and travel of terrorists is facilitated by Pakistan. Pashtuns live on either side of the Durand Line and have parts of their families living on both sides.

Durand Line is a colonial era border treaty signed between British and Afghan Emir Abdur Rahman Khan in 1893. It delineated spheres of influence during The Great Game and split the Pashtun population living on either side of it.

Firstpost reached out to CEO Abdullah Abdullah and ex-chief of Afghan Intelligence Agency National Directorate of Security (NDS) Amrullah Saleh to discuss the recent clashes and the kind of military cooperation they expect from India.

What are your comments on the clashes between forces of Afghanistan and Pakistan at Torkham?

Abdullah's media office: The fight in Torkham was started over new installations. Pakistan wanted to have new installations and that led to clashes. According to the agreement we had, Pakistan can't build any gates/installations in the zero point. Pakistan started the fight and Afghan forces are fighting in defence of their country. We are committed to protect our people against every foreign aggression as we have done in the past. We think this fight isn't serving anyone's interests and Pakistan should support our diplomatic efforts to overcome this challenge through diplomatic channels.

Amrullah Saleh: Pakistan has, in recent months, suffered on a number of issues; (former Taliban chief) Mansours killing was a massive humiliation for them. It showed there is no such thing in Pakistan called full spectrum deterrence and that their space can be easily breached. It also showed that they were harbouring terrorists openly on their soil. Also a number of articles, op-eds and commentaries in reputable and prestigious US publications like the National Interest which ran a story called Don't be scared to squeeze Pakistan, pushed them to focus on a diversion strategy. This time the diversion strategy can't be an attack against India or another massive infiltration in Kashmir or another Mumbai. So they identified Afghanistan as a soft spot with international importance and significance. Pakistan army started to build installations on our side of the Durand Line and the Afghan forces responded bravely. That is the story.

What kind of military cooperation does Afghanistan expect from India, both in the short term and long term?

Abdullah's media office: India is a great friend of Afghanistan. India supported Afghanistan unconditionally and we thank India for the support they provided to us. Our first request from all of our partners and friends is to enhance our defence capabilities. Help us improve the performance of our National Security and Defence Forces (NSDF). We want our partners to equip our forces so we can fight terrorism and all other relevant threats on our own.

Amrullah Saleh: I echo the Indian strategists who say there is no exit option for India. Exactly. India as a rising power has shown morale leadership in the region and has tried to stand on the side of values, state systems and civil society. So India is already seen as a country associated with education, health, urban development, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, higher education and media. That is the soft power of India projected. But Afghanistan needs hard capabilities to defend itself against the terror onslaught which is backed by our nuclear neighbour Pakistan. So in that regard, my suggestion is that it is in the interest of both countries to have close defence, security and intelligence ties as the enemy is common, the threat is common and we share a destiny interlinked. India can also do a lot diplomatically by connecting the region and engendering a narrative of cooperation and harmony. There has been some work in this regard but more can be done. So I encourage India to work closely with ANDSF.
Kolkata: Still clueless about her whereabouts, the family of Indian aid worker Judith D'Souza, who was kidnapped in Kabul on 9 June, on Tuesday said they are hopeful of India securing her release.

"So far there is no news of her whereabouts. But we are happy with the efforts of the Indian government in trying to trace and secure her release. The Ministry of External Affairs has been constantly in touch with us," Judith's brother Jerome told IANS.

Judith, 40, working with Aga Khan Development Network, an NGO, was kidnapped while she was returning home after a dinner at a friend's place in the Qala-e-Fatullah area of Kabul.

Hailing from Kolkata, Judith had been working with the NGO in Kabul as a senior technical adviser since July 2015.

"Both the Indian and Afghan governments are endeavouring to secure her release and we are very hopeful of getting her back," he added.

While External Affairs Minister Suhsma Swaraj had called up the family assuring all steps to secure Judith release, the Kolkata-based D'Souzas in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed for her release.

Besides sympathisers and well-wishers appealing to the governments of both countries on social media networking pages for Judith's swift and safe release, political parties including the Congress have urged the Modi government to put pressure on Afghanistan over the issue.
The FBI and San Diego police are investigating a threatening message posted on Craigslist that praised the shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, officials said on Wednesday.

Darrell Foxworth, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's San Diego division, confirmed the agency was looking into the post and attempting to identify the person responsible.

Both the FBI and San Diego police said there were no known credible threats to the region.

Local broadcaster KGTV reported that the message was posted in the men-seeking-men section of Craigslist in San Diego.

"Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name. Those people were walking diseases, bug chasers, and thank god for AIDS and 9-11 and now Orlando. San Diego you are next," the message read, according to KGTV.

A viewer took a screenshot of the message, which included a picture of a revolver being fired, and sent it to the news outlet before it was flagged and removed from the website, KGTV reported.

A gunman opened fire at the Pulse club in Orlando on Sunday, killing 49 people and wounding dozens more in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The shooter, identified as Omar Mateen, was shot to death by police after a three-hour rampage through the nightclub.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Peter Cooney)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: The gunman - Omar Mateen - , who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub club in Florida's Orlando this week, wrote a series of Facebook posts about the "filthy ways of the West" before and during the shooting rampage inside the club, a top US Senator has said and asked the founder of the social networking site to assist in the probe.

Such an assertion by Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs came amid reports that Mateen, 29, made as many as 16 phone calls, including three to 911 and one to a local television stations during the several hours of early Sunday morning when he carried out the deadliest shooting in American history.

In a letter to the Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Johnson said it is his understanding that Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content. "I appreciate Facebooks support of the law-enforcement investigation into this attack and previous attacks. While Facebook is not a target of the Committee's inquiry, I respectfully request your assistance with the Committees inquiry," he said.

Johnson said according to information obtained by his staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen. On 12 June, 2016, Mateen apparently searched for 'Pulse Orlando' and 'Shooting'. Mateen also apparently posted "America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State...I pledge my alliance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi...may Allah accept me."

He then posted "The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the West" and "You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic State vengeance." In a final post, Mateen apparently wrote, "In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the USA."

In his letter on Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained and posted by Fox News, Johnson said his staff learned that in May 2016, Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists. On 4 June, 2016, Mateen apparently searched 'Baghdadi Speech'.

"My staff has also learned that Mateen apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FB searches, including searching for specific law enforcemen offices," Johnson said asking full support of Zuckerberg i its investigations.

"I ask that you please provide all Facebook data on Mateen's activities on his account and any affiliated Facebook accounts, including but not limited to activity logs, Faceboo timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts," he said.

Meanwhile, CNN said officials are looking into the possibility of charging Noor Salman, widow of the slain gunman Mateen, claiming that she knew about the planning of the shooter.

It said she has been giving conflicting statements to the police. Salman told investigators that Mateen told her he had interest in carrying out a jihadist attack -- but she denied knowing of any specific plans, it said.

She initially denied that when Mateen left the house Saturday she had any inkling he was going to do anything violent. The two have been married since 2011 and have a three-year-old son. According to CNN, Mateen called one of its affiliate News13 in Orlando in the middle of the shooting.
Wachula Ghost, a hacker with an anti-IS agenda, has been haunting the Twitter accounts of Islamic State supporters, replacing the terror and hate messages with pornographic content.

Close to 160 members of the terrorist group recently found their accounts filled with pictures of nude women and texts that read, I [heart] porn., reports Washington Times.

The hacker's journey began when he bought his first computer at 16, took it home and disassembled it. When he put the machine back together, it refused to run, pushing him to take help from a local big-box store tech guru, who eventually taught the teen how to hack.

The teen is now a part of a community of international activist hackers called Anonymous, who had declared war against IS post the attacks in France in 2015, reports Deccan Chronicle.

He explained his motives in a telephonic interview conducted by The The Washington Post.

Daesh (Islamic State) doesnt like porn, Ghost told The Washington Post. They dont like women in general. We just started using [porn] to poke fun at them and diminish their presence online."

By tweeting sexual content from IS accounts, the Ghost said he wants to weaken the voices of IS recruiters and chase them off of popular social networks, reports the The Washington Post.

"The madder they get, the happier I get," he was reported as saying.

Despite the general appreciation that Ghost seems to be receiving on Twitter for his agenda against the IS, many do not approve of his method. Putting up pornographic content on Twitter, experts say, could hurt the sentiments of a number of communities, and of those who have nothing to do with the IS, says the report.

Ghost admitted that children should not be exposed to pornography, but he reiterated that his hacktivism was targeted at Islamic State recruiters and those who look for the groups propaganda., reports Washington Times.

Ghost has doubled his efforts post the Orlando shooting that killed 50 people. Many of the IS accounts were replaced with gay pride posts as well. The hacker made a list of all the compromised IS accounts called jacked accounts on Twitter and the social networking site soon deleted all of them.
Three babies have been born in the United States with birth defects linked to likely Zika virus infections in the mothers during pregnancy, along with three cases of lost pregnancies linked to Zika, federal health officials said on Thursday.

The six cases reported as of 9 June were included in a U.S. Zika pregnancy registry set up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency said it will begin regular reporting of poor outcomes of pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The CDC established the registry to monitor pregnancies for a broad range of poor outcomes linked to Zika.

The U.S. cases so far involve women who contracted the virus outside the United States in areas with active Zika outbreaks, or were infected through unprotected sex with an infected partner. There have not yet been any cases of local transmission of the mosquito-borne virus in the United States. Health experts expect local transmission to occur as mosquito season gets underway, especially in Gulf Coast states, such as Florida and Texas.

Two cases of babies born with microcephaly in the United States had previously been reported in Hawaii and New Jersey. The rare birth defect is marked by unusually small head size and potentially severe developmental problems.

The CDC declined to provide details of the three cases it reported on Thursday.

Poor birth outcomes reported include those that are known to be caused by Zika such as microcephaly and other severe fetal defects, including calcium deposits in the brain indicating possible brain damage, excess fluid in the brain cavities and surrounding the brain, absent or poorly formed brain structures and abnormal eye development.

The lost pregnancies include miscarriage, stillbirths and terminations with evidence of the birth defects.

The plan to issue updated regular reports is intended to ensure that the most up-to-date information about pregnancy outcomes linked with the Zika virus is publicly available, the CDC said.

The agency said the information is essential for planning for clinical, public health and other services needed to support pregnant women and families affected by Zika.
Beijing: China criticised US President Barack Obama on Thursday for hosting the Dalai Lama at the White House, despite efforts to avoid irking Beijing by holding the meeting off-camera and out of the public eye.

Obama carried out what has become a political rite in Washington, spiriting the exiled Tibetan religious leader into the White House through the back door  and prompting the usual Chinese denunciations.

"No matter in what way the US leader met with the Dalai Lama, the meeting violated the US promises of acknowledging Tibet as a part of China, not supporting Tibet independence and not supporting separatist activities," Lu Kang, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters in Beijing.

"Such a meeting will hurt China-US mutual trust and cooperation."

Since coming to office, Obama has hosted the Dalai Lama four times. Each time, Obama has tried to limit the fallout by holding the meeting behind closed doors.

Obama was criticised in 2010 for obliging the 80-year-old, clad in his characteristic red robes and flip flops, to leave the White House through a rear entrance and walk past piles of snow and bags of rubbish.

This latest confab took place in the Map Room, not the Oval Office, and the press was not invited -- which meant no images of the two Nobel peace laureates emerged from the meeting.

"The personal nature of their meeting would explain why the president received the Dalai Lama in the White House residence, as opposed to the Oval Office," said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

Obama calls the monk, who is revered by Tibetans but portrayed by Beijing as a dangerous separatist, "a good friend".

He made a highly-publicised public appearance with the Dalai Lama last year at a prayer breakfast in Washington, calling him "a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion".

The spiritual leader  who has lived in exile in the north Indian town of Dharamsala since a failed 1959 uprising  has for decades called for more Tibetan autonomy rather than independence.

Beijing maintains he is a "wolf in monk's clothing" and vigorously lobbies  often successfully  against foreign leaders meeting him.

In a statement after the meeting, the White House said Obama had "encouraged meaningful and direct dialogue between the Dalai Lama and his representatives with Chinese authorities to lower tensions and resolve differences".

Obama also "emphasised his strong support for the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions, and the equal protection of human rights of Tibetans in China", according to the White House statement.

But some exiled Tibetans questioned the value of such meetings, urging bolder action from Washington.

"This will be the fourth time President Obama and His Holiness the Dalai Lama are meeting, yet there has been no significant change on the issue of Tibet," said Tenzing Jigme, head of the Dharamsala-based Tibetan Youth Congress, which lobbies for independence rather than greater autonomy.

"The situation inside Tibet is dire and requires immediate intervention and so I urge President Obama to take a strong stand and pressure the Chinese government to resolve the issue of Tibet."

Many Tibetans consider any criticism of the Dalai Lama to be heresy, but some younger exiles argue that his long campaign of diplomacy has achieved little and call for more assertive policies.

China has ruled Tibet since the 1950s and many Tibetans say Beijing represses their Buddhist religion and culture  charges China denies.

More than 130 ethnic Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest at Beijing's rule, campaign groups and overseas media have said. Most of them have died.

The Dalai Lama has described the protests as acts of desperation that he is powerless to stop.
BRUSSELS The NATO alliance agreed on Wednesday to hold onto its broad geographic layout of bases in Afghanistan, a move that could make it easier for the United States to keep more troops there as Kabul struggles with a resurgent Taliban threat.

President Barack Obama has planned to slash the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from about 9,800 to 5,500 before he leaves office in 2017, despite calls from former commanders and envoys to halt the drawdown.

NATO defence ministers gathered in Brussels signalled a willingness to stay, with Britain's Michael Fallon saying flatly at a news conference: "This is the wrong time to walk away from Afghanistan."

He warned that any collapse of the country would send thousands more migrants heading to Europe at a time when the continent already faces uncontrolled migration flows.

Fallon said U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter told the ministers during closed-door talks that U.S. troop levels were again being reviewed.

Carter declined to confirm that at a news conference, saying it was "not a topic of discussion." He said Obama would be willing to consider security conditions in Afghanistan and their impact on force levels later in the year.

"I expect he will do that again as the year goes on," Carter said.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Carter did not tell NATO allies during the closed-door discussions that troop levels were being reexamined.

Obama has shown a willingness in the past to alter his plans in Afghanistan and last week approved giving the U.S. military greater ability to accompany and enable Afghan forces in offensive operations, including carrying out air strikes.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said several nations on Wednesday committed to a troop presence next year in Afghanistan, underscoring a theme likely to figure prominently at next month's NATO summit in Warsaw.

"With a regional presence, we will continue to advise, train and assist the Afghan national forces because we are very committed to continuing to support Afghans," Stoltenberg said.

The United States contributes 6,800 troops to NATO's training mission in Afghanistan, which will fall to 3,400 under the current plan, a senior NATO diplomat told a small group of reporters on condition of anonymity. Washington also carries out a unilateral counter-terrorism mission in Afghanistan.

NATO's so-called hub-and-spoke model for troops training and advising Afghan forces extends well beyond the capital Kabul to allow an international military presence at regional hubs. But NATO policymakers had been examining whether it was possible to keep those posts open, even as force levels fall.

"I believe we'll have sufficient resources, and our military commanders have told us we'll have sufficient resources, to stay in the basic posture," the NATO diplomat said.

The diplomat also said NATO leaders are expected to agree to some $5 billion in funding to sustain Afghan security forces at the current levels through 2020.

The current NATO commitment to fund the Afghan security forces extends through 2017.

The funding is based on maintaining a goal of 352,000 Afghan soldiers and police. The official roster includes about 320,000 members of the security forces, a U.S. military commander said earlier this week.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Robin Emmott; Editing by Andrew Roche and Richard Chang)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama told US President Barack Obama on Wednesday that he is not seeking independence of Tibet from China and hoped that talks with the Chinese government would resume soon, the White House said.

"The Dalai Lama stated that he is not seeking independence for Tibet and hopes that dialogue between his representatives and the Chinese government will resume," the White House said.

"The President and the Dalai Lama agreed on the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the United States and China," said the statement issued after the two Noble laureates met at the Maple Room of the White House, which was described as a personal meeting.

During the meeting, the Dalai Lama condoled Obama over shooting in Orlando on Sunday. Obama commended the Dalai Lama for his efforts to promote compassion, empathy, and respect for others.

The two leaders discussed the situation for Tibetans in China, the White House said.

Obama expressed support for the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions and the equal protection of human rights of Tibetans in China.

"The President lauded the Dalai Lama's commitment to peace and nonviolence and expressed support for the Dalai Lama's 'Middle Way' approach," the White House said.

Obama in his meeting encouraged meaningful and direct dialogue between the Dalai Lama and his representatives with Chinese authorities to lower tensions and resolve differences.

"In this context, the President reiterated the longstanding US position that Tibet is a part of the People's Republic of China, and the US does not support Tibetan independence," it said, adding that the two agreed on the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the US and China.

"The President welcomed the Dalai Lama's leadership on climate change issues, and expressed support for the Dalai Lama's efforts to raise awareness of the importance of limiting global warming, including to protect the Himalayan glaciers and the environment on the Tibetan plateau," the White House said.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest described the Obama-Dalai Lama meeting as personal.

"In this case, the Dalai Lama is not a head of state, and so this was handled differently. When there's as head of state typically there will be a meeting in the Oval Office, typically there will be some kind of joint statement to the media. But in this case the interaction was different, primarily because the Dalai Lama is not a head of state," he said in response to a question.

"But the President does have a personal affection for the Dalai Lama and for his teachings. The President does support the preservation of Tibet's unique, religious cultural linguistic traditions, so that's the president had the meeting, but the meeting was treated differently than his meetings with other heads of state, because the Dalai Lama is not a head of state," he said.

Responding to a question on Chinese opposition to the meeting, Earnest said that has not worked.

"Based on the reaction from the Chinese government that somebody referred to earlier it sounds like if they're hoping to have that kind of influence they are not succeeding," he said.
London: Campaigning for Britain's EU referendum next week was suspended on Thursday following news that a leading MP with the "Remain" camp was in a critical condition after being shot.

Jo Cox, a 41-year-old mother-of-two from the opposition Labour Party, was left bleeding on the pavement after the incident in the town of Birstall in northern England, according to witnesses quoted by local media.

The Stronger in Europe camp said it was "suspending all campaigning for the day", as a police statement said authorities had arrested a 52-year-old man.

A spokesman for the rival Vote Leave group, which is backing a so-called Brexit, said that their 'battle bus' had stopped campaigning for the day.

"The battle bus that Boris was on is turning back to London," he told AFP, referring to lead campaigner Boris Johnson, the Conservative former mayor of London.

Police said "a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries" and was in a critical condition.

Channel 4 News quoted Cox's office as saying the pro-EU MP had been shot and stabbed.

Sky News television quoted unconfirmed reports from witnesses that the shooter shouted "Britain first"  possibly a reference to British sovereignty, although there is also a far-right party called Britain First.

The attack came with campaigning in full swing before a crunch referendum on June 23 on whether Britain stays in the EU or becomes the first country in the nearly six-decade history of the bloc to leave.

Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted that he was cancelling a planned pro-EU rally in Gibraltar following the shooting.

His controversial trip, the first by a British premier since 1968, has angered Spain, which also claims the tiny rocky outcrop.

Earlier Thursday, EU leaders had warned against Brexit but stressed that the EU would survive if Britain quits, as two new polls showed Britons tending towards a "Leave" vote.

"I know it's very difficult for us to be optimistic today, we know the latest polls," EU President Donald Tusk said on a visit to Helsinki, amid volatility on the financial markets that has hit the value of the pound.

"The cost will be very high also for us," he said, adding however: "The EU will survive, I have no doubt, it is still much easier to survive when you are 27 member states than completely alone".

At at an economic forum in Russia, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said a Brexit would usher in "a period of major uncertainty, both in Britain and in European Union".

But he added: "I don't think that the European Union will be in danger of death if Britain leaves because we continue the process of closer cooperation in Europe".

The warnings came after two polls showed a surge of support towards "Leave".

An Ipsos Mori survey published Thursday showed 53 percent of voters backing a Brexit compared to 47 percent who wanted to stay in the European Union.

Another poll by Survation put "Leave" ahead by 52-48, excluding undecided voters.

Polling expert John Curtice said the race was now too close to call.

"Until this morning I would have said to you that on the balance of probabilities, 'Remain' were the favourites. I think we no longer have a favourite in this referendum," he told BBC Television.

In the minutes of its June meeting, the Bank of England warned once again that the outcome of the referendum was "the largest immediate risk facing UK financial markets, and possibly also global financial markets".

London's FTSE 100 share index was down one percent to 5,908 points, while the pound reached a new two-month low against the euro.

"City watchers are beginning to take the threat seriously and start to price in the possibility of a Brexit," said Joe Rundle, head of trading at ETX Capital.

Leading business newspaper the Financial Times endorsed the "Remain" camp, saying Britain had benefited from its 43-year membership of the European fold and leaving would "seriously damage" the economy.

It said a choice for "Leave" would favour "a pinched nationalism" and "marginalisation", adding: "A vote to withdraw would be irrevocable, a grievous blow to the post-1945 liberal world order."
London: British lawmaker Jo Cox was shot dead in the street in northern England on Thursday, causing shock across Britain and leading to the suspension of campaigning for next week's referendum on the country's EU membership.

Following is a summary of reaction from politicians and analysts:

Brendan Cox, Jo's husband

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people."

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her."

David Cameron, British Prime Minister

"We have lost a great star. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion, with a big heart."

"It is right that we are suspending campaigning activity in this referendum, and everyone's thoughts will be with Jo's family and her constituents at this terrible time."

Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party Leader

"We've lost a wonderful woman, we've lost a wonderful member of parliament, but our democracy will go on. Her work will go on. As we mourn her memory, we'll work in her memory to achieve that better world she spent her life trying to achieve."

"Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve."

"In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan and their two young children."

Manuel Valls, French Prime Minister

"Deeply sad for Jo Cox and the British people. Through her it's our democratic ideals that were targeted. Never accept that!"

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Dutch Finance Minister and Chairman of Group of Euro Zone Finance Ministers

"The UK is a beacon for peaceful politics, and we hope that the British public ... can make their democratic choices serenely and in a safe way next week."

Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister

"This is utterly shocking and tragic news, which has left everyone stunned."

"She was held in huge regard as a brilliant young woman, who had already contributed a huge amount in her time in Parliament, and today she was simply going about her job as a local MP."

Matthew Barzun, U.S. Ambassador to Britain

"We are heartbroken by the loss to her family and country of MP Jo Cox. My love and our love to them, in this time of unbearable grief."

Gabrielle Giffords, Former U.S. Congresswoman, who survived shooting in 2011

"Absolutely sickened to hear of the assassination of Jo Cox. She was young, courageous, and hardworking. A rising star, mother, and wife."

John Curtice, Polling Expert and Politics Professor at University of Strathclyde

"It's fairly clear no one is quite sure what has happened. Until it's clear who was responsible and what their motivation was or it might have been, all it does is stop the campaign when the 'Remain' side probably would not want it to be stopped."

Mujtaba Rahman, Europe Practice Head at Eurasia Group

"This will hurt the momentum of the 'Leave' campaign, which has been gaining steadily in recent polls."

"It will allow British Prime Minister David Cameron an opportunity to act like a statesman and retrieve the agenda, something he has lost over the last week.

"If the incident is confirmed to have been motivated by Brexit, it will also reflect poorly on the more strident elements of the Vote Leave campaign, potentially swinging undecided voters towards 'Remain'."

Alan Ruskin, Global Co-Head of Fx Research at Deutsche Bank

"Certainly people are talking about the possibility that this does influence the Brexit vote in favour of 'Remain'. It is a tragic event all around. There is a sense, there is an immediate emotional reaction, but there is still a week before the referendum itself."

"It definitely is seen as part of the story, the recovery of risk. Generally you are seeing so-called riskier assets recover. All the assets, whether equities, aussie/yen or sterling/yen are recovering. They are up on the perception of a higher probability of a 'Remain' vote."
London: Police say British lawmaker Jo Cox has died after being shot in the in the town of Birstall near Leeds, part of the area she represented.

Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police says authorities can't discuss any motive for the shooting yet but they have arrested a 52-year-old man and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack.

They say a man was also injured but is expected to survive.

British Prime Minister David Cameron says he has cancelled a planned pro-European Union speech in Gibraltar after Cox was shot. Cameron was scheduled to make a two-hour visit to Gibraltar Thursday to seek votes to keep Britain in the EU in the 23 June referendum. But he wrote on Twitter "I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar."

Groups on both sides of the referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union have suspended campaigning.

The "remain" and "leave" campaigns said Thursday that campaign events will be stopped for the rest of the day.

Further details are expected shortly.
Soweto: South Africa on Thursday marked 40 years since the Soweto uprising, when white police officers gunned down black students in a massacre that ignited a new era of anti-apartheid resistance.

The 1976 protests, and the government's violent response, were a turning point in the struggle that eventually led to the fall of apartheid rule with Nelson Mandela's election as president in 1994.

The anniversary commemorated the youthful, unarmed protesters who gathered in Soweto township to demonstrate against an order that schools could only teach in the Afrikaans language used by whites.

At least 170 people were killed, with some estimates putting the death toll at several hundred over the following months as the uprising spread nationwide.

"The apartheid ideology espoused that whites were by nature superior and that blacks were inherently inferior," President Jacob Zuma said in a televised speech at a stadium in Soweto, south of Johannesburg.

"The struggle and sacrifices of the class of 1976 were not in vain.

"South Africa is indeed a much better place than it was when the students stood up and said 'enough is enough' in June 1976, but the struggle continues."

Images of poor, young black students shot dead by the police also brought the injustices of white-minority rule to the world's attention and spurred the global anti-apartheid movement.

Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday placed a wreath at the memorial to Hector Pieterson, 13, who was one of the first victims.

The black-and-white photograph of Pieterson's body being carried away by a student in tears became the iconic image of the uprising.

Race injustice persists

Divisions along racial lines remain strong in South Africa, with most black people enduring worse education, housing and unemployment than white people.

Students have again been protesting in recent months over tuition fees that force some poor black youths out of education.

Racist Internet postings have also underlined long-standing frictions worsened by the country's dire economic performance and anger at politicians' failure to meet post-apartheid expectations.

Highlighting the country's unhealed wounds, a reconciliation event in Soweto last Saturday was sparsely attended.

The gathering had been intended to bring together black and white people, but it split some black activists, and white former policemen declined to take part.

Dan Montsitsi, a student leader of the uprising, told AFP that the 1976 march in Soweto had been planned for months.

The students, most of whom were in their school uniforms, carried placards reading: "Afrikaans stinks", "To hell with Afrikaans" and "Afrikaans needs to be abolished".

"We were amazed with the number of students that we had been able to put in the streets," he said ahead of the 40th anniversary.

He recalled that the police released a dog into the crowd, which was killed.

"The police were very angry obviously and they decided they would use teargas.

"(Soon after) they started to shoot."

The African National Congress (ANC) party, which was headed by Mandela, has ruled since the end of apartheid but it has fallen in popularity and faces difficult local elections in August.

On Thursday, it hailed the "courage that led the students to confront the bullets of the apartheid security forces."

16 June is a national holiday in South Africa marking Youth Day.
New Delhi: Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha arrived in New Delhi on Thursday for a three-day visit, with an aim to deepen bilateral cooperation in areas of trade and investment, defence, security and tourism.

Chan-o-Cha will have extensive talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday during which both sides are likely to explore ways to expand maritime security cooperation, deal with threat of terrorism and boost trade.

There are indications that both leaders will discuss the situation in the South China Sea.

The Thai Prime Minister is accompanied by his spouse Naraporn Chan-o-cha and a high-level delegation comprising several cabinet ministers, senior officials and a 46-member business delegation.

Chan-o-cha's, who arrived on his first visit here as Prime Minister, was received at the airport by Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju.

"India's excellent relations with Thailand are an important and integral component of India's strategic partnership with Asean. India's 'Act East' policy is complemented by Thailand's 'Look West' policy in bringing the two countries closer," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

Modi will host lunch in honour of his Thai counterpart on Friday. The Thai PM will also call on Vice President M Hamid Ansari.

Chan-o-cha is expected to deliver a speech at the business event hosted by Ficci, CII and Assocham on 17 June. The India- Thailand Joint Business Forum will hold its first meeting during the visit and make recommendations for boosting trade ties between the two countries.

He will visit Bodhgaya on Saturday before returning to Thailand.

"India and Thailand have strong economic synergies and the diversifying profile of growing bilateral trade and investment reflects the growth and maturity of the interaction between the two economies," said MEA.

Issues related to the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the two countries are likely to figure in talks. The volume of current annual bilateral trade between the two countries is nearly USD 8 billion and both sides are keen to expand it further.

Earlier Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra had paid a State visit to India in January 2012 and was the Chief Guest for the Republic Day celebrations.

Maritime security cooperation between the two countries countries in the Indian Ocean is already "very strong", said Secretary (East) in the Ministry of External Affairs Preeti Saran, adding ways to further enhance it may be explored during the talks.

Thailand has shown interest in joint ventures in defence production and procurement of defence platforms from India.
WASHINGTON The awkward efforts of Republicans to embrace their partys standard-bearer Donald Trump looked particularly painful in Congress this week as lawmakers ducked into elevators, dashed away from reporters, ignored questions or, worse, tried to answer them.

Only days after a furore over his criticism of a Mexican-American judge, the presumptive presidential nominee sent Republicans reeling again by renewing his call for a ban on Muslim immigration after a gunman who pledged allegiance to Islamic militants killed of 49 people at a Florida nightclub.

Then former reality TV star Trump waded into two sensitive topics for social conservatives by embracing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and suggesting the country may need certain new gun control measures.

For lawmakers accustomed to well-crafted talking points and predictable lines of questioning, the week marked a chaotic flurry of contorted responses or terse, tight-lipped replies.

Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming walked away when asked about Trump's embrace of the LGBT community, saying: "I dont know what the latest is. I havent read anything. I havent been watching."

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a former Trump adversary in the presidential primaries, had to bat away two Trump questions before he could announce that he is considering running for re-election  a decision that could determine whether Republicans retain control of the Senate in the Nov. 8 election.

Senator Ted Cruz, another rival in the primaries, refused to respond directly to the speech in which Trump hardened his line on Muslims while Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr called it an OK speech before stepping into an elevator and refusing to respond to any more questions.

The Trump challenge is obvious even for seasoned Republicans.

"I'm spending my days commenting on everything that Donald Trump says," lamented John McCain, chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee.

Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, ricocheted from rejection of Trumps comments on Muslims to doubts about the legality of his proposed immigration ban to bafflement over the billionaires response to the Orlando shootings.

'YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS UP'

Trump controversies have also overshadowed House Speaker Paul Ryans rollout of a policy agenda, a campaign document that was supposed to help bring Trumps position more into line with mainline party doctrine.

Asked on Thursday whether he was bothered by having to contend with Trump's remarks, Ryan called Trump "a different kind of candidate...(in) a different kind of year."

Asked how many more times he would be called on to do so, Ryan said: "I don't know the answer to that question either."

In an ironic message to his critics among the Republican leadership this week, Trump had this to say: "Be quiet, just please be quiet. Don't talk. Please be quiet. Just be quiet.

Ryan's response? "...You can't make this up sometimes," he said.

A political neophyte who has never held elected office, Trump has also said he may not need much from his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill anyway.

"We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself. Ill do very well, he said in a CNN interview. A lot of people thought I should do that anyway, but I'll just do it very nicely by myself."

(Reporting by David Morgan; additional reporting by Richard Cowan, Susan Cornwell and Alana Wise; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
WASHINGTON U.S. senators signalled on Wednesday a new willingness to consider certain restrictions on the sale of guns after the Orlando nightclub massacre, with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and others in his party ready to discuss limited gun control measures.

Emotions have run high in Congress since the Orlando massacre with Democrats stalling Senate proceedings on Wednesday to filibuster for tougher gun control legislation. Earlier this week, some House Democrats interrupted a moment of silence for victims, with shouts of "where's the bill", to protest the Republican-led chamber's refusal to consider tougher gun laws.

With Republicans and the National Rifle Association gun lobby under pressure to respond to the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Trump said he would meet with the NRA to discuss ways to block people on terrorism watch or no-fly lists from buying guns.

Republicans over the years have blocked gun control measures saying that they step on Americans' right to bear arms as guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. Senate began discussions on legislation to ban firearm sales to the hundreds of thousands of people on U.S. terrorism watch lists after a gunman who had been on such a list killed 49 people at a gay nightclub on Sunday.

Senator John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican, and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein were holding private talks on a possible compromise bill stopping weapons sales to those on watch lists, according to a Cornyn aide.

OPPORTUNITY CITED

Another Republican, U.S. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, also is working on a bill that would keep guns from people on watch lists, a gun control group said.

Toomey, who is in a possibly difficult re-election bid this year, took to the Senate floor urging compromise.

So theres an obvious opportunity here guys, to work together and find a solution, he said, adding, "This is not rocket science to figure this out."

Congressional Republicans and the NRA have thwarted previous gun control measures backed by Democrats and President Barack Obama after other mass shootings, and supporters of new restrictions remained cautious about the moves.

"The Cornyn bill is outlandish and is worse than nothing. From what I'm told all of the compromises proposed by Cornyn and Toomey are not at all acceptable," said Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, of New York.

And Feinstein, speaking to reporters following a closed briefing from the Obama administration on the Orlando massacre, gave little hope that her talks with Cornyn would bear fruit. "I don't think it's going to work out," she said, but added that she was still engaged in talks.

Trump said on Twitter he would meet with the NRA "about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns." His campaign did specify what he might support legislatively, and a spokeswoman declined to give details about the timing or nature of the meeting.

The NRA, a politically influential lobbying group that claims more than 4 million members, said in a statement it was "happy to meet" with Trump, whom it endorsed for president on May 20.

The group said in a statement that anyone on a terrorism watch list who tries to buy a gun "should be thoroughly investigated" by the FBI and any sale to that person delayed, a position the lobby group has long held.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has supported gun control efforts and on Monday said she was "bewildered" that Republicans in Congress had blocked a Democratic effort to restrict gun sales to people on the watch lists.

(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey and Susan Cornwell; Editing by Will Dunham and Howard Goller)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Washington: A resolution has been introduced in the US House of Representatives supporting India's bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, with the lawmakers saying a permanent spot for the country on the Council would strengthen democracy around the world.

The resolution was introduced on Wednesday in the House by Congressman Frank Pallone, the co-founder of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans and Congressman Ami Bera, the only Indian-American in the Congress and current co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans.

India is the only country which has been endorsed by the Obama administration for a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

"At a time when international relations are being redefined, we should acknowledge and empower those nations that share our enduring core values," Pallone said in a statement after he introduced the bill in the House.

"It's in the interests of the United States and the world to have a UN Security Council whose members combine military strength with respect for democracy and pluralism, and an appreciation of the dangers posed by rouge states and terrorist groups," he said.

Last week, Pallone and Bera applauded Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to strengthen ties between the US and India during a speech before a joint session of Congress.

"I was honoured to meet with Prime Minister Modi during his visit and I am more committed than ever to the bond between our two nations share and the positive impact that India would have on the UN Security Council," said Pallone, who along with Bera served on the escort committee that led Modi into the House chamber for the speech.

"As the world's oldest democracy and the worlds largest democracy, the United States and India share common values and a growing partnership on many fronts, especially on defence cooperation," said Bera.

"India plays a critical role as a strategic partner to the United States, and as a pillar of stability in South Asia. Securing a permanent spot for India on the UN Security Council would be beneficial for India and the United States, and would strengthen democracy around the world," he said.

In a statement Pallone and Bera said the UN Security Council still reflects the world as it was in 1945 when the United Nations was created. Despite the fact that the UN has grown from 51 member nations at its inception to nearly 200, the Security Council has not grown to reflect these dramatic changes, they said.

There are currently five permanent members of the Council including the US, the UK, Russia, China, and France. The resolution reflects the sense of the US Congress and it does not has any legislative implications on the Obama administration.
Washington: The US Senate has passed its draft of the National Defence Authorisation Bill, including a provision to set up a new fund to reimburse Pakistan for its efforts in the war against terrorism.

The Senate version authorised USD 800 million under a provision called the `Pakistan Security Enhancement Authorisation, Dawn online reported on Thursday.

It also fenced $300m behind a similar Haqqani network provision that has existed in the annual defence authorisation acts since the fiscal year 2015.

The proposal for Pakistan was passed as originally initiated.

The proposed reimbursement mechanism for Pakistan replaces the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), which was used to reimburse both Afghanistan and Pakistan for their efforts to combat terrorism.

Pakistan has received a total of $3.1 billion since 2013 under the CSF. But this fund expires in the current financial year, ending in October.

While adopting the new provision, the Senate Armed Services Committee used the CSF model to restructure security support for Pakistan. But it focuses specifically on Pakistans own security needs instead of tying it to a broader coalition.

In doing so, the new provision delinks Pakistan from Afghanistan, by recognising it as a country with its own strategic value for US interests.

In a report filed with the draft Defence Bill, the US Senate Armed Services Committee called Pakistan "a long-standing strategic partner and stressed the need to continue a strong relationship with the country.

Both houses of the Congress have passed their versions of the Defence Bill. A conference committee of both houses will now be formed to develop a consensus draft.

The procedure can be completed by July, although past bills have been passed as late as November.

Besides, the Haqqani restriction, the bill requires Pakistan to keep open ground communication lines to Afghanistan for receiving reimbursements from this fund.

Another bill, passed by the House of Representatives last week, linked $450m from a total of $900m proposed for Pakistan to take action against the Haqqani network.
No verdict reached after first few hours of deliberations in Darrell Brooks trial

Waukesha County Now
DEFOREST  American Packaging Corp., maker of flexible packaging for a variety of food, health care, hygiene and household products, plans to build a plant in DeForest and add as many as 300 employees there over the next decade.

Company officials joined Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Village President Judd Blau in announcing a $50 million first phase of the plant at a Wednesday morning press conference in the DeForest Northern Business Park.

The project will be helped by an incentive package that includes up to $750,000 in Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. tax credits and nearly $1.9 million in land subsidies from the village.

American Packaging has more than 600 employees across three plants in Columbus; Rochester, New York, where it has its headquarters; and Story City, Iowa. It manufactures packaging for major consumer product companies such as Unilever, Mars, Nestle and ConAgra Foods.

The privately-held company has seen its annual sales grow from about $100 million to more than $500 million in a little more than a decade as more American companies have switched from rigid packaging to the cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative.

American Packaging planned to put a new Italian-made rotogravure printing press it ordered into its Columbus plant, but rapid growth would have required the company to order another right away, and executive vice president Jeff Koch said adding two presses at that plant would have been a challenge.

When we talked about expansion, we could have made this work, but we know that our longer-term strategic goals are not just two machines, Koch said. Two machines can produce $70 million. Thats not the end game for American Packaging. Were going to be much larger.

Instead of forcing that machine in there, we said, Lets just start greenfield, lets bring both of those presses to that greenfield site and well build from there.

Construction is already underway on the first, 170,000-square-foot phase, just west of Highway 51 on the villages northern edge. It is expected to open by February with about 60 employees.

Three subsequent phases are expected to increase the buildings footprint to at least 400,000 square feet by the end of 2026. The additions are expected to accommodate between 250 and 300 jobs.

Kleefisch and Koch credited WEDCs Certified in Wisconsin sites program for helping meet American Packagings tight timeline. State-certified sites have been pre-reviewed, ensuring that all critical stumbling blocks to development have been cleared so that companies can begin building quickly.

We know this is a program that will continue to attract interest around this country and, frankly, around the globe, especially when we have friends like American Packaging Corp. taking advantage of it. They are on top of global trends, Kleefisch said.

WEDC also authorized up to $750,000 in tax credits for the project over five years. The total amount of tax credits American Packaging can earn is tied to job creationquotas, wage level requirements and capital investments.

Under the agreement, the company must maintain at least 48 new full-time employees at the site through May 31, 2021. It can earn up to $250,000 in job creation tax credits through May 30, 2019. The credits will be calculated at 10 percent of the wages of employees at the site.

The agreement makes American Packaging eligible for up to $500,000 in capital investment tax credits, calculated at 3 percent for company property and 5 percent for real estate property investments.

American Packaging is building on two parcels in the DeForest Northern Business Park. The company paid $86,249 for a 1.3-acre parcel and the village is subsidizing the adjacent 25-acre parcel for a value of $1.9 million.

Of the $1.9 million loan for the land, the initial $673,002 payment is forgivable if the company completes at least a 165,000-square-foot building by the end of the year, according to a development agreement approved unanimously by the Village Board on May 3.

The company is also eligible for credits against the remainder of the loan balance based on construction quotas to be performed by the end of 2020, 2024 and 2026.

Because of the training involved, some of the roughly 300 employees at the Columbus plant will be tapped to help open the DeForest plant; however, the Columbus plants eight presses will remain in operation, Koch said.

The DeForest facility will be the first of two or three satellite plants, Koch said. The company does a different kind of printing at its Iowa plant and is in negotiations to buy land for a second plant in Altoona, a suburb of Des Moines.
Iran has filed a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice to recover $2 billion worth of assets frozen in the United States.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani made the announcement in remarks Wednesday on state television. The tribunal also confirmed that the suit was filed, on Tuesday.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced in April that the frozen funds would be used to compensate the victims and families of victims of the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, and other attacks that have been linked to Iran.

Iran has denied any role in the attacks and rejected the court ruling, calling it theft.

Iran's claim says the U.S. legal proceedings violate a 1955 "treaty of amity" between the two countries that covers economic relations and consular rights. It has called on the United States to make full reparations to Tehran for violating its "legal obligations."

More than 1,000 Americans have joined a suit blaming Iran for providing material support to Hezbollah, the Shi'ite Islamic military group behind the Beirut bombing and the bombing of Saudi Arabia's Khobar Towers in 1996.

The plaintiffs include people whose family members were killed in the attacks, as well as people who were injured.
For the United States and its coalition partners, it is the sound of progress  the dull roar of engines as Iraqi Humvees kick up dust and dirt on the outskirts of Fallujah. In the distance, smoke rises as Iraqi forces push on with a slow but steady advance.

The scene, shared in a video handout by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, makes the battle for the key city look more methodical than it is. Closer in, Iraqi forces are meeting with what coalition officials have described as stiff resistance from Islamic State (IS) fighters.

But for many, the trend appears clear: The terror groups self-declared caliphate is starting to crumble.

This is the first time ISIL is experiencing pressure from a number of places, said a U.S. official who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity, using an acronym for the group.

Weve never seen them have to react to this sort of pressure, the official added. Were looking closely.

Possible death spiral?

So far, the results have been less than impressive for IS fighters forced to confront Iraqi, Kurdish and Syrian forces backed with U.S. and coalition air power.

ISIL is unable to respond, said a U.S. intelligence official, describing the groups attempts at resistance as a lashing out.

ISIL has ramped up its use of suicide attacks, particularly against Shia religious pilgrims, to foster sectarian discord, disrupt government functions and deflect attention from its inability to recapture and hold territory, the official said.

Increasingly, the terror groups fighters have retreated back to a dwindling number of strongholds like Fallujah in Iraq and Manbij in Syria.

We could be looking at a death spiral that will destroy the organization, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has been closely following ISs fortunes.

For almost two months, U.S. intelligence officials have described IS as being at its weakest point since its rapid expansion, pointing to a number of factors.

IS cash flow, while still significant, has been cut substantially, with U.S. Treasury Department officials noting the groups profit from oil sales has been cut in half.

The flow of foreign fighters, at one time flocking to the group at a rate of 1,000 or more a month, has slowed to a trickle. No longer able to replenish fighters at the rate they are being lost on the battlefield, U.S. military officials say IS leaders in places like Manbij are turning to forced conscription of captive civilian populations.

I dont think they can reverse their losses in Iraq, Syria or in Libya, Gartenstein-Ross said, warning ISs grip on its self-declared wilayats, or provinces, is also tenuous.

In almost every theater, its foreign presence, where it has expanded outside of Iraq and Syria, has been massively overstated, including in Yemen, including in Somalia, including in Algeria and elsewhere, he said.

Capable of surviving

Still, U.S. officials have been cautious, continuing to describe even a faltering IS as a dynamic and formidable threat that still holds key territory, including the city of Mosul, Iraq and its capital of Raqqa in Syria.

I actually see the overall strategic environment as favoring ISIS retention of those cities, said Jessica McFate, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Iraq, using yet another of the groups acronyms.

The major impediment to that operation is not ISIS capability to defend but the inability of anti-ISIS elements on the ground in Syria to get along well enough to be driving in the same direction, she said.

Ultimately though, McFate, now with the Institute for the Study of War, agrees that, IS is going to lose most of its terrain. But she remains concerned that the terrorist group still has the ability to survive, noting the durability of its predecessor, al-Qaida in Iraq.

ISIS has latent capability to regenerate operations again, she said.

That capability also worries senior U.S. officials, who have called the scourge of IS a long-term challenge that goes well beyond smashing the self-declared caliphate.

Its a mistake just to focus on the [IS] state in Syria and Iraq, Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes told VOA via Skype, saying the groups aggressive strategy has given it too many enemies to retain control of any meaningful terrain.

But that doesnt mean the end of ISIS as an idea, an ideal, as an inspiration and as a force around the world, he said. ISIS found a way to inspire violence throughout the west, not just in the West in the Muslim world as well that is powerful and presumably enduring.

More terrorism coming

U.S. military and intelligence officials hope that, at the least, the eventual demise of the caliphate will strike a significant blow, doing irreparable damage to an IS brand deeply rooted in the idea of a caliphate and built on the notion of unceasing military momentum.

Yet even with IS forces reeling in Iraq, Syria and Libya, a U.S. official cautioned the terror group maintains the means to wage its brand of violence.

And it could get worse before it gets better.

We should be prepared for an increase in terrorism in the region and in the West, said J.M. Berger, a fellow at George Washington Universitys Program on Extremism.

If the proto-state falls, those resources will be available for terrorism, he added. Terrorism is much less resource-intensive than governing  even a small insurgency translates into a very large terrorist organization.
An aerial photo taken on Sept 25, 2015 from a seaplane of Hainan Maritime Safety Administration shows cruise vessel Haixun 1103 heading to the Yacheng 13-1 drilling rig during a patrol in South China Sea. [Photo/Xinhua]

As is now well known, the Philippines has brought arbitration proceedings against China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea relating to the South China Sea, and the Tribunal has recently given its decision on whether it has jurisdiction over the claims made by the Philippines. It found that it had jurisdiction, although unconditionally only over three of the 15 submissions made by the Philippines. The Tribunal has since heard argument on the merits of the various claims, and is likely to give its ruling on them later this year. But looked at critically the decision of the Tribunal that it has jurisdiction has a number of weaknesses.

As background, UNCLOS emphasizes that the States bordering a semi-enclosed sea, like the South China Sea, should cooperate together in dealing with common issues, even when there is no agreement about the maritime boundaries between them.

In addition, UNCLOS sets out what maritime zones it is permissible for a coastal State to claim: a territorial sea of twelve nautical miles, an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles, and a continental shelf stretching at least to 200 nautical miles, but potentially extending beyond that if the geological conditions are right. These maritime zones cannot be claimed from "low-tide elevations", that is features which are underwater at high tide. All of these maritime zones can be claimed from islands, except that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own" can only generate a territorial sea. This definition of "rocks" is not easy to interpret and so far there has been little international case-law on what it might mean. However, it is critical to many of the arguments of the Philippines that they allege that a large number of the features in the South China Sea are either low-tide elevations or "rocks".

Under UNCLOS there are certain circumstances in which a State is obliged to accept that a dispute with another State can be put to arbitration, but there are a significant number of exceptions and limitations to this obligation, some of which are exercisable at the option of the State concerned. In other words, when it is said that under UNCLOS the States party have consented to arbitration, this is true only in a very qualified way: they have only consented to arbitration subject to the exceptions and limitations set out in UNCLOS. This is important because the provisions in UNCLOS on the settlement of disputes were accepted as part of a package deal at the UN Conference which adopted UNCLOS; it is obviously important to all parties to UNCLOS that the package deal is not disturbed.
The detentions of thousands of suspected criminals across Bangladesh led to the arrest of a suspected member of a banned Islamist group accused of violently attacking a publisher last year, police said yesterday.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said the raids are part of an effort to root out Islamic militants blamed for a wave of deadly attacks against atheists and religious minorities, even though the vast majority of those detained are accused of petty crimes and not radicalism. The raids have been criticized as a pretext for intimidating political opponents, with the main opposition party saying thousands of its members were rounded up.

Mohammed Sumon Hossain, a suspect presented before court yesterday, was suspected of participating in an attack against publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul in his Dhaka office in October, the head of police counter-terrorism operations told reporters. Tutul survived the attack, in which two of his friends were also injured, and later was given asylum in Norway.

Authorities identified Hossain as a suspect while questioning two others picked up Monday on the outskirts of Dhaka, according to the counter-terrorism chief, Monirul Islam.

Information that we got from them led to his arrest last night, Islam said. We acted upon specific information we got from them.

Islam said Hossain used several names while operating as a member of the banned Ansarullah Bangla Team, which has claimed responsibility for killing several atheist bloggers and threatened to target more.

The suspect had worked in a private company in the southeastern city of Chittagong. Last month, police had included Hossains name on a list of suspected militants believed to have been involved in the deadly attacks on atheist bloggers, online activists, writers, members of religious minorities and foreign aid workers.

Islam said Hossain provided information to police during questioning that could help in apprehending those who killed another publisher, Faisal Arefin Deepan, on the same day Tutul was attacked.

Both Tutul and Deepan had published works by Bangladeshi-American blogger and writer Avijit Roy, who was hacked to death in February 2015 while walking with his wife on the Dhaka University campus. ABT claimed responsibility for the attack.

Another jihadist group, Ansar al-Islam, the Bangladesh division of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attacks on Deepan and Tutul, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist online postings. The claim of responsibility could not be independently verified.

At the time, Ansar al-Islam accused the secular and atheist publishers of putting out books by blasphemers that dishonored the Prophet Muhammad, and also threatened more attacks.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for many of the attacks since last year, but Bangladeshs government has repeatedly dismissed the idea that the extremist Sunni group has any presence in the country.

Hasinas government has instead blamed domestic terrorists along with Islamist political parties  especially main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its main ally, Jamaat-e-

Islami  of orchestrating the violence in order to destabilize the nation.

A London-based spokesman for the BNP again dismissed the allegation this week as an effort by Hasinas government to divert attention from the worsening security situation in Bangladesh. He said the latest crackdown was a hard-handed effort to stomp out political dissent. AP
A gun was spotted yesterday morning at a bank branch in Grand Lisboa, according to a TDM report. A guard from a security company has reclaimed the weapon, admitting that he forgot it. The police confirmed that there were three bullets in the gun at the time the gun was handed in, and that it has returned the gun to the company. The situation violates the law regulating the activities of local private security companies. As a result, the company responsible for the incident could be fined and the employees firearm qualification might be revoked. The employee in question has since been suspended.

New facilities to be located at Taipa landfills

The Land, Public Works and Transport Bureau (DSSOPT) is searching for contractors to build a road at the Taipa construction waste material landfill area. DSSOPT issued a call for bids yesterday and has so far received a total of 17 bids. The bureau stated that an inert construction sorting field and a field for preferentially processing abandoned vehicles will also be established in the area. DSSOPT claimed that the construction of the road will not disrupt neighboring traffic, as all activities will be located within the landfill perimeter.
A Bloomsday reception was held at the Macau Military Club last night, where aside from presentations of the latest developments in the Irish community of Macau, the life and works of Irish writer James Joyce was celebrated.

The event drew a total of around 80 to 90 attendees according to organizers, including members of the Trinity College Dublin Chapel Choir, who had arrived in the city to perform at the conclusion to last nights activities.

Bloomsday is a celebration and commemoration of the novel Ulysses by iconic Irish writer James Joyce. It chronicles the story of Leopold Bloom, who is both the protagonist and anti-hero in the story, according to the Consul General of Ireland to Hong Kong and Macau, Peter Ryan.

The whole book takes place on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, where [in some sense] the whole of Blooms life is packed into a single day, explained Ryan. So on this day we celebrate with readings [from the novel], eating some of the food that Bloom ate and trying to recreate parts of his day.

Ryan explained that recreating the day, as part of the celebrations, is an important way to improve accessibility of the story, especially for young people. The novel is notorious for being difficult to read, and people often dip in and out of it, explained Ryan.

Highlighting the significance of the book to Irelands culture, Ryan said: They say that, if Dublin was destroyed [suddenly], it could be rebuilt based on the detail and descriptions in the book.

Last nights event was the latest in a series of recent activities organized by the Irish Consulate General and the Chamber of Commerce. In March, a Saint Patricks Day parade was held in the MSAR for the first time drawing the attendance of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Criona Ni Dhalaigh. On the preceding night the Ruins of St. Pauls Cathedral in Macau, along with many iconic buildings and structures around the world, were illuminated in green.

Asked whether the latest event is part of a larger campaign to increase the presence of Irish culture in Macau, Ryan said: We just want to make more friends here. More friends of Ireland in Macau and more friends of Macau in Ireland.

We have a lot of catching up to do in Macau, because for so long we didnt have an office here, added the Consul General, who is the first of his kind to represent Ireland in the Special Administrative Regions.

The Trinity College Dublin Chapel Choir, which visited Macau to perform at the Bloomsday reception, also attended a meeting with students at the Matteo Ricci College earlier yesterday.

We want to show off the musical pieces related to Joyce, said choir member Eimear Sparks, and also to show that there is more to Ireland than the stereotypes that are often associated with it.

The students at Macau Ricci were more interested in music in general and how to fit it into their schedules, than learning about Irish culture, she admitted, but added that the reception at the school had been positive.

Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture Alexis Tam was also present at the event and explained to the choir members Macaus historical purpose as a link between East and West.

Macau is a place which links the West with Chinese culture, said Tam. The people of Macau are happy to receive and meet people from around the world. We hope that you come back soon and perhaps next time we can visit you [in Ireland].

Tam and representatives of the choir exchanged gifts before the performance. In my official role as the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, I want to enhance this kind of exchange, added Tam. I think we can do more of it in the future.

Separately, a childrens art contest was held in the MSAR, inviting the participation of local school children that were tasked with incorporating the Irish national figure of Saint Patrick into a Macau setting.

According to Niall Murray, Chairman of the Irish Chamber of Commerce of Macau, over 2,000 entries were submitted, of which nine distinguished students were awarded during last nights festivities.
The president of New Macau Association (ANM), Scott Chiang, was brought in by the Public Security Police Force for questioning yesterday, as predicted a day earlier by the groups leadership. Chiang has now been named a suspect in a case of disorderly conduct.

Chiang is being investigated for his part in organizing a May 15 protest against a RMB100 million (MOP123 million) donation to Jinan University, which demanded the Chief Executives resignation.

I met with the police [yesterday] for around an hour and they asked me some questions. I have been declared a suspect [in a case] of disobedience, Chiang told the Times.

Chiang said that he was unable to disclose the details of his questioning as the case is still ongoing, but asserted that Macau authorities seem more interested in building a case against him than looking into some of the complaints raised by the protest.

Jason Chao, ANMs vice president, on Wednesday said that police actions in the investigation show signs of political persecution due to the victimization of individuals who raised issues during the protest.

They are trying to fabricate a case against those who actually go on the street and those who are against the funding, he said. It is disheartening to see that the administration did not respond to our demand for reform.

The RMB100 million donation to Jinan University via the Macau Foundation drew criticism last month after some speculated that Chief Executive Chui Sai On had abused his position of power. Chui is being accused of using his ties to the mainland education institution to facilitate the monetary transfer.

The large-scale demonstration called for greater transparency in the Macau Foundation and demanded Chuis resignation, with protestors chanting, Chui Sai On, resign!

Organizers say that as many as 3,300 may have attended the demonstration, while the police put their estimate at just 1,100.

Critics of the government have also called on authorities to answer why the significant donation occurred against the setback of recent cuts to Macaus own educational institutions. The government says that the two are unrelated.

Members of ANM have been detained by the police before. In August 2014, then-president Jason Chao as well as four volunteers were detained by the police after holding a public referendum on whether the MSAR should adopt universal suffrage and pursue democratic development. The ANM members were arrested for allegedly violating the personal data protection law in recording the responses.

According to Scott Chiang, Chao was also detained on June 30, following a protest against lawmaker Melinda Chan.
The Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT) organized a Tourism Education Student Summit on the IFT campus this week. Sixteen presentations on different topics related to Macaus gaming and tourism industries were presented to the audience.

Remus Xu Lufan, one of five student presenters honored with a best paper award, illustrated the concept of destination image branding based on Chinese and Portuguese Communities in Macau. Xu collected 117 completed questionnaires, 67 of which were filled by Chinese respondents aged between 25 and 34, while the other 50 were from Portuguese people aged between 18 and 24.

His work indicates a great difference between the two communities perceptions of Macaus brand image, as well as their opinions on government initiatives. On average, the Portuguese respondents awarded lower scores in all categories listed under the physical environment section, such as cultural heritage and natural scenery. In terms of social environment, however, they said Macau is safer and more politically stable. On other matters, such as cleanliness and business opportunities, they were less satisfied than Chinese respondents. The IFT student, who majored in Tourism Business Management, spoke to the Macau Daily Times about his work.

MDT  What are the main differences between the perceptions of the two communities?

Remus Xu (RX)  From my perspective, it is the cultural and lifestyle differences that influence the perceptions of these two groups of people. The results indicated that Portuguese respondents focused more on citizens rights and daily life, while Chinese respondents were more concerned with the governments work efficiency and effectiveness.

The Portuguese stated that Macau was a very nice place to live. Of course, Portuguese residents play an essential role in Macau, but we do not know if this will continue in the future.

Another thing mentioned by some Portuguese respondents is that the government should seek to improve residents language skills. Most of the people in Macau speak Chinese and unfortunately, the populations English knowledge is not as proficient as it should be, given Macaus status as an international city.

MDT  What do you think has caused the difference?

RX  I think it is because Western countries have very advanced welfare policies, education systems and health care facilities that Macau needs to emulate. As most of my Portuguese respondents were not originally born in Macau, that might cause them to compare their pre-cognition of their own countrys system with what they now know of Macaus system.

The language skills are definitely a handicap in the communication between the different groups of people who are living in Macau. Chinese people are dominant in Macaus society but they are not the only ethnic group here.

MDT  What do you foresee in terms of Macaus development related to both communities?

RX  I think Macau has been putting a lot of effort into promoting itself as having a mixture of Chinese and Portuguese cultures, for the purposes of tourism marketing. However, it does not involve its Portuguese residents a lot in urban development. Although [they are] a really small group, they play a very influential role in all kinds of industries in Macau. So the government should put more effort into improving Portuguese peoples daily lives and enhancing communication between them and other groups of residents.

I believe that the Portuguese community will become smaller and less important in Macau society in future, since over 90 percent of residents are Chinese or from a Chinese cultural background.

Popularizing English or Portuguese in Macau should be one of the most important tasks to advance the development of society. Gradually, Portuguese people in Macau may feel more welcome and have an increased emotional attachment to Macau. Staff reporter
President Barack Obama thanked the Dalai Lama yesterday [Macau time] for offering condolences after 49 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, as the pair once again angered China by meeting at the White House.

It was Obamas fourth White House meeting with Tibetan spiritual leader, whom Beijing accuses of leading a campaign to split the region off from the rest of China. The Dalai Lama says he simply wants a higher degree of autonomy under Chinese rule.

China condemned the meeting after the White House listed it on Obamas public schedule. The meeting was closed to news media coverage, but the White House released on its Flickr account a photo by the presidents official photographer of the two men greeting each other.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama has warm personal feelings toward the 80-year-old Dalai Lama and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Obama also appreciates his teachings and believes in preserving Tibets unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions, Earnest said.

The Dalai Lama led a minute of silent prayer for the shooting victims during a visit at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington this week, the day after a gunman opened fire at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding dozens more.

The president thanked the Dalai Lama for his expression of condolences about the terrorist attack in Orlando over the weekend, Earnest said.

China strongly disapproved of the meeting. Its Foreign Ministry said it had made solemn representations to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and expressed its firm opposition.

We need to emphasize that the Tibetan issue is Chinas internal affairs and other countries do not have any right to interfere with this, spokesman Lu Kang told a daily media briefing.

The 14th Dalai Lama is not simply a religious figure but a political figure in exile who has been conducting secessionist activities internationally under the pretext of religion, the statement said. If President Obama meets with Dalai Lama, it will send the wrong signal to Tibetan separatist forces, and it will undermine the mutual trust and cooperation between China and the U.S.

Lu urged Washington to stick by its promise of recognizing Tibet as part of China, and not support Tibetan independence or any separatist activities.

Earnest reiterated that U.S. policy toward Tibet remained unchanged.

Tibet, per U.S. policy, is considered part of the Peoples Republic of China, and the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence, he said.

China also blames the Dalai Lama and others for inciting a wave of self-immolations among Tibetans in recent years. Dozens have set themselves on fire while calling for the return of the Dalai Lama or for Tibetan independence.

Obama held the meeting in the Map Room, instead of the Oval Office, because the Dalai Lama is not a head of state.

The president had been scheduled to travel to Wisconsin yesterday for his first campaign appearance with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton following his formal endorsement of her last week. But the event was postponed after the Orlando shooting, creating room on Obamas schedule to meet with the Dalai Lama, who was already visiting Washington.

Obama planned to visit Orlando today [Macau time] to pay tribute to the victims and meet with their loved ones. AP
CHINA-SERBIA Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Serbia today in an effort to further boost relations with the friendly nation and assert Chinas intention to radically increase its presence in the Balkans and Europe.

SOUTH CHINA SEA The Philippines says differences within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations prevented the 10-nation bloc from issuing a tough statement on territorial feuds in the South China Sea after a meeting hosted by China this week.

CHINA Police detain a man over an attack on an airline check-in clerk that left her lying in a pool of blood and arrest two others who charged the cockpit as their flight was taxiing for takeoff, the latest in a growing tally of dangerous acts involving Chinese airline travelers.

BANGLADESH The detentions of thousands of suspected criminals across Bangladesh led to the arrest of a suspected member of a banned Islamist group accused of violently attacking a publisher last year, police say.

JAPAN A Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at tackling the nations declining birth rate.

THAILAND The police raided a Buddhist temple complex to arrest an abbot accused of embezzling USD40 million but are blocked by thousands of his followers who say he is too ill to be taken into custody.

INDIA Three lions identified as having eaten villagers in western India have been caged and will never be released back into the wild, forest officials say.

INDONESIA More than 30 whales were stranded on the coast on the island of Java and 10 of them have died, authorities said.

LIBYA At least 16 Libyan militia fighters have been killed in two attacks by the Islamic State group as pro-government forces try to dislodge the extremists from Sirte, their last stronghold in the country. The bombings were part of a wave of suicide attacks launched by IS to stall the initially fast progress of the anti-IS forces, who are led by militias from the western city of Misrata.

AUSTRALIA A flamboyant Australian lawmaker is under fire over a campaign ad playfully suggesting he shot dead two political rivals that was posted online days after the Florida massacre. Independent candidate Bob Katter has made no apology.

USA Newly declassified documents offer more details about a detainee who died inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks and disclose that President George W. Bush was worried about the image of shackled detainees wearing adult diapers.
Drivers  The American Cancer Society is looking for volunteer drivers for its Road to Recovery program in Twin Falls. Volunteers will drive patients to and from medical treatments. Commitment is flexible. Information: Renae Delucia at renae.delucia@cancer.org or 702-891-9023

Volunteers  Idaho Home Health and Hospice needs volunteers who will bring compassion, support and dignity to those facing a serious, life-limiting illness and their families. Volunteers can choose between offering respite to family caregivers or provide support with administrative tasks. Information: Heidi Walker, 208-734-4064 or Heidi.Walker@LHCgroup.com.

Volunteers  The Fifth Judicial District CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) Program is seeking community volunteers to become advocates for abused children. Advocates receive training and support to investigate, report, monitor and advocate for children involved in the child protection system. Advocates are needed in all eight counties of the district, but it is critical to the program to recruit volunteers in the Mini-Cassia area. Information: Tahna, 208-735-1177.

Volunteers  Interlink Volunteer Caregivers provides volunteers to help elderly, disabled and chronically ill people live safely and independently in their homes. Volunteers assist with transportation to health-related appointments and essential errands, light housekeeping chores, friendly visits, yard maintenance and simple home repairs. Carpenters and handymen are also needed. Volunteers are reimbursed for mileage and covered with excess auto liability insurance. Commitment is flexible with no minimum hours required. Information: Edie, 208-733-6333 or ivcofmv@gmail.com.

Volunteers  The Senior Companion Program at the CSI Office on Aging needs volunteers, age 55 and older, to assist homebound seniors by providing friendly visits and transportation as needed. Information: Marisol, 208-736-2122, or toll free, 800-574-8656.

Volunteers  The Foster Grandparent Program at the CSI Office on Aging has openings for volunteers, age 55 and older, to read to children ages 2 to 9 and assist with their academic and social skills. Placements are available throughout the Magic Valley in Head Start programs and public elementary schools. Information: Marisol, 208-736-2122 or toll free, 800-574-8656. Information: Marisol, 208-736-2122, or toll free, 800-574-8656.

Volunteers  St. Lukes Home Health and Hospice needs volunteers to share compassion and increase the quality of life for patients and their families. The program is designed to offer companionship and socialization to patients, plus respite and support for the caregivers. Information: Marie Sharp, 208-814-7603 or sharpm@slhs.org.

Drivers  The Twin Falls Senior Center delivers meals to homebound seniors in the Twin Falls area Monday through Friday, and the routes take an hour or less to complete. Commitment is based on your availability; pick a day of the week or drive once or twice a month, pick a week to drive, or be a substitute driver. Volunteers must be 18 years of age with their own car, and have proof of liability insurance. Drivers receive 54 cents a mile fuel reimbursement. Information: Sandee Earl, 208-734-5084.
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TWIN FALLS | The Blaine County School District announced Wednesday that Val Seamons will be the interim finance manager.

Shell start July 1, pending approval by the school board. Shell replace Mike Chatterton, who retires June 30.

Seamons began working for the Blaine County School District in January 2003 and is currently the accounting manager. She has worked closely with Chatterton over the years.

She has been an officer for the Idaho Association of School Business Officials and has a business management degree from Idaho State University.

Seamons lives in the Hailey with her husband and has grown children who graduated from Wood River High School.

The school district has been working since February to find a permanent employee for the position.

The vacancy was posted both locally and nationally, but remains unfilled. A national search firm, Ray and Associates, has been retained to help with the process.
TWIN FALLS  High school and college students got a flavor of the science behind cheese making Wednesday at the College of Southern Idaho.

During a Discover Science workshop, instructor Rick Parker gave students instructions for the hands-on activity: making cheese curds.

Steps included heating liquids over a burner, and mixing citric acid into milk to lower the pH. Parker asked students if they understand the concept of pH and they nodded.

Good for you, he said. Im impressed. You guys need to go to college.

As the mixture coagulated, students saw milk protein developing. They also learned about whey, a liquid by-product.

After separating cheese curds from the whey, students use flavored salts to give the cheese a better flavor.

Discover Science is a four-day workshop that started Monday and continues through Thursday at CSI. Its free to students and all costs are covered by a grant from the NASA Idaho Space Grant Consortium.

The two-year grant ends soon and its not available for renewal. College officials are looking at other funding opportunities for future science workshops.

The 13 participants  hailing from as far away as Rupert and Hagerman  range from incoming high school sophomores to incoming CSI sophomores.

They all have at least a 3.0 grade point average and are planning to major in a STEM field in college: science, technology, engineering or math.

Incoming Canyon Ridge High School junior William Cawthra, 15, wants to do chemistry research. He became interested in science about five years ago.

I started taking things apart when I was little, he said. I like to see how things work.

William enjoyed dissecting a pig, and seeing its heart and lungs, during a workshop Tuesday.

He said he appreciates the hands-on experiences. Its good to see what science actually is.

Parker was impressed with the students knowledge and specific career goals.

In the past, CSI has offered Discover Science workshops on Saturdays during the school year. Its the first time the college has offered a week-long session.

Workshops are designed for students to gain hands-on experiences with a variety of science topics, said CSI assistant professor of chemistry Megan Jacobson.

Plus, its about recruiting and retention, she said, and encouraging students come to college and eventually transfer to a four-year university.

CSI student Maria Alvarez, 20, is one of the workshop participants. Shes a chemistry major and wants to transfer to a four-year university such as the University of Denver or University of Wyoming.

She has signed up for all of the Discover Science workshops to help figure out her interests and narrow down career options.

The Oakley High alumna is doing an internship at High Desert Milk. She has been at CSI for two years, taking classes while juggling a part-time job at the colleges Office on Aging.

Alvarez said she enjoys encouraging her peers  especially women and minorities  to become involved in college STEM programs.

Theres a variety of science jobs available with good pay, she said. I just want people to know theres opportunities out there.

Wednesdays workshop session focused on dairy science. Students learned about topics such as a cows digestive system, feeds for dairy cows, and milk, cheese and butter production.

After a hands-on cheese making activity, students toured the Idaho Milk Products plant in Jerome. On Thursday, the group planned to take a geology field trip to Hagerman.
TWIN FALLS  The Twin Falls School District and teachers union reached a contract agreement Tuesday night after two months of negotiations.

It wont be official until its signed by union members and school trustees later this month.

Across the Magic Valley, teachers unions and school officials bargain every spring over topics ranging from pay to health insurance. It affects contracts for hundreds of certified employees  such as teachers and counselors  for the upcoming school year.

Most of our meetings were extremely successful, said Twin Falls union co-president Peggy Hoy, adding there were great discussions. But, when it gets to money, its always difficult.

Twin Falls teams started negotiations in late April and held six sessions before reaching an agreement. We believe its a good, strong package, said Hoy, a middle school math teacher.

Once the agreement is approved, teachers will get their contracts for next school year by July 1.

The agreement affects 507 certified employees, plus about another 20 who havent been hired yet.

During negotiations, the largest point of contention was teacher pay under the states new career ladder law.

Obviously, it took us a lot longer to work our way through the compensation, said Brady Dickinson, director of operations for the school district.

The teachers union was concerned about equity and fairness for all teachers, he said, especially longtime workers who max out on the pay schedule. We had to get creative and think outside the box a little bit.

Teams agreed if teachers arent getting a minimum 4 percent pay raise, theyll get additional personal leave days instead.

The solution comes at a minimal cost, but demonstrates the school district places value on veteran teachers, Dickinson said.

A career ladder law took effect statewide in July 2015. It will boost pay over five years with the goal of better attracting and retaining teachers.

Negotiation teams also decided to increase pay for school counselors. Thats a really big thing for our district right now, Hoy said. Its hard to fill those positions.

School counselors will receive an approximately $5,000 stipend. The change will impact about 20 employees. School psychologists and social workers already receive a stipend.

Counselors are paid on the same salary schedule as teachers, Dickinson said, but typically have a masters degree. We felt like they should be paid a little differently than being on the teachers salary schedule.

Another topic during negotiations: health insurance. The school district is covering a 5.8 percent cost increase for next year. The deductible for employees will remain the same at $1,000.

That was a really good thing for us, Hoy said.

For several years, negotiation teams have used an interest-based bargaining format, where they tackle one topic at a time.

They get help from two independent facilitators from the Wood River Valley. That change was made after negotiations became contentious in 2013, when teams reached an impasse and had to call in a federal mediator.

In addition to spring negotiations, teams also meet monthly for breakfast gatherings.

I think that has really helped to minimize the number of issues that come up during negotiations, Dickinson said. Now, teams are focusing on larger topics such as teacher salaries and health insurance.
BOISE  Magic Valley candidates will be in the spotlight as Idaho Democrats kick off their state convention.

The keynote speaker at Friday nights convention dinner will be Deborah Silver, the former Twin Falls County Democratic chairwoman and 2014 state controller candidate who is running against Twin Falls Republican Lee Heider for state Senate this November.

A party statement said Silver will discuss how her local party moved from the margins in 2008 to now, where Idaho Democratic candidates are highly competitive.

The 24th Legislative District, which covers Twin Falls, has a full slate of Democratic candidates for state Legislature this year. Along with Silvers race, Cathy Talkington is running against Rep. Steve Hartgen and Dale Varney is running against Rep. Lance Clow.

And for Saturday nights dinner, the keynote speakers will be this years Idaho Democratic candidates for federal office  James Piotrowski, who is running against U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador, Jerry Sturgill, who is running against U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, and Jennifer Martinez, who is running against U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson to represent the district that includes the Magic Valley. Sturgill grew up in Twin Falls, while Martinez grew up in Wendell. Her past experience includes working on Hispanic political involvement when she was with the Idaho Community Action Network.

The convention includes training for candidates and party activists, revising the party platform and picking delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in Philadelphia next month. Idahos national convention delegates will include four superdelegates, who arent pledged to a presidential candidate, and 23 pledged delegates who are apportioned based on the results of the March Idaho Democratic caucuses  18 to Bernie Sanders, five to Hillary Clinton. Of the states superdelegates, two have said publicly they plan to back Sanders, one Clinton and one was part of Clintons Idaho campaign team but is so far publicly uncommitted. Clinton has clinched the partys nomination, having won more delegates nationally, although Sanders had not conceded or endorsed his opponent as of Wednesday.

One topic of debate will likely be whether the Democrats should stick with a caucus system for picking their presidential nominee or switch to a primary. The state Legislature passed a law in 2015 moving the presidential primary to early March, and the Republicans took part this year. The Democrats opposed the law and stuck with their caucus for 2016, arguing it amounted to creating a taxpayer-funded, closed Republican primary. However, Rep. John Gannon, a Boise Democrat, said in May that he plans to argue at the state convention in favor of getting rid of the closed primaries and caucuses and replacing them with open primaries.

Theres been talk of putting that in the platform, but, assuming it gets majority support, that could end up as a resolution instead, said state party spokesman Dean Ferguson. As for the rest of the platform, Ferguson said, they have been working on it for the past couple of weeks and that, while there are changes being discussed, he also expects it to include much of the 2014 platform.

Theyre not dissatisfied with it, he said. They generally like it.

The convention is being held at the Riverside Hotel in Boise.
TWIN FALLS  Do you have questions for the Bureau of Land Managements Twin Falls District Resource Advisory Council?

RAC meetings provide an opportunity to ask questions of the citizen-based advisory council or to make comments that may assist RAC members in advising BLM regarding its current planning efforts.

The RAC will meet Friday in Twin Falls. Public comments and questions will be heard in the morning, followed by a travel management planning update and an overview of the sagebrush focal area withdrawal proposal. The remainder of the day will be dedicated to wild horse and burro program education, which will include a tour of the Bruneau Off-Range Wild Horse Corrals.

The BLM Twin Falls District RAC is a 15-member advisory panel that provides advice and recommendations to the BLM on resource and land management issues for approximately 3.9 million acres of federal public lands within 10 counties in south-central Idaho. Meetings are open to the public, and attendees are welcome to address the council during the comment period. This forum provides a good opportunity for people to ask questions of the citizen-based advisory council or to make comments that may assist RAC members in advising BLM regarding the current planning efforts.
A lot of people who want tighter gun control blame the Supreme Court for standing in their way. In 2008, a 5-4 majority read the Second Amendment to protect an individuals right to own guns. That decision, Fareed Zakaria writes in The Washington Post, has made common-sense regulation of guns much harder and contributed to Americas high gun-homicide rate. The courts rulings have severely hobbled lawmakers in regulating guns, claims Ian Millhiser. The massacre at a nightclub in Orlando last weekend has led to renewed attacks on the courts gun rulings.

But the practical importance of these judicial rulings has been exaggerated. They are well down the list of obstacles to gun control in America.

The courts decisions struck down gun bans in Washington and Chicago. But banning the possession of guns has not been the stated goal of the mainstream movement for gun regulations. That movement has instead sought more limited objectives, such as bans on some categories of guns and stronger requirements for background checks before guns can be sold.

In its 2008 decision, the Supreme Court explicitly said that it does not consider the Second Amendment to rule out all regulations. The right the amendment protects, it said, is not unlimited. It added that nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

Moreover, it said that the amendment covered only the kind of weapons in common use at the time of the Founding. How to apply these limitations on the right is, of course, debatable. But the court has subsequently declined even to hear a case challenging a local ordinance against assault weapons.

The Supreme Court has not had any occasion to consider a federal ban on assault weapons since it embraced the individual-rights view because Congress has not passed one. In 2013, a Democratic Senate could muster only 40 votes for that ban. Legislation to expand background checks also died without any action from the court.

The gun regulations at the center of our national debate, that is, have been blocked by political opposition rather than judicial rulings. (They had been blocked by political opposition in the years before 2008, too.) The court has merely struck down some of the strictest regulations in the U.S.  regulations that our country as a whole is nowhere close to adopting. The courts rulings have had no effect on the laws governing most Americans.

But while the court has not been a major constraint on gun regulations, the Second Amendment probably has been. Thats because its presence in the Constitution, even when the courts have not used it to nullify any laws, has strengthened popular support for gun rights. It has influenced public sentiment, votes and legislative debates.

In this respect the Second Amendment has worked as James Madison envisioned it. In modern America we tend to think that the Bill of Rights operates mostly through the courts, but he did not. In a 1788 letter to Thomas Jefferson making the case for the amendments, he said their chief value would be to ensure that certain rights were incorporated with the national sentiment and to furnish good ground for an appeal to the sense of the community when those rights were in danger. His speech proposing the Bill of Rights in 1789 emphasized the same points.

Liberals who want stricter gun laws are not the only participants in this debate who sometimes overstate the role of the courts. Conservative advocates of gun rights say that another Democratic appointment to the Supreme Court will make the Second Amendment a dead letter. The truth is that whoever wins the election and however the court rules, tens of millions of Americans will continue to invoke the amendment in defense of their right to own guns  and the political system will continue to respond to them.
Syringa School Responds to Charter Commission

Syringa Mountain School is and will continue to be a public charter school option for families in the Wood River Valley. The speculation of our finances is expected but under misguided understandings of our solvency. After all, we are only two years old. But, despite being just two years with our doors open, we are ending this school year with $20,000 in the bank. For a start up business, this is an incredibly rare success, especially for a non-profit. Most new businesses take between three and five years to become fiscally solvent. Investors will send thousands and sometimes millions to start-up entrepreneurs understanding that they wont see their return for a few years. It takes time to build an organization and in the two years our doors have been open, weve done a wonderful job of grant writing, fundraising, and utilizing our federal and state tax dollars wisely.

Our school is highly supported by many in our valley and beyond. Arts, music, and nature education are hard to come by in most communities and our free public charter school, guided by the core principles of Public Waldorf Education, provide all of these avenues for learning to children daily. Families have moved here from other states to support and be a part of our vision. We believe in a free public option for a school guided by Waldorf principles and we see the community supporting that into the future.

The Board was perplexed with why the following statement would be a surprise for anyone who understands the beginnings of a new business:

While fundraising efforts have met current cash flow needs, SMS has struggled with lack of funds periodically throughout its years in operation.

Thats two years, to clarify. Expecting strong financial solvency for a local charter school in the first two years of operation is unrealistic. Despite this, for two years, we have struggled but met our own financial needs. For such a young school, this is a success. Given the loophole in local tax law, we do not receive local county funding. We are required to make up the local funding deficit with fundraising and have seen and will continue to see massive local support for this. We will continue to see an increase in enrollment and will increase the number of classes in grade levels, and expand into a full middle school to meet the needs of our community. In two years, we have increased enrollment 10 percent and 13 percent, respectively. We plan to recruit new families in a more targeted way in the coming year. We have a new director of school and are hiring a new development director full time with secretarial support. We have a clear, ambitious and achievable plan in place for 2017 and beyond and we are right on target for our long-term goals.

Our solvency plan for the next three years includes national, long-term, and larger funding support through enrollment, grant writing, large donor fundraising and endowment search. Magic Valley News quoted our board chairman as saying, The state is taking action because a significant portion of our budget is raised through philanthropyThey have concerns relative to the efficacy of it being sustainable. Its an inequity of education that we do not receive local tax funds and the state government and charter agencies need to address this unequal distribution of funds if they expect charter schools to be successful in Idaho state on tax dollar funding only. We have successfully raised monies through fundraising every year to meet deficits within our budget without compromising the quality of education for our students.

Syringa Mountain School will not close mid-year nor do we have any reason to believe this could be a possibility. The new payment schedule from the state of Idaho has no bearing on our overall annual funding amounts. The charter commission expects only enrollment increase to create a solvency for our school  we believe we can do better than that. We will increase enrollment at the pace that makes sense for our community while raising funds, grant writing, and securing long-term financial contributions.

Greg Bloomfield, chairman Randy Flood, vice chairman Stafanie ONeill, secretary Phoebe Pilaro, board member Bobbi Filbert, board member Amy Jonas, board member Jessica Banks, board member Christine Fonner, director of school
Authorities in the Republic of Congo have ordered on Tuesday the arrest of a former Congolese presidential security adviser, General Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko over accusations of planning a coup detat.

Mokoko, 69, ex-presidential candidate is accused of involvement in an alleged coup attempt in 2007.

Mokoko is a long-time ally of Sassou Nguesso, but on February 3, 2016, he announced his resignation as the presidents advisor on peace and security, a post he had held since 2005.

He later challenged his former boss in the March 20 election.

This is clearly a desire to harm the general, who stood up to Sassou during the last presidential election, spokesman for the generals political party, Guy Romain Kinfouissia said.

It is just another demonstration of force to muzzle the opposition, he said.

Denis Sassou Nguesso was reelected with over 60 percent of votes in March.

The European Union refused to send election observers to the country, saying conditions had not been met for a transparent and democratic vote.

Sassou has ruled the poor nation of 4.5 million people by facing down challenges from rebels and accusations of corruption and mismanagement of resources, especially in the state-run oil sector upon which Congo heavily depends.

Under his so-called hybrid socialism, he has used Congos oil revenues for major infrastructure and development projects.

But poverty remains endemic in the country, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Africa is able to cater for only fifty percent of its annual requirement of blood despite demand in the continent being high, the World Health Organization disclosed on Tuesday on the occasion of World Blood Donor Day.

From 2013 to 2016, blood donations rose from about 3.9 million units to 4.4 million units. That is 11.4 percent of increase, but this will still cover only around 50 percent of the annual requirement of blood. So far, only 21 countries are collecting 80 to 100 percent of their national blood needs through voluntary unpaid blood donors, the Who said in a statement published on its website.

The global health body also blamed the shortage of blood in most African countries on the weak implementation of policies, and lack of systems and structures to ensure an adequate supply of safe blood and blood products to meet the needs of all patients requiring transfusion.

This years theme Blood connects us all focuses on thanking blood donors and highlights the dimension of sharing and connection between blood donors and patients.

The slogan Share life, give blood has been adopted to draw attention to the role that voluntary donation systems play in encouraging people to care for one another and promote community cohesion.
The archbishop of Bangui, Bishop Dieudonne Nzapalainga, on Tuesday called for calm after renewed sectarian violence last weekend in the Central African Republic has claimed three lives.

The violence in capital city Bangui appeared to be in reprisal for the murder of a young Muslim by unidentified assailants on Saturday night.

Although calm has returned to the capital, there are still concerns the situation could flare up.

Bangui was the site of numerous inter-ethnic confrontations, which left hundreds dead in 2014 and 2015 and forced thousands to flee, according to Human Rights Watch.

The central African nation held largely peaceful elections in December 2015 after several years of sectarian violence. Faustin Archange Touadera, a former math professor and ex-prime minister, was elected in a run-off vote on February 14 and has pledged to restore peace and disarm militant groups in the landlocked country, the third-poorest in the world in terms of GDP per capita.

Sectarian violence erupted in CAR following the deposition of former president Francois Bozize in March 2013 by a mainly Muslim rebel alliance known as the Seleka. Anti-balaka militias formed in response to the deposition of Bozize and the installation of Muslim leader Michel Djotodia.
A secondary school in Burundi has sacked 230 students on Tuesday for defacing President Pierre Nkurunziza portrait in their textbooks.

Kwizera Guillaume, the provincial director of education in Ruyigi province in Burundi, said the administration has sent home a total of four classes who were sitting an exam.

It is an option we took to push them to reveal the authors of the acts, Kwizera said.

Earlier this month, eleven secondary school students were put in jail in the East African nation for scribbling on photos of President Pierre Nkurunziza.

The youths, aged 14 to 19, were charged with insulting the head of state, a crime punishable by imprisonment of between six months to five years, plus up to $32 in fines.

According to AFP, a dozen schools have reported similar cases of defacing the presidents portrait. In some of the pictures the eyes had been gouged out, while insults against the president were scrawled over others.

Last year Nkurunziza won a third term in office that critics say is unconstitutional and has caused turmoil in Burundi that the U.N. says has resulted in more than 400 deaths. More than 260,000 people have fled the country fearing it could return to civil war. Hundreds have also fled fearing persecution or assassination for opposing Nkurunzizas third term.
Return on investment in county public health departments in California exceeds return on investment in many other areas of medical care, according to a new study by a University of California, Berkeley economist.

In the study, highlighted by the American Journal of Public Health and published online on June 16 ahead of print publication, Timothy Brown, a health economist with UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, estimated from his analysis of data for the years 2001 through 2009 that each dollar that counties spent on public health programs in California returned $67 to $88 dollars of value in terms of improved health outcomes.

"The very large estimated return on investment for California county departments of public health, relative to the return on investment for selected aspects of medical care, suggests that public health is a wise investment," Brown concluded. The study is the first to place a value on the overall health outcomes from such programs and to compare them to costs, Brown said.

Unlike medical care, which primarily focuses on treating disease, county public health departments focus on the prevention of disease. Brown also concluded that the return from Medicare's national investment in four major health conditions was far less than the return from county public health spending. For heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke and breast cancer, Brown's review of the research literature revealed that returns on Medicare expenses ranged from $1.10 to $4.80 per dollar spent.

Many innovations in medical care also have had a lesser impact than county public health expenditures, according to Brown. In a review of reported outcomes for innovations in medical practice, Brown found that researchers reported returns ranging from $1.12 for bone marrow transplant for women with metastatic breast cancer, to $38 for heart attack survivors taking beta-blockers.

"Information only recently became available that made it possible to calculate the average return on investment for public health programs in California," Brown said.

The new study is part of a larger project Brown has been leading to develop a health economics framework for determining return on investment in public health.

Public health departments regulate food service establishments, provide disease screening and treatment for communicable disease, offer prenatal care, regulate various aspects of the water supply, provide immunizations, and provide other services that can immediately improve population health, as well as improve population health over the longer term. Health departments also engage in activities that attempt to influence county populations to adopt healthier habits, which primarily affect population health over the longer term.

To understand the potential long-term health impacts of investment in public health, Brown and colleagues published two earlier studies that provided key information used in the return-on-investment calculations in this study. One study found that, on average, a single year of county public health spending continued to improve general health status in the population for over four years, ultimately improving the general health status of over 216,000 people.

A second study found that beyond its effects on general health status, the same single year of public health spending also saved the lives of over 29,000 people who otherwise would have died, with this effect playing out over a ten-year period.

To determine the monetary value of these changes in general health status, Brown used information from another study published as part of this project, in which the "subjective well-being valuation method" was used to determine the monetary value of improved general health status.

This method has previously been applied broadly to value things not normally bought and sold in a market, such as climate, air and noise pollution, risks for natural disaster, and proximity to waste facilities, coastlines, and transportation. It has also been applied to medical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, migraine headaches, various chronic illnesses, mental health and chronic pain.

Conceptually, the method is not unlike the way a victim in an accident may be compensated for pain and suffering, Brown said.

"A decrease in general health status that reduces happiness is statistically valued by the amount of family income it would take to completely reverse this reduction in happiness, so that happiness is the same as it was before the decrease in general health status occurred," Brown stated in the study, which concluded that a year spent in good or excellent health instead of poor or fair health could be valued at $41,654.

To estimate the value of avoided deaths, Brown used standard valuations of $8.9 to $9.6 million per life saved, taken from estimates used by the federal government.

Brown cautions that this study does not address the question of how to optimize public health expenditures among various programs, but notes that other researchers have begun investigating the costs of foundational public health services at a county-wide level.

From Brown's perspective, "Investments in research must go hand-in-hand with investment in public health activities to obtain the long-term improvements in population health that we all work toward."

Explore further Young adult survivors of childhood cancer report feeling middle-aged
Credit: University of Sussex

The UK Government's pilot of seven-day opening of doctor surgeries has significantly reduced weekend emergency hospital visits, hospital admissions and ambulance call-outs, new University of Sussex research has found.

Spread across the whole week, Accident & Emergency visits were down 10 per cent among patients of pilot surgeries in central London. The greatest effect was seen on Saturdays and Sundays, with a drop of 18 per cent recorded across weekends.

Crucially, for squeezed NHS budgets, expensive hospital stays and ambulance call-outs also dropped significantly.The reductions were almost entirely driven by fewer elderly patients with moderate injuries or illnesses - not, as the Government expected, by minor cases being diverted away from A&E.

The researchers believe this is because A&E doctors take fewer risks with elderly patients they don't know and choose to admit them to a ward to be 'on the safe side', whereas General Practitioners (GPs) have an intimate knowledge of their patients' medical history and can send the less serious cases home after treatment. Essentially, GPs make far more effective 'gatekeepers' to more expensive treatments.

Many of the minor cases in A&E are the so-called frequent flyers - people who visit A&E on multiple occasions. Very few of these people took up the option to visit a GP instead.

This suggests that a nationwide roll-out of seven-day opening would not only reduce pressure on stretched A&E services as a whole, but that the impact would be biggest among the most costly cases.

Professor Peter Dolton and Dr Vikram Pathania of Sussex's School of Business, Management and Economics led the study, which is published online in the Journal of Health Economics.

Dr Pathania said: "There is clearly evidence of unmet demand for weekend GP opening.

"Seven-day opening for GPs appears to make a dent in two major sources of A&E expense - admissions and ambulance usage. The latter alone shows a significant drop of nearly 20 per cent on weekends.

"Costs aside, there is also strong evidence that patient healthcare, in many cases, could be better delivered by a visit to a GP.

"Patients may automatically equate the size and complexity of a large hospital-based A&E unit with higher quality care. But typically A&E doctors are junior to GPs, who are equivalent to hospital consultants in terms of their medical training and expertise. Plus GP treatment is based on direct past experience with the patient and access to their medical records."

The research has potentially large implications for NHS finances, with an unplanned hospital admission costing around 30 times as much as a GP visit:

A&E visits have risen 32 per cent over the past decade to 21.8 million a year

Each A&E visit costs the NHS 114

An ambulance call-out adds 220 to the bill

An unplanned hospital admission costs an eye-watering 1489

This compares to just 45 for the average GP visit

The researchers caution that the long-term impacts are still unknown. People may respond to less crowded A&Es by visiting them more, for example.

It is also clear that demand is highest among older people and, as the research also shows, the more affluent.In fact, some practices have already curtailed their weekend opening, citing insufficient demand.

It may be, therefore, that seven-day opening should only be implemented in strategically located surgeries and may not be optimal for all surgeries.

Professor Dolton said: "These findings suggest the need for a careful rethink about the efficiency of redirecting patients to extended GP surgeries to lighten the load in A&E - although this would need to be accompanied by a redirection of NHS funding to Primary Care."

Explore further National study casts doubt on higher weekend death rate and proposals for seven-day hospital services
Adding this variable angle slant hole collimator to an existing breast molecular imaging system allows the system to get six times better contrast of cancer lesions in the breast, providing the same or better image quality while also potentially reducing the radiation dose to the patient by half. Technologies developed at DOE's Jefferson Lab for the variable angle slant hole collimator are included in two filings to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Credit: DOE's Jefferson Lab

Preliminary tests have demonstrated that a new device may enable existing breast cancer imagers to provide up to six times better contrast of tumors in the breast, while maintaining the same or better image quality and halving the radiation dose to patients. The advance is made possible by a new device developed for 3D imaging of the breast by researchers at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Dilon Technologies and the University of Florida Department of Biomedical Engineering.

In breast cancer screening, mammography is the gold standard. But about half of all women who follow standard screening protocol for 10 years will receive a false-positive result that will require additional screening, particularly women who have dense breast tissue. Used in conjunction with mammography, imaging based on nuclear medicine is currently being used as a successful secondary screening alongside mammography to reduce the number of false positive results in women with dense breasts and at higher risk for developing breast cancer.

Now, researchers are hoping to improve this imaging technique, known as molecular breast imaging or breast specific gamma imaging, with better image quality and precise location (depth information) within the breast, while reducing the amount of radiation dose to the patient for these procedures.

According to Drew Weisenberger, leader of the Jefferson Lab Radiation Detector and Imaging Group, a new device called a variable angle slant hole collimator provides all of these benefits and more. When used in a molecular breast imager, the device has just demonstrated in early studies to capture 3D molecular breast images at higher resolution than current 2D scans in a format that may be used alongside 3D digital mammograms.

"These results really focus on the breast. We hope to build on this to perhaps improve the imaging of other organs," Weisenberger said.The new device replaces a component in existing molecular breast imagers.

While a mammogram uses X-rays to show the structure of breast tissue, molecular breast imagers show tissue function. For instance, cancer tumors are fast growing, so they gobble up certain compounds more rapidly that healthy tissue. A radiopharmaceutical made of such a compound will quickly accumulate in tumors. A radiotracer attached to the molecule gives off gamma rays, which can be picked up by the molecular breast imager.

"You can image that accumulation external to the breast by using a gamma camera," said Weisenberger.

Current molecular breast imaging systems use a traditional collimator, which is essentially a rectangular plate of dense metal with a grid of holes, to "filter" the gamma rays for the camera. The collimator only allows the system to pick up the gamma rays that come straight out of the breast, through the holes of collimator, and into the imager. This provides for a clear, well-defined image of any cancer tumors.

The variable angle slant hole collimator, or VASH collimator, is constructed from a stack of 49 tungsten sheets, each one a quarter of a millimeter thick and containing an identical array of square holes. The sheets are stacked like a deck of cards, with angled edges on two sides. The angle of the array of square holes in the stack can be easily slanted by two small motors that slide the individual sheets by their edges. The result is a systematic varying of the focusing angle of the collimator during the imaging procedure.

"Now, you can get a whole range of angles of projections of the breast without moving the breast or moving the imager. You're able to come in real close, you're able to compress the breast, and you can get a one-to-one comparison to a 3D mammogram," Weisenbeger explained.

In a recent test of the system, the researchers evaluated the spatial resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio in images of a "breast phantom," a plastic mockup of a breast with four beads inside simulating cancer tumors of varying diameter that are marked with a radiotracer. They found that using the VASH collimator with an existing breast molecular imaging system, they could get six times better contrast of tumors in the breast, which could potentially reduce the radiation dose to the patient by half from the current levels, while maintaining the same or better image quality. The test results match a published paper that predicted this performance via a Monte Carlo simulation.

The collimator was built at Jefferson Lab and the test results were analyzed at the University of Florida with funds provided by a Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund grant from the Commonwealth of Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology, and with matching support provided by Dilon Technologies.

The test results were presented at the 2016 Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Annual Meeting in San Diego on June 13. The technologies developed for the Variable Angle Slant Hole Collimator are included in two filings to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Explore further New approach to mammograms could improve reliability
Researchers have identified certain modifiable and non-modifiable factors associated with vitamin D deficiency in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD). The findings, which appear in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN), could help physicians protect the health of these young patients.

Vitamin D deficiency is common in children with chronic kidney disease (CKD). In an attempt to understand why, a team led by Anke Doyon, MD and Franz Schaefer, MD (University of Heidelberg, Germany) looked at how various factors relate to vitamin D levels in 500 children with CKD who were residing in 12 European countries.

Among the major findings:

Two-thirds of the patients were classified as vitamin D deficient.

Patients who took vitamin D supplements had vitamin D levels that were 2 times higher than those who did not take supplements, and they had a lower prevalence of vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D levels were lower for certain kidney abnormalities, such as glomerulopathies

Vitamin D levels were lower in winter months than at other times of the year.

Certain genetic variants were also associated with vitamin D levels, but to a lesser extent than disease-associated factors and vitamin D supplementation.

"Vitamin D levels are influenced more strongly by seasonal factors, the type of disease and nutritional supplementation than by common variants in vitamin D regulating genes," said Dr. Doyon. "Supplementation practices should be reconsidered and intervention studies are needed to define guidelines how to monitor and treat vitamin D deficiency in children with chronic kidney disease."

Explore further Many with migraines have vitamin deficiencies, says study

More information: "Genetic, Environmental and Disease-Associated Correlates of Vitamin D Status in Children with CKD," CJASN, June 16, 2016, "Genetic, Environmental and Disease-Associated Correlates of Vitamin D Status in Children with CKD,", June 16, 2016, DOI: 10.2215/CJN.10210915
(HealthDay)An implantable ultrasound device (SonoCloud) appears to enhance chemotherapy treatment in glioblastoma, according to research published online June 15 in Science Translational Medicine.

Researchers from the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris and other French institutions tested the experimental device on 15 patients with recurrent glioblastoma. The intention of the device is to disrupt the blood-brain barrier long enough for subsequent chemotherapy to reach the brain.

Frederic Sottilini, the chief executive officer of Paris-based CarThera, the company developing SonoCloud, explained how the ultrasound device works: It's implanted in the skull, over the area of the tumor. When activated, sound waves cause microbubbles to vibrate, temporarily opening the blood-brain barrier. This permits more of the chemo drug to reach the tumor. The device is activated before each round of chemotherapy, Sottilini told HealthDay. Two minutes of low-intensity ultrasound is enough to open the blood-brain barrier for about six hours and increase the concentration of medication five to seven times, he said.

The researchers used the chemo drug carboplatin for the study. The experimental treatments were conducted monthly for six months at most or until evidence of tumor progression was detected. According to Sottilini, the device appeared safe to use in areas of the brain that control speech, movement, and other senses. This phase 1 trial was not designed to test whether the higher doses of chemotherapy that passed into the brain were effective. However, tumor growth did not progress in nine patients, the researchers said.

The research was partially funded by CarThera.

Explore further Blood-brain barrier opened noninvasively with focused ultrasound for the first time

More information: A. Carpentier et al. Clinical trial of blood-brain barrier disruption by pulsed ultrasound, Science Translational Medicine (2016). Journal information: Science Translational Medicine A. Carpentier et al. Clinical trial of blood-brain barrier disruption by pulsed ultrasound,(2016). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf6086

Copyright  2016 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Urayasu Mayor Hideki Matsuzaki, right, speaks next to Dr. Iwaho Kikuchi of Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital during a press conference in Urayasu near Tokyo, Thursday, June 16, 2016. The Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at tackling the nation's declining birth rate. The Japanese city of Urayasu, about 14 kilometers (9 miles) east of Tokyo, is allocating 90 million yen ($850,000) over three years to fund the research project conducted by the hospital. Matsuzaki said low birthrate is "a national problem." (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

A Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at countering Japan's declining birth rate.

The city of Urayasu, about 14 kilometers (9 miles) east of Tokyo, is allocating 90 million yen ($850,000) over three years to fund the research project conducted by Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital.

The hospital hopes that preserving eggs will encourage women to give birth when they are ready instead of giving up having children.

Dr. Iwaho Kikuchi of the hospital said Thursday that using public funds to support this kind of study may be a first in the world.

The average cost of such procedure is around 500,000 to 600,000 yen ($4,700 to $5,700), but a woman will only pay 20 percent of the cost with the subsidy. Women between the age of 25 and 34 who live in Urayasu, also home to Tokyo Disneyland, are eligible to participate.

Kikuchi said 12 women are in the process of starting the freezing process, and about two-thirds of them or their husbands have some sort of health issue.

The success rate of pregnancy from frozen eggs is slim. If a woman freezes eggs at the age of 25, the chance of successfully giving birth is 30 percent. At the age of 34, it drops to 20 percent.

Dr. Iwaho Kikuchi of Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital speaks during a press conference regarding the city's pilot project that will help women freeze their eggs in Urayasu near Tokyo, Thursday, June 16, 2016. The city in Tokyo suburb will become the first city in Japan to offer public funding to the pilot program to tackle the nation's declining birth rate. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

Japan has been struggling to boost its declining birth rate, which would depress the working population and increase the financial burden on them as the older generation retires.

Urayasu mayor Hideaki Matsuzaki called the low birthrate a national problem.

"In general, pregnancy and childbirth is an individual issue. But when the situation has become this far, I consider it a social problem," Matsuzaki said. "I view using public expenditure as the right thing to do."

Urayasu Mayor Hideki Matsuzaki, right, speaks next to Dr. Iwaho Kikuchi of Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital during a press conference in Urayasu near Tokyo, Thursday, June 16, 2016. The Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at tackling the nation's declining birth rate. The Japanese city of Urayasu, about 14 kilometers (9 miles) east of Tokyo, is allocating 90 million yen ($850,000) over three years to fund the research project conducted by the hospital. Matsuzaki said low birthrate is "a national problem." (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

Dr. Iwaho Kikuchi of Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital speaks during a press conference in Urayasu near Tokyo, Thursday, June 16, 2016. The Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at tackling the nation's declining birth rate. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

Explore further Researchers shed new light on egg freezing success rates

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
PM Kvirikashvili opens new section of Georgias East-West Highway

A new section of Georgias main transport route - the East-West Highway  has opened.The 7km section, which was part of the four-lane highway spanning 12 kilometres along the Agara-Zemo Osiauri in central Georgia, was officially opened by Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili today along with World Banks regional director for the South Caucasus Mercy Tembon and other officials.The remaining 5km section of the same route will open by the end of 2016.The Prime Minister spoke about the importance of the road and added it was "great that the section opened today. He said Georgians and foreign visitors who were attending tonights performance of American pop group Maroon 5 in Black Sea coastal city Batumi in western Georgia were now able to use this new section of road."We plan to open several other important sections by the end of this year. By the end of 2020 we want all of the main road arteries of Georgia to be completed, the Prime Minister noted.Kvirikashvili said some of the roads that were planned to be finished by 2020 included: Chumateleti-Argveta section of the East-West Highway; A road with tunnels to western Georgias mountainous Svaneti region; A road linking Kutaisi in western Georgia with Abastumani in the south; A road to eastern Georgias mountainous Tusheti region; A road to western Georgias remote Racha region.The PM stressed Kutaisi, Georgias second largest city in the countrys west, must become a hub that connects all parts of Georgia with each other.Along with contributing to the countrys economy, the PM said the creation of new roads was important as it contributed to the employment of local residents."More than 500 locals are employed only on this [Agara-Zemo Osiauri] road section. It is very important that these people can feed themselves and their families without leaving their homes, the PM said.The World Bank Group was actively involved in financing the East-West Highway project. In total, the Bank offered $367 million USD to Georgia to develop the East-West Highway.The East-West Highway is deemed the countrys main transport route and covers the road from capital Tbilisi all the way to the other side of the country and the Black Sea resort town Batumi via Poti.In February this year, Georgias Finance Minister Nodar Khaduri and the World Banks regional director for the South Caucasus Mercy Tembon signed an agreement on the East-West Highway Corridor Improvement Project.Project details published by the World Bank on its official webpage said the development objectives of the East-West Highway Corridor Improvement Project for Georgia were to: Reduce road user costs along the East-West highway corridor section upgraded under the project; and Strengthen the capacity of the Roads Department of the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure and the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development to respectively manage the road network.Georgian company Black Sea Group was carrying out the construction works together with Kuwaiti company Copri Construction Enterprises.This road section is part of the Silk Road project that links Europe and Asia and is the fastest transit road to China.
@ByKristenMClark

Hold the phone, Pam Bondi.

In Act 3 of a two-day saga, CNN host Anderson Cooper says Florida's Republican attorney general is "either mistaken or she's not telling the truth" about the pretenses of her now-viral interview with him Tuesday afternoon.

Cooper had questioned the 'sick irony' of Bondi talking about her support for the LGBT community in the wake of the Orlando shooting massacre, when she previously had fought for years efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in Florida.

On Wednesday morning, Bondi responded to the interview by going on a New York talk radio show -- the host of which, Todd Schnitt, called Bondi his "long-time friend." Bondi and the radio hosts criticized Cooper for interviewing her under false pretenses.

She said "the interview was supposed to be about helping victims families" by educating the public about potential donation scams and Tuesday wasn't "the time nor the place" to discuss a "constitutional issue."

But on "AC 360" Wednesday night, Cooper said Bondi's preferred topic actually wasn't the purpose of the interview at all.

He said, before they went on air, he asked Bondi -- as he does all his guests -- what she'd like to talk about. He chose to lead the interview with that, but then he said he wanted to hold her accountable for the contradiction between her past and present comments about LGBT people.

"Let's be real here," Cooper said, "Ms. Bondi's big complaint seems to be that I asked in the first place, in the wake of a massacre that targeted gay and lesbian citizens, about her new statements about the gay community and about her old ones."

He added: "It's my job to hold people accountable. And if on Sunday, a politician's talking about love and embracing 'our LGBT community,' I don't think it's unfair to look at their record and see if they have actually ever spoken that way publicly before -- which I've never heard her say."

Watch Cooper's full response to Bondi here:

The full-length version of her original CNN interview -- which Cooper refers to and which Bondi had complained wasn't posted online -- is available here:

Here, again, was Bondi's response to Cooper on the radio show Wednesday morning:
Former North Miami Mayor Kevin Burns said he filed paperwork today to run for the state Senate after Sen. Gwen Margolis dropped out of the District 38 race in Miami-Dade County

Burns served two terms as mayor from 2005-2009 and was the citys first openly gay mayor. Burns, a real estate broker, lost a legislative race to Margolis in 2010.

The musical chairs may not be over following Margolis decision to drop out last week after she took heat for dismissing some of her Democratic opponents as Haitians.

Sen. Dwight Bullard says he is considering switching districts to run for District 38.

It has been mentioned by party leaders and other electeds about it potentially being a good move for me, Bullard told the Miami Herald Tuesday. The demographics speak to the possibility of an African-American candidate more easily winning the seat than the current seat I am in.

About one-third of the voters in the newly drawn district are black including Haitians and African-Americans.

Without Haitian support I would have never been elected mayor, said Burns who is white.

Democrats say Andrew Korge is taking a look at the seat. Bay Harbor Islands Mayor Jordan Leonard said he is also considering a bid.

Other candidates already in the race are small business owner Anis Blemur, former state Rep. Philip Brutus, teacher Don Festge, lawyer Jason Pizzo and state Rep. Daphne Campbell.

Campbell has raised the most through donations -- about $28,000 -- but Pizzo has the largest total pot due to a $200,000 loan.

All of the candidates are Democrats in the left-leaning district.

The five-day qualifying period starts Monday for the Aug. 30 primary.
@ByKristenMClark

Yet again making the all-too-familiar trip to console and grieve with victims of a mass shooting in an American community, President Barack Obama will travel to Orlando on Thursday.

The trek has become a sadly frequent one for Obama, whose presidency has coincided with other high-profile mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., Charleston, S.C., and Newtown, Conn.

But Sundays slaying of 49 people at a gay nightclub holds special significance as the worst of them all  the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

While in Orlando, Obama will visit with families of the dead and the 53 people who were injured. The president also plans to meet with surgeons, doctors and nurses who treated the wounded, and law enforcement officials and first-responders who were on the scene in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Specific details on the visit havent been released. But Obama is expected to also attend a prayer vigil at the Amway Center, Orlando officials told the Herald/Times.

Obama wants to offer comfort and support to a community thats grieving, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday, adding that he expects it will be an emotional trip for the president.

While the visit will be a somber one, it will also be underscored by some recent political tension between Obama and Republican Gov. Rick Scott  despite other public displays of bipartisanship in a time of tragedy.

Read more here.

Photo credit: Emily Michot / Miami Herald
A $1,500 budget, building a set in Grandmas basement, and film crews of five people are just some of the challenges the creators of the web series "Thirds" have faced.

Thirds, created by Michael Melugin and Joshua Harper and produced by Taylor Palmer, tells the story of three friends in their final semester of college. They grappling with relationships, careers and their impending adulthood.

Its a crash course in growing up that makes viewers feel they are spending time with their friends, Melugin said.

We created it so our peers could identify with these things that the characters are going through, he said.

The nine-episode series has a runtime of two hours. Each episode has its own arc, but when put together, the episodes make a series that resembles a feature film.

The story began as a sketch comedy show based on Melugin's and Harper's lives and evolved when the characters began taking shape, Harper said.

We wrote to the characters, Harper said.

Harper was the only one of the creators who also acted in the film. Five of the six main characters were played by people who had never acted before, Melugin said.

Melugin and Harper cast the characters from a pool of friends, scrolling through Facebook for people who fit the characters of the series rather than hunting for experienced actors. Once their cast was set, the story began to evolve.

Seeing the actors helped us grow the characters, Palmer said.

Palmer, who graduated with a degree in marketing, started as an extra. Palmer ended up producing, part of the sound recording and part of the lighting process.

He didnt know what he was signing up for, Harper joked.

Nevertheless, there's a sense of camaraderie between the three who have supported each other through the yearlong process of creating "Thirds," Palmer said.

They've been together, filming until four in the morning, editing for hours. Melugin even quit his job so he could focus on the project.

Michael is the example for how to make an indie project, Palmer continued, Youve got to indulge in the production.

The trio said that Thirds wont be getting a sequel and tells a complete story.

Instead, Melugin, Palmer and Harper have shifted their focus to helping UM Media Arts alumni film a documentary on jujitsu fighters in Panama City. The production starts filming in August.

Until then, "Thirds" is available for public viewing at the Thirds Web Series YouTube channel.
The Missoula City Council will operate under the presumption that the Historic Preservation Commission was correct  until proven wrong  in denying a demolition permit application for the Missoula Mercantile building submitted by a Bozeman developer.

That was the message on Wednesday during the City Council's land use and planning committee meeting.

"We are operating under a presumption of correctness, so (the HPC) is correct until proven wrong," explained council member Gwen Jones. "That's how we're operating."

HomeBase Montana filed for the permit with the goal of deconstructing the historic Merc and building a five-story Custom Residence Inn by Marriott with ground-floor retail space. The HPC denied its permit earlier this month, saying that, among other things, the owner of the building, Octagon Partners, had not made a "good faith effort" to find an alternative that would result in preserving the building.

HomeBase immediately appealed the decision to the City Council, which now has until July 11 to either approve, approve with conditions or deny the permit.

Wednesday's meeting was largely a recap of the process by which HomeBase arrived at their decision to apply for a demolition permit. City historic preservation officer Leslie Schwab outlined why the city's Development Services staff recommended approval of the permit, saying HomeBase had met all the criteria.

She also outlined the process by which the HPC determined HomeBase's application did not meet the criteria.

Among other things, the HPC found that HomeBase did not consult with the HPC about the demolition permit application.

"What the applicant cited in their application as consultation are actually the discussions with development services that appear to be meant to thwart and circumvent a meaningful consultation process," the HPC wrote.

In their appeal, HomeBase claimed the HPC violated their due process rights and failed to provide a fair, objective consideration of the application.

"Despite demonstrating conduct which requires recusal, such as signing petitions demanding the HPC deny the permit, various HPC members continued to participate int he review process and assisted in crafting the findings of fact," HomeBase's lawyers wrote.

***

At the beginning of the meeting, Mike Doggett, an attorney hired by Preserve Historic Missoula, told the committee he believed they should only review evidence that already has been presented to the HPC and not seek any new evidence or information. Preserve Historic Missoula is an advocacy organization fighting to keep the Merc from being torn down.

"HomeBase has indicated they don't want new evidence collected," he said. "So because the party that is actually appealing doesn't want new evidence, and Preserve Historic Missoula doesn't either, how would that be incumbent on the committee to do?"

A lawyer for HomeBase, Alan McCormick, countered what Doggett said, saying that any suggestion that HomeBase has indicated that they don't want new information collected is "false."

McCormick said he doesn't believe new evidence is needed to support HomeBase's appeal.

Council member Michelle Cares also disagreed with Doggett, saying that there are certain things that the council members need clarification on. She cited as an example the fact that both parties have talked about the availability  or lack thereof  of new market tax credits but that there is no detail provided in any submitted documents.

Council members Bryan von Lossberg, Jon Wilkins and Annelise Hedahl all said they would definitely seek new information if they needed it.

Committee chair Emily Bentley said there were issues addressed by the HPC that were never fully answered and documents that were never made available, such as the plans made by the Missoula Public Library to acquire the Merc property.

"My answer was if it was relevant, it would have come up in the HPC's deliberations," Doggett responded. "For both HomeBase and (Octagon Partners, the current owner of the Merc property), tax credits and the library deal are at best tangential. Since they didn't bring that up (in the appeal) it's their burden to persuade the council that there was an error committed by HPC. Any new evidence wasn't presented to the HPC and can't possibly be looked at with any sort of clarity."

Doggett said recent Montana Supreme Court decisions have made it clear that the process the City Council must follow is outlined very clearly.

"It's almost unheard of when an appellant and an interested party, neither of whom wants new information, that the trier of fact believes new information is somehow necessary," Doggett said. "You guys are on a very slippery legal slope, doing something that neither of the parties wants you to."

Committee member Gwen Jones, an attorney herself, said the council is operating under administrative law and trying a case in a court of law.

"Under administrative law it is not uncommon to pull outside information," she said. "If this was litigation, then all of the boundaries apply there. But this is administrative and so we pull in information that we need so people feel like the city of Missoula did a good, substantive job."
SUPERIOR  A state mediator and representatives of Mineral County and its sheriffs department made progress but didnt hammer out a contract agreement Wednesday.

Progress is slow, but were going to meet again. Its a step in the right direction, absolutely, said Shawn Fontaine of Teamsters Local No. 2 after 4 1/2 hours of meetings on separate floors in the county courthouse.

The next session wont be scheduled until after county commissioners review the progress when they meet Friday.

Fontaine represents 16 deputies, detention officers and emergency dispatchers who went on strike for better pay and multiple-year contracts in late May. After 10 days on the picket line they returned to work last Thursday once the first negotiation session was scheduled.

Mediation went well today with steps being taken by each party to reach a resolution, Bill Smith, mediator from the Montana Department of Labor, said in an email. There will be another mediation session scheduled in the future, and we look forward to assisting everyone in finding a solution.

Just one of Mineral County's three commissioners, Laurie Johnston, participated in the negotiations, along with Dan Johns of Kalispell, the countys legal representative.

Fontaine said discussions started with the big, broad picture of where were trying to get to.

We looked at things we really think we need and what we dont have our gut into as far as our proposals, he said.

The sheriffs office employees have worked without a contract since last July 1. Other than what Fontaine characterized as a few minor details, the retroactive contract for the 11 1/2 months since then have been worked out.

Were working on the second year of an agreement and maybe longer if we can get there, Fontaine said.

Commission chairman Roman Zylawy and Duane Simon are expected to join Johnston at the countys regular meeting on Friday. The tentative agenda includes a reduction in force action item at 9:20 a.m. and another called HRC project discussion at 1 p.m.
Anita Green had plenty of other things on her mind when she woke up Sunday morning.

In the exhausting rush of her historic Saturday in Helena, when the 25-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter from Missoula was elected an at-large delegate to next month's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Green received a text message on her cellphone. It said something terrible had happened in Florida.

As she learned more about the mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando, my heart just sank, Green said this week.

Like most of America and the world, she struggled to understand why someone like Omar Mateen, who became the 50th victim after hed gunned down 49, could do something so heinous, she said.

But Green also felt confused. The day before she had become Montanas first openly transgender national delegate, elected in part on an emotional one-minute speech in which she invoked Sanders support of gay rights dating back to 1983, when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

It seemed as though America was making a lot of progress within the queer community, Green said. When this happened in Florida it felt like we took one step forward and two steps back.

In her undergraduate years Green served on the University of Montana student senate, and last year she made an unsuccessful bid for a Ward 2 seat on the Missoula City Council. Shell speak this weekend at the 2016 Big Sky Pride celebration in Great Falls.

Im not going to lie. There is a little bit of fear, she said. But its far more important to be strong and to be who you are in the face of fear.

Its that courage and passion that first struck Teresa Jacobs, a longtime Missoula activist wholl be going to the Philadelphia convention as a Western Montana delegate for Sanders.

Like many of the 21 pledged Democratic delegates for Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Jacobs and Green hadnt met until the campaign began. They were selected as state delegates last Thursday at the Missoula County Democrats meeting in Hellgate High School.

I was impressed by Anita not because of her transgender status but because of who she is, Jacobs said. I could see that shes committed and shes dynamic and articulate, and thats what we need on our team.

Anita is not a single-issue voter, agreed Debbie Orozco of Arlee, another Sanders western Montana delegate. One of the major issues shes worked on in the Bernie campaign is public lands.

There are so many issues, Green said. I feel as though Bernie is creating a revolution, and he is really going to make a significant difference in politics. Hillary Clinton has flip-flopped on many issues, and Im afraid that if she does get elected president she will flip-flop again on her stance on the Keystone pipeline.

I think that would be devastating for Americas public lands, and I believe it is incredibly important to preserve and conserve our public lands. I believe that Bernie Sanders will do that.

***

Shes blazing a new trail for Montana, but Green wont be the only openly transgender delegate in Philadelphia July 25-28. News outlets report that Iowa and Florida will send their first ones, and if recent conventions are indications therell be several others.

According to the website transunitedforobama.org in 2012, Jane Fee of Minnesota was the first national delegate to represent the transgender community at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Georgia, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania sent people who identify as transgender in their delegations in 2004, and seven states, including Arizona and Oregon in the West, had such delegates in 2008, when gender identity was included in the Democratic platform in Denver.

In 2012, one superdelegate  Barbra Casbar Siperstein of New Jersey  and 13 pledged delegates identifying as female or male transgenders went to the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

***

Greens election speaks to the diversity in the Montana Democratic party, said Nancy Keenan, the state partys executive director.

Democratic National Committee rules call for equal representation of men and women at the convention. Representatives at the state convention each voted for up to two men and two women. The national committee also instructs state parties to adopt and implement programs to achieve full participation of members of the LGBT community, people with disabilities and youth.

Its basically an affirmative action outreach and inclusion plan, Keenan said. When we are choosing our delegates, thats something thats very much part of the conversation that we are inclusive of the variety of the people who live in the state. We talk about that at the opening of the convention.

Some from under-represented communities, be they disabled, gay, Native American or transgender, self-identify in one-minute speeches, as Green did on Saturday, Keenan said.

Green delivered a similar address in Missoula last Thursday, talking about Sanders proactive stance on gay rights that began before she was born. The one in Helena didnt go as smoothly.

I broke down crying, Green admitted.

She was embarrassed, but Jacobs said her passion was unmistakable. So is her resolve.

Montanas Sanders delegates bristle at news accounts that call Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. They say their candidate has the better chance of defeating Donald Trump in the November election.

Sanders did not concede when the primary season wrapped up Tuesday in Washington, D.C., and his backers say the 714 superdelegate votes can still change their minds to swing the nomination in his favor at the July 25-28. Montana has six superdelegates  those who decide for themselves how they cast their vote rather than being pledged to one candidate. Jean Lemire Dahlman, a national committeewoman and superdelegate from Forsyth, has said shell back Sanders, but Jorge Quintana of Helena, party chairman Jim Larson of Billings and vice party chairwoman Jacquie Helt of Helena have not tipped their hands. Neither has Gov. Steve Bullock or U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.

Were really concerned that the superdelegates take into account the 16 1/2 million independents that didnt even get to vote in the primaries because of closed primaries in 14 states, Jacobs said. Thats why its important were talking about who we are, and what we represent and whos out there thats going to be voting in the general election. Its different than the primary.

For Green, it's also a different landscape after the shootings in Orlando.

I dont want people to be afraid of who they are because of this tragedy that took place, she said. Im speaking up now because I want to remind people that its OK to be who you are. Dont let fear control you and drive you back into the closet. Be proud of who you are."
Law enforcement are looking for a man who absconded from probation stemming from his 1996 conviction for attempted deliberate homicide in Missoula.

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of 38-year-old Chad Earl Williams.

Williams is described as a white male, five-foot-ten-inches tall and weighing 200 pounds with short brown hair and hazel eyes. He also has numerous tattoos on his arms, legs and the front and back of his torso. Police say he is known to drive a black 1999 GMC Sierra pickup with the license plate BMC553 and a silver 2002 Chevrolet Silverado pickup with the license plate 3-10820B.

In 1996, Williams was sentenced to 50 years in the Montana State Prison with 25 years suspended after he was convicted of shooting Louis Donald Craighead twice in the head and at least once in the stomach while trying to rob him.
There is a perceived right to protest and thereby a perceived right to subvert the friendly, open process of democracy that gives everybody a chance. Recent violence at the Nevada Democratic Convention finds party officials saying that this misbehavior could easily go on to the national convention.

No matter who you are, you need the Democratic Party to function at its best. Our unique nation requires both parties in order to survive. Violence could happen among Republicans as easily as it has among Democrats.

Political activism south of the U.S. border sometimes turns into guerrilla warfare with wholesale murder. This is one of hundreds of reasons why Americans need the freedom to discuss.

If we like our political system with its earnest attempts to hear and to satisfy the wishes of every citizen, then caution about any immigration seems justified.

A Montana group recently began asking unresponsive officials for particulars on allowing Middle Eastern refugees into the U.S. Inquiry was going nowhere and ugly activism emerged trying to prevent any discussion of refugee issues. Inquiring citizens were called anti-refugee, haters and racists.

At this point people wanting information stood up as graciously as they knew how and asked for a stand-down. On the other side, one of the pro-immigration leaders, Jameel Chaudhry, a peacemaker of high order, promptly honored that request and asked activists to stop protesting, to be honest and to stop calling names. The confrontations halted immediately and dialog is opening. Thanks, Jameel. You made it safe to ask questions again.

In order to preserve that reopening dialog with its friendly atmosphere and to keep America considerate of all its citizens, we need to listen carefully to every side of every argument. More than that, we must convince others that we really are listening and that we are doing so with respect.

Friendly discussion has served Americans well for some 240 years. Ours is not a perfect system but seems superior to any other. If you know of something better, be sure to discuss it on the Opinion page of this newspaper.

Here are some questions that want discussion:

Why was refugee immigration from the Middle East established without citizen input?

The original prediction was 10,000 refugees to Montana every year. How was the number lowered to 100 and what keeps it from going back to 10,000 per year?

Are the proposed hosts long-term citizens or are they recent refugees from the same Middle Eastern sadness?

As long as we are getting 100 refugees per year how can we (graciously) help them assimilate?

Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the U.S. accepts more than twice as many refugees as all other nations combined. Then, without notice, the figure was changed to  more immigrants than all other nations combined  Then that statement disappeared entirely and was only available as a quote from a lesser officer. Is there one government officer who will give stable answers that are trustworthy?

How can we maintain friendly dialog on this tough issue and get needed answers?

Is there an effective way to ask members of Congress Jon Tester, Steve Daines and Ryan Zinke to establish precise, long-term numbers on refugees and/or immigrants to be admitted?

In the meantime, thanks for taking part in this top-notch nation.
The questions surrounding the funding for the Zika virus loom large in Congress and the public as mosquito season begins. ("Tester, Daines, Zinke split on Zika funding by Tom Lutey, The Missourian, June 4.) With modern air travel and the fact that the mosquitoes carrying the virus are common in 40 states, the Zika threat could become a major problem.

Congress has done well robustly funding the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, actually moving forward to the possibility of controlling these pandemics. Now is the time to fund the battle against the Zika virus, since the longer we wait, the higher the costs in dollars and human tragedy.

Concerned citizens can call or write their representatives to make a difference in getting Congress to act on Zika funding.

Willie Dickerson,

Snohomish, Washington
BUTTE  A Butte policeman was justified in fatally shooting a man who had pulled and pointed a pistol Thursday, Sheriff Ed Lester says, but it is a tragedy that will take all officers a while to get over.

In something like this it takes some time to sink in, Lester said Thursday, hours after 36-year-old Peter Grandpre was shot multiple times inside a house in Butte while exchanging gunfire with an officer.

When you start facing your own mortality and realizing that an individual has lost his life, it takes a while for that to sink in, he said.

Lester said the officer was wearing a body camera and video of the incident shows the shooting early Thursday morning was justified. The officer and man fired multiple shots but only Grandpre was hit  several times  and he was pronounced dead after being taken to St. James Healthcare.

There is no doubt in my mind the individual was trying to kill the officer, Lester said at a news conference. He declined to name the officer involved but said he was on administrative leave pending an investigation.

Lester said at this time its not known who exactly fired first. The Montana Division of Criminal Investigation is investigating the shooting.

Grandpres wife called police at 1:51 a.m. Thursday saying her husband had been drinking and they had been arguing in the house at 604 S. Clark St. when he took out two pistols and a rifle, Lester said. Police learned later that two children, ages 4 and 6, also were in the house.

***

Lester said the first officer to arrive scoped out the house quickly and saw a man inside holding a rifle. The man put down the rifle and opened the front door of the house, but stepped back in when the officer began giving him verbal commands.

The officer was standing just outside when Grandpre reached behind his back, pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the policeman about 5 to 10 feet away.

Gun shots were fired, although Lester said he is not 100 percent sure who initiated the first shot.

Four other officers were pulling up when the shots were going off, but none of them took part in the shooting. Lester said investigators were trying to determine how many shots were fired between the officer and Grandpre, who was standing in the living room by the front door when he was struck.

Grandpre was wearing a military-type vest and police found another gun inside the front of it. Both handguns were .45-caliber semi-automatic pistols and a rifle nearby was a .308-caliber bolt-action.

Lester said a chaplain had talked with Grandpres wife after the shooting. She said she and her husband had thrown things at one another before she called police.

Lester said he did not believe the children witnessed the shooting.

***

The sheriff had few details on Grandpre, including his background or how long he and his wife had been in Butte.

But according to Grandpres LinkedIn profile, he studied aerospace welding at Montana Tech. He served in the Marines, the U.S. Army and Montana Army National Guard. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service on the internet.

He described himself on the profile as serving as a Combat Engineer 12B in the Army from December 2008 to September 2013; in the infantry/medic with the National Guard, specializing in explosives handling; and was deployed to Iraq in 2006-07.

As infantry in Iraq I operated armored vehicles during convoy escort operations from southern Iraq (Tallil) up the MSR (Main Supply Route) into northern Iraq. Conducted mounted and dismounted security operations during convoy ops in and around Baghdad, Fallujah, BIAP, Taji, and Anaconda, his profiles said.

He served in the Marines from June 1999 to October 2002. The profile also describes him as a construction equipment operator and handyman.

The profile also listed Grandpre as a semi-retired volunteer.

This statement by Grandpre, posted in the 2013 LinkedIn profile, reads:

My Brother Jake and I are working on starting a non-profit organization to act as quick response to natural disasters and war zones; we are specialists in high-danger areas where other relief organizations are unwilling to go. i.e. Frontline First Responders. We also want to work with other Veterans and Wounded Warriors in our off time as morale builders by providing opportunities to fly in private aircraft. In addition we plan to offer low to no-cost aviation training in maintenance, A&P Certification, Pilot training, and intro to kit aircraft building.

***

Brad Taggart lives next door to 604 S. Clark St., located a block south of St. James Healthcare on the Butte Hill. The steep street features neatly kept, mostly small homes.

Taggart said his bedroom window faces the house, and he was awakened about 2 a.m. to the sound of a man yelling. Taggart's dogs, who were in his bedroom, also started barking.

"I heard a guy scream, can't remember what he said, but it was some guy yelling and then five gunshots. Then, within a minute, we had police here and fire trucks," Taggart said.

Taggart, who has lived 14 years in the neighborhood, said he didn't know the occupants of 604 S. Clark Street, and believes they moved in last fall. The house has seen several different occupants since its owner died some years ago, he said.

Taggart said he knows all his other neighbors. He didn't go outside during the commotion, but later in the morning ventured out to see the neighborhood and street cordoned off with police tape.

Arthur Lillyblad, who lives three houses down from the Grandpre home, said neither he nor his wife heard any of the commotion early Thursday.

While he didn't know the family, Lillyblad said they had "never been a problem" in the neighborhood. He said he never talked with Peter Grandpre, but "we waved to each other" as Grandpre passed in his vehicle. "He seemed like a very congenial man," Lillyblad said.

Lillyblad also observed the kids playing in the yard on several occasions.

"They seemed like happy children," he said.
CROW AGENCY  Theres a big difference between being able to speak the Crow language and being able to teach it. But, for a language used by a dwindling number of people in the roughly 13,000 member tribe, there arent many teaching resources.

The Crow Summer Institute helps fill that void.

Ive learned more from this than I have from anything else, said Roanne Hill, a Crow language and culture teacher at St. Labre High School. The techniques that we use here, I feel like are much more efficient.

The institute, organized by the Crow Language Consortium, Little Bighorn College and The Language Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to save endangered languages, is in its fourth year.

Hill grew up speaking Crow and didnt learn English until age 5. Thats not typical for todays Crow youth; a 2012 study commissioned by the tribe showed that only 3 percent of preschoolers were fluent, while 14 percent had limited fluency.

Tylis Bad Bear is a success story, both for language learners and the institute. He wasnt taught Crow at a young age, but learned the language over time and felt comfortable speaking it more by eighth grade. He graduated from Hardin High School in 2011.

A student of previous years institutes, he was tabbed to teach an intensive beginners Crow language class being offered for the first time this year. He previously taught at St. Labres immersion preschool and taught Crow language at Crow Agency Elementary.

We dont have all the English letters, he told his class Wednesday morning. But the Crow Language does have additional vowels like Uu and Oo.

Which version of a noun is used is often dictated by whether its describing a relationship with a person. There are masculine and feminine versions, and changes for situations.

For example, Dasaake describes a girls dad, as spoken by a third party. Diluupxe is a boys father in the same tense. Basaake is my dad, as spoken by a female, while biluupxe is my dad, as spoken by a male. To address their father, a female says basaakaa. A male says axxe.

It depends on what kind of context youre using, Bad Bear said.

At one point, a Native American student asked why she doesnt hear people using the formal address tense.

Its because nobodys speaking Crow, Bad Bear said. Thats why we dont hear it.

A patient and accepting approach to teaching is crucial, he said. For a while, Crow Indians who didnt speak Crow faced a shaming approach by language teachers.

We damaged a good-sized generation by saying, You should know this. If youre a Crow, you should already know this, he said. Its all about teaching, not preaching.

The institute began at Sitting Bull College in North Dakota, but moved to Little Big Horn College last year.

Many (teachers) came through school when (Crow) wasnt part of the curriculum, said Janine Pease, an instructor and administrator at Little Bighorn College. They are here to sharpen their skills. Theyre almost all teaching multiple grades.

Participants also help record audio for a new Crow app, and the Language Conservancy is working to adapt materials used to teach Lakota for teaching Crow.

With the growth of immersion preschools has come greater demand for speakers of Native languages, especially those with teacher training.

I didnt think learning the language in third and fourth-grade would put me here, teaching this language, Bad Bear said.
POLSON  Half a dozen local individuals and married couples who were defrauded by Polson businessman John Jack Cross will get a portion of their money back while Cross is still in federal prison, thanks to legislation passed in 2011 in Helena.

Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Monica Lindeen on Wednesday announced $186,000 in restitution to some of Cross victims from the Montana Securities Restitution Fund.

Four more Montanans will receive $27,500 from the fund, some of the money they lost in a separate scam perpetrated by a Florida man.

At Lindeens urging, the 2011 Legislature established the Montana Securities and Restitution Fund to help victims of investment fraud recover a portion of what they lost when full restitution is not possible.

The money in the fund comes from fees paid by firms that register with the state to do business with Montana investors. No taxpayer money is used.

Wednesdays awards to Crosss victims ranged from $9,000 to $50,000, Lindeens press secretary Sanjay Talwani said.

***

According to a 2014 indictment, Cross defrauded investors for more than a decade through four firms he established  5 Star Finance and Mortgage, High Yield Return, Wholesale Fireworks Stores and 5 Star Financial.

People who invested money with the 5 Star and High Yield Return firms were told their money would be secured by real property, and received promissory notes guaranteeing interest payments at specific rates, and repayment of loans within a specific period.

Those who invested in Crosss fireworks business were promised they would be paid back in a certain period of time with interest.

Rather than use the money  as he had promised, the defendant  used the money for personal expenses, unrelated business expenses, and for lulling payments to investors, according to the indictment filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Racicot.

In a plea agreement last year, Cross pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and a second count was dropped. He was originally indicted on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and forfeiture.

Many of his victims were reported to be close friends of Cross. He was sentenced to two years in prison by Judge Dana Christensen, and ordered to repay 10 unnamed victims $1.5 million.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Cross, 56, is incarcerated at the SeaTac Federal Detention Facility in Seattle.

***

Restitution from the state fund is limited to $25,000 or 25 percent of unpaid restitution, whichever is less. In 2015, the law was changed to allow victims who are senior citizens, or anyone designated as a vulnerable person under Montana statutes, to receive $50,000 or 50 percent of unpaid restitution, whichever is less.

Lindeen announced the awards on World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, and used the opportunity to remind people of red flags indicating potential elder financial abuse by someone. They include:

A senior lacking basic amenities he or she could usually afford.

A vulnerable person voluntarily giving excessive financial reimbursement or gifts for care and companionship.

A caregiver who has control over an elders money but is failing to provide for the elders needs.

An elder who has signed property transfers or power-of-attorney papers, but is unable to comprehend such a transaction or what it means.

Lindeen encouraged everyone to be wary of any investment opportunity that promises large returns for little risk. If an offer is too good to be true, it probably is.

She said anyone suspecting elder abuse should contact her office or Adult Protective Services.

***

With the $213,500 in awards announced Wednesday, the total payout from the Montana Securities Restitution Fund has now topped $1 million and benefited more than 75 Montana victims.

Talwani said he did not know why four of Cross unnamed victims did not receive partial restitution from the fund, but said some may not have applied for it, or some may not be Montana residents.

In the other scam where victims got some of their money back from the fund, the four Montana individuals or married couples were among 1,800 nationwide who were sucked into an $80 million Ponzi scheme.

In that one, Paul Schumack of Florida told victims they were investing in virtual concierge kiosks, similar to ATMs, that would be placed in hotels, hospitals, stadiums and other public places. The machines would let people download movies, order food and more.

Schumack and others sold interest in more than 20,000 such machines, telling people they would earn a steady income stream. In reality, only 84 were ever produced.
The planned meeting between US President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama sends the "wrong signal" to Tibetan separatists and will hamper Washington's relations with Beijing, the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

China has lodged a diplomatic protest with the United States, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said.

Obama and the Dalai Lama were scheduled to meet privately at the White House on Wednesday morning. At press time, there was no confirmation of whether the meeting had been held.

The Dalai Lama is "not only a religious figure, but a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion," Lu told a regular news briefing.

"Any attempt to take advantage of Tibet issues and undermine stability in China will not succeed," he added.

Obama had been scheduled to travel to Wisconsin to appear at a campaign event with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. But the event was postponed after Sunday's shooting at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub that left 50 people dead.

That created an opening in Obama's schedule that the White House filled with the meeting with the Dalai Lama, AP said.

Obama made a high-profile public appearance with the Dalai Lama last year at a prayer breakfast in Washington, calling him "a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion." Three previous meetings were held privately.

The White House barred the media from the meeting and arranged for it to be held in the Map Room instead of the Oval Office, which is reserved for visiting heads of state, AP said.

Niu Jun, a professor of international relations at Peking University, noted that the meeting was arranged on the heels of the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which ended last week in Beijing and had positive effects on the two countries' relations.

"But the meeting will definitely hamper Beijing's ties with Washington, as it is an issue about sovereignty and separation," he said.
The three cities at the top of the list had average monthly energy bills significantly higher than the rest of the top 50. In Fairbanks, Alaska, citizens have clamored for lower energy bills for years, while Hawaii's isolation and rural island living requires the state's residents to be more dependent on imported resources.
In an 8-3 vote, Butte-Silver Bow commissioners approved a modified request Wednesday night to give $200,000 in county funds to a proposed supermarket and retail project on Harrison Avenue.

The money is contingent on everything being lined up for the possible project  including purchase of the land  within six months. Developers must also update commissioners on progress toward that in three months.

Chief Executive Matt Vincents administration asked for the money on behalf of Idaho-based White-Leasure Development Co., which has been seeking to buy land on the northwest corner of Harrison and Elizabeth Warren avenues for the project.

It is one of the most coveted pieces of real estate in Butte because of the traffic volume.

The development company says the project would be worth $21.5 million if it could purchase the land, but its owners  Helen and Sean ONeill  say the 7.3 acres are not for sale at this time.

Helen ONeill does not want to sell her property, period, at this time, Helen ONeill told The Montana Standard on Tuesday.

Dan ONeill, a member of the ONeill family, reiterated this sentiment during Wednesday nights meeting, saying that the family was not contacted before the item was put on council agenda.

Our family was not in the position to make a selling decision nor was there any agreement in place for our property to be sold. said ONeill. And the family feels that its a slight burden to have city representatives representing our family in the paper for what our intent is to do with the property.

Among other things, some commissioners questioned how the council could commit $200,000 to a project to be built on a property whose owners appear unwilling to sell.

I have some serious problems with this proposal because  we just had a family member whos just said this property is not for sale, said Commissioner Dennis Henderson. If the family says its not for sale then I dont know how were going to even talk about anything until that deed is done.

But Danette Gleason, Butte-Silver Bows budget director, told the council that city officials knew there were some missing pieces to the project and thus decided to add a six-month contingency to the proposal.

We will only hold these funds for a six-month period, said Gleason, explaining that the allocation from the Hard Rock fund would be a reimbursement. The developers have to spend the $200,000 before we ever reimburse them.

Larry Leasure, chief executive officer of White-Leasure Development Co. of Boise, also spoke during the meeting. He acknowledged he did not have a written agreement with the family, but that he had been working on the project for at least three years and has been having ongoing discussions with the ONeill family.

He added that his development company has considered other possible development sites in Butte, but when council members inquired about where these locations reside, he declined to answer, citing confidentially.

Commissioners Bill Andersen, Cindy Perdue-Dolan and Cindi Shaw voted against the $200,000 allocation. Commissioner Brendan McDonough was absent but all others voted for it.
Gary Swant of Deer Lodge was recently presented the Montana Audubon 2016 Citizen Scientist of the Year award by Jack Kirkley, professor of biology at University of Montana Western. Swant was honored at the annual Montana Audubon banquet in Missoula for his contributions in educating Montanans about the state's birds.

Swant said he was completely surprised by the honor, I didnt even know they were considering it.''

He became interested in birding while teaching a field ecology class in ornithology at Powell County High School. During that time he was recognized as biology teacher of the year.

Seduced by birds, it wasnt until his retirement in 1993, after 25 years of teaching, that Swant started making his life list of bird sightings.

Birds are watchable wildlife, and birding is an excuse to get out in nature, he said. It is also an opportunity to see places you might not do otherwise. My wife (Laura Lee) and I have been birding in 18 countries.

Swant said his most exciting sighting was a helmet vanga in the tropical jungle of northeastern Madagascar in 2010 after four hard days of birding with a guide.

When presenting the 2016 Citizen Scientist award, Kirkley cited Swant's numerous activities, including extensive travel documenting sightings, bird counts, education of the public by writing articles and guides, teaching classes, leading birding field trips and more.

Swant systematically submits his records to the Montana Natural Heritage Programs database on birds. Starting in 1986, Swant has contributed 33,713 observations on 320 species.

The dedicated birder is a long-time participant and, more recently, compiler for two Christmas bird counts at Warm Springs Ponds and Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site. He also participates in the count at Clark Canyon Dam.

Swant holds the American Birders Association state record for the most bird species seen in Montana. In 2007, Swant completed 141 days of birding during his Big Montana year  sighting a total of 328 species. During that year he logged 24,003 miles in his Ford Explorer, or 73 miles per species. His final bird, a rusty blackbird, was seen visiting a feedlot south of Deer Lodge, just 7 miles from his home.

As of 2014, Swant had documented 214 species of birds at the Warm Springs Ponds near Anaconda. Because of his long-term bird monitoring at Warm Springs, he has more historic knowledge of the site and the changes that have occurred over time than anyone else in the state.

Swants contribution to public knowledge of birds includes writing a regular bird column for The Montana Standard in Butte for the past several years. His column is now published in the Helena Independent Record as well. He is a regular, long-time contributor to the Montana Online Birding Group, and he authored the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Sites "A Field Guide to the Common Birds by Habitat Type and Basic Color.''

Swant founded the company GoBirdMontana LLC, where he leads field trips, guides clients and researches birds for several companies and state agencies including Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Morrison/Maierle Engineering and ARCO/BP. He also teaches an adult education class on birding at Highlands College in Butte each fall.

I never tire of learning more about birds, Swant said, and I enjoy the challenge of adding to my life list, teaching people and writing articles about birds.

He has 1,814 species on his life list, but his ultimate goal is to record sightings of 25 percent of the worlds birds or 2,575 species.

For their 50th wedding anniversary, Swant and his wife are planning a boat trip in Australia and Tasmania to study oceanic birds.

Swant enthusiastically says, If you have never been birding, you should try it. It is not expensive. A $200 pair of binoculars and a $20 field guide will get you started.
Butte-Silver Bow commissioners agreed Wednesday night to steer $200,000 in county trust money toward a planned overhaul of the vacant Copper King Hotel on Harrison Avenue.

The council also approved a new ordinance that will regulate vacant buildings, in part by requiring owners to register them with their contact information each year. Backers say it will help curb blight.

Although commissioners had a few questions, several said renovations of the Copper King Hotel and convention space were a great investment. That combined with a new $13 million passenger terminal planned for Bert Mooney Airport across the way on Harrison Avenue would give visitors a great first impression of the city, supporters said.

The council agreed on a voice vote to grant the project $200,000 from the Hard Rock Development Trust Account, which can be used for a variety of economic development purposes.

The Copper King had struggled for more than a decade before it was closed in January 2014 and later put into bankruptcy.

I drive by that building and my stomach turns, said Commissioner Dave Palmer.

Developers Matt Nistler, his brother, Ben, and Rex Leipheimer purchased the hotel for about $1.2 million late last year. Nistler and Leipheimer spoke to the council Wednesday night and said they were committed to the project but needed every bit of financial assistance they could get.

They say their renovations could cost about $8.1 million and include a new roof, new windows, refurbished guest rooms, a new courtyard, upgraded pool with a splash park and $500,000 in lights, sound system and other technology for the convention and event space.

The new owners recently opened up the hotel for a day and allowed people to haul off beds, TVs, other furniture and virtually anything else inside except kitchen equipment. Nistler said this week that the give-away was a big success and the hotel was cleared out in less than four hours.

The failure in my opinion of the Copper King has been the lack of reinvestment in the last 36 years, Leipheimer told the council. A lot of the furniture, fixtures and equipment were 36 years old.

Nistler said they thought the Copper King name had become synonymous with a failed hotel, but discovered in talking with others around the state that it was an iconic name and should be kept.

On the other hand, he said, every lending institution in Butte had become involved in the hotel over the years and all had lost money, so the developers were having a hard time getting needed financing.

Commissioner Bill Andersen said he still wasnt sold on giving the project $200,000, but Leipheimer said it would be worth it.

I dont know when the last time was someone came to Butte and hired 98 people, he said. Its been a couple of decades.

The council voted 9-2 for the vacant building ordinance, which will take effect in 30 days. County officials say it would give them another tool to ensure vacant houses and other buildings are safe and secure and their owners can be tracked down quickly if needed.

Owners would have to register the buildings within 180 days of them becoming vacant, then re-register each year. After the first year, a $25 fee would be required with registrations. Violations could carry fines up to $500, but each day could be considered a separate offense.

In other business, the council:

- passed an ordinance to establish a new tax-increment financing district for a 546-acre area south of Butte in hopes of spurring more business and industrial activity.

The Basin Creek Targeted Economic Development District (TEDD) would include the Mike Mansfield Technology Center, an area known as the South Butte Industrial Park, and 100 acres owned by the Butte Local Development Corp. with smaller parcels owned by other individuals and businesses.

agreed to sell 24.9 acres of land in the countys Tax-Increment Financing District (TIFID) west of Butte to Maclin Trusses, a Dillon-based manufacturer of frames that support building roofs. They plan to expand their operations to Butte.
A Butte policeman was justified in fatally shooting a man who had pulled and pointed a pistol Thursday, Sheriff Ed Lester says, but it is a tragedy that will take all officers a while to get over.

"In something like this, it takes some time to sink in," Lester said Thursday, hours after 36-year-old Peter Grandpre was shot multiple times inside a house in Butte while exchanging gunfire with an officer.

"When you start facing your own mortality and realizing that an individual has lost his life, it takes a while for that to sink in," he said.

Lester said the officer was wearing a body camera, and video of the incident shows the shooting early Thursday morning was justified. The officer and man fired multiple shots, but only Grandpre was hit  several times  and he was pronounced dead after being taken to St. James Healthcare.

"There is no doubt in my mind the individual was trying to kill the officer," Lester said at a news conference. He declined to name the officer involved but said he was on administrative leave pending an investigation.

Lester said at this time it's not known who exactly fired first. The Montana Division of Criminal Investigation is investigating the shooting.

Grandpre's wife called police at 1:51 a.m. Thursday saying her husband had been drinking and they had been arguing in the house at 604 S. Clark St. when Grandpre took out two pistols and a rifle, Lester said. Police learned later that two children, ages 4 and 6, also were in the house.

Lester said the first officer to arrive scoped out the house quickly and saw a man inside holding a rifle. The man put down the rifle and opened the front door of the house but stepped back in when the officer began giving him verbal commands.

The officer was standing just outside when Grandpre reached behind his back, pulled out a pistol, and pointed it at the policeman about 5 to 10 feet away.

Gun shots were fired, although Lester said he is not 100 percent sure who initiated the first shot.

Four other officers were pulling up when the shots were going off, but none of them took part in the shooting. Lester said investigators were trying to determine how many shots were fired between the officer and Grandpre, who was standing in the living room by the front door when he was struck.

Grandpre was wearing a military-type vest, and police found another gun inside the front of it. Both handguns were .45-caliber semi-automatic pistols, and a rifle nearby was a .308-caliber bolt-action.

Lester said a chaplain had talked with Grandpre's wife after the shooting. She said she and her husband had thrown things at one another before she called police.

Lester said he did not believe the children witnessed the shooting.

WHO IS GRANDPRE?

The sheriff had few details on Grandpre, including his background or how long he and his wife had been in Butte.

But according to Grandpre's LinkedIn profile, he studied aerospace welding at Montana Tech. He served in the Marines, the U.S. Army, and Montana Army National Guard. LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service on the internet.

He describes himself on the profile as serving as a Combat Engineer 12B in the Army from December 2008 to September 2013; as infantry/medic with the National Guard, specializing in explosives handling; and as having been deployed to Iraq in 2006-07.

"As infantry in Iraq I operated armored vehicles during convoy escort operations from southern Iraq (Tallil) up the MSR (Main Supply Route) into northern Iraq. Conducted mounted and dismounted security operations during convoy ops in and around Baghdad, Fallujah, BIAP, Taji, and Anaconda," his profile reads.

He served in the Marines from June 1999 to October 2002. The profile also describes him as a construction equipment operator and handyman.

The profile also lists Grandpre as a "semi-retired volunteer."

This statement by Grandpre, posted in the 2013 LinkedIn profile, reads:

"My Brother Jake and I are working on starting a non-profit organization to act as quick response to natural disasters and war zones; we are specialists in high-danger areas where other relief organizations are unwilling to go. i.e. Frontline First Responders. We also want to work with other Veterans and Wounded Warriors in our off time as morale builders by providing opportunities to fly in private aircraft. In addition we plan to offer low to no-cost aviation training in maintenance, A&P Certification, Pilot training, and intro to kit aircraft building."

NEIGHBORS' REACTION

Brad Taggart lives next door to 604 S. Clark St., located a block south of St. James Healthcare on the Butte Hill. The steep street features neatly kept, mostly small homes.

Taggart said his bedroom window faces the house and he was awakened about 2 a.m. to the sound of a man yelling. Taggart's dogs, who were in his bedroom, also started barking.

"I heard a guy scream, can't remember what he said, but it was some guy yelling and then five gunshots. Then, within a minute, we had police here and fire trucks," Taggart told The Montana Standard.

Taggart, who has lived 14 years in the neighborhood, said he didn't know the occupants of 604 S. Clark St. and believes they moved in last fall. The house has seen several different occupants since its owner died some years ago, he said.

Taggart said he knows all his other neighbors. He didn't go outside during the commotion but later in the morning ventured out to see the neighborhood and street cordoned off with police tape.

Arthur Lillyblad, who lives three houses down from the Grandpre home, said neither he nor his wife heard any of the commotion early Thursday.

While he didn't know the family, Lillyblad said they had "never been a problem" in the neighborhood. He said he never talked with Peter Grandpre, but "we waved to each other" as Grandpre passed in his vehicle. "He seemed like a very congenial man," Lillyblad said.

Lillyblad also observed the kids playing in the yard on several occasions.

"They seemed like happy children," he said.
Are you looking for something to do outdoors this summer? Visit a State Park.

Have you been to the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park between Three Forks and Whitehall? President Theodore Roosevelt originally dedicated the caverns as a National Monument. But it was turned over to the state of Montana and became our first State Park in 1941. These spectacular caverns lined with stalactites, stalagmites, columns, and helictites that took thousands  perhaps millions -- of years to form make it one of the largest known limestone caverns in the Northwest. Ask about the candlelight tour, or the crawl tour which takes you to places rarely seen by any human being.

Have you seen Bannack State Park where gold was discovered at Grasshopper Creek in 1862? Just 20 miles west of Dillon, it became the first capital of Montana. Now it is the best ghost town in America. Walk on the boardwalks and visit each of the buildings on Main Street, some of the nearly 100 structures that still exist after 150 years. See how the material from the first Capitol building was used to make a barn out back. But the old Masonic Hall and the old Hotel are amazingly well preserved. If you go during the Bannack Days on the third weekend in July, you will see the whole town turn into a living history museum with re-enactments and horse drawn buggy rides.

Have you seen Makoshika State Park in Glendive? Outdoor magazine called it one of Americas 10 least known and under appreciated state parks. It is our largest state park with spectacular bad lands all around. At least 10 species of dinosaurs have been found there and Jack Hoerner says we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what is really there. Be sure to see some of the bones and displays in the museum at the Visitors' Center.

And while you are in the neighborhood, slip down to Ekalaka and visit Medicine Rocks State Park. Teddy Roosevelt called it As fantastically beautiful a place as I have ever seen. Be sure to go on the path around to the south side of the rocks so you can see the ancient Indian pictographs and the many carvings into the sandstone of early cowboys and farmers. At the turn of the century, one early homesteader carved a picture of his sweetheart in the sandstone.

Have you been to First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park (formerly known as Ulm Pushkin) just a few miles south of Great Falls? This is where bison were stampeded over the mile long cliff for hundreds of years starting 1,000 years ago. It was a major gathering point for Indians from all tribes, particularly before horses were introduced which resulted in the Indian tribes warring against each other. The cliff is in all directions from the top -- almost 360 degrees and amazingly undetectable from the top. The new Visitors' Center has great panoramas of Indian life, a great deal of information on all Montanas tribes, and one of the best book stores on Montana history in the entire State.

Of course, when you are in Great Falls you must see Giant Springs State Park. Eighteen giant springs bubble up to form the Roe River, which Guinness Book of World Records once called the shortest big river in the world. It certainly impressed Lewis and Clark when they visited it in 1805.

Have you seen the Rosebud Battlefield State Park between Busby and Decker? Did you know this battle was the largest commitment of American troops in any Indian battle anywhere? They fought for half a day and both sides claimed victory. Actually, that is true. Also, it is probably one of the best preserved battlefields in the country because so little has changed since the battle took place just eight days before General Custer lost his life at the Little Big Horn.

Or, do as many others. Set as a goal the visitation of each of Montanas 55 state parks. Remember, because you have paid $6 when you licensed your automobile, all state parks are free to Montana residents to visit. For each park, click on Visit a Park at stateparks@mt.gov. Download a free app, Montana State Parks by Pocket Ranger. Or get the Complete Guide and Travel Companion, Montana State Parks, by Erin Madison and Kristen Inbody. You will be surprised what Montana has to offer. Have a great summer outdoors.

-- Tom Towe, Billings, is chairman of the Montana State Parks Board.
In an important election year, such as this one, good journalism is vitally important. We need the press to be working hard, digging into details, and holding our candidates, and elected officials accountable. We also need reporters who understand the importance of fairness and accuracy and can discern good sources of information from bad.

Ive noticed a trend recently from Lee Newspapers whereby attacks against gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte show up on the anonymous Democrat attack blog Montana Cowgirl and then, in the next day or two, show up in Lee Newspapers. Now, given that the authors of this blog are not even brave enough put their own names on their work, one would think that newspapers would be a little more careful before publishing pieces based on anonymous blog posts.

Unfortuntately, Lee Newspapers seems more interested catchy headlines than delving into the real issues of the gubernatorial campaign.

Greg Gianforte, a strong supporter of stream access, was attacked by the blog last month over what amounted to a minor boundary issue with FWP that was resolved to everyones satisfaction without public access ever being in danger. Instead of carefully examining the claims made by the blog and looking to the other sides of the story, Lee Newspapers ran a factually challenged piece the very next day that played into a false narrative.

In a similar vein, the Cowgirl published a piece about a Gianforte campaign phone-caller who mispronounced Helena a few times before she was corrected. Not exactly worthy of an article in a major newspaper, you would think. However, that was a headline in the Missoulian two days later. Despite the fact that the reporter had been at an event with both Gianforte and his running mate Lesley Robinson finishing up a five-day tour of the state. What information is more newsworthy to Montanans? The fact that campaign staffers had to tell a phone caller how to pronounce the name of a city? Or the fact that Gianforte and Robinson spent five days touring the state and pitching substantive ideas about the future of our state?

It seems to me that either Lee reporters arent doing their jobs, or there is a bias against Gianforte. Interestingly, Gianforte seems to be quite available to the media for interviews. He even voluntarily released 10 years worth of tax returns to the Associated Press in an unprecedented act of transparency. This in contrast to the current governor, who rarely makes himself available to the press for interviews or direct comment and regularly stonewalls open records requests from media.

Gianforte is engaging the press and everyday Montanans on the issues. Hes traveled all across the state holding public meetings. Why wont the press demand the same of Governor Bullock?

Now, I understand the desire for flashy headlines and headline clicks, but Montanans need and deserve better than gotcha journalism right now. We need our newspapers to be covering the real issues faced by Montanans. We need to hear about jobs and the economy, energy policy, education, not the latest gossip on a liberal blog.

-- Joe Dooling, Helena, is chairman of the Lewis and Clark County Republican Party.
A tourist was fined $1,000 and a $30 court processing fee for straying from the boardwalk Tuesday in the Mammoth Hot Springs area of Yellowstone National Park.

According to a news release from the park, a witness told a ranger that the tourist, who was Chinese, walked on the thermal formations near Liberty Cap and collected water. The witness also said the tourist broke through the fragile travertine crust in the area.

During a law enforcement investigation, the visitor said he did not read the safety information distributed at the entrance to the park. He also admitted to collecting water from the hot springs.

He was issued a federal violation requiring an appearance at the Yellowstone Justice Center Court for off-boardwalk travel in a thermal area.

This is the most recent in an unusual spate of incidents involving the parks thermal features. A 23-year-old man died June 7 when he left the boardwalk and fell into an acidic hot spring at the Norris Geyser Basin. A day later, rangers called off a search for his body, saying no significant remains were left to recover. A teenager was burned June 4 after falling into a hot pool in the Upper Geyser Basin. A group of Canadian men left the boardwalk and walked on the thermal features of the Grand Prismatic Spring.

However, thermal accidents dont account for all of the recent high-profile happenings at the countrys first national park. Some visitors have also had unusual interactions involving wildlife.

A French Canadian man made headlines across the nation when he put a baby bison in his vehicle, saying it looked cold; the calf later had to be euthanized when it was rejected by its herd. A woman was killed by a vehicle as she crossed the road to see an eagle. Another woman was charged by an elk. A woman also ventured too close to a bear and her two cubs during a bear jam, or traffic jam triggered by wildlife.

The national parks website offers the following rules for safety:

Never approach wildlife. Remain at least 100 yards from bears and wolves and at least 25 yards from other animals, such as bison and elk.

Stay on boardwalks and trails. The boiling water of the parks thermal features poses significant risks. The delicate landscape is also easily damaged.

Dont stop in the road to watch wildlife. Use the pullouts in the park to avoid blocking traffic.

Dont feed wildlife or leave trash unattended. This affects the safety of everyone  animals who become used to human food sometimes display aggression toward people and have to be euthanized.
Voters in Whitehall could decide in August whether to recall Mayor Dale Davis and four members of the town council after a resident alleged open meeting law violations.

Joe Adams, council president and one of those up for recall, said no violations occurred and even if they had, a recall was not the remedy. Whitehall is a city of about 1,100, 23 miles east of Butte.

Resident Lynn Nemeth gathered enough signatures to get the recall on the ballot, and the county clerk and recorder set a special election for Aug. 16 on petitions to remove Davis; Adams; and aldermen Gary Housman, Tom Jenkin and Vincent Keogh.

The petitions allege they committed official misconduct at an April 11 meeting when they voted to direct the county to dispatch the Whitehall ambulance to all fire calls. The ambulance director was allowed to make statements during the meeting without the item being posted on the agenda, and the public was not allowed to participate, the petitions allege.

Davis was out of town on a personal matter Wednesday and Thursday, according to a woman at Town Hall. But Adams, president of the six-member council, said the actions taken during the April 11 meeting were done in the open and there were no violations.

It was not something we did hidden in the back corner or something we did in the back alley or something, Adams said.

He said it was a total political thing related to a long-running dispute over ambulance services in Whitehall and said two council members who were not at the April 11 meeting  Francine Janik and Florence Howser  were associated with a private ambulance service in the area.

Janik said she signed the petition but had nothing to do with the recall effort.

Nemeth said she has lived in Whitehall with her husband, a retired law enforcement officer, for 15 years and other family members had been involved in public service. She said she raised her complaints solely as a concerned citizen.

Her complaints are not limited to those on the petition. She put those down, she said, because she familiarized herself with state laws on recalls in Montana, had to allege specific violations of the law, and only had so much space on the formal petitions to do that.

She was also concerned with negative statements she says Davis and Adams made about the Jefferson County Sheriffs Department.

She said she also discovered that Whitehalls contract with the sheriffs department had expired in June 2015, though the city had continued to pay for the services.

She also said the city had paid its attorney $119,000 in fees since Davis became mayor more than two years ago  far more than had been paid annually before that.

When I saw the amount of the fees, I said, This is enough; I just cant watch our government and watch the excessive spending, she said.

She said she did not name the other two council members  Howser and Janik  because they had not been on the council for a long time.

The open meetings violations occurred, she said, but it was the other things that really irked her.

Im really not clear on the ambulance end of things, Nemeth said. It is so muddy that I think you may want to talk to someone else about that.

But Adams said it was all related to the ambulance dispute, which has been going on for months and months. Whitehall officials have sought to keep EMS services under city control while some service members have sought to break away.

Adams said the motion voted on during the April 11 meeting was to reauthorize the citys ambulance to follow the fire department to every call, and the citys attorney was at that meeting.

It was out in the open, and it was something that was done previously, and so it is totally a political thing, Adams said, adding that he hated to see the town divided over such matters.

Keogh, one of the other four council members named in recall petitions, returned a call from The Montana Standard but said he had no comment. Messages were left at phone numbers listed for the other three council members.

The mayor and four council members still have time to issue a formal response to the recall claims that could go on the recall ballot as well.
The Muscatine County Board of Supervisors will conduct a public hearing on Monday, June 20, 2016 at 9:00 a.m. in the Muscatine County Administration Building to take public comments on a proposed ordinance regulating wind energy conversion systems in Muscatine County.

The proposed ordinance is available for review at the Muscatine County Administration Office and on the County's website (www.co.muscatine.ia.us) under "How Do I View - Muscatine County Code of Ordinances - Proposed Amendments". You are invited to appear in person or send written comments to the Muscatine County Board of Supervisors, % Administration Office, Muscatine County Administration Building, 414 E. Third Street, Suite 101, Muscatine, Iowa 52761-4142.
MUSCATINE, Iowa Former Muscatine Mayor DeWayne Hopkins is using the beat to help lead children with a program at the Musser Public Library.

Hopkins had the children and parents sit in a circle with bongo drums loaned from the elementary schools and passed out maracas that he owned, shakers the library owned and a cowbell.

He even shared his prized possession, a shaker bottle he filled with lava sand.

His goal was to show the relationship between music and numbers to the children, though he wasnt going higher than four.

Hopkins hoped what he taught tonight would resonate with the children.

Any time I can pass my skills on to kids, Ill take that, Hopkins said.

Some of the kids in attendance were Bridget Tracy and Luke Young.

Tracy performed multiple musical talents during the circle as she played the drums, danced and offered to sing too.

Her favorite part of the drum circle was getting to play the drums.

Young was there to continue his growing passion for drumming and to harness his drums skills.

Luke likes to practice on the pots and pans at home, Youngs mother, Becky Young said.

The Musser Public Library will be hosting another drum circle featuring former Mayor Hopkins on July 13.
DAVENPORT, Iowa  It was a sentence of life in prison for an Indiana man convicted of robbing a Muscatine bank in 2012.

Thomas Alexander Davis III, 40, was sentenced by Chief United States District Court Judge John A. Jarvey on Thursday morning in U.S. District Court in Davenport to life imprisonment for bank robbery.

The evidence at trial in this case showed that on Nov. 28, 2012, Davis entered the U.S. Bank branch in Muscatine. He presented the teller with a black bag decorated with an Angry Birds cartoon, demanded money, and displayed a handgun. A bank customer was also present at the counter during the robbery.

The teller placed U.S. Bank cash in the bag. Davis fled the bank escaping in a black Cadillac driven by Stacey Fincher, also of Indiana. Davis and Fincher drove back to Indiana. Davis was arrested on Feb. 12, 2015, in Indiana. On April 8, 2016, Fincher was sentenced to a deferred judgment in Muscatine County District Court after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit a forcible felony.

A jury found Davis guilty of the Muscatine robbery on Feb. 11, 2016. He had been convicted in 1995 of an armed bank robbery in the Southern District of Indiana, and robbery with a deadly weapon in Hancock, Indiana. At sentencing the government presented evidence, including certified records and testimony from a FBI Special Agent, an Indiana Deputy U.S. Marshal, a FBI-Biometrics Division Certified Ten Print Examiner, and the Chief of Police from Greenfield, Indiana, to identify Davis as the same person who committed these prior two offenses. Because these two prior robbery convictions qualified as serious violent felonies under a federal sentencing statute, this third conviction for robbery of the U.S. Bank branch in Muscatine mandated a sentence of life in prison. Davis was also ordered to serve five years supervised release, pay restitution, and a $100 special assessment to the Crime Victims Fund.

This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Muscatine Police Department, and prosecuted by the United States Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Iowa.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  The deadline for registering an entry in the Annual 4th of July Parade in downtown Muscatine is 4 p.m. Friday, June 17.

The Greater Muscatine Chamber of Commerce & Industry will hold the parade on Monday, July 4.

Parade entry fees are $100 for business and advertisers and free for not for profit organizations.

All applications received after June 17 will be subject to a $50 late fee.

Participants are encouraged to showcase this years theme, Honoring Our Armed Forces.

The chamber is also encouraging veterans and active service men and women to be a part of the parade. If interested, please contact Shelley at 563-263-8895 or ssides@muscatine.com.

GMCCI is also seeking donations for fireworks. At the quarterly Muscatine Convention and Visitors Bureau meeting, Director Ky Cochran said $7,600 in commitments has been received of the estimated $20,000. Donations are the only funds that drive the success of the event.

Anyone that contributes to the fireworks at the $100 level automatically receives a free entry in the parade.

Applications for food or merchandise vendors at the Riverfront during the parade and fireworks are being accepted at GMCCI. Vendors must provide a copy of their certificate of insurance and permit from the City of Muscatine with their application no later than July 1.

All applications and forms are available on line at www.muscatine.com or at GMCCI located at 102 Walnut St. For more information, call Shelley Sides at 563-263-8895 or email ssides@muscatine.com.
MUSCATINE, Iowa Stanley Consultants, a global consulting engineering firm, elected vice presidents at its annual Board of Director meeting. Bill Harper, Becky Svatos, Mike Veal, and Michelle French were each promoted and elected vice president. Ranked as one of the countrys largest consulting engineering firms, Stanley Consultants provides program management, planning, engineering, environmental, and construction services worldwide.

Bill Harper was promoted to Chief Financial Officer and elected vice president. He is responsible for the financial direction of SC Companies, Inc., the parent company of Stanley Consultants, and all of SC Companies owned subsidiaries. He will also plan, implement, manage and control all financial, building services, and information technology related activities for the company. Harper joined Stanley Consultants in 2000 and has 24 years of professional experience. He is a Certified Public Accountant and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Becky Svatos, P.E., was promoted to Environmental and Urban Design Market Leader and elected vice president. Her responsibilities include creating and implementing a comprehensive market strategy inclusive of business development and program/project execution for the companys environmental and urban planning services. A licensed professional engineer in seven states, Svatos joined the company in 2002 and has 31 years of professional experience.

Mike Veal was promoted to Director of Global Operations and elected vice president. In this position he will oversee the companys operational footprint, focusing on operational efficiencies across the organization. Veal joined the company in 2009, and has 26 years of professional experience.

Michelle French, C.I.H., has been promoted to U.S. Federal Business Development Leader and elected vice president. She will lead all programs relative to the Federal market, identify and implement strategies for growing the Federal business. French brings a wealth of knowledge to her new role, having served most recently as Federal Practice Leader. She joined Stanley Consultants in 2009, and has 25 years of professional experience. She is a Certified Industrial Hygienist, and heavily involved in the Society of American Military Engineers, serving as the Regional Vice President in the Missouri River Region from 2014-2016.
WAPELLO, Iowa  Shirley Wilkerson, 83, of Wapello, died June 14, 2016, at Wapello Specialty Care. Friends may call from 3-7 p.m. , Friday, June 17 at Dudgeon-McCulley, Wapello, where the family will meet friends 10:30 a.m. to noon Saturday. The funeral will be at noon Saturday at Dudgeon-McCulley. Burial will follow at Wapello Cemetery.
Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32, was quick to tell someone off if she thought they were in the wrong, but it was her way of showing she cared, an ex-girlfriend said.
Les emplois a Rennes sont abondants et varies. Il y a quelque chose pour tout le monde. Que vous soyez a la recherche dun emploi []
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
Speeding is one of the leading causes of serious road accidents in South Africa, and plays a part in nearly one-third of all fatal crashes.

According to the Arrive Alive Campaign, many people do not view obeying speed limits as an important way to avoid crashes.

Speed traps and automated speed cameras aim to curb this, and are effective at reducing the speed of motorists on dangerous stretches of roads.

South African traffic authorities make use of various speed trap and camera technologies, with the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg detailing their systems below.

Traditional speed traps

Speed trapping, where vehicles are pulled over and motorists issued with a fine, is done using various speed-measuring technologies.

Laser  A LiDAR speed gun (laser gun) is used to measure vehicle speed, which allows a police officer to measure the speed of an individual vehicle within a stream of traffic.

 A LiDAR speed gun (laser gun) is used to measure vehicle speed, which allows a police officer to measure the speed of an individual vehicle within a stream of traffic. 3D Tracking Radar  Based on similar technology to air traffic control radar, this system tracks the distance, angle, and speed of a vehicle. Multiple vehicles and lanes can be tracked simultaneously.

Speed cameras

All speed cameras use digital media to record and store violation images. Film cameras are now obsolete.

Speed cameras fall into the following categories:

Fixed Speed Camera  Speed cameras mounted at fixed positions.

 Speed cameras mounted at fixed positions. Fixed Combined Speed and Red Light Violation Camera  The camera can detect running of red lights and speeding at the same time, and you can be fined for both offences.

 The camera can detect running of red lights and speeding at the same time, and you can be fined for both offences. Mobile Speed Cameras  Vehicles are fitted with speed camera equipment, which can park on the side of the road to monitor the speed of passing traffic.

 Vehicles are fitted with speed camera equipment, which can park on the side of the road to monitor the speed of passing traffic. Semi-Fixed Speed Cameras  A camera that is installed on a road, but can be moved to a different location if needed.

 A camera that is installed on a road, but can be moved to a different location if needed. Portable Speed Cameras  Hand-held devices or set up on a tripod on the side of the road by police officers.

Hand-held devices or set up on a tripod on the side of the road by police officers. Average Speed over Distance  An ASOD system uses a camera at the start of a stretch of road and another at an end point along the same road. The system uses the number plate of a vehicle as its trigger, and calculates the average speed between the start and end of the measured stretch.

For speed cameras, local authorities use all available and permissible speed measuring technologies for speed enforcement in South Africa.

These speed measuring technologies include:

Laser

3D Tracking Radar

Piezo Sensor  Piezo sensors are embedded into the roads surface. As a vehicle drives over the sensors, the time difference between sensor activation is used to calculate the vehicles speed.

 Piezo sensors are embedded into the roads surface. As a vehicle drives over the sensors, the time difference between sensor activation is used to calculate the vehicles speed. Average Speed over Distance

The City of Cape Town stated that inductive loops across a road are no longer permissible as they do not meet the accuracy requirements for speed enforcement.

More on speed cameras

New Cape Town ASOD Speed Camera plans

Average Speed Over Distance cameras: when you can be fined, prosecuted

Cape Town speed camera system details
Local security company Onguards latest BlueLock system promises to change the way South Africans keep themselves secure.

BlueLock makes use of Bluetooth technology to control access to your property, open and close garages, control lights, and set or disarm alarm systems through a smartphone.

After months of intensive development, the cutting-edge system was introduced to South Africa just over a year ago, said Onguards Richard Frost.

BlueLock is a Bluetooth receiver that can be linked to a gate motor, garage, alarm system, door, irrigation system, or light switch.

The receiver has two relay outlets and is controlled with an app available on the Apple and Google app stores. The receiver has a range of up to 25 metres.

After opening the app, your phone can be added simply by scanning a QR code on the back of the BlueLock receiver.

Once the app is ready, you can control security access with the touch of a smartphone screen. The app can be used by any phone with Bluetooth version 4.0 technology or higher.

The BlueLock system gives users convenient and secure control of their security features.

More on security

Beware the electric fence you install

How to make sure criminals do not get through your electric fence
When he decided to run for the White House race for president, Marco Rubio said that he wouldnt seek reelection as U.S. senator to Florida.

And when running for president did not go according to plan and he suspended his campaign in March of this year, the Republican stated he would be dropping out of politics altogether and becoming a private citizen come January.

But while in Orlando this week to visit the scene of one of the deadliest terror attacks in U.S. history, he has said that he is now reconsidering joining the Senate race.

Obviously, I take very seriously everything thats going on  not just Orlando, but in our country, Rubio said in a Washington Post story on Wednesday. I enjoy my service here a lot. So Ill go home later this week, and Ill have some time with my family, and then if theres been a change in our status Ill be sure to let everyone know.

A spokesman for the senators D.C. office told News 13 that Rubio will not be releasing a public statement about entering the campaign anytime soon.

I cannot confirm or deny (if Rubio is going to run or not), the spokesman told News 13.

But it would have to be soon, as the filing deadline to run for the Senate is next week, Friday, June 24.

But if the 45-year-old incumbent decides to reclaim his seat, he has challengers that he has to face off with and not just Democratic ones. He has fellow Republicans he has to defeat before he battles with Democratic opponents.

In fact, the lieutenant governor of Florida and a good friend to Rubio is running and according to a Politico article, it was Carlos Lopez-Cantera who suggested that the senator seek reelection.

While the two were in Orlando to witness the aftermath of the terror attack by Omar Mateen that left 49 dead and 53 wounded, the two had a conversation about the race and Lopez-Cantera gave the idea to Rubio.

You should reconsider running for your seat, Lopez-Cantera told Rubio, Politico reported.

The lieutenant governor explained to the online political site that he felt compelled to talk to Rubio about the race and what they saw while touring the nightclub and being briefed on what happened.

However, according to Politico, Lopez-Cantera is not stepping out of the race.

And right now, Florida will have to wait to see what the senator will decide to do.


Fighters from forces aligned with Libya's new unity government prepare their weapons in a clearing operation of Zaafran area in Sirte, June 11, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

UNITED NATIONS - The UN Security Council on Tuesday unanimously adopted a resolution to ensure strict implementation of arms embargo on Libya.

The resolution has authorized member states for a period of one year to inspect, on the high seas off the coast of Libya, vessels coming from or to the country, if they have reasonable grounds to believe the vessels are carrying arms or related materials.

"In order to ensure strict implementation of arms embargo on Libya," the 15-nation council authorizes member states to act nationally or through regional organizations to use all measures to carry out such inspections, said the resolution.

The UK-drafted resolution was adopted after the European Union asked the UN Security Council to authorize EU's naval forces in the Mediterranean to enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya.

On June 6, Federica Mogherini, high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy, asked the council to adopt a resolution on authorizing the EU mission Operation Sophia to enforce the arms embargo on the high seas off the coast of Libya.

In 2015, the EU launched the naval operation to reduce migrant and refugee smuggling across the Mediterranean. Last year in October, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution to authorize member states, including the European Union, to take actions on vessels that are used for people smuggling from Libya.

Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi said after the vote that China supports the international community in taking effective measures to implement arms embargo and Libya, in particular severing channels and networks used by terrorist organizations to smuggle and acquire weapons.

Liu said the inspections of related vessels must have the consent of the vessel's flag state, and the measures taken by countries in implementing the resolution should not prejudice the exclusive jurisdiction of the flag state.

Libya, a major oil producer in North Africa, has been witnessing a frayed political process after former leader Muammar Gaddafi was toppled during the 2011 political turmoil, as two rival parliaments and several groups have been fighting for control of national resource wealth.

The UN Security Council imposed sanctions measures including arms embargo on Libya in 2011 to prevent sale or supply of arms and related material of all types to the country.
WASHINGTON  Newly declassified documents offer more details about a detainee who died inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks and disclose that President George W. Bush was worried about the image of shackled detainees wearing adult diapers.

Among the 50 documents released was a heavily redacted memo in which then-CIA Director Porter Goss recounts a meeting with Bush on June 7, 2006. The only sentence left to read said: "The president was concerned about the image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on themselves."

Human rights advocates said Wednesday that this week's release of the documents  many footnoted in the 2014 Senate report on the torture of detainees  depict the human suffering associated with the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, which President Barack Obama said did significant damage to America's standing in the world.

"A lot of these details haven't been released before and I think they kind of underscore the depravity of the program," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. "You read these documents and you cannot help come away with and understand the grotesqueness of the methods they were using.

"It's not like this (the interrogation program) was precisely calibrated. It was just abuse piled upon abuse."

CIA Director John Brennan has said that the agency made mistakes and learned from them, but insisted the coercive techniques used on detainees produced intelligence "that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives." The CIA also has acknowledged, in a response to the Senate report, that its "lack of preparation and competencies resulted in significant lapses in the agency's ability to develop and monitor its initial detention and interrogation activities."

The documents were released Tuesday under a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU and Vice News.

The ACLU's Jaffer cited the case of suspected extremist Gul Rahman, who was interrogated in late 2002 at a CIA detention facility set up in a former brick factory in Afghanistan. He was shackled to a wall in his cell in "near-freezing confinement."

One afternoon, Rahman, who had been deemed very uncooperative with interrogators, threw his food, water bottle and defecation bucket at guards and threatened them with death if he were ever released. Rahman was shackled using the "short chain" method. His hands were chained together. His feet were chained together. Then, a short chain was used to shackle his hands to his feet.

"This position forced Rahman, who was naked below the waist to sit on a cold concrete floor and prevented him from standing up," according to the declassified CIA inspector general's report about his death.

He was found dead the next day in his cell at the compound, northwest of the airport in Kabul. "A palm-sized pool of dried blood was present in and around the mouth and nose of subject. Rahman was observed still shackled and slumped over in the seated position," the report said.

An autopsy reported the cause of the November 2002 death as "undetermined," but the clinical conclusion was that Rahman, who was about 34 at the time, died of hypothermia. Justice Department investigations into his death resulted in no charges.

Rahman was captured in October 2002 in Islamabad, Pakistan. He was thought to be connected to Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and allied with al-Qaida.

The IG report, dated April 27, 2005, described Rahman as "stoic and very stubborn." He complained about conditions, poor treatment and "claimed inability to think due to (cold) conditions," the report said.

A few months after Rahman's death, a memo to the CIA's deputy director for operations on Jan. 28, 2003, described the standard procedure used for detainees at that detention facility.

"Prisoners are dressed in sweat suits and adult diapers," the memo said. "The diapers are used for sanitary reasons during transportation, and as a means to humiliate the prisoner. ... Sometimes the guards run out of diapers and the prisoners are placed back in their cells in a hand-crafted diaper secured by duct tape."
The 31-year-old man who was found kissing a student on the bleachers at American Canyon High School in January has been sentenced after pleading no contest to a felony charge of lewd contact with a minor, according to court records.

Michael Jackson, now 32 and also known as Carlos, was sentenced to 293 days in jail and five years of probation in Napa County Superior Court on Wednesday. He pleaded no contest to a charge of lewd contact with a minor on May 10. Other charges including arranging a meeting with a minor for lewd purposes, lewd contact with a minor, distributing lewd material to a minor and molesting a child under 18-years-old, were dismissed.

American Canyon Police were contacted about a possible relationship between an Arizona man and a 17-year-old American Canyon High School student on Jan. 5 when a woman from Arizona tipped them off about it, according to the probation report. The involved student was contacted by a school resource officer on Jan. 11, but said she didnt know what he was talking about.

The student was found straddling Jackson on the bleachers by a campus supervisor on Jan. 14, according the report. They appeared to be kissing.

Although Jackson claimed that he was 18, he was told to leave the campus. When an officer contacted him, he admitted to being 31-years-old from Arizona, probation reported.

The two met through a Facebook page and became friends after Jackson posted something about being sad and the girl, who was 14 at the time, responded. They started talking and became closer over the course of three years, eventually exchanging I love yous and agreeing that they could not have a physical relationship until she turned 18, according to the probation report. In December, they became impatient to meet each other, so Jackson made a plan to drive to California.

Although the victims parents knew she had a friend named Carlos, they had never met him and were under the impression that he was only 18, probation said. The victims mother described her daughter as being naive and as having some unknown developmental delays.

Jackson has medical problems and developmental delays and allowed the lure of having someone care about him impact his already limited decision making skills, according to the probation report. Jackson said that he sees he made errors in his friendship with the victim and that it will never happen again, probation reported.

As part of the plea bargaining agreement, Jackson does not have to go to jail immediately. Following sentencing, he was released from custody. He was ordered to immediately enroll in a sex offender treatment program and register as a sex offender.
A former top Intel executive won Napa County Planning Commission approval to build a small winery with a twist.

Arvind Sodhani plans to build a 12,000-gallon-a-year winery on an 11-acre site along the west side of Highway 29 north of St. Helena. Bucking a trend, the Sodhani Winery is to have no visitors.

Thats an approach the Planning Commission can appreciate. Often in recent months, the commission has dealt with controversies caused by wineries wanting additional visitors because direct-to-consumer sales are becoming more prevalent.

Is there a secret we should all know about? Commissioner Heather Phillips asked after hearing the Sodhani Winery proposal on Wednesday.

Sodhani explained his business plan to the commission. He retired a few months ago as executive vice president of Intel Corp after 35 years with the computer chip-making giant, in recent years also serving as president of the companys venture capital arm Intel Capital.

I have 12,600 contacts, very good quality contacts  over the last couple of years, we have been reaching out to them and we have been marketing wine to them, he said.

As a result, he feels very comfortable he has a viable financial plan to handle what he has undertaken, Sodhani said.

Commissioner Terry Scott said a small winery with no visitors is possibly the best option for this particular site.

I think it sets a precedent Id like to see continued in the valley, as opposed to the potential for vast visitation and going into that dangerous land of event centers that people are so concerned about, he said.

St. Helena resident Geoff Ellsworth said other wineries have sought no visitation to help win approval and then quickly turned around and asked for visitors. But Planning Commissioners declined to take up that line of thought.

Being speculative about what they might do in the future isnt our job today, Commissioner Jeri Gill said. Our job today is to access this project based on what was been presented to us by the applicant and in our packet.

Donna Oldford of Plans4Wine, speaking on behalf of the project, said the Sodhanis do not anticipate asking for visitors in the future.

Sodhani said he started collecting wine while an undergraduate in beer-loving England. He and his wife Beverly bought the 11 acre property at 3283 St. Helena Highway, three years ago. It has a 6.3 acre vineyard that they will use to make estate wine.

Weve always longed to buy our own place and build our own winery and make super high-end, very exclusive wine, Sodhani said.

Not that Sodhani plans to abandon the world of venture capitalism.

Once you are a venture capitalist, you are always a venture capitalist, he said.

Even with no visitors, the winery will have to create a new Highway 29 driveway. Thats because an existing driveway leading to the winery site also serves two houses.

Total traffic on the existing driveway with the winery would just barely reach the threshold under Napa County standards to require a left turn lane on Highway 29. The Sodhanis, rather than go that route, chose to create a new driveway.

Several commissioners questioned the need for a new driveway that will require the removal of some amount of vineyard.

Were creating another entrance on Highway 29 thats 75 feet from the existing one for a very small winery with no visitation and a maximum of four employees, Scott said.

The project is small, county Deputy Public Works Director Rick Marshall agreed. But Napa Countys road standards dont offer up a lot of flexibility, he said.

Also, the project will truck winery wastewater from the site. Last years county Agricultural Protection Advisory Committee advised doing away with hold-and-haul for new wineries except for during a one-year development phase, though the Board of Supervisors declined to go that route.

Treating wastewater on the site would mean removing vineyards, Sodhani said. His view in favor of hold-and-haul won the day.

This is still an option and tool and something we can use for projects should that be deemed appropriate and necessary, Gill said.

Ellsworth said the county should stop approving new wineries until it can study cumulative impacts of new wineries. But a county report said no evidence under the countys general plan and county code supports denying the Sodhani project.

The winery is to be 7,150 square feet and built into the hillside. It wouldnt be visible from Highway 29 and would be barely visible from Silverado Trail, a county report said.
ST. HELENA  A San Diego environmental advocate who mired the city of Calistoga in years of expensive litigation over water issues is now turning his attention to St. Helena.

Water Audit California, which lists Grant Reynolds as a director, filed a claim with the city of St. Helena on May 19 alleging that the city has failed to meet its bypass requirements to protect fish habitat downstream of Bell Canyon Reservoir, which the city operates under a state permit.

The claim threatens legal action unless the city agrees to the following demands within 50 days: comply with the bypass requirements identified in the claim, stop diverting water to the reservoir between April 16 and Nov. 14, post online the dams daily operational data and water flows, pledge to install flow monitoring equipment by November, and undertake a stream and fish study to determine bypass levels that would be adequate to protect fish downstream.

(Water Audit) is looking for reservoirs that stand out as not being operated in accordance with the law, Reynolds said Wednesday in a phone interview. And St. Helenas reservoir appears to be one of those.

The St. Helena City Council will discuss the claim in closed session at 9 a.m. Thursday, June 16, at City Hall.

The city is carefully evaluating the claim asserted by Water Audit California, and will respond appropriately in due course, Mayor Alan Galbraith said Tuesday in a statement.

The claim alleges that the city failed to install monitoring equipment that it was directed to install nearly 40 years ago at Bell Canyon dam, which was built on Bell Creek in the late 1950s. According to the claim, the State Water Resources Control Board determined in 2001 that the city was violating its bypass requirements, and admonished the city in the early 2010s for exceeding its diversion limits at the dam.

Although the claimant has made specific and repeated inquiry, the City has produced no documents that indicate that the City has any present intension (sic) to perform the necessary monitoring improvements, perform a stream and fish study, or reform its dam operations to the needs of the public trust and the 1989 Orders of the trustee agency, the claim states.

The claim accuses the city of routinely violating its minimum bypass requirements, which dictate how much water must be diverted into the creek during each rainy season and prohibit any water from being diverted into the reservoir between April 16 and Nov. 14.

The claim points to stream surveys conducted by the Department of Fish and Wildlife showing that a species of rainbow trout that the state and federal governments consider threatened used to spawn downstream. But after the dam was built, the downstream population of that fish dwindled over the years, until a 1990 survey found none at all.

Reynolds is well-known in Calistoga, where city officials have accused him of entangling the city in prolonged, expensive and unfounded litigation. In February, the Calistoga City Council lamented the roughly $1.5 million the city had spent defending itself from water-related litigation filed by Reynolds, his attorney William McKinnon of Grass Valley, and Debbie OGorman of Calistoga. Reynolds said one of those cases, involving OGormans water rights, is still pending in Napa County Superior Court.

On Wednesday, Calistoga Mayor Chris Canning said he and Calistoga City Manager Dylan Feik are contacting their counterparts in St. Helena to offer first our condolences and second our assistance.

What I can say from our experience is be prepared for a very long and very expensive process, and dont expect it to be always based in logic or reason, Canning said.

A 2011 profile in The Weekly Calistogan recounted Reynolds colorful life story, which he said included stints in surfboard manufacturing and international marijuana smuggling.

Reynolds financial mentor in the surfboard business was Frank Hickerson, whose son Matt lives in Calistoga. Matt Hickerson and Debbie OGorman engaged in a legal dispute with the city of Calistoga, alleging that a 1939 water agreement with OGormans family gave them the rights to the water at Calistogas Kimball Dam.

As a fly fisherman, Reynolds said he was moved by old photos of steelhead that used to be found downstream of the dam. He got involved in the couples lawsuit in 2009, and the allegations grew in scope, claiming that Calistoga had failed to bypass enough water into Kimball Creek toward spawning grounds for salmon and trout.

My primary focus was to do something for the fish, he said.

In a separate lawsuit, Reynolds accused Calistoga of improperly spending Measure A flood control funds on a water storage tank.

Calistoga eventually did agree to bypass more water into Kimball Creek, but claimed it was in response to pressure from the state, not Reynolds litigation. However, a judge ruled that there was a causal relationship between the citys actions and Reynolds litigation, and ordered the city to pay $575,203 in legal fees to McKinnon, who had represented Reynolds in some of his cases. McKinnon had originally asked for up to $2.8 million.

The same judge later scolded McKinnon for trying to collect on the judgment last June by illegally filing a writ of execution on the citys checking account at WestAmerica Bank at Calistoga, resulting in a fund transfer that left the city with only 1 cent in its account.

The funds were transferred back to the city, which ultimately paid McKinnon $555,767, the amount of the original judgment minus almost $20,000 the city had spent on legal fees related to the bank transfer.

Reynolds claim against St. Helena states that Water Audit will seek reasonable attorney fees and costs if litigation becomes necessary. Reynolds said McKinnon represents Water Audit.

According to the California Secretary of States website, Water Audit California was incorporated in March, with a Sacramento address. Reynolds and the claim describe Water Audit as a public benefit corporation.

According to Reynolds, Water Audit has just gotten off the ground in the last few months, but has already made inquiries with probably a couple hundred dam operators throughout the state.

What we want to do is protect the environment, and one of the ways to do that is to make people, including municipal corporations, obey the law as it pertains to the environment, Reynolds said.

A protracted lawsuit would present another financial challenge for St. Helena, which is already struggling to pay for everyday city operations and has a long list of unfunded capital projects.

The 2016-2017 budget approved by the City Council on Tuesday sets aside $247,037 for litigation.

(Napa Valley Register editor Sean Scully contributed to this article.)
Id just settled in at the bar at an upscale Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., the room washed in that late-afternoon light that settles over the world like a layer of gold leaf. I was meeting the hubs for dinner and was headed back to work in the morning, so it was the perfect moment for an Americano.

No problem, the bartender said. A few minutes later, a cup of coffee was set before me.

I apologized and clarified that Id been asking for the aperitivo combining Campari, vermouth and soda.

You asked for an Americano. This is an Americano, he said.

Im sorry, I said. I shouldve been more specific. Its also a cocktail.

Ive been bartending for 10 years, and Ive never heard of it. He whisked the coffee away, his expression equally dark.

Had I really ordered something so obscure? Was I one of those jerks who expect every bartender to know some bespoke cocktail they once had in a tiny Brooklyn bar: You know, that drink called the No One Ever Orders This? With baijiu and dragonfruit and rhubarb-cardamom bitters?

To be fair, Id made assumptions, based on the time of day, the bars stock of Campari, the fact that the drink has been around since the late 1800s. And its true that a watered-down espresso is also called an Americano. In fact, according to Marisa Huff, author of Aperitivo: The Cocktail Culture of Italy, the similarity in names may come from a similarity in process: Like the diluted espresso that American soldiers in Italy favored during World War II, the Americano cocktail is a watered-down version of a drink called a Milano-Torino or Mi-To, itself named for the two origins of its primary ingredient, Campari from Milan, vermouth from Turin.

Still, I like to believe that bartender would be in the minority. Especially in a globe-trotting city like Washington, Im sure many are acquainted with the Americano and its family of aperitivi: lower-alcohol, appetite-stimulating drinks that, in the context of pre-prandial socialization, may include vermouth, sherry, bitter liqueurs and aromatized wines, pastis, Champagne and more. Certain European countries dedicate whole phrases to the activity surrounding aperitifs; aperitivo, for example, is Italian shorthand not just for the drink but for the hour in which it is drunk and the snacks that accompany it.

The culture varies by country and even by region: You may be drinking spritzes in northern Italy, pastis in France, vermouth in northern Spain, sherry in southern and so forth. In Catalonia, vermouth is often a starter at lunchtime, says Eric Seed, founder of Haus Alpenz, which imports a number of vermouths, quinquinas and other aperitifs. But aperitifnot just the drink, but the activityis a very real element of service, and in all three countries, says Seed.

Theres such a variety of drinks that can be considered part of the category that its worth exploring what they have in common. Leith Shenstone, owner of importer Fasel Shenstone, says that what makes an aperitif is some combination of dryness, sweetness, bitterness and sometimes effervescence.

Bitterness and dryness go hand in hand to activate your saliva glands in the back of your mouth, he says, and that really whets your appetite, so when you start to drink something that dries out your mouth, you start producing that saliva, and your mouths going, Hmm, Id really like to eat something salty to go with it, like olives or almonds. The effervescence, the bubbles open your taste buds a little bit.

Varying degrees of bitterness can be found in vermouths and many other aromatized wines, such as Byrrh, Cocchi Americano and Bonal. Francesco Amodeo, master distiller at local distillery Don Ciccio & Figli, recently expanded into aperitivi with his citrusy Cinque and deep crimson Luna Amara, and says that the various botanicals are chosen specifically to open the stomach and prepare the body to digest food. There are specific botanicals that make a drink better for the earlier stages of the evening drinking and eating as opposed to the later stage, he notes. The herbs used to flavor aromatized wines (and spirits such as Campari and Aperol) often stem from herbal medicine traditions that go back hundreds of years in his native Italy.

In the United States, the craft cocktail movement has embraced bitter liqueurs and helped rehabilitate the once-bedraggled image of vermouth. And thanks to importers such as Haus Alpenz, Fasel Shenstone and Tempus Fugit (among others), we have access to a variety of quality European aperitifs. Watching the way session (lower-alcohol) beers have exploded in recent years makes me hope that the audience is burgeoning.

But there may still be a leap in terms of attitude and culture. We love our happy hours, and day drinking has become quite the memeand aperitifs are made for slow summer sipping. Yet I often see #daydrinking social media posts in a context of tongue-in-cheek braggadocio of the What a naughty girl I am, drinking in broad daylight like a harlot! variety. They suggest that some of us still feel the local temperance union lurking around the corner, peering at our pleasures through disapproving lorgnettes. None of the great apertifing countries went through Prohibition like we didand dont get me started on the pros and cons of the Protestant work ethic.

Even activities we would seem to have in common have differences. Take happy hour, for example. Italys aperitivo would seem to correlate, but not so fast. That sort of sacred sliver of time between work and play . . . is something we havent ever really done all that well, says Talia Baiocchi, editor in chief of online drink magazine Punch and co-author (with Leslie Pariseau) of Spritz: Italys Most Iconic Aperitivo Cocktail, with Recipes.

For us, happy hour has always been how many drinks can we smash into a really short amount of time for the smallest amount of cash, and traditionally doesnt involve food. In Italy, she says, you dont drink without eating. And where our values are more about staying at work later and getting up early . . . Italy is just like, their whole goal is to work less.

Still, Baiocchi says she and Pariseau have started to see American drinkers moving away from this How much booze can you fit in the glass mentality, departing from the notion that heavy booze is a signifier of seriousness or complexity for something that is more sessionable. Baiocchi and Pariseau explore the breadth of the spritz culture, of which the Aperol Spritz is the most famous (the Rib Tickler is a modern American variation), and conclude that in Italy, the spritz is not just a drink, but an attitude.

I was considering how that attitude might translate stateside when I found out that Elliott Rattley, owner of the Classics restaurant in Silver Spring and a known hater of fussy cocktails, had recently spent a weekend pounding Aperol Spritzes and loved them so much he added them to his menu. At first shocked, I then thought: of course. The spritz is a cocktail in which part of the appeal is looseness, a willingness to toss ingredients together in a rakishly pleasing way. Like many aperitifs, its perfect for those like Rattley, who like to drink well as part and parcel of socializing, but cant bear the preciousness that can creep into cocktails.

But will Americans discovering classic aperitifs retain the carelessly sophisticated nature of the European tradition? I can only report anecdotally that Rattleys approach to the spritzinvolving one friend, one bottle of Aperol, three bottles of prosecco and, late in the evening, falling out of a boatconfirmed my suspicion: If we Americans start traveling down the aperitivi road, we may widen that sucker into a six-lane highway.
Wine has been made since biblical times. Oak barrels, glass bottles, corks and screw caps have defined modern innovation. New technologies can reinvent wine, the way temperature control allowed vintners to produce the crisp white wines we enjoy and demand today. But Rollin Soles thinks hes onto something no one else is doing.

Soles is a familiar name to fans of Oregon wine. He co-founded Argyle winery in 1987 with Australian wine legend Brian Croser, specializing first in sparkling wine, later adding pinot noir, chardonnay and other varieties. He left Argyle in 2013 to focus on Roco, the label he created in 2003 with his wife, Corby. Now hes excited about a new variation he has created on whole-cluster fermentation of pinot noir.

Bear with me while I indulge in a little wine wonkiness: Whole-cluster fermentation means the grape clusters are poured into the fermenting bins with their stems, or stalks. The stalks add tannin and structure to the wine, and some pinot noir producers favor this technique because pinot noir is a less-tannic grape than others, such as cabernet sauvignon. Its actually an old winemaking method, as de-stemming machines are a relatively recent invention that helped winemakers emphasize fruit flavors in the wine.

Soles favors the modern method of de-stemming pinot noir, chilling the grapes and letting them cold soakmeaning the grapes slowly decompose at cold temperatures for a week or more until fermentation begins. This technique heightens fruit flavors in the wine and extracts color from the skins.

Ive always wanted to make wine that tastes of the vineyard, of fresh fruit, Soles told me during a recent interview via Skype. With whole-cluster, the wines too often tasted green and vegetal. I could only taste stalks.

Then one year, Soles traveled through the U.S. Midwest on a marketing tour with Dario Boscaini, a noted producer of Amarone, the powerful red wine from northeast Italy made from air-dried grapes. As he listened to Boscaini describe how he made wines from the dried grapes, Soles realized the stalks were left on the clusters, and they were drying, too.

Everyone focuses on the desiccated grapes and their concentrated flavors, but no one mentions the stalks, he said. Because they were drying, too, they may have been losing some of that green, unripe character, he figured.

So in 2011, Soles experimented. Instead of composting the stems he removed from his pinot noir grapes, he saved them and dried them during the seven-to-10-day period the grapes were cold-soaking. Once fermentation began, he added the stems back to the juice.

I expected to get a lot more tannin in the wine while preserving the fruit, he said. And the tannin was measurably higher, about 20 percent. But when I tasted the wine, I noticed a voluptuous texture.

Soles bottled the wine as the Stalker. Its character is similar to that of the Roco Willamette Valley pinot noir, with black cherry fruit and subtle earthy tannins. Pinot fans will recognize both as Oregon wines. The Stalker is more voluptuous, with a fuller mouth feel and a texture that improves as the wine breathes over a day or two after opening.

Soles made only 100 cases that first vintage and just 625 cases in the current release, 2013. Despite his enthusiasm for the results, he doesnt plan to expand production beyond that level in future vintages.

Its a lot of hard work pushing those stems down into the grapes as theyre fermenting, he said wryly. But the effort is worth it.

Its exciting for me to come up with a completely unique way to ferment red wine, Soles said. I never thought Id come up with something that I dont believe anyone else has ever done.
Bloomberg: China's budget deficit since beginning of year approached record trillion dollars

Holy Pontiff of Rome receives Armenian FM

Armenia ruling party convention to be closed to media

Dollar falls, euro rises in Armenia

Governor underscores EU envoy to Armenias efforts in returning of Shirak Province POWs (PHOTOS)

Putin: US is using Ukraine as battering ram against Russia, CSTO, and CIS

Russian military practices massive nuclear strike in response to nuclear attack of adversary

Germany restricts visas for Iranian passport holders

Belarus Foreign Minister visits Iran

Iran expands sanctions against EU

Ardshinbank is the only company from Armenia with assigned ratings from the big three credit rating agencies

Armenia Security Council chief receives OSCE needs assessment mission members

Kremlin comments on deployment of American division in Romania

Iltalehti: draft bill on Finland's membership in NATO allows deployment of nuclear weapons

Kremlin informs about preparation for Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan leaders meeting

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The international conference on the issues of food security held in Tbilisi, Georgia, gave an opportunity to organize effective dialogue between the state sector and civil society.

Armenian Minister of Agriculture, Armen Harutyunyan, said the aforementioned at a conference Thursday.

In his words, such conferences are very important, since they give an opportunity to the state authorities and civil society to exchange information and cooperate more effectively. Moreover, they also improve the dialogue between different state structures, in this case the Ministries of Agriculture and Health.

We must closely cooperate with the Agriculture Ministry in issues of food security and nutrition. The Agriculture Ministry must ensure the growth of self-dependence and development of organic agriculture in the country, which is necessary for healthy nutrition. The Health Ministry also deals with such issues, but if there is no dialogue between us, we will take different paths, and our country will face issues in the sphere of food nutrition. This conference was important also because it helped to raise the level of dialogue between the two ministries to a new level, Harutyunyan noted.

For her part, Director of Oxfam Armenian Office, Margarita Hakobyan, noted that the conference, which ended on June 16, helped the representatives of state institutions to better understand what policy must be developed in this sphere in order to ensure food security in the country and advance the interests of small manufacturers more effectively.

Besides, Hakobyan noted that the conference enabled to compare the problems of Armenia and Georgia in the sphere of food security and understand the need for searching regional solutions to these problems. It is not ruled out that the countries can help each other and import food products from one another if necessary, the specialist stressed.

An international conference on food security was held in Tbilisi on June 15-16. It was attended by the specialist and representatives of the Agriculture and Health Ministries of Armenia and Georgia, as well as international experts ready to share the experience of their countries.
YEREVAN. - The Armenian Commission on Prisoners of War [(POWs)], Captives and Missing People, categorically dismisses the groundless accusations of the Azerbaijani side representative to the Armenian authorities on hiding information.

The activity of the Armenian Commission for POWs, Captives and Missing People is transparent. This can be confirmed by the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) and various media outlets. It has always been aimed at clarifying the fates of the missing compatriots and deciding issues related to the humanitarian problems, something which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the Azerbaijani State Commission, whose activity seems to be aimed at a cheap political PR, misinformation and attempts to blacken the Armenian side, Head of the Commission working group, Armen Kaprielyan, stated upon the request of Armenian News  NEWS.am correspondent, commenting on the statements of the Head of Azerbaijani State Commission on PoWs, Captives and Missing People Ismayil Akhundov.

I advise the part of the community, which still doubts the proper conduct of the Armenian side in this field, to turn to competent international organizations, who, I am sure, dispose of all the necessary information on the issues of concern.

I have to once again officially state that Armenia has no PoWs and captives from among the Azerbaijani civilian population.

Taking advantage of the situation and based on my own experience of work, I would like to tell my so-called colleague the following: Firstly, let them finally determine the number of the missing persons of the Azerbaijani Republic, since in different years and on different occasions the Azerbaijani officials mentioned absolutely different figures. Secondly, let them stop dealing with strictly political propaganda and try to direct at least part of their forces to the consideration of the problems for which purpose the State Commission has actually been set up. Besides, apart from constant mediatory statements, it would be none the worse to try to establish contact with the Armenian side, something that we are trying to achieve during the recent five-six years. However, oddly enough, in light of the statements of the Azerbaijani Commission representative, the Azerbaijani side categorically refuses to discuss the work issues directly with the Armenian side, the head of the Working Group said.

According to APA, the Azerbaijani State Commission representative made subsequent accusations against the Armenian side at Milli Majlis.
19:39

Udta Punjab, the drug-themed Bollywood film that was embroiled in a censorship row and multiple legal battles, was released across the country today as scheduled without any incident being reported, barring protests by Shiv Sena activists in Ludhiana.



Police took 30 activists of Shiv Sena (Hindustan) into preventive custody in Ludhiana after they tried to create ruckus when the movie screening was going on in a multiplex there even as tight security arrangements were put in place at various places across Punjab.



They were later released.



The Police said that security at cinema halls and multiplexes, especially in prominent shopping malls at various cities including Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar, was beefed up.



In Ludhiana, Shiv Sena (Hindustan) leader Rajiv Tandon demanded that the film should be banned because it was defaming Punjab.



The activists of the outfit tried to forcibly enter Goverdan Mall where the Abhishek Chaubey-directed film was being screened. Police, however,prevented their entry.



No other untoward incident has been reported.



Meanwhile, Union Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal today said the controversy surrounding Udta Punjab is an attempt to malign the image of Punjab and its people.



Drug abuse is not the only problem coming from the other side of the border. We have also faced problem of infiltration from the border region, Badal, an MP of the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab, said.



She alleged that it (Udta Punjab controversy) was a clearcut attempt to vilify the state and spread false views about it and said, One knows who has funded the film.



On Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi claiming that seven out of 10 youths in Punjab were drug addicts, she said, If this was the case, why did Congress-led governments not check the menace for so many years?



On drug menace, the Union minister said it was a worldwide phenomenon and even the US cannot control the problem.




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The ANA carried out several military operations in close coordination with police and national intelligence personnel in Ghazni, Paktika, Paktia, Badghis, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces, the ministry said in a statement, Xinhua news agency reported.

The statement also confirmed the loss of 13 army personnel during clashes in the operations and as a result of separate attacks across the country.

The Taliban insurgent group has not made any comment yet.

--IANS pgh/bg

( 104 Words)

2016-06-16-20:22:03 (IANS)
Negative global cues, along with profit booking and a weak rupee, dragged the key Indian equity markets lower on Thursday. The benchmark indices closed the day's trade in the red, after some handsome gains the previous day. Around the afternoon session, the key equity index plunged over 400 points, as heavy selling pressure was witnessed in banking, automobile and capital goods stocks. The wider 51-scrip Nifty of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) edged down by 65.85 points or 0.80 per cent, at 8,140.75 points. The barometer 30-scrip sensitive index (Sensex) of the BSE, which opened at 26,686.03 points, closed at 26,525.46 points -- down 200.88 points or 0.75 per cent from the previous close at 26,726.34 points. The Sensex touched a high of 26,686.03 points and a low of 26,314.91 points during intra-day trade. The BSE market breadth was skewed in favour of the bears -- with 1,650 declines and 940 advances. Both the key Indian indices during the previous trade sessionon Wednesday ended on a higher note. The barometer index urged by 330.63 points or 1.25 per cent, while the Nifty rose by 97.75 points or 1.21 per cent. In terms of broader markets, both the midcap and smallcap indices closed lower by 0.37 and 0.55 per cent respectively. Initially, the equity markets opened on a negative note in sync with their Asian peers, which had receded after the Bank of Japan (BoJ) decided against an increase in its stimulus measures. Apart from BoJ, the US Federal Reserve also dampened sentiments as it reduced US economy's growth forecast. Further, the US Fed decided to maintain its key lending rates at the conclusion of its two-day policy meet that ended late Wednesday. The US Fed also signalled its intention to limit the times it might increase key lending rates due to weak domestic jobs market. Besides, disappointing macro-economic trade data which showed a decline in exports for the 18th consecutive month in May further panicked investors. In addition, lower global crude oil prices and a weak rupee curtailed investors risk taking appetite. However, a late spurt of value buying triggered short covering which aided the equity markets to pare some of their losses. "Negative global cues spooked investors into some early liquidation of positions," Anand James, Chief Market Strategist, Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services, told IANS. "Lower crude oil prices and moderately weaker rupee too dented investors' sentiments," he added. Dhruv Desai, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Tradebulls, said that Nifty opened down tracking negative global cues but recovered from days low in the second half of the session due to short covering at lower levels from traders. "Banking sector stocks witnessed handsome recovery from days low on fresh buying support and ended on a positive note," Desai pointed out. Both the foreign and domestic institutional investors (DIIs) were net sellers during the day's trade. Data with stock exchanges showed that the foreign institutional investors (FIIs) sold stocks worth Rs 156.75 crore, whereas DIIs divested scrip worth Rs 163 crore. Sector-wise, all the sub-indices except metal stocks witnessed heavy selling pressure. The S&P BSE banking index plunged by 283.42 points, followed by the automobile index, which declined by 177.09 points, and the capital goods index fell by 151.72 points. On the other hand, the S&P BSE metal index rose by 33.96 points. Major Sensex gainers during Thursday's trade were GAIL, up 1.08 per cent at Rs 382.35; Asian Paints, up 0.85 per cent at Rs 1,006.80; Wipro, up 0.59 per cent at Rs 549.85; Hindustan Unilever, up 0.56 per cent at Rs 879.75; and Tata Motors, up 0.40 per cent at Rs 454. Major Sensex losers during the day's trade were Maruti Suzuki, down 2.93 per cent at Rs 4,084; Bharti Airtel, down 1.58 per cent at Rs 346.25; ICICI Bank, down 1.54 per cent at Rs 239.60; NTPC, down 1.43 per cent at Rs 151.75; Hero MotoCorp, down 1.41 per cent at Rs 3,023.40. --IANS ppg-rv/vt ( 667 Words) 2016-06-16-18:58:03 (IANS)
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will chair a meeting of home ministers, chief secretaries and Director Generals of Police of coastal states and Union Territories here on Thursday. Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju and senior officers of the ministry will also attend the meeting organised by the Department of Border Management of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Dignitaries from the nine coastal states (West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat) and four Union Territories, (Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Interstate Council Secretariat (ISCS), Registrar General of India, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Shipping, Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries and Indian Coast Guard are participating in the meeting, a release stated. During the pre-lunch session of the meeting, there will be discussions on expeditious implementation of coastal security scheme, institutional set up in states/UTs to review coastal security, constitution of State Maritime Boards, security of non-major ports and single point mooring, coastal mapping, security of islands, distribution of Biometric Identity Cards and Card Readers, colour coding of boats, monitoring of fish landing points and crossing of International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) by the fishermen. There will also be presentations by the Indian Coast Guard (ICG) and the coastal states and UTs, in which they will be highlighting, before Singh, Rijiju, Rajiv Mehrishi (Union home secretary) and Susheel Kumar (secretary (BM), the steps being taken for ensuring coastal security and their requirements and suggestions for further strengthening it. (ANI)
The status of India as a 'major defence partner' of the US will not be impacted by a negative vote in the US Senate on a key amendment, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) clarified today. The clarification comes a day after the Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" as key amendment for modifying its export control regulations could not be passed. "This does not impact in any way our 'major defence partner' status that was conveyed by the US administration, as it was and an executive action," the Government sources told UNI. The position was also articulated in the Indo-US joint statement, which was issued after bilateral talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama on June 7, the sources pointed out. Noting that the US-India defence relationship can be an anchor of stability, and given the increasingly strengthened cooperation in defence, the US had announced that it recognises India as a 'major defence partner'. "The US will continue to work towards facilitating technology sharing with India to a level commensurate with that of its closest allies and partners," the joint statement has said. "The leaders reached an understanding under which India would receive license-free access to a wide range of dual-use technologies in conjunction with steps that India has committed to take to advance its export control objectives," it said. UNI MK DS SB 0914 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-788138.Xml
Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president Anjan Dutta passed away at AIIMS in New Delhi early this morning. He was 64. Reports received here said Dutta breathed his last around 0730 hrs. Dutta was hospitalised at AIIMS for more than a month after contracting infection following his return from a family holiday in South Africa. He was suffering from pneumonia and high blood sugar, Congress sources said here. Dutta's body will be brought to Guwahati and last rites are likely to be performed at his ancestral home in Sivsagar. He was a former state cabinet minister, besides holding several important party positions. Dutta leaves behind his wife and two daughters. Former chief minister Tarun Gogoi has condoled the leader's demise. UNI SG DS SB 0940 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-788148.Xml
Massive search operation continued in the Machil woods near the Line of Control (LoC) in the frontier district Kupwara, where so far one militant and a soldier were killed and four armymen were injured in a fierce encounter on June 14. Defence ministry spokesman Colonel N N Joshi told UNI that operation against the militants was going on and so far no fresh contact was established. Despite very dense forest with narrow mountain ridge, troops were moving ahead from all directions towards the area to corner militants, he said adding during the past 24 hours there was however, no fresh contact with militants. The operation at Jetgali in Machil, within the five km curfew zone on LoC ensued after alert troops noticed a group of militants sneaking into this side from Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) on June 14. However, when challenged and asked to surrender in the dense woods, militants opened fire with automatic weapons. Additional troops were rushed from nearby posts and entire forest area was sealed to foil any militant attempt to escape, they said adding since it is very vast dense forest troops have started forward from all sides to corner the holed up militants. According to intelligence inputs more than 200 militants are currently ready to infiltrate at nearly 30 launch pads in PoK. However, troops guarding the LoC are already on high alert, equipped with latest equipments, including night vision binoculars, goggles and cameras to foil infiltration attempts. Sources said that about 20 militants have infiltrated across the LoC till April this year. However, majority of them have been killed on the LoC by the troops.UNI BAS ADG 1050 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0153-788208.Xml
"Extremely saddened by the untimely demise of Anjan Duttaji.....His passing away is a big loss to the party and the state of Assam", Mr Gandhi said.

"My deepest condolences to his family", he said in his message.

Dutta(64) passed away at AIIMS here early this morning.UNI SS SB 1127

-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0089-788290.Xml
The MoU would enable both NIE and S-VYASA to jointly conduct seminars, conferences and workshops on yoga for students and faculty members. The MoU was signed by G L Shekar, principal and CEO of NIE, and H R Nagendra, Chancellor of S-VYASA University.

A release said S-VYASA, known for its research, quality education and yoga-based clinical service, would extend its resources and provide academic interaction.

Mr Nagendra said there were many school of thoughts by different yoga experts. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had advised these experts, including S-VYASA, to develop common protocol covering both traditional shastras and modern science and there was a consensus among these experts and organisations in framing common syllabus that fits into primary, middle and high school sectors.

The yoga curriculum for higher education will be announced soon by Ministry of Human Resource Development, said Mr Nagendra.UNI BSP HVB CNR1150

-- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0284-788311.Xml
An amount of Rs 44.87 crore will be utilised to install four ropeways to facilitate farmers to transport agricultural products in Kishtwar district in Jammu region. Minister for Rural Development, Panchayati Raj, Law & Justice, Abdul Haq today informed the Legislative Council that installation of ropeways in Paddar in Kishtwar for transporting agricultural products will benefit farmers of the area. Replying on behalf of Minister in-charge Agriculture Production to a Calling Attention Notice of Sajjad Ahmad Kichloo in the Upper House, the Minister said with a view to facilitate transportation of vegetables, fruits, other agricultural products and inputs, the Agriculture Department in coordination with other concerned agencies, made an extensive survey of Paddar areas during 2007-08. He said that farmers could be benefited by installation of Ropeway Trolleys as they are in use in the neighboring states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. He said accordingly, four spots/locations were identified for the proposed Ropeway System. Mr Haq said that the PWD Department framed the estimates during 2007-08 for fixing of the ropeways at a total cost of Rs 1.37 crore. He said these estimates were further recast during 2011-12 at Rs 44.8.7 crore and accordingly administrative approval was accorded by the Agricultural Department and their execution taken-up under Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY). The Minister said that 90 per cent work on installation of 1.50 Km ropeway at Gulabgarh to Ligri with a cost of Rs 70.74 lakh has been completed and tightening and testing of Ropeway is under process. He said for installation of 2.50 Km Ropeway from Sohal to Chitoo the part material has been stacked at the site, while as material for installation of 5 Km ropeway from Sohal to Kabban at a cost of Rs 15.20 crore and 4 km ropeway from Sohal to Ungaie with a cost of Rs 1.29 crore has been stacked at Gulabgarh Paddar. He said that all these four works were allotted to M/S Himcable Ways of Chandigarh during November-December 2012. The works got delayed initially as projects were to be designed by the agency and the same was to be vetted from Design Directorate which took some time. He said material was supplied in the year 2014-15 after a lot of persuasion. Mr Haq said that various notices were also issued by the R&B Department to the said company for early start & completion of the Ropeways. The agency started actual launching works on Gulabgarh Ligri section in October 2015. As of now, the launching work has been completed and only tightening & testing of Ropeway is to be carried out which is expected to be completed shortly, he said. Progress on other three spots shall also be expedited, subject to availability of balance funds by the Agriculture Department, he added.UNI ABS SB 1122 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0433-788198.Xml
Accommodation fiasco has prevented Tripura Power Minister Manik Dey and his officials to from attending the two-day Power Ministers conference that began today in South Goa. Tripura is unrepresented in such an important conference for the first time allegedly due to an adverse decision of Ministry of Power.As principle the left front government in Tripura has been persuading a policy not to allow its ministers and officers to stay at expensive hotel during any government meeting. But this time, power ministers' conference is organised at South Goa and accommodation is made at a star hotel, said Tripura power Secretary S K Rakesh.Moreover, the ministry while inviting Tripura minister and officials made it clear that accommodation expenses has to be borne by the respective state governments. Immediately, the policy decision of the state government was communicated to the ministry, Mr Rakesh said."We are being reimbursed only Rs 601 dearness allowance per day and we never stay at any expensive accommodation. We always request the central government to arrange meeting in Delhi, which is cheaper and easier for us to attend. However, it appears after new government assume office, the meetings are called in various states, which is not encouraging for us," said Mr Dey.Mr Dey, one of the longest serving power ministers of the country recalled after assuming office in 2014, the first conference of power ministers' was called at Guwahati and second one was convened in Cochin and now at Goa."We have pointed out our difficulties in attending meeting outside Delhi several times. But it seems the central government could not realise our problem. Our Chief Minister and other ministers have been leading a very simple life-style and we take extra caution before spending every furthering," Mr Dey stated. The state power secretary informed the union power secretary three days ago that the DA of the ministers of a state was Rs 600 only, which would not be enough to bear the cost of accommodation in a hotel in South Goa and the state government would not pay the cost of a star category hotel accommodation, he added.UNI BB AD ADG PM1250 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0108-788319.Xml
Unidentified criminals have shot dead a young businessman at Makandpur village under Gopalpur police station area in the district. Police said here that the businessman Rajiv Kumar Sah alias Lalan Sah (28) dealing in construction materials was gunned down by outlaws when he was in his office near Makandpur chowk late last night.He died on the spot after receiving three gunshots. The reason behind the murder was not immediately known. The body had been sent to Naogachhia sub-divisional hospital for post-mortem examination. A massive manhunt has been launched to nab the culprits. UNI XC DH AD SB PM1246 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0108-788390.Xml
A 28-year-old doctor attached to a scan centre in Mettupalayam was arrested yesterday following the charges of molestation of a pregnant woman. Police said here today that a pregnant woman from Sirumugai went to the Mettupalayam government hospital for check up. The Gynaecologist after testing asked her to get a scan report from a private scan centre, as the scan machine at the hospital was under repair. When she went to the private centre, the doctor there misbehaved with her. When she hesitated, the doctor N Dhayanandar informed her that he is testing whether she had any breast cancer. She immediately reported to the government doctor and they later informed to the police. One more woman from the same area has also lodged similar complaint against the doctor who was arrested and remanded to judicial custody, police added. UNI KS CNR1340 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0414-788577.Xml
A Bangladeshi ship carrying the consignment of 1,000 MT corrugated iron sheets for Tripura reached Ashuganj river port today.Officials stated that the consignment for Tripura has started from Kolkata on June 3 last using waterways for Ashuganj port, which is about 32 Kms from Agartala by road.This is the first commercial transit consignment sent for Tripura using Bangladesh. Anbis Development Ltd, a Bangladeshi operator, hired the ship to carry the goods from Kolkata to Ashuganj, officials stated.As per arrangement, the goods would be unloaded at Ashuganj port and then loaded onto Bangladeshi trucks, which would cross the Indo-Bangla border in Akhaura. The vehicles would travel by road to deliver the consignment to warehouses in India.Under the transit protocol, goods would be carried from Kolkata to Ashuganj through the river route and then from Ashuganj to Agartala, through a land route. The transshipment fee for carrying goods would be 192.25 per MT in Bangladeshi currency, officials here said quoting the director (traffic) of Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA).UNI BB AD ADG PR1345 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0108-788328.Xml
In a shocking incident, Laxmipuri police has foiled an attempt to abduct a notorious ruffian of 'Marne' gang in Pune. According to Laxmipuri police, a notorious ruffian from "Marne" gang in Pune, Somprakash Patil (44), resident of Baner, Balewadi Road, Pune, was undergoing a sentence in Kalmba district jail here. His colleagues, all from the city, planned to abduct him from police custody. Executing their plan, Patil admitted himself to CPR hospital prisoners ward citing 'health' reasons. But, police also learnt about the plan though its informer and were on alert since last couple of days. Patil's colleagues arranged a liquor party for policemen last night in prisoners ward and kept them engaged. Meanwhile, four colleagues decided to abduct Patil. But, police, who were patrolling around the ward, immediately raided the spot and arrested five people, including Patil, when were trying to scale a seventeen feet tall wall. Besides Patil, four others were identified as Abhijeet Sharad Chavan(26), Sanjay Dinesh Kadam (52), Digvijay Shivajirao Pawar (37), and Jagdish Prabhakar Babar (44), police added.UNI SSS NV SB PR1259 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0169-788337.Xml
According to a release issued by the Crime Branch today, Arjun Khatik was arrested from Dwarka Nagar along with the contraband.

Two drug peddlers Rinku Suryavanshi and Raju Suryavanshi were arrested along with 41 kg cannabis while they were transporting the intoxicating substance from Visakhapatnam to Bhopal by hiding it in the bathroom of a train.

The duo used to supply the drug to suppliers in the city. Arjun, who was one of them, was on the run since his name cropped up.UNI BAG-PS AE AS1430

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Opposition today staged a walkout from the Legislative Assembly, demanding inquiry into alleged distribution of cash for votes in Anantnag constituency, where Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and seven other candidates are seeking mandate in the by-elections scheduled on Jun 22. As the Question Hour was in progress in the Legislative Assembly today, Opposition, including National Conference (NC) and Congress, demanded that the Speaker should order an inquiry into allegations that money was being pumped in the constituency to woo voters. "A private vehicle was intercepted in Anantnag and during checking cash of Rs 38 lakh was recovered. The identity of one of the two people onboard was not made public; the other person was an employee of J&K Bank. Upon questioning, the employee said that the money belonged to J&K bank and it was being transported to deposit in main branch of the bank," former minister and Congress Member from Leh Nawang Rigzin Jora said. Questioning the credibility of the statement by the bank employee, Mr Jora said there is a procedure which needs to be followed while transporting money and it clearly doesn't come across as a mistake in judgment. "Money is being used to woo the voters in the constituency," he said and asked the Speaker to initiate enquiry into the incident. However, Consumers Affairs and Public Distribution (CA&PD) Minister Zulfkar Ali said that the election is being held by the Election Commission of India (ECI). "If the Opposition has any evidence to prove their allegation then they should hand it over to the ECI. Government has no issue if the matter is investigated by the ECI," he added.UNI ABS DS AS1410 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0433-788500.Xml
The rumours spread thick and fast this morning about his healthcondition.

The actor's family members, who are with him in the US, immediately denied the rumours and said the actor was hale and hearty.

He would be back in Chennai in a couple of weeks.

Fans took to social media condemning those who spread false news.

Within a couple of hours, a few websites that had allegedlycarried the news in Sri Lanka tendered apology.

The Padma Vibushan award winner Rajinikanth, who awaits the release of his much-awaited flick 'Kabali', was holidaying in the USwith his family for the last few weeks.

Having completed a shoot of Shankar's magnum opus '2.0',Rajinikanth took a much needed break to rejuvenate and resumeshooting from July.

In Shankar's 2.0, a sequel to blockbuster Enthiran, Rajinikanthwill return as the popular scientist, Vaseegaran.

In Kabali, which is slated for release in July, Rajinikanth will be seen playing an ageing gangster.

The film's story is tipped to be based on the real-life story of a Chennai-based don.

Meanwhile, the actor's spokesperson said the family was contemplating action against websites responsible for spreading false information.UNI GV MVR ADB 1635

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Karnataka Cabinet reshuffle is on thecards, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah today left here for New Delhi toget green signal from the party High Command.Mr Siddaramaiah left here in the afternoon and in all possibilityhe will be meeting AICC President Sonia Gandhi tomorrow and discussabout long pending Cabinet reshuffle, according to party sources.The Chief Minister will be meeting AICC General Secretary andparty Karnataka Affairs incharge Digvijay Singh today evening anddiscuss the issue.Many of the Ministerial aspirants have already reached theNational Capital to influence the Party national leaders for a berthin the Siddaramaiah Cabinet.Sources said that more than 10 Ministers may be dropped andyoungsters may be given opportunity. However, it is an uphill taskfor Mr Siddaramaiah as he has to take steps very cautiously since theAssembly elections are due in the next two years and a wrong step may leadto raise rebellious feeling in the party.Indications are that the dropped Ministers may be givenresponsibility in the KPCC to strengthen and prepare the party forthe 2018 Assembly election. In all possibility the Cabinet reshuffle may take place beforethe beginning of the Monsoon Session on July 4 if Ms Gandhi gives greensignal tomorrow otherwise the process may have to wait for two moremonths since Ms Gandhi will be leaving for the US for treatment, sources added.Minister of State for Agriculture Krishna Byregowda, replying to aquestion at a press conference, said that " I am happy with myportfolio and I have no habit of applying for Cabinet rank or forchange of portfolio."UNI MSP MVR ADB 1643 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0284-788905.Xml
During the meeting, the two discussed various social issues. Mr Roy lauded the works of the state government and also appreciated the tasks being carried out in the area of water conservation.

He gifted a book to the minister and informed him about the activities of the company. Later, Mr Chowdhary also handed a statue of Bhagwan Birsa Munda to Mr Roy. UNI AK PL PR AE BD1740

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Veteran Odia film actress of yesteryears Manimala Devi passed away at a private hospital here this afternoon after prolonged illness. She was 90. She was admitted to the hospital in March following some old age related complications and breathed last at 1445 hours. Born on June 19,1931 at Balibisi village in Cuttack, she joined Annapurna Theatre 'A' group in 1945 and started her career with the play 'Jaydev'.She also took up singing inspired by late Kalichanaran Pattnaik and Balakruishna Das and learned Odishi under the guidance of later Kelu Charan Mohapatra. At her tender age she won the hearts of millions of people of Odisha through her performance. During her long career she had acted in over 50 feature films and 100 plays.As many as 14 of her films have bagged National Film Festival awards. She was also awarded with the state's highest Cine award the prestigious 'Jaydev Puraskar' in 2000 for her contribution in enriching the Odia film industry. In 1960 she made her debut in the Odia film Sri Lokanath which received President's silver medal. Some of Manimala's film such "Laxmi" in 1962, "Surjya Mukhi and Leevan Sathi" in 1963, "Abhinetri and Malajanha" in 1965 were highly acclaimed. Two of her films directed by eminent director Nirod Mohapatra, bagged the Rashtrapati Award for second best film national level (1983).The Sangeet Natak Academy awarded her with a life time achievement. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had condoled the demise of the actress on his twitter page yesterday after a local TV channel mistakenly telecast about her death.However, the message was removed later.The Chief Minister later tweeted for her speedy recovery.UNI BD DP PL PR AE BD1756 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0211-789062.Xml
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today said that exit of veteran Congress leader Kamal Nath as General Secretary incharge of Congress in the state has vindicatedstand of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) that 1984 Sikh carnage was a deep rooted conspiracy of Congress party. Interacting with the media persons on the sidelines of sangat darshan program here, the Chief Minister said that Mr Kamal Nath was reluctant to accept this post because of his 'guilty consciousness' owing to his role in massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs. He said that Mr Kamal Nath could not muster the courage to face people of state who were well aware of his role in the riots. However, Mr Badal said that the people of state in general and Sikhs in particular would never forgive Mr Kamal Nath and other leaders of his party who had planned and executed this heinous act, which was a dark spot in the entire history of Indian polity. Terming that national Civil Aviation policy 2016 would prove to be a big boon for state, he expressed hope that airport at Adampur near Jalandhar would soon get operational. He said that the state government has been constantly taking up this issue with central government, adding that the NDA government has finally given a big gift to state in shape of newly unveiled policy. "The day is not far away when this airport in Doaba region will be operational thereby cherishing the aspirations of our NRI brethren", he added. Replying to query regarding press conference by state Congress Chief Captain Amarinder Singh in New Delhi, he said that these were tactics of Lok Sabha MP from Amritsar to run away from his much hyped announcement of holding 'Darbars'. He said that Captain could not bear the scorching heat in the state so he was indulging in such sort of tantrums to escape from his earlier announced 'Darbars'.More UNI DB SHK 1735 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0293-789023.Xml
Crime branch of the Delhi Police today arrested a drug trafficker and recovered 280 kg of marijuana (ganja) concealed with genuine goods in a truck. The value of the recovered ganja is Rs 28 lakh in international market.The accused has been identified as 30-year-old Prempal, a resident of Etah, UP.The police received information on June 13 that the accused was in the process of supplying ganja after obtaining it from Odisha.According to police sources, Prempal used to bring ganja in his truck with other genuine goods so that in case of checking, he could not be caught. It was further informed that Prempal would come to Outer Ring Road towards Majnu Ka Tilla to deliver ganja to someone. "A trap was laid at Outer Ring Road near Chandgi Ram Akhara traffic lights and Prempal was arrested. 280 kg ganja was recovered from his truck," Joint Commissioner of Police Ravindra Yadav said. During interrogation, it was revealed that Prempal is a married man. Due to a poor financial background, he could not complete his studies and worked as a helper in his father's truck. He gradually learnt driving and stated driving trucks independently. During this profession, he came in contact with one Vijay of Ganjam, Odisha, who offered Prempal Rs 500 as commission if Prempal delivered ganja to his party in Delhi and Haryana. To earn quick money, he started supplying ganja and indulged in illicit trade, the police said. UNI SM SW AE 1818 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0271-789231.Xml
Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in India representative Chung-Kwang Tien today announced that Taiwan would want to revive the possibilities of working out free trade agreement with India for which a feasibility study was conducted three years ago.Immediately after witnessing the signing of a protocol and cooperation agreement between PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Taiwan Chamber of Commerce here, Mr Tien said Indian cabinet has already approved the cooperation agreement with Taiwan in the field of agriculture and horticulture including approving widening of civil aviation activities between the two countries yesterday.In view of both countries wanting to broad-base their both economic and trade engagements, the idea for reworking free trade agreement between India and Taiwan would further cement their ties for manufacturing and services sector and create an ideal situation for moving towards the free trade regime between the two, pointing out that Taiwan is a late entrant into India's economic landscape, which is so huge and wide, said Mr Tien.According to him, the two countries should intensify their trade and economic cooperation in electronics and IT among other things and gradually evolve for free trade agreement.The agreement signed by PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Mahesh Gupta and Taiwan Chamber of Commerce president G F Hao also aims at promoting trade and investment relations between the two countries as also constantly endeavour to improve co-operation with two organisationsThe other objectives of the agreement comprise to assist in the organisation of trade and market research missions, conferences, symposia and other methods of trade promotional activity in each other's country. With this agreement in place, the two Chambers will organize seminars, conferences, exhibitions, trade fairs and other promotional activities to further business relations between the two countries and create and maintain a continuing exchange of information about economic developments and other matters affecting the business interests of their members.UNI ADP SW AE 1818 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0429-789220.Xml
Hitherto there was restriction for utilisation of coal suppliedin a particular plant it was meant.

The Union Cabinet on June 4 decided to allow the flexibility asdemanded by several States.

Mr Shivakumar said "it was a welcome decision and I thankthe Union Minister for Energy Piyush Goel for his effort in concedingthe demand."UNI MSP KVV ADB 1925

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The Education Ministry of Maharashtra andConnectEd Technologies, an education-technology start-up thatcreates hyper-scalable, rural-focused solutions, today launched acampaign, named 'EkShiksha'. The campaign aims at uniting socially-responsible corporates, NGOs, school managements andgrass-root level educators to eliminate the educational inequity andprovide world-class education to children studying in rural schoolsacross the state.An official release from DHFL today stated that Under the aegis ofthis campaign, rural schools will be equipped with ConnectEdTechnologies' 'Smart Classroom System', which is a robust,solar-powered, teacher-aid product that works flawlessly indemanding rural conditions and enables educators to easily integratetailor-made multimedia educational content into conventionalteaching practices, thereby improving learning environment andacademic performance in rural classrooms.The campaign launch also marked the inauguration of ConnectEdTechnologies' maiden project in the Palghar region of Maharashtra,which is the model of development to be followed by the 'EkShiksha'initiative. To execute this project, ConnectEd Technologiessuccessfully garnered support of the Education Ministry ofMaharashtra, Dewan Housing Finance Ltd. (DHFL), school managementsand educators in Palghar to deploy sixty 'Smart Classroom Systems'across an array of rural schools.Education Minister Vinod Tawde in his message on the launch functionsaid, It gives me immense pleasure to announce the 'EkShiksha'campaign for rural schools across the state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Digital India programme with thevision to transform India into a digitally empowered society andknowledge economy, and this campaign is a step forward in thatdirection. ''I hope corporates, NGOs, school managements and teacherswill come forward to support 'EkShiksha' and the dynamic, young teamat ConnectEd Technologies' spearheading it.Lehar Tawde, Co-Founder, ConnectEd Technologies, added, "As far asthe rural education system is concerned, it's time the focus movedfrom improving student enrolment to enhancing education delivery.'EkShiksha' aims at providing children in rural schools with equalaccess to world-class education, as currently enjoyed by their urbanand semi-urban counterparts; with rural-focused technology playingthe medium of delivery. We are immensely thankful to Dewan HousingFinance Ltd. (DHFL) for sponsoring deployment of our model projectin Palghar and hope for a similar response from industry at-large"According to Kapil Wadhawan, CMD, DHFL,, "DHFL has been stead-fastin its corporate commitment to enable people lead better lives bygiving access to affordable housing finance. Education is key tobetter living, which is why we are focusing on its enhancementthrough our CSR activities. It gives me immense pleasure to supportthe model project of this innovative rural education campaign by theEducation Ministry ofMaharashtra and ConnectEd Technologies. I sincerely hope corporatesacross industry-lines step forward to support 'EkShiksha' acrossMaharashtra"The first phase of 'EkShiksha' will focus on enhancing educationalinfrastructure in some of the most densely populated Government,Government-aided and Tribal Welfare schools across every district inMaharashtra; followed by digitization of education delivery acrossall schools in the state. The campaign primarily focuses on denselypopulated schools as these are institutions with the most urgentrequirement for education-technology solutions that promiseimprovement in teaching outcomes.The release further said that the Education Ministry of Maharashtraand ConnectEd Technologies have jointly undertaken 'EkShiksha'campaign for rural schools across state.Under this campaign the Schools are to get solar-powered 'SmartClassroom Systems' allowing teachers toaugment conventional teaching practices with tailor-made educationalcontent.The project was today inaugurated at the Masvan Vibhag High School,Masvan which Caters to around 700 students. Those present for theinauguration include . Rajesh Kankaal, District Education Officer Secondary, and Ms Sangita Bhagwat, District Education Officer,primary.There will be a total of 11 schools under the project which willinclude Government, Government-aided and Tribal Welfare schools.UNI XR NP CJ RSA 2328 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-789931.Xml
The ruling Congress-led Meghalaya United Alliance (MUA) government is mulling to legislate a policy to empower domestic workers and for the benefit of their children. "As a policy maker, there is a need to engage further and for a proposal to the movement to discuss ways and means to empower the domestic workers," Chief Minister Mukul Sangma said addressing the International Domestic Workers' Day here today. ''Let Meghalaya show the way to other states so that we take care of millions and millions of domestic workers in the country and beyond," he said. Dr Sangma said that there was a need to create a very innovative concept to ensure that all our domestic workers and all single mothers are able to send their children to schools which are capable of providing shelter and quality education. "We will look at that programme which is dedicated to domestic workers and single mothers a model programme which can be replicated in other states in the country, so that when domestic workers go to assist their employers they can have the comfort that their children are having the access to that kind of quality education to enable them to compete with the rest of younger generation," the Chief Minister said. The International Domestic Workers' Day was organised jointly by the North Eastern Regional Domestic Workers' Movement (NERDWM), Meghalaya and Ferrando Domestic Workers' Alliance (FDWA), Shillong City, the celebration saw huge participation of domestic workers from across the North East states The Chief Minister called upon the departments of labour and social welfare to jointly take up the responsibility to provide support to organisations working to empower the domestic workers through out-of-the-box, innovative approach involving all concerned to create the kind of environment that would benefit both the employer and the worker. He said that one crucial aspect that the Government should look at was the children of domestic workers to enable them to realise their dreams as per their potentialities. Dr Sangma also appealed to the organisations to take advantage of a number of interventions from the government to create a sustainable livelihood in the rural areas to prevent continuous migration from rural to urban centres in search of opportunities. The North Eastern Regional Domestic Workers' Movement, initially known as Domestic Workers' Association was initiated on June 1, 2003 by the congregation of Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians, Shillong Province in Meghalaya in response to violence and injustice perpetuated on domestic workers. The movement received its legal recognition from the state government on October 15, 2005, under the banner of North Eastern Regional Domestic Workers' Welfare Trust. The movement gradually expanded its activities in other parts of the region including Mizoram, Assam Manipur and Nagaland and recently its activities are further extended in 12 cities of North East under the name of Ferrando Domestic Workers' Alliance. The overall objective of the movement is sustainable improvement of the living and working conditions of domestic workers through activities ranging from mobilising and registration of domestic workers to assisting them to avail various schemes of the government. Till date, 5000 domestic workers are registered in Shillong. UNI RRK AKM RSA RAI2321 -- (UNI) -- C-1-DL0213-789828.Xml
Principal secretary of state cabinet and coordination department Brajesh Mehrotra said here that a decision to this effect was taken ' in a cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

"Mukhyamantri Nari Shakti Yojna has been launched for women empowerment and it also incorporated the women empowerment policy 2015 announced by the state government", Mr Mehrotra said adding that Rs 24.60 crores sanctioned by the government would be spent for the execution of Mukhyamantri Nari Shakti Yojna.

The principal secretary said that Rs 9 crores had been sanctioned for payment of salaries to officers of supervisor cadre of municipalcorporation and local bodies. These officers were made available to corporation and local bodies from Bihar administrative service andother department, he stated.

Mr Mehrotra said that a total of Rs 1,121 crores had been sanctioned for payment of salaries to the teachers during the financial year 2016-17 in primary and middle schools appointed by panchayat and local bodies.UNI KKS AKM RSA RAI2259

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A top drug-trafficking accomplice of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman was arrested in Mexico yesterday for his alleged role in two murders, shortly after he was returned from the United States after completing a prison sentence for distributing cocaine.Hector 'El Guero' Palma was a former partner of Guzman, the head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel who is now fighting extradition to the United States from a Mexican prison.Palma was rearrested by officials on his repatriation to Mexico for his "probable responsibility in two homicides" that occurred in the small Pacific state of Nayarit, according to a statement from the attorney general's office. Further details were not immediately available.He was transferred to the Altiplano maximum security prison, from which his fellow drug lord Guzman managed to escape last year before being recaptured.In the absence of Guzman, Mexican officials appear to be increasingly wary of Palma, given his ties to the Sinaloa cartel.Palma, who first served five years in Mexico's maximum-security Puente Grande prison, was extradited to the United States in 2007. He played a key role in the cartel, which became famous in the 1980s for trafficking cocaine from Colombia in association with the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.Palma served most of a 16-year sentence, which was reduced because of good behavior, said Kristi Rodriguez, from the US penitentiary in Atwater, California.REUTERS RSD PM0918 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0435-788137.Xml
US investigators have questioned the wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the FBI said yesterday, and a law enforcement source said she could face criminal charges if there is evidence of any wrongdoing.Omar Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, knew of his plans for what became the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, said the law enforcement source, who has been briefed on the matter."With respect to the wife, I can tell you that is only one of many interviews that we have done and will continue to do in this investigation," FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper told a news conference. "I cannot comment on the outcome or the outcome of that investigation."CNN, citing law enforcement officials, said a US attorney planned to present evidence to a federal grand jury to determine whether charges would be brought against Salman. She could not be reached for comment.The first memorial for a victim of the Pulse nightclub massacre, a wake for Javier Jorge Reyes, was held yesterday evening at a funeral home near a four-lane highway just south of Orlando. Motorists honked their support for the attendees, many of whom held signs or wore T-shirts reading: "Orlando Strong."In Washington, Sunday's shooting in Florida stirred fresh debate on gun purchases in the United States because Mateen was legally able to buy an assault rifle even though the FBI had investigated him in the past for possible ties to Islamist militant groups.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he would meet the powerful National Rifle Association lobbying group, which has endorsed him, to discuss limited gun control measures.That marked a break with Republican Party orthodoxy, which typically opposes any restrictions on gun ownership.The NRA responded that it believed that people listed on terrorism watch lists should face additional reviews before purchasing firearms.SELF-RADICALIZEDMateen's wife was with him when he cased possible targets in the past two months, including the Walt Disney World Resort in April, a shopping complex called Disney Springs and the Pulse nightclub in early June, CNN and NBC reported.The gunman's first wife, Sitora Yusifiy, says Mateen beat her and forced her to split from him after only four months of marriage.Mateen, a New York-born US citizen of Afghan heritage, was shot dead by police after a three-hour rampage through the nightclub.Federal investigators have said Mateen, 29, who worked as a security guard, was likely self-radicalized and there was no evidence he received any help or instructions from outside groups such as Islamic State.However, even as his victims lay dead around him, Mateen posted messages on Facebook pledging allegiance to Islamic State's reclusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fox News said."The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west...You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes...now taste the Islamic state vengeance," he wrote from the club, according to Fox News. The broadcaster cited Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.Mateen's social media accounts were taken down before they could be viewed widely by the public but committee investigators uncovered some or all of them, Fox News said.Mateen also made calls to 911 emergency services during his rampage, which he used to declare his allegiance to various Islamist militant groups, some of which are at odds with one another.A video clip emerged yesterday showing Mateen cursing and flippantly discussing the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.He was filmed secretly for a documentary about the spill, "The Big Fix," while he worked as a security guard where some of the spill cleanup was taking place in Florida.The Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned Mateen in 2013 and 2014 for suspected ties to Islamist militants but concluded he did not pose a threat.SCENE INSIDE CLUBOrange County Medical Examiner Joshua Stephany came across a chilling scene inside the club after the shooting ended."It's almost like time stopped. There were still background TVs playing, lights blinking, drinks that had just been poured, checks that were about to be paid, food half-eaten. That's not even thinking about the bodies on the ground," he told CNN.US Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who joined Democrats in an unsuccessful push for gun control legislation after the killing of elementary school children in Connecticut in 2012, is working on a bill to keep guns out of the hands of people on terrorism watch lists, a gun control group said yesterday.President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will visit Orlando today to meet the families of victims in the attack, the deadliest on US soil since the hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001."The president, while he's there, will also have an opportunity to speak publicly about what he sees and also about the message that he's preparing to deliver on behalf of the country to make clear that the country stands with the people of Orlando, stands with the LGBT community in Orlando as they grieve for their loss," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.Trump has drawn criticism from Obama as well as some senior Republicans for his proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. Yesterday, he also called for surveillance of mosques as part of US counterterrorism efforts.REUTERS RSD PM0919 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0435-788143.Xml
Reprising his frequent role of "consoler in chief," President Barack Obama will fly to Orlando today to meet with survivors of the massacre at a gay nightclub and families of some of the 49 people killed.The White House said Obama's visit to the Florida city where Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to Islamic State during a three-hour rampage through the Pulse nightclub, was not about the gunman but comforting the victims of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history."This will be, I think, an emotional trip," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, saying Obama would offer condolences on behalf of the nation."The president recognizes that he is a symbol for the rest of the country. But it would be impossible for him not to be personally affected by these kinds of conversations," Earnest said.A long list of mass shootings has marked Obama's 7-1/2 years in the White House.Obama most recently met with grieving families in December in San Bernardino, California, after a married couple inspired by Islamic State killed 14 people. He has visited with victims of mass shootings in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina."Somehow this has become routine," he said last October before meeting privately with victims of a shooting at an Oregon community college where nine people were killed."This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America," he said.Obama has often said his toughest time as president came after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012."Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad," Obama said in January, tears rolling down his cheek, as he launched a push to make gun control an issue in the November 8 election to succeed him.After Newtown, Obama proposed more background checks for gun sales and pushed to ban more types of military-style assault weapons - a tall order in a country where the constitutional right to own guns is fiercely defended.He failed to convince enough lawmakers to back the restrictions, and blamed them for being in thrall to the National Rifle Association, the powerful US gun lobby.The Florida shooting has aroused new debate on gun purchases in the United States, after it emerged that Mateen was legally able to buy an assault rifle even though the FBI had investigated him in the past for possible ties to Islamist militant groups.Obama said Sunday's massacre was "a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub.""We have to make it harder for people who want to kill Americans to get their hands on weapons of war that let them kill dozens of innocents," he said on Tuesday.REUTERS RSD PR1055 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0435-788212.Xml
Amid human rights violations, loss of lives and breach of its territorial sovereignty due to drone attacks, Pakistan has urged United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to respond to the current issue. Pakistan's Permanent Representative, Ambassador Tehmina Janjua, speaking at a meeting of the Council in Geneva said the drone strikes were violation of the UN charter and international law, human rights and humanitarian laws, daily Dawn reported today. She also asked the Council to take notice of the violations taking place due to unlawful drone strikes in her country. Pakistan had been constantly saying that use of armed drones was breach of human rights.UNI XC DS SS -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-788215.Xml
The United Arab Emirates' involvement in more than a year of war in Yemen is "practically over", a top diplomat was quoted as saying yesterday.The UAE is key member of a Saudi-led military coalition which intervened in Yemen in March 2015. It backs the exiled government against the armed Houthi movement, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE fear is a proxy for their regional arch-rival, Iran."Our position today is clear: the war is practically over for our troops," Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash was quoted as saying by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed."We are looking at political arrangements and our political role now is to empower the Yemenis in the liberated areas."A Houthi missile killed more than 60 Gulf Arab troops stationed in central Yemen in September, including 52 Emiratis, the worst loss ever suffered by the UAE military.REUTERS RSD PM1133 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0435-788315.Xml
The agreement to revive the peace process comes after two days of preliminary meetings in Oslo on Tuesday and Wednesday, during which the agenda for the upcoming talks, which will begin in the third week of July, was finalised, EFE news reported.

According to a document signed by the representatives of the government and NDFP, the agenda will include an amnesty for the release of Communist political prisoners, the GMA network reported.

Also on the agenda is the announcement of a ceasefire, the confirmation of previous agreements and ways to speed up the negotiation process.

While incoming presidential peace advisor Jesus Dureza and incoming Labour Secretary Silvestre Bello represented the Philippine government in the preliminary talks in Oslo, the NDFP sent a five-member team, including Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison.

The last round of talks with the communists ended in April 2013, after the government refused to release some political prisoners who were appointed to participate in the peace talks.

President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has announced he is willing to order the release of some insurgents even before a peace agreement is signed.

--IANS ksk/vt

( 232 Words)

2016-06-16-12:40:02 (IANS)
Once Islamic State is defeated, Iraq should be divided into three separate entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed, with a state each given to Shi'ite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, a top Kurdish official said today.Iraqi troops have expelled Islamic State from some key cities the militants seized in 2014, and are advancing on Mosul, the largest city under IS control. Its fall would likely mean the end of the group's self-proclaimed caliphate.But even if Islamic State was eliminated, Iraq would still be deeply divided. Sectarian violence has continued for years and a power-sharing agreement in Baghdad has only led to discontent, deadlock and corruption.Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government's KRG Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain "under one roof"."Federation hasn't worked, so it has to be either confederation or full separation," Barzani told Reuters in an interview yesterday in the Kurdish capital Erbil. "If we have three confederated states, we will have equal three capitals, so one is not above the other."The Kurds have already taken steps towards realising their long-held dream of independence from Iraq, which has been led by the Shi'ite majority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, following a US-led invasion.They run their own affairs in the north and have their own armed forces, the Peshmerga, which have been fighting Islamic State militants with help from a US-led coalition.Sunnis should be given the option of doing the same in the provinces where they are in the majority in the north and the west of Iraq, said Barzani."What we are offering is a solution," he said. "This doesn't mean they live under one roof but they can be good neighbours.Once they feel comfortable that they have a bright and secure future, they can start cooperating with each other."His father has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence this year as the region is locked in territorial and financial disputes with the central government.Baghdad has cut off payments from the federal budget to the KRG to try to force the Kurds to sell crude produced on their territory through the state oil marketing company and not independently. The Kurds also claim the oil region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, as part of their territory.Barzani said that the Sunnis' feeling of marginalisation by the Shi'ite leadership had facilitated the takeover of their regions by Islamic State militants.In addition, Iraq endured months of wrangling and chaos over a government reshuffle that was to curb corruption. In May, frustration over the delays culminated in the unprecedented breach by protesters of the Green Zone, which houses parliament, government offices and many foreign embassies.Ahead of the battle for Mosul, Barzani said the city's different communities should agree in advance on how to handle the aftermath. Mosul's pre-war population of 2 million was mostly Sunni, but included religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis, Kurds and Turkmen.Almost all non-Sunnis fled the Islamic State takeover, along with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who could not live under the militants' harsh rule or could not endure Baghdad's financial blockade imposed on IS-held regions."I think the most important part is how you manage Mosul after Daesh is defeated," he said, referring to an Arabic name of Islamic State. "We don't want to see the gap of liberation and then a vacuum, which probably will turn into chaos."Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that 2016 would be the year of "final victory" over Islamic State with the capture of Mosul.The army, counter-terrorism forces and Shi'ite Muslim paramilitary fighters backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition are also in a major operation to retake the mainly Sunni city of Falluja, an hour's drive from Baghdad.REUTERS RSD AS1346 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0435-788582.Xml
Several contentious issues, including supply of uranium to India under a 2009agreement and participation of Indian companies in Namibia's diamond sectors, are expected to be taken up in deliberations between India and Namibia during President Pranab Mukherjee's 2-daystate visit that began today. Mr Mukherjee, who arrived here on his first visit to this African nation, on the last leg of his three-nation tour, is scheduled to hold talks with his Namibian counterpart Hage Geingob later in the day. The delegation level talks, also happening today, expected to discuss wide range of contentiousissues and likely to sign four MoUs, including one on Defence cooperation. The issue of uranium supply by Namibia to India under a 2009 agreement may also come up duringthe discussions. The President will address a joint session of Parliament of Namibia later in the day. His other engagementsduring the visit include address at a business event, at a university and also a community reception. The legendary leader of Namibia Sam Nujuma will call on the President tomorrow, the last day of the visit. India was among the first nations to raise the question of Namibian independence in the UN. The last time any Indian head of state visited Namibia was 21 years ago in 1995 and after that formerPrime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had visited the country in 1998 when Sam Nujoma was heading thecountry. Namibia is a mineral rich country and the mining sector contributes roughly around 10 or 11 per centof the GDP but it gets them 50 per cent of their foreign exchange earnings so they are highly dependenton that. It is a small country with a population of around 2.5 or 3 million but has a huge territory. India has set up a Plastic Demonstration Centre in North Namibia and a lot of other projects like bio-gasunit, bore wells, maternity clinics and has helped them in agricultural sector as well. It also trying to set upa faculty of mining engineering in IT. Mining engineering is something which is of key interest to Namibia given its importance in their own economic system. Namibia is rich in diamonds. Diamond mining or diamond trade works through cartels or monopolies and De Beers has a great monopoly. India is one of the largest users of the diamonds in terms of the polishing and finishing but it doesn't comes directly to it because Namibia has a long term commitment with De Beers. The country's diamond merchants based outside Antwerp source it from DeBeers and then it gets shippedto India. India is looking to increase its engagement with the country both politically and economically, especially in the diamond sector. The country also supports India's UNSC candidature. Over 1,000 Namibians have been trained in India under the ITEC program. Several Indian experts from government and private sector have been involved with policy formulation in the country since its independence. The volume of trade, at present, between the two countries is small. However, there is tremendous potential to further enhance trade and economic ties. The President will depart from capital Windhoek on June 17.UNI NAZ DS SS -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0177-788511.Xml
Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week."They don't report them," Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. "For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this."But FBI director James Comey said, "They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim."It's at the heart of the FBI's effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks," Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings.Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington field office, told Reuters yesterday that the agency has a "robust" relationship with the local Muslim community. FBI agents operating in the area have received reports about suspicious activity and other issues from community members.Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said the city's Muslim community has been cooperative in reporting "red flags.""I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things," Downing told Reuters. "What we say to communities is that we don't want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behavior."Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has conducted several studies on Muslim-Americans and terrorism, disputed Trump's criticism."To claim there is no cooperation is false and defamatory to the Muslim-American community," Kurzman said.Kurzman said a January 2016 study by himself and colleagues at Duke University's Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that many law enforcement agencies had made progress in establishing trust with local Muslim-American communities.But the study also found some tensions. In one focus group described in the study, Muslim-American participants debated when to report activity when they were unsure how to detect imminent violence."The group participants expressed concern that police would be more likely to encourage a plot in order to make an arrest," the authors wrote, "rather than to divert people onto a nonviolent path that community members and family members would prefer."One imam interviewed for the project told researchers he felt that his "trust is not being reciprocated" by US government officials.The imam told the researchers that after he attended a meeting with federal law enforcement officials designed to increase cooperation, he went to the local airport, was held for hours at security and missed his flight, the study said.A Reuters review of court records also produced examples of Muslim-Americans informing law enforcement of possible radicalization within their families.Suspecting that her then 17-year-old son, Ali Amin, was radicalizing, Amani Ibrahim followed the advice of a local imam and reported her fears to law enforcement officials, according to court records. In August 2015, Amin was sentenced to 11 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State after he helped a schoolmate travel to join the extremist group.In 2014, the sister of Abdi Nur contacted Minneapolis police to report her younger brother missing. She later showed federal agents messages she received, in which he said he had "gone to join the brothers" and promised to see her in the afterlife. Nur has been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group, but is still at large.And in 2014, Adam Shafi's father, Sal Shafi, told officials in the US embassy in Cairo that he was worried his son was radicalizing after Adam went missing during a family trip in Egypt.Adam Shafi soon rejoined his family, but was arrested in July 2015 after trying to board a flight to Turkey from San Francisco airport. He was charged with attempting to provide material support to al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked group in Syria. REUTERS SDR PR1543 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-788803.Xml
The three Indian fishermen were arrested along with a fishing trawler while fishing in northwest of Delft Island in the morning, reports Colombo Page.

The arrested fishermen along with the fishing trawler will be handed over to the Jaffna Fisheries Inspector for further action. (ANI)
Musharraf made the online remarks after the death of a senior Pakistani army officer, who was initially injured during the fight with the Afghan forces.

"Afghanistan must not play into the hands of the divisive and subversive agenda of India and become anti-Pakistan," Khaama Press quoted him as saying.

Asserting that Kabul and Islamabad have shared values, ethnic, linguistic and religious linkages and common cultural tradition, the former president said that we must preserve and strengthen them at all cost.

Firing between the two countries first broke out on Sunday after the Afghan forces prevented Pakistanis from constructing a gate at Torkham.

Afghanistan has blocked repeated attempts by Pakistan to build a fence on sections of the roughly 2,200-km-long frontier, rejecting the contours of the boundary.

Meanwhile, both Afghan and Pakistani authorities have agreed on a ceasefire at Torkham after three days of intense tensions that led to heavy clashes. (ANI)
Namibia today invited Indian companies to invest in mining uranium and expressed its strong intent to sort out the problems that were coming into the way of implementation of the 2009 agreement for supply of the nuclear fuel. The offer from Namibia, which is the fourth largest producer of uranium, would greatly help India increase the component of nuclear power in its energy mix. The keenness of the South African nation in having Indian companies in the mining of uranium and other minerals was expressed by its President Hage G Geingob during his talks with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee, Secretary Economic Reltaions in the Ministry of External Affairs Amar Sinha said at a media briefing on today's talks. However, before Indian companies can start operating, some technical and legal hitches on nuclear trade with India due to Namibia's affiliation with some nuclear non-proliferation regimes and reservations of the African Union have to be solved. More UNI NAZ RP1905 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0364-789446.Xml
British Prime Minister David Cameron said today he was very concerned about reports an opposition Labour lawmaker had been attacked.Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, was in a critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England today, in which she was shot and stabbed."Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family," Cameron said on Twitter. REUTERS SDR BD1930 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-789531.Xml
Collaboration on production capacity will enhance work along Belt and Road route

China Railway Express with the official unified brand departs from Yiwu, Zhejiang Province on June 8. [Photo/Xinhua]

President Xi Jinping's visit to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan will lead to more projects involving production capacity cooperation, Foreign Ministry officials said on Wednesday.

During the eight-day trip that will begin on Friday, Xi will attend signing ceremonies for cooperation documents in the three countries, all of which are along the route of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said Liu Haixing and Li Huilai, both assistant foreign ministers.

Liu told a news briefing that Xi will visit Serbia's Smederevo steel mill, which was founded in 1913 and acquired in April by Hesteel Group, China's largest iron and steel business group in terms of production capacity.

The deal is worth 46 million euros ($51.7 million).

Construction of Serbian power stations and highways in projects involving contracts with Chinese companies is going smoothly, he said.

In Serbia, the Zemun-Borca Bridge, newly renamed Pupin Bridge, was opened in 2014. The bridge over the Danube River is the first built in Europe by a Chinese company.

"The bridge is fondly known by the local people as the Chinese Bridge," Liu said.

The Chinese government is encouraging domestic companies to invest in Poland's nuclear power industry, Liu said.

Poland has been China's largest trade partner in Central and Eastern Europe for 11 consecutive years. It is also the only CEE country that has joined the China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Liu said.

Liu Zuokui, an expert at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that promoting bilateral cooperation with Serbia and Poland will play a positive role in propelling China-CEE relations.

To show support toward China-Uzbekistan cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi will attend a ceremony for the completion of a tunnel made by China, Li said.

While attending the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Xi will discuss with other leaders the applications by India and Pakistan to join the SCO as members, Li said.

Chen Yurong, a researcher of European and Asian studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said the SCO summit is expected to have a huge, positive influence on the growth of the organization, which marks its 15th anniversary this year.
According to the police, a 52-year-old man has been arrested by the police in connection with the case.

The police said that Cox, an MP for Batley and Spen, had suffered serious injuries and was later on pronounced dead by a doctor with paramedics at the scene, the Guardian reports. (ANI)
The presidential candidate of the party Peruvians for Change (PPK), Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2nd R), reacts while offering a statement after the report of the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE, for its acronym in Spanish) on the results of the second round of the presidential election, in Lima, Peru, on June 9, 2016. (Xinhua/Vidal Tarqui/ANDINA)

LIMA, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Peruvian President-elect Pedro Pablo Kuczynski will visit China on his first foreign trip after taking office next month.

Speaking to Channel 2 television recently, Kuczynski said his first official trip will be to China, prior to the Asia-Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) summit Lima is set to host on Nov. 19 and 20.

"It's necessary to go to China before the APEC, because it is our No. 1 trade partner," said Kuczynski, who just won the presidential election.

Kuczynski's decision shows his determination to boost ties with Peru's biggest trade partner, said Carlos Aquino, director of the Economic Research Institute at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.

Presidential candidate Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (front C) of Peruvians for Change (PPK, for its acronym in Spanish) party attends a breakfast with neighbors of La Victoria district, prior to casting his vote during the second round of the presidential elections in Lima, capital of Peru, on June 5, 2016. (Xinhua/Diana Marcelo/ANDINA)

"China is our leading trade partner, the top investor in Peru, especially in the area of mining, and we have a great (joint) project of bicoastal train with Brazil that will hopefully become a reality," Aquino told Xinhua.

Reciprocal high-level visits between China and its trade partners in Latin America are getting more frequent in recent years. Leaders of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Chile have all made China their first foreign trip destinations in recognition of China's growing importance in the economy of the region, said Aquino.

The president-elect's first agenda on the trip will be to boost trade, especially to increase the share of products with more added value that Peru exports to China, said Aquino.

Peru is also seeking to attract more Chinese investment in mining, fishing and infrastructure and more Chinese visitors, he said.

The total value of bilateral trade now stands at some 15 billion U.S. dollars, thanks to the free-trade agreement that went into effect on March 1, 2010.
HANOI, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc Wednesday agreed to extension of customs clearance time in the country's northern border gate to boost litchi exports to China.

Specifically, daily customs clearance time for fresh litchi fruit at Kim Thanh II International Border Gate in Vietnam's northern Lao Cai province, some 250 km northwest of capital Hanoi, will begin from 7:00 to 22:00 local time, extending from current 7:00 to 17:00, till July 31, 2016, reported the e-Portal of Vietnamese government on Wednesday.

Litchi, famous for its succulent taste in Vietnam, is mainly produced in Bac Giang province, Hai Duong province and Hung Yen province.

Official statistics showed that in 2016, Bac Giang will produce some 130,000 tons of litchi while Hai Duong 50,000 tons. This year's early litchi crop falls on June 5-20 while the main crop will last from June 20 till July 25.

According to forecast made by Vietnam's Ministry of Industry and Trade, this year, as many as 78,000 tons of litchi will be consumed domestically while a total of 52,000 tons will be exported.

China remains a major market for Vietnam's litchi through border gates in northern Lang Son, Lao Cai and Quang Ninh provinces, said the ministry. Enditem
NAY PYI TAW, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar and Mongolia Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding on cultural exchange in Nay Pyi Taw.

The signing of the MoU took place after Myanmar President U Htin Kyaw met with his visiting Mongolian counterpart Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj.

Before the signing, the two leaders had discussions on consolidating the two countries' friendship, enhancement of relations through cultural exchange, environment conservation and tourism cooperation, said spokesman of the President' Office U Zaw Htay.

Elbegdorj extended invitation to U Htin Kyaw to attend the 11th ASEAN- Europe Summit to be hosted by Mongolia on July 15-16

Elbegdorj arrived in Nay Pyi Taw Tuesday on a three-day working visit to Myanmar, during which he also met with State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi. Enditem
JERUSALEM, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli parliament approved on Wednesday a controversial anti-terror bill which aims to increase penalties on terror-related moves and qualify more activities as part of its definition of terrorism.

The bill, which has been under discussion by the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee since 2010, was recently adopted and advanced by Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked from the ultranationalist Jewish Home right-wing party.

Fifty-seven lawmakers voted in favor of the bill, while 16 lawmakers objected to it.

The promotion of the bill in recent months came amid a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which started in October, claiming the lives of 32 Israelis and 205 Palestinians since.

The bill extends the state and its security authorities' powers against potential terror suspects and expands the definition of what qualifies as terrorist-related activities.

According to the new law, those convicted of carrying out terrorist acts could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. People convicted of aiding attackers by giving them a ride for example, could be sentenced to up to five years in prison, and a person who did not prevent an attack from taking place while having knowledge of it could be sent to three years in prison.

Those who will express public identification with a terrorist organization could be jailed to up to three years.

Administrative detentions, a controversial measure used by Israeli security forces allowing them to hold security suspects to renewable terms of six periods without pressing charges against them, are also incorporated into the bill.

The measure in use is a legacy from the Emergency Measures Act of the British Mandate from 1945, three years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.

Minister Shaked told lawmakers at the plenum after the approval that "only with proper punishment and deterrence" terror could be beaten.

On the other hand, lawmaker Issawi Freige from the left-wing Meretz party said in March, when the bill was discussed at the Knesset committee, called it "ultra-nationalist legislation applying to Arabs, with civil legislation applying to Jews."

"Now any Arab can be deemed a terrorist. A stone-throwing Arab will become a terrorist, while stone-throwing Jewish ultra-Orthodox will not," he said.

The Israeli government had declared and practiced numerous measures in the past several months in response to the wave of unrest. Some bodies of Palestinian attackers who were killed have been held back and not delivered to their parents, and security forces have demolished several houses belonging to families of attackers.

Furthermore, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered to examine whether it is legal to expel families of Palestinian attackers to other territories in the West Bank or to the Gaza Strip.

Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip territories, home to more than five million Palestinians nowadays, at the 1967 Mideast War.

While Israeli leaders charge the wave of unrest had been triggered by incitement to violence by the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians charge it is the result of 49 years of Israeli occupation on lands where they wish to establish a Palestinian state. Enditem
Israel's police commissioner Roni Alsheich (C) visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City as Palestinians mark the first Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan on the nearby compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount June 10, 2016. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

JERUSALEM, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli parliament approved on Wednesday a controversial anti-terror bill which aims to increase penalties on terror-related moves and qualify more activities as part of its definition of terrorism.

The bill, which has been under discussion by the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee since 2010, was recently adopted and advanced by Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked from the ultranationalist Jewish Home right-wing party.

Fifty-seven lawmakers voted in favor of the bill, while 16 lawmakers objected to it.

The promotion of the bill in recent months came amid a wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which started in October, claiming the lives of 32 Israelis and 205 Palestinians since.

The bill extends the state and its security authorities' powers against potential terror suspects and expands the definition of what qualifies as terrorist-related activities.

According to the new law, those convicted of carrying out terrorist acts could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. People convicted of aiding attackers by giving them a ride for example, could be sentenced to up to five years in prison, and a person who did not prevent an attack from taking place while having knowledge of it could be sent to three years in prison.

Those who will express public identification with a terrorist organization could be jailed to up to three years.

Administrative detentions, a controversial measure used by Israeli security forces allowing them to hold security suspects to renewable terms of six periods without pressing charges against them, are also incorporated into the bill.

The measure in use is a legacy from the Emergency Measures Act of the British Mandate from 1945, three years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel.

Israeli border police stand guard while Palestinians wait to cross through the Qalandia checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah June 10, 2016, as they head to Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque for the first Friday prayer of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

Minister Shaked told lawmakers at the plenum after the approval that "only with proper punishment and deterrence" terror could be beaten.

On the other hand, lawmaker Issawi Freige from the left-wing Meretz party said in March, when the bill was discussed at the Knesset committee, called it "ultra-nationalist legislation applying to Arabs, with civil legislation applying to Jews."

"Now any Arab can be deemed a terrorist. A stone-throwing Arab will become a terrorist, while stone-throwing Jewish ultra-Orthodox will not," he said.

The Israeli government had declared and practiced numerous measures in the past several months in response to the wave of unrest. Some bodies of Palestinian attackers who were killed have been held back and not delivered to their parents, and security forces have demolished several houses belonging to families of attackers.

Furthermore, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered to examine whether it is legal to expel families of Palestinian attackers to other territories in the West Bank or to the Gaza Strip.

Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip territories, home to more than five million Palestinians nowadays, at the 1967 Mideast War.

While Israeli leaders charge the wave of unrest had been triggered by incitement to violence by the Palestinian Authority, Palestinians charge it is the result of 49 years of Israeli occupation on lands where they wish to establish a Palestinian state.
BHAKTAPUR, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chairman of the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party Narayanman Bijukchhe (C) and party members attend a talk program on "Disputes of the South China Sea and the Islands" at Bhaktapur, Nepal, on June 15, 2016. Nepal Workers and Peasants Party, an influential political party in Nepal, on Wednesday voiced its support for China's position on the South China Sea issue. (Xinhua/Pratap Thapa)

KATHMANDU, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Nepal Workers and Peasants Party, an influential political party in Nepal, on Wednesday voiced its support for China's position on the South China Sea issue.

During a talk program on "Disputes of South China Sea and the Islands" organized by the party in Bhaktapur, the party leaders said they stand together with China on its incessant efforts to maintain regional peace and stability.

"South China Sea has been unnecessarily dragged in dispute by Western countries, primarily the U.S., to maintain the hegemonic exploitation over Asian countries," Narayanman Bijukchhe, the party chairman, said.

Bijukchhe called on countries in Asia to be on alert for conspiracies being hatched to arouse fight among the Asian countries.

Prem Suwal, head of the foreign relations department of the party, said Nepal should be concerned about the ongoing world politics and conspiracies hatched by some Western countries.

He said some countries that "are not even related with the South China Sea are encouraged to hold joint military drills and create disputes in order to weaken the prosperity of China."

Surendra Raj Gosai, a member of the foreign relations department of the party, called for standing together for regional peace and justice.

"Asians need to be united to foil the conspiracies of external forces," Gosai said.

He added, "Conflicts in Asia will lead to the suffering of Nepalese people as well, so it's high time to warn the external forces."

Nepal Workers and Peasants Party has seats in the parliament and it supports coalition government led by Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli.
BAGHDAD, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Iraqi security forces on Wednesday made a significant progress in the battles against the Islamic State (IS) militants in the besieged city of Fallujah, while the security forces continued their clashes with IS militants in Iraq's western province of Anbar, provincial security sources said.

The troops took control of Shuhada district in southern Fallujah, some 50 km west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and the troops are fighting near Sixteen Street, which separates Shuhada from the adjacent district of Nazal toward the central part of the city, a security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

"The battles are underway and will continue until defeating the militants of Daesh (IS group) from Nazal district which is close to the government compound in central the city," the source said.

Wednesday's battles resulted in the killing of dozens of IS militants, along with destroying five car bombs, the source added.

The troops also fought heavy clashes with IS militants on the edge of Khadra district and managed to defeat the front defensive lines of the district which is adjacent to Shuhada district in southern Fallujah, the source said.

The latest advance in Fallujah came as the security forces have been battling IS militants after they made their first advance last week in Shuhada and raised the Iraqi flag over some of its buildings.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi army and allied Shiite paramilitary units, known as Hashd Shaabi, liberated three villages in southeast of Fallujah after driving out the extremist militants, according to a statement from the Hashd Shaabi media office.

The battles in southern Fallujah were slowed by IS militants resistance inside the city, with hundreds of hidden bombs believed to be planted by them.

The security forces are also avoiding heavy casualties among tens of thousands of civilians who are reportedly trapped inside Fallujah.

Abdul Wahab al-Saadi, Commander of the Operations Command of Fallujah Liberation, told reporters that a total of 1086 suspected IS members or supporters have been captured after being separated from dozens of thousands of displaced people who were forced to leave their homes in Fallujah.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced on May 23 the launch of a major offensive to claim Fallujah and surrounding towns and areas.

Also in the province, the security forces and allied Hashd Shaabi units, backed by international and Iraqi aircraft, freed the area of Znakoura in northwest of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad, after fierce clashes with IS militants, General Ismail al-Mahalawi, Commander of Anbar Operations Command said in a press release.

The battles in Zankoura came as the security forces carried out an operation to retake control of military positions in the area which were captured the day before by dozens of IS militants who also attacked the nearby areas of Albu Risha, Tway and Jeraishi in north of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, but the IS attacks on the other three areas were foiled late on Tuesday after hours of clashes with the security forces that resulted in the killing of some 25 militants, the source said.

Government troops and allied militias have currently been fighting for months to reclaim key cities and towns in Anbar from IS militants, who attempted to advance toward Baghdad after seizing most of Anbar province.

Iraq has been witnessing a wave of violence since the IS controlled parts of its northern and western regions in June 2014.
RABAT, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Morocco and Italy expresses here Wednesday their will to develop a stronger and ambitious strategic partnership in different fields of cooperation.

It is high time for Italy and Morocco to broaden their relations and partnership in more strategic areas, visiting Italian Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Vincenzo Amendola said at a joint press briefing with Moroccan minister delegate for foreign affairs Mbarka Bouaida.

Amendola said that his meeting with Bouaida was fruitful on bilateral and regional cooperation, noting that Rome and Rabat exchanged opinions concerning Libya.

Bouaida said that the two countries are resolved to strengthen their ties by intensifying meetings at all levels.

The goal is to develop a strong strategic partnership in different areas, she insisted. Enditem
BERLIN, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) would be shocked and could face risks of disintegration if Britain leaves the bloc, warned German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday.

Steinmeier urged the British people to make the right decision in a referendum next week about whether to remain in or leave the 28-member EU.

"Europe would lose a lot if Great Britain decides to leave," he said in a joint press conference with his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Brandenburg, Germany.

"It would be a shock for the EU," he added, "people must then mutually assure that the EU continues to stick together and that a very successful decade-long integration process doesn't end with disintegration."

The minister said he and Ayrault both hoped the British people would make "the right decision," which would be deciding to stay in the EU in the referendum vote on June 23.

"From our point of view, the only right decision is to stay in Europe," he said. Enditem
An aerial photo taken on Sept. 25, 2015 from a seaplane of Hainan Maritime Safety Administration shows cruise vessel Haixun 1103 heading to the Yacheng 13-1 drilling rig during a patrol in South China Sea. (Xinhua/Zhao Yingquan)

SOFIA, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The South China Sea issue should be resolved only by the concerned countries, and international arbitration would not be helpful, a prominent Bulgarian expert on China told Xinhua in an interview here on Tuesday.

China has sovereign rights and interests over the South China Sea since ancient times, said Prof. Nako Stefanov, who wrote the books "China Social-Economic Development from Ancient Times until Now" and "Innovation Development of East Asian Countries", and until recently was the head of East-Asian Studies department at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski".

There are enough historical grounds that the South China Sea was a part of the maritime territories of China in the Han Dynasty, for example, and other Chinese dynasties, Stefanov said.

Speaking about the current tensions in the region, Stefanov said "international arbitration will not help to solve this problem. It is clear."

The 2011 agreement between China and ASEAN countries is a very good ground for discussions to solve the disputes in this area, Stefanov said.

The absence of military and surveillance vessels and airplanes of the United States and other countries, which have no maritime borders with the South China Sea, should be the first step to finding a solution, Stefanov said.

The second step, he said, should be to convene a conference of the countries involved in the dispute, and discuss how to solve the problem, based on the 2011 agreement.

The countries involved in the dispute should solve the issue "based on win-win development," Stefanov said.

The interference of countries which are outside of the area would not reduce the tension but vice versa, he said.

"This interference from forces and countries, which are outside of the area, is raising the tension not only in the South China Sea space and area, but I think at the global level also," Stefanov said.

Related:

South China Sea arbitration: judicial expansion detrimental to settlement of disputes, says Chinese diplomat

GRONINGEN, The Netherlands, June 14 (Xinhua) -- The arbitral tribunal in the Philippines' South China Sea (SCS) arbitration exceeded its competence by circumventing the real disputes and by degrading the role of States, such arbitral expansion is detrimental to the settlement of disputes, said Haibo Gou, legal advisor and counsellor at the Chinese embassy in the Netherlands.

The Philippines, which illegally occupied some of China's islands and reefs in the SCS in the 1970s, unilaterally filed the arbitration in 2013. Full Story

Spotlight: Two law experts in Britain question arbitral tribunal's jurisdiction over South China Sea dispute

LONDON, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Two leading experts on international law in Britain have recently published two research papers, both concluding that an arbitral tribunal which allowed the South China Sea case initiated by the Philippines against China to go ahead is not convincing in many respects.
MEXICO CITY, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Mexican police have arrested a man suspected of being involved in the murder of 11 members of a same family in Coxcatlan, in the central state of Puebla, state authorities announced on Wednesday.

The suspect, whose identity was not revealed, was arrested for his alleged involvement in the murder spree on June 9, when the family was attacked by men armed with guns and knives, said a press release of Puebla's prosecutor general's office.

The mayor of Coxcatlan, Vicente Lopez de la Vega, also told a press conference Wednesday that authorities had arrested a 23-year-old man in the nearby village of El Mirador.

According to the mayor, the suspect, who was found guilty of raping one of the female victims of the family nine years ago, had planned revenge against the family.

Three family members survived the attack, including an 8-year-old boy, who was allegedly the son of the suspect and his rape victim, said de la Vega. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The habit of drinking hot beverages might be linked to oesophageal cancer, according to a report issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday.

"Drinking hot coffee could be dangerous to your health, but apparently it's not the coffee, it's the hot," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters here.

"The report issued by an international group of 23 scientists convened by the WHO found no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect of drinking coffee, or mate," Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here. "But the experts did find that drinking very hot beverages can cause cancer of the oesophagus."

It is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible, according to the report.

The report said a high rate of oesophageal cancers occur in parts of Asia, South America, and East Africa, where regularly drinking very hot beverages is common.

The report was based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies that showed positive associations between cancer of the oesophagus and drinking very hot beverages, WHO said in a press release.

Studies in places such as China, Iran, Turkey and South America, where tea or mate is traditionally drunk very hot (at about 70 degrees Celsius), found that the risk of oesophageal cancer increased with the temperature at which the beverage was drunk, it said. "In experiments involving animals, there was also limited evidence for the carcinogenicity of very hot water."

"Smoking and alcohol drinking are major causes of oesophageal cancer, particularly in many high-income countries," said Dr Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

"However, the majority of oesophageal cancers occur in parts of Asia, South America, and East Africa, where regularly drinking very hot beverages is common and where the reasons for the high incidence of this cancer are not as well understood," he said.

Oesophageal cancer is the eighth most common cause of cancer worldwide and one of the main causes of cancer death, with approximately 400,000 deaths recorded in 2012, which accounts for 5 percent of all cancer deaths.

"The proportion of oesophageal cancer cases that may be linked to drinking very hot beverages is not known," said the press release.

Cold mate did not have carcinogenic effects in experiments on animals or in epidemiological studies, it said. "Therefore, drinking mate at temperatures that are not very hot was not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans."

This was based on inadequate evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of drinking cold or warm mate and inadequate evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of cold mate as a drinking liquid, it added.
UNITED NATIONS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Anne Hathaway, the Oscar-winning actress, was appointed on Wednesday a goodwill ambassador for UN Women, the world body's agency dedicated to promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women.

The UN agency said that the American actress has been a long-standing supporter of women's and girls' rights.

Hathaway, 33, will put under the spotlight the unequal burden of work in the home as one of the key barriers to gender equality.

The head of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, said: "The appointment of Anne is timely because this year UN Women is driving hard to foster more positive mindsets and practical arrangements around workplaces that build and support equality for women."

The senior UN official said Hathaway will be making the case that parental leave for mothers and fathers and childcare services are two important ways for employers "to demonstrate that they understand the value of their staff -- both male and female."

Hathaway, who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2013 for her role in "Les Miserables," said in a statement that she feels "honored and inspired by this opportunity to aid in advancing gender equality."

"Significant progress has already been made but it is time that we collectively intensify our efforts and ensure that true equality is finally realized," she said. Enditem
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the United States , Feb. 1, 2016. (Xinhua file photo/Yin Bogu)

By Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The worst mass shooting in the U.S. history could give a boost to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as it underscores Americans' deep concerns about terrorism.

Forty-nine people were killed and 53 others were wounded Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who had allegedly pledged allegiance to the terror group Islamic State (IS), which is considered a growing threat worldwide.

While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has responded by calling for more gun restrictions - the attacker used a legally purchased military grade automatic rifle - polls show that the gun control debate does not resonate with most Americans.

In sharp contrast, Trump's rhetoric in the terror strike's aftermath has focused solely on the terror threat - an issue that tops the concerns of most Americans.

Republican Strategist Ford O' Connell told Xinhua that in the short run, Trump's focus on terrorism, rather than gun control, will give Trump an edge over Clinton.

"Essentially Americans are scared... And as long as the Trump campaign is about terror and the economy, Trump is on better footing than Clinton," he said.

Indeed, in a recently released poll by Quinnipiac University, Americans view Trump - 49 percent to 41 percent - as a more effective leader in handling IS.

And while a majority of Americans do not think Trump has the temperament to be president, many Americans are not pleased with U.S. President Barack Obama's handling of the terror threat. And Clinton if elected president is regarded as an extension of the Obama administration, O' Connell said.

Indeed, several recent polls show that terrorism tops Americans' list of concerns.

According to a Pew Research survey in January, 75 percent of Americans said both the economy and defending the U.S. against terrorists should be Washington's focus in 2016.

A Gallup poll released in December, in the wake of the IS attacks on Paris that killed 130 people, found that terrorism tops the list of Americans' concerns.

In sharp contrast, despite a number of mass shootings in recent years - including the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children were murdered by a deranged gunman who entered their school - gun control is simply not on the radar of most Americans.

While interest in the issue has tended to spike in the aftermath of several mass shootings in recent years, it dies down after a couple of months and the news cycle shifts toward other issues, polls show.

Moreover, in taking such a strong stance in favor of more firearms legislation, Clinton risks alienating blue collar Democrats, as many in that bloc believe strongly in their constitutional right to bear firearms, O' Connell said.

"The only people who like (gun rights) as much as Republicans are blue collar Democrats, who may well decide this election," O' Connell said, adding that many key states in the 2016 elections are states that favor gun rights.

Those include Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which tend to be strongholds of the Second Amendment - the part of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees freedom to bear arms.

"There are two issues that haven't seemed to change since 1980. One is abortion and the other is guns. Americans still relatively feel the same way about it today as they did then," O' Connell said.

Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies of the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua the shooting attacks underscore Trump's message that the country needs a strong leader in a chaotic world.

In addition, experts said the attack will allow Trump to shift the focus away from his controversial remarks against Latinos, as well as his perceived shady business deadline, which have dogged him in recent weeks.
File photo taken on May 29, 2016 shows Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, addressing motorcyclists participating in Rolling Thunder parade in Washington D.C., capital of the United States. (Xinhua/file photo)

By Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The worst mass shooting in the U.S. history could give a boost to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as it underscores Americans' deep concerns about terrorism.

Forty-nine people were killed and 53 others were wounded Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a gunman who had allegedly pledged allegiance to the terror group Islamic State (IS), which is considered a growing threat worldwide.

While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has responded by calling for more gun restrictions - the attacker used a legally purchased military grade automatic rifle - polls show that the gun control debate does not resonate with most Americans.

In sharp contrast, Trump's rhetoric in the terror strike's aftermath has focused solely on the terror threat - an issue that tops the concerns of most Americans.

Republican Strategist Ford O' Connell told Xinhua that in the short run, Trump's focus on terrorism, rather than gun control, will give Trump an edge over Clinton.

"Essentially Americans are scared... And as long as the Trump campaign is about terror and the economy, Trump is on better footing than Clinton," he said.

Indeed, in a recently released poll by Quinnipiac University, Americans view Trump - 49 percent to 41 percent - as a more effective leader in handling IS.

And while a majority of Americans do not think Trump has the temperament to be president, many Americans are not pleased with U.S. President Barack Obama's handling of the terror threat. And Clinton if elected president is regarded as an extension of the Obama administration, O' Connell said.

Indeed, several recent polls show that terrorism tops Americans' list of concerns.

According to a Pew Research survey in January, 75 percent of Americans said both the economy and defending the U.S. against terrorists should be Washington's focus in 2016.

A Gallup poll released in December, in the wake of the IS attacks on Paris that killed 130 people, found that terrorism tops the list of Americans' concerns.

In sharp contrast, despite a number of mass shootings in recent years - including the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children were murdered by a deranged gunman who entered their school - gun control is simply not on the radar of most Americans.

While interest in the issue has tended to spike in the aftermath of several mass shootings in recent years, it dies down after a couple of months and the news cycle shifts toward other issues, polls show.

Moreover, in taking such a strong stance in favor of more firearms legislation, Clinton risks alienating blue collar Democrats, as many in that bloc believe strongly in their constitutional right to bear firearms, O' Connell said.

"The only people who like (gun rights) as much as Republicans are blue collar Democrats, who may well decide this election," O' Connell said, adding that many key states in the 2016 elections are states that favor gun rights.

Those include Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, which tend to be strongholds of the Second Amendment - the part of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees freedom to bear arms.

"There are two issues that haven't seemed to change since 1980. One is abortion and the other is guns. Americans still relatively feel the same way about it today as they did then," O' Connell said.

Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies of the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua the shooting attacks underscore Trump's message that the country needs a strong leader in a chaotic world.

In addition, experts said the attack will allow Trump to shift the focus away from his controversial remarks against Latinos, as well as his perceived shady business deadline, which have dogged him in recent weeks.
by Marzia De Giuli

ROME, June 15 (Xinhua) -- China's 13th Five-Year Plan will be a driver of the strengthened collaboration with Italy, Italian experts said here in Rome at a conference held earlier this week to give an overall picture of the future development of China.

The economies of the two countries are more and more complementary, and have growing meeting points, Chinese Ambassador to Italy Li Ruiyu said in his address to the conference.

Li said that in recent years bilateral cooperation has been deepened remarkably, with Chinese companies achieving great success in Italy and Italian companies increasing their presence in China. This mutual beneficial exchange has brought new jobs and wealth for the two sides, he said.

"Complementarity" is the key word to exploit the huge collaboration potential between two countries both boasting long history and deep cultural roots, highlighted Marco Simoni, a professor and economic advisor to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

"China and Italy are two friend countries which are looking at each other with a strategic glance," he said.

China's 13th Five-Year Plan, Simoni went on saying, represents the Asian country's big challenge to shift from an export-led one to a more mature economy, "a challenge that the entire world is looking at with great attention and which is not only about China, but about many other countries," he highlighted.

Antonino Laspina, chief trade commissioner with the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade (ICE), said Italy and China already have signed agreements in key sectors such as agriculture, environment and welfare, and the 13th Five-Year Plan is "a great occasion to widen Italy's presence in the Chinese market not only with its products, but also as a supplier of know-how and technologies."

In his view, joint research can bring about new entrepreneurial models and services that could be exported to various other markets including Africa and Southeast Asia by combining Chinese and Italian strength points.

In order to bring Italian experts closer to the document and help them do related research, the Embassy of China presented the outline of the 13th Five-Year Plan translated into the Italian language.

In fact, understanding the plan and its core principles is key for Italy to eye the future development of bilateral relation, Vincenzo De Luca, director-general for the Promotion of the Italian Economic System at the Italian Foreign Ministry, underlined at the conference.

"And it is fundamental that the relation between Italy and China takes into account the priorities of Chinese government," he added.

De Luca said that the qualitative leap of Chinese manufacture, which is closely related to green economy, can especially be a driver of enhanced bilateral collaboration. "After Italian companies have strongly invested in China, it is the moment now of considerable Chinese investments in Italy, a major target of Chinese capital flows into Europe," he said.

Meanwhile, bilateral trade has also grown, De Luca added. But in order to help Italy's trade deficit with China decrease, Italian companies should work at reinforcing their assistance and post-sales services, as well as big distribution channels in China, thus achieve a more structured position in that market, he pointed out.

Exchanges at the university level are also an important driver of collaboration in innovative sectors, De Luca added. He noted that China and Italy have passed from a few collaboration exchanges to 10 double-degree agreements and more than 350 joint programs presently.

Vinicio Peluffo, chairperson of Amici della Cina, or "Friends of China," a China-friendly influence in the Italian parliament, hoped the 13th Five-Year Plan could also help Italians better understand the China-proposed Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, also known as the "Belt and Road" Initiative.

Italy, at the center of the Mediterranean, is in a crucial position expected to facilitate investment, trade and cultural flows from China, and must not miss this opportunity, Peluffo stressed.

"Our group will strengthen all possible collaboration instruments, starting from governmental institutions, to give a new impetus to bilateral relations," he concluded.
HAVANA, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Cuba has detected its 17th case of Zika virus infection in a Cuban health worker who returned from Venezuela on June 7, the Health Ministry said Wednesday.

The 35-year-old patient, who resides in Cuba's eastern Granma province, was infected with the mosquito-borne virus while abroad, according to the ministry.

The day after her return to Cuba, the patient broke out in a skin rash on her chest, face and back, leading her to seek medical treatment. She was hospitalized and the results of a blood test on Tuesday confirmed she had contracted the virus.

She remains "in good general health and is recovering well," said the medical report.

The Zika epidemic has spread rapidly through Latin America after first breaking out in Brazil in early 2015.

The virus can cause debilitating paralysis in adults, though in general, symptoms are mild, including fever and headaches.

However, the virus is linked to a spike in birth defects, such as microcephaly -- babies born with abnormally small heads in infected fetus.
UNITED NATIONS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The UN Security Council on Wednesday encouraged national actors of Guinea-Bissau to abide by the rule of law, while striving to find a political solution to the country's crisis.

The 15-nation council expressed their serious concern over the latest political development in Guinea-Bissau after it was briefed on the country's current situation, said a press statement released here.

Joao Soares Da Gama, ambassador of Guinea-Bissau to the United Nations, told the council on Wednesday that his country is "practically paralyzed" due to prolonged political and institutional crises.

Last month, President of Guinea-Bissau Jose Mario Vaz named Baciro Dja as the country's new prime minister. The appointment triggered immediate opposition from the ruling African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).

The current political crisis is affecting Guinea-Bissau's economic development, according to Soares Da Gama.

"We are aware that the political and institutional crises that have been isolating our country in the past year deserve a political will of the main actors in our country," said Soares Da Gama.

The UN Security Council stressed the need for the government of Guinea-Bissau to continue to take concrete steps towards peace, security and stability in the country, by effectively reforming the security sector and tackling corruption.

"The members of the Security Council reiterated their commitment to continue to monitor the current political crisis and expressed their readiness to take necessary measures to respond to further worsening of the situation in Guinea-Bissau," said the statement.
WASHINGTON, May 30, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, addresses motorcyclists participating in Rolling Thunder parade in Washington D.C., capital of the United States, May 29, 2016. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Wednesday he plans to meet with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to discuss ways of barring people on terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

"I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns," said Trump in a tweet. He didn't' t provide the time or place of the meeting.

Trump's announcement came in the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, in which a gunman armed with an assualt rife and handgun killed 49 people and 53 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida on Sunday.

The NRA, the most influential gun lobbying group in the United States, replied to Trump in a statement that it is happy to meet him, but insisting that its position on the gun control issue has not changed.

However, Chris Cox, executive director of NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, said in the statement that the NRA also believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms.

Authorities said the shooter of the Orlando massacre, Omar Mateen, an American-born son of Afghan immigrants, had been on the government' s watch list for 10 months for suspected links with terrorism before it was removed.

The shooting has renewed the debate over tightening gun control with Democrats calling for people on the federal watch lists to be barred from purchasing firearms.

Trump's latest announcement signals a shift of his position on gun control amid rising calls nationwide for stricter gun control.

Trump has frequently declared himself as a big supporter of the U.S. Constitution's 2nd Amendment that protects people' s rights to own firearms. He has attacked his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for trying to abolish the 2nd Amendment, in an attempt to woo the gun rights advocates.

Clinton denied the Trump's accusations against her on the 2nd Amendment, but added that anyone on the terrorism watch list should not be allowed to buy guns.

"And yes, if you're too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America," Clinton said.
ORLANDO, June 15, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Police officers work near the nightclub "Pulse" where the mass shooting that killed at least 50 people including the gunman happened, in Orlando, Florida, the United States, June 15, 2016. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

ORLANDO, the United States, June 15 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official said on Wednesday the shooting massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida was both hate crime and an act of terror.

"This was an act of violence, born out of hate, that inflicted terror on an entire community,"said Ron Hopper, special FBI agent in charge of the case, at a press conference. "So I would call it a hate crime. I would call it terrorism. It's both."

At least 49 people were killed and 53 other wounded, including a police officer, early Sunday morning in a shooting spree at a popular LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida. It was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history and the deadliest terror attack since the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.

The gunman, identified by authorities as Omar Mateen of Port St. Lucie, Florida, was found dead inside the nightclub after a shootout with the police.

Hours after the incident on Sunday, U.S. President Barack Obama called it "an act of terror and hate."

Meanwhile, according to U.S. TV network NBC News, Mateen's wife had reportedly feared that Mateen was planning to attack a gay nightclub before Sunday's massacre and pleaded with him not to commit violence, but she did not warn to the police.

Speaking at the press conference, Hopper said so far Mateen remained the main suspect in the FBI investigation.

Related:

Orlando gunman's wife may be charged for failing to inform police of possible attack

ORLANDO, the United States, June 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Federal Investigation Bureau (FBI) said on Wednesday that it is continuing to investigate the Orlando mass shooting incident, which killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a gay nightclub on early Sunday in Florida.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 15 (Xinhua) -- An international team of researchers has identified 15 "bright spots" around the world where coral reefs are healthier than expected and marine life is thriving.

In a study published on Wednesday in journal Nature, the team of 39 researchers from 34 universities and conservation groups has also discovered 35 "dark spots" where reefs with fish stocks are in worse shape than expected.

With more than 6,000 reef surveys in 46 countries, it is one of the largest global studies of its kind.

"This approach is an effective way to extract the signal from the noise in global data on reef status," said co-author Larry Crowder, a professor of biology at Stanford University. "The emergent patterns show us explicitly what allows some reefs to perform exceptionally well and others to perform poorly. Knowing this can help us steer reefs to their most resilient state."

About the bright spots, lead author Josh Cinner from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, explained that "given the widespread depletion of coral reef fisheries globally, we were really excited to find these bright spots that were faring much better than we anticipated."

"These 'bright spots' are reefs with more fish than expected based on their exposure to pressures like human population, poverty, and unfavorable environmental conditions," Cinner was quoted as saying by a news release from Stanford, where three researchers affiliated with its Center for Ocean Solutions took part in the study.

The study aims to figure out why some reefs were much healthier and whether there are lessons to be learned about how to avoid the degradation often associated with overfishing.

The researchers identified several characteristics that improved the state of coral reef ecosystems. "Many bright spots had strong local involvement in how the reefs were managed, local ownership rights, and traditional management practices," said co-author Christina Hicks, an affiliated researcher at the Center for Ocean Solutions currently at England's Lancaster University.

Bright spots were typically found in the Pacific Ocean in places like the Solomon Islands, parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Kiribati. Dark spots were more globally distributed and found in every major ocean basin.

The authors say the bright spots offer hope and some solutions that can be applied across the world's coral reefs. "Specifically, investments that foster local involvement and provide people with ownership rights can allow people to develop creative solutions that help defy expectations of reef fisheries depletion," Cinner said. "Conversely, dark spots may highlight development or management pathways to avoid."
An alligator swimming in the waters at Wakodahatchee Wetlands in Delray Beach, Florida. (AFP PHOTO)

ORLANDO, the United States, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Searchers had found the body of a 2-year old boy who was snatched underwater by an alligator near a Disney World resort in the southeastern U.S. city of Orlando, said local police sheriff at a news conference on Wednesday.

Orange County sheriff Jerry Demings announced that the remains of Lane Graves from Nebraska was located at 1:45 p.m. and recovered around 3:30 p.m., more than 16 hours after the boy was pulled away when he was wading water at an artificial lake beach near Disney's Grand Floridian Resort.

Demings said the boy's body was "completely intact", and had been turned to the county's medical examiner's office for an autopsy.

Search for the boy had begun shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday after reports that the boy was attacked. The boy's father tried to fight to get his son back but failed.

The family of four were on vacation at Disney World, one of the world's most popular theme parks.

The incident happened just days after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at a nightclub in downtown Orlando with 50 people killed and 53 injured.

Many worried that the city's tourism industry may take a hit, with potential tourists choosing other destinations for fear of safety.

With tourism as its pillar industry, the city has welcomed 66 million tourists in 2015, according to Visit Orlando, the city's official tourism association.

However, members from local tourism industry have expressed optimism.

"These rare incidents will never happen to normal tourists," said Kirk Shang, tour manager at the Golden Horse Tourism Agency.

"As long as tourists follow those warning signs and do not go where they're not supposed to be, I'm sure they can enjoy a wonderful experience," Shang added.

President and CEO of Visit Orlando George Aguel said in a statement that the safety of visitors was and continued to be the top priority of the local tourism industry.

"We have been a destination that has helped more than 1 billion visitors create emotional connections and lifetime memories as they enjoyed the special experiences in Orlando. We have no reason to believe this will change," said Aguel.
Port St. Lucie County Sheriff's officers exit a home owned by the family of Seddique Mateen, the father of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Fort Pierce, Fla. (AP/File Photo)

ORLANDO, the United States, June 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Federal Investigation Bureau (FBI) said on Wednesday that it is continuing to investigate the Orlando mass shooting incident, which killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a gay nightclub on early Sunday in Florida.

FBI said the killer's wife, Noor Zahi Salman, has been questioned and may face charges if found there was any wrongdoing.

NBC News reported on Wednesday that before the attack, the gunman's wife feared that Omar Mateen, the gunman, was going to attack a gay nightclub overnight Saturday and pleaded with him not to do anything violent, but she gave no warning to police after he left.

CNN also reported that Salman was with Mateen when he bought the ammunition.

U.S. authorities are now considering filing criminal charges against Salman for failing to report to police before the deadly attack.

Meanwhile, American people raised questions about whether the FBI missed the red flags in previous investigations into Mateen, who called 911 three times and claimed allegiance to IS, a radical Jahadist group based in Syria and Iraq, while carrying out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history on early Sunday in Orlando.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday renewed calls for surveillance of mosques as part of U.S. efforts to prevent terrorism in the wake of the nightclub shooting, as the gunman was a U.S.-born Muslim and the son of Afghan immigrants.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday termed the Orlando attack as "homegrown extremism" and "an act of terror and hate" and called for tough actions on gun control on Tuesday.

"Enough talking about being tough on terrorism, actually be tough on terrorism. Stop making it as easy as possible for terrorists to buy assault weapons," Obama said.

Though united in grief, horror and outrage, Americans remain deeply divided over the three major issues: gun control, immigration and how to fight terrorism.
CANBERRA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The second ever detection of deep-space gravitational waves is expected to revolutionize the study of astrophysics, while further research would unlock many more secrets of the universe, scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) said on Thursday.

Gravitational waves were witnessed by scientists for just the second time this week, after a collision between two massive black holes caused ripples throughout the galaxy.

The black holes were observed by the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in the United States, and Australian-based LIGO researcher, Professor Susan Scott from the ANU said as gravitational wave research gets better, the more scientists will be able to discover about the origins of the universe.

"This has cemented the age of gravitational wave astronomy," Scott said in a statement released on Thursday.

"This shows data is going to flow, that will enable us to map a lot more of the Universe than we've seen before."

Dr Rob Ward, fellow LIGO researcher at the ANU, agreed that ongoing discoveries of gravitational waves would become an integral part of further astronomic research.

"Gravitational wave astronomy is going to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe," Ward said.

The team working with the LIGO detectors were able to glimpse the black holes orbiting each other 27 times in their last second of existence, before they coalesced, sending gravitational waves in all directions throughout the galaxy.

The ANU was at the forefront of research when gravitational waves were first discovered in February, confirming Albert Einstein's long-held theory of relativity.

The ANU said the "violent" collision occurred around 1.4 billion years ago in a distant galaxy, and -- while they made their way to Earth -- the waves "died down so much" they registered as just a tiny fraction of the width of a proton on the LIGO detectors.
MANILA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The incoming Philippine government of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte and the country's leftist movement have agreed to hold formal peace talks in next month in Norway, a joint statement said Thursday.

Negotiators for the Philippine government and leftist National Democratic Front (NDF) said in a joint statement issued at the end of July 14-15 exploratory talks in Oslo, Norway, that they also agreed on the agenda of their formal talks in the third week of July in Oslo, Norway.

The agenda includes the release of political prisoners, the mode of interim ceasefire and the how to speed up the negotiation process, said the statement issued to the media.

The government panel will recommend to Duterte the immediate release of all leftist consultants and political prisoners "based on humanitarian grounds," the joint statement said.

The government's chief negotiator, incoming labor secretary Sylvester Bello signed for the government while NDF panel chair Luis Jalandoni signed for the rebel side.

The Front groups the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People's Army (NPA), with other leftist organizations.

The Philippine military said the NPA has estimated 4,000 members. The rebels have been fighting the government since 1969 in one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies.

The government has been trying to forge peace with the leftist rebels since 1986 but the on-off talks have faltered many times in the past.

Duterte, who won in the May 9 elections, will assume the presidency on June 30.
CANBERRA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A controversial Australian MP is facing calls to quit politics, after he sparked outcry by releasing a campaign ad which depicts him shooting his political opponents.

Just days after 49 people were killed by a gunman in the Orlando massacre, Queensland MP Bob Katter published a campaign ad which showed him holding a smoking gun near two seemingly lifeless bodies, something meant to represent his disapproval of foreign ownership in Australia.

But on Thursday the rogue MP faced criticism from political opponents as well as high-profile media personalities, with some even calling for the 71-year-old to quit politics altogether.

Queensland Senator Barry O'Sullivan labeled the ad as "abhorrent," and slammed the depiction of violence in a political ad.

"Bob's done some crazy things over the years, but all of that pales into insignificance when he starts to promote the use of violence to murder unarmed political opponents and then declares his defense as he was 'having a bit of fun,'" O'Sullivan said on Thursday.

Katter's half-brother, and Labor party candidate in the Melbourne seat of Higgins, Carl Katter said the ad showed a "total disregard" for the victims of the mass shooting which happened less than a week ago in the United States.

"It's a total disregard for the loss of lives that we saw in Orlando recently, which is still having a huge impact on my community which is the LBGTI, but also the greater community," Carl Katter said.

Katter also faced criticism from the media on Thursday; high-profile broadcaster David Koch asked the independent MP whether or not he knew the Orlando massacre had occurred.

But Katter has defended the timing of the ad, saying he signed off on the video more than a week ago, and that he had "no idea when the thing went out".

"It most certainly wasn't under my control," he said.

Katter then turned the heat onto "the politically correct brigade" who took offence to the "screamingly funny" advertisement.

"You don't realize how stupid your remark is, with all due respects," Katter told TV host Koch, "Comic and humor is not in your pantheon."

Katter is the sitting member for Kennedy in Queensland, representing his own "Katter's Australia Party" at the upcoming election.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the development of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by China.

According to the document, China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, aiming to complete the constellation deployment with 35 satellites around 2020 to provide services to global users, according to the document, which was unveiled by the State Council Information Office.

In the first step, China meant the project to provide services to domestic users, and in the second, the system expanded services to the Asia-Pacific region. The second one was achieved by the end of 2012.

The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.

Related:

Full Text: China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System

China promotes int'l development of homegrown navigation satellite system: white paper

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China has been promoting international satellite navigation applications and will push forward the international development of China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), said a white paper issued on Thursday.

"China actively pushes forward the cooperation and exchanges between the BDS and other navigation satellite systems in the fields of system construction and application from all perspectives," said the document on the BDS issued by the State Council Information Office. Full story

China's BeiDou navigation satellite system targets global users around 2020

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the action plan for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by China.

China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, according to the document released by the State Council Information Office (SCIO). The aim is to complete the deployment of the 35 satellite constellation around 2020 to provide services to global users. Full story

China's homegrown navigation system to have 35-satellite constellation by 2020

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China's homegrown navigation system, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), will cover the whole globe with a constellation of 35 satellites by 2020, said a government report on Thursday.

By 2018, the system is expected to provide basic services to the nations along the Belt and Road, as well as neighboring countries, said a white paper on the BDS issued by the State Council Information Office. Full story

China promises homegrown satellite navigation system "reliable, safe and free"

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China's homegrown navigation system, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), will provide continuous, stable and reliable open services to users "free of charge", said a government report on Thursday.
GENEVA, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Amid warnings that China may face a financial crisis induced by its debt burden, an economic expert said Wednesday that a number of factors make this scenario unlikely.

"Economists have often used such adjectives as 'neck breaking' and 'breath-taking' to describe the very fast economic growth of China in the 1980s and 1990s," said Li Yuefen, special advisor on economics and development finance at the Geneva-based South Center, adding that the same two words were borrowed to describe the Chinese debt burden.

Due to China's rapid structural transition from a trade and investment dominated economy to one based on domestic consumption and services, and the spillover of the global financial crisis, China has suffered an increase of debt-to-GDP ratio.

In spite of rising corporate and local government debt, Li said that the fundamentals of China's financial system remain solid.

"The central government debt is lower than many developing and developed countries. External debt is low. Even though trade surplus has been shrinking, current account surplus is still healthy," she explained.

"The corporate and local government debt are predominantly domestic. Therefore, the probability of a currency crisis is very low. If needed, the central government is in a position to stimulate the economy by increasing central government debt," added Li.

The expert said that China also boasts ample foreign reserves, which is among the highest in the world.

China's economy has also been propped up by a financial system where the state plays an important role, and the unique model would increase creditors' confidence and lessen uncertainties, Li said.

"A look at the asset and liability position shows that, barring seismic global financial volatility, a debt crisis is unlikely in the short term," Li noted, explaining that "the asset and liability positions at the central government and household levels are healthy. The corporate sector and local governments' debt are at manageable levels."

China's deficit also remains low, standing at around 3 percent of the GDP, giving Beijing more spaces to deal with corporate debt if needed, Li added.

The expert suggested that China should slow down credit expansion while enhancing investment quality, and carrying out reforms in state-owned enterprises and local-level taxation.

Maintaining economic growth, strengthening deposit insurance and continuing the current deleveraging measures are also crucial to maintaining control of China's fiscal situation, she said.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China has been promoting international satellite navigation applications and will push forward the international development of China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), said a white paper issued on Thursday.

"China actively pushes forward the cooperation and exchanges between the BDS and other navigation satellite systems in the fields of system construction and application from all perspectives," said the document on the BDS issued by the State Council Information Office.

The country makes efforts to strengthen compatibility and interoperability, achieve resource sharing, complementarity and technology advancement, improve the services of navigation satellite systems, and provide users with more qualified, diversified, safe and reliable services, according to the white paper.

China is also utilizing frequency and orbital slot resources according to international rules, it said.

As limited and valuable natural resources, frequencies and orbital slots provide a critical foundation for the development of navigation satellite systems.

Adhering to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rules, China works to facilitate coordination of BDS frequencies and orbital slots through negotiations, actively participates in the research and formulation of ITU rules and other relevant activities, and expands radio-navigation frequency resources through cooperation with other nations, it said.

Since 2000 China has held effective coordination activities on more than 300 satellite networks with more than 20 countries, regions and international organizations, according to the white paper.

In addition, China promotes the ratification of the BDS by international standards, it said, adding that "the ratification of the BDS by international standards is a milestone for the integration of the BDS into international systems."

China spares no effort to get the BDS ratified by the International Organization for Standardization and other international organizations in the industrial and professional application sectors.

Currently, positive efforts are being made to advance the recognition of the BDS in the International Civil Aviation Organization, International Maritime Organization, Third-Generation Mobile Communication Standard Partnership Project, and other organizations.

China advocates the involvement of enterprises, scientific research, colleges and universities in the formulation of satellite navigation terminals and application standards. In November 2014 the BDS gained recognition from the International Maritime Organization, according to the white paper.
V. International Cooperation and Exchanges

China will push forward the international development of the BDS, actively carry out international cooperation and exchanges in this field, so as to serve the Belt and Road Initiative, promote the development of global satellite navigation, and enable the BDS to serve the world and benefit mankind better.

(I) Strengthening Compatibility and Joint Applications with Other Navigation Satellite Systems

China actively pushes forward the cooperation and exchanges between the BDS and other navigation satellite systems in the fields of system construction and application from all perspectives, strengthening compatibility and interoperability, achieving resource sharing, complementarity and technology advancement, improving the services of navigation satellite systems, and providing users with more qualified, diversified, safe and reliable services.

(II) Utilizing Frequency and Orbital Slot Resources According to International Rules

As limited and valuable natural resources, frequencies and orbital slots provide a critical foundation for the development of navigation satellite systems. Adhering to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rules, China works to facilitate coordination of BDS frequencies and orbital slots through negotiations, actively participates in the research and formulation of ITU rules and other relevant activities, and expands radio-navigation frequency resources through cooperation with other nations. Since 2000 China has held effective coordination activities on more than 300 satellite networks with more than 20 countries, regions and international organizations.

(III) Promoting the Ratification of the BDS by International Standards

The ratification of the BDS by international standards is a milestone for the integration of the BDS into international systems. China spares no effort to get the BDS ratified by the International Organization for Standardization and other international organizations in the industrial and professional application sectors. Currently, positive efforts are being made to advance the recognition of the BDS in the International Civil Aviation Organization, International Maritime Organization, Third-Generation Mobile Communication Standard Partnership Project, and other organizations. China advocates the involvement of enterprises, scientific research, colleges and universities in the formulation of satellite navigation terminals and application standards. In November 2014 the BDS gained recognition from the International Maritime Organization.

(IV) Participating in Multilateral Activities in the Field of International Satellite Navigation

The BDS is one of the major GNSS providers, and China actively participates in international satellite navigation affairs, attends the activities held by the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (ICG) and other relevant international organizations, supports academic exchanges and cooperation in this area, and promotes satellite navigation applications with the contribution of the BDS. China actively takes part in relevant tasks within the orbit of the United Nations, successfully held the Seventh Meeting of the ICG in 2012, when the proposals for the international GNSS Monitoring and Assessment and the BDS/GNSS Application Demonstration and Experience Campaign were initiated, and the Joint Statement of Global Navigation Satellite Systems for serving the whole was issued. The China Satellite Navigation Conference is held annually, and plays a positive role in the development of satellite navigation technologies and applications worldwide.

(V) Promoting International Satellite Navigation Applications

- To intensify publicity and popularization in this field, China has implemented the "BDS Tour" series of events, pushed forward the establishment of BDS Centers to enable better understanding of the BDS. BDS Centers have been jointly set up in a number of nations. The BeiDou International Exchange and Training Center has been opened, and a demonstration platform for education and training in the field of satellite navigation has been set up. In addition, academic education, summer schools, short-term training courses and symposiums, and other international education and training activities have been regularly held.

- To advance and implement internationalization projects, China is promoting research and consultancy services regarding the policies, markets, laws and finance related to international satellite navigation applications, and improving comprehensive international service capabilities. In line with the Belt and Road Initiative, China will jointly build satellite navigation augmentation systems with relevant nations, provide highly accurate satellite navigation, positioning and timing services, improve the overseas BDS service performances, and promote international applications of navigation technologies. China will also carry out application demonstrations in the fields of transportation, tourism, maritime application, disaster reduction and relief, and agriculture, and boost application on a large scale, through establishing an operation and service platform for highly accurate satellite navigation, positioning and timing services.

Conclusion

Navigation satellite systems are the common wealth of the development of mankind, and also a space infrastructure which can provide all-time precise time and space information. They promote the development of emerging industrial clusters that are technology- and knowledge-intensive with huge growth potentials and sound comprehensive benefits, thus becoming critical support for national security, economic and social development, and increasingly improve the people' s production and living activities.

China will continue its BDS construction, improve the system performance, and fulfill its service commitments. It will persist in opening up and cooperation, promote the popularization in this field, strive to advance satellite navigation applications worldwide, and make satellite navigation better benefit the wellbeing of the people and the progress of mankind. Enditem
(II) Main Composition of the BDS

The BDS is mainly comprised of three segments: space segment, ground segment and user segment.

- The space segment. The BDS space segment is a hybrid navigation constellation consisting of GEO, IGSO and MEO satellites.

- The ground segment. The BDS ground segment consists of various ground stations, including master control stations, time synchronization/uplink stations, and monitoring stations.

- The user segment. The BDS user segment consists of various kinds of BDS basic products, including chips, modules and antennae, as well as terminals, application systems and application services, which are compatible with other systems.

(III) Characteristics of the BDS

The BDS development follows a model of developing regional service capacities, then gradually extending the service globally. This practice has enriched the development models for navigation satellite systems worldwide.

The BDS possesses the following characteristics: First, its space segment is a hybrid constellation consisting of satellites in three kinds of orbits. In comparison with other navigation satellite systems, the BDS operates more satellites in high orbits to offer better anti-shielding capabilities, which is particularly observable in terms of performance in the low-latitude areas. Second, the BDS provides navigation signals of multiple frequencies, and is able to improve service accuracy by using combined multi-frequency signals. Third, the BDS integrates navigation and communication capabilities for the first time, and has five major functions - real-time navigation, rapid positioning, precise timing, location reporting and short message communication services.

(IV) Improvement of BDS Performance

To meet the increasing user demand, BDS technical research and development in the areas of satellites, atomic clocks and signals will be strengthened, and a new generation of navigation, positioning and timing technologies will be explored to improve service performance.

- Providing global services. China will launch new-generation navigation satellites, develop airborne atomic clocks with enhanced performance, further improve the performance and lifetime of satellites, and build more stable and reliable inter-satellite links. It will broadcast additional navigation signals, and enhance the compatibility and interoperability with other navigation satellite systems, so as to provide better services for global users.

- Strengthening service capabilities. China will establish a grounded test and validation bed to accomplish the full coverage of tests and validation for space and ground equipment; continue to build and improve satellite based and ground based augmentation systems to substantially enhance BDS service accuracy and reliability; optimize the technical system of location reporting and short message communication to expand user volume and service coverage.

- Maintaining spatio-temporal reference. The BDT is related to the Coordinated Universal Time, and the time bias information is broadcast in the navigation message. China will push forward the clock bias monitoring with other navigation satellite systems, and improve their compatibility and interoperability. It will develop a BDS-based worldwide location identification system, increase the interoperability between BDS coordinate frame and that of other navigation satellite systems, and constantly refine the reference frame.

III. Reliable and Safe Satellite Navigation Services

China is committed to ensuring the safe and reliable operation of the BDS by taking multiple measures, and to providing continuous, stable and reliable open services to users free of charge.

(I) Ensuring Safe and Reliable BDS Operations

- Improving the management mechanism on operation. Perfecting a normalized multi-party response mechanism for BDS space segment, ground segment and user segment. Continuously enhancing the capability of assurance to manage the operation of large-scale constellations.

- Establishing a GNSS monitoring and assessment network. Constructing an international GNSS Monitoring and Assessment System, actively implementing international cooperation, extensively exploiting international resources, carrying out monitoring and assessment of the constellation status, signal accuracy, signal quality and service performance of the BDS at every scale, and providing references for users' applications.

- Taking a redundant and backup approach. Adopting a satellite backup strategy both in-orbit and on-ground to reduce and avoid the effects of emergent in-orbit satellite fault affecting service performance. Redundant and backup design is adopted to enable ground facilities to eliminate weak links, and to enhance BDS reliability.

(II) Providing Open Services Free of Charge

Currently, B1I and B2I open service signals are being broadcast by the operating BDS-2 to provide open services to the Asia-Pacific region free of charge. The services cover an area extending 55 degrees North-55 degrees South and 55 degrees East-180 degrees East, with positioning accuracy less than 10 meters, velocity measurement accuracy less than 0.2 meter per second, and timing accuracy less than 50 nanoseconds.

(III) Disseminating BDS Information in a Timely Manner

- Publishing BDS documents related to open services and signals to provide inputs for global BDS product development efforts. The Interface Control Document of B1I and B2I signals has been published, which defines the interface specifications between the BDS-2 satellites and user terminals. It specifies the signal structures, basic characteristics, ranging codes, NAV messages and other contents. The Open Service Performance Standard has been published, which defines the service coverage area, accuracy, continuity, availability, and other performance indexes of the BDS-2. In the future, related documents will be updated and published in step with BDS construction and development.

- Establishing a multi-channel information dissemination mechanism. China holds news conferences when appropriate to disseminate important information about BDS development, and releases the latest news of the system in a timely manner through the official BDS website (www.beidou.gov.cn) from the aspects of system construction, operation, application, and international cooperation. It also issues notifications worldwide in advance before carrying out plans which might affect user services.

(IV) Protecting the Utilization of Radio-Navigation Satellite Frequency Spectrum

- Protecting the radio-navigation satellite frequency spectrum according to law. China protects the utilization of BDS frequency spectrum, and ensures the safety of BDS operation and BDS users pursuant to the national laws and regulations regarding the radio frequency spectrum.

- Firmly rejecting harmful interference. China prohibits the production, sale and use of illegal interference devices, investigates and punishes in accordance with the law any hostile interference actions which affect the system operations and services. (more)
NAY PYI TAW, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj is currently on a three-day working visit to Myanmar since Tuesday.

His visit came on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Myanmar-Mongolia diplomatic ties and is the second world leader coming to Myanmar since the new government took office in April.

During his visit in Nay Pyi Taw, President Elbegdorj held talks with his Myanmar counterpart U Htin Kyaw on boosting bilateral relations and friendship through cultural exchange.

The two leaders discussed further cooperation in trade, mining, education, environmental conservation and tourism sectors.

The two leaders witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding on cultural cooperation between the two countries.

During his visit, Elbegdorj also met with State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi with the pair vowing to enhance bilateral cooperation.

The pair discussed matters concerning democratization and rule of laws, national reconciliation and peace process, and democracy culture.

Protection of natural resources, preservation of heritage and cooperation in power sector were also covered by their talks.

During the visit, a Mongolia-Myanmar Business Council was launched following the signing of an MoU on economic cooperation between Mongolia National Chamber of Commerce and Industry and its Myanmar counterpart.

Elbegdorj extended invitation to both President U Htin Kyaw and State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi to visit Mongolia and attend the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) to be hosted by Mongolia on July 15-16.

Elbegdorj paid the first state visit to Myanmar in November 2013 since the two countries established diplomatic ties in 1956 and the two countries then signed an agreement on mutual visa exemption for holders of diplomatic and special passports of citizens of the two countries.

Elbegdorj addressed a Myanmar-Mongolia business forum in Yangon and also delivered speech at the Yangon University on experience in reform in Mongolia.

Aung San Suu Kyi also last visited Mongolia earlier in April of 2013 in the capacity of then opposition leader and parliamentarian.

According to figures, Myanmar exported textile worth 370,000 U.S. dollars to Mongolia in the last fiscal year 2015-16, while medicines, tyres, soft drinks, computers and related accessories worth 2,000 USD were imported over the fiscal year when the two countries began bilateral trade.
SYDNEY, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer research agency has found no conclusive evidence that coffee causes cancer.

The recent study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) did however uncover that drinking very hot drinks (above 65 degrees Celsius), can cause cancer of the oesophagus.

"This is another example that highlights the difficulties faced in weighing evidence for cancer risk from food," cancer biologist and senior lecturer in pathology at the University of New South Wales Dr Darren Saunders said on Thursday.

"While lots of studies claim a link between various foods and either increased cancer risk, or a protective effect, in many cases the evidence is unconvincing and often contradictory."

He noted that this could lead to general confusion among consumers, where every new study seems to contradict the previous one.

"While the IARC now classify hot drinks as a probable carcinogen in oesophageal cancer, we shouldn't forget that smoking and alcohol consumption are established major risk factors."

Emeritus Professor Bruce Armstrong from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney said it would be reasonable to conclude from the IARC review that coffee drinking is unlikely to increase a coffee drinker's risk of cancer.

"So the take-home message is: Enjoy your coffee with peace of mind but don't drink it very hot!"

It was noted that tea was not evaluated as part of the recent study.
An aerial photo taken on Sept. 25, 2015 from a seaplane of Hainan Maritime Safety Administration shows cruise vessel Haixun 1103 heading to the Yacheng 13-1 drilling rig during a patrol in South China Sea. (Xinhua/Zhao Yingquan)

LONDON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- An arbitral tribunal's decision to allow the South China Sea case initiated by the Philippines against China to go ahead is not convincing, according to a leading international law expert at the University of Oxford.

In 2013, the Philippines unilaterally filed compulsory arbitration against China at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague with respect to the two sides' dispute in the South China Sea.

"For the most part, the tribunal hasn't answered satisfactorily with respect to why there is a dispute under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and also how these claims do not relate to sovereignty, and in my view they do (relate to sovereignty)," Antonios Tzanakopoulos, associate professor of public international law at the University of Oxford, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

The dispute between the Philippines and China concerns sovereignty over maritime features in the South China Sea, but questions of sovereignty do not fall within the scope of UNCLOS, according to the expert, who had studied law in Athens, New York and Oxford and worked for the UN Office in Geneva.

"I think there are some very important questions, it hasn't answered fully. I don't think it has dealt with the issue of sovereignty very clearly," he said.

China made a declaration in 2006 in accordance with Article 298 of UNCLOS, making it clear that China would exclude disputes on maritime delimitation from compulsory arbitration.

Tzanakopoulos noted the tribunal "hasn't to a large extent answered how the claims put forward by the Philippines do not fall within the Chinese exceptions to the jurisdiction, because the convention allows every state to exclude some disputes from the jurisdiction of the relevant tribunals."

In April, Tzanakopoulos published a research paper in the Social Science Research Network, arguing that the tribunal's decision to give an award and allow the arbitration case to proceed is not convincing on many points.

"I read the award and then I was slightly uncomfortable with some of the things that it said. I had questions about how these are not related to sovereignty and so on and so forth," he said.

He added that "these international courts and tribunals don't actually have the power enforcing their decisions, so the best thing they can do is to give convincing answers to the disputes submitted by the states."

If a tribunal fails to do so, he warned, "there is a risk that the tribunal rendered a decision which fails to generally convince."

The scholar also pointed to "the indispensable third-party rule" in international jurisprudence, which could make the case inadmissible, but the tribunal "didn't answer satisfactorily and thoroughly" to the question.

He said the dispute is quintessentially a multilateral one involving many states, but the Philippines is "bilateralizing" this dispute.

"How can the tribunal essentially prejudge and decide claims of sovereignty at all, but even also claims of sovereignty of states not before it (i.e. states not involved in the case)? In the International Court of Justice (ICJ), this rule is called the Monetary Gold rule, or the indispensable third-party rule," he elaborated.

The expert noted that, in previous ICJ cases concerning indispensable third parties, the court "would refuse to exercise its jurisdiction and say the case is not admissible."

Tzanakopoulos went on saying that "the dispute settlement system in UNCLOS is not the best way to go about it, if this is done unilaterally by states starting disputes against other states on a bilateral level."
KUNMING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- In a subtropical Chinese county that once made most of its money from coal mining, a thriving mango business is leading the fight against overcapacity.

Everyone thought Sun Shaolun was crazy when he was decided to sell a coal mine that brought him 10 million yuan (1.52 million U.S. dollars) each year to start growing mangoes in Huaping County, Yunnan Province.

Sun sold the first fruits grown on deserted mine for 380,000 yuan in 2006 as an experiment before making the bold decision three years later.

"Any mine's resources are limited and you cannot rely on them forever," he said.

Running a coal mine is an anxious business and Sun found himself unable to sleep at night as he fretted over the possibility of accidents that might lead to many deaths and his own incarceration. He did not dare to turn off his mobile even after bedtime. "I was terrified whenever my phone rang at night," he said.

In May 2003, 24 people were killed in a coal mine blast in the county and Sun had no wish to be next.

Overcapacity and the mounting cost of increasingly strict safety regulations led to smaller profits; one more reason to give up the mining business. Coal prices have also dropped from a peak of 1,000 yuan per tonne to just 50 yuan today.

Sun now makes 1 million yuan a year. He was one of the first mine owners to start growing mango trees in his village and today there are 770 hectares of them there. More than 70 percent of them are on the sites of former mines.

In 2013, Huaping's coal output was worth 4.77 billion yuan, accounting for over 50 percent of the county's total economic output. Then, in 2014, the Yunnan government told Huaping to shut down over 30 mines and upgrade the remaining 50. It was done within a year, by offering a one-off 4 million yuan payment to the owner of each mine that closed.

Huang Changhui was once a miner, now he works on mango plantation, wrapping the fruit in paper and earning 80 yuan a day. He also has a small mango plantation himself. He makes about the same now as he did as a miner .

"I had to learn from scratch. The trees need pesticides, fertilizer and weeding, but it is much more pleasant than being a miner," he said.

Zou Jie says the transformation was a "redemption" for the deteriorated environment that coal brought. Mining consumes trees and years of exploitation had turned vast tracts of land black, with no trees left and no crops nearby.

"Locals never put on a white shirt as it would soon become dirty in the dusty air," she said.

Zou and her husband suspended the family mine and planted mangoes in 2009. They built a processing line and produce mango puree and dried mango.

To encourage the switch from coal to fruit, the government has arranged loans at a reduced rate of interest. These loans have so far cost the government 10 million yuan to cover the interest discount, according to Wang Guohua, head of the agricultural bureau of the county.

The government has also organized free training and study tours to major mango production regions. Experts are invited to visit the farmers.Farmers are also encouraged to buy a mango insurance, with one fifth of the premium paid by the government.

China plans to cut 500 million tonnes of coal capacity completely and consolidate another 500 million tonnes into the hands of fewer, more efficient operators in the next three to five years.
CARACAS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The meeting between Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday seemed to have raised hopes for improving the relations between the two longtime foes.

However, analysts believe that recent U.S. moves against Venezuela are part of "the second phase of an international siege" to stifle the South American country amid its political and economic crises.

HOPES?

Speaking to reporters in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, where regional countries gathered for the 46th general assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS), Kerry said the U.S. agreed to hold high-level talks with Venezuela.

"I have committed myself to seeing if this works, so let's see if we can improve bilateral ties," Kerry said.

Rodriguez and Kerry met on the sidelines of the Assembly.

"They spoke of matters of great interest about the quality of the relationship, and the meeting produced positive signs from both sides that it is possible, with patience, discretion and diplomacy, to resume quality ties between the two countries," said Roy Chaderton, former Venezuelan ambassador to the OAS, who is now in charge of international affairs for Venezuela's ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV).

Franklin Gonzalez, former Venezuelan ambassador to Greece, added that "the U.S. and Venezuela have always met and fallen out. I hope this new attempt can be maintained and formal relations can be re-established."

Washington and Caracas have not sent ambassadors to each other capitals since 2008. Ties also worsened in March 2016, when U.S. President Barack Obama extended an executive order labeling Venezuela a threat to the national security of the Untied States.

After the Tuesday meeting, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro hailed this diplomatic effort and repeated his desire to negotiate with the U.S., as long as Venezuela's sovereignty and right to self-determination was respected.

"Even though I have been proposing this to Obama for three years, I welcome dialogue...and the end of conspiracies against Venezuela. I am in favor of accelerating these high-level contacts," said Maduro.

The president also called on the U.S. to name an ambassador to Caracas, thus "normalizing" ties between the two countries, adding that this "should be done on the basis of mutual respect."

"This is the right path for Venezuela, a path of diplomacy and closeness. However, we cannot underestimate that our country is the target of attacks...and must remain ready and alert," Gonzalez noted.

SANCTIONS

In recent weeks, however, the U.S. has manifested its interest in joining a dialogue between the Venezuela government and the opposition, which is currently led by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, and former presidents of Panama and the Dominican Republic, Martin Torrijos and Leonel Fernandez.

Still, in his address to the OAS on Tuesday, Kerry said Washington backed a call by Venezuela's right wing to hold a recall referendum to oust Maduro.

Jose Antonio Egido, professor of sociology at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, told Xinhua in a recent interview that the U.S. is increasing political pressure on Maduro, adding this is part of "the second phase of an international siege" by the U.S. to stifle the South American country amid its political and economic crises.

"Since the Maduro government has not fallen despite an economic crisis, the U.S. is taking actions through the local opposition and manipulating the Organization of American States," said Egido.

At the end of last May, OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro called for invoking the body's Inter-American Democratic Charter (IDC) against Venezuela. However, the attempt was thwarted by OAS members at a special OAS session held in early June and an appeal for further dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition was made.

Egido said the United States named Venezuela in its Country Reports on Terrorism 2015 issued in early June, accusing the country of allowing listed Colombian rebel groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army to operate from bases on its territory.

Egido noted that in this "more aggressive" second phase of an "international siege," the U.S. is also piling up financial pressure so that "no country lends money to Venezuela."

It "seeks an eventual asphyxiation of Venezuela, which the government is continuing to resist," he added.

In March, Obama renewed an executive order for another year, which he signed in March 2015 to declare Venezuela a national security threat, saying Venezuela's political situation "has not improved."

Extending the decree that imposes sanctions against Venezuela, Obama said the Venezuelan government continues to undermine human rights guarantees by "persecuting" political opponents, curbing press freedom and fueling violent protests.

The sanctions includes the seizure of assets and suspension of visas.

In protest, Venezuela then recalled its top diplomat to the United States.

Venezuelan political analyst Alberto Aranguibel told Xinhua in a former interview that the White House executive order labeling Venezuela as "an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security" was driven by ulterior motives.

Aranguibel said it's unreasonable to consider "a small country like Venezuela, with no nuclear weapons or a powerful army," a threat to the world's largest power.

"It's absurd (to think) Venezuela can be a threat to the United States," said Tony Boza, author of "La guerra contra el pueblo (The War Against the People)."

"That country's war budget is 1.5 times larger than Venezuela's entire gross domestic product, it's practically 30 times larger than our international reserves," he said.

The U.S. has mounted an aggressive campaign against Venezuela to "obtain underground resources," such as oil and minerals, he added.

The decree is part of the "pretexts" the U.S. has historically used to "invade" other countries, Boza said.
KUNMING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Border trade has been booming along the Chinese border with Vietnam, after intense government support to improve customs clearing processes, officials said during the China-South Asia Expo in Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province.

In 2015, Yunnan registered 10.5 billion yuan (1.6 billion U.S. dollars) in mutual trade among its border residents in 2015, up by 32.9 percent year on year. More than 4.7 million tons of fruit, seafood, cement, floor tiles and other commodities were traded, said Yang Ming, deputy director of clearance at Kunming Customs.

"More than 87 percent of the customs clearance is done through our electronic system without the need to file any paper documents, which has really boosted efficiency," he said.

Hekou County, along the China-Vietnam border, has one of the busiest ports for trade. Three years ago, border residents had to queue to file their trade documents with the customs. Now the clearing is done with zip cards and fingerprints.

"Very few people were doing trade just three years ago. Filing paperwork used to take about a day, now it takes less than an hour," said Deng Xing, a border resident in Nanxi township in Hekou.

Hekou Port now uses an electronic system, developed by the customs office, to register all import-related details. Inspection and clearing have also become much more efficient, said Deng.

Faster, smooth and convenient trade has resulted in a boom of new logistics and transport companies in Yunnan. In Dehong prefecture alone, the number of companies in foreign trade grew by 15.2 percent year on year to reach 1,125 in 2015. The figure is more than five times the number in 2011, according to the local statistics bureau.

On the other side, similar measures have also been taken to facilitate trade, said Dang Xuan Phong, chairman of LaoCai Province People's Committee in Vietnam.

"We have upgraded equipment, improved checking and inspection, and simplified administrative measures," he said, adding "we plan to further share information with the Chinese side and enhance our trade ties."

"Yunnan will continue to improve infrastructure and services to boost trade with its neighbors. We have much more to do in cooperation in customs clearing, logistics, entry and exit of the people," said Liu Jing, deputy director of the provincial commerce department.
CARACAS, June 15 (Xinhua) -- At least 408 people were arrested Wednesday after violent protests in Venezuela, which saw shops being looted.

Luis Acuna, the governor of Sucre State, called for "calm" in a press conference, after 15 shops along the Panamericana avenue in Cumana, capital of the north-eastern state of Sucre, were looted, including supermarkets, clothes shops and an optician shop.

Acuna said the "violence had left no dead and no injured", although opposition forces said that one man named Cristobal Castaneda had been shot dead.

Nelson Moreno, governor of Anzoategui state, which neighbors Sucre, also announced Wednesday that eight people had been arrested for looting, adding that two of the eight men arrested were known criminals with "a history of homicide, robbery and theft."

"This morning, we called a meeting of the state security apparatus, along with the mayors," said Moreno at a press conference. Moreover, he accused the speaker of National Assembly Henry Ramos Allup of "instigating violence" on social media.

According to opposition sources, the protests took place due to anger at the shortage of food in the South American country.
MELBOURNE, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Crime in Victoria in 2015 rose 12.4 percent on the previous year with theft accounting for one in three crimes.

Statistics released on Thursday by the Crime Statistics Agency (CSA) revealed that 519,130 crimes were committed in the state from April 2015 through March 2016, up from 461,796 crimes the previous year.

The CSA attributed the jump mostly to a dramatic increase in property-related offenses in 2015.

Theft, including theft of and from cars, accounted for a third of all crimes committed in 2015 with 171,531 reported instances, a 16.1 percent increase on 2014, almost half of which were committed by people between the ages of 20 and 34.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said the increase in vehicle-related theft was gang related.

"There certainly are organized groups involved and the taskforces certainly are focusing on those particular groups and a lot of that, the organized groups are more into the theft for profit, so they're stealing cars and then on-selling them," Ashton told the ABC.

"We're working with the bodies that are heavily involved in assessing the information around this, like the Motor Theft Reduction Council, working with them and their data as well."

"We're certainly hearing things that cause us concern about young people thinking it's better to steal than to earn."

There was also a significant spike in assault, abduction, burglary, weapon and drug-related crimes with weapons and explosive offenses increasing by 18.5 percent.

The greater Dandenong area, in Melbourne's southeast, recorded the highest increase in crime with a 24.1 percent jump.

Disorderly and offensive conduct offenses were the only category to show a significant fall, dropping from 20,530 instances in 2014 to 17,328 offences in 2015, a 15.6 percent drop.

Crimes committed per 100,000 people also grew by 10.3 percent from 7,777 in 2014 to 8,575 in 2015.
QUITO, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Government representatives from China and Turkey on Wednesday toured Ecuador's quake-hit areas and assessed reconstruction cooperation between them.

In the "ground zero," the area worst hit by a devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake which hit Ecuador in April, the Chinese representatives assessed medical and educational infrastructure, as well as utilities and other services key to the reconstruction and post-construction plan.

The Chinese were joined by a Turkish delegation from Istanbul, which arrived here on Monday. Their tour was accompanied by Ecuador's Minister of Security and Coordination Cesar Navas.

Following the site inspection, the representatives met with Ecuadorian officials from the Technical Secretariat for Reconstruction as well as local governments to better determine the needs of the affected communities, the ministry of security and coordination said.

The visit aimed to "strengthen the international humanitarian aid related to the process of reconstruction and economic recovery in the areas damaged by the earthquake," said the ministry in a press release.

The quake, which rumbled through Manabi and neighboring Esmeraldas province to the north, killed 668 people and displaced around 80,000 inhabitants. Eight people are still missing.

The reconstruction is estimated to cost some 3.344 billion U.S. dollars, according to the National Planning and Development Secretariat.

Navas has earlier met with representatives of the National Disaster Mitigation Center of China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, and Ji Xiaofeng, commercial counselor from the Chinese Embassy, among other Chinese officials.` The minister has also met with Turkish Ambassador to Ecuador Korkut Gungen and coordinator of the Turkish International Development and Cooperation Agency Memet Ozkan.

"At both meetings, (officials) talked about the possibilities for cooperation in rebuilding and reactivating productivity," said the ministry.

Navas also expressed Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa's appreciation "for the significant humanitarian aid provided by both countries."

The minister underscored China and Turkey's help in mitigating the impact of the disaster by helping set up temporary shelters for the homeless.




BEIJING, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Ran Chengqi (R), spokesman for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), addresses a press conference on the development of the BDS in Beijing, capital of China, June 16, 2016. The Chinese government on Thursday released the white paper about the development of the BDS, which is independently developed and operated by China. (Xinhua/Li He)

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the action plan for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by China.

China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, according to the document released by the State Council Information Office (SCIO). The aim is to complete the deployment of the 35 satellite constellation around 2020 to provide services to global users.

This is the first white paper on the navigation satellite system. It is also the 100th white paper released by the SCIO.

Initially, China aimed to provide services to domestic users. The following stage featured the expansion of the network to cover the Asia-Pacific region, which was achieved by the end of 2012.

Currently, B1I and B2I open service signals are being broadcast by the operating BDS-2, providing open services to the Asia-Pacific region free of charge, according to the white paper.

The services cover an area between 55 degrees north latitude and 55 degrees south latitude, and between 55 and 180 degrees east longitude, with positioning accuracy less than 10 meters, velocity measurement accuracy less than 0.2 meters per second, and timing accuracy less than 50 nanoseconds.

BDS spokesperson Ran Chengqi told a press conference Thursday that tests in the Asia-Pacific region showed the system to be performing well.

Ran, who is also director of China's Satellite Navigation System management office, said in priority cities including Beijing and Urumqi, the capital city of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, positioning accuracy was less than 5 meters.

The same result can be duplicated in low latitude countries, such as Thailand, according to Ran.

The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.

The BeiDou project was formally launched in 1994, however, the first BeiDou satellite was not launched until 2000. The 23rd satellite was launched Sunday.

In addition to providing continuous, stable and reliable services for global users, the BDS will support national security, economic and social development, and improve people's living standards.

According to the document, the BDS is designed to provide open satellite navigation services free of charge.

International cooperation and exchanges on navigation satellite systems will be encouraged and the BDS compatibility with other systems will be enhanced to provide better services to end users.

"As the BDS is used with other navigation satellite systems, China will work with all other countries, regions and international organizations to promote global satellite navigation development and make the system better serve the world and benefit mankind," according to the document.

Products related to the BDS have been used in areas including communication and transportation, marine fisheries, weather forecasting, mapping and geographic information, forest fire prevention.
HARBIN, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A charter route between China's northeastern province of Heilongjiang and Alaska in the United States will be upgraded to be a regular route, local authorities said Wednesday.

The round-trip, operated by Russia's Ural Airlines with an Airbus A320 once a week, will begin in September, said Hou Wei, deputy head of Heilongjiang's tourism development commission.

The route will link Harbin City, capital of Heilongjiang, and Anchorage in Alaska, with a stop in the Russian port city of Magadan.

The route, which takes six-and-a-half hours each way, is the shortest linking China and the United States.

The regular service is likely to boost tourism between the two popular destinations, Hou said.

The governments of Heilongjiang and Alaska established friendly relations in 1985. The charter route was launched in 2013.
WELLINGTON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand's economy grew slightly faster than expected in the quarter to the end of March, with gross domestic product (GDP) up 0.7 percent, the government statistics agency said Thursday.

The rise, which compared with an increase of 0.9 percent in the December 2015 quarter, was driven by the construction and health industries, according to Statistics New Zealand.

"The main driver behind the GDP growth was construction, which rose 4.9 percent. This was the strongest quarterly growth for the industry since March 2014," national accounts senior manager Gary Dunnet said in a statement.

Rising demand saw service industries grow 0.8 percent, with the health and retail trade industries leading the overall increase.

"We saw a larger population reflected in the rise in health care and consumer spending. When the rising population is taken into account, our GDP per capita rose 0.1 percent on the previous quarter," Dunnet said.

Strong tourist arrivals also supported the growth in service industries, reflecting a 4.9-percent rise in tourist spending.

Annual GDP growth for the year ended March 2016 edged down to 2.4 percent while the size of the economy in current prices was 249 billion NZ dollars (176.31 billion U.S. dollars).

Finance Minister Bill English said that while the dairy sector continued to be under pressure, other sectors were performing well and contributing to an overall solid rate of economic growth.

New Zealand's annual growth rate was in the top 10 of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) group of developed nations and compared to 2 percent in the United Kingdom and United States, 3.1 percent in Australia, 1.1 percent in Canada and 1.8 percent across the OECD.

"The outlook remains positive. Treasury's Budget forecasts see the economy continuing to grow at 2.8 percent on average through to 2020," English said in a statement.

Unions and opposition lawmakers said the GDP growth of 0.1 percent on a per capita basis meant ordinary people were falling behind overall economic growth.

"Right now Kiwis are working extremely hard, but they're playing catch up," said Grant Robertson, finance spokesperson for the main opposition Labour Party.

"The economy simply isn't keeping up with population growth, which has seen a net 70,000 people arriving in the country in the past year," Robertson said in a statement.

An economic note from the ASB Bank said the growth was stronger than the market median expected, and slightly stronger than the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) forecast this month.

The ASB still expected the RBNZ to cut the official cash rate by 25 basis points to 2 percent in August, followed by a further cut to 1.75 percent later this year.
NEW DELHI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will embark on a four-nation tour of Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya and Mozambique next month, sources said Thursday.

The Indian Prime Minister will also hold bilateral talks with leaders of all the four countries during his visit to the four nations," the sources said.

"During his visit, Modi will consolidate India's economic and maritime ties with these countries. Blue economy will be one of the major areas which India is likely be focusing on," the sources said.

Blue economy is the economy of the ocean. Africa has a long coastline and Indian Navy has played a significant role in securing the sea from pirates, thus boosting trade.

Also on the agenda during Modi's visit are issues like food security - a common concern for India and Africa - agriculture, trade and investment, the sources said.

India's bilateral trade with Africa stands at 70 billion U.S. dollars and it has investments over 32 billion dollars in foreign direct investment in the continent.
HANGZHOU, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The trial of 26 people, who face charges related to the trafficking of 26 infants, began Wednesday in east China's Zhejiang Province, according to a local court.

The cases are being heard at the people's court of Cangnan County with the intermediate people's court of Wenzhou City, which administers Cangnan, overseeing proceedings.

The principal suspect, a 51-year-old man from Cangnan, identified by his surname Zhang, confessed that he and his lover started the business in 2013.

Procurators said the babies were sold for between 10,000 yuan (1,520 U.S. dollars) and 100,000 yuan. One baby boy was resold five times, with the first buyer paying 10,000 yuan and last 83,000 yuan.

The defendants, aged between 27 and 79, are from Wenzhou, Fujian and Yunnan.

The Wenzhou court said most of the suspects were only educated to primary school level or were illiterate.

The trial is expected to last until Friday.
The logo of all-gender toilet in Beijing. (Web photo)

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Male or female? Things are not that simple, and Beijing is offering another alternative as the capital has begun installing all-gender toilets in China's first such campaign to promote an open gender attitude, local media reported Thursday.

Some cafes and bars in Gulou East Street, a reconstructed hutong block full of hipsters and boasting nightlife, has transformed some of their toilets and put up a sign with a logo featuring three figures: a woman in a dress, a man in trousers, and a third one wearing half dress and half trousers.

The Beijing offices of United Nations Women and United Nations Development Program have also joined the campaign, according to the Beijing Times.

The all-gender toilet in the Beijing office of UN Women. (Photo from UN Women's account on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo)

The all-gender toilet in the Beijing office of UNDP. (Web photo)

These gender neutral facilities are open to everyone regardless of gender distinctions, including transgenders, parents with young children of different genders, and children with elderly parents of different genders.

These groups can use the toilets without embarrassing themselves or others, said Yang Gang, who is in charge of the campaign.

"We hope the initiative can show our determination to wipe out the gender label and promote gender equality," he added.

An all-gender toilet in a cafe in downtown Beijing. (Web photo)

The campaign was launched by Beijing Gender Health Education Institute (BGHEI), a non-governmental organization, on May 17, which marks International Day Against Homophobia.

The organization plans to release a map this month to mark out all such facilities in the city. They are also working to provide consultation and training service for organizations which intend to install all-gender toilets.

Installation is not simply hanging a sign, Yang said, as many details should be taken into consideration.

"Many females may feel uncomfortable at the sight of urinals in a no gender restroom. So do some males when they see wasted sanitary napkins," he said. "We have to sort out all these problems when setting up all-gender toilets."

An all-gender toilet in downtown Beijing. (Web photo)

About 30 venues in Beijing have taken part in the campaign. According to BGHEI, it is the first campaign in such a large scale in China.

The first gender inclusive toilet in China was reportedly established 2013 in Baiyang Lake scenic area, north China's Hebei Province, to facilitate the needy who are accompanied by guardians of different genders and to alleviate shortage of lady's rooms. A similar toilet was set up last year in a scenic spot in southwest China's Chongqing.

A no gender toilet in Chongqing. (Web photo)

China's efforts also echo the worldwide initiative to establish gender neutral toilets in public venues and organizations to show respect and tolerance towards the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Bai Enpei, a former senior official with the top legislature, on Thursday stood trial on two counts of corruption-related charges.

Bai, formerly deputy head of the Environment and Resources Protection Committee of the National People's Congress, was accused of taking advantage of his various official posts and other perks associated with his posts from 2000 to 2013 to seek benefits -- in regard of project construction, real estate development, obtaining mining rights and personal promotions -- for 17 companies and individuals.

In exchange, he personally, or through his wife, accepted bribes worth over 246 million yuan (37.4 million U.S. dollars).

Also, prosecutors allege, the assets and expenditure of the Bai family significantly exceeded their legal income and Bai was unable to specify the sources of his assets, which constitutes another suspected criminal violation.

The People's Procuratorate of Anyang City in central China's Henan Province filed the two charges with Anyang Intermediate People's Court.

In his final statement, Bai accepted the charges and showed repentance.

Over 60 people, including legal and political representatives, journalists and members of the public, attended the hearing.

The court ruling will be announced at a later date.
MOSCOW, June 16 (Xinhua) -- "Silence regime" has been enforced in the Syrian city of Aleppo for 48 hours on the initiative of Russia, said the Russian Center for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides Thursday.

"Silence regime" started from Thursday in order to reduce armed violence and stabilize the situation in the Syrian city, the center said.

Earlier, opposition groups were fighting with government troops in Aleppo.

Syria has been mired in a civil war since March 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fighting many opposition factions and extremist groups.

A cease-fire brokered by the United States and Russia came into force in Syria in February. It was supported by the Syrian government as well as dozens of opposition groups.
ANKARA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Six people were killed and one injured early Thursday when a passenger car and a truck collided in central Turkey, Dogan news agency reported.

All those aboard the car died, and the driver of the truck carrying vegetables was injured in the crash in Alaca, a town in the central Anatolian province of Corum, Dogan said.

It was not clear if any of the victims were foreigners.




WARSAW, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Xu Jian, Chinese ambassador to Poland receives an exclusive interview with Xinhua in Warsaw, Poland on June 5, 2016. The upcoming visit to Poland by Chinese President Xi Jinping will bring historic opportunities to the two countries, said the Chinese ambassador to the Central European country. (Xinhua/Chen Xu)

WARSAW, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The upcoming visit to Poland by Chinese President Xi Jinping will bring historic opportunities to the two countries, said the Chinese ambassador to the Central European country.

Relations between China and Poland have embarked on a fast track of development since they forged strategic partnership in 2011, Xu Jian told Xinhua ahead of Xi's trip to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan.

Xi's visit is expected to usher in a new era in the partnership between China and Poland, said Xu.

Political mutual trust between China and Poland is ever deepening in recent years with increasingly mature dialogue mechanisms between the two countries, he said.

Apart from the vice-ministerial strategic dialogue mechanism and the intergovernmental cooperative committee, the China-Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) cooperative mechanism initiated by China and Poland has effectively promoted exchanges between China and countries in this region, he added.

Polish President Andrzej Duda visited China in November last year, when he and Xi reached wide consensus and agreed to boost the strategic partnership between the two countries.

One benefit of their sound relations is rapid surge of trade between the two sides, said Xu, adding that bilateral trade topped 17 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, a six-fold rise on that in 2004.

For many years, Poland has been China's biggest trading partner in the CEE region while China has been Poland's biggest trading partner in Asia. Moreover, Poland is the only CEE country among founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, said Xu.

Meanwhile, people-to-people exchanges between China and Poland are flourishing. Recent years have seen fast rise in the numbers of Polish students in China and Chinese learning in Poland, and five Confucius Institutes have been set up in Poland, said the ambassador.

The annual inflow of Chinese tourists to Poland has increased to more than 60,000 from some 7,700 in 2004, while 70,000 Polish nationals going to China last year, he said.

Local-level exchanges mark another highlight of their ties. There are now more than 50 pairs of sister cities between China and Poland.

A direct railway connection between Lodz in Poland and Chengdu in China has helped forge a close link between the two countries, said Xu.

On the Belt and Road Initiative, Xu said Poland is the biggest CEE country in terms of territory, population and economic volume, adding that it's important both for the initiative and China-CEE cooperative mechanism.

During his trip to China last year, Duda expressed support and readiness to join the Belt and Road Initiative and the two countries signed agreements to work together for the initiative.

Xu said China and Poland have a lot to cooperate in areas including infrastructure, logistics, agriculture, clean energy and science and technology.

"I'm so much impressed by the ever growing China-Poland relations in recent years. Our ties are the best ever nowadays," said the Chinese ambassador.
JINAN, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The valuation of audio-streaming service Ximalaya shot to 4.1 billion yuan (623 million USD) from 2.6 billion in November 2015, according to an investor.

Shanghai-listed Qingdao City Media Co. Ltd., disclosed the valuation on Wednesday in response to an inquiry by the Shanghai Stock Exchange over its investment in Ximalaya.

It said the valuation was based upon Ximalaya's last round of fundraising in which it invested 60 million yuan for a 1.45-percent stake in Ximalaya.

In November last year, Ximalaya was valued at 2.6 billion yuan, with 4.5 million daily active users and 30 million monthly active users. As of today, those numbers have climbed to 8 million and 45 million, respectively.

Ximalaya is similar to SoundCloud, which was widely reported to be valued at 700 million U.S. dollars following its latest bout of investment -- 70 million U.S. dollars -- from Twitter.
JAKARTA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Tidal waves striking Indonesia's Bali island have left one holiday maker dead and another injured, a senior official of disaster agency said here on Thursday.

Piter Tan and Wong Sum Sum, both 64 years old from China's Hong Kong, were dragged to sea by tidal waves in a popular surf spot in Sanur beach of Bali, Gde Jaye, senior official of the agency said.

"Peter Tan was dead, but Wong Sum Sum survived after being treated at Sanglah Hospital," he told Xinhua by phone from Bali.

Several cafes and restaurants have been damaged by the unusual and dangerous huge waves in Jembrana tourist resort, Jaye disclosed.

Tourists in Bali have been warned to stay alert as the meteorology and geophysics agency forecast the extreme weather will keep happening until the end of this month.

"Coast guards have boosted surveillance in beaches at several spots. Tourists are also warned and banned from beach activities," the official stressed.

Previously, hundreds of houses and building were damaged on Java Island and hundreds of people fled homes after tidal waves and sea water flooding hit coastal areas, according to the national disaster management agency.


Nigerian agricultural technicians take part in the training in Abuja, Nigeria, June 13, 2016.(Xinhua/Zhang Baoping)

ABUJA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese multinational group of companies CGC on Monday kicked off capacity building organized for Nigerian agricultural technicians, an effort aimed at promoting integrated agricultural technology in the West African country.

The five-day training program, sponsored by the Chinese Embassy in Nigeria, was, according to organizers, put together in line with the principal focus of the China-Africa agricultural modernization plan - one of China's 10 major cooperation plans with Africa.

At least 40 technical personnel of the Nigerian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development are taking part in the training which was designed to cover many agriculture aspects such as the rice and vegetables cultivation, soil and fertilizer management, seed production, agro-machinery and plant protection.

Earlier, while declaring the training open in Abuja, the Nigerian capital city, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Shehu Ahmed said the China-assisted training was introduced this year as a follow up of President Muhammadu Buhari's state visit to China in April where bilateral cooperation between the two countries was intensified, particularly in areas of trade and agriculture.

Zhao Linxiang, the Chinese Economic and Commercial Counselor in Nigeria, said Africa's most populous country has abundant agricultural resources, adding that agriculture plays an important role in growing the national economy.

He said that the agricultural development in China and Nigeria was highly complementary, with great potential for cooperation.

"This is this first time that the China-aid agricultural training courses has been held in Nigeria, which is groundbreaking," Zhao said, noting it was important to strengthen personnel training to enhance agricultural cooperation between the two countries.
VANCOUVER, June 15 (Xinhua) -- The prospect that real estate developer Donald Trump would become U.S. president continues to worry Canadians, a new Canada-wide Insights West poll has found.

An online survey released on Wednesday showed 76 percent of Canadians think having Trump as America's head of state would be "bad" for Canada.

This represents a nine-point increase from a survey conducted by Insights West early this year, and a fourteen-point increase from the first similar poll in August 2015.

The survey was conducted from May 30 to June 2 among a representative sample of 1,001 Canadian adults.

Conversely, 50 percent of Canadians believe having former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as U.S. president would be good for Canada, and 48 percent feel the same way about Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

A majority of Canadians say they are not worried about a U.S. presidency of either Sanders (61 percent) or Clinton (52 percent). In the meantime, 77 percent are "very" or "moderately" concerned about a final Trump electoral victory.

Still, 53 percent of Canadians would like to see elected Canadian politicians staying neutral and avoiding public statements during the U.S. presidential campaign, while 40 percent want them to voice their concerns, if any, according to the poll by Insights West, a progressive, Western-based, full-service marketing research company.

"As the months go by, the level of apprehension from Canadians on the idea of Donald Trump in the White House has only intensified," said Mario Canseco, vice president of public affairs at Insights West. "Fewer than one-in-six Canadians think this scenario would actually be positive for Canada."
TEHRAN, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Tehran has taken lawful measures against a U.S. court ruling that allows the seizure of parts of Iran's assets in the United States, state TV reported.

Iran has filed a lawsuit against the United States at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanding compensation over the seizure of 2 billion U.S. dollars of the country's assets by the U.S. court, Rouhani was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the transfer of nearly 2 billion dollars to American victims of attacks blamed on Iran, including the 1983 truck bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

Investigators of the court concluded that Iran was responsible for that attack, which Iran has denied.

The assets, belonging to the Central Bank of Iran, have been blocked under U.S. sanctions.

The verdict by the U.S. court is illegitimate, and the case of American nationals killed in Lebanon has nothing to do with Iran, Rouhani said.

"It is not clear what the Americans were doing in Lebanon and how is the case related to Iran," Rouhani said, adding that Iran will never keep silent on the issue and that legal action will continue until the sum and all related compensations are retrieved.

"The Islamic republic of Iran holds the United States government responsible for this outrageous robbery, disguised under a court order, and is determined to take every lawful measure to restore the stolen property," Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad-Javad Zarif, said in a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on April 28.
SYDNEY, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China's economic development will provide Australia with numerous economic opportunities, an official of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said Thursday.

Christopher Kent, RBA assistant governor, made the remarks at an Economic Society of Australia lunch.

He said that although the Chinese economy would experience a gradual moderation in growth over the next few years, "The Chinese authorities have an expansive agenda of reforms necessary for this transition and progress has been made on a number of fronts."

"There have been many positive signals from the leadership (in China) about improving the sustainability of growth, including recent calls to implement so-called 'supply-side' reforms, with a view to facilitating deleveraging in the corporate sector and reducing excess capacity in key industries," he said.

Kent noted that China's economy had grown at an impressive rate over the past 20-25 years and China would continue to provide Australia with significant economic opportunities over the long term, in sectors such as agriculture, education and tourism.
SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Two militants were killed and a trooper was wounded Thursday in a fresh gunfight near the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Kashmir, officials said.

The gunfight broke out at Tangdhar area of the frontier Kupwara district, about 155 km northwest of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir.

According to an Indian military spokesman, the militants were trying to infiltrate into Indian-controlled Kashmir.

"We have foiled another infiltration bid in Tangdhar today by killing two militants," the military spokesman said, adding, "While fighting militants, a trooper was also wounded."

Officials said the operation in the area was underway to trace the remaining militants.

On Wednesday, a militant and an Indian military trooper were killed, while four troopers were wounded in a similar gunfight in Machil sector of the district.

"The operation in Machil is also going on since Tuesday, but no fresh contact could be established," a military official said.

Reports said the Indian army has launched intensive searches at both the places to take on militants.

LoC is a de facto border that divides Kashmir into India- and Pakistan- controlled parts. Militant groups are engaged in a guerilla war with Indian troops in the region since 1989. Gunfight between the two sides takes place intermittently.

Kashmir, the Himalayan region divided between India and Pakistan, is claimed by both in full. Since their independence from Britain, the two countries have fought three wars, two exclusively over Kashmir.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Business leaders of G20 members will focus on promoting robust, sustainable and balanced growth of the global economy during the September summit, an official said Thursday.

The Business 20 (B20) summit will gather nearly 1,000 business leaders in east China's Hangzhou city on Sept. 3 and 4, said Yin Zonghua, vice chairman of the B20 2016 Host Committee and vice president of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

The summit will have six issues on its agenda: financing growth, trade and investment, infrastructure, small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) development, employment and anti-corruption, Yin told a press conference.

The business leaders have formed a draft report on policy advice for G20 leaders including topics such as green financing, a global e-trade platform, international investment and business transparency, he said.

The report will be submitted to the G20 summit, which will be held in Hangzhou on Sept. 4 and 5 under the theme "towards an innovative, invigorated, interconnected and inclusive world economy."

B20 attendees produce policy recommendations for the annual meeting of the G20 leaders. It brings together G20 business leaders to reflect upon the role of the private sector as the main driver of economic growth.

China formally took over the G20 presidency on Dec. 1, 2015.
WELLINGTON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Motoring in New Zealand can be a bit of a white-knuckle ride with its wide open roads and assertive driving style - and soon it will be an amusement park attraction.

Prime Minister John Key on Thursday attended the launch of a new attraction at the country's biggest theme park - a scaled-down urban streetscape where kids can drive miniature Suzuki Swift cars around town.

However, executives at Rainbow's End park, in Auckland, stressed that some of the country's more notorious motoring habits such as high-speed tailgating would not be included in the thrills.

The AA Driver's Town attraction would be a fun but educational experience, allowing children aged 5 to 13 to get behind the wheel of a Suzuki Swift and drive safely through the miniature town, said marketing manager Katharine Murray.

The colorful, tiny town featuring traffic lights, two-way roads, roundabouts, parking spaces, car wash, petrol station and other landmarks, would be open before the end of the year, Murray told Xinhua in a phone interview.

The involvement of the New Zealand Automobile Association (AA) motoring organization and Suzuki was crucial to its authenticity and appeal.

"The drivers will get an education program before they go on to the road. It's about teaching young people driving skills and road courtesy," said Murray.

"They're going to get quite an authentic driving experience."

The electric-powered cars had been designed to allow an adult to sit behind the driver if needed and park staff would be on hand to police the roads.

Schools were also showing an interest in the attraction for their education programs.

Dougal Swift, general manager AA membership and brand, said the cars would be decked out in the livery of the AA Driving School and he hoped they would encourage positive attitudes to driving.

"It provides a great opportunity for kids to learn basic road rules, patience and healthy attitudes to driving safely," Swift said in a statement.

New Zealand's road toll hit a 60-year-low of 254 deaths in 2013, but has since climbed back up.

In the year to the end of June 16, the roads had claimed 297 lives, compared with 269 in the same period a year earlier, according to the New Zealand Transport Agency.
MANILA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Four U.S. attack planes have landed in the Philippines to take part in a joint training with Philippine air force pilots, a U.S. Navy statement said Thursday.

"The first temporary detachment of U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler airborne electronic attack aircraft arrived at Clark Air Base, June 15, for training with Armed Forces of the Philippines FA-50 aircraft pilots," the U.S. Navy Task Force 70 statement said.

The statement said the detachment is composed of four aircraft and about 120 personnel assigned to the Electronic Attack Squadron VAQ 138 expeditionary squadron based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines offered to host the U.S. Air Contingent at Clark Air Base to train with their FA-50 fighter pilots and support units which are located in the base north of Manila, it said.

"The first temporary Air Contingent was comprised of five A-10C Thunderbolt aircraft, three HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters and approximately 200 personnel deployed from multiple Pacific Air Forces units. The forces deployed to the Philippines for exercise Balikatan and completed their final mission April 28, 2016," it said.




BEIJING, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Ran Chengqi (R), spokesman for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), addresses a press conference on the development of the BDS in Beijing, capital of China, June 16, 2016. The Chinese government on Thursday released the white paper about the development of the BDS, which is independently developed and operated by China. (Xinhua/Li He)

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the action plan for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by China.

China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, according to the document released by the State Council Information Office. The aim is to complete the deployment of the 35 satellite constellation around 2020 to provide services to global users.

The system is expected to provide basic services to the nations along the Belt and Road, as well as neighboring countries, two years before achieving the 2020 goal.

This is the first white paper on the navigation satellite system. It is also the 100th white paper released by the office.

Initially, China aimed to provide navigation services to domestic users. The following stage featured the expansion of the network to cover the Asia-Pacific region, which was achieved by the end of 2012.

The BeiDou project was formally launched in 1994, however, the first BeiDou satellite was not launched until 2000. The 23rd satellite was launched Sunday.

Currently, the system is providing open services to the Asia-Pacific region free of charge, according to the white paper.

The services cover an area between 55 degrees north latitude and 55 degrees south latitude, and between 55 and 180 degrees east longitude, with positioning accuracy less than 10 meters, velocity measurement accuracy less than 0.2 meters per second, and timing accuracy less than 50 nanoseconds.

The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.

QUALITY SERVICE

BDS spokesperson Ran Chengqi told a press conference Thursday that tests in the Asia-Pacific region showed the system is performing well.

Ran, who is also director of China's Satellite Navigation System management office, said that in priority cities including Beijing and Urumqi, the capital city of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, positioning accuracy is less than 5 meters.

The same result can be duplicated in low latitude countries, such as Thailand, according to Ran.

In addition to providing continuous, stable and reliable services for global users, the BDS will support national security, economic and social development, and improve people's living standards.

FEATURES

The system's space segment is a hybrid constellation of satellites in three kinds of orbits. In comparison with other navigation satellite systems, the BDS operates more satellites in high orbit to offer better anti-shielding capabilities, which is particularly observable in terms of performance in the low-latitude areas.

The BDS provides navigation signals of multiple frequencies, and is able to improve service accuracy by using combined multi-frequency signals.

The system integrates navigation and communication capabilities for the first time, and has five major functions -- real-time navigation, rapid positioning, precise timing, location reporting and short message communication services.

INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

China would like to "share the fruits of development in the field of satellite navigation, increasing the comprehensive application benefits of Global Navigation Satellite System," according to the white paper.

International cooperation and exchanges on navigation satellite systems will be encouraged and the BDS' compatibility with other systems will be enhanced to provide better services to end users.

"As the BDS joins hands with other navigation satellite systems, China will work with all other countries, regions and international organizations to promote global satellite navigation development and make the BDS better serve the world and benefit mankind", said the document.

Adhering to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) regulations, China works to facilitate coordination of BDS frequencies and orbital slots through negotiations.

Since 2000 China has been involved in coordination activities on more than 300 satellite networks with more than 20 countries, regions and international organizations, according to the white paper.

Meanwhile, China will spare no effort to get the system ratified by the International Organization for Standardization as well as other international organizations in the industrial and professional application sectors.

In November 2014 the BDS gained recognition from the International Maritime Organization, according to the white paper.

EXPANDING APPLICATION FOR CIVILIANS

Products related to the BDS have been used in areas including communication and transportation, marine fisheries, weather forecasting, mapping and geographic information, and forest fire prevention.

According to Ran, more than 40,000 fishing vessels along China's coastline are now equipped with BeiDou application terminals.

The nation is establishing an industrial system for the BDS and fostering "an independent BDS industrial chain," according to the white paper.

Moreover, China is developing chips, modules, antennae and other basic products based on the BDS and other compatible systems, it said.

Ran said the BDS technology had been applied to more than 24 million terminals and more than 18 million mobile phones featured BeiDou chips by the end of April.

The government also encourages the integrated development of the BDS with big data and cloud computing.
TEHRAN, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) killed nine terrorists in the country's northwestern city of Oshnavieh, semi-official Fars new agency reported on Thursday.

Two members of the IRGC also died in the clashes with "counter-revolutionary terrorist groups" on Wednesday, the report said.
WELLINGTON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Exports from New Zealand's farming sector are set to grow strongly over the next two years, with the pillar dairy industry rebounding from its slump, according to a government forecast out Thursday.

A report from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) showed that exports were expected to show growth of 3 percent in the year to the end of June.

"New Zealand primary industry export revenue is estimated to reach over 36.7 billion NZ dollars (25.83 billion U.S. dollars) in the year ending June 2016, supported by strong growth in horticulture and other primary sector exports and foods," MPI director of sector policy Jarred Mair said in a statement.

"Dairy prices have remained weak as global supply is still abundant. New Zealand production is down marginally but export volumes are up. Production is still high in the EU, which is keeping downward pressure on prices," said Mair.

"Overall there has been a 6-percent decline in the value of dairy exports in the past year, but an expected gradual price recovery should lead to increasing dairy export values looking out two to three years. Overall our forecasts show 34 percent growth out to 2020."

Horticulture exports, which exceeded 5 billion NZ dollars (3.52 billion U.S. dollars) for the first time in the 2015-2016 season, were expected to continue their growth over the medium term.

The outlook was supported by the primary sector's significant investments in processing capacity across the country.

"Free trade agreements will also help grow our exports, while population growth and economic development throughout Asia will support increased demand for New Zealand's protein, horticulture, wood and fiber products," said Mair.
HOUSTON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The police in the U.S. city of Houston are investigating a threat against next week's Gay Pride parade.

The police were aware of a tweet that read: "There will be a massive shooting at the Pride parade in Houston, Texas," the Houston Chronicle daily on Wednesday quoted Houston police spokesman John Cannon as saying.

"We're trying to figure out who it is," Cannon said, referring to the now deleted account "crehgdu123" that tweeted the threatening message. "We're looking into it just like we'd look into any other threat made to someone's life."

The police encouraged those who know information about the owner of the account and any possible threat to the upcoming event to call 911 or the police hot line.

The Houston police said that more officers would attend this year's Pride event in the wake of the Orlando shooting, which left 49 people dead and more than 50 others injured.

On Wednesday night, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, along with more than 1,000 people, attended a candlelight vigil outside the City Hall, honoring the victims of Sunday's Orlando shooting.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday reminded the United States to maintain the overall bilateral relationship, and urged it to refrain from interfering in China's domestic affairs, such as Tibet-related issues.

U.S. President Barack Obama held a closed-door meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama at the White House Wednesday.

"Tibet affairs are China's domestic affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told a daily news briefing.

Lu said the 14th Dalai Lama was not a purely religious figure, but a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion, and the essence of his "middle way" approach is "Tibet independence".

The meeting goes against the United States' acknowledgement that Tibet is an inseparable part of Chinese territory and its rejection of "Tibet independence" and anti-China separatist activities, Lu said.

Such a meeting constitutes interference into China's internal affairs and harms China-U.S. mutual trust and cooperation, Lu said.

Related:

Commentary: Washington should stop playing "Tibet card"

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Disregarding the Chinese government's strong opposition, U.S. President Barack Obama met with the 14th Dalai Lama behind closed doors at the White House on Wednesday.
HANOI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The search and rescue mission for the remaining pilot on a missing SU-30 fighter jet continued in Vietnam Thursday, with over 1,500 people joining the search, according to the Ministry of Defense (MoD).

The Russian-made SU-30 fighter jet of Vietnam air forces disappeared from radar screen while carrying out a training mission offshore Vietnam's central Nghe An province on Tuesday morning.

There were two pilots aboard the aircraft, namely Tran Quang Khai and Nguyen Huu Cuong, who are said to be experienced and high-hour pilots. The jet took off Tuesday morning from Sao Vang airport in Vietnam's central Thanh Hoa province, some 140 km south of capital Hanoi, for training.

On Wednesday, one of the two pilots, Nguyen Huu Cuong, was rescued by local fishermen. Cuong was safe on land on Wednesday afternoon.

According to the MoD, on Thursday, the searching area was extended from waters off coast of central Ha Tinh province to northern Thai Binh province.

Equipments specialized for detecting plane's black box have been deployed, said the ministry.

A total of 1,564 people in navy, coast guard, border guard, air defense-air forces, Military Zone 4 and fishermen as well as 102 ships and five aircrafts have been joining the search and rescue, which has stepped into the third day.

So far, there has no sign of human or plane, said the MoD.

Vietnam has bought as many as 32 Russian-made Su-30 fighter jets. This is the first reported accident with the SU-30 fighters in Vietnam, according to local VNExpress online newspaper on Thursday.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim Bank) offered stronger credit support last year for the development of green economy amid China's drive to promote ecological progress and curb pollution.

Outstanding loans extended by China Exim Bank for energy saving and environment-friendly projects amounted to 76.602 billion yuan (11.69 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of 2015, up 44.75 percent year on year, said Feng Chunping, a senior official from China Exim Bank, during a press conference.

The government-backed policy bank has financed several hundred renewable energy projects including wind power, solar energy and energy-saving projects in the steel and chemical industries to help enterprises improve energy efficiency, said Feng.

Outlined as one key task in the plan for the next five years, green finance is now part of China's national strategy since being first mentioned in 2015.

Green finance uses institutional and policy arrangements to encourage more investment in energy-saving and environmentally friendly projects via financial products and services such as green loans, bonds, stocks, private equity, insurance and carbon emissions trading.
CAIRO, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Two policemen were shot dead in Egypt's North Sinai province, the Interior Ministry said in a statement Thursday.

Four masked gunmen approached the house where the two policemen resided in Al Arish, the capital city of Egypt's North Sinai province, and opened fire, according to the ministry.

Armed militants have chosen the Sinai Peninsula as a center for most of their operations.

Attacks against security personnel have escalated following the army's 2013 removal of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi from power in response to mass protests against his rule.

Hundreds of police and army personnel have been killed in these attacks.

Ansar Beit Al-Maqdes, an armed group affiliated with the Islamic State (IS) in Sinai, has claimed responsibility for most of the attacks.
ST. PETERSBURG, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that Russia should initiate the process of lifting economic sanctions if it wants the European Union to eliminate the anti-Moscow sanctions.

Sarkozy, who is here attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, believes that there is a necessity to remove those sanctions, but "the strongest," which he said is Russia, should "extend a hand first."

He said he had made this proposal to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting on Wednesday, but he declined to disclose Putin's response.

Russian officials have insisted that it was up to the West to start lifting sanctions it introduced, as the sanctions were hitting not only Russia but also the West itself.

"We have enough problems besides them. We cannot afford to suffer," said Sarkozy.

He voiced his public opposition to the United States "dictating relations between Russia and Europe," saying that "it is up to Russians and Europeans to decide (their relations)."

The West has imposed several rounds of sanctions against Russia over its takeover of the Crimean peninsula and alleged interference in the Ukraine crisis since 2014.

Moscow, in response, has banned the import of some foodstuffs and other products from countries that introduced the restrictions.

Sarkozy said he came to Russia in a bid to contribute to preventing a new Cold War between Russia and Europe, as their relations "have never been so cold."
Photo taken on June 7, 2016 shows the Mount Muztagata on Pamirs Plateau, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

URUMQI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- In China's remote western Pamirs, wealth is measured not in money or houses, but in sheep and cattle.

Every year, the herdsmen move their livestock between summer and winter pastures to "maintain and increase the value of assets."

A woman of Kirgiz ethnic group prepares at home for moving to the summer pasture in Atjiayili village inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

Kirgiz herdsman Sulayman, 26, lives in Atjiayili Village, the closest Chinese village to the border with Afghanistan, in the Wakhan Corridor, an area with an average altitude over 4,000 meters.

Sulayman of Kirgiz ethnic group and her aunt, 31-year-old Gulqal, rest in the car while on their way to the richer summer pasture in Atjiayili village inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

He is going to move 200 sheep to a summer pasture in a valley 25 kilometers away with his family.

The transfer is divided into two groups. One is led by Sulayman, who drives a jeep carrying his mother Aterhan and aunt Gulqal. They will arrive ahead of the livestock so they can set up yurt, prepare food and build the sheepfold.

Sulayman says they must also put up a smaller sheepfold for the lambs. "The lambs have to be separated with their mothers in the evening or they won't have enough milk in the daytime."

Frontier guards help moving livestocks to a summer pasture in Tajik Autonomous County of Taxkorgan, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. Frontier guards helped Kirgiz nomads move to their summer pasture over the border areas of some 4,000 meters above the sea level here in Xinjiang. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

The long distance and the high altitude make the transfer of livestock arduous, but the young, weak and old animals are well cared for. Three lambs less than two months old are also taken in the jeep.

In the past, horses were the main form of transport for the herdsmen and their belongings, but the jeeps make the journey easier and quicker, says Sulayman.

Gulqal prepares her bedding in her yurt, a new home for her on the summer pasture inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

On arrival, Sulayman and the two women set up beds and stoves, and then Aterhan makes lunch - yak meat with potatoes, and naan, a staple food of Xinjiang, and a nutritious brick tea.

Aterhan sets up a movable yurt, her new home at the summer pasture inside the Wakhan Corridor, in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

The other group - uncle Qurbaneli and sister Huryet - is leading 200 sheep. Huryet is taking part in the transfer for the first time. She insists on walking.

At 5:30 p.m., nine hours after they set off, the sheep come into view of the encampment. Sulayman greets his uncle and sister, and counts the sheep - all are present. Sulayman smiles on seeing the sheep in the sheepfold.

Sulayman and his sister Huryet take a rest in a yurt, their newly-set home, after they arrival at the summer pasture inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

From now till October, Sulayman and his family will graze sheep on the pasture and help protect the border. Although they are not professional border guards, they can observe movements there.

May and June are the busiest time in the Wakhan Corridor as herdsmen in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region take their livestock to summer pasture at higher altitudes.

Aterhan stands on a hill looking at her sheep arriving at the summer pasture inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, June 6, 2016. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

Nomadic herdsmen spend their lives following the water and pasture. The transfer provides cattle and sheep abundant food and enables the grassland to renew itself.

It is near dusk when Sulayman finishes work. He estimates his earnings for the year. "I get a subsidy for help protecting the border. Taking the subsidies and sales of sheep into account, I could earn more than 20,000 yuan (3,036 U.S. dollars) for the year," he says.

"As long as the border area is stable, our life is settled."

FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT

Zhao Ge, a Xinhua correspondent in Xinjiang, accompanied Sulayman family during the livestock transfer.

He said the transfer was small compared with some that take several days.

Although they traveled just 25 kilometers, it was not easy for the herdsmen due to the high altitude, bumpy roads and "naughty" sheep.

Photo taken on June 6, 2016 shows the summer pasture for nomads inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

Livestock transfers are common for nomadic herdsmen, but following water and grass means it is difficult for them to access medical care, education and other services.

Some herdsmen choose to settle down and some maintain the life lived by their ancestors over thousands of years.

The experience made Zhao even more aware of how important national stability is for the people. Sulayman, his father and his grandfather belong to a group of very important people. They are not border police guards, but they help to keep an eye on the border.

They report to the police anything they think is unusual or suspicious along the border of China and Afghanistan.

Photo taken on June 4, 2016 shows a river merged by two streams of different colors inside the Wakhan Corridor in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. (Xinhua/Zhao Ge)

At the other end of the Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan is in chaos - two very different worlds separated by the border.
CHANGSHA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Four people were killed and another four remain missing after rainstorms across south China's Hunan Province on Tuesday and Wednesday, the provincial authorities announced Thursday.

The heavy rains have affected more than 1.06 million people in 10 cities and prefectures, and 51 counties across the province. About 144,600 people have been relocated, and 59,300 hectares of crops and 1,951 houses destroyed. Economic losses are estimated to be around 756 million yuan (114.8 U.S. dollars).

Heavy rain also hit east China's Jiangxi Province, and the southern provinces of Guizhou and Guangdong provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region this week, causing floods and landslides.
By Zhang Bo, Matt Burgess

SYDNEY, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Kickbacks to Australian tour guides are still continuing despite a raft of measures by local authorities to counter the practice, causing Chinese tourists to pay up to three times more than the average cost of some goods.

Though Australia's tourism marketing has been focusing on the independent traveller, particularly from China's emerging middle class, inbound tour groups still account for over one-third of the more than 1 million Chinese visitors who arrived on Australia's shores in 2015.

Australia was granted "Approved Destination Status" (ADS) in 1999, allowing guided Chinese tour groups to travel to the "land down under." What followed was wide spread rip-offs by Australian operators and tour guides on the visitor, causing Australian authorities in January 2015 to force all in-bound tour guides who operate under the ADS scheme to comply with a code of business standards and ethics.

"Under the code, tourists must be informed where shops are operating commission shopping arrangements, and they must be taken to competitive non-commissioned shops for equal shopping time," an Austrade spokesperson told Xinhua in a statement.

"All tour guides and inbound tour operators are required under the Code to keep records of all commissions received and to provide those records to Austrade upon request."

Austrade is the Australian agency responsible for ADS compliance.

A Xinhua investigation, however, has found some Australian travel agencies focusing on serving Chinese tourists are violating the code of conduct.

The investigation found some locally based Australian souvenir businesses in Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast have entered into arrangements agreeing only to sell products to the tour groups, giving a kickback to the tour guide.

"Some tour guides will tell this group's spending power before they arrive in the shop, the store's staff will use different marketing strategy, and they will change the price tag," a former staff member of Sydney International Duty Free store located near Star Casino in Pyrmont, told Xinhua. The staff member declined to be publicly identified.

Tourists interviewed have also told Xinhua that the tour guides have prevented them visiting other stores to compare prices, either by staying at locations away from shopping districts or not facilitating shopping at non-commissioned stores, a direct contravention of the ethical code.

"Some tour guides defame (Sydney's) China Town," store owner Xu Yaolin told Xinhua.

"(Tour guides) call that area's security bad and the store's price high.

"We suffer a lot of negative affects, some stores collapsed in the recent three years."

Sydney's China town has more than 10 gift and souvenir stores within a short distance of each other, allowing Chinese tourists to easily compare prices.

Australian authorities stress, however, offenders are being caught through the use of a compliance-monitoring agency.

"These activities include random checks on ADS tours, conducting mystery shopper operations, and regular visits to operators to ensure compliance with the Code," an Austrade spokesperson said, but did not provide further details.

Under the code, those sanctioned incur demerit points and if 10 accumulate within a 12-month period, the ADS approval is suspended. Repeat offenders will have their approval cancelled.

The largest difficulty however is complaints on unscrupulous tour guides ending up being filed with the tour operator themselves, rather than local Australian authorities. That's despite the code of conduct mandating all ADS itineraries in both English and Chinese include comprehensive information on consumer rights, where to make complaints and details for interpreter services.

"If I find the price is a little bit high, I will bear it, because I do not want this to make trouble for me and I do not know where I can complain in Australia," Liu, retired two years ago but declined to give her full name, told Xinhua.

"However, if the price is too much more expensive, I only can complain when I'm back in China."

China is Australia's most lucrative tourism market with expenditure up 45 percent to 8.3 billion Australian dollars (6.11 billion U.S. dollars) in the year to December 2015.

It seems that Australia should do more to protect Chinese tourists' interests. But the Australian Tourism Export Council (ATEC), the local peak body representing Australia's tourism export industry, would not respond to Xinhua's repeated requests for comment.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday reminded the United States to maintain the overall bilateral relationship, and urged it to refrain from interfering in China's domestic affairs, such as Tibet-related issues.

U.S. President Barack Obama held a closed-door meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama at the White House Wednesday.

"Tibet affairs are China's domestic affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told a daily news briefing.

Lu said the 14th Dalai Lama was not a purely religious figure, but a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion, and the essence of his "middle way" approach is "Tibet independence."

The meeting goes against the United States' acknowledgement that Tibet is an inseparable part of Chinese territory and its rejection of "Tibet independence" and anti-China separatist activities, Lu said.

Such a meeting constitutes interference into China's internal affairs and harms China-U.S. mutual trust and cooperation, Lu said.

It is reported that when meeting with the Dalai Lama, Obama emphasized his strong support for the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions.

The Chinese people are best qualified to speak on the situation in Tibet, Lu said, noting that Tibet has witnessed brilliant achievements in its economic and social development since its peaceful liberation.

"These facts won't be denied by anyone without political bias," he added.

"If one compares Tibet's religious and cultural condition before its peaceful liberation with the development after its peaceful liberation, anyone who has an objective attitude will draw the correct conclusion," Lu said.

The determination of the Chinese government and people to safeguard national sovereignty and unity is unshakable, Lu said, adding that any attempt to harm China's stability and unity will not succeed.

Related:

Commentary: Washington should stop playing "Tibet card"

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Disregarding the Chinese government's strong opposition, U.S. President Barack Obama met with the 14th Dalai Lama behind closed doors at the White House on Wednesday.
YANGON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar and India vowed on Thursday to cooperate in border security and stability, sources with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

The pledge came as Myanmar State Counselor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi met with Ajit Doval, visiting Advisor for National Security of India who is visiting Nay Pyi Taw as special envoy of the Indian prime minister.

Their discussions also covered development of long-term advantages from road connectivity between the two countries.

In June last year, there were clashes between the Indian army and an Indian rebel group, the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), near Myanmar-India border.

Myanmar army then assured India of not tolerating any rebel groups active on its soil.

Doval last visited Myanmar in June last year.
SEOUL, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Revenue among South Korean companies fell for eight straight quarters through the first quarter of this year due to sluggish exports that had rattled the export-driven economy, central bank data showed on Thursday.

Combined corporate revenue reduced 2.0 percent in the January-March quarter compared with a year earlier, according to a Bank of Korea (BOK) survey of 3,065 domestic companies subject to external audit. It was the eighth consecutive quarter of reduction since the second quarter of 2014.

The continued fall came as South Korea's exports, which account for about half of the economy, kept a downward trend for the longest period of 17 months.

Low crude oil prices led to a decline in drill ship orders for shipbuilders and a fall in revenue for oil refiners and chemical companies, resulting in reduced revenue for shipping firms amid weak demand for transport. The country's major shipbuilders and shippers are being under the government-led restructuring process.

A fall in global trade, caused by global slowdown, dragged on revenue especially among domestic exporters. It boosted worries about the prolongation of low growth trend of the South Korean economy.

Revenue among manufacturers declined 3.3 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, marking the faster fall compared with a 0.2 percent reduction among non-manufacturers.

Cheaper crude oil, which was the main source of revenue fall, improved corporate profitability as it reduced energy costs. The ratio of operating profit to revenue was 5.6 percent in the first quarter, up 0.4 percentage points from a year ago.

South Korean currency's weakness to the U.S. dollar also contributed to the enhanced profitability. The won/dollar exchange rate averaged 1,200.9 won per dollar during the quarter, up 9.1 percent from a year earlier.

The ratio among manufacturers was higher at 6.1 percent than 5.0 percent for non-manufacturers.
MANILA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Incoming Philippines' Armed Forces (AFP) chief Lt. Gen. Ricardo Visaya said on Thursday that he is open to the declaration of Martial Law not only in Sulu, but also in Basilan, to solve the Abu Sayyaf problem there.

Visaya, the outgoing commander of the AFP's Southern Luzon Command, said the military will conduct a study on the imposition of Martial Law in these areas after he assumes the military leadership on July 1.

"As far as I'm concerned, that is an option ... We will study the declaration of Martial Law in Jolo and Basilan because there appears to be a failure of governance (in these areas). Perhaps, that is one option that can be undertaken to establish order in Jolo and Basilan," said Visaya.

"We have seen the Abu Sayyaf carry out kidnappings for the past months and brought their victims to Jolo. Martial Law can be an answer to prevent the Abu Sayyaf from continuing their kidnapping activities," said Visaya.

A senior military official on Wednesday said there is a need to declare Martial Law in Sulu to solve the Abu Sayyaf problem. He said a military rule will also help in going after local government officials supporting the Abu Sayyaf.

The U.S. and the Philippines have both listed the Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organization for carrying out kidnappings, beheadings and bombings.
KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese leading banks and company on Thursday express their support for a flagship project in the Malaysian capital, which will also house the terminal of the proposed high speed rail linking Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

Bank of China, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank will join hands with HSBC and several leading local banks to provide funding to the investors of the Bandar Malaysia project, according to a memorandum of understanding signed here Thursday.

Located about 7 km from the Kuala Lumpur city center, Bandar Malaysia will serve as a future transport, business and commercial hub for Kuala Lumpur.

China Railway Group Limited (CREC), one of China's largest state-owned companies, owns 24 percent equity of the project.

The Malaysian government, through the finance ministry, owns the majority stake of the project.

"The ministry of finance in particular is proud to partner with CREC, a major international developer that is also a Chinese state-owned company", said Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who also holds the finance minister portfolio.

"This commitment by CREC is as a clear endorsement by China of its continued confidence in the strength and resilience of the Malaysian economy," he added.

Najib pointed out that the joint venture between Malaysia and China in the Bandar Malaysia project was "another indication of the strong and vibrant relations between the two countries."
SEOUL, June 16 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's Olympic committee upheld its decision on Thursday to ban former Olympic swimming champion Park Tae-hwan from competing at the Rio de Janeiro Games even though he finished an 18-month doping suspension in March.

The South Korean Olympic Committee reiterated that it will not change its rules that block athletes from the national team for an additional three years after the end of their doping suspensions.

Park's legal team said they would ask the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to immediately start an arbitration process after the Korean Olympic Committee rejected the swimmer's appeal.

"And if the KOC fails to respond to a decision by the CAS, we would file a lawsuit in South Korean court," Park's lawyers said in a statement.

Lee & Ko, a Seoul-based law firm representing Park, said the CAS will be able to reach a decision by early July, before the July 18 entry deadline for swimmers at the Rio Games.

The 26-year-old Park came off an 18-month ban in March after testing positive for testosterone in an out-of-competition doping test.

He won 400m freestyle gold and 200m freestyle silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and two silver medals at the 2012 London Olympics. He is the only South Korean to win an Olympic medal in swimming.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- After six decades of aerospace development, it is high time for China to embrace the new era of space economy, participants at a forum agreed Thursday.

During the first China Space Economic Forum, in Beijing on Thursday, government officials, aerospace scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs exchanged views on China's space economy developments.

While addressing the forum, Tian Yulong, chief engineer of the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, noted that much of China's space technology and infrastructure achievements were ready for commercial use-oriented development.

Official data shows that, currently, more than 2,000 kinds of aerospace technology in China are being used in various industries, and 880 kinds of new materials have been developed based on aerospace technology in recent years.

The government is accelerating cooperation with the military, discussing plans to share military space resources with enterprises to ensure government investment better benefits the public, said Tian, who is also general-secretary of China National Space Administration.

Concurring with Tian, Yu Dengyun from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation added that China must push ahead with further development of aerospace technology.

China has announced it will complete aerospace projects currently underway by around 2020, including manned space programs, lunar probes, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and the Gaofen observation satellite program. A Mars exploration program is scheduled to begin around 2020.

Satellite applications should be central to space economic development in China at present, and the country must strengthen its commercial use of domestic remote sensing satellites and provide better services to the public, said Yu.

Attendees of the forum agreed that China initiatives including "Internet Plus," "China Manufacturing 2025" and the "Belt and Road" initiative have driven development of China's space economy.

Moreover, a law on aerospace has been listed in China's legislation plan, and the central government has signed over 100 aerospace cooperation agreements with more than 30 countries, which will provide a favorable environment for space economic development in the country, Tian said.

Related:

China plans 5 new space science satellites

BEIJING, June 1 (Xinhua) -- China will put into space five new satellites within around five years as part of the country's fast-expanding space science program, a senior scientist said on Wednesday.

The five satellites, including a Sino-European joint mission, will focus on observation of solar activities and their impact on the Earth environment and space weather, analysis of water recycling and probe of black holes, according to Wu Ji, director of the National Space Science Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Full story

NASA views China as "potential partner" in civilian space

WASHINGTON, April 27 (Xinhua) -- U.S. space agency NASA views China as a "potential partner," not a threat, in the civilian space area, said its head Wednesday.




HANOI, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese clients check the features of a machinery brought by China's Yuchai Machinery Co. at the Vietnam exhibition session of the China-ASEAN Expo 2016 (CAEXPO 2016) in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, on June 16, 2016. The CAEXPO Vietnam Exhibition is held here from June 16 to June 18 with 166 Chinese enterprises from 13 provinces and regions displaying their products at some 330 stalls covering around 5,000 square meters. (Xinhua/Le Yanna)

HANOI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- "The China-ASEAN Expo (CAEXPO) Vietnam Exhibition 2016 will provide an opportunity for the businesses of Vietnam and China to strengthen cooperation and exchanges," said Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Do Thang Hai on Thursday.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the CAEXPO Vietnamese Exhibition in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, the Vietnamese official said that economic, trade and investment cooperation plays a very important role in Vietnam-China relations.

"The event is expected to further promote trade and investment between the two countries, increase competitiveness and production efficiency of businesses," Hai said.

As many as 166 Chinese enterprises from 13 cities and provinces are attending the CAEXPO Vietnamese Exhibition 2016 to showcase their products at some 330 stalls covering around 5,000 square meters.

The products on display comprise machinery, advanced technology, energy-linked equipment, automobiles and agricultural machinery, among others.

Chinese Ambassador to Vietnam Hong Xiaoyong said that through the exhibition, Vietnamese enterprises can approach more Chinese enterprises and familiarize themselves more with them, thus expanding practical cooperation.

"Through the exhibition, I want to learn more about Chinese enterprises in the science and technology area, so as I can support Vietnamese enterprises, especially the small and medium ones, and connect the two countries' businesses," Pham Ngoc Hieu, head of Design Technology Simulation and Prototyping Division from the National Institute of Patent and Technology Exploitation under the Ministry of Science and Technology, told Xinhua.

"I focus on areas of mechatronics, mechanical engineering, and automation, which are essential for Vietnam's supporting industry," Hieu said.

Hieu's job is to connect businesses together so that they can find cooperation opportunities.

"China has advanced and updated technology with competitiveness in human resources and prices. Therefore, the event is a good opportunity for cooperation between Vietnamese and Chinese enterprises," Hieu said.

"I hope that there will be more events like this to support Vietnam-China businesses," he added.

"Such an event is a huge opportunity which helps connect businesses," Dao Thanh Huong, Sales and Marketing assistant of a company related to electrical equipment, told Xinhua.

Huong has spent quite a long time talking with representatives of China's Guangxi Huanan Electric Co., Ltd. as she is seeking a partner providing electrical equipment.

"After talking with Chinese partners, we will sit down together in the near future for more discussions on cooperation opportunities," Huong said.

Apart from providing cooperation opportunities for businesses, the CAEXPO Vietnamese Exhibition 2016 also introduces Chinese brands to Vietnamese consumers.

Bui Duc Thinh, a 51-year-old Hanoi citizen, showed his interests in cars made by China's Dongfeng Liuzhou Motor.

"Chinese cars have a good design and appearance with nice interiors and are priced reasonably compared to others," Thinh told Xinhua, after reviewing Dongfeng Liuzhou Motor's lineup.

Dongfeng Liuzhou officially entered the Vietnamese market in 2004. Its trucks are among the most favored brands by Vietnamese customers, said Feng Jie, assistant general manager of Dongfeng Liuzhou.

Feng Jie told Xinhua that his company is expanding its business reach in Vietnam to include family cars. Several latest models of Dongfeng Liuzhou's family cars are being displayed at the exhibition, and have been garnering a great deal of attention of visitors.

"Through the exhibition, I can see and check many car models before buying. I will talk more with the company before buying their car," Thinh said.

Meanwhile, for Yuchai Machinery Company which has established a firm foothold in the Vietnamese market, attending the exhibition will help further promote its brand among local consumers, according to Tang Haidong, chief representative of Yuchai in Vietnam.

Entering the market here in 1997, Yuchai is currently holding around 70 percent of the market share in providing engines for under eight-ton trucks.

The CAEXPO Vietnamese Exhibition is scheduled to conclude on Saturday. The event is the first leg of the ASEAN Tour Exhibition within the 13th China-ASEAN Expo to be held in China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in September.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Supreme People's Court (SPC) of China on Thursday rejected the appeal of U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co. against Jiangsu-based Changzhou Watson Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. in a long-standing patent infringement case.

It also overturned a previous court ruling on patent infringement in favor of Eli Lilly, which ordered Changzhou Watson to pay Eli Lilly millions of yuan in compensation, after investigators concluded that "the alleged infringement does not fall into the scope of patent protection in the case."

This is the first time that SPC has designated technical investigators in a lawsuit to help clarify the technical details of the case.

Eli Lilly and Changzhou Watson have been locked in patent infringement disputes for over ten years over the latter's production of olanzapine, an anti-psychotic drug.

In 2003, Eli Lilly lodged a patent infringement litigation against Changzhou Watson and a lower Chinese court ruled in favor of Eli Lilly on grounds of Changzhou Watson's failure to meet the burden of proof.

In 2013, Eli Lilly sued Changzhou Watson again to seek economic compensation, and the latter was ordered to pay 3.5 million yuan (about 531,000 U.S. dollars).

Both Eli Lilly and Changzhou Watson challenged the ruling and appealed to the SPC.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China's central authorities has ordered the adoption of a legal counsel system at governments and Communist Party committees above the county-level as well as state-owned enterprises (SOE) before 2017, a major step to promote rule of law.

Such legal counsels, either hired from outside or converted from the previous public office lawyers within the government, will play a bigger role in government functions and SOE operations, according to a guideline released by the general offices of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council.

Government and Party organizations are urged to hear the opinions of legal counsels before making major decisions, involve them in the process of decision-making, formulation of major government policies and intra-Party rules, and the handling of some legal cases and emergency situations, said the guideline.

Legal counsels are also required to participate in negotiations involving the government or party organizations and deal with other legal matters.

Matters that are deemed illegal or in violation of regulations in the opinion of legal counsels should not proceed, said the guideline.

Legal counsels at SOEs will take part in the formulation of board rules, help review operational decisions and contracts and provide legal opinions on major moves, such as mergers and acquisitions, reorganization, going public and intellectual property protection.

Leading officials and executives of SOEs will be held accountable if failure to hear legal opinion leads to losses or adverse effects, it added.

The document is a follow-up to a decision released after the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, which said, "We will establish a universal system of legal counsel."

Li Mingzheng, an official with Legal Affairs Office of the State Council, said the move is important in building a clean, efficient and law-abiding government and in ensuring that SOEs preserve and increase state-owned assets and participate fairly in the market.

According to the document, lower-level governments can also hire legal counsels if they have a need. Public institutions should explore the system.

By 2020, a system of legal counsels, public office lawyers and corporate counsels commensurate with China's economic development and legal services should be established, it said.

Lyu Hongbing, vice chairman of All China Lawyers Association, said the guideline also set a high bar for lawyers, compelling them to on the one hand, help the government do its duty in accordance with the law, while on the other hand, serving the public good and justice.
DAMASCUS, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Several Syrian soldiers suffered suffocation and breathing difficulties when rebel groups attacked a government military position east of the capital Damascus, using unidentified nerve agent, state TV said Thursday.

The rebels attacked the military post in the eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus on Wednesday, the report said.

The rebels may have used Sarin in the attack, the report said. "Terrorist groups have repeatedly used poisonous gas, including Sarin, in several Syrian areas... to cover for their losses at the hands of the Syrian army."

Further details surrounding the attack Wednesday are still forthcoming.

The TV report said rebels managed to smuggle components of poisonous gas producing equipment into the country from neighboring Turkey.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has carried out several inspections in Syria and saw the destruction of Syria's chemical arsenal with the help of international powers.
JERUSALEM, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's ambassador to Israel, Hazem Khairat, on Thursday urged Israelis to reach a peace deal with Palestinians, cautioning that time is running out.

"A two-state solution is the only way to end the conflict," Khairat said during a rare public appearance in Israel. "We are running out of time and there are no alternatives."

He made his remarks during the annual Herzliya Conference in Herzliya near Tel Aviv.

"Losing hope not only subverts regional and international stability, but also encourages extremist organizations to spread more violence and hatred," he warned.

Khairat praised the recent French peace initiative as "a major initiative for regional peace," adding that Egypt regards the peace summit in Paris "as a step towards peace."

A meeting was convened on June 3 in Paris to prepare the comprehensive peace conference by the end of the year in order to resume negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians after the last round of talks reached an impasse in April 2014.

Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East War and has controlled it since then, despite international condemnation.

In May, Egypt stepped up its calls for a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, with President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi calling on both parties to take historic steps and sign a peace treaty.
ISLAMABAD, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan on Thursday invited Afghanistan for talks to deescalate the current tensions along a busiest border crossing that has caused casualties on both sides.

Border troops started clashes along the Torkham border at the weekend over the construction of a gate.

Pakistan military says it is building the gate some 40 meters inside its territory but Afghanistan argues Pakistan cannot build the gate as "status of the border is disputed."

Guns are silent as both sides have now declared ceasefire but tensions persist.

Pakistan Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz told the parliament on Thursday that he has invited Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani and National Security Adviser Hanif Atmar to visit Islamabad to find out solution to the issue.

Afghan ambassador in Islamabad Omar Zakhilwal discussed the proposal of high level talks when he met with senior Pakistani military officials on Wednesday.

"To break the current tension and show that we were on to resolving this peacefully, a conversation at the leadership level was needed." Ambassador Zakhilwal said in a statement.

He also called for an immediate high level Joint Pak-Afghan military coordination meeting to resolve this issue expeditiously and amicably.

Aziz defended Pakistan's plan to secure the border to check the infiltration of the militants and curb drug smuggling.

"Pakistan believes that effective border management is a key to enhancing security and checking infiltration of terrorists along Pakistan, Afghanistan border," he said in the National Assembly or Lower House of the parliament in a policy statement.

The Adviser reaffirmed Pakistan's commitment to completing construction work at Torkham as this is a part of the plan to strengthen border controls and regulate movements across border.

"Effective border management is vital for enhancing security of both Pakistan and Afghanistan," Aziz further said, adding "it is also important for efforts for combating threat of terrorism as unregulated movement provide opportunity for infiltration of terrorists and smugglers across the border, which is not in the interest of the two countries."

Pakistan and Afghanistan have nearly 2,600 km border, mostly porous, and the militants take advantage of the loose control.

In order to strengthen monitoring, Pakistan introduced a new mechanism that has made it obligatory for every Afghan to carry passport and visa to enter Pakistan from June 1.

People living near the borer areas on both sides earlier moved across the border without travel documents.


BRUSSELS, Feb. 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister David Cameron addresses a press conference at the end of an extraordinary two-day EU summit at the European Council in Brussels, Belgium, Feb.19, 2016. European leaders on Friday night reached a deal on British Prime Minister David Cameron's reforms after marathon talks, President of the European Council Donald Tusk tweeted. (Xinhua file photo/Ye Pingfan)

BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Europe seems to be experiencing a "referendum fever," starting with the "Brexit" on June 23, followed by the constitutional amendment referendum in Italy and refugee quota referendum in Hungary.

On the surface, referenda are the most formidable tool of democracy, giving voters a direct say on political, economic and social issues. However, behind the "referendum frenzy" in Europe, there are evolutions that may harm democracy.

MISAPPLICATION OF REFERENDUM

Looking back on the referenda held in European countries in the past few years, it is easy to find that the democratic tool has been frequently misapplied.

First of all, referenda, created to compensate and remedy the representative democracy, have been applied as a political tool to exert or fend off pressure.

Taking Greece's referendum during its debt crisis as an example, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras aimed to grasp more negotiation room from the Europe Union and international creditors by extortion with Greek public will.

Second, referenda have become a channel for people to air grievances, rather than being decisive in major issues.

The Dutch referendum, which was originally on the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, turned into a protest vote against the EU by euroskeptics.

Third, referenda on occasions cover the essence of problems and postpone the outbreak of crises, making situation more complicated.

BREAKING PROMISE, SHIRKING RESPONSIBILITY

Frequent referenda show increased disappointment of the public at political elite, said Cui Hongjian, a senior research fellow on European studies at the China Institute of International Studies.

Referenda, supposed to get citizens engaged in politics and make governments responsive, are also a double-edged sword, Cui said, as they seem to attract the broadest public will thus bring about authority and legitimacy, but in fact they are reflection of shirking responsibility by some politicians.

Critics argue that voters are forced to make decisions on complex issues about which they may not have complete knowledge. Referenda tend to create the illusion that complex issues can be presented in simple terms, and the vote is often reduced to a binary "yes" or "no."

FROZEN, REVERSED EU INTEGRATION

Given the current situation in Europe, the spate of referenda may continue and cause political and social impact.

First of all, inspired by Brexit, many European countries are expected to hold referenda to gain political ground domestically and force the EU to compromise.

Second, referendum makes "reaching consensus" increasingly hard, even exacerbates contradiction and creates breeding ground for populism.

Stefan Lehne, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, said "it's almost impossible now to see how 28 states would ratify an EU reform treaty."

In the Brexit case, British Prime Minister David Cameron said the upcoming referendum can solve Britain's "EU problem." However, the referendum in fact strengthens opposition and exacerbates social division.

Related:

Brexit to create instability, uncertainty: Irish PM

DUBLIN, June 13 (Xinhua) -- Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said on Monday a Brexit would create instability and uncertainty, as well as the likely return of border checkpoints between Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

"Stability and certainty are absolutely essential to successful small open economies," Kenny said in a speech at Ulster University, Belfast, referring to how this would affect the relationship between Northern Ireland -- a part of Britain -- and the Repbulic of Ireland. Full story

Brexit could start destruction of EU, western political civilization: EU President

BERLIN, June 13 (Xinhua) -- A Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the European Union, but also of the entire western political civilization, warned European Council President Donald Tusk in an interview published on Monday.

Ten days ahead of a referendum in Britain on the country's membership of EU, Tusk told German Bild newspaper that it would be dangerous if the British people decide to leave the union. Full story

British PM denounces Brexit's "complete untruths" in hastily called briefing

LONDON, June 7 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister David Cameron held an unscheduled press conference Tuesday to denounce what he described as "complete untruths" from Brexit campaigners.
KABUL, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani met with visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on bilateral relations Thursday, said Arg, the country's Presidential Palace.

"The two sides discussed and exchanged views on expansion of relations between Afghanistan and Turkey during the meeting held in Arg on Thursday morning," a statement from the Presidential Palace said.

Cavusoglu has reiterated Turkey's continued support to Afghanistan, saying that Turkey will support Afghanistan's position during upcoming international conferences on Afghanistan, the statement added.

The two conferences to be held in Warsaw in July and Brussels in October will focus on Afghanistan's security and development respectively.

The Turkish top diplomat also said his country will continue to play a constructive role in Afghan government's push to realize peace, security and stability in Afghanistan and in the region, the statement noted.

Welcoming Cavusoglu and the visiting delegation, President Ghani thanked on behalf of the Afghan government and the Afghan people for Turkey's help and cooperation in various fields in Afghanistan particularly Turkey's military assistance within the framework of NATO-led Resolute Support (RS) mission.

The NATO and U.S. forces completed their combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 after 13 years of military presence in the country.

Nearly 13,000 foreign forces are currently stationed in Afghanistan to help Afghan forces for training advising and backing Afghan forces in fight against insurgents.

About 520 Turkish soldiers have been serving in the central Asian country within the RS mission.
HANOI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A CASA aircraft with eight people aboard lost contact early on Thursday afternoon while carrying out rescue mission in waters off northern Hai Phong city in Vietnam, an official from the National Committee for Search and Rescue told Xinhua on phone.

The aircraft was carrying out searching mission for the SU-30 fighter jet which went missing Tuesday morning.
LONDON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- British Labour MP Jo Cox was shot in West Yorkshire Thursday afternoon, local media reported.

A witness said that the politician was injured in the attack, which took place in Birstall, a village in West Yorkshire, according to the report.

The report said Cox was shot while at her advice surgery in Birstall.

"We are aware of a serious incident ongoing in Birstall. Details will be released in the press in due course," West Yorkshire police said in a tweet.
Yu Yong (L F), president of China's HeSteel Group (HBIS), and Serbian Economy Minister Zeljko Sertic show the contract after the signing ceremony in Smederevo, Serbia, April 18, 2016. Under the contract, HBIS will buy the Smederevo Steel Mill of Serbia at 46 million euros. (Xinhua/Wang Huijuan)

by Nemanja Cabric and Han Jianjun

SMEDEREVO, Serbia, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The Smederevo steel mill stands a good chance to recover and develop after it was sold to Chinese HeSteel Group (HBIS), experts and officials said.

Ljubisa Obradovic, secretary of the association of the metal-electro industry, metal mines and metallurgy at the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, said the Serbian metal-electro industry gained a lot by the arrival of Hesteel.

"The arrival of Hesteel to Serbia opens huge potential in the metal-electro industry and mining in the sense that the level of production will double," he told Xinhua.

Slobodanka Susa, director of the Serbian Association of the Steel Industry, said the steel mill is an important part of the "infrastructure of the Serbian economy" and new investors will need money to improve technology and offer a wider range of products.

"The HBIS is one of the biggest in the world and have the possibility to have cheap raw material to produce steel in Smedervo and that is most important for continuity of production in Smederevo," she said.

She explained that the continuation of production in Smederevo means regular delivery to domestic markets and to exports. For Serbia it means it can expect an increase in economic activity.

Photo taken on April 18, 2016 shows the plant area of Smederevo steel mill in Smederevo, Serbia. The contract for the sale of Serbia's sole steel mill was signed between representatives of Serbian government and Chinese HeSteel Group (HBIS) at a ceremony in the city of Smederevo on Monday. (Xinhua/Wang Huijuan)

The Smederevo steel mill was founded in 1913. After it went bankrupt in 2003, it was sold to U.S. Steel for the price of 23 million U.S. dollars.

Serbia became the owner of the steel mill once again in 2012 when the investor from the United States withdrew and the country bought the factory back for 1 U.S. dollar. After the departure of U.S. steel, the country was looking for a new investor, while the company's 5,000 workers were sent on paid leave until April 2013 when the furnaces of the steel mill in Smederevo started operating again with limited capacity.

HBIS was the sole competitor at a tender which finished on April 6, and bought the factory for 46 million euros (51.6 million U.S. dollars).

Many workers were glad as the takeover of the steel mill ended years of uncertainty.

For Goran Gigic, a 38-year-old shift manager, the steel mill will gain a lot by becoming a part of Hesteel.

"I expect that production will increase, new technologies implemented, to work more and live better from our work," Gigic said.

Ivan Matkovic, 37, a deputy shift manager who spent 16 years in Smederevo, hoped the new owner will increase financial investments.

"We hope for better times, and that we continue to work professionally as always," he said.
HANGZHOU, June 16 (Xinhua) -- "If you hear Zhejiang or Wenzhou dialect in Milan, Italy, you should not be surprised," said Zhejiang businessman Lou Dengxin.

Over half of the population of Lou's hometown in Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province have had started businesses overseas.

What began as a way of making a living far from their poor mountainous home, former Wenzhou residents have gradually built a reputation for diligence and integrity. The entrepreneurs have become fully-fledged members of their local communities and an economic force to be reckoned with.

MIX WITH LOCALS

Zhou Xiaoyan is one of the most successful of Zhejiang's entrepreneurs in Italy. She moved there in 1990 and now owns the Milanhuaxia Group, a communications conglomerate whose diverse business interests include housing, tourism and design.

Chinese companies in Italy have traditionally been associated with restaurants, bars and hotels, but Zhou's business has moved out of this comfort zone.

Milanhuaxia Group's media center hosted several events during the 2015 Milan World Expo, including an exhibition on Chinese charities and a celebration of traditional ink painting. Zhou has also hosted activities such as China-Europe fashion month.

Not merely doing business, Chinese entrepreneurs play their parts in local social welfare through charity work, said Zhou, and the Italian government has an open and welcoming attitude towards Chinese capital.

WIN-WIN

Wang Benshan is chair of the board of Zhejiang Rifa Precision Machinery. Half of the Zhejiang private listed company's operation has been in Italy since the purchase of two Italian digital machinery companies in 2014 to 2015.

The acquisition gave a big boost to Rifa's research and development capacity while Rifa's well-established sales network in China has helped the two Italian companies.

For the Italians, Zhejiang's businesses are seen as a positive force for creating jobs, and they pay their taxes.

BUILDING UP THE BRAND

According to Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences, there are over 2 million people from Zhejiang living in over 180 countries, most of whom run businesses there. Their assets are estimated at over 700 billion U.S. dollars.

In Italy for example, most of the 321,000 Chinese living there are from Zhejiang, and one in five owns a business.

Chen Zhengxi, chair of Italy Fansheng Import and Export, said that over the past 30 years, Zhejiang business people in Europe have started from nothing and have made their success mostly from importing Chinese products. Now as the economy slows in Europe, they are seeking ways to transform.

The success of Zhejiang's businesses lies in honesty and hard work, according to Qiu Yuanping, director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council.

The space for China-Europe business cooperation remains huge, with China's vast consumer market and Europe's brands.
LONDON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A man was arrested after a British Labour MP was shot in Birstall, West Yorkshire, local police confirmed Thursday.

West Yorkshire Police said they were called at 12:53 to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries.

The injured woman is reported to be Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen and a mother of two. She was shot in an attack and was witnessed lying bleeding on the pavement. The attack took place near the town's library where she held advice surgeries, according to local media.

Police said she is in a critical condition and has been sent to hospital, while a man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries.

"Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area," police said, but not revealing further details.

Police presence in the area has been increased as a reassurance to the community, police added.
LAGOS, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is well and will return to Nigeria on Sunday to resume work on Monday, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo said Thursday.

"I spoke with him yesterday (Wednesday) evening and I think it is just the best that he takes the weekend off. He will certainly be back on Sunday," Osinbajo told reporters in Abuja, the country's capital shortly before presiding over the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting.

The vice-president added that there was no point for his rushing back since the weekend was close by as the President needed to take the weekend off and resume work on Monday.

Osinbajo confirmed that President Buhari had fully recovered, when asked about the condition of health of the President.

"Mr President is in good condition, he is fine, and he is very well," he said.

"He should take a day or two off in London and rest a bit and come back hale and hearty on Sunday and be ready for work on Monday," Osinbajo added.

The Nigerian leader had informed the National Assembly of his medical condition and asked for 10 days off to attend to an ear infection in London.
HANOI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A CASA aircraft with nine people aboard lost contact early on Thursday afternoon while carrying out rescue mission in waters off northern Hai Phong city in Vietnam, an official from the National Committee for Search and Rescue told Xinhua on phone.

The number of nine people aboard has been confirmed by the committee, instead of the previous report of eight people.

The aircraft was carrying out searching mission for the SU-30 fighter jet which went missing Tuesday morning.

The CASA aircraft lost contact when it was flying over Bach Long Vi water area in Hai Phong (some 90 km east of capital Hanoi), the source told Xinhua, adding that searching work is underway.

Earlier on Tuesday morning, a Russian-made SU-30 fighter jet of Vietnam air forces with two pilots aboard disappeared from radar screen while carrying out a training mission offshore Vietnam's central Nghe An province, some 260 km south of capital Hanoi.

One of the two pilot was rescued by local fishermen on Wednesday while the other pilot remains missing.

According to the Ministry of Defense on its website, on Thursday, the searching area for the SU-30 and the missing pilot was extended. Equipment specialized for detecting plane's black box have been deployed.

A total of 1,564 people in navy, coast guard, border guard, air defense-air forces, Military Zone 4 and fishermen as well as 102 ships and five aircraft have been joining the search and rescue, which has stepped into the third day.

So far, there has no sign of human or plane, said the MoD.

Vietnam has bought as many as 32 Russian-made Su-30 fighter jets. This is the first made-public accident with the SU-30 fighters in Vietnam, according to local VNExpress online newspaper on Thursday.
JOHANNESBURG, June 16 (Xinhua) -- In commemorating the Youth Day, South African President Jacob Zuma on Thursday called on his fellow countrymen to assist in ridding the society of the social ills affecting the youth.

Zuma was addressing the country in Johannesburg in a Youth Day speech commemorating the 1976 Soweto Student Uprising, which helped end the apartheid system.

The Youth Day is commemorated in remembrance of the 1976 uprising by students who took to the streets against the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in schools.

The country uses Youth Day to give homage to the role the youth played in liberating the country and the role they continue to play in the country's socio-economic and political sphere.

Zuma called on the youth to use education to improve themselves.

Zuma said, "Education is an apex priority and receives the biggest chunk of the national budget. In paying tribute to the uprising in 1976, we urge our youth to make education their apex priority too. Nothing must distract you from obtaining education. We are looking up to you as the youth, to move South Africa forward, and that you will do, armed with the most powerful weapon of all, education."

The commemorations were being held under the theme - "Youth Moving South Africa Forward."

Zuma said the Youth Day will be used to reflect about the achievements, challenges and opportunities facing the South African youth.

To improve access to education, At least 80 percent of SA public schools are now no-fee schools and 9 million children are exempted from paying school fees. In this way the country is making progress with regards to free basic education for the poor and the working class, according to Zuma.

Poverty must not prevent a child from obtaining an education, said Zuma.

He also declared war on drugs which is affecting most of the South African youths.

"Another serious and very painful matter affecting our youth is the abuse of drugs and alcohol. Indications are that between 7.5 percent and 31 percent of South Africans have an alcohol problem or are at risk. We have a duty to protect our children. The abuse of drugs is threatening to destroy many families. We appeal to our youth to say NO to drugs."

Zuma encouraged the South Africans to work with law enforcement agents to bring to book drug peddlers.

The youth, he said, should also assist in fighting child abuse and AIDS infection.

Zuma slammed those who resort to violence when expressing their grievances during student protests.

In the last month over 20 schools were burnt down in Limpopo province, Zuma said.

He said such hooliganism have no place in the country.

Zuma said, "Hooliganism and thuggery do not build nations. Such actions give an impression that we are going astray as a nation. There can be no justification for such violence in a country. We have access to government at three spheres to communicate our grievances peacefully."

"We live in a country where freedom of expression, association and of the media are enshrined in the Constitution, where we know we will not be shot and killed for staging a peaceful march to state our grievances," he added.

Seth Mazibuko, one of the student leaders during Soweto upring on June 16, 1976, told Xinhua that the youth should take a leaf of the past and tackle challenges facing them.

He encouraged the youth to fight drug abuse, unemployment, child pregnancy and burning of schools.

Popo Maja from the June 16 Foundation, challenged the South African youth to prioritize education, saying, "Let us not forget the contributions and sacrifices made by the students 40 years ago. We are calling on the young people to go to school, educate yourself and make the country the best that we all yearn for."

A variety of events were taking place across the country to mark the day.

Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa laid a wreath at a memorial centre for Hector Petersen who was shot dead by the Apartheid security agents during the Soweto uprising.

An interfaith prayer was also held in Pretoria for the country to overcome its challenges. The prayer consisted of the religions like Christian Faith, African Religion, African Independent Churches, Jewish Faith, Baha'i, Bhuddist, Hindu, Islam and Rastafarian.
LISBON, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Guo Jinlong (2nd L), a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, meets with Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (2nd R) in Lisbon, capital of Portugal, on June 14, 2016. Guo paid a three-day visit to Portugal heading a CPC delegation. (Xinhua/Zhang Liyun)

LISBON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Guo Jinlong has said here that China is willing to further strengthen mutual political trust, deepen pragmatic cooperation in economy and trade with Portugal in a bid to raise the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries to a higher level.

Guo, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, paid a three-day visit to Portugal heading a CPC delegation.

During his visit, which concluded on Thursday, Guo met with several top leaders such as Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Prime Minister Antonio Costa, Socialist Party President Carlos Cesar, and main opposition Social Democratic Party President Pedro Passos Coelho.

Guo said that at the present time, China and Portugal have seen frequent contacts and exchanges at a high level and great achievements have been made in cooperation in such domains as economy and trade, investment, personnel and culture exchange.

The two countries have also had timely communication and coordination in international affairs, he added.

Guo said that China attaches great importance to the development of ties with Portugal and is willing to further strengthen mutual political trust, deepen pragmatic cooperation in economy and trade with Portugal, foster growth in the sectors of tourism, sea and third-party cooperation.

Guo spoke highly of the position of Portugal's two main parties to implement a friendly policy towards China.

He also expressed his hope that political parties in the two countries would continue to maintain the momentum of exchanges to further enhance mutual understanding and trust, value the concern of each other's core interests and safeguard and promote the healthy and steady development in China-Portugal ties as well as that of China-EU as a whole.

For his part, Portuguese President Rebelo de Sousa appreciated the achievement China has made in its development and hoped that the two countries would further strengthen political exchange, and expand cooperation in fields such as economy, trade, investment, tourism, education, and science and technology.

He also said that Portugal would continue to promote the development of ties between Europe and China.

Both Costa and Passos Coelho said that Portuguese political parties would continue to enhance exchanges and cooperation with the CPC and jointly promote mutual political trust between the two countries and friendship between the two peoples.

During his visit, Guo also inspected a program carried out by the Beijing Enterprises Water Group in Portugal and attended the Night of Beijing concert in Lisbon.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers a speech at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in Santiago, Chile, May 25, 2015. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

SANTIAGO, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America and the Caribbean fell 9.1 percent in 2015 to reach 179.1 billion U.S. dollars, the lowest figure since 2010, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) on Wednesday.

At the launch of its new report, "Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean 2016", the UN body linked this drop to low investment in mining and oil and gas, as well as an economic slowdown across the region, especially Brazil.

For 2016, the report said FDI could drop 8 percent if countries in the region do not seek out quality capital investments.

Alicia Barcena, ECLAC's executive secretary, told a press conference that "in the current global economy, FDI is linked to relevant actions in national and regional development strategies."

She added that countries "need to...diversify their economies, empower innovation, incorporate new technologies, and face the challenges of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals."

The drop in the region hit Brazil the hardest, with FDI falling 23 percent, or 75 billion U.S. dollars. However, Brazil remains the main destination of FDI, claiming 42 percent of the regional total.

Executive Vice President and Deputy General Manager of State Grid Corporation of China, Yang Qing (C), celebrates after won an auction for the procurement of the second transmission system of power generated by hidroelectric Belo Monte at BM&FBovespa Stock Market in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on July 17, 2015. (Xinhua/Rahel Patrasso)

In Mexico, the second-largest receiver, FDI rose by 18 percent to reach 30.285 billion U.S. dollars, the highest level in seven years. More investments in the manufacturing, automotive and telecommunication sectors helped reach this level.

However, the woes of the mining industry and its falling prices contributed to FDI falling in Colombia by 26 percent and in Chile by 8 percent.

ECLAC also highlighted important changes in FDI patterns over the last decade: the relevance of the extractive industries has fallen, the automotive sector is showing particular vigor, while telecommunications and renewable energies are growing. "Investments in renewable energies, and other environmental proposals, remain a pillar of ECLAC's proposal to develop the region...and make it a leader in productivity, energy and low-carbon consumption," emphasized Barcena.

The fall of FDI seen in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2015 contrasted with the huge increase of FDI from China.

According to China's Ministry of Commerce, Chinese direct non-financial investment in this region reached 21.46 billion U.S. dollars in 2015, up by 67 percent from 12.85 billion U.S. dollars in 2014.
LAGOS, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The unrest in oil-rich Niger Delta of Nigeria can only be solved with dialogue by parties involved, former Nigerian army General Abdulsalami Abubakar has said.

"All we need to do is to sit down on a round table and discuss these problems," Abubakar said in an interview with reporters on his 74th birthday in northern city of Minna Wednesday.

"Even if you fight a war and win, you must sit down with the people you conquered. The insecurity we are going through now is uncalled for," he added.

A militant group, the Niger Delta Avengers, has carried out several attacks on oil pipelines and installations in the Niger Delta region.

The group threatens to ground Nigeria's oil and gas production.

The group's operation had become more audacious in recent weeks as it continued to cripple Nigeria's oil production, demanding a sovereign nation of the Niger Delta people.

Abubakar decried a situation where the people are going through hardship because of the activities of militants.

He advised the avengers against vandalism, saying it would negatively affect the 13 percent derivation accruing to the region due to sharp decline in oil revenue.

Similarly, Udom Emmanuel, the governor of southeastern state of Akwa Ibom, has advised the government to dialogue with the Niger Delta Avengers to allow for sustainable peace and development in the region.

Emmanuel said the country's economy had been brutalized by the recent violence being experienced in the Niger Delta region.

President Muhammadu Buhari has said his government would engage leaders of the region on the way out of the crisis, and has ordered the military to cease fire.
HANOI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Thursday called on Vietnam and Thailand to step up their efforts to bring bilateral trade to 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.

At a reception for Thai Deputy Prime Minister Thanasak Patimaprakorn in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, the Vietnamese prime minister suggested the two countries, as the world's biggest rice exporters, partner with each other to keep rice prices beneficial to both sides' farmers, reported Vietnam's state-run news agency VNA.

A boost should be given to collaboration in trade and investment, Phuc said, citing opportunities awaiting Thai investors after Vietnam engages in new-generation free trade agreements.

Phuc proposed the two countries join hands in culture, national defense and security while strengthening bilateral ties in people-to-people exchanges.

The Vietnamese prime minister also urged the two countries to team up with other countries and organizations in the management and sustainable, effective use of Mekong River water resources, reported VNA.

For his part, the Thai deputy prime minister expressed his hope that the Vietnamese government will create favorable conditions for Thai businesses in the country, saying that the Thai government encourages local investors to run long-term and sustainable business operation in Vietnam.

Patimaprakorn conveyed Thai PM Prayuth Chan-ocha's invitation to Phuc to pay a visit to Thailand on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Vietnam and Thailand established diplomatic relations in August 1976.

Also on Thursday, the Thai deputy prime minister met with his Vietnamese counterpart Vu Duc Dam during which they shared the view that Vietnam and Thailand hold substantial potential for cooperation in economy, trade and investment that can bring bilateral trade to 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2020, reported VNA.

The Thai official is visiting Vietnam from Thursday to Sunday. Enditem
The government of the Czech Republic will provide 200 million euros ($224 million) to join a Chinese government fund aimed at promoting investment in Central and Eastern Europe, said a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by the Czech government and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China on Thursday.

According to the MOU, the Czech government will support investment operations of the fund in the Czech Republic, give necessary investment guidelines and recommend potential investment opportunities.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the nation's largest commercial lender by assets, will invest 1 billion euros to establish a China-Central and Eastern Europe financial holding company, which will initiate the establishment of the Central and Eastern Europe fund and several other funds.

The ICBC said the to-be-formed company will raise funds from the government of Central and Eastern European countries or their authorized institutions as well as from other markets. Its investments will target infrastructure construction and international production capacity cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, and its target markets of investment cover Central and Eastern Europe and other parts of the world that conform to the interests of China and these regions.

Last month, former ICBC chairman Jiang Jianqing, 63, resigned due to his age. Sources with knowledge of the matter said he may lead the preparation work for the establishment of the new fund.

Also on Thursday, the bank signed an MOU with the Czech government in Beijing to set up a branch in Prague to further strengthen bilateral financial cooperation.

The Czech Republic is China's second largest trading partner in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2015, bilateral trade between the two countries increased 7.8 percent from a year earlier to $20.7 billion.

Contact the writer at jiangxueqing@chinadaily.com.cn
ANKARA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Turkey is set to install more air defense systems in its southeastern province of Kilis to enhance security on the border with Syria, Hurriyet News reported Thursday.

The counter-mortar "Serhat" radar system and self-propelled "Korkut" air defense gun system, developed by the country's leading defense manufacturer Aselsan, will be installed at the Elbeyli border crossing in Kilis.

Two batteries of Aselsan's High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System will also be brought to Kilis alongside armed drones.

Meanwhile, efforts to seal off a 70-km strip of Turkey's border were nearing an end. According to reports, the related construction continues in the southeastern provinces of Kilis, Gaziantep, Hatay, Sanliurfa and Mardin.

The structure, 70 percent of which is now completed, will be five meters high, including four meters of concrete and one meter of razor wire.

The border will be monitored around the clock by unmanned bubbled surveillance systems dubbed "mini zeppelins," also developed by Aselsan.

Islamic State rocket attacks have claimed the lives of 21 since Jan. 18, including eight Syrians, in Kilis, while more than 80 people have been wounded.
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that it is the United States and its allies, not Russia, that are responsible for the delay in seeking a peaceful settlement of the Syria crisis.

The top Russian diplomat, who is here attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, made the remarks to refute a recent statement of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said that Washington was losing patience with Russia and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who are "creating obstacles" to a solution in the war-torn country.

"It is not correct to demonstrate impatience referring to us," said Lavrov.

He noted that it was "due to the position of our U.S. partners who are unable, or do not want to exert pressure on their allies in the region" that led to the failure of making all parties involved in the Syria settlement to sit at the negotiating table.

Turkey was not ready to admit Syrian Kurds, while some members of the opposition, which cooperate with the United States and their allies, refuse to treat other opposition groups as equals, he added.

Lavrov said that in February Kerry himself stressed the necessity for all groups territorially mixed with the Nusra Front and Islamic State terrorist groups to distance themselves from them and leave those zones.

However, the U.S. side is now saying that they are unable to remove the "good" opposition members from the positions held by the Nusra Front, and that they still need an additional two or three months, said the diplomat.

Related:

Russia, Syria defense ministers arrive in Iran for cooperation talks

TEHRAN, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Defense ministers of Russia and Syria arrived in Iran's capital Tehran on Thursday to discuss further cooperation.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu and Syrian Defense Minister Fahd Jassem al-Freij will attend a trilateral meeting at the official invitation of their Iranian counterpart Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan. Full story

U.S.-backed Syria fighters cut off routes to IS-held city near Turkey

DAMASCUS, June 9 (Xinhua) -- The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have cut off almost all the routes into the city of Manbej in northern Syria on the borders with Turkey, a monitor group reported on Thursday.

The SDF, a recently-formed group with the participation of Arab and Kurdish fighters and led by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), have reached only 800 meters from the last remaining road between Manbej and the IS-held city of Bab in northern Aleppo, after cutting off all the other routes between the city and other IS-held areas in Aleppo, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Full story

Russian, U.S. FMs discuss joint operations against terrorist groups in Syria

MOSCOW, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed over phone on Monday with his U.S. counterpart John Kerry about the possibility of conducting joint operations against terrorist groups in Syria.
BRUSSELS, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The main institutions of the European Union (EU) have agreed on a framework to stop trade in illegally mined materials used to finance armed conflicts, so-called conflict minerals, particularly in African countries.

During late-night negotiations Wednesday, the European Commission, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament reached a political understanding on a framework for an EU regulation to stop the practice.

"Many long hours of work have paid off. We now agree to put ambitious rules in place against conflict minerals, to root out this bloody trade," EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a short comment posted on Twitter after the negotiations on Wednesday.

The aim of the EU rule is for European companies to responsibly source materials such as tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, minerals typically used in the production of mobile phones, laptops, cars, industrial machinery and tooling industries, as well as in jewelry.

"The EU is committed to preventing international trade in minerals from financing warlords, criminals and human rights abusers," Lilianne Ploumen, the Dutch minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, said on Thursday.

"This political understanding on conflict minerals will help trade to work for peace and prosperity, in communities and areas around the globe affected by armed conflict," said Malmstrom.

The EU approach will build upon the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) due diligence guidance for responsible mineral sourcing, a statement released on Thursday said.

The agreed framework carries clear obligations for the critical "upstream" -- or raw materials -- part of the conflict minerals supply chain, including smelters and refiners.

According to the framework, the EU importers will have to check the origin of the relevant raw materials to see if they come from a conflict zone.

The vast majority of metals and minerals imported to the EU will fall under the law. But small volume importers will be exempt from these obligations, so as to avoid encumbering their businesses with unreasonable bureaucratic burdens.

Besides, recycled metals, existing EU stocks and by-products are also excluded from the regulation, the statement said.

The Dutch presidency has pledged to conclude the informal legislative negotiations before its term ends on July 1.

The regulation should be adopted in the coming months, the statement said.
BEIJING, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The People's Daily, mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, will carry a lengthy article on Friday on the bright prospects of cooperation between China and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visits to Serbia and Poland will be of "milestone significance" and is starting a new chapter for development of relations between China and CEE nations, according to the column piece.

It will also inject strong impetus for the development of China-Europe ties as a whole, the article said.

China and the CEE countries have a long history of cultural exchanges and they admire each other's culture, said the article.

People in China and the CEE fought together against the Fascists during the World War II. China sheltered more than 20,000 Jews from countries including Poland, while medical staff from Europe helped treat many Chinese soldiers, it mentioned.

Trade volume between China and CEE countries reached 56.2 billion U.S. dollar in 2015, a 28 percent increase from 2010. The Chinese investment in the 16 CEE countries has exceeded 5 billion U.S. dollars.

"It's a mode of '16+1>17'," the article said, adding the "16+1" cooperation accords to the interests of all and will benefit all people of these countries.

Along with the Belt and Road Initiative, the "16+1" cooperation is uploading a super engine for the train of China-CEE cooperation.

The China-CEE cooperation is an important, integral part of overall development of China-Europe relations, according to the article.

China's cooperation with CEE countries will contribute to Europe's integration and will promote a more balanced development among European countries, the piece said.

Related:

Spotlight: Xi's upcoming trip to CEE countries, Central Asia to boost Belt & Road Initiative

BEIJING, June 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's upcoming trip to Central and Eastern European Countries (CEE) and Central Asia from June 17 to 24 is expected to significantly boost the Belt and Road Initiative.

During his trip to CEE countries as well as Central Asia, two key regions under the framework of the initiative, Xi will pay state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan from June 17 to 22, and attend the 16th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent on June 23 and 24. Full story

Riga Guidelines for transport between China, CEE countries adopted

RIGA, May 17 (Xinhua) -- The first meeting of transport ministers from 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and China (16+1 format) was held here this Monday and Tuesday.

Discussions at the meeting are focusing on the development of transport and logistics operations between China and Europe. The first day of the meeting resulted in the adoption of the Riga Guidelines for transport. Full story

Chinese premier hails China-CEE business forum

BEIJING, May 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday sent a congratulatory message to a "16+1" business forum held in Sarajevo featuring cooperation between China and the 16 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.
KAMPALA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A soldier in the Ugandan capital of Kampala on Thursday killed seven people and injured one, a military spokesman said.

Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, the army spokesman told Xinhua by telephone that Sgt. Isaac Obua of military police Makindye carried out the gruesome act.

Ankunda said all the victims were women and children.

He said Obua who is alleged to have gone berserk was later killed by the military.

The motive of Obua's action is not yet known.

There have been several incidents where soldiers have killed civilians.

The last incident occurred in April this year where a soldier killed seven people in western Uganda after a quarrel. Enditem
BANGKOK, June 16 (Xinhua) --The Operation of the department of special investigation (DSI) to arrest the embattled abbot of the largest buddhism temple in Thailand ended amid resistance from his faithful followers Thursday afternoon.

The DSI arrived at the temple in the morning with a search warrant from the court to capture the abbot. Officials said over 600 policemen stood by to support the raid.

A total of 21,200 people, mostly the temple disciples, gathered in the temple, meditating and giving moral supports for the abbot, according to the source from the police.

They said the abbot was too sick to answer the DSI's summons. They sat in heavy rain, forming a human barrier to stop the officials from entering the gate.

The temple, known as the largest buddhism temple in the world with an area of 400,000 square meters, was implicated in embezzlement in the Klongchan Credit Union Cooperative(KCUK) scam since 2015, during which the ex-chairman of the KCUK had fraudulently authorized 878 cheques worth 11.37 billion baht for the temple and related organizations.

Phra Dhammachayo, the 72-year-old abbot of the temple, has landed in trouble now because he was found to have received several cheques from the ex-chairman of the KCUK before the embezzlement scandal was exposed.

The DSI has pursued charges of money laundering and acceptance of ill-gotten gains against the abbot. However, he has declined to answer DSI summons, claiming to be too sick.

The DSI said they believed the abbot was still in the temple though his exact whereabouts were unclear. They left the temple in the afternoon and would leave the failed search to the court, waiting for instructions for further action.

The temple issued a press release, claiming that the abbot will not turn himself in nor enter judicial processes until the nation has returned to normal conditions when full democracy returns.

The abbot has been wanted on an arrest warrant approved by the Criminal Court on charges of laundering money and receiving stolen property worth 1.2 billion baht since May 18.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in St. Petersburg, on June 16, 2016. (The Kremlin Photo)

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, June 16 (Xinhua) -- The 20th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum opened here Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin urging more global interaction to solve economic problems.

The three-day forum attracted over 10,000 participants, including government and business leaders.

"The global economy is increasingly impacted by political and social factors ... It is vital that we work together in our search for additional drivers of development," Putin said in a greeting read at the opening ceremony of the three-day forum.

The forum is a platform for sharing best practices and proposing solutions to a wide range of issues, he told the forum.

Putin went on urging every nation to fully make use of the industrial, scientific, technological and innovative potential, as well as "the potential of international integration structures."

"We must react more swiftly to the shifting demands of the market and to the looming transformation of the global technological landscape," Putin added.

Discussions at the forum would provide guidance and consensus for Russian and global economic development, and give impetus to all-round international cooperation, Putin said.

This time's gathering also involves sub-forums of regional and international organizations like the Group of 20 (G20), BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

During the G20 Business 20 Forum, experts, business leaders and officials from various countries discussed issues including infrastructure, employment, development of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as finance and investment.

At the warm-up of the upcoming G20 Summit, to be held in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou in September, Chinese Internet giant Alibaba's chairman Jack Ma promoted the initiative of establishing a new global e-commerce platform, the Electronic World Trade Platform or e-WTP.

Ma said that the e-WTP could become an "e-road" that better connects global SMEs through logistics and inclusive financing.

The digital trade route would lead to the establishment of various "e-hubs" in different countries, and improve the global environment for investment and economic development, Ma said.

Despite the economic focus of the forum, political issues were also brought up at the St. Petersburg forum themed "Capitalizing on the New Global Economic Reality," including Western sanctions against Russia.

Guests like United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker both called for dialogues between Western countries and Russia.

"We see countries breaking ties and building new walls or barriers ...We need to strengthen ties and build bridges instead of walls," Ban said.

Meanwhile, Juncker said the implementation of the Minsk deal, signed in February 2015 to settle the Ukraine crisis, is the only way to lift the sanctions against Russia, adding that dialogues should be maintained and bridges built.

The 20th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is widely regarded in Russia as a chance for the country to mend its ties with Western countries.

Juncker's visit is a good sign, but no breakthrough should be expected, said Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia's Federation Council, or the upper house of parliament.

Related:

Spotlight: Energy cooperation "backbone" of Russia-China economic ties

MOSCOW, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Energy cooperation has become the pillar of the Russia-China economic partnership, while bilateral interaction is expected to speed up in all economic fields.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich expressed the confidence that bilateral economic cooperation would continue to grow steadily in various fields. Full story

Russia faces more economic difficulties ahead, but to weather challenges: Russian PM

MOSCOW, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- Russia's economy faces new challenges this year due to low oil prices and economic sanctions, but it has all the necessary conditions to get out of the crisis, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday.
Fighters from forces aligned with Libya's new unity government prepare their weapons during a clearing operation of Zaafran area in Sirte, June 11, 2016. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

TRIPOLI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Ten Libyan presidential guards were killed on Thursday when an IS suicide bomb attack hit a police station located in the outskirts of Sirte, media office of the presidential guards announced.

The attack took place at dawn in the nearby town of Abo-Gren, the office said on its official Facebook page. The government forces also announced that the IS launched two car bomb attacks on Thursday, but the two bombs exploded before hitting the troops.

The government forces have been engaged in a violent war in the city of Sirte, some 450 km east the capital Tripoli, since May, which have killed and injured hundreds of the government forces.

The presidential guards are formed by the UN-backed unity government to fight against the IS.

The media office of the presidential guards said that they have controlled most of the city. The terrorist group has launched seven suicide bomb attacks on the government forces since Sunday.

Sirte, the hometown of the late leader Muammar Gaddafi, was dominated by the IS for over a year.
European Council President Donald Tusk gives a press conference at the end of an extraordinary two-day EU summit at the European Council in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 19, 2016. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan)

HELSINKI, June 16 (Xinhua) -- European Council President Donald Tusk said here Thursday the European Union (EU) would no doubt survive if Britain were to exit from the 28-member bloc, but the price would be high.

Tusk said preparations had been made for the alternative, but he was unwilling to provide any concrete details as to what actions the EU would take.

Tusk talked to journalists at a joint press conference with Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila. Later on Thursday he also met with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.

Referring to the recent opinion polls carried out in the UK, Tusk said it was "not easy to be optimistic" the vote would be to remain in the EU, but the view of the UK people must be respected.

Tusk said that besides the economic impact, political and geopolitical repercussions would be unpredictable at a time when there is a major need for unity.

Tusk said European history had shown that unity means strength. He defined an exit of the UK as a danger for both Britain and the whole western community.
GENEVA, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Senior Advisor to the UN Special Envoy for Syria Jan Egeland welcomed Thursday the headway made by humanitarian actors in reaching civilians trapped in besieged areas in Syria.

"After several really very bad weeks for humanitarian access in Syria, we have made progress of late in reaching the besieged areas," Egeland said after convening with humanitarian taskforce members in Geneva's Palais des Nations.

"It was very significant that we were able to reach both Darayya and Duma in recent days with a partial delivery of food and full delivery of other humanitarian items," he added.

An additional aid convoy is expected to reach the besieged town of Al-Waer, whose population has been without supplies for over three months.

This means that 16 out of the 18 besieged areas will have received life-saving assistance since relief operations kicked off in February this year, with the remaining two towns of Arbin and Zamalka located in rural Damascus scheduled to receive aid in the coming days.

In comparison, only two areas were reached over the course of last year.

The latest UN figures show that over 844,000 people living in both hard-to-reach and besieged locations in Syria have received assistance since the beginning of the year.

As fighting between warring factions shows no sign of abating, Egeland stressed more needed to be done to cater to all those in need of assistance.

"We're acutely aware that the access we have now can end tomorrow," he added.

The Norwegian diplomat welcomed the 48-hour ceasefire implemented Thursday in Syria's northern city of Aleppo.

He also called for more such truces to take effect in the country which has been at war since 2011. Enditem
German Chancellor Angela Merkel(R) talks with British Prime Minister David Cameron prior to family photo session during a two-day European Union leaders summit at the EU Council headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, March 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan)

BERLIN, June 16 (Xinhua)-- German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday reiterated her hope for Britain to stay in the EU, warning that the country's access to the European single market will be blocked if British people choose to leave in the referendum next week.

"Anything related to the domestic market and the common wellbeing of Great Britain and other European countries would, of course, not be available any more for the Great Britain." she told a press conference in Berlin.

The chancellor said Britain would have to negotiate as a third party country with the remaining EU member states if it leaves the bloc.

"I cannot imagine that this would be of any advantage."she said.

However, Merkel added that it was up to the British people to determine the country's future relations with the EU.

It was the latest remarks from Europe's biggest economy on the referendum scheduled for June 23 on Britain's membership of the EU.

On Wednesday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his French counterpart said they hoped that the British people would make the right decision next week.

"From our points of view, the only right decision is to stay in Europe," he said.
DUBLIN, June 16 (Xinhua) -- U.S. internet giant Google opened a new 150-million euro (168 million U.S. dollars) data center in west Dublin on Thursday, bringing its total investment in capital assets in Ireland to over 750 million euros.

The new two-storey data center in Clondalkin, which houses computers that run services such as the Google search engine, Gmail and Google Maps, was built alongside Google's existing data center which opened in 2012.

This is Google's second major data center investment in Ireland, and is the newest addition to Google's global fleet of energy-efficient cloud computing facilities.

The company employs 3,000 people directly and about 3,000 people in contracted positions, bringing the total employment at Google Ireland sites to 6,000, a 20 percent increase in the past year.

Speaking at the event, Ireland's Prime Minister Enda Kenny said the opening of this new data center opens a "new chapter" in Google's story in Ireland.

"With the number of people employed by Google now surpassing 6,000, the company is a fantastic leader within Ireland's digital community," Kenny said.

He said his government's priority is to make Ireland a more competitive location for new investment and job creation, adding that the ongoing development of Ireland's digital industry is a key part of that plan.

Google first arrived here in 2003. It is now one of the largest employers in Ireland. (1 euro = 1.12 U.S. dollars) Enditem
An aerial photo taken on Sept. 25, 2015 from a seaplane of Hainan Maritime Safety Administration shows cruise vessel Haixun 1103 heading to the Yacheng 13-1 drilling rig during a patrol in south China Sea. (Xinhua/Zhao Yingquan)

by Xinhua Writer Zhang Jianhua

LONDON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Two leading experts on international law in Britain have recently published two research papers, both concluding that an arbitral tribunal which allowed the South China Sea case initiated by the Philippines against China to go ahead is not convincing in many respects.

Antonios Tzanakopoulos, associate professor of public international law at the University of Oxford, and Chris Whomersley, a former deputy legal adviser to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, were the experts.

JURISDICTION QUESTIONABLE

In 2013, the Philippines unilaterally filed compulsory arbitration against China at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague with respect to the two sides' dispute in the South China Sea.

The dispute is obviously concerning sovereignty and maritime delimitation, which are beyond the stipulations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), according to a recent research paper by Tzanakopoulos originally published in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

"Both the Philippines and the Tribunal sought to carve out distinct and limited 'disputes' over which the Tribunal could make a decision," but this carving-out exercise "smacks of artificiality," he wrote.

China made a declaration in 2006 in accordance with Article 298 of the UNCLOS, making it clear that China would exclude disputes on maritime delimitation from compulsory arbitration.

The paper further elaborated: "It is difficult to see how questions of entitlement generated by maritime features are not inextricably intertwined with issues of delimitation as well as with issues of sovereignty over the relevant features."

Tzanakopoulos' analysis on the jurisdiction of the arbitral tribunal was echoed by Whomersley.

In his paper published last week by the Chinese Journal of International Law, an independent and peer-reviewed research journal, Whomersley wrote that "questions of territorial sovereignty, status of features and maritime delimitation are inextricably linked; to consider only one element out of these three is unreal and artificial, and worse it risks producing a distorted result."

The tribunal "failed to recognize that the fundamental dispute is about the sovereignty over the features in the South China Sea, and that the status of the features, such as whether they are low-tide elevations or 'rocks,' is a question which can only logically be answered once the sovereignty dispute has been resolved," Whomersley wrote. "To put it succinctly: the Tribunal should have got below the surface of the Philippines' claims, but it did not."

ESTOPPEL

In 2002, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the Philippines, signed the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), which stipulated that "the parties concerned undertake to resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means, without resorting to the threat or use of force, through friendly consultations and negotiations by sovereign states directly concerned."

Whomersley argued that "there is a strong case for saying that the Philippines was estopped from ignoring the declaration and proceeding to the institution of legal proceedings."

Tzanakopoulos, in his paper, observed that "the relevant provision therein regarding resolution of disputes by negotiation was drafted in clearly binding terms, stating that the parties 'undertake' to resolve disputes through friendly consultations."

ADMISSIBILITY

The South China Sea disputes involve many of the littoral states, and any determination by the tribunal may have the effect of rendering states other than the Philippines and China the "indispensable third parties," Tzanakopoulos wrote in his paper.

He argued that "the South China Sea disputes, as multilateral disputes, are not fit for determination in the context of a bilateral, adversarial proceeding between only two of the many disputing states."

POTENTIALLY DESTABILIZING

Whomersley, in his paper, also pointed to the potential damage to international relations by an unconvincing decision of the tribunal.

He warned "it is potentially destabilizing to the general course of international business that the Tribunal accepted that the Philippines could resile from the undertakings in a formal document like the Declaration (DOC)."

Tzanakopoulos also warned in his paper: "The complex and multilateral nature of the relevant disputes" in the South China Sea could lead to "a rather hard case" for the arbitration system.

"Hard cases make bad law, and it may be that the Annex VII Tribunal in the Philippines-China dispute has not taken this fully under advisement," he explained.

The scholar suggested that the best solution to these complex disputes is putting aside disputes and engaging in joint exploitation of the territory in the South China Sea, put forward by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping decades ago.

"Perhaps zones of cooperation will do much to allow the littoral states to enjoy the benefits of the South China Sea without all the fallout that adjudication inevitably produces in the face of strong objections," he concluded in his paper.
WASHINGTON, June 16 (Xinhua) -- China's major conservation projects to fix its worsening ecosystem that has come in the wake of the nation's economic boom are paying off, results from the first China ecosystem assessment (CEA) showed Thursday.

"The results of the CEA show that improving ecosystem services and economic growth can coexist," first author Zhiyun Ouyang, deputy director of the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua.

"It is possible to increase the provision of key ecosystem services with economic growth through intelligent policy design," Ouyang said.

The findings, published in the widely respected U.S. journal Science, came from a team of scientists led by Ouyang, Stanford University's Gretchen Daily, Stephen Polasky of the University of Minnesota and Jianguo Liu of the Michigan State University.

50-BILLION-DOLLAR INVESTMENT

Since the "reform and opening up" began in the late 1970s, China has succeeded in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but this feat, based largely on heavy industry and manufacturing, came at high environmental and public health costs, Ouyang said.

China first awoke to its ecological problems in 1998, when severe flooding along the Yangtze River, China's largest river, killed thousands of people, rendered 13.2 million homeless, and caused about 36 billion U.S. dollars in property damage.

The devastating flooding prompted creation around 2000 of the world's largest government-financed payment for ecosystem services programs: the Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP) and the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP).

By 2009, more than 120 million farmers in 32 million households have been enrolled in the SLCP alone, which compensates farmers for restoring forests and grassland.

In total, China poured in an impressive more than 50-billion-dollar investment in the two programs in roughly the first decade.

SIGNIFICANT SUCCESS

In order to determine the impact of these programs, the new study examined how China's ecosystem services -- food production, carbon sequestration, soil and water retention, sandstorm prevention, flood mitigation and biodiversity -- are doing, and what trends have emerged.

The assessment, the first of its kind in the nation, involved a staggering amount of data from all of mainland China, including from satellite images, field studies and historical records.

The results revealed that all ecosystem services evaluated over the decade from 2000 to 2010 increased, with the exception of habitat provision for biodiversity.

Food production had the largest increase (38.5 percent), followed by carbon sequestration (23.4 percent), soil retention (12.9 percent), flood mitigation (12.7 percent), sandstorm prevention (6.1 percent), and water retention (3.6 percent), whereas habitat provision showed a slight decrease of 3 percent.

These changes varied by region, with some areas experiencing decreases in certain ecosystem services, despite overall increases nationwide.

Collectively, priority areas such as Changbai Mountains, Loess Plateau and Nanling Mountains, accounted for a majority of ecosystem services provided, although they made up only 37 percent of the area of China.

"This study demonstrates that our conservation policies and measures including the NFCP and SLCP have achieved significant success, contributing to improvement in ecosystem services and ecological quality in China," said Ouyang.

But he was quick to point out that serious environmental challenges remain, including deteriorating air, soil and water pollution that has caused great concern in China.

CHINESE EXPERIENCE FOR OTHER COUNTRIES

Co-author Jianguo Liu, director of Michigan State University's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, said the findings indicate that effective government policies can play crucial roles in achieving global environmental sustainability and enhancing human well-being.

"It is hopeful that the experiences from increasing China's ecosystem services can help address China's enormous environmental challenges such as air pollution, water pollution, and resource shortages," Liu said in a statement.

"They may also offer useful insights into environmental and poverty problems in other parts of the world," he said.

A statement from Stanford University, which also took part in the study, echoed similar views, saying that China's massive efforts to restore forests and grassland have established itself as "a global environmental leader."

"China is providing a case study for the world, showing how with funding and government leadership, ecosystem services can be restored, while also improving people's livelihoods and creating greater security for businesses who hope to operate there," the Stanford statement added.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a session of the Valdai discussion club in St. Petersburg, Russia, on June 16, 2016. (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo)

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that it is the United States and its allies, not Russia, that are responsible for the delay in seeking a peaceful settlement of the Syria crisis.

The top Russian diplomat, who is here attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, made the remarks to refute a recent statement of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said that Washington was losing patience with Russia and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who are "creating obstacles" to a solution in the war-torn country.

"It is not correct to demonstrate impatience referring to us," said Lavrov.

He noted that it was "due to the position of our U.S. partners who are unable, or do not want to exert pressure on their allies in the region" that led to the failure of making all parties involved in the Syria settlement to sit at the negotiating table.

Turkey was not ready to admit Syrian Kurds, while some members of the opposition, which cooperate with the United States and their allies, refuse to treat other opposition groups as equals, he added.

Lavrov said that in February Kerry himself stressed the necessity for all groups territorially mixed with the Nusra Front and Islamic State terrorist groups to distance themselves from them and leave those zones.

However, the U.S. side is now saying that they are unable to remove the "good" opposition members from the positions held by the Nusra Front, and that they still need an additional two or three months, said the diplomat.
BELGRADE, June 16 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese Film Week kicked off Thursday in Serbia's capital Belgrade, seeking to boost cultural links and cooperation among filmmakers in the two countries.

The weeklong event will be held in the Yugoslav Film Archive, the Fountain Cinema in Belgrade and the Cultural Center of Novi Sad from Thursday to next Wednesday.

A total of six latest Chinese films, including To The Fore, Xuan Zang, and The Monkey King 2, are to be screened during the period.

The films touched upon various themes from ancient Chinese legends, folk arts, young people's dreams and adventures, to adaptations of Chinese literary classics. They covered a wide range of genres, including action, comedy, fantasy and documentary.

The Chinese Film Week is hosted by the Chinese Embassy in Serbia, China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) and the Serbian Ministry of Culture and Information, in partnership with China Radio International (CRI) and some leading Serbian cultural institutions.

More than 200 delegates from both countries attended the opening ceremony of the event on Thursday.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, CRI Director-General Wang Gengnian expressed the hope the Chinese Film Week could serve as a bridge linking China and Serbia, and boost the exchanges and cooperation between Chinese and Serbian filmmakers.

Sasa Mirkovic, Secretary of State for the Serbian Ministry of Culture and Information, said the Chinese Film Week will not only promote the development of film industries in both countries, but also help the Serbian people better understand Chinese history and culture.

He added that Serbia has held many Chinese film events in the past decade and hosting such activities has become a tradition in his country.
TAIYUAN, June 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Directors Tian Qinxin (R) and Yang Xiaoyang introduces rehearsal of their new opera The Long March in Beijing, capital of China, June 16, 2016. In order to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the victory of Red Army's Long March, National Centre for the Performing Arts invited domestic first-class artists including Yin Qing, Zou Jingzhi, Tian Qinxin and Yang Xiaoyang to constitute the creative group of opera The Long March. The opera will premier from July 1 to July 6. (Xinhua/Luo Xiaoguang)
Just show how we will be repaid

The meeting was held to deal with the re-election of directors who had been required to retire according to the bye-laws of the bank, accept the resignation of some who had resigned effective June 13, and elect directors who were eligible for re-election.

Darbasie was asked to respond to a challenge by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley to the local banking sector to support local manufacturers in the current recessionary period through which the country is passing. The Prime Minister issued the challenge in early June while delivering the feature address to the Presidents Dinner of the Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers Association.

Darbasie said once a proposal is made to the bank it works with the customer and once the project flows and cash flows are sure how the bank is going to be repaid, We are certainly willing to consider any project. She said the bank is also willing to accept that in the current period loan repayments might take a bit longer than in normal times.

We are willing to look at any project and if it means that the cash flows show that additional time is required but it means properly dimensioning those risk factors up front and continuing to stay in touch with the customer as things develop.
Enill: Govt had no choice but to go into HSF

There is an academic conversation that is taking place and there is a reality. An academic conversation is what we should have done.

The reality is this, we have a $23 billion deficit, we dont have mon ey. The Government correctly, at the time, said that we were going to do two things.

One was to protect the US dollar and in order to do that they would have to draw from the HSF, and draw down on the import cover that is now 12 months, and they want to bring it down to six months.

As far as the HSF is concerned they needed money for budgetary support and they were determined at the time that it was required to pay bills.

As far as I am concerned, that decision can be supported, Enill told reporters on Tuesday at the Collective Agreement Signing between the Eastern Credit Union and the Banking Insurance and General Workers Union (BI GWU) at Valpark Chinese Restaurant, Valsayn.

Asked whether the people should have been consulted before Government decided to take this sum of money from the countrys coffers, Enill said it was just a matter of how the move was interpreted.

The method by which the Government talks to the population is through the Parliament, so if there is a Parliament sitting and the minister did not talk about it after having done it, I would have said he was wrong.

In the circumstances he used the first opportunity he had to talk about it. My concern is do we have a choice, the answer is no. In 2016, 2017, 2018 we are challenged because the energy sector companies are not going to give us any revenues. That is as a result of the fiscal programme they are currently on, so we are going to have to find a way to survive and paying bills in my view, trumps everything. If that is how the fund was used, I can support that., Enill said.

He said within these three years, the energy companies would be operating in a fiscal regime where they were not going to be paying any money to the Government.

That is fundamentally different. It means that they are not going to be contributing to the revenue stream of the country, that is different.

We are going to have to figure out how we are going to survive, he said.

Enill said the previous Interim Stabilisation Fund was set up to deal with interim issues such as changes in the price of energy.

We changed it to the HSF and our thinking at the time was this.

When I looked at the Ryder Scott report in 2000 we had about 13 years of reserves. What that meant was that over a 13-year-period we should have been saving in the HSF, so that we would have accumulated financial assets that would earn income.

This income that is earned would replace energy revenues that may be reduced. Unfortunately the Government changed and that programme did not continue, so we find ourselves in a situation today where we dont have the kind of resources, in my view, that we should have in the fund, and therefore we are not earning the kind of money that we should be earning, Enill said.

He said Finance Minister Colm Imbert had available to him the ability to borrow and he was going to fund the deficits by borrowing.

I think on this occasion the reason he did not go there is because he has another problem which he has not talked about yet which is the US currency issue, so that the HSF could assist with that as well immediately and at the same time, deal with budget support, he said.

Conrad Enill
Improvements in TTs Financial Stability Report, but: Lingering questions

It is laudable to see emphasis placed on estimating household debt given the risk that can be faced by the financial system in a period of economic decline. Quite frankly, consumer debt at 25 percent of GDP, when compared internationally, does not suggest a big threat. Perhaps of greater importance is the Total Debt Servicing Ratio (TDSR) and the number of loan applicants who may in fact be operating at the 40 percent threshold. That may be far more relevant. Certainly we hope the stress test conducted would provide a level of comfort and there will be no surprises in say a few months time. In addition, it is pleasing that some

statement, though a very brief one on FATCA has been made; the threat posed to correspondent banking and the implications for international trade and every form of international financial transaction require perhaps more effort on the part of the bank, despite the fact they are not the competent authority. The report also commented on the FATF report, although it is a worrying piece since no problems appear to be identified although a slew of recommendations were forth coming. So what were the problems? Should we be understanding these? We need to understand these before developing solutions. We hope the Central Bank did not simply lift the recommendations from the FATF report but first assessed these to determine their relevance and enforceability in our environment.

The Central Bank indicates that The Financial Stability Report (FSR) reviews the performance of the financial sector, examines latest developments and discusses stability issues on the domestic, regional and international front. It goes on to indicate that the first edition was published in September 2008. It must be pointed out that this would have been less than four months before the then Governor and Minister of Finance announced the biggest financial collapse faced by the country. Did the Financial stability report pick this up? Isnt the Central Bank in its report to discuss stability issues; would the threat to the financial system be such an issue? Perhaps more fundamentally did the Central Bank in its regulatory work, research, and review of the many financial indicators pick up any problem? One suspects that research would have pointed to a problem and no alert was sounded. This is fundamental to the present FSR that is available. What are the issues that arise that we should be concerned about?

High on the agenda must be the state of the loan portfolio in the banking system. How at risk are these institutions and the percentage that maybe at default should our economy fail to stabilize in another year. The problem of correspondent banking has been stated. How exposed are institutions to the state? How many of our big financial institutions are holding government paper in excess of 30 percent, 40 percent of their total assets? Does the bank know this? Why arent we hearing about the sovereign risk faced by our institutions?

What about Petrotrins financial health? Do they have bonds with call options that, if the rating of the sovereign were to fall below investment grade, could trigger a call on the bonds? What would this mean to the country and to the financial system? How exposed are our financial institutions to Petrotrin? If the company has to repay the bond because of a sovereign downgrade would it be forced to remove its investments in companies in this country? Would the State be forced to intervene and what is the extent of assistance that will be required? How will we meet this need? Can financial firms deal with this scenario?

Out of curiosity, what if one of the big banks is affected- can the Deposit Insurance Corporation cover such a failure? Given the size of the fund (just over TT$2 billion) failure of none of the big banks can be dealt with using Deposit Insurance? Are we at risks here? Clearly the state will be called to intervene given the precedent that has been set by CLF and HCU intervention? Does the lack of a proper safety net for the country constitute a financial risk? Maybe we can hear about these sometime or else we may have to drink ourselves silly just because no one in authority seem to have a clue.
ASCU launches e-banking system

Commenting at the launch Joanne Edwards, General Manager of the Credit Union said, We live and function in a fast-paced and ever changing world, where ICT is now a major aspect of life. No doubt todays launch is a symbol of Aero Services keeping up that pace. She said the founders of Aero Services Credit Union, some 65 years plus ago, in all their vision for the company, could not have envisioned that technology would be where it is today. She then recalled her first cell phone back in 1998 and compared it to today, adding that the mobile phone is in use more than the line. Edwards then said, Online banking in todays financial environment is not a luxury, but rather another service mode to meet the needs of a progressive and savvy society.

Moreover, as we launch Aero ACCESS, we are now strategically placed and on even keel with a service mode long adopted by our large profit companies. She pointed out that a recent seminar which she attended, the research suggested that Credit Unions were for old people. But she saw the Credit Union as more like family, where people went to an office to meet and greet people you have not seen for while or even you favourite Customer Service Representative (CSR) for a chat.

On the other hand, said Edwards, Millennials, as they are called, are not in the main interested in coming to a building to conduct business or to stand in line before a cashier behind a cage. The truth is Aero Services, and I daresay all Credit Unions have to find ways to ensure that the existing younger members and those we would like to become members, are not left out. She said Aero Services ability to complete in cyber space the processes of making transfers, submitting loan applications, checking balances, getting statements and making letter requests, would go a long way in promoting convenience and an improved service experience for members with internet connection.

Addressing the gathering Collinsworth Howard, General Manager of Micro Software Designs (MSD), the company responsible for Aero Services jump into the world of IT said the Credit Unions like this one, (Aero Services) within this economy now faced increased competition from the more powerful financial institutions.

Howard said it was imperative for Credit Unions to effectively fuse traditional member service and Information Technology (IT) to deliver quality service to their members and increase member satisfaction. This would lead to improved member loyalty and ultimately a higher member retention rate, eventually resulting in increased profitability and improved competitiveness, he said.

He believed if Credit Unions adapted an integrated approach to system deployment.

Their level of efficiency and effectiveness will be improved.

Howard pointed out that Members will be afforded a level of service second to none, resulting in the stimulation of confidence, reliability and trust in the service delivery process, thus eventually eroding the dual loyalty mode. Howard said, We at MSD remain focussed and committed to providing quality technological solutions which will enable Aero Services Credit Union to continue the perpetuation of their noble service, by ensuring ICT continues to be fused with traditional member services, so as to maintain a member centric approach when services are delivered to their membership. Aero Services chairman Brian Matthew expressed his overall satisfaction over the development of the system, since he indicated that the team had worked feverishly on the programme since October las year and it was exciting to see it materialise Brent Gaspard, a member of the team did a short video presentation on how the system could be accessed and used saying a paperless system is hid greatest aim.
Cops seize 361 illegal firearms

Boxill noted that while some police divisions are yet to meet the 30 percent international detection of crime benchmark, others including Eastern, Southern and South Western Divisions have done so.

To date for 2016, the TT Police Service has removed off the nations streets 361 firearms, which represents a 25 percent increase in gun seizures for the comparative period, which stood at 289. At the end of 2015, police removed the largest overall total number of firearms off the streets, 691 which is 63 percent above the 425 seized in 2011 and 18 percent more than 2014, which stood at 585. Of the murders committed for 2016, 77 percent were committed with illegal firearms, Boxhill said.

The detection rate for serious crimes nationally is 22 percent, he said, and the target detection rate set by the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service for 2016, is 30 percent.

The international benchmark for the detection of serious crime is between 30 and 40 percent. Eastern Division has a detection rate of 40 percent; Southern 34 percent and South Western, 34 percent.

Boxill stated that compared with the period January 1 to June 11 of 2015, there was an overall reduction of seven percent in serious crimes. Speaking specifically on sexual offences, he noted there was a 73 percent decrease (395 reports against 105) this year, when compared with last year.
Police Cybercrime Unit investigates blackmail videos

The money was paid via wire transfers on more than one occasion to the woman who had a character name on Facebook.

Newsday understands that the TT Police Services Cybercrime Unit has been called in to assist officers of the Fraud Squad in finding the person who fleeced Ali of his cash. The woman is believed to be a resident of the United States of America. Officers are expected to view Facebook messages between Ali and the woman.

Newsday also understands that local financial institutions will be called in to assist in the investigation.

Ali, 42, a contractor and pilot who contested the 2015 General Election for the San Juan/ Barataria seat but lost, began a Facebook communication with the perpetrator of the blackmail recently. Newsday understands that there are several videos in which the woman, who is Caucasian, is captured undressing while playing with sex toys. In one of the video chats she is urging Ali to also undress.

The perpetrator coerced Ali to expose himself in a video chat live feed link. She then threatened to release the video images if he failed to pay a certain amount of cash. The father of five became afraid and began wire-transferring large sums of cash to the person who collected the money yet still released the video.

On Friday last, Ali went to the Fraud Squad and reported the blackmail to head of the Fraud Squad Snr Superintendent Totaram Dookhie. He then met with Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley and tendered his resignation as a Government Senator.

He has promised to reveal all at a press conference soon. Police sources said yesterday they believe there are other locals who may have been fleeced of cash by this same woman and are urging members of the public who can assist in this investigation to come forward.
Attempted murder suspect detained

However, a warrant has been issued for his arrest. According to reports, Reno Sampson, 42, was walking to his Cumana Village home last week Thursday at about 9 pm, when he was shot seven times by two men, known to him. Sampson was rushed to the Sangre Grande Hospital where remains warded in critical condition.

Newsday understands that a party of officers under Inspector Ken Lutchman carried out surveillance work for several days following the shooting and at about 1 am yesterday, officers went to an area in Cumana Village.

According to reports, officers led by Superintendent Phillip, Inspector Lutchman and including Sgt Mickie Williams, Cpl Jason Osuna, Cpl Shahid Khan, PC Yohaness Joseph, WPCs Linton, Stewart and Moses from the Sangre Grande CID, Eastern Division Task Force and Crime Suppression Unit (CSU) executed a search warrant at the first suspects home and effected the arrest.
Court Marshals rescue children

The injunction, which was filed by attorney Dayadai Harripaul at 5.45 pm on Tuesday was granted shortly after seven oclock that night by Justice Ricky Rahim in the San Fernando High Court.

The injunction, from the childrens 35-year-old mother revealed that the 32-year-old father allegedly sexually abused the eight-year-old girl when she was four and allegedly committed acts of violence against two other boys, who are his step-children. The childrens mother claimed in the injunction that four years ago she returned to her home in Barrackpore where she had been living in a common-law relationship with the man and found him in a comprising position with her four-year-old daughter.

She fled the house the next day and returned to her Mayo home with her five children.Two of the five children are for the suspect.

The mother also claimed in her affidavit that the man allegedly beat her elder son several times for eating additional food cooked by her and in another instance used a heater to burn the hand of another son because he could not tie his shoes. She also claimed in her affidavit that she was severely beaten during her six-year relationship with the man.

On Monday the woman claimed that she left the children at home with her father and was contacted by her eldest son who told her that the man went to her Mayo home and took possession of her eight-year-old daughter and threeyear- old son. She tried contacting the man but he refused to take her calls. In desperation she went to the Gasparillo police station and made a report, and when officers contacted the man he promised to return the children at about midday.

When he failed to do so the children returned to the Gasparillo police station and was told to go to the Barrackpore police station to make another report. At Barrackpore the frantic woman was told that she needed to get a court order to have the children return to her because the children were with their biological father.

Unable to cope with the situation the woman then turned to the child line and was told that she needed to secure the services of an attorney to have her children returned to her. It was at that time that the woman contacted attorney Harripaul who filed the injunction late Tuesday and was successful in having the injunction granted.

Rahim ruled that the children be returned to their mother forthwith and that the father be barred from making any contact with mother and children and also desist from calling, molesting or harassing them. At about 9.30 pm, on Tuesday, two Marshals of the High Court went to the Barrackpore home of the man and were met with verbal abuse from his relatives. However after the judges decision was read to him relatives handed over the children to the Marshals and the childrens mother.

A substantive motion was filed yesterday by Attorney Harripaul for the childrens mother to have sole custody of the children.

Newsday understands that the childrens mother will be seeking counselling for the children.
Problems to legislate on abortion

Noting statistics on teenage abortions that Attorney General Faris Al Rawi presented at yesterdays consultation at the Radisson Hotel on proposed reform of the marriage acts, Seebaran-Suite said a breakdown was needed of the classification of the 743 abortions conducted over 2011 to 2105 in public health institutions.

Which of those were spontaneous abortions, how many resulted from those who would have had unsafe abortions on the outside, and who, when they run into trouble went to public institutions for - perhaps a surgical procedure to complete the phenomenon? she queried.

Reading the statistics provided, she said, May give the erroneous impression that there are doctors in public institutions performing elective abortions.

I dont think that is so. The other issue to strike while the iron was hot was the issues the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transexual Intersexual (LGBTI) community, she said, in keeping with freedoms and rights enshrined in the Constitution.

We have been pressing Government to amend the EOC act to permit us to receive complaints of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation which the definition of sex in our act prohibits us from doing now, she said.

Seebaran-Suite, who was representing the EOC and the council of the Law Association of TT on the issue of raising the age of consent of marriage, said they support the general policy that the age of consent to marriage should be 18 years. However, she said, they are also aware that 16 years is another benchmark for children attaining certain rights, including the right to work.

As such, she said, there may also be valid exceptions between 16 and 18 years to marry.

This was in consonance, she said, with rights that have been proclaimed in many of the international conventions that TT has signed onto which also seek to give voice to the child, and seek not to criminalise sexual activity of emancipated minors.
PM meets with Admiral Kidd

A statement issued by the Office of the Prime Minister said Admiral Tidd previously served as the Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commanded US Naval Forces Southern Command and the US 4th Fleet. He commanded Carrier Strike Group 8 aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower during a combat deployment in support of coalition forces in Operation Enduring Freedom.

Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General and Legal Affairs Stuart Young, US Embassy Charg? dAffaires, political advisor Greg Marvil and US Army Colonel Claudia Carrizales were also present for the meeting. At a Peoples National Movement (PNM) public meeting in St Joseph on Tuesday night, Rowley thanked this countrys international partners for ensuring the safe passage of the TTS Nelson II from China to this country.
Underage marriage not unique to Hindus, Al-Rawi

I have seen an unfortunate singling out of the Hindu community, which I do not agree with, he said noting that the Hindu community has 7,000 years of history behind it and there has been a tendency to polarise the issue.

Certainly I dont agree that the head of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS) (Sat Maharaj) should be singled out, Al- Rawi said.

Addressing stakeholders at a consultation to reform the countrys four marriage acts and to bring the age of consent of marriage to 18 years, Al-Rawi said, I take absolutely no offence to somebody being a strong advocate for their beliefs. The Marriage Act allows for Christian and civil marriages below 18 years with consent, the Hindu Marriage Act provides for a girl to be married at 14 years and a boy at 18.

Under the Muslim marriage at a girl may be married at 12 years and a boy at 16, and under the Orisha Marriage a girl may be married at 16 years and a boy at 18.

Meanwhile, Pandit Seetahal Maharaj of the SDMS said he was glad that Al-Rawi addressed the issue of Hindu marriages, as it appeared in the press to be a Hindu issue, which it is not. The SDMS wanted to make the point that the religious issues were there, and when one speaks of the consanguinity laws, he said, certainly that is governed by Hindu law and not secular law. He noted that the Constitution recognised the supremacy of God.

From the SDMS point of view, he said, We continue to miss the train completely.

We continue to have the process in inverse order when talking about childrens issues.

Discussions were taking place on finding a solution without first understanding all the dimensions of the problems.

If we are serious about addressing childrens issues which really ought to be our key focus and not the marriage acts, he said, they need to be addressed in an integrated manner across all ministries, non-governmental organisations, community- based organisations, faith-based organisations, and individuals for a better understanding of all the dimensions of the problem qualitatively and quantitatively.

Then we will address issues without seeking to provide solutions to a problem we do not understand, he said.
Education Minister claims wastage at GATE

We have found that there is a large amount of wastage where GATE is concerned, Garcia revealed.

According to the minister, many of the students who access the programme, are not adhering to the GATE agreement and are engaged in other activities such as liming.

Many of the students do all sort of things contrary to the agreement and this is a cause of concern because the evidence is there that there is a large amount of wastage, he told reporters.

Garcia was speaking to reporters during a school tour at the Penal Secondary School.

In 2004 GATE was introduced by the Peoples National Movement (PNM) administration to cover 100 percent of tuition fees at the undergraduate level and 50 percent at the post graduate level.

In March, a Task Force team was appointed and began reviewing the programme. Garcia yesterday reiterated that the government spent approximately $650 million to fund the GATE programme for 2016.

You could understand that in these days of economic stringency we have to ensure that there is value for money, he said.

Garcia said the task force will submit their report to Cabinet and then any necessary changes would be implemented before the beginning of the academic year in September.

After the report is submitted, the findings would be made available to the national community.

But the minister said that he did not want to pre-empt any recommendations of the task force.

He further noted that in February during a national consultation on education a number of persons also aired similar concerns on the wastage in GATE.

This is based on discussions and actual evidence that we are having because our aim is to provide quality education and in the provision of quality education we have to ensure that every stakeholder plays his or her part including the students, he said.
Garcia wants denominational boards to step up

The law gives to the board the right of ownership and we dont want to take away from the boards, but there must be that corresponding responsibility, said Garcia.

The boards and churches must play their part in schools once they own the schools. Speaking during a tour at the Penal Secondary School yesterday, Garcia said that denominational boards and churches must assist with problems at school.

The government welcomes the involvement of the church in our schools and are grateful for the role the church plays in education over the decades, but certainly we cant expect the board to sit down and leave everything in the hands of government, he said.

I cannot be expected to out every fire and simply because we have other officials in the Ministry of Education, he stated.

National Parent Teacher Association (NPTA) president Zena Ramatali yesterday called on parents to get more involved in supporting their childrens education.

She said that there was a large percentage of parents absent from PTA meetings. She noted the lack of parental involvement in schools. The minister also visited the St. Dominics R.C Primary School and Iere High School
Independents raise IMPACS questions

In his contribution to debate on a motion to approve the Privileges and Immunities [CARICOM Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS) Order 2016 in the Senate, Mahabir observed that the Order conferred certain diplomatic privileges and immunities on members of IMPACS.

However he also noted that there are cases in other jurisdictions where, people with diplomatic immunity have in fact broken the law of the home territory. Against this background, Mahabir suggested, I think we need to give some consideration to individuals who are employees of this agency who may be in violation of TT law and who are going to be immune from prosecution. He asked Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi, who opened debate on the motion, Do we have an existing agreement with the home country, from which they have originated, that they will be prosecuted in their home country for a crime committed in TT? Speaking earlier in the debate, Independent Senator Ian Roach asked, What is the impact of IMPACS? Roach agreed with earlier observations from Opposition Senator Wade Mark about the status of the agency and its budget.

Roach asked what labour laws would be applicable for any TT nationals employed with IMPACS.

Roach said crime is no longer localised and intelligence gathering is key to any new dispensation to combat crime today.

He expressed optimism that IMPACS would help in this regard and his support for the motion.
What you need to know about the Octagon Art Festival on Sunday in Ames

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Are Russian recon planes in Syria really spying on American carrier groups?

(NationalSecurity.news) American defense analysts believe that a Russian submarine-hunter turned spy plane spotted Sunday over Syria may be reconnoitering U.S. Navy carrier strike groups operating in the Mediterranean Sea, sources told AMI Newswire.

Monday by AMI Newswire. The Russian Tu-142 Bear F, equipped with high-tech sensor packages, reportedly was filmed June 5 over Idlib, in northwest Syria near Aleppo. The story was reportedby AMI Newswire.

The Bear appearing in conjunction with the strike groups is no coincidence, a U.S. intelligence analyst told AMI. The analyst is not authorized to speak to the press, and commented on condition of anonymity. This is creating buzz, trust me.

The four-engine plane, based on the Soviet-era Tu-95 bomber design, reportedly was seen while one U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Group was preparing to hand off to another in the seas around Syria. The area falls within the Navys 6th Fleet area of operations.

The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group has been in the 6th Fleet area since transiting the Suez Canal on June 2. The Truman, an aircraft carrier, is accompanied by three destroyers: the USS Anzio, Gonzales, and Gravely, a 6th Fleet spokesman said.

The Truman will hand off to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which includes the flagship aircraft carrier and its accompanying ships.

Both strike groups entered the Mediterranean to wage combat flight sorties against ISIS, the 6th Fleet commander, Vice Adm. James Foggo III, said in a statement.

The groups would present an irresistible lure to the expanding Russian military, the intelligence source told AMI.

They want to see what we have and whats the latest.

AMI was not able to confirm whether the U.S. Navy has seen the aircraft that reportedly was filmed over Syria.

We have not received any reports but have seen the open source reporting, wrote Lt. Andrew DeGarmo, a 6th Fleet spokesman based in Naples, Italy.

An email sent directly to the commanding officer of the Truman, Capt. Ryan Scholl, went unanswered by Wednesday afternoon.

Analysts, meanwhile, continue to decode what the Tu-142s presence would signify.

If it is indeed a Bear F, the implication is, for the first time in a long time the Russians are conducting naval air reconnaissance over the eastern Mediterranean, said Frank Miller, a former senior U.S. defense official and special assistant to President George W. Bush. Miller is a Russia specialist with the Washington, D.C.-based Scowcroft Group, where he is a principal.

Who would the Russians be reconnoitering? The only ones there are the U.S. and our allies, Miller said.

Reporting by Susan Katz Keating, AMI Newswire

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Bolivia rejects totally unnecessary chicken donation from globalist Bill Gates

Bill Gates philanthropic efforts are usually greeted with near-universal praise, but a recent attempt by the US billionaire to donate 100,000 chickens to impoverished countries has ruffled some feathers. The leftist government of Bolivia, one of the nations reportedly earmarked to receive the poultry, has refused the donation, describing Gates gift as offensive.

(Article by James Vincent, republished from //www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952200/bill-gates-bolivia-chickens-refused)

He does not know Bolivias reality to think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce, said Cesar Cocarico, Bolivias minister of land and rural development, according to the Financial Times. Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia, and once he knows more, apologize to us.

Gates announced the chicken initiative  dubbed Coop Dreams  earlier this month as a partnership with Heifer International, a charity that aims to eradicate poverty by giving away livestock and agricultural training. The gift of 100,000 chickens is to be distributed among countries with high poverty levels: mostly nations in sub-Saharan Africa, but also including Bolivia, reports Reuters.

Its pretty clear to me that just about anyone whos living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens, wrote Gates in a blog post. In fact, if I were in their shoes, thats what I would do  I would raise chickens. He says that the animals are easy and inexpensive to raise, empower women (because chickens are small and stay close to home), and can help feed children in poor families.

But Bolivias government, led by anti-imperialist president Evo Morales, says the South American nation already produces 197 million chickens annually, and has the capacity to export 36 million. Bolivias pride is justified: the countrys economy has nearly tripled in size over the last decade, with its GDP per capita jumping from $1,200 in 2006 to $3,119 in 2015. The IMF predicts that Bolivias economy will grow by 3.8 percent in 2016, making it the best performer in South America.

Minister Cocarico told reporters in the countrys capital La Paz that Gates should inform himself that us Bolivians have a lot of production and do not need any gifted chicks in order to live, we have dignity. He added: It think its rude coming from a magnate that does not know Bolivias reality. Well, he certainly knows now.

Read more at: //www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952200/bill-gates-bolivia-chickens-refused

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Nawazuddin Siddiqui goes back to his roots

Bollywood, Thu, 16 Jun 2016 NI Wire

Mumbai: Nawazuddin Siddiqui is one actor who is unperturbed by his super stardom and continues to live a simple life like he did before becoming a star.

France is world's second largest agricultural exporter and follow highly advanced agricultural techniques. During his recent visit to Cannes, the actor befriended a few Frenchmen who happened to own farms in Nice and invited the actor for a tour. Nawaz learnt a new technique of irrigation during the tour.

He says, "Almost every kind of crop in France was being irrigated using this cost-effective and water efficient technique called center pivot irrigation". Nawaz instantly thought of applying this technique in his Village, and got a sample model fabricated and shipped to his village.

His native place Budhana falls under the dark zone where the water level is way below the alarming level and farming is becoming a challenging task with every passing day, thus water conservation is of utmost importance in this region.

In the traditional irrigation technique, water is sprinkled in the farms in random directions which may or may not meet the need of the crop, it also ends up wasting a lot of water which is not a feasible idea in dark zone regions. With central pivot irrigation, minimum water is used and crops are watered from top to bottom, which is the most ideal way of watering a crop (natural way like rains).

"The UP Government commissioned a research which marked Budhana in the `dark zone' given its sinking water levels. When I worked in the fields, we would manage to find water 80 feet below the ground and until four years ago, bore wells could pump water out of 110-120 feet, today, in Budhana, water is found 220 feet under the ground. It was challenging to explain the farmers the benefit of this technique. The best way to explain this technology to them was to ask them which is the best way to irrigate land. Everyone agreed that natural rainfall was the best option and this technique recreates the sprinkle of rainfall."

Nawaz, has grown sugarcane, rice and wheat in his farms and returns to inspect the progress of his harvest, whenever he gets time.
Investigating Agency Should Also Inquire Why Kejriwal Government Did Not Cancel The Agreement

New Delhi, Thu, 16 Jun 2016 NI Wire

Investigating Agency Should Also Inquire Why Kejriwal Government Did Not Cancel The Agreement With Private Companies Even After He Came to Know About the Truth

BJP DELEGATION DEMANDS THE LT. GOVERNOR TO INCLUDE THE NAME OF CHIEF MINISTER ARVIND KEJRIWAL IN THE FIR FOR SUPPRESSING THE CASE OF DJB TANKER SCAM

New Delhi, 15th June: A delegation of BJP Delhi Pradesh submitted a memorandum to the Lt. Governor Shri Najeeb Jung yesterday and requested him to order filing FIR and investigation by ACB or the CBI into the DJB Water Tanker Scam of Rs. 400 crores so that the accused persons may be arrested soon.

In its memorandum BJP has said that the Fact Finding Committee set up by the present Delhi Government had submitted its report with all the proofs to the Delhi Government in July, 2015 and the Water Minister Kapil Mishra had apprised about it to the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal 11 months ago. Shri Mishra had written a letter to the Chief Minister in this context and also submitted the report of the committee but the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal sat over the file for 11 months. Hence from legal point of view he is guilty of protecting the persons involved in the scam. Besides this it is also a matter of investigation that why Kejriwal Government did not cancel the agreement with Tanker Supply Companies?

Delhi BJP in its memorandum has demanded that it is matter of investigation that why the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal sat over the file related to the report on this scam for about 11 months. The investigation which will start now should have been started one year ago and perhaps all the guilty persons might have been sent to Jail. Hence Honble Lt. Governor should include the name of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in the FIR so that the investigation agency may find out the reason behind suppressing this case.

BJP Delegation included National Secretary Sardar R.P. Singh, LOP Shri Vijender Gupta, Pradesh General Secretary Shri Ramesh Bidhuri, Shri Ashish Sood, Smt. Rekha Gupta, Pradesh Vice President Shri Tilak Raj Kataria, Smt. Sikha Rai, Shri Jai Prakash, Shri Kuljeet Singh Chahal, Smt. Vishakha Shailani, Smt. Kiran Chaddha, MLAs Shri Om Prakash Sharma, Shri Jagdish Pradhan and Media Incharge Praveen Shankar Kapoor.
Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi praises Manju Lodha PARAMVIR book

New Delhi, Thu, 16 Jun 2016 NI Wire

Mrs. Manju Lodha's new book - PARAMVIR, beautifully captures the heroic deeds of our brave soldiers. This book revolves around the lives of the brave men who fought for their motherland, India on land, sea or air; during the Kargil War. The book comprise of twenty one such instances of bravery recounted by the friends and families of the brave hearts. Recently Manju Lodha presented PARAVIR book to our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, event held at PMO Office Delhi. Her book was praises by non-other than Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi and blessed her.

Our soldiers often go beyond the call of duty and show rare courage and determination against all odds. The book evokes feelings of patriotism through the simple yet powerful story telling abilities of its author. Mrs. Lodha coming from a patriotic family background, so she know how these men in uniform often downplay their deeds. Drawing out these stories from records and people and reconstructing them to tell an engaging story is a feat which Rachna has accomplished with flourish...

Paramvir Chakra is the highest military honour that is bestowed by the Indian President to those serving the military. So, far twenty one Paramvir Chakras have been awarded. Thus, this was an apt name for the book.

Mrs Lodha comments, It's great moment for me our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi praises my book and blessed me. Paramvir is very close to my Heart. My new book takes you into the hearts and minds of those who die so that we may live. Each story has been encapsulated after spending time with the family, friends and colleagues, which added a personal touch to each of the 21 stories, making them heartfelt memoirs.

Mrs Lodha's father-in-law was a freedom fighter and a true patriot at heart. Her husband too is in politics but with a patriotic fervour to his goals. Thus, patriotism has been instilled in her roots very deeply. She is credited with eleven other books, some of which are Bharat Bhagya Nirmata, Babul, Paati, Maa and Yaden. Paramvir would be launched in English.
It's raining much awaited Animation movies for families in 2016!

Animation movies, Thu, 16 Jun 2016 NI Wire

Families and youngster have a grand time at the cinema in 2016 with a plethora of much awaited animation movies coming to India!!

One of them is Disney-Pixar's much anticipated sequel Finding Dory, the sequel to the 2003 film Finding Nemo. Fans have been waiting since 2003 for the sequel and it will finally release this week.

Finding Dory focuses on the amnesiac character Dory, and explores her journey to be reunited with her family. The film takes place six months after the events of Finding Nemo and is set off the coast of California. Many characters from the first film, including Dory, Nemo, Marlin, Mr. Ray, Crush and Squirt, all appear in the sequel. Finding Dory features an all-star voice cast, welcoming Ellen DeGeneres (The Ellen DeGeneres Show) and Albert Brooks (This is 40) back to the sea as favorite fish Dory and Marlin. Ed O'Neill (Modern Family)lends his voice to septopus Hank, Kaitlin Olson (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) voices whale shark Destiny, and Ty Burrell (Modern Family)gives voice to beluga whale Bailey. Portraying Dory's parents Charlie and Jenny are Eugene Levy (Schitt's Creek) and Diane Keaton (Love the Coopers). And 12-year-old Hayden Rolence (Beta Persei) steps in to help bring Nemo to life.

With Disney-Pixar's FINDING DORY up for release this week, heres a quick look at the other movies up for release this year

1. Moana

A CG-animated feature film about an adventurous teenager who sails out on a daring mission to save her people. During her journey, Moana(voice of Auli'i Cravalho) meets the once-mighty demigod Maui (voice of Dwayne Johnson), who guides her in her quest to become a master wayfinder. Together, they sail across the open ocean on an action-packed voyage, encountering enormous monsters and impossible odds, and along the way, Moana fulfills the ancient quest of her ancestors and discovers the one thing she's always sought: her own identity. This film is touted to be the next Frozen' for Disney

Disney's Moana Teaser In Cinemas November 2016

Directed by the renowned filmmaking team of Ron Clements and John Musker (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Princess & the Frog) and produced by Osnat Shurer (Lifted, One Man Band), Moana sails into Indian theaters on Nov. 23, 2016.

2. The Secret Life Of Pets

The same minds that brought audiences Despicable Me back in 2010 are now at it again in a cute, family-friendly film that follows pet's lives when their owners are away. The Secret Life of Pets is about a single pet in particular, Max (Louis C.K.), as his life is turned upside down when his owner brings home a new pet, Duke (Eric Stonestreet). But the feud must turn into a friendship when abandoned pets begin an army meant to take revenge on all the happily owned pets.Dana Carvey, Bobby Moynihan, Ellie Kemper and Kevin Hart also lend their voices to the animated film.

3. Storks

They used to deliver babies, but now, storks are used to deliver packages all around the world via Cornerstore.com, a global Internet giant. Junior (Andy Samberg) is the top delivery stork until he accidently turns on the Baby Making Machine and produces an unauthorized child that he must then deliver before his boss finds out, quite possibly beginning the end of delivery packages and starting over an age-old tradition of delivering babies. To date, the only other known cast member is Kelsey Grammer. Still, the film is family-friendly and falls under comedy and adventure, making it an animated film to watch out for in 2016

4. Sausage Party

The film - which boasts a voice cast that includes Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig, and James Franco - follows one sausage on a journey of self-discovery, as he and his friends rush to make it back to their grocery store aisles in time for a new sale. It sounds ridiculous, but if nothing else, the film should offer an alternative to those squeaky-clean animated comedies.
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A series of cultural activities showcasing Chinese culture are being held on Thursday in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, ahead of President Xi Jinping's state visit.

Six bookstores in Belgrade are participating in a book fair to promote ancient and modern Chinese literature. The launch ceremony of the book fair, organized by China's State Council Information Office, was held at the Delfi bookstore in Belgrade.

Among the 105 volumes on display at the fair are ones featuring information on China's history and cultural heritage, as well as others featuring China's politics and economy. According to the organizers, the fair will last one month.

The Chinese movie week is also expected to kick off on Thursday in Belgrade, during which six movies will be shown between June 16 and 22.

Xi will pay state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan from June 17 to 22, the Foreign Ministry announced on Monday. Xi will also attend the 16th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tashkent, Uzbekistan on June 23 and 24.

On Tuesday, a similar book fair was also launched in Warsaw, capital of Poland, with about 100 bookstores across nine Polish cities taking part.

Many of the works featured are in English, but there are also 20 titles in Polish on display.

Guo Weimin, vice-minister of the State Council Information Office, said these books will help people better understand China, especially its modern politics, economy and culture.
Early trial data shows a drug developed using artificial intelligence can slow the growth of cancer in clinical trials.

The data, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference, showed some tumors shrank by around a quarter.

The compound will now be taken into more advanced trials.

Scientists said we were now in an explosive stage of merging advances in computing with medicine.

Spotting every difference between a cancerous and a healthy cell is beyond even the brightest human minds.

So the US biotechnology company Berg has been feeding as much data as its scientists could measure on the biochemistry of cells into a supercomputer.

The aim was to let an artificial intelligence suggest a way of switching a cancerous cell back to a healthy one.

It led to their first drug, named BPM31510, which tries to reverse the Warburg effect  the phenomenon in which cancerous cells change their energy supply.

Data from 85 patients showed signs the approach could kill tumors.

The trial was designed to test only for toxicity, but in one patient the tumor shrank by a 25%.

Dr Niven Narain, one of the founders of Berg, said it was still early days for the drug, but claimed supercomputing was the future of cancer.

He told the BBC News website: I think were at a very explosive stage, this fusion of biology with technology in helping us understand the basis of this disease more fundamentally.

Its going to allow us to make better decisions on how we develop drugs, to whom we give these drugs to so that were able to increase the survival outcome.
A British-Iranian woman arrested in Tehran in April has been accused of espionage and attempting to overthrow the country's leadership, according to a statement from Iran's Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday.

The Guard statement said that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested by the intelligence wing of the Revolutionary Guard at the Imam Khomeini worldwide airport in Tehran and subsequently transferred to Kerman in southeast Iran.

'We have also been supporting Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's family since we were first made aware of her arrest.

"She was a member of foreign companies and organisations that planned and carried out media and cyber projects with the intent of a soft overthrow of the holy Islamic Republic government", the Guards' statement said, according to Fars.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a charitable organisation coordinating training programmes for journalists around the world.

Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards released a statement on Wednesday accusing the 37-year-old of being the ringleader of a network of "hostile institutions" associated with foreign intelligence agencies.

She was alleged to have conducted "various missions. leading her criminal activities under the direction of media and intelligence services of foreign governments".

Iran does not recognise dual nationality and has regularly detained and prosecuted them.

It states that after her detention, she was transferred to the southern province of Kerman and held in solitary confinement. Ratcliffe described his wife as "not political. but someone with a honest moral core and great integrity".

Ratcliffe said the family had contact with Nazanin earlier this week and she'd been moved to Evin prison in Tehran.

Last month, Mr Ratcliffe said it was "hard to understand how a young mother and her small child on holiday could be considered an issue of national security".

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained while trying to fly out of the country with her toddler daughter, Gabriella, who remains in Iran with family after authorities seized her passport, according to Amnesty International.

Richard Ratcliffe, who is in the United Kingdom and needs a visa to travel to Iran, said: "If these are indeed the allegations, this is of course farcical". On Friday, he led a rally outside the Iranian embassy in London to press for her release. Her employer said she had "no dealing with Iran in her professional capacity".

Individuals At Risk Campaigns Manager Felix Jakens said: 'This case has all the hallmarks of another spurious, trumped-up case created to exert diplomatic pressure on a Western country - in this case Britain.

But at least two Iranian-Americans, businessman Siamak Namazi and his 80-year-old father, Baquer Namazi, remain in detention.

It added: "We have raised this case repeatedly and at the highest levels and will continue to do so at every available opportunity".
USA president Barack Obama is preparing to meet with the Dalai Lama at the White House today (June 15), and China has already expressed its discontent. "It acknowledges that there is only one China, that Tibet is an inseparable part of China and will never recognise the so-called Tibetan government in exile", the spokesman, Lu Kang, said during a press briefing.

The White House has barred news media coverage of the meeting and the meeting will be held in the Map Room instead of the Oval Office, which is reserved for visiting heads of state.

In an interview with VOA, Myles Caggins, National Security Council spokesman for Asia, said the meeting was personal in nature. Representatives for Gov. Gary Herbert, Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Taylorsville, and Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski say they plan to meet with the Dalai Lama.

"We demand the USA government earnestly stands by its promises, conscientiously handle the relevant issue in accordance with the one China principle and not give any space to any individual or behaviour which tries to create two Chinas, one China one Taiwan, or to split China", he said.

But it is one of several meetings that Obama has held with the Dalai Lama since becoming president.

The president and the Tibetan spiritual leader also talked about issues facing Tibetans living within China.

The Dalai Lama fled from Tibet into exile in India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Obama commended the Dalai Lama for his efforts to promote compassion, empathy, and respect for others.

Earnest added: "Both the Dalai Lama and President Obama value the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the United States and China".

Earlier, China warned Obama against meeting with the Dalai Lama, saying it could damage mutual trust.

"The U.S. government made solemn commitments". US officials have called on China to halt its controversial island-building and land-reclamation projects in the South China Sea.

"The President emphasized his strong support for the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions and the equal protection of human rights of Tibetans in China".

Liu said Washington seemingly did not want to weaken its improving relations with China, but was clearly frustrated by Beijing's refusal to budge on the South China Sea disputes.
With the U.S. pushing its case, India's bid for NSG membership has received positive indications from most of the member countries but China is still playing the spoiler by persisting with its opposition.

A source in the government said Russian Federation was among the countries which was "actively pushing" India's membership and was "hopeful" New Delhi could be admitted at the NSG plenary meeting in Seoul on June 23 and 24.

The 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group aims to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons by restricting the sale of items that can be used to make those arms.

The NSG was formed in 1975 in response to and a year after India's nuclear weapon test, in a program clandestinely developed from peaceful technology. India's membership is being strongly supported by the US.

The application was strengthened by the fact that India might join the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) after talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama in Washington, which will give it access to state-of-the-art nuclear and surveillance technology. "The NSG is an important part of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime which is based on the cornerstone of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)", the statement said.

Adviser to the Pakistan prime minister on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, has contacted the foreign ministers of Russia, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea, as part of Pakistan's diplomatic efforts for mobilising support for membership in the NSG, according to Dawn.

While the United States made a strong push for India's membership bid and most NSG members lent support to it, however, the opposition from China delayed any decision on the same. Massieu expressed support for a "non-discriminatory approach on NSG expansion to non-NPT states", the statement said.

Inching closer to join elite Nuclear Supplier Group, India on Thursday got backing of Mexico after USA and Switzerland supported the move ahead of crucial meeting of the 48-nation nuclear trading bloc in Vienna.

But China, a major NSG member, is still holding out, citing that India needs to sign the NPT. The NSG works under the principle of unanimity and even one country's vote against India will scuttle its bid. "The US called on NSG participating governments to support India's application when it comes up at the NSG plenary later this month".

Pakistan joining would be unacceptable to many, given its track record.

The industry body welcomed the operationalisation of India US Civil Nuclear deal. He added: I thank President Pena Nieto for Mexicos positive and constructive support for Indias membership of the NSG..

"By bringing India on board, it's a slap in the face of the entire non-proliferation regime", a diplomat from a country resisting India's bid said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The President of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto said on Thursday that they are positively and constructively supporting India's membership to the NSG.
"The discussion on the conditions for peace between Israelis and Palestinians must take into account the entire region", Francois Hollande told delegates at the opening of the conference in Paris.

It also follows months of violence in which at least 206 Palestinians and 28 Israelis, as well as two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese national, have been killed, mostly in incidents involving alleged knife, gun or car-ramming attacks by Palestinians, according to Israeli authorities.

"We extended our hands to the Israelis and Palestinians, and we hope that they will respond positively and take action to renew the peace process", Ayrault said.

Neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives were invited to attend the meeting, which aimed to lay the ground for a fully-fledged peace conference to be held by the end of the year.

"We reject the French initiative and all attempts to resume futile negotiations [with Israel], which have only led to the construction of more [Jewish-only] settlements [on occupied Palestinian land] and provided political cover for the ongoing Judaization of Jerusalem", the joint statement read.

"The two-state solution is in serious danger".

Participants made a decision to set up teams by the end of the month to work on economic and security incentives for the Israelis and Palestinians for reaching a deal, French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said at a news conference.

"The conventional wisdom for the last few decades has been that a solution to the Palestinian issues will result in improved ties between Israel and the Arab world", he said. Abbas welcomed the French effort, however, as a departure from the USA monopoly on leading discussions.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said in a newspaper column the old method of bilateral talks had failed and that it was time to move to a "multilateral framework". "Our initiative aims at giving them guarantees that the peace will be solid, sustainable and under worldwide supervision", Hollande told the gathering. And the top US diplomat appears as determined as ever, despite the dwindling months remaining in the current administration, as he prepares to attend the ministerial meeting Friday in Paris, where the resumption of talks aimed at ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the focus.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledges to pursue peace, his increasingly hardline government and its strained relationship with much of the worldwide community makes that seem less likely.

The last round of peace talks took place between July 2013 and April 2014 with the mediation of the US, and ended abruptly without results. "We must act urgently to revive the two-state solution, to bring it back before it's too late". Israel blames the bloodshed on incitement by Palestinian leaders and media.

Israel never accepted the Saudi plan, which required it to withdraw from most of the West Bank and other territory it captured nearly half a century ago in return for normalizing ties with Arab nations.

Foreign ministers of more than 20 Western and Arab countries, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, attended the summit.

On Monday, Netanyahu offered to negotiate with the Arab world on the parameters of a regional peace plan, as part of the Arab Peace Initiative, which Israel which calls for an Israeli withdrawal from all territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War and an agreed resolution to the issue of Palestinian refugees, in return for normalized relations with the Arab world.

France reportedly wants to set a deadline for talks after which it would recognize Palestinian statehood regardless of the talks' outcome.
Dive teams on Wednesday afternoon recovered the body of a toddler snatched by an alligator in a Disney World lagoon, the Orange County sheriff confirmed.

"The body has now been turned over to the Orange County medical office for an autopsy", Sheriff Jerry Demings told reporters.

Lane was found 10-15 yards out from the bank, in approximately 6 feet of water, the sheriff estimated.

A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission helicopter flies over the Seven Seas lagoon at Walt Disney World resort after an alligator dragged a two-year-old boy into the water in Orlando, Florida, June 15, 2016.

"Of course, the family was distraught but also, I believe, somewhat relieved that we were able to find their son with his body intact", Demings said.

Searchers have already killed five alligators they discovered in the area.

But the Graves' family came from Nebraska, noted Philadelphia lawyer Brett Tessler. He says the theme parks' wildlife management system works diligently to keep guests safe from dangerous Florida creatures, removing or killing any alligators they find.

The sheriff said there had been no other recent reports of similar alligator attacks on the lake. His parents are Matt and Melissa Graves, Demings said.

"The body was completely intact and so at this time we will go through the formality of making a formal identification".

Disney closed all beach areas and recreational marinas in its resort, although the Disney World theme parks were open Wednesday. The child had waded no more than 1 or 2 feet into the water around nightfall Tuesday when he was taken from a small beach, authorities told The Associated Press.

The company announced Wednesday that it's closing the beaches in "an abundance of caution". Two days before that, 22-year-old Christina Grimmie, a contestant on season six of "The Voice", was killed in Orlando while signing autographs after a show.

"Disney has a wildlife management in place and they have worked diligently to ensure their guests haven't been exposed", Demings said, adding that in the 45-year history of the resort, this is the first such attack.

Ricketts says "no family should ever have to experience such horror" and that he and his wife are praying for them.

The boy, playing in less than a foot of water in a Disney World lake around 9 p.m. Tuesday, was snatched by an alligator as his screaming parents struggled to save him.

The resort had no signs to warn that an alligator could be nearby.

Authorities in Orlando, Florida, are still searching for a 2-year-old boy who was dragged into the water by an alligator near Disney's upscale Grand Floridian Resort & Spa and are hoping for the best.

"We are helping the family and doing everything we can to assist law enforcement", Jacquee Wahler, vice president of Walt Disney World Resort, said in a statement.
The race for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee is finally over, as Hillary Clinton was declared the victor of the final primary in Washington DC on Tuesday night, just as she sat down for a highly anticipated summit with rival Bernie Sanders.

Those issues and more were likely discussed inside the conference room at the Hilton, where Sanders and Clinton met behind closed doors and away from the throng of reporters who crowded into an alley to catch a glimpse of the candidates entering the hotel. Instead, he indicated that he was staying in the fight through the D.C. primary.

"We need major, major changes in the Democratic Party", he said.

The meeting also was attended by Jane Sanders, Jeff Weaver, John Podesta and Robby Mook. Trump said the Pulse Nightclub attack was an "assault on the ability of free people to live their lives, love who they want and express their identity".

"I can see Clinton and Sanders working together", said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group, "with Sanders holding her feet to the fire". He also proposed changes in the Democratic National Committee's leadership.

Presumptive Democratic nominee for president Hillary Clinton. The Vermont senator has begun signaling that his campaign is soon to close, but Sanders' aides say he is not expected to immediately endorse Clinton.

During a visit to Capitol Hill earlier on Tuesday, Sanders told Democratic senators he would take his message of progressive values and party reform to the convention.

Meanwhile, the most recent general election polls show Clinton well ahead of Donald Trump - despite holdout Sanders supporters.

The president of the Communications Workers of America, one of the largest labor unions that backed Sanders, said Tuesday that Clinton, not Sanders, will be the nominee and that the time had come for the union to rally around her. Debbie Wasserman Shultz (Fla.), is replaced by a new chair who will operate in the style of Gov. Howard Dean (Vt.) when he was leading the DNC.

Obama endorsed Clinton later that day.

In an interview Tuesday with Telemundo before their meeting, Clinton said she and Sanders have common goals on numerous issues, including dealing with income inequality and making college more affordable.

"He wants to talk directly with grassroots supporters about how the revolution continues", explained Michael Briggs, Sanders' spokesman.

He asked supporters to tune in Thursday evening to an online video announcement, though has given no indication when, or if, he will end his campaign for the White House.

"We're meeting with Secretary Clinton this evening and we'll see how that goes and where things stand after that and make some decision about the future based on more intelligence about where we're going", Briggs said.

The Clinton campaign said in a statement both candidates had "a positive discussion about their primary campaign, about unifying the party and about the unsafe threat that Donald Trump poses to our nation".
"Ongoing and recent displacement, especially from Fallujah, requires immediate attention", said IOM Iraq chief of mission Thomas Lothar Weiss.

When Islamic State militants entered Fallujah in January 2014, months before their main sweep across northern and western Iraq, many residents welcomed them as liberators, said a 30-year-old man from Fallujah.

The Iraqi Defense Ministry said Brigadier Ahmad Badr al-Luhaibi was killed by a sniper during an operation to retake a village south of Mosul.

Along with Mosul, it is one of the last two major Iraqi cities still under IS group control.

The recaptures are the latest in a series of advances made by Iraqi forces against Daesh in Fallujah, a city in the western province of Anbar which has been in the hands of the militants for the past two years.

Iraqi security forces, supported by US-led coalition air strikes and advisors, have been fighting to retake the city for more than three weeks.

The U.S. Army's 1st Battalion, 10th Aviation Regiment, Task Force Dragon, prepares an AH-64 with armaments for flight in Erbil, Iraq, on May 6, 2016, in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.

Internally displaced Iraqis look out from a tent Monday at a camp outside Fallujah, Iraq. Of that number, more than 8,000 people left from villages east of the Tigris, putting additional pressure on existing camps for refugees and the displaced.

Frederic Cussigh, head of UNHCR's field response unit in the northern, semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region, warned that there are no safe routes for those escaping war.

The Iraqi command said Sunday that key areas west of Fallujah had been taken and that Iraqi forces pushed deeper into the city from its southern edges. The U.N. estimates about 50,000 civilians are trapped inside the city and that 42,000 people have fled Fallujah since a military oper...

The fighting against IS in Iraq has forced 3.3 million people to flee their homes.
Democrats Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez have scarcely criticized one another during their year-long campaign for the open Senate seat in California.

A November 8 showdown between Harris, a second-term attorney general, and one of the lesser-known GOP candidates would be a boon for the Democratic Party, which overwhelmingly endorsed Harris earlier this year in an effort to avert an expensive and potentially personal feud between two of its own.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D) was trailing far behind Harris with 16 percent of the vote, but she was still in second place.

The question in the fall isn't whether California will send a Democrat to the U.S. Senate, but which one.

Del Beccaro, 54, is a small business attorney and was chairman of the California Republican Party form 2011 to 2013. Those voters will likely play an outsized role in the race, and many are expected to show up to the polls: Sixty-eight percent of the state's Latino registered voters said the chances that they'll vote in the primary election were "almost certain", according to a USC / Los Angeles Time survey.

Harris, who is half African-American and half East Indian American, would become the only black woman in the Senate.

"I am just thrilled. The eyes of the country are on us, and I know we are prepared to do ourselves and our state and our fellow Californians proud", Harris told cheering supporters at a celebration rally.

This story will be updated as more information comes in.

Sanchez serves on the House Armed Services Committee and Homeland Security Committee and has made fighting against sexual assault in the military a signature issue.

Under the state's primary system, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election. During the open primary, she raised $11 million compared to Sanchez's $3.5 million, gained the endorsement of Democratic Gov. California is also a blue state, making it friendlier territory for Democrats than Republicans. Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Nevada to replace Sen. Either way, California is poised to make history, reports Mollie Reilly.

She added that Latino voters may turn out en masse in November to oppose presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric. California had a surge of last-minute voter registrations - 76 percent of which were Democrats.

California U.S. Senate candidate Kamala Harris has claimed one of two spots in the November runoff, moving the state attorney general into a potentially historic election. More than 1.4 million voted for Sanders and 1.8 million for Clinton, according to the unofficial tally. Other House Republicans who may be at risk, but probably less so, are Reps. Harris is considered the frontrunner and the establishment candidate, having the support of California Gov. But factors including a recent surge in voter registration among Latinos will make her a strong competitor in the general election, analysts said. Harris hosted a meeting of the state's district attorneys to develop recommendations on reducing gun violance. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

On the flip side, Sanchez has the support of the party's traditionally conservative crowd from Orange County.

The close race for the top-two primary lies between the second and third place candidates. That is likely to change as they enter the next phase of the contest.
The AP reports that prosecutors in Howell's home state of in have charged him with felony child molestation of a 12-year-old girl.

Howell was arrested by police in Santa Monica, California, on this past Sunday after a resident called stating that Howell was knocking on his door and windows. He told Santa Monica Police that he was on his way to the West Hollywood Gay Pride Parade.

"I believe he left the state of IN and went to California because he understood that this child molesting investigation was ongoing and he was IN imminent danger of being arrested", Mull said. Police say they discovered Howell in his White Acura with three assault rifles, ammunition and - according to sources - Tannerite, an explosive material that can used for target shooting inside his white Acura.

When he was picked up in Santa Monica, there was an assault rifle in his car's passenger seat and 15 pounds of "Shoc-Shot", two chemicals that explode when mixed and shot.

(AP Photo/Nick Ut). Deputy District Attorney Sean Carney speaks after the arraignment of James Wesley Howell, 20, of IN, IN Superior Court IN Los Angeles Tuesday, June 14, 2016.

James Wesley Howell remains in custody on a $2 million bail in California after being indicted on Tuesday.

Judge Keith Schwartz presides at the arraignment of James Wesley Howell, 20, of IN, IN Superior Court IN Los Angeles Tuesday, June 14, 2016.

'I can not in good conscience think of any reasonable reason that somebody would be traveling across the country with all of these things, ' he said. He agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of "intimidation" and the firearm charge was dropped. The rifle had a round in its chamber and additional rounds in a 30-round magazine attached to it. Another 30-round magazine was taped to the rifle.

Joseph Greeson, a friend of Howell's from IN, described the suspect as bisexual and said he harbored no ill will towards gays and lesbians.

According to court documents, Howell is a gun aficionado with a volcanic temper. In October, he twice was accused of pulling a gun and making threats, once against a boyfriend and once against a neighbor. Under the terms of his probation, he was not allowed to have weapons or leave Indiana.

Howell's attorney, Pamela Jones, told the judge there was no evidence Howell planned to detonate the chemicals. According to KTLA, police also found a knife, Taser, handcuffs, a black hood and a security badge.

Three days after his plea deal, a grand jury across the river in Louisville, indicted Howell on separate charges of speeding, fleeing police and reckless driving. "For a civilian to have a weapon rigged as such, 'it suggests his purposes are deadly".

The FBI served a search warrant Monday night at Howell's home in Jeffersonville, Ind., FBI officials confirmed to The Indianapolis Star.
As part of the Obama Administration's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has approved six domestic airlines to begin scheduled flights between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis/St. Paul and Cuba as early as this fall.

A direct flight to Havana, Cuba, is listed on a screen in JetBlue Airways Corp.'s Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) airport in NY, on August 7, 2015. The brass ring for the airlines, of course, will be the re-emerging nation's capitol, Havana; although approved destinations for Havana flights are still being worked out.

American Airlines received the approval of service from its hub in Miami and five cities in the island - Camaguey, Cienfuegos, Holguin, Santa Clara and Varadero.

St Augustine, as well as Jacksonville, are capable of clearing Homeland Security US Customs Service in northeast Florida; however, the first flights into Cuba will likely be from south Florida. All the flights are expected to begin in the fall.

Cuba's former president Fidel Castro (L) sits next to his brother and Cuba's president Raul Castro during the closing ceremony of the seventh Cuban Communist Party (PCC) congress in Havana April 19, 2016. The Fort Worth, Texas-based airline has also been flying aircraft on behalf of charter companies for the longest time, since 1991. Despite this, Washington continues to maintain its commercial, economic, and financial embargo, which makes it illegal for United States corporations to do business with Cuba. Last year, it saw 18 percent more passengers than in 2014, according to government aviation officials. Flights to Havana have not yet been approved, but officials said they are coming. Almost 160,000 US leisure travelers flew to Cuba a year ago, along with hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans visiting family.

The total number of airlines that applied for flight permits was 13.
Politico's report said ad time was not bought in the traditional battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and MI, where Republican candidate Donald Trump has said he hopes to compete in the general election. "And it is just more evidence he is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be commander in chief".

"You see military officials, who now retired, saying that for the first time in a long time, they're going to vote for a Democrat", Israel said.

"I am no fan of President Obama, but to show you how dishonest the phony Washington Post is, they wrote, "Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting" as their headline". While the post drew criticism, Trump has said he received "tens of thousands" of notes praising his foresight. "And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test and not a religious test". She wouldn't use it. But I was hitting her hard on it. Very hard. Are we going to start discriminating against them due to their faith?

Groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria want to present themselves as the leaders of a "war between Islam and America", Obama said.

"You've given me the honor to lead the Republican Party to victory this fall", he said, adding: "I understand the responsibility of carrying the mantle and I will never, ever let you down...."

U.S. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who sources say is among the Republicans that Trump is considering for his vice presidential nominee, said he was "discouraged" by the way the Trump campaign was going.

"Inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric and threatening to ban the families and friends of Muslim Americans, as well as millions of Muslim business people and tourists from entering our country, hurts the vast majority of Muslims who love freedom and hate terror", she said.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also accused his party's leaders of being weak and told them to "please be quiet".

"Every year we bring in more than 100,000 lifetime immigrants from the Middle East, and many more from Muslim countries outside of the Middle East", he said.

Jewish Republicans are criticizing Donald Trump for his renewed call to ban Muslim immigration, although few of his Jewish supporters seem to be reconsidering their endorsement of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The latest poll has her at 45-35 over Trump.

The CBS News poll revealed that two-thirds of voters believe Clinton did something wrong setting up a personal email server while secretary of state and 41 percent think what she did was illegal.

Assuring the audience that he would "save" the Second Amendment, Trump dismissed arguments for stricter gun control by pointing out that nobody at the nightclub had been armed, and that France and Belgium had strict gun laws, before concluding that the terrorists had been able to kill easily and impunity as a result. However, Mr. Trump had stood his ground.
The deadliest mass shooting in United States history has once again unleashed gun control advocates clamoring for curbs on weapons sales.

Trump added that more gun control would be tantamount to disarming law-abiding Americans and leaving them more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. He was initially put on the terrorist watch list, but was removed after the agency dropped the first probe.

The FBI briefly placed Orlando shooter Omar Mateen on a watch list while investigating him for alleged sympathies for extremist Islamic groups and loose ties to a fellow Floridian who became a suicide bomber in Syria.

Washington, The White House on Monday said President Barack Obama will visit Orlando city in Florida on Thursday to mourn the victims killed at the gay nightclub. Mateen died in a gunfight with a SWAT team.

So, while Clinton said the measure applied to suspected terrorists on the no-fly list, that's only 64,000 names.

Q: That's a lot of people. "Americans are concerned about somebody who they think might be reckless in their conduct on foreign policy".

Despite the comprehensive information, there is no current legal prohibition against someone on a watch list purchasing a firearm.

But it's unclear if the political dynamics have changed enough to give Feinstein's proposal a better chance now.

Among issues that disqualify a sale are felony convictions, documented mental health issues, multiple DUIs, drug convictions or a history of domestic violence. But being a suspected or known terrorist is not one such category.

Democrats are homing in on the watch lists as a starting point for screening gun sales. Almost all were for gun purchases. Of those, 2,265 were approved - more than 91 percent.

Q: What would Feinstein's bill do?

Republicans have also used the due process argument to campaign against Feinstein's measure, pointing out the flaws of relying on the government to root out terrorists based on secretly-compiled lists where entries are hard to challenge.

Gun-rights advocates say the Legislature's crackdown would not prevent determined criminals from gaining access to weapons.

"I am here because of the love shown to us at Mother Emanuel", said Rev Betty Diaz Clark.

Cox charged that "political correctness" on the part of President Barack Obama's administration had prevented the Federal Bureau of Investigation from stopping shooter Omar Mateen - who had been investigated for suspected radicalism but against whom they were unable to build a case.

Q: What about Mateen's weapons?

That spray of bullets is what makes high-capacity, military-style rifles so deadly.

He explained: "They (guns) represent a feeling of American individualism, the idea that Americans don't want to rely on others for self-protection, such as police or government", he said. Democrat Hillary Clinton has called for a similar ban, while Republican Donald Trump is opposing reinstatement of the ban.

"Reinstate the assault weapons ban, (and) make it harder for terrorists to use these weapons to kill us", said Obama at a press conference, warning that without such a ban, "these kinds of events are going to keep on happening".
Esty asked for unanimous consent to bring up H.R. 1076 for a vote, "a bipartisan bill to stop individuals on the FBI's terrorism watch list from purchasing guns".

Senator Ed Markey was also among those who joined the filibuster, denouncing Republicans over the lack of movement on gun control laws. He spoke of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting, which hits close to home: "I live every single day with the memory of Sandy Hook". Chris Murphy, D-Conn., left, confers with Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., emerge from a closed-door party caucus on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Murphy launched the filibuster late Wednesday morning as the Senate prepared to debate amendments to an appropriations bill.

December's attack in San Bernardino, Calif., and last weekend's mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., as well as other attacks in France, India and Kenya, show that "places like stadiums, concert venues malls, movie theaters, nightclubs" have become targets, Schumer said.

"Anyone on a terror watchlist who tries to buy a gun should be thoroughly investigated by the FBI and the sale delayed while the investigation is ongoing", the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action said in a statement.

"Why can't we find a way to at least fund the research on the causes of gun violence?".

U.S. Democrats are filibustering Wednesday to demand the Senate address gun violence in the wake of the country's deadliest shooting, NPR reported.

The FBI does not now have the authority to block the sale of a firearm to a person on a terrorist watch list, but the agency is merely notified when that person has applied for a background check through the National Instant Criminal Background Check system.

Senate Democrats also want to establish universal background checks, closing the loophole that exempts sales at gun shows.

The election-year fight over gun control pits strong proponents of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms against lawmakers arguing for greater restrictions on the ability to obtain weapons.

"The idea of following up more moments of silence with more inaction is not good enough", Wyden said.

"I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns", he wrote.

"If they have something that's decent we'll work with them", he said, but added that "this is not the end" of the issue for Democrats. "It wasn't the first time a terrorist with hate in his heart and a gun in his hand had mowed down his fellow citizens with a high-powered weapon". Pat Toomey, hoping that he'll again emerge as a lead Republican to build a bridge between the parties on gun law changes being debated after the Orlando mass shooting early Sunday.

But Democratic leaders cautioned against an incremental approach on gun measures - issuing a warning to Cornyn Wednesday.
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The Daily News publishes death notices and obituaries on a daily basis for Norfolkans, area residents and former residents.

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People needing additional information about death notices and obituaries can call the Daily News at 371-1020 or (877) 371-1020 and ask for the newsroom.
Jo Cox. Photo: Yui Mok/PA Wire

A member of Britains Parliament has died after an attack Thursday. Jo Cox, a 41-year-old Labour Party MP who represented Batley and Spen (in West Yorkshire), had reportedly left a constituent meeting when a man shot and stabbed her repeatedly, leaving her bleeding body on the street. Emergency responders who rushed to the scene said she died of her severe injuries.

A 77-year-old man was also injured in the attack.

Police arrested a 52-year-old suspect, Tommy Mair, who was reportedly taken into custody not far from the site of the attack. Police also found a gun near the scene. At least one witness told police that the assailant shouted Britain First, which, per The Guardian, is the name of a far-right political party that grew out of the British National Party in 2011. However, other witnesses have told competing stories, including one man who told cops that Cox had gotten involved in a dispute between two men. Police are investigating and trying to piece together what happened.

Britain is hotly debating a referendum on its European Union membership  called the Brexit  which is supposed to take place June 23. Both sides are suspending their campaigning on the issue in light of the tragedy.
Egyptian officials said Thursday that a search vessel had discovered and retrieved the cockpit data recorder of EgyptAir Flight MS804, which crashed over the Mediterranean Sea en route from Paris to Cairo about a month ago. All 66 people onboard died, and the cause of the disaster remains unknown  but officials are hoping the black-box recorder, one of two on the plane, can finally give them clues as to what doomed the airliner.

The cockpit recorder was found 13,000 feet beneath the surface of the Mediterranean. It was partially damaged, reports ABC News, but its memory storage unit appeared to be intact, so investigators should be able to examine and recover data from it. The other black box, the flight-data recorder, is still missing.

The black box is currently on its way to Alexandria, Egypt, where investigators will pore over its contents. Officials have speculated that a catastrophic event brought down the plane, hinting that terrorism or human error were more likely than a mechanical failure  but, ultimately, the investigators have little to go on. No group has claimed responsibility for downing the jet.

Search teams were racing against the clock to find the black boxes. The recorders send out signals for 30 days until the batteries die, making them nearly impossible to pinpoint after that. Earlier this month, Egyptian officials detected pings within its search area, which they believed belonged to one of the recorders. But until today nothing had been recovered.

The big black-box breakthrough comes a day after the same search vessel discovered the wreckage of the crashed jet. The main wreckage was apparently seen at several main locations by the research boats underwater robot, reports The Guardian. The investigators got images of the wreckage, which theyll use to draw a map of the crash scene.
Chris Murphy finally cedes the floor. Photo: Pete Marovich/2016 Getty Images

This week has been, if not productive, certainly a chaotic one for members of Congress. After a lone gunman opened fire at a gay club in Orlando, killing 49 people and wounding 53, Democrats are demanding action on gun control, and early this week, Republicans showed no signs they were ready to comply. Indeed, House Speaker Paul Ryan steamrolled through protests on Monday when, after holding a moment of silence for the victims, Democrats shouted, Wheres the bill?

So, on Wednesday morning, at 11:21 a.m., Connecticut senator Chris Murphy launched an unexpected filibuster on the Senate floor to force a debate on gun control. I am prepared to stand on the Senate floor and talk about the need to prevent gun violence for as long as I can, Murphy tweeted at the outset. Throughout the day, he was joined on the floor by dozens of lawmakers (most of them Democrats), and when it ended just after 2 a.m. EST, Murphys filibuster had become the eighth-longest in history.

Murphy and the various senators he called to the floor were pushing for a vote on two gun-control amendments. One, which was written jointly by Republican senator Pat Toomey and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, requires criminal mental-health background checks at gun shows and for online gun sales  two loophole areas where potential buyers have historically been able to avoid scrutiny.

The other is a proposal by California senator Dianne Feinstein that would allow the attorney general to prevent potential terrorists from purchasing guns. During the filibuster, Murphy said that these two policies were chosen not only because they would make a difference in the number of mass shootings perpetrated in America, but because they have the most bipartisan support.

Having come through the experience of Newtown, Ive had enough, he told the Senate. Its been four years, and nothing has been done.

Democrats Senate #filibuster - @ChrisMurphyCT "I'm prepared to stand on this floor...for frankly as long as I can." https://t.co/RjUlVcw10D  Mohamed Hemish (@MohamedHemish) June 15, 2016

Off the floor, Murphys colleagues attempted to reach a compromise, but criticism flew on both sides. Toomey reportedly engaged in talks with Everytown for Gun Safety, a group backed in part by Michael Bloomberg, to design a measure that would prevent potential terrorists from obtaining firearms. Theres an obvious opportunity here, guys, to work together and find a solution, Toomey  who was the only Republican with permission to speak  said during the filibuster at around 3 p.m. But by evening, an Everytown representative told the Washington Post: Were not there yet.

Meanwhile, Feinstein carried on separate negotiations with Texas senator John Cornyn. Feinstein told the Post that her proposal would keep guns from people on the terror watch list going back five years  a period that wouldve covered Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, who was removed in 2014. Cornyns measure, on the other hand, would allow the attorney general to delay a gun purchase for up to three days. But after an attempt to meet in the middle, on Wednesday evening, Feinstein told reporters, I dont think its going to work out.

This is a lot more nuanced than some people appreciate, Cornyn told Politico. Were trying.

While they tried, Murphy held the floor for just under 15 hours, all the while wearing dress shoes. He called dozens of senators to the floor, and rather than read the Constitution or from the Bible, every speaker used their time to address the issue of guns in America and, in many cases, the toll mass shootings have taken on the countrys collective psyche.

Several mentioned the tragedy in Orlando  Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin erected a poster showing the victims photos before she spoke, and near the end of the night, Murphy memorialized Luis Vielma, a 22-year-old Universal Studios employee who was killed in the shooting.

Sorry you missed class today, @SenateGOP, but you can borrow our notes. #Enough pic.twitter.com/Ch247YUQnC  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) June 16, 2016

Senator Cory Booker joined in at the start, saying he cleared his entire day to stay on this floor and support Senator Murphy as he pushes this body to come to some consensus in a way the country has already done. It will not be business as usual, he promised.

The hashtags #filibuster and #holdthefloor ignited as Twitter monitored the senators progress and called into the offices of their representatives.

US #filibuster participants, includes at least two republicans, no Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/lbC00hHAui  Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) June 16, 2016

I'm hearing that in its 11th hour, #holdthefloor guns filibuster is generating 400,000+ tweets, getting overwhelmingly positive responses  igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) June 16, 2016

Oh, dear. The NRA seem unhappy about the filibuster. I'll send them my thoughts and prayers. #holdthefloor  Pam Howell (@BookaliciousPam) June 16, 2016

Booker remained on the floor with Murphy, who concluded the filibuster by remembering Dylan Hockley, a 6-year-old boy who died in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

And finally, at around 2 a.m., Murphy announced that Senate Republicans had agreed to vote on both measures. Theres no guarantee theyll pass, but the filibuster accomplished what Murphy was hoping for: It got peoples attention.
Obama, according to his 2008 opponent, was to blame for the massacre because he is insufficiently committed to big Middle East wars, past and future. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

After Donald Trumps explosions at the president for his refusal to endorse blatant religious and ethnic profiling in anti-terrorism efforts, youd figure the presumptive Republican nominee has reasserted his leadership of the Obama-haters of America. But then came his astounding attack today:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the elder Republican statesman, said President Obama was directly responsible for the terror attack in Orlando due to his failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State terror group.

Wow.

McCains reasoning, so to speak, for this remarkable statement involved the stacking of dubious premises to reach an absurd conclusion:

When pressed by a reporter on the claim that Obama was directly responsible, McCain reiterated his point  that Obama should not have withdrawn combat troops from Iraq and should have made a more determined effort to intervene in the Syrian civil war.

Keep in mind that so far as anyone knows, ISIS had nothing to do with the Orlando massacre other than taking credit for it ex post facto thanks to the murderers apparently independent decision to dedicate his evil act to the evil actors in the Middle East.

Shortly after spouting this insanity, McCain issued a statement on Twitter saying that he misspoke: To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obamas national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself.

So thats reassuring: McCain was not accusing the president of being personally involved in the planning or execution of the attacks in Orlando. But that he felt the need to clear that up is telling.

Its worth remembering that if John McCain had somehow beaten Barack Obama in 2008, he might still be in office today, actively waging wars instead of merely longing for them and bitterly lashing out at a commander-in-chief who is, to his view, insufficiently bloodthirsty. Hes convinced himself that the case for an expanded and eternal Iraq War was strong when he championed the surge and, if possible, is even stronger today. And he wants a new war or two now to make up for Obamas horrific decision to bring that great folly to a close. Perhaps because he knows Donald Trump wont make this particular argument, McCain felt the need to make it himself.
Maybe Clinton and Sanders are better as just friends. Photo: Bill Clark/ 2016 CQ-Roll Call, Inc.

Hillary Clintons last interaction with Bernie Sanders may have been positive, but that doesnt mean shes willing to join forces with the Vermont senator for good. Although there has been some speculation Sanders could be in the running for a spot as Clintons running mate, on Wednesday, her campaign quashed the rumor by revealing that he isnt even being considered.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the vetting is still in its early stages, but Sanderss name isnt on the short-list. Those under consideration are reportedly:

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (duh),

Labor Secretary Tom Perez,

Perez, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro,

Castro, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia,

Virginia, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio,

Ohio, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey,

Jersey, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti,

Garcetti, Representative Xavier Becerra of California, and

and Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio.

So far, each candidate has been vetted using publicly available information; the Clinton campaign hasnt asked anyone to submit tax returns, and Clinton is just beginning to meet with prospective candidates herself. Based on the results of a new Bloomberg poll, most of Clintons supporters (35 percent) are hoping shell choose Warren as a running mate, while Booker was their second choice.

A few Sanders surrogates have expressed the belief that Clinton ought to tap Sanders as VP because of the ideas and energy hes brought to the race. But according to his aides, Sanders himself isnt expecting to be offered the job. Instead, hell focus on his work in the Senate, where hes likely to have considerably more pull (or at least more name recognition) following the campaign.
Somebodys making a mistake in devising a battleground-state strategy. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Politico didnt have to mince words when it came to describing the strategies Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will pursue in the key general-election battleground states:

Republicans will rely on the sheer force of Donald Trumps personality to tap into deep-seated voter anger. Democrats are counting on a superior field organization to serve as Hillary Clintons firewall.



The Republicans quoted in the story appear to have decided to make a virtue of Trumps famous disdain for data analytics, micro-targeting, and all that other fancy-dan stuff. He doesnt need it.

His job is to be Mr. Trump, said Rob Gleason, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. His appeal is very different than a normal politician. Usually, when we have rallies for people, we prepare weeks in advance. All he has to do is announce three days ahead of time hes going to be somewhere and a huge crowd shows up. It always energizes people.

Indeed, Trumps casual approach to figuring out what to do where is encouraging to GOP leaders in places presidential candidates usually skip:

Deployed the right way, Trumps force-of-nature persona could help flip some long-blue states toward the GOP, others said. I think if he invests in Michigan and shows up in our state, he will do very well, said Ronna Romney McDaniel, chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party (and niece of 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney). We havent had a candidate actually run a robust campaign in Michigan where theyre showing up post-convention.

You may recall that Sarah Palin pitched a fit in 2008 because the McCain campaign would not waste time and money contesting Michigan. Her buddy Trump may be easier to persuade. After all, hes very different from a normal politician.
Photo: Prince Williams/WireImage

In the three days since 29-year-old security guard Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, reports have begun to emerge that the shooter may have been gay himself. The FBI is now investigating whether he had accounts on Grindr or other gay dating apps, and whether he patronized Pulse in the past, as some have claimed.

Several news outlets, meanwhile, have reported on the possibility that Mateen was driven to violence by his own self-hatred. (Its far too early to be definitive, one law-enforcement official told Reuters, but we have to consider at least the possibility that he might have sought martyrdom partly to gain absolution for what he believed were his grave sins.) Its a notion that one study, at least, seems to support: A buzzy piece of research from 2012 has suggested that homophobia is often the result of a person reacting to their own same-sex attraction. In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves, one of the study co-authors said in a statement at the time, and they are turning this internal conflict outward.

But overall, the research tends to support the opposite idea. Psychologists have a term for when gay, lesbian, and bisexual people absorb negative ideas about their sexual orientations: Its called internalized homophobia, and there are a few important things that research has shown about how it works. First, it can cause a raft of mental-health issues, including depression, suicidal tendencies, and problems forming stable relationships. And second, although we dont know what drove Mateen to do what he did early Sunday morning, we do know that internalized homophobia almost never manifests itself as violence  more often than not, people suffering from internalized homophobia focus their negative feelings inward. An internal conflict turned outward, to borrow the phrasing, is far outside the norm.

I think one of the favored explanations  because its a good story, a good narrative  is the Freudian idea that a person is sexually repressed and has unconscious feelings that they dont understand or maybe arent even aware of, but it leads them to engage in these hostile interactions towards people who are gay, says Greg Herek, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, whos published several studies on anti-gay prejudice. That probably happens, but it seems to be very much not the way that prejudice gets expressed in most cases.

Herek prefers to use the term internalized sexual stigma, which he believes better captures the widespread nature of anti-gay beliefs  people of all sexualities, he explains, exist in a cultural backdrop in which homosexuality is stigmatized. And in many cases, when people grow up in more religious or socially conservative environments, that stigma is repeatedly socially reinforced: Its very functional for people to [show anti-gay prejudice] because they get rewards from their social circle, their family, their friends, their religious group, whatever. (It bears noting that Mateens father has made anti-gay comments in the aftermath of the shooting, declaring that God will punish those involved in homosexuality.)

Regardless of sexual orientation, everyone inevitably internalizes at least some of that stigma  they learn these stereotypes, they learn these negative associations, he says, and only some people come to unlearn them over time. The same thing happens with race and other groups where theres some type of stigma out there in the culture. We learn this stuff. Its like the air we breathe, really hard to escape.

Its kind of a cliche to say people who are strongly prejudiced against sexual minorities are themselves gay or lesbian, he adds. Thats not the common story  for most people it comes from learning those cultural attitudes, not from their own sexuality.

And those cultural attitudes can manifest in damaging ways. Internalized homophobia has been linked to depression, loneliness, a sense of helplessness about the future, and increased risk of suicide. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people with high levels of internalized homophobia often have problems sustaining healthy romantic relationships (even, past research has shown, when they report feeling connected to the LGBT community)  theyre less likely to be in relationships, and when they are, those relationships tend to be shorter and more strained. Theyre also less motivated to resolve relationship conflicts, and more likely to have sex-related anxiety. Internalized homophobia can also spill over into other types of emotional intimacy, negatively affecting relationships with friends and family members.

But these findings apply specifically to people who already identify as gay, meaning theres a glaring blind spot in what the research shows about internalized homophobia: Specifically, its nearly impossible to study in people who havent come out or are in denial about their sexuality, says psychologist Ilan Meyer, who has published several studies on the subject. The questions usually have to do with how you think about being gay, how well you accept yourself as a gay person, says Meyer, a researcher at the Williams Institute, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on gender- and sexuality-related public policy. If you say, Well, Im not gay, it would be hard to assess that.

Herek, meanwhile, cautions against pointing to Grindr use and Pulse attendance as evidence that Mateen himself was gay, even if those pieces of information bear out as true. There may be other things that explain that, including the possibility that even if he were curious about same-sex behavior or attraction, that wouldnt necessarily mean hes gay, he says. Its helpful to make a distinction between peoples behaviors and actions and their identities. And Mateens seuxal identity, whatever it was, may not offer much clarity as to his motives.
Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Anne Hathaway has a new role this year: She will be joining other A-list celebrities working with the United Nations to promote gender equality.

Hathaway will be working as the latest global goodwill ambassador with U.N. Women, the agency within the United Nations that focuses on gender equality.

Within her role, Hathaway plans to focus specifically on gender discrimination within the workplace. As an advocate, shell focus on issues that affect families like parental leave and affordable child care, according to ET.com.

The appointment of Anne is timely because this year UN Women is driving hard to foster more positive mindsets and practical arrangements around workplaces that build and support equality for women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the U.N. Women executive director, said in a statement.

Hathaway will be in good company. Emma Watson, Nicole Kidman, and the princess of Thailand are goodwill ambassadors.

Were looking forward to seeing what changes are achieved.


Taylor Swift. Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Late yesterday afternoon, a British tabloid published several photos of Taylor Swift kissing the actor Tom Hiddleston on a rock near her home in Rhode Island. Two weeks before that, Taylor Swift broke up with her previous white male companion, Calvin Harris (a DJ). And roughly 4.6 billion years before that, collisions in a solar nebula caused the formation of the sun and eventually, Earth. Why did these events happen in this particular order?

Because Taylor Swift wanted them to.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

Taylor Swift dating Tom Hiddleston - two weeks after dumping Calvin Harris.https://t.co/ytzLqZyGSu pic.twitter.com/2SBiPbFMxu  Dan Wootton (@danwootton) June 15, 2016

Taylor Swift has been strategically employing famous boyfriends to shape her music and public image since it was legal for her to do so. She started dating Joe Jonas a few months after she turned 18 and later told Ellen Degeneres that he broke up with her in a 27-second phone call, inspiring the song Forever & Always. Then it was Taylor Lautner (Back to December), John Mayer (Dear John), Jake Gyllenhaal (We Are Never Getting Back Together), Conor Kennedy (Begin Again), and Harry Styles (Style). She has it all down to a science. First comes the adorable paparazzi photo shoot (remember those maple latte pics with Gyllenhaal at Thanksgiving?), then a coy interview or two, then a breakup song.

Taylor Swift says the hardest song to write was about Jake Gyllenhaal  https://t.co/RmX71ujZ9s pic.twitter.com/ONBEdy92W5  HollywoodLife (@HollywoodLife) April 19, 2016

Yesterday, Swift rushed her tried-and-true formula. Before processing the Calvin Harris breakup through song, she let paparazzi photograph her being all cute and goals with a new man. Why?

The answer is in Caity Weavers excellent GQ profile of one Kim Kardashian.

In it, Kardashian discusses the drama surrounding the release of her husband Kanye Wests recent album, which contains the following line about Swift: I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous. When he released the album in February, West claimed he called Swift to discuss the line with her, and she approved it. Swifts publicist then released a statement denying his claim: Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single Famous on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. The next day, in a Grammy acceptance speech, Swift made a dig at West, stating, I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments, or your fame

Kardashian is calling bullshit on Swifts claims. From GQ:
Michelle Obama and Meryl Streep Photo: Getty Images

In what has the potential to be the greatest buddy comedy ever  sorry, Kevin Hart and the Rock  Michelle Obama are Meryl Streep are going to Morocco together.

In partnership with the Let Girls Learn initiative, the pair will travel to Marrakesh in June to discuss the challenges women in the African country deal with on a regular basis. They will be joined by First Daughters Sasha and Malia, actress Freida Pinto, and the girls grandmother, Marian Robinson. Mobama will also travel to Spain and Liberia to discuss the educational barriers that girls face around the world.

Of course, Meryl and Michelle go way back  they chatted about equal rights in More magazine in 2015, plus Barack is a self-proclaimed Streep fanboy  so we expect there will be some fun in addition to spreading the gospel of womens rights. Carpet shopping in the souks! Afternoon tea at the Mamounia! A camel trek! Can we please send Nancy Meyers along with a camera to make My Holiday With FLOTUS a reality?
Brock Turner Photo: Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office

One of the factors that presumably helped Stanford swimmer Brock Turner get a lenient six-month sentence after being convicted of three counts of sexual assault was the judges perception that he was a small-town boy out of his element in college. Turner himself wrote that coming from a small town in Ohio, I had never really experienced celebrating or partying that involved alcohol, and blamed his crime on alcohol and partying culture.

However, unearthed court documents indicated that Turner was no stranger to using drugs and alcohol while still in high school in Ohio. Now, InTouch reports that he also made members of the Stanford womens swim team feel uncomfortable prior to his arrest.



Brocks arrest wasnt surprising to anyone on the team. From the beginning, the women swimmers had found him to be very, very odd. Brock would make comments to the women such as I can see your ts in that swimsuit, an anonymous Stanford swim team insider reportedly told InTouch. He was warned by upperclassmen on the team to scale back on the partying, but he just didnt listen.

The source also told InTouch that the team has been instructed to not discuss Brock Turner publicly or to the media; however, the entire team completely supports the victim and wishes that Brock had gotten a much harsher sentence.
Photo: Getty Images; BFA

June 15 began as any typical Wednesday begins  that is, until The Sun published photos of Taylor Swift shaking off her past relationship with Calvin Harris, the Scottish DJ shed been seeing for 15 months.

As in, The Sun published an exclusive series of photos of Swift and Tom Hiddleston smooching away atop some rocks on a beach in Rhode Island.

Coming home from work to see the Internet like: #Hiddleswift pic.twitter.com/ejKoTyagGC  Leann (@leannelisabeth) June 15, 2016

#Hiddleswift feels like something that Tumblr users willed into existence by clapping their hands and believing.  Rohan Williams (@rohan_williams) June 15, 2016

THIS IS EVERY PUBLICIST'S WET DREAM #Hiddleswift  Agos B   (@ago2911) June 15, 2016

I leave the Internet for just two hours and my whole world implodes. What is #hiddleswift and why is it happening? https://t.co/ezmfLuAgj5  Grainne Coyne (@Grainnenewsie) June 15, 2016

I was going to have a quiet night reading and casually cleaning. Then #Hiddleswift happened and I now I am undone.  Taylor O'Brien (@tayobrien) June 15, 2016

Taylor Swift was with Calvin Harris like two weeks ago and now she's with Tom Hiddleston pic.twitter.com/9McYuoWQT9  danielle  (@danielleroj) June 15, 2016

but why does taylor swift and tom hiddleston feel like a punch in the heart? I like both of them, but...

THERAPIST: aaaand that's our time  Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) June 16, 2016

Kanye was broke, Donald Trump might be the next president, Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston are dating



It's 2016. Anything is possible.  uni (@roquetship) June 16, 2016

Currently having feelings that I cannot even identify nor have I ever felt before #Hiddleswift pic.twitter.com/WpqFb1eFX3  sophie (@smdavenport13) June 16, 2016

Enough with smooshing names together. Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston's couple name is "Greg."  Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) June 15, 2016

But seriously though: Hiddleswift or Tiddleston?
It's been a pretty crappy week so far, and if you're not a fan of Taylor Swift's face everywhere it's not going to get much better, so please allow this unproblematic ray of Swedish of sunshine to brighten up your day.

Alexander Skarsgard wore a gay pride pin yesterday as a tribute to those affected by the tragic Orlando shooting this week.

It is devastating, he said. I want to support my brothers and sisters in the LGBT community. Intolerance is just unacceptable and it is horrific what happened and it is also scary how in the States they try to politicise it.

It is important to know that this was not done by 1.3 billion Muslims, it is very alarming when certain politicians try to turn this into a religious war. We need to unite people and spread the message of love.

I hope this post brought you a tiny bit of joy, ONTD.sources 1




rip sweet babby, she was so so fab. irl queen

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omg i loved her so much, rip you beautiful thing

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aw, RIP :( she was hilarious

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Aww, RIP Grandma Yetta. I loved her on The Nanny. One of my favorite characters!

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she was lovely on the nanny. rip.

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this is so sad, RIP, she was one of the best characters



They started rerunning the Nanny here a few months ago and I watch it whenever I work from home

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Aw, I loved The Nanny. Rip

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Awww :'(

I loved The Nanny as a kid. Grandma Yetta was hilarious.

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Yetta: Schmooie, come here. I'll introduce you to your Uncle Stanley

[whispers]

Yetta: just play along. Stan look, Schmooie! You haven't seen him since he was this big. He's being Bar Mitzvahed while you're on your cruise.

Uncle Stanley: Sorry we're going to miss it. This is from me and your Aunt Cookie

[gives him cash]

Uncle Stanley: .

Brighton: Thank you very much!

Yetta: [to Brighton] We split everything 50/50

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She was awesome on The Nanny :-]



RIP

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god and then at the end of that episode she's like I'm taking all of it and he's like but you said 50/50 and she's like hey I'm old, poor, and probably going to die in a home soon while you're young and rich and live in a fancy mansion- I need it more than you and he's like yeah you're right

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YETTA!!!  Aww RIP

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never realised until this moment how much she looked like a geriatric Lady Gaga



rip Yetta

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Oh thank God someone else saw this. Yes.

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ow, my childhood. rip grandma yetta.

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RIP Grandma Yetta. :(

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I didn't realize she was Millie from The Dick Van Dyke Show until I read this last night. I loved Millie growing up. I hated Rob (Van Dyke). Loved the women characters instead.

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I figured it out from an episode of The Nanny, actually. She's talking about how Fran and Maxwell are basically Rob and Laura, and then she looks in a mirror and is all "AND THERE'S MILLIE!"

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are we sure he's not 40?

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I just, can't believe he's in his thirties.





Imma need a long form birth certificate.

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WHAT THE FUCK I THOUGHT HE WAS 45

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stop i am 25 and NOT 30 stop rounding that way S T O p

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LIES



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i'm finding it difficult to believe he is only 4 years older than i am

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he's 35

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God knows, he's British after all.

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lmao

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LMAO

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lmao

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lmaoo

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LMAO, we're obviously not. We need that long-form birth certificate!

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LMAO mte

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I'm fucking cackling.

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Omg this is a joke right? Because I would LOVE durex if they actually released a twit pic like this lol!

Get that safe sex guys!

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lmao

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is this real or fan-created?

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Oh my god

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ABSOLUTELY DONE

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they are perfect for each other

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they really are

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most definitely

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honestly

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Without a doubt

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The most perfect fake relationship ever.

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A match made in Hollywood heaven

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both look like rats 

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Rose the Broadway Rat didn't die for this.

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bless you for never forgetting about our fallen stars

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I just googled her. Poor little darling. It made me so sad.

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rats are cute and innocent

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Can't wait for Animal Planet to released their coitus tape.

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wasn't ONTD obsessed with Hiddleston a little while ago?

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strangely yes

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I still love him but this is too entertaining.

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thor was 5 years ago

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Yeah, I'm not sure why we've turned on him so completely -- but that's the ONTD way. \_()_/

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lol I was just thinking this. I was like wait what did he do... ? Anyway I liked him in The Hollow Crown

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Probably because he worked with Woody Allen.

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me neither but that is how we do

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Unfortunately yes. Some people here have the weirdest taste.

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those were such fun and pure times!

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Some are embarrassingly

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Some still are, but there is also a very vocal group that is always calling him ugly.

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he's a good actor and all and he has his moments of looking pretty but this is SO WEIRD that he's ruined forever lmao

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Cheaters are so gross

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I feel like if she were a man this would be the dominant narrative. I'm surprised more people didn't bring this up, especially since most people were just assuming Calvin Harris was the one who did her wrong.

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And if the tables were turned, and a woman was the backup in Hiddleston's place, it'd be all "She LURED HIM AWAY from the perfect relationship WITH HER DEVIL VAGINA" (see: Brangalina)

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Taylor will never be the one who is wrong, ONTD has fallen under that spell a long time ago

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I doubt she actually cheated. More likely she met Tom and clearly felt a thing for him and they started being flirty so that when for whatever reasonsTay and Calvin called it quits (maybe directly because she wanted to be Tom, maybe not, w/e), she had already cultivated another relationship she could dive right into.



/shrug idk everyone knows someone who's bounced from relationship into another in a short time span.

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Kinda counters the narrative that calvin broke up with her cause she was 'too hollywood'

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Would he have been gushing about her if they were cheating? I don't think he's that stupid. If he was cheating with her, he would have said nothing.



She caught the spark at the Met Gala and dumped Calvin. It's not too hard to do the math.

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ia this was much more exciting yesterday. i'm massively happy about her upgrade because tom seems like the completely opposite of douchey and i hated, HATED calvin, but not even calvin deserved this messy overlap.

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didn't u see the radar online article about him sending dick pix to girls when he was still dating taylor?

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lmao for real I'm already over it. It was fun for like 3 hours.

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yeah i was bored about an hour after the story blew up

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i'm not attracted to him but he looks like he'd be into french vanilla sex.



her....prob not.

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lol....what is French vanilla sex? That sounds like an oxymoron.

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i always kind of figured taylors pussy game was strong af (despite everything she is/logic) since she these guys keeps falling for her

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they're both OTT attention whore theatre kids who love to dance in public but do it TERRIBLY

so that CLEARLY translates into the FACT that they definitely are OTT and try really hard in bed, but their results are definitely terrible. i believe this to the depths of my soul.

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I need him to dump her for Rita Ora now that would be a real juicy drama

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here for this!

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i'm confused by the correlation of this tbh



"I think 'Shake It Off' was released around the time we made I Saw the Light, and she's very cool."

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idk maybe because he was stateside he heard/saw it everywhere. who knows.

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ooh i mean i guess?

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I was also confused by this lol

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lol right? forced promo i guess

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Gotta get that subtle promo for his movie.

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Because...she's kind of a country artist, and the movie's about...? Oh, never mind, I got nothin'.

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Inserting a humblebrag in there like "You know, since I'm a musician now too..."

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Written by a PR person.

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I'm still so mad I missed the post yesterday. But this I'm here for. zzzz



idk what to say man, her 2017/2018 album is gonna be something else

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I love that Taylor Swift is finally delivering on her messiness. Thanks girl!



omg this



4. When asked about doing a duet with her, "I don't know that I could stand up to her vocal talents, to be honest. That's what she does. She's a professional musician and I'm an actor. We'll see. You never know. But I'm pretty sure we won't do it."



Edited at 2016-06-16 04:37 pm (UTC)

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LMAO omg he's such a loser I love it

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vocal talents?

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lmao

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Vocal talents? He's def trying to fuck her with that lie of a compliment.



Edited at 2016-06-16 04:52 pm (UTC)

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lol I didn't even see that until u guys all went in on her. lol. so mean. HAHA!

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lmao this asshole

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omg i'm glad he quenched his thrist apparently god damn

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lmao

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lmao quoting my dear Arctic Monkeys: "the proof that love's not only blind but deaf".

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yikes

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lmao, vocal talents, I'm living for the comments tbh.

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yeah he's smitten

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LMAO I'm ready for all 100 of these ensuing posts

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lmao this! like I already find them boring but for those said limited edition 100 posts, yah y not?

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this is fucking brutal

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RIP :( Her poor children. After this week I feel like we're heading to a right wing apocalypse. Let's see how they spin this, I see a "mentally ill" shooter.

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they're saying either it's wrong/typical of the left to use it for their political gain, or that we should focus on jo and not make it political

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Like they won't have used her death for political gain if the killer was Muslim and/or an immigrant.

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Which is bullshit, because she was an outspoken MP doing her job at the time she was killed. She was killed for political reasons, and not to acknowledge that seems an insult.

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IA. And I think it's so typical for them to blame it on mental illness. This is just one in a million reasons why mental illness is looked at the way it is - which is, portrayed disgustingly wrong in the media so that anyone that isn't neurotypical is always going to ~suddenly snap and kill people~. These things aren't caused by mental illness. They're caused by right-wing bigots.

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yep. it is fucked up when cnn seems the reational reporters but they are the ones going 'this was over brexit wasn't it?' as british politicians get interviewed and look hella uncomfortable.

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Yep, not long until a new Hitler rises somewhere. People are fucking idiots

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I'm in shock. I saw a tweet which said 'today started with nazi propaganda and ended with a political assassination.' Pretty much sums up the state of the U.K. right now.



Rest in peace.

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I saw that tweet too and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It's so scary what's happening in the UK, but even scarier is the fact that the same thing is happening around the world, Holland, France, Germany, East Europe, the Philippines, Brasil, the US, etc. The end times are here for real...

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yeah, it's seriously terrifying.

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i think everyday how we are living in end times... the stuff is getting way out of control

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Yeah we had a similiar case in Germany where a woman that was running for mayor of a big city was stabbed in the neck shortly before election. She survived though, and was still elected while in a coma.



The guy wasn't even organized in the nazi scene just an old dude who thought this would help stop refugees from coming. It's so sad and terrible

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What was the nazi propaganda??

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I know :( Horrendous. We are doomed. And if the UK votes out Scotland is going to blow a fuse because I have no doubt we will vote overwhelmingly to remain. Shit London spun the referendum threatening that if we lost we wouldn't get into the EU!

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Rest in peace :(



She was my local MP and I voted for her in the last election. She was a good person and she deserved much better than this, this whole thing is so upsetting.

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She's my local MP as well, totally devastating to hear about this

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i'm so sorry to hear that. that's devastating.



when charles kennedy died last year, i was absolutely heartbroken. he was the mp for the constituency beside ours and he had made such an effort to make sure their voices, and even ours, were heard. it's so awful losing someone who affects your community so closely. i don't even support the lib dems but i loved him.



Edited at 2016-06-16 06:25 pm (UTC)

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Charles Kennedy was a great MP and I'm the same, even though I didn't support the libdems I liked and respected him a lot.

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He was my MP, spoke at my school, my gran knew his parents etc etc etc. Really, truly, a lovely man.

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CK's death really hit me hard. It's always a shock to remember that he's no longer with us.

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It really is dreadful :(

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This is a legit question.

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men are fucking insane

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toxic masculinity is taught to boys from a young age

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Bc they don't teach empathy at school.

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i was just reading the details of the attack. so horrific.



hope that BNP scumbag that did this to her rots in prison forever.

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scary thing is i'd doubt they were THAT far to the right. The right in general has completely lost any sense of reason or humanity.

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rip :(

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Sickening. Sometimes it feels like all of western civilization is regressing.

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Omg how absolutely awful. What a horrifying attack; this has been a violent week (although I suppose sadly so many are :()

RIP.

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I seriously just need to go a day without hearing about women and minorities getting murdered. Like, a SINGLE DAY where brutal, senseless violence perpetrated by men isn't the dominating story.

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I'm applying for an abused women counsellor/advocate program. The first question of the application is, of course, why I'm applying. I wanted to just print out all the news stories- since the beginning of this month- that show women being abused and murdered by men and turn that in with a "That's why."

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Same, this is exhausting

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This is just devastating. Her husband's statement is lovely. ALso i'm already seeing disgusting pro-gun americans latch onto this tragedy to prove gun control laws aren't needed in their country.

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I knew the Americans would do that, smh

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Me too :( and not only is it despicable how gleefully they're latching onto it in order to support their arguments, it does even add any weight to them. A single shooting in the UK? It's a rare tragedy, not an everyday occurrence...

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It's sickening how gun nuts are using this. Hello, this is one shooting in England today...compared to how many in the U.S. this week?

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they fucking would

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Americans are aware of something going on outside our borders? I'm both shocked that they're aware and annoyed by their thought process (these ones at least).

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They probably have "gun" on Google Alerts so they can salivate about them in the comments section.

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My God. The poor woman. Her poor family!

She sounds like she was doing great work as a politician.

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This is horrible :( her poor husband and children

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I would be STUNNED if Khloe's father was anyone other than Kris's hairdresser.

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I just googled him and wow yeah, I see it.

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I googled him because of this comment and wow.

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the resemblance is uncanny.

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lol mte

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ia

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mte

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ikr! it's like totally Khloe with short hair

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same

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yup

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Mte

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Same

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Yeah, I believed the OJ thing because I could see her being mixed and she resembles his daughter. But then I saw the hairdresser and was like YEAH NEVERMIND.

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mte

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That's her god damn daddy, is everyone in their family blind?

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OMW

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IKR

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i don't really see it

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mte. no one thinks OJ is her dad, it's clearly that hairdresser guy

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exactly. only celeb gossip noobs (lol remember when people used that word?) think it's OJ

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mte

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yep. their faces are too similar

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That would be too simple for these attention-whores

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lmaoo

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lmao

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lmao

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didn't she test out Kris instead ? lol

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it seems like the family members don't actually want Khloe to get an asnwer

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I know people suspect already, but can you imagine the #drama if he ends up being her father?

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watch them have an E! OJ reality show w/ khloe once he gets out of prison next year...

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I honestly think I would throw up and cackle at the same time

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Oh god I hope so. It will finally come full circle

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lol didn't they already do this plot in their show in like the 2nd season?

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yes... iirc she didn't end up taking it.

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No, I don't think it was for that purpose, they took a test for the BRCA gene. Khloe didn't want to. Ended up Kim and Kourt didn't have the gene. To be fair Khloe's refusal had a lot to do with the fact that Robert Sr.'s condition once he contracted cancer deteriorated so quickly and she said she'd rather not know.



This was an episode back in January. I don't remember any other DNA testing done on the show, but I could have just forgotten.



Edited at 2016-06-16 06:30 pm (UTC)

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OH WAIT. Yes, there was another episode where Khloe had KRIS tested. Which I thought was weird because of course it'll show she's her mother, as she IS. It wasn't that long ago the episode aired maybe last year or the year before iirc?

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Right? Or if I found out he was my dad, I would take that shit to my grave.

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Same

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Pretty much.

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ok but what about alex roldan

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I love that Kris had the audacity to make Khloe's middle name Alexandria.

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IT IS?!!





Have you no shame, Kris??

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omg

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hahhahahahahhah omggggggg

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lmaoo yeah okay

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hope he's not her father. she'll be even more insufferable like "yasss i can say the n word, and wear "cornrolls" i'm half black!!!!"

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my first thought was how soon she'd start saying the n word publicly

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nnnn @ 'cornrolls'

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My white ass is cackling at this. IDEC. LMAO!

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ugh you know it

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mfte ugh

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Ugh jfc

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do you really want him to be your father Khloe?

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Ugh people need to stop with this shit it's so cruel imo.

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I don't know who her father is but Robert Kardashian is not, for sure.

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She just wants to be black

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has she ever claimed to be armenian before?



Edited at 2016-06-16 06:30 pm (UTC)

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I guess she went to be included, but she's definitely not Armenian because she's not Robert Kardashian's kid.

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She must have, since she accompanied her sisters to Armenia last year.

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In my last article for OilPrice.com (May 16, 2016), I laid out my reasoning for a prediction that the Global Oil Markets would soon be back in balance. Picking an exact date when an oil cycle will end is difficult, but they do call them cycles for a reason. This cycle is no different than all of the others that came before it. Oil producers and consumers respond to price changes, which brings supply & demand back into balance, just like they always do.

The last six major oil price cycles lasted an average of two years. This one started in July, 2014.

On June 14, 2016 the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued their monthly Oil Market Report. In the report the IEA revises their first quarter increase in global demand forecast from a 1.4 to 1.6 million barrel per day year-over-year increase. They are also forecasting a big spike in demand of 1,270,000 barrels per day from the 2nd quarter to the 3rd quarter. Since demand ALWAYS spikes in the 3rd quarter, this was not a surprise to anyone.

Link to IEA Oil Market Report summary: https://www.iea.org/oilmarketreport/omrpublic/

Since this cycle has been so severe, I predict that it will not end well for speculative traders that continue to short oil futures. If some of you purchased a gas guzzling SUV because you believed the talking heads that said oil would never sell for $100/bbl again, you may want to consider a smaller second car.

 Global oil production in May was 590,000 barrels per day less than it was a year ago.

 Nigerias oil sector is under attack and the situation seems to be getting worse

 OPEC production fell by 110,000 barrels per day as increases in Iranian production were more than offset by big losses in Nigeria, Libya and Venezuela

 Global demand is up 1,600,000 barrels per day year-over-year as Chinese demand has held up and demand from India is very strong

Canadian wildfires at their peak took 1,500,000 barrels per day off the market. This production should be restored in the 3rd quarter. The situations in Nigeria, Libya and Venezuela are much worse. Inf fact, there is now concern that the government in Venezuela may collapse under the debt load created by low oil prices.

The direction of the oil market should now be crystal clear to everyone. Demand growth is relentless. The products refined from oil are essential to a high standard of living on this planet. We will all complain when gasoline is back over $3.00/gallon, but we will continue to pay for it. Within 6 to 9 months, demand for oil should exceed production. High storage levels provide a cushion, but oil prices will continue to ramp higher.

What are other analysts predicting?

 Raymond James says West Texas Intermediate (WTI) will average $60/bbl in the 3rd quarter and $75/bbl in 2017

 Morgan Stanley recently raised their long-term oil price for Brent by $10/bbl to $80/bbl

For those of you investing in upstream oil & gas companies it is important to note that $70 is the new $100. By this, I mean that the improving well results and much lower drilling & completion costs of horizontal wells in the U.S. shale plays makes the economics for new wells about the same at $70 oil as they were a couple of years ago at $100 oil. Related: Cheap Energy Storage Is Set To Undermine Fossil Fuels

Keep an eye on the frack sand companies (EMES, FNSA, HCLP, SLCA). The upstream companies are getting better well results by using a lot more sand to complete horizontal wells. To stabilize U.S. oil production, the upstream companies will need to complete twice as many wells as they are completing today. Demand for frack sand could double within twelve months.

Natural Gas Market

I want to shift gears and remind you that all upstream companies produce a combination of oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL). Each product trades on a separate market.

The U.S. natural gas market is isolated from the rest of the world. Although we are the worlds largest gas consumer, the U.S. has very little import capacity other than pipelines from Canada. Canadian production has declined, so they have less gas to send us. We are now exporting gas via pipeline to Mexico and via ship in the form of liquified natural gas (LNG). The U.S. is on-track to be a net exporter of natural gas by 2020.

In just the last two weeks, the price of natural gas has increased by $0.45/mmbtu. The January, 2017 NYMEX contract, which will be the front month contract by late November, closed at $3.32/mmbtu on June 10th. The oil and gas prices you see quoted in the business news each day are the front month NYMEX contracts.

(Click to enlarge)

The reason for the sharp move in the gas price is awareness by the speculative traders that our gas market is going to be a lot tighter heading into next winter. U.S. production is now falling by over 400 MMcf per day month-after-month, primarily because the associated gas from horizontal wells in the oil shale plays is dropping like a rock. Gas from the Eagle Ford shale play in South Texas is falling by over 200 MMcf per day. At this rate of decline, we will have 4 to 5 Bcf per day less gas supply heading into the heating season than we had a year ago. Five percent less supply will have a significant impact on gas prices.

For reference, the U.S. consumed approximately 80 Bcf per day in 2015 (including exports). U.S. consumption is expected to be approximately 83 Bcf per day in 2016 and approaching 100 Bcf per day by 2020. Driving the increasing demand is power generation, LNG exports and industrial demand.

(Click to enlarge)

Five coal fired power plants and a nuclear power plant are being replaced by gas fired plants this year. Plus, the weather forecast for July is HOT for the eastern U.S., which will significantly increase demand from our gas fired power plants. Gas fired power plants now produce more electricity than coal fired power plants in the U.S.

Over 90 percent of new homes built in the U.S. are heated with natural gas, so residential space heating demand goes up each year.

Natural gas in storage is high for this time of year thanks to a mild winter, but a hot summer should bring storage levels back to normal by the time the next winter heating season begins. If that happens, the price of natural gas in the first quarter of 2017 should top $4.00/mmbtu.

Conclusion

The sharp decline in drilling activity has U.S. oil and gas production on steady decline and I expect the rate of decline to accelerate in the 3rd quarter. Related: Can Trump Change The Direction Of U.S. Energy?

This cycle has devastated the oilfield services firms, so it will take longer than expected to ramp up drilling & completion activity.

Wall Street fund managers have already started rotating money back into the energy sector. Although the risk-reward potential is compelling, investors should expect a lot of volatility in the sector. The large-caps are the safe bets because they have an advantage with better access to the capital markets. As the cycle matures, the well positioned small-caps should do quite well.

Upstream MLP have been hammered over the last two years and they may remain in the Wall Street penalty box for quite some time.

By Dan Steffens for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The impact of rising oil prices on North American light tight oil (LTO) production is said to be a Catch 22, the title of Joseph Hellers popular 1961 novel set in WWII. The premise was you could get out of the army if you were crazy but you werent crazy to try to get out of the army. So this avenue to escape the war didnt work for the books main character John Yossarian.

Too many analysts continue to believe drilling and service has the same problem with rising oil prices. With WTI back above $50 a barrel  at least briefly last week  North American LTO developers are putting rigs, service equipment and personnel back to work. The so-called fraclog or DUC inventory (wells drilled but uncompleted) is being reduced. While this is good it is also thought by some to be temporary.

Those who study crude prices have correctly observed it was the 4 million barrels per day (b/d) increase in U.S. LTO production that contributed greatly to the 2014 oil price collapse. So if the price of oil is now high enough to make LTO economic again some believe the reward will either be a cap on further price increases or the foundation of the next collapse. The Catch 22 is if oil prices rise high enough to put drilling and service back to work then it wont last long.

Maybe.

To this writer the most meaningless indicator of the future of world oil prices has been the weekly U.S. oil rig count published by Baker Hughes and opined upon regularly by oil analysists and writers since late 2014. Thats when it became an important world oil price driver for the first time. The argument emerged that having contributed to the collapse of world oil prices, U.S. LTO was the new global swing producer, replacing OPEC leader Saudi Arabia in that role. If and when prices rose the U.S. rig count would rise and ultimately cause prices to fall again. If prices went too low the LTO operators couldnt afford to drill, which would shrink supply and cause prices to rise.

This is materially different than prolific oil producer Saudi Arabia, which established its swing producer credentials over several decades merely by opening and closing valves. The geological and commercial differences between the two couldnt be more glaring. In the Middle East a single state oil company is exploiting arguably the most prolific reservoirs in the world. A state-controlled entity can do whatever it wants including shutting in production to manipulate prices without fear of prosecution.

In the U.S. hundreds of operators run thousands of rigs to exploit arguably some of the most expensive and geologically complex reservoirs in the world. If they somehow collude to restrict supply to affect prices they will be prosecuted and perhaps sent to jail. Whoever came up with this idea really should do more homework.

Nevertheless, the comparison got legs and away it went. With world oil prices being a huge business story analysts started to focus their attention on the weekly U.S. oil rig count as a precursor of when U.S. LTO would fall. Every Friday the Baker Hughes rig count would wiggle. If it went down WTI might tick up. If it went up WTI might tick down. WTI is the most heavily traded and speculative commodity in the world some days trading 1,000 times as many dry barrels (futures contracts) as wet barrels (actual oil production priced off WTI). Related: Will This Commodity Rebound Continue?

Besides massive futures trading, the other factors affecting WTI include the value of the U.S. dollar (it rises and WTI falls), OPEC production, world oil demand, North American and U.S. storage, Iranian crude embargoes, and periodic and unplanned supply disruptions from everywhere from Libya to Nigeria to Fort McMurray.

Regardless, the U.S. oil rig count regularly makes the news and affects the price of WTI. The following chart shows the figures for the past 19 months since it peaked in October of 2014 at 1,609 and hit the lowest level in years at only 316 in late May, merely 20 percent of the high water number.

(Click to enlarge)

The collapse of the American rig count and subsequent decline in LTO output has indeed contributed mightily to rebalancing world oil markets. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) U.S. oil production is down nearly 1 million b/d in the past year. The EIA reported June 14 that it expects LTO output to fall by another 118,000 b/d by July, mostly from the Bakken and Eagle Ford.

Assisted by this and other factors, WTI has been one of the top performing commodities since it closed at the lowest price in over a decade at only $26.19 on February 11. It has risen almost steadily to reach the highest price since last July on June 8 when it closed at $51.23, a whopping 96 percent increase. In the past week two things have occurred: WTI has lost about $3 a barrel and on June 10 the U.S. oil-targeted rig count had risen by 12 to 328.

This modest uptick in the rig count once again caused concern and prognostication on the future of oil prices. In a Globe and Mail story June 10 a New York oil trader told Reuters news agency, This looks like the beginning of a trend that will translate into the slowing down of U.S. production declines. Im adding to my short position in spreads.

This view was supported by the news June 9 reporting LTO pioneer Continental Resources Inc. was picking up service rigs and frac crews to reduce its fraclog in the Bakken. Reports say the U.S. exited 2015 with 4,290 DUC wells waiting for completion which, in most cases, costs more than drilling. That said, Continental CEO Harold Hamm said his company had no intention of resuming drilling until WTI reached $60. He was also optimistic WTI could exit 2016 at $70 because of the rapid rebalancing of global crude supply and demand.

On Wednesday July 15 Goldman Sachs resumed its pessimistic outlook with a research report stating, On an aggregate, we view the price recovery as fragile. The latest bearish outlook from Goldman is remarkable considering the June 13 monthly world crude oil markets report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It contained the outlook for the remainder of 2016, and the IEAs first stab at 2017 which is in the following chart.

From this data it is impossible to be anything but optimistic about future oil prices. The two-year massive oversupply of production versus demand (the green line over the yellow line, the blue bars above zero) from the third quarter of 2014 through to the second quarter of 2016  sometimes as much as 2.4 million b/d  is all but gone by Q3 2016. Because of massive reductions in capital spending all over the world (Wood Mackenzie currently estimates the aggregate value of cancelled oil development projects to be over $1 trillion) and the natural decline of all reservoirs, falling supply and rising demand for the next 18 months will create the best conditions for higher prices since 2013 and early 2014. Then WTI at or near $100 a barrel was common.

The IEA also admits it has underestimated demand growth. It forecast a consumption increase of 1.2 million b/d in 2016 but reported an actual increase of 1.6 million b/d in Q1 2016. Regardless, the IEA has only increased estimated demand growth for 2016 by 100,000 b/d - 8 percent - despite being low by 33 percent in Q1. Higher than expected oil consumption could accelerate price increases. Some analysts have consistently noted IEA demand estimates are usually excessively conservative.

The IEA cautions the return of Canadas oilsands to the market or the potential outbreak of peace and tranquility in Nigeria, Libya and Venezuela could change this outlook. Okay. Every forecast must carry these caveats. But the tall foreheads in Paris who study global oil markets do not believe U.S. LTO production will recover materially or that Irans current and planned production increases will actually affect world crude markets. OPEC is at or near peak output. Middle East OPEC members are having to add more drilling rigs just to sustain output let alone increase it. Related: Rebels And Tax Avoidance: Chevrons Problems Pile Up

The IEA estimates world oil demand will be nearly 97 million b/d by Q4 2016 but some analysts still figure that 12, 20 or even 100 more rigs drilling LTO in the U.S. is going to cap the world oil price. Rubbish. The U.S. oil rig count would have to double to actually move the needle in the face of continuous LTO reservoir decline rates exceeding 100,000 b/d per month.

The problem is the massive machine that put 4 million b/d of U.S. LTO on stream from 2010 to 2014 no longer exists. It was fueled by $100 oil, hundreds of operators of varying sizes, red hot equity markets, open and reckless debt markets, and nearly 1,500 drilling rigs operating every day supported by an over-levered fracking and oil service infrastructure now on its knees if still in business.

To grow production at this rate the cash to pay for drilling, completions and tie-ins was plentiful and came from a variety of sources. While oil prices may be rising theres just no cash. Many LTO developers have gone bankrupt and many more are up against their credit facilities. Junk bond buyers are more concerned with getting their money back from past investments than writing cheques. When cash flow increases with oil prices in many cases the first call will be by lenders. Squeezed drilling and service operators are in no position to extend credit to struggling operators.

It will take some time to completely refuel the LTO development machine. Those who figure U.S. LTO output will track WTI in a straight line clearly dont understand the complexities of how this large and complex business, fueled extensively by external capital, actually works.

So drilling and service can relax. With the exception of oilsands, the North American upstream oil and gas sector is more likely to be in the early stages of a long-term recovery than experiencing a short-term blip.

By David Yager for Oilprice.com

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Canadian natural gas producers will most likely continue to face increased short-term difficulties due to the twin factors of lower prices and stronger competition from the U.S., according to a study released earlier this month by Canadas National Energy Board (NEB).

The Short-term Canadian Natural Gas Deliverability 2016-2018  Energy Market Assessment study anticipates that natural gas prices will tumble from an average of about US$2.70 per million British thermal units (BTU) in 2015 to a mid-range estimate of US$2.50 per million BTU in 2016.

The NEB also posits that the price of Canadian natural gas this year could reach as high as US$3.00 per million BTU, which sits somewhat below the 2014 peak of nearly US$4.50 per million BTU.

The NEB expects prices to rebound in 2017 and 2018 by an average of US$2.75 per million BTU and US$3.00 per million BTU, respectively. Paul Mortensen, the NEBs director of energy supply, implied that such an improvement would be welcomed by gas producers as prices will likely start rising in the upcoming winter months. Nevertheless, the projections continue to be short of prices from 2014, and substantial relief could take a while to develop.

The NEB noted that gas production has risen 2.4 percent between 2014 and 2015 in order to meet a slight bump in domestic demand. North American producers have faced diminished revenue from lower commodity prices, yet investigators admitted that Canadian firms face added problems from the purchasing of equipment and supplies with the stronger U.S. dollar. The extra squeeze could lead to further decreases in drilling activity, layoffs, and seeking price concessions from suppliers in order to reduce costs. Of particular concern for the NEB are small and mid-sized Canadian producers that could have difficulty accessing capital.

Exports to Canadas southern neighbor remained flat in 2015 while imports suffered a moderate decline. The NEB did point out, however, that exports to the U.S. Midwest region continued to slide since 2015 despite increased natural gas sent to the western states. Related: Kurds To End Oil Standoff With Baghdad For $1B

A more pressing concern regarding the U.S. involves shale resources in the Appalachian basin that have already significantly displaced Canadian exports to northeastern U.S. states. Multiple pipeline projects flowing gas out of Marcellus and Utica are scheduled to be operational by 2017 and 2018. The NEB feels this could further challenge western Canadian gas in key domestic markets.

The report also details how the U.S. has a large supply of wells that have been drilled but are yet to be completed. The NEB worries that these wells could be completed once gas prices rise, and therefore quickly cause supply to spike, hurting Canadian producers.

In addition, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on 7 June predicted that the domestic natural gas production is expected to soon surpass domestic consumption. The greater concern for Canadian producers could come from EIA projections of the U.S. becoming a net exporter of gas for the first time since the 1950s.

Increases in natural gas prices will surely be less than in 2014 and offset by additional costs as well as tougher competition from the U.S. Despite assurances from NEB officials and private sector analysts, the outlook for Canadas natural gas industry doesnt look to good over the next few years.

By Erwin Cifuentes for Oilprice.com

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Italy has leapfrogged Turkey to become the second-largest importer of Russian gas, according to Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller on 15 June.

"In 2016, Italian consumers have increased their demand for gas from Russia," Miller said in a brief statement cited by S&P Global Platts. Demand grew by 5.3 percent to 24.2 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from 2014 to 2015, which was the second highest volume in its history. Purchases from Italy continue to rise this year with a first trimester yearly increase of 28 percent, though growth continued in the second quarter at a slower pace of 5.3 percent.

In contrast, Turkish imports have faltered in the early part of this year purportedly amid strained diplomatic relations stemming from the downing of a Russian fighter jet in November 2015. Turkey bought 6.42 Bcm from Gazprom in the first three months of this year, representing a 15 percent dip compared to the first quarter of 2015.

Italy isnt the only country suffering from a slowdown of Russian gas imports in the second quarter of this year. The latest Gazprom data also revealed that sales of gas to Europe and Turkey (not including ex-Soviet Union states) were practically unchanged in the first five months of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015. But supplies to several key European markets including top Russian gas importer Germany grew at a gradual pace in the early part of this year.

A silver lining to the easing of imports is the expectation of increased purchases by European countries due to the possibility of pricing under oil-indexed mechanisms falling from current levels.



Related: Conoco-Philips Pipeline Leak Threatens Wildlife Area In Alberta

In addition, the Italian market may also benefit in the long run from greater availability of natural gas from Russia. Russian plans for the construction of a new pipeline route across the Black Sea to Greece and Italy continue to run their course. Energy Minister Alexander Novak further claimed the implementation of the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project from the Caspian Region and the Middle East would not interfere with the delivery of gas to Italy.

By Erwin Cifuentes for Oilprice.com

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As alleged peace talks break down before getting off the ground, and the Niger Delta militants claim another attack on a state-run oil pipeline, a second group has emerged, threatening an attack on a major gas plant in the region.

On Thursday, the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) used its twitter feed to claim responsibility for an attack on an oil pipeline in the Oruk Anam Local Government area.

The pipeline is owned by the state-run Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), and the attack comes just days after the NDA agreed to talks with the government.

The NDA is calling for the military to leave the Niger Delta and believes the government is not earnestly pursuing peace talks. The group is also seeking independent meditators for any potential peace talks.

In the meantime, another militant group has publicly emerged in the Niger Delta in the form of the Ultorogu Liberation Movement. This group is now threatened the Otorogu Gas Plant in the Deltathe largest plant in West Africa--as well as oil facilities. They have declared their support for the NDA.



Related: Why Has There Been So Little M&A Activity During The Oil Crisis

In a statement, the newly emerged group said: It is a secessionist move. The awareness of things happening in our environment is a means to outline our course of action. The awareness is an agitation for economic balance. We have a common enemy, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC and ND Western who hate your progress and wish you die in poverty.

By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com

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The Aruban unit of oil company Citgo and the Aruban government have reached an agreement to re-open one of the Caribbeans largest oil refineries in San Nicolas, Aruba, the Caribbean Journal reported Sunday. The refinery had previously been operated by San Antonio-based energy company Valero Energy, and had sat idle for years prior to the agreement. The new deal is for a 15-year lease with the option for a 10-year extension. The signing ceremony took place in Caracas with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Aruba Prime Minister Mike Eman present. This project will transform the refinery into an upgrader for Venezuelan extra-heavy crude within 18 months to two years. This processwhich will require an investment ranging from $450 [million] to $650 million, to be obtained from external financing sourcescan be compared to a large turnaround, Citgo CEO Nelson Martinez said. After an initial adaptation process, the facility will upgrade to refining extra-heavy crude from the Orinoco Oil Belt and transforming it into intermediate crude. Citgo is owned by PDV America, an indirect subsidiary of Venezuelas PDVSA.

By The Dialogue

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Last months wildfire in northern Alberta Canada could cost Suncor Energy almost $1 billion CDN, or $778 million USD.

That fire, which resulted in the evacuation of Fort McMurray, shut down Suncor along with other producers. That situation cut Canadas output by over a million barrels of crude oil per day. A spokeswoman for Suncor did not comment on any losses.

However, two Suncor employees, whove asked not to be identified, put the losses at $1 billion Canadian. One employee said that the news had come from a Suncor executive. The sources also claimed that they had been told that Suncors thermal operations were not coming back online as soon as the company had hoped. They were also told that the company has around six months of available inventory at its main site.

Another employee, who also remained anonymous, said that the company saw losses that could go beyond the $1 billion mark. That employee said the costs were attributed to worker transportation and lodging. Sneh Seetal, a Suncor spokeswoman, said that the return to operations is going as planned.

The company now anticipates 2016 total production of 585,000-620,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOE/D), down from the prior guidance of 620,000-665,000 BOE/D.



Related: Oil Sell Off Continues Amid Economic Uncertainty

Energy companies Husky and Cenovus, which resumed operations last week, did not expect their wildfire losses to be substantial, but representatives for the company did not provide a dollar estimate.

Suncor and other producers were forced to stop operations after fires in Fort McMurray and Pelican Lake prompted worker evacuations.

By Lincoln Brown for Oilprice.com

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Calgary-based energy infrastructure company TransCanada said it would build and operate a $2.1 billion natural gas pipeline in Mexico, Reuters reported Monday. TransCanada will own a 60 percent stake in the project, and San Diego-based Sempra Energys IEnova unit will hold the remaining stake. TransCanada said Monday the Sur de Texas-Tuxpan pipeline would be built through a joint venture between the two companies and be backed by a 25-year transportation service contract with Mexicos state-owned power company. Houston-based Spectra Energy said it won a contract to build and operate a $1.5 billion natural gas pipeline in Texas that would connect to the 497 mile-

long Sur de Texas-Tuxpan pipeline. The Sur de Texas-Tuxpan pipeline is expected to be in service by late 2018 and is the largest of three new projects in Mexico that TransCanada has recently announced. Construction has already begun on the $500 million Tuxpan-Tula pipeline and the $550 million Tula-Villa de Reyes lines. This new project brings our footprint of existing assets and projects in development in Mexico to more than $5 billion, TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said in a statement. U.S. President Barack Obama rejected TransCanadas Keystone XL oil pipeline expansion last year, and the company is currently struggling to gain approval for its Energy East project in Canada.

By The Dialogue

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I survived the presidency of George W. Bush. This shouldn't be a surprise; in 2000, I was white, male, college-educated and working in a job with security and modest prospects for advancement independent of the ebbs and flows of the business cycle. I'm not saying I was invulnerable, but I was really far up on that particular food chain.

In other words, if things got to the point where someone like me was in trouble, then the world was probably too far gone ever to be saved, and all those Americans more vulnerable than I were well and truly screwed.

As it turns out, this is almost exactly what happened. By 2008, I had bought a house, paid off my student loans and regularly vacationed on some of the world's nicest beaches. But a lot of people were losing their houses, the country was embroiled in two unwinnable wars, the economy was in the tank, income inequality was out of control, John Roberts and Samuel Alito joined the Supreme Count and tens of millions of vulnerable Americans were in demonstrably worse shape than before Bush took office.

I didn't vote for Ralph Nader in 2000, and I hesitate to blame Nader voters too much for costing Al Gore an election that should have been a landslide victory in his favor rather than a close popular vote win and electoral vote loss. Still, the median Nader voter was a young, white, male, East Coast liberal  the kind of person whose privilege would let them, like me, get by just fine under a Republican presidency. Nader's case then was that there was no real difference between Gore and Bush, a case no one in their right minds would make today.

I think about Nader now and feel compelled to write about this now, because now that Bernie Sanders has lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, there's a disturbing trend among some of his backers.

Not all of them, of course. The vast majority of Sanders voters are ready to support Clinton, according to the polls. Which makes a lot of sense  as I have written here, and as others have documented, there's not that much space between the two of them ideologically. For the two years they were in the U.S. Senate together, they voted the same way 93 percent of the time.

There are also some holdouts putting a lot of faith in absentee California ballots and in "superdelegates" who have never once acted against the outcome of the pledged delegate race, hoping to see Sanders nominated at the Democratic convention next month. Those people are just delusional.

But there's a dangerous third set of supporters who have accepted Sanders's loss and, rather than support Clinton, are ready to burn the Democratic Party to the ground out of spite. Clinton is the last person they would every vote for; they will vote for Donald Trump, or for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or go ahead and write in Sanders himself.

I am not making these people up. More than 100,000 of them have signed a petition pledging not to vote for Clinton because, as they say, "Clinton"s policies are center-right, she carries too much baggage and she has too many enemies to win the general election." Those are easily disproved falsehoods (she's simply not "center-right") or just plain dumb opinions, but they're enough to create a potential Nader moment this fall. Like 2000's Naderites, these Sanders dead-enders don't see a difference between Clinton and Trump.

Democrats I have known and liked for years are now proudly "#NeverHillary." One long-time good friend of mine insisted recently that Clinton was "rammed down our throats" by Democratic insiders, and despite Clinton's wide popular-vote win and consistent lead in head-to-heads against Sanders, she only won because the party leadership was "ignoring the people and manipulating things for Hillary Clinton."

Or this from a self-described progressive friend-of-a-friend on Facebook: "I don't vote for family crime syndicates," meaning the Clintons. Another: "If Trump gets in, we have a rough ride. If Clinton gets in, we have a rougher ride, and very likely we will be responsible for millions of deaths."

When I posted a quick note last week to try to offer Sanders voters a sympathetic perspective, the sole comment I received was a blistering anti-Clinton screed from a regular, reliably liberal commenter.

He equated Barack Obama with Scott Walker  I know, I don't get that either  and then wrote, "Enough of the failing imperialists empire of fascist conquest, there are other avenues to human survival on this planet. Hillary is the sure and certain road to further ruin."

Don't ask me to explain what that word salad even means or just how these people think Clinton is a bigger threat to national or international security than Donald Trump, a man who seems to understand geopolitics about as well as I understand these "#NeverHillary" wackos. I'm just pointing out that there is a real and concerted movement dedicated to making sure the legitimate Democratic nominee doesn't win come November, a movement that either doesn't believe there's a difference between Clinton and Trump, or just doesn't care.

Of course, I personally can survive the presidency of Donald Trump. I'm still a white, male, college-educated, job-secure homeowner. According to various internet calculators that track these things, Trump would even cut my taxes by quite a bit, so I'd even have that going for me.

These "#BernieOrBust" folks are, by and large, coming from a similar place of privilege as I am. They are not personally going to be affected, at least not seriously, by the regressive policies of President Trump.

Instead, they think, losing the White House in November will finally bring about some unspecified epiphany in the Democratic Party, something about how maybe now they'll "listen to the people." Who suffers harm in this scenario, the "#NeverHillary" contingent insists, is the Democratic Party leadership, the Debbie Wasserman-Schultzes of the world. This will be a juicy comeuppance for those elites!

However, that's the furthest thing from reality. Those who suffer will, of course, be those most vulnerable, those just now barely recovered from what they went through under the Bush administration.

It won't take too long for a President Trump, especially with a House dominated by Republicans who make a misshapen lump of steel look warm and human by comparison, to ratchet up the pain and suffering of tens of millions of Americans. Every step forward made under President Obama will be offset by a thousand steps backward. Terrible people will replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Everything from repealing the Affordable Care Act to tearing up the nuclear arms treaty with Iran will have real and frightening ramifications domestically and internationally.

Here's the thing: These "#BernieOrBust"-ers don't care. They actually see the failures and upheaval this country would experience under Trump to be a feature, not a bug. When Americans see how horrible Trump is, they say, they'll flock to our side and progressive Democrats will sweep into power.

Let's ask Gov. Tom Barrett how well that strategy works, shall we? I think he's out back tending his flock of unicorns.

And while, yes, Democrats did reclaim power in Washington in the wave elections of 2006 and 2008, it took a literal natural disaster  Hurricane Katrina  atop all the Bush-made unnatural disasters to spur that upheaval. How many billions of dollars did all that cost? How many thousands of lives? And these people want to do that all again!

While yes, I do come from my own place of privilege, I spend every working day of my life with the distinctly underprivileged, the children of the Milwaukee Public Schools. While I don't initiate talk of politics in my classroom, it's hard to avoid it in years like this. And my students are scared to death of President Trump. They know that they are likely to be among those whose lives and livelihoods will be disrupted or destroyed under a Trump regime.

We can't let that happen.

So this is my earnest plea, fellow Democrats and fellow liberals. You can still love Bernie Sanders. You can still agitate to make sure Clinton's choice for vice president is someone who shares your ideology or doesn't toe the corporate line or whatever you wish to be true of him or her. You can keep working hard to build a more progressive party structure with down-ballot candidates and state party leadership. You can still go to Philadelphia to sway the national party to change its platform to look more like the Sanders agenda and kill the "superdelegate" system dead while you're at it.

But vote for Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8. Those who lack your privilege are counting on you to set yours aside and do the right thing.
By Robert Nelson



Like Gen. MacArthur as the Japanese closed in Hillary fears the IG report on her emails

(Image by ThisCantBeHappening!) Details DMCA



Few people thought, back in 1941 that the Japanese military could defeat or pose a serious threat to the US military. Yet, by April 8, 1942, only five months into the war, United States' forces stationed on Luzon, our Philippine colony, had surrendered to a upstart Asian colonial power, the empire of Japan. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the US commander in the Far East, had fled in ignominous defeat from the colony to Australia a month before. The remaining Filipino and American prisoners of war were left behind and forced in a death march of 65 miles to move to POW camps, where they remained under brutal conditions for the rest of the war. The name "Bataan" has since come to symbolize the depths of depravity following defeat.

Bataan was invoked again by journalists to describe the conditions at the Brooklyn campaign headquarters of then-Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the wake of an improbable and unexpectedly harsh finding by the inspector general (IG) of the State Department. The State Department's own watchdog found its former boss, Secretary Clinton, to have clearly violated the rules and procedures of her own agency and the legal requirements of the National Freedom of Information Act. Clinton, the IG's report said, posed "significant security risks" through her decision to use a private email server for professional business while she was secretary of state.

The IG's report promises to be the centerpiece of the Republican attack on the Democrats in the fall election if Secretary Clinton grabs the party's presidential nomination.

While her damage-control operation -- a fixture in the Clinton political machine through decades of scandals -- has gone into full gear, and a largely supportive corporate media has predictably tried to play down the import of the IG's report, there is still a major FBI investigation underway of the same misconduct by former Secretary Clinton, which has included granting immunity from at least one key member of her staff who handled her home communications system -- a staffer who already took the Fifth over the issue at a House hearing. If the FBI were to indict Clinton, her situation would start to resemble General MacArthur's in the spring of 1942 -- surrounded with no way out but to flee the scene.

Some of Clinton's mass media friends have attempted, predictably, to link these developments to the continuing assault by what she once called, " " a vast right wing conspiracy." The problem with this defense lies in the very nature of the IG process"

For the rest of this article by ROBERT NELSON in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3201
On Thursday, in a political move more typical of the United States than Europe, a member of the British Parliament was murdered. She was an opponent of Brexit (Britain exiting the European Union), and her murderer reportedly shouted "Britain First!"

There is a case to be made, on the one hand, that exiting the EU is actually the move away from violence. There are many areas, from banking to farming to militarism, that motivate Norway and Iceland to stay out, for all the right reasons, including resistance to war making -- as with Sweden's and Switzerland's staying out of NATO. I was rooting for Scotland's departure from the UK in the name of peace and disarmament, and looked forward to U.S. nukes and NATO being kicked out of that beautiful country.

The European Union has become the civilian arm of NATO, expanding ever nearer Russia at the insistence of the United States, which -- believe it or not -- is not actually a European nation at all. Were Norway to join the EU, that could mean trouble for Norway's fair and humane economy. But Britain? Britain is a drag on the EU, there at the insistence of the United States which needs puppet-veto power over any European moves toward independence, peace, environmental sustainability, or economic fairness. The EU's influence on Britain is largely to the benefit of the Brits.

There is perhaps a stronger case to be made that exiting the EU would be a move toward violence. This is the case for the EU as a model of peacemaking. For this argument I refer you to a new book by Vijay Mehta called Peace Beyond Borders: How the EU Brought Peace to Europe and How Exporting It Would End Conflicts Around the World. Let me make very clear that I think Mehta wildly exaggerates his case. Far more important to ending war in the world, I believe, are a number of other factors, the top two being: (1) Get the rich countries, led by the U.S. and Europe, to stop selling weapons to the world, and (2) Get the rich countries, led by the U.S. and Europe, to stop bombing, invading, and occupying poor countries.

The EU's supposed 70 years of peace leaves out massive warmaking abroad, as well as wars in Yugoslavia. The case for the EU's bringing of peace and prosperity has to explain Norwegian and Icelandic peace and prosperity as tangential effects of the EU's orbit. Bestowing a Nobel Prize on a leading warmaking region of the world, a prize meant to fund disarmament activists given to the EU which could fund itself by buying a bit less weaponry -- that was an insult to the world and to Alfred Nobel's will.

But, within its proper scope, there is nonetheless a major point to be made. Europe was for centuries the leading hotspot for war as well as its leading exporter. For an unprecedented 71 years Europe has been almost exclusively an exporter of war. The idea of a war within Europe is now almost unthinkable. Mehta argues that we ought to try thinking it, because a few slips could quickly bring it back again. Mehta credits the EU with having made peace normal through 10 mechanisms. I would add to these, of course, fear of nuclear holocaust, and cultural trends away from war acceptance. But here are the mechanisms:

Enshrined democracy and rule of law

Economic truce

Open borders and human ties

Soft power and shared values

Permanent discussion, dialogue, diplomacy

Financial incentives and support

Veto and consensus building

Resistance to external influence

Rules, human rights, and multiculturalism

Mutual trust and peaceful coexistence

Mehta argues that these mechanisms helped resolve the dispute in Northern Ireland, a dispute over Gibraltar, and secessionist movements in Scotland, Spain, and Belgium. (But, even by Mehta's admission, the EU bowed to U.S. desires in facilitating a coup in Ukraine.) Mehta believes the EU should change, should free itself from U.S. influence and militarism. Yet he makes a strong case for the power of the ten mechanisms. And he strengthens it with examples of budding regional unions in other parts of the world: the African Union keeping the peace between Egypt and Ethiopia; the International Criminal Court being put to good use by African nations; the Association of South-East Asian Nations influencing its members and would-be members toward peace; and the Union de Naciones Suramericanas developing similar potential. (Mehta's book seems to have been written before the latest coup in Brazil).

LESSONS FOR THE USA

Surprisingly, Mehta's advice to the United States is not to join a regional alliance, but to restore power to the states that has been concentrated by the federal government. Mehta's prescription is for both internationalism and localism. He holds up Canada as a model of the latter. Canadian provinces have far more power and independence than do U.S. states. California's budget is less than 3 percent of the U.S. government's. Ontario's is 46 percent the size of Canada's.

U.S. states lower corporate taxes to attract corporations, resulting in smaller budgets for all U.S. states. The federal government takes on the role of guiding the economy, resulting in military expansion as a jobs program -- there being nothing else the government is willing to hire people to do than kill.

Of course, U.S. liberals rightly fear racism and bigotry from state governments, while wrongly not really caring much about massive slaughter abroad. But giving power to states would give power to democracy and strip it from Wall Street and weapons makers. Some states might do horrible things. Other states would do amazingly wonderful things. Look at the states that are right now being blocked from providing single-payer healthcare by Obama's corporate boondoggle. Imagine the influence the first state to provide preschool, college, family leave, vacation, retirement, childcare, transportation, and environmental sustainability would have on the other 49!

So, the United States needs to re-federalize by de-concentrating power. It also needs to pull its nose out of every region of the earth other than North America. Britain could give the U.S. a helpful kick out the door by voting to stay in the EU and to declare independence instead from the U.S.A.
Reprinted from The Hill

In a column in July 2015 titled "The GOP Frankenstein," I quoted Rick Perry as describing Donald Trump as a cancer on conservatism. Almost a year later, the GOP Frankenstein continues on a rampage, and the cancer metastasizes with every new Trump comment -- comments so vile that even House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) describes them as textbook racism.

The profile in courage demonstrated by Perry's honest and accurate description of Trump has become a profile in cowardice and convenience, as Perry and Ryan, along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and other conservatives and Republicans, put party ahead of country, and convenience ahead of principle, and fall in line supporting Trump for president with different degrees of enthusiasm but equal degrees of shame.

If they were with us today, which sadly they are not in body or spirit, conservative icons Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and Barry Goldwater would unequivocally oppose Donald Trump for president and commander in chief.

It is a cancer on conservatism to align conservatism with racism or bigotry against any group. Why can't Ryan and Rubio, who call themselves principled conservatives inspired by Kemp, understand that he would have angrily denounced and aggressively opposed any candidate who spews racist words about Hispanics or any group?

While retired general and former CIA Director David Petraeus warns in The Washington Post that politicians who foment bigotry and employ hate speech against Muslims endanger our nation and help genocidal terrorists who seek to kill us, it is a cancer on conservatism for Trump, an ignoramus on national security who is vehemently opposed by a long list of conservative national security experts, to employ these tactics in his politics of fear and hate.

It is a cancer on fiscal conservatism for Trump to suggest that the United States does not have to pay its debts, that the full faith and credit of the United States can be discarded like an old shoe, and to suggest -- inaccurately -- that the president can just print more money. Why can't Ryan, McConnell, Rubio, Ayotte and all conservatives understand that William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman clearly would have considered this view economic heresy that would trigger another financial meltdown if executed by an economically incompetent president?

It is a cancer on conservatism that Trump has more in common with the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev, who built a wall to protect communism, than Reagan, who challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall to promote freedom.

Winston Churchill did not defeat Nazis by praising murderous dictators, dividing his people against one another and telling them they should cower in fear, as Trump does in his daily defamations against conservatism and Americanism.

It is a cancer on conservatism for any believer in free enterprise to praise Trump's business practices, which major investigative reports document have reaped huge personal profits through bankruptcies, a pseudo-university widely accused of fraud, failed businesses that have destroyed value for shareholders and bondholders and deadbeat tactics that have put contractors out of business and workers out of jobs.

While George Washington said he could never tell a lie and Abraham Lincoln was labeled Honest Abe, it is a cancer on conservatism to support a nominee who was identified as liar of the year by a leading fact-checker in 2015.

While Reagan embodied a conservatism of principle and civility, it is a cancer on conservatism for the shape-shifting Trump to suggest President Obama may secretly want terrorists to attack America, to suggest the father of a conservative opponent may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination and to ridicule the heroism of American prisoners of war.

Conservatives might consider that when a patient's life is threatened by a metastasizing cancer, the doctor removes it with surgery, radiation or chemotherapy -- he does not support the cancer and promise it will behave better after the patient is dead.
Reprinted from Palestine Chronicle

"(At dawn) ... I will resist ... (Since) upon the wall there is still a white sheet ... And my fingers are yet to (completely) dissolve."

This is a translated verse from Mu'in Bseiso "Three Walls of the Torture Chamber." He was -- and remains -- one of Gaza's most influential intellectual and renowned poets.

After Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, he lived in exile for the rest of his life, hopping from one country to another. Many of Gaza's great intellectuals were exiled as well; others languished in jail or were assassinated.

Bseiso died in some London hotel in 1984. One of his older plays carrying this verse envisaging his death...

"And my tongue was a sword ... But I am now dying ... And my (only) witnesses are these four muted walls."

Every phase of Bseiso's literary work carried clues to the struggle faced by Palestinians throughout their modern history, which he echoed in his poems until his passing. His words spoke of resistance, love, torture chambers and naked walls, children coloring on a beach, exile ... oh, the endless exile.

But Resistance featured prominently in almost everything he wrote.

"If I fall, comrade, in the struggle, take my place, And gaze at my lips as they halt the madness of the wind. I have not died ... I am still calling you from beyond my wounds. Sound your drums, so that the whole people may heed your call and fight ..." (The Battle)

The spirit of Gaza is the spirit of Mu'in Bseiso: beautiful, poetic, tortured, strong, undying, and loving and although confined by ever-shrinking spaces, always resisting.

I am writing this, not only as a nod of gratitude to Gaza's great poet for the way he influenced me and several generations of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals in Gaza and elsewhere, but to denote a fact that seems to escape many of us: Gaza is also an abode of poetry.

Alas, how many of us can name a single Palestinian poet from Gaza? Likely, very few. It is because we are accustomed to affiliating Gaza with death, not life. Poetry is the greatest intellectual affirmation of life because great poets never die. Their verses linger like the roots of an ancient Palestinian olive tree.

This is what Asmaa al-Ghoul, one of Gaza's finest young writers and bloggers, wrote of a poetry festival held in Gaza City a few years ago. The event, which took place in 2013, was staged sometime between the two most destructive wars launched by Israel against the besieged Strip:
See original here



'Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee,' the hacker wrote, emailing documents purportedly from DNC servers to various outlets.

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This week's hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network "just became a big deal," according to whistleblower Edward Snowden: on Thursday, a lone actor took responsibility for the cyber attack previously blamed on Russia and published a series of documents allegedly extracted from DNC servers.

A hacker calling themselves "Guccifer 2.0" -- after Guccifer, the currently jailed Romanian hacker who claims to have accessed Hillary Clinton's email server during her tenure as secretary of state -- emailed documents to Gawker and the Smoking Gun that appear to be opposition research (pdf) on Republican front-runner Donald Trump as well as lists of million-dollar-plus donations and donor contact information.



One of the documents released by 'Guccifer 2.0.'

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The hacker also published the documents on their blog.

Gawker reported that it "has not yet been able to verify that the Trump file was produced by the DNC, but we have been able to independently verify that the financial documents were produced by people or groups affiliated with the Democratic Party."

After stating that the attack was "easy, very easy" to accomplish, the hacker wrote in their email to the Smoking Gun that "Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton's and other Democrats' mail servers. But he certainly wasn't the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC's servers."

Guccifer 2.0 went on to claim that they accessed "many thousands" of documents from DNC servers, and that they gave WikiLeaks "all the rest."

The release of donor information appears to refute the claims of the DNC and its cyber security firm, CrowdStrike, which earlier this week said that no donor or financial documents had been breached.

"DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said no financial documents were compromised," the hacker wrote on their blog. "Nonsense! Just look through the Democratic Party lists of donors!"

In response to Guccifer 2.0's posting, the DNC doubled down on the original claim that Russia was behind the cyber attack: "Our experts are confident in their assessment that the Russian government hackers were the actors responsible for the breach detected in April, and we believe that today's release and the claims around it may be a part of a disinformation campaign by the Russians," the DNC told Wired.

Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, also suggested to the Washington Post that Guccifer 2.0's release of documents "may be part of a 'Russian disinformation' campaign."

"We are exploring the documents' authenticity and origin," Alperovitch told the newspaper. "Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government's involvement."

"Some small signs do point to Russian involvement," Wired noted. "The PDFs posted by Gawker and the Smoking Gun contain error messages on several URLs that include Cyrillic characters and translate from Russian to 'error, invalid hyperlinks.'"

"Finding the perpetrator of a sophisticated hacker intrusion can be messy," as Wired observed. "Getting to the bottom of a vicious data breach at the center of a no-holds-barred presidential campaign is a full-on trainwreck."

Regardless of whether or not Russia is indeed behind the incursion, Edward Snowden pointed to the significance of the DNC hack on Twitter:




How to Start A Public Bank

by Scott Baker, New York Coordinator for the Public Banking Institute

Why write a How-To Guide to starting a Public Bank?

A lot has been written about why we need Public Banks, from the books and articles of Ellen Brown -- essentially the founder of the modern American Public Banking Movement in the 21st century - to individual State or City Public Banking chapters creating their own feasibility studies and documenting their results and projections.

Unfortunately, for the average activist looking to take on this kind of reform in his or her community, there is very little to actually show them the way in a step-by-step nuts and bolts fashion. Where will the money come from? Will that money be needed back and if so, when and is that feasible? What are the balances, operating and performance ratios you must maintain (if you don't know what these terms mean, don't worry, that's another thing that will be explained in the following pages), how much money can a community of X population expect a public bank to be able to lend? How will this change over the years as the bank becomes more profitable?

There are some banking basics books and articles available that explain how to create a small, basic commercial bank, and we will use a three-page section from one of them: Banking Basics (pgs 19-21) from the article Money Basics by Christopher D. Moore, 2003 (see Appendix). But the requirements and options for a Public Bank are substantially different, and advantageous as we will see, and so require modifications to the basic banking spreadsheet created by Moore. These have been made to the working spreadsheet that accompanies this document.

Both this Adobe Acrobat document and the MS Excel spreadsheet may be found and downloaded from the files section of the Public Banking for New York State Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/groups/publicbanking/files/

Even though the Facebook page is set up for New York, my work as the New York Coordinator for the Public Banking Institute has brought me projects from New York City; Goshen, NY; Pennsylvania; Philadelphia; Vermont; New Jersey (Princeton, Trenton, etc.); Tacoma, Washington; Arizona; New Mexico; California (Santa Cruz); and, most importantly for this exercise, the moderately sized city of Oakland, California.

The members of the Oakland chapter first hired me to assess the assets potentially available to create a Public Bank in the summer of 2015. I completed that assignment in early 2016, but quickly realized that it was not enough to just identify the pools of money available (more on that later) without specifying how that money will be used to set up a bank and critically, since it will be borrowed from existing funds under the scenario I've been promoting for 4 years, how and when it will be repaid.

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(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
The "no fly, no buy" idea -- a proposal to ban people whose names appear on the Terrorist Screening Center's "no fly list" from purchasing firearms -- has been around since at least 2009 when an act of that name failed in Congress. It was an evil idea then and it's an evil idea now. But it's once again an evil idea on the march, backed by demagogues of both parties in Congress and by Republican and Democratic presidential nominees-apparent Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

What's so evil about it? Let's break it down into its constituent parts to find out.

First, "no fly." The no fly list is a list of people forbidden to board commercial aircraft in the United States on the claim that they are suspected of terrorist inclinations. Who suspects them? Nameless bureaucrats. On the basis of what evidence? Only those bureaucrats know. Who's on the list? Once again, only those bureaucrats -- and people who are actually stopped from boarding aircraft -- know.

There's a name for a system under which your ability to travel can be abridged by force of law absent evidence, without charge, sans trial and conviction, without due process of any kind. That name is "police state."

Secondly, "no buy." I shouldn't have to explain this one. If the original police state measure (the no fly list) is an evil idea (and it is), extending that evil measure into additional areas of American life is equally evil if not more so.

Make no mistake about it, the backers of "no fly, no buy" are a far greater threat to our lives and our liberty than any number of Omar Mateens. That they're dancing on the graves of Mateen's victims in pursuit of their goals is nauseating but not surprising.

The uses of the no fly list should not be expanded. Instead, the list itself should be deleted -- consigned to oblivion -- as soon as it exhausts its purpose as evidence in charging and convicting those who created and implemented it for conspiracy against rights under 18 US Code, Section 241:

"If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same ". They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section " they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death."
Reprinted from Unz Review

The power of the Israel Lobby





Last Wednesday at noon at Arlington National Cemetery I attended the annual commemorative gathering of the survivors and friends of the U.S.S. Liberty. The moving service included the ringing of a ship's bell for each one of the 34 American sailors, Marines and civilians that were killed in the deliberate Israeli attack that sought to sink the intelligence gathering ship and kill all its crew. Present were a number of surviving crewmembers as well as veterans like myself and other Americans who are committed to ensuring that the story of the Liberty will not die in hopes that someday the United States government will have the courage to acknowledge what actually happened on that fateful day.

It was the 49th anniversary of the attack. In truth the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, has almost faded from memory, with a younger generation completely unaware that a United States naval vessel was once deliberately attacked and nearly sunk by America's "greatest friend and ally" Israel. The attack was followed by a cover-up that demonstrated clearly that at least one president of the United States even back nearly 50 years ago valued his relationship with the state of Israel above his loyalty to his own country.

It was in truth the worst attack ever carried out on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time. In addition to the death toll, 171 more of the crew were wounded in the two-hour assault, which was clearly intended to destroy the intelligence gathering vessel operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Israelis, whose planes had their Star of David markings covered up so Egypt could be blamed, attacked the ship repeatedly from the air and with gunboats from the sea.

The incredible courage and determination of the surviving crew was the only thing that kept the Liberty from sinking. The ship's commanding officer Captain William McGonagle was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic role in keeping the ship afloat, though President Lyndon Baines Johnson broke with tradition and refused to hold the medal ceremony in the White House, also declining to award it personally, delegating that task to the Secretary of the Navy in a closed-to-the-public presentation made at the Washington Navy Yard. The additional medals given to other crew members in the aftermath of the attack made the U.S.S. Liberty the most decorated ship based on a single engagement with hostile forces in the history of the United States Navy.

The cover-up of the attack began immediately. The Liberty crew was sworn to secrecy over the incident, as were the Naval dockyard workers in Malta and even the men of the U.S.S. Davis, which had assisted the badly damaged Liberty to port. A hastily convened and conducted court of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain acted under orders from Washington to declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquiry's senior legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be a "deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew," also described how "President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

The court's findings were rewritten and sections relating to Israeli war crimes, to include the machine gunning of life rafts, were excised. Following in his father's footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona has used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence. Most of the documents relating to the Liberty incident have never been released to the public in spite of the 49 years that have passed since the attack took place.

The faux court of inquiry and the medals awarded in secret were only the first steps in the cover-up, which has persisted to this day, orchestrated by politicians and a media that seem to place Israel's interests ahead of those of the United States. Libertysurvivors have been finding it difficult even to make their case in public. In early April a billboard that read "Help the USS Liberty Survivors -- Attacked by Israel" was taken down in New Bedford Massachusetts. The billboard had been placed by the Honor Liberty Vets Organization and, as is normal practice, was paid for through a contractual arrangement that would require the billboard company to post the image for a fixed length of time. It was one of a number of billboards placed in different states. Inevitably, Israel's well connected friends began to complain. One Jewish businessman threatened to take his business elsewhere, so the advertising company obligingly removed the billboard two weeks early.

After 49 years, the dwindling number of survivors of the Liberty are not looking for punishment or revenge. When asked, they will tell you that they only ask for accountability, that an impartial inquiry into the attack be convened and that the true story of what took place finally be revealed to the public.

That Congress is deaf to the pleas of the Liberty crew should surprise no one as the nation's legislative body has been for years, as Pat Buchanan once put it, "Israeli occupied territory." The Lobby's ability to force Congress and even the presidency to submit to its will has been spelled out in some detail by critics, first by Paul Findley in They Dare to Speak Out, later by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in The Israel Lobby, in Alison Weir's Against Our Better Judgment, and most recently in Kirk Beattie's excellent Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East.

Congressional willingness to protect Israel even when it is killing Americans is remarkable, but it is symptom of the legislative body's willingness to go to bat for Israel reflexively, even when it is damaging to U.S. interests and to the rights that American citizens are supposed to enjoy. I note particularly legislation currently working its way through Congress that will make it illegal for any federal funding to go to any entity that supports the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, better known as BDS. BDS is a way to put pressure on the Israeli government over its human rights abuses that is both non-violent and potentially effective. As the federal government has its hooks all over the economy and at various levels in education as well as state and local government its threat to force the delegitimization of BDS is far from an empty one.

Existing laws in more than 20 states with more on the way, including most recently New York, punishing entities that support the peaceful BDS movement by labeling BDS as anti-Semitic and making it illegal or sanctionable to support it are direct attacks on free speech. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated "We want Israel to know we are on its side." And it doesn't stop with BDS. Recently signed trade agreements with Europe were drafted to be conditional on European acceptance of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian West Bank while Israel is also pushing to censor the internet to make material that constitutes "incitement" banned. Incitement would, of course, include anything critical of Israel or its government on the grounds that it is anti-Semitic.

Democratic candidate presumptive Hillary Clinton has explicitly promised to do all in her power to oppose BDS, telling an adoring American Israel Public Affairs Committee audience in March that "Many of the young people here today are on the front lines of the battle to oppose the alarming boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS. Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people. I've been sounding the alarm for a while now. As I wrote last year in a letter to the heads of major American Jewish organizations, we have to be united in fighting back against BDS."

So the treatment of the U.S.S. Liberty should surprise no one in a country whose governing class has been for decades doing the bidding of the powerful lobby of a tiny client state that has been nothing but trouble and expense for the United States of America. Will it ever end? As the Israel Lobby currently controls the relevant parts of the federal government and much of the media, change is not likely to happen overnight, but there are some positive signs. If the Democratic Party platform committee under the influence of Bernie Sanders is successful in toning down the usual extravagant praise of Israel -- against the wishes of Hillary, one might add -- that would be a sign that change is difficult but not necessarily impossible.

If Donald Trump wins and holds to his promise to be neutral between Israel and Palestine in negotiations that too would be a marked shift in perception of the conflict. And if the American people finally wake up and realize that they are tired of the entire farce and decide to wash their hands of the Middle East that would change everything. Just imagine picking up the morning newspaper and not reading a front page story about the warnings and threats coming from that great world leader Benjamin Netanyahu. That would be quite remarkable.
"We need a party which is prepared to stand up for the disappearing middle class, for the 47 million people in this country who are living in poverty, and take on the greed of the powerful special interests that are doing so much harm to this country, who have so much power over the political and economic life of our country," he said.

"We need, obviously, to get rid of superdelegates," he added.

The news conference also precedes a speech that Sanders plans to deliver to his supporters on Thursday via an online video address.

"When we started this campaign, I told you that I was running not to oppose any man or woman, but to propose new and far-reaching policies to deal with the crises of our time," he stated in an email advertising the event. "And for the past fourteen months, through the entire primary process, we've sent the establishment a message they can't ignore: we won't settle for the status quo."

"After today, the voting is done, but our political revolution continues," he wrote, referring to the primary taking place in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

Over the past year, political revolution has become Sanders' signature call to action; as he and Clinton prepare to meet, observers noted the significance of his campaign in influencing Democratic platforms and breathing new life into the electorate at large.

As author and activist Naomi Klein wrote on Tuesday:

"The evidence is clear: The left just won. Forget the nomination -- I mean the argument. Clinton, and the 40-year ideological campaign she represents, has lost the battle of ideas. The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of data. "What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud -- free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy. And the crowds are cheering. With so much encouragement, who knows what's next?"

To that end, Sanders is expected to push for progressive reforms to the DNC's platform in his meeting with Clinton as the two candidates carve out an action plan following her win in California, clinching the Democratic nomination.

According to CNN, the concessions he is likely to ask for include a change in DNC leadership, more open primaries that make it easier for independents to take part, and a roll call vote at the party's upcoming convention in Philadelphia that would allow his delegates to speak before a nominee is chosen.
What is scapegoating? When a Baptist preacher in Sacramento, a man of Latino heritage, applauds the deaths of nearly 50 individuals whose sole crime was dancing while gay and Latino, saying, "I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight. The tragedy is that more of them didn't die. I'm kind of upset he didn't finish the job."

Singling out one facet of identity to blame for whatever the scapegoater detests is always--and I mean always--vicious, untrue, and damaging. Anyone who doubts this needs only shift the practice onto categories normally considered immune in this society. Friday is the first anniversary of the Charleston church massacre, in which a lone gunman killed nine people at a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church. The shooter, Dylann Roof, maintained a website of white supremacist and neo-Nazi material, along with a manifesto with separate sections for "Blacks," "Jews," "Hispanics," and "East Asians." He said he attacked the Emanuel parishioners because he wanted to start a race war, commending himself on his "bravery." He belonged to a Lutheran Church.



We stand with Orlando - An activist at London's vigil in memory of the victims of Orlando's gay nightclub terror attack.

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Each hour since Omar Mateen opened fire in Orlando has added more information, more complexity, to the story. Witnesses described Mateen's having previously visited the night club he later attacked, and also being an active user of a gay dating app. Is it possible he was ashamed and conflicted--especially given the violent homophobia of his father, an outspoken Taliban supporter--and acted out his self-hatred and ambivalence on others as a perverse and horrific attempt at redemption? Fariba Nawa, herself an Afghan-American, offers a deeply felt and thought-out essay on the PRI website in which she explores this question and asks her community to acknowledge and interrogate the pervasive homophobia that has resulted in beatings, ostracism, broken lives--and perhaps, in Omar Mateen.

We are all beings of complex and often conflicting motivations. What can we say about the men who perpetrate these crimes, treating other human beings as disposable symbols of their own longed-for dominance? Tara Culp-Pressler has plenty to say about the role of toxic masculinity in mass shootings on ThinkProgress. You owe it to yourself to read her litany of lone gunman and their abusive relationships, frightening the people they held closest, killing others when abusing their families failed to suffice. Then consider the abusive behavior described by Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy.

Imagine Donald Trump--for that matter, imagine anyone--the 2014 morning after Elliot Rodger opened fire on a Santa Barbara campus to avenge his rejection by women, going on TV to condemn "Male terrorism." I

The U.S.-born Mateen worked as a security guard for G4S, the world's largest private security firm, with major contracts with clients including the Department of Homeland Security. His job was at the lowest level--protecting the residents of a gated retirement community--but it required him to pass background checks, including two by the FBI. He was trained to use firearms, encouraged to see himself as a protector of values, and surely inculcated with the various forms of profiling typical of law enforcement and security circles. He was embedded in the gun culture.

As reliably happens in this country, firearms sales skyrocketed following the Orlando shooting. In a culture that equates guns with safety and freedom, fear sells. If Omar Mateen had not been able to legally purchase the type of assault weapon that has no legitimate use in hunting or target-practice, would he have translated his self-hating, fear-filled fantasies into bloody reality? I have been endorsing every campaign to ban assault weapons. At this writing, MoveOn.org's has nearly half a million signatures.

One of the falsehoods spread by scapegoaters is that terrorism has not been condemned by Muslims. Here are just a few links to counter this lie (thanks for sharing, Andrew Slack), and a moment's googling will yield more. From London. Here's a compilation from Belief.net. A compilation from NBC. From The New Yorker.

Mateen's act of terror targeted two communities, two identities that are vilified by Donald Trump and his supporters. Right after the attack, I shared a graphic posted on Instagram by David Klion to Facebook. It said this: "There will be attempts to pit two vulnerable communities, LGBT and Muslims, against each other. RESIST THEM."

Since Omar Mateen opened fire, I've been hearing from folks who belong to categories singled out for hostility--people of Latin heritage, LGBTQ folks, Muslims--many of whom are social activists, working their hearts out for equity and justice, and right now, doing their best to persevere and offer support despite an even heavier burden of scapegoating-induced hatred coming their way. It is heartbreakingly beautiful to see the tremendous outpouring of love and outrage, consolation and despair sparked by an act that expresses so much about the bumper crop of pain and fear reaped by a society in which an archetypal act of exuberance--dancing, for God's sake, conviviality and joy--draws a death sentence.

No one denies that terrible acts have been committed in the name of religion--Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, a long and disturbing list. No one denies that terrible acts have been committed in the name of ideologies quite separate from religion: to preserve a social order that perceives constitutional rights as affronts (read about the killing of unarmed student protestors at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970; consider the Soviet gulags). But how we tell these appalling stories shapes our relationship to them and indeed, our future. If we tell them in scapegoat fashion, leaving out most of the truth so as to pretend membership in one vilified category explains an evil that is actually grounded in a pervasive brokenness--well, what's that thundering noise I hear? A flock of scapegoats coming home to roost.

Homophobia is a cultural issue. Hatred and resentment of Latinos is a cultural issue. Scapegoating is a cultural issue. Hyper-masculinity is a cultural issue. And while cultural means alone may not suffice to to heal them (that assault weapons ban is necessary, for instance), certain interventions will go a long way to help. Share the links in this blog, complicating the story so that it begins to resemble real life rather than a scapegoater's monochrome fantasy. Speak out when people confidently repeat falsehoods, such as the idea that Muslims fail to oppose terrorism. When people shake their heads and say they can't understand why this happened, don't shake your head too: open a conversation about the way scapegoating acts on our culture, misdirecting our attention from the embedded hatreds that distort nearly every community. Help people think about the messages they are putting out (or at least not contradicting) that feed the climate of fear and hatred producing a homegrown terrorist like Omar Mateen, Elliot Rodger, or NRA head Wayne LaPierre, dedicated to ensuring easy access to assault weapons for the next assassin.
There is a YouTube video making the rounds. It's called " Obama Slow-Jams the News ". Perhaps you've seen it; thus far it has received over eight million views. It's a segment from the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, who begins speaking briefly about the president's accomplishments over the past eight years. He'd intended to make a joke about it but then changed his mind; it didn't need a joke; what it needed was to be. He asked the Roots' Tariq Trotter, who assented, if the record should be slow-jammed, and the curtain rose on their guest--President Obama. And the band began to play--softly, slowly, down-tempo.

With Obama and Tariq fanned out behind Fallon, the focus on each in turn, Obama sing-songed the list of his accomplishments in office--you've heard it often enough, the optimistic assessments, the face-lifted facts, the occasional nugget of truth like a gnat in spider silk--summoning all those jobs (in which the discouraged who stop looking for jobs are folded into falling unemployment numbers), eradicating the recession (until comes the next bank failure, at which point people will, no volition required, 'bail-in' their bank accounts for parasites too protected to fail), conducting undeclared wars in seven countries and establishing forevermore anonymous assassination by drone (well, he didn't mention those).

The litany was relieved by a focus on Fallon as he intoned, "Oh, yeah, president Obama stimulated long-term growth, in both the public, and the private, sector ..." Eyes sleepy, mouth to the mike as he swayed to the rhythm, Fallon did a fine impression, much of the audience standing, quivering with amusement and awe, unable to believe this, sharing the air with Obama.

"In 2008," Fallon murmured, "the country wasn't feelin' in the mood; it was too tired and stressed; it said it had a headache ... Barack lit some candles and got some silky satin sheets ..."; Tariq crooned, "Silky satin sheets, now ...", the lazy beat zapped with finger snaps. Fallon: "He told the American people, yeesss, we can ..."; Tariq: "Yes, we can, and it's all right; he created tons of jobs for you and me ...", pause, "and he's got one left, for Hil-lar-y! ""

Obama hit all of his sugar-spun accomplishments, his State of the Union redone in sing-song. And I, no admirer of the man, could smile along, enjoying the parody, letting the half-truths float by--until it went one plug too far.

After seven years of darkness during which details of the so-called free-trade agreement were kept not only from the people but even from Congress (if not from Wikileaks), the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership finally erupted like methane into infrared. As has been noted elsewhere, an authentic free-trade agreement need not be lengthy, primarily needing provisions to remove tariffs and eschew currency manipulations--practices that otherwise increase the cost of imports. But in the darkness the TPP ballooned into thousands of pages within which trade is barely glimpsed. Its greater aim is to consolidate legal rights of the non-patriated special interests that fashioned it, while leaving consumers effectively unclothed. Incidentally, perhaps, it will handicap the US, because the TPP neglects to address two issues that are crucial specifically to US global competition: Value-Added Taxes (VATs) and currency manipulation.

Applied to imports at the point of entry, VATs are employed by every country in the TPP save Brunei, a tiny nation on the island of Borneo. And the US. Although TPP indeed cuts thousands of tariffs, VATs go unmentioned. The way TPP is written--and it cannot be renegotiated--this will act as a tax on US exports to other TPP countries. As to currency manipulation, the US doesn't do it but many other TPP countries do, and this too will give their products an advantage over US goods.

One can only speculate as to the reasons for Obama and his highly touted trade negotiator allowing the US to be put to such needless disadvantages. But maybe these issues seem safely removed from your concerns.

This won't be. TPP greatly expands the Investor State Dispute Settlement system. ISDS gives corporations the right to sue governments that have laws--environmental, policy, labor--that might impair their profits. Might is the operative word; in their suits they need not substantiate their claims of impaired profits but just assert them. These suits will be heard not in the court system but in a closed-door tribunal. Only private industry may sue through ISDS; state or citizen suits wend their ways through the court system. Governments trying to protect consumers or labor or environment will be engulfed in lengthy and expensive legal actions while corporations take their profits one way or the other.

We've already had a taste of what's to come--note the TransCanada suit of Obama's administration over Keystone--but, as they say, you ain't seen nothing yet. If all 12 countries involved implement TPP, it will expand ISDS provisions from 20 percent of the world's economy to 90 percent. This will affect you.

If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs."--Julian Assange

What Obama has done in advocating for TPP with perhaps more energy than he's put into anything since running for office surpasses hypocritical. (And pay great attention to the pact--TTIP--behind the curtain.)

Any politician who backs TPP unaware of its contents is dangerously naive; any who with knowledge backs it should be debarred from public service, for it is not the public that he--or she--serves.


Vote like your life depended on it!

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Voting blocs, smoting blocs, who gives a damn? I got bloc'd in traffic the other day! This is America and everybody has a "voting bloc!" What ya' didn't know they're on sale at Walmart? Two for a dolla'.

Yah, I get it. Voting blocs are part of the American experience. What you may not get is that we are discussing two entirely different things.

When we look at American bloc voting it has been issue oriented about American civil rights, immigration, and American life. These are American issues brought front and center by American people, to be decided by and for American people.

Looking at the largest American bloc voter segments today we find " In the 2012 elections , African-Americans accounted for about 13% of total votes, while Hispanics accounted for about 10% of the electorate." Add in the Asian-American bloc vote " ..., that figure is nearing 6 percent and spiraling upward.

These represent what is purported to be the largest voting blocs in America today and yet, " Arab Americans make up about one percent of the US population , but many live in the swing states that could decide the White House race." What's really weird about this election is that Arab Americans are predominately Christian and traditionally voted Republican- oopsie Mr. Trump.

What's different about the voting blocs I am describing is they could care less about American democracy or civil rights. As a matter of fact, they hate the idea of it.They were the constituency of governments in exile that served Nazi Germany in WWII. They are still ultra-nationalist politically and serve the foreign governments they set up when the Soviet Union collapsed.

If they were "democratic" would it be reasonable to assume the countries they set up or helped set up and support would be democratic too? Their impulse to support nationalist countries is so overwhelming for them they could give a damn when Americans lose their lives in wars they start for their foreign governments...so be it.

Four short examples of this are the Polish presidential election of 2015, Ukrainian-American perceptions about themselves, the actual reason we fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the elections of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. People self-describe themselves clearly in their actions.

Remember 1+1 always=2. In 2015 Andrzej Duda was elected president of Poland. That sounds democratic. But president Duda is profoundly ultra-nationalist. This sounds like a problem for Poland, right? Well, no, Polish-Americans voted in that election and showed their true democratic colors.

More than 80% of Polish-Americans voting, supported the Nazi , now president, Duda. The Telegraph called it the "Velvet Road to Dictatorship. "What would be a good start for a Nationalist/Nazi president of Poland?

How about Holocaust denial? Shown in Part I, Polish-Americans make up 10% of America's electorate on their own. In America, Polish-Americans that voted for Duda traditionally prefer to vote for the Democratic ticket.

In February 2015 I wrote an article about the illegality of Ukrainian-Americans supplying weapons to volunteer groups in Ukraine that were systematically killing civilians. Even though they openly stated at the time that funding was going for weapons, knew they were openly breaking Federal Law, the practice continues.

The Ukrainian Diaspora even acknowledged that this is illegal in their own publication linked below. " Supplies are all nonlethal equipment, as sending weapons would be illegal. "

This has been going on for the entire war in Ukraine, from Maidan onward. Open calls for weapons donation funding became common in American social media.

How do they self-identify? Did Adolf Hitler call himself a Nazi? Would Adolf Hitler be happy if you called him a Nazi to his face? Or was it how his enemy identified him? Are these Ukrainian-Americans Republican, Democrats, or Independents? Or Nazi? Do they believe in Democracy for Ukraine? For America?

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Liza Featherstone

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My guest today is Liza Featherstone, editor of the just-released book False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Joan Brunwasser: Welcome to OpEdNews, Liza. How did you come up with this project in the first place?

Liza Featherstone: Actually, I was asked to do this by Andy Hsaio, an editor at Verso Books. At first, I said no because I don't like how much time and airspace our elections take up, I find it forecloses the development of more interesting, radical and fruitful politics. Also I didn't want to spend so much time thinking about Clinton, a person I don't like very much! But I thought a lot about it and realized it was a great opportunity to elevate left feminist voices, and advance a kind of feminism that has been largely absent from the discourse but has a long and rich tradition, an anti-war, socialist feminism.

JB: I haven't yet had an opportunity to read your book so I can't speak about that. But I'd like to know whom you enlisted to contribute and why.

LF: I took care to make sure our contributors were diverse in life experience, age, race, writing style, and expertise as I knew that would make the collection far more interesting and politically powerful. Margaret Corvid is a sex worker as well as a writer, while Donna Murch is a history professor. It was also important to me that we have a mix of contributors well known to the left wing reader, like Frances Fox Piven and Laura Flanders, and people who should be much more widely read, like Yasmin Nair and Catherine Liu. I wanted the collection to reflect emerging younger left feminist voices like Tressie Cottom McMillan, Amber A'Lee Frost and Megan Erickson, while also incorporating the work of thinkers like Zillah Eisenstein who have been at this for a long time. I was also thrilled to be able to publish people whose work I admire so much who are not being widely read right now but should be; a great example is the brilliant Moe Tkacik, who like so many women is not writing that much because she is taking care of her baby and making a living. Moe heroically managed to write, between waitressing shifts and despite fierce opposition from her baby, perhaps the most powerful feminist essay of this whole campaign season. What all the contributors have in common is that I admire their writing and thinking, and that they are all part of the left feminist tradition that I think the world badly needs.

JB: Sounds good! Regrettably, many of us are not familiar with your background, Liza. What made you the right choice to put this together?

LF: I'm a longtime journalist and essayist on feminism and economic justice issues -- and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Walmart (Basic Books, 2005).

JB: Your book came out smack dab in the middle of a presidential election cycle. I'm assuming that was not a coincidence of timing. What were you hoping to accomplish?

LF: Not at all. We anticipated that the rhetoric surrounding her campaign would reach peak nonsense levels and would need to be balanced by other feminist perspectives. If she wasn't running for president right now these critiques wouldn't be so important. Some of us were also hoping that our book would help the democratic socialist challenger. Even though the book didn't come out until late in the primary cycle, I think that through the media coverage we received and the excerpts we published, we did at least help to get out an alternative point of view to the ubiquitous drone of HILLARY IS THE FEMINIST CANDIDATE. Now that she is presumably the Democratic nominee, there is still a need to point to her record and say, look, feminism should be better than this. We hope that people -- especially women -- will be gearing up to criticize her and protest her once she is in office.



cover art for 'False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton'

(Image by courtesy of Liza Featherstone) Details DMCA



JB: This is a little broad, Liza. Can you be more specific about your complaints against Hillary?

LF: Sure. Clinton has devoted her career to austerity at home, and war abroad, all of which runs counter to feminist goals. Domestically, she made one of her first big policy splashes as First Lady of Arkansas, aiming to improve schools in that state by fighting the teachers' unions. Her efforts there helped lay the groundwork for the bipartisan war on public school teachers -- most of whom are women, many African-American -- and their unions, which continues to this day. But it wasn't just middle class working women whose interests she was willing to sell out in the interests of the austerity demanded by the one percent and by a growing conservative movement: she was also an influential voice within her husband's administration calling for the end of traditional welfare. Scaling back public assistance in the '90s greatly impoverished many women and their kids, yet Clinton later referred to these reforms as successful, saying that the welfare recipients had been "deadbeats," not a very feminist way to refer to women who are raising their kids.

Abroad, she is hawkish even by the generally militaristic standards of the Democratic party. She voted for the war in Iraq, which has been an unqualified disaster. As Secretary of State, she was more bellicose than the rest of the Obama administration, even the Republican defense Secretary. Republicans have obsessed over Benghazi, in which a few Americans tragically died, but they should be criticizing her role in the whole Libyan intervention, which has killed many more Libyans. She also aided and provided cover to, in Honduras, a right wing coup against a democratically elected government, unleashing a wave of horrific violence in that country, greatly increasing the rate of rape and femicide. Some of this violence has been state violence from the regime Clinton helped to install, including - to come full circle here -- the killing of public school teachers protesting their conditions.

JB: That's quite a shopping list of complaints. What're your thoughts regarding the email scandal? Is it a big deal? And if so, is it enough to get her indicted, dropped from the ticket or to lose to Donald Trump, who, whatever else he is, is highly unqualified for the highest office in the land.

LF: Well, it's not really a list so much as a specific and partial description of what I mean by "austerity and militarism," cornerstones of an agenda I see as deeply at odds with the interests of most women.

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Reprinted from Smirking Chimp

Unless you follow politics closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton has locked up the Democratic presidential nomination. This is not true. She still doesn't have the requisite number of delegates. That could, and probably will, happen next month when her lead in superdelegates puts her over the top at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia -- when the superdelegates actually, you know, cast their actual votes.

The media, however, doesn't want you to know that Bernie Sanders is still in the race. And so, based on that flimsiest of measures -- an opinion survey of superdelegates who are allowed to change their mind at any point before July's DNC -- they've called the Democratic race for Clinton.

This completely illogical reasoning logically leads pundits to the question of the month: how can the Hillary Clinton campaign convince progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders -- whose race was largely based on the assumption that Clinton is so far to the right that she might as well be a Republican -- to vote for her?

Every four years mainstream political writers and commentators push Democrats to the right after the primaries, arguing that swing voters decide presidential elections. Like trickle-down economics, however, that doesn't seem to have been true any time in the recent past. Political parties seem to perform best when they motivate their base to turn up at the polls. Given the fact that Republican voters are congenitally more likely to fall in line behind their nominee even if he turns out to be a potato -- or, this year, a proto-fascist -- than Democrats, it's obvious to everyone that Hillary Clinton will need as many Bernie Sanders supporters as possible in November if she indeed becomes her party's nominee.

Obvious to everyone but Hillary.

Last week, NBC's Lester Holt asked her about Sanders: "Can you name one idea that he's put forward that you want to embrace? That he has really changed your position on?"

Her answer: a big fat negatori.

"Well, it's not that so much as the passion that he brought to the goals that -- his campaign set," said Clinton.

Granted, I can't think of anything she could do to get me to vote for her. But there are millions of Sanders voters who could be convinced not to sit home on election day, support a third-party candidate like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, or defect to Donald Trump. She'll need those voters if there are any more Orlando-style terrorist attacks (great for Trump's fear-based campaign) or, for that matter, after presidential debates in which I expect Trump to savage her.

Maybe Debbie Wasserman Schultz can schedule those debates for the middle of the night on Kazakhstani state television.

Except when she's hanging out with investment bankers and Walmart board members, Hillary Clinton reflexively refuses to compromise. If she continues her "I have nothing to learn from Bernie and he'll be lucky to get a speech at the convention" attitude, however, better get prepared for President Trump.

What do Bernie Sanders supporters want? As Trump says, everything is negotiable. So let's negotiate!

"Add back the public option to the Affordable Care Act," Howard Dean suggests to Hillary in the New York Times. "Let Americans vote with their feet about whether they want to be in a single payer or the current system."

The problem with that is, big insurance companies bribed her with $13 million in campaign contributions to get her to say that single payer "will never, ever come to pass."

Dean wants Clinton to back Sanders' "massive overhaul of the criminal justice system, starting with emptying for-profit prisons and juvenile detention centers."
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Sen. Ted Ferrioli and Rep. Mike McLane

Career politicians are often accused of talking out of both sides of their mouth. After a 25-year career in politics, Gov. Kate Brown is perfecting the art of saying one thing while doing another.

Gov. Brown recently reiterated that she is not taking a public stance on Initiative Petition 28, the $6 billion tax on Oregon sales that government employee unions say will fund public services (although a speciously large portion would fund raises that Gov. Brown is giving to government employees).

Staying neutral is a politically convenient position, as a recent report from the nonpartisan Legislative Revenue Office cautioned that such a tax on Oregon sales, higher than any similar tax in other states, could seriously dampen Oregons economy, cost Oregon families around $600 per year and result in over 38,000 lost private sector jobs.

But despite staying officially silent on whether she supports or opposes the measure, Gov. Brown has taken the curious step of promoting exactly how she would spend the revenue raised from IP28 if it were to pass.

Are we the only ones who think this seems hypocritical? The governor says she may still oppose the measure  but promoting how the billions of tax dollars should be spent reveals her true stance on IP28. It just isnt politically convenient to say outright that she supports the costly measure.

Curiously, she hasnt presented a plan for if the measure fails.

Gov. Browns politically convenient stance goes beyond not wanting to put herself on the line during what could be the most expensive ballot measure fight in Oregon history. Government employee unions are pushing for a new tax on Oregon sales because the Democrat-controlled Legislature has overpromised and overspent for years. Oregons own state economist recently quipped that Democrats in Salem spent like drunken sailors in this years budget.

Next year, Oregons budget faces a multibillion dollar hole from government employee raises, PERS liabilities and reduced federal subsidies for Obamacare. This threatens to dry up Oregons coffers, leaving little left for education. This tax is nothing more than a desperate attempt by Democratic politicians to cover up the budget mess they created.

Were already seeing warning signs of a slowing economy. IP28 would result in 38,000 fewer private sector jobs and, because it is a tax on Oregon sales, would cost Oregon families around $600 more each year. Ironically, this tax on sales would have the greatest impact on low-income families.

Is Gov. Brown really promoting a regressive tax that hurts working families and fixed-income seniors? That is not the Oregon way.

By putting the cart in front of the IP28 horse, Gov. Brown is hitching her political future to the success of this government employee union-backed measure to fix a mess politicians in her own party created, at the expense of working families, Oregon businesses and even private-sector union members.

Gov. Brown should take a public stance against IP28, start looking for real solutions to Oregons budget crisis and stop spending her time divvying up money raised from a tax she wont even publicly support.

This op-ed ran in The Oregonian on Monday  Sen. Ted Ferrioli is the Oregon Senate Republican Leader and Rep. Mike McLane is the Oregon House Republican Leader
Member of Parliament (MP) for Atwima Mponua, Hon. Isaac Asiamah has called on President John Dramani Mahama to resign for not acting per the oath he swore to be the leader of this country, due to the disgrace he has bestowed on this country for accepting a Ford Expedition car gift from a Burkinabe contractor.



Joy News Manasseh Azure in a latest investigation claims President John Dramani Mahama (then Vice President) was presented with a new Ford Expedition vehicle as a gift by a Burkinabe contractor, Djibril Kanazoe, purportedly for helping him to secure contracts for fencing Ghanas embassy in Burkina Faso and also winning a 46.4km European Union funded Dodo-Pepesu Road Contract.



Burkinabe contractor, Mr. Djibril Kanazoe, who has received praise from President John Mahama for his work, has confirmed he presented a brand new Ford Expedition to the President as a gift . . . , Manasseh wrote in his expose, which was also aired on Joy FM.



In an interview with PEACE FM 6pm news bulletin, Hon. Isaac Asiamah indicated that the Public accounts committee in parliament through a report served it from the Auditor General indirectly made the house know that the state on behalf of President John Mahama has been involved in a fraudulent act .



The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bank of Ghana were invited into parliament to be part of the discussion to clarify the issue that has come-up. It was in this meeting that the house got to realize that the state has paid some money to Ghana mission in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso to be used for the construction of a fence wall.



He added The money involved amounted to six hundred and fifty six thousand, two hundred and forty eight dollars ($656,248). In fact we were all surprised about how such a huge amount would be used for such a project on behalf of this nation when there are a lot more important things to be done in the country. We never understood and asked for further explanations from both the Bank of Ghana and the Ministry of Finance, but have not up-till date received any breakdown.



This is an issue that should not be left unexplained especially when the president has recently declared himself as a clean man when it comes to corruption matters, this shows the kind leader we have, he said.



This is a disgrace to this nation and I would compel President Mahama to resign for the act caused.





Source: Elizabeth Semiheva/Peacefmonline.com









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Black spruce. Credit: Loic D'Orangeville

In the Canadian province of Quebec, a study of more than 26,000 trees across an area the size of Spain forecasts potential winners and losers in a changing climate.

The study, published today in the journal Science, shows that boreal forests in far-northern latitudes may one day act as a climate refuge for black spruce, the foundational tree for the northwoods ecosystem - a major source of the world's paper; home to caribou, snowshoe hare, lynx, and sable; and nesting site for dozens of migratory bird species.

"During this century, the northwoods will experience some of the Earth's largest increases in temperature," says Loic D'Orangeville, postdoctoral researcher at Universite du Quebec a Montreal and Indiana University, who led the collaboration of scientists from six institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

Northern boreal forests are a crucial part of the global climate puzzle, comprising nearly 30 percent of the Earth's forested area and storing at least 20 percent of its carbon. The study's tree ring analysis revealed these forests' sensitivity to changes in temperature and precipitation.

"A warming climate increases the amount of water boreal forests need to survive," explains D'Orangeville. "It's possible that only a relatively small part of North America's boreal forest will have enough water to compensate for the increased demand."

Boreal forest. Credit: Loic D'Orangeville

North of a certain latitude (broadly 49 degrees North), the study showed, warming melts snow earlier and lengthens the growing season: good news for tree growth. "Right now - June and July - is when most of the annual tree growth takes place in the boreal forest," says D'Orangeville. Climate models predict that by 2050, the growing season in the study area will have expanded by 3 weeks.

South of the 49th parallel, however, warming and the lengthened growing season are more likely to cause drought stress that could overwhelm black spruce. The researchers say this may explain increased tree mortality already being observed in the region.

"But as you move northwards, temperatures cool, and evaporation diminishes," says D'Orangeville. As climate warms through 2070, more than two-thirds of the forested territory just above the 49th parallel should still be showing a positive response.

"This part of the forest could adapt to climate change in our lifetime, if future warming stays below the temperature threshold," says Neil Pederson, co-author of the study and a senior ecologist at Harvard Forest. "But the future cannot be perfectly predicted." And, he cautions, unpredictable factors, such as the recent mega-fires in boreal regions of western Canada and Alaska, could disrupt this dynamic.

Still, the study offers a note of hope. "In a world where many ecological forecasts appear dire for plants, animals, and people," says Pederson, "identifying areas that could serve as potential havens for biodiversity during potentially tumultuous times is good news."

Explore further Canada wildfires in 'bullseye' of warming planet trends

More information: Northeastern North America as a potential refugium for boreal forests in a warming climate, Science, science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi  1126/science.aaf4951 Journal information: Science Northeastern North America as a potential refugium for boreal forests in a warming climate,
University of Utah materials science and engineering associate professor Mike Scarpulla stands next to a solar panel made of the compound semiconductor, cadmium telluride. Scarpulla along with Kirstin Alberi of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have developed a theory that adding light during the manufacturing of semiconductors can reduce defects in the materials, leading to more efficient solar cells and better LEDs. Credit: University of Utah College of Engineering

University of Utah materials science and engineering associate professor Mike Scarpulla wants to shed light on semiconductorsliterally.

Scarpulla and senior scientist Kirstin Alberi of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, have developed a theory that adding light during the manufacturing of semiconductorsthe materials that make up the essential parts of computer chips, solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs)can reduce defects and potentially make more efficient solar cells or brighter LEDs. The role of light in semiconductor manufacturing may help explain many puzzling differences between processing methods as well as unlock the potential of materials that could not be used previously.

Scarpulla and Alberi reported their findings in a paper titled "Suppression of Compensating Native Defect Formation During Semiconductor Processing Via Excess Carriers," published June 16 in the journal, Scientific Reports. The research was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Semiconductors are pure materials used to produce electronic components such as computer chips, solar cells, radios used in cellphones or LEDs. The theory developed by Scarpulla and Alberi applies to all semiconductors but is most exciting for compound semiconductorssuch as gallium arsenide (GaAs), cadmium telluride (CdTe), or gallium nitride (GaN)that are produced by combining two or more elements from the periodic table. GaAs is used in microwave radios in cellphones, CdTe in solar panels, and GaN in LED light bulbs.

The fact that compound semiconductors require more than one chemical element make them susceptible to defects in the material at an atomic scale, says Scarpulla, who also is a University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professor.

"Defects produce lots of effects like difficulty in controlling the conductivity of the material, difficulty in being able to turn sunlight into electricity efficiently in the case of solar cells or difficulty in emitting light efficiently in the case of LEDs," he says.

For nearly a century, researchers have usually assumed that the numbers of these defects in semiconductors were uniquely defined by the temperature and pressure during processing. "We worked out a complete theory that couples light into that problem," Scarpulla says.

The team discovered that if you add light while firing the material in a furnace at high temperatures, the light generates extra electrons that can change the composition of the material.

"We ran simulations of what happens," Scarpulla says. "If you put a piece of a semiconductor in a furnace in the dark, you would get one set of properties from it. But when you shine light on it in the furnace, it turns out you suppress these more problematic defects. We think it may allow us to get around some tricky problems with certain materials that have prevented their use for decades. The exciting work is in the future thoughactually testing these predictions to make better devices."

The team is working to apply their theory to as many semiconductors as possible and testing the real world results. For example, the team believes this could improve the efficiency of solar panels that use thin films of cadmium telluride and even those made from silicon.

"It's really cool to be working on this fundamental problem in semiconductors," says Scarpulla. "Most of the ideas were worked out decades ago, so it is really exciting to be able to make a contribution to something fundamental. It feels like we have shined light onto a new path and we don't know how far it will take us."
Variations of the homologues temperature of olivine with depth beneath typical continental units. Fo number indicates the mole concentration of forsterite in olivine. Credit: Science China Press

The homologous temperature of a crystalline material is defined as the ratio between temperature and the melting (solidus) temperature (Tm) in Kelvin. Because Tm of a crystalline material is controlled by the bonding force between atoms, T/Tm has been widely used to compare the creep strength of crystalline materials. As the most abundant mineral in the upper mantle, olivine is the solid solution of forsterite (Mg2SiO4) and fayalite (Fe2SiO4). Recent deformation experiments have revealed the influence of water, temperature, pressure, stress and partial melting on fabric development of olivine. However, how to extrapolate laboratory results to mantle deformation is still under debate.

In a recent review in Science China Earth Sciences, Qin Wang from Nanjing University established the phase diagram of dry olivine up to 6.4 GPa using previous melting experiments and generalized means. She found that the change of T/Tm of olivine with depth allows comparison with the strength of the upper mantle under different thermal states and olivine compositions. The transition from semi-brittle to ductile deformation in the upper mantle occurs at a depth where T/Tm of olivine equals to 0.5 (Figure 1).

In addition, T/Tm is used to analyze fabric transitions of olivine. The results indicate that the effect of water on olivine fabrics is closely related with pressure. Below 6.4 GPa (less than 200 km) and under the strain rate and low stress in the upper mantle, the [100](010) slip system (A-type fabric) becomes dominant when T/Tm > 0.55-0.60. When T/Tm < 0.55-0.60, [001] slip is easier (Figure 1). Low T/Tm favors the operation of [001](100) slip system (C-type fabric). This is consistent with the widely observed A-type fabric in naturally deformed peridotites, and the C-type fabric in peridotites that experience deep subduction in ultra-high-pressure metamorphic terranes. However, the [001](010) slip system (B-type fabric) will develop under high stress and relatively low T/Tm.

This study provides new information on tracing mantle flow from seismic anisotropy. Seismic anisotropy of the upper mantle is controlled by the A-type fabric of olivine in most regions, where the fastest P-wave velocity and the polarization direction of the faster S-wave velocity are parallel to the mantle flow direction. However, olivine in subduction zones may develop the B- or C-type fabric, making the fastest P-wave velocity and the polarization direction of the faster S-wave velocity normal to the mantle flow direction. Seismic anisotropy of the upper mantle beneath cratons can be simulated using a four-layer model with different fabrics.

It is noteworthy that when pressure is higher than 6.4 GPa, the melting behavior of iron-rich olivine and the incorporation mechanism of hydrogen in olivine are different from those at low pressure. The lack of melting experiments on hydrogen-bearing olivine at high pressure hampers our estimation of its homologous temperature. Such knowledge will improve our understanding of the role of water in mantle rheology and planetary evolution.

Explore further Stretchy slabs found in the deep Earth

More information: Qin Wang, Homologous temperature of olivine: Implications for creep of the upper mantle and fabric transitions in olivine, Science China Earth Sciences (2016). Journal information: Science China Earth Sciences Qin Wang, Homologous temperature of olivine: Implications for creep of the upper mantle and fabric transitions in olivine,(2016). DOI: 10.1007/s11430-016-5310-z
"Olli" an autonomous shuttle is seen at the Local Motors facility at the National Harbor in Maryland on June 16, 2016

A new maker of self-driving vehicles burst onto the scene Thursday in partnership with IBM's supercomputer platform Watson, and it's ready to roll right now.

The vehiclea 3D-printed minibus called "Olli" capable of carrying 12 peoplewas unveiled by Arizona-based startup Local Motors outside the US capital city Washington.

Olli was designed as an on-demand transportation solution that passengers can summon with a mobile app, like Uber rides. And it can be "printed" to specification in "micro factories" in a matter of hours.

Olli will be demonstrated in National Harbor, Maryland, over the next few months with additional trials expected in Las Vegas and Miami. Local Motors is also in talks to test the vehicles in dozens of cities around the world including Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra.

Even though Google and several automakers see several years of testing before deploying autonomous cars, Local Motors co-founder and chief executive John Rogers said this vehicle is ready to go into service as soon as regulations allow it.

"The technology has been readyfielding it is what has been hard," he said in an interview with AFP.

By "fielding," Rogers said Local Motors can design and make the vehicles to specification and offer a service to local governments or other buyers.

"Local Motors is about selling (the vehicles) into the markets that are ready now," he said.

Rogers said the company has an advantage over other systems because it is building the vehicles from the ground up, and producing most components with 3D printers.

"We hope to be able to print this vehicle in about 10 hours and assemble it in another hour," he said.

He envisions hundreds of "micro-factories" producing the vehicles around the world.

The privately held company with about 45 investors can easily revamp its design based on what a customer wants, and lacks the large infrastructure costs of traditional automakers, according to Rogers.

"Olli" an autonomous shuttle is seen at the Local Motors facility at the National Harbor in Maryland on June 16, 2016

The Watson experience

The driving is controlled by a system developed by Local Motors with several software and tech partners. IBM is not doing the driving but is providing the user interface so passengers can have "conversations" with Olli.

"Watson is bringing an understanding to the vehicle," said IBM's Bret Greenstein.

"If you have someplace you need to be you can say that in your own words."

It marks IBM's first venture in fully autonomous driving, although it has worked with other automotive partners on technology solutions.

Greenstein said IBM sees Olli as "the first complete solution" for autonomous driving, and makes use of Watson's cognitive computing power.

Using "natural language" recognition can help create "a relationship between the passenger" and the vehicles, Greenstein said.

"A vehicle that understands human language, where you can walk in and say, 'I'd like to get to work,' that lets you as a passenger relax and enjoy your journey," he said.

The vehicle relies on more than 30 sensors and streams of data from IBM's cloud.

With Watson, passengers can ask about how the vehicle works, where they are going, and why Olli is making specific driving decisions. And it can answer the dreaded driver question "Are we there yet?"

It also can offer recommendations for popular restaurants or historical sites based on the personal preferences of the passenger.

"Cognitive computing provides incredible opportunities to create unparalleled, customized experiences for customers, taking advantage of the massive amounts of streaming data from all devices connected to the Internet of Things, including an automobile's myriad sensors and systems," said IBM's Harriet Green in a statement.

The company said Las Vegas has purchased two of the vehicles and Miami-Dade County is exploring a pilot program in which several autonomous vehicles would be used to transport people around the Florida region.

Rogers said the company has had discussions in at least 50 countries where there is interest in new transportation solutions.

"There is a long list of cities that are interested," he said.

 2016 AFP
A new procedure developed at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may revolutionize the culturing of adult stem cells. In their report that has been published online prior to its appearance in the August 6 issue of Cell Stem Cell, the team describes generating and expanding airway stem cells from the sorts of tissue samples collected during routine treatment of lung disorders. The overall approach appears applicable to several other tissue types, including skin and the linings of the gastrointestinal and reproductive tracts.

"This new methodology opens up new avenues for research in any airway disease, such as asthma or COPD," says Jayaraj Rajagopal, MD, of the MGH Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, senior author of the report. "While in the past we could only expand stem cells for a few generations, now we have the ability to generate enough cells to last multiple laboratories for years of experiments. Our system is also very simple, avoiding the complexities of former culture systems and making it more accessible to many labs."

Many hypotheses had been suggested to explain the limited ability to maintain stem cells in culture - including a loss of the telomeres that protect the end of chromosomes and cellular senescence, a form of aging that puts a halt to growth. Rajagopal's team focused on a cellular signaling pathway known to regulate cell growth and the critical process of differentiation, in which cells become more specialized and lose their ability to give rise to other types of cells. Activated by proteins such as TGF- and bone morphogenic protein (BMP), the pathway transmits signals to the nucleus by means of intracellular proteins called SMADs.

The researchers investigated whether inhibiting SMAD pathways could foster the expansion of cultured adult stem cells by preventing differentiating. In a series of experiments, they first confirmed that both TGF-/BMP and SMAD signaling were active in differentiated cells but not in adult stem cells. After showing that blocking SMAD signaling could prevent the differentiation of airway stem cells from mice, they found that blocking both TGF- and BMP pathways allowed the expansion of many generations of airway stem cells. They were able to generate human airway stem cells from samples taken during bronchoscopy, a procedure routinely used for diagnosing or monitoring airway disorders. Remarkably, the investigators were also successful in generating and maintain airway stem cells from some samples of sputum, the fluid expelled from the respiratory tract during a cough.

"If we could find ways to induce cough samples containing larger numbers of stem cells, our technique would represent the least invasive way to obtain any stem cell from any organ, and if we could improve the procedure to yield stem cell cultures from 100 percent of sputum samples, we could acquire samples to study lung disease in the laboratory with less invasiveness than a blood draw," says Rajagopal.

"We also found that the same methodology works for many tissues of the body - from the skin to the esophagus to mammary glands. Many of these organ tissues cannot currently be cultured, so it remains to be seen whether scientists in these areas will be able to grow stem cells from samples acquired from other minimally invasive procedures, including the collection of secretions. If all this becomes possible, it would represent a big step forward for personalized medical approaches to disease," he says.

An associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Rajagopal elaborates that the ability to maintain and expand populations of adult stem cells will improve the modeling of disease processes, allow screening of potential therapeutic drugs with cells derived from individual patients, and enable the creation of human "knockout/knockin" cellular models using the powerful CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology. "In many diseases - lung diseases in particular - the mouse is a very poor model of human disease, so this ability really opens up new horizons to apply human genetics to human lung cells and disease models."

He adds that this technology should improve the safety of stem-cell-based therapies by removing the risk of contaminants introduced by mouse cells that are traditionally used to support airway stem cells in culture. While the new procedure maintains the function of adult stem cells through many generations, eventually they do begin to deteriorate, which makes reducing or even eliminating this loss of function is an important next goal. "We have lots of ideas and collaborations in place to try and sort out ways to make these cells nearly perfect," Rajagopal says. "The problem may be genetic or epigenetic, and the MGH has considerable expertise in both of these areas of investigation."

Explore further Biologists find how plants reconstitute stem cells
Telescopes have never seen a black hole, and the world's brightest minds are unable to reconcile their core characteristics with some of the bedrock laws of nature

First postulated more than 230 years ago, black holes have been extensively researched, frequently depicted, even featured in sci-fi films.

We've all seen the artists' impressions and read of their ravenous star-gobbling feasts.

But here's the thing... science is still not 100 percent sure what they look like, how they behave or even that they exist.

Telescopes have never seen a black hole, and the world's brightest minds are unable to reconcile their core characteristics with some of the bedrock laws of nature.

Seeking answers, scientists have trained a massive telescope, named Gravity, in Chile on a point some 24,000 light years away where a supermassive black hole is thought to lurk at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

The enormous eye will look for miniscule but telltale deviations in the movement of gas and stars swirling around the monster hole.

"The goal of Gravity is to finally prove the existence of a black hole at the centre of our galaxy," project member Guy Perrin, an astronomer from the Paris Observatory, told AFP.

But finding something unexpected would in some ways be an even bigger breakthrough as it may offer clues to our imperfect understanding of physics.

Sharper than ever

Gravity's theorised target, Sagittarius A, is four million times more massive than our Sun, packed into an area smaller than the Solar System.

To observe it up close, astronomers have combined the power of Europe's four largest telescopes, based in the Atacama desert, to create the most powerful instrument of its kind ever built.

Picture released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows an artist impression of a possible seed for the formation of a supermassive black hole

The images will be "about 10-20 times sharper than what we had before," said project leader Frank Eisenhauer of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

With a combined diameter of about 130 metres (427 feet), the device will allow astronomers to observe more detail, closer to the black hole, than ever before.

"We will check whether our physical understanding is correct to conclude it is a black hole," Eisenhauer told AFP by telephone from Atacama, where the telescope is being put through its paces before starting full-scale observations, probably next year.

"If you see the motion of matter so close to a black hole, it would be very difficult to find any other explanation."

Black holes are regions in space-time where mass is collapsed into such a small area that gravity takes over completely, and nothing can escape its pull.

Eighteenth century amateur clergyman and scientist John Michell is credited with conceptualising black holes in 1783.

They were also predicted in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1915.

There are two types: "stellar mass" black holes that form when a monster star implodes, and the "supermassive" variety which lie at the centre of large galaxies.

Ubiquitous as they are believed to bemillions in the Milky Way galaxy aloneblack holes are invisible because they absorb light, along with everything else.

Was Einstein wrong?

Their existence is inferred from the behaviour of objects nearby, including stars swirling around them as planets orbit our Sun.

Black holes were predicted in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1915

Some scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking, have suggested black holesif they exist at allmay not fit the general relativity mould.

In February, evidence for stellar mass black holes emerged when scientists observed a gravitational wavea ripple theorised to move through space-time when two of these beasts collide.

Each black hole, in Einstein's world, should have an "event horizon," a point of no return beyond which gravity takes over.

But a major problem in science today is that general relativity does not gel with quantum mechanics, the other pillar of modern physics.

Quantum physics perfectly describes phenomena on the minuscule, subatomic level, but gravity does not seem to work on that scale.

When it comes to black holes, general relativity predicts that nothing can escape them. Quantum theory, however, posits that no information from the Universe can ever just disappear.

By zooming in so close on the event horizon, "we will be able to test a number of theories in an environment with an extreme gravitational field," said Karine Perraut of the Grenoble Observatory in southeast France.

It will be the toughest test yet for general relativity, which has withstood all other science challenges.

For Einstein to be right, the Gravity team would have to see the stars' orbit change slightly with every full rotation around the black hole.

But what it would look like if Einstein was wrong, nobody knows.

"I can only imagine the shock if we cannot confirm that it is a black hole. It will have huge implications for our understanding of the Universe!" said Perrin.

Gravity started early operations in June and is expected to report on progress next week.

Explore further Image: Computer simulation of a supermassive black hole

 2016 AFP
WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 - The U.S. will take all the help it can get in pushing forward negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union  and thats one of the reasons USDA Acting Deputy Agriculture Secretary Michael Scuse is in Eastern Europe.

The U.S. is counting on Lithuania and Romania, two of the countries that Scuse has visited on his week-long trip, to support the U.S. goal of getting T-TIP fully negotiated this year, he told reporters today in a conference call from Bucharest.

Scuse said he has met with the prime ministers of both countries and stressed to each that the U.S. is hoping they will take leadership roles in moving the T-TIP negotiations forward.

In Lithuania and Romania the indication that I got is theyre strong supporters of (T-TIP), Scuse said. They very much would like to see this done. I think they understand that we need to get this done as quickly as possible.

T-TIP negotiations so far have been fraught with differences over issues like EU's demands for geographical indicator protections for certain food products such as Parmesan cheese. But Scuse said that issue isnt very controversial in Lithuania and Romania.

Photo courtesy of Iowa Ag Secretary Bill Northey

These countries have strongly supported the T-TIP and they dont have, in most cases, the same concerns that some of the other (EU) countries have on some of the other issues, he said.

While there may be little T-TIP controversy in Lithuania and Romania, there is plenty in other countries like France and Germany and USDA has not been shying away from thorny issues, he stressed.

Secretary (Tom) Vilsack has been very much engaged with his counterparts in those other member countries in the EU, as has (U.S. Trade Representative Michael) Froman and the team at USTR, Scuse said.

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But Scuses trip to Eastern Europe wasnt all about T-TIP. He also visited Ukraine, traveling with representatives of state agriculture departments and private companies like Case New Holland and Valley Milk that are hoping to forge new business ties.

When we sit down to have these business-to-business meetings, theres a lot of opportunities to connect our industries with industries in these countries that are looking for different products or improved products, Scuse said.

Scuse said he has even toured a Ukrainian supermarket and met with the manager to discuss ways in which the business could source more products from the U.S.

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Their rock-solid software and unrivaled connectivity provide the backbone for numerous high volume independent restaurants and chain restaurants alike.
Netsurion and POS Solutions Partner on Security and PCI Compliance

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)  To protect restaurant, retail and hospitality merchants against cyberattacks, Netsurion, a leading provider of remotely-managed data and network security services for multi-location businesses, has named POS Solutions a Gold Partner. The company will resell Netsurions Brand Guard services bundled with its own point of sale (POS) packages to give customers enterprise-level security for a fraction of the cost.

According to the 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, in the last year, small retail businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees accounted for 102 out of 159 confirmed industry breaches, and small hospitality companies accounted for 140 out of 362 in the accommodation sector.

By offering Netsurion merchant data security solutions, POS Solutions will provide their customers with the level of network security required to gain PCI compliance and safely process transactions, offer secure Wi-Fi, and ultimately protect their customers and business.

To ensure POS Solutions customers receive the best in PCI compliance, Netsurion will offer its new reseller partner a Qualified Integrators & Resellers course. This course trains eligible professionals on the secure installation of Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS)-validated payment applications into merchant environments to facilitate PCI Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliance.

Nothing is more important to a business than keeping its customers payment card data secure. But becoming and staying PCI compliant is difficult and time consuming. Netsurion has been helping merchants since the inception of the standard through our affordable systems and services, said Mark Cline, vice president of Channel Sales, Netsurion. Plus, our managed firewall network allows control over outbound network traffic, preventing data from being sent to malicious sites and countries, as well as denying traffic requests containing other potential vulnerabilities. By partnering with POS Solutions, we have the opportunity to protect even more companies from the constant barrage of both internal and external cyberthreats.

POS Solutions, located in Austin, Texas, has more than 30 years of experience in the POS business, providing installation, help desk and training services to its customers. Its knowledgeable staff dedicates its time to ensuring that their customers have access to the best combination of products available today.

At POS Solutions, we believe that service is the cornerstone of any business. We have a staff of like-minded employees who have worked in the hospitality and retail industries. We empathize with and understand customer pain points and are here to help, said Chad Edwards, director of operations, POS Solutions. Were excited to combine our expertise and 24x7x365 in-house and field services with Netsurions established security and compliance portfolio.

The reseller partnership will officially launch July 6, 2016. To learn more, visit http://posstexas.com/about-usand www.netsurion.com.



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SARATOGA SPRINGSSaratoga Springs and Burlington, Vermont, are the kinds of communities that make national lists of best places to live.

But while they may be the envy of other communities, neither is perfect.

Business leaders in both are thinking they can learn from each other  and interested enough to each make the 21/2-hour road trip to the other end of Lake Champlain this summer.

Starting this week, business and elected leaders will be visiting the cities to compare notes.

The Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce is sending a delegation this week to visit Burlington, a city of 42,000 people, compared to Saratoga Springs 27,000.

About 20 people, including some local elected officials, will head to the Green Mountain States largest city on Thursday, and return the next afternoon.

Its an intercity visit. Its kind of common in the chamber world, said Tom Torti, president and CEO of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Both cities have vibrant pedestrian-friendly downtowns and a panhandling problem, and both have economies tied to tourism and, more recently, high technology.

But there are also differences: The Vermont city has a successful waterfront, Saratoga a convention center that helps fill restaurants and hotels in the winter.

No one ever has it figured out. You could always do better, Torti said.

A delegation of representatives from Burlington will visit Saratoga Springs for an overnight in August, to catch breakfast at the track and learn about the GlobalFoundries plant in Malta, and also about the Saratoga Springs City Center convention site.

It was fascinating how many challenges we have in common and how many opportunities we have in common, said Kathleen Fyfe, the Saratoga chambers vice president for community development.

Its silly for people to try to come up with solutions on their own, she said.

Officials from Stillwater and Mechanicville also will be going, hoping to learn about how Burlington developed its Lake Champlain waterfront with restaurants, shops and walking trails.

The local delegation will be meeting with Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger, get an orientation tour of the waterfront and University of Vermont area, and participate in panel discussions, touching on homelessness and panhandling, an issue seen in both cities.

Its an ongoing problem [in Burlington] and clearly there is no single answer. A lot of the homelessness problems are multidisciplinary and multifaceted, Torti said.

In exchange for this weeks visit to Vermonts largest city, the Burlington chamber will be coming to Saratoga Springs Aug. 16-17.

In Saratoga, the Vermont delegation will be guests at an evening reception, have breakfast at Saratoga Race Course and participate in a panel expected to include Mayor Joanne Yepsen and Arthur Mo Wright, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors.

The idea of an exchange between Saratoga and Burlington isnt new. The two cities also exchanged delegations in the 1980s, at a time when many people saw Burlington as the more successful community.
HUDSON FALLS  A Fort Edward woman was jailed Wednesday for allegedly selling cocaine on two occasions in Hudson Falls, police said.

Alisha M. Clausen, 28, was charged with two counts each of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance for two cocaine sales to an undercover police officer, according to State Police.

The sales were alleged to have occurred earlier this year. The charges were contained in a Washington County Court indictment against Clausen.

Clausen was arraigned and sent to Washington County Jail for lack of bail.

State Police were assisted by the Washington County Sheriff's Office, Hudson Falls Police and Washington County Probation Department.
CHESTER  North Warren school officials and the teachers union have agreed on a new three-year contract that increase teachers salaries by an average of 3.7 percent and require them to contribute more to the cost of their health insurance premiums.

The school board on Monday approved the pact. Teachers had been working under a one-year deal that was reached in February.

The new agreement would increase the salary schedule by 0.8 percent each year. When the step increase teachers receive for another year of service is included, the average increase comes out to 3.7 percent.

The starting salary in the new deal is $39,341 and a teacher on the 20th step earns $75,607. Those teachers already on the top step will receive an additional $1,000.

The contract also increases the teachers share of the cost of health insurance. Starting in 2016-2017, their contribution would increase from 12 percent to 13 percent. That would increase to 13.5 percent in 2017-2018 and 14 percent in 2008-2019.

Interim Superintendent Bernard McCann said it is a fair agreement.

The board was looking for a little more in health insurance sharing. They got that. Teachers wanted a little more on the high end of the salary schedule. They got that, and we were still able to keep it within our budget, he said.

The other changes are minor, according to McCann. The word consecutive was added to the clause that requires elementary teachers to have 30 minutes per day and 250 minutes per week of preparation time during the school day with no other assigned duties.

McCann said the other change was adding language to make it clear that members of the union who are not part of the Teachers Retirement System, such as occupational therapists, will pay the same rate for health insurance premiums in retirement as they did in the final year of their employment and 50 percent of the cost of their dependents.

Union President Deanne Peters said she was happy about the outcome.

I am pleased that our Board of Education, Superintendent McCann and the negotiations committee were able to work well together and come to an agreement in a timely manner, she said in an email.

In other business, the board has hired Shelley Dupuis as the new principal for prekindergarten through sixth grade. Dupuis, the coordinator for instruction and curriculum services, will receive a salary of $83,945 for 2016-2017.

Officials decided to restructure the schools administration as Michele French prepares to assume the job of superintendent on July 1. Theresa Andrew had previously been principal for prekindergarten through 12th grade. Now, she will supervise grades seven through 12.

McCann said he recommended the change to make the operations of the school run more smoothly.

He said the jobs are very different. The elementary principal has a more hands-on role with children while in the high school, the administrator is dealing with discipline and academics.

Each principal will be responsible for their own curriculum coordination, according to McCann. No new staff would be added.

Were restructuring and dividing the duties differently, he said.
There it was, lying on my bed, a brand-new 20-gauge Mossberg pump  ultimate prize for a 12-year-old who just passed his hunters safety course.

The gleaming shotgun was given after years of humping through upstate New Yorks deepest forests, armed with a BB gun. It was gifted only after countless lectures about proper handling, maintenance and storage. Carry it this way. Finger off the trigger until youre ready to shoot. Never point it at something youre unwilling to kill. And, at the end of the day, hand it over so it can be locked in the gun cabinet.

The Mossberg was carried, for seasons to come, only with my father at my side. An avid white-tail deer hunter, he didnt much care for the rabbits and squirrels that became my quarry.

No, this shotgun was just another step toward manhood, ultimately bestowed at 16 with a high-powered rifle and confirmed with the first dead deer. Even then, semi-automatics and pistols were off-limits for several more big-game seasons.

The overarching message was hammered into my young mind: Carrying a tool solely designed to kill brings with it unmatched responsibility. And the unofficial crash-course, from father to son, took years to complete.

Sunday mornings tragic mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando has again shown how anachronistic my fathers safety-first mantra has become in just a couple decades. Social media exploded with calls to ban all gun-free zones. The more than 100 killed and wounded by an apparent Islamic extremist could have fought back if they had been packing, the narrative goes. Suddenly, even those swilling booze on the dance floor should have a piece on their hip.

Fear has remade the gun conversation in its own image. Mythical self defense trumps caution and care now. Locking up guns doesnt work when hunting takes a back seat to self defense. The latter requires instant access, even if data shows that civilians who brandish a gun are significantly more likely to get killed.

More guns in more places, suddenly, equates to safety, among the gun set. Drunkenness: No sweat. Packing fixes everything.

Its utter insanity.

Sundays bloody massacre is deeply complex. Religious zealotry. Prejudice. Rejection of Western inclusion. And yes, 2004s sunset of the assault weapons ban, which opened the floodgates to civilianized versions of military weaponry. AR-15-type weapons, and their quick-change high-capacity magazines, are the most popular firearms in America. Newtown, Connecticut; Aurora, Colorado; San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida: Theyre the tailor-made weapon for a rampaging shooter, Muslim, Christian and nihilist alike.

Official after official issued the standard thoughts and prayers statement Sunday morning. Never mind that prayers serve no practical purpose. Its just a friendlier way of saying nothing will change.

But, as a gun owner, its imperative to realize how much groups, such as the NRA, have hijacked our ranks. Responsibility has been reduced to a tertiary throw-away line. Fears of boogeymen hiding in the shadows now drive gun sales. And with that fear comes a total breakdown in the priorities that long defined gun owners. As such, the weapons of choice have changed. These are pure man-killers.

And state-level restrictions are falling one-by-one. College campuses. Bars. Churches. Gun-free zones are, suddenly, under assault by a twisted view of the Second Amendment. And its happening when guns are, as a matter of technological innovation, more efficient killers than ever before.

A line from Stanley Kubricks Full Metal Jacket sums it up best, Its not your daddys shotgun, cowboy.

No, no its not.

Jon Alexander, a former reporter for The Post-Star who grew up in Warrensburg, is editorial page editor at the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa. He can be reached at jalexander@qctimes.com
The investigations further showed that the contractor was being considered for another contract to construct the Wa-Hamile road on sole-sourcing basis.

But on Joy FMs Super Morning Show Thursday, Roads and Highways Minister Insuah Fuseini said Kanazoe will no longer execute the new contract.

According to him, Kanazoe was invited to be selected for the purpose of executing the Wa-Hamile road but refused to partake in the tendering process without any reason.

The Burkinabe contractor Mr. Djibril Kanazoes based on his previous performance was invited to be a part of the contractors to be selected for the purpose of executing the contract.

Sorry to inform you that the contractor refused to partake in the process when the bids were available to be purchased, he said.

Fuseini said the bids were made available two weeks ago and that the tender was opened on Wednesday, June 15.

According to him, the contractor did not give any reason for his withdrawal.

Fuseini added that he did not also bother to find out the reason Kanazoe pulled out, saying I dont think he has any obligation to give any reason.

Kanazoe had earlier admitted giving president Mahama a Ford Expedition as a gift.

However, Government in a statement issued by Communications Minister, Edward Omane Boamah said even though the car was received, it had nothing to do with the contract awarded.

The said vehicle, which was placed in the vehicle pool at the Presidency as per established convention had nothing to do with the award of the contracts, the statement said.
Cabinet approved the transfer of the Dry Dock company to GPHA in its 41 Meeting held on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Tema Shipyard Cabinet gives GHPOHA control over Tema Shipyard

Reacting to the news, Head of Communications at the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority, Juliana Addai emphasized GPHAs preparedness to carryout the mandate.

According to her, the Ghana Ports and Harbours authority has a track record for raising strategic funds for important projects, something they will replicate with Tema Shipyard and Dry Dock Company.

 GPHA has raised sizeable amounts of finance through loans and internally generated funds for its projects. For example, we raised 122 million Dollars to finance the construction of a 400 meter long bulk vessel paid from our internally generated funds.

Juliana Addai also mentioned the Takoradi port-expansion project, which was done at a total cost of 197 million Euros.
The Authority revealed this in an address to the press on Thursday, organized to announce the beginning of another exercise targeted at mobile phone operators.

Head of the GRA Special Tax Mobilization Force, Theophilus Gaskin expressed optimism that more revenue will be raised in the second half of the year.

The Commissioner-General of GRA, George Blankson, in his statement said the GRAs attention has been drawn to Mobile phone operators because of the massive contravention of the VAT and income tax laws.

The GRA has noted with concern that persons who deal in mobile phones and accessories have failed to charge VAT as required by law.
According to the publication which came with the headline, Confusion in VVIP: Stage act exposes them, Reggie Rockstonewho joined Zeal and Prodigal to form VVIP after Promzys departure, was reluctant when songs by VIP were played and vice versa.

It added that after the event, some patrons also voiced similar observations.

But Reggie Rockstone in a tweet laughed at the publication and cautioned that journalists be circumspect as Ghana goes to the polls this year.

In a later interview on Pluzz FMs AM Pluzz, Reggie Rockstone described the publication as a reckless observation.

It is a ridiculous headline. There is no iota of truth in it. We have various arrangements on how we come on stage and how we connect. Sometimes, we do old songs before new ones. We even perform and make it seem like a competition to entertain people before songs we have done as VVIP. The headline is just sensational. That story was written for you to buy the newspaper. Thats all, he said.

Reggie further stated that there are evidence that there was coordination between them during their performance.

When they sing old songs, Im the one seen dancing from one point to the other. Ask Stephen Appiah, check out the reports from the show and they will tell you how lively we were. They are just making up a story. Its really a reckless observation, he noted.
However Fante Fante is not only authentically Ghanaian, it is also easy to make. More so, it goes very well with a variety of accompaniments, very popular among them being Etsew. If you ever run out of ideas for dinner, or get tired of rice-based meals, give Fante Fante a try. It isnt hard to prepare at all and Onga Efie Aduane Series is here every step of the way, to share the wonderful Fante Fante recipe with you.

Fante Fante is a fresh fish sauce, made with palm oil. As the name suggests, Fante Fante is a local dish which originated amongst the people of the Fante-land, predominantly the people of the Central region. Traditionally, Fante Fante was only made with fresh fish and eaten with fante kenkey or Etsew. These days, there are a number of modifications in the preparation of Fante Fante; some people fry their fish before the actual preparation of the Fante Fante in order to prevent the fish from breaking into pieces. In spite of these variations in recipe, most Fante people maintain that any self-respecting Fante Fante should have fresh fish as its major ingredient.

The Fantes have had a monopoly over Fante Fante for quite some time.

They named the food after their ethnic group after all, and they have a better access to fresh fish than someone from Brong Ahafo might. But thank heavens the Fantes have not attempted preventing the Gas, Ewes, Kwahus and any other tribe from savouring the ostentatiously rich delicacy that is Fante Fante.
According to the GNR, malnutrition has gradually become the new normal in many parts of the world. The report titled; From Promise to Impact: Ending Malnutrition by 2030, found that the scale of the problem was larger than initially thought.

Aside the strong claim that a third of all humans were not eating well, it found that, in every part of the world and in almost every country, obesity and the rate of people becoming overweight were on the rise and that almost half of all deaths under the age of five could be linked to malnutrition.

It also established a link between the loss of income and obesity and diabetes; which are aftereffects of malnutrition.

However, the report was eager to announce progress that have been made at addressing the problem. It cited Ghana as a model for many countries hoping to reduce the rate of stunting among children.

In Ghana for example, stunting rates have almost halved  from 36 to 19 percent in just 11 years. Many countries are also close to being on track to meet global targets; Peru and Malawi, for example, are close to being on track to meeting global targets on breastfeeding and anaemia reduction.
The dilemma of gift giving to public officials has become a source of public concern after it was discovered that a Burkinabe contractor, Djibril Kanazoe, who has won a number of government contracts, gave President Mahama, a Ford Expedition car as a gift.

Responding to the development, the government said the gift, although intended for the president, has been added to the vehicle pool at the Presidency as per established convention had nothing to do with the award of the contracts.

The acting executive secretary of GACC, Beauty Emefa Narteh told Pulse News although the 1992 constitution (Chapter 24; article 284) and the Commission of Human Rights and Administrative Justices conflict of interest guideline talks about what constitutes conflict of interest, the passage of the bill will go the extra mile to regulate the conduct of public holders especially on gifts.

We are appealing to Parliament to pass the bill before they rise in July. That bill goes into detail to talk about the difference between a bribe and a gift; the type of gift to accept, the process that you can go through with the gift and then what not to accept

The bill when passed into law, will determine the grounds for disqualification from holding public office, declaration of assets, what constitutes improper enrichment, solicitation and the acceptance of gifts, acceptable gifts as well as the forfeiture and disposal of prohibited gifts.

Narteh also added that these rules will not only apply only to elected officials.

Although we are talking about the presidency, the principles apply to all public holders....As public officers, there is a need to know the kind of gifts we take and that if these are potential people that we are going to have business with, then we need to have some discretion in terms of receiving these gifts.

Many groups including the minority in Parliament, have already indicated this could be grounds for the impeachment of the president.

Narteh defined bribery as taking something, to abuse your office, for personal gain, to take an action or even to coerce an inaction.
President of the court, Hon. Justice Micah Wrights, established that the rights of Obioma was violated which led to his death.

Justice Wrights also noted that the Ghanaian government did not do enough to investigate the cause of the boys death.

In a suit no ECW/CCJ/APP/03/14 filed by the father of the deceased, he pleaded with the court to compel the government of Ghana to undertake proper investigation to reveal the circumstances that led to the death of his son, News Agency of Nigeria reported on Wednesday.

In addition, he also asked the court to compel the government of Ghana to compensate his family with the sum of $ 10 million for the violation of the right of his late son.

However, the presiding Judge maintained that the court cannot hold the government of Ghana responsible for the death of the young Nigerian.

The court held that since Ghana government failed to provide adequate investigation as well as detailed report on how the boy died, the court would have no choice but to indict the Ghanaian government.
According to George Loh, presidents receiving gifts is very normal in the countrys body politic.

Many anti-corruption campaigners have slammed the president for what they describe as his disregard for the guidelines on conflict of interest in accepting the vehicle gift.

However, Government in a statement issued by Communications Minister, Edward Omane Boamah said even though the car was received, it had nothing to do with the contract awarded.

Commenting on the matter on Accra-based Adom FM, the Member of Parliament for North Dayi, George Loh said Ghanaians are just creating a storm in a tea cup.

Former presidents John Agyekum Kufuor and Jerry John Rawlings all received gifts so should we say they also awarded contracts? he asked.

He stressed that the car was a gift not bribe.
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At the Islamic ceremony for Madam Abiba Nnaba, Mr Rawlings was joined by his wife and leader of the National Democratic Party, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings..

The ceremony was also attended by members of the government and the opposition parties.

Among those who have been expressing their condolences include former president John Agyekum Kufour, Nana Akufo Addo and Black Stars captain Asamoah Gyan.

Abiba Nnaba, born in 1931, died on Tuesday June 14, 2016 and is survived by six children including the president. She will be buried in Bunusu on Friday.
This was contained in a paper read in the house of parliament by the Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho.

The communication read In accordance with section 17 of the security and intelligence agencies act 1996 I hereby assign ministerial responsibilities for the intelligence agencies to the minister of interior with immediate effect.

This directive by the president will give an opportunity to the legislature to interrogate the Minister of Interior regarding any of these intelligence agencies.

But Member of Parliament for Sunyani East, Kwasi Ameyaw Cheremeh speaking on the floor of parliament asked that a better explanation is given on this directive to prevent any form of confusion.

He said previously they all had where they were reporting to different ministries but now they all have to report to the Interior Ministry. This will create some confusion.

He also questioned the motive behind the directive arguing that the closeness of the November 7 election raises eyebrows. I hope it is not because of the upcoming elections that these changes have been made he said.
According to the statement, the countrys thermal plants in the Aboadze thermal enclave have been deprived of enough gas supply to operate, owing to a faulty equipment on the countrys gas plant.

READ MORE: Power Supply Dumsor looms over gas shortage

Alfred Ogbamey has, however, confirmed that an order has been placed for the replacement of the equipment, meaning that the gas plant should be fully-operational by Sunday.

 Yes, the statement by the Power Ministry is true. We have had a challenge with the knock centre of the plant. This a key component that is used for determining and measuring the kind of gas received and transported.

Unfortunately, our local supplies have run out, so we have no option but to order it. We believe by Sunday the problem would have been fixed, Alfred Ogbamey said.
The campaign, which is being led by a group calling itself JM Fun Club, is aimed at getting 1,000,000 new votes for the presidential candidate of the party, President John Mahama in the elections.

Some achievements chalked up by President Mahama in his first term of office will also be highlighted by the Fun Club on various platforms in each of the 275 constituencies in the country.

The campaign began last Sunday in Ablekuma Central in Accra and will be extended to other regions.
The Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC) had called for the suspension of the new billing software used by the Electricity Company of Ghana after investigations of complaints of irregular charges by customers.

Speaking at Chorkor in the Greater Accra region as part of his tour in the Greater Accra region, Nana Addo said Everywhere I have been to, I have spoken to people about the cost of prepaid electricity. By the grace of God if I am elected President of Ghana I will reduce electricity and water tariffs. Yes I can do it. Secondary and Senior High School education will also be free,

The PURC in December late last year increased electricity and water tariffs by 59.2 percent and 67.2 percent respectively. A development most industries and individuals described as unreasonable.
It was responding to a recent joint communique issued by the Christian Council of Ghana and the Ghana Charismatic Council which called on the Electoral Commission to implement the Supreme Courts directive and delete the names of people who registered with NHIS cards.

President of the Association, Bishop Prince Benny Wood, who spoke on behalf of his group on Okay FM on Thursday asked if the Christian Council led by Reverend Dr. Emmanuel Opuni Frimpong clearly understands the ruling.

He also wondered if all members of the Association really endorsed the communique that was issued over the weekend.

Referring to 1 Chronicles 12:32 of the Bible, which reads; ..And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment.., Bishop Benny Wood explained that even in those difficulties, Israel had a way of dealing with the issues. He argued that even Counsel of the Plaintiffs in the case claimed the ruling was ambiguous and they are back in court to seek interpretation.

The Concerned Clergymen said the Christian Council should rather have advised Abu Ramadan and his group to go back to the Supreme Court for interpretation as was indicated by Justice Jones Dotse, a member of the Supreme Court panel which sat on the case.

The constitution is clear that EC does not take instructions from anybody. So if the Christian Council thinks its members do not understand the ruling, they could have sought interpretation rather than meddling in politics. Does it mean it does not care about the positions of those involved in the case? Its very unfortunate Bishop Benny Wood noted.

He said, I would like to read the minutes of the meeting that concluded the communique issued. I dont think it reflects what was really discussed. They are rather stoking fire. Its not right. Thats divisive.

Earlier this week, Deputy General Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Koku Anyidoho described the General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), Rev Dr Opuni-Frimpong and few of his colleagues as NPP moles in cassock who masterminded the communique calling on the EC to implement Supreme Court ruling.
At the age of 58, late Afro Beat icon, Fela Anikulapo Kuti had been arrested 200 times, contested for presidency and had married 27 women on the same day but to his manager, Rikki Stein, he remained an enigma and was first and foremost a friend whose bravery and resolve for change remains unrivaled.

For 15 years, Rikki Stein was Felas manager and during this period, he dedicated 15 years of his life towards working with a man whose ghost and message continued to haunt the very walls of Nigerias corridor of power.

In this interview Stein revealed how he met the fallen star, some of his unforgettable moments with him and how he came to respect the musical brand and person that Fela stood for. This year marks 19 years since the death of Fela, and according to Riki Stein, the great Abami Eda still keeps him busy.

Its because we put up his music worldwide, the catalogue of 50 albums, plus compilations, plus Vinyls. We have a series of Vinyl box sets that we put out, that we invite respected artistes to curate. The first was Questlove from The Roots, the second was Ginger Baker, and the third was Brian Eno, and we are just in the process of asking Erykah Badu to do box 4.

In an emotional revelation Stein detailed his first encounter with Fela Kuti in London, and how they were brought together via chance. The duo hit it off at the first meeting, which was the start of a great relationship which last for over a decade.

I met Fela first in the back of a Mercedes van, on the M4 Motorway in the UK, lying in the heap of African dancers on our way back from a show. Someboy put on a cassette, and it was sorrow, tears and blood. I had never heard Fela before.

I went away and did some research, and I found out some more. Then I met somebody, who knew one of the people that was working with him when he was in London on tour. At the time I was working on a rainforest festival, and I wanted to invite artistes from all the rainforest countries of the world to come together, plus people that could talk about the issues of deforestation.

So I put together a proposal because I wanted Fela to join my board of advisers, and also to come play at the festival. I put a leather-bound proposal together. It was in the winter, and I had a hat, a coat and a scarf, and I knocked on the door, and he said come in.

The room was filled with pretty girls, and Fela and his speedos as usual. And I sat down next to him, and I gave him this proposal and he was leafing through the thing, and I was talking into his ear. I cant remember what I said, but I said something, he spun around and looked at me, and we both started laughing, and we just became friends in that instant.

Stein also shared details about his work with Fela, recounting how much of a visionary Fela was, and the influence he wielded around the country as a man who fought for the people. He also spoke of Felas burial, detailing scenes from the burial day.

On the issue of Felas post-death global status, Stein talked about detractors who credit his death for the growth of his music, and his influence. Thats a wicked thing to say, Rikki replied.

He further talked about Felas message and how much of it still remains relevant today, due to the unending ills of the society.
According to numerous sources,

He confirmed this news, via Instagram, on June 15, 2016.

My dear fans and friends I am happy to inform you all that I am the new face of KIA@kiamotorsnigeria. MrP now KIAs ambassador in #Nigeria. Pls help Welcome me now to the KIA family. I give all thanks to God for blessing me much more than I deserve! And may the Good Lord Bless my family,friends and fans for me as well @kiamotorsnigeria #kiaambassador# StyleMeetAttitude," his caption read.

The company also shared the news, saying,We are happy to introduce the new face of Kia, MrP now Kias ambassador in #Nigeria. Welcome to the Kia family @peterpsquare #kiaambassador. @peterpsquare has joined the only family that has the Power to Surprise. We are pleased to have you MrP, welcome to the family that cares, Kia. #stylemeetsattitude.
The designer who is usually the demure, sophisticated and classy lady had all of that in the new photoshoot (and more) except for this time, she went all out sexy for the super glam editorial.

Think thigh flashing, sultry styles, garter, bedroom/posing in bed, stockings, unkempt hair and more the usually glammed up designer and mother of four chose to let her sexy side out in the cover feature.

She chose a black slip dress with laser perforation details while holding on a plate of tarts flashing skin with her brunette hair tousled and let down for the cover shot.

The stunning 42-year-old also chose glam leather lingeries, trench coats, matching shorts set, while posing off sexy in the bath on the bed super sexily.
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!
Ahmad Aliyu, Nibras Mamman, Muhammed Sulei, Abdulrahman Nasir, Kabir Mubi and Umar Baba, all residents of Jimeta area in Adamawa State were arrested on Tuesday, June 14, 2016, for reporting policemen working at the Doubeli Police Division, for torturing another resident, Kabiru Ahmed.

According to Punch, the police officers were not impressed by the newspapers report on the matter.

Adamu Ibrahim, a resident of the community, narrated the circumstance leading to the reckless arrest.

He also appealed to the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, and the state commissioner, Ghazzali Mohammed, to intervene.

Ibrahim said, Around 5pm yesterday (Tuesday), 14 of us went to visit Kabiru (Ahmed) at the hospital. He was able to recognise us but he could not talk.

We donated the little amount we contributed to him and left the ward at about 5.30pm.

A friend left to visit another patient in the hospital and begged us to wait for him. I was hanging around the premises while the others were at the point where we parked our bus.

Then, about 10 policemen in mufti came and asked, Where is Adamu Ibrahim? They did not see me, but they arrested the six residents.

A friend called the Police Public Relations Officer and informed him of the development, but he said he was not aware. I think it was your (PUNCHs) report that prompted their action.

Mallam Ali Mamman, one of the parents of the arrested persons, narrated thated that he was denied access to his son and his friends.

Mamman said, The policemen did not allow me to have access to my son and refused to tell me the offence he and his friends committed.

On Wednesday, the CP called the policemen to bring them. He asked the policemen and the children what happened.

The CP asked why the arrest was made but they said they only invited them to the station to gather information.

He said what they did was wrong and ordered that they should be released without delay. They have all been released.
Matthias, who is the paramount ruler in his community, was kidnapped from his palace on May 28, 2016, by a group of five kidnappers, who had stormed his palace wearing military camouflage, shooting sporadically into the air before whisking him away.

The Rivers State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Ahmad Muhammad, while speaking to newsmen of the feat of his men, disclosed that acting on a tip-off, the operatives moved to Umuapu in Ohaji Local Government Area of Imo State, where the kidnappers were holding the monarch hostage.

Mohammad added that the kidnappers began to shoot on sighting security operatives, adding that three of the hoodlums were gunned down during an exchange of fire, while one AK 47 rifle was among the items recovered from the kidnappers.

We got information that they (kidnappers) moved to Umuapu in Imo State after kidnapping the paramount ruler. Our men stormed the place on Monday, June 13.

As usual, there was a gun battle and three of the suspected kidnappers were gunned down; one AK 47 rifle, five rounds of 7.62 mm life ammunition were recovered from the hoodlums.
The other four officers dismissed are Samuel Ando, Michael Adeoya, Richard Ugwu and Sulaiman Muhammed.

It was gathered that Osaimayu, who was attached to the Lagos State Task Force on Environmental and Special Offences (Enforcement) Unit, Alausa, was reportedly arrested by the X-Squad of the Command in Oshodi.

It was gathered that a known hoodlum in the area was arrested and the money found on him and he confessed that the police sergeant gave him the money to keep for him.

The State Police Commissioner, Fatai Owoseni, said the officers were dismissed for extortion and improper dressing.

Adeoya was allegedly dismissed for wearing flip-flops while on duty, while Muhammed was dismissed for allegedly not wearing police uniform while on duty.

While he was being paraded, Osaimayu pleaded that the money that was found with the hoodlum was not collected in his name, while pleading with Owoseni to reverse his dismissal as he had no other means of feeding his family.

I was at my duty post on Monday in the Oshodi area when the X-Squad operatives came to arrest me. It was around 10am. A hoodlum had earlier been arrested and searched, and the money was found on him. The suspect confessed it was the money obtained from motorists and he said I authorised him to do it.

I did not know he collected any money on my behalf. I was whisked off to the Command Headquarters, Ikeja. They searched me, but no money was found on me. The CP should reconsider me. I have family members to cater to.

Adeoya, who was arrested for wearing flip-flops, denied that he was on duty at that time, adding that he went to the Mile 12 Market to buy food supplements for his fowls.

I boarded a tricycle to the Mile 12 area. As I alighted, the X-Squad officials swooped on me and said I was improperly dressed. But I was not on duty. I worked as a guard to a chairman of a political party in the Kosofe area.

As of the time of my arrest, I was going to the market to buy food supplements for my fowls. I rear fowls in my house. I was surprised that I was arrested.

After I was interrogated, they said I would be tried for improper dressing. There is nobody to feed my fowls. They would have all died by now.

Another dismissed officer, Muhammed, who was attached to the Idimu Police Division, said he had a health challenge and was going to treat himself when he was arrested.
The girl's mother, identified as Maame Ampomaa, could not come to terms with why her teenage daughter would be a love relationship with a man old enough to be her father and narrated how the whole incident played out:

About a week ago, I noticed that she had gotten herself a boyfriend. I am a widow and a single mother who toils to take care of her, so, I told her that she would stop schooling and stay home if she continued the relationship.

I woke up this morning and could not find her. I went to her room only to find her almost dying after consuming a poisonous substance.

I rushed her to a nearby hospital and I am praying that she gets well soon. I was only looking out for her own good so that with all the monies spent on her education, she does not get pregnant.
Confessing that he was actually the one who coordinated the abduction of the girls, the 37-year-old Sylva, an indigene of Delta State, also stated that he also coordinated the kidnap of a Chinese construction manager in the Igando area of the state, and got N250,000 for his efforts.

Sylva, also known as Tradition, was arrested by the operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad at a hideout in the Arepo area of Ogun State on Saturday, June 11.

Recall that it was reported that 15 gunmen had attacked the school at about 8:30pm, firing gunshots in the air, and succeeded in abducting three young school girls, Timilehin Olosa, Tofunmi Popoola and Deborah Akinayo, and taken in a canoe through the Majidun area to a creek.

Few weeks later, three members of the gang, Emmanuel Arigidi, Akanji Sheu and James Henry, were arrested while Sylva, whom they all fingered as the leader, was declared wanted by the police.

Speaking while being paraded, the kingpin opened up:

Lamiameni and I got the job of the Ikorodu schoolgirls for our gang. There was a third leader, called Millions. In the end, I made N300,000 from the schoolgirls abduction. I was a timber dealer in Delta State before coming to Lagos State.

I stayed in the Majidun area and I have two children. I went with the gang on the day we abducted the schoolgirls. Lamiameni and others held guns. I did not. My role was to talk to the families of the schoolgirls after the whole operation.

We carried them through the bushes. I did not let anyone rape them. If a gang member should rape any victim, we would kill him. After the Ikorodu incident, I fled to the Igbo Olomu area. It was at Igbo Olomu that I coordinated the kidnap of the Chinese manager. I got N250,000 from that operation."
Sarah, who is being investigated by the police, explained that it was all due to hardship, as she has no one to support her.

She said, I came to Lagos in 2009. I lived with my mother at No.1, Ejo Street, Igando.

It was my mother that used to pay the house rent. One day, we didnt just see her again. She didnt come back home.

She didnt leave home with anything; all her things are still there. I dont know her whereabouts. But when the rent expired, I had no choice but to leave the house.

That was over a year ago. I live inside market, just any space to sleep.

The woman also explained that she has lost contact with the man who was responsible for her pregnancy.

The man, identified as Sunday, suddenly absconded before she could return to their residence.

I only know him as Sunday. I dont know his surname. I dont know his parents. I dont know his whereabouts too.

That day, I went to sell pure water but before I came back, he had packed all his belongings and disappeared, leaving me behind.

I gave birth to my baby at Ikotun market.
Most doctors in Zimbabwe run private practices and some also put in hours at private and state hospitals. Government-run hospitals, used by the majority of Zimbabweans, often lack basic medicines and specialist doctors and are largely shunned by patients on health insurance.

The southern African nation has more than 20 registered health insurers serving about 800,000 members, according to the Association of Health Funders of Zimbabwe (AHFoZ), which represents health insurance firms.

In a statement, the Zimbabwe Medical Association (ZiMA)accused AHFoZ of failing to pay or delaying payments to doctors, who were nonetheless forced to pay taxes on funds they had not received.

"As a result of the above, health insurance firms currently owe health services providers an estimated $220 million," ZiMA said in the statement.

ZiMA president Agnes Mahomva would not say how many doctors would comply with ZiMA's decision or the number of patients that would be affected.
Dasuki is standing trial at the Federal High Court Abuja and the High Court of the FCT on Money Laundering, abuse of office and embezzlement of public funds amounting to 2.1 billion dollars.

Delivering the judgment, Justice Abdul Aboki, said the appeal was based on the ruling of the High Court of the FCT given on Dec.18, 2015 which granted him bail.

Aboki said the appellant had challenged his re-arrest after fulfilling his bail terms on Dec. 29, 2015.

``Having gone through the argument studied the arguments presented by the parties, this panel holds that the appeal lacked merit and hereby dismissed, Aboki held.

Dasuki, through his counsel, Mr Joseph Daudu (SAN), had invited the appellate court to decide whether it was right for him to be re-arrested after fulfilling his bail terms.

The appellant had also asked that court to decide whether the action of the Federal Government was not in violation of his rights.

Dasuki further asked the court to rule that the criminal actions brought against him were abuse of court processes.

The appellant further asked that court to stop the Federal Government and its prosecution agencies from appropriating and reprobating in the circumstance.

On his part, Mr Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), Counsel for the EFCC, prayed the court to dismiss the appeal for lacking in merit because the appellant had misdirected the appeal by listing EFCC as the only respondent to the matter.

According to him, the EFCC has not violated the order of Court deliver on Dec.18, 2015 in any ways.

``My Lords, the EFCC is not holding Dasuki in its detention facilities anywhere in the country.

``The warrant which authorises the release of the appellant after fulfilling his bail conditions was directed to the Comptroller of Prisons where he was held at that material time.

``To depose to an affidavit suggesting that EFCC was instrumental to Dasukis re-arrest was a fatal error, he said.

Jacobs also said that the order of the High Court of the FCT which granted the appellants bail application expired as soon as he (Dasuki) was released from detention on Dec.29, 2015.

``The order either stopped his re-arrest, further investigation or prosecution.

``In any case, the EFCC is not privy to his re-arrest. The Department of State Service (DSS) that re-arrested was not even served the order.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that workers led by the national leadership of the NLC had on June 6 declared an indefinite strike over their unpaid six months salaries.

The workers also rejected governments controversial education initiative to involve private participation in the management of public secondary schools while also demanding the withdrawal of all charges against the labour leaders in a court of law.

Speaking after the meeting, which ended at exactly 8.15p.m., the parties told newsmen that the reconciliatory process was on course.

Mr Peters Adeyemi, Deputy President of NLC, said that the meeting was a tough one that required extensive deliberation.

He said that the labours leaders would go back to brief members on the issues discussed and take a collective decision.

"We cannot take a decision on the ongoing strike action here unless we brief our people and collectively a decision is taken.

"Whatever is our decision would be communicated to the government and the media on Thursday," he said.

Adeyemi commended the governor for his tolerance and the Assembly for its timely intervention.

Also speaking, Gov. Abiola Ajimobi commended the commitment and maturity displayed by the national leadership of both NLC and NUT.

Ajimobi said that he saw honesty of purpose in the discussion between the parties, expressing optimism that the outcome would be for the progress of the state.

"I have no doubt that we will all succeed at the end," he said.
Speaking in Abuja on Thursday, June 16, 2016, the NAFRC Commandant, Air Vice Marshal Mike Iloenyosi noted that the retirees have undergone various training that would enable them fit into the society.

According to him, 449 were drawn from the Army, two from the Navy and 13 from the Air Force He added that more officer cadre will join up in the course soon.

The 464 military retirees will join 40,500 other personnel of the Nigerian Armed Forces who had in the past benefited from military-sponsored vocational training courses between 1945, when the centre was established, and 2016.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Army has confirmed the retirement of some senior officers from service following the approval of the Army Council.
Yerima, while being cross examined by Badeh's counsel, Mr Akin Olujimi, in Abuja on Wednesday said that the statement he made to the EFCC were only summary statements.

Yerima had on Tuesday told the court that the first witness, retired Air Commodore Abdullahi Yasha'u, gave him N650 million to pay for a plot for Badeh.

At the resumed hearing, on Wednesday, he told the court that there was no way he could have given details in the statements, adding that he only wrote what he could remember at the time.

He also added that the statements he made were based on questions put to him by the EFCC officials.

He said that he did not mention the meeting in the statements because he did not remember the meeting at the time he wrote it

Yerima had told the court in his evidence in chief that he bought the land on the instruction of Yasha'u

He added that Yusha'u also instructed him to do the documentation in his companys name, RyteBuilders Technologies Ltd, pending when the real name of the purchaser would be given to him.

Yerima maintained that Yushau had told him that he was acting on behalf of his boss ( Badeh).

Olujimi, however, showed him the statements he made to the EFCC, pointing out that he did not mention anywhere that Yusha'u told him he was acting on the instructions of Badeh

He also asked Yerima why he did not mention a meeting where he was told the plaza belonged to Badeh in all the statements he made to the EFCC.

"In all your five statement that you made to the EFCC, you did not say that there was a meeting you attended in which Yusha'u told you that the plaza belongs to his boss."

Trial judge, Justice Okon Abang, adjourned the case till June 16, for continuation of cross examination.

Badeh is being tried by the EFCC for allieged divertsion of N3.97billion meant for fighting insurgents in the North-East.
This is according to a report on the Hausa service of the Voice of America broadcast on June 15, 2016.

In a report by Daily Trust, the establishment of the radio station has been confirmed by residents in Tolkomari, northern part of Cameroon.

it was further reported that the station broadcast propaganda materials to counter media reports of victories by troops from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic in the war against the terrorists.

The Voice of America also reports that the Cameroonian government is worried by the new development and has commenced investigations towards locating the radio station, which is reportedly situated on the border of Nigeria and Cameroon.

______________________________________________________
The 73-year-old former military ruler flew to London on Monday last week to see an ear, nose and throat specialist after being examined by two doctors in Nigeria who, according to Buhari's spokesman, "recommended further evaluation, purely as a precaution".

"He is in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning," Vice President Yemi Osinbajo told reporters in the capital, Abuja. He said he had spoken to Buhari late on Wednesday.

"He should take a day or two off in London and rest a bit and come back hale and hearty on Sunday and be ready for work on Monday," said Osinbajo, adding that the president was "in good condition" and "very well".
Pictures of the visit were released on the official Twitter handle of the President (NGRPresident) on Thursday, June 16, 2016.

Although details of the meeting was not disclosed, some Nigerians are of the opinion that the visit is a demonstration of the fact that the president is in good terms with the national leader.

Pulse recall that Tinubu recently denied a rumour that he publicly condemned Buharis policies and performance.

President Buhari who departed Nigeria on Monday, June 6, 2016, for a 10-day vacation trip to the United Kingdom was expected to return to Nigeria today.
Buhari was expected back in the country today, June 16, 2016, after taking a 10-day trip to the United Kingdom to seek medical attention for a persistent ear infection.

Osinbajo has however said that Buhari will return to Nigeria on Sunday, June 19.

The President will be back on Sunday. I spoke with him yesterday evening and I think it is just the best that he takes the weekend off. He will certainly be back on Sunday, Osinbajo said during an interview with State House correspondents today, according to Daily Trust.

I think the most straightforward thing is when he will be back. He will be back on Sunday. There is no point rushing back on Friday or something like that. He will just take the weekend off and be back on Sunday. He is in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning.

Mr President is in good condition, he is fine, he is very well. He should take a day or two off in London and rest a bit and come back hale and hearty on Sunday and be ready for work on Monday. So we expect him back on Sunday," he added.
Civil servants in the state are also at loggerheads with Governor Fayose over the non-payment of their salaries.

Premium Times reports that Fayose spoke to the unions leader and asked them not to go on strike till he comes back from Abuja.

Speaking to newsmen, the acting President of ARD, EKSUTH, Tunji Olaoye said the strike will go ahead despite the Governors plea.

Olaoye also said We hope that the issues will be resolved by Monday, if not the emergency services will be removed and there will be a total strike.
Olayinka, in a statement obtained from Premium Times, said It is only in the world of miracle that a State that was plunged into debt and is losing over N1 billion to loan deductions monthly can sustain regular payment of salaries.

In saner climes, the likes of Dapo Kolawole will be covering their faces in shame, having presided over the unprecedented looting of Ekiti State treasury and plunging of the State into unwarranted debt.

The reality is if Ekiti was not plunged into debt by the Fayemis government, the State would have received N1, 920,027,383.96 for the month of April, 2016; N1, 860,919,359.32 in May, 2016; N2, 151,966,892.79 in March, 2016; N2, 324,677,903.78 in February, 2016; N2, 546,181,882.96 in January, 2016 and N2, 258,837,558.38 in December, 2015!

Therefore, a man like Dapo Kolawole, who as Finance Commissioner ran the State economy aground should just cover his face in shame instead of running from one media house to another to justify the use of borrowed funds to plant flowers, construct uncompleted State Pavilion, Civic Centre, Governors Lodge among other irrelevant projects.

Above are just two aspects of the financial mismanagement superintended over by Dapo Kolawole and common sense demands that characters like him should just keep mum while the Government of Ayodele Fayose goes about finding solutions to the financial crises caused by the frivolous loans obtained by the Fayemi-led APC government.
Obanikoro has been accused of participating in the $2.1 billion arms deal fraud and is also wanted for allegedly receiving a luxury vehiclefrom an associate of former petroleum minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, who is facing corruption charges herself.

The former ministers sons, Gbolahan and Jide Obanikoro are also alleged to have received N4.75 billion from ex-National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki, who is believed to have supervised the arms deal fraud.

Obanikoro claims that he is not running away from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) but he has managed to keep himself and his sons out of the agencys reach since investigations began.

To begin with, no allegation has been made against me officially that I know of. Therefore, I have no reason to run. I know for sure that all the accusations in the media are in the realm of speculation, he said.

To make the case official, the EFCC, on Tuesday, June 14, 2016, raided Obanikoros home in Parkview Estate and his son, Jides home on Onikoyi Drive in Ikoyi but found only the younger Obanikoros wife and children at home.

In response, the former minister said that he was being witch-hunted and dared the EFCC to extradite him from the US if it could.

I cannot submit myself to such glaring witch-hunt, injustice and charade but I'll fight it legally, with God and clear conscience on my side. Rumours of extradition are also lies - false allegations cannot stand up to any decent legal inquiry in a civilised system such as in the US, he said via a statementreleased on Wednesday, June 15.

I welcome an extradition process as it will expose the shenanigans going on with their fraudulently fictitious fight against corruption, he added.

If Obanikoro is so sure of his innocence, why doesnt he come back willingly to prove it? Why is Jide Obanikoro in the US instead of in Ikoyi with his wife and children? The same Jide Obanikoro who was previously resident in Nigeria and contested the Lagos House of Assembly elections is now a resident of the US? Why?

The only way the former minister can convince Nigerians of his innocence, is by coming out of hiding and clearing his name, if it indeed can be cleared.
Gololo was alleged to have sexually assaulted a housekeeper in his hotel room while Gbillah and another lawmaker, Samuel Ikon (Akwa Ibom) were accused of soliciting prostitutes.

According to New Telegraph, Entwistle reported the matter to House of Reps Speaker, Yakubu Dogara via a letter dated June 9, 2016.

This is an affront on the National Assembly and Nigeria, it appears they have ulterior motives. We are not going to take this lightly; we will take legal actions against the US government. It is a dent on our image, Gbillah said in response to the claims.

I went on the trip with my wife and baby and insisted that she stayed with me, but they told me the accommodation was meant for only participantsI saw the ambassador (Entwistle) and went to greet him and he told me how a few of us tarnished the image of the House. I advised him to make it formal so that we can know who was involved and what actually happened.

It was after this encounter that they called us to their premises and said they were identified by their accusers in a group picture. This is curious. No video footage. They didnt accost us while we were in US. We suspect this is a calculated attempt to rubbish the National Assembly.

We, the concerned members, have written to the speaker indicating the facts and demanding footage of our stay in the hotel. We also want them to provide access to our accusers to identify us. But most importantly, we would be demanding compensation from the US government for defamation of character, he added.

Gololo is also said to have denied the claims via a letter written to Dogara on June 13.

Let me, from the outset, express my shock and dismay at the contents of the letter generally and particularly affects me, he wrote according to New Telegraph.

These are totally false, unfounded and baseless allegations against me. I categorically deny any such incident happened, I never grabbed any housekeeper nor did I solicit for sex. I also take this issue very seriously not only because I am a honourable member representing a hallowed institution, but because of my integrity as a husband and father. How would my family and in-laws react to these wild and grave allegations?

I demand an apology and retraction of these allegations or I shall not hesitate to engage the services of lawyers and not only to clear my name, but to seek redress for the damages done to my reputation. I insist that evidence of the allegations against me be produced, he added.

Ikon was said to have turned off his phones and as such was not available for comment.
The Ambassador is further said to have reported the lawmakers, identified as Mohammed Garba Gololo (Bauchi), Samuel Ikon (Akwa Ibom) and Mark Gbillah (Benue), to House of Reps Speaker, Yakubu Dogara.

Entwistle is said to have filed the complaint via a letter dated June 9, 2016, addressed to Speaker Dogara and obtained by New Telegraph.

The letter reads:

Ten members of the Nigerian National Assembly recently travelled to Cleveland, Ohio as participants in the International Visitor Leadership Programme on good governance. We received troubling allegations regarding the behaviour of three members of the delegation to the U.S. Governments flagship professional exchange programme.

The U.S. Department of State and the Cleveland Council on World Affairs received reports from employees of the Cleveland hotel where the representatives stayed, alleging the representatives engaged in the following behaviour: Mohammed Garba Gololo allegedly grabbed a housekeeper in his hotel room and solicited her for sex.

While the housekeeper reported this to her management, this incident could have involved local law enforcement and resulted in legal consequences for Representative Gololo. Mark Terseer Gbillah and Samuel Ikon allegedly requested hotel parking attendants assist them to solicit prostitutes.

The U.S. Mission took pains to confirm these allegations and the identities of the individuals with the employees of the hotel in Cleveland. The conduct described above left a very negative impression of Nigeria, casting a shadow on Nigerias National Assembly, the International Visitor Leadership Program, and to the American hosts impression of Nigeria as a whole. Such conduct could affect some participants ability to travel to the United States in the future.

While the majority of Nigerian visitors to the United States do behave appropriately, even a few Nigerians demonstrating poor judgement leads to a poor impression of the Nigerian people generally, though it is far from accurate.

Such incidents jeopardise the ability of future programming and make host institutions and organisations less likely to welcome similar visits in the future.

In addition, most of the members of this group reacted very negatively to my deputy when she brought this matter to their attention, further calling into question their judgement and commitment to the goals of the International Visitor Leadership Programme.

This leads us to question whether to include National Assembly members for other similar programmes in the future. I request, in the strongest possible terms, you share this message with members of the National Assembly so they understand the seriousness of these issues, and the potential consequences of their actions, not only for themselves as individuals, but also for the future of such programmes designed to benefit Nigeria.
The Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Ibok Ete-Ibas, gave the assurance on Wednesday in Abuja, when the House of Representatives Committee on Navy, visited the Naval Headquarter on oversight functions.

Rep. Abdussamad Dasuki, chairman of the committee, who spoke, commended the Navy for their efforts at tackling the security challenges in the maritime environment.

Dasuki said that the importance of the Navy was evident when one considers the strategic importance of the Gulf of Guinea and the critical infrastructure located in the area.

According to him, the present situation in the maritime domain called for a stronger maritime policing architecture, spearheaded by the Navy to effectively combat all forms of maritime crimes.

``The situation in the Niger Delta area and the increasing reports of piracy attacks in the Gulf of Guinea deserves special attention, he said.

He urged the Federal Government to consider the presentation of a Maritime Security Supplementary Appropriation Bill.

According to Dasuki, this will enable the Federal Government to immediately purchase equipment for the Navy to tackle the security challenges in the Niger Delta region and the Gulf of Guinea.
This is contained in a statement issued on Wednesday in Abuja by Alhaji Suleiman Kawu, Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (House of Reps).

``We wish to thank the House of Representatives under the leadership of Speaker Yakubu Dogara for passing two of our bills today, June 15, 2016, the statement said.

``One is a Bill for an Act to Provide for the Domestication and Enforcement in Nigeria of the Avoidance of Double Taxation Agreement between the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Kingdom of Spain.

``The other is a Bill for an Act to Provide for the Domestication and Enforcement in Nigeria of the Avoidance of Double Taxation Agreement between the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Republic of South Korea and for Other Related Matters.

``We hope you will also pass our other bills that are currently before the House with the same zeal that you passed these two.

``Indeed, we believe that this will guaranty a robust and cordial relationship between the executive and the House in the next three years.
The militants issued the warning on Thursday, June 16, 2016, saying they had to take the action because the companies refused to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Ekpeye community.

The affected oil companies are: Nigerian Agip Oil Company, Shell Petroleum Development Company, Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas and Niger Delta Petroleum Resources.

The spokesman of the group, Obodo Obodo, in a statement said The Ekpeye Liberation Group, a forum of ex-militants and freedom agitators from the Ekpeye Ethnic Nationality in Rivers State (Part of the Niger Delta), is utterly disappointed with the conduct of the oil multinational companies operating in the area.

In the light of their nonchalant, including lukewarm attitude to the massive killings and kidnappings of our people in recent times, the Ekpeye Liberation Group has been forced to issue a notice of eviction to all oil companies operating in Ekpeye territory and its waters.

They (oil companies) are required to pack out of Ekpeyeland within 14 days, from Thursday 16th of June or face massive vandalisation of their assets. A stitch in time saves nine.

Meanwhile, the minister of state for petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu paid a visit to Gbaramatu kingdom in Delta State, to meet with representatives of the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA).
This is coming on the heels of a commendation message sent by Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) to the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) for issuing an ultimatum to some Governors in the South East to release their members.

IPOB spokesman, Emma Powerful also said its leader, Nnamdi Kanu was honoured with an award by the Igbo Youths Movement in Enugu state, for fighting for the liberation of the Igbos.

Powerful also said Prince Nnamdi Kanu received the award as a great liberator of our days and as the man who destroyed the falsehood in Nigeria with the truth without a metallic bullets and bombs, his determination, resoluteness and truthfulness towards the liberation of his people accorded him the honour and respect among the youths across the world.

IPOB family members worldwide under Mazi Kanu promise to restore Biafra through a peaceful means because it is a divine project from Chukwuokike Abiama (God Almighty) which no human being can stop. The killing, torture, intimidation and arrest of Biafrans cannot stop our resolve towards the restoration of Gods projects.

Nnamdi Kanu is the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). He is currently being tried by the Federal Government of Nigeria for treason.
A statement issued in Lokoja on Wednesday by the Public Relations Officer of the state Ministry of Justice, Mr Saeed Saqeeb, said that the judge was released in Okene area at about 7 p.m. on Tuesday.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that Usman was returning to Lokoja when he was kidnapped at gun point on Itakpe-Okene road on June 12.

``The judge has since reunited with his family members, Saqeeb said in the statement.
The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence, Amb. Danjuma Sheni, said this at the closing of two-day seminar on Peace Support Operation, organised by his ministry in Abuja on Wednesday.

He said a revised policy on peace-keeping operation would ensure that Nigeria got value for resources invested in operations.

Sheni decried a situation where the country invested huge human and material resources in peace support operations and got less benefit in return.

``In the last three days, we have been taking stock, generally speaking of our participation in peace keeping operations.

``We noticed in particular the kind of challenges Nigeria has been facing. The purpose of the seminar is to look at the way forward.

``First of all, we need to improve on the quality and quantity of our contingents equipment to peace support operations, he said.

He said Nigeria would leverage on other areas of its participation in peace support operations to boost its economic diversification plan.

Sheni added that the ministry would convene a meeting of stakeholders regularly to ensure that the revised policy was implemented.

``We need to look outside the traditional peace keeping operations in terms of combat and look at other areas called enablers particularly the medical field.

``So, we will be looking at those directions in order to enhance our participation.

``The level and quality of our participation will determine what kind of reimbursement we get from UN.

``So, as the country begins to look towards diversifying sources of foreign exchange earnings, I think peace keeping operations if handled properly can be another source of foreign earning for us.

Sheni said lack of commitment and genuine investment was responsible for Nigerias inability to maximise its participation in peace support operations despite many years of sacrifice to the cause for global peace.

He said a country usually does not get much from the UN if its equipment stock fell short of the approved template for equipment approved for their peace support operations.

On Nigerias eventual withdrawal from Liberia under the UN mission, Sheni said the withdrawal was not total as a substantial number of Nigerian troops would stay back in the West African country.

He said it was a normal development for a countrys contingent to peace support operations to pull out especially where the clear objective had been achieved.

According to the permanent secretary, over 1,000 men and women, including police and medical service personnel, would still remain in Liberia.
The militants sent out a tweet that they had blown up the pipeline which is located in Oruk Anam Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom state.

Vanguard reports that Mani said the blast was caused by a leakage in the gas pipeline, adding that some engineers came from Port-Harcourt to resolve the issue.

The Akwa-Ibom state police boss also assured residents to go about their normal businesses.

Mani also told newsmen that the state is safe and there was no cause for alarm.

The undefinedthe Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) for issuing an ultimatum to some Governors in the South-East to release the Biafra agitators in police custody.

Oil prices jumped to the highest level in eight months, due to ongoing undefinedand strong Chinese oil demand data.
According to an early tweet, by the militants on June 16, 2016, the NNPC pipeline situated in Oruk Anam Local Government Area in Akwa Ibom,was blown at about 3:00am in the wee hours of the day.

ALSO READ: Militants claim to have blown up Chevron Oil Pump

"At 4:00am @NDAvengers blow up NNPC Pipeline in Oruk Anam Local Government Area in Akwa Ibom," the tweet read.

The latest destruction of the oil facility is coming seven days after the last attack which saw the Obi Obi Brass Trunk line belonging to Agip ENI going up in flames.

Other affected companies include Shell Petroleum Development Community and Chevron Petroleum which had over three of its ol facilities destroyed by the militants.
Ajumogobia made the denial via a statement released on Wednesday, June 15, 2016.

It reads:

My attention has been drawn to widespread reports in the media claiming that I have agreed to participate in negotiations with the Federal Government over the issue of attacks against oil installations in the Niger Delta on behalf of some of the alleged perpetrators of these actions or connected persons.

This is not so. I wish to make it absolutely clear that I do not know the alleged perpetrators nor have I offered to serve as their representative in prospective discussions with the Federal Government in any capacity whatsoever.

I was recently contacted by someone who claimed to represent the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). In that conversation the caller asked if I would be willing to participate in an initiative to find ways to end the attacks on oil installations through dialogue towards restoring peace and stability in the region.

My brief response was that if the Federal Government was genuinely interested in entering into discussions with credible parties who could help to facilitate such a dialogue to halt the actions that were undermining the social and economic stability of the region and the nation I would readily participate. In such an event I would seek to articulate the proper interests of all law abiding Nigerians generally and the ordinary people of the Niger Delta States, in particular.
The House also urged the Federal Government to formulate sustainable plan to end militancy devoid of any confrontational approach.

The resolutions were sequel to a motion entitled "Need for an improved funding for the amnesty programme and a suitable strategic plan to end militancy in the Niger Delta" sponsored by Rep. Ekpenyong Ayi and 30 others.

Ayi, while moving the motion during plenary session, said former President Umaru YarAduas introduction of the amnesty programme led to increased oil revenue for the country.

He expressed worry that N20bn proposed by the Federal Government was inadequate to sustain the payment of N25,000 stipends and other allowances to the ex-agitators.

``The incessant attacks on oil facilities has led to Nigeria losing its place as Africa's largest oil producer because it's oil output had dropped to 1.4 million barrels per day as against the budgetary target of 2.2million barrels.

``This massive cut from the proposed N55billion of the amnesty office has threatened the sustainability of the amnesty programme.

``Also, this has led to a resurgence of militancy, as the militants are being owed arrears of stipends which had affected oil production", the lawmaker said.

Ayi further contended that the attacks have negatively impacted on electricity output, particularly on thermal power stations that are reliant on gas to power the turbines.

The House, therefore, urged it's leadership to interface with the executive arm of government to make funds available for the short fall.
The Ambassador, in a letter dated June 9, 2016, addressed to Speaker Dogara, Mohammed Garba Gololo (APC, Bauchi), Samuel Ikon (PDP, Akwa Ibom) and Mark Gbillah (APC, Benue) had, on a recent visit to the United States for the International Visitor Leadership Programme, brought disrepute to the parliament by soliciting for sex from prostitutes and attempting to rape the housekeeper.

Ten lawmakers were invited by the US government for the International Visitor Leadership Program held between April 7 and 13, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. They include: Gaza Jonathan Gbefwi (PDP Nasarawa), Danburam Abubakar Nuhu (APC, Kano), Nkole Uko Ndukwe (PDP, Abia), Rita Orji (PDP Lagos State), Ayo Huliyat Omidiran (APC, Osun).

Entwistles letter reads: It is with regret that I must bring to your attention the following situation. Ten members of the Nigerian National Assembly recently travelled to Cleveland, Ohio as participants in the International Visitor Leadership Programme on good governance.

"We received troubling allegations regarding the behaviour of three members of the delegation to the U.S. Governments flagship professional exchange programme.

"The U.S Department of State and the Cleveland Council on World Affairs received reports from employees of the Cleveland hotel where the representatives stayed, alleging the representatives engaged in the following behaviour:

"Mohammed Garba Gololo allegedly grabbed a housekeeper in his hotel room and solicited her for sex. While the housekeeper reported this to her management, this incident could have involved local law enforcement and resulted in legal consequences for Representative Gololo.

"Mark Terseer Gbillah and Samuel Ikon allegedly requested hotel parking attendants assist them to solicit prostitutes The U.S. Mission took pains to confirm these allegations and the identities of the individuals with the employees of the hotel in Cleveland.

"The conduct described above left a very negative impression of Nigeria, casting a shadow on Nigerias National Assembly, the International Visitor Leadership Program, and to the American hosts impression of Nigeria as a whole. Such conduct could affect some participants ability to travel to the United States in the future.

"While the majority of Nigerian visitors to the United States do behave appropriately, even a few Nigerians demonstrating poor judgement leads to a poor impression of the Nigerian people generally, though it is far from accurate.

"Such incidents jeopardise the ability of future programming and make host institutions and organisations less likely to welcome similar visits in the future.

In addition, most of the members of this group reacted very negatively to my deputy when she brought this matter to their attention, further calling into question their judgement and commitment to the goals of the International Visitor Leadership Programme. This leads us to question whether to include National Assembly members for other similar programmes in the future.
The United States Ambassador to Nigeria, James Entwistle, had in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, accused three members of the lower chamber of improper conduct, attempted rape and soliciting for prostitutes while on official trip to the U.S.

The three lawmakers namely; Mohammed Garba Gololo, Samuel Ikon and Mark Gbillah were accused of soliciting for sex and attempted rape.

Spokesman of the House, Abdulrazak Namdas who confirmed the receipt of a letter from Mr Entwistle to the Speaker said the leadership of the House has begun investigating the matter adding that the outcome would be made known in due time.

"We are in receipt of a letter from the ambassador from the United States to Nigeria where he alleged that there was misconduct by some members of the National Assembly that attended a programme.

"However as a responsible parliament, the leadership has received these letters and it's doing its own investigation and it remains an allegation," Namdas said.
Dikko made the call while addressing the Chairmen and Secretaries Forum of APC FCT chapter, who paid him a courtesy visit in his office in Bwari.

He called for synergy between the Forum and the Executive of the party in the FCT.

``In Bwari we inherited challenges, but we are not deterred to make remarkable progress.

On top of all these challenges, we are going to make sure that the flag of our party keeps flying so that our party achieves what has not been achieved before.

We need your maximum support to tackle our daunting challenges; we know that with God we are going to overcome our challenges.

He enjoined them to use the Ramadan season as an opportunity to pray for divine intervention.

Speaking on behalf of the Forum, Alhaji Haruna Mai Yaba, the Chairman, Abaji chapter of APC, congratulated Dikko on his victory at the poll.

Mia Yaba, who is also the spokesperson for the Forum, reminded the chairman to fulfill his campaign promises to the electorate in order to to sustain active support for the party.

He said that the purpose of the visit was to congratulate him and advise him to be loyal to the electorate.

You have to be loyal to them; your door should be open for advice and recommendations on means to move the party forward, he said.
Sources disclosed that a four-man committee set up by the Markafi led PDP, screened the aspirants, Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu, Chief Solomon Edebiri and Matthew Iduoriyekemwen on Wednesday, June 15, 2015 at the party's secretariat in Benin, Edo State.

In a report by The StreetJournal, the Screening Committee was headed by former Minister of Education, Prof. Tunde Adediran and also had Senator Abiye Sekibo, Senator Joshua Idaini, Ndubusi Nwingwe and Faruk Yahaya Idris as members.

After the exercise, the Chairman of the Committee, Prof. Adeniran, reportedly expressed confidence in the screening, saying it was thorough.

ALSO READ:

We are here for the screening of governorship aspirants with a view to electing a candidate through a credible and transparent primary election that will be taking place on Monday.

The screening exercise has been undertaken, very thorough and we are indeed very proud as a party that we have a very wonderful and patriotic Nigerians and committed party leaders from Edo State who have shown interest in vying for the candidacy of our great party.

Three of the governorship aspirants were screened one after the other and we found them very worthy. They have met the relevant criteria and conditions stipulated in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and of course, the requirements of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

We believe that with these men of honour, we are sure that the details of the Electoral Act must be taken into consideration in the screening and by the time we present whoever emerges among them as required by the Electoral Law, it will be easy for our candidate to scale through, Adeniran said.
The university further said that as such, it would ``not have any hand in the affairs of the association.

This is contained in a press statement signed by Ibrahim Sheme, the universitys Director of Media and Publicity and made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Wednesday.

The statement quoted the Vice-Chancellor of the university, Professor Abdalla Adamu, as saying that the group was a voluntary body for former students who chose to join it.

It said that with effect from Wed, June 15, 2016, the universitys Advancement Unit, which had been empowered to liaise and work with the association, would stop all forms of collaboration.

The university does not have any hand in the affairs of the association.

The university will henceforth treat and relate with NOUN Alumni Association as a voluntary association that is independent and remains on its own, the statement quoted , Adamu as saying.

According to the statement, the universitys decision to sever ties with the association followed the refusal of the Board of Trustees (BOT) and the National Executive Council (NEC) of the association to agree to a truce proffered by the universitys management to resolve a lingering factional crisis between the two groups at a meeting held at the NOUN headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday.

The statement said that at the meeting, which was attended by officials of both bodies, the vice chancellor had noted that there were numerous complaints from members of the association and the general public which border on power tussle and allegations of wrong doings against both the BOT and the NEC.

The statement said Adamu appealed to all concerned parties to sheathe their swords and embrace peace in the interest of the association and the image of the university.

It also said that the vice-chancellor suggested steps to be taken to resolve the lingering crisis.

According to the statement, the VC advised the association to withdraw and settle all pending court cases out of court.

The statement also said that the vice chancellor called for the dissolution of the current BOT and NEC officials from the state to federal levels with strict adherence to due process.

It said that Adamu also recommended that a Care-taker Committee be set up to conduct the affairs of the association pending fresh elections of officials.
This announcement was made in a statement by Prof. Smart N. Uchegbu, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Enugu Campus, on Wednesday, June 15.

According to the statement, the school announced the immediate and indefinite closure of the university following last week' students protests over poor academic environment, that halted academic activities.

ALSO READ:

This is to bring to the notice of the University Community that in the light of the violent protest and monumental destruction of properties on 13th June, 2016, the Vice Chancellor has approved the implementation of the measures listed below:

Immediate suspension of the Enugu Campus Student Union Government; and closure of the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus indefinitely, the statement said.

Last week, the students of the institution halted academic activities in the school went on a rampage to protest the lack of electricity and poor learning environment.
The airline announced that it was providing free seats on flights to and from Orlando for the family and domestic partners of victims of the vicious attack at Pulse club.

Fee waivers are also available to those who need to make last minute changes to flights to or from Orlando.

According to reports by Fox13, the night of the attack was "Latin Night" at Pulse, and many of the victims have family in Puerto Rico, which is a popular JetBlue destination.

In a post on it's blog, JetBlue wrote:

"This weekends events are felt by all of our 19,000 crewmembers, many of whom live in, work from and travel through Orlando, we want to do our part to help the victims of this tragedy, as well as support the Orlando community through this difficult time."

The airline also reportedly made a $100,000 donation to the OneOrlando Fund, which seeks to "provide a way to help respond to the needs of our community, now and in the time to come, after the effects of the Pulse tragedy."

JetBlue, an American low-cost airline, is the only American airline to do this so far although Delta Airwill offer "situational flexibility" to people affected by the attack.
Follow the necessary:

Social media is very tempting and everything can tend to look good and attractive but not all things actually help us be the best version of ourselves. Thus, only follow pages that add consistent value to your life.

Block away:

Dont apologise for keeping people at bay, if they are stressing you or bringing your mood or esteem down, because we have a lot of cyber bullies these days. |Dont let anyone rub you of your happiness, simply block them!

Be minimal:

Social media is still the internet in case you may have forgotten. Once you put stuff up there, it stays there forever. Thus, try to only put up things that you wont regret having up for years to come. Id advise staying away from the personal things like family posts.

Do you:
"I have no doubt that when it comes to the agenda we have ahead of us - and that now means above all dealing with the Mediterranean route from Libya - that Slovakia will be an honest broker and that it will, with the presidency, unite the member states of the European Union," she said.
The blackened ruins are testament to war, but the peaceful rhythm of daily life has returned to the former Bougainville capital, which is ringed by rainforested hillsides.

In the early morning, trucks piled with sacks of potatoes and taro are unloaded at the central market, and women open stalls selling boiled eggs, rice balls and cassava puddings.

But 15 years after a 2001 peace agreement, which included a disarmament process, the islands are still awash with weapons, putting communities at risk. And it is women leading calls to banish guns from their villages and towns.

"The time of using the gun is over. During the conflict we held guns. Now that the peace process is in place, there is no need for guns," Lydia Morisa, a woman who lost her brother-in-law in a gun shooting last year, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Morisa, an assertive middle aged woman with a scarf taming her thick hair, is from Domakungwida, a village near Arawa with traditional thatched dwellings, meeting houses and a strong adherence to indigenous customs.

The conflict, known locally as 'the Crisis', erupted in late 1988 as local anger grew about the impact of the huge Panguna copper mine managed by Bougainville Copper Ltd, a subsidiary of mining multinational Rio Tinto.

Some Bougainvillean landowners and residents said the mine caused environmental damage, and they resented an influx of foreign workers and profits from the huge open cut mine leaving the island. Their demands for compensation were unmet.

AWASH WITH GUNS

Nestled in a valley in the Crown Prince Range of mountains, Panguna is now a landscape of gutted former mine buildings and abandoned rusting machinery, slowly disintegrating into the forest. The noise and dust of the mine's round-the-clock operation have been replaced by the sound of villagers at work under clear blue skies.

But the air of peace belies the problem of continued violence in some Bougainville communities, fuelled by the availability of guns.

The United Nations-led weapons disposal process was deemed only half successful after its conclusion in 2005.

An estimated 1,600 guns were surrendered by armed groups, such as the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and Bougainville Resistance Force, according to the Australian Defence Force, part of peace monitoring force deployed by Papua New Guinea's former colonial ruler.

But some factions neither signed the peace agreement nor relinquished their arms. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reported in 2008 that at least 3,000 Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) used during the conflict were never surrendered.

Weapons were common in Morisa's village when her brother-in-law was accused of sorcery and gunned down in October last year. In retaliation, a relative shot the person believed to have ordered the killing. The violence escalated as homes were burnt down.

But the local community - its women especially - refused to stand by in the face of such violence. The affected families met to work out a resolution to the conflict, while women retrieved the guns used in the killings and handed them over to clan chiefs for safekeeping.

Then they signed a traditional peace deal. "We came to sign the memorandum of agreement that there would be no more killings and no more guns used for any other purposes, even the killing of pigs. There must not be any sound of guns in the area," said Rosemary Dekaung, a Domakungwida resident.

The incident came four years after more than 1,000 women and girls, led by the Leitana Nehan Women's Development Agency (LNWDA), a local non-government organisation, gathered in the capital, Buka, to protest against the threat of arms to daily life in Bougainville's mostly rural communities.

Helen Hakena, LNWDA's director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that guns featured in incidents of domestic violence, land disputes, and violence related to accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, which are common on the islands.

Women often bear the brunt of the abundance of guns on the island, sometimes even losing land that is rightfully theirs.

"This is a matrilineal society and women own the land, but women cannot speak up to claim their land because (frequently) the opposing party are known to have guns. So land ownership goes to the wrong people," Hakena said.

The capacity of law enforcement agencies to respond to gun crime is limited by a stipulation in the peace agreement that the police are unarmed.

Local women's organisations say residents are also reluctant to give up their weapons because of uncertainty about the region's political future. Within the next four years, Bougainville, with huge copper reserves, is due to hold a referendum on independence from Papua New Guinea.

"Some are holding on to their guns because they want to see the final destiny of Bougainville. We want to see that what we fought for has been achieved," said Josephine Kauona, chair of the Tunaniya Open Learning Centre, a grassroots education project in Arawa.

Many in Bougainville see the island's long struggle for self-determination as a struggle for justice and particularly freedom from external control over politics and the region's mineral wealth, added Rosemary Moses of the Bougainville Women's Federation.

INCLUDING WOMEN AND CLANS

But the current lack of gun control could jeopardize the referendum and its outcome.

"We would like to make our own choices, we do not want people with guns to force us to vote the way they want. We want freedom of expression, freedom of decision," Hakena said.

Despite their central role in persuading combatants to lay down arms to end "the Crisis", women have been left out of official consultations about weapons and disarmament, activists say.

"In terms of being written on paper... it is there, but in practice it's not happening. In our walk towards nationhood, women need to be participating fully and making decisions," said Moses.

And greater consultations with clan leaders, often the main authority in rural areas where government presence is minimal, is essential if gun crime is to be addressed at the grassroots.
The militant group's terrorism capability and global reach were not diminished, despite gains against it on the battlefield, he said at a rare public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"We judge that is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks," Brennan said at a hearing just days after a gunman, believed inspired by Islamic State, killed 49 people in Orlando, Florida.

Brennan told the panel the CIA had not yet found direct links between the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, and any international terrorist organization.

Islamic State will likely change its strategies to make up for battlefield losses and constraints on its finances, he said, and it would probably rely more on "guerrilla tactics," including high-profile attacks outside territory it holds in Iraq and Syria.

"The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly," he said.

The CIA is concerned about the growth of Libya as a base of operations for Islamic State militants, who had 5,000-8,000 fighters there, although the number of its fighters in Iraq and Syria had dropped to 18,000 to 22,000 from 19,000 to 25,000.

"I am concerned about the growth of Libya as another area that could serve as the basis for ISIL to carry out attacks inside of Europe... that is very concerning," Brennan said, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State militant group.

Months after Islamic State attacks that caused mass casualties in Paris and Brussels, Brennan said European Union countries were still not where they needed to be in terms of intelligence sharing.

The CIA and the European Union's Counter-Terrorism Group have been discussing ways to improve the sharing of intelligence on terrorist threats in the wake of the attacks, Brennan said.

Questioned about the broader crisis, Brennan told lawmakers he believed the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been strengthened with Russia's support.
Hector 'El Guero' Palma was a former partner of Guzman, the head of the powerful Sinaloacartel who is now fighting extradition to the United States from a Mexican prison.

Palma was rearrested by officials on his repatriation to Mexico for his "probable responsibility in two homicides" that occurred in the small Pacific state of Nayarit, according to a statement from the attorney general's office. Further details were not immediately available.

In the absence of Guzman, Mexican officials appear to be increasingly wary of Palma, given his ties to the Sinaloa cartel.

Palma, who first served five years in Mexico's maximum-security Puente Grande prison, was extradited to the United States in 2007. He played a key role in the cartel, which became famous in the 1980s for trafficking cocaine from Colombia in association with the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Up to 86,000 Africans from Cameroon to Central African Republic and Mali to Nigeria took part in the survey via their mobile phones. The poll targeted people aged between 15 and 30 for their views on the continent's conflicts and crises.

"It is so crucial, and even urgent for the leaders to heed the voices of the youth, if we are to silence the guns," said African Union Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma in a statement responding to the UNICEF poll findings.

Two in three of those who responded to the multiple choice questions sent by text message said African heads of state must do more to end conflicts, while more than half cited politicians fighting for power as the main cause of unrest, UNICEF found.

Respondents said having a strong economy, having a more independent foreign policy and investing in education were the best ways for leaders to stop conflicts, according to the survey published on Thursday on the annual Day of the African Child.

"The conflict in Central African Republic (CAR) is rooted in frustration and the mismanagement of public affairs," 17-year-old Davilla Andjidakpa, a student from CAR's Ouaka region, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The country spiralled into crisis in early 2013 when mainly Muslim Seleka fighters toppled the then president. Christian militias responded by attacking the Muslim minority.

A fifth of the population fled their homes due to violence and the country remains largely divided along religious lines and controlled by warlords, but experts hope the recent election of President Faustin-Archange Touadera will help end the unrest.

"Regarding the state's reaction, I am already encouraged by the political will they have shown to play the card of peace," said Yann Ningatoloum, a 23-year-old student from CAR's capital Bangui.

"This approach is especially effective if there is to be a gradual return to calm and restraint," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation after responding to the UNICEF survey.
The East Moline Police Department is warning the public about a possible home repair scam.

Police said Thursday that they want to talk to one suspect, Steve Vega, 39, of Florida.

Vega is allegedly operating a door-to-door asphalt seal coating business known as Jet Black, according to police.

East Moline police received a complaint on Tuesday from a senior citizen that Vega charged an exorbitant rate to complete a residential seal coating job.

Further investigation with reputable area asphalt companies found Jet Black charged them more than four times the normal rate for seal coating a residential driveway, according to police.

Vega may be traveling with another man named Andy and driving a white Dodge Ram pick-up truck. Vega is not an authorized employee of the Florida Jet Black organization, according to police.

Police say homeowners should be cautious in dealing with door-to-door salespeople with no local connections. Homeowners should be concerned if a contractor demands cash payment or full payment before work is completed.

Always ask contractors for references and proof of insurance, always get written estimates and never sign contracts with blank spaces or something that you dont understand. Never pay more for work after completion of the project if you have previously agreed on a price in writing.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  A woman sexually assaulted by a Muscatine police officer is refusing to hide in the shadows, anonymous to the world.

Shari Martin of Davenport said she did not expect to go public with her story, but she hopes her decision will help other women facing a similar situation.

Why do the women have to feel shame in these circumstances when they were the ones victimized and preyed on? Martin asked.

Thomas Tovar was on duty with the Muscatine Police Department in February 2013 when he gave an intoxicated Martin a ride back to her Muscatine motel after Martin's boyfriend was arrested for drunk driving.

Martin said Tovar saw her to her room and then sexually assaulted her. He claimed the sex was consensual. Tovar is no longer employed by the Muscatine department.

A Muscatine County District Court jury found Tovar guilty of third-degree sexual abuse, a class C felony, last week. His sentencing is set for late July. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

She said although testifying in open court about her experiences was not easy, she thinks the evidence spoke for itself. During her testimony, Martin admitted she was too intoxicated to remember some parts of the night, but she did tell the jury that she recalled a male wearing a heavy uniform being on top of her.

It just shows me that all of the prayers I received from friends and family defeated the enemy, she said. "The jury was phenomenal and well-rounded."

Evidence in the case included Martin's jeans and the bedding in her hotel room, in which Tovar's DNA was found. Martin said that other officers at the Muscatine Police Department encouraged the investigation that led to the evidence, so although her attacker was an on-duty police officer, her faith in law enforcement has not wavered.

They could have given up and said I had no clue what was going on and overlooked it, but they dug deep and investigated everything, Martin said.

Martin said she hopes her actions during the trial, especially her willingness to come forward and testify, will help other women who have had a similar experience find strength when it is most needed.

When you finally realize the things that were done to you and the way that they were premeditated, you realize that you have done the right thing, she said.

Martin said she thinks going public was the right thing to do, and the possibility of helping other women helped her find a purpose in the most dire of circumstances.

Sometimes, it's not enough for me to fight for myself, but when I know it can help others, it lights a fire in my soul."
La Crosse automobile scion Kenneth Dahl, one of the few Americans whose life experiences include being on one of the first planes hijacked at gunpoint to Cuba, died Friday.

Dahl was 100 years old  daughter Nancy of Santa Fe, N.M., said the half was very important to him, befitting his sense of humor, twinkling eyes and pride in his Norwegian heritage.

The 1968 diversion of the Northwest Airlines flight to Miami actually was the second time that Dahl and his wife, Eleanor, had visited the island nation but the first time with a hijackers gun to the pilots head. Although the airline sprang for a sumptuous steak dinner, the Dahls were forced to spend a night sleeping in chairs in the airport terminal.

Their 1946 vacation trip had been much more comfy, occurring years before the United States broke off relations with Cuba in 1961.

The diplomatic break interfered with Dahls souvenir purchases on the hijack trip, when U.S. customs officials confiscated the Cuban cigars he had bought.

I dont smoke cigars anyway, he quipped.

It was one of the very first hijackings, son Vinje recalled during a phone interview Monday from Davenport, where Vinje had operated a Dahl dealership from 1972 until retiring last year.

One of Vinjes favorite stories in the family lore of hundreds of tales traces back to 1917.

One of the earliest memories was when my father and his family were living in a duplex owned by a German, Vinje said. Dad was about 2 and was playing in the yard when the landlord came out.

My dad said, My mommy and daddy say youre pro-German, Vinje said. The landlord was so angry he gave them 24 hours to move out.

Kenneth Dahl  generally known by the more casual Kenny or Ken  presided over the continuing nationwide expansion of the longtime family car business to nearly 40 dealerships from Wisconsin to Texas and New York to California.

Kenny noted in the 2010 book Deal With Dahl, which he co-authored with Sue Hessel, the national expansion created what we once called the Dahl Automotive Empire, or what we more modestly call Dahl Motors today.

Of course, nowadays, its Dahl Automotive Inc., but the Milwaukee Sentinel dubbed the clan Champion Flivver Family of Wisconsin because Dahl stores sold so many Flivvers, the one-time nickname for Fords.

The Dahls didnt focus only on Flivvers, though, adding Subaru, Hyundai, Mazda, Toyota, Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Lincoln franchises over the years.

Dahl Automotive began in Westby, Wisconsin, in 1911, when family patriarch Andrew H. Dahl obtained an agency agreement from the Ford Motor Co. to hawk Model Ts at $500 apiece, along with the food, clothing and other staples he stocked at Andrews General Store there.

Andrew H., who juggled his store ownership with his duties as a state legislator and being the father of seven children, expanded the vehicle line to Viroqua and La Crosse that same year.

Dahl Automotive now is in the hands of its fifth generation and is the ninth-oldest family-owned Ford dealership in the country.

Kennys grandson, Andrew, one of the fifth-generation Dahls in the business, along with brothers Jansen and Tyler, said, Gramps had a huge pride for the family business. He was very unassuming and kind to team members as well as guests.

He had this legacy focused on the family. His dad was more focused on the business, but Grandpa was more focused on the family. He believed if you dont have a healthy family, you wont have a healthy business, so he was always home for meals, Andrew said.

At the same time, son Vinje recalled, He wasnt a materialistic guy. He didnt accumulate things.

Daughter Nancy said, Dad was very happy to make 100 because he said it would make his kids proud. I am proud and grateful for that and so much more: his humor  always a twinkle in his eyes  his generosity, his compassion and empathy, his love for life, his example of how to be a successful businessman and never lose touch with your humanity and those less fortunate.
The Elephant Club will host the fifth annual Flowers on the River event 15 5 p.m. today, Thursday, June 16, at Schwiebert Park, 1st Ave., Rock Island.

Family Resources SafePath staff will read the names of local domestic violence victims, while a flower is placed in the river to honor each victim. For more information, visit www.famres.org.

The Elephant Club is a group of men who define their common responsibility as men who love, care, and respect women and children. Currently, the Elephant Club is entirely comprised of volunteers. As of July 1, the Elephant Club will become a funded program of Family Resources.

Family Resources was recently notified by the Crime Victims Assistance Division of the Iowa Attorney Generals Office of a $142,255 grant award to support the work of the Elephant Club. The grant will allow Family Resources to hire two Engaging Males Advocates to work with current volunteers of the Elephant Club, as well as provide direct services to boys and men who are victims/survivors of violent crimes.
The Davenport City Council heard details Wednesday about the Fire Department's new boathouse, which will be built along the riverfront and moved into place next month.

The structure will arrive in pieces July 6 and be assembled at the foot of Main Street over the course of a week before floating to its permanent location down the Mississippi River from the Centennial Bridge by the end of the month, Fire Chief Lynn Washburn told aldermen.

The City Council will vote on the location at its meeting next week.

Washburn said having a boat on the river will improve response times for river-related emergencies. The boat has been housed at Central Fire Station.

"Even shaving off pieces of time so we dont have to take time to back up a fire truck, load the boat and take it down to the river will be beneficial for the community," she said.

Tiger Docks of O'Fallon, Missouri, is building the structure.

It will arrive in prefabricated pieces July 6 to the Main Street boat ramp, where it will be assembled over the course of a week. Then it will float downstream to its location near the Marquette Street boat ramp and be connected to the seawall with a truss system, Washburn said.

A small parking area and a set of steps are near where the boathouse will connect to the seawall. The steps will remain open to the public, Washburn said.

The railing at the site will be cut and a ramp will provide access to the structure. The ramp will have a locked gate and the fire department is considering other security options, such as a camera, at the location.

The boathouse will be "100 percent" solar-powered, Washburn said.

Alderman Kyle Gripp, at large, thanked Washburn for "working hand-in-hand" with the city Levee Improvement Commission on the look of the boat house and its location.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency grant is paying for the majority of the $250,000 boathouse project. The FEMA grant is for $187,500, with Davenport putting $62,500 toward the total cost of the project.

The Davenport Fire Department purchased a fire boat in 2011 for $178,182. The 20-foot flat-bottomed boat is equipped with its 8.1-liter Chevrolet V8 engine and bow-mounted fire hose that can spray 2,500 gallons of river water per hour.
Parents and children, brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, gay and straight, married and unmarried, all just human beings, gathered Wednesday night to memorialize those killed in the Orlando nightclub, talk about the circumstances of the hate crime and offer prayers and blessings for the future.

More than 1,000 people of all ages, races and sexual preference were packed together, standing-room-only, in Davenport's Metropolitan Community Church, pouring out the door, to the point where a separate prayer vigil and discussion started outside in the lawn for the few hundred that couldnt fit inside.

It was a herculean outpouring of love, acceptance and understanding, a celebration of diversity and of sharing hope that someday, these gatherings would be nothing but a historical anecdote.

Were here to support the LGBT community, because this wasnt just an attack on them, this was an attack on America, on all of us, said the Rev. Stephanie Haskins, 34, of Maquoketa. We also want them to know that there are Christians who care about and accept LGBT people.

It was an incredibly tragic event, but its very encouraging to be here together and to see people all over the country and all over the world coming together in support, said Lindsey Spies, 39, of Davenport.

We all know people who are gay, whether we realize that or not, said Mary Gross, 69, of Donahue, Iowa. The people who were killed in Orlando were sons and daughters, friends and loved ones; they are mourned, and it was an incredible loss.

The service began with a lengthy African drum circle as the hundreds of people congregated, politely, respectfully, with hugs exchanged as friends met and smiles were given to new acquaintances.

I thank you all for being here tonight, this is overwhelming, the Rev. Rich Hendricks, the pastor of MCC, said in the heat of the packed church. Tonight, we mourn. Tonight, we honor. Tonight, we strengthen our resolve to stand on the side of love.

While in the church, speakers stood at a podium and talked of history, struggle and overcoming hatred and bigotry with love and open-mindedness; outside, an informal discussion reigned, as more than a hundred gathered took turns speaking their minds.

Many people questioned what could or should be done in the aftermath of such a tragedy, while others offered anecdotes, advice and general thoughts on the circumstances of the event.

If youre looking for something that you can do, check in with your friends in the LGBT community, said James Dionysis Brandhagen, 19, of Davenport. They might be scared or upset, and they might need your help or support.

Candles were distributed and lit at the end of the event, a union of flame, a symbolic gesture, but it wasnt needed. The unity of resolve and spirit was palpable among those present.

It all has to start with us; we have to let people know that regardless of your sexuality, your race, your gender or your identification, that you are worthy of love, you are worthy of acceptance, that you matter, you have worth, said Liz Mayer, 44, of East Moline. We have to teach that at home, in schools and in our lives. Thats the only way real change is going to happen. We have to learn to accept each other.
In a ruling announced Thursday, the Moline-Coal Valley School District won a case in the Illinois Supreme Court that could have cost the district at least $150,000 in tax revenue annually.

The Illinois Supreme Court voted 6-1 to uphold the 3rd District Appellate Court ruling from 2014 that favored the school district's position over that of Elliott Aviation, Moline.

"We are very pleased and appreciate that the Supreme Court upheld the decision," said Dave McDermott, chief financial officer of the school district and who has estimated the $150,000 was at stake in the judgment.

Elliott Aviation was disappointed in the ruling.

"Our primary focus will remain on our employees and running our business here in the Quad-Cities in a very competitive environment. This and many other factors will be considered as we grow and expand our business in the future," said Andrew Evans, director of marketing for the firm that operates private air services at the Quad-City International Airport in Moline. Evans issued his statement in an e-mail message to the Quad-City Times.

The decision stems from 2013 legislation that granted the firm a tax break, fashioned by Quad-City business leaders after the company let it be known it might expand operations in Des Moines, rather than Moline. Iowa does not issue property taxes on such businesses.

Soon after, then-Gov. Pat Quinn signed the legislation and joined Elliott officials in announcing a $1.8 million expansion at the Quad-City airport. This expansion included 50 new jobs.

The Moline district sued, however, stating the tax dollars generated by the firm were necessary to the education of the district's students.

Elliott won the first round of litigation in Rock Island County, but the 3rd District Appellate Court in Ottawa rejected that decision.

The Supreme Court reaffirmed the appellate court decision, noting the property taxes are paid by businesses similar to Elliott Aviation in several other areas of Illinois.

Elliott Aviation is considered a fixed-based operator, or FBO, at the airport, and the justices' opinion mentioned several times that it is not the only FBO in the state.

Justice Lloyd Karmeier delivered the opinion, with agreement from Chief Judge Rita Garman and Justices Charles Freeman, Robert Thomas, Thomas Kilbride and Anne Burke concurred. Justice Mary Jane Theis dissented.

"Based upon what is before us, we do not see and cannot reasonably conceive of anything that would justify distinguishing FBOs operating at the Quad-City airport from any number of other FBOs at other Illinois airports, or indeed, from other Illinois businesses which operate on our borders or compete with companies in more tax-friendly jurisdictions, for purposes of property tax liability," Karmeier wrote for the majority.

Dissenter Theis wrote that the majority has paid "only lip service" to its duties and excused the school district from its responsibilities.

The case was Moline School District No. 40 Board of Education, Appellee, v. Patrick Quinn, governor, State of Illinois, et al. Elliott Aviation, Aviation, Inc., Appellant.
MUSCATINE, Iowa  A woman sexually assaulted by a Muscatine Police Officer is refusing to hide in the shadows anonymous to the world.

Shari Martin, of Davenport, said she did not expect to go public with her story, but she hopes her decision will help other women facing a similar situation.

Why do the women have to feel shame in these circumstances when they were the ones victimized and preyed on? Martin said.

Tomas Tovar was an on-duty officer with the Muscatine Police Department in February 2013 when he gave an intoxicated Martin a ride back to her Muscatine motel after Martin's boyfriend was arrested for drunk driving.

Martin said Tovar saw her to her room and then sexually assaulted her. He claimed the sex was consensual. Tovar is no longer employed by the Muscatine Police Department.

A Muscatine County jury found Tovar guilty of third-degree sexual abuse, a class C felony, last week. His sentencing is set for late July. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

She said although testifying in open court about her experiences was not easy, she feels the evidence spoke for itself. During her testimony, Martin admitted she was too intoxicated to remember some parts of the evening but she did tell the jury about recalling a male wearing a heavy uniform being on top of her.

It just shows me that all of the prayers I received from friends and family defeated the enemy. The jury was phenomenal and well-rounded, she said.

Evidence in the case included Martin's jeans and the bedding in her hotel room, in which Tovar's DNA was found. Martin said that other officers at the Muscatine Police Department encouraged the investigation that led to the evidence, so although her attacker was an on-duty police officer, her faith in law enforcement has not wavered.

They could have given up and said I had no clue what was going on and overlooked it, but they dug deep and investigated everything, Martin said.

Martin said she hopes her actions during the trial, especially her willingness to come forward and testify, will help other women who have had a similar experience find strength when it is most needed.

When you finally realize the things that were done to you and the way that they were premeditated, you realize that you have done the right thing, she said.

Martin said she felt going public was the right thing to do, and the possibility of helping other women helped her find a purpose in the most dire of circumstances.

Sometimes it's not enough for me to fight for myself, but when I know it can help others, it lights a fire in my soul."
Parents tuned in just as intently as their children  particularly the ones who never learned how to bait a hook with a night crawler or cast a reel.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources launched its summer Urban Fishing Program this week across the state, and dozens of beginner anglers flocked to free clinics in the Quad-Cities.

Ive never done it myself, said Amrit Parab, who, along with his wife, Jana, and their 9-year-old son, Ashwin, attended a fishing lesson Tuesday at Butterworth Park in East Moline.

Growing up in Bombay, now Mumbai, India, one of the most-populated metropolitan areas in the world, the Parabs previously werent exposed to the recreational pastime. They emigrated from the south Asian country in 2013, when Amrit began working for Deere & Co., as an engineer.

"I've always been curious how to fish," Amrit said. "Now that our child has the opportunity, he might as well try his hand at it, and we get to experience something we never did in our childhood."

Surrounded by other first-timers, the Parabs found a prime spot to learn the basics.

Without a smartphone or tablet in sight, Alex Earhart, the DNR's local urban fishing clinic instructor, broke down fishing 101 for youngsters and their families.

His two-and-a-half hour clinics, which run through the first week in August at Butterworth and Riverside Park in Moline, incorporate instruction on baiting a hook, tying a knot and casting. Additionally, he makes sure to leave time for catch-and-release fishing tactics, ethics and safety.

If were not going to eat the fish, we should throw them right back in the water, he said, encouraging his students to measure and photograph their catch before releasing it.

The bearded outdoorsman, who is starting his fourth season with the DNR, said he hopes to combat a downward trend of youth participation in outdoor activities, especially fishing.

Its all about getting them out and active and showing them its fun to do something away from the television or computer, said Earhart, who works as a substitute teacher in the area during the school year. "And sometimes you can meet the best people fishing."

Illinois Urban Fishing Program, which the state launched in 1985, targets children ages 16 and younger, but anyone interested in learning may attend.

Last year, the programs coordinators, summer interns and network of fisheries volunteers led 1,681 fishing and conservation classes for almost 80,000 participants.

Clinics this summer are scheduled at 20 sites, from East St. Louis to Chicago, throughout the state.

Following his hour-long introduction, Earhart distributed rods, reels, bait and tackle to every student.

At the age of 9, Bradley Converse, of Silvis, already calls fishing one of his favorite hobbies.

It actually helps calm you down, said Bradley, as he untangled his weed-covered line. When I see other people fishing I know theyre calm, too, which is one thing I love about it.

One father-daughter duo attended Earharts first class of the summer Tuesday morning and spent the rest of the day fishing along the shore at Butterworth pond, which the DNR recently stocked with hybrid bluegill.

With hands-on help from her father, Makyah Boykins reeled one in, and quickly let it go.

I was scared to touch it, the smiling 9-year-old said. I didnt want him to poke me.

Her father, Michael, just laughed.

Its peaceful out here, he said, adding that they planned to return next week. It gives me something to do with my daughter that doesnt break the bank.

The DNR uses hybrid bluegills  a cross between male bluegill and female sunfish  because they grow fast, swim and hunt aggressively and dont reproduce, Rick ONeil, a fisheries technician with the agency, said.

As temperatures crept into the 90s Tuesday before thunderstorms shortened their outing, Ashwin cast his reel for the first time as his father waited patiently for a turn and his mother snapped photos.

"It's fun," the soon-to-be fifth-grader said, keeping the pole to himself. "We'll be back."

ONeil, who assisted Earhart and circled the pond offering tips and demonstrating proper technique, noted the programs range of benefits.

Even though youve got traffic going by here, everyone is zeroed in on the water and fish, he said. Not everyones going to fish, but if a few people take it up as a hobby, then weve done our jobs.
DAVENPORT  Ken Foote, 63, passed away Wednesday, June 8, 2016, at Clarissa C. Cook Hospice House, Bettendorf, after a heroic battle against stage IV lung cancer. Funeral services to celebrate Kens life will be 1 p.m. Saturday, June 18, in the All Faith Chapel at Halligan-McCabe-DeVries Funeral Home, 614 Main St., downtown Davenport. The family will greet friends from 10:30 a.m. until the time of the service Saturday at the funeral home. Following Kens wishes, the rite of cremation was accorded. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital, Kings Harvest Pet Rescue No-Kill Shelter, or Habitat for Humanity Quad-Cities.

Kenneth Lee Foote II was born Oct. 28, 1952, in Crescent City, California, the son of Kenneth L. and Rhoda (Iden) Foote. He grew up fishing, sailing and surfing on Monterey Bay, and attended schools while living in Santa Cruz, California. He moved with his family to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1966, where he attended Stranahan High School. He was united in marriage to Peggy Ann Damos on Aug. 2, 1997, in Davenport.

Ken started in the electrical trade in 1969 as a delivery driver. He was then accepted into the apprentice program that began his electrical career for the next 45 years, before retiring as a master electrician. Ken moved to the Quad-Cities in the fall of 1974, only to fall in love with Iowas beauty and outdoors. He became the electrical inspector for the city of Moline for 18 years, a position he truly enjoyed. Ken served on numerous boards, committees and services clubs, such as the Elks, Lions Club, Muskies Inc., QCCA board of directors, Moline Riverfest committee, Viva Fest, and the lighting of the trees at Christmas along Ben Butterworth Parkway. He spent countless hours working and organizing volunteer labor and donated materials to provide electricity for all the events along the parkway in Moline. Whether it was preventing the only Latin American grocery store from closing because of poor wiring or installing new wiring for the New Kingdom Trail Riders corral or the first Boys and Girls Club, Kens compassion for helping others and seeing the smiles on faces after an event was his reward and his way of giving back to his community. He enjoyed teaching third-year apprentice for ABC of Iowa, never wanting to teach the entire class out of the book but from practical experience from the numerous positions he held as an inspector, estimator and electrician. With all Kens experience and talent, he and Peg spent countless hours remodeling their homes they lived in, but it was a passion they shared and loved doing it together. He loved the outdoors and was an avid fisherman in his later years.

He leaves behind a tremendous legacy and will be greatly missed by those who were lucky enough to know him during any point of his 63 years with us. His courage, spirit, and positive attitude served as a true inspiration. Ken demonstrated firsthand the beneficial effects of love, laughter and hope when used in tandem with evidence-based cancer treatments. Not only did he exceed expectation  he defied the odds, nearly tripling his life expectancy!

You never give up and always give 100 percent, no matter what you do in life. That was Kens attitude about all things in his life and as we all saw, he lived that belief.

Those left to honor his memory include his loving wife, Peg Damos; son, Chris Quist, Bettendorf; brothers-in-law, Chris (Susan) Damos, Richmond, Virginia; Craig (Sue) Damos, West Des Moines; Lary (Dee) Coppola, Port Orchard, Washington; nieces and nephew, Michelle (Arron) White, Denver, Colorado, Ashley Damos and Brett Damos, both of Des Moines; great-nephew, Luke White, Denver, Colorado; and his two very loyal canine companions, Ted and Sam. He was preceded in death by his parents; a sister, Susan Lachelt; and his in-laws, Paul and Alice Damos. May they all rest in peace.

The family would like to extend a very special thank you to Dr. Mario Sy and his staff at Hematology Oncology Associates. We truly believe it was your excellent care and compassion that extended the extra years that we never thought we would see. We would also like to extend a special thank you to some very special friends without whom we could not have managed to survive this journey  Sue OMalley, Susie Luense, Deb Carter, Susie Martens and Denise Wagner-Mommsen.

Condolences and remembrances may be expressed to the family by visiting Kens obituary at www.hmdfuneralhome.com.
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Donald Trump's ban of Washington Post journalists has left other news outlets with a stark choice: your ratings or your responsibility as journalists in a free society?

Trump's announcement that he is barring Post journalists from his events follows similar bans he put on reporters from Politico, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Gawker, Foreign Policy, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register and the Daily Beast. Trump goons have been known to kick out undesirable reporters at Trump events.

For those journalists and media executives who still don't share the view of Post Executive Editor Martin Baron that Trump's action "is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press," it won't be long before Trump comes for you, too.

Earlier this year, Trump said he would "open up" libel laws -- in other words, dispense with the First Amendment -- to make it easier for him to sue news outlets. He has suggested that, if president, he would use antitrust laws to harass Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post. And longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has proposed that a President Trump seek retribution against CNN: "Turn off their FCC license."

This goes beyond even Nixonian hostility. Before Trump events, all journalists -- blacklisted or not -- must apply for permission to attend. They are then notified if their applications have been approved.

But there is, happily, a just and appropriate response to Trump's blacklist: a Trump blackout.

I don't mean an outright ban of Trump coverage. That would be shirking our civic responsibility. But I suggest an end to the uncritical, free publicity that propelled him to the GOP nomination:

No more live, wall-to-wall coverage of Trump's rallies and events; this sort of "coverage," particularly by cable news outlets, has been a huge in-kind contribution to Trump.

No more Trump call-ins to TV shows; this enables him to plant falsehoods with little risk of follow-up.

Rigorous use of real-time fact-checking, pointing out Trump's falsehoods in the stories in which they're reported. That's not injecting opinion -- it's stating fact.

Beyond that, news organizations should demand that the Republican National Committee, at next month's convention, reinstate and credential all media outlets that Trump has banned. Does the RNC want to join Trump in opposing a free press?

Politicians have long tried to freeze out critical reporters and news organizations by refusing to return phone calls or denying them questions at news conferences; I got that treatment covering George W. Bush's White House. But this is fundamentally different: If Trump were to behave this way in office, he could choose which journalists and outlets would be admitted to the White House briefing room, participate in the press pool or join presidential events.

A push-back against Trump's authoritarian actions could work, because Trump relies almost entirely on free media attention. He lacks a traditional campaign apparatus with the ability to target and mobilize voters with advertising and field organizing.

Trump won the nomination using what the British call the "dead cat" tactic: Throw a dead cat on the table, and that's what people will talk about. Trump kept hurling cats, thereby staying a step ahead of the media watchdogs.

In a report out Monday, Harvard University's Shorenstein Center found that eight top news outlets gave Trump the equivalent of $55 million of free advertising last year, and about two-thirds of Trump coverage was positive. Taking the news media as a whole, the center said the claim that Trump's media coverage was worth $2 billion in ads "might well be correct."

Shorenstein's Thomas Patterson suggests a "corrective" response by the media to Trump's blacklist. "Too many journalists are hung up on the old balance of 'he said, she said' and are silent about putting their finger on the scale and saying which viewpoint has the larger weight" of truth, he told me. "One would hope that would change."

That has begun to change in the past month. The focus has shifted from Trump's dead cats to serious probing of Trump's past, falsehoods and racial politics. Nobody has done this better than my colleagues at the Post -- which is the real reason for Trump's blacklisting.

Covering Trump will be more difficult if Post reporters are denied seats on the Trump press charter and news conferences and access to Trump rallies. But their coverage will be as vigorous as before. The question is whether other news organizations will recognize that Trump's ban is a call to conscience for all who believe in a free press.
CEDAR RAPIDS  Sen. Chuck Grassley urged President Barack Obama to use his presidential bully pulpit to make clear he understands the threat terrorism poses to the United States and who the enemy is.

That includes using the phrase radical Islamic terrorist, Grassley told reporters Wednesday.

The Iowa Republican also rejected comments Donald Trump made earlier this week that were interpreted as suggesting Obama had some role in terrorist acts against the U.S.

I dont think Obama meant to do anything to assist these bad guys, but we do need to be clear who the enemy is, and the president is in the best position with the bully pulpit to tell not only America, but the world, where it is, Grassley said.

Using the term radical Islamic terrorist would help make that clear because not making that clear, I think, can allow the radicals to hide behind the good name of Islam, he said.

And it is a good name, he added. Were not fighting Islam. Were fighting the radicals who distort the religion.

Use of radical Islamic terrorism has been a flashpoint in the 2016 presidential race again this week with Trump suggesting Obama is abetting terrorism by refusing to use the words.

Words are very important, Grassley said when asked about Trumps comments. If Obama had been using those words the last eight years  just think of the impact the president of the United States has.

Speaking of the shooting at an Orlando nightclub over the weekend, Grassley said Americans are scared and anxious, and I think rightly so.

Were seeing our way of life and our freedoms that make this country special come under attack from radical Islamic terrorism, Grassley said. We have to fight back and, of course, we will fight back. This fight is about freedom.

Grassley said he would attend a briefing later Wednesday in a secure room by directors of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa  U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley will leave it up to Sen. Joni Ernst to decide whether she would accept an invitation to be Donald Trumps running mate.

The six-term senator had some advice for his freshman colleague, however, if she is offered the vice presidential slot by the presumptive Republican nominee.

I think she has a long, potential career in the United States Senate, Grassley said Wednesday. I dont know how to measure this, but if she would be a vice president nominee and that ticket would not win, she ought to take that into consideration.

Grassley said he hasnt talked to Ernst about the possibility of her being Trumps vice presidential running mate.

In fact, Ive tried to avoid it for the reason that I think its a very personal thing, he said during his weekly conference call with Iowa reporters.

Grassley thinks Ernst could be an asset because of her demeanor and the leadership shes shown in her first 17 months as a senator. Having a woman on the ticket would be an asset because the more Republican voices we have of conservative women, or women in general, the better off the party is.

Her military experience  Ernst served 23 years in the Army Reserve and Iowa Army National Guard  is something that Trump could use some back-up on, he said.

Ernst isnt the only Iowan worthy of vice presidential consideration, according to Grassley. Former Gov. Tom Vilsack, now President Barack Obamas Secretary of Agriculture, is among the many Democrats mentioned as Hillary Clinton's potential running mate.

Like Ernst, Vilsack would bring something to his partys ticket the presumptive nominee lacks, Grassley said.

Hes as clean  ethically very clean, Grassley said. That sure would make Hillary Clinton look a lot better.

Picking Vilsack as a running mate would emphasize agriculture and, again, that would be a signal that Iowa is very important to carry if you are going to be president, Grassley said.

Grassley gives Vilsack good marks for his efforts as USDA chief and said he has been helpful on issues of mutual interest. One of them involved the USDAs discriminatory treatment of black farmers by denying them loans, disaster aid and representation on agricultural committees.

He fully kept his commitment to me, Grassley said.

Another issue they have worked on is a payment cap of $250,000 from all federal farm programs.

We havent been too successful, but hes tried to help all he could, Grassley said.
With a deadline approaching, U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos ratcheted up the pressure Thursday on Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to move ahead on the stalled passenger rail link between Chicago and the Quad-Cities.

In a letter, Bustos, a Moline Democrat, noted that June 30 is the deadline to use the federal funds that were awarded six years ago for the project, and she urged prompt action.

"There are only two weeks until the deadline!," Bustos wrote by hand at the bottom of a letter she sent in late April asking the Republican governor to take action. "I strongly urge you to work with me to grow our economy before it's too late!"

At stake is $177 million in federal funds, Illinois' share of an original $230 million award the Obama administration made in the fall of 2010 for passenger rail service between Chicago and Iowa City.

Rail enthusiasts in the Quad-Cities have been lobbying for passenger rail service for years, and the federal grant was seen as the key to achieving it. The last time there was passenger service here was in 1978.

The Iowa City leg was stymied after Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad balked at the state's share of the cost. But the link between Chicago and the Quad-Cities had been moving forward.

The state of Illinois, under then-Gov. Pat Quinn, committed $44 million for the effort. But the Rauner administration put a range of projects across the state on hold after he took office last year.

A spokesperson, Catherine Kelly emailed Thursday that the project is under renew and declined further comment.

Local officials believe they can get an extension past the June 30 date, but they are dependent on the state to request it.

Henry Marquard, director of government relations for the Quad-Cities Chamber of Commerce, said Thursday that he and others are talking with members of the Rauner administration this week, hoping for progress.

Discussions with the Illinois DOT earlier the week did not yield any new information.

"DOT says they still are considering it," Marquard said.

The Federal Railroad Administration sent a letter to the state DOT in April outlining steps to close the grant, as well as options that could allow it to be extended.

"To date, the FRA has not received a request to amend or extend the grant. FRA Spokesman Marc Willis said in an email Thursday.
When your day starts and ends on a river you had a good day. When you put some ice cream in between that makes it even better.

Day 5 of our journey on U.S. 6 started at Starved Rock State Park near Utica, IL. A few miles south of the Grand Army of the Republic highway, but close enough for a visit. We learned the story behind Starved Rock. The Illini Native American tribe killed Pontiac, the Ottawa tribes chief and the Ottawa cornered the Illini at Starved Rock. Rather than surrender, the Illini warriors chose to starve atop the rock.

There are many trails, canyons and scenic points at the State Park and it is well worth a visit by I-80 or our favorite highway, U.S. 6.

Our Wednesday continued in Utica where we had lunch at Joy & Eds in the historic downtown. Inside the establishment there is a memorial painted on the wall to the nine residents who were killed in a 2004 tornado.

From there we jumped back on to Route 6 and continued west.

The route is mostly flat with some tree-covered areas and towns every 10 to 20 miles. There are also quite a few ice cream shops. If youre new to reading about our road trips there is an unsaid rule (well, now I said it) if we see an ice cream shop we have to stop.

There were too many during this stretch of the road and we have a schedule to keep so we only stopped at three. In one day.

We stopped at Grandma Rosies which is right across from the Bureau County Fairgrounds. I had to put the straw of a chocolate milkshake in Paytons mouth to wake him up from a road nap.

We stopped at Paxtons Corner Coop in Annawan. Actually they are a cupcake shop that serves ice cream, too. But the name was so close to Paytons, we had to stop.

Our final stop of the day was at Lagomarcinos, the grand daddy of them all in Moline, Illinois.

I will mention we drove by Whiteys and Country Style ice cream shops without getting ice cream. Both are highly recommended as well.

At Lagomarcinos the boys and I met with Curt and Libby Roseman who are two experts on U.S. 6. Libby is also an expert on the famous ice cream and candy shop as she worked seasonally at the store for several years. Through the Rosemans we were able to get some tips on where to go for the remainder of our journey and we were introduced to Beth Lagomarcino, a third generation owner of the business.

Our day ended looking over the Mississippi and the future of our journey. We will be visiting the Quad-City Times on Thursday morning before exploring Iowa.

Today: Quad-Cities

Tomorrow: Marengo, IA

Follow the trip at www.sanduskyregister.com/GoWest or Facebook.com/SanduskyRegisterWerling or Twitter @WhirlybirdPhoto and Instagram @SanduskyRegister.
PIERRE | South Dakota needs criminal sanctions for people convicted of drug abuse who are caught using again during their probation and parole periods, several police chiefs told legislators Wednesday.

The panel of lawmakers is studying methamphetamine and opioid use and looking for ways to steer students away from the drugs.

Rapid City Police Chief Karl Jegeris suggested tracking babies whose mothers are methamphetamine users. He also asked for a third party to conduct a survey of people who work in the criminal justice system.

David Kull, the Brandon police chief, said hes seeing continued drug abuse by young people while on probation. Kull said there has to be a point where incarceration is strongly considered.

Belle Fourche Police Chief Scott Jones said it has become difficult to protect the public from meth-related crimes.

Theres no deterrent. Theres no fear, Jones said. Our citizens are becoming victims due to an epidemic.

Underlying the chiefs comments is South Dakotas current emphasis on keeping non-violent criminals out of jails and prisons.

Methamphetamine and opioid use is one of the Legislatures topics for interim study this year. The meeting Wednesday was the first for the study committee on that topic.

The study committees chairman, Sen. Jim White, R-Huron, said the panel needs information about when youths start using meth, what are effective counter-measures and what families can do.

Study committee vice chairman Rep. Mike Stevens, a lawyer, said meth is the worst drug his clients have become involved in. He said its completely different than dealing with heroin or cocaine.

Its a significant problem that we have to deal with, said Stevens, R-Yankton. He warned meth "virtually is going to kill you" if you are a continuing user.

Methamphetamine labs in South Dakota have declined in recent years but that hasnt diminished the flow of meth through the state, according to Brian Gortmaker, director for the state Division of Criminal Investigation.

He said meth from Mexico is cheap and prevalent. Thats the reason our number of meth labs is down.

Gortmaker said South Dakota needs data from its medical community about whether juveniles are getting prescription drugs, such as opioids, from their parents medicine cabinets.

Were being way over-medicated, he said.

Attorney General Marty Jackley and the state Department of Social Services are working on campaigns to discourage people, especially students, from using methamphetamine.

The last time South Dakota had an anti-meth campaign came during the Rounds administration a decade ago.

Rep. Steve Haugaard, R-Sioux Falls, said the committee should consider whether incarceration is at the right level and the roles of pardons and paroles.

The committee plans to meet three more times. The next time is July 12. White said they will talk then about focusing the following meeting on the meth problems at reservations.

I think the problem we might run into, is this is a pretty deep hole, Stevens said.
Over 150 people with the Little Big Horn Associates, history buffs dedicated to studying the life of Lt. Col. George A. Custer and the 7th Cavalry, are in Rapid City for their 43rd annual conference.

The group, from all over the United States and as far away as England and Ireland, will be touring area historic sites, including a bus trip today to the Wounded Knee Massacre site on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, according to Don Schwark, event chairman.

Members also will tour the Oglala Lakota College's cultural center, Crazy Horse Memorial and museum, several of the 1874 expedition campsites, the 1881 Court House Museum in Custer and the Journey Museum in Rapid City.

Schwark said the groups only other Black Hills visit in the organizations 49-year history happened in 2005. Every year the associates choose a different place to hold their conference and tour sites related to the life and times of Custer.

This will be their first visit to the Crazy Horse Memorial and to the Wounded Knee site.

Jerome Greene, author of American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 and other books, will speak at the Wounded Knee site.

He said he will present evidence he wrote about in his most recent book related to the Wounded Knee Massacre (Dec. 29, 1890) and the Battle of Little Big Horn, commonly known as Custers Last Stand, which occurred June 25-26, 1876.

Greene said he spent nine years researching for the book, specifically looking for evidence that reinforced the popular belief and showed that Wounded Knee was a retaliation by the 7th Cavalry for Little Big Horn.

But there is really no basis for it, Greene said Wednesday in a phone interview.

He said he found the Army was planning on disarming the Native Americans and moving them to Nebraska, but an incident with a young Lakota man who may have been deaf led to a misunderstanding by the soldiers. They struggled with the boy to get his gun, which led to accidental shots being fired and then led to more shots being fired.

The tour will go to the site, and I will be talking about the preliminary history, and then at the site I will explain how it all unfolded, Greene said.

In all, at least 200 Lakota men, women and children and 36 soldiers were killed, according to Army records.

It became an insurmountable tragedy, Greene said. And its too bad because it shouldnt have happened at all. Im going to discuss it in depth on the site and it will hold more meaning because they will be there. The ravine is still there and it still looks much the same, and there is the mass grave on top of the hill where 146 Lakota people are buried.

Schwark said the group is looking forward to hearing from experts about the history of the Wounded Knee Massacre and the other sites around the Black Hills.

Were just interested in the history of (Wounded Knee), Schwark said. Were not pro/con anything. Our motto is, to seek the truth.

The group also will hear several authors and historians during the tours and at the symposium Saturday at the Best Western Ramkota Hotel and Conference Center in Rapid City.

Paul Horsted, local photographer based in Custer and author and co-project chairman for the event will be speaking along with his co-author Jon Nelson of Rapid City.

Another presenter, site director David Rambow of the H. H. Bennett Studio & History Center in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., is a widely known period photographer. He will discuss and demonstrate the difficult wet plate photography process as practiced by William Illingworth during the 1874 Expedition through the Black Hills. His modern tintypes have recently been seen in Hollywood movies such as True Grit, Cowboys and Aliens, Sweetwater and A Million Ways to Die in the West, according to Schwark.

Dr. James Hanson, director of the Museum of the Fur Trade, a Nebraska State Museum in Chadron, will discuss Native American weapons used at the Little Bighorn.
The brown trout population in Spearfish Creek is not lacking in numbers, but recent sampling data has shown that the fish in the creek aren't as healthy as they could be.

Sampling data from South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks shows that there is an abundance of fish in the creek, but those fish aren't big or healthy enough.

A joint research project between South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks and South Dakota State University will look to improve the health of the population by using a method that hasn't been used much.

The project will run from July this year through the summer of 2017, with a final report set to be completed in 2018.

"In this project, we're focusing on a different management tool, which is population manipulation," Area Fisheries Supervisor Jake Davis said. "We do that in the Black Hills quite often. Most of it involves adding fish into a system; in this case in certain areas we'll be reducing fish that are in the system."

Competition for a small amount of resources among many fish is cited as the reason that fish are smaller and less healthy, according to Davis.

"Our previous sampling data has indicated that we have a lot of fish, but when you have a lot of fish you can tie up resources," he said. "In certain areas, we want to see if resources get freed up when we remove a portion of the population."

The health of fish in the control areas where a portion is removed will be judged with areas where the population isn't manipulated.

Davis had a public presentation Monday with masters student Travis Rehm from Montana State University, who will be working on the study.

The purpose of the meeting was to get input from area fishers and keep them informed about the project.

A few questions came about the population manipulation, but for the most part the attendees of the meeting seemed pleased that an effort is being made to make the trout population in Spearfish Creek healthier.

Davis said during the presentation that some of the fish would be taken out of the creek to be used for research, which would result in the death of the fish, but not all fish removed will be killed.

"They're involved from the start, so they know what we're doing, why we're doing it and if they have any questions, comments or concerns they can voice them now," Davis said. "That gives us a chance to address them now and maybe change the project. It's a lot easier to do that now than two years down the road."

Davis said high numbers and high biomass can make the population appear healthy, but he said there are red flags that indicate that the population could improve.

"We have high numbers and high biomass, but a lot of that biomass is found in small fish. We're seeing if we can create larger fish," he said. "We're seeing fish in fairly poor condition, so we're hoping this benefits the overall health of the population."

The creek is used a lot by those who fish, and Davis said that's why it's important to make sure that the fish are healthy.

"It's a popular fishery," he said. "It gets a lot of use, and we have a lot of unknown questions, so we hope we can find the answers to those questions."
Our top priority at the Indian Health Service is making sure that American Indian and Alaska Native families have access to quality health care. Were not accepting business as usual at IHS. We are working hard to make sustainable improvements.

This year, we began executing an aggressive strategy to improve the quality of care at IHS hospitals in the Great Plains Area and across the country. First, were assessing the quality of care to quickly make needed improvements. Second, were transforming how hospitals deliver care to patients. Third, were strengthening management. Fourth, were building a quality network to share best practices. Fifth, and most importantly, were doing this work hand-in-hand with tribes and local organizations that are valuable sources of expertise and partnership.

Assessing care

We want to lift up the facilities across Indian Country that deliver high-quality care and work closely with those that need improvement. We are taking a very close look at the quality of care delivered through direct service hospitals at IHS facilities across the Great Plains Area and throughout Indian Country.

For the past 10 years, health-care systems have been embracing a new focus on quality improvement, and we are working to bring this sharper focus to IHS. For example, IHS is beginning a system-wide mock survey initiative at all 27 of its hospitals to assess compliance with Medicare and readiness for re-accreditation. These mock surveys are being conducted by teams from outside Areas to reduce potential bias.

Improving service

A main obstacle to getting high-quality care to patients in Indian Country is the chronic shortage of clinicians. We are working diligently to stem local shortages and build a pipeline for staff training and deployment.

Already, more than two dozen clinicians from the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps have deployed to hospitals in the Great Plains. And our colleagues at the National Institutes of Health are helping us try out new and innovative recruitment strategies. We are also exploring alternative ways to get people the health care they need, like expanding outpatient hours in certain locations and using telehealth to bring hard-to-find specialty care right to the patient.

Strengthening management

We want every hospital to be a top-quality facility with strong management. We have a new search committee process for recruiting highly qualified managers and executives. Vacancies are now widely advertised through federal, state and non-profit partners. And we have expanded tribal participation in filling vacant Area Director positions.

Bringing expertise to IHS

A key way to improve IHS facilities is by helping them exchange innovative ideas and tools that are proven to work. We recently launched a Hospital Engagement Network to reach across all 27 IHS hospitals and share strategies on how to reduce avoidable readmissions and hospital-acquired infections. Working together, hospitals can learn more and improve faster. Were also bringing experts from different parts of HHS to consult with IHS hospitals and ensure that our improvements are real and measurable.

Engaging local resources

Our government-to-government relationship with tribes is the foundation of our work at IHS. Some of the most helpful expertise and effective leadership is in the tribal communities we work with every day. Thats why were always committed to strengthening these relationships and engaging further with partners from the community  like local and regional health-care systems, local colleges and universities, and the leadership of direct service hospitals. Were all stronger when we work together.

At IHS, were committed to making meaningful and measurable progress to improve the health and well-being of Indian Country today, and for generations to come.
WASHINGTON |The only reasonable response to the massacre in Orlando is to ban the sale of military-style assault weapons. All else, I'm afraid, is just noise.

If this ensconces me in an ideological corner, I'm fine with that. If it insults the Constitution, so be it  any other response would do far greater harm to our freedoms. Or we could argue for a while and then do nothing. We've tried that course of action many times, and it doesn't work.

An Islamic State sympathizer was able to go into a gun store days or weeks ago and buy both a pistol and an AR-15-style semiautomatic assault rifle, which he used to kill 49 men and women at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Had he been armed with the pistol alone, he still would have killed people  but not so many. Keeping military-grade combat weapons out of the hands of maniacs should not be a controversial idea.

The Second Amendment enshrines the right to keep and bear arms, and the Supreme Court has ruled that this is an individual right, not a collective one. The court has made clear, however, that this does not preclude reasonable gun control measures.

When the framers wrote of "arms," they were thinking about muskets and single-shot pistols. They could not have foreseen modern rifles or high-capacity magazines. They lived at a time when it was impossible to imagine one man barging into a crowded room and killing more than one or two people before having to reload and surely being subdued. Today it is tragically commonplace.

No hunter needs an AR-15 to bring down a deer. None of us needs such a weapon to defend our families against intruders. And for those who believe assault rifles offer protection against a hypothetical tyrannical government, I have sobering news: If and when the black helicopters come, they will be accompanied by tanks.

Why focus exclusively on the guns? Because other proposed solutions would violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution  and surely wouldn't work anyway.

One of the presidential candidates  I don't want to sully this column with his name  has suggested a ban on Muslim immigration. The idea would be laughable if it were not so dangerously un-American.

First, it would be useless. The Orlando murderer  I don't want to use his name, either  was born in New York, just like the presidential candidate in question. The self-radicalization of American citizens is not going to be solved by banning all believers in Islam from entry.

Which would be impossible, of course. I suppose immigration officers could ask every foreign visitor whether he or she is a Muslim, but then what? If the answer is no, wave them through? Stop them for further questioning if they "look" Muslim, whatever that means? Don't you think Islamic State operatives might be smart enough to have Bibles in their carry-on rather than Qurans?

Attempting such a prohibition would also be obscene in a nation that enshrines religious freedom in the First Amendment. Enough said about this loathsome idea.

Another possible response would involve more vigilant surveillance. The Orlando shooter had been interviewed by the FBI at least twice because of alleged extremist leanings or connections. He was apparently on a terrorism watch list for a time, but was removed after authorities decided there was no need to keep him under suspicion.

By all means, Congress should immediately ban gun sales to anyone on such a watch list. But that wouldn't have helped in Orlando. No level of surveillance remotely permissible under the Constitution would allow authorities to detect all instances of self-radicalization and act on them. We put people in jail for what they do, not what they think.

Should there be universal background checks for gun purchases? Yes, of course. But the Orlando killer passed a background check. It is not possible to have a free society without the presumption of innocence.

Freedom is possible, however, without the right to buy military weapons designed for killing sprees. Banning them would not end mass killings, but it would mean fewer deaths. If we do not act, the blood of future victims will be on all of our hands.
Russia's Biocad sues Roche over alleged anti-competitive practices

MOSCOW, June 15 (RAPSI, Maria Petrova)  Russian pharmaceutical company Biocad has lodged a complaint against F. Hoffman La-Roche Ltd. (Roche) with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York accusing the Swiss company of anticompetitive conduct.

RAPSI has a copy of the complaint at its disposal.

According to the plaintiff, in Russia Roche has deliberately lowered prices of a number of drugs used to treat cancer, whereas raising the prices of the same drugs in the USA. It concerns Avastin, Heceptin and Rituxan cancer drugs. The complaint says that these drugs bring Roche over $20 billion per year, with almost 50 per cent of such profits coming from the US, which remains the most lucrative market for the defendant.

At present, the plaintiff alleges, Biocad is the only pharmaceutical company in the world that was able to recreate biosimilars of these anticancer drugs.

In 2014, shortly after the Russian company recieved approval in Russia for its first biosimilar of Roches Rituxan and announced that significant progress was being made to create generic copies of Avastin and Herceptin, Roche and Genentech (a US Roche subsidiary) implemented a price hike in the US and simultaneously were selling the drugs in Russia at lower prices, the complaint maintains.

The Russian company alleges that in this manner Roche is trying to destroy its business and prevent it from entering the US market.

Biocad accuses Roche in abuse of its monopoly market position and asks the court to rule the defendants actions as illegal. The Russian company also demands reparation of damages, which should, according to the complaint, be determined at the trial.

The Roche (Switzerland) pharmaceutical company was established in 1896, and currently operates in 150 countries. It has more than 80 000 employees, according to the company's website. Roche produces biotechnological medical products to treat cancer, viral infections, metabolic, central nervous system disorders and inflammatory diseases.
Russian Supreme Court refuses to review sentence in Defense Ministry embezzlement case

MOSCOW, June 16 (RAPSI)  Russias Supreme Court on Thursday declined to reconsider the sentence handed down to ex-Defense Ministry official Yevgeniya Vasilyeva and her accomplices in the Oboronservis embezzlement case, RAPSI learnt in the court.

The court dismissed cassation appeals filed by ex-head of Oboronstroy company Larisa Yegorina and her former deputy Yuri Grekhnev sentenced to 4 years and 3 months and 4 years in prison respectively.

The Oboronservis criminal case was opened in 2012 after a major embezzlement scheme inside the Defense Ministry was revealed. This resulted in the dismissal of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

Under the scheme, the accomplices, led by former Defense Ministry official Yevgeniya Vasilyeva, allegedly sold facilities owned by the Defense Ministry at undervalued prices through Oboronservis companies and several other private companies. The embezzled funds amounted to 3 billion rubles ($45.5 mln). The deals were closed as part of a major Defense Ministry reform program that was to close unnecessary facilities and functions.

Vasilyeva was sentenced on May 8 to five years in prison for fraud, money laundering and abuse of office. Four of her accomplices were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 36 to 51 months. In late August 2015, a court in the Vladimir Region released Vasilyeva on parole.
Gazprom appeals $3.4 bln fine in Ukraines Supreme Economic Court

MOSCOW, June 16 (RAPSI)  Gazprom has lodged an appeal with the Ukrainian Supreme Economic Court against an 86 billion hryvnia ($3.4 bln) fine issued by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU), RIA Novosti reported on Thursday.

Earlier, Gazprom had been fined by the Antimonopoly Committee for abuse of its dominant position on the gas transit market. At that time, the company was ordered to pay the fine until April 12.

According to Gazprom, this fine was unexpected since the firm was not engaged in business activity within the Ukrainian territory. Gazprom states that natural gas is being sold to Naftogaz on the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Russian oil giant appealed the fine in the Kiev Commercial Court but the complaint was returned to the plaintiff without hearing. Later the Kiev Commercial Court of Appeal upheld this decision.
Sentence for eccentric artist Pavlensky appealed

MOSCOW, June 16 (RAPSI)  Lawyers of the performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky have appealed the ruling of a court that found him guilty of setting fire to the Moscow headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB), his lawyer Olga Dinze told RAPSI on Thursday.

Ive filed a motion with the Moscow City Court because I disagree with a [Meshchansky District  ed.] courts conclusion that he is guilty, she said.

On June 8, the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow imposed a 500,000 ruble ($7,600) fine on performance Pavlensky and ruled in favor of this security agency, which sought 481 thousand rubles ($7,400) in the framework of a civil lawsuit.

The court imposed on Pavlensky a fine of 1.5 million rubles ($23,000); however, taking into account his detention during pretrial investigation, this amount was reduced to 500,000 rubles ($7,600). The artist was set free in the courtroom.

Additionally, Pavlensky was sentenced to pay a 480,000 ruble ($7,400) compensation to FSB for the damaged door of its Moscow headquarter.

The artist told a crowd of journalists gathering to report about the proceedings, that he was disinterested in the results of the lawsuit.

Eccentric artist Pavlensky was arrested on November 9, 2015, along with several other people who claim to be journalists that were invited to the artists performance. The next day Pavlensky was detained under a court decision.

Initially Pavlensky was accused of vandalism but later investigators reclassified charges against him to destruction of cultural heritage sites.

Pavlensky is known for a number of controversial performances.

In July 2012, he sewed up his mouth and stood at the Kazan Cathedral with a poster in support of Pussy Riot.

In May 2013, Pavlensky lay down on the ground in front of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly naked with barbed wire around his body.

In November 2013, also naked, Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to the Red Square pavement near the Lenin Mausoleum.

In October 2014, he staged an eccentric stunt on the roof of the Serbsky Mental Institution in Moscow by cutting off one of his earlobes.

In February 2015, Pavlensky and his accomplices burned car tyres, waved Ukrainian flags and banged sheet metal with sticks in a show of solidarity with the anti-government protesters in Ukraine. The performance was held near the Church of the Savior on Blood in St. Petersburg.
Russias Atomstroyexport awarded nearly 550 mln over abandoned Bulgarian NPP

MOSCOW, June 16 (RAPSI)  The Paris-based International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce has awarded Russian engineering company Atomstroyexport about 550 million to be paid by Bulgarian National Electric Company (NEK) for an abandoned nuclear power project, Reuters reported on Thursday.

"NEK received the court's decision late last night. It is still not handed down officially. In the next days, NEK will approach Atomstroyexport over the decision," the news agency quotes Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova as having said.

NEK will have to compensate the costs of the equipment manufactured for the NPP, as the court of arbitration has rejected the Atomstroyexport claim for recovery of damages resulting from lost profits, according to Petkova.

A procedure for selection of a contractor for construction of Belene NPP was launched in 2005. It resulted in Atomstroyexport winning the bid for the contract. An agreement on the NPP construction was signed in November 2006. After the project had been approved by the European Commission as meeting technical requirements, the contract for the design, construction, and installation of Belene NPP was signed. Nevertheless, Bulgarian authorities officially terminated the project in March 2012.

Atomstroyexport initiated proceedings in International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in July 2011 requesting a 58,000,000 payment for the works carried out in the framework of the project implementation. In September 2012, the Russian party informed that the compensation it demanded from NEK was raised to 1 billion.
Its about community.

Dan and Connie Mayer, of Bee Happy Honey Farm, love selling at the Hamilton Farmers Market.

The market makes a more cohesive community, says Dan, who is a retired county extension agent, and along with Connie has turned the family honey bee hobby into a vocation.

Connie adds, People like buying from the same vendor all the time. Its more than a business relationship. We build trust. People are proud to bring visitors to our market because it is so welcoming and friendly. We stop at farmers market when we travel and ours is the best. Customers here dont just shop and leave quickly; they linger and have a great time.

The Mayers have been selling wildflower honey from their Bitterroot Valley hives at the market for six years, and keeping bees for 40 years. They are proud to offer unprocessed raw honey, with all of its original anti-allergy pollen, vitamins, antioxidants, and enzymes intact.

Dan explains, Texas A&M University analyzed honey in grocery stores a few years ago, and found that much of it was cut with sugar syrup and a lot came from China. Our honeys local, unprocessed and pure.

In addition to golden glass jars of pure honey, Connie creates specialties like spun honey, and takes orders for wedding favors, gift baskets and her secret recipe for huckleberry-infused honey from Montana wild huckleberries. For more information visit Dan and Connie at the market in their booth on South Third Street, or call 360-1393 or 360-5435.

What makes the Hamilton Farmers Market such a huge success? Community.

Vendors and customers have increased every year, and this year is no exception, with an average of 90 farmers, artisans, and food vendors every Saturday.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running a farmers market outside USDA headquarters near the Smithsonian in Washington DC for the past 21 years  four years less than the Hamilton Farmers Market. The USDA market is the departments own living laboratory for farmers markets across the country.

Community working together has built the Hamilton Farmers Market, while about half of the farmers markets across the U.S. close within the first year. The partnership between the City of Hamilton, the county (Ravalli County Museum), and the Hamilton Farmers Market board is obvious. The city closes the shady streets to vehicles; the museum offers its lawn and bell tower for musicians; and the market in turn brings visitors to downtown businesses and the museum.

Belenda Mehlschmidt, of Hillside Designs, has been selling her amusing knitted and crocheted trolls and mice, beadwork, ceramics and paper crafts at the market for two years. A retired nurse, Belenda immediately connects with customers with a warm smile.

I was a tomboy as a kid and fought my mother, who was determined to teach me how to crochet and knit. Im so glad now she did. I retired from nursing a couple of years ago and we moved from Alaska to Hamilton. My trolls were sick and tired of the cold, she laughs, referring to her colorful bearded creatures.

Ive been a crafter all my life, and love selling at the market. Ive met a lot of people, and some have become good friends. There is such a strong sense of community here.

Visit with Belenda in her booth on the north side of Bedford Street, about mid-block.

The seventh annual S.A.F.E. Family Fun Day at the market will happen this Saturday, June 18, the day before Fathers Day, on the Ravalli County Museum lawn during the market. Family Fun Day is sponsored by Ravalli County Coalition Against Domestic Violence because healthy relationships begin with healthy families. For more info about this free family event, contact Jamie at S.A.F.E., 363-2793.

Senior food coupons are available at the market.

Lower-income seniors can receive Farmers Market Senior Coupons to use at valley farmers markets to purchase locally grown produce. At Hamilton Farmers Market, coupons can be combined with a seniors SNAP benefits. Applications are available at the Council on Aging and must be filled out before coupons can be assigned. Barbara Evans, from Council on Aging, will be in her booth on the SE corner of Bedford and S. Third Streets this Saturday to hand out coupons.

Call Barbara at 363-5690 for information on how to qualify for Senior Coupons.

Live music will take place on June 18 on the Museum lawn and will feature Tin Cup, an eclectic folk group with bluegrass and gospel.

Market vendors sell non-GMO locally-grown produce, meats, dairy goods, a variety of hot food, beverages and baked goods, and unique, local, hand-crafted wares. Nonprofit organizations can set up at no cost at 8:30 a.m. pending open spaces.

Produce vendors accept WIC, Senior Food Coupons (from Ravalli County Council on Aging) and SNAP tokens. The Market Information Booth can issue SNAP tokens and swipe credit cards in exchange for market tokens.

The market is open every Saturday through October, 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., on Bedford Street and S. Third Street. To become a vendor, or for more information, contact Market Manager Laura Craig at 961-0004, hfmc844@gmail.com, visit the Facebook page, or hamiltonfarmersmarket.org.
A longtime Bitterroot business will officially fade away Saturday.

The liquidation auction of Pfau Feeds will start at 10 a.m. on June 18.

The Pfau family has a history of solid agriculture business in the Bitterroot Valley.

George Pfau started Pfaus Pellet Mill in 1964, with the help of his sons Jack and Jim. It grew to be a thriving business.

According to Jack Pfau, the brothers bought out their father about 1972. George passed away in 1984.

The Pfaus were very involved in the community, buying local hay and grains to make feeds and pellets, sold statewide.

We bought hay and grain locally and out of Idaho and eastern Montana, Jack Pfau said. We shipped in corn from the Midwest. We used the railroad and that hurt when they stopped. We had to increase prices and truck it in.

The Pfaus were also big supporters of youth projects such as 4-H, FFA, valley academics and sporting events. Both brothers were involved in the Etna Fire Department. Throughout the years, they were always in friendly bidding competitions against other local businesses at the Ravalli County Fair livestock sale to see who was going to buy the grand and reserve champions.

In 2008, the brothers sold the business to Scott Kurfman, an out-of-state owner, who changed the name to Pfau Feed.

He was not a hands-on operator, Jack Pfau said.

The business slowly kept declining and the business closed in 2014.

We had Pfaus Pellet Mill for about 44 years, Jack Pfau said. It was an asset to the community and I feel bad it is shut down after all the years we had it. We loved the people and really enjoyed visiting with them. That was the big thing and what I missed the most.

On Saturday, a bank liquidation will be held. Vehicles, equipment and other items will be sold at the live on-site auction. The mill will be sold online.

Jack Pfau said he would be at the auction on Saturday.

If there are questions, Ill be there to provide answers, he said. It will be hard to watch it sell in bits and pieces. It was a sad day when they closed it up. Saturday will be fine. The bank needs to get their money out of it. Well see what happens. I dont have a clue what will happen.

Auctioneer Kevin Hill said, Pfau Feeds is a business that will surely be a missing icon in the agricultural community of Montana.

They have been a big part of the valley since the 1960s, Hill said. I know they supported the kids and purchased local grains and hay so this is tough on local farmers. I have had calls about this auction from Billings, Great Falls, Glasgow, Sandpoint, Idaho, Wenatchee, Washington and Canada since people have found out it is going out of business.

The auction of Pfau Feed will take place at 2685 Eastside Highway in Stevensville and online.

For more information, and the list of equipment and farm vehicles, visit online at kevinhillauctions.com or contact Hill at 406-531-7927.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has invited again the agitating parties to sit in the dialogue table. It seems that Prime Minister Oli would have made the invitation just to avoid the criticism labeled to the government for failing to implement the constitution by taking into confidence the agitating parties. As holding of local body elections is considered as the basis to implement the constitution, Prime Minister Oli would have parroting about the elections in the local bodies.

However, holding of local body election would not possible until and unless the existing federal structures, as provisioned in the new constitution, come into implementations. The parroting claim of the government to hold the local body election on the name of implementing the constitution is not possible now as not only a section of a society has stand against the existing federal structures but also the local unites under the federal states are fixed yet. As some Madhes based political parties and the indigenous groups have been protesting the existing constitutional provisions of the federal structures, the government should settle the differences first.

Though the Prime Minister Oli has invited the agitating parties, the disgruntle parties have abruptly rejected the proposal, that mean there is no possible of consensus immediately. It has become crystal clear that neither the incumbent government would be able to hold the election by taking into confidence to the agitating parties nor it has any capacity to implement the constitution forcefully sans of consensus with them.

As Nepal has not seen elections in the local bodies for more than one and half decade, holding of local body election is most in the country not only to implement the constitution but also to provide feelings to the people of government in the local levels. The people at the local level are facing numerous hassles in the absence of their representatives.

The people are deprived even from the basic service that can be delivered from VDC office. The development budget mobilized in the VDCs is misused rampantly in the absence of peoples representatives. The big political parties, particularly the allies of the incumbent government in the center are gulping the development budget on the name of on the all party mechanism in the local bodies.

The governments decision to run the local bodies as per the strength or share in the central politics has not only deprived the people from their rights but also slandering the fundamental principle of the democracy.

With the promulgation of the new constitution, the debates are riffed in the society over the future of the local bodies and its elections. There is a looming question over the mind of people that how would be possible to hold the local bodies at this juncture as claimed by the government.

As the people in the local levels have desperately been waiting for their representatives, the statements of the Prime Minister would have also raised the expectations. But the statements of the Prime Minister over the issue of local body election was just to win the sentiments of the people but not to hold the local body elections as of need and desire of the people.

We are not in position to blame merely the Prime Minister too, but also the other political parties for pronouncing the issue of local body elections just to win the sentiments of the people but not to hold. As periodic election particularly the local body election is the fundamental pillar of functional democracy, we always welcome the elections.

But concerns of our here is that the issue of local body election should not be used as of tricks just to win the sentiments of the people. As we had repeatedly been insisting for the consensus government, we would like to repeat again here that national consensus government is the only way-out most not only to hold the elections but also to implement the constitution by overcoming the hurdles of the country.
Kathmandu, Nepal : Though the government has officially urged again the agitating parties for the dialogue, there is no possibility of resumption of negotiations immediately, thanks to the denial of the agitating parties to sit in the dialogue table with the government.

The agitating parties have dismissed the governments formal call on Monday. The government had sent a formal letter requesting them to present in the dialogue table to seek the solution of the recent political deadlock. The agitating parties have denied the government call claiming that Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is not serious to addressing their demands.

Though the Samyukta Loktantrik Madhesi Morcha (SLMM) and the various indigenous forces have formed the Sanghiya Gathabandhan to protest the constitution and currently now staging a hunger strike in Khula Manch, the government had sent a formal letter to the Morcha to sit in the dialogue table.

Despite the internal differences among the SLMM, it has denied to sit in the dialogue table stating there would not be any meaning to sit in the dialogue table unless their three preconditions-withdrawing cases against their cadres, declaring those killed during Madhes protests martyrs and providing treatment expenses to those injured during the protests are addressed.

Though the government call is denied the Morcha seems to have divided over the issue of dialogue with the government. It is said that the other allies of the Morcha except Upendra Yadav led Federal Socialist Forum Nepal are positive to the prime ministers call to sit in the dialogue table.

As the alliance has been differing not only on the issue of ideology but also on the issue of program, the Lokdal led by Kaushal Singh, Bahujan Samaj Party Nepal led by Ganga Mahara and Democratic Party Nepal led by Jivan Sah had already left the alliance.
Kathmandu, Nepal: With the formation of the Naya Shakti Nepal under the leadership of former Maoist leader Baburam Bhattrai, the new party has witnessed severe debate over the ideology. The Naya Shakti Nepal party was announced on Sunday amidst a gathering at Dasharath Stadium in Kathmandu.

During the discussions in the closed door session, not only the leaders but also the participants have vertically divided onto two ideologies- one is left oriented ideology and another is democratic oriented ideology.

As a large section of the party leaders and members including its coordinator Bhattrai are from the Maoist background, they have been strongly lobbying for leftist oriented political line while those who were not leftist background earlier have been insisting for the democratic lines.

Around 2,000 representatives have been divided into 13 groups to discuss over the three reports that were presented in the closed session.

Party coordinator Bhattarai presented the report on 'base component for Naya Shakti', secretariat member Devendra Poudel on 'principles of organization and statute' and another secretariat member Rameshwar Khanal on 'draft for development and prosperity.'

As the deviation on political line or ideology is the only basis of division of any political parties, the vertical division over the ideology would be a beginning point of the division or downfall of the party, a political analyst has a saying.

Responding to the ideological division and differences among the participants, party coordination Bhattrai used to term party as the leftist Democratic Party, the differences over the issue of ideology are not settled properly, claims a participant preferring anonymity.
Kathmandu, Nepal: The deadline to file complaints against perpetrators of serious human rights violations during the decade-long Maoist armed insurgency has been extended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Thursday.

A meeting of the TRC decided to extend the deadline by 30 days the. With the extension of deadline, the victims of human rights violations can file complaints against their perpetrators till July 16, 2016 (Shrawan 1, 2073 BS).

The TRC has made the decision to extend the deadline considering the situation of growing number of complaints against perpetrators of serious human rights violations during the armed insurgency.
Vice-President Nanda Bahadur Pun

KATHMANDU, June 16: Vice-president Nanda Bahadur Pun returned home on Thursday afternoon concluding his week-long official visit to China.

VP Pun, who left for China on June 10, attended the fourth China-South Asian Fair and 24th Kunming Export Import Trade Fair there.

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli received VP Pun at the VVIP lounge of the Tribhuvan International Airport.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Kamal Thapa, Minister for Information and Communications Sherdhan Rai, Minister for Home Affairs Shakti Bahadur Basnet were also present on the occasion.

Similarly, Chief Secretary Somlal Subedi, Heads of the diplomatic missions in Nepal and their officials, secretaries of the government of Nepal, Chiefs of security bodies- Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force and National Investigation Department- were also at the Airport to receive VP Pun.

A contingent of Nepal Army presented a guard of honor to the VP. RSS
Botswana Chamber of Mines said diamond beneficiation in the country is still in its infancy, but moving towards maturity.

Botswanas 20 remaining cutting-and-polishing factories were processing $1-billion worth of diamonds a year as of 2015.

The chamber chief executive Charles Siwawa told a mining conference in Gaborone that the aggregation of diamonds produced by De Beers was a significant step.

There remains scope to add value through extraction, processing and finished product to the market, he said.

In the diamond industry for example the process of cutting and polishing is defined as beneficiation to the whole value chain.

He said the availability of rough stones for local cutting and polishing as a result of the De Beers and government sales agreement in 2011 was positive, but noted that the country was yet to create a lot of employment in the sector.

Botswana had an employment force of about 4000 in the diamond cutting and polishing sector, but that had since declined by about 50 percent due to the diamond market downturn, said E Consult managing director Keith Jefferies at the same gathering.

Credit facilities had tightened for the cutting and polishing sector.

Two of Botswanas diamond cutting and polishing factories were closed last year.

Meanwhile, Siwawa said that the beneficiation of minerals in the country was essential as the depletion of minerals was inevitable.

The upside potential for value addition is the boost of government fiscal regime, downstream industries and job creation, he said.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau from Gaborone, Botswana, Rough&Polished




The Washington Post, June 15, 2016

Shukur, 21, right, was kidnapped in Kabul when he was 12 years old and taken to Kunduz, where he was kept as a bacha bereesh. After five years he escaped and returned to Kabul, where he now earns a living working as a dancer. (Barat Ali Batoor)

Two young men kissing on the streets of Miami. A wealthy older man fondling a pretty young boy in Afghanistan.

The first scene, reportedly encountered by Omar Mateen before he started slaughtering patrons at a gay dance club in Orlando early Sunday, represents something that conservative Afghan society teaches is wrong, disgusting, unnatural and against the law of God. It is an aspect of American culture that Afghans say revolts them and against which Muslim clerics preach all over the world. Mateenas father, after the killings, said he was saddened by what his son had done a but that homosexuals should be punished by God.

The second scene, described by Western journalists and other visitors to Afghanistan, represents something that Afghan society has long accepted as a common if semi-hidden practice, a privilege for wealthy men and macho militia commanders to keep boys for sex. It is not viewed or condemned as homosexual behavior, and any man who does it would be shocked and enraged at being called homosexual.

Mateen was born in the United States, but the mixed messages sent by his native culture may well have added to the stress, confusion and anger that led him to start shooting in a gay club. He was clearly a troubled person. His former wife said he beat her constantly; his former classmates said he was bullied in school and that he laughed and cheered at the World Trade attacks. He regularly visited a mosque and vowed allegiance to the Islamic State during his shooting rampage a but he also reportedly had visited the Pulse nightclub before and communicated with men on a gay dating site.

aMaybe he acted out of self-hate,a one caller to a C-SPAN discussion show speculated Tuesday.

The revulsion Afghans express toward Western gay lifestyles that involve affection and sex between consenting peers, and their societys simultaneous acceptance of forced sex between powerful men and young boys, is an apparent contradiction that is never confronted, acknowledged or publicly discussed in Afghan society. But it has been reported in detail by Western visitors, including former Post reporter Ernesto Londono, who investigated the practice of older men buying and keeping dancing boys, known as bacha bazi.

[Afghanistan sees rise in adancing boysa exploitation]

This practice was also reported by two U.S. Army officers who were stationed with Afghan militia units. They said they were appalled at seeing and hearing militiamen abusing boys, but that they were told by superiors to ignore the situation so as not to offend the Afghan military officials who were their partners in the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. One American officer who beat an Afghan fighter for keeping a boy chained to his bed was relieved of his command.

In my own reporting visits to Afghanistan over a number of years, I have seen slender boys in makeup and bangles dancing at parties for groups of older men, and I felt a sick premonition about what would happen afterwards. I have also realized how this tradition, especially among ethnic Pashtun tribes, can function as an outlet for the strict social suppression of what Westerners would call normal romantic relations between men and women.

In Afghan culture, young people are never allowed to date or be alone with members of the opposite sex except for their immediate relatives. Their spouses are chosen by family elders, and even engaged couples may meet only a few times, in formal settings surrounded by relatives. Men may remain single for decades because their families cannot afford expensive weddings. In villages, young girls are sold as brides to much older men or handed over as payment in disputes. If young couples fall in love, they are often forcibly separated and married off to others. If they elope, both may be caught and killed for dishonoring their families and tribe.

These traditional practices are frowned upon by educated civic leaders and womenas groups, and laws have been proposed to criminalize domestic violence, but little is done by government authorities to stop it. The recent retreat of Western troops and international aid agencies from Afghanistan, combined with the increased influence of Taliban insurgents, has enabled such behavior to revive and spread. I have visited privately run shelters where women and girls sought refuge from honor killings and state prisons where others have been locked up for running away with a boyfriend.

At the same time, growing access to the Internet and cellphones has exposed once-isolated young Afghans to Western liberal lifestyles as well as to pornography. On TV soap operas imported from India and Turkey, womenas chests are quaintly blurred by censors, but at Internet cafes, porn sites pop up as frequently viewed a while radical Islamist websites that rail against Western vulgarity and sin are just as popular. With modern technology, the bombardment of mixed messages and temptations has multiplied.

Even more recently, as thousands of jobless Afghans have fled their struggling country and reached Europe, they have found themselves immersed in cosmopolitan societies where girls and women wear skimpy and revealing clothes, where alcohol is available at pubs and bars, and where there seem to be no limits. Often they may feel confused, excited and guilty, with no past experience to guide them through the maze.

Sometimes, violence results. Last month, authorities in Austria reported a series of rapes and sexual assaults against women by newly arrived Muslim migrants, most of them young Afghan men. When others encounter the even more forbidden realm of open homosexuality, they may face sharper conflicting messages and feel a more tormented mix of fascination and revulsion. Such extreme psychic stress may well have contributed to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
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Seabiscuit, Secretariat and now American Pharoah.





Fabled horses whose iconic stories have become a part of the popular culture. Horses who have become almost larger than life with countless portrayals in books or on screens. Horses who have struck quite a love affair with the public.



Now Maryland author Eliza McGraw (above) is doing her best to add another magnificent Thoroughbred to that list. You could say by doing so rounding out horse racings Mount Rushmore of sorts.





As track announcers proclaimed so many times, Here Comes Exterminator.





While researching a story about WWII cavalry war horses for Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred, McGraw, a self-proclaimed horse lover to the enth degree, came upon the name of one race horse over and over again.



And now shes introducing all of us to that horse whose story anything but pales in comparison to the Seabiscuits, Secretariats and American Pharoahs of racing lore.



A larger than life horse that she first gave us a feel for in her 2013 New York Times The Rail Blog entry Exterminator, A larger than life horse that she first gave us a feel for in her 2013 New York Timesentry Exterminator, A Long Shot to Remember









Churchill Downs photo from 1918 Kentucky Derby.



Now, welcome to the pages of her new work that takes this horses story up another notch. Her equine labor of love that she now shares with all of us, Here Comes Exterminator!: The Longshot Horse, the Great War, and the Making of an American Hero.







A horse who she first about as a young girl after reading the 1955 childrens book about Exterminator, Old Bones, the Wonder Horse. As she learned during her exhaustive research that took her across the country, Old Bone turned out to be this unique horse's nickname.







Exterminator, a horse that you could argue helped usher-in the Golden Age of horse racing just at the end of World War 1, "The Great War"



A time in this nations that saw "war horses", many with Thoroughbred blood lines, play such a vital role in the war effort.



A time when thank to Henry Fords Model T, the nation was transitioning away from horse drawn carriages. Making the move from horses to horsepower.



A time when Horse racing was arguably the nation's the most popular spectator sport.



1918. A year in time when a lanky chestnut colt named "Exterminator", a 30 to 1 longshot from humble beginnings, .emerged on the scene in a big way in the nation's biggest race, rallying from the back of the pack on a wet track to win the Kentucky Derby by a length.







A day in time and a race in time that Eliza McGraw found through her diligent research that help spawn a nation's love affair with Exterminator. A love affair of Seabiscuit, Secretariat and American Pharoah proportions.



Exterminator, a tall gelding that would go on to race and race and race into the decade of the 20's, winning an amazing 50 of 99 career starts and finishing 2nd or 3rd 17 times each.



Do the math. Exterminator only finishing out of the money" 16 times in his fabled career. A career that Eliza learned brought Exterminator right here to Pimlico and Laurel on many occasions. In fact, After winning the Pimlico Cup 3 times, for decades a prominent stakes race at Pimlico was named in honor of the charismatic and spirited steed.





A record 33 stakes wins. A record BTW that our old friend Ben's Cat is chasing now with 26. This blogger digresses. The same Ben's Cat who Eliza was in attendance to see win yet another stakes race on Black-Eyed Susan Day last month at Pimlico.





Eliza McGraw at Politics & Prose book signing





Exterminator, the horse owned by a Binghamton, New York "patent medicine" marketing pioneer turned newspaper-mogul and horse breeder.



Exterminator, the horse ridden exclusively over the course of its 7 year racing career by Willie Knapp, the same jockey, who enjoyed what turned out thanks in big part to Exterminator to be a hall of fame career.



And even though it raced almost a century ago, a horse that captured the imagination of a talented Marylander who now is sharing Exterminators special story with all of us today!



Thanks to Eliza McGraws self-proclaimed obsession with this horse, I can imagine the track announcer saying it now as I look down the stretch at Pimlico, Here Comes Exterminator! Very cool.
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Running a small business in the gilded city of San Francisco is a drag, or so says contractor-for-hire site Thumbtack, which just released a study asserting that because of roadblocks like "regulations," San Francisco gets a "F" grade when it comes to "small business friendliness."

Thumbtack, which is headquartered in San Francisco (coincidence?), finds that "approximately 27% more locals called licensing rules 'unfriendly' than 'friendly.' In other U.S. cities, licensing was 60% more likely to been seen as 'friendly' than 'unfriendly.' "

Got that? But wait, there's more: According to the survey, "Locals gave the city a D+ on health and safety rules."

The Business Times picked up the report, and noted that only two cities  Oxnard and Syracuse  came in below SF. "This rating makes sense," Gwyneth Borden, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, told the Times. "All the mandates, all the permits, they are well-intentioned but the question is, should it be the onus [sic] to figure out how to comply with them?"

Now, having myself spent countless hours mired in Brazil-like nonsense at City Hall, frustration with city bureaucracy is understandable. But is it really that much worse right here at home than in other places? And do we really want to live in a place that ranks the "most friendly" to business when health and safety regulations are considered "unfriendly"?

And just what city, exactly, is the most friendly to business? According to Thumbtack, that would be San Antonio.

Related: Business Licenses For Some SF Uber And Lyft Drivers Cost Hundreds More Than Expected
Some cries for help are clearer than others, and sometimes there are no cries to be heard at all, but even when a so-called "red flag" is (metaphorically) held aloft by someone contemplating self-harm or suicide, it's unlikely that the first person who sees it will be a professional crisis counselor, willing or able to take action.

That, it seems, is why Facebook wants to ensure that all its users  anyone at all who might identify a friend who is visibly despairing  have access to professional resources that could potentially save that person's life. To put it grimly: Imagine if it were as easy to express concern (or summon professional assistance) in response to a post on the world's largest social network as it were to "like" it. At least to me, it appears that such is Facebook's vision.

The New York Times seems to have first reported Facebook's suicide prevention project, writing that the company has dedicated more than a dozen engineers and researchers to the project's development. Users can flag posts that raise the explicit threat or mere specter of self-harm or suicide.

"With the help of these new tools, if someone posts something on Facebook that makes you concerned about their well-being, you can reach out to them directly  and you also can also report the post to us," Facebook's Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis and Researcher Jennifer Guadagno wrote to the website, "We have teams working around the world, 24/7, who review reports that come in."

Sadly, the inspiration for the effort came close to home for the website: From the rash of suicides among Palo Alto teens. That town, of course, is where Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns a home and where the company was first headquartered. The suicide crisis of Palo Alto teens has been covered, forgive me, basically to death, and is addressed here to some small degree.

These "tools" were developed in collaboration with mental health organizations and with input from people who have personal experience with self-injury and suicide, and, as TechCrunch explains, appear on a dropdown menu beneath posts. Users may share words of support, in phrases suggested by Facebook in conjunction with its research, either under their own name or anonymously. Further, posts can be flagged for review by Facebook employees, who will "reach out to this person with information that might be helpful to them. If a user suspects a member of their social network to be in immediate danger, the company recommends contacting police.

While the project may have been inspired long ago (per the New York Times it's been as much as a decade in the making), it comes at a time of particularly distinct need. Suicide, a National Center for Health Statistics study released this April determined, is at a 30-year high. An estimated 72 percent of Americans use Facebook, as do roughly 1.65 billion people across the world.

If someone you know exhibits warning signs of suicide: do not leave the person alone; remove any firearms, alcohol, drugs or sharp objects that could be used in a suicide attempt; and call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or take the person to an emergency room or seek help from a medical or mental health professional.

Related: The Atlantic Is The Latest To Ask Why Palo Alto Teens Kill Themselves
A gaggle of powerful members of the tech sector have banded together to support an effort, spearheaded by Governor Jerry Brown, to override local planning reviews and affordable housing requirements for new developments, in order to jumpstart housing development statewide. The Business Times reports that over 80 prominent members of the tech and business community have signed a letter put forth by pro-business group Bay Area Council in support of Brown's "as of right" proposal.

Under the bill, according to the Times, any new development with 20 percent affordable housing would be exempt from most local review laws  as long as the proposed tenants in those units make no more than 80 percent of median income in the area. The bill would also clear hurdles for developments with only 10 percent affordable housing that are near certain forms of public transit.

Signatories to the letter include Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce), Ron Conway (prominent angel investor), Marissa Mayer (CEO of Yahoo), Jeremy Stoppelman (CEO of Yelp), Logan Green (CEO of Lyft), and numerous other digerati.

"The state cannot fix a housing crisis without building significantly more housing, more quickly," reads the letter. "This is a state-level problem that must be addressed by our state leaders. [...] This idea respects local control and community values while cutting the 'excess process' that creates lots of controversy but too little housing too late at too high a price."

As Curbed notes, San Francisco would still be able to set minimums for affordable housing, but as soon as those minimums are met in a development "it would have to be approved almost automatically."

Brown's proposal, which is expected to be voted on in August, has clearly frustrated Supervisor Aaron Peskin. According to Curbed, the supervisor yesterday put forth a resolution requesting that Bay Area state representatives amend Brown's bill with the goal of exempting any California city that already hits the 25 percent affordable development mark annually.

"By-right development would restrict the potential to use development incentives to further increase affordability beyond the existing requirements," Peskin says.

Five other supervisors currently support Peskin's proposal.

This post has been updated to clarify the impact of Brown's "as of right" proposal on San Francisco's minimum affordable housing requirements.

Previously: Gov. Jerry Brown Declares War On NIMBYs And Planning Commissions With New Housing Bill
SFist's Caleb Pershan is pinch-hitting on the Apartment Sadness column this week.

"Big Style, Little Benjamins" is one of several highly suspect claims made on the swanky website for the "new" (also not 100% accurate) Waterbend Apartments, advertised on BART and elsewhere and brought to SFist's attention by a tipster.

The biggest question mark on the website and other advertising: Where  except for "big city" San Francisco  these new (actually built 2011) apartments might be. First off, they aren't, as listed here on Craigslist, in Bernal Heights, which is a wonderful neighborhood but actually a fair distance from this location.





The words "Bayview/Hunters Point" are conspicuously absent from the new site. Hmm. You do, in the neighborhood section, learn after some searching that these apartments are located at 5880 Third Street  which prospective renters will quickly learn is not the Dogpatch. And it looks like they abandoned the complex's previous name for this very reason  the old website is still live, calling it 5880 Third.

Live it up at Waterbend apartments, the newest luxury apartment community in San Francisco. Big city living on an outer city dime, without compromise. Featuring spacious Jr. 1, 1 & 2 bedroom apartments, modern amenities and easy access to Downtown and beyond.

Downtown access be damned! You ARE, you may notice if you're diligent, near Bayview Park, which is a nice spot!

Now, about the Benjamins: Those are also not as "little" as advertised. When SFist called up for pricing, we learned that studios (Jr. 1 bedrooms) go from $2,700 to $2,840. For their part, one bedrooms start at $3,130. Two bedrooms become slightly less egregious in value,, starting at $3,840. Utilities aren't included.

Last year SFist observed in a headline that "If You've Got $3,000 A Month To Spend On A Studio, There Are Now Hundreds To Choose From," and that remains true. In fact, for $2,950, you can rent in the Jasper (Rincon Hill), or at least listing site Apartment Guides tells us. So, do with that what you will  if you work downtown, you might just save money on transit!

Another mystery, by the way, is what these living quarters actually look like. Here's the "gallery" (click for images of downtown and the GG bridge etc.)

Yeah. Here are a few not-unflattering photos from Craigslist postings, but again, these are the one bedrooms, which start at $3,130.



via Craigslist



via Craigslist



via Craigslist

It would seem that advertisements like "San Francisco Living Within Reach," officially mean nothing, which I say because the  let's be real!  far-flung Bayview is not "Within Reach" of much else in San Francisco (beyond the ruins of Candlestick), though it is on the T-Third. And further, $2,700/month is absolutely out of reach for most current Bayview residents, not to mention most everyone: At last glance, median one-bedroom (not studio!) rent in this neighborhood was just $2,350, and chances are that was not a unit in one of the neighborhood's many smaller, two- and three-unit buildings.

And look: Just last November we found this terrific basement unit in the Bayview for just $800, if you want to compare.

Maybe the big ad push on BART by Waterbend is indicative of the fact that they're not finding a ton of takers for their non-affordable "luxury" units in the Bayview? And I should also point you to this modular, pre-fab affordable apartment complex just a few doors down at 5830 Third Street, where the developer promised back in October that one-bedrooms would start at $2,000/mo, and two-bedrooms would start around $3,000/mo, which sounds a whole lot more in line with this location.



All previous editions of Apartment Sadness.
Two men were critically injured Thursday morning, after they were shot while sitting in a car parked in the Mission District.

According to a spokesperson with the San Francisco Police department, the shots were fired at 2:18 a.m. on 17th Street between Mission and Hoff Streets.

The victims, a 39-year-old man and a 36-year-old man, were seated in a car parked on 17th, according to police. The shooting suspects, described by police as a man and a woman, pulled up behind the victims in a black sedan.Then the driver of the sedan approached the parked vehicle, and shot both men with a handgun "while they were sitting in vehicle," according to the SFPD report.

Both men were transported to San Francisco General Hospital for treatment of their injuries, which the police characterize as "critical." "The car has bullet holes [in] the windows," KRON 4 reports, and "is being towed for investigation."

As of publication time, no additional information was available on the suspects or their motive. As of 8:40 a.m., a spokesperson says, no arrests had been made in this case.

This is the second major shooting for the area in two days: Early Tuesday morning, a man was shot and killed at 20th and Shotwell Streets. As of Thursday, there was no information on any suspects in that shooting, nor had any arrests been made.
Uber has settled yet another lawsuit, with the issue of driver background checks at the heart of the latest legal dispute. According to Reuters, in response to a case brought in San Francisco federal court by a group of drivers, the ride-hail giant has agreed to pay out $7.5 million.

The dispute involves drivers who allege their accounts were deactivated (essentially fired) after Uber pulled their consumer background reports without first getting drivers' approval.

This, it should be noted, is a separate settlement than the $100 million the company agreed to pay to CA drivers in April of this year  and that had to do with the classification of drivers as contractors and not employees, an issue that appears far from settled, but is settled for now in California.

The company has settled a string of cases recently, including the aforementioned $100 million settlement with the goal of keeping drivers as contractors, and yet another $25 million settlement to the cities of SF and LA relating to a so-called "safe-ride fee."

It should be noted that Uber is currently valued at $62.5 billion and can probably afford it.

Nothing is final yet, however, as the judge in the case must agree to the settlement.

Related: Uber Paying Off Drivers To The Tune Of $100M So They Can Keep Them As Contractors
There is a lot of instability right now in our community which is bringing us together on the issue of gun... https://t.co/T9EzHvpiOW  D Mendoza Consulting (@Champ4Justice) June 16, 2016

Yesterday's abrupt announcement by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf that she was relieving Interim Police Chief Ben Fairow of his duties after only five days raised a few questions which Schaaf only vaguely answered in a news conference and statement. She said, "I firmly believe that when you make a mistake you need to own it, and act quickly to correct it." Further, she explained that "new information" had led to her abrupt decision, and as Matier & Ross report via sources, Schaaf failed to do any background check on Fairow before appointing him to the position late last Thursday to replace resigning Chief Sean Whent.

Fairow has been serving as Deputy BART Police Chief and it appears he will continue to do so following this brief blip. BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey issued a statement Wednesday evening welcoming Fairow back to his department, and revealing, "Ben has shared information with me that, while he was married, he had a personal relationship with a consenting adult more than a decade ago, none of which precludes him from serving as a sworn law enforcement officer or as one of my Deputy Chiefs."

Something about this doesn't quite add up, however, and a single extramarital affair doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would disqualify a person from being an effective chief of police, especially an interim one.



The Mercury-News mentions that Fairow also, allegedly, "had inappropriate sexual contact with another employee during his earlier stint with OPD, possibly influencing Schaaf's decision." And that OPD employee is not the one referred to in the above affair.

Another detail the Chronicle brings up may get more to the heart of Fairow's firing:

Fairow served for 21 years in Oaklands Police Department before moving to become deputy chief at BART police, where he came under fire last year for the death of Sgt. Tom Smith, who was inadvertently shot by a colleague. In a federal lawsuit filed in May 2015, Smiths widow, Kellie Smith, who was a BART police officer at the time of the shooting, accused Fairow of denigrating his rank and file and even calling them pussies when they asked for additional training.

You may recall that Smith was the first BART officer to be killed in the line of duty when he was shot in January 2014 in a friendly-fire incident in Dublin. He and other BART Police officers were searching a suspect's home relating to some robberies on BART property when an officer shot and fatally wounded Smith. The incident prompted his widow, fellow BART officer Kellie Smith, to sue the department alleging that officers were improperly trained for this kind of work. At the time, in a letter to BART, Smith wrote, "My husband said to me [prior to the shooting], if anything happens to me, I want you to sue the shit out of BART and Fairow.'"

Yeah, it kind of sounds like that has more to do with this firing than an affair.

As of Wednesday, Oakland's Assistant Police Chief Paul Figueroa has taken over as Interim Chief of Police, and KRON 4 briefly interviewed him.

And in related news that may or may not have any legs, The Examiner reports that the SFPD is now just making sure that none of its officers had any contact with the sex worker at the center of the whole Oakland scandal, Celeste Guap.

Previously: Oakland Police Sex Scandal Deepens With More East Bay Officers Implicated, Interim Oakland Chief Fired
BOYDEN, Iowa | The former city clerk of Boyden, Iowa, has been arrested for first-degree theft following an investigation into improper money disbursements while she was employed by the city.

Sioux County authorities say Beth Sipma, 53, of Boyden, turned herself in at 8:45 a.m. Thursday. Authorities say she was released on personal recognizance.

A state audit released in May found more than $36,000 in improper spending by Sipma between July 1, 2013, and April 30, 2015. According to the report, investigators found $36,277 of improper and unsupported disbursements of city funds. Of the $34,659 in improper disbursements, $30,735 were payments made to or for Sipma.

Those payments included payroll, reimbursements and purchases made with the city's credit card, including $1,321 for airline tickets from Minneapolis to Scotland, a $506 personal cellphone bill and $428 of personal purchases from IKEA.

The audit reported $1,568 of unsupported disbursements did not have sufficient reporting documentation.

City officials had requested the investigation because of concerns regarding payments made by Sipma from a city bank account. The auditor's report included recommendations to the city to strengthen internal controls.
Le MARS, Iowa | In the 1950s, Jim Nicholson was a talented second basemen "with a good arm" for the Le Mars Community High School Bulldogs. Nicholson didn't make in the Major Leagues, but he did make the White House team 50 years later.

Nicholson served as U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs in the President George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2007.

"My arm isn't as good anymore," Nicholson, 78, laughed. He did mention he threw out five first-pitches at MLB games as secretary.

He also served as chairman of Republican National Convention in 1997 and U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican in 2001.

On Wednesday, he returned home for his 60th class reunion at Le Mars High School -- a homeland where a value system was planted in him that helped flourish his distinguished career.

I always get sentimental when I come back here. It is such a beautiful slice of Americana, Nicholson said. He and his wife are residents of Colorado, but still live near Washington D.C. As a boy growing up, you would see farmers joining together to help with the harvest, and people getting together to help people construct a barn. Its a basic value system this community has given me, one that honors hard work, sharing, integrity and dependability.

Today, Nicholson is part of the senior counsel for the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, but remains vocal on the direction the Republican Party is going as Donald Trump prepares to accept the GOP nomination for president at the national convention in Cleveland.

Trump's looming nomination has received an array of support and disdain from Republican politicians due to the billionaire businessman's "not politically correct" utterances and lack of concrete policies and strategies to implement them, Nicholson said.

I think it is problematic. I have a lot of friends, who right now, say they cannot vote for Donald Trump, he said. I can understand  he has not given them a lot to work with and cling on to."

Nicholson said Trumps popularity was fueled by the contest Republican voters were faced with before the primaries started.

We had 17 Republican candidates, and very qualified people and proven leaders But it was this guy, Donald Trump, who discovered this vein out there in our country -- this vein of extreme dissatisfaction with the establishment, Washington D.C. and people in government, Nicholson said.

He also mentioned last weekend's domestic terrorist attack in which a lone gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in an Orlando nightclub.

People are not feeling economically insecure; they are feeling physically insecure, Nicholson said. Trump has trumpeted he would implement a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country and a wall would be built to separate Mexico and the U.S, under his administration.

Nicholson did compliment Trump for being forthright and decisive on how to make this country strong and people safe.

Nicholson had supported former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the nomination, but said his support is always going to be with whomever the people in the Republican Party choose.

We have a man that has never served government, and only recently has become a Republican, he said. But he is our nominee, and I support him to become president, because I think he may have the potential of being a very good president.

Born in 1938, Nicholson grew up in a family of seven children on a tenant farm in Struble, Iowa, a small town in north central Plymouth County, and attended high school in Le Mars. His father suffered from alcoholism, and there wasnt a lot of money, or food, he said.

It was a struggle; we were pretty hard up, he said. But in many ways a happy struggle. We had a lot of nice community members and relatives around us, and a great educational system. My mom always said if you keep your nose to the grindstone and get a good education, you will do well in America, and she was right ...,

Nicholson and his brother, Jack, both received recommendations from congressmen to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York. Nicholson then went on to serve eight years as a paratrooper and ranger-qualified U.S. Army officer, and led troops in Vietnam. He then retired with the rank of colonel after 22 years in the Army Reserve.

He kept his nose to the grindstone like his mother said by also earning a masters degree in public policy from Columbia University, and a law degree from the University of Denver.
SIOUX CITY | The Missouri River Historical Development Board has approved a $1 million grant for Sioux City's proposed Ag Expo & Learning Center.

The gift, the second-largest in the 27-year history of MRHD, a local nonprofit gaming group, could help leverage millions of dollars in state tax dollars for the $6.7 million ag center, envisioned for a parcel in the former stockyards along Interstate 29.

MRHD, which holds the state license for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and collects a share of the casino revenues to distribute to various charitable and community endeavors, is scheduled to formally present the award to ag center leaders at a ceremony Thursday at the Hard Rock's Anthem indoor venue.

MRHD President Mark Monson said he hopes the pledge will kick start additional private contributions for the ag center, which would host equestrian competitions, livestock shows and other farm and ag-related events. Preliminary plans call for the complex to include a 3,000-seat arena, a warm-up arena, livestock pens and a stockyards hall of fame.

Backers say the venue would draw scores of exhibitors and visitors to the community. The project calls for an $8 million hotel next to the center.

An ag center was initially proposed for Moville, adjacent to the Woodbury County Fairgrounds, but financing never materialized, and supporters then shifted their focus to Sioux City.

In November, the Sioux City Council pledged $2 million and 12 acres at the site of the former John Morrell pork plant, which closed in 2010 and was later demolished. The city's ag center funding was contingent on pledges of $2 million from Woodbury County and $1 million from MRHD.

County officials say they like the concept of the facility, but the challenge is how to come up with the money. At its weekly meeting Tuesday, the county board of supervisors is tentatively scheduled to hear a presentation from ag center leaders.

The city's application for $14 million in state tax breaks for the ag center and two big-ticket projects is also indirectly tied to the county contributing financially.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority Board has given preliminary approval to Sioux City's request for funding from the state's Reinvestment District program, which reinvests hotel and motel sales tax into economic development projects. But at a recent meeting, the IEDA board challenged Sioux City and other applicants to secure more local support. Board member Dave Bernstein, a Sioux City businessman, suggested Woodbury County and Western Iowa Tech Community College, should offer assistance because each would benefit from the ag center.

Sioux City's $72 million Reinvestment District project also includes a new convention center hotel and Virginia Square, a new commercial development led by Ho-Chunk Inc.

The MRHD board approved the ag center award at its June 6 meeting. It's only the second time the nonprofit has pledged $1 million or more for a single project. Last month, the organization announced a $1.25 million gift to the city of Sioux City to help complete its network of riverfront trails.

Previously, MRHD's single largest grant was $500,000 for the Tyson Events Center, which opened in 2003.
Mackquiber Bracamonte-Mujo, 28, entered his pleas Friday in Woodbury County District Court to four counts of second-degree theft and one count of driving while license barred.

From May 15, 2015, through Dec. 15, Bracamonte-Mujo stole several vehicles and sold them, stripped parts off of them for sale or used the vehicles to commit other crimes. He also was found in possession of three stolen iPads.
Hulse is doing what she believes to be right. If you want to call her something, call her an example to landowners whose property is along the route of Navigator's proposed CO2 pipeline. She wants others like her to know they're not powerless.
DES MOINES | Presidential candidates campaign ads are returning to Iowa televisions today.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, is running campaign ads on television starting today in eight states, including Iowa.

The ads will be the first from a presidential candidate on Iowa TV since the Iowa caucuses concluded on Feb. 1 and the national primary elections ended earlier this week.

Most election forecasters rate Iowa as a likely toss-up state in the November presidential election, which will feature Clinton against presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump.

The two new ads are part of an eight-figure, six-week buy, according to the Clinton campaign.

The ads, titled Always and Quiet moments, focus on Clintons work  as first lady, in the U.S. Senate and as secretary of state  on various causes benefiting women and children.

The ads note Clintons work as first lady to expand health care access to children; the campaign said her efforts helped produce Iowas hawk-i program, which provides health care coverage to 38,600 Iowa children of working families.

Always also includes clips from a Clinton caucus campaign event in Keota, Iowa, in late December 2015.

The ads also will run in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, the campaign said.

An ad produced by Priorities USA, a Super PAC supporting Clinton, has been running in Iowa in recent weeks. The Priorities USA ad criticizes Trump for mocking a reporter with a disability during a campaign event.

The Republican National Committee issued a statement Thursday suggesting the ads exaggerate Clintons role in the childrens health care expansion, saying the ads are recycling debunked falsehoods about (Clintons) biography.

The RNC statement references stories published in 2008 by the Boston Globe and Washington Post, both of which cited lawmakers and other sources who said Clinton was not as central to the creation of the childrens health care program as she implied during her 2008 campaign for president.
CHICAGO -- Imagine that: Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor now agree on the role of heritage in a judge's ability to be impartial. They both say it's a non-issue.

After a surprising -- and reassuring -- display of bipartisan disgust at Trump's recent comments that Indiana-born federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel is biased because his parents are Mexican immigrants, Trump had to backpedal. He released a statement that said his words had been "misconstrued," adding: "I do not feel that one's heritage makes [judges] incapable of being impartial."

Even many of Trump's supporters had denounced him. Speaker Paul Ryan called the candidate's original comments about Curiel "the textbook definition of a racist comment." Newt Gingrich noted, accurately, "If a liberal were to attack Justice Clarence Thomas on the grounds that he's black, we would all go crazy."

Speaking of crazy, there was plenty of that too.

President George W. Bush's disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales came out of the woodwork to support Trump. In a Washington Post opinion piece that underscored several salient points why Curiel is beyond reproach -- namely that while Curiel may be a member of a group called the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, it is not in any way affiliated with the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy organization -- Gonzales sought to explain Trump's unease.

"If ... Trump is acting from a sincere motivation to protect his constitutional right to a fair trial, his willingness to exercise his rights as an American citizen and raising the issue even in the face of severe criticism is surely also something for voters to consider," he wrote, sending judiciary experts across the country into a tizzy.

During a recent telephone news conference, Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said, "Suggesting that a judge is disqualified from presiding over a matter because of his or her racial or ethnic heritage could ultimately bring our judiciary system to a halt. Judges are randomly assigned to cases in their district, which is a system that has served us throughout our entire history. And, in fact, 30 years ago this year, the Supreme Court ruled, in Batson vs. Kentucky, that it is unconstitutional for anyone to peremptorily challenge a juror based on race or ethnicity, due to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment."

Yet despite the many statements about how ridiculous Trump's remarks about Curiel were, at midweek his apologists were still sticking their feet in their mouths as they attempted to stay in the presumed Republican presidential nominee's good graces.

New York state Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican, went on CNN and declared, "You can easily argue that the president of the United States is a racist with his policies and his rhetoric."

And then, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, went for the jugular. He told reporters in his home state, "I think that you don't have any more trouble with what Trump said than when Sotomayor said that -- when she was found saying in speeches that, quote, 'A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.' I don't hear any criticism of that sort of comment by a justice of the Supreme Court."

Grassley is wrong on two counts.

First, everyone and their mother heard the criticism over that comment during Sotomayor's confirmation hearings -- it, apparently, still haunts her to this day.

Second, Sotomayor herself has, on many occasions, taken pains to clarify her stance on race and ethnicity as a judicial lens, most notably during the second day of her confirmation hearings.

"I want to state upfront, unequivocally and without doubt: I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judging," she told senators. "I do believe every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge, regardless of their background or life experience. ... The words I chose, taking the rhetorical flourish, it was a bad idea. I do understand that there are some who have read this differently, and I understand why they might have concern."

So there it is: Sotomayor and Trump agree that a judge's heritage shouldn't imply an inability to be impartial. And for anyone to suggest that it should is, as even Trump's supporters have made clear, racist.

Worse, as other Republicans have noted about this latest Trump offense, it's un-American.
OKOBOJI, Iowa | Juli Johnson walked into a gallery containing a permanent collection representing artists from behind the former Soviet Union's "Iron Curtain."

"You never know what you'll find here," the interim director for Pearson Lakes Art Center said with a smile.

Johnson is correct in pointing out the 2201 Highway 71's facility's eclectic take on artistry.

In addition to its collection of Russian and Soviet Era Impressionism paintings, Pearson also has permanent collections dedicated to children's murals, an outdoor sculpture trail and the Pearson Art Foundation Collection -- a comprehensive series featuring American and European paintings curated under the supervision of Gerald "Bud" and Beverly Pearson more than 20 years ago.

The primary goal of the Pearson Art Foundation Collection -- as well as a principle established by the Pearson Lakes Art Center -- is to expand art appreciation by all members of the community and, specifically, to enhance the enjoyment of art by young people.

Johnson said that's accomplished through an ongoing series of exhibits featuring a variety of artists.

"In addition to presenting works from such artists as (Sioux Falls-based artist) Christopher Hood; (oil painter) Lauren Chapman; and (Spirit Lake, Iowa muralist) Danielle Clouse-Gast, our guests will get to learn about individual pieces during artist talks," Johnson said.

Hopefully, a love of art can be contagious since the Pearson Lakes Art Center offers a host of art classes for both kids and adults.

That includes an interactive educational gallery called "ArtSmart."

"'ArtSmart' is a hands-on program that gives our visitors a chance to discover the creative process of an artist," Johnson explained. "It allows our visitors to expand their understanding of art in all area."

With exhibits that contain wind tubes, color wheels and magnetic boards, art really can be found anywhere.

Yet music fans should also take time to check out the Lauridsen Performing Arts Theatre, which will feature a diverse calendar of events that include big bands, a ukelele workshop as well as tributes to both Ritchie Valens and The Beatles.

"It's very important for us to represent the visual arts as well as the performing arts," Johnson said. "That keeps us relevant to the community."

So does the series of events that the Pearson Lakes Art Center hosts every summer. This includes a Community Art Crawl and Celebrate the Arts program (June 3 - 4); the Bedell Family Color Dash (July 9); and Art in the Park (Aug. 6).

"Lake Okoboji has a very impressive arts community," Johnson said. "The Pearson Lakes Art Center is happy to share that with our visitors every summer and all year 'round."
Well, you gotta hide your drugs somewhere

SIOUX CITY | A woman accused of hiding methamphetamine in her bra has been found guilty of selling the drug in Sioux City.

On Thursday, a jury in U.S. District Court convicted Elizabeth Lopez, 29, of Omaha, Iowa, of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine and possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine.

During the two-day trial, the U.S. Attorney's Office introduced evidence that Lopez was part of a conspiracy to sell more than 50 grams of meth in the Sioux City area. On Aug. 4, Lopez hid 5 grams or more of meth in her bra and traveled from Omaha to Sioux City to sell it, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Lopez faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison and possible maximum of life in prison.

Hide and tweak

SAC CITY, Iowa | An inmate at the Sac County Jail is facing additional charges after telling local authorities where his stashes of meth were located in May.

Matthew James Wessels, 35, of Sac City, had been arrested May 14 for violation of probation. According to court documents, on May 17, he told authorities that he wanted to talk to them in the morning because he had some things at his residence he wanted to get rid of, the report said. Before leaving, he said, "I'm throwing myself under the bus."

At approximately 1:30 p.m., authorities took Wessels to his residence in the 800 block of North 16th Street. In the garage, Wessels gave authorities a small digital scale and two small plastic bags of crystal methamphetamine. Wessels then took authorities to the south of his residence and in the roadside ditch by a small tree gave them another small plastic bag with more crystal meth.

Items were weighed at the sheriff's office and found to be approximately 9 grams.

Wessels was charged with violation of a controlled substance. According to court documents, he was also charged Monday with delivery of a controlled substance connected with the sale of 2 grams of meth to a police informant in July 2015.

Wessels now faces charges for controlled substance violation, delivery of a controlled substance and probation violation. He is being held in the Sac County Jail on $135,000 bond.
The June jobs report disappointed and surprised many, with the U.S. economy only gaining 38,000 jobs in May.

One of the few bright spots was the strength of the healthcare sector, which added more jobs than any other industry. And before you think that healthcare jobs are likely more in demand at bigger companies but youd be mistaken.

Indeed data shows that small businesses have just as much demand for healthcare workers as other sized businesses, with nurses, both registered nurses and licensed practical and vocational nurses, leading the way for demand. Those jobs appear first and third, respectively, on the most in-demand healthcare positions with small businesses.

Healthcare Jobs in Demand Right Now by Small Business

Pharmacy technicians are second-most in demand at small businesses.

While nurses are in demand by all size businesses, Indeed data shows that small businesses have a strong need for highly skilled healthcare workers, like physicians assistants and physical therapists. Physical therapists, Indeed says, are fourth-most in demand positions at a lot of small businesses.

The high skilled positions often require an advanced degree and there is a shortage of this type of talent, said Daniel Culbertson, economic research analyst at Indeed. Additionally, private practices are a large part of the small business healthcare landscape, and they are the ones looking for these specialized workers.

Healthcare is one of the few recession-proof industries, and Culbertson believes that small business demand for both highly skilled and technician roles wont slow down anytime soon.

Rounding out the top 10 healthcare jobs being filled most by small businesses in the U.S. are occupational therapists, medical records and health information techs, speech language,, pathologists, pharmacists, and medical and clinical lab technologists.
Most businesses need to maintain an online presence today. But achieving online success in this increasingly competitive space is a huge challenge, a new study has found.

The survey conducted by GoDaddy and Alignable reveals five top obstacles to a businesss online success. Here is a look at each in a bit more depth.

Building Your Website

According to the study, more than 51 percent of small businesses hire a professional Web designer to build their website. About 26 percent of businesses use DIY Web builders like Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder and Squarespace.

Free website builders provide all the basic tools small businesses need to get up and running in no time, the study says. Before building a website, businesses must properly understand what they need. A clear understanding will make it easier to build a customized site.

Branding Your Website

A cluttered online space means finding a domain name that hasnt already been taken wont be easy. The study also confirms this. It finds that 50 percent of small businesses own more than one domain.

If the domain you are looking for is already taken, get creative. For instance, if you are keen on the domain name www.juiceexpress.com which is already taken, consider options like juiceexpress.us or juiceexpress.biz.

Optimizing Your Website

An extremely interesting finding of the study is that 91 percent of small businesses are looking for more opportunities to generate revenue from their website. On the other hand, 40 percent of businesses are creating and sharing content via blogs less than once a month. So these insights clearly highlight theres plenty of room for growth.

Customer Communication

More than 70 percent of American consumers prefer email to communicate with businesses. For these consumers, trust is a big factor. So if your mail ends with a generic email address like @gmail.com, they may doubt the legitimacy of your business, the study finds.

Selling Products Online

About 48 percent of small businesses sell their products or services on the Web. A key step to growing your business involves enabling users to make purchases from your website. Branching into ecommerce is an effective way to build business online.

Easy-to-use ecommerce site builders and online marketplaces like Etsy are making it easier for businesses to reach more customers.

For the study, GoDaddy and Alignable surveyed more than 100,000 small business owners in North America.

Boston-based Alignable is a social network for local businesses to generate trusted referrals. GoDaddy is an Arizona-based Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company.

Get the latest headlines from Small Business Trends. Follow us on Google News.
There are many fitness goals out there that we desire. Some of us want to be leaner and others wish to put on muscle mass. The thing is, for you to achieve your fitness goals, you need to
The Calvert County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) adopted a resolution at its June 14 meeting that streamlines procedures for amending the Calvert County Zoning Ordinance and fosters openness and accountability in the zoning ordinance amendment process.The resolution clarifies the roles of the BOCC and the Calvert County Planning Commission regarding zoning ordinance amendments. It also sets a timeline for Planning Commission action to ensure timely public input. The policy states that, once the BOCC refers proposed amendments to the Planning Commission, the commission has up to 180 days to make a recommendation to the BOCC. If the Planning Commission makes no recommendation within that time, the BOCC may vote to proceed with its public hearing, deliberation and decision regarding the proposed amendments without the Planning Commissions recommendation, except where State law requires the Planning Commissions recommendation to move forward. Exempted from this policy are certain amendments for which Planning Commission recommendation is required by state law.In deliberations over zoning ordinance amendments related to the Prince Frederick Town Center, we have experienced what the commissioners believe are undue delays and a lack of openness, said BOCC President Evan Slaughenhoupt Jr. As a response, this resolution clearly delineates the roles of the Board of County Commissioners and the Planning Commission. It also establishes a policy to ensure a balanced approach to zoning amendments while allowing for appropriate public input in reasonable time frame.The policy further states that failure of the Planning Commission to meet the time objectives is grounds for removal of Planning Commission members by the BOCC.This is a strong statement, acknowledged Commissioner Slaughenhoupt, but we believe it is merited as part of our effort to engender accountability in local government.The Calvert County, Maryland, Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) yesterday approved a $246.8 million balanced budget by a vote of three to two. The budget includes increases to real property and local income tax rates to take effect July 1, 2016 and Jan. 1, 2017, respectively, as well as a resolution to annually reevaluate the need for the tax increase.The Calvert County income tax rate will be raised from 2.8 percent to 3 percent. This would mark the first income tax rate increase in 13 years or since Jan. 2004. The new 3 percent rate would place Calvert County near the state average and in line regionally with Charles and St. Marys counties.The property tax increase takes the rate from $.892 to $.952 per one hundred dollars of assessed value. Real property taxes have not been raised in Calvert County since 1987 or 29 years. Under the new rate, Calvert Countys real property taxes would be the 9th lowest among Marylands 23 counties and Baltimore City.The new tax rates will generate approximately $8.6 million and close a significant and ongoing financial deficit created after a prolonged national economic downturn. The county prepared for the downturn and continued to budget conservatively by cutting operating budgets for several years, postponing needed purchases and holding the line on hiring new employees through a soft hiring freeze.The approved FY 2017 budget allows county staff to avoid using the countys fund balance as the sole method to address the ongoing deficit and allows for increased spending in areas either not funded, or under-funded in recent years. Those areas include road maintenance, school improvements, fire and emergency medical services apparatus and supplies, and county employee salary steps.Not one of the county commissioners wanted to raise taxes, said Calvert County Board President Evan Slaughenhoupt. We have spent the last year analyzing and examining the operational efficiency of the countys expenditures and services, and weve done so in public forums and via our county website. Based on thorough examination, we understand that in order to maintain our exceptional bond rating, our exceptional level of services and our exceptional workforce, we had no other choice. Todays vote was necessary for the sustainability of Calvert County Governments services to the citizens today, and for many many years to come.The adopted FY 2017 General Fund budget is approximately $7.9 million more than the FY 2016 General Fund budget. This is due to the following changes: $2.0 million to restore the annual paving budget $1.5 million more for vehicles and equipment $1.2 million on a salary increase for employees and other staffing changes $2.5 million more in pensions and insurance, but $1.2 million less for other post-employment benefit trust contributions $1.0 million more in snow removal and contingency funds $0.9 million in other operating increasesThe six-year Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) is reviewed annually in light of the Countys financial forecast and the cost of commodities, in addition to requests from citizens. The Education component, primarily Northern High School ($15.9 million) and Public Safety ($5.9 million) categories of Fiscal Year 2017 CIP budget make up the majority of the $32.7 million in planned capital improvement expenses for FY 2017. The remaining details of the CIP are presented in the budget.Residents are encouraged to review the approved budget online.Review the approved FY 2017 budget at http://www.co.cal.md.us/index.aspx?NID=2049
WASHINGTON

(June 16, 2016)The U.S. Department of Defense recently announced the following contract awards that pertain to local Navy activities., is being awardedfor firm-fixed-price task order 0011 against a previously issued basic ordering agreement (N00019-16-G-0001) for automated maintenance environment in support of F/A-18 A-F and EA-18G aircraft for the Navy and the government of Australia. Work will be performed in St. Louis, Missouri, and is expected to be completed in December 2018. Fiscal 2016 aircraft procurement (Navy); and foreign military sales funds in the amount of $17,241,112 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the fiscal year. This order combines purchases for the Navy ($15,468,605; 90 percent); and the government of Australia ($1,772,507; 10 percent) under the Foreign Military Sales program. The, is the contracting activity., is being awarded afirm-fixed-price contract for the procurement of 101 full-rate production Lot 39 advanced multi-purpose displays for F/A-18E/F and EA-18F aircraft. Work will be performed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is expected to be completed in October 2017. Fiscal 2015 aircraft procurement (Navy); and fiscal 2016 research, development, test and evaluation (Navy) funds in the amount of $9,086,802 are being obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. The, is the contracting activity (N00019-16-C-0057).
Da'Juon Washington, left, a rising senior at North Point High School is sworn in June 14 as the new Student Board Member by Board of Education Chairman Virginia McGraw, right. Washington will serve as the Student Board Member for the 2016-17 school year.

LA PLATA, Md.

(June 16, 2016)The Board of Education on June 14 met its new student representative for the coming school year, North Point High School rising senior DaJuon Washington. He was sworn in as the Student Board Member at the start of the Boards monthly meeting by Board Chairman Virginia McGraw.Washington may have been familiar to the Board members as he served as the student liaison for North Point during the 2015-16 school year. In his first report to the Board as the Student Board Member, Washington said he looks forward to working with the group.I am extremely thrilled to serve as the new student member of the board. This truly is a testament of how hard work pays off, he said.As the new Student Board Member, Washington will work with a committee of student liaisons from the countys seven high schools. Each high school is required to have a liaison, who is selected by methods approved by each schools student government association (SGA) and principal.The liaisons for the 2016-17 school year are Kaitlyn Willett, rising junior and alternate Student Board Member, Henry E. Lackey High School; Sarah Gough, rising senior, La Plata High School; Donnell Johnson, rising senior, Maurice J. McDonough High School; Jordyn Best, rising junior, North Point High School; Arianna Hebner, rising senior, St. Charles High School; Amira Sago, rising senior, Thomas Stone High School; and Zeles Amoah, rising senior, Westlake High School.Washington was named as the new Student Board Member last month. Students interested in being considered for the position are required to submit an essay regarding a student concern and possible solution. A committee of school system staff reviews the essays.Each year, the top three students in the running for the position give a speech at the spring Charles County Association of Student Councils (CCASC) meeting, and participate in a question and answer session with student delegates. Student delegates from all middle and high schools vote to elect the Student Member to the Board, as well as for the officers to represent the CCASC the following school year.
The outer Banks of North Carolina in the morning hours before the beach fills up with vehicles and people. (Photo: David Noss)

It's beach season along the old Atlantic seaboard, drawing crowds of us inlanders east like our creeks and rivers. We're heading for the Bay, the beach, the Outer Banks eager for life's troubles to evaporate between the spanking hot sand and some breakers.But as coastal dwellers know, life's troubles are here to greet us. They've arrived in abundance, dumping down a kind of sea treasure nobody wants to findan ancient treasure called wisdom.These beloved beaches are disappearing as oceans rise. The very development that accommodates us beach lovers has far worsened the effect.That's because manmade structures are rarely designed for nature's flux. They're made for human control, separation, permanence. That these goals are at odds with reality is nowhere more clear than along a beach, as any kid with a sandcastle knows.Many rows of pricier beach castles here have collapsed, swallowed by the sea. Insurance rates and federal rescue tabsat a cost to all taxpayerskeep soaring.One new study projects that within eight decades, 13.1 million Americans could be displaced by sea-rise. The East Coast would experience the heaviest loss. If we slow climate change, the toll could drop to 4.3 million coastal dwellers.But climate action has formidable obstacles, namely well-heeled stakeholders and human inertia. Something in us refuses to give ground. So the coastlines have to.In the Chesapeake Bay, shorelinesentire islandsalready are disappearing. Tangier Island will likely be uninhabitable in 25 years. Its residents and the Army Corps of Engineers want multi-million-dollar funding from Congress to build new protective barriers called "breakwaterThe problem, many geologists point out, is that water doesn't breaknot for long. It flows. This very flexibility is the secret to its endurance.The same is true of coastal islands. Their ability to stir allows these beaches to respond to reality, to shift, re-form themselvesand survive.That's why, says Duke geologist Orrin Pilkey, construction solutions create their own problem. "[You can] stop the retreat of the shoreline," he says, "but you have not addressed the underlying cause of erosion. Thus the beach continues to lose sand . . . until it disappears."Take North Carolina's Outer Banks. A perfect storm of development, sea-rise and hurricanes have long been clobbering these historic barrier islands, leaving familiar news footage.Roads buckle, slabs of asphalt pitch sidelong into the sea, oceanfront houses get picked up and crashed down elsewhere, timbers bobbing dismally in the surf. Whatever is hard and rigid goes ker-smash. Not because nature is angry and destructive, but because natureand these barrier islandswant to survive.And they would if we let them, says geologist Stanley Riggs. He's been researching these Outer Banks for decades. "The only constant in dynamic coastal systems is that of change," Riggs points out.That's why, left to themselves, these islands would respond to sea-rise by shifting westward, reshaping into vital wildlife habitat and still buffering the mainland.But we humans don't want them to shift. We've become entrenched expensively in roads and rigid, ill-placed structures.To continue shoring it all up, Riggs said, on these "narrow and collapsing simple barrier islands" would mean "forever fighting expensive battles"and losing. Everyone would pay, including the beaches.What's the alternative? Instead of fighting the changing seas, these geologists urge, we humans need to change our response. Riggs and Pilkey have called for a retreat from all the futile development and mitigation along these fragile beaches.For us seashore lovers, admittedly, a retreat is hard to fathom. Would it mean an end to human presence on the shore, an end to those local economies?On the contrary, Riggs points out, it's the only way that any economyand the beaches themselvescan survive.He envisions a high-tech ferry system to replace harmful and ill-fated roads, along with an eco-tourism grounded in reality and aliveness, not illusion.Otherwise, our futile constructions, repairs and expenses amount to what geologist Pilkey regards as "beating our head against the wall."Well, we are fond of walls. We believe they will protect us. That's why Riggs, Pilkey and myriad climate scientists have met with stonewalling opposition from powerful industry lobbies and public officials entrenched in the status quo.But our planet isn't a stasis. It flows. That's how it is able to stir us all to life. This aliveness and stir, ironically, are what we so value along the coastand a powerful reason to be stirred in response.
DAHLGREN, Va. - Matthew Swartz - U.S. Fleet Cyber Command Executive Director and Command Information Officer - talks to the audience at Naval Support Facility Dahlgren about the 2016 Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month's national theme: "Walk Together, Embrace Differences, Build Legacies." Swartz weaved personal stories about growing up at the Dahlgren naval base into his keynote speech. ""In those journeys I used to take with her, I learned from her differences to the point where I finally got comfortable with our differences and started to embrace them," said Swartz about long walks he would have with his mother and his differences as an American with Japanese ethnicity. "I no longer tried to hide them, which was interesting." (U.S. Navy photo by Patrick Dunn/Released)

DAHLGREN, Va.

Florence Smith Finch, the daughter of an American soldier and a Filipino mother, who was working for the U.S. Army during World War II when the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Claiming Filipino citizenship, she avoided being imprisoned with other enemy nationals at Santo Tomas Internment. She joined the underground resistance movement and smuggled food, medicine, and supplies to American captives.

Col. Young-Oak Kim. In 1951, Kim was the First Asian-American to lead a combat battalion in a war. Kim is also the only Korean-American to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at the Battle of Anzio during World War II. Kim, having reenlisted and promoted to major, became the first ethnic minority to command a regular combat battalion, the first of the 31st Infantry.

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye. In 2000, he was the first Japanese-American and only second recipient to receive both the Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor. Inouye is also the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress. On Dec. 7, 1941, the fateful day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 17-year-old Inouye was one of the first Americans to handle civilian casualties in the Pacific war. During World War II, Inouye served in the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Composed of Soldiers of Japanese ancestry, the 442nd became one of the most decorated military units in U.S. history. For his combat heroism, which cost him his right arm, Inouye was awarded the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart with Cluster.

Susan Ahn Cuddy joined the Navy in 1942 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. She was the first Asian-American woman to join the U.S. Navy and became the first female to operate flexible-mount or turret-mounted machine guns on an aircraft in the Navy. She left the Navy in 1946 at the rank of Lieutenant.

Maj. Kurt Chew-Een Lee, the first Marine officer of Chinese descent, broke barriers of segregation upon his 1944 Marine Corps enlistment, retiring as a Major in 1968. Lee earned the Navy Cross under fire in Korea in September 1950.

Rear Adm. (Gordon Pai'ea) Chung-Hoon served during World War II and became the U.S. Navy's first Asian American flag officer. He attended the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1934, after becoming the first Asian American, U.S. citizen to graduate from the academy. He is a recipient of the Navy Cross and Silver Star for extraordinary heroism as commanding officer of USS Sigsbee from May 1944 to October 1945.

(June 16, 2016)Matthew Swartz recounted the day his brother signed up at the Virginia Army National Guard unit in Fredericksburg, Va., shortly after 9/11."He was out of the Army for 10 years and just had his second daughter, less than a year old," said Swartz. "He had a very stable job as a police officer, and his first daughter was about to graduate from high school."Swartzthe Executive Director and Command Information Officer for U.S. Fleet Cyber Commandwas speaking to his audience at the Naval Support Facility Dahlgren base theater about the 2016 Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month's national theme: "Walk Together, Embrace Differences, Build Legacies.""You can imagine the conversation in his household with his wife when he told her that he was departing for Iraq in less than a monthafter making that decision without talking to her," said Swartz."Who would do that," he questioned, as military members, government civilians, and defense contractors listened to the keynote speaker at the May 24 Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD)-sponsored event."I think a lot of the culture and attributes that my mother instilled in him in terms of hard work," explains who would do that, said Swartz. "They trained you to do a job, you're expected to do the job, and you're expected to do the best you can."Moreover, Swartz recalled the day his brother deployed as a member of the 29th Infantry Division out of Mary Washington College with a combat badge on his shoulder. "None of the 29ers had it," said Swartz who quoted his brother's comment: "There's not a single guy there wearing a CIB (combat infantry badge). How can I be from this town with this training and let that unit go forward without me?"Swartz considered the story as an example of "walking together"the first component of an AAPI Heritage Month theme that defined the struggles Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders faced and overcame in a process that was not always favorable."I take a lot of pride in what he's contributed and provided," said Swartz. "It's one reason that I continue to do what I do in the Navy as a civilian. It's the sense of commitment and I think that's why we are all here. It's because we are committed to the mission. We are committed to what we do every day and we want to do it the best we can, whether we are wearing a uniform or whether we are wearing a suit. And you have to embrace those differences. I think those differences are what inspired him to do what he does."This year's three imperativeswalk together, embrace differences, and build legaciesserve to promote equal representation and to remove barriers in developing diverse leaders, acknowledging the challenges that still exist today."It's an exciting time for me to celebrate our heritage and talk to you about the contributions of the (AAPI) members that are part of our Navy team today, but also those who came before us, recognizing the contributions that they provided," said Swartz. "This is an opportunity for me. I am of Japanese heritage. My mother was first generation Japanese. She married an American GI during the Vietnam War while he was stationed in Japan, and eventually found herself coming to the United States."Swartz reminisced about growing up on the Dahlgren naval base while his father worked as a government employee. The stories clearly credit his mother and her diversity with shaping him to be who he is today."If you walk together, embrace differences, embrace each other, and take what you have from each other to do the best that you can as a collective unityou will build a legacy," said Swartz. "You don't have to try to build it. I take a lot of pride in my family legacy. We have a pretty robust military background, military heritage, and commitment to service. That's a legacy that we built as a family. If you can find a legacy that you will take pride in or that you're going to own, I think you will achieve that, and you're going to get an inspiration in that."Swartz managed to simultaneously work full-time in a factory and part-time at a bank holding company while drilling as an active Army reservist and attending Mary Washington College where he earned his bachelor's degree. He went on to earn master of science degrees from the University of Virginia and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces National Defense University."I think the traits of hard work and dedication will enable you to find out your path and help provide the things you need," said the cyber command senior executive. "So that's walking togetherwhat you need to do."He mentioned another personal example of walking together."In those journeys I used to take with her, I learned from her differences to the point where I finally got comfortable with our differences and started to embrace them," said Swartz about long walks he would have with his mother and his differences as an American with Japanese ethnicity. "I no longer tried to hide them, which was interesting."Swartz and NSWCDD Commanding Officer Capt. Brian Durant reviewed examples of Asian American and Pacific Islander lives and legacies that are bigger than the individual legacy."I want to pay homage to the folks who came before us. It's important to understand who paved the way for us," said Swartz, recalling legacies of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, including Florence Smith Finch, Col. Young-Oak Kim, and U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye. Florence Smith Finch, the daughter of an American soldier and a Filipino mother, who was working for the U.S. Army during World War II when the Japanese occupied the Philippines. Claiming Filipino citizenship, she avoided being imprisoned with other enemy nationals at Santo Tomas Internment. She joined the underground resistance movement and smuggled food, medicine, and supplies to American captives. Eventually, she was arrested by the Japanese, tortured, and sentenced to three years imprisonment. After serving five months of her sentence, Finch was liberated by American forces. Returning to the United States aboard a Coast Guard transport, she headed for Buffalo, New York, her father's hometown. She then enlisted in the Coast Guard to "avenge the death of her late husband," a Navy PT boat crewman killed at Corregidor. Seaman First Class Finch was the first U.S Coast Guard Women's Reserve member to receive the Asian-Pacific Campaign ribbon in recognition of her service in the Philippines. At the end of the war, she was awarded the civilian U.S. Medal of Freedom. Col. Young-Oak Kim. In 1951, Kim was the First Asian-American to lead a combat battalion in a war. Kim is also the only Korean-American to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at the Battle of Anzio during World War II. Kim, having reenlisted and promoted to major, became the first ethnic minority to command a regular combat battalion, the first of the 31st Infantry. When then-2nd Lt. Young Oak Kim reported for duty at Camp Shelby, Miss., in February 1943, the commander of the 100th Battalion (Separate), Lt. Col. Farrant Turner, offered him an immediate transfer because "Koreans and Japanese don't always get along." Kim refused on the spot: "You're wrong. They're Americans, I'm American, and we're going to fight for America." The young Korean-American lieutenant was being both patriotic and pragmatic. Born in 1919 in downtown Los Angeles; amid Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, and Jewish immigrants, Kim knew his opportunities for advancement would be limited in a "white man's army." "If I wasn't with the 100th," Kim recalled many years later, "I would be a PR [Public Relations] officer or have some insignificant duty someplace else, because nobody was going to let me, as an Asian, command regular troops." Sen. Daniel K. Inouye. In 2000, he was the first Japanese-American and only second recipient to receive both the Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor. Inouye is also the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress. On Dec. 7, 1941, the fateful day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 17-year-old Inouye was one of the first Americans to handle civilian casualties in the Pacific war. During World War II, Inouye served in the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Composed of Soldiers of Japanese ancestry, the 442nd became one of the most decorated military units in U.S. history. For his combat heroism, which cost him his right arm, Inouye was awarded the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart with Cluster. He practiced law in Hawaii before entering territorial politics in 1954. When Hawaii became the 50th state, Inouye was one of its first representatives in the U.S. Congress. He won an election to the U.S. Senate in 1962. Inouye served as the Senate's president pro tempore from 2010 until his death in 2012. In 2013, Inouye was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, becoming the first senator to receive both the Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor."Asian American and Pacific Islanders have been serving honorably in the United States Military since the War of 1812," said Durant. "The first Asian American Pacific Islander to reach general officer rank was Brig. Gen. Albert Lyman, who was ethnic Hawaiian. He was the commanding general of the 32nd Army Division that fought in the Leyte campaigns in the Philippines in World War II. The highest ranked Asian American Pacific Islander in the military was Eric Shinseki, recently former four-star general and Army chief of staff."Durant also recalled legacies of Asian American and Pacific Islanders Susan Ahn Cuddy, Major Kurt Chew-Een, and Rear Adm. (Gordon Pai'ea) Chung-Hoon. Susan Ahn Cuddy joined the Navy in 1942 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. She was the first Asian-American woman to join the U.S. Navy and became the first female to operate flexible-mount or turret-mounted machine guns on an aircraft in the Navy. She left the Navy in 1946 at the rank of Lieutenant. Even in her elder years, Susan remained active, speaking at Navy functions and Korean American community events. She died at her home June 24, 2015 at aged 100 in Northridge, California. Maj. Kurt Chew-Een Lee, the first Marine officer of Chinese descent, broke barriers of segregation upon his 1944 Marine Corps enlistment, retiring as a Major in 1968. Lee earned the Navy Cross under fire in Korea in September 1950. He passed away in 2014. He remains a prominent symbol for AAPI Heritage Month and Lee is recognized alongside all Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders within the Marine Corps. Rear Adm. (Gordon Pai'ea) Chung-Hoon served during World War II and became the U.S. Navy's first Asian American flag officer. He attended the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1934, after becoming the first Asian American, U.S. citizen to graduate from the academy. He is a recipient of the Navy Cross and Silver Star for extraordinary heroism as commanding officer of USS Sigsbee from May 1944 to October 1945. He served 25 years in the U.S. Navy and retired as an admiral. He died July 24, 1979 at age 68.
I woke up Sunday morning to the horrible, alarmingly common news of an incident of gun violence and terrorism. But this one was different: The shooters target was the LGBT community. I learned about the incident as I was getting ready to march in Philadelphias Gay Pride Parade. I never questioned whether I would march, but it took me hours to realize why.

The thousands of people who gathered for the Philadelphia parade were joyous, not sober, even as news began to stream out: The Orlando shooting left 49 dead, more than 50 wounded and was now the worse mass shouting in U.S. history.

As the parade moved forward, I was confronted with images of the past, of the very first gay pride march, in New York on June 28, 1970. It was called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and I was there. We didnt know what to expect, as no group of known homosexuals had ever gathered and marched across Manhattan to proclaim their pride in who they were. At first, the city wouldnt give us a permit to march, but we were going to do so with or without it. Because LGBT people didnt usually leave Greenwich Village as an openly out group, we expected violence and we prepared for it by taking lessons in passive resistance. At 18 years old, I was one of the youngest marshals.

Until that June 28, no more than 100 or so openly gay people had ever been organized in a march, picket or protest. But this was one year after the Stonewall riots, and we wanted to celebrate our pride in our community, in the youth and trans organizations wed build. Wed put together legal and medical support systems and even the worlds first LGBT community center. We wanted to celebrate.

On the day, we didnt know if there would be many more than 100 people brave enough to march with us. But when we got to 23rd Street, I looked back to see a line of people still coming out from the village. That sent chills down my back. The final participation counts in the Christopher Street Liberation Day March range from 5,000 to 15,000 people.

As it was then, Sundays parade was no longer a mere celebration, it was a march of defiance. It was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. The past few decades have seen success after success for our community, but those of us who were there in those early days recall the violence. We recall Stonewall, and the Comptons riots in San Francisco. We recall the numerous firebombs at our churches; we recall the arrests, the incarcerations, the nickel rides in police wagons; we recall Mathew Shepard; we recall the tens of thousands who were lobotomized; we recall a nation and its president turning its back as a plague killed hundreds of thousands. In 1973, an LGBT club called the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans was firebombed, and 34 people died.

This is the violent history against our community that has been ignored for the sake of celebration. Orlando is proof that what we started in 1969, then again in 1981, is still true today. We are not just fighting for our lives, we are fighting to have a life, a life beyond the silence, beyond what was expected of us before the movement took off.

What has saved us all these years, through all the horrors that our community has faced, is our sense of pride. All of us marching in events this pride month will be doing so in honor of those killed not only in Orlando, but nationwide. Our community has lived with this violence for all these decades. It has taken a mass shooting to shift the news medias attention back to the real issue: hatred for who we are and how we live; hatred for our efforts to carve out a more inclusive world for ourselves.

Nothing will replace the lives that were lost in Orlando; it will take time to close the fractures. But our community will endure. Our triumphs and our tragedies make us who we are. We who march with pride and joy in our hearts make a pledge that was made at Stonewall and at that first gay pride event: We will be out and proud and there is nothing you can do to force us back into silence.

Mark Segal, former President of the National Gay & Lesbian Press Association and National Gay Newspaper Guild is the nations most-award-winning commentator in LGBT media. His bestselling memoir is "And Then I Danced, Traveling The Road To LGBT Equality." Follow @PhilaGayNews
It was, quite possibly, the longest 49 seconds the students of Coral Springs Charter School ever experienced.

Each second was for one of the 49 victims of the attack that took place at Pulse nightclub in Orlando on Sunday  a moment of silence held during a candlelight vigil at the school tonight. It was a vigil that began with a rainbow forming off in the distance.

Its a sign, said Sara Parks, student government association advisor.

Joining the students were faculty, parents, members of the community and the Coral Springs Police Department.

Valedictorian Kasia Wiech recounted the story of her frantic efforts to make sure her friend, who was visiting Orlando during the attack, was unharmed. But thats not the case for 49 others, said an emotional Wiech.

Wiech, and Student Government Association President Gabi Pineros read the names of the victims and talked about the origin and meaning behind the Pride Flag. Pineros said no one should be targeted because of their sexual orientation or any other reason.

When is enough, enough? she asked.

Earlier in the day, a blood drive was held. During the vigil, students sold food, water plants and pride wristbands to raise money for the victims.

Theresa Brier, a representative for Congressman Ted Deutch, read a statement on his behalf. Deutch called on Americans to unite against hate and renew efforts to make communities places of love and safety. Lets remember that they were taken from us in a place that served as a refuge to them . . . My hope and prayer is that this tragedy will not drive a wedge through our community. The loved ones of those lost remember them as being kind, passionate, and joyful about life. Lets honor them by following their example.

Despite lightning and threatening rain clouds, the crowd that gathered tonight stayed until the end. Some stayed longer, waiting until their candles had burned all the way down to the foil candle holders.

I hope we send a message to everyone that love will conquer hate, Parks said.

For more photos check out our Facebook gallery here.
One of the victims of the Orlando massacre was a Captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, the Pentagon disclosed Tuesday.

Capt. Antonio Davon Brown, 30, was one of 49 people murdered by a madman during the early hours Sunday at Pulse Nightclub. A graduate of Florida A&M University, Brown lived in Cocoa Beach.

In a statement, Defense Department Secretary Ash Carter expressed deep sadness for the soldiers death.

Capt. Antonio Davon Brown served his country for nearly a decade, stepping forward to do the noblest thing a young person can do, which is to protect others. His service both at home and overseas gave his fellow Americans the security to dream their dreams, and live full lives. The attack in Orlando was a cowardly assault on those freedoms, and a reminder of the importance of the mission to which Capt. Brown devoted his life," Carter said.

The Army Times reports Brown was deployed to Kuwait for 11 months during the drawdown of Operation Iraqi Freedom. According to the U.S. Army, since November 2013, Brown was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 383rd Regiment, 4th Calvary Brigade, 85th Support Command based in St. Louis.

Lt. Col. Kevin Dasher, commanding officer of the battalion, told the Army Times Brown was a loyal and dutiful officer who truly cared about the soldiers in his charge. Brown, the Army says, received his commission in August 2008 and was assigned to a Decatur, Ga.-based combat support group. He transferred to Fort Riley, Kansas in 2009 where his unit was deployed to Kuwait.

Eric Fanning, the Armys newly confirmed Secretary, said Browns death was even more personal. Fanning is an openly gay man.

To be blunt, it could have been me, Fanning said in a Facebook post. This act of cowardice sought to rend the fabric of our nation, our people and my community. I promise you it will not; rather, it will almost certainly bring us all closer together, advancing the tolerance and progress he sought to destroy.

Carter echoed Fannings comments.

We stand with the people of Orlando and the nations LGBT community during this difficult time, and stand in determination to defeat ISIL and prevent the spread of its hateful ideology, Carter said.

On a state level, the massacre reignites debate about hate crime laws. Scott Herman, a Gulf War combat disabled veteran who lives in Oakland Park is none too pleased with the initial response from Florida Governor Rick Scott, who failed to acknowledge the LGBT community.

It took the Governors staff 36 hours to even type the letters LGBT, Herman said.

Herman, who sits on several veterans boards in South Florida, also took issue with Attorney General Pam Bondis office.

Its shameful that it took such an assault on the LGBT community for those in executive power in Tallahassee to realize we are all human," Herman said. "And if the criminal would have been taken alive due to our current laws he and/or she would not have faced hate crime charges on the state level. Even now our State Attorney General (Bondi) is pretending to care when just last year she considered married couples like those killed in Orlando and even my military family a threat to our state."
People dressed in business attire with jackets and suits. Many women wore dresses but they were of dark color fabric, projecting a serious image.

The Viridian Cannabis Investment Conference, held last week in Fort Lauderdale, was not for your average, run-of-the-mill pot smoker. Business leaders, Wall Street investors, entrepreneurs and attorneys made up the conference hosted by the Westin in northern Broward County.

Florida is poised to become the first state in the South to legalize cannabis for medical purposes. A constitutional amendment is, once again, set to appear on Novembers ballot, asking Floridians if they approve of the substance. Last time it was on the ballot it got 58 percent, just short of the 60 percent it needed to pass.

We cant count the chickens before they hatch, warned NORML Vice Chairman Norm Kent, making a reference to his farmer friend Arnold from New Yorks Catskill Mountains. We cant be opening up stores before the votes are counted.

Kent was one of many speakers at Viridian Capital Advisors event. Sue Sisley, a medical doctor, addressed the situation with veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Dr. Sisley owns a letter of commendation from former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Twenty-two veterans a day are lost to suicide, Dr. Sisley said. This is a public health crisis.

Dr. Sisley is conducting a cannabis study in Arizona and Maryland in relation to veterans who suffer from PTSD. She said the veterans she has seen were like zombies. The veterans hospitals, Dr. Sisley said, are pouring pills down their throats.

Scott Calhoun, a Gulf War vet, agreed.

The VA prescribed me 75 pills, Calhoun told a press conference at Wednesdays event. Big Pharma wants to see me drugged out.
Check out this week's latest news from around the world!

International  Suggested renegotiations of Trans-Pacific Partnership would demand equal treatment for LGBT citizens

In response to new persecutions of LGBT residents of Malaysia, Rep. Mark Pocan alongside more than two dozen House colleagues, has issued a letter to President Obama arguing that the Trans-Pacific Partnership to include protections for gender and sexual minorities, according to a [email protected] release.

The adjustments to the treaty would also demand that all countries participating in the TPP treat all of their citizens as equal under the law regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

It continues to be clear that Malaysia will not voluntarily end the repression and harassment directed at its LGBTQ citizens and that pinky promises of future reform are not enough to ensure compliance with basic and needed international human rights standards or ensure new dignities and protections for all Malaysians, said Jerome Davis, Executive Director of Pride at Work.

The recent mistreatment of the LGBTQ community in Malaysia as well as its neighbor Brunei have justified concerns to further human rights advocacy across the world. Instead of leveraging the trade pact in order to encourage enforceable progress on LGBTQ rights in these countries and others, the TPP has so far been a missed opportunity to improve the lives and protections for all, according to the release.

Dear Mr. President, Rep. Pocan wrote, we urge you to use the opportunity presented by the United States inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership to explicitly protect LGBT individuals in the agreements participating countries  Given the continued prevalence of attacks on the LGBT community in Malaysia and Brunei, we urge you to consider renegotiating the agreement to include protections for gender and sexual minorities and further demand that these countries treat all of their citizens as equal under the law regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Religion  Hamas founders grandson is a gay Christian in NYC

John Calvin  a name he chose to replace his birth name  is a gay Christian who fled the Middle East for fear of certain execution at the hands of his own family, according to the New York Post.

Calvin left his home, leaving behind his jihadi grandfather, Said Bilal, one of the founders of the jihadist group Hamas, at the age of 14  fleeing the members of his family involved in the terrorism business.

He began studying Christianity and decided to convert. He moved to Canada, changed his name, and as an adult he came out as gay.

Shortly after, his father and family members began plotting an honor killing for Calvin, stating that if he ever returned to West Bank, hed be killed just as Saddam Husseins son-in-law was killed after running from Iraq, according to CNN.

Ive lost count of how many threats there are on my life, and yet I prevail, Calvin said.

Still considered a de facto member of the terror network, Calvin has faced many struggles when it comes to registering for refugee status. He was rejected by the Canadian government last year, and fled to the United States hoping for asylum. Instead he was detained for seven months.

However, with death threats on Calvins head ever present, and American judge decided to give Calvin a deferred removal, meaning he wont be deported and can apply for work permits every year, CNN said.

Calvin hopes to go to law school and maybe one day have a husband and two kids, and I guess live happily ever after, he said.

International  Thousands march for gay rights in Poland, Croatia

(EDGE) Thousands of people marched Saturday in colorful gay pride events in Italy, Poland and Croatia urging support for minority rights in the mostly Catholic nations.

The parades in Poland and Croatia come amid mounting right-wing sentiments that pose new challenges to gay rights activists. Italian participants, however, had more reason to celebrate after winning the right to form same-sex civil unions this year.

Still, the Italians said there is far more to be done given the limited nature of the new civil union law, which took effect last Sunday.

Italy doesn't allow same-sex marriage, and gay rights proponents failed to get the civil unions law to include adoption by a gay civil union partner of the biological child of the other person in the union.

"In a country like Italy where LGBT rights are not fully recognized, the fact of showing ourselves in public in front of other people means that we are claiming our presence. In this moment we are saying: 'even if you do not agree with us, we are here,'" said Nadir Signori, a participant from Brescia.

In Zagreb, former interior minister Ranko Ostojic and several well-known public figures joined an event dubbed "Croatia is Not Over Yet." Ostojic says "I am glad to be here today, this is my Croatia."

Liberals have warned that Croatia has been tilting to the right under a conservative government that took over in January. Similarly in Poland, there are concerns for minority rights under a right-wing government that took office in November.

Health  United Nations commits to double AIDS treatment

A high-level United National meeting came to a close on Friday as countries committed to nearly doubling the amount of people who receive HIV treatment in the next five years, according to EDGE.

The U.N.s 193 member states committed for the first time to monitoring the quality of treatment, with the goal to reduce the viral load of 90 percent of antiretroviral recipients to an undetectable level  thus improving the quality of life and reducing the risk of transmission.

The United Nations is now aiming to raise $13 billion over the next three years in order to support these goals.

The United States also announced Thursday that it would start a new $100 million Key Populations Investment Fund in order to reach people most at risk, such as young women, gay men, transgender people and intravenous drug users.

Today is the day that we collectively say that we will end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, General Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft said. We must pay greater attention to equality and inclusion, uphold human rights and speak out against stigma and discrimination.

"Too many leaders say they support the end of AIDS and claim to stand with the people facing the life-threatening effects of bigotry and discrimination on full display during this week's negotiations. But for many governments these are just words  they fail to take action where it counts," Asia Russell, Executive Director of the Health Global Access Project, said in a statement. "We are therefore heartened to see the U.S. government pledging funding to directly confront the human rights violations that keep quality, evidence based prevention and treatment services from key populations around the world."

National  Hundreds line up to give blood after gay club shooting

(EDGE) Hundreds of people in Orlando have lined up to give blood to help the victims of the massacre at a gay nightclub.

Officials at OneBlood say they have received such an overwhelming response that they are now asking donors to come back over the next several days. More than 50 people were injured and 49 were killed when a gunman opened fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning.

In the hours after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, officials urged people to donate blood to help the victims.

In December, the nation's three-decade-old ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men was formally lifted, but there are still major restrictions to limit who can give blood. The Food and Drug Administration said it replaced the lifetime ban with a new policy barring donations from men who have had sex with a man in the previous year.

International  Ukraine holds its first major pride march in Kiev

(EDGE) Around a thousand people turned up on Sunday for Ukraine's first major gay pride march which was held amid tight security measures in the capital Kiev.

Several thousand police forces were guarding the procession in central Kiev and the rally was peaceful despite far-right groups making threats last week to attack it.

People were marching with rainbow flags and carried placards saying "Love has no gender."

"The road to equality in Ukraine is difficult as well as dangerous," Bohdan Hloba, one of the rally's organizers, said. "We have been threatened with a 'bloodbath' but every step of this march gives us hope."

Authorities sanctioned gay rights marches when the new pro-Western government came into power after the 2014 revolution, but earlier gatherings have been small and have come under attack from far-right groups.

The Kiev city police cordoned off nine streets and closed one subway station Sunday to ensure tight security and prevent clashes. A few anti-gay activists did get in, however, although they were not violent.

"I'm against gay propaganda that these sick people have organized here in collusion with authorities," said Serhiy Hashchenko, a 56-year-old father of 12 who went to the march carrying a placard "Ukraine is no Sodom."

Ultra-nationalist radicals who have threatened to disperse the march were watching it from the security perimeter lined with riot police.

Last year, a gay pride march in Kiev was called off less than half an hour after it began as right-wing activists pelted the marchers with smoke grenades.

National  DC pride event to go on, receives security increase after Orlando shooting.

The DC Capital Pride Festival will go on as planned, according to Pink News. This is in the wake of Sundays mass shooting in Orlandos LGBT Pulse club that left 50 dead and 53 injured, and has become the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

We deplore the wanton and senseless act of terrorism in Orlando, Florida earlier this morning, and our thoughts are with the victims, their families and the people of central Florida, Capital Pride President Bernie Delia said in a statement.

Capital Pride will observe a moment of silence from the Capital Stage at 1 p.m. in remembrance of the victims, Delia added. We will not give in to terrorism  Thats what they want.

Following the moment of silence, the Gay Mens Chorus of Washington will sing the national anthem as planned.

Delia has every confidence in the security the event will provide, as they are pulling from local and federal law enforcement agencies in the Washington D.C. area.

Today, as always, we will not be deterred by hate as we gather to celebrate love, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a statement.

Education  Trailblazing LGBT studies class expands in San Francisco

The first LGBT studies class at a public high school in the nation is expected to expand to two or more schools in San Francisco next fall after meeting with success at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

The class was based on students inquiry into LGBT subjects such as the importance of LGBT visibility and voice, the definition of gender, and historic events in San Francisco and beyond.

Im really excited to see it expand, Lyndsey Schlax, who taught and designed the curriculum for the course. I was trying to design this in a way that was not just the same old class, but just a new topic.

Instead of taking quizzes, students would listen to their homework on MP3 players and give written responses. Speakers like Felicia Flames, transgender activist and Tom Ammiano, a politician who worked with Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold public office in the U.S.

Theres a lot of interest and support in expanding [the course], Erik Martinez, LGBT program coordinator for the district said. Theres also a lot of desire to make sure these topics are infused into other subjects.

Next school year, the year-long elective course will be taught at Mission High School and Thurgood Marshall High School in the San Francisco Bayview by two veteran teachers, both of whom identify as LGBT, according to Martinez.
The full crew of Expedition 47 aboard the International Space Station. ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Timothy Peake (bottom left), NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra (bottom middle) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko (bottom row right) are set to depart the International Space Station and return to Earth June 18, 2016. Russian cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka (top left) and NASA astronaut Jeff Williams (top row middle) and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin (top right) will stay on as crew members for the next Expedition 48. Credit: NASA. NASA

A pair of Expedition 47 crew members tested the motion control system of the docked Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft. Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko and astronauts Tim Kopra and Tim Peake will ride the Soyuz back to Earth early Saturday morning. They will undock from the Rassvet module then land in Kazakhstan ending a 186-day mission in space.

The trio continued packing the Soyuz and training for Saturday mornings descent. The crew will experience strong jolts, heaviness and labored breathing and speech as they re-enter Earths atmosphere and begin experiencing gravity.

After Cygnus departed safely away from the International Space Station on Tuesday scientists from NASAs Glenn Research Center sparked a large fire inside the space freighter. The Saffire-1 experiment is exploring how fire behaves in microgravity so engineers can design safer spacecraft.

NASA astronaut Jeff Williams worked on two U.S. spacesuits ahead of a pair of spacewalks targeted for later this summer. He sampled the cooling loop water then scrubbed the cooling loops inside the spacesuits.

Flight Engineer Oleg Skripochka continued transferring cargo in the Progress 63 resupply ship. His fellow cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin worked on the Plasma Kristall experiment exploring how micro-particles become highly charged and interact in plasmas.

On-Orbit Status Report

Cygnus Spacecraft Fire Experiment-I (Saffire-I) Operations: Yesterday, Saffire-1 successfully completed the first of two phases when a flame experiment was performed inside the Cygnus vehicle after departing the ISS. Today began the second phase which consists of retrieving experiment data via downlink passes at various ground sites. Because fire is extremely dangerous on a spacecraft, most controlled flame growth experiments have been limited to small sizes. Instruments measure flame growth and oxygen use, improving understanding of fire growth in microgravity and safeguarding future space missions.

Dose Distribution Inside the ISS  3D (DOSIS 3D): The European Space Agencys (ESAs) DOSIS 3D passive detectors were de-installed from the Columbus module. Data from the various active and passive radiation detectors installed in the ISS are used to measure radiation field parameters such as absorbed dose, particle influence and Linear Energy Transfer (LET) spectra as well as dose equivalent at different locations inside the ISS using passive and active measurement devices.

Human Research Program (HRP) Collections: The crew collected saliva samples and stowed them in the Minus Eighty-degree Freezer for ISS (MELFI). These sample collections are used to support the following HRP investigations: Biochem Profile, Repository, and Cardio Ox.

Microgravity Experiment Research Locker Incubator (MERLIN) Desiccant Kit Installation: Eight desiccant packs were installed inside the MERLIN which provides a single middeck locker-sized Expedite the Processing of Experiments to Space Station (EXPRESS) Rack compatible freezer/refrigerator or incubator that can be used for a variety of experiments.

Fine Motor Skills: The crew completed a series of interactive tasks for the Fine Motor Skills investigation. This investigation is the first fine motor skills study to measure long-term microgravity exposure, different phases of microgravity adaptation, and sensorimotor recovery after returning to Earth gravity.

Dose Tracker: The crew completed entries for medication tracking. This investigation documents the medication usage of crew members before and during their missions by capturing data regarding medication use during spaceflight, including side effect qualities, frequencies and severities. The data is expected to either support or counter anecdotal evidence of medication ineffectiveness during flight and unusual side effects experienced during flight. It is also expected that specific, near-real-time questioning about symptom relief and side effects will provide the data required to establish whether spaceflight-associated alterations in pharmacokinetics (PK) or pharmacodynamics (PD) is occurring during missions.

Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) Cooling Loop Maintenance: The crew completed ionic and particulate filtration (scrubbing) and biocidal maintenance (iodination) of EMUs 3003 and 3010 and Airlock cooling water loops. These activities are part of nominal 90-day maintenance requirements.

Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) and Water Processor Assembly (WPA) Status: Overnight both UPA and WPA completed their process cycles and the Waste and Hygiene Compartment (WHC) was configured to UPA. UPA conductivity was still elevated and oscillating during the first part of the run before it was able to stay in process consistently. Teams are reviewing data from the runs.

45 Soyuz (45S) Undock Preparations: The 45S crew performed descent training in preparation for 45S undock and landing this Saturday. 45S performed a nominal thruster test in preparation for departure.

Todays Planned Activities

All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.

HRF  sample collection and prep for stow

Check status of fuses in MRM1 on -4, -7 by LED indication

HRF- Insertion of samples into MELFI

Close shutters of windows  6,8,9,12,13,14 in SM/ r/g 6965

Search of NeST SSD memory device

RADIOSKAF. Deactivation of TOMSK- TPU 120 nano satellite from charging unit and stowage r/g 2530

DOSETRK  questionnaire fill out

Emergency Book Update

Close USOS windows shutters

PK4- Hard drive data copying

Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth

 On MCC GO Water transfer from Progress 432 tank 2 (on [] aggregate compartment) into  r/g 2541

EMU SS cooling loop scrubbing (start)

Final configuration of EWC WAP access point and stowage of WAP SM

FINEMOTR- Experiment run

PBRE  Water Purification

[] toilet activation in Soyuz 719

Replace urine receptacle  #0950040and filter insert in 

[] activation after replacement

Soyuz 719  test prior to undock r/g 2538

Preparation of US equipment for stowage in Soyuz

SOZh maintenance

Install radiation monitors

ARED  clean flywheel cylinder

DOSIS. Transfer DOSIS 3D kit to be returned to the ground / r/g 2546

Handover DOS3D dosimeters to RS to be placed into payload container and be returned in Soyuz

Downlink log-file 1- via RSS2 r/g 2550

Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth

MATRESHKA-R. Remove  passive assemblies to be returned in Soyuz / r/g 2545

4  experiment run / See OPTIMIS Viewer for Procedure

Water sampling after EMU SS cooling loop scrubbing

EMU SS  connectivity test

MATRESHKA-R. Remove napkins and towels from protection curtain in starboard cabin r/g 2545

DOS3D  remove 3D passive sensors in Columbus

LBNP assist / r/g 2532

LBNP session (FINAL) r/g 2532

Check positioning of -1 sensors

Camera installation in LAB for feeding to RWS monitor 3

4  Experiment Run

Reconfigure equipment for cleaning EMU SS cooling loop scrubbing

Stow personal medical kits

Soyuz 719 descent simulation r/g 2539, 2544

DUBRAVA. Observation and photography with [] equipment / r/g 2548

Progress 432 (on []) cargo ops and IMS update / r/g 1812, 1832

EMU reconfig

IMS update

PAO Hardware Preparation

EMU SPACE SUIT  Long Drying

DOSETRK-  questionnaire

Video downlink  terminate

RWS deactivation

Pille dosimeters reading / r/g 2540

Crew prep for PAO

PAO

Replace flash-card of Pille equipment r/g 2540

Stow syringes used in H2O connectivity test

Sprint Exercise- at crews discretion

KONTENT. Experiment run / r/g 2537

On MCC GO Closeout ops after Progress 432 RODNIK tank 2 compression (on [])

Greetings video recording / r/g 2547

MERLIN  Desiccant Change out

Completed Task List Items

iPAD cert update [Active]

Ground Activities

All activities were completed unless otherwise noted.

EMU operations

Nominal ground commanding

Three-Day Look Ahead:

Thursday, 06/16: JEM stowage wire kit install, Emergency R&R review, Neuro Mapping

Friday, 06/17: Change of Command, Handhold Experiment Platform attach, MSL sample cartridge exchange

Saturday, 06/18: 45S undock/landing

QUICK ISS Status  Environmental Control Group:

Component  Status

Elektron  On

Vozdukh  Manual

[] 1  SM Air Conditioner System (SKV1)  Off

[] 2  SM Air Conditioner System (SKV2)  On

Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Lab  Standby

Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Node 3  Operate

Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Lab  Idle

Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Node 3  Operate

Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA)  Process

Urine Processing Assembly (UPA)  Standby

Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab  Off

Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3  Full Up
Coffee is much more than just some brown beverage. What we drink in a normal day represents the last step in a long journey that spans great distances and entails enormous amounts of effort. Be it Brazil or Colombia, Kenya or Burundithe trip from soil to cherry to bean to cup is an arduous one. This is especially true for the coffees of Yemen.

Enter Mokhtar Alkhanshali. His struggles to bring Yemeni coffee out of his war-torn country have become synonymous with this particularly intense iteration of the journey. Alkhanshali, a Yemeni-American coffee importer who grew up in the Bay Area, had been thrust into the public eye in March of 2015, when, after a series of bombings in Yemen, he escaped through the historic Port of Mocha on a 20-foot boat. And though his plight drew the attention of global mediainspiring our own deep dig into the history of coffee of Yemenit was what Alkhanshali carried in two briefcases that brought him to the attention of Blue Bottle Coffee founder James Freeman: high-quality Yemeni coffee.

Yemen is historically famous for coffee production. Its said that in the 1500s there were more than 3000 coffee shops in Cairo, all of them serving Yemeni coffee, and its speculated that the very first coffee beans to be served to the Western world were most likely of Yemeni descent. Specifically, Central Europes first coffeehouse, Zur Blauen Flasche (The Blue Bottle), was said to have been purveyors of Yemeni coffee, purchased from traveling Turkish troops in the 1680s. Some 330 years later, Alkhansharis Port of Mokha coffee company and Freemans Blue Bottle Coffee (named for the titular Viennese coffee shop) have come together to start selling Yemeni-grown, specialty-grade coffee to the public. The coffeeYemen Hayma Hussein al-Habasells for $65 for six ounces online and in stores for $16 a cup, paired with an informational pamphlet and a sesame cardamom cookie inspired by one of Alkhansharis great-grandmothers recipes.

I spoke with Freeman and Alkhanshari prior to the launch about what brought them together, the miracle of coffee export, and just how difficult it is to produce delicious coffee in todays troubled Yemen.

How did you end up being drawn towards Yemeni coffee, James?

James Freeman: The first single-origin coffee I sold was actually from Yemen. It was a lot I purchased from Royal for a couple years, and it was really delicious. Id read about the history of coffee before I started Blue Bottle and was familiar with Yemens history with coffee and its importance in the coffee world. Those early bags had this thick, beautiful fruit and I developed a lot of affection for Yemeni coffee.

How did you get into coffee, Mokhtar?

Mokhtar Alkhanshari: I love history. I loved learning about the Port of Mocca and the ancient Sufis who drank coffee there. I was born in the Bay Area and was exposed to specialty coffee the right way. I worked here as a community organizer and coffee was this amazing intersection of something that could fuel social impact, a delicious drink, and a way to do something that helped my familys homeland. It was, for me, this wonderful thing that just came together.

What brought the two of you together?

MA: My very first interaction with specialty coffee, with what coffee was really supposed to be like, was at Mint Plaza. After that first cup, I started going to the coffee classes they held on Sundays. I really started to annoy [Sprudgie Award winner & former Blue Bottle green buyer] Stephen Vick. After escaping from Yemen and arriving in America, I took an Uber over to Webster for a cup of coffee. My Uber driver had heard my story on NPR, and she stopped and bought me flowers. And then I walked into the coffee shop and there was James. And theres a picture of you, Stephen, and I and Im holding those flowers.

JF: There was a big, long dry spell where our standards were getting higher and the coffees coming out of Yemen werent as interesting. And then Stephen Vick tells me, I met this guy thats making really great coffee from Yemen. And I had to taste that coffee.

Explain a little bit about the difficulties of producing coffee in Yemen?

MA: A good example is getting GrainPro bags into the country. To do so I have to buy them in the Philippines, fly them to Ethiopia, and then fly them again to Djibouti. From Djibouti, they have to be smuggled on a boat to one of the ports of Yemen (if theyre open) and then driven from that boat on dangerous roads through airstrikes. All of this, just to bring GrainPro bags to our farmers. Recently, I wanted to bring new Shore 920 Moisture Analyzers into Yemen through the airports. But, of course, the militia that was controlling the airport at the time wanted to know what these Moisture Analyzers were. So, I just told them they were carrot juicers.

And then getting the coffee out of Yemen, what is that process like?

MA: The only way to get to Yemen, currently, is through a UN chartered flight from Jordan. The country is still in the midst of a war. Its very difficult to go in and out. For a long time the ports in Yemen were closed, but because Yemen imports 90% of its goods, I knew that, eventually, the ports would have to open. They did, and the coffees got shipped out on the MSC Rebecca and finally, landed here. Its a miracle that coffee from anywhere gets to us the way it does. My story is just a little bit more extreme.

JF: No coffee company has worked more hours per kilogram for a coffee.

How does selling Yemeni coffee help the people of Yemen? More so, how does it help the way we in the West understand Yemen as a country?

MA: 90% of the coffee in the world derives genetically from Yemen. Most people dont know that. They see Yemen and they see ISIS and war, but ISIS doesnt represent us. A cup of coffee helps to dispel the stereotypes because it shows something positive coming out of this country. Our farmers are wonderful people and in all the pamphlets theyre smiling. It is so powerful for people to see that. To see them smiling.

JF: Whats in the cup is so special and the story behind it is so special and the history is so special and the guy behind it all is so specialits just one thing after another really coming together.

MA: Its so important to me to have these products out in the world. The farmers worked so hard on these coffees. We take a large risk in paying them what we pay, but we have to. I want two things to happen: one, for people to taste something unbelievably delicious and to have a new experience; and two, to actually do something important for a country currently in the midst of a war.

How do you convince customers that this cup of coffee is worth $16?

JF: Miracles arent cheap. And we want people to know how special and how expensive it is to get it into this country. Were working on a cookie to go with the coffee, a sweet really, based on Mokhtars great-grandmothers recipe. And weve designed this beautiful, information pamphlet. If someone wants to order their $16 cup of coffee to go, they can do that. But this is more than just coffee in a paper cup, its a real experience. Theres going to be, perhaps, people that think that this coffee should be cheap. We cant control that. What we can do is present it in the most compelling way, knowing that ultimately it has to live up to that presentation and be remarkably delicious. One or two people who purchase this coffee might think its an outrage, but most of these people who spend $16 on Mokhtars coffee, theyll be talking about it for months. Theyll be telling their friends that they had the most amazing cup of coffee and that it was from Yemen.

Whats next?

MA: Our farmers are working hard. In the fall, another shipment will come out. Well keep working to continue this project. I want to have a long-term effect on Yemen. And thats our goal with James. People are excited. I tell my story of escaping Yemen on a boat with two briefcases of coffee and people always ask me, Where can I get it? And now I can say, At Blue Bottle.

JF: I see this as the beginning of a relationship. Helping Mokhtar build on this and to help people recognize it as high-quality coffee and to offer more and more of it and for it to get better and better, thats my hope. I want this to just be the start of something.

MA: This time last year, there were no ports open. This year, there are two ports open and an airport. The war hasnt ended yet, but Im very stubborn. This goal with this coffee, well, failure isnt an option. Would I have ever thought that I would escape Yemen on a boat, and then a year later see my coffee land in Oakland, or that Blue Bottle would be launching it the way they are? Im just going to keep pushing and if people are interested and willing to pay this price, well, I think I can help to shed light on specialty coffee as a whole.

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.

Photos courtesy of Nick Wolf.
He further said that today terrorism is a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional and multi-levelled phenomenon; it has many faces, angles and causes. Therefore, it is impossible to win at the expense of elementary forces. There needs to be a systematic struggle.

Above all there must be a struggle of wits. Our task is to ensure that the phenomenon of terrorism anywhere and in any form, provokes antagonism and condemnation in any corner of the world. Sponsors of terrorism are themselves victims of this sinister phenomenon, Malahati said.

He spoke about Daesh and the atrocities that the terrorists commit, saying that the destruction of cultural and historical values of civilizations and monuments hurts humanity.

Today, nations of the world must realize that, despite differences, they can live side by side in peace, tranquility and friendship. They must believe that a racial difference is not a threat, on the contrary, these are faces that help people come together and feel common values of good.

The candidate further noted that at this stage, he would really like to conduct a few round table meetings with candidates of the award from other countries, to discuss tools of opposition to violence.

According to him, in that way a suitable environment for proper measures and joint efforts to promote a universal culture of tolerance and non-violence can be created.

Taking this opportunity, I would like to declare my will to host a joint conference in Iran in the city of Shiraz, near the tomb of the Persian poet Saadi, whose work is an achievement of all of mankind, Malahadi said.

The prize was established in 1995 on the occasion of the United Nations Year for Tolerance and the 125th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi.

It was also the year when UNESCO Member States adopted the Declaration of Principles on Tolerance.

The creation of the prize has been inspired by the ideals of UNESCOs Constitution which proclaims that peace, if it is not to fail, must be founded on the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.

This year International Day for Tolerance will take place on November 16 at UNESCOs headquarters in Paris with the participation of the Secretary-General. For the tenth time the committee will select its laureates.
TOKYO (Sputnik)  South Korea is conducting maritime exercises off the western coast to prepare for possible North Korean provocations, the countrys Navy said in a Thursday statement.

"We are keeping full combat readiness to swiftly respond to the enemy's possible provocations in waters off the west coast," the statement says, as quoted by the South Korean Yonhap news agency.

The three-day exercise started on Thursday and involves around 20 warships. The drills aim to prepare South Korean servicemen for North Koreas possible crossing of the western maritime border (Northern Limit Line), the Navy said.
TOKYO (Sputnik)  The special law enforcement team comprises about 40 people who are on the streets between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m, the Japanese broadcaster said. The team was formed following several tragic events involving US servicemen.

The US command of the military bases in Okinawa has previously introduced a curfew for the personnel serving in the region, to be implemented from May 27 and until June 24, after last month former US Marine Kenneth Franklin was arrested on suspicion of stabbing and strangling a 20-year-old Japanese woman near the base. Franklin has reportedly admitted to committing the murder.

Following the events, a US servicewoman from the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa injured two people in a reported drunk driving incident.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Afghanistan believes that the Taliban militants will retaliate for their killed leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai said Thursday.

"We are trying to launch a dialogue but it seems to us that they [the Taliban militants] will retaliate for the death of their leader and it will be difficult to start the dialogue," Karzai said at the round table organized by the Russian International Affairs Council.

Afghanistan is struggling with a political, economical and social crisis as it attempts to tackle the Taliban's insurgency. The situation in the country has worsened in recent months, with the Taliban launching offensives in major cities.
Thailands Prime Minister is on a state visit at the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is accompanied by a high level delegation including Deputy Prime Minister, several cabinet ministers, senior officials and business leaders.

Thailand PM Prayut Chan-o-cha arrives in Delhi, received by MoS Home Kiren Rijiju pic.twitter.com/YYzHcFfXhH  ANI (@ANI_news) 16  2016 .

The Thai Prime Minister will inspect the Guard Of Honour at President House and will also lay a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial at Rajghat on Friday.
Twenty-eight-year-old Muhammad Usman from Punjab has been recognized for his dedication to helping all children receive an education. He designed an educational program called "Back to Life Edutainment for Street Children," which was upheld through social media and inspired over 500 young people to voluntarily implement the project in four cities. Muhammad told BBC he was grateful to his father who had pushed him to get an education, despite the fact that he grew up in a poor village. This inspired him to set up the program of free quality education, including computer skills, English language and peace education.

Twenty-six-year-old Zainab Bibi, another winner from Pakistan, Lahore, will become the first Pakistani female to get the award for her work and research. As well as establishing the Pakistan Society for Green Energy, Zainab has developed a bio-fuel from waste tissue paper which could help to provide cleaner energy. She also introduced to Pakistan, from the USA, a plant species that produces bioethanol (biodiesel). "Camelina sativa" has a short growth cycle and a greater resistance to drought, which means that it can be grown in desert areas in Pakistan.
In Eastern and Central Europe, I do not see any issues with Chinas plan for investment, except, perhaps, in the financial sector, since it has already been taken over by the largest European and American banks. As for the construction of new enterprises, I do not think there will be any difficulties for China, Bazhana said.

Head of the School of Oriental Studies at the Higher School of Economics, Alexei Maslov, said that Central and Eastern Europe would be very pleased to take Chinese money in the economic belt of the Silk Road.

This is not a gift and not some kind of sponsorship from China. It is, in fact, a transfer of a portion of Chinese business outside of China.

Today this region, in my view, is a relatively weak link. It does not have large financial resources and is ready to a certain extent to give way to Chinas pressure. It creates a very important starting point for the expansion of China's presence in Europe, Maslov said.

In January of this year, the Chinese company COSCO Group (Hong Kong) Limited won the tender and became the owner of a controlling stake in the Greek port of Piraeus.

Hence, with this deal China controls the entire logistics corridor of Piraeus, making Xi Jinpings visit to Belgrade easier to consolidate China's leadership in this and many other future projects.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russia's Energy Ministry allows for Chinese companies to take part in the privatization of Russian energy giant Rosneft, Energy Minister Alexander Novak said Thursday.

"This will depend on the investors themselves. We are allowing for major companies to take part in the privatization, including Chinese ones," Novak told reporters.

One Chinese company, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), has been promised a seat on Rosneft's board of directors if it acquired a sufficient stake during privatization by Russian Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukaev. CNPC already has a small stake in Rosneft acquired in 2006.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russia and Guinea have not yet reached an agreement on deliveries of helicopters, Guinean President Alpha Conde told Sputnik on Thursday.

"On helicopters no, it is not," Conde said answering a corresponding question on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

In April, Russia offered Guinea to deliver civil helicopters of various types, including light multipurpose Ka-226T and medium-sized Mi-17.
KIEV (Sputnik)  In January, the AMC fined Gazprom 85 billion hryvnia ($3 billion) for abusing its market monopoly. Gazprom challenged the fine in the Kiev Commercial Court. The case was struck out and subsequently an appeal was lodged in a higher court. The appeals court ruled that Gazprom's complaint about the AMC fine did not stand and the Kiev Commercial Court decision should be left unchanged.

"The appeal complaint was registered on June 7 and yesterday [Wednesday] materials were transferred to the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine," the court's press service said.

In December 2015, AMC head Yuriy Terentyev said that Ukraines national oil and gas company Naftogaz had suffered an estimated $6 billion in damages as a result of Gazprom's abuse of its monopoly of gas transit in the country. Gazprom called the move a pressure-applying tactic, stressing that it did not conduct any business in Ukraine, as it transfers its gas to Naftogaz at the Ukrainian-Russian border.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  After the emissions scandal became public, Volkswagen announced it would set aside more than $7 billion to tackle the consequences of the emissions effects.

"Transforming the core business also encompasses systematically promoting an entrepreneurial mindset and approach in the Group. Alongside gradually implementing the model line organization at the Group brands, this primarily involves realigning the components business <> The Volkswagen Group hopes that realigning the components business will strengthen competitiveness, increase efficiency and make significant contributions to future topics such as the e-mobility initiative," the company said in a statement.

Volkswagen's components business currently accounts for some 67,000 employees at 26 locations worldwide, according to the statement.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The CEO noted that the disscussions concerned projects in the sphere of "the production and downstream [refining]."

"A number of projects is being discussed with a number of international partners, including the European companies; we are discussing the creation of partnerships for the projects' implementation, including those in Russia," Dyukov told RIA Novosti.

Gazprom Neft is also looking to increase its oil production at the Badra field in Iraq up to 115,000 barrels per day and discuss with Iraq possible increase of production to 170,000 barrels per day, the companys First Deputy CEO Vadim Yakovlev said Thursday.
BRUSSELS (Sputnik)  Greece has completed all the measures needed to receive a new tranche of bailout from its international creditors, Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem told reporters on Thursday.

"They seem to have done all the work on the prior actions, so I think there are four very small issued that will be dealt with later," Dijsselbloem said ahead of the Eurogroup meeting in Luxembourg, when asked whether Greece has completed all the necessary requirements.

He noted that the decision on the transfer of funds to Greece will have to be made by the Board of Directors of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The Eurogroup head said that the decision would be made "later this week." ESM Managing Director Klaus Regling swiftly added that it would be made on Friday.
According to the Third Energy Package, the company that produces gas cannot operate the pipeline. Gazprom owns 50 percent of Nord Stream 2, so it would violate the regulations. However, it would run in international waters, beyond jurisdiction of the EU. This is why Brussels cannot apply norms of the Third Energy Package to block it, the article read.

Those supporting a pipeline under the Baltic Sea argue that the Ukrainian gas transportation system is in poor condition. This risks disrupting gas supplies since Ukraine has traditionally been a transit country for Russian gas to Europe. However, Kiev cannot afford modernization of its gas transportation system. The Ukrainian government also opposes Russian investments in its energy sector. What is more, gas transit has long been a source of income for Ukrainian oligarchs, the article read.

Ukraine has actively opposed Nord Stream 2 because the pipeline would strip them of transit fees.

Last year, Kiev received 1.8 billion on transit of Russian gas. If transit stops in 2019 this would deal another heavy blow to the Ukrainian budget.

Other regional countries are trying to reduce their reliance on Russian gas, by building own terminals for liquefied natural gas. However, if Nord Stream 2 is built it will deliver much more gas to the European market, making those terminals useless, the article read.

"Finally, Nord Stream 2 will strengthen Gazproms position in the European market. However, it will also strengthen mutual commercial reliance between Moscow and Europe," it added.

Despite all difficulties, Berlin is preparing for the implementation of the project. However, Nord Stream 2 is also facing opposition in German government, the article read. Some in Berlin say that the project is "dangerous" and would undermine European energy security.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  In April, OPEC and major non-OPEC oil producers failed to agree on freezing oil output at January levels to shore up prices. Saudi Arabia backed out of the deal, insisting that Iran, its regional rival which has been boosting oil production after years of international sanctions, should be part of any production cuts.

"There is no alternative to OPEC at the moment. OPEC was always a sufficiently effective instrument to influence the market, it has maintained the demand-supply balance. Recently, unfortunately, there were many political factors, they also affected OPEC's functioning," Alekperov told Rossiya 24 television.

Alekperov also noted that the OPEC session in June was constructive enough, as some solutions to stabilize the market was identified, although they have not yet been adopted.
ST PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Tehran has sent a group of experts to the United States to discuss the issue of Washington freezing Iranian assets, an Iranian Central Bank official said Thursday.

"The funds were denominated in the US dollar, but they (funds) were issued by non-US institutions We are now in the process of investigating this, we have already sent some teams from the government to negotiate with the United States. I am sure that will be settled shortly," Hossein Yaghoubi Miab, director general of the international affairs department of Iran's Central Bank, said at the the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
ROME (Sputnik)  According to the Ansa news agency, the sides signed nine agreements and letters of intend.

The 2016 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) is taking place on June 16-18.

The agenda for SPIEF 2016, which is held at a new venue for the first time in 20 years  at the Expoforum Convention and Exhibition Centre  includes business forums of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, and the Business 20.
According to Otty, Europe continues to invest in foreign projects, including those in Russia. Although some people claimed that the investment activity of the European Union slowed down, Otty stated that during the forum the opposite trend could be seen.

"We actually saw an increase of foreign direct investment projects and an increase in the number of employment created as a result of that. So that was very exciting. I think long-term there will continue to be some challenges in Europe, but we have a very able work force, we have great technological know-how, and I think Europe will continue to be an important part of the global economy," Otty said.

The expert also mentioned that Russia is likely to expand its markets and develop fruitful economic ties with the African continent.

"The first thing to recognize is that there seems to be a great deal of African participation in this event which is quite different from what we've seen in prior years. There is a real interest from the African continent to engage with Russia both at the governmental level and the private sector," the expert said.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The projects include construction of the Baltic LNG plant, expansion of Sakhalin-II LNG plant and the development of the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye gas field on the island of Sakhalin.

"The overall investment in these projects is over $13 billion," the minister told reporters on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

In mid-2015, Gazprom and Shell sighed an agreement stipulating the strategic partnership development across all segments of the gas industry. Shortly after that, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said that his company was engaged in a commercial negotiations with Shell on the potential partnership within the Baltic LNG project.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The minister stressed, though, that Russia will deliver at least 18 million tonnes of oil to Belarus in 2016.

"The deliveries in the third quarter will be 2 million metric tons less that stipulated in previous agreements," Novak told reporters on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

In the past few years, Russia has been delivering an average of 23 million metric tons of oil to Belarus.
In Finland, the temperature was about five degrees higher than usually observed across most of the country, the Finnish Meteorological Institute reported.

Alaska witnessed its hottest spring on record, and half of Australia saw the warmest fall ever recorded.

The state of the climate so far this year gives us much cause for alarm, said David Carlson, director of Genevas World Climate Research Programme, in a release from the World Meteorological Association.

Carlson said that the 2016 Super El Nino is partially responsible for the temperature records, but only partly, as global warming, conditioned by the man-made greenhouse effect that is a result of burning fossil fuels, is the new normal.

Noting the direct results of global warming due to climate change, including increasingly violent storm systems and widespread and severe coral reef bleaching, US scientists are predicting that 2016 will be the hottest year in 136 years of record keeping, topping previous highs in 2014 and 2015.
Earlier this week, lawmakers backed Norway 's overambitious goal to become carbon-neutral by 2030, two decades ahead of the schedule set by the United Nations' December 2015 climate accord. The resolution was approved with a slight numerical superiority despite opposition from the conservative minority government, the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Nringsliv wrote.

Climate neutrality does not mean that Norway will cease to release greenhouse gases. Instead, it intends to achieve the noble goal of zero net contributions to carbon emissions, Norway, a major oil producer, will have to purchase so-called carbon offsets abroad. The offsets include investments in environmental projects that decrease carbon emissions into the atmosphere through reforestation, improving energy efficiency or switching to cleaner power.

Ironically, Norway's environmental efforts have been met with scathing criticism from no other than Climate and Environment Minister Vidar Helgesen, who in a letter to parliament, branded the initiative premature and costly, saying the price could be as much as 20 billion kroner (2.4 billion dollars) per year in 2030.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  France's former President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that he is against a visa-free regime between Russia and the European Union at this time due to the current security situation in Europe.

"Everything is clear to me. With the current security situation in Europe we need to protect our borders, control our borders. I am in favor of maintaining the visa regime in countries that are in a state of emergency, and we are in a state of emergency," Sarkozy said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

The former president underlined that his stance is not caused by distrust toward Russians, "it is just about maintaining European security."
With its 5 million members, the UK's Catholic community are a force to be reckoned with, so could their ballot end up deciding June 23's result?

Prima facie, it would seem that they are bound to vote for remaining in the EU.

The European Union's creators  some of which, like Alcide de Gasperi and Robert Schumann, were very religious  were undoubtedly inspired by Catholic concepts such as subsidiarity, solidarity and peace when they started building the European edifice.

Our religious freedoms are not best served by the EU @PeterOSmith You can't evangelise in the public sphere & mention sexuality #CVEUBrexit  Caroline Farrow (@blondpidge) June 15, 2016

And just weeks ago, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, made clear that Catholicism steers clear of division, which in his opinion ""almost inevitably leads to further division."

"There is a long tradition in Christianity and Catholicism in particular of believing in holding things together," he added.

"So, the Catholic stance towards an effort such as the EU is largely supportive."

Nichols' points were largely echoed by Tugendhat, who also explained that the EU was partly if not uniquely responsible for Europe's long decades of peace.

"NATO, the Church and the European Union all contributed, in different ways, to the continent's peace and stability," he said.

"Catholic values are best served by unity within the EU."

While acknowledging that the organization is not exempt from defects, Tugendhat said that reforming it was the safest, and the most Catholic course to follow.

Michael Gove said on #bbcqt that the EU is a job destroying machine. Unemployment of under 25s is 51% in Greece because of EU austerity  Gisela Stuart MP (@GiselaStuart) June 15, 2016

But pro-Brexit Gisela Stuart retorted saying that the EU's "discriminatory immigration policy"  which favors European over non-European citizens  and "taxation," were damaging the poorest British communities.

Stuart, who is challenging her party's pro-Remain line on the referendum, said that the EU was destined to become an "ever closer union," in order to deal effectively with the euro crisis. Those countries unwilling to integrate further, she argued, should better leave now.

"The Catholic vote will do what's in the best interest of the country and the best interest of Europe," Stuart told Sputnik.

"If [as a Catholic] you think you've got a responsibility to help your neighbor, our responsibility to our neighbors is to leave Eurozone countries to sort out their economy, integrate deeper, whereas for those who are not in there, it should be a trading relationship which is democratically run."

Catholics were once a powerful voting bloc in Britain, able to decisively tip the electoral scales in some English regions and  even much more so  in Scotland. It appears that now, they could also end up shaping the future of Britain's place in the world.
Initially, the online services were intended to be introduced in spring. The necessary technology is available, but the launch has been postponed for fear that the new service would multiply the number of applications beyond all reason.

"This is not intended to deliberately make things more complicated. But we simply do not have the sufficient resources for this," the Foreign Ministry's IT manager Ari Uusikartano told Finnish national broadcaster Yle, referring to staff cutbacks, which left many offices struggling with a personnel shortage.

Besides, even with the electronic application available, the applicants would have to appear at a Finnish mission in person anyway to be interviewed and make a payment for the application. Still, the electronic service could have saved the applicants a difficult and perilous journey, as Finland has no diplomatic missions a number of war-torn countries in the Middle East. Therefore, Syrians and Iraqis are forced to travel to the Turkish capital of Ankara to initiate the process, whereas Afghanis have to travel to New Delhi in India.
CROISSY-SUR-SEINE (France) (Sputnik)  The Russian national team has already played twice at UEFA Euro 2016 underway on June 10-July 10 in France, playing a draw against England (1-1) on Saturday, and losing 1-2 to Slovakia on Wednesday.

French police have boosted security at the Russian team's training facility in the suburbs of Paris without prior notification, deploying two additional cordons and tightening entry requirements for journalists arriving to witness a training session of the Russian national team.

The decision was made on Thursday morning, a police spokesperson told R-Sport without specifying the reasons behind it.
The armed militants, who have no passports on them, plan to "reach Europe by boat via Turkey and Greece," Belgium's Derniere Heure daily newspaper reported, citing a message that local anti-terrorism authorities distributed earlier this week. "They will split into two groups, with one targeting Belgium and the other one heading to France."

The newspaper described the attack as "imminent."

Daesh may be losing on the ground in Iraq and Syria, but the group is still capable of wreaking havoc across the globe.
While the residents of Gibraltar are fiercely nationalistic and fond of British traditions, they are expected to vote en masse for remaining.

Tomorrow all Gibraltarians & Gibraltar residents should be @ CASEMATES @ 5pm for a rally with speeches at 5.30pm inc @David_Cameron #BETHERE  Fabian Picardo (@FabianPicardo) June 15, 2016

That is mainly due to fears that  if Brexit were to happen  Spain could close its borders with Gibraltar, effectively isolating the territory.

Right now  as a part of the UK and therefore, of the EU  Gibraltar has close relations with its Spanish neighbors, with over 10,000 people commuting across the border every day. Some worry that the only way to keep the border open would be accepting a joint British-Spanish rule on the territory, a perspective loathed by most Gibraltarian Britons.

Cameron's 2-hour trip is the first time a British PM visits Gibraltar since 1968 and, while largely symbolic, it is rekindling old grudges in Spain. Madrid sees Gibraltar as a colonialist relic that blemishes Spain's territorial unity.

The Spanish government made clear its "opposition to these kind of visits [on the part of the British PM]" and ordered its ambassador in the UK, Federico Trillo, to hammer the point home.

Rajoy  who is still formally running the country after last December's inconclusive election and ahead of next week's new round of elections  said Madrid would not take any additional measure to condemn Cameron's visit.
However, Turkey also had to fulfill a number of other commitments, chiefly on human rights, documentation, security and refugee humanitarian needs. But the stumbling block has been over Turkey's refusal to tighten anti-terror laws that critics say have been used to silence journalists and media organizations. Moreover, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lifted immunity from prosecution for opposition parties in a move many see as a threat to democracy.

"Snail's Pace"

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Wednesday (June 15) said the June deadline for the visa deal would pass as more work was needed on Turkey meeting the EU requirements. "The final time for visa travel will depend on both when Turkey completes work on the remaining benchmarks and when the co-legislatures ultimately take their decision," he said.

Our priority remains continuation and full implementation of entire EU-#Turkey statement https://t.co/2TUN5uSfip  DimitrisAvramopoulos (@Avramopoulos) 15 June 2016

European Parliament Green party asylum spokesperson, Jean Lambert said: "The analysis and proposals released by the Commission today underline the dysfunctional nature of the EU's response to the refugee crisis. Returns to Greece under the Dublin system have long been suspended and the Greek system continues to be overwhelmed. It is unbelievable that the Commission is proposing to reinstate returns to Greece against this background, particularly given the painfully slow pace of relocation.

"The snail's pace of progress resettling and relocating refugees is clearly the fault of EU governments, which are refusing to accept their responsibilities in managing this humanitarian crisis. Less than 5% of the original commitment has so far been fulfilled. This is a damning indictment of the EU collective response, all the more as they have further reduced their commitment in the context of the highly controversial agreement with Turkey."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier this week, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said that he wanted to put an end to the practice of tolerating polygamous marriages among immigrants in Germany.

"The fact that an asylum seeker may have multiple spouses in his or her home country does not affect the chances of asylum. The only relevant factor is whether the asylum seeker is being persecuted in his or her home country," Piotr Malachowski said, when asked whether polygamous migrants would have slimmer chances of being granted asylum in Germany.

While polygamous marriages are illegal in Germany, where they are punishable by up to three years in prison, immigrants from Muslim countries often live in Germany with multiple spouses.
"If you want to sell them in France, the French authorities, would not have the right to restrict the import and sale of your product, unless there is a very important reason to do so, which will have nothing to do with economics. They will have to show that imposing a restriction is necessary and proportionate. If you feel you have a problem with this, you could sue them before the French courts," he said.

Back to the Old Days?

Professor Koutrakos, who is joint editor of European Law Review, said it was not possible to wind the clock back to the time before the Maastricht treaty of 1992  which created the EU as we know it now  and go back to the time when the UK was part of the European Economic Area.

"You could not, in the sense that what we've got now is much more advanced than what we had before. One of the most vocal advocates of the single market, which entered force in 1992 was the government of Margaret Thatcher. The whole idea was that, if we had a single market, it would be easier to trade, easier for workers to move around, easier to provide services in other countries. There would be more economic activity, it would be cheaper and consumers would have more choice."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The shooting and stabbing incident took place outside Birstall Library, near Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

The alleged 52-year-old male attacker was arrested in the area, according to West Yorkshire Police.

Following reports on the incident, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and former head of the UK capital Boris Johnson have expressed support to Cox and her family.
"We are in your emails and computer systems, watching and recording your every move," Hussain's 30-page document read.

"[We] have your names and addresses, we are in your emails and social media accounts, we are extracting confidential data and passing on your personal information to the soldiers of the khilafah, who soon with the permission of Allah will strike at your necks in your own lands!"

Hussain was killed shortly after his tweet in an American drone strike. The US then, managed track down Ferizi, exploiting some mistakes he made during his hacking escapades: for instance, the Kosovo-born hacker failed to conceal his IP address on various occasions. That ultimately led to his arrest in October 2015.

While much has been speculated about the Islamic State's cyberwar capabilities, this is the first time a hacker is prosecuted for aiding Daesh, and in general, for aiding a terrorist group through actions carried out in cyberspace.

"Ferizi endangered the lives of over 1,000 Americans," US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Dana Boente said in a statement.

"Cyber terrorism has become an increasingly prevalent and serious threat here in America, both to individuals and businesses. However, cyber terrorists are no different from other terrorists: No matter where they hide, we will track them down and seek to bring them to the United States to face justice."

Ferizi will eventually be sentenced in September of this year, when he could be meted out a sentence of up to 25 years.
LONDON (Sputnik)  A Labour lawmaker representing Batley and Spen constituency for the House of Commons of the UK Parliament, Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed earlier Thursday outside Birstall Library, near Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

"We are suspending all campaigning for the day. Our thoughts are with Jo Cox and her family," the Twitter page of the campaign said.

Local police reported is had arrested a 52-year-old man suspected of the attack.
The government in Warsaw said it would ignore the ruling, refusing to publish it. Under the Polish constitution a ruling does not become final until officially published.

Urgent Course Change

Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters:

"Recent far-reaching changes to Poland's legal and institutional framework threaten human rights and undermine the rule of law, on which the protection of human rights ultimately depends. Lawmakers and the Government should urgently change course."

The Commissioner said he was particularly concerned by the prolonged paralysis of the Constitutional Tribunal which "bears heavy consequences for the human rights protection of all Polish citizens and prevents human rights proofing of legislation." He called on the Polish authorities to urgently find a way out of the current deadlock, stressing that "the rule of law requires that any solution be based on respect for and full implementation of the judgments of the Tribunal."

Erosion of rule of law threatens human rights protection in #Polandhttps://t.co/XIyHFbGp7k pic.twitter.com/1ZmQILUWVX  Nils Muiznieks (@CommissionerHR) 15 June 2016



The Polish Government in December 2015 also passed legislation, allowing ministers to appoint the heads of state radio and TV stations, in a move widely criticized as suppression of media independence.

"Putting public television and radio under the direct control of the government runs contrary to Council of Europe standards on media freedom," said the Commissioner.
According to a British police commissioner, the attack on the lawmaker was a "lone incident."

Cox, a Labour lawmaker representing Batley and Spen constituency for the House of Commons of the UK Parliament, was shot and stabbed earlier Thursday outside Birstall Library, near Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Local police reported they had arrested a 52-year-old man suspected of the attack.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  She added that Britain's potential exit from the bloc is also complicating the negotiation proceedings between Bern and Brussels, as Brussels has put all bilateral negotiations on hold until after the UK referendum.

"Brexit would be a catastrophe for Switzerland. The Swiss franc will grow stronger and stronger. That would be very bad for our economy," Elisabeth Schneider-Schneiter, who is also a member of the National Council's Foreign Affairs Committee, said.

Earlier in the day, head of the Swiss National Bank Thomas Jordan told reporters that the Swiss economy could face turbulence if Britain opts to exit the bloc, vowing to "take measures if required."
BRUSSELS (Sputnik)  NATO defense ministers agreed Wednesday rotational deployment of four battalions in the Baltic states and Poland. The majority of the contingent, to be deployed as early as in 2017, will comprise military personnel from the United States, Germany and the UK.

"NATO officials realize that it does not matter for Russia whether it will be constant rotation or permanent deployment, prohibited under the Russia-NATO Founding Act," Grushko told Russian reporters in Brussels.

Grushko stressed that Russia considers NATO rotation plans in Eastern Europe a threat to national security and will respond adequately to such a move.
PARIS (Sputnik)  On Monday night, the 22-year-old man was arrested in the French city of Carcassone, confessing to planning attacks against foreign tourists and security forces. The man is registered in the security services' databases as posing the security threat.

The L'Express newspaper said with reference to a source in law enforcement agencies that the investigation had been opened under the article "criminal conspiracy with the aim to prepare a terrorist attack".

The country is in a state of emergency after 130 people were killed in November in a series of terror attacks in Paris.
Earlier this month the Microsoft mogul said he had launched a charity program to ease the lot of those living in extreme poverty around the world.

"Its pretty clear to me that just about anyone whos living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens," Bill Gates wrote. "In fact, if I were in their shoes, thats what I would do  I would raise chickens," gates wrote in his blog.

The Coop Dreams project is being implemented in cooperation with Heifer International, a charity organization working to eradicate poverty in the developing countries, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, by handing out livestock and offering agricultural training to the locals.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The Syrian Cairo opposition group will hold a technical meeting with UN Special Envoy for Syria representatives on June 18-19, head of the group Jihad Makdissi told Sputnik on Thursday.

"Yes the meeting will be with our group in Cairo 18-19 June. And it is a technical meeting" he said.

Earlier in the day, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said that de Misturas representatives are expected to travel to Damascus, Moscow, Riyadh and Cairo to hold technical talks with Syrian opposition members.
GENEVA (Sputnik)  Daesh has committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Yazidis, the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic said in a report released Thursday.

"ISIS [Daesh] has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis, thousands of whom are held captive in the Syrian Arab Republic where they are subjected to almost unimaginable horrors," the report read.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The statement comes a week after the Afghan government said that it welcomes the changes in US rules of engagement in Afghanistan enabling US forces to strike Taliban fighters.

"We intend to establish relations with groups of Afghan origin, such as Taliban. For them, the doors to peace are open, and we will continue to urge them to peace, including using the quadripartite group of the United States, China, Pakistan and the Russian Federation. Our only goal is to sat Taliban down at the negotiating table, and our efforts in the reconciliation process will be continues," Karzai said at the round table organized by the Russian International Affairs Council.

Thus, Kabul expects to hold talks with Taliban by the end of the year, gives positive assessment of the group's new leader, Karzai added.
"I examined the Daesh fighters. They had gunshot wounds. None of them received life-threatening injuries," the medical worker detailed.

Earlier, Turkish forces opened fire when a group of foreign fighters tried to cross into Syria near Oguzeli, a city in the Gaziantep province. Three militants were killed, 11 were injured. Four of them were brought to the Ersin Arslan regional hospital. No record of their stay was made.

However, during Phelans recent visit to Gaziantep, a city in south-central Turkey some 60 kilometers from the Syrian border, eyewitnesses and doctors told the RT correspondent that most of the Daesh fighters were treated in the border city of Kilis, south of Gaziantep.

Many wounded Daesh militants or FSA [Free Syrian Army] fighters were brought to the border in pick-up trucks, not ambulances, Medical Association Chair in Gaziantep and Kilis Hamza Agca said. Many were unconscious and bleeding when they were brought to us.

Agca further said that the injured men were apparently driven right from a war zone and doctors on a number of occasions had to deal with things like grenades falling out of their pockets.

One doctor from Kilis also confirmed to RT that they received fighters from across the Turkish-Syrian border, including Daesh militants. The doctor said on condition of anonymity that he was just one of the many doctors who treated terrorists in Kilis.

He described discovering suicide vests on some of Daesh patients and felt horrified as he was forced to take them off.

When asked about how the doctors felt about treating terrorists, Agca said that as medical professionals they were under an oath to help the injured, no matter who they were. Any doctor throughout the world would do the same, he said.
The aim for this financial center isnt to look onto Qeshm, but to be a window onto the mainland. he said by phone. There is much interest to enter Iran, Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary, senior adviser to the Qeshm Investment and Development Company, told Bloomberg.

He added that several Russian and Chinese banks had already shown interest in opening offices on the island in the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic location for international trade where 20 percent of the world's oil passes through annually.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The US-led coalition against Daesh carried out 27 airstrikes in Syria and Iraq against the terror group on Wednesday, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a press release.

"In Syria, coalition military forces conducted seven strikes using bomber, attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft against ISIL [Daesh] targets," CENTCOM stated on Thursday. "Additionally in Iraq, coalition military forces conducted 20 strikes coordinated with and in support of the Government of Iraq."

Near the Syrian city of Manbij, coalition airstrikes hit five Daesh tactical units, destroying three fighting positions, a vehicle and six command and control nodes. An additional strike near Abu Kamal destroyed four Daesh oil well heads, according to the statement.
As a result of the fighting that took place on June 15, six terrorists were killed and the rest retreated without continuing to fight.

One member of the armed Yazidis told Sputnik that the unit was able to kill six terrorists who had suicide belts on and were trying to break through to Bab Shlo.

Suicide bombers wanted to climb the mountain of Sinjar, where there is a camp for Yazidi refugees on the border with Syria, where women and children reside, the source told Sputnik.
Earlier in the day, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said that the US-led coalition against Daesh carried out 27 airstrikes in Syria and Iraq against the terror group on Wednesday.

Daesh is a terrorist organization outlawed in the United States, Russia and many other countries.

A US-led coalition of over 60 nations has been conducting airstrikes against Daesh in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
Washington announced an operation to liberate Mosul, Iraqs second-largest city, in early-March. According to some military analysts, before the liberation of Mosul, Iraqi forces would liberate Fallujah. Then, the army and Kurdish troops would deploy to Mosul.

"They cannot liberate Mosul so far. There are tensions between Baghdad and Kurds as well as in the Iraqi government. There is the issue of dividing Mosul after the liberation. Mosul is a stumbling block between Kurds, Sunni, and Shiites, but also between Iran, Turkey and the US and other Western countries," the analyst said.

According to him, the main question is not the liberation of Mosul but who will reap the fruits of this victory.

"I think that the liberation of Mosul would be postponed. The situation in Raqqa is not that complicated so its liberation would be successful," Karim suggested.

Russia, the US, Kurds

According to the analyst, in order to liberate Raqqa, the US was ready for a compromise and formed a tactical alliance with the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the largest and most powerful Kurdish group.

"Previously, relations between Washington and PYD were not close. But amid rapprochement between PYD and Moscow, Washington was concerned. The US promised to open a PYD office in Washington. Then, a Pentagon representative visited Kobani and the US and PYD agreed on an operation in Raqqa," Karim said.

Russias Role in Fighting Daesh
Smith suggested that Canada's continued trade deals with Saudi Arabia highlighted "hypocrisy" in Canadian foreign policy, describing Saudi Arabia as "one of the most brutal, violent oppressive dictatorships in the entire world."

"It brings Canada closer to Saudi Arabia, and to countries like Saudi Arabia. It sends the message that the Canadian Government think these are legitimate governments you can do business with. It really highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of foreign policy.

"The Canadian Government is regarded as a more peaceful one than the US. It's regarded as a more liberal one than the US, everybody knows that there is rank hypocrisy right at the core of US foreign policy but I don't think everybody knows that about Canada," Smith told Sputnik.

The European Parliament voted in favor of an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia in February this year, but this is not a legally binding agreement and the United Kingdom continues to trade weaponry with Saudi Arabia alongside several other European Countries.

"There's a difference between what the European Parliament says and what European Governments do," Smith said, adding that the European Parliament vote would not have put pressure on Canada with regards EU relations.

I call on Saudi Arabia to stop targeting civilians in #Yemen. #EU arms embargo necessary. #Yemeni_Lives_Matter pic.twitter.com/8XUSgYgvWN  Alyn Smith MEP (@AlynSmithMEP) February 25, 2016

"There's a large difference between the rhetoric and reality. In terms of the impact on European-Canadian relations, I don't think it will necessarily make any long-term change."

One area that has caused great concern to many human rights organizations is the ability for rebel troops and terrorist organizations to gain weapons that have been sold to Middle Eastern governments. Earlier this year it was reported that Canadian rifles were being used by rebel troops in Yemen.

 honouring the Saudi arms deal is a matter of principle  Trudeau said..  Joseph Paris (@josephparis) June 16, 2016

"When arms are sold into warzones we have no idea where they are going to end up. That's how you end up with rifles falling into the hands of Houthi rebels, that is how you end up with ISIS [Daesh] tooling up with weapons by stealing large quantities of those which were originally sold to the Iraqi Government.

"This is a large part of the problem, there's no such thing as arms control in a warzone and countries like Canada are selling weapons into warzones on a daily basis." Smith told Sputnik.

In justifying the trade deal the Canadian Government highlighted that it would create 3000 jobs in Ontario  this is the same number of civilian fatalities that a United Nations Human Rights spokesperson estimated had occurred in Yemen alone between March and December of last year.
This morning, as a result of heavy fighting, the Syrian Army managed to take control of the area around the Karamanl hill and the village of Isa Pnar which is 4 km from the Turkish border.

Due to this, the territory around Turkmen Mountain was under full control of Syrian government troops. After liberation, Daesh terrorists fled to Turkey, some of them continue to hide in the region.

With the liberation of Turkmen Mountain, which is an important strategic point because of its proximity to the Turkish border and mountainous terrain, the terrorists can no longer carry out attacks in Latakia with missiles and receive weapons from across the Turkish border.

The fact that the area has been liberated is also important because it is located on the Turkmen Mountain which is leading to the city of Idlib.

This will allow the Syrian government troops to start operations in the strategically important village of Jisr al-Shughur, located on a hill between Latakia and Idlib. Taking over the village will contribute to freeing Idlib.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  A number of soldiers were suffocated as a result of the chemical attack on Wednesday, the source told SANA agency.

The source did not specify the type of chemical used by the terrorists.

Chemical weapons reportedly have previously been deployed by rebels groups in Syrias Aleppo.
TEL AVIV (Sputnik)  According to the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, the 37-mile wall worth about $0.5 billion aims to solve the issue of underground tunnels used by Palestinians to illegally penetrate into Israel's territory diversionary purposes.

Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip in 2007, when Hamas took over the exclave following the ouster of the Fatah party from the Palestinian national unity government. The border is equipped with concrete and iron fences and signal systems.

After the July 2014 Israeli ground offensive, aiming to destroy Hamas rocket launchers and the network of tunnels along the Gaza border with the Jewish State, Israeli military continue searching for Hamas made tunnels, which have been used to resist the Israeli forces as well as to secretly enter Israeli territory and smuggle arms.
CAIRO (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan said that Ansar Beit al-Maqdis was behind the terrorist attack on the Russian passenger jet.

"The Russian side told us the same thing and we replied that the investigation was still ongoing. We will not comment on the CIA director's statement," Abu Zeid said.

On October 31, 2015, a bomb claimed to have been planted by Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia, brought down a Russian-operated Airbus A321 flying over Egypts Sinai Peninsula with 224 people on board. No one survived the crash that became the largest tragedy in Russian and Soviet civil aviation history.
Kirby noted that the United States is continuing to work with Russia on trying to develop mechanisms going forward that can achieve a cessation of hostilities that is better enforced and better sustained over periods of time over the entire country.

"We would like to get beyond a point where we are looking at days of silence in localized areas and get to where the cessation can be actually enforced and enacted nationwide," Kirby explained.

It was too soon to tell, Kirby added, whether the latest localized ceasefire has taken effect in Syria or the degree to which it is being violated.

On Wednesday, US State Secretary John Kerry stated that Russia had to understand that Washington had "very limited" patience left in regard to Syria ceasefire violations.

The Russia-US brokered ceasefire regime in Syria came into force on February 27.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The United States will continue targeting al-Nusra Front terrorist organization which does not have any role in Syria's political future, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the United States appears to have a wish to maintain al-Nusra Front terrorist group in some form in Syria, and use it to achieve its own goals.

"Al-Nusra is a designated terrorist organization, is not a party to the cessation of hostilities and certainly not a part of the political future of Syria. [US] airstrikes against this group will continue," Kirby stated.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The US Navy is conducting airstrikes against the Islamic State from two operational theatres for the first time after the amphibious assault ship Boxer joined the strikes from the Persian Gulf, US Naval Forces Central Command said in a statement on Thursday.

Earlier on Thursday, US Marine Corps Harrier jets flying from the Boxer joined aircraft operating from the aircraft carrier Harry Truman strike group in the Mediterranean Sea.

"This marks the first naval aviation combat strike missions of Operation Inherent Resolve launched from Navy warships in two different operational theaters," the Navy stated.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The military personnel of Russia's Southern Military District repelled an attack by a simulated enemy on field communication units during a surprise military inspection, the district's press service said Thursday.

"The military protection units have practiced detecting and repelling attacks on field communication centers, as well as tracking and destroying scouting groups of a simulated enemy. During the exercise, soldiers used the technical means of protection and detection," the press service said in a statement.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russia is the primary target for hackers among other countries, according to the experts of Russias largest lender, Sberbank, the bank's Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board Stanislav Kuznetsov told Sputnik on Thursday.

"The analysis showed that the situation is very diverse Russia is in the first place by the number of set up viruses, the number of attempted attacks on various types of institutions, including government, finance ones compared with the other countries. Brazil is in the second place, the United States is third," Kuznetsov said.

He noted that since there was no scheme of global cyberthreat monitoring, Sberbank launched one of its own in December 2015.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that NATO has no intention of fighting Russia and assuming this would be a strategic mistake.

"I want to say with certainty that we no longer live in the time of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, the Cold War is over. NATO has no goal of fighting Russia," Sarkozy said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

"I think it's a strategic mistake to think so," he added.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Kabul will ask Moscow to step up its military support to Afghanistan, Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Karzai said Thursday.

"We will continue to strengthen our defense forces," Karzai said at a round table hosted by the Russian International Affairs Council.

The deputy minister said one of the main goals of his Moscow visit was to address Russian partners and "attract them to provide military support to Afghanistan."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The deputy foreign minister is on an official visit to Moscow, noting that one of the main goals of his trip was to urge Russian partners to provide military support to Afghanistan.

"We sent a request to the Russian Security Council for expanding cooperation [in the military field], including for the deliveries of helicopters to Kabul," he said.
The prime minister was instructed to award those contributing to the development of the missile system, according to the media outlet.

The Polonez system was first unveiled at the May 9, 2015 Victory Day Parade in Minsk.
Recently, the Norwegian government presented a long-term plan, in which an additional 172 billion kroner (20 billion dollars) were earmarked for defense purposes over the next 20 years. The Norwegian defense sector is therefore looking forward to purchasing up to 52 new fighter jets, four new submarines and four P-8 Poseidon marine patrol aircraft. Additionally, the garrison of Sr-Varanger that guards the border with Russia will be reinforced with a new company, armed with a much heavier arsenal.

Besides substantial funds laid aside, guidelines for a new type of army have been laid down, commentator Frithjof Jacobsen of the tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang argued.

The most substantial changes are in store for the Norwegian Navy. The number of frigates is going up from three to five in a bid to enhance Norway's presence in the northern seas. The corvette class will be temporarily shut down, only to reemerge in about ten years, strengthened with new fighter jets.
Beijing claims sovereignty over much of the South China Sea, a valuable waterway through which roughly 1/3 of the worlds goods are shipped. The waters also contain one of the worlds largest oil and natural gas deposits, with 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The United States has repeatedly intervened on behalf of several other regional countries, including Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, who hold competing claims. President Obama has called on Xi Jinping to submit to a process laid out in the Law of the Sea Treaty, a treaty Washington is not a signatory to and under which legal experts believe China has an undeniable claim.
In 2011, the comedian posed a similar line of questions to former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during an appearance on the Opie and Anthony radio show. Conducting a publicity tour for his book, "Known Unknowns," the architect of the Iraq War faced the question of whether or not he is a "flesh-eating" lizard alien.

The questions, asked in jest, were met with a stunning barrage of irrelevant anecdotal stories, misdirection and direct non-answers, raising suspicions among the American people that Rumsfeld may indeed be a malevolent reptilian humanoid wearing the skin of some poor Earthling he had devoured.

The former Bush administration cabinet member refuses to weigh in on the raging debate on to this day.

In 2014, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key was forced to publicly address whether or not he was a space lizard after an Auckland citizen filed an official Freedom of Information Act request. Key seemed somewhat uncertain of his status as a non-lizard.
It isnt the first time that candidate Trump waded into this controversy, having remarked in September 2015, "Remember when they were handing $50 million in cash when they were going through Afghanistan? I want to know who were the soldiers who were carrying cash. 50 million dollars cash! Cash! How stupid are we? I wouldnt be surprised with those soldiers if the cash didnt get there."

On Wednesday, Sputnik News sat down with retired US Army Major Glenn McDonald, an award-winning New York Post reporter and editor of MilitaryCorruption.com, to discuss the issue.

"The problem was very severe at the height of the US invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, officers up to the rank of full colonel were caught with their hand in the till," said McDonald. "For example, a West Point graduate, Army Captain Michael Ngyuen, returned to the United States and immediately bought a $70,000 BMW before he was caught with $300,000 in cash in the attic of his home in Oregon."

"He had been shipping home the money that he had made in bribes as a crooked contractor, he was shipping it home in the mail and he hadnt touched his Army pay which went straight into the bank and this was just a low-level captain," noted McDonald. "There had been colonels and I wouldnt be surprised if it went higher than that, but no general in the US military is going to be punished for most anything, because it is like a get-out-of-jail-free card once you are a flag officer."
VLADIVOSTOK (Sputnik)  Russia sees positive prospects for cooperation with Japan, despite current tensions in relations, Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament, said on Thursday.

"We are at a fairly crucial stage of development of Russian-Japanese relations. Despite difficulties, we believe and understand the prospects of cooperation in the economic, political and humanitarian spheres. That's what we will talk about tomorrow," Naryshkin told reporters ahead of his visit to Tokyo.

On Thursday, Naryshkin is set to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, while on Friday the speaker of Russia's lower house of parliament plans to hold consultations with representatives of Japans political and business elites.
"We have offered our EU colleagues to conduct a comprehensive revision of the relations, first in the internal format within each of the parties, and then discuss the results jointly. By the way, more than half of the federal ministries and departments are engaged in the work with the European Union. We are waiting for the EU to complete their internal consultations and will be ready for such a conversation," Chizhov told Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper.

Relations between the European Union and Russia soured after Brussels imposed several rounds of economic sanctions against Moscow for its alleged role in the conflict in southeastern Ukraine. Russia has refuted any allegations of involvement and advocated for settling the conflict between Kiev forces and southeastern Ukraine's pro-independence militia peacefully.
Almost half of Europeans (47 percent) believe that sanctions against Russia should be lifted in June 2016, according to a survey conducted for Sputnik by French opinion and marketing research company Ifop and UK polling agency Populus.

The poll found that 51 percent of Italian, 48 percent of Germans and 43 percent of French respondents want sanctions to be lifted in June 2016. At the same time, only 29 percent of Americans supported the removal of sanctions.

Since 2014, the European Union, the United States and their allies have imposed several rounds of sanctions against Russia over accusations of Kremlin's alleged interference in the Ukrainian conflict  a claim that Moscow has repeatedly denied.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The deputy minister noted that Russia calls for a quick resumption of intra-Syrian negotiations and will ask de Mistura about the dates of a new round of talks.

"Today, there are going to be contacts with [UN Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon and with de Mistura's delegation, there is going to be a separate meting between Sergey Viktorovich [Lavrov] and de Mistura. They will discuss Syria," Bogdanov told reporters.
"We are working with Russian companies to invest in the UK, we also support more than 100 Russian companies to invest in British economy," he said.

The envoy noted, however, that the United Kingdom would like to see specific steps from Russia aimed at improving investment climate.

"Trade between Russia and the UK is down by around 40 percent," Bristow said, adding that it was caused by "difficult " political and economic circumstances.

"This is in line with what is happening with other European economies <> There are plenty of things we would like Russians to do to improve investment climate," the ambassador added.

According to Bristow, another important area for cooperation is education, as Russian students continue to actively study in the United Kingdom.

Relations between Russia and the United Kingdom deteriorated after the start of the Ukrainian crisis and a referendum in Crimea to rejoin Russia in 2014, which prompted the European Union to impose sanctions on Moscow. Russia has repeatedly denied involvement in the Ukrainian conflict.

The 2016 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is taking place on June 16-18. According to the organizing committee, the number of contracts at SPIEF is expected to be not less than in 2015 when the total volume of agreements reached 293 billion rubles ($4.4 billion). Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said on Tuesday that the number of SPIEF participants would exceed 10,000 this year, compared to 7,500 in 2015.
NATO's networks are targeted on a daily basis, but this measure will likely only apply to the most serious security breaches that could trigger the collective defense clause under Article 5.

Cyber attack can trigger Article 5. It is important to develop defensive capabilities & attribute the attacks  #NATO SG @jensstoltenberg  Carmen Romero (@NATODepSpox) 14  2016 .

"A severe cyberattack may be classified as a case for the alliance. Then NATO can and must react," Reuters quoted Stoltenberg told as telling the German newspaper Bild. The bloc's chief was vague on how exactly the alliance plans to respond, saying only that the strategy "will depend on the severity of the attack."

Stoltenberg appeared not to mention how the alliance plans to determine the assault's origin, which is a major challenge when it comes to sophisticated operations since hackers are capable of launching and routing attacks worldwide.
BERLIN (Sputnik)  A visa-free regime between the European Union and Turkey is not feasible yet, European Parliament Vice President and EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee member Alexander Lambsdorff told Sputnik on Thursday.

"My party and I, personally, see no possibility for the full visa freedom at the moment, although we really want it As long as Erdogan is not ready to change his so-called anti-terrorist legislation, he cannot anticipate that the EU will fulfill its part," Lambsdorff said.

He said Turkey-EU free regime had a real chance only when Ankara met all 72 conditions put forth by the bloc.
At the same time, Lavrov said, Western countries have already felt the outcome of sanctions and restrictions they imposed against Russia. Now, there is a growing number of those in the West who want Russia back in the G8 and want sanctions to be lifted.

"In fact, were trying to be creative and were not trying to blandish our European and American partners to remove sanctions. It is up to them to decide how to overcome this stalemate," the minister said.

"We are not taking any initiative on this issue," Lavrov said, adding that western partners were "persuading themselves that Russia has to be returned to G8."

Russia has a vision of the future to establis a common economic and humanitarian space stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, developing cooperation using the formats of the Eurasian Economic Union, G20, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and ASEAN. Another major priority is BRICS.

"Were in active talks on free trade zones with a number of countries across the world. We will rely on strategic partnerships with China, India, and Vietnam. Russia will also expand cooperation with other Asian-Pacific countries," the minister said.

Lavrov also commented on the terrorist threat coming from the Middle East, saying Russias engagement in Syria contributed to weakening the terrorists in Syria.

Moscow will continue a foreign policy course based on respect for international legal norms and collective mechanisms to resolve international problems, with the leading role of the UN.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The SPIEF-2016 will be held on June 16-18. The forum is organized annually and attended by business representatives and officials from dozens of countries.

"Im planning the meet with Lavrov," Barzani said as he was arriving at the event.
BERLIN (Sputnik)  He expressed support for German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier's proposal to gradually lift anti-Russian sanctions , depending on the fulfillment of the Minsk agreements.

"Russia is our neighbor on the European continent. Therefore we very much need neighborly relations However, the Russian government's conduct over the last [few] months [have] made many heads of national governments nervous," Lambsdorff said, adding that Russia's denial of its military presence in Crimea created an environment of mistrust.

Relations between the European Union and Russia soured after Brussels imposed several rounds of economic sanctions against Moscow after Crimea reunified with Russia and for Russia's alleged role in the conflict in southeastern Ukraine. Russia has refuted any allegations of involvement and advocated for settling the conflict between the Kiev forces and southeastern Ukrainian pro-independence militia peacefully.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The US-led coalition of nearly 60 nations has been conducting airstrikes against Daesh first in Iraq and later in Syria since 2014  albeit without the approval of the Syrian government or the UN Security Council.

Russia has conducted an aerial campaign in Syria since September 2015 after the official request by the country's president, Bashar Assad. On March 14, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered to withdraw most of the country's military aviation after accomplishing its objective in the fight against terrorism.

"While we fully support the coalitions fighting in Syria against ISIL [Daesh], at the same time it will be important to prevent why this extremism and terrorism happens. We need to address root causes," Ban said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russia has an opportunity to work alongside the European Union as a partner, he added, stressing that the country had a duty to use its powers for the greater good.

"If our relationship today is troubled and marked by mistrust, it is not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it, and I believe we can. I have always believed in the power of dialogue. When our relations are tense, we must keep talking. Even when economic sanctions are in place, we must keep the door open. And if I am here with you today, it is because I want to build a bridge," Juncker said.
ST PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  UK nationals are set to vote on June 23 in a referendum on the country's EU membership, after Prime Minister David Cameron and the leaders of the 27 EU member states agreed in February to grant the United Kingdom a special status within the bloc.

"I think out British friends would be best advised not to do it [vote to leave the bloc], because if Britain is leaving the European Union this will open a period of major uncertainty both in Britain and in the European Union and on a more global level," Juncker said at a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

SPIEF started at the ExpoForum Convention and Exhibition Centre in St. Petersburg earlier on Thursday. The forum is taking place on June 16-18.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  In February 2015, a peace agreement was signed between Ukraines conflicting sides in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, after talks of the Normandy Four countries, comprising Russia, Germany, Ukraine and France. The deal stipulates a full ceasefire, weapons withdrawal from the line of contact in eastern Ukraine, an all-for-all prisoner exchange and constitutional reforms, which would give a special status to the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk peoples republics.

Both sides of the conflict, however, are constantly accusing each other of violations of the ceasefire.

"At the moment no other basis for settling the intra-Ukrainian crisis exists. Russia and other members of the Minsk four hold the view there is no alternative line for the implementation of the Minsk agreements The Ukrainian side, indeed, continues stalling implementation of these agreements," Peskov told reporters.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk are ready for a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and regret that this part of the Minsk peace agreements remains unfulfilled, Donetsk People's Republic head Alexander Zakharchenko told Sputnik on Thursday.

"It is very unfortunate that the main part of the Minsk agreements is being breached, we have no direct contact with the Ukrainian government. And there is no meeting," Zakharchenko said.

"The main postulate [of the Minsk deals]it is written in plain text: in order to normalize the situation and settle relations, a direct meeting needs to be held between the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics and the Ukrainian leadership," he added.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The foreign minister stressed that the European Union is showing inability to comprehend current situation by saying that Russia was no longer a strategic partner.

Earlier in June, it was reported that Germany's new White Paper on security policy will include Russia in the list of 10 major threats for the country.

The 80-paper document, which is in the final stage of preparation, will include Moscow in the list of factors posing threat to Berlin, among international terrorism, hacker attacks, migration crisis and climate change.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The issue of anti-Russian sanctions may be examined on an EU meeting in October, Prime Minister of Finland Juha Sipila said Thursday.

"Now it is clear that sanctions are going to continue. These are linked to the Minsk agreement and there has been no progress on that. This is because of all the parties, not only Russian. But we have already agreed this discussion [on sanctions lift] in October. It is really needed," Sipila said.

Relations between the European Union and Russia soured after Brussels imposed several rounds of economic sanctions against Moscow after Crimea reunified with Russia and for Russia's alleged role in the conflict in southeastern Ukraine.
"The accusations are very serious. In particular, the Assyrians claim that Kuveyt Turk Bank's channels were used to transfer money to the accounts of such terrorist organizations as Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra. In addition, Kuveyt Turk Bank and its financial subsidiaries have been allegedly directly involved in the genocide of Assyrians, international terrorism, as well as crimes against humanity,'" Varol said.

According to the expert, the claimants possess very detailed data about how the money transfers were accomplished. In particular, they argue that Turkey was directly involved in the illegal financial activities and carried out money transfers via fundraising campaigns initiated by associations and organizations operating in Turkey.

"Support of international terrorism and involvement in genocide is a serious accusation. Turkey can get into the position of a country that violated the UN sanctions regime against terrorist organizations Daesh and.Jabhat al-Nusra," the expert said.

According to Varol, the fundraising campaigns are said to have been organized under the pretext of "delivering humanitarian aid to Aleppo." The website of one of the organizations suspected of being involved in the illegal financial activities contained account data of the Kuwaiti-Turkish bank.

"Given the difficult situation in which Turkey now is with regard to the Syrian crisis and activities of terrorist groups, one should not underestimate the seriousness of such campaigns as the collection of money under the pretext of sending aid to Aleppo. Turkey seems to have not yet fully understood how serious all this is. This trial [] could signify only the beginning of a series of much larger future trials and proceedings related to Turkey," Varol said.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Kerry stated earlier in the week that Russia must understand that Washington has "very limited" patience left in regard to Syria ceasefire violations.

The foreign minister said he was surprised by Kerry's statements and urged the United States to show more patience in regard to Syria.

"First of all, we have not promised anyone to do anything. We have given no promises to anyone, but agreed that everyone working on the Syrian settlement will be guided by agreements reached by the International Syria Support Group, which have been written down in UN Security Council Resolutions," Lavrov said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  In February 2015, a peace agreement was signed between Ukraines conflicting sides in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, after talks of the Normandy Four countries, comprising Russia, Germany, Ukraine and France. The deal stipulates a full ceasefire, weapons withdrawal from the line of contact in eastern Ukraine, an all-for-all prisoner exchange and constitutional reforms, which would give a special status to the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk peoples republics.

Both sides of the conflict, however, are constantly accusing each other of violations of the ceasefire.

"Attempts to rewrite [the Minsk agreements] are unacceptable, inadmissible. We hope that our Western partners will carry out the work with Kiev, especially as the Germans and the French, and even the Americans are beginning to get tired of the whims of their wards, who signed the document and do not want to implement it," Lavrov told a session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the DPR head, Kiev's proposals to arm OSCE observers in eastern Ukraine is senseless, as handguns would not help the mission against machine guns.

"We would not oppose it in such case," Zakharchenko said, answering a question on DPR's stance on possible deployment of the Russian peacekeeping mission.
The new global economic reality presumes that the international community is abandoning the old type of relations between countries and economies.

"We did our best to include Russia in the World Trade Organization. But when this integration began to progress the West imposed sanctions. The priority should be economy not military hostility. So everyone who works with the EU and NATO should keep in mind the dangers of this cooperation," Wimmer said.

He underscored that currently there is a dangerous trend of "re-militarization" underway in Europe.

Wimmer expressed hope that during the economic forum participants would reach an understanding that the only way to overcome tensions is return to partnership, including intensive economic cooperation.

"Good-neighborly relations mean that partners are engaged in trade cooperation. If not there would be conflicts. Lets take the example of the United States. Washington is trying to pressure Moscow on all directions. Such a policy would provoke conflicts," he concluded.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged the US earlier this month to convince those rebel groups which they support in Syria to leave areas where al-Nusra Front militants are present.

Earlier, Washington asked Moscow to direct its airstrikes solely at al-Nusra Front and refrain from targeting so-called "moderate" rebels, working with al-Qaeda's branch in Syria.

"The Americans are now saying that they are unable to remove the 'good' opposition members from the positions held by al-Nusra Front, and that they will need another two-three months. I am under the impression that there is a game here and they may want to keep al-Nusra Front in some form and later use it to overthrow the [Assad] regime," Lavrov said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  UK nationals are set to vote on June 23 in a referendum on the country's EU membership, after Prime Minister David Cameron and the leaders of the 27 EU member states agreed in February to grant the United Kingdom a special status within the bloc.

"The issue of disaccord between the elites and people in Europe is becoming central one and it should be treated even if the UK votes to stay. The people of Europe do not vote more integration at the moment," Vedrine said.
Thus far, he notes, Washington's "pervasive bipartisan assumption" that Moscow is an "aggressively expansionist power" bears no relation to reality.

If one looked back in time, one would find out that Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic States had been under Moscow's control for centuries before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Moreover, Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783. Only in 1954 was the peninsula "gifted" to Ukraine by adventurous Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the one who ordered a deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba back in 1962.

It is begging the question why and when the fate of Russia's neighbors  the Baltic republics, Georgia and Ukraine  became the focus of Washington's attention and a vital security interest of the United States, Carpenter wonders.
Russian-French cultural and humanitarian ties have not been significantly impacted by the strained political situation in Europe, she added.

On Wednesday, the French Senate passed by overwhelming majority a resolution calling on the government to ease sanctions against Russia. The National Assembly, France's lower house of parliament, adopted a similar resolution in April.

On June 28-29, the EU leaders are due to decide on further prolongation of sanctions at a summit in Brussels.
Maria Zakharova did not leave US State Secretary John Kerry's recent remarks on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad without a comment.

"Russia needs to understand that our patience is not infinite, in fact it is very limited with whether or not Assad is going to be held accountable," America's top diplomat said on Wednesday. State Department Spokesman John Kirby later clarified that this "wasn't a hollow threat. It wasn't even a threat."

Washington "has walked back and, let's say, adjusted its approach, saying that [Kerry's remarks] were not a threat; everything was balanced out. It is hard time for them at the moment," Zakharova noted. "Emotions run high ahead of elections."

As the Obama administration is getting ready to leave the White House, the team is less focused on "setting certain processes in motion to resolve them and more intent on casting a positive light on its activities," the spokeswoman explained.
On June 23, the UK public is set to vote on whether or not the country should keep its membership of the European Union, with many British media outlets linking the vote in the Swiss parliament with the forthcoming referendum.

"To withdraw the request [for EU membership] was demanded by a motion on March 21, 2014. It is not unusual that a procedural request takes to years time until it becomes definitively decided," Georg Darendinger, Head of Communications at FDP.The Liberals, which supported the motion, told Sputnik on Thursday. He also ruled out any link between the two events.

The Swiss Confederation has never been part of the European bloc. Following the signing of the European Economic Area Agreement in May 1992, the country rejected the move in a popular vote just in a few months later.
However, in recent years the situation has changed drastically: "hostages are no longer taken to achieve anything, but just to buy time."

"Hostage-taking lengthens the terror attack, increases the dramatic atmosphere surrounding it, ensures heavy media coverage and enhances terror's psychological effect," Harel explains.

Citing Moty Cristal, an Israeli expert on negotiating with terrorists, Harel stresses that there seems to be a gap "between the way Western security forces deal with such hostage situations and the new modus operandi."

"It seems that the negotiating component in such crises will be reduced proportionately and there will be a need to develop the ability to strike as quickly as possible," Cristal told Haaretz.
"Over the past two years, submarines started to appear again, this time allegedly sent by the evil Putin. The emergence of these submarines might now result in a situation in which Sweden, which has just taken part in the "Anaconda" maneuvers, will become a NATO member. Sweden, Finland, Ukraine and Georgia  all this is an unfriendly act towards Russia justified by its alleged aggression. A fake incident with submarines is just supposed to serve as confirmation of its aggressiveness," Pohlmann stated.

In autumn 2014, Sweden launched a massive eight-day witch hunt for a foreign submarine, which was suspected to be Russian. The chase in the Stockholm archipelago ended in a bitter fiasco, sparking a hot debate on whether the largest Nordic nation, with almost 10 million citizens, should abandon its non-alignment policy and join NATO on account of the fact that it is unable to defend itself properly.

"In October 2014 the Swedish Navy declared that it discovered  with 100 percent probability  a foreign submarine. The news caused uproar all across the world. Then in January 2015 the submarine appears again, this time the announcement was made by the Swedish military," Pohlmann recalled the events.

In fact, in October 2014 the discovered submarine was Swedish, Pohlmann added. A Swedish general confirmed this to Sveriges Radio. It was a new type of submarine. The government discussed increasing defense spending under pretext of this submarine hysteria.

"With the assistance of former Swedish servicemen  some admirals in reserve who argued that this was undoubtedly a Russian submarine  the news which until that moment was objective was  by means of false reasoning that seemed logical  transformed by journalists into the news about Russian submarines. And this was the news that set the mood," Pohlmann stated.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday said that the failure to get the US Senate's nod will not have a major impact on India-US relations.

"This does not impact in any way our Major Defense Partner' status that was conveyed by the US Administration and also articulated in the Indo-US Joint Statement," a statement from the Ministry of External Affairs said on Thursday.

External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup further added that, "The preparation of the National Defense Authorization Act in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers. The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content."
Another important step, according to the newspaper, was the appointment of the new ambassador to Moscow, Huseyin Dirioz.

"The appointment of a new ambassador to Moscow is being viewed as a new start in relations with Russia'," the newspaper noted.

And last, but not least: Russia's ambassador to Ankara, Andrew Karlov, organized a big event at the Russian Embassy in Turkey last week. The event was attended by the assistant of a Turkish Foreign Minister Deputy and three CEOs as well as representatives of the Turkish military.

"This year, in an interview with reporters Russian Ambassador to Ankara Karlov expressed his satisfaction with the level of participation and made it clear: Our relations are important,'" the article said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Juncker said he enjoyed being at SPIEF in Russia despite some people disliking the idea of his participation in the forum.

"The fact that Juncker is participating at SPIEF and his contacts with the Russian president is a definite step toward restoration of our relations. Maybe it will be a new normality but perhaps it will be more pragmatic," Chizov said at SPIEF.

SPIEF started at the ExpoForum Convention and Exhibition Centre in St. Petersburg earlier on Thursday and will continue until June 18.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russia will have to develop separate bilateral relations with the United Kingdom if the British public decides to terminate its membership in the European Union, Russian ambassador to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov said Thursday.

"I don't know who would profit from Britain leaving the European Union. Relations with the European Union in the 28+1 format would come to an end, turning into 27+1. We would have to develop bilateral relations with Britain in those sectors where it acted as an EU member. But let us wait for the results," Chizhov said.

UK nationals are set to vote on June 23 in the referendum on the country's EU membership, after Prime Minister David Cameron and the leaders of the 27 EU member states agreed in February to grant the United Kingdom a special status within the bloc.
Following the inking of the Syrian ceasefire agreement by Washington and Moscow, Kerry announced that the Obama administration had a so-called "Plan B" that envisioned the partitioning of Syria as the way to settle the conflict.

Apparently, the current president's administration is itching to implement the plan before Barack Obama leaves the Oval Office.

This version could be possibly proven by the fact that in early May Kerry gave a de-facto ultimatum to the Syrian government and its allies, saying that they face an August deadline for starting a "political transition," that obviously meant Assad's stepping down.

"The target date for the transition is August 1. So we're now coming up to May. So either something happens in these next few months, or they are asking for a very different track," Kerry told journalists at the State Department, as quoted by the Associated Press.

"And it's unlikely that the Obama administration, so long opposed to an active American combat role in Syria, would significantly boost its presence beyond the 300 special forces it has authorized thus far in the heart of a US presidential election season. It may be more feasible for US allies like Saudi Arabia to give the rebels new weapons to fight Assad, such as portable surface-to-air missiles," Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press suggested.
On June 12, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the occasion of Russia's national holiday, expressing hope for good bilateral relations.

"Erdogan's letter can be viewed as an attempt by the Turkish leadership to test the waters' and see how feasible it is in the current circumstances to achieve the normalization of relations with Russia," Sezer said.

"Turkey is making such steps because its policy in Syria and in general in the Middle East has reached a deadlock [] However, this is not only a matter of foreign policy. In Turkey, there is now a serious crisis in the economy, which in the Turkish society is directly associated with the break up between Turkey and Russia," the expert claimed.

Taking into account all negative factors, the re-establishment of relations with Russia is essential for Turkey, according to Sezer.

"Given the tensions with the EU and the global economic crisis as well as the fact that Turkey's policy in the Middle East led to a sharp drop in the country's image in the international arena, neglecting a friendly relationship with Russia is nothing else but shooting itself in its foot," Sezer argued.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated that Russia was willing to resume its relations with Turkey, but Ankara will have to go through all the necessary steps, including an apology and compensation for the incident. Turkish-Russian relations deteriorated after a Turkish F-16 fighter downed a Russian Su-24 bomber over Syria on November 24, 2015.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said that de Mistura's representatives would hold meetings with members of the Syrian opposition groups in the coming days in Damascus, Moscow, Riyadh and Cairo.

"I heard that Mistura is supposed to be in Moscow soon. There is no certain news, but there is possibility he will meet various groups of the opposition, including the internal opposition. I think he can meet with us after he meets with Riyadh group and other groups. It will be even better, because there are so many differences between the oppositions now," Krydee said.

A Syrian government delegation, as well as three opposition groups  the Riyadh-formed High Negotiations Committee, the Moscow-Cairo and the Hmeymim groups have been taking part in the UN-mediated Geneva talks on Syrian reconciliation.
The Republican that once considered himself a moderate and a maverick has recently drifted further to the right in an attempt to shore up electoral support ahead of a closely contested primary election. Recent polls also show the five-term senator narrowly losing his reelection effort to Democratic Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick.

Political pundits appear to hold the longtime statesman to a higher standard than the reality television show-inspired campaign ran by Donald Trump, with furious controversy erupting immediately following the Arizona Senators comments.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) struck quickly with a fierce denunciation of John McCains comments, comparing them to the radical statements made by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

"Unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump," said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

Realizing the inefficacy of associating a sitting US President with genocidal terror cults stuck in the 7th century, the prominent Republican senator quickly retracted his statement, issuing several Tweets and a press release acknowledging that he "misspoke."

John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) June 16, 2016

I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the President himself. As I have said, President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL, McCain said.

"I and others have long warned that the failure of the Presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando."

David Samples (@NatureGuy101) June 16, 2016


The news of Junckers meeting with Putin was met with apprehension in the United States, political analyst Dmitry Babich tells Loud & Clear , as it could be an indication that the Russian leaders attempts to mend fences with the West are now bearing fruit.

[Vladimir Putin] did his best to keep good relations with the EU and with the US, Babich says. This is why many in the US are unhappy with JCJs visit to St. Petersburg. They are afraid that Putin can strike what they call a separate deal with Europe, bypassing the US and improving relations with the EU.

However, Washington politicians should not be concerned given that the European Union has pursued anti-Russian policies even more harshly than the United States.
Sarah continued saying that much of the Leave UK campaign is plain racist. The real problem is austerity, and neoliberal policies imposed on a local level, which are putting people further into poverty, not immigration.

As regards the emotional element of Brexit, Sarah pointed out that it is really interesting that if you break down the figures, how different parts of Britain feel about immigration. Where there is the most fear around immigration, thats where there is very little immigration. The campaign on both sides has become an emotional one, and that leads to a misunderstanding of the facts and figures that are out there. Sarah said, we need to understand peoples fears, and those fears are being stoked in many cases by the mainstream media, who find it is in their interests to put people against one another. We have to admit that there is a stoking of fear of the other and a racist undertone.

The Leave camp can also be accused of misrepresentation of the facts regarding the membership fees for being in the EU, which the labourleave.org site says is 50m a day. The website does not make it clear how much the UK gets back in terms of investment from the EU and in terms of trade. Brendan answered by saying that the UK should not be sending more and more money to the EU, money which is spent in unaccountable ways. Sarah replied that it is frustrating to hear from other people from the left that Austerity is something to do with the EU, austerity is a political choice that was made by the labour government as well as the Tory government, and it is something which we should be fighting together. Brendans reply was: you dont have to be in a political union to trade with the rest of the world.

In the second part of the programme the figures concerning for support of the EU admin are discussed. According to MORI, most people think that the contribution is about 27%, when in fact the real figure is 6%. Sarah agrees with Brendan that there are issues where the EU should be reformed, in particularly around the transparency issues of the democratic accountability of the structures of the EU. Brendan, however, pointed out that we have been trying, without success, to change the way the EU is run for a long time.

There are many interesting points in this programme which you should perhaps listen to if you wish to understand what is really happening in the last week of this devastatingly important campaign.
As Juncker meets with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg today, the EU remains deeply divided and evidently tired of sanctions against Russia. Is there a thaw in EU-Russia relations?

Also, the Libyan government is suing Wall Street megabank Goldman Sachs for $1.2 billion dollars, claiming that it used bribes to secure contracts in 2008. The case is in front of the London High Court, but White House fingerprints are all over the case. To discuss this Becker is joined by editor-in-chief of news website WhoWhatWhy Russ Baker.

And the State Department is blocking the release of Hillary Clintons emails on the Trans-Pacific Partnership until after the election in November. Why is the Obama Administration so scared and whats in these emails thats so secretive? Becker is joined by executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and co-creator of the investigative website District Sentinel Sam Sacks.
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The St. Petersburg forum will be a a good chance for Western investors to see where the Russian economy is going to move in the coming years.

What we can see now are attempts to kickstart the economy, but I dont think that we should expect any dramatic upswing happening any time soon. This means that foreign investors who are serious about working in Russia should carefully analyze the results of this meeting, Vladimir Osakovsky, chief economist on Russia and CIS at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

European and US sanctions imposed on Russia and cheap oil remain a serious problem, the Kremlins press spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that during the forum Russia would be looking for ways to ramp up mutually-beneficial cooperation with foreign companies.

Sergei Katyrin, president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was optimistic about Russias economic future.

Even though the sanctions showed that we are lagging behind in high-tech and some other areas, we have just unveiled the MS-21 new generation passenger jet which will successfully compete in the global market, he said.

Despite the current crisis, foreign investors want to increase their presence in Russia with about 80 percent of German companies working in Russia all set to expand their business operations.

I have pragmatic, not political, advice to [potential investors]. The depreciation of the ruble is a good opportunity for them to invest in production facilities in Russia and sell their products abroad, for example in China, Alexander Shokhin, the president of the Russia Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, said.

Many European companies believe that they will be financially better off by outsourcing to Russia. Production costs are pretty low here and a couple of years from now this the window of opportunity may close down, so now is the right time to move to Russia, despite the embargo, he added.

This forum is the starting point of our cooperation as its amply proved by Prime Minister Matteo Renzis decision to come. By his presence here the Italian government is sending a message of support to Italian companies willing to invest in Russia, Italian ambassador Cesare Maria Ragaglini told Gazeta.ru.

Italy is the only European country to have its own pavilion at the forum where over 20 companies will be showcasing their products.

We see a great deal of interest by foreign investors to work in Russia, so I dont think we have any reason to talk about sanctions, the Russian Direct Investment Funds head Kirill Dmitriev said.

He added that more than 40 investors from 18 countries were expected to come and that the RDIF planned to announce the construction of a factory in Russia in cooperation with French partners and launch a major medical infrastructural project with Italian businessmen.

The 2016 International Economic Forum will run until June 18.
SEVASTOPOL (Sputnik)  Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu arrived in Crimea on Thursday as part of his working visit to Russias Southern Military District, ministry's spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.

"During his one-day visit, the head of the military ministry will hear the Southern Military Districts and the Black Sea Fleets command on implementation of plans of construction of military infrastructure objects," Konashenkov told reporters.
A strong US dollar did play a part in this adding to the cost of US grain exports and enabling Russia to clinch deals to sell wheat to such traditional buyers of American grain as Nigeria and Mexico, Russian Grain Union Vice President Alexander Korbut told Sputnik.

Korbut said that, barring bad weather, Russia was likely to maintain its lead into the next year.

Russia expects to take in some 64 million tons of wheat with the total grain harvest estimated at between 106 and 111 million tons.

This means that this years harvest could exceed the previous record of 108.2 million tons taken produced in in 2008.

This is a recurring trend across most of the agricultural sectors with poultry and pork meat production accordingly tripling and doubling since 2006.

Western economic sanctions, imposed on Russia over its alleged role in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, have played right into the hands of Russian farmers.

In 2015 the export of excessive agricultural produce earned Russia a record $20 billion, more than the sale of arms. Simultaneously, food imports dropped by a hefty 40 percent.


MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The sides have agreed to continue the joint work to search for and commemorate fallen servicemen.

"On June 15, at the initiative of the Russian Defense Ministry, a meeting with the Defense Attache of Germany Brig. Gen. Reiner Schwalb was held. Russian military experts gave the German side materials related to the discovery of the location of a sunken World War II U- 307 submarine in the Barents Sea," the press release by the ministry reads.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  That is possible to create an analogue for Alibaba in Russia, Ma told Sputnik on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

However, Alibaba itself cannot implement such a project in Russia alone, the company needs a partner that will support it in Russia, Ma said.

Alibaba, China's biggest e-commerce group that includes such online shopping websites as Taobao, AliExpress and Tmall, was founded in 1999. According to the companys statistics, last year ended in March Alibabas revenue amounted to more than $15.3 billion.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russia seeks to attract Chinese investment for the construction of Russia's first super high-speed Hyperloop transport system, Russian Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov said Thursday.

"The Russia-China intergovernmental council will convene in a month. I will suggest that my counterpart consider this project, in particular in terms of investments," Sokolov told journalists.

He added that the Hyperloop construction project would be funded by private investors.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Rosselkhoznadzor head Sergey Dankvert met with Jose Miguel Burgos, the head of Chiles Sernapesca fisheries body, on Thursday.

"The sides [Russia and Chile]have mapped out concrete steps for the supply of genetic material from Chile for growing salmon in the Russian Federation. This will allow to replace Norwegian supplies of this product," Rosselkhoznadzor said in a statement after the meeting.

According to the Russian agriculture watchdog, the move comes amid concerns over the spread of salmon infections.
The council is set to be held on the Greek island of Crete on June 17-26, after more than 50 years of preparations. A number of churches, including the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church have refused to participate in the council as the procedure and documents of the council have not been worked out properly yet.

On Monday, Russian Orthodox Church said that the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church met for an extraordinary session after which it offered to postpone the Council to a later date because several Orthodox churches had refused to participate and it was expecting a response from the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

"Unfortunately, the problems voiced by the autocephalous churches were ignored. Now, in the remaining time, they can not be solved. In such circumstances, I see no reason which could move the Russian church to change its decision," the metropolitan said.
ST.PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Iran's ambassador to Russia expects a major growth in tourist relations between the two countries in 2016, Iran's Ambassador to Russia Mehdi Sanaei said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

"I am sure that this year we will witness a twofold increase in the tourism area," he said.

Earlier this year, Sanaei suggested that Tehran may unilaterally cancel tourist visas for Russian citizens.
"He was scary in a concerning way," Daniel Gilroy, a co-worker at G4S, told NBC. "And it wasn't at times. It was all the time. He had anger management issues. Something would set him off, but the things that would set him off were always women, race or religion. [Those were] his button pushers."

The shooter was questioned by the FBI a second time, after a Florida man with whom he had ties traveled to the Middle East and blew himself up in a suicide bombing. G4S again took no action.

G4S was formerly known as the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, founded in 1954 by three former FBI agents. Mateen is not the first G4S employee who passed background checks and screenings to become employed, and subsequently engage in violent attacks resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

In a report from The Intercept, Alex Emmons detailed others employed by the firm who went on to commit atrocities, and noted previous accusations of the improper vetting of employees by G4S.
"We have proven by our decision today that we are as relevant as ever and that we are capable of adapting to changes in the security environment."

This isnt the first time the NATO chief has brushed off the billionaire.

"The strength in NATO is that one of our core values is that we are an open democratic society, and in an open democratic society there are different opinions and different views and we agree and we disagree. That is part of democratic society," he told reporters earlier this month, in response to Trumps comments.

"Despite all that we are able to reach consensus and implement our decisions."

Stoltenberg added that no matter the outcome of the US election, the alliance will continue to operate as normal.
The Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, was a licensed security guard permitted to carry handguns, and legally bought a semi-automatic military-style assault rifle from a gun store in nearby Port St. Lucie, Florida. He went on to use this weapon to kill 49 and wound 53 people at a popular nightclub in Orlando.

Zeid pointed out that the process for purchasing deadly weapons in the United States is far too lax, and makes widespread slaughter such as that witnessed on Sunday far too simple. It is hard to find a rational justification that explains the ease with which people can buy firearms, including assault rifles, in spite of prior criminal backgrounds, drug use, histories of domestic violence and mental illness, or direct contact with extremists, both domestic and foreign," he stated.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Mateens Facebook accounts were taken down, so the messages could not be viewed by the public, however, investigators were able to uncover some of them, Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson said on Wednesday.

"In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state [Daesh] in the usa," one of Mateens messages said, according to Johnson.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to Brennan, all anti-Daesh efforts made by Washington and its allies have not reduced the "terrorism capability and global reach" of Daesh.

"ISIL [IS] has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West. And the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel," the statement published on the Senate's website quoted Brennan as saying.

Daesh, which is banned in the United States, Russia and several other countries, claimed responsibility for the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, which killed 130 people, and the March 22 series of blasts in Brussels, which claimed the lives of 35 people.
Although four decades have passed since a prolific serial rapist and murderer terrorized California communities from Sacramento to Orange County, the FBI and local law enforcement announced a national publicity campaign todayand a significant rewardin the hopes of locating the suspect and finally bringing him to justice, the FBI said in a statement on Wednesday.

In the 1970s and '80s, California was terrorized by a man who committed at least 175 crimes, including at least 45 rapes, over 120 burglaries, and 12 murders. His victims ranged in age from 13 to 41 and included women who were home alone, women at home with their children, and married couples, the FBI reports.

The man, who was also known as the East Area Rapist, was never captured and is believed to now be in his 60s or 70s. The agency is back on his trail after decades of the notorious killer remaining seemingly dormant.
MEXICO CITY (Sputnik)  The Exxon Mobil oil and gas corporation has evacuated staff from a plant in southern California amid a wildfire, the companys spokesperson said.

"Employees who remain on site are involved in various fire-protection activities," Exxon spokesman Todd Spitler said in an email to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

The wildfire started in Californias Santa Barbara county on Wednesday. By Thursday, it had covered some 1,100 acres, according to country data cited by the newspaper.
In the latest UN report on child victims in armed conflicts, the Saudi-led international coalition was included in the UN blacklist, as a party responsible for hundreds of child casualties in its war with Yemen.

General Ahmed Asiri, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, claimed that the report was unbalanced, not based on reliable data and didn't serve the interests of Yemenis. He asserted that the sources were Houthi-linked, and therefore untrustworthy.

The UN refused to disclose its sources, despite a June 8 letter from Saudi UN Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi, in which he asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to reveal details.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Atomstroyexport's dispute with Bulgaria's National Electric Company was over the termination of the project of Belene Nuclear Power Plant.

"Atomstroyexport will receive 620 million euro [almost $700 million] from Bulgaria," the spokesperson told reporters.

In 2011, Atomstroyexport sued Bulgaria after it scrapped the Belene project for which the Russian company had won a tender.
Pavel Negoitsa, publisher of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, said the album is the second example of cooperation with Chinese media after the release of the photo albumOne Hundred Photographers Focus on Russialast year. Such cooperation testifies to the lasting friendship of the two countries, he said.

Kaminskaya Kseniya, deputy director of the Russian government's News and Information Department, said that when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had visited China he took photos. Medvedev has contributed three pictures to the new album, showcasing the high level of attention he pays to Sino-Russian relations.

Negoitsa said Sino-Russian friendship has passed through generations and should be passed on to the next generation.

China Watch reaches more than 50 million readers in political and business circles with help from the circulation channels of newspapers in various countries.

The publication is circulated with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in the United States; The Daily Telegraph in Britain; The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and Financial Review in Australia; Le Figaro in France; Handelsblatt in Germany; The Nation in Thailand; The Jakarta Post in Indonesia; and Uno and El Cronista in Argentina.

By Ren Qi in Moscow (China Daily)
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reaffirmed at a meeting on Thursday the necessity to continue efforts to resolve crises in Syria, Libya and Yemen, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"The two sides discussed the most pressing issues on the international agenda, including the situation in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Middle East peace process and the fight against international terrorism. The sides agreed on the need to make additional efforts to achieve progress in the soonest settlement of these regional crises. Lavrov stressed that a just and viable solution to these problems requires taking into account the interests of all parties involved," the statement reads.
CAIRO (Sputnik)  According to the statement, the voice recorder was delivered to Alexandria, where it will be examined by investigation committee's members.

"The recorder was recovered at several stages, as it has been damaged and broken up into several parts. Using the ship's equipment, the part, that contained the device's hard drive, which is the most important part in the recorder, was recovered," the statement said.

On May 19, the EgyptAir Airbus A320 plane disappeared from radar screens over the Mediterranean Sea, 10 miles into Egyptian airspace. The plane was headed from Paris to Cairo.
BRUSSELS (Sputnik)  According to the statement, the Commission updated the EU Air Safety List, which includes airlines that do not meet international safety standards, and are subject to an operating ban within the bloc.

"Following my visit to Iran in April, a technical assessment was successfully carried out in May. Based on this I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from Iran Air back into European skies," EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc said, as quoted in the statement.

In addition, all airlines certified in Zambia were also cleared from the list, along with Air Madagascar and Indonesia's Citilink, Lion Air and Batik Air.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Iran is interested in joint production of Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliner with Russia, talks on the matter are underway, Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh, Iran's Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade, said Thursday.

"Sukhoi Superjet is a good modern aircraft. We take interest in the aviation industry to work together and realize joint production," the minister said.

He added that the negotiations on the issue were underway but there were no concrete results so far.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Russia, along with several other countries, including the United Kingdom, suspended flights to Egypt over safety concerns after an Airbus A321 crashed en route from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, killing all 224 people on board after an explosive device detonation.

"It [flights suspension] is affecting tourism. We are working on diversifying tourism sources in addition to covering industry drop in other sectors. We see a much stronger Arab tourism," Tarek Kabil said on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

Kabil stressed that restoring tourism took time.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  The demand for Iranian oil will continue to increase gradually, former International Energy Agency's Head Nobuo Tanaka told Sputnik Thursday.

"Iranian oil will continue to growing. It is obvious that with sanctions lifted so the production will increase the demand for Iranian oil will increase gradually. It is already coming close to the level before the sanctions, and it will continue," Tanaka said.

In January, the European Union, the United Nations, and partially the United States lifted their sanctions against the Islamic republic after the International Atomic Energy Agency verified Tehrans compliance with a nuclear agreement reached last July. The lifting of sanctions allowed Iranian oil producers to re-enter the global market.
ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik)  Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riyad Haddad said on Thursday he does not rule out that Syrian, Iranian and Russian defense ministers will hold new meetings.

"Allied states hold such meetings between defense ministers from time to time. Half a year ago, for instance, such a meeting was held in Moscow. Another one has been recently held in Tehran. The third one may take place in some other place. The main purpose for such meetings is to determine at which stage we currently are and what else should be done for [Syrian] reconciliation. We consider holding such meetings is necessary," Haddad told reporters.

Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces loyal to President Bashar Assad fighting a number of opposition factions and extremist groups.
A pair of track records, seven victories and a New York Sire Stakes win. It was just another day at the office for driver Jim Morrill Jr. at Buffalo Raceway on Wednesday night (June 15).

Morrill Jr. captured a $58,000 division of the New York Sire Stakes for the three-year-old pacers as he guided Missile J to a neck victory over Manny in a track record of 1:53.1, which eclipsed the gelding mark of 1:53.4 set by Murder He Wrote in 2014.

Earlier in the program, Morrill Jr. and Terrorcam set a new track standard for the four-year-old pacing mares with a 1:54.1 clocking in a filly and mare optional claiming race. The winning time crushed the old record of 1:55 established by Bet The Ranch in 2009 and Skyway Tia in 2015.

Wednesday marked the fourth time this season that Morrill Jr. has posted seven wins on a program at Buffalo Raceway as he accomplished the feat on March 3, March 25 and April 15. Kevin Cummings still holds the Buffalo Raceway mark to beat with eight wins back on June 11, 2005.

Fine Diamond and driver Joe Bongiorno won the $59,100 first division of New York Sire Stakes with a half-length decision over Craftship in 1:56.

Missile J ($2.20), the winner of the $300,0000 Art Rooney Stakes at Yonkers Raceway earlier this season, opened up a six-length edge with a quarter-mile to pace, but just had enough left to beat the hard-charging Manny (Chris Lems) by a diminishing neck in 1:53.1.

A blistering :26.2 second panel, which set up a :54 half for Missile J, wasn't what Morrill Jr. was hoping for, stating, "He was all wound up. He just wanted to go."

And go he did. Missile J tipped the timer in 1:23.1 to three-quarters, but was begging for the finish line.

"He was certainly tired at the end, especially with those fractions," Morrill Jr. said after the race.

Manny finished in second with JK Heaven Sent (Bongiorno) taking third.

Owned by Kj Stables LLC and the Purple Haze Stables and conditioned by Linda Toscano, Missile J (American Ideal-Cantors Daughter) earned his sixth win from 10 starts this season. The victory increased his seasonal earnings to $232,675. Missile J was unraced in 2015.

In the other NYSS division, Fine Diamond and Bongiorno sat back and watched the front end battle between Craftship (Morrill Jr.) and Bottom Deals (Lems). The speed duel did the pair in as Fine Diamond scooted down the passing lane to register the half-length decision. Craftship took the place position and Autotune Hanover (Dobson) was third.

"With Bottom Deals and Craftship pushing the fractions, it set it up pretty well for me," said Bongiorno. "Fine Diamond was excellent."

A Meadowlands regular, the 22-year-old Bongiorno said, "It's my first time here [at Buffalo Raceway] and it was a great experience."

The win was the fourth in six starts for Fine Diamond (Rock N Roll Hanover-Yellow Diamond). The decision pushed his seasonal bankroll to $63,635 and lifetime earnings to $209,145. He is trained by Ron Burke and owned by the Burke Racing Stable, Weaver Bruscemi and the Panhellenic Stable.

In the Excelsior A Series, with each leg carrying a purse of $15,000, the winners were: Hash Tag Chrome (Sam Schillaci), Readysetletsroll (Billy Dobson) and Heres The Scoop (Morrill Jr.).

The non-betting Excelsior B Series race worth $6,200 went to Americanation (Dobson).

Wanna Rock N Roll (Lems) captured the $9,500 Open Pace for the filly and mares in 1:56.1 and returned $4.20.

(With files from Buffalo Raceway)
Empire Stallions has announced that the mighty grey Jet Laag, the former world champion, million-dollar earner and a highly successful sire has been retired from stud duties.

The 1:49 son of Laag, who was first at the stud in Ohio, has stood in Victoria since 2001, where he enjoyed spectacular success as a sire. He produced almost 300 individual winners from 504 starters and they amassed $11.3 million in earnings for an average of $22,000 per starter.

Lombo Pocket Watch, the winner of three Derbies and a record $1.5 million, was undoubtedly his greatest performer.

Argent Treasure, winner of the WA Derby; the Australian Pacing Gold winner Hilton Fly High; Im Blue Double Dee (Mildura Cup); the WA feature race winners Smokey The Bandit, Alkira Jetstar, Deluxe Edition and La Mia Juliette; and The Stewardess were other good winners sired by Jet Laag.

In North America, Jet Laag sired the winners of nearly $8 million with 39 in 1:55 and 129 in 2:00.

Jet Laag, trained by top U.S. trainer Linda Toscano, won 44 races during his six-year career and $1,001,746 in purses. The crowning moment of his racetrack campaign was his win in the 1999 Senior Jug at Delawares half-mile track in a world record 1:49.

Jet Laag has been a true champion both on the racetrack and in the breeding shed, said David James, owner of Empire Stallions. He is a loveable horse with a great personality. At age 23, we have decided that it is time for him to retire and enjoy his remaining years grazing in his favourite paddock. Jet has been a terrific sire here in Australia and his influence is sure to carry on for years to come.

(With files from Empire Stallions)
Southern Baptist Convention Passes Resolution on Natural Marriage and Religious Liberty





The Resolution states, in part: ST LOUIS, Mo., June 16, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- During its annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a resolution supporting natural marriage and religious liberty . "This Southern Baptist Convention has sent a strong message in support of natural marriage, biblical sexuality, and religious freedom," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. Staver served on the SBC Resolutions Committee.The Resolution states, in part:

WHEREAS, In the beginning God created male and female in His image as the crowning act of Creation (Genesis 1:2627); and

WHEREAS, Marriage is between one man and one woman, ordered by God toward the union of the spouses, the means of procreation, formative of family, and foundational to the common good of society (Genesis 1:28, 2:1824); and

WHEREAS, The Baptist Faith and Message asserts, "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it;" and

WHEREAS, The Baptist Faith and Message also affirms, "A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power;" and

WHEREAS, Any law that directly contradicts natural law and biblical truth is an unjust law; and

WHEREAS, Our highest respect for the rule of law requires that we not affirm an unjust law that directly contradicts higher law.

The Resolution states that the U.S. Supreme Courts marriage opinion in 2015 "purporting to redefine marriage does violence to the Constitution and is contrary to the Bible and natural order." The Resolution "dissents" from this opinion, urges lawmakers to pass legislation that protects religious liberty, and stands in solidarity to those who have faced religious discrimination. The Resolution, among other things, also commits to strengthen biblical marriage and to pray for revival.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.


Hospital Puts Teenager on Fast Track to Medical Termination

Contact: Allison Aranda, Life Legal Defense Foundation , 707-227-6744, akaranda@lldf.org LOMA LINDA, Calif., June 16, 2016 / Standard Newswire / -- 13-year-old Alex Pierce, brain-damaged in Loma Linda Medical Center, faces tests and medical rulings that may end his young life. His family is desperately seeking a physician or hospital to conduct an independent evaluation of Alex's condition. If you know of medical personnel willing to help, please contact Allison Aranda at akaranda@lldf.org On Friday June 3, Alex was one of nearly 100 local students attending a pool party at Vista Murrieta High School. During the party, Alex was spotted at the bottom of the pool. Students tried to get the attention of the lifeguards and parents but were ignored. Two classmates finally rescued Alex from the pool. He had been under water for at least 95 seconds and it was at least another five minutes before paramedics arrived and started CPR.Alex went to Inland Valley Medical Center, where he was put on a ventilator and continued to open his eyes and move his arms. He was later transported by air ambulance to Loma Linda Medical Center. An EEG showed measurable brain activity on Friday, and Alex continued to open his eyes. Late Saturday night, Alex began having spasms that were later diagnosed as seizures. After several hours on multiple medications, the seizures ceased. However, after heavy doses of medication, Alex's condition had changed. He no longer opened his eyes or moved his arms.On Sunday, June 5  just two days after his accident  Loma Linda notified the Pierce family that the hospital would conduct a "brain death" test  the first step toward removing a patient from life support. The family adamantly opposed this test, and Alex's mother requested time for a second opinion before the test. The family is concerned that the test itself, specifically the apnea test during which Alex would be taken off the ventilator for up to fifteen minutes, could cause further injury to Alex's brain.Allison Aranda, Senior Staff Counsel for the Life Legal Defense Foundation, filed a petition on behalf of Alex and his mother and requested an emergency restraining order against the hospital that would prohibit them from conducting the "brain death" exam and specifically the apnea test that would remove Alex from his ventilator for a dangerous period of time. Life Legal also asked the court to order that Loma Linda give Alex nutrition and thyroid hormone that is essential to brain healing and function. As of Tuesday, June 7th, Loma Linda had not provided any food or nutrition to Alex since his arrival Friday evening. The judge mercifully granted Life Legal's request in its entirety.Another hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, June 21st. However, Loma Linda is trying to conduct dangerous brain death test before we even go back to court. The Pierce family needs a physician or hospital willing to conduct an independent medical evaluation of Alex. Anyone with a referral that may help the Pierce family should send the information to Allison Aranda at akaranda@lldf.org At this time, the Pierce family is holding out hope that their son will respond the life-saving nutrition and hormone treatment that he is finally being given. The family is looking for a long-term care facility that will allow Alex the time needed to recover from this horrific event. Life Legal has located several facilities that are able to care for Alex and give him the time he needs to recover, but these facilities require that Alex have a tracheotomy and a gastric feeding tube. Loma Linda refuses to perform the procedures needed to facilitate the transfer. Life Legal Executive Director Alexandra Snyder commented: "It is absolutely unethical for a hospital to refuse to provide the lifesaving measures needed to sustain this young boy's life. These are common procedures routinely performed by the hospital, yet Loma Linda is denying this basic level of care to Alex." Life Legal is calling on the public to show their support for this family and to demand that Loma Linda do what is necessary to get Alex to a long term care facility.Life Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit www.lldf.org
It's Election season and our editor's mailbox is overflowing. Who do your neighbors support? Read about it here.
Weyerhaeuser Co. announced Wednesday that it will sell its Longview liquid packaging plant  a major portion of the Longview operations  to Nippon Paper Industries for $285 million, according to a company press release.

The sale doesnt include NORPAC, the Longview newsprint and book-paper maker jointly owned by Weyerhaeuser and Nippon. Once the transaction is complete by the end of the third quarter, NORPAC would be Weyerhaeusers only remaining pulp and paper mill as it moves to focus on its timberlands and forestry.

This transaction creates significant value for Weyerhaeuser shareholders and enhances the focus of our portfolio as we work to be the worlds premier timber, land, and forest products company, said Doyle R. Simons, Weyerhaeuser president and chief executive officer, in a press release.

The Federal Way-based company expects to use a substantial portion of the proceeds from the sale to pay down debt.

The Longview mill has about 550 employees making 280,000 tons of product annually, according to Weyerhaeuser. Last year, the mill made $362 million in net sales with a gross profit of $23 million and an operating income of $9 million, according to Nippon.

Its not clear whether there will be any layoffs.

Weyerhaeuser spokesman Anthony Chavez said NORPAC is still under strategic review and details will be announced once the review is complete.

By the end of September, Nippon will create a wholly-owned subsidiary from the Longview mill, plus sales offices in the U.S., Japan and South Korea, according to the report from the Nikkei Asian Review.

The deal would make Japan-based Nippon Paper the worlds third biggest maker of cups, milk containers and other liquid packaging products, Nikkei Asian Review reported.

Nikkei and other news agencies broke word of the sale before either Nippon or Weyerhaeuser Co. made an announcement on their websites and before filings were available at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. However, Weyerhaeuser and Nippon issued press releases about the sale by early Wednesday evening.

Greg Pallesen, vice president of the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, said the liquid packaging plant employs about 450 hourly, unionized workers. Nippon will have to honor AWPPWs contract with Weyerhaeuser, he said.

We have succession language in our labor agreement and our expectation is that language will hold, Pallesen said. AWPPW already represents workers at Nippons paper mill in Port Angeles.

Weyerhaeuser has been shopping around its cellulose fiber business since last November. In February, the company nearly doubled its U.S. timber acreage when it finalized a $8.8 billion merger with Plum Creek, creating the worlds biggest timberland and forest products company. In early May, International Paper Co. bought seven of Weyerhaeusers mills for $2.2 billion, but the deal excluded the Longview newsprint and liquid packaging mills.

Analysts did not seem surprised that Nippon was the buyer, but wondered why the sale did not include NORPAC.

The argument in the past was the liquid packaging plant is integrated operationally with the NORPAC mill, said Kevin Mason, an analyst with ERA Forest Products Research.

The joint venture component might have made the Longview locations a tough sell to outside companies such as International Paper, Mason speculated.

Mason added the deal makes sense as Weyerhaeuser shifts away from pulp and paper.

Theyre basically backing off to focus on timberland or housing-related parts of the business, he said.

Weyerhaeuser will continue to operate its Longview saw mill and log yard, which is the largest log export operation on the West Coast, Chavez said.

The employees of our liquid packaging board business have much to contribute to the future success of Nippon Paper Industries, Simons said. I want to thank our team for continuing to operate safely, and for delivering an exceptional customer experience throughout the strategic review process. Our liquid packaging board products and people are celebrated across the industry for their quality.
tech2 News Staff

Google has just released a bunch of tools and services to help businesses make video advertisements quickly and easily. There is an application called YouTube Director that is available only on iOS as of now, coming soon to android. This app lets businesses create a video ad right from an iPhone, without the need for any extra gear or editing software.

There is a YouTube Director onsite service, available in select US cities, that sends a professional director and crew to film your ad for free. The onsite solution is available in Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Atlanta, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The utility is expected to be available in more cities. This service is available only to businesses who spend more than $150 (Roughly Rs 10,069) on advertising on YouTube. If your business is an application, there is a process by which the data entered by the developer in the Play Store backend is churned to create a custom video for the application. This service is available on request.

The most accessible tool from all of these is the app. The iPhone app is available in 49 languages, including Hindi. There are a bunch of templates available for every kind of business, and you can pick one that is suitable to your business, and the aspect of it that you want to showcase. Everything from planning, to shooting, to recording the voice over if necessary, and publishing the video, can be done from within the application itself.

The same templates are sorted into two menus. The Featured menu has the most used templates, and the ones appropriate for any kind of business. There is also a menu for choosing the video advertisement according to the business. Each sub menu serves up a list of templates, which are pre-made storyboards. This removes the component of brainstorming or ideation. Users only have to shoot the video, and not bother about what to shoot, or a structure for the entire advertisement. It is functionally equivalent to a script with blanks that can be quickly filled in.

Each template shows the expected duration of the final video, as well as the number of shots required to make the video. There are typically between five to fifteen shots in videos, and the duration of each ranges from twenty four to eighty seconds. They are mostly short, quick and easy to make templates.

You have to tap on each shot, and can start shooting it right away. Each shot, when clicked, shows a short clip of how the shot can actually be taken. The storyboards include camera angles and framing guidelines as well. There are title overlays available for some shots that can be edited from within the application itself. You work your way through the storyboard, shot by shot. If necessary, a voice over video is added. Then the video can be directly put up on YouTube instantly.
tech2 News Staff

In an interview with the Economic Times, Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys spoke about Indias economic growth, the future of startups and advice for entrepreneurs.

Speaking of the NDA government, Narayana Murthy said that he was very happy with the way things were today. He said that he was particularly impressed by the alignment of dynamism and enthusiasm between the ministers and the bureaucrats.

Indias economy has been growing at a rapid rate (7.6 percent), by some estimates, it might even be called the fastest growing economy in the world, but Murthy pointed out that the growth rate is only relative to our actual GDP, which is relatively small. Pointing out that a 6.5 percent growth rate for China would mean $650 billion and that 3 percent for the US would mean $500 billion, he said that Indias 7.6 percent would only amount to $150 billion. Rapid growth is good, but theres still a long way to go before we can catch up with the rest of the world.

Murthy believes that the Startup India initiative by the government is good for the country. He also adds that this means higher growth and more jobs. More importantly, he believes that RBI governor, Raghuram Rajan, holds the keys to Indias economic success. Calling him the finest economist in the world, Murthy says that Rajan is well aware of the economic situation and is a highly respected man the world over. He also believes that India would be well-served is Rajan is offered a second term as RBI governor.

Before 1991, Murthy says that there was too much friction when interfacing with the government. He mentioned that it would take 50 trips to New Delhi just to get a license, 5-7 years to get a telephone connection and myriad other issues.

He believes that the challenge for todays entrepreneurs is getting good talent. He insists that the education system is not keeping up with the worlds progress and that demand for good talent is not being adequately met.

The other challenge facing Indian entrepreneurs, says Murthy, is that theyre too focused on India. He feels that the Indian market is already a very competitive space with huge, multi-national corporations and money to spare.

With regards to policies, Murthy feels that its the entrepreneurs responsibility to maintain an open dialogue with the government. He adds that todays policies are much better than previous ones and continuous dialogue will only serve to improve the situation.

When asked about money drying up and inflated valuations of startups, Murthy only said, We always believed in fundamentals. We evaluate business plans very realistically, using as much data on the ground as possible.

He also hopes that companys as big as, or even bigger than, Infosys come up. Its good for the economy and its good for the people and thats all that matters.
tech2 News Staff

There is no denying that iPad sales have been falling and it's now possible that with iOS 10, Apple will further contribute to the decline in overall tablet sales.

With the announcement of iOS 10, Apple said that it is dropping support for the iPad 2, iPad 3 and the first-generation iPad mini as well as every other Apple A5-powered device. This will be lead to about 40 percent of the overall iPads going obsolete, according to Localytics (via ZDNet).

The report goes on to explain, "The iPad 2 is a very popular device (it was sold between March 2011 and March 2014), and is only one percentage point behind the iPad Air (18 percent share, compared to 17 percent). It's possible that these numbers have changed a bit since March as Apple sells more iPads, but given that it now sells about 10 million a quarter, and cumulatively some 318 million iPads have been sold in total, whatever was sold since isn't going to shift the needle by much."

This could work both ways. It could very well be a well thought out plan by Apple to induce obsolescence and push people to newer devices, giving a big push to iPad sales in the process. However, it could also mean those millions of users may find that there's no need to own a new iPad, which was once considered to be the coolest device in tech world.
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Mexican billionaire telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim launched a program on Wednesday to collect used smartphones and donate them to schools, in order to provide students free access to educational materials. Slim, who controls telecoms giant America Movil, said at an event the firm would offer free wireless broadband access to whoever accessed contents on its website Aprende.org, whose offerings range from elementary math to university courses.

The businessman said he was looking to create a secondary market for smartphones used for a year or two, "giving them an economic value," and then passing them on for free to public schools. The firm plans to offer its clients a 500-peso credit ($26) for each smartphone returned in good condition, Slim said. He added that he hoped his competitors in Mexico, which include Spain's Telefonica and U.S.-based AT&T, followed his lead in offering free access to educational materials.

This comes soon after he launched Aprende.org on Wednesday. Aprende.org is a free online educational platform aimed at offering learning opportunities to anyone who owns a smartphone with an internet connection. What it does is that this is integrated with educational materials that are already offered for a price online by Slim's foundation. He also mentioned that data charges will not accrue if they connect via Slim's Telmex or America Movil.

Reuters and AP
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The father of a Paris terror attack victim has filed a lawsuit against Twitter, Google and Facebook for allowing Islamic State (IS) to use their platforms to spread terrorist propaganda, the media reported. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in Northern California by Reynaldo Gonzalez, the father of Nohemi Gonzalez who was among the 130 killed in November in Paris, said these social media giants also allowed IS to raise funds and hire recruits, the International Business Times reported.

According to a Mirror report, IS leader Omar Hussain used the social networking website Facebook to recruit members for the Paris attacks. The IS supporters have tweeted photos of dead soldiers with the hashtag #AmessagefromISIStoUS on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Several beheading videos have appeared on Google-owned video-streaming platform YouTube.

In January, a Florida-based woman filed a lawsuit against Twitter, accusing it of supporting the global spread of the IS by enabling its followers to recruit on its social media platform. Tamara Fields, whose husband was killed in a lone wolf terrorist attack in Amman, Jordan, in November last year, sued Twitter for damages. "Without Twitter, the explosive growth of IS over the last few years into the most-feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible," she wrote in her lawsuit. Twitter has knowingly permitted IS to spread propaganda and recruit members, she added.

Twitter rejected the lawsuits claims. While we believe the lawsuit is without merit, we are deeply saddened to hear of this familys terrible loss, a Twitter spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement. Like people around the world, we are horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by extremist groups and their ripple effects on the Internet. Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our rules make that clear, it added.

IANS
tech2 News Staff

We cant live without our notifications and Samsung is working to ensure that you never have to. Recently leaked images of a Samsung project called Smart Glow show a ring-type LED indicator on the back of Samsung phones.

One might point to the rear flash unit as an LED in itself, but this Smart Glow seems like an independent unit that can also be configured by the user. The leaked details indicate that the indicator will exist in the form of a ring and that it can be configured to indicate battery status, missed calls, and other notifications. The ring unit can also double as a flash if required.

We dont know if well see the Smart Glow system on the upcoming Galaxy Note device, but its expected to pop up in a Samsung Galaxy J2 (2016) that's headed for India soon.

It would be really cool if the Smart Glow ring responded like Dead Spaces health indicators, but that just might be wishful thinking.

By the looks of it, Android phones will soon start offering not just one notification LED, but two. But what of Apple? They dont even offer a single LED.
hidden

A top Google official on Tuesday hailed Israel's tech sector, saying it trailed only Silicon Valley in the United States when it comes to "initiatives". Eric Schmidt, formerly Google chief executive and now executive chairman of its parent company Alphabet, said Israel, a country of only around eight million people, was punching far above its weight in technology. "For a relatively small country, Israel has a super role in technological innovation," he told an audience at Google's offices in the commercial capital Tel Aviv.

"I can't think of a place where you could see this diversity and the collection of initiatives aside from Silicon Valley," he added. "That is a pretty strong statement." Israel has long self-styled itself as the "start-up nation", encouraging entrepreneurship - especially in the technological sector.

However, companies have often been sold to larger investors in the United States, rather than remaining in the Middle Eastern country. Schmidt said he had seen a "maturation" of the "start-up nation" in recent years. "(Previously) it seemed like many of the initiatives were not fully thought out," he said. "But now I am beginning to see companies that are on their way to being worth a billion dollars."

Google acquired Waze, an Israeli real-time traffic application, for more than $1 billion in 2013 and has also bought other smaller Israeli firms. The company develops many of its technologies in research and development centres in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Schmidt said the small population and therefore limited local market was one of the main factors constraining Israel's tech sector.

AFP
Inclusive and quality education: A participatory means to implement

Habibul Haider Chowdhury :

The 4th goal out of 17 Sustainable Development Goals declared by UNO is very much related to basic education. This goal suggests development of an environment for inclusive and equitable quality education by 2030.

There may be some convincing arguments whether this goal is achievable at all, yet cannot be ignored as unattainable. The timeframe declared for implementation of the targets relevant to the goal has just begun. I would like to propound and share some of my ideas relevant to the issue as this a vital focus to ponder.

1) Pool of Teachers - An attempt should be made to form a pool of teachers for each defined work area. The teachers of this pool will provide necessary support to all other teachers of the area in enhancing their quality of teaching and effectively using the teaching aids. Local teachers' associations need to be involved in this plan. This pool will be given appropriate training on techniques of managing class room environment and using teaching aids to be developed to help visual learning.

2.) Chapter Coordinator - Each Upazila should be declared as Chapter (work area) and I emphasize on using one or more local NGOs to coordinate the overall executions of the plan. Each of these NGOs will be treated as Chapter Coordinator. Chapter Coordinators will arrange for necessary training programs and workshops based on Continuing Professional Development (CPD) concept with the help of the pool of teachers formed for the purpose.

3) Chapter Member - Each local Primary School, Secondary and Higher Secondary School/College, Vocational Institution and Madrasa (Alia) will be treated as Chapter Member and head of these institutions will be called Chapter Member Representative. Chapter Members will be the beneficiaries of the program. Chapter Coordinator of respective area will coordinate the program in the Chapter and make liaison with the Chapter Members. Chapter Member Representatives will meet once in three months period to discuss the progress and inherent difficulties in implementing the programme.

4) Stakeholders Forum - There will be a Stakeholders Forum for each Chapter under the leadership of Upazila Nirbahi Officer (UNO) who will look after the interest of the stakeholders in the concerned Chapter. Upazila Parishad Chairman, Union Parishad Chairmen, Upazila Primary Education Officer, Upazila Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Officer, Representatives of Upazila Teachers Associations, local NGO representatives and other dignified persons of the work area will be the members of this Forum. The Forum will be open for all. Any persons interested to contribute to the development of education in the Chapter including the researchers of the area may be included as a member.

5) Evaluation of the Progress - There will be a Progress and Quality Evaluation Committee formed with open minded scholars and teachers (including retired teachers) in national level. This committee will appropriately guide the Chapter Evaluation Committee as to the methods and techniques of evaluation to be employed. Chapter Coordinator will maintain the office of the Chapter Evaluation Committee and extend its help to the Committee where necessary.

6) Involvement of Upazila Resource Centre - This will be rather meaningful had we involved URC to this program. The Chapter Coordinator may use URC for any training help and use their available facilities.

7) Funding - Funding is a big issue for successfully implementing a program. Usually, the government and the donor agencies play a pivotal role in financing a project. I suggest using Bangladesh NGO Foundation (BNF), an autonomous body of Ministry of Finance through which organization all finances of this program may be controlled, administered and monitored. By this process, financial activities will be in true sense under control of the government. Chapter Coordinators will be beneficiaries of this program and be authorized to utilize this fund.

Sustainable Development Goal-4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all" focuses predominantly on learning outcomes and cognitive skills that are the basic need and right of a human being and goes beyond school attendance and enrolment. The goal views education as a tool of productivity and skill rather than making a confident person. Our Government should take a realistic step by undertaking a government and non-government participatory plan where control should be with the government as facilitator and execution with the NGOs working long side by side with the government to build educational infrastructure of the country. Stakeholders participation in the implementation process will help accelerating the execution of implementation plan by making awareness of social responsibility of the community people.

The above idea may be a unique and effectively deployable participatory model for the whole country. The term sustainability means ensuring economic and environmental durability. For this, overall plan needs to be supported by a national policy level coordination between our basic needs such as economic, social and environmental needs.

I took such an experience in Senbag upazila, Noakhali on January 1, 2016. I was an instructor of a two-days long English Language training workshop of local teachers from 20 high schools and 3 madrasas, which was an outstanding initiative towards SDG - 4 goal, and may be an exemplary event. The especially of that program was the enthusiastic participation of the stakeholders that is, NGO-Government- Local Government - Educational Institutions. Bangladesh NGO Foundation funded the program and a local NGO named Munshi Atar Ali Welfare Society (MAAWS pronounced Moss) organized the program. All others other stakeholders came forward to make it a success. Upazila Secondary Education Officer took initiative himself by selecting the participating institutions for the program. Senbag Upazila Chairman, Kabilpur Union Parishad Chairman, MAAWS Chairman and Upazila Secondary Education Officer participated in the program. New English teaching methodology 'HAQEL' with its teaching aids: lesson cards and concept cards and their use were explained. Had we implemented the model on pilot basis, a clear demonstration may be seen. MAAWS is already on its way to form the model in Senbag Upazila. The UNO, Upazila Teachers Association, Upzila Chairman, Upazila Secondary Education Officer confirmed their all-out support to this initiative.

To get an expected result, we need to produce good teachers for grooming our students to right direction. I emphasise we should make good teachers in English language so that we can put our steps comfortably on this globalized world and make ourselves competitive.

We need a healthy and educated nation. To be a middle income country we need an integrated participatory program for our health, education and all our basic need. Let's try out and make our life a heavenly one. Come forward and make chapter in your Upazila. We should be aware of our social responsibility and some has to take initiative. n



(Habibul Haider Chowdhury is an author, researcher and also developer of HAQEL English Teaching

Methodology and Teaching Aids)
Russia announces new truce for Syria`s Aleppo

Aleppo has been witnessing fierce fighting and bombardment, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides of the contested city.

AFP, Beirut :Russia announced a last minute 48-hour ceasefire for Syria's war-torn Aleppo, just hours after Washington warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his ally Moscow that they must respect the nationwide truce agreed in February.The vital northern province of Aleppo has been ravaged on multiple fronts in a devastating war that has killed more than 280,000 people.Dozens of fighters were killed in a fresh bout of fighting between the regime, rebels, and jihadists south of Aleppo city on Wednesday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.Backed by Russian and government air strikes, pro-regime fighters are locked in battle with rebel groups and Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front for a string of villages lying in hilly terrain between strategic routes."On Russia's initiative, a 'regime of silence' has been introduced in Aleppo for 48 hours from 00:01 16 June (2101 GMT Wednesday) with the goal of lowering the level of armed violence and stabilising the situation," the Russian defence ministry said in a statement.The statement did not specify who Russia has discussed the two-day ceasefire with.It accused Al-Nusra of attacking various Aleppo neighbourhoods with multiple rocket launchers, as well as mounting a tank attack southwest of the city.The five-year conflict has drawn in world powers who back opposing sides -- including the United States which broadly supports the opposition and Russia on the side of Assad."Russia needs to understand that our patience is not infinite, in fact it is very limited with whether or not Assad is going to be held accountable," said US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday."We also are prepared to hold accountable members of the opposition," he said after a meeting in Norway with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.UN-hosted peace talks aimed at ending the conflict have been stalled since April, and a fragile ceasefire deal between the government and non-jihadist rebels has all but collapsed."It is very clear that the cessation of hostilities is frayed and at risk and that it is critical for a genuine cessation to be put in place," said Kerry.Efforts were underway, he said, to reach a new agreement "in the next week or two" to reinstate the ceasefire across Syria, leading to more humanitarian aid deliveries and a resumption of the peace process. Since fighting erupted in Aleppo province on Tuesday, at least 70 fighters in total have been killed and the villages of Zaytan and Khalasa have changed hands twice.The strategic border province is criss-crossed with supply routes for various sides of the conflict, including rebels, regime, Kurds, and jihadists such as the Islamic State group.Aleppo was once Syria's commercial powerhouse, but it has been a battleground since 2012 when rebels seized the east of the city confining the army to the west.A hospital in eastern Aleppo supported by Medecins du Monde was heavily damaged in an air strike on Tuesday, the France-based charity said, without reporting casualties.Three other hospitals in Syria were hit in bombing at the start of June, leaving 10 dead.As opposing forces close in from either side, residents of both halves of the city fear a potential total siege on the northern metropolis.The UN says nearly 600,000 Syrians live in besieged areas, most surrounded by government forces.Earlier this month, it said the government had granted preliminary aid access to 15 of 18 besieged areas, after one was taken off the UN's list.Dozens of opposition activist groups accused the UN of "capitulating" to Damascus on aid access.The scathing report, authored by The Syria Campaign (TSC) advocacy group, was based on testimonies from current and former UN staff and other aid workers.It accused the UN of "choosing to prioritise cooperation with the Syrian government at all costs," allowing the regime to unduly influence UN aid strategy.The UN humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, said however that while aid access was not ideal, the UN continues to "assist Syrians based on need".TSC spokeswoman Bissan Fakih countered: "A UN with the backbone to stand for its principles would help get aid to hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians under siege, many of them only a few minutes' drive from where the UN is based in Damascus."
RANGPUR: Newly -appointed Deputy Director of District Combined Office of ACC Mozahar Ali Sarder being greeted at a monthly meeting of District Prevention Committee in Rangpur on Wednesday.
KULAURA(MOULVIBAZAR) : Md Mizanur Rahman PPM, DIG Sylhet Division handing over a certificate to office-in charge of Kulaura thana Md Samsudduah PPM as best Police officer of the Division on Monday.
9 vessels fined

Chittagong Bureau :

Nine vessels in Chittagong port channel were convicted with penalty of Tk.2.30 lakh for obstructing navigations, piloting the vessel without masters, lack of security equipments and excess cargo loading by Chittagong Port mobile court on Wednesday.

The mobile court conducted raid in port channel from morning to afternoon led by CPA Executive Magistrate Rokeya Parvin on Wednesday a CPA sources said.

During the raid, mobile court realized the arrear-berthing bill of Tk.71 thousand from the vessels. The convicted vessels are- MT Arjoo, MV Charsamail, MV Prince of Samrat, OT Shabanti, MT Fariad, Atiq-5, MV Sara-2, MV Padma Par and MV Samira, sources said.


Debutant Barry McCarthy is elated after dismissing Danushka Gunathilaka for 9 during the 1st ODI between Ireland and Sri Lanka at Malahide on Thursday. Sri Lanka scored 303 for 7 in 50 overs.
RK Mission priest gets death threat

UNB, Dhaka :A priest of Ramakrishna Mission received death threat in a letter came from militants.Mridul Maharaj, a priest of Ramakrishna Mision, lodged a general diary in this connection with Wari Police Station on Wednesday night, said Zihadul Islam, officer-in-charge of Wari Police Station.The letter reads, "Bangladesh is an Islamic State. No one will be allowed to preach Hindu religion. You just go to India, otherwise, you'll be killed". The letter was posted from Gazipur in the name of Islamic State Bangladesh mentioning the sender's name as AB Siddique on top of the letter, said the OC.
Aggyan partymen active ahead of Eid 24 held in city

Md Joynal Abedin Khan :The 'Aggyan party' and 'Malam party' men have become active again ahead of upcoming Eid-ul-Fitr.They use sedatives and ointment to make their prey temporarily blind and unconscious in order to loot money and valuables, detective police sources said. Such incidents, in most cases, occur in buses, shopping centres, bus terminals and branches of different banks, they said. More than 400 members of different organised Aggyan parties are active in the capital, Police Headquarters sources said. However, members of DB Police arrested 24 members of a dope gang from from Paltan and Shahjahanpur areas of the capital early Thursday, said Masudur Rahman, Deputy Commissioner (Media and Public Relations) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP).They snatched money and other valuables from the targeted people by feeding foods and water which mixed with sedative, the DC said.Mohammad Mashiur Rahman, an Executive Magistrate of Dhaka Metropolitan, sentenced the miscreants to two years jail, he said.The police official claimed that police seized sedatives, ointment mixed with red chilli powder and tiger balm from their possession during the raids.He said, the arrested gangs operate on three major exit routes of the capital - the Dhaka-Manikganj route, Dhaka-Tangail route and Dhaka-Mawa route.According to police sources, 26 cases were filed from January by DMP. Within this time, police arrested 53 accused and 12 suspected from the city. With this, a total of 83 dope gang members were arrested in the city this year.
UK opposition MP Jo Cox shot dead

Al Jazeera news :Jo Cox, a member of the British parliament, died after being shot in northern England, UK police have said.West Yorkshire Police said a 52-year-old man has been arrested.A mother of two, Cox was an MP since 2015 and chaired the all-party parliamentary committee on Syria.Reuters adds: The death of opposition Labour lawmaker Jo Cox is a tragedy, British Prime Minister David Cameron said."The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP (Member of Parliament). My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children," he said on Twitter.Earlier report says: A member of the British parliament has been injured after being attacked in northern England, her office has said. Local media reported on Thursday that Labour party member Jo Cox had been shot at her advice surgery in Birstall, near the city of Leeds.Al Jazeera's Barnaby Phillips, reporting from London, said that according to British media her condition was critical."She was taken by air ambullance from Birstall library near the city of Leeds. Eyewitnesses say she was shot and stabbed and taken by air ambulance to Leeds infermary," he said. "She is a 41-year-old Labour member of parliament, a mother of two. She first came into parliament during the general elections of 2015, she chairs the all-party parliamentary committee on Syria."
US attorney in Manhattan probes BB cyber heist: source

Reuters :

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has opened an investigation of the cyber heist of $81 million from Bangladesh Bank's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a law enforcement source said.

Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is investigating the February crime, in which criminals used the SWIFT fund-transfer network to steal money from Bangladesh's central bank.

Bharara's office declined to comment.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly.

The investigation by the federal prosecutor comes as the FBI and other

government agencies are seeking to guard against other cyber thefts. The Federal Reserve and other financial regulators last week told banks to review cyber-security protections against fraudulent money transfers in the wake of the Bangladesh Bank heist. The FBI last month privately urged banks to look for signs of attempted cyber thefts.

Last week, an FBI official speaking in Washington said the agency is investigating "a number of different tentacles" but does not yet know who committed the Bangladesh crime. The Bangladesh police and other law enforcement agencies also are investigating the largest known cyber heist from a bank. A U.S. congressional committee has launched a probe into the New York Fed's handling of the heist. Thieves in early February hacked into the Bangladesh bank's interface with the SWIFT network and peppered the New York Fed with fraudulent payment instructions. The New York Fed transferred $81 million held by Bangladesh Bank to accounts in the Philippines, where it went missing.


Clinton widens lead against Trump, say Pollsters

Dawn.com, New York :Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's advantage over Donald Trump in the coming November election rose by double digit over the course of the last week, according to the results of the latest NBC News and Bloomberg survey.Released on Wednesday, the survey said Mrs Clinton narrowed Trump's lead among men and white voters to single digit over the past week and now leads Trump by 25 points - 58 per cent to 33pc - among voters describing themselves as moderate.Among men, Trump led Clinton by 14 points in last week's survey, but now leads by only nine points in this week's poll - 51pc to 42pc. Among white voters, Trump's lead also shrank to nine points, 50pc to 41pc.Republican Party leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have tried to distance themselves from the presumptive nominee because of his controversial statements on Mexicans and Muslims.NBC news said in a four-way race, including Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Clinton has also distanced herself from Trump, leading him 42pc to 38pc, compared with last week, when she trailed 40pc to 39pc. Johnson received 9pc support, while Stein drew 5pc. Regardless of whom they support, a majority of 54pc said they thought Clinton would win the general election, while 40pc said that Trump would win.
Held ABT man placed on remand

Court Correspondent :

Ansarullah Bangla Team's suspected activist Shihab alias Saiful alias Sumon alias Shakil on Thursday was placed on a five-day remand in connection with his alleged attempt to murder publisher and blogger Ahmed Rashid Tutul.

Dhaka's Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Lutfor Rahman Shishir passed the remand order after hearing.

DMP Additional Commissioner Monirul Islam, while addressing a press conference at Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) media centre said, a team of DB police arrested two top leaders of Ansarullah Bangla Team, Chittagong unit, named Sayed Mohammad Mojahidul Islam and Ariful Islam Solaimani alias Arafat from Kamrangirchar of the capital on the night of June 13 this year.

On the basis of information given by the two detainees, a DB team arrested Shakil from airport bus stand area of the capital at about 8:30 pm on Wednesday, he added.

Shakil confessed to the law enforcers that he and his four accomplices were directly involved with the attack on publisher and blogger Ahmed Rashid Tutul and his two friends.

Earlier on October 31 last year, three persons, including Shuddhashwar publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul, were hacked by unidentified assailants in the office of the publishing house in the city's Lalmatia area.


Extortionist killed in city 'gunfight'

Staff Reporter :

An alleged extortionist was killed in a 'gunfight' with the members of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) in city's Sher-e-Bangla Nagar area early Thursday.

The deceased has been identified as Aidul alias Mama Sagor, a top extortionist of Karwanbazar area of the city.

Yeasir Arafat, Operational Officer of RAB-2, said, "A patrol team of elite force challenged a gang when the gang was moving suspiciously in the area around 2:00am. At one stage, they opened fire on the team, forcing the elite force to fire back that triggered a gun battle. Mama Sagor was caught in the line of fire and seriously injured while other members of the gang managed to flee the scene." He was rushed to Dhaka Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) where doctors declared him dead, the RAB official said.

RAB recovered a pistol and two bullets from the spot, he said.

Sagar also was part of a gang, which extorts money from businesses in Karwan Bazar and Farmgate areas, the largest kitchen market in the capital, the RAB personel claimed.

Earlier on May 17, RAB had informed the media of arresting Sagar and his associate Samad Khalifa with loaded firearms.

No explanation is available yet on how Sagar has been found involved in 'criminal activity' a month after his arrest.
3 broad areas with security on top

Amid growing attacks on innocent people on both sides, Bangladesh and the United States will have a very broad discussion in the upcoming Partnership Dialogue to be held in Washington with security cooperation having on top of the agenda.

"As security is the number one task of any government, it'll remain on top of the agenda of the upcoming Partnership Dialogue," US Ambassador to Bangladesh Marcia Bernicat told UNB before leaving for Washington on Thursday, mentioning that importance on security is not being given by mistake, rather it deserves so. Asked whether the US side will raise the issue of strengthening private security forces engaged for the security of its officials in Dhaka, Bernicat said they want to see the force "as robust as possible" as the local guards are not allowed to use arms as per the local law.

The US side acknowledges that the Bangladeshi police provide "outstanding and professional" protection to US diplomats but the Embassy is interested exploring option of some of the Bangladeshi private security "carrying arms". Besides, like most diplomatic missions and thousands of other establishments in Dhaka, the Embassy relies on private Bangladeshi security companies for secondary protection needs.

The US side will flag the issue in the coming fifth Partnership Dialogue between the two countries to be held on June 23-24. The US side will enquire about the progress over investigation into USAID official Xulhaz Mannan's killing as the US government wants a transparent investigation into it so that the actual killers are tried. "We want to see a transparent investigation into it and want to see that killers are tried," Bernicat said.

Xulhaz, an advocate for LGBT rights, and his friend Mahbub Tonoy were hacked to death at his Kalabagan flat on April 25. The US will continue to work closely with Bangladeshi police to see that the killers are identified and punished. The US will also want to see Bangladesh addresses a number of crucial issues, including human rights, governance, transnational crimes and cyber security as both countries need to find out ways to those challenges thus boosting ties further. Money laundering and terror financing, migration, capacity building of law enforcement agencies, trade and investment and environment, education issues will also be discussed in the partnership dialogue, which both sides consider as a "big umbrella" dialogue.

Since internet is becoming a very important part of economy, both countries want to see it safe. The two countries will discuss how better internet can be monitored to protect system because the attackers know how to find out weak points, said a foreign ministry source. The two countries will also look into two transnational crimes- money laundering and terror financing-as these are "very complex" issues and will find ways on how to stop the "illegal movement" of money. Overall human rights issue will come up "broadly" in the discussion as there are reports that people are being harassed in the name of arrest of criminals and reported extrajudicial killings, foreign ministry sources said.

Both the countries will also discuss on projects focusing democracy and the rule of law and ways to keep society free from conflicts denying extremists views and will make fresh pledge that they want to do all the things to help flourish democracy. The US government is deeply touched by the condolence message sent to US President Barack Obama after the deadliest attack in a gay nightclub in Orlando, a city in central Florida that claimed 50 lives and injured many. Bernicat also appreciated it terming the message "strong and compassionate". There have been widespread debates in the public domain over the presence of ISIL in Bangladesh and the government continued to say that there is no evidence of ISIL's presence in Bangladesh.

The US, apparently stepping back from the debate over ISIL's presence, is now saying that terrorism is a global threat and therefore its presence is global and there is no need talk about where an organisation is or is not.

"ISIL has global reach and can be everywhere thanks to the internet," Bernicat said adding that the two governments have agreed that it is a global threat and they have to work on it globally and jointly.

There is an standing explanation globally that if someone goes on to his or her computer and can reach by somebody in ISIL or can find somebody in ISIL and talk to them then they are present in his or her life and they can distort his or her life.
It was ghost polls, SUJAN demands dialogue

Staff Reporter :Belief it or not! When living persons could not go to vote centres in fear of life, the dead cast their votes Apparently, it was the observation of some civil society members about the recently concluded Union Parishad elections across the country.The observations came up at a press conference titled -- UP election 2016: an evaluation -- arranged by Shushasoner Jonno Nagarik [SUJAN] held at the Dhaka Reporters Unity on Thursday."It was the worst ever election in the history of 150 years. Ayub Khan had introduced UP elections as fundamental one. But I'll say that the recently held UP polls was a ghost election, because most of the voters failed to go to the vote centres in fear of life. And in many areas, the dead were shown casting their votes," eminent columnist Syed Abul Maksud said."We don't see any similarity between the local body elections of Bangladesh and other foreign countries. Ultimately, the ruling party is the gainer in the polls. The electoral system has been collapsed," he said.The UP elections - to elect leaders for the lowest tier administration of local government - conducted in over 4500 unions across the country from March 22 to June 6 claimed more than 110 lives and 5000 others injured in a conservative estimation.SUJAN, however, claimed that the number of deaths was 145 and injured 11,500. It also blamed the government for destructing the entire electoral system and demanded to arrange a 'national dialogue' to get a solution over the issue. Former Adviser to the caretaker government M Hafizuddin Khan, also president of SUJAN said: "The system of open violence and irregularities has been introduced in the immediate past UP elections. It will be very tough to bring the situation under control in the future."SUJAN also claimed that a large number of minority people came under attack in different parts of the country during the six phases of UP elections. And the local leaders and activists of Awami League were directly involved in these incidents. "The people of minority communities were attacked in several areas, including Barisal, Patuakhali, Barguna, Pirojpur, Khulna and Bagherhat during pre-polls and post-polls violence," Dilip Kumar Sarkar, coordinator of SUJAN, said in a press statement. "Each and every incident was occurred during clashes with ruling-party backed candidates and party's rival contenders. In some areas, the minority people were threatened before voting," added the press statement.
Shift tanneries or pay Tk 50,000 as compensation a day

Staff Reporter :The High Court (HC) Division of Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the owners of 154 tanneries situated at Hazaribagh area in the capital to pay Tk 50,000 per day each as compensation for damaging environment. The HC bench comprising Justice Syed Muhammad Dastagir Husain and Justice AKM Shahidul Haque passed the order upon a petition filed by Advocate Manzil Murshid. The companies will have to deposit the compensation in the state fund until they relocate to Savar area where they have to shift their leather processing plants as the government has allocated land for tannery factories there. The court ordered the secretary of industries to submit a report whether the companies paid the compensation to the government treasury by July 17. The court also directed the secretary of Environment to submit a report by July 17, assessing the damage of environment of Buriganga River due to the waste of tanney. The High Court in it several orders directed them to relocate their factories to Savar by 2010 and again extended the time till 2013. The owners are still running their tanneries in violation of the High Court order, which is contempt of court, said Manzil Murshid, President, Human Rights and Peach for Bangladesh (HRPB).Upon a petition filed by Manzil Murshid on April 12, the High Court ordered the Industry secretary to submit a list of the tanneries still operating at Hazaribagh with detailed information by June 13.Accordingly the industries secretary submitted a list of 155 tanneries, which are still operating at Hazaribagh in violation of HC order. Of the listed tanneries, Reliance Tannery Ltd has already relocated their factory to Savar. The rest of the companies have to pay the compensation of Tk 50.000 (fifty thousand) every day until they relocate their factories to Savar, added Manzil Murshid.
Chargesheet against mother

Court Correspondent :

Detectives of police on Thursday submitted charge sheet against Mahfuza Malek, mother of two children, who were found dead at their residence in the city's Banasree area on February 29, in a case filed for killing the duo.

MD Lokman Hekim, Inspector of the Detective Branch (DB) of police submitted the charge sheet to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Court of Dhaka on Thursday.

The submitted report will be produced to the court on Sunday, a court source (General Recording Officer) added.

The two siblings- Nusrat Jahan Urmi, 14, a Class-VII student of Viqarunnisa Noon School and College, and her younger brother Alvi Aman, 6, a nursery student of Holy Crescent School, were found dead at their home in Banasree area on February 29.

Family sources, earlier, claimed that the two kids died after having food taken from a Chinese restaurant. However, the autopsies, conducted by the forensic department of Dhaka Medical College Hospital, found injury marks on the throat of Urmi and Alvi, and also on one of Alvi's legs.

During primary interrogation, Mahfuza had also confessed that she herself killed the two children.

Briefing reporters at the Rab headquarters on March 3, its director (media) Mufti Mahmood Khan said Mahfuza Malek during interrogation said she strangulated her daughter and son to death with a scarf as she was worried over their education and future.

The murder case, filed by the father of the two kids, Amanullah, with Rampura Police Station on March 3 against Mahfuza, was transferred to the DB on March 7.

On March 13, Mahfuza Malek made confessional statement a court of Dhaka.


MP`s claim not conducive to education

DEPUTY Speaker Advocate Fazle Rabbi Mia on Tuesday said the order of the Appellate Division of Bangladesh Supreme Court barring MPs from becoming head of the governing bodies of private schools and colleges has exceeded the jurisdiction of the apex court. We know that he was speaking replying to a question of a ruling party MP but in our view his comment in support of the MP's claim that the order of the apex court has crossed the legal limit is not acceptable by any means. In fact by taking side the Deputy Speaker has demeaned and ignored the powers of the court and created controversy that is not desirable with an independent judiciary. The MP's observation and the Deputy Speaker's endorsement of the observation that such order has infringed privilege of all other MPs is not justified. The highest court's order deserves respect of the lawmakers. The lawmakers must also be aware that they cannot act against public interest. The Supreme Court two weeks ago upheld a High Court verdict declaring illegal the provisions that allow lawmakers to become head of governing bodies of private schools and colleges as per their desire. A four-member bench of the Appellate Division headed by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha passed "no order" on two petitions seeking a stay on the HC verdict. The court gave the order banning MPs from capturing chair of the private school and college bodies as they like while giving verdict in a case involving the critical situation to a particular academic institution. We don't know why MPs should be chairman of schools and colleges when many of them are totally corrupt and are not even graduate and known to be scandalous in politics. In our view responsibility of the lawmakers is to deal with national policies and not assert power in local matters. The prestige and honour of MPs depend on their own honesty and dedication in the service of the people and not on how much control they want over running schools and colleges.
House Bill 887, approved overwhelmingly during the regular session, is on Gov. John Bel Edwards desk awaiting his signature  or his veto.

The Louisiana Association of Educators is urging Gov. John Bel Edwards to veto a bill that would convert a Baton Rouge charter school into a boarding school for at-risk public school students  a school that would have a school board unaccountable to local or state oversight.

House Bill 887 sailed through the Legislature during the regular session with a combined 123-2 vote in both the House and Senate. The bill would create Thrive Academy and allow students who meet certain criteria, no matter the school district in which theyre currently assigned, to attend. The bill creates a nine-person board of directors to the school, with appointments to the board made by the state superintendent of education, the governor, the director of the state Department of Children and Family Services, the president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, state lawmakers and others.

The board of directors is given in the bill a broad range of powers including the right to purchase land, equipment and supplies, and enter into contracts  all at taxpayer expense and without oversight. If the bill is signed by Gov. Edwards  or allowed to become law through no action by the governor  Thrive Academy would become incorporated on July 1, 2017. That, not coincidentally, is the day after the charter for Thrive Baton Rouge, a non-profit charter school that was registered in East Baton Rouge parish in 2011, expires.

The Louisiana Association of Educators, at its annual meeting in Marksville, is taking aim at the bill. LAE representatives, according to LAE Legislative and Political Director Shane Riddle, have already met with the governors office to lodge the groups opposition to the bill.

In an email to The IND Wednesday morning, Riddle outlined the groups reasons for opposing the bill:

 While the school is defined as its own local education agency (p. 6) it is not a parish and city school system entitled to receive Minimum Foundation Program funds under Article 8, Section 13(B). Further erosion of this constitutional provision should not be tolerated.  The definition of an at-risk student (p. 2) is overbroad.  There are no criteria for admission.  There are no geographic boundaries for the students of the school.  While the bill states that the school shall be subject to the same laws, rules, regulations and other requirements applicable to public schools it then limits those laws, etc. to those applicable to charter schools.  The schools board is not elected by the public.  The schools board is highly political.  The school is not prohibited from leasing property at above market rates from entities such as the THRIVE Foundation (which now owns all property previously purchased with public funds by THRIVE Baton Rouge).  There is no indication that property purchased by the school with public funds will remain public.  The bill forces the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board and non-public schools in Baton Rouge to permit students at the school to participate in extra-curricular activities. This is particularly troubling with respect to the entanglement between this supposedly public school and non-public schools. Additionally, there is no method in the bill by which to reimburse non-public schools for the costs associated with this mandate.  The fiscal note attached to the bill indicates that the operational costs at the school will skyrocket from $11,341 per student ($1,474,330/130 students) in FY 2016 to $23,714 per student ($8.5 M/350 students) in FY 2017.  The fiscal note attached to the bill indicates that there are other costs that are indeterminable at the time (such as retirement, group insurance and costs related to support services) that will add to the operational costs at the school.  There is no reason for the state to take over this school at the end of its charter with the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board.  If the school, operated as a Type 1 charter school, is worth replicating, that replication should be accomplished in other parish and city school systems where the school (and its board of directors) is ultimately responsible to the voters in the school system that approves and establishes it.

To read the bill, click here.
Pre-purchase property inspection is a relatively new thing in the United Kingdom. Its not something that most people have heard about, but it has become increasingly popular over the last few years with the rise in property prices and increased demand for high quality homes.

What are the benefits of pre-purchase building inspection? What can you expect to find out when you pay someone else to inspect your home before you buy it? And what should you look for during an inspection?

Many people want to know if theyre buying a house thats been well maintained or if its had any serious problems. If youve found a place on the market that seems attractive, but then discover some issues after moving in, you may not be as excited about buying it as you thought you were.

Its important to do your due diligence when looking at properties. A lot goes into making a property appealing to potential buyers, from the landscaping to the flooring to the kitchen appliances. The same applies when inspecting a property  there are many things that need checking over to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Here are some of the benefits of performing a pre-purchase inspection:

You get to see exactly what will happen to your money

When you go shopping for a new car, youll probably be shown several different models. You might even be shown one that looks like a great value, but doesnt fit around all of the extra features that you want. When it comes time to actually buy the vehicle, however, you wont have seen how your money will be spent on it once you drive it off the showroom floor.

Likewise, when you shop for a new home, you dont really know what youre getting yourself into until you move in. In order to get a feel for whether the home youre considering is what you want, you normally have to spend quite a bit of time inside it. This allows you to learn more about everything that youre going to be spending your hard-earned cash on.

A pre-purchase building inspection gives you much the same kind of experience without having to spend thousands of dollars. Since youre paying for the service, you can expect to see exactly what youre paying for, instead of just seeing a vague idea of what you might end up with.

You find out about potential major repairs

Some buildings are very expensive to maintain, which means that owners often neglect them for the sake of saving money. While youre paying for a building inspection, youre also paying for a professional who knows how to spot signs of trouble and repair work that needs doing.

If you notice that a particular area of your new home needs fixing right away, you can call in an expert to take care of it quickly. If you find that theres something wrong with your boiler, you wont have to wait weeks for a plumber to come over and fix it. Instead, youll have access to a solution immediately.

You can save hundreds of pounds by finding out about potential problems early on

One of the biggest expenses when you first buy a home is the cost of moving in. Many people dont realize this until its too late. Buying a home involves not only paying for the actual house, but also for moving costs, furniture, and other items that have to be moved along with the home.

Having a good idea ahead of time of what youre likely to encounter can help you avoid these kinds of costs. If you know youll need to replace the plumbing system, for example, youll be able to put together a budget for the expense and plan accordingly.

You can protect your investment by finding out if the homes been well cared for

While there are plenty of people who think that houses always look better when theyre newly built, youd be surprised at how well maintained older residences can still look nice. Sometimes, though, those homes need some additional maintenance to keep them looking their best.

This could involve repairs that arent so noticeable or small improvements that you wouldnt consider otherwise. Even worse, some houses have fallen into disrepair without anyone noticing. This is why having a professional perform a building inspection prior to purchasing a home is such a big benefit.

Not only will it give you insight into the state of the property, but it will also give you peace of mind knowing youre not getting taken advantage of. As long as youre aware of the potential pitfalls, youll have less reason to worry about the state of your new home.

You can use information gathered during a building inspection to negotiate a lower price

If youre worried about buying a home because you suspect that it may need extensive renovation work, you may already have a rough idea of how much work youll need to do to bring it up to scratch. That knowledge can come in handy if you decide to buy the home.

You can use all of the details that you gather during a building inspection to present a realistic picture of what the home is worth to prospective buyers. If a potential buyer thinks that the home is worth more than what you paid for it, you can try negotiating a lower price.

You can sell your home faster and for more money

If you decide to list your home on the market soon after buying it, youll need to price it accurately in order to attract buyers. But if youve already done a thorough building inspection, youll know exactly what work is needed and what the current market conditions are.

In other words, youll be able to make a more accurate estimate of the amount of money youve invested in the home and how much its worth. If you find that youre selling your house for close to its full market value, you can use this information to convince the potential buyer that your home is worth the asking price.

Even if youre planning to stay in the home for a while before you decide to sell, the fact that you did a thorough building inspection will give you more confidence when listing it. Prospective buyers will know exactly what theyre paying for.

Your home will hold its value longer

As mentioned earlier, the value of a home depends heavily upon the condition of the building itself. If your home is in bad shape, potential buyers wont be interested in buying it. On the other hand, if youve performed a thorough building inspection and know what sort of repairs are necessary, you can offer your prospective buyer a compelling reason to invest in your property.

When you buy a home, youre essentially agreeing to have it inspected periodically to ensure that it stays in top shape. Not only does this allow you to avoid expensive repairs down the road, but it can also increase the value of your home.

You can make smart decisions about property investments

Buying real estate isnt as simple as just driving a couple of minutes to pick up a house. There are lots of considerations involved, ranging from location to cost. The same is true when youre investing in property.

If you find a house that meets all of your requirements, youll want to make sure that you have a solid understanding of where it stands with regards to the rest of the market. If you havent spent enough time researching the area, you could inadvertently end up with a bad deal.

There are lots of resources available online that can help you determine the overall level of competition in your area. They can also help you figure out if there are any properties that meet your requirements that you didnt know about.

If you own rental property, you can use the information to identify tenants who might cause damage

If you own rental property and youve noticed that certain tenants consistently cause damage, you can use the results of a building inspection to identify them. You can then contact them directly to let them know that youre watching them closely and that you dont appreciate the problem theyre causing.

They might start taking better care of their homes, which would be good news for everyone. It could also be the case that youll find out that theyre responsible for previous damages that werent caught during a previous visit.

You can make smarter decisions about hiring contractors

If youve hired contractors to build or repair your home, you might want to ask them for references. However, unless you perform a thorough building inspection, you might not know exactly what to look for.

For instance, maybe you only checked the roof for leaks or the walls for cracks. You might not have looked underneath the foundation for anything that could cause a future issue. By performing a building inspection, you can ensure that you hire reputable contractors who will be trustworthy with your money.

You can avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition

Of course, the main benefit of structural inspections perth is that it helps you avoid purchasing a home thats in poor condition. Before you make the decision to buy a home, you should do whatever you can to find out about the state of the building.

You can also ask your realtor about what sorts of inspections are typically recommended. Some agents say that its standard practice to check the heating system, the roof, the electrical wiring, and the floors. Others will tell you that they recommend that you check the entire structure.

Either way, if you choose to hire an inspector, youll find out exactly what needs to be fixed and how much it will cost to do so.

As a result, it can be concluded that a pre-purchase building inspection is highly important for the buyers because it provides transparency regarding the current conditions of the structure. Additionally, the building owner is made aware of any upgrades or repairs that are required, which could lead to a fair deal throughout the purchasing and selling process.
President Joe Biden has decided to ban Russian oil imports, toughening the toll on Russia's economy in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine. The United States generally imports about 100,000 barrels a day from Russia, only about 5% of Russia's crude oil exports, according to Rystad Energy. Last year, roughly 8% of U.S. imports of oil and petroleum products came from Russia. Gas prices have been rising for weeks due to the conflict and in anticipation of potential sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The U.S. national average for a gallon of gasoline soared 45 cents a gallon in the past week and topped $4.06 on Monday, according to auto club AAA. Should the US ban Russian oil imports over Ukraine war?

You voted:
The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now.

Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market.

In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender.

India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex.

Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted.

But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted?

Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner.

If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems.

I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now.

I want more variation in masturbation

I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own.

If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end.

What is sex toys for Indian?

Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation.

It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms.

They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable.

Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner.

The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner.

It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past.

In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping.

Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order.

In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing.

Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome.

Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own.

But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance.

More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around.

Sextoy situation in India

Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years.

In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India.

Mumbai

Kolkata

Bangalore

Delhi

Chennai

Hyderabad

These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India.

In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well.

If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too.

If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it.

What are Sextoys for beginner?

Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms.

Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy.

I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion.

I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy.

If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma.

Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it.

Advantages of using sextoy for Indians

There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians

You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways.

Can have stimulating sex

Can develop new sexual zones

If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern.

However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways.

You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation.

Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever.

There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure.

This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it.

When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems.

It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms).

For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles

[Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou...

Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India.

Sextoy for beginner men in India

So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners.

For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men!

The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men

Masturbator

Cock rings

Love Doll

Sex Lubricants

Toys for the prostate

Lets check each one in detail.

Masturbator

The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products.

It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands.

Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands.

They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.)

Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much.

Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! !

Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa   SEXToys India PR  (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018

Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood.

If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here

Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ...

[For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien...

Cock Ring

A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis.

It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow.

It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber.

In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection.

Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction.

It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it.

Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time.

Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function.

Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy.

You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect.

[Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat...

Love Doll

Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex.

There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women.

Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price.

The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true.

You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste.

There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice.

You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls.

If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here

Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to...

Sex lubricants

Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules.

It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution.

Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse.

There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent.

Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent.

If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here.

What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many...

Toys for the Prostate

Another sextoy for men is prostate toys.

The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line.

Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men.

Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men.

What is the prostate?

The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm.

You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus.

By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms.

Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.)

The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation.

Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure.

sextoy for beinner women in India

The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy.

The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy.

Vibrator.

Dildo

Electric Masserger

Lets check out what each one is in detail.

If you want to check out womens toys, click here.

[BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm...

Vibrators

A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator.

Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy.

It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy.

Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women.

For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators.

Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex.

Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself.

This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual.

Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men.

When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons.

Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most...

Dildo

A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis.

It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass.

A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it.

They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well.

It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device.

A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo.

Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands.

For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis.

This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one.

To learn more about dildo, please click here.

What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th...

Electric Masserger

A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores.

It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low.

Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels.

Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation.

It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure.

For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm.

It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out.

If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager?

To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here.

What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th...

How to choose a sextoy for Indian

Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one.

Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points:  Does the size fit you (the partner)?

Does the size fit you (your partner)?

Is the environment able to produce sound without problems?

Price range

First of all, the choice of size is quite important.

Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women.

For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage.

Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems.

Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise.

If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level.

Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it.

Finally, there is the price range.

The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest.

Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy.

Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy?

I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance.

For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics.

If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out.

How to buy sextoys in India

The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping.

For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below.

Sextoy is one of them.

Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping.

SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India.

They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry.

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To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy.

ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal.

Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on.

Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture.

Cautions for Indians using sextoy

When using sextoy, keep the following three things in mind

Keep sex toys clean

Watch out for electrical leakage

Beware of the heat generated by the body while using a sex toy

As I mentioned earlier, many sextoy products are used for the delicate zone.

Therefore, it is most important to keep the sextoy itself clean. It is very important to keep the sextoy itself clean, because if a slight scratch is created by friction, bacteria can enter and breed there.

It is safe to wear a condom when using the masturbator, just in case.

In addition, many sextoy devices are powered by a power source, so if they are not waterproof, there is a possibility of electric shock or malfunction due to wetness.

Some may even develop heat during continuous use. If the fever becomes too much, you may get burned, so be careful.

If you get a fever during use, stop driving the sextoy immediately and refrain from using it.

You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly.

Summary

What did you think?

In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India.

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SIU's University Museum 2016 summer exhibitions opened June 14 and will be available for viewing through Aug. 5, with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m. July 8.

There are several exhibitions to view, including "By Chance and By Design: Dine (Navajo Nation) Weavings," from the collection of Richard and Linda Helstern. The Helsterns' collection of Navajo weavings began as simply an appreciation of the fine work. Later, they realized they had begun a collection, and one they have added to for close to sixty years. The weavings range from utilitarian saddle blankets to tour de force weavings by renowned Navajo artists, according to a news release from the museum.

"Double Take: Photographs from the Collection, 1848  to the Present," was curated by Alison Erazmus. She selected photographs from the earliest to the latest, from the Civil War to yesterday, to illustrate the breadth and scope of photography the museum has to offer.

Arts and Design instructor Jo Nast has selected a number of objects from the University Museums Native American collection for her summer class. The objects will be displayed in the study gallery.

"Artists on War" accompanies an exhibit on the wars of the 20th century and their impact on Southern Illinois. Dona Bachman has selected a number of artists works that respond to those wars.

With the Summer Olympics in Rio, the University Museum presents "Posters from the Summer Olympics," several posters celebrating the worldwide event.

University Museum will be open this summer from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. The galleries will be closed from Aug. 6 to 22, and will reopen for the fall semester. The museum is located in Faner Hall at the North End, 1000 Faner Drive in Carbondale.

For more information call 618-453-5388 or visit www.museum.siu.edu.

*Please note the following correction, the museum is located in Faner Hall at the North End, not in room 2469.

 The Southern
Three individuals were sentenced to prison Thursday in Hamilton County, announced States Attorney Justin Hood.

Lenwood Arnold, 28, of McLeansboro, was sentenced six years in prison after pleading to unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. Arnold was a passenger in the vehicle during a search by McLeansboro Police Department on June 1.

Opal Zuber, 40, of McLeansboro, was sentenced to five years in prison also after pleading to unlawful possession of methamphetamine. Zuber had less than 5 grams of methamphetamine in her possession during a probation search at her residence on May 24.

Jesse Hampton, 32, of Benton was sentenced to two years in prison after he pleaded to unlawful possession of a controlled substance, a Class 4 felony. Hampton was stopped by police while walking on Illinois 14 on March 17. He had 92 Tramadol pills in a duffel bag without a prescription.

 The Southern
MARION  The Johnston City Police Chief is concerned about the ambulance service in his city.

At Tuesdays Williamson County Board of Commissioners meeting, Chief William Stark spoke with the three commissioners about Williamson County Ambulance Service and its business with Johnston City.

Stark said the ambulance service refuses to come to Johnston City without a price tag.

The reason I am getting involved is because my officers are responding to these calls for help and there is no medical attention in a timely manner, he said. Also, God forbid one of my officers get shot or hurt  medical attention is going to be that far away.

Williamson County Commissioner Ron Ellis said Williamson County Ambulance Service may have the countys name as part of its business, but it is a private entity, and it has zero county oversight. The ambulance services Facebook page says it provides coverage for Herrin and rural Williamson County.

Stark said Johnston City did accept a bid for service from Abbott EMS in Franklin County. But, because of a mutual aid agreement, there are times when Abbott is not able to respond with an ambulance. However, he said when Abbott is unavailable, Williamson County Ambulance Service is still refusing to come to Johnston City.

That forces the city to reach out to surrounding agencies which could take 20 to 30 minutes before emergency services reach the city, he said.

Richard Collier, owner of Williamson County Ambulance Service, was also in attendance Tuesday morning. He said he offered Johnston City service for $60,000. The reason for the price tag was because he needed to add employees in order to service the territory.

Stark later admitted that Johnson County accepted a bid for Abbott EMS for $100,000, instead of the $60,000 from Williamson County Ambulance Service.

Johnston City Mayor Jim Mitchell was unavailable to take phone calls Wednesday when The Southern attempted to seek comments.

Stark said that without county oversight, he fears Williamson County Ambulance Service could eventually refuse to service other cities unless more money is paid.

He said the commissioners should adopt an exclusive contract with an ambulance service or force emergency service agencies to respond when an emergency occurs.

Commissioner Brent Gentry said there are some apparent issues between the Johnston City City Council and the provider. He said the two entities need to sit down and talk about these issues.

Ellis said he doesnt see a way where the county can step into the ambulance field and direct any private business.

The Williamson County government has no business telling a privately-owned business what they can or cannot do, he said.
CARBONDALE  Mary Virginia Ginny Jackson Racine, formerly of Centralia and Marion, passed away Wednesday, June 15, 2016, shortly after midnight, after a day spent surrounded by family.

Virginia was born Aug. 8, 1922, in Marion, to Norman and Glenna (Webb) Jackson.

She married Tommy P. Racine of Marion on Aug. 1, 1942. He preceded her in death on July 4, 2011.

She graduated from Marion High School, with honors, in 1940. After giving up nursing school to raise her family, Virginia later returned to college and graduated from Rend Lake College, with honors, as a licensed practical nurse; and from Kaskaskia College in Centralia, with honors, as a registered nurse.

She had a long nursing career at St. Marys Hospital in Centralia, where she was a favorite of the doctors delivering babies there. She was an excellent nurse, and many mothers talked about how wonderful she was during their experience. Her nursing service was a source of great pride to her and her family. After retiring as a full-time nurse, she became a nursing instructor at Kaskaskia College.

After Virginia and Tommy were both fully retired, they traveled across the United States, often taking their grandchildren with them on their traveling adventures. She was an avid history buff and relished the opportunity to share our countrys history with them. Virginia loved the ocean, and she and Tommy became winter Texans for a time. She often spoke about how much she loved camping on the beach on Padre Island, where she enthusiastically led her visiting children and grandchildren on late-night, low-tide walks on the beach to collect sea shells and stargaze.

Mrs. Racine was a lifelong member of the Community of Christ Church, from which she drew a great deal of faith and strength over the years.

In addition to her husband, she was also preceded in death by two siblings, Ronald Jackson of Grand Prairie, Texas, and Norma Lee Rockett of Mount Vernon; and a nephew, Garry Rockett of Salem.

She is survived by her children, Joseph L. Racine of Chesterfield, Missouri, Stephanie Gustave of Lawrence, Kansas, and Cara Recine of Carbondale; four grandchildren, Aaron Racine of Overland Park, Kansas, Hamp Webster III of Carbondale, Bradley Gustave of Denver, Colorado, and Kelley Racine Gustave of Carbondale; three great-grandchildren, Wyatt Joseph Racine and Asa Alexander Racine of Overland Park, and Ivy June Webster of Carbondale; a niece, to whom she was very close, Shelley Rockett Munton of Bonnie; nieces, Linda Rockett Smith of Hampshire, and Carmi Hill and Marlene Thompson, both of Marion; her brothers daughters, Becky, Cindy, Crystal and Leslie; many great-nieces and great-nephews, and many cousins in the Webb and Jackson families.

Visitation will be from 9 to 11 a.m. Saturday, June 18, at Mitchell-Hughes Funeral Home at 800 N. Market St., in Marion, followed by a celebration of life service at 11 a.m. Burial will be immediately after the service in Maplewood Cemetery in Marion, where she will be laid to rest alongside her husband, Tom, and her parents.

For additional information or to sign the guest memorial register, visit www.hughesfuneralhomes.com.
BENTON  Scott L. Thompson of Sesser pleaded guilty to bankruptcy fraud charges Wednesday in federal court in Benton, according to a Thursday news release from James L. Porter, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois.

Thompson was indicted Feb. 2 as part of an effort to crack down on those who commit fraud during the course of bankruptcy proceedings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Illinois. The indictment charged Thompson with one count of concealing assets and three counts of fraudulently withholding records in a bankruptcy case.

In pleading guilty, Thompson admitted that he concealed from the bankruptcy court a $28,129.55 settlement he received for a workers compensation claim. In addition, Thompson acknowledged that he withheld copies of his federal and state tax returns, despite being ordered to turn them over by the bankruptcy court. Under federal law, tax refunds in amounts above certain thresholds must be paid to the bankruptcy court and used to pay back the creditors. Thompsons chapter 13 bankruptcy case was filed and litigated in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Benton.

Thompsons sentencing hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Sept. 13 at the federal courthouse in Benton. Each count of bankruptcy fraud is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison, and/or a $250,000 fine, not more than three years of supervised release following the prison term, and restitution.

Members of Southern Illinois Bankruptcy Fraud Working Group assisted agents from the Springfield Division, Fairview Heights Resident Agency of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the investigation. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott A. Verseman.
The Kluttz household is made up of three strong, opinionated women who share their thoughts and feelings with each other. They also do a lot together. This year, all three of them completed one segment of their education.

Stephanie graduated from Voorhees College on May 7 with a bachelors degree in organizational management. Her twin daughters, Genesis and Jewel, graduated from Calhoun County High School on June 3.

Stephanie enrolled at Voorhees three-and-a-half years ago, partly because the lack of a college degree had held her back in her career but mainly because she wanted to set an example for her girls.

One day we were all sitting at the kitchen table, she said. We were all talking about school work and grades and how important it is to do well in school so you can potentially get scholarships and go to college.

One of her girls said, Momma, did you go to college? I didnt want to answer because I did go to college but I didnt finish, Stephanie said.

I didnt want to be one of those mothers who say, You do what I tell you to do. I wanted to live the example. It was time for me to put up or shut up, she said. I made the decision I was going to college.

At first, the twins werent too sure about Stephanies decision and as usual, they spoke their minds.

We could do a reality show at our house sometime, Stephanie said. We talk about everything  nothing is off limits.

Mom, youre going to go off to college and youre going to disappear, her daughters told her.

Well, in a few years youre going to disappear on me, she countered.

Genesis said she was scared when her mom started college.

She was home a lot at one time. We got to spend a lot of time with her, she said. Then she started going back to work and she started going back to school, and it was like she disappeared, especially when she pledged a sorority.

That was very true, Stephanie said. She wanted the full college experience she missed after high school.

When I tell you I was a full-time student, I was a full-time student. They offered clubs, organizations, honor society  I did it all. I graduated magnum cum laude. I did whatever I could do because I didnt want to miss out on an opportunity like I did when I was in school in my teens.

Genesis said her mothers example inspired her.

While Jewel has maintained a grade point average of more than 3.0 throughout school, she has been a C student, Genesis said.

My priorities werent straight when I started high school, she said. I wasnt much interested. I just didnt want to do anything.

But after her mom started going to school, she knew she wanted that for herself, Genesis said. This year her grades have improved to the point where shes made mostly As.

It may have been my grades I was putting up on the refrigerator, Stephanie said. She had to keep up with Mom.

Genesis says shes always goofed off the first part of the year and then crammed like crazy the last quarter to pull up her grades.

I tell her maybe she should be a jockey and learn to ride horses because she always comes in on the last leg, Stephanie said.

The twins are going to follow in their mothers footsteps and enroll in Voorhees this fall, but Jewel says she plans to get her first year at Voorhees and then transfer to S.C. State to study nuclear engineering.

She said she wanted to go to S.C. State in the first place but allowed Genesis to persuade her to enroll at Voorhees.

I finally got her to go with me, Genesis said. She was trying to go to State, and I was like, No, Jewel. Go to school with me.

Genesis used the argument that they could get an apartment together and not have to stay on campus.

That was a pretty convincing argument, she said. Jewel can transfer next year if she wants to, but she may change her mind.

She said she thinks she and Jewel will get along well sharing an apartment even though they do have some arguments.

Shes so headstrong and she doesnt listen. She just does not listen, Genesis said.

Jewel says her sister is too bossy.

I am bossy, Genesis admitted. But she really does not listen. Im just trying to help her.

Shes really excited about experiencing new things at college with Jewel, she added.

On the other hand, Jewel says shes a little nervous because her life as a high school student is over and shes facing an entirely new experience.

Stephanie says shes really going to miss the girls, adding that at least theyll be living in an apartment only a block away from the campus.

This has been a great journey, she says. I feel like I gave them everything they need. I told them as much as I could tell them, and they listened sometimes. The opportunity was there for them if they wanted to hear it.
Local clergy members and others from the community converged upon Orangeburgs Memorial Plaza Wednesday morning to pray for a more unified community and world in the aftermath of the nations worst mass shooting in modern history.

As we mourn the loss of 49 victims and 53 injured persons in the Orlando, Florida, area, let us be reminded that it could have happened anywhere. Were praying for the great loss, but were also praying for Orangeburg, South Carolina, and these United States of America, Orangeburg Mayor Pro Tem Liz Zimmerman Keitt said.

The shooting occurred at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in the early morning hours of June 12. The gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 more before being killed by police.

A former Claflin student, Darryl Roman Burt II, was among the shooting victims.

Keitt called it senseless bloodshed.

Orangeburg Mayor Michael Butler, pastor of Victory Tabernacle Church, said Wednesdays service was a time for the community to come together and pray for those touched by the tragedy.

We want to extend our love and our prayers to the family members that are going through this and those that are steadily recovering, Butler said. We want to give them our prayers and our attention here in the city of Orangeburg, South Carolina.

Orangeburg resident Jessie Glover was among the community members who attended the service. She is a member of Faith Tabernacle Deliverance Temple in Orangeburg.

Glover said her heart was touched by the tragedy in Orlando, but she is confident in the power of prayer to bring healing. She attended the service with her sister and brother.

Prayer brings about change. We just wanted to pray for Orlando and our young people. We just pray for everybody worldwide, but that touched my heart because it could have happened here, Glover said.

The Rev. Kevin Amos, chaplain at Claflin University, said the community came together with heavy hearts.

I come to lift up the concerns and prayers for our colleges and universities, our young people who are going from one place to another experiencing life, looking for opportunities every place they go, Amos said.

But we are called to be light bearers, and we pray right now protection over each and every one of them. Were in a darkened world, a world that has seen great tragedy and great struggle, the chaplain said.

Amos said in his prayer that it is important to know that God is still a beacon of hope amid sadness and struggle.

As we may be surrounded by the world, we know God that you are with us. You promised to never leave us or forsake us, he said. We ask your blessing upon our students wherever they may go.

Let us come to realize that no matter what we do or where we go, when we put ourselves into your capable hands, it doesnt matter how dark the road might be.

Minister Xavior Robertson of Project Life Positeen Inc. prayed that God will pour out his spirit among youth everywhere, particularly in the Orangeburg community, as source of strength and hope.

Allow them to be a light, Lord, in a dark place. Let your spirit, Lord, shine through all of the youth right now, he said.

The Rev. Hayes T. Gainey, pastor of Good Shepherd Community Ministries in Orangeburg, prayed that the families of every individual impacted by the heinous crime will find comfort and strength in God.

Sometimes storms must come to teach us lessons. One of the things that we can learn is that we need to treasure every day we have because tomorrow is not promised to anyone. Another lesson that we can get from this is we need to learn to love everybody, Gainey said.

Gainey added, We know where love is absent, hate can reside. When hate resides in an individuals heart and mind, they are able and liable to do anything, such as what we have seen happen in Orlando.

Rocky Simmons, a member of Victory Tabernacle Church, sang a rendition of Mary Marys Thank You. He is a recent Claflin graduate who said one of his friends just visited Pulse a few weeks ago.

She was like, It could have easily been me in that club,  Simmons said. He said hes praying for the families and Im asking that they stay strong through this difficult time. Its just more of a shock than anything.

The Rev. Jerome Anderson, pastor of Unity Fellowship Community Church in Orangeburg, said it is important to pray for victims of violence and terror everywhere.

He asked God to help the community show more love and unity.

We thank you that you have given us power over evil, and that power comes through unity and love. We pray for a community that exemplifies the unity and love that you express in your word, he said.
A Columbia man remains in jail after being charged in connection with a fatal hit-and-run collision in Calhoun County.

On Tuesday, the S.C. Highway Patrol arrested Ricco Lee Williams, 28, of 253 Brook Pines Drive, Apt. 10115.

He faces one count of driving without a license and another count of hit-and-run resulting in death.

Authorities say he was driving the 1998 Lexus that struck 55-year-old Loubert Laube on May 24.

The Lawrenceville, Georgia trucker was standing outside his 2007 Freightliner when he was killed. Laube was illegally parked in the eastbound lane of Frontage Road, according to the S.C. Highway Patrol.

SCHP Lance Cpl. Judd Jones said someone provided a tip that led to Williams arrest.

On Wednesday morning, Williams appeared before Calhoun County Magistrate Robert Lake, who set his bond at $150,000 surety.

Jones said Williams has been cooperating with authorities.

Laubes sister-in-law, Roberta Laube, said that her family is glad someone has been arrested and charged in the death of her brother-in-law.

We thought this would bring some closure, but it hasnt. Its still fresh, she said.

We want to know why he left the scene, she added.

She said the family plans to be at Williams upcoming court appearances.

Last week, the family visited the spot where Loubert Laubes life was cut short.

Loubert has been described as a devoted husband and father of two.

If convicted of hit-and-run resulting in death, Williams faces a minimum of one year in prison and a maximum of 25 years.

He also faces paying a minimum fine of $10,000 and a maximum of $25,000.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is expected to announce today whether South Carolina State Universitys probation has been lifted.

S.C. State has scheduled a press conference for 7 p.m. Thursday on the steps of Martin Luther King Jr. auditorium.

The university was originally placed on warning status by the accrediting agency in June 2013 for nine issues related to governance and finance. It was later placed on probation.

SACS said the university resolved seven of the issues related to governance, but still had to fix two problems related to finance. The S.C. State board has been working to resolve the issues through budget cuts, cost increases and additional money from the state.

On Wednesday, S.C. State administrators met with the SACS board to respond to the final issues related to financial stability.

The accrediting agency was expected to look at S.C. States most recent independent audit and its budget during Wednesdays meeting.

SACS will decide to either lift the institutions probationary status or remove it from membership in the organization.

The administration asks that all members of the Bulldog family attend Thursdays press event in support of the university.

In the case of unfavorable weather conditions, the press conference will be held in the Donma Administration Building.
Three people have been referred to doctors after they came into contact with a rabid fox near Barnwell, the Department of Health and Environmental Control reported Thursday.

The people were potentially exposed to rabies on June 12 when the fox appeared on their property acting aggressively. The victims were subsequently bitten or scratched by the fox.

The fox was submitted to DHECs laboratory for testing on June 13 and was confirmed to have rabies on June 14.

Additionally, a pet dog was potentially exposed to rabies by the fox. The dog is current on its rabies vaccination and is required to undergo a 45-day quarantine. If the dog had not been vaccinated for rabies, a longer quarantine would have been required per the Rabies Control Act.

Sandra Craig of DHECs Bureau of Environmental Health Services said to reduce the risk of getting rabies, we recommend that people avoid wild animals acting tame and tame animals acting wild.

Also, keep pets up to date on their rabies vaccination.

A total of 51 cases of animal rabies has been confirmed statewide this year. There were 130 confirmed cases of animal rabies in South Carolina in 2015.
WASHINGTON -- These weeks were destined to be the last chance for Brexit, as the days dwindle down to the historic June 23 British referendum on leaving the European Union.

The fierce arguments pro and con have been mutually mustered; the strident voices on both sides are now even more strident; and the rest of Europe is looking at "this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle," with all the understanding George Washington might have drummed up for Benedict Arnold.

Those who are FOR Britain's exit from the E.U. -- that "bureaulith" of Brussels that, in its formative years, was the butt of many jokes including being accused of insisting that condoms be of uniform size (the Italians complained they weren't large enough) -- essentially are arguing for Britain's "sovereignty." Not for them to forget that their little islands once constituted an empire on whose shores the sun never set!

The anti-Brexit forces, not surprisingly, are English bankers, industrialists and most of the diplomats. This is no longer 1940, they argue, when Britain "stood alone." In today's world, every nation stands alone only at enormous risk. As the Financial Times editorialized this week: "The gains from pooling sovereignty speak for themselves. Britain joined the E.U. as the 'sick man of Europe.' Now its economic performance is among the best."

Too bad, of course, that so much of the public conversation this week has not had to do with Brexit. Too bad that our airwaves have been dominated by still another horrific slaughter of innocents in America, this one in Orlando.

Too bad -- because this new self-inflicted tragedy knocked Brexit off the front pages just when readers needed most to understand it, but also because Orlando had NOTHING at all to do with Brexit.

Yet, I now find myself begging to disagree with myself. (I often do.) For when I think more deeply, I realize that Brexit and Orlando are actually two RELATED problems. Ones, moreover, that we foolish humans ignore at our peril. Think of this wisdom-challenged relationship in terms of two outstanding questions.

First, why did 29-year-old Omar Mateen sweep into an LGBT club in the early morning hours of June 12, shooting like a madman and killing 49 innocent people? While mental instability and an inordinate hatred of outlier groups surely are part of the explanation, the fact that he was of Afghan heritage and at least claimed before he died that he identified with ISIS and Osama bin Laden should not be ignored.

He was born in America, of Afghan refugees. But please note that his Afghan-born father, Seddique Mateen, only hours before the "Saturday Night Slaughter," posted a video on Facebook called "Provisional Government of Afghanistan." In it, Dad was dressed in Afghan army fatigues and pretending to be the Afghan president, ordering the police and intelligence to immediately arrest almost the entire American-approved government and get rid of them.

The play's the thing.

Second, what does all of this have to do with the fact that the British vote on whether to remain in the E.U. may sever Britain from the organization of 28 European member-states begun with great patience and wondrous hope after World War II?

E.U. secretaries-general have told me repeatedly when I have visited Brussels headquarters: "The E.U. means there will be no more wars within Europe. It will be impossible with so many economic and financial ties between nations."

Only one catch: Even though Britain, in its present agreement with the E.U., chose NOT to take part in the controversial Schengen agreement, by which national borders are abolished and people move freely from one nation to another, it still is being overwhelmed by immigrants, drawn by its blooming economy, by metropole London and by still-superior English laws and institutions.

The problem is that Britain has thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Omar Mateens. The north of England -- smaller cities like Birmingham and Rotherham -- is overwhelmed by Pakistanis. If policies are to be judged by the empirical evidence we have at hand, then the story here is not a pretty one.

British newspapers are finally telling the story of the 1,400-or-so English teenagers groomed, beaten, raped and sold as sex slaves, many by Pakistani immigrants. The events of last New Year's Eve in Cologne are also engraved in most European and British minds now. That was the night when refugees kindly taken in by Germany assaulted, raped and robbed hundreds of women in the very shadow of the city's sacred cathedral.

It never stops: In the next step, Muslim "educators" are trying to take over schools in the north of England where they can have only Muslim education. Even in America, little-known, but dangerous new carriers of the radical Islamic thematic keep suddenly appearing, as out of nowhere.

In Orlando itself, The Washington Times reported, radical Islamic scholar Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar spoke earlier this year at the Husseini Islamic Center. In a 2013 speech he urged that gay people should be killed, according to Islamic law. "Death is the sentence," he reportedly said that day. "We know. There's nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence. ... Out of compassion, let's get rid of them now."

And, of course, there are the Omar Mateens, with his automatic gun, and of course, his dad, all dressed up and no place to go.

There is no question -- from all the polls and surveys, from all the interviews and politicians, from the extreme hatreds involved -- that uncontrolled immigration, particularly when it involves cultures with institutions as different as Christianity's and Islam's, is at the root of both the Brexit fears and many of the repeated gun attacks in America.

Is Britain going to leave, or is it going to stay? Is America going to take charge of its out-of-control immigration and its sick gun mania, or is it going to keep killing itself?

-----

Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
Growing up in the South during the Civil Rights era, Leo Twiggs was well acquainted with the Confederate flag, but it wasnt until he went to 
Calhoun First Steps Board meets

Calhoun First Steps Board will meet at noon Thursday, June 16, at the Calhoun County First Steps Office, John Ford Community Center, 304 Agnes St., St. Matthews. The public is invited. Calhoun County First Steps is a non-profit organization that focuses solely on school readiness. For more information about Calhoun County First Steps, call 803-655-5126 or visit Facebook at calhouncountyfirststeps.

Ribbon-cutting in Denmark

The City of Denmark will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 1 p.m. Thursday, June 16, for the new Splash Pad at Simmons Davis Park, 59 Hayne St., Denmark. Bring your swimsuit and suntan lotion.

OCCOA gathering planned

The Orangeburg County Council on Aging will have David Cooler and Miles Bryant from 11 a.m. to noon Thursday, June 16, at 2570 St. Matthews Road. For more information, call 803-531-4663.

Davyne power lunch Friday

Gospel rapper and teen mentor Davyne will hold a power lunch for teens at noon on Friday, June 17, at 2020 Wilkinson Drive. Space is limited to 20 teens, so please email your teens name to davynebooking@gmail.com.

RBW group gathering set

Rebuilding Broken Walls Inc. meets at 7 p.m. every third Friday for single parents, single women in need and foster parents. The next meeting is planned for June 17 at Santee Town Hall Community Center. For more information, contact Cynnamon Morant at 803-596-4570 or www.rebuildbrokenwalls.com.

Denmark council meets

Denmark City Council will hold at workshop at 11 a.m. Friday, June 17, at Denmark City Hall. Council will meet at 7 p.m. Monday, June 20, in the Brooker Center.

Eutawville FD headquarters grand opening

The Eutawville Fire Department will hold a grand opening and dedication of its headquarters from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 18, at its Dawson Street site. The public is invited. The event will include kids' activities, music, the American Red Cross smoke detector program, S.C. Electric & Gas safety tips and a demonstration by the Orangeburg County Office of Emergency Management of one of its emergency vehicles. There will be free food and refreshments while supplies last. Door prizes will also be given away.
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/By Azernews/

By Gunay Camal

The Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict occurred after Warsaw Pact and collapse of the USSR, when there was no justice in the international relations.

Deputy Head of Azerbaijani presidential administration, chief of the administration's foreign relations department Novruz Mammadov made the remark while addressing the 8th High-Level Meeting of Nizami Ganjavi International Center titled "Political Map of the Future" in Andorra, Azertac reported.

"Azerbaijan was able to guarantee stability, security and continued progress in the years of independence. However our problem with the neighboring country prevents our future progress, Mammadov said, pointing to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as the key obstacle to the development.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict, which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

Despite the official ceasefire back in 1994, each year the conflict becomes a cause of the deaths of dozens of civilians and military. The latest outbreak of violence on the contact proved that it is impossible to resolve the conflict by keeping a status quo.

Mammadov went on to say that international law is neglected in the settlement of the conflict and four UN Security Council resolutions have not been implemented. OSCE Minsk group co-chairs have failed to produce any tangible result for 25 years. All these processes are sacrificed for geopolitical interests. No one mentions rights of the IDPs and refugees who emerged as a result of the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and its seven surrounding regions by Armenia, he added.

Today, Azerbaijan with a population of about 10 million is home to more than 1.2 million refugees and IDPs. Every 8th citizen in Azerbaijan is a refugee, which is one of the highest per capita number of refugees.

The bloody Nagorno-Karabakh war left 700,000 civilians of Nagorno-Karabakh and the regions adjoining it, as well as the regions bordering with Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh without homes. Moreover, 250,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia and became refugees due to Armenia's ethnic cleansing policy after the emergence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan.

The official reminded that during its military provocations in April this year Armenia used white phosphorus bombs and also threatened nuclear strikes, urging the international community to "react timely to such cases".

Former prime minister, member of parliament and other officials of Armenia have declared this April that Armenia has a nuclear weapon, so-called dirty bomb, mentioning that these bombs can be used against Azerbaijan.

Baku turned to corresponding international organizations to examine the statement and stop Armenian nuclear threat and blackmail.
Azerbaijani Prime Minister Artur Rasizade and Chief of the Swiss Border Guard Corps Jurg Noth hailed close cooperation between Azerbaijani and Swiss border services as they met in Baku.





They stressed the necessity of the coordinated efforts for combating transborder crimes, especially for preventing illegal migration and drugs smuggling.





They also underscored the necessity of further strengthening relations in the border protection system, improving the legal framework of bilateral cooperation and conducting permanent exchange of experience.





PM Rasizade said that a part of Azerbaijani territory was occupied and more than a million of Azerbaijanis became refugees as a result of Armenia`s military aggression. He also pointed out the existence of double standards in the conflict resolution.





Chairman of the State Border Service, Commander of the Border Troops Elchin Guliyev was also present at the meeting.




The problems and prospects of the NATO's Resolute Support non-combat mission in Afghanistan will be discussed at the Warsaw NATO summit, the Polish foreign ministry told Trend June 16.

According to the Polish foreign ministry, an Azerbaijani delegation will also take part in the discussions.

The NATO-led Resolute Support mission was launched in Afghanistan on Jan. 1, 2015.

Azerbaijan has been recently actively involved in peacekeeping missions, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The cooperation is carried out as part of the Partnership for Peace program.

NATO approved the document of the fourth stage of the Individual Partnership Action Plan for 2015-2016.

The Polish foreign ministry stressed that other key aspects of NATO-Azerbaijan bilateral cooperation will be discussed during the summit.

"Azerbaijan's initiative and active participation will be appreciated," the Polish foreign ministry said.

Many other important issues, namely, open door policy, partnership cooperation, mission in Afghanistan, NATO policy towards Russia or the Allied assistance for Ukraine and other aspects of NATO's activity will be discussed during the Summit.

The Warsaw NATO summit will be held July 8-9, 2016.
Saudi Arabia's powerful deputy crown prince held a full day of meetings with US lawmakers on Wednesday, part of a visit aimed at restoring frayed ties with Washington and promoting his plan to wean the kingdom away from oil revenue.



Mohammed bin Salman, son of Saudi Arabia's King Salman, is expected to meet US President Barack Obama on Friday.



Lawmakers said his discussions on Wednesday, including meetings with the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees and House Speaker Paul Ryan, emphasised his push to help end Saudi dependence on oil by 2030.



"I know that there are tremendous cultural challenges that he'll have to overcome, but if he's 50 percent successful, it will be something," said Republican Senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Foreign Relations committee.



The "Vision 2030" plan relies on an expanding private sector, selling shares in the Saudi state-owned oil company and reducing government subsidies.



"It was a fairly compelling vision. It was an interesting, detailed and engaging presentation of his economic vision, and then how that translates to regional stability," said Senator Chris Coons, a Democratic foreign relations committee member.



Prince Mohammed's US tour is expected to last more than 10 days and include stops in California and New York.  Reuters
Arabian Construction Company (ACC) said it has been awarded the contract for the construction of the first phase of an extension to the specialist Children's Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357.

The $200-million hospital expansion project will see ACC build two more buildings, an outpatient centre extending over 8,500 sq m area and an administrative smart building. Both comprise three basements, a ground floor and 13 subsequent floors.

The outpatient centre also includes a bridge link back to the main building, said the company in a statement.

The planned extension will upgrade the facility so that it continues to offer first-class paediatric cancer care for children, it added.



Constructed by ACC and opened in 2007, it is one of the largest children's cancer hospitals in the world, providing world-class cancer care and treatment to infants and junior patients from Egypt and around the world.



ACC Egypt general manager Salah El Kadi said: "ACC is honoured to have its construction expertise called upon once more to expand the Children's Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357, one of the worlds most established and highly-regarded cancer hospitals."



"We are delighted to take this fine institution forward to its next phase. To be invited back for the next chapter in the hospitals development is a testament of the high quality of work we have produced for the hospital since its inception," noted El Kadi.



This expansion, he stated, will improve the hospitals facilities thus upgrading its ability to serve more patients.



"We will work to the same high standards of ACC to ensure that children who visit this hospital for cancer treatment, both from Egypt and around the world, are provided with the very best in 21st century cancer care," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Trojan Holding, one of the UAEs leading construction groups, is to hand 100 engineering students an invaluable opportunity to gain a head start in the highly-competitive engineering sector.



The 100 Trojan Young Engineers initiative will offer engineering students at universities throughout the UAE the chance to shadow Trojans teams as they manage the planning, design and execution process of various construction projects.



The Trojan initiative is led by its CEO Hamad Al Ameri, who as a qualified engineer, is passionate about the importance of young engineers for the future of the country and is committed to helping build their skills, experience and leadership qualities.



During the programme, the students will be encouraged to grasp the day-to-day activities and gain an insight into working life by experiencing both management and construction sites roles.



The programme spearheads Trojans bid to foster a new generation of engineering leaders offering them the first taste of the practical experience that will allow them to contribute the UAEs construction sector.



At the conclusion of the programme, Trojan will offer the students who demonstrate the right attributes such as enthusiasm, practical skills, courage and leadership a one-month internship.



The selected students will gain experience at an internationally acclaimed establishment with projects ranging from infrastructure, mass housing, low rise to high rise, MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) works, concrete production, steel structure and facade glazing.



Commenting on the initiative, Al Ameri said: "The 100 Trojan Young Engineers initiative presents an exclusive advantage for students to gain tactical experience and be exposed to complex problem solving scenarios that arise in execution phase of a project."



"Our main goal is to make a difference in the lives of these students by providing them with a platform that allows them to extend their educational knowledge into the skills and tactics required in a practical, corporate workplace," he noted.



The 100 Trojan Young Engineers initiative, which runs till March 2017, is open to fourth year engineering students with a GPA of 3.0 and above.



Each month, a group of ten students put forward by their university; will spend two full days with Trojans team of in-house engineers, where they will grasp, day-to-day activities, into how practical life will be through a rich program in both head office and construction sites.



Al Ameri pointed out that the construction sector was one of the most competitive working environments in the UAE in which an advantage in a graduates knowledge and experience could significantly enhance their CV and chances in landing a reputable professional job.



"However, the 100 Trojan Young Engineers is about more than just the first step on the ladder, but rather about giving back to the community through helping students understand what their future career could hold and expose them to the fantastic opportunities a career in engineering can offer," he stated.



The young generation are the future leaders of the UAE and we are very confident that the experience and self-confidence they would gain during their time at Trojan Holding will help set them on a course to become leaders in their field, he added.



Trojan Holding have teamed up with several universities, and are also encouraging others to get in touch to book places for their students.-TradeArabia News Service
The American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) has announced the launch of Seed to Seat, a collaboration with seven of the most prominent and exciting designers in the UAE, who have been given an open brief and asked to design something to sit on.



The leading international trade association for the American hardwood industry said the pieces, which will be made from a selection of four American hardwood species, will be unveiled at Downtown Design 2016, which will run from October 25 to 28, at Dubai Design District.



With Seed to Seat, AHEC aims to identify the true environmental impact of design and build on its extensive work with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).



This is the second collaboration between AHEC and Downtown Design and builds on prior initiatives in the Middle East and internationally, which have aimed at creatively promoting American hardwoods, and have involved the likes of Zaha Hadid, David Adjaye, Matteo Thun, Sou Fujimoto, Norman Foster and Paul Smith amongst others.



According to Roderick Wiles, AHEC regional director, the word sustainable has almost become design rhetoric. Whilst many well-intentioned designers claim sustainability in their approach to their work, there is often little solid evidence to support them in making those claims.



Fadi Sarieddine (Fadi Sarieddine Design Studio), Anna Szonyi (Studio Anna Szonyi), Tarik Al Zaharna (T.Zed Architects), Bruce Paget (Herriot-Watt University - Dubai Campus), George Kahler (Kahler Design), and Monica Twarowski (DWP) are collaborating with AHEC to demonstrate that sustainability can have substance, he stated.



In response to an open brief for something to sit on made from American hardwood lumber, each designer has been asked to create a piece made from American cherry, tulipwood, soft maple or red oak, remarked Wiles.



During the manufacturing process and incorporating data from LCA research for 19 American hardwood species, all materials, energy usage, transport and wastage will be recorded to assess the full environmental impact for each design.



Life Cycle Assessment is a scientific tool that helps industry to establish environmental frameworks that have real meaning and assess true sustainability.



The result will present the cradle-to-grave impact of creating each product across six categories. The most topical impact category is global warming potential (GWP), or carbon footprint, he noted.



"We are very excited, not only by the caliber of the designers involved in this project, but also by the fabulous pieces that we look forward to seeing in these versatile, yet less well-known American hardwood species," said Riles.



"We have seen for a long time that the Middle East has a real commitment to sustainable design in principle and through this project we can demonstrate what that means in reality - an opportunity for us to show, and learn, what works and what design elements make a difference to the environment, he added.



The project in the Middle East is the second phase of Seed to Seat, which was initially launched in Australia and New Zealand earlier this year.



"Were extremely happy to be working with Ahec again this year, to be able to support such a worthy initiative and promote sustainable design and development not just in concept, but in practice," stated Rue Kothari, the fair director, Downtown Design.



"Allowing local designers to engage with the material in a very conscious way, is providing exactly the kind of mentorship and guidance that our emerging designers need, and can only help to strengthen our collective commitment to the future environment of the city we live in," added Kothari.-TradeArabia News Service
Omans Ministry of Transport and Communications recently signed agreements with three ship classification societies for small ships that do not abide by international treaties, said a report.



The agreements were signed with the British (Lloyds Register of Shipping), Italian (Rina) and Emirati (Tasneef) ship classification societies, added the Times of Oman report.



Saeed bin Hamdoon bin Saif Al Harthy, undersecretary of ports and maritime affairs, signed the agreements on behalf of the ministry and the chief executive officers and regional directors represented the classification societies, it said.



The authorisation includes conducting a technical survey on ships holding the Omani flag, as well as the issue of international certification regarding maritime safety and the safety of life at sea, ships safety certification, maritime pollution caused by ships and hazardous material avoidance certification, collision avoidance certification, load lines certification, tonnage certification and other internationally required certifications.



These pacts will authorise the three classification societies to supervise small ships that are not abiding by the international treaties in order to ensure their navigational validities, as well their compliance with maritime safety requirements in accordance with the provisions of small ships not complying with international treaties regulations in the GCC, which the sultanate has approved under a ministerial decision.



Al Harthy also added that the inking of these pacts with the international classification societies is part of compliance under Omani maritime law, as well the international maritime agreements regarding navigation safety, added the report.
Daetwyler Holding said on Tuesday it has agreed to buy Premier Farnell in an all-cash offer that valued the British electronic component distributor at just over 1 billion Swiss francs ($1.04 billion).



Altdorf, Switzerland-based Daetwyler, which distributes more than 500,000 electronics products under brands like Nedis, said the combination would create a group with total revenues of 2.5 billion francs ($2.60 billion).



Premier Farnell, which makes and sells the Raspberry Pi  a mini, low-cost computer, has been battling falling profit and squeezed margins as sales growth as its key UK and North America markets has hit a roadblock.



Premier Farnell unveiled a raft of measures in the face of shrinking profit which included slashing dividends and selling its industrial products unit Akron Brass to US-based IDEX Corp for $224.2 million in February.



Premier Farnell shareholders would receive 165 pence for each share held in the all-cash offer, said Daetwyler.



The deal values the entire share capital of Premier Farnell at approximately 848 million francs ($880.45 million) with an enterprise value of 1.09 billion francs ($1.13 billion). - Reuters
Siemens, a globally operating technology company, has agreed to provide three steam turbines for the Noor II and III solar power plants in Morocco by the end of 2016, said a report.



The Noor Solar Complex in Ouarzazate will be the largest solar complex in the world once it is completed, added the Morocco World News report.



The first phase, Noor I, was completed in February and currently provides 650,000 locals with electricity for the majority of the day, it said.



Currently, Morocco has entered the second phase of the project: creating the Noor II and Noor III plants. Siemens, which provided the turbine for Noor I, will deliver three turbines from Germany to the Ouarzazate plants by the end of 2016.



The Noor II and III turbines will produce electricity using concentrated solar power (CSP), the process of using solar-generated steam to generate electricity, and will have power capacities of 150 megawatts (MW) and 200 MW, respectively.



The Noor solar complex will include one installation of solar panels (Noor IV) and the three solar plants (Noor I, II, and III) using CSP, added the report.


The Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company (Adnec) pavilion showcasing the International Defence Exhibition & Conference (Idex) and the Naval Defence Exhibition (Navdex) has drawn high interest from key exhibitors and decision makers in the global defence industry at the Eurosatory 2016 currently ongoing in Paris, France.



Adnecs participation in Eurosatory, the world's largest international land and air-land defence and security exhibition, articulates its ongoing efforts to promote the 2017 edition of Idex and Navdex.



As part of this priority, Adnecs outing at Eurosatory is designed to showcase the unique opportunities created by the definitive events to major players in the global defence industry.



Held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE and Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, Idex and Navdex are among the largest defence exhibitions in the world. The biennial arms and defence show is set to run at Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre from February 19 to 23, in 2017.



Humaid Matar Al Dhaheri, acting group CEO of Adnec, said: Our participation in Eurosatory 2016 offers a crucial opportunity to explore latest developments in the global defence sector. This supports our efforts to enhance the competitiveness of our events and attract the participation of a larger number international companies and industry professionals.



The high interest shown by top global arms-producing and military services companies to attend the upcoming editions of Idex and Navdex validates the growing reputation of Abu Dhabi as a preferred destination for specialised industry events. Both shows have already created a niche in the defence industry as must-attend platforms to engage with global defence manufacturers and decision makers, he said.



ADNEC has emerged as an important driver of economic growth in Abu Dhabi through its consistent support to the emirates burgeoning business tourism industry, one of the key focus areas of the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030 for achieving economic diversification. This is evidenced by the significant economic value created by Adnec through its direct and indirect support to several sectors such as transport and tourism, among others, he added.



For his part, Saeed Al Mansouri, director of Idex, said: We are delighted with the high footfall registered by Idex and Navdex pavilions at Eurosatory 2016 from both existing and new exhibitors.



The decision to delink Idex from Umex that was held as a standalone event for the first time in March 2016 has been a welcome move for many of our clients. This will enable us to allocate additional space to meet their increasing demand and evolving requirements, he said.



In addition to our ongoing efforts to promote Idex 2017 and Navdex 2017 among potential participants of international exhibitions, preparations are in full swing for the highly anticipated editions of the shows that are expected to witness the announcement of major deals between the suppliers and producers of defence equipment, he added.  TradeArabia News service


A major cyber attack could trigger a collective response by Nato, its secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview published by Germany's Bild newspaper on Thursday.



"A severe cyber attack may be classified as a case for the alliance. Then Nato can and must react," the newspaper quoted Stoltenberg as saying. "How, that will depend on the severity of the attack."



He spoke after a decision this week by Nato ministers to designate cyber as an official operational domain of warfare, along with air, sea, and land.



In 2014 the U.S.-led alliance assessed that cyber attacks could potentially trigger Nato's mutual defence guarantee, or Article 5. That means Nato could potentially respond to a cyber attack with conventional weapons, although the response would be decided by consensus.



The Nato chief told Bild that the alliance needed to adjust to the increasingly complex series of threats it faces, which is why Nato members have agreed to defend against attacks in cyberspace just as they do against attacks launched against targets on land, in the air and at sea.



The United States and other Nato states have become increasingly vocal about cyber attacks launched from Russia, China and Iran, but officials say it remains hard to determine if such attacks stem from government bodies or private groups.



Recognizing cyber as an official domain of warfare will allow Nato to improve planning and better manage resources, training and personnel needs for cyber defence operations, said a Nato official, speaking on condition of anonymity.



The official stressed that Nato's cyber activities would remain purely defensive. "We have no offensive cyber doctrine or offensive cyber capability. And there are no plans for Nato as a body to use such capabilities. Nato's core cyber defence task is to defend Nato's own networks," said the official.



Individual members have already declared cyber an operational warfare domain, including the United States, which said in 2011 that it would respond to hostile attacks in cyberspace as it would to any other threat. -Reuters
Nissan has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Greater Amman Municipality in Jordan to provide the kingdom with its first 100 Nissan Leaf and Nissan e-NV200 electric vehicles (EVs).



The vehicles, to be supplied by Bustami & Saheb (BSTC), Nissans exclusive distributor in the kingdom, will be operated by Ammans Al Mumayaz Taxi Company in Jordan and will be the first electric vehicles of their kind to be used as taxis in the Middle East.



The Leaf and e-NV200 are Nissans leading electric vehicles in markets around the world and offer fully-electric operation with zero tailpipe emissions, said Samir Cherfan, Nissan Middle Easts managing director.



This historic agreement between Nissan, Bustami & Saheb and the Greater Amman Municipality demonstrates the kingdoms forward-looking vision for a sustainable future that starts with eco-friendly public transport. Awareness of the benefits of sustainable motoring for both private and commercial use will certainly increase from this agreement, which serves as proof-of-concept for future EV applications in the region will draw attention to the positive influence of EVs on public health, the economy and most importantly, the environment.



With more than 240,000 Nissan EVs sold worldwide, the Leaf and e-NV200 EVs are proven all-electric vehicles that are environmentally-friendly and emit zero CO2 or exhaust gases during operation. They produce very little noise during driving, making them ideal for the busy streets of Amman, in addition to being roomy, fun-to-drive, and with low running costs.



The Amman Municipality has begun deploying vehicle charging stations in major parts of the city and will continue to expand the number of available stations to cover a wider area.



The partnership between Nissan, BSTC and the Jordanian Government is the first of its kind in the kingdom, said Wessam Issa, CEO of Bustami & Saheb (BSTC). We believe other countries in the Middle East will see the positive impact that the use of electric vehicles will bring. We are very proud to have been able to assist the leaders of this great country in establishing this ground-breaking programme. From the day this deal is signed, Nissan EV taxis will be a regular sight around the capital.



Nissan has spent more than 20 years investing in and developing the Leaf's lithium-ion batteries, which are compact, powerful, safe and durable. The cars battery modules are located underneath the floor, which means more room in the boot and the cabin. A driving range of up to 160 km on a single charge is offered on the Leaf to be used as taxis in Amman. The Nissan Leaf can be recharged at home with an EV battery charger, or by using public battery recharging facilities. - TradeArabia News Service
China and Iran plan to jointly build an oil terminal at a cost 0f $550 million on Qeshm Island in the southern part of the Persian Gulf, a report said.



The contract was signed by Iran's Machine Making Co. and China's largest heavy industry enterprise, reported Iran Daily, China's Peoples Daily Online.



The island will be able to store 10 million barrels of light, heavy and ultra-heavy crude oil produced in Iran's West Karoun region with the completion of the first stage of the joint project.



The oil terminal will accommodate tankers up to 140 meters deep and store an estimated 30 million barrels of crude, the report said.
Microsoft has launched a new Middle East and Africa centre of excellence for oil and gas in Dubai, built specifically to assist customers in driving digital transformation, cost cutting and optimisation of their operations.



It is the largest such centre for Microsoft globally, a statement said.



The centre will help companies in the sector take advantage of the latest trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), advanced analytics, modern productivity and cloud computing using Microsoft technologies like Microsoft Azure and Office 365. The centre also brings together leading industry players like Accenture, Aveva, Baker Hughes, Honeywell, OSIsoft, Schneider Electric and Schlumberger.



Increasing spend on digital transformation



Despite oil price challenges, the industry is seeing increasing IT spend as a way to maintain profitability and boost productivity. According to the 2016 Upstream Oil and Gas Digital Trends Survey by Accenture and Microsoft, 80 per cent of upstream oil and gas companies plan to increase spending on digital technologies in order to help them drive leaner, smarter organisations.



The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that IT spending in oil and gas will increase to nearly $50 billion in 2016, while spending on connectivity related technologies should increase by 30 per cent.



Digital transformation is top of mind for executives in the oil and gas industry, which is why we built the centre of excellence in the Middle East, said Omar Saleh, director for Oil and Gas at Microsoft, Middle East and Africa.



For the industry to transform, companies need to develop sound digital strategies, built on secure and agile platforms, either on a companys premises or in the cloud. Continuous dialogue with our customers and partners is essential for enabling innovation and moving the industry forward. This is what the centre of excellence is built for.



With 44 per cent of respondents in the 2016 Upstream Oil and Gas Digital Trends Survey reporting that investing in the Internet of Things (IoT) is their next big priority, its clear that in the current challenging environment the industry is focusing technologies on areas that will deliver efficiencies and savings in the short term while enabling faster decision making. Respondents also saw the greatest impact from IoT in enabling connected field workers, with 60 per cent planning to have field workers and assets digitally connected with smart devices.



Massimo Pagella, resources lead for Accenture Mena, said: Oil and gas industry leaders continue to look to digital technologies as a way to address some of the key challenges the industry faces. They are expected to continue investing in areas that help lower operations costs, infrastructure costs and drive better asset management through analytics.



However, looking into the future, these companies are starting to realise that traditional cost cutting levers will not be enough to sustain future growth. Accentures unique alliance with Microsoft will help give this sector an opportunity not only to cut costs but also redesign businesses to thrive in volatile market conditions.



Ensuring safety and security



As with all industries in the modern marketplace, oil and gas needs to ensure that any progress made in technology is done so in a safe, trusted, and secure way.



According to a report titled The Global State of Information Security Survey 2015, there were nearly 6 000 detected security incidents against the sector in 2014. Other research done by Symantec found that more than two-thirds of organisations in the Middle East struggle to protect themselves from sophisticated cyber-attacks, and close to 70 per cent of the region's IT experts lack confidence in their company's cybersecurity measures.



Microsofts experience in cyber security, including its own Digital Crimes Unit, brings industry-leading experts and technology together to protect against modern threats. Security will be at the core of conversations taking place at the new centre of excellence for the oil and gas industry.



Solutions for the industry from Microsoft and its partners are based on the worlds most cost-effective, functionally-rich technology platforms. For example, Microsofts Azure Internet of Things (IoT) Suite, captures and analyses disparate data and connects devices to improve business results.



Microsoft has been delivering IoT and advanced analytics technologies for more than a decade. Partner solutions will play the leading role in making sure the centre of excellence hosts the most progressive discussions on technology in the oil and gas industry.  TradeArabia News Service
Everyday detailsbe it the flash of fireworks in an otherwise darkened suburb, or sunlight cutting through heavy cloudstake on stunning beauty in Jacques Audiard's (The Prophet, Rust and Bone) Palme d'Or winner, Dheepan. These details, deftly imbued with weight when they come into focus, offer a beauty that is redemptive in the otherwise bleak world of three Tamil immigrants living outside of Paris.

The first sequence of the film follows Yalini (played with heart-wrenching bitterness by the worry-filled Kalieaswari Srinivasan) as she races around a Sri Lankan refugee camp asking each family she encounters, Is this your child? Having found a 9-year-old girl, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), whose parents are dead, she makes her way to a tent where a man is selling the passports of a dead family. Here, she meets and is paired up with the titular character of Dheepan (played by former Tamil soldier and novelist Jesuthasan Antonythasan) who assumes the role of husband, and the three become a tenuous family, bonded by necessity, in order to seek asylum in France. The three are forced, literally and metaphorically, to abandon their identities as they move into a new world. Dheepan is the name on the main character's passport, rather than his real one, and his life, formerly marked by nationalism and ideology, is now loosened of it.

With Audiard's effusive style, the film moves from post-civil war Sri Lanka to Paris with ease. There's a blurred neon flashing cutting through the darkness, the frames are slowed down and Dheepan comes into focus, wearing Mickey Mouse ears as he hawks trinkets to tourists on the sidewalks of the capital. It's spirit-sapping to see the Liberation Tiger warrior Dheepan diminished. He goes home to Yalini and Illayaal at dawn, and the three seem just as foreign to one another as they do to France.

Soon the family is relocated to a housing project in the suburbs of Paris, where the pain of immigrant life is even more sharply brought into focus. The apartment block to which they move is primarily a site for drug dealing and gang activity. As such, the story successfully transcribes the violence of turbulent post-civil war Sri Lanka to a French public housing unit wherein low-level menace is a furious constant. Dheepan takes on work as the maintenance man of the apartment unit and Yalini works as the caretaker of a tenant nearby while Illayaal attempts to transition into French public school. Joined not by love, but through the struggle for survival, the three attempt to fabricate normality out of the tension and turmoiland it almost seems like it is going to work.

The plot takes on a new pace when ex-prisoner Brahim, who lives with the man that Yalini acts as caretaker for, appears. With Brahim's return the violence just outside their windowwhich Yalini and Dheepan frequently linger in front of, staring outside, wishing they could extricate themselves from the grim concrete apartment blocks and nagging tensions of their new lifeescalates. Dheepan, wishing to exert control, to establish harmony for the sake of his make-shift family, irreversibly embroils himself in the action. To jeers and taunts that harp upon Dheepan's race more than anything, Dheepan, heart-wrenchingly tries to make change, but flounders. Dheepan clearly illustrates that for the impoverished, there is no escape from the world's brutality.

In what seems almost to be a shift in genre, the final scenes are the action-packed fodder of a crime drama, not of the quiet and contemplative film that precedes them. Dheepan is unable to escape violence, and as he is thrust back into the tumult of battlethis time in the gritty housing projects of Paristhe full breadth of his character is more fully realized. This is a man that has not just suffered, but has participated in atrocities, and the action of the film does not allow him to forget them or place them firmly in the past.

Every last character in Dheepan is emotionally complex, even the gangster Brahim, and Audiard treats them with compassion and sympathy. Whether it is biting interpersonal conflict or widespread cruelty and disorder, the characters struggle toward escape, read: greater humanity. Dheepan can be excruciating to watch because we want so badly for the characters to succeed. The ending may feel improbable at best, totally illogical at worst, but still manages to satisfy if you one can suspend a scrap of disbelief.

In Dheepan, Audiard has constructed a heartrending parable, particularly in light of greater migration into Europe. With a mastery of style that is firmly rooted in the telling detailsa scornful glance, a body moving into the ever-increasing dark, an elephant stirring from a forest canopy, the peeling of yellowed wallpaperAudiard creates a film with rare conscience that unfolds one story of immigration to illuminate us all.
After more than a decade of deliberations, India has finally unveiled an aviation policy to open up the worlds fastest growing major air-travel market, said a report.



Prime Minister Narendra Modis government decided on Wednesday to permit domestic airlines to fly overseas provided they deploy 20 planes or 20 per cent of capacity, whichever is higher, on local routes. Earlier, carriers needed to have a minimum of 20 aircraft in their fleet and five years of domestic services, Bloomberg reported.



The move benefits operators such as Singapore Airlines and AirAsia, two of Southeast Asias biggest airlines, and has the potential to attract new investments from Middle Eastern carriers such as Emirates and Etihad Airways. More may enter the market, leading to a possible consolidation among local carriers, said Amber Dubey, an aerospace consultant at KPMG in Gurgaon near New Delhi.



The policy framework is transparent now, Dubey said. If you dont get in now, you never will.



Outpacing China



Air travel in the South Asian country grew more than 20 per cent last year, according to the International Air Transport Association (Iata). In comparison, passenger traffic in China rose about 10 per cent and by less than 5 per cent in the US, Iata said in a December presentation. Local air traffic in India increased even faster at more than 23 per cent in the first four months of 2016, according to data from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation.



Modis decision to amend the regulation, locally known as the 5/20 rule, is part of a new aviation policy framework unveiled by the cabinet after at least 13 years of consideration by successive governments. The South Asian nation, which has at least 10 major carriers, had earlier relied on the British colonial-era Aircraft Act of 1934, which was periodically revised in a piecemeal fashion.



It is a turning point for Indias civil aviation sector as it frees the operators from the shackles of the 5/20 rule for flying overseas, said D S Rawat, secretary-general of the Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India, a business lobby. The step would surely attract more investment in aviation, which in any case had become quite viable after a sharp correction in fuel prices.



Too Many



Singapore Airlines and Etihad said they will study the policy before commenting, while Emirates said in an e-mail that it is significant and includes positive initiatives that aim to address challenges. In comments posted on his Twitter account, AirAsia group chief executive officer Tony Fernandes said the minimum fleet requirement of 20 is too many, but thanked Modi.



We will now focus on aggressively investing in India and increasing the fleet size, said Amar Abrol, CEO of AirAsia India. He is targeting to increase the carriers aircraft to 20 from six now, he said, without elaborating.



Vistaras CEO Phee Teik Yeoh said hed like to see the unconditional removal of the 5/20 rule for the sector to grow faster. This announcement paves the way.



After a brief rally on Wednesday, spurred by the clarity on the new structure, shares of some carriers declined on Thursday. SpiceJet was down 0.2 per cent in Mumbai; Jet Airways India, 24 per cent owned by Etihad, fell 0.7 per cent. IndiGo rose 0.4 per cent following a 2.1 per cent advance the previous day.



More Orders



The move also heralds increased competition, posing a possible challenge for market leader IndiGo, run by Interglobe Aviation, and SpiceJet, carriers that were opposed to freeing up the sector. The winners are Singapore Airlines, which has a local venture known as Vistara, and AirAsia, the regions biggest discount carrier that began domestic Indian flights in June 2014.



This will help expand their market position in India, said Shukor Yusof, founder of Malaysia-based aviation consultant Endau Analytics, referring to Vistara, adding the Singapore Airlines partnership will benefit more than AirAsia. Given this, there could be demand for more aircraft, more orders.



No Game Changer



Not everyone was impressed with the new policy. It takes at least 36 months to get a new airline started, and would take about three to four years to build a fleet of 20 planes, not to mention various approvals from regulators and authorities, said Mark Martin, founder of Dubai-based aviation consultancy Martin Consultancy.



It isnt a game changer and nothing to write home about, he said. For Middle East-based operators, starting an airline in India would mean compromising your hub model.



If every middle-class Indian takes just one flight a year, Indian carriers will sell 300 million tickets compared with the current 80 million. India wants to achieve that in five years to become the worlds third-biggest aviation market, according to the government.



Imagine what kind of business opportunity it represents, R N Choubey, the top bureaucrat in the aviation ministry, said in an interview. We will become the new hub. I expect investments to go up considerably.
ECity, an operator of multi-brand electronics retail stores across the UAE and a part of the Albatha Group of Sharjah, recently opened its 9th store in the UAE.

The newly opened outlet, located at Dalma Mall in Abu Dhabi, features the company's rebranding initiative, including the new logo and identity, reflecting its concept of utilising technology, fixtures, lay-outs and displays that have never been used in today's industry and the markets, the company said.

The company's tagline, 'Experience the future of electronics,' throws the spotlight on today's leading innovative brands and the products and services they offer, some of which have never been experienced or witnessed in the UAE, it added.

Jaouad Dakir, CEO of ECity, said: We are proud of the opening of this new store, which features our new redesigned logo and identity. Our rebranding initiatives reflect our one-of-a-kind specialty consumer electronic concept and ably complements our expansion strategy. All of our stores will be redesigned with a strategic lay-out that will improve the over-all customer experience  presenting them with a smart and friendly shopping environment that focuses heavily on convenience, online shopping and in-store and home repair services.

ECity recently announced its rebranding efforts, which is focused on consolidating its position as the region's first 'Technology Convenience Store.' The company's new store and portfolio has been designed to uplift the brand's appeal by featuring vibrant new products, a new signage and an improved store plan crafted specifically to improve the customers shopping experience.

ECity stores will be throwing the spotlight on tablets and smartphones, which have been seeing strong sales growth. However, the company will also be featuring other smart gadgets and accessories along with Small and Major Domestic Appliances, Personal Care, Audio Video, Gaming and Toys, Drones, Accessories, 3D printing, notebook, wearables and camera.

Consumers today have demonstrated an increased preference for all things compact and multifunctional--a trend that has set the tone of experiencing the future of electronics and what it can offer. The trend also reflects our continued investment and commitment in the retail industry, as well as our dedication to provide only the best quality experience for our customers, concluded Dakir. TradeArabia News Service
Unikai, one of the largest FMCG companies in the UAE, has joined forces with EcoLab and Zebak Emirates to bring food production and quality to the next level.



The deals, to be implemented over five years, will see Zebak Emirates building a central laboratory for Unikais research and quality development activities, fortifying their commitment to providing consumers with only the best in quality products. EcoLabs agreement will see them jointly investing in hygiene equipment and products designed to improve operations on all levels.



These momentous partnerships are a reflection of the rapid growth and maturity of the food and beverage sector within the UAE. We welcome this collaboration with two of the leading firms in complimentary sectors, which clearly demonstrate Unikais deep-seated commitment to research and development, as well as quality, said Mana Mohammed Saeed Al Mulla, chairman of Unikai.



The food and beverage (F&B) sector in the UAE has seen significant growth in recent years and Unikai have been playing a key role in this growth.



As one of the most experienced players in the FMCG sector in the UAE, we see it as our duty to lead the way with progressive R&D and quality standards. Our collaboration with EcoLab and Zebak Emirates cements our commitment to bringing only the best to our customers and setting the highest benchmark for the industry as a whole, added Al Mulla.



The deals sign-post the maturity of the F&B sector in the region and a growing recognition that consumers should not have to settle for anything less than the best.



With consumers ever changing tastes and preferences, Unikai recognises the significance of these deals. It will not only allow us to bring more of the best tasting products to our customers, but will also ensure the highest quality standards that reflect our position as an industry leader, commented Neeraj Vohra, Unikais Chief Executive Officer.



We are thrilled to be partnering with Unikai and commend its commitment to leading the way in improving quality standards across the industry. Our combined expertise and joint investment will provide the highest hygiene and safety environment across Unikais facilities, resulting in increased and sustainable operational efficiency, said Tamer El Ashmawy, vice president and general manager of EcoLab.



Jiji Manikkath, managing director, Zebak Emirates added: Zebak Emirates are proud to be joining forces with Unikai to develop this state-of-the-art facility. Bringing all quality facilities under one roof will ensure optimum performance from the quality team, the benefits of which will guarantee the finest consumer experience. - TradeArabia News Service
The Westin Doha, a leading five-star hotel in the Qatari capital, has welcomed Bulent Canbolat as its new executive chef.



An ace in his field, Canbolat brings 15 years' experience in the Middle East hospitality industry.



His interest in cooking was sparked when he was pursuing his Hotel Management Degree in Turkey.



Canbolat's passion for food and gastronomy led him to train as an apprentice in five-star hotel kitchens, later moving to the Middle East in Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE and Thailand, learning his culinary craft by taking on an array of kitchen positions.



Canbolats career has seen work with many leading hotels including Le Meridien, Angsana, Shangri-La, Banyan Tree and Dusit International. - TradeArabia News Service
The European Commission said Iranian state carrier IranAir can resume flights in the EU, along with Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air, a major buyer of Airbus and Boeing jets, which has been removed from a safety blacklist.



The decision could potentially lead Lion Air to buy more planes, analysts have said.



Following a visit to Iran by the EU executive in April, most of IranAir's aircraft have been allowed to resume operations in the European Union, the Commission said in a statement on Thursday.



As some of its aircraft are still banned IranAir will technically still be on the blacklist, however.



"I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from IranAir back into European skies," said EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc.



The EU executive also removed Indonesia's Citilink, Batik Air and all Zambian airlines from the blacklist.  Reuters
The cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir flight MS804 has been retrieved by search teams in a breakthrough for investigators seeking to explain what caused the plane to crash into the sea killing all 66 people on board.



The Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean early on May 19 on its way from Paris to Cairo.



Since then, search teams have worked against the clock to recover the two black box recorders crucial to explaining what went wrong, before they stop emitting signals in about a week.



Egypt's investigation committee said in a statement that a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search was forced to salvage the device in stages because it was extensively damaged, but was able to retrieve the memory unit.



"The vessel's equipment was able to salvage the part that contains the memory unit, which is considered the most important part of the recording device," the statement said.



Egypt's public prosecutor ordered that the recovered device be handed over to Egyptian air accident investigators for analysis.



Two specialist vessels, John Lethbridge and Laplace, are continuing to search for the second black box, which contains the flight data recorder. They have yet to detect signals from that device but have identified the location of the main parts of the wreckage.



The black boxes are usually located in the tail, so finding the wreckage and one of the devices narrows the search.



The investigation committee said on Monday the black boxes were expected to stop emitting signals around June 24. That would make the second device harder to find because the plane crashed in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean, about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) below the surface.



With only limited amounts of wreckage and human remains found before Thursday's breakthrough, Egypt's investigators have had little to go on.



They said on Monday that radar imagery obtained from the Egyptian military had confirmed previous reports based on Greek and British radar data indicating that the plane had swerved sharply to the left, then spun 360 degrees to the right before disappearing from radar.



That conclusion is important, one aviation source has said, because it goes some way to excluding the possibility that the plane was brought down by a mid-air explosion.



No group has yet claimed responsibility for bringing down the plane, but investigation sources have said that it was too early to rule out any explanations, including terrorism.



The crash is the third blow since October to Egypt's travel industry, which is still reeling from the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.



A Russian plane crashed in the Sinai Peninsula last October, killing all 224 people on board in an attack claimed by Islamic State. In March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked by a man wearing a fake suicide belt. No one was hurt. - Reuters
The city of Casper may contribute up to $5 million to improving infrastructure near a possible new convention center at the Parkway Plaza Hotel.

The proposed center would be 40,000 square feet, and paid for by CRU Casper LLC. The city would pay for improvements to public property and streets around the hotel.

Casper City Council members gave the project a thumbs up at their Tuesday meeting.

The city has tried for four or five years to bring a convention center to Casper. It has $5 million in optional 1-cent funds earmarked for the effort.

The Amoco Reuse Agreement Joint Powers Board, whose plans for a hotel and convention center at the old Amoco refinery site have not materialized, is currently holding those funds.

Its money in the bank, committed to a conference center, explained City Manager V.H. McDonald. Where the conference center is is the key.weve had the softening of the ability to be able to put it at the Amoco site.

The project is coming even as the city is cutting its budget due to the economic downturn.

I know right now with everybody saying, The citys broke; how are you going to do this? said Vice Mayor Steve Cathey. We have that money already set aside so all were doing is shifting money.

McDonald said the city would support only one conference center project.

Obviously we cant say there will never be another conference center in town, because if a private company wants to come in and build it, then they will build it, McDonald said. But we have one-time funding available to do this work, and our goal is to get a conference center in Casper.

Before the city commits, however, the hotel owners must present detailed plans and prove they can finance their share of the undertaking. CRU purchased the hotel last year from longtime owner Pat Sweeney.

The initial concept is for a 40,000-square-foot structure that includes a 25,000-square-foot ballroom. The two-story building would be in what is now the southwest parking lot and connected to the current hotel. It is slated to be finished by March 31, 2018.

If the project moves forward, the city will be required to upgrade a short portion of E Street leading to the hotel and rename it Parkway Plaza Drive. It will also upgrade the D Street entrance to the complex.

The city will also put in lighting and make other improvements to the Platte River Parkway trail that borders the hotel along the river. Under the plan, the public will continue to have access to the Parkway trail.

As the project progresses over the next 15 months, the city will also improve the Interstate 25 underpass area, along with the railroad underpass leading to downtown.

This is one of the largest sections on the obligations of the city.railings, walkways, aesthetic upgrades, looking at the traffic management component, beautification, and the landscaping, all being done in a compatible format, said Assistant City Manager Liz Becher.

The city also intends to seek grants from the Wyoming Business Council, using the $5 million as its share of any match requirements.

If we dont get a Business Council grant, well put in as much money as we can, or as much money as is needed, up to the limit, McDonald said. We dont know what the price tag is yet.

Meanwhile, it was noted the city has long wanted to improve that area of Center Street.

Its always going to be the gateway to downtown, said McDonald.
CHEYENNE  A new task force that will assess bicycle and recreational trails and paths in Wyoming will begin meeting in the coming weeks.

Ultimately, the task force will create a final report that will help better understand the opportunities and challenges of nonmotorized recreation.

Its significant because its the first state-level effort to study bicycles and pathways, said Tim Young, a member of the task force and director of Wilson-based Wyoming Pathways, a statewide nonmotorized recreation advocacy group. Its got a fairly broad charge.

The Legislature passed, and Gov. Matt Mead signed, the law creating the task force this past session.

The law directs the task force to consider a number of different aspects of nonmotorized recreation, including:

The health benefits of bicycling and pedestrian recreation;

Opportunities for using pathways for tourism and the community;

Fatalities and accidents involving motor vehicles and bicycles and pedestrians;

State coordination and assistance in developing pathways and trails;

Use of pathways and trails for people riding horses; and

Effective methods of construction of pathways and trails.

The law also calls for the task force to identify and evaluate funding options for pathways and trails.

A preliminary report on the subject is due this October, with a final report due in October 2017.

Young said the creation of the task force is the second of two very positive steps in state policy changes that are friendly to nonmotorized recreation.

The first was the enactment of a state law in 2015 that requires motorists to give at least three feet of space when passing a bicyclist.

Still, Young said there are some ways state law could be improved, and thats something he hopes the task force will identify.

Another task force member, Angela Emery, said she hopes additional miles of trails  and finding ways to pay for those paths  will come out of the task force.

Emery is the director of Platte River Trails, a nonprofit organization that advocates and raises funds for trails in and around Casper.

Im just so pleased the Legislature empowered the task force to talk about trails and their role in Wyomings future, she said.

Emery said her office sits near U.S. Highway 26, and she sees a high number of cars carrying bicycles as they drive down the road, alluding to trails economic effects.

I see trails as being a tourism infrastructure product, she said.

That aspect  economic benefits of trails  is something Jeff Wiggins, the trails coordinator for Cheyenne and a task force member, would like the group to address.

Wiggins also wants the task force to look at how to make cyclists and drivers more aware of one another to improve safety, and also to identify opportunities that exist to promote trails.

We have so many amazing assets (in Wyoming), he said.

The task force has not yet set a meeting time.

Each of the 11 members of the task force is required to represent a specific entity or interest.

Young and Emery represent bicycle groups, and Wiggins is the local government representative.

In addition to those three, members of the task force are:

Dr. Wendy Braund, of Cheyenne, senior administrator and state health officer at the Department of Health, who represents the state epidemiologist;

Wyoming State Parks and Historic Sites & Trails Administrator Domenic Bravo, of Cheyenne, who will represent that agency;

Matthew Carlson, of Cheyenne, Highway Safety Program manager at the Wyoming Department of Transportation, who will represent that agencys highway safety role;

Patrick Collins, owner of The Bicycle Station in Cheyenne, who represents a bicycle tourism-related business;

Jim Hellyer, of Lander, who represents agriculture;

Jack Koehler, of Jackson, who represents WYDOT in the construction of bike and pedestrian paths;

John Rutter, of Moran, who represents tourism; and

Molly Spangler, of Cheyenne, who serves as the Wyoming Business Council representative.
AURORA, Colo.  The Veterans Affairs Department was about to fire one executive because of massive cost overruns at a VA hospital outside Denver, and another was under investigation, but both retired before the department could take an action, Deputy VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said Wednesday.

It was the VAs most detailed public explanation to date about attempts to discipline high-ranking officials over problems that caused the new hospitals price to nearly triple to $1.7 billion.

Congress has repeatedly demanded that the VA fire the executives responsible for the cost overruns, but to date no one has been dismissed. The VA says everyone who was to blame has left the department.

Gibson identified the two executives who retired only by title, the head of the office of acquisition, construction and logistics and a senior VA attorney. He didnt say which was about to be fired.

Glenn Haggstrom, who held the acquisition and construction job, retired in March 2015, one day after he was interviewed under oath as part of an internal investigation. He didnt immediately return a phone message Wednesday.

Phillipa Anderson, an assistant general counsel in the VAs contract office, retired in June 2015. She said Wednesday she had no knowledge about whether she had been under investigation over the hospital project, and said her retirement wasnt related to the hospital. She declined further comment.

Gibson, speaking at a news conference at the hospital construction site in suburban Aurora, said the VA would not publicly release the results of its internal investigation.

Internal reviews go on all the time, and disclosing this one would make it difficult to conduct them in the future, he said.

You end up chilling the whole investigative process, he said.

The VA has shown the report to members of congressional committees that oversee the department, Gibson said.

A second investigation by the VAs inspector general is still underway and will be made public when its complete, he said. Its not clear when that will be.

Investigators blamed the overruns on multiple design changes and a decision by VA officials to use a complicated contract process they didnt fully understand.

We got a lot of things wrong, Gibson said Wednesday.

The 184-bed hospital is 70 percent complete and construction is expected to be done in January 2018. It will replace an aging, overcrowded facility still in use in Denver.

Gibson said the hospital would be opened in phases but declined to give specifics, saying he wanted to make sure everything was in place before committing to dates.
State and tribal governments deserve a bigger say in federal coal policies, U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke said Tuesday, while seeking to overturn a temporary federal ban on coal leases.

Montanas lone congressman told the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources that the federal decision suspending coal leasing earlier this year was hurting state and tribal economies.

Leasing was suspended in January by the Department of the Interior, which contends the public isnt getting a fair royalty price for its coal. The department estimates theres a 20-year coal supply available without new leases. Its expected to take several years to establish a more equitable royalty rate, the Interior estimates.

To undo the suspension, Zinke has proposed the Certainty for States and Tribes Act. In addition to ending the suspension, the bill directs the Secretary of the Interior to re-establish a royalty policy committee from which state, tribal and energy interests consult the department. A state would need to have $10 million in leasing royalties annually to be considered for the committee.

This administration seems to be waging a war on coal specifically, and other natural resources, fossil fuels, and weve seen how hard hit Montana is as a result, Zinke said.

Zinke cited the loss of research databases at Montana school libraries because of declining coal revenue. In Musselshell County, commissioners are preparing for a $300,000 shortfall because of slumping coal taxes and the local school district is faced with paying for a $9.8 million construction bond as its largest taxpayer falters.

The Crow Tribe has cited lost coal revenue at its southeast Montana mine for a multimillion deficit in the tribal budget. Quarterly payments from the Absaloka Mine, operated by Westmoreland Coal Company, were off $1.2 million in 2015. The tribal government furloughed a quarter of its workers in January as a result.

For the Crow, there are treaties, the treaties specifically state that the United States will not interfere with their manifest destiny if they choose to mine their coal, Zinke said. The problem is, were getting in the way of a treaty. Either Indian tribes are sovereign, or theyre not.

Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif., questioned the bills merits, both for reinstating coal leasing before Interior officials determine a more lucrative royalty rate for public coal, and for seeming to allow states, tribes and coal companies a committee from which to override federal policy.

This legislation would make the committee effectively able to stop a regulation in its tracks if it estimates there will be negative economic impact. As far as the Congressional Research Service can tell, this is unprecedented, Lowenthal said. Its very possible this provision could block critical health, safety or environmental regulations.

But the undoing of the Interiors suspension of coal leasing was Lowenthals biggest concern. He said 1.8 billion tons of coal would again be eligible for lease at royalty rates the Interior estimates have cost the public billions of dollars.

Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School, said state and federal losses to under-calculated coal royalties exceed $28 billion. Leasing more coal before adjusting the royalty rate, something the government hasnt done in 30 years, just compounds the publics loss, he said.

We ought to recognize that coal is in decline, Squillace said. We need to manage that decline in a responsible way that can help coal-dependent communities transition away from coal.

The professors remarks didnt sit well with Jillian Balow, Wyomings superintendent of public instruction, who had minutes earlier praised Wyoming coal revenue for financing 100 school construction and remodeling projects in her state since 2003. Coal revenues also cover roughly a third of Wyomings state budget, she said.

This bill is really a responsible way for states, tribes and the federal government to engage so that all Americans can benefit.

Earlier this year, Wyoming braced for a 9 percent hit to its state general fund because of a crashing coal industry. Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican, estimated the state would needed to cut $300 million or more over the next two years because of souring coal markets.

Mike Johnson, a union representative from Montana told the subcommittee that federal management of public lands had cost him his job at a Missoula paper mill, apparently because of federal logging contracts, and now threatened his livelihood in Eastern Montana, where Colstrip miners and power plant workers were bracing for an unwelcome transition out of the coal economy.

The power plant at the heart of the community is challenged by energy market prices driven down by natural gas, and climate change-cautious customers in the Pacific Northwest who no longer want coal power. Additionally, there are tougher federal pollution standards on the horizon that could shutter the older portions of Colstrip Power Plant built in the 1970s.

These people have lived there for generations and generations. They dont want to be retrained. They dont want to have to relocate, Johnson said. Most of them, the average age of coal miners is about 55 years old, theyre too old to retrain and start a new career. Theyre too young to retire. Its a very, very hard situation to have your life turned around like that.

The subcommittee expects to mark up Zinkes bill by months end.
A Tucson woman is the first employee in the McDonalds Rocky Mountain Region to earn her high school diploma through the companys Archways to Opportunity and Career Online High School programs.

April Boone was honored with a graduation ceremony Tuesday at the McDonalds at 4495 N. Oracle Road.

Archways to Opportunity helps McDonalds workers earn their high school diploma and college degree, and in some cases learn English as a second language. Since its launch in April 2015, more than 5,000 employees in the U.S. have enrolled in the program, including nearly 90 in Arizona.

Boone has been with McDonalds for eight years, starting as a crew member and working her way up to kitchen department manager, while balancing her work and motherhood responsibilities with her studying, the company said in a news release.

She plans to continue her education in the fields of veterinary studies and business.

McDonalds Rocky Mountain Region includes the Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs and Tucson markets.
This is who we are:

A city bursting with smarts, innovation, unique thinkers and, especially, creativity.

Sometimes its hard to get that.

But its hard to ignore now with the murals that have popped up all around downtown.

The city of Tucsons Mural Arts Program has made the area an outdoor art gallery, with murals that scream Tucson in gorgeous colors, graceful birds, big hearts and blooming cacti. The murals speak to the Southwest and to the soul of the community.

The new murals that have gone up in the last month are visual celebrations of the Old Pueblos colorful personality. One, the jaguar, is courtesy of the Center for Biological Diversity. The remaining eight (including one that is not yet done) are a result of the citys mural program.

I got the idea for the program from one in Richmond, Virginia, says Camila Bekat, an economic development specialist with the citys economic initiatives office.

Theyve used murals as a way to revitalize areas and a way to create visual interest and deter taggers. We thought a similar program would help us achieve those goals, too.

The first step in the mural program was securing the funding, and the Tohono Oodham Nation came in with a $50,000 grant. Visit Tucson threw in a couple grand.

Then Bekat and the city went to a group who knows how to do what they wanted done: the Tucson Arts Brigade.

The 20-year-old nonprofit has long matched up muralists with owners of walls that called out for visual pizazz. It has also brought art to schools, neighborhoods and community centers and has an extensive arts education program. The idea is a community that embraces and cares about art and artists thrives culturally and economically.

The Art Brigades recent Trash Container Mural project, an effort to reduce graffiti while brightening up neighborhoods, sent Bekat to the organization with the idea it could manage the downtown mural program.

She said, We need this in Tucson, recalls Michael Schwartz, a co-founder of the Arts Brigade.

Ive been waiting 20 years for that call.

Planning began in late January. In the little more than four months since, the city and the Arts Brigade called for proposals from artists, looked for partners in building owners who wanted murals on walls, winnowed down 58 artists proposals to 16, and saw seven of the eight murals completed. The last will be done by Monday, June 20.

I thought it would be a real asset, says developer John Wesley Miller, on his wall at 9 N. Scott Ave. Miller, like all those offering up walls, was able to select the mural he wanted from the final 16.

Isnt it pretty? he asks about the Isaac Caruso mural. The towering piece looks over an alleyway and drips with juicy oranges and orange blossoms on a cool blue background.

I love it.

Benjamin Plumbing Supplys historic building at 440 N. Seventh Ave. has a 55-foot-high wall facing west. Blank, it was a magnet for taggers. Tagging and graffiti have never been our friend, says Tina Roesler, director of marketing at the 56-year-old Tucson company.

Weve spent thousands of dollars trying to keep up with taggers.

Today, Rock Martinezs riveting Agave Lady peers over the buildings toward the Stone Avenue underpass, serving as a cant-miss-it greeting to downtown travelers and a beckoning to the arts district.

Tagging is an uncomfortable reality in Tucson. Schwartz hopes the graffiti artists respect the murals, but he is realistic. All the works have a protective coating that will make removal of graffiti a quick and fairly easy job.

Most of the artists began the work in May and finished early this month.

The response has been electric. While a few have groused about wasting taxpayer dollars  which were not used for this project  most of the reaction has been positive, says Jessica Harris, who is tracking responses for the Arts Brigade.

The citys Bekat says her office is receiving mostly praise from the community for the project, as well. So much so that shes planning more.

We just applied for another round of funding through the Tohono Oodham Nation, and hopefully we will be successful, she says.

If that happens, we hope to do another eight to 10 murals, and well expand it a little bit. Areas along North Stone Avenue and North Oracle Roads are likely the next sites, she says.

That is exciting to Schwartz, who is passionate about the role art plays in the community, and the ripple effect it has on economic development.

The murals are creating an ambiance downtown thats a reflection of the Tucson that we all love, he says.

Theres a feeling here that this is a special place, an old community with a lot of creative ideas and energy. To see that animated creates possibilities.  Downtown is now poised to be a place of inspiration for all of us, and to draw in a lot of new businesses who see the murals and see a community that supports the arts.

The Murals

Swipe to view.

Close 1 of 8 Luis Mena Luis Menas mural covers the front, the doorway, curves around to the side, and overflows onto the overhang of the building at 142 E. Pennington St. Just 7-feet high but an impressive 83-feet long, it includes blossoms, birds, a mariachi and a deep blue background that pulls you in and cools you off. Its a colorful celebration of the Latino culture in Tucson, and practically shimmers with energy thanks to the glitter the artist added in strategic spots. Look up to the overhang to catch his celestial and ghostly drawings. Rock Martinez Rock Martinez took about a month to create the Agave Lady, which covers Benjamin Supply's 65-feet long and 55-feet high wall at 440 N. Seventh Ave. The piece is one of his Cactus People series. Martinez, who is out of the country and wasnt available for comment, used the grid laid out by the walls bricks as his guide, says Cristina Perez, who assisted him. He would finish one grid, climb off the scaffolding, cross the street to check the work, then climb back on and continue. Getting the proportions right was the biggest challenge, says Perez. Martinezs website: yfiart.com. He is also on Facebook. Rachel Slick, Tim Schirack and Alexandra Gjurasic The winged heart on the side of Cafe 54, 54 E. Pennington St., was done by a team of artists: Rachel Slick, Tim Schirack and Alexandra Gjurasic. The wall is 18-feet high and 50-feet long, but it felt longer than that, says Gjurasic with a laugh. The biggest challenge was the texture of the wall on the building. It has a thick adobe texture and it chewed through brushes and it ate paint, she said. More of the artists works at: rachelslicksculpture.homestead.com, alexandraGjurasic.com and timothyschirack.homestead.com Isaac Caruso Isaac Carusos mural is on a 50- by 50-feet wall at 9 N. Scott Ave. Bright oranges float in front of a striking blue background, bringing a touch of coolness to the hot city. A quail pops up between the fruit. I wanted to do something that represents Tucson and I automatically thought of quail and orange trees, says Caruso. He lives in Phoenix, and took a week off his art director job to stay in Tucson and bang out the mural. And this is how dedicated he is: He spent one night high in the air on the lift so he could work as late as possible, and get as much sleep as possible. It was elevated about 20 feet and I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, he says. He wasnt worried about falling. Paint cans were my borders, he explains. More of his art: isaacncaruso.com. Jessica Gonzales Jessica Gonzales mural on the west wall of Wig-O-Rama, 98 E. Congress St., is 27- feet tall and 32-feet wide. The festive piece has faces peering out toward the center of Downtown and is festooned with iconic Tucson images, from monsoon clouds to a lasso. She projected her image onto the wall as her guide, though she incorporated the grid system, as well. I felt it was important to honor the Downtown community, says Gonzales about her design. I live here, I work here, I went to Tucson High School. Its about the connectedness of creative locals and the support system we have. You can see more of her work on her Facebook page. To-Ree-Nee Wolf Keiser To-Ree-Nee Wolf Keiser got a late start on her 12-feet-high and 40-feet-long mural at the old Scrappys, 213 E. Broadway. Shes battling oppressive heat but shell be done by June 20, she says. Her inspiration is The creation story, chaos theory and quantum memory, says Wolf. Incorporating bright colors  which are her signature  and images of rainbows and a butterfly will be key. Her biggest challenge? The heat, she says quickly. To avoid it, she has to get up early to start work on the mural. That presents another challenge: Im a night owl, she says. If I see dawn, its because Im going to bed, not rising. toreenee.com. Ignacio Garcia Ignacio Garcias mural on the east wall of the Rialto Theatre, 318 E. Congress St., was inspired by myths and symbols often identified with the Southwest. He submitted his proposal in February, so the rodeo was on his mind, and the mythical jackalope seemed to go right along with that. I wanted it to be fun and have a childish feel, he says. We all have this inner child; seeing something like this can give us a happy feeling. Originally, the rider on the jackalope had the face of a child, but the Rialtos Curtis McCrary suggested it have basketball announcer Bill Waltons face instead. The image of Walton, who Tucsonans either love or hate for his goofy personality, ups the fun of the mural, which is 45-feet long about about 70-feet high. People are going bananas and being emotional about (the murals), says Garcia. I didnt realize how much people wanted this movement; I didnt realize how much people needed this. More of Garcias work at artebyignacio.com. Niki Glen Niki Glens mural on the corner of North Fifth and East Toole avenues is a celebration of nature in our part of the country, with Monarch butterflies, hummingbirds and an abundance of color. The theme is pollinators, she says. The mural is 50-feet long and just 4-feet high. I wanted to do something that was timeless and contemporary that I thought people would enjoy looking at now and in 20 years, she says. Find more of her work on her web page, glenstudios.com. Meet the artists of Tucson's Mural Arts Program Creating one of the murals wasnt as easy as coming up with a design and slapping on paint. The surfaces needed to be power washed  the Tucson business Graffiti Protective Coatings did that job gratis  scaffolding and lifts were necessary for most jobs, as were volunteer assistants to help the artists, who were on tight deadlines. 1 of 8 Luis Mena Luis Menas mural covers the front, the doorway, curves around to the side, and overflows onto the overhang of the building at 142 E. Pennington St. Just 7-feet high but an impressive 83-feet long, it includes blossoms, birds, a mariachi and a deep blue background that pulls you in and cools you off. Its a colorful celebration of the Latino culture in Tucson, and practically shimmers with energy thanks to the glitter the artist added in strategic spots. Look up to the overhang to catch his celestial and ghostly drawings. Rock Martinez Rock Martinez took about a month to create the Agave Lady, which covers Benjamin Supply's 65-feet long and 55-feet high wall at 440 N. Seventh Ave. The piece is one of his Cactus People series. Martinez, who is out of the country and wasnt available for comment, used the grid laid out by the walls bricks as his guide, says Cristina Perez, who assisted him. He would finish one grid, climb off the scaffolding, cross the street to check the work, then climb back on and continue. Getting the proportions right was the biggest challenge, says Perez. Martinezs website: yfiart.com. He is also on Facebook. Rachel Slick, Tim Schirack and Alexandra Gjurasic The winged heart on the side of Cafe 54, 54 E. Pennington St., was done by a team of artists: Rachel Slick, Tim Schirack and Alexandra Gjurasic. The wall is 18-feet high and 50-feet long, but it felt longer than that, says Gjurasic with a laugh. The biggest challenge was the texture of the wall on the building. It has a thick adobe texture and it chewed through brushes and it ate paint, she said. More of the artists works at: rachelslicksculpture.homestead.com, alexandraGjurasic.com and timothyschirack.homestead.com Isaac Caruso Isaac Carusos mural is on a 50- by 50-feet wall at 9 N. Scott Ave. Bright oranges float in front of a striking blue background, bringing a touch of coolness to the hot city. A quail pops up between the fruit. I wanted to do something that represents Tucson and I automatically thought of quail and orange trees, says Caruso. He lives in Phoenix, and took a week off his art director job to stay in Tucson and bang out the mural. And this is how dedicated he is: He spent one night high in the air on the lift so he could work as late as possible, and get as much sleep as possible. It was elevated about 20 feet and I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, he says. He wasnt worried about falling. Paint cans were my borders, he explains. More of his art: isaacncaruso.com. Jessica Gonzales Jessica Gonzales mural on the west wall of Wig-O-Rama, 98 E. Congress St., is 27- feet tall and 32-feet wide. The festive piece has faces peering out toward the center of Downtown and is festooned with iconic Tucson images, from monsoon clouds to a lasso. She projected her image onto the wall as her guide, though she incorporated the grid system, as well. I felt it was important to honor the Downtown community, says Gonzales about her design. I live here, I work here, I went to Tucson High School. Its about the connectedness of creative locals and the support system we have. You can see more of her work on her Facebook page. To-Ree-Nee Wolf Keiser To-Ree-Nee Wolf Keiser got a late start on her 12-feet-high and 40-feet-long mural at the old Scrappys, 213 E. Broadway. Shes battling oppressive heat but shell be done by June 20, she says. Her inspiration is The creation story, chaos theory and quantum memory, says Wolf. Incorporating bright colors  which are her signature  and images of rainbows and a butterfly will be key. Her biggest challenge? The heat, she says quickly. To avoid it, she has to get up early to start work on the mural. That presents another challenge: Im a night owl, she says. If I see dawn, its because Im going to bed, not rising. toreenee.com. Ignacio Garcia Ignacio Garcias mural on the east wall of the Rialto Theatre, 318 E. Congress St., was inspired by myths and symbols often identified with the Southwest. He submitted his proposal in February, so the rodeo was on his mind, and the mythical jackalope seemed to go right along with that. I wanted it to be fun and have a childish feel, he says. We all have this inner child; seeing something like this can give us a happy feeling. Originally, the rider on the jackalope had the face of a child, but the Rialtos Curtis McCrary suggested it have basketball announcer Bill Waltons face instead. The image of Walton, who Tucsonans either love or hate for his goofy personality, ups the fun of the mural, which is 45-feet long about about 70-feet high. People are going bananas and being emotional about (the murals), says Garcia. I didnt realize how much people wanted this movement; I didnt realize how much people needed this. More of Garcias work at artebyignacio.com. Niki Glen Niki Glens mural on the corner of North Fifth and East Toole avenues is a celebration of nature in our part of the country, with Monarch butterflies, hummingbirds and an abundance of color. The theme is pollinators, she says. The mural is 50-feet long and just 4-feet high. I wanted to do something that was timeless and contemporary that I thought people would enjoy looking at now and in 20 years, she says. Find more of her work on her web page, glenstudios.com.

Mapping it out: Visit the new murals
In 1989, my mother packed up my sister, myself, and the cat and left the greenery of Massachusetts for Tucson. I turned 6 in the car on the way.

We lived in midtown until I graduated from Tucson High in 2001 and moved away for college. After 10 years, I came home to be near family and try grad school at the University of Arizona.

Though Ive traveled my whole life, Tucson is and will always be my hometown. In May, I finished degrees in journalism, Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Judaic Studies at the UA, and am now finishing nearly three years with the Arizona Daily Star.

This week, I leave Tucson again and this time, theres no apparent return date.

My time here has formed me and informed me. Looking back, Im filled with fond memories, while looking forward makes me sweetly regretful of the many things I never quite had time to do. Some are strange, some familiar, but all of them, in my opinion, are totally Tucson. Here a few of my favorite things:

Black Cherry Burlesque at the Surly Wench Pub: Founded in 2006, Black Cherry is Tucsons first burlesque troupe. Ive known founder Kate Johnston since we were 6, and recall conversations while living in Georgia when she had just begun to say So, I have this crazy idea ... She hit the stage as Inga Kaboom, and since then, the group has spawned acts and performers, expanded and contracted and been reincarnated many times over. Its offshoots include the body-positive Burlesque for the Soul mentorship program, and the Manly Manlesque show, an all-male parade of body hair, comedy and kitsch that is so charming and funny, it cant help but be sexy. Find performance schedules and links to tickets at facebook.com/tucsonburlesque and facebook.com/manlesque

Catalina State Park Run: When I first returned to Tucson in 2011, it was hard to find my footing, despite growing up here. As Ive gotten older, Ive learned that in times of uncertainty there is always comfort to be found outdoors. Tucsons affinity for outdoor events, and especially running, seemed to have grown alongside my own while I was gone. Everyone Runs organizes the Catalina State Park 5.2- and 10.35-mile races. Running in a beautiful place, with people who appreciate the smells of creosote and wildflowers, and the tracks of desert animals in their path as much as I do, gave me something to look forward to and helped me find my way home. This fall, the run includes a 5K road run/walk as well as the trail runs. It takes place Sept. 25; register at everyoneruns.net

Tucson Meet Yourself: It seems obvious, but what event could be more Tucson? I remember eating chicken skewers in the courtyard of the historic Pima County Courthouse at Tucson Eat Yourself when we were both much smaller. Its come a long way since then, having served more than 120,000 people and hosted more than 550 artists, musicians, dancers and tradition bearers since its 1974 inception. Organized by the UA-affiliated Southwest Folklife Alliance, this years event is Oct. 7-9. Information for guests and vendors is at tucsonmeetyourself.org

While at the Star, Ive gotten to try a lot of things, including being dropped off a 17-story building, learning about historic district building codes and more about beer than I ever thought was possible. I also discovered about a million more things there never seemed to be enough time to try. Here are just a few of the things I wish I hadnt missed:

Brew at the Zoo: I just cant understand how this event managed to pass me by year after year. Oh wait, yes I can: grad school. Anyway, few things have ever sounded like as much fun, or seemed as badly needed in one of our stifling summers as cold beer and a (relatively) cool night of grownup time at the zoo. If you havent committed to this event yet, theres still time. It happens Saturday, June 18, and tickets are available online at reidparkzoo.org/event/brew-zoo

Music Under the Stars/Music in the Park: The best things in life are free, and this is not lost on Foothills Phil, Tucson Pops and Arizona Symphonic Winds director and UA alum Laszlo Veres. The Tucson Pops just ended its 62nd annual Music Under the Stars free concert series at the DeMeester Outdoor Performance Center in Reid Park, and Music in the Park just closed out its 30th season of free concerts at Udall Parks Laszlo Veres Amphitheater. Somehow, I never made it to either venue to spread out a blanket in the spring air and bask in the community concert appreciation. Dont make the same mistake I did. Get information on concert dates from tucsonpops.org and Facebook.com/ArizonaSymphonicWinds
A sign at an unsupervised shooting site near the Catalina Highway northeast of Tucson urges shooters to put an end to trigger trash  but not all shooters heed the message.

The site, on national forest land fewer than 200 yards from the highway, is less littered than it was two years ago, but shot-up targets, shell casings and discarded drink bottles still make this a far-from-pristine parcel of public land.

Recreational shooting is an acceptable use of national forest land when done safely and responsibly, said Heidi Schewel, spokeswoman for the Coronado National Forest. Shooters and other forest visitors who leave trash and debris behind are not acting responsibly and detract from the enjoyment of the forest by others.

Environmental group leaders and activists say the site near the 4.4-mile point on the Catalina Highway is one of many areas on public lands where irresponsible shooters have had a negative impact on the landscape.

Irresponsible shooting activities have increased on public lands, said Sandy Bahr, director of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club. Shooting of saguaros and other vegetation is a real problem in some areas, plus people haul all kinds of stuff out to the public lands, shoot it to pieces, and then leave behind the trash as well as shell casings.

If they are shooting (at) electronics, there are heavy metals that can contaminate the soil and, of course, there is also the lead from the ammunition, Bahr said. Contamination of the soils is definitely a concern.

Cyndi Tuell, an attorney and environmental activist, said she is dismayed by the actions of many shooters.

Im beginning to question whether there is any such thing as responsible target shooting on public lands, said Tuell, who is a Green Party candidate for Pima County Attorney. Every single place target shooting takes place, we see trash, bullets, destroyed vegetation and contamination.

People who shoot on our public lands are making it clear they cannot follow the rules, and they should be prohibited from destroying our lands, Tuell said.

They are poisoning our lands with lead and other toxic chemicals, and we cannot tolerate this any longer.

Bahr called for stepped-up enforcement.

Overall, people need to understand that if they abuse the lands, there are consequences, she said.
Eastside Covenant Church and the Islamic Center of Tucson will stand together Thursday night to pray for the victims of the Orlando mass shooting.

The interfaith vigil at De Anza Park, 1000 N. Stone Ave., is the first partnership between the two religious organizations, whose leaders connected last fall.

"I would just say from our Christian perspective, we just think it's really important in the midst of this to show intentionally that we love our Muslim neighbors and we mourn with the gay community, because both are feeling isolated and afraid right now," said Taylor Burgoyne, the pastor at Eastside Covenant Church. "We want to condemn those who would do either community wrong."

Other religious groups have been invited, said Ahmed Meiloud, a board member at the Islamic Center.

On Sunday, the mosque posted a condemnation of the Orlando shooting on its Facebook page.

"I think the main goal here is to show that we have little tolerance for violence against people, regardless of their orientation or religious background or personal," Meiloud said Wednesday.

The Facebook page for the vigil encourages people to pray for the victims of the shooting, even if they cannot attend the event from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Thursday, June 16.
A reconnaissance flight near Arizona City led to the discovery and raid of a suspected drug cartel scout campsite, one of two such busts in the past few weeks.

Agents with the Border Patrols tactical unit then fast-roped from a Black Hawk helicopter onto a mountaintop in the Silver Bell mountain range northwest of Tucson, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Wednesday.

After a foot chase that ended about 30 feet from a cliff with a dangerous and potentially fatal drop to jagged rocks below, agents arrested the two suspected scouts who were working out of a mountainside cave on May 20. Cartel scouts are tasked with guiding drug and human smugglers from the border to their next destination. In many cases, they spend weeks at observation posts on hilltops or mountainsides.

The raid resulted in one suspect facing federal criminal charges and the seizure of a large cache of counter-surveillance equipment, CBP said in Wednesdays news release.

On May 29, Border Patrol agents arrested two suspected scouts in the Sawtooth Mountain Range near Casa Grande at an observation post. Agents seized four solar panels, two pairs of binoculars, eight cell phones, two radios, and two radio chargers, CBP said earlier.Both of the suspects are Mexican nationals and were charged with conspiracy to smuggle contraband. One also was charged with assault on a federal officer after struggling with an agent. The suspect was subdued with pepper spray, CBP said. The incident was the third assault on an agent by a suspected scout since April 1.

Instead of being charged with drug smuggling, scouts are often charged with conspiracy because they do not possess drugs when they are arrested.

Until a March 2015 federal court case in Arizona opened the door to prosecuting scouts despite them not having drugs at the time of arrest, the Border Patrol had never seen a scout case successfully prosecuted, the agency said.

Since then, Tucson Sector agents have arrested 61 scouts from mountaintops, including 54 who were convicted on federal conspiracy charges, the agency said. The other seven are either pending criminal charges or were deported.
A county commission asked to look into voter confusion after the March 22 presidential preference election reported on June 10 that it does not believe there were intentional or inadvertent modification of any voter registration databases.

However, the Election Integrity Commission also found that there definitely were cases where voters were surprised to find they had to vote provisionally.

A recorders office official who reviewed affiliation change cases told the commission that they stemmed from human error either by the voter or by the (Motor Vehicle Department), according to the report.

It was very clear to us that the MVD form was confusing, the report reads, referring to paperwork that requests customers party affiliation.

Some of those who found out they were ineligible to vote in the preference election, in which only registered members are able to vote in their partys election, said the change came after visits to the MVD for new licenses and other matters, not to change party affiliation.

A secretary of state spokesman previously told the Star that if someone doesnt select a party preference in MVD forms, they are assumed as a PND, or party not designated, meaning they could not vote in a presidential preference election.

A spokesman with the Arizona Department of Transportation, which oversees MVD offices, later told the Star that his agency does not designate customers as PND  unless that is what the customer inputs. ADOT does not register voters or change party preference  ADOT only conveys customer information, at their request, to the secretary of state.

EIC Chairman Tom Ryan said it was his understanding that the MVD was modifying its forms in response to complaints, adding that he had recently gone to the MVD and found himself a little confused.

You go through the form, and if youre already registered to vote and you want to leave it just the way it is, it doesnt really give you an option for that, he said.

After reaching out to both the county Republican and Democratic parties, the commission was told that the problem with voters having their affiliations inadvertently changed was not extensive.

In the short report, the EIC states that it was unable to do extensive research on the topic. Ryan said this is because the commission is an all-volunteer organization with no resources.

The secretary of states office was also looking into the party affiliation issue after the March 22 vote, but a spokesman did not immediately return a question for comment on where that investigation stood.
Even though special master Ken Feinberg, who was in charge of the first federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, distributed $6 billion to the estates of those killed on 9/11  an average of more than $2 million to the nearly 3,000 victims  the House of Representatives passed its new Fairness for 9/11 Families Act to allow additional claims for the deaths inflicted by the terrorists and set aside $2.7 billion for them.
PHOENIX  A federal appeals court rejected the idea that Native Americans may be more inclined to confess to crimes they did not commit based on historical trauma and cultural differences.

The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling of an Arizona judge who said prosecutors could not use incriminating statements made by Calvert L. Woody, a Navajo Indian. The ruling, unless overturned, paves the way for Woodys statements to the FBI to be used in court, where he faces charges of sexual conduct with a minor.

The appellate judges, in the unsigned opinion, said David McIntyre, the licensed psychologist who testified in Wakes court, admitted that he was making very broad generalizations about Native Americans. The judges said McIntyre, who at the time was regional chief of the behavioral health branch for the Indian Health Service in Phoenix, said Woody had not been diagnosed with historical trauma because there is no such diagnosis.

And the appellate judges said it was wrong for U.S. District Judge Neil Wake to throw out Woodys statements even if McIntyre had specifically said Woodys confession was based on cultural differences and historical trauma. The impact such attributes had on the voluntariness of Woodys statements remained only speculative.

The appellate judges, however, did not address Wakes very pointed criticism of the FBI that deliberately did not tape the polygraph exam administered to Woody or the pre- and post-test interviews at which he made the incriminating statements. That is based on FBI policy, which precluded such taping.

And Wake was clearly displeased he did not have such evidence to weigh how voluntary Woodys statements were.

It is a secret why the government purposely hamstrings courts in this way when recording equipment is available and only needs to be turned on, the judge wrote.

The FBI policy not to preserve this crucial evidence has no stated justification, Wake continued. It is a policy without purpose  or none that is admitted.

The appellate judges instead focused only on McIntyres testimony and what Wake decided.

During a hearing, McIntyre said one factor that may have affected the voluntariness of anything Woody said was his heritage.

McIntyre discussed the traumatic effects of certain events in Native American history which he said is internalized and passed on to later generations. That, the psychologist said, means some Native Americans experience depression, substance dependence and other issues as a result of unresolved trauma from historical losses (loss of people, land, and culture) that occurred to their forefathers ... and transmitted to the younger generation.

McIntyre said historical trauma does not affect all Native Americans.

Nevertheless, historical trauma often induces a feeling of powerlessness that could render a Native American willing to provide desired information simply in order to terminate an uncomfortable interrogation, Wake wrote in explaining McIntyres testimony. He said the psychologist testified that many Native Americans avoid conflict at all costs, and when conflict becomes too great, they may submit or walk away rather than push back.

All that, the judge said, may make Native Americans more susceptible to interrogation pressures, though Wake said McIntyre could cite no published research to support this conclusion.

And Wake said that, combined with Woodys low IQ, made it difficult for him to resist the kinds of stresses and pressures of a police interrogation.

The appellate judges, however, said Wakes decision to suppress Woodys statements could not be justified in the totality of the circumstances.

They said Woody agreed to be interviewed and arrived at the FBI office voluntarily. They also said Woody acknowledged and waived his rights before questioning. And they noted that Woody was not under arrest at the time.
Help India!

By Shafeeq Hudawi

As children, we often do a number of things to fit in with our friends. For Congress leader and former MLA TN Prathapan, one such habit from his childhood days has continued throughout his adult life. Prathapan, a Hindu from Kerala, has been fasting every year during the month of Ramadan for the past 20 years.

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The young Congress leader, who has twice represented Nattika in the state assembly, says the habit of fasting dates back to the 1980s when he was a school boy.

His Muslim friendsAshraf Maliyekkal, Gafoor Thalikkulam and Babu Saleemshowed him ways of fasting. My friends would not eat food or consume water during the days and I tried the same too, he reminisces.



TN Prathapan attending the Iftar meet at Palayam Juma Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram

The story of this friendship has since then become a familiar story of Hindu-Muslim harmony in Nattika. Prathapan has got accolades from the cultural and social leaders of Kerala by organising the annual social congregation at his constituency named Mythri, which literally means unity.

Prathapans fasting is all about attaining spiritual and physical purification rather than earning a good name of being an advocate of communal harmony. Fasting lends me the joy and spiritual elevation, which words clearly fail to explain. Its all about keeping my body and mind purified, he says.

Prathapan suggests fasting as an ideal way to purification. Fasting shouldnt be conceived as a ritual of Muslims. Non-Muslims should try it. It makes man ready to overcome crisis, he adds.

Asked about what is his Niyyah (intention of behind fasting) before having Sehri (predawn food) Prathapan says that his intention is the well being of the society.

My fasting is a prayer for the well being of mine and the whole society, he says.

An advocate of fasting in his speeches during Iftar parties, Prathapan has now turned into a columnist who describes Ramadan through newspapers and visual media. His works speak volumes about the spiritual virtues of fasting rather than turning Iftar into big social parties that have now become the norm. Iftar parties have become venues of amorality and extravaganza. They should be exclusive for the persons those who are on fast and their sanctity should be respected as we do towards fasting, he says.


Australia says to benefit from China's economic development Updated: 2016-06-16 16:19 (Xinhua)

SYDNEY - China's economic development will provide Australia with numerous economic opportunities, an official of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said Thursday.

Christopher Kent, RBA assistant governor, made the remarks at an Economic Society of Australia lunch.

He said that although the Chinese economy would experience a gradual moderation in growth over the next few years, "The Chinese authorities have an expansive agenda of reforms necessary for this transition and progress has been made on a number of fronts."

"There have been many positive signals from the leadership (in China) about improving the sustainability of growth, including recent calls to implement so-called 'supply-side' reforms, with a view to facilitating deleveraging in the corporate sector and reducing excess capacity in key industries," he said.
Spokesman denies anti-Taiwan sentiment among mainlanders Updated: 2016-06-15 17:44 (Xinhua)

BEIJING -- A Chinese mainland spokesman on Wednesday said that what some have taken to be an "anti-Taiwan sentiment" among people on the mainland, was actually about rejecting "Taiwan independence."

An Fengshan, spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office who was speaking at a press conference, warned that "Taiwan independence" in any form was a flagrant provocation and would sabotage cross-Strait peace and stability.

Responding to a question about a recent proposal by some Taiwanese political parties to challenge the one-China provisions with "constitutional amendments," An said, "Any attempt to seek secession will be unsuccessful."

He also rejected a statement by Taiwan's cross-Strait affairs authority to term the cross-Strait relationship as one among "neighbors."

"The mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, and compatriots on both sides are a family, not 'neighbors.'"

Moreover, in response to a question about a plunge in the number of mainland tourists to Taiwan, An said the mainland authority had never set a quota on the number of tourists to Taiwan.

"Changes in the island's tourism are mainly due to changes on the island this year. The impact certain events have had on cross-Strait ties has been felt by the market," he said.

He said the mainland will continue to enhance cross-Strait exchanges and cooperation for the interests and welfare of the compatriots on both sides.

According to An, a Kuomintang Party youth-wing delegation will visit the mainland next week to discuss cross-Strait exchanges.

During the tour, the delegation is expected to meet with Zhang Zhijun, head of the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

Mainland authorities have also decided to add six mainland bases for cultural exchanges with visitors from Taiwan, bringing the total bases on the mainland to 49.

However, the spokesman stressed, cross-Strait communication, dialogue, and exchanges must be based on the recognition of the 1992 Consensus and the one-China principle.

"So far, the island's new leader has adopted an ambiguous attitude toward the nature of relations between the mainland and Taiwan. To ensure the peaceful development of cross-Strait ties, the confirmation of the one-China principle is a must," he said.

He reiterated this principle when answering questions about an upcoming visit by Taiwan's new leader Tsai Ing-wen to Panama and about a recent report that Chen Chu, mayor of Taiwan's city of Kaohsiung, has expressed willingness to visit the mainland.
PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Reel World Guerilla tactics Grammy nominated musician and punk rock filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (Terminal USA, Mod Fuck Explosion, Fame Whore) is offering a two-day crash course in Guerilla Film Production and Distribution. The 12-hour intensive filmmaking seminar promises to unleash your inner creative id. It will take place Saturday, June 18, and Saturday, June 25, from 9am to 3pm. Cost is $125, and all students will receive a 30-page filmmakers workbook filled with sample forms, contracts, articles and crucial contact info. Class will consist of lectures, film clips, discussions and exercises. It all goes down at the Santa Fe Community College, room 605 (6401 Richards) You can register by calling (505) 428-1676 or by going to sfcc. edu/ continuing_education/ schedule/ media. For more info on Mr. Moritsugu, check out jonmoritsugu.com.

Park it Bernalillo Countys popular Movies in the Park series continues this Friday and Saturday, June 17 and 18. On Friday its the diminutive Marvel superhero movie Ant-Man at Valle del Bosque Park (480 Sunset SW). On Saturday, its the Adam Sandler sci-fi movie Pixels. In that one Sandler and his former video game nerd pals defend Earth from an invasion of familar computerized characters (including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Tetris). Pixels screens at Vista Grande Community Center (15 La Madera in Sandia Park). Bring your lawn chairs and blankets and enjoy some free outdoor movies with the family. Both shows begins at dusk (around 8pm). View in Alibi calendar

Bueller? Bueller? Oh, yeah! This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the 80s comedy classic Ferris Buellers Day Off. KiMo Theater (423 Central NW) is celebrating with special screenings of the 1986 film starring Matthew Broderick as a high school-skipping legend. The film will screen at 2 and 6pm on Saturday, June 18. Admission is $8 adults and $6 students/seniors. The first 30 people through the door at each screening will recieve a free pair of Ferris Bueller shades. (He wears Ray-Ban Clubmasters in the film. Im assuming youre not getting thosethey cost $120.) For more info go to kimotickets.com.

Q factor Indie Q, the Albuquerque Film Offices quarterly meet-up of local film talent, hits KiMo Theatre (423 Central NW) this Wednesday, June 22, starting at 7pm. As always, the lineup will include a fresh selection of New Mexico-made shorts, trailers, music videos and works in progress. Filmmakers will be in attendence. Admission is free. View in Alibi calendar
Xi's visit to boost partnership projects Updated: 2016-06-16 07:49 By An Baijie(China Daily)

Collaboration on production capacity will enhance work along Belt and Road route

President Xi Jinping's visit to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan will lead to more projects involving production capacity cooperation, Foreign Ministry officials said on Wednesday.

During the eight-day trip that will begin on Friday, Xi will attend signing ceremonies for cooperation documents in the three countries, all of which are along the route of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said Liu Haixing and Li Huilai, both assistant foreign ministers.

Liu told a news briefing that Xi will visit Serbia's Smederevo steel mill, which was founded in 1913 and acquired in April by Hesteel Group, China's largest iron and steel business group in terms of production capacity.

The deal is worth 46 million euros ($51.7 million).

Construction of Serbian power stations and highways in projects involving contracts with Chinese companies is going smoothly, he said.

In Serbia, the Zemun-Borca Bridge, newly renamed Pupin Bridge, was opened in 2014. The bridge over the Danube River is the first built in Europe by a Chinese company.

"The bridge is fondly known by the local people as the Chinese Bridge," Liu said.

The Chinese government is encouraging domestic companies to invest in Poland's nuclear power industry, Liu said.

Poland has been China's largest trade partner in Central and Eastern Europe for 11 consecutive years. It is also the only CEE country that has joined the China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Liu said.

Liu Zuokui, an expert at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that promoting bilateral cooperation with Serbia and Poland will play a positive role in propelling China-CEE relations.

To show support toward China-Uzbekistan cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi will attend a ceremony for the completion of a tunnel made by China, Li said.

While attending the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Xi will discuss with other leaders the applications by India and Pakistan to join the SCO as members, Li said.

Chen Yurong, a researcher of European and Asian studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said the SCO summit is expected to have a huge, positive influence on the growth of the organization, which marks its 15th anniversary this year.

anbaijie@chinadaily.com.cn
Planned Obama, Dalai Lama meeting protested Updated: 2016-06-16 07:49 By Li Xiaokun(China Daily)

The planned meeting between US President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama sends the "wrong signal" to Tibetan separatists and will hamper Washington's relations with Beijing, the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

China has lodged a diplomatic protest with the United States, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said.

Obama and the Dalai Lama were scheduled to meet privately at the White House on Wednesday morning. At press time, there was no confirmation of whether the meeting had been held.

The Dalai Lama is "not only a religious figure, but a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion," Lu told a regular news briefing.

"Any attempt to take advantage of Tibet issues and undermine stability in China will not succeed," he added.

Obama had been scheduled to travel to Wisconsin to appear at a campaign event with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. But the event was postponed after Sunday's shooting at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub that left 50 people dead.

That created an opening in Obama's schedule that the White House filled with the meeting with the Dalai Lama, AP said.

Obama made a high-profile public appearance with the Dalai Lama last year at a prayer breakfast in Washington, calling him "a powerful example of what it means to practice compassion." Three previous meetings were held privately.

The White House barred the media from the meeting and arranged for it to be held in the Map Room instead of the Oval Office, which is reserved for visiting heads of state, AP said.

Niu Jun, a professor of international relations at Peking University, noted that the meeting was arranged on the heels of the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which ended last week in Beijing and had positive effects on the two countries' relations.

"But the meeting will definitely hamper Beijing's ties with Washington, as it is an issue about sovereignty and separation," he said.

lixiaokun@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/16/2016 page3)
Taiwan travel drop natural; there's no quota, official says Updated: 2016-06-16 07:50 By Luo Wangshu(China Daily)

Changing political climate 'triggering concerns' from tour operators, others

The government has never set quotas for mainland tourists traveling across the Taiwan Straits, the spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday about a recent decline in mainland tourists to the island.

"The change in tourist numbers is mainly driven by the market and based on the willingness of tourism operators and tourists. The government has never set any quota to limit the number of tourists traveling to Taiwan," spokesman An Fengshan said at a news conference on Wednesday. An is also the deputy director of the office's media affairs section.

"This year, the political situation in Taiwan and cross-Straits relations have changed, triggering concerns from tourism operators and tourists on the mainland. Thus, their willingness to travel to Taiwan has declined," he said.

The Taiwan tourism sector - the first to face an immediate hit if cross-Straits relations turn south - has seen a downturn in the number of mainland Chinese tourists, with tour bus companies, hotels, restaurants and travel agencies complaining about it.

Recent statistics released by the island's tourism bureau show that since the beginning of May the daily average of mainland Chinese tourists traveling in groups dropped by about 33 percent - or 1,650 people - from the 5,000 recorded over the same period last year.

Fu Kun-chi, head of Hualien county in Taiwan, has noticed the trend.

"The decline has affected cross-Straits relations and many other fields in Taiwan, including agriculture, tourism, family hotel businesses and restaurants," Fu told China Daily at the Straits Forum in Xiamen on Sunday.

Fu hopes that continuous communication across the Straits will attract a stable number of tourists from the mainland.

Tsai Ing-wen, the newly elected leader in Taiwan who took office on May 20, has not yet explicitly endorsed the 1992 Consensus, which states that the mainland and Taiwan are parts of one China.

"The political situation affects tourism the most, but it may also affect the macro economy," said Huang Hai-lung, president of the Overseas Chinese Association, based in Taipei.

"It requires wisdom to balance it," he said.

Statistics from the China National Tourism Administration show that 4.1 million people from the Chinese mainland traveled to Taiwan last year, accounting for about 40 percent of the island's tourists.

On average, each mainland tourist spent NT$7,770 ($240) in Taiwan each day.

An Baijie contributed to this story.

luowangshu@chinadaily.com.cn
Switzerland to open 9 new visa centers in China Updated: 2016-06-16 10:44 By ZHANG YUNBI(chinadaily.com.cn)

The Embassy of Switzerland in China is expanding its visa services to more Chinese cities and it will open nine new Visa Acceptance Centers in nine cities from June to July.

Chinese visitors to Switzerland and the Schengen region, of which Switzerland is a member country, can hand in applications at more convenient locations and enjoy faster services.

This is expected to ease holiday preparations for Chinese tourists traveling to Switzerland this coming summer.

The nine cities, in order of opening, are Xi'an, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Kunming, Changsha, Fuzhou, Jinan and Chongqing.

The new centers are scheduled to be inaugurated between June 15 and July 15 and will be operated by the embassy's commercial partner TLScontact.

The centers are authorized by the embassy in China to accept applications for short stay individual visas and provide administrative support services and biometric data implementation.

The expansion of the visa services is another initiative of the embassy to meet the increasing number of Chinese tourists to Switzerland following the opening of three centers in Chengdu, Wuhan and Shenyang in January.

In 2015, Switzerland issued 81,000 visas to Chinese applicants. The overnight stays from Chinese tourists in Switzerland reached a record number of more than 1.6 million, up more than 33 percent of the previous year. China now is the fourth source of tourists to Switzerland and the first from Asia.

According to the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, 45 percent of the visas issued to Chinese applicants are multi-entry or long-term visas. Short stay individual visa applications are being processed within 48 hours and at VACs, it should take no longer than five days for applicants to receive their visas.

The Swiss embassy and the centers are also working together to provide mobile biometry in the future to smooth the visa application process.
Kidnapper of HK textile heiress jailed for 12 years Updated: 2016-06-16 13:47 (Xinhua)

HONG KONG - A man from the Chinese mainland has been jailed for 12 years by the High Court of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for conspiring to kidnap the heiress of a Hong Kong clothing empire last year in order to procure a ransom, local media reported on Thursday.

Zheng Xingwang, 30, pleaded guilty to the charge on Tuesday, with Justice Kevin Zervos describing the crime as "shocking" and "deserving of a severe punishment," according to the RTHK.

The court heard that six men, wearing masks and gloves, broke into Queenie Law's family home in Sai Kung in the early hours of April 25 last year and tied her and her boyfriend up. They then forced Law to give them the combination numbers of the safes, from which they took jewellery.

She was then blindfolded and taken away, and her boyfriend was told to relay what had happened to her parents.

Law was taken to an isolated cave, where she was asked about her father's background and told to jot down his phone number. They then called him, demanding 58 million HK dollars as ransom and warned that Law would be killed if they were not paid.

The ransom was later lowered to 28 million HK dollars and was delivered in brown envelopes to a public toilet in Fei Ngo Shan on April 28. Law was then released.
Emperors' human side revealed Updated: 2016-06-16 10:36 By Lia Zhu In San Francisco(China Daily USA)

Visitors examine the craftsmanship of Emperor Qianlong's treasure box, within which are three smaller boxes, containing 44 objects made of porcelain, bronze, agate, ivory and fruit seeds, dating from the ancient times to the 18th century. Lia Zhu / China Daily

The legendary emperors of China had a human side too.

Museum goers in San Francisco will get an intimate glimpse into the artistic and personal lives of Chinese emperors from the 12th to 20th century through a collection of their most cherished belongings.

An exhibition titled Emperors' Treasures, on display from June 17 through Sept 18 at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, will showcase nearly 150 pieces of imperial artwork, including exquisite paintings, ceramics and jades.

The exhibition explores the identities of nine key rulers - eight emperors and one empress - and how their tastes shaped not only the imperial court, but Chinese aesthetics as well.

On loan from the Taipei Palace Museum, the show has traveled to the US before, in the 1960s and again in 1995, but many of the items in this exhibition are coming to the US for the first time.

The stories behind the objects were never told from an angle that aims at making the emperors human and offers intimate moments with the audience, said Jay Xu, curator of the exhibition and director of the Asian Art Museum.

"We don't want those emperors to assume remote, abstract and intimidating postures," he said. "This exhibition is designed to enable our audience to have a very intimate encounter with past emperors, to humanize them through the works of art that they created, commissioned or collected to tell a human story about who they were."

The highlights include the masterful landscape and calligraphy of Emperor Huizong, recognized for his distinctive, influential "slender-gold" script.

Xu explained that unlike in the West, Chinese emperors' portraits were only stored in ancestral temples rather than hung on the wall, so calligraphy was very important as one's personality was expressed by it.

Another rare exhibit is a blue and white Ming flat vase, depicting Western Asian entertainers, one of only two surviving in the world. It illustrates both Ming Dynasty porcelain craftsmanship and cultural exchanges between China and the outside world in the early 15th century.

The "holy grail" of Chinese porcelains - a wine cup with a cock and hen with three chicks - is not only rare but also "striking", said Xu.

"The image of the rooster, mother hen and three chicks is very warm and homely. It's a family portrait of an ordinary coop," he said. "Why on earth would an emperor want to choose this image for one of his most precious cups? I think you can relate to a yearning for family."

Among the objects brought to the US for the first time is the celebrated "meat-shaped stone," a jasper stone intricately carved to resemble a portion of braised pork belly.

"Those emperors lived in the largest palace in the world, and yet they liked to stay in a small private corner and play with the small objects as toys, as cultural nourishment.This is their human side," said Xu.

In honor of the stone's unusual appeal, more than a dozen San Francisco chefs, both up-and-coming and established, will feature versions of the mouthwatering, slow simmeredbraised pork belly in their restaurants, and the museum's caf will offer the dish to visitors throughout the exhibition's run.

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com
Tribunal proceedings on Manila's claims flawed Updated: 2016-06-16 07:55 By Chri S Whomersley(China Daily USA)

As is now well known, the Philippines has brought arbitration proceedings against China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea relating to the South China Sea, and the Tribunal has recently given its decision on whether it has jurisdiction over the claims made by the Philippines. It found that it had jurisdiction, although unconditionally only over three of the 15 submissions made by the Philippines. The Tribunal has since heard argument on the merits of the various claims, and is likely to give its ruling on them later this year. But looked at critically the decision of the Tribunal that it has jurisdiction has a number of weaknesses.

As background, UNCLOS emphasizes that the States bordering a semi-enclosed sea, like the South China Sea, should cooperate together in dealing with common issues, even when there is no agreement about the maritime boundaries between them.

In addition, UNCLOS sets out what maritime zones it is permissible for a coastal State to claim: a territorial sea of twelve nautical miles, an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles, and a continental shelf stretching at least to 200 nautical miles, but potentially extending beyond that if the geological conditions are right. These maritime zones cannot be claimed from "low-tide elevations", that is features which are underwater at high tide. All of these maritime zones can be claimed from islands, except that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own" can only generate a territorial sea. This definition of "rocks" is not easy to interpret and so far there has been little international case-law on what it might mean. However, it is critical to many of the arguments of the Philippines that they allege that a large number of the features in the South China Sea are either low-tide elevations or "rocks".

Under UNCLOS there are certain circumstances in which a State is obliged to accept that a dispute with another State can be put to arbitration, but there are a significant number of exceptions and limitations to this obligation, some of which are exercisable at the option of the State concerned. In other words, when it is said that under UNCLOS the States party have consented to arbitration, this is true only in a very qualified way: they have only consented to arbitration subject to the exceptions and limitations set out in UNCLOS. This is important because the provisions in UNCLOS on the settlement of disputes were accepted as part of a package deal at the UN Conference which adopted UNCLOS; it is obviously important to all parties to UNCLOS that the package deal is not disturbed.

When the Philippines commenced arbitration proceedings under UNCLOS, China declined to appear, arguing that the proceedings were covered by one of the exceptions in UNCLOS. Non-appearance by a State in international proceedings is actually not so unusual. Most famously, the United States declined to participate in the proceedings brought by Nicaragua in the International Court of Justice in the 1980s after the Court had held that it had jurisdiction.

So, on what basis did the Tribunal find that it had jurisdiction? The first point to note is that the Tribunal does not have jurisdiction to adjudicate upon the territorial sovereignty over the various land features in the South China Sea - even though it is common knowledge that this issue is hotly disputed, not only by China and the Philippines, but also by Viet Nam, Malaysia and Brunei. In other words, the Tribunal cannot say that a particular feature belongs to China or the Philippines. This is because the Tribunal only has jurisdiction to decide on disputes over the "interpretation or application" of UNCLOS, and UNCLOS of course is not concerned with resolving disputes over land territory. The Philippines recognized the difficulty here and expressly denied that it was seeking a decision on sovereignty over land territory.

Despite this, the Tribunal took the view that it can decide upon the status of features in the South China Sea (ie whether they are "rocks" or low-tide elevations), even though it cannot rule on which State the feature belongs to. I have described this elsewhere as putting the status cart before the sovereignty horse, and there appears to be no precedent for an international tribunal proceeding in such circumstances.

In reaching this conclusion, the Tribunal asked itself what was the "real issue" in the case brought by the Philippines, and decided that it was not about the sovereignty over the features, but about their status; thus, it said that it could rule on the latter question without touching on the former. This is despite the recent precedent of the case brought by Mauritius against the United Kingdom, in which by bringing proceedings under UNCLOS questioning the validity of the marine protected area declared around the Chagos Archipelago, Mauritius sought to dispute the sovereignty over the islands. The Tribunal in that case rightly saw through that device and declined to accept Mauritius's argument on this point. It is perhaps surprising that the Tribunal in the Philippines case did not follow this precedent.

It is also important to note that one of the exceptions in UNCLOS which China has made use of relates to maritime delimitation. Thus, there can be no compulsory recourse to arbitration in a case about maritime delimitation involving China. But actually one of the key questions in any maritime delimitation is: what is the status of the various features in the maritime area being delimited. This is because, as we have seen, low-tide elevations do not generate maritime zones at all and "rocks" only generate a territorial sea. So, deciding upon the status of maritime features is an indispensable component in effecting a maritime delimitation. In other words, delimiting a maritime boundary necessarily involves also considering the status of maritime features. There is a strong argument therefore that the Chinese exception for maritime delimitation should also have been held to cover the question of the status of the maritime features which are an indispensable part of effecting a maritime delimitation.

Furthermore, there is a well-known legal dictum that "the land dominates the sea". In other words, a State's entitlements to maritime zones depends upon the territory owned by that State. Thus, the International Court of Justice in its case-law has always decided upon disputes over land territory before proceeding to prescribe a maritime boundary. So, there are three interdependent elements: the status of features, maritime delimitation and sovereignty over land territory. But even though the Tribunal accepted that it has no jurisdiction over the latter two elements, it has decided to proceed with the case on the basis that it has jurisdiction over the first element.

One wonders whether it was right for the Tribunal to proceed in this way. The International Court of Justice has emphasized in several cases that it must protect the integrity of its judicial function. In the same way, it is legitimate to ask whether the Tribunal can be said to be acting with due judicial integrity when it seeks to exercise jurisdiction on the basis that it can rule on one element of a case, but not on two prior and indispensable elements of that case.

China has always maintained that any disputes concerning the South China Sea should be settled by negotiation between the parties, rather than through recourse to judicial procedures, and in this respect it points to the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, signed by China and ASEAN (including the Philippines) in 2002, which states this explicitly. A document like the Declaration may not be formally legally binding in itself, but to international lawyers it would normally be regarded as giving rise to what is called an estoppel. This is where State A makes a representation to State B, which State B relies upon to its detriment; in such circumstances, State A cannot go back on its representation. But in this case the Tribunal held that the Declaration did not amount to a representation by the Philippines. This is very difficult to understand: the Declaration was a jointly negotiated document, which was signed at a high level, so to say that it does not constitute a representation seems odd. But the result was that the Tribunal allowed the Philippines to resile from what had been said in the Declaration and to proceed with the arbitration. This may be an unfortunate precedent: there are many tens of thousands of similar documents negotiated between States, which may not be legally binding, but which States feel they ought to abide by; the Tribunal's decision is therefore potentially destabilizing in international relations generally.

Finally, under UNCLOS, the Tribunal is obliged to ensure that a case is "well founded" before proceeding. One of the arbitrators in the Philippines case, speaking in an earlier case, likened this to the standard "beyond reasonable doubt" applied in criminal cases in common law countries - which is of course an exacting standard. The question here is ultimately whether the Tribunal applied this high standard in deciding that it had jurisdiction to hear the Philippines' claims.

The author is former Deputy Legal Adviser of the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

(China Daily USA 06/16/2016 page12)
Wu's next role offers more sex appeal Updated: 2016-06-15 08:23 By Xu Fan(chinadaily.com.cn)

Daniel Wu. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Many fans are sighing over Daniel Wu's "ugliest" role in history in the film Warcraft, but they may find more to enjoy in his role in the upcoming sci-fi action Sky on Fire.

Wu played a green-skinned, slouch orc villain in Warcraft, which has raked in around 1 billion yuan ($152 million) after its fifth day of release.

Now, starring as a head bodyguard in the new movie, Wu returns to his familiar zone.

Set about 10 years in the future, Sky on Fire offers a storyline in which scientists successfully develop a new medicine to prolong the human life span. But the medicine is stolen and Wus character is involved into the crime.

A martial arts practitioner, Wu handled most of the action sequences without using stand-ins.

Daniel Wu (left) and Zhang Jingchu (center). [Photo provided to China Daily]

"I broke my nose the second day," he recalls in a news conference during the 2016 Shanghai International Film Festival.

However, Wu says his biggest concern was not his nose but whether he could continue working in the directorial work of Ringo Lam.

Lam has directed a small number of films, around 10, in a career spanning for more than 30 years. He is known for breathtaking action films, and Sky on Fire marks his return to directing after a seven-year break.

Most of the photography was shot in a 35-story skyscraper in Hong Kong.

In addition to Wu, the celebrity cast includes Chinese mainland actress Zhang Jingchu, Taiwan actress Amber Kuo and Taiwan actor Chang Hsiao-chuan.

The feature is set for a national release during the 2017 Spring Festival holiday.

Related:

Officials urge more cooperation in films and TV series translation
Tribunal proceedings on Manila's claims flawed Updated: 2016-06-16 08:27 By Chris Whomersley(China Daily)

An aerial photo taken on Sept 25, 2015 from a seaplane of Hainan Maritime Safety Administration shows cruise vessel Haixun 1103 heading to the Yacheng 13-1 drilling rig during a patrol in South China Sea. [Photo/Xinhua]

As is now well known, the Philippines has brought arbitration proceedings against China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea relating to the South China Sea, and the Tribunal has recently given its decision on whether it has jurisdiction over the claims made by the Philippines. It found that it had jurisdiction, although unconditionally only over three of the 15 submissions made by the Philippines. The Tribunal has since heard argument on the merits of the various claims, and is likely to give its ruling on them later this year. But looked at critically the decision of the Tribunal that it has jurisdiction has a number of weaknesses.

As background, UNCLOS emphasizes that the States bordering a semi-enclosed sea, like the South China Sea, should cooperate together in dealing with common issues, even when there is no agreement about the maritime boundaries between them.

In addition, UNCLOS sets out what maritime zones it is permissible for a coastal State to claim: a territorial sea of twelve nautical miles, an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles, and a continental shelf stretching at least to 200 nautical miles, but potentially extending beyond that if the geological conditions are right. These maritime zones cannot be claimed from "low-tide elevations", that is features which are underwater at high tide. All of these maritime zones can be claimed from islands, except that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own" can only generate a territorial sea. This definition of "rocks" is not easy to interpret and so far there has been little international case-law on what it might mean. However, it is critical to many of the arguments of the Philippines that they allege that a large number of the features in the South China Sea are either low-tide elevations or "rocks".

Under UNCLOS there are certain circumstances in which a State is obliged to accept that a dispute with another State can be put to arbitration, but there are a significant number of exceptions and limitations to this obligation, some of which are exercisable at the option of the State concerned. In other words, when it is said that under UNCLOS the States party have consented to arbitration, this is true only in a very qualified way: they have only consented to arbitration subject to the exceptions and limitations set out in UNCLOS. This is important because the provisions in UNCLOS on the settlement of disputes were accepted as part of a package deal at the UN Conference which adopted UNCLOS; it is obviously important to all parties to UNCLOS that the package deal is not disturbed.
SelectUSA summit to greet most from China Updated: 2016-06-16 10:36 By Chen Weihua In Washington(China Daily USA)

US ambassador to China will lead 150-member contingent from mainland

Chinese investors continue to show strong interest in the United States with the largest delegation to next weeks 2016 SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington.

The 150-strong group from the Chinese mainland will be led by US Ambassador to China Max Baucus. The vast majority will be attending the summit for the first time, according to Vinai Thummalapally, executive director of SelectUSA, a federal government initiative to attract foreign direct investment into the US.

In addition, there will be a 20-strong delegation from Hong Kong.

The annual summit, first launched in 2013, will be held at the Washington Hilton on June 19-21, with nearly 2,400 participants from 70 markets and the US. Thummalapally on Wednesday described this years meeting as oversubscribed.

US President Barack Obama will deliver a keynote speech on Monday, while Secretary of State John Kerry and five other cabinet secretaries will also address the gathering. Some 50 government and business leaders will speak at various sessions throughout the summit, whose theme this year is The Innovation Advantage.

Stefan Selig, under-secretary of commerce for international trade, dismissed the notion that a slowing Chinese economy is dampening the enthusiasm of Chinese investors.

We would expect to see robust and strong Chinese investment to continue despite macroeconomic trends, he said on Wednesday. He noted that the growth percentage of the Chinese economy is misleading because the economy is getting so much bigger, meaning the aggregate economic value of the growth has continued to grow.

He said that Chinese officials voiced concerns over the CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) reviews of Chinese FDI at the eighth round of China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing early this month.

Selig emphasized that the reviews focus exclusively on national security concerns and not broad economic or policy interests, noting that only a very small percentage of foreign and Chinese investments are reviewed by CFIUS.

I dont think what we are doing at CFIUS should be construed in anyway as a deterrent to foreign investment here, he said.

China also promised at the S&ED that it will soon present the US with a new negative list for a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), but many experts believe that a BIT is highly unlikely under the remaining months of the Obama administration, given that it is trying to make a last-ditch effort to press Congress to ratify the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries.

At a Tuesday meeting on Asia-Pacific economic integration at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, most people didnt believe the TPP would be ratified by the US Congress during the lame-duck session.

Selig emphasized the US was committed to a BIT with China. We are awaiting Chinas next negative list. We are hopeful that it is ambitious. And if it is ambitious, I think we actually have a pathway to making a tremendous amount of progress on that BIT in this administration, he said.

Chinese FDI in the US grew to more than $15 billion in 2015, setting a record high, according to an updated New Neighbors report released in April by the Rhodium Group and the National Committee on US-China Relations.

The number of Chinese affiliated companies in the US exceeded 1,900 by the end of 2015, extending across more than 80 percent of congressional districts, or 362 of 435. The number of Americans employed by these Chinese affiliated companies rose by 12 percent in 2015 to 90,000.

The report predicted that with more than $30 billion already in pending deals and projects, 2016 is likely to be another record year for Chinese FDI in the US.

The report cautioned that US regulators and lawmakers have a responsibility to guarantee that legitimate concerns about Chinese FDI are addressed. At the same time, they also need to ensure that political rhetoric and politicization do not needlessly impede job creation, investment inflows, particularly in an election year, the report said.

chenweihua@chinadailyusa.com
Ma's counterfeit comments don't show Alibaba efforts Updated: 2016-06-16 10:36 By Amy He In New York(China Daily USA)

Jack Ma's comment that fake products made today are "better quality and better priced" than the real goods should not be taken as a reflection of Alibaba's failure to curb counterfeits, counterfeit experts said.

The e-commerce executive chairman made his comments on Tuesday at an investor meeting in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province.

According to reports, he said the better quality of the fake goods is due to many of them being made at similar factories, sometimes with the same labor force using the same materials.

"They are exactly the same factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names," Ma said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

He also said the problem of counterfeit goods cannot be solved "100 percent, because it's the fight against human instinct", according to The New York Times. "But we can solve the problem better than any government, than any organization, than [anybody] in the world."

Ma's remarks were made in response to persistent criticism from luxury brands that the company is not doing enough to get rid of counterfeit goods on its sprawling e-commerce platform Taobao, where it is easy to find fake designer bags and jewelry.

Peter Yu, professor of law at Texas A&M University, said in an interview that counterfeits can be classified into various categories, with Ma most likely referencing "A-grade" goods that are so difficult to tell apart that they can only be verified by lab technicians or the original manufacturer.

"From the perspective of brands, when they see fake goods on Alibaba, they believe that Alibaba hasn't done enough to enforce and protect intellectual property rights, and that Alibaba should do more," said Yu.

"But the part of the story that isn't emphasized is how much money and effort those auction sites have already put in to police the networks," he said.

Yu said that fake goods are also available on eBay, Alibaba's American equivalent, but the scale of counterfeiting in China is much larger, so even with the resources that Alibaba is putting into combat the proliferation of fakes, brands might still feel the efforts are inadequate.

Alibaba had been criticized by the Chinese government for failing to curb fakes, and late last year the US government issued a stern warning to the company, saying it could be added back to the "Notorious Markets List" if it does not do a better job enforcing piracy rules.

Alibaba had been admitted as a general member of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a group that represents many luxury brands, but the category was suspended a month after it had been admitted under the new category. The organization's board of directors said the suspension was due to concerns from members of the group, which the Journal reported included Michael Kors. A representative from Michael Kors declined to comment.

At the investor meeting, Alibaba forecast that its sales through the year ending March 2017 will rise at least 48 percent, which is the company's first financial forecast since the US Securities Exchange Commission announced it was investigating the company's accounting practices.

amyhe@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 06/16/2016 page2)
Gravitational waves detected for a second time: scientists Updated: 2016-06-16 05:12 (Xinhua)

Dr. David Reitze, Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech, shows the merging of two black holes at a news conference to discuss the detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago, in Washington, DC, US on February 11, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

LOS ANGELES -- Four months after the historic first-ever detection of gravitational waves, scientists said Wednesday they have directly detected another gravitational wave washing over the Earth.

The gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime, were observed for a second time on Dec. 26, 2015, at 03:38:53 UTC, scientists said at a press conference during the American Astronomical Society conference in San Diego, California.

Scientists said that the incredibly faint ripple that eventually reached Earth was the result of the spinning dance of a binary black hole pair on the brink of merging, although this duo weighed only 8 and 14 solar masses.

Their merger produced a single, more massive spinning black hole that is 21 times the mass of the sun, and transformed an additional sun's worth of mass into gravitational energy, they said.

The scientists detected the gravitational waves using the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) interferometers, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington.

In contrast, LIGO's historic first detection on Sept. 14, 2015 resulted from a merger of two black holes 36 and 29 times the mass of the sun.
SelectUSA summit to greet largest group from China Updated: 2016-06-16 11:20 By CHEN WEIHUA in Washington(chinadaily.com.cn)

Vinai Thummalapally (left), executive director of SelectUSA and Stefan Selig, US under-secretary of commerce for international trade, talk to reporters about the 2016 SelectUSA Investment Summit in a briefing at the Washington Foreign Press Center on Wednesday. [Photo by Chen Weihua/China Daily]

Chinese investors continue to show strong interest in the United States with the largest delegation to next week's 2016 SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington.

The 150-strong group from the Chinese mainland will be led by US Ambassador to China Max Baucus. The vast majority will be attending the summit for the first time, according to Vinai Thummalapally, executive director of SelectUSA, a federal government initiative to attract foreign direct investment into the US.

In addition, there will be a 20-strong delegation from Hong Kong.

The annual summit, first launched in 2013, will be held at the Washington Hilton on June 19-21, with nearly 2,400 participants from 70 markets and the US. Thummalapally on Wednesday described this year's meeting as "oversubscribed".

US President Barack Obama will deliver a keynote speech on Monday, while Secretary of State John Kerry and five other cabinet secretaries will also address the gathering. Some 50 government and business leaders will speak at various sessions throughout the summit, whose theme this year is "The Innovation Advantage".

Stefan Selig, under-secretary of commerce for international trade, dismissed the notion that a slowing Chinese economy is dampening the enthusiasm of Chinese investors.

"We would expect to see robust and strong Chinese investment to continue despite macroeconomic trends," he said on Wednesday. He noted that the growth percentage of the Chinese economy is misleading because the economy is getting so much bigger, meaning the aggregate economic value of the growth has continued to grow.

He said that Chinese officials voiced concerns over the CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) reviews of Chinese FDI at the eighth round of China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing early this month.

Selig emphasized that the reviews focus exclusively on national security concerns and not broad economic or policy interests, noting that only a very small percentage of foreign and Chinese investments are reviewed by CFIUS.
Businesses support UN sustainability plan Updated: 2016-06-16 13:17 By HEZI JIANG in New York(chinadaily.com.cn)

Wang Shuguang, general manager of Broad USA, signs a commitment letter promising to help the United Nations achieve its "2030 Agenda", on Monday at UN headquarters in New York. [PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY]

Dozens of members of the Chinese business community have taken their corporate responsibility to the global level, committing to help the United Nations achieve its "2030 Agenda".

Last fall, more than 190 world leaders signed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which listed 17 goals ranging from ending poverty to addressing climate change.

On Monday, 32 Chinese and multinational businesses presented a commitment letter to Lenni Montiel, the assistant secretary-general for economic development.

"Business participation will be crucial" to realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), said Montiel, and praised the participating companies for their "remarkable leadership and initiative".

The submission of the letter took place as part of a symposium, co-organized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and FiSO Group and sponsored by the New Empire Real Estate Group and Lanyu Inc, at UN headquarters in New York City.

"Achieving the SDGs will require more than the commitment and energy of nations and governments," said Jing Zhao Cesarone of FiSO Group, in opening remarks at the symposium.

"The scale and ambition involved mean that businesses, organizations, communities and individuals must be mobilized to realize the SDGs," she continued.

Business representatives spoke of making sustainability as key focus in their operations, improving employee welfare and promoting partnerships for sustainability.

Contact the writer at hezijiang@chinadailyusa.com.
Houston firm joins China clean energy project Updated: 2016-06-16 13:40 By XIU SHIDUN in Houston(chinadaily.com.cn)

Front left to right: SES Vice Chairman Robert Rigdon, Deputy Governor of Hekou District Zhao Mingyin and Deputy GM of CESI Huang Jiangtao shake hands after signing the agreement in Dongying, Shandong on June 14. [Provided to China Daily]

Houston-based Synthesis Energy Systems (SES) announced on Wednesday that the company, along with state-owned China Environment State Investment Company (CESI), signed a project investment and cooperation agreement with Shandong Dongying Hekou district government. Total construction investment is estimated to be $380 million.

The project will use SES Gasification Technology's clean syngas to produce lower-cost hydrogen needed for clean fuels production by refineries at the Hekou Blue Economy Industrial Park Project in Dongying, Shandong.

The planned build-out consists of multiple projects completed in phases with an estimated preliminary total investment of approximately $85 million for the first phase. The first completed facility is expected to deliver 50,000 cubic meters of 99.99 percent pure hydrogen per hour, as well as syngas and other industrial gases, to the refineries in the park.

When fully completed, the capacity of the entire project will be a combined 300,000 m3/hr of hydrogen, syngas and other industrial gases.

According to the announcement, the projects will be funded by equity from a combination of SES, CESI and funding partners along with debt financing.

In addition, this project, and the previously announced SES-CESI Dongying pipeline hydrogen project in Lijin Binhai New District, will be used as demonstration sites for energy conservation and emission reduction through the capture and utilization of carbon dioxide.

The Hekou government will assist in coordinating with the local Shengli Oil Field for the demonstration of using the projects' carbon dioxide for oil field flooding. The project will apply for China's National Demonstration Project status.

"Dongying City is in the backyard of Shengli Oil Field and has the highest concentration of local refineries in China," said Wang Wei, CESI Chairman. "With the policies to drive the refineries away from the city and into the industrial parks, and with the requirement to improve the quality of oil products and the relaxation of rules on the rights to import and use imported crude oil, the demand from the local refineries for hydrogen will grow. Our Lijin and Hekou coal-to-hydrogen projects are extremely attractive."

"We are pleased to move forward with our second major clean energy undertaking in China together with CESI, in support of the government's environmental and economic initiatives to centralize our industry into cleaner and more efficient industrial parks," said DeLome Fair, SES president and CEO.

Fair said that the timeline established includes a target to complete the required project development steps by the end of 2016, which is necessary for the project to apply for government approvals and to complete the financing necessary to begin construction.
Jack Ma calls for digital free trade zones for small businesses Updated: 2016-06-16 20:40 By Lu Haoting in St. Petersburg and Meng Jing in Beijing(chinadaily.com.cn)

Jack Ma delivers a speech at the forum. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/China Daily]

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, proposed the establishment of digital free trade zones for small businesses in Russia and called for the country to become an e-hub connecting Asia and Europe.

"An e-hub is a digital free trade zone designed for small businesses in which services including logistics, payment, financing and inspection would be provided," Ma said.

"Trains have stations and aircraft have airports. We should build an e-road that connects every e-hubs around the world. It would be a paradise for SMEs to sell products to serve anywhere in the world," Ma said.

"Russia has very good chance to be one of the hubs," Ma said.

Jack Ma, (left), chairman of Alibaba Group, chats with Kevin Rudd, president of Asia Society Policy Institute, former prime minister of Australia, on Thursday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/China Daily]

Ma made the remarks at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that opened on Thursday and will last until Saturday. The three-day forum is an annual international conference dedicated to the most pressing economic and business issues facing Russia and the rest of the world.

Ma's proposal is part of his ambition to build a global e-commerce platform called Electronic World Trade Platform that serves the interests of SMEs which have been left out of the free trade regime of the world in the past.

"In most countries, SMEs contribute over 50 percent of the GDP and even higher percentage for employment. But SMEs face challenges such as poor access to global markets, complex regulations and certifications designed for big companies, and lack of access to financing," Ma said.

"We urge G20 countries to support the growth of SMEs," said Ma, who is also the chair of the Business 20 (B20) SME Development Taskforce. B20 is the business advisory group to the G20.

"Cross-border shopping is the fastest-growing sector in Russia's e-commerce market," Ma said in a 2015 interview.

According to Ma, about one in 10 people from Russia made online purchases through Alibaba's AliExpress, a website that allows shoppers around the world to buy goods at whole sale prices. "Hundreds of thousands" of packages are sent from China to Russia on a daily basis, according to the e-commerce giant.
Culture activities held in Belgrade ahead of Xi's visit Updated: 2016-06-16 21:03 By Cui Jia(chinadaily.com.cn)

A series of cultural activities showcasing Chinese culture are being held on Thursday in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, ahead of President Xi Jinping's state visit.

Six bookstores in Belgrade are participating in a book fair to promote ancient and modern Chinese literature. The launch ceremony of the book fair, organized by China's State Council Information Office, was held at the Delfi bookstore in Belgrade.

Among the 105 volumes on display at the fair are ones featuring information on China's history and cultural heritage, as well as others featuring China's politics and economy. According to the organizers, the fair will last one month.

The Chinese movie week is also expected to kick off on Thursday in Belgrade, during which six movies will be shown between June 16 and 22.

Xi will pay state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan from June 17 to 22, the Foreign Ministry announced on Monday. Xi will also attend the 16th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tashkent, Uzbekistan on June 23 and 24.

On Tuesday, a similar book fair was also launched in Warsaw, capital of Poland, with about 100 bookstores across nine Polish cities taking part.

Many of the works featured are in English, but there are also 20 titles in Polish on display.

Guo Weimin, vice-minister of the State Council Information Office, said these books will help people better understand China, especially its modern politics, economy and culture.
China Merchants opens London branch Updated: 2016-06-17 01:10 By Cecily Liu(chinadaily.com.cn)

Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming (second from right) and China Merchants Bank President and CEO Tian Huiyu (first from right) attend the opening ceremony of CMB London Branch on June 16. [Photo by Cecily Liu/chinadaily.com.cn]

China Merchants Bank became the first Chinese joint-stock commercial bank to open a branch in London on Thursday, highlighting significant market-driven demand for Chinese financial service providers to expand internationally to serve increasing Chinese investment abroad.

The Shenzhen-based China Merchants Bank, established in 1987, is China's sixth largest bank, and the world's 16th largest bank. It first established a London presence in 2009 as a representative office, and with the launch of a branch China Merchants Bank will be offering a range of wholesale banking businesses serving corporate clients, including deposits, financing and currency clearing.

Tian Huiyu, president and CEO of China Merchants Bank, said the establishment of the bank's London branch is a vote of confidence for London's strength as a leading financial center.

Tian added the move is also an integral part of its overseas growth strategy.

"With Sino-UK relations entering a golden era, and bilateral investment continue to grow, London's position as the second largest offshore renminbi center is consolidating. More and more Chinese corporates are investing in the UK, and the establishment of a branch in London allows us to provide financial services to those companies following a global strategy," said Tian.

CMB London Branch's opening follows in the footsteps of three Chinese banks with branches in London, which are Bank of China, China Construction bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of Communications also have subsidiaries in London.

Liu Xiaoming, Chinese ambassador to the UK, said the steady stream of Chinese banks coming here is a clear indication that Chinese banks are now going global, and is also evidence of a very strong China UK cooperation.

Liu said the CMB London Branch launch is also significant as it is the first of its kind of a Chinese bank in Britain which has set up by a joint-stock bank.
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A fock-lifter loads a container at Tien Sa Port in a Nang city. Viet Nam has to change institutions to create more favourable conditions for businesses development.  VNS Photos Cong Thanh

a Nang  Slow institutional change is seen as a bottle neck in boosting Viet Nams economy and growth in the context of world development during the next two decades, according to Nguyen Van Vinh.

Vinh, Deputy Director of Strategy Institute under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, made his remarks during a workshop entitled Viet Nam 2035 Aspirations: Development of Dynamic Private Sector and Need for Institutional Modernisation in the central city yesterday.

Vinh emphasised that institutional reform in Viet Nam has yet to catch up with rapid changes in the world economy and trade, and the country can sometimes appear backwards, in comparison to other nations.

Vinh, who is a member of the compilation council for Viet Nams Report 2035 by the World Bank, said Viet Nam remains behind other countries in the region and world in economic development.

Viet Nam is a success story, following a 30-year renewal process, but we lag behind other countries economically due to different reasons, including the small scale economy, low income, poor productivity, serious environmental degradation and ineffective State owned sector investment, Vinh said, as the main speaker at the workshop.

Reform is always urgent and its a key for Viet Nams aspirations in 2035, in moving towards prosperity, creativity, equality and democracy, he said.

Vinh stressed that the private sector and market economy will play a key role and focus in Viet Nams economy in the future.

Meanwhile, senior economic advisor Pham Chi Lan said per capita income in Viet Nam in 2013 remains less than 40 per cent of the world average, in terms of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), and 20 per cent in terms of market prices.

She pointed out that serious existing problems in the economy include low and decreasing productivity, weak innovation systems, and ineffective urbanisation related to growth, as well as grey growth and climate change.

Viet Nam has been seen as having the quickest growth and a stable economy, as well as the successful alleviation of poverty. However, total factor productivity (TFP) was seen as very poor, falling from 5.5 per cent per year to 3.4 per cent in early 2000, Lan said.

She blamed ineffective investment in the public sector and State-owned enterprises, noting that this was one of the major reasons for brown growth in Viet Nam.

Lan also said the foreign direct investment sector, which contributed 70 per cent of the countrys exports and 50 per cent of manufactured industry, has no link with domestic enterprises, since the FDI sector only uses 26 per cent of domestically produced materials.

Meanwhile, the private sector  one of three major economic elements in Viet Nam  is operating with largely small- and medium sized investments, noted Lan.

She said the scale of investment in the private sector fell 50 per cent, in comparison to 2002, and the number of enterprises with over 300 labourers is rare.

Lan added that the country issued many laws, but the enforcement of these laws is seen as being very poor.

Tran Thi Lan Huong, from the World Bank, said institutional changes are a key for the countrys growth in 2035.

Drastic institutional reforms would clear the way for Viet Nams aspirations in 2035, along with more transparency and publicity. People and businesses have more rights to approach information from the Government in policy, planning and others, Huong said.

The General Secretary of the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI), Pham Thi Thu Hang, said Viet Nam needs to build new and flexible institutions to determine how to boost private sector and labour productivity.

She said the development of domestic businesses must be linked to FDI and global supply chains, as well an enlarged investment scale.

Hang said Viet Nam has 500,000 enterprises and 4.5 million household businesses, but the number of labourers in businesses has fallen from 49 to 25, on average.

She also said a Nang has been seen as a dynamic development city in Viet Nam, leading in the Provincial Competitive Index (PCI) for many years.

According to the citys investment promotion centre, it takes investors only five days to obtain business licences in a Nang.

Of note, in 2013 the Viet Nam Tokai companys automobile and spare parts and accessories plant received a business licence in just one hour  being the quickest example in a Nang.  VNS
Agricultural products being processed at An Giang Company in southern An Giang Province. With the ASEAN Economic Community already formed and 13 FTAs signed, Viet Nam has free trade relations with 55 countries, including all G7 nations and 15 of the G20 countries.  VNA/VNS Photo

HA NOI  Fruitful economic stabilisation and restructuring along with ensured social welfare are the prerequisites for successful international economic integration, Deputy Prime Minister Vuong inh Hue said.

Hue told a workshop on Viet Nams participation in TPP and EVFTA: Seizing the Opportunities of New-Generation Free Trade Agreements that international integration, which focusses on international economic integration, has been a consistent and long-term policy of the Vietnamese Party and State.

With the ASEAN Economic Community already formed and 13 FTAs signed, Viet Nam has free trade relations with 55 countries, including all G7 nations and 15 of the G20 countries.

Those FTAs, especially the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the EU- Viet Nam FTA (EVFTA), are considered the agreements of the 21st century. They have opened up huge opportunities for Viet Nam, particularly in trade and investment, he noted.

The Vietnamese government will submit the TPP to the National Assembly for ratification in the next few months. It has reviewed the legal system and will overhaul existing regulations or issue new ones to realise integrational commitments and create the right conditions for successful integration.

The Deputy PM quoted Resolutions No 19 and 35 as examples of the Cabinets efforts. While Resolution No 19 aims to improve the business climate and national competitiveness, the Government has asked ministries and localities to robustly implement Resolution No 35 on supporting Vietnamese businesses.

Viet Nam hopes to have at least 1 million enterprises by 2020, almost doubling the current figure, he added.

He said the Vietnamese Government is determined to build a transparent and clean government, maintain macro-economic stability and accelerate economic restructuring in order to better serve enterprises and the people. In return, businesses also have to pro-actively move ahead on the basis of renovation and creation.

World Bank Regional Vice President for East Asia and the Pacific Victoria Kwakwa said that integration into the region and the world has played a crucial role in Viet Nams economic transition. The country has become an FDI magnet and a growing export economy.

Viet Nam would remain attractive to foreign investment and continue to achieve a good growth rate thanks to strong exports. It now has a great chance to capitalise on benefits generated by the FTAs like the TPP and the EVFTA.

Not only containing traditional market access issues in regards to goods, trade services and investment, the two trade pacts also cover new areas, either not covered by or go much deeper than those signed on the framework of the World Trade Organisation, such as e-commerce, labour, environment, small- and medium-sized enterprises, State-owned enterprises and regulatory coherence, Kwakwa said.

She said these new-generation agreements are expected to generate considerable benefits for Viet Nam in terms of trade, investment, growth and job creation, but they are also accompanied by a number of big challenges and, without careful implementation of commitments, many of the benefits might pass the country by.

She added that the World Bank Group has pledged to help Viet Nam optimise the new-generation FTAs to achieve a high growth rate, create and share prosperity, and sustainably provide high-quality jobs for its young population.

At the workshop, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Quoc Khanh gave a briefing on the situation of Viet Nams TPP and EVFTA ratification as well as its plan to enforce the two agreements.

The participants discussed issues such as grasping opportunities and minimising risks from the TPP and the EVFTA, the road map for reforming trade-related laws, and the FTAs significance in local agriculture.  VNS
A free concert celebrating World Music Day will be held at the Institute for Cultural Exchange with France (IDECAF) on June 21.

The concert has been held annually for more than 10 years. It will feature pop, rock, jazz, rap, electronic and classical music.

Performers from the Passion Music Club and IDECAhat Club will take part in the event, to be held from 7 pm to 9 pm at 28 Le Thanh Ton Street in District 1.

Sofitel Saigon Plaza will also host a concert performed by both professional and amateur musicians at Boudoir Lounge on June 21. The Fete de la Musique 2016 will feature classical music and other music styles.

The event will begin at 7 pm at 17 Le Duan Street in District 1.  VNS
Saigon Outcast will host a concert of Balearic music, an eclectic blend of DJ-led dance music that emerged in the mid-1980s, on June 25.

The show will feature DJs Nick Ford from the UK, MAQman from Switzerland and Datodeo from Viet Nam. Balearic music along with afro, funk and disco will be featured.

The seven-hour party will start at 3 pm. The venue is at 188/1 Nguyen Van Huong Street in District 2. Entrance is VN50,000.  VNS
Vice President ang Thi Ngoc Thinh meets with Swiss President Johann Schneider Ammann in Bern on Tuesday. VNA/VNS Photo Quang Hai BERN  Swiss President Johann Schneider Ammann and Vietnamese Vice President ang Thi Ngoc Thinh affirmed the importance of increased co-operation during their meeting in Bern on Tuesday.

Ammann said Switzerland considered Viet Nam a priority partner in the Asia-Pacific region while Thinh expressed her hope for deepened ties.

Host and guest agreed on the need to maintain the exchange of delegations and step up the two countries co-odirnation at multilateral forums and international organisations.

The two sides will join hands to organise activities marking the 45th anniversary of their diplomatic ties.

They also agreed to enhance economic collaboration, focusing on finance, banking, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical products, agriculture and tourism, which are Switzerland s strengths and those sought by Viet Nam .

The two countries will also strengthen their partnership in education-training and science-technology.

Viet Nam will create optimal conditions for Swiss businesses to set up stable and long-term operations in the country, Thinh pledged.

She thanked the Swiss Government for its official development assistance (ODA) describing it a significant contribution to poverty reduction and socio-economic development in Viet Nam .

Ammann stressed that Switzerland wished to soon conclude the negotiations and signing of a free trade agreement between Viet Nam and the European Free Trade Association of which Switzerland is a member, together with Iceland , Norway and Liechtenstein .

The President noted his hope that the deal, once in effect, would open up new co-operation opportunities for Vietnamese and Swiss enterprises.

He noted that along with the ODA, Switzerland will pour more investments into the Southeast Asian nation.

Regarding the East Sea issue, the President shared his concern over the regional tension and voiced his backing for Viet Nam s stance on settling disputes by peaceful measures.

The same day, Thinh met with the staff of the Vietnamese Embassy and representatives of the Vietnamese community in the host country.

She also had a meeting with Anjuska Weil, President of the Viet Nam-Switzerland Friendship Association, whose activities support Vietnamese victims of wars and Agent Orange (AO)/dioxin.  VNS
HCM CITY  HCM City has set an ambitious goal to become a value-added service centre similar to other East Asian cities, attracting investment from world-renowned corporations.

In a meeting with members of the Young Presidents Organisation (YPO) earlier this week, Nguyen Thanh Phong, chairman of the citys Peoples Committee, said the city was committed to creating a favourable investment environment for the business community.

The goal is to help HCM City grow like other East Asian cities. City agencies will outline specific goals and strategies for development, Phong said. If these goals arent identified and acted upon properly, however, the effort will go to waste. I hope that businesspeople will take part in making HCM City a leading economic hub of the country.

The city has been working with economic institutes and experts on development plans that will be submitted to the Government for consideration.

I expect entrepreneurs to be ready to compete with huge brands with high-quality products. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has removed tariff barriers hampering business growth, so entrepreneurs must come up with breakthrough changes to enhance their competitiveness in the market, Phong said.

The citys management team will also ensure that urban infrastructure meets the needs of development and creates a dynamic business environment.

Also speaking at the meeting, Don Lam, CEO of VinaCapital Group, said the city should ensure that products such as bonds or company shares were available for investors to buy and sell because they prefer avoiding contracts that need three to four years of negotiations.

The chairman of the AA Corporation, Nguyen Quoc Khanh, suggested that large-scale exhibition centres be built to attract more investors.

HCM City only has one major convention centre, a 20,000-sq-metre building in District 7, in contrast to larger centres in Singapore, which has a 200,000-sq-metre centre, and Guangzhou, with an 800,000-sq-metre exhibition centre.

Vo Sy Nhan, general director of NP Capital Limited, noted that new policies should be considered for the Thu Thiem Urban project to further its potential, in addition to the existing plans to become a major financial centre linked with downtown HCM City, with metro lines and connecting bridges.

He said the city also should streamline the visa-making process and reduce personal income and corporate taxes to attract multinational corporations and large financial institutions.

In addition, the city should re-organise Tan Son Nhat International Airports taxi pick-up and drop-off areas.

The airports taxi area is very chaotic. We need to re-arrange it to make a good impression on our international friends, Nhan added.

Agreeing that the airport needs renovation, Phong said he had made recommendations to relevant authorities since the airport is not under the citys jurisdiction.  VNS


The Quang Ngai Province Peoples Committee has ordered officials to come up with support policies to enable farmers in uc Pho District to produce and sell clean salt in 2016-20. Photo vov.vn

HCM CITY  The Quang Ngai Province Peoples Committee has ordered officials to come up with support policies to enable farmers in uc Pho District to produce and sell clean salt in 2016-20.

The province Department of Agriculture and Rural Development will draft policies to support salt farmers and individuals and organisations providing services for salt production, processing and trade.

The Peoples Committee has also ordered it to hand over its task of developing infrastructure at the Sa Huynh salt fields in uc Pho Districts Pho Thanh Commune to the district administration.

Sa Huynh, the largest salt producing area in the central province with 120ha, is also famous for the delicious taste of its salt.

Sa Huynh salt was in fact granted trademark protection in 2011 by the National Office of Intellectual Property.

But the continuous decline in salt prices and large inventories have caused many producers there to abandon the work and switch to other jobs, like peeling shrimp for local processors.

The price of salt is now VN350 a kilogramme, causing losses to farmers.

As of June 1 Sa Huynh salt producers had inventories of 2,000 tonnes from the last season.

Around 120 out of nearly 600 households, with a total area of 30ha this year, have stopped producing salt, according to Pho Thanh authorities.

Tran Ngoc Thanh, who has a 3,000sq.m salt field, said: My family has made salt for 40 years, but this is the first year it has left such a large area unproductive.

In recent years Quang Ngai authorities have been making efforts to develop salt production.

More than 100 farmers have been given loans worth a total of more than VN1.3 billion (US$59,000) to cement salt fields for making clean salt.

The province built a refined salt processing plant with a capacity of 120,000 tonnes a year near Sa Huynh at a cost of VN5 billion ($230,000). But it shut down in 2010 not long after being built.

Last year the provinces Youth Union launched a programme to help Sa Huynh producers sell their salt by setting up sales points. VNS
With India keen to expand its supply chain of uranium for civil nuclear purposes, the issue figured prominently during talks between the Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and his Namibian counterpart Hage Geingob in Windhoek, Namibia, on Thursday.

Addressing the media after bilateral engagements, Secretary Economic Relations in Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Amar Sinha said Namibia is committed to honour the deal signed with India in 2009 to supply Uranium for civil use.

He further said a high level expert team from India will visit Namibia to explore possibilities of mining Uranium in the country.

Namibia is the fourth largest supplier of Uranium and both the countries signed an agreement on nuclear energy in 2009.

Namibia invited India to mine uranium from here and reiterated its commitment to honour the deal for supply of the mineral inked in 2009.

The deal, however, could not move forward all those years as Namibia has to take concurrence of the African Union and get the deal ratified from its parliament.

Namibia assured India that it did study the framework New Delhi has signed with 12 other countries including UK, US, Australia, Sri Lanka, France and South Korea besides others.

Officials accompanying the Indian President on three-day visit informed Namibia about its efforts to gain membership of Nuclear Suppliers Group . India also said even though it is not a member of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) but it has inked the deal for procuring uranium from these countries. Namibia was also informed that there was no hindrance in buying uranium even if India is not a signatory to NPT.

As a follow-up to the issue getting discussed at the highest political level now, an Indian team comprising Department of Atomic Energy and industry will visit Namibia soon to carry forward Namibia's offer to mine uranium from here.

The Namibian president assured President Mukherjee that he will study the agreements India inked with other countries and reiterated his country's willingness to honour the deal signed in 2009.

Besides this critical mineral needed for India's nuclear plants to meet growing energy demand, the two countries also discussed ways to further enhance co-operation in the mining and exploration of other minerals including zinc and marble.

India and Namibia also discussed mining of diamonds as the African country has one of the largest reserves of diamonds. As per the existing laws in Namibia, a mine has to own site to indulge in trade and India wants direct mining from Namibia. Now, this precious item is routed through London and Antwerp.

Both the leaders stressed the need for moving ahead in time-tested ties and step up the economy and the trade to remove poverty. President Mukherjee offered all assistance in these efforts and capacity building for the sustainable development. He also offered co-operation in the field of defence.

The two countries signed an agreement in this regard for Indian Army engineers training their Namibian counterparts here in signals and communication. India will also supply communication equipment. New Delhi has already supplied four helicopters to Namibia some year back.

An agreement for enhancing co-operation in the field of information technology was also inked and India will set up a centre of excellence here. Already, India has trained more than 1,000 IT professionals from Namibia.

The issue of India's bid for a seat in the UN Security Council (UNSC) also came up during the talks and Namibia assured of its support for New Delhi's candidature. The Indian President also backed Namibia's candidature for a temporary seat in UNSC and said there was no representation from 54 countries of Africa in this body. It was not keeping in with the global reality, he said.

Facing drought, Namibian sought India's help and it will supply 1,000 tonnes rice and 100 tonnes of medicine besides $20,000 grant for Indira Gandhi maternity centre here, officials said after the talks. India also extended a Line of Credit worth over $100 million for various developmental projects besides enhancing scholarships in IT sector for Namibian candidates to 200.

The visiting President also noted that two mining institutes set up with up Indian help were now functioning in the University of Namibia.

Later in the day, he addressed Namibian parliament and said, " We see in Namibia a valuable partner in India's quest for progress and prosperity as we pursue our identical priorities. We are therefore united not only by shared past but at this moment by our common aspirations."
Abandoned the families: Kean lashes Labors first budget NSW Treasurer Matt Kean has slammed the Albanese Government for failing to provide families with cost of living support amid soaring inflation and electricity prices.

Isnt sufficient: Experts reply to Chalmers bold housing crisis solution Jim Chalmers has announced a historic national Housing Accord which will see one million homes built over five years - but experts are not convinced the "bold" plan is enough to address the housing crisis.

Fill up now: Petrol prices set to soar Motorists in major cities have been warned to "fill up" as soon as possible as Australians face several surging costs following the Albanese Government's first budget overnight.

Police saddle up for return of crowds at Melbourne Cup Victoria Police sent a message to racegoers as cops prepare for hundreds of thousands of punters to descend upon Melbourne for the race that stops the nation.
CIA chief: IS plans to attack the West

WASHINGTON (AP)  CIA Director John Brennan will tell Congress today Islamic State militants are training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for its territorial losses.

In remarks prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan says IS has been working to direct and inspire attacks against foreign enemies, such as the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels. He says IS has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially carry out such attacks. He also will note the groups call for followers to conduct lone-wolf attacks.

2 guilty of prank

on autistic man

MANASQUAN, N.J. (AP)  Two men have been convicted of endangering the welfare of an incompetent person by coaxing a man with autism to jump into a freezing ocean for $20 and cigarettes in a prank that was filmed and posted online.

A judge found Nicholas Formica, 22, and Christopher Tilton, 21, guilty on Tuesday and sentenced them to probation and community service.

The pair in February 2015 dared Parker Drake, 20, to eat a hamster for money, walk into the ocean for two packs of cigarettes or jump from the jetty for the cigarettes and $20, authorities said. Drake declined the first two options but agreed to jump from the jetty.

Drugs, C-sections may hurt babies guts

WASHINGTON (AP)  Two new studies are offering some of the clearest snapshots yet of how babies build up protective gut bacteria, adding to evidence antibiotics and birth by C-section may disrupt that development.

Intestinal bacteria are underappreciated. They do far more than help digest food  they also play roles in the immune system. The types and amounts of gut bacteria that people harbor are thought to influence obesity, digestive diseases, even autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies.

But very little is known about how babies first develop their own unique set of bugs, whats called the gut microbiome. Wednesdays studies closely tracked infants through toddlerhood and concluded the first two to three years of life are a critical period for budding microbiomes.

Town lets girl keep therapy chickens

GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP)  A Pennsylvania town has decided not to evict a teenage girls four pet chickens her parents say are emotional support animals.

Hempfield Townships zoning board said Tuesday the 15-year-old girls two hens and two roosters could stay as long as her parents give up other chickens.

The family had about 25 chickens until April, when neighbors complained about the birds.

David Downing says his daughter suffers from anxiety and depression and she turns to chickens for comfort.

WHO: Coffee doesnt cause cancer

LONDON (AP)  Coffee is now off the list of things that could possibly cause cancer.

Experts convened by the World Health Organizations cancer research arm declared Wednesday there isnt enough proof to show the brew is linked to cancer. But the same report warned drinking very hot beverages of any kind could potentially raise your risk of the disease.

The agency said some studies showed coffee drinkers had a lower risk for cancers of the liver and womb. For more than 20 other cancers, the evidence was inconclusive.
Court upholds year-long pet ban

DES MOINES (AP)  A state appeals court says a man convicted of animal torture for striking his dog in the head with a hammer can be barred from possessing animals for a year.

The Iowa Court of Appeals on Wednesday said a judges sentence for George Harrington was reasonable because it protects the communitys interest in stopping animal abuse.

Harrington, of Mason City, was charged with animal torture in July 2015. He spent two days in jail and was sentenced to probation with no animals for a year.

He appealed saying his granddaughter living with him has a pet and hed either have to move or shed have to give up her pet.

Harrington claims his dog became ill but he couldnt afford to take it to a veterinarian to be euthanized.

Ethanol plant owner pleads guilty

DES MOINES (AP)  A northeast Iowa ethanol plant owner has pleaded guilty to failing to pay employment taxes and dumping ethanol into a stream, federal prosecutors say.

Randy Less, of Hopkinton, was charged in January with failing to collect and pay to the government federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld from the wages of employees of Permeate Refining.

At his guilty plea hearing on Tuesday, Less admitted he failed to properly handle payroll taxes. He also admitted that in July 2013 he discharged ethanol into an unnamed tributary of the Maquoketa River violating the Clean Water Act.

A sentencing date hasnt been set. He faces up to five years in prison for the tax charge and up to three years for the ethanol discharge and fines of up to $500,000.

Great Lakes area rattled by storm

SPIRIT LAKE (AP)  Docks were damaged, boats flipped and trees toppled by thunderstorms that passed through Iowas Great Lakes region in the northwest portion of the state, spawning a weak tornado, officials said.

No injuries were reported from Tuesdays storms.

Philip Schumacher of the National Weather Service said Wednesday the tornado was spotted a little after 2:20 p.m., seven miles south of Lake Park in Dickinson County.

New trial oredered

in fatal beating

DES MOINES (AP)  The Iowa Court of Appeals says two men convicted of second-degree murder for their involvement in the mob beating death of a Des Moines man in a downtown parking lot in 2013 will get new trials.

The courts ruling filed Wednesday says new trials are necessary for James Shorter and Yarvon Russell to determine their role in the death of 40-year-old Richard Daughenbaugh.

The court says juries may have relied on the legal theory of joint criminal conduct which requires proof there was a plan in place among the crowd participants to repeatedly strike Daughenbaugh after he was knocked to the ground.

The courts concluded since there was no proof of such a plan and juries may have relied on that theory to convict, a new trial is required.

Grenade forces plant evacuation

JOHNSTON (AP)  DuPont Pioneer employees in central Iowa were forced to leave the building Monday when an employee found a hand grenade in a field on the property.

The Des Moines bomb squad disposed of the grenade.

Police said the grenade was a World War II-era weapon, likely left on the property for decades. The property was once part of the Camp Dodge training facility.

Fair unveils food contest finalists

DES MOINES (AP)  Three finalists have been announced for the New Food Contest at the Iowa State Fair.

Fairgoers can vote on them Aug. 11-15. The winner will be announced Aug. 16.

The finalists are Ice Cream Nachos, Not Your Mammas Taco and Pride of Iowa Wrap.

The nachos are crisp cinnamon sugar chips covered with cinnamon ice cream drizzled with hot fudge and caramel and sprinkled with chocolate, caramel and strawberries. Its topped with nuts, whipped cream and a cherry.

The taco is made from a deep-fried flour tortilla thats layered with shredded turkey and veggie slaw and topped with mango salsa.

The wrap uses a jalapeno-cheddar tortilla with pork shoulder, corn salsa and bacon bits. Its layered with cheddar jack cheese, avocado relish, chipotle aioli and crispy tortilla bites.
WATERLOO  Iowas Court of Appeals has upheld the conviction of a Michigan man charged in the freezing death of a toddler in Waterloo in 2013.

Nathaniel Quentin Knight had been babysitting 2-year-old Kennadi Porter on March 12, 2013, when paramedics were called to the home because the girl was unresponsive. She later died of hypothermia, and prosecutors allege Knight had placed Kennadi on an unheated porch in below-freezing temperatures after giving her a bath while he cleaned up an accident.

A jury found him guilty of child endangerment resulting in death in a February 2015 trial.

On appeal, Knight argued the judge should have acquitted him of the charge because prosecutors failed to prove he intentionally committed acts that resulted in harming the girl.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, the Iowa Court of Appeals said there was ample evidence for a jury to conclude Knight had acted knowingly.

Taking the evidence in the light most favorable to the state, and allowing all reasonable inferences, substantial evidence supports a jury finding that Knight knowinglywith conscious awareness his acts would create a substantial risk to (Kennadi)  or intentionally  with specific purpose  placed and left (Kennadi) on an unheated porch in subfreezing temperatures, which resulted in (Kennadi)s death, said the ruling, which was written by Judge Michael Mullins.

The court also turned down arguments that sought a new trial over jury instructions used in the original trial.

Knight was sentenced to up to 50 years in prison. Now age 30, he is serving his time at the Anamosa State Penitentiary.
ALTOONA  Black youths in Iowa are punished at school and arrested five times more often than white youths, and the disparity in arrests is widening, according to a state report.

That disparity was the subject of a conference Wednesday at a hotel on the Adventureland amusement park campus attended by dozens of law enforcement officials.

It is time for each one of us to confront and eliminate the implicit bias and disparity that exists in our criminal justice system, said Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Cady, who spoke at the event.

Iowa has the highest rate of black incarceration in the country. According to an early summary of a report from the state Department of Human Rights Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning that will be published in August, black Iowa youths are five times more likely than white youths to be suspended from school and are five times more likely to be arrested.

The arrest rate of black youths has increased 3.4 percent in nine of the states metropolitan areas, but the arrest rate of white youths has decreased nearly 31 percent during the same time period, the report summary said.

The over-representation of African-Americans in our criminal justice system is brought to life in our own data. It is visible, it is factual, and its impact is felt in our communities, Cady said. Let us never forget that the data has a face.

A significant part of the problem is the countrys reliance upon incarceration, said James Bell, founder and executive of the Burns Institute for Juvenile Justice Fairness and Equity of Oakland, Calif., another of Wednesdays featured speakers.

Our justice system is driven by an addiction. And that addiction has always been, from the 1600s and 1700s to today, our societal reliance on incarceration as a primary instrument of societal control, Bell said. When you have to put a child on a crate to fingerprint them to incarcerate them, thats an addiction.

Bell said states are not adequately funding services to prevent minority juveniles from running afoul of the law, and the court system has become overly burdened by an issue it is not equipped to handle.

The justice system is the dumping ground for other failed systems, and the justice system, to its credit, keeps taking them, Bell said, using drug and family courts as examples of how court system is handling people it should not. Treatment courts are the tacit admission by the justice department that its dealing with societal problems. 

What that is, is justice saying, We cant do this, but you keep asking us to.

Wednesdays event also featured a panel of four Iowa court and law enforcement officials who in recent years participated in conferences hosted by the Georgetown University Center for Juvenile Justice Reform.

What I learned in Georgetown was that what we were doing with children was not working, was not making my community safer and was hurting children. That undermined my two main goals as assistant county attorney, said Assistant Scott County Attorney Julie Walton. So we have to do something different.

Dave Kuker, executive officer with the division of criminal and juvenile justice planning, said a need exists for open discussions between delinquent youths and city officials, school officials and juvenile justice officials.

He said Wednesdays event was not so much about raising awareness as it was gathering local and state officials together to establish short and long-term goals for reducing the disparities that exist for minorities.

The report summary also highlighted pilot projects throughout Iowa.

In Black Hawk County, a program diverting low-risk juvenile offenders has cut arrests for both black and white youths roughly in half.

In Woodbury County, a program to reduce juvenile detention to individuals who have a court appearance or are deemed a threat to public safety has reduced the facilitys black population by 57 percent.

Nick Fisher contributed to this story.
CEDAR FALLS  The Cedar Falls School Board extended Superintendent Andy Pattees contract but did not offer a salary increase  at the superintendents request  following a closed session Monday night.

Pattee, who has been superintendent since 2013, has a three-year contract, which was extended for another year at Mondays meeting. The actions followed a year-end evaluation with Pattee.

We wanted to honor Dr. Pattees request, Cedar Falls School Board President Jim Kenyon said in a statement after the meeting. We are appreciative of the work, progress and direction we are heading as a district with Dr. Pattee in the leadership role.

Kenyon said the board appreciated Pattee taking the initiative to advocate for no salary increase. He said the review session included discussion on many significant accomplishments Pattee has had.

Among those was the passage of the April bond vote to address our districts increasing enrollment and inequity among our elementary buildings, as well as many educational initiatives Dr. Pattee has and continues to move forward for Cedar Falls schools, Kenyon said.

The board held its midyear review of Pattee in May, which led to evaluations being held nearly back to back. Kenyon similarly offered praise during last months review, saying the board was extremely, extremely pleased with Pattee.

Iowa code allows evaluations to happen in closed session.

Pattee was first hired in July 2013 and had a two year-contract. The board approved a three-year contract during its review last year. Pattee received a 3.23 percent raise last year following the boards evaluation.

During Mondays meeting, the board also approved salary and benefit adjustments for its administrative team and its supervisors, managers, coordinators, transportation department, information technology technicians and 12-month clerical staff. Those are nonbargaining positions.

The board approved a 4.65 percent salary and benefit increase for supervisors, managers, coordinators, transportation department, IT department and 12-month clerical staff. There are 47 people, or 42.04 full-time equivalents, who are a part of this group.

The board also approved a 4.5 percent salary and benefit increase for the administrative team that includes directors and building administrators. There are 21 people, or 20.80 FTE, in the administrative team.

The increases include a health insurance increase of 6.85 percent as well as adjustments to dental, vision, life, long-term disability, FICA and retirement costs.

The adjustments are comparable to the 4.71 increase the board previously approved for the Cedar Falls Education Association bargaining unit.

The adjustments will go into effect on July 1.
CEDAR RAPIDS  By eliminating counting hands and paper ballots, the Iowa Democratic Party hopes to wrap up its state convention Saturday before the day is over.

In an effort to improve the accuracy and efficiency of voting for a total of 15 national convention delegates, State Central Committee members, two Democratic National Committee members, two presidential electors and platform planks, the party will implement new voting technology. Delegates to the convention at Hy-Vee Hall in Des Moines will cast their votes using a hand-held device.

As long as it took some of the district conventions, we wanted to make sure we had better efficiency without trading off security, State Chairwoman Andy McGuire said. Some district conventions ran past midnight.

We always want plenty of time for discussion, McGuire said. This should take what I would call dead time while youre waiting for people to get the votes done, and speed it up.

In previous years, it could take hours to data enter every ballot, said IDP Rules Committee Co-Chair Sandy Dockendorff of Des Moines County. But this year, utilizing the hand-held voting devices, the turnaround time for elections will be dramatically reduced.

The Republican Party of Iowa used similar technology at its district conventions, and the response was so favorable the party contracted to use them at its state convention last month, spokesman Taylor Mason said.

Neither Mason nor McGuire would say what it cost to use the devices.
WATERLOO  Hundreds of miles separate Waterloo from Orlando, Fla.  the location of the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history  but its much closer in the minds of some in the Cedar Valley.

Roughly 300 people came together Wednesday for a peace vigil at Lincoln Park in Waterloo to honor the lives of those killed and wounded in the shooting Sunday at Pulse, a gay nightclub. Forty-nine lives were lost and 53 people were injured.

The shooting hit home for Derrick Andersen, perhaps more than to others: He lost friends. The Cresco native frequented Pulse during the five years he spent in Orlando.

It could have been me, Andersen said. It could have been me; were all people, no matter who we love, and were all a family.

Andersen wore a rainbow flag tank top  its festive stripes a contrast to the anger and grief on his face as he talked about reports the gunmans wife allegedly knew about the plan to kill.

Its devastating, and words cant express the frustration I feel that it could have been prevented, Andersen said, choking back emotion.

Following the vigil, the crowd marched half a mile, crossing the Fourth Street Bridge to converge at Kings and Queens Club.

Kaila Pacheco is vice president of the Cedar Valley chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens. She said recognizing the intersectionality of the victims is important. The great majority were Latino.

It definitely impacts our community, Pacheco said. Its a hate crime. Its terrorism.

The theme of those who spoke formally during the vigil was a call for common-sense gun control and a ban on assault weapons.

We will not overcome violence by simply praying, said the Rev. Abraham Funchess, director of the Waterloo Commission on Human Rights.

Assault weapons, like those used in a number of recent mass killings, are too easily purchased, Funchess said.

Bob Clark of Cedar Falls also attended the vigil. He is concerned about the spread of such violence to the Cedar Valley.

But gun control wont stop it, Clark said. There are all kinds of hateful people out there.

Chris Schwartz, organizer for Americans for Democratic Action, called out Iowa legislators who he said have failed to act on gun control legislation: Rep. Rod Blum, Sen. Charles Grassley and Sen. Joni Ernst. Schwartz called their inaction offensive.

We stand here today in tumultuous times ... a year where gun violence continues right here in our own community, Schwartz said. At a time where a 4-year-old, on the street that I live on, can be the victim of a stray bullet.

Schwartz was introduced at the vigil as the first openly gay candidate running for the Black Hawk County Board of Supervisors.

Schwartz said the victims were gunned down simply for who they were born to love.

Nate Nims, pastor at First United Methodist Church in Waterloo, said his religion teaches every person is of sacred worth.

A gay bar can feel a lot like a church, and I sympathize with the reality of losing that symbol and sense of community, Nims said.

Schwartz and others called for action. Americans for Democratic Action will host a gun control task force meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Waterloo Public Library.
CEDAR FALLS  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority of Black Hawk County may overhaul metro bus routes in Waterloo and Cedar Falls.

Were looking at all routes, MET general manager Mark Little said. There are areas of the community that are expanding. Were looking at expanding or restructuring. Expanding service would be preferable, but it depends on the budget.

Little noted development on the north side of Waterloo at the old Logan Plaza and on the west side in the United Medical Park area on West Ridgeway Avenue.

Another growth area is southern Cedar Falls. Little recently appeared before the Cedar Falls City Council to address concerns there is no longer front-door service to Wal-Mart on Brandilynn Boulevard. The bus now stops at the Brandilynn access road. Door-to-door para-transit is available for the less mobile but costs more and must be arranged in advance.

MET officials moved the bus stop away from the store for safety reasons and to keep the route running on time.

Buses continue to stop at the Waterloo Wal-Marts front door. Its a little bit better but not ideal. I dont like any of the situations were in, and were going to correct them, Little said.

MET is looking at restructuring its entire system, Little said. He said changes probably wont be implemented until next summer. Waterloo must still update bus benches to comply with ADA requirements. MET also does not want to implement changes during winter.

Routes could be restructured to serve busier, growing areas, but that might be at the expense of other areas where residents are more dependent on public transit. Theres a solution to all of this ... but it costs money, Little said.

Thats a decision for the mayors and councils of each city.

MET is operated under a cooperative agreement between the two cities. Each city funds its share with a public transit property tax levy. In Waterloo, the fiscal year 2016-17 budget for MET is $1.4 million, said Michelle Weidner, Waterloos chief financial officer. The levy rate is 62 cents per $1,000 taxable property valuation. The maximum levy rate allowed by the state code is 95 cents per $1.000. A penny increase would raise and additional $22,530, based on property values for that fiscal year.

Cedar Falls levies 24 cents per $1,000 taxable property valuation, and that will raise $374,000 for met for fiscal 2016-17, said Jennifer Rodenbeck, the citys director of finance and business operations. Increasing that levy by a penny would raise an additional $15,700 based on the current tax base.

Bus fares have not increased since 2002 and provide about 14 percent of revenues. However, Little said no bus system is supported entirely on fares, and an increase would affect those most dependent on public transit and least able to afford it. Federal funding has fallen off as well.
HAMPTON  Prestage Foods of Iowa has had little contact with Franklin County since May, an economic development official said Monday.

Theyve gone kind of quiet, Franklin County Development Association Director Karen Mitchell told county supervisors. After Mason City, theyve gone quiet.

A Prestage representative met with Franklin County officials in May to talk about the county as a possible location for the plant. The supervisors approached Prestage after the Mason City Council turned down a development agreement to build a plant in Mason City.

We dont know if theyre really interested or not, Mitchell said.

In the meantime, the association has been working to discuss whether or not special committees should be formed to deal with law enforcement, education and more if the opportunity for Prestage remains a possibility.

Weve commissioned an economic impact study from Iowa State University, Mitchell said. Weve been talking with city councils in our communities.

Mitchell said Hampton and several communities within the county have extend public support for the project.

Supervisors agreed to assign Supervisor Michael Nolte to work with the development association as a liaison.

Lanier said the search for a location is ongoing.

We have not made any final decisions and are continuing to evaluate all of the communities that have contacted us about being considered as a possible location for our project, Lanier said in an email.

While we hope to locate this project in Iowa, several upper Midwestern states are being considered, Lanier said. Communication will be ongoing with any community that is being considered as a possible home for this facility.
WATERLOO  First Baptist Church at West Fourth and Baltimore will have a special outdoor celebration of praise and worship June 26.

The Rev. Joe Greemore and the Band of Light will lead the worship service at 10:15 a.m. Outdoor seating will be provided and a nursery is available for children up to age 5.

Following the service, there will be a potluck lunch in the church social room. Visitors and guests need not bring food or register in advance for the potluck. Call the church at 234-1537 for more information.

CEDAR FALLS  St. Stephen the Witness Catholic Student Center, 1019 W 23rd St., will host a farewell open house for the Rev. Ken Glaser on June 26.

It will be in the social hall on the lower-level of the center from 1 to 3 p.m. June 26. Dessert and refreshments will be served.
After the last few years of a global pandemic, and the resulting pressure that is being put on many care providers, health is
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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.
According to a report released by the National Insurance Crime Bureau this month, the Albuquerque metro area ranks second highest in the nation for car theft rate. State Superintendent of Insurance, John Franchini, told KOAT that automobile insurance rates in New Mexico could go up 10 percent in the next two years as a result. Former Bernalillo County Sheriff's Captain and current State Representative Bill Rehm says car theft is rarely committed for joyrides or long-term use, but are often used as transportation for other crimes before being abandoned. A car-theft task force is being created by city and county police agencies in an attempt to lower the numbers. Many cases of car theft are pleaded down by defendants, resulting in shorter jail time or less severe penalties. Representative Rehm says district attorneys and judges need to take these offenses more seriously.

As of July 1, all state-run museums, including the Natural History Museum, the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the Museum of New Mexico, will be increasing their admission fees and possibly limiting the number of free Sundays for state residents. This follows the announcement of a $2 million budget cut for the Department of Cultural Affairs' next fiscal year, and the subsequent layoffs of six of the seven historical site managers , as well as five other jobs. Most state agencies are receiving decreased funding this year due to declining oil and gas revenue , a major source of funding for the state. Despite the budgetary and personnel cuts, the Department of Cultural Affairs plans to maintain its standards for the upkeep of historic sites.

Police Chief Explains Policy-making Process

In response to a letter from the Police Oversight Board chairwoman Beth Mohr, which expressed the board's frustration in not being involved in the development of the Albuquerque Police Department's new use-of-force policy, Police Chief Gorden Eden has outlined the policy-writing process in a response. In the letter, he cites time constraints as the reason for not involving the board in policy development, which had previously been described by an independent monitor overseeing the reforms process as confusing. Chief Eden fully outlines the process, which begins with policy discussions in the departments newly created Office of Policy Analysis. Policy drafts then go to a Standard Operating Procedure Committee for review. They are then sent to PowerDMS, an internal police communication system where board members and officers can comment. The policies then return to the Standard Operating Procedure Committee for further review. They then go to the Policy and Procedure Review Board. And finally, they go back to the Office of Policy Analysis. Adjustments to the policies are made along the way, and even after they have been presented to the Department of Justice. Other than the Oversight Board's exclusion from the process, Mohr also expressed concern over the inclusion of the term when feasible in the new use-of-force policy. City officials have said the wording was discussed fully and agreed upon by all parties involved. They also say the department is nearly finished rewriting the 37 policies, as required by the DOJ.
Jun 16, 2016 | By Alec

Metal 3D printing is growing in popularity in numerous industries, including the aerospace and automobile sectors, for its ability to realize very complex and detailed single-part geometries  perfect for highly complicated rocket engines. The only downside is that just a limited number of metal powders can currently be 3D printed, many of which have roughly comparable properties. That could change soon, however, as German metals developer Heraeus and Swedish startup Exmet AB have now succeeded to 3D print amorphous metals, paving the way for a lot more 3D printable materials with unique properties.

An amorphous metal is a solid metallic material, usually an alloy, with a disordered atomic-scale structure. While most metals are crystalline, amorphous metals are not and instead form glass-like structures that are perfect electrical conductors. Also known as bulk metallic glasses (BMG) and glassy alloys, they can be made from almost any metal alloy, are virtually unaffected by corrosion, and are extremely strong and energy absorbent. Theoretically, they can provide engineers with the opportunity to significantly reduce the weight of parts, but these amorphous metals are difficult to manufacture and are therefore rarely used commercially.

But that could change thanks to the 3D printing innovations of Exmet AB and Heraeus. Using Exmets disruptive 3D printing technology, they are completely bypassing the need for casting, melt spinning and thermoplastic forming when working with amorphous metals. Now Exmet AB can help you move the technical dreams into reality, the company says.

During the collaboration, Heraeus provided the materials and metal powder expertise, and will be incorporating these amorphous metals into their portfolio of 3D printing materials. Heraeus is extremely optimistic, arguing that this breakthrough could fundamentally change manufacturing in the future. They possess a wide variety of previously incompatible characteristics: They are very strong and yet malleable, as well as harder and more corrosion-resistant than conventional metals. Together with Exmet, we intend to open up this new class of materials for industry and 3D printing, Tobias Caspari, head of Heraeus 3D Printing, says. Particularly in additive manufacturing, it is crucial for the material and the manufacturing process to be perfectly matched in order to ensure the utmost consistency and quality.

By making these materials 3D printable, they are effectively greatly enhancing the potential of metal 3D printing, says Mattias Unosson, Exmet co-founder and CEO. For fifty years the commercial success of amorphous metals has been held back by inadequate manufacturing methods. Now that changes. Exmet looks forward to cooperating with Heraeus as a competent partner with a worldwide network to help bring this disruptive new technology to the market, he argued.

Its not difficult to imagine a wide range of applications for these interesting amorphous metals. Especially the materials energy-absorbing and scratch-proof qualities would make them suitable for 3D printed consumer electronics, among others, while their high strength and resistance to corrosion should be very welcomed by industrial engineers. To realize those possibilities, Exmet AB is currently seeking corporate partners to help commercialize their disruptive 3D printing platform, while Heraeus is expected to make these metals commercially available. Metal 3D printing, it seems, is about to get a whole lot bigger.

Posted in 3D Printing Technology

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Jun 16, 2016 | By Benedict

From 21-23 June, a new trade show called In(3D)ustry: From Needs to Solutions will take place in Barcelona, Spain. The show has been co-founded by HP, which recently entered the 3D printing world with its Jet Fusion 3D printer.

While the consumer 3D printer has enabled a new generation of creative individuals to build some incredible products, industrial 3D printing promises to make an even greater impact on future technologies and world affairs. Before this happens though, industry figures need to be shown how additive manufacturing can benefit their companieswhether in the healthcare, architecture, fashion, aerospace, or automotive industries.

Anyone curious or skeptical about additive manufacturing (and who happens to be in the Catalonia region of Spain next week) will have a chance to witness the future of industrial additive manufacturing first-hand, at a new trade show organized by Fira de Barcelona. The In(3D)ustry conference will take place at the Montjuic Venue in Barcelona and will showcase 50 3D printing solutions from additive manufacturing specialists in the areas of Retail & Consumer Goods, Healthcare, Automotive & Aeronautics, Architecture & Habitat, and miscellaneous.

Leading the way in Barcelona is event co-organizer HP, which recently unveiled its Jet Fusion 3D printer, a super-fast industrial 3D printer which has already been adopted by Nike, Siemens, Johnson & Johnson, and several other high-profile companies. The companys global 3D printing development center is situated in nearby Sant Cugat del Valles, where it used to manufacture its large-format paper printers. Those machines are now manufactured in Asia, leaving a large factory space in which engineers can work on next-generation 3D printing technology.

HP is committed to advancing the state-of-the-art of 3D printing with a disruptive technology and an Open Platform that will drive collaborative innovation with materials and software partners, said Ramon Pastor, vice president and general manager of HP 3D Printing. To this end, platforms such as In(3D)ustry From Needs to Solutions are key to enabling productive dialog amongst industry players, and encouraging open discussions to resolve common 3D printing industry challenges.

The In(3D)ustry event will consist of a conference area, where experts will discuss the current and future state of industrial 3D printing, and an Open Innovation Marketplace, where startups and entrepreneurs will have a chance to demonstrate their latest 3D printing products aimed at industry customers. Keynote speakers include Mark Burry, an architect who is using 3D printing to help complete the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and Xavier de Kestelier, head of the Specialist Modeling Group at Foster + Partners, who is attempting to build houses on the moon using 3D printers and moon dust.

In(3D)ustry From Needs to Solutions will be an unprecedented global event designed for the demands of industries such as the automotive and healthcare and for the creators of 3D machinery, to help them tackle this revolution in manufacturing technology, said Miquel Serrano, director of In(3D)ustry. The goal of this new hub is to support a burgeoning sector and provide a meeting place that serves to accelerate this technology and successfully adapt it to the real needs of consumers and industrial users.

The 3-day event kicks off with an opening keynote on Tuesday, June 21. Interested parties can request an invitation online.

Posted in 3D Printing Events

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Jun 16, 2016 | By Andre

When it comes to the desktop 3D printer market there was a time when your material choice was strictly limited to ABS. Then, as years went by, PLA became the de facto standard on account of its structural stability along with fewer print restrictions (no heated bed required for example). Since then, nylon, woodfill, polypropylene-like, bronzefill and all other assortment of experimental materials made their appearance. Through all of this experimentation, 3D print reliability was limited so PLA and ABS remain champion to this day.

But the rigidity of these materials had people craving more. Ninjaflex, a popular brand of flexible filament hit the streets late in 2013 and has remained the most reliable of all the flexible materials ever since. It seems New York based Voodoo Manufacturing has noticed an increasing demand for this material and is now offering Ninjaflex (and its slightly more rigid Semiflex) to their repertoire of available materials via their 3D print service center.

Voodoo Manufacturing, started by a group of former Makerbot engineers in 2015, focuses on high-volume cost effective 3D printing via their fleet of 130 Replicator 2 3D printers (without a doubt the best 3D printer released by Makerbot to this date).

Co-founder Jonathan Schwartz notes that in the last few months, weve been testing TPU filaments for 3D printing to see if theres a way that we can offer this material scalably and reliably. Were excited to share that weve been successful in developing internal technologies that make it possible for us to scalably offer TPU, and we look forward to working with partners to push the boundaries of whats possible.

To me the move to offer Ninjaflex through their 3D print service is a great idea. Ive worked with the material for years now and, providing the object being produced is relatively straightforward with minimal support requirements, it continues to prove to be an incredible versatile and reliable material. And while its difficult to produce exact flexibility (durometer) values like one can do on higher grade 3D printers, a little experimentation with model density and wall thickness goes a long way.

I have noticed that Voodoo Manufacturing doesnt explicitly mention their material is indeed Ninjaflex until you delve deeper into the materials data sheet accessible on their page. Regardless, the Replicator 2 3D printer they use is actually very nicely suited for the material (loads easily compared with 5th generation Makerbot Replicators for example) so kudos to the team over at Voodoo Manufacturing there.

All said, Im most impressed with the sites quoting system, the sheer number of 3D printers and their very affordable rates (I ran some STLs through their quotation system and wow!) The compelling case studies that showcase projects theyve worked on in the past is also worth checking out (the 3D printed dress is definitely a must see).

Sometimes, I feel Ive just become the rickety old hipster in the 3D printing racket by saying that Ive been offering Ninjaflex to clients before it was cool. But who am I kidding, Ninjaflex by Fenner drives is one the the better material options to hit the market in the last few years so its exciting to see others incorporate its use into their business strategies.

Posted in 3D Printing Service

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Biged Fromny wrote at 6/16/2016 3:26:42 PM:Too bad they offer services with their Makerbot Z18 3D printers, yet don't have any that are functioning. I wonder what else is malfunctioning with their marketing.




Deirdre Nansen McCloskey in Reason:

Contrary to economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies. The Great Enrichment did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The accumulation of capital was of course necessary. But so were a labor force and the existence of liquid water. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. Yet it would be unhelpful to explain the Chicago Fire of October 810, 1871, by the presence of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere.

The modern world, in other words, can't be explained by routine brick piling, such as the Indian Ocean trade, English banking, canals, the British savings rate, the Atlantic slave trade, the enclosure movement, the exploitation of workers in satanic mills, or the original accumulation of capital in European cities. Such routines are too common in world history and too feeble in quantitative oomph to explain the 30- to 100-fold enrichment per person unique to the past two centuries.

Hear again that amazing fact: In the two centuries after 1800, the goods and services made and consumed by the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 to 100that is, a rise of 2,900 to 9,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments. It was caused by massively better ideas in technology and institutions.

More here.
Rupert Neate in The Guardian:

Getting locked up is unlikely to be good for your health but its terrific, terrific business for the booming private industry supplying doctors and nurses to jails and prisons. Many of those suppliers descended on Austin, Texas, last month to tout their services directly to jail administrators at the 35th annual American Jail Association conference.

As trade fairs go, this one is a little macabre. Companies line up to market everything from jumpsuits and meal trays to masks to stop prisoners from spitting, straitjackets and other full-body restraints. Once the national anthem had been observed and the AJAs chaplain had led a prayer for jailers across the country, those gathered at Austins convention centre could get down to business: making money.

How long prisons will continue to be such money-spinners could depend on who wins the race for the White House. On the campaign trail Hillary Clinton has vowed to end private prisons and private detention centers. They are wrong. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has called for increased outsourcing of prisons. I do think we can do a lot of privatizations, and private prisons it seems work a lot better, he said in an MSNBC town hall earlier this month.

In the meantime, Ahmad Afzal and his two brothers are making a very good living manufacturing prison jumpsuits, underwear and suicide safety smocks in Pakistan and selling them to US jails.

More here. [Thanks to Anna Hall.]
Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza. ~Dave Barry





Fort Point Beer Tasting and Instrument Petting Zoo

The Jewish Community Center of San Francisco invites everyone of every faith to celebrate Shabbat this Saturday with a beer tasting from Fort Point Beer Company, DIY popcorn, origami-folding, a Zumba class, live music, and a musical instrument petting zoo. Bring the kids along, because they're also hosting Storytime with PJ Library and a "Tot Spot." // 3200 California St. (Presidio Heights), jccsf.org/unplugged





StarChefs Tasting Gala

Rub elbows with rising stars of the food and beverage world on Tuesday, June 21st at the StarChefs Rising Stars Gala, in the uber-classy Julia Morgan Ballroom. The awards ceremony begins at 6:30 p.m., followed by a tasting gala at 7:15p.m., featuring bites, beverage pairings, and cocktails prepared by the Bay Area's best chefs, sommeliers, and bartenders. Tickets are available online for $100 to $175 (VIP). A portion of proceeds will benefit La Cocina. // 465 California St. (FiDi), starchefs.com/cook/risingstars





Five Buck Beers for Fathers at Jasper's

Looking for a low-key way to celebrate the favorite dad in your life this Father's Day? Take him to Jasper's Corner Tap & Kitchen on Sunday for $5 beers from any of the bar's 18 taps of local and international brews, including Fort Point's Westfalia and Sierra Nevada's Kellerweis Hefeweisen. There's no word yet on how to prove you're a father to get the five dollar deal, but we're guessing they'll take your word for it. // 401 Taylor St. (Tenderloin), jasperscornertap.com





Boozy Floats for Ice Cream Soda Day
Donner Pass (about 9 miles west of Truckee) is most famous for its role in destroying the unfortunate Donner Party more than 150 years ago. If the thought of getting trapped in a snowstorm (and having to eat your family) terrifies you, may we suggest tackling Donner Pass during the summer the high pass and its peaks have some of the area's most diverse hiking trails, and the views are incredible. Here are five awesome hikes to choose from on your next trip to Tahoe.





Coldstream Trail to Tinker Knob

For a shorter hike, check out what the locals have dubbed the Lost Trail (since so few people hike it). This 10-mile round trip hike goes along the Coldstream Trail and weaves above Donner Lake up to Tinker Knob  a granite bump on the ridges above I-80. It's pretty difficult, but rewards include gorgeous views of Coldstream Valley and Donner Lake. Heads up, you will need to pay the Donner Memorial State Park parking fee to park your car near the trailhead. More info.





Directions to trailhead: From I-80, take the Donner Pass Road exit (184) and follow the signs for the Donner Memorial State Park. The trailhead is past the Ridge and Creek Campgrounds at a signed junction for Coldstream Valley.





Castle Peak (Courtesy of Wikipedia)





Castle Peak

With any hiking trip to Donner, you can't miss out on Castle Peak. This popular 9.6-mile round trip hike follows the Pacific Crest Trail up to the top of one of North Tahoe's highest summits. The trail will lead you to the base of Castle Peak and (if you're not afraid of heights) you can scramble to the top to get views of Lassen Peak to the north and the coastal hills of California to the west. More info.





Directions to trailhead: Take the Castle Peak/Boreal Ridge exit from I-80 and take the frontage road on the south side of the freeway to the Pacific Crest Trail parking area. Well marked signs will show you the trail.





Lake Angela

If you want something shorter, this pretty 6.4-mile hike winds around granite cliffs and boulders to Lake Angela just behind Boreal Mountain Resort. The trail offers views of Donner Lake and the Rainbow Bridge along the way. As the trail begins to head down toward the end of 3.2 miles, keep an eye out for the power lines to the west and head down to the lake which can be seen from the ridge. More info.





Directions to trailhead: Take the Castle Peak/Boreal Ridge exit from I-80 and take the frontage road on the south side of the freeway to the Pacific Crest Trail parking area. Well marked signs will show you the trail.





Summit Tunnel (ChiefRanger, via Flickr)





Summit Tunnels

For something unique, the 3.0 Summit Tunnel Hike at the Rainbow Bridge overlook takes you along petroglyphs (walls built by Chinese immigrant railroad workers in the mid-1800s) and into the creepy-yet-cool tunnels of the old railroad. From the trailhead, keep heading west and up the incline to visit the stone walls and through the underpass of the old railroad bed. Tunnel 7 and Tunnel 6 have a fair amount of graffiti, but make for great photos. Flashlights are recommended for the tunnel portion. More info.





Directions to trailhead: Park your car at the Rainbow Bridge overlook on U.S. Route 40. Carefully cross Donner Pass Road. The trail starts near the markers for the petroglyphs.





Donner Pass tunnels (Courtesy of Wikipedia)





Warren Lake

If you have a long weekend and want to do some overnight backpacking, take a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail to Warren Lake north of Donner Summit. This 15-mile round trip hike is strenuous with an elevation gain of 2,250 feet and a loss of 2,125 feet. The trail winds through wildflower areas and provides views of Castle Peak and Carpenter Valley. Warren Lake is ringed by granite cliffs and has a few small islands, so be sure to bring a camera! More info.





Directions to trailhead: Take the Castle Peak/Boreal Ridge exit from I-80 and take the frontage road on the south side of the freeway to the Pacific Crest Trail parking area. The trail begins on the east side of the parking area. A good topographic map of the area is recommended.


Off-Take MOUs with Leading End-User Groups and $4 Million Placement

Melbourne, June 16, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Volt Resources Limited ( ASX:VRC ) ("Volt" or "Company") is pleased to announce that it has successfully signed three non-binding Memorandums of Understanding ("MOUs") with high-quality Chinese off-take partners in the high-tech lithium-ion battery market. The combined total of graphite off-take stated in the non-binding MOUs covers annual production of 100,000 tonnes per annum. The MOUs signal the intent of the parties to enter into detailed product test-work, with the objective of converting the MOUs into binding off-take agreements.



Highlights:



- Three MOUs signed with major Chinese graphite end-users totalling 100,000 tonnes per annum



- 60,000 tonnes with Optimum Nano - China's second largest lithium-ion battery producer



- 20,000 tonnes with large scale anode and electrolyte producer Huzhou Chuangya



- 20,000 tonnes with specialised anode & spherical graphite producer Shenzhen Sinuo



- MOUs are a result of many months of negotiations for the Company



- Signing large scale MOUs demonstrates unprecedented demand out of China for graphite in the lithium-ion battery market alone



- China increased spherical graphite capacity 50% in 2015 according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence but this is likely insufficient for its needs



- Discussions with North American, Japanese, South Korean and European off-take partners, including car manufacturers, remain ongoing



- Volt successfully completes placement to raise $4 million with strategic institutional investment fund



- Placement price completed at a significant premium to recent VWAPs



- Institutional investment fund is experienced in investing in the graphite sector



- Funding will be used to complete the Pre-feasibility (completion Q4 2016) and progress the Namangale Graphite Project in Tanzania



INTRODUCTION



Each of the MOU partners use graphite in the production of anodes for the lithium-ion battery market and they all have very aggressive expansion plans in order to meet ever increasing demand. Brief company profiles are appended.



MEMORANDUMS OF UNDERSTANDING



The Company is today announcing the signing of three large scale MOUs for graphite off-take with high tech producers in the lithium-ion battery and high-tech markets. The MOUs have been signed with some of the largest companies in the lithium-ion battery market, including key lithium-ion battery producers, anode manufacturers and key component suppliers to the industry.



Following the signing of the MOUs, Volt will supply concentrate to each of its MOU partners for additional verification and testwork. Volt will continue to work with its MOU partners, with the vision of signing binding off-take agreements in the near future.



In relation to the MOUs, Executive Chairman Stephen Hunt commented: "What is abundantly apparent is the incredible expansion plans that are taking place in the lithium-ion battery industry within China. Signing the MOUs is a very significant first step in the marketing process and to positioning ourselves to be at the forefront of graphite supply. The signing of these MOUs provides additional security over the future output from the Namangale Project. All three companies are at the forefront of graphite battery research and the Company intends to build our relationship for mutual benefit. These MOUs are the culmination of many months work and the Company now looks towards signing Binding Off-take Agreements."



The Company continues to pursue MOUs in North America, Japan, South Korea and Europe, to add additional supply into other markets and diversify outside of China. Volt will continue to keep the market fully informed of all material developments regarding off-take partners.



GLOBAL DEMAND AND SUPPLY FOR SPHERICAL GRAPHITE



In a recent commentary, which demonstrates the prevailing global demand and supply situation for spherical graphite, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence (5 June 2016) articulated:



"Today, 100% of natural spherical graphite is produced in China, and last year alone production expanded by nearly 50%. Increasing demand has seen prices of uncoated spherical graphite increase by 10% in the last two months.



While the country is increasing its spherical graphite capacity, there is a fear that there will not be enough quality product available for internal Chinese needs together with other emerging customers such as Tesla."



Volt is now positioning itself strategically to tap into this macro dynamic and become a major supplier of spherical graphite to the lithium-ion battery sector.



PLACEMENT



Volt Resources is also pleased to announce that it has successfully completed a placement of 40 million new ordinary shares at 10 cents ($0.10) per share to a strategic institutional investor to raise $4 million before associated costs ("Placement").



This represents a 29.6% and 12.0% premium to the 30 trading day VWAP and 15 trading day VWAP respectively.



The institutional placement will fund the further development of the Company's flagship Namangale Graphite Project in Tanzania and working capital.



The Pre-feasibility study remains on track for completion by Q4 2016.



Settlement of the Placement is expected to occur on Monday, 20th June 2016 with quotation of the new shares expected on Tuesday, 21st June 2016.



Commenting on the Placement, Executive Chairman Stephen Hunt said: "Having this institutional investor support the Company in the development of its Namangale Graphite Project is very significant. Funding of this type provides further confidence of the Project's viability and further certainty around funding over the medium to long term. By attracting this level of investment on highly favourable terms, the Company can further accelerate plans for the Namangale Graphite Project to meet the demand of the graphite sector going forward."



To view the release including figures, please visit:

http://abnnewswire.net/lnk/3J3DDGE9





About Volt Resources Ltd





Volt Resources Ltd (ASX:VRC) is a graphite exploration company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange under the ASX code VRC. The Company is focused on the exploration and development of the Jumbo Flake Namangale graphite project in Tanzania which has the potential to add to value for shareholders.

The Namangale Project is one of the largest graphite deposit in Tanzania containing a JORC compliant Inferred Resource of 179Mt @ 5.1% TGC. The project is exceptionally well located in South Eastern Tanzania being 140km from a deep-water port and 10km from sealed roads. Mineralisation at the three drilled deposits, occurs from surface and remains open in all directions. After the completion of this the recent capital raising the Company is now fully funded to complete the Pre-Feasibility Study into commencing production of high quality flake graphite targeting the rapidly expanding lithium-ion battery market. Volt has established a dominant tenement position in this extremely well located graphite rich part of Tanzania.


MMJ Appoints Pharmaceutical Professionals to Drive Expansion Strategy

Sydney, June 16, 2016 AEST (ABN Newswire) - MMJ PhytoTech Limited ( ASX:MMJ ) ("MMJ" or "the Company") is pleased to advise that it has strengthened its senior management and advisory personnel with the appointment of Stanislav Sologubov as Chief Executive Officer of Satipharm Switzerland and John Hollister as a strategic pharmaceutical consultant.



Highlights:



- Stanislav Sologubov appointed Chief Executive Officer of Satipharm Switzerland to drive European sales growth



- John Hollister appointed as consultant to provide framework on pharmaceutical manufacturing across key business divisions in Canada, Israel and Switzerland



- Licensing applications for Duncan and Lucky Lake production facilities progressing positively with Health Canada



The key appointments have been made as MMJ continues to advance its clinical development and pharmaceutical processing strategy, and are intended to support the Company's ongoing evolution towards a pharmaceutical business model.



As CEO of Satipharm Switzerland, Sologubov will be focused on accelerating sales of Satipharm's medical cannabis ("MC") consumer health products in Europe. With the mid-term goal of establishing a robust, multi-product cash flow stream to fund MMJ's clinical development and pharmaceutical processing initiatives.



Sologubov will initially focus on the rapid expansion of Satipharm Gelpell(R) Gastro-Resistant Microgel CBD Oral capsule sales. Furthermore, Satipharm has a robust pipeline of exclusive MC-based consumer health products which have been earmarked for near-term release to support the pharmaceutical-grade capsules, and the Company will provide additional product updates in due course.



Sologubov is an international sales and marketing expert with more than 15 years' experience working with global healthcare companies including Johnson & Johnson and Bausch + Lomb a robust track record in delivering sales growth and brings with him a wealth of industry knowledge and contacts that will play a critical role in building MMJ's market presence in Europe.



Hollister is a healthcare industry executive with more than 25 years' experience working for large pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies. Hollister has extensive experience in all aspects of commercialisation in the healthcare industry, having recently held the position of CEO at US-based biopharmaceutical company Nemus Bioscience Inc.



In addition, the Company is also pleased to report that the Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations ("MMPR") licensing approval for the Lucky Lake production facility is progressing.



Furthermore, pre-production and ramp-up activities are underway at the Company's Duncan Facility in preparation for the final licensing approvals, which are expected to be granted imminently. Upon receipt of all licensing approvals, the Duncan and Lucky Lake facilities will be integrated, allowing MMJ to scale up production capacity.



MMJ PhytoTech Limited's Managing Director, Andreas Gedeon, commented: "We are very pleased to be appointing two highly regarded healthcare industry professionals to assist with our transition into a leading pharmaceutical company.



We view our expansion into key European markets as a significant near-term value driver for the business, and the appointments of Stanislav and John respectively, are a core component of this strategy.



The Board is also very encouraged by the continued progress being made in respect to our MMPR licensing applications in Canada, and we expect to be in a position to provide further updates on these approvals shortly..



Also noteworthy, is that the granting of MMPR licenses has served as a significant value driver for a number of listed companies operating in the sector, and we expect the approval of our applications to be a key catalyst for MMJ in the near-term."





About MMJ Group Holdings Ltd





MMJ Group Holdings Ltd (ASX:MMJ) is a global cannabis investment company. MMJ owns a portfolio of minority investments and aims to invest across the full range of emerging cannabis-related sectors including healthcare, technology, infrastructure, logistics, processing, cultivation, equipment and retail. For MMJ's latest investor presentation and news, please visit: https://www.mmjphytotech.com.au/investors/
MEXICO CITY  Mexican drug lord Hector El Guero Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native country Wednesday after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison and was transported to another maximum-security lockup where he will await trial on two murders.

U.S. authorities handed over Palma in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, according to a statement from the Mexican Attorney Generals Office. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico confirmed Palmas transfer in a statement.

Palma had been released from federal prison in California on Friday and put into the custody of U.S. immigration officials. He was flown to Mexico City and then transported to the Altiplano prison outside the capital, the same prison that Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin El Chapo Guzman escaped from in 2015.

Palma was detained under an arrest order from the western state of Nayarit. No additional details were provided about the two murders.

Earlier, Mexican officials had said they did not know whether authorities in Mexico planned to bring new charges against Palma. If not, Palma would go free.

Attorney General Arely Gomez had said her office was reviewing whether there were any pending cases against Palma. We are in the process of carrying out an exhaustive review, checking all the prosecutors offices.

Palma was arrested in June 1995 in western Mexico and later extradited to the U.S. where he pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking charges and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The U.S. Embassy said Palma received early release for good behavior.

Some experts believed that Palma could have returned to drug trafficking if allowed to walk free, but would have faced a world that has changed since he helped Guzman found the Sinaloa cartel in the early 1990s.

He could try to get involved, but I dont know how directly, said Mexico City-based security analyst Alejandro Hope. Palma may have lost much of his money and his connections since he was arrested following a plane crash.

Once released, he could have just disappeared into Mexicos hinterlands, just like Caro Quintero, Hope noted, referring to the last major old-guard drug lord released, Rafael Caro Quintero.

Freed by apparent judicial misconduct in 2014, and currently sought on a re-arrest warrant, Caro Quintero hasnt been seen since. Given that he participated in the 1985 torture-slaying of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Kiki Camarena, Caro Quinteros release was a major embarrassment for the Mexican government.

Palmas return threatens to be another headache.

Even before he was extradited to the United States in 2007, Palma had compiled an excellent track record of beating charges in Mexico. He was acquitted, or had the charges dismissed, for accusations including multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, robbery and drug possession.

In Mexico, Palma, known as El Guero for his fair hair, served only a 2 1/2-year sentence for minor convictions including weapons violations.

Like his business associate, El Chapo, Mexico appears unable to do a very good job of keeping Palma in jail. He essentially fell into the hands of law enforcement in 1995 after his plane crashed.

And with all the trouble that Mexico is currently going to to get El Chapo Guzman extradited, Palmas return raises the unnerving possibility that some day, Guzman could be sent back.

If we extradite narcos to the United States, we should demand they not send them back, read a cartoon in the newspaper La Jornada, depicting Palmas return.

Thats not just an idle jibe, says Mike Vigil, a former head of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

There are a lot of individuals in Mexico, government officials, that are a little bit perplexed because they feel that if the United States wanted Palma, that he should have remained in prison here for a lot longer time  And then youre letting him go very quickly, Vigil said.

That is their concern, so that is going to throw a little bit of a bar into the extradition process between Mexico and the United States, which has been sporadic at best since the inception since the extradition treaty was signed between the two nations in 1978.

Vigil says Palma is likely to cause trouble if hes released. In my opinion based on 13 years in Mexico  Palmas release will translate to more drugs in the U.S. and more violence for Mexico.

The thing, the only business that El Guero Palma understands is the drug trade, hes an expert when it comes to trafficking and distributing drugs, Vigil said.

And as Vigil notes, Palma is extremely, extremely, extraordinarily vicious.

He became vicious after his wife was seduced by a rival trafficker, who had her withdraw a purported $7 million from Palmas bank accounts, then beheaded her and sent her severed head to Palma. Venezuelan trafficker Rafael Clavel then allegedly took Palmas two children, aged four and five, and threw them off a bridge.
A Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputy guards a crime scene after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Employees and witnesses wait inside a crime scene after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. The suspect in the shooting later died after a shootout with APD officers and BCSO deputies. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputies investigate a fatal shooting at the Auto Zone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputies guard a crime scene after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) A Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputy stretches crime tape after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. The suspect in the shooting was later died after a shootout with APD officers and BCSO deputies. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputies investigate a fatal shooting at the Auto Zone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Prev 1 of 6 Next

A man was shot and killed during a reported carjacking outside a South Valley auto parts store Wednesday evening, according to Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office deputies.

The victim hadnt even made it into the store when he was killed, BCSO Lt. Larry Harlan said at the scene.

The shooting happened before 7 p.m. in the parking lot of an AutoZone store in a busy shopping plaza near Coors and Rio Bravo SW.

The victims identity had not been released by late Wednesday evening, and the shooter was still at large, BCSO spokeswoman Felicia Romero said.

Deputies were searching for the suspect, who they say fled in the victims red Honda CRV or Jeep Cherokee or Patriot-style vehicle.

He was described as a Hispanic male, and was last seen wearing blue jeans, a red shirt and black cap.

Harlan said authorities believe he may have been involved in an armed robbery at a McDonalds at Coors and Quail NW after the shooting, but police didnt catch him.

Cynthia Reyes works at a nearby Pizza 9 and said she saw the suspect sitting on a bench outside the pizzeria before the shooting.

She said he had a backpack and was acting nervous, looking around and fiddling with his hands.

The shops owner, Diane Maldonado, said her niece told her the suspect then walked in front of a car and made an obscene gesture to the driver or raised his hand before continuing.

None of the employees heard gunshots.

Save
ORLANDO, Fla.  The mourners had not made it to the door of the funeral home before the tears and sobs began.

Friends and relatives of Javier Jorge-Reyes fell into each others arms in the parking lot, rocking one another as they took the next few steps to the foyer together.

It would be the first of many memorials to come for the victims of Sundays massacre at Pulse nightclub, where Jorge-Reyes, 40, was a regular.

Longtime friend Dagmaris Maldonado helped organize the viewing and service that brought hundreds of people to honor Jorge-Reyess memory before his body is flown to Puerto Rico, where he was born.

Jorge-Reyes came to Florida more than a decade ago and, most recently, was working at a Gucci store at the luxurious Mall at Millenia in Orlando. His friends say he was outgoing and passionate about life.

He would always say, Thank you for coming, as if it was his party, whenever we all went out, said Domingo Meza, 40.

Mezas husband, Elbano Chacon, said Jorge-Reyes was the kind of person who would just make your day.

We still dont understand, Meza added.

Jon Jon Clark, 7, had a special friendship with Jorge-Reyes, said his mother, Tiffany Clark. The little boy arrived at the funeral home carrying a rainbow-colored teddy bear wrapped in a red, white and blue bow. Jorge-Reyes used to cut Jon Jons hair and tried to teach him Spanish.

He wasnt just a regular type of guy, Tiffany Clark said. He was an amazing guy.

Asked whether he would miss Jorge-Reyes, Jon Jon said: Like for 20 years or 100.

And while those who loved Jorge-Reyes streamed in and out of Family Funeral Care grieving, sentries ringed the parking lot to protect them.

Those standing guard included tattooed bikers, sheriffs deputies, young members of the LGBT community and local allies, who didnt know Jorge-Reyes personally but wanted to help. They used posters and rainbow-colored sheets as shields to block the view and prevent potential disruption by anti-gay protesters.

Jessica Wright-Maynard helped arrange the human chain, as the organizers called it, after rumors circulated that members of Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, who protest at gay and military funerals, had planned to demonstrate outside Jorge-Reyess memorial service. Nearly 100 people joined the human chain. No Westboro protesters showed up.

The families deserve respect, said Diana Mitchell, 33, a college professor from nearby Polk County. This is their time to mourn.

The next few days will bring more somber remembrances, and members of the human chain plan to be present wherever a threat arises, organizers said.

Jorge Bustamante was inside the funeral home but joined the crowd on the sidewalk outside when he could no longer bear the sadness inside.

I couldnt walk up to him, said Bustamante, who previously worked with Jorge-Reyes at Gucci. This was a tough experience.

On the remembrance cards attendees carried away from the service was a note in Spanish that accompanied a stylish photograph of Jorge-Reyes.

Dont suffer for me because now I am free, the card said. God wants me now. He has placed me in liberty.
WASHINGTON  Hillary Clinton faces a strategic choice. She can concentrate on closing off Donald Trumps potential openings with the white working class. Or she can build large leads among more affluent voters, many of whom are moderate and see Trump as dangerous, extreme and temperamentally unfit.

She will necessarily do some of both  she needs a decent share of the blue-collar vote to hold key Midwestern states  and she will have to rally what have been core Democratic constituencies: younger voters, who eluded her during the primaries, African-Americans and Latinos. But the direction of her campaign and her selection of a running mate will depend in significant part on the class tilt of her strategy.

For the moment, however, her decisions are easy compared with those confronting Republicans. Trumps stubborn refusal to transition away from his persona during the primaries has put the partys leaders in an impossible position.

They can try to prop up their presumptive nominee in an effort to avert a quick collapse that could endanger their entire party in November. Or they can distance themselves from him now in the hope of disentangling their ticket from what is beginning to look like an epic disaster.

But this is a classic Catch-22: The very process of pulling back from Trump further weakens him, making the calamity the party fears even more likely. And Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says Republican candidates for the House and Senate would risk large defections from their base if they are seen as sabotaging Trump.

This is why House Speaker Paul Ryan ended up in the anomalous position of reiterating his support for Trump even as he was condemning the racism of his candidates attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Endorsing Trump means always having to say youre sorry.

Clinton set up what was by far the best period of her campaign with a sweeping assault on Trump to which he offered only a feeble reply, while drawing little defense from his own party. Clintons primary victories last week opened the way for endorsements from Obama and Elizabeth Warren even as Bernie Sanders signaled he understood that his campaign was nearing its end.

Yet Sanders comments after a White House meeting with Obama pointed to the choice Clinton confronts.

Sanders promised to work as hard as I can to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States. But he also pledged to continue to oppose the drift which currently exists toward an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires exercise enormous power over our political, economic and media life. Sanders enthusiasm for the first objective will depend in part on Clintons enthusiasm for the second.

Still, theres a lot to be said for the upscale strategy. Clintons forceful emphasis on Trumps character and Vice President Joe Bidens talk of his authoritarianism will resonate in better-off suburbs and urban precincts.

I do think his temperament and divisiveness are going to discredit him with voters who might otherwise have been available to a Republican nominee among the white college educated, said David Axelrod, formerly Obamas senior adviser. And given a Democratic leaning in the electorate reflected in Obamas 5 million vote margin from 2012, Trump is unlikely to gain enough in the white working class to offset his losses among the well-to-do. He cant trade votes and win, Axelrod said.

Moreover, Greenberg sees a focus on Trumps personal volatility as having helpful ricochet effects with other constituencies. To the extent that Trump is forced by the party to tone down his rhetoric  just watch his flat, Teleprompter-driven address from last Tuesday  he may start losing some of his magic with working-class voters.

And Greenberg argues that Clinton knows she has to offer a strong economic message with a populist feel to win over the millennial voters who flocked to Sanders. Appeals aimed their way will simultaneously help earn Sanders blessing and pick up the white working-class votes shell need.

The fact that the strategic playing field now favors Clinton points to how urgent it is for Trump to turn the campaign narrative to her weaknesses, which he says hell do this week.

His challenge is that while most of the negative information about Clinton is already well-known, each day seems to bring new revelations about Trumps past business practices and personal habits. And out-of-control attacks on Clinton will only provoke more questions about Trumps temperament.

For the first time all year, being Hillary Clinton is easier than being Donald Trump.

Dionnes columns, including those not published in the Journal, can be read at abqjournal.com/opinion  look for the syndicated columnist link. Copyright, Washington Post Writers Group; e-mail: ejdionne@washpost.com.
A woman who police say was driving drunk in a dramatic crash that injured her 2-year-old child has gotten a temporary reprieve.

Prosecutors dropped child endangerment charges against Erica Tamra Garcia, 29, this week in connection with a crash last month that left the toddler in critical condition.

District Attorney Office spokesman Phil Sisneros said prosecutors hadnt received complete police reports, medical records and scientific results to meet the DAs interpretation of court deadlines set by the state. The deadlines were implemented to clear a backlog of cases in District Court.

Albuquerque police spokeswoman Celina Espinoza said Wednesday that lab work on Garcias blood, taken at the hospital after the crash, is still being processed and paperwork in the crash report is complicated and taking extra time to complete.

Both offices said they are working together to pursue the case, and Sisneros said prosecutors plan to refile charges when the complete file is available.

Until then, Garcia remains in jail on probation violation charges.

She had been sentenced to three years probation after pleading guilty to a charge of child abuse not resulting in great bodily harm or death when she left a 7-month-old child in a hot car in June 2013.

Police said in a criminal complaint that she had left the baby in the car with its father so she could get to an appointment for a mandatory drug test. The father, Juan Flores, told police he thought the baby was with Garcia. He was also charged in the case.

The baby was found in critical condition, according to initial reports.

Six months after the hot car incident, Garcia was charged with and pleaded guilty to possessing drugs. She was also sentenced to probation in that case.

On May 21, police said she was intoxicated when she crashed her car on Mountain Road near the Interstate 25 overpass. They reported that about 10 a.m. the car swerved into oncoming traffic, hit a curb and then drove up a support wire for a large utility pole.

When it was about 15 feet in the air on the wire, the car flipped over. The child was ejected from the vehicle and had been listed in critical condition.

Albuquerque police initially treated the case as a traffic fatality, but Espinoza said Wednesday that the child is recovering.

Garcia was taken to a hospital for stitches to her head. Police said in a criminal complaint that while under the influence of pain medication at the hospital she told officers she had 30 beers before she drove. She was initially charged with a child endangerment.

The states Children Youth and Families Department spokesman said confidentiality laws prevent him from confirming if workers had contact with Garcia during either of the cases or if the department has worked with her.
SANTA FE  Theres a new player on New Mexicos political scene: an organization started by a ranch-owning oil-and-gas lawyer that gave nearly $50,000 last month to various Republican state political committees.

The New Mexico Habitat Conservation Initiative was formed recently by Dan C. Perry, a lawyer who relocated from Texas to Santa Fe and owns Trout Stalker Ranch, a fly-fishing and hunting operation just south of Chama along the Rio Chama and Rio Chamita.

He was active in the successful effort by ranchers and others during the 2015 legislative session to get a bill passed, and signed by Gov. Susana Martinez, that bars the public from walking or wading in streams that run through private property without written permission.

It was narrowly approved  passing the House by just a single vote  and Perry wants to make sure it doesnt get undone in the Legislature.

We want to maintain that law. Thats one reason we set up the initiative, he told the Journal on Wednesday.

Protecting private property rights and promoting conservation stewardship will be major focuses of the Habitat Conservation Initiative, he said.

There is no other specific legislation on the horizon that the group is interested in, but were prepared to address issues if they come up, said lawyer Marco Gonzales, the lobbyist for Trout Stalker Ranch.

Habitat Conservation Initiative made its first political contributions in May, giving $10,800 to each of four Republican-affiliated political action committees and $5,000 to the campaign of House Majority Leader Nate Gentry, R-Albuquerque, who is spearheading the effort to get Republicans elected in November and keep the GOPs hold on the House.

The amounts were the maximum allowable for the 2016 election cycle.

The organization is currently registered with the Secretary of States Office as a nonprofit corporation, and is filing with the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status, which would allow it to engage in some political activity.

Although its first round of contributions went to Republicans, the group also intends to contribute to Democrats, according to Perry and Gonzales.

We want to support those legislators who support us, Perry said. No House Democrats voted for the 2015 legislation, but it was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Richard Martinez of Espanola, and 15 Senate Democrats voted for it.

The bills backers argued that allowing public access to streams on private property could disturb or destroy riparian habitat improvements that landowners had made significant investments in. Opponents objected that the bill was vague and perhaps unconstitutional, that courts should decide the critical question of whether streambeds are public, and that the bill was part of a broader assault on public resources.

Perry  who also made modest personal contributions this year to Democratic candidates for district attorney and state representative in Santa Fe-area races  represents mineral owners in negotiating their oil, gas and uranium leases, and then audits royalty payments and tracks the performance of the lease covenants.
A lawsuit filed in response to an Albuquerque police shooting that was cited by the Department of Justice can continue after the New Mexico Court of Appeals reversed a district court judges decision to dismiss the case.

The ruling means the lawsuit filed by Mickey Owings children will head back to state district court. City Attorney Jessica Hernandez said the city hasnt decided if it will appeal the decision or ask the judge to dismiss the case for other reasons.

Albuquerque police officer Kevin Sanchez in 2010 shot Owings in a Wal-Mart parking lot in west Albuquerque. Police were investigating a suspected stolen vehicle when Owings, 26, parked his car right next to the stolen car and a passenger got out and started getting into the stolen car.

Sanchez, a plainclothes detective, and officers in unmarked police cars surrounded Owings, who was unarmed. He backed into a police vehicle and then crashed into parked cars to try to escape when he was shot.

He lost consciousness and crashed the vehicle after the shooting and died at the scene.

The DOJ in April 2014 letter announced Albuquerque police had a pattern of excessive force that included police shootings. The letter said in many cases, including the Owings incident, the officers own recklessness led to unlawful shootings.

Owings did not pose a threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or anyone else; he was driving straight into unoccupied, parked cars when he was shot. This damage to property, as serious as it was, did not justify taking Owings life, the DOJ wrote.

The DOJs letter brought to light details of the shooting police had never released, including the fact that there was surveillance video of the incident, said Shannon Kennedy, an Albuquerque attorney representing the children.

The children, only identified by their initials, filed a lawsuit against the city in 2014 seeking damages for loss of consortium.

The city filed a motion to dismiss, citing four reasons the plaintiffs didnt comply with Tort Claims Act rules. Second Judicial District Judge Denise Barela-Shepherd dismissed the complaint based on one of those reasons. New Mexico Court of Appeals Court Judge Michael Bustamante wrote in the opinion that the district court judge erred when she dismissed the complaint because the children did not suffer a battery.

Kennedy said the city is continuing to fight DOJs findings by trying to get the lawsuit thrown out.

The city is still turning their backs on people who were harmed by the excessive use of force by officers, she said.

Hernandez said a settlement agreement that aims to address the DOJ findings allowed the city to move forward with reforms without admitting to guilt in individual cases outlined by the Justice Department. She said all lawsuits brought against the city are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

The city made the decision to move forward with reforms rather than to litigate whether or not to reform, she said.

An Albuquerque police spokeswoman said an internal affairs investigation was completed in 2013 and no discipline was passed down.
Former Albuquerque resident Lois Duncan, a prolific writer of young adult suspense novels whose most personally written book detailed the unsolved homicide of her own daughter, has died. She was 82.

Duncans husband, Don Arquette, reported her death Wednesday to her followers on Facebook, saying he found her collapsed that morning in the kitchen of their home in Sarasota, Fla.

Duncan, the daughter of famed photographers Joseph and Lois Steinmetz, was born in Sarasota and began her writing career at age 13 when her first story was published in a national magazine. Altogether, 48 of her books have been published, ranging from Hotel for Dogs for children to I Know What You Did Last Summer, a suspense novel for young adults. Many of her novels were turned into films.

But the book she said was her most important was Who Killed My Daughter?  the story of her search for the truth behind the shooting death of her youngest child, Kaitlyn Arquette, 18, who was shot twice in the head as she drove home on Lomas NE the night of July 16, 1989.

Albuquerque police dubbed the shooting a random drive-by, but Duncan never stopped believing that the case was botched and more nefarious motives for the death were to blame.

Duncan had moved to Albuquerque in 1962, where she taught at the University of New Mexicos journalism department, later returning to Florida after her daughters death.

Duncan is survived by her husband, Don; daughters Robin Arquette Burkin and Kerry Arquette; and sons Brett Arquette and Donnie Arquette.
Employees and witnesses wait inside a crime scene after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. The suspect in the shooting later died after a shootout with APD officers and BCSO deputies. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) A Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputy stretches crime tape after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. The suspect in the shooting later died after a shootout with APD officers and BCSO deputies. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) A bullet struck an Albuquerque Police Department officer's vest in a shootout with a homicide suspect early Thursday morning. (Courtesy of APD) Albuquerque police investigate the scene of a shooting near Central and Unser SW early Thursday morning. (Robert Browman/Journal) Albuquerque Police Department officers and Bernalillo County Sheriff deputies investigate a fail officer-involved shooting at Central and Victory SW. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Journal) Albuquerque Police Department officers and Bernalillo County Sheriff deputies Thursday morning investigate a fatal officer-involved shooting at Central and Victory SW. The red Jeep involved in a fatal carjacking incident near Rio Bravo and Isleta was stopped by spike belts. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/JOURNAL) Albuquerque police investigate the scene of a shooting near Central and Unser SW early Thursday morning. (Robert Browman/Journal) A Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputy guards a crime scene after a fatal shooting at the AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office deputies investigate a fatal shooting at the Auto Zone near Coors and Rio Bravo SW Wednesday evening. (Robert Browman/Albuquerque Journal) Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office deputies investigate the scene of an officer-involved shooting on Central near Unser on Thursday morning. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Journal) Prev 1 of 10 Next

It began with the carjacking and shooting death of a 64-year-old man outside an auto parts store near Coors and Rio Bravo and ended several hours later with the suspect dead after a gunfight with police and sheriffs deputies around midnight Wednesday.

In between, there was a chase down West Central in which officers used a spike belt to disable the suspects car. He fired at least one shot at officers, police said.

Authorities say an Albuquerque Police Department detective narrowly escaped the gunfire with his life  his bulletproof vest deflected a bullet that spokesman Tanner Tixier said would likely have pierced the officers heart.

The body armor did save his life, and we are very grateful that hes in good condition at this point, Bernalillo County Sheriff Manuel Gonzales said at a news conference at the crime scene at 2:30 a.m. Thursday.

As the sun rose Thursday morning on the crime scene, which sprawled along old Route 66 from Unser to 90th, investigators methodically combed through the evidence.

The focus of the scene was a charred red Jeep Patriot riddled with bullet holes, its back window blown out. Lying on the street next to the drivers side door was the suspects body, face up.

Gonzales did not identify the man, but said he was the suspect who shot and killed a man in the parking lot of AutoZone near Coors and Rio Bravo around 7 p.m. Wednesday, then took off with the victims car, a red Jeep Patriot.

Victim identified

The man killed at the auto parts store, who a deputy at the scene said didnt even make it inside, was identified as 64-year-old Santiago Romero-Amaya. Gonzales said he appeared to have been chosen at random.

An address for Romero-Amaya found in public records shows that he lived within three miles of the AutoZone store.

After the carjacking, deputies immediately released a description of the suspect, saying he was a younger Hispanic male last seen wearing a red shirt and black hat. Witnesses said that, before the carjacking, he had appeared nervous, pacing in front of a pizza shop and frequently looking around.

At about midnight, several hours after the carjacking, Albuquerque police spotted the stolen red Jeep Patriot near Unser and Central. Gonzales said officers and deputies began chasing the suspect, and used a spike strip to deflate one of the Jeeps tires. They then did a maneuver near Central and Victory that spun the car back toward officers.

Gonzales said the suspect opened fire on officers and deputies, who fired back. At some point after the spike strip was deployed, the Jeep caught on fire.

A BCSO deputy tried to render aid to the victim, but he was pronounced dead at the scene, Gonzales said.

Deputies have not said exactly how the suspect died, but Gonzales said he would believe the suspects body had gunshot wounds.

Authorities have not said how many law enforcement officers opened fire, or which agencies they were from.

The APD detective whose vest was struck by the bullet was released from the hospital early Thursday with a large bruise, Tixier said.

He said a second officer was also injured during the chase. An officer who threw out a spike belt to try to stop the suspect tore his Achilles tendon and was also taken to the hospital. He was also released Thursday morning, Tixier said.
Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnsons presidential campaign is going prime time.

CNN announced this week that Johnson and his running mate, Bill Weld, will participate in a town hall meeting on the national network on Wednesday, June 22 at 9 p.m.

The format, aired live and hosted by Chris Cuomo, will allow voters to ask questions of Johnson and Weld, a former Massachutsetts governor.

Johnson, who is mounting his second bid for president, has long complained about a lack of media coverage for his campaigns. He contends more extensive coverage would give him a better chance to reach a 15 percent polling threshold required for inclusion in the presidential debates.

A national FOX poll earlier this month showed Johnson with 12 percent support, a record high for him.
FARMINGTON  A Navajo Nation Council standing committee has set July 13 as the deadline for hiring a chief of police for the Navajo Police Department.

Delegate Edmund Yazzie, who serves as the Law and Order Committee chairman, said today that the committee approved a bill that directs tribal President Russell Begaye and Jesse Delmar, executive director of the Division of Public Safety, to promptly hire a police chief within 30 days.

Committee members approved the bill 4-0 on Monday, agreeing it is a tool to help the executive branch fill the vacancy, said Yazzie, who sponsored the bill.

Delegate Raymond Smith, the committee vice chair, signed the resolution today.

We do need a chief of police. Its imperative that we get one, Smith said.

It has been about 10 years since a chief of police supervised the department, Yazzie said.

Calls to name a police chief gained momentum after the March 2015 fatal shooting of Navajo police officer Alex Yazzie and the kidnapping and death of 11-year-old Ashlynne Mike last month, said Edmund Yazzie.

We heard from the officers there was no solid direction in how to handle that, he said about the Amber Alert that was issued hours after Mikes disappearance.

When asked why it has taken months for the committee, which oversees the division, to address the police chief issue, Yazzie said the previous committee talked about the vacancy, but the former division executive director did not meet with committee members.

Yazzie said he will keep in contact with Delmar about progress to fill the position.

Delmar was unavailable for comment today because he is out of the office until Friday, according to his office in Window Rock, Ariz.

Both Yazzie and Smith said the executive director did not oppose the legislation, and a signed copy will be submitted to his office.

Yazzie added he will request a meeting to discuss the legislation between the committee and President Begaye.

A spokesman for the Office of the President and Vice President did not respond to a request for comment.

Noel Lyn Smith covers the Navajo Nation for The Daily Times. She can be reached at 505-564-4636.



2016 The Daily Times (Farmington, N.M.)

Visit The Daily Times (Farmington, N.M.) at www.daily-times.com

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ORLANDO, Fla.  Embracing grieving Orlando families and appealing anew for national action, President Barack Obama claimed a threat to all Americans security Thursday as a strong reason to tighten U.S. gun laws. Counterterror campaigns overseas, he declared, can never prevent all lone wolf attacks like the one that killed 49 people in Orlando.

Speaking at a makeshift memorial to the victims, Obama said the massacre at a gay nightclub was evidence that different steps are needed to limit the damage a deranged person set on committing violence can do. He cheered on Democrats push for new gun control measures, including a new ban on assault weapons and stricter background checks.

Although he showed little hope the measures would find much support among most opponents, Obama seemed to be aiming for other lawmakers, perhaps Republican hawks eager to get behind counterterror campaigns but steadfastly opposed to gun restrictions.

Obama arrived as Orlando began the next stage of its grief  funerals all over town. A visitation for one victim, Javier Jorge-Reyes, on Wednesday night turned out a crowd of friends, family, drag queens and motorcyclists to pay their respects.

Were just here to spread love and joy and try to put an end to all the hate, said Ezekiel Davis  or, as hes known to some, Sister Anesthesia Beaverhausen. Obama could not miss other signs of a community coming together in tragedy. Hundreds of people gathered in 95-degree heat outside the Amway Center stadium where he met with families.

Brittany Woodrough came to honor her close friend, 19-year-old Jason Benjamin Josaphat.

I just pray for his family and I cant believe this happened, she said. Seeing President Obama here makes it real.

Orlandos calls for solidarity stood in contrast to the sharp-edged political debate in Washington and the presidential campaign trail that continued during Obamas visit.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican and frequent Obama critic, accused the president of being directly responsible for the shooting because, he said, Obama had allowed the growth of the Islamic State group on his watch. McCain quickly walked back those comments with a written statement saying he had misspoken and was referring to Obamas national security decisions, not the president himself.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, had made calls during the attack saying he was an IS supporter. But CIA Director John Brennan said Thursday the agency has found no connection between the gunman and any foreign terrorist organization.

In Orlando, Obama noted the need for strong efforts to fight terrorists before they can get to America, but he said thats not enough.

Its going to take more than just our military, he said. We will not be able to stop every tragedy. We cant wipe away hatred and evil from every heart in this world, but we can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives.

We can reduce the impact of a terrorist attack if were smart, he said, a reference to a ban on assault-type weapons that can kill dozens of people in moments. Mateen was armed with a Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle.

Obama made his remarks in downtown Orlando during an afternoon visit to express condolences to this grieving city. The president spent roughly two hours talking privately with victims families and survivors of the attack in a gay dance club. He told them he was inspired by their courage and felt their pain at the loss of so many young lives.

Our hearts are broken, too, he said.

Elsewhere in the city and in Washington, investigators were working to reconstruct the movements of the 29-year-old shooter before he opened fire at the Pulse dance club, including what his wife may have known about the attack. The Senate Homeland Security Committees chairman sent a letter to Facebook asking for help with messages denouncing the filthy ways of the west left on Facebook accounts believed to be associated with Mateen before and during the attack.

In his remarks, Obama also expressed solidarity with gays and lesbians who were targeted at the nightclub.

This was an attack on the LGBT community. Americans were targeted because were a country that has learned to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or who you love, Obama said. And hatred toward people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of whats best in us.

There were some signs of political unity: Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican frequently at odds with Obama, greeted him on the airport tarmac. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, also a Republican, traveled with Obama from Washington, along with Rep. Corrine Brown, a Democrat who represents parts of the city. Biden and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., joined Obama on the tarmac.

But there was no bipartisan unity on the need for new gun legislation. As the Democratic push continued, including a 15-hour filibuster from Sen. Chris Murphy, whose state of Connecticut shouldered the killing of 20 children in Newtown in 2012, Republicans said their response would focused on the threat posed by the Islamic State group.

As a result, the Senate faced the prospect of taking votes beginning next Monday on dueling Democratic and GOP legislation. A Democratic bill would keep people on a government terrorism watch list or other suspected terrorists from buying guns. A Republican version would allow the government to delay a gun sale to a suspected terrorist for 72 hours but require prosecutors to go to court to show probable cause to block the sale permanently.

Both bills were expected to fail.

I truly hope senators rise to the moment and do the right thing, Obama said. Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense.

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Hennessey reported from Washington. Kevin Freking and Joshua Replogle contributed to this report.

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Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP and Kathleen Hennessey at http://twitter.com/khennessey
VERMEJO PARK RANCH  With towering, snow-draped mountains scratching the sky at nearly 13,000 feet framing one end of a valley and rolling green meadows serving as a backdrop at the other, Casa Grande was unveiled Wednesday and opened for business following a four-year, multi-million-dollar renovation project.

The centerpiece of Ted Turners 590,000-acre ranch, Casa Grande  created as a mansion in the early 1900s  will serve as upscale guest quarters for those who wish to commune with nature on a grand scale.

The costs are on something of a grand scale, as well, as room rates for two at Casa Grande start at $850 (including all meals) per night, although there are other, less expensive rooms available at the Vermejo.

The opening of the 25,000-square-foot Casa Grande coincides with last years creation of Ted Turner Expeditions as the media mogul has thrown open his three New Mexico ranches, covering about one million acres  not to mention his other properties across the country  to sportsmen, adventurers and ecotourists.

Casa Grande is a national treasure set amidst the national treasure that is Americas West, Turner said. By opening this mansion to global travelers, I invite visitors to explore our American heritage and assist in its preservation.

Seven bedrooms are sprinkled across the opulent, stone-faced mansion, built by Chicago businessman and former Vermejo Park owner William H. Bartlett. The structure also houses a billiards room, library, plant-filled atrium and a ballroom complete with a grand piano.

Of course, this project would not have been possible without the support of Ted Turner and his vision for the ranches, Gus Holm, ranch manager, said at Vermejo Park. Weve not only preserved a piece of the Vermejo with the Casa Grande, but also sustained the Vermejo going into the future.

At this point in his life, Turner said, it was time to start letting other people enjoy some of what hes been fortunate to own.

I have too many places to enjoy them all myself, he said to reporters here. So thats the reason Im going to rent them out a little bit so they can be utilized. This has really been a wonderful experience and it gives me something to live for beside cable television.

Turner, founder of cable television stations CNN, TBS and TNT, bought the Vermejo ranch in 1996, but the 106-year-old Casa Grande was in need of modernization. It was built between 1907 and 1909 by prominent architect Joseph Lyman Sisbee, a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright.

The renovation began four years ago at the insistence of Mark Kossler, general manager of Turner Ranches, Holm said.

Mark was the person who had the vision and the drive to start this project, he said. We would not all be standing here in front of this incredible building, celebrating its return to its former glory, without Mark Kossler.

The plan was to modernize the building while also retaining its original Victorian charm in order to make it a special experience for anyone using it, said Jeff Mokotoff, chief administrative officer of Turner Enterprises.

During Teds ownership of Vermejo, Casa Grande had been used by Ted, his family and guests as a private getaway, and was not generally open to the public, he said. But we realized to appeal to the ecotourism guest that we were seeking to attract, we wanted to have a property that would act as a crown jewel for our overarching brand.

The ranch has long served as a playground for the wealthy. For instance, in the 1920s, notable luminaries such as Cecil B. deMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and even President Herbert Hoover each paid an annual $1,000 fee for the rights to use the ranch to hunt and fish.

The Great Depression signaled the end of that enterprise and it passed through various owners until 1960 when Casa Grande got its first facelift. The Pennzoil Co. soon bought the property, holding it until selling it to Turner for a reported $80 million. (The New Mexico state government had passed on buying Vermejo Park in the 1970s for $26 million).

With more than 50 years since its last renovation, Casa Grande needed significant work, particularly in the area of heating and cooling, electrical and plumbing.

So, when Casa Grande was undergoing restoration and renovation for Ted and his family, Ted agreed to allow us to bring Casa Grande into our greater vision of ecotourism on Teds properties, Mokotoff said.

So now the lineup of activities at Vermejo includes ecotours that can be as short as three hours or many, many hours as visitors keep on the lookout for bobcats, black bears, wild turkeys, raptors, elk, feral horses and, of course, bison, of which some 1,700 head roam on the ranch. The ecotours also can encounter desolate homesteads, Native American ruins and 100-year-old charcoal kilns that still carry the burning odor.

Theres mountain biking, not only on the 2,000 miles of dirt roads that crisscross the ranch, but also on rugged trails through the hills and mountains. Hiking is plentiful and challenging, with numerous high-country peaks and fish-stocked lakes. Skeet and clay pigeon shooting both enthrall visitors, as does the archery range with targets shaped like animals.

Mokotoff tried to put the immensity of Turners holdings in New Mexico and the West into some kind of perspective.

Over the course of the last two decades, Ted has acquired over two million acres of land in the western United States, he said. Two million acres is more than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. And those two states have more than two million people living in their borders. We have a couple of hundred people living in there.

So visiting the Vermejo is akin to having a private national park.

The smallest of Teds three ranches in New Mexico is 150,000 acres, which is the same size as Zion, he said. Zion sees approximately 3.5 million visitors a year. Vermejo will see a couple of thousand, with a nearly certain chance of seeing more wildlife than you would have at the very best national parks. Ted wishes to share his complete love of nature, wildlife and discovery in order to help all generations develop a keen appreciation and awareness of our earth and what it has to offer. And, just as importantly, a shared responsibility for the well-being of our environment.

It comes down to conservation and being stewards of the land, Holm said.

Our mission statement is to manage Turner land in an economically sustainable and environmentally sensible manner with an emphasis on native species and habitat, he said. Many people believe this statement is contradictory. One cant be done without negative impact on the other. But we at Team Turner view this mission statement as complementary and interconnected. Sort of a yin and yang, for everything must be in balance.
WASHINGTON  Republican Sen. John McCain said Thursday that President Barack Obama is directly responsible for the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, because of the rise of the Islamic State group on the presidents watch. But he later issued a statement saying that he misspoke.

I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the president himself, McCain said in his statement, issued as his initial comments were drawing heated criticism from Democrats.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, spoke to reporters in the Capitol Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sundays attack and some of the survivors.

Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaida went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq, a visibly angry McCain said as the Senate debated a spending bill.

So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies, McCain said.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old Muslim born in New York made calls during the attack saying he was a supporter of the Islamic State. But he also spoke about an affiliate of al-Qaida and Hezbollah, both of which are IS enemies.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting U.S. enemies ahead of Americans. Trump also has suggested that Obama himself might sympathize with radical elements.

Democrats criticized Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves from his remarks.

McCain is seeking a sixth Senate term from Arizona and is locked in a tight race. He has a Republican primary on Aug. 30  the day after his 80th birthday  and a likely general election matchup against three-term Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick.

Questioned on his startling assertion, McCain initially repeated it: Directly responsible. Because he pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked and there would be attacks on the United States of America. Its a matter of record, so he is directly responsible.

However, about 90 minutes later, McCain issued his statement saying he misspoke, though his statement continued to lay blame for the attack on the presidents policies  just not on the president himself.

As I have said, President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL. I and others have long warned that the failure of the presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.

Democrats quickly pounced on McCains criticism.

Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said McCains unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump.
A new industrial park served by rail is proposed for a 1,400-acre site west of Los Lunas.

The project developer, Rio Real Estate Investment Opportunities, on Thursday said it is asking Los Lunas to annex the property into the village and have it rezoned special use to permit the creation of a business and industrial complex.

Central New Mexico Rail Park is designed for large land users, such as third-party logistics operations, as well as sites for manufacturing, warehouse and distribution opportunities, said Lawrence Rael, a Rio Real Estate partner.

The undeveloped chunk of land is about four miles west of Los Lunas on the north side of N.M. 6. The property, which wraps around the south and west sides of an existing quarry operation, stretches from the intersection of the highway and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks west to Quintana Road.

Rael said development of the site would be a key asset in regional efforts to diversify the economy.

A number of businesses looking to invest and set up operations have indicated they need access to rail services, so the location of this new industrial park very much fulfills that requirement, said Rael, adding that the company has already purchased 400 acres from property owners to serve the projected first phase of tenants.

Rael declined to divulge the sales price, but said the partners have options to draw down additional chunks of land as new tenants come on line.

He said the company has hosted several visits for prospective tenants, who will be responsible for their own site development, although Rio will pay for infrastructure improvements, such as building roads and utilities.

The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company is on board to provide direct service to the 1,400-acre rail park.

BNSF Railway is proud to support this new rail-served industrial development in New Mexico, said Keary Walls, railway general manager of the southwest division.

This new facility will be located on a BNSF main line known as the Glorieta subdivision, which offers access to the companys route linking the ocean ports of southern California to Chicago, said Walls.
The Mexican man police suspect of fatally shooting his wife and four daughters in their Roswell home is headed back to the U.S. after the launch of formal extradition proceedings, officials said Thursday.

Juan David Villegas-Hernandez was initially held by Sonora state police on Sunday  a day after police in Roswell said the 34-year-old shot and killed his wife, Cynthia Villegas, and their daughters  ages 14, 11, 7 and 3.

Roswell police waited to confirm the identity of the man in Mexican police custody as initial reports indicated he had attempted suicide and was in a hospital. They announced on Monday that they could confirm Villegas-Hernandez, 34, was in Mexican police custody.

On Tuesday, Gov. Susana Martinez met with relatives of the victims and said her office would work with federal officials and authorities in Mexico for the quick extradition of Villegas-Hernandez.

But on Thursday, state Attorney General Hector Balderas, whose office is in charge of all extraditions to the sate, said Villegas-Hernandez had just been taken into the official custody of Interpol for formal extradition proceedings.

I am thankful for the hard work of our state, federal, and international partners, and Villegas-Hernandez is now in the custody of Interpol in Hermosillo. He is being processed and will then be transferred to Mexico City pending extradition, Balderas said in a statement.

Villegas-Hernandez returns to face grand jury indictments on five counts of first-degree murder for the shooting deaths of his wife, 34, and the four girls, Yamilen, 14, Cynthia Janet, 11, Abby, 7, and Ida, 3. A grand jury also indicted him on four counts of intentional abuse of a child resulting in death for each child, said Roswell police spokesman Todd Wildermuth.

Cynthia Villegas had recently asked for a divorce, police have said.

Wildermuth said his department has handed off extradition effort to the state AGs Office.

Weve put it in their hands, he said.

Authorities have said Villegas-Hernandez has dual citizenship in the United States and Mexico, according to the Associated Press, so he must be extradited and cannot be deported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Judge Jed Rakoff told attendees at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' Annual Global Fraud Conference in Las Vegas that prosecutors are falling short on prosecuting fraud.

I am regretfully increasingly convinced that the federal government and the federal system of justice has somewhat retrogressed over the past couple of decades in its prosecution of fraud, or at least in its prosecution of fraud when its perpetrated by people at the highest levels of the financial establishment, said Rakoff, who received the Cressey Award from the ACFE. And I have to further add that the federal courts have played a role in this regard in erecting unnecessary barriers to the successful prosecution of fraud at these levels.

He pointed to the wave of fraud prosecutions in past decades and contrasted them to the reluctance of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to pursue mortgage fraud cases in the wake of the financial crisis.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the SEC, at the impetus of the then director of enforcement Stanley Sporkin, expanded the scope of securities fraud prosecutions to reach high-level corporate executives, big-firm accountants and so-called white-shoe attorneys who had perpetrated substantial fraud, Rakoff said during a keynote address Monday. In turn, the U.S. Attorneys Office, under the leadership of Robert Morgenthau in the Southern District of New York in the 1960s, brought criminal prosecution against these individuals. And finally the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, under the aegis of many judges, but particularly the very famous judge Henry Friendly, proved receptive to affirming these prosecutions and overcoming any legal barriers to their effectiveness.

He recalled an accounting fraud case during the 1960s that he helped prosecute in which they were able to convict the CEO, the companys general counsel, outside auditors and many others. We never thought of going after the company, said Rakoff. That wasnt what we needed to do. We needed to go after the people who actually personally committed the fraud.

However, many prosecutors now are hesitant to pursue the individuals who perpetrated mortgage fraud, interpreting statutes in a narrow way that gives them higher hurdles to overcome before tackling a case. The Justice Department may have been discouraged by an unfavorable decision in a 2008 case involving midlevel executives at the failed investment bank Bear Stearns, one of the early casualties of the financial crisis.

Not every case winds up being decided on the merits, said Rakoff. But historically the government has won the great majority of criminal cases it has brought, including white collar cases. To let a single defeat deter the government from prosecuting what appears to many as clear cases of high-level fraud seems irrational, and maybe its just possible that this provided a handy excuse for declining prosecution of cases in which the government had done so much to help create the conditions that led to the fraud.

Rakoff acknowledged that the courts too have made it increasingly difficult to prosecute fraud cases. The common theme of many of these decisions is to impose impediments to actions against fraud that are nowhere to be found in the language of the anti-fraud statutes themselves, he pointed out. This is particularly striking when one remembers that for at least 50 years, the accepted mode of statutory construction has been that the statutory language controls, and if that language is unambiguous, nothing more is required. Yet in the cases Im referring to, the federal courts have read one or another of the anti-fraud statutes as imposing requirements that are nowhere to be found in the statutory language, and the effect has been to saddle prosecutors and litigants with burdens difficult to meet.
Highlights of some of our favorite tax-related blogs from the past week.

Tragedy

Dont Mess With Taxes: Americans, and particularly the families who suffered incomprehensible loss in the horrific mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, are still trying to cope with the tragedy. Help for affected families: Not only must these people work through the personal loss and pain, many also will face practical challenges... For instance, scammers wholl try to profit.

What to believe

Mauled Again: No such thing as a free lunch, of course. Is there such thing as a free health care tax subsidy?

Tax Vox: Turns out you cant believe the right or the left  especially on this balloting year  when it comes to federal taxes. A look at a new Congressional Budget Office report.

H&R Block: Blogger Jillian Yakominich of The Tax Institute reminds you about what to remind clients about concerning buying or selling a house.

TurboTax: Suddenly itll be fall and suddenly college students will have to head back to campus broke. What they can do on the long break to keep a passing grade on their finances (peek at the first tip: OK, Im not your dad, but ).

Complex guilts

Taxable Talk: ClubFed keeps its business brisk with yet another ID thief.

TaxProf: Does a criminal conviction for insider trading absolutely, positively rule out getting a $17 million income tax credit?

The Income Tax School: Tax Code on the left, soup spoon on the right: Business Etiquette for Tax Preparers looks at the commonsense points of politeness that help solidify your relationship-based business.

Big questions

Procedurally Taxing: First-time guest blogger and Villanova Professor Joy Mullane brings a two-part post on the recent 11th circuit case Peterson v. Commissioner, which concerns cosmetics powerhouse Mary Kays payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to a new retiree.

Tax Policy: Part one of two on whether Basic Income Guarantees, now gaining global traction (and sometimes not, if youre talking about Switzerland), might work.

BNA blogs: The recent Bloomberg BNA Survey of State Tax Departments posed a new question on an ever-changing topic: nexus for corporate income tax. The bigger question: Which states are protecting what activities and where does that guidance come from?
My son Dylan handed me his Letter to the Editor assignment. I had asked him to write a letter to a publication expressing an opinion on something he was passionate about. I thought he would write about Why Kids Should Play Video Games Every Day. What he wrote took me by surprise. We have talked about ADHD a lot together, so I know he worries that people think hes a bad person. He sometimes worries that I think hes a bad person.

When I read his letter, I cried. I asked him if he wanted to share the letter with the moms and dads who read ADDitude. He said, Sure! I want to share it with the world! I want people to know how I feel! So here it is.

Dear Editor,

Why do some people think kids with ADHD are bad? Kids with ADHD arent bad; they just act impulsively. This means they act without thinking. I have ADHD, and my brain that works differently than other kids brains. Some famous people have ADHD. If famous people have ADHD, then people with ADHD cant all be bad.

Kids with ADHD sometimes get overactive, which makes it hard for them in school. Kids with ADHD act differently than kids without ADHD. Kids with ADHD have slower brainwave activity than other kids, which makes it hard for them to focus. The parts of the brain that are affected by ADHD are the frontal lobes, inhibitory mechanisms of the cortex, limbic system, and the reticular activating system. All of these are vital to the brain, especially the frontal lobes.

In school, kids with ADHD get distracted and squirm in their seats. Kids with ADHD are constantly in motion, and cannot complete a quiet task without making noise. Some kids talk nonstop and are very impatient. They sometimes act without thinking. It is hard for them to control themselves because their limbic system doesnt function like other peoples brains. They need their teacher to understand that they have ADHD so the teacher wont think that theyre rude and disrespectful.

[Self-Test: Could Your Child Have ADHD?]

Teachers also need to learn about ADHD, so they know that kids arent choosing to act this way. They need to speak to them without hurting their feelings, and let them learn in their own way. Homeschooling can be good for a kid with ADHD, because he is with people who understand him and know how to talk to him.

Kids with ADHD sometimes dont do well in a place with a lot of other kids. Big groups make it harder for kids with ADHD to control themselves because their brain starts getting real excited.

I know these things because I have ADHD. The disorder makes you seem like you are rude and disrespectful to other people, and that can make parents think that their kids shouldnt be around you. I want kids to think that I am just a person with a different kind of brain, not a bad person. I think I am a good person because I care about others, Im funny, and Im smart.

ADHD makes it hard for me to make friends, but I want people to understand me. I hope this letter will help someone with ADHD understand that theyre not the only person with ADHD, and that they are not a bad person.

[What Kids Need to Be Happy]
The amount of time people around the world devote to using mobile internet will increase by27.7 per cent this year, driving a 1.4 per cent increase in overall media consumption, according to Zeniths Media Consumption Forecasts, published today. The consumption of all other media  including desktop internet  will decline, by 3.4 per cent in total.

This is the second annual edition of the Media Consumption Forecasts, which surveys changing patterns of media consumption, and assesses how the amount of time people allocate to different media will change between 2016 and 2018. The report looks at the amount of time spent reading newspapers and magazines, watching television, listening to the radio, visiting the cinema, using the internet, and viewing outdoor advertising while out of the home. This edition covers 71 countries across the world, up from 65 last year.

71 per cent of internet consumption is now mobile

Desktop internet consumption grew rapidly in the early years of this decade, peaking at 52 minutes a day in 2014, up from 36 minutes a day in 2010. But desktop consumption is now in decline as users switch to mobile devices. In 2015, mobile overtook desktop to become the primary means of accessing the internet, and this year it is forecast that people across the world will spend on average 86 minutes a day using mobile internet, compared to 36 minutes using desktop internet. This means that 71 per cent of internet consumption will be via mobile. The region most heavily skewed towards mobile internet consumption is Asia Pacific, where 73 per cent of internet consumption is mobile, closely followed by North America, where the mobile share is 72 per cent.

Mobile internet grows while all other media decline

Mobile internet consumption is now growing at the expense of all other media. It is forecast that the average time spent with mobile internet globally will grow 27.7 per cent this year, while time spent with desktop internet will fall 15.8 per cent. All traditional media will shrink this year: cinema by 0.5 per cent, outdoor by 0.8 per cent, television by 1.5 per cent, radio by 2.4 per cent, newspapers by 5.6 per cent and magazines by 6.7 per cent.

Note that these figures only refer to time spent with these media in their traditional forms  with printed publications and broadcast television channels and radio stations. Much of the time that consumers spend on the internet is devoted to consuming content that has been produced by traditional publishers and broadcasters. Traditional media owners have invested heavily in online brand extensions, and some of them have larger audiences online than they ever had for their offline products. The expansion of mobile internet consumption is an opportunity for traditional publishers and broadcasters, as much as a threat.

Mobile drives continued growth in total media consumption

The growth of internet consumption (first desktop, now mobile) has driven a 7.9 per cent increase in the total consumption of all media between 2010 and 2015, from 403 minutes a day to 435. Growth has averaged 1.5 per cent a year and a further 1.4 per cent growth is forecast for this year. For 2017, the growth forecast stands at 1.2 per cent, while a mere 0.4 per cent growth is forecast for 2018 as mobile consumption starts to level off. The study expect global media consumption to average 448 minutes a day in 2018.

Television still dominates global media consumption

Despite its recent decline, traditional television remains by far the most popular of all media globally, attracting 177 minutes of consumption a day in 2015. Internet consumption came second at 110 minutes a day. Television accounted for 41 per cent of global media consumption in 2015, and the study expects it will still account for 38 per cent in 2018, when the internet will account for 31 per cent.

Mobile technology is transforming the way people around the world consume media, and is expanding overall media consumption, said Jonathan Barnard, Zeniths Head of Forecasting. It provides traditional media owners the opportunity to reach people and places theyve never had access to previously, and gives consumers entirely new ways to find and enjoy compelling content.

In India, television continues to account for 49 per cent of the time spent and is the largest medium in urban markets. Out Of Home (OOH) is the second largest medium with 22 per cent of urban time spent. Digital is the third largest medium. Digital now accounts for 16 per cent of time spent in urban India, on all media, up from just 4 per cent in 2010. 90 per cent of digital time used to be on the desktop in 2010. Today, it has come down to 27 per cent, with 73 per cent being on mobile.
National Geographic Channel (NGC) announced today that it has partnered with Honda, one of the worlds leading motorcycle manufacturer, to produce the thrilling new adventure series Riding Morocco: Chasing The Dakar. The 60 minute special follows professional racer Christophe Barriere-Varju and model-adventurer Laura Csortan as they go on a unique motor biking tour across Africa using Honda Africa Twin bikes. Riding Morocco: Chasing The Dakar premieres globally on NGC this month. In India, it will premiere on 17th June, 2016.

Co-presenters Barriere-Varju and Csortan will be taking the ultimate biking tour in Riding Morocco: Chasing The Dakar, seeing enigmatic parts of Africa that are off the well-worn tourist trails. They will take audiences to historical sites hidden deep in the desert as well as gorgeous, untouched oases towns, meeting a variety of personalities, from tribesmen and silver miners to astronauts preparing for a space mission. Bringing their own supplies, Barriere-Varju and Csortan will travel through every imaginable extremefreezing nights and blazing mid-day sun, large sand dunes, mountains and valleysto test their personal limits and experience all of Africas hidden terrain and cultures along the ride of a lifetime.

Barriere-Varju is the perfect presenter for Riding Morocco: Chasing The Dakar, having ridden both the African and South American versions of the Dakar Rally, an annual off-road endurance event that has tested the most experienced drivers in the world. He brings this racing experience to the fore in the show, calling on it to navigate and handle the various types of rugged terrain that Africa has in store for the riders. Meanwhile, Csortan is an experienced presenter and model who is also a racing enthusiast, having been a panellist on Grand Prix TV. She became the face of The Australian Moto GP in 2008 and travelled the world for seven years presenting the Australian travel show The Great Outdoors. Its her love for adventure and racing that viewers will relate to upon seeing their journey unfold. Not only will Barriere-Varju and Csortan reveal the hidden stories of Africa and get to know themselves better in Riding Morocco: Chasing The Dakar, but their completion of the ride also spells a victory for the human spirit.

MayYi Lee, Vice President of NGC Regional Production & Development for APAC and Middle East, said, Were excited to have partnered with Honda on this ambitious television programme that fulfils the human need for exploration and uncovers a fascinating side of Africa. Viewers must tune in to Riding Morocco: Chasing The Dakar to witness Barriere-Varju and Csortans ultimate biking expedition and learn what extremes true adventurers will endure for the sake of self-discovery and making history. NGC is committed to continue producing quality programming that promotes the values of knowing more about the world and driving it forward.
Welsh: Joint force in excellent shape, but needs resources, prioritization

The joint force is in excellent shape, but leaders must pay attention to it, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III told the Defense Writers Group here June 15.



Welsh, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to the group as one of his last public acts in office. He retires later this month after 40 years in uniform.



But the general didnt look back, and he said his service is well-placed to counter future threats.



Transnational, multi-domain threats



Welsh said he agrees with Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that transnational, multi-domain threats will be the hallmark of conflict in the future.



Compared to any other service, the Air Force is already operating transnationally and across domains today, he said. We cross a lot of boundaries.



Aircraft, by their nature, are a transnational asset, he said, noting that aircraft launching from the U.S. can cross a number of combatant commands. The Air Force also does multi-domain operations every day, he added.



The Navy is another service with this expertise in its DNA, Welsh said. He noted the Navy is launching sorties from the Mediterranean Sea to the Middle East, crossing the boundary from U.S. European Command into U.S. Central Commands area of operations.



But what we need to do as a joint force is how do we bring all that together, he said. The other services do the same thing -- we just do it on a broader scale day to day.



The American military is used to dealing with transnational and multi-domain conflict, the general said, but military leaders need to make sure the command and control systems and sensor networks are capable of connecting across all lines.



Prioritization of planning, resources



The Joint Chiefs are worried about prioritization of planning and prioritization of resource assignment as they look at problems that straddle geographic lines, Welsh told the writers.



If you take Russia as an example, if someone asks, Whats the issue with Russia, and whats our plan for action if the next Russian action should occur? Its not just U.S. European Command, which is where everybody tends to look, he said. European Command is worried about any engagement with Russia, but so is Central Command, so is Pacific Command, so is Strategic Command, Northern Command -- everybody is worried about it.



The question then becomes how the military balances the priority for planning and resources across all those lines. The chairman really has to be the one, along with the Joint Staff, to do that direction and prioritization, Welsh said. Thats what Gen. Dunford is talking about.



Joint force is healthy



The joint force is really healthy, the general said -- able to execute the strategy well and amazingly capable. If you look at the results of joint operations over time, they are pretty darn good, he said. There is no one on Earth thats as capable as the American military.



The joint force has the same problem the Air Force has, the general said. Were short on people in many areas, he explained. We need to modernize. We just have got to realize that for the tasks weve been given, there needs to be a certain level of resources assigned to it, or change the tasking.



The last is not something military leaders decide, Welsh said.



If we decide that the United States is not going to be as engaged and use its military as it has for the last 50 or 60 years, OK, he said. Then we will tell you what the military needs to look like to do whatever the nation wants us to be able to do. But you cant expect to keep using us the way weve been used over the last 50 years and cut the size of the force and limit our ability to modernize it. That combination doesnt work.
Online training designed to educate Airmen about the new Blended Retirement System, the Defense Department system with changes on the current military retirement system, is now available via Joint Knowledge Online course number P-US1330. The course is also available to those without a Common Access Card -- to include family members -- via an alternate website The BRS was enacted into law in the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, and will go into effect Jan. 1, 2018. All currently serving members are grandfathered into the current military retirement system. However, those with fewer than 12 years of service as of Dec. 31, 2017, or Air Force Reserve component members with fewer than 4,320 retirement points may choose to opt in to the BRS during the designated opt-in period from Jan. 1, 2018, through Dec. 31, 2018.The BRS is a major change for our Airmen, said Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly, the Military Force Management Policy director. Although the majority of Airmen serving today will not fall under BRS, it is important for all Airmen, either as leaders today, or as leaders tomorrow, to understand the changes that will impact Airmen in the future.The BRS Leader Training is a 30-minute course designed to provide basic familiarity with the key components of the upcoming retirement system and the timeline for implementation. It is designed primarily for Air Force leaders at all levels, but is also open to all Airmen and others who wish to learn more about BRS.Education is key in providing Airmen the information they need in order to make informed decisions about the BRS, Kelly said. The Defense Department is on track to provide three additional courses with more detailed information within the next 18 months.An opt-in course is targeted at those eligible to opt into the new system. This course will provide eligible active and reserve component members an understanding of both the current and new systems. The course will be available in January 2017.A train the trainer course for personal financial managers, counselors and retirement services officers is targeted at those experts who serve in an advisory role to commanders, Airmen and their families. This course should be ready by fall of 2016.A new accessions course targets individuals who enter military service on or after Jan. 1, 2018. It is intended to provide those members who enter service under the BRS an understanding of their blended retirement benefits and personal options.The Air Force is taking a comprehensive approach to BRS education. Online courses are designed to provide basic knowledge and understanding, Kelly emphasized. In addition to the aforementioned courses, Airmen will receive in-person education at various points in their career, starting in basic training, and professional counseling will also be available.To learn more about the Blended Retirement System, visit militarypay.defense.gov
The trial of 26 people, who face charges related to the trafficking of 26 infants in China, began today in eastern Zhejiang Province.

The cases are being heard at the peoples court of Cangnan County with the intermediate peoples court of Wenzhou City, which administers Cangnan, overseeing proceedings.

The prime suspect, a 51-year-old man from Cangnan, identified by his surname Zhang, confessed that he and his lover started the business in 2013.

Procurators said the babies were sold for between 10,000 yuan (USD 1,520) and 100,000 yuan (USD 15,200).

One baby boy was resold five times, with the first buyer paying 10,000 yuan and last 83,000 yuan.

The defendants, aged between 27 and 79, are from Wenzhou, Fujian and Yunnan, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The Wenzhou court said most of the suspects were only educated to primary school level or were illiterate.

The trial is expected to last until Friday.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court rejected a petition challenging the release of Udta Punjab, due on Friday. This came shortly after the Supreme Court also dismissed a plea filed by an NGO seeking stay on the release of the Abhishek Chaubeys film. Meanwhile, reports said the main accused behind the alleged leaking of Udta Punjab on the internet and the subsequent making of its DVDs has been identified and is likely to be arrested soon. With only a day to go for the release of the controversial film on Punjabs drug problem, reports said the DVDs of the film were leaked in Mumbai. Udta Punjab was leaked online allegedly by a member of the Central Board of Film Certification, forcing its makers to allege that the movie was being sabotaged by Pahlaj Nihalanis men.

An offence under the sections of the Copyright and Information Technology Act have been registered by the Mumbai Police. Meanwhile, Nihalani has rejected the allegation of a CBFC member behind the leak of the film. The films lead actors Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt have appealed to their fans to not watch the pirated version of the movie online. Earlier, the Supreme Court also refused to entertain the plea of an NGO seeking stay on the release of the film and asked it to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court. On June 13, the Bombay High Court had cleared the decks for the films release after ordering the deleting of an urination scene and displaying a revised disclaimer.

Producer Anurag Kashyaps Udta Punjab, made a strong pitch for freedom of speech earlier, attacking Censor Board chief Pahlaj Nihalani, who has ordered 89 cuts in the film. Actually, ahead of elections BJP is in no mood to expose drugs scenario in Punjab, Nihalani is BJP pet and to please his political masters he has taken adequate steps by cutting the movie at length.

Earlier, Rahul Gandhi made a statement that seven out of 10 youth are drug addicts which resulted in a heated argument from Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), which is ruling party of the state. Rahul also proposed the youth to come and join hands with Congress and become a part of politics for bringing changes in the country. There are many allegations on Punjab government for breeding terror and drug trafficking. Variety of incidences, which takes place in Punjab, is due to youth heading towards wrong direction.

There was also a hash tag post #DrugsMafiaMajithia, on twitter by AAP supporters against Punjabs revenue minister Bikram Singh Majithia. Daring him to put him behind the bars, AAP national spokesperson Sanjay Singh commented that he continues to stick to his statement that AAP will put Majithia behind the bars if voted to power as he is related to drug business in Punjab. Due to various issues and terror attack, drugs, flesh trading, arms, Badal government lost its credibility in the state and AAP could get strong foothold here. Meanwhile, Majithia has filed a defamation plea against Sanjay Singh in Ludhiana court claiming that without any proof he has been defamed as drug trader by Sanjay Singh. Majithia had said that not he but Sanjay Singh will be put behind the bars for defaming him. Anyway, after these allegation sagas no one went to jail and no one was actually exposed yet. The fact cannot be ignored that Punjab has become heaven for drugs. This evidently does not seem to be possible, at least, at the moment, but this can definitely pull seats for AAP.

The variety of incidences, which takes place in Punjab, is due to youth getting into wrong direction. Murder, robbery, rape and even teasing; these are common crimes in the state; Rahul Gandhi has hit the nail. We can see how Punjab has lost the battle against drug addiction even before it has begun, a study by All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, has indicated. It will take more than 10 years for the state government to provide even a single episode of treatment to addicts if it continues with the current strategies, the survey by the institutes National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre says, painting a grim picture of the days ahead. A single episode of treatment is a standard course of treatment ranging from a minimum of four-to-six weeks to six months where the patient is given opioid substitution treatment (OST) that involves medication like methadone or buprenorphine to help him wean away from drugs. The study point out that Punjab does not have OST for the patients as a widely available therapy on a long-term basis. There is a huge gap in the availability of treatment services for opioid dependent individuals despite significant demand. OST is the most evidence-based treatment modality, which has been endorsed by United Nations and World Health Organisation as well as the Indian Psychiatric Society. In Punjab, less than 10% of patients have received OST ever, stated in study.

The survey, commissioned by the Union ministry of social justice and empowerment in August 2015, has in fact ridiculed the approach by the Punjab government, saying that it is only focused on rehabilitation centres. At a time when the nexus between terrorists and drug smugglers in Pakistan has come under a harsh spotlight after the Pathankot airbase attack, a new study by AIIMS has found that opioids worth Rs 7,500 crore are consumed in Punjab every year. Of these, heroins share is a massive Rs. 6,500 crore. This is a shocking disclosure given that almost all the heroin that comes to Punjab is through the Pakistan border, pumped in by smugglers allegedly aided by ISI. It is this smuggler network that the terrorists who attacked the Pathankot airbase are believed to have used.

The survey reveals that opioid-dependent people are spending approximately Rs 20 crore daily on these drugs. On an average a heroin-dependent individual spends about Rs. 1,400 per day. The study  Punjab opioid dependence survey: estimation of the size of opioid dependent population in Punjab  was presented to Punjab health minister Surjit Kumar Jyani on January 6 but no action has been taken even today. The study was conducted between February and April 2015. Data was collected from 3,620 opioid dependents from 10 districts. Among the men aged between 18 and 35 years, four in 100 are opioid dependent; while 15 in 100 could be opioid users.

Drug smuggling cannot occur without the guard of police and politicians. Police protection cannot be assured without unspoken approval of politicians in power. Successive Punjab governments have turned a blind eye to drug smuggling because of the money that it brings and keeps the youth engaged so that they will never ask for their rights, Punjab youth either flee abroad or they are addicted to drugs, only 10% of youth are living on values in India.

The film can expose Punjab and its present scenario, but before audience could reach theatre some elements leaked this movie online by damaging the producer to keep up his own ego.

(Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com)
With Congress leader Kamal Nath resigning as the partys in-charge of Punjab affairs, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju on Thursday said the move is a clear evidence of the fact that the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 was a very well organised and orchestrated by the grand old party and its leaders.



We just saw the news that Kamal Nath has been withdrawn as the in-charge for the Punjab election. Probably, the Congress realized that they have made a mistake. It is very clear and evident that the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 was a very well-organised and orchestrated by the Congress and its leaders. So, they must have probably realized it, said Rijiju.

Kamal Nath, whose appointment drew sharp criticism from the Shiromani Akali Dal(SAD) and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), stepped down as the general secretary in-charge of the Punjab Affairs following a controversy over his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

A day after Kamal Nath resigned from his post, Congress has appointed Shiela Dikshit as Punjab in-charge for the party.

Sonia Gandhi had accepted his resignation on Wednesday itself. Now, former Delhi CM Shiela Dikshit will replace him and handle the charge.

Certain elements are raking up these issues now only for political gains. I am touched by the support shown by our party workers and leaders in Punjab in rejecting the false accusations. I am a practitioner of Nehruvian politics and maligning of the Congress party using false accusations is unacceptable to me, Nath said in the letter.

Hoping that the party focuses on the upcoming elections rather than the furore over his appointment, he added the Congress must highlight the issues of misgovernance, misery of farmers and youth, break down of law and order and rampant drug trade in Punjab. Given this, I request that I may be relieved of my charge to ensure that the attention is not diverted from the real issues facing Punjab, he said.
Tawde and Akolkar nonetheless dropped the plan to eliminate Dabholkar after two Sanatan Sanstha workers died while ferrying the bomb to Margao.

Activists of Sanatan Sanstha Virendra Tawde and Sarang Akolkar had planned to eliminate rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2009 itself but they dropped the plan due to occurrence of the Margao bomb blast in the same year. Two Sanatan Sanstha workers  Malgonda Patil and Yogesh Naik  died when the bomb they were ferrying to Margao, Goa, accidentally exploded in November 2009. Akolkar, one of the accused in the blast, case is absconding since then.

As per the documentary evidence and investigation till now, Tawde and Akolkar wanted to kill Dabholkar in 2009. However, they had to drop the plan after two Sanatan Sanstha workers died when the bomb, they were ferrying to Margao, accidentally went off, they said.

The name of a police officer from Pune too has cropped up in this case. The police official is under the radar of the Central Bureau of Investigation which is probing the formers involvement in the murder. Police are monitoring the call records of Virendra Tawde and the police officer. According to sources, the official holds the rank of inspector and is posted in Pune division. The police officer was interacting with main accused Virendra Tawde until right before Dabholkars murder on August 20, 2013. According to the CBI the police officer might have supplied firearms to Tawde.

The last call made by Goa blast suspect Malgunda Patil, who died when the bomb accidentally exploded in 2009, was to Virendra Tawde, arrested on Friday in the Dabholkar murder case. Moreover, Sarang Akolkar an accused in both the Goa blast and the Dabholkar murder case, had called Tawde from Goa before and after the blast.

The CBI had arrested Tawde from his Panvel residence and learned during its probe that he had telephonic conversations with the two Goa blast suspects. He was the first accused to be arrested in the Dabholkar murder case. His vehicle was used for murdering Dabholkar. Tawde was unhappy with Dabholkar as he was fighting a battle for eliminating superstition from the society and had urged the government to pass a law in this regard.

Tawde, suspected to be the brain behind the murder conspiracy, kept on planning a hit on the activist along with Akolkar. The plan was finally executed on August 20, 2013, when Dabholkar was shot dead by two unidentified men while he was on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge here, they said.

The CBI custody of Tawde, was on Thursday extended till June 20 by a local court. He was produced before Judicial Magistrate First Class V B Gulve-Patil on the expiry of his earlier remand.

CBI lawyer B P Raju sought further custodial interrogation of the accused, saying he was not cooperating with the investigating agency. Subsequently, the court extended his CBI custody till June 20.

On the other hand, Sanatan Sanstha has denied any role in Dabholkars murder and termed Tawdes arrest as mysterious.
By Dan Olmsted

Editors Note: This is the second story (the first was How Autism Happens: A Conversation with Kathryn Wolcott) in which parents tell how they watched their child develop autism  and Sheila Ealey has quite a story to tell. She lives in New Orleans, but, married to a military man, has moved around the country. She set up a school for special needs kids in New Orleans, in part to help her autistic son, Temple, but the day it was to open, Hurricane Katrina swept in. She relocated to Houston with thousands of others but is now back in New Orleans; the school, the Creative Learning Center of Louisiana, is thriving. I met Sheila at an autism conference in 2006, introduced by our mutual friend Brooke Potthast. With the news about the higher risk of autism in black males, and the CDC effort to hide it I remembered our conversation and Brooke helped me get in touch. The conversation starts with her son, Temple, and his twin, Lucinda, at a military hospital in Maryland for their one-year shots along with their older sister. If you want to participate, e-mail me at olmsted.dan@gmail.com.

Sheila: It was August 2, 2000  my birthday  and Temple and Lucinda were almost 13 months

old. Leielani is only 15 months older. Lucinda can manage to get herself out of the triple stroller, she did not want the injection, and she was fighting tooth and nail not to have it. I looked down for just a moment -- the nurse had all the vaccinations lined up. She had the HIB, the DTaP and the MMR for each child. When I looked up after taking her twin sister up, she had given Temple both of the MMRs along with the DTaP and the HIB. The next morning, he was not responsive anymore. It took me until he was 18 months to get a finished diagnosis of autism for him.

Dan: When you say, he was not responsive anymore, how do you mean?

Sheila: He didnt have language yet by that point, but he was walking. He walked exactly on his birthday July 12 of that year, and he was walking well. After the shot he stopped walking, he started crawling, he started banging his head against the wall, the floor, anything he could. He stopped imitating with his father, he was making no eye contact, and he didnt want you to touch him or hold him.

Dan: That happened within a day?

Sheila: He cried so -- he cried, cried, cried the entire night. I called the doctors back because I caught the mistake right away, and the doctor who was on duty at that time said, Im going to call Merck and find out what to do. But in the meantime the fever went up extraordinarily high. He said, Give him Tylenol. Which is what I did. The next morning when I went to his crib he wasnt standing, rocking on his crib, calling for me, Ma, ma, ma to come get him. Nothing. Nothing. He was lying there looking in the ceiling. He looked gone. My baby was gone.

Dan: His sister didnt have any of these problems?

Sheila: I refused to give her the vaccination, so she didnt get it. We left. She is fine. She is learning three languages. She is doing extraordinarily well. Now it seemed that she did have a few issues from the vaccinations before, at 5 months. She had reflux, but outside of that she is absolutely fine. She doesnt have any issues. But this child, Temple, was hit so hard. Language has not come back in. Before the shot, he wasnt speaking in sentences -- he was just a year old -- but he would say Mama, stuff like that.

After this happened I started taking him to developmental specialists and they kept saying, He is a boy. Sometimes boys are a little slower. And I said, Okay. I came home, I decided to pack my bags and to move back to New Orleans because I had a pediatrician I had been dealing with for years for my older daughter. I asked her, What is this? I have never seen this before, because I didnt know about autism. She said, Sheila, I think your child has autism. I said, What? What is that? The minute I took him to see a neurologist that she told me to take him to, he told me, Im sorry this child is so autistic, he has to have chronic autism. When I asked him what that was he told me, He had to be born with it. I said, Im not sure -- this baby was just perfect and now  there was nothing wrong before.

Let me tell you what else happened to me, Dan. After I went to Autism One, I was still living in Houston because we had lost everything to Katrina, but I had his records with me where the doctor had said that he had gotten a double dose of the MMR, and that they should call Merck, and Merck said he doesnt need to be vaccinated for the MMR anymore.

We came home to New Orleans and we left those records locked up in the apartment. Someone went into our apartment and stole his records. They didnt take anything but his record.

Dan: Oh Lord.

Sheila: Temple's records were stolen from our apartment. My partner in the school is a lawyer who worked at the time for [a new Orleans law firm]. When she returned in October of '05, by spring of '06 they fired her because they were representing Merck against me. Thanks to Congress, my case was thrown out. I also filed with the vaccine injury program and they dismissed my case because they said I needed a doctor who could without a doubt state that Temple was damaged due to the double dose of the MMR.

Dan: What do you think about this new report about the black males and the high risk and all that -- what does that make you think?




May 19, 2016, the Compton Herald, in Compton, California, published the piece, Vaxxed: Smoking gun on autism in Black boys, others, by Madlen Grgodjaian.

In the first paragraph Madlen Grgodjaian alleged that the CDC covered up a link between the MMR

Ron and Sheila Ealey

vaccine and autism in African American boys. Almost all sources in the mainstream news that have bothered to mention the real story of Vaxxed carefully omit any mention of the racial aspect of this study. The Herald accurately described Andrew Wakefields work on his 12 patients in Britain who had regressive autism, again something you wont find in national print and broadcast news. Grgodjaian even mentioned that Congressman Bill Posey had pleaded with members of the House to hold a hearing the CDC whistleblower.

Ealey delivered an emotional and alarming speech on the decades of experimentation on African Americans by health officials, and the massive number of vaccine injured children today suffering under what she called medical tyranny.

Here is what Sheila said at the "Vaxxed" screening in Compton in May.

"I'd like to start by telling you a little history. In the 1800s, Dr. Merriam Sims thought so little of enslaved African women that he experimented on them. And he experimented on them without anesthesia, and some of our enslaved women had as many as thirty operational procedures. He became the father of what we know today as gynecology.

In the 1930s, the American government thought so little of our African American men that they went to Tuskegee and decided, instead of treating them for syphilis, they would experiment on them. And that experiment lasted until the 1960s. In 1960, Dr. Saenger decided that 88 African America individuals between the ages of 9 and 88 with cancer, lives were not worth two cents. He quadrupled the dose of radiation, he burned them and he maimed them. And that experiment lasted from 1960 to 1971.

Well today, the American government, the CDC, has decided that my sons life and the lives of others like him are not worth it. They knew what they were doing when they sent that shot in the dark to cause this to happen to my son. But you see, heres the difference: When you turn your face away from whats happening in one community, then the greed decides then that it has no respect of person, race or nationality and it trickles down to every other race of people.

So, now what we have is a holocaust. Our children are being maimed and theyre being killed, and youve got a government sitting in Washington, DC that doesnt think enough to subpoena Dr. [William] Thompson, who came out and said what they [the CDC] were doing. So, what we have to do today is take back our communities, take back our children. And how do we do that? We walk out of the doctors offices, we decide no were not going to take that shot [of vaccine] in the dark. Well take our children out of the school system, because the only thing theyll understand is money. Education is not free. You pay taxes for it, and its certainly not appropriate. Once this happens to your child, you cant get services. You got to go fight for an independent educational program. You got to go fight for services. You got to fight with the insurance company. And they still stand there and say, your child is not worth it.

Our children are our legacy, thats all we have. And without our children, this country cant stand. So take them out of the schools. Go into your churches and tell them to see this movie Vaxxed. And then ask them to open the doors to the connection, the annex building, and allow you to come in and educate your children so you can go to work. We know how to be a community, we know how to do it. We dont have to reinvent the wheel. During the Civil Rights Movement, that beautiful lady, Rosa Parks, she wasnt the first to get arrested, but she was the last, because she was a tender, beautiful example of dignity. She was the weakest of them all, and we became enraged. And what did we do? We got off the bus!

So Im asking you to stand with us, stand with the Nation of Islam and get off the bus! We have to get off the bus!

And let them have their schools, let them have their doctors. Take back our children! Take back our heritage and lets stand together and do it. This is not about a white child or a black child or a Filipino child or a Hispanic childThis is about our children! All of our children! And if you think in 16 years were going to have one in two children that look like my son, thats too much. Thats too big of a price to pay.

Im asking you to stand with us. Stand with the Nation of Islam. Stand with us as Christians, stand with us as agnostics, atheists. but stand on behave of our children.

Sheila Lewis Ealey is the mother four and lives with her husband Ron in New Orleans. Her son Temple was taken to the doctor to be vaccinated along with his twin sister Lucinda, he was given a double dose of the MMR vaccine, along with the DTaP and HIB vaccines. The effect was immediate. By the next morning, he was not responsive. Within the next six months, Temple was diagnosed with severe autism disorder and later in 2008 with mitochondrial myopathy one. Her son's case was one of the 5,000 injury claims dismissed by the federal government.

Since that time, Sheila has been an advocate for informed consent and truth in the vaccination program.

She was educated in New Orleans' public schools and St. Mary's Dominican College and Loyola University. Currently, she is finishing a Masters in Education. Previously, she was a co-founder, director and curriculum developer for the Creative Learning Center of Louisiana, a school for students with autism for the last 10 years. She is certified in different educational modalities and plans to pursue a doctorate in education beginning in September 2016.

For more on Sheila Ealey, see Dan Olmsted' post How Autism Happens: A Conversation With Sheila Ealey



Anne Dachel is Media Editor for Age of Autism.








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It's not often that I ask for your help. But today, I need your help and your action to send an unforgettable message to Big Food that says, "We demand food transparency, honest ingredients and clean food!"



How can you send that powerful message to Big Food? I've just released my first book through traditional publishing channels. It's called "Food Forensics" and it's launching July 26th through all the major book reseller channels like Amazon.com, BN.com and brick-and-mortar book retailers.



Even in its current preorder stage with very little publicity, this book has already achieved #1 on Amazon.com for the best new release in its category. But that's not enough. To really send a message to Big Food and help make history through independent science and grassroots demands for food transparency, we need to make this book #1 on Amazon.com as it launches.



That's why I need your help -- and it's a rare request coming from me, you know -- to put this book into the top sales lists on Amazon.com, BN.com and book retailers.



Click here to get the book on Amazon.com or click here to get it from Barnes & Noble.



Remember, this isn't a BOOK... it's a MOVEMENT! When you support my work through this book, you are part of a global revolution in food transparency, honest labeling and grassroots clean food activism.



Check out my two-minute book trailer video here to get a sense of why this book is so important:









I won't earn any real profit from this book, but together we will send a huge message to the food industry

Preorder Food Forensics now, and you'll join thousands of others who are joining the grassroots rebellion against food deception

Every copy that's purchased through any retailer is a "vote" for clean food





This isn't about earning money from selling a book. It cost me far more in laboratory instruments and consumable lab supplies than I will ever earn from this book. And since both Amazon.com and BN.com heavily discount all new books today, there's relatively little profit for publishers or authors these days.I knew from day one that this book was never about earning any dollars. It had a much more important mission: ToThis book, Food Forensics , is Big Food's worst nightmare. As you've seen here at Natural News, an independent clean food activist (that's me) has turned to science to expose the lies they've tried to keep hidden for decades. Now,, and we're using the world's most advanced scientific instrumentation to do that. (My lab, CWCLabs.com , is, meaning it produces authoritative analysis results that are accepted as rigorous scientific evidence everywhere around the world.)That's why today, I'm asking you to "vote" for my book in the only way votes really count in the commercial marketplace: byit. When you buy, Amazon.com takes notice. With enough sales, we might even make the New York Times bestseller list. And even more importantly, if this book does well enough for the publisher (BenBella books), they will likely commit to a second, follow-up book that publishes test results for pesticides, herbicides and hormone disrupting chemicals!Truly, the best way to support my ongoing lab work in exposing these heavy metals and chemicals in foods is to support this book. And remember thatbecause they're largely supported by toxic food companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers -- the very corporations I expose in this extraordinary compilation of scientific research!Together, we're all part of aagainst deceptive agricultural poisoners and unethical food giants. We the People now have the means to fight back against dishonest food labels, hidden toxins and unsafe heavy metals lurking in our foods.If you're tired of being poisoned by Monsanto, lied to by PepsiCo, tricked by General Mills or deceived by "all natural" foods that are loaded with toxic chemicals, this is your opportunity to send an unforgettable message to Big Food What does that message say?by independent scientists they cannot influence, corrupt or control. The food giants already know they can control the mainstream media by threatening to pull their advertising. But when this groundbreaking book slaps them across the face -- (that's a metaphor, please don't physically assault anyone with my book) -- they will quickly realize that the Health Ranger's Food Forensics books cannot be suppressed or silenced... and that more books may soon follow to reveal testing of off-the-shelf products while exposing those products that are grown, harvested or processed with toxic substances.You can help send that message right now by preorderingfrom Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble Buy more than one copy if you have a friend or family member who can benefit from this breakthrough knowledge.. As book sales climb up the charts at Amazon.com, they will take notice! And together, we will demonstrate the extraordinary power of grassroots consumers who are sick and tired of being poisoned by food manufacturers who hide toxic chemicals and heavy metals in their products.Share my YouTube trailer video at this link , and check out some of the testimonials about the book:" - Michael T. Murray, author of The Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine" - Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association." - Robert Scott Bell." - Ty Bollinger, The Truth About Cancer








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It might have been launched with the best of intentions during the Reagan administration, but the so-called "war on drugs" has been used more times as justification for violating Americans' constitutional rights than it is possible to count.



And the government still persists in utilizing anti-drug policy to invade our privacy. This latest assault on the Fourth Amendment is being launched by the Obama administration's Drug Enforcement Agency.



As reported by The Daily Beast, the DEA has gone to court to fight for unrestricted access, without a properly issued warrant based on probable cause  as required by the Fourth Amendment  to millions of private medical files, including those of two transgender men who are taking properly prescribed testosterone.



Full force of the Obama administration in play

Fourth Amendment is clear

Specifically, the agency is battling to get access to databases in Oregon that contain health files of around 1 million state residents. As thereports:The case involves the full force of the Obama administration against the state of Oregon and just five individuals  two of whom are are taking prescription hormone drugs that have to be monitored by state officials, per statute.That said, in 2014, U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty ruled against the DEA, claiming that the kind of warrantless searches of health record databases being sought were textbook privacy invasions."It is difficult to conceive of information that is... more deserving of Fourth Amendment protection," Haggerty wrote in his decision. "By obtaining the prescription records for individuals like John Does 2 and 4, a person would know that they have used testosterone in particular quantities and by extension, that they have gender identity disorder and are treating it through hormone therapy."Although there is not an absolute right to privacy in prescription information... it is more than reasonable for patients to believe that law enforcement agencies will not have unfettered access to their records," he noted further.So, the Obama administration  not one to allow the Constitution to get in the way of policy implementation  disagreed, arguing instead that because health records have already been handed over to a third party  Oregon's Prescription Drug Monitor Program  then of course patients can no longer expect them to remain private.As noted byCritics of the administration's attempt to gain unfettered health record access claim that the Fourth Amendment is clear about its requirements that government needs a good reason, and a court-issued warrant, before it can pry into Americans' personal "papers and effects."
WASHINGTON, June 16, 2016 - The Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a fiscal 2017 spending bill that would block the Obama administrations Waters of the United States rule, curb work on greenhouse gas regulations and bar some endangered species protections.

The WOTUS provision, which mirrors riders in two House spending bills, seeks to block the Obama administration from enforcing the rule in case court stays are lifted.

A senior Democrat on the committee, Minority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois, warned that Democrats would probably block the Interior-Environment bill from moving on the Senate floor. Republicans control 54 seats in the Senate, but 60 would be needed to bring it up for debate. The Senate committee approved the bill on a party-line vote, 16-14.





I think its quite likely this bill will never be considered on the floor because of these riders. Its sad because there are many parts of the bill that are very good, said Durbin. The bill funds the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Forest Service, which is part of the Agriculture Department.

The committee separately approved a Financial Services bill that includes an amendment to allow private banks and companies to offer credit for agricultural exports to Cuba. That amendment, approved 22-8, was sponsored by John Boozman, R-Ark., and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D.





"Weve had good intentions behind our isolation policy toward Cuba, but the results have not changed. Its time to try a new approach, said Boozman.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the Interior-Environment Subcommittee, said some of the environmental provisions in the bill that Democrats oppose have bipartisan support while others have been enacted previously.

This bill strikes a critical balance -- directing federal resources where they are needed, while blocking excessive regulations that are causing harm and burying us in red tape, Murkowski said.

But the subcommittees ranking member, Tom Udall of New Mexico, singled out the WOTUS rider for criticism, noting that previous efforts in this Congress to kill or block implementation of the rule had failed. Many of us are confident the rule will prevail (in the courts) on its merits. We should not be intervening in the judicial process, he said.

A similar WOTUS rider was dropped from the fiscal 2016 spending legislation because of strong resistance from the White House.

The Senate bill, unlike the House version, wouldnt block implementation of the administrations plan for reducing carbon emissions from electric utilities, but it would restrict EPAs funding to continue work on the rule.

Other provisions in the bill, which Democrats said were poison pills, included one that would prevent the Fish and Wildlife Service from further study on whether the lesser prairie chicken should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Another rider would override court rulings that require gray wolves in Wyoming and the Great Lakes to remain protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Watching for news on the Clean Water Act? Find it on Agri-Pulse. Sign up for a four-week free trial subscription.





Udall did manage to get the full committee to increase funding for fighting wildfires. The draft bill would have funded firefighting at the 10-year rolling average cost, or $1.6 billion, but the panel agreed to add $661 million, the level the Interior Department and the Forest said they would need for 2017.

The bill would cut funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund by $50 million to $400 million for fiscal 2017. The Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, which compensates local governments for revenue they lose because of federal land holdings, would be increased by $28 million in 2017 to $480 million.

The bill also includes a provision, sought by Western ranchers, that would allow the carryover of grazing fee credits from year to year to pay for improvements on federal lands.

#30
Mass in Damascus in Memory of Armenian, Assyrian Genocide Victims

A mass was held on Wednesday at Mar Gregory Cathedral for Syriac orthodox in Damascus, on the centennial anniversary of the Syriac genocide (Seyfo 1915). The mass was led by Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II Karim, SANA reports. Patriarch Aphrem said the memory of martyrs, Assyrians and Armenians, who were killed at the hands of Ottomans, gives us a momentum to remain in Syria and defend it in the face of terrorism that targets the one Syrian family. "The memory of massacres that killed half million of Syriac people and more than million and a half of Armenians will remain alive in our hearts as we will remember them in our prayers," the Patriarch said. He called on the world governments and parliaments to recognize the genocides, hailing the stance of the German parliament that lately recognized the genocide, demanding states that ignite the crisis in Syria to stop doing so. Following the mass, a march of candles set off from the patriarchate into the park of Syriac martyrs.
Liberal Canadian MPs Applaud Defeat of Genocide Recognition Bill

Ottawa -- The Centre for Canadian-Assyrian Relations (CCAR), along with several members of the Yezidi community, are deeply disappointed over the conduct of several Liberal MPs following the vote to officially recognize the atrocities committed by ISIS as genocide. Several Liberal MPs proceeded to applaud the outcome of the vote leaving many in attendance dumbfounded over their cause for celebration. "Not only did they refuse to acknowledge the loss of life and destruction as genocide," says Aneki Nissan, president of CCAR, "but they applauded their actions. It was surreal." Every member of the Assyrian and Yezidi community in attendance has been directly affected by ISIS efforts to end the existence of the indigenous Assyrians and Yezidis. Assyrian and Yezidi-Canadian community leaders attending the vote were left feeling dejected and extremely upset. CCAR is therefore calling on the Prime Minister's Office to right this horrible wrong by issuing an apology for the conduct of his MPs. While CCAR believes that the applause had no malicious intent, "It clearly demonstrated that these MPs did not truly understand or appreciate the magnitude of this vote" said Nissan. CCAR refuses to accept that Canadian MPs be on the wrong side of history. "We will continue to work closely with them to ensure they understand that genocide is happening and ISIS is the perpetrator," says Nissan. The European Union, United Kingdom, and American legislators, and as recently as today, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, have recognized ISIS crimes as genocide, leaving human rights activists perplexed at genocide denial by Canadian MPs.
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Assyrian Lawsuit Against Kuwaiti Bank 'May Have Serious Consequences' for Ankara
The TEXUS 57 sounding rocket was successfully launched on the first launch attempt on 1 October at 08:26 local time (06:26 UTC) from the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden to enable microgravity experiments in space. What is behind this long-lasting programme and what is its contribution to scientific research?


The European Commission has lifted bans on Zambian-based airlines, Air Madagascar and Indonesias Citilink, Lion Air and Batik Air, along with most Iran Air aircraft.

Publishing the EU Air Safety List, which details airlines that do not meet international safety standards, EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc said: "I am happy to say that after seven years of work and extensive European technical assistance, we were able to clear all Zambian air carriers from the list. Following my visit to Iran in April, a technical assessment was successfully carried out in May. Based on this I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from Iran Air back into European skies."

Some 216 airlines remain on the list, most of them due to a lack of safety oversight by the aviation authorities in their home countries. Iraqi Airways and Blue Wing Airlines (Suriname) are subject to individual bans.

A further six carriers six airlines are subject to operational restrictions and can only fly to the EU with specific aircraft types: Afrijet and Nouvelle Air Affaires SN2AG (Gabon), Air Koryo (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea), Air Service Comores (the Comoros), and TAAG Angola Airlines (Angola).

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June 16, 2016

CAIRO  Egyptian foreign policy has faced many challenges, especially after the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhoods regime on July 3, 2013, and particularly when it came to countries that saw it necessary to accommodate the Islamic political movement and rejected its downfall. Among the latter, according to statements made by former Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy to Al-Monitor, was the United States, which adopted a policy to overly support the Muslim Brotherhood, and, in the process, ignored the popular decision reflected in the events that began on June 30, 2013, as the United States pressured Egypt by delaying the delivery of military aid, leading to a deep schism in the relationship of the two countries on the popular level.

Fahmy described Egyptian-US relations as being in a state of stagnation, with both countries endeavoring to limit losses and avoid direct confrontation. He further expected relations to undergo developments after the US elections, albeit at a snails pace, due to continued disparity in their respective positions vis-a-vis the issues of liberties and the assimilation of political Islam.

Fahmy strongly rejected the statements made by US presidential candidate Donald Trump concerning Islam and Muslims, which he viewed as hostile and unacceptable  expecting him to backtrack on them if he won the elections. In contrast, he described presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a veteran politician, with all the positive and negative connotations associated with such a characterization.

Concerning the Egyptian-Russian rapprochement, Fahmy said, It caused tension in Egyptian-US relations, particularly in the area of armament  with Russo-US relations also affected.

With regard to efforts underway to resolve the Palestinian issue, Fahmy said, The current Israeli government does not believe in the two-state solution, and negotiating with it is futile. He urged Netanyahu to give a speech in Ramallah announcing his acceptance of the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, as proof of goodwill in reaching a comprehensive peace.

Fahmy further stated that negotiations with Ethiopia had not come to any fruitful conclusions concerning the Renaissance Dam, in light of the Ethiopians insistence that construction continues unabated during negotiations, without providing concrete binding assurances concerning the Egyptian states water management rights, with all Egyptian options remaining on the table to safeguard said rights.

The text of the interview follows:

Al-Monitor: Egyptian foreign policy underwent many tribulations subsequent to the fall of the Muslim Brotherhoods regime [in] 2013, when a multitude of foreign options were proposed. What was the cause?

Fahmy: I assumed my ministry responsibilities at a very difficult time  immediately after the fall of the Brotherhood, and specifically on July 16, 2013. The difficulty attributed to that time period was caused by three factors. First, the Egyptian people had just lived through two revolutions and were demanding to see quick results proving that Egypt was free in adopting its foreign policies. Second, the Egyptian peoples rejection of the Muslim Brotherhoods attempts to change Egypts identity was not to the liking of many countries that supported the Brotherhood and stood against the peoples choice. Third, there existed an urgent need to properly rebalance Egypts relations with other countries, which is an extremely difficult and time-consuming task to accomplish due to regional and international developments. Such were the difficulties that made me propose a new foreign policy philosophy, four days after assuming office.

Al-Monitor: What effect did that new policy have on Egyptian-US relations? And what is your current assessment in that regard?

Fahmy: Undoubtedly, Egypts relationship with the United States was greatly affected by the fall of the Brotherhood, when implementation began of the Egyptian road map that all political, partisan and religious forces agreed to in the meeting of July 3, 2013. Said relationship endured a grave blow due to the United States overly defending political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, while adopting a negative attitude toward the popular decision reflected on June 30, as it delayed the delivery of military aid, particularly the Apache gunships. This pressure exercised by the United States left a bitter taste in the mouths of Egyptians  a bitterness that remains to this day.

Relations between the two countries now solely revolve around limiting losses and avoiding a direct confrontation. Despite the slow improvement witnessed after the conclusion of the Egyptian road map and the election of a parliament that reflects the will of the Egyptian people, I nevertheless do not expect Egyptian-US relations to undergo any marked or fast improvement in the coming period, because the United States still calls for political Islam to be assimilated, while failing to demand that said movement espouse the concept of a national state that tolerates all of its constituents. Furthermore, disagreements remain between the two countries concerning the issue of personal liberties.

Al-Monitor: Do you think that the Egyptian-Russian rapprochement came at the expense of Egypts relations with the United States and created tensions therein?

Fahmy: It was not intended to come at the expense of the United States, but was aimed at diversifying Egyptian options. Of course said rapprochement negatively affected Egyptian-US relations, in particular the armament aspect. It should be noted though that the Russians also have qualms about Egypts relationship with the United States, for Egyptian air defenses relied on Russian technology prior to the 1970s, with American weapons and equipment later supplementing our capabilities in other areas.

What I want to say is that it is not easy for Egypt to replace the United States with Russia, nor should it be. The United States is an important country that cannot be ignored, while Egypt is also one of the largest and most important countries in the Middle East; as such, neither of them can dispense of the other, for a mature state is one that depends on diversity in its foreign relations, and having good and balanced relations between Egypt, Russia and all other factions will lead to stability and an enhanced role for Egypt and the Middle East. In the long term, doing so would benefit Russia and the United States, even if some tensions arose from time to time.

Al-Monitor: Who is better for achieving cooperation with Egypt: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

Fahmy: The rhetoric adopted by US presidential candidate Donald Trump vis-a-vis Islam and Muslims is unacceptable and greatly offensive. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton carefully chooses her words and is a "veteran politician," with all the positive and negative connotations associated with such a characterization. Unfortunately, most Arab countries, especially the Gulf states, view the Republican candidate as being better than the Democratic one due to the formers close ties with the business and petroleum sectors. I do not share that opinion and prefer to base my choice on the candidates respective stances and on prevailing conditions. I am sure that the positions of both candidates will change once the US presidential elections are concluded, but whether said change will be for the better or worse depends not on the identity of the next American president as much as it depends on the state of Egyptian and Arab affairs. For the more stability increases in Egypt and the more it regains its regional role, the more foreign countries will be willing to cooperate with Egypt and give due consideration to its opinions in the Middle East. But if Arab affairs do not improve  particularly in Egypt  then neither a Republican nor a Democrat can improve our lot, because the United States will continue to deal with the Arab world as one that is indecisive in dealing with Middle Eastern affairs, and will thus try to impose its own views. I am certain that the future of Arab-American affairs is 70% controlled by the Arab world and 30% in the hands of the United States. Therefore, the Arab world must reassess its stance, reinvigorate its role in solving regional conflicts and avoid any over-reliance on foreign parties to solve its problems.

Al-Monitor: President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi called on Israel to embrace peace and find a solution to the Palestinian cause. What is your assessment of Egypts current relations with Israel?

Fahmy: The Arab world forsook the Palestinian cause due to its preoccupation with the many internal conflicts and crises that have plagued it during the past five years, as well as the result of the internal Palestinian conflict and state of division that existed between Fatah and Hamas. Consequently, reopening discussions in that regard would serve and come to support the Palestinian cause. Egypts espoused policy in that regard is correct, but in my opinion the currently prevailing mood in Israel does not favor the establishment of two states, as reflected by the Israeli prime ministers latest comments about him disagreeing with the Arab Peace Initiative because it calls for adherence to the 1967 borders, which Israel rejects. Many steps must be taken to resolve this conflict. First, Israel and Palestine must proclaim their acceptance of the two-state solution along the 1967 borders, and agree to put an end to settlements in return for continued security cooperation between them throughout the negotiations period. Second, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations must begin under Egyptian auspices for a six-month period, with these commitments drafted in a Security Council resolution to give them the required legitimacy and political clout.

Al-Monitor: Some have asked President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to visit Israel  as Anwar Sadat did before him  to confirm his commitment to comprehensive peace. Do you endorse this proposal?

Fahmy: I do not see the logic in such a proposal, as Egypt is one of the parties backing negotiations and not a party to the negotiations themselves. As such, there is no point in creating such a proposal, for this step must be undertaken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If he truly desired peace, then he must go to Ramallah and state his desire to reach a comprehensive peace, while demonstrating goodwill by making clear statements and taking specific steps. There is no need for Sisi to go to Israel as some ridiculously propose.

Al-Monitor: Saudi Arabia has proposed the formation of many alliances  such as the Arab and Muslim alliances  to confront the so-called dangers that threaten the Arab world. What is your assessment of those alliances?

Fahmy: There is no doubt that Saudi Arabia is now playing a very different role  in fact a number of simultaneous roles, whether in Syria, Yemen or other countries. Even if some disagreed with the details associated therewith, the Saudi regional role is important and constructive. Concerning the alliances, in my opinion, they represent a correct approach, but require additional maturity to be effective for many reasons, most important among them the disputes that exist between some countries  though I hope that these alliances come as a result of an Arab political initiative to resolve specific regional conflicts. As I said, more important than any alliances is the significant Saudi activity that reflects its desire to deal with issues that have plagued the Arab world.

Al-Monitor: The announcement that Saudi Arabia had been given complete sovereignty over the Tiran and Sanafir islands led to angry popular reactions. What information do you have in that regard, and  in your opinion  are Tiran and Sanafir islands Egyptian or Saudi territory?

Fahmy: I fully understand the reaction on the streets because this is a sensitive issue related to territorial sovereignty. Irrespective of whether they are Egyptian or Saudi land, the state should have been completely transparent during the negotiations and subsequent announcement of the results thereof. It should be noted that this is an old issue occasionally discussed on the technical committee level. It was shelved for a long time until the subject of demarcating the maritime border was introduced in a recent joint statement, with negotiations resuming as a result. With regard to whether Tiran and Sanafir are Egyptian or Saudi, I repeat that this matter was not widely or conclusively discussed within state institutions in the past. Therefore, I call on the Egyptian parliament to form a neutral technical committee to transparently endeavor to review all historical documents and maps, particularly those going back to 1906, 1922 and 1933, which relate to the Ottoman period, Egyptian independence, the establishment of the Saudi state, sovereign national activities and the like  and to subsequently announce its findings to the general public, be they in favor of Egyptian or Saudi ownership of those territories.

Al-Monitor: Egyptians were angered by the Ethiopian minister of informations statements that the Renaissance Dam was now 70% complete. How did you view these statements?

Fahmy: Egypts historical water quota is no longer sufficient, with population growth now necessitating the appropriation of a larger share. This issue is highly sensitive and we must abandon our constant resorting to threats aimed at the Ethiopian side, though excessive optimism is also unwarranted and, in fact, baseless. The situation is extremely complicated and sensitive, thus requiring very careful negotiations.

Al-Monitor: What is your assessment of the negotiations conducted by Egypt in this regard?

Fahmy: Unfortunately, negotiations between the three countries have neither led to the desired results, nor to any palpable changes on the ground, particularly in relation to water quotas and management, which are political par excellence. From before my heading the ministry in July 2013 to date, no tangible progress has been made in the negotiations, and I fear that we are faced with a fait accompli, and see the dam completed without binding agreements signed in its regard. I hope that the three countries adopt clear standards concerning reservoir replenishment and water management, irrespective of the size or type of the dam. For even technical and environmental issues are not being discussed, with the technical committee yet to begin its work due to a disagreement about the scope of discussions relating to environmental issues and tripartite cooperation in the economic and social development of the Nile Basin. We must be more forthcoming in this matter, as clear differences exist between us and the other parties due to a failure in giving us well-defined commitments or reassurances. Excessive optimism and the presumption of unsubstantiated good faith are as dangerous as the repeated threats of resorting to force. The situation is highly alarming and disconcerting, with it potentially posing a real and serious problem.

Al-Monitor: How do you reply to calls for military intervention or international arbitration in this case?

Fahmy: I must be a little cautious here, in my recent capacity as a former Egyptian negotiator, and in the context of my previously mentioned point of view calling for the signing of a consensual agreement between all three parties, with all options remaining open and notwithstanding my reservations concerning the building of the dam without an agreement. I once more repeat that if the Ethiopians are truly devoted not to detrimentally affect Egyptian water needs  as they say  then they should provide a clear commitment in that regard, particularly considering that continuing construction indicates that they want to try and impose a fait accompli.
June 15, 2016

TEHRAN, Iran  A cursory review of changes in the volume of untreated steel, base metals and petrochemical products traded on the Iran Mercantile Exchange reveals that demand is depressed. Disregarding imports, it is evident that local industry is on a downward trajectory.

A survey conducted by the bimonthly economic publication Payam-e-Eghtesadi shows that the volume of steel exchanges reached 5.46 million tons in the Iranian calendar year 1394 (March 21, 2015-March 20, 2016). This figure is a 31% drop from the preceding year's 7.9 million tons. Similar declines can also be seen in the trade of other key goods. For instance, during the same period, consumption of copper decreased by 20% while aluminum consumption dropped by 5%. Meanwhile, the volume of petrochemical products traded on the Iran Mercantile Exchange dropped from 2.9 million tons in the Iranian calendar year 1393 (March 21, 2014-March 20, 2015) to 2.5 million tons in 1394, a 13.7% decline.

In sum, as far as the exchange of base materials is concerned, the past Iranian calendar year ending March 20 was one of decline, confirming the reported 2.2% negative growth of local industry.

Among the issues driving the decrease in the volume and value of transactions on the Iran Mercantile Exchange are decreased funding for construction projects, a decline in demand for housing and the growing recession in the industrial sector.

Economic analysts argue that among the many problems that are affecting construction projects, lack of adequate capital is a key factor. Although allocated funding should have been sufficient, these funds have in reality been spent on other, peripheral areas. The available statistics show that the budgets allocated to construction projects between the Iranian calendar years 1388 (March 2009) and 1395 (March 2016) have increased  but only on paper. Indeed, the portion of promised funding for construction projects that actually materialized dropped from 61% and 65% in 2009 and 2010, respectively, to 19.5% in 2013-15. This means that a large portion of the governments general budget has consistently been spent elsewhere, resulting in an effective reduction in the development budget. Thus, one of the key drivers of consumption of basic commodities traded on the Iran Mercantile Exchange has been halted. As long as construction projects do not receive adequate funding in practice, it is unrealistic to expect any improvement in the overall economic conditions.

Domestic producers of various goods, including steel and base metals, need to sell a major portion of what they have in stock to the government and state-owned companies, considering that their bottom lines  as well as cash flows  are dependent on the government buying their products. Given low oil prices and government subsidies largely being extended to consumers rather than producers, local industry is faced with major problems and it is no surprise that trade volume on the Iran Mercantile Exchange has noticeably decreased.

Another feature of the big picture is the continuous recession that has afflicted the housing and construction sector since 2013. As a result, the demand for goods used in the housing and construction sector has plummeted, with a corresponding drop in the consumption of raw materials. In other words, the recession in the housing sector has quickly spread to local industry. This decline has, for instance, negatively affected the market for steel beams, reinforced steel, sheet metal, metal doors and windows, aluminum, asphalt and paint as well as polymers.

Another key driver of the reduced trade of basic commodities is the decline in Iranian auto production. The Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade has announced that 976,836 vehicles were produced in the last Iranian calendar year, a decline of 13.5% compared with the preceding year, after auto production actually experienced a growth of 53.4% from March 2013 to March 2014. The recession in the auto industry without a doubt directly impacts the volume of metal traded on the Iran Mercantile Exchange.

Worryingly, statistics released by the Iran Mercantile Exchange for the past two months show no significant changes in the market for raw materials compared with the previous year. Rather, there has been a continued decrease in the volume and value of trade in the output of local industry and mining. For petrochemical products, there has been a very small increase in exchanges. These sectors make up the vast majority of the volume of trade on the exchange. As such, in order to aid local producers grappling with the ongoing recession, it is important for the government to find solutions to these problems.

In this vein, supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is necessary to stimulate demand that can revive the industrial sector and also boost the volume and value of trade on the Iran Mercantile Exchange. In this regard, the recent letter from the governor of the Central Bank of Iran to CEOs of banks and credit institutions asking them to allocate at least 10% of loans to SMEs is an important step forward. The launch of a market for SMEs on Irans smaller Fara Bourse later this month is another important step that can facilitate the kind of financing necessary to boost SMEs, thereby creating sustainable economic growth that can create jobs.
June 15, 2016

The deadly attack on an intelligence facility near Baqaa Palestinian refugee camp June 6, which claimed the lives of five people, including three officers, was heavily symbolic. The General Intelligence Department (GID), north of Amman, is Jordans most prestigious national security apparatus. It is in the forefront of the war against jihadis and other militants. It had been effective in preventing terrorist attacks against government and civilian targets. Its last such operation was in March, when special forces took down what was described as an Islamic State (IS) cell in the northern city of Irbid. All the cell members were Jordanians.

Until the general prosecutor issued a ban on publication of news on the attack last week, the government had released some information about the single assailant  who was caught on the same day with the help of citizens  and his motives. Government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani told the official Jordanian news agency that the gunman was a Jordanian citizen and a resident of the nearby camp. Mahmoud al-Masharfeh, of Palestinian origin, was a jihadi sympathizer last arrested in 2014 when he tried to enter Gaza to join Jaish al-Islam, a branch of al-Qaeda. Momani told reporters, Early indications are that this was an isolated act.

During a visit to the GID headquarters June 7, King Abdullah reiterated his confidence in the military and security agencies, commending their role in defending the country and safeguarding its security and stability.

But the attack shifted attention to Jordans problem with home-grown radicalism. There are conflicting reports about the number of Jordanians who had crossed the border with Syria and joined al-Qaeda proxy Jabhat al-Nusra and IS. According to the figures compiled by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence in 2015, an estimated 1,500 Jordanian citizens are fighting in Syria and Iraq. One study by Radio Free Europe suggested that Jordans ratio of jihadis to general population is 315 per million, making it the top contributor of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria per capita.

The majority of these fighters belong to the Salafi-jihadi movement in Jordan, estimated at 5,000 members. Most are from economically marginalized towns such as Zarqa, Maan and Irbid.

The Baqaa attack has raised fears of sleeper cells or lone wolves who may have indirect contacts with IS or Jabhat al-Nusra. An unknown number of Jordanian jihadis have managed to return from Syria and many have been charged and tried before the countrys State Security Court.

The problem of home-grown radicals has reignited a national debate following the Baqaa incident. In February 2015, Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour reiterated a commitment to a national plan the government adopted in 2014 to confront extremism that focuses on all sectors, including education and rehabilitation of mosque preachers. Ensour said, Difficult economic conditions and the spread of poverty and unemployment in addition to political conditions have contributed to extremism and terrorism. But since then, there has been no indication that such a plan was being implemented or that it is achieving results.

On June 12, Al-Ghad newspaper reported that a US State Department report on terrorism had criticized Ensours plan, claiming that it lacks resources and manpower. The report also said that Jordanian officials are reluctant when pushed to acknowledge the phenomenon of local extremism.

Mohammad Abu Rumman, a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and an expert on jihadi movements, said that while the state is successful in battling extremists on the security front, it has failed politically and culturally in protecting Jordanian young people against extremist ideologies. He told Al-Monitor that the government strategy was born dead and that we know little about efforts to rehabilitate and reform prisoners. He said that the Baqaa assailant had been indoctrinated while he was in prison for two years.

Abu Rumman said he is puzzled by Jordanian young people who are inspired by the discourse presented by radical groups while at the same time distrusting the official religious line or the thinking of moderate groups. We need to build psychological profiles of these young men to understand what drives them, he said. The danger is growing and we should be worried that IS is now appealing to middle-class youth as well, Abu Rumman added.

Moderate Islamist activist and newspaper columnist Hilmi al-Asmar said it is not enough to review the official religious discourse and the content of Friday sermons to fight extremist ideas, explaining, We need a surgical intervention to overhaul school curricula, and this is not easy because there are legitimate questions about jihad in Islam that require modern-day answers that will be acceptable to the majority.

In his view, the best strategy should seek to instill the values of a civil state, equal rights before the law and an encompassing identity that confronts auxiliary identities that have fragmented our society.

Jordanian officials and pundits were quick to reject insinuations that the Baqaa attacker's actions were linked to his Palestinian origin. Abu Rumman said that the Salafi-jihadi movement appeals to a mixed group of Jordanians. Ensour may be right in pointing the finger at the economic conditions that Jordan is dealing with, made even worse by the presence of at least 1.2 million Syrians in the kingdom.

But salvaging the economy will take a long time and recent figures show that the unemployment rate, especially among young people, is rising, reaching as high as 13%, the highest since 2008. While fears of attacks from across the border with Syria and Iraq are receding, experts such as Abu Rumman say that local conditions are providing a rich habitat for home-grown extremism.

Editor's note: This article has been updated since its initial publication.
June 15, 2016

The Obama administration is throwing its weight behind Libyas new UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA), laying out a $56 million aid plan for the coming months.

The State Department plans to reallocate $35 million in current and prior year funding to help the political transition in Tripoli, special envoy for Libya Jonathan Winer told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a June 15 hearing. That includes $4 million for a United Nations-led Stabilization Facility, announced in April, to repair public infrastructure such as hospitals and water facilities.

The proposal would require moving around money that has already been approved by Congress. Some of the funding, however, would require a green light from lawmakers, a State Department official told Al-Monitor.

The funds would come on top of the State Departments $20.5 million bilateral aid request for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. That would bring the total US contribution for the coming year to $55.5 million.

Our strategic interest in Libya is to support a unified, accountable government that meets the economic and security needs of the Libyan people, Winer told senators. At the center of our policy has been support for the creation of the GNA as a unifying bridge to help Libyans move beyond the damaging period of political competition  and fragmentation until the country adopts a new constitution and a long-term government.

Winer went on to press the Libyan factions in Tripoli and the countrys east to get behind the GNA, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council in December. Without reconciliation and the resumption of oil exploitation (down from 1.5 million barrels a day to 400,000), Winer said, the country could be broke within two years.

Winer received a warm reception on Capitol Hill, even as bipartisan doubts linger about the international communitys ability to bring warring factions together and defeat the Islamic State (IS) and other Islamist groups in Libya. Many Republicans opposed President Barack Obamas decision to intervene in the 2011 uprising against Moammar Gadhafi, and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has made it a centerpiece of his attacks on his rival Hillary Clintons record as secretary of state  although he has also said in the past that he supported the NATO-backed campaign.

It still appears to me that we have a really light touch  a very, very light touch  in a country that  could in fact breed problems far greater than Syria, said panel chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn. It still doesnt appear to me that weve come together around something that has a sense of urgency or seriousness to it relative to the negativity that can occur if Libya fails.

The top Democrat on the panel hammered home the need for unity, without which the pressure for rival outside interventions will only grow.

The GNA itself has not requested foreign intervention. And while we can provide training to GNA-controlled units, we cannot fight this fight for them, said Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. If and when the US decides to give military equipment and training to Libyan forces, it must be with the full cognizance of who were giving support to and the potential for that support later to be turned against the United States.

The United States has stationed a handful of special forces troops in the country to help organize the fight against IS. And Secretary of State John Kerry said in May that he was ready to look at exemptions to the international arms embargo against the country.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., raised concerns that some US allies  notably Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Egypt  have supported an array of actors in Libya. He questioned the wisdom of lifting the embargo under those circumstances.

How can the [Obama] administration ensure that its allies are abiding by international law and not undermining the unity government? Menendez asked. And how can the United States ensure that the GNA is strong enough to control any arms that are supplied?

Winer acknowledged that ensuring such an outcome would be a shared responsibility between Libya and potential arms providers, including the United States.
June 15, 2016

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  This Ramadan, Palestinians are entertaining themselves by watching the popular dramas Kafr al-Lawz, Bas ya Zalameh, Fidai 2 and Watan Ala Watar. They offer viewers tastes of satire, social commentary and drama in examining life in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The series are positive additions to Palestinian drama, which has to compete with the more than 80 Arab TV dramas that began airing at the start of Ramadan.

Arab TV channels bought the rights to three of the series, Watan Ala Watar being the exception, to broadcast during Ramadan. Despite their low production quality, the Palestinian series are highly rated as evidenced by the number of views after being posted online following their broadcast. Some of them have registered more than 200,000 views.

Bas ya Zalameh ("Enough Man!") is a satirical comedy about the trials and tribulations of daily Palestinian life, including societal and other problems, like electricity cuts. It is being broadcast on the Jordanian Roya TV. The previous seasons had been available to watch online.

Hisham Adnan, an actor in the show, told Al-Monitor that the series objective is to raise awareness of social problems and issues in a comical way, but without trying to provide specific solutions to them. The popularity of the series over the past three seasons has prompted the show's team  the two main actors, the director, the producer and the cameraman  to work on another season of the series. The first season premiered in 2013.

According to Adnan, the biggest challenges facing Palestinian drama are the lack of cutting-edge equipment and official sponsors. Actors and directors must self-finance their productions in the hope that their show will eventually be marketed and broadcast by TV channels. The simple and colloquial dialect used in Bas ya Zalameh, which consists of episodes between 10 and 13 minutes long, has been the key to its success.

Kafr al-Lawz, named after a Palestinian village near Jerusalem, features the same satirical and comical style as Bas ya Zalameh and is being broadcast on Palestinian TV. It centers on the competition between two families in Kafr al-Lawz to lead the village council. Meanwhile, Watan Ala Watar ("Homeland on the Verge of Collapse") is being aired daily in Jordan, in an Amman hotel, by subscription. Palestinian satellite channels passed on the opportunity to broadcast it, perhaps because it is too critical in its satirical take on public figures. Each episode focuses on a particular social problem or issue, such as price hikes and travel by government officials.

Fidai 2 ("Resistance Fighter," season 2) is a drama being aired on the Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa TV. The series focuses on prisoners in Israeli jails, Palestinians confronted by settler attacks in the West Bank and the Israeli wars on Gaza. The first season of the series, which proved to be quite popular, aired during Ramadan last year.

Mohammed Khalifa, director of Fidai 2, told Al-Monitor that the series tries to offer something different from the common Arab depictions of the Palestinian situation, in particular in Egyptian and Syrian dramas. In other words, the goal is to present the Palestinian situation from the Palestinians perspective.

Khalifa added, Another purpose behind the series is to instill the concept of resistance against the Israeli occupation  which international law guarantees to the occupied Palestinian people  through the events unfolding in the series. Khalifa declined to reveal the cost of producing the series' 30 episodes, each one 45 minutes long, on which almost 300 people worked.

Walid Abu Jyab, an actor in Fidai 2, told Al-Monitor that the social, emotional and national character of his show greatly contributes to the series exciting and thrilling plots. This is despite the series focusing on Palestinians suffering in Israeli prisons and from attacks by settlers and the Israeli army.

Abu Jyab said he is satisfied with the series, despite the low quality of production facilities and equipment. He claims that large Palestinian and Arab audiences are watching the series.

Hazem Abu Hamid, a Palestinian director, told Al-Monitor that Palestinian drama is trying to put itself on the Arab drama map. It is still a fledgling sector, despite attempts to improve storylines, cinematography and production.

Noting that Palestinian audiences are free to choose from dozens of Arab TV dramas, Abu Hamid said, The challenges facing Palestinian drama are story development, scripts and competencies, which are more important than the [financial] aspects and equipment. Many actors do their job for a living, not as a profession, in light of the widespread poverty and unemployment, and this is evident in the quality of the acting. To this is added the poor income those working in this industry receive. For instance, the extras are paid $10 per day.

Palestine still lacks institutions to teach theater and acting, so maybe the problematic elements of Palestinian drama identifed by Abu Hamid will change when this situation changes.
June 15, 2016

Questions about the legitimacy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's university diploma have been simmering for a while and now have the potential to become a major issue.

Erdogan went to an imam-hatip school, a high school-level institution that educates religious preachers. During the 1970s and 1980s, graduates of those schools could pursue their higher education only in theology. Erdogan, however, was thought to have graduated from Marmara Universitys Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences; to have registered there, he would have needed a certificate to prove he was also educated at a school other than an imam-hatip school.

There starts the scrutiny of Erdogan's diplomas, or rather, whether he has valid documents to prove he is eligible to be president.

The latest allegation is that he doesn't have a valid university diploma. If true, it would have enormous consequences because, according to the Turkish Constitution, the president should be an alumnus of a university or an institution of higher education. The constitution's Article 101 stipulates that and it is unequivocal.

At first glance, the allegation about Erdogan didn't seem to make a lot of sense, particularly seeing as how Erdogan is now in his second year as president; presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin ruled out any wrongdoing, simply saying that the rumors were ridiculous.

The allegation initially was raised with the Higher Electoral Board by a former judge, Omer Faruk Eminagaoglu, the founding president of the well-known association of judges and prosecutors, YAR-SAV. Members of that group have a reputation for a Kemalist-style ideology and for being affiliated with the opposition, namely the Republican People's Party (CHP). YAR-SAV and its founding president have been widely known for their hostility toward the ruling Justice and Development Party.

That is one reason the allegation didn't attract a lot of attention at first. Yet the former judge was persistent. Though the Higher Electoral Board ultimately rejected Eminagaoglu's appeal, the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) took up the matter.

The board chose to respond to the HDP, perhaps thinking it would silence those who might just be fishing for something to use against the president. The board recently sent the HDP a copy of Erdogan's supposed diploma, the one he presented when he ran in the August 2014 presidential elections.

The HDP duly published that copy on its Twitter account.

With that, the controversy entered its second and probably more interesting and important phase: There are very strong arguments that the document might be forged, and that the college diploma of the president of Turkey might be a fake one.

There are very valid reasons to suspect the document's authenticity, as the copy indicates that Erdogan graduated from the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences of Marmara University in 1981. At the bottom of the diploma, two signatures can be seen clearly: those of the university president and the dean of faculty.

That is very problematic, indeed. First of all, there was no Marmara University in 1981 and no such faculty under that name. Marmara University was founded in Istanbul in 1982. The faculty took that name and became affiliated with the school in 1983. Previously, it had been a college-level institution known as the Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences.

So, how is it that Erdogan has a signed and dated university diploma, when there was no university or affiliated faculty under that name then?

That is why the HDP is pursuing the matter.

And from the other end of the political spectrum, anti-Kurdish, arch-Turkish nationalist Gokce Firat has presented detailed arguments that Erdogan's diploma is forged.

If taken seriously, the follow-up to the controversy could create monumental legal questions in Turkey. If it turns out Erdogan was never qualified to be elected president, whatever he has signed or implemented would have to be considered null and void from a purely legal point of view. Politically, it would provide an armory of ammunition to his critics, whose numbers abroad are rapidly increasing.

For example, in Germany, Erdogan recently riled Bundestag (parliament) members of Turkish descent. The Bundestag voted June 2 to recognize as genocide the 1915 Ottoman Turks' slayings of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. Erdogan's response was to say that Green Party co-chair Cem Ozdemir's "blood should be tested" to verify that he actually is of Turkish descent. Ozdemir led the resolution on the Armenian genocide.

Ozdemir was the first of 11 Bundestag members of Turkish descent to be elected, and Erdogan's statement didn't sit well with the other 10 either. One of them, Sevim Dagdeviren, from the German Left Party, said Erdogan should be banned from entering Germany.

Erdogan's remarks may fall into the category of "racist discourse," which is considered a crime in Germany. I recently had the opportunity to talk to Ozdemir. He did not want to discuss the issue personally, because he does not want it to be interpreted as arising from a vendetta between him and Erdogan. However, there are enough German parliamentarians of ethnic Turkish background  and ethnic German parliamentarians in general  who could bring up an accusation of racism. And if Erdogan's university diploma proves to be a forgery, that would naturally provide ammunition to his international opponents to bring up the argument of whether his title is legitimate.

Raising the issue in Turkey is more difficult because the media is strongly controlled and thus muted to avoid irking the president.

Few people, including myself, took the questions about Erdogan's higher education seriously. It is mind-boggling. But if Erdogan's diploma ends up being a forgery, even Turkey's cowed media will not be able to ignore or avoid the explosive scandal that would result, with all its international dimensions.
June 16, 2016

Samia Danna, a young Palestinian woman from Jerusalem, is worried about how she will get through Ramadan this year. Danna works in Ramallah at a communications company, and the holy month has arrived while she is six months pregnant. Although Islam exempts pregnant women and others (the sick, travelers and women menstruating) from the all-day fasting ritual, Danna was worried that she wouldnt be able to find a restaurant open from which to order lunch.

Responding to Al-Monitor by email, Danna said that she has not had a problem finding food. While many restaurants are closed, many restaurants whose owners are Christians are open, she reported, ticking off the names of some half dozen eateries in Ramallah that are open during the day.

In Bethlehem, the situation is no different. Jeryies Sadis family rents a number of shops, including a restaurant on trendy Karkafe Street. The local government in Bethlehem has no problem with people eating on the streets, and restaurants are open here, Sadi told Al-Monitor.

Bethlehem and Ramallah may be exceptions to the rule. With traditionally strong Christian populations and Christian mayors  Musa Hadid in Ramallah and Vera Baboon in Bethlehem  the two towns are known for having liberal and open zoning laws and policies, including on the issue of alcohol. Al-Bireh, however, Ramallahs twin city, has strict zoning laws, and no stores sell alcohol in this Muslim-majority city.

Regulations on things like alcohol might differ, but one would expect the Palestinian central government, police and other legal branches of government to apply the law equitably. Yet the local press has published numerous stories of individuals being arrested and imprisoned for eating, drinking and smoking in public in Nablus and Tulkarm. The existence of different laws and regulations in different cities led Sadi to sarcastically refer to the United States of Palestine.

I have always had problems with how the Palestinian Authority [PA] handles areas differently, which eventually will create polarization, he told Al-Monitor. The PA has to either prevent people from violating the sanctity of the month of Ramadan or allow people to go about their way in all districts of the country.

In Tulkarm, the police arrested an unidentified man June 12 on charges of violating the sanctity of Ramadan and turned him over to the attorney general's office for processing. The attorney general will present the case to a judge who will decide the mans fate. Perhaps as a nod to hard-liners, the Palestinian police posted a report on the arrest to its website and illustrated it with a large set of handcuffs.

In Nablus, the public relations department of the police issued a statement saying that on June 11 they had detained three individuals on charges of violating the sanctity of Ramadan. We received a complaint from a citizen that a number of people were huddled behind the local vegetable market, eating and smoking, the police statement read. A police car was dispatched, and three individuals were arrested for publicly eating during Ramadan.

Article 274 of the Jordanian Penal Code stipulates, Whoever publicly violates fasting in the month of Ramadan, s/he shall be punished by imprisonment of up to one month or a fine of up to 25 Jordanian dinars [about $35]. Jordanian law still applies in Palestine unless a statute has been amended. Most Arab Mashreq countries have similar laws for those who eat, drink or smoke in public during Ramadan. Egypt and other North African countries, with the exception of Morocco, have no such laws on the books.

Sani Meo, general manager of Turbo Design and the publisher of This Week in Palestine, said polarization within Palestinian society is obvious at Ramadan. In Palestine, we have been experiencing an increase in how people view social-religious issues, between those who are very conservative and those who are more liberal, he told Al-Monitor. According to Meo, the more conservative wing is the more influential.

Meo's impression of increased polarization is not universally held. The difference in treatment of citizens during Ramadan is nothing new, Anees Sweidan, a civil servant from Nablus who works in Ramallah, told Al-Monitor. Those who normally dont fast are not fasting this year, and the number of those fasting is no different from previous years.

Although many Palestinians look forward to the month of Ramadan because of the colorful customs, traditional foods (especially the Qatayef sweets, a sort of pancake with nuts or cheese soaked in syrup) and other rituals associated with it in terms of bringing people together, the holy month does have a way of exposing societal differences and pushing to the forefront issues of faith and conviction, which many people feel should remain private. That government agencies police personal choices, such as whether to fast, is seen as offensive to many although a consensus exists that one should not be disrespectful of others in as much as it is possible.

It is unclear which direction the trend is headed in Palestine. Religiosity during Ramadan is on the increase in some areas but is decreasing in others. It is also unclear whether differences in governmental approaches will remain limited or trend in a specific direction.
June 15, 2016

TINDOUF, Algeria  For 40 years, the harsh Hamada desert in southwest Algeria has punished Western Sahara refugees with its merciless environment. One man thinks it's finally possible to change that situation.

There is little available in the camps from which to build durable shelter; adobe houses and tents are all the refugees have been able to erect. But Tatah Lehbib is demonstrating what he says is a viable alternative that is stronger and more affordable than mud bricks.

Lehbib earned a master's degree from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canarias, where he specialized in energy efficiency. He got his bachelor's degree from the University of Tlemcen in Algeria, where he studied renewable energy. Lehbib has been living with his grandmother in a Tindouf camp. As a child, he went to school there even when temperatures exceeded 50 degrees Celsius (122 F) and played barefoot in the dusty streets. As a university student, he would return home in the searing summers.

When I started my undergraduate studies, I began dreaming of constructing a home that resists heat, rain and storms," he told Al-Monitor. Lehbib was granted a full Erasmus scholarship. By the time he was researching his thesis, which focused on the suffering he and his grandmother endured, the refugee camps were struck by the heaviest rain in four decades. I had to include that catastrophe in my research as well," he said.

The refugee camps' infrastructure is a main concern, particularly after floods destroyed thousands of homes, forcing people to take shelter uphill and watch their belongings vanish. However, as soon as the crisis passed, people had no choice but to rebuild with the same mud bricks they had seen melt before their eyes.

Lehbib is taking a totally different approach based on science. For a month he has been building a house of plastic bottles filled with wet, compressed sand. When I first started building, people thought I was crazy," he said. He hopes to reach his goal by establishing a scientifically designed plan. Many of the existing houses trap the heat inside, as they were built without an understanding of ventilation. Since hot air rises, "there must be a window in the roof to let it out."

Tatah collected most of the materials he uses from garbage. The round room he is building is half finished, with 1,300 bottles. This kind of alternative housing has many benefits, especially in a desert environment, he said. The shape will help lessen the heat, because air circulates naturally around the circular design, and the construction requires less water. It also puts otherwise wasted plastic to good use. And, he said, One plastic bottle is stronger than 20 mud bricks  it bounces when you drop it, but bricks break apart.

The creative refugee said he does not get financial support, and so everything is done using the simplest means possible. My professors have taught me that every single nation has gotten along with the little they had, whether by digging caves or something else," he said.

The round-house bottle approach is apparently new to the Sahrawi society. In his neighborhood and even throughout the camps, no one has adopted the idea. He thinks that as long as they do not see it completely decorated and polished, they wont dare to follow suit.

Most of the people seem to prefer staying in their comfort zones.

Regardless, Lehbib keeps defying the odds. While others are unable to buy cement to fortify mud walls because of the lack of resources, he has invented a new mixture made out of trash and some natural additions. I went to the carpenter and took the wood waste, found an outdated natural hydraulic lime at home, and mixed them with yellow and red sand and charcoal ashes," he said. He demonstrates by pouring water on the mixture to show how consolidated it is. The hybrid literally shields the plastic building. His selection of materials is practical: Sahrawis make tea every day on coal, carpentry is a craft practiced in all local markets and lime is one of the cheapest items to buy.

Despite the skepticism surrounding this project, Lehbib is interacting a lot with his neighbors. He is using their water tank, and they constantly give him bottles.

During Ramadan, Lehbib is one of very few people working, and he has cut back in observance of the holy month. I reduced my working hours; they were eight, and now I am working in the mornings only," he said.

He can be found filling empty bottles in his turban and shorts, under the shadow of a blanket hanging on a fence. He talks about the importance of this project and says it is based on a spirit of cooperation. The collaboration really became evident when many people started sharing pictures of the building online and offline as they helped with the construction.

The idea, he said, was first implemented in Latin America. The first time I saw it was on TV in India, but it was founded in Latin America, he said.

The cohesiveness of the architecture is essential. From the inside Lehbib will sew the bottles with thread to create a net to keep everything well-connected.

His ambition goes beyond the plastic house. He also has a vision to improve mud bricks. At his house, he has planted a cactus tree that he said produces an adhesive liquid. According to Lehbib, in Mexico people put the substance in a barrel of water to "brew" it, then they make brick with it. The bricks become waterproof. The goal is to provide a stronger alternative for thousands of families whose houses are devastated every time it rains.

It is clear that Lehbib will need to spread such knowledge. I will be more than happy to help others establish those houses and even form a specialized group" toward that end, he said.
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A rendering of AC Hotels by Marriott at CityCentre at Big Spring. (Courtesy photo)

Work will begin this month on a new-to-Alabama hotel at one of the city's most anticipated projects in downtown Huntsville.

RCP Companies and Yedla Hotel Management confirm grading will start before the end of June on AC Hotels by Marriott, a proposed 150-unit boutique hotel at CityCentre at Big Spring at the old Holiday Inn site, which was razed in January 2015. Vertical construction will follow early this fall.

The hotel will be the 10th U.S. location for AC Hotels, a global joint venture with Spanish hotelier Antonio Catalan. Yedla Management Company, which owns and operates Starwood, Marriott and Hilton franchises, will run the property.

RCP Director of Acquisitions and Asset Management Odie Fakhouri said the hotel will be customized for Huntsville and have integrated new restaurants with rooftop bars and outdoor terraces overlooking Big Spring International Park.

"The results are delivery of a special hotel experience that resonates with the local market and embodies a unique personality within the brand," he said in a statement.

Plans to get started on the European-inspired hotel were delayed last year due to an internal impact study by Marriott, which determined the property will not pose an unfair competitive advantage over other Marriott brands in the city. Fakhouri said the hotel will be complete by next summer.

CityCentre at Big Spring, a $100 million project, will also feature a 12,000-square-foot artisanal food hall called The Public Market designed by The Gravity Company, an Orlando consulting firm. Ray Schaefer, founding partner of The Gravity Company, said food halls offer a "snapshot of a community's culinary and cultural identity."

The food hall at CityCentre will be inspired by Ponce City Market and Krog Street in Atlanta, Eataly in Chicago and The Source in Denver.

"Food halls are a part of a culinary trend spreading throughout the U.S., born of an era in which the old way of buying and consuming is new again," Schaefer said. "They celebrate emerging talent and give small purveyors a chance to display their creative skills in a brick-and-mortar location."

More CityCentre details are expected this summer.

The project as a whole will feature approximately 50,000 square feet of retail, upscale homes, structured/street-level parking, and regional and local cuisine. It will also have pedestrian crossings, bike pathways, walkways and a linear park that connects visitors to Big Spring Park, the VBC, Twickenham Square, medical district and other nearby properties.
Bob Dylan (File photo)

If you're keeping a list of signs that the apocalypse is nigh, add this one: Bob Dylan performed "Free Bird" at a recent concert.

Well, sort of. The tale is skimpy on real detail and seems to have grown a bit in the telling, as it has been vividly re-imagined in various media outlets. Depending on where you read it, some guy in the back of the Greek Theater in Berkeley, Calif., yelled out "Free Bird" near the end of Dylan's show. Instead of muttering some incomprehensible, cryptic putdown, Dylan led his band in a cover of the song, just for "that guy."

More sober accounts of the June 9 happening, such as a report in The San Diego Union-Tribune, describe a tip of the hat rather than a full performance: "near the conclusion of his concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Dylan and his band did indeed break into the guitar coda from 'Free Bird' during 'Love Sick,' their second and final encore."

That seems to fit the available video evidence, which consists of a couple of YouTube clips of Dylan's band performing the coda while he struts the stage. Let's face it: If ol' Bob had spent seven minutes croaking out lyrics like "and this bird you cannot cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-nge," there'd be enough evidence to break the Internet.

Still, that he went there at all is something unexpected. And it opens up entirely new questions, like the one that comes inevitably to mind:

If Dylan's band has touched on "Free Bird," how long can it be before they greet an audience with the intro riff to "Sweet Home Alabama?"
Linda.JPG

Linda Flaherty-Goldsmith is the first woman president of Birmingham-Southern College.

(Photo by Greg Garrison/AL.com)

Linda Flaherty-Goldsmith became the first woman president in the 160-year history of Birmingham-Southern College on Friday.

"That's not the most significant thing to me," she said.

More important is to keep moving the college forward. "I'm real excited about this job," she said. "All of higher education is under strain right now and we're no different."

Birmingham-Southern College was founded in 1856, is affiliated with the United Methodist Church and had 1,337 students enrolled in fall 2015.

She said she expects enrollment to be up in the fall. "We're still working every day on enrollment," she said. "Recruiting and fundraising will take up two huge portions of my time."

Flaherty-Goldsmith took over the position on Friday, about a year after Birmingham-Southern had hired Ed Leonard as president.

Outgoing President Edward F. Leonard III is "vacating the position," according to a news release from the college on June 10. No explanation was given for Leonard's short tenure, nor any details about the terms of his departure.

Flaherty-Goldsmith declined to discuss Leonard's brief tenure. She's returning to the college after serving as its chief of staff from 2011-2013 under Gen. Charles Krulak. Krulak, former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, took over as president in 2011 and helped steer the college out of a financial crisis. Flaherty-Goldsmith began working for Birmingham-Southern College as a consultant to the board of trustees in 2010.

"I think we made tremendous progress," she said. "In terms of student recruitment, we're light years ahead of where we were."

The college has stabilized and can now look at improving the situation for employees, such as increasing 401k retirement fund matching, she said.

"We had to make major reductions that made the college more efficient and sustainable," Flaherty-Goldsmith said. "It's time for us to restore some things and to be smart about how we grow."

Flaherty-Goldsmith grew up in Pontotoc, Miss., one of nine children, graduating from high school there in 1967. Her mother, 96, still lives there. She then attended the University of Alabama. Six years ago, she published a book of short stories called "An Anguished Hallelujah," about growing up poor in rural Mississippi.

"The theme of the book is about people in poverty regardless of race," she said. "What makes the difference in how you escape poverty."

For Flaherty-Goldsmith, the answer has focused on education. "It's everything," she said. "I don't know why we can't figure that out and take the money we spend on prisons and put it into education."

Flaherty-Goldsmith was Vice Chancellor for Financial Affairs for the University of Alabama System from 1993-1998, and prior to that she served 13 years in key financial roles at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, including serving as Vice President for Finance and Administration. She taught leadership in the Culverhouse College of Commerce at the University of Alabama from 1998-2000, before establishing a financial and organizational consulting practice.

In 2013, the Birmingham-Southern College faculty awarded her the honorary degree of Doctorate of Humane Letters. Since 2013, Flaherty-Goldsmith has worked as a pro bono consultant with Human Rights First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan human rights organization.

She wants Birmingham-Southern College to pay attention to what the community needs. "Community is so important," she said. "Any way the community needs your support, you need to be supportive."

Flaherty-Goldsmith said it's an asset of the college that throughout Birmingham, BSC graduates proliferate and flourish in every field, including medicine, education, law, the ministry and business.

"The Birmingham community values what Birmingham-Southern College brings," Flaherty-Goldsmith said. "It's just such a gem."
Donald Trump is in trouble. You cant tell from his performances at his campaign rallies. The Republican presumptive presidential nominee remains bullish and combative, but the problems are there.

First he stirred up a controversy with comments about a judge hearing a civil case against him. Even though the judge was born in Indiana, Trump insisted he could not get a fair hearing from the man because he was of Mexican heritage.

The businessman said as he was going to build a wall to keep undocumented immigrants from crossing the Mexican border, the judge, an experienced and respected member of the legal community, would be biased against him.

His remarks, repeated in several media interviews, stirred the Republican establishment. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, the most senior elected Republican in the country, described the comments as the textbook definition of a racist comment.

Yet, given that hed finally endorsed the Republican nominee just a few days before, he insisted he still had his support.

Trump backs blocking gun sales to terror suspects

Let than sink in for a moment.

His most high-profile backer had essentially called him a racist, but was still going to try to have him elected as US president.

It was interesting that on the US media networks no senior Republicans popped up to support the nominee. Veteran US journalist Bob Schieffer said: The silence is deafening.

Then there was his reaction to the shooting in Orlando.

As police counted the bodies, Donald Trump tweeted: Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I dont want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!

Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

His critics from all sides of the political spectrum were angered, claiming that even in moments of national tragedy Trump remained solidly self-centered.

In a speech the next day, he took the opportunity to renew his call for a complete ban on Muslim immigration.

He made a similar call in December after a mass shooting in California and was criticised by many, including Republicans, who said the idea was not only unconstitutional, it was un-American.

In fact Paul Ryan  him again  said at the time: This is not conservatism, is not what this party stands for, and, more importantly, its not what the country stands for.

Trump insisted, without any evidence, that people in the Muslim community had known in advance about the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando and done nothing to stop them.

Again, no senior Republican backed Trumps ideas or appeared on the media to defend him.

Then on Tuesday, he tweeted again that he was going to meet the National Rifle Association (NRA) to discuss implementing new gun legislation after the Orlando shooting.

His main concern was no-fly no-buy, the idea that anyone on a US Government terrorist watch list or no-fly list should also be barred from buying a gun.

Its a proposal put forward by many Democrats, including President Barack Obama, who has called it a common-sense measure.

Obama slams Trumps Muslim ban call

The NRA, who had endorsed Trump at its national convention just two weeks ago, said it was happy to meet. But many supporters were furious the Republican nominee would even consider changes to gun legislation.

Right-wing blogger Erik Erikson wrote: This is a terrible idea and a flat-out cave by Donald Trump. You cannot deny constitutional rights to American citizens because the government is suspicious of you.

If all that wasnt enough, new opinion polls show that firstly Trump is falling behind Hillary Clinton in the national polls.

And another poll says Trumps standing with the American public has deteriorated significantly. A man who has already borne the burden of being the least popular presidential candidate in modern American political history pushed that barrier a little further. Now 70 percent of the electorate view him negatively, 56 percent feel strongly unfavourable.

Theres a long way to go until the election, but the events of the last two weeks and the new polls tell the same story. Trumps in trouble.
Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China  The sun rises over holy Mount Yala, imposing and jagged at 5,820 metres. Student nuns and monks begin their prayers at the 1,400-year-old Lhagang Monastery in Tagong, a town in the mountain-ringed grasslands of the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China.

The people of the town emerge from their stone winter houses to tend to their yaks. When the mild summer arrives at the Tibetan highlands, the semi-nomadic herders who live in the town will set off to roam the grasslands with their herds and tents as they have done for centuries.

Tagong is a frontier town of about 8,000 people on the 2,142km-long Sichuan-Tibet Highway, about a quarter of the way to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Formerly known as the Kham region of eastern Tibet, the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture is roughly the size of Nepal and has a population of mainly Tibetans.

READ MORE: Indias disappearing nomads
Space, the final frontier. From Jules Verne's seminal novel From Earth to Moon, to George Melies' iconic silent 1902 movie inspired by the same book, space has always been a fascination for humankind, a place for the great unknown and a constant reminder of how small we are in the Universe.

"From this vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest," declared astrophysicist Carl Sagan in 1990. He was marking the Voyager 1 spacecraft's moment at the edge of the Solar System, just before it entered interstellar space - the greatest distance covered by a human-made machine.

But it was a machine after all. And human beings, as the most complex machines that we know, are nowhere near to travelling such a distance.

The International Space Station (ISS), the largest artificial body in orbit, has been hosting astronauts since 2000 and helping humanity to unlock the mysteries of life in space as well as its effects on the human body.

The ISS is not the first of its own kind, but it is the first joint programme in space exploration to involve the best minds of humankind. After thousands of experiments to test the effects of microgravity and other spatial factors, scientists are tirelessly preparing Earthers to expand our horizon, and push the frontiers forward.

While our current technology is allowing us to send robots and spacecraft to nearby astronomical formations, our bodies are not capable of undertaking comprehensive missions. Such long trips would have drastic consequences on spacefarers, effects that astronauts in the ISS and scientists on the ground have been researching for decades.
Engaging in a serious debate about tomorrows options is more useful than pretending todays processes are delivering.

James Denselow is a writer on Middle East politics and security issues and a research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre.

Almost six months on from when direct talks were scheduled to begin, is it time to admit the failure of the latest Syrian peace process and look into alternative ways forward?

United Nations Envoy Staffan de Mistura announced last week that he would not attempt to reconvene the Syria peace talks until August, saying that the time was not yet mature for the official third round of intra-Syrian talks.

Violence in the country is spiking and making a mockery of the international communitys cessation of hostilities agreed in February. Things are looking particularly bad in Aleppo as the regime and allied forces apply the squeeze on opposition-held areas.





The one route out of the city has become known as the road of death such is the frequency of strikes upon it, and those civilians who remain fear a total siege. Muskilda Zancada, the head of mission for Syria at Doctors Without Borders bemoaned how the world is turning a blind eye to the carnage in Aleppo.

Hospitals, markets and residential areas are still under fire, and no one is doing anything to put out the flames, she said.

Testing ground for Russian weaponry

After attacks in Idlib were reported to have killed some 40 people, Dr Riyad Hijab, general coordinator for the Syrian opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC), responded to the attacks by claiming that Russia clearly aims to exterminate Syrians and turn Syria into a testing ground for Russian weaponry.

ALSO READ: Can the world provide Syrians with aid from above?

Meanwhile, the suburb of Daraya, which has been under siege since 2012, saw a glimmer of hope when global pressure allowed food aid in.

De Mistura ... has seemingly been let down by a combination of regime deceit, Russian duplicity, US disinterest and opposition disorganisation. by

This opening was quickly put in brutal perspective when regime forces dropped 68 barrel bombs on Daraya just hours after the aid had arrived. This bombing left France outraged beyond words, yet words have so far failed to deliver on the cautious optimism that we started the year with.

De Misturas marshalled Vienna agreement set out an ambitious new package to bring the conflict to an end with direct talks supposed to start in January, a new credible, inclusive, and non-sectarian government expected before June.

After that, as well as a schedule and process for drafting a new constitution, UN supervised elections were planned by the middle of 2017.

Instead the opposing sides have yet to meet face to face, the good intentions and hopes of the cessation of hostilities has degenerated into conflict and talk of transition have been summarily executed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assads vow made last week to retake every inch of Syria.

Russian duplicity, US disinterest

De Mistura, the man with the hardest job in the world, has seemingly been let down by a combination of regime deceit, Russian duplicity, US disinterest and opposition disorganisation.

The continued focus on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS) has meant that much of the debate on Syria is centred on counterterrorism efforts, while in European capitals it is the migration crisis that frames attitudes towards the conflict.

Meanwhile the marginalisation of the UN and its agencies was attacked in the media this week when it was revealed they have recently launched an anti-smoking drive in the country.

For too long the talks have been seen as the only game in town and therefore have not been critically challenged. They have been defined by much process and all too little peace.

Syria is in clear and desperate need of a new deal that can help chart the country and its remaining people out of the conflict.

ALSO READ: Where next for Russia in Syria?

Frederic Hof, formerly US President Barack Obamas special adviser for transition in Syria, wrote recently that for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Syria is all about beating the United States.

Top down efforts from global powers, either with or without the domestic protagonists present, have had little success. There needs to be a de-geopoliticisation of the conflict, with genuine independent help from countries that have endured their own recent history of violence.

Options for tomorrow

One interesting alternative is the International Dialogue made up of a number of actors including the g7 group of fragile and conflict-affected states.

The Dialogues flagship New Deal aspires to change what and how things are done to support countries transitions from conflict and fragility via nationally-owned and led development plans.

With successes in Sierra Leone and Somalia, there are lessons for whether it can be applied to the Syria. The lack of BRICS actors  Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa  currently within the Dialogue and the current belligerence of the regime may not make this the best option for the present climate but could be something for the Syria of the future.

Engaging in a serious debate about the options for tomorrow is far more useful than pretending the processes of today are delivering when they so clearly are not. If you needed a powerful reminder of this just take a few minutes of your day to watch an event that will scar a family forever as three brothers went out to play in Aleppo and only two came home alive. We can do better for Syria, we must.

James Denselow is a writer on Middle East politics and security issues and a research associate at the Foreign Policy Centre.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Meral Aksener represents a significant threat to Erdogans plans to change the system into an executive presidency.

Meral Aksener is a gutsy 59-year-old Turkish politician. Her bid to take over the leadership of the opposition Nationalist Movement Party from Devlet Bahceli, at a special party congress on July 10, has put the cat among the pigeons in Ankara.

Yet, for a time it was unclear whether the congress would even take place due to internal and legal obstacles, allegedly influenced by the ruling Justice and Development Party. The green light was finally given following a decision from the Court of Cassation on May 24.

With support for the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) under the leadership of Aksener reportedly ranging between 20-25 percent, she has the potential to shake up the countrys political landscape. And also, with a stronger party, she has the potential to hamper Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans plan to fully consolidate his power by transforming Turkeys governance system into an executive presidency.

This is why Aksener  who has been compared to the Iron Lady, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher  represents a significant threat to Erdogans plans, and may ultimately prove that the president is not as powerful or as undefeatable as many people, both in Turkey and the West, have portrayed him.

Aksener first entered Turkish politics in 1995 as a member of parliament for the centre-right True Path Party (DYP) of Tansu Ciller. She was the vice-chairwoman of the party, before becoming minister of interior in 1996  the first female to hold that post in Turkish history. With the decline of the DYP, she joined the MHP. With her democratic resistance to the February 28, 1997, decisions taken at the National Security Council meeting, her career took another turn.

The February 28 process  the so-called post-modern coup  resulted in the removal of the prime minister of the day, conservative Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, and her resistance significantly jettisoned her into the spotlight.

This has never been forgotten, and earned her the respect of many pro-democracy Turks from different political backgrounds.

An alternative to Erdogan?

The current policies of Bahceli  as MHPs chairman since 1997  have been unconstructive to the point of him being labelled as Mr No.

This has included his categorical opposition to the Kurdish peace process, his unwillingness to consider several coalition options in the aftermath of the June 7, 2015 parliamentary elections, and his failure to produce appealing policies to challenge the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

With significant support from MHP members, Aksener's victory is almost certain. However, exactly because of this reason, it is also possible that her ascension to the party leadership could be hindered by some external forces. by

This has cost the MHP dearly, with many loyal voters opting to back the AKP, which has adopted an increasingly nationalist narrative over past years.

If a snap election were to be held tomorrow, it is unlikely the MHP would pass the 10 percent threshold needed to enter parliament.

Hence, there is an urgent need to revitalise the party. Aksener is particularly well placed to take on this role.

One of the reasons behind the AKPs and Erdogans appeal when the party was first founded in 2001 was tied to the political climate in Turkey in the aftermath of the February 28 coup.

Erdogan  who comes from the same school of political Islam as Erbakan  benefited from this victim image very well for many years.

Yet, because Aksener also had such a central role in opposing the coup and had to face its consequences, she is equally entitled to claim victimhood.

Moreover, considering the Turkish voters predominantly centre-right leaning, it is likely that a credible alternative to the current government can come from that part of the political spectrum.

However, the failures of the centre-right in the 1990s and the AKPs spectacular success left no space for a new party despite the presence of a large number of traditional centre-right voters.

OPINION: Whats behind Turkeys bill of immunity

The secular and liberal share of this group have voted for the Republican Peoples Party (CHP) in the last few elections, but a large majority of right-wing conservative voters have backed the AKP.

While some of the conservatives are unhappy with the AKPs current policies, it is very difficult for them to support the CHP, which is historically a centre-left secular party and still continues to peddle against Turkeys conservative masses.

At this stage Akseners background represents hope for millions of conservatives who are disillusioned with the AKP and cannot associate with the CHP.

Changing the image of the MHP

The MHP has a very negative image in the West, which to some degree is understandable given the partys past.

It and its supporters have been accused of being linked to violence, especially in the 1970s during struggles between right and left groups in Turkey.

However, Bahceli has managed to change this image and move the party to a democratic line. Moreover, Akseners centre-right pro-democracy background may bring the party to a line similar to that of the New Flemish Alliance in Belgium  a mainstream central-right party with nationalist, conservative and liberal elements, rather than an ultra-nationalist line.

Whats next?

Clearly Bahceli will not go without a fight and he still has control over the party. Furthermore, Erdogan could use the internal power struggle to his advantage.

Changing Turkeys governance system to an executive presidency requires serious amendments to the constitution. Currently the AKP has 317 seats in parliament. This falls short of the necessary number to change the constitution unilaterally  which requires 367 seats  or bring the issue to a referendum  which requires 330 seats.

OPINION: The conservative turn of Turkeys opposition

The support of another political party is a must. Although Bahceli is an opposition figure, at times, he has directly and indirectly supported the AKP.

Nowadays, there seems to be an unofficial collaboration between the AKP and him. Thus the AKP seems to be backing his leadership and in return he may indirectly support Erdogans objective to establish an executive presidential system.

Recent decisions from regional courts aimed at preventing the congress, along with the support of pro-AKP media to Bahceli demonstrate the Erdogans preference to keep Bahceli as chairman.

With significant support from MHP members, Akseners victory is almost certain. However, exactly because of this reason, it is also possible that her ascension to the party leadership could be hindered by some external forces.

If this were to happen, Aksener would once again be the victim of an undemocratic process, and it is likely that she will establish her own party in cooperation with other senior opposition figures from the MHP and even some former senior figures from the AKP.

Such a centre-right movement might also become the main opposition movement in Turkey.

Amanda Paul is a senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre.

Demir Murat Seyrek is a senior policy adviser at the European Foundation for Democracy.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Member of Labour Party Jo Cox, 41, was shot in Birstall, near Leeds, British media reports.

A member of the British parliament has been injured after being shot in northern England, UK police and media reports have said, prompting the supension of campainging for next weeks EU referendum.

Local media reported on Thursday that Labour party member Jo Cox, 41, had been shot at her advice surgery in Birstall, near the city of Leeds.

Al Jazeeras Barnaby Phillips, reporting from London, said Cox was believed to be in critical condition.

She was taken by air ambulance from Birstall library near the city of Leeds. Witnesses say she was shot and stabbed and taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary, he said.

A mother of two, Cox has been an MP since 2015 and chairs the all-party parliamentary committee on Syria, Phillips added.

West Yorkshire Police said a 52-year-old man had been arrested by armed police and that a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries.

Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Twitter. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family.

Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

A man in his late 40s to early 50s also suffered slight injuries, police said.

One witness told the Press Association that Cox had intervened in a scuffle between two men, one of whom pulled a gun from a bag and then fired twice.

TV footage showed the surrounding area had been sealed off.

EU referendum campaigning suspended

Following the attack, both sides in Britains upcoming referendum on leaving or staying within the European Union said they were suspending campaigning for the day, while Cameron said he would pull out of a planned rally in Gibraltar.

The Stronger in Europe camp said it was suspending all campaigning for the day, while a spokesman for the rival Vote Leave group, which is backing a so-called Brexit, said that their battle bus had stopped campaigning for the day.

Labour MP Kate Osamor welcomed the decision to suspend campaigning, adding that the attack had caused concern among other politicians over their own security.

I dont know what the motivation can be, which is more worry for all of us, parliamentarians doing our job, she told Al Jazeera.

Cox, a Cambridge University graduate and aid worker, became a Labour MP for Batley and Spen last year. Known for her work on womens issues, Cox has worked with several charities.
Campaigning for Britains EU referendum suspended after Labour politician Jo Cox, 41, was shot dead in northern England.

Jo Cox, a member of the British parliament, died after being shot in northern England, UK police have said.

West Yorkshire Police said on Thursday a 52-year-old man had been arrested following the incident, which prompted the suspension of campaigning for next weeks referendum on the countrys EU membership.





The attack took place in Birstall, near the city of Leeds. It happened outside the library where she regularly held meetings with her constituents.

Jo was attacked by a man who inflicted serious and sadly, ultimately fatal injuries, Dee Collins, acting chief constable of West Yorkshire Police, told reporters.

Police said a 77-year-old man was also assaulted in the incident and suffered injuries that were not life-threatening.

One witness told the Press Association that Cox had intervened in a scuffle between two men, one of whom pulled a gun from a bag and then fired twice.

She was taken by air ambulance from Birstall library near Leeds. Witnesses say she was shot and stabbed and taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary, Al Jazeeras Barnaby Phillips, reporting from London, said.

Officers said weapons, including a firearm, had been recovered from the scene.

This was a localised incident, albeit one which has a wider impact, West Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Mark Burns-Williamson told reporters.

Dreadful news

The news of Coxs death caused deep shock across Britain.

The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family  and indeed the whole country  will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the killing of Cox, who was a mother of two, was a tragedy.

We have lost a great star, Cameron said in a statement. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion, with a big heart. It is dreadful, dreadful news.

The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love, Coxs husband, Brendan, said in a statement after the slaying of his wife.

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her, he said. Hate doesnt have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

Cox was a leading campaigner for Britain to remain in the 28-member bloc and chaired the all-party parliamentary committee on Syria.

A University of Cambridge graduate, she was the Oxfam aid agencys policy chief before entering parliament and a prominent campaigner for refugee rights.

She became a Labour MP for Batley and Spen in the May 2015 general election and was also known for her work on womens issues.

Campaigning suspended

Following the attack, both sides in Britains June 23 referendum on leaving or staying within the EU said they were suspending campaigning, while Cameron pulled out of a planned rally in Gibraltar.

The Stronger in Europe camp said it was suspending all campaigning for Thursday and Friday, while a spokesman for the rival Vote Leave group, which is backing a so-called Brexit, said that their battle bus was returning to headquarters.

Britains flag was flying at half-mast over the Houses of Parliament in London, while in Birstall hundreds of people attended a vigil at a local church.
ISIL has tens of thousands of fighters and retains ability to conduct attacks around the world, CIA director warns.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) remains formidable and resilient despite efforts to defeat it militarily, the director of the CIA has warned, adding that the group has tens of thousands of fighters around the world  far more than al-Qaeda had at its height.

John Brennan told the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday that ISIL was losing ground in Syria and Iraq but the group retained its ability to conduct attacks around the world.

Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the groups terrorism capability and global reach, he said.





In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.

Brennan said that ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West.

His comments came a few days after an attack at a gay nightclub in the US city of Orlando left 49 people dead  the worst mass shooting in US history.

The shooter, Omar Mateen, had called 911 during the attack at the Pulse nightclub early on Sunday to express his allegiance to ISIL.

But Brennan said the CIA has found no connection between the Orlando shooter and a foreign terrorist organisation.

He added that the CIA was sharing intelligence with the FBI to help identify potential lone-wolf attackers, but the agencys responsibility was to gather information about operations overseas.

READ MORE: Shock and grief after Orlando shooting

This is a global challenge, Brennan said. The number of ISIL fighters now far exceeds what al-Qaeda had at its height.

He said there were 18,000 to 22,000 ISIL fighters in Syria and Iraq  down from about 33,000 last year.

The branch in Libya, with between 5,000 and 8,000 fighters, was likely the most advanced and most dangerous, but ISIL was trying to increase its influence in Africa and to plot attacks in the region and in Europe, Brennan said.

He said Boko Haram was now the ISIL branch in West Africa and had several thousand fighters.
Total of 34 bodies of people trying to reach Algeria found after being abandoned by human traffickers, officials say.

People smugglers in Niger abandoned 34 refugees  including 20 children  in the Sahara desert where they died of thirst.

A statement issued by the countrys Interior Ministry on Wednesday said that the group had died trying to cross the desert into neighbouring Algeria between June 6 and June 12.

Thirty-four people, including five men, nine women and 20 children died trying to cross the desert, a statement from the ministry read.

[They] were abandoned by people smugglers.

The statement said that only two of the bodies have so far been identified: a man and a 26-year-old woman, both from Niger.

It was not immediately clear what the nationalities of the other victims were.

Temperatures in the region can reach 42C, with powerful sandstorms tearing across the desert.

The hostile conditions mean that only a fraction of those who die trying to cross the area are ever found.

Dying of thirst

Thousands of migrants and refugees have arrived in Algeria in recent years, mostly from neighbouring Mali and Niger.

They probably died of thirst, as is often the case, and they were found near Assamaka, a security source told AFP, referring to a border post between Niger and Algeria.

Libya used to play host to the majority of refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, but since that country descended into chaos following the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, Algeria has become the main destination for the regions refugees.

Many transit through Algeria headed for Europe.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that 120,000 people crossed through Agadez, in Niger, last year and said that 37 refugees died in the desert last year.
A search team has recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last month, in a major step towards establishing the cause of the tragedy.

The device was found broken into pieces but the salvage experts managed to retrieve the recorders crucial memory unit, Egypts civil aviation authority said on Thursday. It was located by a diving robot operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search.

Officials are preparing to transfer the recorder from a search vessel to the city of Alexandria on Egypts Mediterranean coast for analysis, a statement said.

READ MORE: Crashed EgyptAir MS804 wreckage finally found

The cockpit voice recorder keeps track of up to two hours of conversations and other sounds in the pilots cabin.

Upon arriving in Egypt, the prosecutors would receive the device and hand it over to the investigators to access and analyse the recordings, the authority said in the statement.

An investigator from Frances BEA air safety agency is to travel to Cairo on Friday to offer technical expertise on taking readings from the recorder, the agency said.

Unlocking the mystery

The EgyptAir Airbus A320, en route to Cairo from Paris, had been cruising normally in clear skies on an overnight flight on May 19 when it crashed.

The radar showed that the aircraft turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right, plummeting from 38,000ft to 15,000ft before disappearing at about 10,000ft.

Leaked flight data indicated that a sensor detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the planes cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

Airbus said the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery of why the plane went down with 66 people on board en route from Paris to Cairo nearly a month ago.

Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the Mediterranean by search teams, along with belongings of passengers.

READ MORE  Timeline: Major air disasters

The passengers on the plane were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a boy and two babies.

Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board.
Deadly downpours cause widespread flooding along the Cape Coast as the West African wet season intensifies.

Four days of heavy and steady rain has left at least 10 people dead in the south of Ghana. The streets of Accra have been left under water after the torrential downpours caused widespread flooding earlier this week.

The nations capital was hit bit 185mm of rain on Sunday, which is more than they would expect for the entire month of June. This is the wettest month of the year with an average rainfall of 178mm.

Since the weekend a further 50mm of rain has fallen exacerbating the severe problems already faced. President John Dramani Mahama has surveyed the areas concerned. He was reported to have driven through several neighbourhoods on a motorcycle.

Heavy downpours were also recorded 150km to the west of Accra in the Central Regional capital, Cape Coast where 10 people died in floods, Sandy Amartey, regional coordinator of the National Disaster Management organisation, told AFP.

In all we have 10 to 12 who lost their lives during this rainy season.

The rains come too late to save the nations struggling coca crop. The regions Harmattan winds have been blamed for likely poor yield.

The Harmattan is the cold, dry wind that blows across West Africa from the Sahara during the winter months. It does have a tendency to sap the moisture from the soil and can spoil the cocoa seeds.

The rains finally arrived in March. Since then they have been insufficiently light and patchy until recently.

This current spell of heavy showers is set to continue well into next week.

The rainy season is not expected to ease significantly until early July.
Groups pledge to do what is necessary to prevent June 26 event that attracts tens of thousands of people every year.

The annual Gay Pride Parade in Istanbul is under threat from ultra-nationalist and conservative groups who have pledged to do what is necessary to stop the event.

In a press conference late on Tuesday, Alperen Hearths, the youth group loyal to far-nationalist Great Union Party (BBP), promised to intervene to stop the June 26 march.

Pride Parade and Pride Week Istanbul (June 20-26) have taken place since 2003, attracting tens of thousands of people in recent years, with a reported 100,000 participants in 2013.

Dear state officials, do not make us deal with these. Either you do what is needed or we will do it. We are ready to take any risks; we will directly prevent the march from happening, the Alperen Hearths Istanbul provincial head, Kursat Mican, told journalists.

[We] will not allow degenerates to carry out their fantasies on this land, which our ancestors left us by paying a heavy price  We are issuing our warning now. We said what is going to happen and are not responsible for what will happen after this point, Mican added.

A group that calls itself the Anatolia Muslim Youth Association made similar threats on social media earlier in the week, promising to take action to prevent fats from marching.

We are responsible to intervene into the perversion allowed by the secular republic, said the flyers of the group promoted on social media.

Important to express ourselves

Gorkem Ulumeric, a representative of the Istanbul Pride Week group, told Al Jazeera that the event is very important for Turkish LGBT people to present themselves to wider society.

LGBT people go through different unfair treatments in various areas of their daily lives, such as work, health, education and even life itself. Therefore, it is important for us to express ourselves on one day in a year at the centre of the city, he said.

https://twitter.com/Karen_Broady/status/743340106874912768

A senior state official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera that there has been no application to the governorship of Istanbul for a march on June 26.

An application is required to conduct a procession, parade or race in Istanbul and the governors office must be informed. As of today, no such request has been received by the governors office, he said.

Turkish law allows citizens to organise a march or a protest as long as authorities are informed. However, authorities can ban these events on the basis of various concerns, such as those of security or public order.

In reaction to the public threats, Istanbul Pride Week group launched a petition this week calling on the authorities to guarantee their security during the march in its 14th year.

Following the threats, we made this move in order to attract public attention. These threats include Istanbul governorship, following the incidents of last year, Ulumeric said.

READ MORE: Turkish football authority to pay outed gay referee

The Istanbul pride parade in June 2015, which overlapped with Ramadan, was banned by the governorship hours before the event. Soon after, it was shut down through police intervention for the first time in its 13-year history.

The governorship of Istanbul said police did not allow the march after it received intelligence that some other groups might react to the event.

Ulumeric said that the important issue is the states stance towards these threats as LGBT citizens of Turkey have the same rights as any other Turkish person.

We are allowed to organise a march like every other citizen, he told Al Jazeera.

Earlier in June this year, a Gay Pride Parade took place in Izmir, the largest city in western Turkey, although the provincial governorship banned the event, citing intelligence that there will be terror propaganda.

Nevertheless, the event, the fourth one of its kind in the city, passed peacefully without police intervention despite the ban  albeit reportedly with low participation.

Follow Umut Uras on Twitter: @Um_Uras
Men who flee the ISIL-held city are often abused, or killed, by armed groups bent on revenge.

Amiriyat al-Fallujah, Iraq  As the Iraqi armed forces and allied militias continue their battle to take Fallujah from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), a growing number of civilians have said that they were tortured after escaping the besieged city.

In one tent in the Amiriyat al-Fallujah camp, which is hosting displaced people from Fallujah, three men claimed to have been tortured while held captive by sectarian militias affiliated with the Popular Mobilisation Forces.

The men, along with their families and many others, fled the al-Azraqiyah area, northwest of Fallujah, as the Iraqi military advanced towards their houses. Although they knew the road to reach the camp was not completely safe, they decided to leave out of fear of what might happen if they stayed.

We knew that the militias might arrest or even kill us, but we had to leave, said Abu Muhammad, 57, who asked that his real name not be used. Staying in the area meant sure death, whereas if we tried to leave, we might have the chance of surviving  or if not us, at least our families.

READ MORE  Fallujah crisis: We are being left to slow death

Since 2014, a number of sectarian militias, collectively known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces or al-Hashd al-Shaabi, has played a major role in assisting the Iraqi armed forces in the fight against ISIL. But they have also been accused of perpetrating human rights abuses against civilians on sectarian basis.

Abu Muhammad said he experienced days of hell during his detention by the militia fighters. We saw men in uniforms with army vehicles. We thought it was the Iraqi army that was approaching. We walked towards them holding white flags to make sure they know that we are civilians and unarmed, he explained.

The families soon discovered that the men in uniforms were not army soldiers, but militiamen who belong to the mobilisation forces. They separated women and children from the men, and put everyone in houses taken from families who had fled as the military operation started, Abu Muhammad said. After two days, the women and children were moved to the Amiriyat al-Fallujah camp, while the men remained in detention.

They would put me face down, and start pulling the rope higher and higher. I felt that my limbs would be detached from my body. I lost consciousness several times during those days. by Thamer Hassoun al-Shoukor, a tortured Fallujah resident

According to Abu Muhammad, this is when the agony began.

The militants told us: We know that you have fled a place which is more like hell  al-Azraqiyah  but we will send you to hell again.

Abu Muhammad said he was beaten repeatedly for six days. They would beat us with water pipes; they would take turns to torture us. My hands were tied behind my back, and one of the militants sat on my chest after he got tired of beating me. He just threw himself on me. I felt my ribs breaking. I screamed in pain; I spat blood. I asked for water, but I was denied even that.

A week after their ordeal started, the Iraqi federal police arrived and moved the hundreds of detained men to the al-Mazraa military base, located east of Fallujah. They were held there for interrogation, then transferred to Amiriyat al-Fallujah.

Mahmoud al-Naji al-Shoukor, who also fled al-Azraqiyah, said he had lost the will to live as a result of his and his familys treatment at the hands of the sectarian militia.

I was humiliated by my countrymen for reasons I do not comprehend until now. My two brothers, Ahmad and Hussein al-Naji al-Shoukor, along with my two cousins Muthanna and Ahmad al-Naji al-Shoukor were detained the same night. But we still have not found them; they are still missing. I think they are dead  so I have nothing left to lose.

While detained, Mahmoud said he saw civilians being slaughtered like chicken, and that he himself was very close to being executed. They put some of us in a line on our knees, with our eyes blindfolded, he said. Al Jazeeras Omar Al Saleh:

The battle for Fallujah Iraqi army commanders estimate it will take them about 48 hours to clear Fallujah. I think this is very optimistic. There are between 400 and 1,000 ISIL fighters stationed inside the city  including its most experienced. In the early hours of Monday morning, Iraqi forces began efforts to advance from three fronts  mainly from the south and northeast. Fighting is going to be tough for both sides. We understand that there is heavy air power provided by the US-led coalition and the Iraqi air force. Fallujah is very symbolic for the government. Its very close to the capital, Baghdad, which can be reached in a 30-minute drive. Fallujah was the first Iraqi city to fall to ISIL in 2014. It was also the main Sunni city that fought against the Americans when they occupied it in 2003. They started taking us one by one. They killed several men before it was my turn. I could hear the men scream and beg the militia men to spare their lives  they were swearing that they never fought, and that they never joined ISIL  but that did not stop the militia fighters from killing them, Mahmoud told Al Jazeera.

One of the fighters dragged me on the ground, saying that it is my turn to die. But at that moment I heard a voice saying that the killing has to stop, because the religious authority in al-Najaf [the religious leader of Iraqs Shia, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani] had issued an order that was circulating among the militia men to stop the executions after the news of sectarian killings had been leaked.

Mahmoud said the militiamen told them that if it werent for Sistanis orders, all of them would have been killed in a blink of an eye.

Removing his shirt, Mahmoud showed the marks of torture on his body: Deep wounds from beating and flogging.

The third man in the tent was Thamer Hassoun Mohammad al-Shoukor. He was unable to easily move his arms: For six days, his hands were tied behind his back from the elbow, and his legs tied together from the ankles.

They would put me face down, and start pulling the rope higher and higher. I felt that my limbs would be detached from my body. I lost consciousness several times during those days, Shoukor said.

One night, they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. It was the Iraqi federal police. If they did not show up, we could have been dead, he said.

Upon the mens arrival at the al-Mazraa military base, they were immediately given food and water, and several medical teams attended to those in urgent need of care.

When we arrived, lots of tribal fighters from Hashed al-Anbar, which is a Sunni militia fighting with the government forces, started comforting us and telling us that our families are safe in Amiriyat al-Fallujah camp, and that we will be released once we receive medical care, Thamer said.

That same night, they received a visit from Yahia al-Ghazi, a member of parliament from the province. We asked him about our families and about other men who were detained with us. All he had to say was that, we thank God that you are alive, and that our families were in the camp. But he didnt give us any information on the missing men and boys.

Sohaib al-Rawi, the governor of al-Anbar province where Fallujah is located, confirmed that civilians fleeing the city and surrounding areas had been tortured by some militias fighting alongside the Iraqi armed forces.

Rawi told Al Jazeera that more than 49 civilians have lost their lives under torture. He added that 643 men were missing, with no information on whether they had been executed or are still in detention.

Although Rawi refused to give the name of the militia that carried out these acts, he said that the government and the security forces were given the names of the 643 who are still missing.

Last week, Human Rights Watch issued a report stating that it had received credible allegations of summary executions, beatings of unarmed men, enforced disappearances, and mutilation of corpses by government forces over the two weeks of fighting, mostly on the outskirts of the city of Fallujah.

Quoting witnesses who survived the killings, the report found that a group consisting of Federal Police and PMF [Popular Mobilisation Forces] had separated men from women, marched the men to where the troops officers were, lined them up, and shot at least 17 of them, including one teenage boy.

On Wednesday, June 15, Salama al-Khufaji, a member of the Iraqi Commission for Human Rights, announced that Iraqi security forces had arrested a militia fighter in connection with the killing of the 17 civilians.

However, it is yet to be seen whether other militiamen involved in abuses will face justice.
Fighters killing thousands of members of religious minority in Syria and keeping women as sexual slaves, UN says.

Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) are committing genocide against the Yazidi community in Iraq and Syria, UN human rights investigators say.

More than 3,200 Yazidi women and children are held mostly in Syria by the fighters who keep them as sexual slaves, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a report on Thursday.

Genocide has occurred and is ongoing, commission chairman Paulo Pinheiro said in Geneva.

READ MORE: In five years, there wont be any Yazidis left here

ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities, he said.

According to the UN report, ISIL fighters exterminated Yazidis in mass killings when fighters based in Iraq and Syria attacked the Iraqi region of Sinjar in August 2014.

Based partly on interviews with survivors, the report found that ISIL sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment.

Girls as young as nine were raped, as were pregnant women, said the report.

Most of those interviewed reported violent daily rapes by their fighter-owners, the commission added.

ISIL fighters were also actively preventing births among Yazidis, by separating women and men, and by sexually traumatising females, it charged.

The UN rights investigators said the UN Security Council should consider steps to stop these crimes under its powers to impose military or economic coercive measures.

The Yazidis are neither Muslims nor Arabs and follow a unique faith abhorred by ISIL.

The United States and the EU Parliament earlier this year accused ISIL of committing genocide against minorities in Iraq and Syria.
Suicide car bomb kills 10 members of forces allied to UN-backed government and wounds seven others west of Sirte.

A suicide car bombing has killed at least 10 members of forces allied to Libyas internationally backed government west of the coastal city of Sirte, according to hospital sources.

Seven others were wounded in Thursdays attack which was blamed on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

Ten dead and seven wounded were brought in  after a suicide attack carried out by Daesh [an Arabic name for ISIL] in Abu Grein, 130km west of Sirte, a source at the central hospital in Misrata told the AFP news agency.

The figures were also confirmed by hospital spokesman Abdel-Aziz Essa, who told the Associated Press that the attack took place in the early hours of Thursday.

The UN-backed government forces have recently launched an offensive from the western city of Misrata against ISIL fighters.

READ MORE: How serious is the ISIL threat in Libya?

The fighting in Sirte, the final ISIL stronghold in the oil-rich country, started in early May.

It is being led mostly by fighters from Misrata, which is aligned with the UN-brokered government based in the capital, Tripoli.

The government-allied fighters face increasing resistance from ISIL, which has retaliated with roadside bombs and suicide attacks.

Sirte, around 450km east of Tripoli, is strategically important because it links Libyas east and west.

Libya has been in turmoil since the 2011 revolt which toppled longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, and ISIL has taken advantage of the chaos to seize territory along the sparsely populated central coast and expand in the country.
Amoro, the locally produced mushroom, has already taken roughly half of the market share from Israeli producers.

Jericho, Occupied West Bank  Tucked away amid the palm trees in one of the worlds oldest cities, an unadorned white warehouse sits on a dusty plot of land. Inside, air conditioners hum as workers hover over elevated beds of dirt.

They methodically pick out the pearly white domes peeking out from the compost as a strip of neon lights shines overhead. When their work is done, the first locally produced mushrooms in Palestine will be packaged and shipped to Nablus, Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem and other cities across the West Bank.

The Amoro farm was formed three years ago by four young Palestinians who noted the absence of local mushroom production in the Palestinian market, which is saturated with Israeli goods.

The group of friends had no agricultural background  their studies focused on IT, web development and business  but they researched mushroom-growing techniques and enrolled in classes in Europe on how to cultivate the organic, white fungi.

Two of the co-owners ditched their high-paying NGO jobs and immersed themselves in what they soon found to be a sophisticated art form. Mahmoud Kuhail and Sameer Khrishi now work on the farm full-time.

They hope their business will make Palestinians less reliant on Israel and bolster local production. [In the] donor industry everything you produce is reports and proposals, which nobody even reads, Kuhail said.

You dont feel like you are producing anything for your community and yourself. Its good money, but you dont sleep well at night, because you dont believe in what you do.

The owners soon found that their product was well received, with consumers showing more interest in locally-farmed goods. We realised that theres a lot of demand for our mushrooms because the culture of boycotting Israeli mushrooms was gaining traction, he said.

Our parents never bought Israeli goods and we have been boycotting their products ever since I can remember, Kuhail said. So with this venture, we hit all our target points: boycotting Israel, and doing something good for the community and for ourselves.

READ MORE: Ramadan Tov: How to stop funding Israels occupation

According to Kuhail, Amoro has already taken roughly half of the market share from Israeli producers. But even this accomplishment had its drawbacks: Palestinian shops and grocery stores were running out of the mushrooms quickly, so the owners decided to expand the farms growing area  a decision that brought production to a grinding halt for four months late last year.

The journey of Amoro, named after the Amorites that lived in the area more than 4,000 years ago, has been peppered with bumps in the road. The first of which was finding a piece of suitable land outside of Area C  the most fertile part of the West Bank, which is under complete Israeli control.

The ongoing Israeli control of Area C, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank, deprives farmers from essential agricultural and water resources, said Mahmoud al-Attari, a Palestinian agriculture expert. The picture is bleak: productivity is down and a lot of farmers are moving away from farming their land to taking up desk jobs.

Our parents never bought Israeli goods and we've been boycotting their products ever since I can remember. So with this venture, we hit all our target points: boycotting Israel, and doing something good for the community and for ourselves. by Mahmoud Kuhail, co-owner of Amoro farm

Also, the Amoro team needed to find land that they could afford  a difficult task in the Ramallah area, where the men live, and where a recent property boom has skyrocketed the price of a single dunam (1,000 square-metres) of land to $1m.

Jericho, the ancient, sleepy city, home to many Palestinian farms, proved a more sustainable choice, but also meant delays at Israeli checkpoints as they made their way to and from the Jordan Valley.

With the Palestinian borders also under Israeli control, the farms founders pay hefty customs duties at Israels Ashdod Port to bring in raw materials such as fungal spores.

The compost they recently bought from Holland was held up for more than two months by the Israeli authorities for security reasons, costing them extra fines for storage.

Using World Bank data, the Applied Research Institute  Jerusalem (ARIJ), a Bethlehem-based NGO that promotes sustainable development, found that border and documentary compliance procedures imposed on Palestinian exporters are 2.6 times those imposed on their Israeli counterparts, and subject to double the cost associated with these delays.

According to Kuhail, such restrictions are tantamount to Israeli government support for Israeli compost growers, because it forces Palestinian farms such as Amoro to buy from them to avoid customs delays and fines.It also means competition would be reduced for the Israeli [mushroom] producers, who would go back to owning 100 percent of the market share, he said.

We had to stop production for 77 days and thats a long time.

The ARIJ estimates the total economic cost of the Israeli occupation of Palestine at approximately $9.5bn a year due to Israeli restrictions on industries and services, infrastructure, access to natural resources, and constraints on movement of goods.

Israeli [companies or suppliers] exploit restrictions on Palestinians ability to produce or purchase goods and services at a competitive price, by providing the Palestinian market with the same goods and services, said Nur Arafeh, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

The Palestinian market thus becomes captive, filled with Israeli products, and subject to impediments imposed by Israel.

Since Amoro was founded, Israeli producers have slashed their white button mushroom prices by 45 percent, -two kilos of the fleshy fungus now cost 35 shekels ($9)  a change that Amoro believes is intended to pressure the Palestinian mushroom farmers economically.

This is another strategy by [the] Israeli producer to get us out of the market, he said. We took a remarkable market share from Israeli producers, it meant they didnt have as big of an opportunity to continue giving us their [rejected] B-quality mushrooms, which they cannot sell in the Israeli market.

READ MORE: Israel spraying toxins over Palestinian crops in Gaza

Despite the difficulties, homegrown mushrooms are fast becoming a popular alternative for Palestinian green grocers and restaurants. The Amoro farmers believe their product is more marketable because it goes from harvest into the Palestinian market on the same day, whereas Israeli mushrooms make a longer journey via Israeli and Palestinian distributors.





Consumers realised the quality difference between the two in terms of shelf life and what they see, co-owner Khrishi explained. Compared with our white mushroom, the Israeli product always has blotches, because it takes two or three days before it reaches customers.

The mushrooms have a growth cycle of 40 days, half of which is for incubation, and the remainder for picking. During incubation, temperatures, humidity and carbon dioxide levels, and watering, are all controlled to simulate the climate conditions conducive to their growth.

Multiple flushes or yields from one cycle are also made possible by adding more water and altering the temperature and humidity.

So far the business has not broken even, but the Amoro team remains optimistic as production increases and demand from customers  namely grocers, supermarkets, and some restaurant chefs who want specific sizes of the spongy growths for recipes  rises.

These days there is more acceptance of Palestinian goods, Khrishi said. Local produce is the main pillar of the Palestinian economy, and it paves the path to its independence and sustainability. It is a source of power for all of us.
Death is the fourth in recent days as protesters demand an end to chronic food shortages in the country.

A 17-year-old boy has died after being badly wounded at a protest by Venezuelans demanding food, authorities say.

Officials did not give details on the boys injuries, which occurred on Tuesday night in the western town of Lagunilla, in Merida state in the Andes.

Local media reported he was shot in the head when police and soldiers clashed with demonstrators at the food protest, in which he was not taking part.

He was taken to the hospital, where he died on Wednesday morning. Eleven people were arrested over the violence, police said.

They included several minors allegedly caught with food and electronics from looted businesses.

President Nicolas Maduro faces mounting protests over shortages of food, medicine and electricity.

The leftist leader is fighting off opposition attempts to call a referendum on sacking him.

The South American oil producer is mired in an economic crisis brought on by the plunge in global crude prices over the past two years.

Also on Tuesday, the Venezuelan military deployed in the city of Cumana, which is the capital of Sucre state, and detained more than 400 people after street violence and looting over food shortages.

Local authorities said that the acts of what they called vandalism were inspired by a right-wing faction within the countrys opposition.

Local media was saying that three people has been reported as having been killed, but local authorities denied these claims, said Al Jazeeras Virginia Lopez, reporting from Caracas.

At least four people have died in protests and looting crackdowns in recent days.
Alleged 20th September 11 attacks hijacker asks review board for freedom as the US admits his torture at naval prison.

A Saudi national accused of trying to take part in the September 11 attacks who has been repeatedly tortured gets a chance to plead his case in front of a Guantanamo parole-like board on Thursday.

The United States government has admitted that prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured, including severe sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, violence and other sadistic interrogation methods carried out for weeks, which were detailed in a log about the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Currently not charged with a crime, Qahtanis torture and time at Guantanamo is said to have caused psychotic symptoms that included repeated hallucinations involving ghosts and a talking bird.

The prisoner also often soiled himself, cried uncontrollably, and conversed with himself and with others who were not present, according to his legal team.

Alleged hijacker



Inside Story  CIA torture: Who knew what?

Qahtani tried to enter the US on August 4, 2001, almost certainly to be a 20th 9/11 hijacker, according to American officials. Mustafa al-Hawsawi, an alleged organiser and financier, is said to have provided him with money and a ticket to Orlando, Florida.

However, Immigration and Naturalization Service officers denied Qahtani, now 40 years old, entry because officers thought he seemed suspicious and they sent him back to the United Arab Emirates.

Qahtani later returned to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was captured and then transferred to Guantanamo in February 2002.

Qahtani, who has been described as short and skinny, wasnt very intelligent and did not have a well-thought-out cover story about his reason for being in Afghanistan, and about why he had arrived in Florida via a one-way ticket with almost non-existent English, according to an account by former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Qahtani and wrote about it in his book, The Black Banners.

Qahtani, who Soufan wrote evidence indicated was an intended muscle hijacker, would likely only have known about his specific role in a plot, but not other plans. However, the abusive techniques used on Qahtani by others did not manage to get any valuable information  let alone the basic stuff, according to Soufan.

Mark Fallon, a former special agent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, told Al Jazeera he too was concerned that the abusive techniques were not going to be effective. Equally important he said he thought they would also be illegal, and would make Qahtani un-prosecutable after [they] had done things that were tantamount to torture.

The Saudi prisoner, who wants to return to his family in the Gulf kingdom, has been mostly compliant, but has not cooperated with his interrogators, according to the US military.

Psychiatric disabilities

Qahtani suffered from severe psychiatric disabilities prior to his alleged criminal acts, according to his lawyers.

Qahtanis first traumatic brain injury occurred because of a car accident when he was an eight-year-old, a review board was told. Later he had shown extreme behavioral dyscontrol, including an episode when he was found naked by Riyadh police in a dumpster.

The legal team cites expert witness Dr Emily Keram, who reviewed Qahtanis 2,000 records of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in Mecca, and concluded his pre-existing mental illnesses likely impaired his capacity for independent and voluntary decision-making well before the United States took him into custody, and left him profoundly susceptible to manipulation by others'.

The severity and long standing of his psychiatric problems give Qahtanis lawyers good reason to doubt the accuracy of the governments factual account of his past actions, Shane Kadidal, a senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer representing Qahtani, told Al Jazeera in an email.

Today, Qahtani is said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and he would receive the best care if returned to Saudi Arabia, according to Keram.

The Saudi Ministry of Interior is said to have offered security and humane treatment guarantees, and expressed a readiness to welcome him in its rehabilitation and aftercare programme.

Qahtani cant realistically be charged  too much of what they would need to show in his case relates to intent, and there is nothing but torture evidence going to intent, Kadidal said.

Regarding any potential threat concerns the prisoner may pose if released a psychiatric commitment in a country with a modern psychiatric resources and an all-seeing secret police ought to satisfy anyones concerns, he added.

Closing Guantanamo

There are 80 men left in Guantanamo, which US President Barack Obama has consistently promised to close. In addition to 10 men in various stages of military commission proceedings, some 30 prisoners are cleared for transfer while 40 men are not. But they have also not been charged with a crime  it is these later men who are appearing before the Periodic Review Board, compromised of senior officials with a stake in national security, to plead their cases.



Last British prisoner held in Guantanamo Bay returns home

Expected later this year is the PRB hearing of Abu Zubaydah, the first black-site prisoner who was also subjected to waterboarding 83 times in one month.

On Tuesday, the CIA released documents, some heavily redacted, regarding its torture and rendition programme. In the documents, it is apparent there was awareness that Zubaydahs interrogation could kill him.

If subject dies, we plan on seeking assistance for the cremation of subject, states one of the documents, which were released after lawsuits from the American Civil Liberties Union and reporter Jason Leopold.

Further, the waterboarding was pointless. In any event, there was no evidence that the waterboard produced time-perishable information which would have been otherwise unobtainable, another document stated.

In the end it confirms what everyone already knows, and there will be no strong justice handed to those who ordered the enhanced interrogation, his sister-in-law Jody Abu Zubaydah told Al Jazeera.

The CIA felt like they were above all laws, she said, adding she believed it could happen again as there has been no accountability.

Meanwhile, Qahtani should know in about a month if the review board will recommend he be transferred.

Perhaps more than any other prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtanis continuing imprisonment at Guantanamo represents everything about the prison that is inconsistent with our proclaimed national values, his lawyers said.

To begin to turn the page on this ugly chapter in our countrys recent history, surely our government must release from its custody the one man whose torture it has officially acknowledged.

Interrogation Log, Detainee 063

23 November 2002: The detainee arrives at the interrogation booth at Camp X-Ray. His hood is removed and he is bolted to the floor

07 December 2002: Corpsman checks vitals and finds the detainees pulse is unusually slow. Doctor arrives and decides to perform an EKG

19 December 2002: Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog.

Follow Jenifer Fenton on Twitter: @jeniferfenton
Statement leaves open the possibility of keeping troops in Arabian Peninsula nation for counterterrorism operations.

The United Arab Emirates says the war is over for its troops in Yemen, though it may continue to keep them there for counterterrorism operations.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabis crown prince and deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces, carried the announcement on his official Twitter account late on Wednesday.

He was quoting Anwar Gargash, UAEs junior minister for foreign affairs, who had given a speech saying the war is over for our troops.

Our standpoint today is clear: war is over for our troops; were monitoring political arrangements, empowering Yemenis in liberated areas     (@MohamedBinZayed) June 15, 2016

An Arabic version of his comments was worded slightly differently from the English one, saying the war is practically over.

  :                       (@MohamedBinZayed) June 15, 2016

The statement left open the likelihood that Emirati troops would remain in the Arabian Peninsula country, where they operate in the southern province of Hadramawt and the port city of Aden.

The spokesman for the Arab coalition assembled by Saudi Arabia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In his remarks, Gargash defended the UAEs decision to go to war in Yemen, saying that all political means had been exhausted in the crisis and that Iranian interference and support for the Houthis required decisive action.

The military role has ended, Riad Kahwaji, a military analyst, told Al Jazeera from Dubai.

Now the Yemeni conflict has to be resolved through political means. Operation Decisive Storm and Operation Restoring Hope have achieved their objectives.

No dispute

Kahwaji ruled out the possibility of a dispute between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, key members of the Arab coalition.

What we have seen over the past few weeks is Saudis retaliating to violations by the Houthis, who were fighting beyond their borders, he said.

We have not seen major operations against Houthi forces from either the Saudis or Emiratis.

The Arab coalition accuses Iran of arming and supporting the Houthis, while Iran says it has only given the group political support.

READ MORE: Q&A  The man who defeated al-Qaeda in Yemens Mukalla

Gargash was speaking to a private audience of guests invited by the crown prince to his royal gathering space, or majlis, as it is referred to in the Gulf, as part of a nightly series of lectures given during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Gargash was also quoted as saying that the UAE was monitoring political arrangements and empowering Yemenis in liberated areas.

The UAE has been among the most active members of the Arab coalition that intervened more than a year ago to help forces loyal to Yemens internationally recognised government roll back gains by Shia Houthi rebels, who still control the capital, Sanaa, and much of northern Yemen.

Yemeni security officials told the Associated Press news agency that Emirati troops were still guarding the airport and presidential palace in Aden on Wednesday, from where the government of exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has been operating.

Hadis government was driven out of Sanaa in late 2014. Emirati troops also have a camp in Aden.

Continued fighting on several fronts killed at least 48 people over the past day, according to Yemeni security officials.

Another 65 people were wounded in combat between rebels and government forces around the besieged city of Taiz as well as in Shabwa, Jawf and Marib provinces.

All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to journalists.

In addition to fighting the Houthis and their allies in Yemen, the UAE helped the Arab coalition drive al-Qaeda from the southern coastal city of Mukalla in April.

ANALYSIS: How can wartorn Yemen find peace?

The US has provided military support, intelligence, ships and special operations forces to help the ongoing operations against al-Qaedas Yemen affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

American special operations forces have also been advising the Yemeni, Emirati and Arab coalition forces in the region.

The UAE, which has one of the best-equipped militaries in the region, suffered numerous losses over the past year of fighting in Yemen, including four pilots killed in two separate helicopter crashes this week.

Government media reports say more than 80 Emirati soldiers have been killed since operations began there on March 26, 2015.

In September, 45 Emirati troops were killed by a rebel missile attack, marking the deadliest day for its military in its 44-year history.

The government has not made clear the numbers of Emirati troops serving in Yemen.

The United Nations said in February that at least 2,800 civilians have been killed and more than 5,300 wounded since the coalition operation began.

The coalition has been criticised by rights groups and aid organisations for the deaths of hundreds of Yemeni civilians in air strikes.
NATO is planning to send combat-ready troops to Eastern Europe in a move likely to anger Russia.

Britain, Germany and the US have agreed a plan to send around 4,000 NATO soldiers to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, a decision that is likely to anger Russia.

It is NATOs biggest military build-up in the region since the end of the Cold War. And although the troops will effectively sit near Russias border, NATOs secretary general says the alliance is not trying to start a new Cold War.

NATO says the deployment is needed to deter an increasingly aggressive Russia.

It is one of a number of measures being implemented by the North Atlantic alliance to make sure its member states in Eastern Europe feel secure.

They include the creation of a 40,000-strong rapid reaction force as well as a so-called Spearhead force that could be deployed in a matter of days.

But will this deter what NATO calls an increasingly hostile Russian policy in the region?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Vladimir Sotnikov  Strategic analyst at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Ted Seay  Senior policy consultant for the British American Security Information Council.

Magnus Nordenman  Director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative.
What does the Soweto Uprising mean for a new generation of young South Africans 40 years on?

It is considered a turning point in the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa. On June 16, 1976, schoolchildren took to the streets of Soweto to protest against a decision that would force them to be taught in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors.

Schools for black children were already in a dismal state, intentionally overcrowded and under-resourced. It was under these conditions that the students protested on that day 40 years ago.

In a response consistent with the way the apartheid government repressed dissent, police opened fire on the young protesters.

Officially, 170 students were killed, but many put that figure as high as 700 in the violence that followed.

It became known as the Soweto Uprising and led to other protests across the country. But 40 years on, what does the Soweto Uprising mean for a new generation of young South Africans?

Presenter: Folly Bah Thibault

Guests:

Noor Nieftagodien  South African research chair at the University of Witwatersrand

Simamkele Dlakavu  student activist for the movement Fees Must Fall

Somadoda Fikeni  policy and political scientist at the University of South Africa
To much of the world, Somalia has a fearsome reputation. It is seen as one of the most dangerous places on the planet  a failed state that is widely believed to be home to warlords, pirates and terrorists.

But in the north of the country, at least, the reality is different.

Somaliland is an autonomous enclave with its own flourishing capital city, Hargeisa. Though a long way off from receiving international recognition as an independent state, it is a haven of peace and stability when compared with the rest of Somalia.

But Somaliland has its dark side. Within living memory its citizens fell victim to the most savage of state-sponsored atrocities. General Siad Barre  the ruthless dictator who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991  went to war with the clans who inhabited the area. Believing them to be supporting a rebellion against his regime, he took revenge by sending in his army with a mandate to kill all but the crows.

The city of Hargeisa was virtually destroyed during intense and pitiless bombardment. Many thousands of people were killed or driven into exile. Barres soldiers, meanwhile, tortured and murdered as many as 50,000 others  most of them civilians  and buried their bodies in mass graves. Now, as those who still live in this region try to secure their future, some feel those past agonies should be re-examined and those responsible held to account.

In this exclusive two-part investigation, People and Power meets a community coming to terms with the horrors of the past and joins forces with a group of forensic investigators and human rights activists attempting to bring an alleged war criminal, Yusuf Abdi Ali, also known as Colonel Tukeh, to account.





FILMMAKERS VIEW

By Zach Jama

Throughout the process of shooting these two films, every time I met someone affected by violence against the inhabitants of northern Somalia, I couldnt help but reflect that it could have been me standing in front of the camera offering testimony, that it could have been members of my family wiped out by the Somali military 25 years ago. My parents are from this region of Somalia, today known as Somaliland, and, indeed, from the very clan that was targeted for annihilation by the forces of the dictator Siad Barre.

But, growing up in Canada, I had never heard of these mass atrocities  my family sought to insulate me from the horrors which they fled, and never spoke of the violence and murder that had erupted at that time. It was only when I decided to visit my ancestral homeland, as an adult, that I came face to face with the terrible violence that has marked so many lives in this region.

It was a chance encounter with Jose Pablo Baraybar, the world-renowned forensic investigator, and local Somali human rights activist Aziz Deria, several members of whose family were murdered and buried in mass graves, that made me realise I had to document the important work they were doing, aimed at uncovering the crimes ordered by Barres government and carried out by the Somali military during those dark years.

Baraybars Peruvian Team of Forensic Anthropologists were attempting to exhume a mass grave where it was believed soldiers had dumped the bodies of local residents they had murdered. The team hoped, with the help of relatives still living in the area, that they might be able to identify the remains and gain evidence to support witness accounts of how these people met their end. I knew immediately that I wanted to bring their work to a wider audience. I hoped that by doing so I might play a part in this effort to examine what it means to attempt reconciliation and closure after so many years.

In early 2016, my team and I returned to Somaliland to film the forensic investigation, as well as the effect this work was having on the local community. We were overwhelmed by the willingness of survivors of violent incidents to share their stories  it was like opening Pandoras box; the silence was broken, and almost every member of the community had a story to tell.

Despite the evident willingness of Somalilanders to share their experiences, asking people to tell us about some of their worst days on earth is always a challenge. At times, the camera felt like a new tormentor, interfering with people who had restarted their lives and overcome trauma, while at others we were able to capture their pain unfolding once again, after years spent buried away in the depths of their psyche. We can only hope that this two-part investigation will help spark a healthy and healing dialogue and that, as such, it was worth any pain that was sparked anew during the filmmaking process.

By far the prevalent attitude in the Somali community towards the civil war is to forgive and forget. The fact that my parents never told me about the atrocities experienced within our own extended family is testament to this unspoken Somali desire. Nevertheless, this can leave younger generations bereft of the opportunity to learn from past mistakes.

Somalis born after the civil war can find themselves feeling this trauma handed down from one generation to another, without being able to fully grasp its cause. This project is an attempt to record those facts and offer commentary on the present forms of justice available to the many thousands of genocide victims. Without an acknowledgement of suffering, there can be no healthy dialogue, no reconciliation and no true acceptance. To move forward once and for all, Somalis must truly address the horrors of the past and move together beyond the artificial boundaries of clan.
Ed Gilman strengthened more than just trees.

After 30 years researching and teaching arboriculture (the cultivation of trees) for the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Gilman improved relations between different professionals in the industry, boosted research funding and increased the usefulness of research findings. For these reasons, Gilman said he is content with entering retirement June 24.

When I retire, I feel very comfortable that they dont need me anymore, he said. Weve developed a process and a culture in the industry that this will carry on by itself without me.

Gilman started his career at UF in 1986. He has since taught classes related to plant identification and arboriculture and also made strides in the arboriculture industry through his research and instruction.

He said Floridas 2004 hurricane season inspired him to study how people could prevent trees from falling in high winds.

There were six or seven hurricanes that year that ripped through Florida in all different directions, with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of trees on the ground, Gilman said. We wanted to know why those trees fell over.

He joined a team to research how trees could be planted, raised and pruned differently to reduce risk during severe weather.

In a partnership with the Florida Chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture, Gilman helped create a TreesAreCool license plate that continues to raise money for a research endowment at UF, Gilman said.

The license plate raised at least $380,000, according to a June 3 press release.

Gilman said his curiosity and ensuing achievements all started at the age of 7 with a few outings in his own neighborhood.

I saw a couple of trees planted in front of our house, and I thought that was pretty cool because I didnt even know people planted trees, Gilman said. I thought Hey thats neat, that would be cool to study someday.

Andrew Koeser, a UF assistant professor of landscape management, said Gilmans innovation and work ethic is impressive.

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Ed was probably the most productive person in our field, Koeser said. Hes very passionate and very curious. Whoever replaces him has really big shoes to fill.

Once retired, Gilman plans to enjoy his time working with stained glass, consulting and extending his work with trees even further.

Ive worked with living trees for so many years, so now Im going to be working with dead trees  woodworking, he said.
Professors at UF tend to be more liberal on paper but more moderate and unbiased in practice, according to an analysis of campaign contributions.

A look at the Federal Election Commissions records of UF professors since 2015 reveals that those employed by universities and who donate to presidential candidate campaigns tend to be more liberal.

However, only 14 of the thousands of professors employed by the university were reported to have donated to a presidential candidates campaign directly. This excludes those who donated to political action committees, such as Emilys List, which bundles money and sends contributions to various places, including House and Senate campaigns.

Of those professors, eight donated to Clintons campaign, four to Sanders, one to Rubios and one to Carsons.

Hearing that 14 professors had donated to a presidential campaign struck Professor Stephen Craig as a low number.

The 67-year-old UF political science professor embarking on his 38th year at UF guessed that the reason these 14 had donated in the first place was because they make more than the rest of us.

He was not surprised, however, at the number of law professors who had donated to Democratic candidates, saying he was sure the level of interest in politics is higher with lawyers.

Professor Craig said he does not contribute to campaign funds anymore. He said he aims to maintain a neutral stance inside and out of the classroom and takes pride in the fact that students still come to him and say theyve been debating his political party affiliation.

Any sort of political advocacy would undermine that bipartisan stance that Ive worked so hard to take, Craig said. Money has corrupted the [political] process to the point where I dont want to be a part of that.

Another political science professor, David Hedge, 65, tends not to donate to campaigns himself because he said, They raise so much money on their own they tend not to need mine.

Professor Hedge was not surprised by the Federal Election Commission data because it mostly aligned with what he thought the politically active professors would donate.

The higher your income, the more youre able to contribute, he said.

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While Hedge recognized that many professors lean left, he said most try not to speak about their political views. The reason he lets his students know what he is from the start, a progressive Democrat, is so it doesnt sneak up on them, he said.

He tries not to let his political tendencies affect his teaching, however.

You have to be objective, or nobodys going to believe you, he said.

Nicole Malec, a 27-year-old UF political science and international studies alumna, has experienced professors whove been biased in their teaching, that is, before she came to UF. Their biases were so strong it was unbelievable, Malec said of her past professors.

When she got to UF, she said she noticed a huge difference, and bias wasnt a problem.

Malec guessed many of her UF professors were moderate Democrats and felt it reasonable for them to contribute to campaigns, as they understand the political system. Theres nothing wrong with a professor letting his students know what side hes on, she said.

Malec said a lot of professors at UF probably think of themselves in the way that her past political science professor Benjamin Smith does.

Im not a politician; I study them, she paraphrased from one of his lectures.
University Police arrested an assistant professor in the UF College of Pharmacy on Tuesday after authorities said he cyberstalked a woman.

On Tuesday, the woman visited the police department and said Vishal Lamba would not stop sending her emails and texts, even after she told him to stop, according to a police report.

Lambas behavior made the woman uncomfortable, and she began to walk to and from certain places with her mother for added safety, according to the report.

The report also states that Lamba followed the womans car when he thought she was inside, according to the report. When he walked up to the car, he instead found the womans father.

Lamba told police he did not know the woman, but later admitted to speaking with her, according to the report.

When police tried to arrest Lamba, he tensed his arms, pulled away and refused to be handcuffed, according to the report.

The university placed Lamba on paid administrative leave until further notice, UF spokeswoman Janine Sikes wrote in an email Wednesday.

He joined the university on a tenure track in July 2014, according to his resume. Lamba pled not guilty Wednesday, and the woman now has a restraining order against him, according to Alachua County court records.

Police charged Lamba with stalking and resisting an officer without violence. Authorities took him to the Alachua County Jail where he was released Wednesday afternoon on a $5,000 bond.

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Isabel Bonnet Caroline Phillpot, a 25-year-old tattoo artist, poses in the shop she works in, Sacred Skin Studios, where she is offering tattoos of a rainbow heart with the words Love Conquers Hate, for $50. She started the initiative after the shooting in an Orlando nightclub and will donate 50 percent of the proceeds to the Support Victims of Pulse Shooting GoFundMe page by Equality Florida.

A 25-year-old tattoo artist in Gainesville is using her craft to raise money for victims of the Orlando shooting.

Caroline Phillpot of Sacred Skin Studios, located at 4445 SW 35th Terrace, is offering a rainbow heart design, adorned with a phrase that reads LOVE CONQUERS HATE for $50.

Half the proceeds will be donated to a GoFundMe created by Equality Florida, an organization that focuses on equality for Floridas LGBTQ+ community, Phillpot said. She hopes to raise $1,000.

The more I thought about it, I started thinking about that Mr. Rogers quote about looking for the helpers and I started thinking, How could I help? she said.

Phillpot said she became serious about tattoo art when she studied abroad in Austria during high school.

Though she did not speak German, Phillpot said she often communicated through art.

As a bisexual mother and a peace advocate, Phillpot said she hopes the tattoos serve as a reminder that love and compassion are always the answer.

Erica Carter, a 24-year-old photography student at Santa Fe College, said she hopes to add the heart to her collection of about 20 tattoos.

I get my tattoos for myself, but this is a tattoo that Im getting for hundreds of people, including myself, she said. Its a tattoo that I would be proud to show off.

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When Australian doctors told Wayne Garland he had spinal cancer and would live no more than six months, he quit his job and traveled to Asia to try to prove them wrong.

Garland will turn 70 this month and has lived 27 years past that diagnosis. He found his cure in vitamins, herbs and minerals.

Garland is the founder of PaleoGanic, the first and only immune system food company in the U.S., he said.

PaleoGanic is a Gainesville startup company that began in December. The company sells healing, organic vegan soups.

The soups are available at Haile Farmers Market, Luckys Market, Wards Supermarket, North Florida Integrated Medicine and at two Jacksonville locations.

He spent 13 years traveling throughout the East to learn natural medicine.

I didnt find just one answer, Garland said. I found a thousand.

Micheline Voets, a 51-year-old physical therapist, went through surgery and chemotherapy to fight her breast cancer. The treatments dehydrated her and gave her severe diarrhea.

I was able to go through my last treatment without any diarrhea at all, Voets said. All the ingredients that he chooses really helps your immune system.

When possible, PaleoGanic gets most of its ingredients from local farms, like Swallowtail Farm.

I knew that if I was going to sell this food in America, it had to taste great, he said. America has the most demanding stomach in the world.

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During Tuesday nights Senate meeting, Senate President Jenny Clements started her report with a moment of silence for victims of the recent mass shooting in Orlando.

Afterward, she encouraged UF students who are affected by the tragedy to contact U Matter, We Care for additional support.

Danielle Quevedo and David Mkoji, both sophomores, used the public debate session to present their new organization, SwampCycle.

They proposed a plan to install shared bike stations for students on campus. The initiative is meant to offer students an easier transportation system on campus, especially when someone doesnt own a bike.

The current plan is to set up shared bike stations in predominant areas on campus, such as Turlington Plaza, Marston Science Library and Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Students would have to swipe their Gator 1 Card before and after using the bikes, and the estimated cost to ride would be $5 an hour.

If the program were established, providing preview bike tours and offering visitors the opportunity to pay for a bike tour could be possible.

The new idea is in the early process of being connected with Student Government. There are currently no other details about the cost of installation or if Senate will help the organization.

Capt. Jeff Holcomb later announced the Student Nighttime Auxiliary Patrol is officially moving from the University Police Department to the transportation department.

The vehicles, he said, will be moved to Garage 2 for storage, but no changes other than management should be made to the service.

Holcomb said he believes the service will be better managed under the new department.

He also addressed the question of whether SNAP would ever offer its services off-campus. Such an initiative would require a lot of expansion, Holcomb said, and it wont likely happen in the near future.

The Executive Branch also released a public video of Student Body President Susan Webster and Vice President Brendon B. J. Jonassaint announcing the 24/7 opening of Library West in the Fall. As of press time, the announcement is SGs most popular video, with 54,000 views on Facebook.

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There will be no Senate meeting next week.
Local Gainesville band Flat Land will bring its technicolor vibe to stage this Saturday in its first ever album debut at the Wooly.

The release will also kick off a summer tour that will take the band members all the way to New York for the debut of Arrow to the Sun. In one of Flat Lands Facebook posts, the enthusiasm was all too clear.

Mom, were goin to the Big Apple!

Flat Land was founded by five UF alumni who shared a common interest and passion for good music. For nearly four years, the band has worked together to perfect their act and is thrilled to finally be releasing their debut album.

Members include: Christopher Storey, 39, on guitar; Grant McLeod, 26 on drums; Ian McLeod, 30, on percussion and keys; Brandon Miller, 25, on bass; and Fae Nageon De Lestang, 27, as lead vocalist and violinist.

Were proud, Nageon De Lestang said. Our goal is for our audience to have a great experience  we really want people to have a good time.

The bands music, eccentric and funky, has accumulated a following in Gainesville of music lovers who find Flat Lands composition unlike any other.

One word that describes it?

Colorful, Nageon De Lestang said. It incorporates a lot of different elements and personalities.

Fans agree.

The band that no one knew is now the band to know, said Ken Honer, a Virginia-based fan.

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What started out as a hobby has evolved into something that people are crazy about.

For Honer, one of the worst parts of uprooting from Gainesville was missing Flat Lands live shows.

Now I am seeing them in Philly, Honer said. Couldnt be happier.

Instilling a passion for music in young kids is also one of Flat Lands passions.

In April 2015, Flat Land won a $15,000 grant to start a youth education music non-profit called Future Music Makers. Their goal was to introduce kids to music while providing them with the resources they need to explore music.

The program has largely supported Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Elementary School, located in Northeast Gainesville. The band has worked closely with music teachers at the school and has volunteered their time and effort toward engaging students in music.

For now, band members are simply excited for the launch of the album and to be doing what they love.

Weve worked hard to create the best composition possible and were proud of that, Nageon De Lestang said.

Doors will open at The Wooly downtown Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets can be purchased before the event at showclix.com for $8 or at the door for $10. Bands Little Tybee, a national act based out of Atlanta, Georgia, and Velocirapture will also perform.
Just as bankers are adjusting to the terminology and nuances of digital ad campaigns, astute retailers are shifting resources to a more efficient digital marketing medium: content.

Content marketing is the use of articles, videos, infographics, testimonials and blogs  virtually any communication vehicle that influences buyer behavior and stimulates purchases. Content, after all, attracts attention from credible websites, social media networks and search engines  online resources where most consumers do their shopping research. Wise community banks should follow retailers' lead and add the technique into their marketing mixes.

According to a survey conducted by marketing and events media company ClickZ, content marketing ranks as companies' most significant digital marketing trend of 2016  ahead of pay-per-click, paid search and display ads.

Content marketing has taken center stage among companies for three reasons: it's cheaper, more credible than paid advertising, and it gets around ad blocking technology, which has exploded in the last two years as ever more consumers embrace mobile technology.

Indeed, U.S. adults are now spending a majority of their digital media time on mobile. This spells bad news for digital advertisers because browsers like the iOS 9 version of Apple's Safari are coming with built-in ad blockers. As a whole, U.S. ad blocking grew by 48% (45 million active users) in the 12 months ending in June 2015.

But the most appealing feature of content marketing is the relatively low associated cost of attracting superior leads. Sure, the strongest and most economical leads come from repeat customers, customer referrals and walk-ins, while organic leads from search engines are the next strongest leads. However, content-generated leads are close behind.

As an example, Liberty Bank is a small, Chicago-based institution that relies on digital marketing to attract mortgage applicants. At our bank, pay-per-click costs are averaging $162 per mortgage lead while content-related leads are just $36. Even greater cost-benefit ratios are found in content marketing for checking accounts and credit card acquisition.

It's easy to see why content is king. Prospects tend to discount or even dismiss the barrage of ads coming from the financial sector, and indeed, all retailers. Content, meanwhile, embraces what the consumer wants: messages tailored to tastes and lifestyles, pertinent information that helps decision-makers.

As banks explore using this strategy, it's important to recognize what content isn't, as much as what it is. Content isn't a direct mail pitch, email or video touting a product. In other words, it is not an ad. Rather, it is any piece that informs, entertains or otherwise engages prospects. Content isn't limited to websites either. Yelp reviews, YouTube videos and live streaming deliver popular and persuasive content.

What makes the best content? Anything that engages the customer. Think infographics, quizzes, calculators, assessments, or graders. Stories on improving FICO scores, reducing student debt and calculating retirement needs attract readers. So do compelling first-person narratives. Make sure content pieces appeal to your target market and advance your marketing goals.

The larger your investment is in content, the more prominent your placement will be in search listings  the place consumers are going to shop. Indeed, 60% of shoppers use a search engine to find the products they want, and 61% read product reviews before making any purchase, according to 2014 data from MineWhat. Yet, remember, like any long-term investment, allow a year or so for it to show meaningful results.

Easy access to information has fundamentally changed the way consumers research products and, ultimately, make purchase decisions. By developing content that provides advice and engages the customer, you'll enhance your brand and reduce acquisition costs.

Kevin Tynan is senior vice president of marketing at Liberty Bank in Chicago. He can be reached at ktynan@libertybank.com.
Call to Action: Is the financial services industry content with mostly talk when it comes to addressing the gender gap? Oliver Wyman's "Women in Financial Services 2016" study shows almost no progress over the past three years in increasing the ratio of female chief executive officers, among other distressing stats. Efforts to improve networking and leadership programs and offer flexible work options have been "insufficient in retaining and advancing women over the long term," the study says, citing unconscious bias and inequality on promotions and pay as the big hurdles that need to be overcome. Bankers like HSBC's Katia Bouazza and Centric Bank's Patti Husic said the findings are a call to action and their advice includes pushing for more women on bank boards. "When an organization has more women on the board, the diversity will trickle down faster," said Bouazza, head of capital financing for Latin America at HSBC.

A New Sheriff in Town: The New York Senate has approved Maria Vullo as the next superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, a year after her aggressive, headline-grabbing predecessor Benjamin Lawsky left the post. In response to questions about whether she could be a "sheriff" like him and fill his boats, she told a committee of state senators: "I don't wear boots. I am going to be Maria Vullo." She also said, "Ben did a tremendous job in this post, but I'm not stepping into anybody's shoes. What I do will depend on the issues presented to me. I want DFS to be important. I want this agency to be a player." As you may recall, observers have been speculating that she'll take a more conciliatory approach on enforcement matters than Lawsky.

Take Two: Just 8% of CEOs in financial services are women, according to the Oliver Wyman study. But how women many have had that job multiple times? Mary Lynn Lenz is one, and she's part of this slideshow titled "Bank CEOs' Second Acts." Lenz has lead banks in Arizona, California and Massachusetts, and her latest job has been a turnaround effort at TFB Bancorp in Yuma, Ariz., where 2015 earnings improved 45%, to $3.1 million, from a year earlier.

Fintechs and FICO: Online small-business lender Kabbage is among the fintech companies that forgo FICO scores entirely. Its cofounder and chief operating officer, Kathryn Petralia, said it uses sales and shipping data from UPS, Amazon, eBay and other online marketplaces to analyze potential borrowers' revenue streams. To Kabbage, personal credit scores are irrelevant. But on the question of whether FICO will continue to be relevant in banking, Rebecca Kaden, a partner at the Seattle venture capital firm Maveron, argues it will. Platform lenders collect tons of data on potential borrowers, but Kaden questions how much of it is meaningful. "What we don't know yet, and what has to be developed over time, is: How do you correlate what actually does matter and develop that core capability in the company?" Kaden said.

Remembering Her Dayton Days: KeyCorp Chairman and CEO Beth Mooney says that the four years she spent in Dayton, Ohio, early in her career shaped "my view of how you organize a bank." But this interview, conducted when she was in the city to visit with Key employees and local business leaders, is more about Dayton than banking. "One of the abiding memories of Dayton I have is what a genuinely warm and welcoming community it was, and how engaged civically its business community is," said Mooney, who is one of our Most Powerful Women in Banking. Being civic minded is something she tries to embrace in her current role at Key, she added.

Role Call

U.S. Bancorp said Kathy Rogers is stepping down as chief financial officer due to "family circumstances," but will stay with the company and continue to oversee the stress-testing process. Terry Dolan, vice chairman of wealth management and securities services, will succeed Rogers in the CFO role Aug. 1.

Beyond Banking

The Pursuit of Balance: Work-life balance can be a challenge for men as well as women. Here 25 male CEOs talk about how they rose to the top of their companies while maintaining a family life (or in some cases not). One executive blocks off time with his daughter on a public calendar so employees understand it's important to have a life outside of the office.

Actions Speak Louder than Words: More than two dozen major companies signed a pledge to conduct an annual gender pay analysis to eliminate inequitable compensation, ahead of the White House's inaugural United State of Women Summit, hosted by Michelle Obama and Oprah. "The pledge is to actually take action," said Tina Tchen, executive director for the White House's Council on Women and Girls. The 28 companies  which include Amazon, PepsiCo and Dow Chemical  agreed to embed equal-pay efforts and review hiring and promotion processes. The summit, which kicked off Tuesday, attracted thousands to the White House for a discussion on progress in women's equality.

And lastly  an ode to pants.

Did you miss last week's edition of this newsletter? You can find it here.

Please join our LinkedIn group to connect with other women in the industry and visit our Women in Banking page for more frequent news updates.
MB Financial Bank in Chicago has filled its chief risk officer post.

The $15 billion-asset bank said in a press release Wednesday that Kevin Moffitt has been hired to succeed Brian Wildman, who was named MB Financial's executive vice president of consumer banking in March.

Moffitt will lead the bank's risk management group that includes credit review, compliance, financial crimes risk management, enterprise risk management, and the legal and mortgage risk management divisions. Moffitt is tasked with helping to further build risk management processes across the entire company, the bank said.

Moffitt arrives at MB Financial from the $10.6 billion-asset First Midwest Bancorp in Itasca, Ill., where since 2009 he was executive vice president and chief risk officer.

"With three decades of risk and control management experience and a strong record of achievement, Kevin's background positions him to be an influential executive," Chief Executive Mitchell Feiger said in the release.


In an industry filled with combative personalities, Tim Sloan, president and chief operating officer of Wells Fargo, is strikingly low-key and even keel.

Sloan, 56, is widely viewed as next in line to succeed John Stumpf, the chairman and chief executive of the San Francisco company. Wells tapped Sloan for his current role last fall, placing him in charge of community banking, consumer lending, wealth management and wholesale banking.

Sloan has quickly risen through the ranks during his three-decade career at Wells. He has held a number of C-level positions, including chief financial officer and chief administrative officer.

But he does not want anyone to jump to conclusions about what is next.

"We'll see what happens," Sloan said during a recent interview, in his characteristic, soft-spoken monotone. "The board will decide."

Still, it is easy to see how Sloan's even-tempered demeanor is a key asset at a company that faces challenges on multiple fronts: new regulatory hurdles, near-constant pressure to innovate and ongoing problems in its energy book.

The company's first-quarter profits fell 6% from a year earlier, as it boosted its provision for problem loans in its oil and gas portfolio. Wells' total energy book was about $40.7 billion as of March 31; it accounts for about 2% of its total loans outstanding.

Despite the recent setbacks, Wells has no plans to change course on energy lending in the future, according to Sloan.

In fact, if oil prices hold steady at about $50 per barrel, Wells Fargo may even increase its exposure to the cyclical industry over the next couple of years, he said.

Sloan discussed CEO transition, as well as a number of other topics, during an interview at Wells Fargo's offices in New York on June 9. Here is an edited transcript.

You're viewed as next in line to take over as CEO. How are you handling the speculation?

TIM SLOAN: You know, I've worked at the company for 29 years. My experience has been that I just focus on the job at hand, and that's worked out OK. It's not a secret that we have a mandatory retirement age for our senior executives of 65. John [Stumpf, 62] has been very clear that his expectation is that he's going to retire when he's 65. I wish that wouldn't happen because he does such a great job. But that's the way the company operates.

Is the CEO role something you've always had in mind? Why do you want the job?

Well, I think being the CEO of Wells Fargo is the greatest job in the world. I think being the president and chief operating officer of Wells Fargo, to me, is the greatest job in the world. If you told me this was the last job I'd ever have with Wells Fargo, that would be absolutely fine with me.

Let's talk about oil. Prices are hovering around $50 per barrel. Does that mean the worst of Wells Fargo's energy problems are over?

I don't know. I think we'll know if the challenges in the industry have bottomed out two or three quarters after they have bottomed out. I think that anybody's ability to kind of call the bottom is just challenging.

I'm wondering, when the energy market stabilizes 

I wonder, too. The sooner, the better.

When it all shakes out, though, will Wells Fargo's approach to energy lending change?

Oh, it won't change. We're very focused on providing credit to our customers. The way to be successful in providing credit is to have a very long-term strategy ... which means, when times are good, you don't want to overlend. I've been with the company now for 29 years; this is my fourth of fifth cycle that I've seen. Each one is a little bit different. You just need to work through it and be there for your customers.

But your total energy exposure  will it change?

I don't know. It's going to be a function of growth in the industry. But it wouldn't surprise me. Let's just say that prices stabilize where they are. If you said to me, do I think that our energy portfolio would be larger or smaller today compared with two years from now? I think it would probably be larger.

Any concerns about the auto-loan market  or is it full speed ahead for Wells?

Yeah, we have concerns about the market all the time. Our portfolio was performing well. Generally, what you've seen historically, when you get to a point where the auto production and auto sales are at their peak  that's the point at least from my experience where you start to get concerned about lending. We have seen some extension in terms  not necessarily for Wells Fargo. We have seen some increase in loan-to-value. Again, we really haven't changed our underwriting.

But remember, our portfolio is a little bit different, because we tend to be a little bit more of a used -car lender than a new-car lender. New-car lending is where you generally see the most aggressive lending, because lenders are not only competing with each other, but they are also competing with the finance arms of the auto companies.

What's the credit profile of your auto borrowers?

The majority of our portfolio would be in the prime sector. We use different credit algorithms to make decisions than just the FICO score. So, for example, if you looked at our portfolio today, you'd say about 20% of the portfolio, just based on FICO score, would be subprime.

We actually look at that 20%, and we think about half of that is really not subprime because the borrower characteristics, either beyond their FICO score or the rest of their financial condition, our experience with them, and so forth would put them in the prime category. So we think about 10% of our auto portfolio would be subprime.

Have you scaled back lending in subprime?

No.

Do you have any expectation that you will in the coming year?

No. We're more of a used-car lender  and we're very comfortable with that. What you tend to find is that used-car buyers are generally using that car to get to work, which is one of the reasons why the portfolio performed so well in the prior cycle. People wanted to continue to make their car payment because that's how they got to their job, and if they didn't have their job, then all heck would break loose.

But what we are very focused on is the Manheim index of used car values. There's been a concern  and a legitimate one  that the Manheim index would start to decline. Having said that, the last couple of months, it has actually increased, which has been a little bit of a surprise. But it's something we're watching.

When did you start using alternative data, other than just FICO scores?

Just as it relates to auto? We've been doing that for decades. Because when you think about making credit decisions, whether it's on a consumer or commercial basis, you fundamentally want to use your own experience with that customer, more than an independent scoring model.

With commercial customers, it tends to be kind of customer by customer. So for example, you could have a company that's performing very well today, but we don't do business with them because 10 years ago, we remember how they treated us when they had a problem. And we'll never forget.

Let's talk about regulation. I'd like to get your take on the Federal Reserve's recent commentary around requiring higher capital levels for big banks to pass the annual stress tests.

I don't think it will have a big effect. What [Fed] Gov. [Daniel] Tarullo talked about  which, by the way, wasn't a surprise, because there's been some discussion about applying the incremental SIFI buffer to CCAR for probably the last couple of years. So just on its face, if you took our SIFI buffer, and you applied it to our Tier 1 common equity as of the end of the first quarter, we were at 10.6%, which is well above the current requirements. If you added that buffer to the existing requirements, as of the end of March we would have had to have had 10.9% of Tier 1 common equity. That delta is really not that big.

On the other hand, one of the other changes we believe that the Fed is considering, and may be implemented at the same time, is the assumption that in their supervisory stress scenario we will continue to make the same capital distributions that we're making in a non-stress environment. We're not going to do that. If we got into an environment like we saw in 2008, we would stop buying our own stock back. We may or may not reduce our dividend.

So if both those occur at the same time, I don't think it's going to be a big challenge for us.

Another regulatory topic  living wills. The submission is due in October 

The resubmission.

Yes, the resubmission. Any updates there?

We're going to resubmit. We've got work streams in place. I'm confident we'll be successful and do a good job of exceeding the regulatory expectations. But we'll find out.

I just want to get your thoughts on the "too big to fail" debate that's going on in various ways in the industry.

I think the political environment today makes the topic pretty complicated. It's "too big to fail," break up the banks, all kinds of things rolled into one. From our perspective, it really comes down to we don't think any institution should be "too big to fail"  at all.

I think this whole focus on "too big to fail" is a complete waste of time. In the current environment, we've got new regulatory reform that has been generally positive for the industry, particularly as it relates to something like resolution and recovery. We can debate whether any institution should have passed or failed any sort of test, but the fundamental process of having the regulators ask the banks to do a very thorough job of detailing the underlying operations of the company and provide the regulators with a playbook of what to do in the event of stress for that institution, I think that makes a lot of sense.

Let's talk tech. Wells has talked about releasing a robo-advisory product or service in the coming month.

I would say months. Well, my bet is sometime next year, maybe the first half of next year, we'll have a robo-adviser option. The genesis of that is that's the feedback that we're hearing from our customers. Some would like that kind of an option, and that's fine. If that's what they want, that's what we're going to give them. We don't believe that that means that human interaction in terms of investment advisory, whether it's to an individual or a family or an institution, is going to fundamentally end. It just means that some segment of consumers want that option.

Would you partner with a robo firm, or develop your own platform?

That's a good question. That's why it's not going to be rolled out next month. So we're looking at a variety of different options, [and] we haven't made a decision yet. But assume that sometime next year, again the first part of next year, we'll have that option available.

Is that thinking shaping the way you look at other products? What other things do you think are laborious for customers?

You know, we're always trying to improve customer service. Just think about it, which institution rolled out online banking first? Wells Fargo did. Which institution has been a leader in authentication? Wells Fargo is.

This idea that somehow fintechs have a corner on all the good ideas of the world, is silly. They have to be a lot louder about their products and services, because that's all that's all they do. Our business model is different, in that we've got this broad set of products and services. We want to make sure that everything works, so we're not going to talk about something until we're confident about it, we're ready to roll it out, we've piloted it, and so on.

How does Wells plan to recreate its strong sales culture in a digital environment?

By using data. For example, let's say you go to one of our ATMs today, and you access whatever you want to do. We might use data to look at the types of products and services you have, compare similar customers' products and services. And we might ask you a question at the ATM: "Hey, would you like to talk to the banker about X?" That's a way to do it. Now just apply that to phone bankers, apply that online, and apply that by mobile.

On the topic of cross-selling  Wells has come under scrutiny for its strong sales culture. Is there any sense that the bank has pushed that strategy to the limit?

No. Because when you think of our vision, it's to satisfy our customers' financial needs, and to help them succeed financially. We know a lot about our customers, and so doesn't it make sense that we would use our data and match it with our product set to try to broaden our relationship with our customer?

How we do it, how we talk about it, making sure that we do it correctly, and appropriately  and making sure we follow regulations  that will continue to evolve. But the fundamental strategy that we have is not going to change.

How do you strike a balance between properly targeting customers using data, but not seeming creepy?

Well, good question. We don't think of it as targeting or creepy. I personally don't think that anybody uses data as well as they could today, whether it's banks or not. We're going to go through a period of time where data will be used differently, and sometimes it might feel creepy  not just for banks, but for everyone.

But it's amazing to me  I was just having this conversation with my daughter over the weekend. She is very concerned about government surveillance, but on the other hand she's more than happy to tell her entire life story on Facebook to a lot of people who don't even know her. But she's my daughter, so she doesn't listen to me.

The way that we think about that is you've got to make sure that you have a risk-and-compliance overlay to any sort of customer data. That's how you guard against making sure that you're using data inappropriately. The way that you guard against the creepy part, of what you described, is just kind of new product introduction 101. Before we're going to roll out any new product, we're going to test it, and we're going to get customer reaction. One of the nice things about having 268,000 team members is that that's a great place to test your products. Because guess what, most of those folks  though probably not all  do business at Wells Fargo.

We haven't talked about your GE acquisition. Any updates there  and are you considering other portfolio or nonbank acquisitions?

So I'll take the last part of the question. We've been fortunate to be able to continue to make acquisitions, because we've got sufficient capital and liquidity to make those acquisitions. We don't feel like we have to make any acquisition to continue to be successful, grow revenues and returns for shareholders, and the like. Whenever you feel like you have to do something, generally you're going to make a mistake.

The GE acquisition has gone  knock on wood  well so far. It's a multipronged acquisition. There was a real estate portion of it, there was a rail portion of it, and then even with the commercial lending businesses we bought, there were four different businesses and different geographies. I know there's a lot of excitement on the part of analysts, who are saying: "When are we going to see the results?" It's just going to take time. We want to do it right.


Im not a wishy-washy or indecisive person but jumping aboard the Trump Train has, at times, felt more like riding an emotional roller coaster than an iron horse. One day Im the person talking others into voting for Donald Trump and then, just when Im ready to throw my full weight behind him, hell say something or Ill read an article or have a conversation with someone, and I start second-guessing myself.

I am not alone. Millions of conservatives, who supported candidates other than Donald Trump but are committed to vote for the Republican nominee, suffer from this affliction. We understand what Trump is doing and what his appeal is -- and we wholeheartedly concur. But, we question his devotion to conservative principles and have concerns about how he will govern. We want to stand by our conservative convictions but we also want to be pragmatic. We arent #nevertrumpers. We will vote for Anyone But Hillary. We do not want to stay home on Election Day. We do not want a third-party candidate -- and we certainly dont want to vote for Gary Johnson. We do not want this vote to go to the House. We do not want to do anything to hand a victory to Clinton. We want to vote for the most conservative candidate who can win -- and that clearly is Trump -- but we dont want it on our shoulders if he turns out to be a dud.

The schemes of the #nevertrumpers do not appeal to us nor are they viable. Their never-ending quest for a better, more palatable candidate is at best a pipe dream. Their insistence that Trump will ruin the country, fails to acknowledge that that country is already long gone, has been decimated by eight years of Obama, and will never recover from a Hillary presidency. Their concern that Trump would usher in the death of the GOP is blind to the fact that the GOP is already in a death spiral. And their fantasies about some kind of spoiler candidate who would throw the vote to the House, is guaranteed to sound the death knell for the GOP and ensure that the 2018 elections are a bloodbath.

Even worse, they have put their playground politics ahead of national security by refusing to join forces with the one candidate who isnt afraid to say Islamic. Radical. Jihad. If they truly believe that a Clinton back in the Oval Office, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a Supreme Court stocked with young, healthy progressives will teach the rest of the GOP a lesson, then they should just buy a pitcher of Kool-Aid pitcher and get it over with: they are not Republicans or conservatives.

There was a time when we might have been somewhat sympathetic to some of the concerns expressed by the #nevertrumpers, but their relentless, tone deaf pushback has only served to antagonize, and drive us further into the embrace of Trump. A few examples will illustrate.

When Paul Ryan hemorrhages about Trump not being P.C., he sends a message to the millions backing Trump because of his anti-PC approach, that he really doesnt have our six. Not only is Ryan doing the unthinkable and downright treasonous -- siding with the Democrat-Media Complex -- but he has become a general in the P.C. Army, wielding his cudgel of political correctness againsthis own kin.

Then there is Romney, the Pusillanimous. After repeatedly failing to fight back about his wealth, women in binders, the 47%, and Obamas lies about Benghazi, it turns out hes more Romney, the Raging Pugilist -- only hes throwing punches at the wrong guy. Add to that his comments about trickle-down racism and we are left with a man who has little regard for the people, doesnt believe we can think for ourselves, and openly maligns Trump and his supporters as racists. With friends like that who needs Democrats.

While an entire cadre of writers at National Review fits the bill, Jay Nordlinger is this weeks stand out: hes leaving the GOP because the GOP left him by allowing Trump to be the nominee. What rock was this self-proclaimed quintessential conservative hiding under when the Tea Party was agitating -- nay, begging -- for the GOP to adhere to conservative principles? Where was he the last 30 years when conservatives reluctantly voted for moderates like Dole, McCain, and Romney, and for some, both Bushes? What planet was this National Review sweetheart living on such that he missed the noise conservatives made whenever a candidate they supported turned out to be a quisling once inside the Beltway? Got Martha McSally?

The GOP left conservatism in the dust decades ago, but I guess Jay Nordlingers been too busy typing about being a true blue conservative to notice.

GOP leadership and punditry can ignore the people they ask for money, votes, and support, only for so long. They can water down conservatism only for so long. As some point the masses will rebel and that is happening with the ascendancy of Donald Trump.

But why do so many informed, intelligent conservatives support a guy who is so unpolished? So inarticulate? So inconsistent? So unprepared? Someone who, in the words of the Wall Street Journals Kimberly Strassel, is clearly winging it?

Conservatives and a significant part of the general voting public have tired of the polished, perfectly groomed candidate. Their handshakes and slick-talking dont matter anymore. Their scripted talking points and sound bites are so rehearsed and predictable, as to be rendered meaningless.

And what did voting for the most presidential or most conservative candidate get us, anyway? An endless string of electoral heartbreaks. How many times can the average grassroots activist make personal sacrifices to get out the vote for a candidate who secretly harbors intentions to betray the very people who got him elected? We will not be jilted again.

Trump is the exact opposite of what we are used to. When it comes to messaging, conservatives are chronically cerebral with a long history of appealing to the rational brain as opposed to the emotional brain. Maybe Trump has the right idea: your average Joe doesnt have time to decode a speech, read between the lines in a campaign ad, or research the finer points of policy. Appeal to the gut. It worked for Obama.

Maybe, we just want to believe that the person inhabiting the White House loves this country, will do his best to keep us safe, will work hard in the best interests of the majority of citizens, and will seek policies and a way to govern that balance the most amount of freedom with the least amount of intrusion. Maybe. Its. Just. That. Simple.

Trump is the same guy weve always known -- not a prepackaged stiff in a suit, with perfect hair and a glimmering smile. A billionaire, yes, but the kind of guy you really could have a beer with. When he wears his hat, it looks at home on his head -- not out of place like Al Gore in lumberjack garb. And his speech is his -- not that fake preacher drawl Obama acquired halfway through his campaign or the I aint no ways tired other worldly thing that came out of Hillarys mouth.

Sure, Trump has a shtick. But there is an authenticity to his shtick. It isnt feigned. It isnt newfangled. Donalds political shtick today is the same shtick he had as a real estate developer, a casino builder, and a reality show host.

Truth be told, Trump is as much a cult of personality as Obama is -- and maybe that is how we win elections in the 21st Century. Obama had little to no real political experience, but was uber-successful in marketing the persona of Barack Obama. He accomplished little in Illinois and the Senate but he used his election successes to leap frog to the presidency at warp speed. He is the penultimate empty suit whose penchant to divide borders on OCD. He is a master at condescension and insulting his political rivals and their supporters, and is adept at sleight of mouth and doublespeak. He has no compunction manipulating everything that happens in the world to promote his agenda. But mostly, he is a marketing phenom who stirs emotions, instills pride, and promises something greater than each of us.

He does sound a bit like Trump. Obama might be a cocky empty suit with an answer to everything, but for Democrats, he was their empty suit. And he promised them Hope and Change.

Trump might very well be a brash political novice with answers that sometimes make us cringe, but hes our political novice. And hes promised to Make American Great (Again).

Weve tried it the formulaic way time-after-time and things have only gotten worse. At least this time, if Trump wins the election but fails as president, we can shrug our shoulders and walk away knowing we gave it the old college try, but didnt get hoodwinked in the process.

Trump is the mirror image of everything political that has been thrown our way -- he is not politically correct, he is not rehearsed, he is not scripted, he is himself, and he doesnt care about the press. While he might overpromise and underdeliver, weve already factored that into the calculus. We know the risks of a Trump presidency and were okay assuming those risks rather than throwing in with the known risks of what a Hillary presidency will bring.

In a Venn Diagram world with conservatism one circle and Trump the other, a distinct area of overlap lies where the two intersect. Juxtaposed with Hillarys circle, however, the circle with conservatism is lightyears apart.

I remain wishy-washy no more.

With 49 dead in Orlando, the Supreme Court hanging by a thread, a country more divided than ever, and an economy on the verge of collapse, its hard to imagine how the #nevertrumpers couldnt see the obvious unless, of course, theyve already drunk the Kool-Aid.
What is the difference between a Muslim who applies henna to his beard and a Muslim who beheads someone for rejecting Islam?

Answer: There is no difference. Both are following the example of the behavior of Muhammad -- his sunna.

This is an important word, because it is where the Sunnis take their name. The Sunnis, who make up 90 percent of all Muslims, are the followers of the ways of Muhammad, his behavior in all areas of his life. The Shias also follow the ways of Muhammad, as do Muslims from every minor sect.

The imitation of Muhammad could be as innocuous as wearing a full beard and applying orange coloration by dyeing it with henna, or stepping into a mosque with the right foot, but stepping out of it on the left foot. It is recorded that Muhammad did such things. Because Muhammad did it, imitating him is a way of racking up points with Allah.

Muhammads sunna including dyeing his beard with henna so that it appeared orange. Many fundamentalist Muslims will dye their beards because thats what Muhammad did.

Thus is also considered praiseworthy to eat with two fingers and lick them three times after a meal, and triply praiseworthy to lick three fingers three times. And much more. An entire book held in great esteem by Muslims is the Shamail by Tirmizi, which gives an account of Muhammads mannerisms, habits, and physical characteristics. Osama bin Laden was known to model his mannerisms and habits by imitating what is found about Muhammad in the Shamail.

Muhammad also gave the example of horrific barbarity. His biography is a chronicle of assassinations, mass murder, genocide, plunder, and the enslavement of men, women, and children -- all against people who refused to accept him as the last and final prophet, as he claimed about himself. Osama bin Laden followed Muhammads example of mass murder, and it cost 3,000 people their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

Muhammad beheaded people who rejected him, making it part of his sunna. Because he chopped off heads, Muslims today chop of heads of people who reject Islam

If Muslims were to limit their imitation of Muhammad to brushing their teeth the way he did, Islam might have a legitimate place in the non-Muslim world. But Muslims cannot pick and choose. Once they believe that he was the Messenger of God -- the affirmation of faith contained in the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith -- they are declaring their faith that everything he did was good because it was in furtherance of Gods cause -- including his violence against people who rejected him

Muhammads body was reduced to dust nearly 14 centuries ago, but his spirit lives on in his Koran, which contains numerous incitements to violence against people who rejected him, and in the example of his behavior -- his sunna. Every time suicide bombers blow themselves up, killing other people along with them, there is Muhammad. When the 9/11 hijackers slammed their passenger airplanes into buildings, there was Muhammad in the cockpit with them. Just today, as 50 people fell to the machine gun bullets of a Muslim who walked into a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire, the spirit of Muhammad hovered in the background, nodding with approval.

The saying, Know your enemy, is attributed to Sun Tzu, the 6th century BC Chinese military strategist and author of The Art of War. If you dont understand your enemy, but your enemy understands you, you lose. Islam understands the West, but the West does not understand Islam. The proof is that the West allows not just immigration from Muslim countries, but massive immigration of people who are committed to bringing about a world dominated by Islam. That is what Islam aspires to do because that is what Muhammad commanded it to do and showed how to do it by his example, his sunna.

Sun Tzu also said that all warfare is based on deception. Muhammad knew this and said the same to his followers. This is the practice as Islam spreads in the West: Show a friendly smile, insist that Islam is a religion of peace, but lay the groundwork to take over.

In the West some feeble efforts have begun to deal with Islam, such as banning the wearing of burkas and hijabs in public. These measures would be laughable if they werent such chilling evidence of ignorance about Islam.

The only way to save your family, your country, and your civilization from Islam is to get rid of it, but most people still have a long way to go before understanding that this must be done. It took Europe centuries of suffering Muslim predation before it finally organized crusades against Islam, ultimately pushing it back and containing it. Today, the non-Muslim world does not have the luxury of waiting centuries to defend itself.

It is important to consider the concept of critical mass in the formation of political will to take action. Without a critical mass of citizens who understand that Islam is their implacable enemy, and that it is implacable because it is founded on the behavior of Muhammad, his sunna, meaningful action will never be taken against it. At best, the wearing of hijabs in public will be forbidden. Critical mass can be achieved when those who have taken the trouble to understand that Islam is all about Muhammad teach what they know to others, and thus the knowledge spreads, and if this process is pursued aggressively, critical mass will eventually be achieved. The political will to take meaningful action will be there.

The burden for this is on the shoulders of those who have already become enlightened. In its perverse way, Islam is a helpmate in this, for every mass murder event such as the one in Florida encourages more people to understand what is behind it. Be there with the answers.

This process of education would accelerate if enlightened people who also happen to possess financial resources step into producer shoes and develop movies depicting Muhammad -- films that show this Messenger of God committing the atrocities that are attributed to him in Islams own literature.

Teach the grotesque truth about Muhammad, do so aggressively, and you will save your country and preserve your civilization.

This article may be reproduced in whole or in part provided the following attribution is given: Article by F. W. Burleigh, author of Its All About Muhammad, a Biography of the Worlds Most Notorious Prophet. He blogs at www.itsallaboutmuhammad.com
James Sanders was the first investigative reporter to get beyond the TWA 800 press releases issued by the FBI. He paid a high price for doing so. If Sanders seems a bit cynical, the reader will soon understand why. -- Jack Cashill

Americas citizens must learn the truth: Reality is what remains after federal propagandists interpret fact. This is an absolute truth for citizens living in a failed republic -- including the United States in 2016.

Im a medically retired police officer from southern California with more than thirty years experience investigating federal lawlessness buried within the National Archives storage boxes and the Freedom of Information Act. In my investigation of TWA Flight 800 among other incidents, I discovered that the greater story was the fall of the American Republic.

Over the decades it became abundantly evident the federal National Security State does not care what the law states. It will fight to keep the worst sins classified even though the law says documents classified secret and more than fifty years old must be declassified with only two very narrow exceptions: weapons of mass destruction and the name of a source.

Whenever the United States goes to war, the Republic ceases to exist for the duration. After World War I the defenders of a republican form of government rose up and forced a return to limited government, the Republic given to us by the Founding Fathers.

Americas road to Big Government and an expansionist foreign policy was beaten back. Franklin D. Roosevelts rise to power brought the Republic once again under attack. Expansionist foreign policy cannot exist within a republic.

A republic exists to serve the needs of its citizens. Expansionist foreign policy within a National Security State exists to serve the perceived needs of the State. A common interest between an individuals freedom and the National Security State cannot exist in perpetuity.

Ten years into my second career -- journalism -- July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 was shot down by the United States Navy just south of West Hampton, Long Island, shortly after 2030 hours. It was the second time in four days the United States Navy shot something out of the sky in the waters south of Long Island, and I have the video to prove it.

The 747 was seriously injured when the force of a thermite warhead, unique to the United States Navy in 1996, struck in the area where the leading edge of the right wing attached to the fuselage. A few feet away was engine number three, the first significant piece of the 747 to hit the water about 14,000 feet below, so close to JFK Airport that it was outside the initial search area.

Its factual location was so damaging to the FBI/CIA cover-up ordered by the National Security State that its actual location was expunged from the debris recovery log and moved more than 5,000 feet to the east to comport with a mechanical explanation.

Witness 73 told the FBI that she observed a missile strike the right side of the 747 at the point where the leading edge of the right wing attaches to the fuselage. All non-altered evidence confirms her observation. The FBI/CIA cover-up team altered her statement, but not just hers.

For instance, Mike Wire, Witness 571, was declared by the FBI/CIA cover-up team to be the most important witness, so important that if his original statement was correct, TWA Flight 800 must be investigated as a shoot-down.

So the cover-up team concocted a fictional follow-up interview with Wire, who allegedly confessed that his initial statement was completely false in all important aspects. Wire then supposedly agreed with the FBI/CIA cover-up team that their version of what happened was 100% correct.

These factually false alterations of witness statements are each felonies that I (and other investigators) uncovered during my investigation of the FBI/CIA cover-up team.

The normal American is like the frog in the high school lab experiment. Put the frog on a hot skillet and it will instantly hop off. Put the frog on a cool skillet and gradually increase the heat and the frog will sit there until it dies. Thats what happens to the normal citizens brain in this era of National Security State operating under the facade of Democracy.

The 1992 presidential election opened Americas political sewer floodgates. Political bodies soon surfaced: Billy Dale and the White House Travel Office; Drug Running out of Arkansass Mena Airport; Whitewater, Hillarys cattle futures and ongoing bimbo eruptions where the President of these United States was constantly sexually harassed by a seemingly never-ending stream of morally depraved women.

Dominant media, particularly the New York Times and network television News were, with some justification, accused by those not of the extreme left of being thoroughly corrupted protecting their President during the never-ending stream of scandal and lawlessness Hillary insists was nothing more than a vast right wing conspiracy.

I stepped into this boiling caldron of political filth shortly after TWA Flight 800 was shot down. Dominant media had already circled the wagons, protecting the Clinton con game that must be run in a presidential election year when a horrendous event occurred, the possible murder of 230 people onboard TWA Flight 800. The National Security State had already tasked the FBI and CIA to come up with a believable con.

One medically retired California police officer backed by one medium size California newspaper. What could possibly go wrong?

The level of disgust within the alleged investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 made it easy to develop sources. By far the most productive was Terry Stacey, a TWA 747 pilot assigned to the NTSB side of the investigation. He was confident a cover-up was in progress.

Stacey met almost nightly with TWA legal counsel where the details of this suspicion were discussed. A second source at the top of the FBI, within Louis Freehs inner circle, soon developed. Eventually the evidence of a government conspiracy became so obvious, a large number of TWA Flight 800 investigators began to form a secret team.

Then my wife and I were indicted for conspiring with Terry Stacey to have residue from the thermite warhead tested. The federal judge refused to allow us a First Amendment defense and removed all potential jurors that would not swear they believed the federal government couldnt possibly engage in the cover-up I alleged. Second Circuit Appellate Judge Sonya Sotomayor (now on the Supreme Court) conspired with two other temporary judges to alter facts from the trial in order not to overturn the verdict.

The Supreme Court effectively killed Freedom of the Press in the 1970s. Individual rights have been superseded by the perceived needs of the National Security State. This trend will continue unabated.

James Sanders is one of family members, whistleblowers, researchers and others who have not given up the pursuit of the truth. To learn more about their story please read Jack Cashills introductory article in this series or his book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy (Regnery: July 5).
When Democrats aren't provided with talking points, they are dumbstruck before God. While conservatives and Democrats disagree on virtually everything, we don't want to see them tormented in a lake of fire for eternity, so here's a little something to help them out.

According to an article posted by the Independent Journal:

Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes [D] led a group of politicians Monday in a walkout of a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando shooting on the House floor [snip]. The Congressman addressed the floor, saying: "I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity, and tepid smugness of a House complicit in weekly bloodshed. Sooner or later the country will hold us accountable for our inaction." [snip] On Twitter, Himes elaborated on why he moved to not attend the moment of silence: The Moments of Silence in the House have become an abomination. God will ask you, "How did you keep my children safe"? Silence.  Jim Himes (@jahimes) June 13, 2016 God will ask you why you did not defer to the will of the people as children poured out their blood. And we will answer with silence.  Jim Himes (@jahimes) June 13, 2016 If whatever God you worship is in fact a God of love and peace you had better use the Moment of Silence to pray for our souls.  Jim Himes (@jahimes) June 13, 2016 If God is an angry God, prepare to know a hell well beyond that lived day to day by the families of the butchered. I will not be silent.  Jim Himes (@jahimes) June 13, 2016

Imagine the media reaction if a Republican were to broadcast such sanctimony.

If the nth degree of hypocrisy were measurable, a Democrat (official sponsors of abortion-on-demand since 1973) feigning indignation, invoking the blood of our children, would probably be the accompanying photograph.

Perhaps the only reason the Honorable Mr. Himes has a premonition of silence is because he is a Democrat. In answer to the question "How did you keep my children safe?" a Republican would be able to answer:

I tried to keep perverts out of girls' washrooms. I tried to defund Planned Parenthood. I tried to secure the borders from barbarian invaders. But at every turn, the enemy stationed Democrats to deter me.

In answer to, "Why did you not defer to the will of the people as children poured out their blood?," a Republican would be able to answer:

Thankfully, the Book of Judges tells us over and over again that when the people were left to follow the desires of their heart, they forsook you LORD. Instead, we endeavored to "defer" to Your will, and do that which is right, and (not coincidently) coherent and sane.

It's curious that prayer is deemed appropriate, only "if whatever God you worship is in fact a God of love and peace." Conversely, "if God is an angry God  I will not be silent. "

Those are lofty words from a representative of the party that attempted to remove reference to God from their platform in 2012. Students of Scripture will note that hypocrites appealed to the government under Pilate to have God removed, invoking similar hyper-sanctimony.

Since Mr. Himes refuses to shut up, perhaps he should confess his sins and profess faith in God. Let's follow his admonition to pray.

It's his only hope (and ours).

Mike VanOuse lives in Lafayette, Ind., and knows in Whom he believes.
If we don't get serious about jihad in America, a major disaster is heading our way. How many American lives need to be sacrificed?

Voters support Donald Trump's halt to Muslim immigration  yet the GOP leadership continues to parrot Democrat talking points about religious liberty. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are earning an implacable enmity as they condescend to us with moral posturing. Religious liberty is a constitutional right of American citizens, not a right for immigrants to enter our country even if their imperial religion demands the death of homosexuals, the bondage of women, the murder of Jews, and sharia law.

The next jihadi may not be content with a nightclub massacre. He may go in for the big stuff. From Judicial Watch, "'Islamic Refugee' with Gas Pipeline Plans Arrested in New Mexico Border County":

Police in a U.S. town bordering Mexico have apprehended an undocumented, Middle Eastern woman in possession of the region's gas pipeline plans, law enforcement sources tell Judicial Watch. Authorities describe the woman as an "Islamic refugee" pulled over during a traffic stop by a deputy sheriff in Luna County, New Mexico which shares a 54-mile border with Mexico. (snip) Judicial Watch has broken a number of stories in the last few years about Mexican drug traffickers smuggling Islamic terrorists into the United States through the porous southern border. Last summer high-level sources on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border offered alarming details about an operation in which cartels smuggle foreigners from countries with terrorist links. (snip) A few months ago Judicial Watch reported that members of a cell of Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks with the help of Mexican drug traffickers. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to Judicial Watch's high-level Homeland Security sources. Now Khabir trains thousands of menmostly Syrians and Yemenisto fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juarez. Khabir actually brags in a European newspaper article about how easy it is to stake out American targets because the border region is wide open. In the same story Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, Mexico's top diplomat, says she doesn't understand why the Obama administration and the U.S. media are "culpably neglecting this phenomenon," adding that "this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States."

I was in Animas, New Mexico a few months ago, not far from where the Gas Pipeline jihadi was just arrested, and had the privilege of attending a standing room only townhall meeting of all the local ranchers and townspeople, following a kidnapping of a man by some Mexican drug runners. As I was chatting with one rancher after the meeting, he pulled out a photo he took on his property of an illegal resting in the shade of a tree. "Does that look like a Mexican to you?" he asked, as we both stared at the photo of what distinctly appeared to be a Somali.

The handwriting is on the wall. And our leaders are wanting.
The media is abuzz with claims that Mateen was gay or at least closeted. Reports are circulating that his ex-wife of three months said he might have had gay tendencies, but the New York Daily News reported that when asked if he was homosexual, she hesitated and responded, I dont know. She also stated that he told her he liked to frequent clubs when he was younger, but she didnt specify what kind of clubs. None of this proves he was gay.

Several patrons and employees of Pulse assert he was gay because he patronized the club and tried to pick up men. One witness said he saw him dancing with a guy. Again, none of this proves anything.

Its more likely he was scoping out the venue for his future shooting spree, as terrorists tend to do. Its generally good planning to know the layout and clientele, confirm that this is indeed the den of iniquity you want to destroy, and assess how security responds to disturbances.

Moreover, if he was doing his recon job properly, it wouldnt surprise me if he was just pretending to pick up guys to keep his cover. When a Muslim fanatic cases a gay bar for future mayhem, he doesnt want to draw attention to himself by acting straight. The fact that no one has so much as hinted that he actually hooked up with anyone also suggests he was playing a part.

Lastly, a classmate from the police academy claims that Mateen once asked him out. Although he declined, Mateen supposedly visited gay bars with his classmates. Straight people go to gay bars all the time  they go with gay friends, watch the drag shows, and party. Its also possible he misunderstood a request to hang out with one to go out  it happens all the time.

Mateen also apparently communicated with gays on apps like Jackd or Grindr, yet there is no evidence he ever hooked up with anyone from these exchanges. Its not unreasonable to conclude that this might have been more about his terrorist inclinations than his homosexual ones.

Mateen might have been gay, but its equally possible he was just a good little terrorist assessing the best targets to infiltrate.

Does it change anything if he was gay? It matters not a whit.

Remember, he was a practicing Muslim who prayed several times a week at the Fort Pierce Islamic Center and pledged his allegiance to ISIS. He shouted Allahu akbar as he was slaughtering innocents. He is alleged to have ties to a radical imam in Orlando, and he made two pilgrimage visits to Saudi Arabia, which is very unusual. The suspicion is that Saudi Arabia was a jumping off point to terrorist training camps in other lands, perhaps Yemen.

It makes no difference if he was 100% straight and hated gays and wanted to kill them because of his Muslim beliefs or a self-loathing closeted homosexual who hated gays and wanted to kill them because his sexual urges conflicted with his Muslim faith. Either way, his Muslim religion is the motivating factor.

It would be significant only if he werent a practicing Muslim or had disavowed his faith and then massacred his fellow homosexuals out of pure hatred or self-loathing, in which case it would be prosecuted as a hate crime or murder under relevant state or federal laws versus as an act of terrorism by a radical Muslim. To date, there is no evidence that his hatred and motivations were unrelated to and indeed untethered from his religion.

If the only difference it would make is in how the case would be prosecuted, this is really much ado about nothing, given that the Obama administration refuses to prosecute acts of terrorism as acts of terrorism and instead prosecutes them as crimes such as "workplace violence" or "hate crimes." For our commander-in-chief, they are acts of terrorism only in the loosest, most colloquial of senses  with no national security implications and no connection to radical Islam.

President Obama blames this massacre on the internet, where Mateen was supposedly radicalized, and on the availability of guns  even though planes, pressure cookers, knives, rocks, and hands can be instruments of terrorism. And now his lackeys in the press are trying to deflect blame from the obvious and shift it toward Mateens sexual orientation  which makes no sense at all.

While rational people all over the world understand that Mateens hatred of gays  to the point of brutally killing them  is rooted in radical Islam and bears blame, our leaders are blaming everything but radical Islam. This willful blindness is nothing new. It is how 102 fellow human beings came to be victims in Orlando in the first place.
A hacker calling himself "Guccifer 2.0" released more than 200 pages of opposition research on Donald Trump compiled by the Democratic National Committee, after the information was stolen from DNC computers by Russians.

Guccifer is the handle used by a notorious hacker who first revealed the existence of Hillary Clinton's private email server. He is currently cooperating with the FBI in their investigation of Mrs. Clinton.

Donald Trump responded immediately, hinting that the Democrats had hacked their own server in order to get the dirt out to the public.

Politico:

We believe it was the DNC that did the hacking as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader, Trump said in a statement released Wednesday. Too bad the DNC doesnt hack Crooked Hillarys, 33,000 missing emails.

The Hill is reporting that the information on Trump is comprehensive and deals with both his political and personal life.

The document, titled Donald Trump Report, includes an attack on the presumptive Republican presidential nominees character and record, and hundreds of pages describing instances of Trump changing his stance or saying something false or inflammatory. Trumps marriages are also covered extensively, according to Gawker.

The document even gives an overview of how the Democrats are going to attack Trump. In a section headlined "Top Narratives," it's clear that the Democrats are going to try to savage Trump's character:

One thing is clear about Donald Trump, there is only one person he has ever looked out for andthats himself. Whether its American workers, the Republican !arty, or his wives, Trumps only"delity has been to himself and with that he has shown that he has no problem lying to the American people. Trump will say anything and do anything to get what he wants without regard for those he harms. Trump Is Loyal Only To Himself. Trump has repeatedly proven that he is only loyal to himself. Trump has switched his policy! positions and political party affiliations multiple times over the course of the last 4 decades most often latching on to whatever set of ideas or party is in power or whatever reactionary bandwagon he could jump on to keep /is name in the headlines. And despite his rants against outsourcing, China, and free trade deals, Trump has invested abroad and showed little loyalty to America in allowing his clothing line to import clothes from China. Hes laid off American workers and even complained that American wages are too high. Even in his personal life, Trump /as openly! discussed his view that fidelity is the right thing to do unless a marriage is going poorly and described his relationships with women as a game.

They really don't get it. People already know that Trump is a heel, a jerk, a loudmouth sexist, and that he doesn't always tell the truth. The only question is, do they hate Hillary Clinton more, so that even voters who despise Trump will vote for him?

Unless there's a revelation in that research that proves that Donald Trump committed murder, the DNC might have saved itself some time and money by moving on to more productive work.
NeverTrump Republicans are indulging a fantasy that if only the Republican Party had a "normal" candidate, if only Trump behaved in a "polished" way, the nominee and the party at large would avoid a lot of P.R./media headaches. But this is contrary to what actually happened a mere four years ago.

On the morning of September 12, 2012, hours after the attack in Benghazi, Buzzfeed ran a headline "Foreign Policy Hands Voice Disbelief at Romney Cairo Statement." The critique was that Romney's statement after the attack was wrong. The sub-headline read: 'Bungle utter disaster not ready for prime time not presidential Lehman moment.' And thats just the Republicans."

Here is a portion of the hit job by Ben Smith:

Its bad, said a former aide to McCains 2008 presidential campaign. Just on a factual level that the statement was not a response. A third Republican, a former Bush State Depart official, told BuzzFeed, It wasnt presidential of Romney to go political immediately.

ABC News had a headline "Obama Says Romney 'Shoots First and Aims Later.'" The report said, "[S]ome prominent Republicans joined in questioning Romney's timing. Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush said Romney 'will find out that first reports from the battlefield are always incorrect This should be his mantra, so he can speak in a deliberate manner, and not have to repent at his leisure later.'" The story noted that "Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, who spoke in De Pere, Wisc., was also less overtly political than Romney."

A day earlier, the lead-in to a Politico item read, "Mitt Romney is getting the full John Kerry treatment on national security  and some top Republicans are alarmed."

Sounds familiar?

The New York Times painted Romney in a bad light, starting with a headline "Romney's Criticism of Obama Post-Benghazi Is Furiously Returned." The Times' report lamented that "[r]ather than back away, Romney doubled down" and his comments "ended up putting Mr. Romney on the defensive as he sought to define his differences with the president and demonstrate his bona fides as a potential commander in chief."

The Times even admitted why the media picked on Romney: "The debate over his comments drew attention from questions about how Mr. Obama had managed the popular uprisings in the Arab world, the aftermath of the war in Libya and the broader battle against Islamic extremists." Basically, the concept that statements from the GOP nominee are used by media to divert attention away from Obama did not start with Trump being too "wild."

And as always, some smarty Republicans piled on Romney to the Times:

I would probably have waited 12 or 24 hours and put out a more comprehensive statement, said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. When something tragic happens and a quick statement is made, it can be interpreted as political. John Ullyot, a Republican strategist, said it was a self-inflicted wound: Its developed into another distraction that has put foreign policy  not a strong suit for the G.O.P. ticket this time  front and center in an uncomfortable way in a campaign that is becoming less and less about the administrations job record.

To top it off, "Republicans like Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, kept their distance from Mr. Romney's comments," noted the Times.

The bottom line is the GOP lost the popular vote in five of the six last presidential elections before Trump was the nominee. The GOP was unable to win the House for forty years even before it became the party of Trump. Despite its current majorities, the GOP keeps losing the public debate on policy and repeatedly caves on legislation such as the Homeland Security budget, Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, Omnibus, the Iran deal, and TPP  just to name a few things from 2015.

Clinton inherited a booming economy from Bush and left behind a bust, and the Bush economy was doing fine until a year after the Democrats won the House/Senate in 2006, yet in 2012 more people blamed Bush than Obama for the weak economy created when Obama was a senator in the majority. In fact, the Bush name  the name of the only GOP presidents the last thirty years  was essentially banned at the GOP convention in 2012. How was the GOP going to win 2012 or 2016 when they are ashamed of their last two elected nominees?

The GOP has a message problem, a unity problem, and a throwing-under-the-bus problem from well before Trump showed up. The party  run by a Group of Putzes (GOP)  will continue spinning in neutral until it adapts tactic from the Dems: be united in message, go on offense, and turn the tables on the opponent regardless of the issue.

Yossi Gestetner is on Twitter @YossiGestetner.
Barack Obama once said that we need to have a national conversation about firearms. It is impossible to have any kind of constructive conversation with somebody who lies routinely, and this is the standard operating procedure of the anti-Second Amendment camp. It is particularly important to convey this to their rank and file, because the best way to get people to walk away from a cause is to prove to them, or even better, let them prove to themselves, that their own leaders are abusing their trust.

I reported previously how Katie Couric and Stephanie Soechtig's "documentary," Under the Gun, claimed that their producer from Colorado bought firearms in an Arizona parking lot without undergoing a background check. Somebody who claims to have proven some kind of point by committing a felony such as hacking into a computer; embezzling money; buying or selling illegal drugs; or, in this case, violating federal gun laws has almost certainly fabricated the story in question  professional misconduct among journalists. It is legally impossible for a resident of one state to buy any kind of firearm in another state unless the transaction goes through a licensed dealer, who must then perform a background check. This is prima facie evidence that these "journalists" fabricated a story out of whole cloth.

The Million Mom March, meanwhile, defrauded its donors and volunteers with its claim that firearm violence kills 12 children a day. Very few of the "children" in question were toddlers who found their parents' guns and shot themselves or playmates. Most were teenagers in a high-crime age group who knew exactly what they were doing, as well as legal adults (18-19) whom the MMM redefined as children to inflate its figures. "That depends on what you mean by children" is to the gun control controversy what "that depends on what you mean by sex" is to Bill Clinton. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) made themselves parties to this fraudulent statement, as did many other left-wing Democrats.

Harry Reid's press release of June 15 includes a flat-out lie that, along with the Under the Gun scandal, should expose the blatant and routine dishonesty of the enemies of the Second Amendment.

Washington, D.C.  Nevada Senator Harry Reid spoke on the Senator floor today calling on Republicans to join with Democrats to pass legislation preventing suspected terrorists from buying guns and explosives. Below are his remarks: Here is a frightening quote from an Al Qaeda spokesman urging would-be terrorists to buy weapons here in the United States. "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?"

Somebody who repeats a lie without qualification, and with the obvious intention to deceive his listeners or readers, is himself a liar. Senator Harry Reid is telling us that our gun laws allow somebody to buy a fully automatic weapon without undergoing a background check. Just as it was legally impossible for Stephanie Soechtig's producer to buy a firearm across state lines without a background check, it is legally impossible to acquire any kind of automatic weapon without a background check.

Transferring a machine gun: With certain limited exceptions, the NFA requires anyone transferring a machine gun to register it with ATF. (The NFA put this responsibility, along with the $200 tax discussed below, on the transferor, rather than the transferee, in an effort to deter all transfers of machine guns.) In order to register a machine gun, a transferor must obtain authorization from ATF prior to the transfer in accordance with ATF regulations[.]

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), meanwhile, subordinated his past honorable service as a Marine officer to party politics with the following statement. "I carried guns every day in Iraq, guns very similar to the ones used to perpetrate the Orlando murders and many other mass shootings in America." As shown above, it is absolutely illegal for a private citizen to acquire fully automatic firearms like the ones Moulton carried in Iraq without a background check and a federal permit. No legally owned machine gun has ever been used in a mass shooting, and a grand total of two have apparently been used in homicides between 1934 and 1995.

Reid's and Moulton's deliberate obfuscation of semiautomatic rifles and assault rifles is entirely consistent with the Violence Policy Center's openly stated agenda to deceive the American public, and with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt money in the bargain.

Assault weapons  just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms  are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons  anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun  can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Honesty is a prerequisite for any kind of constructive conversation, and that quality has been universally lacking among the advocates of so-called commonsense gun laws. This needs to become a front and center issue in the upcoming national elections.

William A. Levinson, P.E., is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.
President Obama addressed the country after meeting his national security team. He was rather angry at Mr. Trump. I wish he had been that angry and passionate about destroying ISIS.

Many of us were hoping for a strategy, or a twofold plan that uses the military to destroy ISIS over there and unleashes law enforcement agencies over here. In other words, let's fight them over there and pre-empt them over here. Maybe that sounds too much like Bush for the un-Bush president!

Last week, I watched All the Way, an HBO film about LBJ in 1964, or the year that he was running for president after President John F. Kennedy's assassination.

The movie takes you to that election year and how President LBJ fought to pass a civil rights bill and defeat Senator Goldwater.

It also showed how President Johnson went out of his way to avoid talking about Vietnam.

In the end, Vietnam found the president as he celebrated his landslide victory over Goldwater. We saw an aide handing him a classified envelope about that place that he promised never to send U.S. troops to.

President LBJ went back to the election night party knowing that there'd be little to celebrate about Vietnam very soon.

In 1964, President Johnson met with his advisers:

At a meeting of the National Security Council, McGeorge Bundy, President Lyndon B. Johnsons national security advisor, informs those in attendance that President Johnson has decided to postpone submitting a resolution to Congress asking for authority to wage war. The situation in South Vietnam had rapidly deteriorated, and in March 1964, Secretary of State Robert McNamara reported that 40 percent of the countryside was under Viet Cong control or influence. Johnson was afraid that he would be run out of office if South Vietnam fell to the communists, but he was not prepared to employ American military power on a large scale. Several of his advisers, led by McGeorge Bundys brother, William, had developed a scenario of graduated overt pressures against North Vietnam, according to which the president -- after securing a Congressional resolution -- would authorize air strikes against selected North Vietnamese targets. Johnson rejected the idea of submitting the resolution to Congress because it would raise a whole series of disagreeable questions which might jeopardize the passage of his administrations civil rights legislation. Just two months later, they revisited idea of a resolution in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf incident.

Like President Obama today, President Johnson decided that he could avoid going to war by not talking about it and getting angry at his opponents.

We know that war eventually found LBJ, and it became his legacy. I have an eerie feeling that war will also find Obama.

Unlike LBJ, Obama will leave office in seven months. Like LBJ, he will be remembered for indecision and an unwillingness to face facts.

I hope #45 is ready for the mess that awaits him or her!

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
During the recent anti-Trump riots in San Jose, an angry-looking Latino held up a hand-lettered sign that said, Trump, this is Mexico! You are not welcome on Native Mexican soil. Other protestors threw eggs and rocks, burned American flags, and waved Mexican flags. Five persons have been charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon. The riots were part of what some Latinos call the Reconquista. It harks back to the fifteenth century, when the Spanish reclaimed the Iberian peninsula from the Moors. As I shall show, however, California is not native Mexican soil.

The California Reconquista is fueled by false information in the history books. They read as if American forces invaded California when it was ruled by Mexico. In fact, Mexico's governance of California had ended one and a half years earlier, and Mexican rule had been brief. Here is the true story.

In 1820, Mexico had a Spanish governor, and the people living there were called Mexicans. At that time, California had a Spanish governor, and the people living there were called Californios. There was little interaction between the two provinces. Land travel between them was discouraged by hostile Native Americans. Seldom would a ship proceed from Mexico to California and if it did, the ship would stop first at Hawaii.

In 1821, the Mexicans overthrew Spanish rule and became independent. In the following year, Mexico laid claim to California. The Spanish governor in the capital of Monterey declared the claim absurd. He expected help to come from Spain, but none came. The governor departed, and the sparsely populated province submitted to Mexican rule. But not for long. The Californios and the Mexicans were not compatible. There were revolts in which Californio governors temporarily replaced Mexican governors. Few Mexicans moved to California.

In 1842, Mexico tried to sell the ungovernable California to the king of Prussia. His ambassadors in London and Washington urged purchase, but the king declined the offer on the advice of a famous explorer, Alexander von Humboldt.

In February of 1845, a Mexican governor was ousted by Californios for the last time. The new governor was Pio de Jesus Pico, a Los Angeles businessman of partly African descent. Erroneously, Pico often is referred to as the last Mexican governor of California. In fact, he was a Californio born near Los Angeles during the period of Spanish rule. The Mexican governance of California had lasted, off and on, for only twenty-three years.

The leading Californios debated how they could be safe from foreign aggression. Governor Pico recommended a British protectorate. Noting that France was Catholic, General Jose Antonio Castro recommended a French protectorate. General Mariano Guadelupe Vallejo urged annexation to the United States. In that case, he said, the Californios would not be subjects. They would be fellow-citizens ... prosperous, happy, and free.

In 1846, after the Mexican-American War broke out, the U.S. Navy arrived in Monterey on July 1 and hoisted the American flag. It was a timely arrival. A British fleet showed up on July 16  too late. The British had planned to seize California as a means of collecting Mexican debts.

In sum, Mexican rule was brief, much interrupted, and unwelcome. California was destined to become British or American. It was not native Mexican soil.
After 20 years of NAFTA, protectionism, once pronounced dead in the water, seems to be raising its damp head despite powerful economic arguments that back up free trade. As Mark Twain said, rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

1. Free Trade and the Loss of U.S. Jobs  the Washington Post

2. Trade policy and job loss  Economic Policy

3. Fast Track to Lost Jobs: Free Trade Agreements Are

4. NAFTA Cost U.S. 700k Jobs, Report Says  The Huffington Post

5. Free Trade Costs American Jobs  Newsweek

Granted, this is not your Smoot-Hawley protectionism but rather a look before you leap criticism of slap-happy free trade.

This editorial in the New York Times by the distinguished economist Craig Roberts, who was president Reagans principle adviser in dealing with stagflation, indicates how the free trade ship of state may be headed for a wreck on the shoals of the new outsourcing realities emerging on the horizon.

Two recent examples illustrate this concern. Over the next three years, a major New York securities firm plans to replace its team of 800 American software engineers, who each earns about $150,000 per year, with an equally competent team in India earning an average of only $20,000. Second, within five years the number of radiologists in this country is expected to decline significantly because M.R.I. data can be sent over the Internet to Asian radiologists capable of diagnosing the problem at a small fraction of the cost. We are concerned that the United States may be entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level -- from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst.

Losing 800 jobs with salaries of 150K? Do companies have the right to harm the communities that support them so that executives get bonuses? And yes, that is a (shudder) moral rather than purely economic argument.

As Craig Roberts concludes in the aforementioned New York Times article:

In this situation, there are no longer shared gains  some countries win and others lose.

What is clear is that NAFTA destroyed manufacturing communities across the Midwest and utterly destroyed the family farm communities that formed the very basis of Mexicos culture. It caused terrible disruption of lives and communities. Yet the net benefit debate continues.

Underlying the purely economic arguments demonstrating the benefits of free trade is the theoretical construct of Homo economicus. The posit of economic man is fine for theoretical purposes, just like perfectly frictionless surfaces in physics. For Homo economicus, more, better, and cheaper goods all around is the be-all and end-all. But for constructing or guiding national policy, Homo productus is a much more fitting model.

More and cheaper goods  consumption  is not the sole nature of man. Homo productus is a better model: man/woman the creator, maker, nurturer, builder. Meaningful work and shared community benefit man more than cheaper strawberries and shoes. And what does that entail in terms of socioeconomic policy? Well, at least it means not blindly worshiping Homo economicus.

But the really naive and dangerous assumption underlying the Homo economicus paradigm is that free trade will be fair. This naive assumption has proven to be disastrous. We have become dependent on other countries for our most basic needs, and these countries may not always have our best interest at heart.

Chinese hackers recently gained access to secret plans for many important U.S. weapons systems, including missile defense systems and our most high tech fighter jets. Our leaders always attempt to approach China as an economic partner, but it is clear that from Chinas point of view we are a partner only insomuch as it benefits their economy. As countries like China gain more and more influence over our economy we will see our ability to protect ourselves, both economically and militarily, decline.

This is a self-sufficiency argument based on an analysis of human nature and not a purely economic argument. Why should other countries have our best interest at heart? Being self-sufficient is a Realpolitik assessment of the nature of foreign competition. Unlike home-grown industries, foreign countries may seek to weaken and undermine U.S. strength. And there is also the fall-out benefit of protecting our domestic industries in that domestic industries keep more of our money in U.S. communities (including taxes!). But more importantly, protecting vital industries provides independence and self-sufficiency. Is it really wise, for example, to move shipbuilding to Korea and lose our own capabilities? Manufacturing farm equipment? Computer components? Steel industry? Aluminum industry? One website concluded that, on the basis of comparative advantage, we should let Japan build computers while we stick to farming.

Homo economicus is a stupid model for framing national policy.
When I learned of the Orlando shooting, I was completely overwhelmed by feelings of sadness for a moment  until I realized the opportunity before me. My fleeting encounter with human sympathy quickly shifted to rage. The boiling emotions inside could not be subdued. I will not allow sorrow, moments of silence, or any pallid sentiments to get in the way. This is a time for unbridled political rage. I'll tell you why.

Time and time again, we have failed to live up to our self-appointed moral standing by not capitalizing on massacres  and that must end now! What's the use of a tragedy if we can't profit from it for political gain?

One of the greatest dangers at a time like this is allowing irrational passion to be replaced by responsible accountability. There is self-righteousness to be achieved, and we cannot allow facts, truth, or any other inconvenience to stand in the way.

As such, there is only one group to blame for the Orlando shooting, executed by a Democrat ISIS operative: Republicans. Yes, my political opponents. Why?

For their continued refusal to expand my political sovereignty over their individual rights. They are the ones at fault. It would be far too simple to blame shooters who identify with a worldwide syndicate dedicated to beheading dissidents.

ISIS members are Muslims. Muslims are a minority. It is bigoted to demand that a minority to live up to our basic social standards. You expect members of a victim group to be free moral agents, capable of deferring raging impulses?

I don't even expect it of myself. What kind of a hypocrite would I be to expect it of a minority?

No. The shooter is absolved of responsibility. The blame is yours, GOP. If only you had not denied me my right to decide what you need and don't need for protection, none of this would have happened. After all, your rights end where my feelings begin.

My seething is justified. All that stands in the way of our finally achieving peace is a single piece of legislation. That's it. Just one law away from utopia. And your fetish for individual rights won't allow that to happen. We could have ended shootings years ago, if not for you. Why wouldn't I be indignant?

Sure, the shooter passed federal background checks, but that proves only that we need even bigger and better checks! And who's stopping those? You, Republicans! How many more need to die before you finally submit to us? When will you surrender the power we seek to finally end bad things for everyone? If only you terror accomplices were as forward thinking as the citizens of Paris or Brussels, all of this could have been avoided.

I appeal to the wisest minds of our time:

Rolling Stone called the Second Amendment outdated and petitioned for its repeal. And who understands being outdated more than Rolling Stone?

Middle-aged Canadian TV person Samantha Bee discharged an emotional outburst. Internet headlines called it blistering, and I'm not going to argue.

Somebody else said, "[We] must command all the guns. That way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." Okay, it was Mao, but it sounds as though he was onto something.

Let us never forget that if things are illegal, they're impossible!

It is absolutely paramount that opposition to progressive social policies be tied to terrorism. Otherwise, how are we expected to progress? By changing minds? Your failure to conform to our superior morality is what fuels terrorist acts by registered Democrats. Because sharing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s position that biology has something to do with marriage is qualitatively identical to supporting the mass murder of homosexuals.

Finally, I have decided that there is simply no reason for anyone to have the power to kill 50 people. Granted, you could do the same with a car or a pressure cooker, but when did I claim any devotion to consistency? My devotion is to public officials, who should have the power to end the world ten times over.

Of course, more genocide has been committed by governments against unarmed citizens than everything else in history combined...but that's beside the point. Only a paranoid maniac would think that our government could ever become a totalitarian dictatorship. Now, if you don't mind, I have a Trump-is-Hitler rally to attend.

So hang your thoughts and prayers. No more silence. Our noble expression of rage toward innocent citizens who resist intrusion is needed more than your appeal to a deity. Who needs that, when we have something greater to rely on: government?

If it takes a thousand more terrorist attacks, we will keep exploiting them until you disarm. America will be as free of weapons as Pulse was. Only then will there be peace, once and for all. We've had enough! We are coming for your guns, Republicans. What could go wrong?
Googles parent company Alphabet is not only heavily investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud storage services but is also improving the latter by combining it with the former. According to the Mountain View-based tech giant, AI is the future of cloud storage and its main competitor Amazon agrees. Namely, it was only last month that reports on Amazon implementing AI into its Web Services in order to combat cloud competition from Google have surfaced online, and it seems that the Seattle-based company has now made another serious statement of intent regarding the cloud storage business.

As it turns out, Amazon has recruited Alex Smola, a renowned machine learning scientist from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) who also happens to be Yahoo and Googles research alumni. Mr. Smola will now soon be running the so-called Cloud Machine Learning Platform at Amazon Web Services. As he put it, his main goal at the AWS will be to simplify machine using and integrate it in as many Amazon services as possible. Does the idea of easy-to-use and multifunctional machine learning sound familiar? It definitely does as its the exact same thing Google has been trying to accomplish for quite some time now.

Furthermore, in his open letter to the community which was originally only addressed to his CMU team before leaking on Weibo, Smola assured his friends, students, and colleagues that he and his AWS team wont be exclusively profit-oriented. We will try to give back to the academic community, said the machine learning expert, explaining how he plans on contributing to it through open source projects and such. While he admitted he still cant share any details on his future endeavors, he promised that good things will happen.

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Smola was employed at the CMU for the last four years. The scientist is currently in the process of moving from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the San Francisco Bay Area where his new Amazon lab will be located. Hes expected to start his new duties in a few months though he formally wont leave the CMU until August of 2017. Hell formally be on leave of absence until then in order to ensure that all of his current Ph.D. students are taken care of.
Among the many innocent victims of the horrible carnage in Paris last November was a young American design student, Ms. Nohemi Gonzalez. Now her father is holding internet giants Google, Facebook and Twitter accountable for allegedly providing material support to terrorists and those attuned to their ideology. According to a lawsuit filed by Mr. Reynaldo Gonzalez in a California federal court on Tuesday, the three aforementioned companies are alleged to have knowingly allowed terrorist organizations like ISIS to go about raising money, spreading its violent propaganda and recruit foot soldiers for its nefarious purposes using their respective online platforms. Mr. Golalezs 23-year old daughter was among the 130 people killed last November, when assailants believed to be inspired and assisted by ISIS gunned down innocent and unarmed civilians with impunity at various locations across the French capital.

According to the lawsuit filed by Mr. Gonzalez in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, the aforementioned companies knowingly permitted the terrorist group ISIS to use their social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits. The lawsuit also argues that Google benefited financially from advertising revenues earned from ISIS propaganda videos posted on YouTube. The lawsuit also holds the three tech companies responsible for the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most-feared terrorist group in the world.

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While Facebook and Twitter reportedly dismissed the suit as being without merit, Google pleaded innocence by pointing out that YouTube has a strong track record of taking swift action against terrorist content. According to a statement released by the search giant to the media, YouTube has clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence. The company also claimed that it does its best to remove videos violating its stringent policies and that it also terminates accounts run by groups advocating violence. It remains to be seen what comes of this lawsuit against three of the largest tech companies in the world, but with more and more young people resorting to violence after being influenced by material found on the internet, politicians around the world are coming under increasing pressure from law-enforcement agencies to introduce more stringent regulations that can have a chilling effect on the right to free speech for the vast majority of law-abiding citizens.
Chinese phone maker Huawei recently announced that its sale of smartphones in the current year grew 64% over last year. The company has also announced that it sold as many as 2.6 million Huawei P9 and P9 Plus smartphones in the last six weeks, thereby consolidating its number 3 spot in the global smartphone market and capturing 8.5% market share in the tightly-fought space. The company has singled out select countries like China, France, Finland and Britain where Huawei P9 and P9 Plus phones have been very popular and have been purchased in large numbers. Huaweis announcement comes at a time when a number of other Chinese phone makers like Oppo, Xiaomi and Lenovo are snapping at its heels with their premium smartphone offerings.

Announced on April 6th in London, the Huawei P9 stands out among contemporary smartphones thanks to its dual rear camera setup. The camera experience was co-engineered by German camera maker Leica and while one can capture pictures in black and white, the other one captures them in vivid colors. The Huawei P9 also arrived with the latest specifications like a 5.2-inch Full HD curved display, 3GB/ 4GB of RAM, 32GB/64GB of internal storage, a Hisilicon Kirin 955 octa-core processor, an 8-megapixel front camera and a 3,000 mAh battery. The phone also runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow as well as Huaweis home-grown Emotion UI. The larger Huawei P9 Plus phone features a 5.5-inch Full HD display, a Hisilicon Kirin 955 processor, 64GB of internal storage, 4GB of RAM, the same dual-rear-camera setup as in the Huawei P9 and a powerful 3,400 mAh battery.

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Despite their premium features and popularity, the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus are unlikely to be the companys last flagships to be launched this year. Earlier this month, Huawei confirmed that it will launch a new smartphone in Autumn which will be compatible with Googles Daydream VR. The phone is set to become the first smartphone, after the Google Nexus 6P, to support Daydream VR and will launch before the likes of Samsung, HTC, LG, ASUS, Xiaomi, ZTE and Alcatel devices that are to support the platform. Given that another Huawei Mate phone may also launch in the Fall of 2016, the company may close its gap on Apple by the end of the year and gain further market share in the global smartphone market in the process.
Lenovo are a Chinese company that mean business when it comes to smartphones. The business already have a footprint in the desktop and laptop markets and have been steadily increasing sales into the tablet and smartphone sectors. The company bought Motorola from Google and for 2015, showed strong growth. Lenovo is planning to use its two brands  Lenovo and Motorola  to appeal across the market, with Motorola considered the more premium brand of the two. And when it comes to various markets around the world, the company is clearly not frightened of a challenge. Earlier this week, Lenovo Senior Vice President, Aymar de Lencquesaing, explained that the company is aiming for strong sales growth in the India market, where it is aiming for the number two position.

According to Aymar, Lenovo has already captured almost one third of 4G smartphones sold in India, which we are assuming means LTE-enabled devices. However, this share drops to 9% of the overall market (including Motorola) as India is still developing its LTE (and 3G) infrastructure, so not all customers are needing a LTE device. Weve seen recent reports stating that Lenovo is one of the fastest growing vendors in India for the first quarter of 2016. Aymar excitedly explains that Lenovo has a strong foothold in most regions of the world, covering Brazil, Latin America, EMEA, Middle East, and Africa. It is the number two brand is Brazil and sales growth is increasing into Western Europe.

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Why India? This is because India is seen as one of the fastest growing countries for smartphone adoption. Indian carriers are rapidly rolling out their networks to cover the country and smartphones are a more reliable connection to the Internet compared with fixed line alternatives, where quite often there is no coverage. The Indian Governments Make In India project has encouraged smartphone businesses to manufacturer devices for the Indian population by building factories and employing Indians. Make In India has helped Lenovo manufacturer six million units a year, which it is selling via an online retail plan. However, Lenovo have plans to sell via offline means: in other words, they are planning to stock shops of smartphones to sell to customers. Lenovo understand the need to have almost their entire portfolio available offline, which means considerable investment into the necessary infrastructure to supply and support these sales.

For the premium end of handset sales, Lenovo is planning on using Motorolas branding as already said. However, this will require ongoing investment into bringing groundbreaking products to the market, such as the Moto Mods featured on the Moto Z family. It will also include their development work with the Tango smartphone, developed in conjunction with Google. Lenovos research and development businesses have been reorganized and incorporated under the Motorola umbrella.
Last week, at Lenovo Tech World, the company launched a slew of new devices. The more interesting devices that were launched were the Moto Z and Moto Z Force. Lenovo did state that both devices would launch exclusively on Verizon this summer, but the Moto Z would be available from Motorola.com in September, while the Moto Z Force remains exclusive to Verizon. Lenovos global mobile business head, Aymar de Lencquesaing, stated in an interview that the Moto Z will be coming to India, around September or October. About the same time frame as it launching in the US.

The Moto Z is launching this summer on Verizon and then will be available unlocked in September. Those in India that are looking to pick up the device before then, will need to import one from the US. Which is going to be a bit tricky since it will only be available on Verizon before then. Moto Mods are also coming to India with the Moto Z. Lencquesaing noted that the prices will range from $50 to $200 USD in India. However, keep in mind that the most successful smartphones in India cost around $200 themselves (including the Moto G line from Lenovo). Thats going to make it tough for Lenovo to sell these Moto Mods over there.

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Other Lenovo news for India included the PHAB2 Pro, which is the first and currently only, Tango smartphone. It will be available here in the US this summer for $499. Lencquesaing did say that the PHAB2 Pro is coming to India, but didnt give any other indication on pricing or availability for the device. Lenovo is currently manufacturing around 6 million smartphones in India each year, under the Make in India program. This program is designed to bring more manufacturers into India, which provides more jobs for that country. The total revenue for Lenovo in India was Rs. 67.35 billion (around $1 billion USD) last quarter, alone.

The Moto G4 family has already launched in India and has done quite well (similar to the older generations of the Moto G smartphone). The higher-end Moto X, hasnt been hugely popular in India, but that could change with the Moto Z.
Tablet shipments have been decreasing for quite some time now, and it seems like quite a few analysts think phablet adoption has something to do with this. It is normal to see 6.4-inch devices these days, Xiaomi had introduced the 6.44-inch Mi Max phablet earlier this year, and Lenovo released three 6.4-inch PHAB2 devices quite recently as well. Quite a few companies are still releasing tablets, but not nearly as many as before. Samsung is definitely one of those companies, this Korea-based tech giant tends to release quite a few tablet devices a year, theyve recently unveiled the Galaxy Tab A 10.1 actually. Well, it seems like Samsung is getting ready to announce yet another tablet, read on.

The Galaxy Tab 4 was originally introduced back in May 2014. This was, based then, one of the more affordable Samsung-branded tablets, and it seems like its successor is on the way. The Galaxy Tab 4 (SM-T230NW) has been listed on Zauba (Indias import  export site) about a month ago, and the device has now received radio certification in South Korea by RRA. The tablet was actually certified yesterday, and it carries the same model number as the one that was listed by Zauba. As many of you know, official certification is one of the last steps a device needs to take before it gets released, and it seems like we might see the Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 (2016) released in the next couple of weeks.

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Now, as far as specs go, this tablet is expected to ship a 7-inch display, though we still dont know if it will come with a 720p or 1080p resolution, though were guessing the latter. The device will ship with 1.5GB of RAM, and will be fueled by an octa-core SoC running at 1.7GHz, at least if benchmarks are to be believed. Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow will also be a part of this package, and youll be able to find Samsungs custom UI on top of Googles OS, of course. All in all, this will be a really affordable device, one of Samsungs most affordable tablets this year, thats for sure. Well let you know as soon as new info surfaces, stay tuned.
Omar Mateen: the bullshit of hate crime

Much debate over why Omar Mateen murdered scores of people in a gay night club in Florida. Did he do it because he hated gays, loved Islamic State, was mentally ill, was able to buy guns, or because we there was nothing on the telly? The New York Times produces an editorial:

While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. He targeted gays deliberately. That much is certain. Hate crimes dont happen in a vacuum. Hate crime? Whats a hate crime? This was mass murder. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Hate crimes happen when expressing your opinion for something is deemed to be hateful by lawmakers. What is hateful is not fixed? Do you hate gays (wrong) or do you hate people tho hate gay marriage (fine)? Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.

You extinguish hate by making hate hateful and banning it, so they say. Mateens was a heinous crime. The New York Times conflates the slaughter of innocents with what people say. It puts violent acts on a par with violent words. Injury to feelings is placed on a on par with physical injury.

Incitement to violence, we can understand. But incitement to hatred can look a lot like outlawing expressions of heartfelt belief.

Anorak

Posted: 16th, June 2016 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
Labour MP Jo Cox has been shot by an unknown attacker at her parliamentary surgery:

Labour MP Jo Cox has been shot and injured in an attack in her constituency near Leeds.

An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying bleeding on the pavement after the incident in Birstall, West Yorkshire.

The attack took place near the towns library where she held advice surgeries.

Ms Coxs condition is unknown.
(ANSA) - Rome, June 15 - Italy runs the greatest risks if a majority of British voters were to vote for a Brexit in next week's referendum, ex-premier Enrico Letta said Wednesday. "Italy needs stability for a very simple reason, which I think is being underestimated - we have been burdened with a large public debt since the 1980s, due to choices that were made at the time," he told Radio Radicale. "If market instability were to return, Italy would be the first country to come under attack".

A Brexit would bring about "a long phase of instability and incredibly complicated legal controversies that would end up distancing investors from the Old Continent," the center-left Democratic Party (PD) politician said.

"And then... Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt, as well as Milan will want to 'divide the spoils' of London as the financial capital of the single European market," Letta explained.

Letta added a Brexit would send a very negative message as "Europe, which has always grown, will start losing parts".

British voters will issue their verdict on June 23.


(by Alberto Zanconato) (ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, JUNE 16 - Mary is 10 and has not been able to walk ever since, in the Palestinian camp of Yarmuk, in Damascus, a bullet went through her shoulder and entered her spine. She has travelled to Italy from Beirut, hoping that doctors in Turin will be able to give her back that childhood that was taken away from her.

They have travelled with 78 other Syrian refugees in the third trip that was part of the initiative in favor of 'humanitarian corridors' promoted by the Sant'Egidio Community, the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy and the Valdensian community in cooperation with the foreign ministry.

Each one has a dramatic story to tell, because they belong to the most vulnerable categories of those who were affected by the civil war: victims of persecution, families with children, lone women, elderly, sick and disabled people.

One of them is Mohamed, 19, the eldest of six siblings (the youngest is aged 9), who were orphaned four years ago when gunmen broke into their home in Homs and killed their parents.

''We never found out who was responsible - he told ANSA - but we were probably targeted because my father worked for the government''. Mohamed studied but ever since he arrived in Lebanon, three years ago, he had to stop because money was tight. Here, relatives took care of him and two of his siblings.

Three others are in Jordan with an uncle.

Mohamed is in Turin but when asked about his future he replied: ''I'm not thinking about it for now, the only thing that interests me is for my family to get back together, to enable my siblings to travel here. I haven't seen them for three years''.

Then, he would like to study again: ''I would have liked to study economy - he said - but I think I will have to give up and pick something easier''.

The 81 Syrians arriving in Italy today will join 200 others who arrived last February with the 'humanitarian corridors'.

They spent the last two or three years in Lebanon. Most of them come from the region of Tripoli, in the north. There are 29 Christians, the rest are Muslim. Thirty are children, with two disabled kids, including Maria. Several others are sick. Suzanne has breast cancer. She will leave with her husband Shady and their three children.

They used to live in a shack in Lebanon, which they rented for 200 dollars a month in El Marj, in Bekaa Valley. And treatments for Suzanne were too expensive. Shady was so desperate he planned to travel illegally to Europe by sea. ''It was worth risking to die'', he said.

But there are also Syrian middle class families among the refugees, including Edward and Nilva, two Armenian Christian doctors from Hassake, in the country's north.

He has decided to stay to work at the local hospital, which has very little personnel. She will travel to Rome to then reach Lucca with son Raffi, 25, and daughter Rupina, 14.

It was for Rupina, who has a serious form of diabetes, that they decided to leave. ''I never thought I would see a war'', she said. Instead, her life, already difficult due to her condition, was struck by a civil conflict that has been going on for over five years.


(ANSA) - Brussels, June 16 - European anti-terror chief Gilles de Kerchove said Thursday that ISIS "is expected to be completely destroyed in Syria and Iraq in a year's time" thanks to the international alliance and Europe must gear for the return of foreign fighters. "The European fighters will return" to the EU, he said. "We must be prepared to deal with them". De Kerchove also warned against Salafist organisations that try to "recruit disillusioned Syrian refugees".

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John Brennan on Thursday is expected to tell the US Congress that ISIS is training operatives to carry out further attacks on the West. In remarks drafted for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan reportedly warned that the so-called Islamic State will be relying more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for recent territorial losses in Syria and Iraq. In addition, Brennan noted that ISIS is working on an apparatus able to direct and inspire attacks similar to the ones carried out in Paris and Brussels and has several operatives who would be able to carry out such attacks. The CIA chief added that the group is calling on followers to carry out lone-wolf attacks in their home countries.


(ANSA) - Milan, June 16 - Corruption makes up an estimated 40% of the overall value of large-scale public works contracts in Italy, a think tank on corruption said Thursday.

"Italy ranked 61st in Transparency International's 2015 worldwide corruption rankings and came in second-to-last after Bulgaria in the European rankings," said Professor Emanuele Fisicaro, chief of the Anti-moneylaundering and Anticorruption Research Center think tank, at a conference on combating corruption organized by the city of Milan and the national accountants' guild.

"A 2013 Eurobarometer survey shows 97% of Italians believe corruption is rampant in Italy while 42% said they are personally subjected to corruption in their daily life," he added.

Fisicaro made an example of high-speed rail construction, whose costs differ depending on the segment.

"Costs vary from 47.3 million euros per kilometer between Rome and Naples, to 74 million between Turin and Novara, to 79.5 million between Novara and Milan, reaching 96.4 million per kilometer between Bologna and Florence," he said.

This compares to 10.2 million euros per kilometer to build high-speed rail links between Paris and Lyon, 9.8 million euros between Madrid and Seville, and 9.3 million between Tokyo and Osaka.

"We can infer that one in two public contracts could be corrupt," Fisicara concluded.


(ANSAmed) - Brussels, June 16 - EU border agency Frontex said Thursday that "at the end of May more than 13,000 people were saved in the central Mediterranean in a single week (May 20-27), the highest total ever recorded in the area". Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri, who is planning to move crews and frontier guards from the Aegean, directed "an appeal to States to give Frontex more boats to give full support" to Italy. An increasing number of migrants is heading for Italy from North Africa after the closure of the Balkan Route through Greece.

The number of migrants who landed in Italy in the first five months of the year was roughly in line with the same period in 2015, Frontex said. But in May some 19,00 arrived, more than double the total in April, because of the growing number of migrants from west Africa and the Horn of Africa, it said. For the second month in a row the number of people arriving in Italy from Libya and Egypt surpassed the arrivals in Greece, where thanks to an EU-Turkey deal the number fell to 1,500, 60% down.

The EU-Turkey deal virtually shut down the Balkan Route through Greece. Many more migrants are expected from North Africa this summer despite fighting in Libya.

Eurostat, meanwhile, said Thursday that the number of first-time asylum seekers applying for international protection in the European Union fell to 287,100 in the first quarter of 2016, down 33% on the 426,000 registered in the same period last year. Italy was second for the number of asylum seekers in the first quarter with 22,300, 8% of the total, well behind Germany with 175,000 first-time applicants in this period, 61%.




Bolzano - Austria is still working on "border management" at the Brenner Pass on the border it shares with Italy, Tyrol Governor Gunther Platter was quoted as saying Thursday by local media. "Ninety containers will be ready by the end of June in case of migrant arrivals", he reportedly said. Earlier this year, Austria said it may erect a barrier at the Brenner Pass to keep asylum seekers out. Border checks will kick off "if the political and security situation requires it", Platter said. However, data released by the Austrian region of Tyrol showed only 114 migrants tried to reach Austria from Italy in May and 54 in the first two weeks of June. A reported 82 migrants have also been refused entry by Germany and have travelled to Austria since May. Tyrol's regional police chief, Helmut Thomac, praised the work carried out by Italian authorities. "Italy has worked a lot in this direction and is acting in a very effective way", he said.
Brussels - The number of migrants who landed in Italy in the first five months of the year was roughly in line with the same period in 2015, Frontex border-protection agency said Thursday. But in May some 19,00 arrived, more than double the total in April, because of the growing number of migrants from west Africa and the Horn of Africa, it said. For the second month in a row the number of people arriving in Italy from Libya and Egypt surpassed the arrivals in Greece, where thanks to an EU-Turkey deal the number fell to 1,500, 60% down.



The EU-Turkey deal virtually shut down the Balkan Route through Greece. Many more migrants are expected from North Africa this summer despite fighting in Libya.
(by Alberto Zanconato)

BEIRUT - Mary is 10 and has not been able to walk ever since, in the Palestinian camp of Yarmuk, in Damascus, a bullet went through her shoulder and entered her spine. She has travelled to Italy from Beirut, hoping that doctors in Turin will be able to give her back that childhood that was taken away from her.



They have travelled with 78 other Syrian refugees in the third trip that was part of the initiative in favor of 'humanitarian corridors' promoted by the Sant'Egidio Community, the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy and the Valdensian community in cooperation with the foreign ministry.



Each one has a dramatic story to tell, because they belong to the most vulnerable categories of those who were affected by the civil war: victims of persecution, families with children, lone women, elderly, sick and disabled people.



One of them is Mohamed, 19, the eldest of six siblings (the youngest is aged 9), who were orphaned four years ago when gunmen broke into their home in Homs and killed their parents.



''We never found out who was responsible - he told ANSA - but we were probably targeted because my father worked for the government''. Mohamed studied but ever since he arrived in Lebanon, three years ago, he had to stop because money was tight. Here, relatives took care of him and two of his siblings.



Three others are in Jordan with an uncle.



Mohamed is in Turin but when asked about his future he replied: ''I'm not thinking about it for now, the only thing that interests me is for my family to get back together, to enable my siblings to travel here. I haven't seen them for three years''.



Then, he would like to study again: ''I would have liked to study economy - he said - but I think I will have to give up and pick something easier''.



The 81 Syrians arriving in Italy today will join 200 others who arrived last February with the 'humanitarian corridors'.



They spent the last two or three years in Lebanon. Most of them come from the region of Tripoli, in the north. There are 29 Christians, the rest are Muslim. Thirty are children, with two disabled kids, including Maria. Several others are sick. Suzanne has breast cancer. She will leave with her husband Shady and their three children.



They used to live in a shack in Lebanon, which they rented for 200 dollars a month in El Marj, in Bekaa Valley. And treatments for Suzanne were too expensive. Shady was so desperate he planned to travel illegally to Europe by sea. ''It was worth risking to die'', he said.



But there are also Syrian middle class families among the refugees, including Edward and Nilva, two Armenian Christian doctors from Hassake, in the country's north.



He has decided to stay to work at the local hospital, which has very little personnel. She will travel to Rome to then reach Lucca with son Raffi, 25, and daughter Rupina, 14.



It was for Rupina, who has a serious form of diabetes, that they decided to leave. ''I never thought I would see a war'', she said. Instead, her life, already difficult due to her condition, was struck by a civil conflict that has been going on for over five years.
'90 containers for Brenner barrier' By the end of the month, according to Tyrol governor

(ANSAmed) - Bolzano, June 16 - Austria is still working on "border management" at the Brenner Pass on the border it shares with Italy, Tyrol Governor Gunther Platter was quoted as saying Thursday by local media.



"Ninety containers will be ready by the end of June in case of migrant arrivals", he reportedly said.



Earlier this year, Austria said it may erect a barrier at the Brenner Pass to keep asylum seekers out.




BRUSSELS - European Union member states are still handling more than a million asylum requests, according to Eurostat figures updated at the end of March.



At the end of March 2015 the figure was just over half that level, at 560,000.



With 473,000 requests under examination (47% of the EU total), Germany has for a long time been dealing with the highest number, followed by Sweden (147,300, 15%), Austria (84,500, 8%), Italy (60,000, 6%) and France (42,900, 4%).



The first quarter of 2016, nevertheless, has seen a decline in asylum requests in Europe compared to the last quarter of 2015: in total there were 287,085 new requests against 426,000 in the last three months of 2015.



Italy received 22,335 new asylum requests in the first three months of the year, putting it in second place for numbers received after Germany, who recorded 175,000 new requests (61%).






Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos on Wednesday talked with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau about "bringing the visa waiver for the Romania citizens to the attention of the Ottawa Government at political level, after several years now that the topic has been approached especially from the technical point of view, in various negotiation formats," a release by the Romanian Government sent to AGERPRES informs.

Dacian Ciolos handed in his Canadian counterpart a joint letter co-signed by the Bulgarian premier, Boyko Borissov, which "reaffirms the wish to strengthen partnership and friendship with Canada, reviews the important themes on the common agenda of the next period which the citizens and companies of the three countries could benefit from and ask for the attention of Premier Justin Trudeau on the need of reciprocity in what concerns the visa waiver for Romanians and Bulgarians as it has been specified in the Declaration of the most recent summit European Union-Canada, in 2014."

During the meeting, the two high officials also referred to the "good Romanian-Canadian bilateral relationships also based on the contribution of a community of rd 200,000 Romanian-born Canadians excellently integrated in the adoption country's culture, who also bring an utmost contribution to the Canadian society's progress."

"I came to Canada amid a privileged relationship we have between Romania and Canada and the support Romania gives to the EU-Canada relation. As two friend countries, we've agreed that we must show a clear will to solve the issue of visa liberalization for Romanian citizens. We have the technical elements to which we'll add, as of today, a joint political approach for a decision to be made in the coming period. Prime Minister Trudeau showed openness to work together, fast and efficiently in this respect. Minister Tudorache has had today a first meeting with the Immigration minister and they'll keep in touch to show the success of a collaborative, open policy, as Prime Minister Trudeau and I have concluded," said Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos.

According to the release, Premier Justin Trudeau thanked Romania for the consular support given to Canada in Syria.

The two high officials also addressed topics related to the preparation of the forthcoming NATO Summit in Warsaw.

During his official visit to Canada, Premier Dacian Ciolos has also met head of the Senate George J. Furey and that of the Chamber of Commons Geoff Regan, as well as the General Governor of Canada.

Dragos Tudorache, head of the Prime Minister's Chancellery, has met John McCallum, the Immigration Minister of Canada's Government "to establish the working stages regarding the Visa file and clarify some technical aspects referring to the visa regimes starting from the preliminary results of the conclusions of the Canadian technical committee that visited Romania last week."

"During all talks with the Canadian officials, the need of a political dialogue regarding the issue of the visa liberalization for Romanians was emphasized, complementary to the Romania-Canada-European Commission three-party format. The dialogue on the visa regime liberalization is relevant both from the perspective of the EU-Canada Strategic Partnership Agreement and in particular of the preparation of the signing, enforcing and ratification in the following months of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA)," the government release adds.

According to information provided by the Romanian Executive, among the EU member states, Romania and Bulgaria are the only ones Canada is still maintaining the visa requirements for. Romania gave up in 2002 the short-stay visa requirement for Canadian citizens, complying with regulations in the EU.

A new EU-Canada summit, to make the transition to a comprehensive political and economic cooperation between EU and Canada, on a higher level, is envisaged for late October 2016.
The aircraft received Type Validation after a comprehensive testing programme, and being awarded Type Certification awarded by Transport Canada in December 2015.

EASA validation allows the aircraft to be delivered to launch operator Swiss International Air Lines at the end of this month and be entered into service next month.

"In the same week that our C Series aircraft surpassed 5,000 flight hours and the first SWISS aircraft readies for its first flight, we are celebrating another very proud moment with the receipt of the CS100 aircraft EASA and FAA Type Validations, said Robert Dewar, vice president, C Series Program, Bombardier Commercial Aircraft.




Above: An United Arab Emirates (UAE) Navy AS332B Super Puma lands on the flight deck aboard USS Constellation (CV 64) to refuel.

Courtesy US Navy / Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Daniel J. McLain



In addition, the overall naval training system for the UAE Navy is being designed for networking and interoperability to enable distributed multi-platform and joint mission training.



With potential phases, the UAE NTC programme could be worth approximately C$450 million over the next 15 years.



CAE has established CAE Maritime Middle East LLC to serve as the prime contractor and programme management company in Abu Dhabi, UAE.



CAE will be supported on the programme by Babcock International, one of the United Kingdom's leading engineering support organisations, as well as other local UAE companies.



"This is a major strategic win for CAE and clearly demonstrates our capabilities to serve as a training systems integrator across all defence domains," said Gene Colabatistto, CAE's Group President, Defence & Security. "The UAE Navy selected CAE as its training partner because of our focus and expertise in training, and the result will be a comprehensive naval training enterprise that helps the UAE Navy achieve a high level of fleet operational readiness."



The UAE NTC will include whole ship simulation suites for the bridge, combat information centre (CIC), and machinery control room (MCR). CAE's naval tactical mission trainers (TMTs) will be provided and can be reconfigured for a variety of vessel types, and used to deliver individual training across a range of ship systems and subsystems, including Combat Management Systems, sensor, and weapons systems. The naval tactical mission trainers will be networked and used as part of a whole ship configuration for team and multi-ship training.

CAE will also provide airborne tactical mission trainers to represent both fixed-wing and rotary-wing maritime aircraft that can be included as part of joint and collective mission training exercises.



The UAE NTC will feature a tactical control centre that will be used to coordinate and conduct comprehensive joint training and mission rehearsal exercises. The training facility will include all the requisite functionality and capability to perform naval exercise planning, execution, analysis, debrief, and evaluation. The whole ship simulation suites of various vessels combined with a high-fidelity synthetic environment based on the Common Database (CDB) will also enable development and evaluation of naval tactics, procedures and doctrine.



The UAE Naval Training Centre will be located in Taweelah with connectivity to several other naval and air bases throughout the UAE. The UAE NTC is expected to be complete and ready-for-training by early 2019.
The Competition Commission of South Africa launched an investigation in April 2105, after accusations that the carrier had been bribing travel agents to steer ticket away from rival airlines.

"We take compliance with competition law very seriously wherever we operate, and we are co-operating fully with the Commission's enquiry, said representatives from Emirates.

In November 2014, the government withdrew a fourth Dubai-Johannesburg frequency from Emirates, as it had been "unduly granted" by an official "with no authority to do so".
Operated by an Emirates B777-300ER aircraft, EK408 will depart Dubai at 03:00hrs and arrive in Melbourne (MEL) at 23:20hrs. The return flight, EK409, will leave Melbourne at 06:00hrs and land in Dubai (DXB) at 13:05hrs. The current service from Dubai to Melbourne operates via Kuala Lumpur (KUL) in both directions. These flight changes will save passengers approximately two and half hours in travel time in each direction when travelling between Dubai and Melbourne on these services.

The change to these services will provide passengers with improved one-stop connectivity when travelling from more than 150 destinations on the Emirates network to Melbourne via Dubai.

Emirates offers a total of four daily flights from Dubai to Melbourne with codeshare partner Qantas, including three services operated by an A380 aircraft and one flight on an Emirates B777-300ER. With this change, from 30 October 2016, these four daily services will include two daily nonstop flights to Melbourne from Dubai on Emirates and one flight on Qantas aircraft, as well as one daily Emirates flight to Melbourne from Dubai that operates via Singapore.

Together, Emirates and Qantas operate 91 flights per week to Australia from Dubai. Of these 91 flights, 77 of these are Emirates services, which operate to and from Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, including six daily A380 flights.


The US search vessel, mv John Lethridge, has picked up the signals from the aircrafts cockpit voice recorder and was able to locate the equipment from the sea bed and bring it to the surface.

The CVR is being taken to Alexandria on Egypts north coast where crash investigators will take it to Cairo for analysis.

The device was said to be damaged, but the memory unit that retains two hours of conversations from the cockpit was retrieved, Egyptian officials said.

The flight data recorder, which stores technical parameters on the flight, hasnt been recovered yet.

Flight MS804 crashed on May 19, killing all 66 passengers and crew. The plane was flying from Paris to Cairo before it deviated from its course while cruising at 37,000 feet, first turning left before rolling to the right and completing a full circle, investigators said this week.




The AC-208 Combat Caravan is a light attack combat aircraft manufactured by the US-based aerospace and defence company Alliant Techsystems (ATK). It is derived from the Cessna 208 Grand Caravan aircraft.

ATK developed a combat variant of the Cessna 208 by incorporating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance features. It is armed with Hellfire missiles. Other upgrades over the basic Cessna Grand Caravan include an electro-optical targeting system with an integrated laser designator, air-to-ground and air-to-air data link and self-protection equipment.

The US State Department has given approval for a possible sale to IRaq for sustainment, logistics, and spares support. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale on 14 June.

Iraq has requested a five-year sustainment package for ithe AC/RC-208 fleet that includes: operational, intermediate, and depot-level maintenance; spare parts; component repair; publication updates; maintenance training; and logistics. The total overall estimated value is $181 million.

This will allow the Iraqi Air Force to continue to operate its fleet of eight C-208 light attack and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft beyond the existing support contract which ends this month. Ultimately, the goal is for the IRaqi Air Force to become self-sufficient in maintenance and logistics training.


The team has continues to search for flight data and cockpit voice recorders since the aircraft disappeared in May with 66 people on board.

A signal believed to be from one of the data recorders was picked up by French naval search vessel La Place, as well as a signal from an automated emergency locator transmitter (ELT) also being detected.

Deep Ocean Search (DOS) has been brought in to assist the recover of the data recorders by searching the wreckage area with its search vessel, and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has also joined the search.

The Egyptian Armed Forces Investigation Committee received radar images of the A320 route before its crash, which identified that the aircraft swerved to the left then turned right for a full circle. This comes in accordance with the British and Greek radar images; however the investigation cannot count merely on such information, the Egyptian investigators have said.
Le CBD, cette molecule active du cannabis a aujourdhui le vent en poupe. Et cela est en grande partie du au fait quil permet...
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. The inclusion of the Armenian Genocide subject in Germanys educational program in being discussed, Anto Aznavurian  Head of the Armenian National Committee of Germany told ARMENPRESS.

The Armenian Genocide is not fully presented in school books of Germany. Currently the inclusion of the subject is being discussed. This will contribute that representatives of different nations  including Turkish, living in Germany, will know the truth and will have a clear perception of what actually happened, Aznavurian said.

Aznavurian says similar attempt was made previously  a pilot program was implemented in the state of Brandenburg, Germany.

We want this experience to expand throughout the entire Germany, and to include the Armenian Genocide in school books. I think the Bundestags adoption of the Armenian Genocide recognition resolution will contribute to this program, Aznavurian added.

On June 2 the Bundestag adopted the "Remembrance and commemoration of the genocide of Armenians and other Christian minorities in 1915 and 1916" resolution.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. United States Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and other Democrats have taken over the Senate floor to call for tougher gun control laws and specifically action on keeping people on terrorist watchlists from buying firearms, reports The Hill.

I'm prepared to stand on this floor and talk about the need for this body to come together on keeping terrorists away from getting guns ... for, frankly, as long as I can, because I know that we can come together on this issue, Murphy said in beginning the filibuster on Wednesday.

Murphy began speaking at about 11:20 a.m., and the filibuster was still going more than 12 hours later.

Other Democrats who joined him included Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Joe Manchin(W.Va.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Al Franken (Minn.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Charles Schumer (N.Y.), Ben Cardin (Md.) and Ed Markey (Mass.).

It also won support from presumptive Democatic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The Senate is currently considering an appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice departments and science programs. Though no votes are currently scheduled, the senators are blocking any amendments to the bill.

"I don't think we should proceed with debate on amendments to this bill until we have figured out a way to come together," Murphy said, referring to the spending bill.

The Democrats are also technically blocking Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) from ending debate on the legislation, though a spokesman shot down any speculation that the Republican leader would have tried to wrap up work on the spending bill Wednesday.

Democrats have given no indication how long they plan to hold the Senate floor. Chris Harris, a spokesman for Murphy, said Democrats launched the talkathon because the senator will no longer accept inaction or half measures in the face of continued slaughter.

The effort comes three days after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. A gunman armed with a Sig Sauer MCX rifle and a handgun on early Sunday killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.

Murphy is well-known for his support for tougher gun control laws. One of America's most shocking gun crimes occurred in his home state in Newtown, where 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

"I can't tell you how hard it is to look into the eyes of the families of those little boys and girls who were killed in Sandy Hook and tell them that almost four years later we've done nothing, nothing at all," Murphy said.

Since the Orlando attack, Democrats have put a renewed focused on legislation meant to block the sale of guns to people on terrorist watchlists.

An effort to move legislation was previously blocked last year.

Sen. Ben Sasse (Neb.) was the first Republican senator to join Murphy and other Democrats, asking a question about the government's terror watchlists.

"I'm familiar with the terrorist screening database. There are a series of lists that fall from the database, but I don't think there's any such thing as 'the terrorist watchlist,' and I certainly don't understand what due process rights would apply," Sasse said.

Sasse's comment reflects a central problem Republicans have with a proposal from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would give the attorney general broad authority to block people on watchlists from being able to buy guns or explosives.

Republicans argue that could deny constitutional rights to Americans who arent actually tied to terrorism.

Instead, Sasse and most Republicans support an alternative proposal by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) that would allow the attorney general to delay suspected terrorists from getting a gun for up to 72 hours while seeking a court order to stop the sale.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who faces a tough reelection bid, came to the Senate floor urging his colleagues to compromise.

"There's an obvious opportunity here, guys, to work together and find the solution," he said. "What I'm suggesting is let's get to work here."

Toomey on Wednesday criticized the Feinstein measure as "badly flawed." But he also said that Cornyn's proposal, which he previously voted for, likely didn't give enough leeway to the attorney general.

He made the comments after Democratic Senate candidate Katie McGinty, who is hoping to unseat Toomey, pressured the GOP senator to back the Feinstein legislation during a press conference Tuesday.

Wednesday afternoon, Toomey said he planned to introduce a compromise bill Thursday aimed at combining aspects of both the Feinstein and Cornyn proposals.

Toomey's legislation would require the attorney general to create a list of "likely terrorists" that could be blocked from buying guns. The list would then be submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which would review it annually and remove any Americans inadvertently included, according to a summary of the forthcoming bill from his office.
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. CNN reports a 48-hour "extendable ceasefire" has been secured for the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo, the United States and Russia said.

Brett McGurk told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday the cease-fire was expected to start Thursday. He stressed that the parties need to do all they can to enforce a "cessation of hostilities."

"We're going to take the next few days to try to get something in place, particularly in the northern section of Aleppo, where the cessation of hostilities is completely fraying," said McGurk, the U.S. envoy for the anti-ISIS coalition.

The Russian Defense Ministry said a 48-hour "regime of silence" will be enforced in Aleppo.

The initiative is designed "to reduce the level of armed violence and stabilize the situation," the ministry said in a daily bulletin posted on its website.

The United States and Russia have been working to enforce ceasefires in the city and surrounding region.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a watchdog group, reported casualties Wednesday from heavy shelling on areas controlled by regime forces in Aleppo.

It reported fighting between the Islamic State and rebels in the northern countryside and it cited fighting between regime forces and allied militia and rebel and Islamic factions and the al-Nusra Front.

Last week, the U.N. humanitarian wing decried the latest escalation of violence in Aleppo, where dozens of casualties have been reported in attacks on two medical facilities.

Since April, attacks in Aleppo and the surrounding areas have resulted in hundreds killed or injured, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

"It has also caused damage to schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure, and hindered humanitarian aid operations," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told journalists in New York. He said that such attacks "can constitute violations of international humanitarian law."

"We call on all parties to the conflict to take all measures to protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian access, as required under international humanitarian law, in order to safeguard the lives of all civilians," Dujarric said.

The U.N. agency that handles the affairs of Palestinian refugees in the Middle East denounced the deadly violence, saying Palestinians in the region have been caught in the crossfire.

"There's really two main battles going on in Aleppo. So we've been very analytically precise about this that, under the cessation of hostilities, the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's affiliate, is not a protected party. So the regime has every right to defend against that offensive.

"They have absolutely no right, however, to continue this offensive in the northwest part of the country, in which they're trying to cut off the opposition supply lines into the city. So that has to stop. There's ongoing discussions about this actually right now, about settling down the situation. It's just truly unconscionable."
YEREVAN, JUNE 16, ARMENPRESS. The Government of Armenia approved the draft of the National Revival party on making amendments to the Armenian Law of National Assembly Regulation. The draft proposes to change the name of the Rule of Law (Orinats Yerkir) faction into National Revival, reports Armenpress.

Justice Minister of Armenia Arpine Hovhannisyan said she has no principled objections over the draft.

The Rule of Law party was renamed National Revival.

Previously, the Government was against the above-mentioned draft.
A lot of confusion ensued from this artnet post today, in which Brian Boucher reported:

Artnews S.A., the Polish company that briefly published the New York-based ARTnews magazine and, even briefer still, Art in America, has filed for bankruptcy and liquidation of its assets, according to the Polish website Investments.

Did this mean that ARTnews was going to fold? Not so, according to the official statement, just issued by Rubenstein Associates, the media relations firm, on behalf of collector/publisher Peter Brants BMP Media Holdings.

The statement should alleviate concerns about the continued life of the in-flux ARTnews (at least for now):

Last month, BMP Media Holdings took control of Art in America, MODERN, The Magazine ANTIQUES, and ARTnews from their former parent company, Artnews S.A., which is based in Poland. [Links are mine, not theirs.] This week, BMP announced that those titles will be held under the name Art Media Holdings LLC, a privately held company located in New York. Artnews S.A., which owns Art & Business magazine and Skates Art Market Research, has no affiliation with the U.S.based ARTnews magazine and ARTnews.com, despite their similar names. Art Media Holdings, the newly formed company, which is wholly owned by Peter Brant, is located in Manhattans SoHo neighborhood. All of its magazines, websites, and related publications will continue as usual [emphasis added].

And in other ARTnews news, its former editor and publisher, Milton Esterow (under whom I published many articles, both on staff and freelance) recently received a Cross of Honor for Science and Art, conferred on him and the magazines former contributing editor, Andrew Decker, by Austrian Federal President Heinz Fischer:
All the latest Ashbourne news. Ashbourne is an historic market town in Derbyshire. Situated on the southern edge of the Peak District, it is known as the 'Gateway to Dovedale' and the 'Gateway to the Peak District'. Ashbourne is famous for the annual Royal Shrovetide Football Match, which has been played since at least 1667, although its origins may date back centuries earlier. Ashbourne became a Fairtrade town in March 2005. The popular Tissington Trail, which follows the route of the former Ashbourne to Buxton railway, starts on the edge of town. Keep up to date with the latest news from the town by signing up for our newsletter.
The countrys ruling party warns everyone using social media. Three people arrested reappear on TV to apologise for their actions. Worldwide Movement for Human Rights highlights the gap between what Laotian authorities say and what they do. The group calls for the prisoners immediate release.

Vientiane (AsiaNews)  Exiled activists and civil society groups are increasingly concerned about a government crackdown on freedom of expression in Laos.

People who posted critical comments on social media about the countrys one-party state have been targeted. The latest are three Laotians who complained about human rights abuses on Facebook.

Police arrested Somphone Phimmasone29, his girlfriend Lod Thammasong, 30, and Soukan Chaithad, 32, in Navatai, Kammouane province, on 5 March, after they returned from Thailand to renew their passport.

Along with others, the detainees had protested in front of the Laotian Embassy in Bangkok on 2 December 2015, demanding the government respect democracy.

After going missing, the three appeared on national television 25 May in a prison clothes, and apologised for endangering the countrys unity.

"From now on I will behave well, change my attitude and stop all activities that betray the nation, said Somphone. Soukan stressed their confessions weren't forced by the authorities.

The Paris-based Worldwide Movement for Human Rights (Federation international des ligues des droits de lHomme, FIDH) and the Lao Movement for Human Rights (Mouvement laotien des droits de lhomme, MLDH) issued a joint statement calling for the release of the three arbitrarily arrested prisoners.

The two groups pointed out that the governments systematic crackdown on peaceful dissent shows the huge gap that exists between its promises to the international community and its violent actions.

Increased repression by the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party might be due to rising Internet use. Between 2011 and 2013, the number of users went from 60,000 to 400,000.

Arresting dissidents is nothing new. On 26 May 1999 five members of the student movement for democracy were arrested in Vientiane and sentenced to 20 years in prison. One of them died from abuse.

In 2009 nine other activists were arrested for taking part in pro-democracy protests in the capital. Nothing is known about their fate.

The best known case is that of Sombath Somphone. A teacher, a human rights activist and a Magsaysay Award recipient, he went missing on 15 December 2012 near a police check point.

Although CCTV cameras clearly show his abduction, the government has never provided any information about his fate.

According to Reporters Without Borders, Laos is one of the least press freedom-friendly countries in the world, ranked 173rd out of 180.
by Christopher Sharma

The cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism. Although a secular country, Nepals old Civil Code remains in effect. Cow slaughter can mean up to 20 years in jail. The carcass was found in the jungle and a public complaint led to the Dalits arrest. For activists, "They are an easy target because the poor and illiterate."

Kathmandu (AsiaNews)  Nepali police yesterday arrested five Dalits for allegedly slaughtering an ox after its carcass was found in Chitwan district (south-central Nepal).

Speaking to AsiaNews, some human rights activists complain that Nepals majority Hindus harass Dalits. Despite becoming a secular country with the approval of the new Constitution, discriminatory practices linked to religion remain.

The five arrested are Sunita Nepali, Shiva Nepali, Jivan Nepali, Kopila Nepali and Sagar Nepali. "We detained them because a complaint was filed against them for killing an ox to eat the flesh, said District Police Superintendent Basanta Bahadur Kunwar. The Investigation is ongoing and a case has been filed against the five for cow slaughter."

The cow is considered a sacred animal in Hinduism and is associated with Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, light, and wealth.

Oxen are used only to plough the fields and pull carts, but Hindus still consider cow slaughter a crime, and impose heavy penalties on law breakers.

Last year the Parliament of Nepal approved a new constitution that defines Nepal as a secular and democratic State, removing all references to Hinduism present in the previous constitutions.

Nevertheless, the Civil Code in force under the old Hindu monarchy is still valid. Slaughtering a cow is punishable with up to 20 years in prison. The new code is still under discussion, and the authorities simply enforced the old one.

According to activists defending the rights of Dalits, the later are easy victims of the Hindu majority. Dalits are always repressed, said Kaman Biswokarma. They are poor, illiterate, who cannot defend themselves. They are only victims.

The animal was found dead in the jungle. There is no way of knowing if the Dalits killed it or not. For non-Dalits, it is easy to blame the marginalised."

Yogta Rai, activist and lawyer, points out the legal contradiction between the constitutional provisions, which should be above any other rule, including the old Civil Code.

"It is the duty of the State to formulate laws in accordance with the Constitution, she said. Dalits are poor and do not have the means to buy goat or other meats. This is not a violation of Hinduism; it is their right to have healthy food."

She is confident that the court will release them, but the police officer insists that all he " did was to enforce the law. We follow the law and uphold it accordingly.
by Mathias Hariyadi

The event was held under a huge tent in Mena, Timor Island, thanks to local authorities who issued all the marriage certificates at once. Hitherto many couples opted out of registering their union for financial reasons, with the result that their children have no birth certificate.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  St Filomena Church in Mena saw 239 couples celebrate in style their marriage thanks to the collaboration between the Diocese of Atambua and local authorities in East Nusa Tenggara (Nusa Tenggara Timur, NTT) province.

Led by Fr Kanis Oki, several priests took part in the Mass organised as part of the Jubilee of Mercy "to reiterate the beauty of marriage.

Practical reasons brought about the mass wedding, most notably a desire to facilitate the issuance of marriage certificates, a notoriously hard thing to do in Indonesia.

A few months ago, Social Affairs Minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa spoke publicly about the importance of marriage and birth certificates, something that many Indonesians fail to grasp.

According to the minister, 85 per cent of all children in NTT, the countrys most Catholic province, do not have a birth certificate. Some 36 million Indonesian children out of a total of 87 million do not have this document.

In NTT, many adults also do not register their marriage because women, according to tradition, are required to provide a dowry (called bellis in the local language) to the groom's family. This is not the case in Java and other provinces.

However, the bellis is a financial burden for many people, and so couples opt out of the official marriage to avoid the payment. Their children however end up without a birth certificate, unable to attend state schools.

To solve the problem, Minister Parawansa contacted religious leaders in the province, which includes the Indonesian side of the island of Timor, Flores Island, and other islands, to seek their cooperation.

"Thanks to a positive dialogue and acts of friendship, our mission is accomplished, he said.

St Filomenas pastor, Fr Bowe, said, "We received the full support of the government and dozens of NGOs, local and foreign. Mass weddings were carried out to help newlyweds get the papers required by the State."

Abe Besteas, is one of the grooms. He said that he was filled with joy to share this with other couples. Thanks to this day, it was not hard to get the papers. The Church and the government helped us."

In Indonesia, red tape and corrupt officials are a major problem. Yesterday, President Joko Widodo cancelled 3,143 useless by-laws.
Washington (AsiaNews / Agencies) - US President Barack Obama has met with the Dalai Lama for the fourth time since his election to the White House. The visit took place in private, behind closed doors and in the Map Room. During the talks, the US leader encouraged the head of Tibetan Buddhism to "dialogue" with the People's Republic of China.



White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, made it clear after the meeting that " Tibet, per US policy, is considered part of the People's Republic of China, and the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence. Both the Dalai Lama and President Obama value the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the United States and China."



Despite the very low profile of the meeting, China still protested vigorously. Lu Kang, a spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said: "This meeting sends the wrong signal to those who work for the independence of Tibet and separatist forces. It also damages the mutual trust and cooperation between Beijing and Washington ".

Liu Peng, an expert on religious issues for the Chinese Academy Social Sciences, believes that the meeting is no different "from all other points of conflict that characterize the history of relations between the two nations. These are events that displease or even outrage Beijing". According to the analyst "Washington does not want to weaken the relations with China, but is frustrated by Beijing's stance on the situation in the South China Sea and other geopolitical issues".



The People's Republic considers the Dalai Lama "a wolf in monks robes" and accuses him and the Tibetan government in exile of wanting to "divide the country." However, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism has consistently denied wanting to separate the region from the rest of China, and instead has for decades been seeking respect for Tibets cultural, linguistic and religious autonomy.
Vatican City (AsiaNews) - "Beneath material and moral incrustations, and the tears and bloodshed caused by war, violence and persecution, beneath this apparently impenetrable " there is light. This is the encouragement that the Pope addressed today to the participants in the Assembly of Reunion of Aid Agencies for the Oriental Churches (ROACO), to whom he also recommended greater unity of purpose between the Churches of East and West.

The pope, after having expressed "sympathy and gratitude" to the Friars Minor who care for the holy sites, said " I have been told that in the course of restoration work in Bethlehem, on one of the walls of the nave a seventh angel in mosaic has come to light, forming with the other six a sort of procession towards the place commemorating the mystery of the birth of the Word made flesh. This can lead us to reflect on how the face of our ecclesial communities can also be covered by incrustations as a result of various problems and sins. Yet your work must unfailingly be guided by the certainty that, beneath material and moral incrustations, and the tears and bloodshed caused by war, violence and persecution, beneath this apparently impenetrable cover there is a radiant face like that of the angel in the mosaic. All of you, with your projects and your activities, are part of a restoration that will enable the face of the Church to reflect visibly the light of Christ the Word Incarnate. He is our peace, and he is knocking at the doors of our heart in the Middle East, as he does in India and in Ukraine, a country for which I determined last April that an extraordinary collection should be taken up among the Churches of Europe.



" Your reflection in these days centres on the presence of the Syro-Malabar and Syro-Manlankara Churches in the territories of India outside Kerala. It is a sign of hope that, following the indications set out by my Predecessors, progress can be made in respect for the proper rights of each, without a spirit of division, but rather fostering communion in witness to the one Saviour, Jesus Christ. That communion, in all those parts of the world where Latin and Oriental Catholics live side-by-side, needs the spiritual riches of East and West as a source from which coming generations of priests, men and women religious, and pastoral workers can draw. For, as Saint John Paul II observed: The words of the West need the words of the East, so that Gods word may ever more clearly reveal its unfathomable riches. Our words will meet forever in the heavenly Jerusalem, but we ask and wish that this meeting be anticipated in the holy Church which is still on her way towards the fullness of the Kingdom (Orientale Lumen, 28).



" As I invoke upon all of you the Lords blessings, I ask for your prayers, for in a few days I will go on pilgrimage to a land of the East, Armenia, the first nation to welcome the Gospel of Jesus. I thank you most cordially. May Our Lady watch over you and accompany you".
Authorities in Geneva have detained a computer specialist for the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in connection with the unprecedented leak of offshore companies data.



Prosecutors placed the computer specialist in temporary detention earlier this week following the recent release of "a very large volume of confidential data, the Associated Press reported, citing a story published by Swiss newspaper Daily Le Temps.



While it did not specify when the data was released, the Swiss news report said Geneva prosecutors and policemen raided Mossack Fonseca's local office and seized computer equipment.



According to the Associated Press, the latest leak could fuel new theories about the elusive source of the Panama Papers.



The documents, which were revealed by German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung last April, contained data on over 200,000 offshore companies.



The papers detailed how businesses, celebrities and even world leaders use shell companies incorporated in low-tax countries like Panama, the Bahamas and the British Virgins Islands.



The Associated Press noted that offshore companies are often used for bribes, tax evasion, money laundering and to ensure privacy or protect wealth from authoritarian regimes.



The Panama Papers scandal led to the resignation of Iceland's embattled prime minister while other leaders in Argentina, Ukraine, China and even Russian President Vladimir Putin were scrutinised following the massive leak.


Scientists have detected gravitational waves for a second time, caused by the collision of two black holes 14 and eight times the size of the sun.

The team, including scientists from The Australian National University, The University of Western Australia and Monash University, glimpsed the black holes orbiting each other 27 times in their last second before coalescing. The signal was 10 times longer than that of the first gravitational wave, which was announced in February this year.

The signal was detected by the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in the United States, said LIGO researcher Professor Susan Scott, from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE). This has cemented the age of gravitational wave astronomy, she said This shows data is going to flow, that will enable us to map a lot more of the Universe than weve seen before.

The violent collision happened approximately 1.4 billion years ago in a distant galaxy. During the journey to Earth, the gravitational waves died down so much that they stretched the LIGO detectors only a tiny fraction of the width of a proton.

Gravitational waves are caused by violent cosmic events such as collisions between stars or black holes, or explosions such as supernovae. They were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, but he thought they would be...
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer agency of the World Health Organization, has found no conclusive evidence that coffee causes cancer. The group did however find that drinking very hot drinks (65 degrees or above) probably causes cancer of the oesophagus. This finding suggests that it is the temperature of drinks rather than the drinks themselves that is important when it comes to cancer.

IARC have classified the consumption of coffee as "not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans" (Group 3). A Group 3 evaluation does not mean coffee drinking has been proved safe when it comes to cancer, but it means that there is not enough evidence to say it is hazardous. Coffee drinking was previously categorised as Group 2B or "possibly carcinogenic to humans" on the basis of a link to bladder cancer, the experts say this link has become weaker and it is no longer possible to determine if coffee causes bladder cancer.

Tea was not evaluated as part of this review.

Coffee drinkers should be comforted to know they are not increasing their cancer risk  as long as their coffee isnt too hot. The risk applies to beverages at 65 degrees Celsius or hotter. As a guide, a beverage at that temperature is likely to be uncomfortably hot for some people to drink. So let the drink cool a little and...
Hi everyone!



I have a question about the subclass 600 visitor visa. I'm Canadian and my Fiance is Australian. I wanted to apply for a visitor 600 visa and live with him taking short trips over to NZ every 3 months. Is this allowed or does immigration look down on this kind of thing? After the 12 month visa is up, is it possible to apply for a de facto visa? Obviously I would be bringing my own money over to Australia to help pay for rent/food and expenses. Also how hard is it to get accepted for a De Facto visa compared to a PMV visa?



Thanks in advance!
Manufacturers have held back MPV launches in India following boom in SUV segment.

GM India announced recently that the Chevrolet Spin MPV, which was earlier confirmed for the domestic market, will not be launched now. Instead of launching the new MPV, the carmaker will now be introducing the Beat Activ soft-roader, based on the new-generation Beat hatchback that will also hit Indian shores later this year. Although the company says that the decision to shelve the Spin launch is largely based on changing customer preferences, formidable opposition from the likes of the Toyota Innova and the Maruti Ertiga and poor performance of the recent MPV launches by other manufacturers also seem to have a large bearing on the decision.

GM India's production-ready Spin MPV was displayed at Auto Expo 2016. Nevertheless, GM is not the sole OEM to have shelved its plans for an MPV in India. Hyundai Motor India, which had showcased the Hexa Space MPV (HND-7) at the 2012 Auto Expo, is believed to have put the project on hold and instead, is focusing on bringing the HND-14 concept-based compact SUV to production reality.

With global OEMs such as Chevrolet and Hyundai putting their MPV plans on hold, it seems that the overall appeal for the segment has fallen sharply. A testament to this is the poor performance of the models currently on sale in the segment in India compared to the level of success that compact SUVs have seen in recent times. There are a total of five offerings available in the MPV segment at the moment, starting with the entry-level Maruti Ertiga till the range-topping Toyota Innova Crysta.

Apart from these two models, none of the MPVs currently on sale have managed to catch the Indian buyers fancy. Other offerings in the segment include the Honda Mobilio, Renault Lodgy and Chevrolet Enjoy. Despite starting on a strong note, Hondas Mobilio, which was launched in 2014, has seen a constant decline in sales and was also among the worst performers during FY 2015-16 with a decline of over 73%. Renault Indias Lodgy, which was launched in April last year, has also shared the Mobilios fate as sales fizzled out after the initial momentum. The Chevrolet Enjoy, which has largely been a vehicle for fleet owners, has only sold 31,784 units since its launch in April 2013.

The changing preferences of Indian buyers towards more feature-laden SUVs and crossovers along with the explosion of the compact SUV segment has pressurised volumes in the MPV segment. Of the 10 new mass market PVs that were launched in 2015-16, only one was an MPV (the Lodgy) while four compact SUV and crossovers hit the Indian markets during the fiscal. For an OEM, entering the booming compact SUV segment seems a much better bet than the not-so-promising MPV market. Furthermore, with most MPVs being diesel-engined, the rising uncertainty about the fuel in the country also puts a question mark on their growth prospects.
After a delay of five months, TVS has started deliveries of the RTR 200 24V.

After nearly five months of having been launched, TVS flagship motorcycle, the Apache RTR 2004V, is now available in Maharashtra and is being delivered to customers. A slow ramp up from a small production capacity is understood to have delayed the roll out of the keenly anticipated RTR200 4V. The Apache family has a keen following in India and while testing it around Mumbai and Pune, we were constantly stopped and questioned by motorcyclists regarding its availability. The Apache RTR 2004V boasts a new 197.8cc engine and is available in three guises  Carburetted, Carb+ Pirelli tyres, or fuel-injected and shod with Pirellis.

This delay is also likely to impact the roll out of the faired version and we can expect the X21 concept-derived design to make its debut in the first half of 2017. But before that, will come the wildly exciting fully faired 310cc sportsbike based on the TVS Akula concept. This is expected to be launched towards the end of 2016 after the arrival of its mechanical sibling, the BMW G310R, which was spotted testing in India recently. Expect the G310R in October and the Akula by December. Hopefully TVS doesnt miss an opportunity then and rolls out the Akula India-wide in one go. Prices for the TVS Apache RTR 200 start at Rs 88,542 (ex-showroom, Mumbai).
Adaptive Cruise Control

For $300 more than the old Accord Hybrid, the new kid on the block also gets best-in-segment fuel economy ratings of 49 mpg city, 47 mpg highway, and 48 mpg combined (4.8, 5.0, 4.9 l/100 km). In the mid-size sedan realm, no other hybrid can pride itself with a combined output of 212 horsepower. The get-up-and-go comes courtesy of a two-motor hybrid powertrain and an efficient 2.0 i-VTEC Atkinson Cycle engine.In EV mode, the 2017 Honda Accord Hybrid is able to drive on electric power alone for short distances. Customers can rest assured because the battery pack is covered by an 8-year/100,000-mile warranty. The Accord Hybrid is the ultimate Accord, offering exceptional dynamic qualities with the greatest technological sophistication and fuel efficiency in the Accord family," said Jeff Conrad, senior VP and General Manager of the Honda brand at American Honda Motor.Depending on trim level, the mid-sized hybrid sedan is equipped with standard and optional equipment that includes front and rear parking sensors, remote engine start, rain sensing wipers, auto high-beam headlights, as well as heated rear seats. Design features exclusive to the hybrid model include an aluminum hood, blue highlighted LED headlights and Hybrid exterior badging. Thanks to the compact battery, trunk capacity is a segment-leading 13.5 cubic feet (382 liters), enough for a weekend away from home.The Accord Hybrid isnt just frugal and spacious, but also laden with active and passive safety technology. Standard safety features come in the form of a rearview parking camera, Lane Keeping Assist System, Lane Departure Warning,, Collision Mitigation Braking System, Forward Collision Warning, and Road Departure Mitigation. To those souls who would rather this ultra-economical sedan instead of a 2017 Toyota Camry Hybrid, have fun configuring your 2017 Honda Accord Hybrid
While the Rolls-Royce Vision Next 100 looks somewhat unfinished, the MINI Vision Next 100 is wrong on many more levels. Id like to point out whats wrong with it by highlighting some passages from the press release. Heres the first one: Todays MINI is the perfect premium compact car for the modern city. Hear ye, hear ye, the MINI three-door hatchback is classified as a subcompact car. Signed, Captain Obvious.In the future, driving in a MINI must still be fun, to the extent that drivers will prefer to drive themselves  as often as possible... Various aspects of the MINI Vision Next 100 will take the go-kart feeling to another new level. Cleared of many controls and screens, the interior has a pure, uncluttered look.... Here, augmented reality displays show the route or ideal driving line, heightening the driving sensation.For a car that advocates for autonomous driving, handling and driving sensation dont mix from my point of view. If you read that passage again, youll notice that MINI tries to tell you that the Vision Next 100 is a hoot to drive because the dashboard is more minimalistic that a cell in Guantanamo Bay. What does interior design have to do with handling prowess? Im not sure either. Hypothetically speaking, a girl couldnt drive this car in a skirt because the windshield and minimalistic dashboard would reveal her panties.Then theres this line: The efficiently-packaged, zero-emission drive system and the reduced need for crash zones in the future enable a compactness of body not so far removed from the first MINI back in 1959. Im sorry, but thats so not right. In the photo gallery below, theres a pic of a woman about to enter the concept. The womans shoulders stand as high off the ground as the roof line of the car. The average height of a British woman is 5 feet 3 inches (160 centimeters). The height of a 1959 Mini is 4 feet 5 inches (1,346 mm). Hmm...Now that Im done with my rant, I have to give admit that MINI did one thing right with this concept. That thing is the sliding pedal box and steering wheel. Think about it: at the press of a button, you can change the layout from left- to right-hand drive. That comes in handy when traveling to countries that drive on the other side of the road and, more importantly, such a feature would streamline development and production. In this regard, I tip my hat to the peeps at MINI. All the info on the concept is available in the release below.
We're obviously talking about the 911 R. So far, we've only seen Porsche-owned examples of the manual Neunelfer, with the four-car convoy that paraded through Monaco being the... pinnacle of spotting so far.Nevertheless, since it's June, customer deliveries have kicked off and we're here to show you the first such case. However, we're not really sure if we should call the R in the image above a customer car, since this is the personal ride of Porsche GT division helm man Andreas Preuninger - we must thank Drive for the pic.Being dressed in British Racing Green and wearing Silver stripes with retro-colored "Porsche" badging on the doors, this 911 R is as much of a nod to the five-decade-plus history of the 911 as a 991 can be.We lost count of how many eye-candy 911 GT3 RS PDKs we showed you (Porsche only builds around 2,000 units per year) and we feel the spotting story will continue with the three-pedal machine mentioned above.As for Andreas Preuninger, not all Porsche fans are his fans nowadays. It all has to do with the three letters mentioned at the end of the GT3 RS designation above. At first, one might think that the 991.1 GT3 and GT3 RS losing their stick shifts will be corrected by the clutch pedal returning in the upcoming 991.2 GT3.However, the PDK-only form of the current models also means 996 and 997 GT3 prices skyrocketed, with many enthusiasts not being able to afford them anymore.Then again, the GT man had his reasons. Perhaps the greatest challenge here came in terms of lap times. We can cut Porsche a bit of slack for its manual mistake, as the contemporary supercar landscape has turned lap times into an obsession, with clutches meaning inferior performance - for instance, you should keep in mind that the 991.2 Turbo S is a full two seconds faster on the Nurburgring than the 991.1 GT3 RS, which was supposed to be the ultimate 911 track weapon.However, we can only be glad Porsche is returning to a market Ferrari and Lamborghini have left behind.
The Weekender found plenty of Fathers Day weekend outings on SocialFlight, cookouts included. On Saturday, Boulder Airport Day and Open House will feature aircraft of all kinds, including warbirds, antique and corporate aircraft. Many will be open for cockpit climbs. The Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum will host a special KidSpace for building model rockets and balsa wood airplanes, and flying flight simulators.

Dragonfly Aviation in Winder, Georgia, will host its Second Anniversary Party, Open House and Fathers Day Celebration on Sunday at Barrow County airport. Show off your airplane, mingle with fellow aviation enthusiasts and enjoy some free food.

Fly in to Butler Field in Hutchinson, Minnesota, for your choice of a Fathers Day Sunday breakfast or dinner. The pancake breakfast and classic car show will run from 8 a.m. until noon. Pork chop dinners complete with all the fixings will be served from 4 p.m. until 7.

Also Sunday in Redding, California, Aviation Day returns for its annual Fathers Day celebration with breakfast, military and medevac helicopter displays and more. Benton Air Center will offer airplane rides, while helicopter flights will be available from Air Shasta.
16 June 2016 11:01 (UTC+04:00)

Armenian armed forces have 8 times violated the ceasefire with Azerbaijan on the line of contact over the past 24 hours, Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said in a message June 16.

Armenian armed forces stationed in Chinari village of Armenia's Berd district opened fire at the positions of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Agbulag village of the Tovuz district.

Moreover, Azerbaijani positions underwent fire from the positions located near Chilyaburt village of the Tartar district, Yusifjanli village of the Aghdam district, Horadiz, Ashagi Seyidahmadli villages of the Fizuli district and from the nameless heights in the Goranboy, Fizuli and Khojavend districts.

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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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
16 June 2016 16:22 (UTC+04:00)

Gunay Camal

The state of Azerbaijan continues to work with international organizations for releasing its citizens Dilgam Asgarov and Shahbaz Guliyev taken hostage by Armenian militaries.

Ismail Akhundov, the head of the working group of the State Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons, announced about this while addressing the hearings at the Azerbaijani Parliament on June 16.

The state commission has urged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to multiply efforts for the immediate release of Asgarov and Guliyev, he said.

Armenian forces killed an Azerbaijani, Hasan Hasanov, and detained Guliyev and Asgarov while they were attempting to visit the graves of their relatives in July 2014.

Guliyev and Asgarov have been judged illegally by the unrecognized courts of a separatist regime in occupied Nagorno-Karabakh. Following an expedited judicial process" in December 2015, Asgarov was sentenced to life imprisonment and Guliyev to 22 years.

Akhundov further stated that the commission also called on the ICRC to prepare and submit for consideration of the parties an agreement on return of captives and persons taken hostage in the short term, adding that the issue is being discussed with the ICRC.

Azerbaijan, whose over 4,000 citizens were taken captive, hostage, or went missing as a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh war, has repeatedly declared its readiness to begin negotiations with Armenia in this direction.

A number of international organizations, as well as Baku, repeatedly urged Yerevan to start peaceful negotiations on this issue and to free the hostages, but, the Armenian side remained deaf. Furthermore, the Armenian side ignoring all calls and violating the international rules and norms was subjecting the hostages to various tortures.

Armenian aggression against its neighboring country resulted in occupation of 20 percent of Azerbaijans internationally recognized territories. The large-scale hostilities resulted in death of over 20,000 Azerbaijanis while over 4,000 ethnic Azerbaijanis were taken captive, hostage, or went missing as a result of the war. The majority of those captured during the hostilities are children, elderly people and women.

The Azerbaijani National Security Ministrys documents earlier revealed that Armenian vandals have set up six women- and children- only internment camps: Vardenis childrens camp (250 occupancy), Razdan children's camp (180 occupancy), Khankendi (Stepanakert) children's camp (180), Gechashen women's camp (320), Jermuk women's camp (250) and Kalbajar women's camp (150).

The available data shows that Armenians have grossly violated the rules and provisions of the conventions on captives and hostages. They subjected hostages to brutal forms of tortures and forced them into hard labor.

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16 June 2016 14:14 (UTC+04:00)

By Dalia Marin

Last month, Austria avoided the election of a president from the xenophobic Freedom Party by the skin of its teeth. Indeed, the Freedom Party is now challenging the result. Given the worrying nature of the populist challenge, and its implications for European politics and the handling of the refugee crisis, it is important to diagnose what ails Austria, so that the cure doesnt end up being worse than the disease.

Austria was once lauded as Germanys more successful neighbor, one of Europes fastest-growing countries. But its economy has been sputtering since 2012, with GDP up last year by a meager 0.7%; only Greece and Finland performed more poorly. And Austrias unemployment rate has soared, from 5% in 2010 to 10% today.

These developments have their origins in how Austria engaged with Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. At first, Austria benefited from the European Unions eastern enlargement. International trade soared, Austrian firms invested heavily in the region, and Austrian banks opened subsidiaries there, financing these countries modernization. All of this was good for business, and the Austrian economy grew rapidly.

But a hidden dynamic ultimately turned the tables on this success. Central and Eastern European countries had low per capita income, but were rich in skills. Austria, far wealthier, was not. In 1998, 16% of Central and Eastern Europeans (including Russia and Ukraine) had academic degrees, compared to just 7% of Austrians. So, when Austrian firms invested in Eastern Europe, they did not just relocate low-skilled manufacturing jobs; they also offshored the parts of the value chain that required specialized skills and produced valuable research.

According to my research, from 1990 to 2001, Austrian subsidiaries in Eastern Europe employed five times as many people with academic degrees, as a percentage of staff, as their parent firms did. They also engaged 25% more research personnel in their labs.

This relocation of research activity lowered growth in Austria and boosted growth in Eastern Europe. Research spills over to the rest of the economy, as new knowledge diffuses into commercial activities. Tapping the knowledge produced by Austrian subsidiaries was one of the ways Eastern European economies were able to grow so quickly.

Today, Bratislava, Prague, and Warsaw  the location of most Austrian subsidiaries  have higher per capita incomes than Vienna. Indeed, according to the Hungarian economist Zsolt Darvas, in terms of purchasing power parity, all three cities surpassed Vienna in 2008. This is a remarkable development, given that Vienna has served as a reference point for these capitals for centuries.

Germanys growth was not similarly affected, for three reasons. To begin with, after the fall of Communism, Austria reoriented its foreign direct investment almost exclusively to Eastern Europe, which accounted for nearly 90% of its FDI outflows. In Germany, just 4% of FDI moved to Eastern Europe in the 1990s, reaching 30% at the turn of the century. As a result, Austria became much more integrated with Eastern Europe.

Second, Germany was richer in skills than Austria. In 1998, the share of the German population with academic degrees was 15%, more than double the Austrian level. German firms did relocate high-skilled work to the east, but not to the extent that Austria did. As a proportion of the workforce, German affiliates in Eastern Europe employed three times as many people with academic degrees as their parent firms did. And German subsidiaries employed 11% more researchers than their parent companies.

Finally, many of the Austrian parent companies were themselves subsidiaries of foreign firms, while German firms were German multinationals, which transplanted their corporate culture to their Central and Eastern European subsidiaries. They employed more German managers relative to local managers, which gave them more control over innovation. Furthermore, most German investments were based on the transfer of an established technology; only 8% of the countrys FDI in the region involved cutting-edge research.

By contrast, Austrian firms adapted their business to the regions environment and employed more local managers than Austrians. As a result, their subsidiaries were more autonomous in their innovation decisions. There was no mechanism that guaranteed that the knowledge created in a subsidiary also benefited the parent company.

If Austria is to return to its previous growth path, it will have to become more attractive as a location for innovation. And to do this, Austrian firms must employ highly qualified people in their research labs.

Educating a highly skilled workforce takes time, of course. But fortunately, Austria has another option: immigrants. Austrian policymakers could choose to follow Canadas example and introduce a selective immigration policy that welcomes highly skilled migrants and refugees.

Austrians nearly closed the door on that option. Now they must recognize that what populists call a weakness could be Austrias best hope for reviving growth.

Copyright: Project Syndicate: Whats the Matter With Austria?

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16 June 2016 11:28 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Camal

The Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict occurred after Warsaw Pact and collapse of the USSR, when there was no justice in the international relations.

Deputy Head of Azerbaijani presidential administration, chief of the administration's foreign relations department Novruz Mammadov made the remark while addressing the 8th High-Level Meeting of Nizami Ganjavi International Center titled "Political Map of the Future" in Andorra, Azertac reported.

"Azerbaijan was able to guarantee stability, security and continued progress in the years of independence. However our problem with the neighboring country prevents our future progress, Mammadov said, pointing to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as the key obstacle to the development.

For over two decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in conflict, which emerged over Armenia's territorial claims against its South Caucasus neighbor. Armenian armed forces have occupied over 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent regions.

Despite the official ceasefire back in 1994, each year the conflict becomes a cause of the deaths of dozens of civilians and military. The latest outbreak of violence on the contact proved that it is impossible to resolve the conflict by keeping a status quo.

Mammadov went on to say that international law is neglected in the settlement of the conflict and four UN Security Council resolutions have not been implemented. OSCE Minsk group co-chairs have failed to produce any tangible result for 25 years. All these processes are sacrificed for geopolitical interests. No one mentions rights of the IDPs and refugees who emerged as a result of the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and its seven surrounding regions by Armenia, he added.

Today, Azerbaijan with a population of about 10 million is home to more than 1.2 million refugees and IDPs. Every 8th citizen in Azerbaijan is a refugee, which is one of the highest per capita number of refugees.

The bloody Nagorno-Karabakh war left 700,000 civilians of Nagorno-Karabakh and the regions adjoining it, as well as the regions bordering with Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh without homes. Moreover, 250,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia and became refugees due to Armenia's ethnic cleansing policy after the emergence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan.

The official reminded that during its military provocations in April this year Armenia used white phosphorus bombs and also threatened nuclear strikes, urging the international community to "react timely to such cases".

Former prime minister, member of parliament and other officials of Armenia have declared this April that Armenia has a nuclear weapon, so-called dirty bomb, mentioning that these bombs can be used against Azerbaijan.

Baku turned to corresponding international organizations to examine the statement and stop Armenian nuclear threat and blackmail.

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16 June 2016 17:15 (UTC+04:00)

By Gunay Camal

Azerbaijan, as one of the developed countries of the region, fully ensures human rights.



The statement was made by Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Bahar Muradova during the hearings in the Parliament dedicated to the Human Rights Day in the country on June 16.



Today's success of Azerbaijan are connected with the name of Heydar Aliyev, Muradova said, stressing that after returning to power Heydar Aliyev defined the rights and freedoms as the main principle of his activities.

Speaking at the event, Ali Hasanov, the Azerbaijani president's aide for public and political affairs, said that ensuring human rights and freedoms, and a decent standard of life of citizens are the highest goals of Azerbaijani state.



Independence means not only realization of Azerbaijani people's aspirations regarding statehood, but also an opportunity to secure human rights and freedoms, Hasanov added.

In early years of Azerbaijan's independence, the country saw massive human rights violations, he said. "Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan and with the help of its patrons occupied the country's Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts."

"Thus, more than one million people became refugees and IDPs," Hasanov noted. "Unfortunately, a number of international organizations and states speaking under the slogan of human rights give no assessment to such a gross violation of the rights of more than one million citizens."

Armenia keeps under occupation 20 percent of Azerbaijan's internationally recognized territory, ignoring the UN Security Council's four resolutions on immediate withdrawal from the occupied lands.

Hasanov further emphasized that all sectors, including NGOs and the media, require transparency.

Recently, President Ilham Aliyev banned all the checks for private companies, with the exception of tax audits for two years. However, some forces under the guise of NGOs try to carry out illegal inspections on fire safety rules and protection of consumer rights in those enterprises, he said.

The top official pointed out that currently, quite enough number of journalists are engaged in racketeering.

Hasanov recalled that once a minister complained to him regarding blackmail from a newspaper, and it later turned out that the name of a journalist involved in the mentioned blackmail, is under 15 criminal charges. The official added that such incidents are unacceptable.

Each NGO and media outlet has tasks and they should create a transparent atmosphere for discussions, said the president's aide.

Hasanov noted that democracy and civil society are very closely linked to the freedom of assembly, association and expression.

Today, 55 political parties, 3,000 non-governmental organizations, as well as civil society organizations involving nearly 2 million people freely operate in the country, he underlined.

Hasanov said that protection of freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom of information are on the focus of the government. Its very easy create a newspaper or magazine in Azerbaijan. So, a body can start publication in seven days after submitting relevant documents to the Justice Ministry, he said.

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16 June 2016 18:36 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Irans Ata Airline launched flights en route Tehran-Baku-Tabriz from June 16.

The airlines representative Nader Shayesteh stated that the flights are performed by Airbus aircraft which has the capacity of 145 people.

The flights to both cities will be performed twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays, he added.

The cost of the Baku-Tehran round trip tickets is 180 manat ($119), the same price is applied in reference to Baku-Tabriz round trips.

Departure of the aircraft from Tehran is at 12:15 local time with the estimated arrival in Baku at 13:30 local time. After an hour and a half break the aircraft departs to Tabriz with the estimated arrival at 18:00 local time.

The fleet of the Ata Airline which was established in 2008 is comprised of 4 Airbus A320-200, 2 Boeing 737-400 and six McDonnell Douglas MD-83 aircrafts. The company launched its scheduled operations in 2010 with the provision of services for domestic routes. Currently, the airline opetrates flights to a number of international destinations such as Tbilisi, Istanbul, Bahrain, Baghdad, and Kuwait.

The airline celebrated its fifth anniversary of official operation in 2015. The company has its headquarters in Tabriz and based in Tabriz International Airport

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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

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16 June 2016 14:23 (UTC+04:00)

With the start of summer season, Azerbaijani leading mobile operator Azercell Telecom has launched a new favorable campaign in the regions. Unlimited calls in regions campaign offers daily unlimited packs for pre-paid subscribers residing in provinces for only AZN 0.25 per day. In order to benefit from this campaign subscribers of Bolge tariff pack should just text START SMS to 2323. Daily pack can be used till the end of the offered day. The campaign is only applied in the regions and excludes calls in Baku and Absheron peninsula.

With this campaign Azercell continues the strategy of mobile communication development in the regions started in March 2012. During several years Azercell customers, residing in the provinces benefit from special Bolge tariff pack. Subscribers joining this tariff may talk for free with on-net contacts after the third minute of call.

Azercell will continue to please its subscribres with favorable campaigns, as well as high quality network throughout the hot summer months.

Azercell Telecom LLC was founded in 1996 and since the first years sustains a leading position in the market. Azercell introduced number of technological innovations in Azerbaijan: GSM technology, advance payment mobile services, M2M,MobilBank, GPRS/EDGE (mobile internet), 24/7 Customer Care, full-time operating Azercell Express offices, mobile e-service ASAN imza (ASAN signature) and others. With 48,2% share of Azerbaijans mobile market Azercells network covers 99,8% of the countrys population. In 2015, the number of Azercells subscribers reached 4,5 million people. In 2011 Azercell deployed 3G and in 2012 the fourth generation network  LTE in Azerbaijan.

The Company is the leader of Azerbaijans mobile communication industry and the biggest investor in the non-oil sector. Azercell is a part of Telia Company Group of Companies serving 186 million subscribers in 17 countries worldwide with 27,000 employees.

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16 June 2016 12:14 (UTC+04:00)

By Laman Ismayilova

The 4th edition of International Children's Art Festival Pure Colors ended in Baku, Trend Life reported.

The festival took place in the exhibition hall of Azerbaijan State Academy of Arts. As usual, the event was organized by Azerbaijan State Academy of Arts with the support of the Russian Information and Cultural Center (RICC).

More than 1,000 works from 38 countries were submitted to the festival.

Speakers at the event included rector of the Academy, People's Artist Omar Eldarov, head of Rossotrudnichestvo representative office in Azerbaijan Valentin Denisov and other officials.

The jury selected 300 works, including 6 paintings by Anastasia Gorbacheva, who will leave for a world tour.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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16 June 2016 15:35 (UTC+04:00)

The Azerbaijan Youth Union (AYU) and the Azerbaijan Dance Association (ADA) held a grand festival of arts Save The Children`s World in honor of Children's Day.

The festival held from June 4 to 11 featured two big concerts, sightseeing tours, museums, friendly meetings, creative evenings. Nine international teams were guests of the event.

The opening of the festival and the first concert on the stage of the House of Actors uas held on June 4. As part of this event were the dance and vocal and instrumental ensembles, from Baku, and from neighboring countries. The concert was visited by children from orphanages.

During the 6 days, the visitors familiarized with the history, traditions and customs of our country, visiting different tours, recitals, master classes, and shared experiences with the Azerbaijani teams.

The event ended on June 11 in State Music Theatre named after Rashid Behbudov with a great concert, which was attended by all the teams. The concert began with a parade of bands, the song We are family and ended in the same parade and awarding the participants and leaders of diplomas and cups to the song of Michael Jackson We are the world.

"This year we decided to organize a big celebration in honor of Children's Day, not limiting it to one day. We organized a week-long festival, both for our children and for our younger guests.

We have invited kids from children's homes to two major concerts. We try not to forget the children throughout the year and organize a variety of activities for them. For example, soon will start a children's creative camp in Nabran. The program includes a variety of workshops, educational games and festivals. So we are waiting for all the kids in our creative camp. In summer, you need to not only relax, but also to continue to grow, " said President of the Azerbaijan Dance Association and vice-chairman AYU Aziz Azizov.

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16 June 2016 12:39 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

The World Bank (WB) is considering a possibility to provide loan guarantees for financing the construction of the Azerbaijani part of the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) project.

The statement was made by Larisa Leshchenko, head of the WB Baku office to Trend on June 16.

TANAP is a component of the Southern Gas Corridor, which envisages transferring natural gas from Azerbaijans section of the Caspian Sea to Europe. The pipeline stretches from the Georgian-Turkish border to the western borders of Turkey with Greece.

Leshchenko noted that the Bank also continues discussions on the issue of financial support to the Azerbaijani part of the TANAP project.

It is too early to speak about the volume of financing as the discussion and preparation processes are currently being conducted, she said, adding that if the project is approved, it will increase the volume of TANAP's financing.

Perhaps, the financing will be via the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), Leshchenko said adding that it is also possible that the WB will provide loan guarantees through the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA, an institution of the World Bank Group).

Meanwhile, WB regional director for the South Caucasus Mercy Tembon underlined that the Bank's mission on studying possible financing of the TANAP project continues its work in Azerbaijan.

There are a number of tasks that the mission must fulfill, said Tembon adding that it will take some time as it is necessary to bring together all the fragments and submit to the bank's management.

At the same time, the WB is in the negotiation process simultaneously with Turkey's Botas Petroleum Pipeline Corporation and Southern Gas Corridor CJSC for financing TANAP.

Moreover, it is expected that additional $1.07 billion will be allocated by the European Investment Bank (EIB) to TANAP pipeline. The loans will be long-term, and will possibly be provided under state guarantee.

TANAP will be connected to the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) which is the European leg of the SGC.

The source in TAP consortium told that the construction of subsea section of the TAP pipeline is expected to begin in the winter of 2017-2018.

Immediate construction works within the framework of the TAP project will kick off in the countries that located on the route of the pipeline this summer, said the source by stressing that after the groundbreaking ceremony of the TAP in May, contractors has been mobilized and pipes continue to arrive in the ports of Greece and Albania.

The completion of the TAP is expected in 2019. The gas will be transported from the Turkish-Greek border through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea and then coming ashore to Italys south.

TAP's initial capacity will be 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year with the possibility expand it to 20 billion cubic meters.

The SGC is one of the biggest construction projects of our times with a value of $40 billion. The realization of SGC will serve to enhancing energy security of the EU and diversify its gas supply routes.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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16 June 2016 17:29 (UTC+04:00)

By Fatma Babayeva

Although sending a letter of congratulation is a traditional and diplomatic gesture practiced between states for ages, President Recep Tayyip Erdogans letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin is assessed as a step taken by Turkey to normalize the deteriorated relations between the two countries.

In his letter, sent on the occasion of Russia Day celebrated on June 12, Erdogan stated that he wishes the Russian-Turkish relations to reach a deserved level.

Although some Turkish officials pinned a hope for President Erdogans message to serve as ice-melting in ties and were waiting for a similar signal from the Russian side, Moscow left the letter unanswered.

Press Secretary for the President of Russia, Dmitry Peskov said that exchanging letters during national holidays is an ordinary practice in international relations. Worsened diplomatic ties is not always a reason to cease sending such letters.

There were no other substantial moments in Erdogans letter, Press Secretary noted, adding that therefore, there is no need to reply this letter.

In the meantime, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim also sent a letter to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on the same occasion.

Earlier, Russian President expressed in Athens his country's willingness to restore relations with Turkey and stressed that first move should come from Turkey.

Nevertheless, actions speak louder than words for Russia. Russian officials ask Turkey to apologize and compensate for the losses, which were caused by a war crime (shot down of SU-24 plane) if they really want to restore the relations.

In response to this statement all the senior government officials of Turkey made a call for Russia to establish a joint working group to discuss which steps can be taken to restore ties between two states.

Diplomatic relations between the two countries soured after a Russian SU-24 trespassed Turkish airspace and shot down by Turkish F-16 fighters on November 24, 2015.

The incident was followed by harsh statements from sides shattering the traditionally friendly ties between the nations both politically and economically.

Turkey stated that Russian fight jet entered to its airspace, while Russia denied its warplane flying into Turkish skies. Turkey reiterated that Ankara didn't know who owned the plane that they shot.

Since then the governments could not achieve any rapprochement to move this diplomatic crisis from deadlock. The Kremlin imposed sanctions on food products, put an end to visa-free travel and called Russian people to boycott Turkey for as tourist destination.

After the sanctions, economic relations between the two countries experienced decline. In particular, statistics show that before the jet incident, about 1,500 Turkish companies operated in Russia in various spheres of business ranging from construction and tourism to imports of Turkish fruit, vegetables and textiles. However, currently, only about 200 Turkish firms are operating in Russia, according to non-official statistics.

Also, statistics show that Turkish exports to Russia fell to around $108 million in January, down two-thirds on the previous year.

Until the incident of SU-24, the political and economic relations between Turkey and Russia have had important and strategic nature, and some even speculated that the external forces are interested in the crisis in the Turkey-Russia relations.

Restoring relations serve to the interests of both Russia and Turkey. These two countries used to have deep relations in economic, political and cultural areas which cannot be discarded easily.

Russia is the largest gas supplier to Turkey, while Turkey used to be exporter of various agricultural products to Russia worth more than $1 billion.

Turkey also was a favorite destination of Russian tourists where they were welcomed and offered reasonable prices.

A source in Turkish presidential administration earlier noted that Turkey has never closed diplomatic channels with Russia.

Moscow and Ankara have long been holding secret negotiations for the normalization of their relations since the crisis in relations affects both countries in a negative way.

Additionally, Russia has not completely abandoned Turkish Stream either, as President Putin said earlier.

Turkish Stream replaced South Stream, which was the envisaged gas pipeline project of the Russian Federation to bypass Ukraine as a transit country.

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Fatma Babayeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Fatma_Babayeva

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16 June 2016 12:02 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

Exploration of oil fields is currently one of the priority directions of the Turkmengeology state corporation.

The Turkmen Oil and Gas Ministry announced about this, mentioning that the whole dry land territory of Turkmenistan is considered as prospective in the terms of hydrocarbon reserves.

The company gradually introduced new technologies in the sphere of deep-well drilling. Practical use of the technologies and up-to-date aggregates of driveheads have allowed reducing the term of the well construction as well as significantly cut production costs. The corporation is engaged in the process of contract conclusion on the delivery of the necessary equipment and training of local specialists.



Furthermore, Turkmengeology expects to get considerable results from a number of contracts previously concluded with foreign companies.

Chinese Chuanqing Drilling Engineering Company Limited (CCDC), which is a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), is expected to complete drilling process of the exploratory well located in the Nagarachi area, in the east of the country. The total depth of the well is considered to be 5,500 meters.

CCDS is focused on upstream oilfield services and committed to provide innovative solutions to develop the oil industry in all of its subsidiaries.

Meanwhile, Yug-Neftegaz Company which is registered in Singapore, continues its seismic operations using 2D and 3D methods in the area of Northern Goturdepe, Goturdepe and Barsagelmes fields in the west of Turkmenistan.

The work will be performed both on land and partly on the shallow part of the Turkmen sector of the Caspian Sea," the ministry reported.



Turkmenistan has abundant reserves in the energy resources.

The countrys oil production in 2015 amounted to 12.7 million tons, the rate is higher by 5.0 percent in comparison to the figures shown in 2014, according to the BP energy outlook. The countrys share in the worlds total oil production amounted to 0.3 percent in 2015.

Turkmengeology State Corporation is the leading government organization in the field of geological exploration which specializes on comprehensive study of interiors of the Turkmenistan area, discovering and exploration of all kinds of natural reserves.

The corporation implements operation of different kind of geological exploration work such as deep prospective drilling, geophysical field surveys, processing and interpretation of geological and geophysical materials, received in the process of field surveys, mechanical core drilling, geological, hydrogeological and geoecological survey, engineering geological prospecting, laboratory studies of rock samples, core and fluid analysis, collection and storage of information about geological feature and natural reserves of Turkmenistan as well as maintains work accounts and records focused on study of geological feature of interiors of Turkmenistan.

The rate of growth of oil and gas condensate production of the country in January-March 2016 amounted to 101.5 percent, natural and associated gas - 100.4 percent, while exports of "blue fuel" in foreign countries - 103 percent. The processes are implemented within the framewotk of the "Program of development of the oil and gas industry of Turkmenistan until 2030" Production of a number of petroleum products, including polypropylene, technical lubricants, liquefied gas has increased in comparison to the same period in 2015 increased.

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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

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16 June 2016 13:30 (UTC+04:00)

By Nigar Abbasova

The oil and natural gas production in Kazakhstan decreased in January-May 2016, the Kazakh Statistics Committee said.



Oil and gas condensate production decreased by 4.4 percent - to nearly 32.38 million tons in January-May 2016. The oil production decreased by 2.8 percent, to 27.67 million tons, while gas condensate decreased by 13.4 percent, to 4.71 million tons.



Gas production in the same period decreased by 2.3 percent and amounted to 18.99 billion cubic meters. Associated gas production amounted to 10.63 billion cubic meters, which is 5 percent higher than the rate shown in the same period of 2015.



Kazakhstan's oil and condensate output totaled to 79.46 million tons in 2015, which is by 1.7 percent less than in 2014. The gas production increased by 5.2 percent - to 45.713 billion cubic meters of gas in the country in 2015.

Kazakhstan's economy depends heavily on the oil sector. It accounts for an estimated 20 percent of GDP, 50 percent of fiscal revenues, and 60 percent of exports

The country's proven oil reserve as of early 2016 stood at 30 billion barrels, according to BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Largest oil fields of the country are Tengiz, Karachaganak and Kashagan.

Mining industry

Meanwhile, the volume of raw, semi-finished, powder-form gold production in January-May totaled 27.88 tons the rate is by 19.9 higher than the same period in 2015.

The production of affined gold in the country increased by 3.7 percent and amounted to 13.25 tons.

The production of raw, semi-finished, powder-form silver has decreased by 1.9 percent and totaled 508.92 tons. The production of affined silver amounted to 507.84 tons, the rate is lower by 1.9

The country is reach in terms of the mineral resources such as zinc, copper, titanium, alumina, tungsten, steel, and barite. Kazakhstan ranks second after Russia for the quantity of mineral production among the CIS countries.

Metals and mining industry is vital to the country. The industry contributes about 19 percent of the countrys GDP and 16 percent of exports. The mining industry in Kazakhstan is focused mainly on extraction and export of raw materials and base metals.

Kazakhstans GDP growth slowed from 4.1 percent shown in 2014 to 1.2 percent in 2015 due to falling oil prices and weakened domestic and external demand.

The official exchange rate of the US dollar and euro to Kazakh tenge was set at 338.75 tenge and 380.04 tenge respectively on June 16.

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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

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16 June 2016 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

By Amina Nazarli

Azerbaijan is the land where all paths meet, fully refuting disproving the old saying that, "West is West and East is East, and never the twain shall meet".



Situated on the Great Silk Road, and divided partially between Eastern Europe and Western Asia, Azerbaijan blended the best from both cultures, forming its own unique rich culture, thats why its people are neither totally Eastern, nor totally Western.

Azerbaijan has long been called The Land of Fire because of the phenomena of "burning hillsides" caused by gas seeping through fissures in the earth.

Travelers always remember the romantic Maiden Tower in the center of Baku, dazzling Palace of Sheki Khans from Venetian glass, as well as the cradle of human civilization -- Gobustan with thousands of incredible petroglyphs.

Azerbaijan makes everything possible to use its natural advantages to develop the tourism sector of the country, implementing various projects and programs for attracting tourists to the Land of Fire. These efforts gave fruit and in a short period of time the country was able to raise the quality of its tourism sector.

For the past 10 years, the number of tourists visiting Azerbaijan increased by five times. Culture and Tourism Minister Abulfaz Garayev earlier make this statement speaking at the public debate on the topic "Tourism in Azerbaijan: strategic view".



He said that this figure is a very good indicator for a relatively small country like Azerbaijan, stressing that tourism is one of the priority spheres of non-oil sector of the Azerbaijani economy.



Due to the measures taken over the past few years, the tourism industry of Azerbaijan is experiencing a period of development. Today, tourism, as one of the main areas of the global economy, is rapidly evolving.

After gaining independence, Azerbaijan has implemented large-scale projects for the development of the tourism sector, and many branded hotels have been operating.

Today, 4.5 percent of the total gross domestic product falls for income from tourism. It is no accidentally that Azerbaijan ranked 36 among 141 countries in terms of human resources and labor market in the Index of competitiveness of travel and tourism sector in 2015. Today, Azerbaijan has about 300 tourist companies and more than 570 placements, the minister said.

To attract a large number of international visitors Azerbaijan use the tested practice such as holding popular sporting events. Given the fact that in a couple of days the country will host the European Grand Prix Formula 1 in Baku, foreign tourist flow will increase significantly.



The race route runs through the central part of the capital, so that the viewers will have a unique opportunity to enjoy not only the competition, but also a wonderful appearance of the beautiful capital.

Major sport events usually receive substantial attention in the media. Therefore, local stakeholders often share hopes that the event will promote the destinations in which these events are hosted by stimulating inbound tourism in the longer term after the event. Experts claim that the broadcast of the event will see millions of fans around the world.

--

Amina Nazarli is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli



Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Food processors and their customers have a broad array of audit and inspection protocols at their disposal. The type of audit or inspection they select is usually market driven.

BRC, GFSI, IFS, FSSC 22000 and SQF are internationally recognized food safety audit schemes by GFSI. ISO 22000 is a global food safety standard introduced in 2005 by the International Organization for Standardization. National Sanitation Foundation (NSF), AIB International, Eurofins, Silliker Laboratories and others have developed their own private standards. These groups will also conduct one or more of the GFSI audit schemes.

The audit companies have changed to offer more choices of audit standards, Richard Stier, a consulting food scientist who advises food facilities worldwide about food safety.

British Retail Consortium (BRC) Global Standards is a safety and quality certification program used in 123 countries. Its certifications are issued through a worldwide network of accredited certification bodies. BRC noted that its standards are often cited by leading food retailers as a fundamental requirement in their supply chain relationships.

Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) launched in May 2000 and takes a collaborative approach. Food safety problems were making a lot of headlines in Europe, noted Karil Kochenderfer, GFSIs North American representative. Retailers were particularly concerned about managing food safety for foods that traveled across borders. Every retailer was asking its suppliers for a different audit. The supply chain needed to harmonize around good food safety practices.

Today, most large companies follow standards that comply with GFSI, and outreach is now being made to intermediate and smaller players. The group developed GFSI Global Market, a one-to-three year program that helps such companies without extensive food safety expertise or staff to acquire that knowledge and prepare for certification.

The first year of the GFSI Global Markets program applies the basic checklist, said Kim Jennings-Knoll, business development manager, US Food Division, Eurofins. The second year, the facility graduates to the intermediate level with a checklist of increasing rigor, and the final step is to go for full GFSI certification. By participating in this program, the facility demonstrates to its customers that it is committed to GFSI and that its on its way to achieving this.

Standards written by International Featured Standards (IFS) ensure that companies produce foods, other products or services that comply with customer specifications while continually working on process improvements. Its goal is to ensure comparability and transparency for the consumer throughout the entire supply chain. It was founded in 2003 under the name of International Food Standard and has branched out into other fields since then. Its technical committee sets the standards.

ISO (the groups name is derived from the Greek word isos, meaning equal) is another independent, non-governmental international organization. Through its members, a network of national standards bodies in 162 countries, ISO brings experts together to share knowledge and develop voluntary, consensus-based standards. These voluntary standards encompass more than just food processing, spanning environmental management, social responsibility, information security, medical devices and anti-bribery systems.

An independent, accredited organization, the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) develops standards, performs audits and makes certifications. It was founded in 1944 with a mission to protect and improve global human health. It also provides education and risk management.

Safe Quality Foods (SQF) standards include a quality certification component as well as an ethical sourcing standard. Its standing Technical Advisory Council constantly reviews the independent groups voluntary standards and proposes changes. The group licenses certification bodies to conduct SQF audits for Level 1 (fundamental controls), 2 (HACCP- and ISO-based programs) and 3 (comprehensive mastery) certification.
The What and Why of the Mexican Real Estate Trust

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - Buying property in Mexico may seem a little daunting and different than in your country, but well worth it. The key word is "different," not better, not worse, just different.

The Fideicomiso (Bank Trust) is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of purchasing property in Mexico. The experts at MEXLend, the most experienced mortgage broker in Mexico, explain the What and Why of the Mexican Real Estate Trust.

The reasoning behind the Mexican bank trust for foreign ownership of property in the so-called restricted zones, like so much of life in Mexico, is steeped in tradition. The current Constitution of Mexico was enacted in 1917. It was created in a form to protect all Mexicans from the kinds of foreign invasions they had suffered for centuries. In the spirit of that protection of natural rights, the Constitution forbids the direct ownership of land by any foreigner within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the national borders of Mexico or within 50 kilometers (31) miles of the seashore.





In olden days, the usual way of conquering someone else's territory was to encroach upon it and establish a base. Once you set up camps and then settlements where your citizens or armies actually owned property, you could claim that the land was no longer in the possession of the other country, but belonged to you. So, armies often landed on the coasts of Mexico or crossed its border and began this form of conquest by possession. Mexico lost a great deal of its original land mass, won in the war of independence from Spain, in just such a manner. The current Mexican Constitution was designed to ward off this kind of threat.

Over the years, it has become less and less probable that such an outmoded form of military attack would be used to attempt to conquer another country's territory, especially in North America. Nonetheless, rather than amend the national constitution, the Mexican people, through their government, have designed a system through which foreigners can and do enjoy all the benefits of property ownership in the highly desirable restricted zone... especially along the coasts.

The Mexican Bank Trust is based on a common set of fiduciary principles. Much like a trust in the United States, property owned or controlled by one party is turned over for the benefit of another party, using the stewardship of a trustee  a third party. Your uncle may die, for instance, leaving his estate in trust for the benefit of your widowed aunt for as long as she lives, giving a trustee the responsibility for managing the estate and ensuring that it is used for your aunt's needs and desires.

In Mexico, a Fideicomiso is a bank trust agreement whereby the bank, acting as trustee, manages the ownership of the land and improvements for the use, enjoyment and enrichment of a beneficiary. If you are a foreign citizen and you buy property in the restricted zone in Mexico, you arrange with a bank to be your trustee. The bank actually ensures that the closing is legal and appropriate and takes possession of the real estate for your sole use  until you give them instructions to the contrary.

If you decide to sell the property, you must instruct the bank's trust department in writing to transfer the trust ownership to your buyers. The buyers can either assume your existing trust, or they can initiate a new bank trust with a different bank, if they choose.

Bank trusts are typically written for 50 years, and they are renewable for any number of additional 50-year periods. When you set up your bank trust, you must even specifically name your beneficiary or beneficiaries who will automatically own the property in trust if something happens to you. The trustee, that is your bank trustee, is prohibited by the trust agreement and by Mexican law from transferring ownership of the property, changing the beneficiary rights or from doing anything else concerning the property without your written instructions.

There is an initial fee to set up the trust. It will be included in your estimate of closing costs. There is an annual fee for maintaining the trust, which is typically only a few hundred dollars a year. Under the trust agreement, you maintain and enjoy the right to occupy, rent, repair, expand (within property building codes) and sell the condo or house at your will.

As you make your decision about owning a home or vacation property in Mexico, relax and enjoy the search, knowing that your acquisition will be yours and yours alone, that you will be able to enjoy it as long as you like, that you can sell it whenever you want and that, if you do not sell it, it will legally pass to your named heirs.

Should the bank holding your trust be bought out by another institution or become insolvent, your trust will automatically be assigned to another banking institution. In other words, your trust is not an asset of the Trust Bank; they are merely the stewards of the trust.
This week, the Students Against Destructive Decisions organization (S.A.D.D) held its annual safe driver training conference on the Campus of Johns Hopkins' All Children's Hospital.

Teens learn about dangers of distracted driving

61 teens from 18 Florida counties participated in the four-day course



During the course of four days, 61 Florida teenagers from 18 counties were given the chance to hear from speakers about dangers of distracted driving.

Through a series of workshops and sessions, the students interacted with peers during team building exercises. They were given real-life scenarios to solve and participated in many hands-on sessions involving distracted driving.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association, 10 percent of all drivers, ages 15 to 19, involved in fatal crashes were reported as distracted at the time of the crash. Thats what the conference leaders hope to keep from happening.

Danielle Branciforte, S.A.D.D. Florida Coordinator, along with parents and educators from around the state have come together to make sure that these students take the lessons they learn here back to their Community.

And a part of the agreement of coming here is that when they go home, they have to implement a teen traffic safety campaign in their community or school," Branciforte said.



Aureon Rackley, 12, attended the conference and learned some very valuable lessons.

It had a really big impact on me and it will have an impact on my future," Rackley said.



For more information on S.A.D.D and how to get your child involved, visit their website.


The deadly attack on a gay Orlando nightclub will cast a long shadow over next week's Pride Festival in St. Petersburg.



Extra security will be in place for St. Pete Pride, set for June 23-26



Measures come after attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed



St. Petersburg Police actually had conversations about scaling back the parade but Chief Anthony Holloway rebuffed that idea.



The city held a community forum Thursday on how to keep the public safe during the largest gay pride festival in the state - particularly Saturday's gay pride parade. The meeting and security concerns come in the wake of a gunman opening fire in a crowded nightclub last weekend in Orlando, killing 49 people.



Holloway said initial concerns about parade security prompted the idea of moving the event to the daytime instead of its usual evening start.



However, the chief said with St. Pete police and state and federal officials also helping with security, he and Mayor Rick Kriseman are confident the event will be safe.

"When you think back to why pride was formed, it was formed from violence," Kriseman said. "And I'll be damned if we're going to let violence stop us from going forward and celebrating this."



St. Petersburg police and city officials are finalizing a security plan that will implemented during the festival, which runs June 23-26.



The event's centerpiece, the June 25 parade, will run from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.



St. Pete Pride is the biggest gay pride festival in Florida and one of the largest in the country. About 250,000 people are expected to attend the four-day event.


Investigators into the Pulse nightclub shooting continue to look at the gunman's wife, what she knew and when she knew it.

Authorities said they believe Noor Salman knew about her husband's plot ahead of time, said an official who was briefed on the progress of the case but insisted on anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation.



On Tuesday, media reported that Salman had gone with her husband to buy ammunition and had also driven him to the Pulse nightclub on a previous occasion because he had wanted to survey it.



Orange County State Attorney Jeff Ashton said indirect involvement in the shootings could lead to charges.



"Well having knowledge is not a crime in Florida," Ashton said. "But if you know a crime is going to be committed and you want it to happen and you do something to help it happen, you are responsible just as if you did it yourself. You're called a principle.



"So if there's evidence that somebody out there helped him get this done, knew it was going to happen, that person could be guilty of 49 counts of first degree murder."



Investigators have spoken extensively with her and are working to establish whether she recently accompanied her husband to the nightclub, officials said.



Salman, a 30-year-old California native of Palestinian heritage, was escorted to and from the condo Monday night by authorities.



Salman made a brief visit to their first-floor apartment late Monday, escorted by police and her brother-in-law. Her father-in-law said she came to retrieve clothing. She did not speak with reporters.



Her current whereabouts are not publicly known.


President Barack Obama will visit the families of the victims of the Pulse nightclub terror attack on Thursday.

Vice President Joe Biden is also joining the president on the trip, now four days after a gunman killed 49 people at the club near downtown Orlando.

The president and vice president are expected to arrive at Orlando International Airport at 12:30 p.m. They plan to meet the families of the victims, along with doctors, paramedics and other first responders.



Obama stepped out of Marine One and boarded Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews near Washington just before 11 a.m.

The White House has not released where the president will visit families in Orlando.

Obama said hes promised Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer hell do what he can to help.

"I was in touch with the president and have been in touch with the White House throughout the course of the last several days, Dyer said. He indicated that he would like to come visit and comfort and show support and unity with Orlando and the victims."

After visiting with the families of the victims, Obama and Biden are set to depart at 4:35 p.m. Thursday.



News 13 and MyNews13.com will bring you live coverage, so check back often.


Walt Disney World will be looking at how it warns guests about wildlife at its parks and resorts following the death of a boy attacked by an alligator Tuesday night.



2-year-old boy dragged into water by alligator

Disney to warn guests of wildlife at parks



All Disney beaches remain closed



A source with inside knowledge of the decision confirmed to News 13 on Thursday that signs will be posted warning guests of alligators at Disney parks and resorts. Specifics of when the signs will go up and where havent officially been announced.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday at Disney World's Grand Floridian Resort, 2-year-old Lane Graves was at the edge of the water of the beach on Seven Seas Lagoon when an alligator attacked, according to Jeff Williamson of the Orange County Sheriff's Office. Several bystanders and the boy's father tried to rescue the boy before he was pulled under the water.



Jacquee Wahler, a spokesperson for Walt Disney World, issued this statement Thursday.

"All of our beaches are currently closed, and we are conducting a swift and thorough review of all of our processes and protocols. This includes the number, placement and wording of our signage and warnings."

Also on Thursday, the Orange County Medical Examiner's Office released the boy's cause of death as drowning and traumatic injuries.

Disney World closed all of its beaches Wednesday morning and said the ferries would not be running out of an abundance of caution. Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings says there are signs that say no swimming in the water in that area. But there are no signs that warn of alligators.



Demings thinks the gator drowned the boy.

The Graves family asked Demings to relay that they appreciate all of the prayers, and are thankful to law enforcement.

The Sheriff's Office said they have no record of anything like this happening before at Disney World, and they know of no reports of nuisance gators in the lagoon.

Demings said the family of five was vacationing from Nebraska at the Grand Floridian. They were relaxing on the beach area, wading in the water on the edge of Seven Seas Lagoon.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has euthanized six gators found in the body of water. Officials have not said whether one of those gators is responsible for taking the young child. They used sonar and alligator traps in their search efforts.



Wiley said it's very rare for alligators to attack people. According to a FWC statistics report, nine people have been attacked by alligators since 2015. And between 1948 to April 2016, a total of 383 attacks have been recorded by the FWC.



Demings said Disney is cooperating with the operation. FWC said that Disney has a wildlife management system in place, and the agency is called when gators are found on property.

George A. Kalogridis, president of the Walt Disney World Resort, released this statement Wednesday:



"There are no words to convey the profound sorrow we feel for the family and their unimaginable loss. We are devastated and heartbroken by this tragic accident and are doing what we can to help the family during this difficult time. On behalf of everyone at Disney, we offer our deepest sympathies."

Robert Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, released a statement Wednesday as well:

As a parent and a grandparent, my heart goes out to the Graves family during this time of devastating loss. My thoughts and prayers are with them, and I know everyone at Disney joins me in offering our deepest sympathies.



One of The Grand Floridian's pool areas backs up to a beach and the Seven Seas Lagoon. (Christian Menard, via Twitter)



Crime scene tape is up at Grand Floridian Resort and Spa, where a toddler was dragged into the water by a gator. (Shawn Powers, via Twitter)



Spotlights are brought in to assist with the search for a child dragged by a gator at Grand Floridian Resort. (Katherine Popp, via Twitter)
Colleen Deacon has a 33-point lead over her closest competitor in the 24th Congressional District's Democratic primary, according to a new poll released Thursday by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Half of the 485 likely voters surveyed said they will vote for Deacon, D-Syracuse, in the June 28 primary. Seventeen percent said they'll support Steve Williams, an attorney from Baldwinsville.

Eric Kingson, a Manlius Democrat, received 8 percent of the vote in the poll.

A DCCC memo said Deacon leads Williams and Kingson by 30 points and 40 points, respectively, among voters in Onondaga County  the district's largest county. She has a commanding lead among women voters  41 points over Williams and 50 points over Kingson.

With seniors, Deacon leads Williams and Kingson by 35 points and 41 points, respectively.

The DCCC also touted Deacon's favorability. She is viewed favorably by 52 percent of primary voters and 57 percent of women surveyed.

Among Cayuga County Democratic voters, Deacon has a 62 percent favorable rating.

The poll, which was conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, was released less than two weeks before the primary.

The DCCC has previously said it believes Deacon is the best candidate to challenge U.S. Rep. John Katko, a freshman Republican, in the 24th Congressional District race.

Deacon has been added to the DCCC's Red to Blue program  a sign Democrats view the race as a top target.

She's also received other endorsements throughout the campaign. U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer visited central New York last week to show their support for Deacon's campaign.
Three-Day Workshop Shows What's Behind the Workings of the Oregon Coast

Published 06/15/2016 at 8:11 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Depoe Bay, Oregon)  If you look at the Oregon coast and wonder why it looks that way or how its ecosystem works, a workshop is coming up that will feed your brain. This years CoastWatch Shoreline Science Workshop will be held July 8-10 at the Depoe Bay Community Hall (220 S.E. Bay Street). Three full days of instruction cover rocky shore, beach and estuarine habitats in depth, and touch on forests, the nearshore ocean, marine mammals, tides and oceanography, and many other topics.



The workshop will be led by ecologist Stewart Schultz, author of The Northwest Coast: A Natural History. Matters of concern such as marine debris and invasive species will also be discussed. Each session will include field trips, indoor presentations and laboratory experiences (with some variation, depending on the weather).

Online registration is open: https://oregonshores.givezooks.com/events/2016-coastwatch-shoreline-science-workshop.

Stewart Schultz wide-ranging experience in studying the Oregon coast makes him a very knowledgeable guide to the shoreline environment. An Oregonian who grew up playing on the shore near Gearhart, he went to Reed College and obtained his doctorate in botany from the University of British Columbia. He worked on the Oregon coast for the Nature Conservancy, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, gaining extensive field experience, before pursuing an academic career as a professor at the University of Miami, and now the University of Zadar in Croatia.

During the academic year he studies marine ecology, as well as his specialty of plant evolution and genetics, but every summer he returns to the Oregon coast to teach shoreline science.

Fawn Custer, CoastWatchs volunteer coordinator and herself an experienced marine educator, will assist Schultz and introduce participants to a variety of opportunities to participate in citizen science. Teachers and other professionals can obtain professional development units by attending the workshop.

CoastWatch is the volunteer program of the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition, through which participants adopt one-mile segments of shoreline and monitor them for natural changes and human impacts. These annual workshops were originally developed as intensive training sessions for CoastWatch volunteers, but they are also open to members of the general public.

If you would like to reserve a place, but dont wish to do so online, contact Fawn Custer at (541) 270-0027, [email protected] She can hold a place for you and arrange with you to pay the workshop fee by check.

CoastWatch has offered three such workshops every summer for many years. Schedule constraints limited the group to the one workshop this year, but the plan is to resume holding three next year.

For more information about the workshop or CoastWatch, go to the website, http://oregonshores.org/coastwatch.php5. Depoe Bay Lodgings / Hotels for this event - Where to eat - Map and Virtual Tour

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UPDATED: Summer Solstice Includes a Moon Rarity for Portland, Oregon, the Coast

Published 06/15/2016 at 8:51 PM PDT - Updated 06/15/2016 at 9:01 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Portland, Oregon)  It's not only the longest day of the year, but it's the official start of summer. Around Oregon  including the coast and Portland  the official turn into summer happens at 3:34 p.m. on June 20. (Photo: sunset in Yachats).

This is the summer solstice, according to OMSI's Jim Todd, when the Earth is tilted so that the north pole is at its closest point to the sun. Todd added another fun science fact: the Earth will be at its farthest distance from the sun, called aphelion, on July 5.

On top of it all, there's a rare combination of events on the Summer Solstice day: the Full Moon appears on the same night as the June Solstice. A full moon only occurs on the same night as a solstice about once every 15 years. The last time this occurred was in 1986 and 1948.

Todd said because of the summer solstice there will be more minutes of sunlight in the northern hemisphere than there are at any other time of the year.

Todd said the word solstice is derived from the Latin sol-stitium, for sun-standing.

The summer solstice is the time of the year when the sun stops its northern climb and stands briefly before turning back toward the equator, he said. As seen from Portland, the sun will reach its highest northern point in the sky at 67.54 degrees from the horizon on June 20 and 21 at approximately 1:12 p.m. From March 21 until September 24, there are more hours of daylight than darkness. After June 21, the days will gradually grow shorter until December 21, the winter solstice.

A curious fact for those on the Oregon coast that summer solstice day: the sun actually goes down a few minutes later there than in Portland. Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff measured the difference at seven minutes. Since sundown times are listed with a flat horizon in mind, places like Portland will see the actual sunset a few minutes earlier than is listed in the almanacs because of high spots like the west hills or the coast range.

On the beaches, it's even later than that, however.

Not everybody is celebrating, however. Todd said that far to the south of Oregon, across the equator, winter has arrived. For people in the southern hemisphere, June 20th, will be the shortest day of the year. It also means the beginning of their winter.

With that lunar rarity happening on the same night, there's more to see after dark.

Todd said that full moon will reach its highest point this month, due south. Despite being at its highest in the sky, viewers in Portland (1:06 a.m. on June 20 or 1:57 a.m. on June 21) may struggle to see it, as it is very low 25 degrees in the sky. In fact the full moon nearest the summer solstice (June 20 or 21) is the lowest full moon of the year.

Plus, notice the champagne color as it rises from the east, Todd said.

The reason for this, Todd said, is that during the summer months, the moon tends to sit low on the horizon. This makes it farther away from you than when it's directly overhead, forcing the light to travel through more atmosphere. This breaks down the color bands within the light, causing them to bend and get tossed out  mainly the blues, greens and purples. Todd said the strong light waves that do make it are red, yellow and orange, the colors with the longest wavelengths.

It gets even more intriguing, in the astronomical sense. Todd said that since full moons occur when the moon is directly opposite the sun, you can imagine the two as sitting on either sides of a celestial see-saw: on the day when the sun is highest in the middle of the day (in summer), the moon is at its lowest high point at midnight; and on the day when the sun is at its lowest high point in the middle of the day (in winter), the moon is at its highest high point at midnight. The highest for December is when the moon will be more than 68 degrees above the southern horizon. Compare this to June when the moon barely grazes 25 degrees above the southern horizon. Oregon Coast Lodgings for this event - Where to eat - Maps - Virtual Tours





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Ashlea Gutierrez, winner of the recent Miss Dallas USA pageant and a 2009 graduate of West Brook High School, will appear Saturday for meet-and-greets at two Beaumont restaurants.

She will be at Casa Tapatia, 145 Interstate 10 Frontage Road, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen, 4040 Interstate 10 South, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the foyer, said her mother, Sheree Gutierrez.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' endorsement could be a game-changer for Eric Kingson's congressional campaign.

Kingson, D-Manlius, said Thursday he received more than $30,000 in the first 28 hours after Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, endorsed him last week.

Last week, Kingson's campaign received roughly 8,000 donations, most of which came as a result of Sanders' endorsement.

The influx of money allowed Kingson to make investments he couldn't make before. A television ad he released last week was running only on cable stations in central New York. With the additional funding, he's able to air the ad on broadcast outlets in the region.

"It allows us to do a number of things that you need to do in a campaign, ideally," Kingson said in a phone interview. "We still have our grassroots, but we have lots of other things going, too."

The donations haven't stopped flowing in. Kingson said they're still seeing the benefits of Sanders' endorsement ahead of the Democratic primary on June 28.

Kingson is running against two other Democrats  Colleen Deacon and Steve Williams  for the party's nomination to challenge U.S. Rep. John Katko, a Republican seeking his second term in Congress.

"I'm not a greedy person, but it could not have come at a better time," Kingson said.

Deacon is backed by prominent Democrats, including U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner and Auburn Mayor Michael Quill.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House Democrats' campaign arm, considers Deacon the best Democrat to challenge Katko, R-Camillus, in the 24th Congressional District race.

Williams doesn't have the same level of establishment backing, but he has support among some union members and had enough resources to air two television ads in the Syracuse media market.

And then Sanders endorsed Kingson. Is that enough to shift the direction of the race? The answer will come on June 28.

"I believed we could win  that we have a good volunteer base and other things. I think that really shifted the race significantly," Kingson said of Sanders' endorsement. "Who knows what will happen? But I think we're in a very good position."
A Beaumont man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in a 2008 hit and run accident that took another man's life.

John William Alexander pleaded guilty to failure to stop and render aid and felony driving while intoxicated under a plea agreement that capped both offenses at 10 years.

Alexander was indicted in 2008 on those charges in connection with the death of 20-year-old Michael Gatlin. Gatlin was walking along Texas 105 to a store near his house on Jan. 15, 2008, when Alexander hit him and drove away leaving him in the roadway.

Judge Bob Wortham sentenced Alexander to 10 years on each case, to run concurrently.

Emotional witness impact statements from Gatlin's mother and sister followed sentencing.

Claudia Lincoln was getting ready for bed that night when she heard a loud boom. She got dressed and got in her car to go find out what had happened and found her son's lifeless body in the road.

She said she forgave Alexander, although he has never apologized to her or any of her family.

Alexander appeared to shirk away from Lincoln and her daughter, Lola Gatlin, as they spoke about the pain of losing their loved one.

His lawyer, James Makin, said Alexander did feel remorse, but he had instructed him not to contact the family while the charges were still pending.

Alexander had two previous DWI convictions in 1990 and 1993, and faces another pending misdemeanor failure to stop and render aid in an incident while he was free on bond in the case of Gatlin's death.
A Beaumont man who used a BB gun to rob a West End bank last November was sentenced Thursday to six years and four months in federal prison.

James Richard Newton, 47, pleaded guilty in January to robbing the Third Coast Bank at Dowlen and Phelan Nov. 10, court records show.
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The Southern Baptist Convention's disavowal Tuesday of the Confederate battle flag further distanced the denomination from racial insensitivities that have dogged it, but the potential impact on local displays of the flag is unclear, experts said.

Two Southern Baptist pastors in Southeast Texas, an area where the banner can be seen on homes, cars and a school district's crest, said they welcomed the non-binding resolution, with one calling the flag "needlessly offensive."

"There is nothing gained for the gospel by holding on to things like the Confederate flag," said Jordan Rogers, pastor at Hillcrest Baptist Church in Nederland. "There are many things in the past and even in the present that Christians have latched themselves to that are needlessly offensive."

Delegates to the annual SBC convention adopted the resolution to repudiate the flag, acknowledging that it offends "millions of people" and calling on Christians to stop displaying it.

The shift came 21 years after SBC delegates apologized for once advocating for the right to own slaves, opposing civil rights for black people and generally "condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism."

"I think the Southern Baptist Convention in a positive way is trying to make amends for a continued legacy of their historical involvement in both slavery and segregation," said Chad Seales, an assistant professor of American religious history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Because Southern Baptist churches maintain more local control than other denominations, the resolution is not a mandate facing dozens of Southern Baptist churches interspersed throughout the region, said John Storey, a retired history professor at Lamar University who studies American religious history.

"Upon reasonable people, thinking people, (the resolution) will give them reason to pause and consider the implications of that particular symbol," Storey said, adding that it's hard to argue what the flag symbolizes. "The flag cannot help but be divisive, cannot help but be offensive."

The SBC resolution recognizes "that the Confederate battle flag is used by some and perceived by many as a symbol of hatred, bigotry, and racism, offending millions of people," and it urges Christians "to discontinue the display" of the flag.

Roger Hoogterp, pastor of Central Baptist Church in Evadale, supported the resolution as a means to "accommodate and understand as many people as possible."

Hoogterp did not offer an opinion on the symbol's prevalence in the town's school district, which features the flag on its high school's walls and as the centerpiece of its district crest.

"As long as it's not a problem to the students and all ethnicities in the area, I think it's not necessary to address it at this point," Hoogterp said.

Seales said racism was long the clear distinction of SBC from churches with similar theology and part of the denomination's focus on "cultural authority." A second pillar, particularly recently, has been opposition to civil rights for the LGBT community, he said.

Rogers, who said same-sex marriage is "a doctrine of man," said worshippers shouldn't apologize for opposing what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled is a civil right.

"There are some things that is right to offend people over," Rogers said. "We don't endorse anything that the Bible condemns. We shouldn't be apologetic about that."

EBesson@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/EricBesson_news
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Hardin County attorney Rebecca Walton has asked the attorney general to rule on whether Lumberton Police Chief Danny Sullins can simultaneously serve as police chief and as constable, a position he's running unopposed for in the November general election.

The request for a ruling, dated May 23 and received by the AG's office Wednesday, argues that a distinction exists between holding public office and being a public employee.

In support of Sullins' position, Walton has cited a 1955 Texas Supreme Court ruling, Aldine Independent School District v. Standley, which states that a public officer is distinguished from an employee if his or her duties are "largely independent of the control of others."

As Lumberton police chief, Sullins answers to the city council and should be considered a public employee, according to Walton's letter.

In the constable role, Sullins for the most part would operate independently, the letter states.

Sullins on Wednesday said he has always been interested in running for constable and threw his name in the hat when Greg Smith decided not to seek re-election.

The only local municipality with an elected police chief or city marshal is Groves, where Sullins said it would not be legal to hold two elected positions.

Sullins won the Precinct 5 constable position with 54 percent of the vote in the March primary election.

His opponents questioned during the campaign whether Sullins, a self-described "workaholic," could fully commit his time to the constable's office.

"I won outright without even needing a runoff so I think the voters spoke pretty strong," Sullins said.

Sullins, who still works weekend off-duty jobs as the Lumberton police chief, would join a list of Hardin County constables with other employment.

Precinct 2 Constable Ben Hawthorne is also a deputy at the sheriff's office.

Red Cooper, the Precinct 1 Constable, is the full-time bailiff in the 356th District Court.

Precinct 6 Constable Tim Moody is an investigator for Walton's office.

Greg Smith, who Sullins is replacing, is Sullins' nurse practitioner.

The constable job, which pays about $33,000 a year with a car allowance, mostly involves serving civil papers in the late afternoon and evenings, Sullins said.

Walton was not available for comment Wednesday.

BScott@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/BrandonKScott
The House of Representatives once again showed its support for U.S. Rep. John Katko's bill to bolster the Department of Homeland Security's counterterrorism programs. The question is whether the Senate will consider the legislation.

Katko's measure, the Counterterrorism Advisory Board Act, was included in the Countering Terrorist Radicalization Act approved by the House Thursday. The package of three bills passed by a 402-15 vote.

The legislation's passage came four days after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at an Orlando gay nightclub. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.

"Our nation has experienced a tragedy," Katko, R-Camillus, said in a statement. "As we continue to mourn the victims of Sunday's horrific terrorist attack in Orlando, it is critical that we take action to counter violent extremism and to strengthen our counterterrorism tools here at home."

House leaders opted to combine Katko's bill with two others in hopes of securing quick passage in the Senate.

The bill Katko sponsored, which would create a counterterrorism advisory board within the Department of Homeland Security, was already approved by the House in May. But the Senate hasn't acted on the legislation and two other counterterrorism bills included in the Countering Terrorist Radicalization Act.

Katko, who chairs the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, said the idea for his bill came out of his work with the Task Force on Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel. He chaired the panel, which released a report in September that contained dozens of key findings and recommendations.

Under Katko's legislation, the Homeland Security secretary would be required to name a counterterrorism advisory board coordinator. The bill also would require the board to provide guidance to the secretary on issuing terrorism alerts.

Whether consolidating Katko's bill with the other measures will result in Senate passage remains to be seen. But Katko is hopeful the other house will consider the legislation.

"It is time for the Senate to take action on this important, bipartisan package of bills so that these measures reach the president's desk," he said.
No one in Southeast Texas had to come to the special Mass celebrated on Monday at St. Anthony Cathedral Basilica or Tuesday's gathering at the Event Centre in Beaumont. It wouldn't change the tragedy in Orlando or directly help the survivors or those who lost a loved one. Yet they came anyway, in fairly large numbers, to pray, to mourn, to support one another. And similar somber gatherings were held all over America this week.

Even though all these vigils and memorials had no direct connection to Orlando, they still had a purpose. By rejecting hatred and promoting tolerance, they helped a nation heal and, maybe, just maybe, did something to prevent a similar tragedy in the future in some other city.
The American Medical Association is changing the Quadruple Aim to include a fourth measure that accounts for physician work-life balance, according to Medscape.

Here are four things to know:

1. After discovering physician and staff burnout were jeopardizing the Triple Aim, the AMA implemented a new policy, in which CMS will use the quadruple aim when assessing accountable care organizations and other practices.

2. Opponents of the new policy say the AMA is not prioritizing, and should first and foremost focus on the patient. A Boston physician argued, "This is not what the AMA should be standing up and saying publicly. I don't think we should be messing with the Triple Aim."

3. However, the American Academy of Family Physicians backed the AMA's decision, especially due to burnout's prevalence amongst healthcare leaders.

4. This week, the AMA also agreed to lobby third-party payers to cover eating disorders, as well as legislation banning pharmacy benefit managers and payers from implementing minimal periods before patients with specific conditions renew prescriptions for medications including solutions, gels, creams and nasal sprays.

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Here are seven updates:

ASCs reduce outpatient procedure costs by $38B per year compared to HOPDs

ASCs can reduce outpatient surgery's cost by more than $38 billion dollars annually compared to hospital outpatient departments. ASCs can reduce a patient's out-of-pocket costs by more than $5 billion each year through lower deductibles and coinsurance payments.

Valeant Pharmaceuticals' Salix to pay $54M for alleged illegal kickbacks

Valeant Pharmaceuticals is paying $54 million to settle kickback charges against its Salix unit. Valeant's Salix unit, focused on licensing, developing and marketing gastroenterology disorder treatment products, allegedly paid illegal kickbacks to physicians for prescribing seven of its products. As per the settlement, Salix will pay $46.53 million to the United States and $7.47 million to various states.

AMA asserts gun violence is a 'public health crisis'

The American Medical Association voted to declare gun violence "a public health crisis," following our nation's deadliest mass shooting in Orlando, Fla. During the early hours of June 12, 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and injured another 53 people at a nightclub. AMA's decision marks the first time the organization labeled gun violence a public health crisis.

North Carolina senator brings state CON law back into the spotlight

Sen. Ralph Hise, R-McDowell, is working to repeal the state's certificate of need law by next year during a Senate Health committee meeting. Working to revoke the CON legislation, the senator amended House Bill 161 so the legislation features language revoking the CON legislation starting January 2017.

5 top-paying states for anesthesiologists

Insider Monkey published a list of the top-paying states for anesthesiologists, which includes Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Kansas. Anesthesiologists in Iowa, on average, make $307,663.

Maryland co-op sues government over $22M+ potential fees

Evergreen Health Cooperative, a Maryland co-op, filed a lawsuit against the federal government to avoid more than $22 million in fees. Evergreen Health is the first co-op to file a lawsuit against the federal government, and claims the Affordable Care Act's risk adjustment program is "dangerously flawed."

Aetna to partially fund Humana deal with $3.2B bond

Aetna reported the payer plans to take out a $3.2 billion bond to help fund its proposed $37 billion Humana acquisition. Despite many Aetna and Humana stockholders and shareholders approving the merger, some Humana stockholders filed three class action complaints opposing the merger. The stockholders filed two suits in the Circuit Court of Jefferson County (Ky.) and one in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware.

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A Louisiana House tax committee has approved a measure that would produce about $113 million that could be used, in part, to pay for the hospital funding shortfall, The Times-Picayune reports.

The measure, House Bill 38, was introduced by Louisiana House Rep. Neil Abramson (D-New Orleans). Ultimately, the legislation would limit a tax break that goes to about a quarter of taxpayers who itemize deductions on their federal income taxes, according to the report.

But the report notes the bill passed only after it was amended to keep that income tax break in place, but delay people's ability to take advantage of it until two years from now.

The full House is slated to take up the measure Thursday, and it will likely face a close vote since many Republicans oppose it, according to The Advocate.

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Denver-based Envision Healthcare Holdings and Nashville, Tenn.-based AmSurg Corp. have agreed to merge, creating a healthcare services company worth $10 billion.

AmSurg provides physician outsourcing services to hospitals and healthcare organizations and operates more than 200 ambulatory surgical centers. Envision has a physician-staffing unit and provides medical transportation services.

Here are seven things to know about the transaction.

1. The all-stock deal has a fixed exchange ratio of 0.334 AmSurg shares per Envision share.

2. Envision shareholders will own about 53 percent of the combined company named Envision Healthcare Corp. AmSurg will own the remaining 47 percent.

3. The new company will have dual headquarters in Nashville and Greenwood Village, Colo.

4. Envision and AmSurg had revenue of more than $8.5 billion in the 12 months ended in March. Through cost savings and other benefits, the companies said they expect the combination to result in $100 million of synergies within three years.

5. Upon closing of the transaction, William A. Sanger will become executive chairman of the combined company. He currently serves as president, CEO and chairman of the board of Envision.

6. Christopher A. Holden will serve as president and CEO of the combined company, the same positions he holds at AmSurg.

7. Mr. Sanger expressed excitement about the deal. "Our two organizations complement each other in a way few others could, and this merger will accelerate our collective ability to positively impact healthcare delivery across the country," he said.

Mr. Holden added, "This merger will create a national platform with a highly differentiated suite of solutions. It will significantly increase our ability to empower physicians and expand our client relationships."

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St. Joseph Health  which includes Santa Rosa (Calif.) Memorial Hospital and Petaluma (Calif.) Valley Hospital  and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco have signed a joint venture agreement to enhance and expand neonatal and pediatric services.

Through the joint venture, UCSF Health will continue to provide consultative services to women with high risk pregnancies at the UCSF Prenatal Diagnostic Center in Santa Rosa.

"St. Joseph Health and UCSF have enjoyed a longstanding relationship in meeting the healthcare needs of residents of Sonoma County," Stephen Wilson, MD, PhD, CMO of UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco, said in a prepared statement. "We respect the mission and vision of St. Joseph Health and we are excited to be entering into this deeper partnership to better the health of families in Sonoma County."

UCSF has provided medical education and specialty physician services to the Sonoma County community, many of these programs in collaboration with St. Joseph Health, according to a news release. For the past 16 years, Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital has had an agreement with UCSF to operate its UCSF intensive care nursery.

UCSF outpatient pediatric specialty practices will also partner with Annadel Medical Group pediatricians to expand the availability of UCSF subspecialty care available at a clinic located in one of Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital's facilities, officials said. Services available include hematology, endocrinology and diabetes, gastroenterology, cardiology, neurology, organ transplantation support and nephrology. Additionally, St. Joseph Health will expand obstetrical care at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

Through the joint venture, St. Joseph Health, Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals will also work together on:

Developing telehealth consult services

Providing opportunities for UCSF medical students and residents to participate in clinical rotations at St. Joseph Health facilities including Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and Petaluma Valley Hospital.

Creating educational programs for physicians, nurses and support staff

Continuing to grow the obstetrical, neonatal and pediatric service lines through program development.

"The most profound impact of this affiliation on the community will be greater access to specialty coverage," Todd Salnas, president of St. Joseph Health, Sonoma County, said in a prepared statement. "Utilizing telemedicine technology, this will benefit not only residents in Sonoma County but also residents in Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte and Napa counties by integrating UCSF's many strengths, resources and expertise in perinatal and pediatric care with the clinical expertise already available at our St. Joseph Health facilities."

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From the Federal Trade Commission losing its bid to block a merger between two Chicagoland health systems to a former California senator admitting he accepted bribes from a corrupt hospital executive, here are the latest healthcare industry lawsuits and settlements making headlines.

1. FTC can't block Advocate-NorthShore merger, judge rules

On Tuesday, an Illinois federal judge denied the Federal Trade Commission's request to block the merger of Downers Grove, Ill.-based Advocate Health Care and Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem. The commission is appealing the decision.

2. Healthcare CEO gets 10 years for fraud that led to 2 patient deaths

The CEO and co-owner of a Maryland diagnostics company has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for charges related to healthcare fraud resulting in the deaths of patients.

3. Washington hospital CEO ordered to admit patient or go to jail

A Pierce County Superior Court Commissioner ordered the new CEO of Lakewood, Wash.-based Western State Hospital to either admit a man to the psychiatric hospital or report to jail. A judge subsequently granted the Washington Department of Social and Health Services request to issue a stay on the ruling, keeping the CEO out of jail at least through June 21.

4. CNO claims hospital forced her out after she raised concerns about EMR

A former nursing executive at Sonoma West Medical Center in Sebastopol, Calif., filed a lawsuit against the hospital, alleging she was fired after raising concerns the EMR was a threat to patient safety.

5. Former Calif. senator admits accepting bribes from ex-hospital CEO

Ron Calderon, a former California senator, pleaded guilty to a federal corruption charge, admitting he accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from a corrupt hospital executive and FBI agents.

6. One charge against Planned Parenthood undercover filmmaker dropped

A misdemeanor charge against David Daleiden  the 27-year-old responsible for the videos that attempted to frame Planned Parenthood for illegally selling fetal tissue  was dismissed by a judge in Texas.

7. Former owner of HIV/AIDS clinics heads to prison for $12M fraud

Jorge Juvier, a former owner and operator of HIV/AIDS clinics in New York City, was sentenced to 63 months in prison for his role in a $12 million Medicare fraud scheme.

8. Court dismisses American Well's patent infringement suit against Teladoc

A Massachusetts federal court dismissed a lawsuit telemedicine provider American Well filed against Teladoc, another telemedicine provider, alleging Teladoc infringed upon intellectual property.

9. Epic asks court to reduce $940M awarded in Tata case

Epic Systems asked a federal court to reduce the $940 million it was awarded in damages against an Indian consultancy firm, citing state laws that put a cap on the amount of punitive damages permissible.

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Board members, the chief compliance officer and the interim CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Broward Health appeared to be at odds Wednesday over whether an anonymous complaint the board received May 6 should be handled internally or by someone outside of the district, according to the Sun-Sentinel.

The complaint accused General Counsel Lynn Barrett of deception and the law firm Baker Donelson of overstepping its authority and lacking independence and experience, according to the report.

Broward Health hired Baker Donelson to monitor compliance after the health system paid the U.S. Justice Department $69.5 million in September to settle allegations of using a secret compensation system to reward physicians for patient referrals, according to the report. Since then, the system's CEO, Nabil El Sanadi, MD, committed suicide and it was revealed that the organization was under state and federal investigations.

Laura Ellis, senior counsel at the HHS Office of Inspector General, said in a letter sent Monday that multiple people with ties to Broward Health have raised concerns about J. Scott Newton, an attorney with Baker Donelson who is leading the review team at Broward, according to the report. However, she said she believes Mr. Newton is within his bounds in his request for the health system's complete disclosure logs, and is both qualified and independent.

The complaint also accused Ms. Barrett of acting improperly by requesting the complaints made by Broward Health employees be turned over to Baker Donelson immediately.

The allegations against Ms. Barrett were not discussed Wednesday, nor were they mentioned in Ms. Ellis' letter, according to the report.
A former employee of the Aspen (Colo.) Valley Hospital District is suing the hospital, alleging the organization breached his right to privacy when it disclosed he was HIV positive, according to the Denver Post.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver Tuesday on behalf of a man identified only as John Doe, indicated he was an employee and patient at the hospital. According to court documents, the lawsuit names the hospital and five employees, including the privacy officer, as defendants.

The plaintiff is seeking an apology, compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney fees from the hospital, according to the report. The lawsuit also seeks a policy change at the hospital to prevent further privacy breaches.

The lawsuit says the defendants first breached John Doe's HIV status in 2012 "as a piece of conversational gossip over drinks to human resources co-worker Marlene Saleeby in flagrant violation" of the hospital privacy rule imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1993, according to the report.

"All patients of Aspen Valley Hospital should be very alarmed by this revelation. When a hospital's so-called 'privacy officer' feels free to disclose a patient's most private and sensitive health information as cocktail-hour gossip, no Aspen Valley Hospital patient can assume that their medical privacy will be respected," the plaintiff's attorney, Mari Newman, said in a statement.

After learning of the breach, he filed a complaint, but it was denied after a "sham" investigation, according to the report. He then filed a complaint with HHS in June 2014. Two weeks later, the hospital disciplined John Doe for a "retaliatory act," then demoted him and lowered his pay after he had to take a four-week medical leave. After he filed a third complaint against the hospital, he was fired.

John Doe worked in the hospital's IT department for 11 years before he was fired.
MORAVIA  A Moravia woman with a history of drug use pleaded guilty to burglary Thursday in Cayuga County criminal court.

Heather Young, of 5765 Sayles Corners Road, admitted to knowingly and unlawfully entering a neighbor's residence last summer to commit larceny. The 30-year-old said she broke into the home around 12:30 a.m. July 12, 2015, and stole nearly 200 Vicodin pills.

"I had a drug problem and I was not feeling well," Young said, noting she was going through withdrawal. "I knew (my neighbor) had Vicodin and I went in and took it."

Neither the Cayuga County District Attorney's Office nor Judge Thomas Leone made any promises regarding sentencing in exchange for Thursday's plea, but Leone indicated Young had completed treatment for her addiction and seemed to be "doing well."

"Everything is on the table here," Leone said. "If you continue to do well, I'm in your corner. If you slip up, you're looking at jail or prison."

Young faces up to seven years in prison for third-degree burglary when she is sentenced Sept. 8.

Also in court:

 An Auburn man could face up to 12 years in prison for selling cocaine last July.

Burrell Wingate, 25, was charged with two counts of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and two counts of criminal possession of a narcotic on July 16 and July 17, 2015.

Wingate, of 3 Pine Street, pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance in exchange for three years in prison and two years post-release supervision. However, according to Leone, Wingate could receive a maximum of 12 years in prison as a second felony offender.

The defendant was convicted of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and sentenced to two years in prison and two years post-release supervision in January 2013.

Wingate will be back in court for sentencing Aug. 25.

 Two registered sex offenders in Cayuga County were sentenced in separate cases Thursday for violating their probation.

First, 38-year-old Frederick Springer, of 1 Near Place in Auburn, was sentenced to one to three years in prison for failing to report a change of address within 10 days.

According to Cayuga County District Attorney Jon Budelmann, Springer has an extensive history of sexual abuse dating back to the 1990s, including a second-degree sodomy conviction from 2002.

Springer was recently sentenced to 37 months in federal prison for violating the terms and conditions of lifetime probation supervision. Leone said this sentence will run consecutively to Springer's federal sentence.

Later, a Locke man convicted of attempted rape in 2015 admitted he failed to register a Facebook account within 10 days.

Joseph Barney, 36, of 953 Main Street, will spend one year in Cayuga County Jail for violating his probation. He was also sentenced to five years probation.

 An Auburn man is headed to prison after being convicted of introducing prison contraband in the Town of Sennett.

Jeffrey Shields was sentenced to one to three years in prison for violating his probation.

The 23-year-old was previously convicted of second-degree attempted assault for driving recklessly and injuring a man during a drug deal in 2014. Shields had been sentenced to five years probation, which Leone revoked Thursday.
The Federal Trade Commission is appealing a federal judge's decision that denied its request to block the merger of Downers Grove, Ill.-based Advocate Health Care and Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem.

In 2014, Advocate and NorthShore unveiled plans to come together and create a new health system called Advocate NorthShore Health Partners, which would include 16 hospitals with more than 4,000 hospital beds, employ more than 45,000 workers and serve more than 3 million patients annually. After a 15-month review, the FTC opposed the merger in December.

Both sides presented testimony in April over whether the FTC's request for a preliminary injunction to halt the transaction should be granted. The FTC argued the merger would have anti-competitive effects. However, Advocate and NorthShore claim the merger will not raise healthcare prices for consumers or reduce health insurers' bargaining power.

In a brief order issued Tuesday, U.S. Northern District Court Judge Jorge Alonso said the government did not provide enough evidence that the partnership would harm competition in the region. The judge's full opinion remains under seal, but a version will be made available to the public after the health systems and the FTC meet about redacting information from the full opinion.

The FTC filed a notice of appeal Wednesday in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune.

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The CEO and co-owner of a Maryland diagnostics company has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for charges related to healthcare fraud resulting in the deaths of patients, according to the Department of Justice.

In February, a federal jury convicted 67-year-old Rafael Chikvashvili, PhD, of two counts of healthcare fraud that resulted in death. Dr. Chikvashvili was the co-owner and CEO of Owings Mills, Md.-based alpha Diagnostics, which was a portable diagnostic services providers, principally of X-rays.

According to evidence presented at trial, Dr. Chikvashvili was involved in a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid. He and others allegedly conspired to create false radiology, ultrasound and cardiologic interpretation reports. He also allegedly submitted insurance claims for medical examination interpretations that were never completed by licensed physicians, according to the DOJ.

Dr. Chikvashvili allegedly instructed his nonphysician employees to interpret X-rays, ultrasounds and cardiologic examinations, which, according to testimony provided at trial, ultimately resulted in two patient deaths due to the employees' incompetence to accurately diagnose them.

In one case, an Alpha employee who was not a physician reviewed X-ray images and failed to detect congestive heart failure. As a result, the patient was not transferred to an acute care facility and died four days later. In the second case, an Alpha employee misread a patient's pre-operation X-ray and failed to detect congestive heart failure, which put the patient at an increased risk of bleeding during and after an upcoming elective surgery. Due to the misinterpretation, the patient was cleared for surgery, experienced significant bleeding, and died six days after her chest X-ray was misread.

Dr. Chikvashvili and his co-conspirators allegedly defrauded Medicare and Medicaid of more than $6 million through the scheme, which occurred from 1997 through 2013, according to the DOJ.

In addition to healthcare fraud, Dr. Chikvashvili was also found guilty of wire fraud, false statements and aggravated identity theft.

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Police arrested a man Wednesday after he reportedly made threats at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Denton, according to a police report.

The 28-year-old man, identified as Peshwaz Azad Waise, walked into the Center for Women at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital and proceeded to threaten those inside, "insisting they take the [Quran] from him," and telling "them to give the Quran to the chaplain or chapel 'or die,'" the report stated. Mr. Waise left the hospital before police arrived.

The day before he entered the hospital, Mr. Waise stopped Denton police while they were driving to another call and began "speaking irrationally," police said. Since he did not act illegally, they resumed their duties.

Then on Wednesday morning, the University of North Texas Police responded to a reported disturbance at an IHOP on campus. Police found Mr. Waise again "speaking irrationally," and issued him a notice for trespassing, the report stated. He then proceeded to go to the hospital.

After he left the women's center, Mr. Waise went to the Denton County Courthouse and tried to enter but was stopped at a security checkpoint. Sheriff officials arrived on the scene, escorting Mr. Waise outside of the building where he was detained. Authorities are currently searching his car.

Mr. Waise is being held at Denton County Jail as the investigation continues.

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The FBI is investigating a threat written in graffiti in Louisville, Ky.-based Humana's Waterside Building, WLKY reported.

Humana officials heightened security and employees were on high alert Wednesday following the discovery of a threatening message written in graffiti on a bathroom floor. Some employees were sent home following the discovery.

A number of employees told WLKY the threat referenced the recent shooting in Orlando, stating a similar situation could happen in Louisville. One employee told WLKY the graffiti felt like "a direct threat of a workplace shooting."

Humana, the FBI and Louisville Metro Police are investigating the incident. Humana is not releasing many details.
Effective January 2017, employees who work for the city of Portland, Maine, can receive coverage for transgender health services under the city's insurance, the Portland Press Herald reported.

Prior to the announcement, health coverage under the city excluded transgender health services like counseling, hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.

"This has been in the works for many, many months," City Manager Jon Jennings told the Portland Press Herald. "I just believe it was the right thing to do." Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling added that the policy change will support transgender health and will protect all residents.

Portland joins 60 other U.S. cities  including San Diego, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, N.Y., Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Boston  to change their healthcare coverage to include transgender health services.

Groups supporting the transgender community  EqualityMaine, Maine Trans Net, the ACLU of Maine and Consumers for Affordable Health Care  said in a joint statement the decision "represents an important step forward in expanding health coverage to transgender Mainers."

Portland City Council will vote Monday to endorse the change, the Portland Press Herald reported.
For pregnant women infected with Zika in the third trimester, the risk of birthing a child with microcephaly could be quite low, according to preliminary results of an ongoing comprehensive study being conducted by scientists in Colombia. The early data has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study is monitoring thousands of cases of Zika infection. The populations being monitored include a subgroup of 1,850 pregnant women  532 with Zika infections contracted in the first trimester, 702 in the second trimester and 616 in the third trimester. More than 90 percent of the women infected in the third trimester have given birth, and no cases of microcephaly or brain abnormalities have been reported in this subgroup to date.

Still, when contextualized, this good news does not alleviate concerns about Zika's potential impact on pregnancy outcomes even when infection occurs late in pregnancy. Another study, published in NEJM, suggests Zika infections late in pregnancy could increase the risk of complications like miscarriage and stillbirth.

Regarding the preliminary report, Margaret Honein, PhD, epidemiologist and chief of the birth defects branch of the CDC, told NPR, "I think it's somewhat reassuring that there were not major birth defects identified...but I want to make sure we understand there is still a lot that we don't know."

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As a boy, Philip Kucab, MD, felt special when his pharmacy rep  who sold him his hemophilia medicine  joined the family for dinner or sent a gift basket during the holidays. Now, Dr. Kucab, a resident at Detroit Medical Center, looks back on the relationship with a more cynical view, according to The Washington Post.

In a new study published in PLOS Medicine, Dr. Kucab and his colleagues detail direct-to-consumer marketing techniques, detailing the great lengths drug companies go through to connect with hemophilia patients  gifts, assistance in paying for drugs, internships, college scholarships, coloring books, grants for summer camps and apps where they can track their drug infusions.

While the connection between patients and companies may seem mutually beneficial on the surface, these complex relationships may disguise an effort to secure customer loyalty or sell more expensive drugs for a rare disease where each customer  who requires a lifespan of treatment  can prove extremely valuable.

There are many options for hemophilia treatments on the market, but little comparative data exists on the methods. Physicians are concerned that these relationships may persuade patients to try a treatment that's more expensive but not proven to be more effective than cheaper alternatives.

"They definitely get in the way of the doctor-patient relationship, because there's sort of a buddy relationship that develops," said Ellis Neufeld, MD, PhD, medical director of the Boston Hemophilia Center. "We had one 9-year-old explain to us that he and his mom had gotten a pitch in their home from a sales rep that one drug was better than the other. That's way past the bounds of any propriety. It's very, very pernicious  so if you take a drug that on the average costs $200,000 per patient per year ... [it] is well worth it to a manufacturer."

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It may seem a bit unusual to hear a chief creative officer extol the virtues of paid search, but for Andreas Dahlqvist at Grey New York its almost under-leveraged for the purposes of promoting film content.

The agency leveraged this knowledgeand that of male search behaviorto inform its well-received Gillette commercial about reconnecting dads and sons on Fathers Day. Stating that 94% of teenagers seek out help on the Internet instead of asking their dads, the spot shows them entering search terms about cooking, fixing a flat tire and, yes, how to shave.

We analyzed search behavior and the insight there is that pretty much every kid out there is turning to Google more than they do to their dads, Dahlqvist says in an interview with Beet.TV. We basically bought out all of the search terms around how-to videos. Thats a pretty interesting opportunity. I think search is to a certain extent almost under-leveraged as a medium when it comes to film content.

One main benefit is that brands can serve up film that is not only relevant to what consumers are looking for but that co-mingles with their mindset. Its huge, Dahlqvist says.

In his opinion, when it comes to marketing messages, the shift is actually in favor of the consumer right now. The brands that care to listen the most will win.
Professor Marie McHugh, of Ulster University Business School (centre) along with panellists, Angela McGowan (Chief Economist, Danske Bank), host Jim Fitzpatrick, Irwin Armstrong (Founder and CEO at CIGA Healthcare) and Colin Walsh (Founder & Chief Executive at Crescent Capital). Pic Matt Mackey

Northern Ireland voters are "sleepwalking" into a decision to leave the EU, an economist has warned.

Danske Bank's Angela McGowan told an EU debate last night that she is "worried the vote will go the wrong way" and there will be a vote for Brexit.

"I do fear that we are sleepwalking into this... people are not fully informed," she said.

Business leaders and economists argued the case for and against Brexit with just a week to go before the vote on June 23.

The event heard from one member of the audience, who said a US investor had shifted a planned visit to Northern Ireland to the Republic instead, after learning of the upcoming Brexit vote.

And investment fund boss Colin Walsh, who has backed some of Northern Ireland's fastest growing technology firms, says he "would be out of business" in the event of Brexit.

Responding to a comment during an EU referendum debate chaired by broadcaster Jim Fitzpatrick and hosted by Ulster University Business School, Mr Walsh of Crescent Capital, said Brexit is "blowing both our feet right off".

"It would cripple investment," he said.

But arguing the case to leave, Ciga Healthcare boss Irwin Armstrong, said the EU was "anti-competitive and protectionist".

He said his business, which produces pregnancy tests, was "effectively removed" from selling into the EU, due to the difficulties in deals with pharmacies in countries such as France.

Mr Armstrong said he wants "complete liberalism" in the global market.

"There is a big world out there," he said.

He said the quality of some factories in places such as China was also now of a higher standard than those produced in the EU.

"If we go out to negotiate as the UK... it is one-to-one, and that makes life a lot easier."

Speaking about grants, Mr Armstrong said he believed companies should stand by themselves in the long term.

He said there was a "misconception" about how border controls work.

"We are now concentrating on selling into the EU because it is seen as easy," he said.

But ex-CBI chairman Mr Walsh said: "From that standpoint I think Crescent Capital would be out of business. All three venture funds have had considerable EU funding.

"I would be out of a job. Crescent's demise would also mean (the same) for the private sector economy."

Ms McGowan said: "I do believe Northern Ireland is better off in the EU."

"There is no doubt about it that Brexit would bring uncertainty. I fear if we were to leave the EU, there isn't a Plan B."

She said the economic debate had been won by the remain campaign.

Ms McGowan said "we are already seeing the impact" of uncertainty.

And Mr Walsh said: "If we choose to take back control of laws, and regulations that are administered in EU, it wouldn't be a zero sum gain."

He said "both sides have been particularly negative" in the debate.

But he said he "can't buy the argument" that exports would improve outside the EU.
The sale of the Sirocco site in east Belfast, which is due to be developed in a 300m project, is facing a major setback after it was slapped with a Government conservation order.

It is also believed the new buyer is concerned about the impact of a potential Brexit.

A sale deal for the site, which is owned by US vulture fund Cerberus, is understood to have been agreed in March.

But the Historical Monuments Council of the Department for Communities has issued an order on around 1.6 acres of the area because of archaeological issues involving the remains of a former glass factory.

The vision for the development includes a financial services hub and a media hub, with speculation growing that the BBC may be interested in moving to the area.

It is also understood that uncertainty surrounding next week's EU referendum could also be delaying the deal.

One source said the sale was agreed four months ago but has yet to be completed.

There are concerns that working up a new plan could take up to a year now that the conservation order has been applied.

"There's 296m of investment at stake here, and there's a risk to that," a source said.

"Some of the investors are becoming concerned about the possibility of Brexit, and this delay is another pressure."

The source also claimed a search of the Land Registry did not show any issues.

But after the sale was deemed to be agreed, the Historical Monuments Council placed an order on a 1.6-acre section of the site.

It is understood the buyer did not know about the order until several weeks later.

A spokeswoman for the Department for Communities said the site of the glassworks was "designated as a Scheduled Historic Monument on March 21".

"The remains of these 18th century Georgian industries were designated in recognition of the key role they played in the early evolution of the city of Belfast," the spokeswoman added.

The department said works within a "scheduled area are subject to having received a permission called scheduled monument consent in advance".

The status gives protection to "nationally important archaeological and historic sites to ensure their preservation".

The spokeswoman said it would be "anticipated that any potential developer will be involved in discussions" with the department over potential plans for any works in the area.

The site affected is understood to be close to the entrance of the long vacant area.

At one stage, the quays were to be transformed in a 600m investment by owner Carvill Group, which later went into administration. The sprawling industrial area has been sitting largely disused for years.

Plans for the development included 5,000 apartments, a hotel, an international convention centre, a supermarket and leisure and retail offerings.
In response to a report from the state Inspector General's Office concerning the escape of two inmates from Clinton Correctional Facility, the union representing state corrections officers said more tools, training and technology are needed to improve prison safety and security.

The union makes some good points, but it puts an awful lot of its emphasis on the need for more staffing, calling a shortage of workers the "underlying culprit" behind many of the failures identified by the inspector general's office.

This is what one would expect from a union  an argument for additional members. And the point shouldn't be dismissed, because more people might be needed to ensure that prisons can adequately perform all of the tasks they need to.

Having said that, simply adding more corrections officers will not magically correct what the inspector general's office described as "longstanding, systemic failures in management and oversight" by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision that allowed the escape to happen.

The IG's report paints a picture of a prison system with too little oversight and too many people not doing their jobs properly. It says that management failures at Clinton Correctional Facility led to a "culture of complacency," where acceptable corrections procedures were not being followed.

For its part, the union condemns the "few bad actors" who violate their obligations, and welcomes a comprehensive evaluation of policy. And statistics provided by the union show that assaults on staff, contraband and gang activity are a growing problem, making prisons less safe than they ought to be.

The bottom line is that gate searches failed to stop an employee from bringing tools into the Dannemora prison and multiple cell searches failed to find large openings that had been cut through cell walls. An internal investigation failed to confirm the truthful allegations that a staffer was having an inappropriate relationship with one of the future escapees.

And that all led to two murderers popping up through a manhole on a quiet residential street.

The union representing DOCCS workers may very well need more employees. But it also needs to be willing to work with the state to correct flaws in the correction system, including the "culture of complacency" that can develop within its ranks.
City of London Corporation chairman Mark Boleat said access to the European single market is critical if the UK wants to ensure businesses do not desert the Square Mile

The chairman of the City of London Corporation has taken aim at leading business figures in the Brexit camp and warned that firms could flee the Square Mile if Britain leaves the EU.

Referring to City bosses who are campaigning for Brexit, Mark Boleat told the Press Association: "Not one of them runs a business that I'm aware of. Most of the people I'm debating with are not running a business, Howard Flight is a non-executive director, but he's speaking personally, Daniel Hodson similarly.

"Gerard Lyons has got no position. David Buik is David Buik. Robert Hiscox was a great insurance man in his time, but he has no position. As for JCB, the view is that JCBs would be critically affected if Britain leaves."

Lord Flight is a non-executive director at Metro Bank, Daniel Hodson is former d eputy chief executive at Nationwide and Robert Hiscox is honorary president of Hiscox insurance. David Buik is a market commentator at Panmure Gordon.

The Corporation, which governs the Square Mile, has repeatedly warned of the detrimental impact Brexit would have on the financial services sector, saying it would be the "hardest hit".

Mr Boleat also said that access to the single market, even if the vote is to leave, is critical if the country wants to ensure businesses do not desert the Square Mile.

"Much of what we do is trying to get business into the City; over the next year it might be trying to stop business leaving. But that can't be by saying 'Please don't go, we're nice people', you can't con them. Access to the single market is a key point.

"The EU has contributed massively to jobs and prosperity, mainly through access to the single market, access to talent, the free movement of labour. London has captured the international financial service market," he said.

Mr Boleat added that City opinion is "80% or 90%" for remaining the EU, and urged campaigners to step up as the June 23 vote nears.

"Clearly it's not gone according to plan, but it was always going to be a tough ask when the people on the other side are not an alternative government. There's no question the chances of leaving are substantially higher than 10 days ago.

"I'm not involved in the Remain campaign, but they clearly need to have some people who can connect with voters."
Lord Lamont described George Osborne's threat of an emergency budget in the event of Brexit as "ludicrous scaremongering born of desperation"

Four senior Conservatives, including two former chancellors, have attacked the Treasury and the Bank of England for "peddling phoney forecasts" in a bid to scare voters into choosing to remain in the EU.

Former chancellors Lord Norman Lamont and Lord Nigel Lawson and ex-party leaders Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Michael Howard poured scorn on warnings of economic disaster from the Remain campaign.

But Prime Minister David Cameron said it is "deeply concerning" that senior Conservatives have criticised the "independent" Bank of England.

The four also hit out at pro-Remain Tories for their behaviour in the referendum debate, describing Chancellor George Osborne's threat of an emergency Budget in the event of Brexit as "ludicrous scaremongering born of desperation".

Writing in the Daily Telegraph they said: "There has been startling dishonesty in the economic debate, with a woeful failure on the part of the Bank of England, the Treasury and other official sources to present a fair and balanced analysis.

"They have been peddling phoney forecasts and scare stories to back up the attempts of David Cameron and George Osborne to frighten the electorate into voting Remain."

In the latest blue-on-blue row, the Prime Minister said voters should instead be listening to independent experts.

Mr Cameron tweeted: "It's deeply concerning that the Leave campaign is criticising the independent Bank of England.

"We should listen to experts when they warn us of the dangers to our economy of leaving the European Union."

With a week to go until polling, the senior Conservatives insisted the UK's economy is strong enough to prosper outside the EU.

As well as outlining what they see as the problems of the single market, they claimed immigration is too high, and the UK would benefit from a "managed migration system".

Concluding the article, they said: "We can remain anchored to a declining economic power with a tottering currency, bound by all the EU's laws, with little influence. This master-servant relationship makes no sense for Britain.

"Alternatively, on June 23, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take back control of our economy and our country, to take advantage of the extraordinary potential of the world beyond the EU. We should grasp it with both hands."

Britain Stronger In Europe claimed the Leave campaign is ignoring expert economists because they are united in their warnings of damage to UK finances.

A spokesman said: "This is yet more fantasy economics from the Leave campaign.

"The reason they don't want to listen to economic experts is because they are all agreed that leaving the EU would wreck our economy and hammer family finances."

Lord Howard said it was wrong for the Government to use the Bank of England to support their campaign.

He told Sky News: "I think it's a great pity, frankly, that the Government have tried to drag the Bank of England into this debate.

"It would have been much better if the Bank of England, which after all is going to have to work with a situation whatever it is after the vote, had stood aloof from the debate and remained completely impartial."

Despite his criticisms of Mr Osborne, he insisted "I haven't lost all my admiration for him" and supported Mr Cameron's continued leadership.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond defended the Bank's decision to release its analysis of the risks of Brexit and blasted politicians who have "misused" the information provided by independent experts.

Answering questions following a speech to the Chatham House thinktank in London, Mr Hammond said: "Everybody has to make their own decision in this great debate, and it's important that they have as much expert opinion available to them as possible, as much analysis as possible.

"I welcome the input of independent organisations like the Bank of England, as well as the many other bodies - I think we've got an IMF report coming out tomorrow morning which will also be important in the debate. The more information the better.

"The problem isn't the institutions providing the information, the problem is the way that information is sometimes misused by people in the debate."
More than 200 locals enjoyed a very special dining experience when celebrity cook James Martin made his annual visit to the brilliant Barnaby's Restaurant in Ballyclare.

The top TV chef cooked there for two nights this week and mingled with guests who tucked into a mouth-watering menu of Korean salad with pan-fried fish, slow roasted fillet of beef, warm mushroom risotto, fresh kale and black truffle, followed by a dessert of blackcurrant delice with blackberry sorbet.

Martin, who recently stepped down as host of his popular long-running cookery show Saturday Kitchen, was giving nothing away about his future plans when he spoke exclusively to the Belfast Telegraph.

He did, however, reveal that he was looking forward to returning to these shores later this year, when the Good Food Show will be visiting the Northern Ireland Food Festival for the first time.

All the dishes James cooked at the restaurant over the two days were created using fresh produce provided by leading wholesale supplier Musgrave MarketPlace, whose meat and fresh produce experts assisted in the selection of the ingredients.

Taking a brief break from the kitchen, Martin said: "I love coming to Northern Ireland.

"I have been at Barnaby's every year for the past eight years and I really enjoy it, although it rains a lot here.

"Of course, I am very familiar with Northern Ireland food. I worked with Paul Rankin on Ready Steady Cook 12 years ago and I know the area and the produce. I used to cook your local duck in my restaurant. You have great meat and great vegetables here."

Martin was just 22 when he opened his first restaurant, and since his TV career started 20 years ago he has rarely been off our screens. He is the author of 15 best-selling and award-winning cookbooks, and this year, he embarked on his first ever UK tour, which will see him visit 25 different venues.

He told how after 10 years on Saturday Kitchen, he was ready to try something new.

"I loved every minute of Saturday Kitchen, and 10 years is a long time for a cookery show on TV as they tend to come and go," James explained.

"It was a great opportunity that the BBC gave me, and we did some mega things on it and it was fantastic.

"I decided to pursue other things, and I have had constant phone calls. Even being here and preparing dinner for 200 people in Barnaby's tonight is a part of that. I am just going to take it all as it comes."

While he creates amazing dishes, the chef is also well-known for his simple fare. His favourite food to cook at home remains egg and chips or steak and chips, although it was fine dining James Martin-style that customers at Barnaby's were treated to this week.

Martin said he believed there was more than enough room for the new cooks and chefs coming on to TV, as well as "old timers" like himself.

"New ones are coming along all the time and that's good," he added. "The guys that have been doing it a long time, like myself and people like Jamie, Gordon and Nigella, all offer something very different.

"Food comes and goes and trends come and go, and last year the trend was for healthy food and everyone was eating a lot of lettuce. But now it's changed again. But it keeps us all busy and we all love our food."

The chef revealed that the current trend was for Peruvian food and that the challenge for chefs was not so much sourcing the ingredients but what they created with those ingredients.

"It is all about fusions at the minute and using different ingredients, which are always going to be local and the UK has great produce," he added. "For chefs it is about how they put the ingredients together.

"People here are great and I've had to spend a lot of time in the kitchen over the past two days, but it has been nice to get into the restaurant and meet people.

"We've just been giving our best and people seem to have enjoyed it."
Prime Minister David Cameron met Jeremy Clarkson during an EU-related visit to television studios in Chiswick, west London

Jeremy Clarkson sent David Cameron a "genuinely worried" text message from Argentina after filming a Top Gear episode that sparked a diplomatic row.

The Prime Minister revealed Clarkson sent the message as the former Top Gear crew were forced to flee the country while filming a Christmas special.

The team, including co-hosts James May and Richard Hammond, were given diplomatic assistance by the Foreign Office after trouble erupted when it emerged they were using a Porsche with the registration number H982 FKL, which some suggested could refer to the Falklands conflict of 1982.

Mr Cameron was speaking as he toured the offices of a television production company in Chiswick, west London, owned by the trio.

He said: "My children, they watched the Patagonia episode five times."

Clarkson replied: "That's not the one to watch - that one did not go well," before Mr Cameron added: "That's why they liked it. They liked the idea that I was going to step in and rescue you."

May said: "We quite liked the idea of that you would step in as well."

Mr Cameron continued: "You did actually send me a genuinely worried text."

Clarkson confirmed: "I did," and appeared to suggest he had done so because he feared they would be unable to get back to the UK.

Former Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman subsequently denied the number plate was a "stunt", while the BBC rejected a demand from Alicia Castro, Argentina's ambassador to the UK, for a public apology.

Clarkson, 56, is a friend of the Prime Minister through the social network known as the Chipping Norton Set, and lives in his Witney constituency in Oxfordshire.

He added that work on the trio's new Amazon Prime motoring show The Grand Tour, which will make its debut on the streaming service in the autumn, is "going really well".

When asked to comment on the revamped Top Gear, now fronted by Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, he said: "We are just working on our programme."
Jimmy Page, left, with Robert Plant, told the court he "liked" Spirit in the late 1960s but he only became aware of the song Taurus in recent years (AP)

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page has told a court that the chords in Stairway To Heaven are similar to Chim Chim Cher-ee from the Disney film Mary Poppins as he faced more questions about the origins of the band's famous hit.

The Dick Van Dyke song was played to the federal court in Los Angeles where Page is facing claims he copied the opening guitar riff on Stairway To Heaven from a track called Taurus by the American group Spirit.

A lawsuit has been filed by Michael Skidmore, the trustee of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe - known as Randy California - who drowned in 1997 having never taken legal action over the song.

Mr Skidmore's lawyer Francis Malofiy asked Page whether he had previously said Chim Chim Cher-ee had "inspired" him to write Stairway To Heaven.

Page replied: "I didn't say that.

"I think I may have said the chord sequence is very similar because the chord sequence has been around forever."

Asked whether there were similarities between the two songs, Page replied: "Yes, a sequence."

Page, 72, has previously told the court he had not heard Taurus until his son-in-law showed him a comparison with Stairway To Heaven on the internet a few years ago.

Giving evidence on the third day of the trial, the musician said he had "no recollection" of meeting Wolfe or of "interacting with him".

He told the court he wrote the introduction of Stairway To Heaven on his own before his bandmate Robert Plant added lyrics at Headley Grange in Hampshire.

A previous interview Page gave in the 1970s, in which he said the wrote the song's intro in Bron Yr Aur in Wales was "incorrect", he told the court.

The jury heard Led Zeppelin received 60 million dollars (about 42 million) after signing a publishing deal in 2008 and 10 million dollars (about 7 million) as part of a record deal with Rhino Entertainment in 2012.

Page, dressed in a dark three-piece suit, with his grey hair tied back in a ponytail, was joined in court by singer Plant as both men face a copyright infringement trial.

Plant and his bandmate John Paul Jones are expected to give evidence in the trial.
Proud father: David Baker has given up work to look after his twin sons Scott, (left) and Michael

Bangor man David Baker is the doting dad who refused to give up. Horrified to be told his tiny premature twin boys had little or no hope of survival when they were born, he was determined they would be given every chance.

The boys, who medical staff dubbed "the miracle twins", put up a brave fight, astonishing everyone.

However, when David (45) and wife Milena (37) finally got their sons, Michael and Scott, home, their babies faced a lifelong list of medical complications.

With no hesitation, David gave up his career as an executive chef in a top hotel to devote his life to caring for his boys. Now aged nine, against all odds and thanks to their parents' devotion, Michael and Scott are healthy, intelligent, fun-loving boys.

And no one is prouder this Father's Day than David as he talks about the twins and the obstacles they have had to overcome since birth.

As the boys are flourishing and no longer need the same level of care, David has decided to give something back. He has become the first male family support volunteer with the premature baby charity TinyLife, to help other families in the same position as him.

David has discovered he has a lot to give - and the Baker family continue to face daily challenges.

The twin boys' proud parents were terrified when their boys were born at 25 weeks on October 2, 2006 - 15 weeks before their January 10, 2007, due date.

At the time, they were the smallest newborns in the UK; Scott weighed just 1lb 10oz (less than a bag of sugar) and was given no chance of survival and brother, Michael, at just 2lbs, was given a slight 10% chance of making it. David says that his boys, including youngest son Jake (6) and wife, Milena, who is from Poland, are the centre of his universe.

The couple met through his work 10 years ago and were overjoyed to be expecting twins.

And when Milena took mild stomach pains in the 25th week of her pregnancy, they had no reason to be concerned. As the pains got stronger, though, they decided to take no chances and called for an ambulance.

The pair just about made it to hospital when the boys were born - two very small and very sick babies.

Michael was born unresponsive and had to be resuscitated. As medical staff worked to save the babies, the couple had an anxious four-hour wait, not knowing if they would ever see their sons alive.

David recalls: "You just go into shock. We were sitting in this room and a nurse brought us photographs in and told us we couldn't see them yet.

"She explained that we might not see them alive, which is why she brought the photographs. We had to sit for four hours in that room waiting and it is hard to explain, but you don't think of yourself, you are thinking of your children.

"You don't fully understand what is going on."

The shocking news about the twins' plight was devastating, with little room for hope.

David explains: "They told us the boys were the smallest surviving identical male twins in the UK at the time. They gave Michael a 10% chance of survival and Scott 0%. They told us that if they did make it, they would be wheelchair-bound and life expectancy would be short."

When Scott was four days old, there was more bad news; they were told he had less than an hour to live, and decided to have him baptised in hospital.

On numerous occasions in the next few months and years, Scott's life hung in the balance.

David and Milena spent the first four months of their boys' lives virtually living in the hospital beside two incubators, willing their babies to survive.

After two months in the Royal Victoria Hospital's intensive care unit, the boys were moved to the special care unit, where they spent another two months.

Despite the heartbreaking prognosis, a very special relationship between the twins was apparent even then, as David explains: "People think that the special bond between identical twins is a myth, but we see it every day.

"The medical staff at the hospital was amazed by it. The closer their incubators were, the more stable Scott's vital statistics became.

"His heartbeat would be going wild and as soon as they put him beside Michael, it calmed again. There was one time when they were separated for five days and Scott was very ill. And as soon as they put Michael beside him again, within seconds he was able to come off the ventilator. The nurse said in 30 years she had never seen anything like it."

The twins put up brave battles and as they grew stronger, the realisation of taking home two sick babies began to sink in. There were risks of medical complications and the boys would need round-the-clock-care.

David made the brave decision to quit his job and care for the children, alongside Milena, who had been providing 24-hour care for them alone.

Since then, the couple has worked tirelessly with the boys to ensure they reached their full potential.

"Obviously we wanted to take the boys home to start living a normal family life, but we were intimidated. We had no support, no one to turn to and no family on hand to help out if things got really tough. It was scary.

"For the next 18 months, we just spent the time taking them constantly to hospital appointments - sometimes twice in one day, and they had to feed every two hours during the night and day."

The devoted parents were also given a frightening list of possible medical problems that their boys were at risk from, and tragically, little Scott has had to face them all.

He is deaf, partially sighted and autistic, has liver disease, kidney failure, heart problems, food aversions and has been through six operations, all of which carried risks.

When he was only eight weeks old, doctors used a pioneering medication to save him.

David explains: "He needed a heart operation and his kidneys were failing, which is why he couldn't have surgery. We were told he had hours to live. There was one study in America, where seven of the eight children who took part had died, but one little girl survived after being given the medication.

"We were told he would die without it and might also die if they gave it to him - but there was no choice. There was nothing and everything to lose. It was a tough decision."

Being the boys full-time carers meant that David and Milena were dedicated to helping both boys achieve active lives.

He says: "We just became sick of everyone telling us what Scott couldn't do, so we focused on what he could do. We wanted him to realise his full potential.

"We had been told that Scott won't go to mainstream school, as he was diagnosed with autism just three months before starting P1.

"We had to fight, but now Scott is doing all the things they said he wouldn't and Michael has outgrown any complications he had.

"Academically, they are in the top third of their class in all subjects, including reading, at Bloomfield Primary School. They are taking part in swimming, which is extremely good for Scott's hips, and when they were five, they got their one-mile badge.

"Every day life does bring its challenges, but there are people who are a lot worse off and our boys are alive. And they are both happy children doing well at school and that's what matters."

As the boys needed David less and less, two years ago he began an Access course to qualify for university. He has just finished and is awaiting his results and hopes to start a history degree at Queen's University, Belfast, in September. While studying, he has also been volunteering with TinyLife, to help other parents with premature babies.

He says: "I knew that the boys would still need me, but to a lesser extent. Going back to the kitchen was unrealistic with long hours and evening work, so I started to explore other options. I've been studying in the evenings and was looking for something to do during the day when Milena suggested volunteering for TinyLife."

TinyLife offer a wide range of support services to local families who have experienced premature birth or sickness at birth.

One of its unique services is a hospital-to-home programme, where a fully-trained volunteer is placed with a family after their discharge from the safety of a hospital setting. Often it is a lifeline for those who feel they have no one else to turn to.

"It was a good fit, given all of our experience with the boys, but I thought, 'I'm a man, surely they wouldn't be interested in me'.

"The charity was delighted and I was very quickly placed with a local family who had two premature twin girls who had similar complications to Scott and Michael. Their father was also a stay-at-home dad. I was able to call on my own experiences and quickly we formed a close friendship."

Most recently, David has been working with another local family, again with premature twin girls who have heart conditions. Their mum has been overwhelmed by David's continuing support, even something as simple as being a listening ear has made a huge difference.

He says: "I always feel like I can make a difference to someone else's life and I know I am.

"I have had a really positive experience at TinyLife and it is good to help other people in need. Being the parent of premature and sick babies changed my life completely, but I am turning the experience into a positive one.

"Every day is different, every day can be a nightmare - but you have to share your story. How else would others know that it will be okay?

"The difference a volunteer can make - and would have made to us nine years ago - is incredible. Just being present to help in any way to lessen the burden is great. There are so many benefits to you as a volunteer, in fact, they outweigh everything else. I have gained great friendships and you can't put a price on what it means to help someone else."
The discovery at a property on Etna Drive in Ardoyne sparked a security operation that saw residents evacuated from their homes for six hours

Controlled explosions were carried out after a bag containing pipe bombs was found at a house in north Belfast yesterday.

The discovery at a property on Etna Drive in Ardoyne sparked a security operation that saw residents evacuated from their homes for six hours.

Detective Inspector Mark McHaffie said the devices were safely detonated by Army bomb disposal experts.

"Police were called to the area at around 2pm after a bag containing what appeared to be a number of pipe bombs was discovered," he added.

The police officer also issued an appeal for information about the incident.
Police are investigating after a man was forced into a van and assaulted by masked men in Belfast at the weekend

A man was forced into a van and assaulted by masked men in Belfast at the weekend.

At around 6pm on Sunday, a 32-year-old man was approached at an address in Mount Eagles by a masked man who demanded that he went with him.

The victim was ushered into a grey van where a second masked male was waiting.

He was then driven to the Ardoyne area where he was assaulted inside the van.

The masked men also demanded money and threatened to kill him if he did not comply.

Detective Inspector Snoddy explained: "Understandably the victim has been left extremely frightened and shaken by this ordeal and we are appealing for the publics help in identifying those involved.

"Anyone who was in the Mount Eagles and Ardoyne areas on Sunday evening and who noticed a grey van or anyone suspicious is asked to contact Reactive and Organised Crime detectives at Musgrave police station on 101, quoting reference 722 14/06/16.

If someone would prefer to provide information without giving their name they can contact the Crimestoppers charity anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Former Irish president Mary McAleese has warned of the dangers of Brexit

A Brexit would cause turmoil and radically alter relations between Britain and Ireland, a former Irish president has warned.

Mary McAleese has also claimed Ireland's peace and prosperity would be in danger if Britain votes to leave the European Union next week.

She said: "Reassurances that nothing will change ... are wishful thinking at best and bluffing at worse."

Mrs McAleese, who was president from 1997 until 2011, will throw her weight firmly behind the Remain campaign as she launches a new report from the British Influence think tank at Westminster later.

In her speech she will urge British voters to avoid a choice for "drift" and loss of influence in Europe. She will also call for the 600,000 Irish citizens resident in the UK to vote stay.

She will also say that the benefits in Anglo-Irish relations, now taken for granted, could be put in peril while the future of 400,000 jobs and the open road border between Northern Ireland and the Republic would also be uncertain.

"The concerns of Ireland are legitimate and well-founded," she said.

"They involve the economy, trade, immigration controls, the hardening of the land border, security, the weakening over time of the excellent current relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom, the impact on the peace process and the impact on European development of Britain's voice being absent from the European Union table."

Meanwhile, the British Influence paper, Brexit: The Irish Dimension, outlines the top seven problems that would upset Anglo-Irish relations in the event of Brexit:

They include the impact on Ireland's economy; disruption of the free movement Common Travel Area and the re-introduction of border controls as well as the ending of current extradition arrangements with the Republic of Ireland.

Other potential difficulties would be disruption to the peace process and the ending of EU-funded programmes while the all-Ireland electricity market and the energy relationship with the UK could also be affected, the report claims.

Peter Wilding, director of British Influence, said: "Vote Leave's 'It'll be all right on the night' attitude is playing with fire when it comes to the future of our relations with Ireland.

"Our report demonstrates - and Mary McAleese together with the entire Irish Government knows - that Brexit means trouble ahead for jobs, investment and the peaceful stability of the island of Ireland."

Meanwhile, Anthony Bailey, who sponsored the report, said he did not want to see the progress of the last two decades derailed.
Motorist Mark Johnston who was jailed for six months yesterday for causing the death of Dromore father of four James Boyd

The family of a man tragically killed in a head-on car crash wept silently in court as the driver was jailed for six months.

The former wife of James Boyd, a father of four from the Drumaghadone Road in Dromore, said they had received "an element of justice" after 45-year-old Mark Johnston was sentenced.

Mr Boyd died after a car driven by a distracted Johnston on the wrong side of the road ploughed into the front of his Mercedes on the Banbridge Road in Dromore on April 27, 2014.

At an earlier hearing, Johnston, from Glen Rise in Belfast, pleaded guilty to causing the death of Mr Boyd by driving carelessly.

Speaking outside court after Johnston was jailed, Mr Boyd's ex-wife Elizabeth and three of his children, Mark, Laura and Julie, said they were relieved at the sentence as "there's an element of justice to it".

"If we had left here today and the person drove up the road in front of us it would be very hard to deal with that but at least we know that tonight, he is behind bars and there's some justice," said Julie.

"I'm just so happy that he isn't walking away today. I don't think I could cope with that."

Sitting together in a side room at Newry Crown Court, the grief and pain they still feel is etched on their faces and visible in their body language.

Asked how the family has coped, Julie said: "Coping isn't even a word I would use."

"Daddy was a generous man and a very funny man.

"He was the 'go to' person, he was the fixer in the family and he was constantly in contact.

"There wasn't a day went by that he wasn't on the phone."

Elizabeth said that if anything good was to come out of the tragedy, it would be that other drivers "think about the long term implications of driving not only too fast, but being prepared to stop if necessary.

"This death was caused at under 40 miles per hour".

As he jailed Johnston for six months, ordering him to serve a further six months on licence after release, Judge Kevin Finnegan QC said he had "seldom seen such glowing references to a person such as James Boyd, or Jimmy", as he had been known to friends and family.

Quoting from one victim impact statement, the judge said Laura, the eldest daughter of the "extremely popular and loved" 54-year-old cattle dealer wrote that "whatever sentence is imposed on the driver will be temporary - but the sentence on all who knew him will be a life sentence".

Prosecuting QC Jackie Orr told the court that Mr Boyd's partner,, who was the front seat passenger, had described how the two were approaching the A1 carriageway from Dromore when she saw the other car on their side of the road and then "there was a loud bang" as the vehicles collided.

"She nudged Mr Boyd and asked if he was OK but there was no reply," said Ms Orr.

Mr Boyd was pronounced dead at the scene.

The impact triggered a police investigation and the lawyer told the court that according to a forensic engineer, it appeared that despite there being a 20mph limit on the exit/entrance road, Johnston's car had been travelling between 28 and 37mph.

Ms Orr said that a forensic engineer suggested that as a result of his speed, Johnston had under-steered and when he put the brakes on, a fault in the car's ABS system had caused the wheels to lock and the car to skid into the oncoming lane.

While Johnston's Vauxhall Insignia had that one fault and was in otherwise good condition, Mr Boyd's Mercedes "was maintained in excellent condition."

Ms Orr told the court she was aware Mr Boyd's family and friends were in court so she would not fully open the findings of the post-mortem examination, save to say that "the cause of death were fractures of the spine consistent with a road traffic collision."

Arrested and interviewed, Johnston initially claimed the Mercedes had been in his lane so he had "braked heavily but couldn't avoid a collision".

In his third and final interview, when statements had been put to him, "he made no comment," Ms Orr told the court.

She added that his guilty plea had been "of considerable solace to the family".

She said it was the Crown view that Johnston's excessive speed brought the case "close to dangerous driving" but that in any event, his relevant convictions for careless driving and driving without insurance in the past aggravated the offence.

Defence QC Arthur Harvey said Johnston had expressed remorse but "will have to live with the fact he killed a fellow human being for the rest of his life".

He revealed that during his police interviews, Johnston had asked to take a break "because the face of the deceased was constantly before his mind and he couldn't concentrate due to the anxiety that this was causing him".

Mr Harvey further revealed that under instruction from an off-duty, pregnant nurse who stopped to help, Johnston and his brother had tried to resuscitate Mr Boyd after the defendant himself had called the emergency services.

Jailing Johnston and banning him from driving for five years, Judge Finnegan said he felt that he had "no alternative but to impose a custodial sentence".
Alan Drennan died during a holiday on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza.

Friends of N Ireland teenager Alan Drennan who died in Ibiza in disputed circumstances dedicated their Euros trip to his memory

Friends of a Northern Ireland teenager who died in Ibiza in disputed circumstances last summer have dedicated their Euros trip to his memory.

Three pals of Alan Drennan hit the road to France "in loving memory" of the mechanic and music lover.

The 21-year-old from Newtownabbey, near Belfast, was allegedly beaten by Spanish police.

Friend Scott Rainey said he would have liked to have been at the Euros.

He added: "If we were here he would have been here."

Mr Drennan died on the sun island last July, less than a day after touching down.

Friends who accompanied him to the Mediterranean on holiday claim he suffered head injuries after being hit by officers from the Guardia Civil at the airport.

Mr Drennan went out partying with his friends after the incident but was found dead in his hotel room the next day.

His favourite song was Satellite by Above And Beyond and the banner included: "you're half a world away" - lyrics from the track.

The massive decorated Northern Ireland flag was hung from some trees in the centre of Lyon ahead of Northern Ireland's crucial fixture against Ukraine on Thursday.
Irish fans are gathering in Bordeaux ahead of their side's clash with Belgium on Saturday

A man who left Ireland when he was nine and dreamed of playing for the Republic is in France for Euro 2016 as part of his 60th birthday celebrations.

Columb Starrett, who lives in Bicester in Oxfordshire, left Holywood in County Down with his family more than 50 years ago.

When asked if he will be cheering for Wales against England, he said: "Yeah, no two ways."

He joined English and Welsh fans in a very wet fan zone in Bordeaux for the sides' big match.

Mr Starrett turns 60 in October, and he told the Press Association: "I wanted to be with the Irish fans watching the Euros. This is the start of the celebrations.

"I've always wanted to play for Ireland. I think if I'd stayed in Ireland I'd have been playing for Ireland. That was my ambition."

His nephew Phil Starrett, 49, who lives in Souldern in Oxfordshire, is also backing the Republic.

"I'm Irish. That's why I've got the Irish jersey on," he said.

Phil Starrett, who was born in Singapore and grew up in Germany, added: "I'm here with my uncle celebrating his 60th birthday watching the mighty green army and having the craic."

Irish fans are pouring into wine capital Bordeaux ahead of their side's game against Belgium on Saturday.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland is seeking help from the public.

Police are hunting masked men who kidnapped and assaulted a man in West Belfast.

The victim was bundled into a grey van and driven from the the Mount Eagles area to Ardoyne.

The attackers demanded money and threatened to kill him.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said the incident happened on Sunday but was not reported until two days' later.

A PSNI spokesman said: "At around 6pm on Sunday evening the male victim was approached at an address by a masked man who demanded he come with him.

"The victim was ushered into a grey van where a second masked male was waiting. He was then driven from the area and taken to the Ardoyne area where he was assaulted inside the van. His assailants also demanded money and threatened to kill him if he did not comply.

"Understandably the victim has been left extremely frightened and shaken by this ordeal and we are appealing for the public's help in identifying those involved."

Anyone who was in the area at the time and who noticed a grey van or anyone suspicious is asked to contact Reactive and Organised Crime detectives at Musgrave police station on 101, quoting reference 722 14/06/16.
DUP leader and First Minister Arlene Foster has said there is 'no such place as the north of Ireland'.

She was responding to a contributor during Wednesday night's BBC Nolan Live EU referendum debate.

During the studio discussion a woman said she travelled from Dublin to take part to ask DUP MP Sammy Wilson a question.

She said: "I travelled across the border hassle free.

"I was looking at the DUP website and it says about moving the north of Ireland forward.

"Surely if we have a border that takes us straight back."

Within moments Arlene Foster took to Twitter to correct the woman.

Just to be clear the DUP website nowhere refers to the north of Ireland #nosuchplace #proudodNI #nolan  Arlene Foster (@DUPleader) June 15, 2016

"Just to be clear," she tweeted, "the DUP website nowhere refers to the north of Ireland.

She ended her tweet with #nosuchplace.

A number of people replied saying there was an actual north of Ireland, however, the First Minister was quick to reply saying in the context of the original comment, there was no such state.
A Northern Ireland football fan has collapsed and died during the European Championship in Lyon, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said.

The man, in his sixties, collapsed in the upper part of the ground and was treated by paramedics but they were unable to revive him.

It happened during the game against Ukraine, which Northern Ireland won 2-0.

Superintendent Nigel Goddard said: "Our thoughts are tragically with a second family this week mourning the devastating loss of their loved one.

"We understand the man aged in his sixties collapsed during the game and was attended to by emergency services in the Stade de Lyon.

"It is extremely sad that this is the second death of a Northern Ireland fan in France during the Euro 2016 games."

On Monday Darren Rodgers, 24, from Ballymena, fell eight metres off a promenade in the south coast city of Nice and died.

Fans applauded his memory in tribute during the 24th minute of Thursday night's match.

Mr Goddard said the Service had been liaising with French authorities and local PSNI officers have been in touch with the man's family in Belfast.

Flags, shirts and scarves have been left at the ground in tribute to the dead man.

A paramedic who treated him said: "We tried but we could not. It is very sad."

The Olympique Lyonnais ground was packed with Northern Ireland supporters who have travelled to France in their droves for Northern Ireland's first major tournament in 30 years.

An Irish Football Association statement said it was deeply saddened to learn of the sudden death.

Chief executive Patrick Nelson said: "The fan passed away as he was watching the game in the stadium. This puts any result of a football match into perspective.

"The thoughts of the board, management, players and staff are with his family and friends at this sad time."
British citizens travelling from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK might have go through checkpoints in the event of a Brexit, the Prime Minister warned yesterday.

David Cameron said it would be an alternative to introducing hard borders between the Republic and Northern Ireland if the UK left the EU.

The Government has previously warned that the Common Travel Area - a current free movement agreement between the two nations - would be under threat.

Brexit supporters such as Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers have described that as scaremongering.

But speaking during Prime Minister's Questions yesterday, Mr Cameron said: "If we vote to stay in, we know what the situation is. We know that the Common Travel Area works, we know it can continue and everyone can have confidence in that.

"If we were to leave and, as the Leave campaigners want make a big issue about our borders, then you've got a land border between Britain outside the European Union and the Republic of Ireland inside the European Union.

"Therefore, you can only either have new border controls between the Republic and Northern Ireland or, which I would regret hugely, you'd have to have some sort of checks on people as they left Belfast or other parts of Northern Ireland to come to the rest of the United Kingdom.

"Now, we can avoid these risks. There are so many risks here - risks to our children's jobs, risks to our economic future, risks to our borders, risks to the unity of the United Kingdom - I say avoid the risks and vote remain next Thursday."

His warning came after SDLP MP Dr Alasdair McDonnell insisted a return to customs and passport control checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic would be a "critical economic issue for Northern Ireland's voters in eight days' times".

Dr McDonnell expressed fears that up to 30,000 commuters who cross the Irish border daily for work could end up in massive queues to present their passports to gain access to one part of Ireland or the other.

The SDLP, which is urging people to stay within the EU, believes most voters across the UK are unlikely to consider the implications of the Irish border.

"Despite the hand-waving and denials of the Leave campaign, the Prime Minister has today made it crystal clear that leaving the EU would inevitably lead to the hardening of the border on the island of Ireland, either through new controls between the North and South or through new controls between Northern Ireland and Britain," said Mr McDonnell.

"We simply cannot afford to return to the days of customs checks, passport posts and a hard border in Ireland, not least because of the 30,000 people that commute across the border every day for work."

But the claim was dismissed by the pro-Brexit DUP. East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson said: "The Common Travel Area was agreed in 1923 and operated before the EU without a problem, and still operates today without an issue and currently includes Jersey and Guernsey, which are both non-EU members.

"Dan Mullhall, the Irish Ambassador to the UK, has stated his belief that the Common Travel Area would continue post-Brexit."
Courtney Robinson of Labour Alternative said the mission has been organised in defiance of Northern Ireland's archaic abortion law

The 'abortion drone' will carry drugs across the border from the Republic next week where it will be met by activists who will then ingest the pill at the drop site

Pro-choice groups intend to deliver abortion pills by drone into Northern Ireland in an attempt to help women safely self-terminate their pregnancies.

The 'abortion drone' will carry drugs across the border from the Republic next week where it will be met by activists who will then ingest the pill at the drop site.

Further pills will be taken during a protest outside Belfast High Court. It will not be revealed which women, if any, are pregnant when they take the World Health Organisation-approved medication.

The highly controversial mission has been organised by pro-choice groups from Northern Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands to highlight the criminalisation of abortion in both Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Abortion legislation in Northern Ireland has come under intense scrutiny in recent months.

Under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, anyone carrying out an abortion in Northern Ireland, except under some extremely limited circumstances, can be jailed for life.

In April a woman was handed a suspended sentence by a Belfast court after buying drugs online to bring about a miscarriage because she couldn't afford to travel to England for a termination.

The 21-year-old admitted procuring her own abortion and was given a three-month jail term suspended for two years.

Another woman is due to stand trial accused of unlawfully procuring a medical abortion medicine for her teenage daughter.

And last month, three women handed themselves in to police stating they had procured and taken illegal abortion pills and requested that they be prosecuted, in protest at Northern Ireland's restrictive abortion laws.

The pills are to be flown from Corna Mucklagh House in Omeath to Narrow Water at Warrenpoint on Tuesday morning.

A protest has been organised for later in the afternoon outside Belfast High Court where an appeal against a court ruling that Northern Ireland's abortion law breaches the European Convention on Human Rights is due to be heard.

Courtney Robinson of Labour Alternative said the mission has been organised in defiance of Northern Ireland's archaic abortion law.

"Every day we are seeing women being criminalised or being forced to travel to England. This is to highlight the criminalisation of women. The United Nations recently ruled that our abortion laws contravene human rights.

"The protest is also in defiance of the law. We are going to make the law unworkable," Ms Robinson added.

Another of the groups involved, Women on Waves, a non-profit group of doctors and activists from the Netherlands, said the abortion drone is "an all-island act of solidarity between women in the north and the south to highlight the violation of human rights caused by the existing laws that criminalise abortion in both the north and south of Ireland except in very limited circumstances".

The group added: "The abortion drone will mark the different reality for Irish women to access safe abortion services compared to women in other European countries where abortion is legal."

Last year Women on Waves used the drone to transport pills from Germany to Poland where women can get a legal abortion only if there is proof of rape or incest, the mother's life is endangered or the foetus is severely malformed.
PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton has spoken of his deep disappointment at allegations student police officers had cheated in their exams.

The Belfast Telegraph revealed earlier this week that more than 50 trainee police officers are suspected of having cheated in their exams.

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The PSNI has launched an investigation into the allegations.

The scandal, which is a huge embarrassment to the PSNI, was uncovered following a complaint from a whistleblower.

Speaking after a meeting of the Policing Board on Thursday, Mr Hamilton said 54 trainee officers were suspected of involvement.

"The allegations of impropriety suggested that student officers had individually memorised examination questions and collectively shared this information between themselves with a view to assisting them prepare for any re-sit examinations they might have been required to take," he said.

"This information emerged the day before last Fridays Graduation. I considered the full range of options available to me which included student suspensions and complete cancellation of the Graduation Ceremony.

"I considered all the information available to me including the early and fulsome acceptance of responsibility by the students concerned while acknowledging the negative impact their behaviour was likely to have on community confidence in them as individuals and the damage to the reputation of PSNI more generally."

He said that the student officers had, "at best, demonstrated extremely poor judgement and their behaviour was a breach of the student officers Code of Ethics".

"As Chief Constable I am deeply disappointed by the actions of those student officers who have acted in a way that is not in keeping with the standards I expect from aspiring police officers," he said.

"There have been disciplinary consequences for all of those students who were involved in this impropriety.

"All concerned have received written warnings under the student officer misconduct procedures; they have been the subject of a clear explanation from an Assistant Chief Constable regarding the need for unquestionable integrity and high ethical standards for those who aspire to hold the office of Constable. Clearly the behaviour and ethical standards of those involved will be closely monitored to ensure their performance meets with the high standards the public rightly expect of their police officers.

"The 54 student officers who have benefited from this impropriety are unable to show they have, on their own merits, achieved the required academic standard and will be required to complete the 22 week training programme in its entirety commencing on 4th July. This decision was taken in partnership with Ulster University who accredit the Police Initial Training Programme. While the need to re-sit the 22 week course is a significant set-back for these students at the start of their career, I agree with the Policing Board that integrity is not negotiable.

"I stand by my own judgement on this matter and fully appreciate the views and concerns expressed by the Policing Board. These 54 student officers have been given a final opportunity to prove their integrity, academic ability and high ethical standards of behaviour. Only when they have done so will they be attested as Constables in the Police Service of Northern Ireland."
The report said a vote to leave the EU could have ramifications south of the border, where the economy is still recovering from the downturn

Brexit could have serious political and economic implications for Ireland, Northern Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations, according to a new report.

The disruption of trade links, re-introduction of customs controls and loss of millions of pounds in aid funding would impact the economy and affect security, it has been claimed.

British Influence, which published the report, said: " These are issues that have only been considered on the periphery of the referendum debate until very recently and yet represent some of the most serious, considering the potential effects Brexit could have on the Irish peace process and north-south co-operation.

"Those who argue for the UK to leave the EU have for the most part dismissed the Irish dimension of Brexit as either irrelevant or inconsequential, a worryingly passive stance. Considering the seriousness with which people on both sides of the Irish border are taking the possibility of the UK voting to leave, Brexit advocates need rapidly to reconsider that stance and begin providing answers for these legitimate concerns."

According to the think tank, the economic consequences for Northern Ireland include an exposed economy left isolated from its second biggest market and more reliant on a poorer and pre-occupied Britain.

The potential loss of foreign direct investment, which has seen some 800 international companies set up in the region, has also been highlighted, as have claims the business community could be at a disadvantage.

The ending of the European Arrest Warrant may also make it more difficult to extradite terror suspects, while the loss of crucial EU funding for cross border projects could disrupt the peace process, the report said.

Meanwhile, British Influence has argued that a vote to leave the EU could have ramifications south of the border, where the economy is still recovering from the downturn.

"A Brexit could be the kind of shock that causes real difficulties," the report said.

While both countries would continue to trade, the volume - presently 30% of Ireland's imports, totalling some 27.86 billion - is likely to be impacted, it is claimed.

Agriculture prices may also be forced down, as the UK would no longer be subject to the Common Agricultural Policy.

And, there would also be consequences for broader relations between the UK and Ireland, which have improved immeasurably in recent years, partly down to mutual membership of the EU.

The report said: "No doubt the British and Irish Governments would seek to maintain their current strong relationship, and it is to be hoped that they would succeed.

"But ... Britain and Ireland would have chosen profoundly different paths and there would be no guarantees that the current relations would remain as they are."
Two associate principals appointed to troubled De La Salle College have left their roles.

Imelda Jordan and John Wilkinson were appointed as relations between De La Salle principal Claire White and staff grew tense.

In April, former Education Minister John O'Dowd ordered an independent investigation into events at the west Belfast school.

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There have been ongoing industrial problems over the last year.

About a third of the 70-strong teaching staff at the school were absent for a number of days before the Easter holiday.

The Concerned Parents Committee of De La Salle has called for the principal, vice-principal and board of governors to be stood down.

They also called for a "thorough independent and transparent investigation" of events at the school.

Imelda Jordan and John Wilkinson were appointed as associate principals earlier this year, however they have now left the roles.

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The Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS) confirmed Ms Jordan and Mr Wilkinson would not be continuing, and insisted that the arrangement was only ever temporary.

"In relation to the associate principals at De La Salle College, it has always been understood by CCMS and the Board of Governors that this was a temporary arrangement," a CCMS spokeswoman said.

"CCMS thanks Imelda Jordan and John Wilkinson for the tremendous contribution to the leadership and management of De La Salle during the school term.

"They are no longer available in these roles as the term comes to an end, however to ensure continuity, they will both provide support to the school as educational associates working through CCMS."

CCMS said that Vice Principal Marian ONeill will take on the role of acting principal from next Monday.

"The Board of Governors has appointed Marian ONeill, Senior Vice-Principal, to the role of acting principal with effect from Monday 20 June until further notice," the CCMS spokeswoman said.

"The governors have great confidence in Marians capacity to continue the work programme developed by Mrs Jordan and Mr Wilkinson."
Northern Ireland MPs with UDR widows outside the Houses of Parliament

Widows of UDR soldiers killed during the Troubles have taken their campaign to have their military pensions restored to Westminster.

They have backed other army widows from across the UK who staged a protest outside the Houses of Parliament yesterday.

The women want to see the military pensions which they use to receive restored. Their pensions had been cut off after they remarried.

One of the UDR widows, Eileen Johnston from Dungannon, lost her husband, Corporal David Graham, at the hands of the IRA aged 38 in 1977.

Mrs Johnston (73) and their three children received a war widow's pension for a number of years until she remarried, after which it was stopped.

She told the Belfast Telegraph she was made to feel as if she had done something wrong.

Across the UK, 250 women are in a similar position because they married again between 1973 and 2005.

A number of Northern Ireland MPs including the DUP's Gavin Robinson, Gregory Campbell, David Simpson, Jim Shannon and Independent MP Lady Sylvia Hermon, turned out to support the widows yesterday.

In May, Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to meet Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland from Leeds to discuss the issue.

Mr Mulholland has been advocating for his constituent Susan Rimmer, who lost her first husband to a terrorist bomb in Northern Ireland in 1972, when she was just 19 and pregnant.

Her war widow's pension was stopped when she remarried.

Mr Mulholland described this as a "disgraceful way to treat those who have lost loved ones serving our country".

In 2014 a similar policy was reversed to allow RUC widows who had remarried to reclaim their pensions, which had been taken away in 1988.

Kenny Donaldson, spokesman for Innocent Victims United (IVU), said the Ministry of Defence must rectify this "gross inequality".

"IVU and the South East Fermanagh Foundation has been facilitating a local campaign group in NI comprised of affected UDR widows," he said.

"Unfortunately none of these widows were able to travel across to Westminster today but I was present to represent their interests.

"The events brought a welcome focus to the campaign which is UK-wide.

"The widows present demonstrated their customary dignity, sharing reflections of difficult events concerning the loss of their loved one, their subsequent joy in remarrying and then their despair at how the MoD dealt with their changed personal circumstances.

"The Defence Minister and MoD must rectify a gross inequality which has been allowed to continue and which insults the memory of the men who were murdered or died whilst serving this country."
An uncle of sexual abuse victim Mairia Cahill has said he is under a death threat from the Provisional IRA.

West Belfast man Sean Cahill claimed that a senior member of the paramilitary organisation visited his home last week.

Mr Cahill last night told the Belfast Telegraph: "This man told me, in front of my wife, children and grandchildren, that I would get a bullet in the head.

"Understandably, my family are very upset and are concerned about my safety."

The IRA man who made the threat was a key player in the 2004 Northern Bank robbery and is a brother-in-law of a prominent Sinn Fein figure.

A career criminal, he became involved with the Provisionals in the early 1990s. He now works for the IRA's finance department and was, in the past, regularly seen in the company of veteran Provisional Bobby Storey.

Mr Cahill, a 52-year-old electrician, also claimed that he had been informed that Sinn Fein members were telling employers that he should not be given work because he was a dissident republican.

He said that he outlined "attempts to destroy my livelihood" on social media last Wednesday and, later that day, was visited by the senior Provisional.

"He threatened my life in front of everybody who was in the house," Mr Cahill added. "My wife was very distressed. I'm obviously concerned and want the threat lifted.

"I don't hold Sinn Fein accountable for what has happened, but I would like them to speak out against it. I'm a republican, I've always been a republican and I have campaigned on behalf of the prisoners in Maghaberry. I have never been arrested by the PSNI, nor have I any convictions."

Mr Cahill said that the day following the death threat, he visited Holy Cross chapel in Ardoyne and asked to speak to Fr Gary Donegan, who has also been threatened by republicans.

"I wanted Fr Donegan to help establish the legitimacy of the threat - whether it was someone on a solo run or if this individual had the authority of his organisation behind him," Mr Cahill said. "I was told by reception at Holy Cross that Fr Donegan wasn't in, so I left my name and contact details. Almost a week later, he still hasn't been in touch with me. I'm very disappointed by that.

Fr Donegan last night told this newspaper he had been away on Thursday and that Mr Cahill's details had not been passed on to him.

"I have no difficulty in meeting Sean Cahill and speaking to him," the priest said. "He can come to Holy Cross or I can go to his home. In recent weeks, I have dealt with 42 threats to individuals from paramilitaries. This will now make it 43."

Fr Donegan recently highlighted threats made to dozens of men in north Belfast by dissident republicans.

Afterwards, he said that police had warned him of a number of threats posted on social media against him and other community activists.

But Fr Donegan indicated that it was irrelevant to him whether a threat came from mainstream or dissident republicans. "I will help the person under threat regardless of who they are in danger from," he explained.
Riot police monitor England fans in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Niall Carson/PA Wire

Riot police in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Niall Carson/PA Wire

England fans outside the train station in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Riot police monitor England fans outside the train station in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

A busker with England fans outside the train station in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

England fans climbs a signpost in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Riot police in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Police in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Riot police in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

UK police officers take a leading role monitoring England fans in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Riot police in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

A busker with England fans outside the train station in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

An England fan climbs a signpost in Lille city centre, France, as fresh clashes have taken place between England fans and Russian hooligans at Euro 2016. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday June 15, 2016. Video posted online showed Russian hooligans approaching a group of English and Welsh fans as they drank together. See PA story SPORT Euro2016. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire

French Police aim their flash-ball guns to disperse English fans in downtown Lille, northern France, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, one day ahead of the Euro 2016 Group B soccer match against Wales in nearby Lens. Russia were playing Slovakia at the Pierre Mauroy stadium in Villeneuve dAscq, near Lille on Wednesday which raised the possibility of violence after clashes between supporters from the two countries at their previous match in Marseille last weekend. (AP Photo/Michel Spingler)

Police have charged at England fans in Lille as flares and bangers were lit in the French city.

Ahead of a baton charge supporters were heard to chant and red flares were let off amid a stand-off with officers.

Fans from England, Wales, Slovakia and Russia have been gathering in the city for Group B matches between the countries.

Earlier police used teargas on crowds following scuffles in the city centre.

In the latest disturbances police charged multiple times and were seen hitting people with batons.

An England fan who charged at officers was pepper sprayed.

Despite the bars being shut and a ban on drinking in the street many supporters have been consuming alcohol outside.

Some were seen climbing road signs and while English police - sent out to help with the security operation - have been urging fans to behave, the French police decided to charge in an attempt to disperse the crowds.

The trouble followed a n earlier skirmish after a small group of Russians threw a flare at large group of England fans who then charged them.

The Russians left the scene and the remaining British fans were tear gassed.
Responsibility for the attacks on November 13 was claimed by Islamic State

A Belgian judge has ruled that two men suspected of aiding the attackers who killed 130 people in Paris can be extradited to France.

The judge's ruling concerns two suspects Belgian authorities have identified only as Mohammed A, 27, and Ali O, 31.

The decision was made public by the Belgian Federal Prosecutor's Office.

It was not immediately clear when the two men will be handed over to the French.

The prosecutor's office said no additional information would be released about further proceedings.

Responsibility for the attacks on November 13 was claimed by Islamic State.

The suspected ringleader and many of the attackers, who used assault rifles and suicide bombs to attack a Paris concert hall, cafes and restaurants and a stadium, were Belgian nationals or residents.
The days go by and we are now just a week away from the European Union referendum. As it draws nearer, the dire predictions from David Cameron and the Remain camp grow ever more frequent and strident. It seems that every day now we are subjected to more catalogues of calamity and dossiers of doom.

Cameron warned us that if the United Kingdom left the EU, it could lead to a third World War in Europe. He also warned us that it could lead to financial ruin, with the destruction of the pensions system and the decimation of the health service.

In this, he has been joined by his good friend and next-door neighbour George Osborne, who has also warned of a multitude of impending disasters.

They are relentless in their prophecies of catastrophe, and the onslaught is so relentless that it is a clear sign of a growing desperation in Downing Street.

However, it just doesnt ring true. If leaving the EU will result in even a fraction of the catastrophes that have been predicted by Mr Cameron, why on earth did he ever promise a referendum in the first place? And why did he suggest that, if he failed to negotiate real change, he would campaign to leave?

Was it all just a confidence trick by Cameron to placate a large section of his own party? And is it not the case that desperation has now set in as he sees the referendum sitting on a knife-edge? Did he not know about all these disasters back at the start of it all?

Back in 2013, Cameron set out his vision for a reformed EU and promised fundamental change.

However, when he went in to negotiate change, he didnt even ask for many of the measures he had outlined. Furthermore, he didnt even get the changes he asked for. He was humiliated by the EU and came home almost empty-handed.

That is because the EU is unreformed and unreformable. The fatcats and the eurocrats who dominate the organisation have no intention of conceding reform. They like it just the way it is because it suits them.

As a result, and with strong support for the Leave campaign, Downing Street is working overtime to ensure there is an incessant stream of statements, speeches and tweets in support of Remain.

Bill Clinton wrote in the New Statesman, the Archbishop of Canterbury weighed in, and a transvestite comedian undertook a nationwide tour to back the EU.

On top of all the warnings of disaster for the UK, there has been a specific focus on Northern Ireland, and two former prime ministers, Tony Blair and Sir John Major, flew in to warn us of the risks.

However, that sort of stage-managed event with yesterdays men has little effect. In any case, who believes Tony Blair about anything these days?

US diplomat Richard Haass even tweeted that if the UK voted to leave the EU, it could trigger violence in Northern Ireland. Is there no end to the inventiveness of these folk?

All that is, of course, on top of the general warnings about almost every disaster imaginable, with the possible exception of the Black Plague.

However, there is still another week to go, so there is still time for someone to pop up with a warning about that, as well.

Indeed, if they run out of ideas for potential calamities, they could, of course, turn to the Book of Exodus and look up the 10 plagues that were inflicted on Egypt in the time of Moses.

The problem for the Remain camp is that the more warnings they make and the more extreme and strident they become, more and more ordinary people are repelled by their threats.

They are simply tired of being battered and bullied by the outlandish rhetoric of the political elite.

So, keep it up, lads. Youre all doing a grand job. Vote Leave.
The various commentators and politicians expressing concern over the possible effects of Brexit on British-Irish trade, immigration and the border with Northern Ireland seem to be ignoring the fact that any problems would not be caused by Britains exit, but rather by continued Irish membership of the EU.

Britain and Ireland have had a common travel area since 1923 and undoubtedly Britain would be happy for that to continue. Similarly, Britain would be happy to continue free trade with Ireland without border posts.

If there are to be any restrictions they will be imposed on Ireland at the behest of the EU  not by Britain.

If the EU is really interested in Ireland and its national interests, then it would accept that the geographical position of Ireland means that it will need to negotiate travel and trade agreements with Britain directly, rather than via Brussels.

If the EU is not willing to allow Ireland to do this (and Ireland accepts that), surely that is a betrayal of the independence that Ireland fought for 100 years ago?

NEIL ADDISON

(BARRISTER-AT-LAW)

New Bailey Chambers,

Liverpool
Saying that "we stand with you and are here for you," President Barack Obama laid a wreath at a makeshift memorial at the downtown Orlando performing arts center Thursday afternoon in remembrance of the victims of the worst mass shooting in modern American history.

"Their grief is beyond description," Obama said, with Vice President Joe Biden at his side on the front lawn of the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center.



The City of Orlando had been "shaken by an evil, hateful act," but today, "most of all, there is love," Obama said.



"After the worst of humanity reared its evil head, the best of humanity came roaring back. Now, if we're honest with ourselves and we do in fact want to show the best of humanity then we're all going to have to work together at every level  government, across political lines, to stop killers who want to terrorize us," Obama said.

Obama and Biden also laid bouquets of flowers among the growing memorial of mylar balloons, flowers, candles, pictures and posters at the DPAC.

"Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families," Obama said. He said he held grieving parents, and "they don't care about politics. Neither do I. This debate needs to change."

Earlier at Amway Center, the president met privately with survivors and families of the victims of the Pulse shooting, which left 49 dead early Sunday. Before the meeting, he and Biden met with local law enforcement officials to thank them for their work.

Outside of Amway, a spokeswoman for the families of the Pulse victims said they were grateful for the president's words and visit.

I would say that everybody left feeling comforted, and I would say on behalf of the Pulse club that resilience is probably the emotion that comes out after this, Sara Brady said.

Salaam Bhatti, a national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, said they were "heartbroken when we heard about this tragedy. We condemn what happened, and we are praying for the victims friends, family, and for the speedy recovery of the injured.

Obama and Biden arrived at Orlando International Airport before 1 p.m. Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Corrine Brown, whose Congressional district includes Pulse nightclub, arrived on Air Force One with Obama from Washington.



Waiting to greet Obama at the bottom of the stairs on a runway at Orlando Interntional was Florida Gov. Rick Scott, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs. Obama shook hands with Scott, and hugged Dyer, who showed him an "Orlando United" T-shirt, with a heart-shaped rainbow. He then shook hands with Jacobs.

Theres no minimizing the impact on these families and their loss, and I know nothing that we can do will heal that wound, but I do know that having a whole community come together and having the President of the United States, President Obama come here personally, on the ground, to meet with the families sends such a healing a message to them that their loved ones mattered," Jacobs said. "Its a healing gesture not only for the families but the entire community, especially our LGBTQ community, as well as our Hispanic community that was hit so hard by this.

"Nothing, nothing can put into words how important and helpful this is.

Obama's motorcade, with the dignitaries and Sen. Bill Nelson, left OIA at 12:58 p.m., headed to Amway Center.

Motorists pulled over on the side of westbound Interstate 4 to watch the presidential motorcade make its way to Amway. Eastbound I-4 was cleared of traffic, and law enforcement officers blocked entrances along the president's route. Dozens of people stood on South Street to watch Obama's motorcade pull up to Amway Center.

Another two dozen Pulse victims are still hospitalized at Orlando Regional Medical Center, six in critical condition. A dozen have been discharged from ORMC, where the majority of the victims were taken because it's just down the street from the gay nightclub.



The low-profile visit is something Obama has had to do many times since entering the White House.

Obama and Biden departed OIA just before 5 p.m.
Bangladesh police escort Suman Hossain Patowari following his arrest in connection with an attack on publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, June 16, 2016.

Dhaka police on Thursday announced the arrest of a man they said participated in a machete attack on secular publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul and two writers in Dhaka on Oct. 31, 2015.

Suman Hossain Patowari, 20, one of five men suspected in the attack at Shuddhashar Publishing House, was arrested late Wednesday, Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman Masudur Rahman told BenarNews.

He was produced before the court today and the court granted five-day remand, Rahman said.

Tutul, Ranadipam Basu and Tareq Rahim survived the attack and have since fled the country or gone into hiding. Another publisher, Faisal Arefin Dipan, 43, was hacked to death at his office that day.

In mid-May, police had announced a 200,000 taka (U.S. $2,546) bounty for Patowari and five other members of the banned militant outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) who they say are responsible for the recent killings of bloggers, publishers and minority group members.

At least 36 people, including writers, LGBT activists, and members of minority communities have been killed by suspected Islamic militants in Bangladesh since February 2013.

The true story

Shuddhashar, a platform for secular thinkers writing in Bengali, had published the work of Bangladeshi-American writer Avijit Roy, among others. Roy was hacked to death by in Dhaka in February 2015.

Shuddhashar co-founder Mahbub Leelen told BenarNews Thursday that Tutul, Basu and Rahim do not recognize the suspect but hope police have nabbed the right man.

We really want to know the true story behind the killings, Leelen said, adding that the Islamic State (IS) had claimed responsibility while authorities said the group had made no inroads in Bangladesh. A lot of people have died.

The arrest came during a massive, weeklong crackdown on militant groups and criminals that has raised concern among rights activists and opposition leaders that innocent people are being swept up in the operation.

We have arrested 8,192 criminals including 119 suspected militants, Police Deputy Inspector-General (DIG) A.K.M. Shahidur Rahman told BenarNews on Monday, four days after the security sweep began.

Caught while fleeing

Meanwhile, police in Madaripur town, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of Dhaka, said local people had captured a man Wednesday moments after he hacked a Hindu man at his home.

Ripon Chakraborty, a teacher at Government Nazimuddin College, survived the attack and was being treated in hospital, Mohammad Sarwar Hossain, superintendent of police in Madaripur district, told BenarNews.

We are not sure whether Chakraborty was attacked for his faith, though the nature of the attack was similar with previous attacks in other places, Hossain said.

Wednesday afternoon, the three attackers entered the house of Chakraborty and hacked him. As the teacher screamed for help, local people gathered and chased the three attackers who were fleeing on a battery-run three-wheeler, student Abdul Momen told BenarNews.

They caught Golam Faizullah Fahim while the two others fled, Momen said.

Fahims father, a businessman in Dhaka, notified police that his son had been missing since June 11, Hossain said.

Under interrogation, the suspect revealed that the attack had been ordered by members of banned militant group Hizbut Tahrir, who told him, This person is an enemy of Islam. He should be killed, Agence France-Presse reported.
Kashmiri mourners wave an Islamic State flag and shout pro-freedom slogans during the funeral procession for Sheikh Tanveer Sultan, 32, a psychiatric patient who was apparently killed in a shootout with police in Srinagar, June 15, 2016.

Separatists who claim to be fighting for Kashmirs freedom from Indian rule say they oppose any effort by the Islamic State (IS) to make inroads in the disputed Himalayan region.

IS is an anti-Islamic, inhuman group of terrorists [while] the ongoing freedom movement in Kashmir is indigenous and peaceful. The Middle Eastern terror outfit has no role to play in Kashmir, said Ayaz Akbar, spokesman for the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 26 political, social and religious organizations that has been fighting for Kashmirs independence since 1993. Jammu and Kashmir is Indias only Muslim-majority state.

His remarks came in the wake of a charge sheet filed last week by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) against suspected IS recruiter Mohammad Sirajuddin, a former employee of the state-owned Indian Oil Corp. who was arrested in December 2015.

Sirajuddins online chats with suspected Middle East-based IS operatives revealed that the terror outfit wanted to establish a caliphate in Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region claimed by India and Pakistan, according to the charge sheet viewed by BenarNews.

In one of the chats, Jundhulla Minaa, a United Arab Emirates-based IS member and close aide of Sirajuddin, said, Kashmir will be Islamic State. Kashmir is Kashmir IS  Inshallah (God willing), the charge sheet said.

IS recruits

We strongly condemn any assertions that suggest the possibility of an IS caliphate in Kashmir. We condemn the violence and bloodshed unleashed by the terror group in the Middle East and other parts of the world, Akbar told BenarNews.

Sirajuddin, 33, actively recruited Indians for IS, spread the groups propaganda through social networking sites, and designed a special currency note for the IS regime in Kashmir  a 20 rupee bill that said, IS welcome in Kashmir, the NIA said in its charge sheet.

Sirajuddin, who is from the southern Indian state of Karnataka, is one of about two dozen suspected IS operatives or sympathizers arrested in anti-terror operations following the Nov. 13, 2015, attack in Paris that killed some 130 people. Since the establishment of IS in 2014, about 30 Indian Muslims have been arrested for allegedly working for or showing sympathy toward the terror group.

At least 23 Indians have left the country for Iraq and Syria to fight alongside the militant group and six are believed to be killed in battle, according to Indian intelligence sources.

Although recent propaganda material apparently released by IS suggests the group has made significant inroads in the sub-continent, the Indian government consistently maintains it has no footprint in the country.

Reacting to release of an apparent IS video late last month that featured Indian recruits threatening to wage war against cow-worshipping Hindus, Minister for Home Affairs Rajnath Singh said: There is no threat from IS. Along with the alertness of the security, the Muslims of the country are also against the IS. In India, the Muslim community wont allow them to do so.

Not interested

The International Forum of Justice and Human Rights, a group fighting against rights violations by Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir state, said IS had failed to leave a mark among Kashmiris because of the groups anti-Islamic ideology.

IS is committing acts of terror and spreading violence across the world  this very ideology is against the teachings of Islam, Ahsan Untoo, chairman of the rights group, told BenarNews.

Instead of focusing on Kashmir, the IS should worry about its own survival. The people of Kashmir are fighting against rights abuses and excesses committed by Indian security forces. They are not interested in killing innocent people, Untoo said.

More than 70,000 people, an overwhelming majority of them Kashmiri civilians, have been killed since the outbreak of a separatist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir in the late 1980s.

Shabir Ahmad Malik, a recent college graduate from Srinagar who seeks Kashmirs independence from India, said, Kashmiris do not need any support from an anti-Islamic group like the IS to liberate themselves from India.

Initially, some misled Kashmiri youngsters began showing sympathy to the group. But now, I dont believe a single Kashmiri supports the actions of IS, Malik told BenarNews.
A Malaysian official on Thursday admitted paying 12 million ringgits (U.S. $2.94 million) to unnamed organizations in the Philippines but denied that the money went to militant group Abu Sayyaf in exchange for four hostages, The Star newspaper reported.

Deputy Prime Minister Dr. Ahmad Zahid Hamidi insisted no ransom payment was made to release four Malaysian sailors  Wong Teck Kang, 31, Wong Chii Teck, 29, Johnny Lau Kim Hien, 21, and Wong Hung Sing, 34 who were abducted April 1 and released June 7.

I can confirm that 12 million ringgits was handed over to the Special Branch given in the form of contributions to certain organizations in the Philippines, he said.

Zahid declined to reveal what groups received the donations, while reiterating that the money did not go to Abu Sayyaf, which beheaded a Malaysian national in November 2015.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the families of the four ex-hostages said the money was given to Malaysian authorities on May 24 to pay for their release.

Spokesman Lau Cheng Kiong said 9 million ringgit ($2.2 million) was donated by people in Malaysia and abroad; 2 million ringgit ($490,000) was from the shipping company that employed the men; and one million ringgit ($244,000) was raised by mortgaging a family residence.

Family members said they made the announcement because donors asked about what happened to the money.

Philippine media reported on Thursday that four more Malaysian sailors had been abducted in Sulu waters, but Malaysian officials dismissed the report as a mere rumor.

The militant group based in the southern Philippines kidnapped fourteen Indonesian and four Malaysian sailors in the Celebes and Sulu seas in March and April. All have now been released.

The Abu Sayyaf, which claims allegiance to the so-called Islamic State group (IS), recently beheaded two Canadian men after failing to receive ransom payments.
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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, June 16, 2016 Contacts: Nicholas Whipps, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 844-7131, nwhipps@biologicaldiversity.org

Rene Umberger, For the Fishes, (808) 875-8759, rene@forthefishes.org Analysis: U.S. Pet Trade Imports 6 Million Tropical Fish Exposed to Cyanide Poisoning Each Year Finding Dory Expected to Fuel Consumer Demand for Royal Blue Tangs, Other Wild-caught Fish OAKLAND, Calif. A new analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity and For the Fishes finds that 6 million fish tropical marine fish imported into the United States each year for the pet trade have been exposed to cyanide poisoning. A photo of cyanide fishing is available for media use. The findings come ahead of the release of Disney/Pixars Finding Dory, which is likely to fuel a rapid increase in the sale of tropical reef fish, including royal blue tangs like Dory. The groups new report, Poisoned Waters, examines the destructive practice of cyanide poisoning in places like the Philippines and Indonesia that supply the tropical aquarium-fish market in the United States. Finding Dory is almost certainly going to trigger a consumer drive to buy tropical fish like the ones seen in the movie. Sadly this business has a dark and dangerous side that ruins coral reefs and devastates tropical fish populations, said Nicholas Whipps with the Center. To catch fish with cyanide, crushed cyanide tablets are placed in squirt bottles filled with seawater. The dissolved cyanide is then sprayed directly onto the reefs near the targeted fish to stun the fish and make it easier to scoop them up. In some cases 55-gallon drums of cyanide have been dumped overboard to capture fish. As much as 50 percent of all nearby fish are killed on contact, as well as nearby corals. Most of the fish that survive are then shipped to the United States and sold for aquariums. This report reveals the extensive destruction to reefs and wildlife caused by the saltwater aquarium hobby, said Rene Umberger with For the Fishes. People who cherish the ocean can take action to protect it by learning which species are captured in the wild, possibly with cyanide, using our free mobile app, Tank Watch. Earlier this year the Center, For the Fishes, The Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society International petitioned the Obama administration to prevent the import of tropical aquarium fish that are caught overseas using cyanide. Under the Lacey Act, it is illegal to import animals caught in violation of another countrys laws. The largest reef-fish-exporting countries  the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka  have banned cyanide fishing but do little to regulate the practice. The Lacey Act prohibits the import of these illegally caught fish into the United States, but enforcement is lacking. As many as 500 metric tons of cyanide are dumped annually on reefs in the Philippines alone. The petition asks the National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use their authority under the Lacey Act to halt these illegal imports. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. www.biologicaldiversity.org.


This ribbon diagram shows two views of the structure of the enzyme Tps2 as it removes a phosphate from a sugar molecule (yellow, orange and red). DURHAM, N.C. -- Fungal infections can be devastating to human health, killing approximately 150 people every hour, resulting in over a million deaths every year, more than malaria and tuberculosis combined.

Unfortunately the antifungal drug arsenal is limited, with many of the best drugs more than 50 years old.

The search for new antifungals has recently alighted on a simple biological pathway, the production of trehalose, a chemical cousin to table sugar that pathogenic fungi need to survive in their human hosts. A team of Duke researchers has solved the structure of an enzyme that is required to synthesize this fungal factor.

When the enzyme is blocked, pathogenic fungi are unable to endure the stressful leap from the outside world into the human body.

The research, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paves the way for designing new antifungal drugs against an enzyme that is essential to the three most deadly fungi: Cryptococcus, Candida, and Aspergillus.

"We found that the active site of this enzyme is identical in each of these pathogenic fungi, so they all use the same mechanism and have the same residues that are necessary for the production of trehalose," said senior study author Richard G. Brennan, Ph.D., professor and chair of biochemistry at Duke University School of Medicine.

"By targeting those active sites, we hope to create a drug with broad-spectrum effects," Brennan said. "If you could kill one fungus, you're going to kill them all; at least if you can get the drug inside."

The development of antifungal drugs has lagged far behind that of other antimicrobials. Because fungi are eukaryotic multicellular organisms like humans, they share a lot of the same genes, proteins, and pathways. As a result, drugs that go after a fungal protein can also harm the human, triggering devastating side effects. These drug toxicities are one of the main reasons that antifungal therapies ultimately fail, either in the clinic or earlier in development. Luckily, the enzymes for synthesizing the trehalose sugar aren't present in people, so scientists can target them with less concern for collateral damage.

Pathogenic fungi use trehalose as a kind of molecular heat shield. Organisms like Cryptococcus, Candida, and Aspergillus spend most of their time either down in the dirt or out on the laboratory bench, where the temperature is a comfortable 30 degrees Celsius. But when they move into an unlucky host, they are suddenly exposed to a steamy 37 degrees. Trehalose protects the fungi's delicate proteins and membranes from falling apart in all that heat.

Brennan and his colleagues, including John R. Perfect, M.D., Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Duke University Medical Center, figured that if they could stop trehalose from being made, they could eliminate the pathogen's protection, such that every time the fungi jump into a host they are sending themselves to a fiery death.

Trehalose is a disaccharide or a double sugar, two sugar molecules that are made and linked together by two enzymes called Tps1 and Tps2, which do their jobs one after the other. Before the scientists could target either of the biosynthetic enzymes, they needed to know its structure.

Yi Miao, PhD, a graduate student in Brennan's lab, followed the instructions written in the genetic sequence of Cryptococcus, Candida, and Aspergillus to build Tps2 (the latter of the two biosynthetic enzymes) from scratch. Then he used a technique called x-ray crystallography to produce an atomic-level three-dimensional structure of the essential molecule.

Miao took several pictures of Tps2 to produce a kind of time-lapse video of the molecule in action: first, as it sat idle; next, as it bound a precursor molecule called trehalose-6-phosphate, popping off its phosphate group to create trehalose; and finally, its job done, as it released trehalose and was alone again.

Afterwards the researchers generated a series of mutations in Tps2 to see if they could impair its ability to produce trehalose, and as a result render pathogenic fungi susceptible to heat shock. They showed that a wide variety of mutations could inactivate the enzyme and create fungi unable to survive the jump from 30 to 37 degrees.

"It appears that this enzyme has become so specific that it has basically evolved itself into a corner." Brennan said. "That's good for us, because if it tries to evolve resistance to an antifungal drug, it will likely lose its activity in the process, so the drug might not be able to destroy it but it will be a lousy enzyme, and the pathogen will die anyway."

Brennan says he and his colleagues are now using their structures of Tps2 to conduct "rational" drug design to create new antifungals that can kill a broad spectrum of pathogenic fungi. They are also performing high-throughput screening for small molecules or other pharmaceuticals that can generate the same effect.

Source: Duke University
Jem's Birding & Ringing Exploits in the Eastern Province and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia
Previously a forgotten market - and especially in one of South Africa's poorest provinces, the Eastern Cape - townships were formerly dominated by informal traders and spaza shops. For a larger variety and bigger purchases, residents were forced to spend their hard-earned savings on public transport to retail centres in town or in neighbouring centres.

Since retailers began entering the township space in the late 1990s, and more so in recent years, township residents have benefitted enormously, said Mdantsane City's GM, Dean Deary, whose centre has become a mainstay in one of South Africas largest townships, Mdantsane, outside East London. Mdantsane City recently celebrated its eighth anniversary.

Aside from assisting in job creation, township-based shopping centres have also alleviated residents need to commute long distances to enjoy a shopping experience that many South Africans take for granted, Deary said.

Township shopping centres have also become a bricks-and-mortar manifestation of the increased spending power associated with a rising black middle class.

The establishment of Mdantsane City in what was once the countrys second-largest township after Soweto is one such success story. Built on the vision of Eastern Cape-born business magnate Sisa Ngebulana, the mall is one of a growing number of township centres now dotted throughout the province.

As head of the Billion Group, it was Ngebulanas personal quest to give back to rural and peri-urban communities similar to those he grew up in, and make life more convenient for residents.

More than 100 stores

Having celebrated its eight birthday in April, Mdantsane City now sprawls across a 9.8-hectare site close to the national road connecting East London and King Williams Town. It houses over 100 stores and draws foot traffic of more than 835,000 each month, making it the third-largest mall in the province.

More than a retail offering, centres such as Mdantsane City are increasingly becoming community-centric, said Deary. At Mdantsane City, emphasis has been placed on creating a community hub and bringing strategic services, such as Buffalo City municipality and the SA Social Security Agency (SASSA) services, to residents. A National Renal Care centre and SAPS satellite office are also located at the mall to service community needs.

While a large percentage of Mdantsanes more than 200,000 residents are unemployed and dependent on social grants, the success of a mall such as Mdantsane City relies on achieving the right tenant mix to meet shoppers needs. At the same time, brands such Woolworths, Foschini and Markhams also trade well and are testament to the increased retail clout of residents in these areas.

Sheer number of shoppers

Although spend per capita is lower than that for suburban counterparts, the sheer number of shoppers brings performance on par in terms of store turnover. With an average trading density of around R32,724 per square metre per year, a township mall like Mdantsane City has become an attractive proposition for investors.

The reality is that the majority of Mdantsane Citys shoppers occupy the LSM (living standard measure) 4-7 lower-to-middle income bracket. But those on the lower end of the scale can take advantage of the bulk buying power of anchor tenants like Pick n Pay and Shoprite, as opposed to the unavoidably inflated prices and limited offering of the corner shop.

A rising black middle class, on the other hand, now also has access to high-end brands that previously did not enter the township market to meet their aspirational lifestyle values, according to Deary.

As key contributors to local economic development, township malls have a major role to play in creating jobs, stimulating spend and acting as a catalyst for investment growth. While obvious socio-economic challenges, such as a lack of infrastructure, poverty and unemployment, are still very much everyday realities, these decentralised shopping centres are nevertheless making their mark in previously underdeveloped areas.
Allan Gray Orbis Foundation's High School Scholarship is available to learners who demonstrate the potential to excel academically and show financial need. The scholarship will provide the brightest Grade 6 learners across South Africa with the opportunity to map their future.

What you need to know:

The Scholarship covers full high school tuition and boarding fees. In addition, Scholars will receive allowances to subsidise travel, stationery, prescribed books, toiletries, school uniforms, civilian clothing, pocket money and extra-mural activities. Scholars also participate in the Foundation's Development Programme, which aims to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.

The Foundation believes that a solid education is the starting point to any entrepreneurial journey and therefore chooses to partner with schools that have a track record of excellence. Successful scholars will have the opportunity to attend one of the Foundations placement schools.

Application criteria:

 Academic requirements: Applicants must achieve 70% or higher in Mathematics and English and an average of 70% in both Grade 5 and Grade 6

 Evidence of entrepreneurial potential:

- Intellectual imagination: enjoys being creative and innovative

- Achievement excellence: sets high academic and non-academic standards for self

- Courageous commitment: must be courageous and determined, brave and persistent

- Spirit of significance: wants to impact others and make a difference

- Personal initiative: prepared to take action to address challenges

 The applicant must demonstrate financial need and must be a South African citizen.

How to get an application form:

 Visit Allan Gray Orbis Foundation to download an application form, or

 SMS SCHOLAR and your fax number or email address to 36777 to have an application form faxed or emailed to you (SMS is free)

Applications open on 17 June 2016.
I recently had the opportunity to attend the Sustainable Brands Summit . This was a gathering of local and international brands, social entrepreneurs and sustainability advocates sharing their stories, thoughts and strategies around sustainability. The information I received from this event left me thinking, "What am I doing about sustainability in my business?"

"In a volatile world of growing social inequality, rising population, development challenges and climate change, the need for businesses to adapt is clear, as are the benefits and opportunities." Paul Coleman Unilever CEO.

The call for responsible, sustainable and equitable business practices is getting louder and any responsible business leader should be acting on it. So what is a sustainable business? Wikipedia sums up the definition: It is an enterprise that has minimal negative impact on the global or local environment, community, society, or economy - a business that strives to meet the triple bottom line.

Ive noted some interesting points from speakers at the Sustainable Brands Summit and added my thoughts and research to share with you, my fellow business owner. I believe this could be of value, as you think about building a sustainability strategy for your business.

1. Smart companies turn sustainability into billion dollar brands

Doing good, is good for business, says Richard Branson  and theres data to support this. Unilever is one of these smart companies. Their CEO reported that theyve seen positive results from their Sustainable Living Brands programme. In 2014, these brands delivered stronger and faster growth than other Unilever brands; they also contributed to 50% of the companys growth and grew at double the rate of the rest of the business. The business case for incorporating sustainable practices into your business strategies is solid. Although the initial investments may seem high, the long-term returns are worth it.

2. Goodvertising is good for brand, bottom-line, people and planet

Spread the word about your good business practices. Tell the good stories about what your business is doing around sustainability. Its not only good for business, but also for society at large and the planet. Brands are influencers and if big brands are sharing their sustainability stories, they spread the good message and influence others to make necessary changes.

Woolworths is an example of a company that does doing good well, and this is one of the reasons theyve been voted the most reputable retailer in South Africa. Their values, such as Integrity sustainability and excellent service, are at the heart of everything they do.

3. Human brands are brands that are empathetic

A sustainable brand is an empathetic one. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone elses shoes, experiencing the world from another individuals perspective. Empathy is central in the designing of sustainable systems, processes and brands.

As business owners, we need to think about how our products and services impact the user. Do they make life better for them? Are we adding value? How does a brand do this? One answer is human-centred design. Made popular by ideo.org, human-centred design is a process whereby  you, build solutions from the perspective of the user. Visit Human Centred Design to learn more.

4. Innovation was not a coincidence, but a game plan

Innovation was not a coincidence, but a game plan, stated P&G IMEA president, Mohammed Samir, in his speech at the summit. Innovation and sustainability go hand in hand. P&G reported that between 2007 and 2012, their sustainable innovation brand sales (products that provide a greater than 10% reduction in energy use) compared to older product versions, sold $52bn. This is approximately 11% of the company's total cumulative sales over the same period. Read more here. Sustainable innovation is the equivalent of evolution in the business world  its a competitive and long-term growth advantage.

5. You need to be a brand with purpose if you want to effectively reach millennials

Todays youth look for value in the brands they choose to consume. If you, as a business owner or innovator, are not creating brands which are youth focused, youre missing out on future growth potential.

Here are the facts that should inspire you to start creating sustainable products and services targeted at the youth:

Our continent, Africa: This continent has the youngest population in the world. The African Economic outlook reported that Africa has almost 200 million youth, and by the year 2045, this number will double.



The youths incredible spending power: According to Adage, starting in 2017, millennials will spend $200bn annually, and up to $10tn in their lifetime.



The youth is socially and environmentally conscious: An online global study conducted by Neilson found that in 2014, 55% of respondents aged between 15 and 20 were willing to pay more for products and services which have a social and environmental impact and this increased to 72% in their 2015 survey.

6. We have an obligation to imagine a better world

Being conscious about what we are doing to the environment and to society as a whole is a moral obligation. Its not all about money Its about people using their skills and figuring out ways to use the assets of their businesses to drive not only profits, but a better world. Writing a cheque might impact hundreds of peoples lives; mobilising your whole business to drive change can impact millions of lives and give a whole new life purpose to all the people who work in your company. Richard Branson, Screw Business as Usual, 2013.

As a business still in its early stages I have the opportunity to design my business model to ensure that sustainable business practices are at the core of what I do, and not just an afterthought. Im going to start making sustainability central to my business, I hope you will too.
Facebook's not just for socialising with friends and family, it's also a cutting-edge way for marketers to communicate with consumers in the most personal way possible. Here's how...

Kate Sayre, global head of consumer goods strategy at Facebook, participated in the digital disruptors panel at the Consumer Goods Forum in Cape Town this Thursday, along with Vivienne Ming, co-founder of Socos and Michael Fertik, executive founder and chairman of Reputation.com.

With the retail industry in crisis, its time to accept that digital is now integral to businesses moving forward. While the session centred on what you can do to ensure your business makes the most of the digital world and swims the distance, as one of the biggest disruptors out there, Sayre shared exclusive insights for the South African market.

Globally, on average people spend 50 minutes a day on Facebook, Instagram and/or Messenger. When we shift focus to mobile that correlates to one in five minutes spent on Facebook and Instagram in the United States.

Kate Sayre, global head of consumer goods strategy at Facebook.

With this as a backdrop, theres no doubt that digital is a crucial aspect of all businesses, particularly when it comes to the realm of marketing. More and more consumers getting information from the digital space and the increasing shift to mobile, particularly to source information on brands and communicate with friends and family on a personal level, as well as in deciding what to buy. This is even more striking when you consider that the biggest shift of momentum has all taken place in the past three years alone. Its a rapid shift and the retail and marketing industries need to focus on these new consumer needs.

Consumer goods are created by brands that are not sold directly  instead, theyre transactions conducted through the wall of a retail intermediary. With new technological advances they can now message customers directly and personalise that messaging, as well as track consumer response like never before with almost instant feedback.

Personal marketing, segment by segment

Sayre explains that Facebook is the perfect platform in which to do so, especially as companies start to roll-out personal marketing at scale. Most important is the need to go back to basics in terms of who youre targeting, focusing on the unique selling point and identifying specific market segments more closely, such as with geographic segmentation, which means you can now tailor your storytelling specifically to both your loyal regular users and the new consumer youd like to attract.

This insight hints at how we can still achieve traditional marketing ideals in new ways, such as increasing consumer adoption of the brand throughout the customers purchase journey, with closer reach as they make that purchase decision.

Digital disruption is a good thing for business, Sayre asserts. Consumers have long embraced digital innovation, which means it may be difficult for industry to catch up and adopt new ways of interacting with them  this puts those early adopters in a good position as they can match their messaging for the mobile medium. Think about it, the phone is the most personal device imaginable, so of course the consumer expects messaging sent to him or her on this platform to be tailored.

The difference between data and insights

If thats the expectation, best your brand hops on trends as soon as possible, or you stand to lose out on customer interaction like never before, as the shift cant be made overnight. The challenge is to understand the difference between those reams of data and whats actually actionable insight  youll need to sift through that data to find the insights thatll make a difference.

Putting this into practice, Facebooks own consumer goods strategy then is based on the reach of the platform, and the fact that 1.6bn people are monthly active Facebookers. They aim to use their position as a win-win for all, by offering value to advertisers as they can achieve their objectives like never before due to reach if they provide a relevant message, and creating a deeper connection through that enhanced customer experience.

Little wonder that Sayres most looking forward to learning how other global companies are managing their consumer goods strategies at the Summit, particularly as its being held in South Africa this year, one of the worlds foremost growth markets. Click here for more on the Consumer Goods Forum.
A major two day meeting of African editors, managing editors, media owners, representatives of journalists' unions and African media organisations has concluded in the Ghanaian capital Accra, with concrete agreements on how the media can use its agenda setting role to tell the story of Africa to the continent and internationally.

Image by 123RF

Bringing together over 30 top level African media personalities from all five regions of the continent, the forum from 11 to 12 June was organised and sponsored by the State of the Union (SOTU) and Oxfam, with support from the African Media Initiative (AMI) and the African Union Commission. The selection of senior level participants was therefore meant to enable the meeting not only to discuss, but also to make decisions on the way forward in communicating about developments on the African continent.

The forum provided opportunity for frank interaction between the AU and the media, with a combination of information sharing, discussions, brainstorming and planning. To support the discussions, the AUC delegation distributed copies of the African Union handbook and the first 10 year implementation plan of Agenda 2063 as key resources.

Media took the opportunity to highlight the challenges they face in reporting on the African Unions activities and to suggest ways of improvement.

Agenda 2063

Ambassador Jean Mfasoni, special advisor to the AUC Chairperson, Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, made a presentation on Understanding the African Union, taking the editors through the aspirations and major expected outcomes of Africas Agenda 2063, as well as key successes that have been achieved under the Agenda to date. Examples were drawn from the areas of peace, stability, good governance, democracy and human rights; agriculture, natural resource management and food security; inclusive economic development and industrialization; health, education and employment; resource mobilisation; a peoples African Union; and institutional capacities and relations with regional economic communities, AU organs and partners.

Our media needs to reflect the true Africa as it is, in an accountable and transparent manner, with its positive achievements and negative aspects to be corrected in order to reach better levels of performance for the benefit of all African peoples, said Mfasoni, adding, Your sustained efforts can greatly facilitate public awareness of the Africa we want, around its seven aspirations.

Osai Ojigho, SOTU coordinator, explained that her organisation is committed to working with the AU Commission to popularise the work of the African Union and the impact it is making on the continent.

SOTU is pushing African voices in support of the AU, she noted. Explaining why SOTU decided to fund the editors forum, she said, We want to bring the AU closer to the people and we need dialogue to see how best we can do it together.

Ojigho presented an analysis of the status of ratification and domestication of key instruments of the African Union, adding that SOTU is engaged in lobbying for the ratification of all AU instruments continent-wide as they had been adopted by heads of state and Government to advance Africas development.

Eric Chinje of the African Media initiative, announced the impending launch of an information exchange platform, which would greatly benefit attempts to collate and share information coming from different media houses for more effective distribution to the African continent. He urged media to feel a sense of commitment to the continent, and play their part in achieving the goals of the AU, while at the same time urging the African Union to fully recognise the place and role of the media.

Story of Africa

Wynne Musabayana, the AUCs deputy head of communication and information presented a technical paper on the spaces available to the media to interact with the AU. She also took the participants through planned activities to enhance the work of the media such as the proposed AU media awards, improved functions on the website, and proposed the formation of an editors database.

The ensuing debate shed light on the medias work processes and requirements. She highlighted the necessity for a long term, substantive relationship with key African media editors - one that has clear strategies and an action plan so as to effectively tell the story of Africa.

She also informed participants of the upcoming editors forum to be held in Kigali, Rwanda on the sidelines of the summit of the African Union, using it as an example of the commissions commitment to work with and through the media.

Marceline Nyambala of the Association of Kenya Media Women, took the meeting through the topic News sources: What makes news and what does not- the role of media in making the news. Sophie Mokoena of the South African Broadcasting Corporation presented a summary of the first days proceedings, emphasising the need for practical and serious efforts at telling the African narrative. She highlighted the need for leaders across the continent to avail themselves to the media in order to project the continent correctly.

Jane Godia, editor of the African Women and Child Features Services, discussed, Medias role in showcasing women leaders across the continent, a topic that led to positive pronouncements on the need to not only profile high flying women, but also to shed light on those performing critical functions in lower positions as well as on supporting the girl child to have equal status and opportunities in life.

The meeting ended with concrete proposals that are expected to lead to more robust reporting on the AU.
Orange Money is now available in metropolitan France. This service is offered to Orange mobile subscribers in France and enables them to transfer money via their mobile to other Orange Money customers in Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, and within Metropolitan France.

We are delighted to offer the Orange Money solution to our customers living in Metropolitan France and particularly to those with a link to Africa  this is a simple, secure and instant money transfer service between family and friends via mobile, states Patrick Roussel, Orange France consumer sales director.

By launching the service in France, Orange is responding to strong demand from its customers with family or friends in Africa.

Money transfers

Orange Money provides a money transfer service from France to Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal through a simple mobile transaction. Orange also makes it easier for recipients to withdraw money from over 30,000 Orange Money points in the three recipient countries, an unrivalled number of points of sale in these countries.

This service will develop gradually and Orange intends to increase the number of points of sale in France. An Orange Money app will be available soon in France and Orange will look to expand the money transfer offer from France to other countries over time.

Amongst the stores offering the secure Orange Money service in Metropolitan France, Orange already has 41 points of sale: newsagents, call shops, local grocery stores and tobacconists across the country, as well as an Orange Money store in Paris.

Mobile money

Orange Money is a mobile account linked to an Orange telephone number, and it is designed to meet the needs of customers in Africa, where most transactions are made in cash. The Orange Money service, launched in Cote d'Ivoire in 2008, has been a success for the Group. Over 18 million customers already use it in 14 countries in Africa to carry out transactions such as payments and money transfers.

In 2013 Orange launched the first international money transfer service for its Orange Money customers between Senegal, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire. In March 2015, this service was expanded to transfers to and from Airtel Money customers in Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal.

Rates for recipients in Africa are explained in the terms and conditions of Orange Money packages in the recipient country.
First, YesPath and Madison Logic have partnered on a program that will allow marketers to trigger campaigns based on buyer signals. Through the partnership, YesPath will identify real-time intent and engagement signals which will then trigger Madison Logics engine to launch relevant campaigns.

The YesPath team has developed an innovative approach to account-based marketing, said Madison Logic Co-Founder and SVP Audience Development Vin Turk. By combining this approach with Madison Logics rich data, clients now have unprecedented reach and scale to deliver the most relevant content to the most receptive prospects.

Meanwhile, Invoca is launching the Invoca for Social tool, which has a focus on Facebook ad optimization. Using the new tool brands can improve attribution, improve audience insights, and obtain call data from within Facebooks reporting.

As smartphones have become the primary device for digital interaction, its no surprise that people are increasingly blending online and offline interactions, said Kyle Christensen, VP of Marketing at Invoca. Marketers are realizing that todays customer journey often jumps around between using the Facebook app, a mobile website, and an in-store visit or phone call. Invoca for Social is an important step forward for the millions of businesses advertising on Facebook that are looking to close the online/offline gap and optimize for the entire omnichannel customer journey.

And, nChannel has partnered with Shopify Plus, giving merchants the ability to move their ecommerce data into Shopify Plus, and to integrate their fulfillment systems with the platform.

As any merchant or customer can attest, the retail industry has experienced a fundamental shift in the way it operates, in large part to the changing consumer shopping experience and what customers demand from todays retailers, said Steve Weber, president and CEO of nChannel. Before they hit the buy button, Shopify Plus provides merchants with the tools to make it easy for shoppers to find and purchase the perfect product. After purchasen, nChannel enables flawless order delivery and provides real-time inventory updates to avoid stock outs and backorders.
Popular Czech websites mislead the public

16. 6. 2016

cas cteni 2 minuty





The highly popular, racist Czech website Parlamentni listy systematically misleads the public, say specialist from Masaryk University in Brno. They have analysed in detail 2660 articles, published by "pro-Russian websites" Sputnik, AC24, Svet kolem nas (The world around us) and Parlamentni listy in March 2016. The analysis shows that 40 per cent of these articles placed non-existent blame on various individuals or institutions, 34 per cent of these articles contained unsubstantiated alarmist news and rumours. 18 per cent of these articles gave individuals or institutions unsubstantiated labels and almost 8 per cent of the published news articles contained subjective views of their authors.

It has been found that the websites under scrutiny do not use primitive pro-Russian propaganda, or fake pictures. Instead, they construct an image of a collapsing democratic system of the West. When reporting the situation in Ukraine or Syria, these websites pretend that nothing serious or drastic is happening in these countries.

The Parlamentni listy website seems to be the worst of the three examined websites. More than 50 per cent of its articles placed non-existent blame on various individuals or institutions, more than 30 per cent of its articles were pure fantasy, 30 per cent of its articles gave individuals and institutions unsubstantiated labels and more than 12 per cent of its articles spread fear. The Masaryk University analysis has shown that Parlamentni listy is a website which systematically disseminates anti-refugee propaganda and supports the political and economic interests of Russia and China and of those Czech politicans who support the governments of these countries. Mainstream Czech politicians give interviews to Parlamentni listy and publish their articles on this website, thus legitimising it.

Source in Czech HERE

More on Parlamentni listy:

A Czech website which is in the forefront of spreading anti-refugee hatred

Czech presidential spokesperson praises a racist website as a "highly pluralist medium"

There are stories like this in the Czech Republic every day that never make it to the outside world because of a lack of translation. You can support us and help reveal what's happening in Central Europe today. Please make a contribution today on www.paypal.com and send your donation to redakce@blisty.cz. We fully rely on crowdfunding in our work. Thank you.

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Nai Hongsar, NMSPs vice-chairman, stated that the money should be regarded as a tax, not extortion.

For our men to be maintained in some areas the need to collect these fees is unavoidable. It is not a lot of money. [Soldiers] only ask local residents to give as much as they can. This is not extortion; it should be viewed as a tax. The government uses its budget to provide for the Tatmadaw [government army]. We can only rely on the public to support our troops. We are here because the people support us. We are not charging them too much.

NMSP troops reportedly began collecting 3,000 kyats or three Pyi, a measurement of rice, from households in Kyaikmayaw Township on June 6. Requests were made in the village tracts of Kadar, Kanar Lo, Maegro, and Than-ga Laung, according to Member of Parliament Min Aung Mon who represents the Kyaikmayaw constituency.

In 1995, the government provided monthly rations and financial support to the NMSP after the resistance group signed a ceasefire agreement with the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).

Now, say party representatives, NMSPs signatures on a state-level ceasefire agreement and bi-lateral union-level ceasefire agreement with the previous administration have not yet resulted in an offer of government support.

The NMSP did not sign the national ceasefire agreement inked by eight other ethnic armed groups last October.
Since September, confirmed cases of Covid-19 have been found in Mon State, and there is a problem of time delay in transporting them to the hospital...


Sao Kiaomurng Mangrai and Sao Sein Mya soon after their marriage

The 18th of 19 children, he inherited little claim to wealth or power, and his passing made no news. Yet he was a kind, principled man, who suffered unjust persecution and exile after the 1962 coup, and his story deserves to be told  not least as a timely reminder of a not-so-distant past era of Shan self-rule.

When Sao Kiaomurng was born, in 1920, Kengtung was in its heyday. The largest of the 33 Shan States, covering most of the trans-Salween area, its main source of wealth was opium  licit in those days. His father, the ruling prince or Saopha, lived an ornate lifestyle, residing in a grand Maharaja-style palace with his six wives. Like other Shan princes, he was left to administer his own state, despite annexation by the British.



Sao Kawnkiao Inthaleng and his 8 princes

Sao Kiaomurng was born to the third wife, Nang Bothiplong. He attended the American Baptist Missionary School in Kengtung, then ordained as a Buddhist novice for two years, learning to read and write his native Tai Khuen (a language similar to northern Thai). He completed his education at the School for Sons of Shan State Chiefs in Taunggyi.

Sibling rivalry among the extended princely family was to spawn tragedy. In 1937, soon after acceding to the throne, his eldest brother, Sao Kawng Tai, was assassinated by a cousin. The murdered rulers son, Sao Sai Long, nicknamed Shorty, only 10 years old at the time, was to become the next and last princely ruler of Kengtung.

During World War Two, Sao Kiaomurng experienced the Japanese invasion and subsequent Thai occupation of Kengtung, ceded to Thailand by Japan under an agreement in 1943.

I remember him describing the heavy-handed Thai attempts to modernize the Shans, on the orders of Field Marshal Phibulsongkram: They made us wear shoes in temples. My sisters were asked to cut and curl their hair, and wear skirts (not sarongs). Betel vines were cut down to stop people from chewing betel.

The Shans simply returned to their old ways after the war, but antipathy to Thailand remained. When asked by the British War Enquiry Commission, before the Panglong Conference, whether they wanted to stay under Thailand, Kengtung leaders declined this option  to the enduring chagrin of later generations.

Towards the end of the war, Sao Kiaomurng had married Sao Sein Mya, of the Mawkmai princely family, and worked for a Japanese paper-making company in Lawksawk. When the Allies began bombing Lawksawk, he took his family to hide in the jungle, and joined US Detachment 101 to fight the Japanese.

After the war, he trained in law in Taunggyi, and became the Kengtung Magistrate, assisting his nephew Sao Sai Long to administer the state. These were turbulent years for Kengtung, where thousands of Kuomintang (KMT) forces had fled after the communist takeover in China. For the first time, Burmese troops were deployed into the state to drive out the KMT, and army chief General Ne Win himself came to oversee operations. In 1958, Ne Wins convoy was attacked by the KMT near Tachileik. He was unhurt, but exploded in anger when reaching Kengtung, blaming my uncles for not warning him of the danger.

Later that year, when Ne Win headed the new caretaker government, Sao Kiaomurng was given a taste of the militarys brand of justice. While in Lashio, his 13-year-old son was knocked off his bicycle by a Burmese army jeep and suffered a serious head injury. His father wanted to charge the sergeant driving the jeep, who had no license, but was told by his brother-in-law  a police officer in Lashio  not to waste his time, as the army had become untouchable.

Sao Kiaomurng himself always tried to be fair. During his thirteen years as a judge, he avoided applying the death sentence. Ironically, this was held against him by the military authorities when, together with most leading members of the Shan ruling families, he was arrested during General Ne Wins coup on March 2, 1962.

Three of his brothers, and his nephew, Sao Sai Long, were jailed for six to seven years in Insein. Sao Kiaomurng was held in a military lock-up while authorities tried to find fault with his work as a judge, homing in on his failure to impose the death sentence in two murder cases.

Fortunately they could find no evidence of malfeasance, and he was released after a year in detention. However, like other members of the ruling family, he was forbidden from staying in Kengtung. He moved with his wife and five children to Taunggyi, where he struggled to make ends meet. While his wife earned an income from knitting, he learned to use a sewing machine, making hats for sale.



Kengtung Palace was demolished in 1991 by Burmese military

He was never to live again in his hometown. The military junta turned the Kengtung palace into an office, then demolished it in 1991  in what many saw as a deliberate act of cultural sabotage  erecting a hotel in its place. In 1996, with the setting up of the Triangle Region Command, Kengtung was formally established as the juntas eastern military bastion; its first commander was future president Thein Sein.

In 2004, Sao Kiaomurng and his wife went to the UK to stay with his youngest daughter and son-in-law. He never returned to Burma.

A merit-making ceremony for Sao Kiaomurng will be held in Kengtung on June 29-30, at Wat Ho Khoang, the temple where he ordained 85 years ago.
Speaking at the SSPP/SSA headquarters in Wanhai on Tuesday during a meeting with civilians and monks, Lieutenant General Pang Fa, said that he will speak to the TNLA leadership to help solve problems that have occurred in the area.

Lt. Gen. Pang Fa whose group did not sign on to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) with the government last year and has continued to clash with Burma's military said: Right now, the TNLA and the government's military are going to hold discussions, The Restoration Council of Shan State [the Shan State Army south who signed the NCA with the government] will also have to talk with them.



Gen Pang Fa and committee members give donations to monks

He went on to say: Even though there has been fighting between us and the Burma army for 50 to 60 years we can find the way for negotiations, but, why can't the Shan and Taang [neogtiate]. We live on the same land so we can talk to each other. Our enemy is laughing when they see us fighting each other.

We have to think deeply about who created this problem. Dont just look at it on the surface.

What the Burma army has been doing is holding water in one hand and fire in the other. This means they do not really want peace.

Fighting between the Burma army and ethnic armed groups in northern Shan State has caused thousands of people to flee their homes. Many of the refugees are currently sheltering in refugee camps in northern Shan State.

Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
The story focuses on Sargent who became the princess of Hsipaw also known as the Mahadhevi Dhusandi and her marriage with the prince who was jailed when General Ne Win launched a coup d'etat in 1962.

As the film, which is the first to explore the events surrounding Burma's 1962 coup, shows Sao Kya Seng died in detention shortly after his arrest under circumstances that have never been fully explained.

Despite the fact that more then 50 years have elapsed since Sao Kya Seng's death government officials deemed the topic of the film as too sensitive and blocked the film from being screened as part of this week's Myanmar Human Rights Film Festival.

An official from the Ministry of Information's (MOI) 15-member film review committee told the AFP news agency that screening the film could cause difficulties.

The deputy chairman of the MOI's film review committee, Thida Tin, said: "We were worried and afraid that unnecessary problems could arise because of this (film) while we are working on achieving national reconciliation."

The film was well received by members of the Shan community in northern Thailand who attended a screening of the film in Chiang Mai last month.
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You must have probably tasted basil seeds in many desserts and drinks like falooda and sherbet. These basil seeds come from the sweet basil plant (Ocimum basilicum L.) which is different from the Holy basil or tulsi plant. Basil seeds, also known as sabja seeds and tukmaria are tiny, black oval-shaped seeds that are loaded with nutrients and provide umpteen of health benefits.

Basil seeds have been used in traditional medicine for the treatment of diarrhoea, ulcer, dyspepsia and other illnesses. They are also used as a diuretic, antispasmodic, stomachic and antipyretic [1].

Basil seeds contain protein, fat, fibre, carbohydrates, water and ash. They are a good source of minerals such as magnesium, iron, zinc and manganese [1]. Basil seeds also contain phenolic compounds like rosmarinic, caftaric, caffeic, chicoric, phydroxybenzoic, pcoumaric, protocatechuic acid and rutin [2].

Basil seeds and chia seeds look quite similar, but they are different in many ways.

1. Aid in weight loss Basil seeds contain soluble dietary fibre which helps keep your stomach full for longer and provides a feeling of satiety. A study showed that obese patients who consumed 2 g of sweet basil seeds extract with 240 ml of water before lunch and supper had a significant decrease in body mass index (BMI). However, this was seen among high dose users who consumed more than 50 per cent of the extract [3].

2. Improve blood sugar Basil seeds are considered good for diabetes patients. The soluble dietary fibre present in basil seeds helps control blood sugar levels which is effective for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Consumption of soluble dietary fibre also decreases the risk of developing diabetes [4]. nutrition How to Eat Chia Seeds + Health Benefits of This Superfood

3. Decrease cholesterol levels Consumption of basil seeds can be good for your heart too. The fibre content in them can aid in lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol and increasing HDL (good) cholesterol. This reduces the risk of heart disease.

4. Increase energy levels Basil seeds are a good source of iron, an essential mineral required for blood production. Iron is an important component of haemoglobin, a substance in red blood cells (RBCs) that transports oxygen throughout the body and helps in providing energy to the body. Lack of iron in the body causes fatigue and irritability [5].

5. Support bone health Magnesium found in basil seeds plays an important role in maintaining healthy bones. Increased intake of magnesium has been shown to increase bone mineral density and helps prevent the onset of osteoporosis [6]. nutrition 8 Surprising Health Benefits Of Mango Seeds

6. Treats common cold The presence of zinc in basil seeds can help strengthen the immune system and treat common cold. It can lower the duration and severity of cold symptoms by acting as an astringent on the trigeminal nerve [7].

7. Improve brain function Basil seeds contain manganese, an essential mineral needed for healthy brain function. It binds to neurotransmitters and triggers the movement of electrical impulses throughout the body, resulting in the proper functioning of the brain [8].

8. Help in digestion When basil seeds are soaked in water they swell up and produce a gelatinous mass due to the polysaccharide layer present on the outer epidermis wall of the seed. This gelatinous substance and the presence of dietary fibre in basil seeds have been shown to aid in the digestion process [9].

9. Lower blood pressure As basil seeds act as a diuretic, they can help lower blood pressure by flushing excess salt and water out of the body. Diuretics also aids in relaxing and widening the walls of blood vessels which makes it easier for the blood to flow through. nutrition Health Benefits Of Orange Seeds That You Must Know

10. Ease stomach cramps Basil seeds have antispasmodic properties which work by slowing down the natural movements of the gut and relaxing the smooth muscles in the stomach and intestines. This helps in relieving stomach cramps.

11. Manage cancer The anti-cancer activity of basil seed extracts has been studied. Basil seed extracts have been shown to have a cytotoxic effect on human osteosarcoma cell lines (MG63). Consumption of basil seeds can cause these cancer cells to die [10].

12. Prevent bacteria-causing diseases The antimicrobial activity of basil seed extract has the potent ability to stop all kinds of pathogens including pseudomonas aeruginosa, a type of bacteria that causes infections in humans [10].

13. Enhance skin and hair health Basil seeds contain a significant amount of protein, iron, zinc and magnesium which keeps your hair shiny and promotes hair growth. The antioxidant activity of the seeds helps in stimulating the growth of new cells, thus improving skin health.

How To Use Basil Seeds  Soak 1 tablespoon of washed basil seeds in 1 cup of water (use more water if desired).

 Allow the seeds to soak for about 15 minutes.

 As the seeds swell up you will see a grey-coloured gel coated around the seed.

 Strain the soaked basil seeds and add them in your dishes.

Uses Of Basil Seeds  Basil seeds are used as a thickening and stabilising agent in the food industry.

 Basil seed gum can stabilise ice cream, salad dressing, jellies, low-fat whipped cream and used as a fat replacement in yogurt and mayonnaise.

 Basil seeds can also be used to thicken recipes like soups, sauces and desserts.

 Use basil seeds in smoothies, milkshakes, lemonade, salad dressings, pudding, oatmeal, whole-grain pancakes, whole grain pasta dishes, bread and muffins. Note: When using basil seeds in baked goods grind them and use them than using soaked basil seeds. How Much Basil Seeds To Eat Per Day? Consume one to two teaspoons of basil seeds per day.

Basil Seeds Recipes Sabja lemonade [11] Ingredients:  1 large lemon

 2 tbsp sugar

 A pinch of salt

 1 tbsp sabja seeds

 600 ml water

  tsp black salt (optional) Method:  Clean and wash the seeds.

 In a bowl, pour 1/3 cup lukewarm water and add the sabja seeds. Let it swell up.

 In a bowl, add lemon juice, sugar syrup, salt and black salt. Mix it well and add sabja seeds along with the water and stir well.

 Pour this beverage into the glasses and serve chilled.
WASHINGTON  The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is urging states to adopt policies to ensure issuers meet their disclosure requirements and provide investors with relevant information.

The recommendations come after SIFMA conducted a review of current state policies related to local government bond issuance, information disclosure, and financial audits. The study of state laws included all fifty states as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

SIFMA also recently unveiled a state-by-state capital markets database that includes, among other things, downloadable data for each state detailing total muni bond issuance, top muni issuers, the number of broker-dealers and financial advisors, as well as total securities industry employment.

Michael Decker, a managing director and co-head of munis for SIFMA, said that the review of state laws is a response to muni market participants' concerns that the Securities and Exchange Commission may try to use disclosure problems to obtain authority from Congress to regulate issuers.

"I understand why issuers would be nervous about having the SEC as their regulator but there does seem to be a need for somebody to be paying attention to this issue from an oversight perspective," Decker said. "If it's not the SEC  then states are in a perfect position to take that role."

The SEC does not currently have direct regulatory authority over issuers' disclosures in the market. Its muni disclosure requirements run through broker-dealers. SEC Rule 15c2-12 prohibits dealers from underwriting most bonds unless they have reasonably determined that the issuer has contractually agreed to disclose annual financial and operating data as well as material event notices. Underwriters also must obtain and review issuer official statements to make sure they do not contain any false or misleading information that would be material to investors.

The SIFMA review found that only one state, Louisiana, has a law in place that is designed to help ensure local governments meet their legal disclosure obligations. The Louisiana law requires local governments to maintain records of continuing disclosure agreements (CDAs) and compliance actions. It also requires auditors to examine governments' CDA records and check that local governments have made their required financial filings.

Using auditors to "poke" issuers about their disclosure responsibilities has been a topic of discussion at several municipal conferences and meetings over the past year and is something SIFMA recommended again after concluding the study.

Decker said SIFMA recognizes the auditor approach would not work for every state. Each state should adopt laws that accomplish the goal of overseeing issuers while fitting into the state's existing legal frameworks, he said.

SIFMA found that 17 states have policies in place that already require governments to file their official statements with state repositories and impose other disclosure requirements on local governments related to bond issuance. Four other states and the U.S. Virgin Islands have laws in place requiring governments to file financial audit information and make the filings publicly available.

"While these initiatives help improve the availability of financial information, they generally are targeted at citizens and taxpayers, not investors," SIFMA said.

Some states, like North Carolina, already have processes in place that can help them ensure compliance, according to SIFMA. North Carolina generally requires its Local Government Commission to approve all local government bond issues. That process could include compliance with outstanding CDAs as a condition of approving future bond issuances, SIFMA suggested.

SIFMA's review follows an ongoing discussion in the municipal market and among market groups on improving disclosure following the announcement of the SEC's Municipalities Continuing Disclosure Cooperation initiative. The initiative, begun in 2014, allows underwriters and issuers to receive lenient settlement terms if they self-report any instances during the past five years that issuers falsely claimed in official statements that they were in compliance with their self-imposed continuing disclosure agreements.

The initiative led to SEC settlements with 72 underwriters representing 96% of the market by underwriting volume. The SEC is expected to soon start releasing settlements with issuers. Some market groups and issuers are concerned the MCDC results could provide Congress with evidence that could be used to justify granting SEC regulatory authority over issuers.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-asean-idUSKCN0Z10KX

Southeast Asian countries withdrew a statement that expressed the region's deep concerns over tension in the South China Sea, where China is involved in protracted territorial disputes with some of its neighbors.

The strongly-worded statement by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), released by the Malaysian foreign ministry, did not name China directly but warned against raising tension in the waters, where Beijing has been building artificial islands and increasing its military presence.

"We expressed our serious concerns over recent and ongoing developments, which have eroded trust and confidence, increased tensions and which may have the potential to undermine peace, security and stability in the South China Sea," said the statement, which was issued following a meeting in the Chinese city of Kunming between foreign ministers from ASEAN and China.

But just hours later, a Malaysian ministry spokeswoman recalled the statement, saying "urgent amendments" needed to be made and an updated version would be distributed.

However, no updated joint statement was later issued and the spokeswoman said countries would now issue individual statements.

China lays historical claim to most of the South China Sea, with its "Nine Dash line" stretching deep into the maritime heart of Southeast Asia, covering hundreds of disputed islands and reefs, rich fishing grounds and oil and gas deposits. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping claims over the region, through which trillions of dollars in ship-borne trade passes every year.

China said the media was hyping up the issue, and that the original statement was not an official ASEAN document.

"This meeting was a closed-door meeting and from the beginning there was no preparation to make a joint statement," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang at a regular briefing.

"PERHAPS TOO MUCH" TO HANDLE

Ian Storey, an analyst at Singapore's ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, said the retraction of the initial statement showed the lack of unity between ASEAN members on the South China Sea disputes.

"The initial statement repeated ASEANs existing concerns over Chinas artificial island building and the militarization of the dispute, but also countered Chinas position that the dispute should be settled by the parties directly concerned and that it is not an issue between ASEAN and China.

"Perhaps this proved too much for some of the member states and the statement was withdrawn."

The ASEAN-China meeting was held ahead of a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on a case brought by the Philippines contesting Beijing's claims in the South China Sea.

China has refused to recognize the case and says all disputes should be resolved through bilateral talks.

The case has become the center of an international diplomatic arm wrestle, with the United States and its allies insisting on international law being obeyed and China saying it has widespread support for its position, including from some ASEAN members.

Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement on the Kunming meeting, made no reference to the earlier ASEAN statement but echoed its concerns over increased military build-up in the South China Sea, "especially the large-scale accretion and embellishment and construction of the reefs, the militarization of the artificial islands and actions of sovereignty claims that are not based on international law".

Singapore and Indonesia, meanwhile, took a softer tone, calling on ASEAN and China to "continue working together to maintain the peace and stability of the South China Sea".

An Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman said the initial statement was a "media guideline" which had been prepared for a planned press conference for the conclusion of the meeting.

"However, because of the meeting dynamics where the meeting extended a few hours past schedule, the press conference was canceled and a number of ASEAN FMs had to leave immediately," Armanatha Nasir told Reuters by text message.

(Additional reporting by Mai Nguyen in Hanoi, Kanupriya Kapoor in Jakarta, Greg Torode in Hong Kong and Michael Martina in BEIJING; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Nick Macfie)



https://next.ft.com/content/3d39944c-32c5-11e6-bda0-04585c31b153



The disarray among foreign ministers at the end of a meeting with their Chinese counterpart reflects divisions over Chinese assertiveness in a region containing some of the worlds busiest shipping lanes.

Tensions over the South China Sea have been rising ahead of a ruling by an international court in The Hague on an arbitration case brought by the Philippines against Beijings claims. China disputes territory with Vietnam, the Philippines and other Asian nations.

In a statement on Tuesday following the meeting in Kunming, southern China, foreign ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations expressed concern over developments that had eroded trust and confidence.

They also stressed the importance of freedom of navigation and overflight of the South China Sea, and said disputes should be resolved in accordance with international law.

But hours later Malaysias foreign ministry said the statement had been retracted, without giving further explanation. The group has not issued an amended statement.

Ian Storey, senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said China may have put pressure on some Asean members to withdraw the statement.

China would have been extremely unhappy with certain phrases in the statement that run counter to its position that the dispute is not an issue between Asean and China, and that international legal arbitration has a role to play in resolving the dispute, he said.

Chinas foreign ministry said on Wednesday that the Asean statement had not been official, and denied applying pressure on any party to retract it.

All Asean counties are independent sovereign states and they can choose their own actions, it said.

Alex Neill, fellow for Asia-Pacific security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, said China was seeking to expunge any mention of the South China Sea from Aseans declarations.

China is bilaterally putting pressure on various member states, gradually corroding away unity of vision in Asean, Mr Neill said:

It is not the first time Asean nations have failed to show a united front on the issue. In 2012 the grouping ended a regional conference without a joint statement for the first time in its history, after members of the bloc failed to agree wording over the disputed waters.

Chinas foreign ministry said in April it had agreed with Brunei, Cambodia and Laos that the South China Sea was not an issue between Beijing and Asean and should not affect China-Asean relations.

Malaysias stance on the South China Sea has been questioned after an influx of Chinese investment, including the $2.3bn acquisition of Malaysian state fund 1MDBs power assets by China General Nuclear Power Corp. Kuala Lumpur has emphasised counter-terrorism over maritime tensions as the key regional defence priority.

A Malaysian government spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Additional reporting by Christian Shepherd in Beijing
Escaped prison inmate Timothy Clausen has been arrested and is in custody in Omaha.

Lincoln Police Chief Jeff Bliemeister confirmed Clausen's capture at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday. He said he has no other details yet.

Clausen, 52, escaped from Lincoln Correctional Center Friday morning with Armon Dixon, 37.

An intense manhunt in Lincoln yielded the capture of Dixon on Saturday afternoon, but Clausen eluded authorities.

The search for him has been concentrated in northeast Omaha since the Saturday arrest of Wanda Minor, who is believed to have helped Clausen get out of Lincoln. Minor, 50, was charged Wednesday with being an accessory to a felony and is in Douglas County jail on $500,000 bond. She served two years on probation for attempting to tamper with a juror during Clausen's 2013 trial for sexual assault.

Clausen was taken into custody at a home in north Omaha at 6:05 p.m. Wednesday, Nebraska State Patrol spokeswoman Deb Collins said in a news release.

He had cut his hair, shaved his beard and changed his clothing, she said. Police found a handgun near him when he was arrested.

Clausens arrest is the culmination of a lot of hard work and long hours by law enforcement from multiple agencies, said Col. Brad Rice, superintendent of the patrol. Our citizens were also a valuable resource and we would like to thank each and every one of them who called to provide a tip or information.

The patrol, Omaha police, Douglas County Sheriff's Office, U.S. Marshals Service and the Metro Fugitive Task Force arrested him without incident, said Collins.

Clausen was taken to Tecumseh State Correctional Institution, where Dixon also is being held.

He and Dixon, both serving time for sex assault, left LCC at 9:12 Friday morning in a prison laundry truck bound for the Tecumseh prison.

They jumped out of the truck a few minutes and a few miles later, then stole a pickup truck they crashed near downtown.

Local, state and federal law enforcement combed the area near the accident at 18th and F streets for much of Friday and into Saturday.

They arrested Dixon at 2 o'clock Saturday afternoon when he popped out of a manhole at 49th and Francis streets in northeast Lincoln.

Dixon already was serving 158 to 278 years for sexual assaults and for being a habitual criminal.

Clausen was doing 51 to 58 years for sexual assault of a child and tampering with a witness.

Gov. Pete Ricketts applauded law enforcement for capturing Clausen, then said, "Our attention now turns to investigating where the corrections system failed, and rebuilding public faith in the ability of our prison system to protect Nebraskans."
Roles were reversed this week for many southeast Nebraska teachers as they gathered at Beatrice High School not to teach, but rather to learn at a tech fair.

Teachers from around the area learned Monday from the keynote speaker, Leslie Fisher, who specializes in presenting emerging and exciting technologies for teachers to bring to the classroom. On Tuesday the teachers broke into different sessions to apply what they learned and to see new technologies in action, with the help of interested middle school students.

The tech fair, sponsored by Educational Service Unit 5 (ESU 5) and hosted by BHS, was meant to showcase new technologies that any teacher could integrate into their classroom.

It is for teachers to understand how to use purposeful integration of technology to enhance teaching and learning, said Nick Ziegler, technology integration expert at ESU 5.

Gym teachers, science teachers, teachers of second graders and high schoolers surrounded the room, learning new strategies for educating with technology.

Its a spectrum across ages for teachers with tools that are applicable across content areas and subjects, Ziegler said. They are tools you can use tomorrow."

Teachers from 25 different school districts in southeast Nebraska were present, with over 150 people in attendance for the speaker, Ziegler said.

ESU 5 serves Gage, Jefferson, and Thayer County in southeast Nebraska and looks to improve with new technologies.

I see measureable differences in integration of technology (following the conference), Ziegler said. Theres a need to teach differently because of technology. Teachers need to understand to enhance what they do because of technology.

The keynote speaker, Leslie Fisher, travels over 200 days a year for worldwide company Fisher Technologies Inc., which works to present technology to educators all over the world, Fisher said.

She said the group was very engaged and she was impressed that the teachers were here on their summer break.

Kudos to them, she said.

All the tools I show, every grade level can use," Fisher explained. "Ive had students reach out to thank me for showing their teacher something and Ive become friends with many teachers.

The presentation lasted four hours on Monday, broken into two sessions.

Fisher said she tries to tailor her discussion for older and younger teachers, ones that are new to technology and those that already use technology every day.

The second day of the tech fair saw teachers break into groups for activities such as Promote your school with live streaming and Google tools for special education. The commons area at the high school was used to showcase fun technologies for classrooms. Interested middle school students and teachers tested a variety of digital teaching tools.

The grouping of activities is designed to give kids opportunities to make connections between workforce skills and what they do in school, said Chad Johnson, Nebraska Public Power District education specialist.

The commons area workshop was divided by four themes: 1) Make it New, focusing on innovation and engineering design. 2) Make it Do, showing what a student can make a machine do using logic and coding. 3) Make an Impact, using data to observe with a focus on environmental impact. 4) Make it You, making things unique using branding and marketing.

Its a lot different than normal classes because there are no step-by-step processes, Johnson explained. We encourage kids to spend time figuring out the problems.

Jaclyn Rasmussen, a seventh grader going into eighth grade at Fairbury, participated in several of the exhibits on display, including a 3-D printer, drones, and a sphere-o.

She said her favorite was the sphere-o, a small, spherical device that moved with remote control from a tablet. Users could input instructions to move the ball anywhere in the classroom. Rasmussen said it was cool for Beatrice to put on the fair and would like to see some of the tools at school.
In light of continued developments, primarily since 2008, there exists in these United States a Legal System which operates on a proved Two Tiered approach to justice rendered, which primarily benefits Democratic Elites and Woke Ideological Virtue Signalers, representing their co-dependent wards, to the expressed exclusion of normal hardworking American citizens: What is your suggestion in remedying this widespread injustice and, if not corrected, its existential outcome for our Constitutional Republic?

Complete overhaul the Department of Justice and their enforcers - the FBI - to reflect a far more honest justice system to keep patriots remaining calm.

Disband the FBI, and request that congress investigate all unethical and non patriotic practices to partially right the wrongs of a distrusted and politically weaponized "Department of Justice."
Unanimous court says NCDOT's use of highway corridors is a taking of private property requiring compensation to landowners

RALEIGH The N.C. Supreme Court on Friday handed hundreds of property owners in highway corridors a victory by ruling unanimously that restrictions placed on landowners by the state's Map Act amounted to a use of eminent domain requiring just compensation.The amount of money the N.C. Department of Transportation will have to pay to the landowners could reach hundreds of millions of dollars.said Matthew Bryant, a Winston-Salem lawyer who led the plaintiffs' legal team.Justice Paul Newby wrote the opinion of the court.Newby wrote.The General Assembly enacted the Map Act in 1987. It allows the DOT to file a highway corridor map with local officials and prohibits local governments from issuing building permits on property within the corridor. It also prohibits land within the corridor from being subdivided.The purpose of the law is to hold down taxpayer costs for highway projects by preventing development.Property owners are allowed a break on property taxes under the law. And they could apply to NCDOT for an expedited acquisition process if they can show that Map Act restrictions place a hardship on them.However, the court ruled that the law doesn't go far enough in protecting property rights.Newby wrote, citing John Locke and James Madison.The court rejected the state's argument that NCDOT was using its police powers, and not eminent domain powers, in placing restrictions on development of property.Newby wrote.Newby said that while a reduction in property acquisition cost for highway projects is a laudable public policy, it doesn't fall under police power protections.Newby wrote.Newby said that the Map Act languageThe case before the Supreme Court relates to the Northern Beltway around Winston-Salem in Forsyth County. However, similar lawsuits were filed in Cleveland, Guilford, Wake, Cumberland, Robeson, and Pender counties involving more than 300 landowners.Bryant said.Bryant noted that organizations filing amicus (friend of the court) briefs backing the property owners in the case ranged across the political spectrum. They included the John Locke Foundation, the Civitas Institute, the N.C. Advocates for Justice, the N.C. Justice Center, and the N.C. Association of Realtors.Bryant said.The Wilmington Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization filed a friend of the court brief backing NCDOT.NCDOT said in a statement. Spokesman Steve Abbott added that because the litigation continues, the agency will not comment further.The case will now go back to the trial court level to determine how much NCDOT owes individual property owners.
The 6th Tokyo International Conference on Africas Development (TICAD VI) senior officials meeting got off on a tense note Wednesday morning in Banjul, The Gambia with African delegates heckling the Japanese facilitator.

The purpose of the meeting was specifically to prepare the draft Nairobi Declaration for today's (Friday) ministerial meeting ahead of the TICAD VI Summit slated for Nairobi, Kenya on August 27  28th. Botswana is being represented at these all-important preparatory meetings by Ambassador to Japan, Jacob Nkate and the Head of African Union (AU) Mission in Addis Ababa, Punkie Molefe as well as Deputy Chief of Japan Mission, Pule Mphothwe.

The morning session nearly degenerated into an argument as some of the African officials accused the Japanese facilitator, Ambassador Norio Maruyama who is Director General for the Africa Affairs Department in Japan of imposing pre-determined Japanese agenda on them. But the envoy denied this, insisting he was instead presiding over procedural issues. So intense were the debates that at one point the Zimbabwean Ambassador to Ethiopia wondered why the five co-organisers- Japan Government; African Union Commission; World Bank and United Nations Development Programme  were making decisions on behalf of African Governments if indeed the TICAD process was a partnership initiative.





But Ambassador Maruyama reiterated there was no intention on his part or the Japanese Governments to impose any decisions on African Governments. He said he is willing to listen to all the comments from the African delegations to inform the Test that the Ministers are expected to produce on Thursday and Friday. Other African delegates especially from Uganda, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone felt that the Draft Declaration produced by the Senior Officials Meeting held March this year in Djibouti had been altered and that they were seeing a completely new Draft dated 3rd June 2016 for the first time in Banjul.

The Japanese Envoy again explained procedure that Djibouti was basically to produce a skeletal draft, which would thereafter be improved. But in the afternoon session, tempers had calmed as the meeting discussed the Draft Nairobi Declaration chapter by chapter and making inputs, which the Secretariat was expected to capture and incorporate into the Text to produce a new Draft Declaration by Thursday morning.

In a separate interview, Mphothwe told Botswana Guardian that by reason of her Middle Income status, Botswana is not benefiting adequately as she would like from the TICAD process. This is because the country does not qualify for grants and loans from Japan. It only receives technical assistance in the form of skills transfer in science and technology related areas, he said.He said it was high time that Botswana developed a TICAD Strategy to derive maximum benefit from TICAD process.
Press Release:

Advancing The Extension of The Pope Airfield Runway

Supporting Military Spouses By Helping Them Gain Federal Employment

Reforming the TRICARE system by increasing collaboration between the military and private sector

Establishment of high performance military-civilian integrated health delivery systems.

Contracts with private sector entities to provide certain health care services at military treatment facilities.

Memoranda of agreements between the Department of Defense and institution of higher education that offer degrees in allopathic or osteopathic medicine.

Contact: Daniel Keylin

Daniel Keylin daniel_keylin@tillis.senate.gov

WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, the Senate passed the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), legislation that funds the military, provides servicemembers with pay raises, and reforms TRICARE, the health care system for servicemembers, reservists, and their family members.said Senator Tillis.The Senate version of the NDAA contains several provisions secured by Senator Tillis aimed at supporting North Carolina's military installations and servicemembers, which include:To protect Fort Bragg's rapid deployment capabilities, Tillis' provision requires the Secretary of the Army, in coordination with the Commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, to submit a report to the Senate outlining plans to extend the runway at Pope Airfield and to indicate whether such project is a priority for the Army.Currently, C-17 and C-5 airlifts cannot depart from Pope Airfield fully fueled with a full load of paratroopers due to the current 8,500 foot takeoff length of the runway. Fully loaded C-17s and C-5s require a takeoff length of 10,500 feet, and 11,500 feet, respectively.Tillis' provision would have an immediate impact on the quality of life for many military spouses and their families by closing the two-year time limit loophole for military spouses who receive a permanent change of station order and seek federal employment on the new base. Currently, a military spouse only has two years to invoke the military spouse preference from the date of the service member's permanent change of station orders, which are issued well in advance of a military family arriving at a new duty station. Combined with the demands of raising children, adjusting to new surroundings, and the actual availability of federal jobs, many military spouses have missed consideration for employment or have had job offers withdrawn because they lost eligibility.The Tillis provision would improve health outcomes and enhance the experience of care for beneficiaries as local military treatment facilities create strong relationships with private sector health systems to form integrated high performance health systems. These formal relationships would foster innovation in military treatment facilities, enhance operational medical force readiness, improve access to specialized medical care, and strengthen care coordination through integration of all activities of these new health delivery systems.The Tillis provision requires the Secretary of Defense to enter into centrally-managed, performance-based contracts with private sector entities to improve the delivery of health care services at military treatment facilities with limited or restricted ability to provide services such as primary care or expanded-hours urgent care. Contracts would be designed to purchase improvement in health outcomes for covered beneficiaries seeking health care services in military treatment facilities.By sharing training facilities, staffing, and material resources, these new academic affiliations could help improve and sustain operational medical force readiness and possibly serve as a productive recruiting grounds for new military physicians. The provision sets the stage for the Department of Defense and Fort Bragg's Womack Army Medical Center to form a partnership with the Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine.


Malabar naval drill. An Indian Navy photo

TOKYO (PTI): A Chinese navy spy ship on Wednesday entered Japan's territorial waters for the first time in over a decade while tailing two Indian naval ships during the trilateral Malabar naval exercise being conducted by the US, India and Japan.



Japanese P-3C patrol aircraft spotted the Dongdiao-class intelligence vessel sailing in territorial waters to the west of Kuchinoerabu Island at around 3:30 AM (1830 GMT Tuesday), Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshige Seko told reporters.



The ship travelled on a south-easterly bearing and left Japan's territorial waters south of the prefecture's Yakushima Island around 5 AM, Kyodo news agency quoted Seko as saying.



It was for the first time that a Chinese spy ship was detected in Japanese water since a submarine was spotted in 2004. The latest intrusion came less than a week after another Chinese vessel sailed near the islands at the centre of a Tokyo-Beijing sovereignty dispute in the East China Sea.



"The ship appeared to be tracking two Indian naval ships that were sailing in the waters during joint naval drills" conducted by Japan, the US and India, Defence Minister Gen. Nakatani told reporters.



A senior Foreign Ministry official lodged a protest with the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo over its military activities in view of latest intrusion.



"We are concerned about the Chinese military's recent activities," Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters.



Japanese officials said they are analysing China's possible motives behind the two actions.



"The government will continue to exert every effort in warning and surveillance activities in the waters and airspace surrounding the country," Seko said.



As to the spy vessel's case Wednesday, the Defence Ministry said it entered the waters while tracking two Indian naval ships that were participating in ongoing Malabar naval drills.



In Beijing, Chinese officials defended the naval vessel's entry into the waters, saying the passage was in line with the principle of freedom of navigation and international rules.



Under international law, ships of all countries, including military ones, are entitled to the right of "innocent passage" through territorial waters as long as it would not undermine others' security.



"There is no need to provide notification or to get authorisation in advance," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in Beijing.



"So if Japan insists on hyping up this issue in the media, we have to question its motives."






BANGKOK (PTI): India and Thailand are set to firm up cooperation to combat terrorism, and boost maritime security, defence ties and trade during Thai Prime Minister General Prayuth Chan-ocha's maiden visit to India.



The Thai premier will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his three-day visit beginning Thursday.



The two countries will issue a joint statement later, expressing their expectations to increase maritime security, double trade in five years, push the India-Myanmar-Thai road project, cooperate in civil aviation, fight cybercrime and promote people-to-people cooperation, said Maj-General Werachon Sukondhapatipak, a deputy Thai government spokesman, on Wednesday.



Werachon said talks with India will focus on issues such as trade, support for Thai agricultural products and cooperation on education and tourism.



He said Gen. Prayuth has said to put all items high on agenda. A high-level delegation will discuss boosting cultural exchanges between the two nations.



India and Thailand will also look for joint projects in solar energy, space applications and space technology sectors.



"Thailand is an extremely important partner and the two sides attach a lot of importance to this visit," India's Ambassador to Thailand Bhagwant Bishnoi told PTI.



Noting that India's 'Act East' and Thailand's 'Look West' policies were complementary to each other, Bishnoi said India was looking forward to signing several agreements, MoUs on narcotics, cultural exchange with Thailand during the visit.



A Thailand-India Free Trade Agreement will be discussed.



"We are looking forward to a substantial joint statement which would talk of other agreements in the pipeline," Bishnoi said, and added that Thailand is also keen on India's 'Make in India' programme.



He said India appreciated the fact that Thailand was "very sensitive" to India's security concerns and ensured that Thai territory was not used by forces inimical to India.



The Thai delegation will discuss cultural links by travelling to Bodh Gaya for prayers.



The Indian Ambassador here said an agreement will be signed by Nagaland and Thailand's Chiang Mai universities to conduct Thai and Indian courses respectively.



India courses have been important to Thailand and centres at Chulalongkorn, Thammasat, and Silpakorn universities have had Sanskrit and Tamil classes for 61 years, Bishnoi said.


By Barry Eitel



SAN FRANCISCO  The planet experienced its warmest spring ever recorded, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday.



They noted that the temperature during the period from March to May was significantly above average.



The average global temperature between March and May is 13.7 degrees Celsius (56.7 degrees Fahrenheit), but that span in 2016 was more than 1 degree Celsius warmer, an increase that is especially alarming.



Usually, records are broken by hundredths and tenths of a degree. March through May is spring in the northern hemisphere, where 90 percent of the globes population lives, and autumn for the southern hemisphere.



May also marked the 13th straight record-breaking month, the longest such span since record keeping began in 1880.



Much-warmer-than-average MarchMay temperatures were present across much of the global land surfaces, NOAA said, with record warmth across northwestern North America, northern South America, central and northeastern Africa, Oceania, and parts of Central America, the Caribbean and the Middle East.



NOAA scientists believe long-term, human-caused climate change is to blame, along with a recent El Nino climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean.



NASA drew similar conclusions in a report released earlier this week.



Scientists working for the space agency were also very direct about their anxiety regarding the record-breaking warmth.



Abnormal is the new normal, David Carlson, the director of the World Climate Research Program at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a statement on Wednesday.



NOAA and NASA are particularly concerned about the warming of Earths polar regions. The climate of these areas, scientists argue, affects climates thousands of miles away.



Sea ice in the Arctic Sea and the Greenland ice sheet have melted unusually early this year.



The state of the climate so far this year gives us much cause for alarm, Carlson warned.





Kaynak: AA

Bu haber AA API servisleriyle otomatik olarak yaynlanmstr. Bu habere herhangi bir editoryal mudahale yaplmamstr.
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A Canadian man pleaded guilty in New Hampshire on Tuesday to making false statements related to buying guns in the state.

Court documents show Nana Baffoe, 63, was arrested in May 26 last year after trying to buy 100 Taurus 9 mm handguns from a licensed dealer in Nashua, N.H..

The dealer, who alerted authorities, said Baffoe produced an American passport and an expired New Hampshire drivers licence when he asked if he was a state resident, an affidavit from federal agent John Cook says.

Baffoe also gave a phone number with an Alberta area code when the dealer asked him for contact information, Cook said.

Agents put Baffoe under surveillance, court documents say, but he never showed up at the address he gave the dealer. In fact, he was seen driving and sleeping in a car with an Alberta licence plate, the documents state.

The sale never went through. When Baffoe returned with a $30,500 cheque to buy the weapons, the dealer told him the guns would arrive within a week.

Baffoe also inquired about purchasing a machine to make ammunition, the agent said.

The Canadian had earlier bought two Ruger .45-calibre pistols from a licensed dealer in Hudson, N.H., filling out a form stating he lived in the nearby city of Manchester.

Under U.S. law, dealers can only sell guns to residents of their own states.

That dealer told investigators Baffoe returned a few months later and discussed smuggling guns to Ghana. But the dealer said he refused to sell him any more guns, according to an agreed statement of facts.

Federal agents obtained records from the New Hampshire Department of Motor Vehicles that showed Baffoe supplied them with a lease agreement to prove he was living in Manchester. Cook said he contacted the landlord, who stated he had never rented an apartment to Baffoe.

Baffoe was arrested after leaving a Manchester shooting range. He admitted to agents he never resided in the U.S. and that he had been living in Canada for more than two years. He also said he intended to sell the firearms for a profit, Cooks affidavit states.

Information about where Baffoe was from in Alberta was not made available.

Baffoe is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 19.
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MONTREAL  The president and CEO of Stingray Digital Group Inc. says a lawsuit recently filed against the digital music distributor is an indication of the progress it has made in the U.S. market.

Music Choice launched the legal action in Texas last week, accusing Montreal-based Stingray of patent infringements.

The U.S.-based company alleges in court documents that Stingray appropriated various technologies after receiving privileged information in 2013 as it was seeking to acquire Music Choice.

Stingray CEO and co-founder Eric Boyko says the lawsuit is incomplete and incoherent.

Our American clients who have seen this (the lawsuit) believe its an act of despair on the part of Music Choice, Boyko said on a conference call Thursday to discuss the companys fourth-quarter-results.

Stingray will fight the allegations in court and isnt ruling out its own legal action.

They allege we have servers in Texas that use the technology in question but we dont have any equipment there, Boyko said.

Our understanding is that the management team, which is not the shareholder of the company, decided to pursue legal action without speaking to shareholders.

Boyko added that one of Stingrays partners is Comcast, which he described as our competitors biggest client.

Earlier in the day, Stingray reported fourth-quarter net income of $3.2 million or six cents a share, a hike of 69 per cent from a year earlier.

Net income for the year ended March 31 soared to $13.9 million or 29 cents a share, from $6.6 million, a jump of 110.1 per cent.

Fourth-quarter revenues climbed 30.6 per cent to $25.7 million from $19.6 million, while 12-month revenues increased 26.7 per cent to $89.9 million from $71 million.

The higher numbers were primarily due to acquisitions, combined with growth in international markets and non-recurring revenues related to installation and equipment sales.

The company also received a boost from the exchange rate between the Canadian and U.S. dollars.

We completed our first fiscal year as a public company with several accomplishments to report, said Boyko.

As planned, we have been active on the acquisition front with four acquisitions representing investments of $33.1 million, including contingent considerations.

We enter the new fiscal year with great confidence considering . . . (our) well-diversified business, our scale, a solid balance sheet and many opportunities to grow through acquisitions and organically.
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A man who pleaded guilty in an impaired driving crash that killed a university student in London, Ont., was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday, as the victims family called for harsher penalties for the crime.

Jared Dejong had more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood when he was arrested in the October 2015 collision that claimed the life of 18-year-old Andrea Christidis.

The first-year student had been walking back to her residence on Western Universitys campus when Dejongs vehicle jumped a curb and hit her. She died of her injuries in hospital two days after the crash.

At his sentencing hearing in April, Dejong, who had been out on bail, said he was haunted by the memory of what he had done.

The Crown had sought a five-year prison sentence for Dejong, while defence lawyers had called for two years behind bars and three years of probation.

Dejongs lawyer said Thursday that the five-year sentence came as no surprise and said his client was determined to make something positive from the tragedy.

It is a sad case for both the Christidis family as well as the Dejong family. And I can speak for my client and his family when I say that they are truly sorry for the loss of Andrea, Jim Dean told The Canadian Press.

We can only hope that this will make someone else think before getting behind the wheel after drinking and possibly prevent the destruction of more families.

Members of Christidiss family, however, said Dejongs sentence didnt go far enough, adding that drunk driving was treated too leniently by the courts.

No sentence handed down today could be fair or just so long as the penalty does not match the crime, said Soula Koutlemanis, Christidiss aunt, who read a statement outside court on the familys behalf.

(Dejong) will return to his family and continue his life. We, on the other hand, have been sentenced to a life sentence of pain and suffering.

Dejong chose to drink and drive without any considerations for the consequences, Koutlemanis said, wondering aloud if harsher penalties would have resulted in him making a different decision.

We are living a nightmare, as are other families in similar situations. Something must change, she said. The first step in our opinion is harsher sentences for those who drink and drive.

An agreed statement of facts heard in the case revealed that Dejong was on Western Universitys campus drinking with friends at the campus pub for three or four hours. He was not a student at the school.

Witnesses said road conditions at the time were perfect and that Dejongs vehicle was seen travelling very fast and at one point cut in front of a bus. Video from the bus also showed him driving on the wrong side of the road.

The car went through two intersections without stopping, causing other drivers to take evasive action, before it jumped the curb and struck Christidis, throwing her 10 metres.

Dejong pleaded guilty to over 80 mg blood alcohol causing death in the case.
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MONTREAL  A Montreal boroughs plan to pay tribute to late sovereigntist premier Jacques Parizeau by changing the name of a park that currently honours Vimy Ridge is being blasted by some critics as disrespectful to Canadas war history.

On Wednesday, the citys executive committee adopted a resolution in favour of a proposal to rename Parc Vimy in Outremont after Parizeau, the man who led the Yes side to a narrow defeat in the 1995 sovereignty referendum.

Former Liberal interim leader Bob Rae was one of many people who took to Twitter to denounce the decision, calling it an insult.

Vimy Park is seen Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Montreal. A move by the Montreal borough of Outremont to change the name of this neighbourhood park from Vimy Park to Jacques-Parizeau Park to honour the former Quebec premier is stirring controversy. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

Changing a park in Montreal from Vimy to Jacques Parizeau  and this during the 100th anniversary of WW1  an insult pure and simple, he wrote.

The recommendation noted that Parizeau lived near the park for much of his life and even insisted his funeral take place in the borough.

Parizeau died last year at the age of 84.

In announcing the decision, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre said the park would be renamed in honour of our premier who was a great economist and a pillar of the Quiet Revolution.

But many on social media expressed displeasure that a park named after one of Canadas defining military moments would be rechristened for someone whose goal was to lead Quebec out of Canada.

Jeremy Diamond, executive director of the non-profit Vimy Foundation, said he was surprised and disappointed to learn of the proposal, especially as the 100-year anniversary of the battle is only months away.

To replace Vimy with another story doesnt do the respect that Vimy deserves, he said. We feel there must be another spot in Montreal that can honour and speak about Mr. Parizeaus impact on Quebec and Canadian history.

He described the 1917 battle of Vimy Ridge, in which four Canadian divisions succeeded in capturing a German-held escarpment in northern France, as a standout moment in the countrys military history.

He noted it was the first time Canadian troops fought together rather than being separated into different units.

Theres a great symbolism to this because we entered the war as British subjects and when the war ended in 1918 we were asked to sign the peace treaty as Canadians, he said.

We were seen as a much different country and much of it has to do with that victory at Vimy.

He said Canadians tend to suffer from historical amnesia, with younger generations feeling increasingly disconnected from their history.

Weve never honestly been good at telling our stories, but Vimy is one of the ones we should be telling, he said.

Former premiers Robert Bourassa and Rene Levesque have had key Montreal streets named in their honour, with the decision in 1987 to turn Dorchester Boulevard (named after Guy Carleton, an Anglo-Irish soldier who later became known as Lord Dorchester) into Boulevard Rene-Levesque rankling many at the time.

In fact, the staunchly federalist and predominantly separate city of Westmount has steadfastly kept the name Dorchester for the portion of the thoroughfare that is located on its territory.
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VANCOUVER  A British Columbia First Nation has launched a court challenge to overturn the National Energy Boards recommendation that the federal cabinet approve the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

The Squamish Nation, whose traditional territories span a large swath of B.C.s south coast, filed an application for judicial review on Thursday in Vancouvers Federal Court of Appeal. It seeks to quash the NEBs decision and refer it back for reconsideration.

The nation asserted in the documents that the NEB had an obligation to determine whether the Canadian government discharged its duty to consult and, if necessary, accommodate the band.

Ottawa needs to hear loud and clear that they cant just run roughshod over aboriginal rights and title. That era has come and gone, said Chief Ian Campbell in an interview.

Trans Mountain, a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan Canada, wants to triple the capacity of its existing pipeline from oilsands near Edmonton to Burnaby, B.C., to 890,000 barrels a day.

The NEB undertook a two-year review that heard from 35 indigenous groups and 400 interveners before issuing its report and positive recommendation, subject to 157 conditions, in May.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus government has delayed its final decision on the $6.8-billion project until December to allow for additional indigenous consultation.

The Squamish Nation said its traditional territory covers 6,732 square kilometres, including parts of Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster and all of North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Whistler and Squamish. These boundaries encompass Howe Sound, Burrard Inlet and English Bay.

The nation said in the court documents that the project would include a substantial expansion of infrastructure and shipping in these areas, including a new pipeline along a new route to a terminal in Burnaby and a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic in Burrard Inlet.

It said Trans Mountain did not consult with the Squamish Nation in any way about the location of the project in its traditional territories.

Campbell said the potential for a spill from increased tanker traffic in Burrard Inlet poses a grave risk to his bands traditional fishing and marine activities. Not enough research has been done on the behaviour of diluted bitumen spills, he added.

A spokeswoman for Trans Mountain, the only named respondent, said the company is currently reviewing the notice of application.

The NEB confirms in its report that Trans Mountain has met the expectations with regards to Aboriginal consultation and there is sufficient evidence about the fate and behaviour of oil, said Ali Hounsell in a statement.

Ultimately, the NEB weighed all the evidence and recommended the federal government approve the expansion.

The Squamish Nation granted conditional approval to a liquefied natural gas project in Howe Sound in October. The agreement means Woodfibre LNG must meet a number of environmental and cultural conditions issued by the First Nation.

The Tsleil-Waututh Nation in North Vancouver has also mounted a court case arguing the energy boards process of reviewing Trans Mountain was unlawful.

The board streamlined the process to meet time limits set by the previous Conservative government and ditched oral cross-examination in favour of written questions and answers.

The NEB was unable to comment Thursday. It has previously said that the evidence was thoroughly tested and the projects impact on aboriginal interests was carefully considered.

Should the project proceed, Trans Mountain would be required to continue its consultation with potentially affected indigenous groups throughout the life of the project.

 Follow @ellekane on Twitter.
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Highlights from the news file for Thursday, June 16:

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MINISTERS SAY NEAR-DEATH PROVISION IN ASSISTED DYING BILL NON-NEGOTIABLE: Health Minister Jane Philpott and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould say they accept most of the Senate amendments to the assisted dying bill, but they reject one that removed the provision that patients must be near death. The ministers say they are confident the government reached the necessary and appropriate balance between personal autonomy and eligibility for medical assistance. The issue must now be debated and voted on once again in the House of Commons before returning Bill C-14 to the upper chamber. Several senators say without the amendment, the bill is unconstitutional.

Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould listens to Minister of Health Jane Philpott respond to a question from the media in the Foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill Thursday June 16, 2016 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

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BRITISH LABOUR MP DIES AFTER SHOOTING ATTACK: Its not clear if the killing of a British Labour MP is linked to the debate over Britain staying or leaving the European Union. Jo Cox, 41, was shot to death in a village in her riding, apparently as she got involved in a scuffle between two men. One of those men reportedly shouted Britain First. Her death has brought the fierce campaign over whether Britain should leave the European Union to a standstill. Cox campaigned for the country to stay in the European Union. Police have a 52-year-old man in custody and have recovered weapons, including a firearm. Police would not speculate on the attackers motive.

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ONE DEAD IN CALGARY CLINIC STABBING: Police said one person was dead and several others injured in a stabbing at a medical clinic in Calgary on Thursday. There was no information in the immediate aftermath of the stabbing on a suspect or what the motivation for the attack may have been. EMS spokesman Stuart Brideaux says first responders declared one adult dead at the scene.

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IN ORLANDO, OBAMA CALLS FOR HEALING, MEETS WITH FAMILIES: U.S. President Barack Obama brought words of comfort but no easy answers Thursday to grieving families in Orlando, striving to help the community heal even while investigators were still struggling to make sense of the carnage at a gay nightclub. As Orlando prepared to bury its first victims from the mass shooting, Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden spent hours meeting privately with survivors of the attack, victims relatives and police officers who responded to the scene on Sunday, when 49 people were killed. The low-key visit reflected the challenge for the president to find something meaningful to say about an attack that has stoked a wide mix of fears about terrorism, guns and violence against gays.

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LIBERALS DEFEND PUSH FOR CPP CHANGES: The federal Liberals found themselves on the defensive Thursday over talks to expand the Canada Pension Plan, with the Conservatives questioning the rush to raise benefits and take more off the paycheques of working Canadians. Just how much more Canadians and their employers could end up paying in CPP premiums is a central issue in negotiations between Ottawa and the provinces that will come to a head next week on changes to the national pension plan. In the House of Commons, both the Conservatives and NDP wanted to know what the government imagines the plan will look like should provinces agree to changes in premiums and benefits. In Burnaby, B.C., Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he wanted to ensure Canadians are going to be able to afford the things they need in the present while ensuring retirement security for as many people as possible.

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QUEBEC SAYS FEDERAL HEALTH TRANSFER PLAN NEEDED: Quebecs finance minister says the agenda for next weeks meeting of federal and provincial finance ministers is lacking a pressing item: health-care transfers. The gathering Monday in Vancouver will be dominated by talks on Canada Pension Plan reform  but Carlos Leitao says federal health transfers are perhaps even more important. The last health accord expired in 2014 and, after refusing to renegotiate it, the previous Conservative government unilaterally declared that the annual six-per-cent increase in transfers to the provinces would end in 2017. The new federal Liberal government has promised to negotiate a new health accord with the provinces.

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NOVA SCOTIA PREMIER TAKES UP CAUSE OF 94-YEAR-OLD VETERAN: The plight of a decorated 94-year-old veteran seeking a bed in a Halifax veterans hospital has turned Liberal against Liberal, with Nova Scotias premier unleashing some mildly unparliamentary language to describe Ottawas behaviour on the issue. Stephen McNeil resorted to unusually candid terms after a cabinet meeting Thursday while commenting on a ruling by Veterans Affairs against Petter Blindheims bid for a bed at the Camp Hill Veterans Memorial hospital. Blindheim was initially barred from entering Camp Hill Veterans Memorial hospital on the grounds he didnt quality as fighting with allies, since he was with the Norwegian forces fighting from England. Then Veterans Affairs rejected his admission saying he could receive adequate care at existing provincial facilities.

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CANADIAN FIRMS LINKED TO CLUSTER BOMBS: Four Canadian financial institutions invested $565 million in the companies that manufacture cluster bombs, a weapon that is banned under a UN treaty that Canada has ratified. The companies are named in a report by the Dutch peace group PAX, part of the international coalition against the indiscriminate weapons that have been widely linked to the deaths of civilians. The companies are among 158 worldwide that invested $28 billion in companies connected to the weapons between June 2012 and April 2016. Paul Hannon, executive director of Mines Action Canada, is calling on the Trudeau government to issue guidelines that would ban such investments by Canadian institutions.

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APPEAL TO BE HEARD IN TORI STAFFORD MURDER: The man convicted of killing eight-year-old Victoria Stafford seven years ago is asking for a new trial, arguing there was too much weight given to the testimony of the unsavoury main witness. Michael Rafferty was convicted in May 2012 of kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and first-degree murder in the death of the Woodstock, Ont., girl. Raffertys former girlfriend, Terri-Lynne McClintic, pleaded guilty in 2010 to first-degree murder, initially telling police Rafferty killed the girl, but testifying at his trial that she delivered the fatal blows. Raffertys lawyer, Paul Calarco, argues in court documents that the judge made several errors, including failing warn the jury against relying on the testimony of McClintic, a person of unsavoury character, with a serious history of violence and lying.

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NATIONAL ENERGY BOARD STARTS REVIEW OF ENERGY EAST: The National Energy Board says its review of the Energy East pipeline will be one of its most innovative and extensive project reviews ever. The NEB has 21 months to hold hearings along the 4,500-kilometre route from Alberta to New Brunswick and report to the federal government on whether the pipeline is in the national interest. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall met with Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard in Montreal on Thursday to defend the project, which is under attack by environmental groups and some First Nations.

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VISA RESPONDS TO WALMART THREAT IN OPEN LETTER: Visa is accusing Walmart of using consumers as pawns in its battle over merchant fees by threatening to ban the credit card from its Canadian stores. The company has written an open letter, alleging Walmart is unfairly dragging millions of Canadian consumers into the middle of a business disagreement that can and should be resolved between the two companies. Walmart says it pays more than $100, million in fees a year so customers can use a variety of credit cards, and that Visas rates are unacceptably high.

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The Finance Minister Michael Noonan has said a verdict from the European Commission on Apple's tax arrangements with Ireland could come as early as next month.

Brussels opened the probe two years ago and in a previous preliminary finding said the tax arrangements with the multi-national were improperly designed to give the company a financial boost in return for jobs.
Former Prime Time presenter and Storyful founder Mark Little is taking over as the head of Twitter in Ireland.

He will replace Stephen McIntyre as the managing director on July 1. McIntyre is stepping down to join venture capital company Frontline Ventures.
Google has opened a 150m data centre in West Dublin.

It is the tech giant's second such centre in Ireland serving cloud computing.

The new two storey data centre which houses computers that run services such as the Google search engine, Gmail and Google Maps was built alongside Googles existing data centre which opened in 2012.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny opened the facility and heard that Google now employs 6,000 people here up from 5,000 a year ago.

Speaking at the event An Taoiseach Enda Kenny TD said "The opening of this new 150 million data centre opens a new chapter in Google's story in Ireland.

With the number of people employed by Google now surpassing 6,000, the company is a fantastic leader within Ireland's digital community.

The Government's priority is to make Ireland a more competitive location for new investment and job creation, and the ongoing development of Ireland's digital industry is a key part of that plan."

Minister for Jobs Enterprise and Innovation, Mary Mitchell O Connor TD also attended the opening. "I am delighted to be present at Google's latest investment project in Ireland.

"Google's continued investment in Ireland is very welcome and this new Data Centre further enhances Google's presence in Ireland and is a vindication of the competitive advantage we can offer high technology companies.

Ronan Harris, VP and Head of Google in Ireland, said: Google has continually invested in Ireland since we first arrived here in 2003. Todays announcement is part of Googles plan to build the worlds most energy efficient computing network and the work of our engineering team in Dublin is central to this success.

Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland welcomed the new centre saying, Google started out with modest plans for Dublin when it first landed here back in 2003. It is now one of the largest employers in Ireland, making a significant contribution to the economy.
Enda Kenny has strongly condemned the attack on a British Labour MP and has suspended campaigning on Brexit for the remainder of the day.

The Taoiseach had travelled to Liverpool this morning to encourage Irish communities in the UK to vote to remain in the European Union.

However, news of the shooting and stabbing which has left Jo Cox in a critical condition, filtered out as Mr Kenny was speaking at St Michael's Irish Centre in Liverpool.

He said: "I have heard about the shooting and the stabbing of Jo Cox in West Yorkshire. This is an appalling crime on a public representative going about her duty, a mother of two young children." he said.

"I hope and pray that she will be ok. Although I understand she may be in a critical condition. And I understand that police have arrested a man in respect of this particular atrocity, this outrageous behavior."

The Taoiseach said he would not be commenting further on Brexit today out of respect, however he would be still attending a business even in Manchester tonight.

"I also understand that the 'Remain' campaign and 'Leave' campaign have cancelled their campaigns for today. So out of respect for those decisions, I will not make any further reference to the referendum to be held next week during the course of my remaining duties here today, Mr Kenny said.
The Taoiseach is due in Liverpool this afternoon to campaign for the UK to remain in the European Union.

Enda Kenny will meet emigrant communities in the city today, before travelling to Manchester tonight to speak to a business audience.
Services will be held in memory of those who died in Berkeley today, one year from the date of the tragedy.

Six students were killed when the fourth floor balcony of an apartment fell 12 metres to the ground below.

The five Irish students who died were all from south Dublin and all 21 - medical students and friends Lorcan Miller and Eimear Walsh; Olivia Burke, who went to school with Eimear; Niccolai Schuster, who was at the same college as Lorcan and Eimear, and his friend from school Eoghan Culligan.

Irish-American Ashley Donohoe, 22, who lived in California and was a cousin of Olivia's, also died.

Another seven sustained serious injuries.

The students were on J1 working visas for the summer and were among 40 people attending a 21st birthday party when the balcony collapsed in the early hours of June 16, 2015.

The US Ambassador to Ireland, Kevin O'Malley, said the six would never be forgotten.

An apple tree has been planted in the grounds of the UE embassy in Ballsbridge, Dublin and a plaque erected in their memory, inscribed with these words from Joyce:

"They lived and laughed and loved and left.

They will not be forgotten."

Mr O'Malley said the people of the US extended heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and loved ones of the students who lost their lives or were injured.

"As the tree grows strong, we will take comfort in the knowledge that the memory of Ashley, Eimear, Eoghan, Lorcan, Niccolai, and Olivia, will remain with us always," the ambassador said.

"We also hold in our thoughts and prayers the young people who are still recovering from their injuries; that they may continue to heal with the love and support of family and friends here and in the United States.

"The remarkable resilience they have displayed sends a powerful reminder to the world of the friendship between our people and of our capacity to unite in times of adversity. I hope the outpouring of love and support from the American people in the aftermath of this tragedy has provided some comfort and brought us closer together."

Insufficient evidence

No criminal proceedings will be brought over the balcony collapse.

After a nine-month investigation, Nancy O'Malley, District Attorney in Alameda County, near San Francisco, found there was insufficient evidence for a manslaughter case.

Initial examinations of the remnants of the balcony showed rot had set in to heavy wooden beams.

Lawyers representing families affected by the tragedy said they are continuing to pursue lawsuits over the disaster.
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A new music festival is putting down its roots in Canberra, with a focus on all things local. Cream Festival at Westside Acton Park is bringing together and showing off Canberra's local music talent, artists and food. The Cream Festival team Norm Marshall, Stephen Rockmann, Oli Friedmann, Adi Watters, Finn Pedersen, Sancho Murphy and Cohen Gum. Credit:Jay Cronan The line-up is packed with Canberra talent, featuring the likes of The Aston Shuffle, Citizen Kay, Coda Conduct, Genesis Owusu, Slow Turismo and Brother Be. "The whole idea with the line-up is to take the insular Canberra music scene and expose it to a larger audience. We just wanted to provide a platform where people can come and see the best of Canberra's local music talent," said festival organiser Oli Friedmann.

The event grew from a desire to create an event that brings lesser and more well-known local talent together to give up to 2000 festival-goers a taste of the broad spectrum of music, food and art on offer in Canberra. "There's a real need for our Canberrans to be recognised as seriously awesome," said festival organiser Stephen Rockmann. "Just because you've got certain social economic circumstances, it shouldn't deliver limitations on your talent." The excitement isn't just focused on the music. Canberra brewing company Pact Beer Co. will be there on the day alongside the existing permanent food vans at the container village. And Sancho's Dirty Laundry will be screen printing merchandise for the event. The festival is a collaboration between Rockmann & Rush, the Ted Noffs Foundation and the TEDxCanberra team, and the organisers are already setting their sights on the future, saying it's what they hope will be the first of an annual event, which will include more food and art in the future.
New York burlesque star Dirty Martini, who has toured with Dita Von Teese and been photographed by Karl Lagerfeld, came up with her stage name in the most mundane of ways.

Working in an office, a world away from the stage, a word processing program spellchecked her real last name Marracini as Martini.

Australian Burlesque Festival performers, from left, Zeila Rose of Melbourne, Jacqueline Furey of Brisbane, New York's Dirty Martini and Alyssa Kitt of Sydney. Credit:Jamila Toderas

"The 'dirty' is a bit of fun because what I do is so far from what people think burlesque is. You can see more on Baywatch than you can in my show. So it's an ironic name," she said.

The travelling carnival of the Australian Burlesque Festival has arrived in Canberra on its way to Sydney, all feathers and sequins and bumps and grinds.
Police have published security camera footage of a man who allegedly stole an Audi Q5 station wagon armed with a shotgun in Civic on Tuesday last week.

The man, who was wearing a black balaclava and tracksuit, is alleged to have also robbed a post office in Fyshwick the same day.

Police want to speak with this man who allegedly stole an Audi Q5 with a shotgun.

The man approached the woman in the Canberra Theatre carpark, on London Circuit about 2.50pm before demanding she abandon her car, according to police. She complied and the man fled in the stolen car.

About 4.30pm the man, again armed with the shotgun, demanded cash from staff at the Australia Post store in Townsville Street, Fyshwick, police allege. The staff complied and the offender fled the scene.
A vote in favour of Brexit would spark more volatility, Clydesdale Bank chief David Duffy said but he moved to calm the nerves of its 400,000 Australian retail shareholders by saying it would have a limited impact on the bank's financial performance.

Mr Duffy also flagged more action to rein in costs, as the former National Australia Bank-owned lender seeks to lift returns before paying shareholders a dividend next year.

Unfazed: (left to right) Clydesdale Bank chief executive David Duffy, NAB chief financial officer Craig Drummond, and Clydesdale Bank CFO Ian Smith. Credit:Sahlan Hayes

Clydesdale stocks have been among the most affected by Brexit fears this week, as it earns all of its income in pound sterling, and is dual-listed in London and Australia.

Its locally-listed stock price of $5.20 has fallen 10 per cent from its peak last month, though it is still up about 30 per cent since its February float, when 75 per cent of its shares were distributed to NAB investors.
Around 100-plus shoppers descended on the new Kmart shop for its opening on Thursday morning, but about twice as many lined up outside Woolworths.

The only problem was - so had Woolworths.

For the opening of its new Top Ryde City store, Kmart had prepared for a full fanfare of balloons and goodies at 8am.

The home of the 'Fresh Food People', which is normally open at 7am, was offering a giveaway to the first 200 customers through the door from 8am, in celebration of its own store "refresh".

Shoppers enter the new Kmart at Top Ryde Shopping Centre. Credit:Nick Moir

At Kmart, shoppers started gathering from 7.30am, some on their way to work, others to the school drop-off.



But all were there for one reason: it's cheap.

"There is no Kmart anywhere else around here, and it's just cheap, so cheap," said local Natalie Porter. "You can get anything and everything. When it's Kmart, there is no budget."

Mitchell Stubbs, who works at KFC in the centre, said there was a lot of hope riding on Kmart.
Earlier this month, Education Minster Shane Rattenbury advised the Legislative Assembly that "the definition of school capacity has been expanded to ensure that all learning and teaching spaces, including curriculum flexibility spaces and special education spaces  have been included".

The elucidation was little remarked upon at the time, being part of a longish statement Mr Rattenbury gave in relation to the tabling of 2017-18 enrolment projections for Canberra public schools. Mr Rattenbury's media release of that same day outlining how the projections were assisting "in planning for and managing" growth in public schools didn't mention it either. It's not escaped Steve Doszpot's attentions, however.

The Opposition education spokesman accused the government of an "outrageous manipulation of data" to allow it to evade criticism over allowing schools to enroll more students than their mainstream capacity. The ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Association, meanwhile, has said the change "appears to be a very cynical move" while the Australian Education Union is seeking a briefing from Mr Rattenbury.

At the heart of this contretemps is the reality that more and more schools are struggling to deal with expanding enrolments. This is not an unusual occurrence in countries of rapid population growth, as Australia is.
While the committee was in Switzerland we learnt about the origins of physician-assisted dying. Aiding and abetting someone to commit suicide in that country has not been a crime since the 19th century. It started as a form of "honour dying" when a businessman who had gone broke would ask a friend in the army if they could borrow a gun. It was considered a compassionate act to hand it over.

We were told by people in Australia that overseas doctors were killing anyone who asked. They told us that doctors were killing people with mental health issues and they were killing babies. What we learned overseas was the accountability and transparency is extremely high and, no, they are not euthanizing babies and people suffering from depression.

In most of the other countries we visited, "terminal sedation" was a well-defined medical model. So when someone is dying in intractable pain, they are sedated into a deep coma and die in that state. In these countries the death is recorded as such but in Australia it isn't. There's just a log of medicines and prescriptions that precedes a death with no recognition of the intent or the humanity behind this course of action.

I had thought that death should be as personal as possible and that governments should not play a role in it at all. What I learned from my engagement with other countries is that this sensitive issue is not so clear-cut. We need regulation. We need review and we need accountability.

Our population is ageing but over the past 50 years we have been separated from death even though it is the one true absolute in all of our lives. We need to change that and this inquiry enabled a broad conversation on end of life choices and what was a "good" death. As a community we need to be prolonging life ... not death.
Cynthia Cooke nursed newly-released PoWs and later became Matron-in-Chief of the Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service.

In January 1945 Cynthia Cooke was a nurse at the Royal Navy hospital at Herne Bay, Sydney, New South Wales, when she volunteered to staff the makeshift hospital facilities onboard the aircraft carrier Formidable. Over the next few months Formidable steamed more than 100,000 miles and carried nearly 14,000 former PoWs to Sydney as well as returning troops from the Far East.

Cynthia Cooke, Principal Matron at the Royal Naval Hospital, Gosport in1972. Credit:Getty

On her first mission, after battling through a typhoon, Formidable collected some 1000 emaciated Australians from Manila. Loading the men in their weakened state from landing craft to Formidable took three days, and in order to load one former prisoner, suffering from tuberculosis of the spinal column, Cooke helped to manufacture a body-length plaster of Paris case which incorporated stretcher poles.

On October 24 Formidable sailed for Papua New Guinea to collect 1254 Punjabi soldiers who were in an even worse condition than the Australians, most suffering from malaria and severe eczema. Though antibiotics and antiseptic treatments were available, the best treatment for most men was curry, which they cooked themselves on the flight deck. There was only methylated spirits to clean ulcers and Cooke would warn through a translator that it would hurt. It was, however, translated to the patients as: "If doesn't hurt, it doesn't do any good."
Water from the Murray River will be pumped all the way to Broken Hill as part of a $500 million investment to provide a "safe and secure water supply" for the outback town, the Baird government said.

A 270-kilometre pipeline will account for the bulk of the funding.The government considered 18 other options, including buying back water rights for the more proximate Darling River from giant cotton farms in Queensland.

"Water security has been a constant challenge for Broken Hill since it was founded in 1883," NSW Premier Mike Baird said in a statement. "This unprecedented investment will provide a reliable water source for the historic township and surrounding communities for the first time in history.

"Everyone should have access to clean and secure water and this pipeline will provide certainty to businesses and residents to give this region every opportunity to prosper."
1. British MP murdered

Jo Cox was holding an MP's "surgery," a quaint name for a public meeting with constituents, at the public library in Birstall near Leeds around lunchtime on Thursday, local time.

Eyewitnesses say as she left the library she intervened in a dispute between two men on the street. She was shot, possibly three times. An hour later she was declared dead. A 52-year old man has been arrested in relation to the incident. Police are treating this as a "lone activity" (ie. not organised terrorism). Our EU Correspondent Nick Miller reports.

Labour MP Jo Cox was attacked and killed overnight in the UK. Credit:AP

The Remain and Leave campaigns swiftly suspended their campaigns as MPs took to Twitter to express their shock. Prime Minister David Cameron called her a "bright star" with a "huge heart," pointing out her work campaigning for refugees and alluding to background in working for Oxfam and fighting modern slavery.
Outspoken Labor MP Michael Danby has angered the party after he defied the orders of the powerful national executive over preferences.

Mr Danby, an outspoken critic of the Greens, has been caught handing out how to vote cards that preference the Liberal candidate for Melbourne Ports ahead of the Greens.

Mr Danby has held the seat since 1996, his current margin is 3.6 per cent but in 2013 Greens preferences helped him hold off a Liberal surge.
Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark, and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, made a stylish pair on Wednesday as they caught up at Royal Ascot.

The glamorous royal duo could have easily passed as sisters in similar cream hats with rose motifs and low chignon buns.

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark, and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, made a stylish pair on Wednesday as they caught up at Royal Ascot. Credit:Getty

Engrossed in conversation as they stood trackside with Prince William, they later carried on their catch-up in the private royal box alongside Prince Frederik.
Reese Witherspoon won't be collecting the estimated $500,000 plus appearance fee she was due to pick up next month on a working trip to Australia.

The Legally Blonde star was due to headline a series of "inspirational" seminars which have now been mysteriously cancelled with organisers of the Simpatico Connection Conference now going to ground.

Reese Witherspoon will not be heading to Australia after the conference she was due to headline was cancelled on Wednesday night. Credit:Getty Images

The event's Sydney spruiker Max Markson said he was "bound by contractual obligations" and would be unable to shed any light on the "issues" cited in a statement on Wednesday night which had resulted in the Oscar-winning actor's appearances being cancelled.
The NSW government has dumped part of a $531 million enrolment system from the state's TAFE network after years of enrolment chaos and a $100 million budget blowout.

The Learning Management and Business Reform (LMBR) network had been rolled out to TAFE campuses since 2013, but has been dogged by complaints and technical faults from its inception.

The system is also in the process of being implemented throughout the much-larger state school system, with frustration being reported by teachers as up to 2200 schools prepare to take on the new network.

Last year, thousands of TAFE students were still not officially enrolled in their courses more than five weeks into term because of problems accessing the software.
"Get the best picture possible, stay away from danger, and have a lot of luck." This simple philosophy was the advice from legendary Singaporean news cameraman Willie Phua on Tuesday as he shared highlights from some of the major events of the last 30 years.

Phua, an ABC foreign correspondent cameraman for more than three decades, captured pivotal moments in Asia's history on film, including the Vietnam War, and was one of the only cameramen to film the so-called "Tank Man", the young protester who briefly held back Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Singaporean news cameraman Willie Phua share his extraordinary story spanning three decades of reporting for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Credit:Jay Cronan

He appeared in conversation at the National Museum of Australia this week with his friend, and colleague, former ABC foreign correspondent, Bob Wurth, where he discussed his memory of the famous images.

"For two weeks, nothing happened. But one morning, a tank came. And a man ran out of nowhere and stopped the tank," Phua said.
The wheels on this bus definitely aren't going round and round.

Peak-hour traffic came to a halt on busy Darling Street in Balmain on Thursday morning when a wheel fell off a bus as it tried to drive through a roundabout.

The wheel fell off the bus at the intersection of Darling Street and Curtis Road in Balmain. Credit:Craig Lewis

Witness Craig Lewis was walking near the roundabout at the intersection of Darling Street and Curtis Road, not far from The London Hotel, about 7.55am when he said he heard an "almighty bang".
"Last year, there were 5000 incidents that were identified as part of the CCTV 24-hour, seven day a week coverage," he said.

The expansion did not come cheap, with a price tag of $2.8 million, but Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said it was worth every cent.

There will be 35 more eyes to watch you 24 hours a day, seven days a week within the next 12 months, as Brisbane City Council expands its CitySafe camera network in the CBD and Fortitude Valley.

"In the Valley, it was around 3800 and one of the great benefits is the amplification that goes with CCTV coverage, so a number of times we've been able to intercede in incidents with immediate voiceovers, indicating to people that they're being watched and that police are on their way."

Nine of the 35 new cameras would be installed in the Valley, with the rest in the CBD.

The expansion would result in a total of 34 cameras in the Valley and 92 in the city.

Police Superintendent Brian Connors said the Queensland Police Service had worked with the council to decide where to place the new cameras.

"(The locations) have been chosen because there hasn't been a lot of coverage there in the past," he said.
Queensland's RSPCA will present a special award to a dog that helped save his family from a raging house fire.

Snoopy the beagle alerted the owners of the Acacia Ridge home, in Brisbane's south, to flames downstairs before it was eventually gutted by the blaze last Friday.

The house had fire alarms, but firefighters said the fire was so intense it initially contained very little smoke.

Snoopy's owner Bill Winter, who was at home with his two children, said he had no doubt the beagle saved their lives.
Maybe he was impersonating a unicorn.

But Surfers Paradise MP John-Paul Langbroek has been accused of making "unparliamentary and inappropriate hand gestures" while sitting in the Parliamentary chamber on Wednesday afternoon.

Speaker Peter Wellington had just called out the Member for Chatsworth, Steve Minnikin, during a back and forth debate across the chamber about the budget, telling the House, "I do not need your hand movements provoking government backbenchers to play a part in this silly game".

"It is a little bit over the top at the moment," Mr Wellington said.
A man allegedly linked to the Nomads bikie gang has been charged after illegal firearms and drugs were seized during a raid at a Brisbane residence.

Detectives from Taskforce Maxima raided a property at Hunter Street, Kelvin Grove just before 7am on Wednesday and found a number of firearms and weapons including a sawn off and modified rifle, shotguns, a pen gun with silencer, a large quantity of ammunition, swords, knives and a tomahawk.

Numerous weapons were found at the Brisbane property. Credit:Queensland Police Service

Police also uncovered drugs and utensils, along with Nomad insignia, at the property.

A 41-year-old man, who allegedly held the office of sergeant-at-arms of the Nomads outlaw motorcycle gang Brisbane chapter, was charged with numerous weapons and drug offences.
A Gold Coast father has pleaded guilty to killing his four-month-old baby girl.

Shayne Robert Quinn appeared in Brisbane's Supreme Court on Thursday where he pleaded guilty to one count of manslaughter and one of grievous bodily harm.

A four-month-old girl died at Surfers Paradise in 2013.

He was charged after his infant daughter died at a unit in Surfers Paradise in September 2013.

It has been alleged the child suffered 20 fractured ribs along with numerous bruises and abrasions.
Even when work is an agonising slog, having a job  any job  is a blessing. Aside from the remunerative benefits that ensue, employment boosts self-esteem, expands social networks and enhances well-being. Those benefits are especially pronounced for people with an intellectual disability.

That's when work becomes not just about deriving a pay cheque but about deriving meaning and purpose. Likewise, work is not just about teamwork but about social integration and it's not just about working independently but about attaining actual independence.

Job vacancies could include a provision encouraging people with disability to apply.

Unfortunately, the prospect for meaningful employment is somewhat gloomy. The rate of unemployment for those with a mild or moderate intellectual disability is 34.9 per cent. For those with a mild or moderate physical disability it's 8.1 per cent. For the general population it's 5.7.

Further insight can be gleaned from an analysis published a few months ago in The Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation. The researchers analysed more than two dozen of the most credible studies on this topic. The culmination of their analysis resulted in four important themes:
Prahran drivers are urged to drive carefully and watch out for some water on the roads after a burst water main at the corner of High Street and Perth Street.

South East Water spokesman Matt Mollett said crews responded just after 7am this morning.



Mr Mollett said the leak was shut off at 8am. There was no damage reported to property, though about 30 people have had their water supply cut off.

He said there was water pooling on the road, but it was hard to estimate the exact volume.

VicRoads spokesman Adrian Pena said there was a slight delay on the outbound lane with traffic building up for "half a block" before the corner of High Street and Perth Street in Prahran.

Inbound traffic is not affected.


Mandurah's foreshore is set to be transformed by three floating barbecues after the council voted unanimously in favour of a BBQ-Boats trial.

The City of Mandurah made the decision on Tuesday to hand a non-exclusive license to Innospiring to operate the BBQ-Boats in front of The Tea & Coffee Merchant Cafe.

An artist's impression of the floating BBQ-Boats on the Mandurah foreshore. Credit:City of Mandurah.

The lease would allow Innospiring to operate three boats from Jetty number 1305 for a trial period of 12 months with the option of renewal for another year.

However, due to the works on the old Mandurah traffic bridge replacement, the new boats would be set temporarily on the eastern foreshore on jetty 1750, in front of the The Stage Door restaurant until the works are finished.
A Morley man tricked women in the Inglewood and Mount Lawley area to indecently assault them by asking for directions, police claim.

Police spokeswoman Susan Usher said police allege in April and May the 44-year-old man approached young women walking by themselves and asking for directions.

When they came close he would indecently assault them and in one incident, he is alleged to have exposed himself.

Ms Usher said an ongoing police investigation in to the assaults identified another incident in 2011.

The man has been charged with indecent assault and will face Perth's Magistrates Court on June 29.
Jakarta: Police fired a warning shot into the air after a group of Sri Lankan women who have been stranded off the coast of Aceh since June 11 disembarked from their boat in defiance of orders from Indonesian authorities.

An eyewitness told Fairfax Media the five women, who are among 44 Sri Lankans who claimed they were en route to Australia when they suffered engine trouble, had earlier pleaded that a child they said was sick be allowed to come to shore.

Indonesian immigration authorities have refused to allow the Sri Lankans, who are believed to be Tamils, to disembark in Indonesia because they do not have passports or travel documents.
Latest News Westpac joins Home Guarantee Scheme Help for home buyers starts mid-2023

CBA-owned stockbroker acknowledges court decision relating to systemic compliance failures A total remediation of $6.5 million has been paid to affected customers

The mortgage broking sector in Australia should be concerned about the future of trail commissions as a part of ASICs remuneration review, an industry veteran has told brokers.Speaking at the FBAA National Tour in Sydney today, Steve Weston, the former CEO of Mortgages at Barclays in the UK and former general manager of broker platforms at NAB , spoke about the major differences between the broker markets in Australia and the UK.According to Weston, Australia is one of the last markets in the world  along with some lenders in New Zealand  to pay trail commissions to mortgage brokers. Because of this, he said it is a reasonable assumption to say ASIC will be questioning this.The other big, big difference is on remuneration  and that is something we should be concerned about with ASIC because regulators will speak to their international counterparts, Weston told brokers.[In the UK] the upfront is not at 60 [basis points] that we have here, its 35-40 basis points and there is no trail.Weston  who admitted he is a big supporter of trail commission and has championed this model in the UK  said it is important now for the Australian mortgage broking industry to fight for it.We need to be very, very clear about what it is we do to justify trail, he said.He then told brokers that the UK experience should be used an argument on behalf of trail commission, not as a justification for abolishing them.This is the UK experience and you are free to use this as it is a good argument to ASIC, he said.According to Weston, 90-95% of the UK mortgage market is made up of fixed rate home loans. However, when he compared the fixed rate products originated through the third party channel to the propriety channel, he found most of the broker-originated home loans were two-year fixed products whilst the propriety channel were five-year fixed products.This is because a lack of trail commissions incentivises churn....[I]nterest rates in the UK  theyve been at half a percent since 2009  at some stage are going up. Borrowers are highly indebted as they are in Australia, so [rate] certainty would have been pretty important for customers. More should be taking a five-year fixed rate now than we are seeing from the broker market," Weston said.But the answer invariably was that because brokers were not getting paid enough commission they were putting a customer into a two-year fixed rate so they could churn them out in two years and get another upfront just so they could survive. Those are the sorts of unintended consequences that would happen if we remove trail.Weston also added that due to the UKs remuneration structure, there is a much higher propensity for brokers to operate under a fee-for-service model.But the FBAAs Peter White told brokers at the National Tour that this is not a viable model for Australia, highlighting the importance of learning from the UK experience.In regards to fee-for-service, I dont believe fee-for-service is a viable model. It has a place in the industry but it is certainly not the majority[I]t is most certainly not where the industry should be heading unless we do wind up going down the route of the UK market, but lets not predestine that journey.
Latest News Westpac joins Home Guarantee Scheme Help for home buyers starts mid-2023

CBA-owned stockbroker acknowledges court decision relating to systemic compliance failures A total remediation of $6.5 million has been paid to affected customers

Greedy state governments have gone too far in their attempt to improve housing affordability by increasing taxes for foreign investors, a property agency has claimed, adding its voice to the protest surrounding the controversial budget announcements.iBuyNew CEO Mark Mendel said the tax hikes announced by the NSW, Victorian and Queensland governments could backfire if foreign investors take their business elsewhere.Foreigners buying property in Australia should be paying some tax but the measures that have been announced by three state governments are over the top and could prove counter-productive for the domestic economy, Mendel said.Earlier this week, NSW Treasurer Gladys Berejiklian announced foreign property investors in NSW will soon face a 4% stamps duty surcharge and a 0.75% land tax surcharge on residential property purchased and owned in the state.Queensland has also announced a 3% surcharge while Victoria will increase its existing stamp duty surcharge from 3% to 7% and a land tax surcharge for absentee owners from 0.5% to 1.5%.Mendel said iBuyNew, which specialises in off-the-plan apartment and townhouse sales, would not see much impact in the Victorian market because off-the-plan sales do not attract much stamp duty.But in NSW and Queensland buyers pay full stamp duty for off-the-plan purchases so it will make it more expensive to buy in those states than in Victoria, he said.With other states likely to follow suit, what will be the impact on foreign buyers? The roll on effect could be an economic disaster for Australia with fewer international students, slower population growth and higher unemployment.Speaking at the Australian Financial Reviews Infrastructure Conference yesterday, Berajaklian, said it would not have an impact on the inelastic market and will support broader growth.Most commentators would argue that its a very inelastic market, so those who were going to make those investments are likely to make those investments anyway, she said.We dont feel in any way we have compromised the property market in New South Wales. What it will do is allow us to support revenue growth; it wasnt by accident that we announced [a lowering of business taxes], whilst were proposing a tax increase on foreign investors, who are likely to continue their decision-making irrespective of that surcharge.I guess its a very strong message to say: if theres a toss-up between do we support local businesses and how else can we generate revenue in a sustainable way for the future, we need to make those decisions.
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76th Precinct

Carroll Gardens-Cobble HillRed Hook

Done and dusted

Police cuffed a 27-year-old guy who they claim they found drunk in his car and in possession of brass knuckles on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway on June 12.

Officers say they observed the suspect slumped over in his 2004 Chevy van with the keys in the ignition near Hamilton Avenue at 9:15 am. The guy was allegedly slurring his words and had bloodshot eyes, and had the brass knuckles right next to him, authorities said.

Police arrested him for the possession of a criminal weapon and driving while intoxicated, officials said.

Maced in the face

Police arrested a woman who they say assaulted a 50-year-old guy in his home on Centre Mall on June 11.

The woman knocked on the strangers door between Columbia and Hicks streets at 11:27 pm, and the two got into an argument. At that point the suspect allegedly maced him, police said.

While he was sleeping

A punk swiped a guys wallet and tablet while he was sleeping on a Manhattan-bound F train on June 11, police said.

The victim said he fell asleep on the train at midnight and when he woke up at his Carroll Street stop, he noticed someone had cut his back pocket and the goods were missing.

He told police the wallet contained his insurance card, New York identification card, Social Security card, work permit, MetroCard, and $280.

Failed robbery

Police arrested a man for threatening to rob a bank on Court Street on June 7.

The suspect walked into the bank between First and Second places at 4:57 pm and allegedly passed a threatening note to the bank teller demanding money.

But he chickened out and ran off, and police arrested him on the corner of Hamilton Avenue and Bush Street, according to authorities.

 Julianne Cuba
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They really warmed up to this field trip.

Student from Kensingtons IS 62 and the Brooklyn Science and Engineering Academy in East Flatbush had a blast learning about a solar-powered airplane at John F. Kennedy airport on June 15, according to an organizer. The middle-schoolers especially enjoyed meeting and doing science experiments with the jets eco-conscious creators and pilots, who are travelling around the world with only the sun as fuel, she said.

Theyre not just scientists  theyre adventurers, said Rebecca Lucore of Covestro, a company that makes energy-efficient technology and hosted the event.

The Kings County scholars were among 300 students from around the city who scored a chance to tour and learn about Solar Impulse 2 and meet with its Swiss creators Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg.

This week marks the flyboys 14th stop in their journey around the planet since starting in 2015 in Abu Dhabi. Technical difficulties delayed the trip in Hawaii last year, but they started again on April 22  Earth Day  and have stopped in five other states to power up the crafts solar panels and let the pilots out of the tiny cockpit to stretch their legs.

Lucore said kids are the perfect people to hear their gospel of green technology, because they are the future innovators, and they need to know that there are exciting jobs in science, tech, engineering, and math that dont involve wearing a white coat or being cooped up in a lab all day.

We do have some people like that who do research, but there are so many opportunities for them, and science plays such a role in other careers, too. Working in teams, adapting to change, critical thinking, creativity  those are skills that are important for all of our workforce, not just for STEM careers, she said.
#WeThePeople Democracy Reform Bills Target Big Money in US Politics

Posted June 15, 2016

Interview with Rachel Curley, democracy associate with Public Citizen's Congress Watch, conducted by Scott Harris

Last April, a coalition of more than 260 advocacy groups supported a series of protest and civil disobedience actions in Washington, D.C. called Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening. These activists demanded the overturning of the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United ruling that opened the floodgates of unlimited and unaccountable money in U.S. political campaigns, reforms to end the corrupting influence of big money in politics and free & fair elections that give every American an equal voice.

The enthusiastic public support for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign message, denouncing the unchecked influence of a small group of billionaires on U.S. politics, reflects public opinion polls where large numbers of Americans express the belief that our democracy is broken.

As the 2016 presidential and congressional election campaign swings into high gear, political spending is predicted to break the previous record of $6.3 billion spent in 2012. On June 9, Democrats in the U.S. Senate seeking to address growing public concern, announced a new package of proposed legislation that they say is designed to hold the government more accountable, amend the Constitution to end unlimited campaign contributions and reform the lobbying laws to limit special interest influence on elected officials. Between The Lines Scott Harris spoke with Rachel Curley, democracy associate with Public Citizen's Congress Watch, who summarizes the set of bills being proposed in the Senate known as #WeThePeople democracy reforms. (Rush transcript)

RACHEL CURLEY: I think the impetus for the action in the Senate really came from the awareness in our country at how fed up people are at the present, of special interests in our democracy. Polling shows us that 85 percent of Americans think that the way we fund campaigns needs to be changed. That's a really high number. That's what tons of people understand, that corporations have more say than we do in our elections and they are tired of that. Tired of seeing that happen, time and time again. And so I think the Democrats in the Senate see that people are deeply by this issue and they want to see change, and so they are taking a stand and putting forth legislation that could make these changes.

There are a lot of things in this package but I will try to summarize them. One section of it covers transparency and disclosure, so making the donations that come to candidates and their campaigns, clear and transparent, so we know where they're coming from. Since some of that is mandatory disclosure of campaign donations, some of it is requiring candidates for federal office to report major contributions within 48 hours. So right now, reporting is not really happening in real time. And if it happened more in real time, that would increase transparency around who is spending in our elections. And another piece of it is reining in these superPACs that are also collecting huge amounts of money for campaigns. So that's one piece of it. Like I said, disclosure and transparency.

Another is affecting laws around lobbying. More folks know what lobbyists are  they go to Congress and talk about specific issues that affect their clients. And there are rules around lobbying right now. You do have to be registered, but the Senate Democrats want to go further. One of the things that they want to do is to enact a ban on former members of Congress becoming lobbyists. So once you've left Congress, either the House or the Senate, you're no longer allowed to come back and lobby for something.

The one other thing I'll mention is that this does include a Constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Citizen's United, which was the case that opened the floodgates for corporate spending in elections.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Is there a realistic possibility that Congress could pass some of this legislation, or is this going to be used in a way to keep politicians accountable when they are up for re-election this November?

RACHEL CURLEY: The legislation is bipartisan, so it shows that there is broad support for these issues. And I think what's important to note is that Big Money in politics is a problem for everyday voters of both political parties, so regardless of political affiliation, wealthy special interests look out for their own interests and not those of everyday Americans. And so I think the success of this proposal is to continually pound the drumbeat that Americans are tired of the system being rigged against them and they looking for change, and that legislators should support this change.

I know sometimes the issue of money in politics can feel frustrating, but this is an excellent opportunity to call your legislator, there is a package of reforms. It's called the "We the People Act" and I would like you to support it, and I would like you to make this happen. So this is a good moment for folks to continue to make noise on this issue.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Rachel, I'll just end on this question here. Many people across the country are pretty cynical about politics and about the role of Big Money. Wall Street money. Pharmaceutical money. Health insurance company money. All that seems to be calling the shots in Washington when it comes to important policy decisions. What, if anything gives you optimism that there's a change of mood in the country, or maybe on Capitol Hill, too, that gives this legislation a fighting chance?

RACHEL CURLEY: I have always been an optimistic person, but I came to Washington anyway, and I love working here because I can see that there are solutions. And even though it seems like an insurmountable problem, this piece of legislation is one piece in a large puzzle of solutions that can happen. Our democracy can be restored. The balance can sort of be reset, and we can have a democracy that is reflective of what our communities actually look like.

And so, I think that what I'll say is that a lot of folks may not think that there are solutions and it does seem like an issue that can't be addressed. But this is one step, the We The People Act. But this is one in a plan of lots of organizations from across the country that are working on. The Democracy Awakening event was just the beginning. I think the movement is growing and I think that the time is now that we can take back our democracy.

For more information on the #WeThePeople democracy reform legislation, visit Public Citizen at citizen.org; citizen.org/congress; and Democracy is for People at democracyisforpeople.org.

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Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parrys Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris



SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.



SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill



SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.



SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.

Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda

Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016



"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)



Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.



You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

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October 3, 2022

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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 ...
Well that crazy trip to the Berkshires that has made up the last three episodes of The Real Housewives of New York City has finally come to an end. So what do the ladies do to recover from all of that trauma? Plan another trip of course! And this one is out of the country. Lets see who doesnt make the guest list for their next bananas vacation.

Lus in Love

Sonja and LuAnn (aka Big and Little Edie) have one of their usual morning gab sessions now that theyre roomies and BFFs. But LuAnn has a big announcement: Shes in love and shes moving out! She tells Sonja all about Tom, her soul mate. Sonja is surprised to hear her soul mate is Tom, considering shes been doing him for years (her words). Wow, LuAnn. So not only are you getting Ramonas seconds, but Sonjas too? What a mess.

The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: The Countess Doesnt Care About her Bad Reputation >>>

Anyway, LuAnn encourages Sonja to patch things up with Bethenny. But Sonja says as long as Bethenny doesnt want to talk to her, theres nothing she can do to make things better. She understands that this isnt about Tipsy Girl being a competing business, but the fact that Bethenny took the name of Sonjas company as a personal insult. (Im surprised Sonja has that much awareness to realize thats the situation. If only she had thought of that before.)

But the person Sonja is really mad at is Dorinda. She can see the only reason Dorinda excluded her from her weekend in the Berkshires was for Bethennys sake and shes still hurt over it. To prove a point to all of the ladies, Sonja tells LuAnn that shes given up drinking. It would seem like something to be proud of if she was doing it for the right reasons, but shes only doing it to prove to the ladies she doesnt have a problem. Which sounds like a problem.

Who to Invite?

Bethenny, Jules, Carole, Ramona and Dorinda meet for drinks. Bethenny invites them all on a SkinnyGirl sponsored tequila tasting trip to Mexico. But they have business to attend to before they get excited: Do they invite Sonja and LuAnn?

They pretty much come to a consensus that it would be irresponsible to invite Sonja to anything thats strictly alcohol related. So nix on Sonja.

Carole says she doesnt want to go if LuAnn is going. But Bethenny says she doesnt want to go if Caroles going. So would the trip even happen then? I dont know, but they dont seem to come to a decision on this one. The only one who really wants both Sonja and LuAnn there is Ramona. Those are her original girls and she thinks theyre both fun on trips. But shes not about to disagree with Queen B. about either decision.

The next day, Carole comes to Bethennys place to have some girl talk. The two of them spent the holidays together in the Bahamas with their men; Caroles man, Adam, and Bethennys new mystery man. Bethenny seems to be pretty enamored. She says hes smart, passionate, and most importantly busy having his own life so he doesnt need to be so dependent on hers. She tells Carole that she may even consider getting married again. Its still a long shot though. And I suppose her divorce has to finalize before that can happen anyway

Carole then tells Bethenny about the traumatic experience she had when she had to give back her foster kitten. She says it made her realize that the only way shes been able to love anything in her life is if she knew it was temporary. It seems like a breakthrough for Carole. Now shes starting to consider about changing the way she lives her life and making Adam into something not so temporary. Yay for girl talk and personal growth!

Speaking of girl talk (but maybe not so much personal growth) Dorinda and Sonja meet to have their nails done. They talk about Ramona and how shes taken sides in this whole Tipsy Girl thing, and unfortunately, its not Sonjas side. Sonja says that Ramona takes her for granted.

Then Dorinda tries to break it to Sonja gently that Bethennys having a trip to Mexico and that Sonjas not invited. Of course Sonja is disappointed to hear this, especially since shes recently quit drinking. But Dorinda says that Bethenny is just too upset with her. Dorinda says that if Sonja were smart, she should apologize to Bethenny and just take Tipsy Girl off the table. Sonja says that its a business, and thats not an option. So I guess a tequila trip to Mexico isnt an option for Sonja.

Ramona is having some weird hair extension party where she, Avery and LuAnn are getting extensions. (Is this a thing New Yorkers do? Extensions parties?) Anyway, LuAnn gushes to Ramona about how shes so in love and how she and Tom are probably going to get married. What does Ramona do after hearing this? She tells LuAnn that shes a girls girl and Ramona just wants LuAnnn to know that Tom calls his ex every day to tell her that hes still in love with her. He also bought her a gold bracelet for Christmas.

LuAnn doesnt think this is true and states that she also doesnt appreciate Ramona bursting her bubble like that. Even Avery thinks what her mom did was messed up. But LuAnn tells Ramona that shes glad shes looking out for her nonetheless. What a strange interaction.

Dorinda and John meet Jules and Michael for dinner. It basically turns into Jules complaining about how Michael isnt helping out with the kids. Then Dorinda, who has had too many dry martinis, goes on a very Dorinda-like rant about men in New York and  special wine grapes? I dont know, but its prime Dorinda nonsense and its so entertaining.



RHONYC Star Bethenny Frankel Confirms Dating a Married Man >>>

Hit and Run Invite

Bethenny meets LuAnn at a wine bar for drinks. LuAnn continues on her gush-about-being-in-love tour. Bethenny doesnt get how someone could move to talks of marriage in only four weeks, but she congratulates her nonetheless.

LuAnn seems insincere and shes fairly infuriating in this encounter. She diminishes Ramona for having said she was with Tom when it was only a few dates. She talks about how shes not concerned that Tom sends gold bracelets to his exes. And she takes every opportunity to talk over Bethenny.

So when she finally asks Bethenny if shes invited to Mexico or not, Bethenny doesnt know how to answer. Bethenny says she came in the bar intending to invite her to the trip, but after her boorish behavior, she kind of doesnt ever want to see her again, let alone invite her on this trip.

Bethenny tells her about the trip and why shes hesitant to invite LuAnn. Mainly she doesnt want her real friend, Carole, to feel uncomfortable having to vacation with her fake/TV friend, LuAnn.

LuAnn says she doesnt have a problem with Carole and that they worked everything out, so no worries there, shell definitely come! She says yes, shed love to come! Then she whisks off to see her Prince Charming. Bethenny doesnt even really know what happened. She didnt even invite LuAnn, but Lu managed to invite herself and accept the invitation herself. Who knew the Countess had such a talent?

Next episode: Bethenny tries to undo LuAnns (perceived) Mexico invitation.

The Real Housewives of New York City airs on Wednesdays at 9pm on Bravo

(Image courtesy of Bravo)
Wayward Pines Exit Strategy isnt much of one, but that doesnt mean there isnt a fair amount of meat to keep this barbecue afloat. Dont get me wrong, Im not giving up on Shyamalans dystopian Once-Upon-A-Time anytime soon, but this episode reminds me that the middle four episodes have a lot of ground to cover, just like during the first season. I just wish it was moving a little faster. Main characters Jason and Theo barely show their faces, an old character returns to add almost nothing to the plot, and Megan is anxious to steal an 11-year-old girls virginity. Them are the yawners.

On the other hand, Megan gets into pissing matches with Kerry and Rebecca, Xander returns from exile to make googly eyes at Rebecca (who bats her lashes right back), and a troop of Piners make camp outside the electrified fence. Then, of course, theres a shocker in the final two seconds of the episode which I will not spoil until the end of my recap.

Wayward Pines Recap: Jason Kills His Murderous Mother >>>

If the Abbies Dont Get You, the Unabomber Might

So it appears Xander wasnt eaten by the Abbies after all. He awakes to find himself at the bottom of a man-sized gopher hole. How he ended up underground is soon revealed when Bob the Sleestack, er, The Abbie comes home to the hole and attacks him. Xander gets the better of Mr. Abbie and strangles him to death, then bashes his head like a watermelon for good measure. What I want to know is why the Abbies didnt eat Xander when they had the chance? This kid doesnt seem to have a scratch on him. And what was the Abbie planning to do with his human prey? Inquiring minds may want to know, but we are going to have to be patient. Answers arent forthcoming during Exit Strategy, but the Wayward Pines mythology continues to spin itself.

Once he claws his way out of the cave/hole/pit, Xander is attacked once again, but this time its not by an Abbie. Meet Ted Kaczynski, aka Adam Hassler, aka Ethan Burkes old boss, Adam Douche Bag Hassler, who enrolled Ethan in this whole cryo-preservation nightmare 2000 years ago.

How Has Hassler Survived All These Years Outside Wayward Pines?

We dont know, and you arent going to find out in Exit Strategy. If you recall, last season Theresa Burke found an underground bunker containing hundreds of archived video journals from nomads, including Adam Hassler, who were barely surviving outside the walls of Wayward Pines. Hasslers last transmission in 2040 showed San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge in utter ruin.

Though Hassler appears fairly coherent at the beginning of the episode, he becomes increasingly unglued as the plot progresses. Hes plagued with PTSD-induced hallucinations as he wanders aimlessly through town after an initial physical with Dr. Theo. What he does tell Xander is that the Abbies are methodical, and if you follow their methods, you can use them to your advantage. Cryptic enough for you? He does mention, however, that the Abbies are human replacements. Everyone seems surprised by this even though its widely known that the Abbies are the result of the evolving human race.

Curiously, Jason doesnt strap Hassler into a chair and torture him into spilling everything he knows about the Abbies. Like, how the hell did he survive? Youd think Megan would want a crack at him as well, but no.

So, why is it that a bunch of intelligent people might not do the most logical thing in the face of this opportunity? Well, what do you do when you dont want too much of the yarn unraveled too early in the plot? You ignore it. Thats what Wayward Pines does here  pretends they dont have the most experienced specimen within reach to prod and poke and get all the answers from. Okay. Deep breath. Patience, young Padawans, we have six more episodes. All will be revealed in its time.

Hassler Needs to See A Man About A Horse

What we do learn about Hassler is that he wants to go home because theres someone Ive gotta see. We dont get a definitive answer to that by the end of the episode, but its inferred that Ethan Burke is the man Hassler hopes to meet up with. Instead, he learns that Ethan is dead, but Theresa remains. We learn half way through the episode that Hassler already knows about Bens death when hes able to bring Bens corpse to Theresa so she can finally put Ben to rest. Unfortunately for Theresa, this means shes most likely no longer needed for the second seasons storyline and will soon be listed in the credits as Abbie kibble victim #23.

Xander is a Man of Mystery  and Romance?

Xander uses Hassler as his Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card and returns to Wayward Pines with him. Once there, he returns to work at the soda fountain. Curious Kerry reads Xanders file and makes veiled threats, but Xander uses the promise of sharing his new-found knowledge of the Abbies (which consists of, oh yeah, nothing) to persuade Kerry that he can be of benefit to Jason now.

Later, Rebecca visits Xander at the soda fountain. The two speak with a familiarity that only comes from having been intimates. After all, Rebecca has been in Wayward Pines for three years without her husband. Shes gorgeous and intelligent. She thought Theo was dead, right? Well, it looks like she spent her time getting busy with young Xander.





Always Remember Not to Use Protection, Boys and Girls

Megan gives pregnancy statistics to Jason and his brat pack during a strategy meeting. There are 78 knocked up teenagers in the First Generation program at Wayward Pines Academy. Eight ore girls, she says, recently began menstruating and can now be used as baby incubators. (How different things are there than they were in my house growing up!)

Lucy Armstrong is an eleven-year-old girl who, along with her brother Frank, were orphaned when Pilcher allowed the Abbies to attack Wayward Pines three years earlier. Lucy was one of the girls who was sent out of class when it was time to talk about sex because she was still too young. Well, now Lucy has gotten her period. She implored Rebecca not to tell anyone because she is terrified of being a mom so young. Rebecca tells her that there is no way out of this crooked system, but she doesnt push her.

Megan smells menstrual blood and approaches Lucy, who denies her womanhood is burgeoning. Megan then threatens Frank to get the truth. Then, she confronts Lucy at Rebeccas beauty shop where Lucy has been spending time. Rebecca stands up for Lucy and is clearly not intimidated by Megan. (What is the history between these two? I still cant decide which side Rebecca is on. Again I ask, was Rebecca part of this whole plan from the beginning?)

Remember, last week Pam told Theo that he wasnt the only reason for the abduction in Hawaii, suggesting she and Pope were equally, if not more interested, in Rebecca. Boom. This incident with Lucy is the first time weve seen Rebecca buck the system, yet shes not afraid to do it. What makes her so valuable to Jason that she doesnt fear he might reckon her for coloring outside the lines?

Wayward Pines: Does Jason Deserve Our Sympathy? >>>

The Harvest is Plenty and Laborers Are Few, Come With Me Into the Fields, Says C.J.

Throughout Exit Strategy C.J. pushes to be allowed to conduct soil and light studies outside the perimeter now that the Abbies have backed off. Jason agrees that its time to expand the crops. As such, C.J. receives permission to take a troop of people and protection outside the electrified wall and scout out fertile ground.

Though Megan fervently insists that their sole focus should be on procreating and propagating, C.J. says nothing matters more than growing food to feed all those mouths Megan is manipulating into existence. He has a good point. Jason is on his side, of course. As for Kerry, she wants Dr. Theo to work with Megan as she examines and studies the captive Abbies.

Bens Uneaten Corpse is Unearthed and C.J. Changes His Tune

Once the group assembles and starts to make camp outside the perimeter, Hassler and Theresa have a little chat. At first she was angry as hell that Hassler got Ethan into this fatal mess. Then she decides to see what the Unabomber has to say. When she asks about Ben, Hassler goes off into the woods and returns with Bens corpse. (Damn! Again, though, why wasnt Ben completely eaten, and what kind of wasteful creatures are these Abbies? Do they hunt for sport?) Theresa freaks, but now she can get on with it.

As Theo and C.J. talk, C.J. admits that the town is still at risk, but says the real reason for the crops is so that through him, those left behind can see hope. Does he mean those who died and have become flowers on a grave, or does he mean the people back in Wayward Pines who wait for the food? His resonant voice is meant to sound like hes imparting wisdom or great insight, but hes being so cryptic its hard to decipher his true meaning. So far the character of C.J. has been one dimensional. Hopefully this will change going forward. It better!

Look Whos Coming To Dinner, Frank

In the final evening scene Frank, distraught over Lucys anger at him for spilling the beans, goes off by his lonesome to eat a sandwich. The lights of the carousel flash on and it begins to rotate. All looks innocent until the lights flash off again. Franks wonder turns to horror when an Abbie growls and appears behind one of the carousel horses. Now, how did he get inside the walls? Tune in next time for Sound the Alarm. It sounds to me like all hell is about to break loose in Wayward Pines, folks.

Wayward Pines airs Wednesdays at 9pm on FOX.

(Images Courtesy of FOX)




News / National

by Fungai Lupande

A ZAMBIAN woman who dumped her minor twins at the Victoria Falls Border Post has been deported back to her country after being sentenced to a wholly suspended six months in jail.Constance Sililo, 32, of Indego Extension in Livingstone, Zambia, dumped the tots aged 28 months on Thursday last week after failing to meet their father, Edmund Mutsinze, a Zimbabwean truck driver.The two had arranged to meet in Victoria Falls to discuss the future of their children.Sililo pleaded guilty to exposing an infant charge when she appeared before Victoria Falls magistrate Rangarirai Gakanje on Tuesday.The magistrate sentenced her to six months imprisonment which were wholly suspended for five years on condition of good behaviour.In mitigation, Sililo told the court that it wasn't her intention to dump the tots but she was desperate and wanted their father to take responsibility."I never intended to dump my children but I wanted their father to take care of them. I've been struggling because he has never supported them. I plead with the court not to imprison me as I have other children to take care of," she said.Sililo was immediately deported back to Zambia while the children were surrendered into the custody of Alexinar Mpuli Chimwanga, her sister based in Livingstone.
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The Gujarat High Court has issued notice to the state government on a petition field by India against state's notification levying 6 to 21% entry tax on goods that are being purchased through the e-commerce portal in Gujarat.

A division bench of Chief Justice R Subhash Reddy and Justice VM Pancholi posted the matter for further hearing on June 20, tagging it along with a similar petition filed by competitive e-commerce company Flipkart.

challenged the state government's amendment to the law to levy entry tax on goods purchased through e-commerce portals, which has apparently been done to provide a level- playing field to traders and retailers in the state.

Like Flipkart, has claimed that the tax is discriminatory, because no such tax is imposed on goods brought into Gujarat through other modes of sale.

It has held that it only provides an online platform to manufacturers, traders and buyers and itself is not involved in selling any product and hence the tax is unjustified.

The Gujarat Tax on Entry of Specified Goods into Local Areas (Amendment) Bill, was passed on March 31.

From April 1, any goods being purchased online are being subject to 6 to 21% entry tax. While normal goods are being levied 6% tax, specified goods are subject to up to 21.6% tax, with majority of goods being levied around 12% tax.

The government amended an Act of 2001, with the aim to cover e-commerce transactions in its ambit, as the government felt this was adversely affecting local traders.

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".
has taken charge as the Officiating Chairman-cum- Managing Director of United India Insurance Company Ltd with effect from June 8, 2016. He has been appointed in place of Milind Kharat who has retired as the Chairman-cum-Managing Director on May 31, 2016.

Hoda is an Economics graduate and is a fellow of Insurance Institute of India, said a company release. He began his career as a Direct Recruit Officer of 1980 batch in National Insurance Company and has worked in various capacities in various parts of India including North East region.

He joined United India Insurance Company as Deputy General Manager in August 2008, after 28 years of service in National Insurance Company Ltd and was promoted as General Manager in 2012. He is a Council Member of Insurance Institute of India and is a Director in Agricultural Insurance Company Ltd, Delhi.
Pharma major is planning to raise around $200 million, of which International Finance Corporation (IFC) is planning to invest up to $75 million. The company plans to raise the money through market issuance of quasi-equity instruments.
has questioned Karnataka government's new regulations for ride-hailing apps, terming these as regressive and practically impossible to comply.

It had written to state transport minister Ramalinga Reddy, saying a few clauses like keeping a fleet of a minimum of 100, generating printed receipts and capping of charges are unfortunately redundant and similar to the radio taxi scheme introduced by Karnataka way back in 1998.

The mandatory clauses are regressive in nature and not in line with our business model.

Uber, which competes with the likes of Ola and Meru in India, requested the minister's intervention on the matter.

"(Uber) would be grateful if you can kindly direct the authorities concerned to look into our submissions on mandatory clauses, which are not only regressive, but also practically impossible to comply with," it argued.

followed up the letter with another one on June 7, saying it had submitted all necessary documents required by the Transport Department to ensure compliance of some 100 vehicle rules for getting the licence.

"However, your office refused to accept our documents or even acknowledge our document submission," it wrote to the Commissioner for Transport and Road Safety on June 7. "In view of this, we are submitting all the documents through Speed Post acknowledgment due today."



Under the new rules, Karnataka has mandated ride-hailing start-ups to provide digital printers, install panic buttons and have taxi signage on their vehicles.

The company contended that it applied for a licence in Bangalore with all the required documents, but its application has not been accepted.

India, Uber's third-largest market, continues to be strategically important for the company, which has committed to investing over USD 1 billion here.

"In Karnataka... we have committed an economic contribution of Rs 99 crore towards creating livelihood opportunities to over 20,000 more driver partners in the next 5 years," the letter said.

Making a case for its technology-led business model, maintained that many state governments in India have realised its potential in creating livelihood opportunities for citizens.

"Uber is committed to working with the state governments to frame rules that are progressive and support innovation and champion ease of doing business," it said.

This is not the first time the start-up, which is valued at over USD 60 billion, is facing issues with government regulations. It has had earlier run-ins with regulators across the world like France and the US as it competes with local taxi operators.
The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Thursday rejected the Union corporate affairs ministry's plea to appoint two government nominees on the Financial Technologies (India) (FTIL) board of directors and instead gave a direction to constitute a five-member committee to oversee the regulatory sale and investments by FTIL.
IN TROUBLED WATERS Sebis new curbs on wilful defaulters

New rule bans wilful defaulters from taking any board positions



Disallow defaulters from setting up market intermediaries



Defaulters would not be allowed to take control of other listed company



No wilful defaulter shall make a public announcement of an open offer for acquiring shares or enter into any transaction



Sebis rule disqualifies Mallya from various posts he holds at the moment

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is not pleased with United Breweries (UB) allowing Vijay to continue on its board of directors, despite being tagged a wilful defaulter.is chairman of the board of Bengaluru-based UB. Several banks have formally declared him a wilful defaulter and under new Sebi norms (late last month), any individual so tagged is barred from holding a board position in a listed company. should have stepped down as UB chairman and from its board, following Sebis new regulations. (We) are keeping a watch on the board functioning, said a Sebi official, requesting anonymity.The regulator could soon initiate action if UB is in violation of the corporate governance norms, said the official. The regulator is believed to have also raised questions on the role of independent directors on UBs board.UB refused to comment on an email query sent to it.Earlier this year, Mallya had resigned as chairman and managing director of United Spirits, as part of a deal with the company's new owner, Diageo. Mallya, however, continued to serve on the board of other companies, including UB. Diageo now owns 55 per cent of USL and Mallya had stepped down from the board in February, for a $75 million payoff.From the March quarter shareholding data, Mallya holds 8.08 per cent in UB in his personal capacity. Another 22 per cent in UB is owned by his group companies.Heineken acquired a 37.5 per cent stake in United Breweries in 2008 through its takeover of Scottish & Newcastle and has since increased its holding to 42.4 per cent.The banks say Mallya had given personal guarantees, apart from pledging his stake in UB Group companies, to raise funds for his now-grounded Kingfisher airline. This resulted in Mallya losing control over his liquor empire to global players  Diageo in spirits and Heineken in beverages.Mallya reportedly left India on March 2, allegedly to escape enforcement action by multiple probe agencies and Indian banks, to which he owes Rs 6,963 crore in loans. In March, a consortium of lender approached the Supreme Court to stop Mallya from going abroad but hed left; on April 18, a court in Mumbai issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against him.Last week, the enforcement directorate had attached United Breweries Holdings and Mallya assets worth Rs 1,411 crore in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Coorg and Chennai. He was also declared a proclaimed offender early this week.

This was issued in response to a plea by the Enforcement Directorate on April 15 before the special court hearing cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. There were allegations on him that he transferred Rs 4,000 crore ($590 million) to tax havens.




Nearly 400 start-up enterprises have filed applications under the governments StartUp India programme to avail of benefits such as tax breaks and faster clearance.Of these, 189 requests have been examined, a senior from the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP) told this newspaper. An inter-ministerial committee periodically examines the requests.Of those examined, the bulk nearly 150 was found to lacked proper paperwork and were disqualified, the official quoted above said. Budding enterprises have to get certification from a recognised incubation centre, apart from other identification details. While lack of awareness has been an issue, the government is looking to increase the number of incubation centres. The StartUp India initiative, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, earlier this year, offers incentives to encourage these entities. For instance, exemption from labour laws compliance for three years, no income tax on profit for three years and self-certification for other regulatory compliance.Also, the government will hasten the establishment of start-up hubs and labs. A fund for start-ups was declared in the Union Budget and Rs 2,500 crore would be released annually over the next four years, to be invested in venture capital funds listed with the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

Start-ups can register for such benefits on the StartUp India online portal. Only 30 start-ups have been asked to give extra information about their innovation and are currently in line to be awarded benefits; only one has got the approval to avail benefits for intellectual property rights. However, all of the 30 start-ups will receive other compliance benefits, the official said.
Taxi aggregator will have presence in 50 cities in India by the end of the current year and is looking to partner with local to expand its business, a top company official said on Thursday.

currently has operations in 27 cities in India and "we will try to be 50 cities by the end of year. Our goal is to reach everybody and we have to this in stages," said Eric Alexander, head of business, Asia.

He was talking to reporters on the sidelines of an event where Uber announced partnership with Tata .

Replying to a query, Alexander said the incentives offered to driver partners was not hurting their business in India. Uber, through its technology, is enabling drivers to be more efficient and make more trips per hour to make more money. "At the end of the day we have make our driver partners make money," he said.

He, however, said the company was trying to make the business stand on its own.

"When you start the business in any city, you have to invest heavily but overtime you tune it. Our goal is to make business stand alone," he said.

Uber, which recently announced partnership with Paytm, State Bank of India (SBI) and Indian Army welfare body, is looking at partnerships with more local to give flexibility and options to driver partners and consumers.

Alexander believes the working with local companies which have technology and expertise is part of Uber's success and strategy. The company was looking for such partnerships on supply side to get more driver partners. After partnering with Indian Army welfare body to get two million ex-servicemen work as driver partners, it is keen to work with others like state governments and driving schools.

"We will be looking for partnerships with local companies in areas like technology, travel and finance. We will also work closely with state governments to grow our business in India," he said.

On surge pricing, he said it was purely designed as a way to allow consumers get a car when there are not enough cars to meet the demand. "This is not something we in Uber can control. It is purely a marketplace algorithm. It is computer generated and we are not doing this as a company to make money," he clarified.

While admitting that sure pricing is controversial, Alexander described it as a technology solution to allow riders who are ready to pay the price.
Wartsila India, in an effort to increase its presence in the Indias power sector, has firmed up plan to take up LNG terminal and ship building projects, develop mid size LNG based power plants as EPC contractor.
Software major on Thursday gave a petition to the inter-ministerial Board of Approval here to set up a Special Economic Zone for information technology and IT-enabled services in the Rajarhat area near here.
After a censorship row, the drug-themed Udta Punjab film will hit the screens as scheduled on Friday, with the Supreme Court and the Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday paving the way for its release. However, its online leak sparked a fresh spat.

Anurag Kashyap, the co-producer who has been at the forefront of a battle with the censor board, and several filmmakers also appealed to people not to watch it online.

The Supreme Court refused to entertain the plea of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) seeking the stay on the release. It asked the NGO to approach the high courts.

The Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh starrer that delves into how a large number of youth in Punjab have succumbed to drugs triggering a political slugfest and multiple legal battles.

A Bench had asked the NGO to approach the high court with its prayer.

"We are not interfering in the matter. We are not going into the merit. Liberty granted to the petitioner to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter," the bench said. The Bombay High Court had already cleared the film with a cut.

In Chandigarh, the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed two petitions filed against the film's release.

The vacation bench of Justice M Jeyapal dismissed the petitions, counsel for the producer said.

"Based on the report submitted today, the high court has taken a decision that the film will be released tomorrow and then dismissed the petitions filed against the release of the movie," counsel Sanjay Kaushal said.

He said the high court noted that the film did not glorify drugs. "Drug menace can be there in any state and the film does not glorify drugs," said the counsel.

Amicus curiae advocate Sujoy Kantawala, who watched the movie on the directions of the high court, also presented his report to the bench.

"I have clearly mentioned in my report which was read out in open court that there is absolutely nothing in the film which could lead any such sort of apprehensions which the petitioner entertained," he said.

As the film was set hit the theatres tomorrow, the online leak of the film prompted Anurag Kashyap to say that he believed it was a case of vested interests "trying to demoralise" the filmmakers in their fight.

The film's producers yesterday lodged a complaint with the cyber crime police in Bandra yesterday.

The entire film has been leaked on various torrent websites with 'for censor' written on the top left corner of the copy, as questions cropped about about any role by the Censor Board in this regard.

"I am not sure whether it was a CBFC copy. But if it's a censor copy then it's a shame on CBFC, it reflects very badly on them. Piracy is an an issue, which we all have been fighting for a very long time," superstar Aamir Khan said.

CBFC chief Pahlaj Nahalani, on his part, said "rumours" about the online leak should not be believed. "Please understand the procedure rather than believing in rumours," he said.
With the first anniversary of launch of smart city mission nearing, the Pune Municipal Corporation may be hosting Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the inauguration of the projects.
The Supreme Court today refused to entertain the plea of an NGO seeking stay on the release of the film Udta Punjab and asked it to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter.

A vacation bench of Justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and L Nageswara Rao granted liberty to the NGO, Human Rights Awareness Association, to approach the high court with its prayer.

"We are not interfering in the matter. We are not going into the merit. Liberty granted to the petitioner to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter," the bench said.

The NGO had yesterday moved the Supreme Court to stall the screening of the film, while another plea by it had prompted the Delhi High Court to direct the producer to modify the promos by adhering to the Bombay High Court order.

The plea filed before the apex court bench sought a direction to restrain the screening of the movie on the ground that it depicted the state of Punjab in a "bad light".

On June 13, the Bombay High Court had cleared the decks for the release of Udta Punjab after ordering deleting of a urination scene and displaying a revised disclaimer according to which the makers would have to delete reference to Pakistan.

The Bombay High Court had also directed the film-maker to make additions to the disclaimer to the effect that the movie, its characters and the film-makers do not promote the use of drugs and abusive language, and the film is only attempting to depict the reality of drug abuse.

In the Bombay High Court, Anurag Kashyap's Phantom Films had challenged the Central Board for Film Certification revising committee's order of June 6 directing for a total of 13 changes in the movie.

The film, starring Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh, delves into how a large number of youth in Punjab have succumbed to drugs.
The Centre on Thursday announced creation of chemical hubs across the country, early environment clearances in existing clusters, adequate infrastructure, and establishment of a Central Institute of Chemical Engineering and Technology.



In an interactive session here on Thursday after the launch of India Chem 2016, Union Minister of Chemicals and Petrochemicals Ananth Kumar admitted the industry faced challenges over environment clearances for greenfield and brownfield projects. But he said there would be no compromise over the environment and the industry would have to put in place effluent treatment plants.
Threatening strict action against those indulging in theft of electricity, Power Minister on Thursday said it is "industries" as well as "big people" and not the poor who are involved in the pilferage.

"Bribes are offered to linesmen and department officials, and may be politicians are also involved in it," Goyal said here at the 2-day conference of power ministers of states and Union territories.

He called for taking action against those involved in power theft saying it will benefit the common man.

He said, "I would like to mention that this is not the issue concerning the poor people. Don't think that you will be politically affected if you take action against the power theft. Poor persons are not involved in the theft. Farmers don't do it because they get it cheap or free power.

"Maximum theft is in the field of industries and by big people. I feel there is a political benefit in stopping the theft because by doing that you will be able to reduce the electricity bill of the common man."



He added, "If you do your job honestly and if you are able to convey to people that what you are doing is for their benefit, then I can assure you that politically there is a great benefit in curbing power theft."



The Union minister also hailed the efforts of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his stint as Gujarat Chief Minister in converting the loss making power sector into a profit yielding one.

"I have learnt this from Gujarat. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, in the first year itself he began a crackdown on electricity theft. This was in the year 2002 and Modi faced criticism," he said.

"Around one lakh FIRs were filed and even BJP workers were put behind bars. But due to that step, Modi managed to improve the power scenario in the state," Goyal stated.

"The electricity companies in Gujarat were suffering losses of Rs 2,500 crore when Modiji became Chief Minister 14 years ago. Within a short span he was able to convert that loss into a profit, probably in two or three years without increasing power tariff," the minister said.

"Over the years, the lowest increase in tariff has been in Gujarat and yet it is in profit, making it a self sustaining power sector," he added.
Non-performing assets (NPAs) have taken a toll on the Indian banking sector in the last couple of years. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the government have taken several measures in recent years to resolve the NPA issue but there hasn't been much progress, as promoters have little money to invest.
The Tamil Nadu government has set up a special team, which recently visited Taiwan to hold talks with potential companies that can take over Nokia's facility near Chennai, said governor K Rosaiah. The facility has been mired in an income tax dispute.

While delivering the inaugural address of the first session of the 15th Legislative Assembly, he said that the state government is taking very serious efforts for the revival of the plant along with the component manufacturers.
Gujarat has distributed more than three million light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs under government of India's Unnat Jyoti by Affordable LEDs for All (Ujala) scheme. With this, the state has become fastest distributor of the LED bulbs in India.

This scheme was launched in Gujarat on May 26, 2016 and the milestone of distributing three million LED bulbs has been achieved within a short span of only 19 days.
The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee addressed the Indian Community Reception hosted by Indian Ambassador, Shri R. Ravindra in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire yesterday (June 15, 2016). .

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Speaking on the occasion, the President congratulated the Indian Diaspora for their law abiding nature and cooperation with the people of the country of adoption. He said the Indians abroad are aware of their roots and have maintained their links with the past.

They are symbols of the soft power of India and unofficial cultural ambassadors of their country. .

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The President said the Indian community in Cote dIvoire has been contributing to the development of this vibrant country through their hard work and professionalism. The greatest contribution of the Indian Diaspora was Mahatma Gandhi who made experiments with truth and non-violence in South Africa which shaped not only his ideology and vision but the future of India. .

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The President said his visit to Africa was not just symbolic. It was to convey the sense and idea to the people of Africa that India is ready to forge new relationships. India is with you in your struggle to achieve job creation, employment opportunities and a better life to your people. .

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The President said India is committed to share with Africa our experiences in the process of development and develop a relationship on the basis of expanding cooperation in trade and investment. .

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The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee addressed a Business Forum organized by the Centre for Promoting Investments into C?te d'Ivoire and the Confederation of Indian Industry yesterday (June 15, 2016) in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire. .

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Speaking on the occasion, the President said his visit to Africa was part of a grand strategy towards Africa. The Vice President of India recently visited Morocco and Tunisia. The Prime Minister would be visiting some other countries in Africa shortly. .

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The President reminded that India during the 3rd India-Africa Forum Summit held in New Delhi last year announced concessional credit of 10 billion US dollars to African countries over a five year period - along with grant assistance of 600 million U.S. dollars. The Prime Minister of India has initiated number of measures such as Digital India, Make in India, Skill India etc. which open up new areas of cooperation among nations, particularly developing countries. .

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The President said India and Cote dIvoire are exploring new areas of friendship, cooperation and investment. A regional office of EXIM Bank has been opened in Abidjan which will facilitate the process. .

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At the Business Forum event, exchange of two MoUs also took place. The first MoU was between CII and CEPICI to enhance cooperation between the Chambers of Commerce of the two respective countries. The other MoU was between the private companies Tata from India and Sutra from Cote dIvoire to reinforce the existing transport fleet by import of 500 buses manufactured by Tata. .

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The proactive business promotion drive by the port administration of New Mangalore Port Trust by conducting business/trade meets at various locations in the hinterland have started to yield positive results. .

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The Port had conducted a series of business meets at Mysore and Nanjangud where various export firms are located. The recent meet conducted in the month of June, 2016 with various export firms like M/s Ranga Rao & Sons Pvt Ltd(incense sticks), M/s J.K. Tyres, M/s Nestle India & M.K. Agrotech Pvt.Ltd.(edible oil) has contributed to the movement of new cargo through the port. Sending of stuffing material of J.K. Tyres and Agarbatti (incense sticks) by Ranga Rao & Sons has already started. Some companies like J.K. Tyres who are already using New Mangalore Port have assured to divert more cargo through the Port. .

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Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate said he would invite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the US, but not for an official state dinner.

The business mogul made the remark on Wednesday when he mocked his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton for her criticism of Trump's willingness to speak with Kim, calling the former secretary of state a "rank amateur", Politico reported.

"She's been doing it forever and she still doesn't get it," Trump told supporters at a rally in Atlanta.

"What the hell is wrong with speaking? And you know what? It's called opening a dialogue. It's opening a dialogue."

Trump, however, speculated that the meeting probably would never happen.

"But there's nothing -- I wouldn't go there," he said.
US President Barack Obama met Tibetan Spiritual Leader the at the White House, his spokesman said, underlining the meeting between the two Noble laureates does not change America's stand on Tibet.

"This is actually the fourth opportunity that President Obama has had to meet with the at the White House over the last eight years," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at his daily news conference.

"And I would just reiterate once again that the US's position, as it relates to Tibet has not changed. Tibet, per US policy, is considered part of the People's Republic of China. And the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence," Earnest said.

Obama met the 80-year-old spiritual leader in the historic Map Room of the White House. The meeting was closed for the press.

The Tibetan spiritual leader did not speak to the battery of reporters waiting inside.

"Just to give you a sense of the meeting, the President thanked the for his expression of condolences about the terrorist attack in Orlando over the weekend," Earnest said.

"The President has spoken publicly in the past about his warm, personal feelings for the Dalai Lama. The president has articulated his appreciation for the Dalai Lama's teachings, and believes in preserving Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions," he said in response to a question.

Earnest said the personal nature of their meeting would explain why the President received the Dalai Lama in the White House residence, as opposed to the oval office, for example.

Earlier in a statement, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, who hosted a lunch for the Tibetan leader's simplicity has caught the imagination of the world.

"I think he has received just about every award we have to give him. In fact, I felt a little sheepish this morning when I realised that all I had to offer him was a lunch. But, as he likes to say, he is a simple Buddhist monk," Ryan said.

"And it is that very simplicity-the simplicity of faith-that has captured the world's imagination. It is almost as if he has no room in his soul for impatience or self-serving. All he has room for is kindness. It is inspiring to see," he said.

Later in the day the Dalai Lama attended an event of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to present the Democracy Service Medal to honour the courageous work of the late Tibetan Buddhist Monk Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, a prominent political prisoner who died in a Sichuan prison in 2015.

According to Human Rights Watch, Tenzin's imprisonment in 2002 was the culmination of a decade-long effort by Chinese authorities to curb his efforts to foster Tibetan Buddhism.

Tenzin was an inspiration for Tibetans struggling to retain their cultural identity in the face of China's harsh policies.
on Thursday said it will become a member of six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) next week, opening new avenues for the country to secure funds for energy and infrastructure projects.

The SCO is scheduled to hold a summit on June 23 and 24 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan where will join the group, Foreign Office spokesman Nafees Zakaria said.

The SCO membership will pave way for opening new avenues for to secure funds for energy and other infrastructure projects, Zakaria was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune.

"A full SCO membership will help Pakistan strengthen its role in regional and global politics, economies and infrastructure by promoting regional connectivity through the One Belt One Road and Eurasian Economic Union projects," Zakaria said.

The SCO summit held in Ufa in Russia last year approved inclusion of India and Pakistan tothe list.

SCO Secretary-General Rashid Alimov this week said that India is likely to attain full membership of the SCO within a year.

The SCO currently has six member states - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as observers, and Belarus, Turkey and Sri Lanka as dialogue partners.

India and Pakistan are expected to be elevated as regular members.
Pakistan's bid to purchase used F-16 fighter jets from Jordan might not be easy as it would require an approval from the US and be subject to end-use monitoring, officials here have said.

"While we are not going to speculate on reports that Pakistan may look to purchase used F-16s elsewhere, we would note that under US law, any re-transfers of US-origin defence items to a third party require approval from the US Government, may require Congressional notification, and would be subject to end-use monitoring," a State Department official told PTI.

The official, who requested anonymity, was responding to a question on reports that Pakistan is considering buying used from Jordan after its plan to buy eight of them from the US at a highly subsidised rates fell through because of the opposition from lawmakers in the US Congress who want Islamabad to take strong action against the Haqqani network.

"The proposed terms and conditions of the Letter of Offer and Acceptance for this proposed sale of F-16 aircraft expired on May 24," the official said.

"Pakistan did not accept the offer to purchase F-16s from the United States, and the terms of the sale have expired," another State Department official told PTI.

"We are now going for a third-party transfer of F-16s and have an offer from Jordan," Pakistan Defence Secretary Alam Khattak had said last week.

"We refer you to the Government of Pakistan to speak to their decision and future defence procurement plans," the US official said when asked about Khattak's statement.

The official was not aware if the US has received such a request from Jordan and Pakistan.

However, it is believed that there could be options for Pakistan to explore the possibility of procuring F-16 from the United States at its full price.

The earlier proposal of eight F-16s to Pakistan at an estimated cost of $699 million was heavily subsidised, to which the US lawmakers led by Senator Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had objected.

Informed sources argue that if Pakistan wants to pursue the sale, it could start a fresh talk with Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer, and negotiate a new full price for the F-16s it wants to buy.
President Pranab Mukherjee, who arrived in Namibia late last night from Abidjan on the final leg of his three-nation six-day state visit, will have a packed schedule over the next two days.

The day will commence with a ceremonial reception at the State House in Windhoek. President Mukherjee will be received by his Namibian counterpart President Hage Geingob, Vice President Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, Prime Minister Nandi Ndaitwah Netumbo and other Namibian dignitaries.

The national anthem of the two countries will be played and will be followed by a 21-gun salute and an inspection of a guard of honour, besides introductions and a cultural programme.

The ceremonial function will be followed with a one-to-one meeting and delegation-level talks between the two sides, the signing of the visitor's book and a signing of bilateral agreements.

In the afternoon, the president will proceed to the Parliament of Namibia, where he will deliver an address after being welcomed by the Speaker of the National Assembly Peter Katjavivi and Chairperson of the National Council Margret Mensah Williams.

He will then proceed to the Independence Memorial Museum, where he will be escorted by Namibia's Education, Arts and Culture Minister Katrina Hanse Himarwa and museum director Esther Mwoombola Goagoses.

In the evening, he will be honoured by a state banquet at the State House.

On Friday, President Mukherjee will visit Heroes Acres to lay a wreath and thereafter will depart for the Namibia University of Science and Technology where he will deliver an address to faculty and students.

The Indian delegation will then be taken to the Okapuka Ranch, a wildlife park, for a tour.

On Friday afternoon, President Mukherjee will meet Namibia's Founding President Sam Nujoma and another former president Hifikepunye Pohamba.

He will also address the Indian community at a reception hosted in his honour before concluding his official state visit.

Earlier on Wednesday, the President was received at the Hosea Kutako Airport by Namibia's Deputy Prime Minister Ms. Nandi Ndaitwah Netumbo. Mrs. Doreen Sioka, Minister of Gender Equality and Child Welfare and Minister in Waiting, Chief of Protocol Neville Gertze and India's High Commissioner to Namibia Kumar Tuhin.
The US Senate has moved to block $300 million military aid to Pakistan unless the Defence Secretary certifies that the country is taking demonstrable steps against the dreaded Haqqani Network terror outfit.

This forms part of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA)-2017 passed by the Senate, by 85-13 votes, yesterday.

Notably, Defence Secretary Ashton Carter is yet to give the necessary certification to Pakistan for a similar legislation passed by the Congress last year under NDAA-2016.

As a result, the Pentagon has not been able to release $300 million of Coalition Support Fund (CSF) to Pakistan for the fiscal year 2015-2016 ending September 30 this year.

However, the Senate version of the NDAA differs with that of the House, which calls for blocking $450 million of the $900 million US aid to Pakistan in CSF.

The Senate version has reduced both the figures to $300 million and $800 million, respectively.

Ahead of the Senate voting on NDAA-2017, the White House had opposed any such move.

"We share concerns regarding the threat posed to our forces and interests in Afghanistan by the Haqqani Network, and we continue to engage with Pakistan at the highest levels regarding the need for concerted action specifically against the group," the White House said in a statement on June 8.

The White House had made similar objection to the House version of the NDAA.

Since 2002, the United States has disbursed $12 billion to Pakistan under CSF.

"The United States strongly supports ongoing Pakistani counter-terrorism efforts. Pakistan has suffered at the hands of terrorists and violent extremists, and the United States will continue to work closely with Pakistan to achieve our shared counter-terrorism goals," a Pentagon official told PTI.

"In our discussions with Pakistan, we have long said that it is in the interest of Pakistan to eliminate safe havens, and we continue to urge Pakistan to take action against all militant groups, particularly the Haqqani Network," the official said in response to a question.
In a world where relentless change is the only constant, how can students best prepare to handle the challenges of tomorrow? With rapid globalisation and technological developments in the business world, the need for education to keep pace with the shifting goalposts of relevance has never been as important as it is today. This is business education's "how" challenge: how can it stay relevant and expand access?



At a seminar on the future of business education held at the Columbia Business School earlier this year, the experts agreed on four broad needs before education at this point:



More focus on interaction and application in class while uploading more lecture-like material



More experiential learning outside the classroom, locally and globally



More emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation, balancing learning-by-studying with learning-by-doing



Supplementing the soft skills of leadership with a data analytics toolkit allowing leaders to talk to and learn from the "geeks"

In India, the world's largest provider of education, too, it is time for introspection: What are the ways in which they can contribute to a better future?Let's face it: Indian B-schools are not unaffected by the impulses of the markets they serve. There are a few things they need to do to be future-ready. Research is one of the key elements that require urgent focus.

That apart, closer interface with the industry, government and policy research institutes is important. The best B-schools integrate industry inputs into the curriculum through internships, guest lectures, live projects and customised business simulations.

Last but not the lest, the trend of top-rung Indian institutions seeking international accreditation is making business schools more competitive. The benefits of accreditation (such as AACSB, SAQS) are many, and it helps increase the visibility and credibility of management schools worldwide. As its significance continues to be recognised, business education needs to respond to dynamic changes and to be future-oriented. A good and balanced business curriculum will equip students to function as viable members of tomorrow's society.

Amid such cross-currents Business Standard brings to you a compilation of the best B-schools in India today. Business Standard has put together this annual survey for more than a decade. A point to remember: this is not a ranking of B-schools, but a guide to the best B-schools in the country to help students make up their minds.
Shares of all three listed associate banks of State Bank India (SBI) have moved higher by up to 20% for the second straight trading session, after the Union Cabinet on Wednesday gave a go-ahead to the merger of five associate lenders and Bharatiya Mahila Bank with the .
Shares of all three listed associate banks of State Bank India (SBI) continued to move north for the second straight trading session in an otherwise weak market, rallying by up to 20% after the Union Cabinet on Wednesday gave a go-ahead to the merger of five associate lenders and Bharatiya Mahila Bank with State Bank of India (SBI).

All these three stocks had zoomed 20% each on Wednesday and traded at their respective fresh 52-week highs on the bourses. On Thursday, State Bank of Mysore (up 20% at Rs 657), State Bank of Travancore (19% at Rs 571) and State Bank of Bikaner & Jaipur (19% at Rs 712) were up more than 15% each as compared with 0.73% decline in the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex at 09:56 AM. SBI was trading 1% higher at Rs 218, after gaining nearly 4% on Wednesday.
The Janata Dal (United) on Thursday said that it would order the cancellation of Bihar topper scam accused Usha Sinha's membership from the party.

"The JD (U) will order cancellation of Bihar toppers scam accused Usha Sinha's membership from the party," said state party president Vashishtha Narayan Singh.

A lower court in Patna had yesterday issued arrest warrants against Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh and former JD (U) MLA Usha Sinha in connection with +2 toppers scandal in the state.

Singh resigned from his post last week following his alleged involvement in the scam.

Amit Kumar alias Bachcha Rai, the mastermind behind the Class 12 scam, was arrested on Saturday after he surrendered before the police.

Both Singh and Rai are wanted by the Special Investigation Team in the ongoing investigation with regard to the alleged irregularities in the results of the toppers in the Class 12 Arts and Science examinations this year.

According to reports, the SIT has found evidences that suggest Singh's role in the racket. The evidence collected also indicates the board's complicity in the scam.

Last week, five persons arrested in this case were remanded in 14 days judicial custody by a local court in Patna.

An FIR was registered against four students and the director of the Vishun Roy College in connection with the scam.

Following the furore over the Bihar Board examination toppers being unable to answer basic questions related to their stream eventually leading to a re-examination, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had earlier said the guilty won't be spared, adding the investigation into this matter will be done with a criminal angle.

The BSEB earlier on June 4 cancelled the results of two toppers, including Sourabh Shrestha, of the Intermediate (Science) examinations after they failed to prove their merits in a re-test.

The board had on June 3 asked Sourabh and his college mate Rahul Kumar, who were among the 13 toppers from the arts and science streams in the Class XII examinations, to reappear in a re-test following a controversy over their merits.

Saurabh Shrestha from the science stream, who had secured 485 out of 500, was caught on camera failing to answer basic questions.

Ruby Rai, the arts topper, from the same college failed to take the re-test earlier on Friday citing health reasons.

Rai had secured 444 marks out of 500 in the arts stream. However, on camera she did not even appear to know the number of subjects in her course.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday dubbed Alka Lamba's suspension as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) spokesperson as a clear conflict between 'action and deeds' and said this episode is an attempt on Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's part to divert public attention from ground realities.

BJP MLA O.P. Sharma told ANI that Kejriwal, who made tall claims during the Delhi Assembly polls, is now trapped in his own web.

"Today when he is surrounded from all sides, he wants to divert the public attention by using these kinds of tactics," he said.

BJP MP Udit Raj said Kejriwal hardly follows what he says.

"He promised a lot of things, including cheap electricity, low water prices, giving permanent status to temporary workers; but none of them have been fulfilled. So, he plays blame game with the BJP," Raj told ANI.

Claiming that Kejriwal has failed on all fronts, he said, "Alka Lamba ji has suffered for speaking the truth."

Lamba, who is the MLA from Chandni Chowk, earlier in the day said she respects very decision made by the AAP as she is a disciplined party worker.

"Even if I have committed a mistake unknowingly, I would surely regret it so that the party's fight against corruption doesn't face a setback," Lamba said in a tweet.

According to reports, Lamba had deviated from the party line and told reporters that Transport Minister Gopal Rai had been 'relieved' of the portfolio to make way for a fair probe into the Premium Bus Service scheme.

"We are here to support Gopal Rai. Give me an example, where allegations are levelled against a minister and the Chief Minister asks that minister to move to Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) with relevant documents to face the probe," Lamba had told reporters.

Lamba made the remarks outside the Anti-Corruption Branch's office, where she had gone to extend support to Rai. He had gone to the agency in connection with the probe into the scheme.

The action by the AAP Government comes at a time when the party has maintained that Rai stepped down from the post due to 'health reasons', Lamba reportedly said Kejriwal wanted to ensure a fair probe into the alleged scam and had asked Rai to step down.
The disgruntled Federal Alliance on Thursday demanded strong commitment from Prime Minister K.P Sharma Oli- led government to hold further talks.

In a meeting held in Sanghiya Samajbadi Forum's office today, the agitating body demanded a reliable promise from the government along with the dedication to address the 26 point demands presented by the alliance.

Condemning the government for not addressing the alliance in the letter inviting for talks, they said that Oli's letter should be addressed to the alliance rather than to the Samyukta Loktantrik Madhesi Morcha (SLMM).

In a bid to resolve the Tarai crisis, Oli had invited the agitating parties for talks.

However, the Terai Madhesi Democratic Party, Forum Democratic, Nepal Sadhvawana Party and other Madhesi parties are willing to go for the talk saying the protest and talks have been staged under Madhesi Morcha's lead.

Oli had sent a letter last month inviting the Madhesi Morcha for talks. However, the letter has now become the main reason for the misunderstanding and division inside the alliance.

While the Madhesi Morcha leaders want to pursue the talk if government is willing to talk over the 11 point demands, the alliance leaders demand a discussion over the 26 point demands and a strong commitment from the government.

But, despite the division seen over the letter and the points to be discussed, the 30-party Federal Alliance have continued their relay hunger strike in the heart of Kathmandu.
The first batch of Kailash Mansarovar pilgrims for this year will begin their onward journey from Sikkim capital Gangtok today.

The Yatra was flagged from New Delhi yesterday. This group of fifty pilgrims will continue its onward Journey in a bus through Nathula pass at height of about 14 thousand and reach China border on June 20.

The entire journey till Mansarovar is expected to be completed in 19 days.

As per reports, the state administration has made extensive arrangements on way to Nathula for weather acclimatization as most pilgrims on board are senior citizens.

The Mansarovar yatri after spending two nights each at 15th Mile and Sherethang area will reach Nathula in four days.

All together about 350 pilgrims will make their journey in seven batches this year.

The Chinese authority will take travel and other responsibility of these pilgrims soon after they cross Nathula border on June 20.

It may be recalled that this Mansarovar route via Nathula opened since last year for the pilgrims is in addition to the existing Lipulekh pass in Uttarakhand.

Kailash Manasarovar Yatra (KMY) is known for its religious value, cultural significance, physical beauty and thrilling nature.

It is undertaken by hundreds of people every year. Holding significance for Hindus as the abode of Lord Shiva, it holds religious importance also for the Jains and the Buddhists.

The Kailash Manasarovar Yatra has been recognised by the Indian Mountaineering Foundation as a trekking expedition.
Continuing to turbo-charge its cast, 'Fast And Furious 8' is all set to have Oscar-winner Helen Mirren in the driver's seat.

The 70-year-old star confirmed that she will be giving the latest installment her badass touch. When asked of her rumored role, the 'Eye In The Sky' star responded, "Yes, I am," reports E! Online.

She may have just been slumming it by playing various English monarchs over the years, but it turns out, Mirren's really into cars and hopes to buckle up and get behind the wheel of one of the film's famous suped-up rides.

She said, "I've always rather loved driving. I said, 'I'll be in it, but only if I'm allowed to drive if I do drive in it.' But we'll see. We'll see how it transpires. Film is a wonderful thing and it can be so many different things. I don't want to turn my back on any of the different ways movies can be. I love the movies. I love going to the films. I like very serious films, I love foreign films, and I love big, fun movies-as long as they're well made and they've got good scripts. That's the most important thing."

Mirren will join the latest addition, Charlize Theron, who will be playing a villain in the newest installment. Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese and more are among the returnees for the movie, which is set for release Apr. 14, 2017.

The ninth and tenth installments are hitting theatres on Apr. 19, 2019 and Apr. 2, 2021, respectively.
Two Memorandums of Understandings (MoU) were signed between India and Namibia here today during the final leg of President Pranab Mukherjee's three-nation visit.

President Mukherjee, who arrived here late last night from Abidjan (Cote D Ivoire), was accorded a ceremonial reception at the State House in Windhoek.

The MoUs include one on capacity building for civil servants of Namibia and the other on setting up of centre of excellence in ICT.

The agreements were signed after a dialogue between President Mukherjee and his Namibian counterpart Hage Geingob. The signing of agreements was followed by delegation level talks in Windhoek.

Addressing the media after bilateral engagements, Secretary Economic Relations in Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Amar Sinha informed that the issue of Uranium supply was one of prominent features of the talks.

He said Namibia is committed to honour the deal signed with India in 2009 to supply Uranium for civil use.

Namibia is the fourth largest producer of uranium and assured India on Thursday during delegation level talks that it study the framework New Delhi has signed with 12 other countries including UK, US, Australia, Sri Lanka, France and South Korea besides others.

Besides this critical mineral needed for India's nuclear plants to meet growing energy demand, the two countries also discussed ways to further enhance co-operation in the mining and exploration of other minerals including zinc and marble.
Iran has responded to a letter written by Pakistan's Interior Ministry seeking investigation into the alleged activities of Indian intelligence agency RAW in Tehran.

The response was reportedly handed over to Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan by Iranian Ambassador Mehdi Hunerdoost, who called on him here on Wednesday, Dawn reports.

Reports suggest that progress in expansion of cooperation in a number of areas, including security, was reviewed and stock of the situation prevailing in the region were also discussed during the meeting.

Making it clear that no third country could influence relations between Pakistan and Iran, Nisar stressed the need for strengthening border monitoring and timely exchange of information between the two countries.

In the letter, Islamabad has asked the Iranian Government to investigate and share details of alleged Indian spy Kulbushan Jadhav's activities in Iran, along with those of his colleague allegedly identified as RAW Sub-Inspector Rakesh alias Rizwan.

Pakistan also asked Iran to immediately arrest and hand over Rakesh for interrogation.
Windhoek (Namibia), June 16 (ANI): Indicating that his first visit to Namibia as the President of India was taking place at time when bilateral relations between the two countries were excellent and of great value to New Delhi, Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday said the India-Namibia relationship has been built on a "firm foundation of mutual trust and understanding.

Addressing the Namibian Parliament in the presence of National Assembly Speaker Peter H. Katjavivi, National Council Chairperson Madame Margareth Mensah-Williams, Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, Leader of Opposition McHenry Venaani and Members of Parliament this afternoon, President Mukherjee said, "Our two nations are bound by our common experience of colonial rule and the struggle of our people for freedom. India was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the leaders and people of Namibia in their liberation struggle. We were among the first nations to raise the question of Namibian independence in the UN. It was India that inscribed on the agenda of the UN general Assembly in 1946, the problem of colonial oppression and racial discrimination in South Africa and Namibia. The first ever SWAPO Embassy abroad was established in New Delhi in 1986, and it was this move by India that started the chain of diplomatic recognition by other countries and the inevitability of Namibia's independence."

President Mukherjee further stated that Namibia's Founding president Sam Nujoma was and continues to be held in high esteem and admiration in India, and reminded the Namibian Parliament that India had conferred upon him the prestigious Indira Gandhi Peace Prize for Disarmament and Development for the year 1990. He added that in 2015 November, New Delhi hosted him as the Distinguished Guest at a function organized by the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR).

"I recall his inspiring words in October 1992 in Liberville, Gabon at the 17th Conference of the Heads of State and Government, and I quote 'There cannot be democracy in an unstable political environment. Neither can there be development in an undemocratic environment..' Unquote".

President Mukherjee said that Namibia today is a shining example of a nation that has repeatedly ensured a trouble-free and peaceful transfer of power from one elected government to another.

"Namibia has once again proven that a vibrant democratic system offers the best possible ecosystem for inclusive development and growth. Namibia's commitment to democracy and the success of her national reconciliation programme has made her a role model for Africa. We, in India, admire Namibia's transformation into a vibrant, peaceful and fast progressing nation," he added.

"I would emphasize that it is the people of Namibia, their unity and their efforts that have made Namibia what it is today-a beacon of hope and motivation, not only on the African continent, but also in the . It is a bright spot in the realm of democracy and rule of law; a nation progressing rapidly on the path of development and contributing to peace and stability in Africa and beyond," President Mukherjee said.

He also said that New Delhi appreciates the vision of Namibian President Geingob in introducing the "Harambee Prosperity Plan and its socio-economic objectives and is ready to extend any assistance that Namibia may require for this as well as its "Vision 2030" plan.

The president further said that both India and Namibia seek to address complex governance issue each in their own way, but through empowerment of the disempowered.

President Mukherjee said that India remains committed to a strong development partnership with Namibia within the South-South framework, and would extend all possible assistance in human resource development and capacity building.

He reiterated that Namibia should take advantage of India expertise in information technology and digital technologies, agriculture and dairy development to further cement the bilateral economic partnership.

"We see in Namibia a valuable partner in India's quest for progress and prosperity as we pursue our identical priorities, skilling our youth, eradicating poverty, building infrastructure without damaging the environment, promoting sustainable technologies that save water and prevent desertification, and so on," President Mukherjee said.

He concluded his address by saying that both India and Namibia are united by their shared past and common aspirations, and added that both can achieve much together by "building on our synergies.
With the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) removing MLA Alka Lamba from the post of party spokesperson, the Chandni Chowk legislator said she respected her party's decision.

"I am a disciplined party worker and I respect party's every decision. Even if I have committed a mistake unknowingly, I would surely regret it so that party's fight against corruption doesn't face a setback," Lamba posted on Twitter.

According to reports, Lamba had deviated from the party line and told reporters that Transport Minister Gopal Rai had been 'relieved' of the portfolio to make way for a fair probe into the Premium Bus Service scheme.

"We are here to support Gopal Rai. Give me an example, where allegations are levelled against a minister and the Chief Minister asks that minister to move to Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) with relevant documents to face the probe," Lamba had told reporters.

Lamba made the remarks outside the Anti-Corruption Branch's (ACB's) office, where she had gone to extend support to Rai. He had gone to the agency in connection with the probe into the scheme.

The action by the AAP government comes at a time when the party has maintained that Rai was stepping down from the post due to 'health reasons'. Lamba reportedly said Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal wanted to ensure a fair probe into the alleged scam and he had asked Rai to step down.

Rai, who underwent a surgery recently to remove a bullet lodged in his neck, has five other portfolios and was relieved only of the charge of the transport department.
Following a twitter tiff with Bihar Education Minister Ashok Choudhary over being addressed as "dear" by him, Union Human Resource and Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani has hit back at the former with an open letter signed as 'Aunty National' on her official Facebook page while throwing light on the struggles faced by the feminine gender in the country.

"So while many working women battle this challenge in confined working spaces, I spat it out on twitter for my office travels with me. But then there are some who say why talk about yourself at all, surely one day they shall realise the amount of work you have done," she writes.

Irani also laid emphasis on the initiatives taken by her after taking charge of the HRD Ministry.

"To them is dedicated the following checklist which is otherwise drowned in the noise:

 Over 4 lakh 17 thousand school toilets made in one year - check

 First time ever all NCERT school text books from classes 1 to 12 available free online - ePathshala- check

 First time ever all Kendriya Vidyalayas are providing SMS to alert parents of student attendance and lesson details- Shala Darpan- check

 First time ever benchmarking of student performances in CBSE schools-Saraansh- check

 First time ever, school evaluation system focused on learning outcomes-Shaala Siddhi- Check

 First time ever, a mentoring and scholarship program to send our girls to technical institutes- UDAAN- check

 First time ever, all teachers trained in inclusive education to facilitate students with special needs- check

 First time ever, 10,000 undegraduate scholarships and exposure visits for students from the Northeastunder Ishan Uday and Ishan Vikas- check

 First time ever, focused interventions to improve Math and Science levels- Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan- check

 First time ever, focused interventions to improve reading and writing levels- Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat- check

 First time ever, the UGC Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal of Sexual Harassment of Women Employees and Students in HEIs to protect women employees and students- check

 First time ever, a portal dedicated to Indian languages- Bharatvani-check

 First time ever, collaborated effort to focus research on the development goal posts of the country- IMPRINT- check

 First time ever, SAARC Declaration on Education- check

 First time ever, Aryabhata's bust installed at UNESCO headquarters to acknowledge India's contribution in mathematics and astronomy-check

 First time ever,IIT fee waivers for economically weaker sections- check

 First time ever, collaborations with Standford, University of Pennsylvania and MIT to strengthen HEIs in India- check

 First time ever, focused effort to bring high quality international faculty to teach in India through GIAN - check

 First time ever, a credit framework to pursue formal education and vocational training- SAMVAY- check

 First time ever, a institutional rankings framework- check

 First time ever, a grassroots based consultation on developing a policy, including over 2 lakh village education committees-check..

.... and the list goes on...," she writes.

The HRD Minister also threw light on her struggle in life and said that nobody can take away the hard work that she puts.

"Growing up in a middle class environment (Lutyen's zone excluded), many girls who would walk to school/college and back home every day, go to the bazaar to get groceries and adequate sabzi in a given budget, would often be told if accosted by a boy or a bunch of them, don't look up and keep walking straight. Don't respond or retort no matter how humiliated you feel. But there would be those rebellious kinds (yours truly included), who would question why? Why not respond? Why zip it? The standard answer such a question begets is 'It is not worth it. Nuksaan tumhara hoga , ladke ka kuch nahi bigadega'," writes Irani.

"Cut to- you grow up and become a TV star. But while you still struggle to make a mark you are advised that if you go to parties and mingle enough, you shall get work. You stoutly refuse as you believe that your talent and hardwork are the only precursors to success, how full your social calender is should not matter. You are scoffed at and brushed off as naive. But lo and behold, you do succeed. You bag all the awards that matter, TRPs soar through the roof and all the naysayers grudgingly accept that you have arrived (though they do take occasional pot shots as their work profile demands)," she adds.

Irani further writes, "And then politics happens. Not when you are a fading star, not when you are unemployed but when you are at the peak of your success. You are given the hard battles to fight, you accept (Chandini Chowk & Amethi were no cakewalk my friends). You work from the grassroots up. Serve as Youth Wing Vice-President in State, become State Secretary, 5 times Executive Member, 2 times National Secretary and once the National President of Women's Wing. You become possibly the youngest ever woman to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha, speak on issues ranging from the budget to women's security. You represent your Nation in the International Parliamentary Union, get unanimously elected to represent the Asia Pacific region, become part of the drafting committee on the Syrian crisis and yet some "intellectual" says "anpad" the minute you are given the opportunity to serve as HRD Minister."

"And suddenly the rules change. You, the creature who on every podium exalts the right of women to speak their mind is told don't speak your mind. Ignore the trolls no matter how high they serve in their political systems. Ignore public attempts to humiliate you through sexual innuendos "kyunki nuksaan tumhara hoga unka kuch nahi bigadega". Ask any working woman, what do you do when your colleague does not finish their assignment on time brushes off your attempt at ensuring accountability and if push comes to shove is cocky enough to gang up with other boys in the club to paint you as either too wound up, to dumb or not competent enough; the successful women always tell you that they continue to crack the whip. For there will come a time when the colleague says "Fine! I'll get the work done"," she adds.
So, why do people assist distant relatives? Mathematical simulations by a University of Utah anthropologist suggest "socially enforced nepotism" encourages helping far-flung kin.

The classic theory of kin selection holds that "you shouldn't be terribly nice to distant kin because there isn't much genetic payoff," says author Doug Jones. "Yet what anthropologists have observed over and over is that a lot of people are pretty altruistic toward distant kin."

Socially enforced nepotism "depends on the moral regulation of behavior according to socially transmitted norms," he writes in the study.

The findings suggest that "a lot of why you help your kin, including distant kin, isn't necessarily because you like them so much but because it's your duty, your responsibility, and other people care whether you do it," he says.

Basic kin-selection theory lacks social norms, so "you as an individual decide on your own how much to help somebody just because of how much you like them or don't like them," Jones says. "But with socially enforced nepotism, you help somebody even more because of the social pressures to do it and social rewards for helping. It improves your reputation, and improved reputation gets you more help from other people."

He says socially enforced nepotism "may help explain the phenomenon of generalized reciprocity, where members of small-scale, kin-based societies share food and other goods because they're supposed to, without expecting an exact return from the recipients."

This expanded theory of kin selection reflects the fact that "we are a very special species because of how good we are at making social rules and enforcing them," he adds. "This means relations among kin work differently in humans than in other species."

The study appears online in journal PLOS ONE.
With Taliban suffering heavy casualties on the battlefield against the Afghan forces, experts say that the militant group has changed its war tactics.

The officials even pointed out that at the beginning of their fighting season this summer, the Taliban launched widespread attacks in Helmand, Uruzgan, Kunduz, Faryab and number of other province, but following the death of their former leader Mullah Mansoor, they now conduct smaller, focused attacks against security checkpoints.

The experts believe the Taliban, with this new tactic, suffer fewer casualties but the casualties are higher among the government forces and the group is now conducting "guerilla" attacks - which also include mass kidnappings on highways.

"Because the Taliban is being defeated, they turn to guerilla attacks. Afghan forces must stand seriously against the armed oppositions and terrorists and fight them," Khaama Press quoted MP Syed Hussain Sharifi Balkhabi as saying.

However, the Parliament members believe that ignoring the Taliban's new tactics will increase casualties among the security force members and also civilians and said the group will also use civilians as human shields.

Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said the Afghan forces will respond to any terrorist activities.

"We are trying to respond to any terrorist activities. Our forces have a strong morale and people are with us," Waziri said.

"Even if Taliban change their war tactics we are after them and no matter where, if they create problems for our people, will we respond to them with force," said Interior Ministry's spokesman Sediq Sediqqi.

The security institutions said that in addition to providing security for the country's highways and that of passengers, the security forces are currently conducting 22 pre-planned military operations in 17 provinces across the country.
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-Cha will arrive in Delhi this evening on a three-day visit.

He will hold discussions with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Fiday on a wide range of issues including Defence, Security, Science and Technology and improving people-to-people contacts.

Briefing media in New Delhi on Wednesday, Secretary (East) of the Ministry of External Affairs Preeti Saran said, the visiting dignitary will be accorded ceremonial reception at the Forecourts of the Rashtrapati Bhawan on Friday.

The visiting dignitary will also call on Vice President Mohammad Hamid Ansari.

Trade and attracting investments from will be high on the agenda.

India will also seek Thai participation in its Make in India initiative. During his stay, General Prayut Chan-o-Cha will meet with Indian Businessmen.

Replying to a media query about free trade agreement with Thailand, Saran said 29 rounds of discussions have already taken place in this connection and India is keen to take the discussions forward.
The U.S. Senate has passed its draft of the National Defence Authorisation Bill, which includes a provision to set up a new fund to reimburse Pakistan for its efforts in war against terrorism.

The $800 million has been authorized under a provision called the 'Pakistan Security Enhancement Authorisation', reports Dawn.

The draft also fences $300m behind a similar Haqqani network provision that has existed in the annual defence authorisation acts since the fiscal year 2015.

The proposed reimbursement mechanism for Islamabad replaces the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), which was used to reimburse both Afghanistan and Pakistan for their efforts to combat terrorism.

In total, Pakistan has received $3.1 billion since 2013 under the CSF. But this fund expires in the current financial year.

The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in a report filed with the draft Defence Bill called Pakistan "a long-standing strategic partner" and stressed on the need to continue a strong relationship with the country.

It also noted that after 9/11, Islamabad has been a vital partner of Washington in efforts to combat terrorism in South Asia.

While both houses of the Congress have passed their versions of the Defence Bill, now a conference committee will be formed to develop a consensus draft.

After the consensus draft is passed from both houses of the Congress again, it will be sent to the President for signature.

Senator John McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, had introduced the bill late last month.

The bill also requires Islamabad to keep open ground communication lines to Afghanistan for receiving reimbursements from this fund.

The House of Representatives last week also passed another bill, which linked $450m from a total of $900m proposed for Pakistan to take action against the Haqqani network.
New Delhi, June 16 (ANI): The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government to create a separate ministry for the welfare of cows.

The Bharatiya Govansh Rakshan Samvardhan Parishad (BGRSP), a group working under the VHP, has urged the Centre to fulfil its promise of saving the cow, which is considered holy in Hinduism.

The VHP is affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which is also considered as the ideological mentor of the BJP.

The demand comes at a time when beef and its consumption has become an issue of controversy in the country.

There have been reports of the people getting targeted by self-styled cow protection groups, accusing them of cow slaughter.

According to BGRSP, a separate ministry for cow welfare was essential for ensuring a total ban on its slaughter, beef consumption and protection of the Indian breeds at a time when some of the breeds faced existential threat.

The BGRSP further said this issue of creation of separate cow welfare ministry will be raised during the Monsoon Session of Parliament, adding that several lawmakers are likely to lend their support.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, has approved the development of 4/6 laning of Kharar-Ludhiana Section of NH-95 (New NH-05) in Punjab.

The cost is estimated to be Rs.2069.70 crore including cost of land acquisition, resettlement and rehabilitation and other pre-construction activities. The total length of the road to be developed is approximately 76 kms.

This work will be done under the National Highways Development Project (NHDP) Phase-V in Hybrid Annuity Mode.

The project will help in expediting the improvement of infrastructure in Punjab and in reducing the time and cost of travel for traffic, particularly heavy traffic, plying between Kharar and Ludhiana section. The development of this stretch will also help in uplifting the socio-economic condition of this region in the State. It would also increase employment potential for local labourers for project activities.

It has been estimated that a total number of 4,076 mandays are required for construction of one kilometre of highway.

As such, employment potential of 3,09,833 (approx.) mandays will be generated locally during the construction period of this stretch.

The Sub-project (Kharar-Ludhiana) is part of the project of Chandigarh-Ludhiana. The project was divided in two sections i.e. Chandigarh-Kharar and Kharar-Ludhiana. The Chandigarh-Kharar section has already been awarded for four laning on Engineering, Procurement and Construction mode.

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Under ESOP

Hindustan Unilever announced that the Committee of the Board in its Meeting held on 15 June 2016 has allotted 23,763 Equity Shares of Re. 1/- each under ESOP, which vide Shareholder's Resolution dated 29 May, 2006 is known as "2006 HLL Performance Share Scheme, further amended vide Shareholder's Resolution dated 23 July 2012 is known as 2012 HUL Performance Share Scheme.

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Two sides agreed to pursue the ongoing dialogue on tax and financial matters in a spirit of mutual friendship and cooperation

Fighting the menace of Black Money stashed in offshore accounts has been a key priority area for this Government. To further this goal, the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi met with the Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann at Geneva on 6th June 2016 and discussed the need for expeditious exchange of information for combatting tax evasion together with an early start to negotiations on the Agreement for Automatic Exchange of Information. As a follow up, Revenue Secretary Dr. Hasmukh Adhia and Switzerland's State Secretary for International Financial Matters Mr. Jacques de Watteville met here today and agreed to move towards an early agreement for the implementation of AEOI between the two countries. It was decided that experts of both the countries will meet before mid-September, 2016 to further discuss the modalities for the reciprocal bilateral implementation of AEOI between India and Switzerland with a view to reaching an agreement at the earliest, possibly by the end of the year. Once this agreement is signed, it will be possible for India to receive from 2018 financial information of accounts held by Indian residents in Switzerland on automatic basis.

Noting the progress in bilateral tax cooperation since the last Secretary-level meeting in October 2014, the two Secretaries encouraged the competent authorities of both the countries to continue with regular bilateral meetings and contacts to further enhance the cooperation.The issue of requests based on stolen data figured prominently in the talks and Revenue Secretary welcomed the decision of the Swiss Federal Council to amend the Tax Administrative Assistance Act in accordance with the OECD standard and provide administrative assistance in requests based on data obtained in breach of Swiss law. This is particularly significant in view of the recent challenges posed by the Panama Papers where voluminous information on offshore accounts has been placed in the public domain. The amended proposal is now with the Swiss Parliament. An early revision of the Swiss law in respect of stolen data would take the Indo-Swiss tax cooperation to a new level.

The two sides agreed to pursue the ongoing dialogue on tax and financial matters in a spirit of mutual friendship and cooperation. The text of the 'Joint Statement signed by the two Secretaries at the conclusion of the meeting is given below:

Joint Statement

In furtherance to the meeting of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi and President Johann Schneider-Ammann at Geneva on 6 June 2016 and in continuation with the Secretary level talks in October 2014, India's Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia and Switzerland's State Secretary Jacques de Watteville met today at New Delhi. They engaged in constructive dialogue on wide ranging bilateral and multilateral tax and financial issues. The talks reflected the increasing cooperation in tax matters as well as the strong political, economic and cultural ties between India and Switzerland. As a follow up of the meeting between the Indian Prime Minister and the Swiss President, representatives of both sides held in-depth discussions on current challenges relevant for both countries. Revenue Secretary Adhia and State Secretary de Watteville recognized the benefits of ongoing dialogue and mutual exchange for attaining effective and sustainable results in bilateral tax and financial cooperation.

Revenue Secretary Adhia and State Secretary de Watteville acknowledged the efforts made towards enhancing bilateral tax cooperation since the last high-level meeting in October 2014 and encouraged the competent authorities of both countries to continue with the regular bilateral meetings and contacts to further improve the cooperation under the Swiss-Indian Double Taxation Agreement, as revised by the Protocol of 30 August 2010. The Secretaries agreed that such contacts facilitate a common understanding of each other's concerns so as to ensure that the requests are dealt with quickly and efficiently. To begin with, a team of officers from India would visit Switzerland for bilateral discussions towards expeditious resolution of pending exchange of information requests. On the issue of requests based on what Switzerland considers as data obtained in breach of Swiss law, Revenue Secretary Adhia, while reaffirming India's position that Switzerland should share information in all cases in accordance with its treaty obligations, noted the progress made in a number of Indian requests based on investigations carried out independently of the 'stolen data'. Secretary Adhia welcomed the decision of the Swiss Federal Council to dispatch to the Swiss Parliament a proposal to revise the Tax Administrative Assistance Act in order to clarify, in accordance with the OECD standard, the possibility to cooperate on requests based on data obtained in breach of Swiss law. A timely revision of the Swiss law in respect of stolen data would take the Indo-Swiss tax cooperation to a new level.

Reiterating their countries' commitment to combat tax fraud and evasion within the applicable legal framework, Secretary Adhia and State Secretary de Watteville expect that the progress made by Switzerland in the field of administrative assistance in tax matters would be appropriately reflected in Switzerland's phase 2 review by the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes (Global Forum). More generally, the Revenue Secretary and the State Secretary acknowledged the work of the Global Forum towards establishing a genuine worldwide level playing field for tax transparency. Referring to the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting held in Washington D.C. in April 2016, the Anti-Corruption Summit held in London in May 2016 and in view of the recent challenges posed by the Panama Papers, Secretary Adhia and State Secretary de Watteville recognized the need to take firm collective action on improving basic, legal and beneficial ownership information of legal persons and legal arrangements, while underlining the importance of full implementation of FATF standards in this regard.

The discussions showed a convergence of views with regard to tackling offshore tax evasion. State Secretary de Watteville informed that Switzerland now has the necessary legal bases to begin with the implementation of automatic exchange of information (AEOI) under common reporting standard (CRS). Recalling the commitment of both the countries to the global standard on AEOI, Secretary Adhia and State Secretary de Watteville initiated discussions for the implementation of AEOI between the two countries and agreed to work towards concluding the agreement within a reasonable timeframe keeping in view their national parliamentary procedures and the need of a level playing field. They agreed that experts of both countries would convene swiftly at technical level not later than mid-September 2016 to further discuss the modalities for the reciprocal bilateral implementation of AEOI between India and Switzerland with the view to reaching an agreement at the earliest, possibly by the end of the year.

Both representatives expressed support for the work of the G20 and the OECD in the field of international economic cooperation. They shared the view that coordinated international actions, as in the case of tax base erosion and profit shifting, are central to achieving a sustainable development path, especially for developing countries. They welcomed the recent adoption of measures to address base erosion and profit shifting under the umbrella of the OECD/G20 BEPS Project, as well as the establishment of an Inclusive Framework to assist and review the implementation of the BEPS package. Both sides look forward to working closely together under the new Inclusive Framework to ensure a smooth implementation of the minimum standard. Revenue Secretary Adhia and State Secretary de Watteville shared their expectation that the results achieved in the BEPS Project should prevent the proliferation of uncoordinated unilateral defensive measures. In the context of transfer pricing and the resolution of cases of possible double taxation, they agreed that efficient and swift procedures are essential to foster cross-border economic exchanges. Finally, both representatives stressed the importance of reaching a worldwide level playing field as regards fair corporate taxation and concurred that all relevant and interested jurisdictions should commit to the new minimum standards and participate in the framework.

Revenue Secretary Dr.Hasmukh Adhia and State Secretary Mr. Jacques de Watteville agreed to pursue the ongoing dialogue between India and Switzerland on tax and financial matters in a spirit of mutual friendship and cooperation.

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InterGlobe Aviation was up 0.8% at Rs 1,016.80 at 11:15 IST on BSE, with the stock extending gains registered during the previous trading sessions triggered by the government giving fillip to regional air connectivity in its civil aviation policy.

Stock prices of two other aviation firms were in red. The decline in both these stocks in percentage terms was lower than the decline in the S&P BSE Sensex. SpiceJet was off 0.4% at Rs 66.10. Jet Airways (India) was off 0.4% at Rs 558.50. The Sensex was off 371.74 points or 1.39% at 26,354.60.

The stock price of InterGlobe Aviation has risen 2.78% in two trading sessions from its close of Rs 989.25 on 14 June 2016. The stock prices of SpiceJet, Jet Airways (India) and InterGlobe Aviation rose 0.21% to 3.5% yesterday, 15 June 2016, after media reports suggested that the Union Cabinet has approved the long awaited civil aviation policy. The official announcement of the government's nod for the civil aviation policy was made in the Press Information Bureau website after trading hours yesterday, 15 June 2016.

The civil aviation policy aims to enhance regional air connectivity through fiscal support. This will be implemented by way of revival of airstrips/airports as No-Frills Airports at an indicative cost of Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore. The selection of airports/airstrips for revival will be based on expected demand and in consultation with state government and airlines. Regional Connectivity Scheme (RCS) will available only in those states which reduce VAT on ATF to 1% or less, provide other support services and bear 20% of Viability Gap Funding (VGF). There will be no airport charges and lower services tax on tickets on 10% of the taxable value for 1 year initially. Airlines can avail lower excise duty at 2% on ATF picked at RCS airports.

The Viability Gap Funding (VGF) will be funded by a small levy per departure on all domestic routes other than Cat II/Cat IIA routes, RCS (Regional Connectivity Scheme) routes and small aircraft at a rate as decided by the Ministry of Civil Aviation from time to time. A detailed scheme will be put up in the public domain for stakeholders' consultations. The VGF will be shared between the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) and state governments in the ratio of 80:20. For the North Eastern states, the ratio is 90:10.

In a major policy change, the government has abolished the requirement of 5 years of domestic flying as one of the two key prerequisites for starting international operations by an Indian carrier. Henceforth, an airline can commence international operations provided it deploys 20 aircrafts or 20% of its total capacity (in term of average number of seats on all departures put together), whichever is higher, for domestic operations.

The regime of bilateral rights and code share agreements will be liberalised leading to greater ease of doing business and wider choice to passengers. "Open skies" policy will be implemented on a reciprocal basis for SAARC countries and countries beyond 5,000 kilometer from Delhi. A method will be recommended by a committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary for the allotment of additional capacity entitlements wherever designated Indian carriers have not utilised 80% of their bilateral rights but the foreign airlines/countries have utilised their part and are pressing for increase in the capacity.

The civil aviation ministry will continue to encourage development of airports by the state government or the private sector or in public private partnership (PPP) mode and endeavour to provide regulatory certainty. Future greenfield and brownfield airports will have cost efficient functionality with no compromise on safety and security. Meanwhile, the existing ground handling policy is being replaced with a new framework to ensure fair competition. All domestic scheduled airline operators including helicopter operators will be free to carry out self-handling at all airports.

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Jaiprakash Power Ventures rose 1.39% to Rs 5.10 at 10:13 IST on BSE after the company said that its board will consider transferring 500 megawatts Jaypee Bina Thermal power plant to a subsidiary.

The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 15 June 2016.

Meanwhile, the BSE Sensex was down 280.62 points, or 1.05%, to 26,406.81.

On BSE, so far 1.99 lakh shares were traded in the counter, compared with an average volume of 2.06 crore shares in the past one quarter. The stock hit a high of Rs 5.19 and a low of Rs 5.03 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 8.42 on 7 August 2015. The stock hit a record low of Rs 3.65 on 2 June 2016. The stock had outperformed the market over the past one month till 15 June 2016, rising 19.48% compared with 3.70% rise in the Sensex. The scrip had, however, underperformed the market in past one quarter, rising 7.94% as against Sensex's 8.30% rise.

The small-cap company has an equity capital of Rs 2938 crore. Face value per share is Rs 10.

Jaiprakash Power Ventures said that a meeting of the board of directors of the company will be held on Friday, 17 June 2016, to consider the recommendations of committee of directors for transfer of 500 megawatts (MW) Jaypee Bina Thermal power plant of the company to its subsidiary company.

Jaiprakash Power Ventures reported net loss of Rs 352.85 crore in Q4 March 2016 as against net loss of Rs 141.54 crore in Q4 March 2015. Net sales declined 26.62% to Rs 669.01 crore in Q4 March 2016 over Q4 March 2015.

Jaiprakash Power Ventures is a power company and a part of Infrastructure conglomerate - Jaypee Group. The company plans, develops, implements and operates power projects in India.

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Shares of 3 associate banks of SBI surged 17.9% to 20% at 10:20 IST on BSE, extending gains registered during the previous trading session triggered by media reports that the government has given its go ahead for merger of 5 associate banks with SBI

State Bank of Mysore was locked at 20% upper circuit on BSE at Rs 657.45. State Bank of Travancore was up 18.6% at Rs 568. State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur was up 17.9% at Rs 707.20. All these three stock rose by their respective 20% maximum permissible daily level yesterday, 15 June 2016. In just two trading sessions, the stock price of State Bank of Mysore has risen 43.98%, the stock price of State Bank of Travancore has jumped 42.32% and that of State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur has jumped 41.52%.

The stock price of parent State Bank of India (SBI) was currently up 0.5% at Rs 216.85. The stock surged 3.9% to settle at Rs 215.65 yesterday, 15 June 2016.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sesnex was off 299.71 points or 1.12% at 26,426.63

On 17 May 2016, SBI had announced that it was seeking in principle sanction of the Government of India (GoI) to enter into negotiation with its 5 subsidiary banks viz. State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala and State Bank of Travancore to acquire their businesses including assets and liabilities. SBI also said at that time that it was considering acquisition of the newly-created Bharatiya Mahila Bank.

SBI holds 90% stake in State Bank of Mysore, 79.09% stake in State Bank of Travancore and 75.07% stake in State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur. State Bank of Hyderabad and State Bank of Patiala are not listed on the bourses.

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The Union Minister for Power, Coal and Renewable Energy Shri Piyush Goyal has said that his Ministry is committed to ensuring that every household is electrified and all farmers in the country get adequate and timely power in the country. Addressing the Conference of State Power, Energy and Renewable Energy Ministers at Goa he said making a difference to the lives of poor, rural people and farmers is important in achieving our goal of 24X7 power for all-industry, commerce, households, farmers- in the country by the year 2019. He also underlined that we are committed to cheaper adequate power in a sustainable efficient manner for the poor. He said it is easy if we work in the spirit of participation and cooperation. Shri Goyal said we learn from experiences of states and I am happy that this conference has developed into a good platform for exchange of ideas and understand each other's problems. Laying a lot of emphasis on the North Eastern states he said unless we develop the East and north eastern states we will not be able to develop India. Commenting on the common pool purchase policy for larger equipments such as transformers, cables he hoped his Ministry will receive help from states. He said if some states feel they can do better in purchasing of equipment and machinery they are welcome however his Ministry is of the view that the centralized system with a common procurement committee is better. He expressed happiness that 2 states Karnataka and Goa are signing the UDAI agreement today. He took pride in the fact that no states have been discriminated except preferential treatment to the North east.

Reacting to the agenda items for the conference Shri Goyal said that hydro and wind energy has been neglected areas and it is important to get them on track with long term plans for growth in the deliberations. Urban areas and our cities/towns also need 24x7 power. Sharing the Gujarat experience of reduction of power thefts he said the tariff increase there had been the lowest. It is not the poor who steal and it's the bigger power thefts which had corruption. He appealed to all states to reduce power thefts and said there is great political benefit in stopping power theft while asking support for the program being suggested in the conference for doing this.

The two day bi-annual conference has been organized by the Ministry for Power and Coal. Ministers from 19 states and Secretaries and officials from as many as 27 states are attending the conference. The Coal Secretary Shri Anil Swarup informed that from a shortage situation sometime back, his Ministry is now facing a situation, where they have coal but there are not many takers for the 550 MT coal stock. He appealed to the generating companies in the states to stop importing coal and said the matter would be discussed at the conference. He said Coal India Ltd has set up processes for auction of coal to public and private entities and a dispute resolution mechanism has also been set up in his Ministry wherein disputes between states can also be resolved. Narrating a story the Secretary MNRE Shri Upendra Tripathy underlined the importance of differential pricing especially for the poor and underprivileged class.

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The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday demanded a probe against Congress leader Kamal Nath over his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Addressing the media, AAP leader H.S. Phoolka said Kamal Nath himself had admitted in his affidavit that he was present at Gurdwara Rakab Ganj in the heart of Delhi when a mob attacked it and killed two Sikhs.

"Kamal Nath is responsible for this and police should ask him who were the people who had assembled unlawfully. He was the leader and controlling them," Phoolka said.

"Kamal Nath still hasn't been questioned over this. This is a mockery of the law."

The Aam Aadmi Party also questioned the links of other Congress leaders with the riots that followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

The violence left over 3,000 Sikhs dead, almost all of them in Delhi.

AAP MLA Jarnail Singh wanted to know why Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was still with the Congress if, as party leader Amarinder Singh says, that he was one of the accused in the riots.

"Why is Jagdish Tytler a member of CWC? The Congress will have to give clarification for this as well. Removing Kamal Nath from general-secretary's post will not be the end of this matter," Jarnail Singh said.

Kamal Nath was on Wednesday relieved from the post of the general secretary in-charge of the upcoming elections in Punjab after he made a request to party president Sonia Gandhi.

AAP leader Dilip Pandey said the Congress had to act on Kamal Nath due to constant pressure.

--IANS

ar-akk/pgh/mr
Army chief General Dalbir Singh on Thursday paid tribute here to Signalman Ajay Singh Choudhary, who was martyred in a gunfight with terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir.

General Singh paid the tribute after the soldier's body was flown to Delhi.

The body has since been sent to the soldier's native Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan by a helicopter.

The soldier was martyred while combating terrorists in Machil Sector in the frontier Kupwara district on June 14. An unidentified terrorist was also killed.

--IANS

ao/tsb/bg
Two militants were killed and an army soldier was injured when the troops engaged a group of infiltrators who sneaked into Jammu and Kashmir early on Thursday, officials said.

The incident took place near the Line of Control (LoC) in the northern district of Kupwara.

Military sources told IANS that the army noticed suspicious movement on the LoC at Tangdhar.

"When challenged, the infiltrating group fired at the soldiers, triggering a gun battle in which two terrorists were killed and a soldier was injured," a source said.

"The operation is still on but the infiltration attempt by the terrorists has been foiled," the source added.

On Wednesday, a solider succumbed to his injuries and a terrorist was shot dead by the army in a gun battle after militants infiltrated into the Kupwara district, near Macchil sector.

Five soldiers were also reportedly injured in that operation.

--IANS

sq/ahm/mr
Anjan Dutta, President of the state unit of the Congress, died on Thursday of a cardiac arrest in New Delhi, doctors said.

Dutta, a former transport minister of and three-time legislator from the Aamguri constituency, was undergoing treatment since May 25 at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi under pulmonary medicine expert Randeep Guleria.

"He died today (Thursday) morning at 7.15 am and his body has been sent to the mortuary now," a senior doctor of the AIIMS said.

Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) members in Guwahati said Dutta went to South Africa after the Assam assembly elections in April and fell sick on his return.

He was initially admitted to the Apollo Hospital in New Delhi and subsequently shifted to the AIIMS. Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi had visited Dutta at the AIIMS.

Dutta became the Assam state Congress president in December 2014.

"It is a shocking news for all of us. We were aware about the ill health of Dutta but this was not expected," said Assam Congress spokesperson Apurba Bhattacharyya.

He said Dutta's body will be brought on Thursday to Rajiv Bhavan in Guwahati, where party leaders will pay tribute to the departed leader. The body will then be taken to his home in Sivsagar district for cremation on Friday.
Assam Congress chief Anjan Dutta passes away at the age of 64 here at AIIMS on Thursday morning .

He was admitted to the hospital on May 25 and was undergoing treatment under pulmonary medicine expert Randeep Guleria.

"He died today (Thursday) morning at 7.15 a.m. and his body has been sent to the mortuary now," a senior doctor from AIIMS told IANS.

The leader who was a cabinet minister for several years was initially admitted to Apollo Hospital in Delhi. However as his condition deteriorated there, he was admitted to AIIMS.

He was appointed Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president on December 13, 2014. Rahul Gandhi had visited him at AIIMS earlier.

--IANS

rup-kd/ksk
A 23-year-old Assamese man has been arrested in the rape-murder of a Dalit woman law student in Kerala that grabbed national headlines for the sheer brutality of the April 28 crime and became a hot political issue during the state assembly elections.

The Assamese man, identified as Amiyur ul Islam, was picked up from Tamil Nadu near the Palakkad border two days ago. According to police, forensic and other evidence has shown the man's involvement in the crime, that was being compared to the December 16, 2012 Delhi gang rape.

B. Sandhya, Additional Director General of Police, who headed the probe in the Jisha murder case, on Thursday said the arrest of the accused has been recorded.

"It was through an extensive probe that the accused was tracked down and finally taken into custody," Sandhya told reporters at the Aluva Police club, where the accused was brought.

Reacting to news of the arrest, the woman's mother Rajeshwari said: "He should be dealt with in the manner in which he assaulted my daughter, and after that he should be hanged to death."

"Not a single woman in the country should ever be made to undergo what my daughter underwent," said Rajeshwari.

Earlier in the day, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, announcing the arrest, said in Kochi: "This is going to be a feather in the cap of the police probe team."

Sandhya led the police questioning of the suspect at Thrissur.

On Thursday evening, Islam was brought to Aluva where all the top police officers, including Sandhya, were present.

According to police, two vital clues turned out to be the clinching evidence for nailing him -- the footwear which was left near Jisha's home and a photo of Islam and Jisha taken at a local studio near her house.

The footwear shop owner and the studio owner identified the man, even as police concluded, from the evidence, that the crime was committed by someone known to Jisha.

Islam had taken part in the construction of Jisha's home, and they were in touch and had some verbal duel over the construction.

According to the information, the Assamese man had come to her home on the morning of April 28 and they had a fight. He came again in the afternoon when he was drunk and committed the crime.

Police zeroed in on Islam after his DNA samples, checked against the saliva and blood samples found on Jisha's body, matched when the results came in on Thursday.

Director General of Police Loknath Behra, who is in Mumbai, told reporters there that things are going well in the case and expressed happiness at the Chief Minister's praise of the police force.

Jisha, 27, was found dead on April 28 at her home in Perumbavoor in Ernakulam by her mother Rajeshwari, who works as a casual labourer. Her body bore injuries in a way that gave rise to suspicion that she was raped before being killed.

The murder attracted national headlines and became a hot topic in Kerala's election season. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) said it reflected the slide in law and order that the then ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) had allowed, and promised to book the culprits within hours, if elected to power.

Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said when the probe began (he was then Home Minister), and the probe team came out with a report that crucial evidence of a pair of footwear is going to be the clinching evidence, the media looked at it with disdain.

"See, now the same footwear has turned out to be the crucial evidence; so it means what happened during our time was on the right track," said Chennithala.

The LDF government, which assumed office on May 25, changed the entire team probing the case and replaced Director General of Police (DGP) T.P. Senkumar with Behra.

--IANS

sg/rn/bg
The CPI-M on Thursday accused the BJP of whipping up Hindutva ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls and said it was promoting "the cult of an authoritarian leader".

Commenting on the June 12-13 National Executive meeting of the BJP in Allahabad, an editorial in the CPI-M journal "People's Democracy" said the event confirmed the "division of labour" between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah.

"While Modi harped on 'vikas' and his government's commitment to push forward development, Amit Shah spoke about the Hindutva issues such as the alleged exodus of Hindus from Kairana in western Uttar Pradesh," said the Communist Party of India-Marxist.

"Modi promised to make Uttar Pradesh a developed state if the BJP is voted to power. Amit Shah, on the other hand, laid out the well-tested Hindutva agenda," it said.

The CPI-M said BJP MP Hukum Singh's allegations that 346 Hindus had been forced to flee Kairana town by Muslims was found to be spurious by the administration and the media.

"It was found that most of the people in the list had left the town years ago in search of better jobs and livelihood. A few were not alive at present.

"Though the Kairana exodus theory has been effectively debunked, the very fact that the BJP national leadership took it seriously and sent an eight-member team of MPs to enquire into the matter shows the way the communal agenda would be raised in the run-up to the (Uttar Pradesh) elections," it said.

The editorial said the other aspect of the BJP meeting was the "concerted bid to propagate and build up Modi's supreme leadership of the party and the government...

"What is in the making is the building up of the cult of an authoritarian leader."

--IANS

mr/
Britain's "special relationship" with the US could come under stress as Washington throws its support behind the Argentine foreign minister's bid to become the next UN Secretary-General.

The White House is reportedly enthusiastic in its backing of Susana Malcorra's application for the UN's top job, despite the concerns of its "closest ally" Britain.

The US move could be interpreted as a snub, threatening to expose existing differences in policy between Britain and America over the Falkland Islands, known to Argentina as Las Islas Malvinas.

While Britain backs the islanders' right to self-determination, the US holds on tightly to its historic policy of conspicuous silence over the issue.

A 2013 referendum on the Falkland Islands -- over which Britain went into war with Argentina in 1982 after Argentina seized them -- found 99.8 percent of the population favours remaining part of Britain.

"It's a really tough call for the UK. There is obvious concern at having someone heading up the UN who firmly believes that the Falklands should belong to Argentina," a British diplomat was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

"But at the same time, Downing Street doesn't want to appear petty by blocking an otherwise excellent candidate, just for her country's claim."

Since becoming Argentina's foreign minister last December, Malcorra has insisted the Falklands question is no longer a major issue, as it had been with the previous government.

However, she said the Malvinas -- as the Falklands are referred to in Argentine -- are still "a top priority because they are in the constitution and if I were to dismiss the issue. I would be going against the constitution."

Washington refused to take sides during the Falklands War, to the grievance of the British government at the time, and has refused to go public on the issue since then.

--IANS

ahm/vt
The Bulgarian parliament has approved a bill that would ban the wearing of garments concealing the face entirely or partially in public places.

A total of 108 MPs voted in favour of the bill on Wednesday, proposed by the nationalist Patriotic Front (PF). Only eight lawmakers were against and none abstained from voting on the bill that would prohibit women from wearing naqabs and burqas, state run Novonite news agency reported.

The bill will be applicable to all official institutions and sites which provide administrative, educational or social services as well as places for public relaxation, sport, culture and communications.

Prior to entering the plenary chamber, the bill underwent approval by several parliamentary committees.

Bulgaria's second largest opposition party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), proposed withdrawing the bill and including it in counter-terrorism legislation but that was rejected..

The law has already come into force in the municipal councils of Pazardzhik, Stara Zagora, Sliven and Burgas.

In May, the Dutch government implemented a partial ban on wearing veils in schools, hospitals and and while travelling in public transport.

In 2011, a law banning full face covering came into force in Belgium.

France has also banned veils and forbids head scarves and other religious accessories in schools and public buildings.

--IANS

ksk/bg
The maximum, all-inclusive air fare of Rs 2,500 proposed in the new aviation policy for travel up to one hour or around 600 km is welcome for promoting regional connectivity. But it isn't really low, going by existing tariff of carriers, analysts feel.

For a person who intends to travel, for example, on July 15 from New Delhi to Lucknow -- which is around 550 km away and appears within the coverage -- the cheapest all-inclusive fare that shows up is Rs 1,653. And this, not for a budget carrier, but for a full-service one like Air India.

And how does this add up? A base fare of Rs 1,150, a passenger service fee of Rs 150, service tax of Rs 65, airline fuel surcharge of Rs 6 and a user development fee of Rs 282. That is, a total levy and surcharge of Rs 503.

In comparison, an all-inclusive executive class fare in Lucknow Swarna Shatabdi Express train is Rs 1,850, while an air conditioned II-Class fare on New Delhi-Lucknow Airconditioned Superfast Express is Rs 1,140.

If the civil aviation policy calls for the bulk of the levies and surcharges to be waived -- not to talk of other promotional concessions proposed -- the Rs 2,500 cap does not really appear to be on the lower side.

"By subsidising the shorter domestic routes for the airlines, the government has given a strong push to regional connectivity by capping fares and thereby expanding the market," said Sharat Dhall, President, Yatra.com, pleased that it will also bost tourism.

"But a cap of Rs 1,200 for 30-minute flights and Rs 2,500 for an one-hour flights should really drive growth in a hugely under-penetrated domestic air market and catalyse economic growth in Tier II and Tier II markets," he said.

But what experts said should be welcome is that even the peak fare can't exceed Rs 2,500.

Using the same New Delhi-Lucknow route on the same travel date of July 15, one also sees that the fare of Jet Airways, with one stop is as high as Rs 9,832 -- even though it also has a lower, all-inclusive fare of Rs 2,070.

A look at fares for similar distances throws up some interesting results, especially when there is a monopoly.

For New Delhi to Kullu on the same date, where Air India is the sole operator, the all-inclusive fare is Rs 10,027. Then for New Delhi to Amritsar, where there are several carriers, the lowest is of SpiceJet at Rs 2,243.

And for New Delhi to Udaipur, among multiple operators, Jet Airways is cheapest at Rs 2,241.

What more will the airline gain? The regional connectivity scheme will only apply in states that levy a maximum of one percent value added tax on aviation fuel at such airports for a period of 10 years. Aviation fuel now accounts for around 40 percent of an airline's operational cost.

A cut in value added tax to one percent -- from a range of 4 percent and 29 per cent that states currently charge -- will have a major impact on airlines' bottomline and provide additional cushion to keep the fares low.

The central excise duty is also proposed at a lower rate of two percent, against 14 percent now.

This apart, there will be no airport charges, parking and landing charges will be waived, service tax on tickets will be levied only on 10 percent of the taxable value for one year, and airlines can manage ground-handling on their own.

Ratings agency Crisil, a part of the Standard and Poor's Group, felt the cap will prove to be a negative factor for airline companies given the government intervention that will follow and the price control.

The agency, however, said further clarity was awaited in terms of whether a fare of Rs 2,500 per hour will be capped even for last-minute bookings under regional service scheme, as regarding the identification of specific routes and associated regional impact.

"The levy proposed to be charged for air tickets in the regional service scheme would marginally increase ticket cost. However, we expect air fares to marginally decline year-on-year in 2016-17 owing to an expected reduction in fuel prices."

--IANS

ap/vt
Film: "Central Intelligence"; Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber; Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Amy Ryan, Danielle Nicolet, Jason Bateman, Aaron Paul; Rating: ***

Director Rawson Marshall Thurber's "Central Intelligence" is a typical frothy Hollywood buddy comedy. Replete with action and adventure, this is a film where cliches are spoofed and spun over, to deliver an unexpectedly refreshing canned drama, that is smooth, fast and funny.

The narration starts off in 1996, at the high school graduation ceremony. Robbie Wryedick is bullied and humiliated for being bizarre and overweight. He is flaunted naked at the assembly. Calvin Joyner, the Student of the Year, saves him from further disgrace by lending him his "Golden Jet" jacket. Ever since then, Robbie has never interacted with any of his schoolmates.

Twenty years later, tables turn when the two meet just before their high school reunion. Calvin is now married to his high-school sweetheart Maggie and leads a mundane life as a run-down accountant, who misses his glorious school days. And Robbie, after shedding off his fat, resurfaces as a fit and muscular, lonely and friendless, lethal CIA Agent -- Bob Stone.

Robbie gets in touch with Calvin Joyner, whom he considers his only friend. He seeks his help to gather information so that he may save the compromised US spy satellite system from enemies, who are trying to sell bogus plans and destroy the country.

How the two friends encounter shootouts, espionage and double-crosses while trying to prevent worldwide chaos, forms the crux of the tale.

The script written by Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen and the director Rawson Marshall Thurber, is unconventional, yet formulaic. The plot straddles on a consistent graph with the right amount of humour, drama and action. It works as a buddy film but fails on the espionage sub-plot front.

Humour arises from action as well as the constant banter between the buddies. The dialogues are colloquial, witty and arresting and the characters with all their quirkiness are well-etched and presented.

Dwayne Johnson is charming as Bob Stone. With his caring smile and lost look, he brings the contrast of his character effectively. With this character, Dwayne proves that he is equally at home with comedy.

On the other hand, Kevin Hart as Calvin Joyner, does not add any nuances to his role. He is his usual self, and thus a bit of a disappointment. But together their on-screen buddy chemistry though odd, is effectual and convincing.

They are aptly supported by Danielle Nicolet as Calvin's wife Maggie, Jason Bateman as their ex-classmate Trevor and Amy Ryan as Agent Pamela Harris. They have their moments of screen glory.

Technically, the film is astutely crafted. Barry Peterson's camera work is noteworthy and his visuals are accompanied by Ludwig Goransson and Theodore Shapiro's music, which is seamlessly layered by Michael L.Sale's efficient editing.

Overall "Central Intelligence" is a fun film only if you park your intelligence for a while.

--IANS

troy/nv/vt
In a bid to expand its operations in India, US-based global technology company Cisco on Thursday launched the Cisco Global Delivery Center in Pune which will lead to its headcount in the country getting doubled over the next two years.

With the new Pune centre, India will be the only country in the world where Cisco will have two global delivery centres, the other one being in Bengaluru.

"The Global Delivery Center in Pune reconfirms our commitment for a long-lasting partnership with our customers and the Maharashtra government. This centre has been designed to provide the best experience as well as services and products along with local innovations to our customers," said Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India & SAARC, in a statement.

"We are excited to play a role in enabling Maharashtra's digitisation, creating employment opportunities for engineering and business professionals, while contributing to the knowledge economy in the state," Malkani added.

The Global Delivery Center in Cisco's 172,000 sq ft Pune office is a strategic move by the company to support customers globally and in India.

The centre will enable Cisco to get closer to its customers, thereby allowing Cisco to expand its current delivery capacity leading to increased customer satisfaction.

The centre will help to proactively explore potential service growth opportunities, especially in Maharashtra.

"The Pune centre plays a key role in our global strategy to execute global advanced services business along with providing services to India," added Sanjay Pal, Vice President, Advanced Services. Cisco Inc.

"This center enables Cisco to share its global best practices and cutting-edge technologies with local customers and provide great services for a broader customer base," Pal added.

"The delivery centre in Pune will focus on customers embracing digitization including leading Indian and global telco operators, insurance and finance institutions, as well as consumer goods companies - most of them operating on a global scale. It plans to double its headcount in the next two years," the company said.

--IANS

na/bg
A Muslim cleric was arrested in Kenya's Mombasa city on Thursday over alleged links with the Al-Shabaab militant group, police said.

Coast Regional Police chief Francis Wanjohi said the cleric Ibrahim Bukhari was arrested after he was found spying on residential and commercial buildings within Kizingo area in the coastal city, Xinhua news agency reported.

"The officials have been granted 30 days to continue interrogating him. We believe he also used the mosque to radicalise youth through extremist ideologies," said Wanjohi.

The cleric's arrest comes in the wake of terror alert in the coastal region during the holy month of Ramadan by Al-Shabaab militants.

Mombasa County Commissioner Maalim Mohammed said elaborate security measures have been put in place in the city.

"We have deployed undercover and uniformed police officers, and surveillance equipment, including CCTV cameras, has been increased in places frequented by people in a move to boost security," Mohammed said.

--IANS

pgh/vm
As the argument on culling nilgai, wild boar and monkeys (rhesus macaque) has reached the Supreme Court, experts warn that large-scale culling could result in near extinction of the animals -- as has happened with the Nilgai in neighbouring Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.

Experts point out that culling these animals, after labelling them "vermin", would also shrink the prey population of predators and make the man-animal conflict more ugly.

Nilgai and wild boars are 'very valuable' prey of leopards, wolves, tigers, hyenas and even jackals and dholes. Monkeys too are the leopard's prey.

"Culling is wrong and will bring these animals on the verge of extinction. Once they are termed vermin and targeted for culling, people would soon start hunting them for sport, or poach for their skin and meat," V.P Singh, Zoologist and a senior research fellow at Dudhwa National Park, told IANS.

In Uttar Pradesh, a senior minister has also gone on record suggesting that Nilgai meat tastes good and the animals are already being hunted down or poached.

Following regressive hunting in the name of crop protection, the Nilgai has already become extinct in Bangladesh. The handsome animals are only sparsely found in Nepal and Pakistan.

"By hunting we are moving against conservation," Kartick Satyanarayan from Wildlife SOS, who is working on bear conservation methods in Alaska, USA, told IANS.

Hunter-turned-wildlife photographer Anant Zanjale explains the reason behind the large population of these animals.

"Presence of any animal in a region is for a reason. They multiplied because their predators were killed and their abodes were destroyed for farming," Zanjale told IANS.

Describing the plight of farmers as "equally genuine", the wildlife experts suggest methods like controlling population by sterilisation or vaccination -- but only in a scientific and flock-wise manner; change in cropping pattern and solar powered fencing.

"Killing 200 Nilgai or wild boar and monkeys for protecting crops would not change anything. Nature is so unique that any vacuum created is filled soon," says Satyanarayan, adding that there are cheaper and more effective methods of keeping animals at bay and protecting crops.

Ecologists also widely disagree that animals like Nilgai, wild boar or monkeys are vermin.

As per the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, Nilgai or Blue Bull along with the wild boar are protected under schedule-3 and Rhesus Macaque under schedule-2. To declare them vermin, the species are shifted to schedule-5. Wild boar had already been declared vermin for a year in Uttarakhand, without clarity on the culling method.

"There is no scientific evidence that they are vermin. The wild boar and Nilgai were declared vermin without doing a predator census in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Uttarakhand," says Satyanarayan.

Any species is declared vermin when they are over populated or are non-indigenous, causing irreparable damage to the local ecology, like in the case of imported exotic snakes in Florida, USA, or Indian parakeets in the UK.

Experts say there are very simple "alternative ways" of tackling the issues of farmers.

In a first such scientific method, the rhesus macaque in Agra are being sterilised through laparascopic surgery.

"The process takes 10 minutes per animal. They are freed within an hour. But it's done in a systematic manner. The same could be done with Nilgai," said Satyanarayan, whose organisation is working with the Agra administration.

Their move was inspired by a similar experiment in Hong Kong. It will soon start in Mathura.

A Bengaluru-based company offers a home-made acoustic device called 'Harmony Q Series', that works on the sound of predators to keep animals away from fields. The device costs Rs 9,000 for a four-acre plot.

"Elephant, Nilgai and wild boars dislike pungent smell of lemon grass, mint, tulsi. Growing them as hedges keeps the animals away," Nikunj Sharma, from PETA, told IANS.

Other local remedies include spraying a mixture of donkey's excreta with cow urine on the fields, which would keep Nilgai away, as it would smell like a rival Nilgai flock.

In Rajasthan, using audio cassette tapes as fencing helps keep Nilgai and wild boar away as the shine of the metallic tapes scares them. This practice is being successfully followed by the Tharu tribe in the Terai region, on the India-Nepal border.

Translocation of the animals is another method that has shown success. Around 5,000 Blackbucks were translocated in Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in 2011 -- within the state -- after the animals started causing heavy damage to crops.

"Herds of elephant were shifted to the dense interiors of jungles from the fringes in Chhattisgarh successfully. We translocated about 172 Nilgai from Delhi airport," says Satyanarayan.

A Nilgai annually reproduces three times lesser than a Rhesus macaque. They can be kept away from farms through government subsidised solar fencing, said another expert.

A Rhesus Macaque gives birth to three offspring while Nilgai reproduces a single calf in a year. A male calf take four to five years to become sexually active. Wild Boars proliferate faster, with up to eight offspring, but the survival rate to adulthood is only 50 per cent and the predators keep the rest under control.

"We must remember that when it comes to nature, only the sustainable solutions work. Culling is certainly not one of them," said Satyanarayan.

(Kushagra Dixit can be contacted at kushagra.d@ians.in)

--IANS

kd/rn/bg
"Dishoom" actor Varun Dhawan and producer Sajid Nadiadwala have denied that a kirpan -- a Sikh ceremonial dagger -- was used in the film's song "Sau Tarah Ke".

At an event here, Varun was asked to comment on a complaint regarding the use of a kirpan-like dagger as an accessory on actress Jacqueline Fernandez's short outfit.

He explained: "It's not a kirpan. It's an Arabic sword which has been used and we must actually be having it, so we can show it. I am a Punjabi myself, and so is my brother (director Rohit Dhawan). So we would never do something like that. It's a misunderstanding."

Nadiadwala said he had read the news that the Sikh community had condemned how Jacqueline is seen shaking a leg wearing a short dress with a short sword, resembling the kirpan, around her waist.

"We shot the song in Morocco. So there's no question (of using a kirpan). Once they see the song, they will know. They saw the clipping and they thought it is a kirpan," the producer said.

An open letter is said to have been addressed to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) demanding to remove the song from the film and from websites like YouTube. Not only that, also they asked for an apology from the makers of the film and posted the same on his Facebook wall terming Jacqueline as 'semi-clad actress'.

Scheduled to release on July 29, the much-awaited action-comedy film is helmed by Rohit Dhawan and also features John Abraham in the lead role.

--IANS

iv/rb/vm
India on Thursday said it was early to speculate on the US Senate's rejection of a key legislative amendment that would have brought India at par with NATO members and other allies in terms of American defence sales.

The National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) 2017 "is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content", External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup told reporters here,

The NDAA is a federal law that specifies the budget and expenditures of the US defence department and determines the agencies responsible for defence. It also limits funding levels and sets out the policy framework under which money will be spent for defence purposes.

As moved in the Senate on Wednesday, one of the amendments to the law included modification of American defence export control regulations that would have recognised India as a key strategic military partner. However, the amendment was reported to have been shot down by the Senate.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the NDAA by the US Senate," Swarup said.

He said that the preparation of act in the US Congress involved approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

The spokesman, however, said the US government had already recognised India as its major defence partner and the preparation of the NDAA "is a process distinct from the decision".

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US government. It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," Swarup added.

--IANS

sar/vt
Still clueless about her whereabouts, the family of Indian aid worker Judith D'Souza, who was kidnapped in Kabul on June 9, on Tuesday said they are hopeful of India securing her release.

"So far there is no news of her whereabouts. But we are happy with the efforts of the Indian government in trying to trace and secure her release. The Ministry of External Affairs has been constantly in touch with us," Judith's brother Jerome told IANS here.

Judith 40, working with Aga Khan Development Network, an NGO, was kidnapped while she was returning home after a dinner at a friend's place in the Qala-e-Fatullah area of Kabul.

Hailing from Kolkata, Judith Ahad been working with the NGO in Kabul as a senior technical adviser since July 2015.

"Both the Indian and Afghan governments are endeavouring to secure her release and we are very hopeful of getting her back," he added.

While External Affairs Minister Suhsma Swaraj had called up the family assuring all steps to secure Judith release, the Kolkata-based D'Souzas in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed for her release.

Besides sympathisers and well-wishers appealing to the governments of both countries on social media networking pages for Judith's swift and safe release, political parties including the Congress have urged the Modi government to put pressure on Afghanistan over the issue.

--IANS

and/ssp/vd
Fashion has become saturated nowadays, and so it's vital that new entrants in the industry have the right knowledge of the craft, business and potential consumers, says Indian-American designer Tina Tandon, who has clients of the likes of Hollywood celebrities Brooke Shields and Padma Lakshmi.

Tandon, who has spent a decade working in the fashion world and has a label T.Tandon, says newcomers need to be "respectful to the craft".

"If you want to become a designer, study it, take courses in it. You have to also work in the industry for a while, get a feel of it, before you decide to branch out on your own," the designer told IANS in an email interview from New York.

"Fashion is so saturated these days that you not only have to know the people you want to cater to, but also fine-tune your unique selling point and aesthetic as well. It can get discouraging sometimes, but it's important to stay passionate and believe in what you have to offer," she added.

The designer, whose forte is pret in women's western wear, also believes that one needs to know fashion and design inside out to have a footing in the industry.

"Just because you can style yourself and others, doesn't mean you would make a good designer. A lot of those who just wake up one day and want to be a designer, don't usually last very long in the running.

"You have to know the craft, and all that goes into it. Everything from how you get buyers, to production and shipping, to getting your work out to the press. It's overwhelming, but you grow as you go," added Tandon, some of whose Hollywood and Bollywood clients also include Katrina Bowden, Pooja Batra, Pooja Kumar and Soha Ali Khan.

A graduate of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, Tandon worked for the likes of Escada, Christian Lacroix and Kenneth Cole among others before launching her own line. Her creations are sold to high-end designer boutiques all over the US -- from Beverly Hills to Madison Avenue in New York City to Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Tandon was born in the US, but her parents moved back to India when she was two years old. A decade later, the family shifted back to the US.

"We moved to North Carolina, where there were hardly few Indians in my middle school, and I often used to get teased and bullied, being new in the country, even for my clothes. That actually intrigued my interest further in fashion, and I thought to myself - you laugh at me now, one day you will wear my clothes," Tandon said.

She says Indian embroidery and techniques are appreciated worldwide.

"Nothing compares to the intricate embroideries, bead-work and other embellishment techniques that come out of India. Fashion brands all over the world look to India for that.

"Now, with Indians being spread all over the world, and with increasing purchasing power of the young generation in India and abroad, many fashion houses and department stores want to cater to them specifically," Tandon said.

She even pointed out how major European houses like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Alexander McQueen and Dior have taken notice of Indian craft and have come up with specifically India-inspired collections.

"The international lines will blur more and there will be more of multicultural influences in fashion all over the world. People are now travelling extensively and frequently, and thereby we are becoming more of one world," she said by adding that she would love to showcase at an Indian fashion event soon.

"I love the way Indian women are embracing fashion, and have become uber stylish over the past few years... We are looking to grow it in the Indian market soon as most of our core business is in the US currently."

(Nivedita can be contacted at nivedita.s@ians.in)

--IANS

nv/rb/bg
Actress Freida Pinto has joined hands with the First Lady of the US Michelle Obama for Let Girls Learn -- a government initiative aimed at helping girls obtain quality education.

Freida, along with Michelle Obama, her daughters Sasha and Malia, their grandmother Marian Robinson - will travel to Liberia, Morocco and Spain at the end of June and early July as part of the Let Girls Learn initiative, read a statement issued on behalf of the "Slumdog Millionaire" actress.

The focus of the trip, which includes Monrovia, Marrakesh and Madrid, is for them to speak to young girls about the importance of education and staying in school.

Starting with Liberia, Freida and Michelle will take part in a discussion which will cover the educational barriers girls face in the country. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will meet them as well.

Next, in Morocco, Hollywood star Meryl Streep will be seen joining Michelle and Freida to discuss the challenges women in the African country deal with on a regular basis.

--IANS

nn/rb/bg
Are you a Bollywood movie buff and want to know about the Kapoors or the Bachchans? Google India has come up with a new and exciting way of answering your queries on films, actors, song lyrics, trivia, trailers, screening times and more with contextual answers.

The latest addition in the search engine's operation was highlighted at an event attended by film director Karan Johar, Google India's Marketing Head Sapna Chadha and Search Product Manager Satyajeet Salgar here on Thursday.

With around one in 10 mobile searches in India related to Indian cinema, Google Search now gives local cinema enthusiasts an easy way to discover and explore everything they want to know about their favourite movies, stars, music, dialogues, actors and more.

"Google has a long history of building products for India, and we wanted to make sure that when these millions of Indian cinema fans pick up their phone and ask Google about their favourite films, actors or songs, they get a delightful, local experience," said Chadha.

Google also released a video tribute to Indian cinema that showcases these search experiences.

--IANS

som/bg
Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal sought the support of the states on Thursday to stop the menace of power thefts in the country.

"Urban areas and our cities and towns also need 24x7 power," Goyal said in his inaugural address at the two-day conference at Consolim, 26 km from here, of power ministers from states across the country.

Sharing the Gujarat experience of reducing power thefts, Goyal said the tariff increase in the state had been the lowest.

"It is not the poor who steal, and it's the bigger power thefts which make corruption," the power minister said.

He appealed to all states to reduce power thefts and said there is great political benefit that will accrue from stopping such thefts. The minister also sought the states' support for some of the central government's initiatives in this regard.

Later, during the conference, Goyal will launch an application named Urja, developed by the Union Power Ministry, that will facilitate easy access to information related to the power situation of the user's locality.

Urja is designed to help the consumer connect better with the urban power distribution system by providing information such as on power outage, timely release of connections, addressing complaints and power reliability.

The ministry will also be launching a soft campaign called Urjagiri, which will entail felicitating and garlanding people caught stealing power, so as to shame them into stopping the practice.

The average accumulated technical and commercial (AT&C) losses, for instance, in Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand are among the highest at around 30 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively.

Delhi loses an estimated Rs 1,000-1,300 crore annually owing to power thefts.

--IANS

bc/pgh/vt
Clearing desks for the release of "Udta Punjab", the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday dismissed a bunch of petitions seeking a stay on it.

Justice M. Jeyapaul dismissed the petitions, moved by advocate Wattan Sharma and others, claiming poor projection of Punjab and its people in the film slated to be released countrywide on Friday.

The vacation judge's order came after amicus curiae Sujay Kantawala apprised the court that the film did not glorify the use of drugs or narcotics, there was nothing objectionable to Punjabis in it and it even did not portray them in bad light.

"In my view the film doesn't in any manner glorify usage of drugs or narcotic substances or contain anything which can be construed to indicate or said to have the possible effect of luring any person or persons towards using drugs," he said in his four-page report.

Kantawala also said he didn't concur with the contention of the petitioner that the film portrays Punjab and the Punjabis in a poor light.

"The film has to been seen as a whole and now will be seen by an adult audience who are capable to appreciate the issues conveyed by the film," he said.

Praising "Udta Punjab", he said it was a modern themed film.

"The film in my view does not in fact seek to make a comment on any particular state...rather the viewer is likely to empathize with the message the filmmaker seeks to convey," the amicus curiae said. "The film does not advocate drug usage nor does idolise persons who use drugs," he added.

Earlier, the amicus curiae was directed by the court to submit his report on Thursday with a focus on the film's content so that the court could take a call that whether it was fit for public exhibition or not.

The high court had also ordered the revisional committee of the Central Board of Film Certification and the producer to screen the film by Tuesday.

--IANS

vg/vd
China could support New Delhi's entry into the NSG if it promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, an influential Chinese daily said on Thursday.

As India has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), it was not fit to get into the NSG, a commentary in the Global Times said.

"Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organization," said the commentary by Fu Xiaoqiang of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG, and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhi's path toward the club," it said.

Commentaries in the English-language Global Times are generally known to reflect the views of the leadership of the Communist Party of China.

The daily noted India's efforts to become a member of the 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the support it has received from the US and some countries on this count.

NSG membership would grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power, the commentary said.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities.

"Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken.

"As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region."

The Times noted that the US recognized New Delhi as a "major defence partner" during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent visit to Washington.

The US was "highly likely to keep supporting New Delhi's nuclear ambitions in order to make it a stronger power to contain China," it added.

Pointing out the objection to India's membership by New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria, the daily said that China "does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules".

"For those countries that are developing nuclear technology without the acceptance of the international community, perhaps counting them into the non-proliferation mechanism will better safeguard nuclear security," it said.

--IANS

mr/rn
A Cambodian court on Thursday sentenced an Indian man to 14 months in prison for sexually abusing an underage girl, an anti-pedophile agency said.

Raj Deo, 46, a cloth seller living in the northwestern province of Siem Reap, was convicted of "indecent assault" against a girl aged 14, said a statement from child protection NGO Action Pour Les Enfants (APLE).

The Siem Reap Provincial Court also ordered the Indian to pay $750 in compensation to the victim.

Raj Deo was arrested by Siem Reap Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile protection police in December after receiving a complaint from the victim.

Cambodia launched an anti-pedophile operation in 2003 in a bid to end its reputation as a haven for child sex offenders. Since then, dozens of foreigners have been imprisoned for child sex crimes.

--IANS

mr/
Signalling a breakthrough in the Jisha murder case, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan announced on Thursday that "the suspect" -- an Assamese youth -- in the murder of the woman law student is in police custody while police said some forensic and other evidence have shown his involvement.

The prime accused in the crime, according to police, is 23-year-old Amiyur ul Islam, who was picked from Tamil Nadu near the Palakkad border two days back.

"This is certainly going to be a feather in the cap of the police probe team," Vijayan told reporters in Kochi about the investigation into the late April rape and brutal murder of the 27-year-old Dalit woman in Ernakulam district.

Additional Director General of Police B. Sandhya, who is heading the new probe team, told reporters in Aluva that things are very positive in the probe.

Islam was picked up by police two days back and Sandhya led his questioning at Thrissur. On Thursday evening he was brought to Aluva where all the top police officers, including Sandhya, were present.

According to police, two vital clues turned out to be the clinching evidence for nailing the perpetrator -- the footwear which was left near Jisha's home and a photo of Islam and Jisha taken at a local studio near her house.

The footwear shop owner and the studio owner identified the youth even as police concluded, from the evidence, that the crime was committed by someone who knew Jisha.

Islam had taken part in the construction of Jisha's home and they were in touch and had some verbal duel over the construction.

According to the information, the Assamese youth had come to her home in the morning of April 28 and they had a fight. He came again in the afternoon when he was drunk and committed the crime.

Police zeroed in on Islam after his DNA samples, checked against saliva and blood samples found on Jisha's body, matched when the results came in Thursday.

Director General of Police Loknath Behra, who is in Mumbai, told reporters there that things are all going well in the case and expressed happiness in the chief minister's praise of the police force.

Jisha was found dead on April 28 at her home in Perumbavoor in Ernakulam by her mother Rajeshwari, who works as a casual labourer. Her body bore injuries in a way that gave rise to suspicions that she was raped before being killed.

The murder attracted national headlines and became a cause celebre in Kerala's election season. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) said it reflected the slide in law and order that the ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) had allowed, and promised to book the culprits within hours, if elected to power.

The LDF government, which assumed office on May 25, changed the entire team probing the case and replaced Director General of Police (DGP) T.P. Senkumar with Behra.

--IANS

sg/vd/vt
A man has been arrested after a British Labour MP was shot at in Birstall in West Yorkshire, police said on Thursday.

The injured woman is said to be Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen.

West Yorkshire Police said they were called to Market Street at Birstall where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries, Xinhua news agency reported.

She was shot at and was seen lying bleeding on the pavement.

The attack took place near the town's library, according to reports.

Police said she was in a critical condition and had been sent to hospital, while a man nearby also suffered slight injuries.

"A 52-year-old man was arrested in the area," police said but did not give further details.

--IANS

pgh/mr
A 22-year-old man was kidnapped from Delhi and shot dead in Gurgaon, police said on Thursday.

The deceased was identified as Dhillu, who hailed from Nalanda in Bihar.

Sandeep Kumar, chief of the Palam Vihar police station, told IANS that three men abducted Dhillu from Delhi's Kapashera area where he lived with his family and shot him in the fields of a Gurgaon village.

The unemployed victim was admitted in a hospital where he succumbed to injuries. No one has been arrested.

--IANS

pra/mr
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday said that while maritime terror posed a major threat to India, the country's coastline is now more secure due to a slew of initiatives taken by the government.

"We are securing the Indian coastline by creating a chain of radars and automatic identification system (AIS) receivers. Consequent upon the implementation of these important initiatives, our coasts are far more secure now," Rajnath Singh said while chairing the second coastal security review meeting here.

He said the vulnerability of India's coasts was exposed in 1993 when explosives were smuggled from Raigad and later in 2008 when Pakistani terrorists sneaked into Mumbai to carry out their deadly attacks.

However, he assured, after the 26/11 Mumbai terror strikes, many initiatives were taken to beef up coastal security, including security audit of all major and minor ports, to identify the vulnerable points.

Besides a chain of static sensors and AIS along the coast and radars operated by the Indian Coast Guard at 45 locations, another 38 more radars are planned to be installed to ensure a gapless surveillance of the entire 7,516-km coastline, he said.

The minister said while the Indian Navy is overall entrusted with maritime security, including coastal and offshore, the Indian Coast Guard is responsible for coastal security in territorial waters, including areas patrolled by coastal police comprising state marine police.

Addressing the meet, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis suggested the formation of a new 'Central Marine Police Force' to protect sea, coast, ports and vital institutions and a high-tech e-surveillance of all landing points and non-major ports.

Singh said the Centre would seriously consider suggestions received from the coastal states and UTs.

He said an in-principle approval had been accorded to set up a National Marine Police Training Institute in Gujarat and State Marine Police Training Centres in police training academies in all states and UTs.

For e-surveillance, the Maharashtra Chief Minister suggested that while the Centre could bear the capital expenditure, the states could foot the operational expenses.

Ge urged that under the universal service obligations, all GSM service providers should be asked to provide services till five-nautical miles from the coast to the sea.

The meeting also discussed expeditious implementation of various coastal security schemes, institutional set-up in states/UTs to review coastal security, constitution of state maritime boards, security of non-major pots, single-point mooring, coastal mapping and security of Indian islands.

Besides, issues like issuance and distribution of biometric identity cards and card readers to fisherfolk, colour coding of boats, monitoring of fish landing points and crossing of Internatinal Maritime Boundary Line by fishermen were discussed.

The meeting was attended by Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju, Lt. Gen. A.K. Singh (retd), the Lt. Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Puducherry Revenue Minister M.O.H.F. Shahjahan, Karnataka Home Minister G. Parmeshwar, Gujarat Home Minister Rajni Patel, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, ISCS Secretary Naina Jayaseelan, Ministry of External Affairs Secretary (Border Management) Susheel Kumar, and Fadnavis.

Besides, top civil and police officials of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal and union territories of Daman and Diu, Lakshadweep, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands attended the meeting.

--IANS

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Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said on Thursday that the "missing documents" of the Ishrat Jahan encounter case amounted to "anti- activity" and those involved will be punished.

Naqvi's reaction came in the wake of an Indian Express report that said a bureaucrat tasked with inquiring into the "missing documents" of the Ishrat Jahan encounter case was found tutoring a witness.

"All efforts are being made (to find out the truth about the missing papers). It's a criminal conspiracy and an anti- activity. Anyone involved will not be allowed to go scot free," Naqvi told reporters here.

P Chidambaram has been accused by the BJP of filing, as then Home Minister, a second affidavit in September 2009 that dropped references to Ishrat Jahan's alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba links and suggested a CBI probe into her killing in an alleged fake encounter.

The BJP alleged that Chidambaram amended an earlier affidavit to suit the Congress stand that Ishrat Jahan was innocent and shot in cold blood on June 15, 2004 with three others, on the orders of the Gujarat government, then headed by Narendra Modi.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said some documents went missing related to the case and tasked Additional Secretary (Foreigners) BK Prasad to conduct a probe.

Prasad submitted his inquiry report to the Home Secretary on Thursday.

The Indian Express report says that Prasad told Ashok Kumar, a director in the Home Ministry in 2011, what he was going to be asked regarding the "missing documents" and what he should answer.

The newspaper also put an audio recording of the purported conversation between Prasad and Ashok Kumar on its website.

Now, the government may order a CBI inquiry to find out how and when the papers related to the went missing, informed sources said.
US President Barack Obama on Wednesday met the Dalai Lama privately at the White House, a session that sparked anger among Chinese officials who accuse the Tibetan spiritual leader of sponsoring a separatist movement.

It was Obama's fourth meeting with the Dalai Lama, CNN reported.

Obama and the Dalai Lama met in the Map Room, on the ground floor of the White House residence.

Obama and previous presidents have avoided receiving the Dalai Lama in the Oval Office, a setting typically reserved for visiting heads of state or government leaders.

Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary, said the meeting's venue indicated that it was a personal greeting rather than formal bilateral talks.

A White House official said that ahead of the talks, the pair discussed a range of issues, including human rights, but declined to provide any further details about the meeting, which was not open to the media.

Later, the White House said the Dalai Lama extended condolences for Sunday's terror attack in Orlando, but declined to provide further details of the discussion.

The Dalai Lama officially retired in 2011 from his political role as the leader of the exiled Tibetan government, but remains the head of Tibetan Buddhists.

On Tuesday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman sharply criticised any decision that could lend legitimacy to the Dalai Lama's claims that Tibet should be independent from China.

"The US government made solemn commitments. It acknowledges that there is only one China, that Tibet is an inseparable part of China and will never recognise the so-called Tibetan government in exile," the spokesman, Lu Kang, said during a press briefing.

Lu said the Dalai Lama is not a purely religious figure, but a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion.

Chinese state-run daily, the Global Times said the meeting showed Obama's "mean side".

"While Obama often says he welcomes China's peaceful rise, his meetings with the Dalai Lama erode his sincerity and make him look more like he is helping the latter continue to make trouble with China," the daily said in an editorial.

--IANS

ksk
US President met privately with the Dalai Lama at the White House, drawing much anger and criticism from China with a leading Chinese daily saying the meeting exhibited Obama's "mean side".

The two leaders met at the Map Room on Wednesday, and discussed issues including human rights and climate change  in what the White House termed a personal conversation based on Obama's appreciation of the 81-year-old Buddhist leader's teachings.

Beijing has strenuously objected to the meeting.

Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary, said the meeting's venue indicated that it was a personal greeting rather than formal bilateral talks.

"Both the Dalai Lama and President Obama value the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the US and China," Earnest said.

During the meeting, Obama repeated the US position that Tibet is part of China and that Washington does not support Tibetan independence, the White House said. The President also urged the Dalai Lama and his representatives to work directly with Chinese officials to resolve differences.

The Dalai Lama fled from Tibet to India in 1959 and established the Central Tibetan Administration after a failed uprising against Chinese communist rule.

The Dalai Lama reaffirmed that he was not seeking independence for Tibet and wants to resume a dialogue with the Chinese government, the White House said.

However, China's Foreign Ministry said it had expressed its opposition to the meeting in "solemn representations" to the US Embassy in Beijing.

"We need to emphasise that the Tibetan issue is China's internal affair and other countries don't have any right to interfere with this," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Wednesday.

In an editorial, China's leading daily, the Global Times said the meeting showed Obama's "mean side".

"While Obama often says he welcomes China's peaceful rise, his meetings with the Dalai Lama erode his sincerity and make him look more like he is helping the latter continue to make trouble with China," the daily said in an editorial.

"Having met the Dalai Lama more often than his Western counterparts in the last decade, Obama has set a bad example," it added.

Another editorial issued by the same daily, which is generally known to reflect the views of the leadership of the Communist Party of China, said Washington's "unwise behaviour has broken the solemn promise of the US not to support Tibet's independence, seriously jeopardised China-US relations, and deeply hurt the Chinese people's feelings".

"By meeting with the Dalai Lama, the US government has broken its own promise and thrown away its political credibility, which is an extremely rash and irresponsible act," it said.

The editorial also said this flip-flopping shows the White House's narrow-mindedness and outdated way of thinking that still seeks to contain China by playing the "Tibet card".

"Playing the 'Tibet card' shows the US government is overdrawing its political credit and prestige," the editorial added.

Obama has met with the Dalai Lama on three other occasions in 2014, 2011 and 2010.
Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed nearly 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) on Facebook message which he posted moments before the worst mass shooting in the US.

"America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state..I pledge my alliance to (IS leader) Abu Bakr al Baghdadi ..may Allah accept me," Mateen posted.

"The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west" and "You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance."

According to the report, Mateen also declared allegiance to IS and al-Baghdadi in 911 calls he made during the attack, CBS News reported on Thursday.

A US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official said the massacre at the Pulse nightclub was both hate crime and an act of terror.

"This was an act of violence, born out of hate, that inflicted terror on an entire community," said Ron Hopper, special FBI agent in charge of the case.

"So I would call it a hate crime. I would call it terrorism. It's both," Xinhua news agency quoted Hopper as saying.

The US authorities were also considering filing criminal charges against Mateen's wife, Noor Salman, for failing to inform the FBI what she knew before the attack.

Salman, has told the FBI that she drove Mateen, 29, to the Pulse nightclub on a prior occasion but that she tried to talk him out of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, officials told NBC News.

Several officials familiar with what she has told the FBI said she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster. She also once drove him to the nightclub because he wanted to see it in advance, the officials said.

The couple has been married since 2011. They have a three-year-old son.

The FBI is investigating reports that Mateen made several visits to the Pulse nightclub and made contact with other men on gay dating apps.

President Barack Obama was scheduled to travel to the scene of the attack in Orlando on Thursday.

--IANS

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Pakistan will become a formal member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) next week, a foreign office statement said on Thursday.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is scheduled to hold a summit on June 23 and 24 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, that will pave way for opening new avenues for Pakistan to secure funds for energy and other infrastructure projects.

The process of granting Pakistan the full membership of SCO got underway in July 2015 during Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's visit to Ufa, Russia, for a summit.

It outlined the organisation's status as an important and effective multilateral forum that discusses actual problems of international policy, economy, regional stability and security. These four elements have been very important in stimulating investment.

SCO was founded in Shanghai on June 15, 2001, by six countries -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan have been accorded observer status.

A full SCO membership will help Pakistan strengthen its role in regional and global politics, economies and infrastructure by promoting regional connectivity through the One Belt One Road and Eurasian Economic Union projects, the statement stated.

--IANS

ahm/vt
Activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) staged a protest in Philippines' capital Manila on Thursday against the use of ostrich leather in luxury brand products.

The group held the protest outside the store of French high fashion luxury goods manufacturer, Hermes, which PETA claims sells bags and sofas that are made from ostrich-leather, EFE news reported.

The demonstrators, which included both foreigners and Filipinos, brought life-size cardboard cutouts of ostriches which they erected in front of the shop, and held placards with the message "Hermes: Accessories to murder" printed on them.

The protest follows a similar one held by PETA activists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in April, when they set up the same cutouts of ostrich images in front of a Prada store.

"Every ostrich-leather bag and sofa in Hermes' stores represents smart, sensitive and curious young birds who were shocked, slaughtered, plucked and skinned," said PETA Vice President of International Campaigns Jason Baker, in a statement in April.

--IANS

ksk/vt
The share prices of three listed associate banks of State Bank of India (SBI) flared up for second consecutive day on Thursday whereas the latter's scrip only went up by five paise.

The three listed associate banks of SBI are: State Bank of Mysore (SBM), State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur (SBJJ) and State Bank of Travancore (SBT).

The SBM scrip gained Rs 109.55 to close at Rs 657.45, SBJJ gained Rs 94.40 to close at Rs 694 and SBT gained Rs 72.85 to close at Rs 551.75.

On the other hand, SBI's scrip gained just five paise to close at Rs 215.70.

The scrips of the three listed banks went up for second day on Thursday after the government gave its in-principle nod to the merger of six banks - five associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank Ltd - with the SBI.

"It is natural that whenever a smaller entity mergers with a bigger entity the share prices of the former will go up," Saswata Guha, director, Financial Institutions at global credit rating agency Fitch Ratings, told IANS.

He said the smaller banks are getting in to bigger franchise - SBI.

"As a stand alone bank SBI is stronger than its associate banks," Guha said.

According to him, scrip prices going up may also be due to speculation as SBI does not hold the entire equity in some of the associate banks.

Analysts are also of the view that the increase in scrip prices of the three associate banks is to catch-up with its actual valuation.

"We did see some broad based selling in the banking sector today. However SBI was able to hold its fort and end in positive territory. On the other hand its associate banks have risen massively by around 35 percent in the last two days," Anand James, Chief Market Strategist, Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services, told IANS.

"The associate banks of SBI rose massively as they are expected to gain more out of this merger in terms of better synergies and management practices coming in from the parent company. Apart from this the rise has basically recouped the losses these banks had suffered after the last time the proposal of merger appeared, but nothing happened. Since then the scrip of these banks had fallen significantly," he said.

The SBI's scrip gaining just five paise is perhaps due to the challenges it would face in integrating the six banks with itself with the unions opposing the move.

Further SBI has to take care of Rs.3,000 crore worth of pension burden of the associate banks.

Global credit rating agency, Moody's Investors Service had estimated it would cost SBI around Rs.16.6 billion ($250 million) for the merger and will have limited impact on its credit metrics, including its asset quality and capitalisation level.

--IANS

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US authorities handed over Mexican drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma Salazar to officials at a border crossing city, after serving almost a decade in an American prison.

Just after 5 p.m. on Wednesday evening, American agents turned over Salazar, who was released from prison in California on June 10, after completing 85 per cent of a 16-year sentence for smuggling 50 kilos of cocaine from Mexico to the US in 1995, Xinhua news agency reported.

The hand over was conducted in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Since then, he was in custody of immigration officials, prior to his extradition.

A Mexican official said that the drug lord was an accomplice of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmon in the Sinaloa Cartel.

Until now, Mexico's prosecutor-general has not ruled on whether Salazar would face new charges in Mexico or would be set free.

--IANS

ksk
A Kerala government project to provide cheap air connectivity between the state and the Middle East can now take off with the scrapping of the "5/20 rule," said aviation entrepreneur K.J. Samuel.

"Yes, with the new rules, if the Kerala government can plan well and judiciously use the funds at their disposal, in a very short time, the long standing dream can become a reality," Samuel told IANS.

Announcing its new civil aviation policy, the central government on Wednesday scrapped the "5/20 rule" whereby only local airlines having at least five years of operational experience and a fleet of minimum 20 aircraft are allowed to fly overseas.

The "5/20 rule" has been the biggest obstacle to the state government's plan to start Air Kerala airline which has already been incorporated but has not been able to start operations.

The main purpose of Air Kerala, registered as a subsidiary of the Cochin International Airport Ltd (CIAL), will be to operate international flights, mainly to and from the Middle East where more than 2.5 million people from the state live and work.

Samuel, who founded Air Deccan way back in 2003 along with G.R. Gopinath and Vishnu Raval, said there is nothing now that stops the state government from implementing the plan.

"I presume that an initial capital of Rs 350 crore would be required for starting the airline," Samuel said.

He said the idea of Air Deccan was floated in February 2003 and by August "we were already flying".

"We started with Rs 20 crore and took on lease six ATR aircraft," he recalled.

Air Kerala is particularly meant to provide relief to those Keralites in the Middle East who need an inexpensive air link with India and feel they are being fleeced by the existing airlines.

The state government in its last budget in February this year had earmarked Rs 10 crore for the Air Kerala project.

A top state government official who did not wish to be identified told IANS that over the years it was the 5/20 norm that stood as the obstacle to the project, while funds were never a problem.

"Leading Middle East-based Keralite business persons had expressed their desire to join this venture and had promised the required capital by subscribing to around five lakh shares, each valued at Rs 20,000," the official said.

--IANS

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A woman claiming to be the "wife" of late Saudi King Fahd has lost the latest round of a legal battle with his son over a $28 million payout she was awarded by the courts.

The Palestinian-born socialite Janan Harb, 68, claimed she married the late King Fahd when she was 19, and his son, Prince Abdul Aziz, promised her the package "to buy her silence", Daily Mail reported.

A judge awarded her $16.9 million, plus interest, and two Chelsea properties worth $7 million last November, but Prince Aziz asked the appeals court to quash the unsustainable award.

His legal team claimed that the judge did not analyse the evidence before him correctly and may have been biased due to a public spat with one of the barristers representing the prince.

The appeal judge called her "unsatisfactory" and described some of her evidence as "bizarre".

"We regret to say that in our view the deficiencies in the judgment are so serious that it cannot be allowed to stand and that the matter must be remitted to the High Court for re-trial," Judge Lord Dyson said.

Harb married a Lebanese lawyer in 1974 and had two daughters and claimed the late king gave her money to help support them and $1.4 million to buy one of the Chelsea flats.

She also purchased the second flat and later sold them back to the King for $3.6 million.

The court heard that, in 2001, the late King gave her $7 million through his agent Faez Martini.

In his judgment, Justice Smith said she used $4.2 million of that to pay off debts including an $119,935 gambling debt, then gambled away or spent the balance of $2.6 million within two years on her lavish lifestyle.

In her battle with the prince, she threatened to "spill the beans" on their relationship and has written two books that are as yet unpublished.

--IANS

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The car-hailing app stakes are growing, both literally and figuratively. Uber Technologies plans to borrow as much as $2 billion on the back of a $3.5-billion investment from Saudi Arabia. That gives the Silicon Valley pioneer led by Travis Kalanick an impressive war chest, but one that could dwindle quickly amid the expensive and escalating battles Uber is waging in India and China.
With reference to the news report, "Reforms take wing" (June 16) by Aneesh Phadnis and Arindam Majumder, the new Civil Aviation Policy aims to open doors to provide better regional connectivity within the country apart from enabling new airlines to fly abroad by amending the 5/20 rule with the 0/20 rule.
Two persons sustained bullet injuries in back-to-back clashes between two groups at Entally area of the city this afternoon leading to the deployment of a big police picket including RAF in the area.

The first incident happened at around 1.30 PM when over ten motorbike-borne men came near an under-construction apartment at Bibirbagan area and attacked a person named Shiekh Aslam, a senior police officer said.

As they opened fire, two bullets hit Aslam's left leg, the officer said adding a few bombs were also hurled by the bike-borne gang at another gang, who on hearing the sound of firing, rushed to the place.

While fleeing, the attackers left behind one of three bikes which was put on fire by locals, who also demonstrated when policemen from nearby Entally and Beniapukur police stations reached the spot.

Within an hour, the attackers' rival gang, allegedly controlled by injured Aslam, tried to shoot one Samshad Ali when he was fetching water from a pond in Motijheel area, a mere 200 metre away from the Bibibagan spot.

Both Ali, who sustained bullet injury in his left shoulder, and Aslam were being treated at the N R S Hospital and police stated condition of both of them were "stable".

The anti-rowdy section (ARS) of Kolkata Police and Entally Police Station have jointly started a probe into the incident which they described as a clash between groups involved in construction business in the city.

According to them all the persons including Aslam, Ali and one of the alleged attackers Niwajuddin, have "serious" criminal antecedents.

The gangsters are allegedly involved in a racket selling a single flat to different customers, the police officer said.

Police have started a suo motu "attempt to murder" case against unknown people and no arrests have been made in connection with the incident.

(Reopens CES23)



Meanwhile, in a joint operation the Anti-Rowdy Squad and Entally police station teams arrested one person from the locality late at night, a senior police officer said.

The accused Sukhen, in his late 30s, was arrested from house in the joint operation by two city police wings.

"Most of the people involved in the clash have past criminal records. Their whereabouts are recorded in local police stations and they will be nabbed," the IPS officer said.
In a breakthrough in the brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman law student at Perumbavoor, a migrant labourer from Assam was today arrested, 50 days after the gruesome murder that had become a major issue in the recent Kerala Assembly elections.

"We have got the accused in the murder case," Additional Director General of Police, B Sandhya IPS, heading the Special Investigating Team in the case, told reporters here after the accused was brought to Aluva.

Refusing to produce the accused Ameerul Islam before media, Sandhya said police wanted to build a strong case against him.

"We will collect more evidence, including identification parade, to build a strong prosecution," she said.

Police said 23-year old Islam, hailing from Dholda Gramam in Assam's Nauga district, was taken into custody from Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu. He had left Perumbavoor soon after allegedly committing the murder on April 28.

He was brought to Aluva Police Club for interrogation with his face covered amid tight security.

The man was allegedly under the influence of alcohol when he committed the crime, police said, adding he had a "pervert" mindset.

The woman, who hailed from a poor family, was raped and brutally assaulted using sharp-edged weapons before being murdered at her house on April 28.

The rape and murder was in focus during the Assembly polls campaign with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for tardy progress in the investigation and failure to nab the culprits.

The LDF government, after assuming power on May 25, had changed the investigation team and entrusted the probe to ADGP Sandhya in its first cabinet meeting itself.

Police said the investigation would be completed after conducting the DNA test of the accused.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said in Thiruvananthapuram that the suspect in the murder of the Law student was in police custody.

"Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From yesterday onwards, the accused was under police radar," he said.

"The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police", he said.

Police said a blood stained 'chappal' (footwear) found from a canal near the victim's house was one of the key evidences in identifying the culprit.

A DNA test conducted earlier on the saliva found from the bite mark on her back, the blood found on the chappal and the lock of her room had revealed that it was only one person who committed the crime, police said.

Over 100 police personnel, who had launched a scientific investigation into the incident, had questioned over 1,500 people. They examined finger prints of over 5000 people and went through over 20 lakh telephonic conversations before reaching the culprit, police said.
The trial of 26 people, who face charges related to the trafficking of 26 infants in China, began today in eastern Zhejiang Province.

The cases are being heard at the people's court of Cangnan County with the intermediate people's court of Wenzhou City, which administers Cangnan, overseeing proceedings.

The prime suspect, a 51-year-old man from Cangnan, identified by his surname Zhang, confessed that he and his lover started the business in 2013.

Procurators said the babies were sold for between 10,000 yuan (USD 1,520) and 100,000 yuan (USD 15,200).

One baby boy was resold five times, with the first buyer paying 10,000 yuan and last 83,000 yuan.

The defendants, aged between 27 and 79, are from Wenzhou, Fujian and Yunnan, state-run Xinhua agency reported.

The Wenzhou court said most of the suspects were only educated to primary school level or were illiterate.

The trial is expected to last until Friday.
The bodies of 34 migrants, including 20 children, who were abandoned by people smugglers while trying to reach neighbouring Algeria were found in the Niger desert last week, authorities have said.

"Thirty-four people, including five men, nine women and 20 children died trying to cross the desert," Niger's interior ministry yesterday said in a statement.

"They probably died of thirst, as is often the case, and they were found near Assamaka," a security source told AFP, referring to a border post between Niger and Algeria.

"(The migrants) were abandoned by people smugglers," the statement added, and only two of the bodies have so far been identified - a man and a 26-year-old woman both from Niger.

Thousands of illegal migrants have arrived in Algeria in recent years, mostly from neighbouring Mali and Niger.

Libya used to play host to the majority of migrants in sub-Saharan Africa, but since that country descended into chaos following the ousting of Moamer Kadhafi, Algeria has become the main destination for the region's migrants.

Many transit through Algeria headed for Europe.
AAP government will fight for making Delhi a strong state with "full powers" so as to realise the "dream" of the city's first chief minister Chaudhary Braham Prakash, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today said.

Celebrating the 98th birth anniversary of Prakash, Kejriwal announced that a life-size statue of the former chief minister will be unveiled at Khera Dabar in August.

Prakash strived for development of Delhi as "Greater Delhi" and to make it a state with full powers by adding some of the areas from the neighbouring states.

"But his dream for the same could not be fulfilled as the 'States Reorganisation Commission' rejected the proposal and gave its adverse report," Kejriwal was quoted as sayng in an official statement.

The event was held at the Old Delhi Secretariat which was also attended by Delhi Assembly speaker Ram Niwas Goel and AAP ministers.

Kejriwal also inaugurated an exhibition of photographs of Prakash and released a book on him.
The Aam Aadmi Party has said it is ready to face elections in Goa any time.

The elections to the 40-member Goa Legislative Assembly are due in March next year.

"People are so sick and tired of this BJP government. People can demand an early election as well," leader Ashish Khetan told PTI.

"We are ready to face election anytime from now in all the constituencies," he said.

has already announced it will contest all the 40 constituencies of the state.

Party's national convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had also recently addressed a public rally in Panaji.

Meanwhile, senior party leader Ashutosh expressed confidence that the party will form the government on its own in Goa after the polls.

However, he also said that would prefer to sit in opposition if it has to take help of any other political outfit to gain power.

He said Kejriwal is likely to visit Goa at least once a month and later more frequently when the polls approach.

Notably, Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar had ruled out early polls in the state, saying he was not in favour of elections before completion of five years of the government.
Several hours after the Paris attacks, three teenagers smoked pot and ate fries with a "normal guy" who turned out to be jihadist Salah Abdeslam, reports said today.

Abdeslam is the only surviving member of the 10-man jihadist team that attacked a string of Paris bars and restaurants, a concert hall and the national stadium on November 13, leaving 130 dead.

After dropping off three suicide bombers at the stadium, Abdeslam abandoned his car in the Montmartre neighbourhood then headed for the rundown southern suburb of Chatillon, where he spent several hours with the youths.

They said he had a Belgian accent and introduced himself as Abdel.

"He seemed like a normal guy with nothing to do," a 17-year-old told L'Obs weekly, which gave him the pseudonym Tom.

"We started talking, he was nice," Tom said, adding that the encounter began at around 1:00 am, half an hour after police stormed the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 people perished.

The teenagers, who also spoke to the all- channel BFM TV, described Abdeslam as calm as they sat in the stairwell by the ninth floor of a highrise apartment block, sharing a few joints and eating takeout from a McDonald's near the building.

L'Obs said the spot was known as a rendezvous point for cannabis deals.

Abdeslam may have been wearing his suicide belt at the time, with one teen saying the down jacket he was wearing was "bulky" and "looked strange".

An unexploded suicide belt bearing Abdeslam's DNA was found in the area 10 days after the attacks.

"He told us his car had a wheel clamp and he had to wait for his cousins in Barbes to come for him," one of the boys told BFM TV, referring to a Paris neighbourhood with a large immigrant population.

"He told us he was going to marry his girlfriend soon, in a few months," he said.

Abdeslam also told the boys he was a tramway maintenance worker in Belgium.

As they chatted, the boys' smartphones began vibrating with reports of the attacks.

Abdeslam looked over the shoulder of one of the boys who was watching an amateur video of people escaping from the Bataclan.

"He didn't show any particular emotion. He looked at it, said it was sad. He seemed to realise what was happening," the youth said. They left him in the stairwell at around 4:00 am, L'Obs said.

Two days later, the teenagers saw Abdeslam's face on television and went to the police.

The jihadist is thought to have left for Brussels at dawn with two Belgian accomplices who managed to get through several checkpoints along the way.

After four months on the run, Abdeslam was arrested on March 18 in Molenbeek, a Brussels neighbourhood notorious for being a hotbed of Islamic extremism where he grew up.

He was transferred to France to face terror charges on April 27. Abdeslam has told investigators that he was supposed to blow himself up but changed his mind.
The opposition AIADMK has urged the Lt Governor Kiran Bedi to intervene immediately and ensure that the privately run medical colleges in Union Territory of Puducherry stuck to the norms of Medical Council of India and earmarked 50 percent of the total seats in first MBBS course and also in PG courses under government quota.

A delegation of party legislators led by A.Anbalagan today called on Bedi at Raj Nivas and handed a memorandum to her bringing to her notice the "irregularities seen in admission of students in the undergraduate and postgraduate streams" in the private medical colleges.

The notification of the MCI should be enforced in letter and spirit and fifty percent quota of seats for government should be ensured without loss of time, it said.

Meanwhile, the AINRC questioned the procedures adopted by the centrally sponsored JIPMER in admission of students to the first MBBS course during the 2016-2017 academic year through online entrance test held on June 5.

AINRC legislator Ashok Anandh said it was really "shocking that JIPMER had held the computer based entrance test for aspirants of medical course in two separate sessions" across the country on June 5. He alleged that there was no transparency in the whole system of admission procedure.
Some 200 intellectuals, scientists and artists from around the world have urged the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada to save North America's endangered migratory Monarch butterfly.

US novelist Paul Auster, environmental activist Robert F Kennedy Jr, Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, British writer Ali Smith and India's women's and children's minister Maneka Sanjay Gandhi were among the signatories of an open letter to the three leaders.

US President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will hold a North American summit in Ottawa on June 29.

The letter by the so-called Group of 100 calls on the three leaders to "take swift and energetic actions to preserve the Monarch's migratory phenomenon" when they meet this month.

They urge the leaders to protect parcels of land containing milkweed, which is threatened by herbicides and feeds the butterflies on their 4,000-kilometre (2,500-mile) journey from Canada to Mexico's wintering grounds.

The letter also called on Mexico to prohibit mining and end all logging in the pine tree reserve where the butterflies live during the winter.

In 2014, Obama, Pena Nieto and then prime minister Stephen Harper agreed to take measures to protect the orange and black butterfly, whose population has drastically dwindled in the past two decades.

The butterfly's population rebounded this past winter season, but it is still far from its peak of 20 years ago.

In 1996-1997, the butterflies covered 18.2 hectares (45 acres) of land in Mexico's central mountains.

It fell to 0.67 hectares in 2013-2014 but rose to 4 hectares this year. Their population is measured by the territory they cover.

They usually arrive in Mexico between late October and early November and head back north in March.
Putting all speculations to rest about 'instability' of the Kalikho Pul government in Arunachal Pradesh, deputy chief minister Chowna Mein along with three senior MLAs today dismissed a report of their alleged rift with the chief minister, which has gone viral in social media.

They have also lodged a complaint with the government and requested that the cyber crime branch investigate the matter and identify and punish the source from where the report originated, a joint statement issued by them said.

Mein, along with MLAs Pema Khandu, Markio Tado and Pasang D Sona, who were said to be the main players of the alleged revolt, claimed that there was no political crisis of any sort in the present government.

"Each minister, parliamentary secretary and MLA is working on delivering the change that the government had promised when it came to power in February this year," the statement said.

"There is absolutely no loss of trust either in the government or within the People's Party of Arunachal (PPA) and such ill-intentioned acts are only being done to try and create a rift between like-minded leaders," it said.

They stated that the 'fraud that has been circulated in the social media over the last few days, regarding a change of leadership in the Kalikho Pul-led PPA government has once again exposed the frustration and desperation in certain political camps over the smooth and successful functioning of the present government'.

"The hoax not only fabricated locations and timing of the supposed 'camp at Delhi', they also completely miscalculated the trust and cooperation between the present chief minister and all of us," the statement added.
Actor Ashley Walters has revealed that he won't be in the first series of the much-anticipated BBC series "Taboo" after his character was pushed to the second series - and admitted that he is "devastated".

"Taboo" stars Tom Hardy as an adventurer who returns to London from Africa, only to discover that his father has left him a mysterious legacy.

Ashley was due to play a "dangerous face" from Hardy's character's past but he said we shouldn't expect to see him in the first batch of episodes, reported Digital Spy.

"My character was meant to be in season one, but basically it got pushed to season two, so I'll make an appearance in season two," he said.

"They're still filming season one and I don't come in until season two. So, I won't start filming until next year, probably. Which was a shock to me. Literally, I heard about it three weeks before I was about to start shooting. I was devastated, to be honest - I'm not going to lie. But it's the nature of the beast."



Ashley has just finished filming a series of shorts for All4 called "Top Dad", in which he investigates fatherhood and meets different parents from all walks of life.
The leadership team at online local classifieds company AskMe will buy out the stake held by Malaysia's Astro Holdings as the international entity pulls out its investments in India.

Simultaneously, AskMe is also in discussions to raise fresh funding of up to USD 200 million to fuel its expansion plans.

"Astro is pulling out of all business and its investments in India because of the political and legal issues. AskMe Group has made a management buyout bid and leadership team is working towards taking over the company," AskMe Group CMO and Head Digital Strategy Manav Sethi told PTI.

He added that the transaction is expected to be completed in a week or two.

Sethi declined to comment on the valuation but said Astro holds over 95 per cent stake in Getit Infoservices, the parent firm of AskMe.

"Also, we are in advanced discussions with three entities for our next round of growth capital. This would be between USD 150-200 million and would take about 2-3 weeks," he said without disclosing further details.

Astro had acquired stake in Getit Infomedia, which was later renamed as Getit Infoservices, in 2010.

Last month, Discovery Channel acquired a majority stake in FoodFood, a channel which Astro had launched as a joint venture with Mogae Consultants and Chef Sanjeev Kapoor.

In 2014, the CBI had chargesheeted Malaysian business tycoon T Ananda Krishnan and Astro All Asia Network PLC in Aircel-Maxis deal-related money laundering case.

Sethi said the funds raised will be used to expand the company's operations and to focus on achieving profitability.

"We are looking at achieving profitability in businesses like grocery and NDD (next day delivery) in the next 2-3 years. We have moved from just being a classified player to transaction-based and that is doing well for us," he said.

Apart from the online listings, AskMe has an online platform for SMEs to sell their products AskMeBazaar, AskMe Pay and online furniture venture, Mebelkart.
A Bahraini court sentenced eight Shiites to 15-year jail terms for forming a "terror" group, as the authorities crack down on opposition in the Sunni-ruled kingdom, a judicial source said.

The criminal court yesterday also stripped the defendants of their citizenship after convicting them of "establishing and raising donations to fund a terror organisation named Bahraini Hezbollah", the source said, citing the verdict.

The group's name appears to link it to Lebanon's powerful Iran-backed Shiite movement, though the verdict did not specify any connection.

The eight defendants were accused of forming the group in 2014, possessing weapons and attempting to kill policemen in Nuwaidrat, a Shiite village east of Manama.

They staged an unauthorised demonstration in Nuwaidrat in June 2014 and blocked the streets while one of the defendants opened fire at a police patrol, the judicial source said.

Two other defendants were jailed three years each for participating in the demonstration.

In another trial, a Bahraini court jailed 13 people to 15 years each after convicting them of the attempted murder of policemen who came under attack when assailants hurled Molotov cocktails at a patrol.

Twenty-two others were jailed for three years each in the same case, while five others were acquitted, a prosecution statement said.

The verdicts are the latest in the series of rulings meted out against members of Bahrain's Shiite majority, and it came days after authorities suspended the main opposition Al-Wefaq group.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon voiced concern yesterday over Bahrain's crackdown against the opposition.

He is also "dismayed" by reports that human rights activists have been intimidated and stripped of their citizenship, a UN statement said.

Ban said "the current actions against the opposition may undermine the reforms undertaken" and "lessen the prospect of an inclusive national dialogue in the interest of all people of the kingdom."



Bahrain re-arrested human rights defender Nabeel Rajab on Monday and in May a court more than doubled the jail sentence passed against Al-Wefaq chief Sheikh Ali Salman.

Meanwhile, the interior ministry said late yesterday police arrested a man described as the main suspect in the shooting of a policeman in Sitra last month.

Eight others convicted over terror charges were also arrested, the ministry said in a statement carried by BNA state agency.

Home to the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, Bahrain has been shaken by unrest since security forces crushed a 2011 uprising demanding a constitutional monarchy and an elected prime minister.

Protesters still frequently clash with police in Shiite villages outside the capital.
Bihar cabinet today proposed session of two Houses of the state Legislature from June 29 to July 4.

This proposal was approved at a meeting of state cabinet presided over by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

The state cabinet gave its nod to 42 agendas of various departments.

The cabinet okayed a proposal of the Labour department to raise the amount given for rehabilitation of a freed child labour and parents to Rs 3,000 from present Rs 1,900.

The money is provided for arrangement of ratio, clothes, medicines and food of rescued child labour and parents.

The cabinet took a stringent approach towards erring officials and approved a proposal of state Health department to dismiss Health officer of Primary Health centre, Ramgarh in Kaimur district Arvind Kumar Sinha for unauthorised leave for more than five years since 2000.

Funds were approved for many schemes under seven resolves of the Chief Minister.
Biking Queens, an expedition on



bike spreading the message of Beti Bachao, Beti Badhao (BBBP) and women empowerment reached Kohima, the capital of Nagaland.

The four bikers Dr. Sarika Mehta, Yugma Desai, Khyati Desai and Durriya Tapia are campaigning for the welfare of the girl child from Surat in Gujarat since June 4 last.

They will travel on bike for 10,000 KM in a span of 36 days covering ten countries - Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and India with the BBBP message and gender equality.

They reached Kohima yesterday and after a night's halt, their onward expedition was flagged off today by Inspector General Assam Rifles (North) Maj Gen Manvendra Singh Jaswal.

They headed to Imphal en route to Myanmar.

"Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao" is a national drive led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for empowering the women in the country. The message is to save and educate girl child, thereby giving them equal opportunity in the society by reducing female feticide and illiteracy among women.
Strongly condemning attacks on its workers allegedly by CPI-M cadres in various parts of Kerala, BJP today demanded Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to take steps to stop the violence and bring "peace and amity".

Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and BJP National General Secretary Ram Madhav, who spoke in Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi respectively, said this kind of political violence cannot be tolerated and put the onus on Vijayan to stop it.

Inaugurating 'Janakeeya sadas', a gathering of BJP activists and their family members attacked in Pinarayi in Kannur district after the May 16 assembly poll results were out, Prasad said BJP believed in peace and non-violence.

Speaking at the event in Thiruvananthapuram, he said 11 crore workers of BJP across the country, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the local level 'mandal karyakarthas', were solidly behind the people of Kerala and the party workers.

"Let me say very clearly, openly and categorically that 11 crore members of BJP are standing behind the people of Kerala and the BJP workers in the state. This kind of violence cannot be tolerated and it is unacceptable. BJP believes in peace, non-violence and in democracy," Prasad said.

In Kochi, Ram Madhav, talking to reporters, urged Vijayan to "control" his cadres, saying he has the constitutional duty to ensure law and order in the state.

All those who were not thinking in line with the CPI(M) were "victims" of the violence "perpetrated by its cadres", he said adding "our people have suffered enormously at the hands of the Marxist terror and Marxist violence."



Apparently faulting the Chief Minister for not taking action to check violence, Prasad said "Mr Pinarayi, I would like to appeal to you...This kind of violence cannot be accepted. Police is with you now. It must be stopped."



Referring to the post-poll attacks on party workers, Prasad said BJP had got every right to work anywhere in the country, including in Kerala.

"Why I am saying that BJP has got every right to grow in Kerala? Today if we have got 15 per cent of votes and we got one leader elected (in assembly polls), the opening has been made. And the future of Kerala belongs to BJP," he said.

He said such kinds of attacks and political violence would give a bad image to the country "which is going great" under the leadership of Modi.
Bulgaria has been ordered to pay Russia USD 620 million for cancelling a nuclear power plant project, significantly less than Moscow had demanded, officials in Sofia said today.

A Paris arbitration court "estimated that (Bulgaria's) National Electricity Company (NEK) is obliged to pay for nuclear plant equipment worth about 550 million euros (USD 620 million)," Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova said.

"The decision is objective -- it is logical to pay for what you ordered," she added at a conference.

Bulgaria scrapped plans in 2012 for the Russian-built 2,000-megawatt nuclear plant near Belene on the Danube river, citing the ever-rising price of the plant, estimated at about 6.0 billion euros (USD 6.8 billion) plus interest on loans.

Russia's nuclear export monopoly Atomstroyexport, part of Rosatom, took NEK to the Paris-based International Court of Arbitration in 2012.

Moscow and Atomstroyexport later increased their initial claim, suing Bulgaria, the poorest member of the European Union, for over one billion euros.

The court decision today awarded compensation to Atomstroyexport only for the equipment, Petkova said, adding that Bulgaria will seek further talks with Russia on resolving the issue.
A 23-year-old student travelling to Kolkata was detained by the police after a bullet was seized from his possession at the Tulihal airport here today, police said.

The CISF personnel seized the bullet from T Maraiba before he was to board a flight at around 11 am, a police official said.

The student, hailing from Maram Keithel in Senapati district, was presently detained at the Singjamei police station for interrogation, they said.
A 38-year-old businessman was killed by a gang of dacoits, who first sedated a security guard and then victim's parents with chloroform and attacked him when he resisted, at his farmhouse in south Delhi's Chhatarpur area in the wee hours today.

The gang is believed to have accessed the posh DLF Farms in Chhatarpur around 1 AM. They first held the security guard at gunpoint and sedated him with chloroform before they scaled the walls of Gupta's farmhouse, a senior police official said.

The gang entered Gupta's farmhouse through a kitchen window and first targeted his parents who were sleeping on the ground floor. They sedated them with chloroform and took away cash and jewellery.

After that, at least three gang members went upstairs where Gupta was sleeping. When they tried to gag him with a chloroform-soaked piece of cloth he woke up and a scuffle broke out between them.

However, they soon managed to overpower Gupta. While one of them strangled him, another gagged his face with the chloroform-soaked cloth, following which he turned motionless, the official said.

Meanwhile, a neighbour who had returned home late, witnessed the commotion in Gupta's residence and called up police informing about a quarrel in the family.

The police team which rushed to attend the call soon evaluated the actual situation and called for reinforcement, following which the entire farmhouse was surrounded and all its entry and exit points were blocked, the official said.

Police teams then went inside and arrested five persons identified as - Ajay, Vipin, Vinod, Shivnath and Vinod Kumar, all aged between 18 and 38 years. At least one of their accomplices is believed to have escaped.

All the accused are natives of a village in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district and they did not have any temporary residence in Delhi, raising suspicion that they were hired for the act.

Police are probing the role of a former domestic help who was sacked by Gupta last Diwali. He too was from Bihar and it is possible that he held a grudge against Gupta. A team has been sent to track him down, the official said.

"A case of murder, dacoity and illegal possession of arms has been registered and the five arrested persons are being interrogated," additional DCP (south) Nupur Prasad said.

Gupta and his parents were found motionless. They were rushed to AIIMS where Gupta was declared dead. Prima facie, he was strangulated to death but the police have not ruled out the role of chloroform overdose. His body was later sent for postmortem examination.

Gupta's farmhouse is located on a plot of land that also



houses two more bungalows, one belonging to a relative of Ponty Chadha. The three bungalows are connected by a common path and an entrance which is guarded by a security guard.

The Guptas have a hosiery export business. Rohan was divorced and lived with his parents Kishan and Rashmi Gupta. They have two domestic helps who were sleeping at the outhouse at the time of the incident. They are also being questioned, a senior official said.

The investigators are probing if any of the accused persons were aware of the layout of the farmhouse, had worked there before or known to any of the former domestic help or staff members of the Guptas.

From preliminary investigation, it has emerged that the accused had conducted recce before executing the crime. They had keenly observed the movements of the Guptas but the attack on Rohan was unplanned, an official privy to the investigation said.

The previous crime record of the gang members are also being scanned. Crime and Forensic teams of south district were sent to the farmhouse and the statements of Rohan's parents and the neighbour, who called up police, have been recorded, the official added.
The Union Health Ministry has granted permission to Dr YS Parmar Medial College in Nahan to admit first batch of 100 MBBS students for the 2016-17 session.

An MCI team had inspected the College twice and the permission was granted on the basis of report submitted by the team, Union Health and Family Welfare minister J P Nadda said today.

However, the classes in other three colleges, including Jawaharlal Nehru College in Chamba, Dr S Radhakrishanan College in Hamirpur and ESI Medical College in Ner Chowk (Mandi) are unlikely to start from the current academic session as necessary faculty and requisite infrastructure were not in place.

The Infrastructure development work and recruitment of faculty is in progress in respect of Chamba College, Land clearance is awaited for Hamirpur Colleges while the Union Ministry of labour is yet to handover the infrastructure created for Ner Chowk College at a cost of about Rs 800 crore, even though the matter has been negotiated and settled between the state government and Union Labour Ministry.

The Chamba and Hamirpur colleges would have 100 seats each while the ESI College would be given 50 MBBS seats.

The two existing government medical colleges, the IGMC Shimla, started in 1966 and the Tanda medical College set up in 1996 also have 100 MBBS seats each and with all four colleges becoming functional, the total number of seats would increase to 550.

Himachal Pradesh Health minister Kaul Singh also confirmed that Nahan Medical College was allowed to go ahead with admissions for the first batch and the state government was making serious efforts to meet the requirements of the MCI to make other three colleges functional as soon as possible.

The Union government had given Rs 570 crore for building infrastructure for Nahan, Hamirpur and Chamba colleges and later released additional Rs 10 crore for Nahan College, he said.

An AIIMS is also coming up near Bilaspur and land had been identified for the mega project, Singh said.
The Centre would do everything possible to reach an amicable understanding between Kerala and Tamil Nadu on the inter-state Mullapperiyar Dam issue, BJP National General Secretary Ram Madhav said today.

His remarks assume significance in wake of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's stated position that a new dam in the downstream the more than a century-old existing structure could be achieved only with the support of the Tamil Nadu and the Union governments.

"Mullaperiyar has been an issue that has been there simmering between two states for a very long time. Our government...Will certainly do everything possible for both these sides to come to an amicable understanding on this issue," Ram Madhav, flanked by Union ministers Suresh Prabhu and Sanjiv Kumar Balyan, told a press conference here.

He said BJP wanted to see that the issue between the two neighbouring states was settled amicably.

"We are in favour of finding an amicable solution for this Mullaperiyar dam issue between the two states," he said, when asked whether the party-led Union government would step in to find a solution to the problem.

The two states are at loggerheads over the Mullaperiyar dam, located in Idduki district of Kerala but is under the administrative control of Tamil Nadu as per a 999-year lease agreement and caters to irrigation requirements in southern districts of Tamil Nadu.

While Kerala had been pressing for a new reservoir on the ground that the existing dam was in a dilapidated state and weak, Tamil Nadu is opposing it saying the structure was safe.

Noting that both Tamil Nadu and the Supreme Court have not agreed to Kerala's demand, the Kerala Chief Minister had recently said that he wanted an internationally acclaimed panel of experts to study the strength of the dam.

Vijayan had also said that the neighbouring state's support was essential to resolve the matter.
China has axed a visit by a popular Taiwanese children's choir after they sang the national anthem at the inauguration of the island's new president, as ties between the rivals grow increasingly frosty.

The choir is the latest casualty since Beijing-sceptic Tsai Ing-wen won the presidency in January, bringing an end to an eight-year rapprochement with China.

Her inauguration in May centred around Taiwan's unique history and culture -- a theme likely to have irked Beijing which still sees the self-ruling island as part of its territory.

The aboriginal Puzangalan Choir made a name for itself island-wide after singing a moving rendition of the national anthem on stage during the celebrations.

But Chinese authorities seem to have been less impressed.

Choir organisers say city officials have cancelled their performance at a children's choral festival in Zhongshan, in the southern province of Guangdong, due to take place in July.

"The invitation from the mainland is gone," said a post on the choir's Facebook page.

"The kids can hardly understand how this happened."



Choir executive Tsai Yi-fang confirmed the concert had been cancelled.

"This has badly hurt our children," he told AFP.

The choir had been hoping to raise funds through the Guangdong performance to travel to a singing competition in Hungary in August.

President Tsai pledged USD 15,430 to their cause after learning of the cancellation.

"This is the voice of Taiwan. Together, we will let the children sing to the whole world," she said in a statement on her Facebook page.

Local media reported choir leaders as saying they had been told by city officials that the cancellation was due to political "sensitivities".

Comments posted on the choir's Facebook page pledged help and support.

"Every one of us on the island who think he or she is Taiwanese would feel proud of you. You represent the roots of Taiwan culture," said one post.

"The more the Chinese on the other side suppress, the more it shows that you have been doing the right thing," said another.

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have banned musical performers from Taiwan for political reasons.

Taiwan's pop diva A-Mei was blacklisted by China for several years after she sang the island's national anthem at the 2000 inauguration of then-president Chen Shui-bian, known for promoting the island's independence.

Taiwan is a fully fledged democracy but has never formally declared independence since splitting from the mainland in 1949 after a civil war.

Tensions eased markedly under Tsai's Beijing-friendly predecessor Ma Ying-jeou.

But warming ties left voters increasingly wary that Beijing was seeking to erode Taiwan's sovereignty, leading to a landslide victory for Tsai.

Beijing is highly suspicious of her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which is traditionally pro-independence.
Chinese pressure was blamed today for a stunning diplomatic U-turn by Southeast Asian Nations that saw them retract a statement sounding alarm over Beijing's island building in the South China Sea.

The chaotic events at the end of a meeting of foreign ministers from China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations on Tuesday have led to allegations of bullying by Beijing.

The document, released by ASEAN member Malaysia and described as a joint statement from the bloc, warned developments in the hotly contested South China Sea could "undermine peace, security and stability".

The statement specified "land reclamation" as a source of tension, a clear reference to China's massive island building activities where it is trying to cement a claim to almost the whole sea.

But just hours later, Malaysia said the grouping was retracting the statement for "urgent amendments", but offered no reason. Various participants have since given conflicting explanations over what happened.

An ASEAN diplomat who was present at the meeting in the Chinese city of Kunming told AFP that China had put the screws on some Southeast Asian nations to get them to withdraw their support.

"The usual factor, pressure from China," said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, when asked why unity crumbled.

"I suspect the two countries that opposed the statement were Cambodia and Laos."



Singapore's Straits Times newspaper also reported today that the joint statement was "scuttled by the Chinese, who lobbied its friends in the grouping to block" it.

"Malaysia releasing it was a manifestation of the extreme frustration of the original five ASEAN members plus Vietnam at the particularly crude and arrogant behaviour of the Chinese," the Straits Times reported an ASEAN official as saying.

The Philippines also said today that there had originally been unanimous support within ASEAN for the strongly worded statement.

"By the time the meeting ended, there was an agreement among ASEAN foreign ministers. They agreed on the text of the ASEAN statement and they agreed it would be released," Philippine foreign affairs spokesman Charles Jose told reporters in Manila.

Jose said the statement was then retracted after the meeting had ended and most foreign ministers, including the Philippines' Jose Rene Almendras, had left the venue to start returning home.

Jose would not be drawn on whether Chinese lobbying was to blame, but insisted Malaysia's initial release had not been in error.
Downplaying reports of scuffles between Indian and Chinese troops during PLA troops transgression intoArunachal Pradesh, China today said it was committed to peace and tranquility at the border areas.

"We have noted that the Indian official has clarified the situation saying that there is no transgression as reported in the media," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters here today replying to a question on reports of scuffles between the two forces.

"China's position on the East part of the border line is clear," he said in apparent reference to China's claims over Arunachal Pradesh as part of Southern Tibet.

"As I said it was a regular patrol by Chinese border troops and China is committed to the peace and tranquility of the border area," he said.

In his comments on the border transgression by over 200 Chinese troops into Arunachal Pradesh on June 9, Lu yesterday said thatChina and India border has not yet been demarcated.

"It is learnt that China's border troops were conducting normal patrols on the Chinese side of the LAC (Line of Actual Control)," Lu said.

The big contingent of PLA soldiers stayed in the area for few hours and left for their base, the reports said.

On the issue of incursions, China has been maintaining the same stand whenever its troops crossed into the Indian side of the LAC stating that both countries have difference perception about it.

The LAC covers the 3,488 km long border. While China says that the boundary dispute is confined to 2,000 kms, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh, India asserts that the dispute covers the whole of the LAC including the Aksai Chin occupied by China during the 1962 war.

The two countries have so far held 19 rounds of boundary talks by Special Representatives.

The incursion into Arunachal Pradesh came at a time when China is opposing India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on the ground that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Asked about reports that Chinese vessel tailed Indian naval ships taking part in the Malabar naval exercises in the Pacific along with the US and Japanese navies, Lu said, "I am not aware of the details. It seems that some people are intent to linking this incidents and everyone should be careful about their hidden motives.
Networking giant Cisco has set up its second global delivery centre (GDC) in the country at Pune, which will employ about 250 people over the next two years.

Cisco's services business serves 10,000 customers globally through a network of integrated GDCs. India is the only market where Cisco has two GDCs, the other one being in Bengaluru.

Globally, Cisco now has six GDCs in the US, Mexico, Poland, China and India (two centres).

"Pune has 100 resources at this point with global expertise in financial services and insurance (FSI), manufacturing and service provider business. Pune also has a 8,000 sq ft lab which can simulate some of the most complex/ largest customer networks for testing," Cisco India and SAARC President Dinesh Malkani told PTI.

He, however, declined to comment on investment details.

The Benagluru GDC is the largest centre for Cisco Services and acts as a hub. It already has over 1,000 people at the centre.

Globally, Cisco's services arm contributes about 25 per cent (USD 3 billion) of its overall revenue (quarterly USD 12 billion) and is one of the fastest growing business for the company.

"The Pune GDC reconfirms our commitment for a long-lasting partnership with our customers and the Maharashtra government. This centre has been designed to provide the best experience as well as services and products along with local innovations to our customers," he said.

The US-based tech giant has already zeroed in on Pune for setting up its manufacturing unit in the country and eventually plans to make India an export hub.

Talking about Pune GDC, Malkani said Cisco plans to double capacity and have 250 resources in two years.

"Currently, 25 per cent of Fortune 500 customers are supported out of India. India centres are the only ones that supports all the geographies (50 per cent in Americas, 25 per cent in Europe and 25 per cent in Asia-Pacific, Japan and China)," he said.

Malkani added the India centre supports customers across verticals like financials, manufacturing, retail, enterprise, energy/utilities including all global top service providers.

"The expansion is aligned with India centres' goal to double the delivery execution capacity in 2-3 years," he said.
Delhi Congress will run a week-long campaign in the 21 Assembly constituencies in the city where sitting AAP MLAs are facing disqualification over the alleged office of profit issue, to demand their resignation.

During the door-to-door campaign from June 19-26 Congress workers will visit household in all these constituencies and collect signatures of people favouring resignation of these sitting AAP legislators who have been appointed as parliamentary secretaries to Delhi government ministers, Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken said.

The campaign will make people aware about the appointment of the 21 MLAs as Parliamentary secretaries "against the rules" and seek their support to demand their resignation following "rejection" of the Delhi government bill for validating the appointments by the central government, he said.

"One of the major issues of the Anna Hazare movement in which Kejriwal was at the forefront, was the right to recall the elected representatives. Why he is not asking for resignation of the 21 MLAs and shying away from holding elections in these constituencies," Maken said in a statement.

Maken claimed that he was also a Parliamentary secretary to the then chief minister Sheila Dikshit but he only assisted her in the legislative work.

"The 21 MLAs were appointed as parliamentary secretaries with perks to keep the flock together as Kejriwal feared that they would break away from the AAP like Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan," he alleged.

The AAP government in March had appointed 21 MLAs as Parliamentary secretaries. However, when the appointments were challenged by opposition BJP and Congress, the government passed a bill in Delhi Assembly in June which was turned down by the President recently.

The Election Commission which is seized of the matter will take a final call on the question of disqualification.
A chilling post on free advertisement website Craigslist has threatened an Orlando- style massacre in California's San Diego city, saying, "you're next", in an eerie warning that has prompted an FBI probe.

A KGTV station viewer saw the post in the men-seeking-men section of the Craigslist San Diego personal advertisements. He took a screenshot and sent it to the TV station before the post was flagged and removed.

The post was titled, "We need more Orlando's (sic)," and it was accompanied by a photo of a hand firing a revolver with a bullet coming out of the barrel.

"Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name...San Diego you are next...," the post read.

The screenshot was then sent to the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) and the FBI. SDPD Lt Scott Wahl emphasised that police have had extra officers on patrol in places where people gather in the wake of the Orlando shooting.

FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth was quoted as saying that the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the Craigslist posting.

"This is something that's very serious, very concerning to all of us, especially given what's happened recently in Orlando," said Foxworth.

"We are going to use all lawful means available to us, so if we have to go out and get a search warrant, we will do that. If it doesn't require a search warrant, we're going to do whatever it takes to do it in a lawful and legal matter," Foxworth said.

Foxworth said there are no known credible threats to San Diego right now, but they are always keeping watch.

The post comes days after Afghan-origin Omar Mateen carried an assault rifle and a pistol into a gay club in Orlando in the wee hours of Sunday and killed 50 people while injuring 53 others. He was later shot dead by the police.
Croatia's government fell today after Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic lost a confidence vote in parliament, in a serious blow to the country's nationalist rulers after only five months in power.

The vote will delay planned reforms in the European Union's newest member, whose economy -- which only last year emerged from a six-year recession -- remains one of EU's weakest.

Cobbled together after indecisive November polls, the fragile coalition has been beset by internal disputes, amid concerns over Croatia's shift to the right.

Speaker Zeljko Reiner said that of those present 125 deputies in the 151-member parliament backed the no confidence motion while 15 were against and two abstained.

If a new government is not formed within 30 days, parliament will be dissolved and the president will call snap elections.

Oreskovic, a former pharmaceutical executive with no party affiliation, came to power pledging to undertake badly-needed economic reforms.

"Initially we all arrived with a common goal to get the economy going," Oreskovic, 50, told reporters after the vote voicing regret over its outcome.

The political crisis, deepened by constant squabbling between the main HDZ party and its junior partner, Most, escalated last month with a conflict of interest affair involving Tomislav Karamarko, the powerful HDZ head and deputy premier.

Most demanded his resignation, while the prime minister called for both Karamarko and Most leader Bozo Petrov -- another deputy premier -- to quit as the coalition descended into chaos.

Oreskovic also rejected a call by HDZ for his own resignation, and the party filed the no confidence motion shortly after, accusing the premier of trying to boost his own political power, instead of dealing with economy.

But, Oreskovic rejected the accusations, saying the motion was tabled as a result of "interests of individuals" -- meaning Karamarko.

"I tried to prevent that. That's my only guilt," he told lawmakers.

Considered a key figure in government, Karamarko stepped down on Wednesday saying the government's "disfunction is unsustainable".

His resignation came just hours after a national ethnics watchdog ruled he had a conflict of interest due to a business deal between his wife and a lobbyist for Hungary's oil group MOL.

MOL is currently in arbitration with Croatia over its national oil group INA, where it is a major shareholder.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) custody of Virendra Tawde, an accused in the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, was extended on Thursday till June 20 by a local court.

Tawde, arrested by the CBI from Panvel in Navi Mumbai last week in connection with the murder of the 67-year-old anti-superstition crusader, was produced before Judicial Magistrate First Class V B Gulve-Patil on the expiry of his earlier remand.

CBI lawyer B P Raju sought further custodial interrogation of the accused, saying he was not cooperating with the investigating agency.

Subsequently, the court extended his CBI custody till June 20.

Tawde, an ear, nose and throat surgeon, is an activist of the Sanatan Sanstha which has come under the scanner for the murders of Dabholkar, communist leader Govind Pansare and rationalist M M Kalburgi.

He is the first accused to be held in the nearly three-year-old case.

Dabholkar was shot dead by two unidentified men while he was on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge, Pune, on August 20, 2013.

Tawde and another Sanatan Sanstha activist Sarang Akolkar wanted to eliminate rationalist in 2009 itself, but they dropped the plan due to the Margao bomb blast that took place in the same year, CBI sources on Wednesday said, citing evidence pieced together by the agency.

Tawde, suspected to be the brain behind the murder conspiracy, kept on planning a hit on the activist along with Akolkar. The plan was finally executed on August 20, 2013, they said.

The CBI is probing the Dabholkar murder case, which was handed over to it in May 2014 by the Bombay High Court. The Investigation Agency is handling the Margao blast case.

The sources also said Tawde hated Dabholkar for his relentless campaign against superstition. He also allegedly played a key role in the 2009 Sangli-Miraj riots.

The Sanstha has denied any role in Dabholkar's murder and termed Tawde's arrest as mysterious.
The suspect in the April 28 brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman at Perumbavoor in Kochi is in police custody, Kerala Chief Minister said on Wednesday.

"Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From yesterday onwards, the accused was under police radar," he said reacting to reports that the accused, Amir Ul Islam, a migrant labourer from Assam, had been nabbed by the Special Investigation team probing the murder.

Police have received all information, he said.

"The people of Kerala were waiting for such a news", he said to a question.

"The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police", the Chief Minister said.

A report from Kochi quoting police sources said that a Special Investigation Team probing the murder of the woman was questioning the suspect.

They said the 23-year-old Islam's arrest is expected to be recorded today, only after which his DNA samples will be taken.

The LDF government, after assuming power on May 25 had changed the investigation team and entrusted the probe to ADGP B Sandhya on its first cabinet meeting itself.

The rape and murder was in focus during the Assembly polls campaign with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for tardy progress in the investigation and failure to nab the culprits.

The woman was murdered in her home on April 28.

The attack, which took place at Perumbavoor in Ernakulam district, had been a major campaign plank of the LDF in the run up to the May 16 Assembly elections.
After being locked in a bitter censorship row, the drug-themed Bollywood film 'Udta Punjab" will hit the screens as scheduled tomorrow with the Supreme Court and Punjab and High Court today paving the way for its release but its online leak sparked a fresh spat.

Anurag Kashyap, the film's co-producer who has been at the forefront of a battle with the Censor Board, and several filmmakers also appealed to people not to watch it online.

The Supreme Court refused to entertain the plea of an NGO seeking stay on the film's release and asked it to approach Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter.

The Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh starrer that delves into how a large number of youth in Punjab have succumbed to drugs had also triggered a political slugfest and multiple legal battles.

A vacation bench of justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and L Nageswara Rao granted liberty to the NGO, Human Rights Awareness Association to approach the High Court with its prayer.

"We are not interfering in the matter. We are not going into the merit. Liberty granted to the petitioner to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter," the bench said. The Bombay High Court had already cleared the film with a cut.

In Chandigarh, the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed two petitions filed against the film's release.

The vacation bench of Justice M Jeyapal dismissed the petitions, counsel for the producer said.

"Based on the report submitted today, the high court has taken a decision that the film will be released tomorrow and then dismissed the petitions filed against the release of the movie," counsel Sanjay Kaushal said.

He said the high court noted that the film did not glorify drugs. "Drug menace can be there in any state and the film does not glorify drugs," said the counsel.

Amicus curiae advocate Sujoy Kantawala, who watched the movie on the directions of the high court, also presented his report to the bench.

"I have clearly mentioned in my report which was read out in open court that there is absolutely nothing in the film which could lead any such sort of apprehensions which the petitioner entertained," he said.

As the film was set hit the theatres tomorrow, the online leak of the film prompted Anurag Kashyap to say that he believed it was a case of vested interests "trying to demoralise" the filmmakers in their fight.

The film's producers yesterday lodged a complaint with the cyber crime police in Bandra yesterday.

The entire film has been leaked on various torrent websites with 'for censor' written on the top left corner of the copy, as questions cropped about about any role by the Censor Board in this regard.

"I am not sure whether it was a CBFC copy. But if it's a censor copy then it's a shame on CBFC, it reflects very badly on them. Piracy is an an issue, which we all have been fighting for a very long time," superstar Aamir Khan said.

CBFC chief Pahlaj Nahalani, on his part, said "rumours" about the online leak should not be believed. "Please understand the procedure rather than believing in rumours," he said.
has withdrawn the order to relocate the office of the Director General of Health Services (DGHS) to LNJP Hospital campus following protest by the faculty of Maulana Azad Medical College, associated hospitals and an umbrella body of doctors.

"As mentioned in email dated June 11, no insult of the learnt members of the faculty was intended vide the aforementioned order and no attempt to decapitate the institution was ever conceived," said .

"The faculty of Maulana Azad Medical College have wrongly interpreted the said order and are considering that it would lead to interference in day to day working of medical professionals." "In view of aforesaid, the order dated May 31 stands withdrawn with immediate effect," said a fresh order issued to this effect.

Lok Nayak Jaiprakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital is governed under the Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC). As per the old order, the office of the DGHS was proposed to be moved to the building block of LNJP in which its Medical Superintendent's office is located.

The faculty of MAMC, associated hospitals along with representatives of Federation of Resident Doctors Association (FORDA) had objected to the decision and had written to Delhi Lt Governor Najeeb Jung in this regard.
Senate Democrats claimed a small victory early today, forcing the US upper house to consider legislation to help keep guns out of the hands of terrorism suspects.

The move, which could break a years-long logjam on gun control, follows demands for action after the weekend massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida.

Democrats took to the floor of the Republican-controlled Senate yesterday to launch a procedural obstruction, known as a filibuster, to press colleagues to accept so-called "no-fly no buy" legislation.

Under it, people on watch lists or no-fly lists would be barred from buying firearms.

The filibuster was led by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where a 2012 school shooting left 20 children dead.

"I'm at my wits' end," said Murphy, as he began yesterday morning his hours-long takeover.

"I'm going to remain on this floor until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together."



Murphy, with support from 40 senators including Republican Pat Toomey, spent hours discussing ways to reduce gun violence.

At 1:53 am (local time) today he claimed victory on Twitter.

"I am proud to announce that after 14+ hours on the floor, we will have a vote on closing the terror gap & universal background checks," Murphy wrote.

The chamber's Republican and Democratic leaders agreed "on a path forward to get votes ... On a measure to assure that those on the terrorist watch list do not get guns," as well as an amendment that would expand background checks to sales at gun shows and on the internet, Murphy said.

The filibuster "captured the attention of our nation," Booker said early today.

"How many of our children's dreams must be destroyed by gun violence before we do the common-sense things that we agree on to begin to shrink those numbers?" he asked.

"When you attack one American you attack us all."



A Senate measure that would have stopped FBI terror suspects from buying firearms and explosives failed in December, with every Senate Republican but one voting in opposition.

Some Republicans appear to be reconsidering, including congressman Bob Dold, who is locked in a tough re-election fight in Illinois.
Thai police today failed to arrest an influential Buddhist abbot, accused of embezzling USD 40 million, as thousands of his followers gathered at a Buddhist temple complex, preventing them from detaining the monk.

The police raided the powerful Wat Dhammakaya temple in northern Bangkok to arrest its 72-year-old abbot, Phra Dhammachayo but the devotees from the controversial Buddhist sect camped outside the sprawling temple complex forcing police to withdraw from the area.

The devotees claimed that the abbot, who leads the largest religious sect in Thailand and has a cult-like following, was too ill to be taken into custody.

Department of Special Investigation (DSI) officials said they could not arrest the abbot because of strong resistance put up by his followers.

The failed bid to enter the wealthy and influential temple was broadcast live on national television.

DSI deputy chief Suriya Singhakamol admitted to reporters that the operation to enter the temple to bring the abbot to hear embezzlement charges at the Criminal Court failed because the abbot's staunch followers did not allow the officials to go inside.

The abbot is accused of conspiring to launder money by accepting stolen cash from a credit union.

He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three police summonses and an arrest warrant. He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he was too ill to report to police for questioning.

Though police withdrew for the day after the fruitless raid, Suriya said the operation to arrest the abbot would continue but he did not give a time frame.

"Our operation has not ended. The (arrest) warrant is still valid so we will have authority to carry out the operation. According to our information, he is still inside," he said.

Temple spokesman Phra Sanitwong, said the abbot did not flee from the temple but he was too ill to come out to meet officials.

He said the temple had already cooperated with the DSI.

The abbot and his followers have denied the corruption allegations, claiming they are politically motivated.

Earlier this morning, 600 policemen were put on standby at Klong Luang district office to support the DSI's search of the Dhammakaya temple.

Police said there were about 8,000 Dhammakya disciples inside the temple.

Several scandals, including trafficking animal parts, in recent years have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand.
Congress leader Digvijaya Singh today said his party stands firmly behind the distressed farmers even as he slammed the BJP for "reneging" on promises made to agriculturists in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Hitting out at the saffron party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said they have forgotten the promises made by them to the farming community after coming to power.

"Congress was solidly behind the distressed farmers and will take up your cause and try to help you overcome the problems caused by policies under the BJP rule," the AICC General Secretary said at Vidarbha here, a region known for farmer suicides.

He was addressing a well-attended protest rally of farmers 'chai ki charcha' organised by the party to highlight "non-fulfilment" of promises made to cultivators by BJP and Modi.

Modi has forgotten all the 'chai pe charcha' promises made to the farmers in Dabhadi village of the district on March 20, 2014, the former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister said.

Modi, then the BJP's PM face, had held discussions at Dabhadi with farmers at 'chai pe charcha', an interactive event that was part of the BJP's campaign.

Singh said Modi had promised that, if elected, his government would incorporate 50 per cent of the total input cost which would be paid over and above the MSP to make agriculture a profitable venture.

The NDA government has "reneged" on this and a number of other promises made to the farming community, the Congress veteran maintained.

BJP had promised to waive crop loan but instead Modi has quietly written off loans of big industrial houses to the tune of Rs 1.14 lakh crore and completely ignored the farmers, he alleged.

On the other hand, the Congress-led UPA had waived crop loans to the tune of Rs 72,000 crore in 2009, he said.

Modi, on assuming office, also failed to live up to his promise of bringing back the black money stashed by Indians in foreign banks and depositing Rs 15 lakh in every individual's account, the Congress leader added.

(Reopens BOM 22)



Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) President Ashok Chavan, Rajya Sabha MP Raj Babbar, former MPCC chief Manikkrao Thakre, Youth Congress President Amrinder Singh Raja Brar and ex-Maharashtra Minister Shivajirao Moghe, among others, were present on the occasion.

Speaking on the occasion, Ashok Chavan said the Congress will fight for the farmers and push ahead with its demand to waive their crop loan.

Highlighting the plight of the farmers across the state, Chavan said three agriculturists allegedly tried to end their lives in front of the Chief Minister's Office in Mantaralaya (Secretariat in Mumbai) a few days ago, which shows their poor condition.

The former Chief Minister said the BJP-Shiv Sena government has failed to tackle drought in the state.

Sending water trains to drought-hit areas shows that the government had not made any plan in advance to deal with water scarcity.
A doctor was arrested today for allegedly molesting a 29-year-old pregnant woman while examining her at a private scan centre in Mettupalayam here, police said.

Dayanandar was arrested based on a complaint from the woman that he made sexual advances and attempted to molest her yesterday when she had gone to the scan centre along with her husband, they said.

The doctor was produced before a court which remanded him to judicial custody.

The accused complained of chest pain while he was taken to the prison after which he was admitted to a government hospital, police said.
A substantial number of fraudsters in the country is high performers who are primarily driven by greed to commit corporate misdoings, says a report.

Leading consultancy KPMG International also said 62 per cent of the frauds in India were committed in collusion, similar to global trends.

"In India, greed is the predominant motivation for 77 per cent of fraudsters compared with 60 per cent globally," it said.

With respect to India, KPMG said 59 per cent of fraudsters were detected as a result of a tip, complaint or a formal whistle blowing hotline while around 25 per cent were detected as a result of a management review.

Mritunjay Kapur, Partner and Head (Risk Consulting) at KPMG in India, said 64 per cent of fraudsters in India are high performers compared with 38 per cent globally. "Their sense of superiority is stronger than their sense of fear or anger," he added.

Weak internal controls are a contributing factor to a significant chunk of the frauds.

The conclusions are based on an analysis of 750 fraudsters who were involved in acts committed in 78 nations. Data were gathered from fraud investigations conducted by KPMG member firms' forensic specialists in Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific between March 2013 and August 2015.

Furthermore, the findings indicate that Indian fraudsters are younger in age than their global counterparts. A good 32 per cent of the perpetrators are in the 26-35 age group, compared with 14 per cent globally, the report said.

As many as 59 per cent of the fraudsters in India are in the age group of 36-55 years, it noted.

"The most-prevalent fraud surveyed globally is the misappropriation of assets (44 per cent). This mainly includes embezzlement and procurement fraud followed by fraudulent financial reporting (20 per cent)," the report, which was released on Wednesday, said.

Globally, 79 per cent of the fraudsters are men and the proportion of women has risen to 17 per cent, from 13 per cent in 2010.
The driver of Yogesh Kislay, Press Advisor to Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das, was abducted by unidentified persons from Ashok Nagar area here before they let him off near Jamshedpur after taking away the car, police said.

The driver, Jitendra Kumar Mahto, told police that the abductors last night intercepted him at Ashok Nagar, beat him up and took him away before leaving him near Ghaghra bridge near the steel town and took away his car and mobile handset.

In the FIR registered with the Argora police station, the driver said the abductors had told him that he was being kidnapped as they had asked for an extortion of Rs one crore from Kislay, which he had not given.

Kislay, however, told the police that nobody had demanded money from him.
Delhi University teachers who have been boycotting evaluation of undergraduate examinations for last 20 days in protest against new UGC norms, today decided to resume the exercise for final year students.

A decision in this regard was taken at a General Body (GB) meeting of the Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA).

"The teachers today decided to end the boycott for final year students (FYUP batch). However, we will continue to boycott the evaluation for first and second year students. The same will be applicable for ongoing admission process and staff council meetings," a DUTA statement said.

The teachers have been boycotting evaluation of UG examinations since May 24 in protest against amendments to UGC regulations that, they argue, will lead to job-cuts to the tune of 50 per cent and drastically decrease pupil-teacher ratio in higher education.

The new gazette notification has increased the workload for assistant professors from 16 hours of "direct teaching" per week (including tutorials) to 18 hours, plus another six of tutorials, bringing the total up to 24 hours. Similarly the work hours of associate professors have been increased from 14 to 22.

Terming it to be an "unethical" mode of protest, students had urged the teachers to end the boycott fearing delay in results.

The varsity authorities had also urged the teachers to resume the exercise saying "any further delay can jeopardies the career of students and also adversely affect the reputation of the university".

The teachers, however, decided to continue with their protest and also boycott the ongoing UG admission process.

The GB decided to continue with boycott till June 20 following which the executive will decided the future course of action.

The teachers will also take out a candle light vigil on Saturday evening demanding HRD ministry rolls back the decision.

Yesterday, Higher Education Secretary V S Oberoi said the direct teaching work load has been restored to 16, 14, 14 hours per week for Assistant Professors, Associate Professors and Professors respectively. This was done through necessary amendments to the UGC norms.
Sanatan Sanstha member Virendra Tawde, arrested by the CBI in connection with the 2013 murder of Narendra Dabholkar, had received a direction through an e-mail asking him to "concentrate" on the anti-superstition crusader, around 2-3 months before the latter was shot dead.

In its remand report submitted before a local court seeking extension of Tawde's custody today, the agency stated that it has also identified five more persons, apart from Tawde, who are suspected to have played a direct role in the crime.

The court extended Tawde's custody until June 20.

CBI stated that these suspects used code words like 'chocolate', 'sahitya', 'devil' and various others words during their e-mail conversation.

The agency's counsel B P Raju told the court that two to three months before Dabholkar's murder, Tawde had received an email from an unidentified person asking him to "concentrate" on the rationalist.

"Tawde did not respond to the mail, but acted on the direction and executed the murder on August 20, 2013," Raju said.

The agency stated that a witness in the case has identified Sarang Akolkar as one of the assailants on the basis of the sketches re-issued by CBI.

Dabholkar was shot dead when he was taking a morning walk at Omkareshwar bridge in Pune on August 20, 2013.

Akolkar, also a member of right-wing Sanatan Sanstha, is wanted in connection with the murder.

While seeking Tawde's custody, the CBI told the court that they want to question Vinay Pawar of the Sanstha and one Agrawal in connection with the crime.

It also told the court that the email conversation has talked about procuring arms from various parts of the country.

"We want to investigate the financial source in the procurement of the arms as the accused and other suspects who were in touch with each other were talking of forming a 'fauj' of 15,000 armed group during their email interaction," Raju said.

CBI told the court that Tawde had visited the weapon training workshops in Sangali and Phonda in 2009.

It was in 2009 when two Sanstha members had died in explosion of a bomb they were ferrying to Margao in Goa.

CBI is probing the Dabholkar murder case, which was handed over to it in May 2014 by the Bombay High Court. The NIA is handling the Margao blast case.

Tawde, an ENT surgeon, was arrested from Panvel, Navi Mumbai last week for the murder of the 67-year-old anti-superstition crusader. He is the first accused to be held in the nearly three-year-old case.

Seeking Tawde's further custodial interrogation, Raju



told the court that he was cooperating with the agency.

In his order, Judicial Magistrate First Class V B Gulve-Patil stated, "It appears from the record that the investigating machinery has done progress in into investigation, minute technical details are yet to be inquired while the valuable material information would not be gathered from the accused except his custody".

However, Tawde's counsel Sanjeev Punalekar rubbished the claims made by the CBI, saying the agency has got enough time to interrogate Tawde but "failed" to gather concrete evidence against him.
Award-wining writer-directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah are set to helm "Beverly Hills Cop IV".

El Arbi and Fallah are filmmakers of Moroccan heritage who studied at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels, reported Ace Showbiz.

Both directed short film "Broeders" and feature film "Image".

The duo gained recognition after winning TIFF's Discovery Award last year when they premiered their edgy drama "Black".

The drama focuses on a 15-year-old girl in a black gang in Brussels who falls for a Moroccan boy from a rival gang, who later must choose between loyalty and love.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Eddie Murphy were impressed by the duo's work on "Black".

They met El Arbi and Fallah and were surprised to find out that the original "Beverly Hills Cop" was very important to El Arbi and Fallah as filmmakers.

The two were tapped to tackle the helming duty after Brett Ratner dropped out of the project.

The story will center on Axel Foley (Murphy), who returns to Detroit after leaving his job in Beverly Hills.
Tamil Nadu Governor K Rosaiah today said "serious efforts" were on to bring back Finnish handset manufacturer Nokia to revive its operations and that the state would continue to implement the ongoing welfare schemes, including low cost food chain 'Amma Unavagam'.

"The state government is taking very serious efforts for revival of Nokia plant along with the component manufacturers. Chief Minister deputed a team of officials to Taiwan recently to hold discussions with global companies like Foxconn.

"The issues pending with the government of India have also been taken up at the highest level to facilitate the revival," he said.

In his inaugural address for the 15th Tamil Nadu Assembly after AIADMK was voted back to power for a second consecutive term, the Governor said the government would continue to be led by policy initiatives like 'TN Vision 2023 Document', an initiative launched by the ruling party in its previous (2011-16) tenure.

Rosaiah said the government began implementing poll promises in right earnest immediately after coming to power.

"This government is committed to improving transparency in administration and will establish the institution of Lokayukta in Tamil Nadu through appropriate enactment once the proposed amendments to the Lokpal Act are made by Parliament," he said.

He said that on assuming charge, Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on day one waived loans of small and marginal farmers, provided 100 units of free power to domestic consumers and increased gold allocation to eight grams from under 'Thalikku Thangam' scheme for women beneficiaries.

She also increased free power to weavers and reduced working hours of Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC), the state-run liquor retain chain.

The Governor said the welfare schemes under the Amma



brand like Amma Cement, Amma Drinking Water and Amma Salt would continue.

On the power front, he said ongoing projects would be expedited and in the next five years, new power generation capacity of 13,000 MW of thermal power and 3,000 MW of solar energy would be added to the state grid.

Rosaiah said the government would take up implementation of Phase-II of Chennai Metro Rail at the earliest.

"Before 2017-end, services will be commenced in the entire metro (Phase-I) network," he said, adding services between Little Mount to Airport and from Alandur to St Thomas Mount would be inaugurated soon.

On the fishermen's issue, he said the government would continue to urge the Centre to prevail upon Sri Lanka to work out a lasting solution to the problem and also reiterated the government stance that it would continue to strive for retrieval of Katchatheevu.

Similarly, efforts would be made to lift the ban on bull taming sport 'Jallikattu' and get the Mullaiperiyar dam water level raised to 152 feet, i.E the Full Reservoir Level. The government will also strive to get an order from the Supreme Court to constitute Cauvery Management Board and Cauvery Water Regulation Committee, he said.

"This government will continue to seek accountability of those who perpetrated genocide on innocent Tamils in Sri Lanka during the civil war," Rosaiah said.

Unlike on previous occasions, the entire Opposition listened to the Governor's address with rapt attention.

Leader of the Opposition M K Stalin (DMK), his party colleagues and members of his alliance party Congress sat through the 35 minutes address.

(REOPENS MDS4)



The Governor also told the House that it had the "onerous responsibility of ensuring healthy and constructive deliberations setting the highest standard of democracy."



"Conscious of this, I hope that this august Assembly will debate and deliberate on important issues and come out with pioneering development-oriented policies and programmes," he said.
Eritrea claimed today to have killed "more than 200" Ethiopians in a battle last week, one of the fiercest border clashes since a 1998-2000 war, while giving no mention of its own casualties.

Each side blames the other for starting the two-day battle which broke out on Sunday, saying also that their rival suffered the most losses.

There was no immediate response from Ethiopia, which has not released numbers killed.

"More than 200 TPLF (Ethiopian) troops have been killed and more than 300 wounded," Eritrea's Ministry of Information said in a statement, calling it a "conservative estimate".

There was no mention of any prisoners of war.

Ethiopian government spokesman Getachew Reda on Tuesday said "there were significant casualties on both sides, but more on the Eritrean side."



Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after three decades of war, but returned to battle in 1998-2000, when nearly 80,000 died.

The neighbours are bitter enemies, with tens of thousands of troops dug into trenches eyeing each other along the heavily fortified frontier.

Open-ended, compulsory national service makes Eritrea one of the world's most militarised nations, but with just five million citizens it is dwarfed by Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous nation with some 96 million people.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday urged both governments to exercise "maximum restraint," and resolve differences through peaceful means. The United States has voiced similar "grave" concerns.

Cedric Barnes, from the International Crisis Group, said the clash appeared to have been the "most serious conventional military engagement for some time", while noting there had been "at least eight significant flare-ups" since 2011.

Eritrea and Ethiopia have long traded accusations of attacks and of backing rebels to needle each other.

Barnes said that one theory for the clash was that it was a "response by Addis Ababa to an armed action by the Asmara-linked Ginbot 7 group in southern Ethiopia in May", referring to an outlawed opposition force.

The two countries remain at odds over the flashpoint town of Badme, awarded to Eritrea by a United Nations-backed boundary commission but still controlled by Ethiopia.
More than 400 people have been killed in since November in a crackdown on anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday, but the government immediately dismissed the claims.

"Tens of thousands" more were also arrested by security forces in "widespread protests in the Oromia region since November 2015," the US-based HRW said.

The protests were sparked by plans to expand the capital into outlying farmland.

The report, titled "Such a Brutal Crackdown", was based on over 125 interviews with protesters and those caught up in the violence.

It spoke of the "government's use of excessive and unnecessary lethal force and mass arrests, mistreatment in detention, and restrictions on access to information to quash the protest movement."

The demonstrations were triggered by a government plan to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa into Oromia. The project was dropped on January 12 but protests continued for weeks.

But government spokesman Getachew Reda dismissed the report, saying that HRW, "is very generous with numbers when it comes to Ethiopia" and attributed any violence on the part of security forces to "bad apples".

"The government feels regret that people are killed," he said.

Reda said the Human Rights Council of Ethiopia, a non-governmental organisation, had said 103 people died.

"Why couldn't they come up with others' names? Because those names don't exist," Reda said.

HRW however said it along with other organisations had "identified more than 300 of those killed by name and, in some cases, with photos", and it was not a case of isolated pockets of violence.

Some of those arrested and later released told HRW they were "tortured or mistreated" inside prison, with several women alleging they were raped.

"Some said they were hung by their ankles and beaten; others described having electric shocks applied to their feet, or weights tied to their testicles," HRW said.

With at least 27 million people, Oromia is the most populous of the country's federal states and has its own language, Oromo, distinct from Ethiopia's official Amharic language.

"Ethiopian security forces have fired on and killed hundreds of students, farmers, and other peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for human life," HRW's deputy Africa chief Leslie Lefkow said.

"The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation, and hold security force members accountable for abuses.
Formula One commercial chief Bernie Ecclestone says he is confused by human rights groups criticising the series for coming to the Azerbaijan capital Baku for this weekend's European Grand Prix.

Human rights organizations have long expressed concern about restrictions on political opposition, and corruption, under the government of Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father in 2003.

Some rights groups have criticised F1 for going to the country, and others have urged the series to use the race to expose rights issues.

However, Ecclestone said at the street circuit today that it was a question of definition.

"The moment someone tells me what human rights are, then we can have a look at it, and see when and where it applies," he said.

Azerbaijan, an oil-rich nation of around 10 million people wedged between Iran and Russia on the Caspian Sea, has been trying to burnish its image through hosting international events such as F1, and the Eurovision song contest.

Ecclestone said the contract with Azerbaijan was for seven years with an option for an extension. There is skepticism about the lasting power of new races after the quick arrival and departure of the likes of India and South Korea over the past decade, but the 85-year-old Ecclestone quipped that "there is more chance of them doing seven years than me doing seven years."



The addition of Azerbaijan stretched the schedule to 21 races, and Ecclestone said that may be extended to 22 next year or cut back to 18. There are doubts about the futures of the German and Italian Grands Prix, while he acknowledged "Brazil has a few problems at the moment."



Sources close to Ecclestone recently talked up the possibility of a race in Las Vegas, backed by Chinese investors, but similar reports over the years have come to nothing.
A forum of teachers at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) today demanded the varsity authorities to immediately and unconditionally revoke the suspension of two faculty members, who are on a relay hunger strike for last two days.

The two faculty members, Associate Professor K Y Ratnam and Assistant Professor Tathagat Sengupta, had on Tuesday launched the indefinite relay hunger strike outside the university protesting their suspension by the varsity on the ground that they had been detained (arrested) by police for more than 48 hours in March this year.

Ratnam, Head of Centre for Ambedkar Studies and faculty member of Department of Political Science and Sengupta, faculty member of Department of Mathematics, were on Monday served with suspension notice for allegedly not informing the university about their detention by police for more than 48 hours on March 22.

The SC/ST Faculty Forum and Concerned Teachers today demanded the university to withdraw all the cases filed against the faculty and students to restore a semblance of normalcy on the campus so that the institutional interests may not suffer.

"We, the SC/ST Faculty Forum and Concerned Teachers at the University of Hyderabad and the teaching fraternity are shocked at the order suspending two of our colleagues Ratnam and Sengupta," the Forum said in a release.

"This act of suspension does not only further the conflict on campus but seems detrimental to the interests of the University community. We condemn this act of suspension that is beyond the imagination or rules of this democratic institution," it said.

"What Professors Ratnam and Sengupta did on March 22 was primarily to appeal to the police to not brutalise students... for the University to suspend professors for an act that was actually the responsibility of the University itself (protecting students) is outrageous," the Forum said.

While it is true that any employee who is in custody for more than 48 hours is deemed to be suspended, the rules for suspension say this should be used sparingly, it said.

The UoH authorities had yesterday said Ratnam and Sengupta were suspended from the services strictly in accordance with Rule 10 of the Central Civil Services Rules.

The suspension orders were issued after the approval of



the university's Executive Council in its meeting held on June 6, the first meeting since the episode of vandalism and disruption at the Vice Chancellor's lodge (official residence) on March 22 while a high-level meeting was going on inside the VC's camp office cum residence, the UoH had said.

Ratnam and Sengupta were arrested on March 22 in connection with the episode and consequently a case of criminal offence is under investigation against them, the university said.

However, the Forum asserted that in this case, there is no real "crime" of the faculty other than expressing their solidarity with students and trying to protect them from police "excesses".

The administration did not take any action immediately or for the entire semester that they were working. Under such circumstances, to suspend them beyond the period of their incarceration raises doubts about the administration's intention, it said.

"It is also surprising that their suspension orders cover the period where they have taught, evaluated and discharged all their duties to the institution with the full knowledge of the University," the Forum added.

The University of Hyderabad, popularly known as HCU, witnessed sporadic protests over the suicide of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula, with protesting students demanding removal of Appa Rao Podile from the VC's post.

Appa Rao was booked under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and for abetment of Vemula's suicide. The university has been on the boil since Vemula committed suicide on the campus on January 17, subsequent to which Podile went on a leave amid protest by students.
A month after Delhi High Court stayed the punishment to JNU students in connection with the controversial February 9 event, the university today formed a four-member committee to hear appeals of those who had been found guilty of indiscipline by the varsity probe panel.

"The Vice Chancellor has formed a committee to assist him in his capacity as the appellate authority to hear the appeals from students who had been found guilty by the High Level Enquiry Committee (HLEC) of violating various university rules during the February 9 incident on campus," an official statement said.

JNU was at the centre of a controversy in February this year because of an event on campus against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru at which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.

Three students including the students union chief Kanhaiya Kumar were arrested in a sedition case over the event and are now out on bail. 21 JNU students were slapped with varied punishments ranging from rustication, hostel debarment to financial penalty on basis of the probe by the HLEC which found them guilty of violation of discipline norms.

The students had gone on an indefinite hunger strike against the decision which lasted for 16 days. As the varsity refused to relent and withdraw the punitive action proposed against the students despite their failing health, some students moved the Delhi High Court challenging the action.

Following this, the High Court issued directions to JNUSU to immediately withdraw the hunger strike and to not launch any fresh agitation. It had stayed action against the students till their appeals have been decided by the appellate authority.

"The proceedings have begun from today and the concerned students have been asked to depose before the appellate authority," the statement added.

(REOPENS DES 20)



JNU students who had boycotted the HLEC proceedings and did not appear before the committee then, decided to appear before the new committee and file their appeals.

While few of them appeared before the four-member committee today, others including Kanhaiya may join the process when they are back in the national capital.
Expressing Lok Janshakti Party's willingness to fight the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections next year as part of NDA, party leader Chirag Paswan said the final call over the issue would soon be taken by BJP.

"LJP is part of NDA at the Centre and we would want to contest the UP elections as part of the same alliance," he told PTI here.

"Having said that, BJP is the bigger alliance partner, and they are the ones who have to take a final call over the issue. We will be meeting Amit Shahji soon and takea final call," he said.

Chirag, son of LJP founder and Union Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, also said the party definitely wants tocontest UP elections, either as part of NDA orindependently.

Asked whether the decision to contest elections in UP as part of NDA was taken in view of the election results in Assam and other states, Chirag said, "Our alliance has performed really well. We managed to get into the North-East and form our government in Assam. That is an achievement for our alliance.

"We also performed well down south compared to our previous results, which isthe reason why we want to continue the alliance." he said.

On accepting Rajnath Singh as the Chief Ministerial candidate, Paswan said, as a partner of NDA, his party will follow whatever decision BJP makes in this regard.

"As an honest ally we will follow whatever decision BJP takes. Whether they want to project the Chief Ministerial candidate or not, we are okay with that," he said.
Tata Motors today said a fire broke out at a unit of one of its vendor partners in the company's Sanand manufacturing facility that rolls out Nano and the recently introduced hatchback Tiago models.

"A fire broke out at the vendor park of M/S Supreme Treaves, our supplier of trim parts for the Nano. The fire is under control now and no injuries were reported," a Tata Motors spokesperson said in a statement.

The company said it is in the process of ascertaining the extent of damage due to the incident.

While there is no impact on production of Tiago, the company is still assessing whether Nano manufacturing will be affected, the spokesperson added.

The Sanand plant, which has an annual production capacity of 2.5 lakh units, currently manufactures only two passenger car models of the company.

The plant was set up after Tata Motors was forced to withdraw the Nano project from its original site at Singur in West Bengal in October 2008 as it faced opposition from displaced farmers led by Trinamool Congress.
Samantha Edwards, a former Miss USA contestant, was found dead by a friend on June 14 in her Minneapolis home. She was 37.

Police are investigating the cause of death for Edwards, a former Fargo resident who was crowned Miss North Dakota USA for 2003, reported People magazine.

A police report points out there was no obvious sign of trauma, but the cause of death is being investigated.

The Miss USA and Miss Teen USA organisation posted a tribute to Edwards on Facebook, calling her one of the most "vibrant, energetic, and full-loving" women to ever hold one of the state Miss USA titles.

According to her Facebook page, Edwards had studied at the University of North Dakota and the Aveda Institute, a cosmetology school in Northeast Minneapolis. She was working as a freelance makeup artist.

A GoFundMe page has been set up by Jessica Dereschuk, who won the title of Miss Minnesota USA 2004 and was a close friend of Edwards.

"Samantha Edwards, affectionately known by most as 'Sami,' was one of the most vibrant, crazy, compassionate, loyal balls of energy you could ever come across in life," Dereschuk wrote.

"A conversation with her could either leave you full of adrenaline or utterly exhausted. She was a spitfire and with Sami you never knew what she'd throw your way - but you ALWAYS knew she would be there for you. She was awesome like that.
The ghost of anti-Sikh riots continued to haunt Congress leader Kamal Nath despite his giving up charge of poll-bound Punjab with his political rivals stepping up attack and demanding filing of a case against him.

On his part, the former union minister and his party rejected reports that he was asked to resign in view of the controversy surrounding him and that he did it on his own volition so that attention is not diverted from issues facing Punjab.

Congress' face in Punjab and former Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh came to Kamal Nath's defence saying he had done a gracious thing by his resignation but maintained that had he continued also "there would not have been any difference".

On Sunday, Kamal Nath was appointed as General Secretary and given charge of both Punjab and Haryana. He resigned last night as in charge of Punjab, which goes to polls next year, in the wake of rivals targeting him on the issue of riots.

Akali Dal leader and Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today attacked Kamal Nath saying his exit "vindicated" the stand of his party that 1984 Sikh carnage was a "deep rooted conspiracy" of Congress party to "butcher of innocent" Sikhs.

"Kamal Nath was reluctant to accept this post because of his guilty consciousness' owing to his role in massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs," Badal alleged on the sidelines of Sangat Darshan programme in Malout Assembly constituency.

He alleged Kamal Nath could not "muster the courage" to face people of state who were well aware of his role in this "barbaric holocaust" of Sikhs.

However, Badal said that the people of state in general and Sikhs in particular would never forgive Kamal Nath and other leaders of his party who had "planned and executed this heinous carnage", which was a dark spot in the entire history of India.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is trying to make inroads into the state in the next year's Assembly elections, also joined the attack on the Congress leader.

It claimed victory over his resignation and demanded that an FIR be registered against Kamal Nath in the Gurudwara Rakabganj Sahib in which two Sikhs were burnt to death in 1984.

After its persistent pressure, the Congress had to sack Kamal



Nath, the AAP said claiming it was an "acceptance" of defeat.

"Two Sikhs were killed in the incident. So Kamal Nath is also responsible for it as he was their leader. This is an insult to the law.

"By merely tendering resignation does not absolve Kamal Nath from the charges and he should be tried for murder and chargesheet should be filed at the earliest," said AAP leader and lawyer H S Phoolka, who has been fighting for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots victims. He said the role of Kamal Nath has never been investigated.

Talking to media, Kamal Nath rejected reports that he was asked to step down as General Secretary in-charge of Punjab and said he quit to ensure that attention was not diverted from the issues affecting the state.

He denied that Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked him to quit the post, adding that she understood the reasons he gave in his letter to the party to step down as in-charge of Punjab.

"I called Rahul Gandhi and told him I am sending the letter...I read him the letter. He told me to send it to the Congress President...I called Sonia Gandhi and told her that this is in the interest of the party and we should not let them use this politics," he said.

Kamal Nath said Gandhi spoke with him again after she received the letter and told him that "well if this is your reason, fine."



On being asked whether he was forced to step down as the in-charge after allegations over his role in the anti-Sikh riots resurfaced, the senior-most Lok Sabha MP wondered why the issue of his alleged role in the riots was being raked up after 32 years. He said the Nanavati Commission which investigated the anti-Sikh riots had absolved him.

"It is nothing but a political ploy to divert from the real issues. There was an adjournment motion on which Akalis spoke, L K Advani of BJP spoke. No one pointed fingers at me," he said.

He claimed that the real issues affecting Punjab such as drugs, farmer plight, mis-governance are being ignored.

Responding to a poser on a letter reportedly written by



his former Cabinet colleague M S Gill, Kamal Nath said he never raised the issue of 1984 riots with him when they were Cabinet colleagues nor in the Cabinet.

Gill had yesterday described his appointment is akin "rubbing salt on wounds".

Kamal Nath rejected suggestions that the Nanavati panel absolved him due to 'lack of evidence'. He said the report should be read in its entirety.

The Congress veteran said he was at the Rakabganj Gurudwara near Parliament House after he was told that a crowd had gathered here.

He said that policemen at the scene asked him to engage the crowd till reinforcements arrived. "I left as soon as I saw the reinforcements arrive," he said.

Senior Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma also defended Kamal Nath saying he resigned "on his own volition" anguished over the "mischievous" campaign against him by opponents regarding the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Talking to media, Sharma dismissed suggestions that the Congress buckled under pressure to replace him and insisted that the "dishonest, perverse, and mischievous" narrative by opposition against him was done with an eye on elections.

Replying to questions, he, however, made it clear that Kamal Nath continued to be the AICC General Secretary in charge of Haryana.

Reports earlier quoting party's chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala had it that Nath had resigned as General Secretary of the AICC.

Asked about the AAP's charges against Nath, Sharma said AAP has "no credibility and has an opportunistic agenda" and was targeting the Congress leader with an eye on polls...

"The demand to reopen cases is ridiculous because there is no case ever. You cannot reopen which does not exist", he said when asked about the AAP demand.

Maintaining that Kamal Nath is the senior-most member of the Lok Sabha, who has also been party General Secretary and Union Minister, Sharma said that he decided to quit "out of his anguish" after being "condemned day in and day out despite being not guilty".
FMCG major Godrej Consumer Products Ltd (GCPL) is scouting for acquisitions in Indonesia and has shared 'a wish list of assets' with various investment bankers as part of its inorganic growth strategy in the South East Asian nation.

"There is already a plan for various assets, which we would love to have within our portfolio if available. Unfortunately, we do not find too many sellers in Indonesia yet," GCPL Head Indonesia and Middle East Cluster Naveen Gupta told analysts in a concall.

He was responding to a query on whether GCPL, which had acquired Indonesian household product major PT Megasari Makmur Group in 2010, is looking for fresh acquisitions.

Gupta further said: "There are wish list of assets shared with various investment bankers, some of them are working on some of the assets that we would love to have with us as part of our inorganic growth strategy. So within that same framework we will continue to expand into Indonesia as well."



However, he didn't share details of the company's possible targets or the sum that GCPL has earmarked for the purpose.

Commenting on the company's overall direct distribution network expansion in Indonesia, Gupta said GCPL is looking at doubling it in the next 3-5 years from 1,10,000 at present.

"In current year we are driving distribution expansion much faster which will happen through two parts - one, possibly creating new stock points of our own where the quality of distribution goes up," he said, besides it would also add some smaller stockists from distributor point.

"Our assumption (is that) the 1,10,000 could be nearly doubled in the next three to five years cycle," he added.

GCPL's net sales in the financial year 2015-16 stood at, Rs 8,957.15 crore and the Indonesian business contributed to 16 per cent of total sales.

Indonesian business is the largest business for GCPL outside India.

The government would get "lot of revenues" from the



demonetisation move, Godrej said, adding that it would be a good opportunity to cut direct taxes in the coming budget so that "much more money will be declared by the people and also it will help the growth of the economy".

"Main thing would be in ease of doing business. That means, less and less government permissions. You declare a policy and let people go ahead and do their business. If they break the policy, take action but don't go for case-by-case government permissions", he said.

"Once GST comes, I think the Indian economy will do very well and growth will be very good," he added.
Union Minister of State for Power Piyush Goyal today expressed his displeasure over non-participation of some states in the power conference underway at here, and has sought a report in this regard.

"Please let me know why some of the states are not represented here. I presume if ministers have not come, their Secretaries must have come. But if Secretaries have also boycotted the meeting, submit a report to me," he told his Secretary after the inauguration of the two-day event.

"If they (states) act like this, we will have to behave in similar way. Last time, I had made it abundantly clear that we have a lot of time to help and solve problems of the state but it will have to be two-way traffic, it cannot be one way. I am very keen to know the reason why few states could not come," the minister said.

Goyal sought the details about the absent ministers, the Secretaries' attendance from all the states, and reasons for their not being here.

"Ministers from the North East have not been able to come. Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura.. If they have any specific problem then we will resolve it," the minister said.

Referring to the conference held in Guwahati previously, Goyal said the meeting had sent a very strong signal that India will go to North East.

"All of us from across the country assembled in North East and discussed the problem of India. It is for the first time in the history of India that a national conference of all power ministers, or for that instance of any ministers from any ministry, had ever met in North East," he said.

"Last time I had mentioned about the importance of everybody's participation at the highest level. More so because this gives us the chance to learn from your experiences, to understand what is best for each state, what could be a better way to do it," the minister said.

"It is probably the first time in so many years that you had a power ministers' conference religiously organised every six months. It is a matter of satisfaction that in last two years we have been able to maintain the discipline and sanctity of this forum which in some sense represents the team which is going to change the future of India. It is going to change the very basis of making India a superpower.

"Not only for the sheer importance that electricity as a sector has in people's lives but also for the fact that the world today is recognising that India is truly committed to making a difference to the life of poor," he said.
The Patna High Court today ordered interim stay on the inspection of private B.Ed colleges carried out by the state government.

Justice V Nath ordered that inspection should be kept in abeyance till the next date of hearing on June 21.

The stay came on a petition of B R Ambedkar college, a private B.Ed college of Gaya.

The petitioner contended that the probe of these private B.Ed colleges could be done only by NCTE (National Council for Teachers Education) and not by the state government.

The Bihar government had decided to crackdown on B.Ed colleges from where reports of irregularities in awarding degree regularly come in.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had recently said a probe is underway to ascertain if the degree awarded by B.Ed colleges in the state are genuine or not.

"All B.Ed colleges are being probed to ascertain if classes are held in these colleges or degrees are distributed illegally," he said at an event in Purnea district on Monday last.

The crackdown on B.Ed degree colleges followed merit muddle in Intermediate examination in the state.
Suspected Islamists claiming to be the ISIS followers have threatened to kill a Hindu priest of the Ramakrishna Mission here if he continues to preach in "Islamic Bangladesh", prompting authorities to beef up security around the area.

"The security of the (RK) Mission has been intensified as the priest filed a general diary with us," duty officer of the city's Wari police station told PTI.

The officer declined to disclose the name of the priest.

The mission officials were not immediately available for comments but police said the priest received the threatening letter last evening on a computer-composed ISIS letterhead with perpetrator identifying him as one AB Siddiqui.

" is an Islamic state. You can't preach your religion here. If you continue preaching, you'll be hacked to death with machetes between the 20th and 30th," the officer quoted the letter as saying.

The letter, he said, did not mention any month.

Last evening, a 50-year-old Hindu Mathematics lecturer at the Nazimuddin Government University College, was hacked with lethal weapons by the attackers who stormed his residence in Madaripur in southwestern .

The lecturer is the only Hindu victim to survive an attack by the Islamists, who have hacked to death four other members from the community in recent months.

Suspected Islamists have killed a number of secular activists, Hindus and other minorities across the country in recent months prompting authorities to launch a nationwide anti-militant clampdown since Friday.

authorities have detained nearly 12,000 people in a nationwide crackdown to halt a spate of deadly attacks. Some of those arrested were linked with outlawed Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh.

Though most of the attacks were claimed by the Islamic State or its affiliates and other similar extremist groups, the Bangladesh government has repeatedly dismissed the claims and said the attacks were carried out by homegrown outfits linked to the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
A meeting of the working group of BRICS countries on employment generation and other issues would be held in Hyderabad on July 27 and 28, Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said here today.

The meeting of the working group is preparatory for a BRICS meet to be held in Delhi, he told reporters.

Dattatreya, who recently attended the International Labour Conference in Geneva, said the focus of the Union Government and other countries is on employment generation.

"The initiatives of the NDA government to spur growth are helping in generating employment. The Narendra Modi government favoured an inclusive growth," he said.

The Labour Ministry would set up 100 model career centres in the country in partnership with the public and private sector, he said.

A modern employment exchange would be opened in Hyderabad in the third week of July, he said adding, job seekers and employers, who have registered on the National Career Service (NCS) portal of the Labour Ministry, would be brought on to a single platform on the occasion.

The state governments would be asked to come on board the NCS portal and a system to provide jobs to lakhs of job seekers, Dattatreya said.

As many as 3.60 crore job seekers, 27,195 skill providers and 8.29 lakh employers, besides 50 placement organisations, have joined the portal.

Through the portal, 45,912 have been provided jobs against 81,000 vacancies, he said.

"This is a small answer to those who are asking what did the government do in the last two years," he said.

The ESI Medical College at Sanatnagar here would be run from 2016-17, he said.

He thanked Union Health Minister J P Nadda and the Medical Council of India for giving the required permissions to the college.
India on Thursday downplayed the US Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as "global strategic and defence partner", saying it would be "premature" to speculate about its final content.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit there last week.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the US Senate.

"The preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

"The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He also noted that preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US Government to recognise India as a Major Defense Partner.

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US Government.

"It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," he added.

The US Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

Top Republican senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with America's closest allies.

NDAA was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13. But some of the key amendments including the (SA 4618) - even though they had bipartisan support.
India today downplayed the US Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as "global strategic and defence partner", saying it would be "premature" to speculate about its final content.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit there last week.

"We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the US Senate.

"The preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

"The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content," External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

In a related development, the US Senate has moved to block USD 300 million military aid to Pakistan unless the Defence Secretary certifies that Islamabad is taking demonstrable steps against the Haqqani Network.

Swarup also noted that preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US government to recognise India as a major defence partner.

"This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US government.

"It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," he added.

The US Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

Top Republican Senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as a "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with America's closest allies.

NDAA was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13. But some of the key amendments including the (SA 4618) - even though they had bipartisan support.

On aid to Pakistan, the US Congress has sought to tighten



conditions for Coalition Support Fund (CSF) to that country.

In the House version of the 2017 NDAA, while the overall CSF authorisation to Pakistan has been kept at the same level as in 2016 (USD 900 million), the quantum of non-waivable funds like funds which can only be provided on the basis of certification by the US Administration has been increased from USD 350 million in 2016 to USD 450 million in 2017.

Grant of this fund is contingent upon a certification by the US Administration that Pakistan has taken action to significantly disrupt safe-haven and freedom of movement of the Haqqani Network.

In the Senate version of the NDAA, CSF is proposed to be replaced with Pakistan Security Enhancement Authorisation (PSEA) for specifically defined activities of counter- terrorism and border security with a reduced allocation of USD 800 million.

It is a reduction of USD 100 million compared to allocation in 2016.
Acknowledging that India is "inching closer" to entering the NSG, Chinese official media today warned that India's inclusion in the grouping will "shake" the strategic balance in South Asia and "cast" a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region.

"New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month," an article in the 'Global Times' said mentioning for the first time India's progress in its bid to join the 48-member elite grouping.

At the same time the article by Fu Xiaoqiang, aresearch fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, warned that India's entry into Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region".

It said China could support India's inclusion in the nuclear club if it "played by the rules".

It is the second article in as many days by the same daily highlighting China's strident and vocal opposition to India's entry into the NSG and concerns that its all-weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'."



"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article.

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," the article titled"Beijing could support India's NSG accession path if it plays by rules".

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

"It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office," it said.
The inaugural flight of India's indigenous basic trainer aircraft, Hindustan TurboTrainer-40 (HTT-40), would be undertaken here tomorrow and Defence Minister ManoharParrikar would witness it.

The inaugural flight of HTT-40, designed and developed by HindustanAeronautics Limited, is likely to take place at 09.15 AM tomorrow at the HAL Airport here.

The sortie is expected to take place for about 25 to30 minutes, HAL officials told PTI.

Aimed at being used for the first stage training forall flying cadets of the three services, HTT-40 had made its maiden flight after much delay on May 31.

Officials said detailed design phase of HTT-40 was launched in August 2013 with HAL's internal funding and was completed in May 2015 and from there it has taken 12 months to fly the first prototype.

Indian Air Force is expected to procure seventy HTT-40 aircraft.

HAL has said that the programme aims to achieve its operational clearance by 2018, and towards this the company will be manufacturing three prototypes and two static test specimens.

Designed to meet the current demands of the Air force, there is also a provision to include weapons for the traineraircraft.

According to officials, the indigenous content on HTT-40 is close to 80 per cent with about 75 plus systems outof the total 90 on the aircraft sourced from local players and sister divisions of HAL.

HTT-40 aircraft weighs about 2,800 kg and has Turbo Prop engine of 950 shp class.

India was assigned the letters VT during the British Raj



when it was still called the Viceroy's territory.

Separately, a committee headed by Additional Secretary B S Bhullar has recommended that airlines should have simulators for every 20 aircraft in their fleet.

Sources said the panel's suggestion is aimed at ensuring that adequate training facilities are available for pilots of domestic carriers instead of going abroad for training.

Airlines shell out a significant amount towards training of pilots overseas and having enough number of simulators in the country itself would help in reducing the overall costs for the carriers, sources added.
India and Namibia today decided to iron out issues which are impeding supply of uranium from this resource-rich African country as President Pranab Mukherjee held talks with his Namibian counterpart.

India will send a joint technical team of atomic energy experts to Namibia to resolve issues which are impeding supply of uranium to India from Namibia, the world's fourth largest producer of uranium.

The issue came up for discussion during bilateral talks between Mukherjee and Namibian President Hage G Geingob.

Mukherjee conveyed to the Namibian President that India despite being a non-NPT signatory, has entered in nuclear fuel supply arrangements with 12 countries.

The Namibian side then expressed the desire to study those arrangements, Secretary Economic Relations Amar Sinha told reporters here while giving details of the talks.

He termed it as a "positive move" that Namibia is ready to engage with India on the issue. India had signed a treaty with Namibia in 2009 for the peaceful nuclear energy use but it is yet to be implemented.

Sinha said Namibia expressed "strong wish" to implement it. The Namibian side said minerals in their mines do not get them revenue, according to Sinha.

The Indian team that will visit here will explain to Namibia the technical and economical details of the arrangements with other countries and how an agreement can be reached between the two sides regarding the supply of nuclear fuel for peaceful uses.

One of the suggestions given by the Namibian side was to let an Indian company mine the fuel but it is yet to be evaluated.

"We will have to see if in this arrangement, Indian company will be allowed to access the excavated uranium. It is too early," an official said.

Namibia despite being one of the largest producer of uranium and having a treaty with India for peaceful use of nuclear use does not supply the fuel to India because of Palindaba treaty among African Union countries which bars exports of the element to non-NPT signatories.

"Regarding uranium, there is a proposal which has been pending at their end basically because of African Union decisions. Whether we can move them along, in terms of becoming a supplier of uranium for us that is one of the key objectives that we have there," Sinha had said in Delhi.

Namibia strongly endorsed the candidature of India for the UN Security Council membership, saying the reforms in the UN are pending for 20 years and should now be brought in as early as possible.

"It is also important for our two countries to maintain



regular consultations on vital issues such as the need for the reform of the United Nations Security Council and other multinational institutions, international terrorism, sustainable development and climate change," President Geingob said.

He also said "drastic" changes are needed in the UN architecture.

Mukherjee said it is an irony that a country which represents one sixth of Indian population and Africa which comprises 54 countries do not find representation in UN Security Council.

The support of Namibia is crucial as it is a member of C-10 which gives position of Africa on UN reforms.

Mukherjee also raised the issue of cross-border terrorism which is affecting India for over three decades.

The two sides agreed to have a defence cooperation with India likely to sign a memorandum of understanding for capacity building of Namibian defence forces in signals and communications by Indian army.

President Mukherjee also said India would consider the request of Namibia to get defence equipment from it.

The two sides also signed memorandum of understanding on setting up of Centre for Excellence in Information Communication Technology and an agreement with IIM Ahmedabad for capacity building of Namibian bureaucrats.

India will send 1,000 tonnes of rice to drought hit Namibia and also 100 tonnes of medicines besides a USD 20,000 aid to the Indira Gandhi clinic here.

India is also exploring a Preferential Trade Agreement with South African Customs Union of which Namibia is also a member.

Mukherjee was given an elaborate reception here at the State House, President's office, with Indian flags and photographs of Mukherjee adorning the sides of the roads. He was also given a guard of honour and a tribal dance presentation.
Government is now also planning to set up a reverse Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in Mozambique mainly for the fertiliser and petrochemical sector, while it is already in talks with Iran for a proposed SEZ there, Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers Ananth Kumar said.

"It is our endeavour to establish reverse Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in oil and gas rich countries with dedicated exports back to the country. After Iran, now we are also considering setting up SEZ in Mozambique," Kumar said at the launch of India Chem 2016 here today.

He said the talks on setting up SEZ in Iran are progressing especially after the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the country.

Government is in talks with Iran for setting up a natural gas-based petroleum plant-cum-petrochemicals complex there.

"Modi's visit to Iran, and bilateral talks with the topmost leadership of the country have strengthened the move (setting up of SEZ). I think, our Iran engagement will continue on the same lines and we are going to have engagement with Mozambique as well," Kumar said.

The minister said that when India is able to set up the reverse SEZs in oil and gas rich countries, feed stock and intermediaries -- considered to be building blocks -- are required to be made available at affordable prices so that the petrochemicals industry will become globally competitive.

He further said the talks with Mozambique are at preliminary stage and therefore, it will be difficult for quantification of amount of gas required and determine its pricing. "Once the talks are fructified, we will be able to give the details," Kumar added.

"The way Chabahar port SEZ in Iran will be a huge gateway of opportunity for bilateral trade between the two countries, we will develop similar ties with Mozambique," he said.
Acknowledging that India is "inching closer" to get membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Chinese official media today said if New Delhi is admitted into the elite grouping, "nuclear balance" between India and Pakistan will be broken.

Stating that India's entry into (NSG) will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", an article in the state-run 'Global Times' however said China could support India's inclusion in the 48 member nuclear club if it "played by rules".

Written by Fu Xiaoqiang research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary Relations, the article a second in as many days by the same daily highlights China's strident and vocal opposition to India's entry into NSG and concerns that its all weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'."



"New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month," the article said mentioning for the first time India's progress in getting support from Mexico and Switzerland.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article titled"Beijing could support India's NSG accession path if it plays by rules".

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," it said.

"As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region," it said.

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

"It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office," it said.
India's entry into the NSG will "shake" the strategic balance in South Asia and make it a "legitimate" nuclear power, leaving behind China's all-weather ally Pakistan, Chinese official media said today as it kept up its strident stand against India's inclusion in the grouping.

In a second article in as many days, state-run 'Global Times' highlighted China's vocal opposition to India's entry into the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and concerns that its all weather-ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'".

India's entry into the NSG will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", the article said.

It, however, said China could support India's inclusion in the nuclear club if it "played by the rules".

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," said the article written by Fu Xiaoqiang, research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article.

At the same time, the article said, "New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month."



"However, as a country that has signed neither the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG," it said.

"That's why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to India's membership," it said.

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into the NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.
Indian steel companies will export rails worth USD 150 million to Iran next month as part of a pact between the two countries for developing railway and other infrastructure at strategically important Chabahar port.

"The maiden consignment of rail from India worth USD 150 million would be sent to Iran in July," a top official told PTI after Ambassador of Iran to India Gholamreza Ansari called on Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari today.

The consignment of rails will be shipped by steel companies, the official said, adding that both Gadkari and Ansari deliberated on taking further the historic pact between the nations on the strategic Chabahar Port in southern Iran which will give India access to Afghanistan and Europe bypassing Pakistan.

The pact to develop the Chabahar port and other infrastructure was inked last month during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Persian Gulf nation.

Gadkari last month said that India would invest billions of dollars in setting up industries -- ranging from aluminium smelter to urea plants -- in Iran's Chabahar free trade zone.

Also, railway PSU IRCON will build a rail line at Chabahar to move goods right up to Afghanistan. The rail links are being built so that the land-locked Afghanistan can get access to the Iranian port as an alternative to the Pakistani port of Karachi.

The official said that a meeting is also "scheduled next month between Shipping Minister and his Iranian counterpart to develop a workplan for industrial needs and investments needed for Chabahar free trade zone".

The focus will be setting up industries in the Chabahar free trade zone.

Besides the bilateral pact to develop the Chabahar port for which India will invest USD 500 million, a trilateral agreement on transport and transit corridor has also been signed by India, Afghanistan and Iran, which the Prime Minister said could "alter the course of the history of the region".

Also, Gadkari has been stressing that the distance between Kandla and the Chabahar port is less than the distance between New Delhi and Mumbai and the pact would enable India quick movement of goods first to Iran and then onwards to Afghanistan and Russia through a new rail and road link.

"Over Rs 1 lakh crore investment can happen in Chabahar free trade zone," he had said.

Earlier this week Gadkari had said that India would be



able to save Rs 45,000 crore per annum on urea if it sets up a plant at Chabahar in Iran, negotiations for which are on to get gas on lower price adding that Iran has cheap natural gas and talks are on to get gas at less than USD 2 per mmBtu.

India Ports Global Pvt, a joint venture of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and the Kandla Port Trust, will invest USD 85 million in developing two container berths with a length of 640 metres and three multi cargo berths.

The Indian joint venture company will invest more than USD 85.2 million in development of the port. India's Exim Bank will provide a credit line of another USD 150 million.

Chabahar port, located in the Sistan-Baluchistan Province on Iran's southern coast, is of great strategic utility for India. It lies outside the Persian Gulf and is easily accessed from India's western coast.

The port project will be the first overseas venture for an Indian state-owned port. The Jawaharlal Nehru port, India's biggest container port, holds a 60 per cent stake in Indian Ports Global while the Kandla port has the remaining 40 per cent.
India and the US should practice cooperating with China wherever they can as this will create the goodwill that makes crises easier to work out, suggests former US State Department official Anja Manuel.

In her new book "This Brave New World: India, China and the United States", published by Simon and Schuster, Manuel stresses on bringing China and India along as partners rather than alienating one or both.

"We should find joint projects together that help us all, such as the civil nuclear agreement between the US and India I had a small part in negotiating, or the climate change agreement China and US announced in December 2014.

"The civilian nuclear talks, for example, were difficult for both countries, but they taught us how to work closely together and helped unlock new cooperation in defence, counter-terrorism and other topics. It would be great for India and China to find a cooperative project," she told PTI in an interview.

Manuel is co-founder and partner with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and former Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, in RiceHadleyGates LLC, a strategic consulting firm which assists CEOs and senior executives of major US companies to expand their business and meet regulatory challenges in key emerging markets such as China, India, Africa and the Middle East.

She says India and the US are closer partners than ever and this should be welcomed, adding, "However, we must continue to hold out an open hand to China as well because creating two hostile camps in Asia is in no one's interest."



According to the Manuel, India and the US should both be clear with Beijing about where their lines are and enforce them consistently.

"The US is not always perfect at this, and it would be helpful to have our partners - such as India and Australia - help us. For example, the US should never have stopped our freedom of navigation exercises in the South China Sea, as it did for several years before recently restarting them. We should make these multilateral whenever possible.

"India could be helpful by also making clear to China,



Vietnam, the Philippines and others that land-grabs by any country are inappropriate. India could also, for example, help the international community keep the pressure to stop Chinese industrial cyber-spying," she argues.

She also suggests companies from all three countries should continue to engage each other.

"Some Chinese companies are actively 'making in India', Indian technology firms are bringing their known-how to China, and US companies are helping China with clean energy or providing care for China's graying population - all while supporting good jobs in each of our home markets. All of us can invite Chinese students to our homes, travel there, and engage as much as possible to increase our limited knowledge of each other and end the distrust."



Manuel thinks apprehension about China has brought India and the US closer.

"Ten years ago when I was serving in the US State Department, when we spoke to our Indian counterparts about China the country was less on their radar. I think that has changed over the last few years as China has become more assertive and radiated its power south into your traditional sphere of influence.

"When I speak to Indian officials, they see China similar to how we in the US see it: First, it is a very important economic relationship, and everyone wants to maintain positive relations with China. However, for the US, China's cyber-stealing of industrial secrets, its promotion of national champion companies and its increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea sometimes makes relations difficult," she says.

For India, she says, it is China's military incursions in the Himalayas, their submarines cruising around in the Indian Ocean, and the "string of pearls."



"So part of the new alignment between India and the US is because both are looking over one shoulder at Beijing. This is a positive development, but we must ensure that we are clear and consistent with Beijing about where the lines are, but that we also make a real effort to cooperate closely with them - to avoid making China feel more surrounded and isolated," she argues.
An Indigo aircraft on a flight from Kolkata to Bhubaneswar, which landed at the Biju Patnaik International Airport here after suffering a bird hit, was withdrawn for maintenance, the airline said.

"On arrival at Bhubaneswar today it was observed that 6E-293 from Kolkata to Bhubaneswar had suffered a bird strike," a statement from the airline said.

It said IndiGo engineering staff took a precautionary measure and withdrew the aircraft from operation for maintenance work.

Consequently, 6E-256 flight from Bhubaneswar to Delhi was cancelled and all 117 passengers booked on this flight had been informed, it said.

It adding that all the passengers had been accommodated on another IndiGo flights via Hyderabad and Kolkata.

The company regretted the inconvenience caused to the passengers.

Earlier, Airport Director R Mahalingam had said the Kolkata-Bhubaneswar-Mumbai IndiGo flight had been grounded at Bhubaneswar following detection of some technical problem after it landed here and its onward journey was cancelled.

He had ruled out bird hit during landing of the flight at Bhubaneswar, as reported in a section of media, and said it was a normal landing and all passengers and crew were safe.
Iranian flag carrier Iran Air has been taken off a safety blacklist and cleared to fly in the European Union, the European Commission said today.

"Following my visit to Iran in April, a technical assessment was successfully carried out in May," EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc said in a statement.

"Based on this I am happy to announce that we are now able to allow most aircraft from Iran Air back into European skies," Bulc said.

Previously, only the carrier's EU-manufactured Airbus planes could operate in the bloc.

Iran's commercial airlines were badly hit by US and EU sanctions imposed over its contested nuclear programme, denying them access to crucial spare parts for their aircraft.

An EU-brokered deal in 2015 ended years of deadlock between the two sides, with sanctions being lifted in return for Iran committing to not develop nuclear weapons.

As a result, Iran earlier this year was able to place a massive order for more than 100 Airbus planes and it is in talks with US aerospace giant Boeing.

Bulc also said the 28-member bloc had removed all Zambian airlines from the safety blacklist after "seven years of work and extensive European technical assistance."



In addition, three Indonesian carriers - Citilink, Lion Air and Batik Air - plus Air Madagascar were given the all clear to fly in the EU.

The Air Safety List is updated regularly and with today's announcement, it names 214 airlines in 19 countries which fail to meet EU oversight standards.

Two other airlines are banned on safety concerns - Iraqi Airways and Suriname's Blue Wing Airlines - while another six are partially restricted in the aircraft types they can fly in the EU.
Iran is "encouraging" terrorism against Israel, "including" in Delhi and its concerns in this regard have been conveyed to the Indian government, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Carmon today said.

The envoy told reporters during an interaction here that Israel does not feel "left out or abandoned" over India's deepening ties with Iran. India and Israel have a lot going on, he said adding that the visit of his country's President to India is pending.

He also called for united efforts in combating terror.

"Terror is terror is terror. I think the phrase that I have learnt in India is a very important one that there is no good terror or bad terror. Terrorism anywhere should be fought and denounced. It is one of the challenges we face and have to confront," he said.

Asked whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel was on the cards, Carmon said it will happen in "due course", without giving further details. He said the high-level visits would be very important for both the countries and "beyond ceremonial".

"Iran is encouraging terrorism including in this very city. We had unfortunately an attack in 2012 against a diplomat of Israel embassy. Iran is encouraging instability in our region, Iran is developing capabilities.

"Iran is practically on the borders with Israel and I think the world knows and if we have not been vocal enough to express what we feel about Iran then we have failed. But I think we have not failed. Our hosts in India, our counterparts know exactly what we feel about Iran," Carmon said.

Israeli diplomat Tal Yehoshua and an Indian driver of the embassy vehicle, was among four people injured in a 2012 blast after a magnetic bomb stuck to the vehicle went off in the national capital. Israel had alleged that Iran was behind it.

Asked about how Israel views Modi's visit to Iran in March and the deal on developing the strategic Chabahar port, Carmon said Israel has been keeping mum on these issues as it does not tell its friends on "how to conduct their foreign policy".

"We will continue to express what we feel all over the world. We will continue to monitor from our side the agreement (P5+1) which we feel was not good. Growing India-Iran ties do not make us feel left out," he said.

Carmon said that he "feels very safe in Delhi" despite such instances. His response came when asked about Pakistani nuclear scientist A Q Khan's comment that his country can "target" Delhi in five minutes.

(REOPENS DEL 80)



Carmon, who has been serving as Israel's envoy to India since 2014, said the two countries have four working groups on internal security including on police modernisation, anti terrorism and border management.

"It encompasses all the fields of homeland security. We are working with your Home Ministry and some states," he said, adding that "we could a little better".

Asked about India's push for an NSG membership, Carmon commented that he was aware of a "very strong effort" by the Indian diplomacy to enter the elite group, although he refused to elaborate further.

On defence collaboration, he said that India and Israel were talking a little more than in the past on issues related to the sector and that things are happening.

On how Israel considers Modi not paying a visit till date despite frequently flying to other countries, he advised against judging ties solely on the basis of "counting visits".

"The 25 years of diplomatic relations would also be a jumping pad for more activities," he said.

While speaking on few other issues, he said that International Yoga Day was not a PR event and that "you will see half of the (Israeli) embassy staff" partaking in the event.

Speaking about cooperation in the agro and water sector, he also said that Israel has developed a mechanism of having dialogue directly with the states in executing projects.

"One million residents of Chennai are having water desalinated using Israeli technology," he said.
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards killed 12 Kurdish rebels near the Iraqi border in clashes in which three Guards were also killed, an Iranian agency reported today.

The fighting last evening took place in Oshnavieh in the northwest, the Tasnim agency said, citing a statement from the Guards.

Two separate groups of rebels had slipped across the border to carry out acts of "sabotage" and "create insecurity among the population", it added.

Oshnavieh lies around 20 kilometres from the border with the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

Iran's top police officer, General Hossein Ashtari, said the fighters killed were members of PJAK - the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, an Iranian Kurdish group with close links to Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

"A large quantity of arms and ammunition was seized from this terrorist group," Ashtari told Tasnim.

The incursion comes days after five Kurdish rebels and five jihadists were killed, along with a police officer, in separate clashes in the northwest and southeast of Iran.

"A team of five from the PJAK terrorist splinter group... has been identified and destroyed in the Sardasht region" on the Iraqi border, a Guards statement said on Monday.

Later that day, state television reported six more deaths in armed clashes in Sistan-Baluchistan province in the southeast.

One police officer and five militants were killed in the fighting, which pitted Iranian forces against Sunni militant group Jaish-ul Adl.
Describing the Islamic State as a formidable adversary, CIA chief today made a candid admission that the US efforts to contain the dreaded terror group have not reduced its terrorism capability and global reach.

Testifying before a Senate Committee, the CIA Director John Brennan told lawmakers that despite all of the progress against IS on the battlefield and in the financial realm, the American efforts have not reduced the group's ability to launch terror attacks outside of its base in Iraq and Syria.

The resources needed for terrorism are very modest and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses on territory, man-power and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly, Brennan said.

With the increase in pressure, Brennan felt that IS will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.

Since 2014, IS has been working to build an apparatus to direct and inspire attacks against its foreign enemies, resulting in hundreds of casualties.

The most prominent examples are the attacks in Paris and Brussels, which were directed by IS leadership, he added.

"We judge that IS is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks. IS has large cadre of western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the west.

"And the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the west, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes and legitimate methods of travel," Brennan warned.

"Furthermore, as we have seen in Orlando, San Bernardino and elsewhere, IS is attempting to inspire attacks by sympathisers who have no direct links to the group. Last month, for example, a senior IS figure publicly urged the group's followers to conduct attacks in their home countries if they were unable to travel to Syria and Iraq," he said.

Brennan told Senators that IS is gradually cultivating its global network of branches into a more interconnected global organisation.

The branch in Libya is probably the most developed and the most dangerous.

"We assess that it is trying to increase its influence in Africa and to plot attacks in the region and in Europe," he said.

(Reopens FGN 25)



Meanwhile, IS's Sinai branch in Egypt has established itself as the most active and capable terrorist group in all of Egypt.

Other branches worldwide, while also a concern, have struggled to gain traction.

The Yemen branch, for instance, has been riven with factionalism, and the Afghanistan-Pakistan branch has struggled to maintain its cohesion in part because of competition with the Taliban, he said.

Brennan said on the propaganda front, the US-led international coalition is working to counter IS's expansive propaganda machine.

IS paints a crafted image to the outside world, lauding its own military efforts, portraying its so-called caliphate as a thriving state, and alleging that the group is expanding globally, even as it faces setbacks locally, he said.

IS, he noted, releases a multitude of media products on a variety of platforms, including social media, mobile applications, radio and hard copy mediums.

To disseminate its official online propaganda the group primarily uses Twitter, Telegram and Tumbler, and it relies on a global network of sympathisers to further spread its messages.

"In sum, IS remains a formidable adversary, but the United States and our global partners have succeeded in putting the group on the defensive, forcing it to devote more time and energy to try to hold territory and to protect its vital infrastructure inside of Syria and Iraq," he said.
Bangladesh authorities have arrested an Islamist militant of outlawed Ansarullah Bangla Team who was involved in the attack on a secular publisher, whose works were deemed blasphemous by extremists, police said today.

Md Sumon Hossain Patwari, 20, was arrested here yesterday for his involvement in the attack on Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul, the Dhaka Metropolitan Police said in a statement.

Tutul's publishing house 'Shuddhashar', whose publications were deemed blasphemous by extremists, had published writings of local secular writers.

He had also published books by a controversial Bangladeshi-American atheist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered outside a book fair in Dhaka last year.

In a near simultaneous attacks on two publishing houses in Dhaka in October, suspected Islamists hacked to death publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan, critically injured Tutul along with writer Ranadipam Basu and blogger Tarek Rahim.

Ansar Al Islam, also known as Ansarullah, claimed responsibility for the attacks calling themselves as the Bangladeshi branch of al-Qaeda.

Patwari "admitted to taking part in the attack and hitting the victim thrice with a meat cleaver," the statement said, adding the suspect has divulged important information about Ansarullah.

Police had placed a Tk 200,000 (USD 2556) bounty on his head last month.

His arrest comes amid a nationwide police crackdown to halt a spate of deadly attacks. Authorities have detained nearly 12,000 people. Some of those arrested were linked with outlawed Jamaatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh.

Suspected Islamists have killed a number of secular activists, Hindus and other minorities across the country in recent months prompting authorities to launch a nationwide anti-militant clampdown since Friday. Nearly 50 people have been murdered over the past three years.
The body of an unidentified climber has been found by an ITBP mountaineering expedition team while they were on their way back after the successful scaling of 7,135 m-high Mount Mukut (East) in Uttarakhand recently.

"Force mountaineers retrieved a body from an altitude of 5,300 meters near camp II of Mt Mukut expedition. The body was found in a sleeping bag en route. It seems that the body is of a mountaineer or high altitude porter who may have been a part of an expedition team heading to summit the peak couple of years ago," an Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) force spokesperson said here.

He said a wallet with a photograph was recovered from near the body which may help in the identification and probably a final closure for the affected family.

"The body with all its belongings was handed over to the Uttarakhand Police. Carrying a body in harsh climatic and geographical conditions is always challenging but the ITBP mountaineers did it successfully," the spokesperson said.

The 25-member team of the mountain warfare-trained border guarding force made the summit on June 5 after it was flagged off for the task last month from here.

Mt Mukut East is located in the Mana valley in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district.

The force, which has a deployment along the hilly and icy Sino-India border, has made a record over 200 successful mountain expeditions on various Indian peaks as also the world's highest Mount Everest.
Citing its unique Constitutional position, Jammu and Kashmir has asked the Centre to protect the state's special taxation powers while rolling out the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Giving this information to the Assembly, Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu today said the draft GST bill circulated by the Centre has not incorporated any safeguards to protect J&K's special taxation powers.

"I have made a case for safeguards being put in place before the proposed legislation and I have been assured by the Union Finance Minister (Arun Jaitley) that it will be done," he said.

His comments came at a time when the Centre is keenly pushing the bill on GST which will reform the taxation system. The bill is currently stuck in Rajya Sabha because of resistance by main opposition Congress.

Drabu said before extending GST to Jammu and Kashmir, the bill will be brought before the state Legislature for ratification and modification, if required.

"J&K is the only state in the country with the powers to tax services... We have time and again taken up the matter of our special Constitutional position within the Union with the Empowered Committee of the Finance Ministers.

"In the recent meeting of the Empowered Committee at Kolkata, I called for constituting a sub-group of the Empowered Committee to take care of J&K's concerns on GST, given the special power to tax that J&K enjoys," he said.

He said the position of the state government over the last 14 years on GST Bill has been that it should protect the special Constitutional position of Jammu and Kashmir.

Targeting the previous National Conference government, Drabu said, "my predecessor, who despite being the Chairman of the Empowered Committee for three years, didn't present the state's views to the forum on how to protect the state's special status, except saying that it should be protected."



He said "no modalities" had been suggested by the previous state government. "We are now working on these. It is we who have to propose to the Empowered Committee how to do it and not the other way round," the Finance Minister said.

On the New Industrial Policy which is being opposed by various parties and separatists, Drabu said the changes to the policy announced in the Budget will be notified after it is passed by the House.

"Nobody should have any misconception that there is any threat to J&K's special status from the New Industrial Policy. It has been reiterated both in the Governors Address and the Budget speech that all policies, industrial and others, will be in line with the special status of the state," Drabu said.

He said the New Industrial Policy will come under holistic review once the GST regime comes into force.

"The present Industrial Policy is also for just a few months. If the GST regime is implemented, there would be sweeping changes in taxation and other matters pertaining to the industry especially in the area of exemptions and incentives," he said.
As fresh pro-quota agitation by Jats continued for the 12th consecutive day today, Haryana Finance Minister Capt Abhimanyu today cautioned the people, saying "it is a political conspiracy by some vested interests".

The Minister said the present BJP dispension in the state had got a law enacted for reservation and then recommended it be incorporated in 9th schedule of the Constitution.

"But some people are trying to spoil the peaceful atmosphere of the state by misleading the youth," an official release quoted him as saying.

He urged the youth not to get mislead and suggested the members of all communities to act wisely.

Abhimanyu, whose house in Rohtak was burnt down by miscreants during Jat quota stir in February, said the current protests in the state were not being made to get benefit of reservation "but it is a political conspiracy by some vested interests."



He said that some people see themselves being trapped in the investigation into incidents of arson during agitation and they fear that they would soon be behind bars.

"Therefore, such people were again trying to create disturbance by misleading the youth," he said.

Abhimanyu also hit out at Congress and INLD, alleging that both these parties were never serious about the reservation issue when they were in power in the state.

The current phase of Jat stir is being spearheaded by All-India Jat Arakshan Sangarsh Samiti, Its Rohtak unit president Ashok Balhara today claimed that the state government had invited some Khaps for talks in Panchkula tomorrow.

He rued that the Samiti's national president had not been invited and demanded that he should be involved towards any solution to the imbroglio.

As the Jat stir continued, INLD also lend its support, with party's senior leader Abhay Chautala yesterday addressing their gatherings at many places.

The state today remained peaceful and no untoward incident was reported, officials said here.

Chautala has so far maintained that his party INLD favours continuation of reservation given to Jats and five other communities.

"We will raise the issue in the next session of the Assembly," he had said.

After the Jat stir turned violent in February claiming 30 lives, the BJP government had brought in laws to provide reservation to them and five other communities under a newly-carved Backward Classes (C) category.

However, the High Court stayed it, acting on a public interest litigation, after which some Jat groups announced the fresh stir.

Meanwhile, Malik today alleged that some Jat youths have



been falsely implicated in cases including murder, attempt to murder and other serious charges, in last year's violence.

He also said that tomorrow AIJASS has called a meeting in Rohtak where people from various dharna sites will sit and chalk out a programme for observing 'Balidan Divas'.

Hitting out at the BJP government in the state, Malik alleged "its officers are preparing report which says that Jats are bringing weapons in tractor trolleys to the dharna venues and there is possibility of violence. They want to defame us, everyone knows that we have been holding dharnas in a peaceful manner for past 19 days. Do they have any proof in making such allegations?"



The state government had last week formed a five-member committee, headed by Chief Secretary D S Dhesi, to hold talks with the agitating Jats.

Recently, a meeting between representatives of a government-appointed committee and leaders of the Jat agitation remained inconclusive.

During the past few days, the number of protesters including large number of women has increased at various dharna sites.

Even though the sit-ins have remained peaceful so far, but the Jat leaders have threatened to intensify the stir after February 19 if their demands are not met immediately.

Besides seeking quota in education and government jobs under the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) category, the demands of the Jats include the release of those jailed during last year's agitation, withdrawal of cases slapped during the protest and government jobs for the kin of those killed and injured while taking part in the stir.

There is also a demand for action against BJP MP from Kurukshetra Raj Kumar Saini for his alleged anti-Jat rants.

The main opposition party in Haryana, the INLD, has openly come out in support of the agitating Jats this time and asked the government to meet their demands.

Senior INLD leader Abhay Singh Chautala has maintained that his party will raise the Jat stir issue in the forthcoming budget session of the Haryana Assembly here.

Senior Congress leader and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda has said that the government should implement the promises it made to the Jats earlier.

During the fresh round of the agitation, the protesters have been staging dharnas at various places in the state amid elaborate security arrangements.

Security has been further strengthened in sensitive Rohtak district, officials said.

Last year, arsonists had also set fire to the Rohtak residence of Haryana's Finance Minister Abhimanyu.

In view of the fresh Jat stir, paramilitary forces have been deployed in sensitive areas, while the state police is maintaining a strict vigil.

Haryana police is also keeping a vigil near the statues of various state icons in sensitive districts to thwart any act of vandalism.
JD(U) today decided not to renew party membership of former party MLA Usha Sinha, wife of controversial Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) Chairman Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh, allegedly involved in the +2 examination muddle.

"Usha Sinha's membership of the party will not be renewed," Bihar JD(U) President Basistha Narayan Singh told PTI.

Sinha was not occupying any party position in the party and since membership drive was on, it had been decided that her membership would not be renewed, he said.

Sinha was a former JD(U) MLA from Hilsa in Nalanda district.

Wife of former Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh, she has been made a co-accused in the toppers scandal.

Both have gone into hiding and evading arrest after a warrant was issued against them by the Court.

Bihar JD(U) President said since a government inquiry was going against her, it was decided not to keep her in the party.

Sinha, who joined as Principal of Ganga Devi Women College in Patna, has already been replaced by senior professor Kanchan Chakhaiyar after Magadh University decided to appoint him for the position.

Her husband, an ex-BSEB chairman is alleged to be the kingpin of the scam which was exposed by media by conducting interview of toppers of Arts and Science streams Ruby Rai and Saurabh Shreshta respectively, who gave unconvincing replies to very simple questions.
EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia today that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal.

"The next step is clear: full implementation of the agreement -- no more, no less," Juncker told Russia's main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.

"This is the only way to begin our conversation and the only way to lift the economic sanctions that have been imposed."



During the meeting, part of which was broadcast on Russian state television, Juncker told Putin that "some in Europe weren't pleased" with him meeting the Kremlin strongman but stressed it was an opportunity to "exchange opinions".

The Juncker-Putin meeting -- their first in Russia since the EU slapped sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine in 2014 -- had sparked Kremlin hopes it might signal the start of a return to business-as-usual with the bloc.

Putin is hosting Juncker as well as Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the three-day conference in Russia's second city just weeks before the expiry of EU sanctions that have helped plunge Russia's economy into recession.

Putin will also sit down with UN chief Ban Ki-moon alongside the world body's envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura, as he seeks to recast Moscow as a more stable partner for the West and bolster his country's flagging economy.

The EU has tied the lifting of the punishing sanctions that have battered Russia's financial sector to the implementation of a deal brokered by the leaders of France and Germany in Minsk in February 2015 to end the pro-Russian uprising in east Ukraine.

But the accord has stalled as the violence -- that Kiev and the West says is masterminded by Moscow -- rumbles on.

And despite some signs of cracks in the EU over extending the sanctions, Juncker insisted the bloc was "united".

Diplomatic sources in Brussels told AFP that EU members could agree to renew the economic sanctions against Russia for six months as early as next week as they look to clear the schedule ahead of a summit at the month's end that is likely to be dominated by Britain's EU referendum.

Despite the frosty ties with Moscow, however, Juncker insisted he had come to Russia to try to improve relations.

"If our relationship today is troubled and marked by mistrust, it is not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it, and I believe we can," he said.
Kakdwip bar association president was allegedly assaulted by Trinamool workers, prompting the body to launch an indefinite strike today demanding the arrest of the culprits.

The bar association president Manas Das was assaulted by alleged Trinamool workers while returning home from court yesterday.

An FIR was lodged in connection with the case.

Das said the association has decided to abstain from work till the attackers are arrested.

TMC had lost to Congress-CPI-M alliance in the March election to the bar association.

TMC local leadership denied any involvement of the party workers in the incident.
Punjab Congress in-charge Kamal Nath resigned as he did not want the "genuine issues" plaguing the poll-bound state to get diverted amidst the politically-motivated allegations levelled by the opposition parties, AICC general secretary Digvijaya Singh said today.

Nath, who was assigned the responsibility as the General Secretary in-charge of Punjab as well as Haryana only four days back, quit last night in a clear bid to control damage in the coming Assembly polls as rivals have been raking up his alleged role in the riots which followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

"Kamal Nath had no role at all during the 1984 (anti-Sikh) riots. The opposition parties have suddenly woken up to the allegations against him in the view of ensuing Assembly elections and started accusing him of something he had no role in," Digvijaya told reporters.

He said Nath stepped down as he did not want the "genuine issues", including drug menace etc, get diverted.

He also criticised AAP convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Earlier in the day, Digvijaya addressed a protest rally of farmers against "non-fulfilment" of promises made by BJP in run up to 2014 polls.
Senior Congress leader Kamal Nath resigned "on his own volition" as party in-charge of Punjab, anguished over the "mischievous" campaign against him by opponents regarding the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the party said today.

Talking to media, Party's senior spokesman Anand Sharma dismissed suggestions that the Congress buckled under pressure to replace him and insisted that the "dishonest, perverse, and mischievous" narrative by opposition against him was done with an eye on elections.

Replying to questions, he, however, made it clear that Kamal Nath continues to be the AICC General Secretary in charge of Haryana. On Sunday, he was appointed to the post and given charge of both Punjab and Haryana. Punjab goes to polls next year.

Reports earlier quoting party's chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala had it that Nath had resigned as General Secretary of the AICC.

Asked about the AAP's charges against Nath, Sharma said AAP has "no credibility and has an opportunistic agenda" and was targeting the Congress leader with an eye on polls...

"The demand to reopen cases is ridiculous because there is no case ever. You cannot reopen which does not exist", he said when asked about the AAP demand.

Claiming that Kamal Nath is the senior-most member of the Lok Sabha, who has also been party General Secretary and Union Minister, Sharma said that he decided to quit "out of his anguish" after being "condemned day in and day out despite being not guilty".

Noting that Kamal Nath's resignation letter to Congress



President Sonia Gandhi is "very clear", he said that the Congress leader has "never been accused of anything and even 32 years after the incident there has never been a case against him."



"He resigned on his own volition. He requested that this situation has been created to deflect attention from the real issues of corruption, misgovernance, drug mafia, syndicate and lawlessness and we have to respect his sentiment", Sharma said.

"For us, this is a non-issue...Congress rejects with contempt that it has buckled under pressure.This has been done for narrow political gains with an eye on elections. Congress has not buckled under pressure"



Targeting the detractors of Congress, he said "You cannot just assault the reputation of any person. In our law, Supreme Court says right to reputation is equal with right to life and you cannot recklessly and irresponsible manner hurl accusations at somebody."



"It was a dishonest, mischievous and perverse narrative being built against Nath".

The former Union Minister had said in the letter to Gandhi that he was "hurt by the developments of the past few days wherein an unnecessary controversy has been created around the tragic 1984 riots in New Delhi."



His action came as Akali Dal, BJP and AAP had kept up attack on him and the Congress over his alleged role in the anti-Sikh riots which followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
The Mangaluru-based Karnataka Bank has bagged the Jamnalal Bajaj award for fair business practices, a certificate of merit under the category 'service enterprises-large'.

The bank's chief general manager M S Mahabaleshwara received the award from Ajay Piramal, chairman, Piramal Group,in Mumbai on June 14 in the presence of Shekhar Bajaj, president, and Kalpana Munshi, vice-president and chairperson of awards committee, Council for Fair Business Practices (CFBP), a bank release said.

The award was constituted by the CFPB in four categories--manufacturing, services, trade and distribution and charitable association.

Karnataka Bank Managing Director and CEO P Jayaram Bhat said in the release that their bank was committed to promoting the highest ethical practices in dealings with customers and stakeholders to provide them complete satisfaction and to create sustained value.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today ordered action against two builders and former management of two co-operative societies on the charges of irregularities.

The builders are 'Emaar MGF Ltd' and 'A N Buildwell Private Limited' while Co-operative Societies include 'Sunhera Apna Ghar Co-operative Housing Society Sector-55' and 'Ram Shanti Group Housing Society Sector-52' of Gurgaon, said a Haryana government release here.

Khattar was presiding over the monthly meeting of District Grievances Committee in Gurgaon, the release said.

He said he chose to preside over the meeting only because of builder-related issues and he wanted to find amicable solutions to the problems of buyers who have been suffering at the hands of builders.

It was informed in the meeting that a society named "Emaar MGF Palm Hills" was launched in March 2010 in Sector 77 of Gurgaon, in which 100 apartments in 65 towers were to be constructed, said the release.

The builder had promised to complete construction in 36 months but even after taking 90 to 98 per cent of the cost, the possession of flats had not been handed over to the allottees, the release said.

The representative of the builder informed the meeting that 25 towers were almost complete and possession would be delivered by December end The builder has 14 projects in the state, the release said.

Khattar directed the Senior Town Planner (STP), Gurgaon, to check whether the payment was construction-linked and if it was so how did the builder got 90 to 98 per cent of the cost deposited.

He also asked the builder to pay compensation to allottees for delay as per Builder-Buyer Agreement. He also directed the builder to give details of payments made by buyers for each tower and also share the work schedule of all the projects with the authorities.

Similarly, in the case of 'Spirewoods' project of A N



Buildwell Private Limited in Sector 103 Gurgaon, Khattar directed the HUDA to get the pits filled with sand after taking out water from there so that the construction remains safe and charge the expenditure from the builder.

It was told that in this issue, liquidation proceedings were going on in Delhi high court as all the directors of the company have resigned, the release said.

An FIR has also been registered against the builder for taking advance registration amount before approval of building plan, it said.

Khattar asked the authorities to try to bring out the liquidation case from the High Court so that the buyers could be provided some relief.

He also ordered to initiate action against former managements of two co-operative group housing societies.

He directed to file a case of fraud against de facto president of Sunhera Apna Ghar Co-operative Society located in plot number 63 of sector 55 for making more members "illegally", the release said.

The Assistant Registrar of Co-operative department after conducting enquiry into the matter, told that in the L-Form available with them, the society has 50 members while the accused president had made 150 members.

It was told that even after 10 years, the status of construction is 60 per cent.

This society was allotted by HUDA and when file was demanded, it was not found in its record room, for which the Estate Officer-2 has got FIR registered, the release said.

In the case of Ram Shanti Co-operative Group Housing Society of Sector- 52 Gurgaon, it was found that the former management committee of the society in collaboration with employees of Co-operative Society Maggu had made 25 extra members whereas the number of original members was 96.

For this, the chief minister directed to initiate action after registering FIR.

The original members will be identified by the Assistant Registrar Co-operative Society, the release said.
India-Sri Lanka relations have moved ahead from "being focussed on the past" after President Maithripala Sirisena took over from his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa in January 2015, the Indian envoy here said today.

Indian High Commissioner YK Sinha said bilateral ties have become robust and entered a new phase with highest-level engagements.

Recalling a flurry of high-level visits between the two South Asian neighbours across the Palk Strait, Sinha said ties entered a new phase since Sirisena took over from Rajapaksa.

He said relations have moved ahead from being focused on the past.

After Sirisena's ascent to power, there have been several high-level visits between India and Sri Lanka starting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2015, which marked the first visit to the island-nation by an Indian leader since 1987.

Sirisena has twice visited India since January 2015. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe also made his first overseas visit to India, Sinha said.

Delivering a lecture on 'India-Sri Lanka relations in the 21st Century' at the Bandarnaike Centre for International Studies, Sinha said bilateral trade between the two nations have formed the cornerstone in the growing relationship.

Contrary to perceptions, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries have been most fruitful, he said.

Sri Lankan exports have grown 13 times since the FTA was signed in 1999. This will show who has benefited most, the Indian ambassador said.

Sri Lanka and India enjoys a robust partnership and New Delhi is Colombo's largest partner in defence training, he said.

On the fishermen issue, Sinha said it was a humanitarian issue with implications on the livelihoods of those involved.

Negotiations are continuing to try and resolve the issue of fishermen of the two countries crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), he said.

He said Sri Lanka's security is in India's interest.

India stresses the need for reconciliation in Sri Lanka through a negotiated political settlement where all communities can agree. This must be within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, Sinha said.

Sirisena has taken steps to reconcile with the Tamil minority.

Several confidence-building-measures such as the release of Tamils-owned lands, lifting of travel restrictions to the North and de-escalating the military presence have been taken since January as part of efforts to ensure reconciliation after three decades of civil war with the LTTE that claimed more than 100,000 lives.
A report of a fact-finding panel on the alleged 400-crore water tanker scam linking former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit was today forwarded to anti-graft agency ACB by Lt Governor Najeeb Jung for further investigation.

The report by a committee of the Delhi Jal Board was sent to Jung by the AAP government for probe by either CBI or Delhi's Anti Corruption Branch following persistent demand by the city BJP leader Vijender Gupta.

Jung has also forwarded to ACB a complaint filed with him by Gupta accusing Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of "suppressing" the committee's report into the tanker scam for 11 months. Dikshit was not immediately available for comment.

Water Minister Kapil Mishra on June 12 had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Jung recommending either CBI or ACB probe against Dikshit in connection with alleged water tanker scam.

"LG has forwarded the committee's report to the ACB for appropriate action in the matter. He has also forwarded Gupta's complaint that the Delhi Chief Minister suppressed the report of the fact-finding committee for 11 months," government sources said.

Mishra today said that the former Delhi CM should be behind the bars for alleged corruption and that she was not facing any action as BJP was not keen to punish the guilty.

"We have filed 3 FIRs against her for various corruption cases and one in depth enquiry report which is with ACB now. My Report exposing corruption by Shiela Dikshit has been forwarded to ACB," he said.

Last week, the AAP Government had made the committee's report public after Gupta demanded from Kejriwal in Delhi Assembly to do the same.

The letter written by Mishra said the committee had "indicated" that Dikshit as the then Chairperson of Delhi Jal Board and other DJB members had indulged in "grave irregularities".

"I am requesting you to kindly hand over this matter to CBI with the direction to lodge an FIR and take further appropriate action in accordance with law," Mishra said in his letter to the PM.
Spanish police said today they had arrested a Dutch national suspected of being the right-hand man of a European drug boss.

Emiel Brummer was arrested in April in the seaside resort of Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol, under a joint probe with Dutch police coordinated by the EU's law enforcement agency Europol, the Guardia Civil police force said.

He was extradited to the Netherlands where he is currently held, they said in a statement.

The 42-year-old "met frequently with the chiefs of drug cartels from South American countries," they said.

Brummer is considered to be "the lieutenant of Robert Dawes," a suspected drug kingpin who was seized last year after a painstaking investigation, they said.

Dawes was detained in November in a raid on his luxury villa in the southern resort of Benalmadena where he lived with his family and bodyguards.

He is suspected of heading one of Europe's biggest criminal organisations devoted to drug trafficking and money laundering.

Dawes has since been extradited to France, where he is wanted in connection with the discovery of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine in a Paris airport in 2013.

According to Spanish police, Brummer "frequently travelled from the Netherlands to Malaga province where until Dawes' arrest, he received instructions regarding the trafficking and distribution of drugs arriving in European ports, particularly Antwerp and Rotterdam."



They added that he continued to develop drug operations after Dawes' arrest, "and was linked to various murders of rival Dutch gang members."



Several raids in Spain and the Netherlands saw police seize "more than six kilos of cocaine, firearms, 500,000 euros (USD 560,000) in cash, diamonds, high-end vehicles and 150 encrypted phones," the Guardia Civil said.
The process of listing of four public sector general insurance companies will begin one by one and "lot of action" is expected on the front in next few months, a top official said today.

"In the last Budget, government has announced listing of various public sector insurance companies and that is work in progress.

"We expect that the process of listing of the insurance companies will begin one-by-one. Modalities are being worked out and I think we should see lot of action on that front in the next few months," Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das said at the Economic Times 'BFSI Best Brands' Summit.

In his Budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had proposed listing of four wholly-owned PSU general insurance companies. The four companies are New India Assurance Company, National Insurance Company, Oriental Insurance Company, United India Insurance Company.

Insurance sector regulator IRDAI yesterday released draft guidelines for Indian listed insurance companies. As of now, no insurer, either private or state-owned are listed. However, several of them shown intent to tap the IPO route and get listed.

Commenting on the narrowing down Current Account Deficit (CAD) numbers, released by RBI this evening, Das said it is a "significant" achievement over the previous year.

"If you see this figure (of CAD) along with fiscal deficit, revenue deficit figures and all the other macro-economic parameters that we have, contextually we can say that Indian economy is doing well. The fundamentals are robust, especially when we have strong global headwinds," he said.

He said India should consolidate on its fundamentals to achieve much higher growth.

"7.6 per cent growth in the last year is not enough...I am sure we can do better," Das said.

Das said with good monsoon rains, passage of GST



constitution amendment bill and cumulative impact of recent economic reforms, "this year we can look at 8 per cent growth".

Talking about the various steps taken by the government, Das said the new law on bankruptcy is a "game changing legislation" and the true impact of the law will be seen when it is implemented.

The Secretary said that government is also working on a comprehensive code for resolution of stressed situation in financial sectors.

"The law is in drafting stage and we are trying our best and we hope to introduce this law in the forthcoming Monsoon session of Parliament," he said.

The bankruptcy law deals with corporates, LLPs and partnership firms. It does not deal with distress situation in financial firms.

Speaking at the occasion, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the "basic principle" of the state government is intent should be clear behind all policies and decisions.

Quoting Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, he said the government's job is not do business, but to make doing business easy and "we are working on this principle". He also said effort is also on to check leakages in taxes by using technology and public participation. He said several innovative steps have been taken in that direction.

Referring to programmes like Skill India and Digital India, Sisodia called upon the banks to support innovative ideas of youngsters and hand-hold them to become entrepreneurs.

Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said the key challenge before India is to rapidly expand its infrastructure.
The Madras High Court today dismissed the plea of an accused in a "bomb hurling" case that sought an inspection of the site by a judicial magistrate, saying such inspections cannot be interchanged for investigation.

Justice P Devadoss of the court's Madurai bench observed that though Criminal Procedure code enabled the magistrate and judges to make local inspections, it cannot be a substitute for collection of evidence.

Such inspections cannot be interchanged for investigation, the judge said.

Petitioner Pasumpon Pandian, who is one of the eight accused in the case related to hurling of a bomb at the office of State Minister Sellur K Raju in January, stated that if the magistrate inspected the site, it would throw much light on the case.

Dismissing the plea, the court said: "Evidence should be recorded in the trial court. The inspection can take place any time. But it should be intended for the purpose of appreciation of evidence adduced before the court."



"If the court finds that the evidence presented certain features and the need arises to see the very place so as to appreciate the evidence, then local inspection can be done."



"In this case, the local inspection could arise when the Investigating Officer completed his investigation, filed final report and also submitted materials as to the place of occurrence and the witnesses gave evidence in order to appreciate the evidence and witness. Now such an inspection was premature," the judge said.
Violent extremism poses "one of the biggest threats" to the Maldives' national security, the president of the troubled honeymoon islands said today, after a wave of Maldivians joined the Islamic State group.

Presenting a new national counter-terrorism strategy in parliament, President Abdulla Yameen said the government would work to tackle "violent extremism and terrorism" and safeguard the islands' prized tourist resorts.

While the president did not specifically mention Islamic extremism, according to the government nearly 50 people have travelled to war-battered Syria from the Indian Ocean archipelago, which is Sunni Muslim by law and has a population of about 350,000.

Defence Minister Adam Shareef told reporters today that 49 Maldivians had travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State group (IS).

To date there has been no violence by jihadists in the Maldives.

However, Yameen told the People's Majlis, or parliament: "Today, one of the biggest threats to the people and the national security of the Maldives emanates from the dangers posed by violent extremism and terrorism."



The strategy focuses on drafting new national security laws, improving intelligence gathering, safeguarding tourist resorts -- a major part of the archipelago's economy -- and beefing up its international cooperation on terrorism.

In its policy statement, the government said the "difficult truth today is that there are people, however small in number, in the Maldives who are motivated by and cultivate violent extremist and terrorist ideology".

"It is distressing to note that a limited number of Maldivian men have travelled to fight in various overseas conflicts, and some of them have chosen to take their wives and children along with them," the statement said.

It comes as the Maldives grapples with political turmoil that has dented its image as a luxury holiday destination.

Former president Mohamed Nasheed was sentenced to 13 years in prison last year on a terrorism charge that has been widely criticised.

He secured political asylum in Britain last month while on prison leave for medical treatment.

Nasheed has said that up to 200 Maldivians were fighting for IS in Iraq and Syria.

Local media have reported the deaths of at least five Maldivians while fighting alongside IS.
Mali's prime minister asked the UN Security Council today to impose sanctions against anyone blocking a year-old peace deal and to strengthen the peacekeeping mission after a spate of attacks.

Prime Minister Modibo Keita warned of deteriorating security on the ground after 28 peacekeepers were killed in attacks this year in Mali, making it the deadliest UN mission in the world.

"The deterioration of the situation is without a doubt a threat to all of our states" in the region, Keita told the council.

The prime minister recalled that the council had adopted a resolution that provides for sanctions against those who oppose the peace deal signed in June 2015.

"It is timely and urgent for this provision to be implemented," he said.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre said it was time to speed up implementation of the peace deal aimed at ending years of fighting in northern Mali and turn the page on the Islamist takeover of 2012.

"We have seen too many delays on too many fronts," said Delattre, who holds this month's presidency of the council.

France is drafting a resolution to deploy some 2,500 extra peacekeepers to the mission, known as MINUSMA, which currently has about 12,000 police and soldiers.

Delattre said the measure, expected to be adopted by the council on June 29, will strengthen MINUSMA's capacity and "enhance the security of peacekeepers."



The UN envoy for Mali and MINUSMA chief Mahamat Saleh Annadif described the situation in Mali as "worrisome" and said delays in moving ahead with the peace deal were "undermining the entire process."



Annadif said "losses could have been avoided" if the contingents were better-trained and better-equipped, in particular with armored personnel carriers that can withstand attacks from explosive devices planted on roads.

MINUSMA is asking the United Nations to provide surveillance drones and five more helicopters to accompany convoys on the dangerous explosives-laden routes.

A German contingent of 650 troops that will deploy in Mali in the coming months will bring aerial drones and transport planes to bolster MINUSMA.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a signatory to the peace deal, has claimed responsibility for two recent attacks on peacekeepers in the northern city of Gao.

Annadif warned that the threat from jihadist groups was shifting further south in Mali and that this should not be "trivialised.
Following Sunday's tragic massacre at a gay club in Orlando, US, "Matilda" star Mara Wilson took to Twitter to confirm that she is bisexual.

The 28-year-old actress also shared an old photo of her at a gay club, reported People magazine.

"Me at a gay club when I was eighteen. I feel embarrassed looking at it now," she wrote.

"Being a 'straight girl' where I clearly didn't belong, but I will say, I felt so welcomed there. I have never had a better experience at a club than I did then. Great music and people. And one of my friends met his partner that night.

"I haven't been to one since college, except once when a friend brought me along. I didn't feel like I belonged there. But the LGBTQ community has always felt like home, especially a few years later when I, uh, learned something about myself. So, thank you."



Although the actress did not say in her first series of tweets that she was bisexual, she later corrected a tweet saying that she was gay, responding that she identified as bi.

The conversation continued into Monday with Wilson further clarifying that she's a 2 on the Kinsey scale, which means that someone is primarily heterosexual, but homosexual in certain instances.

"Let me put it this way: I'm a 2. I know a lot of people don't like the Kinsey scale, and that is fine by me," she added.

"But I'm pragmatic at heart and find comfort in numbers."



Retweeting posts about the LGBT aspect of the shooting and recent commentary from President Obama on gun control, while also urging Facebook to focus on minority members of the LGBT community, Wilson eventually grew tired of the conversation surrounding her sexuality.

"I think I'm going to stay off Twitter for a few days. I had no idea this would be such a thing, but I guess it's flattering," Wilson tweeted on Tuesday.

"Thank you so much to everybody who has sent me words of support. I support you all, too. "



Her last deed before signing off was encouraging her followers to donate to the Pulse campaign on GoFundMe, which has already raised USD 3.5 million.
Shares of Maruti Suzuki today fell by 3 per cent on a costlier Japanese yen that may put pressure on the company's margins.

The stock went down by 2.93 per cent to settle at Rs 4,084 on BSE. During the day, it lost 3.41 per cent to Rs 4,063.45.

The stock was the worst performer among the 30-Sensex blue-chips.

On NSE, it slipped 2.98 per cent to close at Rs 4,084.10.

On the volume front, 1.26 lakh shares of the company were traded at BSE and over 11 lakh changed hands at NSE during the trading session.

"Bank of Japan (BoJ) kept its policy decision on hold. The move sparked a steep rise in the yen which strengthened more than 1 per cent against the USD, hitting a 21-month high," Bonanza Portfolio, Head Wealth Management and Financial Planning Achin Goel said.

Meanwhile, in the broader market, the Sensex ended lower by 200.88 points at 26,525.46.
The Mathura clashes could have been avoided if the Akhilesh Yadav government had followed the high court order in a timely manner, Uttar Pradesh governor Ram Naik said on Thursday.

Voicing concern over the clashes that left two policemen among 29 dead the Governor said whatever happened in the district was unprecedented.

"Whatever happened in Mathura was unprecedented. The death of two police officers besides the other people is a matter of grave concern," he told reporters.

Naik said that if the Allahabad High Court's order for removing encroachment at Jawahar Bagh had been followed, the clashes could have been avoided.

"We saw what happened when the state government could not implement the Allahabad High Court's orders for removing encroachment at Jawahar Bagh. If the court's directions had been followed in a timely manner, we could have avoided such an incident," he said.

Naik, who had directed the government to issue a status paper on illegal encroachments in the state on Wednesday, said that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had apprised him of details of the Mathura incident.

Naik said the government should take back possession of such properties and get the illegal occupants evicted in order to ward off recurrence of Jawahar Bagh-type incidents anywhere in the state.

In various districts, illegal occupants have grabbed government land and local courts have also issued eviction order from time to time but to no avail, Naik had said in a release on Wednesday.

In a letter to the chief minister, Naik had asked the state government to issue a 'white paper' on illegal encroachment on land of parks, grazing grounds, ponds and public buildings by individuals or organisations, a Raj Bhawan release said on Wednesday.

In the clashes, 29 people, including two police officers were killed and a large number of people injured.
The Centre will stop funding states that are found indulging in irregularities in procurement of material for its flagship schemes for rural electrification and urban upgradation of power infrastructure, Power Minister Piyush Goyal warned today.

"I would request states which are not willing to join the common procurement pool to study its benefits, do an apple to apple comparison, compare the specifications (from central pool) to that being procured with your own specifications, compare the prices before you take any decision.

"Any irregularity found by us at the Centre could actually cause us to stop the funding to the states which indulge in any activity which are not in the best interest of the people of India," Goyal told the ministers and secretaries of states at a 2-day conference here.

"Dinadayal Upadhyay Gram Jyoti Yojana and the integrated power development scheme are largely funding the investments in this roll out of rural electrification and urban upgradation," he said.

"We will be watching and closely monitoring the technology and quality of products that are being bought by the states. We will be monitoring the pricing at which these are being bought and transparency with which these are being purchased.

"Any problemsassociated with the quality, technology, pricing or corruption that are brought to our notice will be promptly put up on the website (of the ministry)," Goyal said.

So, it is the choice that different states can make, he said, adding, "If you believe that you can do it better than central procurement, you are welcome. But the strength of this programme is the fact that we are all in it together and we are combining our procurement and...Combined requirement helps us to do process more honesty and helps us to keep tab on quality control".

During his half an hour long speech, the minister said that Maharashtra had earlier joined the operational efficiency part of UDAY scheme.

"Since Maharashtra was not a loss-making discom



(distribution company), we had permitted them to do that (take only operational efficiency). Two days back, when I was returning from Allahabad, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra (Devendra Fadanavis) suo moto told me that they are amending that by withdrawing the Cabinet note and join the financial benefit of the scheme," Goyal said.

"When I asked him what made you change your mind, he said I had a Finance Secretary earlier who was continuously opposing it but I replaced him and the new fellow who came and studied the benefits came up to me and said we are foolish that we are not enjoying these benefits," he added.

Goa and Karnatka will sign agreement for UDAY scheme during the conference, the minister said.

"But the day UP and Bihar join the scheme it will be a certificate for me that the scheme is for the benefit of people.
Friends and family members of victims of nightclub shooting outside the Orlando Police headquarters on Sunday | Photo: Reuters

Republican Sen John McCain said that President Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, because of the rise of the Islamic State group on the president's watch.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, made the comment on Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday's attack and some of the survivors.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaida went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq," a visibly angry McCain told reporters in the Capitol as the Senate debated a spending bill.

"So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies," McCain said.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old Muslim born in New York made calls during the attack saying he was a supporter of the Islamic State. But he also spoke about an affiliate of al-Qaida and Hezbollah, both of which are IS enemies.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting US enemies ahead of Americans.

Trump also has suggested that Obama himself might sympathise with radical elements.

Democrats criticised Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves from his remarks.

McCain is seeking a sixth Senate term from Arizona and is locked in a tight race.

Questioned on his startling assertion, McCain repeated it: "Directly responsible.

Because he pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked and there would be attacks on the United States of America. It's a matter of record, so he is directly responsible."

However, McCain later sought to clarify his comments, saying over Twitter: "To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obama's national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself."

Democrats quickly pounced on McCain's criticism. Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, said McCain's "unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump.onald Trump.
Leading commodity bourse Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX) today said it plans to introduce four-five contracts in agri-space in near future and hopes to launch its own clearing corporation.

"The exchange is ready with new derivative products such as options and indices. We are planning to strengthen our agri portfolio with launch of 4-5 new agri contracts. We have submitted laundry list of products of interest, including agricultural products for regulatory consideration," MCX Managing Director and CEO Mrugank Paranjape told reporters here.

"We are also launching 2-3 non-agri-based contracts in the near future. In line with interests of hedgers especially those from the SME segment, the exchange is also looking at the feasibility of deliverable base metal contracts," Paranjape said. He added MCX's technology is geared up for the projected volume increase post introduction of options.

MCX has cotton, cardamom, crude palm oil and mentha oil contracts in agri space. The exchange has also decided to set up clearing corporation, for which it will invest Rs 300 crore.

"Though Sebi had provided a three-year framework for setting up clearing corporation, with enough cash in hand and technology arrangements in place, the exchange is well poised to operationalise it well before the mandated time. We will invest around Rs 300 cr in setting up of clearing corporation," Paranjape said.

Commenting on technology, he said MCX has no problem with the technology supplied by its erstwhile promoter Financial Technologies (India) Ltd (FTIL) so far.

The current technology provider agreement that MCX has with FTIL would meet its technology requirements till 2022. The exchange is working with FTIL to upgrade the software to meet all future possible market needs in terms of speed and throughput. However, it has been continuously evaluating options for better technology, he said.

The company is committed to keep the focus, and continue to invest in technology and human resources to capture the new growth opportunities as well as to address the challenges of increased competition that might arise. He said there has been a 14 per cent increase in employee strength during the last one year, which also includes the appointment of five senior management personnel.

He expressed confidence that the challenges MCX was facing since July 2013 following the imposition of Commodity Transaction Tax (CTT), payment crisis at NSEL and exit of several senior employees in the wake of a forensic audit of the exchange's operations, were over, and that the exchange is on a solid footing with strong fundamentals to reap the opportunities that are imminent.

"PWC report and its suggested measures having been put in place, it is time that we look forward to launching ourselves on to the next phase of growth," he said.

"In view of substantial drop in commodity prices, the exchange has faced a steep decline in volumes. The average daily turnover on the exchange has stabilised over time and was 61 per cent higher in May, 2016 from the bottom it had touched in November, 2013," he said.

The market share in fiscal 2015-16 increased to 84.3 per cent from 84.1 per cent in 2014-15.
The mortal remains ofSignalman Ajay Singh Choudhary who was killed in Kashmir today was consigned to flames in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan.

The body of Choudhary reached Jhunjhunu in the evening by helicopter from Delhi.

The body was cremated with full military honour, defence spokesperson said.

Choudhary was killed in a gunbattle while foiling an infiltration bid in Machhil sector of Kupwara district in Kashmir.
A 41-year-old British woman MP from the opposition Labour Party was today killed after being reportedly shot and stabbed in her constituency in northern England, a week before the crucial referendum on UK's EU membership.

Labour MP Jo Cox was holding a meeting with constituents, in her local constituency when an altercation reportedly led to the attack.

Cox was rushed to Leeds General Infirmary, where armed police stood guard while medical experts tried to save her life inside.

Another man, in his 70s, was also injured in the attack and is also being treated for his wounds, which are said to be non-life threatening.

A West Yorkshire Police spokesperson said: "We are sad to confirm that Jo Cox died from the injuries she sustained in the attack today."



"We urge any eyewitnesses who were in the area to come forward and help us with our inquiries to establish factually what exactly happened," the spokesperson added.

West Yorkshire Police confirmed a 52-year-old man has been arrested. Weapons, including a firearm, have been seized from the man.

"We are not looking for anyone else in relation to this tragic incident," the spokesperson said.

The arrested man has been locally named as Tommy Mair but there is no confirmation on the motive or the exact nature of the attack, with some local witnesses describing hearing gun-shots while others saying it was a stabbing incident.

Sanjeev Kumar, an Indian-origin shopkeeper from the area, told BBC: "She was lying on the pavement and bleeding a lot. Someone had already called for an ambulance by the time I got to the scene".

The local community is to hold a vigil in Cox's memory at the local church in Birstall.

She is survived by her husband and two children.

Cox retained the Batley and Spen constituency for the Labour party in the 2015 General Election and has been in Parliament for just over a year.

She was due to celebrate her 42nd birthday next Wednesday and had been spoken of as a future minister for the Labour party due to her reputation as a strong politician and plain speaker.

As a sign of respect, both sides campaigning for next Thursday's European Union (EU) - Britain Stronger in Europe and Vote Leave - announced they would suspend their campaign for today.
The Madras High Court today ordered impleading of a top prison official from Odisha on a petition by a murder convict to expedite a decision on his plea for shifting him to a jail in his home state.

Justice S Vimala ordered the impleading of ADGP (Prisons), Odisha, allowing a prayer by the convict, serving his life imprisonment in the central prison here for last six years.

Niranjan Doss, Senior Superintendent of Prisons, Odisha and J Katikia, Additional Government Pleader of Odisha, were present in the court.

The petitioner had been convicted by a court in Ramanathapuram and sentenced to life imprisonment, which was upheld by the high court.

Initially, the petitioner had sought transfer to Magalapodah Central prison in Kendraporah district, but the Odisha government rejected his plea stating that there was no prison in the district.

The petitioner submitted that he could not attend his father's funeral nor look after his aged mother, wife and child who were struggling to make ends meet, without him.

The petitioner also submitted that he was willing to go to any prison in Odisha and as a decision on the matter could be be taken only by the ADGP (Prisons), he prayed the court to implead the ADGP.
Chief Minister V Narayanasamy would meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhinext week and seek the Centre's cooperation for clearance of several projects related to the union territory.

Talking to press persons here, he said his cabinet colleagues would accompany him during the two-day visit to Delhi from June 22.

This is the first visit of the Puducherry Ministers to Delhi after the new Congress ministry led by Narayanasamy was sworn in on June 6 after the recent Assembly elections.
A 17-year-old daughter of a senior Naval officer posted in Visakhapatnam has gone missing from Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad here, police said today.

"Kairavi Sharma, daughter of Arvind Sharma, who studies in Pune had recently completed her XI standard. She was on her way back to Pune from Visakhapatnam on June 14 via Hyderabad when she got down at the airport and has gone missing since then," RGIA police station inspector M Mahesh said.

Her father lodged a complaint with police, following which a missing case has been registered and efforts are on to trace her, the inspector said.

Kairavi's mobile phone is switched-off, he said, adding that an investigation is on.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh today stressed on the need to safeguard not only industrial, commercial and strategic installations, but also the entire coastline from external threats through sea routes.

He was speaking here at a meeting of Home Ministers, Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police (DGPs) of Coastal States and Union Territories, convened to review coastal security.

Singh reviewed all aspects of security along the country's 7,516 km long coastline.

Steps have been initiated post 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, wherein Indian Coast Guard (ICG) is designated as the authority responsible for coastal security in territorial waters, including areas to be patrolled by coastal police, he said.

Indian Navy is responsible for overall maritime security including coastal and offshore security. Indian coasts are guarded by a 3-tier system of State Marine Police, Indian Coast Guard and Indian Navy.

Singh said the ICG conducts coastal security exercises involving all stakeholders in coastal states/UTs biannually to validate these Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), prepared by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) for functioning of coastal police stations and also ICG promulgates these SOPs for coordination among various agencies on coastal security issues.

The coastline has been further secured by the creation of chain of static sensors and Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers along the Indian Coast and radars operated by the ICG at 45 locations while 38 more radars are planned to be installed for gapless surveillance of the coastline, Singh said.

MHA has issued guidelines to the coastal states/UTs in regard to security of non-major ports, the minister said.

For training of coastal police, in-principle approval has been accorded for setting up of National Marine Police Training Institute in Gujarat and State Marine Police Training Centres in the Police Training Academies of States and Union Territories, Singh said.

In order to track illegal movement, registration of fishing vessels has been made compulsory and for sensitising fishermen on safety issues, community interaction programmes are conducted by Indian Coast Guard, the Home Minister said.

After implementation of these important initiatives, our



coasts are far more secure now, Singh said.

To strengthen the monitoring and coordination mechanism for the entire gamut of coastal security, the government has set up an institutional mechanism at state and district levels. It has also strengthened the MHA level Steering Committee at the national level for review of coastal security, he added.

Singh highlighted the issues of maritime terrorism and its economic implications. He invited suggestions from the coastal states/UTs for the Phase-III of the Coastal Security Scheme to be implemented in next five years.

Under the Coastal Security Scheme, assistance is given to all coastal states and Union Territories to set up coastal police stations, check posts, outposts and construction of jetties for berthing of police boats. Presently, the Phase II of this scheme is in progress.

At the meeting, there was discussion on expeditious implementation of the Coastal Security Scheme, institutional set up in states/UTs to review coastal security, constitution of State Maritime Boards, security of non-major ports and single point mooring, coastal mapping, security of islands, distribution of Biometric Identity Cards and Card Readers, colour coding of boats, monitoring of fish landing points and crossing of International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) by fishermen, an official release said.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said as marine policing was a specialised job, a Central Marine Police Force be created to protect sea, coast, ports and vital institutions.

He also suggested that all landing points and non major ports be brought under tech based e-surveillance. Both these suggestions were supported by some states and UTs.

Singh said the Centre will seriously consider to create a coastal police as a Central Armed Police Force based on the suggestions received from coastal states/UTs.

It was also decided that for tracking the movement of fishermen to the sea and back, an integrated computerised system/tech based e-surveillance will be implemented with states and UTs and the central government will help in that direction.

Minister of State for Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju was among those present at the meeting.
Government today said New Mangalore Port, one of the 12 major ports in the country, has attracted export cargo from companies like Nestle and JK Tyres after taking steps to attract more business.

"The proactive business promotion drive by the port administration of the New Mangalore Port Trust by conducting business and trade meets at various locations in the hinterland have started to yield positive results," the Ministry of Shipping said in a statement.

This is primarily a result of the port conducting a series of business meets in Mysore and Nanjangud where various export firms are located.

The meet this month with "various export firms like Ranga Rao & Sons Pvt Ltd (incense sticks), JK Tyres, Nestle India & MK Agrotech Pvt Ltd (edible oil) has contributed to the movement of new cargo through the port", the statement said.

Some companies like JK Tyres that are already using New Mangalore Port have promised to divert more cargo through the port, it added.

India has 12 major ports -- Kandla, Mumbai, JNPT, Marmugao, New Mangalore, Cochin, Chennai, Ennore, V O Chidambarnar, Visakhapatnam, Paradip and Kolkata (including Haldia), which handle approximately 61 per cent of the country's total cargo traffic.
China, on Thursday, said President Barack Obama's meeting with the has "violated" US' promises on not supporting Tibetan independence and warned that it will hurt bilateral cooperation.

Reacting to Obama's "private meeting" with the at the White House, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing that, "Tibet affairs are China's domestic affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere".

"No matter in what way the US leader met with the Dalai Lama, the meeting violated the US promises of acknowledging Tibet as a part of China, not supporting Tibet independence and not supporting separatist activities," Lu said.

"Such a meeting will hurt China-US mutual trust and cooperation," he said.

On Wednesday, China lodged a strong diplomatic protest with the US over the meeting.

Lu said the 14th was not a purely religious figure but a political exile who has long engaged in "anti- China separatist activities under the guise of religion" and the essence of his "middle way" approach is "Tibet independence".

Obama has hosted the 80-year-old spiritual leader four times since coming to office.

In Wednesday's meeting, he met the Dalai Lama in the historic Map Room of the White House. The meeting was closed for the press.

The Tibetan spiritual leader also did not speak to the battery of reporters waiting for him.

"The President has spoken publicly in the past about his warm, personal feelings for the Dalai Lama. The president has articulated his appreciation for the Dalai Lama's teachings, and believes in preserving Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters after the meeting on Wednesday.

Earnest said the personal nature of their meeting would explain why the President received the Dalai Lama in the White House residence, as opposed to the Oval Office, for example.

"And I would just reiterate once again that the US's position, as it relates to Tibet has not changed. Tibet, per US policy, is considered part of the People's Republic of China. And the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence," he said.
President Barack Obama arrived in Orlando, where he will console loved ones devastated by a shooting rampage that has fueled America's culture wars and a fresh push for gun controls.

Air Force One touched down shortly before 1:00 p.m. (1700 GMT) in Florida, where Obama will call for national unity and meet families whose lives have been ripped apart by a tragedy of national proportions.

The massacre of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub last Sunday was the deadliest mass shooting in the history of a country that is depressingly familiar with such events. Another 53 people were wounded.

"This will be, I think, an emotional trip," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

In a rare symbolic show of bipartisanship, Obama arrived with Republican one-time presidential hopeful Marco Rubio and was greeted on the tarmac by Republican Florida governor Rick Scott and Vice President Joe Biden.

Obama and Biden are slated to meet emergency medical crews and hospital staff who laboured to save lives in the chaotic hours after the massacre by gunman Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old Muslim American of Afghan descent.

Mateen was killed in a police raid, but his motivation and how he came to possess an special forces assault rifle remain deeply contentious.

Mateen pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group in a 911 call during the attack.

The IS group then claimed responsibility for the shooting, and FBI agents believe that Mateen was radicalised by following extremist propaganda online.

That has prompted Republicans to call for tougher counterterrorism measures and for the Obama administration to do more to fight the Islamic State group.

The White House says coalition forces and allies are making gains against the group's strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Libya.

But Republican arguments were given credence by Obama's own CIA director John Brennan, who warned the group retains the ability to conduct attacks around the world.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," he told senior US lawmakers.
One person sustained bullet injuries during a clash between two groups at Entally area in the city this afternoon following which a huge police picket including RAF was posted in the area.

The incident happened at around 2PM when over ten motorbike-borne men came near an under-construction apartment at Bibibagan area and attacked a person named Shiekh Aslam, a senior police officer said.

They fired and two bullets hit Aslam's leg, he said adding a few bombs were also hurled by them at another gang, who on hearing the bullet firing rushed to the place.

Aslam was rushed to NRS hospital where his condition was stated to be stable.

While fleeing the attackers left behind one of three bikes which was put on fire by locals, who also demonstrated when policemen from nearby Entally and Beniapukur police stations reached the spot.

The anti-rowdy section of Kolkata Police, which started a probe into the attack, said Aslam and one of the attackers Niwajuddin have "serious" criminal background.

This was probably a clash between groups involved in the construction of flats and there are allegations that the gangsters are involved in a racket selling a single flat to different customers, the police officer added.
The gunman who killed 49 people at a gay club in the US this week wrote a series of Facebook posts about the "filthy ways of the West" before and during the shooting rampage, a top US Senator has said and asked the founder of the social networking site to assist in the probe.

Such an assertion by Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs came amidst reports that Mateen, 29, made as many as 16 phone calls, including three to 911 and one to a local television stations during the several hours of early Sunday morning when he carried out the deadliest shooting in American history.

In a letter to the Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Johnson said it is his understanding that Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content.

"I appreciate Facebook's support of the law-enforcement investigation into this attack and previous attacks. While Facebook is not a target of the Committee's enquiry, I respectfully request your assistance with the Committee's enquiry," he said.

Johnson said according to information obtained by his staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen.

On June 12, 2016, Mateen apparently searched for 'Pulse Orlando' and 'Shooting'.

Mateen also apparently posted "America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State...I pledge my alliance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi...May Allah accept me."

He then posted "The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the West" and "You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..Now taste the Islamic State vengeance."

In a final post, Mateen apparently wrote, "In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the USA."

In his letter on Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained and posted by Fox News, Johnson said his staff learnt that in May 2016, Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists. On June 4, 2016, Mateen apparently searched 'Baghdadi Speech'.

"My staff has also learnt that Mateen apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FBI searches, including searching for specific law enforcement offices," Johnson said asking full support of Zuckerberg in its investigations.

"I ask that you please provide all Facebook data on Mr Mateen's activities on his account and any affiliated Facebook accounts, including but not limited to activity logs, Facebook timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts,"he said.
Pakistan today said it was trying to deescalate tensions at the Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan where deadly clashes this week left a Pakistani army major and two Afghan border guards dead and scores injured.

Advisor on foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz told the parliament that he has spoken to Hanif Atmar, National Security Adviser of Afghanistan, and invited him and the Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani to visit Pakistan to discuss cross-border tensions.

Foreign ministry spokesman Nafees Zakaria also said that the matter will be resolved soon.

Aziz, however, also said that construction work for a gate at the main border crossing with Afghanistan will be completed soon despite this week's clashes that left a Pakistani army major and two Afghan border guards dead and at least 20 others injured.

The construction work to build a gate and other structures at Torkham border crossing will be completed soon for better regulating cross-border movement, Aziz said.

Afghanistan remains opposed to the building of the gate at the border crossing.

Blaming Afghan security forces for "unprovoked firing", Aziz said, "Afghan security forces started unprovoked firing on Sunday on Pakistani forces at Torkham border crossing with a view to disrupt the construction of facilities including a gate being undertaken by Pakistan well inside our territory."



Aziz said construction of the gate was essential for an effective border management to enhance the security of both countries.

"Let me reaffirm commitment of Pakistan to complete the construction works at Torkham which are part of our plan for strengthening border controls and regulate the movements across the border," he said.

Unregulated border movements also provide opportunity for infiltration of militants and terrorists, he said.

As a first step, Pakistan introduced border controls at Torkham with effect from June 1, he said.

He said that the firing has stopped since this morning.

"We welcome this development and hope that both sides move forward for early normalisation and resumption of normal traffic, while the construction works on Pakistani side continue simultaneously," Aziz said.

Pakistan plans to build seven more such gates along the porous 2,200 kilometer-long border with Afghanistan.
Rani Mukherjee starrer "Mardaani" and Mahesh Bhatt's "Jism 2" were offered to Adnan Siddiqui but the Pakistani actor says rejected both the movies as he did not like the roles.

Siddiqui, who will be making his Bollywood debut with Sridevi starrer "Mom", was waiting for the right project to enter the Hindi film industry.

However, in the past, the 46-year-old actor was offered quite a few roles for Hindi films.

"There were couple of offers to do Hindi films, some I liked some I didn't. I got a call from Yash Raj Films (YRF) for a role in 'Mardaani'. They wanted me to audition for a role of a villain (and) I found the part interesting," Siddiqui told PTI.

"But then they (YRF) called up saying they have got a young villain and wanted me to play a police officer. I was not keen on playing this role. (Filmmaker) Mahesh Bhatt had asked me to do a role in 'Jism 2' (and) that again I guess was of a police officer," he said.

There were couple of other film offers but nothing excited Siddiqui.

"I am waiting for 'Mom' to release and then I will decide what next to do here," the actor added.

Siddiqui has created a niche for himself on Indian television with his shows like "Meray Qatil Meray Dildar", "Kaisi Ye Qayamat", "Ru Baru", "Ruswaiyaan", "Mere Humdum Mere Dost" that were aired on Zindagi channel.

"I have been part of the industry for 27 years and I have proved myself. I wanted to try something different. I wanted to do something of substance in Hindi film industry and 'Mom' was the perfect choice," he said.

Siddiqui also played a small role alongside actress and filmmaker Angelina Jolie and actor Irrfan Khan in the 2007 film "A Mighty Heart".
Panama's health minister resigned today, the government said, amid a swine flu outbreak that has claimed 22 lives and sparked a panicked rush for vaccinations.

Francisco Javier Terrientes "today presented his resignation from his post for professional reasons," the government said in a statement.

It added that President Juan Carlos Varela had appointed the deputy health minister, Miguel Mayo, to take Terrientes' place.

Panama's hospitals and clinics are overrun by people wanting vaccinations against the A(H1N1) flu virus which has proved particularly dangerous this year in Panama.

Since early May, 22 people have died of the virus and 671 were hospitalized, of whom nearly half remain admitted and 38 are in intensive care.

Panama's government has announced it would make nearly one million more doses of A(H1N1) vaccines available by next week.

A(H1N1), or swine flu, was first detected in 2009, spreading from the United States to Mexico and prompting the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic that year.

This subtype of the flu virus causes a respiratory infection whose symptoms can be mild or fatal.

In tropical zones such as Panama, it can occur year round, especially during the rainy season, which has now begun in the Central American country.
Days after CBI arrested a right wing activist in connection with Narendra Dabholkar murder case, family members of Govind Pansare today demanded Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to transfer the case of the CPI veteran's killing too to the central agency for a speedy probe.

"The arrest of Dr Virendra Tawade, who is a member of the Sanatan Sanstha by CBI in Dabholkar murder case has prompted us to request Government of Maharashtra with a plea to hand over the case to CBI, as it is appropriate for CBI to take over the case so that uniform investigation can be conducted along with Dr Dabholkar murder case," Pansare's wife and daughter-in-law, Uma and Megha respectively, said in their joint plea to Fadnavis.

While pushing for their demand, the two contended that the CBI officials suspect that the same group of people were involved in the murders of Dabholkar and Pansare.

"In the investigation it has also appeared that there is a common nexus between the murders of the rationalists as there was a use of similar weapons and a common modus operandi involving the members of Sanatan Sanstha. Hence, we are requesting the transfer of this murder case to CBI," they added.

Uma and Megha further said that investigation by one agency essential for a "transparent, fair and quick" conclusion. They noted the CBI has already made progress in the investigation and is well aware of the facts of the case.

Therefore, under the interest of justice it is necessary to hand over the investigation to CBI, they added.

Appreciating Fadnavis' "full co-operation and support" in the probe until now, they duo requested him to also depute state government officers to assist the CBI in the case.

Uma and Megha stated that the special investigation team (SIT), which has been investigating the matter, too can assist the CBI in probing the matter.

The duo though rued that the probe by SIT until now has been slow and said that they repeatedly requested the team officials on visiting Goa-based ashram of Sanatan Sanstha, members who are alleged to be involved in Pansare's murder case, but there was no response.

They said it was expected that the SIT would "work hard with transparency" and come to a logical conclusion of this investigation.

"However, it has been observed that the SIT has



completely stopped functioning since few months. There have been transfers of a number of high profile police officers... this sensitive case has been handled by relatively young officers who have been in service for barely three to four years. We are under the impression that the SIT and the Maharashtra police are not serious about the investigations," they complained.

Noting that the Maharashtra Government had in the recent past taken suo moto cognisance and transferred Sheena Bora murder case to CBI, they hoped the Chief Minister considers their request "immediately".

Pansare and his wife were attacked by motorcycle-borne assailants on February 16 last year when they were taking stroll near their residence in Kolhapur.

Pansare succumbed to his injuries on February 20th in Mumbai, while Uma recovered from the attack but remains under medication and is recuperating at her home.
A key Parliamentary panel, examining a CAG report on under-reporting of revenue by six telecom firms some years ago, has suggested that measures including carrying out raids on such companies should be considered and their accounts be checked periodically.

The suggestions came in a meeting of Public Accounts Committee (PAC), chaired by K V Thomas, which met this week to examine the audit report showing Rs 12,488 crore loss to the exchequer between 2006-07 and 2009-10 due to under-reporting of revenue by six firms, including Airtel, Vodafone and Reliance Communications Ltd.

Members in the panel suggested that besides rectifying defects in policies, if any, emphasis should be on engaging the best of the lawyers by the government to ensure that the companies do not have an upper hand in litigations.

"There was also a suggestion that there raids should be conducted by telecom and revenue department officials on private telecom companies to check violations. Their accounts should be examined and raids be carried out," members said in the PAC meeting on June 13, which was attended by top officials of Telecom and Revenue Ministries besides Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The PAC is likely to submit a report on this issue next month after another meeting.

Officials from the government side, who appeared before the panel, are learnt to have argued that Indian telecom sector has taken a new shape in the last 15 years and certain policy deficiencies may need to be addressed.

"We said that defects in policy, if any, need to be rectified and the system should be strengthened," said a source.

The panel in an earlier meeting on June 6 had slammed telecom and finance ministries for "inefficient functioning" of some of their units.

It had said the lack of proper supervision of Controllers of Communications Accounts (CCAs) in Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Financial Wing in the Finance Ministry has "contributed to significant financial loss to the exchequer".

Examining the CAG report tabled in Parliament on March 11 on revenue sharing by private telecom operators between 2006-07 and 2009-10, the PAC also asked the telecom ministry representatives about a large number of litigations as it examined various angles of the sharing formula.

In its report, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) had said that Reliance Communications, Tata Tele, Vodafone, Airtel, Idea and Aircel under-reported their adjusted gross revenue by Rs 46,045.75 crore, leading to a loss of Rs 12,488.93 crore to the exchequer from 2006 to 2010.

The CAG had said adjustment of one-time entry fee paid by telecom firms, whose licences were quashed by the Supreme Court, deprived exchequer of Rs 5,476.3 crore.
A deep-sea robot has located pieces of the missing EgyptAir plane at the bottom of the Mediterranean as investigators race to find the black boxes that could reveal the cause of the crash.

While the wreckage discovered may offer clues about why the Airbus A320 went down with 66 people on board nearly a month ago, its manufacturer said today the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery.

"The first photos of the wreckage do not allow to establish any scenario of the accident," an Airbus statement said.

"Only the black boxes could contribute to a full understanding of the chain of events which led to this tragic accident."



Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo to crash on May 19, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.

The search vessel John Lethbridge, equipped with an underwater robot, arrived in Egypt last week to begin searching an area around 290 kilometres north of the Egyptian coast.

The robot discovered pieces of the fuselage at "several sites", the Egyptian board of inquiry said late yesterday.

A source close to the investigation told AFP that the robot, operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, had found "small fragments" of the plane.

Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the Mediterranean by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers.

The "pings" emitted by the black boxes were detected by French survey ship Laplace on June 1 but the flight recorders' exact location has not yet been established.

The area where the plane crashed is believed to be about 3,000 metres deep and its flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder should have had enough battery power to emit signals for four to five weeks.

Investigators expect the signals to continue until June 24.

But the John Lethbridge has equipment capable of locating them even with no pings, according to the source close to the probe.

The black boxes of Air France Flight 447, which crashed in 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean, were located nearly two years later and recovered from a depth of almost 4,000 metres.

The flight data recorder gathers information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, while the cockpit voice recorder keeps track of conversations and other sounds in the pilots' cabin.

France's aviation safety agency has said the EgyptAir plane transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.
Two persons, including a police constable, were killed and as many injured when a truck rammed a police barricade and hit three cars in R K Puram area of south Delhi, in the wee hours today.

The incident occurred at 12.50 am near R K Khanna stadium as the truck, loaded with cables, approaching from Africa Avenue did not stop at the barricade raised by R K Puram Police Station staff for checking vehicles, police said.

It first hit a car, then ran over a police constable, Dipak (36), and also hit a car he had stopped for checking papers, killing one of its three occupants, a senior officer said.

The truck driver, however, did not stop the vehicle and sped away towards Vasant Vihar, hitting another car and damaging it badly near Hyatt hotel on Ring Road. He then fled leaving behind the truck, which was confiscated, police said.

The cleaner of the truck, identified as Rahul, was arrested, and hunt is on to nab the driver, Ram Kishan, a resident of Hardoi in Uttar Pradesh, the officer said, adding the truck was going to Narayana from Faridabad in Haryana.

Besides the constable, the other victim was identified as Santosh Borah (32), a native of Assam. Two other occupants of the car, A Sura (31) from Mizoram and Esther Pongen (21) from Nagaland, who were injured in the accident were taken to a hospital and were discharged after treatment, he said.

Dipak, who hailed from Panipat in Haryana, had joined Delhi Police in the year 2000 on compassionate ground following the on-duty death of his father, who also served in the force. He is survived by his wife, 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son who live at Palam Gaon.
B-Ed candidates, seeking admission to Gour Banga University here, today protested outside the Vice-Chancellor's chamber in protest against steep hike in admission fee, in Malda district.

A police officer said the candidates raised slogan against pegging the admission fee at over Rs 1 lakh and squatted outside the chamber of VC Gopal Chandra Mishra.

As Mishra did not give any assurance of scaling down the fee, the students refused to budge unless being persuaded by university staff and the stalemate continued.
As pulses continued to soar to touch up to Rs 200 per kg, intelligence agencies were today asked to crack down on cartels, while futures trade was curbed to check speculation and buffer stock was hiked over 5-times to 8 lakh tonnes to boost supply in a multi-pronged approach.

Efforts were also beefed up to sell larger quantities of pulses at highly-subsidised rates through government agencies and outlets, but any favourable results were hardly visible in the retail and wholesale markets.

Urad dal was selling at as high as Rs 196 per kg, while chana was also seen moving closer to Rs 100 per kg level. Tur dal continued to rule high at Rs 166 per kg, while moong and masur were being sold at Rs 125 and Rs 105 per kg, respectively, as per the latest government data.

In some high-end markets in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the prices of pulses were even higher.

Taking forward the decisions taken at a high-profile meeting chaired by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley yesterday, the Food Ministry decided to enhance the buffer stock of pulses from 1.5 lakh tonnes to 8 lakh tonnes.

Markets regulator Sebi joined hands by banning any fresh futures market position in chana, the only commodity among pulses where such trading was allowed.

At the outlets of the government agencies, further stocks were added to sell pulses at subsidised rates, including at Rs Rs 60 per kg for chana (gram) dal and 120 per kg for urad and tur dal.

Concerned over rising prices, Consumer Affairs Secretary Hem Pande held a meeting with the officials of Department of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Income Tax, the Enforcement Directorate and Intelligence Bureau (IB).

He also interacted with state government officials of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi via video conferencing and asked them to be alert to check hoarders.

"I have asked all of them to pull up their socks and ensure that no artificial rise in pulses' prices take place," Pande told reporters after the meeting.

Enforcement agencies have also been directed to check cartelisation and hoarding of pulses, he added.
To achieve third position among India states in ease of doing business as per World Bank, the Odisha government today fixed timelines for implementation of required reforms.

The timelines were set for different departments at a high level meeting presided over by Chief Secretary A P Padhi here.

Earlier, the assessment done by World Bank and Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), central government, had placed Odisha in the seventh position.

While reviewing the progress, Padhi directed concerned departments to prioritise implementation of the reforms as departmental agenda and achieve the set targets by July 30, Principal Secretary of Industries Department S Chopra said.

Padhi directed the departments to upload reforms implemented in their respective departmental websites in a prominent and user-friendly manner so that investors could easily access and use it while complying to various statutory clearances and certificates.

The departments were told to segregate and categorise various points applicable for different types of industries and communicate with them accordingly through e-mail, mass media and SMS modes, Chopra said.

Stating that state government was in the process of making things easier for small and medium scale industries as these are likely to create more employment, Chopra said.

On achievements so far, he said the compliances to reform agenda by the departments varied from 46 to 100 per cent.

While the department of water resource recorded 100 per cent compliance to reform agenda by June 16, departments like commercial taxes, energy, labour and employees state insurance, industries and pollution control board varied from 82 to 98 per cent.

The overall compliance by June 16 was around 83 per cent, Chopra said.

"We have a strong commitment and will be encouraging Dubai



companies to open up business in Mumbai and to strengthen public-private partnerships," he added.

The Dubai Chamber delegation is visiting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, as part of its Global Business Forum series roadshow.

The delegation includes dignitaries and senior businessmen from the UAE visiting stakeholders in the public and private sector in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. The delegation will also meet up with the Chief Minister of Gujarat Vijay Rupani and discuss new ways to enhance economic cooperation between Dubai and Gujarat.

About Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry Established in 1965, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry is a non-profit public entity, whose mission is to represent, support and protect the interests of the business community in Dubai by creating a favourable business environment, by supporting the development of business and by promoting Dubai as an international business hub. Follow us on:



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Newly-appointed AICC in-charge of Uttar Pradesh Ghulam Nabi Azad today said the 2017 Assembly elections in UP will be a fight between "secular and communal forces" and dismissed suggestions that Rahul Gandhi will be made leader of the state.

He also hoped that Priyanka Gandhi will campaign outside party bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli.

"It would be a fight of principles and a direct contest between secular and communal forces," said the former Union Minister.

Azad, who arrived here to a rousing reception by party workers, was talking to reporters after his day-long interactions with senior party leaders and office-bearers.

Regarding Rahul Gandhi, Azad said the Congress vice-president will be elevated "at the decided time" and hence, there was no question of making him the leader of UP.

To a query, Azad, who had yesterday favoured Priyanka campaigning outside Amethi and Rae Bareli, once again hoped that she would take time out for the other parts of the state.

He also said the party will declare the name of its chief ministerial candidate at the "right time" as there was "no dearth of faces" for the post.

"But, the selection will be on the basis of leadership qualities and capabilities and not on caste and communal lines," he said.

His remark came amid speculation that Congress was planning to project 78-year-old, three-time Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit as its CM aspirant in UP.

Azad, for whom this is the fourth stint as in-charge of party affairs in UP, said this time around, he saw the state moving towards "communalism".

"Congress has always advocated secularism. It will fight whichever party comes before it to safeguard secularism," he said.

Azad, who has his task cut out, said his top priorities include strengthening the party at the ground level and hoped that Congress will get a new lease of life in the state this time.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Congress had secured only two



seats from UP with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi emerging victorious from their family strongholds of Rae Bareli and Amethi respectively.

The party is trying to regain its lost moorings in the state where it currently has only 29 MLAs in the 403-member Assembly.

Charging the BJP with giving "political colour" to the alleged exodus of Hindus from Kairana and Kandhla in Shamli district in western UP, Azad said the Centre has chosen this "wrong path" to divert the attention of the people from its failures.

"The country will have to suffer for this...Congress will not allow polarisation in the name of religion," he stressed.

Noting that communalism has been on the rise in the country in the recent years, Azad said the issue being taken up in Parliament thrice in as many years was indicative of this.

"Central ministers and senior BJP leaders are vitiating the atmosphere and Prime Minister Narendra Modi maintains silence...This proves it is a planned move," said the former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister.

The senior party leader also clarified on UPCC chief Nirmal Khatri's absence from today's meeting with rumours of his resignation doing the rounds.

"Today's meeting was organised by Khatriji who is facing a problem of slip disc. Hence, he could not take part," Azad said, adding that no one has been appointed UPCC chief in Khatri's place.

Congress has been in political wilderness in UP since 1989 following the emergence of 'Mandal-Mandir' politics and rise of BSP which took away its crucial Dalit vote base.

Mayawati's party had also lured a large chunk of Brahmin votes in the past when candidates of the community were given tickets by her to contest elections.

The Brahmin community plays a significant role in poll outcome in central and eastern UP as it is the dominant caste there. Once a traditional vote bank of the Congress, Brahmins in the state shifted allegiance to BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of 'Mandal-Mandir' politics.
Defending the Centre's stand on JNU row, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today said any kind of criticism against India would not be tolerated.

Addressing a gathering of alleged victims of CPI(M)'s post-poll violence here, he said the JNU row emerged as agitating students raised slogans supporting Afzal Guru, the kingpin of the Parliament attack case.

The minister's reaction came in the wake of the recent visit of JNU students' union president Kanhaiya Kumar to Kerala, who criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Centre's stand on the issue.

"Let me tell you clearly what is the position of BJP in the JNU issue. In JNU campus, people raise slogans, Bharat ki barbadi tak, jang rahegi, jang rahegi (we will continue to fight till India is destroyed).

"The other slogan they raised was 'Afzal Hum Sharminda Hai Tere Kaatil Zinda Hai' (Afzal we are sorry that your murderers are still alive)," he said.

Asking the audience who was Afzal Guru, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, said he was the kingpin of the Parliament attack case, who came from Pakistan.

"And that Afzal Guru, along with others, were convicted by the lower court, high court and the Supreme Court. Even the President had rejected his mercy plea. And now you are saying, Afzal Guru's killers are alive and we are ashamed," he said, adding that any kind of criticism against India would not be tolerated.

"You can criticise BJP, you can critise Prime Minister Narendra Modi and you can criticise other leaders. But criticism on India will not be tolerated. And we are very clear about it," he said.

The minister also referred to the recent controversy regarding raising of slogans of 'Bharat Mata ki jai'.

"Come on. What is this? After all in India, you will not say Bharat Mata ki Jai? There is no compulsion. But the respect for Bharat Mata comes from the heart. We are very clear about it," he said.

He also mentioned about one havildar Abdul Hamid, who sacrified his life in the 1965 war with Pakistan and his last words were "Hindustan zindabad and Bharat Mata ki jai".

"We proudly say there is no compulsion, but the respect for Bharat Mata comes from the heart and we will always say Bharat Mata ki jai... Bharat Mata ki jai... And Bharat Mata ki jai," the minister added.
A Taiwanese report says Chinese organisers have canceled an invitation to a children's choir who performed Taiwan's national anthem at last month's inauguration of the island's new president.

The official Central Agency said the Puzangalan Choir made up of children from Taiwan's native Paiwan aboriginal tribe were due to perform at a festival in southern China's Guangdong province on July 20.

It quoted the choir's musical director Wu Sheng-ying as saying the Chinese organizers informed the choir one week after they appeared at the May 20 inauguration of Tsai Ying, the self-governing island's first female president.

China claims Taiwan as its own territory and regularly retaliates against artists whom it sees as backing the island's independent identity, along with other overseas artists with whom it is displeased.
A delegation of the Rubber Industry entrepreneurs will visit Taiwan and South Korea next week to explore new opportunities and expand business collaboration by way of new markets, joint ventures, sharing of best practices and technology collaboration.

The delegation will be led All India Rubber Industries Association (AIRIA) President Mohinder Gupta and would be supported by Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

"With a view to foster ties with East Asia under Act East policy of the government, a high profile business delegation of Rubber Industry entrepreneurs will visit Taiwan and South Korea from June 20-25 2016," AIRIA said in a statement.

The visit is intended to further enhance and expand business collaboration. The main objective is to interact and network with the Rubber industry in both the countries, one- to-one business meetings, visit R&D facilities to get a better understanding of the technology and skills.

"Taiwan is very active in R&D, product innovation and in supplying quality products, which enable the development of international brands. There is lot which both countries can learn and gain from each other," Gupta added.

While both India and Korea are among the world's largest producers of rubber and rubber products. The bilateral trade on rubber and rubber products between our countries is comparatively small, he said.

"We need to develop close synergies between the Indian Rubber Industry and the Korean Rubber Industry for the benefit of two countries," Gupta said.

The visit has been coordinated by India-Taipei Association in Taiwan, Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India and Korea International Trade Association (KITA).

The delegation will be meeting with the Taiwan Rubber & Elastomer Industries Association, Exporters Association of Taipei and with Korea Rubber Industries Association, Korea Tire Association among others.
Rumours about the health of Tamil superstar Rajnikant, who is in the US now, sent his fans into a tizzy today but the actor's office assured he was fine.

"He is taking rest in the US. He is happy and is vacationing with his family. There is no need to believe rumours," his publicist said.

As it was night in the US now, the actor may take to Twitter to reach out to his fans later, he said adding that false about the 'Kabali' star had been flashed in some online portal.

The 'rumours' about their icon's health caused concern among his fans who took to the social media flooding it with enquiries about him.

The 65 year-old actor, who was recently honoured with Padma Vibushan, has finished his soon to be released 'Kabali' and is likely to take up ace director Shankar's "2.O," a sequel to the duo's earlier hit 'Enthiran,' made in Hindi as 'Robot.
A Government-supported campaign aiming to provide world-class education to children studying in rural schools across Maharashtra with help from corporates and NGOs was launched here today.

'EkShiksha' was launched by Education Department of Maharashtra in collaboration with ConnectEd Technologies, an education-technology start-up that creates rural-focused solutions.

The campaign aims at uniting socially-responsible corporates, NGOs, school managements and grassroots-level educators to eliminate educational inequity and provide world- class education to children studying in rural schools.

Dewan Housing Finance Ltd (DHFL) is sponsoring the programme in Palghar district as part of its CSR activities.

"Under the aegis of this campaign, rural schools will be equipped with ConnectEd Technologies' 'Smart Classroom System', a solar-powered, teacher-aid product that works flawlessly in demanding rural conditions.

"The system enables educators to easily integrate tailor-made multimedia educational content into conventional teaching practices, thereby improving learning environment and academic performance in rural classrooms," DHFL said in a release here.

Under the initiative, 60 'Smart Classroom Systems' have been set up in rural schools in Palghar district.

Education Minister Vinod Tawde, in his message on the launch function, said "Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Digital India programme with the vision to transform India into a digitally-empowered society and knowledge economy, and this campaign is a step forward in that direction."



Lehar Tawde, Co-Founder, ConnectEd Technologies, said,



"As far as the rural education system is concerned, it's time the focus moved from improving student enrolment to enhancing education delivery."



'EkShiksha' aims at providing children in rural schools with equal access to world-class education, as currently enjoyed by their urban and semi-urban counterparts; with rural-focused technology playing the medium of delivery, Lehar Tawde said.

Kapil Wadhawan, CMD, DHFL,, "DHFL has been steadfast in its corporate commitment to enable people lead better lives by giving access to affordable housing finance. Education is key to better living, which is why we are focusing on its enhancement through our CSR activities.
South Africa today marked 40 years since the Soweto uprising, when security forces fired on black students in a massacre that triggered a new era of anti-apartheid resistance.

The 1976 protests, and the apartheid regime's violent response, fuelled a struggle that eventually led to the fall of white-minority rule with Nelson Mandela's election as president in 1994.

The anniversary has been commemorated by a series of events to honour those who took part in the uprising, which began as a protest against a government order that schools could only teach in the Afrikaans language used by whites.

"(The students) were dreaming about good quality education, they were dreaming about a new democracy," Jeff Radebe, a senior government minister, said at the start of the official ceremony at a stadium in Soweto.

"The youth of 2016 are enjoying the fruit of seed that was laid by those youngsters of 1976 who defied the might of the apartheid state."



At the time at least 170 people were killed, with some estimates putting the death toll at several hundred over the following months as the uprising spread from the township of Soweto, south of Johannesburg.

Images of poor, young black students gunned down by white police brought the injustices of apartheid to the world's attention and spurred the global anti-apartheid movement.

President Jacob Zuma was due to make a national address at the stadium, after Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa placed a wreath at the memorial to Hector Pieterson, who was killed aged 13.

The black-and-white photograph of Pieterson's body being carried away by a student in tears became the iconic image of the uprising.

Divisions along racial lines remain strong in South Africa, with most black people enduring worse education, housing and unemployment than white people.

Students have again been protesting in recent months over tuition fees that force some poor black youths out of education.

Racist Internet postings have underlined long-standing frictions worsened by the country's dire economic performance and anger at politicians' failure to meet post-apartheid expectations.

Highlighting the country's unhealed wounds, a reconciliation event in Soweto last Saturday was sparsely attended.

The gathering had been intended to bring together black and white people, but it split some black activists, and white former policemen declined to take part.

Dan Montsitsi, a student leader of the uprising, said the 1976 march in Soweto had been planned for months.

The students, most of whom were in their school uniforms, carried placards reading: "Afrikaans stinks", "To hell with Afrikaans" and "Afrikaans needs to be abolished".

"We were amazed with the number of students that we had been able to put in the streets," he told AFP ahead of the 40th anniversary.

He said the police released a dog into the crowd, which was killed.

"The police were very angry obviously and they decided they would use teargas.

"(Soon after) they started to shoot."



June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa marking Youth Day.
In a bid to check cheap imports into the country, India's largest steel maker Steel Authority Of India (SAIL) has urged the government to review the market opening trade pacts with Japan and South Korea.

"We are requesting a review of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with Japan and South Korea as it has resulted in a spurt in cheap imports from these nations," Chairman PK Singh told PTI.

The chief of the domestic steel giant also warned against excess capacity of the metal globally, especially in China, which can impact firms in India and suggested continuation of the minimum import price (MIP) after August 2016.

Government imposed MIP on 173 grades of steel in February ranging between $341 and $752 per tonne for a period of six months ending August 2016.

"India is the bright spot in steel consumption, but we need to check the spectre of excess capacity in the world and in China, which can cause lot of damage here. I think MIP should be extended post August to check this," he added.

Explaining the rationale behind the review of CEPA and MIP, Singh said cheap imports have hurt the sales of domestic firms, which in turn has impacted their margins and has posed a threat for the companies to have excess funds to meet their loan requirements.

"MIP has helped domestic firms a lot in these few months. We also need to understand that this situation (cheap imports) is impacting companies sales and in turn is impacting their loan repayment efforts, which if continues will have a negative effect on the loan repayment scenario," he added.

Last month, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told Lok Sabha, "The biggest contributor in the NPAs is steel sector. Because if our companies will not be able to sell their steel, it is obvious that they will not be able to repay bank loan and the interest upon it."



Gross non-performing assets (NPAs) of PSBs increased from Rs 2,67,065 lakh crore in March 2015 to Rs 3,61,731 lakh crore in December 2015.

According to the government data, helped by MIP and other measures like safeguard and anti-dumping duty, steel imports fell for the second month in May this fiscal declining 41% to 0.546 million tonnes (MT) compared to the year-ago period.

In April too, steel imports were down 15.5% year-on-year at 0.654 MT.

Data also shows that steel imports accounted for 14% of the country's total consumption, which rose 4.3% in the last financial year.

India's consumption of total finished steel saw a growth of 4.3% in 2015-16 to 80.273 million tonnes (MT) as against 77 MT in the previous financial year, Steel Ministry's Joint Plant Committee (JPC) data showed.

"Such growth was mostly led by imports, which accounted for 14% in total steel consumed by the country during the year, given that production for sale was down 1.1% during this period," JPC said.
Samsung Electronics said today it had agreed to buy US cloud computing company Joyent -- the latest in a series of start-up acquisitions aimed at strengthening the South Korean giant's software capacity.

The purchase of the San Francisco-based firm would provide Samsung with its own cloud platform to support its main mobile business and connect with Samsung household appliances such as TVs, refrigerators and air conditioners, a company statement said.

Samsung did not disclose the value of the deal, which remains subject to customary closing conditions.

It would be Samsung's third recent acquisition of a US start-up, following that of mobile payment tech firm LoopPay last year and, in 2014, of SmartThings which connects and controls home appliances via mobile handsets.

Samsung has been searching for ways to boost profits as growth in the global smartphone market slows, and has been actively pursuing tech startups, including those in the artificial intelligence field.

Almost all Samsung's mobile handsets are powered by Google's Android software and past efforts to develop and promote its own software platform have largely fizzled out.
The European Investment Bank has suspended an employee for allegedly installing secret cameras in the female changing rooms, sources close to the bank said today.

Werner Hoyer, the president of the Luxembourg-based lender, announced the suspension of the bank worker and the opening of a police inquiry yesterday, the sources said.

Managers have notified around 150 woman who may have been affected, they said.

"The human resources department has given the details of a psychologist to those who are in a state of shock," one employee told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The bank had initially launched disciplinary proceedings after the employee, a man in his 50s, was given a suspended three-year jail sentence in March in relation to pornographic material.

"The inquiry then found elements showing other potentially illegal activities by this individual on these premises," the EIB said, adding that it involved "visual material."



"The investigations took a lot of time because there was a lot of material to view," a spokesman said, adding that the bank had brought in an external expert. "No one here at the bank has viewed the material."



Luxembourg police have now opened a new inquiry, the prosecutor confirmed.

The EIB lends funds to projects linked to the European Union and has around 3,000 employees.
Congress veteran Sheila Dikshit today met party president Sonia Gandhi amid speculation that she may be made the party's chief ministerial face for next year's assembly polls in politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.

Dikshit, who served as Delhi Chief Minister for three terms, is said to have been sounded by the Congress high command for a leading role in Uttar Pradesh, possibly as the Chief Ministerial candidate.

She is believed to have sought time to make up her mind.

Congress party's election strategist Prashant Kishor is said to be in favour of a Brahmin face in UP elections and is believed to have suggested Dikshit's name.

The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress,



shifted allegiance to BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of Mandir-Mandal politics. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawati's BSP in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community.

The community's support determines the poll outcome in several seats in Central and Eastern UP.

Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Congress leader from UP Uma Shankar Dikshit, who served as Union minister and governor for a long time.

The Congress is trying to regain the lost ground in UP where currently it has just 30 MLAs in the 403-member assembly. Congress could win only two seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls represented by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi respectively.

The Brahmin community plays a significant role in election outcome in central and eastern UP as it is the dominant caste in these areas.

There was also a buzz that 78-year-old Dikshit could be made Congress' in-charge of poll-bound Punjab as the party was looking for a leader having connection with the state in the wake of Kamal Nath quitting the post last night. Dikshit is originally from Punjab.

Sources said party's preparation for assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab came up for discussion during the meeting Dikshit had with the Gandhis.
Over 400 budding entrepreneurs have filed applications with the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) for recognition as innovative startups to avail tax breaks and other benefits.

An inter-ministerial committee, which assessing such applications, has already considered 189 requests and out of that 148 applicants have been asked to properly attach relevant documents and 10 applications have been rejected as there was no innovation involved in that, an official said.

The official said that 30 start-ups have been asked to give additional information about their innovation and only one has got the approval to avail benefits for intellectual property rights.

"The DIPP has asked them to attach their documents in proper way, otherwise it would be difficult to scrutinise them," the official added.

Another source said that the startups are also facing issues in getting a certificate from VCs and incubators on the innovativeness of their proposal, which is a crucial document to avail tax sops, provided in the startup action plan.

The department has launched a portal for startups where they have do the registration process to avail the benefits.

In January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a slew of incentives to boost start-up businesses, offering them a tax holiday and inspector raj-free regime for three years, capital gains tax exemption and Rs 10,000 crore corpus to fund them.

India has the third-largest number of start-ups globally. To boost financing, a 20 per cent tax on capital gains made on investments by entrepreneurs after selling own assets as well as government-recognised venture capitalists is also exempted.

Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has asked the finance ministry to consider raising tax holiday for startups to seven years to encourage budding entrepreneurs.

The DIPP secretary said that although several states are



coming out with specific policies related with start-ups, more needs to be done by the states.

"We are also involving corporates and banks to support start-ups... Nothing is casting stone and we can rework at the definition of start-ups," Abhishek said.

The department, he said, is also working on extending easy funding to start-ups and providing a suitable environment.

Further, Sitharaman asked the start-ups to work on areas like animal husbandry, veterinary science, waste management and aggregation of fuel.

"These are the areas where we want start-ups to work on. I want them to look at how we can make our existing cities smart," she said.

The government launched the Startup India initiative in January last year to promote the budding entrepreneurs in the country.

The initiative lays down the road map for creation of a conducive ecosystem for the growth of start-ups.

As part of the ongoing initiative to facilitate the ecosystem, a virtual hub will soon be rolled out. The hub will serve as a one-stop solution platform for all such queries and also a meeting ground for investors, incubators and start-ups.
Congress leader Kamal Nath today rejected reports that he was asked to step down as General Secretary in-charge of Punjab over his alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and said he quit to ensure that attention was not diverted from the issues affecting the state.

He denied that Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked him to quit the post, adding that she understood the reasons he gave in his letter to the party to step down as in-charge of Punjab.

"I called Rahul Gandhi and told him I am sending the letter...I read him the letter. He told me to send it to the Congress President...I called Sonia Gandhi and told her that this is in the interest of the party and we should not let them use this politics," he said.

Kamal Nath said Gandhi spoke with him again after she received the letter and told him that "well if this is your reason, fine."



On being asked whether he was forced to step down as the in-charge after allegations over his role in the anti-Sikh riots resurfaced, the senior-most Lok Sabha MP wondered why the issue of his alleged role in the riots was being raked up after 32 years. He said the Nanavati Commission which investigated the anti-Sikh riots had absolved him.

"It is nothing but a political ploy to divert from the real issues," he said.

"There was an adjournment motion on which Akalis spoke, L K Advani of BJP spoke. No one pointed fingers at me," he said.

He claimed that the real issues affecting Punjab such as drugs, farmer plight, mis-governance are being ignored.

Responding to a poser on a letter reportedly written by his former Cabinet colleague M S Gill, Nath said he never raised the issue of 1984 riots with him when they were Cabinet colleagues nor in the Cabinet.

Gill had yesterday described his appointment is akin "rubbing salt on wounds".

Kamal Nath rejected suggestions that the Nanavati panel absolved him due to 'lack of evidence'. He said the report should be read in its entirety. He said he was at the Rakabganj Gurudwara near Parliament House after he was told that a crowd had gathered here.

He said that policemen at the scene asked him to engage the crowd till reinforcements arrived.

"I left as soon as I saw the reinforcements arrive," he said.
A suspected member of the Islamic State group was arrested in Sweden this week but is being held by migration authorities because he has asked for asylum, officials said today.

The 46-year-old Bosnian, described by Swedish media as "an Islamic State jihadist", arrived in the country on Monday with his four children.

The Sydsvenskan newspaper, which broke the story, said he had been flagged as a suspect in the Schengen Information System (SIS) -- Europe's system for sharing national security data -- at France's request.

He had flown into Malmo airport in southern Sweden from the Bosnian city of Tuzla carrying a recently-issued passport in his own name.

Noticing he seemed nervous as he passed through customs, border officials questioned him and confirmed his identity.

The man then demanded asylum and, despite being a suspected jihadist, was transferred to an immigration detention centre as Sweden considers the Geneva Convention on refugees to take precedence over police matters.

"Any individual is entitled to do this," Migration Office spokesman Fredrik Bengtsson told AFP. "This does not prejudge the decision that will be taken after his case is examined."



Police criticised the decision to hand the man over to immigration officials, saying he should have been deported.

"As soon as these people play their wildcard and say 'Asylum!', the gates of paradise open for them," Sydsvenskan quoted border police chief Leif Fransson as saying.

"Another Schengen country, France, has already assessed him as dangerous and decided he should be banned (from Schengen member states). Sweden cannot serve as an entry gate," he added.

Sydsvenskan reported that in 2010 the man had been arrested while living in Bosnia after a search of his home found arms and jihadist propaganda.

He had also been arrested in Turkey in February, suspected of having fought for IS, the regional newspaper added. He was deported back to Bosnia where police had seized his passport and banned him from leaving the country.

As a Bosnian national he has an extremely slim chance of winning asylum as his country, a candidate for EU membership, is considered safe by many of the bloc's members.

Sweden took in the most asylum seekers per capita of any EU country last year. Most of the 160,000 arrivals were Syrians fleeing the country's brutal five-year war.
A special court remanded to NIA custody till June 23 of Mohsin Sheikh, who had left him his home in suburban Malwani, allegedly to join .

Sheikh and two others had gone missing in December last year after another youth Ayaz Sultan's disappearance in October. Sultan had reportedly reached Syria and joined .

Sheikh was arrested from Delhi in February by the local police and the case was transferred to NIA.

A case was registered in Mumbai NIA against Sheikh and the local court issued production warrant against him, after which he was brought from Delhi.

In the court, NIA said that Sheik was involved in instigating and influencing Muslim youths in suburban Malwani in Mumbai on the instructions of a Syria-based handler.

NIA also said that he provided logistical support to another accused Rizwan during his Mumbai visit, arranged accommodation and SIM card.

The remand application said that Moshin visited Hubli in Karnataka, Hyderabad and Chennai.

He also took two persons with intention to make them join jihadi organisations in India having affiliations to .

The court accepting the NIA's request remanded him to the agency custody for eight days.
Paris Jackson has revealed the reason she has had 23 tattoos is because they help her forget about her "dark past".

The 18-year-old aspiring actress - the daughter of the late Michael Jackson - only turned 18 in April, but has already had an impressive 23 inkings on her body.

However, to Paris - who was only 11 when her father died in 2009 - the pieces are more than just body art as each time she looks in the mirror she remembers how far she has come since being sectioned to a psychiatric hospital for three months in 2013 after an overdose, reported Femalefirst.

Alongside a picture showing off her inked forearms on Instagram, she wrote: "The craftsmanship of tattoos will always be a controversy. Some people like them, some people absolutely hate them. I appreciate art, I always have. especially when that art means something to me.

"Today I can look at my inner forearms and see art that has meaning for me, I don't see a dark past anymore. My scars and self-hatred have been covered up by loving marks, creativity , ingenuity.. And depth. Sure I will always carry my past with me, but I see ink as a way of changing for the better, always improving. They represent the strength for me. I look back at my old self and then I look in the mirror, and I see a fighter looking back at me. (sic)"



One of Paris' tattoos is her father's 'Dangerous' album cover, her second permanent tribute to the late King of Pop, after she had the words 'Queen of My Heart' in her father's handwriting etched onto her left wrist.
An NGO run by civil rights activist Teesta Stelvad, who has espoused the cause of Gujarat riot victims, was today banned from receiving foreign funds, with the Home Ministry cancelling its FCRA licence.

The Home Ministry issued an order saying that the central government has cancelled the permanent registration of Sabrang Trust run by Teesta and her husband Javed Anand with immediate effect.

The government argued that the foreign funds received by the NGO under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence had not been used for the purposes meant.

The order said that during inspection, the Home Ministry found that foreign contribution has been "frequently used" for items of "personal expenses e.G. For dining in hotels, food takeaways ordered at their residences, cakes and sweets from premium outlets, purchase of purely personal items like ear-buds, wet wipes, clippers, sanitary napkins by both Teesta and Anand, which have been reimbursed to the trustees from FCRA account."



Sabrang Trust has spent an amount of Rs 50 lakh for Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt Limited (SCPPL), of which Teesta and Anand are working as directors, co-editors, printers and publisher, "clearly violating the mandate of the FCRA," the MHA order said.

"By this action, the NGO has not only unauthorisedly utilised the foreign contribution for the purposes of an unregistered entity but also that entity being a self-owned media and publication company, utilised that amount for activities totally prohibited by FCRA," it added.

The order said the NGO had transferred an amount of Rs 2.46 lakh from its foreign contribution designated account to Sabrang Trust domestic account, thus mixing of domestic and foreign funds and violating the rules.

Sabrang Trust has made direct payments of approximately Rs 12 lakh from FCRA designated account to Citi Bank and Union Bank of India on account of credit cards belonging to Teesta and Anand respectively.

The cards are issued in the name of the individuals and the above payments of the foreign contribution shall be treated to have been used for personal gain, the Home Ministry said.

The MHA order said the NGO was given an opportunity for



personal hearing but its response as well as the records made available by it were "not satisfactory" as the "same did not provide adequate explanation vis-a-vis the violations found.."



"... In exercise of powers conferred by clauses (b),(c) and (d) of sub-section (1) of Section 14 of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act 2010, the central government hereby cancels the permanent registration of Sabrang Trust with immediate effect," the order said.

Justifying the cancellation of the licence, the order said, "the association has incurred more than 50 per cent of the foreign contribution on administrative expenditure during 2010-11 (64.23 per cent) and 2011-12 (55.14 per cent) without obtaining the prior approval of the central government which is in violation of section 8(1)(b) of FCRA 2010."



The order said "it was noticed that Sabrang Trust has received Rs 1,52,593 as foreign contribution under the nature 'cultural'. Further, this amount has been reflected in Foreign Contribution-3 return in two different columns as Rs 1,02,593 under 'maintenance of place of historical and cultural importance' and Rs 50,000 under 'other expenses'.

"This indicated that the association has received the foreign contribution for purpose which is not permitted as per mandate of registration certificate and therefore, has violated the mandate of registration certificate."



It added that the NGO had "made payments to Sabrang Communications and Publishing Pvt Limited for purchase of bulk SMS from Sandesh Online Services" based in Goregaon, Mumbai.

"This action of the association is non utilisation of foreign contribution for the purpose for which it was received. Further, it constitutes transferring of foreign contribution to non-registered association engaged in media and publisations, which is prohibited activity under FCRA."



The MHA said Teesta and Anand run the Sabrang Communications & Publishing Pvt Limited (SCPPL) and publish a magazine called 'Communalism Combat'.

"It may be further mentioned that both entities are functioning from the same premises, utilising staff, infrastructure and other resources interchangeably. Thus, the association has violated Section 3 and 7, 8 (1)(a) of FCRA 2010...," the order said.

Before this action, the Home Ministry had in September last year suspended the FCRA licence of Sabrang Trust and barred it from receiving foreign funds without prior approval of the government.

Teesta has been pursuing the cases of the victims of post-Godhra riots in Gujarat when Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of the state.

Another NGO run by Teesta and Anand -- Citizens for Justice and Peace -- has already been put under prior permission category, thus making it mandatory for the organisation to take permission from the Home Ministry before accepting or utilising any foreign contribution.

Following a recommendation of the Home Ministry, CBI has already registered a case and launched a probe against Sabrang Communication and Publishing Pvt Limited for allegedly accepting and utilising foreign contribution in violation of FCRA.
Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha arrived here today on a three-day visit with an aim to depeen bilateral cooperation in areas of trade and investment, defence, security and tourism.

Chan-o-Cha will have extensive talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow during which both sides are likely to explore ways to expand maritime security cooperation, deal with threat of terrorism and boost trade.

There are indications that both leaders will discuss the situation in the South China Sea.

The Thai Prime Minister is accompanied by his spouse Naraporn Chan-o-cha and a high-level delegation comprising several cabinet ministers, senior officials and a 46-member business delegation.

Chan-o-Cha's, who arrived on his first visit here as Prime Minister, was received at the airport by Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju.

"India's excellent relations with Thailand are an important and integral component of India's strategic partnership with ASEAN. India's 'Act East' policy is complemented by Thailand's 'Look West' policy in bringing the two countries closer," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

Modi will host lunch in honour of his Thai counterpart tomorrow. The Thai PM will also call on Vice President M Hamid Ansari.

Chan-o-Cha is expected to deliver a speech at the business event hosted by FICCI, CII and ASSOCHAM on 17 June. The India- Thailand Joint Business Forum will hold its first meeting during the visit and make recommendations for boosting trade ties between the two countries.

He will visit Bodhgaya on Saturday before returning to Thailand.

"India and Thailand have strong economic synergies and the diversifying profile of growing bilateral trade and investment reflects the growth and maturity of the interaction between the two economies," said MEA.

Issues related to the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the two countries are likely to figure in talks. The volume of current annual bilateral trade between the two countries is nearly USD 8 billion and both sides are keen to expand it further.

Earlier Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra had paid a State visit to India in January 2012 and was the Chief Guest for the Republic Day celebrations.

Maritime security cooperation between the two countries countries in the Indian Ocean is already "very strong", said Secretary (East) in the Ministry of External Affairs Preeti Saran, adding ways to further enhance it may be explored during the talks.

Thailand has shown interest in joint ventures in defence production and procurement of defence platforms from India.
Three fishermen from Tamil Nadu were today arrested by Sri Lankan navy personnel allegedly while fishing near Neduntheevu, a small island off Jaffna in the north of the neighbouring nation.

President of Rameswaram Fishermen's Association P Sesuraja said the three arrested fishermen from Kottaipattinam in Pudukottai District were produced before the Oorkaval Thurai court in Sri Lanka, which remanded them in judicial custody till June 30.

The court also extended till June 30, the judicial custody of eight other fishermen, arrested by the Lankan Navy on June 2 and 5 respectively on charges of fishing in their waters, Sesuraja said quoting information received by him.

Four fishermen from Kottaipattinam were arrested when they were fishing near Neduntheevu while others from Rameswaram were detained near Kangeshanthurai.

Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention for the release the fishermen.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhra Raje today inaugurated a Toy Bank Scheme, an initiative by the district administration here, which aims at providing toys to children from poor families visiting Anganwadi centres.

Inaugurating the scheme via videoconferencing, she appreciated the initiative and said the other 32 districts of state should take interest in this type of scheme.

A campaign to collect toys from the public has begun from today for which 10 to 15 centres have been established in the city. After collection of toys, those will be distributed to the 1,936 Anganwadi centres in the district, District Collector Gaurav Goyal said.

The toys would attract children of poor families to visit the Anganwadi centres which provide free meals, health check ups and medicines to children and mothers, he said.

State Women and Child Development minister Anita Bhadel, education minister Vasudev Devnani, Divisional Commissioner H S Meena were among those who attended the programme.
A 48-hour truce took hold in Syria's war-torn Aleppo city today as key regime backer Russia blamed the United States for the lack of progress in peace talks.

The local ceasefire came hours after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Moscow that Washington's patience was running out over breaches of a nationwide truce.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in a war that has killed more than 280,000 people, but there is deep scepticism that the latest halt to fighting in the northern city will last.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and the February 27 countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.

"There is no progress in the political process," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at an economic forum in Saint Petersburg, referring to Syria.

He accused Washington, which supports Syrian rebels, of being "unable or unwilling to put pressure on its allies in the region".

Nevertheless, direct contact between Russia and the United States about Syria have taken place "without any hysteria", he added.

There have been repeated violations of the February 27 truce in Aleppo, with rebels pounding regime-controlled neighbourhoods with rocket and artillery fire and the regime hitting rebel areas with air strikes.

The new 48-hour ceasefire was announced by Moscow late Wednesday in a bid to halt violence in the city, split since 2012 between a regime-held west and a rebel-controlled east.

"On Russia's initiative, a 'regime of silence' has been introduced in Aleppo for 48 hours from 00:01 16 June (local time) with the goal of lowering the level of armed violence and stabilising the situation," Russian's defence ministry said.

The statement did not specify who Russia has discussed the two-day ceasefire with.

Residents in Aleppo's rebel-held east headed out to the markets to buy meat and vegetables on Thursday morning, an AFP reporter there said.

After weeks of air strikes, it was the first time they have shopped in the morning since the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Syria's conflict has drawn in world powers who back opposing sides, including the United States -- which broadly supports the opposition -- and Russia on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.

But a Syria analyst, Karim Bitar, described the latest local truce in Aleppo as a "ceasefire of convenience, which is not linked to a real political process".
Two policemen were killed today after four masked gunmen opened fire on them in Egypt's restive North Sinai area.

Thegunmen attacked the policemen in el-Masaeed district in the North Sinai city of Al-Arish, the Ministry of Interior said in a statement.

Egypt's North Sinai has witnessed many violent attacks by militants in the last few years and since the January 2011 revolution that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak.

The attacks targeting police and military increased after the ouster of Islamist ex-president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by military following massive protests against his rule.

Over 700 security personnel have been reported killed so far.

The military has launched security campaigns in the area, arrested suspects and demolished hide-outs that belonged to terrorists, including those facilitating tunnels leading to the Gaza Strip.
Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations voiced outrage today after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Russia had a role to play in safeguarding human rights and ending the war in Ukraine.

Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko said Ban had praised Russia when Moscow "is the main player in aggressing Ukraine and in keeping the conflict boiling."



Yelchenko said he would send Ban a formal protest to demand an explanation for the remarks made during his visit to Saint Petersburg.

Ban said that Russia "has a critical role to play" in addressing global issues "from ending the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, to safeguarding human rights and controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."



"I am completely outraged by such a statement," Yelchenko told reporters.

"I don't understand how the head of the United Nations can say such things," he said.

Yelchenko took issue with Ban's reference to "safeguarding human rights" when Russia is accused of rights abuses in Crimea, and said Moscow was "building up the nuclear potential" on the Black Sea peninsula.

Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014 in a move the UN General Assembly condemned as illegal.

Ban's remarks disqualified him from playing any role in resolving Ukraine's conflict, Yelchenko said.

The ambassador said he would express his outrage directly to Ban when he returns from Russia.

Moscow denies it is supporting separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, who took up arms against Kiev in April 2014. Nearly 9,400 people have died in the violence.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon voiced concern today over a crackdown by Bahrain's authorities against the opposition.

He is also "dismayed" by reports that human rights activists have been intimidated and stripped of their citizenship, a UN statement said.

Bahrain's authorities have suspended the main Shiite opposition group pending a ruling on its dissolution.

Human rights defender Nabil Rajab, founder of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, has been re-arrested and a jail sentence for Al Wefaq's leader Sheikh Ali Salman on charges of inciting violence has been more than doubled to nine years.

Ban said "the current actions against the opposition may undermine the reforms undertaken" by King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa and "lessen the prospect of an inclusive national dialogue in the interest of all people of the kingdom.
An undertrial, who was arrested in a kidnapping and murder case, today gave police a slip from a government hospital here where he was brought for a medical check-up.

Nazar Mohammad Dar, a resident of Rakh Shalina village of Chadoora, escaped from SMHS hospital where he was brought by a police party from Central Jail, Srinagar, a police officer said.

He said Dar was arrested some time back in a 2011 kidnapping-and-murder-case registered against him in police station Pampore.

A fresh FIR has been registered against him in police Station Karan Nagar and a departmental inquiry was ordered regarding his escape, the officer said.

Action as per law is being taken against the personnel who were accompanying Dar, he added.
Uttar Pradesh BJP chief Keshav Prasad Maurya today alleged that besides law-and-order problem, it was the "terror of a section of the society" which led to alleged Hindu migration in Kairana.

"Besides law-and-order problem, the exodus has happened because of the terror unleashed by a particular section of the society in Kairana," he told reporters here.

He also alleged that the district administration failed to check migration because of "government pressure".

Maurya said the report of the probe team sent by BJP to conduct an on-the-spot assessment of the "large scale migration" will be handed over to Governor Ram Naik tomorrow.

Regarding the state government yesterday suspending SSP, Gorakhpur Anant Dev after a Samajwadi Party leader's son was reportedly beaten up in the police custody there, Maurya accused the SP of adopting "double standards".

"The Gorakhpur SSP was immediately suspended, but no action was taken against the Mathura SSP, despite large scale violence at Jawahar Bagh there," he said.

Asked about some Congress leaders' demand of bringing Varun Gandhi into the party fold and projecting him as the Chief Ministerial candidate, Maurya said Varun Gandhi is a BJP MP and such a demand by some Congressmen points towards their "mental bankruptcy".

The BJP leader said a two-day state working committee meeting of the party will be held in Moradabad, beginning July 9.

Indicating that the working committee will be reconstituted before the meeting, Maurya said a new team will take part in it.

He also said BJP national president Amit Shah will soon attend meetings of booth-level presidents at four places in the state.

As the supense continued, several MLAs made trips to Delhi



for talks with party leadership.

The caste calculus, meticulously stitched by BJP chief Amit shah and his team, which helped the BJP win, is a major consideration for deciding on the next Uttar Pradesh chief minister.

The party also knows that given the kind of bumper voting it has got from both forward castes as well as non-Yadav OBCs, it would not want to upset the caste balance.

There are talks that if the chief minister is made from one community, a deputy chief minister can be chosen from another community to maintain balance.

Given the sheer sweep of BJP's victory which extended beyond geographical and caste boundaries, the party can have the luxury of nominating a person for the top job who can deliver on Modi's development agenda and the promise of putting down alleged lawlessness in the state under SP.

As of now the names for the top post doing the rounds include Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, Manoj Sinha and state BJP president Keshav Prasad Maurya.

Singh, a former UP chief minister, is probably the tallest BJP leader in the state, while Sinha, an upper caste Bhumihar, too has considerable administrative experience. However, their choice could antagonise lower caste voters.

Maurya, who had helped consolidate non-Yadav OBC votes in the party's favour, is said to be in the good books of BJP chief Amit Shah.

Another probable is Union Minister Mahesh Sharma, who has strong links with RSS.

As speculation swirled about the possibility of a BJP legislature party meeting, Maurya had yesterday said, "The picture will be clear in the next two to four days.
The Uttar Pradesh government tonight carried out a major administrative reshuffle shifting 26 IAS officers including three Divisional Comissioners and a District Magistrate.

Comissioner Agra Division Pradip Bhatnagar has been made Principal Secretary (Agriculture) and Aligarh Division Commissioner Chandrakant has been sent in his place, a government spokesman said.

Moradabad Division Commissioner Subhash Chandra has been sent to medical health department as Secretary.

Gorakhpur District Magistrate OP Singh has been made special secretary PWD, the spokean said.

The government also transferred 55 PCS officers.
US authorities have again extended a deadline for embattled German carmaker Volkswagen to present the details of its plan to compensate US car owners affected by the massive engine-rigging scandal, a court said today.

"Given the highly technical nature of the proposed settlements in these complex proceedings," the district court in San Francisco handling the case said in a statement that it had decided to "extend the deadline" from June 21 until June 28.

It had already been pushed back from April until June.

A hearing will be held on July 26 to approve VW's proposed deal, the court added.

VW was plunged into its deepest-ever crisis when it came to light last September that it had installed emissions-cheating software into 11 million diesel engines worldwide.

And it is currently trying to reach agreement with the US authorities over the modalities for rectifying the problem and compensating car owners of the 500,000 vehicles affected in the US.

The carmaker reached an agreement in principle in April offering US owners of some 480,000 illegally polluting diesel cars options of "substantial compensation" and to fix the cars, or to buy them back.

The offer, which will likely cost Volkswagen billions of dollars, also included the creation of a fund for environmental protection.

VW, which owns 12 different brands ranging from Volkswagen and Audi to Porsche and SEAT, has already started recalling the affected vehicles in Europe, but is not offering owners financial compensation.

The group has set aside 16.2 billion euros (USD 18.2 billion) in provisions so far to cover the costs of the scandal, with seven billion euros earmarked for legal costs alone.
US fighter planes have arrived in the Philippines for a training mission and operations to ensure access to the disputed South China Sea, the US Navy said today.

The Philippines' longtime ally deployed the aircraft to train Filipino pilots as Manila remains locked in an increasingly tense maritime dispute with Beijing.

The US Navy made a veiled reference to so-called freedom of navigation operations in which Washington sends a ship or plane to pass by a Chinese-claimed island to reject its claims of sovereignty.

"Growler aircraft will support routine operations that enhance regional maritime domain awareness and assure access to the air and maritime domains in accordance with international law," the US Navy said in a statement, referring to the EA-18G Growler airborne electronic attack planes.

Manila has been improving its defence ties with the United States, its former colonial ruler, to help boost its ability to defend its territory.

The Philippines hosts the temporary detachment at the former US airbase of Clark, a two-hour drive north of Manila.

The American detachment is composed of four aircraft and about 120 personnel, coming over a month after annual war games with the Philippines.

The US deployed similar detachments throughout the Asia-Pacific for exercises with other allies, according to the statement.

Philippine Air Force spokesman Colonel Araus Robert Musico told AFP the mission was not directed toward any country but would boost the capacity of one of Asia's weakest armed forces.

"The advantage to us is we can interoperate with US troops. We've also done a lot of missions for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, how to respond when there's a disaster in open seas," he said.

In April, the United States said it launched joint South China Sea patrols with the Philippines as China builds artificial islands in the disputed waters to press its claim over the territory.

The Philippines is awaiting a ruling from a UN-backed tribunal against China's claim to most of the South China Sea.

Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam also have competing claims to parts of the sea, a key waterway for global commerce.
The US has expressed concern over the recent clashes at the Torkham border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and asked them to take steps to de-escalate tensions.

"We're concerned by the recent clashes at the Torkham crossing point between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have gotten reports that casualties have been taken on both sides," State Department Spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

"We're also concerned about reports of the presence of heavy weapons at the border," he said.

Pakistan and Afghan forces exchanged fire on Sunday over construction on the Pakistani side of the border.

Torkham is the most frequently used crossing point at Pak-Afghan; most of the terrorists have been found using this gate for entry.

"We continue to encourage the governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan to resolve their disagreements at the crossing point and to de-escalate tensions," Kirby said.

Good relations between the two countries are key to the stability to the region, he said in response to a question.
A military search plane in Vietnam carrying nine people lost contact today while it was looking for a missing pilot whose jet fighter went down off the coast this week, state media reported.

The aircraft disappeared from the radar 40 nautical miles southwest of Bach Long Vy island, a small island in the Gulf of Tonkin that sits halfway between mainland Vietnam and China's Hainan island, state-run VNExpress reported.

"There were nine people on board including the main pilot," the site reported.

The ministry of defence said all of the passengers were military staff, according to state-run VTV.

The aircraft was part of a mass mobilisation of planes and ships searching for a jet fighter that crashed during a training mission off the coast of northern Nghe An province Tuesday.

One of two pilots on the Russian-made SU-30MK was rescued by a fishing boat the following day.

But authorities have yet to find the other pilot or any wreckage of the jet.

"There was an explosion in the cockpit. I had to make a parachute jump," the rescued pilot, Nguyen Huu Cuong, told state media after he was brought to shore.

Vietnam's civilian aviation sector has a decent safety record, but there have been several accidents in recent years involving military aircraft.

Four people were killed last year when a military helicopter crashed shortly after it took off from southern Ho Chi Minh City.

In July 2014, 19 people were killed and two others were injured when a Russian-made Mi-171 chopper crashed in the capital Hanoi during a training exercise.

The communist country has been keen to renew its almost exclusively Russian-made military hardware amid rising tensions with Beijing over disputed territory in the South China Sea.

The country will now have access to US-made weaponry after Barack Obama lifted a Cold War-era ban on arms sales during a visit to Vietnam last month.

The move was cheered by Hanoi's leadership and seen as a boost for the country as it tries to bolster its defences against its giant northern neighbour.
Self-drive carrental company Voler today launched its operations here with a plan to expand to cities like Hyderabad and Chennai by the year-end.

Adding to company's successful operations in Delhi,the announcement makes Voler one of the most prominentself-drive rental service currently in Bengaluru with a fleet ranging from mini-hatchbacks to luxury segment, a company release said.

By the end of the year, the Kolkata-headquartered company plans to offer services in major cities like Pune,Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, among others.

Voler said its operating model enables it to connectall parts of Bengaluru, allowing delivery and pickup services from customer's doorstep.

Its pay-per-use rental starting at just Rs 30 perhour, backed by car insurance and 24/7 roadside assistancesupport, liberates users from the hassles that comewith owning or sharing a car, it said.

"We are excited to flag off our operations inBengaluru market, as we have witnessed a growing inclinationtowards car sharing and self-drive.

"More and more Bengaluru consumers are finding renting a car more economical than taking their own cars for travelling," Voler CEO and Founder Vikas Parasrampuria said.

Voler said according to industry research reports, the car rental market in India is expected to touch Rs 800 billion by 2019.

The company claims that its user base in Delhi hasjumped to 15,000-plus with 50 per cent traffic comingfrom its new-age Android and iOS applications.
British national and alleged middleman Christian Michel James, wanted in India in the Rs 3,600 crore VVIP chopper deal case, was keen to get details about certain government payments made to AgustaWestland for Sea King helicopters used by the Navy, says a ED probe report.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), which has filed a second charge sheet in the case that delves deep into the role of Michel, also said that HE was curious if some particular documents had reached the CBI.

According to the report, Michel was last dropped by his driver Narayan Bahadur on February 12, 2013 at the Indira Gandhi International airport here after he which he probably never returned to India.

The charge sheet which goes into Michel's numerous visits and meeting with people in Delhi when the deal for supply of 12 AgusatWestland helicopters to the IAF was being struck, also refers to an incident that took place few years back in a hotel in Italy.

The report mentioned that Michel had offered about Euro 2,500 to a person Vimal Nagpal, Manager of the helicopter firm's services division in India, to "offer lunch/dinner" to a Navy team that was also staying in the same hotel that time.

"The Indian Navy team declined the offer for lunch/dinner by him (Nagpal) and Chris Cornish. However, we insisted and paid the dinner bill once," Nagpal said in his statement to the ED.

He also told ED investigators that Michel "wanted to know the details" of payments made by the Indian government to AgustaWestland pertaining to Sea King helicopter and status of the VVIP choppers and other issues.

"On one such occasion, Michel wanted to check with him (Nagpal) whether the documents approximately 9,500 pages were delivered to CBI or not," the charge sheet said, adding Nagpal replied to him that he will check and get back.

The records also mention an instance recorded by Bahadur where he said that Sanjeev Tyagi, cousin of former IAF chief S P Tyagi, received "three friends of Michel" at a bungalow in the posh Sainik farm area here in 2008 after the middleman asked him to pick them from a luxury hotel in central Delhi.

The driver, whose statements have been extensively used to join the dots of Michel's activities in India, also told ED investigators that the middleman once gave him Rs 5 lakh for purchasing a house in the Kalkaji area, where he also lives now.

The house was priced at Rs 16 lakh and the remaining amount was paid by the driver from his savings, he told the agency.

(REOPEN DEL 32)



Bahadur had also divulged that Michel, till as recent as February this year, used to send him money through wire transfer and that he has got over Rs 1 lakh through this channel in three tranches in less than an year's time.

Bahadur said he also used to carry cash amounts for handing over to various people in Delhi, on Michel's instructions.

"Apart from these payments he (Bahadur) had also received payments from Michel several other times as well," the driver said.

Bahadur told ED that he used to get Rs 12,000 per month in cash as his salary and once when he was taken by ED officials for identifcation of spots visited by Michel he pointed to a property in Vasant Vihar area of south Delhi as that of Michel's friend 'Paolo'.

As per current records, the charge sheet said, an Embassy of an African country is currently operational at the said bungalow.

Nagpal had also told ED that Bahadur had once delivered him cash amounts sent by Michel as AgustaWestland had proposed to IAF to have "six-axis full flight simulators for training pilots on regular basis" for the AW-101 VVIP choppers.

He also told ED that Michel had assured him that he will get "approvals from higher officials of AgustaWestland" to allocate the simulator project to a chosen firm in India.

However, the plan never worked out as IAF "did not" approve the simulator programme.

The 1,300 page charge sheet of the ED was placed before a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court here last week.

It has said the agency's investigation into the case has found that Michel allegedly received around Euro 30 million (about Rs 225 crore) from Ms AgustaWestland which was nothing but "kickbacks" paid by the firm to execute the deal for sale of 12 helicopters to India in favour of the firm in "guise of" of genuine transactions for performing multiple work contracts in the country.

The court is expected to soon take cognisance of the supplementary charge sheet.

Apart from Michel, the agency has named Ms Media Exim Private Limited and its directors, R K Nanda and J B Subramaniyam in the charge sheet. The firm was created by Michel along with the two individuals.

Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, apart from Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the CBI. Both the agencies have also notified an Interpol Red Corner Notice (RCN) or the global arrest warrant against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him.
Congress today sought to take the sheen out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent address to a joint session of US Congress, wondering why the American Senate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner".

Party's senior spokesman Anand Sharma also accused Modi of attempting to mislead the country on the issue of India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).

Talking to reporters, he wondered as to why the US Seate failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" when the Prime Minister had claimed his visit to America a success and his address to US Congress being hailed by his admirers.

Sharma claimed that not even 50 Congressmen were present when Modi addressed the US Congress and a "lot of invitations" were given to NRIs for the function. "Let US Congress publish the names of those who attended...", he said.

Reports from Washington had it that the US Senate has failed to recognise India as a "global strategic and defence partner" of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent address to a joint session of Congress, top Republican Senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as "major defence partner" in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with America's closest allies.

On the issue of India's entry into the NSG, he said Modi should "not mislead" the country as there is a "long list" of countries which have fully endorsed India's entry to the group much earlier.
Software major has sought the government's nod to set up an IT special economic zone (SEZ) in Kolkata.

The company's application will be considered by the inter-ministerial body, Board of Approval (BoA), headed by Commerce Secretary Rita Teaotia, in its meeting on June 22.

has proposed to set up IT/ITeS (IT/Information technology-enabled service) SEZ over an area of 19.76 hectares in Kolkata, the Board's meeting agenda said.

"Development Commissioner of Falta Special Economic Zone has recommended for in-principal approval (of the proposal). State government's recommendation is awaited. The proposal of the developer is submitted for consideration of BoA," it added.

Real estate firm Embassy Property Developments has also sought approval to set up a similar zone in Karnataka.

The board would also take the case of Devbhumi Realtors Pvt Ltd, which wants to surrender its IT zone in Telangana.

Besides, nine SEZ developers and units, including Gulf Oil Corporation and Lanco Solar, have sought more time from the government for implementing their projects.

In the last three years till February, the BoA has granted more time to as many as 132 developers of SEZs across the country to complete projects.

SEZs are exports hubs which contribute about 23 per cent to the country's total outbound shipments.

The commerce ministry is taking steps to revive investors interest in these zones.

The Board deals with SEZ related matters.

Exports from SEZs have declined 1.89 per cent year-on-year to Rs 3.41 lakh crore in April-December of 2015-16.

Exports from such zones stood at Rs 4,63,770 crore in 2014-15 compared with Rs 4,94,077 crore in the previous fiscal.
30-year-old IPS officer K Sasikumar was found dead with a "gunshot injury" in his office chamber in Visakhapatnam today, raising suspicion of suicide, even as the Andhra Pradesh government ordered an inquiry to ascertain the exact cause of his death.

The 2012-batch officer was posted at Paderu in Visakhapatnam district, around 300 kms from here.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, while expressing grief over the tragic death of the Andhra Pradesh-cadre officer, ordered an investigation by the Crime Investigation Department (CID).

"Sasikumar died of a gunshot injury. A note was found at the scene of the offence but his family does not want its content to be divulged," North Coastal Zone Inspector General of Police Kumar Vishwajeet told PTI.

"The exact reason of the officer's death has to be established. The CID has taken over the investigation," he said.

Sasikumar, a bachelor, hailed from Tamil Nadu and was posted as an Assistant Superintendent of Police in the tribal- dominated Paderu sub-division.

This was his second posting, after the first stint at Allagadda in Kurnool district.

Last evening, representatives of a media house spent some time with Sasikumar at Paderu and he was found to be "normal and cheerful".

There had been suspicion that he might have committed suicide but police did not corroborate the version yet.

A gunshot sound was heard from his chamber early this morning following which the sentry rushed in inside.

The sentry found the IPS officer in blood as a bullet pierced through his right temple. The officer's service weapon was found on the table.

His body was first taken to a hospital in Paderu and later to the King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam.

"We are not sure whether it happened accidentally or done intentionally. The Visakhapatnam (Rural) SP has rushed to the spot and we are examining the case," Vishwajeet had said in the morning, soon after the incident.

Home Minister N Chinarajappa visited the hospital in Visakhapatnam and paid homage to the officer. "It's a loss to the state police force," he said.
Bank of Ireland have this week reported a 25% increase in consumers applying for a home improvement loan in the first quarter of 2016 versus the same period last year.

Their data shows that Meath, Longford, Kerry, Limerick and Carlow saw the highest increases in applications for home improvements.

The average loan application amount to the Bank has increased by 20% from 10,000 to 12,000 and the average loan term remained steady at five years.



Four in ten (42%) of applicants were aged 35  44 and a similar proportion (38%) were over 45 years old.

Forty four per cent were applying for amounts up to 10,000, one in three (31%) were looking to borrow up to 20,000 and one in four (24%) requested amounts greater than 20,000.

Sixty per cent of applicants were male.



According to figures provided by Onlinetradesmen.ie, Ireland's largest source website for qualified trade professionals, 14,000 home improvement projects submitted by consumers in the first quarter this year, approximately one in seven (15%) related to extensions. Kitchen / bathroom refurbishment and internal carpentry jobs account for over one in ten projects (12%). Painting and decorating remain popular home improvement projects this year, generating one in ten (9%) online enquiries, while landscaping and patio projects accounted for 7%.

Overall, enquiries for trade professionals have increased by over a quarter (28%) on last year.



Bank of Irelands home improvement loan offers competitive variable rates from 7.5% APR on borrowings from 300 to 65,000 with repayment periods from one to seven years. Customer can make extra repayments and clear the loan early with no penalty fees.



Head of Retail Loans at Bank of Ireland, Scott Kirkwood said, "Weve seen a significant increase in year of year loan applications for home improvements in the first quarter of this year, indicating that this will be a busy year for trade professionals and DIY enthusiasts."

He added, "Figures provided by Onlinetradesmen.ie show that extensions, interior refurbishments and decorating remain popular home improvement projects. Weve always been a house-proud nation and early indications are that 2016 will be a hectic year for the home improvement sector."



Source: www.businessworld.ie

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There has been an improvement in the loan approval rates for SMEs according to the latest Quarterly Bank Watch Survey from the Small and Medium Enterprises Association (ISME).



The survey conducted in the first week of June covers the three months of March, April and May. There were 924 SME owner manager respondents, a response rate of 12%. This provides a strong indication of the real SME lending environment.



The figures show that 41% of respondents had required additional or new bank facilities in the last 3 months, compared with 42% in the previous quarter.

Thirty five per cent of companies who applied for funding in the last three months were refused credit by their banks, a decrease on the 43% rate seen in the previous quarter.



Furthermore, 74% state that the Government is having either a negative or no impact on SME lending, an increase of 2% on the previous quarter.



While welcoming the findings, the Association warned that refusal rates are still too high and there is much more progress needed in this area and in the length of time taken to get approval.



ISME CEO, Mark Fielding commented, "Banks are still not lending to the level appropriate to an economy 'in recovery'. The statistics from our own Central Bank, the ECB and numerous economists, demonstrate the dearth of appropriate credit.

He added, "We must put an end to the fiction that bailed out Irish banks are functioning properly. Despite assertions from the banking PR machine, access to credit is patchy and the application process is getting more torturous, with 21% of applications are still pending at end of May."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
The Irish Independent has today reported that former RTE broadcaster, Mark Little, is to become the head of Twitter in Ireland with current chief Stephen McIntyre moving to join the Irish tech finance firm Frontline Ventures.

Mr Little's new role in Twitter means that he will be in charge of the social network's expanding European headquarters in Dublin which now employs over 200 people and is the company's largest facility outside the US.

He will also continue in his current media partnership role across Europe.



In Ireland, Twitter is the second biggest social network with approximately 900,000 users according to the research organisation Ipsos MRBI. Globally, 300m people regularly use the network.



Currently based between two offices in Dublin's inner city, Twitter will soon move into a newly refurbished European headquarters adjacent to Merrion Square.



Mark Little has served both as RTE's Washington correspondent and its anchor newscaster on the Prime Time television show, Mr Little left the state broadcaster in 2009 to start an online news sourcing company, Storyful, which he sold in 2013 to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for 18m. He joined Twitter last year as head of media partnerships in Europe.



Outgoing Managing Director of Twitter in Ireland, Stephen McIntyre today commented, "Mark is a Twitter evangelist through and through. His leadership experience as founder and CEO of Storyful sets him up perfectly for the role."



Source: www.businessworld.ie

About us
The Womens Executive Network (WXN) have today acknowledged 25 of Irelands most influential and powerful women for their achievements.



Every year, the Womens Executive Network (WXN) identifies and celebrates the outstanding work of 25 Irish women.

These are women who by their success encourage others to follow, be ambitious and to succeed.



This years winners include Rose Hynes of the Shannon Group and Origin Enterprises, Breege ODonoghue of Primark, Dells Niamh Townsend, PayPals Louise Phelan, Disneys Una Fox, RSA Chief-Liz ODonnell, Data Protection Commissioner - Helen Dixon and Second Secretary General at the Department of Finance, Ann Nolan.



To mark this years awards, WXN is hosting two events. The first is a Leadership Summit which is an afternoon of professional learning for members of the network. The second is an Awards Dinner during which the winners receive their awards.

Together, more than 650 senior professionals will attend the two events.



CEO of the Womens Executive Network, Sherri Stevens commented, "This years winners are true leaders in their field. It is essential that we keep promoting and celebrating their success because the sad truth remains that progress is still slow. In Ireland, women only comprise 10% of board seats on ISEQ companies and the gender paygap remains at 14.4%."

She added, "We are proud to be a part of the continued conversation around the success of professional women. The 2016 Award winners are a testament to the value of women across various different Irish sectors and we congratulate them on their achievements over the last year and looking to the future."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Those who have met or worked with Cache Countys new full-time trails coordinator during the last six months will agree that a lot has already been accomplished since Dayton Crites was hired.

On Tuesday, Crites asked members of the Cache County Council to support a grant application that, if approved, would help him pursue something he feels is really needed: a trails master plan.

Without any trails plan on the books for the county, Crites explained, there is a lot of funding from federal and state governments that I simply cant get for us. Its not available.

He said that not only has it been difficult for the county to proceed with grant funding, it has also been a challenge to develop a plan that works with other communities in the county that may not have the staff or resources to develop a trails plan for themselves.

Paradise, Crites cited as an example, doesnt have the staff to put down a simple trails plan that says heres where we want to connect to the Bonneville Shoreline (Trail), here is where we want the Bonneville Shoreline (Trail).

So its these basic things that I want to take before the community, hopefully this fall.

Crites said the grant from the National Park Service Conservation Assistance Program would give his office a free staff of architects and landscapers who work with this group from out of Salt Lake City to help further trails development.

The Cache County Council voted unanimously to support the grant application.
If Britain leaves the EU, could Sweden be secedin'?

Published on June 16, 2016

Story by Joseph Pearson

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As the UK referendum on EU membership draws ever closer, speculation is rife as to what effects a Brexit vote could send rippling across the continent. Scandinavian countries are among those whose names crop up as potential copycats, but are the Swedes really looking to wave the union goodbye?

Its springtime in Stockholm, and the medieval buildings, clear blue bay and wooded horizon seem a long way from Londons concrete jungle. Granted, its raining  though it turns out these cities might have more in common than the weather.

Its nearly exam season  the library of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology is full. Im here to talk to young people about "Brexit"  short for British Exit  the potential withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. One student is quick to sum up the general mood of Swedish media: "What are you stupid Brits doing?"

The UK referendum on EU membership is set for the 23rd of June, and should victory go to the "Vote Leave" campaign  currently ahead in the polls  theres worry that other member states could follow suit. Alongside Denmark, Sweden has been named as at flight risk. Stockholm holds similar views to London on EU federalism and free trade policy, and neither country uses the euro. Some media outlets have gone as far as coining the term "Swexit".

Erik Blohme studies political science at the University of Stockholm, and is also Political Secretary for its Student Union, campaigning for students' rights on a local and national level. He argues, though populist opinion in Sweden is against the EU, people dont want to leave due to potential economic impacts. Could Brexit change things? Erik isnt certain, though does mention it could "pour gasoline on the fire".

On a personal level, Erik isnt particularly in favour of the EU. "Theres a lot of capitalist and neoliberal mechanisms built in that I find problematic," he argues, emphasising his opposition to physical and economic external borders while "people are drowning". But could Swexit be a possibility? "Very unlikely at the moment," he concedes, citing what he views as the country's relatively strong recovery following the 2008 economic crisis.

"The media in Sweden isnt really covering Brexit at all," he continues. "If youre interested in politics you can follow it on certain niche sites, but its definitely not on top of the agenda."

Back outside the KTH Library, not one of the students I speak to has ever heard of Swexit  a few even laugh at the term. One has never heard of Brexit either. But away from the jargon, are people debating Swedens EU membership? One Erasmus student shakes her head in response, "For the last few weeks my Swedish friends have talked about Eurovision"

Yet discussions about Swedens EU position do exist. Support for the euro is low  the country voted against adopting the single currency in a 2003 referendum. I ask one Swedish student who opposes EU membership whether the country shares her political will: "Right now, we dont talk about it. All we talk about is immigration."

"The conservative media in Sweden talk about it," continues one of her peers, "but its a very ideological point of view." Another agrees that the rise of the right shifts focus to the topic. "But if there was a vote right now," he continues, "I guess wed stay."

Away from the library in the corridors of power, sentiment is mixed. Erik describes an internal struggle for Swedish conservatives, with those further right capitalising on the populist strategy pushed by the far right Sweden Democrats  in favour of leaving the EU. On the left, the divide is less present. A small proportion would welcome leaving  if for different reasons to the political right  but in general the consensus favours European integration.

Philip Botstrom is President of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League, on the left of the countrys political spectrum. "SSU are convinced that it's better for everyone if Britain remains," he explains. "Were facing challenging times in Europe and a lot of these challenges need cross-border cooperation." Nor is he keen on a similar referendum in Sweden, arguing the EU has allowed the country to be at the forefront of debates on issues such as migration, climate and tax evasion.

Sweden went through discussions about EU membership before its accession referendum in 1994. "A huge part of the young generation has not experienced a Sweden without EU-membership," Philip explains. "Were used to travel across borders and meeting people from all over the world. It feels like EU membership is entwined in the identity of the young generation in Sweden and therefore young people are more positive and see the benefits of being part of the EU."

Could Brexit change things? Philip acknowledges that it could set a precedent, but remains sceptical in the Swedish case, "I rather think that it will trigger a debate on how the EU should be reformed."

He feels like the Union has grown to feel a more natural part of Swedish politics: "There is a lot of frustration in Sweden about EU countries not doing enough, but there has not been a big debate about leaving the EU." Perhaps similarities between the two countries have their limits after all.

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We've officially been banned from quoting The Clash, but the question nevertheless invokes the famous song. On the 23rd of June 2016, citizens of the United Kingdom will vote on whether or not they want to remain a member state of the European Union. We've a few Babelians who have a thing or two to say about that...

Story by Joseph Pearson
Spanish election debate: Much ado about nothing

Published on June 16, 2016

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The Spanish election debate ended up as a series of interminable monologues from which original ideas were completely absent. Faced with a certain electoral exhaustion, none of the candidates dared to be adventurous, perhaps in order to conserve their existing voter bases. Opinion piece.

The televised debate between the four Spanish candidates for the 2016 elections was expected to be historic, due to the fact that, for the first time, the sitting President from the Popular Party (PP) would not only confront his traditional rival from the Socialist Party (PSOE), but also the two newly emerged political organisations, Ciudadanos and Podemos.

Nevertheless, contrary to expectations, the debate lacked any truly memorable moments. With a very restricted format, moderated by journalists and divided into three policy blocks (the economy, social policy and institutional reform), the candidates, in lieu of debating, espoused their ideas with little intervention or rebuttle from their adversaries. The time alloted for each section was restricted, so moderators were able to nip any glimmer of confrontation squarely in the bud.

The messages of the four leading political parties have barely changed since the last round of elections in December. The PP proclaims itself responsible for Spain's recovery, while PSOE states that it's the only choice that guarantees change. Ciudadanos presents itself as the champions of regeneration and relies on their star proposal of introducing a single contract. Podemos again highlights the need for increased public spending.

Only in the institutional reform section, which included discussion of corruption, did the tone of the debate heat up. Surprisingly, Albert Rivera (Ciudadanos) addressed his criticisms to President Rajoy, which caught the PP leader off guard. Meanwhile PSOE and Podemos were embroiled in their own war. The Socialists made it very clear that Pablo Iglesias prevented the implementation of a government of change in March by rejecting coalition proposals. "Pedro, you've got the wrong rival," replied Iglesias in a murmur that became the talk of the night.

The increased tensions experienced during the corruption discussion came to nothing, and the debate ended in yawns. Afterwards, it was the little details, such as Rajoy's table full of post-it notes or the journalists' inability to guide the debate, that became the hot topic of every Spanish household.

It's a pity that, as Spain's next four years are at stake, important subjects such as male violence were glossed over (it took up 22 seconds of the debate). Something similar happened with the discussion surrounding hosting refugees and European policy, both of which were only superficially tackled. The lengthy and tedious debate finished after midnight, just as the need for a more rational hours in Spain is in the midst of discussion. One argument is to copy good practice from Europe, in order to finally encourage parliamentary reconciliation. Spain continues without an agreement, just as it continues without a debate, and without being confronted with real ideas. It's clear candidates avoided a spirited debate, because at this point they think they are more likely to lose votes than win them.

The question is whether it's in anybody's interest for citizens to go to the polls on the 26th of June with so much disillusion, given that, six months after the cold December elections, this sunnier June offering paints a broadly similar picture. Granted, there's the added mystery of whether there will be a "sorpasso" [Italian word meaning overtaking, here referring to an electoral advantage, ed.] as Unidos Podemos confronts PSOE. Perhaps the lack of confrontation during the debate means someone will reach an agreement?

Story by Ruben Rivas de Roca Garcia

Translated from Debate electoral: mucho ruido y pocas nueces
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By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times

Three Corpus Christi Independent School District students were arrested after a gun was found at Veterans Memorial High School, officials said.

Corpus Christi ISD police were called to the campus Tuesday morning after a student notified school officials of a possible weapon on campus, district spokesman Lyndall Gathright said.

Corpus Christi ISD Police Chief Kirby Warnke said an investigation by police led to the arrest of a student who had the weapon "in some kind of hand bag or backpack."

A lockdown for the summer school classes was not issued because police did not believe the campus was in imminent danger, Warnke said.

"We were able to secure the weapon very quickly," he said.

Further investigation led to the arrest of two other students and all three face second degree felony charges for having the weapon on campus because all are believed to have been in possession of the handgun at some point, Warnke said.

Veterans Memorial is host to summer school for nearby campuses. The students who were arrested were not Veterans Memorial students, Gathright said.

Warnke said two of the students are juveniles and the other is an adult. Texas defines a juvenile as a person under 17. Warnke did not release name of the 17 year old.

Warnke credited the tipster's decision to notify officials.

"This all came from a tip," he said. "These are students working to keep the schools safe."

Twitter: @CallerBetty
Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Sue Nelson (right), superintendent of the Tuloso-Midway Independent School District, is presented with an award by Rick Alvarado, executive director of the Education Service Center Region 2, after being named superintendent of the year for Region 2 on Wednesday at the center offices. Nelson will represent the region in the state competition, which will be announced in the fall.

SHARE Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Sue Nelson, superintendent of the Tuloso-Midway Independent School District, was named Superintendent of the Year for Region 2 on Wednesday at the Education Service Center Region 2. Nelson will represent the region in the state competition, which will be announced in the fall. Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Sue Nelson (from left), superintendent of the Tuloso-Midway Independent School District, was named Superintendent of the Year for Region 2 on Wednesday at the Education Service Center Region 2. Nelson will represent the region in the state competition, which will be announced in the fall. She introduced Tuloso-Midway Middle School student Lana Johnson, 11, and her sister, Skylar Shick, 11 months, as she accepted the award, noting that everything she does as superintendent is about how it will impact the children. Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Sue Nelson, superintendent of the Tuloso-Midway Independent School District, was named Superintendent of the Year for Region 2 on Wednesday at the Education Service Center Region 2. Nelson will represent the region in the state competition, which will be announced in the fall. Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Sue Nelson, superintendent of the Tuloso-Midway Independent School District, is congratulated by Rick Alvarado, executive director of the Education Service Center Region 2, after being named superintendent of the year for Region 2 on Wednesday at the center offices. Nelson will represent the region in the state competition, which will be announced in the fall.

By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times

Eagle Pass, George West and Tuloso-Midway school districts.

Sue Nelson has retired from all three. And from Tuloso-Midway twice.

"I guess I just don't retire well," said Nelson, whose last comeback resulted in the longest tenure in the district's history  19 years.

The Colorado Springs native was praised for her devotion to education Wednesday. The Education Service Center Region 2 announced the 2016 regional superintendent of the year during a news conference. Nelson was honored in front of Region 2 educators, school board trustees and community members.

The annual award is sponsored by the Texas Association of School Boards and has recognized exemplary superintendents since 1984. Candidates are chosen for their strong leadership skills, dedication to improving educational quality, ability to build effective employee relations, student performance and commitment to public involvement in education. As the regional finalist, Nelson will represent Region 2 in the State Superintendent of the Year Award program.

A long list of Nelson's commitments to the district corroborating the nomination was read aloud by ESC Region 2 executive director Rick Alvarado before he handed Nelson the award. It was noted it takes a special kind of leader for a community to petition a facility be named after them, Alvarado said of the Dr. Sue Nelson Performing Arts Center. And the fact that all three of Nelson's children retired before her speaks volumes of her dedication, he added.

Calallen Superintendent Artie Almendarez, who was named the 2010 state Superintendent of the Year, said a common factor among those he went up against and Nelson is the drive behind the work.

"They were all completely student-centered," Almendarez said. "It doesn't matter who the student is, where they live or who their parents are. You have to do the best you can to give them all opportunities to be successful."

Nelson, whose parents could not speak or hear, learned sign language before she could talk and has been "in the business of education" more than 40 years, she said. The nomination was humbling and said she's most proud of working to make Tuloso-Midway the second largest district in Texas to have a year-round schedule.

The state committee will interview regional winners in August in Austin and select five state finalists. The State Superintendent of the Year will be announced at the TASA/TASB state convention in the fall.

Twitter: @CallerBetty
Caller-Times File Harbor Bridge

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By Kirsten Crow of the Caller-Times

A social media firestorm set ablaze over how to best honor the victims of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, now means two color schemes will illuminate the Harbor Bridge.

Rainbow hues are planned for this weekend, a move that recognizes those killed in Pulse, a popular gay nightclub, were targeted because of their sexual orientation, proponents said.

Another color scheme will appear Monday, and continue through June 24: red, white and blue. The U.S. flag theme is inclusive by acknowledging those killed were Americans, not all of whom identify as LGBT, supporters say.

The symbolism of the colors touched off passionate debate within community Tuesday, after several pastors came to the City Council meeting for public comment and objected to the rainbow theme. The pastors' concerns included their perception that a violent act was being used to push a political agenda and the possibility that the colors would imply a citywide statement that did not mirror all residents' feelings.

The brief comments during the council meeting, both in support and opposition, led to lengthy threads and sometimes volatile discourse on social media between residents.

The City Council doesn't approve lighting for the Harbor Bridge, and did not play a role as a governing body in either color scheme initiative.

However, both lighting schemes are being funded by council members, who are acting as individuals in their capacity as private citizens and not as city or City Council representatives.

A social media campaign launched by LGBT activist Korbin Boomer Matthews appealed to Mayor Nelda Martinez to help light the bridge through a Facebook post that was shared more than 1,400 times. City Councilwoman Colleen McIntyre was tagged in it, as well.

Both decided to underwrite the rainbow lights slated to glow from Friday night through Sunday. They are splitting the $400 cost out of their own money to finance it.

"The city with a capital 'c' isn't doing it," McIntyre said. "There are individuals choosing to do this with their money and their time."

It has to do with freedom of speech, she added.

Sponsoring the rainbow scheme in this incident would be similar to sponsoring a burnt orange color scheme if a similar act were to occur on the University of Texas campus, McIntyre said.

It can't be ignored that the LGBT community was targeted in the attack, Martinez said. She said doing so would be "a denial of the reality of what occurred."

"It was a hate crime," Martinez said. "It's important to show unified support."

Matthews, the activist, said rainbow lights on the bridge are about more than honoring the victims of the attack.

"It sheds light on the struggle of the LGBT community throughout the world," he said.

Anyone can apply for a special request for lighting, city officials said. An example of special request lighting would include color schemes for Pops in the Park, said Terry Orf, the designer of the Harbor Bridge lights and a third-party contractor who programs the lights.

Martinez said she and McIntyre went through the same process anyone would go through for a request.

In response to comments made by the pastors at the meeting, City Councilwoman Carolyn Vaughn, also acting in her capacity as a private citizen and using her own money, applied to sponsor a red, white and blue color scheme slated to run Monday through the end of the week.

Martinez and McIntyre expressed support of the move late Wednesday.

Comments by the Christian leaders moved her, Vaughn said.

Leading means inclusiveness, not division, to support the Americans killed in the Orlando shootings, Vaughn added. Everyone suffered and is grieved by what happened, she said. The red, white and blue colors represents all, while the rainbow scheme makes it a political issue, she said.

"Americans were killed," she said. "That's the common thread."

Twitter: @CallerCrow
GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi (second from right) receives the 2016 Coast Guard Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award from Rear Adm. David Callahan (second from left) on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, aboard Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

SHARE GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi hugs friends after receiving the 2016 Coast Guard Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, aboard Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi laughs with his wife, Sunny, after receiving the 2016 Coast Guard Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, aboard Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES The 2016 Coast Guard Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award was given to Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, aboard Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. GABE HERNANDEZ/CALLER-TIMES Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi addresses the crowd after receiving the 2016 Coast Guard Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, aboard Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times

U.S. Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi, 42, will move to North Carolina in July after he is promoted to senior chief petty officer. But on Wednesday afternoon, he was able to add another memento of his time in Corpus Christi when he received the Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

The award ceremony was held in Hangar 41, where Florisi works as an aviation survival technician, or AST. He received the award from Rear Adm. David Callahan, who commended Florisi for helping his officers sign up for the AST exams.

"Chief Florisi stood out as one person in particular who took the extra mile to care for the folks that work for him," Callahan said. "He didn't view himself as successful unless his subordinates were successful."

The Master Chief Angela M. McShan Inspirational Leadership Award is named after the first African-American woman who served as master chief petty officer. The annual award recognizes one Coast Guard chief who embodies core values like honor, respect and devotion to duty. Florisi was chosen for the award from over 32 other nominees from around the nation.

While Florisi said he was honored to win the award, he said it was made more special by the belief of those he works with that he deserves the award.

"I hope the guys I work with every day agree with this," Florisi said. "In reality, everyone in the hangar has inspired me one way or another."

Florisi looks forward to his new responsibilities in North Carolina, but said he hopes to return to the Coastal Bend. He said the past seven years have been formative for him because Corpus Christi is where he met his wife, Sunny.

"It's been a great experience," Florisi said. "There's a 90 percent chance I'm going to retire in Corpus Christi."

Twitter: @Caller_Fares

EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the rank U.S. Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Robert Florisi will be promoted to. It is senior chief petty officer.
Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times

The Harbor Bridge is lit rainbow on Friday, June 17, 2016 in memory of the victims of the terrorist attack in Orlando, FL.

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Let's see if we heard correctly what went down during the public comment section of this week's City Council meeting:

In the city whose name means "body of Christ," where two members of the City Council, in gracious, generous response to a request from the grieving LGBT community, pledged to underwrite personally the cost of lighting Harbor Bridge in rainbow colors to commemorate the victims of the Orlando massacre, three members of the clergy representing the aforementioned Christ whose most defining statements of philosophy included "judge not lest ye be judged" and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone," took offense at the two council members' display of generosity for, among other things, flaunting sin.

Not only that. The preachers condemned the rainbow emblem itself  that beacon of nonjudgmental inclusiveness and acceptance of people's differences. According to them, it's a symbol for a political agenda and a dishonor to the non-LGBT victims of the shooting.

Why not instead use the colors of the U.S. flag, they asked  their reason being that the Orlando shooting was an attack on America.

This wouldn't be much of a concern if the pastors spoke only for themselves. But they're pastors, which means that when they speak to the council during public comment, it's implied that they speak for their congregations, at least. On the topic of symbols and who and what they represent, pastor Rick Milby in particular has achieved a high profile in this city. He began his three-minute public comment allotment with an update on construction of a giant cross that briefly faced a headline-generating lawsuit.

Mayor Nelda Martinez attended the groundbreaking for that cross  and was criticized for it by the atheist plaintiff. Martinez also is one of the two volunteer underwriters of the bridge lighting, along with Councilwoman Colleen McIntyre, which puts them in direct conflict with Milby  whose tone in addressing the council, it should be noted, was gentle despite the brimstone in his words.

Anyway, that's how the two reverends interpreted Martinez and McIntyre's act of kindness. We see it as just that  a kindness. Suffering recriminations for it only makes the two council members all the more like their city's namesake.

The faith to believe what one cannot see is a virtue. But the pastors are asking Corpus Christi to reject what can be seen plainly with human eyes  that an attack on a gay bar by a native-born violence-prone married father strongly suspected of being a frustrated closet homosexual was an attack against the LGBT community, specifically. LGBT people from anywhere in America see the Orlando shooting as an attack on all of them  because it was.

It shouldn't be hard to understand why they would want to mourn publicly and why they would want to rally around the rainbow flag. To condemn them for wanting to do so at a time like this is to confirm why they feel the need to show solidarity.

The pastors and their followers need not worry that the non-gay victims might be labeled gay by mistake. Being where they were when they died is a strong indicator that it wouldn't have bothered them. Also, they will be in the thoughts and prayers of the LGBT mourners at this weekend's bridge-lighting event, along with the LGBT victims. To join them at this event and stand with them under the colors of the rainbow would be a Christian thing to do.
Columnist Dave McNeely

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The Texas Association of Business thinks paying to expand half-day public Pre-Kindergarten to full-day makes good business sense.

The TAB, the state's chamber of commerce, said June 9 its board has voted to support expanding the full-day public pre-K programs for children who already qualify for half-day public pre-K.

Bill Hammond, longtime executive director of the TAB, said new Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath "has told me that the average student entering kindergarten is 12 to 18 months behind.

"It takes at least six years of excellent teaching for those children to catch up and be on grade-level," Hammond said. "The cost of remediation is enormous and can be a detriment to the other children who come to kindergarten prepared to do that level of work.

"Ensuring that every child, who is currently eligible for public pre-K, is enrolled in a high quality, full-day program will help close that gap," Hammond said.

Morath, a numbers-conscious former member of the Dallas Independent School District's board, was appointed education commissioner by Gov. Greg Abbott.

The governor had called for expansion of pre-K programs in his first State of the State speech in February of 2015.

However, a Grassroots Advisory Board Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had appointed sent a letter to Texas senators opposing pre-K expansion.

The proposal is "socialistic," the Tea Party-oriented group said, and "removes our young children from homes and half-day religious preschools and mothers' day out programs to a Godless environment with only evidence showing absolutely NO LONG-TERM BENEFITS beyond the 1st grade."

Patrick said he was blindsided by the letter, and distanced himself from it.

The Texas Legislature finally passed House Bill 4 to expand pre-K in 2015, but only after Tea Party-backed legislators had capped the amount at $130 million over the two-year budget.

Early childhood education advocates said the $130 million, added to a pre-K budget of $1.7 billion, doesn't even make up the $200 million legislators had cut from a pre-K grant program in 2011.

Students who already qualify for pre-K are those below the poverty line, from military families, or in the foster care system. Some school districts already locally fund full-day pre-K.

Studies show children who attended a good pre-K program are more likely to stay in school, graduate high school, and attend college, Hammond said.

They'll earn more over their lifetime, and be less likely to be unemployed or go to prison.

"When you look at those statistics, you realize why this is an important issue to business," Hammond said. "Not only are we talking about quality of life, but we are talking about the future quality of our workforce."

Maybe the TAB's weighing in that early education is a good business decision, and saves money in the long run, will help tilt the Legislature toward greater investment.

That said, TAB had also backed Texas accepting federally financed expansion of Medicaid to insure an additional one million residents, create a lot of jobs, and bring Texas about $100 billion over 10 years in return for investment of $15 billion by the state.

But Abbott copied predecessor Rick Perry, and said no.

Expanding pre-K, on the other hand, may fare better with Abbott endorsing it.

Capitol's Most-Popular Person Retires ... The most widely popular person in the Texas Capitol is leaving, after more than two decades.

No, it's not Rick Perry or David Dewhurst. The former governor and lieutenant governor left more than a year ago.

No, it's not Gov. Abbott or Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, or even House Speaker Joe Straus. They plan on being around awhile.

It's Tim Flynn, the capitol nurse since November of 1992. Flynn, a warm, gregarious nurse practitioner, looked after everybody  everybody  in what he called "my capitol."

He considered people, of every political stripe, from janitors to justices, a friend, someone he might help with a prescription or a medical recommendation, or just a welcoming smile.

During legislative sessions, Flynn routinely appeared in the House and Senate to introduce the visiting "Doctor of the Day," who would then hang out with Flynn in his underground office near the Capitol cafeteria, as they jointly treated a steady stream of legislators, staffers and others.

At his two-hour Capitol going-away reception May 25, the receiving line was nonstop. Everyone from janitors to current and former legislators, staff aides, lobbyists, even journalists, stopped by to give the lanky Flynn best wishes and hugs.

Flynn's retirement was effective May 31. He will be missed a lot, but may be seen occasionally during the next legislative session in 2017, helping lawmakers and their staffs understand the regulatory needs of his fellow nurse practitioners.

Contact McNeely at davemcneely111@gmail.com.
| BY Ricki Green |

V is the most popular energy drink in New Zealand, so when Frucor briefed Colenso on a new campaign for this iconic Kiwi brand the natural expectation was for a regular campaign for its master brand. However, what Frucor received was an idea for an entirely new direction.

Why? Frucors research revealed that people have an increasing need for energy, but a significant preference shift towards products made with natural ingredients is emerging. Colenso suggested instead of producing a new campaign, Frucor should create a whole a new kind of energy drink made with only natural ingredients. Concurrently Frucor R&D had been working on a concept in this realm, and with added encouragement from Colenso everything clicked into place. This product evolved to become V Pure, a revolutionary energy drink with the same energy hit of V  but made with only six natural ingredients.

Craig Irwin, marketing director at Frucor Beverages, explains why they embraced this approach: V has been the market leader for years, but at Frucor we know that its unbelievably important to stay in touch with what your customers want, and to keep innovating if you want to stay relevant. So when we saw the idea for V Pure we quickly applied the energy and resources we needed to make the idea a reality. The initial feedback to V Pure has been outstanding and it has opened up new market segments for the brand, which just goes to prove that you are better to make products that people want than to make them want your product.

All Colenso had to do then was tell people about it in a way that highlighted the natural properties of the product. Through OMDs extensive media strategy V Pure will be launched with a 60 film that will run on digital channels and cinema only. Accompanied by various other short form edits which will play out online, the campaign also includes OOH and real world brand activations.

Dave Brady, art director at Colenso BBDO, explains how important it was to get the right team behind such an important launch: After seeing the Coco De Mer X spot directed by Vicky Lawton through Rankin Films, we knew she was right for the job. She couldnt have been more up for it and brought so much to a very ambitious and action-packed production. We really wanted to elevate the tone for V Pure and leave viewers feeling as energised as they would be after drinking a bottle.

Client: Frucor  Craig Irwin, John Alexander, Ursla Bowden,

Agency: Colenso BBDO

Film Company: Rankin Films

Media Agency: OMD
| BY Ricki Green |

Gemma Ross, co-founder and director, Hustle & Bustle is NZs representative on the Promo & Activation Lions jury. Ross, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

Bonjour from the not so sunny Cannes.

On Monday afternoon I arrived at my first ever Cannes Lions and Lions Jury service. Flying into the South of France my rookie excitement was at an all time high. Like most creative comms people, Cannes has been a career long dream. Since the preliminary judging commenced a month ago anticipation has rapidly built and some veteran Cannes-goers have shared with me some pretty decent yarns that have not only inspired but made me brace myself for the ride

For the past three years my business partner Andrea and I have been head down ass up building our wee agency. As all start-up business owners can relate to the energy that goes into simply opening the doors each day, managing and growing a team, winning new business and delivering good work for your beloved clients is immense. Frankly, there hasnt been a lot of time for awards and Im looking forward to stepping out and immersing myself in the magic of ideas at the heart of this wonderful industry.

On Monday evening we were welcomed with a sophisticated affair on the terrace at The Carlton Hotel. Everyone put their best first impressions foot forward and looked the French Riviera part. Our jury of 25 is representative of all corners of the globe and when were together it feels as multicultural as I imagine a UN gathering. We were also joined by the Direct Jury with familiar Kiwi faces, Dave King, whos now based at Innocean in Sydney, and Tony Bradbourne from Special making an appearance. They told me Id make lifelong friends here and already it feels like thats true  what a marvellous bunch.

Early Tuesday morning six days of judging kicked off with a hiss and a roar. Our President Rob Reilley set the scene with news that Promo & Activation was this years 3rd largest category behind print and outdoor, featuring 3,458 entries from 71 countries  an increase of 8.2% from last year and all-time record high.

The first three days of judging sees us split into sub-juries dedicated to ranking the bulk of the work, before landing on a shortlist on Friday, debating our metal contenders over the weekend, and finally celebrating the rockstars Monday evening.

Two days neck deep into judging its fair to say this category is broad and it is buoyant. There isnt a country, region or category that is not heavily investing in promo and activation campaigns and theyre throwing every tactic, craft, innovation and technology at it.
| BY Ricki Green |

Says Nicoletta Rousianos, EP, The Editors: Ryan has already become an integral part of our roster and were thrilled that he has joined The Editors family. His projects have won many awards and we are very proud to have him with us. With the addition of Ryan to our team, I feel like we are set to continue our level of exceptional work and we are excited for the future ahead.
Jackson water crisis: Failures rooted in poverty, neglect and racism

Mississippi's largest water system was flawed from the start and worsened over the years as the capital city declined and politicians pointed fingers.
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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Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing.

You are our people. You Care. We Care2.
The Indian Navy has released official notification for selection of candidates in executive/technical/submarine branch. The employment notification invites unmarried candidates who will fulfill the below stated eligibility criteria, which are as laid by the Government of India for the entry into Permanent Commission (PC) officers in executive (GS) branch and Short Service Commission (SSC) officers under the University Entry Scheme (UES), for course commencing from June 2017.

The vacancy details at the Indian Navy are as follows:

Name of the Posts:

Executive branch:

General Service

Pilot

Observer

IT

Technical branch:

Engineering

Electrical

Naval Architecture

Submarine branch:

Engineering

Electrical

Who is eligible for the above listed posts?

Below is listed the educational qualification, age limit which describes the criteria for eligibility Permanent Commission (PC) officers in executive (GS) branch and Short Service Commission (SSC) officers posts at the Indian Navy.

Educational qualification:

Candidates applying for the post should be in their final year of BE/B.Tech or integrated degree course.

Candidates must have obtained a minimum of 60% marks till pre-final year.

Candidates must have been admitted in an AICTE recognisded university.

Candidates having a backlog in any semester at the time of campus interview are not eligible to attend the interview.

Age limit:

Candidates applying for the posts listed above must not exceed 24 years of age and must be minimum of 21 years.

Selection procedure:

Candidates will have to appear before a naval campus selection team for the interview.

Candidates who qualify the campus interview will be shortlisted for the SSB interview on the his/her preference for the entry, subject to meeting the eligibility criteria for particular entry.

The SSB interview will be held at Bangalore/Bhopal/Coimbatore/Visakhapatnam.

Pay Scale:

Candidates who are selected will be getting a monthly salary of Rs 15,600 to Rs 39,100, along with a grade pay of Rs 5,400.

How to apply:

Interested and eligible candidates can apply online at the official website of the Indian Navy.

Important dates:

Start of application submissions: June 25, 2016

Last date for the submission of online application form: August 7, 2016

About Indian Navy

The Indian Navy is a well balanced and cohesive three dimensional force, capable of operating above, on and under surface of the oceans efficiently safeguarding our national interests.

The Navy has the following three commands, each under the control of a Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief:-

The Western Naval Command (Headquarters at Mumbai).

The Eastern Naval Command (Head quarters at Visakhapatnam)

The Southern Naval Command (Headquarters at Kochi)

The Western and the Eastern Naval Command are operational commands and exercise control over operations in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal respectively. The Southern Command is designed as the Training Command.

Also read:
Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has invited applications for the posts of Enforcement/Accounts Officer. The posts hold an attractive salary package of Rs 34, 800 per month.

Candidates, who are interested in the aforementioned posts and whose credentials match the requirements, can apply.

Go through the details about the job given below.

Total number of posts: 257

Name of the posts:

Enforcement /Accounts Officer

Category-wise distribution of the posts:

SC: 30

ST: 6

OBC: 84

UR: 137

Education qualification:

The candidates must have a Bachelor's degree in any subject.

Pay scale:

The selected candidates will be earning Rs 9300 and Rs 34,800 + additional grade pay of Rs 4600 per month.

Age limit:

The upper age limit for the candidates is 30 years. Their age should not exceed the limit mentioned here.

How will the candidates be selected for these UPSC jobs?

The candidates will have to write a written test conducted by UPSC. The question paper will comprise objective type questions and all of them will be multiple choice questions. Time duration for the exam is 2 hours.

Time Duration: 2 hrs

Use this link for registering online and other important details: http://upsconline.nic.in/oraepfo/vacancy.php

About UPSC:

The Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services in India submitted its Report under the able leadership of the Chairman Lord Lee, in the year 1924. The report recommended the constitution of the Public Service Commission. This resulted in the constitution of the first Public Service Commission October 1, 1926 under the able Chairmanship of Sir Ross Barker.

Later, the constant efforts of the leaders of the freedom movement helped in the designing of a Federal Public Service Commission under the Government of India Act, 1935.

The Federal Public Service Commission later went on to become the Union Public Service Commission post-Independence. It was also bestowed with a Constitutional status with proclamation of constitution of India January 26, 1950.

UPSC is the central agency of India which has the authority to conduct the Civil Services Examination, Indian Forest Service examination, Engineering Services Examination, Combined Defence Services Examination, National Defence Academy Examination, Naval Academy Examination, Combined Medical Services Examination, Special Class Railway Apprentice, Indian Economic Service/Indian Statistical Service Examination, Combined Geoscientist and Geologist Examination, and Central Armed Police Forces(Assistant Commandant) Examination.
While the rest of Europe can enjoy BMWs xDrive AWD system on the Alpina B7-tuned 7-Series, Brits will have to settle for rear-wheel drive only.



Unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March, the imposing full-sized luxury saloon will celebrate its UK premiere at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, from June 23 to 26, before going on sale locally, with a 115,000 ($162,825) price tag.

The 608 PS (600 HP) and 800 Nm (590 lb-ft) of torque developed by the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 engine and channeled to the rear axle through an 8-speed Sport Automatic Transmission with Switch-Tronic shift buttons, allow it to sprint from rest to 62 mph (100 km/h) in 4.0 seconds, unlike its four-wheel drive sibling that needs 3.6 seconds. Top speed stands, in both cases, close to 200 mph (322 km/h).

Drivers can adjust the sound settings by switching between Comfort and Sport models with the Driving Dynamic Control, while the system can automatically adjust the vehicles suspension for upcoming corners by using the air suspension and Road Preview. Making sure that speed bumps dont pose a threat, owners can raise the ride height by 2 cm (0.78 in) when driving at a maximum speed of 20 mph (32 km/h), while above 140 mph (225 km/h), it lowers itself by 2 cm to improve stability.

UK deliveries of the Alpina B7 will commence this fall and it will eventually be joined by the B6, which will feature the same V8 engine as the B5 and B7, with powered channeled to the rear wheels.

PHOTO GALLERY
BMW has an exceptional relationship with art in general, sponsoring various projects and commissioning artists to use its cars as canvases.



It all began with French racing driver and art enthusiast Herve Poulain, more than 40 years ago, when he asked Alexander Calder to come up with a unique creative piece do design his race car. The result was a BMW 3.0 CSL, which in 1975 was raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and became an instant favorite with the spectators, spawning the BMW art collection dynasty.

Since then, artists from around the world were employed by the German car manufacturer to create Art Cars on the basis of contemporary BMW automobiles.

The most recent project was a M3 GT2 designed by Jeff Koons, in 2010, but BMW announced the upcoming addition (and unveiling) of the 18th and 19th Art Cars, made in collaboration with Cao Fei and John Baldessari.

Both artists will be working with the BMW M6 GT3, and by laying their artistic print on the model, theyll be joining the ranks of outstanding artists such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney.

The 18th model will bear Cao Feis touch (considered by numerous international media as the most important Chinese contemporary artist), who will link the project to the technological and social developments of the 21st century:

The theme of this century is that we enter a landscape of no mans land, e.g. autonomous cars and aircrafts and virtual reality. I expect to transcend the current context of cars and to embrace new possible ways of expressions. To me, that not only includes the artist, but also the public, said Cao Fei.

An icon of American conceptual art, John Baldessari approached the 19th BMW Art Car project with his signature style. Considering himself a minimalist at heart, Baldessari likes to draw on his own iconic techniques:

For me, the car is certainly an icon of contemporary life. I have done sculpture before, but its the first time I have ever in a sense collaborated. I didnt design the car  I collaborated with the designers of the car. I think the challenge comes in making something that cannot be understood from just one point of view, but only from a total point of view. I figured my use of colored dots is kind of an iconic series, so I had to include that. Im actually advertising myself, said John Baldessari

PHOTO GALLERY
With speedsters in Dubai using the emirates long, straight highways for illegal racing, police has had to crack down and seize no fewer than 81 vehicle.



As reported by the BBC, the cars had been racing with no license plates in order to make it harder for the authorities to identify the owners, though once in custody, those behind the wheel faced fines of up to 100,000 dirham ($27,000) with a further 50,000 dirham ($13,600) charged to the owners.

Dubai police chief Maj Gen Khamis Al Mazinah was quoted as saying traffic patrols tracked a number of reckless drivers and seized 81 vehicles, though without specifying when this raid took place and what type of cars were impounded  were guessing the type that can get up to very high speeds.

He then added that owners were using or preparing to use their cars of illegal races. Other cars were caught in dangerous performances and reckless driving that endangered road users. Apparently, some drivers reached speeds of 196 mph (315 km/h) while trying to escape police patrols. Of course, Dubai PD can easily keep up since theyve got plenty of supercars and even hypercars in their arsenal.

According to local media, if the owners of the cars dont pay the fines within three months, their vehicles will be auctioned off.

PHOTO GALLERY
Prior to 2006, when Parn established the animation department at the EKA, there were no formal animation schools in Estonia. Until 1994, the only way to get an animation education was to find your way into one of the two major studios: Nukufilm or Joonisfilm. In between those years, the best solution was to take a four-to-six hour trip via bus and boat to Turku, Finland, where Parn was heading up the animation department of the Turku Arts Academy. In fact, it was there that two future Estonian animators Ulo Pikkov and Kaspar Jancis studied. Given Estonias rich animation history and Finlands lack thereof, it was a somewhat ridiculous situation: Estonians had to travel to another country to learn from one of the great Estonian animators (his filmsincluding Hotel E, Breakfast on The Grass, 1895, and The Night of The Carrotshave won many international awards and influenced contemporary animation in both Estonia and abroad).

In 2006, Estonians realized the absurdity of the situation and fixed it. EKA applied for money to set up an animation department. Parn created a teaching syllabus and brought on his former pupil, Ulo Pikkov, to be an assistant professor. Parns wife, Olga, joined the department as a part-time teacher around 2008. (Pikkov has since left EKA leaving the Parns as the primary instructors.)

Under Parn, the animation department thrived, attracting many native and foreign students while producing a number of festival acclaimed films and animators (e.g. Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, Helen Unt, Michael Frei).

The genesis of the current conflict goes back to 2014. Parn was re-elected by the EKAs council (this takes place every five years) to continue to teach and oversee the animation department. However, Parn refused unless he was given a raise and Olga a full time job. A compromise was reached. Parn would get a raise and Olga would be a part-time assistant professor, but Ulo Pikkov would take over as head of the department and, because the school was uncertain about their future budgets, the contract would only be for two years, not five. This was an ideal situation. Parn would retire at the end of the five-year period and Pikkov would lead the school going forward.

Fast forward to May 2016. With Parns contract schedule to end in September 2016, the Council of the Academy of the Arts holds an election to vote on the professor of animation. Parn is the only candidate. Only 5 of 21 vote in support of him. Parns day as head of the department is over (Parn also refused a follow-up offer from EKA to become emeritus professor).

Now, this is about where I came into the story. Having known Parn for 20 years, I know that he can be a stubborn and single-minded person. I cannot imagine him, for example, going to faculty meetings and being a rah-rah type (and well come back to this later). Regardless, hes always excelled at teaching and has helped nurture many outstanding animators. That so many students were outraged by the schools decision and took immediate action to stop it is a testament to Priit and Olgas impact as teachers.

So just how in hell does one of the most famous animators in the world get booted from his countrys only animation school?

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Well, thats where we get into the Rashomon effect (where multiple recollections of the same event contain conflicting information).

First, theres the issue of the contract. In both an email to me and in an article from the Estonian daily, Postimees, its clear that while Parn had a contract for only two years, he also believed that no election would take place for the standard five years.

However, a new European Law came into effect on January 1, 2015 that changed things so that all contracts could be without terms. This meant that the EKA was freebut not obligedto have new elections whenever they desired. What upsets Parn is that he feels the EKA were well aware of the impending new law but chose not to inform him.

Clearly, the EKA wanted Parn out.

What they perhaps didnt count on was the loud, angry voices of the students who were also heard by the international animation community. In the last couple of weeks, letters have been written, meetings held, appeals made, and movements started (yes, a Je Suis Parn group has been started). Estonian media jumped on the story and Parn took full advantage, blasting the schools bigwigs left and right for what he called deceptive and unethical behavior.

EKA officials finally began to address Parns public attacks in early June. Andreas Tali, the dean of fine arts at EKA, told the Ekspress newspaper that disloyalty was a major factor. In March 2016, upon learning about new elections, Parn immediately wrote a letter to his students saying that the EKA doesnt value his work and that hes in negotiations with Tallinn University to move the animation department to their Baltic Film and Television School (BFM).

From EKAs perspective, this was treason and cause for immediate dismissal.

However, while one former student and teacher, Helen Unt, admits that there was such a letter, she notes that the issue of moving to BFM had been an open discussion for years already because most of our departments are in that school already, and when we moved there, the decision to move the whole department to BFM was also discussed on the highest levels. Though discussions stopped at some point, Unt says that students and teachers continued to discuss the pros and cons of such a move. (As a side note, students also told me that the EKA has been without a single building for years, forcing several of their departments to take up separate buildings. This separation has no doubt played a factor in communication problems between departments and the school administration.)

One of the more telling explanations came from EKA Rector, Mart Kalm. In June 7th issue of the Postimees, Kalm points at perceived limitations of Parns teaching as an issue. International experts are frequently brought in to evaluate school departments. In this case, two consultants (outside of animation) had heavy praise for Parn, but encouraged the school to change horses. They believed that the animation department would be better served by opening itself up and diversifying. This would bring animation more in contact with the wider field of culture and contemporary art. In short, Parns teaching is seen as narrow and old school (Parn doesnt deny that hes using the same teaching system he developed in the 1990s).

Its hard to pinpoint who might be right or wrong in this argument. Parns teaching approach has been successful and students actually appreciate the old school/storytelling approach. Yet, one can understand the universitys thinking here, too. To prevent teachers/professors from becoming complacent (and boy, Ive seen some deadbeat profs over the years) they have to show some development and refinements in their approach. Maybe Parn could have taken the easy road and played their game (while staying true to his teaching philosophy), but thats never really been his way, which is at least admirable.

Additionally, Kalm notes that some students and administrators desired bringing some fresh perspectives into the department. While other disciplines frequently brought in lecturers from abroad, the animation department has apparently been more closed and insular. Kalm also points to Parns overall lack of co-operation with people outside the animation world as another obstacle.

Finally, Kalm touches upon what is clearly the heart of the matter: Olga Parn. While there has always been some concern about a husband and wife running such a small department, it was accepted and likely offset by the presence of Pikkov. However, that all blew up when Pikkov left the animation department in January 2016 (Pikkov wont comment on the situation other than to say that he has no plans on returning to EKA).

From what I can piece together, this is when things really start to unravel. While Parnwho was named temporary department head after Pikkov leftbelieves he was hijacked with this sudden announcement of new elections, he couldnt have been too surprised given dean Talis previous concerns about having Priit and Olga running the department (and its especially tricky if one is the boss of the other).

It likely didnt help matters that during his election platform, Kalm states that, Priit Parn promised that when he retires, the department will be overtaken by his wife Olga. This perceived dictatorial statement apparently angered members of the EKA council and was likely the final stamp in voting him out.

Kalm concludes by saying, quite rightly, that an artist is free with their creations or even when creating their own school, but when youre working in a university, you have to be able to fit into the schools culture and environment.

We can go back and forth on this issue for pages and pages. Each side, convinced that theyre right, will always have an earnest, thoughtful rebuttal. But, there remain many gaps in this story so while its oh-so easy to get swept up by sentiments like Je Suis Parn, write fiery, impassioned protest letters from abroad, and turn this into a David vs. Goliath scenario, its important to remember that truth is a slippery, shadowy creature difficult to catch and even harder to hold down.

And what about the real victims herethe studentswhose needs and desires are being overshadowed by this increasingly hostile and personal dispute.

What becomes of those current and returning studentsmany of whom came to EKA to learn from Parn?

What about new foreign students who were recently accepted to EKA? (Some, apparently, have already decided not to come since hearing of Parns departure.)

Both sides claim to care about the students.

Time, money, and ego will tell just how true that is.

Thank you to all those who agreed to be interviewed including Heinrich Sepp (who also translated all the Estonian newspaper stories) Lucija Mrzljak, Mart Kalm (EKA), Lucija Mrzljak, and Olga Parn.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

The construction project on Penticton's Main Street is just days away from completion.

As part of the downtown revitalization project, the 200 block of Main Street will re-open this Saturday on schedule.

Downtown revitalization is a council strategic priority and this project helped address much needed infrastructure improvements while at the same time created a fresh and welcoming downtown core so we can promote a vibrant atmosphere for people to gather, shop, and enjoy," said Mayor Jakubeit, who will do the ribbon cutting honours on Saturday.

The project, which was completed on time and within budget, is the culmination of four years of work by city staff, the downtown committee, the Downtown Penticton Association, downtown businesses and many further stakeholders that have been involved in this project.

DPA executive director Kerri Milton said they are excited to see the grand re-opening and that landowners and business owners have been waiting patiently for this day to share their block with the public.

Christina Conquergood, owner of Peaches Lingerie, admits it was a bit slow during the construction but it was nothing they weren't prepared for.

"We had good communication from the Downtown Penticton Association on dates and the week to week schedule of improvements," she said. "And now that it's completed I feel excited and anticipate nothing but good responses."

The city also had good words for Grizzly Excavating, the contractor that was awarded the project.

Throughout construction the city has received positive feedback from community members and merchants alike on the professional nature of their team.

"I think I can speak for all Grizzly Excavating employees and sub trades in saying thank you to the downtown businesses and their patrons during this project," said Pat Neil of Grizzly Excavating. "Without their support and patience with this project it would not have been as easy or enjoyable to complete.

In total the project has logged over 12,000 local hours of work for the community.

Plans for the revitalization of the 100 block of Main Street will get underway in September after the busy summer season.

The re-welcoming of the community and ribbon cutting are set for 10 a.m., Saturday, June 18 at the Westminster intersection of Main Street.

Jakubeit, along with council members, MP Richard Cannings, MLA Dan Ashton and the Downtown Penticton Association will be at the ceremony.
Photo: Contributed

Oliver residents and visitors can expect some delays as they drive around town this summer.

The town has awarded the project to reconstruct, upgrade and pave a portion of Fairview Road between Main Street and Nicola Street to Mike Johnson Excavating Ltd.

The project includes constructing a new sidewalk, curb and storm on Spartan Street between Fairview Road and Rockcliffe Road.

There will be times that residents and businesses will not have vehicular access to their property from Fairview Road because of temporary shut downs, but back alley access behind the properties will still be available at all times.

During most of the project there will be access to businesses on the north side of Fairview Road; the westbound lane will be open with access to parking stalls.

Mike Johnson Excavating Ltd. say they will do their best to notify businesses and residents in advance and to keep these interruptions as short as possible.

The south side properties of Fairview Road will be affected the most during construction, but will have back alley access for the duration of the project.

The Spartan Street portion of the project will not affect residences on the west side except that part of the road on the east side will be under construction and the road may be portioned off to allow this work to be done.

The work starts June 20 with mobilization and site preparation, including asphalt, and will conclude in September.
Photo: Crystal Anne

West Kelowna council got a better understanding of the options available to BC Hydro, as they prepare to bring a second power line into the region.

Hydro officials briefed council Tuesday on the four options available, including a line from Vernon along the west side of Okanagan Lake, a second line from Merritt and two proposals which would have lines run from Kelowna, under Okanagan Lake.

West Kelowna Mayor Doug Findlater said it appears one of the four options will be decided upon by the end of the year. However, it could still be several years before construction is finally complete.

The Westside is the largest populated area of the province with only one power grid. The area includes West Kelowna, Westbank First Nation and regional district lands and stretches to just north of Penticton.

The subject of a second power grid in the region has been a priority for West Kelowna council for several years.

Things came to a head when the power grid was put at risk during the Smith Creek fire. More recently, 22,000 customers went without power for nine hours on Oct. 1, 2014, when fire broke out along the line which connects power to the area from Merritt.

A call to the premier officially got the ball rolling.

"Once they go through this latest round of decision making and open houses, the appear to be poised to select one of the options," said Findlater.

"Then, they go into a lot more work on that option. Engineering assessment, discussion with First Nation, environmental and all those things."

While Findlater said council would like to see the project completed sooner, rather than later, he said they do understand this is a long process.

But, he said Tuesday's presentation does show BC Hydro is moving ahead.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

A preliminary inquiry into a Penticton man accused of shooting his roommate is slated to take place next week.

Matthew James Cameron faces a charge of attempted murder with a firearm, stemming from an incident in July 2015 in Penticton.

The prelim is set to start June 22.

Last July, police responded to a residence on the 2000 block of Lindsay Road, about 10:19 p.m.

The investigation revealed those involved knew each other and that shots were fired.

The victim, then 31, was taken to hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries.

The investigation also identified a second person who suffered minor injuries. That individual was treated and released from hospital.



Cameron was arrested shortly after the incident, but was released on bail with several conditions.

Police said at the time it was an isolated incident that resulted from an escalating sequence of events between the two, and that the public was not at risk.

Cameron's lawyer, Ian McAndrews, asked for an adjournment on Wednesday, saying he still didn't have a response to a disclosure request from Crown counsel.

But, after hearing from both McAndrews and Crown counsel John Swanson, Judge Gregory Koturbash determined the inquiry would proceed.
Photo: Getty Images

In my June 1 MP report, I referred to the opposition #FreeTheBeer campaign that ultimately means asking the Liberal government to elevate the Comeau case to the Supreme Court for constitutional clarification.

For a quick refresher, New Brunswick charged Gerard Comeau for importing beer and spirits from Quebec, but a New Brunswick judge found Comeau was not guilty. The judge ruled that our Constitution clearly states in Section 121 that All articles of the growth, produce, or manufacture of any one of the provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other provinces.

Last week, New Brunswick announced it will appeal the ruling.



Elevating this ruling to the Supreme Court for constitutional clarification has the potential to open up our internal economy for all Canadian producers of other products aside from just beer, wine or spirits.

This obviously includes farmers and other agricultural producers. This week, the motion I wrote on elevating the Comeau case to the Supreme Court was the subject of the Opposition day debate in the House of Commons.

This was a my first as an opposition MP and I am pleased to report that both the NDP and Elizabeth May of the Green party joined the Conservative opposition to support this motion.

It was only a whipped vote  MPs have to vote the party line  from the Liberal majority government that defeated the motion after good debate from all sides. I am confident had this not been a whipped government vote it may well have passed.



Also occurring this week in Ottawa, and as I have reported in previous MP reports, is that Bill C-14, the physician-assisted dying legislation, is now in the Senate where the it has received seven different amendments.

The Liberal government has indicated it will not accept any amendments, so a potential standoff between the House and the Senate seems inevitable. Senators have also indicated they may reject the bill if the government does not entertain some of the proposed amendments.

As this is a relatively rare and uncharted situation, it is difficult to speculate what will occur next, however, I will provide updates in my future reports.

On a local note, the mobile constituency service has been so popular in Merritt that I will be expanding it to Princeton and Keremeos.

In Merritt, it is the first Tuesday of each month from 9 a.m. until noon at Merritt City Hall.

In Princeton, It will be available on the second Wednesday from 9 a.m. until noon.

In Keremeos, it will also be on the second Wednesday 1-4 p.m. at the Village Hall.

For more information, please contact me at [email protected] or call 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: Contributed

The British Columbia government says a bus service will be available between Prince George and Prince Rupert by the end of the year on a notorious stretch of road known as the Highway of Tears.

Eighteen women have been murdered or have disappeared along Highway 16 and adjacent routes since the 1970s.

Transportation Minister Todd Stone says agreements between 16 communities along the highway will allow B.C. Transit to operate a scheduled bus service, slated to start at the end of the year.

First Nations, social service agencies and women's groups have called for a shuttle bus service in the area to provide safe, regular transportation for people who live in communities along the highway.

The provincial government announced a five-point transportation plan late last year that promised regular B.C. Transit service and programs to train bus drivers from area First Nation communities.

Stone says the B.C. government is providing an extra $1 million to run the bus service while the federal government is contributing $1 million to fund bus shelters, lights and webcams along the route.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

School District 67 board members said Thursday they are cautiously pleased with announcements from Premier Christy Clark and MLA Dan Ashton about the Rural Education Enhancement Fund.

Clark said Wednesday that districts outside of the Lower Mainland, Greater Victoria and Kelowna areas will be able to apply for ongoing provincial funding in an amount equal to the expected savings from the closing of a rural school.

Board chairwoman Linda Van Alphen, together with district staff, has been in touch with the ministry to confirm the application process and timeline attached to this fund.

As of 8:30 a.m. Thursday morning, the ministry has not released any of this information, but indicated that they are working on these details, as well as a Q and A document.

Once this information is released, the board will call a special public meeting, which requires 48 hours notice, to discuss the fund and criteria necessary to move forward with the application for Trout Creek Elementary, as it was mentioned as a potential recipient of this funding.

The board will also be looking to apply for West Bench Elementary, a second school slated for closure, depending on the criteria required by the ministry.

Decisions for funding will be made by the ministry of education and will be based on the eligibility criteria.

Confirmation of funding will be necessary to keep a school open.

Van Alphen said they look forward to moving ahead quickly in this new process.

School District 53 board chairwoman Marieze Tarr said Wednesday that they are still trying to gather details with regards to the announcement and have not been able to meet as a board or make any decisions.

Osoyoos Secondary School in the district has also been slated for closure.

"I cannot really comment apart from to say that we are very grateful that the ministry is recognizing that rural districts face unique challenges and should be funded differently," she said. "We have been advocating for a different funding model for rural districts for many years both as a board of education and through our provincial BC Trustee Association."

Ashton was slated to discuss the funding at Trout Creek Elementary on Thursday morning.

Castanet will provide more details on the school closure matter as they become available.
In his June 10 letter (Thoughts on His nature), Dustin Lee Burnham quoted from the Mormon's Doctrine & Covenants 30:22, which states in part: "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's."

But Jesus said about his Father: "God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:24). After Jesus rose bodily from the dead, he said to his disciples: "Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.

Burnham also quoted from Joseph Smith, who Mormons believe was a prophet of God.

According to Deuteronomy 18:22, a true prophet had to be 100% accurate when predicting the future: "If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed."

So even a 99% success rate didn't matter. The consequence for making a false prophecy? "But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death. (Deuteronomy 18:20)

Among Joseph Smith's failed prophecies:

1. A temple would be built in Zion, Missouri (Doctrine & Covenants, Section 84). Smith made this prophecy September 22 - 23, 1832. The Mormons were forced to flee Missouri, and a temple was never built.

2. On August 6, 1836 Smith prophesied that gold and silver would be found in Salem, Massachusetts, and that the city would be given into the hands of the Mormons.

(Doctrine & Covenants, Section 111). Never happened.

3. The United States government would be overthrown "in a few years" if it didn't redress any of the wrongs committed against the Mormons in Missouri. (History of the Church, Vol. 5, page 394). Smith made this prophecy on May 6, 1843. Now over 173 years later, the U.S. government still stands.

David Buckna
Photo: Getty Images.

More security cameras are going up in downtown Vernon.

City council has approved the allocation of $11,000 for a security camera program in the downtown core. It will be co-ordinated by the Downtown Vernon Association.

We have to identify areas that need cameras or, perhaps, upgrade (some businesses') existing cameras, said Lara Konkin, the DVA's executive director.

Konkin explained the cameras will be inside businesses and facing towards the street.

Obviously any time we can do something to increase the safety and security of customers, business is in favour of it.

While there is no timeline set for the new program, DVA staff were reviewing a draft contract from the city on Thursday.

We need to establish areas where the cameras are needed, said Konkin. We will be working with the crime prevention coordinator to view areas in need of surveillance.

Konkin said the contract allows for surveillance video to be provided to the RCMP to assist with investigations.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

People in Naramata and surrounding areas may have seen smoke this morning from a small training burn about just southeast of the community, along the Arawana Forest Service Road.

The BC Wildfire Service conducted a controlled burn as part of a basic wildland fire suppression and safety course.

The size of the fire wasn't expected to exceed 10 metres by 10 metres. Two initial attack crews were on site to control the fire's spread and ensure that the fire is properly extinguished.

Fifteen emergency firefighters participated in the course, which is run annually.

Currently, the fire danger rating in the Penticton Fire Zone is very low to low.

To report a wildfire, unattended campfire or open burning violation, call *5555 on your cellphone or call 1-800-663-5555 toll-free. For the latest information on current wildfire activity, burning restrictions, road closures and air quality advisories, go here.
Photo: Facebook - Brandon Oswald

Brandon Oswald was found guilty Thursday on three of the four charges he was facing over a drug store robbery in March of 2014.

The 12-member jury found Oswald guilty of robbery, using an imitation firearm while committing an offence and disguising ones face while committing an offence.

He was acquitted on a possession of a shotgun charge.

Oswald was arrested outside of the Shoppers Drug Mart in West Kelowna on March 11, 2014, after robbing the store for drugs and cash.

Oswald had become addicted to prescription opiates at the time and his defence had argued he was distressed and intoxicated when the robbery took place.

The Crown had said Oswald had used his imitation firearm to intimidate the stores employees and knew the implications this could have on the staff.

Several of the staff members Oswald robbed testified he was very polite throughout the robbery, using his please and thank yous throughout.

Thursdays decision is the culmination of almost three weeks of trial. The jury began deliberation Tuesday, calling the court back into session several times throughout the week to clarify certain points of the case.

Im happy its over with, Oswald said after the verdict was delivered. Its been a long time. Ive been dreading all this and felt bad about it, so it feels like I can leave it in the past now.

Oswald, who was in custody from Feb. 19 until March 18, 2016, for breaching his bail conditions, will remain out of custody until Sept. 10.

A probation officer will prepare a pre-sentence report in the coming months, to outline Oswalds background and make recommendations about his sentencing.

His behaviour over the next three months will also play a part in the pre-sentence report.

Oswald says he will be leaving Kelowna for the summer for Vancouver Island, where he has a job as a landscaper.

Ill be out of Kelowna right away. I dont like this city anymore, Oswald said. I used to love it.
Photo: Kate Bouey

A middle-aged woman riding on the back of a motorcycle was taken to Vernon Jubilee Hospital after a two-vehicle crash Thursday.

Vernon Fire Rescue was called to the scene at 25th Avenue and 41st Street at about 12:35 p.m., said Capt. Dan Walker.

Walker said the bike was rear ended by a black SUV.

The motorcycle driver had a sore knee but did not go to hospital, Walker said.

The driver of the SUV was unharmed.
CDC Begins Reporting Pregnancy and Birth Outcomes of Women Affected by Zika Virus During Pregnancy

Media Statement For Immediate Release: Thursday, June 16, 2016

Contact: Media Relations,

(404) 639-3286

WHAT:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will begin reporting poor outcomes of pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection. Starting today, CDC will report two types of outcomes:

Live-born infants with birth defects and

Pregnancy losses with birth defects

These numbers for US states and the District of Columbia come from the U.S. Zika Pregnancy Registry. In coming weeks, CDC will begin reporting Zika-linked poor pregnancy outcomes in the U.S. territories.

Zika virus infection during pregnancy has been linked to adverse outcomes including pregnancy loss and microcephaly. Despite these observations, little is known about the risks of Zika virus infection during pregnancy. To understand more about Zika, CDC, in collaboration with state, local, tribal and territorial health departments, established the U.S. Zika Pregnancy Registry to actively monitor pregnancies for a broad range of poor outcomes. The poor birth outcomes reported today include those that are known to be caused by Zika (e.g., microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects) as well as others linked to Zika infection during pregnancy (e.g., eye defects).

CDCs top priority for the Zika response is to protect pregnant women and women of childbearing age because of the potential risks associated with Zika virus infection during pregnancy. Reporting the poor outcomes of pregnancies with any laboratory evidence of Zika virus infection will contribute to our understanding of the ongoing effect of Zika virus among pregnant women in US and ensure that the most up-to-date information about pregnancy outcomes linked with Zika virus is publicly available. In addition, the information is essential for planning at the federal, tribal, state, and local levels for clinical, public health, and other services needed to support pregnant women and families affected by Zika.

WHO:

Denise J. Jamieson, MD, Chief, Womens Health and Fertility Branch, Division of Reproductive Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and co-lead of the CDC Zika pregnancy task force

CONTACT:

To schedule interviews, please contact (404) 639-3286, media@cdc.gov

###

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICESexternal icon
Title X service sites have increasingly provided services to male clients. During 20032014, 3.8 million males visited Title X service sites in the United States and the percentage of all family planning users who were male nearly doubled from 4.5% (221,425) in 2003 to 8.8% (362,531) in 2014. In 2014, the percentage of family planning users who were male ranged widely by state from 1% in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama to 27.2% in the District of Columbia.

Although both men and women have reproductive health care needs, reproductive health services traditionally focus on women. Since 1970, the Title X program has provided family planning and related preventive health services with priority for services for low-income women and men. Most clients are women, but the Title X program also promotes use of clinics by men through delivery of male-focused health services.

Although both men and women have reproductive health care needs, family planning providers traditionally focus services toward women (1,2). Challenges in providing family planning services to men, including preconception health, infertility, contraceptive, and sexually transmitted disease (STD) care (3,4), include their infrequent use of preventive health services, a perceived lack of need for these services (1,5), and the lack of provider guidance regarding mens reproductive health care needs (4). Since 1970, the National Title X Family Planning Program has provided cost-effective and confidential family planning and related preventive health services with priority for services to low-income women and men. To examine mens use of services at Title X service sites, CDC and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Population Affairs (OPA) analyzed data from the 20032014 Family Planning Annual Reports (FPAR), annual data that are required of all Title X-funded agencies. During 20032014, 3.8 million males visited Title X service sites in the United States and the percentage of family planning users who were male nearly doubled from 4.5% (221,425 males) in 2003 to 8.8% (362,531 males) in 2014. In 2014, the percentage of family planning users who were male varied widely by state, ranging from 1% in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama to 27.2% in the District of Columbia (DC). Title X service sites are increasingly providing services for males. Health care settings might want to adopt the framework employed by Title X clinics to better provide family planning and related preventative services to men (3).

To describe male client attendance at service sites funded under the National Title X Family Planning Program, CDC and OPA analyzed data from the 20032014 FPAR.* FPAR contains data from all entities that receive Title X grants to support the delivery of family planning and related preventive health services. In 2014, about four million clients were served through approximately 4,100 Title X service sites. Data were included from Title X service sites in the 50 states and DC and used to describe 1) trends in the percentage of family planning users who were male; 2) state-level variation in the percentage of family planning users who were male; 3) demographic characteristics of males who were family planning users; 4) percentage of males who adopted or continued use of a contraceptive method and method type; and 5) receipt of testing for chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among males. A family planning user was defined as a person who had at least one family planning encounter at a Title X service site in a calendar year, where an encounter consists of a documented, face-to-face contact with a family planning provider for the purpose of delivering services to clients who want to avoid unintended pregnancies or achieve intended pregnancies. For the purposes of inclusion in FPAR, written documentation of the services provided during the family planning encounter in the client record is required.

During 20032014, a total of 3.8 million males visited Title X service sites, and the percentage of family planning users who were male nearly doubled from 4.5% in 2003 to 8.8% in 2014 (Figure 1). The percentage of family planning users who were male increased each year during 20032014, with the exception of 20102011, when no change was observed (Figure 1). Among males aged 2029 years, an increase occurred every year during 20032014, and among males aged 30 years, an increase occurred every year except 2011. In contrast, the percentage of users who were male and aged <20 years peaked in 2009 and 2010 at 1.8% and subsequently decreased (Figure 1). There was also a 63.7% increase in the overall number of male clients visiting Title X service sites from 221,425 in 2003 to 362,531 in 2014.

In 2014, 34.6% of male family planning users were white, 27.6% were Hispanic, and 24.2% were black. Approximately half of male users (49.0%) were aged 2029 years, with lower percentages aged 3039 years (20.4%) and 1519 years (14.4%) (Table). By state, there was wide variation in the percentage of total family planning users who were male, from lows in Mississippi (0.7%), Tennessee (0.7%), and Alabama (1.0%) to highs in Rhode Island (16.1%), Delaware (19.1%), and DC (27.2%) (Figure 2).

The majority (87.5%) of male users adopted or continued use of a contraceptive method at the conclusion of their last family planning encounter in 2014, with the male condom being the most common (71.9%). Two thirds of males (66.6%) were tested for chlamydia. Receipt of chlamydia testing was highest among males aged 2024 years (76.9%) and lowest among males aged <15 years (15.5%) (Table). In 2014, for every 10 male family planning users overall, Title X service sites also performed 7.5 gonorrhea tests, 3.3 syphilis tests, and 5.7 confidential HIV tests. By state, for every 10 male family planning users, the number of gonorrhea tests performed ranged from 0.7 (New Mexico) to 10.7 (Delaware); the number of syphilis tests performed ranged from 0.02 (New Mexico) to 9.5 (Alabama); and the number of HIV tests performed ranged from 0.02 (New Mexico) to 9.3 (Alabama).
Philippines: CeMAP claims cement smuggling on rise

ICR Newsroom By 16 June 2016

The Cement Manufacturers Association of the Philippines (CeMAP) has estimated that 75 per cent of the 161,000t of cement imported into the country in the first quarter of this year was technically smuggled, the Standard reports.

CeMAPs president, Ernesto Ordonez, claims that importers have been consistently understating the value of their cargoes to avoid taxes. Mr Ordonez told a press conference: If freight undervaluation goes unidentified and unpunished, this may lead not only to more such cases, but also to more serious violations such as cement misclassification and substandard cement. These pose imminent danger to safety and lives.

However, the Associations claims have been disputed by 4K, one of the importers. Their secretary-general, Rodel Pineda, accused Filipino firms of conspiring to maintain high prices and exclude competition. Mr Pineda told the Standard: They are already benefitting from the Philippine Economic Zone Authority. They are getting special treatment from our government so what are they still complaining about?

There is no technical smuggling among importers and what the cement cartel is trying to do is just to maintain a shortage in their products to make a killing because infrastructure is booming in our country.

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Spain: Cosmos to go ahead with biomass

ICR Newsroom By 16 June 2016

Cementos Cosmos is to be allowed to burn biomass at its kiln, according to the Cordoba appeal judge dealing with the case. Cordoba municipality had said the cement producer could not fire its kiln with waste, but this decision was overruled with municipality having two weeks to carry out the judgment.

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Yale scientists have found a way to greatly boost the intensity of light waves on a silicon microchip using the power of sound.

A team led by Peter Rakich describes a new waveguide system that harnesses the ability to precisely control the interaction of light and sound waves. This work solves a long-standing problem of how to utilize this interaction in a robust manner on a silicon chip as the basis for powerful new signal-processing technologies.

The prevalence of silicon chips in todays technology makes the new system particularly advantageous, the researchers note. Silicon is the basis for practically all microchip technologies, said Rakich, who is an assistant professor of applied physics and physics at Yale. The ability to combine both light and sound in silicon permits us to control and process information in new ways that werent otherwise possible.

Rakich said combining the two capabilities is like giving a UPS driver an amphibious vehicle  you can find a much more efficient route for delivery when traveling by land or water.

These opportunities have motivated numerous groups around the world to explore such hybrid technologies on a silicon chip. However, progress was stifled because those devices werent efficient enough for practical applications. The Yale group lifted this roadblock using new device designs that prevent light and sound from escaping the circuits.

Figuring out how to shape this interaction without losing amplification was the real challenge, said Eric Kittlaus, a graduate student in Rakichs lab and the studys first author. With precise control over the light-sound interaction, we will be able to create devices with immediate practical uses, including new types of lasers.

The researchers said there are commercial applications for the technology in a number of areas, including fiber-optic communications and signal processing. The system is part of a larger body of research the Rakich lab has conducted for the past five years, focused on designing new microchip technologies for light.

Heedeuk Shin, a former member of the Rakich lab who is now a professor at the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea, is the studys other co-author. Were glad to help advance these new technologies, and are very excited to see what the future holds, Shin said.
You've just arrived home with a case of bottled treasure that you discovered on your recent Midwestern Off the Vine wine trip. The only question that remains is, what food to serve with it?

Midwestern wines are cool climate wines. They mimic some of the greatest grape growing regions in Europe, such as Germany, Alsace, Champagne, Bordeaux and Chianti, which lie at similar latitudes to the upper Midwest. Their wines are complex and balanced, with higher acidity and lower alcohol. This makes them food-friendly, connoisseurs say.

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To choose the right food, you need to know two things about the wine: its acidity and its sweetness level. This will give you a clue as to what to serve  and what not to serve  with it.

Wine experts caution that if a wine has less acidity than the food, the wine will taste flat. (Acidity is that tart, sour taste you get from things like lemonade or vinegar.) So you want your wine to have higher acid content than your food. In general, red wines have lower acidity and white wines have higher acidity.

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Low acid foods are things like goat cheese, beans and game. High-acid foods are nuts, seafood and bread.

If you want to eat something sweet, don't pair it with a sweet wine. Sweet wines pair well with salty food. Dry, tart wines pair well with dessert.

If you picked up some local cheese along with your wine, the Midwest Dairy Association suggests pairing rich, red wines with older cheeses such as aged cheddar. Pair younger white wines with fresh, younger soft cheeses such as Camembert or Brie.

You want to mix, not match, your wine and cheese pairs of sweet and salty. Balance a salty cheese with a sweet wine. If your cheese has a nutty flavor, reach for a fruity wine.

The Michigan Grape & Wine Industry Council suggests the following Midwestern wine pairings for meals:

 Cabernet/merlot with braised lamb shanks, venison chops with blackberry compote and beef tenderloin with mushroom sauce.

 Gewurztraminer with Thai chicken salad, pork chops with applesauce and yellow curry chicken.

 Pinot grigio/gris with pesto pasta, spanakopita, Chinese food and sushi.

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 Pinot noir with pork tenderloin with roasted apples and onions and braised chicken with leeks and morel mushrooms.

 Port wine with chocolate truffles, stilton cheese and nuts.

 Riesling with Indian curries, liverwurst, roasted pork loin with herbs and Asian chicken.

 Rose with fried mozzarella sticks and croque monsieur or gorgonzola on sliced apples.

 Sparkling wine with Asian-style appetizers, blue cheese stuffed olives, fish and chips and fried chicken.
ContextMedia's Rishi Shah, from left, and Shradha Agarwal, along with Michael Rothman, CEO of SMS Assist, won Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Midwest Awards. (ContextMedia; Blue Sky photos)

Three Chicago tech companies and an investment firm walked away with awards at the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Midwest Awards Wednesday night.

Held at the Navy Pier Grand Ballroom, the event marked the 30 th anniversary of the awards. An independent judging panel of previous winners selected the recipients.

Award winners from Chicago-based companies included Brad Wilson, CEO of online deals site Brad's Deals; Thomas Scott, founder and CEO of investment firm CA Ventures; ContextMedia co-founders Rishi Shah  and Shradha Agarwal ; and Michael Rothman, CEO of software company and new unicorn SMS Assist.

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Other winners included Patrick O'Brien, CEO of Gurnee-based cosmetic distributor Paris Presents; Jack Lynch, CEO of Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc.-based educational software company Renaissance Learning, Carter Sterling, president of Phoenix, Ill.-based Sterling Lumber Company; and Trisha Lemery, president and CEO of Marinette, Wisc.-based Winsert, which provides alloy expertise to solve industrial problems like corrosion.

The winning companies together generated $5.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2015 and employed more than 15,000 people, according to a news release about the event.

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Winners will be considered for the national awards November in Palm Springs, Calif. The winner there goes onto the World Entrepreneur of the Year Award in Monaco next June.

amarotti@tribpub.com

Twitter @allymarotti
Boston Beer Co. CEO and founder Jim Koch talks about his new book, "Quench Your Own Thirst," his biggest fear and more during a recent Tribune Tower visit. (Phil Rosenthal/Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)

Jim Koch, who launched Boston Beer Co., from his kitchen 30-some years ago with a 19th-century family recipe, said he had no idea that his Samuel Adams beer was name-checked in Broadway's cross-cultural megahit "Hamilton."

His eyes lit up when played the playful allusion to the signature brew (named for a patriot) in a pub scene set in 1776: "I'm John Laurens in the place to be! Two pints o' Sam Adams, but I'm workin' on three, uh!"

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"Love it! Love it! Love it!" Koch said. "You know, somebody probably said, 'You can't have the founding fathers as black actors doing rap,' and look at what they did. That's kind of the story of Sam Adams. People saying you can't do it. You shouldn't do it. But I said I'm going to do it anyway."

Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of Boston Beer Co., takes a drink April 20, 2016, during a visit to Tribune Tower in Chicago. Koch has written a book, "Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two." (Michael Tercha / Chicago Tribune)

Koch, 67, has three degrees from Harvard, including an MBA and law degree. He ditched a thriving career advising manufacturers for Boston Consulting Group (where colleagues included Mitt Romney, who later left to join Bain & Co.) to belatedly extend a family tradition in brewing beer to a sixth generation.

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His Sam Adams beer is credited with powering the craft beer movement, though some in that class today view him and his company's size warily. Boston Beer's market cap is about $2 billion.

Koch visited Tribune Tower recently while promoting his book, "Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two." He brought both Sam Adams and pint glasses and started out with his own question at 10 a.m. "Mind if I have a beer? ... I'm a trained professional."

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You didn't set out to be this. You flirted with the idea of being an environmental lawyer, then joined Boston Consulting.

A: One of my first clients was International Paper, and they had 5-1/2 million acres of timberlands. The new CEO brought us in and said: "Are we managing this right? It's our biggest asset." Long story short, they weren't.

Q: You found a way to up their company's yield while simultaneously preserving old growth in national forests, which  unlike national parks  aren't protected by the Department of the Interior but managed by the Department of Agriculture, which you say had viewed them as tree farms.

A: These agricultural practices then became the norm in the forest products industry. So now there's no argument about farming national forests because they don't need the wood. By doing that, I and the other people who helped me did way more than I ever could as a lawyer, way more than the Sierra Club had done to protect national forests. What that taught me is, wow, business can actually create an enormous amount of good by doing smart things.

Q: I imagine it was lucrative, too.

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A: I worked in all these basic manufacturing businesses, foundries, steel mills, paper mills, plastics, chemicals, big capital-intensive, process-oriented stuff.

Jack Welch was my client at General Electric before he became the icon, back when he was Neutron Jack. They called him Neutron Jack because the people would all be gone but the buildings stayed. GE had just way too much overhead, all these layers.

Q: Were those kinds of cuts your idea?

A: No, that was Jack.

Q: Is that sort of thing why you left?

A: It was the career progression, the way it is at any firm. You start by doing the work and the work I liked. Then you get promoted to managing a group of people doing the work but you're also still very involved in it, and I liked that. But six years in, the next promotion was to being a vice president, where you're doing much more selling and you're managing managers. That was my future, and I didn't want to manage a consultancy. So I got off the train.

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Q: It was just you and your former secretary trying to make a go of it in the beginning. She didn't have a background in business and you didn't take a salary to start.

A: I told her we only have to worry about two things. We're going to make great beer every time and we're going to work our butts off to sell it. So we had no office, we didn't even have a telephone. Remember those answering services with old ladies in a basement, where you'd call in? That's how we got our messages. If we had to have a meeting, we did it in a bar, because they were our customers.

Q: Not everything in the book is a success story.

A: There are minor mistakes, major mistakes and a couple of colossal screw-ups. I wanted it to be authentic because a lot of business books are a little bit, you know, everything goes from good to better.

Q: But your story is still pretty good.

A: Our success as we grew from my kitchen to helping start this whole craft beer revolution largely came from sticking to the core values of the company. That doesn't mean we didn't have difficult times. There's a whole chapter about when Anheuser-Busch tried to put me out of business.

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Q: You're not a big fan of the bigger brewers.

A: They just have a different business model. They are financially driven and motivated. They're private equity companies that happen to make beer. There's nothing wrong with that. That is an important goal of business, to produce returns for the owner, and that is what drives them.

Q: And you?

A: In orientation, when people start working for us, I tell them we have four constituencies. The most important is our customers. The second most important is our people. The third is our investors, and the fourth is our community. I happen to be incorporated in Massachusetts. Corporation laws there are different than Delaware, and they allow a Massachusetts business, within its fiduciary responsibilities, to take into account those other constituencies.

Q: You do what you want.

A: A guy who worked with us for many years had this nice phrase. He said at Boston Beer Co., there's a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo, and that has been kind of one of our values. The status quo sucks. The status quo exists because we haven't figured out yet how to make it better, but we will. We're constantly innovating, not listening to people who say you can't do that.

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philrosenthal@tribpub.com

Twitter @phil_rosenthal
Chicago's North Shore is known for affluent suburbs bordering Lake Michigan, Ravinia and as the location of a number of popular movies, including "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Risky Business" and "Home Alone."

But it's not a relevant geographic market for hospitals, said David Dahlquist, an attorney for Evanston-based NorthShore University HealthSystem, which operates four hospitals.

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Dahlquist is celebrating Tuesday's federal court ruling that allowed his client to complete its merger with Downers Grove-based Advocate Health Care, defeating an attempt by the Federal Trade Commission to block the deal on antitrust grounds.

He spoke to the Tribune on Thursday about the decision, which hasn't been made public yet because it contains confidential business information. But Dahlquist, a lawyer at Chicago-based Winston & Strawn, provided some details about U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso's ruling.

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"It's short; it's about a 13-page decision," Dahlquist said. "It's focused entirely on the geographic market."

In order to prevail, the FTC had to define the geographic area to evaluate the competitive effects of the proposed combination. The commission chose an area in northern Cook and southern Lake counties that it called the "North Shore" market. The FTC alleged that Advocate and NorthShore were the two largest providers and owned six of the 11 hospitals in this area. The next closest competitor only had 15 percent of the market.

The commission asserted that an Advocate-NorthShore merger would lessen competition in the North Shore and give the combined entity the power to negotiate higher prices with insurance companies, which would translate to higher premiums for consumers.

But Judge Alonso didn't think the FTC properly defined the market, Dahlquist said. NorthShore and Advocate argued during a six-day hearing in April that their competitive market was the entire Chicago area, not a small sliver along Lake Michigan. The FTC's market also arbitrarily excluded competitors such as Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and Presence St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Dahlquist said.

"We believe the facts and the evidence showed that there is broad competition in the Chicago marketplace, and patients have a lot of choices and options of where they can go," he said.

An FTC spokeswoman declined comment on Dahlquist's remarks.

Dahlquist expects the judge to make his decision public next week after both sides have offered suggested redactions to protect confidential information. In the meantime, Advocate and NorthShore plan to consummate their merger on Tuesday, Dahlquist said.

But the FTC isn't giving up. The commission has filed a notice to appeal. It also has asked Alonso to temporarily stop the hospital systems from completing their merger pending appellate review of his ruling.

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asachdev@tribpub.com

Twitter @ameetsachdev
Noemi Hernandez walks her 8-year-old daughter Yumalai to school June 16, 2016, on Chicago's Northwest Side. Hernandez, who works as a bartender at a Navy Pier restaurant, has sometimes had to choose between going to work or taking her sick daughter to the doctor and forgoing a day's wages. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Chicago took a major step Thursday toward requiring nearly all employers to offer workers paid sick leave, with a measure excoriated by some business interest groups as overly complicated and inconsiderate of business owners' needs.

Workers and labor organizers cheered after the City Council's Committee on Workforce Development and Audit approved the earned sick time ordinance proposal in a unanimous voice vote. The full City Council is expected to consider the measure at Wednesday's meeting.

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Under the proposed ordinance, employees would accrue one hour of paid sick time for every 40 hours worked, with a cap of five sick days in a 12-month period. Employers could offer more if they wish.

If approved, Chicago would join 26 other U.S. cities, five states and one county with paid sick time laws on the books, according to A Better Balance, a legal advocacy group on work-family policies. The Chicago measure would take effect July 1, 2017.

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"It's a sober victory because we know that until it takes effect, people are choosing between their jobs and their health," said Adam Kader, director of the Arise Chicago worker center.

The measure is meant to protect people like Noemi Hernandez, who works as a bartender at a restaurant on Navy Pier.

Hernandez, 26, said she had a decision to make this week when her 8-year-old daughter woke up with a bloody nose: Should she assume it was no big deal, perhaps a reaction to the hot weather, and head to work for her double shift? Or should she stay with her daughter, forgo the day's wages and risk angering her boss?

With no paid sick days, Hernandez, a single mom living on Chicago's Northwest Side, went to work, and was relieved when she didn't get a call from her daughter's school.

But it doesn't always work out that way.

Hernandez recalls getting a call while at work at a retail store five years ago, informing her that her daughter had swallowed a dime, so she left and rushed to the emergency room. She didn't get in trouble then, but she also didn't get paid, which she said was tough when her paycheck was barely enough to cover her bills.

"It's two losses at once," said Hernandez, who works part-time and recently completed her associate degree. "You lose the wage and you have to pay a doctor's bill."

But some business owners worry the proposed law does not provide employers enough protection to ensure workers don't abuse it.

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"By this language, anyone could call in anytime, without notice, claim an illness, legitimate or not," said Paul Fehribach, chef and co-owner at Big Jones, an Andersonville restaurant with 25 hourly employees who don't get paid sick days.

About 42 percent of Chicago private-sector workers, or 460,000 people, don't have access to paid sick leave, according to Women Employed, an advocacy group that helped draft the legislation. Low-wage workers and Hispanics are the least likely to have access, studies show.

Offering paid sick leave would increase labor costs by 0.7 to 1.5 percent for most employers, depending on size and usage, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Civic Consulting Alliance.

In an unusual turn, the Illinois Restaurant Association, which did not testify at the committee hearing, is not opposing the proposed law, though it stopped short of endorsing it.

"In general, the Illinois Restaurant Association is not supportive of mandates on business," Sam Toia, president and CEO of the restaurant trade group, wrote in an emailed statement. "However, we are pleased that this ordinance is more business friendly than those adopted in other jurisdictions."

But other business interest groups did turn out to criticize the legislation, saying the details are complicated and many small-business owners  already burdened by minimum-wage hikes and the plastic bag ban  don't have human resources departments to ensure they comply.

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"We are not here to kill paid sick leave," Tanya Triche, vice president and general counsel of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, testified before the committee. "What we're asking you for is some consideration for the employers that you are asking more and more of every day."

Mike Reever, vice president of government relations for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said after the hearing the organization opposes a city-only policy because it "creates a chaotic patchwork and a competitive disadvantage." Chamber members also are concerned about a special exemption given to unionized construction workers and how the measure will affect the dynamics of collective bargaining agreements.

Reever hopes to work with aldermen to clarify some of the points before next week's City Council meeting.

"We do recognize there is a lot of support behind this ordinance, so we want to see a more simplistic ordinance that makes it easier for employers to administer," Reever said. "Right now it is extremely complicated."

The legislation, sponsored by 38 aldermen, would apply to employers of all sizes and to anyone who works at least 80 hours for an employer within any four-month period, so most part-time workers would qualify. New employees would start accruing time off right away but wouldn't be able to use it for six months after their start dates, so many temporary or seasonal workers would be excluded.

In addition to illness, paid sick time also could be used in the event of domestic violence or the closing of a school or business due to a public health emergency.

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Employers could not require employees to find a replacement to cover their time off, though they could require up to seven days' notice if the sick time is foreseeable, such as for a pre-planned doctor's appointment.

If an employee is absent for three consecutive days, the employer could ask for proof that the reasons were legitimate, such as a note from a doctor.

Employees could carry over half of any unused sick time into the next year, up to 20 hours. The proposal also would allow employees to carry over up to 40 hours of unused sick time into the following year for purposes of the Family and Medical Leave Act, such as to care for a newborn or an ailing family member.

Employers would not have to pay out any unused sick time when an employee exits a company.

Existing collective bargaining agreements would not have to be modified. When it is time to approve a new contract, the parties could decide to explicitly waive the city's minimum sick leave requirements. The proposed law would not apply to construction industry workers.

The Chicago Federation of Labor, which represents some 300 unions, supports the sick time ordinance. Asked at the hearing to explain the carve-out for the construction industry, Bridget Early, political director of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said the nature of construction work, including scheduling, sets it apart.

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Some business owners applaud the proposal, saying offering employees good benefits reduces turnover and boosts morale.

Dimo's Pizza owner Dimitri Syrkin-Nikolau, who was a vocal supporter of raising the minimum wage, testified that he supports paid sick leave because "our employees need to know that we've got their backs." But he added that "being a business in the city is not easy" and there are questions about how the proposed law would roll out.

"It's a smart idea, but it does need to be simple and it does need to be effective," Syrkin-Nikolau said. Dimo's, which has locations in Wrigleyville and Wicker Park, provides workers with paid time off after a year of employment and a 401(k) match.

Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, the proposal's lead sponsor,

said after the hearing that he will meet with business interest groups as well as worker advocates in the coming days to clarify provisions and implementation of the ordinance, but "I will not support anything that diminishes benefits that we have negotiated."

aelejalderuiz@tribpub.com

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Tony Buttitta of Elite Tile of Oak Park working on the historical society's new first floor bath. (Oak Park & River Forest Historical / Handout)

The old Cicero Fire House No. 2 is getting closer to once again serving the community, and its new tenant, the Oak Park & River Forest Historical Society, is just a few thousand dollars away from meeting a mammoth challenge.

There's still time to give to the T. Kendall Hunt Family Foundation $100,000 Challenge, which matches any amount given up to the $100,000 level. That means your money doubles, and $100 becomes $200, $500 becomes $1,000, etc. The challenge ends on June 30.

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"We're within striking distance," said Frank Lipo, the historical society's executive director. "People kind of get it  for years they've been working with the historical society, and they're generous in general.

"This is a game changer; it's not quite the routine," Lipo added. "It's once-in-a-generation lifetime. I'm so happy people are responding that way. We're now within a few thousand dollars, and it's really gratifying."

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Donations will fund the final phase of construction of the historical society's new museum and headquarters, which includes the installation of tile, carpentry trim work, purchasing fixtures, painting, and many other tasks, Lipo said. Some of the money is earmarked for moving from the historical society's 45-year home at Pleasant Home. Carpet is still needed for the second floor, a few pieces of furniture will be purchased (mostly they'll be reusing pieces they already have), a fire escape has to be built and miscellaneous loose ends will be tied up with the funds, Lipo said.

Some folks like to wait until the last minute to donate, Lipo said. He's hoping that's the case here. People like the feeling they're putting something over the top and that they're at the cutting edge, Lipo said.

Additionally, "things are so community based around here, it's their history, too," said Lipo. "People go back generations  there's a sense of pride in ownership.

"This community is special," said Lipo. "It's not just Anytown U.S.A."

The venerable firehouse, 129 Lake St., was built in 1898. During July, August and September, the historical society will start moving over materials to its new digs. The goal is to be up and operating with a soft opening in mid-September, just in time for the place to be shown off for the annual meeting of the Illinois Association of Museums, whose conference portion is being held in Oak Park at the 19th Century Club. Several other museum related sites, including the historical society, will be used also.

"Professionals in the field will be around to see what we've done so far," said Lipo. "That's what we've always hoped for."

For more info or to donate, go to oprfhistory.org.

Congrats to  Patti Sprafka Wagner, of the WeichertNickel Group in Oak Park, who was named Weichert Real Estate Affiliate's top producing agent in May  nationwide! The recognition is based on gross commission income earned or real estate transactions closed.

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And way to go also to Jane McClelland, broker/owner at RE/MAX in the Village, Oak Park. RE/MAX Northern Illinois recently welcomed McClelland to its Pioneer Club, which celebrates those with 25 years with its Real Estate Brokerage Network.

Felicia Dechter is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.
Dear Donald,

On behalf of the National Contest on How to Respond to the Orlando Tragedy, I want to confirm receipt of your essay, headlined "MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!"

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I have re-printed your essay here:

"Dear matt,

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The horrific attack that took place this past weekend reveals how weak the leadership is in our country. My thoughts and prayers go out to the many friends and families affected by the events in Orlando, Florida. I am going to be a President for all Americans, and I am going to protect and defend all Americans. We will not stand by and allow another tragedy like this to happen. We are going to make America safe again and great again for everyone."

First, Mr. Trump, I must take you to task for again failing to capitalize my name. Putting that aside, you begin your first sentence with so much promise: The.

Well done! Let's Make the Capital Words Capital Again!

Alas, you go downhill from there: "horrific attack that took place this past weekend reveals how weak the leadership is in our country."

Now, that's just plain ugliness in the wake of such a brutal massacre.

High on my list of suggested endings to that sentence: "reveals the brokenness of a national gun-loving culture that enables such rapid-fire weapons of destruction into a citizen's hands."

Instead, you whip out your broad brush of Sweeping Condemnations Without Cogent Recommendations and cynically use this tragedy to try to score political points.

The rest of your diatribe is also a disaster. You offer your "thoughts and prayers" and as if that were not enough to make a fair-minded American gag, you go on to make a promise that is beyond your control: "We will not stand by and allow another tragedy like this to happen."

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Such a pledge is irresponsible and arrogant, for starters. Then, of course, you wield the phrases "great again" and "safe again" in an apparent attempt to anticipate Google search terms  or because you like using "again" again and again. And again?

In closing, Donald, your essay "MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!" finished dead-last in the National Contest on How to Respond to the Orlando Tragedy.

I hope this news didn't spoil your 70th birthday party. Or was it your seventh?

Matt Baron

Oak Park
1. Save cash at Q-Tine

To celebrate its first birthday, barbecue and poutine restaurant Q-Tine in Logan Square is offering its classic poutine (hand-cut fries, cheddar cheese curds and housemade gravy) for $3.75, half off the regular price of $7.50. Spiked slushies are just $5 (regularly $10); flavors include watermelon margarita, bourbon peach and Moscow mule. 11:30 a.m. to 4 a.m. on Friday, June 17 into Saturday, June 18 at 2339 N. Milwaukee Ave., 773-227-5100, www.q-tine.com.

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2. Drink rose at Intro

Intro celebrates rose this month. (Bob Fila / Chicago Tribune)

It's Rose Fest at Intro, where chef Stephen Gillanders' four-course menu comes with a special lineup of roses all month. Start with a glass of Camille Braun from Cremant d'Alsace, France paired with black truffle croquettes and end with Italy's Lambrusco Barbolini teamed with a blackberry bonita float, with pours from California and southwest France in between. $68, plus tax and gratuity. 2300 N. Lincoln Park West, 773-868-0002, www.introchicago.com.

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3. Discover Italian street food

Arancini calls at Eataly. (Leigh Loftus Photography)

Eataly's first Italian Street Food Festival celebrates street dishes from all parts of Italy. Fifteen food carts feature everything from fried risotto balls to fried mozzarella to baked sandwiches, while a beer tent keeps the housemade brews flowing. $42. 5-7 p.m. or 7-9 p.m. on Friday, June 17 and Saturday, June 18 at Eataly, 43 E. Ohio St., www.eataly.com

4. Take a Peruvian cocktail class

Take a pisco sour class at Tanta. (Tanta)

Learn how to make the perfect pisco sour at a cocktail class at Tanta. The River North restaurant invites guests to its rooftop terrace for Peruvian street food and a demo led by Tanta's head bartender on how to make the traditional Peruvian drink and its popular sibling, pisco punch. Tickets ($80, tax and gratuity included) include appetizers, two drinks and the demo. 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, June 18 at Tanta, 118 W. Grand Ave., 312.222.9700, www.tantachicago.com.

5. Hit one of Chicago's biggest beer fests

Hit Grant Park for Chicago Ale Fest, a party spotlighting more than 200 beers from 100-plus breweries. For $50 ($60 at the door), receive 20 drink tickets, each good for a 3-ounce sample. For designated drivers, admission is $25 for all-you-can-drink non-alcoholic beverages. 6-10 p.m. on Friday, June 17 and 2-6 p.m. on Saturday, June 18 at Buckingham Fountain, www.chicagoalefest.com.

mconrad@tribpub.com

Twitter @marissa_conrad






Nomad Food Company, known for the pizza it serves at Green City Market, has signed a lease on an event space. (Abel Uribe )

Nomad Food Company, as you'd expect by its name, is always on the move. The mobile wood-fired oven is wheeled into Lincoln Park twice a week for the Green City Market, where Nomad owner Jared Batson dishes out beautifully blistered thin-crust pizzas with seasonally focused toppings. Despite only operating for two days a week in Chicago, many consider it some of the best pizza in the city.

But Nomad is finally ready to settle down. Sort of.

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Batson recently signed a temporary lease on a space at 4019 N. Damen Ave., which used to house Johnny Casserole. Just don't expect a full-time restaurant. Instead, it will function primarily as Nomad's prep kitchen. "This puts us much closer to the Green City Market," says Batson.

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But don't fret, pizza fans: The space will also host a number of events, including a weekly pizza night. The Monday event will function almost like a pizza incubator for Chicago. "I'll cook Nomad pizza every first Monday of the month," says Batson. "But then it will move to someone else the next Monday."

Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. >

Details are still being finalized, but Batson expects Rachel Post to cook every fourth Monday of the month. She used to work for Floriole, where she helped craft the dough used for the bakery's acclaimed pizzas. Also on board is Abra Berens, the executive chef at Local Foods. Batson expects her to cook every second Monday. The third Monday of each month will be filled in by a rotating selection of Chicago chefs.

Batson still hasn't decided on the price, but it will be all-inclusive event with beer from local brewery Moody Tongue. "It's going to be a fun Monday night bash," he says.

Other events may also take place at the space, though they will probably be small. "If one of my chef buddies wants to do something, they can." says Batson. "I want to make the most out of this space that I can."

When pressed, the chef admitted that he isn't completely averse to opening a restaurant, but he's taking his time. "This space allows us to get our feet wet in Chicago," he says.

A full schedule should be released within the week. Check Nomad's website for updates.

Nomad Kitchen, 4019 N Damen, 847-393-3955, www.thenomadfoodcompany.com

nkindelsperger@tribpub.com

Twitter @nickdk






An industrial-strength shaved ice machine, a plunge pool and dig pits will be among the amenities in a new polar bear habitat that Lincoln Park Zoo is readying for fall or winter occupancy. June 16, 2016 (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune) (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune)

An industrial-strength shaved ice machine, a plunge pool and dig pits will be among the amenities in a new polar bear habitat that Lincoln Park Zoo is readying for fall or winter occupancy.

Much larger than its predecessor polar bear enclosure, which closed in 2014, the new Walter Family Arctic Tundra exhibit will also feature more  and more varied  land area than people are used to seeing in typical polar bear pens.

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That is what the endangered carnivores prefer, rather than the common setup of a big swimming pool, like Lincoln Park had previously, explained Steve Thompson, the zoo's senior vice president of capital and programmatic planning.

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Amid construction crews painting and working on the tree line above the habitat, which expands on the footprint of the old one on the zoo's north side, Thompson showed off the exhibit's features at a hard-hat tour for media Thursday morning. There were no polar bears there yet, however, a good thing because several walls remain open to public walkways.

The tour followed further news about the zoo's pair of Amur tigers, which a story in Thursday's Tribune explained will not have a home when the Kovler Lion House gets its major renovation, beginning when the zoo can raise 90 percent of the money for the anticipated $30 million project.

However, zoo President and CEO Kevin Bell, at Thursday's event, said an eventual return of tigers is possible. "We hope someday to build a tiger habitat, probably at the south end of the zoo," he said. But don't hold your breath: In an interview earlier this week, he suggested that renovation work in that zoo area is many years down the road.

As part of a current $125 million capital improvement and fundraising campaign, the zoo added the new Regenstein Macaque Forest and a new kiddie train ride last year. Next to come on line will be the arctic tundra exhibit and, probably first, the adjacent Robert and Mayari Pritzker Penguin Cove, marking the return to the zoo of the popular flightless birds after a five-year absence. The outdoor penguin exhibit will house a new species, African penguins.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 9 The south viewing shelter, which includes a plunge pool for the polar bears, at the Walter Family Arctic Tundra at the Lincoln Park Zoo on June 16, 2016. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Zoo officials aren't saying anything more specific than fall or winter as opening dates, but on Thursday, Thompson did say he expects the general contractor to be finished with its polar bear work in about six weeks, which would then allow zoo staffers to do their work on the habitat.

Who the male and female pair living there will be is still unknown. That determination will be made by administrators of North American zoos' Species Survival Plan for polar bears, said Megan Ross, senior vice president. Ross said the zoo's last polar bear, a female named Anana, is in a good situation at the North Carolina Zoo, where she is part of a potential breeding pair, making a return unlikely.

The bear habitat has multiple discrete viewing areas and is split into two enclosures, both for more space and better animal husbandry. One area will allow keepers to showcase trained behaviors as guests watch through glass or mesh.

"The polar bears will go full length in front of you," Thompson said, imitating a bear rearing up.

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In the interior spaces, which include a den area for hoped-for pregnancies and multiple spots to hold the animals off-exhibit, Thompson also highlighted features including quarter-inch steel mesh and counterweighted doors of inch-thick plastic.

"Polar bear containment is really very rigorous," he said.

sajohnson@tribpub.com

Twitter @StevenKJohnson

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 126 Woody introduces the gang to a homemade spork toy with self-esteem issues in "Toy Story 4." Read the review. (Pixar / AP)
Profiles Theatre, a small off-Loop company that is the subject of published allegations of intimidation, sexual misconduct and unsafe stage combat, is shutting down permanently.

The closure, announced Tuesday night and effective immediately, was the latest development involving Profiles that has shocked, angered and mobilized the Chicago theater community.

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The Profiles scandal has unfolded during a time of increased discussion about the unregulated nature of some performance spaces, and the small theater and comedy companies that work in those spaces without formal workplace protections being put in place for the performers, especially women.

Last week, the Chicago Reader turned the spotlight on Profiles, a small but long-lived theater at 4147 N. Broadway on Chicago's North Side. The Reader's story focused on co-artistic director Darrell W. Cox's personal conduct and included multiple accusations of physical assault and psychological abuse of mostly younger women on stage and off over nearly two decades. In January, the Tribune ran a story concerning allegations of sexual harassment in the Chicago improv world.

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Lori Myers, a co-founder of an advocacy organization called Not in Our House and a Chicago actress, has served as a spokeswoman and advocate for many of the women featured in the Reader's investigation. She has been widely heralded on social media for her work.

"We are deeply saddened when any theater closes," Myers said in a statement emailed to the Tribune. "We wish for the survivors to reach a point of healing and closure. What has been ignited with this movement is nothing short of a cultural paradigm shift. Keep this positive momentum going. It's time to get back to the work."

People walk past Profiles Theatre, 4147 N. Broadway in Chicago, on June 15, 2016. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Many of the most prominent and successful productions staged by Profiles over its history hewed to a rough-and-gritty style that often included violence, and a notable number of plays featured older male characters in emotionally or sexually dominating relationships with younger women. The behind-the-scenes practices at one such production, the play "Killer Joe" by Tracy Letts, were central in the Reader's story.

Kelly O'Sullivan, a Chicago actress who appeared at age 21 in the 2005 Profiles production of Rebecca Gilman's "The Glory of Living," described her experience working at the theater, and specifically with Cox, as "terrible."

"As a professional actor now I look back on it and there were so many red flags early on," O'Sullivan told the Tribune. "It was my first professional theater gig and I had no idea what normal was."

O'Sullivan said she was asked to have meetings with Cox outside of rehearsal time. "It was," she said, "super-uncomfortable." She also said attempts were made to isolate her from the rest of the cast. "It didn't work," she said, "because luckily another young woman in the show warned me about Darrell within the first couple of rehearsals. And then she and I rode together to and from the show every day, so I had this lovely female bond of a protective barrier."

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Indeed, several other women made specific and similar accusations of abuse by Cox in the Reader's story, and others have come forward  either on social media or on their own blogs  and made similar accusations since the story was published.

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Cox, 48, declined to speak in person or on the phone but agreed through a spokesman to respond to a series of written questions from the Tribune. Therein, he denied the accusations purporting to his behavior within the theater.

"We have always gone to great lengths to protect everyone physically while performing combat, intimate and other risky scenes," he wrote. "The theatre is a physical place. Particular scenes can lead to injury from time to time but all actions are closely supervised with the actor's safety of paramount importance. With respect to 'Killer Joe,' we had a fight call every single day and I checked in after the performance every night. I would ask questions to the actress if everything felt safe and if there was anything we needed to adjust. We did this daily  the fight choreographers had us doing some high-risk moves."

The allegations in the Reader story center on the years before Profiles affiliated with Actors' Equity, which it did in 2012. Equity has extensive rules governing conduct in rehearsals and performance.

Following publication, Penelope Skinner withdrew the rights to her play "The Village Bike," which would have been Profiles' summer show.

"(The Reader) article has done irreparable damage to my reputation," Cox wrote. "It has been very hurtful to not only our friends and family, but, numerous colleagues and supporters of ours, as well. Therefore, we are considering all options."

Between 2004 and 2008, the theater company also created pseudonymous directors on at least four of its productions. The fictional names of "Carla Russell" as director of "The Glory of Living" (Cox won the Joseph Jefferson Award for his leading performance) and of "Sarah Franklin" as the director of "Snakebit" appeared in the Tribune, as they did in other local publications.

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In an online database listing Cox's theater credits, he openly acknowledges his use of pseudonyms (which is not unheard of in the theater but hardly common practice), claiming, in addition to directing those two productions, that he directed "Things We Said Today" in 2007 (credited to "Sarah Franklin") and "Noise" in 2004 (credited to "Carla Russell"). Cox also claims the scenic design of "The Thugs" and "Men of Tortuga" in 2008 (credited to the fictional "Wayne Karl") and the costume design for "Autobahn" in 2006 (credited to "Sal V. Armano").

O'Sullivan said she was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement regarding the true identity of the director of "The Glory of Living." When asked by the Tribune to explain the fabrication, Cox said that he regretted the serial deception. "At the time," he wrote, "Profiles was just starting out and we wanted our patrons to think we were bigger. If we could go back, we would change that."

However, the theater also produced the early work of a number of noted female playwrights, including Ellen Fairey, Julie Jensen, Deirdre O'Connor, Leslye Headland, Johnna Adams and Annie Baker, some of whom were present on opening nights. Acclaimed actors such as Michael Shannon worked at the theater early in their careers, and several artists associated with the Steppenwolf Theatre served in various ad hoc capacities involving teaching, directing and casting.

But it was the nationally acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Neil LaBute who was produced most frequently at the theater and listed as a resident artist. In an interview Tuesday, LaBute, who does not live in Chicago, said he was "horrified by the allegations" and said that while he had a "long association" with Profiles, "it was always a long-distance association."

Profiles also was known for showcasing the work of emerging and talented Chicago actresses, many of whose performances were hailed in reviews, at the Jeff Awards and in end-of-year lists, and who then often went on to work at larger theaters; at Profiles, Cox often was their co-star and his co-artistic director, Joe Jahraus  or some amalgam of Cox and Jahraus  their director.

As an actor, Cox also appeared at the American Theater Company, Steppenwolf, the Goodman Theatre and the TimeLine Theatre Company, among others.

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Profiles was never a fiscally stable organization capable of supporting full-time employment. Most of the people who worked there were paid minimal stipends, if at all, which is not uncommon in storefront Chicago theater. The theater's annual budget was less than $300,000. At the end of 2014, the last year of financial returns available, it reported less than $15,000 in assets. In that year's tax report, the total annual compensation paid to all staffers was $21,803.

Early in 2015, women began sharing their concerns about Profiles in a private Facebook group, which later trickled out more broadly on social media, prompting Myers, along with fellow actresses Molly Brennan and Laura T. Fisher, to create Not In Our House.

"Sexual discrimination and harassment, and gender-based violence often occur in the intimate and physical context of a theater production," the group says in its mission statement.

Not In Our House is encouraging non-Equity theaters to adopt a set of rules and safeguards that would address some of these issues.

In an interview Tuesday, Fisher said a new code of conduct, modeled closely on the policies of the Actors' Equity Association, was in progress. "We hope to have something soon," Fisher said.

Cox wrote, in response to a question about what he wanted to say to the women who have alleged abuse at his hands: "I do regret any actions that may have caused pain to a fellow actor, regardless of gender. Acting and directing are very intimate jobs and ones where a person's intentions can be easily misread or misinterpreted. I have always tried to do good work and work well with those around me  if someone honestly feels that I failed at that then I truly do apologize for that."

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The Not In Our House mission statement reads: "No one should be forced to choose between her personal safety and dignity, and her job. But too often in the theater community, this is exactly the choice that women must make."

Among the broader theater community, there was much soul-searching about the allegations; Profiles was in existence for close to three decades, involving scores of respected Chicago theater artists in classes, workshops, benefits and productions. The reviews in numerous publications, including the Tribune, and the oft-laudatory coverage of the theater's apparent edginess and visceral qualities, long cherished in Chicago theater, were dissected in the new disturbing light. And discussions on social media focused on what could be done in the future to ensure that all actors, especially young actors, felt and were safe.

Even in the smallest Chicago theaters.

cjones5@tribpub.com

Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib

nmetz@tribpub.com

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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)
If Teffi hadn't existed, no one could have invented her. Read and admired by Nicholas II and Lenin, scornful of the Whites and the Bolsheviks, pursued in vain by Rasputin, constitutionally incapable of suffering fools, Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya was one of prerevolutionary Russia's brightest literary beacons, a playwright and humorist whose pen name, she wrote long after she'd adopted it, "sounds like something you'd call a dog."

Teffi wrote for the Bolshevik organ New Life after the 1905 Revolution, but she found Lenin a drag long before he turned up again at the Finland Station. She was the sort of writer dictatorships end up shooting eventually, so despite her socialist principles, she left Russia for good in 1918.

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"Lenin had no feeling for beauty whatsoever, in anything," Teffi writes in one of many resplendent reminiscences collected by Robert Chandler and Anne Marie Jackson in "Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me."

Teffi had feeling for everything in everything; she observed Russian and, later, Parisian emigre society as if she were an anthropologist among some newly discovered tribe whose customs are obscure and harrowing. She captures the inanity of dinner parties better than Evelyn Waugh; her account of dining with Rasputin, and rebuffing his attempts to seduce her, is worthy of Joan Didion at her Morrison-waiting drollest.

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The great mystic comes across in Teffi's portrait as even more of a charlatan than you might have suspected  a posturing buffoon solemnly pronouncing perfect banalities and then looking "round the whole group, his eyes pricking each person in turn, as if to say, 'Have I given you something to think about? Are you satisfied? Have I surprised you?'"

Rasputin is given to suddenly "leaping about like a goat" whenever the musicians he traveled everywhere with struck up. He attempts mesmerism on Teffi several times, moaning in spasms when he's snubbed. Dude was weird.

But it's the high society that courted Rasputin that Teffi's brushstrokes render most farcical. One host badgers her to draw him out: "'Get him to talk about matters erotic. God Almighty! Do you really not know how to get a man to talk?'" A venerable lady-in-waiting "suddenly, shamelessly, lost all self-control at the mere mention of Rasputin, that peasant in a pink calico smock."

But power and authority loom omnipresent in Teffi's Russia, everywhere and nowhere at once, Tsarist and Bolshevik each with their secret police, their agents provocateur. Rasputin is summoned from the table with a phrase that reminds the guests of the dangerous forces at his disposal: "'The palace is on the line.'"

Teffi was most adroit at seeing through the masks of power to its horror and absurdity (though of course her writing is not free of ideology  she reminds us often enough that Rasputin was a peasant). Lenin's humorlessness repulsed her, but so did the hypocrisy of the "refugees from Sovietdom." "The Gadarene Swine" is her Swiftian takedown of the emigres fleeing the Revolution with diamonds sewn into their shoes, spewing platitudes about culture. She fled Russia with them, of course  her wit is at its tautest in "We Are Still Living," a brief and savage account of life under war communism in 1918, in the city she always called Petersburg:

Those Bolsheviks in the Smolny are a crafty lot. They've decreed that every woman under forty must report for snow-shovelling duty. What woman is fool enough to tell the whole world she's over forty?

But she distinguishes the possessed "swine" among the refugees from the "meek, frightened sheep."

They are indeed all running away from the Bolsheviks. But the crazed swine are escaping from Bolshevik truth, from socialist principles, from equality and justice, while the meek and frightened are escaping from untruth, from Bolshevism's black reality, from terror, injustice and violence.

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In one sentence, Teffi moves beyond the idiot opposition of frothy anticommunism and Leninist delusion. It's downright dialectical.

Teffi's humor was as black as Bolshevist reality. "A joke is not so funny when you're living inside it," she writes in "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea," an account of her last months in Russia and the Ukraine reissued by NYRB Classics along with "Tolstoy, Rasputin." Both volumes are comedies you wouldn't want to live inside. In "We Are Still Living"  whose title seems to register surprise or disappointment  the authorities order all criminals to leave the city. Teffi observes that the only effect this had was to make law-abiding citizens jealous of the criminals. Her sentences can be so acidic they make irony seem like understatement. After relating the joke of a man who died from eating adulterated bread one day before "he could have got an egg on his ration card," she writes: "All that was a long time ago, needless to say. About ten days ago. Now it sounds like some fairy story."

I kept thinking of Victor Serge's "Memoirs of a Revolutionary" (also published by NYRB) as I read this collection, though Serge's commitments were very different from Teffi's (he fought for the Bolsheviks before turning against them). They share a resolve not to be taken in, as well as an admiration for those who fight for lost causes. Teffi rebukes those, including herself, who didn't stay in Russia to fight for Bolshevik truth and against Bolshevik untruth:

Should an impassioned knight enter into combat with a windmill, then  and please remember this  the windmill will always win. Even though this certainly does not mean  and please remember this too  that the windmill is right.

--

Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections "Alien vs. Predator" and "The Second Sex."

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"Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi"

Edited by Robert Chandler and Anne Marie Jackson, NYRB Classics, 224 pages, $14.95
On a campaign stop in Atlanta, Donald Trump attempted to argue that he was a stronger ally of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people than Hillary Clinton. (Chuck Burton / AP)

For weeks, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has been touting his "youge!" fanbase with Mexicans, women, a slew of other minorities  often times alienating them with the same breath. On Wednesday, he added "the gays" to his list.

On a campaign stop in Atlanta, Trump attempted to frame this past weekend's horrific shooting in Orlando as a reason for banning Muslims and other immigrants from entering the country, yet at some point in his remarks, he attempted to argue that he was a stronger ally of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people than Hillary Clinton.

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"The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community  they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days," Trump said. "Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me  who's your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?"

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Almost immediately, the Twitterverse jumped on the phrase  "ask the gays"  and turned it into a viral hashtag, with the LGBT community responding with unequivocal sass, in the form of animated GIFs and video clips.

If there's a social media lesson to be learned here, it's this: Ask and you shall receive. "The thing about Trump is that he's designed to make you have a reaction," said Annemarie Dooling, an engagement editor for Vox Media and an expert on internet communities. "And we  either his supporters or people that disagree with him  do react. He wants to get a rise out of everyone."

Brian C. Johnson, CEO of Equality Illinois, a Chicago-based LGBT nonprofit, agrees. "(His statements are) so ridiculous, it's comical," he said. "Trump has a way of oversimplifying nuanced, painful issues, and this is just another example."

For Dooling, Trump's statements  both in speeches and in social media  are par for the course. "He's trolling," she said. "The thing that bothers me about Trump politicizing Orlando is that he's trying to turn the focus to Islamophobia. Trump has always been about 'us versus them,' but he takes every opportunity to redefine who 'us' is."

Similarly, Johnson sees Trump's "ask the gays" as pandering to "a community that's not monolithic."

"His call to ask the gays ignores the full diversity of our community," he said. "For months he's campaigned against Muslims, Latinos, Mexicans, but we have LGBT members who are Muslim, Latino, Mexican. He's trying to divide us, but he's not speaking to us."

The hashtag is proof that "the LGBT community is too smart to fall for this," Dooling said. "While he politicizes the tragedy of Orlando, people are coming together to help each other and get things done."

And therein lies the other social media lesson: Think before you speak.

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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 13 In 1987, Mayor Harold Washington ordered the design of a new central library. The breathtaking Winter Garden on the ninth floor is a quiet locale, perfect for logging some hours. (Stevegeer/iStock)
Jaylene Bermeo, 6, gives a thumbs-up from her bed at Stroger Hospital, where she is being treated for a gunshot wound suffered while she played with friends in Palmer Square. (Hospital photo)

A 6-year-old girl shot in the back last week was readmitted to Stroger Hospital early Thursday, less than two days after being sent home, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Jaylene Bermeo was listed in "stable but guarded" condition, said Alexandra Normington, a spokeswoman for Cook County's Health and Hospitals System.

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Chicago Fire Department officials said she was transported to the hospital in critical condition after experiencing difficulty breathing. Jaylene had suffered a collapsed lung when she was shot June 6.

Jaylene was drawing with chalk on the front sidewalk outside her aunt's house in the 2100 block of North Bingham Street with her two sisters and three cousins when a car drove up and she was hit by gunfire, prosecutors said last week.

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A bullet tore through Jaylene's back, puncturing her lung before lodging near her heart, where it still remained as of last week, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors said the Northwest Side home where the shooting took place has been a focus of Spanish Cobras gang activity.

Several members of the Spanish Cobras were outside the home at the time of the shooting, said prosecutors, who described the shooting as the result of a "war" between the Cobras and the Maniac Latin Disciples.

A 17-year-old suspect in the shooting was ordered held in custody last week.

WGN-TV contributed.
Chicago police help reunite kids with their parents at the end of the school day after a CPS employee was fatally shot across the street from McNair Elementary School in the 4800 block of West Walton Street in the South Austin neighborhood on June 16, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

Students leaving McNair Elementary School in the South Austin neighborhood carried science projects and walked hand-in-hand with staff members who ushered them out a side entrance to waiting parents and buses Thursday after a Chicago Public Schools employee was killed outside the school's main entrance.



The school was locked down, and parents received calls informing them of the shooting and that nobody would be allowed in or out of the school until dismissal at 2:30 p.m.



Detectives and forensics investigators worked quickly to remove the body before school let out. A half-hour after the shooting, an officer brought a blanket out of the school and walked toward the body but returned the blanket when another officer covered the victim in a blue sheet. Students could be seen looking out of the windows.



The CPS employee was shot about 12:30 p.m. and died slumped over a curb across the street. He was identified as Denzel Thornton, 25, of the 800 block of West Buena Avenue in the Uptown neighborhood, the Cook County medical examiner's office said.

Thornton had worked with the district for 10 months as a compliance specialist for nutrition services and was conducting his regular rounds at the school Thursday, said CPS chief Forrest Claypool, who added that the shooting "did not have any relationship to the school."

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An eighth-grade graduation scheduled at the school later took place, Claypool said. Crisis counseling was being offered at the school and district headquarters where Thornton was based.

"On behalf of all of Chicago Public Schools, we were devastated to learn today about the tragic death of one of our employees. Like many CPS employees, he worked hard every day to serve our children," Claypool said in a statement.

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Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy said Thornton had no criminal history or documented gang affiliation, and it wasn't clear why he had been shot.

Taj Woods, 22, was called to the school because her daughter was sick. By the time she arrived, police had taped off Walton Street and told her she couldn't see her daughter until school let out.

About an hour after she arrived, she received a call about the lockdown.

"People can't go out without getting hurt," said Kayla Saffold, Woods' 21-year-old cousin. "It's unsafe. On top of that, our babies go here. We don't want our babies hurt. You can't take a child to school without someone shooting."

Saffold has an 11-year-old sister and cousins who attend the prekindergarten through eighth-grade school.

"Just imagine if kids were coming out," she said. "It wouldn't have just been him hurt, might have been several others."

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Lavonna Brown waited on the east end of the school, where students were getting dismissed.

"This was once a safe place where everybody knew everybody," she said. "Everybody grew up as family. Now everyone hates each other. It's sad."

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When a side door opened, parents clustered around a fence that surrounded the school play lot. A few minutes later, a school staff member came out and said they were hoping to get police to cut the tape that blocked the sidewalk so the kids didn't have to walk past it.

Students left the school in waves, the youngest first, moved along by adults from the school to the embraces of their parents.

A police SUV with its lights on sat parked on the sidewalk in front of the school entrance.

Brown walked her child past a black SUV guarding the west end of the crime scene, around tape, and waved to friends. She and her daughter stopped briefly to talk with friends on a stoop and then kept walking.

pnickeas@tribpub.com
A Chicago police vehicle struck and injured a cyclist biking through West Garfield Park on Tuesday night en route to a call of shots fired, officials said.

About 7:40 p.m., officers were driving south on Hamlin Boulevard toward Jackson Boulevard in a police vehicle with its emergency lights activated, a police spokesman said Wednesday in an email. The officers slowed down at the intersection in order to let another squad car pass them and then struck the cyclist, a 17-year-old girl, who was biking west on Jackson.

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The officers were responding to a call of shots fired on Hamlin near the Eisenhower Expressway and planned to assist state police.

Police could not confirm whether officers tended to the injured cyclist, though a video posted to Facebook appears to show officers helping her. The girl was taken to Stroger Hospital in good condition, complaining of head, back and side pain. Police said the cyclist was expected to be treated and released.

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meltagouri@tribpub.com
Mayor Rahm Emanuel speaks last fall while aides and a member of his security detail talk. Former Emanuel security detail members sued the city over their transfers. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

Welcome to Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield.

Topspin

Protecting Mayor Rahm Emanuel is tougher than protecting Mayor Richard M. Daley.

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So says Chicago police Cmdr. Brian Thompson, who spoke about the differences running Daley's security detail and Emanuel's while testifying this week in the federal trial of a civil lawsuit brought by eight white or Hispanic police officers removed from the current mayor's detail.

"A lot more people hate (Emanuel) for various reasons, as opposed to Daley," Thompson told jurors.

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"There are a lot more protesters," he added. "Due to current events in the city of Chicago, the threat level to the mayor is a lot higher."

Emanuel has faced critics seeking to disrupt his events for months, often trying to draw attention to his handling of the Laquan McDonald police shooting investigation. Before that, mental health advocates periodically staged demonstrations when Emanuel was out in public to object to his 2012 closure of city-run mental health clinics.

And last fall, Emanuel's security team slipped him out the back door of a public meeting the mayor had set to take input on his budget after a crowd of angry protesters took to the stage, calling for him to reopen a South Side high school.

On Wednesday, the mayor's speech at a Crain's breakfast seminar was interrupted repeatedly by groups of people who stood up in the crowd at the Palmer House Hilton and shouted for him to support an ordinance to give the public more control over Chicago Housing Authority finances.

But some of the additional security difficulties, Thompson said, are traceable to Emanuel's personal life and his hectic schedule.

"Rahm's kids are younger and more active, he lives in a house that can be accessed from the street, as opposed to Daley who lived in a gated community," Thompson said. "Rahm is a lot busier than Mayor Daley was. His schedule is a lot longer."

Daley, however, was the target of a few high-profile threats. A River Forest man was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison last year for sending a series of letters to elected officials, including an envelope containing white powder he mailed to then-Mayor Daley's office. In 2010, a California man was arrested for leaving an answering machine threat for the mayor. And in 2008, the FBI investigated a possible connection between an arson near Daley's Michigan vacation home and letters threatening Daley, possibly because Chicago police had shot a cougar on the North Side.

Police Department spokesman Frank Giancamilli declined to discuss the specifics of Emanuel's security detail but said "Commander Thompson was speaking about a variety of differences in protecting Mayors Daley and Emanuel, which were evident before Mayor Emanuel took office." (John Byrne, Jason Meisner)

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What's on tap

*Mayor Emanuel will announce a federal grant for youth employment.

*Gov. Bruce Rauner will attend a law enforcement event in Springfield.

*A City Council committee will hold a morning hearing on a proposal to guarantee paid sick days for workers at Chicago companies.

What we're writing

*Holding out for a hero? Rauner calls aides "heroic" for keeping state government afloat during impasse.

*Emanuel won't blame IPRA chief for mistake in attempt to fire controversial CPD commander.

*Facing heat over Trump ties, Burke tries to recast self as friend of the consumer against big business.

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*Cop's Obama slur shows Chicago police need better anti-discrimination rules, IPRA says.

*Chris Kennedy, political serial tease?

*Michelle Obama, daughters head to Spain, Morocco, Liberia on crusade for girls' education.

What we're reading

*Less for Chicago? Others fill void after Uber and Lyft ditch Austin.

*Profiles Theatre closes, actor responds to misconduct allegations.

*Blackhawks bid for fourth cup since 2010 takes serious hit early in off-season.

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From the notebook

*Debt for sale: The state of Illinois goes into deeper debt Thursday as Gov. Rauner's administration borrows $550 million for construction projects.

The bond issue comes a week after Illinois' worst-in-the-nation credit rating sunk even lower as a pair of Wall Street agencies issued another downgrade. They cited the record-breaking budget impasse that one analyst said has left the state "increasingly vulnerable."

The changes effectively mean that Illinois will pay more money to borrow. The market will determine how much more. The Rauner administration plans to borrow $330 million for mass transit projects, $200 million for road construction and $20 million for other construction projects.

*State museum to reopen: The Illinois State Museum in Springfield will reopen to the public next month after being closed since October as a result of the budget impasse, but visitors will have to pay a $5 admission fee.

That's the result of a new rule, which was approved by a panel of lawmakers this week, that allows the museum to start charging admission in order to pay for keeping its doors open.

Rauner closed the museum last year and moved to lay off its employees, but the union that represents the workers filed a lawsuit that put a halt to the layoffs. Since then, the museum in Springfield as well as a research and collections center and the Dickson Mounds Museum in Fulton County have been closed to the public while workers have kept busy doing curation work and other duties.

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Lawmakers tried to reopen the museum by passing legislation to approve its funding, but Rauner rejected the bill and instead suggested the museum find the money in private and public partnerships.

The new admission fee "is part of a greater effort to diversify the sources of funding for the museum," the Rauner administration said in a statement announcing the museum's reopening.

Children, seniors and veterans will get free admission when the museum reopens on July 2. (Kim Geiger)

*Johnson for president: Seen in Streeterville on Wednesday morning: an early 20s guy with a Gary Johnson for president T-shirt and a bunch of clipboards, presumably helping to gather the 40,000 signatures the Libertarian Party presidential candidate will need to land on the Nov. 8 ballot here. The deadline is Monday. In 2012, Johnson collected 1.1 percent of the presidential vote in Illinois.

*Raja gets backing of former GOP Palatine mayor in IL-8: Former Palatine Mayor Rita Mullins, a Republican, is backing Schaumburg Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi's bid for the 8th Congressional District seat being given up by Senate hopeful Rep. Tammy Duckworth.

Mullins, no stranger to bucking her party, is making the endorsement along with Elgin Mayor David Kaptain, an independent.

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"David Kaptain and Rita Mullins show that leaders must rise above party labels to focus on what hardworking Americans need to get ahead and grow the middle class," Krishnamoorthi said.

Krishnamoorthi is vying against Republican DuPage County Board member Peter DiCianni of Elmhurst for the west and northwest suburban congressional seat. (Rick Pearson)

Follow the money

*Democratic state Rep. Natalie Manley, reported $39,500 in campaign contributions, led by $25,000 from the Chicago carpenters union fund and $10,000 from the trial lawyers. Manley is a two-term lawmaker from Joliet. She's unopposed this fall.

*Track campaign contribution reports in real time with this Tribune Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ILCampaignCash

Beyond Chicago

*Trump signals openness to changing gun laws following Orlando mass shooting.

*Democrats mount election-year gun control filibuster.

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*Orlando killer threatened to strap bombs to hostages.

*Emails appear to show Christie was told about office's political activities.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, second to left, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, House of Commons speaker John Bercow, left, and Speaker's chaplain Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin arrive to leave flowers near the scene where Labour MP Jo Cox was fatally wounded in Birstall, northern England on June 17, 2016. (Nigel Roddis / EPA)

LONDON  A lawmaker who campaigned for Britain to stay in the European Union was killed Thursday by a gun- and knife-wielding attacker in her small-town constituency, a tragedy that brought the country's fierce, divisive referendum campaign to a shocked standstill.

Jo Cox, a 41-year-old Labour Party legislator who praised the contribution of immigrants to Britain and championed the cause of war-scarred Syrian refugees, was attacked outside a library in Birstall, northern England, after a regular meeting with constituents.

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Police would not speculate on the attacker's motive, but Clarke Rothwell, who runs a cafe near the scene of the slaying, told the BBC and Britain's Press Association that the assailant shouted "Britain first!" several times. Police did not confirm that account.

Witnesses described a man shooting Cox several times and then stabbing her as she lay on the pavement. Police said they had arrested a 52-year-old man and were not looking for anyone else.

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"Our working presumption ... is that this is a lone incident," said Dee Collins, acting chief constable of West Yorkshire Police.

British security officials said the shooting didn't appear to be related to international terrorism, but domestic terrorism has not been ruled out.

Residents identified the suspect to the BBC and other media as Birstall resident Tommy Mair. Neighbors said Mair was a quiet man who did gardening jobs for local people.

Violence against British politicians has been rare since Northern Ireland's late-1990s peace agreement. Cox was the first serving member of Parliament to be killed in a quarter-century, and figures from all parts of the political spectrum expressed deep shock.

Both the Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe campaigns suspended activity ahead of next week's vote over whether Britain should remain a part of the 28-member bloc. Prime Minister David Cameron canceled a speech and rally in Gibraltar, and flags on British government buildings were lowered to half-mast.

"This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news," Cameron said. "We have lost a great star. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart."

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said "the whole of the Labour Party and Labour family  and indeed the whole country  will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today."

"Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve," he said.

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It was unclear whether the attack was directly related to the referendum campaign, which has stirred deep passions as Britons argue over their place in Europe, the scale of immigration and the future of their country.

The rival sides have been canvassing feverishly ahead of what is expected to be a close vote and Cox had been campaigning for the "remain" camp.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, center, attends a vigil to slain Labour MP Jo Cox in Parliament square in London on June 16, 2016. (Daniel Leal-Olivas / AFP/Getty Images)

It wasn't clear whether Cox had been deliberately targeted. A 77-year-old man was also wounded, though it was unclear how he sustained his injuries.

Britain's Press Association news agency quoted a witness, Hithem Ben Abdallah, as saying Cox got involved in a scuffle between two men in Birstall, a small market town some 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of London.

Abdallah said one of the men was fighting with Cox and then a gun went off twice and "she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding" on the ground.

Rothwell, the cafe worker, told the BBC he believed Cox had been shot and stabbed multiple times.

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"Three times she was shot, the initial time which then she dropped to the floor and two more times," he said. "The third time he got close proximity, he shot her around the head area."

"In the meantime he was stabbing her as well. He was stabbing her with his knife," Rothwell said.

"He was shouting, 'Put Britain first!' He shouted it about two or three times."

Shopkeeper Sanjeev Kumar told the BBC he saw a woman lying on the ground "bleeding from the mouth and nose," with two women trying to help her.

Cox spent many years working for aid groups including Oxfam and Save the Children, visiting problem-plagued areas, including Darfur and Afghanistan. She was elected to the House of Commons in the May 2015 general election and headed Parliament's Friends of Syria group.

She was one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the subject of the Syrian civil war, and was critical of Britain's reluctance to deepen its military involvement against the Islamic State group as part of efforts to end it. But she abstained last year when Parliament voted to launch airstrikes on IS targets in Syria, saying a more wide-ranging solution to the conflict was needed.

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In her first speech to Parliament last year, Cox spoke of how the area she represented had "been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan."

"While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us," she said.

Immigration has been a flashpoint in the referendum campaign, with many "leave" supporters eager to curb the number of migrants to Britain by leaving the EU, which operates on the principle of free movement of people between member states.

Cox was an enthusiastic supporter of the "remain" cause in the referendum, and on Wednesday campaigned on the River Thames in London with her husband and two young children. Her husband, Brendan Cox, posted images on Twitter of the family in an inflatable dinghy, waving a flag supporting continued British EU membership.

"Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love," Brendan Cox said in a statement after the slaying.

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her," he said. "Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the killing was "an assault on everyone who cares about and has faith in democracy." German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the incident tragic, while French President Francois Hollande sent "condolences and compassion" to Cox's family and loved ones, and expressed his "full solidarity" with the British people.

No serving U.K. member of Parliament has been killed since 1990, when the Irish Republican Army killed Conservative lawmaker Ian Gow with a booby-trap bomb placed under his car outside his English home. A former lawmaker, Donald Kaberry, was injured in an IRA bombing in 1990 and died the next year.

In the past two decades, two other British lawmakers have been attacked during their "surgeries," regular meetings where constituents can present concerns and complaints.

Labour legislator Stephen Timms was stabbed in the stomach and injured in May 2010 by a female student radicalized by online sermons from an al-Qaida-linked preacher.

In 2000, Liberal Democrat lawmaker Nigel Jones and his aide Andrew Pennington were attacked by a man wielding a sword during such a meeting. Pennington was killed and Jones injured in the attack in Cheltenham, England.

Associated Press
In this June 12, 2016 file photo, family members wait for word from police after arriving down the street from a shooting involving multiple fatalities at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. (Phelan M. Ebenhack / AP)

ORLANDO, Fla.  EDITOR'S NOTE - Over the course of three hours, as a gunman stalked the Pulse nightclub, hundreds of terrified club-goers did anything they could to stay alive. Here, some of the survivors tell their stories.

"Please, don't let my hand go," Eddie Justice begged Demetrice Naulings. The two best friends huddled together in the women's bathroom with about 40 other terrified club-goers.

Panic welled in Naulings' chest. "I was like, 'I can't be in this bathroom,'" he recalled, feeling it meant certain death. "Because they closed the door, but we could still hear the gun. And people were yelling, 'Let me in, please!' And I was like, 'Let me out!'"

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So clutching Justice's left hand in his right, Naulings and his friend bolted from the bathroom at the Pulse nightclub. When Justice implored him to hold on tight, Naulings said: "The face that he gave me was just, 'I'm afraid. And I know with you, you gonna get me out.'"

Inside the club, dozens of people wailed and screamed in pain. Shots, seemingly endless, continued to ring out. Some club-goers  stained with their own blood, or with the blood of others  hid under a bar, while others ran wildly in every direction.

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Dozens tried to push toward a hallway leading outside. Naulings had hosted parties at Pulse and knew there was a gate just beyond that. Could they reach it?

And then it happened. Somehow, in the crush of panicked people clogging the narrow hallway, Naulings let go of his friend's hand. Eddie was gone.

As Naulings looked back for him, a woman directly behind him was shot. People were "stumbling over her and walking over her," he said.

He dashed outside and ran across the street to a Dunkin Donuts, where he received a text from his friend. "I've been shot," he recalled Justice writing. "I'm going into shock."

All around the club, people dialed 911 and reached out to relatives any way they could. One of them was Justice, who made his way back to the bathroom and sent his first text to his mother at 2:06 a.m. Sunday, just a few minutes after Omar Mateen first entered Pulse and started spraying the crowded dance floor with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.

This March 2016 photo made available by Demetrice Naulings shows his friend Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30, who was killed Sunday, June 12, when a gunman opened fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Justice sent a series of text messages to his mother from a bathroom at the Pulse nightclub before he was killed. (Demetrice Naulings / AP)

"Mommy I love you," the 30-year-old accountant wrote. "In club they shooting."

Luis Burbano joined the crush of humanity trying to push through the hallway to safety, but few could: Club-goers had toppled atop each other and there was no way out.

"I can't begin to describe," Burbano said. "People were ready to force themselves through, but they couldn't."

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As the sound of the gunshots came closer, Burbano made a decision that now haunts him: He briefly closed the door leading from the club to the hallway to give people time to wriggle out. If the killer knew where they were stacked up, "we were all going to be done," he said.

When Burbano finally pushed through the hallway and escaped through a hole in a perimeter fence, the first thing he saw was a man with his arm virtually destroyed by a barrage of bullets.

Back in two of the bathrooms, the hell wore on for almost three hours. People tried to be as still as possible and many played dead as the shooter stalked the club, firing and reloading.

"Over and over and over again" is how Angel Santiago described the shooting, reverberating as he hid in a stall. "It kept getting louder and closer."

And then the shooter was there: Bullets punched through the wall of the stall where Santiago had taken shelter, ripping into his left foot and right knee.

The shots stopped. Santiago heard the gunmen enter a nearby bathroom: More gunfire. More screaming. He and others shushed the petrified people around them, fearing their panic would draw the gunman back.

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After the gunman shot Patience Carter in the leg in the second bathroom, she tried to wedge herself into the next stall. As she cowered, she heard him call 911 and say he wanted America to stop bombing his parents' native Afghanistan.

Then he spoke to the club-goers in the bathroom directly, she recalled. "He said, 'Are there any black people in here?' I was too afraid to answer, but there was an African-American male in the stall where most of my body was ... and he said, "Yes, there are about six or seven of us.' And the gunman responded back to him saying that, 'You know, I don't have a problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.'"

The gunman walked out, but he returned and ordered everyone inside to silence their phones.

"Hey, you," he said to one man. Then he shot him. And he kept shooting people.

Justice, still hunkered down in one of the bathrooms, continued texting his mother periodically. At 2:39 a.m., he wrote that the gunman was near: "He's coming. I'm gonna die."

Mina Justice texted back, asking her son if anyone was hurt and which bathroom he was in. "Lots. Yes," he responded at 2:42 a.m.

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When she didn't hear back, she kept reaching out. She asked: Was he with police? "No," he responded four minutes later. "Still here in bathroom. He has us. They need to come get us."

At 2:49 a.m., she told him the police were at the club and to let her know when he saw them. "Hurry," he wrote. "He's in the bathroom with us."

At 2:50 a.m.: "He's a terror."

Then, the final text from her son a minute later: "Yes."

At some point in those final, excruciating moments, Mateen lied to hostage negotiators, telling them he was strapping explosives onto four of his hostages. Before that, some club-goers had indicated in 911 calls and texts to loved ones that they believed Mateen brought explosive vests into the club as part of his arsenal.

So the injured lay wounded and dying for hours while law enforcement grappled with what might be happening inside the club, as paramedics stood by helplessly.

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The end came shortly before 5:15 a.m., when Carter heard a voice: "Move away from the walls."

Police ripped through the wall with a battering ram. "Put your weapon down! Put your weapon down!" one SWAT officer yelled. "Get guns in that hole!" another screamed.

The officers punched through the wall a second time. "Nobody move!"

In a club where hundreds had danced and drank and laughed just hours before, 49 people lay dead or dying  50, including Mateen.

Naulings learned that Justice had died when he turned on the TV later that day.

"We were in our safe zone. Our own comfort. It was where we felt happy," he said. "That place will never be the same. It will be a memorial site now."

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Associated Press
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pumps his fist after speaking at a rally at the Fox Theater, June 15, 2016, in Atlanta. (John Bazemore / AP)

WASHINGTON  Donald Trump's latest accusation against President Barack Obama  that he's putting U.S. enemies ahead of America's own people  is thrusting him into uncharted territory for the presidential candidate of any major political party.

Trump spent the first days following the Orlando nightclub massacre hinting Obama was sympathizing with or even supporting terrorists. Some of those times he said he was repeating what "many people" believe  one of the presumptive Republican nominee's favorite ways to sprinkle conspiracy theories into the presidential campaign.

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By Wednesday, Trump abandoned the innuendo and embraced a more pointed accusation against Obama.

"Media fell all over themselves criticizing what Donald Trump 'may have insinuated about @POTUS.' But he's right," Trump posted on Twitter. The message included a link to a story by Breitbart News, a Trump-friendly website, that claimed to have proof the Obama administration backed a terror group in Iraq.

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An: Media fell all over themselves criticizing what DonaldTrump "may have insinuated about @POTUS." But he's right: https://t.co/bIIdYtvZYw  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2016

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the candidate was retweeting a message from another Twitter user. Still, it was an effort by the GOP's White House pick to explicitly link the sitting Democratic president with those seeking to harm Americans, just days after 49 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Florida.

"Trump's comments regarding the president crossed every line," John Weaver, the senior strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich's failed Republican presidential campaign, wrote on Twitter. He cast Trump as a "peddler of lies, fantasies and half-baked conspiracy theories."

For years, Trump has been the most high-profile proponent of the "birther" movement that falsely claims Obama is a Muslim who was born outside the United States, when in fact he is a Christian born in Hawaii. The businessman has also floated debunked conspiracy theories about former rival Ted Cruz's father being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton playing a role in the death of former White House aide Vince Foster.

For Republican officials already struggling with whether to fully embrace him, Trump's willingness to engage in stories usually limited to supermarket tabloids is only making their options more complicated.

"I don't go for these conspiracy theories and the "birtherism" nonsense," said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa. The congressman, who has not endorsed Trump, said that while it's fair to criticize aspects of Obama's approach to combatting terrorism, "I part company with those then who want to get into these conspiracy theories."

In a statement to The Associated Press on Tuesday, Trump said Obama "continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies, and for that matter, the American people."

Clinton, who will face Trump in the November election, quickly challenged Republicans to either "stand up to their presumptive nominee" or "stand by his accusation about our president."

Trump's suggestions about Obama come as the president takes a more active role in the White House race. In a blistering speech Tuesday, Obama said Trump was a "dangerous" threat to national security and was putting America's religious freedoms at risk by calling for a temporary ban on foreign-born Muslims entering the U.S.

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But the White House has avoided commenting on Trump's attempts to link Obama to terrorism, calling the matter "small."

Trump has offered no verifiable information to back up his assertions. His theory was not supported by the document cited in the report he linked to Wednesday  a secret 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency analysis. The Breitbart story, citing that document, suggested that the United States was in league with al-Qaida in Iraq, the precursor to the Islamic State.

Instead, the document states generally what was widely known at the time  that "the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition" to the government of Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

The U.S. backs several anti-Assad rebel groups but does not include al-Qaida in any negotiations or material or financial support, even as it fights Assad's government. Whether the U.S. cooperated with figures from that group is not addressed in the document.

Trump did not mention the report or his broader accusations during a rally Wednesday in Atlanta. But some of those in the crowd said they were on board with the candidate's assertions.

"I think he's dead on the money," said Brad Butler, a 45-year-old Trump supporter from Dallas, Georgia. "So this is Islamic terror and this is his religion. Why would he (Obama) be mad at it?"

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Diane Gurganus, 70, from Jefferson, Georgia, said she, too, believed Obama was a Muslim whose religious beliefs were affecting the way he has responded to Islamic State militants and the Orlando attacks.

"It's like his agenda is to destroy America in everything he's done," she said.

Associated Press
Bicyclists need to follow the rules of the road if we hope to avoid further tragedies. (Brandon Chew / Chicago Tribune)

Blaine Klingenberg's death Wednesday is a tragedy. While we mourn the loss of life, his death should be a wake-up call for Chicago to rethink its bicycle policies. According to police and bystanders, Klingenberg, 29, of Logan Square, violated the law by turning in front of and into the double-decker bus.

All of us who drive in the city know that one never knows what the cyclist next to, behind or in front of us will do. That needs to change.

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I'm a hesitant cyclist. I rarely cycle the streets of Chicago, as I've watched my husband and too many friends land in the hospital (they were lucky) with broken shoulders or pelvises from colliding with open car doors or disobeying a traffic light.

But I'm more terrified as a driver  truly afraid that I will be the one who strikes a cyclist  not because I'm careless but because rules of the road for bicyclists are basically ignored.

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There should be a path forward. Just as we require motorists or horse-drawn carriage drivers to pass the rules-of-the-road examination, so too should bicyclists.

I understand the city's love affair with bikes  lowering the cost of transportation for many and polishing Chicago's image as a place where hipsters and hippies alike can find community. I greet the annual Bike the Drive event with pleasure and greatly enjoyed watching the nude bicycle ride in Lakeview last Saturday. But I also have empathy for motorists for whom a drive down Clybourn Avenue or Elston Avenue now takes twice as long as former two-lane arterial streets have been reduced to one to accommodate bike lanes and where traffic is fraught as cyclists weave in and out for advantage.

I'm not a huge fan of endless City Council regulations. However, there are many deaths on the streets of Chicago. Those of bicyclists are some we can prevent.

Marilyn Katz is president of Chicago-based MK Communications.
Donald Trump's demagogic performance in the days after the Orlando mass shooting has prompted more awkward silence and equivocations from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The Washington Post:

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"But most Republicans on Capitol Hill tried to distance themselves from Trump's comments following the terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that killed at least 49 people. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) refused to respond to questions about Trump at his weekly news conference.

"House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) denounced Trump for trying to rally support for his anti-Muslim policies, while others castigated Trump for the accusations he has lobbed at Obama."

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McConnell and many, though far from all, of his co-partisans deserve every bit of their discomfort, of course. Having shamefully partnered with birthers, bigots and cranks  Trump included  in an effort to chase Barack Obama from the White House, they now find themselves unable to call off the increasingly wild dogs.

Ryan never tainted himself by playing cute with birthers and the like. But he badly miscalculated with Trump. Expressing qualms, Ryan made a show of withholding support from Trump. When he at last agreed to support his party's presumptive nominee, it was widely understood that Ryan expected better behavior in turn.

Instead, Trump has gotten worse. If Ryan had qualms before, he can only be horrified now as Trump uses his enhanced public platform  and the credibility of the Republican brand  to continue to wallow in conspiracy theory, delusion and scapegoating.

Republican leaders seem to have concluded that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. This is a misperception. On one side is indeed a rock  the political difficulty of renouncing the party's all-but-certain presidential nominee while simultaneously trying to bolster its other candidates. But the other side is not a mere "hard place"; it's a moral and political calamity. It could jeopardize the party for years.

It would be better to distance themselves from Trump and treat him as a freak accident (even if he is not). Because his campaign is only going to get uglier.

As Trump continues down his reckless path  there is no Trump general-election pivot toward responsible politics or policy  he is highly likely to lose support. The RealClearPolitics polling average already shows the beginning of such a trend, though it may largely reflect Hillary Clinton's consolidation of support as her primary contest ends.

Still, a CBS poll found respondents had a dismal view of Trump's reaction to the Orlando shooting; only 25 percent approved of his response while 51 percent disapproved. That's not the result of a typical partisan breakdown in which Republicans support the Republican candidate and Democrats don't. Only 50 percent of Republicans approved of Trump's response.

Trump spoke Wednesday night in Greensboro, N.C. According to one report, some members of the audience were as offensive as their candidate, yelling obscenities at the mention of Hillary Clinton's name, shoving and punching and chanting, "Build that wall!"

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There is real dissatisfaction in the U.S., but the majority of American voters do not appear poised to join a mob. Large numbers do not share the anxieties animating Trump's most fervent supporters.

In the likely event that resistance to Trump solidifies, his poll numbers, which he deems almost sacred, will no longer prop up his besieged ego. To soothe his hurt, he will inevitably summon more of what wins him the mob's cheers  demagogy.

Republicans are experiencing karma on a scale that politics only rarely affords. With Ryan, McConnell and their party tethered to Trump's destructive course, he will drag them down with him, and the association will linger long past 2016. Denying him the nomination may be impossible, perhaps even pointless, given that Trump's supporters would not accept a substitute.

Yet self-respecting politicians will be forced to ditch Trump sooner or later. There will be no way to reach an acceptable compromise with the political catastrophe that he both embodies and advances. There's more dignity, and less pain, to be had in walking away  now.

Bloomberg View

Francis Wilkinson writes on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View.
Flags fly at half-staff around the Washington Monument at daybreak in Washington with the U.S. Capitol in the background Monday, June 13, 2016. President Barack Obama ordered flags lowered to half-staff to honor the victims of the Orlando nightclub shootings. (J. David Ake, AP)

When our synagogue heard about the horrific tragedy at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, it was at the same time that we were observing our festival of Shavuot, which celebrates God's giving of the Torah.

As Orthodox Jews, we don't travel or use the internet on the Sabbath or on holidays, such as Shavuot. But on Sunday night, as we heard the news, I announced from the pulpit that as soon as the holiday ended at 9:17 p.m. Monday, we would travel from our synagogue in Washington, D.C., to a gay bar as an act of solidarity.

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We just wanted to share the message that we were all in tremendous pain and that our lives were not going on as normal. Even though the holiday is a joyous occasion, I felt tears in my eyes as I recited our sacred prayers.

I had not been to a bar in more than 20 years. And I had never been to a gay bar. Someone in the congregation told me about a bar called the Fireplace, so I announced that as our destination. Afterward, I found out it was predominantly frequented by gay African-Americans.

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Approximately a dozen of us, wearing our kippot, or yarmulkes, went down as soon as the holiday ended. Some of the members of our group are gay, but most are not. We did not know what to expect. As we gathered outside, we saw one large, drunk man talking loudly and wildly. I wondered whether we were in the right place. Then my mother, who was with me, went up to a man who was standing on the side of the building. She told him why we were there. He broke down in tears and told us his cousin was killed at Pulse. He embraced us and invited us into the Fireplace.

We didn't know what to expect, but it turned out that we had so much in common. We met everyone in the bar. One of the patrons told me that his stepchildren were actually bar-mitzvahed in our congregation. Another one asked for my card so that his church could come and visit. The bartender shut off all of the music in the room, and the crowd became silent as we offered words of prayer and healing. My co-clergy Maharat Ruth Friedman shared a blessing related to the holiday of Shavuot, and she lit memorial candles on the bar ledge. Then everyone in the bar put their hands around each other's shoulders, and we sang soulful tunes. After that, one of our congregants bought a round of beer for the whole bar.

Everyone in the bar embraced each other. It was powerful and moving and real and raw.

After that we moved to the outdoor makeshift memorial service at Dupont Circle. There, too, we did not know what to expect. But as we gathered around the circle, people kept coming up to us and embracing us. One man we met there told us that his daughter sometimes prays with us. Others were visiting from Los Angeles but joined in full voice clearly knowing the Hebrew words to the song we were singing.

As we were singing, I looked over at some gay members of our congregation and saw tears endlessly flowing down their faces. I felt the reality that we are living in a time of enormous pain. But I also felt that the night was a tremendous learning experience for me. I learned that when a rabbi and members of an Orthodox synagogue walk into a gay African-American bar, it is not the opening line of a joke but an opportunity to connect; it is an opportunity to break down barriers and come together as one; it is an opportunity to learn that if we are going to survive, we all need each other.

Washington, D.C.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld leads Ohev Sholom, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Washington, D.C.
Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn kicks off a petition drive to put a two-term limit on Chicago's mayor, and to create an elected citywide consumer advocate position Sunday, June 12, 2016 in Chicago. (Sophia Tareen, AP)

From gadfly to governor and back again: Pat Quinn is passing petitions for two ballot measures that would "put everyday people in charge."

A year and a half after losing the governor's race to Republican Bruce Rauner, Quinn has set his sights on fixing Chicago, pushing measures that would limit the mayor to two terms and establish an elected city watchdog.

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No longer the governor, Quinn can't summon the news cameras at will. So he fell back on his classic ploy of making an announcement on a Sunday morning when reporters have little else to cover. It worked like a charm when Quinn  a lifelong populist, former state treasurer and lieutenant governor  was promoting his earlier causes. Like the successful 1980 "Cutback Amendment," which reduced the size of the state House by a third. Or the failed 1994 "Eight is Enough" initiative, which would have imposed term limits on state lawmakers.

Now he's back. He's tan. He's rested. And he wants your John Hancock.

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His campaign, called Take Charge Chicago, targets what Quinn says is an insider culture in city government.

"Take Charge Chicago would bring openness to City Hall and offer relief to beleaguered taxpayers and consumers," he wrote in a letter introducing the measures.

If Quinn meets an Aug. 8 deadline to gather at least 53,000 signatures from registered voters, the two issues could appear on the Nov. 8 ballot. If not, there's 2018  still soon enough to affect the 2019 mayoral election.

If the term limits measure passed, it would make Mayor Rahm Emanuel ineligible for a third term.

Quinn hasn't shaped his petition drive as an anti-Emanuel movement. But it's no accident the referendums, if approved, would make this term Emanuel's last. Voters already have the power to make that happen, though.

We've never been big fans of term limits. That's what elections are for, right? Recently, though, we've supported efforts to pass a constitutional amendment to set term limits for the Illinois General Assembly because grotesquely gerrymandered legislative maps make it next to impossible to oust a sitting lawmaker. Term limits would root out those entrenched politicians.

It was Quinn, by the way, who signed the 2011 state legislative map that virtually locked in Democratic control for another 10 years.

But the mayoral election is a different story. Chicago's mayor is elected citywide, so gerrymandering isn't a factor.

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Voters had a chance in April 2015 to oust Emanuel after forcing him into a runoff election with Jesus "Chuy" Garcia. The deck was not stacked. Emanuel won, straight up.

Why should buyer's remorse over that election translate into mandatory term limits for every mayor? Because big money and super PACs have too much influence on elections, Quinn says.

"Incumbent Chicago mayors routinely outspend their challengers by millions of dollars reaped from lobbyists, corporations and billionaires," Quinn says.

Emanuel and his supporters spent more than $22.8 million re-electing him, compared with $4.6 million spent by Garcia. But contributions from special interest groups have been a factor in elections, including Quinn's, for centuries. Campaign donations are considered protected speech.

Quinn's second goal is to create a Chicago consumer advocate, elected citywide, to serve as a watchdog over government and a voice for constituents. The way Quinn envisions it, the consumer advocate would oversee the city's existing consumer protection department, making it a separate entity from City Hall.

Keep in mind the city already has an inspector general whose job is to serve as a government watchdog. Yes, the IG is appointed by the mayor. But it's a four-year term, and the mayor can't remove the IG except for cause. Recent inspectors general have been effective and independent.

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So no, Chicago doesn't need to add a paid ombudsman. (Does that sound like a job tailor-made for Pat Quinn? Maybe. But he says he's too busy collecting signatures right now to think about running for office again.)

Taxpayers also elect and pay for 50 aldermen, along with ward offices and staffs, whose job is to advocate for their constituents. Some of them have been around for an awfully long time, and yes, you can blame the map that aldermen drew to protect themselves.

How about term limits for aldermen? Or a fair system for drawing the ward maps? Or a City Council with half as many aldermen?

If only Chicago were looking for an unemployed reformer with the time and energy to pursue those changes. We know just the guy.

Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
I'm from Northern Ireland but have been living in Chicago since 2013 after several years each in New York, Paris, London and Rio, so I've been lucky enough to live in a few tourist meccas. I love this city, and I think (and so do my visitors) that Chicago has much to offer, but very few people from outside the U.S. think of Chicago as a holiday destination, even for a short stopover.

Attract more overseas visitors: Many people fly into Chicago as their first point of entry to the U.S. before flying on to their final destination, so the city could consider something similar to that which is offered at Changi Airport in Singapore. There, if you have at least 5.5 hours before a connecting flight, you can take advantage of their city tours, which give a taste of the city, and hopefully encourage people to come back and stay longer next time. They also have a Singapore Stopover Holiday program, making it easier for fly-ins to organize a hassle-free drop-in.

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Given that Chicago has so many direct flights to Europe (and especially London), the city could try promoting the weekend break. Many people will fly to New York from London for a long weekend, so why not entice them to Chicago? Plus the couple of hours of extra flying time (compared to New York) when visitors take the red-eye back to Europe gives them just a little bit more sleep.

And while it was a little tongue-in-cheek, should the glass gondolas ever come about (which I think are a tremendous idea), Chicago has huge potential as the future setting for a James Bond movie.

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 Caroline Eagles, Chicago
Over tea at Hillary Clinton's Washington home in late 2014, Elizabeth Warren warned her host that when it comes to Wall Street, what mattered most was the people Clinton surrounded herself with.

Months later, as Clinton launched her presidential campaign, Gary Gensler, who had been a Goldman Sachs banker before he became a senior policy aide and Bob Rubin protege during the degulatory years of Bill Clinton's Treasury Department, came on board, in part to serve as a driving force behind her economic-policy shop. Remarkably, Warren would be one of his strongest supporters.

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The deeper explanation is that Gensler is a financial-policy unicorn-a deregulator turned reformer. As head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gensler became known as one of President Barack Obama's toughest regulators, willing to buck his friends and former colleagues to tighten rules on the $400 trillion swaps market following the 2008 crisis. His name became an expletive to many on Wall Street, to the delight of Warren and her allies.

Now, Gensler (along with Mandy Grunwald, who works with both women) is a central conduit between Warren and Clinton.

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"Gary is tough, smart, and principled, and he really understands what it takes to make our economy work better for hardworking families. During his time at the CFTC, he showed that he is willing to take on the big banks and fight to make our financial system safer," said Warren, who met with Clinton last week after endorsing the presumptive Democratic nominee. "I really respect him."

That doesn't mean that Gensler's history doesn't continue to shadow him-along with an old adversary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Unfortunately," said Warren Gunnels, Sanders' top policy adviser in the Senate and on his campaign, "Gary Gensler still has not learned the lessons of the late '90s and of deregulating Wall Street."

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Since he joined the campaign in April 2015, Gensler, 58, has been advising Clinton not just on financial policy but on trade and taxes. With his help, she's focused in on the so-called shadow banking system-non-bank entities that behave like banks but do not face the same regulations-as a key area in need of more rules. He's also resisted activist pressure to support a 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act.

His official post, which he requested, is chief financial officer. At Clinton headquarters, signs hang above each department, briefly distilling what each does. The slogan for Gensler's team could also be campaign manager Robby Mook's mantra: more mission for the money. It's not a radical concept, but it is a big change from 2008, when Clinton's campaign spent more than it raised in its final three quarters and ended with $22.5 million in debt.

Gensler, who tended to high-level surrogates and donors as a senior adviser to Clinton in 2008, had the financial pressures of that race in mind when he told her that the way he could be most helpful this time around was as CFO. Looking at an operation that, if Clinton were to become the nominee, would, along with the Democratic National Committee, need to raise and spend $1 billion and hire 4,000 people, Gensler thought he could make it all work, with enough money for the mission. He'd been counting money since he was a kid, helping his dad's vending business, and his final job at Goldman Sachs, co-head of finance, included many of the functions of a CFO.

Even for a former regulator, it's not the most glamorous role; every day, he's given a big stack of checks to sign. He insisted on using strict accounting practices so that the campaign wouldn't fall into debt by leaving costs off its balance sheet until bills are paid, as campaigns often do. He hopes to end the campaign in November with nothing left in the bank and no debt, either. Obama 2012 ended with nearly $5.7 million in debt.

Gensler's portfolio stretches into other areas as well. He, along with campaign lawyer Marc Elias and national finance director Dennis Cheng, led the process last year to create the Hillary Victory Fund, which jointly raises money for the campaign, the DNC, and state Democratic parties. He's also helping to plan the Democratic National Convention, along with the campaign's chief administrative officer, Charlie Baker. On debate nights during the Democratic primary, he sat in the war room. Ahead of those debates, where Wall Street was almost always a flashpoint, he helped prepare for debate prep sessions with the candidate.

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Like other high-level Clinton aides, Gensler occasionally headlines fundraisers, including one in April hosted by staffers who worked on Dodd-Frank and one this week organized by employees of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which is regulated by the CFTC, including former CFTC Commissioner Mark Wetjen.

It's an enormous time commitment. But Gensler's wife died in 2006 and the youngest of his three daughters just finished her freshman year of college.

Gensler has already served in a senior administration job and could afford to never work again (during the early 2000s, he was a stay-at-home dad and caretaker to his wife). Instead, he's logging 20-hour days not just because he believes in Clinton and wants to help her win but because his ambitions don't end at what he's already done.

He's seen as a possible Treasury secretary for Clinton, if not first out of the gate at the start of her administration then later on (perhaps after Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg or Federal Reserve governor Lael Brainard, if Clinton chooses to nominate the first-ever woman to lead the department).

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Gensler met the then-first lady at end of President Bill Clinton's administration, when he was an aide to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. They came across each other again during Hillary Clinton's early years in the Senate and by the time she was running for a second term representing New York, Gensler and his family were hosting a fundraiser for her at their Baltimore home.

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Clinton's infamous email server contains evidence of their relationship. While Clinton served as secretary of state, Gensler occasionally wrote to her private email address to share his thoughts on the global economy and to ask for career advice.

In the weeks after Obama was re-elected, he twice wrote to Clinton asking for some time to talk about his next steps in the administration. "All is well at the CFTC, but it would be wonderful to benefit from your views on how to consider other opportunities to contribute," he said in one message. He also sent her a link to a glowing profile in Time magazine that declared him to be "The Money Cop."

The next month, as Clinton recovered from a concussion, he sent notes wishing her well and praising a joint interview she did with Obama. "You sounded and looked wonderful tonight on 60 Minutes," he said.

Part of Gensler's influence stems from his temperamental similarities to his candidate.

"Gary's a progressive but he's a practical guy," said Bart Chilton, a Democrat who was a CFTC commissioner when Gensler was the agency's chair. "He's not a left-wing nut. Some people might disagree given all the rules we did. But he's a guy who's able to say, 'No, let's figure out how we get this done that's actually going to work, not just what you might want to do.' "

Gensler and Clinton share a preference for the nuts and bolts of policy-making over the posturing of campaigns. "Policy-making on a presidential campaign isn't like it is on Capitol Hill or in the executive branch," Chilton said.

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In many quarters, Gensler's hiring sent an important signal. Key progressive groups see Gensler as a positive influence on the campaign and, potentially, a future Clinton administration. "If it touches on jobs, growth, the economy, or finance, Gary's opinion is sought and very carefully weighed," said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive officer of Better Markets, which advocates for tougher financial regulations.

Gensler's credibility with progressives is crucial, both because of Clinton's own Wall Street ties and because of the backgrounds of some of her other advisers.

"There are circles of people whose roles are unclear who are associated with the Wall Street wing of the party. That bothers us," said a top official at a labor union who asked not to be named speaking before the union had endorsed Clinton.

The locus of these concerns is Gene Sperling, who ran the National Economic Council in the Clinton and Obama White Houses and is an important outside adviser, especially on issues like manufacturing and housing. Some progressives point to pro-Wall Street positions he took in the Clinton and Obama administrations as reason for concern, and also fret that even as the Clinton campaign tries to keep its distance from Summers, the former treasury secretary is influencing the campaign through his relationship with Sperling. Michael Pyle, a former economic aide in the Obama administration who works at BlackRock, is an unpaid adviser to the campaign on finance policy.

Gensler is temperamentally suited to resisting pressure. To those who don't agree with him-and even sometimes to those who do-his drive to achieve can come off as an unwillingness to listen to others. One Republican who worked with him at the CFTC complained that when the agency started work on a new rule, he already had certain goals in mind and directed the agency's staff to pursue them without seeking the collaboration and consensus that had been part of how the agency worked under other chairs.

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Gensler was once a charter member of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. After earning two degrees at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he spent 18 years at Goldman Sachs, rising to co-head of finance before being brought to the Treasury Department by his former colleague, Rubin. He served as assistant secretary for financial markets from 1997 to 1999 and then became undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance for the remainder of the Clinton administration. In those roles, he pushed for the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated the over-the-counter derivatives market, and he joined his bosses in supporting the bill that repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act.

When he was nominated by President-elect Barack Obama in late 2008 to run the CFTC, his work during the last Democratic administration came back to haunt him.

The Democratic majority in the Senate confirmed Obama's top economic nominees with little resistance, aware that senior jobs needed to be filled in the midst of a deep recession, even as progressives fretted that his picks were heavy on Clinton administration veterans sympathetic to Wall Street. Along with other Senate progressives, Washington state's Maria Cantwell had concerns about Gensler's record on derivatives regulation during his time at Treasury Department and also wanted to make a broader point about Obama's nominees. Sanders also put a hold on the nomination.

In the face of this opposition, Gensler made a concerted effort to show liberal Democrats that he wasn't a typical Rubinite and, unlike most of Bill Clinton's economic team, would publicly acknowledge the deregulatory missteps of the late 1990s that contributed to the 2008 crash. "Looking back now, it is clear to me that all of us that were involved at the time-and certainly myself-should have done more to protect the American public through aggressive regulation, comprehensive regulation," he said during a grilling by then-Iowa Senator Tom Harkin during his confirmation hearing.

When Gensler was nominated, "people were really skeptical about him. He'd come from Goldman Sachs, he'd been in the Clinton administration with a lot of people who were of Wall Street and that's how they viewed the world," recalled former Senator Ted Kaufman, the Delaware Democrat who took Joe Biden's place in the Senate at the start of the Obama administration.

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Gensler made the sale with most progressives because he made clear that "he really wanted to do everything we can to fix the problems that caused the financial crisis, make our markets fairer, make our markets safer," Kaufman continued. "He was single-minded about it."

Gensler played a key role in drafting the Dodd-Frank Act and then used the powers in it to expand the CFTC's reach to include not just the $35 trillion futures market but also the swaps market, which is more than 10 times larger.

"He's a good example of someone drawn from the industry who can provide value added," said Sheila Bair, a Republican who chaired the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation from 2006 to 2011.

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For all the progressives he convinced that he'd left Goldman Sachs and Rubin behind, there was one glaring exception: Sanders.

Sanders opposed Gensler's nomination for months in early 2009, arguing that a Rubinite could never fit the bill. "Gary Gensler, as part of the Treasury Department under Robert Rubin, pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the breakdown of those walls, which have led us precisely to where Citigroup is today, where AIG is today," Sanders said in a March 2009 interview with Democracy Now. "This is a hard-working guy. He is a decent guy. I don't have any animus against him personally. But I think President Obama has brought around him a lot of the Rubin mentality, which is not only deregulation, it's unfettered free trade."

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After working to persuade Sanders and other progressives for another two months, Gensler's nomination finally got a vote on the Senate floor, where he was confirmed 88 to 6. Sanders and five Democrats were the no votes.

While Sanders said that his post might give Gensler the opportunity for a "Nixon in China" moment, he was never fully satisfied with Gensler's work.

"Senator Sanders was very disappointed in the role he played at the CFTC to not move aggressively to eliminate excessive oil speculation in the commodities futures market," said Gunnels.

Gensler's allies rebut that, arguing that he did all he could given that the agency's lawyers didn't believe its emergency powers could be invoked.

But Sanders and his team have never revised their opinion. "There's a myth that he was somehow a strong regulator," Gunnels said.

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Ahead of Sanders' big Wall Street policy speech in January, Gensler offered a prebuttal for the Clinton campaign, urging the Vermont senator to include proposals aimed at reining in risks in the shadow banking system and chastising him for so far taking "a hands-off approach to some of the riskiest institutions and activities in our economy, which were among the biggest culprits during the 2008 crisis."

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Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs fired back at the time with a statement aimed squarely at Gensler's pre-2001 resume: "Senator Sanders won't be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner and a former Treasury Department official who helped Wall Street rig the system."

Some progressives say that, with regard to Gensler, Sanders went too far.

An aide to another senator involved with financial issues said that "Bernie misplayed his Gary interaction" by turning against Gensler rather than embracing the good he's done. "He was a tougher regulator than anybody else who was an agency chair and deserves credit for that."

"It was just kind of jarring in the way that they went after Gary," the staffer added, declining to be named since his office works with Sanders' team on many issues.

Gunnels said the whole flap "almost seemed like it was kind of payback for Senator Sanders' hold he had placed on him."

Gunnels declined to speculate on whether Sanders would block a future nomination of Gensler but added, "I think it's safe to say that Gary Gensler would not be in a Bernie Sanders administration."
If you think age-restricted retirement communities don't go out of their way to welcome grandchildren then you haven't met Jay Tunney, Roy Uddman, or Bob and Jeanne Haller.

They all live at local retirement communities that encourage family visits, and even offer special programs just for grandchildren.

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Let's start with the Hallers. The couple lives at the Moorings of Arlington Heights, a retirement community in the northwest suburb. With 10 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren, the Hallers, over the years, have had four generations attend the community's annual Halloween party.

The party draws about 70 costumed kids and 100 adults  some of them dress up too. The kids enjoy a magic show and trick-or-treat down a long hallway with residents handing out candy. After the party, the Hallers spread a tablecloth on the lobby floor for their grandkids, serving pizza, coke and cookies.

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The Halloween party at the Moorings has become a kind of Haller family tradition. But as Bob notes, "It's not just our family. A lot of residents bring their families."

Retirement communities want grandkids to visit. Young people bring in a lively dose of excitement. Visits also foster family connections, vital to everyone's well-being.

Many retirement communities have playgrounds and swimming pools where grandkids are welcome. Some rules may apply, however, usually specifying when grandkids can use the amenities. Grandparents are also typically requested to accompany their grandchildren in common areas.

Besides providing places to play, communities host planned events for grandchildren. Sun City Huntley, the active adult community, has a Grandma, Grandpa & Me Club. It holds weekly events over the summer.

The Villages, in Florida  reported to be the world's largest retirement community with more than 100,000 residents  holds a summer camp for residents and their grandkids to enjoy together. Some of the 80 activities include swimming, fishing, games and crafting.

Special places, events

Westminster Place, a retirement community in Evanston, hosts a special event on Grandparents Day in September. For the last three years, it's been a pet-a-palooza  a fun-filled day with pet parades, hot dogs, special pet tricks, raffles, and booths for animal adoption agencies and dog washers. Open to the public, last year's event drew about 250 people.

The community plans to change it up a bit this year by holding a block party. Though the planning isn't finalized yet, the day will feature a cook out, petting zoo, pony rides and other attractions.

"We're a very family friendly community," says Nancy Ichinose, director of community programs at Westminster Place. "It's normal to have kids around, and it helps bring back a lot of good memories."

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Roy Uddman created some new memories last December when his granddaughter used a suite at the retirement community where he lives to get ready for her wedding. Uddman lives at Smith Village in the Beverly neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The bride and bridesmaids had a guest room at Smith Village all to themselves where they had their hair and makeup done, and got dressed for the wedding, which was held at a nearby church. The wedding party also took photos at Smith Village, which was all decked out for Christmas.

"The whole staff bent over backwards to make it perfect for the girls," says Uddman. "I could not thank them enough."

Smith Village also holds events for grandchildren throughout the year. A family fun day in August draws about 200 to 300 people for carnival-style food, raffles, games, a petting zoo and other activities. A pet parade in July is another favorite. "Events are important for the children and the residents," says Meghan Leonard, director of life enrichment at Smith Village. "Having children in our community brings joy and laughter to everyone's faces."

The Merion, a retirement community in Evanston, holds a fall festival with pumpkin painting, a bounce house and carnival games. And for the last two years, the Merion has hosted visits with Santa for the wider Evanston community after the tree-lighting ceremony downtown. Kids visiting Santa at the Merion get popcorn, hot pretzels, and hot cocoa.

Everyday life

Besides the special events, communities strive to include grandkids in everyday life. Jay Tunney lives with his wife Kelly at The Clare, a retirement high-rise community in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood.

The Tunney's babysit their two young grandchildren, ages two and four, several days a week at their apartment home at The Clare.

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"We have a lot of fun here," says Jay. The couple keeps their apartment well stocked with toys for the kids, who also like to explore the building, with their grandparents, of course.

They visit the fitness center and indoor pool. "They love the elevator," says Jay. The kids like to stroll around the ninth-floor terrace, just outside the community's bistro which was recently expanded. "We enjoy that in the summer," he adds. The whole family often convenes for Sunday brunch at the Grafton, the community's fine-dining venue. "The kids are treated marvelously by the staff and other residents," says Jay.

The other residents are perhaps the best part. They have fond memories of their own kids, and grandkids. They love to see the Tunney's grandchildren and talk to them. The kids like it too. "They have so many aunties and uncles in the building," says Jay.
If you or a loved one are moving to a senior living community, you'd better be prepared to embrace the 21st century. Technology has already moved in and is creating a safer, healthier, more connected environment for residents and their families.

From apartment monitoring to social platforms to smartphone training, residents in Chicagoland communities are far from stranded in today's sea of tech. Even seniors over 80  who are more likely to be "virtual shut-ins"  are taking to it like fish to water once they learn how fun and useful it can be, according to a survey by Brookdale Senior Living.

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Home monitoring

Home monitoring is a huge growth area in the aging world because of the sense of security it offers older folks and their families. Montgomery Place, a retirement community in Hyde Park, realized this six years ago when it started the LifeCare@Home program, to provide a variety of in-home care services to residents in their own home or in Montgomery Place.

Part of this program was to install motion detectors in some resident apartments. The strategically placed sensors receive signals from a transmitter worn by the resident. This allows their pattern of movements to be logged throughout the day and night, so staff can detect signs of trouble such as using the bathroom too often or falling.

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Residents like the fact that they can maintain their privacy, says Bobby Pope, director of LifeCare@Home. "It's not Big Brother. It only monitors them inside their apartment and they can shut it off," he says. "Besides, at less than $200 a month, it costs far less than hiring a caregiver for even a few hours a day."

For those who want to use a camera to monitor a home and/or keep a watchful eye on loved ones, they will find that home monitoring devices have gotten a lot more affordable and useful. For example, a new video camera line by Vimtag starts at around $100 with no monthly fees.

The company had seniors in mind when it designed an optional SOS button that connects wirelessly to certain models. Each Vimtag camera is Internet enabled via Wi-Fi. So when a person presses the SOS button, it alerts a family member or caregiver via a smartphone app. The cameras also have two-way voice capabilities, so the person who pushed the button has a quick connection to someone who can hear and see them.

Families often use the cameras to keep an eye on caregivers, says Joseph Sherman, vice president of Vimtag.

"For seniors, it's not an invasion. It's quality of life," Sherman says. "It can bring a lot of people a tremendous amount of security and peace of mind."

Connecting online

Using technology to enhance communication among families, residents and staff is a priority at Presbyterian Homes. "We wanted a secure platform that could do this and more, and we chose the Caremerge system as a way to do that," says Nadim Abi-Antoun, chief operating officer. Presbyterian Homes is rolling it out now in a pilot program.

Caremerge is computer based. It gives staff the ability to create an event, invite residents and track attendance, similar to Evite. Residents can create their own event too. This allows staff to gauge what residents prefer. Families can also log in.

"Also, if we see dips in attendance, they might be red flags for other things that we can watch out for," Abi-Antoun says. "We have gotten the most positive feedback form the families of those in memory care. They love to log on and see the activities of their loved ones."

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Smart TVs

Presbyterian Homes also broadcasts to residents' TVs on a special in-house channel. The calendar is there and residents can call to sign up for activities, Abi-Antoun says.

LifeCare@Home offers a system called IndependaTV. It basically turns the television into an interactive experience rather than a passive one. It allows video chatting when the phone rings, and many other interactive health care and social features. It can also do medication reminders onscreen. The cost is about $75 a month, and Montgomery Place has a demonstration room set up for residents to try before they buy.

Personal devices

Brookdale, the country's largest senior living provider, has a campaign to "rewire aging." It wants to make seniors as comfortable with technology as their families are, so they can stave off isolation by engaging with the world digitally.

"Loneliness in this age group is associated with shorter life spans, chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, depression and even dementia. That's why engaging seniors with others is a focus of our communities," says Brookdale's Chief Medical Officer Kevin O'Neil.

Chicago-area Brookdale communities now have iPads available for residents to borrow. They also provide instruction on things like video chatting, Facebook, and email, plus field trips to the Apple store for classes. A senior tech support company has been engaged for fee-based, individualized help.

"Lots of our residents have smartphones and tablets, but they don't know how to fully use them," says Carol Cummings, Brookdale's senior director of optimum life engagement. "What we see over and over again is that they want to use these tools to connect with family and friends and the outside world."

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Brookdale's rewiring is already connecting.

"One woman saw her great-grandchild 15 minutes after she was born. People are able to celebrate birthdays together. Adult children can give their parents a tour of their new house, or they can attend memorial services remotely," Cummings says.

The list goes on: an author who did Face Time with a resident book club; a watercolor class taught via YouTube; residents looking up their childhood homes on Google Earth.

Cummings describes one 80-year-old man's transformation from technophobe to savvy user. "I asked him what the knowledge had done for him. 'It has opened up the world to me,' he said."
A second man has been charged in connection with the beating and robbery of an 18-year-old who thought he was meeting potential buyers of an iPad he was selling in April.

The robbery occurred about 8:05 p.m. April 25 at an apartment complex in the 400 block of South Fourth Street, police spokesman Dan Ferrelli said in an email.

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An 18-year-old man from Hickory Hills and his 21-year-old girlfriend, who lives in Winfield, drove to the apartment complex in Aurora to meet a potential buyer of an iPad posted for sale online, Ferrelli said.

The woman stayed in the car while the man went into a building to find a possible buyer. Once inside, he was beaten and robbed, but did not require medical attention, Ferrelli said.

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Liqurious Devell Braylock, 26, of the 2000 block of North Laporte Avenue, Chicago, was arrested Monday in the 100 block of North Ohio Street on armed robbery charges in connection with the incident, according to Aurora police reports and information provided by Ferrelli.

In May, police charged Jason A. Ware, 32, of the 2400 block of Red Hawk Ridge Court, Aurora, with armed robbery in connection to the incident after an unrelated traffic stop in which a loaded handgun was found in his car. Ware was also charged with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon by a felon, unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon and no FOID card, all felonies, in that case. At the time of the traffic stop, Ware was under surveillance by Community Policing officers as he was wanted for armed robbery, Ferrelli said in an email.

"Braylock was Ware's partner in the crime," Ferrelli said in an email.

Braylock was found guilty of residential burglary and sentenced in November 2010 to five years in prison, Kane County records show. In addition to several traffic offenses, he was previously convicted in July 2010 of resisting a peace officer and sentenced to 23 days in Kane County Jail. In 2009, he was found guilty of misdemeanor marijuana possession.

In addition to numerous traffic infractions, Ware's criminal history includes previous drug and domestic battery charges in Kane and Kendall counties and a burglary in DuPage County.

In May 2003, Ware was convicted of felony burglary and sentenced to six months in DuPage County Jail plus 24 months probation, according to the county clerk's office.

In June 2007, he pleaded guilty to possession of between 2.5 and 10 grams of marijuana and was sentenced to 14 days in Kane County jail with 18 months probation, records show. That November, he was found guilty of a probation violation.

In August 2008, he pleaded guilty to possessing an air gun within city limits and was fined $100.

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Ware was convicted in February 2011 of misdemeanor possession of between 2.5 and 10 grams of marijuana and obstructing identification, and sentenced to 22 days in Kane County jail, records show.

hleone@tribpub.com

Twitter @hannahmleone
An Aurora man has been convicted of sexually assaulting a female relative over the course of several years.

Judge David Kliment announced the guilty verdicts against 48-year-old Jamie Dominguez on Wednesday to conclude a bench trial on multiple counts of criminal sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse. Prosecutors contended Dominguez fondled and performed sex acts on the girl between 2001 and 2014, with many of the incidents occurring before she reached 12 years of age, according to court records.

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Prosecutors also said Dominguez encouraged the girl to tell authorities from the Kane County Child Advocacy Center that she had lied about the assault claims.

Kliment convicted Dominguez, who had been free on bond, on a total of 10 counts which included predatory criminal sexual assault, criminal sexual assault, as well as attempted sex assault and attempted sex abuse.

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Dominguez faces a minimum of 40 years in prison and a requirement to register as a sex offender for life when he is sentenced on Aug. 30.

Dan Campana is a freelance reporter.
Darnell Murry pleaded guilty to one count of operating a continuing financial crimes enterprise and income tax fraud. (DuPage County sheriff's office / Handout)

A Maywood man with a history of thefts whom one prosecutor once dubbed "incapable of reform" has been sentenced to five years in prison for stealing more than $40,000 in a credit card scam, according to the Illinois attorney general's office.

Darnell Murry, 41, was sentenced Monday by DuPage County Judge Brian Telander after Murry pleaded guilty to one count of operating a continuing financial crimes enterprise and income tax fraud.

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According to the Illinois attorney general's office, which prosecuted the case, Murry used stolen identities to defraud suburban retailers like Costco, Macy's and Meijer. Murry would obtain credit card account numbers and then would add himself as an authorized secondary cardholder to obtain credit cards.

"This defendant preys on others for personal gain," Attorney General Lisa Madigan said.

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Authorities say they scheme yielded $40,000 in merchandise for Murry in 2012. They also say he failed to file or pay income taxes that year.

Murry committed the crime while on probation for a federal sentence for similar offenses, according to the attorney general's office. He also has served time in Wisconsin and is facing identity theft-related charges in Indiana, authorities said.

DuPage court records indicate two felony convictions, one in 2000 for attempting to use a forged credit card receipt to steal a computer. In 2003, Murry was sent to prison for four years, after records say he used a fake credit card to steal $3,300 in jewelry from a Villa Park store.

By then he had already served at least three stints in the Illinois Department of Corrections, according to a prosecutor's statement included in his file.

"His previous IDOC sentences further show he is incapable of reform," prosecutors noted in the file.

Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter.
Sometimes, good people lose their way and do terrible things.

I learned this years ago when I reported about Catholic bishops who placed the reputation of the church above the safety of children by shuffling sexual-predator priests to other parishes.

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Now in Illinois, some political leaders have lost their way. They've lost sight of how they were elected to represent people as public servants. Instead, they seem focused on protecting political power above all else.

When did it become about winning at all costs?

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This week, though, Illinois residents can see a glimmer of hope to ending the power struggles that have caused historic budget gridlock, prolonged deficit spending, damaged the state's credit rating and created other serious financial problems.

On Monday, the Illinois Board of Elections certified petition signatures for the Independent Map Amendment.

Illinois is a long way from getting out of the woods, but this development is good news for taxpayers and citizens.

If placed on ballots and approved by voters in November, the measure would amend the state Constitution to allow an 11-member independent commission to determine state and federal legislative districts every 10 years.

As it stands, the Illinois General Assembly draws districts after decennial census updates. Democrats hold a supermajority in the state legislature and have gerrymandered districts to their advantage.

This is why the 1st Congressional District, for example, looks like a weird ink splatter extending from Chicago's South Side through Blue Island, Tinley Park, Orland Park, Mokena, Frankfort, Manhattan and Elwood.

Redistricting reform has nothing to do with whether you like Bobby Rush, the district's longtime representative, or agree with his positions. It's about fairness, real choice and equal representation.

This latest reform attempt stands a better chance of making it to ballots, but it still faces hurdles. Independent Map Amendment supporters learned from previous efforts in 2010 and 2014. Previously a court ruled there was an insufficient number of valid petition signatures and changes to the redistricting process as proposed then were unconstitutional.

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This time, backers collected about 570,000 petition signatures, nearly twice the 290,000 needed. The state board did a random sampling of 5 percent of signatures and found the effort has more than the minimum needed.

However, the state board said it would wait until the outcome of lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the reform effort before deciding whether the question can appear on ballots in November. The board faces an Aug. 26 deadline to decide.

The court challenge is by the group People's Map, but don't let the name fool you. I think they're motivated by one goal, and that is to preserve the status quo and protect the interests of people holding political power.

The group is represented by attorney Michael Kasper, who also led the successful challenge that blocked the reform question from going to voters in 2014. Kasper has previously represented the state's top Democrats, including House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton, the Associated Press reported.

Through a spokesman, Madigan denies any involvement with the legal challenge to this year's reform effort.

Madigan, who has been speaker of the Illinois House for 31 of the past 33 years, has too much power. He uses his control over the rules of the General Assembly to quash any legislation he doesn't want to advance. A bill seeking to impose term limits, for example, never makes it out of committee.

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I don't know at what point in his political career self-preservation instincts took over, but over the years Madigan has changed the rules to protect and increase his political power.

The current legal challenge to the Independent Map Amendment claims having an independent commission decide redistricting would be unconstitutional.

To me, calling this citizen-led reform effort unconstitutional is like saying voting is undemocratic or flying the flag is unpatriotic.

Amendment supporters are only asking for the chance to put the question to voters. If opponents can muster enough support to defeat the question at polls, then so be it. But it's only fair to give voters a chance to decide.

Reforming the way legislative districts are drawn and restoring fairness and common sense to the process would be like light at the end of the tunnel. If the question makes it onto ballots, and if voters approve it, maybe in five or so years more balance might be restored to electoral process in Illinois.

Gerrymandered districts deny voters real choice. A majority of state legislative contests this November are uncontested. The districts are mapped to be so heavily Republican or Democratic that the outcome is presumed.

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It would be pointless for supporters of an opposing party to invest time, money and other resources into backing candidates to challenge incumbents in districts that are heavily red or blue.

Redistricting reform might breathe new life and hope into the election process. If more districts were more evenly balanced with near-equal numbers of Republican and Democratic voters, campaigns might actually focus more on the integrity of candidates and issues important to voters.

Then maybe the legislature could be pressured into adopting campaign finance reform that would limit the influence of lobbyists and special interests.

Then maybe the state could tackle serious problems like the structural budget deficit, high property taxes, gun violence in Chicago and some south suburbs, overly generous pensions to some retired public workers, education funding inequality and other issues.

You have to start somewhere.

tslowik@tribpub.com

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A quilt that hangs on a wall at the South Suburban Family Shelter on May 4, 2015, was made by clients who were victims of domestic violence. (John Booz, Daily Southtown)

By now you've heard about the lenient six-month jail sentence for the Stanford University swimmer convicted of rape. The media has exhausted every angle of coverage. Friends and acquaintances have had their say about the topic on social media.

We've moved on.

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Most of us, that is, have moved on to debating gun control, radical Islamic terrorism or LGBT issues in the wake of the Orlando shooting. Or we're back to talking about the presidential election, the state budget impasse or a host of other issues.

But one local agency that serves people affected by domestic violence is still talking about the Brock Turner case. How the rapist's father asked the judge for leniency, saying his son already was paying a "steep price" for "20 minutes of action."

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"When I look at the Stanford case, I think about how the family does not feel accountable" for the son's actions, said Jennifer Gabrenya, the new executive director of Homewood-based South Suburban Family Shelter.

I reached out to Gabrenya because she's the agency's first new director in nearly 30 years. Diane Bedrosian retired this month after heading the organization for 29 of its 36 years. The organization was formed in 1980 by members of the National Council of Jewish Women/South Cook Section and graduate students from Governors State University.

The agency serves families affected by domestic violence and provides such services as a 24-hour crisis hotline, emergency shelter and transportation, transitional housing, court advocacy and counseling for adults and children.

I spoke by phone with Gabrenya on Wednesday, her third day in her new role. She brought up the Stanford rape case, and how the shelter's mission includes outreach work at local colleges and schools.

"Did he learn different lessons when he was young?" Gabrenya wondered. "Culturally, we've seen a lot of things happen lately where people aren't treating each other with respect."

The agency's school-based prevention program aims to help students identify dating violence and domestic violence, and provide pupils with information about available services. According to the agency's most recent annual report, representatives made 77 presentations to 1,077 high school students and 243 presentations to 1,646 junior-high school students last year.

Advocates also target younger children with prevention messages, giving 197 presentations to 1,233 students in elementary schools and 91 presentations to 665 children in preschool and kindergarten.

When Bedrosian took over as South Suburban Family Shelter's executive director in 1987, the agency had six paid staff members. The agency now employs more than 60 staff members and has an annual budget of about $2 million.

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The agency says it has not had to reduce staff or services despite the nearly year-long state budget impasse.

"We're a very fiscally sound organization, but we can't stay that way forever if the state doesn't get its act together soon," Gabrenya said.

The organization's financial statements show it received nearly $800,000 in state grants during the 2015 fiscal year.

"Given the current climate it's a little concerning," Verlon Johnson, the agency's president, told me. "A majority of our funding comes from state and federal grants. We have a strong support system (and) we're spending within our limits."

Johnson said Gabrenya was selected from more than 100 applicants for the executive director position.

"She has a tremendous amount of leadership experience," Johnson said. "Having worked for the state, she's able to see things from both perspectives."

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Gabrenya's experience includes working as assistant director of grant programs for the Illinois Violence Prevention Authority. She previously was executive director of the Will County Children's Advocacy Center, director of programs for Wheaton-based Family Shelter Service and CEO of the Center for Disability Services in Joliet.

"Jennifer brings energy, experience and a vision for what we can do as an organization," Johnson said.

Education and violence-prevention are key parts of the agency's mission. South Suburban Family Shelter's counseling services include sessions with abusers, as well as people who are abused. The Partner Abuse Intervention Program (PAIP) is part of a statewide effort that aims to prevent domestic abuse.

"The goal is to address behaviors and beliefs behind what makes someone feel they can behave that way," Gabrenya said. "Intervention programs try to prevent future abuse. We look at how we can do some attitudinal changes to this doesn't recur."

That's a strong message to get across to people, starting with young children. It's just part of the work being done by South Suburban Family Shelter and its new director to create stronger and safer communities in the Southland.

tslowik@tribpub.com

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A vigil to honor the memory of the 49 victims killed in Orlando was held at Elgin Community College on Tuesday. (Courtesy of Elgin Community College)

Around 60 people gathered Tuesday afternoon for a vigil at Elgin Community College to honor the memory of the 49 victims killed in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday.

The shooting in the Pulse gay nightclub has been called the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

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Vincent Cascio, wellness professional at the college, and Flo Perez of Carpentersville, president of the college's S.W.A.N.S. (students who are not silent) group, both spoke at the vigil.

The audience was then invited to form a line and take turns ringing the bell at the front table in memory of the victims.

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"It didn't really hit me until today when I counted all the times the bell was rung," an attendee said.

"I thought we would only have S.W.A.N.S. members here," another audience member said. "I'm glad I was wrong."

Perez, a student at the college, has served as the president of S.W.A.N.S. for two years. He is working toward earning his associate's degree in substance abuse counseling.

"What happened in Orlando was not a terrorist attack," Perez said. "It was a hate crime. We have to acknowledge that before we can move forward. I am overwhelmed by what happened. I hope something good comes out of this tragedy."

"Being here today is symbolic of uniting together in the spirit of community, resiliency and honor for those most affected by the losses in Orlando," said Cascio. "This tragedy hits close to home as it directly impacts the community I belong to. There is a lot of sadness, anger and confusion in trying to understand why such a tragedy has to occur in order to get society to unite. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community has a long history of battling hate and violence. Sadly, this isn't the first time something tragic has happened to my community, and it may not be the last."

"I have struggled over the last few days to find hope that things will change for the better," Cascio continued. "However, after receiving messages of love from friends, family and colleagues, I am reminded that good does exist. When we work together, positive changes can happen. I would like to encourage you all to have conversations with your friends and family about what we can all do to create a more accepting world. To be more cognizant of our privileges, to become more aware of the challenges that marginalized communities experience, and examine what our role as allies really entails."

Members of the college faculty and staff attended the vigil.

"We want to show our support for our students," said Elgin Community College President David Sam. "There is no room for the kind of hatred shown in Orlando. If there's ever any issue at our college, we want to know about it so we can improve the environment."

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"At Elgin Community College, we value community," said Ileo Lott, dean of sustainability, business and career technologies. "I'm glad to help our students have community in the face of this loss."

"It was good to come together during this somber time to lift those who were lost and coalescing around the campus," said Katherine Sawyer, executive director of Institutional Advancement and Elgin Community College Foundation.

The microphone was passed around during the vigil so that members of the audience could offer their comments. People who spoke did not identify themselves by name.

"I always felt comfortable with who I am. These situations will not stop me from being myself, but it does make me feel like a walking target. We need to be there for each other as fellow human beings. I am afraid and what happened scares me, but all these people here today supporting us gives me hope."

"I am a straight woman. This is a personal issue for me because I love everyone. People do these things like the Orlando massacre in order to get a rise out of others. Their point is to make people afraid."

"When I first heard what happened, I was in shock. This vigil has given me the courage to stay out. The best way to fight back is to be alive and be our own authentic selves. Be proud of who we are."

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"It's hard to be in a public space. It saddens me that all of us could potentially be in danger, but we're all here today for each other."

"I work here at the college. This tragedy is going to hit us for a long time. Remember that we have your backs."

"I'm compelled to speak for the people without a voice. I am a member of S.W.A.N.S. It means a lot to see my community behind me."

"It was nice to visually see the support today for our community," Perez concluded. "We're thankful for the support. It makes a difference."

S.W.A.N.S., which is open to all, is a student organization focusing on gender and sexual identities, as well as allies. The group meets from 3 to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays in Room B254 at the college, according to Cascio. S.W.A.N.S. does not meet during the summer months. It will start holding meetings again once the college fall semester starts on Monday, Aug. 22.

Pride Talk, a group only for LGBT students, meets from 4 to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays in Room B254 all year long.

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Denise Moran is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
Elgin fire code official Ron Sessions checks in with Human Resources Director Gail Cohen Wednesday during a drill related to dealing with anthrax being released in the city. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

Showing ID, checking in, following a blue line taped down a winding hallway and filling out forms may seem like the typical day at any bureaucracy.

Wednesday morning in Elgin the steps served a purpose as more than 250 city employees on the day shift took part in a drill simulating part of the process involved if someone released aerosolized anthrax as a bioweapon in town.

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The local exercise was part of a broader effort going on across Illinois Wednesday, Assistant Fire Chief Bryan McMahan said.

Anthrax infections are caused by a bacterium, and, while rare in humans, are more typically seen in livestock and wild game birds. According to a handout from the Kane County Health Department, the disease is not known to spread from person to person.

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People can get such infections from handling products made from infected animals, eating undercooked meat from infected animals or by breathing in spores found on products made from infected animals.

Anthrax has been used as a bioweapon, too, most notably in late 2001 when letters laced with it and sent through the United States Postal Service killed five people and sickened another 17, according to the FBI.

Elgin Assistant Fire Chief Bryan McMahan looks over a room being used to fill out forms at part of a drill that assumed anthrax had been used as a bioweapon in Elgin. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

According to an Elgin staff memo about the drill, upon notification from the state, the Kane County Health Department activated a critical responder plan. That department notified the Kane County Office of Emergency Management, which, in turn, notified the Elgin Office of Emergency Management, at which time the city simulated its critical responder dispensing plan.

That involved designated employees driving to pick up faux antibiotics (hard candy in this case) used to treat anthrax-related illnesses and setting up a closed point of distribution for doling out the treatments.

The pretend closed point of distribution processed forms and dispensed medication to city staff members and their families. The scenario assumed only the household member working for Elgin would come to the location site to get what was needed for his or her family.

McMahan explained that if there was a shortage of medications, the actual plan would involve a tiered system, first processing critical responders  police, firefighter/paramedics, public service workers and others deemed essential to addressing an anthrax incident. Next, the rest of the city staff would go through the process.

"In an actual emergency of this sort, we would need everyone to keep things running in the city," McMahan said.

That situation also would ultimately involve not only taking care of the ill but setting up point of distributions to deliver treatment to residents, and, according to the memo, if set up fast enough, some city workers would use these sites, too,

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Wednesday's set-up in Elgin included workers checking in at a table, then heading to another table to go over a list of symptoms. At that point, those showing symptoms or with special medical needs would be sent to a different point for care.

Others would follow the tape to a room holding tables for filling out medical countermeasure data collection forms. Depending on the provided information, at the next station the worker would be given one or two types of antibiotics for themselves and for their family members. Each would be given info sheets about the medications and sheets for each to give to their own doctors.

Elgin firefighters act as dispensers of antibiotics used to treat anthrax during a drill involving city employees Monday. (Mike Danahey / The Courier-News)

McMahan explained that city workers were sent to the closed point of distribution in shifts to make the process a smooth one. The time to process each person was noted, too.

Kane County Health Department Communications Coordinator Tom Schlueter said that planning for the statewide drill began last fall. The Wednesday drill also involved practicing how officials and designated staff would coordinate keeping in touch with each other during such a crisis and getting information to the public through social media and traditional media sources.

While the focus Wednesday was anthrax, both McMahan and Schlueter said the process could be applicable to other emergency situations. And Schlueter noted that similar strategies have been used in recent years in addressing actual and potential outbreaks of the H1N1 flu virus and in distributing measles vaccinations at Elgin Community College after a confirmed case of student there with that disease.

mdanahey@tribpub.com
Elgin Public Works Department employees remove a section of a controversial mural Saturday that was derived from a 1930s photo of a lynching. (Joe Shuman, Chicago Tribune)

If David Powers' mural "American Nocturne" divides residents in Elgin, "it is not doing any good," said Karly Kirkpatrick, one of the Elgin Cultural Arts Commissioners who spoke during its deliberations Monday.

With all of the challenges facing not only Elgin but the country, "we have to be unified based on all of the challenges of the modern day," she said.

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The commission voted Monday night to permanently remove Powers' mural from any public display in the city. The commission vote is just a recommendation to the city council. The council is expected to make its final decision at a later date.

The board took public comments for more than an hour, and although several speakers went over their three minute time allotment, board Chairman Joe Vassallo said he didn't have the heart to stop many of the speakers who were obviously emotional over the controversy.

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While the final voice vote was unanimous to remove the mural, the idea that it may be a form of censorship to do so weighed on the commissioners.

"My impulse as a artist  is that censorship is never good," said Erin Rehberg, co-owner of Side Street Studio Arts, a non-profit art gallery and venue in downtown Elgin.

While that impulse is based, in part, because she sees how attempts at censorship has affected her in the past "this  affects a lot more people," Rehberg said.

It was that distaste for censorship that made it hard to vote to remove it, she added.

More discussion is likely needed, she said, and evidenced by the commission not taking a vote on what should be done with the mural once if it is removed from public view.

"I do think it needs a lot more discussion," and burning it or selling it, as some had suggested, might not be the answer either, she said.

"Not everyone agrees to what censorship is, but there are an awful lot of people who don't want to look at this anymore," said Commissioner Kate Darling-Bond.

Public art "shouldn't hurt people" she said, and many of the people who spoke Monday night said the art was hurting them.

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She also discussed the concept of free speech, adding that many forget that no one is held harmless for the results of their speech.

"Free speech doesn't protect from reaction," to that speech. Powers has a right to free speech, "and the community has a right to respond to that speech," she said.

"This is less about censorship  than appropriate use of taxpayer resources," Darling-Bond said.

One of the speakers, Ernie Broadnax, 81, of Elgin, spoke about his close friendship with Powers. Since he spoke in the media and elsewhere in support of Powers and the mural, he has had many mean and threatening phone calls, Broadnax said.

"I had a lot of notes relating to this mural, I had a lot of phone calls relating to this mural and calling me names relating to this mural," Broadnax said.

But Powers was one of the few young men that would come into "the settlement"  the three block area of Elgin where many of its first black families lived  and sit and talk with Elgin's African American residents in the 1960s, he said.

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"If David made some mistakes, he made them. There is no one in this room who has never made a mistake," Broadnax said. No one in that room, he added, could decide for him who he can be friends with.

Once the mural's fate has been decided, commissioners said, they hope the controversy will help lead the commission's discussion into future public art endeavors.

The commission is working on a public art plan to manage all aspects of public art in the city, including oversight and vetting artists and their works.

Once completed, the public art plan could include regular commissioning of artwork, finding outside grant and other funding mechanisms for the art, managing the city's current collection, and stimulating public awareness and conversations, said Amanda Harris, city staff liaison to the commission.

"We have been working in this well before the mural situation/conversation started  and is not one of those things we want to rush. We want your input on what we are talking about with the mural and going forward," Vassallo added.

Janelle Walker is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
Food trucks from outside of Evanston can now peddle their gourmet sandwiches, pastries, coffee and other foods within the city's borders, thanks to an ordinance change approved by the Evanston City Council on Monday, lifting a restriction that had been place since 2010.

Evanston City Council members approved a change in the ordinance that overturns the original language that stated a mobile food vendor "must be owned and operated by the owner or agent of a licensed food establishment in the city of Evanston." Now food truck operators that don't own a brick-and-mortar shop within city limits can apply for eligibility to operate in the city.

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Aldermen suspended their rules of introducing an item and then waiting two weeks before acting on an issue, hoping to clear the way for outside food trucks to obtain licensing and begin operating here as soon as this summer.

At Monday night's City Council meeting, Jason Huebert, an attorney for Beavers Coffee and Donuts, a popular food truck operation in Chicago, praised the move. The company filed suit against the city in 2012 over the original ordinance.

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"It's going to be a great benefit, not only for start-up entrepreneurial businesses like Beavers Coffee and Donuts, but also for the people of Evanston as they have more food choices," he said, speaking during the citizen comment portion of the meeting.

Officials announced last month they were considering recommending changes to the city's food truck ordinance, acknowledging the lawsuit as a factor in the change.

In the suit, two young Rogers Park entrepreneurs, James Nuccio and Gabriel Wiesen, maintained the city's ordinance was "arbitrary and restrictive" and "serves to protect one group of established business owners from creative competition."

The two hoped to tap the Northwestern University market, believing their doughnuts and coffee would be popular with students.

City officials also convened a meeting April 11 with more than 20 individuals representing various business district groups, restaurants and food trucks, getting their backing of the change.

"It is clear from the suggestions raised by the restaurant industry during the April 11th public meeting that removal of this brick-and-mortar requirement to dispose of costly litigation against the City is not an issue,'' said Henry J. Ford, assistant city attorney, in a memo to aldermen.

Under the ordinance, operators of food trucks would have to apply to operate in the city. It includes a provision for the city to inspect vehicles and determine their suitability for use.

Food trucks could not park or operate within 100 feet of the address point of a licensed restaurant in the city. The ordinance also prohibits food trucks from operating on streets around schools when the schools are in session, and keep at least 500 feet off the address point of the properties.

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The food trucks would also have to stay at least 100 feet away from public parks.

bseidenberg@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter @evanstonscribe
An artist paints flowers during the annual Antiochs Summer Arts & Crafts Faire. (Antioch Chamber of Commerce / Handout)

For at least 30 years, Antioch's free annual Summer Arts & Crafts Faire has continued to be about all things homemade and hands-on fun for the youngsters, said Barbara Porch, executive director of the Antioch Chamber of Commerce.

"We've always wanted this to be a handcrafted fair," Porch said. "We don't want it to be a flea market."

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She said the fair also gives families an opportunity "to watch their children enjoy themselves. Free fun is always a winner. This year, we're promoting family fun."

Adults can wander the streets of Antioch admiring and purchasing items from the juried art show, while children blow bubbles, create a huge art project and get their faces painted at a free kids zone sponsored by NorthBridge Church of Antioch, she said.

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Crafts include woodwork, jewelry, crocheted items, paintings and handmade dog blankets, toys and treats, she said.

"We're dog-friendly," Porch said. "It's fun to watch the big dogs browse the dog treats."

Patrons can also find handcrafted food for humans, she said, including the popular dips booth. A father-daughter team from Rockford brings homemade concoctions that can be paired with chips and other foods.

More homemade goodies include items baked by the Antioch Junior Woman's Club, which is raising funds for Save a Pet and Midwest Dachshund Rescue.

Lakes Area Community Band members will run a food concession this year. In between putting hot dogs and brats on buns, some of the musicians will be jamming to entertain the attendees.

"We always work with our nonprofits. We support our civic groups," Porch said.

Antioch Fine Arts Foundation is there every year and will be working on art during the event for patrons to watch, she said.

To exhibit and sell their wares, crafters send the chamber photos of them creating their art, and a committee decides whether to accept them, Porch said.

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Some crafters have been coming for years because patrons like them so much, she said.

"Amy Roberts, a wood crafter, is one of our busiest crafters," she said. "Her work is great, and she has a nice price point."

The Kids Fun Fair runs from noon to 2 p.m. both days. That's when young artists can contribute to a "paint the town" project.

"We get big cardboard boxes and set them up and give children paints and brushes," Porch said. "We want to make it look like a town, but children have such wonderful imaginations, you never know what will come out of their brushes."

Kids can also be creative when getting their faces painted.

"Kids can be a fairy princess, a super hero, whatever they imagine," she said.

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The youngsters also can reach into a treasure chest and get free prizes, she said. Plus they can engage in a bean-bag toss, using a giant teddy bear.

Last year, the chamber introduced the bubble lady  she sells bubbles and has huge bubble wands.

"The kids loved it," Porch said.

Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter.

Antioch's Summer Arts & Crafts Faire

Where: Main and Orchard streets, Antioch

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When: June 18-19

Tickets: Free

Information: 847-395-2233; www.antiochchamber.org
Abigail Toohey, 21, a student from Lake Forest College, spent time in late May on a research ship in the Bahamas as part of the Shedd Aquarium Marine and Island Ecology program.

Q. What are you studying at Lake Forest College?

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A. Biology and environmental studies.

Q. Where in the Bahamas were you?

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A. The Exuma Cays . It's at archipelago of 365 islands or so. It's a sea park and no fishing zone and completely a conservation area. You can't take in invasive species or fish or take shells from there.

Q. What was the ship like?

A. It was 80 feet long. There were nine students, a captain, professors and a chef on board. Our actual living quarters were pretty small, basically a bunk bed and a place to put your stuff. That's another reason all us students got pretty close to each other. We were forced to hang out with each other.

Q. What was your first impression?

A. I was really surprised that we were just in the middle of the ocean for a week without internet service. We didn't see any tourists or locals other than one island. I got really interested in what I was studying without any background noise or distractions.

Q. What was your day to day routine?

A. We'd have breakfast and the professor would explain where we were going and what we were doing. We'd take a smaller boat to one of the islands and the professor would show us different species we were expected to learn. We'd go back and have a bit of down time, then learn about terrestrial species, then lectures, then we go out again and do another circle (by boat) or island walk.

Q. What else did you do?

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A. We did a whole day of tagging iguanas. There's a big problem with tourists feeding them and they're going extinct on some islands. There were reef sharks and nurse sharks. One of them had a fishing line in its mouth. We got it out with one of my professors. I got within inches of them.

Q. Within inches of a shark?

A. They are a lot more friendly than I expected. All sharks are kind of different. Great whites and others are more aggressive. The ones down there are more afraid of us than we are of them.

Q What were the challenges of this trip?

A. We had one time where our water power was all screwed up. We had to take a rocky four-hour trip back to Nassau. I got a little sea sick. And the natural problems that come from being on a boat. Sometimes the pumps and water breakers and heaters break down. The water gets choppy and the boat doesn't always have the ability to stop rocking.

Twitter: @reporterdude

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Shout Out is a weekly feature in which we get to know and introduce our readers to their fellow community members and local visitors throughout suburban Chicago. Check out more online at ChicagoTribune.com/ShoutOut.
Kate Lindberg-Vazquez (from left), Myrna Vazquez and Matheos Vazquez attend a June 15 vigil at Scoville Park in Oak Park to honor the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. (Steve Schering / Pioneer Press)

Days after the deadliest mass shooting in American history took place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., dozens of people gathered in Oak Park's Scoville Park to honor their memory.

Throughout the service, Teresa O'Callahan held a pride flag on her shoulder and listened to speaker after speaker condemn the attack in front of an overwhelming turnout in Scoville Park, all while her 3-year-old daughter stood by her side.

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"She could have lost us if it would have happened here," O'Callahan said of her daughter. "We need to stand up to hate. This could have happened here."

Speakers included Oak Park Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb, village Trustee Colette Lueck and various elected officials and religious leaders.

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"This was an attack on our LGBTQ brothers and sisters," Abu-Taleb said. "It was an attack on humanity. It was an attack on our right to love and live free from fear. We must stand together against this type of hatred and violence and continue to thrive for equality, acceptance and peace."

Lueck agreed, and called for leaders to work to prevent such a tragedy from occurring once again.

"Even there, one person with easy access to an assault weapon can murder 50 people, mostly young, because of who they are, who they love and where they chose to be on a hot Orlando night," Lueck said. "Fifty people lost their lives; 50 people more suffered gun shots, and our world is less than it was before Saturday night. Be sad, be proud, celebrate life, but please take action to stop the carnage that has become America."

Dozens attend a vigil June 15 at Scoville Park in Oak Park to honor of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orland. (Steve Schering / Pioneer Press)

Oak Park resident Myrna Vazquez and her wife, Kate Lindberg-Vazquez, held a sign displaying the names of the 49 victims, the injured and first responders as they listened to the speakers.

"I felt compelled to honor the names of the victims," Lindberg-Vazquez said. "The shooter's name, his image has been all over the news. We wanted to show respect to the inured, the first responders and their families."

Vazquez also held a Puerto Rican flag during the service, and said seeing so many from the Oak Park community fill Scoville Park was needed following the attack.

"A lot of Puerto Ricans were killed," Vazquez said, while holding back tears. "I came because I needed support, and I needed to be around people in my family. We meet at clubs, and that's how we got to know each other. We are a family."

Vazquez also spoke in support of stronger laws related to access to guns and ammunition as Senate Democrats were staging a filibuster in Washington demanding action on the topic.

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"It could have been any of us," Vazquez said. "It could have been here. I just hope it changes."

sschering@pioneerlocal.com

Twitter: @steveschering
A vigil was held June 15 at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines in remembrance of the lives lost in the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting. June 15, 2016. (Jennifer Johnson/Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)

A diverse crowd of more than 100 Oakton Community College students, faculty and staff gathered at the Des Plaines campus Wednesday for a solemn vigil in remembrance of the victims of the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting.

Tears were shed by some, and Karishma Kamath, Oakton's coordinator for student rights and leader of the ceremony, was comforted by Oakton President Joianne Smith as a video tribute to the shooting victims played on screen in the school's main lobby.

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"My heart has been heavy as I've gotten up to get ready for work this morning; I continue to think of the 49 lives that were lost that day," Kamath told the crowd. "Their lives, along with hopes and dreams, were cut short, and so many others were injured or impacted by a senseless act of hate and violence."

The ceremony, which began at 2:02 p.m.  reflecting the time of 2:02 a.m. on June 12 when the massacre started  was coordinated by Kamath and members of Oakton's LGBTQ+ Working Group, the Muslim Student Association, the Office of Student Life, the Diversity Council and Habitat for Humanity, among others. A similar ceremony also took place at the same time on Oakton's campus in Skokie.

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As Kamath read "An Open Letter To Straight People On The Pulse Massacre," by blogger Connor Doherty, pictures of the 49 murder victims flashed across the screen behind her.

She urged the crowd to consider the kind of impact they can have on others.

"As a community of higher education, we are a strong community," Kamath said. "We are a community of wealth, of resources and expertise that can be utilized to impact our local and global communities in many positive and transformative ways."

A video dedicated to the victims and featuring the song "Pulse" by Eli Lieb and Brandon Skeie, was also played.

Smith noted that this was the third time in the last year that Oakton students and staff have gathered in response to a violent act.

In addition to remembering the lives lost, Smith said the ceremony was meant to "acknowledge and support our LGBTQ and Muslim communities, recognizing that this recent act of terror and violence only increases their feelings of vulnerability and fear that they may be the next victims. We want our community to be a community where all members feel safe and know that they belong."

Students and faculty gather June 15 for a vigil in remembrance of the 49 lives lost during the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting. (Jennifer Johnson, Pioneer Press)

The ceremony concluded with several volunteers stepping forward to plant begonias around trees in the school courtyard. The colorful flowers, donated by Pesche's in Des Plaines, were planted in remembrance of the deceased, but also serve as a "symbol of our hope that peace and understanding will continue to grow and bloom, overshadowing the seeds of fear and hatred," Smith said.

Adrianne Gerber, who has ties to Orlando, said she came to the vigil because of her connection to the city and the LGBT community.

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"My heart is breaking," she said. "I don't know any of the victims, but my heart goes out to their families and the friends."

Oakton student Alek Pennock of Lake Zurich also attended the ceremony and helped planted flowers with several staff members.

"I have several friends who are gay, and I couldn't imagine what it would be like losing them," he said, adding that came to the vigil to pay respects to the families of the those killed.

Pennock said he feels society in general has "come a long way" when it comes to building solidarity with the LGBT community, but there is still much to be done.

"There is still a huge road ahead, not just for the LGBT community, but for all equal rights," he said.

jjohnson@pioneerlocal.com

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Twitter: @Jen_Pioneer
Jim Brilmyer and Della Lovick light candles with the names of each Orlando shooting victim. (Jim Karczewski / Post-Tribune)

The ultimate answer to stopping hatred may always be love, but there are practical measures people can take in the meantime to usher in safety.

Members of Unite of Hammond gathered to mourn the Orlando shooting in a Wednesday night vigil at Unity Church. After the prayers and ceremony, church leaders encouraged people to offer suggestions to help power through the pain caused by the shooting Sunday that left 49 people dead and left 53 wounded.

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Prayer is useful, but it also needs deeds to back it up, said Rey Candelaria, who sits on the church's board. One thing the board has talked about is putting together a social justice action team to help spread the word of peace.

But he also encouraged people to speak out about guns.

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"We must do something about these guns," he said. "We are an armory for Chicago. People come in and buy our guns from these places with no waiting, and then they disappear into the ether once they're bought."

Church member Art Stark compared the pain he feels from the Orlando shooting to the immense grief that continues to overwhelm him over losing friends to the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. He recalled how the government didn't acknowledge it as a serious problem until actor Rock Hudson - a personal friend of the President Ronald Reagan's -- died from it.

"We have a Congress now that refuses to acknowledge the problem of guns, and the only way we can change it is to vote, vote, vote, vote," he said.

People who support the LGBTQ community also can show support to their friends by showing up to Rainbow Serenity's annual picnic Sunday at Wicker Park, said Dawn Croach.

"I've had people ask me if I'm afraid now, and I told them I hadn't thought about it," she said.

William Harth's recommendation was more simple -- step outside yourself and connect with your neighbor.

"I had a man come up to me many, many years ago and say, 'You're not much, Bill, but you're all you think about,'" he recalled. "We live our lives thinking about what 'I' have to do. What does your neighbor need?

"The 'I' thinks of 'those guys,' but the 'we' hurts because our family's been attacked."

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Unity of Hammond's vigil coincided with one in Crown Point at First United Methodist Church. Another vigil is scheduled for 7 p.m. in Valparaiso Thursday.

Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Sheriff John Buncich, Chairman of the Lake County Democrats, speaks out against comments made by Donald Trump about Judge Gonzalo Curiel. (Jim Karczewski / Post-Tribune)

A cadre of Lake County's Hispanic elected officials and Democratic leaders gathered Wednesday to stand behind the federal judge from East Chicago under attack from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Standing on the steps of the Casa Santo Toribio Immigrant Support and Assistance Center in East Chicago, Sheriff John Buncich, Lake County Democratic Party chairman, decried Trump's comments regarding U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of San Diego, an East Chicago native.

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"His comments were not only an insult to Lake County native Judge (Gonzalo) Curiel, the Hispanic community as a whole in this nation, but also in particular to those Hispanics here in Northwest Indiana particularly, where Judge Gonzalo Curiel, a U.S. federal district court judge, was born and raised a short distance from where we stand today," Buncich said.

Trump aimed a racially tinged critique at Curiel during a campaign rally May 27 in San Diego. Curiel is overseeing a civil fraud lawsuit in San Diego that alleges now-defunct Trump University's real estate school was a sham. The attack came shortly after Curiel authorized the release of depositions in the case.

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Trump said he believed Curiel should have dismissed the fraud lawsuit. According to an Associated Press report from the rally, Trump said, "Everybody says it, but I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He's a hater. His name is Gonzalo Curiel."

He proceeded to attack Curiel, saying he was "very hostile" to him and telling the audience at his rally he believes the East Chicago-born Curiel is Mexican, according to the Associated Press. Curiel's parents were Mexican immigrants who settled in East Chicago.

Trump proceeded to post to his Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, on May 30: "I have a judge in the Trump University Civil case, Gonzalo Curiel (San Diego) who is very unfair. An Obama pick. Totally biased-hates Trump"

Also that day he tweeted: "I should have easily won the Trump University case on summary judgment but have a judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is totally biased against me."

Jose Bustos, ISAAC's manager, said the rhetoric surrounding Trump  from calling for a wall on the U.S. Mexican border to the criticism against Curiel  has local immigrants afraid. Clients coming into ISAAC are asking for letters giving care of their children to someone in case they are deported.

"There's a real fear now, even more so than before," Bustos said.

Jose Bustos, Director of ISAAC Immigration Clinic, explains how immigrants fear the words of Donald Trump regarding deportation. (Jim Karczewski / Post-Tribune)

Buncich called upon elected Republicans in Lake County and the state to condemn what he described as Trump's racist comments.

"I am now asking that every Republican officeholder in Lake County and in Northwest Indiana and throughout the state of Indiana, up to and including Gov. Pence, offer an apology to Judge Curiel and to Hispanics everywhere," Buncich said.

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"This country prides itself on its diversity and such racist remarks made by an individual seeking the highest office in the U.S. I find disgraceful and deplorable," he said.

Dan Dernulc, chairman of Lake County's Republican Party, said he was concerned Trump said what he did about Curiel. He said members of the Lake County Republican caucus do not share that view.

"It was unfortunate that was said, unfortunate and something the Lake County Republicans don't agree with," Dernulc said.

He said the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has said things that are controversial, and that some Democrats might not agree with, but they do not apologize for her. As for an apology from local Republicans for the comments made by Trump, Dernulc said the onus is on Trump himself.

Judge Lorenzo Arredondo speaks out about the comments made by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Jim Karczewski / Post-Tribune)

"Mr. Trump is the nominee, and he is going to be the one who has to apologize," Dernulc said.

Alfredo Estrada, chairman of the Lake County Young Democrats, said the beauty of East Chicago and Lake County is its diversity. He said when local Republicans say they do not approve of Trump's comments, yet say they will support the presumptive Republican nominee, they are "talking out of both ends."

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"When good people remain silent, justice does not prevail," Estrada said in calling for the Hispanic community to get out, register to vote and take action Nov. 8.

"Every generation has to contribute to our democracy," Estrada said. "How do you do that? You register and vote."

Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
The Plainfield Library unveiled its newest feature, a book-bike, at the Plainfield farmers market in Indianapolis recently. (Matt Kryger, AP)

INDIANAPOLIS (AP)  A mobile library is nothing new, but how about a library on two wheels?

The Plainfield-Guilford Township Public Library just rolled out its newest delivery vehicle, and it's making the rounds to area parks and farmers markets.

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It's a book bike  a bicycle and pop-up trailer that will bring the library to the people. Fully equipped with books, eBooks, library cards and a Wi-Fi hot spot, the book bike is the first of its kind in Indiana and a reminder of another first in Plainfield.

One hundred years ago, the Plainfield library was the first in the state to have a bookmobile, according to library marketing specialist Abby Nagy. Designed by a local physician who was on the library board, the book wagon was mounted on a 1916 Ford chassis and driven to mostly rural areas.

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It's true. Everything old is new again.

The new book bike made its first public appearance at the Plainfield Farmers Market last week. Curious kids and adults peered into the trailer and discovered a small selection of books and materials available for borrowing. No library card? No problem. Library personnel can get you signed up while you wait.

"Our new book bike will be an amazing tool to connect our community to our library, wherever they are," said library manager Joanna Carter. Whether at the Plainfield Lions Club Splash Pad, Lunch Bunch (kids' summer lunch program at Franklin Park in Plainfield), riding the trails or visiting a festival, "we will bring our library to you," she said.

She took the bike out Thursday and hit the Plainfield trail system, eventually rolling into Franklin Park. "It was hugely popular," she said. "Kids were waving at us, and we made a lot of stops and had several book checkouts."

The library collaborated with the Burgeon Group in Portland, Ore., to design and build the custom book trailer, with help from Hendricks Regional Health, which noted the initiative promotes literacy and physical fitness. In fact, the library's summer reading theme is On Your Mark, Get Set, Read.

"We're getting our sea legs right now, but we have a lot of staff members who are avid bike riders," Carter said. "And our trail system offers great accessibility."

A1 Cyclery in Indianapolis provided the Trek bike to pull the trailer.

"Bicycles bring people together and allow you to experience your community on a much more personal level," said owner Chris Wiggins. "I would love to discover a new book during a bike ride."

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Library staffers will take turns wheeling the book bike, but digital services librarian Matthew Stevenson will be the team captain. Gear and safety equipment will be provided by Hendricks Regional Health.
No fingerprints or DNA were found to link a Merrillville man to a reported rape of a woman in Hobart two years ago, according to testimony by a forensic scientist Wednesday.

Kimberly Anderson, who works in the biology unit at the Indiana State Police lab in Lowell, said she compared DNA standards from John G. Johnson, 27, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of rape, burglary and two counts of theft, and the woman's boyfriend to evidence collected at St. Mary Medical Center in Hobart, where the woman was taken after the incident was reported on April 26, 2014.

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Anderson said the profile was consistent with the woman's boyfriend, she said, but not Johnson's DNA.

The victim, a 36-year-old personal chef and tattoo artist, told the nine-woman, three-man jury she and her husband have an open marriage and at the time she was dating someone. The woman said she had met Johnson around Halloween 2013 at a bar in downtown Hobart. They engaged in sexual activity shortly after they met, and Johnson had contacted her a couple times afterward. The woman said she eventually told him she was married.

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Five months later, they ran into each other at the same bar, and the woman told Johnson to stop by her tattoo shop. Around 3 a.m. on April 24, 2014, the woman said Johnson came by the business with some friends, and he joined her, her boyfriend and others as they continued to drink and smoke marijuana.

After everyone left, the woman said she had sex with her boyfriend, who fell asleep with her on the couch. The woman told police she woke up and discovered a naked man on top of her as she lay by her boyfriend, but did not identify the man as Johnson in testimony Tuesday.

Ruth Ann Krause is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
As Indiana Democrats ready for their state convention Saturday, only about half of the area's usual party regulars will get the coveted nod to attend the national convention in July.

The reason  a split Democratic ticket between presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who won the state in the May 6 Democratic primary. Half of the District 1 pledged delegate spots are assigned to Clinton, the party establishment favorite, while the others are dedicated to Sanders.

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Most notable among the early missing names is Sheriff John Buncich, the chairman of Lake County's Democratic Central Committee.

"I was not selected as has been the custom as far as the county chairman goes," Buncich said. "I will be the first chairman in many, many years not selected."

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There will be 92 Hoosiers in the national convention delegation for Indiana. Fifty-six pledged delegates are split across Indiana's nine congressional district. There are 27 statewide delegates that also will be divided proportionately between Clinton and Sanders based on the primary results, according to John Zody, chair of the Indiana Democratic Party. Seven alternates also will be selected.

"A lot of people are not going to the convention. That's because of the split being between the two candidates. It's proportionately divided almost in half," Zody said.

There are eight District 1 pledged delegates, four go to Clinton and four to Sanders. Delegates Saturday will select two men and two women from District 1 to represent each candidate. Going into Saturday, the Clinton ballot includes Jorge Benavente, Buncich, Matt Gibson, Randy Palmateer, Scott Pelath and Lonnie Randolph, and Julia Sadia Ramos-Harris, Kim Robinson and Karen Freeman-Wilson, according to an email to Clinton supporters from the Indiana Democratic Party obtained by the Post- Tribune. The Post-Tribune was not able to obtain a sample ballot for the Sanders's campaign.

Each district also has one at-large delegate that will be selected Saturday and one Party Leaders and Elected Officials (PLEO). Four PLEO candidates will go to the Clinton camp while five will go to Sanders'. PLEO candidates already have been selected by party leadership in conjunction with the Clinton campaign. It is one of the PLEO spots, Buncich said, that traditionally goes to the county's party leader.

"I wasn't selected as has been the custom a far as the county chairman goes," Buncich said.

Zody would not comment on which officials have been selected for the Public Leaders and Elected Officials, nor on which local party delegates are running for the two available spots until after the election. He said those who have or have not been selected would know their status at this time.

Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson on Thursday confirmed she was selected as a PLEO for the national convention. This means she will not be running on the ballot for one of the two pledged delegate spots.

"I embark on this journey as a national delegate for Hillary Clinton with a sense of humility and responsibility," Freeman-Wilson said in a statement. "It is humbling to play a small role in Secretary Clinton's historic run."

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She said she feels an even greater responsibility to work hard to ensure that she is the next president.

"I can now say to my daughter Jordan  an African-American female  that a goal that seemed very elusive to women of color is not as elusive as it once seemed to my mother's generation. It does not mean that barriers don't exist but it means that we are successfully chipping away at the glass ceiling. Game on," Freeman-Wilson said.

Buncich said while his name is currently on the ballot to run because he was not selected for a PLEO spot, he does not intend to do so.

"I don't want to put my name in a pool with the other individuals. I don't want to minimize their chances of going," Buncich said.

Palmateer, who recently has come under fire for a second operating while intoxicated arrest that resulted in a misdemeanor charge of reckless driving and brought to light a systemic failure in the Lake Station courts to report license suspensions and actions to the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles, confirmed he was a candidate for the national delegation.

The national building trades have endorsed Hillary Clinton out of the gate, he said and the Northwest Indiana Building Trades Association are following that lead. Palmateer is the local association's business manager.

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"I've been a big Clinton fan a long time. I've got nothing against Bernie Sanders. I think Hillary is better for union workers," Palmateer said.

He said a state convention divided between the two camps is not necessarily a bad thing because it means more people are involved in the process.

"Having younger people involved is good," Palmateer said. "I look at is as an opportunity to get more young people involved by any means necessary."

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. confirmed he, too, was one of four PLEO candidates statewide selected to support the Clinton campaign.

"I was a very high-profile Clinton supporter in 2008. The first place she stopped in the region was Hammond," McDermott said. While the party faithful flocked to support Barack Obama in his bid for the Oval Office, McDermott said he bucked the local trend and supported Clinton.

Zody said the 2008 state convention between Obama and Clinton was similar. Delegates were divided between both candidates. While rare, when it does happen it leaves some people who want to participate on the sidelines.

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"There are just a lot of disappointed people. Not everyone gets to go. As a party you want every to go who wants to go but it's just impossible," Zody said.

Carrie Napoleon is a freelance reporter for the Post Tribune.
Former Gary Mayor Richard G. Hatcher jokes with Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson at City Hall on Tuesday, Feb. 23, during the announcement of the return of the black political convention to Gary. (Jim Karczewski / Post-Tribune)

As Indiana's population gets more diverse, minority political representation is lagging.

Blacks make up more than 9 percent of Indiana's population, yet hold 8 percent of the seats in the Legislature and just one of the state's 11 congressional seats, according to an Associated Press analysis. Hispanics make up almost 7 percent of the state's population, but less than 1 percent of the Legislature. The state's nine-member congressional delegation includes one African-American, but no Latinos, the analysis shows.

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Much of the minority populations are concentrated in urban areas like Lake County and Indianapolis, so local officeholders tend to be more diverse there.

Currently, five of the Indiana General Assembly's 13 black legislators hail from Lake County  State Senators Earline Rogers, who did not run for re-election in the May primary, and Lonnie Randolph and State Representatives Vernon Smith, Charlie Brown and Donna Harris. Harris, also, did not run for re-election.

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The AP examined the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Congress and the National Conference of State Legislatures to determine the extent to which the nation's thousands of lawmakers match the demographics of its hundreds of millions of residents. The result: Non-Hispanic whites make up a little over 60 percent of the U.S. population, but still hold more than 80 percent of all congressional and state legislative seats.

While U.S. demographic trends suggest the lack of representation won't always be the case, the minorities are currently excluded from positions that help make important public policy decisions, said Marlene Dotson, president and CEO of the Indiana Latino Institute.

African-Americans underrepresented

State Rep. Charlie Brown, D-Gary, said there are 13 African-Americans currently serving in the Indiana General Assembly, but there should be more.

"There should be at least three more if you look at the composition of districts in Fort Wayne, Evansville and South Bend," Brown said. "We're underrepresented in those areas."

There are no blacks currently elected to prominent statewide office, but that could change soon. Elkhart County Prosecutor Curtis Hill became the first black candidate for Republican statewide office, when he captured the nomination for Attorney General at last weekend's state GOP convention. Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, a Democrat, is a former Indiana Attorney General.

Brown said the Democrats should do better.

"I don't know why the (statewide) ticket couldn't have been more balanced," Brown said. "I think state party and national Democratic Party leaders take African-Americans for granted. We're one of their staunchest supporters, so we don't have to do as much for them. That has got to change on the state and national level."

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Karen Freeman-Wilson was appointed to the Indiana Attorney General post in February 2000. She ran for election to the post that same year, but she was defeated by Republican Steve Carter, a Lowell native.

Freeman-Wilson said she doesn't think her identity as a black female hampered her since Pam Carter  "a great friend and mentor"  had previously been elected to the post in 1993 when Democrat Evan Bayh was governor. Her investigations into poor care by nursing homes and a speech critical the gun lobby likely led to the defeat, Freeman-Wilson said.

"In Indiana, you have to be very careful about how you campaign," she said. "But I think there are many seniors  nursing home residents  who are safer because of our investigation."

Freeman-Wilson said one of the keys is getting political parties to engage young people early.

"I think our parties do have to work to get young people involved," Freeman-Wilson said. "It's through getting involved in the party ranks that you get considered for statewide candidacy. I got considered because there was an African-American party chair Robin Winston and Peter Manous (of Munster) was the party director. They both knew what I could do and how I could be an asset to the ticket."

Freeman-Wilson said the Indiana Democratic Party's Emerging Leaders Program has local alumni including Lori Latham and Steven Marcus, who has worked on Hillary Clinton's campaign.

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"Both parties have to be much more intentional in their recruitment of young people to run and participate in politics," she said.

Growing Hispanic influence

Northwest Indiana is home to a large Hispanic population  particularly in East Chicago, where four city council members and five school board members are Hispanic.

Rep. Christina Hale, an Indianapolis Democrat, is currently only Latina in the statehouse. Hale, who is of Cuban heritage, is the running mate of Democratic gubernatorial nominee John Gregg, who is a former Speaker of the House. If elected, she would become lieutenant governor.

Former State Rep. Mara Candelaria Reardon, of Munster, who is running again for the General Assembly seat in District 12, said that she sees issues that aren't being addressed due to the lack of diverse voices inside the Statehouse.

"I think there are policies in other states, for example bilingual education, improving access to health care that have a minority perspective that I don't think is being addressed," she said.

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"But there's also a misconception that a only a minority should represent a large minority district," she said. "Even with East Chicago included in district, it still only accounted for about 20 percent of the district; now it's closer to 5 percent."

Reardon grew up in East Chicago as the daughter of community activists Victoria Soto Candelaria and Isabelino "Cande" Candelaria, but she said more programs are needed to encourage greater minority participation in public service.

"When I started out in the Indiana General Assembly, we had no pages who were Hispanic," she said. "They didn't know about this program, so I took it as part of my responsibility expose Latino children to state government. Eight years ago we started a Latino Page Day, which is now the Latino Fellows Program. Thirty-nine counties are represented, 165 children.

"It's a great event to get students engaged, as they often don't have much exposure to politics. I'm influenced because of my parents, but these kids are first generation, so hopefully it encourages them to get involved."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

cnance@post-trib.com
Leon Lach, president of the Izaak Walton League Miller Chapter in Portage, said board members will meet Monday to discuss their next steps after a fire ravaged their club late Thursday. (Michael Gonzalez, Post-Tribune)

Marcie Kimzey could only stare at the shell of the Izaak Walton League Miller Chapter building in Portage and remember all of the things that happened there and the people she met over 15 years.

"I have no words, I'm so devastated," said Kimzey, of Portage, the club treasurer and four-day-a-week bartender who likes to host Taco Tuesdays and feed customers. "It's a way of life. You see the same customers day in and day out, and you know what's going on in their lives.

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"We'll rebuild, and we'll all be back in it again."

A steady stream of members and friends poured onto the property Thursday, surveying the damage, comforting each other and trying to figure out their next steps.

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A two-alarm fire destroyed the lodge at 1250 Crisman Road, designed to look like a large log cabin, Wednesday night. Portage Fire Department Assistant Chief Tim Sosby said his department received a call about 11:10 p.m., but, by the time crews arrived, the fire had enveloped the rear of the building and was quickly spreading.

"We didn't send anyone in to put the fire out, because it was already too involved to get real aggressive and enter the building," Sosby said. "What contributed most to the fire spread is it could've been burning for a while before anyone even noticed it."

Shortly after Portage firefighters arrived, they put out a second alarm, drawing help from fire departments in Ogden Dunes, South Haven and Burns Harbor. Portage also used its marine unit, a fire boat pulling thousands of gallons of water each minute from the east branch of the Little Calumet River, running along the club's south boundary.

The building's location and the proximity of fire hydrants posed challenges to fire crews, Sosby said. The property slopes steeply to the river and there is little room for fire vehicles to maneuver around the property.

The fire was struck within two hours, but crews remained to monitor possible hot spots, Sosby said.

Sosby said the cause of the fire remained undetermined Thursday afternoon, but Chapter President Leon Lach said he was told it may have started on a back deck designed to accommodate smokers.

The deck, installed after club members voted to prohibit smoking indoors, was one of many recent upgrades to the nearly 60-year-old structure, Lach said. The many improvements to the building included a remodeled kitchen and a new roof on the north side of the building.

Charred furniture and fixtures showed through broken windows, and blackened, soaked insulation was strewn around the building. The roof caved in, and members still were not allowed into the basement, site of a rifle range and more, Lach said.

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Insurance adjusters were on the scene Thursday.

The building was a second home to many of the club's 350 members, Lach said. He and firefighters retrieved documents and important papers, but what was lost  decades-old plaques and trophies, pictures and memories -- was invaluable, he said.

"The real tragedy is the memorabilia and stuff that's gone," Lack said. "Right now, I'm more or less in reaction mode. This fire, it showed no mercy."

The club's 15-member board will try to catch its collective breath and meet Monday, a regularly scheduled board meeting, to determine its next steps, but they've already received countless offers of help from Izaak Walton chapters across Northwest Indiana and the country, he said.

Jim Ryan, a life member of the club and a board member, said he raised his kids at the club, taking them to the rifle range in the basement and too many family activities to remember.

"I been here since I was a child, and my children grew up here," he said, watching a fire and water restoration crew board up windows. "It brings a tear to my eye. We try very hard to do well, here, and to do things for the community."

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Michael Gonzalez is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Pending approval from the Porter County Council, funds for the new animal shelter will come out of the proceeds from the sale of the county hospital.

The Board of Commissioners on Tuesday approved spending $2.25 million out of the funds for the shelter, which is being designed and built by Larson-Danielson Construction of LaPorte.

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When the council and commissioners created a foundation earlier this year to handle $147 million of the proceeds, $10 million was held back for capital projects. Any use of the proceeds requires a unanimous vote by both bodies; the council will take the matter up at its June 28 meeting.

Another $1 million for the project is coming from private donor Jacki Stutzman, aunt of Commissioner Laura Blaney, D-South.

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Commissioners and the council should recognize Stutzman for her contribution by possibly naming the new shelter for her, said Commissioners President John Evans, R-North.

"She has not asked for that but she would very much agree with that," Blaney said.

County officials have long said that the current shelter, at 2056 Heavilin Road off of Indiana 2, was outdated and too small to handle the number of animals that come through its doors.

Demolition is complete on the old house on the county-owned land for the new shelter, on a parcel between the sheriff's department and the Expo Center on Indiana 49.

The plans for the new shelter, which should be complete early next year, were finalized last week after review by an advisory committee, said county attorney Scott McClure.

Commissioners also approved awarding Larson-Danielson the contract for the new shelter, pending McClure's review of the contract and the approval of funding by the county council.

In other business related to the shelter, commissioners approved a contract with Olson Construction for $45,665 to extend an access road parallel to Ind. 49 to the new shelter.

Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Family Express wants to change out four of its signs across Porter County to new LED signs with changing messages, multiple colors and white backgrounds.

The change, attorney Todd Etzler told the Porter County Board of Zoning Appeals Wednesday, is part of a corporate-wide move to the new signs at all 65 of the convenience store chain's locations across northern Indiana.

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The board tabled the matter until next month to take a look at a sign already in place at a Family Express location in Crown Point. The board has typically denied similar requests for signs that aren't within county ordinances, board members said, adding those might have to change to accommodate the new type of signs, which Etzler said are the latest technology.

"If it is the industry standard, we need to look at the ordinance," said board member Mitch Peters.

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The LED signs, which Etzler said would be no larger than those in place and, in some instances, could reduce the number of signs at a location, would go at Family Express locations at County Road 250 and Indiana 130 in Center Township; on Indiana 2 by the entrance to Aberdeen in Center Township; at U.S. 6 and Juniper Road in Portage Township; and at U.S. 6 and Indiana 149 in Liberty Township.

Residents said they were concerned about how bright the signs would be at night, and that the changing messages would create an even bigger distraction for drivers in an area that already sees its share of traffic accidents.

Brian Mikulski lives by the Family Express on Ind. 130 and said ever since the store switched to being open 24 hours, he sees a "constant glow" from his home and wondered if that would be worse with a new sign, which he can see from his home's picture window.

"Will I have that constant glow, that constant change" when the sign's message changes, he wanted to know.

Kenneth Mineika lives across Ind. 2 from the Family Express store at Aberdeen and said he's witnessed many accidents and near-accidents there already.

"If somebody is driving by the sign looking for it to change, somebody is going to get T-boned," he said.

Etzler said the signs will automatically dim at night but because the technology behind them provides crisper images, they will still be legible. By Aberdeen, the sign will still be low, as is the one now, and the same size.

"Anybody driving by there will see the same amount of signage," he said.

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Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
The Valparaiso City Council conducted initial interviews last week with five candidates vying for a seat on the Valparaiso Community Schools board, including incumbent Paul Knauff, whose term ends in July.

Knauff stressed his 42 years as a teacher and a school administrator.

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"There's some value to having someone who has an education background (on the board)," he said.

During his four years on the board, communications have become better, he said.

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He favors open enrollment for the schools but doesn't like public school money going to charter schools and vouchers, although he thinks public schools need to become more competitive.

Candidate Greg Quartucci stressed his science background as an ecologist as well as his teaching career that includes classes such as remedial reading at Ivy Tech and science classes at Ivy Tech, Valparaiso University, Indiana University Northwest and Purdue University.

He said he wants the school system to retain its high quality as his children finish school and that he is comfortable talking with legislators about school concerns because he regularly works with them in his job, he said while encouraging board members to present a united front when dealing with the state.

Candidate Maria Luisa Garcis-Verdugo is applying for the position for a second time after an effort in 2014. She said she thinks her background in education, including being a language department head at Purdue commuter campuses for eight years, would help her as an administrator.

She said she watches what happens on the state and federal level because it affects her job and her department head position requires her to lead, work with others and allocate resources.

Candidate Ron Donahue spoke of his background educating with his job at Prompt Ambulance Service. He said his duties working with hospitals, nursing homes and others would help his work on the board. He said vouchers and charter schools make public schools more competitive, but funds need to stay in the public system.

Candidate John Novak said he has become more interested in public education now that his daughters are in school and that he thinks his career as a researcher in higher education would be an asset to the board. He said with 90 percent of students still in public schools in Indiana, a disproportionate amount of resources go to vouchers and charter schools. The charter program expanded too quickly and needs review, he said.

The second round of interviews, which will be based on residents' questions, is set to begin at 4 p.m. June 27. Council members plan to appoint someone to the board before their 7 p.m. meeting that evening.

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The City Council is asking residents to submit questions for the school board candidates at City Hall or to council members through their email addresses listed on the city website.

James D. Wolf Jr. is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Western Springs officials are moving toward a November referendum seeking up to $12 million in new taxes to fund road and infrastructure improvements over the next few years.

The Village Board is preparing to ask voters to approve a bond referendum on Nov. 8 to raise the village's portion of a property owners tax bill to pay for future road work, but no plans have been finalized as of yet.

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Trustee Sue Glowiak, who also serves as chairwoman of the village's General Government Committee, said the committee is discussing options of $10 million or $12 million, and whether such funds would go specifically for roads or include other infrastructure improvements such as water and sewer upgrades over a 10 year period.

Voters last approved a $6.5 million road improvement bond referendum in 2008. Those funds lasted six years, and were finally exhausted in 2014, officials said. While those funds have been spent, Glowiak said that residents are still paying for it on their tax bills, with the average homeowner still paying about $93 annually for bonds from the 2008 referendum. That portion of the tax will come off the bill once those bonds are paid off, finance director Grace Turi said.

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Glowiak said the new referendum, if approved by voters, could cost as much as an additional $160 on the tax bills of an average home in Western Springs.

"What concerns residents the most is what it would mean on a homeowner's tax bill," said Village President Bill Rodeghier. "The important thing is that we make full disclose of this to those who will be impacted."

But one trustee has concerns about where money from a referendum would go for improvements in the village, with some neighborhoods seeing a tax hike, but possibly not the benefits of new streets.

Trustee Berry Allen said streets in the Ridgewood Subdivision may not be part of this referendum, and residents may have to seek alternative funding, possible through a special assessment tax, to pay for road improvements in their neighborhood.

Allen also claims that no money generated from the 2008 referendum went to repair streets in the village's sixth precinct section, where Ridgewood is located.

"Why would anyone in precinct six want to support this if they are not going to get any benefit from it?" Allen asked. "That seems really unfair."

Glowiak said there has been no discussion at the committee level regarding separating Ridgewood and requiring them to pay for their own roads. She said each year, the village's Public Works Department reviews all the streets in the villages, then grades them on their condition, with the lowest graded streets getting the highest priority for improvements based on available funds. Those priority streets may change over time.

While the election is not until November, village attorney Michael Jurusik said the Village Board will need to make a final decision in July, as the deadline for getting a referendum on the election ballot is in August.

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Last April, the Village Board approved a contract with Brothers Asphalt of Addison, in the amount not to exceed $681,929, as part of the village's 2016 street resurfacing maintenance program. Work on those streets has begun, as is expected to be done by the end of summer, officials said.

David Heitz is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
China's biggest maker of home appliances Midea Group will likely announce on Thursday a full takeover bid for German industrial robot maker Kuka AG.

Midea will launch the takeover offer to all shareholders of the leading global supplier of intelligent automation solutions, according to a Reuters report, which cited sources in Kuka.

Spokesmen for the Chinese group would not comment on the report, saying a statement would be made after a takeover bid is formally announced.

"Up till now, preparations for the bid have been well conducted in accordance with relevant regulations and laws of China and Germany," said the a spokesman, who declined to be named.

Sources in Midea said earlier that the company, based in Foshan, Guangdong province, an industrial and economic powerhouse in South China, planned to expand its stake in Kuka to above 30 percent.

That would make it the biggest shareholder, ahead of Germany's Voith GmbH, a maker of industrial equipment.

Currently, Midea indirectly owns 13.5 percent of Kuka's shares. The voluntary takeover offer will reportedly be conducted by Midea's affiliate MECCA International Ltd, at 115 euros ($129) in cash per share.

However, according to German business newspaper Handelsblatt, Midea is only seeking a 49 percent stake in Kuka. That paper cited unnamed sources in the German government.

Midea sources reportedly said that the company decided mount the takeover bid for Kuka during a board general meeting on June 6.

The increased shareholding in Kuka was made in line with Midea's "smart" strategy. Launched in 2015, it aimed to upgrade the group's manufacturing competencies and develop more smart home devices, said Midea Chairman and CEO Paul Fang.

"We believe that a larger shareholding strikes the right balance between us and Kuka, while also putting both companies in a position to drive further growth through collaboration, especially in the Chinese market," said Fang.

Fang also said the takeover was in line with the company's expansion in the international investment market, after the company bought an 80.1 percent stake in Japanese home appliances maker Toshiba Corp's white goods business.

The German industrial robot maker will assess a possible takeover bid from a European company, but it would be wrong to assume such an offer would take priority over the bid from Midea, according to earlier Reuters reports, citing sources close to Kuka chief executive.

Industrial giant Siemens AG has no interest in becoming a white knight for Kuka, according to the Reuters report.
Twelve privately owned banks have entered the project demonstration stage before getting final approval to begin operations, said the China Banking Regulatory Commission on Wednesday.

The CBRC has written detailed rules specifying the principles, policies, standards and procedures for the approval of the establishment of private banks. The market niche for these private banks includes internet finance and supply chain finance, depending on the backgrounds of their major shareholders and local government support. They will mainly target micro and small companies.

So far the CBRC has approved five private banks to start operation. As of March 31, total assets of the five private banks reached 95.94 billion yuan ($15 billion), up 21 percent from the beginning of this year. Their balance of loans increased by 51 percent to 35.65 billion yuan and balance of deposits rose 11.6 percent to 22.25 billion yuan during the same period, according to the CBRC.

"These banks keep improving in terms of corporate governance, internal control and risk management," said Qiu Xiaoqiu, deputy director of the city commercial banks supervision department of the CBRC.

China has been steadily promoting the entry of private capital into the banking sector through multiple channels, such as initiating the establishment of small and medium-sized banking institutions.

Statistics from the CBRC show that at the end of March, private capital took a 46 percent stake in joint-equity commercial banks, increasing from 39 percent in 2011.

The share of private capital exceeded 50 percent in city commercial banks and reached nearly 90 percent in rural cooperative financial institutions. Some city commercial banks are wholly owned by private companies. The number of non-bank financial institutions, excluding trust companies, of which private capital took a controlling or participating share was 78, accounting for 25 percent of the total.
Tencent Holdings Ltd is reportedly nearing a multi-billion deal to acquire Supercell Oy. [Photo/Xinhua]

Tencent Holdings Ltd is reportedly nearing a multi-billion deal to acquire Supercell Oy, the Finnish maker of the popular Clash of Clans mobile game, and an industry observer said the deal would make the Chinese internet giant a powerhouse in the mobile game industry.

Citing people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Tencent is in talks with SoftBank Group Corp to buy the Japanese company's majority stake in Supercell and is in discussions with several financial investors, including Hillhouse Capital Group, to join in the purchase as co-investors. The Journal said the deal could value Supercell at more than $9 billion. The Journal also reported in May that Tencent was looking at Supercell.

Tony Lam, a partner at mobile game design consultant Adrian Crook & Associates in Vancouver, British Columbia, said a Supercell acquisition by Tencent would place the Chinese firm in the top tier of mobile game providers.

"This is in line with their gaming strategy of acquiring the top players in large genres...like their acquisition of majority shares of Riot Games and League of Legends in 2011 which solidified them as a top tier player in the MOBA and eSports genre," Lam said.

Games are one of Tencent's biggest business areas. About half of the 32 billion yuan ($4.88 billion) revenue Tencent generated in the first quarter came from online games.

Six members of the Finnish games industry founded Helsinki-based Supercell in 2010 and it has launched only four titles -- Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beachand Clash Royale -- in the US and Europe, according to the Journal. All the titles were among the top 20 mobile games by revenue on Apple Inc.'s iOS system as of May, according to videogame research firm Newzoo, the newspaper said. Supercell's games are free to download. It earns money by selling virtual goods that help players advance.

Lam doesn't think Tencent would be overpaying for Supercell if the purchase price is around $9 billion. "At less than 10x (times) income and less than 4x 2015 revenues, it certainly doesn't seem to be overpaying. In May of 2015, when Softbank increased their ownership in Supercell to 73 percent, that deal was valued at around $5.5 billion so while there definitely a premium being paid, it doesn't seem out of line with a fair valuation," he said.

Lam said he doubted that acquiring Supercell would raise concerns by regulatory officials because the global mobile games market is about $37 billion in size and Supercell's revenue is less than 10 percent of that. "This acquisition certainly doesn't give Tencent a dominant position in the still-fractured market," he added.

Supercell has topped the list of App Annie's Top 52 publishers for 2014 and 2015. The Helsinki-based game developer said in March that posted a profit of $930 million on revenue of $2.3 billion in 2015. It also claimed active daily users totaling 100 million around the world.

Lam said this is more evidence that the mobile game market is a big business with global appeal and has room to grow. "Despite some grumblings about the Free-2-Play model, the business of mobile games has never looked brighter," he said.
The look of the Baili 100C cellphone (L) and the look of the iPhone 6 (R). [File photo]

Apple Inc. is fighting back against a ruling handed down by the Beijing Intellectual Property Office which says the iPhone 6 replicates the exterior design of a lesser known Chinese cellphone, the Beijing Morning Post reported on Thursday.

The Shenzhen-based Baili Marketing Service Inc. filed a complaint to the Beijing Intellectual Property Office against Apple Inc. and Zhongfu Telecom, a Beijing cellphone store chain, saying the exterior designs of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus infringe the patents right of the company's Cellphone 100C.

The intellectual property office ruled on May 10 that Apple Inc. indeed replicates the design and demanded that Apple Inc. and Zhongfu Telecom stop selling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

"The Apple's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have minor differences from Baili's 100C. The differences are so tiny that the average customer could not notice. So, this case falls into the patent rights protection category," the ruling said.

Apple and Zhongfu have filed administrative litigation against the Beijing Intellectual Property Office at the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, asking the court to revoke the office's ruling and announce that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus do not fall into the patent protection range. Both companies say the two iPhones have many notable differences from Baili's phone.

The court has accepeted the case and sent a subpoena to the Beijing Intellectual Property Office for the lawsuit. The proceeding is underway.

If the court sustains the ruling of the Beijing Intellectual Property Office, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will be banned from sale for the first time, in the Beijing area at least. The ruling in effect will also be the reference for other cities. However, Apple Inc. and Zhongfu Telecom can still appeal even if they lose the case, a patent lawyer said.
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A corrupt Chinese former official who had been on the run abroad since 2013 has been brought back to south China's Guangdong Province, local authorities said Wednesday.

Wang Yanwei, who was chairman of people's political consultative conference of Huadu District of Guangzhou, the provincial capital, is suspected of taking bribes. He went missing in June, 2013.

China launched its "Sky Net" campaign in April, 2015, aiming to bring back 100 suspects accused of economic crimes who have fled overseas.

With the space for graft and power abuse considerably narrowed at home after years of anti-corruption efforts, China is increasingly looking to for international cooperation in apprehending suspects overseas.

A total of 29 suspects on the list have been brought back so far.
A Chinese mainland spokesman on Wednesday said that what some have taken to be an "anti-Taiwan sentiment" among people on the mainland, was actually about rejecting "Taiwan independence."

An Fengshan, spokesman for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office who was speaking at a press conference, warned that "Taiwan independence" in any form was a flagrant provocation and would sabotage cross-Strait peace and stability.

Responding to a question about a recent proposal by some Taiwanese political parties to challenge the one-China provisions with "constitutional amendments," An said, "Any attempt to seek secession will be unsuccessful."

He also rejected a statement by Taiwan's cross-Strait affairs authority to term the cross-Strait relationship as one among "neighbors."

"The mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, and compatriots on both sides are a family, not 'neighbors.'"

Moreover, in response to a question about a plunge in the number of mainland tourists to Taiwan, An said the mainland authority had never set a quota on the number of tourists to Taiwan.

"Changes in the island's tourism are mainly due to changes on the island this year. The impact certain events have had on cross-Strait ties has been felt by the market," he said.

He said the mainland will continue to enhance cross-Strait exchanges and cooperation for the interests and welfare of the compatriots on both sides.

According to An, a Kuomintang Party youth-wing delegation will visit the mainland next week to discuss cross-Strait exchanges.

During the tour, the delegation is expected to meet with Zhang Zhijun, head of the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

Mainland authorities have also decided to add six mainland bases for cultural exchanges with visitors from Taiwan, bringing the total bases on the mainland to 49.

However, the spokesman stressed, cross-Strait communication, dialogue, and exchanges must be based on the recognition of the 1992 Consensus and the one-China principle.

"So far, the island's new leader has adopted an ambiguous attitude toward the nature of relations between the mainland and Taiwan. To ensure the peaceful development of cross-Strait ties, the confirmation of the one-China principle is a must," he said.

He reiterated this principle when answering questions about an upcoming visit by Taiwan's new leader Tsai Ing-wen to Panama and about a recent report that Chen Chu, mayor of Taiwan's city of Kaohsiung, has expressed willingness to visit the mainland.
Women are more keen to visit theme parks than men while over 14 percent of tourists surveyed plan to visit Shanghai Disney Resort in one year, according to data from the Chinese tourism website LY.com.

Night view of the castle at the Shanghai Disney Resort in Pudong, Shanghai, China, May 15, 2016.A series of photos reveal intriguing night views of the Shanghai Disney Resort, which is scheduled to open on June 16. (Photo/Xinhuanet.com)

The survey found 46.4 percent of respondents had visited theme parks in the past year. It also found that theme parks are among the top choices for three-day holiday makers and account for over 20 percent of travel routes.

The percentage of female tourists who visit theme parks was 8 points higher than males.

Tourists aged from 47 to 56 were more interested in visiting theme parks than any other age group. Over 34 percent of tourists born in the 1970s have visited the parks with their children. For those born in the 1980s, the rate was 18.7 percent.

Over 32 percent spent 300 yuan ($46) during their visits while 36 percent spent 200 yuan. And more than 80 percent of respondents wish the ticket price to be below 300 yuan.

In the next year, over 14 percent of tourists plan to visit Shanghai Disney Resort, which will open on June 16. The key reason for 52 percent is its "well-known reputation."

Among those who will avoid the park, Disney's first on the Chinese mainland, the main barrier for 43 percent was identified as "expensive tickets," matched by "too crowded" for nearly 43 percent.

The website LY.com said the report was based on 1,867 questionnaires from tourists who travelled through the help of online services in one year.
China's homegrown navigation system, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), will cover the whole globe with a constellation of 35 satellites by 2020, according to a white paper released by the State Council Information Office (SCIO) on Thursday elaborating on the action plan for the BeiDou, which has been independently developed and operated by China.

China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, said the government report.

This is the first white paper on the navigation satellite system. It is also the 100th white paper released by the SCIO.

Initially, China aimed to provide services to domestic users. The following stage featured the expansion of the network to cover the Asia-Pacific region, which was achieved by the end of 2012.

Currently, B1I and B2I open service signals are being broadcast by the operating BDS-2, providing open services to the Asia-Pacific region free of charge, according to the white paper.

The services cover an area between 55 degrees north latitude and 55 degrees south latitude, and between 55 and 180 degrees east longitude, with positioning accuracy less than 10 meters, velocity measurement accuracy less than 0.2 meters per second, and timing accuracy less than 50 nanoseconds.

BDS spokesperson Ran Chengqi told a press conference Thursday that tests in the Asia-Pacific region showed the system to be performing well.

Ran, who is also director of China's Satellite Navigation System management office, said in priority cities including Beijing and Urumqi, the capital city of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, positioning accuracy was less than 5 meters.

The same result can be duplicated in low latitude countries, such as Thailand, according to Ran.

The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.

The BeiDou project was formally launched in 1994, however, the first BeiDou satellite was not launched until 2000. The 23rd satellite was launched Sunday.

In addition to providing continuous, stable and reliable services for global users, the BDS will support national security, economic and social development, and improve people's living standards.

According to the document, the BDS is designed to provide open satellite navigation services free of charge.

International cooperation and exchanges on navigation satellite systems will be encouraged and the BDS compatibility with other systems will be enhanced to provide better services to end users.

"As the BDS is used with other navigation satellite systems, China will work with all other countries, regions and international organizations to promote global satellite navigation development and make the system better serve the world and benefit mankind," according to the document.

Products related to the BDS have been used in areas including communication and transportation, marine fisheries, weather forecasting, mapping and geographic information, forest fire prevention.
A man from the Chinese mainland has been jailed for 12 years by the High Court of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for conspiring to kidnap the heiress of a Hong Kong clothing empire last year in order to procure a ransom, local media reported on Thursday.

Zheng Xingwang, 30, pleaded guilty to the charge on Tuesday, with Justice Kevin Zervos describing the crime as "shocking" and "deserving of a severe punishment," according to the RTHK.

The court heard that six men, wearing masks and gloves, broke into Queenie Law's family home in Sai Kung in the early hours of April 25 last year and tied her and her boyfriend up. They then forced Law to give them the combination numbers of the safes, from which they took jewellery.

She was then blindfolded and taken away, and her boyfriend was told to relay what had happened to her parents.

Law was taken to an isolated cave, where she was asked about her father's background and told to jot down his phone number. They then called him, demanding 58 million HK dollars as ransom and warned that Law would be killed if they were not paid.

The ransom was later lowered to 28 million HK dollars and was delivered in brown envelopes to a public toilet in Fei Ngo Shan on April 28. Law was then released.
An aerial photo taken on Sept 25, 2015 from a seaplane of Hainan Maritime Safety Administration shows cruise vessel Haixun 1103 heading to the Yacheng 13-1 drilling rig during a patrol in South China Sea. [Photo/Xinhua]

As is now well known, the Philippines has brought arbitration proceedings against China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea relating to the South China Sea, and the Tribunal has recently given its decision on whether it has jurisdiction over the claims made by the Philippines. It found that it had jurisdiction, although unconditionally only over three of the 15 submissions made by the Philippines. The Tribunal has since heard argument on the merits of the various claims, and is likely to give its ruling on them later this year. But looked at critically the decision of the Tribunal that it has jurisdiction has a number of weaknesses.

As background, UNCLOS emphasizes that the States bordering a semi-enclosed sea, like the South China Sea, should cooperate together in dealing with common issues, even when there is no agreement about the maritime boundaries between them.

In addition, UNCLOS sets out what maritime zones it is permissible for a coastal State to claim: a territorial sea of twelve nautical miles, an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles, and a continental shelf stretching at least to 200 nautical miles, but potentially extending beyond that if the geological conditions are right. These maritime zones cannot be claimed from "low-tide elevations", that is features which are underwater at high tide. All of these maritime zones can be claimed from islands, except that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own" can only generate a territorial sea. This definition of "rocks" is not easy to interpret and so far there has been little international case-law on what it might mean. However, it is critical to many of the arguments of the Philippines that they allege that a large number of the features in the South China Sea are either low-tide elevations or "rocks".

Under UNCLOS there are certain circumstances in which a State is obliged to accept that a dispute with another State can be put to arbitration, but there are a significant number of exceptions and limitations to this obligation, some of which are exercisable at the option of the State concerned. In other words, when it is said that under UNCLOS the States party have consented to arbitration, this is true only in a very qualified way: they have only consented to arbitration subject to the exceptions and limitations set out in UNCLOS. This is important because the provisions in UNCLOS on the settlement of disputes were accepted as part of a package deal at the UN Conference which adopted UNCLOS; it is obviously important to all parties to UNCLOS that the package deal is not disturbed.

When the Philippines commenced arbitration proceedings under UNCLOS, China declined to appear, arguing that the proceedings were covered by one of the exceptions in UNCLOS. Non-appearance by a State in international proceedings is actually not so unusual. Most famously, the United States declined to participate in the proceedings brought by Nicaragua in the International Court of Justice in the 1980s after the Court had held that it had jurisdiction.

So, on what basis did the Tribunal find that it had jurisdiction? The first point to note is that the Tribunal does not have jurisdiction to adjudicate upon the territorial sovereignty over the various land features in the South China Seaeven though it is common knowledge that this issue is hotly disputed, not only by China and the Philippines, but also by Viet Nam, Malaysia and Brunei. In other words, the Tribunal cannot say that a particular feature belongs to China or the Philippines. This is because the Tribunal only has jurisdiction to decide on disputes over the "interpretation or application" of UNCLOS, and UNCLOS of course is not concerned with resolving disputes over land territory. The Philippines recognized the difficulty here and expressly denied that it was seeking a decision on sovereignty over land territory.

Despite this, the Tribunal took the view that it can decide upon the status of features in the South China Sea (ie whether they are "rocks" or low-tide elevations), even though it cannot rule on which State the feature belongs to. I have described this elsewhere as putting the status cart before the sovereignty horse, and there appears to be no precedent for an international tribunal proceeding in such circumstances.

In reaching this conclusion, the Tribunal asked itself what was the "real issue" in the case brought by the Philippines, and decided that it was not about the sovereignty over the features, but about their status; thus, it said that it could rule on the latter question without touching on the former. This is despite the recent precedent of the case brought by Mauritius against the United Kingdom, in which by bringing proceedings under UNCLOS questioning the validity of the marine protected area declared around the Chagos Archipelago, Mauritius sought to dispute the sovereignty over the islands. The Tribunal in that case rightly saw through that device and declined to accept Mauritius's argument on this point. It is perhaps surprising that the Tribunal in the Philippines case did not follow this precedent.

It is also important to note that one of the exceptions in UNCLOS which China has made use of relates to maritime delimitation. Thus, there can be no compulsory recourse to arbitration in a case about maritime delimitation involving China. But actually one of the key questions in any maritime delimitation is: what is the status of the various features in the maritime area being delimited. This is because, as we have seen, low-tide elevations do not generate maritime zones at all and "rocks" only generate a territorial sea. So, deciding upon the status of maritime features is an indispensable component in effecting a maritime delimitation. In other words, delimiting a maritime boundary necessarily involves also considering the status of maritime features. There is a strong argument therefore that the Chinese exception for maritime delimitation should also have been held to cover the question of the status of the maritime features which are an indispensable part of effecting a maritime delimitation.

Furthermore, there is a well-known legal dictum that "the land dominates the sea". In other words, a State's entitlements to maritime zones depends upon the territory owned by that State. Thus, the International Court of Justice in its case-law has always decided upon disputes over land territory before proceeding to prescribe a maritime boundary. So, there are three interdependent elements: the status of features, maritime delimitation and sovereignty over land territory. But even though the Tribunal accepted that it has no jurisdiction over the latter two elements, it has decided to proceed with the case on the basis that it has jurisdiction over the first element.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan, will significantly boost China's relationship with Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia, diplomats and scholar said Wednesday.

The Belt and Road Initiative will be a focus of the meetings between Xi and leaders of the three countries that have traditional friendly ties with China. All three were among the first to respond to the China-proposed initiative.

President Xi will have an in-depth exchange of views with leaders in the three countries on cooperation in the initiative, officials with the Foreign Ministry said at a press briefing about Xi's visits, from June 17 to 24.

China and Serbia will sign agreements on trade, industry and finance while China and Poland will ink deals on finance, aviation, science and education, Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Haixing said.

Within the framework of China-CEE cooperation, or the "16+1" mechanism, major projects have been given the go ahead or are underway, including a China-Europe land-sea express passage, freight train services to strengthen connectivity between China and Europe, and the construction and revamping of a rail link between the Serbian and Hungarian capitals.

In April, China's HeSteel Group signed a 46-million-euro deal to buy Serbia's century-old steel plant Smederevo, with an aim to transform the plant into one of the most competitive firms in Europe.

Xi's upcoming visit to the CEE comes on the heels of his state visit to the Czech Republic in April, signalling growing importance of the region, said Liu Zuokui, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"Given the influence of Serbia and Poland in CEE countries, their bilateral relations with China will become a model and accelerator to China-Europe relations," Liu said.

President Xi will attend ceremonies marking the completion of major cooperation projects in Uzbekistan and discuss on new projects with his Uzbekistan counterpart during his visit to the central Asian country on June 21-24, Assistant Foreign Minister Li Huilai said.

Xi will also attend a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, where member state leaders will discuss anti-terrorism, drug smuggling and trans-national crimes to deepen security cooperation in the region, according to Li.

Founded in 2001, the SCO now has China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as its full members, with Afghanistan, Belarus, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as observers.
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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif here on Wednesday morning to discuss the nuclear deal, dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as well as the Syria issue.

Their meeting came just one day after Zarif urged the United States to remove the "psychological remnants" of sanctions on his country and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to retaliate if Washington sought to break the nuclear deal.

Kerry and Zarif "discussed progress on the continuing implementation of the JCPOA, including issues related to banking and relief of nuclear-related sanctions," U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Mark Toner said in a statement.

"The two also addressed the situation in Syria, where the secretary stressed the need for full access for humanitarian aid and a nationwide cessation of hostilities," he said.

Zarif said Tuesday in Oslo the United States had removed all the sanctions "on paper," but "the psychological remnants of many years of sanctions are still there." He urged Washington to "take a much more proactive role" in removing these psychological remnants.

In a meeting with senior Iranian administrative, legislative and judiciary officials in Tehran on Tuesday, Khamenei emphasized "we won't break the JCPOA. But if the other side seeks to break it, as some candidates in the U.S. presidential elections threaten to tear it to pieces, we will set it ablaze."

In response to the remarks of the Iranian officials, Kerry defended Washington's efforts to implement the nuclear deal, saying the United States had kept faith with the agreement.

"With respect to the JCPOA, the United States of America has done absolutely everything that we were and are required to do according to the letter of the agreement," Kerry told a joint press conference with Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg later on Wednesday.

"We have completely kept faith with both the black-and-white print as well as the spirit of this effort," he added.

The U.S. secretary of state noted he had done more than what the agreement requires in encouraging U.S. companies to do business with Iran.

Some banks, businesses, and others "have natural reluctance after several years of sanctions to move without fully understanding what they are allowed to do and what they are not," Kerry said. "So a lot of clarifications are necessary."
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President Francois Hollande on Wednesday ratified the Paris climate agreement to curb green gas emissions, making France the first industrialized nation to ratify the accord.

"Signing (Paris climate accord) is good, but ratifying is better. The challenge now is that 55 states representing 55 percent greenhouse gas emissions in turn ratify the treaty," Hollande said.

Hollande also called on European partners to ratify the agreement by the end of the year.

Last week, French parliament gave the green light to government to ratify the accord.

During a summit in May, the heads of state and government of the G7 (the United States, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy and Canada) pledged to energize efforts enough so that the agreement enters into force before the end of 2016.

On Dec.12, 2015 climate negotiators of 196 parties adopted the accord at climate change talks which aimed at limiting global warming by 2 degrees Celsius.
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Moscow has been forced into a confrontation with the West in the latter's anti-Russian campaign based on the Cold War mentality.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov addresses the State Duma in Moscow, Russia, on June 15, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

"Russia does not intend to get involved in the confrontation imposed on it, neither with the United States, nor NATO nor the European Union," Lavrov said when addressing the State Duma, or the lower house of parliament.

He blasted "Western countries led by the United States" for attempting to gain global domination by making use of the current terrorism threat, thus deepening regional conflicts and instability of the world economy.

Noting that international relations are experiencing a watershed moment, the top Russian diplomat called for the formation of a new polycentric architecture.

"No single state or a group of states, however potent they may be, are able to solve the multiple problems of the modern era on their own," he said. "The current situation demands collective diplomatic work ... to find the optimal responses to common challenges and threats."

Lavrov also highlighted the significance of providing a balance of world politics within such frameworks as the United Nations, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Group of 20.
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Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said Wednesday that Chinese frontier guards carried out routine patrols on the China-controlled side of border with India.

Indian media quoted Indian defense and intelligence officials as saying that about 250 Chinese soldiers made "incursion" in the so-called "Arunachal Pradesh" region.

In response to a question in this regard at a regular press briefing, Lu also noted that the boundary between China and India has not been demarcated.
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The search vessel hired by the Egyptian government provided several locations of the wreckage of the EgyptAir flight MS804 recently crashed in the Mediterranean, official MENA news agency reported Wednesday.

"The search team and the investigators onboard the vessel will draw a map for the wreckage distribution after it was located in the search area," MENA quoted the Egyptian investigation committee as saying, noting the committee has been provided by the first images of the wreckage from one of the spotted sites.

EgyptAir Flight MS804, an Airbus A320, went missing from radar screens earlier in May en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French.

Later on, the Egyptian military announced the finding of some personal belongings of the victims and small pieces of the plane wreckage in the Mediterranean Sea 290 km north of the coastal city of Alexandria.
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Turkey has begun to fly observation flights over Russia territory with Finland in accordance with the Open Skies Agreement, Turkey's General Staff said on Wednesday.

According to a statement issued by the Turkish military, these flights are part of the Open Skies Agreement under the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).

A Turkish surveillance plane carrying Turkish and Finnish experts conducted flights over Russia on Monday and will continue till June 17, local media reported.

The Russian Defense ministry official said in a statement that Russian officers will accompany the flights, Daily News reported.

The Open Skies Agreement, which was signed on March 1992 in Helsinki, Finland, between 27 countries of the OSCE, facilitates flights by unarmed surveillance craft over foreign states.Turkey signed the agreement in 1994.

Relations between the two countries have been deeply strained since a Russian Su-24 bomber jet was downed on November 25, 2015. Then Russia imposed a range of economic sanctions against Turkey.

Turkey refused Moscow's similar demand in February citing a disagreement on the route in Turkish skies.

According to local Daily Sabah, a request to fly over the border with Syria by Russia based on the treaty was rejected by Ankara.

Turkish Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Tanju Bilgic said at the time that an agreement could not be reached on the mission plan between the two countries.

He also noted that Russia also imposes restrictions on observations flights to be conducted over its soil, which is known by all members of the Open Skies Agreement.

On early February, Turkish General Staff said in a statement that Turkey performs on average four surveillance flights over Russian territory every year, while Russian inspectors conduct two flights in Turkey.
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Iraqi security forces on Wednesday made a significant progress in the battles against the Islamic State (IS) militants in the besieged city of Fallujah, while the security forces continued their clashes with IS militants in Iraq's western province of Anbar, provincial security sources said.

The troops took control of Shuhada district in southern Fallujah, some 50 km west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and the troops are fighting near Sixteen Street, which separates Shuhada from the adjacent district of Nazal toward the central part of the city, a security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

"The battles are underway and will continue until defeating the militants of Daesh (IS group) from Nazal district which is close to the government compound in central the city," the source said.

Wednesday's battles resulted in the killing of dozens of IS militants, along with destroying five car bombs, the source added.

The troops also fought heavy clashes with IS militants on the edge of Khadra district and managed to defeat the front defensive lines of the district which is adjacent to Shuhada district in southern Fallujah, the source said.

The latest advance in Fallujah came as the security forces have been battling IS militants after they made their first advance last week in Shuhada and raised the Iraqi flag over some of its buildings.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi army and allied Shiite paramilitary units, known as Hashd Shaabi, liberated three villages in southeast of Fallujah after driving out the extremist militants, according to a statement from the Hashd Shaabi media office.

The battles in southern Fallujah were slowed by IS militants resistance inside the city, with hundreds of hidden bombs believed to be planted by them.

The security forces are also avoiding heavy casualties among tens of thousands of civilians who are reportedly trapped inside Fallujah.

Abdul Wahab al-Saadi, Commander of the Operations Command of Fallujah Liberation, told reporters that a total of 1086 suspected IS members or supporters have been captured after being separated from dozens of thousands of displaced people who were forced to leave their homes in Fallujah.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced on May 23 the launch of a major offensive to claim Fallujah and surrounding towns and areas.

Also in the province, the security forces and allied Hashd Shaabi units, backed by international and Iraqi aircraft, freed the area of Znakoura in northwest of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, some 110 km west of Baghdad, after fierce clashes with IS militants, General Ismail al-Mahalawi, Commander of Anbar Operations Command said in a press release.

The battles in Zankoura came as the security forces carried out an operation to retake control of military positions in the area which were captured the day before by dozens of IS militants who also attacked the nearby areas of Albu Risha, Tway and Jeraishi in north of the provincial capital city of Ramadi, but the IS attacks on the other three areas were foiled late on Tuesday after hours of clashes with the security forces that resulted in the killing of some 25 militants, the source said.

Government troops and allied militias have currently been fighting for months to reclaim key cities and towns in Anbar from IS militants, who attempted to advance toward Baghdad after seizing most of Anbar province.

Iraq has been witnessing a wave of violence since the IS controlled parts of its northern and western regions in June 2014.
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The Ambassador of Pakistan to China Masood Khalid presents a cheque of RMB 100,000 to Ms. Zhang Yu, Chief Executive of Longzhen Elderly Care Centre in Beijing on 16th June 2016. [Photo / China.org.cn]

The Ambassador of Pakistan to China Masood Khalid presented a cheque of RMB 100,000 along with goods in kind to Ms. Zhang Yu, Chief Executive of Longzhen Elderly Care Centre here today.

The Pakistan Embassy had raised funds for the charitable cause earlier at a Charity Bazar it had organized on its premises on 28 May 2016, where Madam Qian Wei, the spouse of Chinese Foreign Minister was the Chief Guest.

The Ambassador was received by Ms. Zhang Yu at the Centre compound where a ceremony was held. A representative of the Chinese Foreign Office, officer and ladies from the Pakistan Embassy, as well as the working staff and elderly people from the Centre joined.

Ambassador Masood Khalid in his remarks reiterated Pakistan's long-standing friendship with China, and described the donation as "a modest contribution towards enhancing the welfare of the senior citizens and elderly people."

While speaking on the occasion, Ms. Zhang highly appreciated the kind gesture of Pakistan Embassy in contributing towards the welfare of the elderly people of Beijing.

The elderly people at the Centre also interacted with the Ambassador and his team, and expressed their appreciation. They displayed their art work and pastime activities; one of them, an 87-year-old, demonstrated traditional Chinese tai chi for the guests.

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November 20, 2009

TEXASAfter more than two years of political advocacy and months seeking political refuge outside of China, the wife and two children of imprisoned Chinese legal advocate Guo Feixiong were officially granted political asylum by the U.S. government on November 10, 2009. The law firm handling the case received notification on November 19, and shared the news with the family. Guos wife, Zhang Qing, expressed joy and gratitude for the official decision, after escaping from China with teenage daughter, Yang Tianjiao, and 8-year-old son, Yang Tiance, in February of this year.

Guo Feixiong is considered by many to be Chinas Number Two legal advocate, second only to human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng. Guo (birth name Yang Maodong) has suffered intense persecution for his long history of legal defense work, including legally advising Taishi villagers in a political corruption scandal in 2005, publishing the Shenyang Political Earthquake, a journal which exposed government corruption in Shenyang city, Liaoning, and leading a hunger strike protesting the abuse of human rights activists in 2006.

Guo was formally arrested again September 30th for illegal business activity and held without trial until his indictment on May 15, 2007. During his illegal detention in Guangzhou and Shenyang Detention Centers, Guo was forced under extreme torture by electric shock to confess his illegal business, which the Tianhe District Court of Guangzhou City used to convict him on November 14, 2007. He was sentenced to 5-years imprisonment and a 40,000 yuan fine. Weak from hunger strikes and beatings, Guo continues to serve out his 5-year sentence in Meizhou Prison, Guangdong. For more information on Guos history of advocacy and persecution, view the archived reports at ChinaView.com.

Guos wife, Zhang Qing, became a political target herself beginning in 2007, when she issued ten open letters appealing for Guo Feixiongs release to American and Chinese leadersincluding President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiaobo, U.S. President Bush, and the U.S. Congress. (Read Zhang Qings Open Letter to President Bush, care of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, Epoch Times. and ChinaView) By the winter of 2008, the Guo family had come under close surveillance and harassment by Chinese police, forcing them to seek asylum outside the country.

In February, 2009, Zhang Qing fled with her children to Bangkok, Thailand, sending an appeal for political refugee status to the UN High Commission on Refugees. The UNHCR denied her request on March 19, because her case was not considered under the UNHCRs mandate.

Aware of the Guo familys dangerous situation, ChinaAid President Bob Fu flew to Thailand to mediate their case and speak to the UNHCR office in person. He addressed the Guo familys request to the Obama Administration prior to leaving the US, and continued discussions with them while in Bangkok. When the Obama Administration decided not to activate the special procedure allowing the Guo family to be extradited without UN approval, Bob Fu made the conscience decision to help the Guo family flee to the United States. Zhang Qing and her two children arrived safely on American soil on April 7, 2009.

With the support of many NGOs, churches, individuals, and a strong legal team, the Guo familys asylum case processed smoothly in a little over 7 months. Barred from attending public school in China, the two children now enjoys classes at a private school in Midland, Texas. Zhang Qing, who was a medical assistant in China, will now be permitted to work under asylum status in the United States. She prays that one day, husband and father Guo will be united safely with their family in the United States.

ChinaAid thanks the many prayer warriors and supporters who have invested in procuring the safety of the Guo family. We are encouraged by the U.S. governments decision to protect familes of persecuted prisoners, and will continue to press the issue of human rights until freedom of belief and thought is available to all in China.

EDITORS NOTE: The original press release stated that the Guo family was granted political asylum on November 19. The Guo family was officially granted political asylum on November 10. The law firm handling the case received the notice and shared the news with the family on November 19. ChinaAid humbly apologizes for the mis-report and has duly edited this release.
China Aid

Reported in Chinese by Qiao Nong. Translated by Carolyn Song. Edited in English by Ava Collins.

(Wenzhou, ZhejiangJune 13, 2016) In the midst of negotiations to relocate a government-sanctioned church in Chinas coastal Zhejiang, a team of officials destroyed the structure without warning on the evening of May 20 under the excuse of improving that area of the city.

Zhuyang Church, an official Three-Self church in Wenzhou, was in talks with local authorities about a relocation when nearly 100 officers razed the building, leaving the church in ruins. Church members reported that the head of the church had been negotiating with officials from a sub-district government office regarding a new location and the fee needed for the move in the days before the surprise attack. No consensus regarding the relocation had been made at the time of the demolition.

Members of Zhuyang Church hold service in the rubble of their

church building on May 22. (Photo: China Aid)

Unlike previous church demolitions, authorities did not claim that there was anything illegal regarding the churchs documents or construction. Rather, the reasoning given was that of transforming the villages in the city, including the village in which Zhuyang Church is located. This kind of building destruction is in line with the Three Rectifications and One Demolition initiative, a beautification campaign ongoing in Zhejiang since April 2014.

On the Sunday morning following the demolition, May 22, church members held a worship service within the ruins, holding protest banners which read We are strongly opposed to this brutal, violent forced demolition, The illegal principles of law enforcement are intolerable and The powerful are headstrong. Though church members uploaded pictures and texts about the demolition to the social media site Sina Weibo, all the posts were soon blocked by the website.

Before, the government said that religious matters would be handled with care, but now it doesnt care about religions at all, a church member said after the event. Even churches with full legal documentation, if they fail to reach an agreement, will be brutally torn down by the government. The brothers and sisters of this church wonder if justice still exists.

China Aid reports on instances of persecution, such as the demolition of Zhuyang Church, in order to expose abuses of human rights and religious freedom by the Chinese government.

China Aid Media Team

Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985

Email: [email protected]

For more information, click here
A local tourist poses for a photo with figures from animation movie Toy Story at Shanghai Disneyland. [Photo by Gao Erqiang/China Daily]

As the $5.5-billion Shanghai Disneyland opens on Thursday, The Walt Disney Co has a challenge. The hold of rival Asian characters such as China's homegrown Boonie Bears or Big Big Wolf means seven-year-olds like Li Yixuan have less time for Mickey Mouse and Friends.

As Li settles on the living room floor for 15 minutes of cartoons before homework and bed, Disney doesn't get a look-in this time, as his favorite animated hero, Ultraman Ace from the hit Japanese series, does battle with space dinosaurs.

And as the number of competing theme parks in China soars, it will become even harder to win the hearts of Chinese childrenand open the wallets of their parentsto fuel long-term traffic after the turnstiles start clicking from Thursday.

"When we get kids now to write down their favorite cartoon character, very few put down Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck," said Song Lei, Hong Kong-based director at Animation-Comic-Game Group, the organizer of Asia's biggest annual fair for comics, anime and games.




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Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, speaks at the e-commerce conglomerate's Singles Day promotion party in Beijing. [Photo/VCG] First financial forecast since group went public, in wake of SEC probe in the United States

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said that its revenue growth will accelerate this fiscal year as China's largest e-commerce company provided its first financial forecast since going public in 2014.

The company predicted sales will rise at least 48 percent in the year ending March 2017 as it pushes into new markets and businesses beyond e-commerce.

Part of that growth comes from Alibaba's rapid deal-making: it spent about $18.7 billion on acquisitions and stock buybacks over the past year, including on e-commerce site Lazada Group SA.

Sales should rise more than 36 percent this year if revenue from Lazada and streaming video service Youku Tudou Inc are excluded, Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu said at an investor conference on Tuesday. That compares with a 33-percent growth the previous year.

Analysts were expecting 40 percent revenue growth on average for fiscal 2017.

The guidance reflects how Alibaba is moving into untapped rural markets, exploring business abroad and investing in new sources of income from online media to cloud computing.

The company, which is trying to counter the impact of a slowing economy, bought Youku Tudou to expand into online video and Lazada to gain a foothold in Southeast Asia.

"A growth rate like this would be pretty fast given the base of their business," said Li Yujie, an analyst at RHB Research Institute Sdn in Hong Kong.

Alibaba's shares rose 3.1 percent to $77.77 at the close in New York on Tuesday.

Alibaba's decision to release financial guidance comes after the US Securities Exchange Commission began looking into its accounting practices.

The company is cooperating with the probe, which encompasses data reported from the company's Singles Day promotion on Nov 11, Alibaba's biggest shopping day, as well as how it consolidates results from affiliates such as logistics partner Zhejiang Cainiao Supply Chain Management Co. Alibaba had excluded Cainiao from its results to comply with GAAP accounting rules, Wu said.

Chairman Jack Ma said in November that times would be tough in the following 15 months and that many companies would fail as China tried to rebalance its economy.
Visitors try Kuka's Robocoaster at an expo in Shanghai. [Photo provided to China Daily]

China's biggest maker of home appliances Midea Group will likely announce on Thursday a full takeover bid for German industrial robot maker Kuka AG.

Midea will launch the takeover offer to all shareholders of the leading global supplier of intelligent automation solutions, according to a Reuters report, which cited sources in Kuka.

Spokesmen for the Chinese group would not comment on the report, saying a statement would be made after a takeover bid is formally announced.

"Up till now, preparations for the bid have been well conducted in accordance with relevant regulations and laws of China and Germany," said the a spokesman, who declined to be named.

Sources in Midea said earlier that the company, based in Foshan, Guangdong province, an industrial and economic powerhouse in South China, planned to expand its stake in Kuka to above 30 percent.

That would make it the biggest shareholder, ahead of Germany's Voith GmbH, a maker of industrial equipment.

Currently, Midea indirectly owns 13.5 percent of Kuka's shares. The voluntary takeover offer will reportedly be conducted by Midea's affiliate MECCA International Ltd, at 115 euros ($129) in cash per share.

However, according to German business newspaper Handelsblatt, Midea is only seeking a 49 percent stake in Kuka. That paper cited unnamed sources in the German government.

Midea sources reportedly said that the company decided mount the takeover bid for Kuka during a board general meeting on June 6.

The increased shareholding in Kuka was made in line with Midea's "smart" strategy. Launched in 2015, it aimed to upgrade the group's manufacturing competencies and develop more smart home devices, said Midea Chairman and CEO Paul Fang.

"We believe that a larger shareholding strikes the right balance between us and Kuka, while also putting both companies in a position to drive further growth through collaboration, especially in the Chinese market," said Fang.

Fang also said the takeover was in line with the company's expansion in the international investment market, after the company bought an 80.1 percent stake in Japanese home appliances maker Toshiba Corp's white goods business.

The German industrial robot maker will assess a possible takeover bid from a European company, but it would be wrong to assume such an offer would take priority over the bid from Midea, according to earlier Reuters reports, citing sources close to Kuka chief executive.

Industrial giant Siemens AG has no interest in becoming a white knight for Kuka, according to the Reuters report.
A Chinese clerk counts yuan banknotes at a bank in Huaibei city, east China's Anhui province, Jan 22, 2015.[Photo/IC]

Twelve privately owned banks have entered the project demonstration stage before getting final approval to begin operations, said the China Banking Regulatory Commission on Wednesday.

The CBRC has written detailed rules specifying the principles, policies, standards and procedures for the approval of the establishment of private banks. The market niche for these private banks includes internet finance and supply chain finance, depending on the backgrounds of their major shareholders and local government support. They will mainly target micro and small companies.

So far the CBRC has approved five private banks to start operation. As of March 31, total assets of the five private banks reached 95.94 billion yuan ($15 billion), up 21 percent from the beginning of this year. Their balance of loans increased by 51 percent to 35.65 billion yuan and balance of deposits rose 11.6 percent to 22.25 billion yuan during the same period, according to the CBRC.

"These banks keep improving in terms of corporate governance, internal control and risk management," said Qiu Xiaoqiu, deputy director of the city commercial banks supervision department of the CBRC.

China has been steadily promoting the entry of private capital into the banking sector through multiple channels, such as initiating the establishment of small and medium-sized banking institutions.

Statistics from the CBRC show that at the end of March, private capital took a 46 percent stake in joint-equity commercial banks, increasing from 39 percent in 2011.

The share of private capital exceeded 50 percent in city commercial banks and reached nearly 90 percent in rural cooperative financial institutions. Some city commercial banks are wholly owned by private companies. The number of non-bank financial institutions, excluding trust companies, of which private capital took a controlling or participating share was 78, accounting for 25 percent of the total.
Global share index compiler MSCI Inc on Wednesday (Beijing time) again rejected including Chinese mainland listed A shares from its prominent emerging markets index.

"International institutional investors clearly indicated that they would like to see further improvements in the accessibility of China's A-share market before its inclusion in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index," Remy Briand, MSCI managing director and global head of research, said in a statement.

MSCI said that it would retain the option to include the A shares as part of its next market classification review in 2017.

"MSCI will monitor the implementation of the recently announced policy changes and will seek feedback from market participants," Briand said.

The MSCI decision means A shares, or stocks in the Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses that are denominated in yuan, won't be included in the widely used emerging markets index, which has about $1.5 trillion of assets benchmarked to it. Asset managers, pension funds, insurers and individual investors hold passive investments like an exchange-traded fund or mutual funds that track an MSCI index like its emerging markets benchmark.

Chinese stocks now listed on MSCI's emerging market index are all traded in either Hong Kong or in the United States. That means the world's second-largest economy makes up only about one-fourth of the benchmark index, while projected full inclusion of A shares would bring that ratio to more than one-third.

In June 2015, MSCI rejected the Chinese shares, citing uncertainty about who actually owns them and how easily investors can withdraw their money from Chinese investments.

Earlier this year, China's stock exchanges published rules that restrict arbitrary trading suspensions for Chinese stocks. Chinese officials have been pushing for the inclusion of A shares, seeing it as another step in the assimilation of China into the global financial marketplace.

Qi Bin, an official with the China Securities Regulatory Commission, said improvements to the trading-halt system were part of the Chinese government's efforts to facilitate MSCI inclusion. He also cited freer money transfers allowed by the foreign exchange regulator and greater recognition of beneficiary ownership.

Briand acknowledged that "there have been significant steps toward the eventual inclusion of China's A shares in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index".
JINAN - The valuation of audio-streaming service Ximalaya shot to 4.1 billion yuan ($623 million) from 2.6 billion in November 2015, according to an investor.

Shanghai-listed Qingdao City Media Co Ltd, disclosed the valuation on Wednesday in response to an inquiry by the Shanghai Stock Exchange over its investment in Ximalaya.

It said the valuation was based upon Ximalaya's last round of fundraising in which it invested 60 million yuan for a 1.45-percent stake in Ximalaya.

In November last year, Ximalaya was valued at 2.6 billion yuan, with 4.5 million daily active users and 30 million monthly active users. As of today, those numbers have climbed to 8 million and 45 million, respectively.
BEIJING -- The Supreme People's Court (SPC) of China on Thursday rejected the appeal of U.S. pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Co. against Jiangsu-based Changzhou Watson Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. in a long-standing patent infringement case.

It also overturned a previous court ruling on patent infringement in favor of Eli Lilly, which ordered Changzhou Watson to pay Eli Lilly millions of yuan in compensation, after investigators concluded that "the alleged infringement does not fall into the scope of patent protection in the case."

This is the first time that SPC has designated technical investigators in a lawsuit to help clarify the technical details of the case.

Eli Lilly and Changzhou Watson have been locked in patent infringement disputes for over ten years over the latter's production of olanzapine, an anti-psychotic drug.

In 2003, Eli Lilly lodged a patent infringement litigation against Changzhou Watson and a lower Chinese court ruled in favor of Eli Lilly on grounds of Changzhou Watson's failure to meet the burden of proof.

In 2013, Eli Lilly sued Changzhou Watson again to seek economic compensation, and the latter was ordered to pay 3.5 million yuan (about $531,000).

Both Eli Lilly and Changzhou Watson challenged the ruling and appealed to the SPC.
No 10 Tesla (valuation: $4.4 billion)

A parking sign at a Tesla Supercharger station is shown in Cabazon, California, US, May 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

Toyota retained its title as the world's most valuable car brand, followed by BMW and Mercedes-Benz, according to an annual report released by advertising research firms WPP and Millward Brown.

Toyota, whose brand value rose 2 percent to $29.5 billion, has been the number one for 11 consecutive years. Tesla, with a valuation of $4.4 billion, entered the top 10 for the first time. It overtook Lexus and was ranked the 10th most valuable global car brand.

Let's take a look at 10 most valuable car brands in the world:
The Redmi 3X will go on sale for 899 yuan ($136) through China Unicom's offline stores.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi Corp has teamed up with the country's second-largest telecom carrier, China United Network Communications Group Co, to expand its offline retailing channels.

The move came as the country's online smartphone sales has hit a ceiling and as Xiaomi grapples with declining shipments and mounting competition from rivals such as Oppo Electronics Corp.

Xiaomi launched a custom-made smartphone Redmi 3X on Wednesday. Equipped with a large battery and a 13-megapixel rear-camera, the new phone will go on sale for 899 yuan ($136) through China Unicom's 30,000 offline stores and more than 230,000 bricks-and-mortar retailing partners.

Lei Jun, CEO and founder of Xiaomi, said so far more than two-thirds of the company's smartphones have been sold through e-commerce platforms and the company's official website.

"The proportion of online sales is too big," Lei said. "To maintain the rapid growth we have seen in the past four years, expanding offline retailing channels becomes the key."

Xiaomi and China Unicom will also expand their cooperation beyond handsets to a wide range of products, such as Xiaomi TV, routers and air purifiers.

"All of these Xiaomi electronic products will be available at our nationwide offline retail stores," said Xiong Yu, deputy general manager at China Unicom.

The move fits into China Unicom's broad efforts to transform its abundant bricks-and-mortar assets into a big retailing platform of various electronic products, Xiong added.

As China's smartphone market is reaching saturation point, a number of vendors are banking on bricks-and-mortar retailers to spur their growth.

Xiaomi said earlier this year it will open 200 to 300 retail stores to bolster sales. Its major rival Lenovo Group Ltd also pledged more efforts to expand its offline retailing presence, which its senior Vice-President Chen Xudong called the key to surviving intense competition.

CK Lu, principal analyst at consulting firm Gartner Inc, said China Unicom's sprawling offline resources gave Xiaomi a ticket to enter into low-tier cities, which are dominated by its rivals Oppo Electronics Corp and vivo Mobile Communication Technology Co Ltd.

In the first quarter of this year, Oppo and vivo made their way into the world's top-five ranking of smartphone vendors for the first time, pushing out Xiaomi and Lenovo.

"Xiaomi is an expert in online marketing, but lacks experience and talent to run offline stores. So it makes tons of sense to partner with China Unicom," Lu said.

According to Counterpoint Technology Market Research, telecom operators' retail channels account for 30 percent of China's total smartphone sales, while e-commerce sites contribute another 30 percent, with the rest managed by professional electronic retail stores.

James Yan, a Beijing-based analyst at Counterpoint, said partnering with China Unicom will help Xiaomi quickly boost smartphone sales, but won't necessarily deliver good profits.
Photo taken on April 14, 2016 shows a Uber car-hailing station in Longyang Avenue, Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei province.[Photo/IC]

Uber Technologies Inc announced on Wednesday a new business initiative focusing on providing ride-hailing services to China's increasingly affluent tourists, a move to grab more market share from local rival Didi Chuxing.

The United States-based tech giant said it will leverage its global presence and partners around the world to offer Chinese tourists a seamless traveling experience.

"The number of Uber trips ordered by Chinese outbound travelers surged nearly eight times in the first quarter compared with the same period last year," said Liu Zhen, senior vice-president for Uber China.

According to Liu, the tourism industry can serve as the best gateway to tap into the ride-hailing demand in China as the industry contributed to more than 10 percent of China's GDP.

Uber also announced on Wednesday its first batch of partners for the initiative named Uber+Travel. The list includes several travel services providers from HNA Group, parent company of Chinese carrier Hainan Airlines, to online travel agency Qunar Cayman Islands Ltd.

Uber, which entered China about one and half years ago, said Chinese users had completed nearly 1 million trips via the app in countries outside China in the first five months this year. And its non-Chinese users had completed 3 million trips in 24 cities when traveling in China between January and May.

Wang Xiaofeng, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc, said it is an effective strategy for Uber to win users by tapping into the needs of tourists.

"Didi Chuxing has formed an alliance with overseas ride-hailing apps Lyft Inc, Ola and GrabTaxi, so that it can provide a ride service to cross-border travelers. But Uber genetically has advantages in global traveling," she said.

Uber, which has a plan to expand its service in 100 cities in China, said it has launched its service in 60 Chinese cities so far.

Emil Michael, chief business officer of Uber, said the company has completed more trips in China than in its home market-the United States.
A Chinese mobile phone user uses the taxi-hailing and car-service app Didi Chuxing on his Apple iPhone smartphone in Jinan city, east China's Shandong province, Feb 22, 2015.[Photo/IC]

Didi Chuxing, China's largest one-stop mobile transportation platform, announced on Thursday that it closed a $7.3 billion financing round, becoming one of the world's best-funded companies with about $10.5 billion in disposable funds.

In a statement, Didi said it received $4.5 billion in equity fundraising from Apple, China Life, Ant Financial and other new shareholders, together with existing investors Tencent, Alibaba, China Merchants Bank, and SoftBank, among others.

In addition to the equity investment, China Merchants Bank has also committed to becoming the lead arranger for a syndicated loan facility to DiDi of an amount up to $2.5 billion. China Life also added a long-term debt investment of a billion yuan ($300 million). In total, the ride-hailing app gained $7.3 billion in financing, one of the world's largest private equity funding rounds.

It said proceeds from the round would be used for technology upgrading, big data research and operations, investments in improving rider and driver experience, as well as explorations into new business lines and opportunities.

DiDi now stands as one of the world's best-funded internet companies with approximately $10.5 billion in disposable funds.

The deep-pocket Didi will put Uber Technologies Inc under huge pressure as the two ride-hailing giants are locked in a cut-throat competition in China.

Liu Zhen, senior vice president of Uber China, said in an interview on Wednesday the company's China operation did not lack money.

According to Uber, it closed its latest round of financing at $6 billion. The US-based company is now valued at about $70 billion.
Zhou Yongkang's family members given a total of 27 years by court in Hubei

The son and the wife of former security chief Zhou Yongkang were sentenced to prison terms on Wednesday, according to verdicts issued by a court in Hubei province.

The son, Zhou Bin, 44, was sentenced to 18 years for taking bribes and for illegal business operations, the verdict said.

He was fined 350.2 million yuan ($53 million) and all of his illegally obtained assets were ordered to be confiscated.

Zhou Bin and Zhou Yongkang sought benefits for others by taking advantage of Zhou Yongkang's posts, and accepted property worth 98 million yuan, the verdict, issued by Yichang Intermediate People's Court, said.

Zhou Bin also used his father's influence to obtain advantages for others through officials, and accepted property worth 124 million yuan.

Zhou Yongkang was a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee from 2007 to 2012.

Hours before the verdict on Zhou Bin, Jia Xiaoye, 48, Zhou Yongkang's wife and Zhou Bin's stepmother, was imprisoned for nine years for taking bribes, according to a verdict issued by the same court.

Jia, Zhou Yongkang's second wife, was also fined 1 million yuan.

Earlier reports said Jia, a former editor at China Central Television, married Zhou Yongkang "around 2001".

Neither Zhou Bin nor Jia will appeal, according to a statement issued by the court after the trial.

In July 2014, the CPC Central Committee announced that it had decided to place Zhou Yongkang under investigation. He was expelled from the Party in December that year.

On June 11 last year, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for accepting bribes, abuse of power and deliberately disclosing State secrets.

Wednesday's verdicts came six months after President Xi Jinping issued a warning of "cabals and cliques" in the Party, and reiterated the nation's determination to press ahead with the fight against corruption.

Zhou Yongkang was reported to have formed several networks in the sectors he was in charge of, including law enforcement organs and State-owned enterprises such as China National Petroleum Corp.

Reuters and Xinhua contributed to this story.
A Chinese TV drama series based on the country's fight against corruption and on other political developments is poised to challenge the popularity of the US hit House of Cards.

The new series, In the Name of the People, is produced by the Supreme People's Procuratorate's Film and Television Center. It features about 100 roles and is being filmed with a budget of 120 million yuan ($18.46 million).

Fan Ziwen, deputy director of the center, said it is the first domestic production to portray a State-level government official as a villain, making it a topic of heated debate.

The series has attracted widespread attention, as the topic of corruption had largely faded from TV screens in China after the media watchdog ordered a reduction in the number of such shows in 2004.

Zhou Meisen, screenwriter for the new series, said such productions have not been screened for a decade amid a nationwide increase in more-commercial shows. But they have reappeared with the introduction of intensified efforts to fight corruption.

Fan said, "Audiences will not see the face of the 'tiger', or State-level official, but only hear his voice."

Actors Lu Yi and Zhang Fengyi take the lead roles in the series, which has completed filming and is at the post-production stage. It will begin airing later this year.

Fan said it is being shown to reflect the central leadership's determination and the measures taken to fight corruption since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in late 2012. It also portrays anti-graft work at home and abroad.

In the past three years, corruption has led to the downfall of a series of officials at provincial or ministerial level, including Zhou Yongkang, the former security chief, who was sentenced to life in prison in June last year for graft, abuse of power and disclosing State secrets.

Besides the "tigers", corruption among officials at lower level, or "flies", will feature in the series.

"For example, a figure that is found to have 200 million yuan ($30 million) in cash at hom

e - based on reality - will appear in the shows," Fan said.

To vividly and accurately reflect judicial bodies' anti-corruption work, Zhou Meisen said he visited prosecuting authorities and prisons to conduct interviews. He also had discussions with prosecutors and corrupt officials serving prison sentences.

He applauded the firm steps taken to fight graft, saying this inspired him to join the production team for the series.

Xinhua News Agency reported in September that President Xi Jinping mentioned House of Cards during a speech in Seattle, saying that China's fight against corruption is based on both the government and people's desire to fight graft, and is not a struggle for power, as depicted in the US series.

Wang Qishan, head of the Communist Party of China Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the country's top disciplinary watchdog, has recommended the US series to disciplinary officers many times, Phoenix Weekly reported in December 2013.

Chinese writer Zhang Ping said: "Many TV series are either based on arguments among families, or are science fiction shows. We're eager to see a new series on corruption after such a long time."

From January 2015 to March this year, applications to produce seven TV series about anti-corruption measures were filed with the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.

Li Jingshen, director of the authority, said it is required to produce at least two films and up to three TV series on the anti-graft fight each year.
Collaboration on production capacity will enhance work along Belt and Road route

President Xi Jinping's visit to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan will lead to more projects involving production capacity cooperation, Foreign Ministry officials said on Wednesday.

During the eight-day trip that will begin on Friday, Xi will attend signing ceremonies for cooperation documents in the three countries, all of which are along the route of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, said Liu Haixing and Li Huilai, both assistant foreign ministers.

Liu told a news briefing that Xi will visit Serbia's Smederevo steel mill, which was founded in 1913 and acquired in April by Hesteel Group, China's largest iron and steel business group in terms of production capacity.

The deal is worth 46 million euros ($51.7 million).

Construction of Serbian power stations and highways in projects involving contracts with Chinese companies is going smoothly, he said.

In Serbia, the Zemun-Borca Bridge, newly renamed Pupin Bridge, was opened in 2014. The bridge over the Danube River is the first built in Europe by a Chinese company.

"The bridge is fondly known by the local people as the Chinese Bridge," Liu said.

The Chinese government is encouraging domestic companies to invest in Poland's nuclear power industry, Liu said.

Poland has been China's largest trade partner in Central and Eastern Europe for 11 consecutive years. It is also the only CEE country that has joined the China-proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Liu said.

Liu Zuokui, an expert at the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that promoting bilateral cooperation with Serbia and Poland will play a positive role in propelling China-CEE relations.

To show support toward China-Uzbekistan cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi will attend a ceremony for the completion of a tunnel made by China, Li said.

While attending the meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Xi will discuss with other leaders the applications by India and Pakistan to join the SCO as members, Li said.

Chen Yurong, a researcher of European and Asian studies at the China Institute of International Studies, said the SCO summit is expected to have a huge, positive influence on the growth of the organization, which marks its 15th anniversary this year.
Former Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou hailed his November meeting with President Xi Jinping in Singapore as a historic breakthrough in building "a bridge of peace" across the Taiwan Straits and expressed hope that people from both sides would seek "in-depth mutual understanding".

He made the remarks in a pre-recorded speech presented on Wednesday at the awards presentation dinner of the Society of Publishers in Asia. The event was held in Hong Kong.

It was Ma's first public speech after leaving office on May 20. His Kuomintang party lost the election to Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party.

Ma said the Chinese mainland and Taiwan had built up considerable mutual trust before the meeting with Xi, and he pointed to the 1992 Consensus, which recognizes "one China" and respects "respective interpretations" as the foundation of cross-Straits peace and maintaining the status quo. Any interpretation - "two Chinas", "one China, one Taiwan" or "Taiwan independence" - are prohibited under Taiwan's governing document, Ma said.

After the Xi-Ma meeting, Taiwan opinion polls found that more than 60 percent of Taiwan people supported Ma's interpretation of the consensus, a higher level of support than in the past.

Since he was sworn into office in 2008, 23 major agreements have been signed by Taiwan and the mainland; high-ranking officials in charge of cross-Straits affairs from both sides met several times; and the number of scheduled cross-Straits flights rose from zero to 890 per week. More than 4 million mainland tourists traveled to Taiwan last year, showing a 14-fold increase. Cross-Straits tension decreased significantly, Ma said.

Ma said each side has unique characteristics and values. He appealed to people from both sides to seek in-depth mutual understanding and cultural empathy.

He used the 42,000 mainland students living in Taiwan as an example. Students study, debate, exercise and play with their Taiwan schoolmates, Ma said, which helps create a solid foundation for sustainable peace and prosperity.

Ma had meant to deliver the speech in person at the publishers' dinner in response to the group's invitation, but Taiwan authorities rejected his request to go to Hong Kong.

The spokesman for the office of current Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen cited several reasons: the fact that Ma had only recently left office, that the request was made on short notice, that Hong Kong was sensitive and that security cooperation with the city was lacking.

Ma's office expressed regret over the decision. A spokeswoman said it showed "not only disrespect to the former leader but damages Taiwan's democratic image in the world".
An Fengshan, spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, interacts with reporters at a news conference in Beijing on Wednesday. Zhang Qin / China News Service

Changing political climate 'triggering concerns' from tour operators, others

The government has never set quotas for mainland tourists traveling across the Taiwan Straits, the spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday about a recent decline in mainland tourists to the island.

"The change in tourist numbers is mainly driven by the market and based on the willingness of tourism operators and tourists. The government has never set any quota to limit the number of tourists traveling to Taiwan," spokesman An Fengshan said at a news conference on Wednesday. An is also the deputy director of the office's media affairs section.

"This year, the political situation in Taiwan and cross-Straits relations have changed, triggering concerns from tourism operators and tourists on the mainland. Thus, their willingness to travel to Taiwan has declined," he said.

The Taiwan tourism sector - the first to face an immediate hit if cross-Straits relations turn south - has seen a downturn in the number of mainland Chinese tourists, with tour bus companies, hotels, restaurants and travel agencies complaining about it.

Recent statistics released by the island's tourism bureau show that since the beginning of May the daily average of mainland Chinese tourists traveling in groups dropped by about 33 percent - or 1,650 people - from the 5,000 recorded over the same period last year.

Fu Kun-chi, head of Hualien county in Taiwan, has noticed the trend.

"The decline has affected cross-Straits relations and many other fields in Taiwan, including agriculture, tourism, family hotel businesses and restaurants," Fu told China Daily at the Straits Forum in Xiamen on Sunday.

Fu hopes that continuous communication across the Straits will attract a stable number of tourists from the mainland.

Tsai Ing-wen, the newly elected leader in Taiwan who took office on May 20, has not yet explicitly endorsed the 1992 Consensus, which states that the mainland and Taiwan are parts of one China.

"The political situation affects tourism the most, but it may also affect the macro economy," said Huang Hai-lung, president of the Overseas Chinese Association, based in Taipei.

"It requires wisdom to balance it," he said.

Statistics from the China National Tourism Administration show that 4.1 million people from the Chinese mainland traveled to Taiwan last year, accounting for about 40 percent of the island's tourists.

On average, each mainland tourist spent NT$7,770 ($240) in Taiwan each day.

An Baijie contributed to this story.
The 10-year-old son of a hospital staff member was stabbed by a disgruntled patient in Hunan province, police said on Tuesday, in the latest incident involving tense relations between patients and medical professionals.

The suspect, a 54-year-old man, had sought treatment at Yuejiaqiao Health Center in Yiyang, Hunan province, for emphysema.

He had an ongoing dispute with the hospital over being transferred to another hospital and over medical bills, and he had been to the hospital a number of times to negotiate since May, according to a statement released by the Hunan police on Tuesday.

The man, who was only identified by his surname, He, disrupted hospital work during the negotiating process. A staff member surnamed Kong stopped him, the statement said.

He followed Kong's 10-year-old son to a city bus and stabbed him several times with a knife on Monday morning, according to the statement.

The boy was sent to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, the statement said. The alleged attacker, He, has been detained.

Monday's case was one of a spate of violent incidents against doctors in recent months.

On May 18, a doctor named Wang Jun in Shaodong county, Hunan province, was beaten to death during a quarrel with family members over the treatment of five people who were injured in a traffic accident. Three suspects were arrested two days later, the report said.

In May, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said it has "zero tolerance" toward violence against medical personnel and urged local authorities to severely punish anyone guilty of it.

Nearly 70 percent of doctors in China don't want their children to follow in their career footsteps, due to heavy workloads, high expectations from patients and increasing medical disputes that can result in doctors being injured, according to a report released by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association.

According to an earlier report by the association, an average of 27 cases of verbal or physical violence against doctors occur at each Chinese hospital every year.

Gong Xiaoming, a gynecologist who formerly worked at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, said a security system that protects the interests of both patients and doctors in cases of disputes should be improved in China to reduce such violence.

In particular, the system should ensure that patients get compensation through insurance for medical malpractice, he said.

Patients who are compensated fairly may be less inclined to commit violent acts, he said.

At the same time, doctors should also learn to communicate better with patients and continue improving their service, he said.
Some cafes, restaurants and bars in Beijing have posted signs designating public toilets that can be used by anyone regardless of gender identity.

Some cafes, restaurants and bars in Beijing have posted signs designating public toilets that can be used by anyone regardless of gender identity.

The "All Gender Toilet" placards include a figure with a dress, another in trousers and one with half dress and half trousers.

All-gender toilets are intended to benefits the transgender population and others who fall outside traditional gender classifications.

"I support the idea because I believe it will contribute to social tolerance," said Zhang Lin, manager of Cafe Zarah in Dongcheng district. "Despite differences of appearance, all people should be equally respected."

Beijing Gender Health Education Institute, an NGO, launched its citywide "All Gender Toilet" campaign in May.

Cafe Zarah was the second to join the campaign. Zhang said the inside of the washroom has not changed - only the sign, which welcomes all.

"All-gender welcomes females, males, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders. In my opinion, such tolerance and respect also covers the elderly, children and the disabled," Zhang said.

More than 30 organizations - mostly cafes, bars and nonprofit organizations - have committed to make gender-friendly toilets available. UN Women and the UN Development Programme also joined the initiative.

Any organization participating in the campaign and installing the sign gets a special certificate and will be included in the institute's gender-friendly map, according to Yang Gang, the group's sustainable development project manager.

He said dozens of gender-friendly businesses, UN branch offices and not-for-profits based in Beijing have joined the effort.

"Some people may have trouble using a restroom designated for male or female only, such as boys with long hair, girls with short hair or people who dress gender-blind," Yang said.

He added that narrow toilet distinctions trouble fathers with little daughters or mothers with little sons, as well as people - for example, a disabled or elderly person - who may need help from a friend or relative of a different gender.

They are already becoming the norm across college campuses in the United States and the United Kingdom.

According to a report by Time magazine, there are more than 150 schools in the United States that have all-gender restroom facilities.
Three toddlers were given clothes after they were brought to a police station in Jiande, Zhejiang province, on Monday. Photos By Zhang Luyi / For China Daily

Three toddlers embarked on their maiden road adventure on Monday in Jiande city, Zhejiang province.

The three naked children stumbled down three flights of stairs, walked along a 30-meter terrace, and continued down another three floors until they arrived at the exit about an hour later.

The toddlers - a 2-year-old girl and 1-year-old twins, a boy and girl - were seen walking along the street by a policeman around 6 am as he was having breakfast.

Before that, a grocery owner gave them each a lollipop.

The officer took the youngsters to the police station, where they were given milk and clothes while the police started to looked into where they were from.

Their mother didn't know they were missing until she woke up about two hours later. The worried mom hurried to the police station after being told by nearby residents that the police had found three toddlers and were looking for their parents.

The children were returned to their mother after police confirmed her identity.

The mom said her husband left home for work early in the morning and forgot to lock the door as she was sleeping.

"That might be how they got out and walked onto the street," she said.
String of premature deaths in two months renews talk about high stress in workplace

The recent death of a newspaper's editor-in-chief, following the deaths of at least seven other newspaper staff members in the past two months, has renewed concerns about the overall health of the group.

Du Shaoling, 42, editor-in-chief of Chuncheng Evening News in Kunming, Yunnan province, died on Tuesday of an apparent heart attack arising from cardiovascular disease, the newspaper said via social media on Tuesday.

"Almost all media staffers who died prematurely had similar experiences, such as constant pressure and working overnight," said Li Ying, deputy director of the Media Teaching and Research Center at Communication University of China.

"The job of a reporter seems flexible, but they have to be ready for an assignment at any time, even during holidays. The tension is like their shadow."

Du often worked 17 hours a day, Wen Xing, one of his colleagues, told sohu.com.

Du was in charge of both news reporting and business operations.

Fierce competition in the newspaper industry in recent years, including pressure from online media, has resulted in revenue losses at many traditional newspapers in China. That means more pressure for senior executives, the report said.

Journalism is one of the riskiest occupations in China, according to a report released last year by 51 job, a large human resources service provider.

The report said journalists, who face fierce competition, must work under heavy pressure and on irregular schedules - and all of that brings higher health risks an increased incidence of premature death. Other risky jobs include policemen, IT workers and doctors, according to the report.

Du, the Chuncheng editor, is one of a number of senior staff members in the industry who have died prematurely in the past two months. At least seven others preceded him, including 45-year-old Ma Yuezhou, a senior editor at PLA Daily, which is owned by the People's Liberation Army, and 42-year-old Ren Jie, a senior editor at Mianyang Daily in Sichuan province.

More than 90 percent of people working for media in China face health problems, including high cholesterol, hypertension and insomnia, according to a 2014 report by Selection Market Research Group, a research company in Guangzhou.

Major causes of health problems include lack of exercise, irregular meals and heavy work pressure, the report said.

These factors suggest that the physical and psychological health of journalists deserve the attention of employers, said Li of the media center.

At the same time, she said, news staffers should monitor their own health and get regular checkups.

Wu Bin, a reporter at Southern Metropolis Daily, based in Guangzhou, said work has been quite busy and usually lasts from 10 am to 10 pm.

Wu, who is 26 years old and has been working for the paper for three years, said he attaches more importance to his health since he was diagnosed with a fatty liver during a health checkup.

An editor surnamed Zhang at Netease, which runs one of China's largest news portals, said he faces heavy work pressure as he is multitasked.

"I only slept for about four hours a night over the past two months due to tension," he said.

High-stress occupation

Members of news staffs in China who have died prematurely since April:

Yin Hongwei, 43, freelance investigative reporter, April 26

Jiang Jun, 41, reporter at Chengdu.cn, May 3

Ren Jie, 42, senior editor at Mianyang Daily, May 3

Ma Yuezhou, 45, senior editor at PLA Daily, May 4

Wang Yashan, 28, editor at Netease, May 18

Wang Jun, 39, editor at Henan Legal Daily, May 23

Xiao Chaoli, 51, senior reporter at Lanzhou Evening News, June 11

Du Shaoling, 42, editor-in-chief of Chuncheng Evening News, June 14
China and the United States have pledged to work closer to fight cybercrime and vowed to prioritize cases related to cybertheft of intellectual property for commercial gain.

They will clamp down on the spread of online pornographic information involving children, using technology and telecommunications to assist violent and terrorist activities, internet scams committed through emails and phishing websites, and trading firearms online, the Ministry of Public Security said on Wednesday following the second High-Level Joint Dialogue on Cybercrime and Related Issues in Beijing.

An agreement was reached on the scope and procedures for a hotline to fight cybercrime and related issues, which will undergo a trial run before September.

In recognition of the need to increase manpower and other resources, both sides are to enhance contact between national supervisory bodies involving criminal judiciary assistance, the statement said.

Tao Wenzhao, a researcher in Sino-US relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said, "The joint dialogue mechanism is expected to narrow differences in the two countries' stances on cybersecurity issues and develop collaboration in this regard into a major area of cooperation."

He said they are likely to work more closely on activities involving business intelligence, which will be managed differently from activities related to political intelligence.

A high-level joint dialogue mechanism on fighting cybercrime and related issues was set up in September during President Xi Jinping's state visit to the US. The dialogue is scheduled to occur twice per year. Both sides agreed to establish a hotline for the escalation of issues that may arise in the course of responding to such requests.

The first dialogue was held in Washington in December. The Ministry of Public Security said the two countries will hold the third dialogue in Washington this year.

Under the mechanism, the US secretary of homeland security and the attorney general will co-chair the dialogue, with participation of representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US intelligence community and other agencies.

The second dialogue in Beijing on Tuesday was attended by Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun and Suzanne Spaulding, an undersecretary at the US Department of Homeland Security. Other senior officials from both countries also participated.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Loretta Lynch had been scheduled to attend the meeting, but they withdrew after the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.
Left: A waitress cleans a table at a restaurant in Taiyuan, North China's Shanxi province, in 2013. Right: Students hold empty bowls after a meal at a primary school in Zaozhuang, East China's Shandong province. Provided To China Daily And Liu Mingxiang / For China Daily

Experts are calling for more measures to prevent wastage in restaurants and at the family dining table, as Xu Wei reports.

As he sat in a seafood restaurant in Shanghai, Liu Yao was surprised to see more food going into garbage bags than was actually being consumed, but he was even more surprised that nobody seemed to care.

"They (the diners) were toasting each other, exchanging pleasantries and trying to charm each other. Eating was probably the last thing on their minds," said Liu, a researcher with the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Liu took part in a research program into food wastage at restaurants in four cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan province, and Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet autonomous region.

He said the problem is especially severe in large restaurants because they are the usual venues for business discussions and networking events.

"The customers were only using dinner as a platform for negotiations. They didn't really care about the food itself," he added.

The research conducted by the institute found that diners at large restaurants wasted an average 130.19 grams of food, while those at fast food restaurants wasted 39.09 grams.

"The more high-priced or luxurious the restaurant, the more waste there is," he said.

By weighing the dishes before and after each meal, the researchers were able to identify a number of factors that could be responsible for wastage in restaurants, including age, gender, and the scale and the type of eatery. Based on research in the four cities, the researchers estimated that more than 25 million metric tons of food is wasted in the country's public catering sector every year.

Cheng Shengkui, the institute researcher who led the program, said wastage at official banquets has been curbed dramatically in the four years since the start of the official anti-corruption and frugality campaign. Meanwhile, the government-backed Operation Clean Plate, which encourages people not to order too much at restaurants and to eat everything provided, is also having an impact. However, that does not mean wasteful behavior and lavish dinners have been eradicated altogether.

A large number of business banquets at high-end restaurants have not been affected by the frugality campaign, and big restaurants are switching their focus from government-sponsored banquets to attract more trade from the general public, Cheng said.

He explained that Chinese etiquette requires hosts to provide large amounts of food for their guests. "If all the food on the table is finished after a banquet, it could be interpreted as the host not showing enough largesse," he said.

Cheng noted that food wastage was once prevalent among wealthy people, but the growth of average personal incomes has seen the problem spreading. "Now, it seems everybody is wasting food. People now take wastage for granted," he said.
China releases white paper on BeiDou navigation satellite system (Xinhua) Updated: 2016-06-16 10:41

BEIJING - The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the development of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by China.



According to the document, China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, aiming to complete the constellation deployment with 35 satellites around 2020 to provide services to global users, according to the document, which was unveiled by the State Council Information Office.



In the first step, China meant the project to provide services to domestic users, and in the second, the system expanded services to the Asia-Pacific region. The second one was achieved by the end of 2012.



The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.
To avoid a repeat of the Sichuan teenager who stowed away on a plane bound for Dubai last month, the Civil Aviation Administration of China will launch a special aviation security evaluation of Shanghai Pudong International Airport, ThePaper.cn reported.

All applications for additional domestic flights, chartered flights and new routes from the airport will be suspended, and the listed Shanghai International Airport Co Ltd will be subject to an administrative penalty, the CAAC said.

On May 26, a 16-year-old surnamed Xu sneaked into the airport and stowed away on an Emirates Airline flight, arriving in Dubai more than 9 hours later.

After his arrest, Xu told police that he had made the trip because of an online rumor that said beggars in Dubai could earn hundreds of thousands of yuan every year.
BEIJING -- Bai Enpei, a former senior official with the top legislature, on Thursday stood trial on two counts of corruption-related charges.

Bai, formerly deputy head of the Environment and Resources Protection Committee of the National People's Congress, was accused of taking advantage of his various official posts and other perks associated with his posts from 2000 to 2013 to seek benefits -- in regard of project construction, real estate development, obtaining mining rights and personal promotions -- for 17 companies and individuals.

In exchange, he personally, or through his wife, accepted bribes worth over 246 million yuan ($37.4 million).

Also, prosecutors allege, the assets and expenditure of the Bai family significantly exceeded their legal income and Bai was unable to specify the sources of his assets, which constitutes another suspected criminal violation.

The People's Procuratorate of Anyang City in central China's Henan Province filed the two charges with Anyang Intermediate People's Court.

In his final statement, Bai accepted the charges and showed repentance.

Over 60 people, including legal and political representatives, journalists and members of the public, attended the hearing.

The court ruling will be announced at a later date.
BEIJING -- China's central government has ordered all central ministerial agencies, governments and Communist Party committees above the country-level and state-owned enterprises (SOE) to adopt a legal counsel system before 2017, a major step to promote rule of law.

Such legal counsels, either hired from outside or converted from the previous public office lawyers within the government, will play a bigger role in government functions and SOE operations, according to a guideline released by the general offices of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council.

Government and Party organizations are urged to hear the opinions of legal counsels before deliberations or making major decisions, involve them in the process of decision-making, formulation of major government policies and intra-Party rules, and the handling of some legal cases and emergency situations, said the guideline.

They are also expected to participate in negotiations involving government or Party organizations and deal with other legal matters.

Legal counsels at SOEs will take part in the formulation of board rules, help review operational decisions and contracts and provide legal opinions on major moves, such as mergers and acquisitions, reorganization, going public and intellectual property protection.

The document is a follow-up to a decision released after the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee, which said, "We will establish a universal system of legal counsel."
More international recognition expected for China's homegrown satellite navigation system

China is striving to promote its domestically developed Beidou Navigation Satellite System to more international organizations to boost the space network's overseas expansion, project officials said on Thursday.

The Beidou system's standards have been ratified by the International Maritime Organization for nautical operations, following the United States' GPS and Russia's Glonass, Ran Chengqi, director of the China Satellite Navigation Office, said at a news conference in Beijing.

"We are pressing forward with recognition of the Beidou system by organizations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and 3rd Generation Partnership Project," Ren said.

This partnership project groups regional telecommunications organizations seeking to enhance the standardization of mobile communications.

At the news conference, hosted by the State Council Information Office, a white paper was released, elaborating on the current situation and development plan for the Beidou system. The document is the first of its kind published by China on the global navigation satellite system.

Hu Kaihong, a spokesman for the information office, said China hopes to build a Beidou system benefiting not only the country but also the world. He said the nation is committed to providing a consistent, stable and reliable service to users worldwide.

Wang Li, director of the China Satellite Navigation Office's International Cooperation Research Center, told China Daily the International Civil Aviation Organization has begun standardization procedures for the Beidou system to enable it to be adopted by airlines for flight navigation.
President Xi Jinping visits recipients of the "Model Workers" title in Beijing, April 28, 2013. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - Hybrid rice researcher Yuan Longping told President Xi Jinping on Sunday that he hopes his hybrid rice will one day be grown throughout the world.

The elderly Yuan met Xi at the headquarters of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, where Xi also met with recipients of the "Model Workers" title just ahead of International Workers' Day, which falls on May 1.

Yuan recently began the fourth phase of a hybrid rice breeding experiment, targeting a yield of 1,000 kg of rice per mu (0.0667 hectares).

Yuan said exports of hybrid rice should be permitted and seed companies should get greater support so as to expand the rice's global reach.

Xi previously met Yuan in 1998, when Xi was in charge of agricultural work in east China's Fujian Province. Research on hybrid rice began in 1996 as part of government efforts to ensure food security.

Xi also chatted with other model workers, including an aerospace scientist, a village chief, a steel company employee and the country's first female tractor driver.

Chang Guoli, the head of a research team at Weichai Power, an automobile and machinery company in east China's Shandong Province, is one of the model workers. Her work includes testing engines in high-altitude regions and places with extreme weather.

Xi said skin care products and other protective measures should be used to protect Chang and her female colleagues from sunburns.

Xi also showed concerned about the health of Guo Mingyi, a 54-year-old iron mine worker who was honored for his contributions to needy families.

Guo has spent half of his salary in recent years to pay for schooling for 180 needy children. He has also donated blood regularly for the last 20 years.

"As frequently as you donate blood, can that compromise your health?" Xi asked Guo. "Take care of your health."

"Happiness does not fall out of the blue and dreams will not come true by themselves. We need to be down-to-earth and work hard," Xi said.

He also called on society and the public to respect workers and their work.

"We should uphold the idea that working hard is the most honorable, noblest, greatest and most beautiful virtue," he said.

Xi pledged to protect the rights and interests of workers and ensure social justice so that all workers can live a dignified life.
A policewoman leads a group of fishermen to affirm the oath of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on a vessel in Changle county, Fuzhou, Fujian province, June 30. The border force held the special session, organizing fishermen who are already CPC members to reaffirm their oaths in celebration of the 94th anniversary of the Partys founding. [Photo/Xinhua]
President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang visit a museum with other State leaders on Tuesday in Beijing to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which marked the beginning of Japan's full-scale invasion of China. LAN HONGGUANG/XINHUA

An exhibition opened here Tuesday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.

Liu Yunshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, spoke at the opening ceremony. He said while documenting the historical event and remembering the fallen, the event was also a celebration of peace.

A total of 1,170 pictures and 2,834 artifacts are on show at the Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance against Japanese Aggression near Lugou Bridge, also known as Marco Polo Bridge.
Guangdong wishes to join hands with British Columbia in growing a strong and mutually beneficial business and trade relationship, said Hu Chunhua, Party secretary of the Guangdong provincial committee, on Monday in Vancouver.

"By working together, and sharing our experiences and expertise, both of our provinces will continue to grow in harmony," said Hu, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, at a China-Canada Economic and Trade Cooperation conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Hu led a Guangdong delegation of more than 200 entrepreneurs and government officials to visit BC on Sunday and Monday.

This trip aimed to continue to build on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by BC Premier Christy Clark and Governor of Guangdong province Zhu Xiaodan in November 2015, during a celebration of the 20th anniversary of sister-province relations between the two provinces. The agreement commits both provinces to collaborate on trade, investment and cultural exchange.

Clark said at the conference that the meeting was another example of a commitment to strong sister-province relations with Guangdong and working together to address climate change.

"China is actively exploring alternative energy and adopting clean technology, areas where BC excels," Clark said in her welcoming speech. "We are working together to grow trade and investment in this sector and create opportunity and jobs in British Columbia."

More than 250 Canadian companies and 150 Guangdong companies participated in the conference.

The conference included a signing ceremony for a group of Canadian and Chinese companies to build business ties and seminars on environmental protection, scientific and technological innovation, cross-border e-commerce and the One Belt One Road Initiative.

As part of Hu's visit, several BC and Guangdong companies and organizations announced major partnership deals, with potential value in the billions of dollars. Among the most significant was one between BC-based Woodfibre LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) and Guangzhou Gas Group for 1 million tons of LNG to be exported to Guangzhou over the next 25 years.

"What's most significant about these deals is the diversity of the sectors involved," said Clark, "from education and renewable energy to clean technology and medical research. We are diversifying our economy and creating a new future for trade and investment between BC and China."

In 2015, the GDP of Guangdong reached $1.17 trillion with a growth rate of 8 percent topping the whole China, according to Hu. Exports from Guangdong to Canada reached $9.5 billion, making up a sixth of China's total exports to Canada.

"In a new historic era, we believe the cooperation between Guangdong and Canada will enjoy favorable conditions and foundations, and start to write a new exciting chapter," Hu said.

For China Daily
Australian experts brainstorm on methods of strengthening relations between two peoples

Liu Qibao, China's top publicity official, attended an unprecedented dialogue with Australian Sinologists in Sydney on Friday, aiming to push for more cross-cultural communication.

In a speech delivered at the dialogue, Liu, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and head of the CPC Central Committee's Publicity Department, said Sino-Australian studies are gaining strength, with young Australian scholars joining the ranks in recent years.

"The dialogue is meant to give voice to the views and suggestions from Australian Sinologists for China-Australia cultural exchanges," Liu said, adding that "Australian Sinologists have contributed to China-Australia ties and deepened the friendship between our two nations."

He said the Australian participants at the dialogue made good suggestions, for example that Australian journalists should go to China to learn more about its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) and economy.

About 10 distinguished Australian Sinologists and China studies experts attended Friday's event, which was led by Bob Carr, former Australian foreign minister and director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

"The opening of the dialogue is a very good start to strengthening that relationship," said Carr, who opened the meeting with a warm welcome to Liu and the delegation from China.

Carr commissioned a poll last year of 1,000 Chinese business leaders in China on their views on Australia. "The results were strongly positive," he said.

Ninety-four percent of those polled viewed Australia as a favorable place to do business, he said, compared with 88 percent for the United States and 84 percent for the United Kingdom.

Carr said that 83 percent rated economic relations with Australia as "extremely important" compared with 78 percent for the UK. "It (the poll) is a measure of the strong relationship between China and Australia," he Carr.

Gary Sigley, an Australian academic who attended the dialogue and a China specialist at the University of Western Australia, said, "It is the first time a meeting of this type has taken place in Australia and at such a senior level."

Laurie Pearcey, a China scholar and executive director at the University of New South Wales, said the dialogue was an "important platform".

"For Sinologists and people active in the China space, it is important to have a meaningful and a frank dialogue with someone of Liu's level," he said.

"Liu emphasized the point that China's development is fundamentally in the world's best interest and that China's development brings opportunities for people all over the world," he said, citing China's Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as examples.
Tourists visit the Site of the First National Congress of the CPC in Shanghai. [Photo/VCG]

The First National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was secretly held at a building in Shanghai on July 23, 1921. The First National Congress of the CPC passed its resolution and elected the Central Bureau of the Party, proclaiming the founding of the CPC.

Now, as a renowned historical attraction of Shanghai, the Site of the First National Congress of the CPC has received millions of visitors from home and abroad since its opening.
President Xi Jinping has praised the deeds of a late forestry professor, who championed poverty alleviation through afforestation, saying he should be a role model for members of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Xi made the remarks in an instruction in praise of Li Baoguo, who taught at Hebei Agricultural University. Xi called him an excellent intellectual and likened him to the "foolish old man on the Taihang Mountains," a character in a Chinese fable who relentlessly tried to remove the mountains in front of his house.

Xi urged party members, cadres, educators and scientists to learn from Li, whose tireless, selfless work and spirit was for the masses.

Li will be remembered as a man who was not afraid of getting his hands dirty, as he would spend more than half the year directly involved in afforestation projects and worked closely with villagers to help them lift themselves out of poverty.

He successfully afforested more than 93,000 hectares of barren mountains and helped 100,000 farmers out of poverty.

He died of heart attack on April 10. He was 58.

Li was posthumously awarded the title of "Excellent CPC Member," the top award an individual can receive for deeds that serve the people or the state.

A seminar about Li's work was held on Sunday afternoon in Beijing.

Liu Yunshan, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, met with the members of a group publicizing Li's deeds.

Liu expressed his condolences to Li's family members and presented them with Li's certificate of excellence.

Liu said at the meeting that Li's deeds showed the CPC purpose of serving the people, asking all Party members to implement Xi's instruction and learn from Li Baoguo.

Liu urged Party members to make contributions to the cause of the Party and the people, build a benign image of honesty, uprightness and dedication, and asked Party organizations at all levels to make Li a role model in a bid to ask Party members to learn from him and play as role models themselves.

Liu also called for learning from Li's deeds to lift more people out of poverty, and better support economic and social development. He asked publicity departments and the press to advocate Li's work.

The seminar was co-sponsored by the CPC Central Committee's Organization Department and Publicity Department, the Ministry of Education and the CPC Hebei Provincial Committee.
Yuan Longping, a Chinese agriculturalist, was born in Qianyang, Hunan province in 1930. Professor Yuan graduated from Southwest Agriculture College in 1953 and has since devoted himself to agricultural education and research.

He was currently an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Director General of China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Center, Honorary President of the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China and Vice-Chairman of Hunan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Professor Yuan was a pioneer in hybrid rice research and made remarkable achievements in this area, first developing hybrid rice in the world. The achievements of Yuan Longping greatly solved the food shortage, and provided as a solution the worldwide starvation. It is regarded as the fifth invention after China's Four Major Inventions, and is acclaimed as the Second Green Revolution.

He was awarded with many international awards, such as Gold Medal Award for the Outstanding Inventor of the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization, Science Prize of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Rank Prize for Agronomy and Nutrition of the United Kingdom, Medal of Honor for Food Security and Sustainable Development of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and Fukui International Koshihikari Rice Prize of Japan.

He came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s, when a series of natural disasters and inappropriate policies had plunged China into an unprecedented famine that caused many deaths. Since then, he has devoted himself to the research and development of a better rice breed.

In 1964, he happened to find a natural hybrid rice plant that had obvious advantages over others. Greatly encouraged, he began to study the elements of this particular type.

In 1973, in cooperation with others, he was able to cultivate a type of hybrid rice species which had great advantages. It yielded 20 percent more per unit than that of common ones.

The next year their research made a breakthrough in seeding. They successfully developed a set of technologies for producing indica (long-grained non-glutinous) rice, putting China in the lead worldwide in rice production. For this achievement, he was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."

In 1979, their technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of new China.

At present, as much as 50 percent of China's total rice fields grow Yuan Longping's hybrid rice species, yield 60 percent of the rice production in China. Due to Yuan's hard work, China's total rice output rose from 5.69 billion tons in 1950 to 19.47 billion tons last year, about 300 billion kilograms more have been produced over the last twenty years. The annual yield is enough to feed 60 million people.

The "Super Rice" Yuan is now working on yields are 30 percent higher than those of common rice. A record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare was registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.
After retiring, former government official Yang Shanzhou spent 22 years planting trees and bringing relative prosperity to a small town in Yunnan province. Yang Wanli reports.

Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Festival, on April 5, is when Chinese pay tribute to their ancestors by visiting and cleaning their gravesites. But for 330,000 residents from Yaoguan, a small town in southwest Yunnan province, there is another person to remember this year.

Yang Shanzhou, a former government official who spent his 22-year-long retirement planting trees on the once-barren mountains and helping locals grow cash crops to improve their lives, died on Oct 10, 2010.

"It's almost legendary how an old man changed so many people's lives. It was not an obligation for a retired official and he never earned any money from what he did," says Wu Lianzhang, a town official.

Farmer Zhang Hongfa, 57, recalled the year, 1988, when Yang first arrived in his hometown.

The family was living in a mud-and-straw hut and there was not enough grain to eat, so they were living on corn powder and Chinese yam.

Life began to improve soon after the arrival of Yang, then 60, and about to retire as Party secretary of Baoshan municipal committee.

Wu says, at the time, few families could afford a brick house, electricity was not available and there was little water and few trees on Daliangshan Mountain.

"The mountain lost its trees to support the manufacturing industry, only grass and shrubs remained," Wu says. "We had to get water from 5 km away. A round trip took about an hour."

The lack of water meant locals had a bath just twice a month and washed with a towel in a basin of water.

"The income of a farmer was 6 yuan (92 US cents) per month, which was barely enough to cover the cost of food at that time," Wu adds.

Yang decided to help relieve poverty, mainly through growing trees. On Mar 4, 1988, 17 locals started helping Yang to plant trees, never imagining the work would continue for the next 22 years.

"Yang had an astonishing determination. In the first 10 years (of the project), he lived in a shelter on the mountain," says Zi Xuehong, who worked with Yang for 22 years. "He brought saplings from 300 km away on horses and collected nuts people threw away to plant on the mountain."

Yang used his pension to provide salaries to 17 workers, while the local government provided an additional 70 yuan for food.

Daliangshan Mountain is now covered by 4,800 hectares of greenery, including 3.3 hectares of orchards and 47 hectares of tea plantation.

Cash crop plantations have improved people's living conditions, Wu says.

Mud-and-straw huts are rare and the average annual income for a family has increased to 20,000 yuan ($3,055), Wu says, adding more than 40 families in Yaoguan's Leidashu village bought motorcycles or cars in 2010.

Apart from planting trees, Yang also called on experts to give guidance to locals about farming.

Thanks to Yang, forest coverage in Shidian jumped from 17.1 percent in 1988, to 44.8 percent in 2009. He also helped provide water to 25,000 people in 11 villages. Streams from the mountain provide water for more than 2,000 hectares of sugarcane.

In September 2009, Yang handed over Daliangshan forest to Shidian county government, worth 300 million yuan ($45.8 million), saying he was just a local government representative and he was returning the mountain to its original owner.

When Yang died of lung cancer, he left behind just 40,000 yuan ($6,111), only enough for the funerals of his wife and himself.

"Keep one half for my wife's funeral. I don't want to trouble others and that's all I have," he said in his will.
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Changing political climate 'triggering concerns' from tour operators, others

The government has never set quotas for mainland tourists traveling across the Taiwan Straits, the spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday about a recent decline in mainland tourists to the island.

"The change in tourist numbers is mainly driven by the market and based on the willingness of tourism operators and tourists. The government has never set any quota to limit the number of tourists traveling to Taiwan," spokesman An Fengshan said at a news conference on Wednesday. An is also the deputy director of the office's media affairs section.
The Chinese animated film Monkey King: Hero Is Back is set to be screened in the United States. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The Chinese film and TV industry wants better "foreign voices" on overseas screens.

Translation is still a problem, though. At least, that is the consensus of a recent symposium co-organized by the Ministry of Culture and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.

During a 10-day Sino-Foreign Audiovisual Translation and Dubbing Cooperation Workshop and Symposium in both Beijing and Shanghai, which ended on Wednesday, nearly 60 filmmakers, translators and film company managers from 30 countries shared their insights on how to better promote Chinese productions in their home countries with more approachable channels for audiences.

Nussipzhanov Yertay, a symposium attendee and a major promoter of Chinese films and TV series in Kazakhstan, says he watched last year's popular 48-eposide spy thriller The Disguiser within five days.

"I was looking for someone to translate it into Kazakh, but it has to be someone savvy in history with a wide international horizon rather than someone who does only direct translation," he says.

"When I went to a film studio in Beijing, I was shown some clips of Chinese films, which are dubbed in Russian," Yertay recalls.

"Frankly speaking, I don't quite understand some parts.

"The quality of dubbing and translation needs to be improved. A good work shouldn't be dragged back by dubbing."

This is not a singular case.

Michael Sinterniklaas, founder of NYAV Post, a New York-based recording studio, says Chinese and English translations in cinema can be better.

"When you spend so much money to shoot a film, it is equally important to spend money on dubbing for overseas promotion," he says.

"In the past, we've seen that China is a place full of technology and cultural creativity, but the efficiency of our cooperation can be improved."

NYAV Post's most recent project has been to dub for last year's Chinese hit animation Monkey King: Hero Is Back, which soon will be screened in the United States.

Deanna Gao, founder of the China Film Festival in Paris, says: "In most cases, dubbing is replaced by subtitles to save money and time. But subtitles are difficult to read for many people, like children."

Nevertheless, in China, dubbed foreign films have become rarer in cinemas, and that may partially explain why Chinese films rely more on subtitles than dubbing when they are exported.

Meanwhile, a report released by Beijing Normal University in March shows 70 percent of overseas filmgoers are unsatisfied with subtitles in Chinese films.

Gong Lanwei, president of the Australian International Chinese Film Festival, says that ticket holders for award-winning Chinese films sometimes leave the cinema before the end due to poor translation of subtitles.

Veteran Chinese film producer Yue Xiaomei says making a dubbed version is like re-creating a film, and thus demands more attention.

"We don't encourage foreigners to translate Chinese films. It's difficult for them to capture some cultural meanings," says Zhang Shufang, president of China Broadcasting Media.

"However, the dubbed voice must come from a native speaker of foreign languages and the postproduction needs to be completed in their home countries."

Related:

Officials urge more cooperation in films and TV series translation
British actor IanMcKellen meets an audience for the Shakespeare Lives program during the ongoing Shanghai International Film Festival. [Photo provided to China Daily]

At 77, Ian McKellen surprised a 900-strong Shanghai audience with his excellent memory in a recent master talk in Shanghai Theater Academy.

Pick a Shakespeare stage play, and the iconic British actor could quickly recite lines from the work.

And he was disarmingly honest.

"I just did it for Shanghai. I don't do it all the time. So on the night before that day, I started to run through all the paragraphs at bedtime and was unable to fall asleep," he tells China Daily with a big smile on Monday.

One of the greatest actors of his generation, McKellen recently visited the Shanghai International Film Festival, as part of British Council's Shakespeare Lives, a program celebrating William Shakespeare's works as the world marks the 400th anniversary of his death.

In his acting career spanning around half a century, McKellen has between 1960 and 2007 acted in around 20 films adapted from Shakespeare's works.

"Shakespeare is a huge part of my life," he says.

When McKellen was 8 years old, his parents took him to a local theater to watch a Shakespeare play, which made him fall in love with the master and his works. Theaters and plays also acted as a refuge for him to escape from the stress and sorrow of wartime Britain.

"For me, Shakespeare is religion, or a god, because he was so all-knowing. Even 400 years after his death, human nature doesn't change," he says. "People could still be ambitious, or stupid, or greedy, or still want to tell other people what to do. All what happens now are old stories of Shakespeare."

To date, the world's largest movie site IMDb lists Shakespeare as the "writer" of 1,120 titles and some of the earliest films are adapted from Shakespeare's works.

Shakespeare has more films than any other writers credited to his name. And Shakespeare has been in film history right from the beginning, says McKellen.

As it is a part of the Shakespeare Lives program, eight Shakespeare films are being screened at the ongoing 19th Shanghai International Film Festival.

The titles include Richard III, starring McKellen as the title character; Romeo and Juliet (1968), which won two Oscars; and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

All the films are affected by the personalities of the directors and actors, and the time the films were made. So you can see a display of different approaches to Shakespeare, says McKellen.

McKellen, too, has his own approach to Shakespeare, and it is a bit more modern.

He says the biggest difficulty when doing a Shakespeare film or stage play is to understand the lines.

When asked if there is any shortcut, McKellen quickly picks up his iPad to open an app.
A scene from the film Song of the Phoenix featuring veteran actor Tao Zeru in the main role. [Photo provided to China Daily]

A week after Song of the Phoenix opened, it garnered a paltry 3 million yuan ($454,000) in box-office takings, barely enough to cover the marketing cost. Now, a month after its May 6 opening, it has collected 85 million yuan, a rare feat for an art-house film. What happened in between was an eye-popping act by its 63-year-old producer, a man whom I have known for a while, and whom I talked to recently in a post-screening dialogue.

Fang Li was in tears when he saw me. My eyes were moist, too, as were those of many in the audience. I hugged him, a true hero who almost single-handedly saved what Martin Scorsese calls "a lovely little film by a giant in filmmaking".

Yes, what happened off-screen was just as dramatic, if not more so, as the story on-screen.

On May 12, when the screening rate of the film dipped below four per 1,000 screens, Fang knelt down and begged China's film exhibitors for more screenings.

The real-time video went viral.

Then, as people flocked to movie theaters across the nation, its screening rate shot up, to 10 percent at one point, way past the first-week performance, which is usually the peak for any film.

Fang Li talks about "the 80-million-yuan kowtow" in a recent post-screening event. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Some suspected that the video was a marketing ploy, but Zhang Wei, vice-president of the China Film Criticism Society, provided details that confirmed the incident.

Shortly before what's now called "the 80-million-yuan kowtow", Zhang and a bunch of students were with Fang, and they extolled the latter's integrity in continuing to support the country's quality films.

"He was touched, and maybe he drank some wine afterward," says Zhang.

Fang brushed this off, saying "Had I known my act would have this result, I would not have waited a week before kneeling."

Fang told me that his act was inspired by the internet meme "guiqiu"a humorous term that literally means to kneel down and begrather than by an ancient practice in China, which carried more solemnity and self-debasement.

"I would not do it even for my own films," says Fang.

A scene from the film Song of the Phoenix featuring veteran actor Tao Zeru in the main role. [Photo provided to China Daily]

When River Road, a quiet, beautiful film he funded, grossed less than 1 million yuan in 2014, he did not think of begging the exhibitors.

Even though he is one of the producers of Song of the Phoenix, he has no financial stake in the film. He calls himself "a volunteer producer" who provided resources, including some marketing expenses and his team, as a donation.

Fang's act was for Wu Tianming, the director of the film.

Wu, a renowned filmmaker whose credits include Old Well and Life, a hugely influential work from the 1980s, is widely considered the godfather of China's fifth-generation directors.

When he was in charge of Xi'an Film Studio back then, he broke convention by bankrolling rookies like Zhang Yimou.

For those asking the hypothetical question "Would Wu have knelt for more screenings?" the answer is hereas studio head Wu knelt to beg mediocre peers to not hoard resources so that talented newcomers would have a chance.

Wu died in 2014, a few days after Song of the Phoenix was completed.

A scene from the film Song of the Phoenix featuring veteran actor Tao Zeru in the main role. [Photo provided to China Daily]

His daughter, Wu Yanyan, then tried to sell her father's swan song to China's distributorswith no successuntil she met Fang.

Fang was trained as an earth and ocean scientist and earned an MBA in the United States.

He has a business in Silicon Valley, but started to produce films, mostly art-house fare, early this century.

His biggest project was the 2014 directorial debut by best-selling author Han Han.

The Continent grossed a whopping 632 million yuan.

However, Fang does not agree that he makes "art films".

A scene from the film Song of the Phoenix. [Photo provided to China Daily]

He tells me that the films he has produced, including Song of the Phoenix, belong in the genre of "drama".

He defines "drama" as movies that tell stories and "art films" as experimental works with thin plots.

Yet, Chinese translations are so confusing that little distinction can be made by a layperson with no knowledge of nuance.

Whatever label one may place on it, Song of the Phoenix has now gained three layers of meaning, making it ripe for future film treatment.

The story is about a patriarchal musician who plays the traditional Chinese instrument suona, a high-pitched double-reed with a sound similar to the oboe.

The master is meticulous about passing on the techniqueand the social stature associated with itto the next generation.

But he is chagrined to find that he could be the last of the line because modern, Western instruments, represented by a brass band in the film, have eroded suona's popularity.

In a similar vein, Wu Tianming was from a dying breed, insisting on making films that are personal rather than popular.

A scene from the film Song of the Phoenix.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Unlike his protege Zhang Yimou, Wu did not switch to so-called commercial films. Now, Fang has taken up the baton, believing that if "films with a soul" (in Fang's words) are made, people will turn up to watch them.

At least half of China's filmdom endorsed the film, ranging from pop idols like Lu Han and Fan Bingbing to royalty-like figures Ang Lee and Feng Xiaogang.

Zhang and Martin Scorsese each taped a short recommendation, which are shown before the film.

Had they all charged for their endorsements, the fees would have added to billions of yuan.

Even critics who noticed flaws in the film refrained from publicly pointing them out. Still, the public did not show up. That should give pause to anyone who pays big money for celebrity endorsements.

I joked with Fang that he had used the most effective trick in promoting a small film.

Other forms have been used before, such as open letters or a boisterous fracas with exhibitors, but none has had much effect.

Still others have proposed setting up art-house cinema chains, a platform that's going out of fashion even in developed countries.

Fang has an innovative idea: He wants regulators to place a cap on the screening rate of every film, Chinese or foreign, for instance, a maximum of 30 percent of screens for any film and a minimum of 3 percent.

"That would guarantee diversity," he says.

Related:

Arthouse film: From swan song to rebirth of the phoenix?
Photo taken on April 5, 2016 shows the lighthouse on Zhubi Reef of Nansha Islands in the South China Sea, South China. [Photo/Xinhua]

In a recent statement on the dispute with the Philippines in the South China Sea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated China's adherence to the settlement of the disputes through bilateral talks.

It urged the Philippines to immediately stop the unilateral arbitration case it has launched and return to the road of bilateral talks to resolve the South China Sea dispute.

It is widely believed that the Philippines' unilateral arbitration case not only further complicates the South China Sea issue, but also risks bringing its ties with China to a dead end. It is thus sensible for the Philippines to stop the arbitral procedures as early as possible for the sake of bilateral ties.

Beijing and Manila reached an explicit bilateral consensus that the disputes should be settled through bilateral talks. By initiating the arbitration, the Philippines has not only breached that consensus, but also the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

This explains why China's stance on the arbitration case has won the endorsement of international law experts, including those from the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and Argentina, who find China's "non-acceptance and non-participation" stance reasonable and talks as the correct way to settle the dispute.

Some insightful Philippine experts and scholars have also urged Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte to hold bilateral talks with China, believing such talks are the right approach to re-build bilateral mutual trust.

China and the Philippines have witnessed ever-expanding cooperation in multiple fields since diplomatic ties were established in 1975. With the conclusion of China's talks with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on a bilateral free trade area, ties between the Philippines and China can embrace more opportunities for development.

Manila should not allow itself to be swayed by negative factors from the positive track on which general Sino-Philippine cooperation has been progressing.--Beijing Youth Daily
Members of T-ns SOWL hold placards to encourage young people to vote in the summer's House of Councillors elections outside the Parliament building on June 10, 2016, Tokyo, Japan. The Teens Stand up to Oppose War Law (T-ns SOWL) is a voluntary activist group of high school students whose goals are to protect democracy and pacifism in Japan. This year's House of Councillors elections is the first time that 18 and 19 year old can vote, and demonstration organizers claimed that 1500 attended the event.[Photo/IC]

Japan lodged a serious protest over Chinese warships sailing close to the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea last week, with the Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Akitaka Saiki reportedly summoning Cheng Yonghua, the Chinese ambassador to Tokyo, at midnight to "express serious concern". Beijing News commented on Wednesday:

Determined to revise Japan's Constitution to make the country "a normal state" again, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is willing to go to great lengths to solicit public support at home, especially as the upper house election is drawing near.

Some Japanese opposition parties have made progress in thwarting Abe's long-held aspiration to revise the country's pacifist Constitution, and thousands of protesters gathered in downtown Tokyo earlier this month calling on Abe to resign and for a law allowing the military to fight overseas to be overturned.

Just a few days before the protest, Abe had announced a decision to delay a sales tax increase again by two-and-a-half years, which signals to many the failure of so-called Abenomics.

Smearing China over the Diaoyu Islands issue and playing the "China threat" card, to some extent, may help him dilute public discontent.

In essence, his true intention is to improve his administration's approval rate and enhance the Washington-Tokyo military alliance.

The United States has repeatedly claimed that the Diaoyu Islands fall within the scope of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, which explains why the Abe administration keeps stoking "anti-China" sentiments among the Japanese public and seeking to portray Japan as a victim of the postwar international order.
One report was about a college student in Zhengzhou, Central China's Henan province, who borrowed 8,000 yuan ($1,214) at first but had to repay about 80,000 yuan in accumulated debt and interest after just six months through a series of repayment borrowings. He finally committed suicide as he couldn't pay.

Some lenders even force college students to take nude photos with their identity cards as "receipts" for the loans, and threaten to make them public if they don't pay up.

Third-party internet finance platforms always attract college students, who are willing to borrow despite the high interest. They can easily get loans a few hours after providing some simple personal information like their identification numbers, college information and family information through the apps of the loan providers.

However, once the students fail to pay what they owe on time, they are often forced to promote such loans to their friends and classmates, which forms a pyramid scheme.

The Ministry of Education and China Banking Regulatory Commission issued an announcement in April that requires stronger supervision of loans to students.
Alibaba's Executive Chairman Jack Ma delivers a speech at an investor conference at the company's headquarters in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, June 14, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]

Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, courted controversy this week when he said many fake products are even better than branded goods. His comment seemed to be part of his fight back after Alibaba was driven out of the anti-counterfeiting coalition and widely criticized as a "platform" to sell fake goods.

In May, Alibaba Group was suspended from membership of the Washington-based International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, or IACC, only one month after it gained its membership, because of the accusations that it failed to control fake goods on its online e-commerce platform. Is Alibaba's work of fighting against fake goods less than satisfactory, or are the critics in the IACC unfair to Alibaba?

Alibaba is the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Its customer to Customer (C2C) model, represented by its online platform Taobao, and Business to Customer (B2C) model, represented by its online platform Tmall, are Alibaba's major business models. In 2014 Alibaba officially launched its Tmall platform, on which international brands could directly sell their products to Chinese customers.

Alibaba has been criticized for fake goods ever since it was founded. Not all the commodities sold on Alibaba's platform are fake. But as a third-party platform that has millions of small online shops, low prices are the most important means of competition among sellers. This is why it is so difficult to eliminate fake goods from the platform. Although Tmall has comparatively strict requirements on market access, nowadays there are still fake goods appearing on the platform.

Alibaba has made great efforts to fight against fake goods in recent years, especially putting its strategic focus on B2C platform Tmall, which is characterized by brand and quality, instead of the C2C third-party platform Taobao. Alibaba's IACC membership indicates that the Coalition has recognized Alibaba's efforts in fighting against fake goods.

According to Alibaba, it has established a channel to safeguard intellectual property in 2002, even earlier than the establishment of the Taobao platform. In 2005 Alibaba established a security department to maintain account security, information protection and anti-fraud work. In 2011 Alibaba launched a specific offline campaign to crack down on fake products, in which Alibaba employees voluntarily fight against offline fake goods through cooperating with departments of industrial and business administration and public security.

In Dec, 2015, Alibaba established a department to deal with e-commerce platforms issues, protecting intellectual property and cracking down on fake goods through cooperating with related government authorities.
Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. [Photo/CHINA DAILY]

Jack Ma's comment that fake products made today are "better quality and better priced" than the real goods should not be taken as a reflection of the company's failure to curb counterfeits, counterfeit experts said.

The e-commerce CEO made his comments on Tuesday at an investor meeting in Hangzhou. According to reports, he said the better quality of the fake goods is due to many of them being made at similar factories, sometimes with the same labor force using the same materials.

"They are exactly the same factories, exactly the same raw materials but they do not use the names," Ma said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

He also said the problem of counterfeit goods cannot be solved "100 percent, because it's the fight against human instinct", according to The New York Times. "But we can solve the problem better than any government, than any organization, than [anybody] in the world."

Ma's remarks were made in response to persistent criticism from luxury brands that the company is not doing enough to get rid of counterfeit goods on its sprawling e-commerce platform Taobao, where it is easy to find fake designer bags and jewelry.

Peter Yu, professor of law at Texas A&M University, said in an interview that counterfeits can be classified into various categories, with Ma most likely referencing "A-grade" goods that are so difficult to tell apart that they can only be verified by lab technicians or the original manufacturer.

"From the perspective of brands, when they see fake goods on Alibaba, they believe that Alibaba hasn't done enough to enforce and protect intellectual property rights, and that Alibaba should do more," said Yu, who is also co-director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A&M.

"But the part of the story that isn't emphasized is how much money and effort those auction sites have already put in to police the networks," he said.

Yu said that fake goods are also available on eBay, Alibaba's American equivalent, but the scale of counterfeiting in China is much larger, so even with the resources that Alibaba is putting into combat the proliferation of fakes, brands might still feel the efforts are inadequate.

Alibaba had been criticized by the Chinese government for failing to curb fakes, and late last year the US government issued a stern warning to the company, saying it could be added back to the "Notorious Markets List" if it does not do a better job enforcing piracy rules.

Alibaba had been admitted as a general member of the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a group that represents many luxury brands, but the category was suspended a month after it had been admitted under the new category. The organization's board of directors said the suspension was due to concerns from members of the group, which the Journal reported included Michael Kors. A representative from Michael Kors declined to comment.

"I think the focus of the conversation in the industry isn't to point fingers at Alibaba or any marketplace, but about making sure that our technologies are advanced, that they're easy to apply, track and trace," said Rich Cremona, CEO of OpSec, a brand protection company whose clients include other brands in the IACC, of which it is also a member.

Cremona said in an interview that Alibaba works closely with its clients to ensure that goods are legitimate, and that there has been a "real effort for many of these online market places to step up enforcement to define legitimacy".

At the investor meeting, Alibaba forecast that its sales through the year ending March 2017 will rise at least 48 percent, which is the company's first financial forecast since the US Securities Exchange Commissionannounced it was investigating the company's accounting practices.

Contact the writer at amyhe@chinadailyusa.com.
Tencent Holdings Ltd is reportedly nearing a multi-billion deal to acquire Supercell Oy, the Finnish maker of the popular Clash of Clans mobile game, and an industry observer said the deal would make the Chinese internet giant a powerhouse in the mobile game industry.

Citing people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Tencent is in talks with SoftBank Group Corp to buy the Japanese company's majority stake in Supercell and is in discussions with several financial investors, including Hillhouse Capital Group, to join in the purchase as co-investors. The Journal said the deal could value Supercell at more than $9 billion. The Journal also reported in May that Tencent was looking at Supercell.

Tony Lam, a partner at mobile game design consultant Adrian Crook & Associates in Vancouver, British Columbia, said a Supercell acquisition by Tencent would place the Chinese firm in the top tier of mobile game providers.

"This is in line with their gaming strategy of acquiring the top players in large genres...like their acquisition of majority shares of Riot Games and League of Legends in 2011 which solidified them as a top tier player in the MOBA and eSports genre," Lam said.

Games are one of Tencent's biggest business areas. About half of the 32 billion yuan ($4.88 billion) revenue Tencent generated in the first quarter came from online games.

Six members of the Finnish games industry founded Helsinki-based Supercell in 2010 and it has launched only four titles -- Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beachand Clash Royale -- in the US and Europe, according to the Journal. All the titles were among the top 20 mobile games by revenue on Apple Inc.'s iOS system as of May, according to videogame research firm Newzoo, the newspaper said. Supercell's games are free to download. It earns money by selling virtual goods that help players advance.

Lam doesn't think Tencent would be overpaying for Supercell if the purchase price is around $9 billion. "At less than 10x (times) income and less than 4x 2015 revenues, it certainly doesn't seem to be overpaying. In May of 2015, when Softbank increased their ownership in Supercell to 73 percent, that deal was valued at around $5.5 billion so while there definitely a premium being paid, it doesn't seem out of line with a fair valuation," he said.

Lam said he doubted that acquiring Supercell would raise concerns by regulatory officials because the global mobile games market is about $37 billion in size and Supercell's revenue is less than 10 percent of that. "This acquisition certainly doesn't give Tencent a dominant position in the still-fractured market," he added.

Supercell has topped the list of App Annie's Top 52 publishers for 2014 and 2015. The Helsinki-based game developer said in March that posted a profit of $930 million on revenue of $2.3 billion in 2015. It also claimed active daily users totaling 100 million around the world.

Lam said this is more evidence that the mobile game market is a big business with global appeal and has room to grow. "Despite some grumblings about the Free-2-Play model, the business of mobile games has never looked brighter," he said.

Contact the writer at paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com.
Front left to right: SES Vice Chairman Robert Rigdon, Deputy Governor of Hekou District Zhao Mingyin and Deputy GM of CESI Huang Jiangtao shake hands after signing the agreement in Dongying, Shandong on June 14. [Provided to China Daily]

Houston-based Synthesis Energy Systems (SES) announced on Wednesday that the company, along with state-owned China Environment State Investment Company (CESI), signed a project investment and cooperation agreement with Shandong Dongying Hekou district government. Total construction investment is estimated to be $380 million.

The project will use SES Gasification Technology's clean syngas to produce lower-cost hydrogen needed for clean fuels production by refineries at the Hekou Blue Economy Industrial Park Project in Dongying, Shandong.

The planned build-out consists of multiple projects completed in phases with an estimated preliminary total investment of approximately $85 million for the first phase. The first completed facility is expected to deliver 50,000 cubic meters of 99.99 percent pure hydrogen per hour, as well as syngas and other industrial gases, to the refineries in the park.

When fully completed, the capacity of the entire project will be a combined 300,000 m3/hr of hydrogen, syngas and other industrial gases.

According to the announcement, the projects will be funded by equity from a combination of SES, CESI and funding partners along with debt financing.

In addition, this project, and the previously announced SES-CESI Dongying pipeline hydrogen project in Lijin Binhai New District, will be used as demonstration sites for energy conservation and emission reduction through the capture and utilization of carbon dioxide.

The Hekou government will assist in coordinating with the local Shengli Oil Field for the demonstration of using the projects' carbon dioxide for oil field flooding. The project will apply for China's National Demonstration Project status.

"Dongying City is in the backyard of Shengli Oil Field and has the highest concentration of local refineries in China," said Wang Wei, CESI Chairman. "With the policies to drive the refineries away from the city and into the industrial parks, and with the requirement to improve the quality of oil products and the relaxation of rules on the rights to import and use imported crude oil, the demand from the local refineries for hydrogen will grow. Our Lijin and Hekou coal-to-hydrogen projects are extremely attractive."

"We are pleased to move forward with our second major clean energy undertaking in China together with CESI, in support of the government's environmental and economic initiatives to centralize our industry into cleaner and more efficient industrial parks," said DeLome Fair, SES president and CEO.

Fair said that the timeline established includes a target to complete the required project development steps by the end of 2016, which is necessary for the project to apply for government approvals and to complete the financing necessary to begin construction.
The legendary emperors of China had a human side too.

Museum goers in San Francisco will get an intimate glimpse into the artistic and personal lives of Chinese emperors from the 12th to 20th century through a collection of their most cherished belongings.

An exhibition titled Emperors' Treasures, on display from June 17 through Sept 18 at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, will showcase nearly 150 pieces of imperial artwork, including exquisite paintings, ceramics and jades.

The exhibition explores the identities of nine key rulers -- eight emperors and one empress -- and how their tastes shaped not only the imperial court, but Chinese aesthetics as well.

On loan from the Taipei Palace Museum, the show has traveled to the US before, in the 1960s and again in 1995, but many of the items in this exhibition are coming to the US for the first time.

The stories behind the objects were never told from an angle that aims at making the emperors human and offers intimate moments with the audience, said Jay Xu, curator of the exhibition and director of the Asian Art Museum.

"We don't want those emperors to assume remote, abstract and intimidating postures," he said. "This exhibition is designed to enable our audience to have a very intimate encounter with past emperors, to humanize them through the works of art that they created, commissioned or collected to tell a human story about who they were."

The highlights include the masterful landscape and calligraphy of Emperor Huizong, recognized for his distinctive, influential "slender-gold" script.

Xu explained that unlike in the West, Chinese emperors' portraits were only stored in ancestral temples rather than hung on the wall, so calligraphy was very important as one's personality was expressed by it.

Another rare exhibit is a blue and white Ming flat vase, depicting Western Asian entertainers, one of only two surviving in the world. It illustrates both Ming dynasty porcelain craftsmanship and cultural exchanges between China and the outside world in the early 15th century.

The "holy grail" of Chinese porcelains -- a wine cup with a cock and hen with three chicks -- is not only rare but also "striking", said Xu.

"The image of the rooster, mother hen and three chicks is very warm and homely. It's a family portrait of an ordinary coop," he said. "Why on earth would an emperor want to choose this image for one of his most precious cups? I think you can relate to a yearning for family." Among the objects brought to the US for the first time is the celebrated "meat-shaped stone," a jasper stone intricately carved to resemble a portion of braised pork belly.

"Those emperors lived in the largest palace in the world, and yet they liked to stay in a small private corner and play with the small objects as toys, as cultural nourishment. This is their human side," said Xu.

In honor of the stone's unusual appeal, more than a dozen San Francisco chefs, both up-and-coming and established, will feature versions of the mouthwatering, slow simmered braised pork belly in their restaurants and the museum's cafe will offer the dish to visitors throughout the exhibition's run.

Contact the writer at liazhu@chinadailyusa.com.
Jack Ma delivers a speech at the forum. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/China Daily]

Jack Ma, founder and chairman of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, on Thursday proposed the establishment of digital free trade zones for small businesses and called for Russia to become an e-hub intersection connecting Asia and Europe.

An e-hub is a digital free trade zone designed specifically for small businesses. Ma said services including logistics, payments, financing and inspections would be provided.

"Trains have stations and aircraft have airports. We should build an e-road that connects every e-hubs around the world. It would be a paradise for SMEs to sell products to serve anywhere in the world," Ma said.

"Russia has very good chance to be one of the hubs," Ma said.

Jack Ma, (left), chairman of Alibaba Group, chats with Kevin Rudd, president of Asia Society Policy Institute, former prime minister of Australia, on Thursday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. [Photo by Xu Jingxing/China Daily]

Ma made the remarks at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that opened on Thursday and will last until Saturday. The three-day forum is an annual international conference dedicated to the most pressing economic and business issues facing Russia and the rest of the world.

Ma's proposal is part of his ambition to build a global e-commerce platform called Electronic World Trade Platform that serves the interests of SMEs which have been left out of the free trade regime of the world in the past.

"In most countries, SMEs contribute over 50 percent of the GDP and even higher percentage for employment. But SMEs face challenges such as poor access to global markets, complex regulations and certifications designed for big companies, and lack of access to financing," Ma said.

"We urge G20 countries to support the growth of SMEs," said Ma, who is also the chair of the Business 20 (B20) SME Development Taskforce. B20 is the business advisory group to the G20.

Cross-border shopping is the fastest-growing sector in Russia's e-commerce market.

Ma said in an interview in 2015 that about one in 10 people from Russia made online purchases through Alibaba's AliExpress, a site that allows shoppers around the world to buy goods at whole sale prices. "Hundreds of thousands" of packages are sent from China to Russia on a daily basis, according to the e-commerce giant.
Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming (second from right) and China Merchants Bank President and CEO Tian Huiyu (first from right) attend the opening ceremony of CMB London Branch on June 16. [Photo by Cecily Liu/chinadaily.com.cn]

China Merchants Bank became the first Chinese joint-stock commercial bank to open a branch in London on Thursday, highlighting significant market-driven demand for Chinese financial service providers to expand internationally to serve increasing Chinese investment abroad.

The Shenzhen-based China Merchants Bank, established in 1987, is China's sixth largest bank, and the world's 16th largest bank. It first established a London presence in 2009 as a representative office, and with the launch of a branch China Merchants Bank will be offering a range of wholesale banking businesses serving corporate clients, including deposits, financing and currency clearing.

Tian Huiyu, president and CEO of China Merchants Bank, said the establishment of the bank's London branch is a vote of confidence for London's strength as a leading financial center.

Tian added the move is also an integral part of its overseas growth strategy.

"With Sino-UK relations entering a golden era, and bilateral investment continue to grow, London's position as the second largest offshore renminbi center is consolidating. More and more Chinese corporates are investing in the UK, and the establishment of a branch in London allows us to provide financial services to those companies following a global strategy," said Tian.

CMB London Branch's opening follows in the footsteps of three Chinese banks with branches in London, which are Bank of China, China Construction bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of Communications also have subsidiaries in London.

Liu Xiaoming, Chinese ambassador to the UK, said the steady stream of Chinese banks coming here is a clear indication that Chinese banks are now going global, and is also evidence of a very strong China UK cooperation.

Liu said the CMB London Branch launch is also significant as it is the first of its kind of a Chinese bank in Britain which has set up by a joint-stock bank.
A month-long book fair is launched on Thursday in Belgrade, Serbia, to help local people get a better understanding of China ahead of President Xi Jinping's state visit. [Photo/Xinhua]

A series of cultural activities showcasing Chinese culture are being held on Thursday in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, ahead of President Xi Jinping's state visit.

Six bookstores in Belgrade are participating in a book fair to promote ancient and modern Chinese literature. The launch ceremony of the book fair, organized by China's State Council Information Office, was held at the Delfi bookstore in Belgrade.

Among the 105 volumes on display at the fair are ones featuring information on China's history and cultural heritage, as well as others featuring China's politics and economy. According to the organizers, the fair will last one month.

The Chinese movie week is also expected to kick off on Thursday in Belgrade, during which six movies will be shown between June 16 and 22.

Xi will pay state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan from June 17 to 22, the Foreign Ministry announced on Monday. Xi will also attend the 16th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tashkent, Uzbekistan on June 23 and 24.

On Tuesday, a similar book fair was also launched in Warsaw, capital of Poland, with about 100 bookstores across nine Polish cities taking part.

Many of the works featured are in English, but there are also 20 titles in Polish on display.

Guo Weimin, vice-minister of the State Council Information Office, said these books will help people better understand China, especially its modern politics, economy and culture.
Six Chinese movies will be shown in Serbia between June 16 and 22 as a part of Serbia Chinese Movie Week.

Organized by the State Council Information Office, the film festival features some of the latest blockbusters from China. To the Fore, a film about professional cyclists, was screened at the opening ceremony on Thursday.

The movies will be shown in theaters in Belgrade, the nation's capital, and Novi Sad, its second-largest city.

The latest Chinese productions are targeted at the younger generation of Serbians to give them a taste of contemporary China's movie industry and feel connected.

President Xi Jinping will pay state visits to Serbia, Poland and Uzbekistan from June 17 to 22, China's Foreign Ministry announced on Monday.
President Xi Jinping has proposed more cooperation on major projects with Serbia ahead of his state visit to Belgrade.

A worker adjusts Chinese and Serbian flags for the upcoming visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping on the site of what used to be China's embassy, which was destroyed in NATO's 1999 bombing campaign, in Belgrade, Serbia June 16, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

China wants to share development opportunities and achievements with Serbia, Xi said in an article published by Politika, a daily Serbian newspaper.

The two countries should increase bilateral trade and investment to benefit people in both nations, Xi said.

Describing Serbia as an "eternal friend and sincere partner" of China, he highlighted the bilateral friendship that dates to the 1950s when China established diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia.

"There is a saying in Serbia that friends are the fruits of time," Xi said in his article.

The two countries will sign a number of cooperation documents covering areas including economic affairs, trade, production capacity and finance, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Denis Depoux, deputy president of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants for Asia, said Serbia is one of the hot spots for investments in Europe, as the country seeks to join the European Union.
(Photo : Facebook) Switzerland's Daetwyler has purchased Raspberry Pi maker Premier Farnell.

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Premier Farnell, the company that manufactures the $5 minicomputer Raspberry Pi, has been bought by the Swiss company Daetwyler. The Swiss components manufacturer agreed to pay $1.12 billion to acquire Premier Farnell.



Following the acquisition, Daetwyler highlighted that the two companies have a complementary product range and the merger will boost their scale and global presence.



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Lately, Swiss manufacturing and engineering companies have been cutting jobs at home and have been busy relocating to foreign markets. Many market experts believe that this has to do with the Swiss central bank's decision to abandon the ceiling for the franc against the euro. This decision has led the prices of Swiss goods to rise up.



Daetwyler distributes more than 500,000 electronic products under several brands including Nedis. The Swiss company said that the acquisition of Premier Farnell will create a group with revenues of up to 2.5 billion Swiss francs of about $2.5 billion.



Premier Farnell has been facing a lot of financial problems lately. The company's shares price has dropped by about 10 percent since September 2015. The company has been forced to cut some of its dividends and sell some non-core units due to subpar sales growth in the UK and North American markets.



To fund the purchase of Premier Farnell, Daetwyler will embark on a 200 million francs fundraising and sell some treasury shares amounting to about 60 million francs. Premier Farnell's long time majority shareholder Pema Holding will maintain its current stake.



Daetwyler said that the acquisition will bring additional earnings once it is completed. The company is aiming to finalize the deal and complete the acquisition within the last quarter of the year.



In a statement acquired by The Wall Street Journal, Daetwyler chairman Ulrich Graf said, "By combining our forces, we significantly increase our competitiveness and extend our product range, facilitating a one-stop shopping experience for our wide range of customers from a multitude of industries."



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Tagsraspberry, raspberry pi, Pi, Daetwyler, Premier Farnell
Russian aerial drone shot down by Turkey.

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The cash-poor Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is turning to cheap "kamikaze" aerial drones to destroy battlefield targets not worthy of more expensive guided missiles.



One of the aerial drone models currently used by the Russian armed forces will be modified and packed with an explosive warhead. Commanded by remote control, the drone will dive on and blast its target in much the same way as the manned Japanese Kamikaze planes did to the U.S. Navy in World War II. The drone model wasn't identified.



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As for the Russian Kamikaze drones targets, these might include enemy air defenses or tactical battlefield targets selected by the Russian army. One Russian source said the Russian Kamikaze drone will strike "top secret" targets, however. The Russian military said it soon plans to deploy this Kamikaze.



"A drone which would act similar to a fire ship is being developed now. It detonates after hitting a target," said a defense source to TASS, the Russian government's propaganda agency.



Kamikaze drones are cheaper, lighter and harder to detect compared to the larger and heavier conventional aerial drones.



The Russian Army currently has some 800 unarmed aerial drones used mostly for intelligence and reconnaissance missions.



The U.S. Army has its own Kamikaze drone, the AeroVironment Switchblade. This 2.7 kg UAV designed for use by infantry in the U.S. Army and the United States Marine Corps has a range of 10 km can be used for suicide precision strikes at distant targets. The U.S. military refers to Switchblade as the "kamikaze drone."



The recently upgraded Switchblade is small enough to be carried in a soldier's backpack and can be launched from a variety of ground, maritime and air platforms. Once engaged, Switchblade locks onto a target and flies autonomously toward it, exploding on impact. It can also be used for reconnaissance.



The U.S. Army classifies the Switchblade as a missile rather than a drone. It prefers to use the term "loitering munition" to describe it since the weapon isn't recoverable after launch.



U.S. Army commanders reported Switchblade was very effective in Afghanistan as a Kamikaze. Over 4,000 Switchblades were deployed in Afghanistan.



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TagsKamikaze Drones, Russian Army, TASS, AeroVironment Switchblade
(Photo : Cavan County Museum) This bog butter is estimated to be more than 2,000 years old and still edible.

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Cheese such as gouda and cheddar are known to age for five years to a decade, however, a 2,000 year old chunk of ancient butter, weighing around 20 pounds was uncovered under a peat bog in Ireland, where scientists say it is still edible.



Known as "bog butter" this enormous lump of butter was found by a farmer, Jack Conway, while he was cutting turf from the bog for fuel, in Emlagh Bog in, Drakerath County Meath last June 1. This odd rugby shaped object was apparently buried deep below at 16 feet, inside the bog.



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Conway was quick to realize that this strange, large object is known as bog butter and made contact with the Cavan County Museum. According to the curator of the Cavan County Museum, Savina Donohoe, this is very noteworthy, since butter a long time ago was often regarded as something very valuable, even a luxury.



During medieval times in Ireland, it was also not unusual for people to bury butter under peat bogs as they possess excellent preserving properties like low temperatures and oxygen and a highly acidic environment as well.



However, this new discovery in Emlagh Bog is rather unusual since the butter was not inside a container made of wood or inside a keg, which was a common practice for bog butter storage. Donohoe suggests that this might have been an offering to the gods.



Scientists analyzed the foliage and earth that are found covering the object, dating back the ancient relic by at least 2,000 years old. Donohoe describes this medieval delicacy as still smelling like butter, possessing a strong smell that clings on to the hands after touching and holding it, which is truly remarkable after thousands of years.



To date, the bog butter is now housed under the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin for further examination and research. According to Andy Halpin of the National Museum Irish Antiquities Division, in theory, this bog butter is still edible, but strongly advised against it.



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Tagsbog butter, Ireland, ancient butter, emlagh bog, ancient relics, irish medieval times
(Photo : University of Queensland) The Bramble Cay melomys is now extinct due to rising sea levels that drowned the mammals on its island.

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The world's first mammal to become extinct because of human caused climate change is a small rodent native to Australia, according to a new report released this week.



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This creatures is known as the Bramble Cay melomys which can only be found on small sand covered island measuring only around 10 acres, located in the Great Barrier Reef between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Scientists suggest that these small mammals went extinct due to rising sea levels.



According to author of the study, Luke Leung from the University of Queensland, ocean waters have already inundated the low lying island several times in the past 10 years, which ultimately led to the disappearance of the melomys. The study also reveals how this dramatic habitat loss was mainly caused by ocean water that drowned the animals, as most of the island is measured around 10 feet above sea level.



Between August to September 2014, the team of scientists examined and conducted a survey of the island where they failed to detect any living specimen of the rodent. The last known sighting was by a fisherman that occurred in 2009.



This intensive study was carried out by the University of Queensland with the help of the Queensland state government, as researchers are still hoping that there is still a chance for survival of the species or even a close cousin might be hiding in its habitat or even in Papua New Guinea, however, there is no such recorded sighting yet.



Rising sea levels are caused by man made greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, that trap heat in the atmosphere, leading to warming temperatures that cause the melting of glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Apart from this, water expands when it melts and becomes warmer which can take up more space, adding to global sea levels rising, according to NOAA.



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Tagsfirst mammal extinct climate change, Climate Change, endangered species, Australia, Great Barrier Reef, Bramble Cay melomys
(Photo : SpaceX) Red Dragon uses supersonic retropropulsion to slow down as it pierces the Martian atmosphere .

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It's probably a case of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," but NASA has just decided to support SpaceX's Red Dragon mission to Mars in 2018, and plans to have its own payloads aboard the next SpaceX spacecraft set to later land on Mars.



NASA said its science and space technology mission directorates have a "wish list" of technology demonstration payloads it wants on a future SpaceX Mars mission at a later date. NASA said it will try to have a payload ready for the 2018 Red Dragon mission despite there being less than 24 months before the launch window for that mission opens.



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"We've had very preliminary talks on payloads for the 2018 mission," said Steve Jurczyk, NASA associate administrator for space technology.



"The SpaceX collaboration really is an EDL (entry, descent and landing) demonstration for us," said Jurczyk.



Of special interest to NASA is Red Dragon's "supersonic retropropulsion" that enables the landing of spacecraft far heavier than is possible with NASA's current methods such as parasails and huge bouncing balls. Access to supersonic retropropulsion data remains NASA's primary interest in Red Dragon.



NASA proposes to land its astronauts on Mars in 2035 with landings by its own robot spacecraft to precede this historic event.



Jurczyk also said NASA and SpaceX have revised an existing unfunded Space Act Agreement to focus on a planned 2018 Mars lander mission, using the unmanned Red Dragon spacecraft. Under that agreement, NASA will offer technical support to SpaceX in a number of areas. For its part, SpaceX will provide NASA with data from EDL phase of Red Dragon's mission to support NASA's future Mars missions.



Jurczyk said a particular area of interest for NASA is situ resource utilization or ISRU. This means testing technologies that can extract water, oxygen and other resources from the Martian surface or atmosphere.



NASA plans to have an ISRU experiment on the Mars 2020 mission that will convert carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen. Another experiment will produce methane, which can be used as rocket fuel.



"One would be in situ resource utilization using the water in the soil at Mars to generate potable water and hydrogen and oxygen," he said.



Jurczyk said other technology demonstration payloads could include systems that could generate 10 kilowatts or more of electrical power on the surface.



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TagsSpaceX, Red Dragon, NASA, Steve Jurczyk, Mars
(Photo : Getty Images) President Barack Obama said the Orlando mass shooting was an "act of terror and an act of hate" as he addressed the nation hours after the worst mass shooting in US history unfolded during the early hours of Sunday

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Omar Mateen took his oath of loyalty to the Islamic State a few hours hours after he attacked the Orlando gay nightclub, surrounded by victims who were either dead, dying, or wounded, an influential lawmaker who accessed the killer's posts told FoxNews.com Wednesday.



Omar Mateen, the Afghanistan-born terrorist, killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando early Sunday. Mateen was eventually killed by the SWAT team that attacked the club.



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During the four hours that Mateen ransacked the club, the 29-year-old radicalized Muslim took to social media to express his hatred and swear allegiance to ISIS, Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc) said.



Mateen posted on Facebook: "I pledge my alliance to (ISIS leader) abu bakr al Baghdadi..may Allah accept me."



He also posted early Sunday morning that "the real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west," criticizing the Western world for its "airstrikes" that killed "innocent women and children." He called his act "the Islamic state vengeance."



Mateen's social media accounts were shut down to prevent them viewing by the public. Johnson and his team of investigators, however, managed to see the posts.



Senate staffers sent a letter Wednesday evening to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg informing him that in one of the posts, Mateen pledged loyalty to the leader of the Islamic State. Another post demanded that "America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State."



According to Johnson, "Omar Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content." Johnson also highlighted that his staff found out there are at least five Facebook accounts that he believed are associated with Omar Mateen.



The posts discovered by Johnson's team can explain why Mateen committed the brutal attack.



The FBI, meanwhile, has not yet issued any comment.



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TagsOmar Mateen, Senator Ron Johnson, Mark Zuckerberg, Orlando shooting
(Photo : Joe Raedle/Getty Images) A sign is seen in a parking lot next to the building that houses the law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co on April 7, 2016 in Panama City, Panama. The law firm, which specializes in setting up offshore companies, is at the center of an international scandal and continues to maintain it has broken no laws and that all its operations were legal. A report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists referred to as the 'Panama Papers,' based on information anonymously leaked from Mossack Fonesca, indicates possible connections between people setting up the offshore companies and money laundering.

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A computer technician has been arrested at the Geneva branch of the Mossack Fonseca law firm that is tied to the Panama Papers scandal, for allegedly removing large amounts of data from the company's system.



The reports were confirmed by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps. The Mossack Fonseca employee is said to have been detained for several days now. A spokesman for the Geneva prosecutor's office confirmed that they opened an investigation following a criminal complaint but offered no other details.



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The detained suspect denied any wrongdoing but has been accused of data theft, unauthorized access, and breach of trust. Mossack Fonseca filed the criminal complaint against the person.



Mossack Fonseca has been linked to the major tax leak documents released earlier this year. The law firm specializes in setting up offshore companies.



The company has denied the wrongdoings alleged by reporters, who said that Mossack Fonseca helped clients evade taxes. The law firm pointed out that it is just a victim of a massive data hack.



The company released a statement on Wednesday saying, "We are confident that the authorities in each of these countries will carry out the corresponding processes transparently and effectively in every case." It is unclear how many complaints were filed, but it was reported that many countries are involved.



A lawyer for the unnamed suspect, Romain Jordan, said that his client is innocent of the allegations. He added, "I can confirm that my client is denying all the charges made against him."



Le Temps said that there was no evidence that the detained suspect was responsible for the massive Panama Papers leak last April. However, the prosecutor had computer equipment seized from the Geneva office in order to check if the suspect stole any data.



Due to the leak, many leaders and celebrities have been exposed, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose associates were on the list. Relatives of President Xi Jinping were also in the leaked documents.



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TagsMossack Fonseca, Panama Papers, Panama Papers scandal, Panama Papers leak, arrest, computer technician, Data, massive data hack
(Photo : Getty Images) President Xi Jinping is set to embark on a three-nation trip to Eastern Europe and Central Asia to promote infrastructure investments and sign economic deals regarding areas such as aviation, banking, and telecommunication.

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Building factories and embarking on infrastructure projects overseas will be on top of the agenda for President Xi Jinping when he travels to Central Asia and Eastern Europe starting on June 17, according to Chinese assistant foreign minister Li Huilai.



In a press conference held last Wednesday, Li said that during his state visits to Serbia, Poland, and Uzbekistan, President Xi will promote his economic policy of developing factories and partnering with foreign private companies to invest in infrastructure projects.



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Li said Xi will push for the promotion of the economic policies in an effort to deal with massive industrial overcapacity in the Chinese steel sector and to create new markets for Chinese goods.



He added that President Xi will promote China's export of domestic overcapacity steel during his three-nation visit.



"Belt and Road Initiative"



Li said the president will visit Serbia, Poland, and Uzbekistan on June 17 to 22 and will attend the two-day 16th meeting of the council of heads of state that is part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Tashkent, Uzbekistan from June 23 to 24.



Aside from promoting the export of China's steel, the president will also boost Beijing's "Belt and Road" initiative to enhance and strengthen trade relations with European countries.



This will be President Xi's second Eastern European trip in three months, following his recent trip to the Czech Republic last March.



Xi, in his visit to Poland, is expected to sign a series of economic agreements with Polish President Andrzej Duda regarding areas such as banking, aviation, telecommunication, and infrastructure.



The two countries will also hold discussions on nuclear cooperation, as President Xi will continue to encourage domestic businessmen to invest in China.



In Uzbekistan, Xi will invest in infrastructure projects, including building an industrial park and the longest railway tunnel in Central Asia, Li said.



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TagsBelt and Road Initiative, infrastructure projects, Eastern Europe, President Xi Jinping, three-nation visit, china
The military balance in Europe

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NATO has just declared that an organized and massive cyber attack on any of its 28 member-states (including the United States) by another state is reason enough for the alliance to go to war.



This chilling declaration -- obviously aimed at Russia, the leading patron of state-sponsored cyber attacks against NATO -- now means NATO can react to future cyber attacks by deploying conventional weapons, said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at a high level NATO meeting in Brussels.



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"We have decided that a cyber attack can trigger Article 5, meaning a cyber attack can trigger collective defense," he explained.



"A severe cyber attack may be classified as a case for the alliance. Then NATO can and must react," said Stoltenberg. "How, that will depend on the severity of the attack."



A cyber attack deemed serious enough by NATO will suffice to trigger Article 5, said Stoltenberg. Article 5 is the basis for NATO's collective defense and means an attack on one NATO member-state will be considered an attack on the entire alliance.



Previously, it would have taken a blatant act of war such as an invasion of a member-state to trigger Article 5 and ignite a war. Now, however, any organized cyber attack can be used by NATO as justification for triggering an armed conflict.



"Most crises and conflicts today have a cyber dimension," said Stoltenberg.



He noted that NATO will "organize and coordinate" their defenses against digital threats.



"There's a lot of work to be done," he said.



NATO will formally designate cyber as an official operational domain of warfare along with air, sea, land and space at its upcoming summit at Warsaw this July. The alliance is expected to approve this new definition of war that officially recognizes cyberspace, or digital property and systems, as "operational territory."



Simply put, NATO now considers the digital domain a battlefield and will deploy defensive measures and respond with force if their territory is encroached on or attacked. NATO considers the internet a battlefield just like air, land, and sea.



Individual NATO member-states have earlier made similar announcements, including the United States.



"It is hard to imagine a conflict without a cyber dimension," said Stoltenberg.



The 28 NATO member-states are Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.



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TagsNATO, war, Article 5, Russia, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
Chinese nuclear spy Allen Ho

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A Chinese-American jailed in Knoxville, Tennessee for passing on restricted U.S. nuclear technology to China that might be used to produce nuclear bombs is asking to be released on bail.



The federal government is opposing the plea of Dr. Szuhsiung "Allen" Ho, saying "If he goes to China, we will not get him back."



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Ho, his firm, Energy Technology International, and China General Nuclear Power (a Chinese nuclear power plant) were indicted this April in an alleged conspiracy to lure nuclear experts in the U.S. into providing information that will allow China to develop and produce nuclear material based on American technology. American law forbids this.



The information Ho was buying for China is shared freely among those in the American nuclear power industry but by law can't be shared with China. The technology Ho wanted to deliver to China is used to produce nuclear power for electricity, but materials that can be used to build nuclear bombs are a byproduct of the power generation process.



A government such as China determined to make nuclear bombs could use the technology to do so. The U.S. Congress passed a law against sharing this kind of information without government approval. Ho did not receive this permission from the federal government.



Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Atchley Jr. is asking the U.S. District Court in Knoxville to keep Ho imprisoned pending trial.



Atchley argued that Ho, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Taiwan, is employed by the Chinese government and has funneled $3 million through a Chinese bank during the conspiracy of which he is accused.



Atchley also noted that Ho has a wife in Delaware and a "second family," including a 9 year-old son, in China.



"This man is not living in the U.S.," said Atchley. "He may be a U.S. citizen, but he lives in China. His family is in China."



On the other hand, Ho's lawyer claims no crime has been committed by Ho.



"I think there's a real question in our minds whether a crime has even been alleged," said Peter Zeidenberg, Ho's defense lawyer.



"There is no suggestion Dr. Ho is involved in terrorism, assisting terrorists."



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TagsDr. Szuhsiung "Allen" Ho, nuclear spy, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Atchley Jr., nuclear bombs, Peter Zeidenberg
GOP Senate votes to require women in draft -- 'departure from both Scripture and nature' Guest Reviewer | 16 June, 2016 by Michael Foust

WASHINGTON (Christian Examiner)  The Republican-led Senate passed a bill Wednesday that would require women to register for the draft when they turn 18, putting the proposal one step closer to becoming law and drawing disbelief and protest from Christian and conservative leaders around the country.

Although the draft has not been used since the Vietnam War, for some Christian leaders the mere possibility that daughters, sisters and even mothers could be ordered off to war is outrageous.

Owen Strachan, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, called the action a "departure from both Scripture and nature."

"Many of us are grateful for women who serve in the armed forces in various capacities, but we draw the line at asking women to enter combat. Fathers like me will now find ourselves in a difficult spot: We want to support our government, but we will never ask our daughters to die for us," Strachan told the Christian Examiner. "Let me put it this way: My little girls will die for me over my dead body."

The language related to the draft was part of an amendment in a larger bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed 85-13. If it becomes law, it would require women who turn 18 on or after Jan. 1, 2018 to register for Selective Service.

The issue is but one example of how the culture has turned dramatically in the past decade, if not simply the past five years. During the George W. Bush administration, such a proposal likely would have divided the two parties, and it almost certainly would not have received a vote in a GOP-led Senate. But on the Senate floor this week, even Sen. John McCain  the Republican 2008 nominee  supported the idea. In 2010, McCain opposed a proposal allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly.

"Every single leader in this country, both men and women, members of the military leadership, believe that it's fair since we opened up all aspects of the military to women that they would also be registering for Selective Services," McCain said, according to The New York Times.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas opposed the bill and said in a statement: "I could not in good conscience vote to draft our daughters into the military, sending them off to war and forcing them into combat."

Glenn T. Stanton, director of family formation studies at Focus on the Family, told the Christian Examiner that a "virtuous country does not send its daughters to fight its battles."

"Unapologetically, that is men's work," Stanton said.

There is a difference, he added, between allowing women to serve in the military and requiring them to do so.

"There have long been good women who have chosen to fight to protect their nation, even in close battle," Stanton said. "But they did so because they wanted to. Women can indeed serve their nation well in the military. That is not a question. But a good nation certainly does not require our daughters to, and our mothers and fathers should not stand for it."

Social conservatives still have hope that the proposal will be killed in the House, which already passed its own version of the bill that does not include the women-in-the-draft amendment.

Strachan said that in the Bible, "men are called to be like Christ, and to put the good of women and children before themselves."

"For the Christian tradition, this has meant that men go to war to protect family, community and country," he said. "This principle is no challenge to hold, but depends upon the constitutive differences of manhood and womanhood. In a gender-blurred society, we recognize no such essential distinctions."

According to the Selective Service website, failure of men to register means they might not be eligible for federal student loans and grant programs, or federal jobs. They also might not receive security clearance as a contractor.
The Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution to encourage member churches to welcome Muslim refugees coming to the United States at its annual meeting this week in St. Louis, Missouri.

Resolution 12 on Refugee Ministry was overwhelmingly approved at the church, which stated that SBC encourages its congregation "to minister care, compassion, and the Gospel to refugees who come to the United States."

"We affirm that refugees are people loved by God, made in His image, and that Christian love should be extended to them as special objects of God's mercy in a world that has displaced them from their homelands," it continued.

"That we encourage Southern Baptist churches and families to welcome and adopt refugees into their churches and homes as a means to demonstrate to the nations that our God longs for every tribe, tongue, and nation to be welcomed at His Throne."

The convention had maintained close ties with conservative politics in the country, but at this meeting the church also voted to discard Confederate flag and its use. Apart from voting on the flag, SBC passed 11 other resolutions pertaining to church ministries and culture.

Chairman of the Resolutions Committee, Stephen Rummage, said that the exhortation to evangelize was basic to all the measures taken at the meeting.

The call for evangelism "might just seem like a standard resolution for an evangelical body such as Southern Baptists to pass," he said at the news conference, "but really that is at the heart of everything that we talked about, including what we had to say about the Confederate flag. Everything that we do should have as its end and as its goal reaching people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

Rummage added that the resolutions "build bridges and they tear down walls, but we've got to cross those bridges with the Gospel and take Jesus to people because that's what it's all about and that's the only hope for our world, for our nation and indeed for Southern Baptists."

The annual meeting was attended by thousands of delegates from the largest Protestant denomination in the US, with over 15 million members across the country.

The conventions expressed grief and compassion for the Orlando shooting victims, and asked the congregation to pray, donate blood, and extend other support to them.

"The Bible teaches that God has created all men and women in His image (Genesis 1:26-27), and as the Author of life, regards acts of murder as evil (Matthew 16:18), and calls His people to love their neighbors as themselves," the Resolution 1 stated.

"We extend our love and compassion to those devastated by this tragedy and pledge to come to their aid by donating blood and other supportive means."

"We regard those affected by this tragedy as fellow image-bearers of God and our neighbors, and therefore condemn this act of terrorism and others like it and pray for the day when these senseless acts of violence cease."

Among other resolutions passed, some of the chief messages included prayers for "spiritual, moral, ethical, and cultural renewal," increased efforts to care for Alzheimer's and dementia patients and their family caregivers, and affirmation of "In God We Trust" as the national motto and its public display.
Korean American college students in the campus ministry SOON Movement (formerly known as Korea Campus Crusade for Christ) are preparing to go overseas for summer mission trips once again.

This year, some 280 students across the U.S. have committed to go on mission trips through SOON Movement and students from the L.A. region will be leaving to their respective mission fields on June 23. Students from New York, Boston, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Chicago have already started their ministries in various countries including Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, Mongolia, and others.

Students in the Los Angeles region attended the send-off service that took place at Dong Shin Presbyterian Church on June 12, a service that takes place each year with the students, families, and staff before they take off to their mission fields. SOON Movements field national director Young Lee preached during the service on Matthew 9:35-38, and urged the students to follow Christs example in keeping Scripture at the center, and sharing the gospel with prayer and passion.

Students will be trying something new this year in evangelism. As the generation is changing, college students all over the world are using the media, tablets, and smartphones. We are preparing tools to share Christs gospel in an even more effective way through those outlets, SOON Movement stated in a press release.
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.
CP-GA Picks Darrell Castle, Former Congressman Dr. Paul Broun for Presidential Ticket



ATLANTA, June 16, 2016 /



Dr. Broun wrote a Jobs Act that was highly rated by the Club for Growth, an Audit the Fed bill that passed the U.S. House by a 333-92 margin, and legislation considered to be the best Obamacare alternative. Dr. Broun never voted for a tax increase, never voted to increase the debt ceiling and never voted for a bailout. He also proposed more targeted spending cuts than any other U.S. Representative.



Born and raised in Kingsport, TN, Castle received a B.S. in Political Science and History from East Tennessee State University and a Juris Doctorate from Memphis State. Castle served in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine Corps officer. He has operated a successful law firm headquartered in Memphis, TN since 1984. With his wife Joan, Castle started a foundation for homeless children in Bucharest, Romania in 1998. Mr. Castle produces "The Castle Report," a podcast commentary on domestic and international policy issues. The Castles currently reside in Germantown, Tennessee.



Davis noted, "With the recent endorsement of Darrell Castle by Georgia Right to Life PAC, the Constitution Party of Georgia has the only ticket with endorsed president and vice-president candidates. Castle and Broun have proven track records in defending the sanctity of life."



The CP-GA is attempting to get Mr. Castle and Dr. Broun on the ballot in November by collecting 7,500 petition signatures according to a new interim federal ruling. Though still high, that number is a dramatic reduction from current Georgia law requiring about 52,000 signatures. Voters wanting to see them on the ballot are working to meet the approaching deadline.

Share Tweet Contact: Garland Favorito, Elections Director, Constitution Party of Georgia , 404-664-4044ATLANTA, June 16, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- The Constitution Party of Georgia (CP-GA) held its state convention on June 10th in McDonough. As expected, members selected Darrell Castle, the keynote speaker and party leader from Tennessee, as its Presidential nominee. In a surprise move the members also unanimously nominated Dr. Paul Broun, a native son and former U.S. Congressman, for the Vice-President slot. CP-GA Chairman Ricardo Davis explained: "Dr. Broun has one of the most impressive conservative track records of any Congressman who has ever served in Washington. The CP-GA's mission is to elect individuals like him in all facets of civil government."Dr. Broun wrote a Jobs Act that was highly rated by the Club for Growth, an Audit the Fed bill that passed the U.S. House by a 333-92 margin, and legislation considered to be the best Obamacare alternative. Dr. Broun never voted for a tax increase, never voted to increase the debt ceiling and never voted for a bailout. He also proposed more targeted spending cuts than any other U.S. Representative.Born and raised in Kingsport, TN, Castle received a B.S. in Political Science and History from East Tennessee State University and a Juris Doctorate from Memphis State. Castle served in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine Corps officer. He has operated a successful law firm headquartered in Memphis, TN since 1984. With his wife Joan, Castle started a foundation for homeless children in Bucharest, Romania in 1998. Mr. Castle produces "The Castle Report," a podcast commentary on domestic and international policy issues. The Castles currently reside in Germantown, Tennessee.Davis noted, "With the recent endorsement of Darrell Castle by Georgia Right to Life PAC, the Constitution Party of Georgia has the only ticket with endorsed president and vice-president candidates. Castle and Broun have proven track records in defending the sanctity of life."The CP-GA is attempting to get Mr. Castle and Dr. Broun on the ballot in November by collecting 7,500 petition signatures according to a new interim federal ruling. Though still high, that number is a dramatic reduction from current Georgia law requiring about 52,000 signatures. Voters wanting to see them on the ballot are working to meet the approaching deadline.
Real Verses: The World's First Augmented Reality Daily Bible Verse App



SURREY, B.C., Canada, June 16, 2016 /



Augmented Reality technology allows digital objects to be placed in the real world with the user. The objects are viewed through a camera lens or projected via a Head Mounted Display (HMD). An enormous amount of capital investment is flowing into augmented reality HMD development from major technology and media companies including Google, Microsoft and Facebook but the technology can be deployed right now on millions of mobile devices that consumers already possess.



With the Real Verses mobile app and using the camera on their devices, users can view and capture inspirational photos of augmented reality Bible verses that are digitally placed in the real world all around them. The photos can easily be shared via social media, email or instant messaging just as they would with any other photo. Real Verses also provides users with a unique way to interact daily with Gods word quietly and personally if they choose.



The app offers daily verse notifications and a library of previous verses, as well as a variety of verse collections to choose from. Additionally, users can customize the experience by choosing from a library of iconic Christian symbols to accompany the verses. The app offers live camera views for the augmented reality experience, and virtual camera views for viewing content anywhere at any time with 7 beautiful virtual reality environments to choose from.



The app is available now for US$2.99 on iOS through the App Store, and for free on Android through Google Play with ad support. Android users will have the option to remove ads from the app for US$0.99. Some additional premium content will also be available as in-app purchases on Android for US$0.99.



For review copies/codes, please contact



Real Verses Website -

Press Kit -

Share Tweet Contact: Terry Sanderson, 604-367-7327, terry@deerlakeinteractive.com SURREY, B.C., Canada, June 16, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- Real Verses is a new app release for iOS and Android that displays daily Bible verses using augmented reality, an emerging growth technology providing users with unique new experiences on mobile devices. Users simply hold their device to the sky, tap the screen and watch as the Word of God is revealed in the sky.Augmented Reality technology allows digital objects to be placed in the real world with the user. The objects are viewed through a camera lens or projected via a Head Mounted Display (HMD). An enormous amount of capital investment is flowing into augmented reality HMD development from major technology and media companies including Google, Microsoft and Facebook but the technology can be deployed right now on millions of mobile devices that consumers already possess.With the Real Verses mobile app and using the camera on their devices, users can view and capture inspirational photos of augmented reality Bible verses that are digitally placed in the real world all around them. The photos can easily be shared via social media, email or instant messaging just as they would with any other photo. Real Verses also provides users with a unique way to interact daily with Gods word quietly and personally if they choose.The app offers daily verse notifications and a library of previous verses, as well as a variety of verse collections to choose from. Additionally, users can customize the experience by choosing from a library of iconic Christian symbols to accompany the verses. The app offers live camera views for the augmented reality experience, and virtual camera views for viewing content anywhere at any time with 7 beautiful virtual reality environments to choose from.The app is available now for US$2.99 on iOS through the App Store, and for free on Android through Google Play with ad support. Android users will have the option to remove ads from the app for US$0.99. Some additional premium content will also be available as in-app purchases on Android for US$0.99.For review copies/codes, please contact terry@deerlakeinteractive.com Real Verses Website - www.realverses.com Press Kit - www.realverses.com/presskit
home World China pastor tortured to confess, told he would be fed to pigs by state prosecutors

A Chinese pastor detained by the communist state of China claimed that he was tortured to extort a confession and that state prosecutors threatened him to be fed to the pigs.

China Aid, a watchdog for Christian persecution in China, published Monday, June 13 an interview conducted on May 11 between a pastor at Houshi Church, Yang Hua, and human rights lawyer Chen Jiangang.

In his sworn testimony, Yang narrated two incidences where he was taken to a room bare of any furniture and tortured to confess. He claimed he was falsely accused of "illegally possessing state secrets." He identified the prosecutors who harassed him as Ke Jun, Zhang Wei, Zhao Yuanpeng, Tang Jing, and a person he was only able to identify with the surname Han.

Yang's first meeting with the prosecutors was on March 16. In the first instance, he said that prosecutor Ke ordered him to confess.

"[If you refuse to cooperate,] not only you, but your wife and your children will face problems," Yang quoted Ke as saying.

He added that Ke also said, "I'm a torture expert. I know how to beat you up without leaving a mark on your body for people to see. Doctors won't be able to diagnose you. Even you won't know what you died of."

Afterwards, Yang was forced to sign a transcript. He was taken out of the room and then re-entered for a videotaped cross-examination.

Yang narrated the second incident on April 15 where he was taken to the same room. His defense attorneys noted that this was the time when the case had already been brought to the prosecution stage, so Ke was no longer allowed by law to interrogate Yang.

However, Yang attested that Ke had threatened him with several ways of execution, including turning him into food for pigs.

Ke told him, "Do you know why the pigs on the pig farm behind this building are so fat? We can turn you into food for pigs, which is one way to die."

Yang also remembered Ke as saying, "Suing me won't work. I'm the boss here."

Yang was arrested in January after protecting a church-owned hard drive that authorities wanted to confiscate. Four other members of Houshi Church were arrested by authorities in the rise of state-backed church persecution.
home Faith Christian refugees in Germany hide faith for fear of being targeted by Muslims

Christian converts taking refuge in Germany are forced to hide their faith because of fear from Muslim refugees.

"If they find out, I will be fair game," said 33-year-old Iranian who goes by the alias Dena Kasravi, according to Express. "Everyone will have the right to destroy me. Some Muslims even think it is their obligation. I can't get rid of the fear."

Kasravi, according to the report, attended illegal Bible groups in Iran; but even in Germany, she is still not able to openly express her faith. She and the other Christian refugees in her camp do not read the Bible in front of Muslims nor do they wear crosses, and the church they set up has to be kept a secret. There are still times, however, when they cannot escape questioning, such as when she did not put her name on the list of those who were to participate in the Ramadan. She had to lie and say she had a thyroid problem, thus could not fast.

Guards have also reportedly advised them to keep their Christian faith to themselves because, should it become known, they could not protect them.

"The denouncing of your faith is heavily punished in Iran," said a refugee who wished to remain anonymous. "Therefore converting to another religion was one of the few reasons Iranians would get asylum in Germany."

According to a report by Christian organization Open Doors in May, of the 231 Christian refugees they interviewed in Germany early this year, 96 people or 41 percent received insults, 86 of them or 27 percent experienced bodily harm, 73 individuals or 31 percent received death threats to themselves or their families, 62 respondents or 26 percent were harrassed by loud religious music or prayer, and there were also incidents of sexual abuse, punches, pushing, and spitting. Seventy-five percent said the incidents happened repeatedly.

"At this point I must say that I really did not know that by coming Germany, and only because of my faith, that I would be harassed here as much as in Iran," said a refugee living in a German shelter, as quoted by Gatestone Institute.

It has been estimated that more than 1 million refugees are staying in the country, and harassment because of religion is an ongoing issue that has yet to be resolved.
home US Donald Trump bans Washington Post from his presidential campaign for 'inaccurate reporting'

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump banned The Washington Post on Monday, June 13 from covering his presidential campaign, citing the news organization's "inaccurate" reporting.

Trump quickly took to Facebook to highlight the "incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting" of Post's headline story Monday afternoon that read, "Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting."

The article was written off Trump's comments in an interview with Fox News that morning.

Trump wrote, "Based on the incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting of the record setting Trump campaign, we are hereby revoking the press credentials of the phony and dishonest Washington Post."

Later that night, Trump's camp issued a statement that said, "We no longer feel compelled to work with a publication which has put its need for 'clicks' above journalistic integrity."

On the other end, Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly, told The Guardian (via email) that the outlet amended the headline shortly after it was published "to more properly reflect what Trump said" while noting that none from Trump's camp reached out to them.

"When coverage doesn't correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished," said Martin Baron, Post executive editor, in a statement.

Baron announced that even without credentials granted by Trump's camp, the publication will continue to cover the candidate's campaign "honourably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We're proud of our coverage, and we're going to keep at it."

Journalists from other media outlets, who reacted on the news through Twitter posts, hailed Trump's ban as a news organization's badge of honor.

Post opinion writer Dana Milbank wrote Tuesday suggesting that the right response to Trump's ban is a media blackout. Warning that it may only be a matter of time before Trump attacks other news outlets as well, Milbank detailed several means journalists could push back Trump's authoritarian acts.

Other news outlets in Trump's blacklist are Politico, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Gawker, Foreign Policy, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, The New Hampshire Union Leader, The Des Moines Register, and The Daily Beast.
home Faith Muhammad Ali is in Heaven even though he was a Muslim, says evangelist Alveda King

Evangelist Alveda King, niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., believes that Muhammad Ali is in Heaven despite his Islamic faith.

"Some may question my prayer that I'll see Mr. Ali in Heaven," King wrote in a letter shared with Christian Newswire Friday, June 10.

In her tribute to the late boxer, King defends her belief saying, "God is ever merciful and judges the human heart. Mr. Ali is subject to the same grace and mercy that all humans seek."

The American activist and former state representative for the 28th District in the Georgia House of Representatives recounted her first meeting with Ali in mid-1960s while Ali was still Cassius Clay. She said that she was a "youth organizer" at a "Fair Housing Rally" organized by her father Rev. A.D. King and her prominent uncle.

"I believe in my heart that the Christian message that he learned from my uncle, Martin Luther King, and Daddy A. D. was impacting him, too," King said.

She believes that Ali embraced the idea of "The Beloved Community" that his father and uncle invoked just as his former mentor, Malcolm X, embarked on universal peace and love after leaving the Nation of Islam. King believes that Ali loved his God, his family, and the world. She also defended that he was just like everyone else with shortcomings.

King's letter came just a day after another prominent Evangelical leader commented on Ali's passing and wondered about his soul.

"I've wondered if he put his faith and trust in Christ before he slipped into eternity. I sure hope so," Franklin Graham wrote on a Facebook post.

He explained, "Islam's Muhammad can't save you, only Jesus Christ can save."

Earlier, Graham revealed that the late boxer had paid visits in the 1970s to his father, Billy Graham, because Ali's father worried that his son may have been led astray by his Islamic faith.

The three-time world heavyweight champion was laid to rest on Friday in an interfaith ceremony attended by fans and famous personalities. Tens of thousands also took to the street of Louisville, Kentucky to bid farewell to the widely recognized and greatest boxer of all time.
home US 'Gays in Orlando got what they deserved' is not what Christians should be saying, blogger Matt Moore says

As the world mourns for the victims of the Orlando mass shooting that happened Sunday, June 12, Matt Moore warns condescending Christians against convicting that the homosexuals "got what they deserved."

Moore wrote on his website that while he acknowledged that most Christians sympathize over such tragedies, he warned against those he described as "Bible belt dwellers" and those with the "conservative Republican-ish veneer" to avoid a condescending judgement.

The blogger believes that the members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community has more often been the subject of vicious attacks by these Christians who refer to the gays as "heathens" while citing biblical stories such as Sodom and Gomorrah.

He argued that Christians should instead "mourn over the rebellion of those who refuse to trust" Jesus and "weep over death and the widespread grief" brought about by the tragedy.

He also pointed out that these Christians "are just as depraved and enslaved to the sin" just as homosexuals are, and that a Christian's "wickedness may flesh out differently, but it is no less despicable in the sight of God."

As it turns out, prominent voices in the Christian community were quick to express sympathy to the LGBT people.

Russell Moore, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, also wrote on his blog calling on Christians to show Jesus' love for the homosexuals.

He wrote, "We don't have to agree on the meaning of marriage and sexuality to love one another and to see the murderous sin of terrorism."

The CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Franklin Graham, released an official statement the day after the incident condemning the massacre as a "senseless shooting."

The Benham brothers, Jason and David, uploaded a Facebook video where they asserted that homosexuality is wrong but that they would have placed themselves in front of those who were targeted in the mass shooting and claimed that they've been attending gay pride marches for decades just to bring Jesus' love.

Sunday's incident is considered as the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, where 49 were killed and 53 injured as a gunman attacked the popular Pulse nightclub.
home Faith Joel Osteen reveals what he'd do differently if given another chance

Joel Osteen revealed there's one thing he would do differently when given another chance, as he added that this happens to be something most Christians are well-engaged in as well.

"Somebody asked me if I could do anything over again, what would I do differently?" wrote the best-selling author Friday, June 10.

"I told them I would trust God more," Osteen revealed.

The senior pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas with an estimated 40,000 members shared that he used to lose sleep over worries on budget, ministry, and people liking him.

"None of that worrying helped me to move one inch forward," Osteen taught. "When I look back over my life, most of the things I worried about never came to pass. I wasted a lot of time and energy being uptight."

Unfortunately, he pointed out that a lot of people are so adept when it comes to worrying that they can even multitask or keep worrying while doing other things. Osteen cautioned that one can indulge in as many worries as one can think of but then many of these worries are not even bound to happen. He also went on to say that the biggest thing one worries about in life becomes one's God. To illustrate his point, he explained that a person who worries about sickness night and day ultimately makes sickness as the God in that person's life.

The megachurch pastor's advice is to take off whatever is currently on the throne of one's life and to place God back on the throne. Instead of worrying, Osteen instructed to use the same energy on praising God and thanking Him for His blessings.

When things do get difficult, it's easy for people to get discouraged. Osteen encouraged Christians to trust God's timing. He explained that God made plenty of wonderful promises but sometimes God requires faith and patience from His people.

"Trust that God is faithful to His promises," he advised. "Speak faith over your circumstances."
home World Lebanon: Christian political party members resign as ministers

Two of Lebanon's ministers have quit their posts in protest because their political party deems that the government is failing to address the problems of the country.

"The Phalange Party has decided to resign from the government because Lebanon needs a 'positive shock'," party leader Sami Gemayel said in press conference, as quoted by Gulf News.

The Christian democratic political party pulled out Minister of Labour Sejaan Azzi and Minister of Economy and Trade Alain Hakim following a meeting on Tuesday. Minister of Information Ramzi Jreij, who was reportedly free to make a choice, said that he would remain in his position because he "is not a member of the Phalange Party."

According the report, Gemayel rejected what he callls "cabinet mechanisms" that has suppressed objections, and criticized ministers who are allegedly not concerned with revitalizing the banking sector, having shown little interest on the plan submitted by the Minister of the Economy. He said that these government officials "are only concerned with passing suspicious deals," a remark that Gulf News surmises to be referring to the garbage disposal solution.

Gemayel had objected to the dumping of waste in the Mediterranean Sea as well as the construction of the Janna dam. The contractor hired to build the dam, he reportedly said, is facing corruption charges in Brazil and is "accused of bribing politicians to approve the construction of useless dams."

He also said that the government does not care about finding a solution to the problem of refugees from Syria, which is estimated to be around one million, nearly a quarter of the Lebanese population of nearly 4.5 million.

"This government has become uncontrollable and detrimental" to the interests of the country, he said, according to Al Arabiya. "Its existence is worse than its inexistence. Nothing justifies our participation."

He closed his speech by saying that the party would only be useful to the government if and when its ministers are able to stop corruption; however, he said that it was no longer so.

Lebanon has not had a head of state since May 2014, and the members of parliament have been in office since 2009, having extended their own terms twice.
home World Muslim youngster stays with Christian family in Indonesia to understand religious tolerance better

A Muslim girl in Indonesia who lived in a Christian home for several weeks under a student exchange program learned about religious tolerance, and it was likewise a learning experience for the host family.

"The first time I met them, I was so afraid because I was afraid of people of other religions," Apipa, a young Muslim girl, said of the Christian family she stayed with in Jakarta. In the video, she narrates that she had a classmate of a different faith in junior high school who was always angry and insulted her religion.

Two to three days into the program, she asked her mentor if she could be moved "because I'm afraid that they will take me to church." It was not only her, however, who found the adjustment difficult. Ratna Megarasi, a member of the host family, felt heartbroken at first because Apipa would not eat regardless of what they try to offer her.

The barriers were eventually broken, and Apipa and her host family warmed up to each other. She had a room where she could pray and read the Quran, and Raymond Lim, another member of the family, would take her to the mosque.

Looking back, Megarasi admitted to initially thinking that Apipa should learn from them since she's the guest and they're the host; however, "it turned out that we, as hosts, learned from her." Apipa, likewise, said that the experience was not as she anticipated, and "they are very good, and not evil like I thought."

The program that Apipa participated in is called Sabang Merauke, which is a student exchange program that brings kids from different parts of Indonesia to Jakarta to live and learn. It aims to instill "a spirit of tolerance, education, and keindonesian."

In a post on Our Better World, a digital storytelling initiative of the Singapore International Foundation, Sabang Merauke co-founder Ayu Kartika wrote that she and her friends felt that something needs to be done about the anger and misunderstanding between people of different religions or backgrounds. With the program, they bring together a child and a host family -- such pairing a Hindu kid from Bali with a Muslim family, or a Muslim child from Maluku with a Chinese Catholic family -- in order to promote better understanding and tolerance.

"We believe that these real interactions will open the hearts and minds of both students and hosts, and make them see that we are more alike than different," she wrote. "In turn, they will become peace ambassadors in their circles."

This year, the program will have 15 kids from different parts of Indonesia stay with a host family in Jakarta for three weeks.

"Understanding religious differences is important, especially when it comes to tolerance. Tolerance taught me to respect other people. I should appreciate people of different religions other than Islam," Apipa said. "Tolerance should not just be spoken of but should also be felt."
home US Orlando gunman was gay and a 'regular' at Pulse, witnesses say

The gunman in the Orlando massacre who attacked a gay bar and killed 49 on Sunday, June 12 was a homosexual and a "regular" at Pulse, said witnesses.

"He was trying to pick up people. Men," Jim Van Horn, a regular customer at Pulse, told the Associated Press, as reported by The Guardian.

"He was a homosexual and he was trying to pick up men. He would walk up to them and then he would maybe put his arm round them or something...That's what people do at gay bars. That's what we do," Van Horn attested.

Three other regular customers reported seeing the 29-year-old gunman, Oman Mateen, drinking at Pulse on several occasions before. Mateen held the nightclub hostage for three hours at 2 a.m. Sunday until he was killed by the SWAT team who stormed the building with an armored vehicle.

Kevin West, another regular, claimed that Mateen used the gay chat and dating app Jack'd to message him occasionally in the past year.

A former classmate, Samuel King, said that Mateen and most of the gunman's friends were gay.

"He had to know it, but I never got any sense of homophobia or aggression from him," King told Washington Post.

Mateen's ex-wife Sitora Yusufiy, who described the killer as bipolar, crazy and abusive, also revealed that Mateen once confessed going to clubs and enjoying the nightlife. However, she didn't say whether she thought her ex-husband of four months was a homosexual.

The latest reports on the shooter's homosexuality only make the case more complicated as authorities investigate his motive for the killing.

Although Mateen called 911 before the shooting rampage and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, officials are yet to find indication of ties between Mateen and IS.

Mateen's father, Seddique Mateen, who revealed that his son may have been enraged when he saw two men kissing each other, quickly disagreed to the circulating rumors that his son was gay.

"It's not true. Why, if he was gay, would he do this?" he told The Guardian.

"I think it's possible that he was trying to deal with his inner demons, of trying to get rid of his anger of homosexuality," Van Horn said, as he tried to comprehend the tragedy that killed three of his friends.

He added, "But if you pretend that you're different, then you may shoot up a gay bar."
home US Orlando shooting: Southern Baptist Church near Pulse nightclub helps victims

A Southern Baptist Church located two blocks from the Pulse gay nightclub responded by helping out victims of the Orlando mass shooting that took place Sunday, June 12.

"It was announced in our service that blood was needed, so we encouraged our members to give blood and many did," Pastor Troy Peeples of Delaney Baptist Church told The Christian Post.

The congregation, which has 1,900 members, offered prayers for the victims' families, law enforcement agencies, and first responders during its Sunday's worship service.

"We are looking into ways that we can minister to the various groups impacted by this tragedy," said Peeples.

He added, "Honestly, we are a little overwhelmed! We know that there are and will be many needs and we are praying how best meet some of those needs."

The tragic incident that happened just within walking distance to the church is considered the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. The 29-year-old gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured 53 others before he was killed off by police.

Orlando has received an outpouring of support from across the globe.

According to CNN, hundreds have responded to donate blood for the victims. Local blood bank, OneBlood, hit its capacity already but posted that more blood of the rarer types may be needed in the coming days.

"We've gotten responses from folks all over the world," Ida Vishkaee Eskamani, spokesperson for Equality Florida, told CNN.

Equality Florida is a non-profit organization championing civil rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. They created the GoFundMe account to help the victims of the Orlando massacre and their families. They have now raised the goal to $5 million after hitting the initial goal of $500,000 in just a few hours.

English actor and comedian James Corden hosted Sunday night the 70th Annual Tony Awardsdedicated to the victims of the Orland shooting.

"Theater is a place where every race, creed, sexuality and gender is equal, is embraced and is loved. Hate will never win. Together, we have to make sure of that. Tonight's show stands as a symbol and a celebration of that principle," said Corden, as he opened for the show.
home World Over 8,000 arrested in Bangladesh crackdown after machete attacks on Christians, atheists

Bangladesh police arrested over 8,000 extremists in a nationwide crackdown that began Friday, June 10 as it moves to end the surging violence that has wracked the Muslim nation targeting religious minorities, secular intellectuals, and activists.

"During the anti-crime clampdown we have arrested 8,569 people and of them 119 are suspected militants," AKM Quamrul Ahsan, spokesman for Dhaka Police Headquarters, told reporters Monday, June 13 , according to The Hitavada.

The week-long crackdown on a nationwide scale involved the Border Guard Bangladesh and the Rapid Action Battalion. Authorities have also arrested Shahjahan Robin, whose murder of a top anti-terror officer's wife has prompted the large-scale clampdown.

As the police operation started, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina vowed that "each and every killer will be brought to book."

"It may take time, but God willing, we will be able to bring them under control," she said during a meeting with the Awami League party, as reported by Sky News.

However, the government's opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), feel threatened with the arrests as the prime minister has earlier accused the BNP and its fundamentalist ally Jamaat-e-Islami to be behind the gruesome murders in a bid to destabilize the country.

According to the Daily Observer, Hasina said during a party meeting, "Everybody knows who were behind such killings. The BNP-Jamaat nexus has been engaged in such secret and heinous murders to destabilize the country."

"In the name of an antimilitant drive, the government is arresting opposition activists, including B.N.P. and other antigovernment people," decried BNP's senior joint secretary general, Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, as quoted by The New York Times.

"I welcome this special drive. It should have been taken much earlier," said general secretary of the South Asian People's Union, Shahriar Kabir, a widely-considered militant target.

More than 30 individuals have been killed in a series of machete attacks that targeted religious minorities, secular intellectuals, and activists since February 2013. Islamic militants as well as home-grown militant groups have staked claims on the killings.
home World Patriarchs call for liberation of Iraqi lands for displaced Christians after ISIS attacks

Marking the second year since terrorists displaced tens of thousands of Christians, Syriac Patriarchs called for the liberation of the Iraqi Christian lands.

Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan and Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch delivered a joint statement, as reported by the Catholic Herald.

"On June 10, 2014, our people were forced to leave Mosul. On the eve of August 7 of the same year, the uprooting continued and our people were forced to leave...other villages and towns of the Nineveh Plain," the patriarchs stated.

"Today, two years after the calamity that was brought upon our people, the decision-making countries and the international community remain silent and inactive towards the ethnic cleansing of a historical people who founded the civilizations of the area," they said.

The prelates denounced the atrocities caused by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) terrorist group and hailed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and other countries for declaring these atrocities as genocide.

They also recounted the suffering they witnessed by the uprooted Christians who were forced to settle in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. They noted that the displaced Christians lacked basic necessities such as housing work, healthcare, and schooling for the children.

Younan, the spiritual leader of 158,000 Syriac Catholics, spoke less than a year ago to the congregation at St. Toma Syriac Catholic Church in Farmington Hills, Michigan where he begged the West to stand up for the people in Iraq and Syria.

In an interview with Aid to the Church in Need in December 2014, Younan revealed that he went to France and Europe to seek help for the persecuted Christians in their community. However, he was disappointed to realize that the Western world chose to remain silent instead. By that time, there were already about 140,000 Christian refugees.

The patriarch denounced the West who chose to ignore Iraqi Christians simply because they offered no economic value.

Younan lamented that the Western policymakers choose not to "help those who have neither the numbers, nor the riches to make them attractive."

"And we have no oilathat is to say, we do not offer any economic advantages," he said.
home Faith Pope Francis rejects donation from Argentina president that had figure 666 in it

Pope Francis refused the donation given by Argentine President Mauricio Macri because the sum contained the figures 666, according to reports.

The Argentine president made a donation of 16,666,000 pesos (less than $1.2m) for the Argentine educational foundation supported by the Vatican, Scholas Occurentes. However, Francis reportedly wrote to the foundation instructing to return the money.

"I don't like the 666," the pope was quoted by the Vatican Insider as saying, as reported by The Guardian.

According to Telegraph, an unnamed government official explained to a local outlet that the amount was a sum total based on the computation of the foundation's headquarters in Buenos Aires, the salaries of its 36 employees, and building expenses. The source also added that they were only following the request made by the organization itself but unfortunately the pope was left uninformed about it.

Scholas obliged to return the money while pointing out that "there are those who are trying to misrepresent this institutional gesture...with the purpose of generating confusion and division among Argentines."

Scholas' statement seemed to support reports that Francis didn't take it too well that the Argentinian media are depicting the president's gesture as a sign of a warming relationship between the two prominent Argentinian leaders.

It is not the 666 figure in the donation that reportedly caused the tension between the president and the pope, though. The tension is believed to have sparked when Macri's center-right government arrested Milagro Sala, a popular community activist whose association with the pope goes way back when he was still known as Jorge Bergoglio. Francis is a supporter of the country's social movement for which Sala is a prominent figure.

Macri's side claimed that they did not perceive the pope's rejection of the money as offensive.

"There is no animosity towards the president," Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra said.

"It was a very rich, very natural conversation, with no calling of accounts or enormous philosophical differences," she added.

However, critics of Marci's administration find his donation offensive.

"The 16 million didn't sound good," Argentinian social activist Juan Grabois told local media.

"Whoever thinks that by giving money, especially public funds to a foundation directly or indirectly linked to Francis, is making a gesture to the pope, is stupid."
home World Prince William featured on gay magazine cover

Prince William has just become the first British royal to grace the cover of a gay magazine, as he speaks out against bullying especially of the homophobic kind.

With the caption "Making History, Prince William Meets Attitude," the magazine's July issue features a laughing prince, chin resting on his hand.

The cover also quotes the Duke of Cambridge as saying, "No one should be bullied for their sexuality or any other reason."

On May 12, William invited Attitude and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community at the Kensington Palace to discuss how homophobic bullying impacts mental health. Together with his wife, Catherine the Duchess of Cambridge, and his younger brother, Prince Harry, the royals are leading a campaign called Heads Together to spearhead against the stigma surrounding mental health.

"The young gay, lesbian and transgender individuals I met through Attitude are truly brave to speak out and to give hope to people who are going through terrible bullying right now," William told the magazine.

Attitude quoted a 2015 study revealing that among the LGB young people, 33.9 percent of them have attempted suicide at least once in their lives. For the transgender young people, the number is higher at 48.1 percent. The numbers are in contrast to suicide attempts among young straight people which is at 17.9 percent.

William declared, "No one should have to put up with the kind of hate that these young people have endured in their lives."

He is seen as following his late mother's footsteps, Princess Diana, who also appeared on the cover of a gay magazine after her tragic death in 1997 and worked with those suffering from Aids.

Attitude released the July issue to the press on June 8, only a few days before the Orlando mass shooting incident.

The issue carries a message to the LGBT people that may sound clichA yet made more meaningful because of the person who delivered it.

"You should be proud of the person you are and you have nothing to be ashamed of," said the future King of the United Kingdom.
home Faith Trouble looms in Eastern Orthodoxy as Pan-Orthodox Council approaches

Troubles within the Eastern Orthodoxy threaten the historic Pan-Orthodox Council set on Sunday, June 19, in what is to be its first after more than a thousand years.

Patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Christians have agreed to hold the Holy and Great Council on Pentecost Sunday on the Greek island of Crete. The Council took 55 years in the making and would be the first since year 787 before the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in 1054.

However, disunity and rivalry among Orthodox sister churches are posing threats on the coming Council. In the latest string of churches pulling out from the meeting, the Russian Orthodox Church announced Monday, June 13 in a televised statement that it will not be attending while suggesting to have the Council postponed.

"We have made a decision that we will not be able to take part in the all-Orthodox Synod if other churches do not go," said Metropolitan Hilarion, Moscow's Patriarchate bishop for the department of external church relations, as reported by Associated Press.

Orthodox churches of Bulgaria, Antioch, Serbia, and Georgia had earlier announced their non-participation to the council citing differing issues and complaints.

According to the National Catholic Register, these non-participating churches are "close" to the influential Russian Orthodox Church which has the most number of people and money.

"Kirill plainly intends, in fact, to strip Bartholomew of his exclusive status as the top symbolic representative of Orthodoxy in the world," wrote Sandro Magister, an Italian analyst observing a major rivalry between Moscow's Patriarch Kirill and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.

Although the churches recognize their own leadership, Istanbul's Bartholomew is considered "first among equals" in the Orthodox world.

However, Magister believes that what happens at the Council is largely a showdown of influence between the two Orthodox leaders.

Before Russia's announcement, Constantinople has previously issued that while the Ecumenical Patriarchate has expressed "surprise and wonder" to the decisions of the sister churches who backed out from the meeting, the Council will still push through.

The Eastern Orthodoxy is made up of 14 autocephalous (self-governing) churches of Albania, Bulgaria, Czech and Slovakia, Georgia, Greece, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Cyprus, and Jerusalem.
Alliance for Defending Freedom to arrive in London

A major religious freedom organisation will arrive in London over the summer with the aim to fight legal cases they consider to threaten free speech.

The Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF) is a global legal charity that says it "defends religious freedom and opposes all attempts to compel people to compromise on their beliefs or retreat from civil and political life as the price for following their faith".

The arrival in London marks a dramatic expansion from ADF's origins in the United States and will be the fifth office ADF have established in Europe. The others are in Brussels, Vienna, Strasbourg and Geneva.

Paul Coleman, a deputy director of ADF, told Christian Today the organisation will fight "UK legal issues as they come up whether in the courts or in public policy or in legislation".

Explaining why ADF felt the need for a London office, he said: "The UK is in a dire situation.

"I doubt anyone would say there is no need for us here. The need will always outstrip the supply of help."

He was speaking at the launch of his new book Censored: How European "hate speech" laws are threatening freedom of speech on Wednesday. At a panel event alongside editor of spiked Brendan O'Neill, Coleman warned of the effects of government counter-extremism legislation.

He told Christian Today the government's plans were "terrifying". He said: "They are illiberal and citizens need to be aware of what is going on.

"The tentacles of the state are huge. They are looking to get involved in all sorts of areas of private life.

"It is not beyond the realm of possibility that churches and youth groups will be investigated People need to wake up and realise under these laws we are all extremists. Or we could be."
Charleston church massacre: One year on, congregation 'focuses on God'

"Now is the time to focus on God," the husband of slain pastor Myra Thompson, who was murdered in the Charleston church massacre last year, said as the first anniversary of the shooting approaches.

Rev Anthony Thompson on Wednesday led a Bible study on Mark 4:1-20; the same passage his wife was leading from on June 17 last year.

She was one of nine shot dead by suspected gunman Dylann Roof in the basement of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

According to the Charleston Post and Courier, more than 175 people gathered in the church this week to mark the anniversary of the massacre. Anthony Thompson said he had struggled over the past year, but has relied on the Bible to give him strength.

"It can change our attitudes; it can change our hearts to be who God wants us to be, to do what God wants us to do," he said.

In the days and weeks following the shooting last year, Charleston AME Church made headlines as its congregation forgave Roof.

Just two days after the massacre, the relatives of those killed stood up one by one at Roof's bond hearing and offered him their forgiveness.

"You took something very precious from me, but I forgive you," Ethel Lance's daughter, Nadine Collier, told him. "It hurts me. You hurt a lot of people, but may God forgive you."

"We would like you to take this opportunity to repent," said Anthony Thompson Myra Thompson's grandson. "Repent. Confess. Give your life to the one who matters the most, Christ, so he can change your ways no matter what happens to you and you'll be OK."

The following day Cynthia Hurd's husband, Arthur, said: "What I can say to that young man is that in time I will forgive you."

Charleston is known as 'the Holy City' because of its vast number of churches. Emanuel was founded by freed slaves almost half a century before the US formally abolished slavery and is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the Southern United States.

Roof, 21 at the time of the shooting, had written a manifesto online ahead of the shooting, in which he said he had "no choice" but to kill black people.

"I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country," he wrote.

"We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me."

Roof's death penalty trial is to begin on November 7.
China: Bishop under house arrest who 'stood up to China' alludes to shock turnaround

A Chinese bishop who has been under house arrest since rejecting the government's state-approved Catholic body has reportedly reversed his position in a shock turnaround.

Bishop of Shanghai, Thaddeus Ma Daqin, wrote in a blog post on June 12: "For a certain time, I have been deceived by others and [said and] made certain wrong words and deeds about the CPA [or CCPA, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association]."

Bishop Ma openly rejected the CCPA in 2012 during his consecration ceremony at St Ignatius Cathedral in Shanghai.

In front of 1,000 Catholics and government officials, he said it wouldn't be "convenient" for him to remain part of the state-approved organisation. Many people reportedly erupted into "thunderous applause", according to Reuters. Others wept.

Relations have historically been strained between the Catholic Church and China's ruling Communist party over irreconcilable claims to authority. The Vatican does not accept the validity of episcopal consecrations by the CCPA, and an underground Catholic Church refuses to compromise with the state and is loyal only to the Pope.

Bishop Ma accused the CCPA of defying the Vatican, and was immediately put under house arrest. He has since been banned from pastoral ministry, and was forced to attend communist indoctrination classes.

In 2014, a spokesman for the CCPA told Reuters: "He [Ma] deceived the bishops and cheated the government as well as the public. How can you then take on the responsibility for such a large diocese as Shanghai?

"This clearly shows that he was under the influence of foreigners."

According to UCA News, the suggestion that Ma may now have reversed his position on the CCPA has sent "shockwaves through the Catholic Church in China".

However, a source suggested to America magazine that it's possible the blog post was not actually written by Ma.

"One section of the text is 'rather rude' and quite unlike him," the magazine was told.
Desmond Tutu, Benedict Cumberbatch and Helen Mirren join calls for action to help refugees

Dozens of faith leaders and celebrities have today urged governments around the world to take immediate action on the growing refugee crisis.

In a video released by the UN's Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Archbishop Desmond Tutu joins Benedict Cumberbatch, Dame Helen Mirren, Ben Stiller and more than 60 others in petitioning world leaders.

"Every day, war forces thousands of innocent families to leave their homes," the video says.

"To escape the violence they leave everything behind... everything except their hopes and dreams. We believe all refugees deserve the right to protection and to live in safety. Together, we need to send a clear message to governments. We must act with solidarity and take shared responsibility. We stand together #WithRefugees. Please stand with us."

A petition will be delivered to the UN headquarters in New York ahead of the September 19 UN General Assembly meeting, which will address the refugee crisis.

The petition urges international governments to ensure refugee families have somewhere safe to live, that each child has access to education and that every refugee is given the opportunity to make a positive contribution to their community through skills or work.

The number of people forced to flee their homes due to conflict or persecution is now higher than it's ever been since the Second World War, and "we are in a period of deepening conflict and turmoil," said Filippo Grandi, UN high commissioner for refugees.

"It affects and involves us all, and what it needs is understanding, compassion and political will to come together and find real answers for the refugee plight. This has become a defining challenge of our times."

Grandi paid tribute to the thousands who have died making the perilous journey from war zones to Europe, and praised the "extraordinary outpouring of empathy and solidarity, as ordinary people and communities opened their homes and their hearts to refugees".

"The #WithRefugees campaign and petition aims to amplify those voices of welcome and show that the world stands with refugees," he said.
EU referendum: Welsh bishops are all voting Remain, warn against demonising migrants

Welsh Anglican bishops are all voting Remain in the European referendum, according to a statement released today.

The bishops say that immigrants are being "demonised" in the debate over the referendum. Their statement says: "It is a matter of great concern to us that the debate is frequently couched in the emotive language of fear. We note with particular concern that the divisive issue of immigration, with the demonisation of immigrants, is being used in a way that is in danger of overwhelming sensible debate. This ignores the facts that immigration has been of benefit to the nation, and that immigrants still make up only a very small percentage of the population."

They also say they regret the debate has so far focused on the economic cost to the UK of being in the EU, rather than its benefits of peace and cultural interchange.

The decision, they say, will be the most important in a generation and they urge people not to make it rashly.

The statement is signed by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan; the Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, John Davies; the Bishop of St Davids, Wyn Evans; the Bishop of Bangor, Andy John; the Bishop of St Asaph, Dr Gregory Cameron; the Bishop of Monmouth, Richard Pain; and the Assistant Bishop of Llandaff, David Wilbourne.

Latest polls show the Leave campaign in the lead, with one pollster putting support for "Leave" at a more than three-year high.

The Ipsos MORI poll of 1,257 adults across Britain from June 11-14 showed 51 per cent of all voters wanted to leave the bloc and 49 per cent wanted to stay.

But, when filtered for those likely and registered to vote, the poll showed 53 per cent would vote to leave and 47 to remain  the highest support for the 'Leave' campaign recorded by the pollster in more than three years.

A separate phone poll by Survation showed Leave ahead on 45 per cent, up 7 percentage points from its last poll on May 25 and ahead for the first time since the poll began in February. Support for Remain dipped two percentage points to 42 per cent with 13 per cent undecided. The poll surveyed 1,104 people.

Of the seven most recently published polls this week, six showed the Leave campaign in the lead, a trend pollsters said showed that the opponents of Britain's 43-year-old EU membership had dominated the campaign in recent weeks.

Additional reporting by Reuters.
Federal judge orders Alabama high court to follow SC ruling, stop barring same-sex marriages

A judge has issued a permanent injunction against Alabama's law that bars same-sex marriage, saying state officials must follow the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year on the matter.

In her decision, U.S. District Judge Callie Granade said she issued the permanent injunction because "as long as the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain on the books, there continues to be a live controversy with respect to which the Court can give meaningful relief."

In March last year, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered probate judges to stop issuing same-sex marriage licences because of an existing state law, LifeSiteNews reports.

Chief Justice Roy Moore issued an administrative order last January telling state judges that the ban on same-sex marriage is still valid and that they should not issue same-sex marriage licences.

Last March, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling to reject the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalised same-sex marriage.

Granade's injunction covers probate judges and others "who would seek to enforce the marriage laws of Alabama that prohibit or fail to recognise same-sex marriage," AL.com reports.

But Liberty Counsel disagrees with Granade's ruling.

"This federal judge has no authority over the Alabama Supreme Court," said Matthew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. "This is by no means the final order because this lower federal court cannot direct the Alabama Supreme Court to act one way or another."

Staver accused the judge of "acting as if she is the top appellate court in the state."

"The only Court that has authority over the Alabama Supreme Court is the U.S. Supreme Court. The other parties are free to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case but they have refused to do so. Judge Granade is not the U.S. Supreme Court," he said.

Associate Justice Tom Parker said the U.S. Supreme Court decision was "not based on law, but on the bare majority's philosophy of life."
Franklin Graham Decision America picketed by LGBT activists

Franklin Graham faced hostile protests from LGBT activists as he urged a rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday to elect people who believe in the Bible.

The event on Wednesday was part of Graham's Decision America tour to encourage Christians to vote for Godly candidates. However the public prayer gathering in Madison came under fire for being organised so soon after the shooting in Orlando which killed 49 people in a gay nightclub.

Graham has repeatedly said he believes homosexuality is a sin and warned the LGBT community "that if they want to continue living like this, it's the flames of hell for you".

The Madison based Freedom from Religion Foundation protested at the rally which marks Graham's 28th stop on his tour of 50 American states. The co-president of FFRF, Annie-Laurie Gaylor, said Graham's remarks promoted hatred and misinformation that the US was founded as a Christian nation, according to Wisonsin public radio.

"Contrary to Franklin Graham's hysterical claims, the LGBT community is not a threat to the United Statesbut his campaign to legislate religion-fostered discrimination is," she said in a statement.

Rep. Chris Taylor was also among the protesters to stand at the rally holding a rainbow flag.

"I think it's particularly important in light of what happened in Florida. People are just so appalled by this hatred out there," Taylor said according to The Cap Times. "We're just going to be kind of a presence to really send a message that discrimination, intolerance and hatred are not values that we have."

She continued: "I think people are just really upset. They reject this culture of violence and this hatred. People want to do something positive, and show up and say there's another way forward."

Graham describes himself as a former Republican party member and has not endorsed either candidate in the presidential race. However he has backed a number of Donald Trump's policies including a ban on Muslims entering the US.

"Vote for candidates who stand for Biblical truth," Graham told the crowd. "We need men and women today in high places who will honour almighty God."

He opened his remarks on Wednesday with a prayer for the victim of the Orlando shooting but added afterwards the attack was a "symptom" of America in decline.

"I don't think anybody disagrees that our country is not in trouble. It is in trouble. We just saw what happened in Orlando," he said. "The largest mass-shooting in American history. This is sad. It breaks my heart. We have become a godless nation."
Israeli minister steps in to become saviour of Christian schools

Christian schools at risk of collapse in Israel over a budget crisis have found salvation in the form of Social Equality Minister Gila Gamliel.

Gamliel has decided to take matters into her own hands and allow organisations such as the 47 Christian schools, which are mainly Catholic and educate 33,000 Christian and Muslim children, to claim their missing grant of 50 million Israeli New Sheqels, equivalent to about 9 million, through a new system.

The schools had gone on strike last September after they were hit by budget cuts in the original grant. The strike ended when the Education Ministry pledged to transfer the cash to the Social Equality Ministry to be distributed to the schools. But the Education Ministry has since refused to hand over the money because the schools are not officially recognised, The Times of Israel has learned.

A committee, the Shoshani Committee, set up to look into the crisis had recommended bringing the Christian schools into the public school system to allow them to be publicly funded while remaining religious.

Even Pope Francis got involved, and discussed the crisis with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin when he visited the Vatican last September.

A Social Equality Ministry spokesman said Gamliel is intervening because she believes the schools deserve to have the money.

She is anxious to avoid a repeat of last September where pupils missed the start of the academic year because of the strike by the schools' 3,000 teachers.

Parents pay about a third of the cost of educating their children at the schools, which are among the highest achieving in Israel.

There are about 160,000 Christians in Israel and 14,000 in East Jerusalem.

Christian Schools in Israel have been helping to educate the children of the Holy Land from all faiths and denominations for centuries. The premises are owned by churches and monasteries. For decades the schools have been categorised as "recognised and unofficial".
Leading evangelical bishops call for Church to change on gays

Two prominent bishops have called for evangelicals in the Church of England to cease their fighting over homosexuality and accept other evangelicals as such, even when they take a pro-gay stance.

Bishop of Liverpool Paul Bayes and Bishop of Dorchester Colin Fletcher are among contributors to a new book edited by Jayne Ozanne, a lay member of the General Synod and former member of the Archbishops' Council, who counts herself as evangelical and last year came out as gay.

Bishop Fletcher criticises the "immense" damage to "far too many good Christian people" by the Church's attitude to gay people. Bishop Bayes says: "We need to change the Church  to make room and to extend the table."

In the book, Journeys in Grace and Truth  Revisiting Scripture and Sexuality, the contributors explain why they have moved towards an "affirming view" of same-sex relationships.

0Copies have been posted to all 460 members of the General Synod, who will meet behind closed doors in York next month to discuss the results of the "shared conversations" that have been taking place on sexuality and the Church.

Other contributors include Gavin Collins, Archdeacon of the Meon, Marcus Green, an openly gay evangelical priest, Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul's and broadcaster Cindy Kent, last week awarded the MBE.

All the contributors are from the evangelical wing of the Church of England, where opposition to same-sex relationships remains strongest. Most evangelical bishops and clergy still take a traditional stance against same-sex relationships.

Ozanne said: "There is a growing number of voices across the Church, including the evangelical wing, that believe that it is possible to hold an affirming biblical view of same-sex relationships, and who want to affirm LGBTI Christians for being who they are in Christ. For too long people have felt silenced for saying what they truly believe for fear of being called unsound by their colleagues. The time for silence is now over."

Bishop Fletcher, former chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, says in the foreword that over the past 15 years as a bishop, he has been asked by a growing number of his clergy colleagues if they can offer "something more substantial" than a few private prayers to mark the public affirmation by a same-sex couple of their commitment to one another.

Some clergy are increasingly feeling able to be more open about their own same-sex partnerships, whether or not these have been formalised in a civil partnership or even in marriage, he adds.

"Pastorally too I am still saddened and shocked by evangelical churches who exclude gay men and women from holding office, even when they are un-partnered.

"Part of my learning curve has been to listen to their stories  lay and clergy alike  over recent years and to feel, at least to a small extent, the pain they experience. The damage being done to far too many good Christian people is immense."

He questions whether homosexual practice in the context of stable, faithful, and permanent partnerships is universally condemned in the Bible. "And, even if we believe it is, does that mean that we have, of necessity, to refuse to share in the mission of God with those who disagree with us?"

He also argues that evangelicals should accept each other as evangelicals without resorting to the tactic of marginalising or excluding those they disagree with. "I recognise that this will be difficult to achieve but I think that it is extremely important for the health of evangelicalism, both within the Church of England, and beyond it."

He pleads for an openness among evangelicals "to engage biblically" with pro-gay Christians without writing them off simply as "revisionists".

Bishop Fletcher told Christian Today: "I have not changed my mind on marriage being between a man and a woman. My main purpose in writing the foreword is because I really think there is a very important discussion to be had among evangelicals. It is an internal conversation but it is absolutely crucial to have it without people being dismissed as not biblical, just because they have a different point of view." He said he wanted to defend the rights of people to interpret the Bible differently.

He also said too much emphasis had been placed on sexuality as a "gospel" issue.

"I simply do not believe this is on the same level as conversations about the Trinity or the humanity and divinity of Christ, which are gospel issues to me. Questions of sexuality are strongly significant, but not of ultimate significance, whereas questions of the Trinity and the nature of Christ are credal."

Bishop Bayes writes in the book that his own extended family includes a number of partnerships and a fair number of children  children of opposite-sex marriages, children of a civil partnership, children of a same-sex marriage. "All these children seem to play well together, though the parents of some of them have had difficulty in finding a welcome in the Church of Jesus Christ."

He describes his experience with Open Table in Liverpool, a congregation of more than 40 LGBTI men and women. "In my attempts to give close attention to this experience, I have myself been profoundly changed," he says.

Bishop Bayes told Christian Today that he still backed the Church's teaching on the issue, which is a traditional line. "I'm a bishop. I teach what the Church teaches. At the moment the formal recognition of same sex unions is not something the Church teaches."

But he thinks the Church should move foward. "We should stand together, so we should uphold present teaching. But I believe we should look hard at what LGBTI experience says to us and we should make room."

He added: "The present situation is unsatisfactory. The lack of clarity in the Church produces pain for LGBTI Christian people and those who want to come to faith."

Bayes, who has been taking part in the shared conversations, said God had been moving to underline the encouragement to listen. "If we are going to listen, the possibility must be there that God will teach us as well as others."

He referred to his newborn grandchild, Hector. "He will grow up in a society where same-sex marriage has been legal for longer than he's been alive. So when Hector grows up and asks about Jesus, how do I respond in this England about the Jesus who loves everyone?"

Christians want the Church to be credible. "That includes being credible about this issue. I know conservative churches where gay people are living lives fully faithful to the teaching of the Church. But I also know LGBTI Christians in many churches who want to express their sexuality as a gift from God in the context of faithfulness. They find that difficult at the moment."

He does not believe the Church will change quickly.

"We are going to move forward together. If it's together it has to be slowly. Whoever it is that wants a purer, smaller Church, I'm against that. I would rather have a big messy Church, but that means we are going to move slowly."

Ozanne told Christian Today: "The horrific events in Orlando show what happens when ignorance and fear are left to fester and ferment. It raises very challenging questions for us all. How might we have contributed to what appears to have been the deep sense of self-loathing that motivated a lone gunman to take 50 innocent lives? Are we committed to understanding and celebrating the rich tapestry of 'difference' that weaves us together in our society, and binds us together in the Body of Christ?"
Pan-Orthodox Council: It will go ahead with or without you, theologian tells Churches

The troubled Pan-Orthodox Council is set to begin on Saturday in Crete, but without some key players. First envisaged 55 years ago, it was designed to bring together all of the 14 autocephalous or self-governing Orthodox Churches in the first such gathering since the 8th century.

During the last fortnight it has been hit by last-minute withdrawals by Churches taking exception to the council's discussion documents, agenda and procedures. Most recently the powerful Russian Orthodox Church withdrew, calling for the council's postponement.

So can it still happen at all? And if it does, is it still a Pan-Orthodox Council, even if not all the Churches are there?

Yes and yes, according to Orthodox theologian Fr John Chryssavgis of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Speaking to Christian Today, he said: "We are moving forward very smoothly with 10 Churches and we hope more will come by Friday. But the work is continuing with the clear mandate of all 14 Orthodox Churches."

Chryssavgis, one of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew's advisers, admits it would be "tempting to say it is not Pan-Orthodox, if you look at the table and see there are three or four missing. But that was not how it was convened or conceived." Chryssavgis says that the process by which it was set up, with the agreement of the primates of the Churches and after a long process of discernment, means that its status as a Pan-Orthodox Council cannot be affected if some Churches withdraw. It's those Churches that are reneging on protocols that were previously agreed; it doesn't affect the essence of what will happen in Crete.

He confesses himself baffled by the last-minute criticisms and withdrawals, calling them "bizarre". All of the documents and procedures were agreed in advance, with every one of hundreds of pages initialed in every language of the council by every primate. "It is really surprising and perplexing," he says.

The dominoes began falling with the withdrawal of the Bulgarian Church, but the succession of criticisms and pull-outs reflect wider tensions in Orthodoxy between modernisers and ultra-conservatives. For some, Pope Francis' meeting in Havana with Patriarch Kirill, so much heralded in the West, was an unacceptable compromise with a communion they regard as heretical. Others protested the document on Orthodox relations with the rest of the Christian world, arguing that its emphasis on "restoring Christian unity" gave too much away. According to Bloomberg, rumours circulated among Russian Orthodox that the council was planning to allow bishops to marry and priests to remarry, to abolish monkhood and move to a common calendar.

And behind all this is the rivalry between Patriarch Kirill of the rich and powerful Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Bartholomew, hugely respected personally and first in prestige ecclesiastically, but with a fraction of Moscow's resources.

When Moscow pulled out it was ostensibly because it believed the council had ceased to be a valid one. "One Church after another declares that it is not participating, which means there will be no consensus, which means it is no longer a Pan-Orthodox Council," said the Russian Orthodox spokesman Metropolitan Hilarion.

Chryssavgis disagrees. In the past, he says, councils have been recognised as binding even when not all Churches have been able to be present. Nevertheless, it is "frustrating and scandalising" that some have chosen to withdraw.

He acknowledges that there are problems in the Orthodox world. However, he says, "if unity is the goal, you put everything aside for that. You come to a council because there are problems  but the way to meet those problems is at a council."

Furthermore, he says there was never any danger of smaller Churches being railroaded into decisions they didn't agree with. He points to the Orthodox principle of consensus, developed as a way of ensuring that the views of the smallest Churches were given exactly the same weight as those of the largest. In practice this means that for a decision to be adopted, everyone has to agree. Even the smallest Churches, he says, "have a vote that can overturn the majority. But you can't have a say in the consensus if you're away from the table. If Georgia [one of the Churches not attending] says no, consensus means you can't proceed. But you have to be at the table to do that."

Chryssavgis acknowledges the pain felt on both sides of the divide, including among those Churches that have said they will not attend. However, he says: "I would hope this council, with or without them, will take a first fragile step. We will be able to admire something beautiful. It will take time to see it, but it will be beautiful."

He maintains a certain optimism. However, for many observers the uncertainty and angst surrounding the council  and the absence of some Churches  marks a missed opportunity for reform and progress. Whatever the technical status of the council, the Churches that did not attend have given themselves an excuse of ignoring it. Years of careful preparations have been compromised at the eleventh hour by a bewildering outbreak of hostility and suspicion. Whether another such opportunity will present itself remains to be seen.

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Project Religious Fear: Why we should stand up for Muslim freedoms

The massed Muslim migrant hordes are gathering just across the Channel. If Britain leaves the EU we can cover the beaches with barbed wire again, like in the war, and keep them out. If we vote to Remain we'll have 12 million Turks on us before we know it, at least according to the Daily Express.

This is not an article about the EU referendum. It's about the fear generated in us by the thought of people who don't share our language, our culture or our faith coming to this country and changing it forever. And it's not about migration, either: it's just about the fear, and particularly the fear of Islam.

In the UK, generally speaking, it tends to be the lunatic fringe, like Britain First or UKIP's Christian Soldiers, that links resistance to immigration to fear of Islam. In public at least, the rhetoric is about population density and pressure on services, and these are perfectly valid and important questions.

In the US, the astonishing rise to political prominence of Donald Trump, with his commitment to ban all Muslim immigration into the country, has highlighted a far darker strain of public discourse. For a sizeable section of the population, Islam is the enemy. And at this week's Southern Baptist Convention meeting, that strain showed itself on the floor. One of the messengers, John Wofford, pastor of Armorel Baptist Church in Blytheville, Arkansas, took to task Russell Moore of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which had supported a New Jersey Islamic group's fight to build a mosque.

Wofford proposed a motion calling for the removal from office of SBC leaders who supported the right of Muslims to build mosques. He asked Moore: "I would like to how in the world someone in the Southern Baptist Convention can support defending the right of Muslims to construct mosques in the United States when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans...Do you actually believe that if Jesus Christ were here today that he would support this and he would stand up and say, 'Well let us protect the rights of those Baal-worshipers to erect temples to Baal'? Do you believe that, Dr Moore?"

Moore's answer was both pithy and devastating. To the suggestion that the US government should take sides in a question of religion, he said: "You know, sometimes we have to deal with questions that are really complicated and we have to spend a lot of time thinking them through and we're not sure exactly what the final result is going to be. Sometimes we have really hard decisions to make. This isn't one of those things." The audience applauded.

Moore made the standard, and to a Baptist audience very obvious, arguments for religious freedom. If the government can close mosques it can close Baptist churches too. A religion imposed by government "does not turn people into Christians, that turns people into pretend Christians and it sends them straight to hell. The answer to Islam is not government power, the answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the new birth that comes from that."

Wofford's motion was ruled out of order, though it would have been defeated. However, he is not the only Southern Baptist to have queried the status of Islam in recent days. Gerald Harris, the editor of a prestigious Christian newspaper and a far more significant figure, had attacked Moore in similar terms a few days previously. Harris wrote: "While Muslims around the world and in our own country are shouting "Death to America" should we be defending their rights to build mosques, which often promote Sharia Law and become training grounds for radicalizing Muslims?"

Quoting approvingly from authors who questioned whether Islam was a religion at all rather than an idealogy aimed at global domination, he said: "Southern Baptists entities need to come to the defense of a geo-political movement that has basically set itself against Western Civilization? Even if Islam is a religion must we commit ourselves to fight for the religious freedom of a movement that aggressively militates against other religions?"

Harris' views were rebutted in a response by three Southern Baptist professors, who said it was "inappropriate to question whether Muslims should retain the right freely to practice their religion".

They continue: "Moreover, we believe any attempt to inhibit religious liberty will only prove to be a hindrance to reaching these precious men and women, created in God's image, with the saving gospel of Jesus Christ...we want religious freedom for all human beings, while there is still time before the day of final judgment."

In both the US and the UK there are serious and genuine arguments to be had about immigration, integration and social cohesion. But the debate within the SBC has highlighted something else: that for Christians, religious plurality is non-negotiable. Not just because it provides opportunities for evangelism, and not even because it prevents governments discriminating against Christians too. It is fundamental because it recognises the uniquely precious capacity of human beings to respond to God in their own way and in their own time, their inalienable freedom to choose, and even to choose wrongly.

The great temptation is to imagine that in order for someone to be fully British, or fully American, they have to fit a certain spiritual and cultural template. That's what drives the hatred at Trump rallies, chillingly documented in a series of tweets yesterday by journalist Jared Sexton. That's what drives Harris and Wofford. But Christians need to stand firm: whatever reasons we might have for wanting to keep out the people who so desperately want to come to the UK, their religion must not be one of them.

As the English Baptist Thomas Helwys wrote in 1612: "For men's religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Let them be heretics, Turks [Muslims], Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure."

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Protests outside California pastor's church over anti-gay comments

Protestors have held a demonstration outside the California church whose pastor preached a sermon seeming to endorse the Orlando nightclub attack.

Around 100 people gathered outside Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, while security guards were posted outside.

The picket happened on Wednesday evening while a service was going on inside the church.

The protestors were unhappy about comments made by the pastor of the church, Roger Jimenez, during his sermon on Sunday  the day after the massacre in Orlando, which claimed 49 lives.

Jimenez's talk, which had spread around the world on video, before being removed by Youtube, caused outrage with its content.

The pastor said, "People say, like: 'Well, aren't you sad that 50 sodomites died?... Here's the problem with that. It's like the equivalent of asking me  what if you asked me: 'Hey, are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?'"

Jimenez, whose comments have been criticized by Christian leaders from various denominations, went on to make further incendiary comments about gay people. "I wish the government would round them all up," he said, "put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out."

"These comments, applauding the death of innocent people, are completely contrary to the Bible's teaching and God's heart," the pastors wrote. "His statements do not represent Jesus nor hundreds of Sacramento pastors whose hearts have been broken and are praying for the loved ones so tragically affected by this cowardly act."

Sacramento City Pastors Fellowship released a statement condemning Jimenez's words. It said, "These comments, applauding the death of innocent people, are completely contrary to the Bible's teaching and God's heart," the pastors wrote. "His statements do not represent Jesus nor hundreds of Sacramento pastors whose hearts have been broken and are praying for the loved ones so tragically affected by this cowardly act."
Racketeering suit against former Mars Hill pastor could collapse

Sutton Turner, the former executive pastor of Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church, has filed a motion to dismiss a case against him alleging that he and Driscoll were guilty of racketeering in how they conducted the church's affairs.

The case was brought by Brian and Connie Jacobsen and Ryan and Arica Kildea, former church members, who said they should be reimbursed the $92,000 they donated to the church and receive triple the amount in damages.

However, Turner was never served with the lawsuit and his attorney says it has lapsed.

In a blog post he highlights portions of his response to the court, saying that the "sole purpose of filing the lawsuit was to disparage my character" and that the plaintiffs acted in bad faith. He says their "defamatory" accusations had "caused irreparable harm to my business career and future earning potential. This damage can be conservatively calculated at $5 million based on my pre-Mars Hill Church business earnings."

Turner says he had made repeated efforts to reach out to the Jacobsens and Kildeas without success. He vigorously defends Mars Hill's accounting standards and flatly denies ever profiting personally from Mark and Grace Driscoll's book Real Marriage ,whose promotion by the Results Source company, widely perceived as unethical, was one of the controversies that led to Driscoll's downfall.

He also defends Mars Hill's handling of the controversy over the use of funds donated for use in Ethiopia, some of which were applied to work in the US. An investigation by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability had cleared the church, he said.

Turner also refers to a website set up by the Jacobsens and Kildeas, saying: "There has been significant media coverage on this lawsuit, causing irreparable harm to my reputation and business career. I am only sharing this in order to get my side of the story out there, and hope that it is helpful for anyone still seeking answers about Mars Hill Church and the false accusation levied against me."

The attorney for the Jacobsens and Kildeas, Brian Fahling, has been asked for a respond to Turner's statements.
Rape, prostitution and forced labour: Life for children in French refugee camps

Sexual violence and forced prostitution is a constant threat for children in refugee camps in Northern France, and some young women exchange sex for the promise of passage to the UK, a new report has found.

Published today by Unicef France and Unicef UK, the report sheds light on life for children between the ages of 11-17 living in seven camps along the coast of the English Channel, including Calais and Dunkirk.

Researchers found that sexual exploitation is a "constant threat", including the rape of boys, and the rape and forced prostitution of girls.

Some young women had exchanged "sexual services" with traffickers who promised to help them get to Britain, and traffickers are now charging up to 5,500 per person to cross the Channel.

Children are forced to pay an "entry fee" before they are even allowed to live in the camps. Unaccompanied minors, 500 of whom are living in the French camps, are forced into labour if they can't afford to pay.

"Immediate action by the UK Government could stop children falling into the hands of traffickers and show it's serious about its recent commitments to refugee children, said Lily Caprani, Unicef UK deputy executive director.

"The Prime Minister says unaccompanied children should be brought to the UK if they have family here, yet these children's cases are moving far too slowly. These camps are no place for a child  we know there are at least 157 children in Calais with the legal right to be with their family in the UK.

"The longer these children have to wait, the more desperate they may become and the more likely they are to risk their lives fleeing the appalling conditions of the camps to reach their families."

Unicef is campaigning to have these 157 children reunited with their families in Britain by the start of the school year in September.

Home secretary Teresa May pledged last month to speed up the process, but "people on the ground in Calais tell us nothing has changed and these children are still waiting, facing another uncertain night in a dangerous camp they repeatedly describe as a 'living hell'," Unicef said earlier this week.

It also published statistics revealing that 94 per cent of the 4,760 children who made the journey from North Africa to Italy beween January and April this year were unaccompanied.
Telling it like it is: The power of Christian testimony

John Newton's hymn Amazing Grace has blessed Christians for more than 200 years (he wrote it in 1772). US President Barack Obama memorably sang it at the memorial to the victims of the Charleston killings, and it is sung all over the world.

Its first verse reads: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/ That saved a wretch like me/ I once was lost, but now am found/ Was blind, but now I see." It's simple but powerful, expressing total confidence in what God has done for him  rescuing a wicked slaver and violent mocker of Christianity from spiritual darkness.

What we don't always pick up is that the last line of that verse is a direct quotation, from John 9:25. It's part of the story of Jesus healing a man born blind. He makes mud from saliva (a common folk healing practice with which the man would have been familiar) and tells him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam; the man's sight is restored.

Unfortunately, the miracle takes place on the Sabbath, which isn't good enough for the Pharisees. A comical exchange follows in which they try to persuade the man that Jesus couldn't have healed him, because he was a 'sinner' who didn't keep the Law strictly enough. His response is one of the most powerful statements of faith in the New Testament: "Whatever he is a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!"

The Bible scholar William Barclay tells a story about how, at the turn of the last century, the great agnostic TH Huxley was attending a weekend country house party. He was the Richard Dawkins of his day, a scientist and thinker who was known for making church people look very foolish when they tried to argue with him about things they didn't understand.

On Sunday most of the guests prepared to go to church; Huxley, as was his custom, stayed behind. However, one of the guests was known to have a simple but profound faith. Huxley approached him and said, "Suppose you stay behind and you tell me quite simply what your Christian faith means to you and why you are a Christian."

The man objected, saying that he was no controversialist and that Huxley could demolish his arguments in an instant.

"I don't want to argue with you," said Huxley. "I just want you to tell me simply what this Christ means to you."

The man did as he was asked. When he had finished there were tears in Huxley's eyes. "I would give my right hand if only I could believe that," he said.

There is no Christian 'happy ending'; Huxley never did become a Christian, as far as anyone knows . But what matters is the simple power of the testimony: "One thing I know, I was blind but now I see."

We won't always be able to answer the arguments of people cleverer than we are. We have to guard against being arrogant and assuming we have nothing to learn. We can't assume that our own experiences will convert other people, either. But no one can take away from us what we have felt in our own hearts and known in our own lives: "I once was lost, but now I'm found/ Was blind, but now I see." It's our experience of the transforming power of God that keeps us walking faithfully with him.

Follow @RevMarkWoods on Twitter.
U.S. Muslim professor unpunished, still teaches at public university despite blatant endorsement of Shariah law

An American professor is still employed in a public university in Florida and getting paid in U.S. tax dollars despite his blatant endorsement of Shariah Law, including cutting off a thief's hand as spelled out in the Quran.

Bassem Al-Halabi, associate professor of engineering and computer science at the Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, pushed for the punishment during last month's Islamophobia panel discussion sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood's Muslim Student Association.

During the discussion, Al-Halabi said, "Where there is no Shariah, Islamic Shariah, they die in dozens and hundreds every day because of organised crime. People kill people, other people or steal pizza for $10  so what Islamic Shariah is saying about capital punishment  so even though it sounds like it is severe but if that is the solution to prevent any crimes, then it still has a lot of rules and regulations."

He added, "I will just mention one and stop here, which is let's say cutting off the hands of a person if they steal. It sounds very severe. It sounds very barbaric, I know. But if takes one or two people to have their hands cut off, and then there's no more stealing and there's no more stealing in the whole nation  that's a much better resolution than having hundreds of people die every day.

A check by WND with the switchboard operator of the department where he teaches confirmed that Al-Halabi is still a professor at FAU.

Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of "Legacy of Jihad," told WND, "One wonders which of Caitlyn Jenner's appendages the good professor would want amputated?"

But Bostom said Halabi was just being honest.

"In all seriousness, the man is simply a pious, Shariah-compliant Muslim making a mainstream Islamic argument for the 'justice' of the Shariah," he said.

Clare Lopez, vice president of policy and analysis for the Center for Security Policy, said an honest discussion of Shariah law is not bad altogether.

Lopez said instead of castigating the professor, who she said was just honest and not radical, "they ought to invite him to convene a panel presentation to discuss a full range of Shariah injunctions, most especially to focus on the seven Hudud crimes and punishments ... as long as he agrees to specifically cite only authoritative Islamic sources, such as Quran, Sunna and relevant tafsirs."
UK government hints it will recognise ISIS atrocities against Christians as genocide

Genocide against Christians and Yazidis at the hand of ISIS may be recognised by the UK government after ministers hinted they would take action.

Foreign office minister Baroness Anelay told peers in the House of Lords on Tuesday the government is trying to find "new ways" to work within the United Nations, a previous roadblock in the effort to recognise genocide.

The UK has previously refused to follow the White House and the European Parliament in declaring a genocide, despite a unanimous vote by MPs that it should do so. The Prime Minister has insisted it was a matter for international courts, not politicians.

However several parliamentarians, including Lord Alton who has campaigned for the government to change its position, said this was a "circular argument".

He pointed out that the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot act unless it is instructed to by the UN's security council, of which the UK government is a permanent member. He was joined by Fiona Bruce and a number of other Christian MPs in the Commons and said the government had a "responsibility" to make a referral at the UN security council.

As yet no indication has been given that the government intends to take action. In a debate in the House of Commons foreign office minister Tobias Ellwood said the government was concerned that Russia or China, also permanent members of the security council and long term supporters of the Syrian President Assad, would veto a proposal that called for investigation into genocide in Syria.

But Baroness Anelay's responses to questions in the Lords on Tuesday indicated the government may be shifting its position. She hinted the government could be working on a resolution that Russia and China would agree to, despite their ongoing support for Assad.

But Lord Alton told Christian Today there were other ways apart from the ICC that perpetrators of genocide could be brought to justice. He has tabled a private members bill in the House of Lords that could provide a mechanism that would bypass the obstacle of the UN. If passed it would enable to UK's High Court to assess the evidence and make a declaration on whether genocide had been committed. The bill would force the government to act and refer a High Court ruling on genocide directly to the UN security council and the ICC.

"It is now two months since the House of Commons unanimously passed a Motion declaring a genocide to be underway against Christian and Yazidi minorities and calling on the British Government to raise this at the Security Council," Lord Alton told Christian Today.

"Thus far no Resolution has been tabled. There are many ways in which the perpetrators can be brought to justice  not only through the International Criminal Court - and I hope that we will use our permanent seat at the Security Council to ensure that a mechanism is urgently created."

Lord Alton's bill is unlikely to receive a second reading in the House of Lords due to the lack of parliamentary time available. But it could provide the basis for an alternative response, should the UN security council continue to cause a blockade.
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Texas Outhouse of Houston has sued rival Texas Waste, claiming the company's use of a similar Texas-and-star logo has diluted Texas Outhouse's "iconic" brand.

It's an argument legal specialists say may not pass the smell test. Practically speaking, said John Keville, an intellectual property lawyer at the Houston law firm Winston & Strawn, logos -- iconic or otherwise -- don't matter when you gotta go.

"Texas Waste will probably flush that famous mark and dilution claims pretty quickly," Keville said.

Texas Outhouse was founded in 1994 and in 2008 the company adopted its logo, registering it with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January, according to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Houston.

Texas Outhouse has become "locally famous," according to the lawsuit, because of its products' recognizable Texas logo and their beige and green color scheme.

In addition to adopting a similar logo, the lawsuit alleges, Texas Waste changed the color of its units to tan. Texas Outhouse is asking the court to prevent its competitor from using an outline of Texas and star on its toilets and marketing materials.

Travis Vargo, a Houston lawyer representing Texas Waste Co., said the companies are trying to settle their differences out of court, but expressed surprise that anyone else would care.

"Who knew poop could be sexy?" he said.

At HoustonChronicle.com, our L.M. Sixel explains what could eventually determine the lawsuit's outcome.
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A group of Texas leaders on Thursday joined a nationwide coalition to fully lift the United States' trade embargo with Cuba, aiming to stimulate trade between the pro-business state and the island nation.

The politicians, business leaders and advocates joined the new Texas State Council for Engage Cuba, a national organization that lobbies from Washington, D.C. to end the U.S. travel ban and trade embargo with Cuba. Texas will be the group's eighth statewide effort.

The Texans who joined Engage Cuba's new council include leaders from the Port of Houston Authority, the University of Texas, the Texas Association of Business and Houston's city government. The group plans to hold events in the state to push for free trade with Cuba in the fall.

THROWBACK: Life in Cuba before the 1960 US trade embargo

"We feel that calling for an end to the travel ban and trade embargo is a necessity for Texas business," Texas Association of Business President Chris Wallace said during a media call Thursday morning. "They (Cubans) frankly need the products we are known for here in Texas, particularly around agriculture."

Engage Cuba's main efforts center on pushing for three bills currently in Congress, the Agricultural Export Expansion Act of 2015, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act and the Cuba Trade Act of 2015.

For Texas, opening free trade with Cuba would mean an expanded market for the state's agricultural products. During the first half of the 20th century, Cuba was the largest market for U.S. long-grain rice exports, with many producers concentrated on the Gulf Coast. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that U.S. exports to Cuba could reach $6 billion a year nationwide.

TRAVELING? Everything you need to know about travel to Cuba

U.S. trade with Cuba would also increase exports through the Port of Houston. Port of Houston commissioner Theldon Branch said Thursday that the port has long shipped non-embargoed items to Cuba, but that full trade would greatly increase business for the port.

"We believe there is a lot of upside for not only the state of Texas, but for the Houston region," Branch said.

Cuba's proximity to Texas, too, means the state will be a key player if Cuba becomes a full trade partner with the United States.

"This is an extraordinary and rare opportunity," said Dave Shaw, president of the statewide leadership group Texas Lyceum. "It's not very common Texas gets to develop a new trading partner in our region."
A look at the educational backgrounds of the CEOs at the biggest companies in America shows theres many routes to the top.

The newest edition of the Fortune 500 came out this month. Money Magazine examined the list this week to figure out where the group went to school. The paths vary quite a bit. And an Ivy League education or an MBA is hardly a requirement. (Sidebar: While the educational backgrounds are diverse, its worth noting the CEOs are not; most are white and male.)
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Buc-ee's cleared another step toward its new Interstate 10 travel center in Katy.

The company on Wednesday closed on a 15-acre tract in the West Ten Business Park, at the northeast corner of Interstate 10 and Cane Island Parkway, according to Parkside Capital, the land's seller.

The 56,000-square-foot Buc-ee's is expected to open next spring with 120 fuel pumps, a car wash and outdoor merchandise, according to information from Parkside Capital. The I-10 frontage road will be extended from FM 1463 to Cane Island Parkway to accommodate traffic at the new site, and three other roadways also will be built around the new store.

It will be the 40th location in Buc-ee's chain and one of the company's largest stores. Company co-founder Beaver Aplin told the Chronicle in March that its travel centers typically employ about 200 people.

Katy City Council in March approved an economic development agreement with the Lake Jackson-based convenience store chain. The agreement included a combination of a partial sales tax rebate and property tax abatement.

Buc-ee's, founded in 1982, has developed a Texas cult following with mega-sized convenience stores. The company continues to add travel center locations including some planned for the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it's first-ever non-Texas store near Baton Rouge, La.
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Every year about this time, the globe's top chefs and restaurateurs, along with publicists and corporate sponsors and hangers-on, gather for the announcement of "The World's 50 Best Restaurants" list.

On Monday this festival of self-congratulation happened in New York City  the first time the unveiling was held outside of London  where chef Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, took the No. 1 slot. It was also the first time in the 15-year history of the list, which was launched in 2002 by the British magazine Restaurant, that an Italian restaurant had landed in the top position.

As the rankings sank in, the annual torrent of debate, recrimination, hosannas and wholesale tea-leaf reading roiled forth. Whatever credence one gives to this poll of chefs, restaurateurs, consultants and gastronomes  or to the methodology that produces it  it has become a Rorschach test for the narrow, hothouse world of international fine dining. Your viewpoint depends on where you're seated, if you will.

SEE ALSO: The most authentic restaurants in Houston

"The restaurant world's most influential ranking," GQ's Brett Martin called it in April, noting that it has eclipsed the hoary Michelin rankings.

"Like the tasting menus it celebrates, it's outdated and irrelevant," sniped The Telegraph's Andy Lynes this week.

"Largely a collection of male-run tasting menu venues voted upon by judges who don't have to pay for their meals," sniffed the website Eater the day after the list dropped.

Prominent women of the food world pointed to the lack of female chefs not only on the "50 Best" list but also on the followup top 51-100 list that has been tacked on to the festivities in recent years. They noted that while Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, was honored as "The World's Best Female Chef," her restaurant didn't even crack the "51-100" rankings, making her award look like tokenism.

Here in Houston, fans of Daniela Soto-Innes, who once cooked on the line at Underbelly, celebrated that Enrique Olvera's New York outpost, Cosme  where she is Olvera's chef de cuisine  made it onto the top 100 in slot 96. And Olvera's Mexico City flagship, Pujol, where Soto-Innes cut her teeth, was named No. 25 in the world.

Considering that Soto-Innes won this year's coveted James Beard Rising Star Chef award, our homegirl is having quite a year.

For better or worse, reflected glory is the only kind Houston can claim when it comes to this annual rankings juggernaut. The day after the list came out, I ran into a Peruvian-born chef who was thrilled that 3 restaurants in Lima had earned spots in the top 50: Central at No. 4; Maido at No. 13; and Astrid y Gaston at No. 30.

I felt neighborly pride at seeing so many Mexico City restaurants do so well, from Quintonil at No. 12, to Pujol at 25, to Biko at 43.

And I confess to feeling a quiet satisfaction at spying Relae  the Copenhagen restaurant that has been such a strong inspiration for chef Justin Yu at our city's justly celebrated Oxheart  sitting in the No. 40 position.

So far, the American restaurants that have won spots on the "50 Best" are confined almost entirely to New York (Eleven Madison Park at 3; Le Bernardin at 24; upstart newcomer Estela at 44; Blue Hill at Stone Barns in outlying Pocantico Hills at 48); Chicago (Alinea at 15); and San Francisco (Saison at 27). This pattern holds true for 50-100, too, which gathers in restaurants from the wider Bay Area and Northern California's wine country as well.

That's kind of ridiculous, given the culinary dazzlements spread all across this country these days. There's no reason a restaurant like Oxheart shouldn't be able to crack the top 100  any more than that the top 100 restaurants should all be run by men.

I'm still chewing it all over, and I'll have more to say about the vagaries of these rankings on houstonchronicle.com. Stay tuned.
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This weekend, Friday through Sunday, Comicpalooza takes over the entire George R. Brown Convention Center complex.

All 1.1 million square feet to be exact, according to convention organizers.

You can find everything at Comicpalooza, from comic books, board games, arts and crafts, costumes, autographed items, collectibles, and the people-watching is legendary.

One of the biggest draws this year is a reunion of the cast of the 1986 film "Aliens" featuring Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Paul Reiser, Mark Rolston, Michael Biehn, and Carrie Henn.

RELATED: 'Aliens' cast reunion to be a major feature of this year's Comicpalooza

Information on prices and packages for all eight of the cast members can be found on the event's official website.

There will also be a special, partial reunion of the cast of the 1999 cult hit "Boondock Saints," featuring stars Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery.

Reedus is better known these days as zombie killer Daryl Dixon on AMC's "The Walking Dead."

One of Reedus' co-stars, Lennie James, who plays Morgan Jones on the show, was among the first convention guests announced months ago.

Comicpalooza announced Tuesday that "Sons of Anarchy" actor Charlie Hunnam is returning to Houston to meet with fans on Saturday and Sunday at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Hunnam and other show cast members came to Houston late last month to appear at Space City Comic Con but due to internal struggles, alleged financial bungling and well documented mismanagement the fans at that convention were not able to meet Hunnam or get what they had paid for. A partial reunion of the cast didn't happen as the convention had advertised.

Hunnam, according to Comicpalooza, is honoring the Sons of Anarchy VIP ticket holders from Space City Comic Con, offering them free autographs. Wolf Studios will also honor any unused VIP photo op vouchers from Space City Comic Con.

Comicpalooza's deck of cards is already stacked with previously announced guests Kate Beckinsale, wrestler Ric Flair, Tara Reid, Lou Ferrigno, Eliza Dushku, Walter Koenig, Kel Mitchell, David Prowse, Peter Mayhew, authors Mercedes Lackey, Leslie Klinger and Sherrilyn Kenyon plus comic book notables Adam Kubert, John Ostrander and Mike Zeck.

RELATED: 'Boondock Saints' reunion planned for Houston's Comicpalooza

Not too bad for a convention born in the summer of 2008 with a few dozen artists at the Alamo Drafthouse off Mason Road. The convention is now in its seventh year and shows no signs of slowing down.

The weekend-long, family-friendly event attracts thousands of comic book, sci-fi, and anime fans. There is also a heavy emphasis on cosplay so seeing fans in costume as their favorite characters is the norm. The people watching is top notch.

The convention organizers reported that in 2015 they welcomed more than 40,000 visitors, adding an overall economic impact of $20 million to the Houston area. Comicpalooza has partnered with the Greater Houston Convention and Visitor's Bureau to bolster its footprint.
The food scene in Houston is electrifying  we all know that. But it's just as incendiary, if not more so, in Mexico City.

That's why local gourmands will not want to miss a special culinary cultural exchange coming to Houston June 30 to July 2. Billed as "Sabores CDMX," the event features four top Mexico City chefs who are coming to Houston to do three-day stints at three of H-town's leading restaurants: Americas, Cafe Annie and Arnaldo Richards' Picos.
RC Gallegos, the chef behind RC's NYC Pizza in Spring, has opened a new restaurant in Kingwood specializing in "Southwestern comfort food." This weekend marks the grand opening of Tularosa Southwestern Grill, 1522 Kingwood Drive. According to the restaurant's Facebook page, the restaurant is open today and will celebrate its grand opening on Saturday.

The menu includes dishes inspired by Gallegos' village of Tulie in New Mexico. That means diners will see New Mexico green chile and red chile specialties such as Hatch green chile chicken enchiladas, flat New Mexican red enchiladas, "Navidad" enchiladas (red and green), and Santa Fe Tampico Steak and chicken with Hatch green chile. Green chile also shows up in a Hatch green chile burger and in Hatch chile potato soup.
A suspect has been arrested in the shooting death of a 33-year-old Richmond man Tuesday at a tattoo shop in southwest Houston.

Abdul-Rahman Khan, 21, is charged with murder in the slaying of Peter Pina about 11:30 p.m. at The Electric Chair Tattoos at 8722 Richmond, according to the Houston Police Department.
The summer solstice, which falls on June 20, is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun appears highest in the sky and it heralds gradually shorter days to come.

The days will get shorter beginning Tuesday until Dec. 21, the winter solstice.
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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is coming to Houston Friday, and he needs money.

Where does a billionaire celebrity mogul go to raise funds in the Bayou City? To River Oaks, of course.

But even for residents of the metro area's most expensive neighborhood, it's no small feat to hold a fundraiser for a man who famously casts his name in gold block print.

Executive Trump fans will pay up to a quarter million dollars to gather at the $14 million "English cottage" of Tony Buzbee, a prominent local, cigar-smoking trial lawyer who recently won a $41 million verdict for the victim of a spider-bite death.

Seems like a nice place for a party. According to the Chronicle, the home "includes five wood-burning fireplaces, a 17th Century French mantle, limestone floors, mahogany ceiling beams and a slate roof that was cut in Spain."

It set a record for single-family home sales when Buzbee bought it in 2013.

RELATED: Mansion sets market price mark

So who is Tony Buzbee? He's claimed a high profile in recent years, first defending former Governor Rick Perry on felony charges, then getting booked in Houston for DWI.

Before that, he made a name with his successful, domineering courtroom style, as seen when he shouted at a lawyer for BP to "make an objection, otherwise shut the hell up." See the clip:

He attributed that spunk partly to the fighting spirit of his father, a butcher who raised him and his siblings among livestock in little Atlanta, Texas, according to a 2014 profile by the Austin American-Statesman.

Buzbee's legal career sprouted and flourished with local rootsa bachelor's degree from Texas A&M University, a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center, work in South Texas federal courts and a Houston-area private practice founded in 2000.

His landmark victory came in 2009, when he won $100 million for Texas City residents affected by toxic discharge from the local BP plant. It was heralded as the largest verdict ever against the oil giant, winning Buzbee much acclaim, even though a federal judge cut the award by $99 million months later.

Well established as a Texas legal titan, Buzbee expanded his reach, founding a national real estate investment firm and taking seats on numerous non-profit boards, including the Boy Scouts of America, Bay Area Council.

Perry also appointed Buzbee to the Texas A&M Board of Regents in 2013.

He's been a steward of political funding before, opening the doors of his River Oaks mansion to raise more than $100,000 for mayoral candidate Adrian Garcia in 2014.

He'll elevate his game with the Friday eventTrump's first Houston fundraiserwhich charges couples between $5,400 and $250,000 to attend, with a Trump photo op available to top spenders.
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Four men were indicted on Wednesday on charges of armed robbery at multiple meat markets in December 2015.

Billie Hawkins, 20; Laroderick Martin, 19; Jirron Curtis, 21; and Marcus Malbro, 18, each face up to 20 years in prison for robbery and seven years for discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence.
The last Catholic priest who had been held at the Dachau concentration camp has died in Germany at 102.

The Rev. Hermann Scheipers, one of some 2,800 clergy interned at the Nazi camp, was incarcerated more than four years after being arrested for ministering to Polish forced laborers. He escaped in April 1945 during a death march toward Bad Tolz.

His prison file, reported KNA, a German Catholic news agency, described Scheipers as " a fanatical proponent of the Catholic church" who was likely to "cause unrest among the population."

Ninety-five percent of clergy held at the camp were Catholic priests. More than 1,000 died. Of Dachau's total prisoner population of 200,000, more than 41,500 were killed.

Scheipers escaped the gas chamber only through the pleading of his twin sister, who told Nazi authorities his murder would stir unrest among Catholics in his native Munsterland, reported the Catholic website, Aleteia.

In his memoirs, "Balancing Act -- Priest Under Two Dictatorships," Scheipers recalled that the Nazi camp's commander greeted prisoners with the grim admonition: "You are without honor, without help and without rights. Here, you can either work or perish."

At Dachau, Scheipers "slaved away as a field worker, receiving mostly watery soup to eat," the KNA obituary reported. Prisoners who failed to work with sufficient vigor were tortured or killed.

After the war, reported Aleteia, Scheipers resumed his ministry, only to run afoul of East German authorities. With the collapse of communism, the priest learned that 15 spies had been assigned to monitor his activities. Legal action was to have targeted him for distributing subversive propaganda.

Scheipers died on June 2, but news of his death was reported this week.

You can read the entire Aleletia report here.
A petroleum executive pleaded guilty in Houston Thursday to bribery and tax violations in a scheme to land contracts with Venezuela's state-owned energy company.

Roberto Enrique Rincon Fernandez, 55, of The Woodlands, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller to conspiracy to violate and for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and to making false statements on his 2010 federal income tax return, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson in Houston.
This weekend Houstonians will get an up-close look at NASAs Orion spacecraft at Comicpalooza at the George R. Brown Convention Center, along with the agencys own Modular Robotic Vehicle (MRV).

Orion is intended to one day be a key part of the process that sends men and women to Mars. The MRV is what we might use to tool around on if (and when) we finally get there.
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Donald Trumps ruling philosophy  and sudden favored motto of the campaign  has a Nazi-friendly background.

In recent Twitter posts and speeches, hes touted #AmericaFirst, which has its origins with Americans who supported the Nazi regime in the 1930s.

WELCOME, DONALD: Trump to hold Friday rally in The Woodlands

The quote ostensibly sounds like its about prioritizing Americas needs above all others. Woodrow Wilson used the quote to describe U.S. neutrality and leadership. But the quote was co-opted by some of the biggest players in the first-half of the 20th Century to mean something much different. Eli Lake writes in a recent Bloomberg article that the phrase has been largely banished from respectable discourse.

Aviator Charles Lindbergh would become the main proponent of the tainted America First mentality. He tarnished his hero reputation by gushing at how wondering the Third Reich was in the late 1930s. His America First Committee stoked nationalist fervor until Pearl Harbor made staying out of the war impossible.

>>>See Donald Trump's most controversial campaign quotes in the gallery above

Not every member of the America First Committee necessarily admired the Nazi cause, but certainly the prominent members like Lindberg and anti-Semite Henry Ford did. Even after the war Lindbergh, refused to admit he was wrong about the Nazis.

The subversive use of America First didnt start with Lindbergh however. The Atlantic explains how publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst turned the motto into a tacit form of Nazi sympathy:

"With 'AMERICA FIRST' at the center of his newspaper masthead, emblazoned above a stylized eagle clutching a ribbon reading, 'AN AMERICAN PAPER FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE,' Hearst promoted the virtues of Nazism, whose 'great achievement'and a lesson to all 'liberty-loving people'was the defeat of communism.

---

This was Hearsts 'America First' in the 1930sa nationalist enthusiasm for crushing the left by hyperbole and violence (invariably involving the use of all-caps). Its a discourse familiar to devotees of Trump today (although Trumps preferred typographic emphasis is the exclamation point). Trumps campaign has put Nazi symbols on the U.S. flag and quoted white nationalist websites; now its using a fascist-friendly slogan.

READ MORE: Trump to discuss terrorism watch lists with NRA



Trump, in the past, has quoted (unknowingly) Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. He didnt apologize for quoting the dictator and instead defended what happened by calling it a very interesting quote.

With America First, Trump might make the same claim of ignorance again. Nevertheless, he seems to have a thing for "very interesting quotes" by and for fascists.
City Councilman Mike Knox has fired staffer Trebor Gordon, he announced Wednesday, a month after Gordon tried to block the appointment of a Harris County Republican precinct chair because he is Muslim.

Knox called Gordon's comments "incendiary" and "unfortunate" at the time but did not originally intend to fire him.

The councilman changed his mind, however, citing concerns about Gordon's ability to carry out his job duties. Gordon made $55,000 a year as Knox's community outreach director. His termination was effective Monday.

"It became clear at a certain point that he was going to be unable to function, that some of his decisions ... have interfered with our ability to perform our job as a council representative," Knox said.

Knox declined to comment on what those decisions were, saying he was unwilling to discuss internal personnel matters.

"I know that many people wanted this to happen much quicker, but we want to make sure that we follow the existing process," Knox said.

Gordon did not return a request for comment.

Knox's announcement comes a day after several community members expressed concern at City Council over the councilman's past decisions, including keeping Gordon on staff for a month and attending a May rally protesting Target's new bathroom policy.

Target in April said it would allow transgender employees and customers to use the bathroom or fitting room consistent with their gender identity.

"Council Member Knox, I'm here today because of hateful rhetoric made by those you surround yourself with. The rhetoric made by people you call friends and employees is not only hurtful to the communities they are targeting but outright dangerous," said Caroline Giese, who teaches middle school in Sunnyside.

The same citizens criticized Knox for leaving council at the beginning of the public comment period.

Knox said he left to deal with "an important family matter."

"I can say that I am sensitive to the concerns of the community in general and of the Muslim community in particular," he said.

Knox also noted his opposition to Houston's defeated equal rights ordinance, which would have protected against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
WASHINGTON - From Shanghai to Paris to Moscow, the world has been watching to see how the U.S. election is affected by the latest terrorist bloodbath on our soil, this time in the shadow of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Newspapers in those cities and in many others focused attention on the mass murder of 49 revelers in a gay Orlando nightclub and what might be expected from either a President Donald Trump or a President Hillary Clinton. It escaped no one that the latest horror would become a factor in the campaign. Nothing, not even the sorrows of the bereaved, takes a backseat to political opportunity.

While Clinton spoke against anti-Muslim rhetoric, Trump leapt into the darkness with all four feet, snarling at President Barack Obama's lack of passion in addressing the Orlando slaughter and condemning him for refusing to use the words "radical Islamic terrorism" in identifying the enemy.

These charges are familiar enough, but this time Trump went a step further, suggesting that Obama resign from office and, conspiratorially, that there's more going on than we know. Defaulting to his customary template, Trump shifted responsibility for these thoughts to "people."

"Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind," Trump said Monday on Fox News.

"And the something else in mind - you know, people can't believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can't even mention the words 'radical Islamic terrorism.' There's something going on. It's inconceivable. There's something going on."

And who are these people who can't believe "it?" Trump's Twitter followers? The tiny voices in his head? For certain, they're not The Washington Post journalists whom Trump now has barred from his campaign events.

Why? Because the Post accurately reported Trump's words, noting the obvious implication that the president of the United States was somehow in league with the terrorists. Maybe it's only the "people" thinking this, but Trump's modus operandi is well known by now. His book, tedious even to Dick and Jane, is wide open.

In a normal world, Trump would be booed off the stage. Instead, he is applauded (by some) for adding the Post to his list of journalistic organs denied access to his campaign.

The applause is disheartening, and is evidence that newspapers are little understood or appreciated. This is owing in part to a few notorious fabricators, who were duly punished, as well as a vast array of alternative news sources. But mostly to blame for the demonization of the media broadly are faux news media outlets, Republicans and their cohorts.

For decades now, conservative news sources, many of which are aggregators dependent upon the mainstream media for their bread and butter, have joined radio hosts in blasting traditional news sources. Kill the messenger is their operating principle. Republicans who benefit from this portrayal of the media tender their silence in errant gratitude.

The fact is, Trump hasn't needed any help in exposing his prevarications, exaggerations and just plain awful behavior. His words and deeds speak for themselves. Thus, the idea that there's some sort of anti-Trump cabal in the Post newsroom is nonsense. And picking a side between a bombastic fabulist like Trump and one of the most-respected editors in the country, Marty Baron, shouldn't cut any fresh furrows in anyone's brow.

That is, not if one values the First Amendment, because you can be sure that Trump does not. Already, he has said he wants to "open up" libel laws so that people like him can more easily sue newspapers. This isn't only unlikely to happen but would prove otherwise problematic for Trump. Among other criteria, libel law requires evidence of defamation of character, the implicit presumption of which would seem to inoculate the accused in Trump's case.

More troubling in the long term is Trump's apparent assumption that he can block a free press - much as tyrants, potentates and dictators throughout history have done. Undoubtedly, a state news agency would suit him fine - all the news Good Citizens are fit to read.

Our allies and enemies, meanwhile, will have noted that a possible President Trump, who used the deaths of innocents to essentially indict Obama of colluding with terrorists, would do all in his power to undermine the oldest democracy in the world.

It is hard to sell freedom when at least a sizable portion of the country promoting it seems no longer to understand what it means.

Parker's email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.
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.
Warriors end season with win over Rebels SIOUX RAPIDS - The Alta-Aurelia football team traveled to face Sioux Central for their final game of the season and...

Cherokee takes down Generals to finish season CHEROKEE - The Cherokee football team hosted Sibley-Ocheyedan on Friday and won 35-28 to finish out their season. The...

Warriors suffer heartbreaking end to season ALTA - The Alta-Aurelia volleyball team hosted Lawton-Bronson last Wednesday and suffered a nail-biting 3-2 loss to end their season....

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Wyomings interpretation of Indian treaty hunting rights is being challenged once again in a case that has the potential to reach the U.S. Supreme Court for resolution, according to legal scholars.

At the center of the argument is Crow tribal member Clayvin Herreras killing of a bull elk in Wyoming in 2014.

From our perspective, its a right weve always had, Herrera, a tribal fish and game warden, told The Gazette in a 2015 interview.

Herrera, on the advice of his attorney, would not talk to The Gazette for this article. In a story prior to the trial, though, he said, Grandma always told stories about the mountains and how we can hunt. Never let anyone tell you what you cant do, he said she told him, always speaking in Crow.

Found guilty

Yet in April, Herrera was convicted in a Sheridan County Circuit Court trial of taking an elk out of season from Wyomings Bighorn National Forest, just south of the Crow Reservation, which is located in south-central Montana. He was fined $8,000 and sentenced to one year of probation.

Citing previous decisions, the lower court refused to allow Herreras attorney, Kyle Anne Gray, to argue that his actions were protected by the tribes 148-year-old treaty. So last month Gray appealed the ruling to the Fourth Judicial District Court of Wyoming and is prepared to take her argument to the nations highest court if necessary.

This is a legitimate question that may require a (U.S.) Supreme Court ruling, said Monte Mills, co-director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana, and co-author of a court brief supporting Grays argument.

Thats where we think this is headed, said Gray, whose Billings law firm Holland & Hart has taken on the case pro bono.

Wyomings argument

Wyoming courts have used two previous rulings to support their stance denying Crow Tribe treaty hunting rights.

The oldest is an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said when Wyoming became a state in 1890 all tribes off-reservation treaty hunting rights were nullified. This was based on an argument that all states when they are admitted to the union must enter on an equal footing with all other states. If the treaty hunting rights had not been nullified it would interfere with Wyomings right to regulate its own wildlife, the earlier court found.

Statehood does not deprive a tribe of the right to exercise its treaty rights, said Debra Donahue, a professor of law at the University of Wyoming, who also co-authored a brief supporting Grays argument. Only Congress has the right to eliminate a treaty right.

The second ruling Wyoming has used to deny treaty hunting rights deals with the definition of unoccupied lands. In the Crow and other tribal treaties, the U.S. government guaranteed tribes the right to hunt the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and as long as peace subsists among the whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts.

Wyoming has argued that that national forests are occupied and points to a 1995 ruling by the Tenth Circuit Court in a similar case involving a Crow tribal members shooting of an elk in the Bighorn National Forest as precedent.

That just doesnt make any sense, Donahue said. Its still open public land.

Counter argument

There has been a lot of case law since the 1896 Supreme Court ruling and even since 1995 that Gray is using to support her argument that the Crow Tribes hunting treaty rights still apply in Wyoming.

The lawsuits dot the northwest  salmon fishing in Washington, tribal hunting off reservation in Idaho and Montana  as tribes challenged states over fishing and hunting rights and won based on treaty guarantees.

Its not too unique for a state to be resistant to these rights, said Mills, of the University of Montana. But whats unique to Wyoming is that all of those other state cases have led to Supreme Court decisions recognizing those rights.

In that respect, then, Wyoming stands alone.

New case law

Gray and Mills cite a 1999 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians as the new precedent that could change Wyomings longstanding position. The court ruled that the tribes 1837 treaty and hunting fishing rights were not lost when Minnesota became a state and that only Congress could take those rights away.

Mills said the question now is: What effect does the high courts Mille Lacs decision have on the Herrera case in Wyoming? In Mills opinion, the 1896 ruling has been undermined.

It does make for some complicated questions, Mills said. Yet theres already been guidance from the Supreme Court.

Herreras attorney sees the situation similarly.

We will argue that the circuit court judge got it wrong, that the equal footing doctrine no longer applies in this situation and that forest creation did not abrogate treaty rights, Gray said.

Even if the Wyoming District Court upholds the lower courts ruling, Gray can still appeal the case to the Wyoming and then U.S. Supreme Courts.

I think the law is on (Herreras) side, said Donahue, of the University of Wyoming. But I dont know what kind of chance he has in a Wyoming court.

The notion that a Native American could hunt in Wyoming without a license, it doesnt sit well, especially when it applies to elk, which we hold so dear.
Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is a mess. The bi-state agency is, it seems, continuously mired in debt and scandal, strong-armed by the unions that represent its employees, the port authority lavishes outlandish pay and benefits on its workforce. Decades of corruption and mismanagement have created an unwieldy organization that desperately needs reform. Today on the 10 Blocks Podcast we talk to City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga, who is, among many other things, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Steves piece in the Spring 2016 issue of City Journal takes a hard look at the chaotic, debt-ridden reality of the port authority. Steve Malanga, thanks for joining us on 10 Blocks.

Steve Malanga: My pleasure.

Brian Anderson: The port authority is 95 years old this year. What was it originally formed to do?

Steve Malanga: Well, its part of an interstate compact which essentially means that Congress had to grant it the right to create this operating agency that operated across state lines. And the reason for that was New Jersey and New York were often in dispute about the Port of New York and New Jersey, and particularly about rail operations on the port. They couldnt basically decide who should govern them and they were, they found themselves oftentimes in court over these issues and a federal judge finally said maybe you need to find a way to cooperate. And the port authority grew out of that and began really with what should have been a very focused, modest effort to sort out how to run the great Port of New York at that time.

Brian Anderson: The agency has tremendous debt problems because of its massive personnel costs, especially the cost of providing pensions to its retirees. How did it wind up in this position and can you say a bit about that crisis?

Steve Malanga: Yeah, well, you know the problem, first of all, with the port authority is that it has had to fund, of course, the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan, which in itself has created a big bonded debt burden. In addition to that it has very, very high compensation costs and in particular there are two reasons for this. It participates in the New York State pension system, which is a very expensive system, and in addition to that it has had a culture of overtime among its employees, its unionized employees, for years. And so many unionized employees earn significantly more than their base salary and through many different forms of compensation in addition to overtime, like extra pay for working special shifts and so forth, and as a result of that there are a lot of workers at the port authority who retire with pension benefits that are well beyond, lets say, the typical retirement which might be 60 to 70% of your final base salary, in fact there are quite a number of employees who actually retire making a larger pension than they earned in base salary while they were working. This creates a tremendous burden on the system and it also creates, you know, a whole category of worker at the port authority thats earning even more in pensions than the New York State workers, who do quite well. In fact, of the 300 top-paid, top pensioners in the New York State pension system, 71 of them are port authority employees. This is really extraordinary considering that port authority employees are a very small percentage of all the people receiving pensions in New York State.

Brian Anderson: Your essay draws on new data from an organization called Open the Books that nobodys really seen before and it documents, I think, this remarkable largess on the part of the port authority when it comes to personnel costs.

Steve Malanga: Yes, using Freedom of Information Act requests, they obtained, and we analyzed, five years worth of salary data which include very, very specific breakdowns, if you will, base pay, overtime pay, other kinds of extra pay, and then data on retirees. And so theyre quite extraordinary. To talk about a couple of examples, for instance, on average the police sergeants who work in the port authoritys police force earn a base salary of about $102,000 a year during the periods we looked at, including 2014, the most recent period. However, their average total compensation during those years was actually $182,133 thanks to all the extra pay. Police officers, the top-paying police officers who earn a base salary of $90,000 a year, which after six years is among the highest salaries of police officers in the region, their actual average compensation at the port authority in 2014 was really $153,784. And so it goes on down the line. Electricians earning about 30 to 40% more than their base pay. Senior toll collectors earning significantly more, about $20,000 a year more than their base pay. And all of that, of course, is paid at time-and-a-half. Its a very inefficient way of paying workers, and it helps to drag down the pension system by increasing the cost of pensions for senior workers, older workers, who tend to earn the most in overtime probably because they are looking to, what we call, spike their pensions.

Brian Anderson: In 1967 PATH train engineers won an injunction to prevent them from having to use walkie-talkies. Why? What was that all about?

Steve Malanga: Well, heres the thing. The port authority, of course, is heavily unionized and it controls key assets in the region, including transportation assets, the airports, and so forth. And one of the things its unions have been able to do over the years is essentially not only burnish their wages, but also make sure they essentially keep their workforce growing by threatening those, you know, those assets. By going on strike, by doing work slowdowns and so forth. In that particular case, one of the cases I wrote about years ago, essentially what they were trying to do is stop the port authority from using technology to increase the efficiency of the workforce because they were more interested really in the number of workers, not the efficiency of the workforce. The overall message, when you go back and look over the years and I talk about work stoppages and negotiations in the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s, the overall message is that when you have a unionized workforce that has control over these crucial assets, they can do things like go on strike, as PATH workers did for 81 days at one point, and create chaos in the region and in the process create pressure on the management there to, you know, solve these work stoppages with higher benefits and wages, which is one of the reasons why you see some of these, you know, striking benefits deals at the port authority.

Brian Anderson: Overtime costs are out of control at the port authority. What do we know about what the employees are doing during their overtime hours?

Steve Malanga: Well, this is an interesting discussion. First of all, overtime costs at the port authority have more or less been out of control for about 30 years. Its a regular subject of audits by outside agencies, including New York State controllers office, and the port authority rarely says it plans to bring these costs in line. They seem completely incapable of doing that. In fact, one New Jersey paper commented that it seems like death, taxes, and overtime costs at port authority are all three things we can count on in this particular region. One thing I think that may contribute to it is that because the cost of benefits has gotten so high at the port authority, the price of hiring a new worker, which is not just the workers salary but the workers benefits also, becomes prohibitive. So instead what the port authority is doing is essentially keeping its workforce numbers down but using overtime to fill in the gaps. Thats a very expensive way of doing that, and you only do that if youve got yourself in a position where its too expensive to hire new employees because, essentially, you have granted them levels of benefits that you cant bear. So theyre trading full-time employees for overtime, but theyre paying those overtime employees time-and-a-half and in addition to that the extra cost on the pension system - and their pension costs are rising very rapidly - the extra costs on the pension system, you know, has to be figured into, you know, this overtime mess.

Brian Anderson: Many suggestions have been made over the years for reining in costs at the port authority. Youve just alluded to the overtime question. What would your ideal solution be? What reforms would you like to see enacted?

Steve Malanga: Well, I think there are a whole bunch of them. First of all, the port authority itself has tried, for instance, to hold down healthcare costs for workers by essentially removing healthcare costs from the collective bargaining unionization process, something they have the right to do. However, the current Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who has direct control along with the Governor of New Jersey over appointment to the port authority, stepped in and essentially quashed that for political reasons. And so, you know, thats something that we need to see in order to gain control of healthcare costs, in the same way that if you work for a private employer that employer from year to year makes adjustments to your healthcare program to kind of restrain costs and you have the option of either, you know, paying those extra costs or of leaving. Similarly I think one of the biggest mistakes the port authority ever made was participating in the New York State pension system, because of course New York State has a constitutional guarantee of all pension benefits, not only benefits earned, but benefits that a worker might accrue for work they have not done yet. That makes reforming the pension system very difficult in New York State, and I think that going forward the port authority should, for all new workers, essentially exit that pension system because the guarantees are very costly and find another way, either a separate pension system or participating in creating a new pension system for new workers to get out from under the New York State pension system and its guarantees, because the combination of the overtime and extra pay and the formulas, if you will, that pay benefits in the New York State system are just very, very burdensome on the port authority.

Brian Anderson: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie are searching for a new director for the port authority. Considering the failure of past directors to solve these problems, what type of leader do you think they should be looking for?

Steve Malanga: Well, what they are trying to do is hire a more senior leader. Transform the directors job into something called a chief executives job, and they think that giving that person more power might, in some way or another, improve the port authority. I think the problem is that the political meddling of the port authority and the fact that the costs of the port authority dont appear on the budgets of either state but rather they are paid for by these giant subsidies in the form of very, very high tolls and were now up to $15 and $16 to cross the Hudson, and also very high fees on - at the airports, which are essentially rolled into airline fees. Those kinds of subsidies, in a sense, protect the port authority from reform. If, instead, your taxes were going up, people would be outraged. Although I think, quite frankly, the latest toll increases have also finally got people up in arms, taxpayers and residents of this area, up in arms because its very expensive if you are using port authority facilities these days. Its very expensive because of the fees that are being used to pay for these benefits.

Brian Anderson: Please check out Steve Malangas latest article, Bloated, Broke, and Bullied. Its the latest in an ongoing series were publishing on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Its in our Spring 2016 issue and its on our website at www.city-journal.org. Wed love to hear your comments about todays episode on Twitter, @CityJournal with the hash tag #10Blocks. Lastly, if you like our show and want to hear more, please leave ratings and reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening and thank you again, Steve, for joining us on 10 Blocks.
In politics, dreams can turn quickly into nightmares. Just ask Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy. Not long ago, the Daily Beast touted him as the dream progressive governor who raised taxes, boosted the minimum wage, introduced mandatory paid sick leave, tightened gun control, and still managed to get reelected. Feeling his oats, Malloy even challenged other Democrats to grow a pair by sticking to their progressive principles. That was barely 18 months ago, but it seems an entire political lifetime.

Now, Malloy is being attacked by supporters of progressivisms standard bearer, Bernie Sanders, for not being faithful to the cause. The criticism comes even as the governor has alienated the states business community, provoked criticism from Wall Street for his fiscal management, and garnered among the lowest approval ratings from the general population of any current governor. Its hard to alienate so many people across the ideological spectrum so thoroughly, but Malloy has managed to do it.

Connecticut is a state with deep fiscal problems. Malloys biggest miscalculation was his belief that he could sock residents and businesses with taxes and regulations and then somehow rely on the economy to bail him out. Malloy rammed through a $2 billion tax increase in 2011, promising unspecified budget savings to help balance the books. He cut a mere 1,000 jobs out of a state workforce of 58,000, made only modest reforms to Connecticuts deeply indebted pension system, and declared victory. Enough residents believed him that he eked out a narrow electoral triumph in 2014.

No sooner had Malloy been reelected than the states sinking economy helped create a massive $1.3 billion new deficit problem. Connecticuts Democratic legislature responded by giving the governor a second round of steep tax increases. Businesses and residents yelped. Connecticuts largest private employer, General Electric, began a public hunt for new headquarters in another state. Even as government union leaders and Democratic legislators argued that GE was only bluffing (because of course businesses dont care about taxes), Malloy began backpedaling. He committed progressive heresy by suggesting that people and companies might actually change their behavior in response to high taxes. He scrapped some of his tax increases and instead promised to cut the budget by $800 million. Hes promised to trim an additional 3,000 jobs from the workforce and has cut funding for social services and reduced aid to municipalities. Still, hes left with some $200 million in unspecified further cuts that he promises to make.

All of this might have remained a local concern except that Hillary Clinton tapped Malloy to co-chair the Democratic Partys Platform Committee at this summers nominating convention. Sanders strenuously objected, referring to Malloy, a Clinton supporter, as one of her aggressive attack surrogates. Sanders supporters in Connecticut and nationwide have taken the cue to slam Malloy for being insufficiently progressive. Dan Cantor, who helped found the New York Working Families Party and is national director of the union-backed group, told Salon last month that Malloy was a major disappointment who is pulling from the Republican playbook. The director of Connecticut Citizen Action Group, another progressive organization, told CTMirror.org that Malloy is more inclined now to play favorably with the corporate community.

Even as the Left attacks, Malloys budget moves have hardly won plaudits from the financial community. Last month, both Fitch and Standard & Poors lowered Connecticuts credit ratingthe first time in 40 years that the state received a double-downgrade. Fitch said it was unclear whether the state has succeeded in fully aligning its budget to potential future economic and revenue performance. A new study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University rates Connecticut dead last among the states in fiscal performance (only Puerto Rico, also included in the study, ranked lower). Connecticuts fiscal position is poor across all categories, the study noted.

The states residents, meanwhile, are hardly enthralled with the man they narrowly reelected. In a recent poll by the Morning Consult, Connecticut residents gave Malloy a mere 29 percent approval ratingamong the lowest for any governor. Adding insult to injury, the governor with the highest approval rating was Charlie Baker in neighboring Massachusetts, the state to which GE eventually fled. Now, Malloy is caught in a high-tax governors nightmare: more firms are threatening to leave the state, and hes already dished out millions in tax breaks to keep Bridgewater Associatesone of the worlds most profitable hedge fundsfrom relocating. Thats a strategy that neither the Left nor the Right approves of, to say nothing of hard-pressed residents watching their tax dollars go to corporate subsidies.

Malloy claims that his popularity has taken a hit because hes making the tough decisions, but hes in trouble in large part because he put off those decisions for four years. There is one potential bright spot for the Connecticut governor in all this: if Hillary Clinton succeeds in her bid for the White House, theres probably a job waiting for him in Washington.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
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HELENA  A Montana State Prison guard pleaded guilty Wednesday to smuggling marijuana and tobacco to inmates, telling a judge that he snuck contraband into the Deer Lodge prison 20 times over the course of about a year.

In return, associates of the inmates sent Martin Reap, 25, payments between $100 and $150 through the mail or by wire transfer to Walmart, Reap told U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon. In all, Reap smuggled in between nine and 16 ounces of marijuana, a small amount of the synthetic marijuana called spice, and he took between $6,300 and $6,500.

"I know I made a mistake," Reap said after the hearing. "I feel like I'm doing the right thing by turning myself in."

Haddon accepted Reap's guilty plea and set a sentencing date of Oct. 18. As part of a plea agreement, federal prosecutors plan to drop additional charges of drug conspiracy, possession and distribution, and will recommend a lighter sentence than the maximum 10-year prison sentence the bribery charge calls for.

Prosecutors also could move for an even lighter sentence if he cooperates with the investigation, according to the plea agreement.

Inmates asked Reap to provide them with tobacco starting in 2014, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thaggard. Reap started smuggling drugs along with the tobacco between Feb. 1, 2015, and April of this year, Thaggard said.

The inmates, who have not been named by prosecutors, then distributed the drugs and tobacco to other prisoners, according to Thaggard.

Reap started working at the prison in 2012 and has been suspended without pay since May.

Reap's family, who watched the courtroom proceedings, said this was the young guard's first criminal offense.

"He's a good kid who got himself in a bad situation," his father, Robert Reap, said.

FBI agents began investigating allegations of contraband being smuggled into the prison in 2015.

The investigation has led to a separate indictment charging five people with smuggling methamphetamine and another drug to inmates through a prison laundry worker.

Two women in Tennessee and a former Montana State Prison inmate got the drugs to Erin Bernhardt, the laundry worker, who then brought them to an inmate named Ian Scott Barclay, according to the indictment.

The five have pleaded not guilty to charges related to the alleged scheme. They are scheduled to go to trial on July 25.
Chicago photojournalist Amanda Rivkin is blunt. The men she is photographing were kidnapped by municipal police officers and tortured.

Youre at the corner store. Driven to a rail yard. Your testicles are electrocuted, she says. This is kidnapping. This is not a normal arrest procedure.

The events she describes didnt happen in Azerbaijan or Bosnia or even Turkey, places where the 32-year-old Rivkin has taken photographs for outlets like National Geographic and The New York Times Magazine.

Instead, shes summarizing the stories of people like Darrell Cannon, one of the scores of black men who have told of abuse and torture at the hands of Chicago police from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Their accounts, which have led to tens of millions of dollars in civil settlements, center around Commander John Burge and the so-called midnight crew of detectives under his command, who used violent tactics to coerce confessions. Last year, the City Council acknowledged allegations of torture and abuse from more than 100 African-Americans in a resolution offering a formal apology and reparations to the victims.

Now Rivkin, who grew up in the city, plans to spend the next year photographing these men and recording their stories. The project, supported a recent grant from the International Womens Media Foundation, is designed to culminate in a multimedia exhibit that will be shown to the public in Chicago sometime later this year or early next.

I want to hear their story in their words, she says. I am facilitating them getting their story out there. I am recording their voice and editing it for public consumption. But Im not altering it.

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Rivkin was in elementary school in 1990 when the Chicago Reader published John Conroys first story exposing a stunningly brutal system of police torture under Burge. Later in high school, Rivkin rallied against the Illinois death penalty after stories emerged that nearly a dozen men ended up on death row after being tortured into giving confessions. (Rivkins godfather is David Protess, the embattled founder of the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University, now called the Medill Justice Project, and currently head of the Chicago Innocence Center).

I just sort of grew up in a house that was very newsy, she says. I remember this very well.

No one did more to expose and advance the story of Burge and his torture ring than Conroy and the Reader, with essential reporting from other media outlets that followed. The Chicago Tribune contributed pivotal work about systemic corruption that stretched from prosecutors to the judges on the bench.

Mike Zajakowski, a Tribunepicture editor, said the paper wrote more than 500 stories on Burge and the related corruption. The paper has hundreds of photos that helped document it, including pictures of victims.

Im boggled by it, he says. I keep up with the news as it happens, but its just overwhelming.

Zajakowski, who is familiar with Rivkins previous work, says she will help document the emotional moments in a story that has had many. That is something Amanda can bring.

Conroy, who was laid off from the Reader in 2007, is now a senior investigator at the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University. Having the stories of victims all in one place will be a great thing for the city and a great thing for the victims, he says, assuming they dont mind revisiting what happened to them.

Mark Clements, who describes being struck repeatedly and having his genitals squeezed by police, spent 28 years in prison before his conviction was vacated in 2009. Photo by Amanda Rivkin, used with permission.

Rivkin says that in between travels for work (last year to Poland, Latvia, Serbia, and Germany), she decided to turn her attention to the Burge victims, a story shes been wanting to tell for some time. The grant made it financially possible. But the citys historic reparations deal last year, authorizing $5.5 million to scores of victims, also cleared the way, she says. The city admitting to it is huge.

In spite of the time that has passed, her project does not feel dated. The reparations deal came just months before the city lost a court battle to keep private a video that showed a Chicago police officer gunning down teenager Laquan McDonald. The dash-cam video showed a different story than the one police initially told about how the 17-year-old died. It has renewed national scrutiny of the Chicago police and a justice system that continues to be tainted by charges of corruption. Last week, a county judge ordered a special prosecutor for the murder trial of the police officer who shot McDonald.

All of this weve seen before, Rivkin says. The layers of procedures, oversight boards and task forces Its the same song and dance.

As part of the reparations resolution, the city pledged to incorporate a lesson about the case and its legacy into the 8th and 10th grade US history curriculum in the public schools by this year. That has not yet happened. A spokeswoman for Chicago Public Schools said teachers and officials will meet in the coming months to come up with a pilot for the fall.

Rivkin hopes her photos and audio could be part of the curriculum.

From media accounts, activists, lawyers, and other records, Rivkin has identified more than 100 victims and is now trying to track them down. She has interviewed five of the men so far. Three are featured on her blog.

Everybody thats talked to me has wanted to talk to me, she says. Some of the interviews have taken 30 minutes, she says; one lasted more than four hours. I havent had to do a hard sell yet. I probably will at some point. The goal is not to retraumatize anyone.

Rivkin says shes read and viewed most of the media coverage around Burge, who in 2010 was convicted of lying about the torture in a civil lawsuitbut not of the torture itself, as the statute of limitations had passedand spent nearly four years in prison and the rest of his sentence in a halfway house.

The stories of victims have been told in that coverage. But often, Rivkin says, the reporting has focused on a corrupt system, with victims accounts filtered told through the courts, through lawyers. She sees her work as a sort of oral history, and the men shes interviewed, she says, tend to see her more as a social worker than a journalist.

For most of them, TV is the media, and Im not TV so Im in a different realm. Because Im not putting something out there the next day, that its for an exhibit. Its really about their experience and emotion rather than pumping them for facts.

Rivkin draws a connection between this project, in her home city, to the work she has done around the globe.

Most of my work is about excesses of state power, she says. This is about torture and democracy and how in a democratic system anyone can look the other way.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Jackie Spinner is CJRs correspondent for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. She is an associate journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago and a former staff writer for The Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter @jackiespinner.
Global disasters lead to at least $7 billion in claims as insurers aid the recovery process following May wildfires, floods and storms, according to the latest Impact Forecasting report.

Aon Benfields catastrophe model development team released the latest edition of its monthly Global Catastrophe Recap report, which evaluates the impact of the natural disaster events that occurred worldwide during May 2016. Aon Benfield is the global reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor of Aon plc.

A historic wildfire caused catastrophic damage in the Canadian city of Fort McMurray throughout the month of May, becoming the costliest natural disaster in the countrys history. Insured losses  including physical damage and business interruption  are anticipated to be in excess of CAD4.0 billion (USD3.1 billion). The fire charred more than 580,000 hectares (1.43 million acres) of land and destroyed at least 10 percent of Fort McMurray, including more than 2,400 homes and other structures.

The severity of the wildfire damage in Fort McMurray is an unfortunate reminder of how significant insurable losses can be from the peril. The situation in Canada has already allowed for a strong and cooperative response from both the government and the insurance industry as residents and business owners seek to assess the damage and begin the recovery process. Since this is just the sixth individual global wildfire to surpass the billion-dollar threshold for insurers, there is not a lot of precedent for a fire event of this magnitude, Adam Podlaha, global head of Impact Forecasting said.

Meanwhile, convective storms and widespread flooding from a storm dubbed Elvira swept across parts of northern Europe between late May and early June, killing at least 17 people. The most considerable damage was noted in Germany, France, Austria, Poland and Belgium where floods impacted many major metropolitan regions, including Paris. Insurance industry associations in France (AFA) and Germany (GDV) preliminarily estimated combined minimum claims payouts to exceed EUR2.0 billion (USD2.3 billion). Tentative overall economic damage was estimated to approach EUR4.0 billion (USD4.6 billion).

No fewer than five outbreaks of severe convective storms impacted the United States during May. Parts of the Plains, Midwest, and Mississippi Valley were impacted by damaging tornadoes, straight-line winds, and large hail. Storm-related flooding also caused major damage in portions of Texas during the latter part of the month. Total aggregated insured losses were estimated to exceed USD1.0 billion.

In Asia, Cyclone Roanu brought torrential rainfall to Sri Lanka, eastern India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and China during May. Widespread flooding and landslides ensued and at least 105 people were killed in Sri Lanka alone. Nearly 125,000 homes and structures were damaged or destroyed across all five countries. The estimated cost of reconstruction was up to LKR250 billion (USD1.7 billion), though insured losses were substantially less given low insurance penetration.

Natural hazard events to occur elsewhere during May include:

Five separate instances of flooding impacted China as aggregated economic losses topped USD1.5 billion. Most of the damage was attributed to agricultural interests.

Other major flood and landslide events in May were reported in parts of Hispaniola, Kenya, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Ethiopia, India and Yemen.

Tropical Storm Bonnie brought heavy rainfall to portions of the Carolinas and Georgia in the United States at the end of May and into June. Total economic losses were expected to be minimal.

Earthquakes in Ecuador and China caused damages to thousands of homes and a winter weather outbreak in northern China caused damage to crops totaling USD61 million.

Source: Aon Benfield
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has vetoed a moped safety bill, saying it is government overreach to require reflective vests for nighttime driving and helmets for drivers under 21.

People over 18 should decide for themselves what they should wear for their personal safety, the Republican governor wrote in her veto message, signed Friday.

Sen. Greg Hembree, R-North Myrtle Beach, said he believes mopeds are the most dangerous vehicles for people to drive, partly because there are no regulations. Hes been pushing for safety legislation since his 2012 election.

Theyre slower and you cant see them as well, Hembree said Monday about the need for vests. Thats how they get hit. They get run over at night.

According to the Department of Public Safety, 50 people died in moped crashes last year _ 18 of those in Horry County, which topped the fatality list. The statewide toll was up from 32 moped deaths in 2014 and 24 in 2013. At least 16 moped drivers and/or passengers have died so far this year.

In her veto letter, Haley said the proposed restrictions for mopeds exceed those for motorcycle drivers.

But state law does require anyone under 21 whos driving or riding on a motorcycle to wear a helmet. The motorcycle advocacy group ABATE  which stands for A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactments  has long squashed any effort to require helmets for older riders.

But ABATE spokesman Chad Fuller said the group wanted legislators to add the helmet provision for mopeds.

We supported them having the same regulations that we as motorcyclists have, he said. The group, of which Haley has been a member, took no position on the vest issue.

Legislators will decide later this week whether to overturn Haleys veto.

Rep. Bill Crosby, the main House sponsor, said the bill is not about helmets or vests, but saving peoples lives.

I wish she would reconsider, said Crosby, R-North Charleston. I would think it would sit on her conscience if this doesnt pass.  Well continue having people killed.

He likened the moped restrictions to requiring people in vehicles to wear sea belts.

While a House member, Haley voted against the 2005 law that allowed officers to stop drivers for not wearing a seat belt.

The moped bill would allow officers to charge intoxicated moped drivers with drunken driving.

Literally, you can be stinking drunk on a moped and cant be arrested, said Hembree, formerly the chief prosecutor for Horry and Georgetown counties.

Thats because state law specifically excludes mopeds from the definition of a motor vehicle. Proposals to close that loophole have died repeatedly since 2010. People who lose their license due to a DUI conviction often use a moped to get around. In a state where public transportation is lacking, legislators didnt want to prevent people from getting to work.

To solve that sticking point, the bill creates a special moped license. People who lose their regular license, for whatever reason, can get the separate license, starting the point system over. But a moped license could be suspended too.

If that happens, were starting to lose sympathy for you. Youre going to have to be walking, Hembree said.

The bill would require people to register their mopeds and attach a license plate, which the bill creates as a way to cut down on theft and identify mopeds in crashes. Mopeds would still be exempt from property taxes and insurance.

The bill makes it illegal for mopeds to be driven on highways where the posted speed limit is 55 mph or greater.
Whole Foods Market Warned by FDA Over Food Safety Violations

Whole Foods Market is on the defensive this week after receiving a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration concerning their infractions of food safety rules. An inspection by the federal agency earlier this year identified "serious violations" at the company's food preparation facility in Massachusetts.

The Boston-area plant makes ready-to-eat products distributed to the supermarket chain's locations across the Northeast. Federal regulators identified various failures in the manufacture, packaging and storage of foods used to minimize potential contamination and growth of microorganisms at the February examination.

Whole Foods has until the end of the month to rectify the cited issues. One area of negligence addressed in the letter, dated June 8, concerns condensation from ceiling joints leaking onto items like pasta and vegetables below. Whole Foods' corporate leadership recently released a statement expressing their shock at the admonition:

"We were honestly surprised," said Ken Meyer, executive vice president of operations for Whole Foods Market. "We've been in close contact with the FDA, opened our doors to inspectors regularly since February and worked with them to address every issue brought to our attention."

Whole Foods initially responded to the FDA in March. However, the agency deemed that reply unacceptable, stating in its warning letter that their "response includes retraining of employees as a corrective action for most of the observed violations but ... failed to mention adequate supervision over your specialized food processing."

This is not the first time the company has come under public scrutiny. The grocer, marketed as "America's Healthiest Grocery Store," previously faced backlash regarding employee cutbacks. Last fall, Whole Foods eliminated 1,500 jobs within the company as a countermeasure to slowing sales and accusations of overcharging.

Whole Foods has also weathered health scares before. Earlier this year, the chain recalled certain cheese products due to a possible risk of listeria contamination -- a hot-button issue after Blue Bell Ice Cream's recent listeria outbreak scandal. Last year, Blue Bell recalled all products and shut down production after three people died due to the outbreak.

Stock in Whole Foods continued to fall Wednesday morning on account of the current food safety dilemma. The company reportedly has 15 days to address the FDA's issued violations from the June 8 date of the warning letter.

 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

TagsWhole Foods, Whole Foods Market
AKRON, Ohio -- Summit County jurors on Thursday found a man guilty of selling fentanyl to a woman who overdosed and died last year in Akron.

Kevin Ecker, 30, of Akron was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the March 22, 2015 death of Jessica Canada Holmes, the Summit County Prosecutor's Office said.

He's also been convicted of a dozen drug-related offenses related to incidents from March 2015 to February 2016, prosecutors said.

Ecker's sentencing is scheduled July 22 in Summit County Common Pleas Court.

The case was the first involuntary manslaughter prosecution in Summit County to be decided by a jury trial.

Twenty-two Summit County defendants have been convicted of similar charges since 2013 without going to a jury trial, prosecutors said.

Holmes, 20, died of a fentanyl overdose at her house on Kenmore Avenue, the Summit County Medical Examiner said.

She believed she was buying heroin when Ecker sold her fentanyl. Investigators traced the drug back to Ecker.

Holmes started taking painkillers after she had surgery to remove a cyst that developed on her lower back while she was pregnant with her son. She became addicted and started taking heroin, her mother and sister said told cleveland.com.

Fentanyl killed 998 people in Ohio from January 2014 to May 2015, according to a report released in March by the Centers for Disease Control. The report also concluded that fentanyl is responsible for the majority of recent overdose deaths and is continuing to kill people in large batches.

Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opiate analgesic, is often prescribed after surgery or to people who suffer from chronic pain or illnesses. It is occasionally mixed with heroin to give the user the illusion that they've purchased a stronger grade of heroin.

Drug dealers have been selling a pill form of fentanyl as oxycodone because it looks similar and is cheaper. That can lead to overdoses because fentanyl is significantly more powerful than oxycodone and heroin, officials said.

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Boosting agricultural trade between the United States and the Philippines will be a priority for new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, the countrys Ambassador to the U.S. said Thursday.

Jose Cuisa Jr. is wrapping up his five-year term as the Philippines Ambassador to the United States by visiting as many states as possible. Along the way, hes trying to encourage trade opportunities between the two countries.

Cuisa said Montana is the 43rd state he has visited. While in Billings, he met with government officials and economic development specialists in hopes of encouraging future trade discussions between two allies that share a long history. Cuisa plans to return to the private sector after Duterte takes office on June 30.

The new administration will be focusing a lot more on agriculture, Cuisa said, explaining that Duterte comes from an agricultural region within the Philippines. Our two countries have a shared history, shared values and shared principles. I think there can be a lot more trade opportunities.

Montana exported 121 million bushels of wheat in 2013. Japan, Montanas largest customer for wheat, accounts for about half of those exports, followed by South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, according to the Montana Wheat and Barley Commission. Pineapple, coconuts, sugar and rice are among the major crops produced by the Philippines.

IBM, Procter and Gamble, Citibank, American Express and JP Morgan are among some 600 American companies that have operations in the Philippines, Cuisa said.

Call centers and other back-room operations for financial services companies represent an important sector for the Philippine economy. When stock traders in the United States come to work in the morning, theres a good chance that overnight analytic reports have been prepared by specialists in the Philippines.

They can call their clients and tell them about market conditions. This is very beneficial for the traders, but it also creates a lot of jobs for people in the Philippines, Cuisa said.

The Philippines is one of 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a 49-year-old organization dedicated to pursuing policies that accelerate economic growth, social progress and sociocultural evolution among its members.

The Philippines has discussed joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement involving the United, Canada and 10 Asian countries.

The agreement seeks to eliminate tariffs and other trade barriers among the members. It also includes provisions to protect the environment and eliminate child labor. The United States and other TPP members signed the agreement last February, but the agreement is still awaiting congressional approval and has been criticized by labor unions and some business groups.

I have been pushing for joining the TPP from the beginning, Cuisa said. We believe its a very good agreement, a high-quality trade agreement that would be good for the region and for the 12 individual members.

Cuisa was to meet with members of the local Filipino community Thursday night. About 3.4 million people of Filipino heritage live in the United States.

Reflecting on his time as ambassador, Cuisa said, I think our relations with the U.S. have never been better. The military and security alliance we have has been strengthened further with the signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperative Agreement, which allows the United States to rotate troops into the Philippines for extended stays and allows the U.S. to build and operate facilities on Philippine bases, for both American and Philippine forces.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - The newest addition to the ongoing Red Line rapid transit public art blitz creates the illusion that a small and diverse army of anonymous Clevelanders is holding up the roof of the station platform at Tower City Center.

To create the work, Cleveland photographer Peter Larson set up a photo booth at the station last month and asked transit riders to volunteer to be photographed with their arms straight overhead and their palms pressing upward as if they were carrying a huge imaginary load.

Larson then had the enlarged black-and-white photographs printed on sheets of vinyl so they could be stuck to the station's white ceramic tile columns in a process that involves pressure, and heat from a torch.

Colton Gravo of Brand Installers Inc., based in Canal Fulton, which carried out the installation Tuesday and Wednesday, said it should last 10 years.

The project is both playful optical illusion and a visual metaphor about the role that residents play literally and figuratively in supporting the city.

"It's very ennobling," said philanthropist and art collector Fred Bidwell, who conceived the project and who chose Larson to carry it out. "It doesn't look goofy or gimmicky. I love the dignity of those portraits."

The installation is part of the $507,000 "Inter | Urban" public art project, led by the nonprofit LAND Studio and funded by the Cleveland Foundation and the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency.

LAND Studio's current portfolio includes managing the $50 million renovation of Public Square and additional public art projects on the square and the adjacent downtown Mall, all scheduled for completion before the Republican National Convention, which begins July 18.

The goal of "Inter | Urban," the first phase of which is now largely completed, has been to create a dozen large-scale public art installations at strategic points along the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's rapid transit Red Line, also before the convention.

In a larger sense, the project is intended to be a long-lasting artistic intervention - consisting mostly of murals - that adds surprise, delight and beauty to overlooked bridge piers and retaining walls along the Red Line.

Future phases could involve additional spots on RTA's Blue and Green lines.

LAND Studio tapped Bidwell to curate three photographic installations for the current phase, including the new work at Tower City.

In all, some 50 Clevelanders posed for Larson. They were young and old, black and white, male and female.

There's a middle-aged African-American man dressed in baggy camouflage trousers and a down vest, nonchalantly holding his left arm erect as if carrying big loads is easy for him.

A young white woman in office attire extends her right arm upward in a gesture of power and strength.

And an older white woman in a coat with a broad-brimmed hat beams with pleasure. For her, lifting the ceiling looks like fun - something in which she's thrilled to be involved.

Bidwell, a former advertising executive and co-founder of the Transformer Station gallery, said the creative process of conceiving the project was "a little bit like conceiving a project for an ad campaign."

He said he felt as if the rapid transit station platforms for the Red, Blue and Green lines at Tower City were heavy, dark and pressing down from above.

"I was thinking, 'Gosh, this is oppressive,' " he said, adding that he felt, " 'You've got to have something that turns that around.' "

The a-ha moment came when Bidwell realized "it's not that the ceiling is pressing down, it's that we could be holding it up."

He then came up with the idea of asking a diverse group of Clevelanders to pose like giant caryatids - such as the sculpted maidens that hold up the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, one of which on view at the British Museum in London.

"It seemed a very democratic statement of rising up from adversity and oppression," Bidwell said.

Gravo, who worked on the installation Wednesday with his cousin, Jarrod Gravo, said he was impressed with the concept - and the investment behind it.

"I love it that the city puts money into artwork," he said. "It's definitely a cool project."
Roger Marks.jpeg

Roger Marks Jr., of Ravenna was caught fondling himself in the restroom at Bohlken Park, Fairview Park police said.

(Fairview Park Police Department)

FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio -- An officer chased down a man caught fondling himself in the restroom at Bohlken Park, police said.

Roger Allen Marks Jr., of Ravenna pleaded not guilty to a charge of public indecency Tuesday, according to Rocky River Municipal Court records. He is free on his own recognizance.

A man walked into the restroom at the park on West 210th Street, behind Westgate Shopping Center, about 10:15 p.m. June 9, and saw Marks fondling himself, according to police reports. When the man confronted Marks, he ran.

The witness told an on officer on patrol in the park.

The officer chased Marks a short distance and grabbed him, Fairview Park police Lt. Paul Shepard said.

He is due back in court June 21.

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Life expectancy lags in Hough

Happy Feet Walking Club members, founder Sonya Shakir (L-R), Carol Carrington, and Denise Parker get their 2 1/2 mile walk workout in on the bike route at Thurgood Marshall Recreation Center May 3, 2012 in Cleveland. A study has shown large gap in life expectancy in Cleveland area communities located just 10 miles apart. (John Kuntz / The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- From looking at health data, it would be easy to conclude that Lyndhurst and Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood are on opposite sides of the globe, their populations separated by vast differences in climate and proximity to modern health care.

After all, a new study shows, the life expectancy of a baby born in Glenville is 12 years shorter than one born in Lyndhurst.

But the study by Virginia Commonwealth University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation points out that those communities are less than 10 miles apart, and that their health disparities are driven not by natural differences, but by racial and economic ones.

"When you see these large gaps, you start to realize that the neighborhood itself can be a risk factor," said Derek Chapman, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher who helped compile the study released today.

Chapman said high rates of premature death in inner-city communities like Glenville are not driven by gun violence. Rather, he said, they are fueled by heart disease and other chronic illnesses that result from poverty and a lack of access to healthy foods and safe places to play.

"Neighborhoods can actually limit individuals' choices," he said. "You can think about how something as simple as sidewalks can play a part in reducing obesity."

The study, which mirrors recent health assessments conducted by Cuyahoga County officials, found gaps in life expectancy across the region. It found that residents of Lyndhurst and Chagrin Falls are expected to live to 82 and 83, respectively. In Maple Heights, life expectancy is 75 years. In Berea, it's 79.

But the biggest gaps were between suburban communities and city neighborhoods such as St. Clair-Superior, where researchers determined life expectancy is 72 years. It was found to be 70 years in Glenville.

The study's findings -- displayed on a large map of the Cleveland metropolitan area -- are based on population data from the U.S. Census Bureau and death counts compiled by the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics. It is the latest of several health-disparity maps researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have released in cities across the United States.

Chapman said Cleveland's map was striking for its concentration of neighborhoods with low life expectancies in the downtown area. The lines it draws around those neighborhoods correlate with red-lining practices in the 1950s and '60s that denied loans and mortgage insurance to immigrant and minority communities.

In recent years, as awareness of health inequities in those zip codes has increased, several organizations in Cleveland have begun working to level the playing field. Initiatives have formed to improve access to health education and nutritious foods, and ensure better access to health care for people with chronic diseases.

"People who are affected by these disparities need to be at the decision-making table," said Heidi Gullett, co-chair of the Cuyahoga Health Improvement Partnership. "They need to have their voice heard about what they think is going on and what the solutions are."

Those conversations can be hard, she said, especially given the racial and economic underpinnings of the problem, and a lack of confidence that those factors will be dealt with in a forthright way.

"There is an inherent challenge around trust," Gullett said. "We've needed to create relationships."

Her organization has launched several policy panels to develop solutions in specific areas. It has developed shared-use agreements so local gyms are available for people to have safe places to exercise, as well as funding to help people access fresh produce and other healthy foods.

Gullett acknowledged the problems her group is targeting -- rooted in decades of unequal treatment -- will not be solved overnight or with a series of high-level panel discussions.

"This is not an easy process," she said. "The only way we have found to do it is help people realize the things that they can change."
IMG_7261.jpg

Investigators unveiled a replica car of interest and new photos in the May 21 abduction of a 6-year-old Cleveland girl and the Feb. 25 attempted abduction of a 10-year-old Elyria girl.

(Chanda Neely, cleveland.com)

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shooting.JPG

Willoughby police investigate a shooting Wednesday night at Parkway Apartments on Lost Nation Road.

(Cliff Pinckard, cleveland.com)

WILLOUGHBY, Ohio -- Police are investigating after a man was shot late Wednesday night at an apartment complex on Lost Nation Road.

Police say the 52-year-old man was found near Lost Nation Road with a gunshot wound to the torso. He was flown to MetroHealth Hospital in Cleveland in stable condition.

Willoughby Det. James Schultz said investigators believe the man was shot in a building at Parkway Apartments just before 11 p.m. and made his way to the side of Lost Nation, where he was found by emergency workers.

Police did not have a suspect in custody early Thursday morning. Schultz said it's believed the suspect had left the area and that other residents in the complex were not in danger.

Schultz said it's unknown what led to the shooting and that it remains under investigation. The Bureau of Criminal Investigation also was on the scene.

Several residents of the apartment complex said that drugs are a problem, with people using and dealing.

"It's awful in here," said a 45-year-old resident who declined to give her name. "I've lived here for nine years and I haven't felt safe for the last six."

Residents said there has been an increase in break-ins at apartments. They said that although police have increased patrols, drugs remain a problem.

A 57-year-old man from Mentor-on-the-Lake said he has moved in with his 80-year-old mother because she doesn't want to leave the complex and he is concerned for her safety.

The man said he heard the gunshots Wednesday night but did not see what happened. Despite the drug activity, he said the shooting was unusual.

"I don't feel safe whatsoever," he said. "It's just sad to see this happen."

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CLEVELAND, Ohio - We didn't need convincing with a Doris Duke Artist Award. We've known it for decades.

If any artist in this town ranks as a national treasure, surely it's choreographer Dianne McIntyre. The grant she received in May, the latest in a string of high-level prizes, is simply further confirmation, icing on the cake.

"She could have won this award almost any time," said Pamela Young, executive director of DanceCleveland, a longtime advocate of McIntyre's work.

"In terms of moving dance forward, of what she's accomplished and the dance she's inspired, she's had a huge impact."

You might not guess that by interacting with her. Thin, petite, soft-spoken: McIntyre, 69, is the physical opposite of the giant she is in the cultural realm.

Once the words start flowing, however, once McIntyre recalls even a tiny gesture from one of her countless works, the enormous power of her mind and presence becomes manifest.

One doesn't have to engage McIntyre in a studio to sense that she is a creator who has seen and done it all, and who will only keep on producing more. Especially now, with an additional $275,000 she said will propel her to "a whole new level of creativity" by funding collaborations with musicians.

"It's like divine timing, how things are organized beyond your understanding," she said in a recent interview. "I've been in the right place at the right time."

That place, for much of her life, has been Cleveland. Though she spent many years in New York City, creating an enormous body of work for her own and other companies starting in 1970, McIntyre resides again now in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where she was raised and where her late mother, Dorothy, lived until last year.

To this day, even as she globetrots as a choreographer, teacher, performer and speaker, McIntyre remains a self-described "cheerleader for Cleveland."

Even as an African-American growing up in a segregated Cleveland in the 1960s, McIntyre said she never felt anything but confidence or encountered anything but encouragement on her artistic path.

She thinks of John Adams High School, which she attended, as "a special place" where she received "a great boost to go in any direction I wanted."

It was there, she said, that her idea for and lifelong interest in "dance-driven dramas," works telling stories with dance, text and live music, germinated. (She's famous for a dance based on Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and choreography in the 1988 film "Beloved.")

Racism, in her experience, has always been "something a little more subtle," she explained. "It's more like [exclusion from] an insider fraternity. It's there, but I don't dwell on it. In dance, it's challenging for everybody."

The tables have turned, too. If there's an insider fraternity, McIntyre is surely a member of it, along with the other Doris Duke winners, all of them leading lights in dance, jazz and theater. When Young reminds colleagues in the field that McIntyre is from Cleveland, "Our credibility goes way up," she said.

"There's this club now, because of that award," McIntyre said. "I really was completely taken by surprise and very honored to join that group."

To Cleveland itself, meanwhile, with all its cultural institutions, McIntyre attributes her initial interest and nurturing in the arts. She's proud of the fact that when she enrolled at Ohio State University, she was the only student with direct training and experience in modern dance.

In Cleveland, McIntyre said, "It wasn't strange to want to become an artist. The excellence and support to be an artist are in the air. There's a deep understanding. People here allow and even want you to push the envelope."

Within Cleveland, McIntyre also had the advantage of supportive parents. Dorothy McIntyre, a former aviator with the Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II, and the inspiration for "Takeoff From a Forced Landing," emerged as McIntyre's greatest champion, attending performances of her daughter's work with her husband all the way up until their deaths. Once, McIntyre recalled, her parents even booked a last-minute flight to New York, to catch their daughter's latest premiere.

"My folks were like the parents of my company," McIntyre said, noting that her mother especially, even since her passing, "has been propelling me into these projects, and has been there at my side as a co-choreographer."

She has paid that gift forward countless times. Even as her career has taken her all over the country, to most of the nation's major universities and dance organizations (she just completed a residency at Spelman College in Atlanta), McIntyre has returned to Cleveland regularly to teach and choreograph, feeling it her duty to train and cultivate younger dancers.

"Every company in Cleveland has had her put a work on them," Young said. "We all owe her a debt of gratitude."

In some cases, McIntyre's work has found its way home indirectly. In January, for instance, on the next season of DanceCleveland, Dance Theatre of Harlem will bring to Playhouse Square a new piece celebrating the lives of great women in African-American history.

Pay attention to that one. All followers of McIntyre's career will want to witness how an artist uniquely fluent in the free, expressive language of modern dance translates her ideas on dancers used to a more defined vocabulary.

"It was a step-by-step process," McIntyre said of rehearsals with the company. "I was a student in the world of ballet, even though I was the leader.

"Never in 1,000 years would it have crossed my mind that I would be invited to work with a ballet company, let alone one I hold in such high esteem."

Neither, in 1,000 years, could she have predicted she'd be as busy as she is today. Indeed, instead of winding down as she pushes beyond retirement age, McIntyre is actually picking up steam.

Her calendar in 2016 is fuller than ever, she said, packed with performances, residencies, speeches and other appearances. Scheduling and setting up the interview for this story took over a year. In short: She's in high demand.

"I have hundreds of emails," McIntyre joked, noting her need of an assistant. "It's like things have mushroomed."

This, of course, is a good problem to have. Besides, McIntyre added, this is the future for which she strove.

For an artistic soul like her, creativity is more than just a career. It's a life.

In dance, McIntyre said, "There isn't a term for retirement. You just keep on going. Your work as an artist never stops."
COLUMBUS, Ohio--This year's national Democratic platform will likely place a greater emphasis on gun-control and anti-hate crime measures because of the Orlando shootings, according to an Ohio lawmaker helping to draw up the document.

"I think they will always be big issues, but I think it's even going to be bigger, in terms of our platform being very bold, being clear," said state Rep. Alicia Reece, a Cincinnati Democrat serving on the DNC's platform drafting committee.

Reece didn't say what specific proposals might appear in the Democratic platform, which outlines the party's stances and policy goals on key issues.

But she said gun control would be "a huge push in our platform," as well as expanding the definition of hate crimes to protect victims targeted because of their sexual orientation.

After a gunman who swore allegiance to the Islamic State shot 49 people to death at a gay nightclub in Orlando, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and others have called for tougher gun-control measures.

Reece met in downtown Columbus on Wednesday with representatives from liberal groups across Ohio to hear what they would like Reece to include in the platform.

But the long laundry list of issues the groups laid out didn't include key issues championed by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, such as universal health care and free college tuition.

Though Clinton has locked up the Democratic nomination, Sanders and his supporters hope to use his strong primary showing to ensure that his key issues are reflected in the Democratic platform.

Rather, groups such as the NAACP, labor unions and liberal think tanks urged Reece to include a list of other standard progressive causes, including voting rights, police-community relations, campaign finance reform, among many others.

Reece said after the meeting that it's still too soon to say whether Sanders' key issues will make it into the platform.

"I think they're going to fight for some of those things," Reece said. "Everything is on the table at this point. But where we go from there, we have to see."

But, Reece added, she plans to vote on what to include in the platform based on what will best help Clinton win Ohio in November.

"I'm going to vote for what I think is best for...what's going to help us win Ohio," she said.
NEW_Late_Voting_03042008c

A Sandusky County polling site is shown in this March 2008 file photo. The Northwest Ohio county is being buzzed about as a potential bellwether in the 2016 presidential election. The Townsend Township precinct in Vickery, OH remains open at 8:15 p.m. Tuesday evening in Sandusky County. The polls in the county were kept open until 9 p.m. after some precincts ran out of Democratic Party ballots.

(Sandusky Register file photo, via AP)

National political observers are keeping an eye on Sandusky County and probably should be watching nearby Ottawa County, too. Rob Portman goes on the radio against Ted Strickland but fumbles on the issue of gun control. Read more in Ohio Politics Roundup.

For whom the bellwether tolls: Does Sandusky County hold the key to understanding Ohio in this year's presidential election? Axiom Strategies, a firm run by former Ted Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe, includes it among a selection of "seven counties in seven battleground states that have proven to be bellwethers in the last four elections," Politico's Kyle Cheney notes.

Axiom polling this month showed presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump leading Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by 5 points in Sandusky County and ahead in three others: Luzerne County, Pa.; Washoe County, Nevada; and Watauga County, N.C.

Really? Sandusky County? Not to be confused with the city of Sandusky, which actually is in nearby Erie County - and the far-off port of call for the California delegation during next month's Republican National Convention. (The Sandusky County seat is Fremont.)

No other county's vote more closely mirrored the statewide vote in the last two presidential cycles, according to election data archived online by longtime Ohio political operative Mike Dawson. So in that regard, Sandusky County might be trending toward battleground status.

But here are a few other counties you need to watch ...

Ottawa, which stakes a claim as the Ohio bellwether by picking the winner of the last 11 presidential elections, has mirrored the statewide vote more consistently than Sandusky County has. Stark, long been part of Ohio's bellwether lore, is second on Dawson's list of most-accurate predictors in recent history. And in Lake, which takes in Cleveland's eastern exurbs, the margin separating the winner and loser was less than 1 percentage point in 2008 and 2012.

You also should keep tabs on cleveland.com's Rich Exner - our in-house election data analyst - and on Dawson's OhioElectionResults.com, a site rich in history and context.

And yet Ohio's big Senate race is playing out as if these counties don't exist. Instead, Republican incumbent Rob Portman and Democratic challenger Ted Strickland are duking it out over Appalachia, which reaches across the southeastern portion of the state.

It represents a relatively tiny chunk of Ohio's electorate. But because it has swung in recent years from strongly Democrat to leaning Democrat to leaning Republican, both parties treat it as crucial territory. The political arm of the United Mine Workers of America - a still-influential union in Ohio's shrinking "coal country" - split with Strickland to back Portman.

Strickland hails from the region and has spent time there recently trying to shore up his base, a move interpreted by the Portman team and others as a sign of vulnerability.

Now Portman is targeting Strickland there with his first radio ad. "No Friend" is a minute-long spot aimed exclusively at southeast Ohio. "Strickland turned his back on Ohio coal families, taking a two hundred-and-fifty grand a year job for a liberal Washington group that lobbied for the war on coal," the voiceover intones before plugging the Mine Workers endorsement.

Interestingly, the ad makes no mention of Portman's incumbency. He is heard at the end of the spot saying, "I'm Rob Portman, candidate for U.S. Senate, and I approve this message."

Gun shy? Portman made a bit of a mess this week in signaling his openness to a law that would ban those on the terrorist watch list from buying firearms. In a conference call Tuesday with reporters, "he seemed confused" about a gun control measure he refused to support last year, USA Today's Deirdre Shesgreen writes. On Wednesday, Portman's office "seemed to add to the confusion by telling a New York Times reporter that his position was unchanged from 2015 and that he would oppose the Feinstein amendment. Less than 24 earlier, Portman had refused to give a direct answer to the question of whether he would support the Feinstein bill."

What's good for the goose ... Remember, Portman's allies have reveled in Strickland's admission that his own record on gun control is "mixed and spotty."

Throwback Thursday: Innovation Ohio, a think-tank that is aligned with Democrats and has strong ties to Strickland, will release a report today that calls attention to Portman's job running the Office of Budget and Management in President George W. Bush's administration.

(There's also an accompanying online quiz.)

The group asserts that Portman "oversaw a budget that nearly tripled the annual federal deficit from $161 billion to $458 billion." It's hardly a new charge. Democrats trumpeted the talking point during Portman's 2010 campaign for Senate and were ready to beat that drum again if Mitt Romney had selected Portman as his vice presidential running mate in 2012.

It also might not be the fairest line of attack. Our Stephen Koff dived deep into the nuance four years ago for The Plain Dealer. That piece - linked here - is worth reading again today. It's also worth noting that nuance doesn't stop Team Portman from ignoring the national recession's role in the hundreds of thousands of Ohio jobs lost during Strickland's tenure as governor.

Bursting the Brown-for-VP bubble: "To many, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown should be a frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for vice president," writes Nathaniel Rakich, in a New Republic piece that dismisses Brown and three others generating veepstakes buzz.

"He has credibility with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, which Hillary Clinton must win over, and is from a swing state to boot. But that bonus is also his downfall. Under state law, if Brown becomes vice president, Governor John Kasich would appoint his replacement for the next two years. Kasich, of course, would undoubtedly choose a fellow Republican, handing the GOP a Senate seat that Democrats spent $40 million to hold onto in 2012."

Grain of salt alert: Rakich also floats Beyonce as a sleeper pick for Clinton.

Westboro gets green light for Public Square demonstration: "Cleveland officials have granted permits to 20 individuals and groups who want to publicly demonstrate during July's Republican National Convention," cleveland.com's Andrew J. Tobias reports. "Among those who received permits this week: the Westboro Baptist Church, the virulently anti-gay, Kansas-based group best-known for protesting military funerals. The church was granted a half-hour slot on the city's planned 'speakers platform' in Public Square starting at 5 p.m. on July 20."

Renacci's windfall: "U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci - an accountant who serves on the House of Representatives' tax writing committee - has won his long-festering dispute with the state of Ohio over a $359,822 penalty he paid on his 2000 taxes," cleveland.com's Sabrina Eaton reports.

Renacci, a Wadsworth Republican and one of the wealthiest members of Congress, will receive a full refund, plus interest, following this week's Ohio Supreme Court ruling.

Get Battleground Briefing, our FREE politics newsletter, delivered to your inbox: Sign up here. Tips or links? Send here. Follow along on Twitter: @HenryJGomez.
Donald Trump

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeats his call for a ban on Muslim immigration while addressing the Orlando terrorist attack Monday at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. The Editorial Board Roundtable assesses the speech and its fallout.

(Jim Cole, Associated Press)

Donald Trump delivered a major speech Monday in which he denounced Islam for not doing more to beat back radicalism, repeated his call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration, expanded that to include a ban on immigration from all areas of the world "where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies," -- which would seem to include Israel, France, Spain, Sweden, the Philippines, Indonesia and Great Britain, among others -- denigrated Muslims and appeared to imply that U.S. Muslims shared blame for what happened in Florida.

The Guardian newspaper of Britain summed it up this way: "The speech represented a dramatic shift in traditional campaign rhetoric. Not only did the presumptive nominee politicize the terrorist attack in Orlando, but in targeting Muslim Americans, he also used language without modern precedent in mainstream American politics."

As often happens with Trump, there was a loud rumble of outrage from the usual quarters.

President Barack Obama gave a particularly sharply worded rebuttal Tuesday, which, while not mentioning Trump by name, pointed to such anti-Muslim rhetoric as playing into the hands of terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

"They want us to validate them by implying that they speak for those billion-plus people; that they speak for Islam. That's their propaganda. That's how they recruit," Obama said. "And if we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion -- then we're doing the terrorists' work for them."

Under the headline "Donald Trump's exploitation of Orlando," David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine started his Sunday article thusly: "In the rhetoric of Donald Trump, mendacity and cynicism compete for equal time. It is hard to say which prevailed today as the Republican Party standard-bearer, a man who pretends to the most powerful political office in the land, tweeted this at his followers: 'Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.'"

The rest of The Donald's Tweet was "... I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!" -- and it was retweeted by more than 28,000 people and liked by nearly 73,000.

Earlier today, CIA chief John Brennan delivered a notably bleak assessment of Islamic State intentions, predicting an intensification of attacks, and warning that IS may try to infiltrate fighters by having them pose as refugees.

"Despite our progress against [the Islamic State] on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," said Brennan, as quoted by Bloomberg News. "As the pressure mounts on [IS], we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda."

That's worrisome, indeed.

But what degree of ego made Trump suggest right after the carnage that the Orlando terrorist assault was all about him - another 'win?'

Our Editorial Board Roundtable weighs on Trump's and Obama's remarks from the perspectives of individual board members, and we hope you share your thoughts in the comments that follow.

Sharon Broussard, chief editorial writer, cleveland.com:

This is par for the course for Trump, who manages to politicize the nation's worst mass-shooting massacre by creating an ever-expanding immigrant enemies' list, even if the facts don't warrant such an extreme, un-American response. The gunman was the troubled American son of immigrants, not an immigrant himself. And he may have been motivated by hatred of gays, not just online radicalization by Islamic militants. Mr. Trump, have you no shame?

Ted Diadiun, editorial board member:

Every time I begin to weaken, while imagining the four-year scourge of a Hillary Clinton presidency and what might be left of the country I love after she gets finished with it, Donald Trump does something like this. I keep hoping that he will say something wise or statesmanlike, but the sad fact is that he is catastrophically unfit and unprepared to be president.

Kevin O'Brien, deputy editorial page editor, The Plain Dealer:

What a complete and utter embarrassment. The guy is all ego. In the realm of foreign policy and national defense, he has neither a clue nor any interest in learning. It will be such a relief when this is over and he can get back to being a celebrity and writing books about how great he is. He has no business whatsoever even imagining himself as president. And the same can be said for Trump.

Thomas Suddes, editorial writer:

Mr Trump's antics are getting very old, very fast. It seems to have escaped his notice that the murderous terrorist who killed 49 people in Orlando was born not in some foreign country but in Mr Trump's home state of New York. "Nativism" periodically infects American life, viz., the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, who opposed the entry into the United States of Catholic immigrants from, principally, Germany and Ireland. Most Americans look back in shame and horror at such prejudices -- which are the same sensations that Mr Trump's contemporary diatribes should provoke.

Elizabeth Sullivan, opinion director, cleveland.com:

Obama nailed the stupidity and dangers of Trumpetoric in his impassioned Tuesday remarks at the Treasury Department, following a meeting on his administration's efforts to dry up the resources flowing to terrorist-cult leaders who use iPhones and phony versions of Islam to lure adherents. Our strength both as a nation and in the fight against terrorism is in our diversity and tolerance, as well as in the wiles and courage of our fighting forces -- both of which involve lots of loyal American citizens who happen to be Muslim.

This post was updated at 3:14 pm and again at 3:47 pm to reflect today's CIA assessment of the Islamic State's capabilities.
westboro-baptist.JPG

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas protest in front of the main gate at Fort Campbell before the start of a memorial service for soldiers killed in combat from the Army's 101st Airborne Division in this Feb. 8, 2006 photograph.

(AP file)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland officials have granted permits to 20 individuals and groups who want to publicly demonstrate during July's Republican National Convention.

Among those who received permits this week: the Westboro Baptist Church, the virulently anti-gay, Kansas-based group best-known for protesting military funerals. The church was granted a half-hour slot on the city's planned "speakers platform" in Public Square starting at 5 p.m. on July 19. The city also granted the group an all-day permit for the next day to set up in Perk Plaza, the downtown park.

The city granted the permits on June 13 and June 14 and posted them online. The GOP convention is scheduled for July 18-21.

A message to a spokesman for Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson was not immediately returned.

Under pressure from activists, Cleveland officials on May 25 set up a process for groups to file for permits to use the platform, and/or set up in either Willard Park or Perk Plaza and/or march along a designated "parade route" across the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge toward downtown. An estimated 50,000 people and a significant number of protesters are expected to come to Cleveland during the GOP convention.

The city's online posting did not contain any approved "parade" permits. Acting on behalf of three groups seeking to march in Cleveland during the GOP convention, the ACLU of Ohio this week sued Cleveland for not yet acting to grant or reject any parade permits.

Here are the other groups and individuals granted permits this week:

Andrew Purchin, of Santa Cruz, Calif. (Event name: "The Curious End to the War Against Ourselves")

Willard Park, 9:30 a.m. - 9 p.m., July 20, 21

BlackOnBlackCleveland.com

Speakers platform: 11-11:30 a.m. on July 18; 1:15-1:45 p.m. on July 19

Bring Ohio Back

Speakers platform: 5:45-6:15 p.m. on July 18; 11:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m. on July 19; 2-2:30 p.m. on July 20; 5-5:30 p.m. on July 21

Code Pink Women for Peace

Speakers platform: 11-11:30 p.m., July 20

Don Bryant (Event name: "Peace in the Park")

Speakers platform: 11:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m., July 20

Gaye Lub of Saint Helena, Calif

Willard Park: 9:30 a.m. - 9 p.m. on July 18-21

Greater Cleveland Immigration Network (Event name: "Community Unity")

Speakers platform: 4:15-4:45 p.m., July 19

Imperial Women Coalition

Speakers platform: 9:30-10 a.m., 12:30-1 p.m., July 18

Justin Longwell, of Oberlin, Ohio

Speakers platform: 5:45-6:15 p.m., July 21

League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland

Willard Park: 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m., July 18-21

Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee

Speakers platform, 5-5:30 p.m., July 20

People Fight Back Center/March Against Racism

Willard Park: 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m., July 21

Pierre Nappier, of Cleveland

Speakers platform: 12:30-1 p.m., July 21

Revolution Books

Perk Plaza and Willard Park, 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m, July 18-21

Rose Hamid, of Charlotte, N.C. (Event name: "Salam, I Come in Peace")

Speakers platform: 11:45 p.m.-12:15 p.m., July 18

Stand Together Against Trump

Speakers platform: 5-5:30 p.m. on July 18; 5:45-6:15 p.m. on July 20

Scott Roger Hurley, of Cleveland



Speakers platform: 10:15-10:45 a.m., July 18

Thomas Moran, of Fenton, Mich. (Event name: "Stop Trump")

Perk Plaza: 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m., July 18, 19

Valarie Robinson, of Cleveland Heights

Speakers platform: 12:30-1 p.m., July 19

An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Bring Ohio Back as "Bring Back Ohio." It also incorrectly stated that the Westboro Baptist Church will be speaking in Public Square on July 20.


There is such a thing as a free lunch, and the ones served Wednesday at Pioneer Park were delicious and nutritious as well.

Through a contract with food service company Sodexo, Billings Public Schools began its summer lunch program at seven parks and three other sites Wednesday. The program, free to children 18 and younger and $3.75 for adults, begins at three targeted sites  Olympic Village, Stewart Park and Sacajawea Park  on July 5. Those sites, new this year, are served from a trailer.

Its great, said 4-year-old Nels Hoffmann of Red Lodge, sampling a plate heaped with a hamburger, applesauce, a small bag of baby carrots and chocolate milk.

Asked to name his favorite part of the meal, Hoffmann settled quickly on the chocolate milk.

We were here at the park playing, and we saw they were serving lunch, said his mother, Lindsey.

Thats sometimes the case, said Chris Voeller, who with Zack Elder was serving the crowd at Pioneer Park on the programs opening day. But for more than a few families, the program is an important tool helping them meet their children's nutritional needs.

For some kids, this is the only meal theyll eat all day, she said. To me the best part of the program is knowing that we fed those kids that one meal.

It is convenient, and its nice being able to enjoy lunch outside, said Rebecca Noell, who was in Pioneer Park with her two children, seated on a blanket and enjoying the day's moderate temperatures.

At about 11:30 Wednesday morning, a School District 2 truck pulled into the Pioneer Park site, which is near the wading pool. After Elder and Voeller helped off-load the meal and the tables on which to serve it, Voeller inserted a thermometer into the precooked patties, noting the 164-degree reading.

Thats fine, she said.

By noon, a crowd of more than a dozen children  and a handful of paying adults  were in line ready to enjoy the free fare. On a good day, the Pioneer Park site feeds 80 people, Voeller said.

Last year, the program provided about 43,000 free meals over 42 service days, said Steve Harris, a Sodexo employee whos food service manager for elementary programs.

It pulls at this old boys heartstrings, he said Ive got some images cemented in my brain over the years. Ive seen a young child 6 or 7 years old with a sibling in each hand. Its been a tough day for them. Their hair is dirty, their clothes are dirty  but they get pretty jacked up over a free lunch.

Harris said most of the people serving summer lunches work in food service programs during the school year. We have been real blessed with the whole deal, he said. We have a solid crew that returns year after year. Its continuity and consistency, and they know all the kids.

U.S. Department of Agriculture funds provide the meals, which also carry a significant volunteer component, Harris said.

At rotating sites, volunteers with the Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools put on their Reading Rocks program, reading to young diners and offering them a free book.

That keeps their interest in reading alive during the summer, Harris said.

In years past, the most popular entrees have included ravioli, nachos, hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, fajitas and boneless ribs on buns, Voeller said. Those items should be popping up in the weeks to come.

The program is offered Monday through Friday and runs through Aug. 12, except as noted in the accompanying box. Theres no meal service on July 4.

There are no income guidelines for the program, Harris said. Its open to any child 18 or younger.

More information is available by calling 406-281-5875.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - A few years ago, when it came to contemplating dinner choices, the East Banks of the Flats wasn't a thought. It was a vapid emptiness with little to offer in the way of food or anything else.

And then, in what seemed like a magical overnight transformation, restaurants appeared. Craft beer is a focus at one place, specialty cocktails at another. Outdoor seating is common. And fun, vibrant places like Bold offer tapas-style dining.

With a decor that can be described as deco with a modern twist (dozens of chain links dangled from the chandelier above our booth on one visit), Bold prides itself on portions ranging from tiny to, appropriately, bold.

Multiple visits allowed us chances to explore the menu, from tiny plates to entrees, from fish to steak. We sat inside, we ate outside.

Tiny plates include Little Devil, a mixture of chorizo, medjool dates, pork belly and Sriracha. With a sweet and sour feel, this was a fine start to wake our taste buds. We also opted for Maine Lobster Nachos, tasty dollops of guacamole, romaine heart, lemon and sweet soy balanced on isosceles-shaped pita chips.

We passed on the quartet of salads to nibble and dabble among the many tempting smaller portioned dishes. Small plates include Charred Street Corn, a rich dose of flavor with Cotija cheese, chile crema and cilantro. It was a perfect portion; the flavors are savory but work best in small doses.

Grilled octopus came at our server Molly's suggestion, and she didn't steer us wrong: Moroccan insalata, palm hearts and Farmer Lee Jones micro cress accompany the delicate and well-prepared seafood. On a subsequent visit we tried the Campeche, ceviche-style seafood that was fine, though similar to the Maine lobster dish. Chile Rellenos was a peppery gooey nosh, with a bell pepper - no skimpy jalapenos here. One dining pal thought it was fried just right, though I think it could have been released from the fryer a tad sooner. Cotija, though, is perfect melting cheese.

Our opinions split on Bone Marrow. It's gaining in popularity, and I found myself outnumbered. Pals found it scrumptious while the slimy texture and lack of seasoning didn't do it for me. It's made with a panko verde crust, foraged huckleberry Ohio maple-syrup gastrique and thin, toasted Blackbird Baking Co. baguette. (Tip for restaurants: Treat baguettes like you would water; no need to ask if we want more. Just serve it.)

Three meat dishes: The star here was an 8-ounce filet from pasture-raised beef from Chardon. It offered a pair of textures with every bite - crispy, charred, smoky on the outside and soft and juicy on the inside. A very thick, juicy beef burger was kept wonderfully simple: This is a burger you will want to savor, and not mar by loading with accoutrements. Enjoy it for what it is. (It comes with Pomme Frites, which are given a special touch with a bit of truffle oil.) A quality Angus Beef, 16-ounce ribeye was zipped up a bit with horseradish creme fraiche.

Among the seafood entrees we tried Whole Mediterranean Bronzino and Loch Duart Salmon from Scotland. The former, its bony tendrils stretched across a plate, is light whitefish and not fishy-tasting at all. The accompanying ragu of beans, corn and bacon formed a flavorful melange. The latter was delicately prepared but lacked any real seasoning punch. On the plus side it was the first time I ever had food that originated from Scotland, so cross that off the bucket list.

All the meat and fish dishes were prepared exactly to our specifications. For fowl fans, tender Amish Chicken included a creamy potato with Gruyere cheese - a nice touch.

A la carte sides receive unanimous thumbs-up. Brussels sprouts cooked with Ohio maple, pepitas, dried cranberries and apple cider were unique, in a positive way; they did not have an overwhelming, typical balsamic glaze, a treatment sprouts often are given in restaurants. Creamy white hominy grits with Parmesan and chives are truth in advertising: Very creamy, very cheesy, very good. Thank goodness it's a reasonable portion size.

A trio of desserts topped the nights well. A pair of unique ice-cream flavors offer a harmonious marriage between adventurous palates and chefs' creativity: Strawberry basil and avocado. The atypical dessert flavors are not too strong. A chocolate torte is easy pickings for chocolate lovers - that is, it wasn't special but really, does it have to be with chocoholics?

More on Bold

* Looking for landmarks? Look for the Aloft hotel.

* The restaurant offers an urban streetscape for diners as trains rumble by, and bridges span in the background.

* Receiving a steak knife when you order a prime cut of beef is standard for fine dining. But the knives you get here? A balanced Mercer knife that faced little challenge against our thick filet.

* It's worth strolling as unobtrusively as possible to check out the art, which ranges from a creative three-dimensional piece formed by dozens of open books to the art-deco look of a 1903 Blue Book of American Shipping logo.

* Bold is one of the West 10th Street restaurants with occasional acoustic patio musicians, so expect to hear renditions of everything from 1960s classic rock through '80s pop and beyond.

* Wine-bottle options come from nine countries, so the basics and more are covered among more than 120 offerings. Range is $25 to $175, with most well under $135.

* Demetrios Atheneos and Fady Chamoun own Bold, along with Oak Barrel and Forage Public House.

* Before Bold, Ken Stewart's East Bank was in the space. Bold opened in fall 2015.

* Parking: Valet out front on West 10th, which is one way going north. A pay parking lot at West 10th and Front Avenue is half a block to the north.

Taste Bites

Bold

Where: 1121 W. 10th St., Cleveland.

Contact: 216-696-8400.

Online: boldfoodanddrink.com.

Hours: 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-midnight Saturday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday.

Prices: Tiny, $5-$15; snack, $4-$15; salads, $9; composed plates, $13-$33; bold plates (steak and seafood entrees), $18-$35; sides, $5-$7; dessert, varies.

Reservations: Accepted.

Credit cards: All major.

Cuisine: New American.

Accessibility: Very good, decent space between tables and aisles.

Grade: ***
NWS SVR

The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for areas in orange, and a severe thunderstorm watch for areas in pink.

(National Weather Service Cleveland)

CLEVELAND, Ohio --The National Weather Service in Cleveland just issued a severe thunderstorm warning affecting: Canton, Massillon, Green, Alliance, North Canton, Louisville, Minerva, Hartville, Brewster, Navarre, Waynesburg, East Sparta, Wilmot, Canal Fulton, East Canton, Beach City, Meyers Lake, Hills and Dales, Limaville, Maximo, Millersburg, and Youngstown.

They report 60 mph winds and quarter sized hail, and these storms are moving southeast at 30 mph.

The National Weather Service in Cleveland just issued a severe thunderstorm warning.

An urban and small stream flood advisory is also in effect until 4:30 p.m. for Stark County.

The National Weather Service in Cleveland just issued a flood advisory for Stark County valid until 4:30 p.m.

Storms moving through east Ohio - updated 2:15 p.m.

They also issued a severe thunderstorm watch, where the environment in these areas could be favorable to severe weather but none has been confirmed yet.

The National Weather Service in Cleveland issued a severe thunderstorm watch.

Got video? Send it to us. Keep on sending rainfall measurements, too!

Keep checking cleveland.com/weather for twice daily weather updates for Northeast Ohio, and don't forget to submit any weather questions you may have!

Kelly Reardon is cleveland.com's meteorologist. Please follow me on Facebook and Twitter @kreardon0818.
WILLOUGHBY, Ohio -- Detectives released a recording of the 911 call made by a man shot in the torso late Wednesday outside a Willoughby apartment complex.

The 52-year-old man told a police dispatcher that he did not know the person who shot him just after 10:30 p.m. outside the Parkway Apartments on Lost Nation Road.

Paramedics from the Willoughby Fire Department took the man to Lake West Medical Center before he was flown to MetroHealth. His condition was not immediately available Thursday afternoon.

Detectives do not believe the shooting was random. It's possible the man was targeted, police said in a statement.

The Willoughby Police Department released audio of the 911 recording Thursday morning.

The man told the police dispatcher that he was walking to his apartment when someone shot him.

9-1-1 call

The man called 911 while walking out to Lost Nation Road, police said.

Officers searched the area but did not find the shooter.

Detectives have not released a motive for the shooting.

Several residents of the apartment complex told cleveland.com that drug activity has been a problem in the area.

Anyone with information about the shooting is being asked to contact Detective Krejsa at 440-953-4210.

To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments section.

Previous coverage: Shooting at Willoughby apartment complex wounds one
Theres a big difference between being able to speak the Crow language and being able to teach it. But, for a language used by a dwindling number of people in the roughly 13,000 member tribe, there arent many teaching resources.

The Crow Summer Institute helps fill that void.

Ive learned more from this than I have from anything else, said Roanne Hill, a Crow language and culture teacher at St. Labre High School. The techniques that we use here, I feel like are much more efficient.

The institute, organized by the Crow Language Consortium, Little Bighorn College and The Language Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to save endangered languages, is in its fourth year.

Hill grew up speaking Crow and didnt learn English until age 5. Thats not typical for todays Crow youth; a 2012 study commissioned by the tribe showed that only 3 percent of preschoolers were fluent, while 14 percent had limited fluency.

Tylis Bad Bear is a success story, both for language learners and the institute. He wasnt taught Crow at a young age, but learned the language over time and felt comfortable speaking it more by eighth grade. He graduated from Hardin High School in 2011.

A student of previous years institutes, he was tabbed to teach an intensive beginners Crow language class being offered for the first time this year. He previously taught at St. Labres immersion preschool and taught Crow language at Crow Agency Elementary.

We dont have all the English letters, he told his class Wednesday morning. But the Crow Language does have additional vowels like Uu and Oo.

Which version of a noun is used is often dictated by whether its describing a relationship with a person. There are masculine and feminine versions, and changes for situations.

For example, Dasaake describes a girls dad, as spoken by a third party. Diluupxe is a boys father in the same tense. Basaake is my dad, as spoken by a female, while biluupxe is my dad, as spoken by a male. To address their father, a female says basaakaa. A male says axxe.

It depends on what kind of context youre using, Bad Bear said.

At one point, a Native American student asked why she doesnt hear people using the formal address tense.

Its because nobodys speaking Crow, Bad Bear said. Thats why we dont hear it.

A patient and accepting approach to teaching is crucial, he said. For a while, Crow Indians who didnt speak Crow faced a shaming approach by language teachers.

We damaged a good-sized generation by saying, You should know this. If youre a Crow, you should already know this, he said. Its all about teaching, not preaching.

The institute began at Sitting Bull College in North Dakota, but moved to Little Big Horn College last year.

Many (teachers) came through school when (Crow) wasnt part of the curriculum, said Janine Pease, an instructor and administrator at Little Bighorn College. They are here to sharpen their skills. Theyre almost all teaching multiple grades.

Participants also help record audio for a new Crow app, and the Language Conservancy is working to adapt materials used to teach Lakota for teaching Crow.

With the growth of immersion preschools has come greater demand for speakers of Native languages, especially those with teacher training.

I didnt think learning the language in third and fourth-grade would put me here, teaching this language, Bad Bear said.
A man suspected of causing a fatal crash in Big Horn County on Wednesday afternoon fled after promising to get help, leaving a Florida man dead and his wife injured, according to the Montana Highway Patrol.

Investigating trooper Eric Winburn said an SUV towing a trailer atop which another SUV was secured, began fishtailing on U.S Highway 212 around mile marker 20 at around 1:25 p.m.

According to Winburn, the male driver of the towing vehicle drove into the opposite lane and then went back as he attempted to control the swerving trailer behind him.

As the driver went back into the westbound lane, the trailer broke from its rusted hitch and ripped back off the SUV and swung around and caught the corner of the SUV going the opposite direction, Winburn said.

Winburn described how the unhitched trailer basically ripped down the side of the SUV that had been traveling eastbound.

The collision left the whole drivers side ripped off, and threw the driver and the seat out of the vehicle, Winburn said.

After the collision, a witness who reported the crash told Winburn the male driver of the dark gray, possibly Jeep SUV, pulled a U-turn, yelled out of his window Im going for help, and took off toward Busby, about 10 miles east of the crash.

The about 65-year-old Florida man who had been driving the eastbound SUV was later pronounced dead, and Winburn said the man's wife had minor injuries.

Winburn described the broken trailer hitch as almost completely rusted out. He said MHP continues to investigate the incident.
Leading European entrepreneurs, including the founders of Skype and Lastminute.com, have called for a "single startup market" to help technology firms in the region build the next Facebook or Google .

Currently the European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, is trying to build the so-called Digital Single Market  a set of harmonized rules across all 28 member states in areas including copyright law and e-commerce. The Commission claims this could 415 billion euros ($465 billion) per year to the EU's economy.

But Brent Hoberman, co-founder of lastminute.com and chairman of Founders Forum, a network of the world's tech entrepreneurs and a backer behind the call for a "single startup market", said the EU's plans risk favoring larger business, but not helping growing ones.

"Let's ensure the single digital market doesn't work for largest corporates but is something that works for entrepreneurs across Europe," Hoberman told CNBC in a phone interview.
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Bankers at Goldman Sachs might want to think twice before sending an email calling any trade "a sure bet." They may want to pause before they send a note saying someone "embezzled the account." And they probably don't want to send an email using any one of 13 separate phrases that include the F-word.

That's because Goldman Sachs' compliance department conducts surveillance of employees' email. It's an automated process: Software monitors the emails for certain phrases that are flagged for specific scrutiny. Human employees at Goldman then review the flagged emails and decide whether they represent a problem.

CNBC has obtained a document detailing more than 180 phrases flagged for scrutiny by the monitoring system. The document was produced in 2008, and the firm has updated its search terminology since then. But the list gives a rare peek inside a large bank's real-time compliance surveillance operation, and reveals details of how that process works that even veteran Wall Street executives may not know.

Attorneys for Goldman described the confidential document as "a lexicon of terms and phrases used by the Firm's Compliance department for surveillance of the electronic mail of certain employees." The source who provided the document asked not to be named.

Monitoring employee email is not necessarily nefarious. Banks typically do it to detect any early indicators of fraud. In fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission expects that banks' policies and procedures will include monitoring emails. But the SEC has no specific rules or requirements as to the search terms banks use to do that.

A banking industry expert said technological monitoring of employees is increasingly common in the financial industry. "It's not just email, it's about using key words to monitor social media as well," the expert said. "What the institution is trying to do is to flag activities that may be illegal or may represent insider trading."

Examining the list, it seems clear that Goldman was looking for specific areas of concern: tense exchanges between bankers and their customers, disputes over commissions and money, or certain phrases involving obscenities.

Today, Goldman's communications monitoring is more extensive than it was in 2008 and encompasses communications technologies beyond email. And rules about profanity in email have tightened. Goldman employees say the email system automatically pops up a window if a user attempts to send an email containing a bad word. The sender must click a box to demonstrate that he or she is aware of the expletive and approves sending it before the offending email will go through. Goldman's employees are told their electronic communications will be watched.

"We deploy cutting-edge technology and exercise the utmost care to protect confidential information, secure data and provide high-end client service," said a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs. "The firm's monitoring efforts reflect our commitment to upholding the highest standards of professionalism and integrity."

The Goldman Sachs list was formatted in such a way as to capture phrases with different configurations that produce the same meaning, with word options for each phrase separated by brackets or lines. For example, one search term is: "I didn't {authorize}|{agree}." Presumably, that search term would capture anyone writing the phrase "I didn't authorize," or "I didn't agree," both of which might indicate some sort of dispute.

Goldman Sachs also monitored for email about calling financial regulators or organizations, including the SEC, NASD and New York Stock Exchange. One phrase that would be flagged: "Call the SEC." And the system watched for "20549," which is the ZIP code for SEC headquarters. In places, the list reads like a thesaurus for synonyms for the entire range of emotions a banker or client could experience in the workplace. The longest search phrase on the list is this:

"I {was|am} extremely[?]{pissed|angry|concerned|upset|agitated|bothered|distressed|

perturbed|worried|vexed|confused|flustered|discouraged|

rattled|daunted|demoralized|disheartened|

dismayed|distraught|unnerved}}."

Among the phrases flagged are seemingly innocuous phrases of daily office life: "answer your phone," "don't worry I'll take care of it" and "I don't understand." Also to be scrutinized were "I've been trying to reach you," and even "still have not received."

There are a number of phrases linked to stock trading on the list: "Time to dump," "break the trade" and "stock will fly/soar/dive/tank." And there are several phrases that might indicate a dispute with a customer, including "not made aware," "I trusted you" and "I told you days/weeks/months ago." And particularly, "paying fees through/thru the nose/a--/butt.

Some of the phrases could be indicators of possible fraud, including "adjust your account," or "clowns managing/running the fund/show/portfolio/account/my money."

And no list like this would be complete without the myriad inventive ways bankers find to use of the F-word, including: "don't you fing understand," "mad/angry/frustrated as hell/f---," "Screw/f--- it up," "way to f---ing much," "what I f---ing said," "where the f---/hell are you," "who the heck/f---/hell do you think you are," and "don't you f---ing understand."

That obscenity list, the banking industry expert said, could flag a large number of emails. "You're probably going to get a variety of false F-bomb positives that you don't want to explore any further," the expert said.

Does all this electronic monitoring actually work? It's hard to say. Despite the electronic snooping, it seems that some problems manage to crop up time after time.

One phrase the Goldman software searched for: "How could this happen again?"

Read Goldman's list:
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A so-called Brexit at next week's U.K. referendum is likely to dent to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the country and could lead to talented financial professionals leaving the City of London, according to new research. The new report, published Thursday by specialist financial consultancy The M&A Advisor, states that dealmaking in the U.K. has already been affected by the June 23 vote and outlines a number of possible outcomes if citizens decide to opt out of the European bloc.

"After a record year of domestic and foreign M&A investment in the U.K., we have witnessed slowing deal flow over the past six months with (first-quarter 2016 private equity/venture capital) volume at a paltry 500 transactions compared to over 800 one year earlier," David Fergusson, the Chief Executive and president of The M&A Advisor, said in statement alongside the report.

"(The second quarter) of this year saw volume slide to under 300. This is a dramatic change of events and the threat of an EU exit by the U.K. is at the center of it."





Jetta Productions | Iconica | Getty Images

The report contains a survey of 600 respondents from a total of 35 countries as well as in-depth, one-to-one interviews with leading market practitioners from companies such as Winchester Capital, audit firm PwC and Wilbur Ross's private equity firm WL Ross & Co. The research concludes that a vote to leave the EU, according to most viewpoints, would likely result in a period of "considerable and prolonged uncertainty." A "widely-held" view among these market participants was that a vote to leave the EU would lead to long-term uncertainty which would have a "deleterious effect on transactional activity". Some respondents also spoke of a potential "brain drain" with key workers heading to other financial centers in Europe.

"London as a market is about people; about international people. It is a market with these people choosing to work in London and about the free movement of workers and a culture of bringing together the best brains from all over the world," David Crook, a partner at international law firm White & Case, said in one of the interviews transcribed in the report.

"The effect (of a Brexit) would be slow but either it will shore up people's resolve to ensure that London remains the leading financial center or European centers such as Paris and Frankfurt will try and take back some of their financial services industries."





Get on with business?

Within the survey, 60 percent of respondents felt that the U.K. would be less likely to prosper if it left the EU. A similar proportion said that Britain would be less likely to attract overseas investment. Among the respondents, 60 percent said that U.K. businesses would be less attractive to overseas acquirers in the short term if Britain votes to leave. In particular, 56 percent of respondents thought that EU-based businesses would be less likely to acquire U.K.-based ones, and half of respondents thought that businesses from the United States would be less likely to acquire British ones.

Nonetheless, Alun Baker, the managing director of Merrill Corporation, a technology services provider for the finance industry, tempered some of the viewpoints within the report, suggesting that dealmaking would still continue no matter what the result on June 23.

"I believe the markets will let out its collective held breath and get on with business, regardless of whether that is adjusting to the new opportunities presented by Britain's independence from the EU or the perceived security of further embracing the centralized European model," he said in the report.




Didi Chuxing, Uber's China rival, has closed a financing round worth $7.3 billion, including an investment from Apple , as the taxi app battle in the world's second-largest economy continues to heat up. The total round was formed from a $4.5 billion equity raise from Apple, which invested $1 billion into Didi, $600 million from China Life, and an undisclosed amount from Ant Financial, the affiliate of Alibaba that runs payment solution Alipay. Existing shareholders, including internet giants Tencent and Alibaba , were also involved in the round. And the remainder of the money came from a syndicated loan worth $2.5 billion arranged by China Merchants Bank. And China life added a long-term debt investment of around $300 million.

Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Didi said it would use the money to upgrade technology for big data research and operations as well as investing in improving rider and driver experience and exploring new business lines and opportunities. "We are greatly inspired by strong support from investors worldwide who have demonstrated full confidence in Didi's potential. In just four years, Didi has created a firm lead in China's mobile transportation sector," Cheng Wei, CEO and founder of Didi, said in a press release. "With our advantages in technology, platform synergies and talented team, Didi is prepared to continue this momentum of growth."

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The Federal Reserve is the only institution in Washington acting to support economic growth, but its low-rate policy could be backfiring, former Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said Thursday.

Fisher offered his assessment one day after the Federal Open Market Committee left rates unchanged and more members of the policymaking group indicated they anticipate just one hike this year rather than two.

Congress's failure to stimulate the economy through fiscal policy has forced the Fed to keep monetary policy accommodative, he told CNBC's "Squawk Box." But low rates are taking a toll on community and regional banks that lend to middle-income groups, he said.

That pressure, combined with over-regulation, is retarding growth, he said.

"There's very little incentive, together with the pincer movement of regulatory excess, for people to go out there and lend into job-creating enterprises," he said.

"It's a joint strangle on what moves our economy forward," he said.

Low rates have also slammed insurance companies, he noted. Since insurance provides the savings that many in the second and third income quartiles rely on, Washington is undermining the returns that protect the future of Americans' savings, he said.

Fisher said he believes the Fed needs to consider regulatory conditions when setting monetary policy, something he says never happened in his 10 years of attending policy meetings.

"I'm very worried longer term that this could be undermining the ability of the basic financial fabric of our country to do what it's supposed to do, which is to finance economic growth," he said.
There will be about a hundred of them in all from a dozen or more states, traveling by car or train or airplane, and when they gather in Montana at the end of this month it will be to celebrate another kind of journey  the one their families made by ox cart a century ago.

As John Gutierrez, of Northridge, Calif., explains, it was 100 years ago, in 1916, that several related Ukrainian families  having left their homeland behind when they moved to Canada a few years earlier  made the trek across the United States border. They homesteaded on the open prairie some 40 miles from Malta, the nearest town of any size.

Weve really got to remember these people and the sacrifices they made so we could have what we have today, Gutierrez said. It was a tough place because youre totally on your own  its entirely up to you to succeed or fail. Theres no doctors, no medicine, nothing. Youre 40 miles from the nearest town. You lived in a tent until you built that first two-room house and then youre working in the fields. It just took a lot of stamina and endurance and hope.

A centennial reunion of the Obach-Wachula and Ivanovitch-Walchuk families will celebrate the legacy of those immigrants when the descendants gather June 24-26 in Malta.

Most of those families arrived in 1916 to join the Walchuks, who had already arrived in 1914. It was the still the homesteading era in Eastern Montana, and they had very likely seen the Great Northern posters blaring the promise of lands available for homesteading in places such as Phillips County. They found land near Frenchman Creek.

Its almost a sacred place to me. This is where it all started  the homestead, Gutierrez said. He is helping to coordinate the reunion for the Obach family, descendents of Thomas and Anna Obach.

Gutierrez, who worked on the Saturn 1B and Saturn V Launch Computer Complex for RCA Radar Systems Division in Van Nuys, Calif., from 1961 to 1969, said he sometimes marveled at the way that Obach family  one in which education was stressed  arrived in America.

What is amazing to me is that my grandparents immigrated to the United States in 1916 on an ox-drawn cart  a two-wheeled ox-drawn cart in which they moved to this promised land. In two generations their grandson, me, John Gutierrez, Im working for RCA Radar Systems Division, Im working on the Saturn IB and Saturn V launch computer complex, which helped launch a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth. My grandparents came here in an ox cart and I helped land a man on the moon  only in America could this happen  in two generations. It just boggles my mind.

Pat Donich of Seeley Lake, who is coordinating the reunion for descendants of the Wachula/Ivanovitch family, said the familys story has echoes of the Mayflower voyage  a quest for religious freedom.

At that time, there was still a czar in Russia, and thats when the Bolsheviks were working to take over everything. Our family was in favor of the czar, but they were afraid because they were religious.

The Bolsheviks, who successfully overthrew the czars government in 1917, were famously opposed to religion. For religious people, it seemed like a good time to leave Ukraine.

They were really terrified of the Bolsheviks, who hadnt even taken over yet, said Donich.

And Donichs father, John Ivanovitch  who was 7 when his family came to Canada in 1914, and 9 when then came to the U.S. in 1916  never forgot the feeling that things would be better in America.

I remember my dad saying, Dont ever complain about paying taxes in this country. Just be so happy youre here and you can, Donich said.

Donich said the family already knew about the opportunities to homestead before they left home.

They saw ads in Ukraine about free land, which was the homestead land. So when they got to Canada, after a couple years they just walked across the border and applied for citizenship and homesteads, and nobody cared if they did that. Well, they actually came in ox carts, because they had goods.

The familys tradition also tells that the family stayed one season in Mankota, Saskatchewan, because they needed to raise a crop of potatoes so theyd have something to eat when they came.

The land north of Malta didnt exactly drip with milk and honey when they arrived.

It was prairie and lots of rocks and never very good land, Donich said. They raised lots of things. They raised wheat and barley and hay and turkeys  500 turkeys at a time  and cattle and chickens. They just did anything they could possibly do to make some money.

They lived in sod houses. A sod house is like the sod you would put down on your lawn now, only they plowed up the prairie and the walking plows would plow 18 inches wide. Then they would just stack that up like bricks. They would stack it in two rows for one wall and kind of lean them together and the houses were like 30 feet by 40 feet. And theyd have two rooms in them with all those children.

The Obach family lived in their sod house 10 years and then they bought a wooden house from some neighbors who left. They then donated their sod house as a school to educate their own children and those of the neighbors. So that sod house became the Obach School from 1924 to 1934.

Bonnie OBrien, who came to teach the pupils  there are photos of her and her students standing next to the sod walls of that prairie school  ended up marrying John Ivanovitch and staying in the area as a farm wife, mother and teacher.

The Obachs, meanwhile started looking, American-fashion, for new opportunities as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s set in. They looked toward western Montana.

They sold the homestead back to the government, and the Obach family moved to Charlo. They had a much smaller farm, but it was much more productive. There was rain in the spring and there was water and streams. It became a very successful farm in Charlo, said Gutierrez.

But tragedy went with them. In September 1935, Michael Obach  who had won $20 in May of that year for being the best judge of horses and mules in the state of Montana at a contest in Bozeman  was killed in a car accident near Hinsdale. It was at night, and he had no lights. Another vehicle driven by the postmaster at Meharry struck the Obach family truck head on. Michael was standing in front of the truck at the time, cranking it to get it started. He was pinned between the two vehicles.

He was the fourth-oldest. He was a farmer. He loved it, Gutierrez said. I know my grandmother never got over it  how tragedy strikes your family. And three years after they moved to Charlo, my grandfather died of stomach cancer.

But immigrants in America long ago figured out that bad things still happen in the promised land.

Theres some good stories and some sad stories, Gutierrez said.

They will tell both kinds when the descendants of the Obachs and Wachulas, the Ivanovitches and Walchuks, gather in Malta later this month.
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Mario Schlosser isn't a guy who likes to fly blind. But when he and his wife were expecting a baby in 2012, that's what he had to do. The computer scientist and Harvard Business School graduate found it nearly impossible to learn which hospitals in New York were the best or which obstetrician they should use. He had two options: He could either complain, or he and some colleagues could launch a health insurance company organized to fuse data and health care forever.

"About 20 percent of your income goes to health care, and no one was really there to explain how any of this works," said Schlosser, CEO and co-founder of health-care start-up Oscar. "It's an excellent system in pockets, but the coordination isn't there.'' Four years later Schlosser's other baby, Oscar, is a health insurer that's net insurance-premium revenue remains well below its valuation, but it is among the best-known and largest start-ups attempting to prove that the employer health-care plan model and delivery is unsustainable. The New York Citybased company, No. 17 on the 2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has raised $738.9 million in venture capital at a valuation of $2.7 billion, according to PitchBook. The biggest change is one that Oscar itself didn't set in motion: Its chances rely heavily on whether President Obama's Affordable Care Act gradually breaks the link between where people work and where they get health insurance, prompting an ever-rising percentage of people to buy coverage themselves. Since Oscar isn't targeting the group insurance market dominated by giants like UnitedHealth Group , Humana , Cigna and Aetna , the ACA is the mega-disruption on which its own ambitions ultimately depend.



Brendan McDermid | Reuters

"ACA was a catalyst, but it wasn't the motivation," Schlosser said. "Everyone has come to the conclusion that the system is too expensive, and the best mechanism to change it has to be the consumer. People have to be able to vote with their feet."

Oscar, not surprising for a Silicon Valley-backed company, touts technology as a key advantage. It lets clients use technology to evaluate the best doctors for them, or even get minor illnesses treated by providers they communicate with over the internet. The same data tools can boost quality of care by letting Oscar and doctors coordinate treatment, either within a single complex patient case or spreading the best methods quickly across networks of doctors. But a deeper change on which Oscar relies is in practice patterns called narrow networks: The health-care start-up is trying to hold down the cost of insurance by channeling business to a relatively small number of hospitals and doctors in each city where it does business, in exchange for what Schlosser said are "double-digit discounts.''

About 20 percent of your income goes to health care, and no one was really there to explain how any of this works. Mario Schlosser Oscar CEO and co-founder

The road Oscar faces is long and pocked with challenges. It loses a ton of money  more than $100 million in 2015, and compared to trailing net premium revenue of $127.3 million (that's from plan members on the books in 2015 and added during the 2014-15 open enrollment seasons). Still, Schlosser projects that the company will be cash-flow positive between 2017 and 2018. Its current total of roughly 140,000 members implies an annual revenue run rate of around $675 million, but the business is still a tiny fraction of what giants boast. UnitedHealth, by contrast, claims 27.5 million members. Oscar must hope it can preserve its competitive advantage  the big carriers are pushing to implement many of the narrow-network and tech innovations Oscar would like to claim as its own. But Oscar can't succeed as the king of current ACA exchanges, either, where it's competing for about 15 million people. It needs the exchanges' slice of health insurance to widen, too. "They want to turn a traditional weakness, a narrow network, into a brand and into a strength," said Katherine Hempstead, senior advisor at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation's largest health carefocused philanthropic organization. "Everything now is about integration between the carrier and the provider." Oscar is not alone among start-ups in on this action, some taking Oscar's idea further than Oscar itself does: Companies like Zoom Healthcare and Harken Health even run ambulatory-care facilities themselves, partly breaking down the barrier between the companies that provide health care and those that pay for it, Hempstead said. "Oscar is kind of in a 2.0 mode now" as it figures out how completely to integrate caregiving, technology and payment systems, Hempstead said. "They started out trying to [leverage] telecommunications, but the way they provided health care wasn't especially novel."



Josh Matheus is pretty much exactly the patient Oscar wants, and the 27-year-old restaurant manager from suburban Dallas chose the company for exactly the virtues Oscar is selling. Matheus moved to Oscar from a Blue Cross plan in February 2016: He says his $268 monthly premium (before an Obamacare tax credit for a medium-tier "silver" plan) is about the same as he was paying, but Oscar is cheaper overall because of its lower deductibles and co-payments. The reason that happened was that Oscar has a narrow network in Dallas, but the Matheus case suggests that consumers won't mind less choice as long as they can get to many of the best doctors in their town. In Dallas, one of Oscar's key partners is the Baylor Health System, which is the home base of Matheus' family doctor. Shortly after joining Oscar, he had a stress fracture and was able to pick a Baylor-affiliated orthopedist, too. "I hopped on the app and found one of the best orthopedists in town," Matheus said. That narrow network, like it or lump it, is the key to Oscar's plans to turn profitable. Oscar's regulatory filings indicate that it lost $92 million in its home market of New York in 2015 and almost $13 million in New Jersey. In New York, Oscar's biggest market, and New Jersey, Schlosser said Oscar doesn't have a narrow network and has had trouble making deals with hospitals and doctors for less than it charges in premiums. An announcement about changes to Oscar's New York operation to reduce losses there is coming within a few weeks, he said.

For providers, jumping on a narrow-network strategy like Oscar's can be a path to greater market share, and help provide better care at the same time, said P.K. Khurana, strategic services officer at Oscar's chief Los Angeles partner, Providence Health & Services California.

Washington State-based Providence organized a specific network of doctors just to handle Oscar's patients in Southern California. The network includes six hospitals in Los Angeles County, and St. Joseph Health, a leading player in adjacent Orange County, which is merging with Providence. The key to the network's success is its ability to use Oscar's data tools, which capture information from patients' visits to any health-care provider, to avoid complications in specific patients and, over time, identify the most-effective doctors and cost-effective treatments, Khurana said. That will be integral to Oscar's model all over the country, Schlosser said, because as patients move from doctor to doctor and in and out of hospitals, the one player with all their information is the insurance carrier.

Everybody has a baby and thinks theirs is the cutest. Les Funtleyder portfolio manager at E Squared Asset Management and former Wall Street health-care analyst

"It breaks down a barrier between the insurer and the delivery system," said Khurana, who said the network's goal is to be able to stabilize local insurance premiums. "It improves collaboration across the network." The Providence-St. Joseph alliance will grow as Oscar gains market share and consumers learn to like narrower networks, Khurana said. In Texas, Oscar landed 40,000 customers during its first full open-enrollment season, and the partners think it can duplicate that growth rate in California, he said. "The goal is to triple or quadruple [local customers] very rapidly," Khurana said. "L.A.'s market is very fragmented." Hempstead said the business is moving toward tighter relationships between health-care payers and providers, similar to the way Kaiser Permanente has unified insurance and providing care on the way to more than 40 percent of California's individually purchased health insurance market, or the way Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health Care commands a similar share of Utah's market. But these examples imply the question is still open about how much of Oscar's mission is truly new, and how much shareholder value it can really generate over time, said Les Funtleyder, a portfolio manager at E Squared Asset Management in New York and former Wall Street health-care analyst who has written extensively about the Affordable Care Act. UnitedHealth has had a Centers of Excellence program for more than a decade that, like narrow networks, channels patients to preferred high-quality providers who play ball on price, Funtleyder said. Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and other incumbents are experimenting with different flavors of narrow networks, and United has led the incumbents in rolling up a series of small health-data companies into Optum, to make itself at least as tech savvy as Oscar, Funtleyder said. "Everybody has a baby and thinks theirs is the cutest," he said.

Financial health

Even if Oscar overcomes these barriers, it's still hard to see how recent investors like Fidelity Investments will get hefty, venture capitallike returns on the $2.7 billion valuation of the company's January 2016 financing round, Funtleyder argued. Fidelity led the deal at a time of mounting losses for Oscar  the losses of over $100 million in 2015 versus $27.5 million the previous year. The valuation  which increased by $1 billion based on the Fidelity-led deal  works out to almost 20 times Oscar's sales in a relatively mature, low-margin business where the ACA requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent or 85 percent of premiums on health services, even before including marketing expenses and corporate overhead. And the Big Five of United, Aetna, Cigna, Humana and Anthem trade at less than one time sales, suggesting that Oscar would have to grow fivefold, and achieve profit margins akin to the majors', before more-recent investors could expect to make a cent, Funtleyder said. "I'm not convinced from the insurance filings that they have a handle yet on how to control health care costs, and that's true of a lot of people in that business,'' Funtleyder said. "There's no reason to think it will be easier for the Oscars of the world.'' Aetna's CEO said earlier this year it has serious concerns about whether ACA markets are sustainable. UnitedHealth said it would lose roughly $1 billion on ACA plans in 2015/16 combined. United said it would have waited longer to get into the ACA market, and may yet decide to exit it entirely in 2017. A recent Blue Cross and Blue Shield report, which analyzed health insurance for 4.7 million Americans in all 50 states, showed that new ACA customers were sicker and costlier than people in the old, individual insurance market.
A photograph of Djohar Tsarnaev, who is believed to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the Boston Marathon bombing, is seen on his page of Russian social networking site Vkontakte (VK), as pictured on a monitor and a mobile phone in St. Petersburg April 19, 2013. Tsarnaev posted links to Islamic websites and others calling for Chechen independence on what appears to be his page on the site.

"Once you have found the aggregates, you have got your hand on the pulse of the serious, global, pro-ISIS support," Johnson said.

They identified 196 groups on VKontakte, consisting of a total of about 108,000 members spread around the globe. These are "serious" groups, in that they are sharing information that is operational: knowledge on how to avoid drones, financing data, information on areas of unrest and so on. What is key about these groups is that they are talking about things that can be separated from mere online chatter.

But VKontakte has several features that make it a good place to study extremist behavior online. First, VKontakte is less efficient at shutting down extremist groups than Facebook. As Europe's largest social network, it has about 350 million members who speak many languages and live around the world. Also, because it is based in Russia, it has many Muslim Chechen users in the Caucasus region, which is relatively close to ISIS' power center in the Levant, and ISIS has used the network to spread propaganda among Russian speakers. The Levant can mean all the countries bordering the Mediterranean from Greece to Egypt.

Russia's VKontakte social network is very similar to Facebook . Like Facebook, anyone is allowed to create a community devoted to whatever subject they like  "the Penguins winning the Stanley Cup, or whatever else they like," said Neil Johnson, lead researcher on the study and a professor of physics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

A group of researchers has studied the online behavior of pro-ISIS groups on Europe's largest online social networking service, Russia-based VKontakte, and found some striking patterns they say can track and fight ISIS, or potentially any extreme group in the real world. They also hope that their research will help predict real-world attacks by extremist groups and contribute to better tracking for so-called lone wolf attackers, who carry out assaults alone, or aren't connected to extremist groups offline.

The key to fighting the Islamic State group, or ISIS, in the real world may lie in watching social media.

It isn't limited to ISIS. I would like to think this is some generic way in which humans use the internet.

Pro-ISIS groups online don't have the typical organized hierarchical structures led by individuals. They are more like "aggregates" of members that cluster together, somewhat like a school of fish in nature. Their decentralized nature is vital to understanding how they work and what kind of threat they pose.

"Among those aggregates," Johnson said, "we find there are these pro-ISIS aggregates that are exchanging things internally, that are operational, they have to do with particular designs of drones, how to avoid drones, what kind of kind of unrest is forming in certain areas, information on financing. This is the hardcore kind of material."

Johnson's team saw several striking patterns emerge from their data.



They found that the rate at which these pro-ISIS aggregates were forming accelerated in the days and months that lead up to certain attacks. Johnson's team found just such a spike in the rate of the creation of groups established right before ISIS' surprise attack on Kobane, Syria, in September 2014.

The study noted that this pattern is not unique to ISIS. In previous research, Johnson and his colleagues found that sudden and unexpected protests in Brazil during the summer of 2013 were preceded by a similar spike in the creation of online aggregates.

"If we monitor then the creation of aggregates and begin to see that rate of creation escalate, we can begin to monitor  at least it is helping us to predict  when conditions are favorable for real-world attacks. Basically, it tells us that something is brewing," he said.



Johnson likens it to a doctor who can tell that the conditions are right in a patient for heart disease, while not necessarily predicting exactly when a heart attack will strike. They cannot yet tell when or where such attacks will occur, but this coalescence of people online reliably precedes these major events in the real world. Johnson said he would like to refine the programs to track the content being shared on social media, and develop ways of pinpointing details about major events.



Shutting the groups down, or influencing their behavior, may be one way to prevent attacks in the offline world.



For example, the team also found that the aggregates tend to coalesce like schools of fish  smaller groups merge and become larger groups. By tracking these groups, anti-ISIS agents can break down the smaller ones before they grow to a more powerful size.



In fact, they need to be shut quickly. The team even worked out a formula for the ideal rate of shutdown. If the groups are not shut down fast enough, two things can happen.

Smaller groups will tend to congeal into one big aggregate, which could become far more potent. Instead of people splitting into 196 different groups, there would simply one big group, with "108,000 people across the world all talking the same thing, having the same information, sharing the same everything."

Secondly, if the rate at which the groups are fragmenting drops too far, pro-ISIS information can begin to spread virally among the remaining groups. Members from one shutdown group tend to scatter and join other groups and they carry their information with them.



The team says its system could be improved to potentially identify "lone wolves." Johnson said that it is likely that a person who is a lone wolf in real life is communicating with extremists online.



Chances are a lone wolf "was in an aggregate, will be in an aggregate and carries the knowledge of previous aggregates," he said. "There is no such thing as a lone wolf. Or rather, we can at least mathematically give an estimate of how long it has been since one has been in its last aggregate, and even  I haven't done this yet  get the trajectory of someone you observe now to be a lone wolf, in terms of likely aggregates they have passed through."

To be sure, the research drew some skepticism as to how effective the data would be in helping to stop ISIS.

"I think the paper did an outstanding job looking at VKontakte, however, I think the jury is still out on how this would apply to the fact that ISIS is a very versatile organization," said V.S. Subrahmanian, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, in an interview with IEEE Spectrum. "They understand social media pretty well and they are not likely to be bound by the constraints of operating on just one social media platform."

Johnson expects the team has found a model that shows something fundamental about human behavior that can be used to track all sorts of extremist groups.



"It isn't limited to ISIS. I would like to think this is some generic way in which humans use the internet. That is how we do stuff on the internet, we self-organize into groups," he said.



"I think it is an attractive thing for people who have extreme views  who don't necessarily get the feedback that they need in daily life. I think this same dynamic will happen for any extreme subset of the entire population."
Pharmacy reimbursement rates challenged Rite Aid earnings in the latest quarter, Chairman and CEO John Standley said, in a statement.

Rite Aid shares slipped more than 1 percent Thursday after releasing its first-quarter results. The stock ended the day slightly lower.

The drugstore chain reported adjusted quarterly earnings at 1 cent per share, below a Reuters estimate of 5 cents a share. Revenue rose 23 percent to $8.2 billion on a year-over-year basis, but came in below a forecast of $8.26 billion.

Standley said the chain wasn't able to offset the rate pressure through drug purchasing efficiencies.

"While drug cost reductions will continue to be short of our expectations in the near term, we anticipate improvements over the second half of the fiscal year. As we work to meet this challenge, we remain focused on executing our highly successful sales initiatives like wellness+ with Plenti and the Wellness store program while also making strategic investments for growth and delivering a consistently outstanding customer experience," he said in a statement.



Shares of Rite Aid jumped last week after a report said there are growing signs that the Federal Trade Commission will approve Walgreens' $17 billion acquisition of Rite Aid. The two drugstores agreed to merge in February 2015.

Rite Aid said it expects to close deal with Walgreens Boots Alliance in the second half of this year.

Rite Aid's stock is just slightly lower so far this year.

RAD 2016 Chart
The same could be said of Greece's relations with the rest of Europe given its fraught negotiations over a third bailout and the demands for massive spending cuts in return for a third financial lifeline.

Russia has been one of Greece's few "friends" during its recent period of economic turmoil. Nonetheless, many analysts have wondered what the Kremlin could want in return for investing in the country, at a time when relations between Russia and the rest of the European Union are frosty, with several pointing to Greece's strategically important location.

"We're trying to attract investors, not only from Russia but from all over the world, who can invest in many areas because Greece has a dominant, strategic place in the whole of the Balkans, Turkey and Middle East. So this geopolitical factor is the main determinant favor for foreign investors."

Speaking to CNBC on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Dimitris Mardas told CNBC Greece offered foreign investors the chance of a geopolitical boost, given its location straddling Europe and the Middle East.

Greece's strategic location in the Mediterranean is a bonus for foreign investors like Russia, the deputy minister for foreign affairs in Greece told CNBC.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Athens last month and talks focused on bilateral trade, economic and investment cooperation including projects in the energy and transport sector. Ahead of the visit, Putin even penned an article in Greek newspaper Kathimerini calling Greece "Russia's important partner in Europe."

Mardas said that his country had to pursue investment through privatization (as demanded by its latest international bailout) and through its various sectors.

"The first area is privatization and it's one of the tasks of our ministry to attract foreign investors in Greece. We present many opportunities in many areas  not only in energy, foodstuffs and tourism but in other areas such as aerospace and mechanical engineering, for example," he said, adding that Greece had small but dynamic firms in those areas.

He said that Greece had the potential to be turned into a "logistics hub," thanks to its numerous ports, including Piraeus.

Under pressure from its international lenders to privatize key state assets, Greece sold off the Piraeus Port Authority to Chinese company COSCO last year. The deal will see COSCO invest 350 million euros ($392.4 million) into the port over the next decade.

Despite Mardas' optimism over Greece's economic prospects, public opposition to austerity measures remains strong. Measures demanded of Greece's lenders in return for its third international bailout worth 86 billion euros include an overhaul of the country's pension system, tax hikes and strict fiscal targets, as well as the unpopular privatization program.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras faced calls to resign on Wednesday as thousands of demonstrators took to Syntagma Square in Athens to protest a fresh round of austerity measures demanded by international lenders.

Angry protesters held banners reading "Go Home!" and "Shame on you!" outside a parliamentary session debating Greece's latest growth plan.

Tsipras had initially come to lead the country on an anti-austerity ticket although he capitulated to lenders' demands for more austerity (despite a referendum in which the majority of Greeks rejected bailout demands) when Greece came close to bankruptcy and crashing out of the euro zone last summer.

He was nonetheless re-elected after a snap election in September, giving him four more years in office but rival party New Democracy party has overtaken Syriza in opinion polls and some analysts have said that another election could happen in 2017.

Mardas told CNBC that the government has an order to govern for four years but that it had to enact austerity measures in the short-term.

"We know that there are some fiscal measures which are unpleasant measures, however, these measures are for a short-run. This means that when the recovery comes, and we expect it could even come this year, all these unpleasant fiscal measures will be relaxed in part or by the time that we have another kind of policy."

"This happens in all countries that face some kind of crisis. We have fiscal measures and austerity policies," he said, adding that the government was in the "worst period" of governing during its term in office.

"Our main goal now is how we can see the recovery of the economy and which way growth can come to Greece," he said.
JACKSON  Wyoming officials are investigating the death of a 16-year-old whose body had no apparent signs of trauma.

Kayden Quinn Tapia's body was found by passersby on the Snake River dike Tuesday morning.

Teton County Sheriff's Office Lt. Tom Combs said there is much left to investigate.

He said the witnesses who found Tapia's body also saw four teens leaving the scene in a hurry. The teens were known to be friends of Tapia and were questioned Tuesday. They will be questioned again.

Teton County Coroner Dr. Brent Blue said Tapia's cause of death is still pending, and an autopsy is scheduled for Wednesday.

Combs said authorities took unspecified evidence from the scene and impounded two vehicles parked in the area.
Shanghai Disneyland is "very impressive" and could definitely add to the profitability of Walt Disney over the next few years, analyst Anthony DiClemente said Thursday.



That's because the story is about more than just the theme park, which opened Thursday and is Disney's first in mainland China.

"This is about Disney's brand globally. It's about planting a flag in China. ... It really will extend not only to the parks but also to the studio segment, to the consumer product segment," the senior media and internet analyst at Nomura said in an interview with CNBC's "Closing Bell."

"It's something that over the course of the next 10, 20, 30 years will definitely help the operating results of Disney."

DiClemente, who has a "buy" rating on Disney, visited Shanghai Disney earlier this week. He said the rides and technology are very new compared to the company's existing parks.

"Demand is quite strong. I think the Chinese are going to love it," he said.

The park's highly anticipated debut was overshadowed by the fatal alligator attack on a 2-year-old at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday. The toddler was playing in the water on a beach near Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa when he was dragged away by the alligator.

Disclosure: DIS is an investment banking client of Nomura.
China's total debt reached a record 237 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of 2016, up from 148 percent at the end of 2007, according to calculations by the Financial Times.

Concerns about China, which have already sparked global market turmoil this year, have not gone away and its debt pile still poses risks to the world economy, senior bankers said on Thursday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in Russia.

"It (Chinese debt) could have a very serious knock-on effect, not just to Asian economies, but European ones. That could definitely trigger a potential negative trend," Pavel Teplukhin, chief country officer of Deutsche Bank Russia ,said at a panel discussion hosted by CNBC at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in Russia.

Fellow panelist, Deputy Russian Finance Minister Maksim Oreshkin added that accumulating debt was good for European economies in cyclical slowdown, but bad for the major emerging market economies of China and Russia.

Debt was at the root of the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and has since risen globally in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), the Bank for International Settlements warned in March. Global debt topped $135 trillion at the end of 2015, up from below $110 trillion at the close of 2007, the organization said.

"In the advanced economies at the heart of the crisis, some private-sector deleveraging has taken place, although public-sector debt has grown steadily. But the most worrying development has been the steep rise in private-sector debt elsewhere, especially in several emerging market economies, including the largest  the main engines of global growth post-crisis," the bank said in a statement.

Oreshkin and panellist Oleg Viyugin, the chairman of MDM Bank's board of directors, concurred that China's debt pile was the one that post most risk to the world  although Andrei Klepach, chief economist at Vnesheconombank named the U.S.

Oreshkin struck a positive note on global debt.

"Defaults and crises are a normal part of life  yes, there will be more crises going forward  and we will address them," he said.
watch now

A British lawmaker was shot to death while meeting with constituents Thursday in an attack that halted campaigning over whether the U.K. should leave the European Union. Police said they arrested a 52-year-old man in the attack on Jo Cox, but did not know of a motive for the killing. The attack came a week before British voters were scheduled to decide whether to leave the EU. Cox, a 41-year-old member of the opposition Labour Party, had been campaigning to keep the U.K. in the European Union. Cox was meeting voters in her West Yorkshire, northern England, constituency when she was attacked.

Authorities said in a news conference that they are conducting a "very significant investigation," appealing to witnesses for more information.

Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox. Yui Mok | PA | AP

A representative from the local police said they are "not able to say at present" exactly what unfolded in the attack or a potential motive, but that there are indications this was a lone incident. Weapons, including a firearm, were recovered, police said. The Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe campaigns suspended activity after the attack on Cox, who was elected to the House of Commons only last year. Prime Minister David Cameron called the attack "absolutely tragic and dreadful news." Cameron tweet.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he was "utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox. The thoughts of the whole Labour Party are with her and her family at this time."

Corbyn tweet. According to media reports, which have not been verified by NBC News, the assailant shouted "Britain First" as he attacked Cox  a possible reference to arguments over whether the U.K. should remain as part of the EU. ITV News reports that all campaigning concerning the referendum has been suspended for the rest of the day following the incident in Yorkshire.

Cameron tweet

A police forensic officer works at the scene where a coat, shoe and handbag lie on the pavement outside the library in Birstall where Labour MP Jo Cox was shot on June 16, 2016. Getty Images
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In one of the more unfortunate marketing stumbles, Virgin America sent out a mass email Wednesday morning promoting summer travel deals. The ad campaign included a cartoon image of two tourists in a boat watching an alligator approach them with its mouth open. The "Take a Summer Tour" campaign hit inboxes and social media Tuesday and it continued after a 2-year-old boy was snatched by an alligator at a Disney resort in Orlando. Later Wednesday, the boy's body was recovered.

At some point, the airline changed the alligator image in its marketing to a cartoon of a man floating in a pool.

Virgin America spokesman Dave Arnold told CNBC the airline has often used the alligator image in promotions. "The email distribution, social posts and creative assets had been scheduled for release before the terribly sad and tragic incident occurred at the resort in Florida," he said. "As soon as were aware of the news, we immediately removed the design from our social channels and halted the email distribution to our guests. We sincerely apologize to anyone who may have been upset by the design."

Source: Virgin America
"I think he could (limit immigration from certain areas) with executive action. ... But it becomes very, very hard to do on an operational level. And its yield is extremely doubtful," said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute at New York University School of Law.

If elected, Trump could likely limit immigration from certain parts of the world through executive action, if not approval from a GOP-controlled Congress, experts said. But his proposals  particularly any based on religion  will face significant resistance and could prove onerous in practice.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee first proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country in the aftermath of the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. It was a constitutionally questionable proposal that drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. In a speech this week, he pledged to restrict immigration from areas of the world with terrorism ties.

Donald Trump doubled down on his divisive immigration rhetoric this week following the massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. If elected, he may not even need lawmakers' help to act on some proposals.

Early Sunday, 29-year-old Aghan-American Omar Mateen opened fire at Orlando's Pulse nightclub, killing 49 people and injuring dozens before dying in a shootout with police. He was armed with an assault-style rifle and pistol and had pledged loyalty to the so-called Islamic State terror group. U.S. officials say he was self-radicalized.

Despite Mateen's American birth, Trump seized on the attack as another example of a failed U.S. immigration system. His initial call for a "complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on" followed the December terror attack in San Bernardino.

This week, Trump modified the proposal slightly, saying he wanted to "suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats." He believes he would have the authority to implement the measures, if elected.



"The immigration laws of the United States give the president powers to suspend entry into the country of any class of persons," Trump said Monday.



According to U.S. code on immigration, the president does hold the authority to "suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens" if the group's entry "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States." That can extend for as long as the president deems necessary.

Trump does have some precedent for an executive order on immigration. President Barack Obama has used that power broadly, and issued an order to give some protections to millions of people who entered the U.S. illegally as children or have children who are citizens. The Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to the action.

Still, Trump's immigration moves would likely face court challenges, particularly if they include religious restrictions, said Mark Kennedy, director of George Washington University's graduate school of political management.

"It would be hard to imagine how picking out a specific religion and excluding them would be constitutional," he said. "There is the ability to do an executive order, but it still needs to be constitutional."



Kennedy added, though, that Trump could possibly get congressional support for a "security-focused approach" that centers on a country's government and terror presence rather than immigrants' religion.

GOP leaders seem unlikely to support restrictions based on religion. House Speaker Paul Ryan, the top elected Republican, said Tuesday a Muslim ban is not in the country's best interests.

"I do not think it is reflective of our principles, not just as a party but as a country," Ryan said. "And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test, and not a religious test."

President Barack Obama took criticism of Trump's proposals a step further, contending they would strengthen terror groups and make the United States less safe.

Both Kennedy and the Migration Policy Institute's Chishti see issues with Trump's latest proposal. First of all, Mateen was born in New York and did not immigrate to the U.S.

"What would it do? He was born in New York with access to lethal weapons. None of that would have been prevented," Chishti said.

He also said choosing the countries or areas to bar is "difficult on operational terms." Setting a term like the presence of ISIS, for example, could be open to broad interpretation.

Chishti also warned about the possible breach of civil liberties. He highlighted detentions and searches of certain immigrants after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which prompted years-long legal action against Justice Department officials.
This November, citizens in 31 states won't just vote for president. They'll also decide the fate of over 200 judicial candidates, from the local level up to their state supreme courts. The candidates who triumph will end up addressing matters with major implications for democracy and our economy. Contract disputes, tort cases, zoning regulations  all can fall under the jurisdiction of state courts.

With the stakes this high, it begs the question: are elections the best way to ensure that judges can decide cases objectively, insulated from political pressure?



Judges rightfully deserve praise for their public service and commitment to the pursuit of justice. But lawmakers put judges in a real bind when they enact laws that call for judicial elections. Under these circumstances, it only makes sense that judges are motivated to raise contributions and seek the approval of voters. While such steps appear innocuous, they can lead to campaigns and interest groups engaging in mudslinging, and occasionally result in a judge who weighs decisions on a political balance. This scenario may sound all too familiar, as some judicial contests start to mirror the bickering and distortions that characterize many races for legislative and executive offices.



Along with its negative effects on judicial fairness, electing judges can also weaken an area's economy. Globalization and technological progress now allow capital to cross borders with unprecedented ease. The slightest red flag can encourage investors to take their business elsewhere. In one survey, seven out of 10 companies reported that a state's litigation climate is likely to impact important business decisions, such as where to locate. And among the eight states that received a top ranking for their business climates, just one held judicial contests. Robust market economies clearly depend on stable, even-handed legal environments.



To safeguard neutrality on the bench, states should move from electing to appointing judges  specifically, through nonpartisan commissions that select judges based on merit. These commissions, which are already in place in two-thirds of states, recruit and recommend eligible nominees for judicial appointments. Dispersing power to appoint members of the commission across a variety of groups  the Governor, legislators from both parties  strengthens the commission's independence.



Appointment-based systems better serve their purpose when complemented by evaluation commissions. In 17 states, such commissions conduct thorough examinations of judges' performance during their terms. Criteria typically include understanding of relevant law, administrative prowess, and judicial temperament. As one study reports, "public confidence in judicial candidates and the judiciary as a whole is bolstered when voters receive such information through [judicial performance evaluation] programs." States can look to Arizona, whose Commission on Judicial Performance Review conducts routine assessments and even develops evaluation reports that the public can access, as a model.



But appointment and evaluation commissions can only do so much. The equation must also include recruiting and retaining the nation's top judicial minds. Sitting and aspiring judges may turn to other jobs in the legal profession if states do not compensate them adequately. In Massachusetts, for example, trial court judges actually receive a smaller salary than what is paid to first-year associates at over 30 of the state's law firms. In nearly half the states, compensation recommendations originate in the legislature, where budget battles can lead to inadequate investment in critical areas. A more objective assessment of salary levels is likely to come from a committee that is independent of the legislature.



As arbiters of our nation's laws, judges play an indispensable and honorable role. But the hype and misrepresentations that come with elections risk distorting their judgement on critical issues bearing on our democracy and economy. States should set fair salaries, establish nonpartisan commissions for appointing judges, and periodically evaluate their performance. Doing so would be a major step in ensuring that justice is applied consistently for citizens and businesses alike.
LARAMIE, Wyo.  University of Wyoming President Laurie Nichols said she will declare a financial crisis that will allow for the evaluation and possible elimination of academic and nonacademic programs at the state's only public four-year university.

The university has to cut more than $40 million from its budget over the next two years to compensate for reduced state aid because of a drop in tax revenue from the downturn in Wyoming's energy extraction industry.

Nichols said declaring a financial crisis allows her to appoint a committee that will review all programs at the university this summer.

"It kind of opens the door to allow you to really look at elimination of academic programs," she said.

But she stressed that the university will not do anything that will hurt enrollment or the quality of education students receive.

The UW Board of Trustees would have to approve any program elimination.

The trustees unanimously approved a resolution Wednesday supporting Nichols' plans to immediately save about $26 million, beginning July 1, and to review additional cuts in the future.

Nichols said the immediate savings will come from a number of actions, including eliminating 70 faculty and staff positions that are currently vacant, asking faculty to spend more time teaching, eliminating overtime and offering an incentive for early retirement.

It is hoped that at least 50 employees will accept early retirement.

Some positions will be reallocated to where they are needed most, she said.

"The overall goal is downsizing," Nichols said. "We are not going to be able to replace every position."

She is also considering a four-day furlough during the December break in classes, but Nichols said she wants to avoid that step if possible.

Nichols said the idea behind faculty doing more teaching is to save money by not hiring part-time faculty.

Robert Sprague, associate professor of legal studies in business and a member of the UW Faculty Senate, said most faculty now spend about 50 percent of their time in the classroom and 50 percent on research, which includes producing books, articles, inventions, artwork and finding new discoveries.

Increasing the teaching load will result in less research, Sprague said.

"If a majority of faculty who also perform research are going to have to teach an additional course load, we will have to lower either the quantity or the quality of the research that is generated by that faculty," he said.

Sprague also noted many departments are already short of faculty and some programs need part-time faculty to handle student demand.

The Legislature trimmed spending by about 1.5 percent during its budget session earlier this year. That resulted in about $3 million a year less for the university.

But the state's revenue picture has worsened since lawmakers left Cheyenne, and Gov. Matt Mead says the state will have to cut about an additional 8 percent from the state's $3 billion two-year budget. Mead has already told the UW trustees that the university will see its state support reduced by about another $35 million.

Mead is scheduled to meet with the Legislature's Joint Appropriations Committee next Tuesday to detail proposed cuts in other state agencies.

For the university, the cut in state funding is compounded by a need to find about $13 million over a two-year period to cover costs related to a new financial and reporting system, increased utility expenses and other needs that the Legislature said it could not fund. That means reallocating money it had planned for other things.

Wyoming derives most of its tax revenue from the extraction of coal, oil, natural gas and other minerals. However, low prices, growing wind and natural gas competition and new federal regulations have taken a toll on the industry. Several major coal companies with mines in Wyoming have filed for bankruptcy and hundreds of mine workers have been laid off in recent weeks. Thousands of other jobs directly and indirectly linked to the energy industry also have been lost over the last year.
You never know what kind of creatures youll encounter in the wilds of North Dakota. Maybe youll come across horses, deer, rhinos, crocodiles or sea monsters. Some will just take a little harder look than others.

Deep within the rocks across the state remain the vestiges of long ago beasts. Fossils, whether complete or pieces of a whole, can be found in many places across the state.

You dont have to be a paleontologist to help unearth evidence of the states prehistoric creatures. The North Dakota Geological Survey will hold four public digs this summer where people can search for fossils.

All of the fossils found in the digs will become part of the state fossil collection, said Becky Barnes, a paleontologist with the North Dakota Geological Survey. Once cleaned up, they will be showcased museums to educate people about the states prehistoric origins.

Weve got exhibits all over the state, Barnes said. These are on public land, so theyre entrusted to everyone.

Space is limited on all of the digs, though there are still openings on each of the four sites. Barnes said each site involves different experiences for paleontology enthusiasts of all levels.

The first dig event, June 27 to July 1, will be at sites in the Dickinson area. Groups will leave Bismarck daily and drive to sites where they will concentrate efforts on a 30- to 35-million-year-old site that could contain fossils of saber-toothed cats, rhinos, tortoises, tiny deer and horses. If the weather doesnt cooperate, the group will work in the paleontology laboratory in Bismarck. Barnes said that would involve learning to use tools and clean up existing fossils.

The next two digs are near Medora. From July 12-14, groups will leave from Medora to work in the Whiskey Creek area. The digs will focus on the 60- to 65-million-year-old Bullion Creek Formation, in which crocodiles are the most numerous fossils located. From July 15-17, groups will leave Medora to dig in the 55- to 60-million-year-old Sentinel Butte Formation, where crocodiles, giant salamanders, fish, champsosaurs, clams, snails and other swamp denizens might be located.

The final public dig of the summer will be in Pembina Gorge. Trips will originate from Frost Fire Ski Area and digs will focus on the 80-million-year-old Pierre Formation, which features some of the oldest rocks in North Dakota. Fossils found there include mosasaurs, giant squid, sea turtles, aquatic birds, fish, snails and clams.

Barnes said the Medora dig and the Pembina Gorge dig are geared toward people who have never been to a dig before. Those are quarry sites, and the digs are low-key and have shade and portable bathrooms. Plus, those sites are full of fossils waiting to be found, she said.

You will find fossils, she said.

The Pembina Gorge dig, in particular, is geared towards new diggers. The dig has non-refundable fees, but participants get meals, transportation and a souvenir. The other three digs require $10 fees to hold spots, which are refunded when participants show up. Participants also must bring their food. Transportation also is provided at the Medora dig, but the others require participants to make their own travel arrangements.

The Dickinson area and Whiskey Creek digs are for more experienced or hard-core diggers, Barnes said. There are no portable bathrooms or shade, and more walking will be required.

You may not find anything or you might find a treasure-trove of stuff, she said.

Participants must be at least 12, and those younger than 18 must have an adult with them. The Pembina Gorge dig features a family day in which those 10 and older can participate. Barnes said some parents get their children involved because of their own interest in fossils, while some kids have a genuine and lasting interest in paleontology.

Barnes said the public digs help the North Dakota Geological Survey in providing more hands and eyes to spot fossils.

Especially at the quarry sites, it helps a lot, she said.

For more information about digs, visit www.dmr.nd.gov/ndfossil/digs.
"Radical beliefs have been around since the beginning of mankind," said Tahir Rahman cq , an assistant professor of psychiatry at MU and the lead researcher. "What has changed is how people radicalize. If you can make friends online, then you can radicalize online. As a society, we need to confront how these beliefs are amplified."
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
After eight years in office, Parrell Grossman lost his Bismarck City Commission seat amid controversy over Renaissance Zoning and the city's use of taxpayers' dollars.

"Some decisions as a commissioner were more difficult or complicated than I imagined, and weighed heavily on me. In some instances, all the citizens did not agree with my decisions, Grossman said in an email. "However, I am grateful for having spent thousands of hours trying to do the best possible job for the citizens of Bismarck, and I want to thank my family for their support. I respect the decision of the voters who either did not agree with my contributions or actions, or simply selected another candidate. I wish the very best to the newly elected commissioners."

Grossman garnered less than 20 percent of the vote while the other incumbent, Steve Marquardt, received 28 percent, according to unofficial results.

Marquardt said he does not know for sure what factors might have led to the election results, but he thinks his own victory came because he stayed true to his message.

I think my voting record shows I listen to people, he said.

For example, he voted to let Bismarcks Renaissance Zone expire rather than apply to the state for an extension.

The people I visited with didn't want it to go forward, said Marquardt, adding he was also against the expansion of the Tax Increment Financing district.

I think the citizens sent a message, Marquardt said of the election, and he wants to see the new commission work together to address residents needs. Hopefully, (the commissioners) will see the citizens want change.

He said he would like to see better inclusion of citizens in the decision-making process as well as more transparency.

Parrell Grossman was defeated badly for sticking by Mayor Mike Seminary's anti-taxpayer policy proposals, Dustin Garylow, managing director of the North Dakota Watchdog Network, said in a statement. The local officials who voted on the side of taxpayers won re-election while those who voted against taxpayer interests were defeated.

However, Nolan Canright, who spoke openly about the Watchdog Network's concerns, was narrowly defeated by challenger Shawn Oban.

I think that there was a very well-funded, well-organized effort to actually mislead people about past decisions made by the commission that impacted the race, Seminary said.

Still, he congratulated the victors, whom he said he looks forward to working with, as well as the challenger. Nolan Canright did an incredible job for his first time running for public office," he said.

It has been an absolute pleasure and an honor to work with Commissioner Grossman, Seminary added. I know firsthand the extraordinary effort he put into serving the public.

Seminary praised Grossman for his work in managing the city budget and when it came to negotiating city departments hiring and spending.

He did it masterfully, and I will miss his skills, Seminary said.

Marquardt also said he respected Grossmans decisions and campaign, even when he didnt agree.
What you need to know ahead of mandatory CWD sampling in Missouri

outdoors
Bobcat Co. is bringing more manufacturing to Bismarck.

The company announced today that it will bring its compact excavator manufacturing to its Manufacturing Support Center at 530 S. 26th St. in Bismarck.

Laura Ness Owens, director of marketing for Bobcat, said its an interesting time in the industry. Customer demand has increased for the companys next generation line and Bobcat needs more production space to meet that demand.

The excavators are currently manufactured in Gwinner, Ness Owens said. By moving that work to Bismarck, the company will open up more space in Gwinner for manufacturing its compact loaders.

We are proud to be the market leader in compact equipment  and this move enables us to deliver our next generation of products to ensure that role long term, said Laura Ness Owens, director of marketing for Bobcat Company. Bismarck provides the resources, manufacturing space and greater capacity we need to remain successful in the growing and changing excavator market.

The company expects to hire 160 employees in Bismarck.

Citing pressures from the global recession, Bobcat Co., shuttered its Bismarck manufacturing plant in 2009, cutting 475 jobs in Bismarck and moving about 275 of those to Gwinner.

In 2012, Bobcat announced plans for its Acceleration Center and the 50 jobs that came with it. The companys compact attachment production also moved to Bismarck and what was then Menlo Worldwide Logistics, now called XPO, a partner of Bobcat, added 150 positions.

This time around, about 140 jobs will be eliminated in Gwinner and moved to Bismarck.

Ness Owens said the company expects many of those Gwinner positions to be eliminated through attrition. Employees will be able to apply for additional positions within the company and will be offered transitional assistance with the change.

The move will begin later this year and continue through 2017. Recruitment for the jobs will likely start in early 2017, Ness Owens said.

Doosan Bobcat will continue to employ about 1,460 people in Gwinner after the move.

Gwinner is our home. Weve been producing Bobcat products there for nearly 60 years, and well continue to do so with current and future generations of compact loaders, said Ness Owens. Weve made significant investments in Gwinner in recent years  and will continue to do so as necessary. Todays announcement reaffirms our commitment to continue as the market leader, while also remaining strong in North Dakota.

Including the staff of XPO, Bobcat employs nearly 3,000 people across the state.

Ness Owens said XPO will continue its implement manufacturing and engine assembly work in Bismarck. It has not yet been decided whether the 160 new workers will work as XPO contractors or be employed directly by Bobcat.

To make the necessary space in Bismarck, the company is consolidating warehousing operations to an existing Bobcat facility in Otsego, Minn., starting this summer. About 40 XPO warehousing employees in Bismarck will be reassigned to new jobs within the manufacturing facility.
Officials representing charities say granting North Dakotas five American Indian tribes exclusive rights to host online gambling could effectively end charitable gambling in the state. The tribes want Gov. Doug Burgum to approve the idea under tribal-state agreements known as compacts. The current compacts expire at the end of this year and only Burgum can approve them. The tribes argue that their casinos have been hurt by the explosion of the charities Las Vegas-style pull tab machines. Burgum heard arguments from the charities and tribes on Friday. He says the terms of the compacts are still being negotiated and should be completed next month.
June 13, 2016 - Omar Tellez (L) and Troy McPhail, employees with Balton Sign Co., remove the letter "Y" from the former Peabody Place building Monday. The 15-year-old, 328,000-square-foot space will become home to the new ServiceMaster headquarters. (Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)

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By Kevin McKenzie of The Commercial Appeal

The EDGE board today approved its part of a package of tax breaks and grants to support ServiceMaster Global Holdings Inc.s headquarters move to Downtown from East Memphis.

With little discussion, the Economic Development Growth Engine of Memphis and Shelby County board agreed to a 15-year PILOT that will save ServiceMaster about $844,000 in city and county personal property taxes on office furniture, equipment and the like.

EDGE also approved a $2.3 million grant to aid the public corporation's move of 965 employees and 235 contractors, for a total of 1,200 workers, to a new headquarters and IT innovation center at the former Peabody Place mall.

Wednesday's actions brought the total public incentives amassed to support the move Downtown to $24.2 million.

Among the 965 employees, annual base pay ranges from more than $58,000 to more than $495,000, according to the company.

The Tennessee State Funding Board last week approved a $5.5 million FastTrack economic development grant for the project. The Center City Revenue Finance Corp. on Tuesday approved a tax break that will save Peabody Place owners, Belz Enterprises, about $7 million in city and county real estate taxes over 20 years. And the Center City Development Corp. on Wednesday apprroved a $1 million grant to ServiceMaster for tenant improvements

Memphis Downtown Parking Authority also plans to make use of a public garage at 250 Peabody Place available for free parking for ServiceMaster workers. The parking authority values the parking privilege at $7.6 million.

ServiceMaster expects to move Downtown from near Interstate 240 and Poplar by early 2018. The first 200 or so could be working at an innovation center in the former Tower Records space inside the mall by early 2017, ServiceMaster officials said.

ServiceMaster had looked at locations elsewhere in Greater Memphis and other states before announcing the move to Peabody Place June 3.

In other decisions today, the board:

-- A pproved a 12-year PILOT saving Memphis-based TAG Truck Enterprises LLC to develop a $28 million truck center dealership and mechanic training institute on the former site of the Mall of Memphis.

-- Approved a 7-year, $1.1 million PILOT for expansion of Turner Holdings LLC dairy on Madison in the Overton Square area, adding 25 new jobs to a workforce of 134 with an $8 million project.

George Cates, retired founder of the real estate investment trust, Mid-America Apartment Communities, told the board that the property has better uses, such as a hotel. Board chairman Al Bright said he is for the project, but voted against approval because he believed neighborhood associations should have a chance to weigh in.
SHARE associated press This combination of 2016 photos shows, top row from left, Dana Craig, 15, of River Falls, Wis.; Kimberly Jung, 29, of Chicago and Rodney Kimball, 74, of West Bethel, Maine; middle row from left, Allene Swanson, 22, of Chicago; Craig House, 32, of St. Louis and Mike Poling of Delphos, Ohio; bottom row from left, Amal Kassir, 20, of Colorado; John Moore, 74, of New Orleans and Russ Madson, 45, of Birmingham, Ala. The Associated Press interviewed a wide range of Americans to get a sense of what they think about the nation's greatness in the twilight of President Barrack Obama's eight years in office. (AP Photo) In this Tuesday, May 31, 2016 photo, high school student Dana Craig, 15, stands at her locker in River Falls, Wis. Craig says America is a great place built on the idea that everyone should get an equal opportunity, a chance. "Throughout history (I am) not sure we did best job in keeping up with these principles and reaching those goals in the way that we want to, but I think what defines our greatness is our ability to continue working toward these goals even if we are not necessarily perfect in them," said Craig, 15, of River Falls, Wis. (AP Photo/Robin McDowell) In this April 19, 2016 photo, Syrian-American poet Amal Kassir recites her work during a gathering where immigrants from hostile environments spoke about their lives, at the YWCA in Boulder, Colo. Kassir, a 20-year-old college student, was born in Denver to a father from Syria and a mother from America. A poet who also works in her family's Middle Eastern restaurant, Kassir describes her own life as being intertwined with that of the United States. Is America great? Yes, she says. And it's also her best chance. "No doubt whatever greatness I'm capable of comes from being in this place." (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) ADVANCE FOR USE THURSDAY, JUNE 9, 2016 AND THEREAFTER -In this Tuesday, April 12, 2016 photo, musician "Deacon" John Moore holds his guitar in New Orleans. At 74, he remembers a time when America was headed in the right direction, when everything seemed to be coming together. It was in the 1960s, when black people like himself were seeing an end to racial segregation; when women were gaining equality; when politicians were taking a stand to end poverty despite the turmoil of protests over the Vietnam War. "Those were the best years," said Moore. "And then they were destroyed right before my very eyes when they assassinated all of our leaders. Robert Kennedy. John Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Malcom X. All of our leaders. And, you know, that was the end of hope. We had no more hope." (AP Photo/Jay Reeves) Related Coverage Minorities are underrepresented in the Tennessee legislature

Tennessee's congressional delegation all white

By Jay Reeves and Robin Mcdowell, Associated Press

Americans agree on this much: They are disgusted with politics.

Yet Americans say they still believe in America, the experiment in democracy that the founders described as a place where the government should protect the rights of ordinary people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There's something at the core of America they long for, even if it's hard to define and seems distant in 2016.

Donald Trump proclaims he will "make America great again." Hillary Clinton counters that America "has never stopped being great." But what does that even mean?

The Associated Press interviewed a wide range of Americans to get a sense of what they think about the nation's greatness in the twilight of President Barrack Obama's eight years in office. The responses were as different as Americans can be, yet a theme emerged: Compared to other nations, the United States is at least good, probably even great. But there's a lot of work to be done.

"Yes, America is great. It could be a lot better if the politicians weren't fighting each other all the time ...," said Rodney Kimball, a 74-year-old stove dealer in West Bethel, Maine. "The government needs to start doing what's right for the people."

America is divided, and the current dearth of confidence in the nation's politics and government is striking. Recent polling by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows just 13 percent of Americans are proud of the 2016 election, and 55 percent feel helpless. Only 10 percent have a great deal of confidence in the overall political system.

Although their America is still a land of shining seas, spacious skies and majestic mountains, many express a deep sense of disenchantment and uncertainty in their own lives.

"I think that America as an idea is one of the most beautiful ideas that the world has ever known. I think that American opportunity and ingenuity has built some of the most incredible technologies and innovations today," said Allene Swanson, 22, of Chicago. "And still, when I look around, I see a country that seems like it's crumbling. I see people who are hungry and broke and who are struggling a lot."

For people like 32-year-old Craig House, real success has always seemed out of reach. He lives in inner city St. Louis with his grandmother in a sea of burned-out buildings and abandoned schools, not far from a hip, trendy part of town.

"America has always been great, just not for me and my people. For us it's been the worst ever," said House. "People come from all over the world, Arabs own this, that. Black man don't own nothing."

Known as "Deacon" in his native New Orleans, 74-year-old guitarist John Moore fondly recalls the 1960s, when black people like him were seeing an end to racial segregation; when women were gaining equality; when politicians were taking a stand to end poverty despite the turmoil of protests over the Vietnam War.

"Those were the best years," said Moore, tears welling in his eyes in the living room-turned-recording studio of his shotgun house. "And then they were destroyed right before my very eyes when they assassinated all of our leaders. Robert Kennedy. John Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Malcom X. All of our leaders. And, you know, that was the end of hope. We had no more hope."

Hope returned, at least for some, in 2008 when the election of Barack Hussein Obama as president seemed to prove anyone really could accomplish anything in America.

Yet the years that followed have seemed more unsettling than uplifting to many. Today, some people want more from their government. Others just want it to go away as much as possible.

"I expect less government, less regulation," said Russ Madson, 45, a steel industry worker looking for better opportunities in Birmingham, Alabama. "Our country was built by people like the Rockefellers, Edison, Henry Ford  pioneers. And today they couldn't do what they did because of regulation."

But others expect more of government. Agriculture consultant and farmer Mike Poling of Delphos, Ohio, expects good governance and leadership "and nothing less."

"That's what got us to this point and that's what made America great," said Poling, 58. "What made America great is its people. That's what built the country. Our forefathers had the foresight to draft the Constitution, the Bill of Rights that has laid the groundwork for (the) nation carrying on for 200 years and continues to guide us."

Yet American greatness isn't just about words scrawled on yellowed paper and kept in a vault at the National Archives. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, 29-year-old Kimberly Jung sees it as something deeper, a challenge to every citizen.

"I believe greatness is a responsibility," said Jung, of Chicago. "It's a dual state of mind in which you know your power or you know what resources you have but also your weaknesses. And you harness that set of strengths and weaknesses to work with a group and form a team and do great things."

That striving for the common good is somehow AWOL in America right now, people say.

"If there was one thing I could change about this country it would be to sit here and get us focused back on the country itself and not on our own self-interest," said Poling, the Ohio farmer.

Whether they opt for Trump, Clinton or someone else in November, Americans say the state of the union isn't good enough. Amal Kassir, a 20-year-old college student from Denver, sees her own future caught up with the chance the country has right now to make itself into something better.

"No doubt whatever greatness I'm capable of comes from being in this place," she said.



Associated Press writer Mike Householder in Delphos, Ohio; video journalists Peter Banda in Denver and Teresa Crawford in Chicago; and photographer Bob Bukaty in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.
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By Linda A. Moore of The Commercial Appeal

A Shelby County Commission committee approved a county operations budget Wednesday that awards an additional $28.2 million to education, only to reopen the budget and send it to the full commission without recommendation.

After hours of debate, the budget and finance committee voted to approve the budget with an amendment that would give Shelby County Schools a $22 million portion of the education funding.

SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson applauded the committee for its efforts, though the district's award was less than SCS had requested from the county.

"The county commission worked extremely hard across party lines to do something extraordinary for the school system," Hopson said.

However, the committee reopened the resolution after realizing it had been approved with only the amendment for education, but without addressing $7 million in requests from the other elected officials or the commission's own $64,590 budget increase request.

Commissioner Heidi Shafer said they had "jumped the gun" and proposed that the budget go to the full commission without recommendation.

Commissioner Eddie Jones agreed, noting the amendment for education funding would still stand.

"It doesn't undo what we've already done," Jones said.

The committee stitched together the funds from sources including $8.7 million from property taxes already allocated for education and $16 million from the wheel tax that had previously gone toward debt.

County Chief Administrative Officer Harvey Kennedy also said that the school system had estimated its portion of sales tax revenues at $3 million, but the administration says that number should be $5 million.

There was extensive debate on where to find an additional $7 million for education, with Shafer proposing that the money come from the excess revenues from last fiscal year, which were stashed in the county fund balance.

"I would way rather that money go to schools or the sheriff, our main things, than just sit there," Shafer said.

County administration was critical of that idea, warning that it was never good to use fund balance to for recurring expenses.

"This is somewhat reminiscent of a person in household running up a credit card and taking out a second mortgage on the house," said county Mayor Mark Luttrell.

Commissioner Walter Bailey called the $7 million negligible, money that could be found with a 6-cent property tax increase. With the average home in the county valued at about $70,000, it would cost property owners about $10.50 a year, he said.

Both the schools and the county agreed to split the difference with the school system using $3.5 million from its $59 million fund balance. Kennedy asked that the county be allowed to find $3.5 million somewhere outside of its fund balance.

Bailey did not support the budget, which he said did not address pressing urban needs to reduce crime, poverty and encourage jobs.

The committee also approved on the second of three readings an ordinance that keeps the property tax rate at $4.37 per $100 of assessed value.

The budget will come before the full county commission for final approval Monday.
SHARE At the British biotech company Oxitec, scientists study the pupae of genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, a vector for transmitting the Zika virus. Andre Penner Associated Press

A second case of the Zika virus has been found in Shelby County, local health officials said Wednesday.

Health Department officials provided little information on the patient, saying simply that the victim is "an individual who traveled to one of the affected areas and is currently symptomatic."

"At this time, Zika cases in Shelby County are the result of travelers returning from countries where Zika is prevalent. As the mosquito that can carry Zika becomes more prevalent in Shelby County this summer, it will be essential for Shelby County citizens to take the appropriate precautions to reduce their risk of mosquito bites and possible transmission of Zika," Health Department officials said in a statement.

For most people, the Zika virus causes only mild symptoms such as fever, rashes, joint pain and conjunctivitis. But the virus, which can spread from a pregnant woman to her fetus, has been linked to a serious birth defect called microcephaly, distinguished by small heads. Other problems found among babies infected before birth include absent or poorly developed brain structures, defects of the eye, hearing deficits, and impaired growth.

The disease, for which there is no vaccine, has been spreading rapidly across parts of the Americas
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By Clay Bailey of The Commercial Appeal

This is a bit of an emptying-of-the-notebook version of Outside the Loop. Several different items lingering this week from candidate forums to Kroger packing up your groceries for pick up.

Additionally, reporter Tom Charlier has navigated crossing Germantown Parkway on the new section of the Shelby Farms Greenline. You will have to see the video to know whether he made it safely or not.

Who knows? There could be some other surprising items in here.

GERMANTOWN

PICK UP PLEASE: Kroger is rolling out its new approach to grocery shopping in Germantown today. Reporter Jane Roberts outlined the process for the grocers ClickList endeavor online Wednesday. Basically, you let the store employee pull the items on your grocery list, pack em up, then deliver them to your car when you pull in.

All for the charge of $4.95. And thats after your first three times are free.

Some of your list is loaded onto your phone based on the items you regularly buy.

Which they know, of course, because of that KrogerPlus card you have scanned for deals every time you check out.

What? You thought that was just so you could get a 10-cent discount on a gallon of gas?

Nope, they are keeping up with a lot of your buying habits, choices and whether you like Cheez-its or Wheat Thins.

I, for one, am not big on shopping, but when I go, I also look for the best buy. Should I get the 16-ounce slab of cheese for $4.99 or am I better off grabbing the two smaller ones at 8 ounces for $1.75 apiece? Is it worth an extra quarter for the name brand of salsa versus going generic?

Im not sure the employee is going to study those deals for me.

Anyway, monitoring the concept will be interesting, such as whether there are complaints because a customer got the wrong order or they wanted the Kroger brand or name brand of Oaty Os.

If you get the $8.99 pick em six-pack of beer, do they card the employee filling the order or the customer actually buying the beer?

I know Kroger discourages tipping, but shouldnt there be a little something for the effort, you know?

And, if they could expand the service to delivery of that pick em six-pack, there are probably some who will pay above the $4.95 to avoid driving.

EIGHTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

MAYBE NEXT TIME: The campaign for the Eighth District Congressional seat made a stop at Agricenter earlier this week, featuring all of the Shelby County candidates on the Republican side of the Aug. 4 ballot.

Just the Shelby County candidates. It seems organizers realized a bit too late that a 13-candidate event was a tad overwhelming. So, they limited the invitees to the local hopefuls.

That didnt exactly sit well with Jackson, Tennessee businessman and political consultant Brad Greer, who said he was floored he was excluded. At the same time, Greer noted other forums across the district have limited participants to those who have raised the most money.

Look, from presidential campaigns to last years run for Memphis mayor, theres a history of limiting forum participants. Whether based on money raised, rankings in polls or other factors. Not saying, limiting an event to Shelby County is a valid carving out of candidates. Just noting there are an array of reasons.

Weve learned a few things, said Sam Goff of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Memphis, sponsors of the forum.

BARTLETT

A LOCAL VOICE: There are plenty of times, when stories grab for a lot of voices, that some are left on the editing room floor.

That was the case in a story on Sen. Bob Corker put together from publications across the state. Nobodys fault. Just one of those editing things that accompany trying to bring a story to a manageable length.

Ah, but one of the benefits of a column is resurrecting those lost sections. And, since one of them was Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald. And since he is from the suburb and since I sorta cover Bartlett when Im not directing overall coverage, we now present the words of Mayor McDonald.

Before Corker met with suburban mayors for breakfast earlier this year, McDonald noted the senator hasnt made it to the suburbs much. I made that comment to his staff that he needs to come here more often, the Bartlett mayor said.

McDonald characterized his relationship with Corker as pretty good, and the senator seems more comfortable in his role recently. Corker indicated to McDonald that he feels for the first time since he was Chattanooga mayor that he is making a difference.

The Bartlett mayor said in most cases local government hope the federal government doesnt take any action that negatively impact cities. There are situations like Sen. Lamar Alexander adjusting the No Child Left Behind legislation, but otherwise, there seems to be little direct impact.

What do you really see from senators?, McDonald said, later adding: As the average citizen, we dont typically notice stuff they are doing nationally.

SHORT TRIPS

GERMANTOWN EXIT: The suburb wraps up its review of streetscape plans for Old Germantown tonight. Roberts explained the process city officials are crafting with input from citizens.

BARTLETT EXIT: The Bartlett Board of Mayor and Aldermen holds its public hearing on the property tax rate and budget at 7 tonight. Since the suburb is maintaining the $1.62 property tax rate and the level of services, not much drama is anticipated from the citizenry.

NEW GREENLINE: Reporter Tom Charlier will file his report on this mornings ribbon-cutting of the new stretch into Old Cordova. But one aspect ofhis coverage is a two-minute video of Charlier crossing The Great Germantown Parkway Divide.

Spoiler-alert ... He doesnt go Splat from passing traffic.
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Exactly how the Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board should operate still is in flux.

Memphis City Council member Worth Morgan said Tuesday he will seek a declaratory court judgment on whether the council can use its subpoena power on behalf of CLERB, which reviews police misconduct cases.

Without the ability to call witnesses, CLERB's effectiveness will be limited. Giving the board independent subpoena power has been controversial. Letting the board use the council's subpoena power seems like a good compromise. We hope a judge agrees.

After much discussion, some of it heated, and several delayed votes, the council late last year voted to revive the civilian review board, which had not met for several years.

The approval allowed Memphis to rejoin the roster of cities with active civilian review boards, a number that has grown as public attention has focused on police shootings of young, unarmed men here and across the nation.

Like Memphis, most of the civilian boards also can hear internal affairs cases, where citizens complain about police misconduct. But it is a justifiable concern about the effectiveness of these kinds of boards if they cannot subpoena witnesses who could add more clarity to the facts the board reviews.

That kind of power, however, makes some law enforcement officials skittish about the boards' hearings becoming de facto trials or that a board member could misuse the subpoena power to push a specific anti-police agenda.

We think, though, that using the council subpoena power should allay those concerns. Morgan plans to amend the ordinance that revived CLERB to make the council's liaison to the board  himself, this year  a nonvoting member, which should mitigate any chances of misusing the power.

Morgan also plans to remove language that may require a closed-meeting deliberation on cases in contradiction to the state's open meetings law.

Civilian law enforcement review boards should not be viewed as anti-police. They are about bringing accountability and transparency to what is probably the most important service a city provides its citizens  public safety.

That accountability and transparency should not only apply to law enforcement, but also to the review board. Its hearings must be open to the public, which will allow the board's members to be held accountable. When that happens, law enforcement and citizens both win.

Yes, some complaints will be upheld, but we think the board likely will find many complaints unsubstantiated. How the Police Department responds to the complaints the board upholds will be crucial to the credibility of the process.

The important thing now is for Morgan to get a favorable ruling from a judge on the subpoena issue and for the council to approve amendments to the ordinance governing CLERB that will make sure there is no question that the board's hearings should be open to the public.
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D.M. Edelmuth

Memphis

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland started off by dismissing a number of staff members, which was going to save about $1 million. Oops, nope, he gave raises to new staff members.

Now we are paying a search firm thousands of dollars to find a new police chief for the city, and most of the 21 applicants we hear are mediocre at best (Few candidates for police chief job, June 15 article). Why not make the interim police chief the police chief with decent pay and benefits, as he seems to be doing OK so far?

Sounds like we have another spender, and all his talk about de-annexing has gone under the carpet. Obviously he needs the money.
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By Catherine Rampell

America's economy gets a bad rap these days, thanks in no small part to Republican politicians' constant smears and insults.

"This is the worst recovery after a deep recession since World War II," declared Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Fox Business Network last week. He's used similar language on CNBC, PBS, Fox News and other outlets in recent days, as have other conservative commentators.

This data point, Republicans claim, is an indictment of the Obama administration. It's also supposed to persuade voters to hold their noses and rally around the GOP's bigoted new standard-bearer and the alternative economic vision he supposedly represents.

Except this assessment of our economy is completely wrong. Or at the very least, highly misleading.

In fact, if you go by the historical record, we may have exceeded expectations for where we should be this many years after a severe financial crisis. And relative to most other countries that weathered a crisis when we did, we are doing spectacularly well.

It's true that the Great Recession has been followed by a slow and shallow recovery. Rather than bouncing back with annual growth rates in the 3 or 4 percent range, as we might have hoped, we've been trudging along at about 1.5 to 2.5 percent. Hiring has lately disappointed, too.

This record seems pretty damning. Except, in the grand scheme of things, it's not.

See, it's not really fair to compare today's recovery with any other post-World War II recovery, because this is the first time since World War II that we've had to recuperate from a systemic financial crisis. (The last systemic financial crisis in the United States led to the Great Depression, which was before World War II.)

And financial crises are uniquely traumatic events for economies, according to the work of Harvard researchers Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.

Recoveries following systemic financial crises, Rogoff told me in an email, are always "far slower and more protracted" than those following normal recessions.

How slow and protracted? Well, in a recent paper, the authors examined the aftermath of 100 financial crises spanning the past 150 years. They found that, on average, it takes a country more than eight years to return to its pre-crisis level of per capita income.

In the United States, following the 2007-2008 financial crisis, we achieved that milestone in "only" seven years, according to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook.

We beat not just the (admittedly dismal) historical average, but the records of most of our crisis-stricken contemporaries, too.

The United States was one of 12 countries that suffered a systemic financial crisis in 2007-2008. Of that dozen, only three others have since recovered all the territory they lost in the crisis: Germany, Ireland and Britain. Why did the United States do so much better than most of its peers? Partly better policy, partly luck.

Our central bank, the Federal Reserve, opted to loosen monetary policy and undertake controversial, unconventional measures early on. Today many economists credit these actions with keeping the United States from tumbling into a full-blown depression. The European Central Bank, by contrast, took a long time to follow suit.

On fiscal policy, too, we made better choices. Compared with the U.S., many European countries engaged in much more draconian austerity measures, which often turned out to be counterproductive.

On the luck side of the ledger, though, we also benefited from having the world's reserve currency. This meant investors around the world continued to gobble up U.S. Treasurys at the height of the crisis, which relieved U.S. policymakers of pressure to undertake big austerity measures (as, for example, Greece had to do).

Plus, Americans were able to wipe out their unpayable private debts much more quickly than many of their counterparts abroad did, since mortgages here are more likely to be non-recourse loans. Foreclosures were painful, but once they were over, the underlying loans were discharged and families could move on.

Today, in the United States, the economy may not feel great. But compared with the roads not taken, it ain't so bad.

Contact Catherine Rampell at crampell@washpost.com
STEELE  About 35 North Dakota National Guard soldiers are putting the finishing touches on a parking lot project at the American Veterans Club Post 20 in Steele.

The Guardsmen, including an asphalt team from the 835th Engineer Detachment and concrete crew from the 897th Engineer Detachment based about 80 miles northeast in Carrington, assisted the veterans organization through a state civil-military construction project.

The program provides soldiers with realistic training while providing community nonprofits and governmental agencies needing assistance.

"This was a mutually beneficial project for our Guardsmen and the residents of Steele," said Maj. Gen. Alan S. Dohrmann, North Dakota adjutant general, who visited the units last week.

In May, the 815th and 897th soldiers spent a unit drill weekend clearing the AMVETS parking lot site by using their inventory of earth-moving equipment, including graders, skid-steers, dump trucks, light medium tactical vehicles and rollers. Earlier this month, the Guardsmen began pouring concrete for the facility's new 75- by 135-foot parking lot, as well as additional gutters and driveways.

"The project has given us the chance to do some convoy training and mobilize the equipment we need, as well as conducting planning for the project," said Sgt. 1st Class Joel O'Neil, of West Fargo. "In general, (the project) is bigger than what we usually do, and it's extremely interesting. It seems a lot more important to the soldiers because it serves a community organization.

"(The community) has been awesome and really great to us," he continued. "We have people stopping by and saying 'thanks' all the time. We even had a little kid who wanted to bring us ice cream, so he brought it for all of us. They've been really good to work with."

Spc. Ricky Galindo, of the 835th, is a heavy equipment operator who works construction with his father in Bismarck. He joined the North Dakota Army National Guard in 2013 during his senior year of high school.

"It's a full experience. We have a bigger place to grade, bigger place to put down stakes, form up (concrete); it's basically skills I can use in the civilian world," Galindo said. "It's also good because we get to interact with the community. One day, we had 25 people or so gathered around watching us work."

While in Steele, which touts a population of about 800 residents, the Guardsmen have been housed at the local high school, sleeping in classrooms and using the gym locker room's shower facilities.

The Guard members' presence also has been appreciated by the residents of Steele.

"Everybody has enjoyed having them here. They've been very pleasant, they're easy to work with, and they wanted to help out people in the community in addition to the concrete work," said Lavonne Stockert, the Steele AMVETS manager.

Stockert said the little boy who brought the soldiers ice cream bars was made an honorary member of the unit.

The new parking lot came just in time to accommodate some additional traffic coming into town later this summer, Stockert said. The residents will celebrate a Kidder County All-Class Reunion later this month at the AMVETS facility, and will host a car show later in the fall.
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By Marc Thiessen

After the Islamic State began releasing videos of American citizens being beheaded, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett reportedly told President Obama that Americans were worried that they would soon bring this violence here to the United States. Obama was unfazed.

"They're not coming here to chop our heads off," the president promised.

Now a terrorist pledging allegiance to the Islamic State has murdered 49 Americans in Orlando. What inspired him? CNN reports that "analysis of Mateen's electronic devices showed searches for jihadist propaganda, including ... ISIS beheading videos."

Obama dismissed Omar Mateen as a "homegrown" terrorist who had announced his allegiance to the Islamic State "at the last minute" and declared that "there is no evidence so far that he was in fact directed by ISIL." That distinction (if it turns out to be true) is irrelevant. Last month, the Islamic State commander responsible for external attack plotting, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, gave a speech calling on supporters to carry out killings in the United States during the holy month of Ramadan.

"The smallest action you do in the heart of their land is dearer to us than the largest action by us, and more effective and more damaging to them," he said.

Mateen answered al-Adnani's call, Orlando is awash in blood, and the Islamic State claimed credit for the attack and declared Mateen "one of the soldiers of the caliphate."

He was an Islamic State terrorist. This was an Islamic State attack. And Obama's stubborn refusal to see this is part of a larger pattern of downplaying or dismissing terrorist dangers.

According to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who spent hours interviewing Obama about his foreign policy doctrine, the president "has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates" and "frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do."

That's right, our commander in chief sees the mass shooting of 49 people in Orlando as akin to a slip in the tub.

In his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama blithely dismissed the Islamic State as "fighters on the back of pickup trucks" who he said, in typical strawman fashion, "do not threaten our national existence." In a 2015 BBC interview, he said, "If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100." In other words, no big deal.

After his anti-Islamic State strategy came under withering criticism following the Brussels terror attacks in March, Obama said "my top priority is to defeat ISIL." But he has admitted elsewhere that is untrue. Obama has openly declared that climate change is a much higher priority for him than terrorism because "ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States. Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don't do something about it."

Indeed, Goldberg writes, Obama "gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda" and "his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its 'proper' perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people."

The "proper" perspective. No wonder the president keeps getting the terrorist threat wrong. No wonder, just before the Islamic State took over large swaths of Iraq, Obama said stopping them was not "something that we have to wade into" because they did not pose "a direct threat to us." No wonder, the day before the Islamic State carried out its massacre Paris, Obama boasted "we have contained them." No wonder, the day before the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre, Obama assured (cnn.com) Americans they were safe from a Paris-style attack, declaring "The American people should feel confident that, you know, we are going to be able to defend ourselves and make sure that, you know, we have a good holiday and go about our lives."

Well, 49 Americans in Orlando were busy going about their lives when an Islamic State terrorist murdered them in cold blood. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Danielle Pletka points out, "Contrary to the favored trope  we win by living our lives  the short answer is that we're not winning."

The truth is that for Obama, winning the battle against terrorism is not really his "top priority" but a distraction from his top priorities. He did not come to office to be a war president. He came to office to end George W. Bush's wars, and "turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

But, as we just saw in Orlando, the page has refused to turn. The tide of war is not receding, as Obama promised. The wave of terror is growing stronger and is now reaching our shores. And to the commander in chief, that's no more worrisome than a car accident.

Marc Thiessen, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute and former chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush, writes a weekly online column for the Washington Post.
The FBI has fallen short on assessing the privacy risks and accuracy of a huge facial recognition database used by several law enforcement agencies, a government auditor has said.

A new report, released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Wednesday, shows the FBI's use of facial recognition technology is "far greater" than previously understood, said U.S. Sen Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who requested the GAO report.

The FBI's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which allows law enforcement agencies to search a database of more than 30 million photos of 16.9 million people, raises serious privacy concerns, Franken added in a press release.

"Facial recognition technology is a new and powerful tool that holds great promise for law enforcement," he said. "But if we dont ensure its accuracy and guard against misuse, I am concerned about the risk of innocent Americans being inadvertently swept up in criminal investigations."

The FBI's use of NGI-IPS has lacked transparency because the agency has been slow to assess the privacy impact when changes are made to it, according to the GAO report.

Before NGI-IPS became fully operational in April 2015, the agency also conducted only limited accuracy tests of the service, the GAO added. The FBI "has not assessed how often errors occur," the report said.

The agency isn't conducting operational tests of the system, added Diana Maurer, a homeland security director at GAO. While the FBI has tested the system in controlled settings, "what we don't know is how accurate it is in real-world use," she said in a GAO podcast.

The FBI agreed with a handful of recommendations from the GAO but disagreed with two others. The agency and the Department of Justice don't need to re-evaluate the way they assess the privacy impacts of the system because those assessments were done and because the DOJ "continually strives to assess and refine its internal processes and procedures," the FBI said.

The FBI searches photo databases "in strict compliance with state and federal law," the agency added.

Concerns about the accuracy of the system are overstated, according to the FBI. NGI-IPS is not used for a positive identification of a criminal suspect, but instead "provides a gallery of likely candidates that are to be used as investigative leads."

The FBI has no authority to enforce the accuracy of photos coming from other sources, it added.

Photos in NGI-IPS come from criminal mug shots, driver's license applications and other sources.

As of December 2015, the FBI had agreements with seven states that allow them to search NGI-IPS and was working with more states to grant access.
A hacker claiming responsibility for the recent data breach of the Democractic National Committee apparently has posted the stolen files online.

The hacker, who goes by the name Guccifer 2.0, leaked the files on Wednesday following a breach of DNC computers that has been blamed on Russian hackers.

The posted files include a 231-page dossier containing opposition research on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They also include documents concerning expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clintons election strategy, items on U.S. foreign policy, and donor lists.

Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNCs network, the hacker wrote.

Guccifer 2.0 said the rest of the files have been sent to Wikileaks for posting.

The DNC could not immediately be reached for comment. Details of the breach were announced on Tuesday, but the attacks started as far back as last summer.

Two separate hacking groups with links to the Russian government were involved and are considered among the world's best, according to CrowdStrike, the security firm that the DNC hired to stop the attack. One of the groups, called Cozy Bear, is believed to have hacked networks used by the White House and the U.S. State Department last year.

However, the posting by Guccifer 2.0 implied the attack was carried out by one person. On Wednesday, the hacker mocked CrowdStrike.

Im very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly, he wrote. But in fact, it was easy, very easy.

The name Guccifer refers to a Romanian hacker named Marcel Lehel Lazar who breached Clintons personal email server in 2013. He has been extradited to the U.S., where he awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to identity theft and unauthorized access to protected computers.

This new hacker, Guccifer 2.0, is warning that more breaches could come.

Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clintons and other Democrats' mail servers. But he certainly wasnt the last, the hacker said.

CrowdStrike still stands by its findings that Russian government hackers were involved. The company is working to verify the documents' authenticity and origin and said the Guccifer 2.0 postings could be part of a disinformation campaign.
Email scammers, often pretending to be CEOs, have duped businesses into giving away at least $3.1 billion, according to new data from the FBI.

The email schemes, which trick companies into wiring funds to the hacker, continue to bedevil companies across the world, the FBI warned in a posting on Tuesday.

The amount of money they've tried to steal has grown by 1,300 percent since January 2015, it said.

In the U.S. alone, victims have lost $960 million to the schemes over approximately the past three years, FBI figures show. That figure reaches $3.1 billion when global data from international law enforcement and financial groups is included. The number of victims: 22,143.

In many cases, the scammers pretend to be a business executive at the victims company or a trusted supplier. They can do this by hacking into email accounts to send off fraudulent messages. This type of cybercrime, which usually involves a request for a wire transfer, may be called CEO Fraud and The Supplier Swindle depending on the scheme used.

In other cases, the scammers will create fake email accounts that look like those of the business executive or supplier. Sometimes they pretend to be a lawyer handling confidential matters and pressure the victim into sending funds.

These scammers have requested wire transfers to 79 countries, but most go to banks located in China and Hong Kong, the FBI said.

In some cases, the scammers will follow up with a ransomware attack, the FBI added. Victims may receive an email that contains a link or an attachment with malware. If it's opened, it will threaten to hold their data hostage.

There are ways to ward off the danger. The FBI said the scammers study their targets carefully, so company employees should be careful about what professional details they post to social media. Spam should never be opened, and any wire transfers should be verified with telephone calls between the subjects.

Trend Micro Which company positions are most faked in the email schemes, according to Trend Micro

Security firm Trend Micro has also been tracking these email scams and found that 31 percent of the time, the hackers pretend to be a company CEO.

The schemes most often target a companys financial department. Forty percent of the malicious email messages were sent to a companys chief financial officer, Trend Micro said in its analysis.
Microsoft is extending blockchain technology with a new set of tools designed to make it possible to build a new ecosystem of enterprise applications on top of it.

On Wednesday, the company unveiled Project Bletchley, its term for a pair of tools to expand the potential uses of blockchains. It plans to get more utility out of the distributed ledger technology by using the new secure middleware.

The first tool, known as "Cryptlets," is a set of services that let companies bring in data from outside a blockchain system without breaking the security of that system. Cryptlets can be written in any programming language and run within a secure, trusted container.

That leads to a second set of middleware tools that companies can use to add services that aren't natively available in a blockchain. This middleware can be integrated with a blockchain using Cryptlets. Microsoft has added several native middleware services to Bletchley, including including identity and encryption services.

It's all part of a push by Microsoft to be one of the leading providers of blockchain services to companies that are trying to get started with this burgeoning technology. By providing this middleware tier, Microsoft may make the blockchain more useful for business customers.

Marley Gray, Microsoft's director of blockchain business development and strategy, who wrote a whitepaper on Project Bletchley, said in an interview that the new tools are similar to how computing evolved after the introduction of the Internet. In the same way companies added middleware to deal with the shortcomings of client-server architecture, blockchain middleware will lead to more powerful applications, he said.

If blockchain applications are the future of business, Microsoft could be on the cutting edge of a major market opportunity. Its blockchain push has already picked up steam. The company has partnered with the R3 CEV, a consortium of more than 40 banks, to use its blockchain-as-a-service offering.

The Cryptlets and middleware have the added benefit of being available for use with a variety of programming languages and cloud platforms. In the future, companies should be able to operate their own Cryptlets from an on-premises data center using Azure Stack, rather than having to rely on Microsoft's public cloud.

Companies can use Cryptlets and blockchain middleware regardless of the underlying blockchain platform they've decided to use. Businesses will have the easiest time implementing Cryptlets with blockchains like Ethereum that support Smart Contracts, but Microsoft's tools will be agnostic about what they're connecting to, Gray said.

It's still early for Project Bletchley. In a blog post, Gray said Microsoft will reveal more about its plans at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto next month.
Sanford Wallace will be jailed. The prolific spammer, who once called himself the Spam King, has been sentenced to be locked up for 2 years and pay hundreds of thousands.

Thats in addition to the almost $1 billion he owes Facebook, MySpace and others. We also knew him as Spamford. Not to mention: Dylan

In IT Blogwatch, bloggers cheer justice. Your humble blogwatcher cranks out his usual, 11-year-long schtick as an expression of deep love for you, my lovely auds.

Sanford who? Alex Johnson reminds usWallace Sentenced to 2 Years:

Sanford Wallace, the self-proclaimed "spam king" who has bedeviled Web users [for] two decades...pleaded guilty in August to electronic mail fraud and to criminal contempt of court. ... Judge Edward J. Davila also sentenced King to mental health treatment and five years of probation.



[Its] the first time Wallace has ever been convicted of a crime, but it's definitely not the first time he's been punished for spamming. ... Total damages assessed against King approach $1 billion.

How much? Cyrus Farivar clarifies, saying Wallace defied nearly $1B in default judgments:

A Las Vegas man...was sentenced Monday to 2.5 years in federal prison [and] to pay over $310,000 in restitution. ... Wallace lost civil suits from MySpace and Facebook. ... They have been unable to collect...$1 billion in outstanding default judgments.

How long? The DoJs PR flacks gleefully announce the sentenceTwo And A Half Years In Custody:

[Its] in restitution for sending millions of spam messages to Facebook users and disobeying a court order not to access Facebook. [Its] in violation of 18 U.S.C.  1037(a)(1) and (b)(2)(A); and...18 U.S.C.  401(3).



Wallace illegally obtained, stored, and exploited Facebook user account information. [He] created an automated process to sign into a Facebook users account, retrieve a list of all of the users friends, and then send a message to each of [them. ... He] will begin serving the sentence on September 7, 2016.

How many? Duncan Riley adds it up:

Sanford stood accused of hacking into Facebook accounts and sending 27 million spam messages [having] illegally obtained access to around 500,000 Facebook accounts. [He] is actually fairly lucky: he was facing up to 16 years in prison. [But] It certainly will cause spammers [to] note that if they are caught, they can be locked up.

How about all the rest of them? Imagining the scene in the courtroom, heres T__C:

"On the charges put forward, how does the defendant plead?"

"Your Honor; Guilty of a low credit rating? My sister's aunt earned $3305 a day with this one easy tip."

How amusing. Heed the thoughts of Registered Coward v2:

What I don't understand is once you've discovered your "business model" doesn't work, you don't take what you've learned and try to sell your skills in a way that does't get you in trouble? ... You still could sell your knowledge about spam and how to fight it to corporations. He...could have capitalized on that; after all [he] was one of the early persons to capitalize on spam. ... Follow Frank Abagnale's lead and sell the ability to stop others from doing what you do.



It's not that different from going from being in government to being a lobbyist...or working in a field and then using the knowledge you gain to help others compete in the same field. ... It beats prison, especially since you have your former adversaries now on your side.



And Finally

Bob Dylan: All Along The Watchtower, Explored

Its really astonishing what Dylan achieves in 12 lines, 130 words, and 2 minutes.
Samsung Electronics is acquiring U.S. cloud services company Joyent as it builds its services business around mobile devices and the Internet of Things.

The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Joyent will operate as a standalone subsidiary under the new dispensation and continue providing cloud infrastructure and software services to its customers.

Samsung said Thursday the acquisition would give the smartphone maker access to its own cloud platform to support it in the areas of mobile, IoT and cloud-based software and services.

The South Korean company said it had evaluated a number of providers of public and private cloud infrastructure but zeroed in on Joyent in San Francisco as it saw an experienced management team with deep domain expertise and a robust cloud technology validated by some of the largest Fortune 500 customers.

Joyents key executives, including CEO Scott Hammond, CTO Bryan Cantrill, and Bill Fine, vice president of product, will join Samsung and work on company-wide cloud initiatives.

With Samsung as a key customer, Joyent hopes to achieve the scale required to compete effectively in the "large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market," Hammond wrote in a blog post. Joyent competes with giants like Google, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. As a result of this acquisition, Samsung will become an anchor tenant for Joyents Triton and Manta solutions, Hammond wrote.

Triton is Joyent's container-as-a-service platform while Manta is its object storage technology. Samsung plans to use Triton and Manta as the server-side foundation for a new generation of mobile- and IoT-based application, according to Cantrill.

Samsung has been progressively expanding in the IoT market including through acquisitions. In August 2014, for example, it acquired smart home appliances company SmartThings in the U.S.
The use of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Googles YouTube by terrorist groups for propaganda, recruitment, fundraising and other activities has come into sharp focus recently.

It seemed inevitable that these companies would at some point be blamed for the misuse of these forums and become targets of lawsuits from families of victims.

A lawsuit filed in a federal court in California by the father of Nohemi Gonzalez, a victim of the Paris terror attack in November, charges that Twitter, Facebook and Google have knowingly permitted the terrorist group ISIS [Islamic State group] to use their social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits.

Gonzalez, a U.S. citizen, was killed in November when militants sprayed bullets into the bistro at which she was dining with friends. A similar suit has been brought against Twitter in January by the widow of a person killed in Jordan.

In that lawsuit as also the lawsuit filed by Nohemi's father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, the companies are likely to invoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

That provision protects online intermediaries from being held responsible for content hosted on their websites by third parties, which in this case would include the ISIS.

Congress has "broadly immunized entities like Twitter against lawsuits that seek to hold them liable for harmful or unlawful third-party content, including suits alleging that such entities failed to block, remove, or alter such content," Twitter said in its defense in the January lawsuit.

The January complaint does not allege any direct connection between Twitter and the killer Anwar Abu Zaid or the attack on the police compound in Jordan that killed Lloyd Fields, the victim in the attack, Twitter said. "Nor does it allege that Twitter itself created any of the Tweets, messages, or other content that the Complaint strains to link, even indirectly, to that attack," it added.

The Gonzalez complaint alleges that the three companies provided material support to terrorists under 18 U.S. Code 2339A and 2339B. The services and support that Defendants purposefully, knowingly or with willful blindness provided to ISIS constitute material support to the preparation and carrying out of acts of international terrorism, including the attack in which Nohemi Gonzalez was killed, according to the complaint filed Tuesday.

The complaint cites numerous instances of the misuse of the networks by the ISIS and also points to the revenue earned by the companies by placing advertisements on posts by the terrorists groups. Astonishingly, Defendants routinely profit from ISIS. Each Defendant places ads on ISIS postings and derives revenue for the ad placement, according to the filing.

Social networks for their part claim they are doing their best to weed out terrorist content though it is turning out to be like trying to whack-a-mole, with the proscribed content or new content resurfacing elsewhere.

YouTube has a strong track record of taking swift action against terrorist content, said a Google spokesman, who said the company would not comment on pending litigation. We have clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We also terminate accounts run by terrorist organizations or those that repeatedly violate our policies," he wrote in an email.

A Facebook spokeswoman wrote that there is no place for terrorists or content that promotes or supports terrorism on Facebook, and we work aggressively to remove such content as soon as we become aware of it." A Twitter spokesman said violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our rules make that clear.

In a post on combating violent extremism in February, Twitter said that as noted by many experts and other companies, there is no magic algorithm for identifying terrorist content on the internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgment calls based on very limited information and guidance.

Gonzalez is asking the court for compensatory damages to be decided in a trial. The lawsuit is likely to add to other pressures the social networking companies are already facing on the terror issue from various quarters including Congress. Senators Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, and Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, for example, proposed legislation in December that would require tech companies to report online terrorist activity to law enforcement.
An IT worker at Mossak Fonseca, the company at the heart of the "Panama Papers" leak, was arrested Wednesday in Geneva.

The arrest was made as part of the investigation into the leak, which saw 11.5 million documents from the law firm leaked to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung.

The documents detailed thousands of offshore companies set up by Mossak Fonseca on behalf of rich clients, sometimes for the purpose of tax avoidance.

The identity of the worker has not been released, and the Suddeutsche Zeitung reporter who led a year-long investigation into the documents said he did not believe the arrested worker was his source.

According to our information the #mossackfonseca IT person arrested in Geneva is not #panamapapers" source "John Doe" @ICIJorg @f_obermaier  Bastian Obermayer (@b_obermayer) June 15, 2016

Still, a lawyer for Mossak Fonseca told Swiss newspaper Le Temps that the millions of documents were accessed and downloaded via the arrested worker's computer.

No other details were released. The newspaper quoted a lawyer for the arrested worker denying all charges.

The leak caused embarrassment for many, including politicians who had used the law firm to establish overseas companies to hold assets. Among the casualties was Iceland's prime minister, who resigned in April.
Google has made no secret of its A.I. ambitions, and on Thursday it announced the next step in its bold plans to realize them: a brand-new research group in Europe focused squarely on machine learning.

Based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland, the new group will focus on three key areas of artificial intelligence: machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding, according to a blog post by Emmanuel Mogenet, head of Google Research for Europe.

It will research ways to improve machine-learning infrastructure and enable the technology for practical use, for instance. Researchers will also work closely with linguists to advance natural language understanding, Mogenet said.

Machine intelligence already powers Google products including Translate, Photo Search and Smart Reply for Inbox.

Zurich, meanwhile, is home to Googles largest engineering office outside the U.S. Researchers there developed the engine that powers Knowledge Graph as well as the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in its Allo messaging app.

Google's presence in Europe hasn't been entirely smooth, however: It's facing ongoing scrutiny over antitrust concerns and tax issues.

Its DeepMind unit -- creator of the widely celebrated AlphaGo A.I. software -- is based in London.
After months of frustrating delays for U.S. merchants that have been required to roll out payment systems that can accept new, more secure computer chip credit and debit cards, Visa on Thursday announced a series of remedies.

The steps include streamlining Visa's testing requirements and simplifying the terminal certification process. Visa said it would also add resources and technical expertise to cut deployment times in half.

Many retailers complained that it has taken several months to get a sign-off from banks, card companies and their processing partners that the new equipment they have installed is ready to be used. The certifications apply not only to the terminals in stores but also to the back-end systems used to authorize and certify payments.

Visa conceded in a statement from a spokeswoman that even though the conversion from magnetic stripe cards to chip cards has progressed since last year, "some merchants have reported delays in getting chip-enabled point-of-sale solutions through the testing process."

The solutions were mildly welcomed by retailers and analysts, but were seen as too little too late.

"These delays have been a major concern of retailers and they are the cause of significant unwarranted costs," said Mallory Duncan, general counsel of the National Retail Federation, which represents 18,000 U.S. retailers, including some major chains. "This Visa news is good to hear, but for many of our members it is too little, too late."

Duncan said it is uncertain whether other card companies and banks will embrace Visa's approach. "It's a nasty situation now, and others in the industry are saying Main Street merchants are facing their demise as a consequence of the way the [card] networks and banks have handled" the chip card conversion.

Duncan said retailers have been held hostage by a liability shift imposed by banks last October that required them to update their terminals and systems to support chip cards or the stores would bear the cost of fraudulent purchases. Since October, many retailers have seen big increases in the "chargebacks" they owe to banks for fraudulent purchases, even as they wait for certifications of equipment they have installed.

Major retailers like Walmart prepared their in-store systems for chip cards well in advance of the liability shift, but many mid-size and smaller retailers faced a backlog in testing and certifications.

The result has been that many shoppers don't know how to pay for purchases at various retailers, either relying on the older magnetic stripe card or the chip card. Further complicating matters is whether retailers require customers to use a PIN or a signature to authorize a payment.

"The biggest consumer issue today is the inconsistency of the checkout experience," said Jordan McKee, an analyst at 451 Research. "Shoppers are simply unsure if they should be swiping or dipping their card from merchant to merchant. It's a terrible experience and one that is causing widespread frustration and confusion."

Visa's moves should help in making progress toward the newer terminals, McKee said. But "Visa's announcement begs the question, why wasn't this done from the start?"

MasterCard and other card companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Visa's moves. McKee said he expects other players in the payment ecosystem will begin to "extend olive branches to merchants."

Visa included in its remedies on Thursday a change to its chargeback policies. Visa said it would block counterfeit fraud chargebacks under $25, since these smaller chargebacks "generate a great deal of work and expense for merchants."

In addition, banks will be limited to charging back 10 fraudulent transactions per customer account and will assume liability for fraudulent transactions thereafter. These changes take effect July 22 and will remain in effect until April 2018.

Duncan said the new limits on chargebacks will be small, however. "The new limits are so high as to have a marginal effect," he said. "If you say not more than 10 chargebacks can occur from one customer account, that is still a huge hit on a merchant."

In the past, even two chargebacks per account would have been the normal, accepted limit, but if a single chargeback averages $100, that could reach $1,000 per customer, Duncan noted.

Some retailers seemed surprised by Visa's announcement, and it wasn't clear what precipitated it since retailers have been complaining of certification delays since at least last September.

McKee said that recent chip card lawsuits filed by Walmart and Home Depot may have played a role in Visa's timing and "have shown the industry that retailers are not taking this chip-card transition lightly." While the lawsuits are not directly related to certification delays, they have bearing, McKee said.

Walmart sued Visa in New York State Supreme Court on May 10 for not requiring shoppers to type in a PIN when using a chip-ready debit card.

In a separate lawsuit filed June 13 in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Home Depot also raised the PIN issue against both Visa and MasterCard.

As recently as April, the EMV Migration Forum, which represents 170 banks, merchants and card companies, said the chip-card conversion process was causing consumer confusion and delays at checkouts.

Randy Vanderhoof, director of the forum, said Visa was "showing some flexibility" in addressing delays im merchant chip-card migrations. "This will provide some welcome relief to merchants struggling with the costs of migration in terms of both equipment and certification as well as dealing with chargebacks."

In a statement on Thursday, Visa called the U.S. migration to chip technology " a significant undertaking" but said 300 million chip cards are in the market with 1.2 million merchant locations accepting the cards. An average of 23,000 new merchant locations are chip-ready each week, Visa said.

There are about 12 million payment terminals in the U.S., and the EMV Migration Forum recently said up to 7 million have chip-enabled terminals in place, with only 1.2 million of those terminals certified for accepting chip cards.
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Rapes, Arbitrary Arrests And Fake Surrenders Rampant In Bastar

All India Peoples Forums Fact-Finding Team Visit To Bastar

16 June, 2016

IndiaResists

Raipur, 12 June 2016: An 8-member fact-finding team of All India Peoples Forum visited four districts of Bastar, Chhattisgarh between 8-11 June 2016. The fact-finding team found several incidents of communal violence against Christians; as well as fake encounters; rapes; fake cases and arbitrary arrests; and fake surrenders.

The AIPF team comprised former Madhya Pradesh MLA Dr Sunilam of Samajwadi Samagam, former Jharkhand MLA and CPIML Central Committee member Vinod Singh, Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of All India Progressive Womens Association, Brijendra Tiwari of AICCTU, Amlan Bhatacharya, State Secretary of PUCL West Bengal, Advocate Aradhana Bhargava of Chhindwara, Advocate Ajoy Dutta of Kolkata and Amlendu Choudhury. Bela Bhatia and Soni Sori also accompanied the team.

Communal Violence Against Christian Minorities

At several villages in Bastar district  including Karmari, Bade Thegli, Sirisguda and Belar  resolutions adopted under Section 129 (g) of Chhattisgarh Gram Panchayat Act have been wrongly invoked in violation of the spirit of the law to restrict non-Hindus from residing or building places of worship, even though the High Court has quashed such gram sabha resolutions in Karmari and Sirisguda.

In Bhadhisgaon (Tokapal Panchayat) in Bastar district, Pastor Pilaram Kawde was given a written notice by the Gram Panchayat denying permission to him to construct a place of worship on his own land. The written notice cited Sections 55 (1) and (2) Chhattisgarh Gram Panchayat Act 1993 and said that Pastor Pileman cannot construct a place of worship because People of big-big castes and religions live in this village, and every Dussehra even the Roopshila Devi Ma joins the celebrations.

Christians are being prevented from using burial grounds in several villages. In Bhadisgaon, an elderly Christian lady Saradi Bai died on 25.5.2016, but Hindu villagers provoked by the Bajrang Dal stopped Christians from burying her. Eventually, after negotiations conducted by the police, she was buried in a casket but without the cross  but the Hindu villagers warned that no future Christian burial would be allowed. Accordingly, the 200 Christians of the village gave applications to the SDM, Tehsildar, police and Sarpanch asking that burial grounds be allotted separately for Christians, since they were being prevented from using the common burial grounds.

Saradi Bais husband Sukhdev Netam passed away on 6.6.2016, and Hindu villagers prevented Christians from carrying out his last rites and burying him, threatening to kill them if they tried to bury him. Eventually after police arrived, he was buried but again, the villagers and Sarpanch warned that in future, they will call Bajrang Dal if there is any attempt by Christians in the village to use the burial grounds.

At Ara village, Bario Chowki, Jeypore thana, District Ambikapur, on last Sunday, 5 June 2016, a Bajrang Dal mob of 25 people led by Chhotu Jaiswal, Sonu Gupta, Bipin Gupta, Chhotu Gupta and others attacked the church during Sunday prayers; vandalized the church; and beat up the pastor, his wife and three others. They made a video of the thrashing and made it viral  we have a copy of this video. They dragged off the Pastor, his wife and three others to the Bario Chowki where they were kept till night. No FIR was registered against the assailtants  instead a case under Section 295 A has been registered against the Pastor who is yet to get bail.

In village Sirisguda, rations were denied to Christian believers, and Food Department authorities were beaten up along with Christians; the ambulance was not allowed to enter the village; injured Christians were not allowed to get proper treatment in the district hospital. After great efforts a case was registered but the statements of the injured are yet to be taken in Court. VHP, Bajrang Dal people prevent Christians from filling water in the village. At a meeting called by the DM, the VHP and Bajrang Dal said that Christians must do ghar wapsi, or else we will evict them from the village invoking Section 129 (g) of the Panchayat Act.

Repression and Intimidation of Villagers Resisting Violations of Forest Rights for Raoghat Mines

A villager of village Kohche, thana Antahgarh in Kanker district said that 25 hectares of land have been acquired for Raoghat Mines without informing the villagers, gram panchayat, or gram sabha. (Officially the Raoghat Mines, as well as adjoining dam and railway lines are for Bhilai Steel Plant but a consortium of private companies will be involved with the mining project). Trees have been cut, adivasis forest land that they have had for the last 50 years is being grabbed; several places of worship of adivasis are being destroyed and even the burial grounds have been taken over by the company. CRPF camps have come up densely at every kilometer in the area.

Fake Encounters

Nagalguda, thana Gadiras, Kuakonda Tehsil, District Dantewada: Four women  Rame, Pandi, Sunno and Mase  were killed here in a fake encounter at 7 am on 21.11.2015, and Badru, one former Maoist who surrendered and became a Pradhan Arakshak and had accompanied the force, raped Mase before killing her. 22 DRG jawans were decorated and promoted for this encounter, in spite of the fact that rewarding jawans for encounters is against NHRC guidelines and Supreme Court guidelines for encounters.

Arlampalli, Dornapal Tehsil, district Sukma: Here, villagers told the team that on 3 November 2015, three village boys  Dudhi Bhima ( age 23), Sodhi Muya (age 21) and Vetti Lacchu (age 19) were killed by the police. The three boys left the village in the morning o 3 November on two cycles to get a drink of the local alcoholic drink (made out of date palm fruits). After getting their drink, they were going to the Polampalli Bazaar, where Bhimas mother was waiting for them. Near the nala close to the village, one youth Vetti Lacchu got down from the cycle while the other two went ahead. Security forces were in the area for a combing operation, and caught the two boys on cycles and began beating them up. The third youth, Vetti Lacchu, seeing this, began to run away  and was shot dead by the police. The other two youth were asked to carry the body of their friend to the Polampalli thana but on the way, they too were shot dead. Two elderly people witnessed the two boys carrying their dead friend. No FIR has been registered as yet.



Palamagdu, Dornapal Tehsil, district Sukma: Police claimed that two women Maoists were killed after an hour-long gun battle on 31 January 2016. In a local newspaper, the police is quoted as saying that the two women Naxalites were wearing saris and could not run and therefore fell into a ditch and were killed. The team found that in fact, the police had killed two small girls in cold blood. The mother of Siriyam Pojje (age 14) said that her daughter along with Manjam Shanti (age 13) had gone to feed the hens and was going to have a bath in the river and return home. On the way the police shot dead both the girls. Manjam Shantis father also said that both girls lived in the village and had no connection with Maoists.

Kadenar village, Bijapur district: The police claimed that on 21.5.2016, an encounter took place with 30-35 armed Maoists, in which a husband and wife  Manoj Hapka and his wife Pandi Hapka/Pandi Tanti were killed. On reaching Kadenar village Pandi Hapkas mother and brother told the team that at 8 pm at night on 21 May, police came to the house where the family was eating dinner. They took Manoj and Pandi away, along with their clothes, other belongings and Rs 13000 that they had earned by harvesting chillies in Andhra Pradesh. We were told that Manoj and Pandi had been with Maoists for a year, but five years ago, the couple left the Maoists and came back to the village where they did farming. Pandi has had TB for the past five years and has been very ill.



Fake Cases and Arbitrary Arrests

In Padiya village, Gadiras Thana, Sukma district, on 21 May 2016, at 9 am, a force of 200-300 police came and picked up villagers working on a water body, saying they were involved in the breaking of a Essar pipeline on 19 May 2016. Police took away 11 adivasis, left two of them later, and 8 remain in jail. The night before our team reached the village, the police forced sarpanch Madkam Hadma to wear police uniform and move with the force, arresting four people. Thus the police conspired to make the sarpanch look like a police agent, making him vulnerable to attacks by Maoists.

In the same village, a small 12-year-old boy Joga had been picked up by police on 12 May. The fact finding team met Joga and learned that Jogas father and brothers had been arrested and detained illegally in the thana for seven days, where they were made to clean utensils and do other cleaning work in the thana. They were later released. The night before our team arrived in the village, Jogas father had been taken into police custody with three others. The SHO of Gadiras thana said that repeated arrests are done because Jogas sister is a Maoist Mahila Commander, whereas more than 150 villagers told the team that this is not true and the girl lives in the village. The team is apprehensive for the safety of Jogas sister  she may be killed in a fake encounter claiming she is a Maoist. The sarpanch also is in danger of being killed.

Rape of minor girl by CRPF Jawan

On 8 June 2016, a girl aged 14 years from Podum village, thana Dantewada was shutting her kirana shop when a CRPF jawan came and raped her throughout the night in the shop. She told her brother in law, who complained in the thana and was sent for medical examination last night (11 June 2016)  a process facilitated by the team and by Soni Sori. The CRPF jawan had given a name  RR Netam  and number in writing to the girl but this appears to be false since the TI says that no jawan of this name is there in the Jarum CRPF camp near Podum village.

Fake Surrenders

There have been 70 surrenders in the Chintalnar area. The team visited Chintalnar village where we were told of several staged surrenders. One small trader told us that he was called to the Polampalli thana by an SPO saying there is a warrant against him. He went there where he and 25 others were told that either they must agree to surrender or they will be booked in a case of killing Nagesh, an SPO who was killed 2 years ago. He is 55 years old and he said that the other 25 cases were also not genuine surrenders. They all were given Rs 10000 each on the spot. Several others also testified to fake surrenders but are afraid of reprisals from the Maoists. We were told that the sarpanch, Kosa, is also under threat from Maoists for having facilitated the fake surrenders.

Conditions in the Village

Two AIPF teams covered 1650 kilometres in their journey, where they encountered more than 60 police and CRPF camps. But in the 25 villages that the teams visited, the villagers were insecure and suspicious of each other. In these 4 districts, political groups and other organizations are rather inactive, suggesting that the scope for democracy has shrunk there. Most of the villages visited by the teams were without electricity, without roads, and lacking in education and health facilities. In Ketulnar, two baby girls died after drinking milk provided by the anganwadi. We found that the village had 8 mitanin who did not even have medicines to treat diarrhea and vomiting and the hospital is 10 kilometres away because of which the little girls could not be treated. Now after the death of the girls, medicines have been provided but a case of culpable homicide is yet to be registered against the milk provider.












Kashmir: Self-Rule To Self-Reliance!

By Mohammad Ashraf

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org

(Mehbooba Muftis assertion that Horticulture and Handicrafts have more potential than Tourism is a very bold statement based on reality which,if followed up honestly could make Kashmirs economy self-reliant)

Before 1947, Kashmir was self-reliant in many ways. However, over the years it has become totally dependent on outsiders in every respect. The main reason has been misplaced priorities. It is for the first time in recent years that a top politician has admitted on the floor of the house that Horticulture and Handicrafts have more potential in the State than Tourism. Till now every politician would climb a pulpit to declare that the Tourism is the backbone of Kashmirs economy. This was in spite of the fact that the Tourism does not constitute more than 7% of the GDP of the State. Kashmir has always had an agriculture based economy and in recent years, horticulture has grown up considerably. There are umpteen other areas like floriculture, fisheries, forest based products and so on which could be the mainstay of the economy. Tourism can always be an additional activity.

There are no two opinions that with the possession of extensive potential, Tourism has tremendous possibilities of development in Kashmir.However, apart from the basic requirements of potential, physical accessibility, and infrastructure prescribed under the concepts of area development and physical planning for tourism, there is the most fundamental requirement of the political stability of the area. No one wants to go to an area which is proclaimed all over the world as the most dangerous place, Asias nuclear hot spot and so on. Every second day there is news all over the world about blasts, encounters, and other incidents regarding Kashmir. The most important primary consideration for a popular tourist spot is Peace! In view of this uncertain situation, the tourist arrivals show a swing effect. These keep on rising and falling from time to time. Sometimes there is a boon and supposedly a million tourists arrive while as other times there is a complete drought with hardly any arrivals.

In view of this it is not advisable to make Tourism as the so called backbone of the economy. Such an economy can collapse with every upheaval. Tourism for the present can at best be an additional economic activity and not the main base. Once Kashmir enjoys the real and settled peace, Tourism can become one of the key activities for its economy.Till such time putting all eggs in Tourism Basket is suicidal.

Historically, Kashmir has an agriculture based economy. More than 70% people are involved in agriculture and horticulture. Handicrafts come next and the main income even from this sector is from the exports and not from retail sales to the tourists visiting the valley. According to Export Promotion Council of India, the handicraft export, especially of the carpets grew manifold during the upheaval of nineties. Carpet looms spread into the rural areas and some of the local export houses started operating from Delhi. Same was the situation with horticulture especially the export of apples from the state. Hundreds of crores worth apples and some other fruit are exported from Kashmir to rest of India. Even some factories are exporting apple juice concentrate to Germany and some other European countries.

The possibilities in Agriculture, Horticulture and some other related fields are immense. If the rulers give up the Tourism obsession, they can really work wonders. The basic requirement is the will to undertake modernization of these fields with active private sector participation from within as well as outside state. Let us take Floriculture. There are immense possibilities for cut flowers. A project had been started some years back but it has not taken off in full swing. The main hurdle had been an organization for marketing. Some time back some negotiations were held with some private agencies for cut flower marketing but these remained inconclusive. Incidentally, Bangalore in 2011 exported 3 million roses on Valentines Day that accounts for 40% of the World Flower Trade pegged at $ 100 billion! It may be worthwhile to explore these fields rather than spend crores on a 15 day so called Tulip Festival!

Similarly, Kashmir Trout has immense possibilities. One needs to take lessons from the Chilean farmers. Chile exports Salmon worth more than $ 1.3 billion. Kashmirs trout was brought from Scotland. We have both Rainbow and Brown varieties. One could have dozens of farms like the one in Kokernag established with European Union assistance. Once the production is enough, the same can be exported to most of the five star hotels in India or even abroad. The requirement is degutting machine, deep freezers and dry ice machine. Again everything will depend upon marketing for which tie ups can be arranged with outside buyers.

Fruit has no limits. Apart from Apples which have been Kashmirs specialty from ages, there are some unique fruit which the Agriculture University has introduced. These include the Kiwi Fruit which was introduced few years back. India imports Kiwi fruit from Italy and New Zealand. Again the trade involves billions of dollars. There could be a dozen Apple Juice concentrate plants exporting the same to Europe and other places including Middle East which imports the same from Europe.

In fact, Kashmir has no limit in agriculture, horticulture, and forest based products. One could easily set up a few perfumeries keeping in view the lavender which grows in the wild! There are so many other areas. Just burning walnut shells in a controlled way produces finest Carbon which is used to make Carbon Rods for Nuclear Reactors! Now that the Chief Minister has spoken about it, she needs to follow it up on the ground by personal supervision and monitoring. The immediate requirement is to restore the dignity of manual labour among the youth and make them forget the slavish mentality of government jobs at the lowest level! The way things are going, Self-rule seems a distant dream! It can wait but not Self-sufficiency! That is the need of the hour. In the alternative, Kashmiris may become virtual slaves dependent on outsiders for generations!

Mohammad Ashraf I.A.S. (Retired),Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir














Corporate Media Backing Clinton Exploits Orlando Shooting For Passive Holocaust Denial

By Robert Barsocchini

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Within hours of the mass shooting in Orlando, the corporate media backing neoconservative favorite Hillary Clinton began, almost unanimously, to exploit the opportunity to passively promote holocaust and genocide denial.

Outlets including the NY Times, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, and so on, all referred to the Orlando massacre unequivocally as the worst shooting and/or worst act of gun violence in US history. (CBS News, at the time it was accessed for this piece, was running a large "I'm With Her" ad for Hillary Clinton at the top of its page.) A useful comparison to the corporate assessment might be to imagine if a German civilian gassed a group of people to death and the German press reported it as the worst gassing in German history. After the Paris shooting, the Western press likewise reported that as was the worst shooting in recent Parisian history, despite that the Parisian police not long ago massacred some 300 peaceful marchers protesting the French dictatorship in Algeria and dumped their bodies in the river that runs through the city (more info in previous piece).

Native News Online quickly pointed out that the corporate media was almost completely whitewashing "mass killings of American Indians in its reporting" on Orlando. It gave two well-known (as far as these go) examples of worse gun-violence and mass-shootings: some 300 Native men, women, and children, were massacred at Wounded Knee, and 70 to 180 were massacred at Sand Creek.

One commenter on the Native News piece shared that she "wrote to every single news outlet yesterday from the New York Times, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and Salon to CNN, NBC, and the BBC. I have yet to receive a reply from any of them with the exception of the Oregonian, who changed its language immediately. They also informed me that the Associated Press has just begun to change its language. Im hoping the Guardian and BBC begin to do the same too."

Another commenter on the Native News piece gave a short list of some acts of gun-violence, mass-shootings, or mass killings perpetrated in US history, by US forces:

1864  300 Yana in California

1863  280 Shoshone in Idaho

1861  240 Wilakis in California

1860  250 Wiyot in California

1859  150 Yuki in California

1853  450 Tolowa in California

1852  150 Wintu in California

1851  300 Wintu in California

1850  100 Pomo in California

1840  140 Comanches in Colorado

1833  150 Kiowa in Oklahoma

1813  200 Creek in Alabama

1813  200 Creek in Alabama

1782  100 Lanape in Pennsylvania

1730  500 Fox in Illinois

1713  1000 Tuscarora in North Carolina

1712  1000 Fox in Michigan

1712  300 Tuscarora in North Carolina

1704  1000 Apalachee killed & 2000 sold into slavery in North Carolina

1676  100 Algonquian and Nipmuc in Massachusetts.

1676  100 Occaneechi in Virginia

1675  340 Narragansett in Rhode Island

1644  500 Lanape in New York

1640  129 Massapeag in New York

1637  700 Pequot in Connecticut

1623  200 Powhatan & Pamunkey in Virginia with poison wine

Professor David E. Stannard describes one such massacre, wherein US forces weakened a Delaware group of Native men, women, children, and elders through starvation, convinced them it would be in their best interest to disarm, then tied them up and exterminated them and mutilated their dead bodies. Stannard notes that such massacres by US forces "were so numerous and routine that recording them eventually becomes numbing". (American Holocaust, pp. 125/6)

A couple of corporate news outlets used somewhat more precise language to describe the Orlando massacre, editorializing (while again presenting it as fact) that it was the 'worst shooting in modern US history'.

However, this still leaves unstated the writer's opinion of what constitutes 'modern'. The wounded knee massacre took place in 1898, and the Black Wall Street massacre, for example, in which 55-400 people were murdered and a wealthy black community in Oklahoma ethnically cleansed, took place in 1921. (More examples.)

And, of course, the US has massacred millions of people, many of them with rifles and other types of guns, but also in far worse ways, outside the territory it officially claims, and continues to do so. Obama recently massacred almost a hundred people at one time with what could be viewed as an AR-15 on steroids. Is any of this part of 'modern US history'? Why or why not? The qualifications are unstated and thus subjective. The vague language from the neoliberal, government-linked corporate outlets may lead readers to believe that all of US history is included in their 'factual' statements, and that the US has never massacred more than fifty people anywhere.

In some cases, this impression will have been intentional on the part of the oligarch mouthpiece outlets, which have an interest in fostering a benevolent image of the US to help elites further capture global markets . In others, it will have been a result of conveniently self-aggrandizing ignorance on behalf of the writers and editors - an ignorance that makes an important contribution to their job security.

As some of them partially or belatedly demonstrated, all of the corporate outlets could have easily avoided any holocaust/genocide-denial by calling the shooting the worst by a single civilian on US territory in at least the last thirty years, or any number of other obvious, simple, direct phrasings, which are supposed to be integral to journalism, anyway.

But as John Ralston Saul points out, the neoliberal/neoconservative ideology relies on the 'whitewashing of memory'. That doesn't always work, though, especially on survivors of US and Western genocides, which is why, as Ralston Saul further notes, the West and its proxies are behind most of the global murders of writers, who may try to expose facts and evidence that interfere with the West's historical whitewashing.

Since the Orlando massacre, both Clinton and Trump have called for further escalation of Western aggression in the Middle East.

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter. Authors pamphlet The Agility of Tyranny: Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter.












Ahwazi Municipality Workers Jailed For Protesting Over Six Months Of Unpaid Salaries

By Rahim Hamid

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Twenty-four Ahwazi Arab municipality workers in the regional capital were arrested by Iranian regime security personnel on Monday, June 13 for participating in a peaceful sit-in demonstration in front of the local municipality building to protest against non-payment of their salaries for six months. Seventy staff members at the municipality headquarters in District 4 of the capital, Ahwaz, took part in the demonstration after months of complaints over non-payment of their wages failed to elicit any response from the management.

Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, scores of Iranian security forces carried out a raid to clear the demonstrators away from the area outside the municipality building, arresting the 24 protesters and transporting them to an unknown location, according to a report from the Iranian ILNA News Agency.

The protest followed a similar sit-in demonstration by the municipality personnel on the previous day, Sunday, June 12, during which the protesters demanded that the council members put pressure on the management to pay their long-overdue salaries. The INLA report also stated that the municipality workers are suffering from severe financial hardship as a result of the councils failure to resolve the salary payment issue, which has been worsened by the failure of senior officials to recognise their legitimate demands for their salaries.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the protesters said that municipality officials had promised to pay the outstanding wages before the holy month of Ramadan, a promise they had already broken. The worker said that despite the fact that the first week of the holy month had already passed, there had been no payment of the overdue wages, adding that he is unable to afford the most basic living costs for himself and his family or to provide foodstuffs for Ramadan, especially in light of rising costs over Ramadan.

In similar news, street vendors in the regional capital continue to be subjected to harassment and persecution by Iranian municipality agents, with one vendor, Mehdi Afravi, committing suicide on May 6 by throwing himself under a train in despair after his stall and goods  his sole source of income - were arbitrarily confiscated by regime agents.

On May 16, the agents surrounded the street vendors market in Naderi Street in Ahwaz and prevented would-be customers from entering, thus preventing the already struggling vendors from earning a living. The municipalitys actions are believed to be revenge for the vendors protests a few days beforehand against persecution and injustice over their conditions.

Even the regimes official news agencies and some political figures have acknowledged the severity of the economic crisis and injustices affecting Ahwaz and other areas of Iran.

The Tasnim News Agency, affiliated to the regimes Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), on Wednesday (June 15) quoted Iranian MP Jalal Kazemi who said, We have to acknowledge that the domestic situation, especially in the realm of livelihoods and the economy is not befitting to the Islamic Republic of Irans status in the region and the world. The economic growth rate is very low, if not negative, while unemployment among the young, particularly the educated, is like a time bomb ticking down towards zero.

Meanwhile, the MP for Al -Mohammareh, Abdullah Sameri, heavily criticized the systemic and racist expulsion of Ahwazi Arab workers from the state-owned marine company in the town of Al -Mohammareh, condemning the authorities unjustified and prejudiced policies towards Ahwazi Arabs in the region. Sameri said, While we are in the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, instead of making a positive difference to the tables of the deprived people of Al-Mohammareh, the company has decided to get rid of 40 Ahwazi workers who are the main breadwinners for their families, leaving them to suffer from this dismissal. The MP further condemned the Iranian oil minister, BijanZanganeh, for his ministrys failure to invest in any way in the region to benefit the Ahwazi Arab peoples despite the fact that the oil and gas resources in Al-Ahwaz fuel 80 percent of the Iranian economy.

These latest incidents come not long after another Iranian oil refining company in Mahshor (also known as Mahshar) arbitrarily dismissed many Ahwazi Arab personnel for unknown reasons, replacing them with incomers from mostly Persian provinces of Iran. This move was made despite calls by local authorities and MPs for the state to review its discriminatory policies and halt discrimination against the indigenous Ahwazi Arab people, who face systematic oppression under Tehrans hard-line theocratic regime.

Rahim Hamid is an Ahwazi Arab freelance journalist based in the USA












Why Global Capital Fears Brexit

By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rupert Read & Thomas Wallgren

16 June, 2016

CommonDreams.org

Trade treaties were a hot button issue during the recent US presidential primary campaigns. This represents an important victory for the people  for the grassroots  whose voice is finally being heard. While its hard to know what really lies behind Donald Trumps opposition to the trade agreements, its very significant that Bernie Sanders put Hillary Clinton on the defensive about NAFTA and led her to take a stand against the TransPacific Partnership (TPP). In rejecting these trade deals, political leaders are going against the top-down pressure from global corporations and banks. We must of course be alert to the fact that politicians pander to voters while seeking election, but once in power they only seem to hear the voice of big money. Nevertheless, the fact that awareness about the trade treaties has become so widespread is itself a huge victory. Now that these corporate-friendly deals are seeing the light of day, it is unlikely that future trade agreements will be easy, automatic victories for global capital.

In the UK, meanwhile, another fierce debate is underway: voters in Britain will soon decide whether or not to remain in the European Union. Although this issue parallels  and is in fact linked to  the debate around trade treaties, most voices in favor of Brexit seem to offer little more than narrow nationalism, xenophobia and racism. Such associations make it feel impossible for most Greens and progressive thinkers on the left to vote Leave in the upcoming UK referendum.

And that settles it in the minds of some: one has to vote Remain. Anything else feels unprogressive, reactionary, even downright dangerous.



However, there are powerful arguments against the European Economic Union. In all five Nordic countries  Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark  there has been a very powerful critique of the EU from an ecological, cultural, global solidarity and democratic perspective. A large proportion of the population in those countries realized that the impetus to link countries together was primarily based on a misguided notion of economic growth. However, these arguments didnt reach the English-speaking world, and today on both sides of the debate in Britain this misguided notion continues to prevail.

In order to make sense of misleading pro and con arguments in the media, we need to go behind the scenes to examine the issues holistically. We need to look carefully at the process of economic integration that has been going on for several generations now around the world.

At the regional, national and global level, societies and ecosystems have been transformed in order to accelerate economic growth. The emphasis has been on increasing international trade and benefits to international traders, at great cost to ecosystems, livelihoods, and democracy. It is important to understand the formation of the EU in this context, but by no means do the points we make here apply to the EU alone.

The EU is dedicated to corporate interests and economic globalization

The European Union is an extension of the Bretton Woods institutions  The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

It is widely assumed that the European Union was formed in order to prevent conflict and in order to avoid another depression. In the aftermath of the Second World War, political elites and business leaders promoted the notion that economic integration was a path to peace and harmony.

But the result was a form of economic development  based on debt, global trade and consumerism  that systematically undermined democracy and favored corporate interests while hollowing out local economies worldwide. In country after country, transnational corporations (TNCs) have been able to evade taxes by offshoring their activities, and to bargain for lower tax rates and higher subsidies by threatening to move where even less in taxes will be demanded, and more in subsidies provided.

Today, interlinked multinational banks and corporations constitute a de facto European government, determining economic activity through the European market. Their vast lobbying power has an overwhelming influence on the EU Commission and the secretive Council. In other words, corporations run Europe.

Economic integration imposes human and ecological monoculture

Europe is home to a great variety of cultures, languages and customs. The economic union is based on an economic model that is eroding this diversity, which was born of human adaptation to different climates and ecological realities. A fabric consisting of mutually enriching and different cultural traditions is being replaced by the uniform culture of consumerist individualism.

Previously, the many borders, currencies, and differing regulations made trade difficult for big business, while the diversity of languages and traditions put limits on mass marketing. None of these were obstacles to businesses operating within their own countries  in fact, the borders and cultural diversity helped protect the markets of domestic producers from the predations of mobile capital, helping to ensure their survival.

But for big corporations and financial institutions, diversity is an impediment, whereas monoculture  in all aspects of life, from seeds, fast food and clothing, to architecture  is efficient. For them, a single Europe-wide market of 500 million people was an essential step to further growth: their growth.

Meeting that goal required a single currency, harmonized regulations, the elimination of borders, and centralized management of the European economy.

The EU economy increases pollution and CO2 emissions

The global economic model promoted in the EU increases pollution and fossil fuel use in a multitude of ways.

First of all, economic policies are responsible for a concentration of jobs in ever-larger high-rise urban centers. When people move into urban areas, net resource and energy consumption tends to rise, massively increasing CO2 emissions and toxic pollution.

Secondly, the EU subsidies system not only wipes out family farms but paves the way for agribusinesses that destroy soils and ecosystems, or employ cruel factory farming methods.

Thirdly, investments in infrastructure and fossil fuel subsidies help to prop up the energy-intensive system of mass production for mass consumption. Moreover, most energy subsidies tend to support highly centralized power systems, rather than more decentralized renewable energy.

Even worse is redundant trade: in a typical year, Britain exports millions of liters of milk and thousand of tonnes of wheat and lamb, while importing nearly identical amounts. The cod caught off the coast of Scotland is shipped 5,000 miles to be turned into fillets in China, then shipped back again.

This kind of wasteful trade  which greatly overshadows the efforts of well-meaning individuals to reduce their personal carbon footprints  actually benefits no one but massive corporations. And it is not efficiency but a wide range of subsidies and ignored costs that make it all possible.

National governments stripped of political power

At the same time as governments subsidise big business, they must pay from their depleted treasuries to retrain displaced workers, to mend the unraveling social fabric, and to clean up the despoiled environments left behind by deregulated, mobile corporations.

Forced to go hat-in-hand to banks, countries can easily find themselves on a downward spiral, with interest payments consuming an increasing proportion of national output. Its no wonder that so many governments today are struggling to stay afloat, while global corporations and banks are flush with cash.

This has left nation-states increasingly powerless to deliver what people need. They have lost the power to protect their citizens from the impacts of international capital and financial speculation. As a result, many people have lost confidence in governments and democracy itself. They feel disenfranchised and angered by the escalation of inequality-driven by international market forces and rootless, profit-hungry corporations, with the full complicity of the EU.

This is a dangerous situation, ripe for exploitation by extremist forces, including those of atavism and of outright fascism.

European government is not the answer

Many idealists see the EU as a political bloc that has raised environmental and human rights standards continentally and globally, and acted as a buffer to the United States. There is much truth in this. And to greatly strengthen pan-European collaboration with the aim of solving our global ecological and human rights problems is clearly highly desirable.

However, this type of collaboration does not need to  ought not to be allowed to  erode the rights of smaller nation states to run their own affairs under clearly negotiated agreements of environmental protection. We hold that the relatively high standards in the EU have been a consequence of the integrity of the democracies in many of the constituent countries, not a consequence of creating a single market that benefits big business.

We would also argue that to assess the overall contribution by the EU to global environment and human rights affairs we must not look exclusively at the relatively benign EU policies in these areas themselves but also at the consequences for ecological justice of EU policies in trade and military policy.

In fact, the main impetus behind the European Economic Union was the desire of big business to compete with the US. And to a great extent, what we have today is a nascent United States of Europe, competing with the US about market shares but also working closely together with the US in preserving the hegemony of the global North over the global South.

European democracy? If only 

Meanwhile, within the EU, the public has very little power and ability to affect decisions. There is no common public sphere where European citizens can get together to muster democratic control of the European economy and the administrative power concentrated in Brussels.

The European Parliament is weak, and, more importantly, elections to it work mostly on a national-level basis. There are no real European political parties and movements. Thus the situation is even worse than it is at the national level: for at least at the national level there is a public, a citizenry, a demos, a press, a political debate.

It might appear that the solution is to remove power from national governments and give it to a democratically-controlled European government. There is something completely understandable about this impulse. After all, there is a real need for international co-operation around the political and ecological crises gripping our planet.

But scaling up government means increasing the distance between civic society and their representatives. It would be a step backward to create a federal superstate of Europe. Such a government would be virtually incapable of responding to the diverse needs of half a billion people.

Democratic institutions need to operate at a level that is comprehensible and accessible to people: at a human scale. We must take seriously the possibility that global democracy  peoples urge to care for the globe and for all its citizens  can only be real if most functions are local and peoples dependence on global trade and institutions is limited.

When presented by continent- and global-level problems caused by businesses and untrammeled markets, lets increase international collaboration with the goal of scaling down businesses and markets. This form of collaboration is fundamentally different from scaling up government. It points in the opposite direction!

The following point is then at the heart of the very challenging position we find ourselves in: there is a profound mismatch between politics at the national level, and economics at the international level. Many well-intentioned progressive / green / Left people and organizations across the continent believe the best response to this problem is to create a true (rather than a merely de facto) European government. Yet this is likely to merely amplify the control already exerted by corporations over the European economy.

The answer, instead, is to decentralize the European economy. This will enable us to shape economic activity to reduce waste and resource consumption while providing meaningful livelihoods and restoring the environment. Through decentralization and relocalization we also reassert democratic control over our own destinies.

The way forward: localization

There is an alternative to undermining our own people in order to enrich foreign corporations and banks. Its called localization and it involves moving away from ever more specialized production for export, towards prioritizing diversified production to meet peoples genuine needs; away from centralized, corporate control, towards more decentralized, local and national economies.

This means encouraging greater regional self-reliance, and using our taxes, subsidies and regulations to support enterprises embedded in society, rather than transnational monopolies.

A shift away from the global towards the local is the most strategic way to tackle our escalating social and ecological crises. Localization shortens the distance between producers and consumers by encouraging diversified production for domestic needs, instead of specialized production for export.

Localization does not mean eliminating international trade, or reducing all economic activity to a village level. Its about shifting the power from transnational corporations to democratically accountable entities, including nation states. At the same time we need to build up regional and local self-reliance. Its about reclaiming power over our lives while simultaneously shrinking our ecological footprint.

Localization  the benefits

In contrast with the make-believe of derivatives and debt-based money, localization is founded in real productivity for genuine human needs, with respect for the rich diversity of cultures and ecosystems worldwide.

By shortening the distance between production and consumption, localization minimizes transport, packaging, and processing  thereby cutting down on waste, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. This simultaneously increases resilience, which will be needed to cope with the inevitable crises coming our way.

Localized economies rely more on human labor and creativity and less on energy-intensive technological systems. This increases the number of jobs while reducing the use of natural resources.

By spreading economic and political power among millions of individuals and small businesses rather than a handful of corporate monopolies, localization provides the potential for revitalizing the democratic process. Political power is no longer some distant impersonal force, but is instead rooted in community.

As the scale and pace of economic activity are reduced, anonymity gives way to face-to-face relationships, and to a closer connection to Nature. This in turn leads to a more secure sense of personal and cultural identity.

Localization is a remarkable solution-multiplier, but it should not be mistaken for a complete panacea. It offers no guarantee for peace and ecological wellbeing. Going local needs to be pursued in full awareness of the need for environmental and human rights protection that goes beyond local, regional and national borders. Its a prerequisite, a necessity in order to build the accountable structures we need that respect and renew diversity.

Localization, or decentralization, was central to the thinking of the peoples movements in the Nordic countries that have resisted full integration into the EU. In Norway, the economic and political elites twice tried to achieve EU-membership and were defeated, thanks to the campaigns for democracy and global responsibility for environment and justice.

In Denmark and Sweden, membership in the Eurozone has been rejected in several referenda after historic grassroots campaigns. In Iceland, the popular support for EU membership has always been weak. The first application for membership in the EU was submitted in 2009 but suspended in 2013 when the pro-membership government lost elections.

UK voters: think before you vote!

We are facing huge crises: the frightening specter of climate change; the threat of nuclear annihilation; the enormous problems of hypermobility and large-scale migration 

These are all consequences of a fixation on growth and technological progress. The leadership in both Brexit and Remain are committed to promising more economic growth to the millions of people who are struggling to hold on to a job, struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

The growth that is being discussed is actually supporting excessive global trade and global businesses and banks. The very same process is handing over more wealth and power to the 1%, to the detriment of the 99%. And this type of growth demands ever-more energy for global infrastructures, including bigger airports, ports and super-highways.

So we have a system that destroys livelihoods while driving up CO2 emissions and other forms of pollution. More and more people, including Nobel laureate economists, are questioning this path.

There are some who would believe that collaboration at the pan-European level could facilitate a path to genuine economic decentralization. Others are convinced that those steps to localize can best be taken by first leaving the EU. Still others dont favor either of these paths. We are not trying to tell UK readers how (or even whether) to vote; we are asking you to help us shed light on and bring sanity to this volatile situation.

Whichever way you vote, please reject the glaringly stupid rhetoric in the media. Speak out, let your voice be heard for ecological and economic sanity, for a fundamental turnaround.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is founder and director of Local Futures (International Society for Ecology and Culture). A pioneer of the new economy movement, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for more than thirty years. She is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness, and is the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh. She was honored with the Right Livelihood Award for her groundbreaking work in Ladakh, and received the 2012 Goi Peace Prize for contributing to the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.

Rupert Read was a Green Party councillor in Norwich and a candidate in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. He is Chair of the Green House thinktank.

Thomas Wallgren founded the campaign Yes to the World - No the the EU before the Finnish referendum on EU-membership in 1994. He is a member of the advisory board of Corporate Europe Observatory and of the city council in Helsinki for the Social Democrats.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License










The London Bubble, Brexit And Smug Incompetence

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org

London: Getting to London at this time of the year still sees that early summer foliage in full bloom. There is a rich sap-green life to the trees, and the prospect of a wet season. As the environment teams with turbulent activity and adjustment, the political scene is proving just as frantic. Britain goes to the referendum polls on June 23.

London is snared by the Brexit debate, with posters and placards festooning the city speaking to the benefits and catastrophes of remaining in the European Union. But for all that, such activity is taking place in the beast of Britains political and financial establishment. For all that, it remains a supremely padded cacoon, a vast bubble of protection against so much about what the rest of Britain is saying.

The Leave and Stay campaigns have been at each others throats in what has been, or some time, a campaign more on illusions than facts. Veteran journalist Peter Oborne went so far as to describe the debate as a post-factual one. Those arguing for staying in the EU have done so clumsily and unconvincingly; those on the leave bandwagon have done their best to make omission and misguided patriotism their central policy.

There has even been a good deal of dark cynicism thrown into it, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne using the NHS, that long hated symbol for Tories of universal health care, as political hostage. His promise: Leave Europe, and we will have to gut the service to plug inevitable deficits. The parochial, John Bull set have capitalised on such stances, marking out areas of fiction to assault the British public with in the lead up to the poll.

The Leave campaign, masking itself with stern officialdom, has been busy sending formal correspondence to voters urging the good thing: exit with pride. One leaflet titled The European Union and Your Family is keen to illustrate The Facts. Such a document is designed to help you make your decision in the referendum on Thursday 23 June. Comforting.

Then come those mysterious fog dispelling facts (facts, for some reason, is always coloured a good bolshie red). Again, the magic figure of 350 billion pounds a year for being an EU member makes its tiresome appearance. No mention of other facts, be they subsidies and assistance for British agriculture.

Another fact, conveyed with omissions and faults, is the expansion of the EU. There are legitimate reasons to argue against such a move in terms of political and economic stability, but the Leave campaign has no holds barred on the issue of how troubling it is that other states, when they join will have the same rights as other member states. Equality between members? Revolting, sneer the campaigners.

There is no qualification to the list of states in the queue either. Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey are written in bold text, suggesting that new thieves and brigands are being readied to land on Britains shores. Such hysteria ignores the fact that the British service industry is dominated by a multitude of European nationalities, doing jobs Britons feel beneath, and in some cases beyond them. In that sense, an expanded EU has been an unqualified boon.

For all that, London remains a Venetian city state in the national debate, a point which might explain the bizarre show that unfolded on the Thames on Wednesday.

It was a moment of stock political surrealism, featuring battling flotillas, pleasure boats, and dinghies. It saw Nigel Farage from the UK Independence Party with supporters yelling as they clamoured for a swift departure from the EU, and a combative greying Bob Geldorf, flicking V-signs from a pleasure cruiser stacked with pro-EU supporters. They were armed with the Sixties pop hit Im in with the in crowd blared at deafening levels.

That was not all. Farage, with his boat decked with patriotic balloons, chairs and baubles, had joined pro-Brexit Scottish fishermen squirting water at rival campaigners who had taken to dinghies to harry the Brexiteers. To add to this assembly line of absurdity were transfixed Members of Parliament and a hundred souls or so on a bridge singing Rule Britannia.

The exchange, verbally, was hardly Shakespearean. More like unsupervised playground spluttering. There were rude gestures. There was shouting and jeering. Youre a fraud! charged Geldorf through his microphone. Youre no fishermans friend! Geldorfs point was fair enough, obscured as it was by the scene. Farage, despite being on the European Parliament Fishing Committee, was hardly a regular, having only attended one out of 43 meetings.

Never exaggerate the credentials of pure opportunism, especially from a politician who loathes the EU but has been subsidised by its accounts for a good period of time. Farage has always liked to play the enemy within the Brussels establishment, all too often coming across as the resident philistine.

Nor has Geldorf done much to clarify the issues for the Remain campaign. To those outside London, he remains the millionaire who has dandified causes, a wealthy individual who ennobles poverty and privation for the sake of mission. Furthermore, much of the ground for those wishing to remain in the EU is taken to be obvious for the campaigners, which is exactly why it has verged on smug incompetence.

The idea of Britain leaving the system is deemed so imbecilic is does not warrant a decent counter, hence the Leave campaigns main handicap. It warrants no coherent critique of various European practices that require a good deal of trimming, or the basic notion of constitutional reform. London, as it proved to British Labour in the last election, risks becoming an isolated oasis in the debates of Britannia. Voters outside the vast metropolis will make the difference.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently in London. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com








Rape And Murder In Sukma: Soni Sori On Indefinite Fast

Press Release

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org

Soni Sori and other members of AAP party are right sitting on Dharna outside the Sukma Collectorate of Chhattisgarh state, India against the recent incident of Rape and Fake Encounter of Madkam Hidme, a young girl from Gompad village. Additionally, Soni Sori has decided to go on Indefinite Fast.

On 13th June, the Sukma police announced a successful encounter where a woman Maoist, Madkam Hidme, was killed in an encounter close to village Gompad, Konta Tehsil, Sukma district. Villagers called up yesterday to say that this was incorrect and that Madkam Hidme was not a Naxalite, but a villager, picked up from her home, gang raped by the police and then killed, and body returned to the villagers.

Yesterday, a fact-finding team from AAP, led by Soni Sori tried to visit the village to investigate this. But the team was stopped and harassed at 4 different camps on the way, finally they were stopped and held for almost hours at the Injeram Camp on various excuses, just 10 km short of the village. Soni and others returned back to Sukma in the evening to meet the collector and SP. But no one was available at their office. ASP, Sukma Mr. Santosh Singh met the team and told them that they can't be allowed inside without Security force personnel's. The team then asked them to send some personnel's with them, ASP said no one was available and so they can't be allowed to visit the village.

Villagers on the other hand are willing to talk and are waiting with the body of the girl for the team or journalists to come and talk to them and see for themselves.

In protest, Soni and others have decided to camp/do a dharna at the collectorate itself until they are allowed to go in.

Son Sori told Times of India that Hidme, 21, who is married, was home doing household work when few uniformed security personnel spotted her and dragged her into the forest, covering her mouth to mute her screams. "She was wearing sari when abducted and wasn't a Maoist," Sori stated adding that Hidme was later gangraped whole night and shot dead on Monday morning after security forces allegedly changed her sari into Maoist uniform.












BJP Two Year Rule: Economic Slowdown, Social Divide And Institutional Erosion

By Pushkar Raj

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org



The BJP has completed two years in office recently showcasing its achievements with public money followed by the national executive meeting of the party. The prime minister has congratulated his government for its achievements of development of the country. In reality, however, while the Indian economy has underperformed in the last two years as compared to a recent past, socially and institutionally too the countrys performance tumbled downwards which is a matter of concern not a celebration.

The Indian economy grew on an average of 8 percent in 2004-14, while it has grown by 7.5 percent in the last two years - still short of 0.5 percent that the country recorded during the previous congress governments tenure (World Bank- India data and trading economics.com).

Even this growth, 7.5 percent, is phony as it is capital than job driven. Irrespective of inflating statistics of foreign direct investment crossing 35 billion, 2016 added merely 1.55 million jobs in the economy, lowest since 2009 when 2.49 million jobs were created; while in 2011, 7.04 million jobs were created (Labour Bureau, Government of India, The Hindu, 31 March 2016).

On the contrary, the government has been lacking in redistribution of fruit of economic growth amongst the most needy of the society- the landless farmers, in the grip of drought and desperate for work under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The government could only provide for 40.1 days of work to poor during 2014-15, lowest since the scheme was launched a decade ago. The creation of 48.6 man-days work in 2015-16 is encouraging but it is still under 54 man-days work generated in 2009-10 (Ministry of rural development, government of India).

Socially, the debate on personal matters such as eating and saluting has divided the country on communal lines. Hindu rightist forces are busy debating whether meat found in Dadri was mutton or beef neglecting the fact that a citizen of India was lynched by a mob instigated on an issue that concerned his personal eating choice. Under the new regime, the national debates are being ignited and fought on mythological grounds with emotional spins while the top political leadership chooses a casual silence.

Consequently, there is a general discomfort amongst liberal sections of intelligentsia within the country and abroad over growing religious and social intolerance in public and private life in India. United States Commission on International Religious Freedom in its latest report stated that religious tolerance deteriorated and religious freedom violations increased in India in 2015. Based on religious and social freedoms available to citizens in the country, India was placed in the company of Turkey and Russia under tier 2 countries barely escaping being clubbed with Pakistan and Egypt! It is a serious commentary on erosion of secularism as a value in our political and social life despite its being part of the preamble of the constitution. The Fraser Institute, a think tank based in Canada that gauges personal freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of a country gave India 9.14 points over 10 in 2012 while it could score only 7.36 points in 2015, pointing to a sharp rise on control over citizens private life by the society and state.

On the governance front, some of the major institutions of the country declined in their credibility and integrity during last two years.

While government has not paid any attention to the Chief Justice of Indias public disappointment over pending cases and judicial reforms, it was quick to appoint another retired chief justice of the Supreme Court as the governor of a state, apparently, a lower position under the constitution. Besides, credibility of the Judiciary and prestige of office of the governor also suffered due to allegations that the appointment had something to do with the said justices judgment quashing the second FIR against the ruling partys president (The Hindu, 4 September 2014).

Police continued to touch new lows with its abysmal functioning in the country, more so recently in the capital of the country. Delhi polices embarrassing spectacle was on show during the JNU sedition case when it exhibited poor understanding of law (it could never convince others if there was a legal case made out against the accused under sedition given the Supreme Courts ruling on the said section), and inexcusable failure to protect the accused in its custody. When the prime minister talks about improvement in governance, it should also mean reforms in an institution that supervises implementation of laws of land. If the police itself are oblivious of legal nuances then talk of governance is a delusion.

The image of Army as an institution suffered due to appointment of its retired chief as a junior minister in a government headed by a party known for its exclusive agenda and minority bashing. Though constitutionally there might not be a restriction for assuming such a position, but it strikes a blow to the confidence of minorities especially in J & K and Assam (with a sizable Muslim population) where Army is often called upon to assist civil administration.

In field of bureaucracy, there is no progress on 2nd administrative reforms commission report submitted in 2009. Even a ban on oral instruction from political bosses and superiors and fixed tenure in posting ruled by the Supreme Court has not been implemented. All that has happened is reconstitution of appointment committee of cabinet that has enabled the prime minister office to centralize control of bureaucracy.

Institutions such as Film and Television Institute of India, Central Board of Film Certificates, University Grants Commission, Sahitya Academy and central universities, to name a few, have seen questionable appointments and whimsical functioning. Predictably, in governance rank released by the London based think tank, Legatum Institute, Indian rank in governance slipped to 53rd position in 2016 from 49 in 2015 (www.prosperity.com).

As the BJP continues to wage an aggressive propaganda of development and strategy of social divide, social and political institutions of the country are likely to further stifle, weaken and erode. It would be interesting to see how this moribund social and political structure that is being fashioned by the party will support economic growth and prosperity that the Prime Minister is promising!

 The writer is a Melbourne based independent researcher and writer. Formerly he taught political science in Delhi University and was the national general secretary of People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) @pushkarraaj












GMOs, Biggest Fraud In The History Of Science  Some 'Questions And Answers' For The UK's Royal Society

By Colin Todhunter

16 June, 2016

Countercurrents.org

The decision on whether to renew EU approval for the herbicide glyphosate is to go to an appeals panel on 23 June after a last ditch attempt to get a temporary re-authorisation failed on 6 June (for some background information, see this). It is unclear if the meeting will produce the majority vote needed to pass the authorisation. The current licence for glyphosate in the EU expires on 30 June.

In an ideal world, glyphosate would be taken off the commercial market due to its obvious adverse effects on human health and the environment. In such a world, the EU would at the same time be facilitating policies that would ensure a major shift towards more sustainable agricultural practices.

In the world that we exist in, however, commercial and geopolitical interests trump any notion of what is in the public interest, what is good for the environment and strategies that could result in localised food production systems to ensure food security, thriving communities, nutritious food, replenished soils and climate-friendly practices.

These interests have succeeded in rolling out a system of economic plunder and bad food and poor health across the planet. If the ordinary person were to engage in biopracy, ecocide, the devastation of livelihoods and to knowingly poison the environment and food, as these corporations have, they would face years of incarceration.

Instead, we find these corporations securing privileged access to or control over institutions and co-opting politicians, policy makers, scientists and regulators, who sit on powerful bodies masquerading as public servants or mouth platitudes about serving humanity, while effectively serving the interests of their real constituents: the global agritech/agribusiness cartel.

Conflicts of interest: the EFSA and the Royal Society

In February 2016, campaigner Rosemary Mason wrote to Dr Bernhard Url, Executive Director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), asking him some serious questions about the independence of EFSA committees. The letter comprised the fully-referenced document Glyphosate causes cancer and birth defects. Humans are being poisoned by thousands of untested and unmeasured chemicals.

Bernard Url failed to reply.

On 6 June, Mason wrote to the president of the influential UKs Royal Society, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, about conflicts of interest within the Society.

Venki Ramakrishnan failed to reply.

In late May, the Royal Society released the report GM Plants: Questions and Answers. The report reads less like an objective appraisal and more like a pro-GMO whitewash on GM crops.

The report conveniently fails to address the ongoing debate around glyphosate and, where it is briefly mentioned, it is in glowing terms. Given the prevalence of herbicide-tolerant GMO crops and its devastating health and ecological impacts, this is a serious omission. This should come as little surprise, however, as Professor Jonathan Jones who has links with Monsanto was one of the authors of the report and claims that glyphosate is not poisonous to mammals

Over the years, the Royal Society has consistently misrepresented the facts about glyphosate and GMOs, as highlighted by Steven Druker (discussed further on).

Mason has now penned another open letter (Open Letter to the President of the Royal Society and GMO Scientists (1)), to Ramakrishnan and GMO scientists who are members of the Royal Society.

If GMO scientists are pushing to get GMOs into the UK (and Europe), along with the associated chemical inputs, such as glyphosate, it seems reasonable to suppose that they would be both willing and able to respond to Masons points.

Mason would like these scientists to address the crisis of independence that the EFSA and the Royal Society seem to be experiencing. For example, Mason notes there is no CV available for the public to see for Prof Dr. Achim Gathmann, Vice-Chairman EFSA GMO Panel 2016-2018, and concludes it is because he works for the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL), Berlin: the very office which controversially declared glyphosate not to be carcinogenic.

She also raises the issue of transparency regarding three unpublished studies that the EFSA used to help base its decision on that glyphosate is not carcinogenic to humans (contradicting the WHO evaluation that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans): the 2001 study owned by the Israeli pesticides company ADAMA Agan Ltd, the 2009 study owned by the Australian pesticides company Nufarm; and the 1997 study owned by the Japanese pesticides company Arysta Life Sciences.

The public must ask to view these documents by submitting their requests to the Health and Safety Executives Chemicals Regulation Directorate. They will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Mason cites examples of the EFSA GMO Panel adopting GM without properly considering environmental consequences, despite it admitting to GMOs leading to problems of reduction in farmland biodiversity, glyphosate-resistant weeds and the destruction of food webs and the ecological functions they provide. Papers (cited by Mason) show that super weeds are massively destructive to the environment in the US and that over a period of 30 years there has been uncontrolled spread and contamination globally by many GM plants that are now herbicide resistant.

Prof Joe Perry (Chairman of GMO Panel) retired as a Rothamsted (a UK research institute involved with GM crop research) employee in June 2006. Mason argues he effectively became Rothamsteds man in Europe. From July 2006 he was permanently employed on various GMO Committees, until he took over from Harry Kuiper in 2012 as Chairman of the GMO panel.

While the EFSA claims that the GMO Panel is a committee of experts on GM, Mason provides concrete evidence that they are often anything but. She cites in great detail many examples of the use of flawed science, the ignoring of numerous studies that contradict the assertions being made by panel members and bad advice being offered by prominent and influential figures to push a pro-GMO agenda. At the same time, the EFSA does its best to play down the conflicts of interest among members.

Mason asks why did the EFSA conceal its own paper that discovered a hidden viral gene in GMO crops. Again, Mason suspects deception is the order of the day. She cites evidence to show that US and EU GMO regulators have for many years been inadvertently approving transgenic events containing an unsuspected viral gene which has potential harmful consequences. This, along with other cases detailed by Mason, implicates regulators and the industry in a circle of mutual incompetence and complacency.

Rosemary Mason brings attention to numerous key studies that highlight the adverse health and environmental impacts of GMOs and pesticides which have been ignored by the EFSA, and various conflicts of interest are noted regarding the Royal Society's 'Questions and Answers' recent report.

After having read the points raised by Mason (just a few have been outlined here - readers are urged to read her letter in full) along with the evidence she supplies, many might well assume that, at best, the EFSA is either complacent, or, at worst, incompetent or corrupt.

As a supporter of GM plants, she is quite naturally interested to know what the Royal Society has to say in response.

Mason then goes on to discuss Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini and his teams study showing the toxic and carcinogenic properties of glyphosate-based Roundup. She highlights the industry-motivated attacks he faced, which again were based on flawed assertions wrapped up as scientific fact: unscientific polemics masquerading as science.

And Royal Society members were prominent in these attacks.

Mason does not hold back in naming individual scientists, including members of the Royal Society, whose work she calls into question and whose reputations are at stake due to false, misleading or ignorant statements, academic fraud and corruption, gross scientific misconduct or unscientific papers that were subsequently retracted.

Supporting the biggest fraud in the history of science

The genetic engineering of the food supply is the biggest fraud in the history of science, according to Steven Druker, who provides firm evidence that governments and leading scientific institutions have systematically misrepresented the facts about GMOs.

Mason draws on Druker to make her case and concludes that if the US Food and Drug Administration had actually heeded its own experts advice, told the truth and obeyed the law, the GM food venture would have imploded and never gained traction anywhere, and  as GMOs drive the sale of glyphosate - we would not have witnessed the massive increase in the use of glyphosate which is causing devastation to people and environments across the globe.

In her letter, Mason makes clear to president of the Royal Society Sir Venki Ramakrishnan that Steven Druker has in fact already challenged the Royal Society over its pro-GMO bias. In his open letter to it, he challenged the Society to respond to the catalogue of questionable practices, the smearing of scientists who are critical of GMOs and false statements it or its individual members have been responsible for.

Although members of the Royal Society have been at the vanguard of the pro-GMO scientific movement in the UK, Druker has received no response. The Royal Society has not defended itself. It supports GM crops but refuses to have a rational debate about them.

Mason draws on numerous credible sources to show how modern agriculture and its practices and chemical inputs present a growing threat to humanity and the environment due to hormone-disrupting chemicals, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, crop monocultures, industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides, antibiotic feed supplements and degraded soil, etc.

She also provides quite a detailed summary of the deep politics of GMOs and the green revolution to place issues within a wider context.

Cesspool of corruption?

Recipients of Masons various painstakingly researched open letters usually fail to provide any response. They should understand, however, that her letters are open for the public to read. She conveys deeply held concerns that millions of people have about glyphosate and GMOs and would like to be addressed.

She  and by implication, the public - faces the similar blank responses that Steven Druker faced with his two open letters to Monsanto and the Royal Society. The public would like answers. Are we to conclude that the whole affair concerning GMOs/glyphosate is mired in "a cesspool of corruption"?

The fact we do not receive answers, are informed that we can read certain important reports in a reading room, are offered a whitewash report on the GM issue by Britains preeminent scientific body or can merely make requests to read texts (with no guarantee we will be given access) plants in the publics mind that something is being kept from it.

It also plants in the collective conscience that, while rich and powerful corporations and lobbyists secure privileged access to the corridors of power, the public is being treated with contempt and is being fed a constant dose of pro-GMO propaganda.

Rosemary Mason concludes her letter by stating:

THE AGROCHEMICAL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR PAID LOBBYISTS ARE CONTROLLING PESTICIDES REGULATION. SCIENCE, AND IN PARTICULAR THE ROYAL SOCIETY, THINKS IT HAS ALL THE ANSWERS. MANY GMO SCIENTISTS HAVE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer - website














NATO Says It Might Now Have Grounds To Attack Russia

By Eric Zuesse

16 June, 2016

The Saker

On Tuesday, June 14th, NATO announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATOs Article V collective defense provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country. The preliminary decision for this was made two years ago after Crimea abandoned Ukraine and rejoined Russia, of which it had been a part until involuntarily transferred to Ukraine by the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. That NATO decision was made in anticipation of Ukraines ultimately becoming a NATO member country, which still hasnt happened. However, only now is NATO declaring cyber war itself to be included as real war under the NATO Treatys collective defense provision.

NATO is now alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clintons home computer, this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her U.S. State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russians then snooping into the U.S. State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the U.S. President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the U.S., trigger NATOs mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the U.S. government in going to war against Russia, if the U.S. government so decides.

NATO had produced in 2013 (prior to the take-over of Ukraine) an informational propaganda video alleging that cyberattacks by people in Russia or in China that can compromise U.S. national security, could spark an invasion by NATO, if the U.S. President decides that the cyberattack was a hostile act by the Russian or Chinese government. In the video, a British national-security expert notes that this would be an eminently political decison for the U.S. President to make, which can be made only by the U.S. President, and which only that person possesses the legal authority to make. NATO, by producing this video, made clear that any NATO-member nations leader who can claim that his or her nation has been attacked by Russia, possesses the power to initiate a NATO war against Russia. In the current instance, it would be U.S. President Barack Obama. However, this video also said that NATO could not automatically accept such a head-of-states allegation calling the cyber-attack an invasion, but instead the country thats being alleged to have perpetrated the attack would have to have claimed, or else been proven, to have carried it out. With the new NATO policy, which was announced on June 14th, in which a cyber-attack qualifies automatically as constituting war just like any traditional attack, such a claim or proof of the target-nations guilt might no longer be necessary. But this has been left vague in the published news reports about it.

In the context of the June 14th NATO announcement that cyberwar is on the same status as physical war, Obama might declare the U.S. to have been invaded by Russia when former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clintons State Department emails were copied by someone in Russia.

Its a hot issue now between Russia and the United States, and so, for example, on the same day, June 14th, Reuters headlined Moscow denies Russian involvement in U.S. DNC hacking, and reported that, Russia on Tuesday denied involvement in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee database that U.S. sources said gained access to all opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

In previous times, espionage was treated as being part of warfare, and, after revelations became public that the U.S. was listening in on the phone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, espionage has become recognized as being simply a part of routine diplomacy (at least for the United States); but, now, under the new NATO policy, it might be treated as being equivalent to a physical invasion by an enemy nation.

At the upcoming July 8th-9th NATO Summit meeting, which will be happening in the context of NATOs biggest-ever military exercises on and near the borders of Russia, called Atlantic Resolve, prospective NATO plans to invade Russia might be discussed in order to arrive at a consensus plan for the entire alliance. However, even if that happens, it wouldnt be made public, because war-plans never are.

The origin of this stand-off between the U.S. and Russia goes back to promises that the West had made in 1990 to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to expand NATO up to the borders of Russia, and the Wests subsequent violations of those repeatedly made promises. Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, on the basis of those false assurances from Western leaders. Thus, Russia is surrounded now by enemies, including former Warsaw Pact nations and even some former regions of the Soviet Union itself, such as Ukraine and the Baltic republics, which now host NATO forces. NATO is interpreting Russias acceptance of the Crimeans desire to abandon Ukraine and rejoin Russia following the 2014 Ukrainian coup, as constituting a showing of an intent by Russia to invade NATO nations that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact, such as Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia; and this is the alleged reason for Americas Operation Atlantic Resolve, and the steep increase in U.S. troops and weapons in those nations that border on Russia.

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.












SHARE The new OnePlus 3 smartphone. (Photo: OnePlus)

By Eli Blumenthal, USA TODAY

Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus is back with a new flagship phone, the $399 that is available today on its website.

The phone builds on the reputation the company built up over the past two years, offering a sleek and powerful smartphone for a cheaper price than rival phones from Apple, , HTC or LG.

What is it?

Similar to its predecessors, the OnePlus 3 follows the OnePlus mantra of offering top of the line specs for a discount. For $399 unlocked and without a contract, you get the latest processor, 6GB of RAM, fingerprint sensor and a 16 megapixel rear camera in an aluminum package that's similar in aesthetic to the latest phones from Apple and HTC.

Custom $24.99 backcovers are available in various woods. a Kevlar-like "Karbon" and "sandstone" are also available to spice up the feel of the device.

The phone comes with 64GB of included storage. NFC, or the ability to use the phone with Android Pay for mobile payments, is back on the new phone as is an updated feature called "Dash Charge" that promises 60% battery life in 30 minutes.

By comparison similarly priced phones like LG's $349.99 Nexus 5X and Apple's $399 iPhone SE start with 16GB of storage and come with slower processors and smaller screens.

Like most unlocked devices, it's limited to use on AT&T and 's networks in the US. Sorry, Verizon and Sprint users.

As with 2014's and last year's , the OnePlus 3 features 5.5-inch full HD screen. And like the OnePlus 2 and , the new phone is powered by OnePlus' , a slightly modified version of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow.

Unlike prior OnePlus launches, you can buy the OnePlus 3 today without needing to wait for an invite.

What's it like to use?

I've been using the OnePlus 3 for the past week and overall it is is one the best smartphones currently available. That said, it is not without some faults.

The display on the OnePlus 3 is great, though it's not as sharp as rivals like the pricier Samsung's Galaxy S7 or LG's G5. The company's Dash Charge quick-charging tech works as advertised, getting over 31% charge in 15 minutes and over 60% in 30 minutes, but requires that you use the company's proprietary, more powerful cable and adapter for the full effect. One cable and adapter are included with the phone, with additional cables running $14.95 and additional adapters running $19.95 each. A Dash Charge car charger is available for $29.95.

Other USB-C cables and adapters will work with the OnePlus 3, but they will charge the phone at a much slower pace.

Battery life in general was very good, often easily lasting a full day.

Unlike the Galaxy S7, there is no wireless charging. The device is also not water resistant.

While the 64GB of storage is nice, it would've been great to have a microSD slot for expansion.

The cameras take good looking pictures in well lit environments but struggled in low-light, with pictures not looking as sharp compared to those taken on an iPhone 6S Plus.

Shooting with the camera was fast and the phone was otherwise zippy, as could be expected with so much horsepower under the hood. The aluminum design felt great in the hand, though I personally preferred the smoother feel of the company's Karbon back cover.

Should you care?

If you're in the market for a new phone, particularly a new Android phone, the OnePlus 3 makes a compelling case. Those looking for an iPhone likely won't be swayed here, likewise for those who want the water resistance and better cameras offered by Samsung's latest Galaxy's.



But at $399 the combination of performance, design and price make the OnePlus 3 the best phone OnePlus has made and an incredibly tempting alternative to pricier smartphones.
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MICHIGAN CITY, Ind.  Americans and Hoosiers are angry. They are seeking political retribution. Some are resorting to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders, both having framed powerful indictments of the political and economic status quo.

Why are "We the People" so ticked?

Appearing in Elkhart earlier this month, President Barack Obama laid out the template for the sizzling anger that is fueling one of the most unpredictable political climates in modern times. And Prof. Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University, a macroeconomist and economic historian, supplies an array of data that helps understand why the political contours of 2016 are being framed in the current troubled context.

At the Lerner Theater in Elkhart, PBS moderator Gwen Ifill asked Obama why there is such a disconnect in a county where the jobless rate fell from 19 percent to 5 percent during his two terms in office. "Here's what has changed in the economy over the last 20 to 30 years," Obama began. "Right after World War II, America was ascendant. It was dominant around the world because Europe was blown up, Japan was digging itself out of the rubble, China was still a backwater, Eastern Europe was behind the Iron Curtain. There wasn't much competition. We were the only folks who were seriously making cars and trucks and appliances. We had strong unionization, which meant that workers had leverage so that they could get a good share of a growing pie. And people saw, each year and each generation, their standards of living going up pretty rapidly."

Indeed, growing up as a middle class Baby Boomer, the implicit promise of the "American dream" was the notion that each successive generation would do better than the last. By the time Obama took office in January 2009, not only was the jobless rate up, but home values had tanked and mortgage foreclosures were rampant. The $400 billion budget surplus under President Clinton had ballooned to an almost unfathomable $1 trillion. "What started happening is you started seeing foreign competition," Obama continued. "Unions started getting busted, so workers had less leverage, which meant their wages didn't go up quite as fast." Indeed, per capita income in Indiana had declined by more than 10 percent in the prior decade.

"You started seeing the end of defined benefit pension plans," Obama explained. Workplace health plans were cut. "College costs started going up because the public university system, which used to be generously funded by state governments so that tuition was low" were cut to build prisons and cut taxes. On that front, Hoosier taxpayers are now funding less than 10 percent of the annual budgets of Indiana and Purdue universities. Students are picking up the difference.

"You add all those things together and people then start feeling more stressed," Obama said.

This is where Prof. Gordon picks up the narrative. As the Baby Boomers entered into adulthood, he cites what was essentially the end of a historical anomaly, the termination of what he calls the "special century" from 1870 to 1970. "The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation and early death," Gordon writes in his book, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth."

A century later, there was air-conditioning, instant dinners, appliances and color TV that connected the masses to the world. Life expectancy rose from 45 to 72. "The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could come only once," Gordon writes.

And there are choppy times ahead. Gordon observes, "The problem created by the computer age is not mass unemployment, but the gradual disappearance of good, steady, middle-level jobs that have been lost not just to robots and algorithms but to globalization and outsourcing to other countries, together with the concentration of job growth in routine manual jobs that offer relatively low wages. It combines disappointing productivity growth over the past decade with a steady rise of inequality over the past three decades."

Gordon predicts "four headwinds," citing income inequality; education deficits that have produced lower college graduation rates and decreased vocabulary levels of poor preschoolers, and more than $1 trillion in college loan debt; demographics with the Baby Boom retirement bubble and a declining labor force; and government debt with unsustainable entitlement expenditures, something Purdue President Mitch Daniels described in 2011 as the "new red menace." The presidential candidates have not discussed entitlement reform.

"The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past," Gordon said. "When all the headwinds are taken into account, the future growth of real median disposable income per person will be barely positive."

In reviewing Gordon's book, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, while not quite buying into the theory, observed, "Perhaps the future isn't what it used to be."

As for the present tense, this is why such rage is gathering in 2016.

The columnist is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. Find him on Facebook and Twitter @hwypol.
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A couple of conversations illustrated how poorly our political discussions serve these days.

The first conversation was with Drew Klacik, Jamie Palmer and John Marron, senior policy analysts with the Indiana University Public Policy Institute. We talked over the air about the results of Thriving Communities, Thriving State, the institute's in-depth study of the ways life in Indiana could be improved at the community level.

The study divided the state into three categories  urban centers, mid-sized communities and small towns or rural areas. Some common priorities emerged from the research.

Hoosiers, wherever they live, see strengthening education as a key to enhancing quality of life. They also value diversity as an important part of building a strong economy.

And here's the kicker  they see collaboration as essential to achieving those goals.

They want to see collaboration between the public and private  both for-profit and not-for-profit  sectors to enhance life in Indiana, but they also want to see local, state and federal government officials playing nice with each other.

A few days later, I talked, again on the air, with Katharine Byers and Kelsey Clayton about poverty and opportunity. Byers is the retired former co-director of the Institute for Family and Social Responsibility at Indiana University. Clayton is Indiana Assets and Opportunity Network manager.

Byers and Clayton talked about how so many of our approaches to dealing with poverty are counterproductive. And they discussed how corrosive poverty could be, especially for young people  an important point in a state where 22 percent of the children live below the poverty line.

Byers and Clayton said education, particularly early education, was critical to breaking cycles of poverty. They said the problem of poverty must be met by people who are eager to solve problems, not score political or ideological points.

In short, if we're going to meet the challenge of seeing the middle class erode and having more than one in five of our young people live stunted, often unproductive lives, we will have to  you guessed it  collaborate.

Those two conversations served almost as bookends for the news that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence had done an about-face on prekindergarten funding.

Two years ago, the governor abruptly announced that Indiana wouldn't even apply for $80 million in federal pre-K funds even as state officials were finalizing the paperwork to do so. It was a political gesture on Pence's part.

A Republican governor who, at the time, still was weighing a possible run for the White House, Pence couldn't pass up the opportunity to shake his fist at the big, bad Barack Obama administration  even if the fist-shaking cost our children $80 million worth of opportunities.

We may get that money now, but the children who fell into that crack  who lost those two years of education and opportunity  likely will suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives.

Things change. The governor now is in the middle of a tough re-election battle and, lo and behold, he's discovered Hoosiers care about their kids' schooling.

But it's not fair to single the governor out as the sole offender.

In recent years, our state legislators have made their top priorities  right to work, a same-sex marriage ban, a misnamed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a crackdown on restroom use  issues that were designed to divide Hoosiers, measures aimed at creating problems rather than solving them.

At the federal level, after both the electorate and the Supreme Court have ruled in favor of health care reform, our lawmakers still are fighting not about whether there are ways to improve it, but whether it should exist.

We Hoosiers  we Americans  have some huge problems to solve.

We always have been a middle-class society, but the emergence of what has been called an hourglass economy  bulges at the top and bottom without much in the middle  will test us in ways we can't even imagine.

But our leaders, it is clear, are more determined to score points than they are to solve problems.

Their priority is beating the other side, not figuring out how to work together to make this a better state, a better country.

Collaboration.

It's a simple thing for us to talk about.

It seems to be a hard thing for us to do.

John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism, host of "No Limits" WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
Beck is seen behind Kanye West after West made an unexpected appearance onstage during the 2015 Grammy Awards. (Photo: Getty photos)

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By Alexa Goins, IndyStar / USA TODAY Network

Trying to score tickets to Kanye? You might not want to get your hopes up just yet.

Secondary ticket marketplace vendor Rukkus released figures predicting that tickets to Kanye West's concert would sell out in every city of the 37-date tour in a matter of hours.

West will kick off his Saint Pablo tour in Indianapolis on Aug. 25 at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Tickets, which range from $89 to $129.50 on Ticketmaster, go on sale June 18.

Rukkus is estimating that along with a quick sellout, the average ticket price on the secondary market will be a steep $350, making it the second most expensive ticket this year. Adele's average secondary ticket price was $540.

Ticket scalping is a regular concern for those trying to buy a hot ticket. Ticket brokers often manage to buy up tickets before fans get the chance.

Its all about who you know, said Jake Sharpless, data and content manager of Rukkus. Ticket brokers often get tickets from venues, promoters and talent agencies like Creative Artists Agency and William Morris.

So how, exactly, can you get your hands on Saint Pablo tickets?

Sharpless shared some tips.

"First, cross your fingers. There will be many people trying to buy tickets at once, so there is a bit of luck involved," Sharpless said in an email. "Otherwise, it's good to join artists' fan clubs or follow them on social media in order to get access to tickets not offered on the open market."

Members of West's music streaming service, TIDAL, have access to a private pre-sale beginning Thursday at 10 a.m. American Express Cardholders also have access to a presale running from through June 17.

Keep an eye on local radio stations social media feeds. They often give away tickets as the local tour date approaches.

If the show sells out before you have a chance to get tickets, Sharpless suggests looking at the secondary ticket market, but don't get trigger-happy and buy them right away.

"A pro tip would be to monitor secondary ticket prices over time," Sharpless said.

Ticket prices on the secondary market might be inflated in the beginning but tend to come down as the show date nears.

Sharpless also noted that smartphones and mobile ticketing apps have caused a change in sales, mainly increasing in last-minute ticket purchases. So dont fret if you dont get tickets this Saturday.

Happy ticket hunting! May the odds be ever in your favor, Kanye fans.
Purdue President Mitch Daniels

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By Dave Bangert, USA TODAY NETWORK, Lafayette Journal & Courier

If George Will asks Mitch Daniels often enough, will the Purdue University president and former Indiana might finally cave and make a run for the White House?

In a Wednesday column in the Washington Post, Will  an unabashed fan of Daniels and his work  wrote: Purdue has the president the nation needs.

Will picked up on the commencement speeches Daniels delivered in May to the Class of 2016, when the Purdue president told graduates that they were products of hard work, not dumb luck. Will put Daniels speech up against one President Barack Obama gave earlier in May, in which he told Howard University graduates: Yes, youve worked hard, but youve also been lucky. Thats a pet peeve of mine: people who have been successful and dont realize theyve been lucky.

That bit from Obama made Will chafe considerably and long for the brand of conservativism Daniels might have brought to a 2016 campaign that features two options that most definitely make the Post columnist shudder.

Danielss words to the Class of 2016 clarify why the 2016 presidential campaign offers an echo, not a choice. The presumptive Democratic nominee is a progressive committed to government ambitious enough to iron the wrinkles of luck out of life, and to distribute equity to lifes victims, meaning to everyone. The presumptive Republican nominee is a world-class whiner (a victim of debate moderators who are meanies, and most recently of a rigged judicial system) who is telling Americans that they are comprehensively victimized (by wily Chinese exporters, manufacturers making Oreo cookies abroad, freeloading allies, etc.). Purdue has the president the nation needs.

This isnt the first time Will has confessed his allegiance to all things Mitch Daniels.

In an interview with the J&C in December, ahead of an appearance at Purdue, I had this exchange with Will:

Question: So, is it fair to say youre still a Mitch Daniels fan?

Will: Oh, yes. Every time I open the page and see whos running for president, I think of the man who isnt there.

Q: So what do you think a Daniels White House would be, had he run and had he won in 2012?

Will: I think if he had run, he would have won. And I think there would be a calm in the country. Mitch Daniels is a grown-up. Hes vastly familiar with the federal machinery, having been a chief budgeteer. He knows where the waste is. He knows where the institutional lines should be drawn in this country. He wouldnt be given to executive overreach of the sort were seeing these days. And he would just radiate a sense of adult supervision.

Its also not the first call for Daniels to jump into the fray. When some Indiana GOP delegates traded on Never Trump to float Draft Mitch talk ahead of the states May primary, Daniels brushed off the recruiting effort.

Through a university spokeswoman, Daniels said reaction falls somewhere along the lines of half Gen. Sherman and half Sgt. Schultz on the topic. In other words, to quote Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman: I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected. And to quote Sgt. Schultz from sit-com Hogans Heroes: I know nothing.

Daniels resisted the call in 2012, as he was finishing his term as governor. And hes committed to Purdue, with an extended contract that pays him a total of $1 million in retention bonuses, through 2020.

Is this George Will column  one that reads more like a lament for this years election than it does a recruiting plea  that changes Daniels mind? Probably not.

Does it end the Draft Mitch dreams? Not a chance.
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By Len Wells of the Courier and Press

Two Southern Illinois men have been sentenced to time in federal prison for being in possession of an improvised explosive device.

Aaron B. Flota, 37, of Flora was sentenced to 63 months in prison. His co-defendant, Kevin E. Caldwell, 37 of Edgewood drew a 37-month sentence.

In a stipulation of facts filed by federal prosecutors, the two men admitted they constructed a destructive device using a CO2 cartridge and compounds obtained from fireworks. The two made a hole in the neck of the CO2 cylinder large enough for gunpowder to be packed into the device. The device was then detonated with a blowtorch.

Prosecutors said that the explosion, which happened Aug. 10, 2015, sent a chunk of shrapnel into Flota's arm. The injuries were serious enough that he had to be taken by helicopter to a hospital in Evansville for surgery.

Investigators with the ATF explosives enforcement group investigated the case.
Seddique Mateen pauses while talking about his son, Orlando gay nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, while being interviewed by news media in his home June 14, 2016, in Port St. Lucie, Fla. (Photo: Xavier Mascarenas, St. Lucie (Fla.) News Tribune)

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By Will Greenlee, St. Lucie News Tribune / USA TODAY Network

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla.  The father of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen is involved in at least two active Florida corporations, including one filed this year called Provisional Government of Afghanistan, records show.

Seddique Mateen is listed as the sole member of the board of directors of that non-profit corporation, and the address listed is the residence in the 500 block of Southwest .

The elder Mateen's Provisional Government of Afghanistan Corporation was "organized for exclusively religious, charitable, educational and scientific purposes.

"Specifically, the organization will mediate and attempt to resolve social and territorial disputes," records state.

The father has thrust himself into the media spotlight, talking sporadically with reporters outside and inside his home since Sunday after his son was identified as the mass shooter at Orlando gay nightclub Pulse.

Dozens of reporters, videographers and vehicles have jammed the area around the home for much of the past three days. Police at times have indicated to those at the house that Mateen wanted reporters off the property, but later, Mateen would come out to address the media.

Mateen has declined to give his age and has not spoken much about himself or his businesses. He has objected to some inquiries that he said were political.

But state records show Seddique Mateen is on the board of The Durand Jirga Inc., paperwork for which was filed in 2010. The initial articles of incorporation, like those of the Provisional Government of Afghanistan, state it "will mediate and attempt to resolve social and territorial disputes." Current or former board members were listed as living in California, Florida and Canada.

The Durand Jirga Inc. published videos of Mateen talking about political relationships between the United States and Afghanistan. In one, he announced his candidacy for president of Afghanistan.

Seddique Mateen was the sole board member in a now-inactive corporation filed in 1997 called Happy Beauty Salon Inc. That business was at an address in the 6400 block of South in Stuart.

"The purpose of this corporation is to engage in the business of owning and operating a beauty salon including but not limited to the cutting and styling of hair, manicures, and the sale of beauty related products," records state.

In Stuart, Seddique Mateen also is linked to the inactive Wonderworks Production LLC, which was filed in 2010.

Another inactive corporation, initially filed in 2003, linked to Seddique Mateen is Fine Image Art Gallery Inc. The place of business was listed as in with the purpose "including but not limited to the retail sale of fine art products."

Seddique Mateen, who said he has three daughters, has said he came to the USA in the 1980s after the , which he said is his homeland. He said he moved to from the Queens borough of New York City in 1991.

He said he hoped his son, who has a 3 1/2-year-old son, would get a higher education and serve the U.S.

In a brief statement Wednesday afternoon, he said: "My son sympathized with ISIS, not with me, not with the family, so he sympathized with terrorist group, so we are all victim. I wish he didn't do that."

He declined to take questions and went back inside his home.
I have already weighed in on the recent hubbub over whether bakers, florists, and photographers should be compelled by law to serve ends they deem unethical and in violation of their consciences.

Over at First Things, Eric Teetsel of the Manhattan Declaration offers some helpful embellishment on that last bit  conscience  arguing that Christians ought to be far less blind and arbitrary when it comes to the shape and scope of their stewardship and service.

As for the case at hand (whether to attend or service particular weddings), Teetsel offers the following:

Have you prayed about it? How is the Holy Spirit leading you? Do you feel you can attend the service without compromising your responsibility to be a witness to the Truth? Will attending enable you to continue a Gospel presence in the persons life? If so, then perhaps you should go Individuals may be led one way or another according to their conscience. One may feel they can provide the service without endorsing or celebrating the event; another may feel the opposite. Religious freedom and the right of conscience preserve the rights of individuals to come to their own conclusions in such circumstances. Of course not every act of commerce amounts to an assessment of the moral nature of homosexuality. But every so often a creator is asked to use their talents for something their conscience cannot abide. It may be a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony, or a cake in a lewd shape, or a cake celebrating abortion. In those instances, the Bible fails to provide an absolute answer. What is a Christian to do? The answer is a matter of individual conscience. Not whether Christians should or should not do something, but whether they must do something.

Yet when it comes to nearly every case the Christian encounters, that first paragraph is a rather helpful introduction to the types of questions we should be asking. From setting wages and prices, to innovating new products and services, to the ends those outputs elevate, conscience is integral to rightly ordering our efforts.

In some cases, the Christian baker who disagrees with the ethics and arc of a homosexual wedding (for whatever reason) may wrestle with such questions and determine that going ahead and baking the cake is (for whatever reason) the Christianly thing to do. Yet in other cases, perhaps for the marriage of a heterosexual couple, that very same individual may decide something different. This level of spiritual discernment, moral weighing, and relational complexity is central to our call as Christians. It wont look the same for everyone, and will vary from circumstance to circumstance. Mercy and justice require it.

In their book, Faithful in All Gods House, Lester DeKoster and Gerard Berghoef strike at something similar. The Christian conscience is a watchful monitor of stewardship, they write, one that brings law and conduct together, and judges behavior by the Law. As Gods witness in each human heart, they continue, conscience makes demands on our behavior specific to the situations we encounter:

Conscience plays a unique role in the obedient life. It is often said that the Bible falls short of particulars in laying down regulations for Christian obedience. We are never expressly told, for example, how much we may keep for ourselves of all the goods that God gives us. We are not informed as to whether money should be given to one charity or to another, or whether it is right to enjoy good food and drink while many starve. The Bible declines to be an ethical recipe book. The Word only reveals general mandates and universal commandments. Why? Because God provides conscience to be the bridge from the general and universal law to the particular act. Conscience is, so to speak, the elbow where the vertical command coming down from God governs the horizontal deed done among men. The Bible is geared to conscience. The Word is addressed to conscience, and should be preached to conscience. Out of the struggle to do the revealed will of God in daily living, conscience emerges ever more sensitive and helpful. Conscience is the agent of Christian maturity.

As for how and whether we get this right or wrong, let the Spirit and Word lead us, and let God be our judge. Making these types of transcendent determinations will and should remain a daily struggle for Christians consecrated to Christ, living faithfully, attentively, and sacrificially among their neighbors. But if such discernment is a struggle for the church, it most certainly isnt the core competency of detached government bureaucrats.

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By Joseph Gerth, The Courier-Journal / USA TODAY Network

The slaughter of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., early Sunday morning is propelling gun control to the forefront of U.S. Senate races in Kentucky and Indiana, with the Democratic candidates calling for tighter controls on gun purchases.

In an interview on Tuesday, Baron Hill, a Democratrunning for the U.S. Senate in Indiana, said he favors legislation that would ban people on the federal government's terror watch list from purchasing guns, to close the so-called "gun show loophole," and to put in place controls on private ownership of rifles like the one used in the Orlando shooting.

And on Wednesday, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, the Democrat running for the Senatein Kentucky, held a press conference in Louisville to call on Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul to renounce his vote last December against an amendment that would have prohibited those deemed by the attorney general to be a terror threat from purchasing guns and explosives.

"He should explain how many more mass shootings need to occur before he takes meaningful action to keep Americans safe," Gray said.

But Paul pushed back, saying through his campaign spokeswoman that he supported a different amendment that would have blocked the purchase of firearms by people on the government watch lists for 72 hours, giving the courts enough time to sort out whether or not there was enough evidence to deprive someone of their Second Amendment rights.

Republicans have argued their legislation is tougher because it would allow the federal government to arrest the suspected terrorist if it can convince a judge there is probable cause to block the sale of a weapon.

And U.S. Rep. Todd Young, the GOP candidate in Indiana, said through his spokeswoman that he favors legislation to keep weapons out of the hands of terror suspects and to "help authorities pursue terror suspects who try (to purchase weapons), and protect law-abiding gun owners." But Lauren Beebe, his spokeswoman, said Young was in a meeting and couldn't be reached to say exactly what legislation he would support.

The attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was carried out by Omar Mateen, who was born in America of Afghan heritage. In addition to the 49 people killed, 53 were injured.

The FBI twice had Mateen under investigation because of alleged ties to Middle Eastern extremist groups but removed him from government watch lists after agents closed the case against him, the New York Times reported. But even if the government kept him on the watch list, federal law would not have prevented him from buying the guns he used in Sunday's attack.

The National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have both opposed legislation that would prohibit gun sales to those on the terror watch list because, they say, such a law would deprive people of a constitutional right without due process. The watch lists are secret and are updated often. The ACLU contends that the process set up for people to challenge their inclusion on such a watch list is inadequate.

In what could mark a significant shift in the thinking on that, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who last year said he favored blocking those on the watch list from buying guns, tweeted Wednesday that he would meet with the NRA about its opposition to such legislation.

CBS News also released a poll that found 57 percent of Americans now favor a ban on assault weapons following the attack in Orlando, up from just 44 percent in December in the wake of the terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead and 22 seriously wounded.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made gun control an issue during her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders and has indicated that it would be an issue in the general election as well. On Tuesday, she retweeted a meme that said "weapons of war have no place on our streets," adding herself that "gun violence prevention laws might not stop every shooting or terrorist attack - but they will save lives."

Trump, speaking to the NRA in Louisville last month, said he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote against laws limiting gun rights and has frequently said that Clinton wants to repeal the Second Amendment  something that she has not said and, in fact, has denied.

Gray said in a press conference that he favors legislation to prevent those on the terror list from buying weapons as well as legislation that would close the so-called "gun-show loophole," which exempts some of those who sell weapons at gun shows from performing background checks before selling weapons.

Gray, however, said he is opposed to legislation that would end the sale of assault-style rifles, which were once banned under federal law.

"I do not support a ban on the purchase and sale of assault weapons," he said.

In Indiana, Hill favors broader reforms that he calls "common sense gun laws," including not just background checks at gun shows and a prohibition of those on the terror list from buying weapons, but also "a reasonable way to look at assault weapons that allows sportsmen to still be able to fire those kinds of weapons in a sport environment but not just have them on the street. ...

"There's common sense things we can do that allows gun owners to practice their sport, to do their hunting and the things they like to do recreationally and keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill and terrorists," he said.

Asked if his support for the ban on watch-listed people from buying guns and closing the gun show loophole would harm his campaign, Gray suggested otherwise.

"What I think is important is for us to recognize that most Americans want an end to this violence. They want an end to the massacres," Gray said. "Most Kentuckians recognize that this is just common sense."

Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, said Gray's "more narrow approach" is "probably a wash" since he and Paul will end up arguing semantics over whose approach is the correct one.

Hill's position, however, could harm him, Duffy said.

"Baron Hill has gone further, certainly ... It probably does not endear him much to conservative Democrats, which he is going to need," she said.
When I first read the description of Fr. Alexander Toriks novel Flavian, I was skeptical, says Rev. Gregory Jensen in this weeks Acton Commentary. Recently translated from Russian, it is the story of an unexpected turning point in the life of Aleksei, a quite ordinary city dweller.

A chance meeting with a former classmate turned much in the life of this physics-major-turned-successful-manager upside down, setting Aleksei on a new path with many amazing discoveries along the way. I couldnt help wondering if this was going to be simply a diatribe against business, the free market and the West. But read it I did. And what I discovered wasnt an angry preacher heaping scorn on the unrepentant but a loving pastor offering spiritual guidance to his flock.

The full text of the essay can be found here. Subscribe to the free, weekly Acton News & Commentary and other publications here.
The fight for religious liberty is only beginning to intensify in America, whether for retail giants, restaurant chains, bakers and florists, sacrificial nuns, or the imminent obstructions on the path paved by Obergefell vs. Hodges.

Yet even when facing these pressures for themselves, many American Christians still seek to withhold such freedoms from those of differing religious beliefs. Forgetting our position of exile, such a stance trades the first of our God-given freedoms for narrow self-interest and self-preservation.

Such profound disconnect was recently on vivid display at the Southern Baptist Conventions 2016 Annual Meeting, where a pastor asked Dr. Russell Moore how a Christian can possibly support religious liberty for Muslims. Do you actually believe that Jesus Christ would support this, the pastor asked, and that he would stand up and say, Well, let us protect the rights of those Baal worshipers to erect temples to Baal?

Moores answer couldnt be clearer:

What it means to be a Baptist is to support soul freedom for everybody. When you have a government that says we can decide whether or not a house of worship can be constructed based upon the theological beliefs of that house of worship, then there are going to be Southern Baptist churches in San Francisco and New York and throughout this country who are not going to be able to build. The bigger issue, though, is not one of self-interest. The bigger issue is the fact that weve been called to the gospel of Jesus Christ. A government that has the power to outlaw people from assembling together and saying what they believe, that does not turn people into Christians, that turns people into pretend Christians, and it sends them straight to hell. The answer to Islam is not government power. The answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the new birth that comes from that.

As we fight for religious liberty, let us heed Moores reminder that our action not be inspired by narrow self-interest or self-preservation, as if Christians are trapped within a temporal, humanistic order. It is the Christians role to fight for the advancement of Gods Kingdom, and this includes the fight for a government that aligns with the powers God gave it.

Conscience marks a boundary that the state may never cross, as Abraham Kuyper puts it, no matter what beliefs the conscience adopts. Religious liberty is a divine right from God.

He holds the authority, not the government, and thus we ought to be vigilant in assigning such authority to where it belongs.
Some clouds, it's been said, have a silver lining. But clouds can get even worse. Some of them have black linings, as shitty events get shittier . Those are the clouds we're talking about in this article. Here, for your depressing pleasure, are some of the worst events in history and their depressing epilogues which are so dark that no one can even talk about them.

6 Doomed Sailors Were Trapped Underwater For Two Weeks After Pearl Harbor

The surprise 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in an incredible amount of death and destruction. Nineteen ships were sunk or damaged, and over 2,400 people were killed. That's a big figure, and contains any number of horrors within it. But one horror in particular deserves attention, because of how long it took to play out.

One of the ships damaged in the attacks was the U.S.S. West Virginia. And if getting hit with two bombs, seven torpedoes, and losing over a hundred of her crew didn't ruin her day, holy shit did she have a terrible secret waiting for the crew tasked with salvaging it.

United States Navy A scene Michael Bay didn't film because he didn't want to be pigeonholed as a horror director.

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In the aftermath of the attack, the Marines standing guard over the wreckage reported hearing banging noises emanating from the ship's hull. It was first thought that these noises were coming from cooling metal, or salvage teams, or ghosts. But as they continued, it became clear what was truly going on: There were people alive and trapped in the wreckage. Worse still, they were doomed to stay there. Cutting a hole in the hull could flood the ship or spark an explosion. There was nothing to be done for them.
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Alabama's first salt aerosol therapy spa, Spiro Salt Room and Massage, in Mountain Brook, is open and attracting people statewide

Halotherapy, also known as inhaled dry salt aerosol therapy, is now available in Alabama, and people are driving long distances from throughout the State to come to the special salt room facilities. People seeking new alternative therapies sit in these salt rooms to breathe in air with measured concentrations of micronized salt particles. They relax for 45-minute sessions, letting the salt do its job of alleviating common respiratory and skin ailments.

Sheree Carter, RN, experienced the Salt Room, telling the staff afterwards, "I could actually feel my sinuses release the phlegm and toxins. It was amazing - flood gates open and pollen was gone."

Halotherapy hasn't been available in Alabama until Family Share Massage rebranded in March, adding a Salt Room. Spiro Salt Room and Massage Therapy, in Birmingham's Mountain Brook community, is located on 2816 Culver Rd in Mountain Brook Mall behind Leaf & Petal. Spiro Salt Room and Massage Therapy is providing respiratory relief to those with sinus and allergy ailments.

"More than 70 percent of people in Alabama have sinus and allergy issues," co-owner Loretta Wendel said. "People plagued by eczema see benefits after just a couple of visits. Some see the benefits immediately. We have visitors who drive 4 and a half hours from Mobile, and book a local hotel room just to use the Salt Room."

Spiro Salt Room and Massage Therapy owners, Loretta Wendel and Lee Bruno, already have their eyes on expanding the business with other locations in the State.

"Veteran salt room visitors travel the country seeking the salt room because they know it works and seek out the salt rooms. Doctors and nurses are testifying that the treatment works and say they want to come back."

After a recent treatment, Dr. Beth Scherer said, "I really enjoyed the Spiro Salt Treatment Room. Almost immediately, I could breathe better and my sinuses cleared up. The room is very relaxing and I loved the zero-gravity lounge chairs."

The Salt Room, dubbed the Santorini Salt Room, seats 6. It carries the Aegean theme with a Greek coastal vista on graphic wall murals that cover the upper halves of the walls, with salt coating the lower halves. Salt room visitors cross the room, on their way to zero-gravity loungers, on a loose salt floor, giving the room a true beach-like vibe.

"Although Salt Rooms are fairly new in the U.S., but the concept has been around for a long, long time. It's a secret that doesn't need to be a secret," said Lee Bruno,, who first experienced a Salt Room in Virginia. "When it comes to marketing, many business owners may exaggerate the unique benefits of their services. But in this case, it's our clients telling us the many benefits of the Salt Room. We're learning about new benefits all the time."

Salt room owners say salt can help skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema and a range of respiratory ailments, including colds, asthma, allergies and bronchitis. Sometimes called halotherapy chambers, the rooms are designed to provide a relaxing and unusual experience.

What also separates Spiro from other other massage centers is Spiro's Family Share Membership, a no-fee, no restriction, no penalty 12-month membership which allows individuals to share their membership with family and friends at special discounted prices.

Spiro Salt Therapy and Massage is open seven days a week, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. To make an appointment, call (205) 445-0448 or book through their website, www.spirotherapy.com.

Halotherapy boosts wellness, promotes respiratory hygiene and provides relief for many people - adults and children - with asthma, allergies, bronchitis and other common respiratory disorders.

The therapy was developed in Russia and other Eastern European countries, where since the late 19th century people seeking relief from respiratory ailments sought out treatment at the renowned salt mines that dot the region. Beginning in the late 1980s, a young Russian pulmonologist and her husband labored arduously for years to replicate salt mine conditions, and developed a device that could grind salt into microscopic particles and effectively disperse them into a closed chamber with special ventilation.

The results of their research on the health benefits of their technology and its development were first debuted in the United States in 1994, at an exhibition of Russian life-science technologies at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Va. Before the exhibition, VCU life science faculty had reviewed scores of treatments and technologies not known in the West. In the past several years, dry salt therapy has taken hold in the United States, which now has approximately 200 salt room businesses.

In Russia, Poland, Ukraine and other places in that region, salt rooms abound and the therapy is prescribed by physicians. In Western Europe, Canada and the United States, it's a form of complementary care. A Washington D.C.-area company, Halomed North America (halomedna.com), imports the equipment from Lithuania.

Above-ground salt therapy is made possible by an electromechanical device that salt room visitors might never see because the equipment is housed outside the salt room, on an adjacent wall. Halogenerators micronize pharmaceutical grade salt and, via a fan, disperses it into the salt room. The only sign that there's equipment at work is a small sensor mounted on a salt room wall, which continuously measures the level of salt in the air and prompts the halo generator to either idle or produce more dry salt aerosol, to keep salt room conditions consistent with settings entered at the beginning of each session.

Spiro Salt Room & Massage Therapy

(205) 445-0448

www.spirotherapy.com

2816 Culver Rd., Mountain Brook, AL 35223

Contacts:

Donna Francavilla, FSC, 205-243-1233

Owners:

Lee Bruno (205) 585-7541

Loretta Wendel (205) 936-9594
The FBI has fallen short on assessing the privacy risks and accuracy of a huge facial recognition database used by several law enforcement agencies, a government auditor has said.

A new report, released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office Wednesday, shows the FBI's use of facial recognition technology is "far greater" than previously understood, said Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who requested the GAO report.

The FBI's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which allows law enforcement agencies to search a database of more than 30 million photos of 16.9 million people, raises serious privacy concerns, Franken added in a press release.

"Facial recognition technology is a new and powerful tool that holds great promise for law enforcement," he said. "But if we dont ensure its accuracy and guard against misuse, I am concerned about the risk of innocent Americans being inadvertently swept up in criminal investigations."

The FBI's use of NGI-IPS has lacked transparency because the agency has been slow to assess the privacy impact when changes are made to it, according to the GAO report.

Before NGI-IPS became fully operational in April 2015, the agency also conducted only limited accuracy tests of the service, the GAO added.

The FBI "has not assessed how often errors occur," the report said.

The agency isn't conducting operational tests of the system, added Diana Maurer, a homeland security director at GAO. While the FBI has tested the system in controlled settings, "what we don't know is how accurate it is in real-world use," she said in a GAO podcast.

The FBI agreed with a handful of recommendations from the GAO but disagreed with two others. The agency and the Department of Justice don't need to re-evaluate the way they assess the privacy impacts of the system because those assessments were done and because the DOJ "continually strives to assess and refine its internal processes and procedures," the FBI said.

The FBI searches photo databases "in strict compliance with state and federal law," the agency added.

Concerns about the accuracy of the system are overstated, according to the FBI. NGI-IPS is not used for a positive identification of a criminal suspect, but instead "provides a gallery of likely candidates that are to be used as investigative leads."

The FBI has no authority to enforce the accuracy of photos coming from other sources, it added.

Photos in NGI-IPS come from criminal mug shots, drivers' license applications, and other sources.

As of December 2015, the FBI had agreements with seven states that allow them to search NGI-IPS and was working with more states to grant access.
Douglas Healey / AP

In advance of full details on its pending split into two companies, Xerox revealed Conduent as the name of the business-process outsourcing company it is creating, with a Xerox spokesman stating no decision has been made on any headquarters location for the new company.

Earlier this week, Norwalk-based Xerox (NYSE: XRX) announced the hire of former Infosys executive and New Jersey resident Ashok Vemuri as CEO of the new Conduent, with the company having yet to name the executive who will lead Xeroxs remaining legacy document technology operations.
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As some of Mark Mellers staff reach retirement age, he is beginning to worry he wont find qualified people in the area to replace them.

Meller, a manager at PDC International Corporation in Norwalk, has already had a hard time finding a machine programmer to replace one of the companys employees who will be leaving soon. The company designs and manufactures shrink packaging systems and tamper-evident banding.

How do we get good labor? Meller asked members of the Southwest Connecticut Manufacturing Consortium, which meets monthly to discuss industry issues.

A few seats down, Gene LaPorta, outreach coordinator for Housatonic Community Colleges Advanced Manufacturing Center had just mentioned that six of the schools 35 recent manufacturing graduates were still looking for jobs.

LaPorta told Meller he couldnt promise him a programmer, but the centers students had enough manufacturing knowledge to easily be trained to do the job. Others also piped in with ideas for how Meller could find someone to meet his needs.

Meller left the event, held in Bridgeport at HCCs Beacon Hall, with several options for finding a new hire.

Immediate feedback

Lindy Lee Gold, an official with the state Department of Economic and Community Development, said in its first three years, the consortium has proven to be a great place for manufacturers to air their concerns and get immediate feedback on programs and initiatives available to them.

Its not an easy task to ask for assistance, Gold said. It really helps them to access the help they need.

Meller said he has already benefited from funding available through the state for new equipment.

Weve been able to get state funding for just becoming more innovative, he said. We had some really old equipment, and the group has supported us to know how to even find funding.

In 2014, DECD set up the $70 million Manufacturing Innovation Fund, which includes the Incumbent Worker Training Program, Apprenticeship Program, Young Manufacturers Academy, Manufacturing Voucher Program and other initiatives.

At this months consortium meeting, attendees heard from two members of the governors staff on policy and government affairs, Paul Mounds, Jr., senior director, and Aaron Frankel, senior associate. The men said hundreds of companies have been given assistance through the funds programs.

Because of this, Mounds said, he foresees a continued investment in the innovation fund.

I will say theres a high likelihood we will continue this program because of the high success, he said.

Mounds said the state realizes it needs to step up its assistance to manufacturers.

Were not the ones creating these jobs. You are, he told the group. And we need to support you. Were not the ones making these products. You are.

Available funding

Mounds and Frankel also noted that recently the Connecticut Green Bank launched a way for manufacturers to lower their energy costs with the Energy on the Line program, funded through the Manufacturing Innovation Fund and private-sector dollars through the Green Bank.

The program provides up to $50,000 in supplemental funding to manufacturers who plan to complete a qualifying green energy project using the Green Banks Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy program. The deadline to apply for that program is Sept. 16.

Thomas Auray, co-owner of Bridgeport Fittings in Stratford, said its important for manufacturers to connect with each other and with state officials on a regular basis. The monthly meetings provide that networking time.

This is a nice opportunity to communicate with different manufacturing allies, he said.

Although the speakers enlisted to address the group at each meeting are helpful, its the give and take provided in the meetings  like the exchange that gave Meller options for finding a new hire  that makes the meetings successful, said Kurt Westby, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Labor.

The consortium will not meet in July or August, but plans to have its next meeting in mid-September.

ktorres@hearstmediact.com; 203-330-6227
The state Board of Examiners for Nursing has revoked the licenses of four nurses and disciplined eight other nurses, with all but one of the cases connected to alcohol or drug abuse.

Meeting in Hartford on Wednesday, the board revoked the license of Leslie Matejek, a registered nurse from Derby, after she tested positive for cocaine three times in 2015, the boards memorandum of decision said.

The memo shows that in 2010 Matejeks license was placed on probation for four years after she admitted falsifying a prescription for Oxycontin. According to the memo, she tested positive for oxycodone three times in 2010 and morphine twice in 2011. Her probation was later extended to February of this year, with weekly random drug tests.

The board also revoked the license of Jennifer Reinhard, a licensed practical nurse from Torrington, because it found that she had violated the terms of an earlier two-year probation. Reinhard did not supply reports to show she was seeing a therapist or proof that she had passed weekly drug tests, the memorandum of decision said.

Immediate danger

On Wednesday, the board suspended the license of Dorsey Saunders, an LPN from Bridgeport, because she posed a clear and immediate danger to the public, state Department of Public Health (DPH) records show.

On March 23 the board placed her license on probation for four years for stealing drugs, including oxycodone and fentanyl, while on duty at Fairview of Fairfield, a nursing home in the Southport section of Fairfield.

Officials from the state Department of Public Health repeatedly tried to contact her and were unsuccessful, so they concluded she had failed to comply with the terms of her probation, records show.

The board also revoked the RN license of John Sherman of Watertown, N.Y., who was working at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan. The board found that in 2014 Sherman stole anti-anxiety drugs for his own use and used alcohol or drugs to excess, the memorandum of decision said.

The license of Holly Cocchiola, an LPN from Bethlehem, was also revoked. State records show that she tested positive for heroin after a car accident on Feb. 14. She was arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance, evading responsibility and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, records show.

The board also suspended the license of Dawn Noyce, an RN from Canterbury. State records show that in April 2015, she pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol and was placed on probation for 18 months. Her probation officer, Julie Valliere, told DPH that Noyce had been fired from two nursing jobs in the past year and has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, records show.

Medication stolen

The board imposed a four-year probation on Jamie Libertini, an RN from New Milford, who admitted abusing Percocet, Dilaudid and Xanax to excess between August 2012 and August 2013, according to a consent order.

Libertini also admitted stealing Dilaudid from the patient stock in August 2013 while working as a nurse at Danbury Hospital. She also took blank prescription forms from the hospital and forged 12 prescription orders to obtain Ambien and Xanax, the order said.

On March 30, 2015, Libertini tested positive for an anti-anxiety drug for which she did not have a prescription, and on April 29, 2015, her license was temporarily suspended, state records show. DPH records show the hospital fired Libertini.

On Sept. 9, 2015, Danbury police charged Libertini with multiple counts of obtaining controlled drugs with forged prescriptions, fraud, forgery, larceny and identity theft, DPH records show. She received accelerated rehabilitation, a special form of probation, in connection with the charges, records show.

The board also:

 Imposed a four-year probation on Lori Karen Salupen, an RN from Bristol, after she admitted at a hearing that she had stolen and abused Percocet in September 2015 while working at Cook Willow Health Center in Plymouth, the boards memorandum of decision states.

 Imposed a four-year probation on Shelly Volpe, an LPN from Groton under a consent order with the board. The order said that she took oxycodone and other drugs from the Norwich Rehabilitation and Care Center, where she was working, and falsified one or more drug reports.

 Placed the license of Lindsay M. Wayman, an RN from Naugatuck, on probation for two years, a consent order said. The order said that while working as a nurse at Waterbury Hospital in 2008, Wayman abused alcohol, marijuana and/or opiates to excess and was unable to perform her duties as a nurse.

 Imposed a one-year probation on Allyssa Graham, an advanced practice registered nurse from Old Lyme, who will not be able to prescribe medication for herself or relatives during that year, under a consent order. Between July 2014 and July 2015, Graham prescribed multiple controlled substances for her husband and did not maintain medical records to support the prescriptions for painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, state records show.

 Placed the license of Melody L. Williams-Destra, an RN from Bloomfield, on probation for one year after it found that in 2015 she created two false state Department of Education health assessment forms for a friends grandchildren and forged a co-workers name to the forms, records show.

This story was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team (www.c-hit.org).
WASHINGTON  Less than a week after the Orlando mass shooting, the Supreme Court is poised to decide whether to hear a Connecticut gun-rights groups appeal of the states assault-weapons ban.

A decision could come as early as Thursday or Friday. If the nations highest court takes the case, Shew v. Malloy, the justices would hear oral arguments in the fall term and issue a ruling by June 2017.

If not, the 2014 ruling of the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit which upheld the post-Newtown ban  would remain in place.

The firearms that Connecticut has inaccurately and pejoratively labeled assault weapons in reality are semi-automatic firearms with safety- and accuracy-enhancing features that millions of Americans possess for lawful purposes, said a court brief submitted on behalf of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League.

Although Connecticut has restricted military-style semi-automatic rifles like the AK-47 and AR-15 for decades, the post-Newtown law strengthened it through listing specific guns by make and model. It also bars weapons with certain military features such as a detachable ammunition magazine, a pistol grip, a flash suppressor or a folding stock.

The law restrict access to firearms that are owned by a small percentage of gun owners and are disproportionately used in gun crime, particularly the most heinous forms of gun violence, the state of Connecticuts court brief said, citing Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanzas use of a Bushmaster AR-15 to discharge 154 bullets in the killing of 20 children and six adult staff members.

The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, also used an AR-15-type rifle to kill 49 at the Pulse nighclub.

In its landmark D.C. v Heller ruling in 2008, the court stated the Second Amendment does, in fact, confer the right of individuals to own firearms. But the opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia said that Second Amendment rights are not unlimited.

And late last year, the Supreme Court refused to consider a challenge to an assault-weapons ban imposed by the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Ill.

In that case, Scalia joined another conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, in disagreeing with the high courts decision not to take the Illinois case.

The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting, Thomas wrote. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.

With Scalias seat still unfilled and the court split 4-4, the likelihood of four votes to hear the case is open to question. It takes a minimum of four justices to decide to consider a petition.

I am cautiously optimistic that the court, when it takes its next Second Amendment case, will reiterate that reasonable gun laws are permitted, and that includes assault-weapons bans like Connecticuts, said Jonathan Lowy, legal action project director at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. I think the gun lobby should be very careful what it wishes for.

dan@hearstdc.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Your zip code can affect your life expectancy, according to a study released today. If you live in Cuyahoga County, you can find your community's life expectancy by searching in the box below using your zip code.

Research by the Virginia Commonwealth University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows health disparities and large gaps in life expectancy, particularly between suburban communities and city neighborhoods. Read the full story about this study by Plain Dealer reporter Casey Ross.

to load this Caspio

by Caspio
Staring down the barrel of a rifle, Anne Marie Murphy pulled Dylan Hockley close to her, trying to shield him from the hail of bullets that would kill them both.

Dylan, 6, had special needs, his family said Monday. And Murphy was his "amazing" aide, they said. He loved her, pointing happily to her photo on the Hockley's refrigerator every day.

"We take great comfort in knowing that Dylan was not alone when he died," said his parents, Ian and Nicole Hockley.

Dylan and Anne Marie were among 26 students and school staff members who died in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown on Friday, killed by a lone gunman who had burst into their classroom.

Murphy's family said the Sandy Hook resident, originally from Katonah, N.Y., was "fun-loving," and "artistic," according to Newsday. She loved the outdoors and her family.

In Murphy's obituary, her family asked for donations to be made to the charity Autism Speaks.

The Hockley family, although devastated by their son's death, took the time to honor those who helped him.

"We cannot speak highly enough of Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach, exceptional women who knew both our children and who specifically helped us navigate Dylan's special education needs," Dylan's parents said. "Dylan's teacher, Vicki Soto, was warm and funny, and Dylan loved her dearly."

Soto, Hochsprung, the school's principal, and Sherlach, the school's psychologist, all also died Friday in the shooting, trying to help their students. Another staff member, Rachel D'Avino, was an intern who also helped special needs students. She was studying to earn a graduate certificate in the behavioral analysis of children with Autism.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the other families who have also been affected by this tragedy," the Hockley family said. "We are forever bound together and hope we can support and find solace with each other."

Ian and Nicole, who have an older son, Jake, moved their family to Newtown from England two years ago, choosing Sandy Hook for the community and elementary school.

"We do not and shall never regret this choice," the Hockleys said. "Our boys have flourished here and our family's happiness has been limitless."

Dylan's family said everyone who met him, loved him.

"His beaming smile would light up any room and his laugh was the sweetest music," they said. "He loved to cuddle, play tag every morning at the bus stop with our neighbors, bounce on the trampoline, play computer games, watch movies, the color purple, seeing the moon and eating his favorite foods, especially chocolate. He was learning to read and was so proud when he read us a new book every day. He adored his big brother Jake, his best friend and role model."
NORWALK  A Norwalk High School student was arrested by Norwalk police after threatening harm to a 'hit list' of 29 students there.

On Saturday June 11, 2016 the Norwalk Police Special Victims Unit investigated a threats complaint involving a letter that had been written in January 2016 and had threatened harm to specific individuals.

"The incident was investigated thoroughly and was brought to a resolution quickly," said Norwalk police Lt. Terrence Blake.

Special Victims investigators quickly identified the juvenile author, who was subsequently arrested and charged with 29 counts of breach of peace.

"Administrators at Norwalk High School learned of a potential threatening situation Sunday evening and have been working with the Norwalk Police Department since then," said Norwalk Public Schools spokesperson Brenda Wilcox-Williams. "Families of individuals directly impacted were contacted by the school on Sunday night to make them aware."

The mother of one targeted student, who asked not be identified by name, said she was stunned and concerned when she was notified by school officials that her child had been named on the list.

"I was shocked, and also curious to know who the child was. That was not disclosed to us," she said. "I do feel that the school followed the best protocol by informing parents and removing the child from the school."

That mother expressed concern about the possibility of future incidents.

"In the case of this individual, who knows if she really had intent. Her life is changed forever now," the mother said. "It's important to know what goes on in the minds of some students. I hope that they will have resources in school to help kids to feel good about themselves and to identify students who may be having issues."
RIDGELAND, Miss. -- Senators Michael Watson and Brice Wiggins, along with Representatives Manly Barton, Charles Busby, Jeff Guice, John Read, and Hank Zuber received an "A" on Empower Mississippi's 2016 Education Report Card, which grades every member of the legislature on key school choice and education reform votes from the past legislative session.

This year, 45 members in the House and 21 members in the Senate received an "A," and a majority in both chambers received at least a "B." The legislation that was graded in the 2016 Education Report Card includes appointed superintendents, charter school and Education Scholarship Account expansions, and the renewal of the Dyslexia Therapy Scholarship.

Hank Zuber, Mississippi House of Representative from Ocean Springs says he was glad the Dyslexia Therapy Scholarship was renewed and is proud of the overall work he and his constituents have done in and for Mississippi.

File photo/Gulflive.com

"I am glad I voted for the dyslexia scholarship," Zuber said. "The program was about to retire and it will help a bunch of students not only cope, but overcome dyslexia in Mississippi, so I am very happy for that vote specifically. The "A" grade shows that we are trying to help those who are at the bottom of the ladder for whatever reason and trying to help and assist them reach the top."

Grant Callen, president of Empower Mississippi praised the legislature for voting for items to better assist parents and their children in the state of Mississippi.

"Because of the actions of this legislature, I am proud to report that more parents than ever now have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their child," Callen said.

"We still have a long way to go to ensure that every child in our state has access to a high quality education, but we are making strong progress. Governor Phil Bryant, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, and Speaker Philip Gunn deserve a lot of credit for moving Mississippi in the right direction on education issues. We are on our way to creating for Mississippi a world class education system."

By grading lawmakers on a scale of A-F, such as students and schools, Empower Mississippi's Education Report Card provides a clear and comprehensive assessment of who is truly keeping the promise of a quality education in the Magnolia State.

Twenty members of the legislature, including 13 in the House and seven in the Senate were named to the Honor Roll, which recognizes key members who led on education issues this year.

In the Senate, the members were: Senate President Pro Tempore Terry Burton, Senate Education Committee Chairman Gray Tollison, Senators Chris Caughman, Buck Clarke, Joey Fillingane, John Polk, and Michael Watson.

In the House, the members were: Speaker Philip Gunn, Speaker Pro Tempore Greg Snowden, House Education Committee Chairman John Moore, Representatives Toby Barker, Joel Bomgar, Randy Boyd, Charles Busby, Larry Byrd, Angela Cockerham, Carolyn Crawford, Dana Criswell, Deborah Dixon, and Brad Touchstone.

The four bills included in this year's Report Card were:

Charter Schools

Appointed Superintendents

Education Scholarship Account

Dyslexia Scholarship

The full comprehensive report can be found here.
MERIDIAN, Mississippi -- Meridian police are looking for a man involved in a domestic altercation that led to the shooting of a child in a car seat.

Capt. John Griffith tells The Clarion-Ledger the toddler was in the car when she was hit in the head by a bullet while two men argued inside a residence. Sgt. Dareall Thompson tells WTOK-TV the victim is a girl.

Neither of the men is the child's father. Griffith says one of the men is her mother's boyfriend.

Police are questioning one man and searching for the man who is believed to have fired the shot that hit the car, and subsequently struck the child.

The child was transported to a hospital in Jackson. Her condition is unknown.

The shooting occurred around 11:40 a.m. Wednesday.
Teams and players to watch in the District 5 boys soccer playoffs

Check out the teams and players to watch and the District 5 Class 1A and 2A boys soccer playoffs open.
Cajun time: Buster Tubbs brings the spice to Tavares

Longing for some Louisiana fare? Consider Buster Tubbs in Tavares, where the secret is in the roux, according to chef and spice-master Pernell Stewart.
RIDGELAND, Mississippi -- Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves was honored as the "Education Reformer of the Year" Thursday during the annual Empower Mississippi awards luncheon.

According to Empower Mississippi, Reeves was honored "for his role in championing strong education reforms this session, including appointed superintendents, charter school and Education Scholarship Account program expansions and the Dyslexia Therapy Scholarship program renewal."

The recently-concluded legislative session marked the fifth straight year legislators have adopted student-centered education reforms, according to Empower Mississippi, which says those programs are "designed to provide accountability, transparency and most importantly new education options for families."

Reeves was honored on the same day Jackson County legislatures received a grade of "A" on Empower Mississippi legislative education report card.

The praise lavished on legislators Thursday stands in stark contrast to the criticism they've received for their failure to adequately fund public education. The legislature approved a budget for the coming fiscal year which once again fails to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) and cut K-12 education funding overall by roughly $7.6 million.

Nevertheless, Empower Mississippi credited Reeves for his leadership in education reform.

"Over the past five years, and especially this year, Lt. Gov. Reeves has demonstrated his commitment to creating a world class education system in Mississippi," said Empower Mississippi president Grant Callen. "He has been a steadfast advocate for school choice and the critical education reforms that open new doors of opportunity to Mississippi students.

"Because of Lt. Gov. Reeves' leadership, more parents than ever will have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children, and I'm proud to recognize him with our 2016 'Education Reformer of the Year' award."
Opinion Wordle

The next day I woke to find myself in a WhatsApp group titled Quordle is Awesome!! A small group of three. There was no getting out of it now.
Any sane person would think that by his behaviour, George Osborne is deliberately plotting to wreck Britain's economy and engineer a financial meltdown in the event that we vote Leave next week.

This follows his unveiling of the disgraceful contents of his proposed 'emergency post-referendum budget'.

The Chancellor warned that in the event of a vote for Brexit, he would raise income tax and fuel duty, while slashing funds for the NHS and cutting pensions. He said the national defence budget would also be in line for reductions. (Although, our massive foreign aid budget would be protected.)

The Chancellor, pictured, warned that in the event of a vote for Brexit, he would raise income tax and fuel duty, while slashing funds for the NHS and cutting pensions

It is as if the Chancellor has pointed a gun at the British economy and announced that he will fire it unless Britain votes to remain in the EU.

This is an act of profound recklessness. I also believe it is the moral equivalent of blackmail.

It is depressing that Treasury mandarins have abetted this shabby exercise  another example of the collapse of traditional standards of integrity in the senior ranks of the Civil Service.

There are a number of reasons why the Chancellor's comments were utterly misguided.

First, there is no serious evidence that Britain will be plunged into an economic disaster if the UK votes Leave  unless Mr Osborne personally sets out to construct one.

Not even the Prime Minister thinks there is that risk! Indeed, in a speech last November, David Cameron emphasised that Britain's economic prosperity would not be jeopardised if we leave the EU.

He said: 'No one doubts that Britain is a proud, successful thriving country.' He added: 'Whether we could be successful outside the EU  that's not the question'.

There is a blatant contradiction between the PM's quiet confidence and Mr Osborne's cynical alarmism.

David Cameron emphasised that Britain's economic prosperity would not be jeopardised if we leave the EU

The truth is that the Chancellor is bluffing  and he must know it.

Furthermore, there is no possibility that he will be able to get such a post-June 23 emergency budget through parliament. Fifty-seven Tory MPs have made it clear they'll vote against it. So have Labour.

In other words, this is fantasy economics dreamt up as a political gimmick.

Also, if the British people decide to leave the EU, a humiliated Mr Osborne will be forced to quit the Treasury and thus will not be in a position to deliver any budget. For, after such a defeat, he would have no credibility as Chancellor and couldn't cling to office. Mr Osborne's period in charge of the Treasury has been marked by a litany of failures.

He has failed to honour his promise to balance the national books  so much so that it looks highly likely that the national debt will still be increasing in 2020.

Almost every one of his budgets has ended up in a mess. He has repeatedly got his sums wrong or made political miscalculations which have forced him into embarrassing U-turns.

Mr Osborne may be a clever tactician, but he has no overall strategy. He has done nothing to rebalance the British economy away from its heavy dependence on service industries and consumer demand. The recovery we have seen in recent years is very precarious as a result.

But this is a man who spends insufficient time in his office and pays little or no attention to detail.

In truth, Mr Osborne's main interest is political. Along with his formal role as Chancellor, he has consistently played the unofficial role of the Prime Minister's chief political advisor.

As such, he seemed happy with the risibly inadequate concessions from Brussels ahead of the referendum campaign.

Subsequently, he's been in charge of the deeply flawed Remain campaign strategy, where, alongside Labour's Lord (Peter) Mandelson he has been accused of being behind the so-called 'Project Fear' propaganda.

So, while responsible for the nation's finances, he's also been the strategic mastermind for the Remain campaign. This dual responsibility has turned out to be a disaster for Britain.

Such an obvious conflict of roles means that Mr Osborne has been risking Britain's future economic prosperity while using the Treasury as a tool to try to score political points against his opponents.

Any responsible Chancellor would have put the national finances first.

George Osborne has not done so  and, as a consequence, has generated a revolt that has plunged the Conservative Party into open civil war.

Disciple has broken down and backbenchers are in mutiny.
Saucy: Kathy Lette, right, with fellow writer Laura Bates

Saucy novelist Kathy Lette, 57, recalls her teenage sexual exploits in Sydney, Australia, 40 years ago: 'The boys I grew up with disproved the theory of evolution  they were evolving into apes. They thought that "sex drive" meant doing it in the car. I suspect it had to do with that little sign on the mirror which reads, "Objects may appear larger than they are".' A distasteful thought it might be, but doesn't Kathy  the wife of human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC  seem a little cavalier in today's world about these sexual misdemeanours?

David Cameron, 49, is suffering from a stye in one of his eyes. 'Stress over the referendum vote,' explains a Tory source. Who'd imagine the friendly, tolerant referendum voting process could have such an unhappy result?

The Cabinet presented the Queen with a Dartington crystal vase costing about 125 for her 90th birthday. For a woman with four homes stuffed with antique ornaments and furniture! No 10 officials were advised by palace staff that a cash donation to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Trust would do nicely. But Dave's minions chose a vase  possibly because 125 would seem paltry as a charity donation.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's appearance at Royal Ascot was a birthday present to the Queen. The Duke of Cambridge Stakes was named for Prince William by his grandmother in 2013. Suggestions that a race be named after his stepmother, the Duchess of Cornwall, have not yet borne fruit. 'It would be like naming a race after [historic royal mistress] Alice Keppel,' explains a source.

Margaret Thatcher's ex-press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham comments in his local Yorkshire paper: 'It is sad to see David Cameron and George Osborne wrecking their political careers, with the compliant help of assorted elites, businessmen who want a quiet life and economists who always get things wrong...' Sir Bernard doesn't sound sad, does he?

Prince William and the Duchess of Cornwall have now sworn Privy Council oaths promising to defend the country against 'all foreign princes, persons, prelates, states, or potentates'. Is this compatible with membership of the EU? A PC official says: 'This point does not appear to have been raised.' Time it was!

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's appearance at Royal Ascot was a birthday present to the Queen
What do Oregon Berry Packing, Oregon Heritage Farms, Loch Lolly Farms, Acumed, Bag & Baggage Productions, Beaverton Foods, Forest Dental Products, and Global Aviation all have in common? They are all Hillsboro area businesses, and they have all opened their doors with a warm local welcome to the I Love Hillsboro+ educational travel bus to demonstrate how they produce their goods and services.

The Hillsboro Community Senior Center and AgeCelebration educational travel program showcases local Hillsboro area businesses to learn how goods are made, packaged, and distributed. Residents are often surprised to discover just how many area businesses are global manufacturing companies producing a wide array of diverse products for clients. Community partnership is at the core of the I Love Hillsboro+ initiative, which connects residents with local business leaders, and provides an innovative education opportunity for those who enjoy in-depth behind-the-scenes looks at processes. Another integral partner is Ride Connection which provides transportation for the program. Ride Connection is a non-profit transportation network serving people 60 years of age and older, and people with disabilities in Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington Counties.

I Love Hillsboro+ offers education travel opportunities on the last Tuesday of each month to a different local area business. The Summer series includes Schoch Dairy Farm & Creamery on June 28, Smith Berry Barn on July 26, and Forward Stride Equine Therapy in Beaverton on August 30. The bus leaves at 9:30 am from the Hillsboro Community Senior Center. To register by phone, call 503-615-1090 or register online at http://www.hillsboro-oregon.gov/HBsignUp.
The Umbrage Weekly Herald serves the ancient market town of Umbrage and the outlying villages of Blameworthy, Grudgebear, Livid, Longface and Temperley. These past few weeks, the newspaper has received more readers letters than ever before.

The correspondence kicked off at the beginning of May with a letter from Mrs Emily Plight. Dear Sir, it began, When I came downstairs this morning, I found my six-year-old daughter in floods of tears.

Overnight, her pet goldfish, Sparky, had passed away. This was the third such tragedy in as many weeks. How many more senseless deaths in the goldfish community are we as a country prepared to tolerate?

Before joining the so-called European Union, the nation's goldfish could expect a long and happy life

Hammering nails into walls was easier in the days before the Brussels bureaucrats interfering

Before we joined the so-called European Union, this nations goldfish could expect long and happy lives.

I have many happy childhood memories of goldfish frolicking amongst the buttercups in our beautiful English meadows. But nowadays, they are weighed down by Red Tape from Brussels. How long will these senseless deaths continue? Vote Leave!

The same page carried a letter of complaint from Mr Reginald Gasket, alongside a photograph of him nursing a sore thumb.

Sir, I was hanging a picture on my living-room wall the other day when my hammer hit my thumb, causing me unimaginable pain.

Naturally, I complained to the relevant authorities. They informed me, in no uncertain terms, that the hammer conformed to EU regulations. Consequently, there was nothing they could do about it!

So much for David Camerons much-touted advantages to remaining in Europe! How many more bruised thumbs must we be forced to suffer before we call an end to this Euro-madness?

There followed a flurry of letters detailing stories of misery and woe. Taking up the topic of goldfish, Mrs T. Antrum pointed out that the untold millions forcibly removed from the pockets of the townsfolk of Umbrage to line the pockets of the Eurocrats would be better spent on more spacious goldfish bowls offering state-of-the-art temperature control, colourful underwater furniture, an automatic change of water and food on demand.

Mr Fury from Lower Rankling had also experienced injuries from EU-approved hammers.

An EU hammer dropped from my hand onto my little toe last Tuesday, and it hurt like billy-oh, he complained. But needless to say, I am still awaiting a letter of apology from Monsieur Jean-Claude Juncker. So much for nations working together!?

Another letter, from Ms G. Rouse suggested that the money we send each week to the EU might be more usefully spent on providing a live-in doctor and nurse for every household in the country. And with the money left over, we could build a 12ft wall along the entire coastline of Britain, just in case.

In the final run-up to the Referendum, The Umbrage Weekly Herald has allotted two extra pages to Readers Letters.

In the new issue, Mrs M. Hatter points out that you only have to look at the sheer calibre of those at the forefront of the Brexit campaign  Nigel Farage, Norman Lamont, George Galloway, Iain Duncan Smith, to name but a few  to realise that we would be better off out.

With a future Cabinet consisting of that great team of statesmen, the UK would be guaranteed to beat its rivals to a pulp!

My only hope is that they can persuade the formidable Robert Kilroy-Silk back to his rightful position on the front-line, hopefully taking over the demanding Treasury portfolio!

Many correspondents complain of the crippling effect of EU regulations on our traditional way of life. Hands off our Great British Banger! says Mr Tom Bowler, of Umbrage Meats.

It may surprise your readers to know that, thanks to successive EU rulings, our hands are tied. We are no longer permitted to mix traditional ingredients into our world famous sausages.

Yet it was that centuries-old recipe of Snout (7 per cent), Foreskin (12 per cent), Cardboard (15 per cent), Toenail (10 per cent) and Other (56 per cent) that gave the Great British Banger its wonderfully distinctive flavour. And whatever happened to good old British gristle?

Finally, Victoria Sponge writes in to point out that like so many other British men and women, I have become fuller-figured under the present EU guidelines.

In the 43 years of direct Brussels rule, I look much older than my 17-year-old self and will vote leave as a result

Before Britain joined the Common Market in 1973, I was a slim 17-year-old, able to touch my toes and perform cartwheels.
Fatal error: Prime Minister David Cameron

Whatever happens next Thursday, an almighty mess will be left behind. In the Tory party there will be acrimony and division. In the country as a whole, the political class will have never been held in such low esteem.

This has been a dreadful campaign, full of scare stories and lies, and almost totally bereft of anything approximating what might be called statesmanlike vision. I believe our forebears would be ashamed and aghast if they could see the depths to which our great nation has sunk.

There has been fault on both sides. Remain and Leave have joined in peddling wild exaggerations and untruths, and they have both largely avoided serious and reasoned discussion about the future of this country.

Blame is therefore widely shared. But there is one man who, if he had chosen to, could have spared us much of the rancour and vituperation. He, above all others, has succeeded in turning this debate into an ugly bare-knuckle fight.

The consequence is that it is very hard to see how the man of whom I speak  David Cameron  can survive next week's referendum.

If Brexit wins, he is finished. Yet even if Remain prevails  unless it is by an overwhelming majority  he will be a wounded, discredited and unhappy Prime Minister.

It didn't have to be like this. I'm sure Mr Cameron didn't expect it to be  even in his worst nightmares.

But a combination in him of carelessness, arrogance and something close to contemptuousness has turned what could, and should, have been a spirited and essentially positive process into a destructive fight to the death.

Let's go back. I shall give Mr Cameron the benefit of the doubt, and assume that when he spoke of obtaining a 'new settlement' for Britain in his Bloomberg speech in January 2013, he meant what he said.

But once the negotiations began  and no one can accuse the Prime Minister of not undertaking them energetically  it quickly became clear that our obdurate EU partners would only offer him a small slice of his not-particularly-taxing demands.

He, of course, made the fatal error of saying he was certain an agreement could be reached, and at no stage threatened to walk away from negotiations. On the contrary, he seemed desperate to conclude them come what may, though it had been suggested that a referendum would not take place until 2017.

Even when he came back with his paltry package, he had a choice. He could have frankly told the British people that the deal was in some respects a disappointing one, and left it to them to judge whether it was sufficient. Instead, he insulted our intelligence by claiming that a self-evidently thin agreement was a triumph.

Dignified: Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the leading lights of the Leave campaign, have for the most part maintained a more good-humoured and statesmanlike air than Messrs Cameron and Osborne

Have you noticed that Mr Cameron and the Remain camp have made virtually no attempt in recent weeks to defend this supposedly stupendous deal? The reason they seldom mention it is they know any such claims could be effortlessly demolished by their critics.

Nor have we heard from the Remainers a single rousing argument for staying members of the EU, such as standing by our partners or safeguarding a continent which this country spent much blood and gold in liberating over 70 years ago.

No, in place of such arguments a lie machine has been installed at No 10 which is spewing out preposterous and unbelievable forecasts and scare stories. The man who said as recently as last November that Britain could thrive outside the EU now predicts plummeting house prices, falling incomes and economic mayhem.

To which the obvious response was, and is: how can someone who issues such apocalyptic warnings about the allegedly calamitous effects of a Brexit vote have ever thought it sensible to call a referendum in the first place?

In short, Mr Cameron has intentionally upped the ante. Instead of largely standing aside from the debate  as did Harold Wilson, who was Labour Prime Minister during the 1975 referendum on the Common Market  he has put himself at the head of an increasingly hysterical and outlandish movement with an overwrought George Osborne at his side.

I don't deny that the Leave camp has sometimes replied in kind, though its leading lights, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, have for the most part maintained a more good-humoured and statesmanlike air than Messrs Cameron and Osborne.

My point is simply that it is the Prime Minister, above all, who has lowered the tone, and turned what should have been a respectful, if inevitably lively, debate into a nasty, and very un-British, slanging match.

Last week we witnessed a new low as No 10 sanctioned attacks on Boris Johnson to smear the politician regarded as the main threat to Remain. Delivering scripted sallies during a TV debate, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd alluded to Boris's wandering hands, and accused him of being solely driven by a desire to become PM.

Misjudgment has followed misjudgment on Mr Cameron's part. The first of many self-inflicted wounds came during the last general election campaign when he unguardedly disclosed that he would be standing down before the 2020 election, thereby undermining his own authority.

The truth is that throughout this whole sorry business he could have scarcely made a greater mess of things if he had deliberately set out to damage his party, his country  and himself.

For the irony of all this is that Mr Cameron has placed his own job on the line, and his reputation at risk, by going nuclear. In 1975, few people expected Harold Wilson to resign if he lost the referendum since, in common with most politicians on both sides, he had conducted himself with decorum.

Now, Tory MPs are queuing up to plunge the knife in the Prime Minister's back  and his front.

And as he finds himself fighting for his political life, so his self-interest lies in making ever more outrageous claims in the hope of scaring voters into voting for Remain. He is in the unedifying position of having to exaggerate the perils of Brexit, and talking down his country, in order to survive.

In other words, the Prime Minister's own best interests, and those of his country, are increasingly divergent, since it is surely indisputable that all this talk of Armageddon is not good for Britain, as sensible Remain supporters will concede.

Win or lose, I'm afraid Mr Cameron is almost bound to be left injured, possibly fatally. Whatever one's view of him, there can be no joy in seeing him recklessly throwing so much away.

Since he became Prime Minister in 2010, the economy has rebounded, and the public finances are much improved. The country recovered on his watch.

Nor should anyone except for Corbynistas rejoice at the prospect of a fractious and divided Tory party. If Mr Cameron is ousted, there won't be a smooth transition. I foresee months, if not years, of internecine warfare among Conservatives.

Perhaps the greatest casualty of what has happened is the loss of public trust. Even voters drawn to Remain recoil at the debasement of political discourse, and regret that lying has become such an accepted part of political life. That is a sad legacy to leave behind.
Jokes and banter are great in the workplace but if you've got a boss who takes it too far it's important to stand up for yourself before it escalates.

Karen Gately, a leadership and people management-specialist, says it's important to understand that bullying is repeated, unreasonable behaviour that puts your health and safety at risk.

'If your boss repeatedly behaves in ways that cause you to feel humiliated, intimidated, threatened or belittled you are being bullied,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Ms Gately has six tips on how to deal with a horrible boss.

Stop it before it escalates: If your boss's jokes go too far then you need to stand up for yourself and your colleagues (Horrible Bosses 2011 movie still)

BE PREPARED

Speaking to your boss and telling them about their behaviour is a great step toward stopping workplace bullying, but don't show up unprepared.

Take time to figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it.

Ms Gately recommends getting advice and support from people inside your company, such as other leaders, the HR team and your colleagues, as well as people outside the organisation.

'Be prepared for how your boss may respond to the points you intend to bring up. Consider how you might deal with push back and keep the conversation a productive one,' she adds.

Advice and support: Make sure you know what you will say and how your will say it before confronting your boss about their behaviour

ACT WITH CONVICTION

A firm stance and speaking with confidence around your boss shows them you are standing up for yourself and holding them accountable for their bad behaviour says Ms Gately.

'Having strength is an important part of standing up to anyone who abuses their power,' she says.

Ms Gately added: 'there is no excuse or justification for bullying regardless of who you are and the role you play.' she adds.

Firm and confident: Show your boss that they need to be accountable for their bad workplace behaviour

INFLUENCE AWARENESS

It may be the case that your boss isn't aware their so-called banter is causing you or your colleagues to feel humiliated, belittled or threatened.

'This can be especially true if they get caught up in the moment and focus on their own perspective all too readily,' the people management-specialist says.

Ms Gately added: 'help your boss to understand why their behaviour matters as much as it does and what you think they can do differently to still have fun but behave respectfully toward you.'

Bosses who have no clue: Your boss might not know their bad behaviour is causing you or your colleagues to feel disrespected

BE CONSTRUCTIVE

Behaving like your boss is no way to turn your boss's banter around.

'Your aim should be to influence your bosss thoughts, feelings and ultimately actions by delivering honest feedback with respect and sensitivity,' Ms Gately says.

'Never retaliate no matter how upset you are and if necessary take time out from the discussion to regain composure,' she adds.

If you need some else in the room for support Ms Gately says to take the extra steps make it happen.

Be the bigger person: Give your boss honest feedback about their behaviour with respect and sensitivity

SHARE HONEST INSIGHT

Another of Ms Gately's tips is to talk to your boss about their bad behaviour and share how it makes you feel.

She said: 'explain why you or other people have felt bullied by their behavior. Share how the way you have been treated has drained your spirit or impacted your health.'

Ms Gately also recommends providing them with specific instances of when their banter came across as bullying.

Share specific instances: Give them specific instances of when their behaviour has come across as bullying

AVOID PERSONAL ATTACKS AND THREATS

It's important to make sure that when you do speak to your boss that you focus on their behaviour and not their character

The people-management expert recommends staying objective when talking to them and to communicate your desire for a positive work environment that will enable the whole team to thrive.

'Let them know you value a work environment where people can have a laugh and enjoy one anothers company, Ms Gately said.

'Help them to understand why their current approach is making you feel uncomfortable and bullied,' she added.

Karen Gately is a leadership and people-management specialist and a founder of Ryan Gately
From nervous male clients to pre-teens buying racy little 'V-strings', a former Victoria's Secret employee has revealed what it's really like to work for the lingerie giant.

After three years of working for the mega brand Brooke Sager, who was a sales associate, shared some of her experiences working at one of the many branches in the US.

Working for Victoria's Secret was more than just setting up underwear displays, cleaning fitting rooms and gift wrapping, according to Ms Sager in a post shared on Thrillist.

Realities of retail: Former Victoria' Secret sales associate Brooke Sager says working for the lingerie giant was more than just setting up underwear displays, cleaning fitting rooms and gift wrapping

Favourite customers: She found nervous male customers endearing because they were going out of their comfort zone to make a woman feel sexy (supermodel Gigi Hadid pictured on the runway at the 2015 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show)

Power and appeal: Ms Sager said that working at the lingerie giant was an alluring glimpse into someone else's world

Going the extra mile: Ms Sager said helping female customers who were recently divorced or looking to surprise their boyfriend made my job exciting

From ages 19 to 22 she said she saw 'more boobs than a president of a fraternity', because women took off their tops to get their bra measurements, or for her opinion.

'A woman in lingerie emanates power and sex appeal, whether someone else is getting a look-see or not,' she said.

She added that working in the retail industry, particularly selling lingerie, when someone asks for assistance you are getting an alluring glimpse into his or her world.

During her time at the intimate apparel label she found that nervous looking male clients were her favourites because they were going out of their comfort zone to make a woman feel sexy.

She also said that men were clueless and awkward when it came to sizes, terminology and patterns of the underwear they were looking for.

'It was pretty awkward to be told, "She's about... your size",' she said.

And because men were out of their depths she said it was easier to sell lingerie and other saucy products to get her sales numbers up.

Best sellers: Ms Sager said it was easier to sell lingerie and other saucy products to men which got her sales numbers up (Models Taylor Hill and Megan Puleri with singer Selena Gomez at the 2015 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show)

Sneek peek: She said 'when someone asks for assistance you are getting an alluring glimpse into his or her world'

Going the extra mile: In her time at the lingerie giant Ms Sager assisted a range of customers from cheating husbands to 12-year-old girls buying racy underwear

Ms Sager said that she enjoyed going the extra mile searching for the perfect set of bra and panties for female customers like recent divorcees or a college girl looking to surprise their boyfriend.

'For them, I'd actually search the depths of the stock room for that gingham bra in a 36C, because their stories made my job exciting,' she said.
It is hard to imagine the Queen or other residents of Buckingham Palace being photographed in the buff, but Mario Testino believes that capturing nudity and royalty on camera is pretty much one and the same.

The legendary photographer, 61, told Vanity Fair that the royals 'are like the essence of the country. And a nude is like the essence of a human being. So even though they appear quite different, they have a similarity.'

He continued: 'They represent something fundamental that inspires me, and which I apply to my work in different ways.'

Mario Testino (pictured at the Vogue 100 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in February) has told Vanity Fair why photographing royals and nudes is similar

Most recently Testino photographed the royal family at Sandringham to mark Princess Charlotte's christening.

The now iconic portraits featured the young royal in her gown while George wore a red and white embroidered outfit, strikingly similar to one William wore as a child.

On the nudity front, a range of the Peruvian's more raunchy shots are currently being showcased at an exhibit in Copenhagen titled, 'No Limits'.

Shots of some of his favourite supermodel muses are featured in the show, including ones of Kate Moss, Gisele Bundchen and Karlie Kloss.

Flying the flag: Kate Moss shot in London by Mario Testino in 2008

However, there is also a selection of more formal portraiture with the addition of previously never-seen-before shots of Denmarks Crown Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederik.

When it comes to the British royal family, Testino has been chosen to capture an array of historic events.

Highlights include Prince William's 21st birthday, William and Kate's now iconic engagement portraits, and he even photographed Princess Diana for Vanity Fair back in 1997.

Speaking in the recent interview, Testino said: 'The royals seem to be, especially in countries such as England and Denmark, a constant - families that have existed as part of the country for a very, very long time.'

Royal engagement: Mr Testino took the official and now inconic photos of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to mark their betrothal

Mr Testino was said to be close friends with Princess Diana and took the famous 1997 Vanity Fair portraits

Testino, who was born in Lima, Peru, moved to London in the late 1970s to study photography.

He revealed that he stumbled into doing nudes by chance.

With little money to spare and no stylist, hairdresser or makeup artist, he discovered he could still achieve a lot by stripping everything back to its core.

Now the artist is one of the most-famed photographers in the world. In 2014 he was awarded an OBE recognition of his career and charity work.
It's not simply enough to get down on one knee anymore if you want to propose to your beloved.

Creative men are dreaming up a host of original and wacky ways to pop the question, if these examples sweeping the web are anything to go by.

From homemade Kinder Surprises to customised restaurant receipts, Bored Panda has compiled photographs of the most imaginative engagements ever.

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Fright of her life: This man said he and his friends put a lot of practice into their sign holding before jumping on to this log flume - the couple are now apparently happily married

Water way to do it: This photo, which surfaced on Reddit, was titled: 'All the effort the dolphin put in for this proposal, and she still goes for the other guy'

A real Kinder Surprise: One man went to great lengths by customising the popular children's toy with a miniature plastic version of himself, complete with a sparkling diamond ring

One man roped his passengers into holding signs aloft as they rode the log flume at a theme park.

His screaming girlfriend had no idea of what was unfolding behind her - until she picked up her perfectly-timed photograph. The couple are now happily married.

One photo, which surfaced on Reddit, was titled: 'All the effort the dolphin put in for this proposal, and she still goes for the other guy.'

It showed the porpoise holding a buoy in his mouth, adorned with the words: 'Will you marry me?'

The answer was clearly a yes as the newly-betrothed couple can be seen kissing while still in the ocean.

One man went to great lengths by customising the children's toy inside a Kinder Surprise with a miniature plastic version of himself, complete with a sparkling diamond ring.

Off with a fizz: One man suprised his girlfriend with a personalised selection of Coke bottles, creating the sentence 'beautiful Eloise will you marry me?'

Brolly good fun: One proposer recruited a team of people with umbrellas with letters printed on the top to help pop the question

Another lined up a row of Coca Cola bottles in the fridge, with the labels spelling out the message: 'Beautiful Eloise will you marry me.'

A forward-thinking proposer recruited a team of people to hold colourful umbrellas with letters printed on the top to help him pop the question.

The crowd looked like random bystanders as they stood on a bridge - until they unveiled their surprise at the perfect moment.

Justin Lebon from California, ordered a custom-made Monopoly board for his proposal to Michal Ott - it included personalised locations, loaded dice and a secret compartment with a ring.

Not such a board game: Justin Lebon from California got a custom Monopoly board made for his proposal to Michal Ott - it included personalised locations, loaded dice, and a secret compartment with a ring

A fitness fan took his girlfriend for a run, with the elaborate route with all its twists and turns spelling out 'marry me?'.

It ended at the spot of their first date, at which point the hopeless romantic produced the GPS map to pop the question.

Another man went to extremes by staging a Pride And Prejudice themed engagement, with a whole cast of costume-clad family members and friends joining in.

One woman on Reddit explained 'my cousin is a sweet, hard-working farm boy. He finally met the girl of his dreams, and he pulled off a rather impressive proposal.'

On the right track: A fitness fan proposed to his girlfriend at the end of a run - this was the GPS map he revealed to her when they ended at the spot of their first date

Knight in shining armour: One man went to extremes with his proposal by staging a Pride And Prejudice themed engagement, with a whole cast of family members and friends joining in

The farmer wants a wife: One woman on Reddit explained 'my cousin is a sweet, hard-working farm boy. He finally met the girl of his dreams, and he pulled off a rather impressive proposal'

It involved ploughing a field to spell out the words: 'Will you marry me Joanna?'

One man's friend proposed to his girlfriend with custom Cards Against Humanity cards while a Redditor revealed how their friend popped the question with the help of Super Mario - with a jewellery box containing rings for 'player one and two'.

A keen astrologer from Toronto proposed by pasting the question on the eyepiece of his telescope - describing his wife-to-be as the 'moon of his life'.

While another Romeo had the couple's restaurant receipt customised to include his romantic proposition.

Snap: One man's friend proposed to his girlfriend with a custom-made Cards Against Humanity game

A gamer's paradise: One Redditor revealed how their friend popped the question with the help of Super Mario

Out of this world: One keen astrologer from Toronto proposed by pasting the question on the eyepiece of his telescope - he describes his wife-to-be as the 'moon of his life'

I choose you! This Pokemon proposal appeared to do the trick
Designers used up to 70 rolls of toilet roll to create their entries

Everything - including veils, flower crowns, bouquets and bracelets - were made using toilet paper, tape and either glue or needle and thread

The winner was named at a ceremony in New York at a finale featuring the ten finalists and awarded a check for $10,000

Van Tran, from Brooklyn, New York, beat off competition from 1,500 entries to win Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest

Its collar is so intricate that it could pass as lace and the design so attractive it looks like a fabric wedding dress.

But in fact the entire creation, designed by Van Tran, from Brooklyn, New York, has been made from toilet paper.

She was today declared the winner of the Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest at a ceremony in New York after beating more than 1,500 entrants.

First choice: Wedding dresses, flower crowns, veils and bouquets made from toilet roll were showcased at the Annual Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, won by Van Tran, whose design is pictured left and right

Delighted: Van, from Brooklyn, New York, pictured left hugging the model wearing her design, beat off competition from 1,500 entries to win

Center of attention: The winner was named at a ceremony in New York at a finale, pictured, featuring the ten finalists and awarded a check for $10,000

Van was selected from ten finalists - whose designs included a grass skirt-inspired design, a ruffled skirt and a traditional long-sleeved dress with a headdress.

She was declared the winner - and handed a check for $10,000 - after the finalists showcased their work.

Everything - including veils, flower crowns, bouquets and bracelets - were made using toilet paper, tape and either glue or needle and thread.Designers used up to 70 rolls of Charmin toilet roll to create their entries.

Each dress was rated by judges for its originality, creativity, workmanship, beauty and how it used the toilet paper.

DIY: Everything - including veils, flower crowns, bouquets and bracelets - were made using toilet paper, tape and either glue or needle and thread

Beaming: Designers used up to 70 rolls of Charmin toilet roll to create their entries, pictured left and right

Criteria: Each dress was rated by judges for its originality, creativity, workmanship, beauty and how it used the toilet paper

Celebrity event planner Michael Russo, one of the six judges, praised the level of the finalists.

'All of the dresses deserve to be worn by a bride on her wedding day. Every single beautiful creation, with the incredible level of detail and the uniqueness of the design, is showroom and runway ready,' he said,

Competition co-founder Susan Bain, or Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com, said: 'Even after 12 years, our designers still manage to challenge our expectations. They genuinely surprise us and make choosing a winner more and more difficult.'

Judith Henry from Woodland Hills, Utah, was named runner-up at the ceremony at The Sanctuary Hotel and won $5,000. Third place winner Donna Vincler from Brentwood, Tennessee, who won last year's contest, was awarded $2,500.

Raising the bar: Competition co-founder Susan Bain said designers 'challenged our expectations'

Long-running: The competition, which concluded at a ceremony at The Sanctuary Hotel, New York, is in its twelfth year

Impressed: Celebrity event planner Michael Russo, one of the six judges, pictured right, praised the level of the finalists
A video of a little girl with an enormous appetite is taking the Internet by storm, and has been shared close to 370,000 times on social media.

The young girl, from China, is seen at a table wearing an adorable penguin baby bib and sitting in front of two plates of fruit and vegetables.

The little girl speedily made her way through a number of pieces of watermelon and appeared to be thoroughly enjoying herself as she grabbed some broccoli and cherry tomatoes.

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Yum! A sped-up video of a little girl with an enormous appetite has been shared close to 370,000 times on social media

Delicious: The young girl, from China, is seen at a table wearing an adorable penguin bib and sitting in front of two plates of fruit and vegetables before speedily making her way through them

Overwhelmed by how much she enjoyed the taste of the healthy food, she then started to grab handfuls both fruit and vegetables before picking up the plate and trying to tip it all into her mouth.

When she ran out of watermelon pieces, her parents tipped more onto the plate and once again, she continued to eat.

Between giggles, she completed her meal before finishing it off with a bowl of soup.

Too much! Overwhelmed by how much she enjoyed the taste of the healthy food, she then started to grab handfuls both fruit and vegetables before picking up the plate and trying to tip it all into her mouth

Who would have thought veggies could be this good? The video has divided social media - with some praising her for loving healthy food, while others slamming the parents for 'over feeding' the young girl

The video has divided social media - with some praising her for loving healthy food and others slamming the parents for 'over feeding' the young girl.

'Shes very cute but I think (even if she's just eating vegetables and fruits) that she's eating too much. She s starting with bad habits overeating like that but she still very cute lol,' one Facebook user wrote.

'It is very beautiful and nice to see a child eat well. This is a kind of healthy food for children at this age. However this child is eating too much,' another man agreed.

Is it okay? The video has divided social media - with some praising her for loving healthy food, while others slamming the parents for 'over feeding' the young girl

Too much: 'It is very beautiful and nice to see a child eat well. This is a kind of healthy food for children at this age. However this child is eating too much,' one man said

Others were impressed.

'I commend the child's parents for giving her those healthy foods. Aside from the watermelon, were those sliced cherry tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumber & corn kernels? Nowadays, you'd see children her age eat at fastfood restaurants and would say no at the sight of veggies,' one man wrote.

'At her age, she will know when she is full. It's nice to see that her parents are giving her healthy choices. Not all parents do. If my child likes fruits, veggies, and soup, I too will encourage a healthy appetite for this kind of food,' said another.
Even a maths teacher and puzzle 'professor' says it's unsolvable

The key is in the blue flowers having a different number of petals

People have been debating over the correct answer on Facebook

It's the seemingly simple maths puzzle that is driving people on Facebook to despair as they debate what the correct answer is.

The puzzle, which was posted to Facebook page Trending in China, features flowers being used in place of numbers in equations.

It has drawn a lot of attention on the social media site, where it has had more than 1,200 likes and 1,700 comments.

Can you solve this? A maths puzzle that replaces numbers with flowers has created controversy on Facebook

In the puzzle, which is posted as a graphic, there are three lines showing what different combinations of flowers add up to. Then a new combination is shown, with no total, and it's up to people to work out the answer.

The first line shows three red flowers, which we are told add up to a total of 60. The second shows one red flower and two blue flowers, with a total of 30.

The third line shows one blue flower minus two yellow flowers, which equals a total of three.

The final line shows one yellow flower plus one red flower, multiplied by one blue flower. There is a question mark to indicate the answer not yet revealed.

Wrong: People have given a number of different answers on the Facebook posts, with many of them incorrect

Going viral: The Facebook posts has gotten more than 1,200 likes and 1,700 comments

It seems simple, but many different answers have been posted on the page. Some people are confident it is 102 or 110, whilst others claim it's 25 or 27.

Eagle-eyed problem solvers noticed that there was only one flower in the final line, not two like in the one before, and that the blue flower had only four petals, not five.

There's still debate over the answer however. Logic puzzle solver Professor Puzzler, a maths teacher named Doug, said that the problem was unsolvable, due to blue flower having different numbers of petals.

'The correct answer to this question is, "No, I cannot solve this."' he wrote on the site. 'If you came up with a numerical value, you were wrong (sorry!)...we do not have any information with which to calculate the value of a blue flower with four petals.'

A clue? Some eagle-eyed problem solvers spotted that the blue flower in the final line only has four petals, and not five

Solved! The correct answer to the puzzle is 81, as the correct equation is 1 + 20 x 4

Despite this, many people believe they have solved the puzzle, taking into account the blue flower with only four petals.

The answer? 81.

This is calculated because the puzzle tells us that the red flower is worth 20, that a blue flower with five petals is worth 5, and two yellow flowers are worth two.

In the final line there is one yellow flower added to one red flower multiplied by one blue flower with four petals, making the equation 1 + 20 x 4.

You multiply 20 by four, to get 80, and then add the one to get the final answer of 81.
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H&M on Wednesday came under fire after a size 14 woman posted on Facebook her struggle to fit into a pair of the brand's size 16 jeans.

Ruth Clemens, 25, who is studying at Leeds Trinity University, blasted the store for its 'unrealistically small' clothes, along with a photo of her failing to do up the 10 trousers.

So was it a one-off, or are the brand's sizes not true to size - forcing women with more curvy body shapes to squeeze into bigger sizes or not find anything to fit at all? FEMAIL carried out its own investigation to find out.

Jemma Lamble, 24, deputy editor at DIARY directory at a fashion and lifestyle blogger, wears a size 14. She went shopping at the High Street Kensington H&M in London, trying on 18 different garments - from jeans and shorts, to tops and jackets - all in a size 14 to see how they compared.

Here's how she got on...

LIGHT WASH DENIM JEANS 14.99

Jemma Lamble struggles to do up a pair of size 14 jeans in H&M - she says these are by far the smallest fit of all the items she tried

This pair of H&M size 14 jeans were far too small for Jemma, who said she struggled to even get the pair over her thighs

These light-wash denim jeans proved far too small for Jemma - despite claiming to be a size 14 (the largest size H&M does in these is a 16). Our model said she struggled to even get the garment over her thighs, let alone do them up.

'It was absolutely exhausting trying to get these on,' she said. 'They are no way a size 14, which I could tell from how they looked on the hanger.'

Compared to other pairs of jeans the fashion fan has bought on the British high street, she says these are by far the smallest fit.

'I don't even think they are a 12,' she said, 'because I have size 12 jeans from New Look and they fit me fine.'

Despite the fact that the jeans look forgiving, Jemma found putting them on was a struggle.

'There's a bit of stretch to them but that's really misleading. I can't even get them past the top of the thigh. It's just a no go. A fail on all accounts.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 0 out of 5

PINK TROUSERS 12.99

It wasn't just the size of these trousers that Jemma didn't like, she also said the cut and shape weren't ideal for a size 14 woman

Jemma failed to do up the pink trousers - with around two inches of space. She said the cut was unforgiving on the waistband, stomach, and on the thighs, and made them incredibly uncomfortable

It isn't only the size of these pink trousers, which go up to a size 16, that Jemma didn't like. Our model also felt that the cut and shape of the size 14 garment weren't suitable for curvy women.

'These are the most hideous things in the world,' she said.

'Even if I could do them up they would be skin-tight. It reveals everything I feel so so self-conscious right now.'

Jemma felt that the tight fit, not just on the waistband, but on the stomach and on the thigh, was incredibly unforgiving, and made the trousers very uncomfortable when she did finally manage to get them on.

'I might be able to do them up with a coat hanger but probably not,' she said. 'They aren't very giving. Even if I did them up they'd be digging in.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 0

JEANS, 14.99

However, Jemma had a completely different experience with another pair of dark wash jeans from H&M in exactly the same size

'I actually really quite like these,' she said. 'They are a bit tight but they've still got some room and it actually squishes everything in.'

Size 14 Jemma found success with the darker jeans - which she managed to do up without any problems.

She said they were a decent fit and that she would happily spend her money on them.

'I actually really quite like these,' she said. 'They are a bit tight but they've still got some room and it actually squishes everything in.'

'There is obviously massive cause for concern in the continuity of H&M's sizes,' she said.

'I'd be totally happy to buy these. They fit fine and they are a really good length.

'Considering I couldn't get the other pair past my thighs, the fact that I can then get these on and done up, and I would happily go out with these, is ridiculous. I'd say they were on the smaller size of a 14 but they are much truer to size than the other pair.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 4.5 out of 5

FLOWER-PRINT TOP + DENIM SHORTS - BOTH 7.99

Jemma hated these denim summer shorts, and found them to be far to tight for her on the things, the waist and the behind

'This is a recurring theme now. Again they are denim and I can't do them up. I can't get them up over my bum or my thighs,' Jemma said

Jemma hated these summer shorts, and found them to be tight on the thighs, the waist and the behind. Despite being a size 14, there was no way she was even close to doing them up - and as the largest size is a 16, Jemma is ruled out of wearing them.

The blogger said she felt upset and incredibly self-conscious. 'Clearly these are not good,' she said.

'This is a recurring theme now. Again they are denim and I can't do them up. I can't get them up over my bum or my thighs.'

Despite the fact the short are meant for a size 14 woman, Jemma says she feels they are more similar to much smaller sizes.

'I feel like I'm wearing my sister's denim shorts and they are a size 8,' she said.

Jemma said the flower-print top went on OK as it is a fairly loose design.

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 0

PINK TOP 19.99 + GREEN SKIRT WITH BOTANICAL PRINT, 14.99

Jemma was unimpressed with this botanical leaf print skirt, which was so small that she had to wrestle with it to pull it over her thighs

'This must be a children's skirt surely,' Jemma said. 'I can't move in it. It took me a good few minutes trying to manoeuvre it up'

Jemma was left unimpressed with this botanical leaf print skirt, which was so small in size that she had to wrestle with it to pull it over her thighs. Once it was on, she was still very uncomfortable.

'This must be a children's skirt,' Jemma said. 'I can't move in it. It took me a good few minutes trying to manoeuvre it up and even then I can't do it up.'

This skirt only goes up to a size 14, meaning the one Jemma tried was the largest version of the skirt produced by the chain.

'It's absolutely not a size 14. I would say this was a small 12, maybe even a 10,' Jemma said.

Although she grappled with the fabric she said: 'There is no way I could get it done up.'

Jemma was appalled that the skirt did not come in any larger sizes. 'I know that I'm not the thinnest person but there;s no way this is a size 14. There was a woman in H&M while I was shopping looking for size 14 stuff and she was bigger than me. She wouldn't have got this on either.'

She also found that the size 14 pink top was too tight around her chest, and it looked too tight from the back.

JEMMA'S VERDIT: Top 2, skirt 0

PINK DENIM SKIRT - 14.99

Jemma liked this skirt but felt that it needed just a little extra room to really fit a size 10, and said she would have to size up to wear it

Jemma said she was a fan of the style of the pink denim skirt, but that it needed extra room to really fit a size 14 woman

Jemma said she was a fan of the style of the pink denim skirt, but that it needed extra room to really fit a size 14 woman.

Although she managed to do up the buttons, there was very unflattering gaping between some of them.

'I like this outfit, it just needs that extra inch,' she said. 'It's a stretchier denim but, I mean, ultimately it's not wearable.'

'I'd probably have to size up to be honest. I don't think it is mega on the small side and it's better than a lot of styles I've tried on and if I went up a size in this it would be probably be okay. It's not ideal but it's closer.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 2 out of 5

PRINTED WIDE-LEGGED PLAYSUIT - 39.99

Jemma was highly unimpressed with this playsuit, which she couldn't do up at the back and found far too tight on the crotch

The back of the dress was almost impossible for Jemma to close without a lot of discomfort. 'It looks hideous. I really don't like it,' she said

At a size 14, this is the largest size H&M does in this playsuit, which Jemma couldn't manage to do up at the back and found far too tight on the crotch.

She said: 'It's such a shame because I love the print but it's so disproportioned. The chest is really roomy and gaping so again it's not suitable for the bust. It's also giving me a really bad wedgie.

'At the back I can near enough do it up - maybe I could but it's not going to be comfortable and it looks awful. It looks hideous. I really don't like it.'

'I would have to put a bin bag on my head if I was forced to wear this out - so no one would know it was me.'

Jemma said she felt hugely self-conscious in the studio wearing the jumpsuit. 'I couldn't wear it would because it just won't do up at the back,' she said.

'It's also designed to be worn without a bra and there's no way I could do that with the gaping at the front.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 1 out of 5

GREEN LACE UP DRESS, 14.99

This dress, however, was more of a hit with Jemma, who found the stretchy material more comfortable. She said: 'Generally it's all right'

This size 14, green lace-up dress was a hit with Jemma, who found the stretchy material more comfortable to wear.

'I like this dress. Obviously the material is a bit stretchier and the lace-up works better for the busty person,' she said.

'There's one thing and that's the waist is too high and I feel like I need some support pants, but generally it's all right.'

Jemma said she still felt the item was on the smaller size of a 14, but was wearable.

'My body shape is that I have a small waist and I'm top and bottom heavy so this dress suits that shape and looks okay on me.

'I'd say it's may one the smaller size of 14 than n the average or bigger side,' she said.

FLORAL PLAYSUIT, 14.99

This playsuit made Jemma feel incredibly uncomfortable, thanks to a very unpleasantly tight fit in the crotch

Jemma said wearing this 14.99 playsuit was incredibly uncomfortable, thanks to a very unpleasantly tight fit in the crotch.

'I feel fat, ugly, horrible, I have no self esteem,' the beauty blogger said. 'At this point, if I was trying this on in a fitting room, I would have cried and left by now.'

Jemma found the cut hugely inappropriate for her shape.

'One, it's way too short, two, it's too tight. It probably fits around the bust but it feels so tight around my bum and my thighs. The crotch is too high and it just makes me feel horrible about myself.'

In comparison to other playsuits from the high street Jemma found this fit very small.

She said: 'I have a play suit from Topshop in a size 14 and it fits so much nicer - with room to spare - and Topshop clothes usually come up quite small.

'I'm disappointed.'

JEMMA'S VERDIT: 0

SCUBA FLORAL PRINT MIDI SKIRT - 39.99

'The skirt fits nicely around the waist, it feel a bit tight but I maybe that's just the material. I like the skirt,' Jemma said

Although Jemma wasn't a huge fan of this top, she loved the skirt, which she found really flattering for her figure.

'The top is a bit small - again, bust problems - but maybe I could forgive them a bit for that as 1 know a lot of shops have problems with that.

'The skirt fits nicely around the waist, it feel a bit tight but I maybe that's just the material. I like the skirt. It's something I would probably wear for my size.

'If I tried this on in the shop as a size 14 I'd think, yeah it fits all right.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 4 out of 5

WHITE BLAZER - 29.99. BLUE STRIPED TOP - 12.99

Jemma found the jacket far to tight and restrictive, as she couldn't raise her arms and struggled to do up the button

Jemma said the white jacket was far too tight and restrictive, as she couldn't raise her arms and struggled to do up the button.

'It's a terrible fit - and it's definitely not a good fit for me.'

The pink and blue striped top with a tie around the waist was also a flop,

'This is gaping at the bust. It's too tight. It's a top for a 12-year-old really,' Jemma said.

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 0

CREAM DUNGAREES - 29.99

Jemma didn't mind the dungarees, but found them a bit of a struggle to adjust - even breaking a nail. 'These aren't the worst,' she said

Although this pair of size 14 cream dungarees weren't a perfect fit, Jemma said they 'aren't the worst' as the wearer is able to adjust them - although that's difficult to do, and she even broke a nail trying.

'Again it's the legs which are the problem, and it's the same on all the denim shorts too, they are so tight and the crotch is too short.

'It fits on the waist but just not on the legs. I wouldn't wear them. They are not comfortable and I wouldn't buy them.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 2 out of 5

ZIP-UP DENIM SKIRT 19.99 and BLUE TOP WITH PIE CRUST COLLAR 29.99

'This skirt is hideous,' Jemma said. 'If I move the zip comes down and if I do it all the way up it's uncomfortable and tight'

'This skirt is hideous,' Jemma said.

'If I move the zip comes down and if I do it all the way up it's uncomfortable and tight. Their bottoms are just disgraceful.'

'However, I really like the top, the top fits really nicely.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: Top 5 out of 5. Skirt 1

YELLOW MIDI DRESS, 14.99

While Jemma liked this dress, she couldn't do the buttons up over her bust. she said: 'This is basically a size 10 dress'

Jemma liked this summery yellow dress - but it didn't fit over her bust. And, as a size 14 is the largest H&M does in the style, it means that curvy Gemma is sized out of their market.

'I don't think this would fit many size 14 women,' she said.

'Most size 14 women have a big bust. This a is a problem I always have with dresses, is that they aren't big enough on the bust.

This is basically a size 10 dress for someone with B-cup breasts.'

JEMMA'S VERDICT: 2 out of 5

CONCLUSION:

Student Ruth Clemens took the photo of the ill-fitting clothes after visiting the Leeds H&M store on Monday

Jemma said that after spending a couple of hours trying on clothes from H&M, she felt disheartened because it was such a struggle to find something to fit her.

She added: 'It makes me feel fat, it really brings on self loathing when 75 per cent of the stuff just doesn't fit you.'

'The fact that they only go up to size a 16 is bad enough anyway. If I'm a size 14 and I can't even get into a 14, probably some of that stuff I couldn't get into a sixteen of, then you are discriminating against so many women.'

A spokesman for H&M said: 'Everyone is welcome at H&M and we value all feedback. H&M works with the same measurements and sizes within all concepts, across all 62 markets and online, however the fit of a garment may vary depending on the style, cut and fabric.'
rainbow flag art

((File photo))

Good Thursday Morning, Fellow Seekers.

A Senate committee chaired by Sen. Scott Wagner, R-York, abruptly pulled the plug Wednesday on a planned vote on a bill that would ban housing discrimination against Pennsylvania's LGBT citizens.

And it's not clear when the vote might now take place.

Through a spokesman earlier this week, Wagner, who chairs the Senate's Urban Affairs & Housing Committee, said the time had come to "move the bill and force the conversation."

But the rapid movement of the legislation, and Wagner's announcement of the vote, which came barely 48 hours after an gunman opened fire in an LGBT-friendly dance club in Orlando, Fla., claiming the lives of 49 people and injuring 53 more, may have derailed it.

On Wednesday, Wagner's chief of staff, Jason E. High, confirmed that the vote had been delayed, citing concerns raised by Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre.

Jennifer Kocher, Corman's spokeswoman, said concerns had been raised in a closed-door caucus about the planned vote and that "out of respect for everyone, we are working through that and [the vote] will be rescheduled in the very near future."

The housing discrimination language had been embedded in an LGBT anti-discrimination bill, sponsored by Sen. Pat Browne, R-Lehigh, that had been stuck in the Senate State Government Committee since its introduction last September.

Backers recently split the bill into three, separate pieces of legislation, one dealing with housing, another with employment, and a third covering public accommodation, hoping it would speed the chances of passage.

Critics had raised concerns about the public accommodation language, fearing that it might allow transgender citizens to use the bathroom with which they identify.

Wagner said he'd been facing pressure to take his name off the legislation.

In a statement posted to his website, Wagner, a likely 2018 GOP gubernatorial hopeful, said the bill " "changes absolutely nothing about the way that bathrooms are dealt with, in spite of claims to the contrary that are full of legalese and references to court decisions from states with laws that are very different from Pennsylvania's."

Ted Martin, the executive director of the LGBT rights group Equality Pennsylvania, said earlier this week that his organization had no concerns about the non-discrimination bill being split into three parts.

"Our approach is to fight for everything," Martin said Monday. "We want to make sure that everything is included. There's no issue, procedurally, with the way," the legislation is advancing.

The rest of the day's news starts now.

As expected, Pa. counties and municipalities are seeing less money from that impact fee paid by natural gas drillers, The Associated Press reports.

U.S. Sen Pat Toomey, R-Pa., wants to block gun sales to terror suspects, PennLive's Ivey DeJesus reports.

AirBnB will start collecting Pennsylvania's hotel tax, The Tribune-Review reports.

The Post-Gazette has everything you want to know about Wednesday's Stanley Cup Victory parade for the NHL champ Pittsburgh Penguins.

A former "Apprentice" contestant from Philly has landed a job with the Republican National Committee, PhillyMag reports.

There's a growing rift between environmentalists and Gov. Tom Wolf, StateImpact Pennsylvania reports.

Researchers in Pennsylvania have helped pinpoint a Jupiter-sized planet some 3,700 light years away, NewsWorks/WHYY-FM reports.

The Morning Call has the six things you need to know about filibusters.

State governments are moving to protect your right to gripe in negative online reviews, Stateline.org reports.

Donald Trump's relationship with the RNC has soured, Politico reports.

Meet the Connecticut Senator who finally forced action on gun control (via Roll Call).

Heavy Rotation.

Here's something decidedly dance-y for a gray Thursday morning:

And now you're up to date. See you all back here in a bit.
It was part of the flag renovation for the Regiment of Engineers

She was given the honour of delivering the Spanish flag to Salamanca

She and her husband also sent a telegram of

She's a lady with a penchant for leather, choosing to recycle a taupe-coloured Hugo Boss shift dress on many occasions.

And Queen Letizia turned to her favourite material once again as she stepped out with her husband, King Felipe, in Madrid, Spain, on Wednesday.

The 43-year-old royal showcased her sartorial prowess for the occasion, donning sexy leather trousers, which she teamed with a vibrant fuchsia blouse, black stilettos and pink and green earrings.

Queen Letizia looked high fashion in sexy leather trousers and a fuchsia blouse as she joined her husband in Madrid for a Princess of Asturias Foundation meeting

The King and Queen were at the Royal Palace of El Pardo to meet with members of the Boards of Trustees of the Princess of Asturias Foundation - a non-profit private institution which aims to promote scientific, cultural and humanistic values core to the country.

The duo listened as a report on the work carried out throughout 2015 was recounted.

According to the foundation's website, the most significant activities comprise the granting and presentation of the Princess of Asturias Awards and the arrangements for the cultural week surrounding the Awards Ceremony.

Last year, these included 40 free events open to the general public, which were attended by around 11,000 people.

The 43-year-old royal showcased her sartorial prowess for the occasion, donning sexy leather trousers and black stilettos

The King and Queen were at the Royal Palace of El Pardo to meet with members of the Boards of Trustees of the Princess of Asturias Foundation and the duo listened as a report on the work carried out throughout 2015 was recounted

A stylish Queen Letizia greets BBVA's president Francisco Gonzalez at the Princess of Asturias Foundation Annual meeting in Madrid, Spain

A report was also given on the work of the Music Department, which organised 42 concerts by the Foundations three choirs, as well as a new edition of the International Music School Summer Courses. These were opened by Queen Letizia and attended by over 148 students from ten different countries.

As always, Queen Letizia has been keeping busy with royal duties in recent weeks.

On Monday, she paid an emotional tribute to the victims of the Orlando night club massacre during an official visit to Salamanca.

The 43-year-old royal looked sombre during a ceremony to deliver the Spanish flag to the Regiment of Engineers.

The Princess of Asturias Foundation is a non-profit private institution which aims to promote scientific, cultural and humanistic values core to the country

The couple, who have two children together, proved they're still very much in love as they chatted at the meeting on Wednesday

Letizia looked smart but stylish in her vibrant summery blouse for the annual meeting

During her visit to the town in the north west of Spain Letizia took the opportunity to say a few words in support of the victims of the Orlando massacre that has shocked the world.

The monarch made a speech where she condemned the deaths of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and said that such atrocities can only be combated by 'working together'.

Earlier on Monday, Letizia and her husband King Felipe VI sent a telegram of condolence to President Barack Obama where they expressed 'in the strongest terms' that this was an attack 'against all principles', La Vanguardia reported.

Queen Letizia of Spain paid tribute to the victims of the Orlando massacre during a visit to Salamanca on Monday

The mother-of-two wore a sombre expression as made a speech condemning the deaths of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and said that such atrocities can only be combated by 'working together'
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It's the most fashionable day of the racing calendar with racegoers stepping out in all their finery in the hope of winning the Best Dressed Lady prize.

And today the Queen gave the ladies of Royal Ascot a run for their money in an elegant orange hat and royal blue coat.

While many opted for quirky hats and fascinators - verging from the fun to the ridiculous - the monarch, 90, naturally kept things understated.

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Amid a sea of elaborate and outrageous outfits, the Queen naturally maintained an understated approach

The Queen looked delighted as she prepared to present the winners trophy

The Queen Elizabeth smiles as she presents the Gold Cup during Day Three of Royal Ascot

Perfectly co-ordinated as always, the monarch wore an orange dress with blue floral sprigs and her customary pearls.

She opted for one of her most recognisable brooches, Prince Albert's sapphire which he presented to Queen Victoria on their wedding day in 1840, which went perfectly with the royal blue of her coat.

To complete the look she wore a pair of white gloves which came in especially handy when she had presented the Gold Cup.

The monarch arrived in horse drawn carriage with her husband Prince Philip who was looking smart in a top hat and tails.

They were joined by their granddaughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie who looked chic in matching navy dresses and natty hats that didn't try to compete with the outrageous headgear on display.

Beatrice and Eugenie joined their grandmother for one of her favourite events of the year

Princess Eugenie was a picture of elegance in a a navy Roksanda Ilincic gown with a statement waistband design and collar. The designer is also loved by the Duchess of Cambridge

Eugenie eschewed her usual fascinator for a wide brimmed affair with a spray of feathers adorning the side

Today the Queen gave the ladies of Royal Ascot a run for their money in an elegant orange hat and royal blue coat

Princess Eugenie looked chic in a sleeveless navy Roksanda Ilincic dress with a statement pink and white pointed collar and matching wavy waistband detail.

And she ditched her usual fussy fascinators for a cream hat with a delicate spray of feathers.

Beatrice went for a sober short-sleeved macrame and cotton midi dress by little known designer Adeam which comes with a hefty price tag of 1,415.

She topped the look with a blue and orange matador hat which also coordinated with her regal grandmother's outfit.

Beatrice kept her hair swept back in a messy up-do and wore blue high heeled courts.

Later this afternoon the Queen beamed as she presented the Gold Cup in Honour of Her Majesty's birthday

The Queen joked with jockey Ryan Moore in the parade ring as she appeared to eye up a bottle of champagne

The Gold Cup was presented by Her Majesty to Aidan O'Brien after he trained Order of St George to victory

Princess Anne was also part of the royal procession, wearing a delicate grey jacket with a matching hat, arriving with Princess Sarvath al-Hassan who is the wife of Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan

Sophie, Countess of Wessex, gave a nod to the monarch by incorporating orange in her outfit by British designer Suzannah

Racegoers got their phones out to snap a picture of the monarch as the carriage procession went past

Sophie, Countess of Wessex, joined her mother-in-law and like the Queen she incorporated a colourful splash of orange in her outfit.

The wife of Prince Edward and mother-of-two looked elegant in an orange skirt and loose fitting white blouse.

Princess Anne was also part of the royal procession, wearing a delicate grey jacket with a matching hat- a much more elegant option than the purple and green floral number she stepped out in yesterday.

Following the Gold Cup, which was run in honour of her 90th birthday, the Queen looked delighted to be presenting the winner's trophy

Princess Michael of Kent joined the royal party, wearing shades of grey top to toe, along with her son Lord Freddie Windsor (right)

Princess Anne joined her parents and other relatives for the third day of action at Royal Ascot

She rode in a carriage with Princess Sarvath al-Hassan, the wife of Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.

Princess Michael of Kent also joined the royal party, wearing shades of grey top to toe, along with her son Lord Freddie Windsor.

Thursday is traditionally the busiest day of the festival and the feature race of the day is the Gold Cup, one of the most prestigious events of the whole festival.

The Queen has had 22 winners over 60 years and in 2013, the Queen became the first reigning monarch to win the Gold Cup with one of her horses when her filly, Estimate, stormed to victory.

Prince Philip looked smart in a top hat and tails as he joined his wife to see her horses racing

The Queen arrives into the parade ring as she attends the third day of Royal Ascot

The monarch waved to well wishers as the carriage procession made its way to Royal Ascot

Today, the race was run in honour of the Queen's 90th birthday and following the race, which was won by Order Of St George the monarch looked delighted to be presenting the winner's cup.

Her horse, Dartmouth, is also running in the Hardwicke Stakes and the avid racing fan has attended every royal meeting at Ascot during her reign.

She described her visits with her family as among her 'most cherished' memories and has been going to the festival since she was 19-years-old.

The Queen never misses Royal Ascot and says her visits are among her most cherished memories

The Queen prepares to dismount her carriage with Prince Philip after arriving in a coach procession

Today's Gold Cup was being run in honour of the Queen's 90th birthday

Princess Eugenie abandoned her usual fussy fascinators for an elegant cream hat with a spray of feathers

Eugenie kept her accessories to the minimum with a few gold rings, a slender gold chain on her wrist and a modest clutch bag

Today, the race will be run in honour of the Queen's 90th birthday and her horse, Dartmouth, is also running in the Hardwicke Stakes

This week she made some new memories as she was joined at the event for the first time by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge yesterday.

Novelty bets on the colour of the Queen's hat have been popular all week, but she surprised punters by failing to turn up in the odds-on favourite, blue, for two days running.

On Tuesday she opted for yellow, while yesterday it was pink and today William Hill suspended betting on her hat after a rush of money for orange.

One particularly shrewd William Hill customer based in Merseyside stands to win 2000 should the Queen choose orange today. Two years ago, the same punter backed Purple successfully.

Bookies Ladbrokes said that punters at the Berkshire racecourse are now reinvesting their generous winnings on The Queen going for a Green (4/1) number on day four.
Prince William today spoke of his fears for his children in a speech in which he acknowledged the downside of the Internet in terms of cyberbullying and trolling.

Speaking at the London 2016 Founders Forum, a conference and networking event for leading digital and technological entrepreneurs from the UK and around the world, the father-of-two said that one of the most crucial challenges facing the digital industry is how to protect children online, something that he, as a father, feels strongly about.

'As Catherine and I started our family a few years ago, I was alarmed about the increasing reports of online bullying that were making headlines around the world,' he said.

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The Duke of Cambridge addresses the London 2016 Founders Forum in Watford, where he spoke of his fears for his young children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, growing up in a society where cyberbullying is so prevalent

'From the girls developing eating disorders after being subjected to a campaign of abuse on social media, to the teenage boys who took their own lives following constant targeting  as a parent myself, I was appalled.

'What we were seeing was that social media and messaging had transformed bullying from something that was not only the torment of the classroom and playground, but something that followed you home as well  to the one safe haven that children should have.'

He praised the technology industry for its efforts to combat online bullying - although he singled out Apple as a company that has not yet got on board with his anti-cyberbullying task force.

He added: 'We have a lot of work ahead of us, but by this time next year we expect to have a plan in place to achieve fundamental improvements in online safety for bullied children.

'To school-age children today, there is no difference between their online and offline lives. Bullying is bullying, wherever it happens. '

'As Catherine and I started our family a few years ago, I was alarmed about the increasing reports of online bullying that were making headlines around the world,' he said

Speaking, at the London 2016 Founders Form, the father-of-two said that one of the most crucial challenges facing the digital industry is how to protect children online, something that he, as a father, feels strongly about

He added: 'We have a lot of work ahead of us, but by this time next year we expect to have a plan in place to achieve fundamental improvements in online safety for bullied children'

The father-of-two did, however, admit he firmly believes that technology was very much a force for good.

He said: 'I must admit, like most people my age, I'd struggle without my smart phone  for news, sports, music and the odd bit of gaming. And technology is a big part of my working life, too. As an air ambulance pilot, I love the fact that the helicopter I fly is fitted out with some of the life-saving medical equipment; and I consider social media to be central to how the Royal Family communicates in the 21st century.

'A lot is said publically about the challenges that new technologies  particularly the Internet  can create for people, in terms of the spread of extremism, invasions into our privacy, and the security of our data.

'Social media has also been the subject of scrutiny, for the way in which it can create a platform for trolling and other vicious behaviour.

'But while new technology can of course create new problems, it is my belief that innovation in technology is a force for good, and that these advancements can do a lot more good than the harm that is often talked about. '

The Duke of Cambridge sits in snowstorm, a human carrying drone, at the London 2016 Founders Forum

The invention, which is powered by lithium ion batteries and is solar powered, moves at running speed but can go up to 100 metres in the air

William was fascinated by he device and said: 'I could sit here and play all day with this. I can't get my head around this, this is unreal'

William inspected the 25,000 flying machine made by the student project Snowstorm

The Duke of Cambridge also tried on some 3D virtual reality glasses at the London 2016 Founders Forum

The prince also came face to face with the most humanoid robot ever created today and even got it to dance.

Unfortunately the robot got a little over excited and fell backwards with a thump, prompting William to collapse in a fit of laughter.

'You've got to work on his dance moves a little bit,' the prince said.

Browsing a selection of the stands, the second in line to the throne's eye was caught by Nao, a robot which is already being used as a teaching device in schools.

He speaks 19 languages, as well as sign language, has lenses in its eyes that can distinguish colour and can even independently complement you on the colour shirt you are wearing that day.

'This is the most advanced humanoid robot ever created and has been made for human interaction.' Said Michaek Mendenhall, chief marketing officer of San Jose-based company Flex, which designs and builds them.

Nao, which sorts around 3,000, has been found to be particularly useful when teaching suffering from autism and similar conditions who have been shown to react well to the robot.

When the robot started dancing to Daft Punk's Get Lucky, the prince laughed: 'Good choice of song. He's got good taste' before Nao fell over and had to be righted - although normally the created can do that himself thanks to a gyroscope inside him.

It is particularly useful for pilots, such as William, who when approaching the scene of an incident from the air can bring to life what it looks like on the ground

The Duke of Cambridge watches Nao the robot dance

When the robot started dancing to Daft Punk's Get Lucky, the prince laughed: 'Good choice of song. He's got good taste'

William was also fascinated by 'augmented reality' - or AR - glasses which enable wearers to add information and imagery to your environment. It is particularly useful for pilots, such as William, who when approaching the scene of an incident from the air can bring to life what it looks like on the ground.

'This is just amazing, just incredible,' William marvelled.

He also couldn't resist going off his schedule to sit in a human-sized drone which, it is hoped, will one day be used commercially for people to fly in.

The invention, which is powered by lithium ion batteries and is solar powered, moves at running speed but can go up to 100 metres in the air.

William was fascinated by he device and said: 'I could sit here and play all day with this.'

'I can't get my head around this, this is unreal.'
Keeping GP surgeries open at weekends reduces A&E visits by nearly a fifth, researchers have found.

Experts showed when people were able to access their local clinic on Saturdays and Sundays, fewer people visited hospital emergency departments.

The results shore-up the Governments plan to enable all patients to see their GP seven days a week by 2020.

Keeping GP surgeries open at weekends reduces A&E visits by nearly a fifth, researchers have found

The new study, based on a pilot project at GP surgeries in London, found that when clinics stayed open seven days, visits to A&E units at local hospitals dropped 10 per cent across the week.

The greatest effect was seen on Saturdays and Sundays, when there was a drop of 18 per cent in A&E visits.

And those patients who arrived at hospital were less likely to be admitted  reducing a major expense.

Ambulance call-outs also dropped by 20 per cent, the Sussex University researchers found.

The reductions were mainly driven by fewer elderly patients with moderate injuries or illnesses.

If the pilots can be rolled out nationally, as the Government hopes, the results suggest that they would significantly reduce pressure on stretched hospitals.

But the Governments ambition for seven-day GP services faces two major huge hurdles - a serious shortage of GPs across the country, and the opposition of the doctors union.

The British Medical Association claims that the plans are unfunded and unresourced - and that if they are forced to open all weekend, many GP surgeries will simply stand empty.

Ambulance call-outs dropped by 20 per cent when GP surgeries were open at weekends, researchers found

They point to separate pilots, carried out in Yorkshire, where barely one in ten appointments were filled on Sundays and only half on Saturdays.

BMA chair Mark Porter has also pointed to the huge shortage of GPs, with thousands more predicted to leave the profession over the next five years.

Speaking at the unions conference last year, shortly after plans to force through the seven-day service were announced, Dr Porter said: When will [the Government] provide substance over rhetoric and recycled ideas, to focus on the detail of how they will support GPs already burnt out from overwork, in a service where more than 10,000 GPs are predicted to leave in the next five years? They dont say.

Labours 2004 GP contract has been blamed for spiralling numbers of patients flooding A&Es with minor complaints.

Changes enabled them to opt out of evening and weekend work  leaving patients with nowhere else to go.

Patients who arrived at hospital were less likely to be admitted  reducing a major expense, the study found

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said: Labours 2004 GP contract did terrible damage to out-of-hours care, leaving many people feeling they have no choice but to go to A&E when they want medical attention.

The new research, published yesterday in the Journal of Health Economics, supports Mr Hunts argument.

Its authors said that GPs are effective gatekeepers - keeping mild cases out of hospital.

The researchers believe this is because A&E doctors take fewer risks with elderly patients they dont know and choose to admit them to a ward to be on the safe side.

The study's authors said that GPs act as effective gatekeepers - keeping mild cases out of hospital

GPs, in comparison have an intimate knowledge of their patients medical history and can send the less serious cases home after treatment.

Researcher Dr Vikram Pathania, of Sussexs School of Business, Management and Economics, said: There is clearly evidence of unmet demand for weekend GP opening.

Seven-day opening for GPs appears to make a dent in two major sources of A&E expense  admissions and ambulance usage.

The latter alone shows a significant drop of nearly 20 per cent on weekends.

Costs aside, there is also strong evidence that patient healthcare, in many cases, could be better delivered by a visit to a GP.

Patients may automatically equate the size and complexity of a large hospital-based A&E unit with higher quality care.

The results shore-up the Jeremy Hunts plan to enable all patients to see their GP seven days a week by 2020

The Government is desperate to reduce pressure on hospitals, after the busiest year in NHS history.

Nearly 23 million patients arrived in A&E in the 12 months - a 32 per cent increase from those seen a decade ago.

On average 28,000 patients a day called for ambulances  the highest ever and up from 24,700 the previous year.

And waiting times in A&E have been at their worst since records began a decade ago, with just 87 per cent of patients dealt with in four hours  well below the target of 95 per cent.

Increasing capacity of GP surgeries might help to target this problem - with an average GP visit costing just 45, compared to 114 for an A&E visit.

Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chair of the BMA GP committee, said: GP practices are currently under incredible strain from rising patient demand, falling funding and chronic staff shortages that have left many barely able to provide enough appointments to the public during the working week.

This study needs to be taken alongside others which haven't shown a significant reduction in hospital activity and it should also be noted that schemes such as this have only been possible through significant additional, short term funding.

Many of the pilots have shown that appointments provided on a Sunday were not used by patients, wasting vital NHS resources.
THE GIRLS by Emma Cline

THE GIRLS

by Emma Cline

(Chatto & Windus 12.99)

The grim shadow of the endlessly mythologised 1969 Manson Family massacre hangs over this febrile, hotly tipped debut by 27-year-old Emma Cline.

It is narrated by Evie, who is 14 when she meets the sexually alluring, 19-year-old Suzanne, and through her feral magnetism is drawn into the orbit of Russell, the egomaniacal leader of a local cult.

In alternate chapters, the adult Evie looks back on that renegade, erotically-charged summer of 1969 which was to culminate in a horrific event at which she wasnt present, but which several decades on has nevertheless made her a freak local celebrity.

Cline changes several key details in the Manson story and her novel, told exclusively from Evies point of view, is relentlessly interior, which is both its defining strength and its weakness.

Yet she is exceptionally good at capturing the fearful, conflicted sensibility of a 14-year-old girl as she encounters the darker, cultural force of a predatory male sexuality and, without passing judgment, carefully probes the question of how a group of young girls might have been coerced into something so monstrous.

The sheer poetic lyricism of her prose is remarkable, too.

THE GOOD GUY by Susan Beale

THE GOOD GUY

by Susan Beale

(John Murray 16.99)

Beales Sixties small-town America novel taps into several familiar tenets of the American dream.

Childhood sweethearts Ted and Abigail, now the parents of an adored young daughter, are busy setting up house in a New England suburb.

Ted is an up-and-coming car tyre salesman whose favourite dinner party topic is his own sales figures; Abigail spends her days fretfully cleaning the house and trying, where possible, to keep up her passion for reading, having abandoned her hopes of going to law school.

Ted considers himself a dutiful loving husband but cant help having an affair with a girl he meets on a work night out; Abigail increasingly despairs at the boredom that comes with trying to be the perfect housewife and throws her energies instead into a local history night class. Its not long before the wheels come off.

Beales tale of a life where you are judged on the quality of your lemon drizzle cake is a well-trodden one, but its invigorated by her fresh and lively writing style and notably her canny characterisation of Ted: a weak, callous, unthinking bore whose pumped up sense of himself is at an amusing, ultimately even tragic, variance with the truth.

NO MAN'S LAND by Simon Tolkien

NO MAN'S LAND

by Simon Tolkien

(HarperCollins 20)

There must be something in the Tolkien family DNA that dissuades its writerly members from producing a 200-page novel when a near 600-page whopper will do.

Loosely inspired by his grandfather J. R. R. Tolkiens experiences on the Somme, Simon Tolkien has produced an exhausting historical melodrama in which World War I doesnt even break out until page 223.

Before then, his young protagonist Adam has lost two people close to him, spent time in a workhouse, almost died in a mining accident, fallen in love, been adopted by a rich benefactor and won a place at Oxford.

Steeped in an acute awareness of class tensions, this novel is particularly interested in the way relationships are forged between disparate groups of men - be it among the working-class Yorkshire community in which Adam and his father, newly moved from London, will always be interlopers, or among soldiers on the battlefield.

There are also some vivid set pieces, notably a wonderful section down a mine, while Adam is an intriguing central character: clever, sincere and, amid the turbulence of early 20th-century England, a determined survivor.
STREETS OF DARKNESS by A. A. Dhand

STREETS OF DARKNESS

by A. A. Dhand

(Bantam 12.99)

Set in Bradford, Yorkshire, this up-to-the-minute debut is a scorching story of a city divided between the far-Right British National Party and the Asian community.

Born, raised and still living in Bradford, Dhand paints a portrait of a world miles from the comfortable English crime novel.

Here we have a murdered Asian leader, a Right-wing convict whom someone may be trying to frame for the killing and a suspended Asian police officer, Detective Inspector Harry Virdee, a Sikh who has married outside his faith to a devout Muslim, Saima.

Set against the backdrop of the Muslim festival of Eid, it sees Virdee doing all he can to clear his name and root out the canker of corruption in the force he belongs to, while trying to head off what could turn into a riot. Written with pace and precision, it gives us a character destined for television - it is no surprise the rights have been snapped up - but also announces the arrival of a formidable crime writer.

BURNED AND BROKEN by Mark Hardie

BURNED AND BROKEN

by Mark Hardie

(Sphere 16.99)

Told in a series of flashbacks, this auspicious debut opens with a charismatic Detective Inspector, who is under investigation, found burned alive in his car on the Southend seafront.

Meanwhile, a vulnerable teenager freshly out of a local care home is intent on trying to discover what happened to one of her best friends who has disappeared, and may have been killed.

The engaging DS Frank Pearson and DC Catherine Russell from the Essex Major Incident Team are drafted in to solve the mystery of why their senior colleague has died in such horrifying circumstances and, in doing so, stumble across a series of connections that bring their force under suspicion.

The novel is all the more remarkable for the fact its author turned to writing full-time only when he lost his eyesight 14 years ago. But there is no trace of that in the storytelling, dialogue or descriptive power of this finely drawn, overlapping story.

TRAIL OF ECHOES by Rachel Howzell Hall

TRAIL OF ECHOES

by Rachel Howzell Hall

(Titan 7.99)

The third novel based on black Detective Elouise Lou Norton and set in LA, this confirms the crime series as one of the best-crafted in recent years.

Halls feeling for the pain female detectives can suffer seeps from every line of her stories, as does her sympathy for the dispossessed inhabitants of the City of Angels.

Here, Norton is called to investigate the killing of 13-year-old Chanita Lords, who grew up in the same down-at-heel slum projects as she did.

The detective quickly discovers that other talented but equally disadvantaged teenagers have also gone missing, and then she starts receiving taunting messages from the killer.
History

ZERO HOUR

by Jolyon Fenwick

(Profile Books 25)

The view could not be more peaceful. Cows chew the cud on pastures lined with tall and leafy trees; a field rises gently into the distant horizon; the sky is blue and clear, all beneath it green and pleasant.

There are ten panoramic, wide-angle photographs of country scenes in this unsettling book, each unfolding to the width of four foolscap pages.

Jolyon Fenwick took his colour photographs of these bucolic scenes last year. In chilling contrast, he accompanies them with searing first-hand accounts of the blood-and-gore encounters, the sheer inhumanity that took place in these same spots in 1916

They capture a summers morning, fields of maize and wheat, rapeseed and rye, copses of oak, fruit trees, tractor tracks meandering through the crops, a church spire, a chateau tower.

Unsettling? How could that be?

A clue is in the occasional glimpse of red poppies and white gravestones - line upon line of them.

Because this is the exact landscape in Picardy in northern France today where, on July 1 a century ago, the massed armies of Britain and Germany faced each other before unleashing slaughter on a scale never seen before.

This is the front line of the murderous Battle of the Somme.

Jolyon Fenwick took his colour photographs of these bucolic scenes last year. In chilling contrast, he accompanies them with searing first-hand accounts of the blood-and-gore encounters, the sheer inhumanity that took place in these same spots in 1916.

Where, for example, we now see cattle grazing peacefully near the village of Thiepval, the kilted soldiers of the Highland Light Infantry - half of them just teenagers - climbed from their dug-outs at 7.30am and breezily advanced into ground that was supposed to have been cleared of Germans by hours of overnight artillery fire.

Instead, they were met with a non-stop hail of bullets fired by dug-in German gunners who had so many targets they did not need to aim, just keep the trigger depressed.

TWELVE The age of Sidney Lewis, the youngest soldier to enlist in WW1 Advertisement

After 30 agonising minutes, 15 officers and 400 men lay dead, dying or seriously wounded.

Behind them, a second wave peered through the smoke but could not make out what was happening. So they shook hands and went over the top, too.

One of the few survivors recalled how a bullet burned the back of my neck. Beside me, my best pal fell, raised himself up on one hand, gave a smile, a shudder and then lay still. He was only 17.

Along the 15-mile front, similar dramas of glorious death and narrow escapes were being enacted every few yards, in the offensive that was supposed to end nearly two years of stalemate on the Western Front.

Hundreds of thousands of eager fighting men had been specifically recruited back in Britain for this supposedly pivotal moment when the war would be won.

On that first day alone, 116,000 British soldiers went into battle, in good faith and bad boots, as Fenwick tells us. By nightfall, half were casualties, close to 20,000 of them dead.

Reading this book and looking at its poignant landscapes, the words of that gentle Sixties anti-war song were buzzing in my head: Oh when will they ever learn?

Before the Somme Offensive was called off four and a half months later, its objectives unreached, the death toll of British soldiers was more than 130,000, of whom, in Fenwicks words, 30,000 had corporeally ceased to exist.

No wonder the earth there now is so rich and fertile, fuelled by so many human remains.

The juxtaposition of that lovely landscape with the horrors that took place a century ago - of the benevolent-looking now with the doom-laden then - left me with a renewed sense of the futility of World War I, for all the heroism and self-sacrifice of the men who fought in it. What Owen, Sassoon and the other war poets put into words, Fenwick has captured visually with his modern photographs, each of which is over-printed with the exact handwritten military information that was on reconnaissance pictures taken by the Royal Engineers at these same spots before the battle began.

Enemy front line 230 yards, an Army cartographer scrawled in his best italic hand 100 years ago to help his comrades about to go into battle. MG [machine gun post] 300 yards - these are now just hedges or the edge of a field, for which men in their thousands gave their lives.

A mong the many books on the centenary of World War I, this is perhaps the most unusual and the most moving.

Here are the actual corners of a foreign field that are for ever England.

They are tranquil now, and the author takes consolation from the fact that the horrors of war have been replaced by the healing powers of nature.

But Im not so sure. What lies beneath the earth is an event of senseless and wholesale destruction that the rain can never wash away nor the cornfields conceal.
MY OLD MAN: TALES OF OUR FATHERS

edited by Ted Kessler

(Canongate 14.99)

Shakespeare wrote: It is a wise child that knows his own father. And an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him, added Mark Twain.

Its the open acknowledgement of dads as flawed - but still loved and mostly admired - that makes this collection of short tales of fathers so moving.

The book began as a blog in 2013, when former NME editor Ted Kessler found himself ruminating on his own fathers looming 80th birthday dinner. He knew that time was running out.

Even when dads do engage with us, we dont always listen. Paul Wellers father told him he was an idiot to disband The Jam at the height of his fame. Rob Stewart advised his son, Rod, to: Keep it in your trousers!

On his way to the restaurant, he remembered the intense, pensive man I mainly saw only in charismatic glimpses growing up: head wrapped in bandages after a car crash in Egypt; standing knee-deep in seawater, one hand behind his back reading for hours; breaking 100mph in the driving seat during explosive in-car rows with my mother.

I contrasted that man with the gently eccentric old moose of today. . . tending his yard in Florida in winter.

At the birthday party, he attempted to have a meaningful conversation with Felix Kessler but failed to unlock anything in him.

So he wrote about him on the internet instead. Then he began collecting paternal sketches from friends, mostly musicians and music journalists.

The children of Leonard Cohen, Ian Dury and Johnny Ball give personal insights into their famous fathers, while Paul Weller, Florence Welch and Coldplays Chris Martin lift their own fathers from obscurity.

Umberto Eco believed that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they arent trying to teach us.

Many of the contributors to this book prove him right. Sometimes dads are silent. Tilda Swinton and her brothers dreaded nothing so much as a solo drive with their father: His ability to say precisely not one word to us during an entire journey of several hours was breathtaking.

Ian Durys daughter recalls the New Years Eve on which her dad invited her out with him. The teenager dressed up in her best frock only to find there was no party. He just wanted to score some marijuana from her

Even when dads do engage with us, we dont always listen. Paul Wellers father told him he was an idiot to disband The Jam at the height of his fame. Rob Stewart advised his son, Rod, to: Keep it in your trousers!

At other times, our fathers dont listen to us. When the Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder shouted at his roadie dad to fix the monitors during a gig, his dad strode on stage and punched him in the face.

Elsewhere, booze and drugs leave a more traumatic legacy. Ian Durys daughter recalls the New Years Eve on which her dad invited her out with him. The teenager dressed up in her best frock only to find there was no party. He just wanted to score some marijuana from her.

Desperately seeking his approval, she was proud to have some and pathetically grateful that he didnt embarrass her over its poor quality.

Many of Kesslers contributors are writing after their fathers have died. Some waited decades for apologies that never came. Others had tender, doting fathers snatched away too soon. Many feel the big questions are left unanswered and its the little things that stick: the smell of Brylcreem, a knack for paper folding or the pilfering of other peoples cigarette lighters.
Yesterday, senior Congress leader Kamal Nath resigned from the post of AICC general secretary in-charge of Punjab, which goes to the polls next year, amid renewed criticism of his alleged role in the 1984 riots.

But now Nath has claimed that he actually tried to defuse tension during the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi.

For 32 years, there have been no charges against me. Theres no case against me. For 22 years, nobody uttered a word about me. Not even the press said a word about me, said Nath in an interview to India Today TVs Karan Thapar.

The AAP and BJP have linked Congress veteran Kamal Nath to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, but he insists he actually helped police during the unrest

Claiming that after November 1, 1984, nobody made a charge against me, he said: I actually worked to defuse the tension. I should be rewarded for it. I was helping the police.

Nath had to quit the post two days after his appointment as Punjab in-charge, after the AAP and BJP levelled charges against him and linked him to the riots.

Nath said the Congress leadership went wrong in giving him the key post.

No, I dont think Sonia, Rahul made a mistake by appointing me as partys in-charge for Punjab. It was my decision to resign because there is the issue of drug... I dont want this issue to be diverted. Some parties want to divert the attention to other subjects, he said.

Nath, a party veteran, said he deposed before the Nanavati Commission, formed by the BJP government, and was later exonerated by the panel.

Somebody went to the Nanawati Commission, which was formed by the BJP government, and filed a complaint. The commission cross examined the complaint and came to a conclusion of exonerating me, he said.

Recalling the days when the riots broke out in Delhi, Nath said: I was informed that a big crowd had assembled outside Gurudwara Rakab Ganj. I went there and saw a crowd. The police asked me to talk to the crowd till they got reinforcements. I was not there for more than 40 minutes. This is mentioned in police records, said the Congress leader.

Noting that he was not there when the police opened fire, Nath said: I left the place as soon as the reinforcements arrived at the spot.

Mukhtyar Singh and Ajit Singh stood amongst the mob and they could not have heard what Kamal Nath told any person in the mob. What Mukhtyar Singh and Ajit Singh have stated about Kamal Nath is by way of inference drawn by them, Nath said, quoting Nanawati Commissions report.
Thousands of Pakistanis wanting to cross the border to meet their families are finding it difficult to come to India, as every second visa application was rejected this year.

The increasing number of declined visas has prompted Indian High Commissioner Gautam Bambawale to ask New Delhi why so many requests are being turned down.

With nearly 53 per cent of applications rejected this year, there is a big jump in the proportion of visas being denied in the last two years - 24 per cent in 2015, and 17 per cent in 2014.

The rising number of declined visas has prompted the Indian High Commissioner to ask New Delhi why so many are being rejected

In a recent communication to Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, Bambawale has raised concerns about the number of visa applications being rejected.

I would be grateful if the reasons for the drastic increase in rejected visas can be ascertained and conveyed. If there is no plausible reason for drastic visa reductions then please do help in ensuring that the proportion rejected visas is retained, he wrote.

Out of 33,191 applications received this year by May 31, as many as 17,581 were rejected.

The number of visas declined was 9,335 out of 38,557 applications in 2015, and in 2014, 8,910 visas were denied out of 50,338 applications.

Officials say that following the attack on the Pathankot Air Force base by Pakistani terrorists, the increased hostility between the two countries has had an impact on bilateral relations.

There have been several skirmishes on the border with Pakistani troops over the last two years.

There has been an increase in intelligence inputs indicating that Pakistan-based terrorists could enter the country, leading to heightened scrutiny, sources said.

Earlier this year in January, soon after the Pathankot attack, a group of nearly 75 pilgrims who wanted to visit a shrine near Agra were denied visas on procedural grounds.

Citizens of both countries have families across the border and visit religious places in large numbers.

Last month, Bambawale met the Home Secretary and the two discussed measures to speed up the visa process for Pakistanis. Not only has the number of rejections spiralled, but thousands of applications are being left pending for long periods over lack of security clearance.

Officials said the lengthy visa procedure is likely to be sped up, but security concerns cannot be overlooked.

In 2012, India and Pakistan signed a liberalised visa agreement that proposed a timebound approval to boost trade and people-to-people contact.

While visa rejections are on the rise, the Narendra Modi government is working on amendments to existing laws to ensure persecuted Hindus in Pakistan can get Indian citizenship easily.

A Bill to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955, is likely to be introduced during the Monsoon session of Parliament scheduled in July-August.

Earlier the Narendra Modi government had rolled out an online system for Long-Term Visa applications that allowed Pakistan nationals to live in India for a period of five years.
Baba Ramdev promises to take Dubai by storm when he leads a mass yoga session for 20,000 people

Baba Ramdev promises to take Dubai by storm when he leads a mass yoga session at an event.

Around 20,000 people from various countries are expected to participate. At least half of the yoga practitioners will be women.

The event will be held on June 18 at the Dubai World Trade Centre. Last year, a similar gathering was attended by about 10,000 people.

Ramdev will be in New Delhi a day later, where he will lead yoga session at Rajpath.

PM's Pakistan initiatives under Sangh lens

The RSS has raised questions over the Modi governments diplomatic initiatives with Pakistan, saying they have failed to resolve issues between New Delhi and Islamabad.

Prime minister Narendra Modi flew to Lahore on December 25 in order to improve ties. But what was the result? asked RSS joint general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale.

Modis Lahore visit was only followed by the siege of Pathankots airbase, he said.

Hosabale was speaking at the launch of a quarterly journal, Pakistan Watch, on Monday.

Its either UP or Punjab for Sheila

Three-term former Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit had two rounds of consultations with party chief Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi, amid speculation that the Congress veteran may be given the charge of either poll-bound UP or Punjab.

While Sheilas name is doing the rounds as a potential UP Congress chief given her father-in-law Uma Shankar Dikshit had political roots in UP, she is also being considered for the post of AICC in-charge of Punjab.

BJP fears losing House in Delhi

The Delhi BJP fears losing the post of Opposition leader in the Delhi Assembly in the event of by-elections in 21 Assembly constituencies, after the disqualification of the sitting AAP MLAs.

If the Congress manages to make a comeback by winning 8-10 seats, it might become the principal opposition party instead of the BJP, which has 3 MLAs in the House.

Accordingly, the leader of oppositions post, which is currently held by the BJPs Vijender Gupta, would go to the Congress.

Singh blasts Singh over Punjab

Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh had to cancel the AICC address to media over the law-and-order situation in the state, as he did not get a green signal from the party high command.

But Singh went ahead and lashed out at Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, saying he was ignoring an anarchy-like situation prevailing in the poll-bound state to shield the Parkash Singh Badal government.
An investigation by anti-corruption sleuths has revealed that the Delhi government committed a string of violations in awarding its premium bus service contract to a company in Gurugram.

The ongoing investigation could mean more trouble for AAP leader Gopal Rai, who commissioned the controversial project as transport minister.

The initial probe report, prepared by the Anti Corruption Branch (ACB) and accessed by India Today TV, shows that Rais Cabinet note on the scheme borrowed heavily from the recommendations of Delhis Dialogue and Development Commission (DDC), despite objections from the top officials of his own transport department.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (left) is planning on his premium app-based bus service scheme fulfilling his election promise on public transport

Led by Ashish Khetan, the DDC acts as a think-tank with the primary role of advising the government on a range of civic issues and solutions. Its advice is not binding.

Concerns

Bureaucrats at Rais transport department expressed their concerns regarding various aspects of the app-based bus project, which the ACB report says were ignored in the Cabinet note.

Investigators also found that the government invoked emergency provisions of the 1988 Motor Vehicles Act in its bid to implement the bus scheme.

Clauses M and N of Sub-Section 3 (Section 66) of the Act deal with measures that are put in place temporarily in the events of natural calamities.

The AAP government, however, applied those clauses - and that too for an indefinite period - when it officially passed the bus scheme, according to the ACB report.

The notification under Section 66 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 has been approved by an authority, which is not empowered by law.

"This did not happen because of ignorance, but is a deliberate act for unknown reasons best known to the persons who were instrumental in getting the scheme approved and notified without following the due process of law, the report says.

Besides, the transport department gave the private aggregator, Shuttle, unrestricted freedom to run as many vehicles on as many routes as it wants in what could be a commuter nightmare in the heavily-congested city, the ACB noted.

It observed that Rais bus project could be worse than the Blueline fleets that had to be phased out because of the deadly reputation it had for pursuing passengers.

Notice

When the Delhi government notified the scheme, it cited Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jungs approval. But investigators discovered the L-G had never signed off on the Internet-based bus project.

...the L-G of the National Capital Region is pleased to notify..., said the official announcement of the Delhi government.

The L-Gs office rebutted the notification, saying the AAP administration had not sent any scheme-related documents to Jung.

Former Delhi transport minister and senior AAP leader Gopal Rai was questioned by the media over the awarding of the contract for the premium app-based bus service scheme

The notification does not have the approval of the L-G and is bad in law, Jungs office told the ACB, according to the investigation report seen by India Today TV.

It is tantamount to distortion of facts since the file was never shown to the L-G, it added.

In a September 2013 ruling, the citys transport department was ordered to run its plans, except for cluster schemes, past the Delhi high court.

But the ACB report says that the Delhi government didnt check with the high court before implementing the bus project.

In contravention of the laid-out norms, no public opinion was sought before launching the scheme, the anti-corruption report observes.

AAP supporters protest against the corruption charges levelled against former Delhi transport minister Gopal Rai on the issue of the app-based premium bus scheme

Nor were the law and finance departments or the city's traffic police consulted for their advice on the economic, legal and logistic feasibility of the plan, it says.

The ACBs joint commissioner, MK Meena, vowed to take stern action.

He told India Today TV that the violations his department had detected in the implementation of the scheme could attract prosecution under the anti-corruption law.

Anyone linked to the project, within and outside of the government, can be questioned, he said.

If need be, the ACB can also question Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Meena added.

Kejriwal: Parliamentary secretaries are the eyes, ears and hands of the AAP

by Mail Today Bureau

Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal came out in support of his parliamentary secretaries and said that they are highly qualified people who have been tasked with important duties.

The Delhi CM went on to say that they are the eyes, ears and hands of the AAP government.

The AAP governments 21 parliamentary secretaries were assisting the minister in ensuring ground level work in various fields like education, healthcare, Wi-Fi, ration shops and road and water projects.

AAP MLAs outside the Anti Corruption Branch (ACB) in New Delhi

These secretaries claim that they were working as volunteers using their own resources so that they can address public grievances.

I am 68 per cent disabled and ride pillion on a scooter in my constituency. I look after all the health related grievances that the residents of east Delhi have. We have taken patients to hospitals even after midnight. We have worked really hard in ensuring treatment of EWS patients at private hospitals, said Anil Kumar Bajpai, MLA from Gandhi Nagar.

Bajpais family lives in a small rented flat in Geeta colony paying a rent of Rs 8,000. He has an office in Kanti Nagar for which he pays a rent of Rs 15,000.

Bajpais biggest achievement is starting the first poly-clinic in his area, which earlier lacked basic health facilities.

Similarly Kondli MLA Manoj Kumar, Jangpura MLA Praveen Kumar, and Wazirpur MLA Rajesh Gupta showcased the work they have been doing in their respective constituencies.

All MLAs send grievances of supply at ration shops from there area to us and we take up the issue with officers. Sudden inspection of ration shops, ground check and working on modern technology to bring more transparency is part of my work. We have introduced smart cards and are installing high-tech devices at rations shops for transparency, said Manoj Kumar Parliamentary Secretary to food and supply.

Kejriwal strongly defended the appointment of 21 parliamentary secretaries: They are highly qualified people in different fields, starting from MBA to engineering and not illiterates like in other parties. Mohalla Clinics are product of their hard work so is the mapping of schools, Kejriwal said.

Dwarka MLA Adarsh Shastri, who assists the information and technology minister, is taking care of AAPs ambitious project to provide free Wi-Fi services.
Radical right-wing groups in poll-bound Uttar Pradeshs Aligarh city have announced a bid to protect Hindu virtue with a drive against so-called love jihad.

They believe there is a plot by Muslim youths to woo and convert Hindu women to Islam - though the concept has been repeatedly discredited by sources across the religious divide.

The campaign is likely to revive the love jihad controversy that reared up during by-elections in the state two years ago, driving a wedge between communities and adding fuel to the fire still burning after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots.

A seven-day programme, titled Arya Virangana Charitra Nirmaan Evam Atmaraksha Shivir, involves alerting participants to cynical Muslim ploys to trick them into marriage, the organisers said.

During the camp's seven-day programme, women are trained in weaponry, martial arts, sword fighting and other self-defence techniques designed to 'protect their virtue'

Critics say the concept of love jihad infantilises Hindu women, assuming that they are incapable of thinking for themselves.

In the camp, women are also being trained in martial arts, sword fighting and other self-defence techniques.

Acharya Dharamvir, state secretary of the Arya Vir Dal, said his groups efforts to combat love jihad involve convincing the trainees that theres a conspiracy to convert Hindu women to Islam.

The camp is being held on the compounds of the Arya Samaj temple at Aligarhs Achal Talab area.

Nearly three dozen Hindu women are undergoing training in these classes.

Nineteen people died in clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Muzaffarnagar district. The rioting started after a young woman was allegedly harassed by a member of the minority Muslim community in Kawal village.

While police investigations in several states have found no evidence of an organised love jihad, some Hindu activists have stepped up what they see as necessary defensive measures, such as arms training for men and women, and converting others back to Hinduism through ghar wapsi campaigns.

The Acharya said his organisation teaches female participants to stay on guard against Muslim men disguising themselves as Hindus, in order to gain their trust and woo them.

We have to protect our culture, he claims.
Britain is a nation obsessed with bricks and mortar but experts have warned those thinking of investing in buy-to-let are facing headwinds that will only get worse.

From next year landlords will see tax relief on their mortgage payments cut each year until 2021 - putting pressure on profits and potentially forcing them to raise rents.

Coupled with the pending removal of a 'wear and tear' allowance and a 3 per cent stamp duty surcharge slapped on any buy-to-let purchase made after April this year, many landlords' finances are suddenly looking like they might not stack up.

Can anyone be a landlord? Brokers warn the day of the amateur landlord is over

Graphic evidence emerged yesterday that landlords, both current and prospective, are seeing the writing on the wall: figures from the Council of Mortgage Lenders revealed a spectacular drop in the number of buy-to-let property purchases in April.

The number of buy-to-let mortgages taken out for purchase was just 4,200 after spiking to 28,700 in March 2016 ahead of the stamp duty change deadline.

Although this drop was not a great shock, more telling was the fact that buy-to-let purchases dropped by 51 per cent on the 8,600 recorded in April 2015.

While the stamp duty change will affect new investors and those who might have bought more properties, a bigger impact for existing buy-to-let investors will come from the changes to mortgage interest tax relief.

The large number of landlords who pay 40 per cent income tax will no longer be able to offset all their mortgage interest payments against tax on rental income. Instead tax relief will be capped at 20 per cent, meaning higher rate taxpayers will effectively find themselves paying tax on revenue not profit.

The suggestion is that landlords who can will put up rents to cover this.

Alan Ward, chairman of the Residential Landlords Association, said: 'Faced with substantial tax rises, our research shows 84 per cent of landlords are considering increasing rents to cover their costs.

'To design a policy that needs rents to rise to be successful is plainly wrong. All it will do is make it harder for tenants to save for a deposit for a home of their own.'

Research published last week told a similar story, with Kent Reliance, part of OneSavings Bank, claiming that in the past year the average monthly rent has already risen by 3.5 per cent to 872.

But the lender's research also found that four in ten landlords expect to raise rents in the next six months by an average of 5.6 per cent - an average increase of around 49 per month for tenants.

Three quarters of landlords increasing rents directly blame the impending sharp reduction in mortgage tax relief.

BUY-TO-LET HEADWINDS Tax relief on mortgage payments Currently landlords can claim tax relief on their mortgage interest at the rate they pay income tax. From 2017 this rate will reduce annually over a four year period to a maximum of 20 per cent - down from the maximum of 45 per cent for higher rate tax payers now Wear and tear Until April this year landlords could deduct 10 per cent of their rental income when calculating taxable profit to allow for general 'wear and tear'. Now landlords can only deduct the actual costs incurred by replacing furnishings in the tax year Stamp duty surcharge Anyone purchasing a buy-to-let property or second home after 1 April this year has to pay a 3 per cent surcharge over the standard rate of stamp duty adding tens of thousands of pounds to the cost of purchase Bank of England crackdown Prudential regulators in the Bank of England have expressed worry the buy-to-let market is overheating and are due to publish further measures to keep a lid on landlord investment fuelled by buy-to-let mortgages at the end of June. This is likely to include a cap on the rental income ratio stress test

Dominik Lipnicki, director of mortgage broker Your Mortgage Decisions, said: 'We have already seen rents increasing faster than peoples incomes but my view is that rents can only go up so far - I do not believe that tenants can afford to cover landlords fully if their costs go up.

'The buy-to-let market will be hit and for many their dream of being a landlord will no longer make financial sense.'

Indeed research from specialist buy-to-let lender Paragon Mortgages revealed that 52 per cent of landlords are now looking to reduce the size of their portfolio and plan not buy any further properties as a direct result of these changes.

Domino effect

Although the tax relief cuts don't start until 2017, landlords are already seeing their lenders tighten up, forcing those taking out a new mortgage to raise rents before the policy lands.

Historically, to secure a buy-to-let mortgage borrowers had to show that the rent they collect covers their mortgage payments at a ratio of 125 per cent.

But in the past month Nationwide's specialist buy-to-let lender The Mortgage Works, Barclays, Foundation Homeloans, Keystone and Newcastle Building Society have all turned the screws on landlords looking to borrow to invest in property, raising this ratio to 145 per cent.

While the largest player in the buy-to-let market BM Solutions - part of Lloyds Banking Group - will still lend to landlords with a rental income cover ratio of 125 per cent, mortgage brokers say this won't last.

'No lender wants to be the last man standing and the Bank of England has buy-to-let under its beady eye now,' said David Whittaker, managing director of specialist buy-to-let adviser Mortgages for Business.

'Make no mistake, there are some lenders hanging on for a bit longer at 125 per cent but they will follow to 145 per cent and some may choose to go higher up to 150 per cent.'

Rise and fall: Buy-to-let purchases have been ticking up for the past three years but rocketed in 2016 as the stamp duty hike deadline loomed, before then plummeting, CML figures show. The question is what next?

Regional variation

These changes affect landlords in London and the South East of England most, where house prices are among the highest in the country and the profitability of investing in buy-to-let as measured by rental yields is consequently lower.

BUY-TO-LET YIELD CALCULATOR This calculator shows the rental return on your investment property as a percentage of its value Property value:  Monthly rent:  ::: Calculate ::: Annual rent: Yield:

At the most basic level yields are measured by comparing annual rental income to property prices.

But to get a better measure costs need to be taken into account. That means factoring in rental income earned, the cost of servicing the mortgage, paying a letting agent to manage the property, wear and tear to the property from tenants, maintenance and the risk that a property may be empty for a few months in the year.

Whittaker said: 'In some parts of central London yields can be as low as 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent - clearly a rise in the rental income cover ratio is going to hit landlords in these areas the hardest.'

The knock-on effect will be to force landlords borrowing in London and the South East to stump up larger deposits to bring the cost of the mortgage down, he explained.

'That will force many landlords to adjust their expectations and rethink how they deploy their equity,' he added.

While yields in the north of England look much healthier at around 10 per cent, Whittaker warned: 'I would be very cautious of investing in buy-to-let in a place hundreds of miles from where you live and in an area you don't know.

'The best landlords stick to areas and properties they know where they understand tenant demand. I suspect we will see London landlords shift investment to outer areas of London and in the home counties where yields look better.'

Lipnicki however said he believes the changing dynamics will deter many from investing altogether.

He said: 'We are seeing a cooling in the buy-to-let market already and many so-called amateur investors are likely to pull out of the market completely.'

Yield matters: Brokers predict landlords will start to invest further out of London to make ends meet

Taxing changes

With so many changes to the tax treatment of landlords, advisers are also concerned that anyone thinking of investing or with an existing buy-to-let portfolio takes proper tax advice on their specific circumstances.

Rob Killeen, of mortgage broker Capital Fortune, said: 'With the reduction of tax relief on mortgage interest from next year landlords will effectively be taxed on turnover rather than profit. This will increase the band at which many pay income tax and/or the amount of tax they pay on property.

'As landlords will be assessed on their turnover, someone earning 35,000 annually at work and earning 10,000 in gross rent a year will fall into the higher bracket and make them a 40 per cent rate taxpayer as a direct result of these changes.'

Already, experts say the changes are forcing landlords making new purchases to structure their investments within limited companies.

This means company owners - the landlord - can pay tax at the rate of corporation tax, currently 17.5 per cent.

Someone earning 35,000 annually at work and earning 10,000 in gross rent a year will fall into the higher bracket and make them a 40 per cent rate taxpayer as a direct result of these changes

Claiming back against expenses is also taxed at a more favourable rate within the limited company structure.

Whittaker said: 'I think it would be most unusual for any landlord investing in a new buy-to-let property now or in the future to do that through anything other than a limited company unless they are planning to flip the property within 12 months.

'There are plenty of potential solutions for borrowers who want to invest - the landscape is just getting more and more complex. Speak to an adviser who will be able to help.'

Landlords who invest through a company will find that if they want to draw any income from it themselves they will face extra tax, whether they pay themselves an income or dividends.

Lipnicki added: 'If I could give one piece of advice to anyone thinking about becoming a landlord it's no wishful thinking.

'Investors must do their sums and make sure that they stack up, even if mortgage rates increase or if the property is empty for several months. As always, look at yield and capital growth.

'Subsidising the mortgage by 2,000 a year if the capital growth is 10,000 can make sense to many but what if that growth stops or worse, tumbles? The mortgage will still need to be paid.
Young people are often told that higher education is the key to the job of their dreams. But research suggests that may have become an outdated notion.

A huge 69 per cent of the online small businesses looking to expand this year that were questioned in the eBay Employee Skills Index survey say it isn't particularly important to them that candidates have a university degree.

Instead, they place more importance on skills such as a strong grasp of social media, computer coding, and marketing.

Michael: Working from the bottom up gives you experience you don't get from formal qualifications

Bike insurance firm founder: 'Personality and practical knowledge are key for me' Bikmo is a specialist bike insurer based in Cheshire. It has 10 full-time employees, and founder David George says he will only take on people who have passion, drive, and an interest in cycling. David - whose background is chemical engineering - said: 'When I came out of university I myself knew very little compared to what a year in the job gave me. 'I employ cyclists only, and actively don't employ people from the insurance sector as I believe it's good to get people with fresh ideas thinking about the problems of marketing and selling insurance'. When hiring, David says he will sift through CVs to look for background work experience, which he generally prioritises over any academic accomplishments. He will also turn to his network to ask whether they have any recommendations David hired Michael Montgomery, who has four GCSEs and no further academic qualifications, as head of digital marketing in August last year. He says: 'Michaels key skills which led his employment were search engine optimisation, inbound marketing, content marketing and his fluency with analytics. 'His hiring was a superb move as weve since seen traffic to the site increase by 70 per cent. He has brought with him a wealth of knowledge and contacts which have boosted all areas of the business from marketing and PR right through to business development.' Michael adds: 'I strongly believe that working in marketing from the bottom up gives you insights that you dont get just from having the formal qualifications. 'We had a work placement person in for a month at the beginning of the year and he actually said hes taken more away in that period than he has in nearly three years studying Digital Marketing at University.'

Half of those surveyed said finding employees with a university degree was 'not at all important' to them - and one in four said the same about GCSEs.

Instead, the results indicate that practical skills gained through hands-on experience, and proficiency with technology are valued more highly than academic accomplishments.

More than half of SMEs said it was important that a prospective employee has digital skills, and 41 per cent looked for candidates who could code and build computer programmes.

Meanwhile, a considerable 61 per cent of respondents said they favoured candidates who had a strong grasp of marketing and advertising,

One in three of the small businesses surveyed said they were planning to hire this year.

And while the sorts of skills they are looking for are generally thought of as being the preserve of younger people, 41 per cent of prospective employees said age was 'not at all important' to them - which makes sense, as there are 900,000 more 50-64 year-olds in work now than in 2010.

Essential skills? SMEs are on the lookout for candidates who have experience in social media and marketing

The research came from eBay's Employee Skills Index. The research, done by YouGov was taken from a sample of 409 small businesses owners who have an online presence.

Tanya Lawler, vice president at eBay UK, said: 'The nature of business, especially online retail, is changing rapidly.
An autistic man who was coaxed by two men into jumping into a freezing ocean for $20 and cigarettes surprised a courtroom by asking the judge to spare one of them from jail - because the bully's girlfriend 'was crying'.

Nicholas Formica, 22, and Christopher Tilton, 21, had dared Parker Drake, 20, to eat a hamster for money, walk into the ocean for two packs of cigarettes or jump from the jetty for the cigarettes and $20.

Drake, of Howell, New Jersey, declined the first two options but agreed to jump into the jetty in a prank that was filmed and posted online last February.

Formica and Tilton were convicted of endangering the welfare of an incompetent person in the prank that was filmed and posted online.

Above, Christine Marshall with her son Parker Drake after Nicholas Formica and Christopher Tilton were found guilty in Manasquan, NJ, municipal court Tuesday. The two men were convicted of endangering the welfare of an incompetent person by coaxing Drake, who is autistic, to jump into a freezing ocean for $20 and cigarettes

Tilton (left) and Formica (right) were sentenced to probation and community service. Municipal prosecutor Anthony Vecchio initially asked for a 90-day jail term for Formica because of his prior criminal record - until Drake asked the judge to show him leniency

They were found guilty on Tuesday and sentenced to probation and community service.

However, municipal prosecutor Anthony Vecchio had initially asked for a 90-day jail term for Formica because of his prior criminal record.

Drake then stood up and said, 'Do you think [Nicholas] Formica should really go to jail?', according to Asbury Park Press.

'You're telling me not to send him to jail?' the judge asked Drake.

'I think there should be something else,' Drake replied.

The judge instead ordered Formica to perform 90 days of community service at a facility for disabled children, and suspended a 90-day jail term.

Formica, who was placed on probation for a year, had been out on early release from a three-year prison term for conspiring to commit theft when Drake was subjected to the bullying.

Drake wanted Formica to be spared jail because the bully's 'girlfriend was crying, and she doesnt need that', he said after the trial

Formica also had a conditional discharge for a previous offense, he said.

Capotorto sentenced Tilton, who has no prior criminal record, to perform 60 days of community service at a facility for the disabled. Tilton, 21, of Howell, also was fined $506.

When asked later why he asked the judge to show leniency, Drake said, 'His girlfriend was crying, and she doesnt need that'.

Drake had testified last month that the water was so cold and his body became so numb that he thought he was going to die.

Defense attorneys argued that Drake made a choice that could have been avoided.

'A series of choices were presented ... and there was a fourth choice: Just don't do it,' Formica's attorney, Alton Kenney, said. 'Nobody compelled, nobody forced and nobody threatened Mr. Drake. He was given a series of choices.'

But the judge said there was a possibility that Drake didn't know he could have refused the options.

'It turned out that this prank was well more than that,' he said. 'Fortunately for them, this prank didn't turn out to be something deadly.'
As a senior aid worker for the United Nations, Radek Rzehak is supposed to help the world's poorest and most desperate people.

But while this may be the case, MailOnline can reveal how the head of UNICEF's Syria relief operation does so in style - by staying in the most luxurious hotels, eating at the best restaurants, and taking in the most spectacular tourist sights.

For UNICEF's Syria chief can be exposed as having written scores of picky online reviews of the hotels and restaurants he visited while helping to save lives around the world.

Traveller: Radek Rzehak is the head of UNICEF's Syria relief operation - and a keen contributor to TripAdvisor

Expert: Rzehak can be exposed has having written scores of picky online reviews of the hotels and restaurants he visited while helping to save lives around the world, including in Syria, Lebanon and Ukraine

'Very good': In this one, penned in February, he describes his stay in a hotel in Damascus, currently in the grip of a five-year civil war which has left hundreds of thousands of people dead

In February, Rzehak visited the Syrian capital Damascus for work, from where he posted a review of the of the city's best hotel, the five-star Four Seasons, on the travel website TripAdvisor.

He praised the hotel's room service. But, notwithstanding the fact that Syria is at war and Damascus is just seven miles from the besieged town of Daraya, expressed some concern about certain shortages.

'Despite difficult situation in the country the hotel still functions very well. There is some small shortage in some supplies but staff do very well. Good food selection. Good room service,' Rzehak wrote on his TripAdvisor contributor page.

The Polish UN man also used the review website to detail his touristic travels around the city.

Damascus' majestic Umayyad Mosque was a five-star 'must see', he wrote on TripAdvisor. The city's ancient souk he gave equal praise.

Two months earlier, he was in the Lebanese capital Beirut, where - again according to his TripAdvisor page - he stayed at the five-star Movenpick hotel, famous locally for its twin, glorious seafront swimming pools.

Rzehak - who was again travelling on business - was not overly impressed.

Hints and tips: The Polish UN man also uses the review website to detail his touristic travels around places

Picky: Rzehak was impressed by the swimming pools in Beirut, but not the 'plastic food' on offer

Inconvenient: He found the Ramada Hotel, Donetsk, to be still functioning well, despite the war raging around it

Luxury: Rzehak described the rooms in the Ramada Hotel (left and right), in the war zone of Donetsk, to be 'nice and clean' but said 'breakfast could be a bit better'

'Of course very good standards. Nice rooms. Nice services,' he wrote, but 'the hotel was not refreshed for long time so all is kind of dusty'.

He went on: 'The food is not good enough. It is typical hotel plastic food for both breakfast and lunches. In any restaurant outside of hotel you get much better food.'

Rooms nice and clean. Breakfast could be bit better but is ok. The restaurant offers limited number but good meals Rzehak on Donetsk's Ramada Hotel Rzehak on Donetsk's Ramada Hotel

He advised fellow travellers to 'sleep in eat out'.

Rzehak then gave readers his advice on where in the city one could eat the best food.

In February last year Rzehak was in Donetsk, Ukraine, this time as UNICEF's emergency coordinator in the civil war-torn country.

He wrote a blog for UNICEF in which he told how he visited 'orphaned children, children affected by HIV, and vulnerable children living in inhumane conditions in underground bomb shelters'.

'When a mother of a two-year-old boy hugs me in a wet and dark bomb shelter to thank me for the hygiene kits and water that were delivered, I feel great frustration that this is happening to them and that we're so limited in what we can do,' he wrote online.

But Rzehak also found a few moments to write on TripAdvisor about his own accommodation in the city's best hotel, the Ramada.

'Rooms nice and clean. Breakfast could be bit better but is ok. The restaurant offers limited number but good meals.

'Due to war only cash accepted. So recommended for time of peace and war.'

Good intentions: Rzehak works for UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund) a UN body charged with helping children and mothers in the developing world

Passion: He wrote passionately about his frustration about not being able to reach more children through the organisations work after a trip to Donetsk. Pictured: A tank in the Georgia-Russia war on his Facebook

In November 2014 he was in the Belarusian capital Minsk, staying at the newly opened, five star Beijing Hotel, again on business.

Under the headline 'lost in the bed' he praised the bed's large size and comfort, but pointed out that 'the service at the bar could also be better for 5 stars hotel'. He gave it four out of five.

UNICEF - the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund - is a UN body charged with helping children and mothers in the developing world.

Working in 190 countries, its annual budget - raised from taxpayers as well as voluntary contributions - is $1.44billion. The organisation's celebrity supporters include Annie Lennox, Bono and Sting.

The organisation's distinctive all-white 4 by 4 vehicles are a common sight through the developing world, especially outside good hotels.

According to his LinkedIn page, Rzehak, who is Polish and aged in his 40s, has worked for UNICEF for the past six years. He appears to have started his career in the organisation in Kazakhstan, where he worked as child protection officer.

He is an enthusiastic poster on the TripAdvisor website, having written 152 reviews of hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions over the past six years.

Some he visited while travelling on business; others with his family for pleasure. He describes himself on the website as 'beach goer', 'backpacker' and 'night life seeker'.

Career: Rzehak, who is Polish and aged in his 40s, has worked for UNICEF for the past six years

Get a good deal: In this post, he describes staying in a newly-opened, five star hotel in the Belarusian capital Minsk - but he wasn't impressed with the price

Rzehak did not immediately return a request for comment today. His TripAdvisor review page was yesterday removed from public view.

A spokesman for UNICEF said: 'Given the situation in Syria that review was inappropriate. UNICEF got in touch with the relevant staff member who has now removed the post.
Michelle Obama plans to promote her year-old global girls' education initiative during upcoming stops in Liberia, Morocco and Spain on what could be her final solo overseas excursion as first lady.

The White House announced Wednesday that the three-country trip is booked for June 27-July 1. Her traveling companions are daughters Malia and Sasha, and her mother, Marian Robinson.

Actresses Freida Pinto and Meryl Streep are lending their star-power to the first lady's Africa appearances.

The trip is likely to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax-payer money, according to expense reports from the First Lady's prior trips to the African continent.

Mrs Obama racked up $424,142 on travel and expenses for the plane crew on her 2011 trip to Botswana and South Africa.

The plane that Mrs Obama usually travels on costs $11,684 an hour to operate, and with about 25 hours on her upcoming trip - the bill should amount to a little less than $300,000 just for flying alone.

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Michelle Obama, her daughters and her mother will be travelling to Africa later this month to promote the first lady's 'Let Girls Learn' initiative. Above, the first lady and her daughters arrive in London for a visit ON June 15, 2015

In Liberia, Mrs. Obama is scheduled to visit a Peace Corps training facility in Kakata to meet with girls and young women participating in an empowerment camp. The stop is meant to highlight the Peace Corps' role in the Let Girls Learn initiative, along with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The first lady also plans to visit a school in Unification Town, Liberia, to speak with adolescent girls about their obstacles to getting an education. Pinto, an advocate for girls' education, will moderate the discussion. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will join Mrs. Obama during the visit.

Streep, also a girls' education advocate, is scheduled to accompany Mrs. Obama in Marrakech, Morocco, for another conversation with adolescent girls that is to be moderated by CNN's Isha Sesay. The visit will also highlight U.S. commitments through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. foreign aid agency, and USAID to help Moroccan girls attend and stay in school.

Actresses Freida Pinto and Meryl Streep (pictured) will be joining the first lady on different legs of the upcoming trip

In Madrid, the first lady plans a speech on the Let Girls Learn initiative, launched in March 2015 to encourage developing nations to educate the more than 62 million girls worldwide who currently don't attend school. Mrs. Obama also plans to meet with Queen Letizia while she is in Spain.

With seven months left on the president's term, the upcoming visits to Africa and Europe could be the final foreign trip Mrs. Obama takes without him. August typically is reserved for family vacation, and her fall schedule is likely to fill up with campaign appearances on behalf of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee whom the Obamas endorsed last week, as well as other Democratic political candidates.

Malia graduated from high school last week and is taking a "gap" year before enrolling in Harvard in the fall of 2017. Students who take gap years typically travel and pursue other projects. Sasha will be on summer break before entering 10th grade this fall.

The first lady has promoted Let Girls Learn during stops in the partner countries of Japan, Cambodia, the United Kingdom and Qatar.
A state worker has been accused of having sexual contact with a mentally-ill teenager who murdered his family.

Psychiatric technician Amber Lucero, 35, allegedly had an improper relationship with Nehemiah Griego after falling for him during treatment at the Sequoyah Adolescent Treatment Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The 19-year-old, who is a patient at the center for troubled teens, shot and killed his parents and three younger siblings when he was just 15.

He allegedly used his father's .22 rifle and AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to shoot his sleeping mother Sara before killing his nine-year-old brother Zephania and two sisters, Jael, five, and Angelina, two.

Psychiatric technician Amber Lucero, 35, has been accused of having sexual contact with murderer Nehemiah Griego, 19, at the Sequoyah Adolescent Treatment Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico

It is claimed he then lay in wait at least four hours for his father, Greg, to return to the family home in a rural area southwest of downtown Albuquerque and then shot him dead late on Saturday night.

Police believe the video game-obsessed teen - who had allegedly spent a week plotting the murders - then spent the rest of the day at his local church.

In February, a judge cleared the way for him to be released by the age of 21.

His teachers, psychiatrists and others at the treatment center say he has made significant progress after being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and some learning disabilities.

Lucero made her first appearance in court Tuesday. She's charged with sexual contact of a minor by a person in a position of authority.

Griego (left and right), who is a patient at the center for troubled teens, shot and killed his parents and three younger siblings when he was just 15

It was not immediately clear if she had an attorney.

Griego had received therapy at the facility prior to pleading guilty to charges stemming from the slayings at his family home just south of Albuquerque.

According to a criminal complaint, some of Griego's family members learned of the relationship and reported it last week to administrators at the treatment center.

State Health Department spokesman David Morgan said the allegations are troubling and that the agency, which oversees the center, is taking them seriously.

'DOH placed the employee on leave Monday and we are moving forward with termination,' he told The Associated Press in an email.

'We have also been cooperating with state police on their criminal investigation and will continue to do so.'

He allegedly used his father's .22 rifle and AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to shoot his sleeping mother Sara before killing his nine-year-old brother Zephania and two sisters, Jael, five, and Angelina, two, at their family home in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Lucero (pictured during her first court appearance on Tuesday) has been charged with sexual contact of a minor by a person in a position of authority. The pair allegedly began their illicit relationship in 2014

Albuquerque television station KRQE first reported allegations about the relationship.

The criminal complaint stated that Griego confirmed for investigators that he was in a romantic relationship with Lucero and that the relationship began in the latter half of 2014.

The two began spending time together. Walks around the facility led to holding hands and kissing, and Griego told investigators that he had touched Lucero's breasts over her clothing.

Griego was reluctant to talk about their relationship because he cared for Lucero and didn't want to get her in trouble, according to the complaint.

When Griego was moved to another facility, authorities said, the two continued to exchange letters.

In an interview with police, Lucero said she believed she loved Griego and that she 'weakened' when he asked for a kiss. She went on to say that she overstepped her boundaries by becoming 'too much of a friend with him and caring too much.'

During Tuesday's court hearing, the judge ordered Lucero not to have any contact with Griego or return to the treatment center.

Griego will remain in state custody until he is 21 as part of a sentence handed down in March for the shooting deaths of his parents and siblings.
The FBI is investigating a threatening message posted on Craigslist that praised the deadly shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

The sickening post, titled 'We need more Orlandos' [sic],' was uploaded in the men-seeking-men section of the San Diego personal ads.

In the message, the user says, 'San Diego you are next', and urges others to: 'Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name.'

It also claims that the terrorist attack carried out by ISIS sympathizer Omar Mateen at Pulse nightclub was 'long overdue' and described the 49 victims as 'walking diseases, bug chasers'.

The FBI is investigating a threatening message (above) posted on Craigslist that praised the deadly shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando. The sickening post, titled 'We need more Orlandos' [sic],' was uploaded in the men-seeking-men section of the San Diego personal ads

Darrell Foxworth, a spokesman for the FBI, confirmed the agency was looking into the post and attempting to identify the person responsible.

Local Orlando broadcaster KGTV reported that the message had been posted.

A viewer took a screenshot of the message, which included a picture of a revolver being fired, and sent it to the news outlet before it was flagged and removed from the website.

It reportedly read: 'Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name.

'Those people were walking diseases, bug chasers, and thank god for AIDS and 9-11 and now Orlando. San Diego you are next,' the message went on.

The post also claims that the terrorist attack carried out by ISIS sympathizer Omar Mateen at Pulse nightclub (pictured) was 'long overdue' and described the 49 victims as 'walking diseases, bug chasers'

Mateen (left and right) was shot to death by police after a three-hour rampage through the nightclub.

In Houston, police said on Wednesday they were investigating a threat made on Twitter of a mass shooting against the city's Gay Pride parade, scheduled for June 25.

The threat was made on Monday, police said, though there were no plans to cancel the event.

In Seattle, the FBI said on Wednesday that they were investigating threats against Muslims and LGBT bars in the area, though none had been identified as specific or credible. Seattle police arrested a man on Tuesday who had threatened a city mosque.

In the attack in Orlando on Sunday, a gunman opened fire at the Pulse club, killing 49 people and wounding dozens more in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Roger Rogerson shamelessly gloated about his killings in personalised notes in his memoirs and on stage for years before he was convicted of murder.

The 75-year-old was found guilty on Wednesday of murdering Sydney university student Jamie Gao in a botched drug deal to steal three kilograms of ice in 2014.

It was not his first killing. He had already shot dead three robbers during his time as a NSW Police detective in the 1970s and 80s.

Gloating about their deaths in the years that followed, Rogerson boasted of being 'a good shot' and told one fan that he only needed 'three shots' to kill all the men.

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Roger Rogerson boasted about killing three men in a shameless note to a fan where he described himself as a 'good shot'. Above, he poses in promotional photographs for his DVD in 2009

In a note in the front of his memoirs, The Dark Side, he wrote shamelessly to one acquaintance: 'They tell me you were a pretty good shot! But were you as good as me! Three shots. Three men dead. All past tense. Hope you enjoy the rest.'

The note was dated May 2010, four years before he shot dead university student Gao in a storage unit in Padstow, south west Sydney.

He also boasted about shooting the men during his bizarre stage show, Wild Colonial Psychos, with former AFL player Mark 'Jacko' Jackson and crime figure Mark 'The Chopper' Read.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Rogerson would sign copies of the death notice of Warren Lanfranchi for fans and handed out bullet-shaped pens with the names of the other men he killed - Butchy Burns and Philip Western.

In a promotional video for the show he told of teaming up with Read, an infamous gangster whose signature torture technique was to individually cut off the toes of his victims.

In a 2010 note to a fan (above), Rogerson boasted about killing three men with 'three shots'

The 75-year-old formed a bizarre friendship with the late criminal Mark 'The Chopper' Read (right) and former AFL player Mark 'Jacko' Jackson (left) for their stage show, Wild Colonial Psychos, after leaving jail in 2006

Rogerson shot dead Warren Lanfranchi (left) in 1981 in a laneway in Chippendale. He later claimed self-defence. Lanfranchi's prostitute girlfriend Sallie-Anne Huckstepp (right) was murdered five years later

Huckstepp told friends she feared Rogerson and his informant, drug dealer Neddy Smith (above in 1999), would murder her

Rogerson had already shot Philip Western (left) and Butchy Burns (right) in the 1970s when he killed Lanfranchi

Brothel madam Shirley Finn (left) was killed in 1975. Police believe Rogerson may have information about her death. Christopher Flannery vanished in 1985 (right)

'We started off in completely opposite polls but we come together, talk about similar things from both sides of the spectrum with Jacko in the middle,' said Rogerson of their tour across RSL Clubs in 2005.

He proudly declared himself a 'psycho' earlier in the footage. Rogerson has had his name tied to another 12 deaths, all of them unsolved.

ROGERSON'S MURDEROUS LINKS Philip Western and Butchy Burns: Both shot dead by Rogerson in line of duty in 1976 Warren Lanfranchi: Killed by Rogerson in 1981 in Chippendale laneway Sallie-Anne Huckstepp: Murdered in 1986 after publicly pinning Lanfranchi's murder on Rogerson Lyn Woodward: Murdered within hours of giving evidence into Lanfranchi shooting Shirley Finn: Murdered in Perth in 1975. Police believe Rogerson may have information Christopher Flannery: Disappeared in 1984 Michael Sayers, Daniel Chubb, Barry McCann, Tony Eustace, Roy Thurgar, Harvey Jones and Luton Shu: Killed in Sydney's gang wars of 1980s with Rogerson still in touch with criminal underworld Brian Alexander: Law clerk with ties to criminals murdered Advertisement

Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, Lanfranchi's prostitute girlfriend, was found floating in a pond at Centennial Park in 1986, five years after the policeman killed her boyfriend.

She had previously told friends and lovers of fears that Rogerson and Smith would kill her for suggesting Lanfranchi's death had been meticulously planned by the pair.

Rogerson has never faced charges over her death. Smith was arrested in 1996 - ten years afterwards - but was acquitted three years later.

No one has since been held responsible for her murder.

Huckstepp's friend, Lyn Woodward, has been missing since the 1980s when she disappeared hours after giving evidence at the inquest into Lanfranchi's death.

The murder of another prostitute, Western Australian madam Shirley Finn, has also been linked back to Rogerson who police believe may have information about her death.

Finn was shot dead in June 1975.

It has long been rumoured the then brothel madam had attempted to blackmail WA Police officers with her knowledge of their alleged involvement with her prostitutes to force them to waver a tax bill she was facing.

No one has ever been arrested for her murder.

The deaths of nine others have seen Rogerson implicated in some way. Criminals Michael 'Mick' Sayers, Daniel Chubb, Barry McCann, Tony Eustace and Roy Thurgar all died at the height of Sydney's gangland violence.

Michael Drury, a former NSW policeman, was shot at twice through his kitchen window in 1984. He believes Rogerson organised the attack

Rogerson has long denied involvement in any of the unsolved murders of Sydney crime figures in the 1980s

Now 75, Rogerson was jailed on Wednesday (above) after being convicted of the murder of Sydney university student Jamie Gao

While Rogerson had completed his final act as a policeman in 1984, he maintained relationships with underworld figures.

Jamie Gao, 20, was shot dead and dumped in the sea in 2014

He was also tied to the deaths of petty criminals Harvey Jones and Luton Shu and law clerk Brian Alexander, according to the newspaper.

Christopher Flannery, a hitman who has been missing since 1985, has also been traced back to Rogerson.

Flannery was suspected to have been the shooter in the attempted murder of Michael Drury, a NSW Policeman who was attacked at his home in 1984.

He survived and later alleged it had been Rogerson who arranges the hit because he had refused a bribe to protect a Melbourne drug dealer during at a trial he was due to give evidence in.

Rogerson was charged but later acquitted of conspiring with Flannery to bribe and kill Mr Drury despite aforementioned drug dealer's testimony that the pair had agreed to it for $50,000.

Flannery disappeared the following year and his body has never been found. At an inquest in to his death, Smith pointed the finger at Rogerson who he said had insisted the man 'had to go'.

Rogerson denied any involvement, telling Channel Nine later: 'He didn't want to do as he was told, he was out of control, and having overstepped that line, well, I suppose they said he had to go but I can assure you I had nothing to do with it.'

Gao, his latest victim, was shot dead in 2014 and dumped at sea by Rogerson and fellow former detective Glen McNamara.
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

The bloody crime scene photos taken of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman are seen in full for the first time in the extraordinary new documentary OJ: Made In America.

There are also details of the scene from those who were there that night, including the now infamous Mark Fuhrman.

And Fuhrman also reveals how it was that he came to find a glove hidden behind a bungalow on Simpson's property.

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In documentary OJ: Made In America, Mark Fuhrman explains how he came across a bloody glove (above) at OJ Simpson's home

Kato Kaeilin told Fuhrman there had been an earthquake earlier and he could feel the walls behind his bungalow pounding, so Fuhrman went and took a look behind the tiny abode, where he found the glove

'I got there they had the scene very well secured. They had the entire block taped off. Front door wide open, little music playing in the background, candles are lit inside,' said Tom Lange of the LAPD about arriving at the murder scene.

'Very violent confrontation. Rage. Two victims. Blood everywhere.'

He went on to say: 'We find a glove, it's a left glove, and a blood trail indicating the suspect has been wounded on the left side.

'So we're just getting into this when we find out that this is apparently OJ Simpson's estranged wife.'

That changed everything, Lange explained.

'We have two children asleep, and a very brutal murder. Someone's got to make a death notification to the next of kin.'

At OJ's home, police found a glove matching the left glove (above) they had just seen at the murder scene

Fuhrman went to look behind Kaelin's bungalow after Simpson's house guest said he felt the wall behind it pounding

At that moment, he called over Fuhrman for some help.

'They called me over and said "you were at Simpson's house once, right? We want you to take us up there,"' recalled Fuhrman.

They pulled up to the gate and after repeatedly ringing the bell got no answer. Fuhrman said he decided to take a walk down the street and noticed something when he got down the block.

'By the other gate, there's a white Ford Bronco, and on the door handle there's blood,' said Fuhrman.

'I mean, there was enough evidence outside, we got to make sure everyone's OK in here. We need to go in, so I jump up over the fence and I open the gate.'

It was on June 12, 1994, Nciole Brown Simpson (above) was found dead outside her Brentwood home

OJ Simpson was cleared of murdering his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman (above, his body at the murder scene) after the world-famous year-long trial in 1995

There was no answer at Simpson's house so they went to the bungalows and came across Kato Kaelin, who said Simpson had left for Chicago.

He also told Fuhrman there had been an earthquake earlier and he could feel the walls behind his bungalow pounding, so Fuhrman went and took a look behind the tiny abode.

And found a right glove matching the left glove they had just seen at the murder scene.

'At first I thought it was dog crap,' said Fuhrman. 'And then I shone the light on it. It's a glove.'

When he arrived at the murder scene, Tom Lange of the LAPD said there was music playing and candles lit
Unprecedented revolt: Tories warned that George Osborne's position was verging on 'untenable'

More than 60 Tory MPs were in unprecedented open revolt against George Osborne last night after he threatened to increase taxes if the public votes for Brexit.

Ex-Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith accused him of behaving 'more irresponsibly' than any Chancellor in history and scores of Tories warned that his position was verging on 'untenable'.

Some senior ex-ministers said his career was over regardless of the result of the referendum because he had fatally damaged his 'credibility' and standing within the Tory Party.

Last night, Michael Gove joined the revolt, telling a special edition of the BBC's Question Time programme that he would not vote for Mr Osborne's 'Brexit Budget'.

The roll-call of dissenting Tories included at least 12 former ministers or shadow ministers, seven of whom served in the Cabinet, such as Liam Fox, Cheryl Gillan, Owen Paterson and David Jones.

It came after Mr Osborne yesterday made the 'absurd' claim that a Brexit vote would require him to introduce an emergency budget within weeks.

He said the 30billion shock an Out vote would deliver to the economy would require 15billion of cuts to the NHS, defence and other priorities and 15billion in tax rises.

Mr Osborne added that this would include a 2p rise in the basic rate of income tax to 22 per cent, a 3p rise in the higher rate to 43 per cent, and a 5p rise in inheritance tax rates to 45p.

But his threats instantly crumbled when 57 Tory MPs released a letter saying there were no circumstances in which they would support the Budget. Jeremy Corbyn also made it clear Labour would not vote for any cuts. The Government has an effective majority of only 17.

MPs who support the Remain campaign were also angry with his scaremongering tactics. It is understood he did not consult many of the pro-EU members of the Cabinet before exploding his budget bombshell.

The letter  which had been signed by 65 Brexit Tory MPs by the end of yesterday  was savage in its dismissal of the Chancellor.

Compiled in barely an hour, it said: 'It is absurd to say that if people vote to take back control from the EU that he would want to punish them in this way. We do not believe that he would find it possible to get support in Parliament for these proposals to cut the NHS, our police forces and our schools.

Dissenting voices: Ex-Cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, left, and former Defence Secretary Liam Fox

'If the Chancellor is serious then we cannot possibly allow this to go ahead. It would be unnecessary, wrong and a rejection of the platform on which we all stood. If he were to proceed with these proposals, the Chancellor's position would become untenable.' MPs lined up to savage Mr Osborne in a sustained attack that left his authority draining away.

Ex-work and pensions secretary Mr Duncan Smith told LBC: 'Of all the things the Remain camp has done, this one probably is the most bizarre and the most ridiculous. It's showing behaviour from a chancellor which is more irresponsible than any chancellor I've seen at any time.'

One senior ex-minister told the Mail: 'I find it difficult to see win or lose how the Chancellor can stay in government. The party will come for him.' A serving minister said: 'It looks impossible for George now. Even if Remain squeeze home, the price for Cameron staying on will be to get rid of the Chancellor.'

Angry: Michael Gove on BBC Question Time

Mr Osborne's former Treasury deputy Andrea Leadsom, another pro-Brexit MP, also condemned his intervention, saying she was 'shocked, dismayed and saddened' by his attempt to scare voters into backing Brussels.

Ex-environment secretary Mr Paterson said: 'If the Chancellor thinks he could pass such a punishment budget through the House of Commons he is utterly delusional.'

Ex-Labour chancellor Alistair Darling  whose economic forecasts were ridiculed by Mr Osborne  shared a platform with his successor the to unveil the emergency budget. But Labour leader Mr Corbyn said: 'We would oppose any post-Brexit austerity Budget, just as we have opposed any austerity Budget put forward by this government,' he told David Cameron at Prime Minister's Questions.

Mr Osborne dodged questions over whether he expected to still be in place as Chancellor to write a Budget if he and the Prime Minister were defeated in next week's vote.

He said an emergency Budget would be required 'within the next couple of months' after a Brexit vote in order to show the world that the UK had 'a credible plan' to deal with the deterioration in its public finances which would follow.

His words were echoed by Mr Cameron, who told MPs at Prime Minister's Questions: 'Nobody wants to have an emergency Budget, nobody wants to have cuts in public services, nobody wants to have tax increases.

'But I would say this: there is only one thing worse than not addressing a crisis in your public finances through a Budget, and that is ignoring it.

'Because if you ignore a crisis in your public finances, you see your economy go into a tailspin, you see confidence in your country reduced. We can avoid all of this by voting Remain next week.'

Challenged over Leave campaign claims that this would involve the Conservatives breaching a number of promises from the 2015 manifesto, a senior Downing Street source said: 'We have made very clear what our manifesto pledges are. We want to deliver those and if we vote to remain, we will deliver those, because the economy will continue to grow.

'If we vote to leave, by 2020 when new manifesto pledges would be drawn up, there's clearly a risk.'
Frigid napping has been a staple of northern European parenting since the 1920's, and now it's making a splash at a Melbourne day care centre.

In colder European countries, it's common for parents to bundle their child up in sub-zero temperatures and leave them in a pram outside to sleep.

Prams are often seen lining the outsides of cafes as parents enjoy the warmth inside with no concerns.

Frigid napping in Europe usually means parents leave their rugged up children in a pram outside to sleep while they sit inside, believing the practice has health benefits

The Australian version of this is much milder, but still involves children as young as five months up to two years old taking their naps outside with a warm blanket.

Manager of the Fox Kids Early Learning Centre, Lucy Holmes, began offering frigid naps to her young charges three weeks ago.

Though Melbourne winters can dip to a chilly six degrees, she told the Herald Sun these outdoor naps will only go ahead if the temperature is between 10 and 30 degrees.

Ms Holmes said the idea has been embraced by parents and was helping their young charges thrive.

'It is a natural environment thing, proven through research, that is a great way to boost oxygen intake, create relaxation and experience natural sights and sounds,' she said.

The practice has been around for some time, with a Finnish pediatrician first encouraging mothers to let their children sleep outdoors in the 1920s.

Anecdotal studies done in northern Europe show parents reported their children were sleeping for longer, seemed happier and suffered less illness.

Television personality Jessica Rowe weighed in to the debate last week when she shared a picture of a pram parked outside a cafe with her 28,000 Instagram followers.

'For a helicopter parent like me- this makes me break out into a sweat! But all over Reykjavik families leave their babies outside cafes, shops etc... I'm told 'fresh air is good for them.',' Ms Rowe said.

Many Australians commented that they too would be concerned about engaging in such a trusting exercise. Many worried their child would be kidnapped.

'I can't even leave my dogs unattended outside the paper shop for too long without worrying,' said Natasha Murphy.

The practice of letting children sleep outdoors was encouraged in the 1920s by a Finnish pediatrician

Sleep specialist Dr Chris Seton said while there was no harm in putting babies to sleep outside, there were no proven medical benefits.

'A lot of the research for it has come from Scotland and Northern Europe,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'The medical benefits initially were related to sunshine exposure - it was designed to avoid rickets in children. That's not really a concern in Australia.

Dr Seton said a child's oxygen intake was unlikely to differ between sleeping outside and in a well-ventilated room, and any sensory benefit related to children being outdoors would be nullified if the child was asleep.

Jessica Rowe was taken back by the casual nature of a pram with a sleeping child in it being left outside a restaurant
complaint, Dunkes was looking to meet young girls for sex

A sting operation carried out by police in Northern Virginia ended up catching one of they own after searching online for men who were looking to have sex or commit indecent acts with juveniles.

The sex-sting op nabbed Christopher Dunkes, 27, a police officer based in Maryland.

Dunkes allegedly replied to a Craigslist advertisement posted by an undercover officer with Virginia police, who was posing as a 15-year-old girl from Prince William County.

Dunkes, who is a patrolman with the Montgomery County Police Department, emailed and texted with the undercover officer about sex acts.

Caught: Montgomery County Police Officer Christopher Dunkes, 27, left, was one of seven people arrested this month by Prince William County police. Chad Michael Warner, 34, of Sterling was also caught

According to the complaint. Dunkes twice proposed a specific act and suggested that they meet in his car.

According to court documents, he agreed to meet the undercover officer at a Target store, but instead he was arrested and the cop became a criminal.

Dunkes has been suspended without pay, said Capt. Paul Starks, a Montgomery police spokesman. Dunkes had joined the force in 2014 and most recently had been assigned to the Bethesda bureau.

'We are cooperating with the investigation,' Starks said to KTTN. 'Our internal affairs division is communicating with Prince William County police.'

Steven Castillo, 20, left, of Woodbridge and Curtis M. Jenkins, 54, right, of Fairfax, Virginia were arrested

Jordan Kolbinskie, 23, of Manassas, left, and David Lee Mathes, 58, right, of Warrenton were arrested also

'During this operation, undercover detectives used social media and an undisclosed online site where they posed as underage juveniles,' Prince William police said in the statement.

'Male suspects contacted the undercover detectives and, during the course of communications, solicited sexual or indecent acts. These conversations involving the accused parties took place through electronic means. In each of the incidents, the suspect made arrangements to meet the undercover detective at a public location in Prince William County. Once there, detectives arrested the individual without incident.'
A man charged with the murder of a woman whose body was found just 500 metres from her Melbourne home made a 'full confession' to police.

Christian Bain-Singh, 22, from Clyde North made a 'full admission' to the deadly attack on Rani Featherston, 34, a court heard on Wednesday.

Ms Featherston was found in a pool of blood in the street just 500 metres from her home in Doveton in April 2014.

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A man has been charged over the 2014 murder of Melbourne woman Rani Featherston (pictured)

Ms Featherston, pictured here with her niece, was found in a pool of blood in the street just 500 metres from her home in Doveton

Christian Bain-Singh, 22, who has a full beard, hand tattoo and nose and eyebrow piercings, remained silent in court on Wednesday

Bain-Singh also allegedly admitted to attempted murder and aggravated burglary just ten days before Ms Featherston's death, The Herald Sun reports.

Mr Bain-Singh was remanded in custody to appear in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday.

During the hearing Detective Senior Constable Matt Klova told the court Bain-Singh admitted to the murder of Ms Featherston.

The 22-year-old, who has a full beard, hand tattoo and nose and eyebrow piercings, remained silent in court.

Ms Featherston was found with a mysterious fake tattoo on the bottom of her right leg (pictured)

The attack which killed her left the 34-year-old with stab wounds to her head and face

The 34-year-old woman died 500 metres from her home in Doveton in April, 2014

Ms Featherston was found in a pool of blood about half a kilometre from her home, with a mysterious fake tattoo on the bottom of her right leg.

This tattoo was not there when she was last recorded on CCTV the day before her death, police said.

The attack left the 34-year-old with stab wounds to her head and face.

The news comes weeks after her family organised a memorial walk to the alleged murder scene in the hope of prompting anyone with knowledge about the alleged murder to come forward.

Her mother died last year, never knowing who killed her daughter.
Twitter has come under fire for allegedly censoring conservative gay voices after Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos was suspended and a popular pro-Donald Trump hashtag apparently disabled from the site's auto-complete system.

Yiannopoulos, who has been particularly critical of Islam in the wake of Sunday's shooting, in which Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured 53 more in an Orlando gay club, had his account disabled Wednesday, Heat Street reported.

That same day, Twitter apparently blocked the hashtag #GaysForTrump from appearing automatically when typing.

Suspended: Conservative gay journalist Milo Yiannopoulos was suspended from Twitter Wednesday morning while on a tour that took him to a crowd (pictured, with Yiannopoulos) outside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando

Angry: Yiannopoulos's followers were angered by what they saw as censorship, after the author wrote an article that said 'America, and the world, has an Islam problem'

Suspension: Fans were quick to spread the word that Yiannopoulos has been suspended

Silenced: The view of many was that the controversial journalist, who has also made waves for his anti-feminist writing, was silenced by the social media site

Conservative: Yiannopoulos (pictured left with Anne Coulter and right with Donald Trump) is an outspoken conservative writer

The account run by Yiannopoulos, who is currently on a 50-week, 60-date U.S. college tour in which he espouses anti-feminist, anti-Islam views, went down Wednesday morning, a number of users reported.

Both #FreeMilo and #FreeNero (his Twitter handle) trended as word got out, and several fans objected to what they saw as censorship for his anti-Islamic views.

User @JohnCardillo said: 'Hey progressives, a gay man was silenced by Twitter for calling out radical Islam's killing of gays. #FreeMilo #FreeNero'

Another user, @UKamboj, wrote: 'Milo, a gay journalist, defended the LGBT community and is now suspended by the homophobes at @twitter #JeSuisMilo #FreeMilo'

And @exsacerdotal complained: 'Oh dear, @Nero has been suspended because he's strayed out of the confines of the LGBT zoo.'

Yiannopoulos's account was restored by midday Wednesday, but with just 10,000 of his previous crowd of 275,000 followers. His follower list was restored by 3:30pm, Heat Street said.

Although the reason for Yiannopoulos's suspension isn't known at present, one user said that it was due to a focused campaign of complaints by Arabic Twitter users.

According to @Unspectateur, 'A Muslim with 1.2M followers tweeted out a call to action which led to the temporary suspension of @Nero.'

And @Cernovich identified the same account as being the origin for 'mass spam reports' against Yiannopoulos's account. The account is in Arabic.

On Sunday he wrote an article for Breitbart titled 'The Left Chose Islam Over Gays. Now 100 People Are Dead Or Maimed In Orlando.'

In it, he asked: 'How many more innocent gays need to die before we admit that America, and the world, has an Islam problem?'

He added: 'I dont mean a "radical Islam" problem or an "extremist Islam problem." Violence is not the extreme in Islam any more: its the norm.'

'Call to action': This user said that an account by an Arabic writer with 1.2million followers had demanded action. Yiannopoulos speculated that an automatic suspension was triggered by a mass complaint report

Controversial: Yiannopoulos is infamous for his anti-feminist and anti-Islam views

Yiannopoulos was notified of the suspension in an interview with The Gavin McInness Show, in which he said he wasn't surprised.

'It was probably a mass reporting,' he said. 'Arabic Twitter got hold of me today... if they mass report enough I think it triggers some kind of automatic thing.'

Yiannopoulos had previously complained loudly about Twitter removing the 'blue tick' that signifies an official, 'verified' account, Business Insider reported in January.

The day before Yiannopoulos's suspension, the social media site came under fire for apparently removing #GaysForTrump from its auto-complete function, Breitbart reported.

Ordinarily when typing out a hashtag, Twitter will provide suggestions, with the options narrowing down with each letter typed.

But typing out '#GaysF' does not provide #GaysForTrump as an option.

User @PunishedSage made the observation Tuesday, adding that #LGBTQHatesTrumpParty - a less popular tag, according to data gleaned by Breitbart - was appearing in the auto-complete form.

'Gays for Trump' is a movement started by Chris Barron, president of the now-defunct gay conservative group GOProud, CNN reported.

As of Wednesday evening, neither option appeared when typed - however, Twitter was also not offering anything for the word '#Gay' at all.
The Clement Freud scandal deepened last night as new victims came forward, including one who reported him to police two years ago over Madeleine McCann.

Detectives investigating Madeleines disappearance were alerted to the paedophile BBC stars connection to the case, but nothing was done.

The Mail revealed yesterday how Freud, who died in 2009 aged 84, had a villa in the Algarve resort where Madeleine was snatched  and befriended the McCanns there.

Yet more allegations have come to light about Sir Clement Freud, pictured, who has been accused of molesting girls as young as 10

Now Vicky Hayes, who was groomed by Freud for years before he raped her as a teenager, has come forward to say she told police about the coincidence two years ago.

Mrs Hayes, 64, is one of several new victims to emerge yesterday after Freud was unmasked as a child abuser. She revealed she twice reported him to police, after his death, and last night called for the late broadcaster and MPs knighthood to be revoked.

Among yesterdays developments:

Another woman said her 14-year-old sister was plied with alcohol and molested at his marital home;

Police are compiling a dossier on sex allegations against Freud for the Goddard Inquiry into historic abuse.

Scotland Yard will consider whether any potential accomplices are still alive who could face charges.

Freuds PR executive son Matthew, 52, cancelled his annual star-studded summer party  due to be held last night as a TV documentary exposing his father was being broadcast.

The celebrated raconteur was revealed as a paedophile by two women who gave compelling accounts to the ITV Exposure documentary.

Sylvia Woosley was just ten when Freud, 24, began abusing her, and he later brought her up as a daughter, inviting her into his marital bed with his actress wife Jill.

A second girl was violently raped as a teenager when Freud was a Liberal MP  sharing a House of Commons office with fellow paedophile MP Cyril Smith.

Lady Freud, 89, has said she is profoundly sorry with what her husband of 58 years did to them.

One woman claimed her 14-year-old sister was plied with alcohol and molested at his marital home

Vicky Hayes, who was groomed by Freud for years before he raped her as a teenager, first spoke to police about the alleged abuse in 2010, a year after the broadcaster's death

The five women so far to have told their horrific stories about Freud have revealed the married father of five to be a serial child predator.

Mrs Hayes gave her horrific account to ITV News last night and recalled being paralysed with fear when the manipulative abuser raped her after plying her with champagne when she was 17, then callously advised her to ring me if she was pregnant.

Years later, when she was pregnant by her husband with her first child, he tried to molest her again. She reported Freud to police after he died, but then contacted police again when she realised his connection to the Madeleine case when she read in Kate McCanns book that he had cooked for the McCanns at his holiday villa in Praia da Luz.

Mrs Hayes told ITV News: It really jarred with me, left me feeling very uneasy. He had a home in Praia da Luz, but why invite them and cook for them? Nobody else would have thought Freud capable of abuse and rape but he did it to me. He was capable of anything.

Sylivia Woosley, pictured, claims she was just ten when she was groomed and abused by Clement Freud

She reported her concerns to her local police force in Suffolk, and her son wrote to the Metropolitan Police to pass on his mothers account and concerns over Freuds connection to the McCanns. They received no response.

Mrs Hayes said: Im angry the police were dismissive of my information. I have a six-year-old granddaughter, a young girl like Madeline. If you have something you feel needs to be looked at you have to tell someone. Thats why I contacted the police.

Freuds family says that the former MP was in the UK at the time of Madeleines disappearance in May 2007.

Yesterday detectives were said to be looking into the possibility Freud associated with other alleged abusers at the time of the claims that stretch from the Forties to the Seventies. Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and brother of painter Lucian Freud, went to the same school in the 1940s as the late Lord Janner, accused of sexually abusing a string of boys.

Clement Freud, pictured with his dog Henry filmed several TV adverts in the 1970s for dog food

GIRL OF 14 MOLESTED IN HIS BATHROOM Freud lured a 14-year-old girl to his home, got her drunk and molested her in the bathroom, her sister claimed yesterday. It was Boxing Day 1976 and Lady Freud and the children were away, leaving the MP alone. The sister told the Mail yesterday how she, then 18, the 14-year-old and their mother were invited to his house near Lords cricket ground in St Johns Wood. Despite their mother being teetotal and her sister being underage, Freud made them a fruit cocktail laced with alcohol. They all got very drunk and the woman, now in her 50s, claims she caught Freud groping her sister in his bathroom. Basically he separated us all, she said. Although I was drunk too, I realised something was up and went off to look for my sister. He had her in the bathroom and was molesting her. I got her away and managed to phone a friend for help. I think his intention was to grope all three of us. I remember thinking it was strange there was no one else in the house over Christmas. The invitation was the culmination of a grooming process that began when she met Freud in the Playboy club in the West End nearly four decades ago. Freud invited me to Stocks, the Playboy mansion in Hertfordshire. He also took me to his house in his constituency in Ely where he cooked dinner for me and to a flat in Soho. I knew who he was because he was on the television a lot. I suppose I was rather naive about what he was up to. I must have known he was a family man. She says Freud took her out on a string of dates, before he started to include her younger sister. The womans claims could not be independently verified last night, but the details chime with separate claims she would not have been aware of. Although she was not molested herself, she is the third person to claim he used his family home to carry out attacks. Advertisement

Freud was hailed as a national treasure by Gordon Brown at his funeral, which was also attended by luminaries including Bono, Stephen Fry, Uri Geller, Paul Merton and George Osborne  but yesterday the great and the good deserted him.

Mr Osborne never met him, veteran comedian Barry Cryer only knew him a bit, Lord Bragg was not in any way associated with him, said his wife  despite him going to Freuds 70th birthday party  and Uri Geller said: Dont call me a close friend.

Specialist detectives at the Metropolitan Police are examining a statement from Sylvia Woosley, now in her late 70s, who claims Freud preyed on her for a decade.

Although officers will not open a criminal investigation, they will consider whether any potential accomplices are still alive, and will compile a dossier for the Goddard Inquiry into historic sexual abuse.

'I was 17 and paralysed with fear as he took my virginity'

Vicky Hayes has claimed Clement Freud, pictured, abused her when she was a teenager

Vicky Hayes told last night how Freud plied her with champagne, violently took her virginity, then told her: If you are pregnant, ring me.

He had groomed her from the age of 14 and raped her when she was 17. Years later, when she was married and pregnant with her first child, he tried to molest her again.

He first took a shine to her when she was a waitress in her parents seafood restaurant in Lincoln in the mid-1960s. She was pretty and Freud  Clay to friends  was a regular customer, who wrote about the restaurant in his food column. He used her love of horses to befriend her, and in 1966 he took her to the races, with her parents blessing. Then in 1969, he offered to take her to the races at Newmarket, which meant staying away for a night.

As far as I was concerned he was a friend of the family, she told ITV News yesterday. My father asked if there would be anyone else at the house. He assured my parents there would be a housekeeper.

When we set off in his Bentley he told me not to smoke. On the way he stopped at a restaurant. He plied me with champagne. He didnt drink. I had never had it, I was 17 and was very inebriated. He drove to the house. There was no housekeeper just us.

He showed me to a room, I got out my nightie, assuming naively I was going to sleep alone. Clay said No need for a nightie, get in. He told me I couldnt put it on. I lay there naked, he got in and I just lay there afraid, scared, and he forced himself on me and took my virginity. I did what he said  I was terrified. I was paralysed by fear.

The next day morning, I went for a walk, to think it all over. I came back and he called me upstairs, he pushed me on the bed and tried to rape me again. This time I was sober and told him no.

Freud, then 45 and a father of four, dropped her at a train station. His parting words to me were, If you are pregnant, ring me, she said. I didnt tell my parents because I know my father would have killed him. She told her husband, whom she married in 1972, about the abuse when they got engaged.

He first took a shine to her when she was a waitress in her parents seafood restaurant in Lincoln in the mid-1960s

Clement Freud, top left, came to prominence in the 1960s after appearing on BBC's Just A Minute

Freud remained a family friend for years and incredibly even tried to attack her again after she was married  and pregnant with her first child. She managed to fight him off. After Freuds death in 2009, Mrs Hayes told Suffolk Police about the abuse, giving a statement in 2014.

Suffolk Police said last night that a historic allegation of rape had been recorded but as the suspect was no longer alive, there were no further lines of enquiry.
She wants to girls to be warned of their failing fertility and taught about sex

Dr Sarah Martins da Silva said they do not realise their eggs are declining

Girls should be taught in school that the 'optimal age' to start a family is in their late twenties, a reproductive expert has said.

Dr Sarah Martins da Silva said a generation of career women risk missing out on motherhood because they do not realise the number of eggs in their body is declining.

The consultant gynaecologist and lecturer wants girls as young as 12 to be warned of their falling fertility at the same time they are taught about sex.

Reproductive expert Dr Sarah Martins da Silva (pictured above) said a generation of career women risk missing out on motherhood because they do not realise the number of eggs in their body is declining

Dr da Silva, who works at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, said these children are the 'adults of the future'. Before reaching their forties having run out of time, they should have the information to plan the right time to start a family, she added.

Speaking before a debate in Edinburgh on egg freezing last night, the expert said: 'There is an incredible amount of misunderstanding about when fertility declines. Some people think it is after the age of 40, but late twenties or early thirties is the optimal age to have a baby.

'I want people to be equipped with that knowledge. I don't want children to think they are pitching for their late twenties or nothing else, but I would like them to think about starting a family before their mid-thirties, before the age of 35.

'I think if children are old enough for us to be talking about sexual infections, sexual health and reproduction, part of the message should be about fertility as a running theme.'

The comments come as soaring numbers of women in their forties north of the border are having children, with rising numbers turning to IVF treatment.

Glasgow Centre of Reproductive Medicine, which provides private fertility treatment, this week reported the average age of women seeking its services is 38, many having put off a baby to pursue their career, achieve financial stability or find the right partner.

Dr da Silva said: 'I see women in front of me week after week and have to break their heart by telling them the reality is they cannot have children or the chances are very slim.

The consultant gynaecologist wants girls as young as 12 to be warned of their falling fertility. She said girls should be taught in school that the 'optimal age' to start a family is in their late twenties (file picture)

'The demographic of people that I see in clinic is women who are career women, who are educated and empowered  powerful women  and yet there is this fundamental lack of knowledge about ovarian reserve and female fertility.'

She suggested girls from the age of 12 should be shown a graph charting the decline of the eggs in their body  not to dictate when they should have a baby but to give them enough knowledge to make an informed choice later in life.

Dr da Silva, an honorary senior lecturer in reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee, said: 'This is about encouraging a discussion... empowering us as women and girls.'

The view was backed by another speaker in last night's debate run by charity the Progress Educational Trust, entitled Can Women Put Motherhood on Ice?

Dr Angel Petropanagos, a research associate at Dalhousie University in Canada, said girls should even be taught about the possibility of freezing their eggs in their thirties to delay motherhood.
Clement Freud, pictured here at Royal Ascot in 2006 as been accused of abusing several young girls

After his death, Radio 4 broadcast a celebration of Clement Freud, the longest-serving panellist on its comedy series Just A Minute.

Typical of his lugubrious contributions on the programme was a monologue on the subject How to be irresistible to the opposite sex.

To huge bellows of laughter from the studio audience, Freud said: Keeping ones trousers on at my sort of age is a very good way of being irresistible to the opposite sex  else they might expect what they will not get.

That was in 2006, just three years before he died at the age of 84. But considering what we now know about his past as a child abuser, such humour is pretty sickening.

Freud is just the latest in a very long list of senior Liberal politicians to be revealed as ruthless sexual predators.

Who can forget the recent, sordid case of party grandee Lord Rennard (nicknamed Lord Grope) who was accused of sexually molesting a female election candidate and was further alleged to have preyed on at least 30 victims  allegations which he denies.

And no history of sexual sleaze in Westminster goes without mention of the grotesque story of former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe who became mired in a gay sex scandal involving illicit sex in the Commons, blackmail, a murder plot and the cold-blooded shooting of a blameless dog.

Of course, not all sex affairs in Westminster exclusively involve Liberals  but they seem to have played central roles in a disproportionately large number.

Certainly, such incidents make a mockery of the popular image of Liberals as harmless, sandal-wearing, ban-the-bomb, muesli-munching environmentalists. So why is such a small party  which has been in government only once in peacetime in the past 100 years  so beset by sexual scandal?

One explanation is in the name Liberal. Whereas the Tory and Labour parties were created as moral movements (the former to promote free trade and sound finances; Labour to fight for the working classes against flint-hearted employers), the Liberals were founded on a much more laissez-faire philosophy.

Above all, they were united by the conviction that progress was based on the free exercise of individual energy.

Freud, pictured with his dog Henry, with whom he filmed several adverts in the 1970s for dog food, died in 2009

That individual energy has developed into the psychology of Liberal by name, liberal by nature. At its extreme, in many cases, this has been expressed as wilder examples of sexual freedom.

Another explanation is that, perhaps, forever being the third party and far from the levers of power, their politicians have been under less public scrutiny. As a result, many might have felt able to take far bigger sexual risks.

In addition, a glance at their signature policies over the years shows a party that embraces a very permissive view of society.

Ive lost count of the Lib Dem party conferences where activists have called for sexual relations to be legalised at the age of 12 or 14. I can still recall a decade ago, Don Foster, the partys culture spokesman, successfully calling for 16-year-olds to be allowed to visit sex shops and buy pornography. Matters of taste should have no role in censorship, he said. Foster is now a Lib Dem peer.

For some time, the party has wanted to decriminalise prostitution  believing it to be a legitimate business.

How symbolic, therefore, that William Gladstone, the partys most successful leader who became Prime Minister four times, was well-known for rescuing prostitutes from the streets of London.

A married man, who apparently whipped himself after his encounters, he admitted to a fascination with vice. He wrote in his diary about committing adultery of the heart.

Sir Clement, pictured, allegedly started abusing some of his victims aged just 10. But he is far from the only Liberal politician to be revealed as a ruthless sexual predator

He was followed by David Lloyd George, the last Liberal Prime Minister, who cynically sold peerages to raise money for his cash-strapped party after the First World War. Nicknamed The Goat, he had a mistress for 30 years  his daughters governess  and fathered several children outside marriage.

Much more recently we witnessed Lib Dem election strategist Lord Rennard who was suspended from the party in 2014 over allegations of unwelcome sexual advances against four young female members whose careers depended on his patronage. The porcine Rennard was eventually reinstated and now sits in the Lords.

Party chiefs also had to act after veteran MP Mike Hancock was deselected for serious and unwelcome sexual behaviour towards a woman constituent. He had to apologise in the High Court for the inappropriate and unprofessional friendship and also admitted a four-year extra-marital affair with an alleged Russian spy.

A few years earlier, Mark Oaten MP (married with two children), who was running for the Lib Dem leadership, resigned as home affairs spokesman for having an affair with a rent boy who sold his story to a Sunday red-top tabloid.

Clement Freud, top left, came to prominence in the 1960s after appearing on BBC's Just A Minute

Oaten admitted he had no proper concept of the risk hed been taking, saying he didnt think for a moment the young man would have known who he was.

Five days later Simon Hughes, Liberal MP for Bermondsey, announced he had had gay relationships despite denying being a homosexual. Amid much embarrassment, he was reminded that hed run a notoriously homophobic campaign against Labour candidate Peter Tatchell in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election.

Most notoriously, back in 1979, Jeremy Thorpe was tried for attempted murder after an alleged conspiracy to kill his former male lover Norman Scott  whom he called Bunnies. Thorpe, a married man, was acquitted of all charges but was branded by the judge a crook, an accomplished liar and a fraud.

Of course, one of Thorpes colleagues was the 29-stone Rochdale MP Cyril Smith who, for years, had shockingly managed to repel police investigations into his abuse of young boys in care homes and special schools.

Allegations against him had first surfaced in 1979 but the then Liberal leader David Steel dismissed them saying: All he seems to have done is spank a few bare bottoms.

Sylivia Woosley, pictured, claims she was just ten when she was groomed and abused by Clement Freud

Despite all the rumours, in 1988 Steel ensured Smith was given a knighthood. And on Smiths 80th birthday, the then Liberal leader Nick Clegg extolled him as a beacon of our party in the 1970s and 1980s.

Finally, in 2012, the police admitted that Smith (who died in 2010) should have been charged with sexual and physical abuse and revealed 44 complaints had been made over three decades.

Any roll-call of sexual shenangians in the Liberal Party cannot exclude the antics of Chris Huhne, who stood as deputy leader. He admitted cheating on his wife, Vicky Pryce, with his parliamentary aide Carina Trimingham, who, at the time, was in a civil partnership with a woman.

How ironic that the Lib Dem manifesto for the General Election in 2010 declared: We will clean up politics.
The 'shared conversations' will include the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, pictured, and his fellow bishops

The radical student doctrine of 'safe spaces'  often used to shut down free speech on university campuses  has been adopted by the Church of England.

A major debate on gay rights is to be held behind closed doors with the aim of making all its speakers feel welcome and 'encouraging diversity'.

Church leaders have ruled that the 483 members of the General Synod will discuss the C of E's deep divisions on sexuality under 'safe space' rules over three days in York next month.

The rules say Synod members must promise that 'whatever information they hear is not used to disadvantage any participant in situations outside the conversation'.

But the debate is thought to be the first time in its near 100-year history that the Church's parliament, which has law-making powers, will have gone into secret session to consider its thinking on a moral question of great public interest. The move has angered Synod members on the Church's conservative evangelical wing, who called the secret sessions an affront to democracy.

Safe space doctrine has been adopted by an estimated one in five universities in the name of protecting students from mental harm at debates and events.

Critics say it has been used to censor all but Left-wing and politically correct opinion and to ostracise academics and speakers who hold different views.

The Church has been sensitive over its teaching on sexuality since the gay rights movement began to pile on pressure for equality reforms 30 years ago.

In 1987 the Synod voted, after an acrid public debate, to declare that homosexual behaviour was sinful, and in the early 1990s it developed its current line: that gays and lesbians are welcome in the pews but gay clergy must remain celibate. The Church has also rejected same-sex marriage.

In the safe space talks, Synod members will be asked to debate the question: 'Given the significant changes in our culture in relation to human sexuality, how should the Church respond?'

The 'shared conversations' will include the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, and his fellow bishops.

Church leaders have ruled that the 483 members of the General Synod will discuss the C of E's deep divisions on sexuality under 'safe space' rules over three days in York. Pictured, members of the General Synod in 2012

Organisers say: 'The facilitated conversations are taking place to create safe spaces in which questions of difference and disagreement can be explored in relation to questions of scripture, mission and human sexuality.'

Under the process, 'a space is created in which all feel welcomed and respected, in which diversity is encouraged, and which is private but not secret'. Synod member Andrea Minichiello Williams, who heads the evangelical Christian Concern group, said: 'These are critically important discussions, about an issue that could splinter the Church.

'Shared conversations' is not about debate. It is about controlling the Church's messaging on same-sex marriage.

'These conversations must be held in the open. Transparency and accountability require it. This is how the democratic process works. It is a vital protection against manipulation, spin and sinister power plays.'

Church officials said yesterday that the shared conversations were not officially a Synod debate. 'They are not a debate, they are conversations,' a spokesman said. 'No decision will be taken, and the official Synod will end before the conversations begin.'
Linda McHugh, 63, pictured with husband William, from the Isle of Skye, was among a dozen women who protested outside Parliament. She is seen holding a picture of first husband John Gibbons

David Cameron was yesterday accused of 'demeaning' the sacrifice of war heroes as their widows wept outside Parliament because their pensions were taken from them.

War widows said they had had been left with 'no honour' after the Ministry of Defence stripped them of as a much as 10,000 a year after they remarried.

One bereaved widow who suffered from ptsd after her husband was killed during the Falklands War said it was 'worse than discrimination' and another said she had been forced back into work at 65.

Another was told by the MoD that she must divorce her new husband in order to reclaim back the pension. The average war widow's pension is around 6,500 per year.

Under controversial previous rules, bereaved wives who sacrificed their careers because of their husband's work in the armed forces were having their pensions taken off them when they remarried.

In 2014 David Cameron said it was 'absolutely wrong' that they had to choose between finding new love and financial stability and said 4,000 of them would be entitled to the pension for life.

But the rule did not apply to about 300 women who lost loved ones between 1973 and 2005 and remarried before April last year, when the new scheme came into force.

Linda McHugh, 63, from the Isle of Skye, Scotland was among a dozen women who protested outside Parliament in London yesterday.

She was married for a year when her husband Trooper John Gibbons was deployed to Northern Ireland. In 1973 he died aged 21 in an IRA explosion, leaving behind a three-month old son.

Mrs McHugh re-married in 1977 and had his military pension taken away from her.

She said: 'At the time I thought it was a punishment for trying to rebuild my life but widows have been treated differently to others.

'I feel I have to do this for John because his sacrifice is as just important as the sacrifice of others. All war widows should be treated equally because all of their men paid the same price.'

Weeping, she added: 'John was a soldier through and through, his son was three-months-old when he died and as an army wife I had to accept this.

Margaret Allen, 57, left, had been married for just two weeks when her husband Iain Boldy (pictured) was killed by a bomb blast on HMS Argonaut during the Falklands war. Right, Maureen Jarvis, 61, whose husband, Alan Campbell, 34, pictured in frame, was killed in an air crash in 1990 after serving for 11 years in the RAF

'He was so proud to be a soldier and he would have expected his family to have been provided for.

'He would not believe we had to stand on the street like this.'

Chrissy Fraser, 67, whose husband Lieutenant-Colonel Clive Fraser served in the military for 30 years, said: 'There is no honour for these women. There is no respect for the army wives.'

She said the MoD had seized her 900 monthly military pension after she found a new partner, and she was forced to start a new job two years ago as she struggled to afford to live.

Chrissy Fraser, 67, whose husband Lieutenant-Colonel Clive Fraser served in the military for 30 years

Margaret Allen, 57, had been married for just two weeks when her husband Able Seaman Iain Boldy was killed by a bomb blast on HMS Argonaut during the Falklands war.

His body was never repatriated and she suffered ptsd as a result of the trauma, which cost her her nursing career.

She said of the change to the scheme in 2014: 'We thought it would include all of us. We were really deeply distressed that that day. This is worse than discrimination, it is worse because there's a real lack of respect for my husband's sacrifice.'

Maureen Jarvis, 61, whose husband, Alan Campbell, 34, was killed in an air crash in 1990 after serving for 11 years in the RAF, said it was an 'injustice'.

They had been married for 14 years and when he died he left behind their two daughters, aged 3 and six.

Mrs Jarvis, from Moray, Scotland, then remarried in May 2014, just six months before the government announcement which would have meant she could keep her husband's pension.

She said: 'It isn't about the money. We are the only group of war widows that don't get their husband's pensions for life.

'It is the injustice of it all. My husband would be disgusted. He died and thought we would be provided for.'

Kenny Donaldson from Innocent Victims United, who is campaigning with the women, said: 'The Government demeaned the human life that was lost for this country.'

Lib Dem MP Greg Mulholland, who is campaigning for the war widows, said: 'We owe it to those who die serving our country to take care of their loved ones.'
A former winner of the Miss North Dakota beauty pageant was found dead on Tuesday in a Minneapolis home.

Investigators are waiting for the medical examiner to determine what the cause of Samantha M. Edwards' death was.

Edwards, 37, who was known as 'Sami' by her friends, was crowned Miss North Dakota USA in 2003.

Former Miss North Dakota USA Samantha Edwards was found dead at a Minneapolis home Tuesday morning. This is her final photograph, taken in March of this year

Pictutred here when she won the competition in 2002. A heavily-redacted police report indicates the Miss Edwards was found dead, a sergeant was notified, and the medical examiner took custody of the body

A heavily-redacted police report indicates the woman was found dead, a sergeant was notified, and the medical examiner took custody of the body. The cause and manner of death remain under investigation.

On her Facebook page, Edwards said she had studied at the University of North Dakota and the Aveda Institute, Minneapolis.

The Miss USA Facebook page shared a message on Facebook, saying they're 'saddened' to hear about the death of 'one of the most vibrant, energetic, and full-loving titleholders' they've had.

'A conversation with her could either leave you full of adrenaline or utterly exhausted. She was a spitfire and with Sami you never knew what she'd throw your way -- but you ALWAYS knew she would be there for you. She was awesome like that,' wrote Jessica Dereschuk on a GoFundMe page set up to cover funeral expenses.

The cause and manner of Miss Edward's death remain under investigation. his picture was taken in August 2013

Miss Edwards studied at the University of North Dakota and the Aveda Institute, Minneapolis. This picture was taken in July 2014

She 'was one of the most vibrant, crazy, compassionate, loyal balls of energy you could ever come across in life,' Dereschuk said.

'To Samantha Edwards....I love you so much. You will always be my best friend and I'm still saving you a seat at the wedding,' Dereschuk wrote as part of her tribute to Edwards.

'You left us all way too soon, but in true Diva style, you will have us talking about you forever.....you left a positive mark on this world and in my life and I will continue to live life with passion and love because I know that is what you would want. I will see you again my beautiful friend'
A grand jury has indicted Officer Jessie Laconsay, the Honolulu police officer on allegations that he raped a friend's 14-year-old daughter. Laconsay is charged with four counts of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of third-degree sexual assault. (Honolulu Police Department via AP, File)

A grand jury on Wednesday indicted a Honolulu police officer on allegations that he raped a friend's 14-year-old daughter.

Officer Jessie Laconsay is charged with four counts of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of third-degree sexual assault.

The girl's mother found them having sex last week, according to a police affidavit for an arrest warrant.

The girl told her mother they have had sex before, which Laconsay denied.

Laconsay was yelling and crying, then fled in his police car, the document said.

The next day, police put out an all-points bulletin seeking help finding Laconsay.

A police corporal and an officer found him parked at a beach on Oahu's North Shore with cuts on his wrists.

While the corporal was treating Laconsay's injuries as they waited for an ambulance, Laconsay kept saying he was sorry for 'letting us down,' the affidavit said.

Laconsay is being held on $500,000 bail. His public defender declined to comment.

'Sadly, it's a continuation of incidents and problems and crimes involving our county law enforcement officers, and it seems like the Honolulu Police Department needs a change in leadership,' said state Sen. Will Espero, a Democrat. 'It's quite appalling.'

Charged: Officer Jessie Laconsay has been charged with the sexual assault of a minor. Laconsay is currently on leave without pay

In recent months, a grand jury began looking into allegations of civil rights abuses and corruption within the agency.

The department also came under scrutiny this year when Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha sought to promote a major who had been arrested in 1994 for domestic violence. The major later declined the promotion.
Members of the Stanford University women's swim team were wary of Brock Turner's lewd behavior long before he was convicted of raping an unconscious student, a report suggests.

The Ohio native, who was given just six months in jail for the attack, would allegedly make comments to the women such as 'I can see your t***s in that swimsuit,' while one elite swimmer vowed to never be alone with him at a party.

A source told In Touch that his arrest didn't shock anyone on the team, as many believed he was 'odd'.

The athletes even considered writing to his trial judge about his antics, but they were reportedly warned off by Stanford officials as they didn't witness the crime.

'He was warned by upper classmen on the team to scale back on the partying, but he just didn't listen, ' the insider told the magazine.

Members of the Stanford University women's swim team were wary of Brock Turner's lewd behavior long before he was convicted of raping an unconscious student, a report suggests. He can be seen smiling in a a high school yearbook photo as he is named 'Best Legs' with an unidentified female classmate

'There were rumblings that the women were pressured by Stanford officials to not do it since they hadn't witnessed any crime that Brock had committed,' they added.

'The team has been instructed to not discuss Brock Turner publicly or to the media; however, the entire team completely supports the victim and wishes that Brock had gotten a much harsher sentence.'

Lisa Lapin, the school's associate vice president for university communications, told In Touch: 'As private individuals, our students can say what they wish to whom they wish.'

Turner's six month sentence for rape was met with controversy around the world.

The judge who faced seething criticism for handing him the light sentence has since been removed from a similar case on grounds he may be biased.

The Ohio native would allegedly make comments to the women such as 'I can see your t***s in that swimsuit,' while one elite swimmer reportedly vowed to never be alone with him at a party

Turner (pictured) was allegedly told by more senior members of his team to tone down his partying. He blamed the alcohol for his actions during his rape trial

Prosecutors in Santa Clara County, in northern California, on Tuesday filed a challenge against Aaron Persky in a case involving a male nurse accused of sexually assaulting a sedated woman.

The request to have him removed from the new case came after he suddenly dismissed a misdemeanor theft case before deliberations started, arguing prosecutors had not made their case.

'We are disappointed and puzzled at judge Persky's unusual decision to unilaterally dismiss a case before the jury could deliberate,' Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement to AFP, confirming Persky's removal from the new sex assault case.

The athletes even considered writing to his trial judge about Turner's (pictured in court) antics, but they were reportedly warned off by Stanford officials as they didn't witness the crime

'After this and the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient.

'This is a rare and carefully considered step for our office. In the future, we will evaluate each case on its own merits and decide if we should use our legal right to ask for another judge in order to protect public safety and pursue justice.'

The judge could not immediately be reached for comment.

Rosen had disagreed with Persky's ruling in the Turner case, stating at the time that the lenient sentence did not 'factor in the true seriousness of this sexual assault, or the victim's ongoing trauma.'

'Campus rape is no different than off-campus rape,' he said. 'Rape is rape.'

The sentence, which gained international attention after publication of the victim's powerful statement to the court in which she described the assault's impact on her life, has prompted widespread outrage and calls for Persky to be recalled.

In transcripts released from Turner's case, Persky, pointed specifically to a classmate of the 20-year-old, Leslie Rasmussen, who had been in school with him for years.

He quoted a part of Rasmussen's character letter, which read: 'If I had to choose one kid I graduated with to be in the position Brock is, it would never have been him.'

Persky said that image of Turner 'rings true' and 'corroborates the evidence of his character up until the night of this incident, which has been positive', he said in the transcripts.

Aaron Persky, the judge who faced seething criticism for handing him the light sentence, has since been removed from a similar case on grounds he may be biased

The 'lenient' sentence dished out to Turner has sparked outrage around the world and Persky has since received death threats at work, and is the subject of a petition, signed by more than a million people, to have him recalled.

The transcripts give a comprehensive view as to why Persky rationalized a short sentence.

Rasmussen's letter was believed to place much of the blame on Turner's victim. She later apologized for the letter.

Turner, who was found guilty on three counts of rape, is currently incarcerated in Elmwood Jail, a minimum to medium security facility, in Milpitas, California.

However, Daily Mail Online revealed earlier this week that he will serve just three months of his sentence and is slated for release on September 2.

He has applied to serve his three-year probation term in his home state of Ohio.

Turner will also have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and complete a sex offender management program.

The 39 people who wrote letters in support of Turner have also been subjected to a barrage of abuse.

Turner has also been banned for life by USA Swimming and, as a result, is now ineligible for all major sporting competitions  among them, the Olympics.
Sky News presenter Paul Murray has been caught up in an unfortunate gaffe while criticising refugees for being 'illiterate'.

When Immigration Minister Peter Dutton appeared on his show last week, the pair were discussing literacy rates in Afghanistan.

However as Murray was pointing to the data - the headline at the top of the chart read 'Afgahanistan' - a blunder which was discussed on The Chaser on Wednesday evening.

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Paul Murray has come under fire for criticising 'illiterate' refugees but spelling 'Afghanistan' wrong on his show

While Immigration Minister Peter Dutton was on the show this spelling error showed up on the screen

'At least the guy who's show he was on .... (Paul Murray) backed up Dutton with some proof that these refugees are illiterate', Chaser presenter Chas Licciardello quipped.

The hosts then threw to the footage of Murray on his show discussing the data, with the incorrect spelling of Afghanistan splashed across the screen.

'Yes there are so many illiterate refugees some of them found their way on to Paul Murray's graphics team,' Licciardello said.

'I think the refugees from Afgahanistan must have taken their jobs!,' co-host Andrew Hansen added.

Chaser hosts Chas Licciardello and Andrew Hansen pointed out the blooper on Wednesday night

It was during a segment on their show discussing immigration policy and Peter Dutton

It comes after comments from Mr Dutton last month claiming 'illiterate refugees will take local jobs' if allowed in to Australia.

'For many people they won't be numerate or literate in their own language let alone English... these people would be taking Australian jobs and there is no question about that,' Mr Dutton told Sky.
A comic illustrator has walked out of court looking sulky and covering her face with her hair after she received a good behaviour bond for spitting in face of a council administrator.

Nicole Minus, 26, was filmed spitting in administrator Richard Pearson's face during an Inner West Council meeting in Sydney last month and was charged with offensive conduct.

Ms Minus left Newtown Local Court on Thursday facing the ground while looking unhappy after pleading guilty to the charge.

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Nicole Minus sulkily looked at the ground as she left Newtown Local Court on Thursday

Ms Minus was among angry residents picketing NSW Premier Mike Baird's recent decision to merge the three local councils into one, and the WestConnex transport infrastructure development when the incident took place.

Her lawyer Miranda Moody told the court Ms Minus was 'carried away' during the protest, The Daily Telegraph reported.

'She spat once and she immediately knew it was wrong it was a completely repulsive act,' Ms Moody said.

'The moment that she did it she was instantaneously remorseful.'

Facts recorded following the incident which were tendered to the court also noted that Ms Minus was unaware an offence was committed.

I did not know spitting was an offence, Ms Minus was noted as saying to police.

Nicky Minus (pictured) was filmed spitting at administrator Richard Pearson at an Inner West Council meeting in Sydney last month and was charged with offensive conduct

She pleaded guilty to the charge of offensive conduct and was given a good behaviour bond

The 26-year-old looked somewhat remorseful as she covered her hair with her face

The 26-year-old illustrator who is nicknamed the 'queen of seed', was reportedly worried about the public attention to the video footage and initially removed her social media accounts and shut down her illustration website.

After footage of the spitting attack emerged Mr Pearson said he wanted to 'move on'. But others argued there was no defence for her 'reprehensible' actions and called for the former UTS student to be charged with assault.

Ms Minus said her work focuses on female empowerment and often features explicit drawings of the female anatomy which has drawn some criticism from 'prudish' publishers, some even calling her 'the queen of seed', according to an interview in The Lifted Brow.

The 26-year-old former UTS student and illustrator (pictured) appeared in Newtown Local Court on Thursday

Inner West Council administrator Richard Pearson (pictured) said that he had 'moved on' from the incident and didn't want to press charges against the spitting protester

Ms Minus (pictured) is said to be worried about the public attention to the video footage and initially removed her social media accounts

Mr Pearson was escorted out of the Inner West Council meeting last month after Ms Minus, who was wearing a yellow top, approached him.

The video shows her cross the room to get near Mr Pearson, and shout in his face before she allegedly spat at him and another council member intervened.

Mr Pearson said he has 'moved on' and didn't intend on pressing charges against the Ms Minus, theDaily Telegraph reports.

Riot police were also called during the meeting, which was disrupted by the hundreds of protesters and ultimately descended into chaos.

Administrator Pearson (right, behind the man in the blue jacket) was being escorted out of the Inner West Council meeting in Sydney when Ms Minus, in a yellow top (left) approached him

Seconds later, she spat in the shocked administrator's face, before another council member stepped in to block her from getting any closer

The angry residents were picketing NSW Premier Mike Baird's (pictured) recent decision to merge the three local councils into one, and the WestConnex transport infrastructure development

Protesters packed the meeting last month in Sydney's inner-west and forced it to be abandoned

The newly formed Inner West Council is an amalgamation of Sydney suburbs Leichhardt, Ashfield, and Marrickville.

A NSW Police spokesman told Daily Mail Australia last month that riot police were called to the meeting as a precaution, however there were no reports they were needed.

Images posted to social media show the crowd of furious locals gathered outside the Petersham Service Centre, with many seen holding signs.

A local resident is seen protesting with a sign outside the Inner West Council meeting last month
Corbett told police he had taken two doses of Suboxone, a prescription used to treat opiate addiction - authorities said alcohol also involved

They said Corbett did not wake up when firefighters broke the window

Two women spotted him slumped over the wheel and saw the girl inside

Robert Bryant Corbett, 49, was arrested after his six-year-old daughter had to be rescued from his hot, locked car after he passed out in the driver's seat

An Alabama man has been arrested after his six-year-old daughter had to be rescued from his hot, locked car after he passed out in the driver's seat.

Robert Bryant Corbett, 49, faces misdemeanor charges of public intoxication and endangering the welfare of a child.

Two women stopped to check out Corbett's car after they saw him slumped over the wheel of his Dodge Challenger in the middle of a roadway in Birmingham around 4.45pm on Monday.

That'd when Syneathia James and Belinda Stoves found Corbett's young daughter awake in the backseat. James immediately asked a neighbor to call 911.

'I said, "If they're not here in a few minutes, I'm going to break the window,'" James told the Huntsville Times.

'So I went to the back of my van and got my hammer. I wasn't going to let this baby die.'

James and Stoves tried to bang on the window but Corbett did not wake up. They tried to ask the girl to unlock the car doors, which were all locked, but she seemed too afraid to respond.

Corbett only woke up after firefighters broke the passenger's side window of his car and pulled the girl out

Authorities sat Corbett on the curb. He told police he had taken two doses of Suboxone, a prescription used to treat opiate addiction, and claimed he was driving to the doctor

'He was sweating like a dog. She was red,' James said. 'It was hot as hell in that car.'

James said Corbett still didn't wake up when firefighters broke the passenger's side window to get to his daughter.

Corbett finally awoke as he and his daughter were pulled out of the car and authorities placed him on the curb. The girl was taken to a rescue truck to be examined by paramedics.

The father told police he had taken two doses of Suboxone, a prescription used to treat opiate addiction, and claimed he was driving to the doctor.

Authorities have since said alcohol was involved.

The man's wife was called and his daughter was turned over to relatives.

Syneathia James spotted Corbett slumped over the wheel and asked a neighbor to call 911. She then went to her car to retrieve her hammer, just in case she needed to break window to rescue the young girl
A woman has admitted possessing and supplying illegal drugs while she worked for a Perth organisation that aims to help substance abusers.

Former West Australian Substance Users Association (WASUA) board member Elizabeth Mary Dear was initially charged with 57 drug-related offences, including 47 counts of offering to sell or supply a prohibited drug.

In the Perth Magistrates Court on Wednesday, Dear pleaded guilty to 49 charges while eight charges were dropped.

Former West Australian Substance Users Association board member Elizabeth Mary Dear admitted to possessing and supplying illegal drugs (stock image)

She will face the WA District Court for sentencing on 42 charges on August 12, while seven charges will remain in the magistrates court, with a mention scheduled for August 15.

Her subordinate at WASUA, Rosemary Rebecca Kaniski, was jailed for two years and three months in January after pleading guilty to 26 charges.

The District Court heard during sentencing that Kaniski, who was a volunteer and then an outreach officer for the association, had struggled with drugs for about 50 years.

She supplied small amounts of heroin to people who weren't clients of the association to pay for her own use of the drug and never made a financial profit, the court heard.

Kaniski must serve a minimum of 13-and-a-half months behind bars before she will be eligible for parole.

Dear was initially charged with 57 drug-related offences, including 47 counts of offering to sell or supply a prohibited drug (stock Images)
Liberal party candidate Chris Jermyn has been accused of giving an empty block of land as his address to vote in the 2013 federal flection

A Liberal party candidate has been accused of listing an empty block of land as his address when voting in the last federal election - a breach of Australian Electorate Commission rules.

Chris Jermyn, who is vying for the electorate of McEwen in Victoria, was not living in the area when he registered to vote there in the 2013 federal election, it has been claimed.

The address he gave was, and remains, an empty plot of land in the small town of Christmas Hills that was once owned by his businessman father Peter, The Age reported.

In the months before the election he appeared to be living an hour away in the electorate of Melbourne Ports at an address on Queen's Lane.

Had he given this address, the same one later listed in paperwork in 2014, Mr Jermyn would have had to vote in the electorate of Melbourne Ports - a long-time Labor stronghold.

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The 30-year-old is campaigning for the Labor seat of McEwen

The politician's office said: 'The candidate for McEwan resided overseas during much of 2013.

'He was enrolled by the AEC at an address in McEwen before he left for overseas.

'Section 94 of the Act clearly states that a person my remain on the roll and vote, for up to six years, at their enrolled address prior to leaving Australia.

'During this time he used his parents address as a mailing address.'

In June 2013 Mr Jermyn complained to a Domino's pizza shop five minutes away from the Melbourne Ports address because it wasn't open at 1am leaving him 'sitting here hungry'.

'Why does your Prahran store suggest on its Google results (proffered by you) that it's open until 1am on a Thursday night, when evidently it closes at midnight?

In the months before the election Mr Jermyn complained to a Domino's pizza store five minutes away from a Melbourne address later listed as his own on Facebook

In an April 2014 document for his business, Mr Jermyn signed a document for his business giving the Melbourne Ports address as his own

'Had I known, I would have made my order quicker, but I tend to rely on your own times being correct. Instead, I sit here hungry. What's the deal?' he said.

In his biography on the Liberal Party website Mr Jermyn gives Warran, which also falls into McCewan, as his current home address.

He is in the process of building his own home in Christmas Hills.

Mr Jermyn made headlines last month after bumbling his way through a pack of journalists after a failed attempt to corner Bill Shorten at a press conference.

Mr Jermyn made headlines last month when he gatecrashed a press conference held by Bill Shorten

He gatecrashed the event at Sunbury Community Health Centre in Victoria holding up signs bearing his own name and photograph before Mr Shorten arrived.

After being discarded by the Labor leader who offered him a belittling handshake, Mr Jermyn attempted to leave the event.

Journalists who had gathered attempted to question him over the Liberal Party's Medicare policy, seemingly an apt topic for the occasion, but he refused.

Instead the man tried to flee to his car, carrying a sign under one arm and muttering: 'This is exactly what I mean about journalism'.
A tourist holidaying in Bali feared a tsunami was coming after he saw monster waves smash the island's seaside hot spots.

Sutanto Danuwidjaja said he feared for his safety and his family as more dramatic footage emerged of tourists being smashed by monster waves as they drink cocktails.

'[I was] fearing a tsunami was coming up,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

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Holidaymakers at the popular Ayana Resort and Spa in Kuta, on the island's south, have captured the massive swells hitting the clifftops at the luxury hotel's Rock Bar metres above sea level

In one video, a man is almost wiped out by a wave as he walks across the floorboards of the bar and water soaks the entire area

'But nothing happened. Thank God.'

Holidaymakers at the popular Ayana Resort and Spa in Kuta, on the island's south, have captured the massive swells hitting the clifftops at the luxury hotel's Rock Bar metres above sea level.

Two tourists, from Hong Kong and Singapore, died after they were dragged out to sea at nearby Padang Galak Beach in Sanur, local newspaper Tribun Bali reported on Wednesday.

The severity of the conditions has been documented in one video where a man is almost wiped out by a wave as he walks across the floorboards of the bar and water soaks the entire area.

He even gets an umbrella out at one point to keep himself dry from the wild seas.

A second video also shows a lower seating section of the resort being flooded by water as waves clear the barrier between the ocean and the platform.

Rock Bar at the popular Ayana Hotel was lashed by wild sea conditions last week

Further down the coast, Ku De Ta was also subjected to the same conditions. Tourists in the infinity pool were wiped out by this wave

More dramatic footage has emerged of tourists being smashed by monster waves as they drink cocktails at Bali's seaside hot spots. One tourist thought another tsunami was on its way

Craig Brokensha, surf forecaster from Swellnet.com, said raging sea conditions were caused by a big and powerful southern ocean ground swell last week

Craig Brokensha, surf forecaster from Swellnet.com, said the raging sea conditions were caused by a big and powerful southern ocean ground swell last week.

'There was a really big storm in the southern Indian Ocean for four days creating 100km/h winds and then the swell made it over the Indian Ocean [towards Bali] over the next few days,' Mr Brokensha told Daily Mail Australia.

'Every year winter is their [Bali's] swell season. This is one of the bigger they have had this season.

'These swells have lots and lots of energy and when they hit the coast they stack up and slam into the the cliff along with the high tide cycle.

'A really large swell and the high tide, they combine and just slam into the cliffs.'

Despite media reports, Mr Brokensha also said the waves were not tidal.

'Tidal waves are created by earthquakes or landslides underwater and there would be damage across the whole region not just one area,' he explained to Daily Mail Australia.

Despite media reports, Mr Brokensha also said the waves were not tidal. Waves hit another resort in Seminyak, Bali last week

The dangerous swells made it difficult for tourists to enjoy the beachside relaxation on offer at popular spots Seminyak, Kuta and Sanur. Above is the Rock Bar at Kuta

Mr Brokensha said it was rare for this sort of wave activity to happen but it could happen again.

'It looks like it was a perfect kind of set up,' he said.

'[But there are] no big swells for the next three weeks.'

The dangerous swells made it difficult for tourists to enjoy the beachside relaxation on offer at popular spots Seminyak, Kuta and Sanur.

On Wednesday, video also emerged of tourists lounging by an infinity pool at Ku De Ta restaurant being hit by big waves.

Micha Sussex, from Singapore, was enjoying a cocktail by the pool at Ku De Ta when the latest wave hit on Wednesday.

'We were just sitting on the sun lounger when a huge wave came over the side and into the infinity pool,' the 26-year-old told Daily Mail Australia.

Despite media reports, Mr Brokensha also said the waves were not tidal. He said it was a really large swell and high tide combining

Water floods this lower seating area at the Ayana Resort in Kuta. Even the barriers could keep the wild seas at bay

'People just ran around gathering their belongings and then ran inside. I think people lost a few things in the swell. It was pretty scary.

'It looks like it's business as usual today though. I noticed people were repairing the wall but apart from that, it's like nothing has happened.'

Ku De Ta guest relations manager Dewi Suwan said the waves had damaged the swimming pool but they were still open.

'Last night there was an incident. One guest was swimming at the beach - it's something he was doing with a friend. There was big waves,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

Earlier this month, a woman from Two Rocks, Perth, was one of five people swept out to sea and killed while she was on her honeymoon.

Brad and Lestari Williams were walking along the beach at Angel's Billabong beach at Bali island Nusa Penida, when a rogue wave swamped them from behind and washed them out to sea.

Mr Williams made it back to shore but Mrs Williams and her eight-year-old sister vanished in the surf.
A 61-year-old Ohio grandmother says she used a bottle of perfume and a swift kick to get rid of a kidnapper.

A masked man approached Joyce Kenney as she stepped out of her Middletown home, grabbed her and forced her to drive him through the city, the Hamilton-Middletown Journal-News reports.

Kenney says she spotted a bottle of body spray from Bath and Body Works in the side pocket of her Toyota Yaris, sprayed him in the eyes with it  and then kicked him as hard as she could.

She says he went out the door and she saw him bounce on the street.

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Joyce Kenney (pictured), 61, says she used a bottle of perfume and a swift kick to get rid of a kidnapper

A masked man approached Joyce Kenney as she stepped out of her Middletown home and forced her into her Toyota Yaris (above)

She then drove to a gas station where she called police and waited for officers to arrive.

The suspect is still at large. He is described as white, skinny and about 5 ft 8 ins tall.

He grabbed me from behind and put his band over my mouth and said do not scream, Kenney told the Journal-News.

He took her keys from her door, forced her into the vehicle and demanded she drive while he sat in the passenger side.

Kenney says she spotted a bottle of body spray (above) from Bath and Body Works in the side pocket of her car and sprayed him in the eyes with it

Kenney said she sped up to around 80mph and started weaving across lanes in the hope that a police officer would pull her over.

Then, while making a turn, she saw an opportunity to distract him when she spotted the bottle of spray and took it.
As hundreds of shoppers flocked to the new Kmart store for its grand opening, supermarket giant Woolworths launched its own promotion in an effort to attract early birds.

With the launch in full swing, the discount retail giant unveiled its new store at Top Ryde City shopping centre in Sydney, with shoppers lining up in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Not only did they bag themselves a bargain, shoppers were on a spree of freebies as the two stores went head to head to win over their customers by giving away goodies.

Hundreds flocked to the new Kmart store for its opening at Top Ryde City shopping centre on Thursday

As Kmart unveiled its new store, Woolworths also launched its own promotion of its 'refreshed' supermarket

Woolworths, which normally opens at 7am, offered the first 200 customers goodie bags from 8am in celebration of launching its own 'refreshed' store.

Much to the customers delight, each bag comes complete with popcorn, a granny smith apple, Twinings tea, a Freddo frog as well as a $25 voucher.

Many shoppers had initially lined up at the supermarket to score a freebie bag before making their way over to the new Kmart store after its opening at 8am.

One shopper told Daily Mail Australia she was really excited about the launch because she will no longer need to travel far for the next closest Kmart.

'I am so excited Kmart is coming to Top Ryde, currently my closest store is at Chatswood so it's great to have one closer to home,' she said.

Hundreds of shoppers have taken to social media to express their excitement over the new Kmart store

Excited shoppers lined up in the early hours of Thursday morning for the grand opening of Kmart in Ryde

Kmart fans have made 'memes' on social media to show their obsession over the retail giant

Despite the supermarket appearing to go to extreme lengths to win over customers, a Woolworths spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the promotion was 'unrelated' to Kmart's opening event.

'This morning Woolworths was excited to unveil our refreshed Top Ryde supermarket as part of our ongoing efforts to improve our customers' shopping experience,' the spokesperson said.

'The refurbished Top Ryde store offers our customers a fresh market feel, including new bakery and produce ranges.

'We're grateful for the patience of our Top Ryde customers over recent weeks as we transformed the store, and this morning at our launch we were able to offer them a 'thank you' in the form of a products bag which included a $25 Woolworths voucher for their enjoyment.'

Kmart has become popular among hundreds of thousands of shoppers in recent years, with a host of Instagram pages dedicated to sharing design tops and tricks using the store's products.
'I think my nursing instincts took over,' said Nixon

A Pittsburgh nurse went from a wedding kiss to the kiss of life Saturday when she performed CPR on a collapsed woman right after her wedding ceremony - while still wearing her dress.

Julie Stroyne Nixon, 24, and new hubby Andrew Nixon, 26, were heading to their hotel room at the Westin Convention Center when they heard commotion.

'We were just about to go through the doors,' Julie told CBS, 'and then we heard somebody scream, Does anybody know CPR? Is anybody a doctor?'

Hero in white: Julie Nixon (pictured left with new husband Andrew Nixon) stopped to save a life right after her wedding. She gave CPR to a collapsed woman in a Pittsburgh street (right) while still wearing her dress

There wasn't a doctor to hand, but Nixon - a nurse at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital - knew exactly what to do.

'I looked over, and I think my nursing instincts took over,' she said. 'And I bolted over to the bench to see if she was all right.'

The woman, who was lying on a concrete bench, didn't have a pulse, bystanders said. But that was no problem for Nixon, who got right to work, giving the woman CPR.

It may well have saved the woman's life, as she soon began to come around - though she was groggy and confused.

And being stood over by a couple in wedding clothes can't have helped.

'She was mumbling, finally, and she tried to get up,' Nixon said. 'And I just kind of like held her hand, and I tried to make sure she didnt fall.'

Paramedics then arrived to take the woman to hospital; she was feeling much better.

'It really did seem that we were in the right place at the right time,' she added.

And Andrew, who has known Julie since they were children, was unfazed that his new bride had saved a life.

'It was a heroic act, but I've known her for long enough,' he said. 'Im not surprised at all.'
A Brisbane man arrested after sending an ultrasound of his unborn child to an FBI agent posing as a paedophile was later found with more than 6,000 child pornography files in his possession.

Ashley David Hill appeared at the Brisbane District Court on Thursday and pleaded guilty to five charges, including using a carriage service to access child pornography.

Hill, a 25-year-old chef, was arrested by the Australian Federal Police in January 2015 after coming to the attention of an undercover FBI agent posing as a peadophile after sending an ultrasound of his unborn child online.

Ashley David Hill appeared at the Brisbane District Court on Thursday. He used a carriage service to access child pornography material

Judge David Reid said the case was one of the worst cases of child exploitation material he had ever encountered.

Commonwealth Prosecutor Aimee Sanderson described the material, which included cartoons, as depraved, and estimated there was thousands of actual children depicted in Hill's material.

They ranged from babies to pre-prepubescent youths and were predominantly female, she said.

Image he had ranged from babies to pre-prepubescent youths and were predominantly female

Notably, she said Hills type of offending was deliberate, persistent and becoming increasingly prevalent.

But defence barrister Malcolm Harrison submitted a head sentence of no more than five years, with a non-parole period of a third of the term, should be imposed.

Judge Reid reserved his decision and adjourned the sentencing for a date to be fixed.
A Taiwanese manufacturing company who was ordered to pay more than $870,000 to its exploited workers last year will face court after refusing to back-pay another two of its employees, who were allegedly paid just $4.90 an hour.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has started proceedings in the Federal Circuit Court against Chia Tung Development Corp and its director Michael Chen-Fa Lin.

They allege Chia Tung failed to comply with an order to back-pay almost $62,000 to two Filipino men, who were in Australia between December 2013 and August 2014 on temporary visas.

Chia Tung, who make and install animal feed mills in Bomaderry (pictured), Nowra and Manildra in regional NSW, will face the Fair Work Ombudsman over accusations they have underpaid two Filipino employees - who allegedly made just $4.90 an hour

The order was issued to the company on January 8 and replaced a possible prosecution against the company.

Chia Tung failed to meet a January 22 deadline to pay this money, and instead argued Australian workplace law did not apply to these employees.

In a statement, the watchdog alleges two of the company's Filipino employees were paid a monthly amount in US dollars, which was then converted to Philippine pesos, and equated to about $4.90 an hour.

It is also alleged that employees of Chia Tung were not compensated for working overtime, weekends, public holidays or for work completed on their days off.

The company, which employs welders, metal fabricators and electricians, was recently ordered to pay out more than $870,000 in back pay to other exploited employees (stock image)

During the manufacturing company's previous encounter with the Fair Work Organisation, it was revealed 43 employees from the Philippines and China were exploited.

It was revealed that 30 of the employees, aged 20-50, were living in a five bedroom house in Nowra.

The company, which employs more than 4000 people globally, was forced to pay between $10,000 and $30,000 in wages to each employee and make written apologies to each of its underpaid workers.

Deputy Fair Work Ombudsman (Operations) Michael Campbell says while the Agency would usually prefer to work alongside employers, it is prepared to take legal action against those who don't pull their weight.

'We are committed to helping employers understand and comply with workplace laws, but operators need to make an effort to get the basics right in the first place,' he said.

'We will take a dim view of those who give us the cold shoulder and refuse to work with us when we are trying to get to the bottom of an issue.'
The new era of US-Cuban normalization has brought hundreds of thousands of dollars of supplies to build a simple but up-to-date conservation facility for Ernest Hemingway artifacts.

The famed writer's items range from books and letters, to fishing rods and African animal heads.

Hemingway lived at the airy home known as the Finca Vigia in the 1940s and '50s, and places where the Nobel literature laureate worked, fished and drank have become important Cuban cultural sites and draws for tourists from around the world.

The home fell into disrepair over a half century of Cold War between the US and Cuba, which suffers under both a US trade embargo and the self-imposed problems of an inefficient and unproductive centrally planned economy.

Ernest Hemingway lived at the airy home known as the Finca Vigia in Havana in the 1940s and '50s. He is pictured in Cuba in this 1940 photo

A hunting trophy lies on a bookshelf at Finca Vigia, Hemingway's home in Havana, Cuba

The famed writer's dining room at Finca Vigia is on display in this photo

A view from above highlights the glassware and plates on the dining room table

Hemingway is seen inside his home in this October 1954 image

The writer, pictured with Adriana Ivancich, is seen in Cuba in this undated image

Finca Vigia fell into disrepair over a half-century of Cold War between the U.S. and Cuba, which suffers under both a US trade embargo and the self-imposed problems of an inefficient and unproductive centrally planned economy

Just before noon outside Hemingway's Havana estate, a metallic screech cut through the chirping of tropical birds and the sound of a live band entertaining tourists.

An American worker pulled open one door of a 40-foot shipping container. A Cuban worker pulled open the other. Out spilled treasure: box after box of US-bought tools and hardware, from electric fuse boxes to hurricane-proof windows.

The opening of two containers on Wednesday was far from the most momentous event in the year and a half since Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro declared detente.

But there was a symbolic charge to the unpacking of American goods that will be used to preserve the memories of a man who's become an icon of friendly US-Cuban relations.

'Preserving Hemingway's legacy brings honor and dignity to North Americans and Cubans alike,' said Ada Rosa Alfonso, head of the Finca Vigia museum.

Ernest Hemingway and model Jean Patchett are pictured together at the Finca Vigia in this file image

Workers unload a newly arrived container container filled with construction tools and supplies at the house

Reading glasses belonging to U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway sit on bedside table at Finca Vigia

Goods and tools brought from the U.S. will be used to complete the first stage of the conservation of Hemingway's estate, that should be finished in the spring of 2017

The goods unpacked Wednesday will be used to complete the first stage of the conservation facility that should be finished in the spring of 2017, said Mary-Jo Adams, director of the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation, which raised nearly $900,000 for the project.

When he died in 1961, Hemingway left approximately 5,000 photos, 10,000 letters and hundreds, perhaps thousands of margin notes in the roughly 9,000 books at the Finca Vigia.

Most are stored in the decaying, termite-infested basement of a guest house on the estate, but will be moved to the new facility as soon as possible, Adams said.

'This is where he kept the objects that he loved, and where they reside,' she said.

Executive Director of the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation Mary-Jo Adams stands in a building under construction on the grounds of Hemingway's home in Havana

Hemingway left approximately 5,000 photos, 10,000 letters and hundreds, perhaps thousands of margin notes in the roughly 9,000 books at the Finca Vigia

Alfonso said the Finca Vigia could become a model for other historic preservation projects in Cuba, which has struggled to find the resources to protect centuries of globally renowned architecture and art.

She said it was thrilling to see the containers unpacked after years of trying to preserve Hemingway's home without state-of-the-art supplies or equipment.

'I really feel the fact of having the best materials, the tools, really having the best conditions to continue preserving the collection,' she said. 'Material and tools coming from the United States isn't something you see every day.'

Hemingway lived at the airy home in the 1940s and '50s, and sites where the Pulitzer-winning author worked, fished and drank have become important Cuban cultural sites and draws for tourists from around the world.

The master bedroom of U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway's estate is pictured here
The co-chairman of Donald Trump's campaign has a message for the Republican Party's elites: Jump aboard the Trump train or 'shut the hell up.'

Sam Clovis told CNN's audience Thursday morning on the 'New Day' program that Trumpworld is getting tired of hearing GOP leaders bad-mouth the man who crushed a field of traditional candidates in their primary season.

'What we're saying is, the Republican party, the leadership of the Republican Party needs to figure out what they want,' he said.

'Either they want to get behind the presumptive nominee who will be the nominee of this party  and make sure that we do everything we can to win in November  or we're just asking them, if they can't do that, then just shut the hell up. That's what we're asking them to do.'

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'SHUT THE HELL UP': Donald Trump's campaign co-chairman warned Republican Party elites to get aboard the Trump train or stay silent

'QUIET!': Trump told Republican leaders on Wednesday to either be 'tougher, smarter, sharper' and side with him  or 'Just please be quiet' and get out of his way, promising to go it alone if he has to

Clovis's stunning ultimatum followed a Wednesday night Trump rally in Atlanta, during which the billionaire politician warned his party's leaders that he could abandon them and 'do it alone' if they kept up their lukewarm support for him.

'You know, the Republicans  honestly folks, our leaders have to get tougher,' Trump told a crowd of nearly 4,000.

'This is too tough to do it alone. But you know what? I think I'm going to be forced to.'

'Our leaders have to get a lot tougher,' he said. 'And be quiet. Just please be quiet. Don't talk. Please be quiet. ... They have to get tougher, they have to get sharper, they have to get smarter. We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.'

On Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan  who has long criticized Trump's campaign tactics  stood with President Obama in condemning Trump's renewed promise to ban non-citizen Muslims from entering the U.S., this time by not accepting immigrants from terrorism-afflicted nations.

'I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country's interest,' Ryan said during a press conference at the Republican National Committee's Capitol Hill headquarters.

'I do not think it is reflective of our principles - not just as a party, but as a country. And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test, not a religious test.'

Donald Trump campaign co-chair: If the GOP can't get behind Trump, we're asking them to "shut the hell up" https://t.co/GgU7XkYhSM  New Day (@NewDay) June 16, 2016

Other Trump naysayers include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had condemned Trump's attacks on Mexican-American judge Gonzalo Curiel, and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn.

Cornyn told Politico on Tuesday that he would not talk to Trump at all until after the election on November 8.

But Trump said on Wednesday that 'I've gotten tremendous endorsements, but if I don't get them that's okay.'

'We're gonna run. We're gonna win. And here's what we're going to do when we win: We're gonna make our country so great again.'
Firefighters and ambulances were also called to the scene on Thursday

They were reported as being 'suspicious' and police closed down the street

The cars were parked in front of Commonwealth officers for several days

Bomb squad officers have inspected two 'suspicious' vehicles that were left outside Commonwealth offices for several days.

Police closed Felix Street, in central Brisbane, after being called to Waterfront Place shortly after noon on Thursday over concerns about two abandoned vehicles.

Two cars - including a silver, older-model Toyota Camry - were meticulously checked by explosive ordnance officers who used mirrors to inspect underneath.

A man (right), who appears to be the owner of silver Toyota, looks at his car after it was the subject of a bomb scare in Brisbane

Bomb squad officers have inspected two 'suspicious' vehicles left outside Commonwealth offices

A police spokesman told AAP the two 'suspicious' vehicles had been sitting outside the premises for several days and started incurring parking tickets.

Police stopped workers from entering nearby buildings and advised passers-by that a 'QPS operation' was under way.

Waterfront Place houses several Commonwealth offices and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton held a media conference just before the street was closed.

Waterfront Place staff said there had been no evacuations and the building where they worked could still be accessed from a riverside entrance.

The man was seen talking to officers after they searched the vehicle for explosives

Two vehicles, including a silver, older-model Toyota Camry, were meticulously checked by explosive ordnance officers who used mirrors to inspect underneath

Assisting police with their inquiries the man appeared to pulling out belongings from the vehicle

A police spokesman told AAP the two 'suspicious' vehicles had been sitting outside the premises for several days and started incurring parking tickets

Police stopped workers from entering nearby buildings and advised passers-by that a 'QPS operation' was under way

Firefighters and ambulance officers were called to assist police at about 3pm.
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Dozens of short-finned pilot whales were found stranded in shallow waters in Indonesia on Wednesday, as locals worked together to help the living ones back to sea.

Heartbreaking pictures show residents and soldiers using ropes to pull the dead whales out of the water. One whale is pictured with a big scratch on its face, close to its eye.

One photograph shows a young boy hugging the fin of a dead whale and another shows the boy and his friend standing on a corpse.

Of the 32 whales that washed up at Pesisir Beach on the coast of Probolinggo in East Java, eight were dead and 24 were rescued and returned to sea.

The Jakarta Post reported that local tradition dictates residents must bury dead whales, as they believe the creatures purposely come ashore to end their journey.

'What do you expect us to do? If they are still alive, we will surely help them return to deep sea,' Sanemo, the Pesisir Village Chief said.

'The dead ones, we must bury them.'

A heartbreaking photo shows a young boy hugging the fin of a dead pilot whale in Probolinggo

Residents and soldiers worked together to help the 24 living whales swim back out to sea

It is not yet known why or how the whales became stranded ashore. It is possible the mammals were searching for cooler waters or that they were caught by a sudden low tide

The short-finned pilot whale usually lives in warm, deep water. The whales can often stray inland slightly, which can lead to being stranded

Two boys play together on the corpse of a beached whale in East Java while someone takes a photo from the boat behind them

The pilot whales that were not helped back to sea were brought ashore for burial in alignment with local tradition
A TV personality's underdog campaign to oust former prime minister Tony Abbott from his seat is reeling following claims he has dodged paying a $400 hair and make-up session for eight months.

Make-up artist 'Mary' told 2GB's Ben Fordham Show a 'desperate' James Mathison booked an urgent beauty session with her in October 2015.

But Mary said she had been chasing the former Australian Idol host for the bill since, saying: 'I'm actually mortified and disappointed and disgusted with his behaviour.'

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Make-up artist 'Mary' said a 'desperate' James Mathison booked an urgent beauty session with her in October 2015 and was repeatedly chased up to pay her for the $400 session (text from Mary to Mathison in November pictured)

Former Australian Idol host James Mathison, who is hoping to upset former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in Warringah, did not pay a hair and make-up artist until eight months later

'I was doing him a favour... within an hour I was pretty much there. I didn't want to do it, I put myself out there.'

Mathison initially planned to pay for the session in cash in the following days. The money never arrived.

In November, Mary sent him a stern reminder: 'Mate I don't know if you forgot that you owe me $400. I have been patient waiting for your call but its been long enough'.

Mathison replied: 'Mary!! I am so sorry. We've just moved house so it's been insane the last few weeks.

'I can swing by tomorrow and meet you or if you send me your bank details I'll eft you tonight. Huge apologies'.

The make-up artist, who did not want to be named, again said she didn't get the money.

'Mary!! I am so sorry. We've just moved house so it's been insane the last few weeks. I'm embarrassed. I can swing by tomorrow and meet you or if you send me your bank details I'll eft [Eftpos] you tonight. Huge apologies. Let me know xx,' Mathison replied

Speaking to Fordham, Mathison said he felt 'embarrassed' but insisted it was all a misunderstanding

In May, Mary again followed up the payment: 'Dear James. I find it most interesting that you are running against Tony Abbott because you believe he does not keep his promises. Yet to date you still fail to pay me for work I did for you'

In May, she texted: 'Dear James, I find it most interesting that you are running against Tony Abbott because you believe he does not keep his promises.

'Yet to date you still fail to pay me the $400 you owe me for work I did for you... Do the right thing and keep your promise and commitment to pay what you owe.'

Mathison was apologetic. 'Oh my god i [sic] am so sorry. That was such a crazy time in my life, i [sic] was moving house and helping my wife launch a business and this honestly slipped through the cracks.

'Let me sort this out this week and email you a receipt. Huge apologies. I'm mortified.'

Days later, the money still hadn't arrived.

Speaking to Fordham, Mathison said he felt 'embarrassed' but insisted it was all a misunderstanding.

He said he had attempted to pay her in December, but Mary had provided the wrong bank details - with only four BSB numbers instead of six.

He again said he was 'so sorry', claiming paying her 'honestly slipped through the cracks'

Early this month, Mary again followed up after not receiving the $400 for the last-minute hair and make-up session

Mr Mathison provided a message showing Mary had provided the wrong bank details - with only four BSB numbers instead of six.

Text messages of the exchange prove that error. But Mathison admitted it was no excuse for delaying the $400 payment so long.

'I didn't realise it'd bounced back. Only two weeks ago did she bring it to my attention,' he told 2GB.

'The important thing that I'm getting across is that I did attempt to pay her.'

He blamed forgetting to pay her in recent weeks when Mary had again brought it to his attention, Mathison said he had 'a fair bit on my mind at the moment'.

'But she's got rent and bills to pay too, of course.'

The TV star said he paid her on Thursday morning, adding he would provide Fordham with proof of the bounce-back.

In recent weeks, Mathison has been raising funds for his Warringah campaign online. At the time of publication he had raised $2924 on Pozible.

Mathison is running as an Independent in Warringah in Sydney's north shore against former Prime Minister Tony Abbott (Mathison pictured earlier this month with people from the community - Cath, Pedro and Rossana)

Mathison is pictured in November attending the official launch party for Soda Bar at the Golden Sheaf Hotel
Two 'absolutely despicable' NHS managers have been jailed for a total of seven years after they scammed more than 120,000 out of vulnerable adults they were paid to look after.

Joanne Brownhill, 46, and Mandy Sargent, 49, were senior managers at a complex in Sheffield which provides accommodation for adults with moderate to severe learning disabilities.

The pair ripped off at least 24 residents at Mansfield View Supported Living Accommodation whose money they were responsible for managing over a seven-year period.

'Absolutely despicable': Joanne Brownhill (left), 46, and Mandy Sargent (right), 49, were senior managers at a complex in Sheffield which provides accommodation for adults with moderate to severe learning disabilities

Five of their victims have now died, and police say the 'full extent of their deception' may never be uncovered due to a large number of records being destroyed.

Brownhill, of Killamarsh, and Sargent, of Rotherham, were jailed for three-and-a-half years each at Sheffield Crown Court after pleading guilty to false accounting at an earlier hearing.

Many of the residents at the accommodation did not have the capacity to manage their finances and as such, supported living assistants helped with shopping and payment of household bills.

Residents' Financial Services, RFS, hold their money and management could request RFS vouchers for residents to reimburse them for these costs.

The duo were suspended by Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust (SHSC) in 2013 and police were called after an audit of the home revealed significant financial discrepancies.

Detective Constable Jenny Elsley said: This has been a complex investigation over three years, looking at thousands of financial transactions by two women employed to care for vulnerable adults.

Home: The pair ripped off at least 24 residents at Mansfield View Supported Living Accommodation (pictured) in Sheffield whose money they were responsible for managing over a seven-year period

The victims' families entrusted these women to care for their relatives and instead, they abused their positions as senior management to exploit these individuals for financial gain.

Their offending was sophisticated and pre-meditated, with such a large number of victims being deliberately targeted. At no point throughout our investigation or legal proceedings have either of the defendants offered any explanation, apology or remorse.'

The victims' families entrusted these women to care for their relatives and instead, they abused their positions as senior management to exploit these individuals for financial gain Detective Constable Jenny Elsley

He added: While it is estimated that the women defrauded 24 residents out of around 120,000 over a seven-year period, because a large number of records were destroyed we may never know the full extent of their deception.

'Their behaviour is absolutely despicable and I am pleased they have now finally accepted responsibility for their crimes after three years of denial.'

Enquiries under the Proceeds of Crime Act are now underway to try to reclaim the money taken.

SHSC chief executive Kevan Taylor said: We welcome the verdict. It is important to recognise the impact this upsetting situation has had on the residents and their families as well as trust staff and we have taken every possible step to ensure that appropriate support has been put in place.'
The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in Afghanistan by exploiting the pervasive practice of 'bacha bazi'  paedophilic boy play  to infiltrate security ranks, say multiple officials and survivors of such assaults.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where 'bacha bereesh'  or boys without beards  widely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacks  at least six between January and April alone  that have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

Afghan men perform the Bazi dance to police officers in Charchino in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. The performance is based upon the Bacha Boy dances that were common during the Taliban reign when Bacha Boys were prostituted to wealthy men and made to perform (file picture)

'The Taliban are sending boys  beautiful boys, handsome boys  to penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen,' said Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai, who was Uruzgan's police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

'They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forces  bacha bazi,' he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanai's view saying: 'It's easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers'.

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

'These bacha attacks have fuelled deep mistrust within police ranks,' Seddiqullah, a police commander at a checkpoint near the provincial capital Tarin Kot, told AFP.

The insurgents are using boys as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

The Taliban are now exploiting the use of Bacha Boys among police to launch crippling insider attacks

He said the attacker was the checkpoint commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah.

Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

'He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive.

'I pretended to be dead,' said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

'As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: "Everyone is dead".'

The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

'We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operations  all grown men with beards,' a Taliban spokesman told AFP.

The insurgents have long denied using children in combat, a claim repeatedly debunked by rights groups and the government.

Survivors of insider attacks who spoke to AFP, including Matiullah, suggest the Taliban are exploiting the institutionalisation of bacha bazi in police ranks for military gain.

Afghan police commander Seddiqullah, 30, (left) sits alongside his subordinates as he speaks at a checkpoint in Tarin Kot, capital of southern Uruzgan province.Seddiqullah voiced concern about Taliban insider attacks carried out by child sex slaves that have fuelled deep mistrust within police ranks

Practically all of Uruzgan's 370 local and national police checkpoints have bachas  some up to four  who are illegally recruited not just for sexual companionship but also to bear arms, multiple officials said.

Some policemen, they said, demand bachas like a perk of the job, refusing to join outposts where they are not available.

Horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys, many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment  often because there is no other escape from exploitative commanders.

Many who have tried to escape have been dragged back with trumped up charges of Taliban links, two senior provincial judges told AFP.

Boys have also spurred a deadly rivalry between policemen, with officials reporting incidents such as a public gunfight this year between two commanders in Gezab district as one of them angrily accused the other of 'stealing' his bacha.

'To restore security in Uruzgan, we will first have to separate policemen from their bachas,' one of the judges said.

'But if they are told to reform their ways, a common reply is: "If you force me to abandon my boy lover, I will also abandon the checkpoint".

'The Taliban are not blind to notice that this addiction is worse than opium.'

'I pretended to be dead': Matiullah, 21, (left), a former Afghan policeman who survived an insider attack carried out by a child sex slave recruited by the Taliban, works at his tailor shop in Tarin Kot

Bacha bazi, which the U.S. State Department has called a 'culturally sanctioned form of male rape', peels away the masculine identity of boys in a society where the sexes are tightly segregated.

In conservative areas women are mostly invisible in public  and often unattainable due to steep bride prices.

Bachas supplant the role of women, adopting a feminine gait and sometimes wearing makeup and bells on their feet.

Many in Uruzgan see bacha bazi neither as paedophilia nor homosexuality, which is forbidden in Islam. If social norms had a pecking order, violating boys would be seen as far more ethical than violating women.

'Bacha bazi is pervasive sexual slavery of children, seen widely as a cultural practice and not a crime,' said Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International.

'Since it is mostly practised by those in positions of power  warlords, commanders, politicians  it is hard to stamp out. It appears sustained partly by the fact that access to women is limited.'

Insider attacks by child slaves have also been reported in recent years from neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar provinces, where bacha bazi is prevalent.

But the tactic appears more deep rooted in Uruzgan, where the boys are widely flaunted as a totem of affluence, with some officials openly displaying cellphone images to AFP of their 'handsome bachas'.

'Come see my beautiful bacha,' said Naqibullah, a police commander in Dehjawze village near Tarin Kot, boasting that he had been holding the teenager for two years.

With a touch of kohl on his eyes, and bleached blond curly hair poking out of his embroidered hat, the boy sat in a corner of the checkpoint surrounded by opium farms, quietly refilling tea glasses for Naqibullah's guests.

'Commanders prowl neighbourhoods for young boys. We are scared of dressing up our children or buying new clothes that will make them attractive,' said Nader Khan, a tribal elder in Dehrawud.

Najeebullah, 18, who survived an insider attack by a bacha or child sex slave, smokes a shisha in Tarin Kot

Khan's 13-year-old nephew was taken captive earlier this year by Naqibullah, a local commander not related to the Dehjawze official, when his family sent him to deliver bread for policemen. He was released only after angry tribal elders besieged the governor's office in Tarin Kot.

Governor Mohammad Nazir Kharoti told AFP he ordered Naqibullah's arrest but he was released in less than a month because he was needed for combat duty.

'It is difficult to implement the law 100 per cent when we are faced with a war situation,' Kharoti said, without elaborating on the case.

Afghanistan's interior ministry refused to confirm or deny that bachas were being used in insurgent attacks, but said it was committed to police reforms and acknowledged that 'bacha bazi within the ranks of police is a serious crime'.

The practice has put the United States and its NATO allies, who have spent billions of dollars to build Afghan forces, in a precarious position.

The US Congress last year voiced concern over 'predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police', prompting watchdog agency SIGAR to launch an investigation that is still ongoing.

The head of a government-affiliated agency in Uruzgan showed AFP two letters from the attorney general in Kabul, one last year and another dated January, ordering a separate probe into sexual abuse and the illegal recruitment of child conscripts.

'We haven't been able to visit even one checkpoint to investigate,' he said, speaking in hushed whispers in his own office.
A mother is suing the owners of a house in The Hamptons and 100 unnamed guests for $40million because they failed to notice her 29-year-old daughter had got drunk and drowned in their pool.

Russian-born Olya Lipina, an illustrator and graphic designer, died during an all-night party at the house in Hampton Bays, New York in July 2014.

But her body was only found around midday as it floated in the pool.

Olya Lipina (pictured) was a promising graphic designer when she went to the party in The Hamptons in the summer of 2014. Her grieving mother is suing for $40million

The New York Post said her mother, Alla Lipina-Skyba, from Brooklyn, has filed a civil lawsuit against the owners of the house, Laura Edith Kreft and Daniel and Linda Finer, but in an extraordinary twist she has also sued 100 revellers.

She claims they were negligent in allowing her daughter to get so drunk.

The New York Daily News said a friend called 911 when she found Miss Lipina in the pool but she was confirmed dead when paramedics arrived.

Hampton Bays (pictured) is a popular destination for affluent New Yorkers seeking a break from the summer heat of Manhattan

The lawsuit says the hosts and partygoers failed 'to respond to and or seek appropriate aid and assistance for Olya Lipina.'

It also says the defendants 'knew or should have known that Olya Lipina was intoxicated or becoming intoxicated' when she entered the pool.

The plaintiff is suing the hosts and revellers jointly for wrongful death, personal injury, conscious pain and suffering, asking for $10million for each cause of action.
Tourism chiefs on Ibiza have reacted furiously after an episode of Geordie Shore showed the cast enjoying themselves in the holiday resort of San Antonio.

They insist the producer did NOT have permission to film the scenes and say they very much regret that private businesses went against the local council's wishes by allowing recording 'for their own benefits'.

The owners of a nightclub where filming also took place are said to be considering legal action against the company for doing so 'without permission'.

The producers of Geordie Shore have come under fire from local council officials in Ibiza for filming at LYT Nightclub in San Antonio, against the wishes of tourism chiefs

Spanish newspaper Diario de Ibiza says LYT Ibiza did not authorise filming inside its premises and is unhappy about the situation.

Magaluf recently went head to head with the show when it insisted it didn't want to be associated with a programme like Geordie Shore and refused filming permission.

Last year, Ibiza rejected a bid to film a new series 'Ibiza Shore', saying it was not the image they wanted to give of the island which is trying to get away from the booze culture in favour of a family atmosphere.

Marnie Simpson and Chloe Ferry from Geordie Shore out in Ibiza where filming has been taking place

Last year, Ibiza rejected a bid to film a new series 'Ibiza Shore', saying it was not the image they wanted to give of the island which is trying to get away from the booze culture in favour of a family atmosphere.

At that time, more than 25,000 people signed a 'don't film in Ibiza' petition on change.org

Now, San Antonio council has been forced to issue a statement after pictures of the stars were shown enjoying themselves on Ibiza.

Geordie Shore's Marty McKenna and Nathan Henry out in Ibizia, despite the wishes of the Sant Antonio council for the reality show not to be filmed in the coastal resort town

They are furious that the stars seemed to have island-hopped from Mallorca on to Ibiza instead with filming 'through the back door'.

'The image projected in such programmes does not correspond to the qualities that Sant Antoni wants to transmit as a tourist destination,' they said in an official statement.

Both the council and business associations have rejected such programmes.

San Antonio's leaders say they did not give for recording scenes and are unhappy to have been linked with the reality show.

A spokesman said they were not aware of any filming having taken place on public roads and were saddened that the programme had obviously used a loophole through private venues.

A spokeswoman for the show's production company said: 'Lime Pictures has completed all due diligence in securing the correct licenses for filming material for broadcast in Ibiza.

'Prior to our arrival we were aware that filming in certain areas would be prohibited and have adhered to the restrictions, filming only where we are licensed to.
A man who visited a police station in a bid to get arrested after his girlfriend dumped him ended up spending hours wandering around, trying on helmets, reading crime reports and taking selfies.

William Linton, 25, of Edinburgh, took pictures of himself wearing a police hat, filmed himself behind the desk of a senior officer, smashed the window of a patrol car, defaced notebooks and even stole a set of handcuff keys.

At one point a cleaner appeared in the room but Linton carried on reading crime reports and asked her to shut the door behind her.

William Linton, 25, of Edinburgh, took pictures of himself wearing a police hat (pictured), filmed himself behind the desk of a senior officer, smashed the window of a patrol car and even defaced notebooks

The incident took place at Police Scotland's Lanarkshire divisional headquarters in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, which is open 24 hours a day.

Furious senior officers launched an immediate inquiry into the incident of October 8, 2014, and Linton handed himself in the following day.

He told police he had gone to the station in a bid to get arrested in a vain attempt to get noticed after losing his job and his girlfriend.

At Hamilton Sheriff Court Linton admitted charges of malicious damage, breach of the peace and theft in relation to the incident.

The incident took place at Police Scotland's Lanarkshire divisional headquarters (pictured) in Motherwell

He was fined 400 by Sheriff Ray Small who branded the incident 'totally inappropriate'.

Linton had arrived at the station car park in the early hours of the morning and used a ratchet to smash the police car window.

Just after 3.30am, he pressed a door buzzer and was given access to the building by a worker inside.

He then wandered the corridors before entering an office on the first floor where he sat behind the desk and read paperwork and clowned around with a uniform.

Depute fiscal Lisa Lann said: 'He read a number of crime reports which included names and addresses, details which normally wouldn't be accessible to members of the public.

'He also tried to gain access to the police computer but was unable to.'

Linton's antics only ended when a police civilian worker arrived around 7am and spotted him.

Linton represented himself in court and had written to the sheriff admitting his guilt

Mrs Lann added: 'When she arrived Mr Linton was sitting at a desk with his feet up on an open drawer.

'He then removed a police hat he had been wearing and she noticed that the room was in a state of disarray.

'She went out to speak to other people and that's when Mr Linton left the building through the back door.'

Linton represented himself in court and had written to the sheriff admitting his guilt.

He added: 'I have now picked up my own tenancy and I'm currently trying to seek employment but that has been hard for me because of this.'

Sheriff Small said: 'This seemed to be a fairly straightforward case but one that was a totally inappropriate incident.

'You pled guilty to deliberately smashing the window of a police vehicle to get yourself attention.

'You then attempted to enter the police station itself and for some unknown reason were admitted in the dead of night.

'One you were inside you took advantage of this to enter into offices, sit at a desk and draw inappropriate things on documents.

'I'm satisfied though that this is all that you did and did not try to access confidential information.

'I take into account that you have been in custody for a while at the start of this.

'In your letter to me you have asked that you should be admonished on this matter but you have been in trouble before, and admonishing you would send out the wrong message to the public.

'I will therefore deal with it by way of a fine.'

Linton is paying the fine at 20 per month. His not guilty plea to a charge that he had committed fraud by impersonating a police officer during the incident was accepted by prosecutors.

A Police Scotland spokeswoman confirmed the force had overhauled security.
A young mother and her new boyfriend killed her 'whingeing, attention-seeking' baby and tried to cover it up after bingeing on drink and drugs, a court heard.

Noah Serra-Morrison was found dead on November 21 2015 after suffering 15 fractures to his body, one a 15cm wound across his skull.

Jurors at Luton Crown Court were told the little boy was injured likely after 'deliberately and violently being swung against a wall or floor', or by his limbs being twisted with 'severe force'.

Medical experts said the 13-month-old's injuries were so severe they were similar to those sustained in a car crash or a fall from a building.

But his mother Ronnie Tayler-Morrison, 21, and her partner Hardeep Hunjan, 26, told police, paramedics and neighbours he injured himself falling from a cot - and that he was 'awake and moving, with his eyes open', but 'not with it and not crying'.

Ronnie Tayler-Morrison, 21, and partner Hardeep Hunjan, 26, are on trial charged with murdering her son Noah Serra-Morrison, one, at their home in Crawley Road, Luton, pictured

Prosecutor Jane Bickerstaff QC said suggested this claim was 'impossible'.

She told the court the pair delayed calling paramedics for an hour as they tried to cover up the 'deliberate' crime, trying to wash away forensic evidence in a shower in the 'blind hope that somehow they might get away with it'.

Ms Bickerstaff said the pair repeatedly lied to police during interviews and after they were released on bail fled to Scotland - which the prosecutor said was because they knew what doctors would uncover.

The trial heard Noah was subjected to horrific and deliberate abuse for weeks before he died.

A post-mortem examination revealed that as well as the fatal injuries, the toddler suffered fractures to an arm and leg around a week before his death, and similar injuries again to an arm and leg between four and six weeks before he died - 15 fractures in total, along with bruising over his entire body.

Ms Bickerstaff said they were deliberate injuries, consistent with a 'road traffic collision or a fall from greater than one storey'.

Tayler-Morrison sobbed with her head in her hands when the court heard Noah would have been severely brain-damaged if he had survived.

She and Hunjan, both of Crawley Road, Luton, each deny charges of murder, causing or allowing the death of a child, and child cruelty.

The court heard the unemployed couple began living together shortly after Tayler-Morrison separated from Noah's father in July 2015.

Their 'chaotic' relationship was fuelled by alcohol and cannabis and based on 'love, jealousy and control', Ms Bickerstaff said.

She told jurors Tayler-Morrison wrote in her diary, 'I don't see life without him, and as much as this sounds selfish I know that I love Noah but I love Hardeep more'.

The couple told a health visitor they did not use drugs or alcohol, but jurors were told a video from November 19 showed Tayler-Morrison almost passed out from using a device that allowed her to smoke three joints at once.

The evening before Noah died the couple again smoked cannabis and downed a full bottle of vodka after putting the toddler to bed, the court heard.

At 1.45am on November 21 Tayler-Morrison searched the internet for 'my baby is hurt' and 'my baby is breathing but not moving'.

Half an hour later she phoned her student nurse sister, telling her she had found Noah on the floor after he pulled a fan onto his cot.

But she did not call an ambulance until almost 3.30am. Hunjan apparently attempted CPR, but Ms Bickerstaff said that if he did so 'it was a false and futile attempt, for show'.

Paramedics were left waiting at the door, the court was told, and Noah was found on a bedroom floor in a nappy, cold and with major swelling to the right side of his head, no heartbeat and not breathing.

Luton Crown Court heard the baby was left with injuries similar to 'falling from a building' and the prosecution alleged he had been 'swung violently against a wall'

Despite efforts to save him he was pronounced dead at hospital at 4.10am.

Police broke into the flat and arrested Hunjan, finding him hiding under a duvet in the kitchen with his dog, while Tayler-Morrison was arrested at the hospital.

Hunjan told police he looked upon Noah as his own son and could not explain his injuries, while Tayler-Morrison blamed them on him climbing from his cot, complaining that he cried and whinged as if he 'attention-seeks'.

Ms Bickerstaff told jurors: 'The prosecution says that when you have heard all the evidence in this case that Noah's injuries were not caused by a fall out of his cot, you will be sure that Noah was seriously assaulted, including having his head forcibly smashed against a hard surface such as a wall or floor.

'Both of these defendants have covered this up.'
The Bank of England moved to the heart of the EU referendum battle today as it was accused of producing 'phoney' forecasts in a bid to avoid Brexit.

Governor Mark Carney was forced to defend his warnings about a possible recession after senior Tories suggested he had breached election rules.

Two former Conservative leaders and two former Chancellors have also attacked the Bank for a 'woeful failure' to present 'fair and balanced analysis'.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned there could be a recession if we vote to leave the EU

The extraordinary row about the behaviour of the independent Bank - which is published its latest assessment of the economy today - came as the struggle over the UK's ties to Brussels enters its last week.

George Osborne faced a vicious backlash from his own party yesterday after he unveiled a post-Brexit 'punishment' Budget that included swingeing tax hikes and slashing public spending.

Appearing in the Question Time special last night, Justice Secretary Michael Gove added his voice to some 65 Tory MPs who have condemned the dire claims.

He insisted there would be 'no need' for an emergency Budget if we left the EU.

David Cameron met former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May on the Eu referendum campaign trail today

'I think what we have heard from the Remain campaign throughout this whole referendum has been dire warnings of the terrible consequences of the British people just taking control of their own destinies,' Mr Gove said.

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, former chancellors Lord Norman Lamont and Lord Nigel Lawson and ex-party leaders Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Michael Howard poured scorn on warnings of economic disaster from the Remain campaign.

'There has been startling dishonesty in the economic debate, with a woeful failure on the part of the Bank of England, the Treasury and other official sources to present a fair and balanced analysis.

'They have been peddling phoney forecasts and scare stories to back up the attempts of David Cameron and George Osborne to frighten the electorate into voting Remain.'

Bernard Jenkin, Conservative chairman of the Public Administration Committee and a senior figure in Vote Leave, has written to the governor warning him that he is 'prohibited' from speaking out against Brexit.

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, left, and ex-Chancellor Norman Lamont have attacked Mr Carney over his interventions during the referendum campaign

Mr Duncan Smith and Lord Lamont wrote a joint letter criticising the Bank with ex-party leader Lord Howard, left, and another former chancellor Lord Lawson

Mr Jenkin said the Bank was covered by the 'purdah' rules which prevent publicly funded bodies making statements in the run-up to elections..

The letter, seen by the BBC, said: 'You have already made your views known about the question of the forthcoming referendum.

'The concern is that you, as Governor of the Bank of England, or others who serve the Bank, may have occasion to make further public comment on matters arising from the question on the ballot paper for the referendum.'

The Prime Minister leapt to the defence of the Bank of England governor on Twitter this morning

Mr Jenkin went on: 'You are prohibited from making any public comment, or doing anything which could be construed as taking part in the referendum debate,' the letter continues.

'I have taken legal advice from Speakers' Counsel ... (and) wanted to take the opportunity to stress the importance of this matter.

'I very much hope you will avoid doing anything which could suggest you or the Bank have disregarded Parliament's wishes.'

But Mr Carney - whose officials are said to have regarded the letter as a 'threat' - wrote back to Mr Jenkin, insisting he had not 'made my views known' on the referendum.

'Nor do I intend to share my private opinion other than via the anonymity of (the) ballot box when I join millions of others to cast my vote,' the letter says.

'All of the public comments that I, or other Bank officials, have made regarding issues related to the referendum have been limited to factors that affect the Bank's statutory responsibilities and have been entirely consistent with our remits.'

Tory MP Bernard Jenkin

Mr Carney said that Mr Jenkin's letter 'demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of central bank independence' and the Bank had 'a duty' to report 'evidence-based judgements'.

He also said the Bank was not officially covered by the purdah rules but had 'voluntarily' agreed to be bound by them 'in the spirit of the guidelines issued by the Cabinet Office'.

David Cameron, who met former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May in TV studios in west London as he campaigned today, said the Tories were wrong to question the governor's position.

The Prime Minister tweeted: 'It's deeply concerning that the Leave campaign is criticising the independent Bank of England.

'We should listen to experts when they warn us of the dangers to our economy of leaving the European Union.'

Labour former chancellor Alistair Darling said the Leave campaign was making a 'blatant attempt to muzzle a respected independent voice'.

'The Bank of England is independent, the Governor is independent and he has a duty to say what he thinks,' Lord Darling said.

'It is very clear the Leave campaign doesn't want people to hear what the Bank has to say on the most critical issue facing our generation because they don't like its conclusions.'
ISIS have been accused of covering up the death of its talismanic leader in a desperate bid to prevent morale collapsing among its fighters.

Reports circulating earlier this week said Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed in a U.S. air strike in the terror group's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.

His death would be a devastating blow for the jihadists at a time when they are losing swathes of territory and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost oil revenue in the face of coalition air strikes.

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Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, is pictured addressing Muslim worshippers at a mosque in Mosul

The Al-Hashd al-Shaabi militia, a group of Iraqi Shi'a paramilitary forces, said it was still trying to verify reports of al-Baghdadi's death, it was reported by Iraqi News.

In a statement, it said: 'ISIS is working to hide its leader's death due to the sizable amount of loss that has been inflicted upon it in the recent past.

'Some Arab and foreign media indicated to the injury of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, while other media confirmed his death in the Syrian city of al-Raqqa.

'The intelligence of al-Hashd al-Shaabi is working to verify this information.'

ISIS are waging a desperate last stand to hold the city of Fallujah and are losing ground around its other Iraqi stronghold of Mosul as the Iraqi army backed by U.S.-led air strikes dent their territory.

The number of foreign fighters joining ISIS in Iraq and Syria has decreased sharply in the past year to about 200 a month from between 1,500 and 2,000.

And U.S. Air Force Major General Peter Gersten said last month that the number of fighters defecting from ISIS was increasing as well, but he did not give a specific number.

Reports of the leader's death, carried by the respected Turkish daily Yenis Safak, comes only days after 49 people were killed in an Orlando nightclub by a man pledging allegiance to ISIS.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been the leader of the jihadist militant organisation of ISIS

But there have previously been reports that al-Baghdadi, who proclaimed himself caliph of all Muslims two years ago, has been killed or wounded, which turned out to be untrue.

The Abna24 website said al-Baghdadi had been killed on Sunday morning by an air strike in Syria.

However, there has been no confirmation of his death by the US or any other coalition powers, who have been targeting the terror group in Syria and Iraq.

A Pentagon spokesman told MailOnline they were not aware of any 'high value targets' having been killed.

Baghdadi was born as Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri, in 1971 in Samarra, Iraq, to a lower-middle class Sunni family.

His tribe claimed to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad.

As a youth Baghdadi was a meticulous observer of religious law and could recite the Koran from cover to cover.

He then rose from obscurity to lead the world's most infamous and feared terror group, reviving the organisation's fortunes as it launched its sickening offensive across Syria and Iraq.

But he still continues to shun the spotlight for an aura of mystery that adds to his appeal and his lack of public appearances means he still has a unprecedented $10million bounty on his head.

The situation is in direct contrast to the likes of Osama bin Laden, who regularly appeared in videos sprouting hate messages and was internationally known long before 9/11.

Conversely, Baghdadi's only appearance came during a slick propoganda video last summer, when he led a sermon in a mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The video - which showed a man with a black and grey beard wearing a black robe and matching turban - came after the group captured Iraq's second largest city, a terrifying moment which highlighted how quickly the terror group was gaining territory.

ISIS members wave flags as they parade through their stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, where Baghdadi has reportedly been killed in an airstrike

An Iraqi intelligence report indicates that Baghdadi - who it says has a PhD in Islamic studies and was a professor at Tikrit University - also married a second woman, with whom he had another son.

Baghdadi apparently joined the insurgency that erupted after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, at one point spending time in a U.S military prison in the country's south.

But he did not swear allegiance to the leader of the al-Qaeda network, Zawahiri, who had urged ISIS to focus on Iraq and leave Syria to al-Nusra.

Baghdadi and his fighters openly defied the al-Qaeda chief, leading some commentators to believe he now holds higher prestige among many Islamist militants.

As well as the uncertainty surrounding his true identity, his whereabouts are also unclear. Although there were reports he was in Raqqa in Syria, - the ISIS stronghold - those reports are unconfirmed.

In the past year, Baghdadi has been reported wounded multiple times. Last year there were two reports that Baghdadi had been wounded in air strikes, but they turned out to be inaccurate.
Leader tells men to beat their wives if they do not listen to them

An Islamic leader in Pakistan has defended his step-by-step guide on how to beat a woman, saying he will not reconsider the recommendations.

Pakistan's Council of Islamic Ideology chairman Muhammad Khan Sherani said husbands were often left without a choice if they felt their wives were not listening to them.

He said: When we draft a bill concerning women we have to consider all possible situations.

If a woman does not fulfil her responsibilities in marriage first you advise her.

If that doesnt work then you consult her relatives.

If that doesnt work then you desert her in bed and if all of this doesnt work then light beating is allowed.

The recommendations were part of the Koran and Sunnah the prophets teachings, with Chairman Sherani telling BBC that no one can dispute that.

When asked if he was concerned that the recommendations would be used as an excuse for husbands to beat their wives he redirected the question back to the reporter.

He said: Then you tell me, what is the solution to this issue?

Is a woman doesnt respond to advice, doesnt listen to her relatives after all youve used all the options what should be done?

Chairman Sherani said men could try speaking to their wives then the family with the last alternative being a light beating

Chairman Sherani said women could also consult their families if there was an issue.

Calmly explaining in how to deal with the issue, he said: First she can involve someone from the family to resolve the issue but in the end if they feel they cant live together she has the right to get a divorce.

The councils initial proposals saw a huge backlash from the public with women responding with #TryBeatingMeLightly hashtag.

Pakistani photographer Fahhad Rajper shared photos of women standing up against the advice, including prominent women in the community saying what would happen if a man tried to beat them.

#TryBeatingMeLightly I'll break that hand you raised, remaining damage? I'll leave it upto Allah.

Shagufta, Doctor. pic.twitter.com/esqM7qlCc4  Fahhad Rajper (@FahhadRajper) May 30, 2016

#TryBeatingMeLightly, you won't survive to see the morning.

Sumbul Usman, Social Media Manager pic.twitter.com/d5KfM5Fzmy  Fahhad Rajper (@FahhadRajper) May 29, 2016

Despite the huge backlash to the councils initial proposals, Chairman Sherani remained steadfast.

He said: Society is not the media. Theyre two different things and we will not reconsider the recommendations.

This is according to the Koran. You cannot ask someone to reconsider the Koran.

Muhammad Khan Sherani leads the 20-member Islamic Council, a constitutional body of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and can advise the government over potential laws.

It previously proposed allowing man to 'lightly beat' his wife if she does not 'dress as he desires', refuses to have sex, or fails to take a bath after her period.

The proposals, as part of its own women protection bill, recommended that women could be beaten if they refused to have sex without a religious excuse or failed to bath after intercourse and periods.

It rejected Punjab province's controversial Protection of Women against Violence Act, branding it un-Islamic.

Chairman Muhammad Khan Sherani (pictured) has defended the Islamic Council's proposals for men to 'lightly beat' their wives

Women should also be beaten for not wearing hijabs, or for speaking so loudly that strangers can hear them, it recommended.

Women should also be beaten for not wearing hijabs, or talking to strangers, it recommends (stock image)

The bill further argued that women should be banned from military combat, welcoming foreign delegations and appearing in advertisements, and must have spousal permission to give monetary support to somebody.

Female nurses should be banned from taking care of male patients and there should be no-co-education after primary school, it suggests.

The bill advised that a woman must not interact with strangers and that abortion after 120 days should be declared murder.

However, it said that a woman can participate in politics without the permission of her parents and that anyone who tries to force women to marry should be jailed for ten years.

Sources in the council told The Express Tribune that three of the council members rejected some of the proposals in the bill during heated discussion led by Chairman Muhammad Khan Sheerani.
A suspected drug trafficker was shot dead by a Homeland Security agent at a strip mall in Chula Vista, California, after an undercover operation turned violent.

Police officers then went through each business in the busy mall and employees could be seen emerging with their hands in the air.

A taskforce of undercover federal agents from Operation Alliance - which targets cross-border narcotics trafficking - had arranged a meeting with a group of suspected smugglers.

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Armed agents from Operation Alliance swoop on a car in the parking lot of a strip mall in Chula Vista. A suspected drug trafficker was shot dead during the incident

A suspect is led away by Homeland Security agents after the incident in Chula Vista

A fight broke out around 2pm local time and a Homeland Security Investigations agent shot one of the men in the parking lot of the Shops at San Miguel Ranch mall in Eastlake and he died of his injuries in hospital.

Acting special agent Mike Carney said: 'One of the suspects became violent and forced our agent to take offensive action to defend himself, to defend his life.'

Four of the suspects fled but were later arrested after a white Ford Focus crashed.

A sixth man was arrested near the border.

Agents also cordoned off a nearby condominium complex.

The local CBS8 channel reported that those arrested were Jesus Rizo, 20, Rafael Morataya-Aguilar, 19, Sergio Arias-Ibarra, 31, Miguel Parra, 22, and Jovani Bernal-Moreno.

The dead man has not been named.
Police were this morning investigating a suspicious black vehicle abandoned next to a London train station.

Specialised officers arrived on the scene after the Renault Clio was reported in a narrow walkway next to Blackfriars station.

Police set up a cordon for the area, which caused problems in the busy area during rush hour this morning.

A terror alert is being investigated at a London train station after a suspicious black car was abandoned on the pavement

Police set up a cordon for the area, which caused problems in the busy area during rush hour this morning

Police investigated this morning and have since said that there is nothing suspicious about the vehicle

A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: 'Police are in attendance at Bankside, SE1 to reports of a suspicious vehicle.

'Cordons are in place while police assess the situation.

'Specialised officers are at the scene. Enquiries continue.'

Commuters were discussion the disruption on Twitter this morning.

One witness wrote: 'What on earth is happening at Blackfriars station this morning?? Police everywhere'

Three men were arrested in the same area last night after police stopped a van with a Belgian numberplate.

Officers closed Blackfriars Road in both directions as they investigated.

However, after investigating the incident today, police revealed that it is not terror-related.
Britains biggest air show will not feature a stunt display from the Red Arrows for the first time in 52 years due to new safety rules after the Shoreham air disaster.

Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Turner, who is responsible for the aerobatics teams safety, said the RAF had decided not to risk doing stunts at the Farnborough Air Show after the crash in August 2015.

The news was last night described as a huge disappointment by aviation enthusiasts, with up to 80,000 people expected to enjoy next months show in Hampshire.

Display team: The Red Arrows are pictured in their 'Big Battle' formation over London for the Queen on Sunday

Smoke: A photograph taken from the rear seat of Red 8 shows the Queen's Birthday Flypast on Sunday

Tight new safety regulations have been imposed by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) since last years crash, which has led to over half of the UK's 300 air shows which were scheduled to take place this year being cancelled.

Eleven people were killed and 16 injured when a vintage jet ploughed into the A27, in what was the deadliest air show disaster in the UK since the Farnborough crash in 1952.

The typical Red Arrows 22-minute display features nine jets travelling at 800mph while passing each other as close as 15ft apart, sometimes just 50ft above the trees.

But an accident, such as a collision, aircraft malfunction or bird strike, at that speed could cause multiple third-party casualties, according to AVM Turner.

In formation: The Red Arrows fly alongside a Vulcan bomber (centre) at the Farnborough Air Show in July 2012

In the air: The Red Arrows display team perform their aerial routine at the Farnborough Air Show in July 2000

Tragic crash: Eleven people were killed and 16 injured when a vintage jet ploughed into the A27 in Shoreham, West Sussex, in what was the deadliest air show disaster in the UK since the Farnborough crash in 1952

He said: The position we find ourselves in is either we seek to clear the area of civilians, or we tolerate the risk and frankly right now, we the RAF have decided that that is not a risk worth bearing given the Shoreham public reaction.

He added that there was not enough time to specifically tailor the display for the Farnborough show. The Red Arrows will still attend but will be limited to ground demonstrations and flypasts.

Its a huge disappointment, but it has been done for all the right reasons and I am not surprised Howard Wheeldon, aerospace analyst

They still intend to do a stunt display at the remaining air shows where they are booked to appear, AVM Turner said.

An RAF spokesman told The Telegraph: The high speed and dynamic nature of the traditional Red Arrows display is no longer appropriate due to the large amounts of local housing, business areas and major transport links underneath the planned display area.

Howard Wheeldon, an aerospace analyst, told The Telegraph: Clearly its a huge disappointment, but it has been done for all the right reasons and I am not surprised given the tight restrictions put on air shows by the CAA.

A statement for the air show said: In light of the accident at Shoreham last year the nature of their display will change.

The CAA said many UK airshows have been cancelled because a 'significant majority' of show organisers have declined to co-operate with the new guidelines.

The new regulations include stricter checks on pilots, better training for organisers and a sharp increase in CAA inspection fees - some will increase from 2,695 to over 20,000.
CCTV footage has captured the moment an elderly woman disappeared into an uncovered manhole after she lost her footing.

Several passers-by race to help the stricken woman - who appears to have been saved by the open umbrella she was clutching as she fell.

The unidentified woman had been walking round a small excavation site in the city of Leskovac in southern Serbia, when she suddenly slipped and tumbled into the hole.

The CCTV footage shows the woman losing her footing as she walks along the pavement

No-one else is in the shot as the woman slips and tumbles into the hole, vanishing from sight

Luckily it was raining and she had her umbrella open, and managed to keep a hold of it above her head when she fell.

Witnesses rushed to help lift out the woman, who suffered minor injures from the incident but was otherwise okay.

The incident was captured on CCTV from a nearby shop on the street.

Residents said the manhole had been left open because of construction works taking place on the water supply network.

The manager of the water company, Kosara Ilic, told local media they were not responsible for the incident but were going to launch an investigation.

The lady appears to have been saved by the open umbrella she was clutching as she fell - which is the only thing visible above ground level

Several passers-by race to help the stricken woman, who had been walking round a small excavation site in the city of Leskovac in southern Serbia
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These spectacular images capture the moment a butterfly catches the gaze of a graceful lion as it flies close to the big cat's head.

The brightly coloured insect was spotted calmly flying next to a lion and almost landing on the predator's head.

But while looking a little annoyed, the female lion appeared to be somewhat of a gentle giant as she allowed the butterfly to fly peacefully around it.

Mesmerising: A lionness locks eyes on a butterfly floating peacefully around her head in Chobe National Park in Botswana

The images were captured by photographer William Steel in Chobe National Park near to his home in Botswana, Africa

Careful not to aggravate the lion too much and perhaps sensing its annoyance, the gentle butterfly soon flew away.

This image was captured by photographer William Steel in Chobe National Park near to his home in Botswana, Africa.

Mr Steel, 24, said: 'I was guiding two friends from England while on a month-long road trip through Southern Africa.

'My guests were enjoying their first ever lion sighting, a large pride, as they slowly made their way along the Chobe River.'

While looking a little annoyed, the female lion appeared to be somewhat of a gentle giant as she allowed the butterfly to fly around her

Photographer William Steel said: 'The lion raised its head to investigate a passing herd of impala when suddenly, out of the blue, the bravest of butterflies began to fly directly at the lion's face in repeated aerial dive bombs'

This is the moment a daring butterfly risked the wrath of a lion when it flew dangerously close to the predator's head

Photographer William Steel said: 'I was thrilled. The sighting was spectacular and it is always a joy to have such a close sighting. This was simply the sweetest possible cherry on the cake'

He added: 'The beautiful female lion was lying down, propped up against an ant hill in lovely afternoon light.

'It raised its head to investigate a passing herd of impala when suddenly, out of the blue, the bravest of butterflies began to fly directly at the lion's face in repeated aerial dive bombs.

'The lion simply glared in annoyance each time the defiant butterfly brushed past its face.

'The simple answer is the butterfly was simply too small to effect the lion, like the constant pestering flies on its face, lions become tolerant to these irritants.

Looking for a cheeky pit stop: The brightly coloured insect was spotted flying next to the lion and almost landing on the predator's head

Mr Steel added: 'The lion simply glared in annoyance each time the defiant butterfly brushed past its face'

'Although I like to think that maybe the lion also saw the beauty in the moment.

'After about five flybys the butterfly finally realized it may have picked on someone the wrong size and continued its journey along the Chobe River in an erratic carefree flutter.

'I was thrilled, the sighting was spectacular, and it is always a joy to have such a close sighting, this was simply the sweetest possible cherry on the cake.

'As a wildlife photographer you are always pushing for that extra drama in an image, I could not have imagined this was going to come from the likes of a beautiful and brave butterfly.'
Politicians in Bulgaria have approved a bill that would ban the wearing of clothing that conceals faces, fully or partially, in public places.

A total of 108 MPs voted in favour of the legislation - eight voted against - at its first reading, according to reports, which was proposed by the nationalist Patriotic Front (PF) and would prohibit niqabs and burqas.

The law will apply to all official institutions and sites which provide administrative, educational or social services as well as places for public leisure.

The end of the burqa and niqab in Bulgaria?: 108 MPs voted in favour of the ban - only eight were against

The country's second-largest opposition party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), proposed withdrawing the paper and including it in counter-terrorism legislation, but the ideawas rejected.

MPs from DPS and its splinter group DOST, headed by former DPS chairperson Lyutvi Mestan, expressed opposition to the bill, claiming 'it does not really resolve any of the considerable problems' and that it was the result of a 'political deal'.

The bill had already been approval by several parliamentary committees, while the cities of Pazardzhik, Stara Zagora, Sliven and Burgashave have already approved similar bans on a local scale.

The Muslim face veil is already outlawed in a number of European countries including France and Belgium

Latvia is planning a similar outlawing of full-face Muslim veils in public, despite less than a handful of people in the country wearing them.

The Ministry of Justice has called the proposals on niqabs and burqas a 'preventive measure' to protect Latvian culture, ensuring that newly-arrived Muslims adhere to the country's traditions.

Earlier this year, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called for the banning of Muslim headscarves in universities, prompting opposition from within his own government.

In an interview with the daily newspaper, Liberation, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said France should 'protect' French Muslims from extremist ideology.

The country has already banned face-covering Muslim veils and forbids headscarves and other religious symbols in schools and public buildings.

In May, the Dutch government implemented a partial ban on wearing an Islamic face-covering veil in schools, hospitals and on public transport, with fines of up to 300 for anyone caught flouting the law.

A law banning the full-face veil in neighboring Belgium came into force in 2011.
Boris Johnson today denied he was bidding to become Prime Minister in the aftermath of the referendum as more polls showed Vote Leave ahead.

With just one week until the historic referendum finally takes place, the latest surveys matched a string of polls over the past week to have shown big leads for Leave.

Despite the Remain campaign scrambling to halt an apparent slide in support, the new snapshot of public opinion by Ipsos-Mori indicated the momentum continued to be with Brexit supporters as Leave led by six points.

Survation released another survey showed Leave up seven points on 45 per cent, leading Remain on 42 per cent, down two. Excluding 'don't knows' Brexit leads 52-48 with a week to go.

On a visit to a fish firm in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the ex-mayor of London gutted a fish for the cameras before dismissing suggestions he could be in No 10 within weeks.

Boris Johnson went in search of inspiration today as he was told he should be prime minister on a campaign visit to a fish firm in Suffolk today

The new opinion poll from Ipsos-Mori for the Evening Standard made grim reading for David Cameron's Remain campaign as it revealed another big lead for Leave

David Cameron - due to campaign in Gibraltar today - is widely expected to announce his resignation if today's poll for the Evening Standard is borne out at the ballot box

On his visit, Mr Johnson declared 'they're pinching our fish' as he posed for photos while holding a live lobster, before then attempting to fillet a salmon.

Speaking at the Sam Cole Food Group to people involved in the fishing industry, Mr Johnson said he is campaigning for Britain to 'take back control' of its waters and ensure North Sea fish is more fairly distributed.

The former London mayor said: 'We think we'd get more boats coming to Lowestoft.'

He added: 'We hope that carries your core support.'

John Knights, who has a fishing boat in Lowestoft docks, said: 'As long as you end up prime minister.'

But Mr Johnson replied: 'No, that's not going to happen.'

Speaking after Mr Johnson's visit, Mr Knights added: 'I'm really worried about this country.'

Asked if he hopes Mr Johnson would be PM if the UK leaves the EU, Mr Knights replied: 'Yeah I do. That man in charge - he's got a pair of balls.

'I don't think he knows much about the (fishing) job, but I believe he really does care about Britain and I believe the man has got some guts to run this country - not just the fishing.

'This country is getting in a mess.'

Mr Johnson grappled with a live lobster on his visit to the fish factory to make a rallying cry to protect the fishing industry by voting for Brexit next week

David Cameron today appeared with Jeremy Clarkson, right, and James May, centre, in a bid to boost his flagging campaign in the final week

Mr Johnson, who was joined by Conservative ministers Penny Mordaunt and George Eustice, was also presented with a 'Save Our Soles' T-shirt.

He joked: 'You've got to make sure you don't say that too fast.'

The T-shirt also says: 'EU destroyed our fishing industry - vote leave.'

The details of today's opinion poll made grim reading for the Remain campaign.

Fewer than one in five people believe the main Treasury campaign claim that households would be 4,300 after a Brexit vote.

By contrast, almost half of people do believe the controversial Leave campaign figure that Britain would get back control of 350million a week after Brexit.

Both numbers have been dismissed by independent experts but the gulf in trust between the two campaigns will send new shudders through the Remain camp.

In other findings, Ipsos-Mori found more people think they would be better off in five years after Brexit than if Britain stays in.

Immigration is now the most important issue to voters seven days out - a sharp turn around from earlier in the campaign when the economy dominated.
Shocking CCTV footage shows the moment a customer and two employees began viciously fighting one another inside a nail salon over an unpaid bill and a stolen bottle of varnish.

CCTV shot inside Nail Lover, in Tilbury, Essex shows the three women grappling with one another before the blonde customer's boyfriend intervenes - and apparently slaps the two employees in their faces.

Grainy mobile phone footage then captured the moment the row spilled out on the street after two members of staff accused the woman of not paying for her eyebrow treatment and stealing products.

CCTV shot inside Nail Lover, in Tilbury, Essex shows the three women grappling with one another (pictured)

CCTV shot inside the shop shows the three women wrestling with one another before the blonde woman's boyfriend intervenes - and apparently slaps each of the two brunette women in their faces (pictured)

Astonishing footage filmed by a passer-by shows the blonde woman, believed to be the customer, swinging one of the employees around by her hair while swinging punches at the second employee, who is trying to hit her with a mop.

The confrontation, which took place just before 6pm on Tuesday, began inside the shop before spilling on to the street.

The sickening footage shot outside captures the customer pummeling a member of staff, grabbing her hair and repeatedly punching her in the face as the victim lays on the floor.

As the women grapple with one another a different nail bar employee tried to intervene by hitting her with a mop.

The footage shows the moment a customer and employees began viciously fighting one another in the salon

At one point salon worker Hanna Hue Thi Nguyen, 40, is seen being dragged down the street by her hair by the woman.

Her colleague Thao Nguyen, 42, then hit the customer twice across her back with a mop in a bid to stop the assault.

However the woman, wearing a crop top and jeans, continued to kick and punch both women who needed hospital treatment for with severe bruising and cuts.

The brawl was eventually broken up by a man who was driving past.

Thao Nguyen, 42, and her colleague Thi Nguyen (right) were attacked at the nail bar in Essex

Initially it appeared the woman's boyfriend was trying to break up the fight, but things quickly turned nasty

The incident at the Nail Lover salon, in Tilbury, happened on Tuesday night

Salon worker Hanna said: 'I asked her to pay her bill but she said 'no' and left the shop. She was very angry.

'I ran after her because I needed the money from her but she started hitting me and kicking me. She was horrible. I didn't think she was going to leave me alone and I wanted to get away.

'I was hurting so much but I just wanted to get the money for her eyebrows. I've never known anyone to behave like this, I was so glad when she went away.'

Miss Hue Thi Nguyen told how they fear the woman returning to the salon in case she strikes again.

She added: 'I hope she never comes back, she is a nasty lady. We are worried she might try and fight us again.

'I was just trying to do my job and she hurt me and my friends like this, also it upsets the customers.'

The short clip was filmed by passer-by Andreaa Vitali who said: 'I was just going to Tesco and I saw this, I couldn't believe it.

Two members of staff at Nail Lover, in Essex, ended up fighting with a blonde customer in the street after accusing her of not paying for her treatment and stealing products (Pictured: The employee is on the floor)

A third woman, in pink, joins in the fight as she tried to help her colleague (far left) while brandishing a mop

'Apparently this woman came to the nail shop and didn't want to pay for her brows to be done.

'Then she picked up some nail polish and the lady from the bar said 'Don't worry about the money, just give me my nail polish', and it all kicked off.'

Thao Nguyen has been unable to return to work yet because her eye sight has been affected.

Emily Huong Nguyen, the owner of Nail Lover, said: 'The lady refused to pay for her treatment and sometimes she causes trouble in my shop and we refuse to serve her.

'But she asked us to do the work for her because it was her birthday that day.

'So my staff did it for her but when it was done, she said she didn't want to pay and she then took nail polish bottles and tried to run away.

'My staff followed her and asked for the nail polish back and she started hitting my staff and holding their hair and fighting.'

Eventually a concerned motorist (right) gets out of his car in order to intervene in the on-going brawl

As the women scrap the second nail bar employee tried to save her friend by waving the mop (pictured)

Essex police has confirmed it is investigating the fight after the video appeared online.

A police spokesman said: 'Police are investigating reports of theft and assault following a disturbance at Nail Lover salon in Calcutta Road, Tilbury.

'Officers were contacted at about 5.50pm on June 14 with reports of an argument involving a woman and staff members.

'The woman is then alleged to have taken a bottle of nail polish without making any attempt to pay.

'There followed an altercation, which carried on into the street, involving the woman, a man, and two female staff members, aged 40 and 42 from London.

'The woman and man left the scene in a silver car. The staff members suffered minor cuts and bruises and were taken to hospital as a precaution.

'Enquiries are ongoing.'
Troy Vance Thompson allegedly fired nine nails into a woman's head before turning the gun on himself

An Oregon man accused of shooting a woman with a nail gun told investigators that the woman recruited him to kill her.

Troy Vance Thompson, 46, of Creswell, fired nine three-inch nails into the woman's head on June 1 before turning the nail gun on himself, authorities said.

Thompson said he first met the 31-year-old Eugene woman the day before the incident, according to a police report made public this week, The Register-Guard reported.

He said the woman stopped her car on Highway 99 in Eugene and approached him while he walked along the road, according to a search warrant affidavit filed by trooper Cale Day.

She apparently told Thompson she needed someone to kill her because she didn't want to be committed to a mental hospital,.

The affidavit says the two discussed different methods of killing themselves before the woman announced a plan to rent a nail gun, travel to the woods and carry out a homicide-suicide.

Mr Day wrote that the manager of an equipment rental store corroborated Thompson's claim that the woman went into the business to rent a nail gun and an air compressor.

The store manager reportedly told investigators that the woman asked for the gun with the largest nails.

Thompson told police he fired three nails from the gun into the back of the woman's head, then stopped.

The woman 'was still alive and told him to keep going (and) reminded Troy he had promised her he would help her,' Mr Day wrote.

Passers-by later found Thompson and the woman and called police, according to the report.

The two allegedly discussed methods of suicide before the woman announced a plan to kill herself with a nail gun (file picture)

The woman's mother told a detective that her daughter is delusional, has bipolar disorder and has been hospitalized several times in the last year.

The mother also said the woman has asked friends, family and strangers to help her die, the report said.

Thompson told police that he has 'brain injuries from the past' as well as a history of substance abuse and suicidal thoughts.

Thompson gave Oregon State Troopers a detailed statement the day after the incident.

At the time, he was in a Springfield hospital recovering from an injury caused by the nail he fired into his own head.

Prosecutors have charged Thompson with assault but have not asked a grand jury to review the case yet.

He was put in jail after his release from the hospital.

The woman's current condition is unknown. Police said last week that she was still hospitalized in critical condition.

The alleged victim has not been identified.

For confidential support in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255.
A driver who left three colleagues seriously injured in the wreck of his car after crashing into a stack of gas bottles at a service station has been granted bail on the same day he was sentenced to six months' prison.

Seyoung Lee, 51, drove three colleagues from a work function at a Korean barbecue at Hurlestone Park in Sydney's inner-west when he barrelled through an intersection, hit a kerb and sent the car airborne before it crashed into a cage of canisters at the Belfield BP service station.

There were strong suggestions he had been drinking the night of the crash in January, Magistrate Michelle Goodwin told Burwood Local Court on Thursday.

Lee was sentenced to prison but released on bail while he appeals its severity.

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Seyoung Lee, 51, was sentenced to six months' jail on Thursday but was released on bail while he appeals the severity of the sentence (pictured at Burwood Local Court)

But Ms Goodwin said in sentencing: 'I don't think there's a more serious set of facts that I've come across.'

The initial impact of the collision forced gas bottles through the front windows of the service station, court documents state.

The car then crashed through two bollards and into the servo, coming to a halt about two metres from the owner, who was behind the counter.

Lee fled after the crash, leaving passenger Kyumin Lee with a fractured vertebrae, dislocated right shoulder and facial cuts. Another passenger was left in the car with a broken arm and a third needing urgent surgery to stop internal abdominal bleeding.

Lee fled the crash scene in January, leaving his three colleagues in his car with serious injuries (CCTV of crash pictured)

Lee turned himself in after two weeks and was charged with three counts of negligent driving causing bodily harm and four counts of failing to stop and assist after impact (CCTV of crash pictured)

Lee turned himself in after two weeks and was charged with three counts of negligent driving causing bodily harm and four counts of failing to stop and assist after impact.

He was sentenced to six months' jail, fined $400 and had his licence disqualified for three years.

'(He) left the scene, (he) failed to assist any of (his) friends. These offences are too serious,' Ms Goodwin said.

Defence lawyer Steve Kassem filed an appeal immediately upon leaving the courtroom and Lee was granted conditional bail by Ms Goodwin soon after.

He was released on bail on Thursday afternoon after being in custody for only a few hours.

Lee is due to appear at Sydney's District Court in August to appeal the severity of his sentence.

The crash had been caught on CCTV and shows the car barrel into the service station and narrowly miss hitting a woman as debris is sprayed through the air.
Gunther Oettinger (pictured) the Digital Commissioner for the European Commission said Britain's exit could allow the EU to 'develop a new perspective' and 'gather new dynamics'

Brexit could allow the EU to 'develop a new perspective and 'gather new dynamics' a top German Eurocrat has suggested.

Gunther Oettinger, the European Commission's digital chief, said Brussels would be able to speed up development of its common security policy, foreign policy and anti-terrorism powers because Britain is one of the main opponents to further European integration.

His remarkable intervention just a week before British voters have their say in the EU referendum marks a significant break in silence from the unpopular European Commission, which has been careful to stay silent on the referendum to avoid deterring voters from backing Brexit.

Oettinger stressed his desire for Britain to stay in the Brussels club. He also warned of a possible 'domino effect' and of the dangers for trade with countries such as Denmark and Germany.

But his candid views yesterday signal some in the EU's governing institution can see potential benefits if the UK does choose to leave.

Speaking at a Politico event this week, he said: 'On the timescale I have to say my expectation is that the European project would gather new dynamics, after the elections in France without Marine Le Pen and after the elections in Germany with Angela Merkel.

'Mr Juppe, our chancellor, Jean-Claude Juncker and (European Council president Donald) Tusk could probably move us all closer to the European objectives, they could probably work out a new perspective.

This great challenge of the refugee crisis could offer us a great opportunity, we need a common external policy, we need foreign aid policy, we need security policy.'

According to a translation from the German, he added: 'So if we leave the election year 2017 behind us then I think we will gather some more power and strength and I really believe in that.'

Asked why the European Commission had been so silent on Britain's EU referendum, Oettinger joked: 'We always hoped the queen or the pope would say something, that is why we held back.'

Other German officials have said the country wants Britain to stay in the EU.

Ulrich Grillo, head of Germany's BDI industry association, said earlier this week that businesses in Europe's largest economy did not want Britain to leave the EU, adding that his message to Britain was: 'Stay in'.

A survey published last week showed that almost two-thirds of German companies are uncertain what the effect of Britain leaving the EU would be on their business.

Donald Tusk, left, runs European Council summits and was a key figure in helping David Cameron hammer out his deal with the EU in February, pictured, and earlier this week he delivered an extraordinary warning that Brexit would trigger the end of Western civilisation

While most European politicians have complied with instructions to avoid causing any controversy that could sway the referendum, European Council president Donald Tusk made an extraordinary intervention earlier this week by warning a Brexit vote would trigger the end of Western civilisation.

In apocalyptic comments in an interview with German newspaper Bild, Mr Tusk - who runs Brussels summit for leaders of EU states - said 'no-one could forsee' the consequences of Brexit.

'Why is it so dangerous? Because no one can foresee what the long-term consequences would be,' Mr Tusk said.

'As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilisation in its entirety.'

He argued that everyone in the European Union would lose out economically if Britain left.

'Every family knows that a divorce is traumatic for everyone,' Mr Tusk said.

'Everyone in the EU, but especially the Brits themselves, would lose out economically.'

The headline in an earlier version of this article quoted Mr Oettinger as saying We dont want you stay in the EU. We are happy to clarify that he did not say this and the headline has been amended accordingly. Fuller quotes translated from German have also been added to give a more detailed account of his views
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The stunning moment lightning strikes behind a tower of giraffes has been captured in a spectacular image of the African plains.

The bolt from the blue illuminates the sky above the Etosha Park in Namibia - with the exact moment that the lightning strike descends from the clouds captured in Russian photographer Julia Sundukovas photo.

The giraffes, perfectly lined up along the green and brown plains, are turned towards the camera, unaware of the breathtaking sight just behind them.

Russian photographer Julia Sundukova first thought the giraffe had been hit by the bolt of lightning above the Etosha Park

The weather's turning... shall we make a bolt for it? The giraffes are unmoved by the lightning storm

WHY ARE GIRAFFES SO TALL? Giraffes are the world's tallest mammals and can reach about 6m high. Their legs along can grow up to 1.8m. The animals can use their height to their advantage, plucking leaves and buds from treetops that other animals can't reach. Even a giraffe's tongue is long, measuring more than 50cm. The giraffe's height can also help to keep a lookout for predators. Source: National Geographic Advertisement

The dramatic backdrop is framed by the sparse African flora with the giraffes towering above the scraggly shrubs.

Photographer Julia Sundukova, who has been sent to capture images across Africa before, said she was left gobsmacked when she saw a bright bolt of lightning shoot out of the sky, appearing to strike one of the pack.

Julia, 31, said the cloudy sky looming over the giraffes gave her an ominous feeling.

She said: The giraffes weren't scared of the thunderstorm - they stood together in unity, whilst lightning struck behind them.

This story is unforgettable for me - not just because of the wonderful animals, but because of the lightning which I caught purely by accident.

Despite the bright bolt of light far behind the giraffes, who can grow up to 6m tall, the experienced photographer said she was at first scared that it had hit the giraffe.

She said: It really looked like it was hitting the giraffe - at first I thought he was a goner!
Figures show the number of under-18s arrested in terror probes is rising

The 16-year-old suspect is being questioned at a nearby police station

A 15-year-old schoolboy has been arrested in London on suspicion of encouraging terrorism.

The boy was detained at a house in the east of the capital earlier this morning and is now being held at a police station nearby.

Scotland Yard said anti-terror officers are now searching the address where the boy was arrested.

Scotland Yard officials announced that a schoolboy has been arrested on suspicion of encouraging terror

A Met police spokesman said: 'Officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's Counter Terrorism Command attended a residential address in east London, at approximately 08.15hrs, on Thursday, 16 June, and arrested a 15-year-old boy on suspicion of encouraging terrorism.

'Officers are searching the address. The boy has been taken to an east London police station where he remains in custody pending further enquiries.'

The law is designed to stop inflammatory messages or extremist videos or pictures being posted on social media or blogs.

It defines encouraging terrorism as publishing a statement which 'glorifies' extremist attacks or which might cause others to go out and commit such acts.

Figures released earlier this year showed a record number of teenagers were arrested on suspicion of terrorism-related offences last year.

The number of under-18s arrested in terror investigations rose to 16 in 2015, from 10 the previous year.

In April, West Midlands police held an 18-year-old man at Manchester airport on suspicion of Syria-related terrorism offences.

In February last year, three schoolgirls from east London, Shamima Begum, then 15, Kadiza Sultana, then 16, and Amira Abase, then 15, ran away to ISIS-held Syria. They followed another youngster from their school who went to the country the year before.
The Irish government is preparing a major drive to reassure investors in the wake of the surge for Brexit in the polls.

Dublin is said to be readying contingency plans for a campaign stressing that it will not be quitting the EU even if UK voters decide to leave.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has criticised the Remain campaign in Northern Ireland and reiterated that there will be no referendum in the Republic.

David Cameron and Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny. The government in the Republic is said to be preparing contingency plans for a Brexit vote after support surged in polls

David Cameron angered unionists yesterday by warning that border controls could have to be introduced between mainland Britain and Northern Ireland after Brexit.

'If we were to leave  the leave campaigners want to make a big issue about our borders  we will have a land border between Britain outside the European Union and the Republic of Ireland inside the European Union,' Mr Cameron told the House of Commons.

'Therefore, you can only have new border controls between the Republic and Northern Ireland or, which I would regret hugely, you would have to have some sort of checks on people as they left Belfast or other parts of Northern Ireland to come to the rest of the UK.'

According to the Irish Times, Mr Kenny told his Fine Gael parliamentary party last night that there would be serious implications for Ireland after Brexit.

There have been concerns that growth will be slashed and investors may move elsewhere in the expectation that Ireland will follow the UK out.

However, there have also been predictions that more businesses will relocate to the Republic to maintain links with the EU.

Mr Kenny is spending two days in Manchester and Liverpool urging Irish people living in Britain to vote Remain on June 23.

'There is evidence of little activity from the political parties on the ground in explaining to people what this referendum is about and the consequences for Northern Ireland,' he said.

Mr Kenny had been expected to make a joint appearance with Mr Cameron, but it has apparently been cancelled as the PM lowers his profile over fears he is turning off voters.
The family of a strangled girl attacked her two killers, who had gone partying after the murder, after a court convicted the evil pair in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Even though the men were sentenced to 40 years in jail for the calculated and planned killing of the young woman, it was not enough for her family, horrified by the party video and determined to extract further revenge.

The incident happened in the court room in the city of Zenica - about 43 miles north of the capital, Sarajevo.

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Court drama: Angry relatives attack the two men convicted of murdering 24-year-old Arnela Djogic

Two of the victim's family saw red and charged at the killers, trying to break through the security guards

The two defendants, Avdija Selimovic and his friend Muriz Brkic, both 26, were found guilty of killing 24-year-old Arnela Djogic, whose body was found in February, a few days after she was reported missing.

The court heard how Selimovic, the jealous ex-boyfriend, asked her to meet up with him and drove her to his house, where Brkic was waiting. The friend then got into the car and strangled her.

Later they realised that Arnela was still alive and stabbed her with a knife.

Jealous ex: Avdija Selimovic (left) and his friend Muriz Brkic (right) strangled and stabbed Arnela Djogic before throwing her body in a river. The pair were later seen partying on the same night

Arnela Djogic, 24, was strangled and stabbed by the pair. Her body was found in a river a few days later

The killers then threw the body of the young girl in the river - together with the knife - where police later found her.

Despite the best attempts of the pair to hide the evidence, authorities identified them through phone messages.

Images taken in court show the distraught family shouting at the defendants, before two of the men lose it and charge at the convicts, trying to break through the security guards to get at them.

Unashamed: Muriz and Avdija out partying on the same night they carried out the brutal murder

Policemen had to quickly escort the two killers out of the courtroom, while other officers restrained the angry family.

Another video, reportedly taken the night of the killing, shows the defendants in a local tavern singing and drinking.

Both men have been were convicted to 40 years in jail.

The distraught family shouted at the defendants before two of the men lost it and chargd at the convicts, trying to break through the security guards to get at the murderers
Video shot in one of Africa's largest game reserves captured the moment a lioness attempted to sneak up and pounce on a herd of impala - with hilarious results

The bungling big cat can be seen in the foreground of the video clip camouflaging herself as a herd of impala drink from a nearby water source.

But as she makes her attack, the impala suddenly scatter with the lion leaping to catch them - only to end up belly flopping into the empty lake.

On your marks.. The lioness was filmed by passing students, who were left stunned by her failed attempt

After stalking her prey for several moments, the lioness races towards the herd but the impala quickly scatter

A stunned and dirty lioness can only watch on as the impala run off into the distance.

The video footage was filmed in Kruger National Park in South Africa.

Student Natasha Van Der Walt, 20, captured the hilarious moment.

She said: 'This was rare for me because I have seen many failed hunts before but none that ended with such a splash.'

The video footage was filmed in Kruger National Park in South Africa - one of Africa's largest game reserves

Belly flop: As the impala make their getaway, the lioness belly flops straight into the lake - sending water crashing into the air, with a loud splash

She added: 'The pair of young lions were, at first, just lazing around until a few impala arrived to drink.

'We were excited by the possibility of seeing a hunt in progress and waited intensely for the happenings to unfold, but by the end of the sighting we couldn't contain our laughter anymore.

'The lioness completely missed the impala and landed in the waterhole chasing the rest of the herd away.'
The gunman who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub over the weekend told police he would strap bomb vests to his hostages while he was in a standoff with officers, the citys mayor says.

While there is no evidence Omar Mateen was armed with explosives, there were claims that the 29-year-old had threatened to rig himself, his hostages and the Pulse gay bar with bombs as the mass shooting unfolded.

Mateen, who pledged allegiance to ISIS during the terror attack and had allegedly been a patron of the nightclub in the past, told police by phone he would strap explosives to four hostages and place them in the buildings corners, said Mayor Buddy Dyer.

Omar Mateen, 29, was armed with two firearms when he killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others

Investigators outside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where Omar Mateen killed and wounded his victims

The 29-year-old gunman had allegedly been a patron of the popular gay nightclub in the past

Hostages who made calls and sent text messages to 911, family members and friends said Mateen had discussed explosives, the New York Times reported.

We had a lot of information from the inside and they independently were saying yes, the bomber is about to put on an explosive vest, said Mr Dyer.

It was an apparent attempt to keep police at bay while he was holed up inside a bathroom with the hostages.

After the massacre, police told reporters a SWAT team rescued 30 hostages when they stormed the building and killed Mateen in a shootout, bringing an end to the deadliest mass shooting in US history.

Authorities have confirmed Mateen, 29, was armed with a .223-caliber AR-15-style rifle and a handgun when he killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others in the attack which began on Sunday around 2am.

Three hours later, after Mateen mentioned explosives during discussions with hostage negotiators, police decided to storm the building to prevent an even greater loss of life.

'We knew there would be an imminent loss of life,' said Orlando Police Chief John Mina afterwards.

A SWAT team smashed a hole in the side of the nightclub using explosive charges and an armored vehicle. The explosives did not penetrate the wall completely, so the armored vehicle was used to open it up.

In the ensuing chaos, officers shot and killed Mateen and freed the hostages, who were searched for explosives or firearms when they escaped or were rescued.

Law enforcement officials conduct an investigation at the Pulse nightclub where the shooting occurred

Noor Zahi Salman (left) with her husband, Omar Mateen (right), and their three-year-old son

Fearing the building was booby-trapped, police sent a robot into the nightclub, with the bodies of many victims still inside, to check for the presence of explosives.

Police feared the gunman had strapped explosives to himself or the dead after the robot sent back images of a battery pack next to his body.

When the shooter was killed, you could see a battery pack right next to him, which would indicate to us that theres a detonator of some sort, said Mr Dyer. There was also a bag near his body, so you would logically lead to the conclusion that the bag contained explosives and he had some type of detonator that could have been a pressure detonator that was under the body.

At the time of the massacre, Mateen, an American citizen who was born in New York after his parents emigrated from Afghanistan, lived in Fort Pierce, Florida, with his 30-year-old wife, Noor Salman, and their three-year-old son.

Salman, who was born and raised in Rodeo, California, could face criminal charges over what she knew about her husband's intentions.

Law enforcement sources claimed Salman was aware of his plans, and previously drove him to a gun shop, where he purchased ammunition, and on scouting missions to Pulse and Walt Disney World.

LEST WE FORGET: THE 49 VICTIMS OF OMAR MATEEN THE 49 GUNNED DOWN BY ZAHI WERE: FIRST ROW (LEFT TO RIGHT) Edward Sotomayor Jr., 34; Stanley Almodovar III, 23; Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, 20; Juan Ramon Guerroro, 22; Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36; Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, 22; Luis S. Vielma, 22. SECOND ROW Kimberly Morris, 37; Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30; Darryl Roman Burt II, 29; Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32; Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21; Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, 25; Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35. THIRD ROW Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50; Amanda Alvear, 25; Martin Benitez Torres, 33; Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, 37; Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26; Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35; Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25. FOURTH ROW Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31; Oscar A Aracena-Montero, 26; Enrique L. Rios Jr., 25; Miguel Angel Honorato, 30; Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40; Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32; Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19. FIFTH ROW Cory James Connell, 21; Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37; Luis Daniel Conde, 39; Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33; Juan Chevez-Martinez, 25; Jerald Arthur Wright, 31; Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25 SIXTH ROW Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25; Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24; Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, 27; ; Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, 33; Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49; Yilmary Rodriguez Sulivan, 24; Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32. SEVENTH ROW Angel L. Candelario-Padro, 28; Frank Hernandez, 27; Paul Terrell Henry, 41; Antonio Davon Brown, 29; Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24; Akyra Monet Murray, 18; Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, 25. Advertisement

An FBI source told NBC News she feared he was going to attack a gay bar and tried to talk him out of it, but did not alert police when he left their home on Saturday night claiming he was going to visit some friends.

A federal grand jury is being convened to hear evidence and decide whether Salman should be charged.

Meanwhile, it was revealed Mateen, a devout Muslim who worked as a security guard for G4S, wrote a series of Facebook posts before and during the attack raging against the 'filthy ways of the west'.

Omar Mateen blamed US airstrikes for the deaths of 'innocent women and children', and wrote 'now taste the Islamic state of vengeance' the morning of the mass shooting.

Omar Mateen, 29, killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others in the mass shooting in Orlando

Mateen's final post was a warning: 'In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa'.

The Facebook posts were revealed in a letter sent by the Senate Homeland Security Committee to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that requested additional information on Mateen's online activity.

Senator Ron Johnson revealed in the letter that Mateen searched for 'Pulse Orlando' and 'Shooting' during the attacks to see if news of his massacre had begun to reach the media.

In another post he pledged his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, also writing 'America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state' and 'may Allah accept me'.

Mr Johnson said his staff had also learned that Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino shooters just two days before the attack on Pulse.

It has also emerged that Mateen called a local news station in the middle of the rampage to pledge his allegiance to ISIS.

Local news network Bright House cable News 13 was covering the horrific attack when a producer received a chilling phone call at 2.45am - around 45 minutes after the mass shooting began.

'I'm the shooter. It's me. I am the shooter,' the caller told the network's stunned Matthew Gentili.

Omar Mateen called News 13 and spoke to producer Matthew Gentili (pictured) during his rampage

Supporters stand outside the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes on Wednesday

Luis Delaluz, 26, holds a rainbow flag during a vigil in Queens, New York, for the nightclub shooting victims

Mateen then announced that he was carrying out the atrocity in the name of ISIS.

'He did it for ISIS, and he started speaking Arabic,' Mr Gentili said. 'At the time, I didn't know what he was saying. He was speaking so fast. But it was... he was speaking fluently.'

The TV producer said he had answered the phone to hear the caller ask: 'Do you know about the shooting?'

After Mr Gentili confirmed that he did, Mateen told him that he was the shooter and that he was carrying out the attack 'for ISIS' before lapsing into Arabic.

Mr Gentili asked the caller to speak in English, and then Mateen once again pledged allegiance to the terrorist group.
A British girl is fighting for her life after falling from the third floor of her holiday hotel in Mallorca.

The 17-year-old girl was at the hotel in Santa Ponca when she fell from the balcony just before midnight and suffered serious injuries to her back.

Emergency services rushed to the popular resort, understood to be on the Carrer Huguet des Far on the south-west coast of Mallorca, in the early hours of Thursday morning before taking her to hospital.

Mallorca has long been a mecca for tourists wanting to soak up the sun and party with the beauty of the Palma de Mallorca (pictured) just one drawcard

The incident is a blow to Mallorcas tourism industry with tourism chiefs recently launching a strategy to swap the island's booze-filled party culture with a cleaner, safer image.

Part of the newly launched strategy is to try to prevent constant falls from hotel balconies with hotel owners encouraged to break up any parties or group drinking sessions throughout the night.

The island has been plagued by issues with tourist safety with the fall just one of six similar incidences this year alone.

Last summer, officials announced a plan to introduce fines of up to 3,000 (2,182) for anyone caught being naked in the street.

The new rules came into effect in June 2015, and also included hefty fines for anyone urinating in public or 'balconing,' which refers to the act of drunkenly jumping from hotel balconies.

A British tourist was killed when she was crossed the road to reach a rural cottage she had rented with her partner earlier this year.

Patricia Crosby, 67, was fatally hit by a car driven by a Spanish teenager, in May.

A Scottish tourist was also killed on the island in March this year when he was hit by a truck on a busy road between Port D'alcudia and Alcudia.

The Civil Guard has now launched an investigation to find out what happened, including whether the young girl tripped or was involved in balconing, where people climb from one balcony to another.

The island attracts almost six million tourists a year, who make the pilgrimage to enjoy the Spanish sun and laidback lifestyle.

The island is also a mecca for tourists wanting to hike or cycle.
Malcolm Turnbull has become the first Australian prime minister to host an iftar, breaking bread with faith leaders.

The Prime Minister hosted the end of Ramadan feast at Kirribilli House on Thursday night, with a guest list that included recent Gold Logie winner Waleed Aly and his wife Susan Carland.

Mr Turnbull was photographed sharing a joke over dinner with Aly and Carland, while at other times they appeared deep in conversation.

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Malcolm Turnbull has become the first Australian prime minister to host an iftar, breaking bread with faith leaders

The Prime Minister (right) hosted the end of Ramadan feast at Kirribilli House on Thursday night, with a guest list that included recent Gold Logie winner Waleed Aly (left) and his wife Susan Carland

Others invited to dinner include AFL player Bachar Houli and author and mechanical engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

Mr Turnbull described Ramadan - the period in which Muslims fast from food and water between dawn and sunset - as a special time of forgiveness, reflection and spiritual renewal.

He also recognised the other faith leaders present to share in the spirit of Ramadan.

'By breaking bread across religions and by bringing diverse people together, we are embodying Islam's emphasis on human diversity,' he said reciting a Koranic verse.

Others invited to dinner include AFL player Bachar Houli and author and mechanical engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied (right)

Mr Turnbull was photographed sharing a joke over dinner with Aly and Carland, while at other times they appeared deep in conversation

Singling out young Muslims, Mr Turnbull acknowledged the important contribution Muslims have made to Australian society.

He sought to assure them that extremists will not win in their aim to divide Australia.

'Acts of terror like Sunday's massacre in Orlando are perpetrated to divide us along lines of race, religion, sect and sexuality - but that kind of hatred and division must not prevail.

'We must stand together like we do tonight as one Australian family united against terrorism, racism, discrimination and violence.'

Aly also quizzed the Prime Minister on whether highs-speed internet via the NBN was available Kirribilli House, before Mr Turnbull replied saying he knew The Project host was 'keen' on the internet upgrade.

'It is very well connected to broadband,' Mr Turnbull said during the lighthearted interview.

'Can I say, I know you are very keen on the NBN, but let me tell you something.

'Within a week or so, a quarter of all Australian premises, that's households and business premises will have the NBN available.'

'By breaking bread across religions and by bringing diverse people together, we are embodying Islam's emphasis on human diversity,' Mr Turnbull said reciting a Koranic verse

Australian Rules player Bachar Houli also attended the dinner in Sydney, speaking to the audience

Singling out young Muslims, Mr Turnbull acknowledged the important contribution Muslims have made to Australian society

The Prime Minister later declared his favourite dishes of the iftar at Kirribilli House was tabouli and fattoush - which is a Lebanese fried bread salad.

He confirmed he didn't fast in preparation for the dinner.

'I just showed up here for the meal,' Mr Turnbull told Aly on Network Ten's The Project from the dinner.

Earlier, Mr Turnbull began the day with a tour of Qantas' Innovation Day with Treasurer Scott Morrison, seeing first hand the airline's connections to Australian business.

'I just showed up here for the meal,' Mr Turnbull told Aly on Network Ten's The Project from the dinner

Waleed Aly and Susan Carland (pictured at the Logie Award in May 2016) attended the dinner in Sydney on Thursday

Family butter company Pepe Saya tried to get him to sample some of their creamy spread.

He declined, but was impressed by their product and story.

Owner Pierre Issa said it was an honour to meet him.

'We didn't get to butter him up, but we tried,' he joked.
A Church of England pastor has been suspended from the clergy for two years for 'dishonouring God' after he had an affair behind his wife's back.

Reverend Mark Bailey, who describes himself as a 'family man', quit his role at Trinity Church in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in January when his secret relationship was exposed.

The disgraced 56-year-old, who is married to Karen, 54, has now been banned from using his powers as an ordained Church of England clergy member for two years.

Church of England pastor Mark Bailey has been suspended from the clergy for two years for 'dishonouring God' after he had an affair behind his wife's back

But despite being ousted by the church Rev Bailey, from Cheltenham still seems to be enjoying family life.

A smiling photo of him on holiday with his wife and other relatives in Lagos, Portugal, was shared on Instagram earlier this week.

Bishop of Gloucester, The Right Reverend Rachel Treweek, who imposed the two-year penalty, described Rev Bailey's behaviour as 'dishonouring to God and the Church'.

But despite being ousted by the church Rev Bailey, from Cheltenham still seems to be enjoying family life. This smiling photo of him on holiday with his wife and other relatives in Lagos, Portugal, was shared on Instagram earlier this week

She began investigating his 'extramarital affair' - which has now ended - in January after a meeting which he instigated.

Bishop Treweek asked him to 'step back from his ministry as Team Rector of Trinity Cheltenham and St Paul', which he did 'of his own volition'.

The matter was then considered under the Clergy Discipline Measure.

Announcing her findings on Wednesday, Bishop Treweek said clergy are 'expected to aspire to the highest possible standards of conduct within their ministry'.

Bishop of Gloucester, The Right Reverend Rachel Treweek (left), who imposed the two-year penalty, described Rev Bailey's (right) behaviour as 'dishonouring to God and the Church'

Rev Bailey had been pastor at the church in Cheltenham, for more than 20 years and involved in ministry for more than 27 years. He grew up in a Christian home and his father was also a minister

'In imposing this penalty I have sought to acknowledge God's grace whilst also taking into account the importance of living with consequences,' she added.

She also considered 'the need for deep inner reflection with a commitment to address the underlying issues of personal behaviour'.

Rev Bailey had been pastor at the church in Cheltenham, for more than 20 years and involved in ministry for more than 27 years.

He was appointed the national director for New Wine, a UK-wide Christian fellowship which is working to 'change the nation', in October 2013.

Rev Bailey grew up in a Christian home and his father was also a minister.

Rev Bailey was appointed the national director for New Wine, a UK-wide Christian fellowship which is working to 'change the nation', in October 2013. He withdrew from the role in January

Speaking in a New Wine leadership video, he said his only focus in life growing up was rugby, until he was seriously injured and began reading Scripture while bed-bound.

He said: 'I came across this character called Jesus who basically bore no resemblance to anything I'd come across in church before.

'I realised that he loved me and I was in love with him.'

He added: 'Basically, I've wanted to give back to the one who's given me everything ever since then.'

After withdrawing as leader of New Wine in January, Rev Bailey announced he was taking a break from Twitter.

He wrote: 'It's time to put on my own oxygen mask now #pleasepray.'

He also shared a quote on Instagram, which reads: 'Mistakes are proof that you are trying.'
Three of the nations leading charter school advocacy groups are calling for a complete overhaul of state policies governing online-only charter schools.

A new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now (50CAN) outlines the challenges facing the online-only, or virtual, schools and offers recommendations to hold their authorizers accountable for student performance and financial decisions.

The three groups largely crafted the reports recommendations in response to sweeping research findings released last fall that showed that students who took classes through virtual schools made dramatically less progress than their peers in traditional schools. It was the first national study of the cybercharter sector and was conducted by the Center for Research and Educational Outcomes at Stanford University, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and Mathematica Policy Research.

In a review of online charter school performance, the charter school advocacy groups found that:



On average, full-time virtual charter students make no gains in math and less than half the gains in reading of their peers in traditional brick-and-mortar public schools.

All subgroups of students, including those in poverty, English-language learners, and special education students, perform worse in full-time virtual charters than in traditional public schools.

Students who leave full-time virtual charter schools are apt to change schools more often after they leave cyber charters than they did before enrolling.

If traditional public schools were producing such results, we would rightly be outraged, the report introduction reads, in part. We should not feel any different just because these are charter schools.

To address those concerns and others, the report authors recommend:



Only permitting authorizers that are granted statewide or regional chartering authority to oversee full-time virtual charters that enroll students from more than one district.

Considering enrollment criteria for full-time virtual charter schools based on factors proven necessary for student success, such as self-motivated students and engaged parents.

Setting enrollment caps that allows schools to grow or notbased on student performance.

Establishing goals for enrollment, attendance, achievement, truancy, finances, and operations that are tied to renewal and closure decisions.

Requiring virtual charter operators to propose and justify a price per student in their charter school applications. The group argues that too many states rely on funding systems designed for brick-and-mortar schools.

Despite performing worse academically than traditional brick-and-mortar schools, the enrollment in virtual schools continues to grow . Mostly run by for-profit, companies, full-time virtual charters schools enroll about 180,000 students in 23 states and the District of Columbia. More than half the virtual charter students are concentrated in three states, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the report found.

Many of the schools serve students who need flexibilitylike rural students who want to avoid lengthy bus rides to traditional brick-and-mortar schools and home- or hospital-bound students who want to remain in school despite illness.

The charter advocacy groups voice support for virtual charter schools, making the case that banning or shutting down the schools would limit parent and student choice. But the paper make clear that the results clearly show that significant problems exist within this part of the charter school movement.

Left unchecked, these problems have the potential to overshadow the positive impacts this model currently has for some students, the report concludes. We urge state leaders and authorizers to address these problems head-on instead of turning a blind eye to them.

VirtualReport_Web614

Image: Courtesy of National Alliance for Public Charter Schools

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But Prince Aziz, his son, appealed and claimed the judge was biased

Awarded 15million and 5million in property by a judge in November

The 'secret wife' of a late Saudi king has lost the latest round of a legal battle with his son over a 20million payout she was awarded by the courts,

Palestinian-born socialite Janan Harb, 68, claimed she married the late King Fahd when she was 19 and his son, Prince Abdul Aziz, promised her the package 'to buy her silence'.

A judge awarded her 12million, plus interest, and two Chelsea properties worth 5million last November, but Prince Aziz asked the appeal court to quash the 'unsustainable award'.

Janan Harb (pictured, left and right) today won her court battle to keep the 15million and two apartments worth 5million from the late Saudi king she claims she married in secret

She told the court that she married the king in 1968 (pictured together) but was later exiled from Saudi Arabia in 1970

His legal team claimed that the judge did not analyse the evidence before him correctly and may have been biased due to a public spat with one of the barristers representing the prince.

Today, Lord Dyson, Master of the Rolls, sitting with Lord Justice Moore-Bick and Lord Justice McFarlane, ruled that the case will now have to be retried in front of another High Court judge.

The appeal judges said Mr Justice Peter Smith's 'approach to the evidence was unsatisfactory in a number of significant respects'.

Lord Dyson said the judge failed to give sufficient detail and in effect took a 'short cut' after deciding Miss Harb was a reliable witness.

He called her 'unsatisfactory' and described some of her evidence as 'bizarre'.

Lord Dyson added: 'We regret to say that in our view the deficiencies in the judgment are so serious that it cannot be allowed to stand and that the matter must be remitted to the High Court for re-trial.'

Abdul Aziz (pictured) today won the chance to appeal and the case, which will now have to be retried in front of another High Court judge

In the previous hearing, Miss Harb had told the judge she was aged 19 when she married King Fahd in a secret ceremony under sharia law in March 1968 at the Al Sharafiya Palace.

But members of the king's family were opposed to their relationship because she was from a Christian family in Palestine, and she was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1970.

Both she and the king later remarried, however, she told the court he had promised to look after her for the rest of her life.

Miss Harb claimed the financial agreement was reached when the prince met her at the Dorchester Hotel in London on June 20 2003, while the king was seriously ill, which the prince denies.

Mr Justice Peter Smith ruled that, although her behaviour was 'unattractive', Ms Harb was 'telling the truth' about the agreement.

He declared she was entitled to 12 million, plus interest of 3million, and two luxury flats in Chelsea, south west London, worth around 5 million.

But Lord Grabiner QC, for the prince, appealed the decision and said Mr Justice Smith failed to analyse the evidence properly and was biased.

Lord Grabiner also claimed the judge was biased after he wrote a 'shocking letter' against Blackstone Chambers, the legal office which provided the barristers representing the prince.

Lord Grabiner QC said a dispute arose after the publication of a newspaper article written by Lord Pannick QC, a member of the chambers, who appeared for the prince at an early stage in the case.

The article in The Times criticised the judge after stood down from a case involving British Airways after he demanded to know what had happened to his luggage on a flight home from Florence.

Lord Pannick had written that the case 'raises serious issues about judicial conduct that need urgent consideration by the lord chief justice'.

Ms Harb was also awarded two apartments in this building on the banks of the River Thames in Chelsea

In response, the judge wrote to Anthony Peto QC, one of two heads of Blackstone Chambers, saying: 'The quite outrageous article of Pannick caused me a lot of grief and a lot of trouble.'

He added: 'I will no longer support your Chambers, please make that clear to members of your Chambers. I do not wish to be associated with Chambers that have people like Pannick in it.'

Saudi Arabia's King Fahd pictured in 2004

Lord Grabiner told the appeal judges the 'shocking and indefensible' letter was clear evidence of possible bias against the chambers and could have affected the outcome of the Harb case.

There was also a real possibility that the judge became biased against the prince after he failed to attend court in person to give evidence, his counsel claimed.

Charles Hollander, QC, for Miss Harb, argued that the appeal should be dismissed.

He said the judge had been entitled to reach a judgment in favour of Ms Harb on the evidence before him and there was a lack of any real evidence of bias.

Mr Justice Smith has agreed 'to refrain from sitting' pending the outcome of the appeal.

And the Judicial Conduct and Investigations Office (JCIO) has been investigating the British Airways matter.

Today, Lord Dyson said the judge had accepted that he should not have written the letter.

He added: 'It is difficult to believe that any judge, still less a High Court judge, could have done so. It was a shocking and, we regret to say, a disgraceful letter to write.

'It shows a deeply worrying and fundamental lack of understanding of the proper role of a judge. What makes it worse is that it comes on the heels of the BA baggage affair.

'In our view, the comments of Lord Pannick, far from being 'outrageous' as the judge said in his letter, were justified.

'We greatly regret having to criticise a judge in these strong terms, but our duty requires us to do so.

'But it does not follow from the fact that he acted in this deplorable way that the allegation of apparent bias must succeed.'

The prince appealed the payout through the courts after his attempt to get sovereign immunity against paying her failed.

A judge found the king's family had promised to take care of Ms Harb (pictured) after their relationship in the 1960s, although the High Court will now look at the ruling again

He claimed that his agreement was not binding, and the court heard how the king had supported Miss Harb, now a scientologist and mother of two, with vast sums of money throughout her life.

After the alleged 1968 marriage, he opened a bank account for her with 25,000 in it as 'spending money.'

She married a Lebanese lawyer in 1974 and had two daughters and claims the late king gave her money to help support them and 1million to buy one of the Chelsea flats.

She also purchased the second flat and later sold them back to the King for 1.9million.

The court heard that, in 2001, the late King gave her 5million through his agent Faez Martini who kept 100,000 for arranging the transfer.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Smith said she used 3million of that to pay off debts including an 85,000 gambling debt, then gambled away or spent the balance of 1.9million within two years on her 'lavish lifestyle.'

In her battle with the prince, she threatened to 'spill the beans' on their relationship and has written two books that are as yet unpublished.

Senior judge's 'deeply worrying' letter after public argument with legal chambers that QC claimed created bias in case

The Saudi prince's lawyer accused Mr Justice Peter Smith of possible bias in the case

A senior judge wrote a 'shocking and indefensible' letter revealing possible bias when he allowed a multimillion-pound legal claim by the 'secret wife' of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, a QC has told the Court of Appeal.

High Court judge Mr Justice Peter Smith ruled last November that Miss Harb had 'a lavish, high-maintenance lifestyle' and plainly received payments in the past 'to buy her silence'.

Although her behaviour was 'unattractive', the judge ruled, she was 'telling the truth' about the agreement and entitled to more than 15million, plus the value of two apartments in an exclusive part of London.

Lord Grabiner QC said that, before the judge handed down his judgment in favour of Miss Harb last November, a newspaper article written by Lord Pannick QC - a barrister for the firm representing the prince - openly criticised the judge over another case.

Lord Pannick, who represented the prince at an earlier stage of the Harb case, reported that the judge had stood down from a British Airways case claiming he could not continue after he demanded to know what had happened to his own luggage on a trip home from Florence.

Lord Pannick had written: 'How we laughed. But the case raises serious issues about judicial conduct that need urgent consideration by the lord chief justice.'

In response, the judge wrote to Antony Peto QC, one of two heads of Blackstone Chambers, saying: 'The quite outrageous article of Pannick caused me a lot of grief and a lot of trouble.'

He added: 'I will no longer support your Chambers please make that clear to members of your Chambers. I do not wish to be associated with Chambers that have people like Pannick in it.'

Lord Grabiner told the appeal judges - Lord Dyson, Master of the Rolls, sitting with Lord Justice Moore-Bick and Lord Justice McFarlane - the letter was clear evidence of possible bias that could have affected the Harb case.

He described it as 'a shocking piece of paper - the judge's behaviour is indefensible'.

Today, Lord Dyson said the judge had accepted that he should not have written the letter.

He added: 'It is difficult to believe that any judge, still less a High Court judge, could have done so. It was a shocking and, we regret to say, a disgraceful letter to write.

The long-running legal saga is playing out at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London and will now go to the High Court after today's ruling

'It shows a deeply worrying and fundamental lack of understanding of the proper role of a judge. What makes it worse is that it comes on the heels of the BAA baggage affair.

'In our view, the comments of Lord Pannick, far from being 'outrageous' as the judge said in his letter, were justified.

'We greatly regret having to criticise a judge in these strong terms, but our duty requires us to do so. But it does not follow from the fact that he acted in this deplorable way that the allegation of apparent bias must succeed.'

Mr Justice Smith has agreed 'to refrain from sitting' pending the outcome of the appeal.

A spokesman for the judiciary said: 'Mr Justice Peter Smith has agreed to continue to refrain from sitting at the present time.'

A spokesman for the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said: 'The JCIO investigation into the BA matter is continuing.

'If there is a finding against any judicial office holder, a statement is published on the JCIO website.
Julia Harris, pictured, said she was 'outraged and intimidated' by workmen she alleges shouted and 'wolf-whistled' at her while she was alone at Tunbridge Wells station

A 34-year-old woman has blasted Network Rail after she was 'wolf-whistled and shouted at' by workers on the platform at a train station.

Julia Harris has fired off complaints to the rail company and is seeking assurance that 'women can feel safe on their rail network'.

The mother-of-one was the only person waiting for a train on the platform at around 12.30am when the men from the opposite platform allegedly harassed her.

She felt so intimidated and frightened that she walked to the other end of the platform to be closer to the guard's office at the station in posh Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Despite complaining straight after the incident which happened on Thursday 9 June, and decided to go public after the latest response from the company informed her they were still investigating.

She said: 'I am a 34-year-old woman and I feel like I can take a lot but what if it had been a 15 or 16-year-old?

'I would have been absolutely terrified. What if this happened at a rural station? At least there are station staff at Tunbridge Wells.'

Ms Harris, who works in PR, described the lengthy delay while Network Rail try and establish which works were taking place at the time as 'terrible'.

She said: 'After almost a week of investigations they don't seem to know where their staff are at any one time or have checked platform CCTV.'

The former journalist who lives in Hastings, East Sussex, had been to an awards ceremony for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in central London on the night of Wednesday June 8.

She had to switch trains at Tunbridge Wells and was on the platform, while the men in 'head to toe high vis' were on the opposite platform.

She said: 'I'd been to talk to the taxi drivers to see how much a taxi would be and it was as I was coming back on to the platform that they started shouting.

'The first thing was a wolf whistle.

'I looked up in a 'what seriously?' way. Then one shouted 'come over this side' and they were all staring.

'I guess I was a novelty. I had a short dress on as I'd been to the awards and they were laughing and jeering.'

Ms Harris added that she felt relieved when at the end of the platform where she sat down she heard voices from the guard's office.

Talking of the harassment, she said: 'I felt really intimidated and baffled - this was happening in the 21st century - and just a little bit outraged.'

The mother-of-one, 34, pictured, complained to Network Rail, which has confirmed it is investigating

Ms Harris said she was alone at the station, pictured, at 12.30am when workmen began 'shouting and whistling at her'

She tweeted Network Rail and told them: 'While I'm not, in principle, offended by a wolf whistle, bearing in mind the time of night and that I was not just the only female in the station, I was the only other passenger, the leeriness was sufficiently intimidating for me to walk to the other end of the platform.'

A week later she is still waiting for Network Rail to establish who was responsible. They dont seem to know where their staff are at any one time or have checked platform CCTV, she said.

Network Rail said: 'We take this allegation very seriously and this sort of behaviour is utterly unacceptable.

'Tunbridge Wells station is not managed by Network Rail, however we do have staff and contractors who work in and around it and all railway stations.

'Therefore our team has asked for CCTV to be downloaded so we can investigate further and we are also checking our records.
Known as Leopard Man of Skye, he died on Sunday at a home in Inverness

Former soldier spent 5,500 on covering his body with leopard-style spots

A former soldier who was once the world's most tattooed man has died in a care home at the age of 80.

Tom Leppard, born Tom Wooldridge, spent 5,500 on his art and lived in a small bothy on Skye, Scotland, for more than two decades, taking a kayak to the mainland for supplies once a week.

The pensioner - known as the 'Leopard Man of Skye' - swapped his hut on the banks of Loch na Beiste for a house in 2008 and later moved into a home in Inverness, where he died on Sunday.

Mr Leppard, born Wooldridge, had 99.9 per cent of his body tattooed and said he had 'no regrets' over it

Mr Leppard said he had 'no regrets' about his tattoos, which began as a way to make money.

Speaking in 2001, he said: 'I thought if I get the biggest of something and live in a strange way people might pay me.

'I knew as soon as the needle went in for the first time that it would have to be completed. The bonier areas were sore - the rib, the spine, the skull - but I'm stubborn.'

Despite his spots, he said he felt 'no affinity with leopards' and called spiritual questions about his tattoos 'rubbish'.

He added: 'In the UK people have been brainwashed into thinking that a tattooed person is just a criminal and that's it. [My tattooes] haven't changed me but they've changed the view people have of me.'

When living in Skye, his home was a ruined shelter under a roof made from pieces of plastic sheeting.

He had no electricity, no furniture and had to canoe three miles for his weekly shopping.

Tom Leppard (pictured) spent 5,500 on his art and used to live in a small bothy on the Isle of Skye, Scotland

However he was then forced to abandon the wild side in 2008 and moved into a one-bedroom terraced home in nearby Broadford.

Speaking at the time he said: 'I learned to live so simply over there that I really don't need much in the house - I would cook a curry on my stove and that would last me for days.

'I'm certainly not going to do much cooking because I live in a house - I'll just get what I need from the shop.
Police in Florida went above and beyond by surprising an autistic boy at his eighth birthday party after no one responded to his invites.

Daniel Nicastro's parents say this wasn't the first time no one has called to say they were coming to their son's party in North Port.

The Nicastros say making friends is difficult for Daniel, who has autism.

The boy's mother, Carolyn Nicastro, told WFLA: 'His father [Dan] and I remembered the past two years of no one showing up for his birthday parties, he would spend the day crying that he had no friends.'

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Police in Florida went above and beyond by surprising an autistic boy at his eighth birthday party after no one responded to his invites

Daniel Nicastro's parents say this wasn't the first time no one has called to say they were coming to their son's party in North Port. The Nicastros say making friends is difficult for Daniel, who has autism

The mother continued: 'We could not let that happen again.'

So his parents decided to invite the police officers, who Daniel considers 'superheroes,' to the party.

They were hoping a few officers would show up, but instead, an assembly of officers arrived, even bringing gifts.

Police Sgt. Paul Neugebauer says they wanted to attend and let Daniel know that he's appreciated.

His parents decided to invite the officers, who Daniel considers 'superheroes,' to the party. They were hoping a few officers would show up, but instead, an assembly of officers arrived. The officers' invite is seen left

He told WFLA: '[We wanted] to make that boy's day, spread good cheer; let him know that he is appreciated, that we did want to attend.

'Children with challenges and such don't need to feel left out more than they already are.

'So if he views us as superheroes, the least thing we can do is show up at his party and make his day.'

A photo of Daniel with the officers shared online has drawn attention from around the world.

The North Port Police Department posted the image on Facebook Monday, and quoted a letter from Carolyn Nicastro.

Daniel's parents, Daniel and Carolyn Nicastro, are pictured together here

The letter, according to police, said: 'While playing with his cousin Adam Sunday at McKibben Park he saw a large line of police cars coming down the road.

'He was so excited! His favorite friends came to his party. He is still talking about it being the best birthday ever!

'Thank you North Port Police Department. You made my son's birthday extra special with his favorite super heroes!'

The boy's father Daniel Nicastro told WFLA: 'I cant thank [the police] enough.

'I never will be able to, and he'll never forget this birthday because of it I'm sure.'

North Port police wrote on Facebook Tuesday that they 'are going to keep the love flowing.

'Volunteers with the North Port Police Department are currently organizing a community birthday bash for not just Daniel but any other child in our community who has felt left out.
A British businessman was bitten by a 14-foot snake in Hong Kong and returned to the scene to catch the giant Burmese python 48 hours later.

Brave Karl Davies spent six hours in hospital after the snake darted out of undergrowth and sank its teeth into his leg on Monday and tried to coil itself around him.

Seventeen-stone Mr Davies, 49, fought off the huge snake and fled to safety.

He was taken by ambulance to hospital and treated for leg wounds and badly gashed fingers from trying to prise open the beast's jaws in the attack in Hong Kong's rural New Territories.

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Attack: British businessman Karl Davies (right) returned to the spot where he was ambushed by a 14ft Burmese python with snake-catcher Dave Willott (left) to catch the Burmese python

Giant: The enormous python is one of the biggest captured in Hong Kong and weighed in an a massive 22kg

Bagged: The father-of-two and Mr Willott were able to track the snake, which they found lying in wait by the path and hunting for more prey. Pictured, Mr Davies and his two Border Collies with the snake in a bag

Mr Davies, from Oxford, was walking with friend Andrew Chambers and his pet dogs.

He told MailOnline: 'It jumped out of the bush and sank its teeth into my leg. It got me around the lower calf.

'Andrew started shouting and screaming 'Get out of here, get out of here.' He gave it a couple of kicks and threw a stone at it but missed and hit me on the ankle.

I tried to prise the snake's jaws off my leg and punctured two fingers, and then I tried to smack it on the head with the stone. Karl Davies, snake bite victim

'I tried to prise the snake's jaws off my leg and punctured two fingers, and then I tried to smack it on the head with the stone that Andrew threw and that didn't do any good either.'

He went on: 'I wasn't particularly frightened. The adrenaline kicked in and I just thought "I have to get its jaws off my leg". It felt like an age but it was probably all over in less than 30 seconds.

'I dragged my leg along to drag it off and then I tried to run with it to see if I could shake it off. By then the snake was starting to coil. I dragged it full length into the path and I fell down, and I saw it again trying to coil itself. When I got up, it let go and fell off.'

Mr Davies, who runs a company called H&BA Transformational Solutions, was walking with his pet Border Collies and believes the snake was attracted by the scent of the dogs and launched itself at him by mistake.

'It was like pulling a dead weight,' Davies said. 'It should be a training regime for rugby players  snake on the leg.'

Injured: The 49-year-old spent six hours in hospital after the attack, during which the snake sank its teeth into his leg and tried to coil itself around him

Bite: The pair drove the giant snake to the police station to be rehomed, after snake-catcher Mr Willott agreed that the 'aggressive' animal living in the popular family area posed a risk to children

Catch: They then carried the 22kg python nearly two miles along a remote country trail before driving it to the nearest police station

Despite his ordeal, the father-of-two contacted British snake catcher Dave Willott who lives nearby and returned to the scene of the attack on Wednesday morning.

They found the python waiting for prey in the same stretch of undergrowth and Mr Davies grabbed its tail while Mr Willott seized it by the head and forced it into a sack.

They then carried the 22kg python nearly two miles along a remote country trail before driving it to the nearest police station.

The python  one of the biggest captured in Hong Kong  is believed to be behind a series of fatal attacks on pet dogs walking along the popular hiking trail in recent years.

Mr Davies, who has been in Hong Kong for eight years, went on: 'This snake was in its natural habitat but it needed to be removed.

If there had been a family going down there with young children I'd hate to think what might have happened,' he said.

'It was so close to the path. This was a particularly nasty and aggressive snake. If it had been a kid or a dog instead of me, they would have been gone. I have no doubt about that.'

Mr Willott, 50, has worked as a snake catcher in Hong Kong for more than a decade and says he prefers to leave snakes in their natural habitat.

However, he agreed that this was an 'unusual case' that left little option but for the python to be removed.

'I don't think it's fair to the snake but it's the right thing to do because it's a place where people go hiking and walking their dogs every day,' he said.

Ordeal: Mr Davies told MailOnline: 'I tried to prise the snake's jaws off my leg and punctured two fingers, and then I tried to smack it on the head with the stone that Andrew threw and that didn't do any good either'

Pain: 'I dragged my leg along to get it off and then I tried to run with it to see if I could shake it off. By then the snake was starting to coil. I dragged it full length into the path and I fell down'

New home: Although he normally prefers to leave snakes in their natural habitat, Mr Willott said this was an 'unusual case' that meant the python should be rehomed

Pythons are Hong Kong's biggest natural predator and are protected by law. Captured snakes are usually released back into the wild in remote areas.

A Hong Kong government spokesman said on Wednesday the python was being monitored in an animal welfare centre.
An 'abhorrent' video showing Vietnamese workers bludgeon what appears to be Australian live export cattle with sledgehammers has prompted authorities to suspend exports to three abattoirs.

The film shows a cow repeatedly beaten over the head with a sledgehammer before it falls to the ground and is clubbed a further four times before it dies.

Further video shows a bull fall to the ground in 'terror' before he has even been struck after watching the fate of his pen mates.

Australia's live cattle trade with three Vietnamese abattoirs has been suspended after the footage was secretly obtained by Animals Australia investigators.

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WARNING: DISTRESSING FOOTAGE

A cow is repeatedly beaten over the head with a sledgehammer before it falls to the ground and is clubbed a further four times before it dies (pictured: cow believed to be Australian live export cattle)

Australia's live cattle trade with three Vietnamese abattoirs has been suspended after the footage (pictured) was secretly obtained by Animals Australia investigators

Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce described the footage as disturbing and 'totally abhorrent'.

The abattoir at the centre of the most serious allegations is not approved to have Australian cattle under the strict Exporter Supply Chain Assurance system rules, Mr Joyce said.

'It has not yet been confirmed on the evidence available whether the cattle were originally sourced from Australia. However, the Australian industry has already taken action to suspend all exports to identified Vietnamese abattoirs,' Mr Joyce said.

'Anyone viewing this footage would be shocked and upset at the mistreatment and we are taking these reports very seriously.'

He ruled out a live export ban, ABC reported.

'Anyone viewing this footage would be shocked and upset at the mistreatment and we are taking these reports very seriously,' Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce said

Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce described the footage as disturbing and 'totally abhorrent'

Animals Australia first reported the incident on June 9 and the department began investigations the next day after receiving preliminary evidence.

The department has met with Vietnamese authorities, who are also investigating the allegations.

One of the bulls in the video collapsed to the ground 'in absolute terror and anxiety before he'd even been hit once' after watching his pen mates have their skulls crushed by a sledgehammer, Animals Australia said.

'I thought I'd seen it all, and I haven't,' Animals Australia campaign director Lyn White told ABC.

Further video also showed an Australian bull being 'butchered' while still alive at an approved abattoir, the animal rights group claimed.

'Regulations are failing, exporters know it, and yet they continue to flood Vietnam with animals.

'The evidence gathered exposes systemic corruption and circumvention of the traceability system in Vietnam, leaving tens of thousands of animals exposed to horrific cruelty.'

Only two of the 13 abattoirs visited by Animals Australia met requirements, the group said.

Ms White has called on live export regulation to be moved to an independent body.

Pictured: Australian cattle in a Vietnamese slaughterhouse. Australia's live export with three abattoirs in the country has been suspended following the release of footage showing the mistreatment of animals
Doctors in Germany have been told to stop frivolously handing out sick notes to migrants who claim they are too ill to be deported.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said too many certificates were being issued when there is 'no real health reason' why they can't travel.

He said: 'It can't be true that 70 per cent of men under the age of 40 are declared sick and not fit to travel before deportation. Experience suggests this is not the case.'

Migrants queue at the compound outside the Berlin Office of Health and Social Affairs as they wait for their registration. Doctors have been told to stop frivolously handing out sick notes to migrants who claim they are too ill to be deported after their applications have been refused

Mr de Maiziere said migrants should have their benefits cut if they do not co-operate on establishing their identity or if they do not leave the country if their asylum application is rejected.

The legal framework for that was established last year and needs to be applied more consistently, he told regional newspaper Rheinische Post.

More than a million migrants arrived in Germany last year, a record influx that has boosted support for anti-immigrant groups and raised concerns about security. New arrivals have slowed this year.
If you fancy hitting the surf off the cost of California, keep your eyes peeled because the number of juvenile great white shark sightings has shot up.

Before 2015, Huntington Beach was never closed due to shark activity - but this year, there have already been three closures.

'I've seen more white sharks this year than I have in the previous 30,' Lt. Claude Panis of the Huntington Beach Fire Department's Marine Safety Division told LA Times.com.

With the increase in great white sightings in the last few years, researchers who have been studying juvenile sharks off neighboring Sunset Beach said the predators have a tendency to leave during the colder months and head toward Mexico.

However, scientists at Cal State Long Beach's Shark Lab said some have remained in the area as a result of warmer waters due to El Nino.

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Before 2015, Huntington Beach in Orange County was never closed due to shark activity - but this year, there have already been three closures. A two-mile stretch of the shoreline was closed earlier this month after several large sharks were spotted (one pictured above)

The sharks (including the one pictured) were estimated to be at least 8ft long and 150 yards from shore

The Shark Lab team discovered 21 cases of juvenile white sharks swimming in Huntington Beach waters in 2015  the first year sharks were properly tracked in the area, and the highest number along any southern California beach.

'I'd never heard of juvenile great white sharks in the water off Huntington Beach until last year,' Chris Lowe, head of the lab, told the LA Times.

Lowe said scientists had tagged 16 great white sharks there in 2015, four times the total of all great whites tagged in 2014.

Just ten days ago, a two-mile stretch of shoreline was closed after several large sharks were spotted.

The Shark Lab team discovered 21 cases of juvenile white sharks swimming in Huntington Beach waters in 2015  the first year sharks were properly tracked in the area

A 2014 survey found there are about 2,400 great white sharks living in California waters (Sunset Beach, above)

A sheriff's helicopter crew spotted them off Sunset Beach on Sunday around 2pm.

The sharks were estimated to be at least 8ft long and 150 yards from shore.

A Huntington Beach Police Department helicopter then flew out around 3.30pm to surveillance the area and spotted the three sharks, according to the Orange County Register.

The sighting came a week after a swimmer in a wetsuit was attacked by a shark about 15 miles to the south at Corona Del Mar State Beach on May 30.

The woman, 52-year-old Maria Korcsmaros, had a bite from a large shark on her upper body, but she is expected to survive.

Maria Korcsmaros, 52, (left and right) was pulled from the Pacific Ocean by lifeguards on a patrol boat over Memorial Day weekend about 150 yards off the shore of Newport Beach after she was seen in distress

She was pulled from the Pacific Ocean by lifeguards on a patrol boat on Sunday about 150 yards off the shore of Newport Beach after she was seen in distress.

The shark that attacked her was not found.

Juvenile white sharks are unlikely to bite humans, and prey mainly on fish as their jaws are not strong enough to withstand the forces required to attack larger prey.

A 2014 survey found there are about 2,400 great white sharks living in California waters.
EU has not considered it an official candidate for 20 years

to join the EU was submitted by the country in 1992

Politicians in Switzerland have voted to withdraw the country's long-standing European Union application, a week before Britain decides on its own EU membership.

Thomas Minder, counsellor for Schaffhausen state and an active promoter of the concept of 'Swissness,' told Neue Zurcher Zeitung he was eager to 'close the topic fast and painlessly' as only 'a few lunatics' may want to join the EU now.

A total of 27 members of parliament's upper house voted to invalidate the 1992 application, backing up an earlier decision by the lower house. Only 13 senators voted against while two abstained.

Switzerland first applied to join the EU in 1992 but after 24 years will now give formal notice to Brussels

The original motion, introduced by the conservative Swiss Peoples Party MP, Lukas Reimann, received overwhelming support from law-makers in the lower house back in March, with 126 National Council deputies voting in favor, 46 against.

Switzerland will now give formal notice to the EU to consider its application withdrawn, the countrys foreign minister, Didier Burkhalter, was quoted as saying by the paper.

Hannes Germann, also representing Schaffhausen, compared the symbolic importance to Icelands decision to drop its membership bid in 2015.

Switzerlands long-standing application to join has had little impact on domestic politics for more than 20 years

Iceland had the courage and withdrew the application for membership, so no volcano erupted, he said.

Switzerlands long-standing application to join has had little impact on domestic politics for more than 20 years, after it suspended accession negotiations in 1992, following a referendum to join the European Economic Area.

However, the Swiss public narrowly rejected EEA membership.

Some have even argued that the vote was unnecessary because the EU no longer regards Switzerland as an official candidate to join.

Filippo Lombardi, from the Christian Democratic Peoples Party, said it was 'not very clever to discuss it once again,' calling the whole thing 'a bit ridiculous'.

Switzerland, never a member of EU, shares free trade with the union and free movement of people as part of the Schengen zone.
Walt Disney World has removed five alligators from the lagoon where a two-year-old boy was snatched and killed admitting it routinely catches the reptiles near the resort.

Lane Graves was grabbed by a predator at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Orlando while wading in the Seven Seas Lagoon with his parents Matthew and Melissa and older sister on Tuesday night.

The family, from Nebraska, had been 10 feet from the shore and even though there were signs warning against swimming in the lagoon, they did not tell guests to be aware of alligators.

Wildlife workers capture and kill and alligator that was found in the Seven Seas Lagoon next to the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Orlando

The dead animal is loaded on to a boat. The animal is one of five ho were caught and killed after being found in the lagoon

Two-year-old Lane Graves was dragged to his death by an alligator at the Walt Disney World Resort. It is unclear if the animal that grabbed him has been caught

Now Walt Disney World has admitted that it routinely captures and moves dangerous gators from its grounds despite the signs at the Seven Sea Lagoon only warning against deep water and steep drop-offs.

It comes as pictures have emerged of wildlife officials removing one of the five alligators who were caught and killed after being found in the lagoon while they searched for Lane.

It is unclear if any of these that were captured were responsible for dragging the boy to his death.

Meanwhile, a grounds worker told the New York Post: 'There's gators in the lakes and lagoons here.

'They rarely come onshore but you should not go into the water.'

Meanwhile another worker told the Orlando Sentinel, gators often come ashore at the resort as they are lured by guests.

Walt Disney World has admitted that it routinely captures and moves dangerous gators from its property

He added: 'There is such a problem on property with guests feeding the alligators thinking its cool', adding some even throw them food from their balconies.'

Disney are facing mounting questions over why there was no sign telling guests to be aware of alligators where toddler Lane was dragged to his death.

At neighbouring resort, the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, signs around the shore of a lake read: 'Please be aware of alligators in the lake.'

Hundreds of people have since poured onto social media, condemning Disney's sign policy in the wake of the horrifying incident.

Some claimed a 'no swimming' sign simply doesn't work while others urged the parents of the tragic boy to sue the company.

s Disney are facing mounting questions over why there was no sign telling guests to be aware of alligators where a toddler Lane was dragged to his death next to the Seven Seas Lagoon

At neighbouring resort, the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, signs around the shore of a lake read: 'Please be aware of alligators in the lake'

Daily Mail Online have contacted Disney about the signs. Police have said the company will be reviewing their policy.

But a Disney representative, speaking on condition of anonymity because the company had yet to prepare a formal statement, said Disney would 'thoroughly review' the sign issue in the future.

However, wildlife officials have come out to defend Disney, saying the company has worked with law enforcement to make sure that their properties are safe for guests by locating and removing dangerous indigenous creatures from the resort.

Last night, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demmings confirmed the body of Lane had been recovered 'intact' from the lagoon.

It came 17 hours after his father had attempted to to save his son after the gator snatched him, but he could not pry the toddler from the animal's grasp - and the creature disappeared underwater, taking the child with it.

The Graves family were on the third day of their vacation in Orlando when Lane was snatched as they waded in the water off this beach at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa

Rescuers searched the water in the shadow of Cinderella's Castle at the Magic Kingdom for 17 hours before Lane's body was recovered in tact

The Graves family were on the third day of their vacation in Orlando when tragedy struck on Tuesday night.

Sheriff Demmings also confirmed it was unlikely that Lane's parents to be charged with any sort of neglect and added that the alligator probably drowned the toddler and abandoned his body on the bottom of the lagoon.

During the search, wildlife officials caught and killed five alligators in the lake and they say they will now use forensics to determine whether they have already euthanized the gator responsible for the attack.

If not, officials promised to continue searching the lake for the creature.
Missouri became the latest state to require CPR training for high school graduates after Gov. Jay Nixon signed Senate Bill 711 into law Tuesday.

When the law takes effect in the 2017-18 school year, the Show Me State will join more than 30 others that require cardiopulmonary resuscitation training in public schools. Many passed such laws in recent years in response to a push by the American Heart Association called Be CPR Smart.

Training students in CPR can be accomplished with a minimal investment in time and cost, the organization says on its website. According to the latest science, traineesincluding schoolchildrencan achieve acceptable levels of CPR skills proficiency in 30 minutes or less. That means in less time than it takes to watch the average sitcom, students can learn this lifesaving skill.

This map from the American Heart Association shows states that have passed such laws, most in the last five years. (Click through to see an interactive version of the map , which links to state laws and provides additional details.)

In Missouri, Senate Bill 711 requires that, beginning in the 2017-2018 school year, all high graduates, including those from charter schools, will receive 30 minutes of CPR instruction and training in the Heimlich maneuver, which is used to aid choking victims.

Basic first aid can sometimes be the difference between life and death, " Gov. Nixon said. Making sure young people are familiar with CPR and the Heimlich maneuver is a prudent addition to their coursework in physical education.

Supporters of such laws cite life-saving potential in urging their passage. Opponents say schools are increasingly being asked to do more with less. It can be difficult for educators to find the time and resources to meet another mandate, they say.

What do you think?

Related reading:

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Senator Michaelia Cash has come under fire for comparing the three years spent backpacking across the Middle East to the struggles faced by the less-fortunate.

Ms Cash made the comment on ABC's Kitchen Cabinet, after journalist Annabel Crabb asked whether people who are fortunate can understand issues faced by those in society who are poorer.

'I mean, there will always be some who are lucky enough to have wealthy parents, but, you know, the majority of people I know, they started with nothing and they worked really, really hard to make something of themselves,' the Employment Minister said.

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Senator Michaelia Cash has come under fire for comparing her three years spent backpacking in the Middle East to the struggles faced by the less-fortunate

'I started with nothing. When I backpacked for three years, I practically had nothing.

'So, you know, I think that you can empathise, and as a policymaker, that's why it's so important to go out and talk to people, get out of the Canberra bubble, get back to your home state, get out to the shopping centres, talk to people, because when you're talking to people, you begin to better understand the issues that they face.'

Ms Cash explained she visited Israel, Egypt and Turkey during her travels after finishing university.

Viewers were quick to react to the comment online, with some taking aim at the Senator for sounding like she did not understand the issues faced by those who are worse-off.

Ms Cash (left) made the comment on ABC's Kitchen Cabinet, after journalist Annabel Crabb (right) asked whether people who are fortunate can understand issues faced by poorer people in society

'I started with nothing. When I backpacked for three years, I practically had nothing,' Ms Cash (left) said to Crabb (right)

'You cannot compare a backpacker holiday to being deprived at all,' one person tweeted.

'Loved Michaelia Cash telling us she understands what it's like to be poor because she "backpacked around Europe for three years", lol,' another wrote.

'Lol Senator Cash saying that she was poor when she was younger (while being financially able to go backpacking for three years),' one viewer said.

'There will always be some who are lucky enough to have wealthy parents, but... the majority of people I know, they started with nothing and they worked really, really hard to make something of themselves,' Ms Cash said

Viewers were quick to react to the comment online, with some taking aim at the Senator for sounding like she did not understand the issues poorer people face

'Michaelia Cash spent three years backpacking, not privileged at all,' another added.

But others gave the Employment Minister more glowing reviews for her appearance, with one suggesting it showed she should be prime minister in the future.

'How great was Senator Cash? Not a fan but what a funster!' Iain Dawson tweeted.

Federal Minister for Employment and Women Michaelia Cash (left), and Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, speak at a press conference in Brisbane

Some viewiers gave the Employment Minister glowing reviews for her appearance, with one suggesting it showed she should be prime minister in the future

'Michaelia Cash for PM - what a treasure!' John Blackman added.

The Senator also discussed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's upbringing in the interview, saying he is 'a Prime Minister who started with nothing, who, through hard work and taking risks made something of himself and, in fact, has gone on to be very successful'.

When asked by Crabb about whether she is a feminist, Ms Cash said: 'if feminism is a fundamental belief in gender equality, then I would hope all Australians are feminists'.
David Cameron tried to kick his flagging referendum campaign into top gear this morning by appearing alongside his old friend Jeremy Clarkson.

Clarkson, together with James May, met the Prime Minister at TV studios in West London where he is making his new motoring show for Amazon.

With just a week left of the referendum campaign, Mr Cameron is staring at the prospect of humiliating defeat as almost all polls show Brexit is ahead.

Clarkson, a controversial figure after his sacking from the BBC last year, surprised many by endorsing the campaign to stay in the European Union.

But he joked today staying inside the EU was one of just three things he and and fellow former Top Gear host May agreed on.

David Cameron shared coffee and croissants with James May, left, and Jeremy Clarkson, right, today as the trio discussed the referendum battle

Mr Cameron met with the two TV stars at the TV studios they own together with producer Andy Wilman to work on the new project with Amazon

Clarkson said to the PM: 'It's an extraordinary thing that James and I only agree on three things, which is sandwich spread is delicious, the old Subaru Legacy Outback is a good car and Britain staying in.'

During an informal talk with Mr Cameron over cappuccinos in Stronger In-branded mugs and croissants, Clarkson added: 'I have not, with the greatest of respect, heard one politician say anything that's caused me to change my mind.

'There's huge numbers that don't understand and get confused. Really, it's my gut.'

Clarkson said he felt there were 'compelling' reasons for leaving.

But, he added: 'They're not compelling enough for me to say I want to drive a Morris Oxford, which is what would happen.'

Clarkson has famously insulted many countries - on one occasion getting into hot water for suggesting the first German-built Mini had turn signals that looked like a Nazi salute.

The biggest diplomatic incident triggered by the presenter focused on Argentina when he was accused of driving a car with an offensive number plate.

Despite his frequent gaffes, Clarkson is an enthusiastic European - once hosting an entire TV series dedicated to a driving tour of the continent.

May said: 'If I'm honest, it's a gut feeling for me as well.

'There are too many people who think we will be alright... but that's just not true.'

Mr Cameron turned up with branded Britain Stronger in Europe mugs to try and reinforce his campaign

The pair discussed the effects of Brexit on the UK car industry and Mr Cameron said manufacturers would face tariffs on exports to the continent in the event of vote to leave.

He said: 'I've spent a lot of time in different car plates in the last few years and if you look at Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar, Ford they are all doing well in Britain.

'They are all expanding, they are all making more, they are all selling more and if we were out - like America was out and with a trade deal like them - they would actually face a tariff on every single car they send to Europe.'

Clarkson added that his fellow presenter Richard Hammond was filming in France for the trio's new Amazon Prime show and was still undecided on how to vote.

'He is a don't know - he does not actually know there's a referendum on,' he joked.

In his previous declaration for Remain, Clarkson said it would be 'better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly'.

He wrote in the Sunday Times: 'Britain, on its own, has little influence on the world stage. I think we are all agreed on that.

'But Europe, if it were well run and had cohesive, well thought-out policies, would be a tremendous force for good.'

Mr Cameron and Clarkson live close to each in Oxfordshire and the PM offered support to his friend when he lost his job at the BBC's Top Gear for punching a producer.

Clarkson and May, together with Richard Hammond, are currently working on a new motoring show for the Amazon TV streaming service.

The trio set plans in motion for the new show following Clarkson's sacking and The Grand Tour is due to air later this year.

The third part of the motoring trio, Richard Hammond, was said to be absent filming and completely unaware of the fact the referendum was taking place

Both Clarkson, left, and May, right, are both firm supporters of the Remain campaign and greeted the PM at the W Chump and Sons TV studios today

The Prime Minister is due to take his campaign to Gibraltar later today in a further bid to prop up the campaign.

But he arrived to calls from Leave advocate Liam Fox to give a clear signal of support for The Rock whatever the result next week.

Mr Fox said: 'The PM must make clear that whatever the referendum result the UK will fully back the sovereignty and security of Gibraltar.

'The message must be completely unequivocal.

'The people of Gibraltar are owed nothing less.

'This is one place where 'Project Fear' would be wholly irresponsible.

'Gibraltar's successful economy is based on tourism, shipping, financial services and online games.
Says Europe is at 'breaking point' and UK must 'take control of our borders'

Controversial poster shows influx of Syrian refugees on Slovenian border during migrant crisis last year

Nigel Farage was branded 'fundamentally racist' today after he unveiled a Brexit poster showing thousands of male refugees flooding into Europe.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said his latest poster is 'disgusting' while Tory Treasury minister Harriet Baldwin hit out at the Ukip leader for 'vile xenophobia'.

MPs from all main Westminster parties hit out at the ad minutes after it was unveiled by Mr Farage in Westminster this morning.

The poster uses a picture of Syrian refugees being escorted along the Slovenian border during the migrant crisis last October and tells voters the EU is at 'breaking point, adding: 'The EU has failed us all. We must break free of the EU and take control of our borders.'

Ukip leader Nigel Farage unveiled the controversial poster in Westminster this morning but was immediately condemned by MPs from all main Westminster parties

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Twitter that Nigel Farage's latest poster is 'disgusting'

It is expected to be the largest advertising campaign of the referendum so far and will be rolled out across the country today.

Defending his poster amid attacks from all sides of the political spectrum, Mr Farage claimed 'all' the people pictured in the poster will have EU passports within years.

'This is a statement about the whole of the European Union and politically I really do think that the European Union is at breaking point,' he told the BBC as he unveiled the poster in Westminster.

'That is why you are seeing new parties emerging and new change happening. And I have to say something - every one of these can get to Calais.

'We know how bad our government is at defending our borders, and within a few years all of these people will have EU passports. We are much less safe as part of this European Union.'

But Tory, Labour, Lib Dem and Green MPs united to condemn the poster this morning, accusing Mr Farage of 'exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way'.

The poster (pictured being driven around Westminster this morning, is expected to be the largest advertising campaign of the referendum so far and will be rolled out across the country today

Tory MP Neil Carmichael, who is campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU, said: 'It's disappointing to see Ukip jumping on the refugee crisis to further their own political aims.

'Britain can only deal with the issue of immigration by working together with European countries that face the same challenges.

'Distasteful propaganda like this can only make our immigration challenges worse, not better, and damage community cohesion in Britain.'

Labour's Yvette Cooper said the poster was irresponsible and said all European countries had a moral duty to help with the migration crisis.

'Ripping up cooperation with the EU would make it much harder to stop the people smugglers, help refugees or prevent illegal migration,' she said. 'No country can cope with something like this alone.'

Attacking Mr Farage, Ms Cooper said: 'Just when you thought leave campaigners couldn't stoop any lower, they are now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way.

'Europe didn't cause the Syrian refugee crisis and pulling out of the EU won't stop people fleeing conflict and persecution by ISIS and the Assad regime.'

The picture used by Ukip in its latest Brexit poster is from a photo taken from the Slovenian border in October

Labour MP Paula Sherriff and SNP MP John Nicolson both hit out at Nigel Farage's latest poster today

Meanwhile a rival campaign poster supporting Britain staying in the EU mocked up Nigel Farage as a government minister and warned: 'Don't wake up with Nigel next Friday'.

It echoed Conservative party election posters used in last year's General Election warning.

With just a week until voters finally have their say in the referendum, another poll showed Brexit ahead this morning.

The Ipsos Mori survey put the Leave campaign six points ahead of the Remain camp and matched a string of polls over the past week to have shown big leads for Leave.

The details of today's opinion poll made grim reading for the Remain campaign.

Fewer than one in five people believe the main Treasury campaign claim that households would be 4,300 after a Brexit vote.

By contrast, almost half of people do believe the controversial Leave campaign figure that Britain would get back control of 350million a week after Brexit.

Today's poster signals another high profile intervention from Mr Farage after he was caught up in an extraordinary clash with Sir Bob Geldof on the Thames yesterday.

In the most bizarre scenes of the EU referendum so far, the Ukip leader took to the waves with dozens of fishing boats as he urged a vote to cut ties with Brussels next week.

But they were greeted by boats carrying Remain supporters including the rock star, and loud speakers blasting out the song 'In With the In Crowd'.

Nigel Farage unveils his latest Brexit poster in Westminster but MPs from all main Westminster parties immediately condemned it

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (right) said Nigel Farage's latest poster is 'disgusting'

A rival campaign poster supporting Britain staying in the EU mocked up Nigel Farage as a government minister and warned: 'Don't wake up with Nigel next Friday'

The fleets chased each other along the river for several hours - while at one point hoses were deployed by the trawlers to try to settle the argument.

Speaking after the PR stunt, Mr Farage hinted he could quit politics if the country backs Brexit next week - although he refused to rule out taking a seat in the Lords.

The Ukip leader said that despite the encouraging polls, the Leave camp were 'a very long way' from winning the referendum on June 23.

Asked about his plans after the vote, he said: 'I might go and get a real job, you never know.'

Mr Farage, speaking to reporters on a boat on the Thames as part of the Fishing for Leave flotilla, said: 'I haven't thought about it. Everything in my career in politics has been about next Thursday, everything.'

Mr Farage has curtailed his drinking, although he smoked cigarettes during the voyage on the Thames yesterday and joked: 'I think the doctors have got it wrong about smoking.'

Asked whether he would serve in a post-Brexit government with Boris Johnson in charge, he said: 'I want to win next Thursday. God knows what comes afterwards, who know what happens to the Tory party afterwards?

'Who knows what happens to the Labour Party afterwards, to Ukip?'

Asked whether he would rule out taking a seat in the Lords, he said: 'I wouldn't rule in or rule out anything after next Thursday, including quitting politics altogether.'

ANOTHER poll gives Brexit a six-point lead with just a week to go as Boris denies he's fishing to be Prime Minister

Boris Johnson today denied he was bidding to become Prime Minister in the aftermath of the referendum as another poll showed Vote Leave was six points clear.

With just one week until the historic referendum finally takes place, the latest survey matched a string of polls over the past week to have shown big leads for Leave.

Despite the Remain campaign scrambling to halt an apparent slide in support, the new snapshot of public opinion by Ipsos-Mori indicated the momentum continued to be with Brexit supporters.

On a visit to a fish firm in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the ex-mayor of London gutted a fish for the cameras before dismissing suggestions he could be in No 10 within weeks.

The latest row came as another poll showed Brexit six points ahead with just one week to go until the June 23 referendum

Boris Johnson went in search of inspiration today as he was told he should be prime minister on a campaign visit to a fish firm in Suffolk today

David Cameron - due to campaign in Gibraltar today - is widely expected to announce his resignation if today's poll for the Evening Standard is borne out at the ballot box

On his visit, Mr Johnson declared 'they're pinching our fish' as he posed for photos while holding a live lobster, before then attempting to fillet a salmon.

Speaking at the Sam Cole Food Group to people involved in the fishing industry, Mr Johnson said he is campaigning for Britain to 'take back control' of its waters and ensure North Sea fish is more fairly distributed.

The former London mayor said: 'We think we'd get more boats coming to Lowestoft.'

He added: 'We hope that carries your core support.'

John Knights, who has a fishing boat in Lowestoft docks, said: 'As long as you end up prime minister.'

But Mr Johnson replied: 'No, that's not going to happen.'

Speaking after Mr Johnson's visit, Mr Knights added: 'I'm really worried about this country.'

Asked if he hopes Mr Johnson would be PM if the UK leaves the EU, Mr Knights replied: 'Yeah I do. That man in charge - he's got a pair of balls.

'I don't think he knows much about the (fishing) job, but I believe he really does care about Britain and I believe the man has got some guts to run this country - not just the fishing.

'This country is getting in a mess.'

Mr Johnson grappled with a live lobster on his visit to the fish factory to make a rallying cry to protect the fishing industry by voting for Brexit next week

Mr Johnson, who was joined by Conservative ministers Penny Mordaunt and George Eustice, was also presented with a 'Save Our Soles' T-shirt.

He joked: 'You've got to make sure you don't say that too fast.'

The T-shirt also says: 'EU destroyed our fishing industry - vote leave.'

The details of today's opinion poll made grim reading for the Remain campaign.

Fewer than one in five people believe the main Treasury campaign claim that households would be 4,300 after a Brexit vote.

By contrast, almost half of people do believe the controversial Leave campaign figure that Britain would get back control of 350million a week after Brexit.

Both numbers have been dismissed by independent experts but the gulf in trust between the two campaigns will send new shudders through the Remain camp.

In other findings, Ipsos-Mori found more people think they would be better off in five years after Brexit than if Britain stays in.
Lane Graves, pictured, two, was found dead after being taken from a beach at Disney in Florida by an alligator

The list of bad things that can happen to your child is long.

As a mum  trying to protect her cubs, The Fear you are cursed with on the day your child is born is always there.

The horror that your child be taken from you; whether its the perils of the internet or a sad little man in a van. All trying to prize your most precious thing way from you.

But even when The Fear is heightened  by threat or uncertainty, we can still be ambushed and our child be snatched away.

Like when a toddler is taken from a beach by an alligator.

As a parent, it just makes you want to throw your hands in the air and surrender. OK  I give up. Death is too cruel. Death wins.

Its not just the fact it was an alligator  a modern-day dinosaur, chowing down on a child in the shallows.

Or that the family were on holiday, off-guard, safe in a bubble where money matters less and fun matters more.

The real horror of the thing is that it happened at Disney  where dreams come true. The jazz band on Main Street replaced by the shark motif from Jaws.

It seems death is laughing at us from backstage. You fools, you believe in dreams? You know, here at Disney, nightmares happen too.

And Ive seen a few for myself.

Working as a Security Guard at Euro-Disney for a university holiday job, I got a swift lesson in the reality behind the magic.

We were all transformed into cast members, and every time we entered the park through secret doors  we were taught we were on-stage.

Guests to the park were only ever allowed to see the glossy set. Never the rusty scaffolding behind the show.

Multiple Mickeys were coordinated by radio, to ensure no two Mice were ever in the park at the same time, keeping the magic alive.

Even as a smiling Security Guard, my main job was retrieving lost kids or booting out surly teens smoking enough weed to be smacked up on Space Mountain.

One day, a flasher, dressed only in boiler suit, was displaying his wares in Fantasyland. Pulling a paedo from Peter Pans Flight was my most magical day in the park.

The boy, right, had been paddling in water 10 feet from the shore at the upscale Grand Floridian Resort & Spa close to the Magic Kingdom, left

In later years, there have been stories of wealthy families signing up to rent-a-cripple to skip long lines or get premium disabled seats. Not quite what Walt had in mind?

But the British are cynics at heart. We are a country able to laugh at itself. We have gallows humour. My dad said my recent spat with meningitis would help me forget I have bloody ugly feet.

British people dont have the same connection with Disney. I like to think it has something to do with the American Dream  where anything is possible, and magic really does happen.

Where a migrant knowing one word of English shoe can become the founder of Yahoo. Or a black man embody change at the White House.

Disney seems to be the embodiment of all of this. Women are beautiful princesses and Prince Charming always saves the day.

Life is a fast-ride and even walking is effortless on a magic moving-carpet. (Faire-attention a la tapis-roulent!)

Pictured: The beach area of the Grand Floridian resort where the child was snatched by the creature

It is an ambition Disney works incredibly hard to sustain; providing cast members with clean uniforms collected backstage each day and vast armies of street-sweepers to keep the park looking surreally litter-free.

Everything is perky and upbeat  from Hakuna Matata piped at the line for the bathroom to Elsa the Ice-Queens boobs.

Which makes the tragedy of the toddler on the beach so stark.

Even if you exhaust your duties as a mother, it is still possible a monster from the deep might come and eat your child.

In a world of terror threats and gun-toting nutters, just where does The Fear end? What can you put your trust in?
The birds had not been released and were an apparent freak

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This is the moment exactly 49 birds - one for every person killed during the terrorist attack at an Orlando gay nightclub, appeared over the memorial during a vigil for the victims.

Thousands had gathered in the city on Monday to mourn, remember and pay respects to everyone killed in the brutal attack, each one symbolized by a bell toll at the end of the event.

As the names of each victim were read out, a photographer at the event noticed a flock of birds flying overhead.

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This is the moment exactly 49 birds - one for every person killed during the terrorist attack at an Orlando gay nightclub, appeared over the memorial during a vigil for the victims

She snapped a quick picture but it wasn't until she studied the photograph on her camera she noticed its significance - there were exactly 49 birds in the picture.

'I then showed everyone around me and had them count,' she told CNN. 'We were all stunned.'

The photographer, who wishes to remain nameless, had been mourning somebody close to her who was killed in the tragedy on Sunday morning when she noticed the birds.

'Seeing the birds made me feel a sense of peace about the tragedy,' she said.

Thousands had gathered in the city on Monday to mourn, remember and pay respects to each of the 49 victims (pictured) who were killed in the brutal attack

Masses: There were people from all walks of Orlando life at the event, gathering to mourn, remember and hope for a better future

Unity: Many of those in attendance were from the city's LGBT community. Speakers talked of the need to unite across all boundaries, and not to submit to 'homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia.' Shooter Mateen was a radical Islamist

Vigils for the victims were held all over America on Monday. At some, including a ceremony in Lakeland, Florida, just 60 miles away, 49 doves were released in honor of those who lost their lives.

But a spokesman for Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, where the Orlando vigil was held, confirmed that they had not released any birds.

While those in the picture appear black, compared to the white doves released a few miles away.

The photographer posted the picture on Facebook where it has since been shared thousands of times.

Her caption read: 'There were 49 birds, my friends. The fallen were with us tonight.'

Many commenters were also moved by the strange coincidence.

'We are, each of us, angels, but with one wing. We may only fly by embracing each other,' one user wrote.

The vigil was one of many held all around the world to remember the victims who were killed when Omar Mateen had opened fire at Pulse nightclub in the early hours of Sunday morning, killing at least 49 people and injuring more than 50 others.

Vigils for the victims were held all over America on Monday. At some, including a ceremony in Lakeland, Florida, just 60 miles away, 49 doves were released in honor of those who lost their lives (pictured)

Prayers: Thousands gathered to offer prayers and hold candles for those lost in the brutal attack on Sunday morning

Comfort: Freedanchy Ruiz (left) was comforted by Shawn McCluskey as she is overcome with emotion thinking about her cousin, who was killed at Pulse. Right: The twin flags of America and the LGBT community symbolized the unity that so many speakers called for

The vigil brought forth raw and powerful emotions for many taking part in a candlelight memorial service the day after the mass shooting

In dozens of countries and cities from London to South Korea, Copenhagen, Berlin, Bangkok and Australia, mourners have paid their respects as landmarks across the world - from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to Syndey's Harbour Bridge, were lit up in rainbow colours to show their solidarity with the LGBT community.

In Orlando, the crowds heard from Muslim, LGBT and Latino community leaders, and those affected by Sunday morning's attack.

Orange County Mayor Theresa Jacobs told crowd: 'This is not your fight - this is our fight. This is America's fight'.
Authorities in Virginia are investigating after the body of an infant was found inside a bag in a Danville home over the weekend.

An affidavit for a search warrant states police responded to a home on Schoolfield Drive on Sunday.

When officers arrived, they discovered 'a dead infant in a bag', The Danville Register and Bee reported.

The warrant states a man opened the bag and found the 'deceased infant that had been dead for some time.'

Police are investigating the nature of the death.

The Danville Police Department told Daily Mail Online they are not releasing any additional information at this time.
A Florida sheriff's deputy facing 29 child sex-related charges died after shooting himself when he bonded out of jail on Wednesday.

Broward County Sheriff Department Sgt. Kreg Costa shot himself at his home in Sunrise after he was released from jail on $250,000 bond for the charges that included child pornography and illicit sexual conduct.

In a news release, authorities say the 43-year-old man died after being rushed to Broward Health Medical Center suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

BSO spokeswoman Veda Coleman-Wright said: 'As you can imagine (Costa's wife) is devastated. His wife and children need our prayers and support.'

Broward County Sheriff Department Sgt. Kreg Costa (above in his mugshot) died after shooting himself when he bonded out of jail on Wednesday. He faced 29 child sex related charges in Florida

Costa shot himself at his home (file above) in Sunrise after he was released from jail on $250,000 bond for the charges that included child pornography and illicit sexual conduct

Costa, who had been with the sheriff's office since 1999, was arrested after a check into his work computer showed that he was viewing websites dedicated to hardcore pornography, incest and bondage while at work.

The two-month investigation started when staff at his office noticed that the married father-of-five was staying in his office during the night shifts with the lights off and his uniform belt and gun belt removed.

Hidden cameras were planted inside of his office following the tips from staff members about his odd and weird behavior, the Sun Sentinel reported.

It was documented on the cameras that Costa would spend 'three to four hours per midnight shift perusing online child porn,' the Sentinel reported.

After the Public Corruption Unit made the discovery of the illicit content on his work laptop, Costa was suspended without pay and arrested on June 9.

They also found that he exchanged sexually explicit emails and videos with a now-16-year-old girl in California.

The veteran officer was found to be involved in cybersex chats with the girl who went by the username of 'Babygirl' online.

She told Costa, who reportedly earned $146,000 including more than $10,000 in overtime last year, that she was underage when they first began communicating in August, the investigation revealed.

Costa (above), who had been with the sheriff's office since 1999, was arrested after a check into his work computer showed that he was viewing websites dedicated to hardcore pornography, incest and bondage while at work

Sunrise police spokesman Chris Piper said that they received a call at 5.30pm on Wednesday saying that police need to come to the side of the house located at 9130 Sunset Strip, according to The Miami Herald.

Once officers arrived, they found Costa still breathing with a self-inflicted gunshot would.

Piper said that no one was home at the time of the shooting and that there are not witnesses.

Costa's supervisor, Scott Israel, called the the allegations 'disgusting' last week in a press conference.

'These charges are deeply disturbing. These allegations, if true, are reprehensible,' Israel said.

'We're not going to stand for this type of behavior. It was illegal, it was immoral, and it tarnished the badge.'

Authorities believe there are other victims, the Sentinel reported.
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Britain united in grief for murdered MP Jo Cox this morning as it emerged the popular politician had been subjected to a barrage of hate mail in the three months prior to her brutal killing.

The mother-of-two was punched and kicked to the ground by her attacker before being shot three times  once in the head - with an 'antique gun' outside a West Yorkshire library yesterday afternoon.

The married 41-year-old, who was a rising Labour star and dedicated MP, died from the catastrophic injuries she sustained in the attack, after the killer ambushed her as she walked to her constituency surgery in Birstall near Leeds at about 1pm.

Mrs Cox's friend and fellow Labour MP Rachel Reeves broke down in tears as she and others visited the centre of Birstall this morning, where hundreds of flowers and cards have been laid by grieving locals.

Flags across Whitehall are flying at half-mast, while flags at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh are also lowered in tribute. A Buckingham Palace spokesman said the Queen had written privately to Mrs Cox's husband, Brendon.

It came as it emerged that police had been poised to step up security for Mrs Cox, who became an MP last year, as she had been harassed in a stream of abusive messages over the last three months.

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Popular MP Jo Cox, 41, has tragically died after she was shot three times - once in the head - and stabbed repeatedly with a 'foot-long knife' by a man as she arrived for a constituency meeting in Birstall near Leeds yesterday. She leaves behind her husband and two children

Mrs Cox, 41, is pictured with her husband Brendan on election night when she was elected as an MP for the Batley and Spen area (left) and posing happily with her husband on their wedding day (right). The MP was shot and died of her injuries outside a constituency meeting

Two hours after her death, Mrs Cox's heartbroken husband Brendan tweeted a photo of her standing by the houseboat they stayed on when they were in London. Just yesterday, he tweeted updates from the River Thames as he rode on a flotilla with their two young children

Locals have named and identified 'loner' Tommy Mair as the 52-year-old man who has been arrested by police in connection with the attack

Map showing Birstall Library, where Jo Cox's surgery was scheduled, Market Street, where the MP was attacked, and Lowood Lane, where the attacker, named locally as 'loner' Thomas Mair, lived. Police remained at the crime scene and outside Mair's home this evening

The Times reported today that additional security was being considered at her constituency surgery in Birstall, as well as her houseboat on the River Thames in London where she lives with her family.

A source said that Mrs Cox had 'thought little of' the harassing messages until the 'volume and frequency stepped up'. A man was cautioned over them, and police have confirmed this was not the same man who was arrested yesterday following the attack.

The newspaper suggested there was no known link between the messages she had received and yesterday's attack, but reported that her security had not been upgraded before she was targeted.

Detectives were last night questioning 52-year-old 'loner' Thomas Mair, amid fears he was motivated by Mrs Cox's political campaigning. It was claimed her attacker shouted 'Britain First' as he targeted the MP in broad daylight.

Dramatic pictures show a man being arrested just minutes after the attack in a nearby street.

There is unconfirmed evidence Mair supported far-Right causes and claims he had mental health problems and had been released recently from psychiatric care.

The MP was an outspoken supporter of the Remain campaign and had called for more refugees to be given a safe haven on our shores. Last night her husband, charity worker Brendan Cox, 37, said he would dedicate 'every moment' of the rest of his life to his wife's memory.

'Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people,' he said.

'She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

'Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.'

Two hours after her death, Mr Cox  with whom she has two young children, aged three and five - tweeted a photograph of her and urged people to 'fight against the hatred that killed her.'

In a moving statement, he said: '[This] is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo's friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.'

Her parents, Gordon and Jean Leadbeater, who live in the small village of Roberttown, West Yorkshire said the family were 'in shock'.

Mrs Cox's killing has sent shockwaves across the country with MPs across the political spectrum paying warm tribute to her.

Elected to represent Batley and Spen last year, the Cambridge University graduate had already earned great respect for her work ethic and humanitarian campaigning.

David Cameron said the country has 'lost a great star' as the Leave and Remain camps suspended campaigning.

The murder took place outside Birstall Library in a busy shopping street just before 1pm. Mrs Cox was walking to a constituency surgery  advertised on posters inside the building  after attending a school assembly about three miles away.

Witnesses said a man in a baseball cap grabbed her, pulling her hair as he punched and kicked her to the ground. As bystanders attempted to intervene, he pulled out a large hunting knife and repeatedly stabbed the MP, also catching a 77-year-old man in the stomach as he tried to intervene.

He then pulled out what appeared to be an antique gun which he fired three times from just a few feet away, aiming the final shot at her head. Some witnesses claimed he looked 'full of range' as he shot her at close-range.

One man said the killer deliberately moved in to finish off the MP, firing a final shot to 'the head area' in a horrific attack that lasted up to 15 minutes.

A picture has been circulated on social media that is said to show the suspect being arrested after the attack in Leeds yesterday afternoon

A picture was taken of the man believed to be the suspect seconds after he was tackled to the ground by two uniformed police officers

Dramatic news footage shows the moment the 52-year-old man was arrested in connection with the attack on Mrs Cox in Birstall, Leeds

A view of the scene of the shooting outside the library in Birstall, where Mrs Cox was attending a constituency meeting yesterday

Forensic officers are seen outside the home of the attacker, who has been named locally as Thomas Mair, as the investigation continues

A 77-year-old have-a-go-hero passer-by who tried to save the MP was stabbed in the stomach. Doctors said last night that he was expected to make a full recovery.

Witness Clarke Rothwell, who runs a cafe near where the attack took place, said the attacker shouted 'Britain first' as he carried out the sickening attack.

He said: 'He was stabbing her with a foot-long knife multiple times while shouting 'Britain first, Britain first, Britain first'.

'Three times she was shot, the initial time which then she dropped to the floor, and two more times.

'The third time he got close proximity, he shot her round the head area.'

He added: 'In the meantime he was stabbing her as well, he was stabbing her with his knife.'

The 42-year-old said he had rushed to the scene after hearing a 'popping sound'. He said he turned around to find the gunman standing over her.

'He seemed to have what looked like an old gun, like a musket, in his hand and he shot her again in the middle,' he said.

'He then seemed to shoot a third time, towards her head or face. He was also stabbing at her with what looked like a hunting knife, about a foot long. He was stabbing her and waving the knife around.

'A man who I know... tried to get near but the man swung his knife around and caught him in the stomach. Blood started coming out.'

Mr Rothwell said his friend 'tried to grab him, wrestling with him,' but the killer lunged at the MP 'half a dozen times' with the knife.

He said the sound of the gunshots sparked pandemonium, with people 'screaming and running from the area'.

Mr Rothwell said he attempted to follow the attacker in his van and saw him dump his jacket on the ground, possibly in an attempt to change his appearance.

A forensic officer picks up a shoe from the ground and inspects it after Mrs Cox was stabbed with a 'hunting knife' and shot three times

A forensic police officer collects a handbag from the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds following the horrific killing

Police officers are maintaining a 'significant and large crime scene' in the Birstall area of Leeds where Mrs Cox was killed yesterday

Police and forensics officers carry out searches in the area of Birstall where Mrs Cox was fatally injured in broad daylight yesterday

Forensics officers examine potential evidence, including a bloodied shoe and handbag found near where Mrs Cox was attacked, right

Another witness, Sam Watson, added: 'The man walked away calmly and nobody wanted to approach him.'

Local restaurant owner Hichem Ben Abdallah, 56, was in the cafe next door to the library when he heard screaming and went outside. He said he saw Mrs Cox lying on the ground between two parked cars.

SUSPECTED GUNMAN HAD 'LINKS TO THE FAR-RIGHT', LONG TERM MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES AND VOLUNTEERED AT SPECIAL SCHOOL The man suspected of killing Labour MP Jo Cox confessed to feeling socially isolated and disconnected from society as a result of long-term mental illness, it emerged last night. Detectives were last night questioning 52-year-old Thomas Mair, amid fears he was motivated by Mrs Coxs political campaigning. There is unconfirmed evidence Mair supported far-Right causes and claims he had mental health problems and had been released recently from psychiatric care. It was also revealed that he volunteered at a special school several times a week. Friends said Mair had never shown any interest in politics or the EU referendum. The only possible clue to Mairs political leanings yesterday was that his name and address appear on a list of former subscribers to an anti-ANC pro-white South African magazine. The newspaper, then known as the South African Patriot, rejected 'multi-cultural societies, expansionist Islam and third world tyrants', and supported 'imperial solidarity'. In 1987, it moved to the UK 'following the fall of civilized rule in South Africa'. Finding solace through volunteer work as a gardener, he was regarded as a quiet but friendly loner by neighbours on the estate on a hill above the murder scene where he had lived since childhood. Mair also regularly helped his mother Mary, 69, who last night told friends she feels responsible for what he is alleged to have done. Shes blaming herself, one said. I told her she cant blame herself, she cant be responsible for other peoples actions, but she is. Shes devastated. At home last night, Mrs Mair said: I dont understand it, I just dont understand. Duane St Louis, age 41, the suspects half-brother, said Mair had 'never expressed any views about Britain, or politics or racist tendencies'. He said: 'Im mixed race and Im his half-brother, we got on well. He never married. The only time I remember him having a girlfriend was as a young man, but a mate stole her off him. He said that put him off [women] for life. He added: It feels like a dream that I want to wake up from. I couldnt believe it when I saw a picture of him on the news in handcuffs. In 2010 the alleged gunman had spoken to a local newspaper of how volunteering at a park near his home on the Fieldhouse estate in Birstall had helped improve his mental health. I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world, he told The Huddersfield Daily Examiner. Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common mainly caused by long-term unemployment. All these problems are alleviated by doing voluntary work. Mair also volunteered several times a week at a special school in Dewsbury. Advertisement

He said: 'I saw a man wrestling with a guy with a baseball cap, trying to restrain him, but he shrugged him off. All of a sudden he started shouting and he pulled a gun from his bag. It looked like an old shotgun, maybe with a shortened barrel, the size of a cucumber. Then he fired and three or four seconds later he fired again. Bang, bang.

'At the first shot everyone ran, but then the adrenaline kicked in and we went closer again.

'He then just calmly walked away down the street.'

Mr Abdallah said the killer looked like he was in a 'rage' as he pulled the trigger.

Describing the gun as looking 'handmade', he added: 'She was a standing-still target for him when he shot her.

'The man stepped back with the gun and fired it and then he fired a second shot.

'As he was firing he was looking down at the ground.

'She was sat on the floor and looked like she was on the beach, her hair was roughed up, her face and legs were bloody.' Mr Abdallah said the MP appeared to be unconscious.

It was earlier thought Mrs Cox had intervened in a fight between two men but it is now believed that her attacker was lying in wait. One witness said he believed the attacker was waiting for Mrs Cox outside the library where she was holding the surgery with her constituent members.

Car-wash worker Karman Kinder said he saw her lying on the ground as a woman standing beside her screamed: 'Oh Jo! Oh Jo!'

He said there was a man lying on the floor nearby who looked as if he had been injured.

Mr Kinder added that he saw the gunman rushing away seconds after the shots were fired.

'As I went up the road there was a guy on the other side, hurrying down the street. He looked old and had his face down and then I saw he was holding a gun in his hand,' he said.

'Other people were chasing him and he disappeared into a side street. It was terrifying.'

Aamir Tahir, of The Dry Clean Centre, said the gunman was heard shouting 'Britain first'.

He said: 'The lady I work with heard two loud bangs. I wish I was there because I would have tried to stop him.

'Apparently the guy who did it shouted 'Britain first' and if I had been there I would have tackled him.'

Graeme Howard, 38, who lives nearby, told the Guardian that he also heard the man shout 'Britain first' before the shooting and during the arrest.

He said: 'I heard the shot and I ran outside and saw some ladies from the cafe running out with towels. There was loads of screaming and shouting and the police officers showed up.

'He was shouting 'Britain first' when he was doing it and being arrested. He was pinned down by two police officers and she was taken away in an ambulance.'

Britain First is the name of a far-Right group opposed to immigration, multiculturalism and the UK's membership of the EU. Its leader, former BNP councillor Paul Golding yesterday posted a video online saying the attack was 'disgusting' while the group said it was 'not involved and would never encourage behaviour of this sort'.

Passers-by immediately tended to the stricken MP and police and paramedics were on the scene within minutes.

Witnesses feared the worst as paramedics performed CPR on Mrs Cox for up to 15 minutes before she was airlifted to hospital.

As a manhunt was launched for the killer, local shops and a primary school just 50 yards away from the scene of the attack were immediately put on 'lockdown', with no one allowed in or out.

However, shortly afterwards, two police officers arrested the suspect.

He did not try to resist, and photographs showed him sprawled on the road with officers standing over him and what appeared to be trail of blood by his arm.

Later they recovered the gun and a bloody machete-style knife. A team of officers were searching his council home, less than one mile away, where he has lived virtually all his life.

Neighbours said Mair, a voracious reader, volunteer gardener and special needs helper, was a regular visitor to the library where Mrs Cox held her surgery.

They said the semi-detached council house had been his home since childhood and said he had lived there alone since his grandmother died about 20 years ago.

The house is one of a number of addresses being searched by police as part of the investigation into Ms Cox's death.

David Pickles, a neighbour of Mair, said: 'He's just quiet. He kept himself to himself. He lived by himself. He's been on his own for about 20 years. I've never seen a lot of people visiting or anything like that.'

Fellow neighbour Katherine Cooke, 62, said Mair had walked past her house at 12.20pm yesterday. He looked the same as he always does, she said. The only difference was, he had a rucksack on.

Mair regularly helped his mother bringing shopping to her Batley home and helping in the garden.

One neighbour said: He doted on his mum, he was round here twice a week bringing her shopping and things. He was devoted to her. Another added: He was a lovely lad. This is completely out of character.

There is evidence Mair subscribed to a pro-white publication 'SA Patriot', an inflammatory tiny circulation magazine based in London. One online message group described him as 'one of the earliest subscribers and supporters' of the magazine.

But his brother Scott, 49, said Mair showed no strong political views. 'He has a history of mental illness, but he has had help,' he said.

The suspect's devastated mother, Mary, who also lives in Birstall, was being comforted by friends. One said: 'She's really upset about the children. She's blaming herself.'

Duane St Louis, 41, Mair's half-brother, said he had obsessive compulsive disorder. At his home in Dewsbury, he said: 'He'd clean himself with Brillo pads.'

A jacket, handbag and shoes were left at the scene. They are believed to belong to the MP who was attacked in broad daylight yesterday

A coat allegedly thrown under a car by the shooter remained stricken on the road yesterday afternoon as forensics gathered evidence

Emergency equipment left at the scene where Mrs Cox was attacked during a horrific incident near her constituency surgery yesterday

Police are currently at the scene of a home in Birstall, Leed, pictured, which is understood to belong to Mair - the man allegedly arrested

Dee Collins and Mark Burns Williamson confirmed Mrs Cox's death in a press conference at Carr Gate police headquarters, Wakefield

'IT WAS LIKE A MUSKET': WAS THIS THE GUN USED IN THE ATTACK? Witness Hichem Ben Abdallah, 56, drew this picture illustrating the type of gun he saw being wielded by the attacker. The image was shared on Twitter by Channel 4 News correspondent Michael Crick Police investigating the killing of MP Jo Cox have confirmed they recovered weapons, 'including a firearm', from the crime scene. Conflicting reports have emerged over what type of gun was used in the attack, but it is believed to have been an antique weapon - and one witness described seeing an 'old gun, like a musket'. Hichem Ben Abdallah, 56, was in the cafe next door to the library when he heard screaming and went outside and found a man trying to fight off the attacker, named locally as Thomas Mair, as he wrestled Mrs Cox on the street. He reportedly drew a picture of the gun for Channel 4 News correspondent Michael Crick, which was later shared on Twitter. It shows what appears to be an old-fashioned gun, which he said was the 'size of an average cucumber'. Speaking after the attack, Mr Ben Abdallah said: 'There was a guy who was being very brave and another guy with a white baseball cap who he was trying to control and the man in the baseball cap suddenly pulled a gun from his bag. 'He was fighting with her and wrestling with her and then the gun went off and then she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding on the floor.' Gas engineer Witness Clarke Rothwell, 42, was outside the sandwich shop close to the library when he heard a 'popping sound'. 'I looked round and there was a guy standing over a woman on the floor,' he said. 'He seemed to have what looked like an old gun, like a musket, in his hand and he shot her.' Advertisement

Mrs Cox, lived with her husband and two young children on a houseboat on the Thames. Before winning her seat last May she worked as an adviser to Gordon Brown's wife, Sarah, and Lady Kinnock.

She has become the first woman MP ever to be murdered and the first MP to be killed since the murder of Conservative Ian Gow in a 1990 IRA bomb blast.

MPs warned they were in danger in a committee report last year which highlighted increasing complaints of obsessive stalkers. Several MPs complained they had been confronted by obsessives armed with knives and guns.

Last night, a vigil was held by colleagues outside Parliament and by friends and neighbours at Mrs Cox's Thames houseboat, where owners sounded their horns in a two-minute tribute to the MP.

Candles were lit along the gangway down to the jetty and hundred of flowers and pictures were placed on the vessel she shared with her husband.

Anne Wainwright chair of the Heritage Moorings said: 'We are a very tight community. We're all pulling together. It's just so awful.

'Lots of people came to lay flowers last night, tributes have come from all over the world, it was rally amazing.

'We burnt some of our horns out because we sounded them for two minutes straight.

'I spoke to Jo's husband Brendan last night and we've exchanged some messages.

'He's obviously in bits, I can't imagine what he's going through. And her parents as well, it's so terrible, we're in such shock.

'I'm not sure when her family are coming back but when Brendan comes back we'll talk about any further tributes as a community.

'It has been mentioned that her name might get put on a bench nearby, but we're not sure yet.

'Jo was such a lovely person, she was tiny but had so much energy. She loved her work so much she had to get back to work after being a full time mum.'

A book of condolence was also set up for residents. One tribute left read: 'You have left a world that is changed by your humanity and empathy for the plight of others.

'May your lasting legacy be one that remembers that joyful optimism and tireless work really does change the world. Rest in peace Jo.'

Another tribute read: 'From one mother to another may your joy live on through your children.'

It came as politicians up and down the country paid tribute to Mrs Cox, who was described as 'one of the brightest MPs'.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: 'Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

'In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.'

Prime Minister David Cameron added: 'The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.'

Campaigning for the EU referendum by Britain Stronger in Europe and Vote Leave has now been suspended for the day after the attack.

Commenting on the attack, temporary Chief Constable Dee Collins said: 'Just before 1pm [yesterday] Jo Cox, MP for Batley and Spen, was attacked in Market Street, Birstall. I am now very sad to have to report that she has died as a result of her injuries. Before going into further detail, I would like to express our deepest sympathies to her family and friends at this tragic time.

'Jo was attacked by a man who inflicted serious and sadly ultimately fatal injuries. There was a subsequently an attack on a 77 year old man nearby who has sustained injuries that are non-life threatening. Shortly afterwards a man was arrested nearby by police officers. Weapons, including a firearm, have also been recovered.

'At 1.48pm Jo was pronounced dead by a doctor working with a paramedic crew who was treating her injuries. This is a very serious investigation with a large number of witnesses that are being spoken to by police at this time. There is a large and significant crime scene. There is a large police presence in the area. A full investigation is underway to establish the motive of this attack.

Mrs Cox, who died from her injuries after being shot and stabbed yesterday, is pictured above on her wedding day with husband Brendan

Labour MPs Yvette Cooper, Rachel Reeves and Judith Cummins attend a vigil at St Peter's church in Birstall tonight in memory of Mrs Cox

Labour MP Yvette Cooper was seen wiping away tears as she broke down during the vigil in honour of Mrs Cox who was killed yesterday

Pictured left to right: MPs Yvette Cooper (Pontefract and Castleford), Naz Shah (Bradford West) and Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central), attending a vigil for Mrs Cox in St. Peter's Church, Birstall, near Leeds. Pictured right: A mourner fights back the tears during the service

Labour MPs (L-R) Yvette Cooper, Naz Shah, Dan Jarvis, Rachel Reeves and Mary Creagh at a vigil in St Peters Church in the town of Birstall

Flowers are laid at a statue to Joseph Priestly in Birstall near to the scene where the popular Labour MP was shot three times and stabbed

Flowers and tribute messages laid at the cenotaph in the centre of Birstall, near where Mrs Cox was shot and stabbed yesterday

Heartbreaking tributes were left on flowers near to the scene of the killing in the town of Birstall, West Yorkshire, yesterday afternoon

Flowers have been left on Mrs Cox's houseboat in London this morning. Fellow houseboat owners say they are devastated by her death

The boat where Ms Cox lived was covered with flowers this morning as people rushed to pay their respects to the MP

A book of condolence was also set up in honour of Ms Cox at the moorings in Wapping where she lived

'There are specially trained officers with Jo's immediate family who are fully aware of what has taken place. And we would ask the media to respect their privacy at this difficult time. Additional officers are working with the local community this evening, in order to provide support and reassurance to our communities.

'Clearly as our inquiry is at a very early stage, and we have an individual under arrest, we are not in the position to discuss any motive at this time. We are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.'

She added: 'We are attending a number of scenes as part of this investigation and we will be looking very closely at what evidence we may or may not be able to recover.'

Cambridge graduate Mrs Cox was elected to the seat of Batley and Spen at the last general election in 2015, having previously worked in aid.

She is national chair of Labour Women's Network, and has worked for various charities including Oxfam, Save the Children and the NSPCC.

The mother of two young children, who is said to enjoy mountain-climbing, boating and running, worked for Oxfam between 2001 and 2009 in a variety of different roles - and it was while working for the charity that she met her husband and father of her children, Brendan.

As head of Oxfam's Brussels office she spearheaded Oxfam's campaign for trade reform. In 2005 she joined Oxfam GB as head of advocacy.

Paying tribute, the charity's Max Lawson said: 'Jo was a diminutive pocket rocket from the north. She was as a ball of energy, always smiling, full of new ideas, of idealism, of passion. She gave so much to Oxfam.

'She was an inspiring leader, really bringing the best out of all of us, always positive, always believing we could win, and always passionate for change.

'She was particularly brilliant at bringing huge energy to our campaigning around the desperate humanitarian crisis in Darfur.'

Oxfam GB's Chief Executive, Mark Goldring, added: 'Oxfam is proud of the role that Jo played in our work over a decade. Many of our colleagues remember her fondly. The rest of us followed her work with admiration. She never lost her passion for peace, justice and equality.

'Everyone is deeply shocked to hear the news. Our thoughts and sympathies are with Brendan and Jo's family at this difficult time.'

Mr Cox and the couple's children drove a boat down the Thames yesterday. with an unknown woman, opposing Nigel Farage's 'flotilla'

Brendan Cox and his two children were seen on the River Thames yesterday, with an unnamed woman, as they opposed Leave EU protest

Labour MP Mrs Cox has been campaigning for Britain to remain in the EU in recent weeks and is pictured handing out leaflets this month

Mrs Cox voted in April for the UK to accept 3,000 unaccompanied Syrian child refugees, saying that she 'would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hellhole'

Earlier this year MPs were given an 'enhanced' security package amid heightened fears about the threat of attacks.

The move by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) came after the Commons vote on bombing Syria saw protests outside MPs' constituency offices and homes. There have also been concerns that backbenchers could be a soft target for Islamic State extremists.

Details of the extra security measures were not published, but they are thought to include more funding for alarms, locks and CCTV in constituencies and homes. Police carry out assessments of what risk MPs face.

The watchdog authorised 77,234 of spending on additional security measures last year - more than double the sum in the previous 12 months.

MOTHER-OF-TWO WAS AID WORKER BEFORE ENTERING COMMONS Jo Cox worked for Oxfam before she entered parliament as MP for Batley and Spen at the general election last year. A mother of two young children, she is married to Brendan Cox, a former adviser to Gordon Brown who has also been chief executive of Save the children. The 41-year-old also worked closely with Mr Brown's wife Sarah on efforts to prevent mothers and babies dying needlessly in pregnancy. Since entering the Commons, she has made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria issues, including calling for the UK to enforce a no-fly zone. In 2015 she abstained in a vote on whether we should join airstrikes. Ms Cox nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader, but is regarded as a moderate within the party and is very popular among her fellow MPs. Advertisement

Yesterday, it emerged that a 37-year-old man had been arrested following a death threat made to Labour MP Ben Bradshaw.

The arrest follows an alleged campaign of extreme right-wing racist and homophobic abuse aimed at Mr Bradshaw and his staff.

Devon and Cornwall Police said the man was held for questioning after a call was recorded at the Labour MP for Exeters office at Westminster.

Scottish Secretary David Mundell revealed today that he had once received a death threat after MPs backed airstrikes against ISIS in Syria.

The minister said police had advised him of a 'credible' threat in the wake of a Commons vote in favour of the action in December 2015.

He said, however, that Mrs Cox would not have wanted politicians to 'pull up the shutter' and become less accessible to the public.

Speaking after a meeting of the British-Irish Council in Glasgow, he said: 'I didnt make it public at the time, but immediately after the Syria vote I received what police regarded as a credible death threat.

'Its very concerning, not just for yourself but for your family, your staff in particular.

'The police do offer very good guidance and support in relation to how to carry out your duties in the safest possible way.

'But, ultimately, accessibility is at the heart of politics and you cant let those people who want to disrupt our political system win by refusing to be accessible to the public.

'I know Jo Cox would not have wanted us to pull the shutter up as a response to yesterdays dreadful events.'

He criticised the 'vilification' politicians are subjected to, saying weve come to accept abuse and name-calling as a matter of course'.

He continued: 'When people hear about Jo, they understand that she is the exact opposite of the stereotype, somebody who wasnt in it for themselves, somebody who took huge personal sacrifices, having a young family, having to come to London, because she wanted to do better for her community and the wider world.'

Last night, Lord Porter, Chairman of the Local Government Association, offered his condolences to Mrs Cox's family and friends.

He said: 'On behalf of everyone in local government I would like to extend my deepest sympathy to the family and friends of Jo Cox. Our thoughts are with them at this tragic time.'

Councillor Nick Forbes, Senior Vice Chair of the Local Government Association, added: 'On behalf of Labour Councillors I wish to express our deepest condolences to Jo's family. Jo was a committed campaigner and Labour politician who died carrying out her public service. We have all suffered a great loss.'

The close knit community of boat owners along the River Thames also paid a nautical tribute to their loving friend.

At 8pm, boats berthed in Wapping by Tower Bridge blasted their horns three times before a full two minute blast in memory of Mrs Cox.

As the horns rang out, some neighbours stood solemnly by their boats with tears in their eyes before five children, holding a single red rose approached the houseboat and threw them onto the deck.

Holding back tears Anne, the chairman of Hermitage Moorings where Mrs Cox lived with roughly 45 others, said: '[This] is the saddest day of this close community.

'We have lost a dear, dear friend in the most tragic and outrageous circumstances.

'We pay tribute to our amazing, wonderful and spirited member of this community.

'A beacon of hope who believed in love friendship and values that we all so much need at this time.

'The community will continue to be inspired by her relentless energy and commitment to all that is good.

'Our thoughts go to her husband Brendan and her two wonderful children.'

Before she reached the end of her speech, Anne burst into tears and turned away throwing her own red rose onto the houseboat.

One witness said he saw seven police cars 'racing up' the road to the scene in West Yorkshire after reports of shots being fired at 1pm

One witness claimed the man shouted 'Britain first' during the incident in Birstall, West Yorkshire - possibly referencing the far-right group

Forensic police officers collect a woman's shoe on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall, Leeds, following the attack on Mrs Cox

A 'happy go lucky girl from Yorkshire': Jo Cox dedicated her life to helping the lives of people on the other side of the world but never forgot her local roots

By Matt Dathan

Jo Cox, 41, (pictured) used her short time as an MP to continue her career-long dedication to helping the plight of refugees and made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria-related issues

Jo Cox was among the rising stars in Parliament before she was shot dead on the streets of her Yorkshire constituency.

She used her short time as an MP to continue her career-long dedication to helping the plight of refugees and made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria-related issues.

The married mother of two young children was about to celebrate her 42nd birthday next week and yesterday her young family enjoyed a day out at Westminster, pictured in a boat on the Thames during an EU campaign event.

Mrs Cox was a slight figure but had a powerful voice and used it repeatedly in Parliament over the last year to make the passionate case for taking in more Syrian refugee children.

And it was a fitting outcome that the former aide worker, who had put herself in danger throughout war zones and the developing world, played a central role in persuading the Government to change its mind and agree to accept 3,000 Syrian children into Britain.

In a memorable speech in April, she told MPs: 'Those children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness, and I know I would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hellhole.'

Mrs Cox was born and raised in the West Yorkshire town of Heckmondwike and was elected as the local Batley and Spen MP at the General Election in May 2015, beating the Tories with a 6,051 majority.

Born to Jean, a school secretary, and father, Gordon, who worked in a local toothpaste and hairspray factory, Cox was educated at Heckmondwike Grammar School and became the first person from her family to graduate from university.

But before she arrived in Cambridge, she spent the summer working at her dad's factory, packing toothpaste while all her peers enjoyed a gap year.

She recalled in an interview with the Yorkshire Post how she 'didn't really speak right or knew the right people' at university and admitted her experience at Cambridge 'really knocked me'.

She read social and political studies at Cambridge University, which is where her passion of politics was born.

'I just felt like I wasn't quite up to speed with everyone else,' she explained. 'I was a happy go lucky 18-year-old from Yorkshire going out in Leeds having a good time.

'A lovely life and a lovely family. Then I was thrown into a Cambridge environment where I just didn't get it. It shook me. All my norms and everything I was used to didn't feel like they were right anymore.'

She went on to work as an adviser for the Labour MP Joan Walley and Baroness, before embarking on a successful career as an aide worker.

She was married to Brendan Cox, a former adviser to Gordon Brown who has also been chief executive of Save the children.

The 41-year-old also worked closely with Mr Brown's wife Sarah on efforts to prevent mothers and babies dying needlessly in pregnancy.

Since entering the Commons, she has made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria issues, including calling for the UK to enforce a no-fly zone.

In 2015 she abstained in a vote on whether we should join airstrikes.

Mrs Cox nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader, but is regarded as a moderate within the party and is very popular among her fellow MPs.

Jo Cox (pictured) was among the rising stars in Parliament before she was shot dead on the streets of her Yorkshire constituency

Days before she died, Jo Cox took part in the traditional tug of war against the House of Lords

Labour MPs join hundreds of mourners in moving church vigil to honour popular Mrs Cox who 'fizzed with life and crackled with energy'

Hundreds of mourners including Labour MPs Yvette Cooper and Naz Shah tonight attended a special vigil to pay their respects to Mrs Cox who they said 'fizzed with life and crackled with energy'.

Mrs Cox was remembered by her constituents, friends and colleagues as they packed out St Peter's Church in Birstall to mourn their friend and peer.

More than 500 people attended the 40-minute ceremony, including Mrs Cox's fellow Yorkshire MPs Ms Cooper and Ms Shah, who sat silently next to each other.

Labour MP Yvette Cooper (centre) hugs the priest at St Peter's Church after a vigil in memory of Mrs Cox, who was stabbed and shot

Labour MP Yvette Cooper appeared emotional as she consoled the priest following the service which was attended by more than 500

Members of the local community attend a special church service for the killed Labour MP at St Peters Church in Birtsall this evening

Addressing the crowds, Bishop of Huddersfield Rev Jonathan Gibbs said: 'Jo grew up in this community, she loved this community and she served this community. And in the end - she gave her life for this community.'

Bradford West MP Naz Shah was in floods of tears as she shuffled into the church to comfort Mrs Cox's constituents before being seated at the front of the room alongside her peers.

Other MPs - Dan Jarvis, Mary Creagh and Caroline Flint - also attended, and linked arms as they left the church together in a defiant chain.

Opening the ceremony at 8pm, Bishop of Leeds Rev Nick Baines said: 'Welcome on this very sad occasion.

'We pray for Jo and her family and friends, mostly in silence, let's think of what brings us together and what we are responsible for.'

Sobs and sniffles could be heard around the room as the room fell silent to remember their 'loving and caring' MP.

After five minutes of absolute silence, a psalm was read to the large crowd of hundreds.

Speaking at the vigil, Rev Gibbs said: 'None of us could believe the news. The texts and messages came flooding through and we saw the news - and yet we still couldn't believe the news.

'We come tonight, overwhelmed by shock, and above all we are still numb and that is still part of our reaction for all of us, to Brendan, and to her children.

'We should be still tonight - but after a time of stillness we will need a time to talk. There will be anger, hurt and pain, and we need to learn how we deal with that in our own communities.

'We remember Jo as a wife and a mother and tonight we honour both of those. We hold her, we hold the family in our hearts and our pride.

'We pray that justice is done.'

Labour MP's Mary Creagh (left) and Caroline Flint (second right ) leave St Peters church after attending a vigil in honour of their friend

Speaking about the turn out after the ceremony, Rev Gibbs said: 'I'm so pleased by the range of people who have come to pay their respects.

'Jo was hugely respected by the whole community and she had their whole affectionate respect.'

Speaking outside the church about her friend, Wakefield MP Mary Creagh said: 'Jo fizzed with life and crackled with energy.

'She not only cared a lot about family and family values, but also about the forgotten, and disposed of people, and atrocities across the world.

'It has been a very troubling day in our open democracy - but our thoughts are with Brendan and those motherless children.

'Tonight I want Jo to be remembered as warm, witty and principled MP.

'She is such a loss, not just to the Labour party and her constituents, but the entire country.'

'We have lost a great star': David Cameron leads tributes from a shattered Westminster to tragic Labour MP Jo Cox

David Cameron tonight paid tribute to Mrs Cox and said she was a 'star' in Parliament who had 'huge compassion and a big heart'

By Tim Sculthorpe

David Cameron said Britain had lost a 'great star' as he led tributes from a shattered Westminster after the killing of Jo Cox.

The Prime Minister, who has cancelled his referendum campaigning, said it was 'tragic and dreadful news' and sent his thought's to Mrs Cox's husband Brendan.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke of his shock at the loss of a 'much loss colleague' who was a 'dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace'.

Politicians from across the political spectrum revealed their grief after news of Mrs Cox's death was confirmed shortly after 5pm.

Mr Cameron said: 'This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news. My thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan, her two children, and their wider family.

'We have lost a great star. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart and people are going to be very, very sad at what has happened. Dreadful, dreadful news.

'It's right we are suspending campaigning activity in this referendum and everyone's thought will be with Jo's family and with her constituents at this terrible time.'

Labour leader Mr Corbyn said: 'The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family - and indeed the whole country - will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox.

'Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity. She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen  where she was born and grew up.

'Jo was dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights  and she brought those values and principles with her when she became an MP.

'Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all.

'Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

'In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

'We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.'

Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said: 'The whole of the Labour movement is devastated at Jo's death. We have lost a colleague so young who had much more to contribute to public life. She was our future.

'It is hard to comprehend how a compassionate, principled and beautiful person can be taken away from us so cruelly. It's even more devastating because she was doing what she did best - serving her constituents.

'We grieve her loss. Our love and prayers are with Brendan and Jo's family.'

Commons speaker John Bercow said: 'I am absolutely devastated to learn the news about Jo Cox.

'Jo was an outstanding Member of Parliament and a wonderful, kind, caring person who was liked and respected in all parts of the House.

'My thoughts and prayers are with her family at this harrowing time.'

Mr Cameron said the loss of Jo Cox was a 'tragedy' as he offered condolences to her family, including husband Brendan and their children

Union Jack flags were seen flying at half mast from the roof of Downing street in London this evening in honour of Mrs Cox

Theresa May said Mrs Cox was one of the 'brightest and most popular' MPs and the pain her family and friends are suffering is 'unimaginable'.

The Home Secretary added: 'Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this terrible time.

'The full details of what happened outside Jo's constituency surgery in Birstall are not yet clear and until the facts have been fully established I will not comment further.

'It is entirely appropriate that all campaigning for the referendum has been suspended.

'All of us are united in our deep sadness at the loss of one of our brightest and most popular Westminster colleagues.'

Former Labour MP Joan Walley, in whose parliamentary office Mrs Cox had worked before becoming an MP herself, was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's PM programme as news of her death came in.

A clearly distressed Ms Walley said: 'Nothing has prepared me to be in a situation where I'm live on BBC radio to pay tribute to a really, truly special and compassionate woman, who totally believed in public service, who totally believed in eradicating poverty, who totally wanted to see environmental improvements, with a young family and a whole life in politics in front of her.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (pictured tonight right), paid his own tribute to Mrs Cox, as did Home Secretary Theresa May (left)

ONE OF THE 'BRIGHTEST AND MOST POPULAR' MPS IN THE COUNTRY Theresa May said Mrs Cox was one of the 'brightest and most popular' MPs and the pain her family and friends are suffering is 'unimaginable'. The Home Secretary added: 'Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this terrible time. 'The full details of what happened outside Jo's constituency surgery in Birstall are not yet clear and until the facts have been fully established I will not comment further. 'It is entirely appropriate that all campaigning for the referendum has been suspended. 'All of us are united in our deep sadness at the loss of one of our brightest and most popular Westminster colleagues. Advertisement

'Words can't express what I feel because Jo's life and everything she believed in are so badly needed now.

'My thoughts and prayers are with her family and I just hope all Jo's many family, friends, admirers, whatever political side they are, will unite to think about her, to think about our parliamentary democracy and to think what we can do together to be true to the things she believed in.'

Former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell told PM: 'My thoughts - as everyone across Parliament's will be - are with her husband Brendan and her two lovely little children, who used to come into Portcullis House to have tea with her during the week.

'It is an unspeakable and un-understandable event that has taken place, and Parliament and her constituents will be much the poorer for her passing.

'But it's her family and those two little children who we must be thinking about now.'

Labour MP Jess Phillips said: 'My heart is broken. She was amazing, a brave giant who stood against bullies.'

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: 'Deeply saddened by news of the death of Jo Cox.'

And Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: 'I didn't know Jo Cox but by all accounts she was a brilliant young MP.

'And she was just doing her job. My heart breaks for her family.'

CHANCELLOR CANCELS MAJOR ADDRESS ON ECONOMY TO PAY EMOTIONAL TRIBUTE TO 'LIKED AND RESPECTED' MP George Osborne tonight cancelled a major address on the economy and referendum to pay an emotional tribute to Jo Cox George Osborne tonight cancelled a major address on the economy and referendum to pay an emotional tribute to Jo Cox. He said all MPs had been rocked by the 'appalling, shattering news' of her death when it was confirmed by West Yorkshire Police shortly after 5pm. But a week before a vote that will define his career, Mr Osborne said 'freedom, liberty and justice' would prevail over the 'hatred that killed her'. The Chancellor welcomed the decision to suspend campaigning on the EU referendum with less than a week to polling day out of respect for the tragic events in Birstall. Mr Osborne, speaking at the annual Mansion House dinner, said Mrs Cox had died 'serving her constituents, serving our democracy'. And Mr Osborne reflected on how all MPs making themselves available to their constituents is 'one of the virtues of our Parliamentary democracy'. He said: 'It's what makes the way we govern ourselves very different from many others. 'To be an effective representative, all of us who are MPs engage with their communities, talk to everyone and anyone, hold constituency surgeries and must be prepared to stand up and argue publicly for what we believe. 'Jo did all of these things.' The Chancellor said the Batley and Spen MP had been 'liked and respected across the House' after making an immediate impact since her election last year. He said shed changed attitudes and helped change Government policy despite being a new, backbench, opposition MP. Mr Osborne said: 'She will never know how many lives she helped transform. 'Doing that job, she senselessly lost her own life. 'Not since Ian Gow lost his life to an IRA bomb twenty six years ago has an MP been murdered, but others since have faced attack, injury and intimidation.' The Chancellor continued: ' We believe in Parliamentary democracy. 'MPs have the privilege of representing the views of those who voted for them and those who did not. We believe in tolerance. 'In the words of her husband, Brendan, Jo would have wanted us to unite against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion. It is poisonous. 'And we believe in freedom, liberty and justice.' Mr Osborne said the day's 'horrible events' were an 'assault on all these values'. But in a defiant conclusion, he said: 'But we know that these values, no matter how they have been challenged in the past, have always prevailed, prevail today and they will always prevail. 'For they are the values of Great Britain, our great democracy.' Advertisement

How MPs' security was beefed up this year after they voiced fears about lack of protection

By James Tapsfield for MailOnline

MPs were given extra protection this year after fears were raised about their safety

Security for MPs was beefed up earlier this year after fears were raised about a lack of protection from people with 'knives and guns'.

The expenses watchdog announced an 'enhanced' package for politicians outside the parliamentary estate in January after a survey carried out by the Commons authorities revealed extreme concern about their own safety and that of their staff.

Details of the extra measures were not published, but they are thought to include more funding for alarms, locks and CCTV in constituencies and homes. Police carry out individual assessments of what risk MPs face.

The watchdog had already more than doubled the amount of spending authorised on security away from the Commons to 77,234 last year.

The internal report prepared by House staff following interviews with MPs said: 'Security was raised as a key concern by many participants; this related both to their constituency offices and their accommodation in London and largely related to what expenses they could or could not claim under Ipsa rules ...

'It was felt that the limitations of the office allowance that could be claimed meant offices could often only be situated in out of town areas, or deprived areas of town, where rentals were below premium.

'This had potential implications for the security of staff, who were often women working alone or in pairs. Participants also stressed that security is important as staff can be at risk due to the number of constituents they deal with that have mental health issues.'

'Others raised concerns about safety in their London accommodation. Although there is a separate allowance for security measures in their constituency offices, most participants understood that they had to pay for security measures for their London home from the London accommodation budget, which because of the very high rental prices in London was very difficult to do.'

'A few MPs gave examples of incidents involving stalkers, and those with knives and guns, which although not just issues for women, were ones where some women felt they were more vulnerable.

'A few were aware that concerns could be reported to the Police or via the Sergeant at Arms; but others did not know this and referred to difficulties in getting advice and support.'

The document went on: 'Many women stressed that if they were travelling between Westminster and their London accommodation, or back to their constituencies when it was dark, they would prefer to take a taxi as they felt it was safer.

'They were concerned that this was not allowed under IPSA guidance unless it was past a specific hour, and that even then it was subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, which deterred many women from so doing.'

Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle carried out a review the security provision away from parliament last year, and at one point there was pressure for Ipsa to be stripped of responsibility for funding security away from parliament.

In a letter to politicians in January, chief executive Marcial Boo said the expenses watchdog had always 'taken seriously the need for MPs and their staff to besecure'.

Referring to high-profile protests against MPs over the vote on bombing Syria and concerns that backbenchers could be a soft target for IS extremists, he wrote: 'Recent events have led us, with the police and the House of Commons, to take stock of our arrangements to ensure that they are appropriate to changed circumstances.

'This letter announces enhancements to the security measures available to you and your staff.'

Ipsa has distributed - but not published - guidance prepared by the National Counter Terrorism Security Office and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure.
The wife of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen could be charged as if she killed 49 people, according to a report citing law enforcement sources.

FBI detectives are currently interrogating Noor Salman - who allegedly knew about her husband's plans to commit a massacre last week.

If Salman, 30, did drive her husband to scout locations and buy ammunition, then she could be found just as guilty as him of committing a hate crime, detectives told Fox News.

Noor Zahi Salman (left) with her husband, Omar Mateen (right), and their three-year-old son

Salman's mother, Zahi, a Palestinian-born American, opened the door to an FBI agent during a raid

Investigators outside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where Omar Mateen killed and wounded his victims

A grand jury has been assembled to consider charges as the FBI compiles evidence.

Investigators have reportedly obtained surveillance footage showing Salman buying ammunition with Mateen days before the attack.

And reports claim she told law enforcement that she drove her husband to Walt Disney World and Pulse nightclub to scout out locations.

Despite initially resisting questions, law enforcement said, Salman is now fully cooperating with the investigation.

She was seen on Monday returning briefly to the home in Fort Pierce, Florida, that she shared with Mateen and their three-year-old son, before getting back in a police car to continue questioning.

Salman has not commented publicly since the attack, which began around 2am early Sunday.

'I can assure you that we're working with our law enforcement partners to find out everything that we can about what happened at the Pulse nightclub,' Lee Bentley, the U.S. Attorney for Florida's middle district said on Wednesday.

'We are using all law enforcement and legal tools to reconstruct not only the events of that night but the events of the past several months.'

Salman was raised by her Palestine-born parents in Rodeo and she graduated from John Swett High School in nearby Crockett, where many of her extended family still live.

Noor Zahi Salman is pictured at the age of 15 in this 2001 yearbook photo from a California high school

Her first marriage was arranged in the Palestinian Territories by her parents, but the cultural frictions between them - Salman an American, her husband Middle Eastern - were too great, neighbors said.

She met Mateen - security guard, bodybuilder and devout Muslim - online. They were married on September 29, 2011, near her hometown.

On June 12, 2015, Mateen unleashed his deadly attack on a nightclub of innocent people.

Salman, who lived in an apartment in Fort Pierce, Florida, with Mateen and their three-year-old son, is the eldest of four daughters, with other relatives living in Ohio and Louisiana.

It's unclear when her parents, who served as witnesses for Salman's wedding to Mateen, came to the US. Their naturalization papers allowing them to stay in the country were approved in 1984.

According to a neighbor Jasbinder Chahal, who has lived across the street from Salman's childhood home for the last 15 years, Salman's parents tried to shelter their four girls as they grew up.

'Noor never played in the street, and the girls were never allowed to drive,' Chahal said.

After graduating, she stayed somewhat reclusive.

'You know, some kids after high school, they open up the box and the world is theirs. She was inside the box, just pack it up and get married,' Chahal said.

'They had a small wedding and took lots of pictures here at the house,' said Chahal. The marriage license says the ceremony took place in Hercules, California, and that an imam officiated.

Of Mateen, Chahal said, 'He was shorter than her and did not seem very friendly.'

Salman rarely came home to visit after she married because Mateen would not let her, Chahal said.

She quoted Salman's mother telling her that Mateen even tried to keep the daughter from traveling home to see her father when he was sick.

Eventually Noor managed to scrape together the money to visit before her father died in a local hospital, Chahal said.

Mateen was shot dead by law enforcement at the climax of his attack.

A federal grand jury is now being convened to investigate his widow.

The jury will hear evidence on what Salman knew about his intentions, and criminal charges could be brought against her as early as Wednesday, a law enforcement source told Reuters.

She could face charges as an accessory for allegedly failing to report Mateen's plans to authorities.

First appearance after: Salman seen on Monday night arriving at her home to collect her belongings

On Tuesday, FBI agents visited the home of Salman's mother, Zahi, in Rodeo, California, a small town north of San Francisco.

A woman, believed to be Zahi, a widow, came to the door when Daily Mail Online visited but refused to say anything beyond that the family are 'OK'.

The woman added: 'We are OK but we don't want to say anything. I am waiting for my daughter and to hear of her son. We will be OK.'

Shortly after the FBI departed, a neighbor Chuck Surman, 54, approached the house to leave a bunch of flowers on the mat.

Asked why, he said: 'I wanted to do something for her [Zahi]. You can't help what your kids do. I was shocked when I heard.'

Another neighbour said Salman only visited her mother once after she married Mateen.

Salman's mother 'didn't like him very much. He didn't allow her [Noor] to come here,' neighbor Rajinder Chahal told Reuters.

He said he had spoken to Noor Salman's mother after the Orlando attack, adding. 'She was crying, weeping.'

Salman's cousin Sana, 24, also lives close by but when approached by Daily Mail Online, said she did not know Mateen and had no further comment to make.

Salman's mother, Zahi, 50, still lives at the family home, which was left to her by her 56-year-old husband following his death last year.

Neighbors describe a peaceful family who are quietly religious and have never caused trouble on the tranquil street on which they live.

A marriage license says Salman and Mateen, 29, married on Sept. 29, 2011, in Hercules, California, and that an imam officiated, AP reported.

Salman married him after his divorce from first wife Sitora Yusifiy, 26, of Boulder, Colorado. It was also the second marriage for Salman, whose first had been arranged in Palestine by her parents, said Jasbinder Chahal, her mother's neighbor.
With schools out for the summer across Louisiana, some teachers in the Bayou State are trading their classrooms for factory floors and office cubicles.

With assignments ranging from one or two-day stints to as much as two-week placements, both general education and career-and-technical-education instructors will be spending part of the summer in their communities offices and factories, under a state initiative.

The idea is that the teachers will get to see what industry actually looks like from the inside in their region, and they will return in the fall with curricular ideas that tap their increased understanding of what it really means to be career ready.

These paid externships are a component of Louisianas Jump Start program , which created a pathway for students to earn career diplomas. (Students pursuing those diplomas are required to attain industry credentials but are allowed to graduate with fewer foreign language, social studies and science credits.) The externships are part of a plan to have more high school teachers get the same industry credentials the state expects career-diploma students to earn, which is important because the state requires that educators hold the industry credential they are preparing their students to attain.

The teacher-externship program currently only exist in select districts around the state. And while some of those districts have had programs in place for years, externships are new to others. The Louisiana Department of Education is currently working on expanding the number of externships available in the parts of the state that already have programs: Northwest Louisiana, Central Louisiana, South Louisiana, and around Baton Rouge.

The state hopes that participating teachers will return to schools in the fall able to tell students what their regions jobs are actually like, with the ability to answer questions like: What skills are needed? Are there opportunities for advancement? Whats the hiring process?

A Different Perspective

Last year, a coalition of ten districts in the northwest corner of the state sent 50 teachers into industry , 36 CTE and 14 core academic teachers. That was up from 40 participants the previous year. This year, the Northwest Louisiana Regional Jump Start Team hopes to again increase the number of overall participants, but are particularly interested in growing the number of general education teachers, counselors, and administrators. Whenever possible, the coalition is suggesting to districts that they send pairs of academic and CTE teachers, so the educators can work together to envision what career-readiness will look like across the curriculum.

Rosetta Boone, who is the CTE supervisor in Caddo Parish schools, fondly remembers her externships under a now-defunct state program called Teachers in the Working World.

I spent two summers working in industry, said Boone. I worked for Libbey Glass and GE, back when they made transformers. Those experiences allowed me to see a different perspective, to see what the workplace was really like, and bring that information back into my classroom.

Boone, a former CTE teacher herself, says that while externship programs for teachers arent a new idea, in the age of college-and-career readiness, administrators are taking the idea more seriously.

In the past, everyone was just focused on that college path, said Boone. Now academic teachers are embracing CTE. Thats why were trying to pair a CTE teacher with a teacher in a traditional core curriculum area. We want them to go out together and come back and work out how math, English, science and CTE will come together to get our kids ready for the workforce.

A group of districts in Central Louisiana is also looking to rejigger how teacher externships are happening in their part of the state. Last year, with help from the Orchard Foundation, a local education fund, 31 teachers spent three days touring ten businesses . That program will be offered again this year, but some teachers will be on weeklong placements.

Our teachers wanted to stay longer, said Jennifer Cowley, program manager at The Orchard Foundation. So this year, we are making sure to give them more time to do actual job shadowing.

They are going to be able to go back to their students and talk about the real world, talk about how what they are learning is going to apply after high school, added Cowley. When I think back to college, I was always more receptive to what my professors had to say when they brought in their real world experiences.

The externships are being funded through philanthropic and state grants to districts, as well as through federal funds flowing from the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, which is currently up for reauthorization .

Academic Concerns

Louisiana isnt the only state where teachers will be spending part of their summer working in industry. As of 2014, eight states were requiring districts to provide teachers with work-based learning opportunities if they wanted to access Perkins funding. Teachers in Tennessee can partake in weeklong summer externships in industries such as aerospace, energy, and healthcare. The state is encouraging districts to send two teachers, one from CTE and one from a core academic subject. And the University of Arizonas College of Education offers a program called Teachers in Industry for STEM teachers. The participants take classes at the university and spend their summers working for Arizona STEM firms.

As states like Louisiana have strayed from college-for-all models , some educators have expressed concern that these new program could result in decreased academic rigor. What remains to be seen is how many Louisiana teachers and administrators will embrace the externships.

Lisa French, executive director of career and technical education at the Louisiana Department of Education, has some advice for administrators who may be encountering general education teachers who are skeptical of the programs value.

I think you start with the fundamental reason why a math teacher went into the profession in the first place, that is to help students learn and succeed, said French. You have to get that teacher to see that this will help make their lessons more relevant, and with that increased relevance theyll see students more engaged and ultimately more successful.
She appears to easily juggle life as the mother of two daughters and being First Lady of the United States.

But Michelle Obama has warned she believes having a perfect career alongside a family is a 'ridiculous aspiration'.

Mrs Obama appeared at the White House State of Women summit on Tuesday night where she was grilled by Oprah Winfrey on the challenges of being a modern woman and being a mother to daughters Malia, 17 and 15-year-old Sasha.

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Michelle Obama speaking at a White House summit, where she dismissed the idea that women can have the perfect career alongside bringing up a family

But when the talkshow host asked her about women 'having it all', the First Lady dismissed that it was possible.

She said: 'I am always irritated by the "You can have it all" statement.

'It's a ridiculous aspiration. I don't want women out there to have the expectation that if they're not having it all, then somehow they're failing.'

Mrs Obama also slammed social media, which allows people to present their their lives as 'perfect'.

She added: 'They're lying. Everybody's lying. Y'all need to stop lying. Be real about the fact that no one gets everything.'

Mrs Obama has spoken of the struggle of juggling her career with bring up her two daughters Malia, 17 and 15-year-old Sasha

The First Lady told the chat show host she wants to return to a normal life during the first White House State of Women summit on Tuesday night

Her comments come as she also revealed that the first thing she wants to do when her husband leaves the White House is go shopping and sit in a public park.

She also drew a laugh when she admitted that her husband looks 'swagalicious' when walking off Marine One.

She then went on and described how she told him to be 'authentic' during the presidency.

'I told people from the very start, Barack Obama is exactly who he says he is.

'He's an authentic man as he came in and he's going to leave as the same person,' she said.

She also revealed in the frank interview that she told him to 'chill' when he said he considered running for the White House, and was immediately concerned for her daughters, who are now aged 17 and 15.

'It moves me to tears to think about the first day I put them in the car with the Secret Service agents to go to their first day of school.

'I saw them leaving and I thought: "What on earth am I doing to these babies?'"

Michelle Obama has revealed the first thing she wants to do when her husband's term ends is go shopping in Target and sit in a public park during an interview with Oprah Winfrey

She was candid when speaking about how it felt to watch her children, Malia and Sasha, drive to school with the Secret Service for the first time. But she also made the audience laugh, admitting that she thinks the president is 'swagalicious'

'I knew my first job was to make sure they were going to be whole and normal and cared for in the midst of all this craziness.'

Mrs Obama also started gushing about her spouse, saying: 'When I see him get off Marine One and walk into the White House

'It's mm, mm, mm! And you know, he has that walk, right?'

'He's got the swag,' Oprah said. 'He was very swagalicious,' Mrs Obama then said.

When discussing the end of their White House stay in November, she said: 'I want to walk down the street, I want to sit in a yard that is not a national park. I want to go to Target, again.

'I've heard so many things have changed,' she joked.

'I tell my friends they will have to give me re-entry training. What do you do now at [pharmacy] CVS, how do you check out? I've been living in a cave.'

The pair urged women to be more empowered and told the men in the audience to 'be better'

The summit included hundreds of speakers including the president, vice president Joe Biden, Gloria Steinem and president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards.

Michelle had advice for the men in the audience: Be better.

'Be better at everything. Be better fathers.

'Just being good fathers who love your daughters and are providing a solid example of what it means to be a good man in the world. That is the greatest gift that the men in my life gave to me.'

She urged the men to do the dishes and not 'babysit' their children.

'Be engaged. Don't just think going to work and coming home makes you a man,' Mrs Obama said.
Hundreds of acid attacks recorded every year but usually against women

with Ali, also married, for several years

She had been in a

A woman has been arrested in Pakistan for allegedly throwing acid over her boyfriend because he refused to marry her.

Already-married mother-of-four Momil Mai had been in a relationship of several years with Saddaqat Ali, also married, according to police near Multan city in the Punjab province.

Mai had been demanding Ali, 25, make her his second wife

Pakistani Kanwal Qayyoum was covered with acid in a separate incident in Karachi. Often women are the victims, which makes Mai's attack a rarer case

'On Wednesday night, Ali went to see Mai as usual and she threw acid on his body after he once again refused to marry her,' Bashir Ahmed, a local police official, told AFP.

Ali had time to turn, with the acid causing life-threatening injuries to his back but not his face.

Polygamy is legal though rare for men in conservative Muslim Pakistan, although a woman would have to divorce before being allowed to marry again.

Asma Fayyaz underwent surgery at a Karachi hospital after she was attacked with acid in a separate assault

Ashiq Malik, medical superintendent at the government hospital in Multan where Ali is being treated, said that the victim received burns to around 60 per cent of his body.

'Doctors are fighting to save Ali's life', he said.

A criminal case was brought against Mai, whose current husband is a labourer, after a complaint by Ali's family.

Acid attacks, which can disfigure and even blind their overwhelmingly female victims, have long been used to settle personal or family scores in Pakistan, with hundreds of cases reported each year.

However it is very rare for a woman to attack a man.
A male nurse who had sex with his 15-year-old relative and a dying patient's wife has been banned after he was found of professional misconduct.

The man was 37 when he began an ongoing sexual relationship with the teen relative in the early 2000s, a South Australian Health Practitioners Tribunal judgement shows - though he has not faced criminal proceedings.

He also had sex with a palliative care patient's wife after she turned to him for comfort while he was working at Canberra Hospital in 2006.

A male nurse has been suspended for professional misconduct for having an ongoing sexual relationship with his 15-year-old relative and for having sex with his dying patient's wife

The now 50-year-old, who cannot be named, was reprimanded in 'the strongest possible terms' in the judgement published on Thursday.

Together, the 'abhorrent behaviour' amounted to 'a very serious departure from professional standards', the judgement said.

He'd told the tribunal his marriage had been breaking down at the time, but expressed remorse and concern for those affected.

He has been taking part in psychological therapy since 2013 and is now medicated for depression.

The palliative care patient's wife after she turned to him for comfort while he was working at Canberra Hospital (stock image) in 2006

The South Australian Practitioners Tribunal found his 'abhorrent behaviour' amounted to 'a very serious departure from professional standards'

His nursing registration was cancelled and he has been banned from applying for nursing registration for four years. He must also pay the complainant's proceedings.

'The sexual misconduct of (the nurse) is a grave example of professional misconduct ... worthy of cancellation of registration and disqualification of same,' it said.

The tribunal accepted the nurse, who has been in the profession since the 1990s and 'had rehabilitated' following therapy, but said that did not outweigh his actions.

'His abhorrent behaviour represented a huge departure from the codes applicable to the profession,' it said.

It cancelled his registration as a nurse and disqualified him from re-registering for four years.

The South Australian Health Practitioners Tribunal also suspended a female nurse for professional misconduct until June next year for lying about bruising a patient's jaw.

The tribunal also suspended a female nurse for lying about bruising a patient's jaw at Royal Adelaide Hospital (stock image)

She had placed her hand over the 98-year-old woman's mouth and chin in April, 2014, at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

She then 'generated a false, inaccurate or misleading report', the tribunal found in its judgement.

The nurse had claimed the woman struck her face on the bed rail. She then 'implored' a colleague to corroborate her story.

'She was dealing with a patient of advanced years who was in a vulnerable and somewhat frail state [and] lacked basic communication skills. The patient was in a somewhat defenceless position,' the tribunal said.

Other nurses said the patient had been spitting at them, and the tribunal 'conceded the patient was behaving in a somewhat agitated and aggressive manner'.

The nurse later admitted she put her hand over the woman's face to stop her yelling and screaming as a 'knee-jerk' reaction to calm her.

She rejected she intended to hurt the patient.
Solicitor Graeme Stening, 51, admitted performing a lewd act which means he will no longer go on trial next week - but the woman who accused him of sexual assault gets to remain anonymous

A married lawyer caught engaging in a sex act with a QC outside a busy railway station has admitted outraging public decency in a move which will stop the case going to trial - but the woman who accused him of sexual assault gets to remain anonymous.

Solicitor Graeme Stening, 51, admitted performing a lewd act with the female barrister while they were both drunk outside Waterloo Station in central London during rush-hour, police said.

He was due to stand trial next week but has now withdrawn his not guilty plea and accepted a caution.

After both were held overnight in the cells, the woman QC, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was found with her knickers round her ankles, accepted a police caution on August 21 2015 for outraging public decency.

Mr Stening refused to do so and faced trial  meaning the female barrister would have been named publicly in court.

But six weeks after the evening rush-hour liaison on August 20, she tried to retract her acceptance of the caution, claiming that following a boozy lunch with Mr Stening she would not have been able to consent to sexual activity and must have been assaulted by him.

This gave her lifetime anonymity as a potential sex assault victim.

But Stening was not charged with sexual assault after police found two witnesses who said she was a willing partner in the drunken romp.

Mr Stening, a father of three whose wife Sian is standing by him, insists their encounter was consensual. But as a result of the allegations, he spent months in fear of prosecution until police confirmed yesterday that he would not be charged.

His solicitor said yesterday that the woman should be investigated for perverting the course of justice.

LAW WHICH PREVENTS THE LEADING QC BEING NAMED Under laws in England and Wales those individuals who have made an allegation that they have been sexually assault should be provided with anonymity during the investigations and subsequent case, under the Sexual Offences Act 2003. If an individual has a right of anonymity it means that they have a right to remain anonymous to the general public. This means that they will be unable to be named in any reports which are released to the general public through the press, unless (as is unusual) a court removed the restriction because it considers it unreasonable. The main reason behind this principle was the factor that it was felt that the victim has already suffered the physical and emotional abuse following the rape that if allegations concerning her sexual history, behaviour, clothing or even questions that she may have asked for it were aired in the media then she would be forced to suffer even more emotional abuse. Source: inBrief Advertisement

The woman requested a review of the police decision not to pursue a prosecution against Mr Stening due to insufficient evidence.

Stening was due to stand trial at Camberwell Magistrates' Court on June 23 in relation to the original incident, which took place in Spur Road at 7pm on August 20 last year.

A source told the Mail Mr Stening and the QC met for a boozy lunch at her instigation  and ended up so drunk they were found by police leaning on a wall outside Waterloo.

The source said: 'She had her knickers round her ankles, while he was exposed and touching himself with one hand, and her with the other.'

After her night in the cells to sober up, he refused to accept a caution for outraging public decency, but the QC signed it.

Along with being a leading lawyer herself, she had legal advice before signing the caution  in which a suspect admits a criminal offence and accepts a police warning without going to court.

She later said alcohol and medication had left her incapable of consenting to sexual activity. But officers found two independent witnesses who confirmed Mr Stening's claim that she played a willing part in the sexual activity.

Police decided there was not enough evidence to give to the Crown Prosecution Service after rejecting an appeal by the barrister last month for them to reconsider her allegation.

The source said: 'The witnesses said they saw this incident going on  but this woman seemed to be consenting to everything. The two police who caught them assumed the same.'

Mr Stening, who lives in a 2million house in Windlesham, Surrey, eventually accepted the caution for outraging public decency, meaning he will not appear in court and risk jail.

But his solicitor, Amarjit Bhachu, said the barrister should be investigated over whether she made the sex assault claim to keep her name a secret.

Family man: The 2million house in Windlesham, Surrey, he shares with his wife, who stands by him

He told the Mail: 'It was apparent from the outset that the complainant's motive was to obtain anonymity. Despite the police taking the decision not to take any further action, the complainant has achieved what she wanted by taking this calculated course of action.

'I hope the police will review the complainant's actions and the independent evidence with a view to bringing charges against her for attempting to pervert the course of justice or at the very least wasting police time.'

He added that his client had initially refused to accept a caution because he disputed the details of the what the police wanted him to admit. Those issues have now been resolved.

The female barrister said through her solicitors Bindmans: 'I reported an incident to police in good faith having carefully considered the implications and only because I believed it was the right thing to do.

'I would never make a deliberately false allegation of a serious criminal offence and any suggestion that I did so is deeply offensive and upsetting.'

She is still fighting to quash her caution, while facing a Bar Standards Council investigation into her behaviour.

Critics have expressed concern that the anonymity law could have been used to keep the woman's name secret  and pointed out that a prosecution of Mr Stening for sexual assault would have been fatally flawed by the caution she signed admitting consensual sexual activity.

Knickers around her ankles

A source familiar with the case told the Mail: 'I can't believe the police will accept her attempt to withdraw her acceptance of the caution. If her attempt were to be successful, she would surely have to be charged with outraging public decency  and appear in court after all. Witnesses claim she was an active participant in this 'romp'.'

Mr Stening is understood to have reported himself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority and could be disciplined for lowering the profession's standing.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said today: 'Detectives at Lambeth CID began investigating this allegation as sexual assault.

'A man was interviewed under caution as part of police inquiries. He was not arrested.

'A file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service and a decision was subsequently taken by police that there was insufficient evidence of a realistic prosecution.

'The complainant invoked a Victim's Request for Review and the matter was reviewed by a detective superintendent who upheld the original decision that there was insufficient evidence to proceed.'

A spokesman for private equity firm Doughty Hanson, where Stening is an in-house lawyer, said: 'He is not commenting on this any more and wants the whole thing to move on.'

Police say they are not investigating allegations of perverting the course of justice or wasting police time in relation to the alleged victim.
It may look like this ship is coming under attack but the USS Jackson was actually undergoing a deliberate shock test as it prepares to go into service.

It was the first of three tests for the vessel, one of a new generation of Littoral Combat Ships - vessels designed for warfare relatively close to shore.

Around 10,000lb of explosives were ignited off the coast of Florida and the USS Jackson passed the test with flying colors.

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The USS Jackson successfully completes the first of three scheduled full-ship shock trials off the coast of Florida

The ship returned to port in Mayport, Florida where she was inspected and data was collected from on-board cameras and monitors.

The next two shock trials will involve the same amount of explosives being detonated closer and closer to the ship.

Another littoral combat ship, the USS Milwaukee, will undergo the same test plan later in the summer.

The USS Milwaukee broke down in December, only a few weeks into its sea trials.

The littoral combat ship (LCS) program has been dogged by problems.

Earlier this year USNI News reported that Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote a highly critical letter to Navy chiefs in which he said: 'More than seven years after the first LCS was delivered, the report makes clear the program remains mired in testing delays with an unclear path ahead.'

The USS Jackson (LCS 6) which was commissioned at the Port of Gulfport, Mississippi, on Saturday, has sparked controversy with its name

Rear Admiral Brian Antonio told USNI News: 'This is no kidding, things moving, stuff falling off of bulkheads,' he said. 'Some things are going to break.

'We have models that predict how electronics are going to move and cabinets are going to move, but some things are going to happen, and we're going to learn a lot from this test.'

A US Navy spokesman told Mail Online: 'Shock trials have been a key component of Navy ship testing for some time now, and are used in the analysis of the ship and crew's survivability in combat.

'These trials provide an additional means to assess the shock response of a manned ship and the interaction of the ship's systems and components.

'The test results from a shock trial provide important information that is applied to follow-on ships and is used to improve the initial ship design and enhance the effectiveness and overall survivability of the ship and crew.'

But Joshua Kristenson, a naval officer, tweeted tongue-in-cheek: 'We just built this ship. Now we are blowing it up.'

USS Jackson is the Navy's newest littoral combat ship and was commissioned in December in honor of Jackson, Mississippi, which is named for former President Andrew Jackson.

Native Americans and human rights activists are furious the seventh president, who is most famously remembered for the 1830 Indian Removal Act, should be celebrated.

USS JACKSON: FACTS AND FIGURES Length: 419 feet Beam: 104 feet Draft: 14.5 feet Displacement: 3,000 tons Maximum speed: 40-plus knots Range: 3,500 nautical miles at 18 knots Crew: 11 officers and 42 enlisted Propulsion: Two GE LM2500 gas turbine engines, two MTU 8000 main prop diesel engines, four water jets, one bow thruster Weapons: 57mm BOFORS cannon, close-in weapons system, rolling airframe missile, .50-caliber machine guns and associated mission package weapons Aircraft: MH-60R multi-purpose helicopter, MQ-8 unmanned aerial vehicle Engineered by Austal USA of Mobile Source: Clarion Ledger Advertisement

Jackson USS is the fifth littoral combat, LCS, ship in the Navy's fleet, and described as a 'milestone' in the LCS program. It is the third of the Independence variant to join the fleet.

'As we welcome USS Jackson to the fleet, we are reminded of the importance of the partnership between our Navy and our nation's shipbuilding industry; a relationship that has brought us to the Jackson's commissioning, a time-honored tradition during which the Sailors who make up her crew will breathe life into the hull of this great warship,' said Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy, when the ship was commissioned in December.

'We also celebrate the lasting bond this ship will share with the great people of Jackson, Mississippi, as it sails the globe, providing a presence that only our Navy and Marine Corps can maintain,' he added.

Built at the Washington Navy Yard in 1832 for the United States Revenue Cutter Service, the first was a cutter that served along the east and gulf coasts discouraging smuggling operations, assisting distressed shipping, and conducting counter piracy operations.

She remained in service for 33 years before being decommissioned and was sold after the Civil War in 1865.The second was one of the original '41 for Freedom' fleet ballistic missile submarines. USS Andrew Jackson (SSBN 619) was commissioned July 3, 1963.

The LCS class consists of two variants, the Freedom variant and the Independence variant - designed and built by two industry teams. Freedom team is led by Lockheed Martin, while the Independence variant is led by Austal USA.

LCS seaframes will be outfitted with re-configurable payloads, called mission modules, which can be changed quickly.

These modules combine with crew detachments and aviation assets to become complete mission packages, which will deploy manned and unmanned vehicles and sensors in support of mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, or surface warfare missions.

The U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ship is designed to replace and meet the survivability requirements of three retiring ship classes: FFG-7 Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates; Avenger class mine countermeasures vessels; MHC-51 Osprey class coastal mine hunters

The LCS, with a draft of between 14 and 15 feet and a speed of 40 knots, was designed to operate in the kind of environment that is reflected in its name, littorals, or shallower coastal areas.

It is designed to defeat threats in coastal waters where increasingly capable submarines, mines, and swarming small craft operate.
A plucky pair made their getaway from the cast-iron clutches of the law after bending a police van door to escape.

The men broke out of the vehicle, parked on a street in South Africa, by making a crack big enough to squeeze out of and wriggle free.

Instead of chasing after the crooks, stunned onlookers laughed and applauded their audacious efforts - with one viewer even filming the 45-second escape on their phone.

Audacious: The crooks squeeze their way out of the crack after kicking and bending at the doors of the van

One of the men crawls out head first and the other wriggles through on his back.

In a matter of seconds the pair help each other out of the van and sprint off down the road.

The first of the pair to try his luck even stops to bend back the door so that his escape can go un-noticed.

No police officers were seen throughout the short clip, but they were in for a nasty shock when they returned to their car.
Navy SEAL Theo Krah, 28, is accused of killing a man in Santa Monica over the weekend

A decorated Navy SEAL is accused of beating and stabbing a man to death in Santa Monica over the weekend, police said.

Theo Andrew Krah, 28, allegedly got into a fistfight with another man on the Santa Monica Pier around 4pm Saturday, police said.

An hour later, the other man was found on a nearby street with fatal stab wounds and head trauma.

Police confirmed to Daily Mail Online the victim was Santa Monica resident Kris Anderson, 58.

Anderson was an Arts staff member at UCLA Extension, according to a post on the school's Facebook page.

Police were called to break up the initial fistfight, and identified both men. Nobody was arrested at that time.

'Nobody was injured [in the fistfight] and nobody wanted to press charges, so we separated both parties,' Santa Monica public information officer Saul Rodriguez told Daily Mail Online.

An hour later, Anderson was found lying unresponsive in the 1300 block of 5th Street, a few blocks from the pier, suffering from 'substantial head trauma' and stab wounds, police said.

Anderson died early Sunday morning at a local hospital.

He was described by a friend in a social media post as a 'very gentle' man. Another man who said he was a coworker of Anderson's at UCLA Extension wrote he was a 'friendly guy who wouldn't harm anyone.'

Kris Anderson, 58, died from stab wounds and head trauma on Sunday morning. The day before, he was found on the street in Santa Monica, not far from where he allegedly got in a fistfight with Navy SEAL Theo Krah, 28

Social media posts showed a memorial for Anderson set up at UCLA Extension, where he was an Arts staff member

A man who said he was a coworker of Anderson's at UCLA Extension wrote he was a 'friendly guy who wouldn't harm anyone'

Theo Andrew Krah, 28, allegedly got into a fistfight with the victim on the Santa Monica Pier around 4pm Saturday, police said

A woman who answered the phone at UCLA Extension said it was a 'very, very sad day' when she learned the news of Anderson's death. A spokesperson for UCLA Extension had no immediate comment.

Police said Anderson and Krah did not know each other before the alleged fight.

Santa Monica police department detectives tracked down Krah to San Diego, where he was arrested Monday morning before being taken to jail in Santa Monica.

He was charged with murder and is being held on $2 million bail, records show.

A Navy spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times that Krah is a petty officer 2nd class assigned to a West Coast-based special warfare unit. The spokesperson wouldn't comment on Krah's arrest because he is a SEAL.

The Navy is cooperating with the Santa Monica police department's investigation, and its Criminal Investigation Service is also looking into Krah's arrest, the Times reported.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said at least 85 British jihadis and fighters have been killed in Syria's bloody civil war

At least 85 British jihadis and fighters involved in Syria's bloody civil war have been killed, the Defence Secretary said today.

Michael Fallon confirmed around 850 people linked to the UK and regarded as a security threat are now believed to have taken part in the conflict.

While just under 50 per cent are thought to have returned to the UK, more than 10 per cent have been killed, Mr Fallon said.

High-profile British deaths have included Mohammed Emwazi, who became known as Jihadi John after he appeared in propaganda videos from terror group Islamic State (IS) in which British and US hostages were murdered. He was killed in a drone strike last year.

Not all of those fighting in Syria have joined IS, which still retains strongholds in Syria despite increased military pressure.

Shadow Foreign Office minister Diana Johnson said the 'grim reality' for those lured to join IS, also referred to as Daesh and Isis, had been highlighted by the figures.

But ministers must do more to explain how the 400 or so 'homegrown extremists' are being managed following their return to the UK, Ms Johnson insisted amid concerns that available powers are not being fully used.

Cabinet minister Mr Fallon, in a letter to Ms Johnson, said: 'Approximately 850 UK-linked individuals of national security concern have travelled to take part in the Syrian conflict.

'Just under half of these have returned and over 10 per cent have been killed.

'This number includes all those of national security concern who have travelled to take part in the conflict, not just those who have affiliated themselves with Daesh.'

He added: 'Those returning to the UK after training or fighting with groups such as Daesh can expect to be rigorously investigated to ensure that they do not pose a threat to our national security.

'If the authorities believe they have committed criminal offences, they will be prosecuted.'

Mr Fallon disclosed the latest update after Ms Johnson pressed the Government to reveal the number of UK men and women who have travelled to support IS in Syria and those who have returned.

Among the around 85 British casualties in the war included Mohammed Emwazi, known as Jihadi John, who was killed in a US drone strike last November

Labour's Ms Johnson told the Press Association: 'These figures show the grim reality for the UK citizens who have been lured into joining Isis - it's not glamorous, it's not exciting and you are very likely to end up either dead or tortured.

'But there is also a real issue here about the 400-plus fighters who have gone out to Syria and returned.

'These homegrown extremists pose a serious risk.

'Last year the Government introduced new powers to manage these extremists when they return, but the Government keeps refusing to say how often, if at all, these powers have been used.

'The Government needs to explain what they are doing to manage the risk these individuals pose.'

The UK Government believes the number of foreign fighters joining IS has fallen to around 200 a month from its peak of 2,000.

Mr Fallon met with his German counterpart Ursula von der Leyen at a Nato defence council meeting in Brussels yesterday

More than 50 UK-based people have been convicted so far of offences relating to the conflict.

Last month a senior British jihadi who boasted of recruiting hundreds of Britons for IS was reportedly killed in Syria.

Raphael Hostey, also known as Abu Qaqa al-Britani, left Manchester to join IS in 2013.

The 23-year-old became a key recruiter of British fighters and jihadi brides for the terror group and was also heavily involved in its propaganda. Many others have tried to travel to Syria and Iraq but were stopped on their journey.

In May, three children were taken out of their mothers care after a high court judge concluded she had planned to take them to an area of Syria controlled by IS.
Tigerair is the most complained about airline in Australia but its overall performance has improved.

The airline saw its complaint rate fall from 4.71 per 100,000 customers to 1.56 in regards to refunds, and from 2.28 to 1.48 in relation to flight delays or cancellations.

Head of Communication for the airline, Vanessa Regan told Adelaide Now that this rate was 0.005 per cent of all Tigerair Australia passengers.

Tigerair (stock) receive the most complaints in Australia but overall has improved. Complaints for refunds fell from 4.71 per 100,000 customers to 1.56 and 2.28 to 1.48 for flight delays and cancellations

She said: 'This is extremely low compared with many other industry sectors.'

Ms Regan also added that the year on year complaints had decreased by 36 per cent and were down 45 per cent since 2013.

She said: 'The significant decrease in complaints comes as Tigerair has strengthened its operational performance and customer including Tigerair's on-time performance and reliability.

'In 2015, Tigerair had the best on-time performance of the major domestic low cost carriers as well as the lowest cancellation rates of all major domestic airlines.'

The annual Airline Customer Advocate report, released on Thursday, showed that Qantas (stock) received the least number of complaints at a rate of 0.2 per 100,000 passengers

The report also showed that Regional Express (stock) tied with Qantas with the least number of complaints

The annual Airline Customer Advocate report, released on Thursday, showed that Qantas and Regional Express (Rex) received the least number of complaints at a rate of 0.2 per 100,000 passengers.

According to the report 28 per cent of the complaints were for refunds, followed by 25 per cent for flight delays and cancellations, 11 per cent for fees or charges and 10 per cent for baggage services.

Virgin Australia was ranked third, Jetstar fourth and Tigerair fifth.

Meanwhile Virgin Australia (stock) was ranked third in the least complaints out of the 1,204 which were received in 2015

Meanwhile last year 1,204 complaints were received which is up six per cent on 2014 and only a fraction of the 70 million passengers that are carried on domestic airlines.

Whereas loyalty programs only had five per cent of complaints overall.

The report also said about 93 per cent of customers agreed or strongly agreed they were treated fairly by the advocate and about 89 per cent believed the advocate was neutral in its interactions.
Stressed-out police officers are having lunchtime meditation sessions to help them cope.

So far, 250 police officers and back-office staff in Salford, Greater Manchester, have taken part in the 'mindfulness' sessions held at Pendleton police station, whose officers have been struggling to cope with a series of gang-related shootings in the last year.

'Mindfulness' is a cornerstone of Buddhist practice which encourages people to focus on the present rather than the past or future.

Some officers are sceptical but others say the sessions really help.

So far, 250 police officers and back-office staff in Salford, Greater Manchester, have taken part in the 'mindfulness' sessions held at Pendleton police station, whose officers have been struggling to cope with a series of gang-related shootings in the last year. File pictures

Tibetan chimes are sounded as the officers go through meditations, concentrating on breathing and deep relaxation.

Some of the sessions, which are run by 13 volunteer police officers, are so successful that officers have been known to fall asleep.

It is believed Greater Manchester Police is the first force in the country to try meditation for officers and it could extend the scheme to other divisions across the county.

Police bosses hope the sessions will help to reduce rising sickness absence.

The latest figures from 2014/15 revealed 30,766 working days were lost because of sickness in GMP, with an average of 460 staff off at any one time.

When he retired last year, the then chief constable Sir Peter Fahy (above) admitted he had sought counselling as he struggled to cope in the top job and that he had also become a 'mindfulness' enthusiast

Research conducted on behalf of GMP estimates that sickness absence costs the force about 17million every year, based on the average salary of a police constable.

Psychological illness - stress, anxiety and depression - now accounts for nearly a third of all sickness absence.

Research conducted jointly by GMP and Manchester Metropolitan University - funded by the College of Policing - reported that 'sickness absence is placing a huge strain on the organisation and there is now an acknowledgement that the wellbeing of staff needs to be prioritised'.

When he retired last year, the then chief constable Sir Peter Fahy admitted he had sought counselling as he struggled to cope in the top job and that he had also become a 'mindfulness' enthusiast.

He encouraged efforts to improve the mental health of his officers, including free Indian head massages at the force's Sedgeley park training school to help officers stay calm.

The latest initiative has sparked cynicism among some officers but one experienced bobby said: 'The job's getting harder, there are less people and there's more accountability.

'People used to dismiss this kind of stuff and blame it on a bad back. To be fair to Sir Peter, he broke all that. If it helps people, it's got to be worth it.'

Chief supt Zoe Sheard said: 'My view is that mental health is as important to a police officer as physical health.

'We want them to go out and deal with conflict, but those same people will also have to deal with victims too - with compassion and often in the same incident.

'Mindfulness is about keeping them fit for each role. There's nothing mystical in this - it's just practical.'
An agreement forged by the Los Angeles school board and the local teachers union gives teachers more leeway over evaluation, by reducing the frequency of the review for veterans and providing flexibility in the use test scores for judging teachers.

The agreement isnt a total overhaul of the city teacher contractthats not due for a few years yetits instead intended as limited contract reopener. The districts board approved the overhaul at its meeting June 14, and 97 percent of voting educators signed off on it, according to United Teachers Los Angeles.

The new language can be found in this board document (scroll to page 10).

Most notably, the new system reduces the number of ratings categories from four to three. The exceeds expectations category is now gone. That may seem like not a big deal, but as Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times points out, this means that the city will have a much more difficult time using evaluations to establish master teacher positions, career ladders, or performance-based pay.

The new pact also slims from 15 to seven the number of performance objectives each teacher must meet and allows teachers to file grievances if theyre placed in the lowest overall evaluation category.

Teachers with more than 10 years experience wont have to be evaluated every two years, as was previously the case; now theyll be evaluated as infrequently as every five years. And the contract now requires administrators to notify teachers each year that theyll be evaluated.

Test scores on hold

State law requires pupil progress to be part of each districts teacher-evaluation system , but the new Los Angeles pact doesnt specify how that requirement needs to be met. It says only that the standards for measuring progress and methods of assessing whether theyre met must be determined by teacher and evaluator.

Former L.A. Superintendent John Deasy had pushed for test scores to count for 30 percent of each teachers review, and was blocked by UTLA in doing so.

The agreement specifies that the evaluation system is meant to encourage a career long growth of educator development and support, but some of those supports are optional. For example, theres a provision tucked in saying that its voluntary, not mandatory, for teachers to complete the written reflection elements of each evaluation cycle.

The agreement also establishes some new class-size limits and requires a new full-time teacher at each high school to teach electives.

Photo: Michelle King, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent, shortly after being named to the position. AP-File

For more on teacher evaluation in Los Angeles:
Little Lane's body was recovered intact from lagoon on Wednesday night

Disney says it will 'thoroughly review' its signs in the face of criticism over the lack of warnings about alligators

alligators were not on my mind at all when (her son) was in the water'

She has defended the parents of the youngster saying '

in the same spot just an hour before

A mom has posted pictures of her son standing on the same Disney resort beach where toddler Lane Graves was attacked and killed by an alligator just an hour later.

Jennifer Venditti, of Massachusetts, shared pictures of her son Channing, 3, wading into Seven Seas Lagoon at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Orlando - taken at around 8pm to 8.30pm on Tuesday night.

Around an hour later, at 9.20pm, Lane Graves was grabbed by an alligator as he paddled in the water with his parents Matthew and Melissa and older sister. His father had attempted to to save his son after the gator snatched him, but he could not pry the toddler from the animal's grasp.

Although there are 'no swimming' signs at the beach, they do not warn of the danger of alligators. Disney says it will 'thoroughly review' it signs after the tragedy amid mounting criticism.

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Jennifer Venditti, of Massachusetts, posted pictures on Facebook of her son Channing playing in the same spot Lane Graves was killed just an hour later

Venditti, who said her son was playing in the 'exact spot' little Lane was attacked, has leaped to the defense of the family who have faced criticism after the death of their son.

'I've already seen posts criticizing the parents. I can assure you alligators were not on my mind at all when Channing was in the water,' she wrote in an open letter on Facebook.

'It's a tiny beach, surrounded by pools, water slides, a restaurant and a fire pit. I can't conceive that an alligator would be in such a busy, small space.'

She also urged people to pray for the family in the wake of the tragedy, asking 'How does one go home without your baby in tow?'

The Grave family, from Nebraska, had been 10 feet from the shore of the lagoon when their son was snatched by the predator.

Chinning Venditti was pictured wading into Seven Seas Lagoon at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa in Orlando

Jennifer Venditti, pictured with her son Channing at the resort, said 'alligators were not on my mind at all when (her son) was in the water'

Venditti has leaped to the defense of the family who have faced criticism after the death of their son

Even though there were signs warning against swimming in the lagoon, they did not tell guests to be aware of alligators.

Last night, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demmings confirmed the body of Lane had been recovered 'intact' from the lagoon.

Authorities had scoured the area with a boat, helicopter and with a dive team and used sonar equipment to finally locate the body in the 'murky' water.

Officials will perform an autopsy but the sheriff said he believes 'the child was drowned by the alligator.'

It came 17 hours after his father had attempted to to save his son after the gator snatched him, but he could not pry the toddler from the animal's grasp - and the creature disappeared underwater, taking the child with it.

The Graves family were on the third day of their vacation in Orlando when tragedy struck on Tuesday night.

Walt Disney World has admitted that it routinely captures and moves dangerous gators from its property (pictured wildlife officials remove an alligator from the lagoon where Lane was attacked)

A Disney lifeguard told Daily Mail Online that the boy was wading in water about 10 feet from the shore when he was attacked

Disney World's flagship resort, the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, is on the waterfront and a stop away from the Magic Kingdom on the monorail

The body of two-year-old Lane Graves (pictured left and right) was recovered after he was snatched by an alligator at the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando on Tuesday night

Sheriff Demmings also confirmed it was unlikely that Lane's parents to be charged with any sort of neglect and added that the alligator probably drowned the toddler and abandoned his body on the bottom of the lagoon.

Demings added that the boy had been playing along the water's edge, doing 'what any 2-year-old would do' on a pleasant Florida evening.

During the search, wildlife officials caught and killed five alligators in the lake and they say they will now use forensics to determine whether they have already euthanized the gator responsible for the attack.

If not, officials promised to continue searching the lake for the creature.

Demings also said his department and the state wildlife agency would look into the issue of signs around Seven Seas Lagoon, where Disney had posted 'no swimming' signs but no warnings about the presence of alligators.

Disney are facing mounting questions over why there was no sign telling guests to be aware of alligators where a toddler Lane was dragged to his death next to the Seven Seas Lagoon

Lane Graves was grabbed by an alligator as he paddled in the water with his parents Matthew and Melissa and older sister on Tuesday (pictured, police at the scene where the toddler was snatched by the predator)

Divers located a body in the man-made lake around 1:45pm yesterday and it was pulled out of the lagoon around 3:30pm, authorities said

Around 1.3million alligators live in Florida, with an average of a dozen attacks against humans recorded each year (file pic)

Walt Disney World shut down all of its Florida resort beaches and marinas out of precaution after the incident - the first such death in its 45-year history.

The resort has admitted that it routinely captures and moves dangerous gators from its grounds despite the signs at the Seven Sea Lagoon only warning against deep water and steep drop-offs.

Disney are facing mounting questions over why there was no sign telling guests to be aware of alligators where toddler Lane was dragged to his death.

At neighbouring resort, the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress, signs around the shore of a lake read: 'Please be aware of alligators in the lake.'

Hundreds of people have since poured onto social media, condemning Disney's sign policy in the wake of the horrifying incident.

Some claimed a 'no swimming' sign simply doesn't work while others urged the parents of the tragic boy to sue the company.
PC Michael Graham, 49, was found guilty of seven counts of rape and one count of sexual assault

A police officer is facing years in jail after he was found guilty today of raping a woman and telling her 'I am a police officer, I can do what I want'.

An Old Bailey jury found PC Michael Graham, a Metropolitan Police officer based in Hounslow, west London, guilty of seven counts of rape and one count of sexual assault relating to the strangling of the victim, who lived in fear and was left 'absolutely humiliated and disgusted'.

Court was told the 49-year-old,from Poole, Dorset, raped the woman repeatedly over a nine-month period and on one occasion was recorded raping her on an iPhone app designed to tell people if they snore.

Graham, who was suspended from the police following his arrest last October, is due to be sentenced later today by Judge Peter Rook QC.

Graham, who denied the charges, used rape as punishment and would tie the woman's hands with rope before he forced himself on her, the jury was told.

His victim told court she first went to police in 2012, 'but they didn't believe me'.

Graham, sporting a beard and wearing a blue suit, bowed his head as he stood in the dock when the verdicts were returned.

The jury found him not guilty on two counts of rape.

His victim was sat behind a screen when she delivered evidence during the trial.

She said: 'I didnt think anyone would believe me, because he told me that no one would believe me.

'And he told me, "I am a police officer, I can do what I want."'

Graham said he would tell everyone she was "mad" so they wouldn't believe her, she added.

She told the jury he used rape as punishment.

'I said, "No, I dont want to." And he said he is a lot bigger than me. He can just put his body weight on me. He can just force himself on me,' she said in court.

The woman told the jury at the Old Bailey (pictured) that he tied her up and used rape as punishment

In a police interview shown to jurors, Graham's victim said she was left feeling 'absolutely humiliated and disgusted'.

She said: 'He was always very violent sexually. He was a very angry person. I just remember feeling the pain of what he was doing to me. He tied me up and didnt stop. I had no control.'

Describing one attack, she said: 'He is shouting at me how much he hates me. He is just shouting at me, pushing me down and holding me down.

'He is just full of rage and anger. He was hurting me and I couldnt breathe. I am terrified of him. I am scared he is going to kill me, because when he goes into his rages theres like nothing there.

'I just thought he is out of control. He isnt going to stop. He just says that he wants to kill me. He was telling me that he was going to tie me up.'

In the video, she gestured to the police officer how her wrists were tied with rope, before describing how he would force himself on her.

When he was first arrested, Graham denied ever hitting or tying up the complainant, and insisted he had never sexually assaulted her.

He added that he had patchy memory of the last few months due to a side-effect of his insomnia medication.
Comes after he failed to cough up 1.2m to pay victims of investment scam

'Lord' Hugh Rodley, 69, has been jailed for another seven years for failing to pay the victims of his investment scam

A conman dubbed the Lord of Fraud has been jailed for another seven years for failing to cough up 1.2m he was ordered to pay to victims of his investment scam.

'Lord' Hugh Rodley, 69, was jailed for seven years in 2012 for fleecing up to 600 pensioners with the promise of rich rewards.

He was already serving an eight-year sentence for plotting to steal 229m from a Japanese bank in one of the biggest ever cyber crimes of its kind.

Following a confiscation hearing under the Proceeds of Crime Act, the fraudster was ordered to repay 1,236,736 to the victims of his investment con in November 2014.

But the conman - who splashed the cash on a Gloucestershire mansion and a fleet of luxury cars - failed to pay back a single penny.

Rodley has now been ordered to serve the full extra seven years after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court.

Acting detective sergeant Melonie Moody, from the City of London Polices asset recovery team, said: Rodley now faces the consequence for failing to pay the confiscation order with one of the biggest default sentences we have seen in recent times.

Our work does not stop here and we are now co-ordinating further legal proceedings which will hopefully enable us to reunite 741 victims with money they had lost to Rodley.

This result sends a clear message to the criminals who must realise that punishment does not end with a conviction and possible prison sentence.'

Rodley along with Julian Silver, 47, Adam Corbett, 36, and Sonny Willis, 33, targeted the elderly and sold them worthless shares in the boiler room scam.

The gang drew up sucker lists of people they planned to exploit and splashed their criminal fortune on flash cars, including an Aston Martin, Range Rover S3 and a Lotus Elise.

The plan to plunder Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation in 2004 failed at the last minute after the bungling computer boffins inputted the wrong codes.

Father-of-three Rodley, Silver, Corbett and Willis were found guilty of running the scam between 2004 and 2007 after a trial at Southwark Crown Court.

The men employed high pressure sales techniques and promised rich rewards to trick members of the public to invest in firms they claimed were to be floated on the stock market.

They said the cash would be invested in exotic and fail-safe projects such as land development in Europe and Asia - but none of the firms were ever floated.

Investors were cherry-picked using so-called sucker lists, detailing people who had already invested in some shares.

Father-of-three Rodley (pictured) targeted the elderly and sold them worthless shares in an investment scam

One 87-year-old man lost more than 800,000 to the fraudsters.

Victims were told they would quickly make handsome profits when the companies were floated on the Alternative Investment Market.

But most people had little or no contact with the fraudsters afterwards after signing a contract setting out the amount of shares they had agreed to.

And at the heart of the scam was a floor book - a list of over 1000 investors, of whom 600 handed over cash to the fraudsters.

The document was seized after being discovered on Rodleys computer when his property was searched following his arrest.

Speaking about Rodley's extra seven-year jail term, Stephanie Jeavons, deputy director of the NCAs economic crime command, said: Rodley is a career criminal who has funded his lavish lifestyle at the expense of others.
A woman who ran a home for refugees in Sweden is under investigation for sexual offences after two Afghan boys claimed she threatened them with deportation if they refused her advances.

The boys, who have not been named, say the woman encouraged them to film her having sex with each of them, according to Eskilstuna Kuriren.

She then urged them to watch the films and to phone her when they missed her, they said.

One boy said they would be 'stoned to death' if they ever went back to Afghanistan and their story got out

The Swedish newspaper was shown the films and believes they show the acts described by the boys, and that the woman can clearly be identified, although she rejects all the accusations.

The pair said they tried to tell social services and the police but nobody listened to them.

They then went to the newspaper with their story on the advice of relatives living in another part of Sweden.

The boys, who cannot be named, claim they had sex with the woman on four or five occasions, at a hotel and in her own home in the Sormland region in Sweden

'The boss at the home forced us into it and exploited us for sex. She knew we had to, and that nobody would help us,' one said.

The boys claim they had sex with the woman on four or five occasions, at a hotel and in her own home in the Sormland region.

On one occasion all three were in bed together, they say, but mostly one of the boys had sex with the woman while the other filmed.

The woman also offered them alcohol, they claim, saying it would help them enjoy the experience, despite them being under the legal drinking age of 18.

They allege that she promised to buy them clothes and toiletries if they had sex with her, but she also told them she would destroy important documents and get the migration agency to deport them if they said 'no'.

They also faced sexual advances from other people in the womans social circle, they say.

One of the boys said they would be 'stoned to death' if they ever went back to Afghanistan and their story got out.

The boys were recently moved to a home in a different municipality where local authorities contacted the police after hearing their allegations.

Police confirmed to the newspaper that an investigation into sexual offences was ongoing, although they would not specify what the alleged offences were.
The judge who sentenced Brock Turner to just six months for raping an unconscious woman believed the Stanford swimmer asked her for consent, case transcripts have revealed.

Under fire Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Judge Aaron Persky said he trusted Turner, who assaulted the woman behind a dumpster, when he claimed that even in his 'drunken state, he remembered consent'.

'I mean, I take him at his word that, subjectively, that's his version of events,' Persky said, according to sentencing transcripts from a June 2 hearing.

He added: 'The jury, obviously, found it not to be the sequence of events.'

Prosecutor Alaleh Kianerci slammed Persky's ruling after witnesses saw the student athlete on top of the passed out, half naked victim.

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According to the sentencing transcript for ex-Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky (above) said, 'I take him at his word' on Turner's claims that the victim gave him consent

In court, Persky's ruling on Turner's (above) six month jail sentence was repudiated by prosecutor Alaleh Kianerci who said witnesses saw the athlete on top of the victim, who was unconscious during the sexual assault

Kianerci added that Turner believes the woman was coherent 'because that's the story that he tells himself and his family and that gets him through his day.'

'...While the defendant believes his lie, this court shouldn't, because 12 jurors didn't,' Kianerci said.

Controversy erupted after Persky announced his sentence for Turner, who was convicted in March on three felony counts for the 2015 sexual assault that happened at a fraternity party at Stanford where he was a freshman student at the time.

The 20-year-old faced a maximum possible sentence of 14 years in prison, and prosecutors were seeking a six year sentence in the case.

But Persky, who followed a recommendation from probation officials, handed down the six month sentence, which could see Turner released in as little as three months. Turner will be on probation for three years after his release and has to register as a sex offender.

For the judge to sentence Turner, it was necessary for him to find 'unusual circumstances where the interest of justice would be best served,' the documents read.

At the hearing, Persky stated that the woman's life has been 'poisoned by the assault,' but countered that a state prison sentence for Turner would not be 'an antidote for that poison.'

He said that he considered the fact that Turner did not have any previous convictions when he sentenced him to six months.

In addition, Persky also said he considered Turner's age, the fact that he wasn't armed during the rape, that he didn't portray criminal sophistication, would follow probation orders and would not be a danger to others if he wasn't imprisoned.

Kianerci added that Turner (above) believes the woman was coherent 'because that's the story that he tells himself and his family and that gets him through his day'

Kianerci said: '...While the defendant believes his lie, this court shouldn't, because 12 jurors didn't.' Above Turner is pictured while swimming

Persky believed that a prison sentence for the athlete would have a 'severe impact' on him, and that his life would suffer severe 'collateral consequences' due to the publicity and requirement to register as a sex offender, the sentencing transcript states.

The documents state that the judge also responded to a probation officer's finding that since Turner was drunk, his crime was 'less serious' than other assaults.

Though Persky said alcohol was 'not an excuse,' he did consider it in Turner's favor when he assessed moral culpability.

In factoring his decision for probation in the case, Persky said that the victim was 'extremely vulnerable' and said she suffered 'both physical and devastating emotional injury.'

The judge called her victim impact statement, which has since gone viral, 'eloquent.'

But Persky said that he considered the 39 letters he received that vouched for Turner's good character, and said that one point made in a letter 'rang true' when a childhood friend of his said that she didn't expect Turner to ever be in the position he was in.

'It sort of corroborates the evidence of his character up until the night of this incident, which has been positive,' Persky said.

The friend who wrote the letter has received backlash on social media for supporting Turner and has since apologized for the letter.

'I don't think it's fair to base the fate of the next 10+ years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn't remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him,' her letter reads.

Kianerci begged the judge to sentence the athlete to 'at least a year in county jail.'

'The sad reality is that sex assaults often occur by people you never expect them, people who look just like Mr. Turner, people who were the nice guy, the guy next door,' she said in response to Persky's comments about the character letter.

Persky believed that a prison sentence for Turner (above) would have a 'severe impact' on him, and that his life would suffer severe 'collateral consequences' due to the publicity and requirement to register as a sex offender

Turner apologized to the victim and her family while speaking before the court at his sentencing hearing.

'It's unbearable to think that my actions that night have caused these good people so much sorrow and pain,' Turner said, according to the transcript.

'Nobody deserves a single second of what I have caused them to go through.'

At the hearing, Persky said 'one of the most conflicted and difficult issues in the case' is whether or not the athlete is truly sorry for his actions.

The rapist faced controversy for blaming his conduct on alcohol and 'the college lifestyle' when he was speaking to probation officials.

In the victim's powerful impact letter she said 'assault is not an accident' and called on him to accept the responsibility for what he's done to her.

'You have been convicted of violating me with malicious intent, and all you can admit to is consuming alcohol,' the victim wrote in the emotional letter.

'Do not talk about the sad way your life was upturned because alcohol made you do bad things. Figure out how to take responsibility for your own conduct.'

But Persky then said that he believes Turner was genuinely remorseful, and said Turner would not be truthful if he changed his version of what took place that night last year.

'And so you have Mr. Turner expressing remorse, which I think, subjectively, is genuine, and [the victim] not seeing that as a genuine expression of remorse because he never says, 'I did this. I knew how drunk you were. I knew how out of it you were, and I did it anyway.' And that - I don't think that bridge will, probably, ever be crossed,' Perskey said.

Prosecutors in Santa Clara County, in northern California, on Tuesday filed a challenge against Aaron Persky in a case involving a male nurse accused of sexually assaulting a sedated woman.

The request to have him removed from the new case came after he suddenly dismissed a misdemeanor theft case before deliberations started, arguing prosecutors had not made their case.

Since the sentencing, Persky has faced seething criticism and death threats for his decision. Protests (above) have erupted with calls and a petition to have him removed from the bench

'We are disappointed and puzzled at judge Persky's unusual decision to unilaterally dismiss a case before the jury could deliberate,' Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement and confirmed Persky's removal from the new sex assault case.

'After this and the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient,' Rosen said.

'This is a rare and carefully considered step for our office. In the future, we will evaluate each case on its own merits and decide if we should use our legal right to ask for another judge in order to protect public safety and pursue justice.'

A juror who helped to convict Turner spoke out against the judge for his 'ridiculous lenient' jail sentence.

The juror said it made a mockery of the panel's verdict to convict the Dayton, Ohio native.

'It seems to me that you really did not accept the jury's findings,' the jury member wrote to Persky, adding: 'We were unanimous in our finding of the defendant's guilt and our verdicts were marginalized based on your own personal opinion.'

The juror anonymously wrote in the scathing letter that he was unconvinced by Turner's argument that the victim gave consent for sex, according to The Palo Alto Weekly.

The juror argued that it contradicted the accounts of two graduates from the prestigious school who said the Turner ran away when they confronted him when he was on top of the motionless victim.
An anti-gay preacher who claims gays should be be punished by Allah with AIDS and HIV has joined Malcolm Turnbull, Waleed Aly and his wife, Susan Carland, at an end of Ramadan feast.

Sheik Shady Al-Suleiman attended the Iftar dinner at Kirribilli House in Sydney on Thursday night, which Mr Turnbull said was a chance for all people to unite against extremism, the Herald Sun reported.

The sheikh shared some of his radical views in a video posted online in April 2013, where he said if homosexuality was out in the open 'amongst a tribe... Allah will send on them diseases'.

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Malcolm Turnbull (right with Waleed Aly and his wife, Susan Carland) has become the first Australian prime minister to host an Iftar, breaking bread with faith leaders

Sheik Shady Al-Suleiman (pictured) attended the Iftar dinner at Kirribilli House on Thursday night, which Mr Turnbull said was a chance for all people to unite against extremism

'Allah will send on them diseases they have never experienced before,' he was recorded saying.

'What's the most common diseases these days, HIV, AIDS, that's so common, and there's no cure to it.

'When did it exist? Just decades ago. And more diseases are coming... homosexuality is spreading all these diseases.

'Let's not deny the fact, don't call it the name of freedom or that, don't talk about that this is the freedom of action... these are evil actions that bring upon evil outcomes to our society.

The sheikh (pictured) shared some of his radical views in a video posted online in April 2013, where he said if homosexuality was out in the open 'amongst a tribe... Allah will send on them diseases'

The Prime Minister (right) hosted the Ramadan feast at Kirribilli House on Thursday night, with a guest list that included recent Gold Logie winner Waleed Aly (left) and his wife Susan Carland

'The prophet Allah, 14 centuries ago, spoke about whenever [homosexuality] is spread in a society diseases will be set upon them.'

In other videos posted online, Sheikh Al-Suleiman said women should not look at men and they would be 'hung by the breasts in hell'.

It comes after Mr Turnbull became the first Australian prime minister to host an Iftar, breaking bread with faith leaders.

The Prime Minister hosted the feast, with a guest list that included recent Gold Logie winner Waleed Aly and his wife, Susan Carland.

Others invited to dinner include AFL player Bachar Houli and author and mechanical engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied (right)

Mr Turnbull was photographed sharing a joke over dinner with Aly and Carland, while at other times they appeared deep in conversation.

Others invited to dinner were AFL player Bachar Houli, and author and mechanical engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

Mr Turnbull described Ramadan - the period in which Muslims fast from food and water between dawn and sunset - as a special time of forgiveness, reflection and spiritual renewal.

He also recognised the other faith leaders present to share in the spirit of Ramadan.

'By breaking bread across religions and by bringing diverse people together, we are embodying Islam's emphasis on human diversity,' he said reciting a Koranic verse.

Singling out young Muslims, Mr Turnbull acknowledged the important contribution Muslims had made to Australian society.

Mr Turnbull was photographed sharing a joke over dinner with Aly and Carland, while at other times they appeared deep in conversation

'By breaking bread across religions and by bringing diverse people together, we are embodying Islam's emphasis on human diversity,' Mr Turnbull said reciting a Koranic verse

He sought to assure them extremists would not win in their aim to divide Australia.

'Acts of terror like Sunday's massacre in Orlando are perpetrated to divide us along lines of race, religion, sect and sexuality - but that kind of hatred and division must not prevail,' Mr Turnbull said.

'We must stand together like we do tonight as one Australian family united against terrorism, racism, discrimination and violence.'

Aly also quizzed the Prime Minister on whether highs-speed internet via the NBN was available Kirribilli House, before Mr Turnbull replied saying he knew The Project host was 'keen' on the internet upgrade.

'It is very well connected to broadband,' Mr Turnbull said during the light-hearted interview.

'Can I say, I know you are very keen on the NBN, but let me tell you something.

Australian Rules player Bachar Houli also attended the dinner in Sydney, speaking to the audience

Singling out young Muslims, Mr Turnbull acknowledged the important contribution Muslims have made to Australian society

'Within a week or so, a quarter of all Australian premises, that's households and business premises will have the NBN available.'

The Prime Minister later declared his favourite dishes of the Iftar at Kirribilli House was tabouli and fattoush - which is a Lebanese fried bread salad.

He confirmed he did notfast in preparation for the dinner.

'I just showed up here for the meal,' Mr Turnbull told Aly on Network Ten's The Project from the dinner.

Earlier, Mr Turnbull began the day with a tour of Qantas' Innovation Day with Treasurer Scott Morrison, seeing first hand the airline's connections to Australian business.

'I just showed up here for the meal,' Mr Turnbull told Aly on Network Ten's The Project from the dinner

Waleed Aly and Susan Carland (pictured at the Logie Award in May 2016) attended the dinner in Sydney on Thursday

Family butter company Pepe Saya tried to get him to sample some of their creamy spread.

He declined but was impressed by their product and story.

Owner Pierre Issa said it was an honour to meet him.

'We didn't get to butter him up, but we tried,' he joked.
Man stabbed his elderly father in the throat with the wooden chopstick

Michikazu Ikeuchi, 51, said he wanted to stop his parents arguing

A Japanese man who stabbed his elderly father to death with a 30cm chopstick has been arrested.

Michikazu Ikeuchi admitted he had stabbed his father in the throat with the long wooden chopstick when a fight broke out in their Osaka home.

But local police said the 51-year-old man told them he did not mean to kill his father.

Ikeuchi said he waved the chopsticks in front of him angrily but did not mean to fatally stab his father (picture above posed by model)

An Osaka police official said: Ikeuchi told us he had tried to stop his parents from arguing and he did not intend to kill his father.

He said in his anger he waved the chopstick in front of his father but before he knew it, it got stuck in him.

The chopstick used in the fatal incident was a large cooking utensil.

It is understood the man, who lives with seven people including his parents and his brothers family, called emergency services after the incident.

Chopsticks have been a staple utensil in Japan since 500AD with the Japanese the first to create the now popular disposable set which are made of bamboo or wood.

A woman in China made headlines earlier this year when doctors removed a 30cm chopstick from her stomach.

Tang Tang, 23, was suffering from abdominal pain at her home in Chongqing on March 22 2016 when she needed to be rushed to hospital to have it removed.

She had accidentally swallowed it a few months ago when she was shoving it down her throat to force herself to vomit, according to Huanqiu.com
These sickening pictures claim to show four married men being stoned to death by ISIS after being accused of adultery.

The images show blindfolded prisoners praying on the floor next to a pile of rocks before they are executed under the terror group's warped interpretation of sharia law.

They are surrounded by a huge crowd including children who have gathered for the chilling spectacle, believed to be somewhere near the Tigris river in Iraq.

Final prayers: One of the ISIS prisoners sits on the floor next to a pile of rocks before he is brutally stoned to death after being accused of committing adultery in Iraq

Militants hurl the rocks at the prisoner, causing to die a slow and painful death until his skull is crushed

A summary for the photographs, which were uploaded online, reads: 'Implementing the limit of fornication on four married men.'

In another image several militants are seen hurling them at the prisoner, although the victim is not seen in the shot.

As often is the case with stonings, the prisoners most likely suffered unbearable agony until their skulls finally ended up being crushed.

Dozens of onlookers gather for the chilling spectacle, believed to be somewhere near the Tigris river in Iraq

Under Islamic sharia law, married men or women can be stoned to death for having sex outside wedlock, while those who are unmarried face being lashed.

Stoning as a method of execution has frequently been been reported in areas controlled by Islamist groups across the Middle-East.

They include ISIS-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq as well as Taliban territory in Afghanistan.
A heroin addict is accused of grabbing a boy, seven, and calling him 'cute' in a department store while he was on bail for an alleged rape and has again been released on bail.

Sina Babakhani was on home detention for the alleged rape of a woman when he allegedly attempted to pull a boy by the arm as the seven-year-old and his sister hid in the toy section at Kmart in West Lakes shopping centre in Adelaide's north-west.

The 31-year-old was charged and remanded in custody for aggravated assault when he was identified using CCTV footage in January, Adelaide Now reports.

Sina Babakhani was on home detention for the alleged rape of a woman when he allegedly attempted to pull a boy by the arm as the seven-year-old and his sister hid in the toy section at Kmart in West Lakes shopping centre in Adelaide's north-west

But he was again released on home detention in April after a Supreme Court bail review.

He has again been remanded and released on bail after he breached the home detention conditions when he returned a urine sample earlier this month which tested positive for heroin.

Babakhani told the Adelaide District Court on Thursday he was a recovering addict on the methadone program.

Prosecutor Patrick Hopton opposed Babakhani's release under any conditions, but Judge Brebner said he had one last chance to abide by strict bail conditions.

The accused's lawyer said he would be pleading not guilty to the alleged assault of the boy.

He will face the charge in Port Adelaide Magistrates Court in August.

His hearing for the rape trial is listed for April next year in the District Court.

He allegedly called a seven-year-old boy 'cute'. When the boy and his sister hid in the toy section of Kmart (stock image), Babakhani then allegedly tried to pull him away by the arm
Two human traffickers have been jailed for a total of 17 years after a man fleeing radical Islam died in a shipping container crammed with 34 other asylum seekers.

The family of Meet Singh Kapoor, 40, were forced to watch him die of natural causes as they were powerless to help and couldn't raise the alarm during the 14-hour ordeal in the 40ft-long steel box.

Stephen McLaughlin, 36, and Martin McGlinchey, 49, were convicted today of conspiracy to facilitate illegal entry into the country following a re-trial at Basildon Crown Court, Essex.

The sentencing follows the discovery of 35 Afghan men, women and children who were found in cramped, squalid conditions at Port Tilbury, also in the county.

Human traffickers Stephen McLaughlin (left), 36, and Martin McGlinchey (right), 49, were jailed today for a total of 17 years after a man fleeing radical Islam died in a shipping container crammed with 34 other Afghan asylum seekers

The family of Meet Singh Kapoor, 40, were forced to watch him die of natural causes as they were powerless to help and couldn't raise the alarm during the 14-hour ordeal in the 40ft-long steel box. Above, an ambulance at Port Tilbury, Essex, on August 16, 2014, after the grim discovery was made

Ten women, 10 men and 15 children were being smuggled in from Dover to Calais from Zebrugge Port, in Belgium where the desperate families boarded it.

The Sikhs had paid an incredible 28,000 per family for the crossing - selling their businesses, stock and jewellery to flee radical Islamists in their home country.

McLaughlin, of Limavardy, County Londonderry, was jailed for eight years and McGlinchey, of Dungannon, County Tyrone, for nine years.

A jury heard McGlinchey helped to organise the lorry's movements and drove the container to Dover.

McLaughin supplied the lorry and allowed his shipping account to be used for the container's outbound and inbound journeys.

A third man Taha Sharif, 39, of Tottenham, north London - who is awaiting sentencing - organised the loading of the people into the container.

Following the macabre discovery, detectives from the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate launched an investigation, working with colleagues from the National Crime Agency, Port of Tilbury Police, Belgium Federal Police, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the Metropolitan Police Service and the UK Border Force.

A third man Taha Sharif (above), 39, of Tottenham, north London - who is awaiting sentencing - organised the loading of the people into the container

The court heard that the asylum seekers had paid thousands of pounds to travel to the UK.

The adult men all described themselves as shop keepers and when interviewed by officers they described being taken by various vehicles to the container and being told to climb into it.

They had to sit on top of bowsers within the container, their clothes getting wet.

As their 14-hour journey continued, they became cold and sick, fearing for their lives.

The container was dark and there were just two holes on the side to let air through.

There were no toilets and the children had to be sick into carrier bags.

A court heard how they couldn't breathe and prayed to God to save their lives.

When other containers were loaded next to the one they were travelling in, closing the air holes, they thought they were going to die, the court was told.

After the container arrived at Tilbury, ports staff heard banging and opened it.

They found the people inside and immediately called for ambulances and police.

The travellers were taken to various hospitals across south Essex where they received treatment for shock, exhaustion and dehydration.

Once well enough, they were interviewed by police and cared for by the Sikh community of Thurrock, who offered their help after seeing reports on the news.

They were later passed into the care of the UK Border Force agencies.

Detective Chief Inspector Martin Pasmore, who led the investigation, said: 'I welcome today's verdict and sentence, which reflect the serious nature of this sickening crime.

'Vulnerable people seeking help were treated in an appalling way at the hands of these greedy criminals, which prevented any prospect of medical help for Mr Kapoor.

'My thoughts remain very much with his wife, children, family and friends, and the other surviving asylum seekers who endured such distressing and shocking conditions.

'I am very grateful to the local Sikh community and the Red Cross who, in the days following the incident, were instrumental in quickly building a rapport between the victims and police as well as providing food and essential items.
A few weeks ago, I reported on my recent visits to several schools in Hong Kong . Ive just returned from another visit to that city, the purpose of which was to explore the policy context in which those schools developed. We wanted to understand, from the point of view of those who had driven the process as well as those in the schools who had a ringside seat for its implementation, what the policies put forward by the Education Commission in 2000 had been intended to accomplish, how they were experienced by those they were intended to affect, what went right and wrong with the implementation, and what those present at the creation think needs to be done now.

The new Hong Kong government created the Education Commission as the British colonial era came to an end and Hong Kongs new identity as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China began. The Commissions report was issued in 2000, the result of an extraordinary process in which it conducted more than 300 separate consultations and received more than 30,000 separate written suggestions and comments. Not your usual commission report, it contains a cogent and powerful analysis of the context in which the policy was made and offers as humane a conception of the purposes of education and as persuasive a proposal for achieving those purposes as I have seen anywhere. You can read it here .

I will focus on a few key features. The reforms were driven by the realization that Hong Kongs manufacturing economy, which had provided employment to millions of people with a modest education, was on its way out, being replaced by a financial services industry, consulting and management services and related industries that required far better-educated and much more highly skilled people. But they also realized that the future, not just of employment and work but of many other things as well, was becoming chronically unpredictable. The education system, which had been designed long ago to produce a small, highly educated elite and provide everyone else with just a very basic education, would no longer be good enough.

That system, based on an aggressive tracking and streaming design that favored memorization of facts, rote mastery of procedures, narrow specialization and advancement based only on exam scores, would no longer serve Hong Kongs interests. They would have to redesign the whole system. The secondary schools would not change unless the universities changed their entrance requirements. They would not be able to get students from widely different backgrounds to very high standards without first-rate teachers. The system would not produce students with the qualities they were after without rethinking the curriculum. That would not matter unless they also rethought how students would be assessed. None of the actors would be likely to change much of anything in reality without major changes in the incentives they faced.

Hong Kong had an excellent teacher corps. For a long time, Hong Kong universities took in less than 1.5 percent of the cohort. Many who did not get in went to the teacher training institutes. When only 1.5 percent of the cohort got into university, the quality of those who went into the teacher training institutes was very high. But over time, when 18 percent got into universities and many of the other top high school graduates went abroad to university, the quality of those who went into teaching declined. The Commission proposed greatly ratcheting up the requirements for entering the profession.

The curriculum and the pathways through the school experience were based on the British system, which strongly encouraged a low standard for most students and a much higher standard for a few, with a narrow path upward for the best students headed for university, who typically specialized in a small handful of subjects in the latter part of high school. The curriculum was focused on the traditional school subjects. Traditional methods of instruction prevailed.

The whole structure of this system was radically changed. The curriculum was both broadened and deepened. The old aptitude test at the end of primary school was abolished. Three public assessments were consolidated into only one at the end of the 12th grade. The focus of the curriculum shifted from teaching the standard subjects to providing a set of five learning experiences, which taken together, would enable students to acquire the whole range of cognitive knowledge and skills, attributes and values that Hong Kong wanted them to have. Some of those experiences would be provided in the classroom, some on the playing field and others through the extracurricular program and outside the school.

One way of expressing at least part of the aim was as a T-shaped curriculum, one arm broad enough to prepare the students for the unexpected and the other narrow and strong enough to enable them to hit the ground running with a very high level of preparation in a particular arena. The new system was meant to shift toward a design that would be heavily project- and problem-based. A number of subjects previously taught separately were integrated in the form of combined science and integrated humanities, and a new arena called liberal studies was created, focused on few broad contemporary issueslike the environmentof concern to the Hong Kong community.

The Commission saw the Hong Kong schools as too much like each other, cut from the same mold, and an old mold at that. They wanted to shake them up, introduce some competition into the system, provide some relief from the regulatory regime overseen by the central administration.

These aims will seem familiar to Americans. The scheme they devised was similar to the idea of charter schools in the United States, but different in crucial ways. Rather than create new schools, they wanted to limit the opportunity to get regulatory relief to the best of the existing schools. These were schools that had been established by church-related groups and other private associations and organizations, typically many years earlier, and had excellent reputations. They offered them financial support at the same level as the regular government schools, but as a block grant that they could use as they wished, rather than with the control over line item expenditures that the government exercises over the government schools. Importantly, these schools can also select their students, while the regular government schools must accept the students assigned by the government in a complex system designed to mix students by ability level. In practice, however, almost all of these schools offer scholarships, some to as many as 40 percent of their students. And the government relieved them of the obligation to teach both Chinese and English and offered them the right to charge for their services.

There was no doubt in our minds that these reforms, on the whole, worked and worked very well. We could see that in the high quality of the schools we had visited as well as the international comparative data for Hong Kong schools. The vision promulgated by the 2000 Commission report and the people who had produced it was alive and well. But we were concerned. Public policy appears to be combining with demographics to cloud the future of education in Hong Kong.

First, while the government required all primary teachers to have university degrees for the first time, it did not pay them at the rate that university graduates should command, which understandably infuriated them. Second, while the government did broaden considerably the range of learning experiences that teachers are supposed to provide, it did not really reduce the enormous number of lessons they are supposed to teach as prescribed by the syllabi. The combined effect of these policies has had a very destructive impact on teacher morale, produced a profound lack of trust in the government and sapped a lot of the enthusiasm for the reforms.

Third, the school-age population of Hong Kong has been falling like a rock as the cost of living in Hong Kong has skyrocketed and the fertility rate has declined. The governments response was a heavy-handed attempt to close the weakest schools. In the end the schools were not closed, but the debate produced rising anxiety among teachers about job security and further reduced their confidence in the government.

Fourth, the parts of the reform agenda that were intended to loosen up the system and produce more variety and better quality were not working as intended. The Commission had hoped that the formerly private schools now given more autonomy by the government but largely free of detailed supervision would constitute at least half of the whole school system. But, as of today, they are only eight percent of the whole. Among the best schools in Hong Kong, they are performing as well as ever. But they stand accused of reducing equity in the city, because they enroll many of the most favored and capable students. In much of the world, this happens because low-income parents, confined to parts of the city in which crime is high and transportation is expensive, struggle to take advantage of the choices offered by school choice systems. This, however, does not apply to Hong Kong, where crime is almost zero and public transportation is safe, cheap and ubiquitous. But government has been reluctant to expand the system for fear that schools that lack a strong record of outstanding performance over many years would abuse the autonomy provided to the schools that have been given this freedom to date.

The people who drove the reforms of 16 years ago do not regard any of these setbacks as fatal or irreversible. Indeed, they see the need for new reforms. I very much hope they get the chance to make the case for those reforms and I hope Hong Kong listens. This extraordinary, yeasty cockpit of messy democracy, sitting astride east and west, is in the crosshairs of the forces to which we are all subject, and it is very lucky to have produced citizens who are as good at thinking about what it will take to cope with those changes as any I have met anywhere.
A 12-year-old girl who says school bullying is 'killing her' has started a petition to stop her fellow students calling her names.

Tayla Sekhmet goes to Dysart State High School in central Queensland, north east of Rockhampton describes her school life as a 'living hell' and says she is 'the most unpopular kid at school'.

'School bullying is killing me. Please, please help me,' Tayla wrote on her change.org petition.

Tayla Sekhmet, 12, pictured above, is constantly bullied at school and describes her time there as a 'living hell'

The young girl said she had been bullied since she started going to the school.

Tayla has told her teachers and tried to make friends but is still targeted every day.

'People call me fatso, weirdo, ugly, freak and tell me I should kill myself,' she said.

'Even people in other grades who I don't know do these things to me too.'

The young girl's mother Kali helped her make the online petition which had more than 24,000 signatures at the time of publication.

The mother and daughter team want to take the signatures to the school and local government to stop bullying from happening,' Tayla wrote.

She goes to Dysart State High School in Queensland and says she has been bullied since day one

'I have told teachers many times, my mum has called the school, and I have had school meetings. None of this is helping.

'I've been told to just ignore these people, but I can't take it anymore.

'I don't know what else to do or where else to go for help.'

The young girl wants to show the school that bullying is not okay by showing them how many 'other people want to take a stand against bullying'.

'Dysart State High School should do more to protect students like me so our education doesn't have to be hell,' Tayla said.

Tayla did have some friends at school but one day they turned on her, according to Fairfax.

'They aren't my friends anymore, they bullied me too... They did something really nasty to me.

'That day I felt like jumping in front of a car, I hope they know exactly how that hurt.'

That day Tayla called her mum in tears. They made the petition the next afternoon.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the principal of Dysart State High School for comment.
A gun store owner reported Orlando shooter Omar Mateen to authorities weeks before he committed the worst mass shooting in US history.

Robbie Abell, co-owner of Lotus Gunworks, told the Wall Street Journal Mateen came into the store in South Florida in May and asked for heavy-duty body armor like the kind used by law enforcement.

Staff at the store, which does not sell body armor, felt it was a strange demand.

After his request was denied, Mateen asked to buy bulk ammunition.

Though Lotus does sell ammunition, staff shut down his request and refused to sell him anything else.

They subsequently reported the incident to the FBI, Abell said.

Mateen had already been investigated by the FBI years before.

But even after Abell's report, the 29-year-old self-radicalized gunman obtained an AR-15 and a semiautomatic pistol from another store in the area, bought stacks of ammunition, then opened fire on Pulse nightclub, where he killed 49 people and wounded 53.

Robbie Abell, co-owner of Lotus Gunworks, told the Wall Street Journal Mateen came into the store in South Florida in May and asked for heavy-duty body armor

'Turned away': The owner of Lotus Gunworks claims Omar Mateen came into the store in South Florida in May and asked for heavy-duty body armor like the kind used by law enforcement, as well as bulk ammunition

The store's owner Robbie Abell told the Journal: 'The questions he was asking were not the normal questions a normal person would be askingHe just seemed very odd.'

Abell also said Mateen was speaking to someone on the phone in Arabic and was walking around the store texting.

Mateen is of Afghan descent, where the official languages are Pashto and Dari. It is not clear how Abell's staff deduced he was speaking Arabic.

He added that staff were on high alert since authorities has recently warned them to look out for suspicious activity in the area.

Abell did not specify which authorities gave this warning.

Port St Lucie police said they did not receive a report about Mateen's suspicious behavior.

The FBI has yet to comment.

Once it emerged that Mateen was the perpetrator of the worst mass shooting in history, Abell said, Lotus staff instantly recognized him and reported their experience to the FBI.

Omar Mateen, 29, (left) killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 others in the mass shooting in Orlando last week. Lotus Gunworks' owner Robbie Abell (right) reported Mateen to the FBI weeks earlier, he claims

Investigators outside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where Omar Mateen killed and wounded his victims

He added that he was glad they did what they could to block him.

'If something is suspicious, its our discretion. We are the gatekeeper,' Abell told the Journal.

Mateen bought his murder weapons from St Lucie Shooting Center days before his attack.

Ed Henson, the reitred NYPD officer who owns St Lucie Shooting Center, defended himself in the wake of the massacre saying, 'I don't make the laws.'

He insisted he put Mateen through the necessary background checks before selling him an AR-15 and a semiautomatic pistol.

Detectives have also been investigating whether there were explosives at the scene after witnesses said Mateen threatened to rig himself and his hostages with bombs.




Hillary Clinton not only has an electoral edge in a new CBS News poll, she's beating Republican rival Donald Trump on two of his signature issues  terrorism and immigration.

The survey found that on handling terrorism, 50 percent of voters believed Clinton would get things done, while 43 percent believed Trump would be the top candidate.

On immigration, 51 percent of voters said they believed Clinton would do a better job, compared to 43 percent who said Trump.

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Donald Trump (left) has some work to do with the American public, as a new poll shows him losing the White House to Democrat Hillary Clinton (right) and losing on two of his marquee issues: immigration and terrorism

Hillary Clinton beats Donald Trump on the issue of terrorism, a new CBS News poll has found - as the former of secretary of state is also leading the billionaire in the general election race

Clinton holds a more narrow advantage on the question of who would do better on gun policy. Here Clinton has 46 percent support, to Trump's 45 percent, within the poll's 3 percent margin of error.

The candidates are tied  47 percent each  on the issue of the economy.

As for who would win in the general election right now, Clinton has the lead.

She has 43 percent of the vote, compared to Trump's 37 percent.

Both candidates have actually lost support, 4 points each, since the survey was taken in May.

Then, Clinton received 47 percent of the vote, to Trump's 41 percent, with 2 percent of voters saying they'd choose an 'other' candidate for the job.

Now, this number has grown to 5 percent, seeking out a third-party candidate, as the Democratic primary has finally almost wound down.

When former New Mexico governor and Libertarian Party hopeful Gary Johnson's name is added to the choices, he garners 11 percent of the vote and Clinton still wins.

She retains 39 percent support, while Trump gets 32 percent  again giving the former secretary of state an edge of 7 points.

A majority of voters also believe that Clinton will be the winner come November, though once respondents are divvied up down partisan lines, it's predominantly Democrats who hold this view.

Overall, 51 percent of registered voters surveyed said they believed Clinton would be the 45th president of the United States, while 35 percent believed Trump would be hired.

The CBS News poll also asked which candidate is stronger on immigration, Trump's signature issue, and Hillary Clinton is ahead

Clinton's win was predicted by 79 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of Republicans, while 47 percent of independents agreed.

On the flipside, 12 percent of Democrats believe Trump will win the White House.

However, 66 percent of Republicans say he'll be the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with 33 percent of independents in agreement.

The poll also looks at two Achilles heels of the candidates.

For Clinton, it's her email scandal.

For Trump, it's the lawsuits surrounding the defunct Trump University.

A whopping 41 percent of voters think that Clinton 'something illegal' in setting up a homebrew server and email system while she was secretary of state.

Another 25 percent say she did something improper, while 26 percent say she did nothing wrong.

Opinions here are also divided along party lines with only 7 percent of Republicans saying she did nothing wrong and 71 percent of GOP voters suggesting that she did something illegal.

Among Democrats, 16 percent say she did something illegal, 31 percent say she did something improper and another 43 percent say she did nothing wrong.

About a third of the electorate, 34 percent, wasn't aware of the ongoing lawsuits over Trump University, the poll found, which was consistent across the demographics.

For those in the know, 25 percent said The Donald did nothing wrong, 20 percent said the billionaire businessman did something improper, while 22 percent said Trump did something illegal.

Similar to Clinton's email scandal, Republicans were more likely to say that Trump did nothing wrong, while Democrats were more prone to say the presumptive GOP nominee did something illegal.

Ten percent of Republicans said Trump did something illegal, while 40 percent said he did nothing wrong.
Introducing Beja, the socially awkward dog.

Beja attends Happy Tails Resort in Norfolk, Virginia - an upscale dog care that recently introduced a 'spa' or paddling pool to their facility.

Only while all the other dogs jump around in the water playing and chasing after balls, Beja prefers to stand on her hind legs and just chill out, alone.

Playing on her own: In a recent video uploaded to Facebook by Virginia-based doggy daycare Happy Tails Resort, the cute pooch, named Beja, is completely unaffected by the splashing and fun happening around her

Even splashing doesn't bother her: Beja barely moved when a dog jumps in the water right next to her

In a video that was posted to the Happy Tails Facebook page - and has since received over eight million views - Beja can be seen literally standing out among the madness of the pooch party.

Some viewers have suggested that Beja might not actually be so introverted, as the clip suggests, but that she is standing by waiting for a treat.

However, in a comment on the video, Happy Tails jokingly referred to her as 'nuts'.

A person claiming to be the pooch's owner also commented that she 'definitely falls somewhere on the dog autism scale'.

According to its website, Happy Tails resort is no regular dog facility.

'Guests' stay on custom-made beds, in suites that feature 'recessed' lighting and 'piped in' music.

There's also multiple indoor and outdoor yards for both small and large dogs to play in.

In the Happy Tails Resort's video, a pool full of bouncy and excited dogs surround Beja, who doesn't seem to care one little bit
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent more than $600,000 of public funds on a six-day trip to New York, including $1,600 on a personal hairdresser, according to a newly released expense report.

The trip to the U.N. General Assembly last fall also included $210 in laundry services, $1,862 in meals and nearly $20,000 to move and store furniture.

Attorney Shachar Ben Meir obtained the expense report after suing Netanyahu's office and the Foreign Ministry. He said that he requested the information in late October from Netanyahu's office and was then referred to the ministry. After he was told to wait for three months, he sued both offices in a Jerusalem court.

Benjamin Netanyahu spent more than $600,000 of public funds on a six-day trip to New York, including $1,600 on a personal hairdresser, according to a newly released expense report. Pictured on a recent trip to Moscow

How do you like my hair? Netanyahu's expense report shows he made lavish purchases when he visited New York for the U.N. General Assembly last year. Pictured with Secretary of State John Kerry during the trip

The report did not include charges for Sara Netanyahu, pictured with her husband in New York last fall. Police already have recommended that she be indicted for inflated household spending and misusing state funds

'It's my money and I want to know what is being done with it,' he said.

The report, which he shared with The Associated Press on Thursday, threatened to reinforce the unflattering reputation Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, have gained for enjoying an expensive lifestyle out of touch with common Israelis.

It did not include charges for Sara Netanyahu on the trip. Police already have recommended that she be indicted for inflated household spending and misusing state funds on private meals and care for her ailing father.

Last month, a Jerusalem labor court awarded $30,000 in damages to a former employee of Mrs. Netanyahu who claimed he faced yelling and unreasonable demands.

In 2013, the premier was chided for spending $127,000 in public funds for a special sleeping cabin on a flight to London. He also ran up a $2,700 bill that year for ice cream, mostly vanilla and pistachio.

The court documents note that the trip also incurred a charge of $1.5 million for a flight, although it did not specify whether the flight was for the Netanyahus only or for staff as well.
A landowner has been fined $3,000 after hosting an unauthorised electronic 'bush doof' in New South Wales where a man died of a suspected drug overdose.

The Clarence Valley Council issued the maximum possible fine to the northern NSW property owner this week after 24-year-old David Gallagher died at the unauthorised Omega Festival on the long weekend near the town of Grafton.

'We will not allow people to flout rules that govern people's safety,' council general manager Scott Greensill said in a statement.

A NSW landowner has been fined $3000 after hosting an unauthorised electronic 'bush doof' (pictured) where a man died of a suspected drug overdose

The Clarence Valley Council issued the maximum possible fine to the northern NSW property owner for holding the festival without authorisation

'If landowners think they can host illegal events like this without penalty they are completely misguided.'

Mr Gallagher was found dead in his vehicle on Sunday afternoon at the event at Newton Boyd, 80km west of Grafton.

Police heavily criticised the organisers and ravers for refusing to stop the party.

More than 2500 people flocked to the remote location for the three-day festival, which had been hastily moved from an indigenous reserve 200km away when the Tenterfield Shire Council was granted a last-minute court injunction.

The body of 24-year-old man David Gallagher (pictured) was found inside a car at Omega Festival on a property in Newtown Boyd, west of Grafton, at about 2pm on Sunday

Mr Gallagher lay dead in the car for up to 12 hours as hundreds of revellers danced only 200 metres away at the festival's main stage, it was reported

WHAT IS A BUSH DOOF? The term doof or bush doof is used to refer to an outdoor dance party in Australia and New Zealand. The parties are generally held in a remote country area and boast live DJs who play electronic music. The scene is often associated with drug use and is not as regulated as common music festivals. Advertisement

Mr Greensill advised landowners who are approached by operators of such events to tell police.

'We make no apology for what some might consider a heavy-handed approach,' he said.

'A young person who attended this latest festival is dead and their family grieving.'

It comes after it was revealed Mr Gallagher lay dead in the car for up to 12 hours as hundreds of revellers danced only 200 metres away at the festival's main stage, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Ravers refused police requests to stop the party after Mr Gallagher's (pictured) death, with people still revelling at 1.30pm on Monday

Police will investigate if a drug overdose caused Mr Gallagher's death.

Ravers refused police requests to stop the party after Mr Gallagher's death, with people still partying at 1.30pm on Monday.

Det Insp Jameson said he was disgusted by the attitude of the partygoers and event organisers.

'In my 26 years in the force I've never seen such a strong disregard for human life than to continue an event when someone has died in front of you,' he said.

'We will not allow people to flout rules that govern people's safety,' council general manager Scott Greensill said in a statement announcing a fine for the organiser

Around 2,500 people flocked to the unauthorised rave, also known as a 'bush doof', over the long weekend after police insisted organisers shut the event down

The dance party was initially going to be held at Tabulam, a rural village NSW's far north east (pictured)

Police tried to shut the event down adding that organisers did not get permission from the land owners

Kylie Walker, Mr Gallagher's aunt paid tribute to her nephew on Facebook.

'Sorry my dear nephew. I wish I had known you better,' she wrote.

The dance party was initially going to be held at Tabulam, a rural village NSW's far north-east, but the Tenterfield Shire Council made a last minute application to NSW Land and Environment Court to cancel the event.
Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan told a Senate panel on Thursday that the Obama administration's fight against the ISIS terror army hasn't set it on its heels, and the group is poised to infiltrate the U.S. and other nations.

'Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach,' Brennan said during a rare open hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

'In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.'

ISIL, not ISIS, is the Obama administration's preferred acronym for the jihadi army that controls large swaths of Iraq and Syria, and is developing a foothold in Libya.

NOT WORKING: CIA director John Brennan testified on Thursday that the Obama administration's efforts to fight the ISIS terror army 'have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach'

SPIN CYCLE: President Barack Obama claimed Tuesday that his administration's anti-ISIS efforts were 'firing on all cylinders'

'ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West,' Brennan said, cautioning that flows of refugees and ordinary travel paths could hide smuggled jihadis in plain sight.

The group is 'training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks' in western countries, he predicted.

President Barack Obama claimed on Tuesday that his military campaign against the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate 'is firing on all cylinders.'

'ISIL is under more pressure than ever before,' he said, as the group 'continues to lose key leaders,' 'continues to lose ground in Iraq,' 'continues to lose ground in Syria' and 'continues to lose the money that is its lifeblood.

'We continue to destroy ISIL militarily,' Obama claimed.

But Brennan said the group has compensated for its losses of 1,000 to 3,000 militants in Iraq and Syria by recruiting and placing between 5,000 and 8,000 fighters in Libya.

'I am concerned about the growth of Libya as another area that could serve as the basis for ISIL to carry out attacks inside of Europe. ... That is very concerning,' he said.

TOUGH TERROR TALK: A senior policy adviser to Donald Trump (pictured) said 'Hillary Clinton's reckless foreign policy unleashed ISIS onto the world'

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has been openly hostile to the Obama administration's terror-fighting approach.

And Stephen Miller, his senior policy adviser, told DailyMail.com that the Democratic presidential nominee is in large part to blame.

'Hillary Clinton's reckless foreign policy unleashed ISIS onto the world  from Libya to Egypt to Syria to Iraq  and her immigration policy gives them the means to attack us on our own soil,' he said.

'Director Brennan's testimony is a chilling warning that if we don't get immigration control in place we will allow both terrorists, and potential recruits, to burrow into the country.'

'Yet Hillary wants to increase Syrian refugees by 550 per cent,' Miller added, 'and bring in hundreds of thousands more from the most dangerous places on earth.'

Brennan predicted on Thursday that ISIS will become more aggressive and diversify its toolbox even as the U.S. ramps up efforts to stop it.

'To compensate for territorial losses, ISIL will probably rely more on guerrilla tactics, including high-profile attacks outside territory it holds,' he warned.

PROBLEM: Brennan said ISIS will ramp up its terror operations in the western world, and has compensated for troop losses in Iraq and Syria with an expanded footprint in Libya

Brennan told senators that the CIA has 'not been able to uncover any direct link' between foreign terror groups and the Islamist who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub last weekend in Orlando, Florida.

The man pledged his allegiance to ISIS during a 911 call he placed in between bursts of gunfire.

The CIA director underscored the ability of ISIS to rally so-called 'lone wolf' acolytes around the world, calling the Orlando murders a 'heinous act of wanton violence' and an 'assault on the values of openness and tolerance' that define the United States as a nation.

Majorty Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday on the Senate floor that ISIS 'is not "contained",' and called it 'the personification of evil in our world, and it will continue to bring tragedy after tragedy to our doorsteps until it is defeated.'
Fiver cars were involved but no one was injured in the incident

About 155 buses were checked for faults to ensure the safety of people

A raid on three bus depots in the Northmead occurred after the incident

The bus driver was taken to hospital but was not injured in the accident

A Hillsbus crashed at about 2.40pm on Wednesday in Sydney's west

Footage has emerged of a bus ploughing into parked cars and then crashing onto the the side of the road.

The Sydney Hills bus is seen rounding a corner and then driving off the road onto the kerb.

It is believed the bus crashed into five parked cars on Boundary road near Kleins Road in Sydney's west at about 2.40pm on Wednesday and three bus depots were raided following the accident.

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Pictures from the crash site of a Hillsbus that was wedged on the side of the road on top of a vehicle were splashed across media on Wednesday following an accident in Sydney's western suburbs

The terrifying footage was posted by Varun Sidhu to State Transit, Ryde Bus Depots Facebook page on Wednesday with the description 'horrible Hills bus'.

In the video a bus is seen turning a sharp corner and hitting parked cars on one side of the road before continuing to go down the street and eventually driving off the road onto the kerb.

Wedged on the side of the road, the bus is seen sitting at an angle between the trees lining the street and the person filming the incident is heard saying 'what the  f*** that s***'.

The video has been shared over 430 times and received 10 comments with one user commenting the driver did not even have his brake lights on during the incident.

Footage has emerged of a Hillsbus ploughing into five parked cars (pictured) and then building on the side of the road at about 2.40pm in Sydney's western suburb Northmead on Wednesday

The terrifying footage was posted by Varun Sidhu to State Transit, Ryde Bus Depots Facebook page on Wednesday with the description 'horrible Hills bus'

Reports of the incident from New South Wales Police said that a number of road closures were in place following the crash in the Northmead street.

Police released a statement which read: 'Police and emergency services were called to Boundary road, near Kleins Street, following reports that a bus had crashed into a number of parked cars.

'There were no people in the parked cars when the incident occurred.'

The bus driver, who was aged 50, was taken to Westmead Hospital for assessment and was lucky to escape with his life.

Five parked cars were involved in the crash (pictured). Police continue investigations into the incident and major road closures occurred on Wednesday

There were no passengers in the bus at the time and no one was injured in the incident.

Police from Parramatta Local Area Command are continuing investigation and a raid of three bus depots was started on Thursday after the accident.

After inspecting 155 buses in the Northmead area officers issued defect notices including oil leaks, faulty lighting, faulty doors, defective seating and faulty braking systems, reported The Advertiser.

The checks occurred at about 10am at New Line Rd, Dural; and Boundry Rd and Seven Hills.

No passengers were in the bus (pictured) at the time and the bus driver was taken to Westmead Hospital for assessment. No one was injured in the incident

Commander of the Traffic and Highway Patrol, Assistant Commissioner John Hartley told the newspaper: 'Bus companies are responsible for transporting hundreds of commuters every day and they are expected to deploy safe practices or risk being taken off the road.'

Drivers were also breath tested and underwent drug detection checks completed by officers who swabbed their tongues.

One of the factors being investigated in the crash on Wednesday include fatigue which is a concern for police and reportedly could have been the cause of the incident, reported 7News.

The transport workers union told 7News that: 'Drivers are constantly under pressure driving for five hours at a time.'

Despite safety campaigns urging motorists to take breaks every two hours when behind the wheel.
warned arresting officers that 'anybody who touches me is going to bleed' and that he was 'I'm imposing the death penalty'

The previous day Waise argued with a Trump supporter when he tried to hand out Korans in an IHOP

Waise later turned up at a courthouse where he 'made threats against individual lawyers and judges', according to a witness

He also allegedly told an employee that the hospital would 'go down'

If they refused they would 'die' he warned them, according to an

Peshwaz Azad Waise was charged with making terrorist threats on Wednesday (pictured on arrest)

An Iraqi man has been arrested after threatening to kill medical staff who refused to take a Koran and warning a Texas hospital would 'go down'.

Peshwaz Azad Waise was charged with making terrorist threats on Wednesday after several run-ins with the police around Denton County - including threatening judges and lawyers at a local courthouse.

Earlier that morning, the 28-year-old, from Iraq, allegedly entered the Texas Health Presbyterian Denton Center for Women where he insisted that staff take a copy of the Koran from him and give it to the center's Chaplin or they would 'die.'

He also warned an employee that the hospital would 'go down', according to an affidavit.

Staff called the police but by the time they arrived, Waise had already fled the scene, CBS DFW reports.

But a short time later the 28-year-old turned up at Denton County Courthouse where he began screaming in Arabic and demanding to see the judges.

Court staff were quickly taken to safe areas during the commotion after being told that Waise had made threats against certain individuals, according to police reports.

'We were told that there had been threats made by this individual to judges and lawyers and that when he walked into the courthouse and they were screaming Arabic and had a turban and was trying to show people copies of the Koran,' said attorney Pete Schulte.

Although no direct bomb threats were made, police brought in a bomb squad as a precaution to search Waise's car. It was clear.

The day before, Waise had approached police 'talking irrationally' and making comments about God and Allah.

He was not arrested, but a short time he clashed with officers again who were called to disturbance at an IHOP restaurant on University of North Texas campus.

IHOP employee Darel Walker said Waise had walked into the pancake chain at around 6am on Tuesday morning wearing a 'turban' and carrying a Koran.

Peshwaz Azad Waise was arrested after several run-ins with the police around Denton County - including threatening judges and lawyers at Denton County Court (pictured)

The 28-year-old, from Iraq, allegedly entered the Texas Health Presbyterian Denton Center (pictured) for Women where he insisted that staff take a copy of the Koran from him and give it to the center's Chaplin or they would 'die'

He began approaching customers to talk about Islam but trouble arose when he approached one man wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt.

Walker said the pair had began arguing which eventually prompted a call to 911.

Staff demanded that Waise leave but he was still in the restaurant parking lot when police arrived who handed him a ticket for trespassing.

'For something like that to happen not only in your city but where I work? It's a little unnerving,' Walker said.

After his outburst at the courthouse the following day, Waise was arrested and charged with making terrorist threats.

Deputies say Waise told them he was 'the king' and warned them that 'anybody who touches me is going to bleed.'

As he was escorted out of the court building he told his arresting officers, 'I'm imposing the death penalty,' according to the affidavit.

Police are investigating what he was doing in North Texas. Wise, who was born in Iraq, does not appear to have ties to the area.
Hillary Clinton is hitting the airwaves in states that typically decide the winner of the general election with a crush of ads as she tees off against Donald Trump.

The newly minted presumptive Democratic nominee made an eight-figure, six-week ad buy in eight states, her campaign said today, that it could extend beyond that.

The ads primarily focus on Clinton's biography and characterize her as a champion for women and are airing as of today in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

One goes directly after Trump for his unsavory comments about people who disagree with him.

Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greets supporters after a panel discussion on national security on Wednesday at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Virginia. She now has ads up in Virginia and seven other swing states

The ads primarily focus on Clinton's biography and characterize her as a champion for women and are airing as of today in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina

One goes directly after Trump for his unsavory comments about people who disagree with him. They all prominently feature Clinton's new general election slogan 'Stronger Together'

'I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you,' Trump says of a rally protester in a clip that's featured prominently in Clinton's ad.

The one-minute spot also goes after Trump for imitating a disabled reporter who wrote an article he didn't like.

'What kind of America do we want to be? Dangerously divided?' it asks, flashing a photo of Trump, 'Or strong and united?' it asks, switching back to Clinton.

Already, Clinton has been framing Trump on the trail as a bully and a demagogue, who is unstable and erratic, and shouldn't be anywhere near the country's steering wheel.

She on the other hand believes the nation is 'stronger together' and would guide the United States into the future with a firm, yet compassionate, hand.

On the trail Trump has countered Clinton with attacks on the job she did as secretary of state and what he sees as a failure to appropriately define ISIS as a radical Islamic terrorist group.

So far, the billionaire has not made any ad buys of his own, amid reports that money is not coming in at a quick enough pace.

After self-funding his primary campaign, Trump is now raising cash from Republican Party donors.

But the process is slow going, several news outlets have reported, and it's hampering his ability to compete in states that will determine the outcome of the race.

Fundraisers are sometimes dragging Trump away from battleground states and into solidly Republican zip codes so he can collect the much-needed checks, the New York Times, observed.

And Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee who Trump has hammered as a 'choke' artist for his loss to Barack Obama, was raising roughly a million dollars a day at this point in his candidacy.

If Trump's fundraising operation isn't firing on all cylinders yet, his campaign is being careful not to show it.

'The money is pouring in for the party,' Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Times.

Hillary for America meanwhile reported more than $30 million cash on hand at the beginning of May.

Her fight against Bernie Sanders winding down, Clinton's appearances at fundraisers ramped up, positioning her to make early ad buys that could hurt Trump in the long term in key general election states.

This week she cancelled an event with donors in Cincinnati a day after the Orlando terrorist attack but kept dates on Tuesday in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. with Hillary Victory Fund benefactors.

Hillary Victory Fund is Clinton's joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee. Checks deposited in that account are systematically divided between the presidential candidate, the DNC and participating state parties.

Two other spots released by the Clinton campaign today, Quiet Moments and Always, chronicle the former first lady's rise to become one of the 'most recognizable women in the world.'

On the trail Trump has countered Clinton with attacks on the job she did as secretary of state and what he sees as a failure to appropriately define ISIS as a radical Islamic terrorist group. So far, the billionaire has not made any ad buys of his own, amid reports that money is not coming in at a quick enough pace

'Through the years there have been challenges, setbacks, but for Hillary, one thing's never changed - helping children has been a cause of her life,' the traditional, introductory bio spot 'Always' states, ending on the note, 'And it always will be.'

Quiet Moments declares that for Hillary, 'It's always been about kids,' and touts her role in the children's health care campaign.

Clinton buttressed the ad buy with visits to Ohio and Virginia this week, along with Pennsylvania, after ditching plans to appear with Obama in Green Bay, Wisconsin, following the Orlando terrorist attack last Sunday.

Her targeting of North Carolina in the ad buy is the latest evidence that she plans to go after Trump not just in states Obama won in the last election, but in those that are trending Republican, as well.

Obama won North Carolina in 2008. In a dramatic shift, it went for McCain in 2012, with Tar Heel voters installing a Republican governor, Pat McCrory, as well.

Polling shows a tight race for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Richard Burr and his Democratic opponent Deborah Ross in a race where the Libertarian candidate who is winning eight percent of the vote could play the spoiler.

With Clinton spending heavily there, Ross may also be buoyed up, pushing Republicans into the paint as they protect their majority in the Senate.
Can the FBI Access My Browsing History?

The kind of websites a person visits can tell you a lot about them. For instance, if someone is visiting ISIL message boards or googling bomb recipes, that might indicate future criminal behavior. And of course federal law enforcement would like as much access as possible to information that might help them prevent or solve crimes. So does that mean they can access your internet browsing history?

Currently, the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs a warrant to view your web activity, but the agency is pushing for an amendment that would allow it to access your internet browsing history without a warrant in terrorism and spy cases.

Letters of Security

The change has to do with the FBI's use of National Security Letters, or NSLs, when conducting investigations. NSLs don't require court orders, therefore there is no warrant and no judicial determination of probable cause for the information the agency is seeking. Furthermore, most NSLs come with a gag order attached, prohibiting the person or entity subject to the request from even disclosing that it has received an NSL.

As it stands now, the FBI can only access four types of basic subscriber information from internet companies using an NSL: your name, address, length of service, and telephone bill records. The FBI considers this limitation a "typo," and contends the bureau should be able to obtain "electronic communication transactional records," including include a person's internet protocol address, which websites she is visiting, and how much time she spends on a given site. FBI Director James B. Comey told Congress the current limitation "affects our work in a very, very big and practical way."

To Warrant, or Not to Warrant

But privacy advocates disagree, saying the change would "dramatically expand the ability of the FBI to get sensitive information about users' online activities without oversight." A letter sent to Congress and signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others claims the additional information "would paint an incredibly intimate picture" of a person's life, including her political affiliation, medical conditions, religion, and even daily routine.

And without independent judicial review, there would be no way to verify if the FBI was, as it contends it will, limiting its use of NSLs to terrorism or spy cases. The FBI made a similar push for browsing history access six years ago, and was rebuffed, and the Senate Intelligence Committee recently voted out an authorization bill with the NSL amendment. We'll see whether this latest legislative effort will give the feds access to your latest internet activity.

Related Resources:
A missing woman, 53, with bipolar disorder who was last seen at her home two weeks ago has still not been found despite the discovery of her abandoned car and a cardigan in nearby bushland.

The search for Angela Joy Jeffrey was formally suspended by police on Thursday after she was last seen at her Penguin home in northern Tasmania, on Wednesday June 1.

But the community has vowed to continue after weeks of scouring bushland with quad bikes, drones and horses at the Narawntapu National Park, where police found her grey sedan about 70km from her home two days after her disappearance.

The search for Angela Joy Jeffrey was formally suspended by police on Thursday after she was last seen at her Penguin home in northern Tasmania, on Wednesday June 1

The community will continue a search this weekend

Facebook page, 'people that would like to help search for Angela Jeffrey', shows the community will continue searching.

Earlier this week, a cardigan believed to belong to Mrs Jeffrey was found in the area.

In the days after her disappearance, her husband Dave told Tasmania Talks the 53-year-old suffers bipolar disorder and hoped she would return safe and well.

'I'm gutted, I want to find her, but it's not even like a needle in a haystack, it's like a pin,' he told The Advocate on Thursday.

'Our thoughts are with the family and friends of missing Penguin woman, Angela Joy Jeffrey, as the police search for her is formally suspended,' Tasmania Police said.

The family has been informed the police search would no longer continue.

Missing person investigations will continue.

'Any information relevant to Angela's disappearance will be thoroughly investigated and we hope to bring closure to her family,' Senior Sergeant Debbie Williams said.

Volunteers from the community have spent weeks scouring bushland with quad bikes (left), drones and horses at the Narawntapu National Park (right: volunteer driving through the start park in four wheel drive)

Police thanked the 'overwhelming number of volunteers who have assisted in the search'.

The search was last week moved to recovery in the hope of giving Mrs Jeffrey's family answers about her disappearance.

Mrs Jeffrey is described as being 164cm tall, of medium build, with dyed blonde hair and brown eyes.

She was last seen wearing blue jeans, black cardigan and short black boots.

Anyone with information which could assist police in their investigations should call Ulverstone Police on 6478 6027 or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.

Police found her grey Mitsubishi sedan at Narawntapu National Park, 70km from her home, two days after her disappearance
Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for two of three men who stormed a Las Vegas liquor store and killed the cashier.

Lee 'Dominic' Sykes, 21, and Ray Charles 'Ray Ray' Brown, 24, are charged with the execution-like murder of the cashier at Lee's Discount Liquor on April 20.

CCTV footage from inside the shop shows the moment one of the men shot and killed 24-year-old Matthew Christensen.

Christensen was ordered to open a safe at the back of the store but when he could not access it, they shot him several times, police told The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Deadly robbery: Three men entered the store in Las Vegas on April 20, with one shooting dead the cashier

The two men - Lee 'Dominic' Sykes, 21, and Ray Charles 'Ray Ray' Brown, 24 - are charged with the execution-like murder of the cashier at Lee's Discount Liquor

Held up: Prosecutors say the cashier was forced at gunpoint to open a safe but could not access it

Video of the robbery was made public Wednesday. Its shows two of the robbers holding guns at a staff member in a back room of the shop. The man is believed to be Christensen, moments before his death

Police have identified Brown as the person who pulled the trigger during the robbery.

Investigators say he is part of the 004 Hoodsman gang.

However both Brown and Sykes have been charged with murder, robbery with a deadly weapon, first-degree kidnapping, burglary while in possession of a firearm, coercion with a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.

Sykes' brother, Lee 'Murry' Sykes, 22, also is charged in the robbery and killing but is not facing the death penalty. He is seen in the store CCTV as standing by the door while the others rob the place.

Prosecutors announced Wednesday they will seek the death penalty for the other two, but that Murry Sykes was not armed during the robbery and does not have a history of violent crime.

'Nevada law provides for the death penalty to be sought in certain circumstances. It is reserved for the worst of the worst,' Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson told the Review Journal.

'The circumstances of this case make it clear that it is appropriate for us to seek the death penalty against Mr. Sykes and Mr. Brown.'

Police have identified Ray Charles Brown (left) as the person who pulled the trigger during the robbery. Lee 'Dominic' Sykes, 21 (right), has also been charged with murder

Michael Christensen was shot several times in an office at the back of the store. He later died in hospital

Brown's attorney, Josh Tomsheck, said Wednesday they will fight against the death penalty.

'While our views are contrary to theirs, we understand the district attorney's ability to seek death as punishment,' he said.

This doesn't change our resolve in finding a just resolution to this case through the appropriate channels.

'The fact that the district attorney has filed murder charges or has filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty changes nothing in regards to Mr. Brown receiving the best defense available and asserting all of his constitutional rights.'

Syke's lawyer, Special Public Defender David Schieck, also said they will fight the charges.

'Clearly, he is not the shooter,' Schieck said. 'I'm a little surprised they would seek death on a 21-year-old non-shooter. But the district attorney has discretion to do what he wants.'
A man who escaped from prison in 1979 and eluded authorities for nearly four decades has been arrested in eastern Kentucky, police say.

Billy Burchfield was serving a 16-year sentence for manslaughter in a Georgia jail when he broke out 37 years ago - and he has been on the run from the law ever since.

Police say the 67-year-old stole the identity of his cousin Harold Arnold after he died and was living under that alias when the cops finally caught up with him.

Billy Burchfield was serving a 16-year sentence for manslaughter when he escaped 37 years ago and had been on the run ever since

Laurel County Police say they were able to track down Burchfield after receiving a tip from law enforcement in Jackson County, Georgia that he was living as Arnold in the area.

Detectives went to a house in Laurel County on Wednesday night and spoke with the occupant who denied any knowledge of Burchfield.

But after he submitted for fingerprinting, Kentucky State Police fingerprint technicians and the FBI were able to determine that he was a match for Burchfield.

Gilbert Acciardo, spokesman for Laurel County Police Department, said Burchfield had lived without incident in the county since fleeing jail.

'Probably somebody like that is going to fly under the radar,' Acciardo said. 'You (would) have to keep your nose extremely clean and apparently that's what he's done.'

Burchfield escaped from a Georgia prison (pictured is Georgia State Prison) in 1979 and eluded authorities for nearly four decades before being arrested in eastern Kentucky

When he was approached by police on Wednesday night, he denied he was a fugitive and continued to deny it after being fingerprinted, Acciardo said.

'He's saying he's not that person,' Acciardo said.

No one answered the phone Thursday at a phone number listed at the London, Kentucky, address where Burchfield was living as Harold Arnold.
A jealous husband lured his estranged wife to their marital home and stabbed her to death with three knives after she told him she wanted a divorce, a court heard.

Abdirashid Khadar, 22, who denies murder, sent mother-of-one Amal Abdi, 21, a text message saying: 'Honey come and see me at home' to persuade her to visit.

When she refused, he persisted and told her that some of his family were visiting and he wanted her to tidy their flat in the Barton Hill area of Bristol.

Abdirashid Khadar, 22, who denies murder, persuaded mother-of-one Amal Abdi, 21 to come to their marital home before he stabbed her with three knives in her jugular, back and lung

Shortly after Abdi arrived at the property Khadar attacked her using three knives before dialling 999 and confessing to killing her.

Police found Khadar in the local area, where he told them: 'I've got something to show you at the flat.'

They took him back to the seventh floor property at Longlands House where they found Abdi lying in a pool of blood on their living room floor, Bristol Crown Court heard.

Kate Brunner QC, prosecuting, told the jury: 'Police went into the flat. They were greeted by a horrifying scene.

'Blood was smeared on the walls and floor. They discovered the body of Amal Abdi in the living room, lying curled up in a pool of blood with large wounds on her neck.

'She had been repeatedly stabbed with a number of different knives.

'The prosecution's case is that it was a set-up, that the defendant lured her to the flat with a false story about his relatives visiting.'

At a police station after his arrest, Khadar asked officers: 'My wife, she OK?'

When told she had died, he replied: 'Can you kill me?'

During interviews Khadar claimed that after he arrived in the UK, his wife would shout and slap him and he would try to be tolerant but 'his patience had worn out'.

He said that his wife had been staying with her aunt and 'had not been with me for some time' and that his memory was poor of events surrounding the alleged attack.

They took him back to the seventh floor property at Longlands House (pictured) where they found Abdi lying in a pool of blood on their living room floor, Bristol Crown Court heard

The court heard that hours before she died on the evening of July 26 last year, Abdi had demanded a divorce and was going to tell her family, saying: 'I don't want you any more.'

But Khadar retaliated by sending his wife a text message threatening to kill himself and referred to the earlier argument, saying: 'When you are saying you do not love me all my life and prestige dedicated to you.'

Brunner said: 'If that sounds a little clumsy, it's because it has been translated from the Somali language. The meaning is clear - this defendant had been rejected by his wife.

'On the day of her death Amal Abdi told her cousin that the defendant was getting on her nerves and was jealous. She said they'd had an argument and that she wanted to divorce him.'

The couple were both from Somalia and married in 2010, with Abdi moving to the UK and settling in Bristol, but Khadar did not join her.

They kept up a long-distance relationship and he moved to the UK in March 2015 - just four months before he is accused of murder.

Jurors heard there was conflicting evidence of how happy the relationship was. Family members thought the couple were happy but Abdi told a friend she wanted to separate yet could not speak to relatives because she feared bringing shame on them.

Police recovered three knives from the scene and forensic tests showed the victim's blood was on all of them.

The court heard that Khadar admitted killing his wife immediately after the stabbing but claims a defence of manslaughter by loss of control. The trial before Mr Justice Garnham continues (pictured: Longlands House)

'A pathologist later examined Amal's body and she confirmed that she had died as a result of stab wounds,' Brunner said.

'One of the most severe had cut Amal Abdi's jugular vein on her neck and another had gone into her back and into her lung.

'The presence of a number of stab wounds to the back suggests an attack from behind or that Amal Abdi was trying to flee from the defendant as he was stabbing her.'

The court heard that Khadar admitted killing his wife immediately after the stabbing but claims a defence of manslaughter by loss of control.

Brunner said: 'The prosecution's case is that this defendant had not lost control at all but that he attacked Amal Abdi in a possessive rage after she told him their relationship was over.'
Officials say a Tennessee homeowner and a suspected bank robber died in a shootout after the suspect used the man's home to hide from authorities.

Sumner County Sheriff's Office found the two bodies inside the house in Cottontown on Wednesday night.

Authorities identified the homeowner on Thursday as 62-year-old Marty Dale Hall.

Mr Hall had been gone since Sunday and when he returned home Wednesday, found the suspect inside the house, hiding from the police.

Callous killer: This is the Bowling Green, Kentucky bank robbery suspect who killed home owner Marty Dale Hall

Authorities believe Hall and the suspect shot and killed each other during an apparent shootout

Thursday afternoon, Bowling Green police were still unsure of the identity of the male bank robbery suspect

Officials say the incident began after the suspect robbed a bank Tuesday in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

After a police chase, the suspect ran from his car and hid inside the house.

One suspect, Colleen Watkins, was taken into custody while her male accomplice evaded authorities.

Sumner County Sheriff Sonny Weatherford said there was a gun battle between the homeowner and the bank robber.

A neighbor told deputies she heard what she thought was firecrackers going off around noon on Wednesday.

Later in the evening, the neighbor sent by to check on the homeowner and saw the two men dead inside the home.

Bowling Green police confirmed the suspect inside the house was the man who was seen robbing a bank in Bowling Green on Tuesday.

The two men exchanged gunfire, fatally wounding each other.

The bank robbery occurred at 10:55 a.m. on Tuesday at which point the suspect broke into Hall's home to hide

The home was located in the area where an the bank robber ran from a car after police used spike strips to stop it

Thursday afternoon, Bowling Green police were still unsure of the identity of the male bank robbery suspect and the connection he had with 53-year-old Colleen Sue Watkins, who drove the getaway van

'We thought we knew, but the more we got to looking at it we realized we don't,' Bowling Green Police Department spokesman Officer Ronnie Ward said Thursday.
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President Barack Obama said today that Orlando was 'shaken by an evil and hateful act' as he and Vice President Joe Biden laid flowers flowers at a makeshift memorial this afternoon for victims of the Sunday shooting after the 'held and hugged' their families.

Carrying two bouquets of white roses, one flower for each of the 49 victims, a somber-looking Obama and a shades-wearing Biden, put the flowers underneath a red, white and blue wreath outside Orlando's Phillips Center, adjacent to City Hall, that was already surrounded by bunches of flowers and Mylar balloons in remembrance of the lives snuffed short in the tragedy.

'Their grief is beyond description,' Obama said this afternoon. 'These families could be our families. In fact, they are our family. They are part of the American family.'

The president said he told them, 'Our hearts are broken, too, but we stand with you.'

Obama said he also talked to families about his belief that broader restrictions on firearms would make it harder for terrorists to commit future acts of mass violence, and 'they pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage.'

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President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden laid flowers flowers at a makeshift memorial this afternoon for victims of the Orlando shooting

Standing next to his vice president, Barack Obama gave an impassioned speech in Orlando, four days after 49 clubgoers were gunned down in cold blood

Earlier today, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer presented Obama with an 'Orlando United' t-shirt on the tarmac (also pictured, Florida's U.S. senators Bill Nelson, to Obama's right, and Marco Rubio)

'They don't care about politics. Neither do I. Neither does Joe. And neither should any parent out there...This debate needs to change,' he said.

Stricter gun laws will not prevent every violent act, Obama said. 'But we can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives.'

'If we don't act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this because we will be choosing to allow them to happen. We will have said, we don't care enough to do something about it.'

Obama began his remarks by reflecting on his trip, and he observed, 'Today we are reminded of what is good. That there is compassion, empathy and decency, and most of all, there is love. Thats the Orlando that weve seen in recent days. And that is the America that we have seen.'

The president soon put aside soothing words as he expressed his frustration with the Republican-run federal legislature that won't approve more aggressive gun regulations and their presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

'Today, once again, as has been true too many times before, I held and hugged grieving family members and parents, and they asked, why does this keep happening? And they pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage,' he said.

The Republican position on gun control 'defies common sense,' Obama said. 'Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families.'

They should also meet with the Newtown, Connecticut, families, he said, whose children would right now be finishing fifth grade had they not been brutally mowed down in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Republicans ought to explain to those families 'why it is that we think our liberty requires these repeated tragedies,' he said. 'That's not the meaning of liberty. '

Obama and Biden visited a memorial in Orlando where thousands had left heartfelt notes and flowers to remember those killed on Sunday morning

The president and vice president, somber expressions etched on both their faces, laid two bouquets of white roses, one flower for each of the 49 victims

After laying flowers at the Orlando massacre memorial, Obama said Orlando had been 'shaken by an evil, hateful act'

As the pair visited the memorial dedicated to the 49 people killed in Orlando, Republican Senator John McCain ccused Barack Obama of being 'directly responsible' for the massacre

Obama told of how he and Biden 'held and hugged' the families whose loved ones were taken away by the senseless act on Sunday morning

'Their grief is beyond description... These families could be our families. In fact, they are our family. They are part of the American family,' Obama said in his address at Orlando's Phillips Center

Obama said he also talked to families about his belief that broader restrictions on firearms would make it harder for terrorists to commit future acts of mass violence

In a nod to Senate Democrats, who filibustered in the name of gun control legislation on Wednesday for 15 hours with Connecticut Chris Murphy at the helm, Obama said he hopes senators who opposed more aggressive background checks have a 'change of heart' and vote for similar legislation now.

As good as they [police] are, if you have lone wolf attacks like this, hatched in the minds of a disturbed person, then we're going to have to take different kinds of steps in order to prevent something like this from happening Barack Obama

Obama said he was heartened to hear that the Senate would, however, take up legislation that would keep guns from being sold to suspected terrorists.

'I truly hope that senators rise to the moment and do the right thing,' he said.

That both of the last two terrorist attacks in the United States - Orlando and San Bernardino - were committed by 'deranged individuals' who were radicalized by propaganda on the internet and used similar instruments of death, 'it's going to take more than just our military' or intelligence teams to defeat ISIS, Obama declared.

'As good as they are,' Obama said of U.S. authorities, 'if you have lone wolf attacks like this, hatched in the minds of a disturbed person, then we're gonna have to take different kinds of steps in order to prevent something like this from happening.'

Obama also seemed to brush back presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who says he'll introduce a ban on Muslim immigrants if he's elected, as he said, 'We're also reminded of what unites us as Americans, and that what unites us is far stronger than the hate and the terror of those who target us.'

'Joe and I were talking on the way over here -- you can't make up the world into us and them, and denigrate and express hatred towards groups because of the color of their skin, or their faith, or their sexual orientation, and not feed something very dangerous in this world,' Obama said, subtly referencing his beef with Trump without mentioning the businessman's name.

Obama said, ''If there was ever a moment for all of us to reflect and reaffirm our most basic beliefs that everybody counts and everybody has dignity, now is the time. It's a good time for all of us to reflect on how we treat each other, and to insist on respect and equality for every human being.'

President Barack Obama arrived in Orlando on Thursday for an afternoon of meetings with local officials and families of the tragedy's 49 victims. He's seen here hugging Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer

A somber looking Obama, who had come under criticism for not ringing Florida Gov. Rick Scott, in the wake of the attack, embraced Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs on the tarmac

Obama (pictured hugging Jacobs) wanted to demonstrate that 'Americans stand shoulder to shoulder' with Orlando, his spokesman said

Obama and Biden headed out of Orlando International Airport earlier today in the presidential motorcade to meet with the families of victims

The president and vice president were in Orlando today for meetings with local officials and families of the nightclub shooting victims, as well as survivors.

He was greeted on the tarmac by Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who presented him with an 'Orlando United' t-shirt.

Obama was not supposed to deliver a speech before he flew back to Washington. The White House said today he would only 'offer a few personal reflections'.

At 18 minutes long, his statement took on a speech-like quality, though, as the president rebuffed the opposing party for placing their belief in constitutional protections afforded by the Second Amendment ahead of proposed regulations that Democrats say could save countless lives.

There's no more tangible way to show support than by traveling to the city where this horrific incident occurred Obama's spokesman, Eric Schultz

'Here in Orlando, we are reminded not only of our obligations as a country to be resolute against terrorists, we are reminded not only of the need for us to implement smarter policies to prevent mass shootings, we're also reminded of what unites us as Americans, and that what unites us is far stronger than the hate and the terror of those who target us,' the president said.

A senior spokesman for the president told reporters riding with the president on Air Force One this morning the president came to Orlando because he wanted to personally demonstrate that 'Americans stand shoulder to shoulder' with residents of Orlando.

'There's no more tangible way to show support than by traveling to the city where this horrific incident occurred,' Obama spokesman Eric Schulz said.

Biden accompanied Obama on the half-day trip and stood at his side as he delivered remarks at the memorial.

The vice president brought his own plane down to Florida and brought Florida's Democratic Senator Bill Nelson as his guest.

Rep. Corrine Brown of Florida and Florida's Republican Sen. Marco Rubio flew down with the president on Air Force One.

Florida's Republican Gov. Rick Scott - who Obama came under criticism for failing to call on Sunday - and Orlando Mayor Dyer were there to meet the president on the tarmac.

Obama's first stop after the airport was Amway Center, home to the Orlando Magic, where he met with law enforcement officials and then had a private gathering with families and survivors of the terrorist attack.

The president and the vice president thanked the officers 'for their actions in responding to the attack at Pulse Nightclub,' the White House said in a statement immediately following the meeting.

Obama later said in his remarks that the we as a nation 'owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to all the doctors, all the nurses who have worked day and night to treat the injured, save lives and prevent even more anguish.

'As one of the doctors here said....after the worst of humanity reared its evil headthe best of humanity came roaring back. '

Obama (pictured meeting Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott) will spend the afternoon meeting with officials and families of the Orlando shooting victims

Obama (pictured shaking hands with Republican Senator Marco Rubio) will not deliver a speech before he flies back to Washington, the White House said today

Rubio (pictured shaking hands with Obama), a Republican, rode to Florida with the president on Air Force One

The president's schedule in Orlando has been in flux since the White House announced the trip on Monday (pictured, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden)

'There's no more tangible way to show support than by traveling to the city where this horrific incident occurred,' said Obama spokesman Eric Schultz

Amway Center arena is located two miles from the site of the Sunday shooting that devastated the Orlando area and has been certified by U.S. officials as a terrorist attack.

I think it's important for the President of the United States, on behalf of the country, to show his support for these families and for these individuals White House Press Secretary, Josh Earnest

The massacre at the gay nightclub had the highest death toll of any instance of gun violence in U.S. history and has likewise been deemed a hate crime in addition to home grown extremism.

In total, 49 night club goers were maimed in the three-hour rampage early Sunday morning, and another 53 were wounded.

Shooter Omar Mateen, age 29, was killed in a bullet spray as he tried to exit the building through a hole in the wall created by police for survivors as an alternate escape for individuals stuck inside.

The White House said Wednesday the president was coming to Orlando to offer his 'condolences and comfort to the families of those who were killed and to those who survived.'

Press Secretary Josh Earnest noted that news reports have highlighted a 'profound sense of survivors guilt that some people are expressing' that 'is painful just to read.'

'And I think it's important for the President of the United States, on behalf of the country, to show his support for these families and for these individuals.'

He also wants to thank first responders who put their own lives on the line for their 'demonstrations of professionalism and courage and patriotism,' Earnest said.

After leaving the airport, Obama headed straught to the Amway Center, home to the Orlando Magic, where he met with law enforcement officials

The president and vice president thanked the officers at the Amway Center for their heroic actions on the night of the Pulse nightclub attack

'So this will be I think an emotional trip,' Obama's spokesman observed.

The White House official said, 'The Presidents visit is about offering comfort and support to a community that's grieving.'

'And hes going down there to make clear that he speaks for the country when he says that we're going to be with the people of Orlando, and we share in their grief, and that they're not alone even as they endure what surely have been several dark nights.'

Sunday afternoon Obama stood at the podium in the White House press briefing room and delivered a rare weekend statement in which he shared his condolences with residents of Orlando and updated the country on the FBI's investigation into the vicious assault.

'We stand with the people of Orlando, who have endured a terrible attack on their city. Although its still early in the investigation, we know enough to say that this was an act of terror and an act of hate,' he said. 'And as Americans, we are united in grief, in outrage, and in resolve to defend our people.'

Obama said he talked to Orlando's mayor, Dyer, on the phone that morning.

Obama's engagements today were muted because the president did not want not to 'overtax local law enforcement officials' in the area

Obama also wanted to thank first responders who put their own lives on the line in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre

'This could have been any one of our communities,' the president recalled telling his friend.

Obama said it was an 'especially heartbreaking day for all our friends -- our fellow Americans -- who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

'The shooter targeted a nightclub where people came together to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live,' Obama said, 'a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights.'

The president told the nation that 'in the face of hate and violence, we will love one another. We will not give in to fear or turn against each other.
A Muslim convert has been arrested in France on suspicion of planning an attack on American and Russian tourists.

The 22-year-old had gone to the southern city of Carcassone 'with a view to carrying out a violent act, in particular targeting Americans and Russians', a judicial source said.

He was armed with a 'knife and a small mallet' when he was arrested on Monday night, the source added.

A 22-year-old has been arrested after travelling to Carcassone (pictured) 'with a view to carrying out a violent act, in particular targeting Americans and Russians'. The town is popular with tourists

The suspect comes from the southern French town of Lunel - notorious for the number of residents who have left to wage jihad in Syria - but has been living in the nearby Tarn region.

At least 20 people have travelled from Lunel, which has a population of just 27,500, to Syria in the last few years, determined to join ISIS or other jihadist groups.

Five people were arrested during anti-terror raids in the Abrivado neighbourhood in January 2015.

At the time, the French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the people arrested - aged between 26 and 44 - were 'suspected of active involvement in a jihadist network'.

He also claimed the network's members 'were recruited and indoctrinated, and who also indoctrinated and recruited several other French youngsters from Lunel'.

A medieval walled city and UNESCO World Heritage site, Carcassone is one of France's biggest tourist attractions with its drawbridges, watchtowers and cobbled streets.
Jeremy Corbyn last night addressed a tearful vigil in Westminster to pay tribute to Jo Cox and warn that 'hatred will never solve problems'.

After Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain had lost a 'great star' from its public life, the Labour leader led mourning in Parliament Square.

Politicians from across the political spectrum revealed their grief after news of Mrs Cox's death was confirmed shortly after 5pm.

Surrounded by weeping MPs from all parties, Mr Corbyn said last night: 'Tonight, her husband Brendan is devastated and their two children have lost a mum they will never see again, lost somebody they can remember as a wonderful woman who stood for many things.

'She was an exemplary MP, a real servant of democracy in every way.

'The statement put out this evening by her husband Brendan saying we had to conquer hatred with love, with solidarity and with support, is one of the most moving statements I have ever heard from someone so recently bereaved.

'I am surrounded by parliamentary colleagues, particularly those who came into Parliament with her in the general election last year. There is a special bond among newly elected MPs, the class of 2015 and they are grieving deeply this evening.'

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Jeremy Corbyn, surrounded by (front row from left) Stephen Doughty, Alison McGovern, Mr Corbyn, Cat Smith and Holly Lynch, paid an emotional tribute in Parliament Square to Jo Cox last night

Flowers were laid in Parliament Square last night in memory of the Batley and Spen MP as emotional tributes to the killed MP grew

Mr Corbyn said: 'Remembering her, remembering all she gave, and we are desperately sad tonight at the loss of such a lovely woman who had everything to live for.

Tributes were paid to Jo Cox tonight from politicians across Westminster, regardless of party affiliation

'This is a shocking occasion and I hope everyone realises hatred will never solve problems.

'Only people coming together will solve problems - Jo believed that, Brendan believed that, we believe that.'

The Prime Minister, who has cancelled his referendum campaigning, said it was 'tragic and dreadful news' and sent his thought's to Mrs Cox's husband Brendan.

Mr Cameron said: 'This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news. My thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan, her two children, and their wider family.

'We have lost a great star.

'She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart and people are going to be very, very sad at what has happened. Dreadful, dreadful news.

'It's right we are suspending campaigning activity in this referendum and everyone's thought will be with Jo's family and with her constituents at this terrible time.'

In an earlier statement, Mr Corbyn said: 'The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family - and indeed the whole country - will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.

'Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity.

'She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen  where she was born and grew up.

Flags over Westminster were dropped to half mast overnight and remained there today in a mark of respect to Mrs Cox

'Jo was dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights  and she brought those values and principles with her when she became an MP.

Mr Corbyn said: 'Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all.

'Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

'In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

Labour MP Mary Creagh laid flowers close to the scene of Mrs Cox's death in Birstall , Yorkshire

Staff from Parliament and passers by laid their own floral tributes to the dead MP across the street from the main gates of the Palace of Westminster

'We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.'

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Labour's Yvette Cooper paid tribute to her colleage.

'I remember Jo as somebody who saw life and shook it up,' she said. 'Its unbearable that shes had hers stolen away. Most of us are struggling to process it. The shock has not sunk in. She never opted for the easy path, she walked towards problems rather than walk away. You saw her do that by championing the cause of refugees.

She was brilliant. She seized on things, was a fierce advocate for what she believed in and a fiercely believed in her family. She was a fantastic mum as well as politician

I think we all take the advice of police on closing our offices. We will all tell you its important for MPS to be embedded in the communities we represent. Sometimes you write peoples problems down on the back of a till receipt. Daily conversations with constituents are so important. But you also want to make sure your staff are protected.

So many encounters you have with people are warm. These cases break hearts and hit the headlines, but at the vigil last night there were so many people there who had met Jo once or twice but as a result of her kindness wanted to pay tribute to her.

David Cameron paid tribute to Mrs Cox and said she was a 'star' in Parliament who had 'huge compassion and a big heart'

We dont know the circumstances in this case but there has been an increase in vitriol in public debate. Some directed at officials, and some directed at each other. Theres a feel that there is a nastiness in public debate now and none of us want to see that. Its only four years since the Olympics where we had a feeling of pride and everyone coming together to support the country.

There is some vitriol around part of the referendum debate which is a bit nasty but the thing about Jo is she would always argue to bring people together, have healthy debate and unite people. Like her husband said, we cannot let hate win.

She was the host of every party, she would joke about calamine lotion for her kids chicken pox, she would joke in the corridor. It was her determination to change peoples lives which we will remember.'

And Holly Lynch added: 'Jo she always seemed to have a real clarity based on her experiences about what she was there to achieve. She did that with a passion and compassion for people she represented both in her home town and right across the world. She used her personality and experience to build support for what she wanted to achieve across the chamber. You saw that in the tributes from across the political spectrum yesterday.'

Ms Lynch said the balance between being active within the community, and being mindful of a potential security risk 'was a challenge for us all'.

'To be a good MP you have to be rooted in your constituency and be available as much as possible to hear peoples problems and make a difference. Its difficult when you see something like this which is unprecedented to think about what the future looks like and about security risks.

'Well never forget what happened to her and you do have to bear in mind the safety of your staff and so you cannot avoid taking these risks and concerns very seriously, but cant let it stop you being an effective MP.

We had similar constituencies. In Halifax I would regularly meet her to compare notes to what was working and what challenges we shared. Weve all been taken aback by the nature and tone of this referendum and had conversations about what the future might mean.

Mr Cameron said the loss of Jo Cox was a 'tragedy' as he offered condolences to her family, including husband Brendan and the couple's two young children

Mr Cameron, pictured on Gibraltar yesterday, called off a referendum rally on the Rock in response to the killing

We shared concerns about how you can be an effective MP dealing with people who have strong and different opinions to yours. You have to get used to working in that environment.

Everyone who comes to see you has a serious problem and wants to work with you to solve that, but we need to work around politics so we have the ability to work with people who have different opinions and keep doing our jobs to make a difference.

She was a hero, she just had that dynamism and clarity about what she was here to do and wanting to make a difference. She had a family and that was always a balancing act for her but she made it look easy. For the rest of us she set an example as to how it should be done and how to make a difference. She did it with a smile and an efficiency based on her experience that won her respect of colleagues across the chamber.

Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said: 'The whole of the Labour movement is devastated at Jo's death. We have lost a colleague so young who had much more to contribute to public life. She was our future.

'It is hard to comprehend how a compassionate, principled and beautiful person can be taken away from us so cruelly. It's even more devastating because she was doing what she did best - serving her constituents.

'We grieve her loss. Our love and prayers are with Brendan and Jo's family.'

MP Jake Berry tweeted a picture of tributes which began to be laid in Parliament Square last night as a shattered Westminster was left reeling by news of Mrs Cox's killing

Labour MP Barry Gardiner said Mrs Cox was the 'brightest best' and questioned what British politics had come to if people were shot for their views

Commons speaker John Bercow said: 'I am absolutely devastated to learn the news about Jo Cox.

'Jo was an outstanding Member of Parliament and a wonderful, kind, caring person who was liked and respected in all parts of the House.

'My thoughts and prayers are with her family at this harrowing time.'

Theresa May said Mrs Cox was one of the 'brightest and most popular' MPs and the pain her family and friends are suffering is 'unimaginable'.

The Home Secretary added: 'Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this terrible time.

'The full details of what happened outside Jo's constituency surgery in Birstall this afternoon are not yet clear and until the facts have been fully established I will not comment further.

'It is entirely appropriate that all campaigning for the referendum has been suspended.

'All of us are united in our deep sadness at the loss of one of our brightest and most popular Westminster colleagues.'

Former Labour MP Joan Walley, in whose parliamentary office Ms Cox had worked before becoming an MP herself, was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's PM programme as news of her death came in.

Ex Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman said the news was 'devastating'

Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner, elected with Ms Cox for the first time in 2015, said he was 'heartbroken'

Labour's Catherine McKinnell said Mrs Cox was 'one in a million'

Tulip Siddiq, another member of Labour's 2015 intake of MPs, said Mrs Cox was a 'wonderful person'

A clearly distressed Ms Walley said: 'Nothing has prepared me to be in a situation where I'm live on BBC radio to pay tribute to a really, truly special and compassionate woman, who totally believed in public service, who totally believed in eradicating poverty, who totally wanted to see environmental improvements, with a young family and a whole life in politics in front of her.

'Words can't express what I feel because Jo's life and everything she believed in are so badly needed now.

'My thoughts and prayers are with her family and I just hope all Jo's many family, friends, admirers, whatever political side they are, will unite to think about her, to think about our parliamentary democracy and to think what we can do together to be true to the things she believed in.'

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, pictured last night, paid his own tribute to Mrs Cox

Former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell told PM: 'My thoughts - as everyone across Parliament's will be - are with her husband Brendan and her two lovely little children, who used to come into Portcullis House to have tea with her during the week.

'It is an unspeakable and un-understandable event that has taken place, and Parliament and her constituents will be much the poorer for her passing.

'But it's her family and those two little children who we must be thinking about now.'

Labour MP Jess Phillips said: 'My heart is broken. She was amazing, a brave giant who stood against bullies.'

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: 'Deeply saddened by news of the death of Jo Cox.'

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: 'I didn't know Jo Cox but by all accounts she was a brilliant young MP.

'And today she was just doing her job. My heart breaks for her family.'

Tory MP Anne Marie-Trevelyan tweeted images of Mrs Cox, far left top and bottom, on the cross-party tug of war team during a charity event last week

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: 'I am utterly heartbroken at the news of the death of Jo Cox. This is a devastating attack on our peaceful society.'

OUR BRIGHTEST AND BEST: THERESA MAY'S TRIBUTE TO JO COX Home Secretary Theresa May, pictured last night paying her tribute, said Mrs Cox was one of the 'brightest and most popular' MPs and the pain her family and friends are suffering is 'unimaginable' Home Secretary Theresa May led tributes to Jo Cox last night. Mrs May - one of the few MPs to have round the clock security because of her role - said the late Batley and Spen MP was the 'brightest' of MPs. She said: 'Our thoughts and prayers are with them at this terrible time. 'The full details of what happened outside Jo's constituency surgery in Birstall this afternoon are not yet clear and until the facts have been fully established I will not comment further. 'It is entirely appropriate that all campaigning for the referendum has been suspended. 'All of us are united in our deep sadness at the loss of one of our brightest and most popular Westminster colleagues.' Advertisement

Labour former deputy leader Harriet Harman said: 'Jo's death is an absolute tragedy. She was dynamic and fearless. Elected only a year ago she was a beacon among the new generation of young Labour women MPs. So full of promise for the future, so committed to progressive politics. Jo's politics were always about bringing people together and never about creating divisions.

'She put into practice her belief that politicians must be amongst the people they represent and she was, in every town, village and community in her constituency.

'We were immensely proud of her and are devastated by her loss.

'Her children will now have to grow up without their mother but we will make sure that they know what an amazing, progressive and principled politician their mother was and how much we admired her.'

Former PM Gordon Brown said: 'Our memories will be for ever scarred by this moment. Our hearts will always be hurt at our country's loss.

'Jo Cox was the most vivacious, personable, dynamic and committed friend you could ever have. Whenever you talked to her, the compassion in her eyes and the commitment in her soul shone through.

'Years of public service advancing the causes she cared passionately about should have been ahead of her.

'Sarah and I were privileged to work with Jo and her husband Brendan over many years and in her tireless efforts on behalf of poor and desolate children and mothers.

'She went to some of the most dangerous places in the world.

'The last place she should have been in danger was in her home town.

'People will say that this does not happen in Britain. This should not happen in Britain. And we must resolve that this will never again happen in Britain.

Boris Johnson's message of condolence was typical of the cross party tributes to the Labour MP. He said it was 'appalling' an MP should lose her life simply doing her job

International Development Secretary Justine Greening paid tribute to Mrs Cox's work on aid as a former Oxfam chief and advocate in Parliament

SNP MP Eilidh Whiteford said Mrs Cox had been a 'brilliant, talented woman who could have done anything. She chose to spend it helping other people'

'My and Sarah's thoughts and prayers are with Brendan and their two young children Cuillin and Lejla this evening. They will have all our support in the difficult days ahead. For them and for those of us who were Jo's friends, this is a devastating day. And it is a devastating blow to our democracy.'

In a statement, former PM Gordon Brown paid tribute to a 'vivacious, personable, dynamic and committed friend'

Paddy Ashdown, who worked closely with Jo Cox, on campaigns for Syria and refugees said: 'I am terribly shocked and saddened by this news and my thoughts are with her family.

'She was someone with extraordinary courage and a principled campaigner for a more enlightened policy towards refugees. She represented all that is best in our country and our political system.'

Labour MP Anna Turley said: 'At the moment we just want to think about Jo, think about her family, think about the wonderful, wonderful colleague that we've been privileged to know and to have worked with, who is just a terrific person.

'And I just want to pay tribute to her wonderful life and think of her family at this time.'

John Hannett, general secretary of the shopworkers union Usdaw, said: 'It is truly shocking to hear the news that Jo Cox was murdered on the streets of her constituency. Our thoughts are with Jo's family and friends.

'Usdaw was proud to have nominated Jo as the Labour candidate in Batley and Spen, she was a true friend of the union and a very hardworking MP.

'We, amongst many others, will miss Jo. Her death will send shockwaves throughout the political world and wider community.'

Labour MP Diana Johnson said Mrs Cox had been an 'exceptional colleague' and a 'brilliant campaigner for the voiceless'

Emma Lewell-Buck said she was 'devastated' at the loss of her friend and colleague

Commons deputy speaker Lindsay Hoyle said Mrs Cox had been a 'rising star from the new intake', admittting she would leave a 'painful void in the House'

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said: 'We're united in grief today at the terrible loss of Jo Cox. Brutally murdered as she served constituents. May her memory be or a blessing.'

Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union, said: 'This is the most appalling crime. Two young children have lost their mum, Jo's husband has lost his wife and a family has had a deeply loved member taken from them.

'Our deepest condolences go to Jo's husband, their children, her wider family, and to the Labour Party to whom she was very dear.

'Jo was doing what she believed in and was passionate about, standing up for the people and the community she represented.

'We must honour her in the best way possible, to carry on her work of uniting people and never letting division or despair win the day.'

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband said his 'heart breaks' over the news and said 'she was so full of life and joy'

2015 Labour MP Cat Smith said Mrs Cox was a 'lovely person, an outstanding MP and most importantly a loving mother and wife'

Wes Streeting, another of Labour's 2015 group, said Mrs Cox had been loved by her colleagues and said they were 'heartbroken'

Labour's Chris Bryant said: 'Some things are incomprehensible. A brilliant, witty, peaceful, caring woman violently taken from her family. Faith feels utterly barren.'

Tory Sarah Wollaston said: 'Jo Cox was the most lovely person, heartfelt sympathy to her husband her children & the community she devoted herself to.'

Labour's Wes Streeting, another member of the 2015 delegation, said: 'Can't tell you how much Jo is LOVED by her colleagues. We are heartbroken to have lost such a talented, special person and brilliant mum.'

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband said: 'My heart breaks for the loss of Jo Cox and for Brendan and their kids. She was so full of life and joy. Words feel hopeless right now.'

Liberal Democrat Alistair Carmichael said: 'Stunned by the news about Jo Cox. Utterly cruel and senseless. All thoughts with her family, friends and colleagues.'

Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns, who represents the neighbouring constituency, said she was 'absolutely devastated' to hear of the death

Sarah Wollaston, the senior Tory MP, said Mrs Cox was the 'most lovely person' and offered her 'heartfelt sympathy' to the Cox family

Environment Secretary Liz Truss said the news was 'absolutely terrible'
Far-right movement Britain First has tonight denied any connection to the suspect who shot and repeatedly stabbed Labour MP Jo Cox in a horrific attack outside her constituency surgery.

The 41-year-old married mother-of-two was shot three times - once in the head - and stabbed by a gunman who opened fire on her in the Birstall area of Leeds as she arrived to meet constituents.

It was claimed that the man - named locally as 53-year-old 'loner' and handyman Tommy Mair - shouted 'Britain First' as he launched the attack, which occurred at around 1pm.

However, Britain First - a British nationalist political party which campaigns against immigration, multiculturalism and Islam - has now distanced itself from the attack and denied any connection.

The group's leader, former British National Party councillor Paul Golding, claimed the attacker could have shouted 'It's time to put Britain first', as he dismissed the accounts as 'hearsay'.

Britain First, a far-right and British nationalist political party, distanced itself from the attack today despite the attacker apparently shouting 'Britain First' as he stabbed and shot Ms Cox, who later died. Pictured: The groups' leader Paul Golding took to its official website to issue a video condemning the 'heinous' attack

Popular MP Jo Cox died after she was shot three times and stabbed repeatedly by a man as she arrived for a constituency meeting in Birstall near Leeds today. She leaves behind her husband Brendan and two children

The leader of the far right movement said: 'She has been out campaigning to keep Britain in the EU and there are people in the area that are against it.

'I don't think it was one of our supporters. We stand in elections and organise protests - we don't encourage this kind of nonsense.

'She has a young family - an attack on a mum like that is disgraceful.

'Whether you agree with Labour, to have had that happen to her on the streets is shocking and an indictment of the state of this country.'

In a video message released following the announcement that Ms Cox had died from her injuries, he added: 'This is a terrible day for our democracy, for our parliamentary system. Our MPs are the representatives of the people and they have been for over 400 years now.

'So this is a very dark day for our country and for our democracy.

'We do not know what was said. At the moment, it is pure hearsay.

'It's an attack on a mother, it's an attack on our parliamentary system. It's just a downright act of criminality on the streets of Yorkshire. That's what we believe, that's what we think.

'I hope the person who carried out this heinous crime gets what he deserves.'

Ms Cox with her husband Brendan on election night when she was elected as an MP for Batley and Spen

A picture has been circulated on social media that is said to show the suspect being arrested after the attack

Britain First, which was founded in 2011 by Jim Downson, an anti-abortion campaigner linked to Ulster loyalist militants, is in favour of preserving what it deems 'traditional British culture'.

The movement first attracted attention by protesting outside homes of alleged Islamists. It has also been known to carry out 'Christian patrols' and 'invasions' of British mosques and is known for online activism.

It has contested elections to the House of Commons, the European Parliament and the mayoralty of London, but has not held any elected posts.

The group is also against immigration - an issue which Ms Cox has spoken positively about.

In her first speech after becoming an MP she praised the positive impact immigration has had on her constituency, Batley and Spen, a semi-rural area near the city of Leeds that has seen high levels of immigration from South Asia.

'Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir,' she said in the speech on June 3 last year.

She had also been voting to 'Remain' in the EU ahead of the referendum.

Locals have named and identified 'loner' Tommy Mair as the 53-year-old man who has been arrested by police

This picture was taken of the man believed to be the suspect seconds after he was tackled to the ground

A view of the scene of the shooting outside the library in Birstall, where Ms Cox was attending a meeting

It has raised suspicions that her attacker was opposing her political views when he fatally shot her.

However, Britain First issued a statement denying any involvement or encouragement in the attack, suggesting that the phrase 'could have been a slogan rather than a reference to our party'.

A spokesman said: 'Britain First obviously is not involved and would never encourage behaviour of this sort.'

Earlier this year, the deputy leader of Britain First led a 'Christian patrol' through the streets of Luton, insulting the Muslims who live there.

Brandishing large white crosses, the group - led by Jayda Fransen  was caught on camera marching through the Bedfordshire town.

She could be seen rounding upon a Muslim woman, with her two young children, telling her that the reason she has to cover herself from head to toe is because 'Muslim men cannot control their urges'.

One man also could be heard shouting that Mohammed is a 'false prophet' in the video, which was viewed almost two million times on YouTube.

Earlier this year, the deputy leader of Britain First - Jayda Fransen - led a 'Christian patrol' through the streets of Luton, insulting the Muslims who live there. She is pictured above brandishing a large white 'Christian' cross

Britain First also previously caused controversy by saying there are 'far too many Muslims' in London.

The statement, released earlier this month, read: 'As became blatantly obvious with the election of Labour's Islamist mayor, there is an increasingly shrinking number of Britons left in the capital overall and far too many Muslims.

'Britons make up less than 45 per cent of the capital and at least half of those who remain will be the 'trendy' left wing chattering class types, the gormless liberals and bigoted white socialists in areas such as Camden, Islington etc.'
Louis Theroux shared a cup of coffee with a man he helped on a TV documentary on alcoholism who has been sober for the past eight months.

Joe Walker, 32, appeared on the BBC show 'Drinking to Oblivion' where he reduced viewers to tears after he was shown leaving hospital covered in blood to buy a bottle of vodka moments after being warned his drinking would kill him.

The former university medical researcher, whose late mother was an alcoholic, featured on the show which had been broadcast in April.

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Louis Theroux posted a photograph on Twitter today showing Joe Walker, 32, who featured on his show 'Drinking to Oblivion'. Mr Theroux praised Mr Walker who has been sober for the past eight months

During the show, Louis Theroux, right, led Joe Walker, left, to A&E where he was told his drinking would kill him

By the time the show was aired, Mr Walker had been sober for six months and was holding down a job.

Today, Theroux, tweeted about visiting Mr Walker. He wrote: 'Coffee with @joedwalker from my alcohol programme, 8 months sober. Congrats, dude! #beards #aa.'

Mr Walker's struggle with alcohol moved many viewers, who watched in horror as he gave up drink only to relapse catastrophically.

In one emotional scene in A&E, the paralytic 32-year-old shared a tearful hug with Louis Theroux and says: 'I don't want to be a drunk - I am dying as a person'.

Minutes later he then decides to walk out of hospital to buy booze even though he knows it could kill him.

He said: 'I like the sensation of it (vodka) going down my throat and I want to experience that for one last time. That's why I'm leaving'.

At the end of the documentary he meets Mr Theroux in a pier in Brighton where he says he is trying to rebuild his life and is staying off the drink 'for now'.

Following the TV documentary, Mr Walker has been sober for eight months and is rebuilding his life

During the heartbreaking documentary, Mr Walker admitted to Theroux, 'I was drinking myself to death'

Viewers of the documentary were reduced to tears when Mr Walker admitted he did not want to die

Mr Walker had described how he turned to drink after problems at work and in his love life. It was also revealed his late mother had struggled with alcoholism.

The former Kings College medical education employee lost everything to alcohol including his job and his girlfriend and spent months drinking two bottles of vodka a day in bed before collapsing in the street.

He said: 'I didn't get the job I wanted and along with a break-up I though s*d it. I think I must have collapsed in the street and somebody obviously thought this guy needs to go to A&E.

'I was drinking myself to death and there was something in me that didn't want to die'.

Days later he was released from hospital and Mr Theroux met him at his London flat, where the curtains are stained with blood from a head wound.

He says this is a reminder to him to stay sober.

But weeks later he relapses and is found drunk, topless apart from a coat wearing blood-stained jogging bottoms.

Louis Theroux is shown helping to carry him into King College Hospital in South London, covered in blood, after relapsing.

After telling doctors he wants detox he is warned that this is his last chance before he decides to leave the hospital in tears looking fore alcohol.

He says he wants to down vodka and sleep in the park he was staying in after being thrown out of his flat.
Austin Drivers Sue Uber, Lyft for Back Pay

The ridesharing companies Uber and Lyft, which recently left Austin to avoid driver safety regulations, are being sued in two cases by Texas workers who say they were laid off without fair warning. The drivers say the companies violated federal regulations requiring employers with 100 or more workers to provide 60-day notice of layoffs.

The companies are probably not alarmed -- between them they face almost 700 cases of labor violations and other infractions, according to Courthouse News Service. They are used to fighting. Meanwhile, the drivers seek class certification, a declaratory judgment that the companies violated the WARN Act, an injunction, 60 days of lost wages and benefits, and statutory damages.

No Fair Warning

The controversy in this case was sparked by a proposition by Uber and Lyft to free them from following the same security rules as cab companies do in Austin. In May, local voters refused to allow the rideshare giants to hire drivers without fingerprinting them or doing other background security checks, as assaults associated with the companies reportedly spiked in the city. Despite massive lobbying efforts by the companies, they did not get what they wanted and left the Texas city quickly, pulling out days after the proposition was voted upon.

In both cases, drivers are demanding 60 days of back pay because neither company followed the federal requirements for large employers in terms of notice for mass layoffs. The companies are accused of violating the Worker Adjustment or Retraining Notification Act, better known as the WARN Act, which demands 60 days notice for employees losing their jobs where an employer has 100 workers or more.

Mocking Austin Politicians

Drivers are also accusing the ride share giants of publicly mocking politicians who opposed them. After spending millions on a public fight that they lost, the companies abandoned Austin and left thousands out of work, both cases claim. According to Courthouse News Service, both filings are nearly identical, and the cases differ only in which company is blamed.

Worker Woes?

If you're concerned about issues with your workers or any other aspect of business operations, speak to a lawyer. Get guidance on your options.

Follow FindLaw for Consumers on Google+.

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The Obama administration is scrambling to head off projected double digit rate hikes by insurers who participate in Obamacare, amid concerns that the hikes could be a political liability.

A new study by Kaiser Health News predicts an average rate hike of 10 per cent in 14 metropolitan areas.

Several of these are in battleground states Colorado, Nevada, and Virginia.

Open enrollment begins under Obamacare in November just days before the Nov. 8 election.

Hoping to avoid the rate hikes, the administration is shoveling money to states to get them to study the problem.

Donald Trump this week called expected health premium increases under Obamacare 'election changing stuff'

This week the administration announced $22 million to help states conduct 'rate reviews.'

The reviews, as reported by The Hill, require companies to justify rate hikes, and can put downward pressure on the increases.

Some companies are struggling to hold costs down because of a shortfall in a high-risk pool meant to compensate them for covering people with higher medical costs.

Major provider United Health dropped out of the federal health exchanges for 2017.

Donald Trump has been calling attention to the rate hikes at his rallies, addressing the topic this week in Atlanta.

Enactment of Obamacare helped swing the Tea Party-fueled GOP victory in the 2014 elections

Premiums are predicted to rise an average of 10 per cent in 14 areas

'Obamacare is a total disaster,' he told a crowd. 'This is election changing stuff.'

'On November 1st, the numbers are going to come out on Obamcacre,' Trump said. President Obama wants to delay the numbers 'til December 1st.'

He also warned of huge spikes in a speech in Sacramento earlier this month  though his estimates appear to be much higher than what Kaiser experts predict. Kaiser is expecting an 18 per cent increase in Oregon.

'The numbers are coming out, right now, the numbers are scheduled to come out on November 1,' Trump said in early June.

'The increases are going to be so large that everybody is going to vote for Donald Trump. It's a catastrophe,' he said.

'Now Obama is trying to move it into December because if people see the kind of increases that you're talking about -- could be 40 percent, by the way -- nobody's going to vote for anybody having to do with the Obama administration.'

The White House has denied any effort to move back notices of the rate hikes.

November 1 is actually the date when open enrollment begins. Americans have until Jan. 31 to sign up for Obamacare coverage or change their coverage.

Health Department spokesman Ben Wakana said open enrollment will begin as scheduled, with no delay planned. The White House has also denied any delay will occur.

'This is just the beginning of the rates process, and despite headlines suggesting double digit increases, proposed rates aren't what most consumers actually pay,' said Ben Wakana, CNN Money reported.

'The vast majority of consumers qualify for tax credits that reduce the cost of coverage below the sticker price, and people can shop around and find coverage that fits their needs and budget,' he added.
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Ever fancied walking on water? Well now you can, thanks to Bulgarian-born artist Christo's latest art installation - a floating walkway across Italy's Lake Iseo.

For just a few weeks, 'The Floating Piers' will rest on the surface of the picturesque lake, 62 miles northeast of Milan, with a 2 mile walkway allowing visitors to set off from the mainland town of Sulzano to the islands of Monte Isola and San Paolo, usually only accessible by boat.

Some 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes have been attached together and anchored by divers for the project. Covering them are 1,076,391sqft of shimmering yellow fabric, which will also feature along 1 mile of Sulzano streets.

The piers, some 52 feet wide and 14 inches high, will 'undulate with the movement of the waves' as visitors make their way, according to the project's website.

They will be on display June 18-July 3, which the 81-year old artist believes is all part of its beauty.'The temporal character is also related to the dynamics of the project,' Christo said, speaking in English.

'The project is designed to a particular moment of a voyage of many years ... The work of art is not the 14 days or 16 days. The work of art is ... that journey to that 14, 16 days.'

Works by Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, have featured in various cities, such as 'The Gates' in New York, where the artists put up 7,503 gates with saffron fabric panels in Central Park.

According to the project's website, Christo and Jeanne-Claude came up with 'The Floating Piers' concept in 1970 and Christo picked Lake Iseo as the location in 2014.

Access to 'The Floating Piers' will be free and organisers say volunteers will be present in case anyone should fall into the water.

For just a few weeks, 'The Floating Piers' will rest on the surface of the picturesque lake, 62 miles northeast of Milan, with a 2 mile walkway allowing visitors to set off from the mainland town of Sulzano to the islands of Monte Isola and San Paolo, usually only accessible by boat

Some 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes have been attached together and anchored by divers for the project. Covering them are 1,076,391 square feet of shimmering yellow fabric, which will also feature along 1.5 km of Sulzano streets

The piers, some 52 feet wide and 14 inches high, will 'undulate with the movement of the waves' as visitors make their way, according to the project's website

They will be on display June 18-July 3, which the 81-year old artist said is all part of its beauty. 'The temporal character is also related to the dynamics of the project,' Christo said, speaking in English

The artist promises the yellow fabric will dramatically shift from nearly red to brilliant gold under the effects of light and humidity

'The project is designed to a particular moment of a voyage of many years ... The work of art is not the 14 days or 16 days. The work of art is ... that journey to that 14, 16 days,' artist Christo (pictured) said

Works by Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, have featured in various cities, such as 'The Gates' in New York, where the artists put up 7,503 gates with saffron fabric panels in Central Park

According to the project's website, Christo and Jeanne-Claude came up with 'The Floating Piers' concept in 1970 and Christo picked Lake Iseo as the location in 2014

Access to 'The Floating Piers' will be free and organisers say volunteers will be present in case anyone should fall into the water

Before the yellow fabric was laid down: Swimming is forbidden - but expected, despite the cold water temperatures and the entrance is free, with the entire cost of the 15 million euro ($17 million) project financed by the artist himself

The artist and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, originally envisioned it for the delta of Rio de la Plata in Argentina, in 1970 but they failed to get permission
Jo Cox, 41, (pictured) used her short time as an MP to continue her career-long dedication to helping the plight of refugees and made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria-related issues

Jo Cox was among the rising stars in Parliament before she was shot dead on the streets of her Yorkshire constituency today.

She used her short time as an MP to continue her career-long dedication to helping the plight of refugees and made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria-related issues.

The married mother of two young children was about to celebrate her 42nd birthday next week and yesterday her young family enjoyed a day out at Westminster, pictured in a boat on the Thames during an EU campaign event.

Mrs Cox was a slight figure but had a powerful voice and used it repeatedly in Parliament over the last year to make the passionate case for taking in more Syrian refugee children.

And it was a fitting outcome that the former aid worker, who had put herself in danger throughout war zones and the developing world, played a central role in persuading the Government to change its mind and agree to accept 3,000 Syrian children into Britain.

In a memorable speech in April, she told MPs: 'Those children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness, and I know I would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hellhole.'

Mrs Cox was born and raised in the West Yorkshire town of Heckmondwike and was elected as the local Batley and Spen MP at the General Election in May 2015, beating the Tories with a 6,051 majority.

Born to Jean, a school secretary, and father, Gordon, who worked in a local toothpaste and hairspray factory, Cox was educated at Heckmondwike Grammar School and became the first person from her family to graduate from university.

But before she arrived in Cambridge, she spent the summer working at her dad's factory, packing toothpaste while all her peers enjoyed a gap year.

She recalled in an interview with the Yorkshire Post how she 'didn't really speak right or knew the right people' at university and admitted her experience at Cambridge 'really knocked me'.

She read social and political studies at Cambridge University, which is where her passion of politics was born.

'I just felt like I wasn't quite up to speed with everyone else,' she explained. 'I was a happy go lucky 18-year-old from Yorkshire going out in Leeds having a good time.

Jo Cox (pictured) was among the rising stars in Parliament before she was shot dead on the streets of her Yorkshire constituency today

Days before she died Jo Cox took part in the traditional tug of war against the House of Lords

Jo Cox (right) was married to Brendan Cox (left), a former adviser to Gordon Brown who has also been chief executive of Save the children

'A lovely life and a lovely family. Then I was thrown into a Cambridge environment where I just didn't get it. It shook me. All my norms and everything I was used to didn't feel like they were right anymore.'

Mrs Cox admitted she wasn't 'political or Labour' before university, but Cambridge was a place 'where you were born mattered... who you knew mattered'.

She went on to work as an adviser for the Labour MP Joan Walley and Baroness Kinnock before embarking on a career as an aid worker in developing countries.

Mrs Cox rose to become Oxfam's head of global policy and a former colleague of her said this afternoon: 'Jo was a brilliant committed activist for social justice with boundless energy and kindness who made a huge contribution at Oxfam.'

She was married to Brendan Cox, a former adviser to Gordon Brown who has also been chief executive of Save the Children.

The 41-year-old also worked closely with Mr Brown's wife Sarah on efforts to prevent mothers and babies dying needlessly in pregnancy.

Jo Cox was a slight figure but had a powerful voice and used it repeatedly in Parliament over the last year to make the passionate case for taking in more Syrian refugee children

Jo Cox (pictured) used her short time as an MP to continue her career-long dedication to helping the plight of refugees and made a name for herself by campaigning on Syria-related issues

Jo Cox, pictured campaigning to keep Britain in the EU, was born and raised in Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, and was popular and well known among constituents despite her short spell as their MP

In Parliament she continued her focus on helping developing countries and specifically on Syria, playing a key role in calling for the UK to enforce a no-fly zone.

As chair co-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group Friends of Syria, finding solutions to the five-year civil war in the country was one of her main priorities in her one-year spell as an MP.

When it came to the vote on air strikes in Syria in December last year, she was one of five Labour MPs to abstain in the high profile vote.

Explaining her reason for abstaining, Mrs Cox wrote: 'My final hope and plea is, whether or not the government win this vote, that they take a long, hard look at revamping their strategy for civilian protection in Syria.

'That in the weeks that come the protection of civilians becomes the central component in our plan.

'In my view it is only when civilians are protected that we will defeat Isis (IS), and until that is at the centre of our plan, I will remain an outspoken advocate for that cause.'

But as a woman who was born, raised and represented Heckmondwike, she campaigned equally hard for local issues, such as social care and fought hard on promoting equality for women.

Mrs Cox nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader, but was regarded as a moderate within the party and was very popular among her fellow MPs.

Mrs Cox spent her final day in Westminster close to her young son and daughter and husband Brendan.

Yesterday she posted a picture of her young family on Twitter enjoying a day of campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU on the Thames.

The family were preparing to hold their annual summer solstice party this weekend, with more than 100 friends and family due to join them.

Jo Cox (pictured left at her count after being elected as an MP last year and right, with Labour's shadow home secretary) was born and raised in the West Yorkshire town of Heckmondwike
Paul Santamaria, of Hebron, New Hampshire, was grabbed by a gator at a Disney campground in 1986, when he was 8 years old

The death of a 2-year-old boy at a Walt Disney World resort in an alligator attack has brought back some frightening memories for a New Hampshire man who was grabbed by a gator at a Disney campground in 1986, when he was 8.

Paul Santamaria, of Hebron, has said he was horrified for the family of Lane Graves.

The toddler was snatched by an alligator in shallow water Tuesday at a beach at Disney's Grand Floridian resort, 3 miles from where Santamaria was attacked.

Santamaria said: 'I have two little girls the age of the boy that was taken, and it was just something that kind of hit home.'

He told WCVB: 'The important thing is people understand that this is a terrible thing that happened to a family.

'My thoughts and prayers are with them. It's just a terrible tragedy.'

In 1986, Santamaria's family was staying at Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground when he was attacked while feeding ducks at a pond.

The gator knocked him down, grabbed his leg and started to thrash around and try to pull him into the water, Santamaria said.

He told WCVB: 'Whether it was after the duck or me, I don't know.

'But it hit me, came up like a swinging thing and knocked me down, then turned its head and grabbed my leg.'

He yelled for help. His 12-year-old sister grabbed him under the arms, and his 10-year-old brother started hitting the gator. Santamaria kicked the gator with his other leg.

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In 1986, Santamaria's family was staying at Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground when he was attacked while feeding ducks at a pond

The gator knocked him down, grabbed his leg and started to thrash around and try to pull him into the water, Santamaria said

Mickey Mouse and Snow White are seen with Santamaria in the hospital

Santamaria recalled to the TV station: 'My sister grabbed me under the arms and started to have a tug of war with this alligator. My brother looked for anything he could throw at it or hit with.'

He told WMUR: 'Instead of just freezing, they decided to fight, to help me to fight to get away, and I'm here because of it. I was lucky.'

Eventually the alligator opened its mouth and let him go. He suffered gashes and a tooth stuck in his thigh, and he was hospitalized for a week. He still has the scars on his leg.

Santamaria told WMUR: 'It was pretty terrifying at the time.'

Santamaria suffered gashes and a tooth stuck in his thigh, and he was hospitalized for a week

The alligator that attacked Santamaria was later shot and killed

A Disney spokesman said then that as far as he knew, it was the first such attack at the sprawling theme park

Speaking about the recent alligator attack at Disney, Santamaria said: 'I have two little girls the age of the boy that was taken, and it was just something that kind of hit home'

Lane Graves, just 2 years old, was snatched by an alligator in shallow water Tuesday at a beach at Disney's Grand Floridian resort, 3 miles from where Santamaria was attacked

The 2-year-old boy who was the victim of an alligator attack, Lane Graves, is pictured in this image

The alligator that attacked Santamaria was later shot and killed. A Disney spokesman said then that as far as he knew, it was the first such attack at the sprawling theme park.

In Lane's case, five alligators were killed in the search for his body, but authorities have yet to determine which of them, if any, was responsible for the boy's death.

The Orange County sheriff said it was the first time an alligator had killed someone at Disney in its 45 years of operations.
Lillo Brancato, 40, partied with NYPD cops despite his involvement in the killing of a fellow officer

The NYPD is investigating to find out which one of their own gave the actor Lillo Brancato a so-called 'get out of jail free card' only two years after he was released from prison for his role in a cop's murder.

'Sopranos' actor Brancato, 40, was reportedly partying with five NYPD officers in May when a lieutenant gave him a union card, which can be useful for getting out of trouble.

He was released in 2014 after spending eight years in prison for his involvement in a botched Bronx burglary during which his accomplice fatally shot a cop.

A family member of the dead officer called the fact that NYPD cops would fraternize with Brancato 'disrespectful,' 'disgusting,' and 'a stab in the face.'

Even within the department, the reported cop-convict shoulder-rubbing raised enough eyebrows to prompt an internal investigation, police sources told the New York Post.

A Manhattan-based investigation unit is 'trying to identify' the officers involved and find out 'if any misconduct was committed,' the Post reported.

The source said the 'department is not happy' about the affair.

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Police investigate the crime scene where off-duty NYPD officer Daniel Enchautegui, 28, was shot and killed on December 10, 2005 while responding to a burglary. Lillo Brancato served time for the burglary and his accomplice Steven Armento is still in prison for firing the shot that killed Enchautegui

Lillo Brancato was shot twice in the chest by the dying officer and was quickly arrested by a back-up unit

Left, slain officer Daniel Enchautegui. Center, cop killer Steven Armento. Right, actor Lillo Brancato

Brancato, who had his breakthrough role in Robert de Niro's 1993 film 'A Bronx Tale,' was found guilty of attempting to break into a home in 2005.

The actor and his accomplice, Steven Armento, were caught in the act by off-duty cop Daniel Enchautegui, who confronted the men before Armento fatally shot the 28-year-old officer in the chest.

Brancato, who was bleeding after being shot twice in the chest by the dying cop, was busted by a back-up unit that arrived on the scene shortly after the confrontation, the New York Times reported at the time.

The actor was convicted of attempted burglary but acquitted of murder. Armento was sentenced to life in prison without parole for firing the shot that killed Enchautegui.

Last year, Brancato told the Post he accepts 'full responsibility for how my actions and my drug addiction contributed to the death of that heroic police officer.' The actor says he's been drug-free since 2006.

Lillo Brancato is pictured left facing Robert de Niro during the filming of the 1993 movie 'A Bronx Tale'

Brancato as Matthew Bevilaqua in the HBO series 'Sopranos.' His character was killed by Tony Soprano

The party where the actor hung out with the cops was a celebration of his latest movie 'Back in the Day,' which opened in May to lukewarm reviews.

Speaking to the Post, Brancato said the party-attending cops told him they were 'very happy for the fact that I'm getting back to what I truly love... Being an actor.'

He said he considered the police lieutenant who gave him the union card 'a friend for life' for the gesture, but that he wasn't sure if he would be able to use the card.

'I get stopped, I'm sure they're going to ask, "Where did you get this?"'

'I'd have to mention [the lieutenant's] name, and I don't want to do that.'

Brancato was born in Bogota, Colombia and grew up in Yonkers, a suburb that borders the Bronx.
He later repeats the feat but strikes his hand and

This is the humorous moment a man is challenged to hit the middle of a dart board - and pulls off two perfect bullseyes.

The footage was captured by George Evans, who filmed his friend playing darts at a pub in an unidentified part of the UK.

The clip, which has been titled 'I'll point at the bull and I bet you can't get it', shows the man being challenged to hit the middle of the board with his next shot.

Confident: The man's son places his finger on the board (left) and his dad pulls off a perfect bullseye, coming withing inches of hitting him (right)

And his son is so confident that he will not be able to pull off the challenging feat he places his finger on the bullseye.

The man is then seen throwing his dart and hitting a perfect bullseye - coming within inches of striking his son's finger and causing the room to burst out in surprised laughter.

He is then challenged to repeat the feat and throw a second dart at the board.

Confident that his father will definitely not be able to hit two bullseyes in quick succession, the man keeps his hand in the way.

Second attempt: The son keeps his hand on the board (left), only for his dad to pull other another perfect shot and hit him with the dart (right)

The dart is then sent sailing towards the bullseye and hits his finger - causing the son to flinch in pain and pull his hand away.

The group of friends suddenly erupt with laughter as the man holds his throbbing hand before later announcing that he is fine.

The video concludes with the man holding his injured finger to the camera and showing off the small wound caused by the dart.
Commuters faced delays and man was arrested for being

Thousands of rush hour commuters face another night of misery after a train derailed yesterday causing travel chaos.

Last night a train, which was not carrying any passengers at the time, ploughed into a gantry carrying over head power lines in and out of Paddington station in central London.

A middle-aged City worker was arrested and handcuffed as thousands of passengers queued for up to four hours following the derailment at one of the UK's busiest stations.

The 45-year-old man from Reading was arrested and remains in custody today after being verbally abusive to a member of station staff as tensions over the delays boiled over.

A 45-year-old man (pictured) from Reading was arrested and remains in custody today after being verbally abusive to a member of staff at Paddington train station last night following the derailment

The Great Western Train derailed after it jumped a red light approaching Paddington station yesterday

A British Transport Police spokesman said: 'The man was arrested under a section 5 public order offence at 8.10pm after being abusive to a member of station staff.'

Engineers had hoped to have repaired the damage by 10.15pm last night, ensuring a full service this morning, but the extent of the damage was too great to hit the deadline.

No trains ran in to or out of Paddington station on Thursday evening and just half ran this morning.

Only four of the normal six possible lines were open today due to damage caused to signalling and overhead wires.

There were no passengers on board during the derailment, which Network Rail said happened when the train went through a red signal.

A spokesman for Network Rail said: 'An empty train travelled past a red signal outside Paddington station which activated an automatic derailment.'

Overhead line equipment was damaged and trains are able to access only three of the six lines serving the station.

The train took out overhead powerlines approaching the station delaying some 10,000 commuters

Nobody was injured following yesterday afternoon's incident which closed the station for several hours

The operator has apologised to customers for delays and advised customers to use routes through Waterloo and Marylebone as an alternative.

Tickets not used on Thursday will be valid for Friday and Saturday.

A Great Western Railway (GWR) spokesman said: 'We're sorry for the disruption this incident has caused to customers this evening.

'We are working with Network Rail to get things back to normal as safely and quickly as possible, however train services are likely to be affected tomorrow morning due to the extent of damage caused by the derailment.

'At the moment, we expect to be able to run around half our normal service into and out of Paddington on Friday morning. We hope this will improve as further progress is made and we would ask customers to check before travelling. Passengers should expect GWR and alternative trains to be much busier than usual, particularly with additional people travelling to Ascot.'

Thousands of passengers faced long delays after the train was derailed on its approach to Paddington

The Network Rail spokesman added: 'Our engineers are working around-the-clock to repair significant damage caused by this incident. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and to minimise the inconvenience for passengers.'

One passenger tweeted a picture of empty departure screens at Paddington, while others described their frustration at delays.

Tanbir tweeted: 'stuck on the train into #londonpaddington going to miss an event I've paid for, really annoyed!'

Clive Nunn wrote: 'Won't make it to the concert now. Gutted.'

Arabel Bailey said her journey home took five hours as a result of the cancellations.

She wrote: '5 hours, 2 Ubers, 4 new friends and I've finally made it home after a derailment closed #londonpaddington.'

Passenger services out of Paddington were suspended yesterday afternoon after the train was derailed

Up to 10,000 passengers were forced to find an alternative route home following the rush hour incident

Heathrow Express services were suspended due to a loss of power at the station following the derailment.

More than 10,000 commuters were forced to find an alternative way home last night. Passengers leaving Waterloo heading west reported severely overcrowded trains with standing room only.

The train only had the driver on board when it left the rails. After the train went through the red light, a special safety system forced the locomotive off the rails to prevent it from striking the platform.

Thousands of commuters were told to make alternative ways home after all services leaving the station were affected.
McCain walked back his comments within an hour, saying he 'misspoke' and that he had policy differences, not personal ones, with Obama

' for rise of the Muslim fundamentalists to whom Omar Mateen swore loyalty during massacre

Republican Sen. John McCain lashed out at Barack Obama on Thursday, saying the president is 'directly responsible' for Sunday's terror attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida  because the ISIS terror army was allowed to flourish on his watch.

But within an hour he walked back his comments, saying he 'misspoke.'

Briefing reporters on Capitol Hill, McCain connected the dots between killer Omar Mateen's ISIS-inspired attack and Obama's policies in the Middle East.

'Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures,' McCain said.

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Blame: McCain accused Obama of being responsible for the rise of ISIS as he spoke to reporters on Thursday afternoon - at precisely the time the president was on Orlando to meet the family of Mateen's victims

Perpetrator: Omar Mateen, 30, an American citizen, killed 49 in the worst mass shooting in modern American history. He attacked the Pulse nightclub, gunning down clubbers at the gay venue, then taking more hostage

When a reporter asked McCain to clarify how Obama is 'directly' responsible, the Arizona senator, who is up for re-election, doubled down.

'He pulled everybody out of Iraq, and I predicted at the time that ISIS would go unchecked, and there would be attacks on the United States of America,' said McCain, who ran against Obama for the White House in 2008 as the Republican nominee.

'It's a matter of record,' McCain continued.

'So he is directly responsible,' the Arizona lawmaker added.

McCain walked some of his comments back in a statement, turning his personal jabs into policy disagreements.

'I misspoke,' he said. 'I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the President himself.'

'As I have said, President Obama's decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL. I and others have long warned that the failure of the Presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.'

ISIL is the Obama administration's preferred acronym, and is interchangeable with ISIS.

Walk-back attempt: McCain tweeted this message shortly after making the accusation about Obama being to blame for ISIS

McCain's Democratic opponent for his U.S. Senate seat, Ann Kirkpatrick released a statement criticizing her rival.

'Elected leaders have a moral duty to work together to root out terrorism and keep Americans safe,' Kirkpatrick said.

'But today, we saw John McCain cross a dangerous line in comments that undermine our Commander in Chief on national security issues  at the very moment the president was in Orlando to comfort victims families,' she continued.

'Its difficult to imagine the old John McCain being this reckless with something so serious. John McCain has changed after 33 years in Washington,' she added.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the body's top Democrat, also condemned McCain's remarks.

It's 'just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump,' Adam Jentleson, Reid's spokesman, said in a statement to the Washington Post.

'There is no daylight between Senate Republicans and Donald Trump.'

Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz also joined the pile-on.

'During the 2008 campaign, Sen. John McCain was quick to deny or dismiss the false, inflammatory and racist insinuations that some in his party aimed at then-Senator Barack Obama,' Wasserman Schulz noted.

When McCain and Obama were running against each other, the Arizona senator memorably corrected a woman in his audience who referred to Obama as an 'Arab.'

'Eight years later, the political courage that once earned McCain accolades and admiration from both sides of the aisle is nowhere to be found,' Wasserman Schultz continued.

'By falling in line behind his partys presumptive nominee and parroting Trumps revolting insinuation that President Obama had something to do with the Orlando attacks, Sen. McCain has sent a clear signal: the Republican Party is Donald Trumps party,' she said.

'McCains Trump-inspired rhetoric is further proof that we must elect Democrats up and down the ballot this November,' she added.

Timing: As McCain spoke, the president had landed in Orlando having come with vice-president Joe Biden to meet families of Omar Mateen's 49 victims

Comfort: The president and vice-president came to Orlando to meet families of the Pulse nightclub massacre at a time when the political fall-out over the terror attack has come to divide Republicans and Democrats

McCain has been trying to distance himself from his party's presumptive nominee in part because his state is heavily Hispanic.

Trump has done himself no favors with this demographic group in calling for a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

The Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub.

The 29-year-old Muslim, a native New Yorker with Afghan parents, made calls during the attack pledging his allegiance to ISIS.

But he also spoke about the al Nusra Front, an affiliate of al Qaeda and about Hezbollah, both of which are ISIS enemies.

Hezabollah is Shi'ite, rather than Sunni  and hates both al Qaeda and ISIS.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting U.S. enemies ahead of American's own people.

Trump also has appeared to suggest that Obama himself might sympathize with radical elements.

Democrats criticized Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves from his remarks.

Tribute: President Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, laid flowers in memory of the victims

Trump and Obama had clashed bitterly over the president's refusal to call the attack an example of 'radical Islamic terrorism' - a long-held policy of the White House.

On Tuesday, Obama unleashed his fury in public, ripping into Trump over the Republican's insistence that he use the phrase 'radical Islam' to describe terrorists like the one who perpetrated the massacre in Orlando.

Obama said Trump's 'yapping' was nothing more than a 'political distraction' and defining an entire religion by the behavior of terrorists who are perverting it would only fuel hate and make America less safe.

'There's no magic to the phrase radical Islam. It's a political talking point. It's not a strategy,' Obama said in speech on Tuesday afternoon after meeting his National Security Council.

'And the reason I am careful about how I describe this threat has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with actually defeating extremism.

'What exactly would using this label accomplish?

'What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?

He said, 'The answer is none of the above.'

'Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.'

Trump tweeted his disdain immediately, and later in the same day it was the Republican who launched his own fusillade.

'I watched President Obama today. And he was more angry at me than he was at the shooter!' he said.

'The level of anger  that's the kind of anger he should have for the shooter, and these killers that shouldn't be here.'
Despite Disney official's claims that they do everything in their power to protect guests from alligators at their resorts, employees at the Orlando theme park say the reptiles have become a problem that the company has been ignoring.

Tragedy struck the 'Happiest Place on Earth' on Tuesday when a two-year-old boy was snatched and drowned by an alligator while wading on a beach outside Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa.

In the aftermath of toddler Lane Graves' death, law enforcement officials defended Disney, saying they are proactive about removing alligators from the lake and releasing them in uninhabited areas.

But employees at the park are now telling a different story.

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Disney employees say they have warned their bosses for more than a year about guests feeding alligators at the Seven Seas Lagoon - especially guests in the $2,000-a-night Bora Bora Bungalows (pictured)

Guests in the bungalows have private porches on the water and have apparently been seen feeding the alligators that swim by

Several employees spoke to The Wrap and said that they had complained about alligators becoming a problem over the past 14 months, thanks to guests feeding the creatures.

On Tuesday, two-year-old Lane Graves was snatched and drowned by an alligator while wading in water outside the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa

The problem has allegedly been exacerbated by the opening of the new $2,000-a-night Bora Bora Bungalows, a an expensive collection of private rooms situated directly on the Seven Seas Lagoon - just across from the beach where Lane was snatched.

The bungalows have private porches and guests apparently feed the alligators as they float past.

'Disney has known about the problem of guests feeding the alligators well-prior to the opening of the bungalows,' said an insider. 'With the opening of the bungalows, it brought the guests that much closer to wildlife. Or, the wildlife that much closer to the guests.'

A few employees said they had complained about the bungalow guests feeding the alligators, but alleged that park officials may have been hesitant to reprimand guests staying in $2,000-a-night suites.

'Disney knew these alligators had become desensitized to humans, as they had begun to associate guests with food, and did not act in a proactive manner,' the insider added.

Disney officials declined to comment when reached by The Wrap.

Other employees said the resort wasn't doing enough to warn guests about alligators in the lake. While the Grand Floridian had posted several 'no swimming' signs, none of their signs warned of alligators in the lake.

Mike Hamilton, a custodial employee at Disney, said he warned his bosses that the gators were swimming too close to the shore and that a fence should be erected to keep them away from the hotels.

If any wrong-doing is found on Disney's part, that could open the company up to a wrongful death lawsuit.

Other employees expressed concern that the Grand Floridian's signs don't do enough to keep guests out of the water, since they only say 'no swimming' and don't mention gators

Police have said the company will be reviewing their policy.

In a statement to Daily Mail Online, a Disney spokesman said: 'All of our beaches are currently closed, and we are conducting a swift and thorough review of all of our processes and protocols. This includes the number, placement and wording of our signage and warnings.'

Wildlife officials have come out to defend Disney, saying the company has worked with law enforcement to make sure that their properties are safe for guests by locating and removing dangerous indigenous creatures from the resort.

Last night, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demmings confirmed the body of Lane had been recovered 'intact' from the lagoon.

It came 17 hours after his father had attempted to to save his son after the gator snatched him, but he could not pry the toddler from the animal's grasp - and the creature disappeared underwater, taking the child with it.

The Graves family were on the third day of their vacation in Orlando when tragedy struck on Tuesday night.

Sheriff Demmings also confirmed it was unlikely that Lane's parents to be charged with any sort of neglect and added that the alligator probably drowned the toddler and abandoned his body on the bottom of the lagoon.

During the search, wildlife officials caught and killed five alligators in the lake and they say they will now use forensics to determine whether they have already euthanized the gator responsible for the attack.

If not, officials promised to continue searching the lake for the creature.
George Osborne last night cancelled a major address on the economy and referendum to pay an emotional tribute to Jo Cox after she was killed in Leeds

George Osborne last night cancelled a major address on the economy and referendum to pay an emotional tribute to Jo Cox.

He said all MPs had been rocked by the 'appalling, shattering news' of Mrs Cox's death when it was confirmed by West Yorkshire Police shortly after 5pm.

But a week before a democratic vote that will define his career, Mr Osborne said 'freedom, liberty and justice' would prevail over the 'hatred that killed her'.

The Chancellor welcomed the decision to suspend campaigning on the EU referendum with less than a week to polling day out of respect for the tragic events in Birstall.

Mr Osborne, speaking at the annual Mansion House dinner, said Mrs Cox had died 'serving her constituents, serving our democracy'.

And Mr Osborne reflected on how all MPs making themselves available to their constituents is 'one of the virtues of our Parliamentary democracy'.

He said: 'It's what makes the way we govern ourselves very different from many others.

'To be an effective representative, all of us who are MPs engage with their communities, talk to everyone and anyone, hold constituency surgeries and must be prepared to stand up and argue publicly for what we believe.

'Jo did all of these things.'

The Chancellor said the Batley and Spen MP had been 'liked and respected across the House' after making an immediate impact since her election last year.

He said shed changed attitudes and helped change Government policy despite being a new, backbench, opposition MP.

Mr Osborne said: ' She will never know how many lives she helped transform.

'Today, doing that job, she senselessly lost her own life.

'Not since Ian Gow lost his life to an IRA bomb twenty six years ago has an MP been murdered, but others since have faced attack, injury and intimidation.'

Mr Osborne said all MPs had been rocked by the 'appalling, shattering news' of Mrs Cox's death when it was confirmed by West Yorkshire Police shortly after 5pm

Mr Osborne, speaking at the annual Mansion House dinner, said Mrs Cox had died 'serving her constituents'

The Chancellor appeared deep in thought with his head bowed as he sat at the dinner at Mansion House

The Chancellor continued: ' We believe in Parliamentary democracy.

'MPs have the privilege of representing the views of those who voted for them and those who did not. We believe in tolerance.

'In the words of her husband, Brendan, Jo would have wanted us to unite against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion. It is poisonous.

'And we believe in freedom, liberty and justice.'

Mr Osborne said the day's 'horrible events' were an 'assault on all these values'.

But in a defiant conclusion, he said: 'But we know that these values, no matter how they have been challenged in the past, have always prevailed, prevail today and they will always prevail.
A hacker who called himself 'Spam King' and sent 27 million unsolicited Facebook messages for a variety of scams has been sentenced to 30 months in jail.

Sanford Wallace, 47 was also ordered to pay more than $310,000 in fines.

The hacker also known as "Spamford" is reported to have compromised over 500,000 Facebook accounts from November 2008 to March 2009, and messaged victims links to external sites that harvested their log-ins and Facebook friend lists. Then, Wallace spammed the Facebook users with links to other websites.

In August, 2015, he pleaded guilty to electronic mail fraud and criminal contempt of court, according to sentencing documents filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, CA. He got the contempt charge for disobeying prior orders from one of his many court cases to never access Facebook in the first place.

"Judge Edward J. Davila also sentenced King to mental health treatment and five years of probation once he's released," NBC News reported. "And he barred King from possessing or using any computer without the permission of his probation order."

Here's the Justice Department announcement today on the end of the Spam King's reign:

Sanford Wallace was sentenced yesterday to 30 months' imprisonment and was ordered to pay $310,628.55 in restitution for sending millions of spam messages to Facebook users and disobeying a court order not to access Facebook announced the Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wallace, 47, of Las Vegas, pleaded guilty on August 24, 2015 to one count of fraud and related activity in connection with electronic mail, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  1037(a)(1) and (b)(2)(A); and one count of criminal contempt, in violation of 18 U.S.C.  401(3). According to the plea agreement Wallace admitted to executing a scheme from approximately November 2008 through March 2009 to send spam messages to Facebook users that compromised approximately 500,000 legitimate Facebook accounts, and resulted in over 27 million spam messages being sent through Facebook's servers. Wallace illegally obtained, stored, and exploited Facebook user account information and earned money by redirecting users to other websites. Specifically, Wallace admitted he opened a fictitious Facebook account in the name of "David Frederix" to test his spam messages and created an automated process to sign into a Facebook user's account, retrieve a list of all of the user's friends, and then send a message to each of the user's friends' Facebook accounts. The message was designed to trick legitimate Facebook account holders into accessing a website listed in the message that was purportedly from a Facebook friend. Once the user entered his or her information, the user would be redirected to an affiliate website. Wallace further admitted that he earned money for directing traffic to the websites and stored users' email addresses and passwords in order to continue sending spam messages. In addition, Wallace admitted that during three time periods he accessed Facebook's computer network to send spam messages to Facebook's users. First, on or about November 5, 2008, and continuing to November 6, 2008, he accessed Facebook's computer network in order to initiate the transmission of a program that resulted in more than 128,883 spam messages being sent to Facebook users. Second, he admitted that on December 28, 2008, he accessed Facebook's computer network in order to initiate the transmission of a program that resulted in nearly 300,000 spam messages being sent to Facebook users. Third, he admitted that on February 17, 2009, he accessed Facebook's computer network in order to initiate the transmission of a program that resulted in more than 126,000 spam messages being sent to Facebook users. Facebook filed a lawsuit against him in United States District Court for the Northern District of California alleging violations of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and California's Anti-Phishing and Computer Data Access and Fraud Acts. (Facebook, Inc. v. Wallace, et al, No. C-09-00798 JF). On March 2, 2009, March 24, 2009, and September 18, 2009, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel ordered Wallace not to access or attempt to access Facebook's computer network in any manner whatsoever nor create or maintain a Facebook account. Wallace admitted that on April 17, 2009, he willfully disobeyed Judge Fogel's order by logging into his Facebook account while aboard a flight from Las Vegas to New York.

From The Verge:

Wallace's spamming career didn't begin with Facebook messages, but stretches all the way back to the '90s, when he sent junk fax messages. He faced civil suits from both Myspace and Facebook in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and racked up nearly $1 billion in fines from the two companies that he was unable to pay. This recent sentence, is the first time Wallace has been convicted of a crime, with the Spam King pleading guilty to one count of "fraud and related activity in connection with electronic mail." His two-and-a-half year jail sentence is just short of the three year maximum he was facing.

IMAGE: A shoop by Xeni for Boing Boing, using an Associated Press shot of 'Spam King' Sanford Wallace.
Richard Armitage, a longtime senior diplomat who was a top security advisor to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush says he'll cast his ballot for Hillary Clinton in November.

He joins an array of top Republicans who said they won't back Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, but goes further than many by saying he'll cast his vote for Clinton.

'If Donald Trump is the nominee, I would vote for Hillary Clinton,' Armitage, who was the No. 2 at the agency under secretary of state Colin Powell from 2001 to 2005, told Politico.

'He doesn't appear to be a Republican, he doesn't appear to want to learn about issues. So, I'm going to vote for Mrs. Clinton,' Armitage told the publication.

Armitage has been well known in D.C. foreign policy circles for years.

He was at the center of a sensational political story during the Bush administration when he was revealed to be the original source who tipped off the late columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of a U.S. ambassador to Africa Joe Wilson, was a CIA agent.

Novak put the information in a column. It's a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Former top diplomat Richard Armitage says he won't vote for Trump because the real estate mogul 'doesn't appear to be a Republican'

Armitage was never indicted by a federal grand jury investigation the disclosure of Plame's identity. The leak was thought to a form of payback against Wilson, who had been a critic of the Iraq war.

Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was convicted of committing obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with a leak investigation.

Armitage himself ultimately admitted the leak.

'I feel terrible. Every day, I think, I let down the president. I let down the secretary of state. I let down my department, my family, and I also let down Mr. and Mrs. Wilson,' he told CBS in 2006. He said he gave up the identity of Wilson's wife in an 'offhand comment' in response to a question, and didn't try to out anyone's identity on purpose.

Armitage admitted that he was the source of a leak about the identity of Valerie Plame, who had worked undercover for the CIA

A group of well-known Republican national security experts declared their opposition back in March when the Republican nomination had yet to be decided. The letter was signed by security experts including Michael Chertoff, who served as Bush's Homeland Security secretary, former attorney general Michael Mukasey. Another signer, foreign policy expert Max Boot, has said he'll vote for Clinton, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

On Thursday, Ohio governor John Kasich, who had signed a pledge to back the ultimate Republican nominee, declared that he 'just can't do it,' and is unable to support Trump.

He held out hope that Trump might have some sort of conversion like the apostle Paul on the 'Damascus road.'

Armitage was never indicted, although Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a top aide to Vice President Cheney, was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury

Armitage was a foreign policy to Reagan and also served in the Defense Department.

Trump on Wednesday lashed out at leading Republicans who have been bailing out on him or otherwise criticizing his most controversial positions and urged them to 'be quiet.'

'Our leaders have to get a lot tougher,' Trump said in Atlanta. 'And be quiet. Just please be quiet. Don't talk. Please be quiet... They have to get tougher, they have to get sharper, they have to get smarter. We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.'
The Indiana man who is accused of bringing weapons and explosives to a Pride parade in California on Sunday allegedly talked about marrying a 12-year-old girl he reportedly had sex with.

James Wesley Howell, 20, was charged with child molestation in Clark County on Wednesday - just one day after he was indicted in California on at least three felony charges.

Officials in Los Angeles announced numerous charges against him including, possession of explosives on a public highway, possession of a high-capacity magazine and possession of an assault weapon on Tuesday.

He was arrested on his way to the Los Angles Pride festival in West Hollywood on Sunday by Santa Monica police who discovered a large amount of weapons and explosives in his car.

In addition, last October Howell's then-boyfriend accused him of pointing a loaded gun at him on his property, but police did not arrest anyone.

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James Wesley Howell, 20, (left on Tuesday, right in mugshot) has been charged with child sex abuse in Indiana - a day after he was charged with taking guns and explosives to a California gay pride parade

Howell, who was ordered held on $2million bail, faces three felony counts of unlawful possession of an assault weapon, high capacity magazines, and explosives

Authorities suspect that Howell left Indiana after he found out that he was under investigation for molestation.

Detectives recorded a brief statement from Howell on June 7 when he asked for a lawyer, they let him go.

'He understood that this child molesting investigation was ongoing and he was in imminent danger of being arrested,' Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull told IndyStar.

The child's mother said that she trusted Howell to take her 12-year-old daughter to a family friend's house on May 31.

She told the IndyStar that she thought Howell was a 'typical' older boy. But before dropping the child off, he allegedly parked the car in Indiana's Clark State Forest and began to undress her and kiss her.

'At the park, they crawled in the back seat (of Howell's car) and did things they should not have been doing,' the victim's mother told IndyStar.

The woman said that her daughter does not understand why Howell is in trouble, and that she considered him to be her boyfriend.

She also said that her daughter and Howell spoke about getting married to each other after the girl got older.

Howell recently drove from Indiana to Los Angeles because of pending charges against him in his home state, police say. His ex-boyfriend claimed that Howell threatened to shoot him last October

'She doesn't see herself as being sexually abused,' the mother told IndyStar.

Court documents state that the girl told authorities that 'she was never forced' to have sex with Howell.

Days after the alleged incident, Howell threatened to kill members of the child's family and himself, according to the IndyStar.

The court documents state that Howell threatened to kill police officers too if they attempted to arrest him.

Howell also sent a message to a friend of the victims saying that he was a 'sociopath with an automatic.'

This isn't the first time Howell has faced trouble with the law. Last October, his ex-boyfriend claimed that he pointed a rifle at him and threatened to pull the trigger, the IndyStar reported.

However, Howell told officers with the Charlestown Police Department that the kept the rifle on his shoulder and pointed it toward the sky as he told his ex-boyfriend to leave his property.

No arrests were made in that incident.

But the next day, Howell was arrested after he pointed a loaded handgun at one of his neighbors.

He was ordered to forfeit all of his weapons after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor intimidation charge in April, the IndyStar reported.

Under the terms of his probation, Howell was not allowed to have weapons or leave Indiana.

One of Howell's ex-boyfriends told the IndyStar that he had a collection of guns that he kept at his home.

'I don't know why he had so many,' Zach Hambrick, 17, told the newspaper. 'He didn't hunt. He just had them.'

If convicted of the child molestation charge, Howell could face up to 17 years in prison, Mull stated.

Howell remains in jail on $2million bond in California.
Iraqi civilian Abd Al-Waheed arrives at the High Court in London to claim in person damages for alleged unlawful detention and mistreatment by UK armed forces

Two Iraqis have been flown to Britain to claim over a quarter of a million pounds compensation for being detained by UK troops in the first High Court case of its kind.

Abd Al-Waheed, a suspected insurgent, is demanding up to 233,000 in compensation after he was imprisoned for 44 days during the Iraq War, documents seen by the Mail reveal.

His claim includes potential pay-outs for damage to teeth and loss of earnings.

Kamil Najim Alseran is claiming as much as 46,000 after he was detained for 52 days following his arrest a week after the start of the war in March 2003.

Mr Al-Waheed, who soldiers believed to be a bomb maker, became the first claimant to come before an English judge to give evidence in person this week after being flown in from Basra.

On day four of the five-week hearing yesterday, two former soldiers were dragged before the judge to testify what happened during the incident nearly a decade ago.

A Mail campaign  calling for an end to the witch-hunt of British troops  has revealed how the MoD has paid out 22million in compensation so far to Iraqi civilians.

But in previous cases the Iraqis did not have to come before a judge and instead, their written submissions were filed by their lawyers and the department paid out.

The MoD are fighting the latest case amid fears more than 600 similar claims could be brought before judges.

According to soldiers, the first claimant, Mr Al-Waheed, 53, was found in 2007 on a sofa handling a deadly roadside bomb in a house which contained mortars and plastic explosives.

Speaking in Arabic at the five-week High Court trial in London, the three-times married father-of-eight denied the claims and said he was asleep with his wife in bed.

He alleged he was beaten by the British soldiers by rifle butts before being transported to Basra airport and tortured with electric cutters used to pinch his flesh during interrogation.

Mr Al-Waheed, who soldiers believed to be a bomb maker, became the first claimant to come before an English judge to give evidence in person this week after being flown in from Basra

Derek Sweeting QC, for the MoD, accused Mr Al-Waheed  whose lawyers are controversial Leigh Day human rights firm - of telling lies about his treatment and making it up.

Mr Justice Leggatt, the judge, will also hear from Mr Alseran, who was imprisoned for 52 days by British troops in 2003.

A total figure and a breakdown of what Iraqis are claiming from the MoD can be revealed for the first time.

Court documents show how Mr Al-Waheed is claiming 98,000 in basic damages, and Mr Alseran 30,000.

Mr Al-Waheeds basic damages include 19,000 for 44 days imprisonment, 12,000 for assault, 930 for damage to teeth, 15,000 for a back injury and up to 41,675 for psychiatric injuries.

Mr Alseran is claiming up to 5,000 for assault, up to 525 for physical injuries and 4,450 for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

They are both also claiming damages under the human rights act, which amounts to up to 45,000 for Mr Al-Waheed and 19,000 for Mr Alseran.

They have also asked for 24,500 and 7,500 respectively in moral damages, which reflects the impact of egregious behaviour by a defendant, a document showed.

The pair are also claiming thousands of pounds for past and future losses, including loss of earnings, previous travel costs and medical costs.

In total, Mr Al-Waheed is claiming as much as 232,964, and Mr Alseran as much as 45,789.

Just weeks before Mr Al-Waheeds arrest in 2007, Private Luke Simpson, 21, was killed when an IED (improvised explosive device) exploded close to his armoured vehicle.

The blast on February 9, 2007, also caused Captain Ibrar Ali to have his right hand amputated while Private Christopher Herbert had his leg below his right knee removed.

Captain Gareth Fulton, commanded a team on a raid where they arrested Mr al-Waheed, who they suspected to be an insurgent from the Mahdi Army, as part of Operation Saddler.

Captain Fulton, who was lieutenant at the time of the arrest and has since left the Army, admitted it would have been tempting for the troops to assault the suspect.

When soldiers arrived at the property, they found mortars, plastic explosives and IED components.

But Captain Fulton, who served two tours of Iraq and one in Afghanistan, remained adamant that the detainee was not attacked.

Lance Corporal David Turner, who served with the Royal Engineers before leaving the Army, also gave evidence to say he did not see a soldier mistreat the detainee.

Mr al-Waheed was arrested at the property, which was his in-laws house in Basra.

A Mail campaign  calling for an end to the witch-hunt of British troops  has revealed how the MoD has paid out 22million in compensation so far to Iraqi civilians. Pictured: British soldiers in Basra in 2007

His lawyers say it was a case of mistaken identity and his brother-in-law was the target of the raid.

The MoD believes that Mr Al-Waheed should be given no money in special damages, and Mr Alseran 364.67 for future psychiatric treatment.

By comparison, servicemen and women who have fought for the UK and now suffer from a fractured skull only received 5,775 in compensation.

In one case, a former signaller with the Royal Corps of Signals received 10,000 for three injuries, including speech processing difficulties, post-traumatic stress disorder and skull lacerations.
Two US tourists have died after being swept from a beach by a large wave in northwest Mexico.

A spokesman at the US Embassy in Mexico confirmed the victims as Nancy and Richard Culpepper and said that its staff are assisting the family.

Cabo San Lucas Civil Protection director Carlos Guevara said the deaths occurred Wednesday evening.

Two US tourists have died after being swept from a beach by a large wave in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (file photo). A spokesman at the US Embassy in Mexico confirmed the victims as Nancy and Richard Culpepper and said that its staff are assisting the family

The victims were senior citizens who had been walking on the beach.

Nancy Culpepper was pulled from the water by a Navy boat, but died upon arrival at the Navy pier.

And Richard Culpepper was recovered from the water but he was pronounced dead at the scene.

More than 150 Americans have drowned in Mexico from January 2010 through December 2015, according to State Department statistics.

Earlier this year in February, a large wave swept four people off a Los Angeles County jetty as high surf pounded much of the California coast, leaving one man dead.

And in April, two 17-year-old boys, were swept out to sea while playing in the surf at San Franciscos Ocean Beach.
Mass murderer Omar Mateen texted with his wife while shooting dead his helpless victims inside an Orlando gay club early Sunday.

Noor Salman, 30, called her husband a little after 2am when his mother contacted her and said she was concerned about his whereabouts, a law enforcement official working on the investigation told CNN.

Mateen, who was just starting his brutal massacre at that time, did not answer, so at 2.30am Salman texted: 'Where are you?'

At that point Mateen responded, telling his wife: 'Do you see what's happening?'

When she replied back to that by texting 'no' he wrote: 'I love you babe.'

There were no text messages exchanged between the two after that, though Salman did call her husband again a few hours later during his standoff with police. He did not answer his phone.

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Omar Mateen, 29, and his wife Noor Salman texted one another shortly after he started massacring people in an Orlando club early Sunday (above with family at her wedding)

The FBI is reportedly considering at least two charges against Noor Zahi Salman (left) following the Pulse nightclub massacre. She is pictured with her husband and attacker, Omar Mateen (right), and their three-year-old son

Investigators on the case are not revealing if Salman called authorities or 911 at any point during the shooting to identify her husband as the gunman, and the answer to that question could go a long way in explaining just how much she knew about the attack.

The FBI and federal prosecutors meanwhile are planning to bring evidence about Salman's role in the shooting in front of a grand jury to get her indicted on at least two criminal charges for her role in the attack - which could possibly include multiple counts of murder and attempted murder for each of her husband's victims.

An FBI source told Fox News that a panel has already been put together to target Salman, who could be facing any possible number of charges.

That source also stated that Salman could ultimately be charged with 49 counts of murder and 53 counts of attempted murder for her role in the shooting, which the FBI has declared was both a terrorist attack and a hate crime.

If investigators find proof that she scouted out Pulse nightclub or went to purchase ammunition or firearms with her husband knowing about his plans, then under federal law she would be just as guilty of her husband's crimes.

Investigators have reportedly obtained surveillance footage showing Salman buying ammunition with Mateen days before the attack.

There are also reports claiming she told law enforcement that she drove her husband to Walt Disney World and Pulse nightclub to scout out locations.

It is unclear though just how much she may have known about her husband's plans, with the FBI and investigators on the case keeping quiet when it comes to that question.

John Malcolm, director of the Heritage Foundations Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said that other possible charges Salman could face include aiding and abetting, being a co-conspirator, or making false statements to federal investigators.

Salman's mother, Zahi, a Palestinian-born American, opens the door to an FBI agent during a raid

Investigators outside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where Omar Mateen killed and wounded his victims

Despite initially resisting questions, law enforcement said Salman is now fully cooperating with the investigation.

She was seen on Monday returning briefly to the apartment in Fort Pierce, Florida, that she shared with Mateen and their three-year-old son, before getting back in a police car to continue questioning.

Salman has not commented publicly since the attack, which began around 2am early Sunday.

'I can assure you that we're working with our law enforcement partners to find out everything that we can about what happened at the Pulse nightclub,' Lee Bentley, the U.S. Attorney for Florida's middle district said on Wednesday.

Noor Zahi Salman is pictured at the age of 15 in this 2001 yearbook photo from a California high school

'We are using all law enforcement and legal tools to reconstruct not only the events of that night but the events of the past several months.'

Salman was raised by her Palestine-born parents in Rodeo and she graduated from John Swett High School in nearby Crockett, where many of her extended family still live.

Her first marriage was arranged in the Palestinian Territories by her parents, but the cultural frictions between them - Salman an American, her husband Middle Eastern - were too great, neighbors said.

She met Mateen - security guard, bodybuilder and devout Muslim - online. They were married on September 29, 2011, near her hometown.

On June 12, Mateen unleashed his deadly attack on a nightclub of innocent people.

Salman is the eldest of four daughters, with other relatives living in Ohio and Louisiana.

It's unclear when her parents, who served as witnesses for Salman's wedding to Mateen, came to the US. Their naturalization papers allowing them to stay in the country were approved in 1984.

According to a neighbor Jasbinder Chahal, who has lived across the street from Salman's childhood home for the last 15 years, Salman's parents tried to shelter their four girls as they grew up.

'Noor never played in the street, and the girls were never allowed to drive,' Chahal said.

After graduating, she stayed somewhat reclusive.

'You know, some kids after high school, they open up the box and the world is theirs. She was inside the box, just pack it up and get married,' Chahal said.

'They had a small wedding and took lots of pictures here at the house,' said Chahal. The marriage license says the ceremony took place in Hercules, California, and that an imam officiated.

Of Mateen, Chahal said: 'He was shorter than her and did not seem very friendly.'

Salman rarely came home to visit after she married because Mateen would not let her, Chahal said.

She quoted Salman's mother telling her that Mateen even tried to keep his wife from traveling home to see her father when he was sick.

Eventually Noor managed to scrape together the money to visit before her father died in a local hospital, Chahal said.

Mateen was shot dead by law enforcement during his attack.

On Tuesday, FBI agents visited the home of Salman's mother, Zahi, in Rodeo, California, a small town north of San Francisco.

A woman, believed to be Zahi, a widow, came to the door when Daily Mail Online visited but refused to say anything beyond that the family are 'OK'.

The woman added: 'We are OK but we don't want to say anything. I am waiting for my daughter and to hear of her son. We will be OK.'

Shortly after the FBI departed, a neighbor Chuck Surman, 54, approached the house to leave a bunch of flowers on the mat.

First appearance after the attack: Salman seen on Monday night arriving at her home to collect her belongings

Asked why, he said: 'I wanted to do something for her [Zahi]. You can't help what your kids do. I was shocked when I heard.'

Another neighbour said Salman only visited her mother once after she married Mateen.

Salman's mother 'didn't like him very much. He didn't allow her [Noor] to come here,' neighbor Rajinder Chahal told Reuters.

He said he had spoken to Noor Salman's mother after the Orlando attack, adding. 'She was crying, weeping.'

Salman's cousin Sana, 24, also lives close by but when approached by Daily Mail Online, said she did not know Mateen and had no further comment to make.

Salman's mother, Zahi, 50, still lives at the family home, which was left to her by her 56-year-old husband following his death last year.

Neighbors describe a peaceful family who are quietly religious and have never caused trouble on the tranquil street on which they live.

A marriage license says Salman and Mateen, 29, married on Sept. 29, 2011, in Hercules, California, and that an imam officiated, AP reported.

Salman married him after his divorce from first wife Sitora Yusifiy, 26, of Boulder, Colorado. It was also the second marriage for Salman, whose first had been arranged in Palestine by her parents, said Jasbinder Chahal, her mother's neighbor.
Bernie Sanders won 22 states and scored a two-hour meeting with Hillary Clinton about Democratic priorities  but he's not being vetted as a vice presidential running mate, according to people familiar with the process.

However liberal firebrand Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren is being considered, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The vetting isn't to the point where candidates must hand over answers to an intrusive questionnaire and fill out detailed financial information and any dirt from their past.

Staff for Clinton's campaign are beginning the search by going over publicly available information as they weigh who could do the most good on the ticket, is up to the job, knows to attack Donald Trump  and won't embarrass the campaign with their own scandals.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is on Clinton's list of potential running mates, and checked off an important box last week when she endorsed Hillary

Clnton dodged when asked on Telemundo whether she would consider running with Sanders saying there are 'a lot' of qualified candidates.

I havent even begun to sort all that out,' she told the Spanish-language network. 'There are a lot of really qualified, dynamic candidates Im sure to be considered for vice president.

Other names that the paper put on the list, sourced anonymously to people who know about the process, include housing secretary Julian Castro, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Also listed were labor secretary Tom Perez, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, Rep. Xavier Becerra of California and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio.

The Clinton camp on Thursday sent out a press statement from Castro, who used to be mayor of San Antonio, blasting Donald Trump, who is campaigning in Texas this week.

Donald Trump's message to the Latino community is clear: You are not American. In Trump's America, Latinos wouldn't be welcome, our LGBT brothers and sisters wouldn't be able to marry who they love, and Americans would be discriminated against because of their religion,' Castro said in the statement.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders won 22 states but is reportedly not being vetted. He has yet to endorse Clinton, and is still trying to force changes in the party platform

'In a time where the Latino community is under attack, we need a leader who will be a partner, not someone who treats Latinos like second class citizens. We need a leader who will break down barriers for us, not build a wall. We need a leader who will strive for inclusion, not division.'

He continued: 'For this and so many other reasons, Donald Trump has proven once again that hes not qualified and hes temperamentally unfit to be President. As Trump visits Texas over the next few days, let it be clear that his hateful rhetoric is not welcome in our community. Let it be clear that we will raise our voices against him in November.

Warren also has been publicly trying out her role as an attack dog, lacing into Trump in Senate speeches and tweets. Last week she tore into Trump as a 'loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud,' then finally endorsed Clinton on MSNBC Friday.

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to Bill Clinton and President Obama, is heading the search along with longtime Clinton counselor Cheryl Mills, who recently testified in a lawsuit related to the Clinton email scandal.

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine is able to speak Spanish

Housing Secretary Julian Castro but out a blistering statement hitting Donald Trump, saying Latino's wouldn't be 'welcome' under Trump

The Clinton camp sent out a missive by Castro Thursday

Labor secretary Tom Perez is also on Clinton's list

Senator Sherrod Brown represents a key battleground state and has been pushing for labor and environmental concessions in trade agreements for years

Representative Xavier Becerra is a member of the House Democratic leadership

Representative Tim Ryan has proposed legislation to let companies petition to get duties from China. his inclusion on the list sends a signal about trade

Sanders has yet to endorse Clinton, even after losing the final primary in D.C. He met with her for two hours Tuesday night to begin talks of negotiating over the platform. The independent socialist who caucuses with Democrats called for a 'fundamental transformation' of the Democratic Party.

"We need a party which is prepared to stand up for the disappearing middle class, for the 47 million people in this country who are living in poverty, and take on the greed of the powerful special interests that are doing so much harm to this country, who have so much power over the political and economic life of our country," Sanders said this week.

Clinton, who suffers from high disapproval ratings, is anxious to find a way to mollify Sanders' younger, more progressive supporters.

The Huffington Post reported citing sources that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid now wants Clinton to pick Warren. Earlier, Reid said his position on the idea was 'hell no,' because it could temporarily cost Democrats a Senate seat.
Deiseane Santiago, 22, (left) flew to the UK to stay with Simon Ellis (right), 26, last November and planned to fly back to South America with him before her five-month visa expired

A Brazilian woman who was advised not to return to her homeland while pregnant with her British fiances child because of the Zika virus has been told she could be deported within days.

Deiseane Santiago, 22, flew to the UK to stay with Simon Ellis, 26, last November and planned to fly back to South America with him before her five-month visa expired.

But Miss Santiago, who is known as Daisy, fell pregnant while in Britain and is concerned their unborn child could contract the virus, which has been linked to birth defects - in particular, abnormally small heads, known as microcephaly.

Her fears were backed up by Mr Elliss GP, Dr Tim Daniel, who wrote a letter supporting their application to extend Miss Santiagos visa until after the babys birth.

But the Home Office has now turned down the request - claiming Public Health Englands advice that pregnant women should avoid non-essential travel to countries with active transmission of the virus relates only to British nationals.

On Monday, Whitehall officials wrote to the former business student warning her she could now be arrested and deported before the end of the month.

It warned: You will not be removed for the first five working days after you receive this notice.

Following the end of this period, and for up to three months from the date of this notice, you may be removed without further notice.

Mr Ellis, 26, a hotel worker, said: We are worried that Daisy will still be made to return to Brazil, despite medical advice. We dont want to put our unborn child at any risk.

We are not spongers. We just want to follow the medical advice and protect our baby from this awful virus which causes death, devastation and destruction to families.

He said he had paid for Daisys medical care in the UK until after the baby is born via the Immigration Health Surcharge, a fee which must be paid as part of some immigration applications.

But Miss Santiago, who is known as Daisy, fell pregnant while in Britain and is concerned their unborn child could contract the virus, which has been linked to birth defects

Mr Ellis, from Kegworth, Leicestershire, met Miss Santiago online three-and-a-half years ago. The couple, who got engaged earlier this year, are planning to lodge an appeal against the Home Office ruling, which Mr Ellis branded as racist.

He said of the Public Health England advice: It doesnt say British pregnant women, it says women.

So for them to say its for British women, why arent they putting that in their advice? That annoyed me. In theory, thats being racist.

Miss Santiago, who is now 26 weeks pregnant, has been suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum, an extreme form of morning sickness which the Duchess of Cambridge suffered from during both her pregnancies, and was said to be resting yesterday.

A church community in Kegworth, where Simon lives, has rallied behind the couple, along with North West Leicestershire MP Andrew Bridgen.

The Rev Paul Phillips, pastor at Kegworth Baptist Church, which Simon and Daisy attend, said: It is inhumane to send a pregnant woman to a place where British and World Health authorities have said pregnant women should avoid.

All for the sake of allowing the woman and her unborn child to stay in the UK for another 15 weeks.

But the Home Office has now turned down extend her visa until after the baby is born - claiming Public Health Englands advice that pregnant women should avoid non-essential travel to countries with active transmission of the virus relates only to British nationals

Susan Cooke, the children and family worker at the church, added: They had been planning to fly out to Brazil, get married and settle down and start a family but have had to alter their plans after Daisy fell pregnant.

All they want is a healthy baby and they are worried that the baby could be severely disabled if she contracts Zika.

They will still be moving out to Brazil, all they want is to be allowed to stay in the UK for a few extra weeks.

Symptoms of the Zika virus include fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis, although only one-in-five infected people tend to develop the signs.

Deaths are rare but there is no vaccine or drug treatment, with patients advised to rest and keep hydrated.
When he collapsed, they told his friends he died and sold his

An elderly man went through years of 'psychological abuse' after opening the doors of his home to two imposing house guests who treated him like a slave and even told his friends he was dead.

Cornelius Wiley, 86, invited a friend's son to stay at his house in Auckland for a few weeks while he got back on his feet.

But the short stay turned into a four-year nightmare for the vulnerable pensioner who was expected to wait on and financially support his new house guest and his partner.

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Cornelius Wiley, 86, went through years of 'psychological abuse' after openings the doors of his home to two imposing house guests who treated him like a slave and even told his friends he was dead

'I invited him because he had nowhere to go, I felt sorry for him,' Mr Wiley told ONE News.

'I paid for things... they left me no money,' he added.

The couple shafted Mr Wiley from his own bedroom and made him do all of the cooking and cleaning.

He was also forced to go to the shops for them, which one day caused the 86-year-old to collapse in the street, ONE News reported.

Mr Wiley wanted to help his friend's son but had no idea he would move his partner in and stay for four years

The couple shafted Mr Wiley from his own bedroom and made him do all of the cooking and cleaning

'They put me in hospital,' he said, adding that he was too afraid to go home.

While Mr Wiley was being cared for in hospital, his house guests stooped to a new low.

They told his neighbours he had died, sold his belongings and trashed the home they had been squatting in for the last four years, according to ONE News.

Age Concern, an organisation that advocates for the elderly in New Zealand, stepped in and found Mr Wiley a place to stay in an aged care facility where he has been able to get back his independence.
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Hundreds gathered to remember MP Jo Cox at a moving church vigil in her home town last night as tearful mourners paid tribute at an impromptu memorial in London.

Labour colleagues including MPs Yvette Cooper and Naz Shah joined friends and constituents at St Peter's Church in Birstall to mourn the mother-of-two, who was described as 'fizzling with life and crackling with energy'.

More than 500 people attended the poignant 40-minute ceremony, where Bishop of Huddersfield Rev Jonathan Gibbs said Mrs Cox 'gave her life for this community.

Meanwhile Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and a number of other MPs attended an impromptu vigil in Parliament Square, where mourners stopped to lay flowers and light candles in tribute. The Union flag also flew at half-mast over the Houses of Parliament in tribute to the politician.

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Labour MP Yvette Cooper was seen wiping away tears as she broke down during the vigil in honour of Mrs Cox who was killed yesterday

Pictured left to right: MPs Yvette Cooper (Pontefract and Castleford), Naz Shah (Bradford West) and Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central), attending a vigil for Mrs Cox in St. Peter's Church, Birstall, near Leeds. Pictured right: A mourner fights back the tears during the service

Labour MPs (L-R) Yvette Cooper, Naz Shah, Dan Jarvis, Rachel Reeves and Mary Creagh at a vigil in St Peters Church in the town of Birstall

Remembered: Mourners lay flowers and lit candles at an impromptu memorial at Parliament Square, paying tribute to Labour MP Jo Cox

Support: Labour MPs Yvette Cooper, left, and Rachel Reeves, centre, leave St Peters Church in the town of Birstall, where a vigil was held for their colleague Jo Cox. Right, the Union flag is flown at half-mast in a mark of respect for the MP

Poignant: Touching tributes were left near the street in Birstall where Jo Cox was shot dead yesterday afternoon

Addressing the crowds, Bishop of Huddersfield Rev Jonathan Gibbs said: 'Jo grew up in this community, she loved this community and she served this community. And in the end - she gave her life for this community.'

Bradford West MP Naz Shah was in floods of tears as she shuffled into the church to comfort Mrs Cox's constituents before being seated at the front of the room alongside her peers.

Other MPs - Dan Jarvis, Mary Creagh and Caroline Flint - also attended, and linked arms as they left the church together in a defiant chain.

Opening the ceremony at 8pm, Bishop of Leeds Rev Nick Baines said: 'Welcome on this very sad occasion.

'We pray for Jo and her family and friends, mostly in silence, let's think of what brings us together and what we are responsible for.'

Sobs and sniffles could be heard around the room as the room fell silent to remember their 'loving and caring' MP.

After five minutes of absolute silence, a psalm was read to the large crowd of hundreds.

Speaking at the vigil, Rev Gibbs said: 'None of us could believe the news this afternoon. The texts and messages came flooding through and we saw the news - and yet we still couldn't believe the news.

Popular MP Jo Cox, 41, tragically died yesterday. She leaves behind her husband and two children

Labour MP Yvette Cooper (centre) hugs the priest at St Peter's Church after a vigil in memory of Mrs Cox, who was stabbed and shot

Labour MP Yvette Cooper appeared emotional as she consoled the priest following the service which was attended by more than 500

Members of the local community attend a special church service for the killed Labour MP at St Peters Church in Birtsall this evening

Labour MP's Mary Creagh (left) and Caroline Flint (second right ) leave St Peters church after attending a vigil in honour of their friend

'We come tonight, overwhelmed by shock, and above all we are still numb and that is still part of our reaction for all of us, to Brendan, and to her children. We should be still tonight - but after a time of stillness we will need a time to talk. There will be anger, hurt and pain, and we need to learn how we deal with that in our own communities.

'We remember Jo as a wife and a mother and tonight we honour both of those. We hold her, we hold the family in our hearts and our pride. We pray that justice is done.'

Speaking about the turn out after the ceremony, Rev Gibbs said: 'I'm so pleased by the range of people who have come to pay their respects.

'Jo was hugely respected by the whole community and she had their whole affectionate respect.'

Speaking outside the church about her friend, Wakefield MP Mary Creagh said: 'Jo fizzed with life and crackled with energy.

Mourners gathered to writes notes in tribute to Jo Cox at an impromptu memorial in Parliament Square, London, last night

Young girls placed lit candles next to a large photograph of Jo Cox at a vigil held in Parliament Square on Thursday night

Mourners stopped to write messages of support on a large board placed in Parliament Square, as part of a memorial for Mrs Cox

'She not only cared a lot about family and family values, but also about the forgotten, and disposed of people, and atrocities across the world.

'It has been a very troubling day in our open democracy - but our thoughts are with Brendan and those motherless children.

'Tonight I want Jo to be remembered as warm, witty and principled MP.

'She is such a loss, not just to the Labour party and her constituents, but the entire country.'

Meanwhile Mr Corbyn and a number of other MPs attended an impromptu vigil in Parliament Square and flowers were laid nearby in tribute.

Downing Street said flags across Whitehall will fly at half mast while flags at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh will also be lowered in tribute. A Buckingham Palace spokesman said the Queen had written privately to Mr Cox.

A woman lays candles at the Parliament Square memorial, where mourners stopped to write messages of support on Thursday night

Dozens of bouquets of flowers - some of them with red Labour rosettes - were left at the memorial in Parliament Square last night

Against the lights of the Palace of Westminster, mourners stopped to pay tribute to mother-of-two Jo Cox

Flowers have been left on Mrs Cox's houseboat in London this morning. Fellow houseboat owners say they are devastated by her death

The boat where Ms Cox lived was covered with flowers this morning as people rushed to pay their respects to the MP
Earlier this week Crowdstrike, a security company hired by the Democratic National Committee, announced that the party's servers had been deeply penetrated by hackers working for the Russian government, who had made off with many sensitive files, including the DNC's Trump oppo research spreadsheet.

According to Crowdstrike, the hacker(s) showed all the signs of being state-level actors, including the use of sophisticated, shifting zero-day exploits that flew under the radar of the DNC's security systems.

But the story just took a turn for the weird. An anonymous person or persons calling themself "Guccifer 2.0," has posted many files that appear to have come from inside the DNC's network, claiming credit for hacking the DNC. Guccifer 2.0 claims to be a lone hacker, working independently, and has mocked Crowdstrike for attributing much more sophistication to the attack than was warranted.

Guccifer 2.0's alias is a nod to the Romanian hacker who broke into Hillary Clinton's private email server and posted a dump of the mail there under the nom de guerre "Guccifer."

Donald Trump has suggested that the truth is that the DNC hacked itself. He is wrong.

But Guccifer 2.0's statement mocked that conclusion. The hacker said he or she was working alone, that the hack wasn't actually "sophisticated" at all. "I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly," he or she wrote. "But in fact, it was easy, very easyI guess CrowdStrike customers should think twice about company's competence." Security analysts following the release pointed to Guccifer 2.0's leak as evidence that Crowdstrike had misidentified the DNC hacker or hackers and badly overestimated their skills and resources. But Crowdstrike, in a statement, stood by its initial analysis. "Whether or not this posting is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents' authenticity and origin," a spokesperson wrote in a statement to WIRED.

This Looks Like the DNC's Hacked Trump Oppo File

[Sam Biddle and Gabrielle Bluestone/Gawker]

A Chaotic Whodunnit Follows the DNC's Trump Research Hack [Andy Greenberg/Wired]
A foster carer who was nearly killed by an adult masquerading as a 15-year-old asylum seeker has been told she cannot claim damages from the council that sent him to her.

Christine Mackay took the man into her home in July 2011, three days after he arrived illegally into the UK in a lorry from Spain with no identification papers.

He told authorities he was a 15-year-old unaccompanied asylum seeker called Aziz Achaheb-Cedar, from Palestine. As a result, Milton Keynes Council was obliged to find him accommodation.

Foster carer Christine Mackay, pictured, was stabbed by an asylum seeker who he had been caring for in 2011

In October 2011 social services agreed to rehome him after Mrs Mackay told them she wanted to end the placement, but he disappeared two days later. After two weeks he returned, breaking into her home near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, taking a four-inch knife from the dishwasher and attacking Mrs Mackay as she slept at 2.15am.

She said: I grabbed the blade and just refused to let go of it. He tried to pull it away from me and in doing so he cut through 40 per cent of the tendons in my hands and almost severed a thumb.

The youth fled when she screamed. Mrs Mackay, who is employed as a foster carer by Archway Care, lost four pints of blood and suffered lacerated hands, sensory loss and nerve damage following the savage attack. The man, whose real identity was later revealed to be David Maria-Garcia, from Spain, was sentenced to 14 years in jail for attempted murder in April 2012.

Aziz Achaheb-Cedar, pictured claimed he was a 15-year-old from Palestine, when he really was David Maria Garcia from Spain

Mrs Mackay, who is in her sixties, claimed the council failed to disclose important information about him before his placement, which she says would have led her to refuse him.

She tried to claim compensation, arguing the council owed her a duty of care. But at a hearing at Oxford County Court in March, a judge denied Mrs Mackays claim.

The case was later taken to the High Court, but yesterday Mr Justice Spencer refused permission to appeal against the decision.

He said: It was plainly a matter of regret to the judge that she was constrained to strike out the claim. She expressed her sympathy for the claimant, who had suffered at the hands of someone who appeared to be a child in need of safeguarding, and whom she was seeking to care for and protect for the public good.

I share the judges regret. Nevertheless ... I am quite satisfied that this appeal has, and had, no real prospect of success. Mrs Mackay previously said: The truth was that none of the authorities knew anything about this boy at all, but they were prepared to gamble and put him into my home where I had three other vulnerable children.
Shocking: X-ray scan showed the metal rod narrowly missed his internal organs and his aorta

A construction worker in China has miraculously survived after a five-foot-long steel rod pierced through his body from his groin to his skull.

The man from the city of Jinan, east China's Shandong province fell from a height and landed on the metal pole on June 14, reports Huanqiu, affiliated with the People's Daily Online.

Doctors successfully removed the rod which narrowly missed the man's critical organs and his aorta after a five-hour operation.

According to reports, the 40-year-old was working on a construction site in Jinan when the incident occurred.

He reportedly fell from a height while at work and landed on a steel rod that was stuck into the ground below.

The steel rod went through his genitals to his head.

The man was immediately taken to the local Qilu Hospital who had been told of his injuries before his arrival.

Medial staff had prepared equipment and called in extra help from off-duty doctors.

The worker arrived at the hospital in the early evening of June 14, according to Qilu Evening News.

An X-ray scan showed the metal rod had narrowly missed the man's critical organs and aorta.

Although he had been severely injured, the patient was able to speak and talked to the medical staff before the surgery, the report said.

The man was sent to the operating theatre at around 7pm.

The operation began at 8pm and was carried out by surgeons from various department from the hospital, including stomatology, heart, chest, otorhinolaryngology and anesthesiology.

Fire crews were also on hand to help with the removal of the rod.

The operation lasted for about five hours until 1am on June 15.

The team successfully removed the object.

More than 30 medical staff had participated in the surgery.

The patient is said to be in a stable condition.

Staff at the hospital said they can communicate with the man and he is recovering well.

However, doctors also said they would need to put him under further observation as there could be a risk of infection.

This isn't the first case of accidents involving objects such as these in China.

In April, a motorist had a lucky escape after a sharp bamboo pole pierced through his chest.

Shocking incident: The man fell from a great height while at work and fell onto the metal rod in Jinan, China
the institution for hospitalising him against his own will

A gay man in China has filed a lawsuit against a psychiatric hospital after he was forcibly hospitalised for 19 days to convert his sexual orientation.

The 32-year-old man was collected against his will, and sent to a psychiatric hospital by his family members on October 8, 2015, reports the People's Daily Online.

He claims that he was tied to his bed and fed medicine and at one point was even threatened with violence if he did not cooperate to treat his 'sexual preference disorder'.

Controversial treatment: Yu Hu is suing a hospital for forced treatment to convert his sexual orientation

According to reports, the man who was given the pseudonym Yu Hu was sent to the No. 2 Hospital of Zhumadian, Henan, after he and his wife agreed to divorce due to his sexual identity.

He was at the hospital in China's Henan province for 19 days and says he was threatened with violence if he did not cooperate.

In a press release the man said: 'They did it simply because I am gay.

'I don't know how many other people have been treated like this. They must be held accountable.'

The local court in the Yicheng district of Zhumadian accepted the case on June 13 after the lawsuit was filed on May 17.

Yu's lawyer told reporters: 'The personal freedom of Chinese citizens is protected by law and cannot be infringed upon by hospitals or one's family members.

'It is against the law to carry out hospitalisation against the plaintiff's will.'

Yu was discharged from the hospital after his boyfriend contacted various LGBT rights groups who then got in touch with the police.

According to reports, he has since been working and living with his boyfriend in a different city because he is traumatised by the ordeal and fearful that his family will send him back to hospital.

The third version of the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders, released in 2001, removed homosexuality and bisexuality from the list of disorders.
However many students are upset that cameras are in their dormitories

It has also helped ensure that teachers arrive for classes on time

A university in China has spent six million yuan (640,000) on surveillance systems to ensure their students study hard.

Wuchang University of Technology in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province, now employs 100 people to keep watch over its students and claims that so far, the system has worked, reports the People's Daily Online.

And the university claims that its extreme measures which include installing the cameras in students' dormitories, have been effective.

Big brother: A university in Wuhan, China has introduced surveillance cameras in all areas of the school

Over 6 million yuan (640,000) was spent on the cameras which needs 100 people to watch them

According to reports, the CCTV was installed 15 months ago and has cut down bad behaviour such as students eating, sleeping and using their mobile phones in class.

It has also stopped teachers from arriving late or leaving early.

Yu Chengqing said: 'This year's survey found that since the implementation of new initatives, classroom discipline has significantly improved with a more intense learning atmosphere.'

Sun Yi, a supervisor told reporters: 'The system has helped us strengthen staff and student management as well as ensuring the quality of teaching.'

Professor Luo Jianguo, director of education at the school told reporters: 'We're not the first university to do this.

'At present many colleges and universities use this method and the results are remarkable.'

However many students are upset that the cameras even extend to their dormitories.

A female student told reporters that she felt uncomfortable with cameras especially during summer when she wears less clothing.

According to Chinese media, the initiative has also raised debate among parents of the students.

One group of parents said that the fact that the school had invested heavily in the cameras reflected the strict management of the school and ensure that students grow.

Wuchang University of Technology in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province claims the system works
A city in northern China was battered by monstrous hailstorms earlier this week.

Alarming pictures emerged online show cars parked on the streets of Jinan, Shandong Province, severely damaged by hail stones as large as eggs, according to Huanqiu.com, an affiliation to People's Daily Online.

The extreme weather began in the afternoon of June 13 and lasted until late night June 14.

Terrifying: Huge hailstones have battered cars in the Chinese city of Jinan between June 13 and 14

Egg-sized stones punched a dozen holes on the wind screen of a car in the street of Jinan earlier this week

Havoc: Locals in Jinan claim the hailstones were as big as chicken eggs and damaged property too

After the city of Jinan was hit by the violent hailstorms, which caused damage to a large number of cars, residents of Qingdao, a nearby city also in Shandong Province, became so concerned that they took drastic action to protect their own vehicles.

Amusing pictures have been shared online of the methods used by Qingdao residents on June 14 to protect their precious vehicles, reports the People's Daily Online.

The images show car owners resorting to cardboard and blankets to protect their cars after an amber weather warning was issued.

Some people made extra sure that their cars were secure by tying rope and string around the materials to stop them from flying away.

The extreme weather began in the afternoon of June 13 and lasted until late night June 14 in Jinan

Look at the size of them! Large hailstones were seen in the city of Jinan in Shandong province

A lot of damage caused: Windows of cars were broken during the storm which battered Jinan

People have been discussing their methods on China's social media site Weibo.

One user wrote: 'This shows us the importance of underground parking'.

While another commented: 'I see an opportunity for street vendors selling blankets'.

And one user said: 'This is a good method, a lot of people do not have an indoor garage and so are worries about the hail storm. If they have no way to protect the car, they found a good way!'

Jinan, the capital of Shandong province was battered by heavy hail storms on June 14.

The hail stones were so big that they damaged property.

Photos show the aftermath of the storm with car windows broken by the stones

Odd: Car owners in Qingdao became nervous after an amber weather warning was issued on June 14

The storm in nearby Jinan had smashed windows so people used anything they could to wrap up their vehicles
Nearly six decades after the luxury liner Andrea Doria sank off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing dozens, explorers ventured on an underwater mission to the wreckage.

A crew that mans an underwater vessel spent two full days at the wreck earlier this month capturing more than a dozen sonar images of the liner.

The team discovered the wreck looks more badly deteriorated than previous sonar images suggest, with its bow nearly broken off.

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This photo shows the bow of the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria in the Atlantic Ocean near Nantucket, made during an undersea exploration of the wreck earlier this month. Stockton Rush, OceanGate's CEO, said the images, which are still being processed, suggest a large section of the bow has broken off

THE ANDREA DORIA COLLISION The New York-bound Italian luxury liner sank after a collision on the foggy night of July 25, 1956, with the Swedish ship Stockholm, which was heading back to Europe. The Stockholm ripped a gash in the Andrea Doria's hull, causing it to list and making some of its lifeboats unusable. Five people on the Stockholm died, but 46 crew and passengers on the Italian ship perished. More than 1,600 others were rescued as the ship took 11 hours to sink. Advertisement

OceanGate, a Washington-based crew that mans an underwater vessel, spent two full days at the wreck earlier this month capturing more than a dozen sonar images of the liner.

The New York-bound Italian luxury liner sank after a collision on the foggy night of July 25, 1956, with the Swedish ship Stockholm, which was heading back to Europe.

The Stockholm ripped a gash in the Andrea Doria's hull, causing it to list and making some of its lifeboats unusable.

Five people on the Stockholm died, but 46 crew and passengers on the Italian ship perished.

More than 1,600 others were rescued as the ship took 11 hours to sink.

Fifty-one people died, 46 of them on the Andrea Doria.

The wreck, in about 240 feet of water 50 miles south of Nantucket, has for years attracted treasure-hunting divers looking for money, china and other artifacts from a bygone era.

But 16 of those divers have died, the most recent just last year.

The wreck has been compared to Mount Everest, because it is as alluring and dangerous to divers as the world's tallest peak is to mountaineers.

Stranded: The Andrea Doria lists heavily after being hit by the Stockholm on July 26, 1956. Note the lifeboats on the port side which could not be lowered and used because of the list to starboard

OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush speaks in front of a projected image of the wreck of the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria during a presentation. He said it's not clear when the bow started breaking up, previous sonar images were taken from the surface and are not as detailed as the ones being produced by his team

OceanGate, a Washington-based crew that mans an underwater vessel, spent two full days at the wreck earlier this month capturing more than a dozen sonar images of the liner. The images, which are still being processed, suggest a large section of the bow has broken off since the last time a sonar image was taken

The Andrea Doria (pictured 1948 leaving New York) has for years attracted treasure-hunting divers looking for money, china and other artifacts from a bygone era. But 16 of those divers have died, including one last year

Isabel Johnson, a submarine pilot in training, sits atop the submersible OceanGate Cyclops, after its undersea exploration of the wreck of the ocean liner SS Andrea Doria in the Atlantic Ocean near Nantucket. The ship went down after a collision nearly 60 years ago, killing 46

Stockton Rush, OceanGate's CEO, said the images, which are still being processed, suggest a large section of the bow has broken off since the last time a sonar image of the ship was taken two years ago by another organization.

'It looks so dramatically different,' he said, speaking at Boston's Long Wharf, where the underwater vessel rested on a docked boat. 'When you look at the shape of the hull, it appears a lot has come off.'

The company did two three-hour dives per day during the weeklong expedition. Stockton Rush, OceanGate's CEO, said the images, which are still being processed, suggest a large section of the bow has broken off since the last time a sonar image of the ship was taken two years ago by another organization

Rush said it's not clear when the bow started breaking up. He said previous sonar images were taken from the surface and are not as detailed as the ones being produced by his team.

OceanGate had hoped to spend up to a week at the wreck capturing detailed sonar images. But bad weather, including high waves, heavy fog and strong winds, cut the expedition short.

'What you can control is your equipment and your people. Mother Nature can then make up her own mind,' Rush said.

Survived: An aerial view of the Stockholm entering harbor after crashing with Andrea Doria; Stockholm's bow was repaired at a cost of $1million and today it sails as the MV Astoria under a Portuguese flag

Isabel Johnson, a submarine pilot in training, sits inside the submersible OceanGate Gyclops. The team plans to return next year to continue its sonar mapping work. The plan is to create a 'virtual model' of the exterior of the wreck as well as its debris field

He said the team managed to complete two of eight planned dives, each lasting about three hours, using the Cyclops I, an underwater vessel capable of fitting five people.

The team plans to return next year to continue its sonar mapping work. The plan is to create a 'virtual model' of the exterior of the wreck as well as its debris field.

Such detailed imagery could prove invaluable to scuba divers, as identifiable landmarks on the popular wreck have decayed over time, making it hard for divers to safely find their way around, Rush said.

OceanGate says its expedition was the first manned submersible trip to the wreck since 1995. This July 25 marks the 60th anniversary of the Andrea Doria's sinking.

Luxury in a bygone era: The Andrea Doria's dining room is seen in this 1955 file photograph. his July 25 marks the 60th anniversary of the Andrea Doria's sinking

Captain on deck: People are seen inside the Andrea Doria's helm in this file photograph
The discovery could help solve the mystery of why reionisation started

But exactly what triggered the process to begin is still not understood

Heavy elements like oxygen and carbon made in stars by 'reionisation'

This is the farthest oxygen has ever been discovered in the universe

The universe we know today is full of thousands of chemical elements.

But in its beginning there was only hot, ionised gas filled with electrons and ions of hydrogen and helium, which buzzed around for several hundreds of millions of years until the first generation of stars formed, synthesizing heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen.

Now scientists have glimpsed the earliest oxygen ever seen in the universe, in a galaxy 13.1 billion light years away, giving an insight in the universe's first stars.

Studying heavy elements from this era provides clues about what triggered the nature of the first stars, and how galaxies were born.

Artist's concept of SXDF-NB1006-2. Many young bright stars are located in the galaxy and ionize the gas inside and around the galaxy. The green colour indicates the ionized oxygen detected by ALMA, whereas purple shows the distribution of ionized hydrogen detected by the Subaru Telescope

WHAT IS REINOISATION? Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang the universe cooled, and electrons and hydrogen ions combined to form neutral hydrogen atoms. Nothing more happened for several hundreds of millions of years until the first generation of stars were formed, emitting strong radiation that ionized hydrogen once again  in a process called reionisation. These stars also made other heavier elements like carbon and oxygen, the elements that have allowed life to form on Earth. But exactly what triggered reionisation is still not fully understood. Advertisement

'Seeking heavy elements in the early Universe is an essential approach to explore the star formation activity in that period,' said Professor Akio Inoue at Osaka Sangyo University, Japan, the lead author of the research paper published online by the journal Science.

Various elements are found around us in the present universe, but just after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago only the lightest elements, hydrogen, helium, and lithium, existed.

Heavier elements, such as carbon and oxygen, have been formed in stars and accumulated in the Universe over time

'Our results showed this galaxy contains one tenth of oxygen found in our sun,' said Professor Naoki Yoshida, from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) in Tokyo.

'But the small abundance is expected because the universe was still young and had a short history of star formation at that time.'

The scientists looked at SXDF-NB1006-2, a galaxy discovered in 2012, which was confirmed by other telescopes as being the most distant galaxy discovered at the time.

Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang the universe cooled, and electrons and hydrogen ions combined to form neutral hydrogen atoms.

Nothing more happened for several hundreds of millions of years until the first generation of stars were formed, emitting strong radiation that ionized hydrogen once again  in a process called reionisation.

Colour composite image of a portion of the Subaru XMM-Newton Deep Survey Field. The red galaxy at the center of the image is the most distant galaxy, SXDF-NB1006-2

These stars also made other heavier elements like carbon and oxygen, the elements that have allowed life to form on Earth.

But exactly what triggered reionisation is still not fully understood.

'SXDF-NB1006-2 would be a prototype of the light sources responsible for the cosmic reionsation,' said Professor Inoue.

Studying these elements from the very first stars is extremely difficult because it requires astronomers to find objects as far away as possible, something only possible using the best telescopes available today.

'This is the first step to understanding what kind of objects caused cosmic reionisation,' added University of Tokyo Assistant Professor Youichi Tamura.

The team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.

The team used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile (pictured). Earlier in 2014, the researchers had run large-scale numerical simulations of galaxy formation to conclude that ALMA would be capable of detecting light from ionised oxygen in SXDF-NB1006-2

The researchers will use the same methods in future to determine exactly how cosmic reionsation came about.

Earlier in 2014, the researchers had run large-scale numerical simulations of galaxy formation to conclude that ALMA would be capable of detecting light from ionised oxygen in SXDF-NB1006-2

As a result, ALMA detected radiation coming from doubly ionised oxygen. From the light's strength the team also calculated the amount of oxygen in the galaxy is much smaller than that in the sun.

Professor Inoue suggested the lack of dust could be an indication that almost all the gas in the galaxy is highly ionised.

Work is already underway for another observation using the ALMA telescope.
For thrifty motorists, squeezing an extra few miles out of each gallon of fuel can become an obsession.

But some have been striving for a semi-mythical goal of achieving 100 miles per gallon of fuel from their vehicles.

Now an inventor in Texas claims to have built an engine that can reach this efficient milestone  using a design that is more than 200 years old.

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SUPER EFFICIENT CARS While most commercial cars can just about manage 60 miles to the gallon if driven carefully, engineers have been building some with truly staggering levels of efficiency. French team MicroJoule have broken the world record for most efficient gasoline-powered vehicle three times. In 1999 they managed to squeeze 9,845 miles out of just one gallon of fuel and then in 2001 they beat this with 10,227 miles per gallon. In 2003 they set a new world record with 10,705 miles per gallon at the annual Shell Eco-Marathon competition. Advertisement

Josh MacDowell, combined a Stirling engine  first created by a clergyman in Scotland 200 years ago  with thermopile technology that converts heat energy into electricity.

Mr MacDowel, from San Antonia, Texas, is currently testing his invention in a Hybrid electric car, allowing it to drive at highway speeds without the need for recharging.

He believes the engine would also be capable of letting an SUV achieve 100 miles to the gallon. He is now hoping to patent his design.

The Stirling engine was invented by Robert Stirling, a Scottish clergyman, in 1816, using the exchange of hot and cold air to power an engine.

Since then, his basic model has been used extensively, from sewing machines, to submarine engines.

Stirling's original 1816 patent contained all the elements of what is now called the 'Stirling cycle engine'  a power piston, a displacer to move air between hot and cold ends, and a regenerator.

The power piston compresses air in the cold end of the displacer cylinder, which then shifts the air from the cold to hot end. The piston is driven back by the air expanding in the hot end.

WHO WAS THE INVENTOR OF THE STIRLING ENGINE? Robert Stirling, who designed the famous Stirling engine, was a Scottish clergyman who lived in Perthshire in the 1800s The Reverend Dr Robert Stirling was a Scottish clergyman who lived in Perthshire in the 1800s. He invented what he called the 'Heat Economiser'  a device for improving the thermal and fuel efficiency of a variety of industrial processes. Stirling obtained a patent for his engine in 1816, however he described a number of additional applications for use in glass and other furnaces. In 1818, Stirling built his first practical version of his engine, designed pump water from a stone quarry. In the 1820s, he teamed up with his brother, James, who suggested that greater power output might be obtained using air pressures greater than atmospheric pressure. The brothers received further patents in 1827 and 1840 for improvements to their air engine. His original 1816 patent contained all the elements of what is now called the 'Stirling cycle engine'  a power piston, a displacer to move air between hot and cold ends, and a regenerator. The power piston compresses air in the cold end of the displacer cylinder, which then shifts the air from the cold to hot end. The piston is driven back by the air expanding in the hot end. Unfortunately, none of his experimental work of papers have survived, except two model engines, which now live in the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Advertisement

Robert Stirling's original design was called the 'Heat Economiser', a device for improving the thermal and fuel efficiency of a variety of industrial processes

Internal combustion engines currently used in cars only use 14 per cent of the energy they produce, but Stirling's engine design can use almost 50 per cent, making them much more efficient.

Speaking to KHOU, Mr MacDowell said: 'I imagine in 20 years the only place you will see an internal combustion engine is on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle because people like the way they sound.'

Mr MacDowell's concept has received scientific backing by researchers at Texas A&M University.

Dr Mirley Balasubramanya, a mathematical physicist at Texas A&M University, said: 'This is a wonderful idea, why didn't someone else think of this?'

The Stirling engine used by Mr MacDowell came from Nasa, who experimented with one in vehicles in the early 1980s. Their experiments saw a Dodge pickup achieve roughly 54 miles per gallon.

While his current engine is used in a Hybrid electric car, Mr MacDowell believes he will have the Stirling engine running in a Ford F-150 pickup truck, getting at least 58 miles per gallon.

The original Stirling engine was fairly bulky, but Mr MacDowell has redesigned his to look more like a small four cylinder engine.

In a Stirling engine, the power piston compresses air in the cold end of the displacer cylinder, which then shifts the air from the cold to hot end. The piston is driven back by the air expanding in the hot end

Be claims this will allow him to put the engine in a smaller SUV, where he believes it could achieve at least 100 miles per gallon.

His next plan, is to use his current engine in an SUV, starting on the east coast of the US, and driving to California - a journey around 2000 miles long.

However, with his engine, he believes he can make the trip on less than 40 gallons of fuel.

In the UK, the price of petrol is currently around 4.50 per gallon. If Mr MacDowell's predictions are correct, his journey would only cost around 180.

On his journey, Mr MacDowell says he will put his vehicle together and document everything, then send his findings to the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio to verify the results.

Trying to describe just how significant this invention could be, Mr MacDowell said his design is to the Hybrid industry, what Diesel-electric locomotives were to steam engines.
You might think of glass as fragile, but a French biomaterials is using it to regrow one of the toughest tissues in the human body  bone.

Manufactured by Noraker, the powdery granules of BoneGlass help bones to regrow by stimulating cells called osteoblasts.

It has already been used to treat more than a million patients around the world, helping fractured bones heal themselves.

Just a tiny amount of the powder, which resembles coarse salt (pictured), is added during surgery  such as in reconstructive spinal operations to repair worn bone. It has already been used to treat more than a million patients around the world, helping damaged bones to heal themselves

HOW DOES IT WORK? BoneGlass comes in the form of powdery granules resembling coarse salt. It is made up of 45 per cent silicon, 24.5 per cent calcium, 24.5 per cent sodium and 6 per cent phosphorus. The powder is mixed with a patients bone fragments before being applied to where its needed. As the powder is bioactive, it simulates cells called osteoblasts to form new bone - it does this by releasing silicon ions at the site of damage, recruiting bone stem cells and enabling bone to heal itself. Advertisement

Just a tiny amount of the powder, which resembles coarse salt, is added during surgery  such as in reconstructive spinal operations to repair worn bone.

Earlier this week, reporters were invited to see how BoneGlass is made at Norakers production facility in Villeurbanne, France.

The granules are a glass ceramic bioactive powder called '45S5', comprising silicon, sodium, phosphorous and calcium oxide  all of which are key to the bone forming process.

Decked out in silver heat-resistant suits, operators mix white hot molten materials in the lab to prepare the bioglass, which once dried into its final powdery form is ready for the operating theatre.

The interest of the bioactive glass is that it will stimulate the cells responsible for bone growth, said Professor Cedric Barrey, spine surgeon at the hospital Pierre Wertheimer in a suburb of Lyon.

A spinal surgeon in France has used the powder for 18 months to treat worn bone in the neck (illustrated) and mixes the powder with fragments of bone taken from the patient before moistening them to form a paste. This paste is added to the site of the wound, before the patient is stitched up

Operators at Noraker in France mix white hot molten materials in the lab to prepare the bioglass, which once dried into its final powdery form is ready for the operating theatre

The surgeon has used the powder for 18 months and mixes the powder with fragments of bone taken from the patient before moistening them to form a paste.

This paste is added to the site of the wound, before the patient is stitched up.

If everything goes to plan, it will stimulate the growth of new bone at the site with the granules broken down by the body within six months.

However, the bioglass doesnt come cheap. In France, a box of just 12mg of the powder costs 230 Euros (180).

Granules of BoneGlass (pictured) are a glass ceramic bioactive powder called '45S5', comprising silicon, sodium, phosphorous and calcium oxide  all of which are key to the bone forming process

The powdery granules are mixed with fragments of bone (pictured in trays) taken from the patient before moistening them to form a paste. This paste is added to the site of the wound, before the patient is stitched up

This is a product that is expensive, since silicon comes from quartz, said Celine Saint Olive Baque, general manager of Noraker.

Synthetic bone substitutes are in demand in orthopaedic markets around the world, with strongest growth in Muslim countries, where bone substitutes of human and animal origin have been world, completely rejected for cultural reasons, said Ms Saint Olive Baque.

Turkey is the first market Noraker, which exports 70 per cent of its production. The company also sells in Egypt and Iran, Europe and Latin America, and in May recorded its first order in Asia, shipping to Taiwan.

Earlier this week, reporters were invited to see how BoneGlass is made at Norakers production facility in Villeurbanne, France

To start the process the constituents are weighed and mixed. BioGlass is a ceramic bioactive powder called '45S5', comprising silicon, sodium, phosphorous and calcium oxide  all of which are key to the bone forming process

A sterilised mix of sodium carbonate, calcium carbonate, quartz and phosphorus pentoxide is then removed from the steriliser, ready to prepare in its final powdery bio-glass form

As for the US, a key market of orthopaedics, Noraker hopes to win an FDA approval by the end of 2017.

The company also covers other applications since last year it markets a screw bioglass associated with a polymer, a single compound in the world for promoting fracture repair the cruciate ligaments of the knee.

Another avenue explored is the direct addition of bioactive glass on the surface of orthopaedic implants, so they integrate better bones.

Noraker is also working with Imperial College London on a project for artificial cartilage made from modified bioactive glass, which Ms St Olive Baque predicts could lead to better treatments for osteoarthritis within 6-8 years.

The crystals of sodium carbonate, calcium carbonate, quartz and phosphorus pentoxide are then washed and sieved

As the powder is used for biomedical purposes it must be sterilised. However, the powder also has antibacterial properties

A laboratory operator mixes the components in the bench top

The powder is manufactured in a clean laboratory environment to eliminate any contamination

A molten mix of sodium carbonate, calcium carbonate, quartz and phosphorus pentoxide is heated white hot to prepare the bioglass used to simulate bones or as a bone substitute
An 'impossible' fuel-free engine, that could take humans to Mars in just 10 weeks, has been shown to work - but no one knows why.

The so-called EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around in an enclosed chamber, and uses only solar power.

Many argue the concept is simply hype, suggesting the design goes against the laws of physics.

Now, a group of scientists claim they have a new theory that could explain exactly how the EmDrive would work.

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A prototype of the 'impossible' fuel-free engine that some say power a spacecraft to Mars in just 10 weeks. The design is now set to undergo peer-review. Many maintain the system goes against the laws of physics

WHAT IS AN EM DRIVE? The concept of an EmDrive engine is relatively simple. It provides thrust to a spacecraft by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. Solar energy provides the electricity to power the microwaves, which means that no propellant is needed. The implications for this could be huge. For instance, current satellites could be half the size they are today without the need to carry fuel. Humans could also travel further into space, generating their own propulsion on the way. But when the concept was first proposed it was considered implausible because it went against the laws of physics. Its allegedly fuel-free nature also means that the drive may directly contradict the law of conservation of momentum. It suggests it would produce a forward-facing force without an equal and opposite force acting in the other direction. Advertisement

The idea for an EmDrive was proposed in 2000 by a researcher named Roger Shawyer.

Since then four independent labs, including one at Nasa, have recreated the drive.

But the mysterious engine had baffled scientists because it appeared to violate the law of conservation of momentum, which states for every action there has to be an equal and opposite reaction.

This means the rocket can only accelerate forward if a force of equal magnitude is sent in the other direction - the rocket's exhaust.

But a new paper, published in AIP Advances. suggest the EmDrive produces an exhaust like every other rocket.

'EmDrive works just like any other engine,' Dr Arto Annila, physics professor at the University of Helsinki and lead author of the paper, told MailOnline.

'Its fuel is the input photons at microwave lengths.'

The researchers suggest the photons coming out of the machine interfere with each other, so that the overall effect seems as if nothing is there.

'In the cavity the input photons will bounce back and forth, and invariably some of them will interfere completely destructively.'

Simulated transverse magnetic modes TM20, (red high, blue low) at the wide and narrow ends of the EmDrive tapered cavity differ from each other. This implies interference of microwaves, and hence also anisotropic efflux of paired photons. The loss of momentum results in an equal and opposite reaction, i.e., thrust.

The idea is the same as water waves travelling together, at the exact right time so that the crest of one wave is exactly at the trough of the other

'Then the two photons will be exactly 180 degrees out phase.

'At the complete interference electromagnetic fields for the two photons will cancel exactly, but the photons themselves continue to propagate.'

The idea is the same as water waves travelling together, at the exact right time so that the crest of one wave is exactly at the trough of the other and cancelling each other out.

The water does not go away, it's still there. In the same way the pairs of photons are still there and carrying momentum even though they cannot be seen as light.

'The paired photons without net electromagnetic field will escape from the cavity,' Dr Annila said. 'This efflux of paired photons is the exhaust of EmDrive.'

'When the cavity is asymmetric, like the tapered cone, the efflux of paired photons is also asymmetric. Therefore the loss of momentum carried by the paired photons is uneven. In other words, thrust is non-zero.'

Dr Annila came up with the idea along with Dr Erkki Kolehmainen, an organic chemistry professor at the University of Jyvaskyla and Patrick Grahn, a multiphysicist at engineering software firm Comsol.

'Thrust without exhaust is of course impossible,' the authors wrote in their. 'Yet, certain resonant cavities, when fueled with microwaves, deliver thrust without apparent exhaust.'

Their theory suggest the exhaust produced by the EmDrive is there, but just cannot be seen.

Dr Annila said the photons could theoretically be detected by an interferometer, the same instrument used to detect gravitational waves.

'My gut feeling is that it will be very difficult to detect such a small excess in energy density, especially when operating EmDrive steadily,' he said.

'Namely changes are more amenable to detection in any case. But still our idea about the exhaust can be useful to design the cavity for pairing photons better for an exit in a preferred direction, and hence to generate more thrust.'

HOW THE EMDRIVE PRODUCES THRUST WITHOUT AN EXTERNAL FORCE Dr Mike McCulloch of Plymouth University has a new explanation about how the EmDrive works The EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around in an enclosed chamber, and uses only solar power. According to classical physics, the EM Drive should be impossible because it seems to violate the law of conservation of momentum. The law states that the momentum of a system is constant if there are no external forces acting on the system  which is why propellant is required in traditional rockets. But Mike McCulloch of Plymouth University came up with a possible explanation based on a new theory of inertia. McCulloch's suggests inertia arises from an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity called 'Unruh radiation'. The Unruh radiation effect states that if you're accelerating in a vacuum, empty space will contain a gas of particles at a temperature proportional to the acceleration. According to McCulloch, inertia is the pressure that the Unruh radiation exerts on an accelerating body. When the accelerations involved are smaller, such as is the case with the EmDrive, the wavelength of Unruh radiation gets larger. At extremely small accelerations, the wavelengths become too large to fit in the observable universe. As a result, inertia may only take on whole-wavelength units over time, causing it to become 'quantized.' This means it can only in some multiple of a unit of measure, causing sudden jumps in acceleration. But because of the EmDrive's truncated cone, the Unruh radiation in tiny. The cone allows Unruh radiation of a certain size at the large end but only a smaller wavelength at the other end, according to an in-depth report by MIT. This means the inertia of photons inside the cavity change as they bounce back and forth. To conserve momentum, they are forced to generate thrust. The concept of an EM Drive engine is relatively simple. It provides thrust to a spacecraft by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. Dr Mike McCulloch, a scientist at Plymouth University, says something known as 'Unruh radiation' may be behind the bizarre performance of drive Advertisement




Ashley Cervantes, a US citizen who was 18 at the time, was stopped at the Mexico border and accused by Customs and Border Protection of smuggling drugs. A search proved fruitless so they gave her a body cavity search. US Customs and Border Protection still couldn't find the drugs they were looking for so they took her to a hospital for an X-ray. No drugs.

She was released after 7 hours and given a bill for $575 for the "treatment."

Arizona Capitol Times:

Attorney Brian Marchetti said they accused the woman, 18 at the time, of possessing drugs. When she denied that was true, they took her into a detention room where, during the next several hours, she was handcuffed to a chair, had several dogs sniff her, and eventually taken into a separate room where she was patted down and asked to squat so female investigators could visually inspect her. All that, said Marchetti, occurred without her consent or a warrant. In fact, he said, a request to call her mother was denied. It was what happened next that Marchetti charges clearly violated his client's rights. He said an agent of Customs and Border Protection signed a "Treatment Authorization Request" to have her taken to a medical facility as an alleged "potential internal carrier of foreign substance." That form, he said, requested an X-ray. Instead, Marchetti said Cervantes was taken in handcuffs to Holy Cross Hospital where the doctor probed her anus and vagina.

Neither the hospital nor Customs and Border Protection would agree to speak with Arizona Capitol Times.
If you thought choosing what A level subject to study at school was down to personal preference, youd be wrong.

Scientists have found that teenagers choices of what to study are heavily influenced by the genes we get from our parents.

When it comes to choosing science, technology, engineering and maths we are guided by our genes in 60 per cent of cases which suggests genes play a much bigger part in these so-called STEM subjects.

Approximately half of students in the UK currently choose to do A-levels and they freely choose which subjects to study. This is the first time that students are able to shape their learning

THE STUDY DETAILS The researchers analysed data from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), which included more than 6,500 twin pairs in the UK. They found that choosing to continue studies at A-level was influenced in equal measure by genetic (44%) factors and environmental factors shared by siblings growing up in the same home (47%), for example schools, neighbourhoods or the home environment. Choosing specific A-level subjects was found to have greater genetic influence (50% for humanities and 60% for STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - subjects) and less influence from shared environment (18% for humanities, 23% for STEM). Genetic factors affected subject choice across a wide range of school subjects, including second language learning, mathematics and psychology. Advertisement

The influence of genes on choosing to study humanities such as English, languages and history and geography was lower, at 50 per cent.

Our environment - our home, neighbourhood, and school  played a much smaller part for STEM subjects  at 23 per cent  and 18 per cent for humanities.

The Kings College researchers based their findings on studies of 6,500 twin pairs in the UK.

By looking at the educational choices and achievement of the twins  both identical and non-identical  they are able to tease out to what extent it is influenced by genetics, and what extent by social factors.

They also found that nature and nurture were roughly equal in influence as to whether children stay on at all. Genetics accounted for 44 per cent of the reason we stay on to continue our studies while homes, schools and neighbourhood influenced us by 47 per cent.

The authors say that their findings suggest that children should have a greater choice in subjects at an earlier age  so that they are more likely to be able to study subjects that they are both interested in and have an aptitude for.

By allowing, for instance, children to focus on subjects that they enjoy and are good at, they will be more likely to stay on to study A levels.

The authors write in Scientific Reports: The findings that DNA differences substantially affect differences in appetites as well as aptitudes suggest agenetic way of thinking about education in which individuals actively create their own educational experiences in part based on their genetic propensities.

Scientists say that up to 80% of students choices of A-level subjects is down to genetic influence and 23% is down to environmental factors

Kaili Rimfeld from the MRC Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre at Kings College London, said: DNA differences appear to strongly influence academic appetite as well as aptitude, which supports a genetic way of thinking about education where individuals actively create their own education experiences, in part based on their genetic propensities.

She said that children are not being able to make the most of their talents on the basis of their genetics.

Because some people have genes that give them an aptitude for a subject, they should be able to make more use of it at an earlier age.

Our results support educational trends away from a one-size-fits-all curriculum towards a more personalised approach to learning which would help every child reach their maximum potential.

But she said it was too early to screen children on the basis of genetics, but this would likely be the case in the future.
Earth sizzled to its 13th straight month of record heat in May, but it wasn't quite as much of an over-the-top scorcher as previous months, federal scientists say.

Record May heat, from Alaska to India and especially in the oceans, put the global average temperature at 60.17 degrees Fahrenheit (15.65 degrees Celsius), according to NOAA.

That's 1.57 degrees (.87 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Earth sizzled to its 13th straight month of record heat in May, but it wasn't quite as much of an over-the-top scorcher as previous months, the NOAA said.

There's still a good chance that June will break records even as El Nino, one of two main reasons for record heat, dissipates, scientists say.

And in the U.S. Southwest temperatures are forecast to dance near 120 degrees later this week into next week. NOAA's July through September forecast is for hotter-than-average temperatures in the entire United States except a tiny circle of southeastern Texas.

'We're in a new neighborhood now as far as global temperature,' said Deke Arndt, NOAA's climate monitoring chief. 'We've kind of left the previous decade behind.'

But it's not quite as broiling as it has been. May only broke the record  set in 2015  by .04 degrees.

It's the first time since November that a month wasn't a full degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the 20th-century average.

March and February this year were 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

'It is slightly off from the kind of unprecedented large global temperatures we've seen in the last five to seven months,' Arndt says.

An animation created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins has revealed how global temperatures have increased by year on year since 1850.

Arndt, like nearly every major climate scientist, says the record warm temperatures are due to a strong El Nino placed on top of man-made global warming from heat-trapping gases that come from the burning of fossil fuels.

The El Nino has just dissipated and forecasters expect its cooler flip side, La Nina, to kick in soon, which should keep global temperatures a bit lower than they've been, but still warmer than 20th-century average, Arndt said

FILE - In this May 23, 2016 file photo, a man bathes his son on a hot afternoon in Mumbai, India. Federal scientists say Earth sizzled to its 13th straight month of record heat in May, but it wasnt quite as much an over-the-top scorcher as previous months.

But that may not be quite enough to keep 2016 from being the third straight record hot year, Arndt says.

That's because so far, 2016 is averaging 55.5 degrees (13.06 degrees Celsius), which beats the previous January to May record set last year by 0.43 degrees.

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, just came back from India and its record-breaking heat wave in time for potential record breaking heat in parts of Arizona.

'Thirteen months of consecutive record breaking heat is really unprecedented, and it's yet another visceral glimpse of what is yet to come as the planet warms up even a lot more,' Overpeck said in an email.

'No doubt about it, the planet is warming fast and we're feeling the impacts.'
Most of us carry a tracking device around with us every day in the form of the mobile phones, but some people are going further and having microchips embedded in their bodies.

Now the US Navy has grown so concerned over the practice that is drawing up an official policy to help it deal with personnel who have chips implanted.

Officials consulted with American presidential candidate and 'transhumanist' Zoltan Istvan to discuss the implications of fitting humans with microchips to enhance their powers.

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Officials from the US Navy met with US presidential candidate and 'transhumanist' Zoltan Istvan to discuss the 'merger of humans and machines'. Mr Zoltan (pictured) said they were keen to draw up policies about microchip implants that can be used to track and carry information inside the human body

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is already working on microchips that can be implanted into soldiers' brains to make them more resilient to warfare.

WILL BIOHACKING CHANGE US? A pair of wealthy Americans are apparently looking for brain implants on the black market that will allow them to communicate with each other using the power of thought, according to Zoltan Istvan. He believes that technology like this could lead to everyone becoming interconnected into a kind of 'hive mind'. The technology works by using the basics of electroencephalogram (EEG), which can read electrical signals produced by the brain. 'But it will also have technology that can stimulate your brain back, likely through tiny electrical signals it can administer, that allows one to "feel" what the device's input is,' said Mr Istvan. 'If a machine creates this input, then true communication with a machine - or AI -in this case has been created.' Transhumanists believe we can do this through technologies such as mind uploading, cyborg body augmentation, and genetic manipulation. Another Transhumanist vision is to upload parts of their personality to a machine so that future generations can reconstruct a realistic avatar that recreates his being. Advertisement

But according to Mr Istvan, the military is also concerned about unauthorised technology that their personnel may implant themselves.

He told MailOnline: 'The Navy is struggling to create policy around solider or sailors that enter military service with non-authorised chips embedded in them.

'This makes perfect sense since the tech has grown so small, that chip implants can now do a wide range of things - tracking, making payments, monitoring blood flow and bodily health - and be totally hidden in human beings.

'You can imagine how challenging that would be if someone had a non-authorized chip implant on a nuclear base - so policy has to be created and created soon.'

The meeting was held between Mr Istvan and senior members of the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, which investigates new concepts of warfare.

A letter from Vice Admiral James Wisecup, who is director of the group, told Mr Istvan: 'Your comments broadened our understanding of transhumanism and the merger of humans and machines.

'Your personal perspectives were interesting and timely as we begin our research process. You have had a direct impact on our viewpoints for future concepts.'

Mr Istvan believes that technology could be used to give humans immortality by augmenting our bodies with technology.

The 42-year-old is standing at the next presidential election as a third-party candidate for the Transhumanist Party which he founded.

He has also believes that mankind could soon all be connected together in a AI matrix that plugs our brains directly into the internet and social media.

Mr Istvan claims a growing number of people are having microchip implants (like the one pictured) placed under their skin. Most are RFID chips similar to those found inside contactless bank cards, but Mr Istvan believes children should be given GPS implants to help keep them safe

A key part of his election campaign for president is that all children in the US should be given GPS implants.

He said the recent disappearance of two-year-old Lane Graves, who was snatched by an alligator in a lagoon at Disney World Florida, highlighted the need for such a measure.

Mr Istvan said: 'Had that two-year old been GPS chipped - or tattooed - they could of followed the body immediately on their smartphones.

'And security might have had the child back in 2-3 minutes, enough to maybe have it survive.

'As a father of a 2 and 5 year old, I'm a big believer in the future that all children will get chipped, perhaps like all children get vaccines in the US.

'A chip implant procedure takes about 60 seconds via a small needle injection and the implant is only the size of a grain of rice.

'Humans simply need to get over their fear of having technology in our bodies. Our safety depends on it.'

Earlier this year, Zoltan Istvan has toured the US in a coffin-shaped bus as part of his Presidential campaign trail. Istvan admits he doesnt think hell win the presidency his own, but he is hoping to get Hilary Clintons attention and run as vice president

He said that US special forces have been experimenting with GPS chips so they can be tracked during operations while similar chipping technology has been used in animals.

However, most animals are tagged using RFID identification tags that can only be read at close range and radio tags that need specialist equipment to follow.

And it is unclear how GPS implants might be charged as they require batteries to work.

Mr Istvan, who has a RFID chip - similar to the technology used in contactless credit cards in his own arm, said: 'It's crazy to me that we don't develop it and use it in ourselves more, and especially in our children.

'I'm looking into getting my children chipped after this alligator incident and because as a controversial presidential candidate I have security issues myself to worry about.'
in Italy for diamonds and back to Dubai for gold leaf

A new innovation in tyres suggests that diamonds are no longer just a girl's best friend.

Dubai-based Z Tyre has designed a shimmering set of tyres encrusted with 'specially selected' diamonds and 24-karat gold leaf.

And a complete set recently sold for $600,000, earning these luxurious runners the title of 'world's most expensive set of tyres' by Guinness World Records.

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Dubai-based Z Tyre has sold a shimmering set of tyres encrusted with 'specially selected' diamond and a checker patterned of 24-karat gold. And a set of four recently sold for $600,000, earning these luxurious runners the title of 'world's most expensive set of tyres' by Guinness World Records

WHAT IS THE STORY BEHIND THESE DIAMOND ENCRUSTED TIRES? Z Tyre created these unique tyres 'celebrate and recognize the true worth of its range of high performance tires.' Each runner is bedazzled with sparking stones in the firm's logo and gold leaf is places around the edges in a checker pattern. The pricey set was first designed in Dubai and then transported to Joaillier Prive, an artisan jeweler in Italy, where it was adorned with diamonds. After that, the four were shipped back to Dubai where gold leafs were applied by the same craftsmen who worked on Abu Dhabi's new presidential palace A set of four sold for $600,000, earning them thetitle of 'world's most expensive set of tyres' by Guinness World Records. Entire sale was donated to charity. Advertisement

'We've always treasured the outstanding skills and dedication involved in developing our Z Tyre range so we thought what better way to celebrate this achievement than with a record-breaking special set of tyres especially commissioned for a unique buyer,' said Zenises CEO Harjeev Kandhari, commenting on the new world record.

However, in honoring the Holy Month of Ramadan, the luxury tyre manufacturer is donating the entire $600,000 sale to the Zenises Foundation, which 'focuses on improve access to education around the globe,' Kandhari noted.

Each runner is bedazzled with sparking stones in the firm's logo and gold leaf is places around the edges in a checker pattern.

The pricey set was first designed in Dubai and then transported to Joaillier Prive, an artisan jeweler in Italy, where it was adorned with diamonds.

After that, the four were shipped back to Dubai where gold leafs were applied by the same craftsmen who worked on Abu Dhabi's new presidential palace, reports Gizmag.

The firm says it created these unique tyres 'celebrate and recognize the true worth of its range of high performance tires.'

Z Tyre's products may look conventional, as they are just 'black and round', but the first says 'under the surface, tryre technology is advancing rapidly each year'.

'New compound structures such as advanced coupled silica mixing, run-flat technology, advanced tyre building machines that measure tyre uniformity to the ultimate degree - all these are critical to the modern performance tyre,' states the firm's website.

'Z Tyre performance means for us improved durability that maintains the best handling even under the worst driving conditions and provide consumers the 'luxury of driving' through performance, safety, comfort and environment.'

The pricey set was first designed in Dubai and then transported to Joaillier Prive, an artisan jeweler in Italy, where it was adorned with diamonds. After that, the four were shipped back to Dubai where gold leafs were applied by the same craftsmen who worked on Abu Dhabi's new presidential palace

These diamond encrusted tires may be the perfect set for the owner of the 24-karat gold iPhone trimmed with dozens of tiny diamonds.

The company behind the outrageous design, which sees the Apple logo made up of diamonds as well as lining the side of the device with the precious jewels, is called Goldgenie.

Goldgenie provides the rich and famous with million dollar items by adding a little extra bling to them.

Z Tyre was awarded 'world's most expensive tyres' by the Guinness World Records. CEO CEO Harjeev Kandhari attended the event to accept the award and noted the entire $600,000 sale was given to a charity that focuses on improve education around the world

And this time it was an iPhone 6 with a price tag of $3.51 million.
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As far as we know, Earth is still yet to make contact with extraterrestrial life - but that hasnt stopped our ongoing fascination with UFOs from dominating popular culture.

Believers keen to experience an out-of-this-world stay, without any aliens, can blast off to California, Dubai and beyond in an array of space-age, futuristic accommodation.

From floating villas to spaceship tree houses, MailOnline Travel has selected the ultimate UFO-shaped lodgings and concepts, which can be experienced from the comfort of planet Earth.

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The UFO Hotel, California

Described as a 'home for sci-fi fans and adventure seekers', UFO Hotel in Baker, California is in the concept stage and has been on Kickstarter

The one-of-a-kind boutique property is also set to offer a spa, pool, pool bar and 31 themed rooms

Each bedroom (left) will have a unique space inspired aesthetic such as an asteroid field, floating city, weapons room and transporter room

The hotel has been designed to feature futuristic restaurants (left), gift shops (right) as well as accommodation inside its oval interior

Plans to create an entirely UFO-themed hotel were unveiled on Kickstarter last year.

Described as a 'home for sci-fi fans and adventure seekers', UFO Hotel in Baker, California, has been designed to feature futuristic restaurants, gift shops and accommodation inside the 'spaceship'.

The one-of-a-kind boutique property is also set to offer a spa, pool, pool bar and 31 themed bedrooms such as an asteroid field, floating city, weapons room and transporter room.

The ambitious money-raising campaign was cancelled after hitting $11,000 (7,680) of the creators $175,000 (122,000) target but there are still plans underway to fund and build the project. The latest news on the company's website is that the hotel is under construction.

Water Discus Hotel, Dubai

Dubai has plans to welcome the worlds largest underwater hotel, Water Discus which is shaped like a spaceship

Sleeping with the fish: The hotel's luxury suites are designed to 'integrate with the underwater world as closely as possible'

Still in the concept stage, when it is built, the hotel is set to feature a dive centre and a bar as well as 21 bedrooms

Home to record breaking buildings and pioneering innovations, no one has ever accused Dubai of being understated. So it should come as no surprise that an address planned for the Emirati city is designed to push the envelope.

The worlds largest underwater hotel, Water Discus is shaped like a spaceship.

The aquatic wonderland will comprise two large disc-shaped sections one above and one under water, connected by a long narrow shaft containing stairs and a lift.

Still in the concept stage, when it is built, guests will be able to stay in the hotel's 21 rooms, designed to 'integrate with the underwater world as closely as possible'.

Solent Forts, UK

The three circular Solent Fort structures sit independently and away from each other in the sea between mainland Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight

Although not intentionally UFO shaped, these private getaway forts will make guests feel like they're out of this world

The black, iron plated forts designed to protect the naval hub of Portsmouth and the south coast, have been standing strong against the tide for the last 150 years

Although not intentionally UFO shaped, Solents three circular forts resemble unidentified floating objects from above.

The black, iron plated forts designed to protect the naval hub of Portsmouth and the south coast, have been standing strong against the tide for the last 150 years.

But now adventurous holidaymakers can enjoy a far-flung break away from the mainland at one of the private getaways offered.

Each of the forts boasts luxury suites, a rooftop hot pool, a dining room, bar and even business meeting facilities.

UFO treehouse hotel, Sweden

As you walk through the serene Swedish forest, a completely alien metal construction rises six metres off the floor and into the treetops

A spotlight shines down over a staircase leading visitors into the room, making the structure look as though it's hovering to land

Inside the UFO Treehotel the space is decorated like the inside of a spaceship, down to cushions with constellation patterns embroidered into them

The concept of treehouses may not be a new thing - but Treehotel's UFO themed room is out of this world.

As you walk through the serene Swedish forest, a completely alien metal construction rises six metres off the floor and into the treetops.

A spotlight shines down over a staircase leading visitors into the room, making the structure look as though it's hovering to land.

Inside, the 'UFO' is decorated with space-inspired touches down to cushions with constellation patterns embroidered in them, so guests will feel like they're on another planet.
The Chinese government has taken a series of steps in recent years to curb the bad behaviour of rude citizens when they visit other countries.

But one tourist clearly hadn't got the memo when he made a trip to the Japanese city of Kyoto last Friday.

New pictures, taken by a fellow tourist, show the man jumping into a sacred water shrine to collect drinking water in a plastic bottle.

The unnamed man was pictured jumping into the sacred Kiyomizu shrine in Kyoto to fill up his water bottle

The 1200-year-old Kiyomizu shrine was founded on the site of the Otowa waterfall and it was made an Unesco world heritage site in 1994.

The water is divided into three separate streams and visitors can take a sip of the water from one of the streams using special cups that are hung on sticks from a balcony.

One stream is said to give longevity, another success at school and a third is said to give luck in finding love.

Tradition dictates that visitors cannot drink from all three streams though as it is greedy and considered to bring bad luck.

The tourist from Friday's incident appeared unconcerned about such rules though and jumped into the bottom pond fully clothed to scoop up the water from all three streams with his bottle.

The move was said to disgust fellow tourists because of the disrespect to Japanese culture as well as the unhygienic aspect of wading around in the water.

The 1200-year-old Kiyomizu shrine was founded on the site of the Otowa waterfall and it was made an Unesco world heritage site in 1994

The onlooker who took the photograph told the website EJInsight that he was ashamed and that the man's actions proved that Chinese tourists have a lot of learn about etiquette and manners.

Chinese tourists have been involved in a number of high-profile incidents relating to bad behaviour both abroad and domestically.

Recently the country released the definitive list of acts that will get tourists blacklisted and banned from travel as part of the new 'uncivilised behaviour law', which the state tourism department hopes will curb embarrassing incidents sparked by Chinese citizens abroad.

The list of bad behaviour that will get a tourist blacklisted was released by China National Tourism Administration on May 30 and replaces previous versions of the law.

After a number of incidents involving Chinese tourists opening plane doors, it's no surprise that number one on the list is any 'interference' with public transport facilities including planes, buses and boats.

The water is divided into three separate streams and visitors can take a sip of the water from one of the streams using special cups that are hung on sticks from a balcony

Damages to public facilities and historical attractions has also been included in light of the recent reports of Shanghai Disneyland being trashed before it even opened and graffiti at Everest base camp.

During the cherry blossom season in Japan, Chinese tourists were so poorly behaved that there have been calls for a separate area to be created for visitors from China - and so damaging natural environments has also been included in the list of offences.

To make certain that tourists who commit offences not on the list don't escape punishment, the State Tourism Department made it clear that any act deemed unsavoury could result in a ban.
The terrifying moment the cabin of a Jet Airways plane suddenly filled with smoke, less than five minutes after take-off, has been captured on a passenger's camera.

The flight had just taken off from Bangalore, in India's southern Karnataka state, when passengers noticed the smoke and alerted cabin crew.

Oxygen masks were deployed and the plane turned around to return to the airport. And when it landed a number of people were injured in a stampede to get out of the still smoking aircraft.

The aircraft suddenly filled with smoke less than five minutes after take-off from Bangalore

Once the smoke was detected, the 65 passengers and four cabin crew on board were told to put on their oxygen masks to avoid inhaling smoke fumes.

Meanwhile, the plane, which was supposed to be heading for Mangalore, also in Karnataka, turned around and returned to Bangalore's Kempegowda International Airport.

A Jet Airways spokesman has confirmed that some passengers were hurt during the rush to get off the aircraft once they were back on the ground.

Five people were taken to the airport medical room for first aid while other guests were shifted to the airport lounge.

However, a spokesman for Kempegowda International Airport said that none of the passengers had been seriously hurt.

He said: 'With the help of the aircraft rescue and firefighting team, all passengers on board the aircraft were evacuated safely.'

The Jet Airways plane which was supposed to be heading for Mangalore, also in Karnataka, turned around and returned to Bangalore's Kempegowda International Airport (file image)

The runway was closed for 20 minutes after the emergency, delaying arrivals and departures at the airport.

The passengers on board the Jet Airways flight will be transferred to the next available flight to Mangalore.

A spokesperson for Jet Airways told MailOnline: 'Jet Airways flight 9W 2839 from Bangalore to Mangalore returned to Bangalore airport soon after departure due to smoke detected in the cabin.

'All 65 guests and 4 crew of Jet Airways flight 9W 2839 were safely evacuated after landing at Bangalore airport at 10.20am.

'Five guests were taken to the airport medical room for first aid. Other guests have been shifted to the airport lounge and are being cared for.

'All checked-in and cabin baggage has been handed over to the guests, who will be accommodated on the next Jet Airways flight to Mangalore.

'The ATR aircraft has been shifted to the parking bay for further inspection by Jet Airways engineering team. The Airline has informed DGCA about the incident and will extend full co-operation in this regard.'

Earlier this month a Jet Airways aircraft that had set out from Delhi ended up on the grass at Indore Airport after skidding off the runway while trying to land in wet weather

Earlier this month, MailOnline reported that a Jet Airways aircraft carrying 66 passengers skidded off the runway while trying to land in wet weather in India.

The Jet Airways flight, that had earlier set out from Delhi, ended up in the grass at Indore Airport as rain lashed the runway.
They married three years ago so it's no wonder Tamra Judge and her husband Eddie Judge wanted to celebrate in style.

The loved up couple have jetted off somewhere sunny to commemorate their three year anniversary.

The Real Housewives Of Orange County star couldn't wait to share snaps from their enviable holiday abroad.

Celebration! Tamra and Eddie Judge jetted off somewhere sunny to commemorate their three year anniversary

She shared one photo of the pair on Instagram with the caption: '3 years of marriage and we haven't changed at all. He's as hot as the day I met him.'

In the photo Tamra jokingly sticks her tongue out as she hides her face with a pair of big shades.

Eddie too pulls a funny face as the pair pose for the photo.

Clearly her 872k followers are enjoying the images as one user commented: 'Happy Anniversary love that you found the love of your life.'

Strike a pose: The Real Housewives Of Orange County star couldn't wait to share snaps from their enviable holiday abroad

Another chimed in: 'You guys are darling.... Happy Anniversary and heres to many more! (sic)'

Tamra shared another photo with her followers but this time it was a collage of photos as she wrote: 'Anniversary celebration starts NOW #3years #swolemates #funinthesun #wifey.'

Again her followers were over the moon to join in the celebrations: 'Love u guys ur to funny!!! My hubby and I are the same... #love.'

One user wrote: 'Happy Anniversary to you both!! Wishing you many more years of love and happiness!'

Can't get enough! Clearly Tamra's 872k followers are enjoying the images as one user commented: 'Happy Anniversary love that you found the love of your life'; the couple was pictured in 2013

A very enthusiastic fan commented: 'Happiest Anniversary to you! I pray God will continue to bless your marriage as you learn to love one another more each day! He has truly gifted you both with a passionate love that reflects His love for you! Enjoy celebrating today (& every day!)'

Meanwhile Tamra is causing a drama on the RHOC.

Ever since Tamra joined the cast in season three she's been feuding with Vicki Gunvalson.

And apparently that's still going on.

Their relationship hit a rocky patch during production on season 11.

'My relationship with Vicki right now is non-existent because of something she did,' Tamra told The Daily Dish.

'I'm re-evaluating and realizing I don't really need toxic people in my life that talk badly about me and my family and then call themselves my friends, so I am at a crossroads with her,' she continued.

Stirring up some drama: Meanwhile Tamra is causing a drama on the RHOC

Not good: 'My relationship with Vicki right now is non-existent because of something she did,' Tamra told The Daily Dish
She's been impressing her fans on social media, uploading picturesque snaps of her recent trip through Europe.

And Fiona Falkiner did not disappoint on Thursday, as she took to Instagram to share a bikini-clad selfie while relaxing beach-side.

The 33-year-old looked sensational in a simple black number as she soaked up the sun on the island of Kefalonia in Greece.

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Life's a beach: Fiona Falkiner looked sensational as she took to Instagram on Thursday to share a bikini-clad selfie while relaxing on a beach in Kefalonia, Greece

Fiona captioned the shot: 'Work hard, play hard, relax even harder!'

The Biggest Loser host appeared content and without a care in the world as she reclined on the beach in what appears to be a miss-matched two-piece, highlighting her toned figure.

Sporting an enviable holiday glow, she completed her look with a pair of stylish black shades.

Goddess in Greece: The Biggest Loser host appeared content in an earlier snap on Monday wearing what appears to be the exact same bikini

It appears Fiona is not concerned about being a repeat fashion offender as she was seen on Monday wearing what appears to be the exact same bikini.

The TV personality looked stunning in the Instagram snap that showcased her hourglass curves.

Proving her penchant for accessorising, she completed her look with a tight white skirt, pair of sunglasses and a stylish wide-brimmed hat.

She kept her beauty look simple with her blonde tresses falling effortlessly over her shoulders and a golden tan that accentuated her cleavage.

On vacation: Fiona has been enjoying the European summer, with trips to Greece, Italy and the UK

Curves ahead: The curvaceous blonde showed off her enviable physique while cooling down in the pool

Fresh-faced: The stunning model and TV host has been sharing several snaps from her idyllic holiday

Busty display: The personality flaunted her assets in a patterned bikini while enjoying herself on Costa-Costa beach in Greece

The presenter, who is currently making her way around the world on the trip of a lifetime, is candidly open about her curvy frame.

Her take on health, wellness and body image is what fans admire the most.

The bronzed beauty shared with Body and Soul that despite getting down to a size 12 after being a contestant on The Biggest Loser, she discovered being healthy was more than just a dress size.

'Here I was, a healthy size 12 and I still hated what I looked like,' she admitted to the publication.

Picturesque: Fiona also enjoyed the stunning views outside her hotel room while on her European vacation

'It made me realise that my insecurities had nothing to do with what size I was, it had to do with my mindset,' she added.

The now size-16 media personality is adamant that true health can only be achieved through self-love.

'Its been about learning to love my body, to value it and to appreciate it,' she shared with the newspaper.

'When you start to love yourself, you want to look after your body and lead a healthy lifestyle,' she said.

Content: Fiona, who found fame on The Biggest Loser, is adamant that true health can only be achieved with self-love




Much ado was made over Meg Ryan's 54-year-old face at the Tony Awards, and the romantic-comedy queen just resurfaced in Manhattan's Soho neighbourhood on Wednesday.

The three-time Golden Globe nominee went incognito in sunglasses, a straw bucket hat, olive T-shirt, black belted trousers, and unflattering footwear.

'I am a terrible celebrity,' Meg - born Margaret Hyra - admitted to Vanity Fair on Monday.

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First sighting: Much ado was made over Meg Ryan's 54-year-old face at the Tony Awards, and the romantic-comedy queen just resurfaced in Manhattan's Soho neighbourhood on Wednesday

'If I started my career today, I wouldn't have a chance. It's a totally different experience. Social media has changed things. It's so vast and big. I couldn't handle the constant attention and the judging.'

On Sunday night, Ryan inadvertently became one of Facebook and Twitter's top-trending topics for her appearance while introducing the cast of She Loves Me - which was inspired by her 1998 rom-com You've Got Mail.

Users criticized her suspiciously smooth face and plump trout pout, likening the divorced mother-of-two to Batman's Joker and Cry-Baby's Ratchetface.

'Someone erased her delightful, wholesome, girl-next-door look and replaced it with a weird caricature,' plastic surgeon Dr. Lyle M. Back - who has not treated Meg - told Radar Online last year.

Remaining under the radar: The three-time Golden Globe nominee went incognito in sunglasses, a straw bucket hat, olive T-shirt, black belted trousers, and unflattering footwear

Signature Sally Hershberger shag: Meg - born Margaret Hyra - admitted to Vanity Fair on Monday, 'I am a terrible celebrity'

She confessed: 'If I started my career today, I wouldn't have a chance. It's a totally different experience. Social media has changed things. It's so vast and big. I couldn't handle the constant attention and the judging'

'It looks like shes had multiple laser resurfacings, as well as way too much Botox and heavily pumped filler, especially in her overstuffed cheeks.

'Her lips also appear to have been overfilled, leaving her with a "Joker"-like smile. All the laser resurfacing on her face has created a weirdly smooth sheen.'

In a similar style to Oscar winner Renee Zellweger, the Fan Girl actress has scoffed at plastic surgery rumours.

Unrecognizable: On Sunday night, Ryan inadvertently became one of Facebook and Twitter's top-trending topics for her appearance while introducing the cast of She Loves Me

Haters gonna hate: Users criticized her suspiciously smooth face and plump trout pout, likening the divorced mother-of-two to Batman's Joker and Cry-Baby's Ratchetface

'There are more important conversations than how women look and how they are ageing,' Meg told PORTER's Winter Escape Issue 12 back in December.

'There's a lot of hatred in the world today - it's so easy to judge. Imagine being a hater. How stupid!'

The NYU grad continued: 'I love my age. I love my life right now. I love what I know about. I love the person I've become, the one I've evolved into.'

2010 and 2001: Plastic surgeon Dr. Lyle M. Back - who has not treated Meg - told Radar Online that she's had 'multiple laser resurfacings, as well as way too much Botox and heavily pumped filler, especially in her overstuffed cheeks'

1997 and 1984: Back continued, 'Her lips also appear to have been overfilled, leaving her with a "Joker"-like smile. All the laser resurfacing on her face has created a weirdly smooth sheen'

Meg is mother to 10-year-old daughter Daisy as well as 24-year-old son Jack (with ex-husband Dennis Quaid), who played her son in her directorial debut, Ithaca.

'[Directing Jack] was like telling him, "Eat your dinner,"' the Web Therapy star joked.

'He's always worked really hard, so I felt like he was another actor on the set rather than my son.'

'I love my age!' In a similar style to Oscar winner Renee Zellweger, the Fan Girl actress has scoffed at plastic surgery rumours

'[Directing Jack] was like telling him, "Eat your dinner"': Meg is mother to 10-year-old daughter Daisy as well as 24-year-old son Jack (with ex-husband Dennis Quaid), who played her son in her directorial debut, Ithaca

Ryan enlisted Oscar winner Tom Hanks to play her late husband and her ex-boyfriend Grammy winner John Mellencamp to score Ithaca.

The Connecticut-born blonde will screen her forties coming-of-age family drama at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 23-24.

'It was one of the hardest things I have done in my career,' Ryan said of being at the helm.

'Once you do it, you get the bug. I like the behind-the-scenes thing. I really do. Acting for a while was really fun and it still is, but directing is something even more.'

'It was one of the hardest things I have done in my career': Ryan enlisted Oscar winner Tom Hanks to play her late husband and her ex-boyfriend Grammy winner John Mellencamp to score Ithaca

Based on William Saroyan's 1943 novel The Human Comedy: The Connecticut-born blonde will screen her forties coming-of-age family drama at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 23-24
An honest essay has numerous characteristics: original thinking, a good structure, balanced arguments, and plenty more.

But one aspect often overlooked is that an honest essay should be interesting. It should spark the readers curiosity, keep them absorbed, make them want to stay reading and learn more. An uneventful article risks losing the readers attention; whether or not the points you create are excellent, a flat style, or poor handling of a dry subject material can undermine the positive aspects of the essay. The matter is that a lot of students think that essays should be like this: they believe that a flat, dry style is suited to the needs of educational writing and dont even consider that the teacher reading their essay wants to search out the essay interesting. You might want to have online essay editor service to boost your confidence in writing with an error-free output. Academic writing doesnt need to be  and shouldnt be  bland. The excellent news is that there is much stuff you can do to create your essay more attractive, while youll be able only to do such a lot while remaining within the formal confines of educational writing. Lets study what theyre.

Have an interest in what youre writing about

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If theres one thing bound to inject interest into your writing, its being fascinated by what youre writing about. Passion for a subject matter comes across naturally in your essay, typically making it more lively and fascinating and infusing an infectious enthusiasm into your words  within the same way that its easy to talk knowledgeably to someone about something you discover fascinating.

Include fascinating details

Another factor that may make an essay boring maybe a dry material. Some topic areas are naturally dry, and it falls to you to form the article more interesting through your written style and by trying to seek out fascinating snippets of knowledge to incorporate, which will liven it up a small amount and make the data easier to relate to. A way of doing this with a dry subject is to create what youre talking about that seems relevant to the critical world, as this is often easier for the reader to relate to.

Emulate the fashion of writers you discover interesting

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Theres a limit to the quantity of actual story-telling youll do when youre writing an essay; in the end, essays should be objective, factual and balanced, which doesnt, initially glance, feel considerably like story-telling. However, youll apply a number of the principles of story-telling to create your writing more interesting.

consider your own opinion

Take the time to figure out what its that you think instead of regurgitating the opinions of others.

Cut the waffle

Rambling on and on is dull and almost bound to lose the interest of your reader. Youre in danger of waffling if youre not completely clear about what you wish to mention or havent thought carefully about how youre visiting structure your argument. Doing all your research correctly and writing an essay plan before you begin will help prevent this problem.

Editing is a vital part of the essay-writing process, so edit the waffle once youve done a primary draft. Read through your essay objectively and eliminate the bits that arent relevant to the argument or labor the purpose.

employing a thesaurus isnt always a decent thing

Avoid using unfamiliar words in an essay; theres too great a likelihood that youre misusing them.

You may think that employing a thesaurus to seek out more complicated words will make your writing more exciting or sound more academic, but using overly high-brow language can have the incorrect effect.

Avoid repetitive phrasing

Please avoid using the identical phrase structure again and again: its a recipe for dullness! Instead, use a variety of syntax that demonstrates your writing capabilities and makes your writing more interesting. Mix simple, compound, and complicated sentences to avoid your paper becoming predictable.

Use some figurative language

Using analogies with nature can often make concepts more accessible for readers to know.

As weve already seen, its easy to finish up rambling when youre explaining complex concepts  mainly after you dont know it yourself. One way of forcing yourself to think about a couple of pictures, present it more simply and engagingly is to form figurative language. This implies explaining something by comparing it with something else, as in an analogy.

Employ rhetorical questions

Anticipate the questions your reader might ask.

One of the ways ancient orators held the eye of their audiences and increased the dramatic effect of their speeches was by using the statement. A decent place to use a statement is at the top of a paragraph, to steer into the following one, or at the start of a replacement section to introduce a brand new area for exploration.

Proofread

Finally, you may write the top interesting essay an instructor has ever read. Still, youll undermine your good work if its plagued by errors, which distract the reader from the particular content and can probably annoy them.
Australian actor Richard Roxburgh has undergone an identity transformation as it has been revealed he will step back into the role of disgraced former Detective Roger Rogerson for the revamped mini-series, Blue Murder.

The show will follow the recent allegations of Rogerson's ongoing criminal conduct, including the 2014 murder of Jamie Gao, which the NSW Supreme Court found him guilty of earlier this week.

Last week Roxburgh was fitted with a headpiece while visiting a Sydney salon as he prepared to reprise he character 11 years after the show first aired.

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Transformation: Australian actor Richard Roxburgh (L) has undergone an identity transformation as he steps back into the role of disgraced former Detective Roger Rogerson (R) for the revamped mini-series, Blue Murder - the actor pictured at a Sydney salon earlier this month

He was pictured looking through a script as artists blended his bleached blonde hair to match the 75-year-old criminal's.

The series will reportedly leave its former station, the ABC, and screen on Channel Seven at the end of the year.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to the network and production company for confirmation.

The 1995 edition of Blue Murder followed the relationship between the controversial former Detective and notorious criminal Arthur 'Neddy' Smith.

Making a change: Last week Roxburgh was fitted with a headpiece while visiting a Sydney salon as he prepared to step back into character 11 years after the show first aired - the actor pictured at the 2015 AACTA Awards in December last year

Starring alongside Roxbourgh in the production back then, were the likes of fellow actors Tony Martin and Steve Bastoni.

It is believed the upcoming movie will follow the recent allegations of Rogerson's ongoing criminal conduct as well as his 2014 murder arrest.

On Wednesday, Rogerson and McNamara were found guilty of murdering Sydney university student Jamie Gao.

Previous project: Roxburgh is reprising his role of Rogerson, after the 1995 edition of Blue Murder followed the relationship between the controversial former Detective and notorious criminal Arthur 'Neddy' Smith

Actor: Roxburgh has also starred in ABC series Rake and Mel Gibson's film Hacksaw Ridge

The pair were convicted at NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday of killing the 20-year-old at a storage unit in Padstow, south west Sydney, two years ago.

The court heard that the pair had made a drug deal with Gao who they lured to the Rent A Storage unit on May 20, 2014.

They shot him dead to steal three kilograms of ice he had brought with him before dumping his body at sea using McNamara's boat the next day.

They will be sentenced in August. Throughout the four-month trial both men denied the killing, blaming each other for Gao's death.

Guilty: Roger Rogerson (left arriving at court on Wednesday) and Glen McNamara (right) have been found guilty of murdering 20-year-old university student Jamie Gao in 2014

Tragic: Gao was shot twice at a storage unit in Padstow, south west Sydney, in May 2014. He had been lured there by the men for a drug deal

The most recent murder charge was one of many convictions Rogerson had against his name since starting his career as a Detective in the early 1970s.

In 1981 it was reported he was responsible for the shooting death of heroin dealer Warren Lanfranchi. A jury later found he was acting in the line of self-defence.

Eight years later, Rogerson was convicted for involvement in drug dealing but it was later overturned on appeal.

After being dismissed from the NSW Police Force in 1986, he was convicted of perverting the course of justice in relation to $110,000 deposited by him in bank accounts under a false name.

During the early 90s he served nine months in jail before being released on bail pending an appeal which was later unsuccessful, forcing him to spend a further three years behind bars.

In 2005 Rogerson and his wife Anne Melocco were convicted of lying to the 1999 Police Integrity Commission and served 12 months in prison.
There has been no shortage of envy-inducing snaps from Anna Heinrich and beau Tim Robards' trip to Italy.

And it doesn't look like the jet-setting couple will be leaving their thousands of followers high and dry any time soon, as Anna, 29, shared yet another photo to Instagram on Wednesday.

In the sun-soaked shot, the glamorous lawyer is seen reclining on a sun bed, taking in the Italian sun and picturesque surrounding views from a rooftop pool in Florence.

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What a view! Anna Heinrich flaunts her fabulous figure in nautical-style bikini as she soaks up the sun on a lounger while taking in the sprawling views of Florence from a rooftop pool on Wednesday

Sporting a nautical-style red and white striped bikini, the blonde beauty flaunts her gym-honed figure in the high-waisted bottoms, which feature two rows of buttons for detailing.

The balconette-style bikini top frames Anna's curves perfectly, with the matching two-piece putting her long limbs and toned stomach on full display.

Leaning back and looking up into the sunlight, the blonde beauty carefully covers her eyes behind a pair of dark black shades, with her long locks falling back behind her as she poses quite contently for the camera.

Summer loving: Anna's boyfriend of three years, Tim, 33, also shared a photo of himself lapping up the Italian sun and the surrounding views

'This view is insane!!!' she captioned the snap.

And it seems Anna wasn't alone for the sun and swim session, with Tim sharing an almost-identical photo to his own Instagram account.

The buff chiropractor, 33, can be seen lounging on the very same sun bed, flexing his huge biceps as he relaxes and smiles at the camera.

The Bachelor star captioned his snap: 'Florence... U are one sexy beast of a city'.

Celebrating: The glamorous couple have been in Italy celebrating Anna's mother Jude's 60th birthday and have enjoyed a string of parties, dinners and days by the pool

The lovebirds have been in Italy to celebrate Anna's mother Jude's 60th birthday, and since jetting into the country in First Class last week, they have been living in the lap of luxury.

'Couldn't be any more EXCITED. We're coming for you EUROPE,' Anna captioned her shot leaving the Etihad Airways lounge at Sydney Airport last Tuesday evening.

They have been taking in all Italy has to offer, visiting Positano, San Gemini, Sorrento and Florence.

And while they are not filming this European holiday for their YouTube show, Anna and Tim have wasted no time in sharing plenty of photos across social media.

Loved-up: While they are not filming this European holiday for their YouTube show, Anna and Tim have wasted no time in sharing plenty of photos across social media
Kim Kardashian found the perfect place to celebrate North's third birthday - Disneyland.

The proud mom showed her little princess all the beloved sights the 'amusement park in Anaheim, California had to offer on Wednesday, and Kourtney Kardashian, Scott Disick and kids were there for the family fun with Mason and Penelope.

The 35-year-old was seen strolling 'the greatest place on Earth' with a totally amazed North in her arms before hopping aboard the Mad Tea Party ride with Kourtney, 37, Mason, six, and Penelope, three.

Happiest place on Earth: Kim Kardashian treated her birthday girl North to family fun at Disneyland on Wednesday as the little princess turned three years old

North was instantly in awe as she settled herself in the larger-than-life tea cup, a smile spreading across her face.

Kim made sure her daughter was arm's length as Kourtney and her two eldest children crammed themselves into the ride beside them.

The point of the ride once it begins is to turn the center wheel round and round to make the tea cup twirl faster and faster.

Better than the 'North' Pole: The adorable tot enjoyed a ride on the Mad Tea Party

Stay close to Mommy: Kim kept North close as they settled in the larger-than-life tea cup

All aboard: Kim was joined by sister Kourtney and her children Mason, six, and Penelope, who will be four on July 8

Let's get situated: The 35-year-old reality star may have been trying to get her excited birthday girl to settle down while Kourtney and Penelope patiently waited

Of course the end result is dizzy laughter.

The latest GQ cover girl looked hip in ripped black jeans, black T-shirt and camouflage jacket with her long dark hair in plaits.

North was rocking a lookalike hairdo and a white and pink outfit with little white trainers.

VIP treatment? The Kardashian sisters appeared to be waiting for somebody

Let's go Mommy: North was ready for this ride to start... like now

So cute: The birthday cutie was clad in a white top with princess pink slip and braids to match her mom's

Finally: Kim seemed more thrilled than anybody when the tea cups started to move

Round and round: The moms encouraged the kids to spin the wheel to make the tea cup twirl

Daddy's here: Kanye West cracked a smile as he greeted Kim and North after the ride

Kim no doubt had a wonderful time taking North on some of the othergreat kiddie rides like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, It's A Small World and the King Arthur Carrousel.

While Kim's expression was one of wonder, North just stared and stared at the rides and attractions that whizzed by.

The twosome appeared to be accompanied by a bodyguard as they roamed the park, and certainly Kim found time to visit the Carnation Cafe for mother-daughter ice cream cones.

So many rides, so little time: Kim strolled around the Anaheim, CA amusement park with North in her arms

What's next: Mother and daughter seemed amazed by all the fun rides and attractions Disneyland had to offer

Birthday girl getting tired? Kim appeared to be giving the birthday girl a comforting little pep talk as they boarded a boat ride to Cinderella's castle

There's a smile: North was lifted upon her white horse as the family climbed on King Arthur's Carrousel

Wow Nelly: At one point North didn't seem too sure of this saddle

Flying high: Kim took North to ride upon Dumbo The Flying Elephant ride

At one point, Kim's sister Kourtney and her clan hopped aboard the more adventurous Matterhorn Bobsleds ride.

Scott, 33, was seen taking the back seat and Kourtney settled in the middle behind Mason.

It was better than the 'North' Pole as Kim, North and the rest of the family squeezed themselves into a boat ride around Tom Sawyer's Island.

Is it a bird or a plane? It may have North flying high on Dumbo The Flying Elephant that Mason, Kourtney and Kanye were staring at

Faster please: Kourtney couldn't stifle the giggles as she and friendly ex Scott Disick rode the Matterhorn Bobsleds ride with their son Mason

It's A Small World: The family boarded a boat through the children's favorite It's A Small World

Smiling through: North the birthday girl had a front row seat next to Auntie Kourtney

North may have been getting a little weary by this time for Kim was seen hugging her little girl close and giving her comforting pep talk.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Kim alerted social media followers that she was looking for a new bakery to make North's birthday cake just ahead of the big day.

The last minute plea caused fans to wonder what Hansen's Cakes, the Kardashian go-to bake shop over the years, had done to spur this abandonment.

Kim asked: 'Ok guys my family is looking for a new bakery. What are the yummiest cake spots in la that makes amazing cakes & cupcakes?'

The bakery, however, asserts they are still the family's fave dessert place.
She's a likely contender to be Australia's next Bachelorette following her public split from Blake Garvey.

And Louise Pillidge further fuelled speculation she will star in Network Ten's dating show by debuting a striking new haircut this week.

The 28-year-old flaunted her new ombre look - a blend of blonde, chestnut and brown - on Instagram on Wednesday.

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Why the new do, Lou? Newly-single Louise Pillidge (pictured) fuelled rumours she will be the next Bachelorette by debuting a stylish new haircut on Instagram on Wednesday

Louise declared in the caption: 'In LOVE with my new colour', before thanking Perth hair salon Ebony and Ivory.

She later shared an elevator selfie, posing in a chic ensemble consisting of jeans and a black blazer with a Chanel handbag.

Her sleek shoulder-length do will no doubt have the rumour mill spinning about a potential role in this year's Bachelorette.

What's the occasion? Louise, 28, flaunted her sleek new ombre look, a blend of blonde, chestnut and brown

Making a comeback? Louise Pillidge - pictured here in on The Bachelor in 2014 - may have a second chance at happiness on The Bachelorette this year, it has been speculated

Louise placed third in The Bachelor 2014, but later began dating series hunk Blake after he abruptly ended his engagement to winner Sam Frost.

The Perth auctioneer, 33, was later branded Australia's 'most hated man' for unceremoniously dumping Sam just five weeks after his proposal.

Meanwhile, his decision to enter a relationship Louise drew public scrutiny, which she later admitted was 'hard to move on from'.

In happier times: Louise placed third in The Bachelor in 2014 but later began dating Blake Garvey (left) after he controversially called off his engagement to series winner Sam Frost

An unhappy engagement: Blake proposed to Sam Frost (right) in the series finale of The Bachelor in 2014 - but he had ended the relationship before the episode was broadcast

His third choice? Blake was dubbed Australia's 'most hated man' for dumping Sam in favour of Louise

In April, Blake and Louise called off their 18-month romance - but caused controversy yet again by posing for a 'break-up' photo shoot in New Idea.

This week, Louise's odds of being chosen as The Bachelorette increased after rumoured favourite Lana Jeavons-Fellows went public with her new relationship.

The Bachelor 2015 runner-up, 28, told NW Magazine on Monday she has been dating 35-year-old entrepreneur Jake Meah for seven months.

A troubled relationship: Blake's decision to enter a relationship Louise drew public scrutiny, which she later admitted was 'hard to move on from'

LOUISE PILLIDGE AND BLAKE GARVEY - RELATIONSHIP TIMELINE October 2014: The Bachelor finale airs. Blake Garvey, an auctioneer from Perth, rejects Louise Pillidge in favour of Sam Frost. He proposes to Sam in South Africa. October 2014: Later that month, Woman's Day confirm Blake and Louise are dating, despite her placing third in the show. It had emerged Blake called off his engagement to Sam before the finale was broadcast. November 2014: Louise and Blake spend most of their time living in Perth despite plans to move to Sydney. January 2015: Louise officially moves from her Brisbane home to live with Blake in a two-bedroom apartment in WA. February 2016: Blake is noticeably absent in the pictures as Louise celebrates her 28th birthday -but their publicist insists they are still together. February 2016: The couple begin relationship counselling which lasts for three months March 2016: Louise enjoys a holiday in Hawaii with her mother but Blake does not join them April 2016: They confirm split in New Idea magazine Advertisement

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia two months ago, Lana did hint at possibly being involved in the popular reality show, saying: 'You never know!'

Meanwhile, Louise revealed on KIIS 106.5's The Kyle and Jackie O Show in April that she was not ruling out the possibility of taking part in a reality show.

Speaking days after announcing her split from Blake, she said coyly: 'Im not sure  what comes from this who knows?'
Koko: The Gorilla Who Talks To People

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Keeping great apes as pets is frowned on. Even pop stars aren't allowed to do it these days  Michael Jackson famously had a chimp called Bubbles in the Eighties, but imagine the outcry today if Lady Gaga owned an orangutan on a leash.

Still, if you're an animal-lover, it's impossible to see a baby gorilla without yearning to keep it. The spoilt child inside us pipes up: 'Mum, mum, can I have a gorilla? All my friends have got gorillas, I promise I'll look after it, can I have one?'

Gorillas just don't make practical housemates. They start off cute, the ideal mixture of toddler and dog, like a human baby with fur.

Dr. Francine 'Penny' Patterson is shown in this 1972 handout photo with Koko, the famous kitten-loving gorilla

But in a couple of years they weigh more than Giant Haystacks, and they're stronger than a bulldozer.

A naughty puppy will jump off the sofa when you shout  but a gorilla can sit anywhere it likes, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Koko, The Gorilla Who Talks To People (BBC1) was meant to be a scientific documentary, exploring the possibility that our closest animal relatives can use human language to express thoughts and emotions.

But for anyone who dotes on pets, it was a real-life fantasy about what happens when you adopt an ape.

Koko responds to a request to represent the 'Voice of Nature' in a scripted PSA at the Paris Climate Summit

Psychology PhD student Penny Patterson borrowed baby Koko from a California zoo in the early Seventies, as part of a Stanford University experiment. She wanted to spend a year teaching American sign language to a gorilla, and at the end of 12 months the little primate had learned three hand gestures, for 'eat', 'drink' and 'more'.

All that proves is that infant gorillas are slow learners. A dog could have mastered far more.

But Koko kept learning. This programme, assembled from thousands of hours of footage shot over four decades, revealed that while grammar was beyond her brain's capability, she had an almost limitless power to absorb new words, which she strung together in imaginative ways.

PATERNITY TEST OF THE NIGHT So, the father of the queen's black baby in the ridiculous Versailles (BBC2) was not the dwarf jester, Nabo, but the dashing African prince, Annaba. Since Monsieur Nabo was actually played by a woman, Marie-Agnes Ganga, perhaps we should have guessed the truth sooner. Advertisement

By the time she was five years old, she was communicating constantly with Penny, who had raised enough cash to purchase her permanently.

Koko could express feelings of love, sadness and grief, but her most human trait was her longing for a pet. When she was eight, she had a kitten for her birthday: she called it All Ball. Pitifully, it was run over and killed at six months old.

The gorilla was heartbroken. She pleaded for another, in signs: 'Cat gorilla have visit. Koko love. Do visit do.' The meaning could not be plainer. This moving documentary didn't reveal enough about the logistics of looking after a pet ape, though it obviously helps to live in California, where most of the population is so permanently zonked that nothing is weird, not even an eight-foot gorilla in the passenger seat of a Datsun.

But it was a touching reminder of how like us animals really are and that, when they seem to understand every word we say, it's probably because they do.

Rescue Dog To Superdog

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Daisy the dalmatian showed an extraordinary degree of perception and sensitivity in Rescue Dog To Super Dog (C4).

The boisterous pooch, saved by an animal charity in Devon, was being trained to assist 12-year-old Dom, a shy and serious boy with crippling muscular dystrophy.

The dog's job was to push buttons, open doors and retrieve dropped toys. Despite the programme's gloss, she was patently rubbish at it. The most complex instruction Daisy could master was 'Sit', and that was decidedly hit-and-miss.

But she was instinctively brilliant at loving Dom. Disability had left him isolated, with only adults to talk to. Daisy understood that he wanted silliness and soppiness, a friend who would love him to bits, and this she was able to do without any training at all.

'I've got a dalmatian all to myself,' he gasped happily.

We met Teddy the poodle too, a tiny companion for a girl named Enola who suffered from a growth disorder.

Teddy, she said, was 'the best thing that's ever happened to me'.
He is a father-of-six so Brad Pitt is definitely familiar with the heartache that occurs when a child loses a toy.

And despite making his way through a busy airport terminal, he certainly did not hesitate when he saw a young girl dropped one of her belongings.

The 52-year-old actor was dressed casual cool while arriving for a departing flight out of LAX Airport in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

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On-the-go: Brad Pitt was dressed casual cool while arriving for a departing flight out of LAX Airport in Los Angeles on Wednesday

What a gent: The 52-year-old actor's fatherly instincts kicked in as he picked up a toy a young girl had dropped and gave it back to her just outside of the Tom Bradley International Terminal

Brad appeared to be in good spirits outside of the Tom Bradley International Terminal as he picked up the youngster's toy and handed it back to her.

No doubt many travellers were not only in shock seeing an A-lister but also witnessing his act of kindness as everyone seemed to be turned around looking at Brad and the young lady.

He was dressed casual cool in a navy blue blazer over a checked red top tucked into indigo-washed jeans and brown suede leather boots.

Dapper: The Inglorious Basterds star sported a navy blue blazer white jetting out

Casual flyer: He also sported a red checked button-down over a white shirt tucked into indigo-wash jeans and brown suede boots

Slick: He wore a grey fedora along with aviator shades while holding onto a designer leather overnight bag

The Inglorious Basterds star accessorised with a grey fedora and aviator shades while holding a designer, black leather overnight bag.

Brad has been keeping himself busy with his acting roles as he recently finished work on his latest flick Allied, which is currently in post-production.

The previously untitled film sees Brad's character, Max Vatan, fall in love with French agent Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard) during a mission to kill a German ambassador holed up in Casablanca.

They've got his back: Brad did not come alone as he had two security guards accompanying him through the busy airport and travel hub

Later he's informed that Marianne is most likely a Nazi spy.

The film - which is based on a true story - is directed Robert Zemeckis (Back To The Future) and also stars Jared Harris (Lincoln) and Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey).

Allied is slated for release later this year on November 23.
She's been enjoying a fun-filled holiday to Spain with her baby son Paul and her sister Billie.

And Sam Faiers looked as if she was enjoying a spot of R&R whilst she's away in the sun, as the reality star showcased her natural good looks in a fresh-faced selfie before enjoying a day on the beach.

Taking to social media on Wednesday, the 25-year-old former TOWIE star showcased her flawless complexion in a candid snap before flaunting her tanned and toned legs in a beach-bound picture.

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Natural beauty: Sam Faiers looked as if she was enjoying a spot of R&R whilst she's away in the sun, as the reality star showcased her natural good looks in a fresh-faced selfie before enjoying a day on the beach

Sharing a make-up free snap of herself alone in her room, Sam - who first shot to fame on ITVBe's long-running reality show - revealed her flawless and glowing skin.

With her long sandy brown hair pushed back off of her face, the Essex girl allowed her naturally striking and pretty features to come to the fore.

However, it wasn't long before she was back in the sun and on the beach, as she flaunted her toned and tanned legs in a skimpy caftan and swimsuit.

Putting on a VERY leggy display thanks to the caftan's cutaway design, while her high cut bikini bottoms did little to obscure her pins either.

Beach-bound babe: Taking to social media on Wednesday, the 25-year-old former TOWIE star showcased her flawless complexion in a candid snap before flaunting her tanned and toned legs in a beach-bound picture

Sister act: Sam wasn't the only one enjoying life on the beach however, as her sister Billie also joined her for some fun in the sun

Sam wasn't the only one enjoying life on the beach however, as her sister Billie also joined her for some fun in the sun.

Opting for a pair of white hotpants and a layered vest, the TOWIE regular was clearly up for topping up her tan.

The sisters have been taking some time out to enjoy a sun-soaked getaway with their little ones.

And they appear to have been relishing every moment of their balmy escape as they continue to share a number of sweet snaps on social media.

The girls certainly aren't wasting anytime bonding with their cherubic infants, with Sam posting precious snaps of herself and her adorable baby Paul, six months, enjoying a boat trip.

Kicking back: They've taken some time out to enjoy a sun-soaked getaway with their little ones and Sam and Billie Faiers look to be relishing every moment of their balmy escape as they continue to share a number of sweet snaps on social media, one of which saw Sam cuddle up to son Paul, six months, during a boat trip

Reclining on board the luxury vessel, the former TOWIE star sizzles in a reptile print swimsuit with revealing lace-up detailing across the bust as she cuddles up to her bundle of joy.

'Pauls little face gets me every time #boatday,' she captioned the snap.

The cute shot came just moments after Sam shared a more sultry image of herself and sister Billie sipping champagne on deck, the latter clad in a provocative red swimsuit that flashed some serious cleavage with its eyelet cut-outs running along the centre of the torso.

Sister sisterThe cute shot came just moments after Sam shared a more sultry image of herself and sister Billie sipping champagne on deck, the latter clad in a provocative red swimsuit

But the genetically-blessed sisters aren't having all of the fun, as Sam also posted a comical picture of Paul and Billie's daughter Nelly, one, pretending to man their boat.

'Driving the boat with my main chick #captainpaul,' the TV personality wrote alongside the image which showed Paul steering the wheel of the vessel while a chilled out Nelly sat next to him.

The sisters have also been using their getaway to spend some quality time with their children, ensuring the cousins have plenty of bonding experiences.

All abord! And the genetically-blessed sisters aren't having all of the fun, as Sam also posted a comical picture of Paul and Billie's daughter Nelly, one, pretending to man their boat

Yummy mummy! Sam, 25, kicked off the week with a sizzling snap of her own as she opted to go braless in a skimpy pink crop top that showed off her phenomenal physique ahead of her girls holiday

Sisters in the sunshine: The girls were making the most of their girly getaway as they slipped into skimpy swimsuits to soak up the sunshine on a boat trip with their little ones

Billie is the proud mother of one-year-old daughter Nellie with partner Greg Shephard, whilst Sam welcomed son Paul Tony with boyfriend Paul Knightley in December.

The sisters' holiday comes shortly after it was announced that Sam's ITVBe documentary Sam Faiers: The Baby Diaries has been commissioned to have a full series.

The show caused controversy upon its release earlier this year after Paul senior was accused of acting like 'controlling' and like 'a man child' by viewers.

One scene in particular captured the attention of viewers after the property developer was seen getting up close with his mother Gaynor in which the pair locked lips in a close embrace.

The sisters have also been using their getaway to spend some quality time with their children, ensuring the cousins have plenty of bonding experiences.

Billie is the proud mother of one-year-old daughter Nellie with partner Greg Shephard, whilst Sam welcomed son Paul Tony with boyfriend Paul Knightley in December.

And their little ones seemed to be having a great time on the trip, as Sam shared a sweet snap of the foursome hanging out together with the caption: '#familyiseverything.'

She also took to social media to post an adorable picture of herself with son Paul, calling him her 'little man'.

Family fun: The sisters have also been using their getaway to spend some quality time with their children - Billie is the mum of one-year-old daughter Nellie whilst Sam has son Paul, six months

Bonding time: Sam has been soaking up the sun with son Paul who she welcomed with boyfriend Paul Knightley in December. Sharing a snap, he called him her 'little man'

The sisters' holiday comes shortly after it was announced that Sam's ITVBe documentary Sam Faiers: The Baby Diaries has been commissioned to have a full series.

The show caused controversy upon its release earlier this year after Paul senior was accused of acting like 'controlling' and like 'a man child' by viewers.

One scene in particular captured the attention of viewers after the property developer was seen getting up close with his mother Gaynor in which the pair locked lips in a close embrace.

Just landed! On Sunday the girls touched down on their holiday and Billie was quick to snap a selfie to share with her 1.1million Instagram followers which she captioned: 'First night on our holidays with my lady'

Cousin love! The doting mother of nine-month-old son Paul, who she shares with boyfriend Paul Knightley, posted an adorable snap of Nelly and her son cosying up on Sunday

Mummy and son: Sam's Instagram is littered with snaps with her adorable son
He may have been left with a broken heart after the finale of The Bachelorette when Sam Frost chose Sasha Mielczarek over him in front of millions of viewers.

But in doing so, Australia fell in love with Richie Strahan, so much so that Channel Ten gave him a second chance in choosing him as the latest Bachelor.

To continue building the hype for the hit dating series, the 31-year-old stars in the show's very first promo - a cringe-worthy parody of the world's most famous womaniser and spy, James Bond.

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The name's Strahan, Richie Strahan! Australia's newest Bachelor stars in cringe-worthy James Bond-esque promo

Putting his rippling muscles on display, the hunky mining technician buttons up a white shirt before suiting up to a tune that mimics that of the iconic spy films.

The scene then cuts to him walking across the screen against a white background before 'shooting' the camera with a red rose much like the intro sequence from the famous 007 films.

With a coy smile to the camera, he then shows off his break-dancing skills while his laugh echoes in the background.

Hello! The hunky mining technician buttons up a white shirt before suiting up to a tune that mimics that of the iconic spy films

Cupid! The scene then cuts to him walking across the screen against a white background before 'shooting' the camera with a red rose

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the strawberry blonde heartthrob explained that he's just a 'regular Aussie guy' who's looking for love.

'[I want] a girl who is going to be passionate, someone fiery who is going to challenge me,' he said.

'Someone who isnt boring because I dont think Im boring so it is about someone who is going to be my equal and push my boundaries as much as I push hers.'

'[I want] a girl who is going to be passionate': He has since spoken about what he's looking for in a girl

He's got moves! He then shows off his break-dancing skills while his laugh echoes in the background

The identity of his chosen lady remains a tightly-guarded secret, with the finale having already been filmed in Bali last month.

It was widely reported the network had called in the Indonesian military to keep prying paparazzi from discovering the winner.

It was said security and Indonesian Independent Army are then believed to have guarded the hotel premises on the final day of filming which was shot in a private villa.
Funnyman James Corden embodied the American Dream when he packed his bags for Hollywood last February to present one of the biggest chat shows in the U.S.

Yet despite the Californian sun and his multi-million-pound pay cheques for his job hosting The Late Late Show on CBS, is the Hillingdon-born actor and producer already tiring of the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown?

Just over a year since Corden moved wife Julia and their two children  son Max, five, and daughter Carey, 18 months  into an 18,000-per-month villa in Los Angeles, I'm told he is missing Blighty and is keen to move back to Britain as soon as his 10 million golden handcuffs deal with CBS expires.

Just over a year since James Corden, 37, moved wife Julia and their two children to Los Angeles to host The Late Late Show, he is reportedly keen to move back to Britain. He is pictured with Adele for 'Carpool Karaoke'

'He was openly talking about returning to London,' says a source in America, who attended the same party as Corden this week.

According to my source, Corden is keen to do more film and theatre work. But his career plans may come as a shock to CBS bosses. Last August, the network extended Corden's initial three-year contract by two years, and reportedly increased his pay packet to 1.5 million a year.

Corden, 37, hasn't commented on his pay rise, but has discussed the fact he will be working abroad until 2020. 'Five years,' he said recently. 'They can sack me at any point, but I don't think I can leave.'

Corden, who grew up in 'normal' High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and shot to fame playing Essex builder Smithy in the sitcom Gavin And Stacey, has been a surprise hit since taking over from Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson on The Late Late Show last March.

Corden moved wife Julia and their two children  son Max, five, and daughter Carey, 18 months  into an 18,000-per-month villa in Los Angeles after landing a 10million golden handcuffs contract with CBS in the US

But the West Ham fan has confessed to feeling homesick.

Shortly after he arrived in LA, where neighbours include Steven Spielberg and Gwyneth Paltrow, he said: 'I miss my friends and family.

'There's a weird thing that happens at 2pm when you realise even if you wanted to you couldn't phone them.'

On the day it was revealed Sir Clement Freud was a paedophile, environmentalist Ben Goldsmith sent out a tweet to his followers: 'One of history's true monsters.' No, he was not referring to the ex-Liberal MP, but posted a link to a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Was Ben having a sly joke at his sister's expense? Matthew Freud, son of Sir Clement, is said to be dating Ben's sister, Jemima.

Former England rugby star Ben Cohen, 37

Former England rugby star Ben Cohen has been plugging his new range of branded shaving products in the run-up to Father's Day and writes on social media: 'The perfect gift for the perfect Father: our new grooming kit available @bootsuk!'

Cohen, 37, (pictured) dumped his wife and two kids for Russian dancer Kristina Rihanoff, whom he met on the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and later impregnated, so I am not sure there are many people who would see him as 'perfect father' material.

There is speculation that the extra funds he raises from 'Ben Cohen Grooming Tools' will help to pay for his divorce from wife Abby.

Huw socks it to England

Huw Edwards admits that when he reads the BBC news tonight his coverage of the day's big events  the result of this afternoon's Euro 2016 match between England and Wales  may not be quite as impartial as usual.

The 54-year-old presenter is planning to wear his bright red Welsh socks beneath his sober dark blue suit.

'I am very superstitious, in the best Welsh tradition, and will most likely have on my lucky Welsh socks, and a can of Felinfoel Double Dragon Ale at the ready should the result go the right way,' says the proud Welshman.
Aladdin

Prince Edward Theatre

Rating:

Panto season has begun early this year with the arrival of Aladdin in the West End.

Its only June but we already have lamp-rubbing, pops of smoke, plasticky romance and a magic carpet (more a magic mattress) which floats around like a flying saucer.

This is a no-expenses-spared stage version of the 1992 kiddies cartoon film. The backdrops and costumes are as madly colourful as the acting is two-dimensional. Welcome to Planet Disney  spangles, sequins, soupy storyline.

Dean John-Wilson plays the role of Aladdin alongside Jade Ewen as Jasmine in this no-expense spared version of the 1992 Disney cartoon

Schmaltzy songs, we got em, not least the films A Whole New World, long a favourite with little girls. The whole thing is more saccharine than a shedload of Sweetex. Sub-teens will lap it up and I suspect hen parties may also find it a hoot  particularly the muscular pecs of Dean John-Wilsons Aladdin. Phwoarr, what a cleavage!

Although the music is depressingly bland, designer Bob Crowley comes up with a series of amusingly over-the-top sets. The cave where Aladdin finds the lamp is lined with gold. Imagine the Royal Albert Hall wallpapered with gilt Bacofoil. Casey Nicholaws choreography is efficient and incorporates scimitars and turbans and several dimple-deep belly buttons  you could almost call this a navel revue.

Streamers burst into the auditorium. There is certainly spectacle, even if the heart remains unengaged. The American producers plainly realised that a British stage treatment required something slightly saltier than mere duplication of the cartoon.

They have injected a modicum of panto-style self-mockery. The master of ceremonies is Trevor Dion Nicholas as the genie and he certainly gives it full welly. Fiddling in one of his pyjama-trouserpockets for his lamp, he comes up, instead, with a Union Jack umbrella. Mr Nicholas is the best thing in the evening.

The master of ceremonies is Trevor Dion Nicholas as the genie and he certainly gives it full welly, making him the best thing of the evening

The first half hour is frenetic to the point of shouty. At times it was hard to hear the words, the actors were shrieking so hard. Handsome Aladdin steals a loaf  a guys gotta eat, says Middlesbrough-born Mr John-Wilson in a Disney accent.

Enter the baddies, vizier Jafar and his pepperpot sidekick Iago (Don Gallagher and a rather good Peter Howe). Mr Gallagher, equipped with a cobra-head stick, has perfected a Vincent Price-style evil laugh. Characterless glamour is supplied by Jade Ewen as Princess Jasmine.

On Monday night, when I saw it, the streets outside were packed for a moving tribute to the dead of Orlando. Seldom has a musical felt more detached from reality.
Kim Zolciak Biermann took to Instagram on Wednesday to wish her good friend Leah Remini a happy birthday.

The 38-year-old reality star posted a selfie of herself and 46-year-old Leah - known to be a best friend of Jennifer Lopez's - for her roughly two million followers on Instagram.

'HAPPY BIRTHDAY to one of the sweetest people I know @leahremini we love you sooooo much and hope you are spoiled rotten today #HappyBirthdayLeah #Hottie,' Kim wrote in the caption.

Birthday messsage: Kim Zolciak took to Instagram on Wednesday to wish a happy birthday to Leah Remini

Leah took to Twitter to show her gratitude.

'@Kimzolciak you are adorable! Thank you for the love honey,' Leah later shared with her roughly 400,000 followers on Twitter.

Kim for Leah's birthday reposted a color version of a selfie she first posted on November 27, 2015.

They first went public with their friendship in a September 2015 photo that Kim posted when she was competing on Dancing With The Stars with pro partner Tony Dovolani.

Public acknowledgement: Leah took to Twitter to thank Kim for the birthday message

Reaity star: Kim, shown last month in Atlanta, and Leah met last year at Dancing With The Stars

First meeting: Leah was shown in an Instagram posting that Kim posted in September 2015

The cute snap showed Leah smiling backstage with Kim and her daughter Brielle.

'Sometimes in life you meet someone and instantly connect!!! Thank you @tonydovolani for introducing me to the incredible @leahremini 10 minutes before showtime Monday I still didn't have my shoes on and Leah who I never met, was so incredibly kind to help me! Good peeps are not easy to come by!! #DWTS. #GoodHeart #Blessed #HerVoiceIsTooCute,' Kim wrote in the caption.

Leah's best friend of course is music superstar Jennifer Lopez, 46, who has been a longtime loyal and staunch supporter of the actress.

Best friend: The King Of Queens star is shown in September 2013 with Jennifer at Dancing With The Stars

This pic says it all! Pure #LOVE One of my favorite pics of me and my baby sister...always there for each other! #ALWAYS&FOREVER LYNNIE HAS A BIRTHDAY  #lyndalopez #familia #HAPPYBIRTHDAY A photo posted by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Jun 14, 2016 at 10:50am PDT

J-Lo took to social media on Tuesday to wish her younger sister Lynda, 45, a happy birthday with a throwback image.

Leah shared a throwback video on Instagram in February to celebrate the birthday of Jennifer's twins Max and Emme.

The video showed Jennifer as she headed off to the hospital with ex-husband Marc Anthony to give birth to their twins.

Leah and husband Angelo Pagan captured the cute panic as Marc Anthony got ready to escort the pop star to the delivery room.
They've had roaring success to date in their roles as the new hosts of Sunday mornings on Heart.

And it seems that Caroline Flack and Gethin Jones are getting on like a house on fire, as the former X Factor presenter shared a cheeky Instagram snap of the pair enjoying a night out.

Sharing a photo of herself and Gethin, 38, at a bar, the 34-year-old TV star was clearly feeling in a cheeky mood - casting a mischievous glance at her unaware co-presenter.

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'Look at this pair': It seems that Caroline Flack and Gethin Jones are getting on like a house on fire, as the former X Factor presenter shared a cheeky Instagram snap of the pair enjoying a night out

Obviously enjoying a night out on the town in London, the duo looked to be in fine form as they enjoyed a drink.

And it seems that Caroline was full of affectionate praise for the Welsh star - who previously presented Blue Peter and Dancing With The Stars - as she captioned the sweet snap: 'Look at this pair.'

However, the flirtatious presenter may have been cheekily referring to her ample assets, as the Love Island host flashed more than a hint of cleavage thanks to her low-cut black top.

Teaming the top with a leopard-print cardigan and a pair of ripped denim jeans, the stylish and stunning author managed to straddle the line between chic and casual.

A good night out: Sharing a photo of herself and Gethin, 38, at a bar, the 34-year-old TV star (pictured earlier this month) was clearly feeling in a cheeky mood - casting a mischievous glance at her unaware co-presenter

Gethin rocked a relaxed look, pairing a suede bomber jeacket with a grey tee-shirt and a pair of black jeans.

And the former BBC presenter cut quite the rugged figure, leaving a layer of stubble on his chiseled features.

Although the pair looked cosy, Gethin is believed to be in a dating a mystery woman - who he met in Los Angeles while working on Dancing With The Stars.

Taken? Although the pair looked cosy, Gethin is believed to be in a dating a mystery woman - who he met in Los Angeles while working on Dancing With The Stars

Speaking to The Sun in 2015, the Welsh hunk revealed: 'Shes British but she lives in LA. She doesnt work in the industry. Weve been seeing each other for a few months and its early days.

Jokingly adding: 'Its long-distance right now but maybe its the secret of a successful relationship  not seeing them!'

Caroline - who recently set hearts racing with her sizzling Women's Health cover shoot - is beleived to be single, and has been since the end of her relationship with music manager, Jack Street, in 2014.

Prior to that she was rumoured to have dated One Direction lothario Harry Styles, while she's also said to have enjoyed a relationship with James Corden in 2009.

Gethin meanwhile was in a relationship with Katherine Jenkins from 2008-2011, and was also said to have dated Lucy Mecklenburgh in 2014.
She had knee surgery one week ago.

And Ronda Rousey was indulging in some retail therapy as she was spotted in Santa Monica, California, this Wednesday.

The 29-year-old mixed martial artist looked remarkably relaxed and happy as she checked out some clothing stores.

Retail therapy: Ronda Rousey was spotted shopping in Santa Monica, California, on Wednesday

The Olympic bronze medalist hid any signs of a bandage around her leg, in a low-cut striped long jersey dress.

She added an on-trend satin khaki bomber jacket.

Dark glasses covered her eyes as she emerged into the sunshine, as she went make-up free.

Recovery: The 29-year-old mixed martial artist hid any signs of a bandage around her knee, in a low-cut striped long jersey dress

She's said to be working towards getting fit for a comeback fight in December.

'[Her surgery] was nothing serious, just get in there and scope it, clean it out a little bit,' UFC president Dana White told ESPN's SportsCenter on Thursday.

'She feels great. Her spirits are great. She's been training. If she fights, I'm hoping she fights December. If not, she would probably fight at the New Year's show at beginning of [2017]...You never know. Injuries happen in this sport.'

New togs? She looked remarkably relaxed and happy as she checked out some clothing stores

It would be the SI Swimsuit model's first match since her first-ever career defeat to Holly Holm at UFC 193 last year on November 15.

'I'm still grieving the person that could've won it all, but I have to live up to the fact that I'm not her. That's just who I'd like to be. And instead, I'm what I need to be for myself and everyone else,' Ronda admitted to TIME in April.

'I need to come back and I need to win.'

Out of the octagon, Ronda has plenty to live for - including her $14M earnings from 2015, a three-picture movie deal with Lifetime, and upcoming roles in Tina Fey's Do Nothing B****es and MGM's Road House remake.
She's the David Jones ambassador known for her jaw-dropping bikini body.

But it was Jesinta Campbell's glowing skin that was on display this week as she was unveiled as the face of a major skincare brand.

The 24-year-old beauty showed off her fresh, flawless features in a photo shoot for Olay's Total Effects range on Thursday.

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Beauty: Model and brand ambassador Jesinta Campbell (pictured) displayed her glowing skin as she was announced as the face of skincare brand Olay's Total Effects range on Thursday

It marks a significant milestone for the former Miss Universe Australia, who recently signed with international talent company IMG.

Jesinta said: 'I am so excited to be working with Olay, its such a respected brand that aims to make women feel good about themselves, which I love.

'Like all busy women, a simple, effective skincare regimen is essential for me,' she continued.

'Whether Im putting in long hours on set, working out or travelling, I know I can trust that Olay Total Effects will keep my skin healthy and radiant despite my crazy lifestyle.'

Moving on up: It marks a significant milestone for the former Miss Universe Australia - pictured here at the 2016 TV Week Logie Awards - who recently signed with international talent company IMG

The Daily Telegraph reported this week that Jesinta had parted ways with her agent of six years Sharon Finnigan in a bid for global stardom.

Jesinta is now being looked after Australian publicist Annie Kelly, who boasts Lara Bingle and Shanina Shaik among her models.

Meanwhile, Sharon still manages Jesinta's AFL player fiance, Lance 'Buddy' Franklin, 29, among other high-profile names, such as Karl Stefanovic.

New direction? The Daily Telegraph reported this week that Jesinta had parted ways with her agent of six years Sharon Finnigan in a bid for global stardom. Pictured here at the 2012 Logies

Ambition: Under Sharon's management, Jesinta made the transformation from teenage pageant queen and FHM cover girl to to a respected fashion model and David Jones ambassador

Under her management, Jesinta made the transformation from Gold Coast teenage pageant queen to a David Jones ambassador.

Meanwhile, Olay Australia brand manager Sabrina Ayala Mayorca said: 'We are thrilled to have Jesinta on board as Olays new ambassador.

'She completely embodies the Total Effects woman who leads such a multi-faceted life and wants to look her best at all times.'
She's been prolific in keeping her fans up to date with her pregnancy.

And as Neighbours star Natalie Blair Hoffin grows closer to her due date, relishing in her third trimester with spirituality.

Taking to Instagram on Thursday, the 31-year-old shared a snap of her cradling her large baby bump that had been decorated with intricate Henna.

'Me and my moon belly': Neighbours star Natalie Blair cradles her baby bump decorated with Henna on Thursday

'Mandala baby magick! Thank you to my very sweet & generous friends for making me and my moon belly feel oh so very spesh! Love youse! (sic)' she wrote in the caption.

Her Neighbours co-star Natalie Bassingthwaighte commented on the photo, writing: 'How long my dear? You r glowing'.

She's been keeping active throughout her pregnancy too, sharing numerous snaps while dressed in workout wear.

Baby bump alert: The former Neighbours star has been active in sharing her pregnancy journey with her fans

Expecting: She announced she was expecting her first child in March

Late last month, she performed the splits for a snap, writing in the caption: 'Bump gym selfie....9 weeks and counting! Don't know how much longer my ribs can take it little munchkin moosh!'

Natalie made the announcement she was expecting her first child to social media back in March.

'Looky what we made! Yippeee! Bubba Hoflin coming in July,' she captioned the image, also adding the hashtag '#20weeks' to indicate how far along she was in her pregnancy.

Going to be parents: She's expecting her first child with husband David Hoflin who also starred on Neighbours

Ramsay Street couple: Natalie played Carmella Cammeneti, whose character struck up a romance with David's character Oliver Barnes

Still together: The pair jetted to the US and not only did they tie the knot in 2013, but they have been co-stars once again, appearing in NBC's pirate drama Crossbones

Natalie, who forged a romance with Neighbours co-star David Hoflin in 2008, left the show in 2009 after five years on the soap.

She briefly returned to the series for a few episodes in 2011, but has since established a life for herself in the US with her beau who played Oliver Barnes on the Australian soap.

Not only did the pair tie the knot in 2013, but they have been co-stars once again, appearing in NBC's pirate drama Crossbones.

In January the couple celebrated their three-year wedding anniversary.
He's been indecisive in the past about which hair colour he prefers, going from jet-black to peroxide blonde, with bright red in between.

But it seems 5 Seconds Of Summer's guitarist Michael Clifford, 20, may have been slightly too liberal with the hair dye, as his now white blonde locks appear to be thinning.

Attending the Vegemite Mitey Drum launch in Sydney on Thursday with his fellow band mates Ashton Irwin, Luke Hemmings and Calum Hood, Michael's tresses appeared to be distressed, messy and perhaps patchy in areas.

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Is Michael losing his hair? 5 Seconds of Summer's guitarist Michael Clifford, 20, revealed what appeared to be thinner hair on Thursday after bleaching it blonde

This can often be a result of using too much bleach or hair dye, which would be an understandable feat for the eccentric musician, who changes his hair colour regularly.

Michael hasn't shied away from dramatic colour choices in the past, having previously sported an array of rainbow hairstyles including a jet-black do, sometimes with blue streaks, as well as bright red and a more natural brown.

His messy locks are usually styled in the same way, however his most recent look reveals what appears to be a thinner tuft of hair atop his head.

Patchy: Attending the Vegemite Mitey Drum launch in Sydney on Thursday with his fellow band mates Ashton Irwin, Luke Hemmings and Calum Hood, Michael's tresses appeared to be distressed, messy and patchy in areas

Bold choices: Michael hasn't shied away from dramatic hair colours in the past, having previously sported an array of rainbow hairstyles including a jet-black do, bright red and a more natural brown

And this is not the first bout of hair troubles for the Sydney native.

He famously caught on fire during a concert at the SSE Arena Wembley in London in 2015 while performing with the band.

The guitarist reportedly got too close to a pyrotechnic display on stage, which saw smoke billow around his head before his hair caught fire.

On fire: Michael has had hair problems in the past, most notably catching on fire during a concert in London in 2015

Onstage disaster: The 20-year-old reportedly got too close to a pyrotechnic display on stage, which saw his hair catch fire, before the show was cancelled early so the musician could seek medical attention

Recovery: The Sydney native was quick to reassure fans of his wellbeing, posting this snap to Twitter following the incident

He ceased playing immediately, and rushed off the stage at once.

The show was cancelled early so the musician could seek medical attention, but he was quick to take to social media to assure his fans he would be fine, sharing a selfie of his bandaged face.

It is possible the onstage incident has contributed to his now thinning and patchy locks.

The popular Australian boy band recently celebrated their three-year-anniversary since supporting One Direction on tour in their first ever string of international shows.

They have since played their own sold-out shows in London and around the world.

Lucious locks? It is possible the on-stage incident has contributed to his now thinning and patchy tresses

On the rise: The popular Australian boy band recently celebrated their three-year-anniversary since supporting One Direction on tour in their first ever string of international shows
It's become a trend over the last decade for numerous high-budget titles to be filmed on our shores.

And Mel Gibson's latest work Hacksaw Ridge will join another film shot in Australia, Garth Davis's Lion, for a run at awards season later this year.

The Oscar-winning actor, 60, told audiences at the Sydney Film Festival on Tuesday, his latest directorial piece has tested strongly ahead of the Oscars.

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Success: Mel Gibson, 60, told audiences at the Australian premiere of Blood Father on Tuesday that his latest directorial work Hacksaw Ridge has tested strongly in the US ahead of awards season

'It's a 100 per cent Aussie film,' the Mad Max and Braveheart star shared at the Australian premiere of Blood Father.

'An independent film. We screened it in the States and it went through the roof,' Mel added.

The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and Vince Vaughn, is slated for a November release in the US and Australia, just in time for the Hollywood awards season.

Promising: The war drama, which stars Andrew Garfield and Vince Vaughn, is slated for a November release in the States and Australia, just in time for the Hollywood awards season

Star role: Andrew, 32, plays Desmond Doss, a meticulous objector who becomes a war hero after saving over 75 of his comrades' lives during the Battle of Okinawa

'We screened it in the States and it went through the roof': The controversial star's latest directorial work will join another film shot in Australia, Garth Davis's Lion, for a run at awards season later this year

Andrew, 32, plays the role of Desmond Doss, a meticulous objector who becomes a war hero after saving over 75 of his comrades' lives during the Battle of Okinawa.

The war drama also features performances by local stars Sam Worthington, Hugo Weaving, Teresa Palmer, Richard Roxburgh, Rachel Griffiths and Ryan Corr.

Earlier in the week, Mel was seen being affectionate with girlfriend Rosalind Rose, 25, as they arrived in Sydney.

The couple looked to be in high spirits as they walked through the terminal together.

Mel and Rosalind made their first public appearance at the Golden Globes in January.

Star power: Mel took to the stage at the Sydney Film Festival to deliver a speech

Other news: The actor's arrival in Australia comes after it was shared that he was working on a follow-up to his highly successful film The Passion Of The Christ
The couple were reunited just last month after Luke Hunt was released from jail.

Now, it seems the 30-year-old is back in the dog house with his model fiancee as the pair appeared to have a tense breakfast together in Sydney on Thursday.

The 25-year-old appeared to be getting angry with her man, who walked in silence, as they made their way along Woolloomoolloo Wharf to Sienna Marina Restaurant.

In the dog house? Samantha Harris appeared to be getting angry with fiance Luke Hunt as the couple walked to breakfast in Sydney on Thursday

With furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips, the brunette beauty appeared to be furious with her soon-to-be-husband, who just looked down at the ground.

Sam even used large hand gestures to reiterate her points and even appeared to wave Luke off at one point and walk ahead in anger.

While it's not known what they were fighting about, it's clear the tension lasted the entire outing - with the couple sitting in silence across from each other as they sipped their lattes.

Furious? The 25-year-old appeared to be furious with her soon-to-be-husband, who just looked down at the ground

Trouble in paradise? The couple, who were reunited just last month after the 30-year-old was released from jail

Talk to the hand: Sam even used large hand gestures to reiterate her points and even appeared to wave Luke off at one point and walk ahead in anger

The pair dressed casually for their mid-week outing with the model displaying her slender legs in cropped skinny jeans, paired with espadrilles.

This was worn along with a long line black sleeveless top with a high-neckline and gold buckle detailing.

And the successful stunner also carried a Prada handbag over her shoulder.

Meanwhile, Luke donned a while printed T-Shirt with maroon chino shorts and black sneakers.

Casual couple: The pair dressed casually for their mid-week outing with the model displaying her slender legs in cropped skinny jeans

Designer accessories: The successful stunner also carried a Prada handbag over her shoulder

The former Dancing With The Stars contestant famously stuck by her beau's side after he was sent to jail for two years for the death of a grandfather following a fatal car crash in 2012.

The brunette beauty was there to pick up her beau, along with his mum, as he was released from the facility earlier this month - at the time, Hunt was not wearing any kind of ring on his left hand.

The next day, Samantha flew out to Queensland for a modelling job but a representative for the model told Daily Mail Australia Hunt did not go with her as he is restricted to leave the state under his parole conditions.

Tense breakfast! While it's not known what they were fighting about, it's clear the tension lasted the entire outing

His side of the story? Sam was seen pursing her lips as Luke appeared to be giving his side of the story

Hunt was sentenced to four years in prison, of which he served two years, after his speeding car ran a red light and collided with another, killing 78-year-old Kenneth Lay.

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.

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.

Not impressed: The couple appeared to sit in silence across from each other as they sipped their lattes

Focusing on the food? The brunette beauty looked down at her breakfast, seemingly upset

Ahead of his release, the 25-year-old indigenous Australian told the Daily Telegraph in April: 'Yes, hes soon to be released... 'Im so excited, itll be so nice.'

The couple have been engaged since December 2010, after meeting at a Gold Coast shopping centre when Sam was 17, before they started dating and moved to Sydney.

The model doesn't often speak publicly about the couple's status, but was pictured wearing her engagement ring while her partner was behind bars.
Grease: Live's Vanessa Hudgens and Julianne Hough happily reunited at an Emmy Award-hungry, sold-out Q&A event in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

The Pink Ladies - both 27 - resembled a grown-up Betty & Veronica from the Archie comics as they embraced on the red carpet of the Paramount Studio Lot.

The Utah-born Mormon and the half-Filipina stunner - sporting smoky eyes and nude lipstick - coyly grinned as they got extra cosy for a group shot.

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We go together! Grease: Live's Vanessa Hudgens and Julianne Hough happily reunited at an Emmy Award-hungry, sold-out Q&A event in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Hey girl! The Pink Ladies - both 27 - resembled a grown-up Betty & Veronica from the Archie comics as they embraced on the red carpet of the Paramount Studio Lot

Summer nights: The Utah-born Mormon and the half-Filipina stunner - sporting smoky eyes and nude lipstick - coyly grinned as they got extra cosy for a group shot

Julianne showcased her sensationally fit, 5ft3in figure in a strapless red dress and suede spiked pumps selected by stylist Anita Patrickson.

The Emmy-winning choreographer - who relies on make-up artist Spencer Barnes and hairstylist Riawna Capri - made sure to flash her $350K, seven-carat Lorraine Schwartz diamond engagement ring.

It's been 10 months since Toronto Maple Leafs centre Brooks Laich popped the question to Hough, and it's unclear when they will wed.

Meanwhile, Vanessa flaunted her taut midriff in a navy lace off-the-shoulder peplum dress by Australian designer Rebecca Vallance, and gave her 5ft1in frame a boost with sky-high stilettos.

Thigh's the limit! Julianne showcased her sensationally fit, 5ft3in figure in a strapless red dress and suede spiked pumps selected by stylist Anita Patrickson

Bride-to-be: The Emmy-winning choreographer - who relies on make-up artist Spencer Barnes and hairstylist Riawna Capri - made sure to flash her $350K, seven-carat Lorraine Schwartz diamond engagement ring

'Date night with my love!' It's been 10 months since Toronto Maple Leafs centre Brooks Laich popped the question to Hough, and it's unclear when they will wed

The Freaks of Nature starlet - who relies on stylist Natalie Saidi - also gave her raven bob a boost with curly waist-length hair extensions.

Missing was Hudgens' live-in boyfriend of five years, The Shannara Chronicles' Austin Butler, whom she hasn't been seen with since May 18.

The Gigi thespian will next play insurance claims adjuster Emily Locke in the DC Comics superhero sitcom Powerless, which premieres January 2 on NBC.

Speeding along: Vanessa looked sensational as she posed beside a flash car at the event

Cute cut-outs: Meanwhile, Vanessa flaunted her taut midriff in a navy lace off-the- shoulder peplum dress by Australian designer Rebecca Vallance, and gave her 5ft1in frame a boost with sky-high stilettos

Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee: The Freaks of Nature starlet - who relies on stylist Natalie Saidi - also gave her raven bob a boost with curly waist-length hair extensions

Strutting her stuff: Vanessa proved she knows how to work it as she strutted along

When Fox's Grease: Live! aired on January 31, Vanessa was singled out for her strong performance as Betty Rizzo - mere hours after the death of her father Greg to stage 4 cancer.

An impressive 12.2M viewers tuned in to the three-hour live reimagining of the 1971 fifties musical, which was surprisingly well executed despite rain and technical glitches.

The High School Musical alum and former DWTS judge were joined by production designer David Korins and their co-stars Kether Donohue, Carly Rae Jepsen, Jordan Fisher, and David Del Rio.

'When you and your mans hair is on point': Missing was Hudgens' live-in boyfriend of five years, The Shannara Chronicles' Austin Butler, whom she hasn't been seen with since May 18

Need a quote? The Gigi thespian will next play insurance claims adjuster Emily Locke in the DC Comics superhero sitcom Powerless, which premieres January 2 on NBC

There are worse things I could do: When Fox's Grease: Live! aired on January 31, Vanessa was singled out for her strong performance as Betty Rizzo - mere hours after the death of her father Greg to stage 4 cancer

Like Hudgens, the 30-year-old pop diva - who played Frenchy - also rocked a trendy off-the-shoulder frock with matching white pumps.

And 30-year-old Kether - who played Jan - took the plunge in a vampy black gown featuring sheer sleeves and gold platforms.

The You're the Worst actress - who relied on make-up artist Marina Gravani and hairstylist Paul Norton - revealed that she met John Travolta at a FX event and he called their version 'phenomenal.'

Rydell High: An impressive 12.2M viewers tuned in to the three-hour live reimagining of the 1971 fifties musical, which was surprisingly well executed despite rain and technical glitches

Group shot: The High School Musical alum and the former DWTS judge were joined by production designer David Korins (L) and their co-stars Kether Donohue (2-L), Carly Rae Jepsen (3-L), Jordan Fisher (2-R), and David Del Rio (R)

Two-time Grammy nominee: Like Hudgens, the 30-year-old pop diva - who played Frenchy - also rocked a trendy off-the-shoulder frock with matching white pumps

Barely recognizable! And 30-year-old Kether - who played Jan - took the plunge in a vampy black gown featuring sheer sleeves and gold platforms
She boasts a near-flawless track record when it comes to showcasing her style on the red carpet.

And Cate Blanchett remained true to form in a head-turning monochrome ensemble at the Crystal + Lucy Awards at The Beverly Hilton, in California, on Wednesday.

The Australian actress, 47, looked incredible in a black shirt which featured a button-up design along one shoulder and opened to reveal just the right amount of skin.

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Demure cut: Cate Blanchett remained true to form in a head-turning monochrome ensemble at the Crystal + Lucy Awards at The Beverly Hilton, in California, on Wednesday

Cate neatly tucked the slim-fitting top into her three-quarter length silk skirt which included frills with white pompoms.

She placed a polka-dot blazer over her chic attire and boosted her petite frame with a pair of black pumps.

The blonde ditched glitzy accessories for a pair of simple studs and her wedding band, and styled her shoulder length blonde tresses out and tucked behind her ear.

Neat and fancy: The Benjamin Buttons actress neatly tucked the slim-fitting top into her three-quarter length silk skirt which included frills with white pompoms

Au naturel! Cate opted for a natural palette of make-up to highlight her striking features, and appeared to be in happy and content spirits as she posed for the cameras

Quirky cut: The 47-year-old looked incredible in a black shirt which featured a button up design along one shoulder and opened to reveal just the right amount of skin

Cate opted for a natural palette of make-up to highlight her striking features, and appeared to be in happy and content spirits as she posed for the cameras.

Meanwhile, the mother-of-four will join fellow Australian actor Chris Hemsworth in the next Thor blockbuster.

According to the International Business Times, Cate will play super villainess, Hela, in Thor: Ragnarok.

But the Sydney native wouldn't confirm or deny a part in the third instalment when she spoke on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show earlier this year

Eyes on the ensemble: The blonde ditched glitzy accessories for a pair of simple studs and her wedding, and styled her shoulder blonde tresses out and straigh

When asked by the comedian if she would be joining the star studded line-up - which included the likes of Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins - she joked: 'Yes. Chris Hemsworth is busy and so I've been working out.'

To which Jimmy asked the starlet if she was dodging the question.

She replied: 'They are just substituting one Australian for the other. You know, gender equality. Why can't you have a female Thor!'

'Chris Hemsworth is busy and so I've been working out': Cate Blanchett has been confirmed to join fellow Australian actor Chris Hemsworth in the next Thor blockbuster

Jimmy added: 'Well if you going to be in Thor, you need to be ready to fight.'

The actress, who stunned on the late night talk show in a button-up black cardigan with detailed embroidery, responded: 'Anything with a bit of lycra and a workout regime I can do with.'

Mark Ruffalo, who is confirmed to play Hulk in the fantasy film, continued to add fuel to the Hollywood rumour mill when ET spoke to the actor about Cate at the BAFTA Awards Season Tea Party.

'I saw her at the governors' banquet and heard that maybe she was circling, they were talking to her about the part, so I ran up to her and I was like, 'Please, please, please make this work',' he told etonline.com.

'She's just one of the best and to have her play a baddie is going to be really exciting,' he added.
She stunned at a party in Los Angeles celebrating SVEDKA vodka's new cucumber and lime flavour on Tuesday.

Gwyneth Paltrow had that healthy fresh-faced glow as she stepped out to run some errands just hours ahead of her glam evening.

The 43-year-old actress showed off her eclectic style in a pair of wide-legged white culottes, simple white cotton T-shirt and designer boots while going about her day.

Doing a double take: Gwyneth Paltrow must have turned heads as she emerged for an outing in LA on Tuesday while wearing wide-legged culottes with designer ankle boots

Gwyneth had one hand shoved in a pocket of her baggy trousers that were rolled up above her Laurence Dacade tan leather ankle boots that retail for around $1,295.

The Emma star hadn't a trace of make-up on her face, no foundation, no eye shadow or liner and no lip gloss.

She was bare-faced and proud of it while taking long strides her fashion-forward footwear.

Bare-faced beauty: The 43-year-old actress was free of make-up but bright in white clothing

Perhaps it was no coincidence that those very same boots are featured on Gwyneth's weekly lifestyle blog Goop - and on sale for $907.

Her blonde hair was caught up in a high ponytail that swept to and fro with her movements.

A few hours later, Gwyneth looked nautical in a blue striped baggy jumpsuit while holding a SVEDKA vodka cocktail.

Spice of life: Gwyneth exuded confidence and glamour later on Tuesday as she attended the SVEDKA Vodka Celebrates the Launch of Cucumber Lime at SVEDKA's Country Club in LA

Just chilling: The health enthusiast wasn't above sampling the newest SVEDKA vodka flavour

Her outfit featured a glimpse of skin around the abdomen thanks to a strategic tie-up detail, but Gwyneth's tummy was as firm and flat as a mattress.

That was a definite sign that her grueling workouts with fitness trainer Tracy Anderson are working splendidly.

Her hair by now was teased to perfection and her features were emboldened by thick liner and mascara plus a dab or two of rouge and natural-toned lip gloss.

Gwyneth is fresh from a trip to Barcelona with her children, daughter Apple, 12, and son Moses, 10.

It was an opportunity for the children to visit with their father Chris Martin, who is currently on the European leg of his tour with Coldplay.

In March 2014, the couple announced their decision to 'consciously uncouple' after a decade of marriage, and they reportedly finalised their divorce earlier this year.
For Olivia Palermo, there's no such thing as being too overdressed.

And Wednesday was no exception, as the fashionista stepped out in New York City's Upper East Side for an afternoon stroll in yet another flawless ensemble.

Clad in a pair of trendy leather trousers, the 30-year-old appeared deep in conversation as she chatted the day away on her iPhone during the outing.

Just another day: Wednesday proved no exception to Olivia Palermo's commitment to fashion, as she stepped out in New York City wearing yet another flawless ensemble

All in the details: While the bold choice for the Big Apple's increasingly warm weather served as the outfit's focal point, Palermo added a touch of femininity with a floral chiffon blouse in black and white with sheer, flowy sleeves

While the bold choice for the Big Apple's increasingly warm weather served as the outfit's focal point, Palermo added a touch of femininity with a floral chiffon blouse in black and white with sheer, flowy sleeves.

A turn to the side revealed Palermo's top cascaded all the way down to her ankles as she made the NYC streets her own runway.

The socialite rounded out her look with ornately embroidered loafers, a luxe handbag with funky gems across the strap and a pair of oversized sunglasses.

On the move: A turn to the side revealed Palermo's top cascaded all the way down to her ankles as she made the NYC streets her own runway

She parted her rich blonde locks down the center and wore them pin straight over either shoulder.

Olivia has come a long way since her reality television debut on The City, cementing her status as a successful trendsetter and woman about town.

Just last month, news broke that the wife to Johannes Huebl would be the face for Piaget's upcoming Possession Collection campaign.

Previously, the stunner returned to New York City after attending the premiere of La Traviata opera, an opera directed by Sofia Coppola, in Rome.
She moved from her native Poland when she was just five-years-old.

But Real Housewives Of Miami star Joanna Krupa returned in some style when she wore a sheer dress to a fashion show in the country's capital of Warsaw on Wednesday.

The former professional clotheshorse proved there is still plenty of the old magic left as she posed up a storm in her alluring attire.

Coming a Krupa: Joanna stunned on the red carpet as she returned to her native Poland for a fashion show on Wednesday

Joanna, 37, was looking great for her age in the sheer lace gown, which was covered in decorative leaf print, and a pair of orange stilettos.

The patriotic Polish-American looked like she was having a great time in her homeland, and after her spell on the red carpet she cosied up to a bevy of fellow beauties next to to the catwalk.

The Warsaw-born beauty, who is the host of Poland's Next Top got engaged to her 43-year-old husband Romain Zago in 2010 after several years of dating.

They tied the knot on June 13, 2013, in Aviara, Carlsbad, California, in a ceremony captured by the Real Housewives cameras.

Ring master: The natural beauty looked delightful in a pair of chained hoop earrigs

In pole position: Joanna made sure she had a clear run to get into the bustling venue from the car park

Sweat leaf: She looked in fine form indeed in this tree-themed sheer gown

Sadly this was one of the final hurrahs for the thought-provoking show, which followed the lives of a collection of spoiled narcissists and their outrageous adventures in the sunny climes of Florida.

Bravo took the Real Housewives Of Miami off the air in November 2013 after three seasons because of falling ratings.

But desperate Joanna is still keen in clinging on to a fiefdom in the reality realm.

It was previously reported she is pitching a RHOM spin-off centering around Romain's Mynt Lounge nightclub in Miami Beach.

Green goddess: She was the centre of attention as she sat beside a collection of fine fillies next to the runway
He has released a controversial comedy titled Down Under, which looks at the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots that erupted in December 2005.

But Australian film-maker Abe Forsythe says he avoided shooting the film in the Sydney beachside suburb where the actual race-based brawls rolled out.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia at the movie's Sydney Film Festival premiere on Wednesday, the 34-year-old director admitted he was aware of the sensitive storyline, and therefore wanted production to fly 'under the radar'.

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Cautious: Australian film-maker Abe Forsythe says he avoided shooting film Down Under in the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla, despite the movie being based on the Cronulla Riots

'We kind of avoided Cronulla. We got to Kurnell, that was as close as we got,' he said, referring to the suburb adjacent to Cronulla.

'The film mainly takes place at night so we just thought it was kind of good to keep away from there.

'When we shot this movie, we really flew under the radar. We didn't want people to know we were making it.'

Instead Abe and his cast and crew filmed the flick in Botany, Maroubra and Lakemba in addition to Kurnell, the storyline showing the two racial groups retaliating after the initial riots.

Other locations: The director admitted he was aware of the sensitive storyline, and therefore wanted production to fly 'under the radar', choosing suburbs such as Kurnell and Maroubra instead of Cronulla

Despite avoiding the Cronulla area, controversy wasn't too far away for his team during production.

'We had one incident with one of our Middle Eastern cast members where they were getting out of a car being dropped to set, and a car of people drove past and screamed "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie" when they saw him,' Abe revealed of some racism his cast faced during the filming of the movie.

He added: 'Conversely there was an incident too when we were shooting in a Middle Eastern area, where we encountered some confrontation because they didn't know what we were making as well'.

No doubt there was an element of risk-taking for Abe when it came to directing this film.

Real event: The Cronulla riots in 2005 were the result of boiling community tensions, which were ramped up when a group of surf lifesavers were attacked by a group of young Middle Eastern men on December 4

Serious: The Cronulla riots resulted in the arrest of 16 people on 42 charges against Australians on both sides of the conflict and led, briefly, to an overseas warning against people travelling to Australia

'You kind of follow your gut a lot and every single thing that has ended up in this movie has been thought about and discussed and talked about and no decision has been made lightly at all,' he said.

'Obviously it is a very dark topic,' he went on to confess.

'It's not the kind of thing that should be taken lightly and even though it is a comedy and you can take certain things lightly, there's a lot of things involved with the Cronulla Riots and what's happening in the world generally that I kind of find absurd and I'm using this film to highlight that.'

Also speaking to Daily Mail Australia ahead of its release was lead actor Lincoln Younes.

Down Under: Rahel Romahn (L) and Lincoln Younes (R) play Nick and Hassim, young men of Middle Eastern descent in the flick

Racism still exists: Despite avoiding the Cronulla area, controversy wasn't too far away for Abe's team during production, with a group of people yelling 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie' to one Middle Eastern cast member

The 24-year-old former Home And Away star - who is half Lebanese and half Australian - said he was proud to explore his ethnic background and play a young Lebanese man in the film.

'It was something that I wanted to explore, it meant I could research that side of myself,' said the star, who plays Hassim in the highly-anticipated drama.

'I've been fortunate, I haven't really been affected by racism but I have a lot of friends that have been,' Lincoln added, before explaining the film definitely intends to challenge cultural stereotypes.

'There's a lot of Lebanese (people) in Lebanon if you go there, who look like I do... so it's actually about approaching those stereotypes and realising they are stereotypes,' he said.

Sneak peek: The film also stars the likes of Damon Herriman and Justin Rosniak as the group of Australians opposing the Middle Eastern group

'Not everyone in a culture looks the same way and I suppose it's just about approaching everyone differently.'

In the film, Lincoln is joined by fellow actors Damon Herriman and Rahel Romahn, on two sides of the battle.

'It's such an intelligent way they created the film so I was just very honoured to be a part of it,' he also told Daily Mail Australia, commending director Abe while he was at it.

'I just think the way Abe has approached it in a dark comedic fashion means people will come because it's accessible, but they'll laugh until they cry or until they see the tragedy of it all.'

Harsh truth: Durimg the movie, Lincoln's character tries to reason with his pal, after realising violence may not be the best way to sort out the cultural differences

Arresting sight: Footage of a man, seemingly of Middle Eastern descent, being arrested is also shown

No doubt controversial in nature, Lincoln believes the film will spark plenty of discussion amongst Australians.

'I think it's going to cause a lot of debate and I think people are going to respond to it quite well, or not, and either way it's succeeding,' he said. 'What makes Australia likeable, is how blase we can be about things.

'I think it's also part of the reason why racism can kind of sit under the surface and not be talked about,' the actor added.

Proud: Lincoln Younes, who plays Hassim in the film, says he is proud to explore his cultural heritage through the role

The Cronulla riots in 2005 were the result of boiling community tensions, which were ramped up when a group of surf lifesavers were attacked by a group of young Middle Eastern men on December 4.

Reports that young Muslim Australian men were leering at 'Aussie ' girls in bikinis helped ignite the spark.

On the morning of December 11, about 5000 people gathered on Cronulla Beach to protest against the violent attacks.

The Cronulla riots resulted in the arrest of 16 people on 42 charges against Australians on both sides of the conflict and led, briefly, to an overseas warning against people travelling to Australia.
She's been embracing the Italian lifestyle of late, sharing fashionable snaps from her recent vacation.

And Natasha Oakley looked like a vision in white as she took to the streets of Florence on Thursday.

The Sydney-born model flashed a hint of her enviably toned midriff and bronzed complexion in snaps shared to Instagram.

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Details: Natasha Oakley, 25, flashed a hint of her toned torso in snaps shared to Instagram on Thursday while exploring Florence

'It's an all white kind of summer,' she captioned one stunning shot.

Natasha teamed a high-waisted floaty skirt with a crisp white blouse tied underneath the bust.

Looking the epitome of style, she complemented her outfit of choice with a wide-brim hat, feline shaped sunglasses and embellished clutch.

All white: Tash kept her look fresh in a neutral ensemble

Eye-catching: Exposing a hint of side-boob, Tash's dress perfectly accentuated her voluptuous curves as she celebrated the first anniversary of her relationship with boyfriend Gilles Souteyrand

Her blonde tousled tresses fell loosely around her face, while her make-up was kept simple with a flawless base and nude lip.

Earlier in the week, the blonde beauty stepped out in a head-turning evening gown while celebrating her first anniversary with her boyfriend Gilles Souteyrand.

The couple have enjoyed a three-week jaunt across several cities including Venice and Tuscany but Tash said recently that the city of Florence was the most captivating.

'I spent the afternoon strolling around the streets of the city, which is known as one of the most outstanding economic, cultural, political and artistic centers of Italy,' she wrote via her personal blog.

'Being from Australia which is a fairly young country, it is always very humbling to be surrounded by a place that is more than 2000 years old, rich in history and culture.'

Cheers! Gilles also took to social media and posted a snap as they enjoyed a drink together while on a romantic gondola ride in Venice

Tash and London-based Gilles confirmed their relationship to Daily Mail Australia in November.

'We are very much in love and have been together for six months, the stunning model said at the time.

Their trip started with a stay at the luxurious Grand Hotel Tremezzo, where she was pictured showing off her bikini-clad figure as she lazed by the side of a hot tub with the sweeping views of Lake Como behind her.

Pretty in pink: The Sydney-born model has enjoyed a three-week jaunt across Italy recently

The couple explored Venice and its neighboring island, Burano, before heading inland to Florence.

Having secretly broken up with her former boyfriend, French Big Brother star Martin Medus some time this year, Natasha's new relationship took social media by surprise.

As a model and personal trainer, Gilles has worked with high fashion brands such as Burberry, and graced international magazine covers such as Men's Fitness.

He has also worked in several campaigns for Swiss luxury watchmaker, Patek Philipe, and has even included her in his new modelling portfolio for Select Models.

Running his personal training business out of Core Collective in Kensington, London, the fitness guru focuses his methods on CrossFit, core exercise and calisthenics.

Picture perfect: The bikini blogger looked every inch the tourist while exploring Europe
She is enjoying her new role as a leading lady in a successful series.

And Rashida Jones was definitely the centre of attention on her latest outing.

The 40-year-old actress looked stylish as always as she arrived at the Rachel Comey Los Angeles flagship store opening on Wednesday night.

Lovely lady: Rashida Jones looked stylish as she arrived at the Rachel Comey Los Angeles flagship store opening on Wednesday night

The former star of Parks And Recreation went casual chic for the occassion as she sported an oversized navy coat.

Under the stylish outerwear she sported a shimmering white top over a pair of flowy, oversized light blue trousers and white leather wedges.

Her brunette bob was worn down with fringe hanging down to just over her eyes as she sported natural, complimentary make-up on her face topped off with a swipe of shiny lip.

Casual chic: The 40-year-old actress in an oversized navy coat, over a shimmering white top over a pair of flowy, oversized light blue trousers and white leather wedges

Rashida was not alone at the gala as she was joined by fellow actresses Tracee Ellis Ross and Busy Phillips.

Light blue certainly seemed to be the colour of choice as the two comediennes matched with Rashida as Tracee wore a flowy top and Busy wore a dress in the same colour.

The I Love You Man actress even stopped for a photo with stylist and Fashion Police panelist Brad Goreski.

Dynamic duo: She was joined by actress Busy Phillips at the event

Beautiful in blue: The two talented actresses were joined by Tracee Ellis Ross as they all sported light blue pieces

The 38-year-old actor looked dapper in an elongated navy blue blazer over a grey knit sweater, khaki trousers and black leather wingtips.

The daughter of Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton has been enjoying her recent role of being a leading lady in a comedy series.

Last month she gushed to Variety: 'It's been kind of nice to be the center of comedy.

Fancy seeing you here: The I Love You Man actress even stopped for a photo with stylist and Fashion Police panelist Brad Goreski

'Being in a funny show means I'm never going to be the funny one,' she mused about her previous roles.

The former Parks and Recreation star takes on the role of Angie Tribeca, a leader of a group of detectives in the LAPD.
Charlotte Crosby has cancelled her trip to the Sydney Opera House after hurting her eye.

The Geordie Shore star revealed she fell asleep in her contact lenses during her recent trip Down Under and is worried she scratched her cornea.

The 26-year-old told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday that her eye felt painful on a flight from Melbourne earlier that day.

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Ouch! Ex-Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby (pictured) has cancelled her trip to the Sydney Opera House after hurting her eye due to to falling asleep in her contact lenses, she told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday

The British reality TV personality was spotted arriving at Sydney Airport concealing her bloodshot eye behind sunglasses.

She previously tweeted: 'I'm going to the OPERA! How sophisticated! And not just anywhere, (the) SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE'.

But Charlotte has confirmed she won't be watching the performance of French opera Carmen because she can barely keep her lids open.

Change of plan? Charlotte previously tweeted: 'Tonight I'm going to the OPERA! How sophisticated! And not just anywhere, (the) SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE'

Health concern: Earlier on Thursday, the 26-year-old was spotted arriving at Sydney Airport concealing her bloodshot eye behind sunglasses

The Ex On The Beach star also claimed she was disappointed because she'd picked out 'such a nice dress' for the occasion.

I cant put makeup on this eye because its hurting so much and that would irritate it,' Charlotte said.

'So then what am I meant to do when Ive got to wear my lovely dress and there will be 5,000 people taking photos? Im just going to feel awful all night.

'Its also hurting so I dont think I could sit and watch the opera for that long because Im in pain and its hard to open my eyes.'

Skyline: Charlotte has confirmed she won't be watching the performance of Carmen at the Sydney Opera House because she can barely keep her lids open

Charlotte's eye is also particularly sensitive and claims she had to 'close the curtain in (her) room because the light hurts it.'

She added: 'Its a lot of problems and I dont feel I can get over any of them in time. Im really sad about it because I have such a nice dress for it. I hope it will be better in the morning.

It is possible that Charlotte will cancel other appearances in Sydney due to her eye problem.

Meanwhile, Charlotte announced her departure from MTV's Geordie Shore earlier this month amid clashes with her ex-boyfriend Gary Beadle.
She will soon be testifying against her estranged husband Johnny Depp in court.

But that seemed the furthest thing from Amber Heard's mind as she sped out of her exclusive lodgings in her Range Rover in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

The 30-year-old looked all business as she emerged from the posh Palihouse hotel, which is located in the upmarket West Hollywood area.

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Amber alert: Heard was spotted driving out of her hotel in West Hollywood on Wednesday

The pretty Rum Diaries actress was dressed in black, and hid her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses ass he headed to her next location.

Given she is due to appear in court for a restraining order hearing later this week, she may have been heading out to a meeting about the forthcoming appearance.

Amber and two supporters are prepared to testify about alleged domestic violence by the Donnie Brasco star on Friday during a court hearing in Los Angeles.

Her longtime friend iO Tillett Wright and her neighbour Raquel Rose Pennington are willing to provide evidence on her behalf.

However Johnny's legal team is trying to stop them from taking the stand at the hearing, as they claim her lawyers did not follow procedural protocol by failing to provide a witness list beforehand.

A woman with drive: She seemed in a hurry as she left the posh Palihouse hotel

Big week: She will be in court for a restraining order hearing in Los Angeles on Friday

In another twist, his lawyers also want Amber to give them all her communications from December 15 to the present, including emails, writing, documents and text messages

Heard obtained a temporary domestic violence restraining order against Depp late last month and the hearing on Friday will determine if it should be extended.

She has accused the Edward Scissorhands favourite of abusing her on May 22 by throwing a mobile phone at her face.

The actress was granted the restraining order after providing the court with this information and photographs of her alleged injury.

Depp was in Portugal at the time and did not respond to the allegations made by Heard, though his lawyer Laura Wasser did say in court that day that Heard filed these court papers: 'Amber is attempting to secure a premature financial resolution by alleging abuse.

Claims: She has alleged she was injured when her estranged husband threw a phone at her

Lying low: Johnny has been at his private island in the Bahamas following the conclusion of an overseas tour with his band Hollywood Vampires

Request withdrawn: Heard filed paperwork on Monday withdrawing her request for temporary spousal support

Wasser went on to say: 'Her current application for a temporary restraining order along with her financial requests appears to be in response to the negative media attention she received earlier this week after filing for divorce.'

The judge that day ruled that Heard would not be getting spousal support from Depp and would have to pay for her own legal team during the divorce proceedings.

Heard this week filed paperwork dropping her request for $50,000 a month in temporary spousal support.

Johnny has been at his private island in the Bahamas following the conclusion of an overseas tour with his band Hollywood Vampires and is not expected to attend the hearing.

Happier times: Johnny and Amber attending a benefit gala together in New York back in 2014
He is best known for his portrayal of tattooed killer Andrew 'Benji' Veniamin in the acclaimed first season of Underbelly.

And now Damian Walshe-Howling is making his mark on the international film festival circuit, including the Sydney Film Festival, with his award-winning short film MESSiAH.

Speaking to the Daily Mail Australia ahead of the film's screening at the New South Wales festival on Tuesday evening, Damian said he was filled with a combination of 'excitement' and 'nervousness'.

Switching over: Underbelly actor Damian Walshe-Howling has made his film-making mark at the Sydney Film Festival with short film MESSiAH

'I just feel if you put your heart and soul into something and collaborate with a very incredible group of people of course you are going to be nervous with how it's received,' the 45-year-old said.

'But I'm more excited than nervous.'

Damian was announced as one of four winners of the Lexus Short Films international competition at the Napa Valley Film Festival in California in November 2015.

Filled with emotion: Damian said he was filled with a combination of 'excitement' and 'nervousness' ahead of the screening on Tuesday evening in Sydney

The competition attracted more than 4000 entries from more than 100 countries, and boasted a lucrative prize - with winners to direct their short film to be produced by the Weinstein Company then tour international film festivals to promote it.

Damian said he found out about the competition through a friend and only had days to turn his idea into reality.

'I think funny enough the pressure of the time made it relaxed. I thought 'oh well',' he said.

'I'd just threw an idea in and waited to see what happened. Because of that, the creativity flowed in that moment and I was lucky enough that they liked the idea.

'I won the award through that and I spent the next two months writing the script and breaking it down until we got to a place that we wanted to shoot it.'

Famed actor: The Melbourne native has also starred in a number of popular TV series including Blue Heelers, Bikie Wars: Brothers in Arms, Neighbours and Janet King, as well as the films The Reef and Mystery Road

The film follows two travellers, an Irishman and his Parisian girlfriend, who get more than they bargain for when they meet a mischievous stranger in the Australian outback.

'It looks at the quirky ideas outside ourselves to find the meaning of life,' he said.

'The word Messiah we might think of a prophet or messiah or whatever. I guess we chase things that are material, spiritual or emotional to find to bolster to our thinking in life.

'But, it's really looking at where does the meaning come from.'

The famed Aussie actor has also also written and directed two short films including The Bloody Sweet Hit (2007) and Suspended (2013) before moving into shooting commercials.

His breakthrough role came in the first season of Underbelly, co-starring with Frankie J. Holden as Garry Butterworth and Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano.

Gleaming credentials: The famed Aussie actor has also also written and directed two short films including The Bloody Sweet Hit (2007) and Suspended (2013) before moving into shooting commercials

To add to his gleaming credentials, the Melbourne native has also starred in a number of popular TV series including Blue Heelers, Bikie Wars: Brothers in Arms, Neighbours and Janet King, as well as the films The Reef, Mystery Road and Around The Block.

His breakthrough role came in the first season of Underbelly, co-starring with Frankie J. Holden as Garry Butterworth and Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano.

Award winner actor and writer and director: Damian was announced as one of four winners of the Lexus Short Films international competition at the Napa Valley Film Festival in California in November 2015

Big appeal: The competition attracted more than 4000 entries from more than 100 countries, and boasted a lucrative prize

Damian is now following in the footsteps of Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster who made the daring decision to pursue a career behind the lens.

Although these transitional actors have influenced and inspired Damian, he admits it was his mother who has helped him the most to realise his dreams.

'My mother is an actress and a director and I grew up around the theatre scene in Melbourne. My mother definitely inspires me a lot as an actor,' he said.

'My mum was always doing theatre and directing theatre and devising pieces.

'I guess as a child it was a natural inclination to either be interested or not. I was and I was fascinated with what they were doing.'
She threw birthday girl North a party fit for a princess to celebrate turning three.

But now that her first-born is getting older, doting mum Kim Kardashian knows that her over the top displays of affection have become a little 'annoying' at times.

The 35-year-old smothered her big girl with love in a new Instagram post, remaining defiant that nothing is going to change where kisses are concerned.

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Making her dreams come true: Kim Kardashian posted a sweet picture of 'Princess North' on her birthday as she made her three-year-old's dreams come true at Anaheim, California amusement park Disneyland

Kim is seen planting smooches on Kanye West's daughter as the three-year-old wriggles out of grasp while the Kardashian wrote: 'I will never stop kissing you and loving you and annoying you'

The mum-of-two certainly seemed to have spoiled her little beauty on her birthday, posting a second picture of North in her pink princess dress, surrounded by magical Bambi characters.

Imagining North's summary of the day, she captioned it: 'Thank you @disneyland for making all of my princess dreams come true today!'

Kisses: Kim insisted that she would never stop kissing her big girl in a new video

Adorable: She explained that she knew she was being annoying, yet she would never stop

Mummy love: The 35-year-old was shown planting kisses on her daughter as the little one wriggled around

All the family gathered at the Anaheim, California amusement park to help North celebrate her birthday on Wednesday, including Kim's sister Kourtney with Scott Disick and their eldest children Mason and Penelope.

With the other Kardashian kids in attendance, Kim made sure that North knew the big day was all about her - even though she was in denial that North was growing up.

In an another affectionate video, Kim kisses her daughter saying: 'She promised me she wouldn't get any bigger.

'I can't believe my baby girl is 3 years old today!!!! Northie I love you so much I can't even explain it! Happy Birthday to my favorite mermaid!!!'

'Stay little forever': Earlier in the day, Kim posted a sweet video in which she insisted that North get no older

The apple of her eye: The doting mom had her little girl snuggled in her arms

Aww: The video begins with Kim instructing her daughter not to grow up

'So you're not going to get any bigger': The reality star says after giving her daughter a kiss on the cheek

Summer style: North wears a playful bathing suit while her mother has her hair in braids and looks nearly makeup free

While at Disneyland, Kim and her sister Kourtney got in an adrenaline rush by riding the Tower Of Tower.

Kourtney took to Snapchat to share her and Kim's screaming reaction as they plummeted down the ride.

Kim and Kanye West welcomed North in 2013 before tying the knot nearly a year later in Italy.

'My little angel!' Grandma Kris also had some sweet words for the tot on Wednesday

Flying high: Kim took North to ride upon Dumbo The Flying Elephant ride at Disneyland in Anaheim on Wednesday

What's next: Mother and daughter seemed amazed by all the fun rides and attractions Disneyland had to offer

Daddy's here: Kanye West cracked a smile as he greeted Kim and North after the ride

The couple are also parents to newborn son Saint.

Kim recently told fans that she and the The Life Of Pablo hit-maker are 'a perfect match' astrologically.

In a post on her subscription based website kimkardashianwest.com, she wrote: 'Libra/Gemini sex gets a 5-star rating because we're so in tune with each other.'

Kim also shared that both signs 'love travel, surprises and communication' and added that she and Kanye have 'had an amazing connection right from the start'.

Aww: Doting aunt Kourtney Kardashian turned her attention to North

Dressed the part! Kourtney sported a Mickey Mouse top and Minnie Mouse ears

Aww: The birthday girl had a tiny beaded pink purse on her arm

So in love: Kim and Kanye lovingly nuzzled up together

Family: The mother-of-two snapped herself with North as she sported braids on Thursday

Thanks a bunch! The reality star also snapped a sweet birthday note North had received

The open road! Kim shared with her fans her workout routine on Snapchat on Thursday
She recently enjoyed a day at her daughter Anja's end-of-year recital with her fiance Jamie Mazur.

But Alessanda Ambrosio proved she still had time to think about her daywear as she put on a fashionable display while heading out in sunny Santa Monica on Wednesday.

The 35-year-old Victoria's Secret Angel looked sensational as she rocked the boho chic look, while treating herself to an ice cream.

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Treating herself: Alessanda Ambrosio, 35, wore a stunning boho chic outfit as she enjoyed an ice cream in Santa Monica on Wednesday

Showing off her lithe supermodel physique, the Brazilian beauty wore a stunning black crop top with bow-tie straps and a lace hemline which flaunted a slither of her impressively toned upper abs.

Cinching her waist in with a thick brown belt, she went on to skim her sensational legs in a matching black Philosophy skirt, which boasted sheer panel lace detailing.

Alessandra teamed the attire with brown chunky Robert Clergerie heels which accentuated her 5 ft 10 in height, while balancing a matching handbag on her right shoulder.

Adding to the authenticity of the outfit, she wore a pair of tinted aviator shades over her subtle make-up look, while also sporting a Fallon lace choker and longer gold chain.

Fashionista: The beauty wore a stunning black crop top with a lace hemline which flaunted a slither of her toned upper abs, which she teamed with a black Philosophy skirt, which boasted sheer panel lace detailing

The catwalk queen looked as if she had worked up quite a sweet tooth as she lent forward to work her way through her ice-cream, which featured a double scoop of mint and vanilla.

Luckily enough, she managed to finish it off before it melted down on to her silver and gold bangles.

Once she was done with her snack, she took in her sun-kissed surroundings and at one point kept herself updated by checking her phone.

The stunner proves she's the ultimate career mum, which was evident as she made time for her seven year-old daughter's milestone, along with a rare sighting of her beau.

Edging it up: She wore a pair of tinted aviator shades over her subtle make-up look, while also sporting a Fallon lace choker and longer gold chain

The couple have been together for eleven years, having begun dating in 2005.

The duo announced their engagement on May 12, 2008, when Alessandra was six months pregnant with daughter Anja Louise.

Following the August arrival of their first born, Alesssandra gave birth to their second child, son Noah Phoenix Ambrosio Mazur, nearly four years later on May 7, 2012.

Long term: Alessandra is also a hands-on mum with her two daughters, who she shared with her fiance of eight years Jamie Mazur (Pictured in May leaving Cafe Habana in Malibu)

Alessandra also revealed on Monday via Instagram her newest magazine spread which flaunted her taut tummy and perfect figure for Cosmopolitan Mexico's June issue.

Modelling duties aside, it's an exciting time for Alessandra and her fledgling film career.

The actress plays Will Arnett's girlfriend in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.

The film premiered earlier this month and also stars Megan Fox and Laura Linney.

Cover-girl! Alessandra has also graced the cover of Cosmopolitan Mexico's June issue, where she displays her taut abs a skimpy bikini




She shot down suggestions that she would ever make a Geordie Shore comeback.

And not only does Charlotte Crosby intend to leave the show behind forever, she hopes fans will switch off now that her final episode has screened on Tuesday night.

People will still watch it without me, they wont just stop  but I hope they do. I hope everyone stops watching it, she told Daily Mail Australia.

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Switch off: Not only does Charlotte Crosby intend to leave the show behind forever, she hopes fans will switch off now that her final episode has screened on Wednesday night

Its a definite no. Its over now, Ive left, I cant just go back willy-nilly.

However, it seems things might have been different if her and on-again off-again beau Gary Gaz Beadle had worked out.

When asked if she would have stayed on the show if she and Gaz were together and doing well as a couple, the 26-year-old gave an enthusiastic yes.

Though Charlotte ruled out a return to Geordie Shore, even for special occasions, she said she would appear if there was a tenth anniversary episode.

Could have been different: When asked if she would have stayed on the show if she and Gaz were together and doing well as a couple, the 26-year-old gave an enthusiastic yes

Id go back for that but is it even going to be still on by then? she said.

Dont get me wrong I love Geordie Shore and I always will. Its really unfortunate and sad that it had to come to this but sometimes in life you get signs and messages from fate telling you that its best to move on.

I wanted to move on, I wanted to do other things  I think Ive gotten everything I possibly could out of Geordie Shore, Ive taken it as far as I could go.

Charlotte's comments come as Gaz has been linked to a fresh drugs scandal after allegedly slipping out of the Ex On The Beach set in Thailand last month to attend a beach rave.

In a string of Twitter direct messages obtained on Thursday by the Daily Star, the MTV star appeared to admit taking drugs to an anonymous friend.

He allegedly sent a photo of the party to his pal declaring he's 'at a f***ing beach rave', ordering his mate to 'say nothing though' before admitting he's 'off my tits'.

When asked whether he's on ecstasy pills or just boozing, Gaz replied 'gear md'.

Anniversary comeback: Though Charlotte ruled out a return, even for special occasions, she said she would appear if there was a tenth anniversary episode

Earlier this month, Charlotte launched into an angry tirade, which was targeted at her former flame Gary, on Twitter as she dubbed the 28-year-old a 'liar and a cheat' after he slammed her for speaking publicly about her pregnancy.

'Sadly because a certain some1 can't admit to being in the wrong and have to write a short story full of excuses. I have made the very hard decision to Leave the show, it's something I have went back and forth with for a while now (sic),' she began her lengthy tirade.

'But I am willing to sacrifice that part of my career in order to be well away from. A liar and a cheat, I'm actually excited to watch the ex on the beach...to see the numerous girls emerge from the water who you slept with behind lillies back. You no the girl you all thought he wasn't cheating on?!'

On and off: Charlotte and Gary had been on and off since meeting on their show Geordie Shore in 2011

'Am also really excited to see the show you went off to film before that with your grandad, the one you spoke to me every day on, and f**ked some1 else on! While I was sat waiting for you! You may have fooled every else with your victim act!'

The 2013 Celebrity Big Brother winner continued: 'I am hugely sad and it kills me to write this, I will miss Geordie shore with all of my heart, it was my life and I [love] you all so much'.

But Gary wasn't about to go down without a fight as the Ex on the Beach star hit back at Charlotte's comments almost instantly on the social network.

I wanted to move on, I wanted to do other things': Charlotte thinks she has gotten everything she could out of Geordie Shore and taken it as far as she could

Their latest heated exchange comes after Gaz broke his silence on Charlotte's ectopic pregnancy revelation, which was made public during an emotional interview with Heat magazine.

Gaz had kept quiet on Twitter as the news broke on the day, but told his Twitter followers 24 hours later that he had to say something to clear his name.

Gaz posted a link a his Daily Star column on Twitter, telling his followers: 'I was quiet all day yesterday then last night decided to write this... Felt like I needed to say something... Gaz X.'

In a lengthy and passionate post, the star detailed months of his on/off relationship with Charlotte, insisting he was keen to get serious with his co-star but she was the one who was holding back.

He then revealed that Charlotte jeopardised any hope of a monogamous relationship by kissing their Geordie Shore co-star Marty McKenna during a night out.

The pair did make up, though, and after being reunited following Charlotte's trip to Australia, Gaz says they enjoyed an 'amazing' time together.

But despite being keen to again get serious with Charlotte, Gaz reveals it was her who was reluctant, even telling press that they weren't together and she couldn't trust the party-loving star.

'You had your say I had mine.... Just leave it.... Or this will never end... Don't get angry if you don't like what I had to say my victim act are you f**king kidding you did a huge article on something THAT SHOULD OF NEVER BEEN MADE PUBLIC....,' he raged.

She's a winner! The bubbly brunette won Celebrity Big Brother in 2013 after proving poplar with viewers

'Only reason you did it was to turn people against me and for once I have spoken up and u can't handle it... Lashing out on Twitter likemy normally do... I am done.

'Both need to move on... and if you are leaving Geordie Shore that is your own choice don't put it on me.....'

Gaz writes that he was then contracted to shoot Ex On The Beach in Thailand with the couple telling each other they would see what happened when he returned to the UK.

'The next day, I was around the pool and got told I needed to take an emergency phone call. It was MTV saying that Charlotte had been rushed to hospital,' Gaz writes.

'Straight away, I was like, 'I need to go home immediately.' I was told I could speak to Charlotte, which calmed me down.'

Gaz insisted he spoke to Charlotte every day and was keen to be updated about her condition, but she soon discovered he had slept with a fellow EOTB contestant on day one of the show, before he found out about the pregnancy leading to a huge argument.
He is a renowned food critic and regularly eats at some of the best restaurants in the world.

So MasterChef Australia judge Matt Preston paid Trent Harvey a real compliment when he said his seared beef fillet with smoked beurre was one of the best things he has eaten all year.

After tasting the dish - which took its inspiration from autumn leaves - Matt told him: 'This plate of food is so beyond your years, Trent.

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Impressed: MasterChef Australia judge Matt Preston paid Trent Harvey a real compliment when he said his seared beef fillet with smoked beurre was one of the best things he has eaten all year

'In terms of where this sits, not just in the competition, but in terms of everything I've eaten this year - and I've eaten in some amazing restaurants this year - this is one of the best 10 things I've eaten for absolutely sure. It's spectacular.'

Gary Mehigan then added: 'You've just nailed it because the intensity of that red wine butter sauce is spot-on.

'That needs to become one of your signature dishes. That is spectacular.'

Emotional: Trent was seen with tears in his eyes after he was praised by all the judges

Signature dish: The seared beef fillet with smoked beurre rouge sauce was a favourite among the judges

The judges opted to save Trent in his dual with Chloe Bowles - meaning she had to go head-to-head with Nicolette Stathopoulos in the final elimination round on the Channel 10 show.

Matt told the pair: 'Trent, Chloe, two of the best dishes we've seen in MasterChef history.

'Let's not beat about the bush here - they were both spectacular. And I think you saw from our inability to hold any form of poker face there that we loved them both.

'By the barest of margins, though, Trent, we preferred your dish.'

Meltdown: Nicolette Stathopoulos broke down in tears after she struggled to take her chocolate mousse out of the moulds

Kind: Judge George Calombaris comforted Nicolette after she burst into tears during the show

Nicolette, 19, was eventually sent home after her smoked white chocolate mousse lost out to Chloe's cinnamon butter cake with maple meringue.

The student had earlier had a meltdown during the challenge after she struggled to take her chocolate mousse out of the moulds.

'I use a spoon to try and lift some of it out. I'm trying to just get this mousse out of the mould and it's not holding its shape,' she said.

'There's just all these different shapes going on. They're more like blobs rather than logs. It's just devastating.'

Fighting back: Nicolette took George's advice on board and presented her finished dessert to the judges

Emotional: Wiping away her tears, she said: 'This whole competition means the world to me. There's nothing else that I want more than to stay here a little bit longer and just pursue my dreams'

Delicious: The 19-year-old presented grilled peaches dessert with marshmallow and smoked white chocolate mousse

Wiping away tears, she said: 'There's nothing else that I want more than to stay here a little bit longer and just pursue my dreams.'

After she was sent home, Nicolette said she was aiming to be the 'best pastry chefs Australia has ever seen'.

'The entire MasterChef journey is over, but I'm never going to forget it,' she said. 'I think what I can take from this experience is that I should always believe in myself.

'Next for me will just be putting my head down and getting as much training as I possibly can so that I can become one of the best pastry chefs Australia has ever seen.'
She said two weeks ago she had made what seems like the worst decision of my life in leaving Geordie Shore.

But it seems Charlotte Crosby, in the wake of her final ever episode screening on Tuesday night, is now feeling much better about quitting.

I definitely do not think that now, it's probably the best decision Ive made in my life, she told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday.

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No regrets: Charlotte Crosby, in the wake of her final ever episode screening on Wednesday night, now says leaving Geordie Shore was 'probably the best decision Ive made in my life'.

Charlotte had a few days after quitting tweeted: 'When you realise you made what seems like the worst decision of your life.....I've lost my family....my life. Cast and CREW.'

The 26-year-old continued: 'This is gunna be a VERY VERY hard couple of months.'

Not only does she no longer regret walking away from the show she had built her career on since it premiered in 2011, Charlotte said it was liberating to not have cameras watch her every move.

I feel amazing, I never thought it would feel this good. I feel free. I feel like a grown up not having my mobile phone taken off me, not being able to walk into a shop, she said.

'Very hard couple of months': Charlotte had a few days after quitting tweeted: 'When you realise you made what seems like the worst decision of your life.....I've lost my family....my life. Cast and CREW'

I feel liberated. I have my life back.

I wanted to move on, I wanted to do other things  I think Ive gotten everything I possibly could out of Geordie Shore, Ive taken it as far as I could go,' she said.

The 2013 Celebrity Big Brother UK winner said while she was happy to leave the show, there were no hard feelings  despite saying she hoped fans would stop watching it now she was gone.

Happy to leave: Not only does she no longer regret walking away from the show she had built her career on since it premiered in 2011, Charlotte said it was liberating to not have cameras watch her every move

Its weird to think that was my last episode. Dont get me wrong I love Geordie Shore and I always will, she said.

Its really unfortunate and sad that it had to come to this but sometimes in life you get signs and messages from fate telling you that its best to move on.

Despite the dramatic way her time on Geordie Shore ended and her tumultuous relationship with Gaz, she had no regrets about it, and if she had to do it all over again it would be the same.

You only regret something that brings you bad things in life and nothing Ive done on Geordie Shore has affected my life in a negative way in the slightest,' she said.

The Ex On The Beach star was overwhelmed by the support her fans had shown her on social media after the episode aired.

Wouldn't change a thing: Despite the dramatic way her time on Geordie Shore ended she had no regrets about it, and if she had to do it all over again it would be the same. Pictured with the rest of the gang

I checked my Twitter when I woke up and everyone was very sad that it was my last episode, she said.

There were a lot of crying emoji faces, some people were saying they werent going to watch it anymore, or saying I cant believe its the last time Im going to see you in the show.

Charlotte said he hadnt yet seen the episode, but was not afraid she would be portrayed wrongly because editing of the show is always quite true to what happens.

People will say it was edited in a bad way but I dont feel that because you have to be acting that way for it to be shown, so I never have a problem with that. Its always plain and simple what happens,' she said.

'There were a lot of crying emoji faces': The Ex On The Beach star was overwhelmed by the support her fans had shown her on social media after the episode aired

Charlotte also ruled out returning to Geordie Shore, except if there was a tenth anniversary special, and hoped people would stop watching.

People will still watch it without me, they wont just stop  but I hope they do. I hope everyone stops watching it, she said.

Its a definite no. Its over now, Ive left, I cant just go back willy nilly.

The reality star announced she was quitting the show earlier this month amid clashes with her ex-boyfriend Gary Beadle.
Having escaped the chilly winter climes for the European summer, Natasha Oakley has been keeping fans up-to-date with her latest travels.

Taking to her social media sites on Thursday, the 25-year-old shared yet another envy-inducing picture of herself as she headed to one of Romes most famous landmarks, the Trevi Fountain.

The Australian blogger showed off her fabulous style credentials, sporting a tight pair of grey Theory trousers and an off-white Revolve blouse which drew heaps of attention to her toned midriff.

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When in Rome! Natasha Oakley shared yet another envy-inducing picture of herself as she headed to one of Romes most famous landmarks, the Trevi Fountain, on Thursday

She complemented her perfect summer ensemble with a Michael Kors straw handbag, heeled peep-tow boots and a variety of delicate silver bracelets.

Her blonde mid-length tresses were left loose in tousled waves, adding a further touch of Italian glamour to her lovely getup.

Just threw my coin and made my wish, she simply captioned the Instagram snap.

She has so far enjoyed a three-week jaunt across several cities including Venice and Tuscany but Tash said recently that the city of Florence was the most captivating.

City chic: The Australian blogger showed off her fabulous style credentials, sporting a tight pair of grey Theory trousers and an off-white Revolve blouse which drew heaps of attention to her toned midriff

Jetsetter: The 25-year-old has so far enjoyed a long jaunt across several cities including Venice and Tuscany

'I spent the afternoon strolling around the streets of the city, which is known as one of the most outstanding economic, cultural, political and artistic centers of Italy,' she wrote in her personal blog.

'Being from Australia which is a fairly young country, it is always very humbling to be surrounded by a place that is more than 2000 years old, rich in history and culture.'

The stunning blonde and her best friend Devin Brugman rose to stardom in 2012 after launching their popular blog A Bikini A Day, and they now have a combined 2.9million Instagram followers.

All white: Earlier on in the day, Natasha kept her look fresh in a neutral ensemble

Leggy lady: On Wednesday, she flashed her toned limbs as she twirled in a high-slit gown, which featured a plunging neckline and a flared hem

Self-made model Natasha recently claimed that she maintains her fabulous figure by eating healthily and working out rather than using waist-trainers.

Speaking to Women's Health, she slammed the devices - which are often worn by celebrities such as Kim Kardashian - by calling them 'extremely unhealthy'.

'I would never in a million years endorse something like waist-trainers, she confessed. It's extremely unhealthy. These women [the Kardashians] have so many young girls following them - they are supposed to be role models.'
She never strays far from controversy.

And Farrah Abraham was up to her old tricks once again as she got down to filming her latest erotic movie with a host of scantily-clad co-stars in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

The 25-year-old Teen Mom star stripped down to a barely-there bikini for the shoot in which she contorted herself into a host of positions to make the most of her assets.

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Sexy stuff: Farrah Abraham was up to her old tricks once again as she got down to filming her latest erotic movie with a host of scantily-clad co-stars in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Farrah, who soared to fame on 16 And Pregnant in 2009, showed off her phenomenal figure in her micro-bikini which looked as though it was designed for anything but swimming.

Sizzling in the saucy swimwear, the Iowa-born beauty she jutted out her perky derriere alongside her endless legs - a stunning look for any woman in front of the camera.

It is understandable why Farrah is so keen to show off her body given the extensive work she has undergone in her quest for the perfect physique.

The brunette stunner has admitted to multiple procedures including two breast augmentations, fillers in her cheeks and lips, a chin implant and rhinoplasty.

Close up: The 25-year-old Teen Mom star stripped down to a barely-there bikini for the shoot in which she contorted herself into a host of positions to make the most of her assets

Her ombre tresses were styled into flawless waves while her make-up was flawlessly applied with heavy detailing all over.

Clutching a champagne bottle, Farrah was joined by stunning model and entrepreneur Toochi Kash, who sported a similar ensemble to her co-star.

Farrah's time in the spotlight has involved a host of shock twists and turns ever since she first hit MTV screens on 16 And Pregnant.

After her appearance she went on to spin-off show Teen Mom and later went on to launch her Mom And Me pasta sauce range, release a memoir and launch a foray into the music industry.

Cheeky! Farrah, who soared to fame on 16 And Pregnant in 2009, showed off her phenomenal figure in her micro-bikini which looked as though it was designed for anything but swimming

Following her relatively wholesome ventures, in 2013 it was suggested he earned $1.5 million for selling her sex tape Farrah Superstar: Backdoor Teen Mom.

Her co-star in the tape James Deen blasted Farrah's claims that the film was leaked as he admitted she was paid to make the movie by the porn producers.

Three years later, the pretty star is evidently more seasoned in the industry as she was seen shooting her newest lesbian erotica video.
He was engaged to Geordie Shore's Vicky Pattison for a year before calling it quits on their acrimonious relationship.

And while Ricci Guarnaccio, 29, has remained single since the split, there's one place he won't turn in a bid to find love- Tinder.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia at the Australian opening for Carmen, Ricci revealed that: 'I would never go on Tinder. Not in a million years', saying he already receives a 'crazy' amount of sexually explicit messages from fans on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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Swiping left for Tinder! Geordie Shore's Ricci Guarnaccio, 29, revealed to Daily Mail Australia this week that he would never look for love on Tinder

On the topic of his love life, the handsome reality star said: 'I've been single since [Geordie Shore] but I'm at that age where I'm not rushing to get into a relationship just for the sake of being in a relationship.

'I think I'm past that stage, but if the right person comes along, you never know', he conceded.

He also spoke about Gary 'Gaz' Beadle and Charlotte Crosby's recent break-up, describing their romance as being 'mad' and 'absolutely crazy'.

'I'm not rushing to get into a relationship just for the sake of being in a relationship': He also spoke about mature attitude to dating

'I think they both know that its finally come to an end', he said.

Charlotte recently made headlines when she revealed she had suffered an ectopic pregnancy which caused her to lose the baby she shared with Gaz.

She has since spoken of her plans to move Down Under.

Rocky relationship: He also spoke about Gary 'Gaz' Beadle and Charlotte Crosby's recent break-up, describing their romance as being 'mad' and 'absolutely crazy'

Controversial: Charlotte recently made headlines when she revealed she had suffered an ectopic pregnancy which caused her to lose the baby she shared with Gaz

Meanwhile, Ricci revealed that he had caught up with Charlotte earlier this month, and confirmed that 'she's coping' with the painful break-up.

The Durham-born reality star, who has been living Down Under since last November, has been busy filming his newest reality show Australia's Ultimate Worldie, alongside former Pussycat Doll Melody Thornton.

During the MTV series, Ricci and Melody will visit 20 cities on a mission to find a male or female to crown as Australias Ultimate Worldie.

The local production, which is set to film throughout June, will premiere on MTV in Australia mid-2016.

A shoulder to cry on: Meanwhile, Ricci revealed that he had caught up with Charlotte earlier this month, and confirmed that 'she's coping' with the painful break-up
She's the daughter of Formula One billionaire Bernie Ecclestone.

But Tamara Ecclestone, 31, proved she wouldn't be resting on her laurels and got hard at work as she visited her new blow-dry bar Show in Wimbledon Village, ahead of its opening this Saturday.

Stepping out with her adorable two-year-old daughter Sophia, the socialite looked summer ready in a patterned midi-length dress and pastel green blazer.

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Mini business partner! Tamara Ecclestone, 31, visited her new blowdry bar Show in Wimbledon Village with her two-year-old daughter Sophia, ahead of its opening this Saturday

The long flowing garment skimmed her fabulous figure before flaring out into a flamenco style finish.

Giving way to a peek of her tanned legs, she strolled forth in a pair of white trainers which featured gold detailing.

Always one to look glamorous, she sported sultry smoked-out eyes while her cheeks were contoured to perfection- which was further accentuated by half of her brunette locks being pulled up in to a chic bun.

Sophia seemed to have taken style inspiration from her mother and wore a matching pink top and skirt set.

Fashionista: The socialite looked summer ready in a patterned midi-length dress and pastel green blazer

Comfortable glamour: Giving way to a peek of her toned legs, she strolled forth in a pair of white trainers which featured gold detailing

Catch me if you can! Her adorable daughter proved to be a handful as she ran off, while Tamara chased her

Her comfortable white shoes allowed her to take in her surroundings, while Tamara made sure not to keep her eyes off her daughter.

Even when she ran after the little one, the former Playboy cover girl didn't seem to break a sweat and for the most part beamed at her business venture.

Nestled among a cascade of flowers, the upscale hairdressing salon - which opened with a blow-dry range in 2013 - seemed to be in the perfect venue.

This will be the second store for the successful business, the first of which was opened in March 2015 in London's Westbourne Grove.

Adorable: Sophia seemed to have taken style inspiration from her mother and wore a matching pink top and skirt set

Always glam: She contoured her cheeks to perfection which was further accentuated by half of her brunette locks being pulled up in to a bun

Tamara has been incredibly hands on with her role as Creative Director, which is even more impressive given that she recently enjoyed some downtime in LA and Switzerland.

Sunny Los Angeles is where her sister Petra Stunt lives with husband James and their three children, while her father Bernie lives in the serene mountainous Swiss country.

It looked as though cherubic Sophia accompanies her mother everywhere and Tamara was recently forced to defend sharing her bed with her husband, as well as her daughter.

Coming for you! Tamara's comfortable footwear allowed her to chase after Sophia with ease

Running the place! Her colleagues watched on as Sophia stole the show

Appearing on Loose Women earlier this month, she insisted her night-time routine hasn't affected her relationship with husband Jay Rutland.

She said: 'In the beginning he wasn't too sure about it but now he can't imagine her not being in the bed with us

But now, he doesn't want her out of it. He rolls over and gives her a cuddle. It won't be forever so we want to make the most of it while we can. We have the rest of our lives together.'

Keen eye for business: The upscale destination proved to be the perfect location for the blowdry bar

Successful businesswoman: Tamara didn't seem to break a sweat as she seemed excited about her Creative Director position for the salon

Getting down to business! Tamara finally engaged in a serious talk while holding on to Sophia's hand

'When we have date nights now, we just stay at home and turn the baby monitor on. We'll order a takeaway or whatever.'

Presenter Coleen Nolan also asked Tamara if she thought people were jealous of her money, most notably, the money she spends on her daughter.

She said: 'I think it's sad as I like to support other women. There are so many people trying to drag you down. You've got to be strong and support others.'
They were spotted catching some rays on their luxury yacht earlier this week as they enjoy a lavish Spanish summer getaway.

And Jonathan Cheban and girlfriend Anat Popovsky seemed to be appreciating the simpler things in life as they treated themselves to an ice-cream and a stroll around the streets of Palma, Mallorca on Wednesday.

The entrepreneur, 42, playfully fed the ice-cream cone to his stylist girlfriend, 29, who laughed as he smeared it all over her lips.

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Open wide! Jonathan Cheban, 42 and girlfriend Anat Popovsky seemed to be having a blast as they indulged in an ice-cream fight in Palma, Mallorca on Wednesday

The on-off couple - who got back together in November after a brief split - looked smitten as ever as they joked around with the tasty treat.

Jonathan topped up his tan in some denim shorts and an unusual white shirt featuring patterned with brown lips as they roamed the island

His gorgeous brunette girlfriend kept things simpler in a pink cold-shoulder mindress dress, which helped to show off her golden glow.

Anat paired the outfit with grey and cream woven wedges and added a hint of glamour with a miniature black Hermes Birkin handbag.

Cute couple: The entrepreneur, 42, and his stylist girlfriend, 29, both dressed to impress for their day out in the historic city, with Anat putting on a leggy display in a short pink minidress

The pair moored their vast 40-metre boat on the island on Tuesday morning, before taking a romantic walk around the port town of Calvia.

Smitten Jonathan took to social media to document their day out, although he was more concerned about the effect of the yacht on his style choices.

He playfully complained to his Instagram followers that he was not allowed to wear his Yeezy trainers, designed by best friend Kim Kardashian's husband Kanye West, on the swanky vessel.

Jonathan captioned a funny shot of him barefoot: 'Why won't they let me wear my Yeezy on the yacht?!!'

Pucker up, baby! Jonathan opted for an unusual shirt patterned with brown lips

Loved up: The reality star and his beau moored their vast 40-metre boat on the island before taking a romantic walk around the port town of Calvia, on Tuesday morning

Jonathan and Anat met in Florida in 2012 while he was filming for Kourtney & Kim Take Miami.

The pair split up in early 2014, before getting back together again last year.

A source told DailyMail.com: 'He missed her and wanted to give the relationship another try.They have so much in common and an undeniable chemistry that it was inevitable.'

Jonathan is well-known for his close friendship with reality star Kim Kardashian, having made several hilarious appearances on her show Keeping Up With The Kardashians since season one.

For Yeezus' sake: Jonathan playfully complained to his Instagram followers that he was not allowed to wear his Yeezy trainers, designed by best friend Kim Kardashian's husband Kanye West, on the swanky vessel
He's enjoying the most successful period of his glittering career.

And Leonardo DiCaprio, 41, is currently taking advantage of some well-deserved downtime with his guy pals in New York, with the Hollywood heartthrob spotted out and about in the city's East Village, on Wednesday.

The Oscar-winning actor was dressed down in a loose-fitting plain grey polo shirt which he teamed with a pair of cream shorts and navy slip-ons.

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Laidback: Leonardo DiCaprio, 41, is currently enjoying some well-deserved downtime with his guy pals in New York, with the Hollywood heartthrob spotted out and about in the city's East Village

The Revenant star also sported a beige flatcap and a trendy pair of shades as he strolled in the sunshine with a smile on his face.

Bearded Leo held a cigarette in between his fingers as he made his way over a zebra crossing, his casually dressed pal also in high spirits beside him.

And he was soon joined by more friends, with the pack making their way steadily along the sidewalk, each of them checking their phones.

Leader of the pack: He was joined by more pals, with the pack making their way steadily along the sidewalk, each of them checking their phones

The star is regularly linked with stunning younger beauties, and the latest name connected to the actor is Danish model Nina Agdal, 24.

The pair were originally briefly linked back in February 2014 when they were pictured leaving a New York nightclub together.

But they are reportedly spending time together again after they were spotted in Montauk, New York last weekend, according to pagesix.com.

Caught his eye: The star is regularly linked with stunning younger beauties, and the latest name connected to the actor is Danish model Nina Agdal, 24

The handsome couple were spotted making a low-key visit to Goldberg's Famous Bagels and the Montauk Point Lighthouse.

However, a source close to Leonardo denied he was dating the model, saying the actor was in Montauk 'for a friends birthday with a bunch of other people'.

Three weeks ago, Leonardo and Nina were pictured at the same New York nightclub, Up And Down, along with actor's other rumoured flame Rihanna.

When Leonardo and Nina were first linked in 2014, the Oscar winner was dating German model Toni Garrn, who he eventually split from that December.

Casual: The Oscar-winning actor was dressed down in a loose-fitting plain grey polo shirt which he teamed with a pair of cream shorts and navy slip-ons




They got engaged six years ago celebrating their love among family and friends.

And although Samantha Harris and Luke Hunt were forced to put their wedding on hold, the model recently confirmed that it's now very much still on.

Just weeks after 30-year-old Luke was released from the St Heliers Correctional Centre in New South Wales, where he served two years for dangerous driving causing the death of a grandfather, Samantha has spoken out about their on-going wedding plans.

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The wedding is on: Samantha Harris confirmed on Thursday that she will proceed with wedding plans to Luke Hunt just weeks after his prison release

'Things are going very slowly, but surely,' she told The Daily Telegraph on Thursday adding that she's thrilled to have Luke home.

'It is great. Life has been really good.'

The pair, who met at a Gold Coast shopping centre seven years ago, appear to be going strong despite having been apart since 2014.

Looking ahead: The Indigenous model was separated from 30-year-old Luke for two years after he was jailed for dangerous driving which caused the death of 78-year-old Kenneth Lay

During that year, Luke pleaded guilty to dangerous driving, which caused the death of 78-year-old Kenneth Lay after it was revealed that he was driving at 95km/h in a 60km/h zone.

Luke and 25-year-old Indigenous model Samantha were travelling to the gym in Narweena, Northern Sydney at the time when the commodore they were driving in crashed into Kenneth Lay's Hyundai Lantra.

He was sentenced to four years behind bars of which he served two and in addition, he was disqualified from driving for six-and-a-half years.

Happy again: She is thrilled to have her fiance home and the pair is planning a future together

At the time, Samantha expressed her devastation.

'I am beyond devastated with what has happened and for the Lay family. It is still so raw, having lost my partner,' she said after the verdict.

'I need time to process and get used to not having him in my life for now.'

Samantha, who was discovered as a model at age 11, was pictured flashing her diamond sparkler during a brunch date with Luke on Thursday.

The couple was recently rumoured to be scouting potential wedding venues in Byron Bay after Samantha was spotted around town.

She has since denied the reports saying, 'I was just there enjoying Byron.'

Bright future: Samantha and Luke have not yet publicly revealed a wedding date




There is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

Criss Angel, 48, has been hoping for a miracle since his two-year old son, Johnny Sarantakos, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia last October.

And on Thursday the magician and illusionist told UsWeekly: 'Johnny is technically in remission, thank God. I believe he will be healed.'

Miracles do happen: Criss Angel, seen here in March, told UsWeekly his son Johnny Sarantakos, aged two, is in remission from acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Johnny's getting better: Criss took to Instagram last March sharing a sweet photo of Johnny while the little boy flashes a grin for the camera, with the caption; 'Our brave strong boy going through what no child should ever have to'

The little boy has beaten back the disease 'but he is still undergoing intense chemotherapy treatments, blood transfusions and spinal taps in Australia.'

Speaking about his beloved son, the star of Cirque du Soleil's Believe revealed: 'What doctors found is you have to continue treatment to kill all the cells, as there is no guarantee.'

The magician, who shares his son with ex-wife Shaunyl Benson, cancelled his shows in Las Vegas last fall when he found out that Johnny had been diagnosed cancer.

He told his fans that he had to postpone due to a 'family emergency' via Facebook.

Heartbreaking: Since the diagnosis, Criss has been keeping his fans very much updated about Johnny's progress. In one of his firsts heartbreaking social media posts the star of Luxor Casinos MindFreak Live! in Las Vegas tweeted a photo of himself cuddling up with his son and his mom Shaunyl

Criss then flew straight to Australia, where Johnny lives with his mom, to be at his son's hospital bed during his chemotherapy treatments.

Since the diagnosis, Criss has been keeping his fans very much updated about Johnny's progress.

In one of his firsts heartbreaking social media posts the star of Luxor Casinos MindFreak Live! in Las Vegas tweeted a photo of himself cuddling up with his son and his mom Shaunyl.

Cancer research champion: His sons battle against the disease has led the illusionist to become a champion for cancer research. As he anticipated on his Instagram a few months back, his September 12 benefit show and auction at the Luxor, Heal Every Life Possible, aims to raise $1 million to help fund research for cures for pediatric cancer

He captioned: '4th day chemo -- Shaunyl, Johnny & I can't thank u enough for the overwhelming outpouring of love, prayers & support #amazing.'

Criss took to Instagram last March sharing a sweet photo of Johnny while the little boy flashes an adorable grin for the camera, with the caption: 'Our brave strong boy going through what no child should ever have to.'

His sons battle against the disease has led the illusionist to become an advocate for cancer research. As he anticipated on his Instagram a few months back, his September 12 benefit show and auction at the Luxor, Heal Every Life Possible, aims to raise $1 million to help fund research for cures for pediatric cancer.

He captioned: 'The most important event of my life. Hope you can be there.'

The event will feature performances or appearances by Angel himself, Cirque Du Soleil, Blue Man Group, Wayne Newton, Jerry Lewis and many more.
It keeps going from bad to worse for this former child star.

It was revealed Wednesday, that Dustin Diamond owes the state of Wisconsin nearly $94,000 in back taxes.

WTMJ-TV was the first to discover the 39-year-old actor's massive delinquent tax bill.

Big bill: It was revealed Wednesday, that Dustin Diamond (pictured May) owes the state of Wisconsin nearly $94,000 in back taxes

According to the State Department of Revenue website for delinquent taxpayers, the former child star owes a staggering $93,768.

While the Department Of Revenue cannot comment on a specific case, a representative told the Wisconsin station that a tax payer only finds themselves on that list when the owe over $5,000 and have ignored warning letters asking them to pay.

This is just the latest in far from family revelations about Dustin, who played nerd Screech on the popular 1990s television show, Saved By The Bell.

Last year in Wisconsin, he was convicted for disorderly conduct and concealed-weapon charges after he stabbed a man during a bar brawl on Christmas in 2014.

Expensive troubles: According to the State Department of Revenue website for delinquent taxpayers, the former child star (pictured 2015) owes a staggering $93,768

Throwback Thursday: This is just the latest in far from family revelations about Dustin, who played nerd Screech on the popular 1990s television show, Saved By The Bell (pictured with Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Mario Lopez)

He was sentenced to 120 days in jail and released on probation in April.

Mug shot: Last year in Wisconsin, he was convicted for disorderly conduct and concealed-weapon charges after he stabbed a man during a bar brawl on Christmas in 2014

But then just last month he was arrested again and jailed two days for violating his probation order.

The actor was arrested after he had tested positive for the painkiller oxycodone, which Dustin told his probation officer he was taking for a toothache.

After his release from jail the first time, the embattled star spoke to his former castmate Mario Lopez on Extra about his time in jail.

Dustin said: 'It's pretty daunting, it's pretty scary going into that environment. I found that as long as you follow the rules and stay with the system, it works. You can get in and out unscathed.'

Diamond claimed he pulled out his pocket knife and threatened a man after he pulled his fiancee Amanda Schutz's hair as they celebrated Christmas in Port Washington.

He said: 'I opened my pocket knife and said, ''Let my wife go immediately,'' which worked.'

Dustin claimed he accidentally 'nicked' the arm of Casey Smett, 25: 'It was a Band-Aid, the most expensive Band-Aid I've ever bought.'
After the demise of his 18-month-marriage, he seems to have truly moved on.

Cheryl's ex Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini was seen on his third dinner date with a mystery beauty in five days as he stepped out in London on Tuesday.

The 35-year-old restaurateur looked casual yet cool for his meal, which he enjoyed a day after heading out with a blonde stunner and shortly after eating out with Amy Jackson.

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Handsome star: Cheryl's ex Jean-Bernard Fernandez-Versini was seen on his third dinner date with a mystery beauty in five days as he stepped out in London on Tuesday

Jean-Bernard proved he knows all the trendiest hot spots in London as Tuesday evening brought his to A-list favourite 100 Wardour Street in Soho.

While the handsome Frenchman kept things casual in a slogan T-shirt adorned with the words 'Neue Noise' paired with a pair of dramatically distressed jeans.

Ensuring his look was not overly low-key, the handsome star paired the ensemble with slick tan boots which added a debonair feel to the otherwise muted ensemble.

With his smattering of designer facial hair and slick raven hairdo, JB looked truly dashing for the latest in his string of nights out.

Stunner: The 35-year-old restaurateur looked casual yet cool for his meal, which he enjoyed a day after heading out with a blonde stunner and five days after eating out with Amy Jackson

Dashing: Jean-Bernard proved he knows all the trendiest hot spots in London as Tuesday evening brought his to A-list favourite 100 Wardour Street in Soho

His stunning dinner companion was a blonde beauty opting for natural make-up and flowing tresses as she kept her beauty regimen simple before the night out.

She also kept her look classic in a crisp white blazer with a white camisole and light wash jeans while toting a tan coloured handbag.

On Monday Jean-Bernard was seen enjoying a meal with a second blonde beauty while late last week he was pictured on another night out, this time at Chiltern Firehouse, where he was joined by former beauty queen, Amy Jackson.

Cheryl's ex-husband was seen with the stunning brunette on Friday evening, a month after admitting he was romancing a new woman.

Going out, out: With his smattering of designer facial hair and slick raven hairdo, JB looked truly dashing for the latest in his string of nights out

Stylish: She also kept her look classic in a crisp white blazer with a white camisole and light wash jeans while toting a tan coloured handbag

Bollywood actress Amy previously dated Coronation Street hunk Ryan Thomas, but has reportedly been enjoying spending time with Jean-Bernard after they met at Cannes Film Festival.

A source told The Sun: 'Amy first met JB when she was in Cannes last month, when she flew over for meetings with casting directors and producers for upcoming projects.'

They continued: 'Her publicist also works with JB on a couple of projects, so they were introduced and got on really well.

'JB had some business in London and he and Amy met up for dinner and a catch-up.'
She complained that her eyes were so sore after falling asleep in contact lenses she was forced to cancel a trip to the Opera House.

But hours later ex Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby took a selfie that showed off the windows to her soul adorned in sparkly gold makeup.

The 26-year-old shared a snap on Instagram on Thursday of her brown eyes sprinkled with glitter hours after she revealed she fell asleep in her contact lenses and was worried she had scratched her cornea.

Ex Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby was showing off the windows to her soul adorned in sparkly gold makeup hours after she cancelled a trip to the Sydney Opera House complaining of sore eyes

Showing off her enhanced pout, she struck that Charlotte pose for the snap she shared with her 4.8 million followers.

The reality TV star told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday that her eye felt painful on a flight from Melbourne earlier that day.

She was spotted arriving at Sydney Airport concealing her bloodshot eye behind sunglasses.

Shady Lady! Charlotte cancelled her trip to the Sydney Opera House after hurting her eye due to to falling asleep in her contact lenses, she told Daily Mail Australia and was seen arriving at the airport in sunglasses

She previously tweeted: 'I'm going to the OPERA! How sophisticated! And not just anywhere, (the) SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE'.

But Charlotte has confirmed she won't be watching the performance of French opera Carmen because she can barely keep her lids open.

The Ex On The Beach star also claimed she was disappointed because she'd picked out 'such a nice dress' for the occasion.

Change of plan? Charlotte previously tweeted: 'Tonight I'm going to the OPERA! How sophisticated! And not just anywhere, (the) SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE'

Health concern: Earlier on Thursday, the 26-year-old was spotted arriving at Sydney Airport concealing her bloodshot eye behind sunglasses

I cant put makeup on this eye because its hurting so much and that would irritate it,' Charlotte said.

'So then what am I meant to do when Ive got to wear my lovely dress and there will be 5,000 people taking photos? Im just going to feel awful all night.

'Its also hurting so I dont think I could sit and watch the opera for that long because Im in pain and its hard to open my eyes.'

Skyline: Charlotte has confirmed she won't be watching the performance of Carmen at the Sydney Opera House because she can barely keep her lids open

Charlotte's eye is also particularly sensitive and claims she had to 'close the curtain in (her) room because the light hurts it.'

She added: 'Its a lot of problems and I dont feel I can get over any of them in time. Im really sad about it because I have such a nice dress for it. I hope it will be better in the morning.

It is possible that Charlotte will cancel other appearances in Sydney due to her eye problem.

Meanwhile, Charlotte announced her departure from MTV's Geordie Shore earlier this month amid clashes with her ex-boyfriend Gary Beadle.
They competed against each other on Dancing With The Stars in 2015.

And now Alexa and Carlos PenaVega are collaborating on a new project: a baby.

On Thursday the 27-year-old Spy Kids actress and her 26-year-old Big Time Rush actor spouse revealed on Instagram they are expecting their first child together.

Little one on the way: Alexa and Carlos PenaVega revealed on Instagram Thursday they are expecting their first child together

Plug: In their post the two presented a positive pregnancy test. 'Breaking news! Its #ClearblueConfirmed! There is going to be a new cool kid in town  And by cool I mean dorky just like their father,' said the actor

In their post the two presented a positive pregnancy test.

'Breaking news! Its #ClearblueConfirmed! There is going to be a new cool kid in town  And by cool I mean dorky just like their father,' said the actor.

'A little PenaVega is on the way!!!' he added. The hashtags were: #ItsHappening, #HolyWow and #Imgoingtobeadaddy.

Amour: They were engaged in 2013 and married in Mexico in January 2014; here they are seen in February

Alex shared a snap where Carlos was kissing her cheek.

'I cannot believe I finally get to say this  WERE PREGNANT!!!' she wrote. 'Its #ClearblueConfirmed that a little blessing is joining the PenaVega family!!! We cant wait!!!'

They were engaged in 2013 and married in Mexico in January 2014.

When performing on DWTS last year she said: 'If Ive learned anything its that relationships are about compromise.'
Amber Heard was set to testify in court on Friday, along with two witnesses, about alleged domestic abuse by estranged husband Johnny Depp.

And the couple - who were reportedly hoping to avoid an ugly court battle and come to some kind of an agreement - will likely do just that.

US Weekly reports that Friday's hearing has been postponed, according to a confirmation from the Los Angeles County Court's public information officer.

No more drama? Divorcing duo Johnny Depp and Amber Heard reportedly want to postpone their Friday court hearing and settle things themselves

According to the publication, the case will be continued, as requested by the Pirates of the Caribbean star's team.

Sources say that the actors will try to come to a mutual agreement where they agree to stay away from each other.

They will also discuss matters such as spousal support - a request which Amber withdrew recently - as well as settling their property.

Amber, 30, originally asked for $50,000 per month in spousal support when she filed for divorce last month.

Insiders tell TMZ that Johnny is open to discussing paying the Danish Girl star for a period of eight months.

The website previously reported that Amber had not responded to Johnny's initial offer because it was on the condition of a mutual restraining order.

Restraining order: The 30-year-old actress is due in court on Friday, along with two witnesses, to testify about alleged domestic abuse at the hands of Depp, 53

Trying to work it out: The duo are reportedly working on an agreement that will figure out spousal support and a settlement for their property. Amber had originally asked for $50,000 per month before withdrawing the request

The actress apparently doesn't want to be the subject of such an order as she hasn't committed any violence.

TMZ had also reported on Thursday that Amber was not interested in simply settling her case with Johnny, with sources insisting that she believes the actor's team have merely put that idea out because he is terrified about what she will say on the stand.

Amber's sources insist she is still ready to go to court, and that Johnny is simply scared that her testimony regarding the domestic violence will be devastating.

This comes after Johnny's lawyer, Laura Wasser, tried and failed to have Amber's deposition taken before the court, which had previously been planned for Friday, as reported by TMZ.

Amber was not able to attend last week, at first because she was in New Jersey for her best friend's engagement party, and then because she had to travel to London for a costume fitting for Justice League.

Putting an end to the warring: Johnny has reportedly offered some spousal support for 8 months on the agreement that would both stars have to stay away from each other

However, according to another report by TMZ, Amber never went to London, because production crew felt she was too skinny - reportedly after having lost 20 pounds due to 'overwhelming stress' - for her costume.

Amber's team insisted the deposition request was given without proper notice, but Johnny's team thinks Amber is afraid to speak under oath and get cross-examined.

Things quickly turned ugly last month after Amber's divorce petition was filed when the actress was pictured heading into court with bruising to the right side of her face.

She alleged that Johnny had thrown a phone at her in a fit of rage on May 22.

Shortly after, she got a temporary restraining order against the Pirates of the Caribbean star and claimed that the 53-year-old actor had hit her on other occasions.

Ugly battle: The duo, who were married for 15-months, have been locked in a public battle since their divorce was announced last month. Amber's team claim she just wants protection from Johnny and it's not about money

Amber and two supporters are due to testify about the alleged domestic violence on Friday during a retraining order hearing in Los Angeles.

The actress, her longtime friend iO Tillett Wright and her neighbor Raquel Rose Pennington are willing to provide evidence on her behalf, according to an article on Tuesday by PageSix.

Amber this week filed paperwork dropping her request for $50,000 a month in temporary spousal support with sources saying the actress just wants protection from Johnny and that it's not about the money.
Australian radio presenter Mel Greig has been enjoying a relaxing post-breakup trip to Hawaii with a group of friends.

And after posting online numerous snaps of herself relaxing poolside or soaking up the idyllic views of the location, it seems she was feeling a little adventurous on Thursday.

The 33-year-old blonde jumped off a cliff into the ocean in Hawaii with two gal pals.

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Leap of faith: Australian radio presenter Mel Greig jumped from a cliff into the ocean in Hawaii on Thursday, with friends

Sharing a shot to Instagram, the WAVE FM presenter can be seen plummeting into the water near other swimmers.

Mel captioned the shot: 'Had the most amazing day exploring the North Shore and jumping into these beautiful waters with @kt_slade and @tanya_ellen #finalday #hawaii #incredibletrip #roadtrip #friends #laughs.'

The girls are seen jumping into the water in bikinis.

She's also shared to Instagram a shot of herself in a kaftan and coral bikini, showing off a golden tan.

Flaunting it: The blonde stripped down to a skimpy string bikini teamed with a beaded kaftan, flashing her ample cleavage and sun-kissed complexion in all its glory

They've also enjoyed soaking up the pool of their hotel, with Mel stunning in a white lace dress.

The thigh-skimming graphic print ensemble featured a see-through design, and revealed the radio DJs ample assets and slimmed down waistline.

She captioned the image: Sometimes all you need in life are friends and a big goofy laugh.

Lapping up the balmy climes: Mel showed off her toned curves in a semi-sheer floral sundress as she kicked back with her gal pals on Hawaiian holiday

View from the room: The blonde posted the picturesque beach views from her hotel room

Mel previously confessed she wanted to get back to her 'honeymoon size' for the exotic break and previously said online she wanted to shed 15kgs and was almost at her goal, dropping ten.

The holiday comes as a welcome distraction for Mel after she revealed in April that she and husband Steve Pollock have decided to part ways after just one year of marriage.

Appearing on Channel Ten's Studio 10, she said: 'I am separated from my husband now. It's been a couple of months that I've been dealing with that in private.'
It boasts an all-star cast of models, pop stars and Hollywood actors alike.

And a new teaser clip from Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie offers a glimpse at just some of the A-list names featuring in the hotly-anticipated film which will hit cinemas next month.

In the never before seen video, Britain's fashion elite come together to fawn over Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) as she offers to do their PR... before waking up and realising it was all a dream.

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Fashion frenzy: A new teaser clip from Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie offers a glimpse at just some of the A-list names featuring in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie which will hit cinemas next month

Surrounded by Lily Cole, Jourdan Dunn, Alexa Chung, Suki Waterhouse, Lara Stone, Nick Grimshaw and Stella McCartney, the wine guzzling, hapless PR agent finds herself being invited out on luxury trips and outings, with Lara noting that 'Stella [McCartney] will give you all the clothes you need.'

Sipping martinis alongside the creme de la creme of clients, Edina is then approached by none other than Kate Moss, who insists that she wants to work together.

Entering the room in a haze of soft light, the 30-time British Vogue covergirl purrs: 'Oh Eddie, you're my most favourite person in the whole world. You have to do my PR. You have to, please?'

A vision of beauty! Kate Moss stole the show in the teaser trailer as she appeared in a haze of light

Model moment: In the never before seen video, Britain's fashion elite - including Daisy Lowe and Lara Stone - come together to fawn over Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders)

As the models come together to chant 'Eddie' continuously, the camera then pans to her shocked and amused face as she soaks up her newfound career success.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie will also see Joanna Lumley reprise her role as magazine editor Patsy Stone, alongside Julia Sawalha as Saffy, Jane Horrocks as Bubble and June Whitfield as Mother.

Following on from the BBC series, which first aired in 1992, Edina and Patsy are continuing to frequent London't most glamorous hotspots together, often with a drink in hand and lit cigarette in the other.

In great company: Surrounded by Lily Cole, Jourdan Dunn, Alexa Chung and Suki Waterhouse the wine guzzling, hapless PR agent finds herself being invited out on luxury trips and outings

Dream come true: Sipping martinis alongside the creme de la creme of clients, Edina is then approached by none other than Kate Moss, who insists that she wants to work together

But the film will see life as they know it change for the duo after accidentally pushing Kate Moss into the river Thames and being blamed for her death.

In a bid to escape the media frenzy surrounding the incident, the pair flee penniless to the French Riviera as they attempt to hatch a plan to live the high life forevermore.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie opens in UK cinemas July 1, on July 22 in the US and August 11 in Australia.

Rare appearance: Lily Cole came back into the limelight with a cameo appearance in the film
She accepted the 2015/16 title in September, having previously held the regional title of Miss Hull

The morning after, Zara said her behaviour was 'not like her' and she expressed huge regret

As a storm of controversy continues to brew over Zara Holland losing her Miss Great Britain title for having sex on TV's Love Island, the pageant's bosses are striking back.

According to Miss GB executives, the 20-year-old beauty queen was strictly forbidden from having sex on air when they gave her permission to appear on the risque ITV2 show.

But after giving Zara the axe on Thursday - once viewers saw her engage in a tryst with Alex Bowen, 24 - they now say in a lengthy statement that she 'knowingly went against' their wishes.

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Dethroned: Zara Holland, 20, has been stripped of her Miss GB crown after performing a sex act on Love Island Alex Bowen - she has expressed her deep regret

'We feel it important to explain that we have no problem at all with sex and our contestants/winners being sexually active and exploring their sexuality with another consensual adult,' they told MailOnline

'This has never, and will never be a problem. However, we simply cannot condone a reigning title holder doing so on TV.

'To put it into context... if a school teacher took part in the show, that person would have a level of responsibility they would be expected to uphold because of their role, and are certain they would face similar consequences if they took part in similar actions on national television.

'For those saying going into Love Island, its inevitable that she would have sex, that is not true. It is not a prerequisite of the show that you have sex.

Close to you: She and Alex got a little too hot and heavy under the covers on the show

'We gave our permission for Zara to enter, as our current winner, under the stipulation that she did not have sex on TV. Zara fully agreed to this and knowingly went against our wishes.'

And, while there have been accusations of sexism in the strong action taken against Zara for her behaviour, Miss GB bosses insist this is not the case, stating they're protecting their brand.

The statement continued: 'Zara is a lovely girl, we understand that this is out of character for her and that she truly regrets her actions; however, the decision simply comes down to the fact that she has broken the rules of the competition.

'Miss Great Britain works with charities, children & young, impressionable people; our title holder must be an ambassador and this public behaviour does not support the ethos of our brand.'

Regret: Ahead of Thursday night's show, the 20-year-old beauty queen said: 'You know when you're in the moment and it just happens. That's really not like me at all. Why couldn't we have just gone to sleep?'

Despite the action taken against Zara, the Miss GB bosses go on to say that they're actually supporting the star - and hope that she goes on to win the show.

'We wholeheartedly agree, that other than the incident that has forced our decision, Zara was, and is handling herself very well on the show and we still hold her in the highest regard as a friend, and are thrilled to see the support she is now receiving,' they said.

'We genuinely hope she goes on to win the show; she is a lovely girl with a great future ahead of her.'

The model and boutique director from North Ferriby was crowned in Leicester in September 2015, having previously held the regional title of Miss Hull.

Muscle man: Alex arrived on the show the day before and he said he was not averse to the idea of having sex on the show, and appeared to have set his eyes on Sophie Gradon and not Zara

An official statement from the organisation confirmed on Thursday that first runner-up Deone Robertson will take over for the rest of the year because they 'can no longer promote Zara as a positive role model.'

Zara followed her mother Cheryl Hakeney into the pageant scene, with the 51-year-old winning Miss Hull 30 years before her daughter.

Miss Great Britain shared a steamy romp in the bedroom with newcomer Alex in scenes aired on Wednesday night's episode of the dating programme, which is hosted by Caroline Flack.

She was initially said to have 'disappointed' pageant bosses but the organisation confirmed that Zara would no longer represent them on Thursday.

The official statement said: 'Following recent actions within ITV2 show Love Island it is with deep regret that we, the Miss Great Britain Organisation, have to announce that Zara Holland has formally been de-crowned as Miss Great Britain.'

'As an organisation we have not taken this decision lightly, we are close to all of our winners and wherever possibly stand by them during their rein.

'That said, we feel we have no choice but to make this decision under the circumstances.

'The feedback we have received from pageant insiders and members of the general public is such that we cannot promote Zara as a positive role model moving forward.

Oh dear: Zara, left, is said to have 'disappointed' pageant bosses after having sex in the Love Island house and Deone Robertson, right, has been named the new Miss Great Britain

'We wholly understand that everyone makes mistakes, but Zara, as an ambassador for Miss Great Britain, simply did not uphold the responsibility expected of the title.'

Wolverhampton scaffolder Alex arrived on the show the day before, saying in a pre-entrance interview that he was 'unbelievable' in bed, but already found Zara a 'bit annoying' to watch on TV.

The Birmingham Mail quotes Alex as saying: 'As soon as I get with a girl on there, as soon as I have sex with them, they'll be telling everyone how unbelievable I am.'

On Zara, he added: 'I have to meet her properly to see what shes really like. Watching from the outside shes a bit annoying. She doesnt make it easy on herself by saying shes Miss Great Britain all the time.'

Slinky: Zara, left and right, said she got 'swept up in the moment' with Alex and her actions 'weren't like her'

Alex previously dated I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here winner Vicky Pattison, expressing saying that he wasn't looking for 'a drip with no personality' in a girlfriend.

Ahead of Thursday night's show, beauty queen Zara admitted that she'd got swept up in the moment with Alex.

She said: 'You know when you're in the moment and it just happens. That's really not like me at all. Why couldn't we have just gone to sleep?'

Zara spoke of her regret for her steamy romp on the ITV2 dating show when she took to the Beach Hut confessional the morning after.

Taking cover: Shying away from the cameras, Alex and Zara pulled the bed covers over themselves as things got decidedly steamy in the bedroom

Zara is said to have initially 'disappointed' pageant bosses after having sex in the Love Island house in scenes, insiders told The Sun.

Insiders said that organisers had blasted the 20-year-old stunner for 'stooping so low' after she got hot and heavy with Alex.

After a string of failed romances and brutal rebuffs in the house, Wednesday night's show appeared to show a change in Zara's luck as she shared a night with hunky Alex.

An insider stated: 'We do not condone this behaviour. We're disappointed Zara stooped this low. She knows she's a role model and knows we're trying to change the image of Miss Great Britain.'

Shock move: The beauty queen is said to have 'disappointed' pageant bosses after having sex in the Love Island house in scenes which aired on Wednesday night

Zara has been teased for frequent boasts about her Miss Great Britain and it persisted on Friday when celebrities took to social media to mock her of her official de-crowning.

The blonde beauty was feted with the title last year after beating out competition in the bikini and charity rounds and often refers to herself as 'Miss GB' in third person.

The evening of intimacy occurred after the public voted for her to enjoy a date of her choice with either Alex or fellow new boy James.

Zara chose Alex, who had spent most of the day flirting with fellow singleton Olivia Buckland. Zara however was making no apologies for her choice in the Beach Hut.

We didn't see this coming: There's was a surprise in store in Love Island on Wednesday night's episode, when Miss Great Britain Zara Holland enjoyed a steamy night of passion with new boy Alex Bowen

She admitted: 'Obviously I've seen Liv getting to know Alex a little bit. But I want to get to know Alex more. Why not? He's the new boy.'

Alex was uncertain about the date, telling the Beach Hut: 'When she did pick me I was just like s***. I looked at Olivia and Olivia was like 'oh no'.'

The pair enjoyed champagne and chocolate covered strawberries in the Hideaway, but as night-time set in, Zara and Alex moved into their private bedroom.

A text then asked Zara and Alex the all-important question: 'Zara and Alex you can now choose whether you'd like to return to the villa or stay in the Hideaway for the night. #shouldIstayorshouldIgo.'

Family business: Zara, left, followed mother Cheryl Hakeney into beauty pageants, with Cheryl winning Miss Viking Radio 30 years before Zara won the equivalent Miss Hull competition for the first time in 2014

Similar: The pair, pictured, say they get mistaken for sisters all the time because of Cheryl's youthful looks

Without hesitation, Zara announced: 'I think we should stay. Stay the whole night? Yeah. Cool, we'll stay.'

As things moved under the covers, the pair quickly became intimate.

The similarity between the Zara and her mother in their Miss Hull winners' photos is striking - with the exception of Cheryl's 80s perm.

Speaking after her daughter's first victory in 2014, Cheryl, from Hull, said: 'It was totally incredible when Zara won. I was seeing it from a different angle.

'When it is your child, you just want them to do well and I was really rooting for her to win.

Pride: Cheryl, right, previously said it was 'incredible' to see her daughter win in beauty pageants

'There were so many pretty girls that entered. When they announced Zara had won, I thought I was going to faint.'

The pair have previously told MailOnline they are often mistaken for sisters - the ultimate compliment for a mother.

Speaking last October, Zara said: 'Mum knows all about what it is like to be in the competitions. It is really nice because we can talk about everything.

'She has been lovely throughout all of this, really supportive. We are really close and get on so well.'

Cheryl, left and right, left, said Pilates and long walks are the secret of her youthful looks while Zara, right, said she goes to the gym five times a week

'Mum was the runner-up when she was in Miss England.'

So what are their secrets? 'I go to the gym five times a week,' said Zara. 'I think having a healthy lifestyle is so important but I have a massive sweet tooth and love minstrels; everything in moderation!'.

Meanwhile, Cheryl swears by Pilates and long walks. As for her youthful skin, she credits 'regular facials, a good night's sleep and plenty of water'.

'An odd glass of champagne is always a good idea,' she added.

Love Island airs on weeknights at 9pm on ITV2.

Tuckered out: Later on in the evening, Alex appeared to have no problem falling asleep

MISS GREAT BRITAIN BOSSES ON ZARA HOLLAND - THE FULL STATEMENT Fall from grace: Zara Holland has been stripped of her coveted title following an on-air tryst We feel it important to explain that we have no problem at all with sex and our contestants/winners being sexually active and exploring their sexuality with another consensual adult; this has never, and will never be a problem. However, we simply cannot condone a reigning title holder doing so on TV. To put it into context, for those outside of the pageant industry, if a school teacher took part in the show, that person would have a level of responsibility they would be expected to uphold because of their role, and are certain they would face similar consequences if they took part in similar actions on National television. For those saying going into Love Island, its inevitable that she would have sex', that is not true, it is not a prerequisite of the show that you have sex. We gave our permission for Zara to enter, as our current winner, under the stipulation that she did not have sex on TV. Zara fully agreed to this and knowingly went against our wishes. Those stating we are slut shaming: we have never, and would never ever use this word to describe Zara, it is a huge shame that people are attempting to put words into our mouth. Zara is a lovely girl, we understand that this is out of character for her and that she truly regrets her actions; however the decision simply comes down to the fact that she has broken the rules of the competition. Miss Great Britain works with charities, children & young, impressionable people; our title holder must be an ambassador and this public behaviour does not support the ethos of our brand. For people claiming: You wouldnt do this if it was Mr Great Britain and No ones said anything about Alexs part in this, We most certainly would take the exact same course of action had our brand representative been male and this is why we have not mentioned Alex, as he is not an ambassador of our brand. The same goes for the other people within the villa (men & women), we wouldnt pass comment on their actions or decisions as they are not there as a representative of Miss Great Britain, in a current position. We did not take the decision to make this announcement whilst Zara was still in the show lightly, and agonised over it for almost 24 hours. We fully understand peoples feelings regarding this. But we had to act quickly with our statement as the press were already made aware of the decision and were going live. Of course, ideally we would have preferred to let Zara know face to face, but as we are allowed no contact with her whilst she is in the villa, this was taken out of our hands. Zara could potentially be in the show for another 3 or 4 weeks, we could not leave this amount of time before making an announcement. We wholeheartedly agree, that other than the incident that has forced our decision, Zara was, and is handling herself very well on the show and we still hold her in the highest regard as a friend, and are thrilled to see the support she is now receiving. We genuinely hope she goes on to win the show; she is a lovely girl with a great future ahead of her. Whilst we fully expect Zara to be upset when she learns of our decision, she also knows the pageant industry well and were confident she will completely understand why we have taken this course of action in time. Zara is not going to be erased from our history, she will always be one of our winners, but her reign has been cut short at this time and we will be standing by our decision. Advertisement




It might be The Happiest Place On Earth, but it's the rare visitor that doesn't leave DisneyLand exhausted.

So even at six-years-old Mason Disick can surely be forgiven for feeling the need to hop into his sister's stroller on Wednesday.

Enjoying a day out at the magical theme park to celebrate his cousin North's third birthday, he took the weight off with a brief rest while his mother Kourtney Kardashian pushed him through the crowds.

The Parent Trap: Kourtney Kardashian enjoysa DisneyLand trip with ex-partner Scott Disick... while Mason, six, hitches a ride in his sister's stroller as they celebrate his cousin North's birthday on Wednesday

It certainly looked like Mason and his family had been having fun - with the youngster wrapping a balloon animal around his neck. A pretty mermaid balloon could also be seen stuffed into the bottom of the stroller.

Meanwhile Penelope enjoyed a cuddle in her mom's arms after a spell dressing up as a princess - she had her hair braided and colourful extensions worked in while spending time at the Bippity Boppity Boutique.

Choosing a Snow White dress and matching gold shoes, the youngster looked to be a little overwhelmed by the attention as she sought out some comfort from her doting mother.

Princess Penelope! Kourtney cuddled her three-year-old, who wore a Snow White costume

Kourtney also got into the spirit of the outing - teaming her practical skinny jeans with a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and black skinny jeans. She wore sparkly Mickey Mouse ears on her head.

While it appeared Mason and Penelope's youngster sibling Reign, one, had skipped the fun day out, the siblings certainly seemed to be enjoying the time with their parents.

While Kourtney and her former partner Scott Disick separated last year, the two continue to co-parent their children and both were on hand for the family day out.

Taking a ride: Kourtney pictured enjoying time on the Astro Orbiter.

Scott walked alongside Kourtney as they cared for their two oldest kids.

The parents also joined their children on the rides, with Kourtney pictured enjoying time on the Astro Orbiter.

The group briefly left the park for North's birthday dinner at Napoli in Downtown Disney before heading back into Disneyland, where they watched the fireworks together.
He's been trying to keep a positive spin on the dismal start to the re-branded Top Gear.

But it appears the slump in viewing figure and public derision to his presenting style may be getting to Chris Evans, as the DJ appeared to show the strain when he stepped out in London.

Running some errands in North London, the 50-year-old Radio 2 star looked to be in a downcast mood as he stopped by the shops to pick up some items - with the star sporting a particularly quirky ensemble.

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Feeling the strain? It appears the slump in viewing figure and public derision to his presenting style may be getting to Chris Evans, as the DJ appeared to show the strain when he stepped out in London

Following yet another slating for both himself and the show on Twitter, following the third episode of the series, Chris appeared to be in a subdued mood- a far-cry from his usual bouncy demeanor.

Strolling around the streets of North London after another morning in the Radio 2 studio, where he presides over the hugely successful breakfast show, the presenter looked decidedly off-colour.

With a grimace set on his unshaven face, Chris appeared to be deep in though; with his usually sunny disposition replaced by a frown and a grimace.

But if the DJ was attempting to go incognito, his loud and quirky choice in clothing did little to avert attention.

Down and out? Running some errands in North London, the 50-year-old Radio 2 star looked to be in a downcast mood as he stopped by the shops to pick up some items - with the star sporting a particularly quirky ensemble

Presumably fresh from a workout, Chris teamed a blue baggy tee-shirt with a pair of skin-tight lycra leggings, which featured loud multicoloured stripes on the legs.

He rounded his look off with a pair of bright pink flyknit trainers, while the music stalwart appeared keen to keep a low-profile by donning a blue cap and big shades - despite the grey weather.

Chris' outing comes just days after viewers mocked him for throwing up during a segment on the third episode of Top Gear.

Grin and bear it: With a grimace set on his unshaven face, Chris appeared to be deep in though; with his usually sunny disposition replaced by a frown and a grimace

Jumping into a lightening quick Audi R8 V10 as a passenger - with ex-professional racing driver and co-presenter Sabine Schmitz behind the wheel - he came over all queasy.

And as the show showed Chris chucking up by the side of the car, Twitter went wild for the moment, with one saying; 'Chris, are you going to be sick every time you go fast? It's kinda annoying.'

Another wrote: 'Every person who's been on #TopGear so far would make a better presenter than Chris Evans! Who gets sick driving fast and presents a car show.'

Going for a jog? Presumably fresh from a workout, Chris teamed a blue baggy tee-shirt with a pair of skin-tight lycra leggings, which featured loud multicoloured stripes on the legs

Keeping a low profile: He rounded his look off with a pair of bright pink flyknit trainers, while the music stalwart appeared keen to keep a low-profile by donning a blue cap and big shades - despite the grey weather

One said: 'Why did they get Chris Evans to do #TopGear when he gets car sick?! Bet he'd get sick swivelling in a chair...'

The latest social media slating comes after Top Gear pulled in just 2.8 million viewers after the airing of the second episode of the show the week before - well down on the 4.3million viewers Evans and his team drew in their first episode.

However, despite all the criticisms leveled at him and the revamped show, Chris has remained up-beat, and tweeted earlier on this week that the third episode had bagged 6.2million viewers on Tuesday.
Karolina Kurkova stunned at the Faena Hotel Miami Beach where they had a screening of The First Monday In May.

After the screening there was also a Q and A which she attended with Sarah Arison, who is President of the Arison Arts Foundation.

Karolina, who welcomed her second son Noah last November, slayed the fashion game as she showed off her enviable legs in a mini cutout patterned dress.

Beautiful: Karolina Kurkova (left) and Sarah Arison (right) stunned at the Faena Hotel Miami Beach where they had a screening of The First Monday in May

The quirky look had large sleeves as she teamed the outfit with a pair of statement silver heels.

The Czech-born model was seen rocking a stylish updo which consisted of an intricate braid as she showed off her flawless complexion.

The blonde, who has been married to Archie Drury since 2009, was seen answering questions with Sarah.

Knockout: Karolina slayed the fashion game as she showed off her enviable legs in a mini cutout patterned dress

If you've got it, flaunt it: The Czech-born model was seen rocking a stylish updo which consisted of an intricate braid as she showed off her flawless complexion

Sarah looked lovely in a high-neck printed gown as she posed alongside Karolina for the fashion movie screening.

The First Monday In May is a documentary directed by Andrew Rossi.

It is a film about one of the most legendary parties of all, the Met Gala.

Blonde ambition: Karolina looked sensational as she posed alongside Sarah for the event

The screening: The First Monday in May is a film about one of the most legendary parties of all, the Met Gala

It follows the creation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's most attended fashion exhibition in history, China: Through The Looking Glass'

It is an exploration of Chinese-inspired Western fashions by Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton.

The documentary stars a whole host of fashion icons including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Baz Luhrmann, Anna Wintour and Kar-Wai Wong.
He's won two Oscars as well as plaudits across the theatrical world for his work in British theatre.

But Kevin Spacey looked particularly delighted as the House of Cards star was presented with an honorary knighthood by His Royal Highness Prince Charles, on Thursday.

Receiving the his title at a ceremony held in Clarence House, London, the 56-year-old actor looked delighted to be handed his KBE by the 67-year-old heir to the throne.

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Welcome to the club: Kevin Spacey looked particularly delighted as the House of Cards star was presented with an honorary knighthood by His Royal Highness Prince Charles, on Thursday

The New Jersey-born star was awarded the honourary title of Knight Commander for his services to Theatre, the arts and international culture.

And not one to ever let his sartorial credentials slip on the red carpet, Kevin insured he aws immaculately turned out for the ceremony at The Mall.

Opting for a classically cut two piece suit in blue, the American Beauty actor kept things smart and simple with a light blue shirt and dark stripy tie.

Prince Charles meanwhile opted for his traditional yet suave look, with the Prince of Wales wearing a double breasted pin-striped suit in navy, teamed with a white shirt and tie.

A proud day: Receiving the his title at a ceremony held in Clarence House, London, the 56-year-old actor (pictured in April) looked delighted to be handed his KBE by the 67-year-old heir to the throne

While Kevin will be allowed to place the letters 'KBE' behind his name, but as a recipient of the honour from outside the Commonwealth he will not be allowed to style himself as 'Sir Kevin'.

And while the two-time Oscar-winner has continued to garner honours and acclaim for his career on both the stage and the screen, he shows no sign of slowing down - despite his already huge impact on the acting world.

Currently about to embark on the promotional trail for his latest movie Nine Lives, which sees him play billionaire hotshot Tom Brand, who is taught a lesson in love by being transformed into his 11-year-old daughter's cat.

A true credit to the arts: The New Jersey-born star (Pictured as Richard III at the Old Vic in 2011) was awarded the honourary title of Knight Commander for his services to Theatre, the arts and international culture

And with a further three films in post-production, the actor's next year is shaping up to be a busy one.

Alongside his film commitments, Kevin is also set to return to Netflix in House of Cards as the anti-hero president, Frank Underwoood.

Slated for release in February, the hit-series will see Frank pick up where viewers left him - attempting to clinging to the reins of power as POTUS.
Katie Holmes wore a stylish 1960s look as she got into character as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The actress bore a striking resemblance to the former First Lady as she filmed her upcoming TV series The Kennedys: After Camelot in Toronto on Tuesday.

The 37-year-old is reprising her role as Jackie for the return of Reelz series, which will air next year.

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Stylish: Katie Holmes looked the part as for her role as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis while on the set of her upcoming TV series The Kennedys in Toronto on Tuesday

Katie looked focused as she strolled in front of the crew as cameras rolled.

The former Dawson's Creek star wore a 1960s-style white dress with black buttons and a belt.

She added black pumps and wore her hair in Jackie's trademark bouffant bob.

Katie greeted British costar Diana Hardcastle - who plays Rose Kennedy - with a kiss on the cheek.

Action! The 37-year-old leaned in to kiss costar Diana Hardcastle, who plays Rose Kennedy

The series also stars Matthew Perry as Ted Kennedy and Alexander Siddig, who plays Jackie's second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

The show portrays Jackie's life in the aftermath of the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy as she becomes Jackie O.

While Katie was on set in Toronto, her rumored boyfriend Jamie Foxx also traveled to Canada this week.

Chic: Katie wore a white buttoned up dress as she gave costar Diana a kiss on the cheek while cameras rolled

Strong: Katie reprises her role as Jackie in the series, which follows the former First Lady while married to her second husband Aristotle Onassis.

The Oscar-winner headed to Montreal for the Grand Prix weekend, where he'll be performing at New City Gas.

Katie split from her ex-husband Tom Cruise in 2012.

They have one daughter, ten-year-old Suri.

Earlier this week, she filmed wore a blue shawl as she filmed scenes with costar Matthew.
The news that Taylor Swift is dating Tom Hiddleston unsurprisingly took Twitter by storm.

And now fans have begun to question if the 26-year-old songstress could be mixing business with pleasure.

There's been a call for Taylor to sing the next James Bond theme - as her new beau continues to be the hot favourite to play the famous spy in the eponymous film series.

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Shaken and stirred? There's been a call for Taylor Swift to sing the next James Bond theme - as her new beau Tom Hiddleston continues to be the hot favourite to play the famous spy in the eponymous film series

Taking to Twitter, fans of the star immediately spoke out about what a great opportunity it would be to have the pair team up for Bond, with Tom taking care of the acting whilst Taylor provided the musical accompaniment.

Making their feelings known on Twitter, they took to the social media site in droves, with one fan posting: 'If Tom Hiddleston is cast as James Bond, y'all know Taylor Swift's going to, at the very least, sing the next Bond song.'

Another added: 'Ok, if tom Hiddleston plays James Bond, does that mean Taylor Swift will do the next James Bond song?!,' whilst another pointed out their similarities by stating: 'Taylor Swift is literally the female version of James Bond, except she sings for a living.'

Make it happen! Taking to Twitter, fans of the star immediately spoke out about what a great opportunity it would be to have the pair team up for Bond

Chemistry: Taylor and Tom were seen showing off their moves at May's Met Gala before photos of the new couple kissing emerged on Wednesday

One fan pointed out that she could indirectly write the new theme tune as they referred to her songs famously being about heartbreak by posting: 'Imagining the ballad Taylor Swift will write when she and Tom Hiddleston eventually break up. Let's make it the next James Bond theme song!'

Others pointed out that Taylor could take her involvement one step further, musing: 'Hmmm...maybe @taylorswift13 can be the Bond girl if @twhiddleston gets the part. Just saying. No need to pay me, just make the happen.'

The Twitter meltdown comes a day after Taylor and Tom were photographed near her home in Rhode Island, sharing a slow dance and a few stolen moments on the rocks.

Connection: One excited fan pointed out Taylor and Bond's similarities

Shaken it off? Other joked that Taylor could trump her beau to the role

His Bond girl: Fans pointed out that Taylor could go one step further and bag a role in the new Bond movie

New couple: The Twitter meltdown comes a day after Taylor and Tom were photographed near her home in Rhode Island

Now is a critical time for actor Tom, since he's being lined up for the one-in-a-lifetime role of James Bond, superseding Daniel Craig.

He certainly raised his profile with British BBC drama The Night Manager, which enticed an average of 6.6 million viewers, earlier this year but he's yet to make a big splash on Taylor's territory, in America.

Taylor and Tom first bonded at the Met Gala in May, where they were pictured taking to the dance floor, though she is thought to have had her eye on him since they were both at a dinner hosted by Anna Wintour on May 3, 2016.

In a picture of Tom leaving the do with fellow Bond hopeful Idris Elba, she can be seen to clock him out the corner of her eye.

History: Others made quips about Taylor's habit of penning hit tunes about her exes
You could say that fashion runs in her blood.

And Leni Samuel showed she's every inch her famous mother's daughter as she donned a pair of heeled booties on an outing with her family on Thursday.

Joining Heidi Klum, the 12-year-old model-in-training was seen on a New York City sidewalk looking happy in her footwear.

Model in training! Leni Samuel showed she's every inch her famous mother Heidi Klum's daughter as she donned a pair of heeled booties on an outing with her family in New York on Thursday

Young Leni teamed her fringed black booties with a summer dress and denim jacket, and an off-the-minute choker.

The tween joined her siblings on the outing, with six-year-old sister Lou, and brother Henry, 10, seen.

Heidi herself looked lovely in a sky blue off the shoulder top, which she wore with artfully frayed denim jeans and a pale grey scarf.

A pair of large hooped earrings and a long necklace completed the fashionable look.

Flower power: Young Leni teamed her fringed black booties with a summer floral print dress and denim jacket, and an off the minute choker

She has great jeans! Heidi herself looked lovely in a sky blue off the shoulder top, which she wore with artfully frayed denim jeans and a pale grey scarf

Doting mom: The catwalk queen had her little girl in her arms

German-born Heidi can currently be seen on America's Got Talent, where she sits alongside Mel B, Howie Mandel, and Simon Cowell on the judges panel.

In a recent interview the 43-year-old admitted that her daughter wanted to follow in her footsteps.

'I'm not pushing my kids in any direction,' she told Australia's Today show.

Follow the leader! Little Lou held her doting mom's hand

Hard at work: German-born Heidi can currently be seen on America's Got Talent, where she sits alongside Mel B, Howie Mandel, and Simon Cowell on the judges panel

'They should right now first of all be children, and learn everything that they have to learn in school.

'But for the first time, my daughter maybe like two months ago, she said, "Mumma what do I have to do to take over your empire?

'I was like, that's the cutest thing. I was like, 'Well, you go to school first and let's get good grades first', but I thought that was funny and she was like, 'Maybe I should do modelling or designing things.'"

Added extras: A pair of large hooped earrings and a long necklace completed Klum's fashionable look
Tori Spelling happily showed off the tattoo she got last month in Paris to celebrate 10 years of marriage to Dean McDermott during a TV appearance on Thursday.

The reality star and her husband got matching ink inscriptions on their upper inner left arms that read: 'Tout mon coeur. Toute ma vie,' which translates as 'All my heart. All my life.'

The blonde haired 43-year-old flexed her biceps to make the tattoo stand out as she proudly shared the symbol of her success at rebuilding her troubled marriage.

Her love is strong: Tori Spelling flexed her biceps and showed off the cursive tattoo she got in Paris last month to mark her 10th wedding anniversary. It translates from the French as: 'All my heart. All my life'

Tori appeared on Hollywood Today Live to promote the Lifetime remake of her film Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?' that will air on the cable channel on Saturday.

She wore a halterneck sleeveless white frock with an asymmetrical hem and black vertical lines in broad bands.

It was cinched at the waist and she completed the summer look with a pair of funky sandals.

Summer style: The reality star, 43, wore a sleeveless white frock with an asymmetrical hem and vertical black stripes for an appearance on Hollywood Live Today on Thursday

Toned limbs: She wore her long blonde hair sleekly styled and added some red lip color that matched her funky sandals

Promotional duties: Tori, who went bare-legged for her appearance, is currently promoting her remake of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? that's set to air on the Lifetime cable channel on Saturday

The mom of four had her long hair parted in the middle and sleeked down to fall just above her bust.

Her brown brows were arched and she added some dark blush and red lip color.

She also brought along daughter Stella, eight, who joined her on the set, albeit a little shyly.

Had company: The former Beverly Hills 90210 star brought along her eight-year-old daughter Stella, one of her four children with husband Dean McDermott

Proud mama: The little girl wore a pink t-shirt with pandas on it and some shorts and smiled shyly as her mom introduced her on the show

The little girl wore a pink t-shirt featuring pandas and a pair of shorts.

Tori is also mom to daughter Hattie, four, and sons Liam, nine, and Finn, three.

It hasn't been smooth sailing for Tori and Dean who met while both married to other people in 2005.

The couple hit a serious snag in winter 2013 following Dean's affair while he was shooting a movie in Canada.

It erupted into a scandal with the drama flaring in several episodes of True Tori that saw the former Beverly Hills 90210 star struggling to cope with the emotional upheaval.

But all that seems to be in the past and the couple seem happier than ever.
She always turns heads with her fashionable ensembles.But Paris Hilton had eyes on her for the wrong reasons on Thursday as she accidentally flashed her underwear whilst out in Milan.

Bending over to browse the items on sale, the 35-year-old heiress revealed a tad too much as she gave onlookers a glimpse at her pert posterior.

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Something thong?: Paris Hilton had eyes on her for the wrong reasons on Thursday as she accidentally flashed her underwear whilst out in Milan

Whilst she may have suffered a slight wardrobe malfunction, the star still oozed glamour in a studded leather jacket over a bondage-inspired T-shirt.

Carefully selecting her accessories, she stepped out with one of her own Paris Hilton-brand handbags and matching Chanel jewelry.

The former reality TV star is in Milan for a DJ set this weekend, and also to attend the Philipp Plein runway show.

On Thursday, Paris was all smiles as she stepped out in a white shirt with a black leather strap design.

All tied up: The star turned heads with her glamorous ensemble, but kept all eyes on her for the wrong reasons

Whoops! The star's low-rise jeans exposed too much as they fell down to show off her underwear

Full moon: As she squatted lower, an increasing amount of her posterior came into view

Oops: A tad more than expected was on display as she bent over and browsed the shelves

What an Eiffel! Soon, it was all on unwittingly on display as she pressed on with her browsing

She added a cropped motorcycle jacket with studded sleeves, and pulled her blonde hair back in a half-updo.

She added tight camouflage-print pants with studded suede boots, and oversized sunglasses.

Paris matched a large Chanel silver bangle with diamond Chanel earrings, and flashed a large ring as she exited her car and headed inside.

The socialite-turned-international DJ also clutched one of her own black leather Paris Hilton-brand handbags and her iPhone while out about about.

Glam: Paris dazzled as she checked out the items on display

Around the world: The former reality star has been enjoying a successful career as an international DJ

I see Paris, I see France...: The blonde beauty topped off her ensemble with an embellished cropped jacket

Paris set to soon become an aunt for the first time.

Her sister Nicky Hilton, 32, is expecting her first child, a baby girl, with husband James Rothschild.

But her brother Conrad Hilton,22, was last week sentenced to two months in prison after admitting to taking drugs while on probation.

Stylish: The 35-year-old carried one of her own Paris Hilton-brand handbags

La dolce vita: Paris added a studded leather jacket and camo skinny pants

Good mood: The socialite appeared to be in high spirits as she chatted with friends

Cali girl in Italy: The former reality star paired skinny camouflage pants with studded boots
She celebrated her 10th birthday earlier this year, and it seems Suri Cruise has already developed an interest in her mother's Hollywood career.

On Thursday, Katie Holmes was joined by her daughter on the Toronto set of The Kennedys: After Camelot.

The 37-year-old shared a cute black-and-white photo to Instagram which showed her and Suri sitting side by side and both wearing headphones.

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'Set life': Katie Holmes shared a sweet photo to Instagram on Thursday which showed daughter Suri joining her on the Toronto set of The Kennedys: After Camelot

Suri even had her own collapsible chair with her name and 'director' printed on it.

The youngster - who is fast becoming the spitting image of her mother - was wearing a white skirt and matching shirt with small black polka dots.

Meanwhile Katie was wrapped up warm in a black padded jacket and matching hat.

The Dawson's Creek star captioned the photo: 'My sweetie #setlife #gratitude.'

She's back: The actress is reprising her role as former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the mini-series. She is pictured here on Monday

Katie is portraying former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the mini-series, which is due for release later this year.

The actress is reprising her role for the four-part series five years after the release of the original mini-series in April 2011.

The show also stars Matthew Perry as Ted Kennedy and Alexander Siddig, who plays Jackie's second husband, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Co-stars: Friends alum Matthew Perry is portraying Ted Kennedy in the four-part series, due out later this year

The Kennedys: After Camelot depicts Jackie's life in the aftermath of the assassination of her husband President John F. Kennedy as she becomes Jackie O.

Meanwhile Katie's rumoured boyfriend Jamie Foxx also travelled to Canada this week for the Grand Prix in Montreal.

The Batman Begins star was previously married to 53-year-old Tom Cruise from 2006 to 2012, and she retained custody of Suri after their split.

Earlier this month, it was claimed by InTouch Weekly magazine that the Mission Impossible star has not seen his daughter in 1,000 days.
S.Korea's Park appeals as Olympic ban upheld

South Korean swim star Park Tae-Hwan launched an appeal against his Rio Olympics ban on Thursday as officials refused to lift the suspension, which was imposed for doping.

Park's legal team said they would ask the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to immediately start an arbitration process after the Korean Olympic Committee rejected the swimmer's plea.

"And if the KOC fails to respond to a decision by the CAS, we would file a lawsuit in South Korean court," Park's lawyers said in a statement.

South Korean swimmer Park Tae-Hwan makes a formal deep bow to express his regret for his doping during a press conference in Incheon, west of Seoul, on May 2, 2016

The multiple Olympic medallist completed an 18-month drug suspension in April after testing positive for an anabolic steroid in out-of-competition controls before the 2014 Asian Games.

But he remains barred from competing in Rio de Janeiro under a KOC rule which prohibits athletes from representing South Korea for three years after the expiration of any doping ban.

"We've decided not to amend the protocol," Han Jong-Hee told reporters earlier, following a meeting with fellow members of the KOC board of directors.

"The spirit of this protocol is to make sure that national athletes be armed with high morality.

"Doping runs against the spirit of fair play and it must be sternly dealt with, especially for the sake of educating young athletes," Han said.

Park has argued that the KOC regulation is unfair and he pre-emptively filed an appeal with the CAS back in April.

The KOC said it would inform the Lausanne-based court of its decision and would respond to any subsequent mediation efforts.

Park has repeatedly begged for a chance to compete in what would be his third, and probably last, Olympics -- at one point getting down on his hands and knees during a press conference.

The 26-year-old was once the poster-boy of South Korean swimming -- courted by advertisers and idolised by fans.

He won 400m freestyle gold and 200m freestyle silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and two silver medals at the 2012 London Olympics, as well as 400m world titles in 2007 and 2011.

On his competitive return to the pool last month, he easily won the 100m, 200m, 400m and 1,500m freestyle events at the 88th Dong-A meet, which doubles as a national trial.

His positive doping test was only revealed in January last year, and was initially blamed by Park's management team on the incompetence of a doctor at the hospital where the swimmer was receiving treatment.
Taliban use 'honey trap' boys to kill Afghan police

The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- to infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults told AFP.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where "bacha bereesh" -- or boys without beards -- widely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacks -- at least six between January and April alone -- that have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

The Taliban, exploiting the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi" -- the sexual abuse of young boys, have been using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police Rateb Noori (AFP/File)

"The Taliban are sending boys -- beautiful boys, handsome boys -- to penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen," said Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai, who was Uruzgan's police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

"They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forces -- bacha bazi," he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanai's view saying "it's easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers".

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

"These bacha attacks have fuelled deep mistrust within police ranks," Seddiqullah, a police commander at a checkpoint near the provincial capital Tarin Kot, told AFP.

The insurgents are using boys as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

He said the attacker was the checkpoint commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

"He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive. I pretended to be dead," said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

"As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: 'Everyone is dead'."

- 'Addiction' to boys -

The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

"We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operations -- all grown men with beards," a Taliban spokesman told AFP.

The insurgents have long denied using children in combat, a claim repeatedly debunked by rights groups and the government.

Survivors of insider attacks who spoke to AFP, including Matiullah, suggest the Taliban are exploiting the institutionalisation of bacha bazi in police ranks for military gain.

Practically all of Uruzgan's 370 local and national police checkpoints have bachas -- some up to four -- who are illegally recruited not just for sexual companionship but also to bear arms, multiple officials said.

Some policemen, they said, demand bachas like a perk of the job, refusing to join outposts where they are not available.

Horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys, many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment -- often because there is no other escape from exploitative commanders.

Many who have tried to escape have been dragged back with trumped up charges of Taliban links, two senior provincial judges told AFP.

Boys have also spurred a deadly rivalry between policemen, with officials reporting incidents such as a public gunfight this year between two commanders in Gezab district as one of them angrily accused the other of "stealing" his bacha.

"To restore security in Uruzgan, we will first have to separate policemen from their bachas," one of the judges said.

"But if they are told to reform their ways, a common reply is: 'If you force me to abandon my boy lover, I will also abandon the checkpoint'. The Taliban are not blind to notice that this addiction is worse than opium."

- 'Male rape' -

Bacha bazi, which the US State Department has called a "culturally sanctioned form of male rape", peels away the masculine identity of boys in a society where the sexes are tightly segregated.

In conservative areas women are mostly invisible in public -- and often unattainable due to steep bride prices. Bachas supplant the role of women, adopting a feminine gait and sometimes wearing makeup and bells on their feet.

Many in Uruzgan see bacha bazi neither as paedophilia nor homosexuality, which is forbidden in Islam. If social norms had a pecking order, violating boys would be seen as far more ethical than violating women.

"Bacha bazi is pervasive sexual slavery of children, seen widely as a cultural practice and not a crime," Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International, told AFP.

"Since it is mostly practised by those in positions of power -- warlords, commanders, politicians -- it is hard to stamp out. It appears sustained partly by the fact that access to women is limited."

Insider attacks by child slaves have also been reported in recent years from neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar provinces, where bacha bazi is prevalent.

But the tactic appears more deep rooted in Uruzgan, where the boys are widely flaunted as a totem of affluence, with some officials openly displaying cellphone images to AFP of their "handsome bachas".

"Come see my beautiful bacha," said Naqibullah, a police commander in Dehjawze village near Tarin Kot, boasting that he had been holding the teenager for two years.

With a touch of kohl on his eyes, and bleached blond curly hair poking out of his embroidered hat, the boy sat in a corner of the checkpoint surrounded by opium farms, quietly refilling tea glasses for Naqibullah's guests.

- 'Predatory behaviour' -

"Commanders prowl neighbourhoods for young boys. We are scared of dressing up our children or buying new clothes that will make them attractive," said Nader Khan, a tribal elder in Dehrawud.

Khan's 13-year-old nephew was taken captive earlier this year by Naqibullah, a local commander not related to the Dehjawze official, when his family sent him to deliver bread for policemen. He was released only after angry tribal elders besieged the governor's office in Tarin Kot.

Governor Mohammad Nazir Kharoti told AFP he ordered Naqibullah's arrest but he was released in less than a month because he was needed for combat duty.

"It is difficult to implement the law 100 percent when we are faced with a war situation," Kharoti said, without elaborating on the case.

Afghanistan's interior ministry refused to confirm or deny that bachas were being used in insurgent attacks, but said it was committed to police reforms and acknowledged that "bacha bazi within the ranks of police is a serious crime".

The practice has put the United States and its NATO allies, who have spent billions of dollars to build Afghan forces, in a precarious position.

The US Congress last year voiced concern over "predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police", prompting watchdog agency SIGAR to launch an investigation that is still ongoing.

The head of a government-affiliated agency in Uruzgan showed AFP two letters from the attorney general in Kabul, one last year and another dated January, ordering a separate probe into sexual abuse and the illegal recruitment of child conscripts.

"We haven't been able to visit even one checkpoint to investigate," he said, speaking in hushed whispers in his own office.

"Do you think police commanders will leave us alive if we probe their crimes?"

Taliban in Afghanistan Adrian LEUNG (AFP)

Afghan police commander Seddiqullah, 30, (L) sits with his subordinates as he speaks to AFP about the use of child sex slaves by the Taliban to attack police in Tarin Kot, Uruzgan Rateb Noori (AFP/File)

Najeebullah, 18, who survived a Taliban insider attack carried out by a bacha or child sex slave, smokes a shisha in Tarin Kot Rateb Noori (AFP)
Foreign protesters' bark unleashes Chinese dog eaters' bite

International groups and celebrities, backed by millions of foreign petitioners, have rallied against an annual dog meat festival in the Chinese city of Yulin: but the protests may have backfired, residents say, spurring more people to eat man's best friend.

"My store's dog-meat sales are much higher than before, last year was up more than 50 percent," the owner of Yulin Number One Crackling Dog Meat Shop told AFP.

The city, deep in the poverty-stricken southern Chinese region of Guangxi, has drawn international fury for the beating and boiling alive of animals in the belief that the more frightened the dogs, the tastier the meat, activists say.

A cook waits for customers behind a roasted dog outside a restaurant in Yulin, in China's southern Guangxi region Greg Baker (AFP/File)

More than 10,000 animals are killed for the summer solstice festival, which has drawn the notice of celebrities such as British reality TV star Simon Cowell who denounced it as "barbaric".

This year's event is scheduled for June 21, but tensions are already growing.

Last month, activists from China's nascent animal-rights movement stopped a Guangxi-bound van carrying 400 dogs and cats, some still wearing pet collars.

But campaigners' efforts have had a perverse effect, locals say.

"Because of the protests, more people know that Yulin has a dog meat festival, so everyone comes and tries it," said the dog meat seller, surnamed Lin.

"As we get closer to the dog meat festival, all Yulins hotels are completely full."

Lin has opened a dog meat delivery service because "large numbers of people are placing orders online," she added.

Even dog lovers in Yulin say that protest tactics have backfired.

"I used to think our enemy was the dog meat lovers," said the operator of a new dog shelter, who asked not to be named. "Now I see our enemy is the activists from outside."

He fiercely opposes the dog trade and has adopted a retriever rescued from a market, but believes that international protests are "sabotage" that drive people to ferociously defend their custom.

- Changing tactics -

Local patriotism and cultural pride make outsiders bad messengers for change, the shelter operator said.

Foreigners often encounter hostility in Yulin, with butchers known to knock cameras out of visitors' hands.

"When foreigners come to China and say China has this or that problem, people get disgusted with you and won't listen," he said.

"Because of media hype, more and more dog meat is eaten."

To reduce the number of slaughtered dogs, the shelter operator has built a pet centre to demonstrate that the animals can produce more income as consumers of clothing and pet paraphernalia than as meat.

"Our local centre is purely commercial," he said. "Our goal is not to abolish all eating of dog meat, but to give this city an antibody, to resist... this virus."

Andrea Gung, the Taiwanese-American founder of California-based Duo Duo, a group that organised a 2.5 million-signature petition against the festival, says that the fury she has encountered forced her to change approach.

"Everyone hated us," she said of last years festival, noting that dog-lovers receive such animosity in Yulin that they no longer identify as activists.

Now her group is sponsoring animal welfare programmes in schools, hoping to turn the next generation against dog eating by making it "uncool".

"We want to come up with some slogan like, 'Cute girls dont date dog eaters,'" she said, adding that most afficionados in Yulin are men, who believe the meat increases virility.

- Daily trade -

China has no laws to protect non-endangered species.

Although the protests focus on Yulin's festival, canines are butchered and eaten year-round in many places in southern China without attracting international outrage.

In Yulin, a humid city pockmarked by empty factory lots, sidewalk vendors slice meat from dog carcasses on hooks and feed them to men around low tables crowded with beer.

City markets have sections dedicated to selling the meat and restaurant adverts show images of well-groomed retrievers.

The Humane Society International (HSI) has sent researchers to tour slaughterhouses and estimates that an average of 300 dogs are killed in the city daily.

This is despite the fact that pet ownership has grown rapidly in China over the past decade, with almost 30 million households now owning a dog, according to research group Euromonitor.

Washington, DC-based HSI protested at Yulin's Beijing office Friday and mailed an 11 million-signature petition to President Xi Jinping.

The #StopYulin campaign has become one of HSI's "biggest" campaigns now, the group's China specialist Peter Li said.

But the idea that the protests might drive a backlash in Yulin and fuel dog consumption, he said, was "hugely exaggerated".

"A backlash for the short term, yes. But in the long term, I don't worry."

Humane Society International activist Peter Li holds a protest banner near the Yulin government office in Beijing on June 10, 2016 Greg Baker (AFP)

Yulin, in southern China's Guangxi province holds an annual festival devoted to eating dog Johannes Eisele (AFP/File)
'Several dead' as army clashes with rebels in DR Congo

Several people were killed in clashes between the army and former rebels at a military base in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said.

Tension had been mounting for days at the military base in Kamina, in the southeast, where more than 2,000 former rebels from various groups are stationed as part of a government disarmament programme.

It was unclear how many had died in the bloody clashes, with one rebel source putting the number of dead at around 10 while an army source said at least 20 people had been killed.

After the defeat of M23 in 2013, the Democratic Republic of Congo government launched a programme to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate more than 12,000 former rebels Isaac Kasamani (AFP/File)

Regional governor Celestin Mbuyu said one lieutenant from the Congolese army was among the dead, "killed with a machete by rebels... who were headed to the city centre to loot it".

More than 2,300 former rebels are stationed in the Kamina base, including members of the ethnic-based Mai-Mai militia and the M23 movement.

After the defeat of M23 in 2013, the government launched a programme to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate -- known as DDR3 -- more than 12,000 former rebels.

But the programme, the third of its kind since the end of the Second Congo War in 2003, has been hit by delays and funding problems.

Kamina has previously faced a mutiny from the disgruntled former rebels, who have complained about the living standards on the base.
Dozens of pilot whales stranded in Indonesia, eight dead

Eight pilot whales have died after a mass stranding on the coast of Indonesia's main island of Java that sparked a major rescue operation, an official said Thursday.

Thirty-two of the short-finned pilot whales came ashore during high tide early Wednesday in Probolinggo, East Java province.

"At first there were just one or two whales swimming near the shore, and the nature of whales is that if they are sick they will come near the shore," Dedy Isfandi, the head of the local maritime and fisheries office, told AFP.

Indonesian environmental activists try to help a group of short-finned pilot whales that became stranded during a high tide in Probolinggo, East Java province on June 16, 2016 Juni Kriswanto (AFP)

"But whales have such high social interaction -- when one fell ill, they approach the sick one to swim back to sea... when the tide fell all of them were trapped," Isfandi added.

Hundreds of local fishermen and government officials tried to take them back out to sea overnight, but in the morning eight whales had returned to shore and died, Isfandi said.

About 23 others were already out at sea while one disoriented whale was accompanied by some rescuers to make sure it did not return to shore.

Rescuers used tarps to wrap around the beached sea mammals and pull them out to sea while swimmers plunged into the water to drive others out of the area.

Vets and scientists conducted autopsies on the dead whales to find out why they were stranded, but fishery officials said it could be due to turbulent waters in the Indian Ocean or they had eaten something poisonous.

Over the last decade or so, whale sharks and orcas were also found stranded in the area, Isfandi said.

Conservation group International Union for Conservation of Nature said there was insufficient data to classify the risk of extinction of short-finned pilot whales, which are found in warm temperate to tropical waters.
Kidnapper of Hong Kong heiress jailed for 12 years

A member of a kidnap gang that abducted a Hong Kong heiress for a multi-million-dollar ransom was jailed for 12 years Thursday after what the judge described as a "terrible ordeal" for the victim.

Queenie Rosita Law, granddaughter of late textiles tycoon Law Ting-pong, who founded the Bossini clothing chain, was abducted from her house in Hong Kong in April last year.

The 29-year-old was held in a mountain cave before family members paid a ransom of HK$28 million (USD$3.61 million) for her to be released three days later.

A member of a kidnap gang that abducted a Hong Kong heiress for a multi-million-dollar ransom has been jailed for 12 years after what the judge described as a "terrible ordeal" for the victim Philippe Lopez (AFP/File)

Zheng Xingwang, 30, was the only suspect on trial in Hong Kong and pleaded guilty to one count of forcibly taking or detaining a person with an intent to procure a ransom.

Eight other men have appeared in court in the mainland, where they have also pleaded guilty and are awaiting a verdict.

"The offence of kidnapping is a wicked and heinous crime," said judge Kevin Zervos as he sentenced Zheng at the city's High Court.

Law and her boyfriend were asleep at her house in the quiet coastal area of Clearwater Bay when a gang of six mainland Chinese men raided the house, tied them up and put adhesive tape over their mouths, the court heard.

They stole about HK$3 million worth of jewellery and cash from two safes, after forcing Law to give them the combinations.

They then tied her to one of the gang members and she was carried on foot to a hillside cave one-and-a-half hours away while her boyfriend was told to notify her father of the ransom demand.

Zheng provided logistical support and supplies, the court heard.

His lawyer had argued that he played a different role from other members of the gang and was not involved in the robbery at Law's home at the time of her abduction.

"I see no justification to distinguish his role from the others as he clearly came to Hong Kong with them with the sole purpose of carrying out this kidnapping," Zervos said.

His thumb prints were found on one of the brown envelopes carrying the ransom money.

Throughout the ordeal Law had feared for her life, even though she was not physically harmed, Zervos said.

"When she was found by two police officers, she was trembling with fear," Zervos added.

"Queenie went through a harrowing experience."

Wearing a dark suit in court Zheng, who is from Guizhou and married with a two year-old daughter, remained expressionless as he received his sentence through translators.

Zheng said in a letter to the court that he felt "remorseful" and apologised to Law's family.

He was on trial in Hong Kong as he was caught in the city -- the other members of the gang were arrested in the mainland.

Police in Hong Kong had embarked on a massive operation to hunt down the suspected kidnappers, deploying hundreds of heavily armed officers, helicopters and marine vessels, and setting up roadblocks.

Almost all of the money has been recovered, including some buried on hillsides near the cave where she was taken.

A tent was set up in the cave and Law was fed McDonald's, rice boxes and bread, the court heard.

The judge described it as a case of premeditated kidnapping which was "meticulously planned and executed".
Trump's long, combative war with the press

Donald Trump has had tense ties with reporters since launching his presidential campaign one year ago Thursday, but he took it a dramatic step further this week by banning The Washington Post from his events.

The presumptive Republican nominee's campaign has banned at least a dozen news organizations, a disturbing trend that media groups say highlights his disdain for free speech enshrined in the US Constitution's First Amendment.

Trump assails newspapers that anger him as "failing" enterprises that are "pure scum."

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign has banned at least a dozen news organizations, a disturbing trend that media groups say highlights his disdain for free speech Timothy A. Clary (AFP/File)

At rallies during primary season, he lashed out at journalists as "dishonest" and "sleaze." Some were threatened by Trump supporters, others manhandled by security personnel or Trump staff.

When a reporter crosses an invisible line, he yanks their credentials.

"If people don't cover me fairly, or if they actually make things up, I don't know why anybody should be allowed" into his events, Trump told The New York Times, which wrote that the White House hopeful "casts himself as punisher in chief."

Trump's ban on the Post apparently stemmed from his disapproval of its story -- reported after the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida by a radicalized gunman -- stating that Trump seemed to suggest that President Barack Obama sympathized with terrorists.

The action against the award-winning newspaper could be considered just the latest in a string of vengeful responses by a thin-skinned candidate, but it was met with incredulity and alarm by some.

- Beyond Nixonian? -

"Even Saddam Hussein didn't revoke the @washingtonpost press credentials," tweeted former national editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who covered the Iraq war for the newspaper.

Others noted how president Richard Nixon never barred the paper from the White House, even at the lowest points of his presidency after the Post historically broke the story about the 1970s Watergate scandal.

Trump himself sounded gleeful about the ban during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on Tuesday.

"I love it! We just took the press credentials away from the dishonest Washington Post," he boomed, to cheers and laughter.

Trump has routinely assailed news outlets in his Twitter posts, ranting about their liberal bias and poor editorial decisions.

"I predict that dying @UnionLeader newspaper, which has been run into the ground by publisher "Stinky" Joe McQuaid, will be dead in 2 years!" he wrote in December, speaking of the New Hampshire paper.

He denied credentials to the Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper, after its editorial board urged him to quit the race.

In one of the most notable clashes, Trump had Jorge Ramos of Univision, the best-known Hispanic reporter in the United States, ejected from a press event last year when Ramos repeatedly questioned his immigration policies.

"Go back to Univision," Trump seethed.

Ramos, who has interviewed several US presidents and Latin American leaders, was eventually allowed back inside. But the incident highlighted Trump's penchant to tangle with journalists he dislikes.

Politico has repeatedly incurred Trump's wrath. It said its reporter Ben Schreckinger was prevented from entering a Trump press conference in March and "escorted off of the property" even after he was granted campaign credentials.

Similar bans have been placed on reporters from Buzzfeed, the Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Gawker, Huffington Post, Mother Jones and others.

"If the goal is to squelch independent journalism about Trump it certainly won't work," Politico editor Susan Glasser said in a statement.

The Standing Committee of Correspondents who cover Congress said Trump was engaging in "troubling pattern" by punishing journalists who seek to hold public officials and candidates like him accountable.

"Candidates should respond to such scrutiny with facts and arguments, not by banning the messenger," the committee said.

Post opinion writer Dana Milbank suggested a more direct approach by the media.

"There is, happily, a just and appropriate response to Trump's blacklist: a Trump blackout," he wrote on the Post's website, urging an end to wall-to-wall live coverage of Trump rallies and Trump call-ins to television shows.

"For those journalists and media executives who still don't share the view of Post Executive Editor Martin Baron that Trump's action 'is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press,' it won't be long before Trump comes for you, too," Milbank added.

Donald Trump's ban on the Washington Post apparently stemmed from his disapproval of its story stating Trump seemed to suggest President Barack Obama sympathized with terrorists Timothy A. Clary (AFP/File)
S. Korea to resume lifting of sunken Sewol ferry next week

South Korea said Thursday it would resume salvage operations on the Sewol ferry next week, but underlined the enormous challenges posed by raising the vessel that sank in 2014 with massive loss of life.

The Sewol was carrying 476 people when it went down off the southwestern island of Jindo, leaving 304 -- mostly school children -- dead in one of the country's worst maritime disasters.

Nine bodies still unaccounted for are believed to remain trapped inside the sunken ship, and raising it intact was a key demand of the victims' families.

A man prays in front of portraits of the victims of South Korea's Sewol ferry disaster at a memorial altar in Gwanghwamun Square where relatives of the victims are camped out in Seoul on June 16, 2016 Jung Yeon-Je (AFP)

The 6,825-tonne ferry lies more than 40 metres (130 feet) below the surface and the process of actually lifting it off the seabed began on Sunday -- only to be postponed a day later due to adverse weather conditions.

The bow was raised about five meters but part of the deck was damaged by underwater wires in the rough conditions.

"The operations will resume around June 24 when the currents slow," the ministry said in a statement.

The salvage effort is expected to cost around $72 million and is being led by a Chinese consortium.

The initial schedule envisaged bringing the ferry to the surface by late July, but the ministry said Thursday that the more likely timeline was now August or even later -- depending on conditions during the July monsoon season.

"The Sewol salvage project is a work against nature, as it is being staged in an area known for strong currents," said Kim Hyun-Tae, a senior maritime ministry official, told reporters.

The effort to raise the vessel in one piece, without dismantling it first, was "unprecedented," Kim said.

Investigations into the Sewol disaster concluded it was largely a man-made tragedy -- the cumulative result of an illegal redesign, an overloaded cargo bay, inexperienced crew and a questionable relationship between the ship operators and state regulators.

Captain Lee Jun-Seok was sentenced to life in prison for "murder through wilful negligence" and sentences ranging from two to 12 years were handed down to 14 other crew members.
Bangladesh arrests Islamist militant over publisher attack

An Islamist militant suspected of attacking a publisher last year has been arrested, Bangladesh police said Thursday, in what they described as an important breakthrough in their investigations into a spate of horrific attacks.

Suman Hossain Patowari, 20, was arrested in Dhaka late Wednesday over a brutal attack that wounded publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul and two others at his office in the capital in October.

The arrest comes amid a nationwide police anti-militant crackdown that has seen more than 11,000 people, including 176 suspected Islamist militants, detained since Friday.

Bangladesh police in Dhaka on June 16, 2016 escort Islamist militant Suman Hossain Patowari (C) after his arrest in connection with an attack on a publisher Str (AFP)

Police said Patowari belonged to banned Bangladesh militant outfit, Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT).

"He admitted he himself hacked publisher Tutul three times during the attack," said Monirul Islam, who leads the police's counter-terrorism unit.

Islam told reporters that the arrest of Patowari represented "an important breakthrough" in smashing the leadership of the ABT, a group suspected of carrying out several attacks.

Three assailants wielding machetes and meat cleavers attacked Tutul, together with a secular blogger and a poet, at his publishing firm in the capital, leaving them in a pool of blood.

Tutul had published books by a controversial Bangladeshi-American atheist writer Avijit Roy, who was murdered outside a book fair earlier in the year.

On the same day Tutul was attacked, another secular publisher was slaughtered at his office near Dhaka University.

A group named Ansar al-Islam, which claims to be a Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), claimed responsibility for both attacks.

However in a new development, police said Thursday that ABT and Ansar al-Islam were the same outfit.

"Ansar al-Islam and Ansarullah Bangla Team are the same people," Dhaka police spokesman Masudur Rahman told AFP.

Moreover, officers said that neither ABT nor Ansar al-Islam had any proven link to the international jihadist network Al-Qaeda.

Bangladesh is reeling from a wave of killings of religious minorities and secular and liberal activists that have spiked in recent weeks.

On Wednesday a Hindu lecturer was left seriously wounded after being attacked in a southern district.

Earlier this month, an elderly Hindu priest was found nearly decapitated in a rice field, a Hindu monastery worker was hacked to death and a Christian grocer was murdered near a church.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has vowed to catch "each and every killer" as her government comes under mounting international pressure to end the attacks.

Nearly 50 people have been murdered over the past three years.

The Islamic State group and AQIS have claimed responsibility for many of the murders. But the police and the government say international jihadist groups have no presence in the country.

Bangladeshi activists in Dhaka hold photos of some of those who have been killed in a spate of brutal attacks by unidentified assassins in the last few years Str (AFP/File)
UAE says 'war over' for its troops in Yemen

The United Arab Emirates has said the "war is over" for its troops in Yemen after a nearly 15-month intervention as part of a Saudi-led coalition that cost the lives of around 80 Emirati soldiers.

The announcement by a government minister, which the crown prince of the UAE's richest emirate Abu Dhabi then posted on his official Twitter account, came with large swathes of the country, including the capital Sanaa, still in the hands of Iran-backed Shiite Huthi rebels.

"Our standpoint today is clear -- war is over for our troops, we're monitoring political arrangements (and) empowering Yemenis in liberated areas," said state minister for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash.

A UAE military convoy returns from Yemen in November, as part of a nearly 15-month intervention aiding the Saudi-led coalition - (WAM/AFP/File)

His comments came in a speech late on Wednesday to foreign ambassadors and senior Emirati officials, including Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

Sheikh Mohammed is also deputy supreme commander of the UAE armed forces.

But Gargash appeared to clarify that his country's forces were still committed until the coalition decides to end combat operations altogether.

"Our armed forces ... have performed their combat duty bravely and professionally. This role continues, along with sisterly (kingdom of) Saudi Arabia, until the coalition announces an end to the war," he wrote in a tweet posted late Thursday.

The UAE was a mainstay of the Saudi-led coalition which intervened in Yemen in March 2015 as the Huthi rebels threatened to overrun the whole country, prompting President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi to flee into exile.

The coalition succeeded in pushing the rebels out of southern cities, where Hadi's government has set up base, but the rebels remain in control of most of the central and northern highlands as well as the Red Sea coast.

Eight weeks of UN-brokered peace talks in Kuwait have made no major breakthrough in the face of deep mistrust between the warring parties.

It was the first time in the UAE's history that it had deployed ground troops beyond its borders.

In March, UAE special forces also played a major role in driving Al-Qaeda out of the southeastern provincial capital of Mukalla, which it had held for a year.

The jihadists had taken advantage of the conflict between Hadi loyalists and the rebels to seize several cities in the south and southeast.

The intervention cost the lives of UAE air crews as well as ground troops.

In March, a Mirage jet crashed in Yemen killing both its crew. And this week alone, two UAE helicopters crashed with the loss of their four crew.
Taiwan lawmakers urge Formosa probe over Vietnam fish deaths

Taiwanese lawmakers urged the government Thursday to investigate local conglomerate Formosa's possible role in mass fish deaths in Vietnam, as activists said industrial pollution from its multi-billion dollar steel plant could have caused the environmental disaster.

If Formosa is behind the tonnes of dead fish that began washing up along Vietnam's central coast two months ago, it could jeopardise new President Tsai Ing-wen's signature policy of promoting investment in Southeast Asia in a bid to reduce Taiwan's economic reliance on China, lawmakers said.

"There will be no end of trouble", for the so-called Southbound Policy if Tsai's new government doesn't carefully address widespread concern among the Vietnamese public over the incident, said senior lawmaker Su Chih-feng of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

A villager shows dead fish he collected on a beach in Phu Loc district, in the central province of Thua Thien Hue in April

The fish deaths have devastated local fishermen and caused public anger in communist Vietnam, including rare public protests which were violently broken up by authorities, who arrested scores of activists.

Vietnam's state-run media initially pointed the finger of blame at Formosa's steel plant in central Ha Tinh province, but has since back-peddled.

The authoritarian communist government has carried out tests but not yet announced an official verdict on the causes of the fish deaths, prompting many activists to allege a cover up.

- Poor track record -

Formosa has a poor track record of environmental scandals spanning the globe, from Texas to Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

It has also been accused of causing pollution in Taiwan, including a petrochemical complex in southern Yunlin where Su used to be county chief.

Authorities in Taiwan need to step in and ensure the company meets "international environmental, human rights and labour standards", said Chang Yu-yin, chief of the Environmental Jurists Association, a Taiwanese organisation.

Peter Nguyen, a Taiwan-based Vietnamese priest, said Tsai's government must ensure Formosa -- if proven responsible -- clean up the environmental disaster and fully compensate victims.

"Vietnam wants foreign investment but it should be win-win," he said.

"If our environment and our people suffer, it will pose major challenges and problems" for future Taiwanese investments in Vietnam, he added.

Taiwan and Vietnam do not have formal diplomatic relations but maintain close trade ties. Around 250,000 Vietnamese live in Taiwan, either because of work or due to marriage.

David Wang of Taiwan's department of investment services, said the island had offered to assist the Vietnamese government's own probe into the fish deaths but the help was declined.

Hanoi will release the results of its probe -- conducted with international experts -- by the end of June, he added.

Formosa fanned the flames of suspicion in April when one of its employees in Vietnam told state media the country had to "choose whether to catch fish and shrimp or to build a state-of-the-art steel mill".

The employee was subsequently removed from his post and apologised for his remarks.

"I couldn't catch a fish since March," 29-year-old Vietnamese fisherman Le Guang Dung told AFP, adding he'd been forced to move to Taiwan to find work.
Israel's new hardline defence minister to visit US

Israel's new Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman is to visit the United States this weekend for talks with his US counterpart, his office said Thursday, after Washington raised concerns over the hardliner's appointment.

Lieberman's trip will be his first abroad since being sworn in on May 30, though he is familiar to US officials from an earlier stint as foreign minister.

It comes with the United States and Israel in the process of negotiating a new 10-year defence aid pact to replace the current one, which expires in 2018 and grants the Jewish state more than $3 billion per year.

Hardliner Avigdor Lieberman was sworn in as Israel's new Defence Minister last month Abir Sultan (Pool/AFP/File)

Lieberman leaves on Saturday and is set to meet US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter on Monday.

He will also attend a ceremony in Dallas next Wednesday marking the development of US defence firm Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet, which Israel is purchasing, and tour a factory of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

Israel is to take delivery of its first two F-35s in December.

Following Lieberman's nomination, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner, in a rare comment on Israeli internal politics, said the Jewish state's new ruling coalition raised "legitimate questions" over Israel's commitment to a two-state solution in its conflict with the Palestinians.

Lieberman's appointment tilted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, already seen as among the most right wing in Israeli history, even further to the right.

He has in the past spoken of harsh measures against Palestinian "terrorists".

Both Netanyahu and Lieberman have however sought to allay concerns over the appointment, saying they are committed to peace and the two-state solution.
Australian cattle 'sledgehammered' in Vietnam abattoirs

Vietnamese abattoir workers have been filmed using sledgehammers to bludgeon Australian cattle, activists said Thursday, prompting some exporters to stop supplying livestock to some slaughterhouses in the southeast Asian nation.

Undercover investigators working for Animals Australia filmed footage last month of one worker clubbing a cow over the head five times with a sledgehammer before it fell to the ground beside the bodies of two other cows.

The man then hit it another four times before it finally died.

Animals Australia filmed a Vietnamese abattoir worker using a sledgehammer to bludgeon Australian cattle Handout (Animals Australia/AFP/File)

The activist group said it visited 13 slaughterhouses in North and Central Vietnam, home to a multimillion dollar industry and one of Australia's biggest live cattle export markets, in what it said was "their most dangerous operation ever".

"Only two met Australian requirements for approved abattoirs," campaign director Lyn White told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which aired the footage on national television Thursday.

"I thought I'd seen it all, and I haven't," she said.

Animals Australia said ear tags were removed from cattle so they could not be linked back to exporters and that the killings took place in "filthy, unhygienic conditions".

It is the second time the group has exposed alleged abuses in Vietnamese abattoirs, claiming thousands of Australian cattle have been slaughtered in facilities not approved by Canberra, as required by export controls.

White said Animal Australia chose not to publicly release video it shot last year, but instead supplied it to the Australian Livestock Exporters Council (ALEC).

She claims the industry body promised a response within six weeks, but nothing happened which was why she went public.

ALEC chairman Simon Crean said the procedures that were filmed were "inexcusable".

"No animal should have to go through the fear or the pain," Crean told broadcaster ABC. "We've determined that... we should stop the supply of animals to all of the facilities that are under investigation."

ALEC added in a statement it had suspended abattoirs in Vietnam's Bai Do region and a feedlot in Haiphong from receiving Australian livestock.

It said it would also review management and oversight of cattle control and traceability to determine how some could end up in non-approved facilities.

The Department of Agriculture and Water Resources ordered a probe and said the animals depicted in the footage were likely exported from the nation.

"Exporters were immediately informed of the complaint so that urgent action could be taken to protect the welfare of cattle currently in Vietnam," it said in a statement.

Australia's live cattle export trade has been under the spotlight before, notably in 2013 when shipments to Egypt were suspended for months after abattoir footage showed "horrific" mistreatment of cows.

Trade to Indonesia was also temporary halted in 2011 on cruelty concerns.

Overall, the government estimates the live export trade is worth about US$800 million a year to Australia and employs thousands of people.
China blamed for ASEAN U-turn on South China Sea

Chinese pressure was blamed Thursday for a stunning diplomatic U-turn by Southeast Asian Nations that saw them retract a statement sounding alarm over Beijing's island building in the South China Sea.

The chaotic events at the end of a meeting of foreign ministers from China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Tuesday have led to allegations of bullying by Beijing.

The document, released by ASEAN member Malaysia and described as a joint statement from the bloc, warned developments in the hotly contested South China Sea could "undermine peace, security and stability".

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea -- home to some of the world's most important shipping routes Greg Baker (AFP)

The statement specified "land reclamation" as a source of tension, a clear reference to China's massive island building activities where it is trying to cement a claim to almost the whole sea.

But just hours later, Malaysia said the grouping was retracting the statement for "urgent amendments", but offered no reason. Various participants have since given conflicting explanations over what happened.

An ASEAN diplomat who was present at the meeting in the Chinese city of Kunming told AFP that China had put the screws on some Southeast Asian nations to get them to withdraw their support.

"The usual factor, pressure from China," said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, when asked why unity crumbled.

"I suspect the two countries that opposed the statement were Cambodia and Laos."

- 'Crude, arrogant' -

Singapore's Straits Times newspaper also reported on Thursday that the joint statement was "scuttled by the Chinese, who lobbied its friends in the grouping to block" it.

"Malaysia releasing it was a manifestation of the extreme frustration of the original five ASEAN members plus Vietnam at the particularly crude and arrogant behaviour of the Chinese," the Straits Times reported an ASEAN official as saying.

The Philippines also said Thursday that there had originally been unanimous support within ASEAN for the strongly worded statement.

"By the time the meeting ended, there was an agreement among ASEAN foreign ministers. They agreed on the text of the ASEAN statement and they agreed it would be released," Philippine foreign affairs spokesman Charles Jose told reporters in Manila.

Jose said the statement was then retracted after the meeting had ended and most foreign ministers, including the Philippines' Jose Rene Almendras, had left the venue to start returning home.

Jose would not be drawn on whether Chinese lobbying was to blame, but insisted Malaysia's initial release had not been in error.

Asked why Malaysia gave the statement to the media, Jose said: "That was the point where there was consensus among ASEAN to have that statement. So by the time it was released, there was agreement."

Indonesia said on Wednesday the release -- titled "Media statement by the ASEAN foreign ministers" -- was issued by mistake, and that it was only meant to be a "media guideline".

China has responded to the controversy by insisting there had not been unanimous support for the original statement

"It is clear that if ASEAN wants to issue an official statement, such statement will be based on consensus," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Wednesday.

- ASEAN disunity -

The events have been widely seen as another example of ASEAN's inability to present a united front toward China as it dramatically expands its presence in the waterway.

China claims nearly all of the sea -- home to some of the world's most important shipping routes and of vast military importance.

ASEAN members the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as Taiwan, have competing claims to parts of the sea.

While the Philippines and Vietnam have been particularly critical, Laos and Cambodia have been generally regarded as preferring to side with their giant neighbour and benefactor.

In 2012, ASEAN foreign ministers failed to release a joint statement for the first time at the end of their annual gathering, with the Philippines blaming event host Cambodia for blocking criticism of China.

Laos this year has the rotating presidency of ASEAN, and will host a series of meetings over the coming months in which the South China Sea will inevitably be a hot talking point.

Disputed Spratly Islands Adrian Leung (AFP)

Chinese warships conduct naval exercises near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea in May 2016
Nigeria's Buhari pushes back planned return from London

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari will stay in London for several more days despite being expected back in the country after health checks, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said Thursday.

"The president will be back on Sunday. I spoke with him yesterday (Wednesday) evening and I think it is just the best that he takes the weekend off," Osinbajo told reporters in Abuja.

Buhari, 73, left Nigeria on June 6 for tests on what the presidency described as a "persistent ear infection" that forced him to pull out of a series of engagements. He had been due back on Thursday.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari Dan Kitwood (Pool/AFP/File)

The presidency has said the recommendation to see an ear, nose and throat specialist in the British capital was "purely as a precaution".

Osinbajo said Buhari was "in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning", adding: "Mr President is in good condition, he is fine, he is very well."

The Nigerian presidency has historically reticent about disclosing health matters of the head of state and rumours have swirled about the seriousness of Buhari's condition.
China axes Taiwanese children's choir trip

China has axed a visit by a popular Taiwanese children's choir after they sang the national anthem at the inauguration of the island's new president, as ties between the rivals grow increasingly frosty.

The choir is the latest casualty since Beijing-sceptic Tsai Ing-wen won the presidency in January, bringing an end to an eight-year rapprochement with China.

Her inauguration in May centred around Taiwan's unique history and culture -- a theme likely to have irked Beijing which still sees the self-ruling island as part of its territory.

The aboriginal Puzangalan Choir sings the national anthem during Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen's inauguration ceremony in Taipei on May 20, 2016 Sam Yeh (AFP/File)

The aboriginal Puzangalan Choir made a name for itself island-wide after singing a moving rendition of the national anthem on stage during the celebrations.

But Chinese authorities seem to have been less impressed.

Choir organisers say city officials have cancelled their performance at a children's choral festival in Zhongshan, in the southern province of Guangdong, due to take place in July.

"The invitation from the mainland is gone," said a post on the choir's Facebook page.

"The kids can hardly understand how this happened."

Choir executive Tsai Yi-fang confirmed the concert had been cancelled.

"This has badly hurt our children," he told AFP.

The choir had been hoping to raise funds through the Guangdong performance to travel to a singing competition in Hungary in August.

President Tsai pledged Tw$500,000 ($15,430) to their cause after learning of the cancellation.

"This is the voice of Taiwan. Together, we will let the children sing to the whole world," she said in a statement on her Facebook page.

Local media reported choir leaders as saying they had been told by city officials that the cancellation was due to political "sensitivities".

Comments posted on the choir's Facebook page pledged help and support.

"Every one of us on the island who think he or she is Taiwanese would feel proud of you. You represent the roots of Taiwan culture," said one post.

"The more the Chinese on the other side suppress, the more it shows that you have been doing the right thing," said another.

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have banned musical performers from Taiwan for political reasons.

Taiwan's pop diva A-Mei was blacklisted by China for several years after she sang the island's national anthem at the 2000 inauguration of then-president Chen Shui-bian, known for promoting the island's independence.

Taiwan is a fully fledged democracy but has never formally declared independence since splitting from the mainland in 1949 after a civil war.

Tensions eased markedly under Tsai's Beijing-friendly predecessor Ma Ying-jeou.

But warming ties left voters increasingly wary that Beijing was seeking to erode Taiwan's sovereignty, leading to a landslide victory for Tsai.
Barrel bombs in Syria's Aleppo threaten new truce

Barrel bombs and air strikes hit Syria's Aleppo on Thursday hours after a temporary truce announced by regime ally Russia came into effect in the northern war-torn city.

An AFP reporter said regime helicopters dropped the crude explosive devices on the city's rebel areas after residents had headed to markets for their first morning shopping in weeks.

In the evening air strikes hit the eastern part of the city controlled by the rebels, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that the insurgents retaliated by firing rockets into the regime-held west.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year Syrian conflict have stalled Thaer Mohammed (AFP/File)

At least four civilians were killed in the fresh violence, three on the eastern side of Aleppo and one in the west, added the Britain-based monitor.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in a war that has killed more than 280,000 people, and there is deep scepticism that the latest halt to fighting in the battered city will last.

The two-day truce came hours after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Moscow that Washington's patience was running out over breaches of a nationwide ceasefire.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and a February countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.

"There is no progress in the political process," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, referring to Syria.

He accused Washington -- which broadly supports the opposition -- of being "unable or unwilling to put pressure on its allies in the region".

Nevertheless, direct contact between Russia and the United States about Syria have taken place "without any hysteria", he added.

There have been repeated violations of the February 27 truce in Aleppo, with rebels pounding regime-controlled neighbourhoods with rocket and artillery fire and the regime hitting rebel areas with air strikes.

- 'Artificial and fruitless' -

The new ceasefire was announced by Moscow late Wednesday in a bid to halt violence in the city, split since 2012 between a regime-held west and a rebel-controlled east.

"On Russia's initiative, a 'regime of silence' has been introduced in Aleppo for 48 hours from 00:01 16 June (2101 GMT Wednesday) with the goal of lowering the level of armed violence and stabilising the situation," Russia's defence ministry said.

A source close to the regime said the truce had been decided "in connivance" with Washington.

Residents in Aleppo's rebel-held east had headed out to the markets to buy meat and vegetables on Thursday morning, the AFP correspondent said.

After weeks of air strikes, it was the first time they had shopped in the morning since the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

A Syria analyst, Karim Bitar, described the latest Aleppo truce as a "ceasefire of convenience, which is not linked to a real political process".

"Syrians are increasingly sceptical about these brief ceasefires, which seem to have become as artificial and fruitless and the negotiation sessions -- which each time revive hopes then end in bitter disappointment."

- 'Rest for the killers' -

The Observatory, which relies on sources inside Syria to gather information on the war, agreed.

"This temporary truce of a few hours doesn't aim to end the bloodshed, but to give some rest to the killers -- those who massacre the people of Aleppo and Syria -- before they resume their crimes," it said in a statement.

A US-led coalition has been bombing the Islamic State group -- which is not included in the February ceasefire -- since 2014.

CIA chief John Brennan said on Thursday that IS has suffered major losses as a result, but that it retains the ability to conduct attacks around the world.

UN-backed Syria peace talks in Geneva came to a deadlock in April after the opposition walked out over increasing violence and lack of aid access to besieged areas.

The United Nations says nearly 600,000 Syrians live in besieged areas, most surrounded by government forces.

An aid convoy was ready to go to one of these areas in the central province of Homs and was expected to ferry in desperately needed aid there Thursday, the UN said.

"We are ready loaded with a large convoy to go to the besieged town of Al-Waer," said Jan Egeland, who heads a UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria.

If the convoy entered, it would be of "great significance", he said, adding the rebel-held area had been "without supplies for more than three months."

"People have died in Al-Waer because of lack of humanitarian supplies of late," he said.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in Syria's five-year war Karam al-Masri (AFP/File)

US Secretary of State John Kerry has told Moscow that Washington's patience is running out over breaches of a nationwide truce in Syria Saul Loeb (Pool/AFP/File)
A Hong Kong bookseller known for selling titles critical of Beijing told Thursday how he was blindfolded, kept in a cell and interrogated by Chinese authorities after going missing eight months ago.

Lam Wing-kee is one of five booksellers who published salacious titles about leading Chinese politicians and disappeared at the end of last year in a case that heightened fears Beijing was tightening its grip on Hong Kong.

He said that although he was not physically harmed, he had suffered mentally in detention and was unable to contact a lawyer or his family. He was kept in confinement, unable to walk outside and repeatedly interrogated.

Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee said he was handcuffed and blindfolded for selling books critical of the government leading to fears that Beijing was tightening its restrictive grip on the former British colony

The booksellers' case has sparked international condemnation.

Lam is the only bookseller to have spoken openly and said the case had 'violated the rights of Hong Kong people'.

He described how a confession he gave to Chinese state television about trading banned books was forced.

'I acted in front of the camera, I needed to. There was a director. I had to recite the script,' he said.

'I was in fear. I felt helpless. I didn't know what they would do to me.'

He was supposed to return to the mainland Thursday after being released to Hong Kong on bail Tuesday, he told reporters.

Five booksellers who published salacious titles about leading Chinese politicians disappeared last year

Lam was arrested in October when he crossed the border from Hong Kong into mainland China

However, he decided not to go back and instead to speak out about his case after learning of the support the booksellers had received from the Hong Kong public.

Lam said he had spent two sleepless nights making the decision to speak.

'If I don't speak up Hong Kong will be hopeless. It's not just a personal matter,' he said.

'I dare not go back.'

He added that while in custody he had been told that his case was being dealt with by a 'special unit' which he believed was not part of the ordinary police or military.

The condition of his bail was to bring back a list of 600 customers, the majority of them from the mainland, who had received books from the Causeway Bay Bookstore that he managed.

Lam said he did not want to comply for fear that it would be seen as selling out the readers.

He struggled to contain his emotions as he gave a detailed description of his detention and how he was forced to sign a document giving up his right to a lawyer or to speak to his family.

Lam said he was arrested after crossing the border from Hong Kong into the southern mainland Chinese city of Shenzhen in October to see his girlfriend, but was not told why.

He was blindfolded and taken by train to the city of Ningbo, where he was kept in a 200-square-feet room for five months under guard. He was then moved to an apartment.

It was only some time after he was first detained that he was told his detention was related to bringing banned books into the mainland.

All but one of the booksellers have been allowed to return to Hong Kong on bail but have swiftly gone back over the border, apart from Lam.

The case of bookseller Lee Bo caused the greatest outcry as he was the only one to disappear from Hong Kong, leading to accusations that mainland law enforcement agents were operating illegally in the city.

Lee has insisted he is a free man just helping the authorities with their investigation.

But Lam said Lee had told him he had been brought to the mainland against his will.

The men all worked for the Mighty Current publishing house, which produced books about political intrigue and love affairs at the highest levels of Chinese politics.
10 dead as pinned-down IS steps up Libya suicide bombings

Pinned down in the centre of the coastal city of Sirte, Islamic State group jihadists Thursday stepped up suicide bomb attacks on forces of Libya's unity government who suffered 10 dead.

The focus of IS counter-attacks has been aimed at retaking Sirte's port and western sectors of the city, the hometown of late dictator Moamer Kadhafi, military sources said.

Jihadist groups took root in Libya in late 2014, taking advantage of the chaos and power struggles that followed the NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed Kadhafi in 2011.

Forces loyal to Libya's UN-backed unity government fire from a tank in Sirte's centre as they advance to recapture the city from the Islamic State group on June 10, 2016 Mahmud Turkia (AFP/File)

"A suicide attack using a booby-trapped car targeted the Abu Grein checkpoint," the forces of the Government of National Accord said in a statement sent to AFP.

IS claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings against pro-GNA forces on Thursday, without mentioning Abu Grein.

In messages distributed online, it said a Tunisian and an Egyptian had detonated car bombs targeting "apostate" forces west of Sirte, US-based monitor SITE Intelligence said.

It was unclear if these were the same attacks the GNA forces announced on Thursday morning, since they have not specified the location of the two attacks.

Forces allied to the GNA captured the town of Abu Grein on May 17 as they advanced on Sirte, the jihadists' stronghold in Libya, 130 kilometres (80 miles) to the east.

Thirty-two people were killed and 50 wounded in a car-bomb attack in Abu Grein the next day targeting the forces allied with the GNA.

Ten members of the pro-GNA forces were killed and seven wounded in Thursday's blast at Abu Grein, said sources at the central hospital in Misrata, from where they launched an offensive against the jihadists.

The military command of the anti-IS operation said two other car-bombings inside Sirte itself were foiled on Thursday.

"Our forces managed to destroy two car bombs before they reached their targets," it said.

"The two cars had targeted positions of our forces on two fronts."

- Stalled advance -

The jihadists have mounted eight suicide car bombings against pro-GNA forces since Sunday, as they intensify efforts to regain lost ground in the Mediterranean city.

The pro-GNA forces backed by air strikes entered the city last week, aiming to drive the extremist group out of its bastion on Europe's doorstep.

But the advance has been stalled since Sunday on the outskirts of Sirte's residential areas where the jihadists are holed up.

Established in Tripoli more than two months ago, the UN-backed unity government has been struggling to exert its control over the North African country, which is awash with weapons.

The operation to retake Sirte has so far left 164 pro-GNA fighters dead and more than 500 wounded, according to an AFP count based on reports from medical officials.

Unity government head Fayez al-Sarraj said this week that the GNA forces' advances in Sirte should be a model for "a national initiative to fight terrorism".

His task is complicated by the presence of a parallel government operating out of eastern Libya, backed by local militias and units of the national army loyal to a controversial general, Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar, who is also a fierce opponent of Islamists, refuses to recognise the GNA and considers its forces "militias outside the law".

Analysts have warned that Sirte's fall would not spell the end of the jihadists in Libya.

"ISIL is implementing it's traditional tactic of using terrorist means when it's territorial control shrinks," said Mattia Toaldo, Libya expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

"Hitting in Abu Grein shows that they are present beyond Sirte and that they can hit Misrata in the back," he said.

"But it is not clear yet whether this strategy can bring any fruits other than bleeding Misrata a little bit."

Foreign intelligence services estimate the extremist group has 5,000 fighters in Libya, but its strength inside Sirte, which IS has held since June 2015, is unclear.

Loyalist forces enter Sirte, IS bastion Kun TIAN, Thomas SAINT-CRICQ (AFP)
IS still has 'global reach,' CIA chief Brennan warns

Despite suffering major losses in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State group can still conduct and inspire attacks across the globe, America's spy chief warned senior lawmakers Thursday.

John Brennan, the director of the CIA, testified before the US Senate Intelligence Committee amid renewed fears about IS and the threat of terror attacks, after a gunman slaughtered 49 people in a Florida gay nightclub.

Though the CIA has not found a direct tie between the shooter, Omar Mateen, and any foreign organization, he pledged allegiance to the jihadists and other groups as he perpetrated the worst mass shooting in US history early Sunday.

Director of the CIA John Brennan testifies before the Senate (Select) Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on June 16, 2016 Jim Watson (AFP)

The IS group has lost much of the territory it once held across its so-called "caliphate" in northern Syria and Iraq, and has seen its ranks thinned by US-led air strikes and desertions.

Authorities estimate between 18,000 and 22,000 IS jihadists remain in Iraq and Syria, down from about 33,000 last year.

But despite upbeat Pentagon assessments about progress in the anti-IS fight, Brennan warned the group is still able to inspire and direct attacks beyond the territory it holds.

IS claimed responsibility for the Orlando massacre and is thought to be behind a string of deadly suicide bombings in Baghdad and Damascus, as well as recent attacks in Paris and Brussels.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan told lawmakers, using an acronym for the IS group.

IS fighters are "probably" exploring a variety of means for sneaking operatives into the West, he added, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes and through regular travel.

"We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks," Brennan said.

"ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West."

- Tech-savvy jihadists -

Strikes against IS cash hoards and oil smuggling infrastructure have affected the jihadists' financing, but they have made up for the shortfalls through new taxes in the territories it controls and continued smuggling.

And even though it has lost large bands of territory in Syria and Iraq, including major cities like Ramadi, IS is pushing to expand footholds in other countries.

Between 5,000 and 8,000 IS members are based in Libya and another 7,000 in Nigeria, plus hundreds more in Yemen and Afghanistan, authorities estimate.

"The branch in Libya is probably the most developed and the most dangerous," Brennan said.

"It is trying to increase its influence in Africa and to plot attacks in the region and in Europe."

Lawmakers voiced concern about extremists' online outreach and the ease with which they can inspire potential "lone wolf" attackers through the Internet.

Authorities are also troubled about the growing use of encrypted devices and apps that make it difficult for intelligence agencies to monitor communications.

US tech giants and the law enforcement community have been feuding for months about whether the government should have access -- sometimes called a "back door" -- to encrypted communications.

The issue gained new traction after a legal standoff between the FBI and Apple when it refused to unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a mass killing in San Bernardino, California, last year.

Brennan had publicly supported the FBI in the case but he told lawmakers he also supported encryption as a "capability that protects our way of life, our prosperity, our national security."

Still, experts should find a solution "that is not going to be perceived as a back door, but is going to allow the government to legitimately carry out its responsibilities while not compromising the great benefits that accrue to encryption."
The FBI's facial recognition database has more than 400 million pictures to help its criminal investigations, but lacks adequate safeguards for accuracy and privacy protection, a congressional audit has revealed.

Totalling 411.9 million images, privacy campaigners have slammed the 'unprecedented number of photographs, most of which are of Americans and foreigners who have committed no crimes.'

The huge database - which enables investigators to automatically search images for criminal suspects - 'is far greater than had previously been understood' and raises concerns 'about the risk of innocent Americans being inadvertently swept up in criminal investigations,' said Senator Al Franken, who requested the study.

The FBI's facial recognition database includes some 30 million criminal mugshots and 140 million images from visa applications by foreign nationals

WHAT THE DATABSE CONTAINS The FBI's database includes some 30 million criminal mugshots and 140 million images from visa applications by foreign nationals, the GAO found. It also contains drivers' license pictures from 16 US states and 6.7 million photos from the Defense Department's biometric identification system of individuals detained by US forces abroad, among others. Advertisement

'I will be asking tough questions about the FBI's use of facial recognition technology and its plans to improve the testing, transparency, and privacy protections of its system,' the Minnesota senator said as he released the Government Accountability Office report on Wednesday.

The FBI's database includes some 30 million criminal mugshots and 140 million images from visa applications by foreign nationals, the GAO found.

It also contains drivers' license pictures from 16 US states and 6.7 million photos from the Defense Department's biometric identification system of individuals detained by US forces abroad, among others.

The FBI's database includes some 30 million criminal mugshots and 140 million images from visa applications by foreign nationals, the GAO found.

It also contains drivers' license pictures from 16 US states and 6.7 million photos from the Defense Department's biometric identification system of individuals detained by US forces abroad, among others.

The system enables the FBI to use pictures of unidentified people to determine if they are being sought in criminal investigations, and can also assist local law enforcement agencies.

But the FBI has failed to adequately assess the system's accuracy for its own images and those held by other agencies, the audit found.

'The FBI should better ensure privacy and accuracy,' the report said.

WHICH STATES ARE INCLUDED? The states which has given driving license information for the system (in deep and light blue). 18 more states are in negotiations with the FBI to provide similar access to their drivers license databases. NGI includes more than 20 million civil and criminal images received directly from at least six states, including California, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Texas, and Virginia. Five additional statesFlorida, Maryland, Maine, New Mexico, and Arkansascan send search requests directly to the NGI database. As of December 2015, FBI is working with eight more states to grant them access to NGI, and an additional 24 states are also interested. Source: EFF Advertisement

The agency has not done enough to protect against 'false positives,' which can prompt the authorities to target innocent people, the GAO said.

'FBI officials stated that they have not assessed how often (system's) face recognition searches erroneously match a person to the database (the false positive rate),' the report said.

'The accuracy of a system can have a significant impact on individual privacy and civil liberties,' it added, saying that the false positive rate should be analyzed 'prior to the deployment of the system.'

'The report shows that the FBI hasn't done enough to audit its own use of facial recognition technology or that of other law enforcement agencies that partner with the FBI, nor has it taken adequate steps to ensure the technology's accuracy,' Franken said.

Civil liberties advocates said the report was worrisome.

Jennifer Lynch of the EFF, a digital rights campaigner, said 'The FBI has done little to make sure that its search results (which the Bureau calls 'investigative leads') do not include photos of innocent people, according to the report.

Senator Al Franken, pictured on May 19, 2015, requested an audit of the FBI's facial recognition database

'The FBI has conducted only very limited testing to ensure the accuracy of NGI's face recognition capabilities.

'And it has not taken any steps to determine whether the face recognition systems of its external partnersstates and other federal agenciesare sufficiently accurate to prevent innocent people from being identified as criminal suspects''

The EFF also says the technology in not accurate.

'As we know from previous research, face recognition is notoriously inaccurate across the board and may also misidentify African Americans and ethnic minorities, young people, and women at higher rates than whites, older people, and men, respectively.'

How the system works: Local police send images to the FBI, which run them through its facial recognition system.

'Face recognition is a relatively new technology and it's important that not only the FBI but the public be aware of its limitations,' Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union said.

'Errors mean random people could be falsely identified as potential criminals and find themselves coming under the FBI's powerful investigatory microscope.
Aid convoy headed for Syria's besieged Al-Waer: UN

A large aid convoy is ready to go to Al-Waer, a besieged area in Syria's Homs governorate, and is expected to bring in desperately needed aid Thursday, the UN said.

"We are ready loaded with a large convoy to go to the besieged town of Al-Waer," Jan Egeland, who heads a UN-backed international humanitarian taskforce for the war-ravaged country, told reporters.

If the aid convoy does get through, it would be of "great significance", he said, pointing out that the rebel-held town in Homs governorate, encircled by government troops, had been "without supplies for more than three months."

Rebel-held Al-Waer is a besieged town in Syria's Homs governorate Judy Arash (AFP/File)

"Conditions in Al-Waer... are terrible. People have died in Al-Waer because of lack of humanitarian supplies of late," he said.

Last week, aid finally reached the besieged town of Daraya for the first time since 2012 and Douma for the first time since 2014.

The UN says some 588,000 Syrians live in 18 besieged areas across the country, most surrounded by government forces.

The list until recently included 19 areas, but Zebdin, with its some 5,000 inhabitants, was removed after the government forces encircling it took control of the town, Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency, told AFP.

- Sustained access crucial -

Egeland said that if the delivery to Al-Waer goes through as planned Thursday, after all permits were finally granted, the UN will have delivered aid to 16 of Syria's 18 besieged areas since mid-February.

And he hoped deliveries to the remaining two areas, Arbin and Zamalka in the rural suburbs of Damascus, could take place in the "coming days".

Egeland said the UN estimates there are about 39,000 people trapped in the two areas, but said the Syrian government "claims there are far fewer there."

While celebrating the prospect of partially or fully reaching all of the besieged areas in Syria this year, after reaching only two during 2015, Egeland acknowledged that the increased access "could end tomorrow."

"We cannot continue this stop-go... We have to have sustained access and the sieges on the civilian populations have to be lifted," he said.

In addition to the planned delivery to Al-Waer, Egeland said large convoys were headed Thursday to the besieged aread of Kafr Batna in rural Damascus, and to Afrin, which is not besieged but considered hard to reach, in northern Aleppo.

"So today alone, we hope to reach 110,000 people in besieged and hard-to reach areas, with more than 100 trucks and vehicles," he said.

Egeland also hailed a 48-hour truce that took hold Thursday in Syria's war-torn Aleppo city, urging all sides "to use this window of opportunity" to try to cement a broader and more long-lasting halt in the violence.

Aleppo has seen some of the worst fighting in a war that has killed more than 280,000 people, but there is deep scepticism that the latest halt to fighting in the northern city will last.

Peace talks aimed at ending the five-year conflict have stalled and the February 27 countrywide ceasefire between the regime and non-jihadist rebels lies in tatters.

Getting aid to civilians trapped in the fighting Philippe MOUCHE, Alain BOMMENEL (AFP)
S.Africa honours Soweto uprising 40 years on

South Africa on Thursday marked 40 years since the Soweto uprising, when security forces fired on black students in a massacre that triggered a new era of anti-apartheid resistance.

The 1976 protests, and the apartheid regime's violent response, fuelled a struggle that eventually led to the fall of white-minority rule with Nelson Mandela's election as president in 1994.

The anniversary has been commemorated by a series of events to honour those who took part in the uprising, which began as a protest against a government order that schools could only teach in the Afrikaans language used by whites.

South African students attend the event "I am constitution" on June 15, 2016 in Johannesburg, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the June 1976 uprising Mujahid Safodien (AFP/File)

"(The students) were dreaming about good quality education, they were dreaming about a new democracy," Jeff Radebe, a senior government minister, said at the start of the official ceremony at a stadium in Soweto.

"The youth of 2016 are enjoying the fruit of seed that was laid by those youngsters of 1976 who defied the might of the apartheid state."

At the time at least 170 people were killed, with some estimates putting the death toll at several hundred over the following months as the uprising spread from the township of Soweto, south of Johannesburg.

Images of poor, young black students gunned down by white police brought the injustices of apartheid to the world's attention and spurred the global anti-apartheid movement.

President Jacob Zuma was due to make a national address at the stadium, after Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa placed a wreath at the memorial to Hector Pieterson, who was killed aged 13.

The black-and-white photograph of Pieterson's body being carried away by a student in tears became the iconic image of the uprising.

- Race injustice persists -

Divisions along racial lines remain strong in South Africa, with most black people enduring worse education, housing and unemployment than white people.

Students have again been protesting in recent months over tuition fees that force some poor black youths out of education.

Racist Internet postings have underlined long-standing frictions worsened by the country's dire economic performance and anger at politicians' failure to meet post-apartheid expectations.

Highlighting the country's unhealed wounds, a reconciliation event in Soweto last Saturday was sparsely attended.

The gathering had been intended to bring together black and white people, but it split some black activists, and white former policemen declined to take part.

Dan Montsitsi, a student leader of the uprising, said the 1976 march in Soweto had been planned for months.

The students, most of whom were in their school uniforms, carried placards reading: "Afrikaans stinks", "To hell with Afrikaans" and "Afrikaans needs to be abolished".

"We were amazed with the number of students that we had been able to put in the streets," he told AFP ahead of the 40th anniversary.

He said the police released a dog into the crowd, which was killed.

"The police were very angry obviously and they decided they would use teargas.

"(Soon after) they started to shoot."

June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa marking Youth Day.

The 1976 protests, and the apartheid regime's violent response, fuelled a struggle that eventually led to the fall of white-minority rule in South Africa with Nelson Mandela's election as president in 1994 Mujahid Safodien (AFP/File)

After violent clashes in Soweto on June 1976, new incidents bursted out in October 1976 between black demonstrators and police in Cape Town
UK law firm faces payout over missing Trafigura compensation

Thousands of people due payouts over the dumping of toxic waste by oil-trading group Trafigura in Ivory Coast won their English High Court claim against their lawyers on Thursday, having never received their money.

The oil company agreed in 2009 to pay around 30 million ($42.4 million, 38 million euros) to 30,000 people affected by the dumping of caustic soda and petroleum residues in the economic capital Abidjan in 2006.

However, 6,000 of the claimants received nothing after 6 million of the payout was fraudulently withdrawn.

The oil company agreed in 2009 to pay around 30 million ($42.4 million, 38 million euros) to 30,000 people affected by the dumping of caustic soda and petroleum residues in the economic capital Abidjan in 2006 Fabrice Coffrini (AFP/File)

High Court judge Andrew Smith on Thursday ruled that London-based legal firm Leigh Day, who represented the claimants, had been negligent in using an Ivorian bank account to park the lump sum, leaving it open to embezzlement.

"I am extremely pleased for our clients, who have been waiting for seven years to get their compensation," the claimants' lawyer Kalilou Fadiga, from legal firm Harding Mitchell, told AFP after Thursday's ruling.

"It's a victory for natural justice and common sense and a light at the end of the tunnel," added Fadiga, who was representing 4,750 of the claimants.

"They (Leigh Day) should have known before they sent the money that Ivory Coast was quite unstable, it was divided between two warring factions... and by their own admission, they saw signs of rampant corruption."

The 6 million was withdrawn by an organisation claiming to be the victims' representative, but which was in fact a "mechanism to embezzle" with the help of corrupt officials, according to Fadiga.

In his ruling, judge Smith revealed that Leigh Day senior partner Martyn Day had been warned by senior lawyer Daniel Brennan that "once the money goes into the (Ivory Coast) system, it is gone as far as the ordinary people are concerned".

But the legal firm went against advice to distribute the money from a European account.

Fadiga said it was "definitely" a blow for Leigh Day, which has built up a reputation as champion of the underdog after fighting high-profile cases against the British government on behalf of the Kenyan Mau Mau and detainees during the War in Iraq.

"It's a lesson for them," he said.

"Not only should they be going round the world to try to help victims, but they shouldn't take their eyes of the ball about the ultimate goal which is to get compensation to the right people."

A lawyer for the victims also called the firm's initial claim of 105 million in legal costs -- three times more than the compensation awarded to the victims -- "staggeringly high", before a judge reduced the amount.

The amount of compensation to be paid out by the law firm will be decided at a hearing in October, but is excepted to be close to the original claim of around 1,000 per person, or 4.75 million in total.
Kenya rules rectal tests on 'gay suspects' legal

A Kenyan court on Thursday threw out a bid to outlaw rectal examinations on people suspected to be gay, a practice condemned by rights campaigners as "abhorrent".

The case was brought by two men who challenged police use of rectal inspections after undergoing the procedure when being investigated for homosexuality, which is illegal in Kenya.

Being gay can carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years in the East African country, although prosecutions are rare.

Kenyans hold a protest against homosexuality in the capital Nairobi in July 2015 Simon Maina (AFP/File)

"There was no other way evidence could have been obtained to ascertain that they are gay without carrying out anal analysis," Judge Anyara Emukule said in a ruling at the High Court in the port city of Mombasa.

The men were expected to appeal the decision.

International rights group Amnesty International condemned the ruling, saying it was "shocking in its disregard for international human rights obligations".

"Forcible anal examinations of men suspected of same-sex relationships is abhorrent, and violates the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment under international law," said the group's East Africa director Muthoni Wanyeki.

"It is also absurd as the government has no business proving or disproving consensual homosexual activity. It's a violation of the right to privacy."

Homophobia is on the rise in Africa, and taking an anti-gay position while espousing evangelical Christian values is a major vote winner in many countries on the continent.

Gay rights activists have warned of rising intolerance in Kenya, including attacks on homosexuals and alleged cases of lesbians being raped to "cure" them.
Obama arrives to console grieving families in Orlando

President Barack Obama embarked on a solemn visit to Orlando Thursday, where he will console families ripped apart by a massacre that has fueled America's culture wars and a fresh push for gun controls.

Air Force One touched down in Florida shortly before 1:00 pm (1700 GMT). In Orlando on Sunday, 49 people were killed and 53 others wounded in a gun attack at a gay club -- the worst mass shooting in US history.
Congo ex-presidential candidate Mokoko charged

General Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko, who ran unsuccessfully against Congo's President Denis Sassou Nguesso, has been charged with breaching state security, his lawyer said Thursday.

Mokoko was in custody in Brazzaville after being charged with "breaching internal state security and the illegal detention of weapons of war and munitions", Yvon Eric Ibouanga told AFP.

The general, who was military chief of the oil-rich African nation from 1987 to 1993, won less than 14 percent in a March election which returned Sassou Nguesso to the presidency with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Then Congolese presidential candidate Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko arriving at his closing rally in Brazzaville on March 18, 2016 Marco Longari (AFP/File)

He was detained on Tuesday by security services for questioning and was seen by several witnesses arriving handcuffed at the prosecutor's office Thursday.

He had quit as a peace and security advisor to Sassou Nguesso in February in order to challenge the strongman's 32-year grip on power, and has been living under surveillance at his home in central Brazzaville since the vote.

"The arrest of general Mokoko is a troubling and very embarrassing matter", said Clement Mierassa, president of the opposition Social Democrats party (PSDC).

Mokoko "has been harassed since ran a good campaign and did well at the polls during the last presidential election," Mierassa added.

Mokoko has been accused of discussing plans to remove Sassou Nguesso from power with a man presenting himself as a French intelligence agent in a video filmed in 2007.
Mali urges UN to impose sanctions, beef up peace mission

Mali's prime minister urged the UN Security Council on Thursday to impose sanctions against anyone blocking a year-old peace deal and to strengthen the peacekeeping mission after a spate of attacks.

Prime Minister Modibo Keita warned of deteriorating security on the ground after 28 peacekeepers were killed in attacks this year in Mali, making it the deadliest UN mission in the world.

"The deterioration of the situation is without a doubt a threat to all of our states" in the region, Keita told the council.

MINUSMA is asking the United Nations to provide surveillance drones and five more helicopters to accompany convoys on dangerous explosives-laden routes in Mali Alou Sissoko (AFP/File)

The prime minister recalled that the council had adopted a resolution that provides for sanctions against those who oppose the peace deal signed in June 2015.

"It is timely and urgent for this provision to be implemented," he said.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre said it was time to speed up implementation of the peace deal aimed at ending years of fighting in northern Mali and turn the page on the Islamist takeover of 2012.

"We have seen too many delays on too many fronts," said Delattre, who holds this month's presidency of the council.

France is drafting a resolution to deploy some 2,500 extra peacekeepers to the mission, known as MINUSMA, which currently has about 12,000 police and soldiers.

Delattre said the measure, expected to be adopted by the council on June 29, will strengthen MINUSMA's capacity and "enhance the security of peacekeepers."

- APCs, copters, drones -

The UN envoy for Mali and MINUSMA chief Mahamat Saleh Annadif described the situation in Mali as "worrisome" and said delays in moving ahead with the peace deal were "undermining the entire process."

Annadif said "losses could have been avoided" if the contingents were better-trained and better-equipped, in particular with armored personnel carriers that can withstand attacks from explosive devices planted on roads.

MINUSMA is asking the United Nations to provide surveillance drones and five more helicopters to accompany convoys on the dangerous explosives-laden routes.

A German contingent of 650 troops that will deploy in Mali in the coming months will bring aerial drones and transport planes to bolster MINUSMA.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a signatory to the peace deal, has claimed responsibility for two recent attacks on peacekeepers in the northern city of Gao.

Annadif warned that the threat from jihadist groups was shifting further south in Mali and that this should not be "trivialized."

AQIM and one of its affiliates has also claimed responsibility for violence in Bamako: the March 2015 attack on a bar that left five dead and the November assault on the Radisson Blu hotel that killed 20 people.

Under MINUSMA's new robust posture, the deployment would be expanded to cover more territory to the center and south of Mali, Annadif told reporters on Wednesday.

"We need more forces to cover the territory," he said.

Mali's Prime Minister Modibo Keita warned of deteriorating security on the ground after 28 peacekeepers were killed in attacks this year in Mali Miguel Medina (AFP/File)
Orlando: When words fail, dogs can ease the pain

When mourners filed in to a prayer vigil in Orlando this week, they hit a friendly roadblock: a team of golden retrievers sent to help soothe a community in shock with their calm, reassuring presence.

As people knelt down to pet and nuzzle the gentle creatures, burying their hands in their soft yellow coat -- many breathed more easily, taking a moment to forget the horror gripping their city.

In the wake of the Pulse club massacre that left 49 dead and 53 injured, a pack of therapy dogs were flown from Illinois to the Florida city to offer comfort to traumatized victims and their families.

A group of young women pet a therapy dog near a memorial for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, June 15, 2016 in Orlando, Florida Drew Angerer (Getty/AFP/File)

On Wednesday night the dozen golden retrievers were stationed outside Trinity Downtown church.

Shelby Gerber, a bubbly young girl who attended the vigil, lives right near the crime scene.

"My anxiety level is pretty high right now," she said. "Sometimes you are too overwhelmed to say anything."

"I didn't realize how much it really was nice to sit after service and just pet them for an endless amount of time. It just alleviates the pressure off your chest."

For nearly a decade -- ever since a February 2008 shooting stunned Northern Illinois University -- so-called "comfort dogs" have become a familiar sight in the aftermath of major tragedies throughout the United States.

The Illinois team have become famous on social media for the therapy they provide: Phoebe, for one, has her own Twitter account.

- 'Scared to leave house' -

In Orlando the dogs, accompanied by 20 volunteer handlers, were visiting three hospitals treating patients wounded in the Pulse attack.

As well as visiting survivors the dogs have consoled emergency caregivers, paramedics and doctors, as well as many families of victims and Pulse staff members.

"People will talk to us and ask if we can visit a family," said Tim Hetzner, president of Lutheran Church Charities, the group that sponsors the dogs' work.

"There's some individuals that lost somebody and they're just scared to go out of their house. So we're going to bring comfort dogs to them."

"Dogs show unconditional love," Hetzner said. "They don't take notes or keep track of wrongs."

The "comfort dogs" owned by the Lutheran Church are distinct from those managed by the Therapy Dogs International program, which brings together about 25,000 dogs volunteered by their owners to provide therapy without special training.

Hetzner's dogs belong to the parish and are subject to training with multiple handlers that sometimes lasts over a year.

He said the training includes teaching the golden retrievers -- a breed known as gentle and affectionate -- not to bite, lick or bark while providing therapy.

- 'Comfort rugs' -

Jennifer Blackwood, who also came to the Orlando vigil, was comforted to see her three daughters fussing over the dogs outside.

"There's a lot that has happened over the last week," she said. I have three kids so that's been a lot of discussion. Hard growing up talks."

Hetzner explains the dogs are taught to lie down like "comfort rugs."

It may seem trivial, but for the traumatized, the simple gesture of petting them can have surprising benefits.

"People feel more relaxed when they have a comfortable dog they can pet," he said. "They calm down, their heart rate goes down, actually, and they're more willing to talk."

Hetzner originally conceived of the idea after a mission to New Orleans in the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

As he worked on the search-and-rescue effort, he noticed the "tremendous bond" those his team rescued had with their pets.

"People would die rather than part with their pet."

The Lutheran church program funds itself with donations, and owns about 120 Golden Retrievers in 23 states.

Three dogs from the organization still reside at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 young children and six staff in December 2012.
McCain walks back claim Obama's to blame for Orlando shooting

Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the massacre at a Florida nightclub, US Senator John McCain said Thursday, a startling accusation that the Republican elder statesman quickly walked back.

The condemnation by the straight-talking national security hawk McCain came with the US president in Orlando for a meeting with relatives of some of the 49 victims of Sunday's attack, the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

McCain told reporters in a Senate hallway that Obama's failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State extremist group helped bring about the Florida violence.

Senator John McCain told reporters that President Obama's failure to combat the rise of IS helped bring about the the massacre at a Florida nightclub Chip Somodevilla (Getty/AFP/File)

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures," McCain said when asked about the gun debate prompted by the shooting, according to The Washington Post.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 White House race, quickly issued a clarification to say he "did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible."

"I misspoke," McCain said in a statement.

"I was referring to President Obama's national security decisions, not the president himself."

He went on to say he and others have long warned that Obama's failure to deny Islamic State extremists a safe haven "would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe, as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando."

His remarks come after Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made statements Monday that seemed to suggest a connection between Obama and the Orlando attack.

Trump then retweeted an article Wednesday by a conservative website which claimed that Democratic White House hopeful Hillary Clinton "received a classified intelligence report stating that the Obama administration was actively supporting Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State."
US gun debate 'needs to change,' Obama says in Orlando

President Barack Obama traveled to grief-stricken Orlando, meeting loved ones devastated by a shooting rampage and using his bully pulpit to demand that the Republican-controlled Congress pass gun control.

Four days after the worst mass shooting in US history, Obama made a solemn pilgrimage to meet staff at the Pulse nightclub, emergency responders and some of the dozens of families shattered by gunman Omar Mateen.

Forty-nine people were killed and 53 wounded when the 29-year-old Mateen -- a Muslim American of Afghan descent -- ran amok in a packed gay nightclub early Sunday, armed with a legally bought assault rifle.

US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden place flowers for the victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub at a memorial in Orlando, Florida on June 16, 2016 Saul Loeb (AFP)

Mateen -- who pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group during the attack -- was killed in a police raid.

But his assault has fueled America's poisonous partisan culture wars, prompting new salvos in bitter election-year rows over immigration, counterterrorism and guns.

After meeting the victims' families, Obama said "our hearts are broken too" and insisted the tone of the country's hyper-partisan debate on firearms "needs to change."

Relatives of the victims "don't care about the politics. And neither do I," he said.

The Republican-controlled Congress has steadfastly refused to pass any gun legislation, saying to do so would infringe on the constitutional rights of gun owners.

Frustrated Democrats took to the Senate floor Wednesday to launch a procedural obstruction, known as a filibuster, to pressure Republicans to accept so-called "no-fly, no buy" legislation that would bar those on watch lists or no-fly lists from purchasing firearms.

The move was a success, and votes were set for next week.

- Can't catch every 'deranged person' -

Understanding of the shooting has been muddied by witnesses who say Mateen was a regular at the gay club and used gay dating apps. Investigators were looking into Mateen's social media activity for more clues.

Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, said in a letter to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg that his investigators had found Mateen apparently made a post sometime during the attack that he was pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group's leader, and "America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state."

He also allegedly posted: "The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west" and "In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa."

Johnson was asking Zuckerberg to share details of five accounts apparently used by Mateen.

"The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown," Obama said, listing two in the litany of mass shootings that have marked his presidency.

"But the instruments of death were so similar. And now another 49 innocent people are dead. Another 53 are injured. Some are still fighting for their lives. Some will have wounds that will last a lifetime."

Obama insisted the military would tackle the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in their hideouts, and intelligence services would work to disrupt such networks.

But, he warned, the government could not catch every "deranged person."

"We can do something about the amount of damage that they do," he said.

"Unfortunately our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons and they can do so legally."

- Rare bipartisanship -

The day was meant to be about unity.

In a rare symbolic show of bipartisanship, Obama arrived with Republican one-time presidential hopeful Marco Rubio and was greeted on the tarmac by Republican Florida governor Rick Scott and Vice President Joe Biden.

But any goodwill was blown apart when Senator John McCain said Obama -- his general election rival in 2008 -- was "directly responsible" for the massacre.

McCain later said he had meant to suggest that Obama's policies in the Middle East were to blame, not the president personally.

In response to the shooting, Republicans have called for tougher counterterrorism measures and for the Obama administration to do more to fight the Islamic State group.

FBI agents believe that Mateen was radicalized by following extremist propaganda online.

The White House says coalition forces and allies are making gains against the group's strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Libya.

But Republican arguments were given credence by Obama's own CIA director John Brennan, who warned on Thursday that the group retains the ability to conduct attacks around the world.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," he told US lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

US President Barack Obama speaks alongside Vice President Joe Biden after placing flowers for the victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub at a memorial for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Florida, June 16, 2016 Saul Loeb (AFP)

People light candles at a memorial to the Orlando shooting victims outside the Stonewall Inn on June 16, 2016 in New York Bryan R. Smith (AFP)

Orlando nightclub shooting Sophie Ramis (AFP)
The vehicles can be printed and assembled on demand in around 11 hours

It is the same computer that won $1 million on the game show

It could take the idea of on demand transport to an entirely new level  a self-driving car that can be 3D printed in a matter of hours and will even have a conversation with you.

The vehicle, which is called Olli and has been developed using IBM's talking supercomputer Watson, is capable of carrying up to 12 people around a city.

Crucially it can be printed and assembled in 'micro factories' in around 11 hours, meaning vehicles can be produced to specific needs.

A self-driving vehicle that can be 3D printed in a matter of hours and can hold conversations with passengers has been developed by IBM and transport start-up Local Motors. Olli, as the vehicle is known, will be able to answer passenger questions, offer restaurant recommendations and talk about its route

The vehicle, which looks like a cross between a mini-bus and golf buggy - can be summoned using a phone app.

IS THIS THE END TO CHAUFFEURS? ROLLS ROYCE'S SELF-DRIVING CAR The world of autonomous vehicles just got a more luxurious, after Rolls-Royce unveiled a driverless super car of the future. It has dubbed its futuristic car, which looks like it could have come straight out of Batman's cave, the Rolls-Royce 103EX. The vehicle will be 19 feet (six metres) long, with a canopy roof, covered wheels and a curved body. The front seat is replaced with a sofa-style body and it features an AI-powered voice assistant named Eleanor. Rolls-Royce describes it as the 'ultimate concept car', in a rare insight into how the luxury vehicle maker sees the future of motoring. The car was unveiled at a global event held in London today but the company said it may be another 25 years before it hits the road. BMW, who own Rolls-Royce, said self-driving technology was still some way off being fully autonomous. During the event, the company cited legislative changes and more accurate maps as hurdles facing drivers. Advertisement

Watson's voice recognition abilities, which were designed to help it compete and win the TV game show Jeopardy, will allow Olli to understand and respond to passenger's questions as they climb inside.

It will be able to cope with questions about destinations and perhaps even make chitchat with its passengers.

Trials of the vehicle, which was unveiled by Arizona-based start-up Local Motors, are to begin in National Harbor, Maryland, in the coming few months, with additional trials expected in Las Vegas and Miami.

The company is also in talks to test the vehicle in dozens of cities around the world including Berlin, Copenhagen and Canberra.

Bret Greenstein, IBM's vice president for the Internet of Things, said Oli was intended to use 'natural language' to develop a relationship between the vehicle and the passenger.

He said: 'Watson is bringing an understanding to the vehicle. If you have someplace you need to be, you can say that in your own words.

'A vehicle that understands human language, where you can walk in and say, 'I'd like to get to work,' that lets you as a passenger relax and enjoy your journey.'

With Watson, passengers can ask about how the vehicle works, where they are going, and why Olli is making specific driving decisions along with offering recommendations for local restaurants or historical sites.

It will even be able to answer the dreaded question 'Are we there yet?'

Although companies like Google, Ford and Volvo are already testing their self-driving cars on the roads, it could be several years before they enter widespread use.

Many expect them to transform the model of car ownership with people hailing vehicles when they need them rather than keeping them parked in their drive.

The vehicle (pictured) can be 3D printed and assembled on demand from 'microfactories' in around 11 hours

The vehicle (pictured) is able to understands human language so passengers can get in and say 'I'd like to get to work' and it will respond. It promises to transform the concept of travel and taxis in city centres

Olli could be the ultimate progression of that with cars being printed off over night to meet customer demands.

It could see traditional taxi drivers being replaced with smart autonomous vehicles that can engage with passengers as they travel.

John Rogers, co-founder and chief executive of Local Motors, said he envisions hundreds of 'micro-factories' producing the vehicles around the world.

'We hope to be able to print this vehicle in about 10 hours and assemble it in another hour,' he said.

Local Motors said trials of the vehicle, which can carry up to 12 passengers (pictured), will take place over the next couple of months in National Harbor in Maryland with further tests in Las Vegas and Miami

IBM's Watson computer won $1 million on Jeopardy in 2011 after being designed to cope with natural speech (Watson is shown in the middle competing on the game show)

The company said Las Vegas has purchased two of the vehicles and Miami-Dade County is exploring a pilot program in which several autonomous vehicles would be used to transport people around the Florida region.

Rogers said the company has had discussions in at least 50 countries where there is interest in new transportation solutions.

'There is a long list of cities that are interested,' he said.

The Watson supercomputer allows the vehicle (pictured from inside) to answer questions in 'natural language' including the dreaded utterance 'are we nearly there yet?'

Local Motors CEO and co-founder John Rogers (pictured) said he hoped it would be possible to print the vehicle in about 10 hours and then assemble it in another hour
DIVIDED AMERICA: Minorities missing in many legislatures

As Virginia's only Latino state lawmaker, Alfonso Lopez made it his first order of business to push for a law granting in-state college tuition to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally since childhood.

The bill died in committee.

So Lopez tried again the next year. And the year after that.

In this Oct. 7, 2015 photo, people walk past the Pennsylvania Capitol building in Harrisburg, Pa. Truly diverse legislatures are rarity across the United States; while minorities have made some political gains, they remain severely underrepresented in Congress and nearly every state legislature, according to an analysis of demographic data by The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

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EDITOR'S NOTE  This story is part of Divided America, AP's ongoing exploration of the economic, social and political divisions in American society.

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Now, in his fifth year in office, Lopez is gearing up for one more attempt in 2017.

"If we had a more diverse (legislature) and more Latinos in the House of Delegates," he says, "I don't think it would be as difficult."

America's government is much whiter than America itself, and not just in Virginia.

While minorities have made some political gains in recent decades, they remain significantly underrepresented in Congress and nearly every state legislature though they comprise a growing share of the U.S. population, according to an analysis of demographic data by The Associated Press. The disparity in elected representation is especially large for Hispanics, even though they are now the nation's largest ethnic minority.

A lack of political representation can carry real-life consequences, and not only on hot-button immigration issues. State spending for public schools, housing and social programs all can have big implications for minority communities. So can decisions on issues such as criminal justice reform, election laws or the printing of public documents in other languages besides English.

When the people elected don't look, think, talk or act like the people they represent, it can deepen divisions that naturally exist in the U.S.

Campaigning door-to-door in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of south Omaha, Nebraska, first-time legislative candidate Tony Vargas has talked with numerous people afraid to participate in democracy. Some felt shunned or confused when they once attempted to vote. Others have misconceptions about the legal requirements to do so. Some simply believe their vote doesn't matter.

"You can hear the fear in people's voices, and you can hear that they feel like less of a member of society, less of an American," says Vargas, whose parents came to the U.S. from Peru.

Though Hispanics now make up 10 percent of Nebraska's population, there is not a single Latino lawmaker in its Legislature.

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Racial minorities aren't the only ones underrepresented in legislatures. The percentage of state lawmakers who are women tripled from 8 percent in 1975 to a high of nearly 25 percent this year, yet that remains well short of their majority in the total population. Legislators also fail to mirror the people they represent in other ways: Statistics show lawmakers generally are older and more likely to have advanced college degrees than the public as a whole.

But the effects of underrepresentation are keenly felt by groups that have not had a full share of the American dream.

The AP analyzed the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Congress and the National Conference of State Legislatures to determine the extent to which the nation's thousands of lawmakers match the demographics of its hundreds of millions of residents. The result: Non-Hispanic whites make up a little over 60 percent of the U.S. population, but still hold more than 80 percent of all congressional and state legislative seats.

Among major minority groups:

Blacks are the least underrepresented but still face sizable gaps in some places. In Mississippi and Louisiana, about one-third of the population is black. Yet each state has a single black member of Congress and a disproportionately small number in their state legislatures.

More than half the states still have no lawmakers with Asian or Pacific Islander heritage, and just four states have any in Congress. They represent about 5 percent of the U.S. population.

Hispanics comprise more than 17 percent of the U.S. population, yet they are fewer than 7 percent in Congress and fewer than 4 percent of state legislators.

In Virginia, for example, the Hispanic population grew by 46 percent from 2007 to 2014  nearly six times the rate of the state's overall growth. Yet the number of Latino lawmakers just rose to two this year.

"Even in Texas, New Mexico and California that have the largest delegations, we're still far short of parity with the population," says Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

California's Latino population has surpassed that of whites, and Latinos now lead the state Senate and Assembly. Yet whites held three times as many legislative seats as Latinos last year, and the gap between the percentages of Hispanic residents and California lawmakers was the largest in the nation.

There are many reasons for the disparities.

The U.S. Hispanic population generally is younger and less likely to be eligible voters. And those who can vote often don't. Voter turnout among Hispanics (as well as Asian Americans) was just 27 percent in 2014, compared with 41 percent for blacks and 46 percent for whites, according to the Pew Research Center.

That gap is evident in Oklahoma House District 89, where Latinos comprise two-thirds of the residents. The district has the fewest registered voters in the state, and even fewer bother to vote. In 2014, barely 650 of the nearly 4,000 registered Democrats voted in a primary runoff for an open seat where Latina community leader Mary Sosa was defeated by construction superintendent Shane Stone, who is white. Sosa was vying to become just the second Hispanic lawmaker in the state.

Ramiro Padilla, the owner of a Mexican bakery in the south Oklahoma City district, says Latinos in his area feel disconnected from local and state government.

"Really, I think we don't have any voice," Padilla said.

Low voter involvement can make it harder to recruit minority candidates, and less likely for minority communities to be targeted by campaigns.

"It becomes sort of self-fulfilling  they're not likely voters, so you don't talk to them, and because you don't talk to them, they don't become likely voters," says political consultant Roger Salazar, whose clients include California's legislative Latino caucus.

The power of incumbency also can work against minority representation. Decades of deeply ingrained name recognition have helped white lawmakers continue to get elected in numerous districts where population shifts have gradually made racial minorities the majority.

In Berks County, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles west of New York City, the Hispanic population has risen 850 percent since 1980  from about 9,000 to 77,000 in the most recent Census Bureau estimate. The 127th House District in Reading has been held that whole time by Democratic Rep. Thomas Caltagirone, who is white, even though his district is now 59 percent Hispanic.

Of the 253 seats in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, just two are held by Latinos.

Some local Hispanics say Caltagirone has striven to serve a diverse district that includes Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans and Salvadorans. He has several Hispanic staff members. Abraham Cepeda, a Dominican-American immigration attorney in Reading, Pennsylvania, says having lawmakers who connect with their minority constituents is as critical as having minorities elected.

"The person is more important than the race or ethnicity," says Cepeda, a local school board member.

Karl Kurtz, a retired NCSL employee who has analyzed the demographics of legislatures, agrees.

"It's desirable to have our legislators look like America, but you kind of have to draw lines with that," he says. "The task is not whether or not you look like your constituents, it's whether you fairly represent them, whether you listen to them and pay attention to their views."

But others say that's not enough.

"I'm not saying a non-Hispanic lawmaker cannot represent a majority community of Hispanics, but any elected body, be it a state legislature or Congress, needs to include those who have lived through the Hispanic experience," says Bernardo Carbajal, a Mexican-American lawyer and school board member in Reading.

"If Hispanics don't see themselves being represented, they see that they aren't part of the community," Carbajal adds.

Another factor is the way legislative districts have been drawn  gerrymandered, in some cases, to protect those people or political parties already in power. Racial gerrymandering can occur either when minority communities are divided among multiple districts to dilute their voting strength or when they are packed heavily into a single district to diminish the likelihood of minorities winning multiple seats.

Federal judges ruled recently that lawmakers illegally packed large numbers of black voters into congressional districts in North Carolina and Virginia. Lawsuits alleging racial gerrymandering from the last redistricting also are pending in several other states.

In some states, most minority lawmakers also are members of the minority political party, which further diminishes their influence. Nationwide, 98 percent of black state lawmakers are Democrats, and 70 percent of them are in states where Democrats are in the minority, according to figures from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. The disparity in racial political power is particularly pronounced in the 11 Southern states that once formed the Confederacy, all of which now have Republican-controlled legislatures. The National Black Caucus of State Legislators listed 347 black lawmakers in those states  343 Democrats and just four Republicans.

The role of minority caucuses in Southern states used to be to compel Democratic leaders to listen to their issues, says Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who is black.

But the Black Caucus and Democratic Caucus now are effectively the same. Of Georgia's 78 Democratic lawmakers, 60 are black.

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In states that have elected a critical mass of minority legislators, they've claimed some successes.

In California, a new law expands the state's Medi-Cal health care program for low-income residents to immigrant children, regardless of their legal status. The state budget includes $15 million for nonprofits to help immigrants gain U.S. citizenship or remain in the country. And a law that kicked in last year provided drivers' licenses to more than 600,000 people living in the country illegally.

The Texas Legislature, which is more than one-fifth Hispanic, in 2013 restored most of the $5.4 billion of cuts that had been made to public schools just two years earlier  a move that particularly benefited Hispanics because they now comprise a majority of the state's public school students.

"It would not have happened without the members of our caucus raising those objections," says Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, chairman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus.

But again and again, minority legislators in other states told the AP that their priorities have been stymied partly due to a lack of others like them.

For 22 years, Delaware state Sen. Margaret Rose Henry has been the only black senator in a state where African-Americans comprise more than one-fifth of all residents. Henry says she has long sought to improve the educational opportunities for black children bused under a Wilmington desegregation plan to suburban schools. But recommendations from multiple studies have gone nowhere over the years.

Now, a new commission has recommended realigning Wilmington area school districts and revising the state funding formula to direct more money to schools with larger numbers of students who are low-income, learning English or at high risk of not completing school. Henry fears the plan will again be difficult to pass.

"If there were more black elected officials, we would have a better chance to get something done," she says.

Washington state Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos tells a similar story.

In 2004, Santos introduced legislation that would have required state agencies to provide public health, safety and welfare notices in other languages if at least 5 percent of the people in an affected area spoke something other than English.

The bill hadn't passed by December 2006, when scores of people  most of whom didn't speak English as their primary language suffered carbon-monoxide poisoning from bringing barbecue grills or portable generators into their homes after a severe windstorm knocked out power. An after-the-fact report by the state Military Department cited the need to translate public safety messages into more languages.

Yet almost 10 years later  and a dozen years after Santos first filed her bill  it still hasn't passed, partly because of concerns it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement.

Santos, chairwoman of the National Asian Pacific American Caucus of State Legislators, believes the measure would have fared better if Washington's legislature  which is more than 90 percent white  more closely resembled its 30 percent minority population.

When lawmakers and policymakers better understand "the way policies are experienced in communities of color," she says, "I think it changes the type of policies we adopt."

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Associated Press writers Sergio Bustos in Miami, Daniel Houston in Oklahoma City and Errin Whack in Philadelphia contributed to this report. Lieb reported from Jefferson City, Missouri. Follow David A. Lieb at: http://twitter.com/DavidALieb

Tony Vargas, candidate for the Nebraska legislature, accompanied by his fiancee Lauren Micek, center, campaigns in a shop in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, June 12, 2016. While campaigning in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of south Omaha, Vargas, whose parents came from Peru, has talked with numerous people afraid to participate in democracy. Though Hispanics now make up 10 percent of Nebraska's population, there is not a single Latino lawmaker in its Legislature. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Tony Vargas, candidate for the Nebraska legislature, reaches out to a potential voter in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, June 12, 2016. Vargas, whose parents came from Peru, says many Latinos in Omaha are afraid to participate in democracy. Some felt shunned or confused when they once attempted to vote. Others have misconceptions about the legal requirements to do so. Some simply believe their vote doesn't matter. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Tony Vargas, left, a candidate for the Nebraska legislature, talks to potential voters in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, June 12, 2016. While campaigning in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of south Omaha, Vargas, whose parents came from Peru, has found that some people felt shunned or confused when they once attempted to vote, while others have misconceptions about the legal requirements to do so. Some simply believe their vote doesn't matter. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Tony Vargas, a candidate for the Nebraska legislature whose parents came from Peru, talks to potential voters in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, June 12, 2016. Though Hispanics now make up 10 percent of Nebraska's population, there is not a single Latino lawmaker in its Legislature. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

A south Omaha resident holds an election flyer for Tony Vargas, who's running for the Nebraska legislature, on Sunday, June 12, 2016, in Omaha, Neb. Campaigning in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of south Omaha, Vargas, whose parents came from Peru, has encountered numerous people afraid to participate in democracy. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Tony Vargas, candidate for the Nebraska legislature, campaigns in a Mexican restaurant in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, June 12, 2016. While campaigning in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of south Omaha, Vargas, whose parents came from Peru, has talked with numerous people afraid to participate in democracy. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

FILE - In this Feb. 10, 2016 file photo, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, right, stands with state legislators, from left, Rep. J.J. Johnson, Rep. Sean Lynn, Sen. Margaret Rose Henry, Sen. Brian Bushweller and Rep. Stephanie Bolden, after signing a House joint resolution that apologizes for the state's role in slavery, at the Delaware Public Archives in Dover, Del. Markell also presented a proclamation recognizing African American History Month. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2016 file photo, House minority leader, Del. David Toscano, D-Charlottesville, left, and Del. Alfonzo Lopez, D-Arlington, right, vote on a motion during the House session at the Capitol in Richmond, Va. Virginia's only Latino state lawmaker, Lopez made it his first order of business to file legislation granting in-state college tuition to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally since childhood. So far, the bill has died in committee each year Lopez has submitted it. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
DIVIDED AMERICA: Constructing our own intellectual ghettos

NEW YORK (AP)  Meet Peggy Albrecht and John Dearth. Albrecht is a free-lance writer and comedian from Los Angeles who loves Bernie Sanders. Dearth, a retiree from Carmel, Indiana, grew up a Democrat but flipped with Ronald Reagan. He's a Trump guy.

They live in the same country, but as far as their news consumption goes, they might as well live on different planets.

Abrecht watches MSNBC's Rachel Maddow each night. She scans left-leaning websites Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and Down With Tyranny, where recent headlines described Donald Trump as "pathetic" and "temperamentally unfit" to be president. The liberal website Think Progress sends her email alerts.

This combination of images made Tuesday, June 14, 2016 shows various media outlets. Top row from left are The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC and the Townhall and Drudge Report websites. Middle row from left are the Talking Points Memo website, Keith Olbermann on Twitter and The Heritage Foundation website. Bottom row from left are The Huffington Post and Rush Limbaugh websites and Neil Cavuto on Fox News. (AP Photo)

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EDITOR'S NOTE  This story is part of Divided America, AP's ongoing exploration of the economic, social and political divisions in American society.

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Dearth is a fan of Fox Business Network anchors Neil Cavuto and Stuart Varney. He checks the Drudge Report, Town Hall and Heritage Foundation websites, where recent stories talked about Trump supporters being "terrorized" by demonstrators. Because of his search history, he's bombarded with solicitations to donate to conservative causes.

In a simpler time, Albrecht and Dearth might have gathered at a common television hearth to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news.

But the growth in partisan media over the past two decades has enabled Americans to retreat into tribes of like-minded people who get news filtered through particular world views. Fox News Channel and Talking Points Memo thrive, with audiences that rarely intersect. What's big news in one world is ignored in another. Conspiracy theories sprout, anger abounds and the truth becomes ever more elusive.

In this world of hundreds of channels and uncounted websites, of exquisitely targeted advertising and unbridled social media, it is easy to construct your own intellectual ghetto, however damaging that might be to the ideal of the free exchange of ideas.

"Right now the left plays to the left and the right plays to the right," said Glenn Beck, the former Fox News host who started TheBlaze, a conservative network, in 2010. "That's why we keep ratcheting up the heat. We're throwing red meat. We're in a room that is an echo chamber, and everybody's cheering."

Albrecht and Dearth don't rely exclusively on partisan media. Albrecht starts her day with the Los Angeles Times, and Dearth occasionally flips to MSNBC to hear opposing viewpoints, particularly on "Morning Joe." They do share mirrored misgivings about the major broadcast networks, newspapers and their related websites  the mainstream media  though Dearth thinks it's too liberal and Albrecht considers it too conservative.

That's the kind of thinking that inspired Roger Ailes to launch Fox News Channel in 1996. The former GOP operative mixed news during the day with a prime-time lineup that appealed to conservatives.

By 2002, Fox had raced past CNN to become the top-rated news network, beginning the golden age of partisan media.

There wasn't anything to compare on the left, at least until summer 2006 when Keith Olbermann began a series of commentaries after being angered by a speech where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld equated Iraq War opponents to pre-World War II appeasers. His show became home for disaffected liberals in the Bush administration's final years. MSNBC hired Maddow and eventually made the entire network left-leaning, although low ratings forced it back to news during the day.

Fueled by Fox's primacy and opposition to the war in Iraq, liberals began finding their voice online in the early 2000s.

Writer Josh Marshall began blogging and reporting, developing the Talking Points Memo website. His work forced wider attention to issues like the firing of U.S. attorneys in the Bush administration, Republican voter suppression efforts and the fight against Social Security privatization. TPM has grown to 25 employees with offices in Washington and New York.

Others followed Marshall's path. Conservatives took advantage of new media, too.

"I don't think it's as much a danger to democracy as people think it is," Olbermann said. "When the business changes to being all conservative media or all liberal media  though I don't know how that would happen  that's when it becomes dangerous."

Yet today's political media get at least some of the blame for a hardening of attitudes. A generation ago, majorities in each political party described themselves as moderate. Now 62 percent of the Democratic primary electorate identify themselves as liberal, and 76 percent of Republicans say they're conservative, according to ABC News exit polling.

Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, spoke with some distress this spring at the commencement of Temple University's School of Media and Communication.

"Today we are not so much communicating as miscommunicating," he said. "Or failing to communicate. Or choosing to communicate only with those who think as we do. Or communicating in a manner that is wholly detached from reality. Too often we look only for affirmation of our own ideas rather than opening ourselves to the ideas of others."

That thought was on Beck's mind when he had lunch a year ago with Arianna Huffington, founder of the left-leaning news site that bears her name. They talked about the need for an outlet where a conservative can talk about ideas to a liberal audience and vice versa.

But for now, nothing's come of the idea.

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Follow David Bauder at twitter.com/dbauder. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-bauder

This combination of June 2016 photos shows Peggy Albrecht, left, in Westlake Village, Calif. and John Dearth in Carmel, Ind. Albrecht is a freelance writer and comedian who loves Bernie Sanders. Dearth, a retiree, grew up a Democrat but flipped with Ronald Reagan. He's a Trump guy. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, Michael Conroy)

This Friday, June 10, 2016 photo shows freelance writer and comedian Peggy Albrecht at her home in Westlake Village, Calif. Abrecht watches MSNBC's Rachel Maddow each night. She scans left-leaning websites Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and Down With Tyranny, where recent headlines described Donald Trump as "pathetic" and "temperamentally unfit" to be president. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

This Friday, June 10, 2016 photo shows freelance writer and comedian Peggy Albrecht at her home in Westlake Village, Calif. Abrecht watches MSNBC's Rachel Maddow each night. She scans left-leaning websites Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and Down With Tyranny, where recent headlines described Donald Trump as "pathetic" and "temperamentally unfit" to be president. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

This Monday, June 13, 2016 photo shows John Dearth outside his home in Carmel, Ind. Dearth is a fan of Fox Business Network anchors Neil Cavuto and Stuart Varney. He checks the Drudge Report, Town Hall and Heritage Foundation websites, where recent stories talked about Trump supporters being "terrorized" by demonstrators and suggested Hillary Clinton answered planted questions at a supposedly unscripted event. An American flag tangled in red tape illustrated a story about Obama administration business regulations. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
UN won't give sources of child casualties in Yemen to Saudis

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The United Nations said Wednesday it will not give the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in Yemen the sources of information that led the coalition to be put on a U.N. blacklist for killing and injuring about 1,200 children in the war-torn country last year.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday that it is "paramount" to protect sources of information used in any U.N. report, especially in a conflict area.

Therefore, he said, the U.N. will refuse a request from the coalition for sources used for the Yemen section of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's annual report on children and armed conflict.

Saudi Arabia's U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi wrote to Ban on behalf of the coalition requesting the sources and other information.

Last Thursday, Ban said he temporarily removed the U.S.-backed coalition from the blacklist for violating child rights pending a joint review of cases because its supporters threatened to stop funding many U.N. programs. He accused some unnamed countries of exerting unacceptable and "undue pressure."

Ban said he stands by the report, which he said "describes horrors no child should have to face."

"We will assess the complaints that have been made, but the content will not change," he said.

Ban didn't say explicitly that the coalition could go back on the list after the review. The Saudi ambassador said last week "it is our firm belief that this de-listing is final, irreversible and unconditional."

The report said the U.N. verified a total of 1,953 youngsters killed and injured in Yemen in 2015  a six-fold increase compared with 2014  and it attributed about 60 percent of those casualties to the coalition. The U.N. said it also verified 101 attacks on schools and hospitals last year, double the number in 2014, of which 48 percent were attributed to the coalition.

Al-Mouallimi's letter, obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, thanked the secretary-general for removing the coalition from the blacklist and said it "deeply regrets every human casualty in Yemen and reaffirms its commitment to taking every possible measure to protect all civilians in Yemen."

It notes that the monitoring of violations against children is to be done in cooperation "with national governments and relevant U.N. and civil society actors.

Therefore, it said, "the coalition requests a detailed overview of the methodology and modality that were used to create the numbers in the report and the sources relied on for said numbers."

The Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen  Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates  also said it is ready to cooperate with U.N. bodies "to exchange information.

It invited a team of experts to visit coalition headquarters in Riyadh to "jointly review the cases and number (cq) in the report to ensure objectivity and accuracy."
California Democrats win safety net gains in state budget

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California lawmakers approved a state budget Wednesday that gives liberal Democrats long-sought increases to safety net programs while socking away billions to prepare for a recession.

The $122.5 billion spending plan, negotiated by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders, earned a rebuke from Republicans, who said it sets the state on course for deficits and fails to provide money to fix California's crumbling roads.

The budget was approved nearly along party lines, with all Democrats and just one Senate Republican  Anthony Cannella of Ceres  in favor.

California Senate President Pro tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, left, smiles as he and Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, chairman of the Senate budget committee watch the votes being posted as lawmakers approved the 2016-2017 state budget, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Sacramento, Calif. Both houses of the legislature voted to approved the $122.5 billion spending plan sending it to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown who is expected to sign it into law. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Democrats praised the budget as a significant investment in alleviating the harmful effects of poverty on children.

"It serves the people of California, I believe, with respect, dignity, appreciation and recognition of the challenges facing their lives," said Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, the chairman of the Senate budget committee.

By law, about half the budget goes to K-12 schools and community colleges. A plan for much of the rest was agreed to last week by Brown, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles.

The budget still must be signed by Brown. A spokesman for the Department of Finance, H.D. Palmer, said the timing has not been decided.

Fearful of a looming recession even as swelling state revenues produce surpluses, Brown has fought lawmakers' desires to increase spending on social services. But he relented on several measures that have long been a priority for fellow Democrats, agreeing to a big boost in wages for people who provide subsidized child care and to allow coverage for nearly 9,000 additional children.

He also agreed to repeal a provision of CalWORKs, the state's welfare program, that prohibits additional state aid for children conceived while a parent is on welfare. Critics said the policy was based on racist stereotypes about welfare recipients. Brown gave in when they identified a long-term funding mechanism.

As the votes rolled in, Democratic senators hugged and fist-bumped Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Los Angeles Democrat who has dueled with Brown over the issue for the past four years.

Lawmakers also voted to increase funding for both California State University and the University of California, which will be required to enroll more California residents.

Brown won a commitment from legislators to pump $2 billion more than required into the state's rainy day fund, which can only be accessed during times of economic distress. He also secured funding to renovate state buildings, potentially including the Capitol.

Republicans said the state won't be able to keep up the long-term spending commitments. They echoed Brown, who warned when he released his own budget plan last month that deficits were on the horizon.

"The governor himself has said that (in) four more years, we could be faced with a $4 billion budget in the red," said Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber.

Lawmakers failed to reach a deal on funding to fix crumbling roads and highways, which they have labeled as a top priority for several years.

"Not any more money is going toward transportation, to our crumbling road infrastructure. That is a glaring omission in this budget," said Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Plumas Lake.

Democrats say they'll deal with road construction separately. They maintain it will require an increase in taxes or fees to generate sufficient revenue.

"It's certainly not something we forgot," Rendon said.

The budget also raises vehicle registration fees from $70 to $80 a year starting in April, to generate $400 million a year for the Department of Motor Vehicles, California Highway Patrol, Air Resources Board and other departments.

Brown and legislative leaders agreed to set aside $400 million for low-income housing, assuming lawmakers and Brown can agree on a plan to bypass construction review processes in certain neighborhoods. The policy has drawn strong opposition from neighborhood activists who fear it will allow developments that change the character of their communities.

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AP writers Alison Noon and Darcy Costello contributed to this report.

Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, right, chairman of the Senate budget committee receives congratulations from Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, left, and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, center, after lawmakers approved the 2016-2017 state budget, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Sacramento, Calif. Both houses of the legislature voted to approved the $122.5 billion spending plan sending it to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown who is expected to sign it into law. Second from right is Sen. John Moorlach, R-Costa Mesa. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

State Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, celebrate after lawmakers approved the 2016-2017 state budget, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Sacramento, Calif. Both houses of the legislature voted to approved the $122.5 billion spending plan sending it to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown who is expected to sign it into law. Mitchell led the effort to overturn the so-called maximum family grant which limits welfare benefits for families that conceive additional children while receiving state aid. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

California Senate President Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, left, congratulates Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, chairman of the Senate budget committee after lawmakers approved the 2016-2017 state budget, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Sacramento, Calif. Both houses of the legislature voted to approved the $122.5 billion spending plan sending it to Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown who is expected to sign it into law. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Vivian Thorp sits beside her daughters Zosia Scislowski, left, and Janina Scislowski Tuesday, June 14, 2016, at their home in Oakland, Calif. The governor of California has given in to liberal lawmakers who want to repeal a welfare policy that critics call racist, ineffective and harmful to the state's poorest children. As part of a pending state budget deal with fellow Democrats, Gov. Jerry Brown has agreed to repeal the so-called maximum family grant policy that prohibits people from receiving increased welfare income if they have more children while receiving public assistance. The change would cost the state about $220 million a year. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
Biden decries lack of progress on 'rational gun safety' laws

WASHINGTON (AP)  Vice President Joe Biden is telling family members of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School that he's surprised by the lack of progress on "rational gun safety" laws three years after the mass shooting of students and teachers.

Biden spoke Wednesday at a fundraiser for an organization called Sandy Hook Promise Champions. He says some changes were made through executive action, but adds that "you'd think by now we'd be in a different place."

Biden says it took seven years for Congress to approve a ban on assault weapons that has long since expired. He says he won't give up on efforts to institute a similar ban.

Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting of the Cancer Moonshot Task Force in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that is part of the White House complex in Washington, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Interim president's mandate expires in drifting Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP)  Haiti entered into another leaderless drift Wednesday as the provisional president's 120-day mandate came to a close amid backroom negotiations, posturing and delays by the deeply polarized country's political class.

Lawmakers were expected to decide whether to extend caretaker President Jocelerme Privert's term until new elections can be held or pave the way for new interim leader. But a National Assembly session failed to take place Tuesday, when Privert's tenure expired under the deadline of a February accord that helped put him in power.

Cholzer Chancy, the acting leader of the National Assembly, on Wednesday demanded that senators and deputies return to Parliament to vote. But a session failed to materialize for a second straight day.

Supporters of presidential candidate Maryse Narcisse chant slogans against legislators as they march to the parliament building during a demonstration in support of interim President Jocelerme Privert, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, June 14, 2016. Haiti's legislators will decide whether to pave way for a new interim leader until elections can be resolved or extend the term for Privert, whose 120-day mandate is due to expire today. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

"We are 92 deputies and 22 senators. Why can't we come in and decide how we will continue to govern the country?" Chancy told a local radio station.

The United Nations, the U.S. government and representatives of other nations making up the "Core Group" that monitor Haiti voiced concern on Wednesday that "no measures have been taken to ensure institutional continuity." They urged lawmakers to quickly reach a solution.

Whether Privert is still Haiti's caretaker president depends on who you talk to.

Senate leader Ronald Lareche and 10 other senators issued a statement saying they will recognize Privert's legitimacy until the Parliament decides his fate.

And in a Wednesday evening national address, Privert insisted he would stay in office until the divided Parliament finally voted. In February, a majority of members elected him interim leader amid suspended elections and another institutional vacuum in the presidency.

"My government is still working. I am available to go to Parliament as soon as they are ready to make a decision," Privert said in the televised address, surrounded by his ministers.

But lower house lawmaker Gary Bodeau and others insist that Privert's term was unquestionably finished. He argued that Prime Minister Enex Jean-Charles automatically became Haiti's top official at midnight Tuesday.

"It would be illegal and unconstitutional for Privert to remain in the National Palace," Bodeau said.

Haitian historian Georges Michel said he believed that only force would remove Privert from power before this electoral cycle can be resolved  and he didn't see that as a very likely possibility.

"It's impossible to say what will happen, but the country is very quiet and very calm for now. So in coming days I think we will see a sort of status quo," he said.

The Tet Kale political party of former President Michel Martelly announced a "popular mobilization" to force the ouster of Privert on Tuesday. But it failed to get many participants and a protest was hastily rescheduled for Thursday.

Meanwhile, over 1,000 protesters aligned with the Fanmi Lavalas faction marched Tuesday through poor neighborhoods of Haiti's capital chanting: "We want Privert to stay!"

But many Haitians are deeply skeptical about the country's politics due to years of broken promises.

"If they wanted to, our politicians could find a solution to this latest mess. But they only care about themselves," said Mickelange Fontilus, who sells women's underwear at a street stall near the National Palace.

At the Organization of American States general assembly in the neighboring Dominican Republic, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry described Haiti as an "area of concern," saying its citizens deserved "the chance to express their will and elect a president without further delay."

Haitian electoral officials recently announced that a new presidential election will be held in October with safeguards to avoid the fraud that marred last year's voting.

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David McFadden on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dmcfadd

Police keep supporters of presidential candidate Maryse Narcisse from stopping a car from crossing the entrance into the parliament building during a demonstration in support of interim President Jocelerme Privert, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, June 14, 2016. Haiti's legislators will decide whether to pave way for a new interim leader until elections can be resolved or extend the term for Privert, whose 120-day mandate is due to expire today. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

A supporter of presidential candidate Maryse Narcisse marches with a Haitian national flag during a demonstration in support of interim President Jocelerme Privert in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, June 14, 2016. Haiti's legislators will decide whether to pave way for a new interim leader until elections can be resolved or extend the term for Privert, whose 120-day mandate is due to expire today. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

A supporter of presidential candidate Maryse Narcisse chants slogan against legislators en route to the parliament building during a demonstration to support interim President Jocelerme Privert in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, June 14, 2016. Haiti's legislators will decide whether to pave way for a new interim leader until elections can be resolved or extend the term for Privert, whose 120-day mandate is due to expire today. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)
Police poised to arrest popular monk in dramatic showdown

BANGKOK (AP)  Thai police entered a sprawling Buddhist temple complex Thursday, wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds, to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million.

The operation at Wat Dhammakaya, a monastery north of Bangkok, began at 5 a.m. and was broadcast live on TV in a dramatic climax to a months-old standoff.

Abbot Phra Dhammachyao, accused of money laundering and links to embezzlement of funds at a now defunct credit union, has brazenly rejected police demands to report for questioning. He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three summonses and an arrest warrant. He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he was too ill to report for questioning.

Buddhist devotees sit outside the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Pathum Thani province, north of Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police entered the sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

It is the latest in several scandals in recent years that have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand.

Police told reporters at a press conference in front of the temple that the next step was for the country's highest investigative authority to serve search and arrest warrants inside the temple.

"We went inside the temple to negotiate," said police Maj. Suriya Singhakamol, the deputy director-general of the Department of Special Investigations. "Today's operation must be carried out in an orderly manner, nobody should be injured, and everything should be done according to the law. As you can see, officers are not carrying at weapons."

Outside of Thailand it may seem odd that a monk should be able to defy law-enforcement officials so brazenly. But a law which forbids a monk in his robes from being arrested for fear it would mar the sanctity of the clergy has repeatedly put police in an awkward position. Authorities are also reluctant to force a showdown with his thousands of supporters, fearing violence.

Buddhism, the national religion, is one of three core pillars of Thai society along with the monarchy and nationhood. Monks occupy a privileged position and are granted many concessions, including not paying taxes and being exempt from arrest until they are defrocked.

This was reflected in the police operation  they paused the raid to allow the monks to eat their once-a-day meal at 11 a.m.

"The temple is happy to cooperate to allow the police to operate inside the temple as it is written in the warrant," Phra Sanitwong Wuttiwangso, a spokesman for the temple, said. "We have been cooperating with the officials."

The main gates to the temple, a futuristic construction resembling a golden UFO-like dome, were blocked with shuttle buses brought in by the monk's followers. Police still managed to go in as thousands of devotees held up signs condemning the police for what the devotees say is a politically motivated investigation.

It was not clear if the police had entered the temple building or were still outside, but on the grounds.

The leader of the religious sect has a cult-like following, the largest in Thailand. He first got into trouble two years ago when it became known that the former head of the Klongchan Credit Union Cooperative, a Dhammakaya devotee, had donated such large sums to the temple that it sent his business into insolvency.

The official was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

__

Associated Press writer Gabrielle Paluch contributed to this report.
Australia's opposition leader says he won't welcome refugees

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australian opposition leader Bill Shorten rejected a newspaper report Thursday saying his center-left Labor Party would lay out a welcome mat for asylum seekers if it wins next month's national election.

The front-page story in the Daily Telegraph newspaper attacked Labor's policy, when it was last in power, of giving refugees who arrived by boat permanent visas instead of the three-year visas the conservative government introduced in 2014.

Labor would get rid of the so-called temporary protection visas if it wins the July 2 election, but says that does not mean it easing up on illegal boat arrivals.

Opponents of the temporary visas argue that they leave refugees with uncertain futures and the prospect that they might one day be sent back to their homelands.

The government argues that the temporary visas are an essential part of their deterrent policies that have prevented any asylum seekers from successfully arriving on Australian shores by boat for almost two years.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government has boasted that stopping the traffic of asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia in rickety boats, usually from Indonesian ports, is one of its greatest policy successes since it was elected in September 2013.

Shorten blamed Turnbull's conservative Liberal Party for the newspaper using an image of a welcome mat to depict Labor's message to asylum seekers.

"This is the same old Liberal Party trying to reheat their same old lies and fear campaign," Shorten told reporters.

"Labor, on July 3, will have the same policy about stopping the boats. We will not put the people smugglers back into business," he said.

Almost daily arrivals of boats carrying thousands of asylum seekers under a former Labor government were a hot-button issue in the 2013 election.

Labor now says it would continue the government's tough deterrent policies, including using warships to tow back people-smuggling boats or putting asylum seekers in motorized lifeboats and setting them on course for the Indonesian coast.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said Thursday that Labor's opposition to temporary visas "tells the people smugglers every single thing they need to know about a Labor government on border protection."

The ruling party has accused Labor of undermining its policies, pointing to criticisms some Labor candidates have made of Australia's policy of paying the Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea to keep Australia-bound asylum seekers in immigration camps.

Labor has promised that, if elected, it would immediately talk to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees about resettling the hundreds of refuges languishing on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Both Labor and the government refuse to resettle them in Australia.

Temporary visa holders also cannot sponsor their families to migrate to Australia or return to Australia if they travel overseas.
Drug lord Palma arrested in Mexico on return from US

MEXICO CITY (AP)  Drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native Mexico after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison and was immediately transported to another maximum-security lockup where he will await trial for two murders.

U.S. authorities handed over Palma in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, according to a statement from the Mexican Attorney General's Office. Palma had been released from federal prison in California on Friday and put into the custody of U.S. immigration officials.

The drug lord was flown to Mexico City late Wednesday and then transported to the Altiplano prison outside the capital, the same prison that Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped from in 2015.

In this photo provided by the Mexican attorney general's office, Hector "El Guero" Palma, as he sits inside a helicopter at a federal hanger in Mexico City, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native Mexico after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison and was immediately transported to another maximum-security lockup where he will await trial for two murders. (Mexico's Attorney General's Office via AP)

Palma was detained under an arrest order from the western state of Nayarit.

He is accused of ordering the 1995 killings of a deputy police chief and a person who was with the officer, a federal official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press on Thursday. The official was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The person said the deputy police chief apparently worked for the Sinaloa Cartel but decided to switch loyalties to the Arellano Felix brothers of the Tijuana Cartel, and allegedly was killed in retaliation.

If authorities had not brought charges against Palma, he would have gone free.

Palma was arrested in June 1995 in western Mexico and later extradited to the U.S. where he pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking charges and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. The U.S. Embassy said Palma received early release for good behavior.

Some experts believed that Palma could have returned to drug trafficking if allowed to walk free, but would have faced a world that has changed since he helped Guzman found the Sinaloa cartel in the early 1990s.

"He could try to get involved, but I don't know how directly," said Mexico City-based security analyst Alejandro Hope. Palma may have lost much of his money and his connections since he was arrested following a plane crash.

Once released, he could have just disappeared into Mexico's hinterlands, "just like Caro Quintero," Hope noted, referring to the last major old-guard drug lord released, Rafael Caro Quintero.

Freed by apparent judicial misconduct in 2014, and currently sought on a re-arrest warrant, Caro Quintero hasn't been seen since. Given that he participated in the 1985 torture-slaying of U.S. DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, Caro Quintero's release was a major embarrassment for the Mexican government.

Palma's return threatens to be another headache.

Even before he was extradited to the United States in 2007, Palma had compiled an excellent track record of beating charges in Mexico. He was acquitted, or had the charges dismissed, for accusations including multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, robbery and drug possession.

In Mexico, Palma, known as "El Guero" for his fair hair, served only a 2 1/2-year sentence for minor convictions including weapons violations.

He essentially fell into the hands of law enforcement in 1995 when his plane crashed.

And with all the trouble that Mexico is currently experiencing to extradite Guzman, Palma's return raises the unnerving possibility that some day "El Chapo" could be sent back.

"If we extradite narcos to the United States, we should demand they not send them back," read a cartoon in the newspaper La Jornada, depicting Palma's return.

That's not just an idle jibe, says Mike Vigil, a former head of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

"There are a lot of individuals in Mexico, government officials, that are a little bit perplexed because they feel that if the United States wanted Palma, that he should have remained in prison here for a lot longer time ... And then you're letting him go very quickly," Vigil said.

"That is going to throw a little bit of a bar into the extradition process between Mexico and the United States, which has been sporadic at best since the inception since the extradition treaty was signed between the two nations in 1978."

Vigil said Palma is likely to cause trouble if he's released. "In my opinion based on 13 years in Mexico ... Palma's release will translate to more drugs in the U.S. and more violence for Mexico."

"The thing, the only business that 'El Guero' Palma understands is the drug trade. He's an expert when it comes to trafficking and distributing drugs," Vigil said.

He also said Palma "is extremely, extremely, extraordinarily vicious."

He's experienced savagery as well. His wife was seduced by a rival trafficker, who had her withdraw a purported $7 million from Palma's bank accounts, then beheaded her and sent her severed head to Palma. Venezuelan trafficker Rafael Clavel then allegedly took Palma's two children, aged 4 and 5, and threw them off a bridge.

In this photo provided by Mexico's attorney general, Hector "El Guero" Palma is escorted in handcuffs to a helicopter by Federal Police at a federal hangar in Mexico City, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native Mexico after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison and was immediately transported to another maximum-security lockup where he will await trial for two murders. (Mexico's Attorney General's Office via AP)

FILE - In this June 1995, file photo, convicted drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma is presented to the press holding an assualt rifle following his June 25, 1997 arrest in the city of Guadalajara, state of Jalisco, Mexico. Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa cartel, has returned to his native country after serving almost a decade in a United States prison. A Mexican federal government official said Wednesday, June 15, 2016, that U.S. authorities handed over Palma in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. (Jorge Zamora/Siglo 21 via AP, File) PLEASE CREDIT SIGLO 21

Police stand guard outside the entrance gate to the airport hangar of Mexico's Attorney General office, in Mexico City, during the arrival of drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native country Wednesday after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison. U.S. authorities handed over Palma in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, before flying him to Mexico City for transfer to Altiplano maximum security prison.(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

A police officer stands guard as a vehicle leaves from the airport hangar of Mexico's Attorney General office, in Mexico City, after the arrival of drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native country Wednesday after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison. U.S. authorities handed over Palma in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, before flying him to Mexico City for transfer to Altiplano maximum security prison.(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

A police officer communicates through a barred window in the entrance gate to the airport hangar of Mexico's Attorney General office, in Mexico City, after the arrival of drug lord Hector "El Guero" Palma, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native country Wednesday after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison. U.S. authorities handed over Palma in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, before flying him to Mexico City for transfer to Altiplano maximum security prison. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

This photo provided by the Mexican Attorney General's Office shows Hector "El Guero" Palma sitting between federal police inside a helicopter at a federal hanger in Mexico City, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Palma, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel, returned to his native Mexico after serving almost a decade in a U.S. prison and was immediately transported to another maximum-security lockup where he will await trial for two murders. (Mexico's Attorney General's Office via AP)
The variety of fish on Earth is huge, ranging from huge whale sharks which can weigh up to 20,000 kilograms, to tiny minnows which weigh a mere eight grams.

But fish are constantly evolving, and even producing new species.

Researchers in Hawaii have now discovered three new species of fish while on an expedition in the protected waters of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.

The Hawaiian Pigfish, one of the deep-water fishes never before collected by divers, was found during a 25-day research expedition in the waters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

THE NEW FISH The divers collected two species of fish that had previously never been seen, and filmed a possible third. One of the new species is a fairy basslet in the genus Tosanoides. A second new species is a wrasse in the genus Suezichthys. The third fish, which was photographed but not collected, is in the genus Emmelichthys. The first specimens of male Hawaiian Pigfish were also collected 90 metres (300 feet) below the surface. Advertisement

The divers collected two species of fish that had previously never been seen, and filmed a possible third.

Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Randall Kosaki, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who led the study, said: 'One of the new species is a fairy basslet in the genus Tosanoides.

'A second new species is a wrasse in the genus Suezichthys. We have specimens of both of these. The third fish, which we photographed but could not collect, is in the genus Emmelichthys.'

The team also collected the first specimens of male Hawaiian Pigfish about 90 metres (300 feet) below the surface.

Speaking to Hawaiian News Now, Mr Kosaki said: 'It's actually kind of surprising to find new species of fishes, but we actually did collect specimens of two or three potential new species.

'But then again it kind of speaks to the fact that these deep coral reefs are very poorly explored and that there is a lot that is yet to discover.'

Researchers in Hawaii have now discovered three new species of fish while on an expedition in the protected waters of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument

The scientists also observed significant coral mortality in the region that was the result of a mass bleaching event in 2014.

Mr John Burns, a researcher from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, said a trip in 2015 found about 90 per cent of the coral around Lisianski Island had died.

This year, the team found that dead coral was covered in a green algae bloom.

These rapidly growing patches of microscopic marine plants starve coral of sunlight and oxygen, slowly killing them.
US commander in Afghanistan submits his 3-month take on war

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)  The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has submitted his first three-month assessment of the situation in the war-torn country and what it's going to take to defeat the Taliban, a U.S. military official has told The Associated Press.

And though the content of the review by U.S. Army Gen. John W. Nicholson is secret, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan received a major incentive this month when President Barack Obama decided to expand America's involvement with more airstrikes against insurgents, giving the U.S. military wider latitude to support Afghan forces, both in the air and on the ground.

The report  and Nicholson's deployment to Afghanistan  come at a time of Taliban resurgence, with the group gaining ground in the southern provinces of the Taliban heartland.

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, New U.S. commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Gen. John W. Nicholson, attends a change of command ceremony at the Resolute Support Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has submitted his first three-month assessment of the situation in the war-torn country and what its going to take to defeat the Taliban, a U.S. military official tells The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

After 90 days in the country, Nicholson has now "completed his assessment and submitted it to his chain of command at the Pentagon," said a U.S. military official in Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

Since all foreign combat troops pulled out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014, leaving only an advisory and training contingent of international forces behind, the Afghan military has struggled in leading the fight, its 195,000 soldiers learning as they go.

The 9,800 remaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan are scheduled to drop to 5,500 by the end of this year, but the pace of that decline has yet to be decided. One factor in determining future troop levels is the extent to which NATO allies are willing to remain involved in training and advising the Afghans.

That is likely to figure prominently in Nicholson's review, which is widely expected to include a recommendation for more U.S. soldiers to boost training.

Nicholson took over the Afghanistan command in March and has since traveled across the country to meet Afghan soldiers on the front lines and gauge their most pressing needs. Earlier, he had already served more than three years in the country, but not as top commander.

His review is also expected to look at the current threat level from various insurgent groups operating in Afghanistan, assess resources to deal with that threat, and look at current and future operational needs. It's likely to take into account every aspect of the Afghan military's preparedness  from operational capability and training needs at all levels, to fundamentals like equipment, facilities, maintenance and logistics, discipline and accountability.

The Taliban's warm-weather offensive has shown the insurgents to be bolder and better organized, holding more territory now than at any time since 2001, when their regime was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion, according to recent U.N. estimates.

Past months have also exposed flaws in the Afghan military  weak leadership, lack of professionalism, complacency and corruption, analysts say.

Both Afghan and U.S. military officials expect the summer fighting to be deadly for Afghan troops, who suffered a 28 percent increase in fatalities in 2015, compared to the year before, when around 5,000 were killed, according to an internal NATO tally seen by the AP.

Afghan Army Gen. Shir Mohammad Karimi, the former general staff chief of operations, said that to stem casualties, improve capacity and boost morale, Afghanistan needs close air support, heavy weaponry and, most of all, training.

"Training is a big issue," he said. "It has to be done even on the front line."

Karimi said that ideally, each of the army's more than 100 battalions should have at least one trainer on the ground. The Afghan general was not involved in Nicholson's report.

Along with the 9,800 Americans there are also 3,000 troops from other NATO countries under Nicholson's command in the Resolute Support mission to train and assist Afghan forces. He also heads a related counter-terrorism mission, Freedom's Sentinel, with close to 3,000 U.S. soldiers engaged against the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Islamic State affiliate.

Afghanistan received four light-attack Super Tocano aircraft earlier this year to boost air power. Karimi said Russian MI 35 helicopters would also be effective in Afghanistan's rugged terrain of mountains, valleys and forests. Heavy fire power, including mortars, are essential in this terrain, he added, along with equipment to counter IEDs, or improvised explosive devices that have proved deadly to American troops in both the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Intelligence equipment is also badly needed to improve monitoring of militant communications  "and, of course, the trainers for all these things," Karimi said.

The Afghan army's wish list is no doubt extensive but Obama's decision this month was a tacit acknowledgement that the Afghans need more help than the Pentagon had originally thought they would at this stage of the war.

The Afghan forces' major weakness has been a lack of offensive capability, which has handed the initiative to the Taliban and allowed them, for example, to take control of a the northern city of Kunduz last September  albeit just for three days, until U.S. special operations forces intervened, backed with air support.

Political analyst and former Afghan presidential adviser Hismatullah Qaneh also advocates "strengthening the army with basic technology and weapons."

The United States has arguably already stepped up its involvement in the Afghan war, with the drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour as he was driving through neighboring Pakistan's Baluchistan province last month.

But Mansour was replaced by hard-line cleric, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, who is as opposed as his predecessor to joining any peace talks with the Kabul government.

Across southern Helmand, Kandahar and Uruzgan provinces where the Taliban have stepped up the fight, local community leaders and politicians say that rather than relying on foreign advisers every step of the way, they prefer a permanent solution: a well-equipped Afghan army able to fight alone.

Helmand tribal elder and former lawmaker Ghulam Mohammad said the Taliban were becoming "stronger and stronger" after 15 years of insurgency.

"If we don't stop them now, it will be too late," he said.

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Associated Press writers Mirwais Khan and Sonia Azatar in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this story.

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, New U.S. commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Gen. John W. Nicholson, speaks during a change of command ceremony at the Resolute Support Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has submitted his first three-month assessment of the situation in the war-torn country and what its going to take to defeat the Taliban, a U.S. military official tells The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, New U.S. commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Gen. John W. Nicholson, attends a change of command ceremony at the Resolute Support Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has submitted his first three-month assessment of the situation in the war-torn country and what its going to take to defeat the Taliban, a U.S. military official tells The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

In this Wednesday, March 2, 2016 photo, New U.S. commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Army Gen. John W. Nicholson, attends a change of command ceremony at the Resolute Support Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. The new U.S. commander in Afghanistan has submitted his first three-month assessment of the situation in the war-torn country and what its going to take to defeat the Taliban, a U.S. military official tells The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
Congress stalemated on guns despite shooting, filibuster

WASHINGTON (AP)  The slaughter in Florida and an attention-grabbing filibuster in the Senate did little to break the election-year stalemate in Congress over guns Thursday, with both sides unwilling to budge and Republicans standing firm against any new legislation opposed by the National Rifle Association.

Democrats renewed their call to action after Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., held the floor along with colleagues in a nearly 15-hour filibuster that lasted into the early hours Thursday.

"We can't just wait, we have to make something happen," said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., at an emotional news conference where Democrats joined family members of people killed in recent mass shootings. "These are people bound by brutality, and their numbers are growing."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., center, calls for gun control legislation in the wake of the mass shooting in an Orlando LGBT nightclub this week, Thursday, June 16, 2016, on Capitol Hill in Washington. From left are, Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Rev. Sharon Risher, Risher, a clinical trauma chaplain in Dallas, who lost her mother Ethel Lance and two cousins in the racially-motivated shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, N.C. in 2015, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Murphy, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

But Republicans were coolly dismissive of Democrats' demands. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., derided Murphy's filibuster as a "campaign talk-a-thon" that did nothing but delay potential votes.

Noting that a few Democrats had skipped a classified briefing on the Florida nightclub shooting to participate in the filibuster, McConnell chided: "It's hard to think of a clearer contrast for serious work for solutions on the one hand, and endless partisan campaigning on the other."

Democrats spoke of the need for new gun legislation. Republicans cited the threat posed by the Islamic State group, to which Orlando gunman Omar Mateen swore allegiance while killing 49 people in a gay nightclub early Sunday. But the two sides mostly talked past each other, and efforts to forge consensus quickly sputtered out. As a result, the Senate faced the prospect of taking dueling votes beginning Monday on Democratic and GOP bills, all of which looked destined to fail.

The back-and-forth came as President Barack Obama visited the victims' families in Orlando, and called on lawmakers to act.

"Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense," Obama said.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined Senate Democrats' call for action. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump weighed in with a tweet suggesting he would meet with the NRA and support efforts to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. Exactly what he would support was unclear.

It's the same exercise the Senate has engaged in time and again after mass shootings. Even after the Newtown, Connecticut, shootings of schoolchildren, the Senate could not pass a bipartisan background checks bill. Moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine criticized the state of affairs as "Groundhog Day."

After the shooting in San Bernardino, California, last year, the effort was downgraded to trying to pass a bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to keep people on a government terrorism watch list or other suspected terrorists from buying guns, but that too failed.

This time, Feinstein is seeking a revote on her bill. Republicans will offer an alternative by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would allow the government to delay a gun sale to a suspected terrorist for 72 hours, but require prosecutors to go to court to show probable cause to block the sale permanently.

Votes were also expected on dueling background check bills. All were expected to fail.

Collins said she was working with other Republicans, as well as talking to Democrats, on a bill that would prevent people on the no-fly list  a smaller universe than targeted by Democrats  from getting guns. But her bill had not been blessed by GOP leaders and it was unclear if it would get a vote.

Polls show large numbers of Americans agree with the need for at least some limited gun measures such as background checks. But Democrats have been unable to turn the tide of public opinion to their purpose because the NRA is able to mobilize and energize voters who will threaten to vote lawmakers out on the gun issue alone.

This past week, the NRA made robo-calls in Pennsylvania urging people to contact their senators and "express their strong opposition to any new gun control laws."

In the GOP-controlled House, Republicans had no plans to act on guns and Democrats were unable to force any action, given House rules less favorable to the minority party than in the Senate. Instead the House passed a bundle of previously approved counterterrorism bills and sent them to the Senate again.

"The question is, is going after the Second Amendment how you stop terrorism? No. That's not how you stop terrorism," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

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Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Rev. Sharon Risher, Risher, a clinical trauma chaplain in Dallas, who lost her mother Ethel Lance and two cousins in the racially-motivated shooting at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, N.C., in 2015, is embraced by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., during a news conference by Democratic senators calling for gun control legislation in the wake of the mass shooting in an Orlando LGBT nightclub this week, Thursday, June 16, 2016, on Capitol Hill in Washington. From left are, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who mourned the loss of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his home state, arrives for a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 16, 2016, after waging a roughly 15-hour filibuster from Wednesday into early Thursday, asserting as he finally yielded the floor that Republican leaders had committed to hold votes on expanded gun background checks and a ban on gun sales to suspected terrorists. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., left, accompanied by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., right, and other Democratic senators, calls for gun control legislation in the wake of the mass shooting in an Orlando LGBT nightclub this week, Thursday, June 16, 2016, on Capitol Hill in Washington6. Sen. Murphy, who mourned the loss of 20 children in his home state, waged a roughly 15-hour filibuster into early Thursday, asserting as he yielded the floor that Republican leaders had committed to hold votes on expanded gun background checks and a ban on gun sales to suspected terrorists. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., joined by, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., criticizes Republicans as allies of the gun lobby as Democratic senators call for gun control legislation in the wake of the mass shooting in an Orlando LGBT nightclub this week, Thursday, June 16, 2016, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

In this photo taken June 14, 2016, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., left, confers with Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., emerge from a closed-door party caucus on Capitol Hill in Washington. Murphy is launching a filibuster and demanding a vote on gun control measures. The move comes three days after people were killed in a mass shooting in Orlando. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Documents: Image of chained, diapered detainees worried Bush

WASHINGTON (AP)  Newly declassified documents offer more details about a detainee who died inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks and disclose that President George W. Bush was worried about the image of shackled detainees wearing adult diapers.

Among the 50 documents released was a heavily redacted memo in which then-CIA Director Porter Goss recounts a meeting with Bush on June 7, 2006. The only sentence left to read said: "The president was concerned about the image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on themselves."

Human rights advocates said Wednesday that this week's release of the documents  many footnoted in the 2014 Senate report on the torture of detainees  depict the human suffering associated with the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, which President Barack Obama said did significant damage to America's standing in the world.

FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2014, file photo, CIA Director John Brennan speaks during a news conference at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Newly declassified documents offer more details about a detainee who died inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks and disclose that President George W. Bush was worried about the image of shackled detainees wearing adult diapers. Brennan has said that the agency made mistakes and learned from them, but insisted the coercive techniques used on detainees produced intelligence "that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives."(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

"A lot of these details haven't been released before and I think they kind of underscore the depravity of the program," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. "You read these documents and you cannot help come away with and understand the grotesqueness of the methods they were using.

"It's not like this (the interrogation program) was precisely calibrated. It was just abuse piled upon abuse."

CIA Director John Brennan has said that the agency made mistakes and learned from them, but insisted the coercive techniques used on detainees produced intelligence "that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives." The CIA also has acknowledged, in a response to the Senate report, that its "lack of preparation and competencies resulted in significant lapses in the agency's ability to develop and monitor its initial detention and interrogation activities."

The documents were released Tuesday under a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU and Vice News.

The ACLU's Jaffer cited the case of suspected extremist Gul Rahman, who was interrogated in late 2002 at a CIA detention facility set up in a former brick factory in Afghanistan. He was shackled to a wall in his cell in "near-freezing confinement."

One afternoon, Rahman, who had been deemed very uncooperative with interrogators, threw his food, water bottle and defecation bucket at guards and threatened them with death if he were ever released. Rahman was shackled using the "short chain" method. His hands were chained together. His feet were chained together. Then, a short chain was used to shackle his hands to his feet.

"This position forced Rahman, who was naked below the waist to sit on a cold concrete floor and prevented him from standing up," according to the declassified CIA inspector general's report about his death.

He was found dead the next day in his cell at the compound, northwest of the airport in Kabul. "A palm-sized pool of dried blood was present in and around the mouth and nose of subject. Rahman was observed still shackled and slumped over in the seated position," the report said.

An autopsy reported the cause of the November 2002 death as "undetermined," but the clinical conclusion was that Rahman, who was about 34 at the time, died of hypothermia. Justice Department investigations into his death resulted in no charges.

Rahman was captured in October 2002 in Islamabad, Pakistan. He was thought to be connected to Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and allied with al-Qaida.

The IG report, dated April 27, 2005, described Rahman as "stoic and very stubborn." He complained about conditions, poor treatment and "claimed inability to think due to (cold) conditions," the report said.

A few months after Rahman's death, a memo to the CIA's deputy director for operations on Jan. 28, 2003, described the standard procedure used for detainees at that detention facility.
Russia says 48-hour truce reached in Syria's Aleppo

BEIRUT (AP)  The Russian Defense Ministry said a 48-hour cessation of hostilities has been declared in the divided northern Syrian city of Aleppo and activists reported a relative calm in Syria's largest city on Thursday.

In past months, Aleppo has witnessed fierce fighting and bombardment, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of people on both sides of the contested city.

Russia said the truce went into effect after midnight Wednesday. Several similar truces have been declared in the city in recent months.

FILE -- In this February 11, 2016, file photo, civilians walk with containers for fuel and water in Aleppo, Syria. After four years of grinding battles, Aleppos divided residents face a common fear as the prospect of a total siege looms. Syrias largest city used to be its economic locomotive, now it is has become an emblem of its stalemated civil war. (Alexander Kots/Komsomolskaya Pravda via AP, File)

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the city was calm early Thursday but that government warplanes later bombarded several rebel-held neighborhoods in Aleppo.

The Observatory said that since the latest round of violence began on April 22, 627 people have been killed and some 2,900 wounded. It said the dead included 124 minors under the age of 18.

Rebels seized part of Aleppo from forces loyal to President Bashar Assad in 2012. Assad's forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, have nearly encircled rebel-held parts of the city in recent months.

Aleppo-based activist Baraa al-Halaby said opposition fighters in the city  once Syria's commercial center  were not informed about the truce. He said that although there is a truce, government forces as well as Russian and Syrian warplanes have been targeting the Castello road that links rebel-held areas with the rest of the country, preventing people from leaving.

"This is a joke," al-Halaby said by telephone, speaking of the alleged cease-fire. "The Castello road has been bombarded with barrel bombs for the past 12 hours."

Jan Egeland, who is leading the U.N. Syria envoy's effort to get humanitarian aid into the country, called the truce a "confidence-building measure" and a key step toward possibly getting convoys into Aleppo "where it has been impossible to do humanitarian work in many areas for too long."

"The fighting has gotten worse. The bombing is worse. The protection needs of the civilian population are being trampled upon across the Syrian map," he told reporters in Geneva, referring to the overall security situation in Syria.

"It is then very positive that a truce for 48 hours was declared today in Aleppo  Aleppo city  we need more of this and we need it in Aleppo and we need it elsewhere because we are acutely aware that the access we have now can end tomorrow," Egeland added.

Humanitarian aid organization Mercy Corps said there has been "a significant decrease in violence, although there have been minor infringements" since the cease-fire went into effect.

"Mercy Corps is deeply appreciative of any opportunity to deliver life-saving aid safely and for the people of Syria to have relief from the seemingly endless violence of this conflict," said Xavier Tissier, North Syria director for Mercy Corps.

"However, a scant 48 hours is not enough time to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people in east Aleppo have the food and other essentials they need," he said. "Incredibly short, one-off windows cannot be considered a serious attempt at permitting humanitarian access. We need permanent, sustained, unfettered access that the people of Aleppo can depend on."

Near Aleppo, fighting continued between members of the Islamic State group and the U.S.-backed predominantly Kurdish Syria Democratic Forces near the IS stronghold of Manbij.

The U.S. Central Command said that as of Monday, the Syrian Arab Coalition, which is part of the SDF, completed the first phase of their operation to free the town of Manbij by securing the territory surrounding the IS-held town.

"After clearing Daesh from this area they are now ready for the second phase to liberate the city itself," the CENTCOM statement said, using an Arabic acronym to refer to IS. It added that since the operation against IS in Manbij began in late May, the U.S.-led coalition has conducted more than 190 airstrikes in the vicinity of Manbij.

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Cockpit recorder of crashed EgyptAir jet recovered from sea

CAIRO (AP)  Egypt said Thursday it has recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the submerged wreckage of EgyptAir Flight 804, a major breakthrough in the investigation that could help resolve the mystery of why the jetliner plunged into the Mediterranean last month and killed all 66 people aboard.

The announcement came a day after officials said they had found the wreckage of the Airbus A320 and are putting together a map of the debris on the seabed. Such images will help investigators determine whether the plane broke apart in the air or stayed intact until it struck the water, aviation experts said.

The wreckage of the Paris-to-Cairo flight is believed to be at a depth of about 3,000 meters (9,800 feet). Previously, search crews found only small floating pieces of debris and some human remains.

FILE -- This August 21, 2015 file photo shows an EgyptAir Airbus A320 with the registration SU-GCC taking off from Vienna International Airport, Austria. The cockpit voice recorder of the doomed EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board has been found and pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt's investigation committee said on Thursday, June 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Thomas Ranner, File)

The cockpit voice recorder was recovered in "several stages" by the search vessel John Lethbridge, operated by Deep Ocean Search and equipped with a Remotely Operated Vehicle, the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee said.

Although designed to survive a crash and fire, the recorder had sustained damage, and only its memory unit  "the most important in the recorder"  was recovered unharmed, it said, without elaborating on the extent of the damage.

"This is a great achievement in a short period of time," said Abdel-Fattah Kato, the former head of EgyptAir who is not involved in the investigation. "We are close to finding out what happened to the plane."

The device, which records the pilots' conversations and other noises from the cockpit, has been taken to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, where it will be turned over to investigators for analysis. Experts say that it takes nearly 48 hours to retrieve information from the recorder.

Search teams will continue looking for the second so-called "black box"  the aircraft's flight data recorder, which carries such information as how a plane is functioning, including its airspeed, altitude, the status of key system and the pilots' actions. Both devices are kept in the tail of the plane.

The voice recorder provides investigators with cockpit interactions that "add a lot of insight into what occurred," said Anthony Roman, a pilot and president of the security consultants Roman & Associates.

But he said the search teams will also want the flight data recorder, because it will help put together a "picture of events that occurred."

Flight 804 disappeared from radar about 2:45 a.m. local time on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.

Radar data showed the aircraft had been cruising normally in clear skies before it turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right as it plummeted from 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) to 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). It disappeared when it was at an altitude of about 10,000 feet (3,048 meters).

Leaked flight data indicated a sensor had detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the plane's cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

No terrorist group has claimed responsibility, although Egypt's civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, has said terrorism is a more probable cause than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event.

Investigators first learned the location of the voice recorder two weeks ago when its battery-powered signals were detected by sonars mounted on the Laplace, a French naval vessel. The signals helped narrow the search to a 5-kilometer (3-mile) area.

On Sunday, Egyptian investigators said time was running out in the search for the black boxes because they would stop emitting signals in less than two weeks due to fading battery life.

Egypt's aviation industry has been under international scrutiny since Oct. 31, 2015, when a Russian Airbus A321 flying to St. Petersburg from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard. Russia said the crash was caused by a bomb on the plane, and the local branch of the Islamic State claimed responsibility, citing Moscow's involvement in Syria.

In March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus. A man described by authorities as mentally unstable was taken into custody.
Egypt says masked gunmen killed 2 policemen in Sinai

CAIRO (AP)  Egypt's Interior Ministry says four masked gunmen have stormed a house in the northern Sinai Peninsula city of al-Arish and shot dead two policemen inside.

Al-Arish, a city on the Mediterranean, has been at the center of an insurgency by Islamic militants targeting members of the security forces and soldiers. The shooting took place early on Thursday.

The statement did not say who was behind the attack, which bore the hallmarks of Islamic militants.
Police fail to arrest popular Thai monk after tense showdown

BANGKOK (AP)  Thai police raided a Buddhist temple complex Thursday to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $40 million but were thwarted by thousands of his followers who said he is too ill to be taken into custody.

The operation at Wat Dhammakaya, a monastery north of Bangkok known as one of the wealthiest in Thailand, began at 5 a.m. and was broadcast live on TV in a dramatic twist to a months-old standoff. But hours later police couldn't arrest the abbot, Phra Dhammachayo, after searching all the areas in the complex but one.

"There is a last area we could not enter because the followers would not allow us," said police Maj. Suriya Singhakamol, the deputy chief of the Department of Special Investigations.

Buddhist devotees sit outside the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Pathum Thani province, north of Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police entered the sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Dhammachayo's case has enthralled the nation with its twists and turns and the conflict between law and religion it has posed. Several scandals in recent years have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand.

Although the police withdrew for the day after the fruitless raid, Suriya said "our operation has not ended. The (arrest) warrant is still valid so we will have authority to carry out the operation. According to our information, he is still inside."

Dhammachayo is accused of money laundering and links to embezzling 1.4 billion baht ($40 million) from a now-defunct credit union. He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three police summonses and an arrest warrant. He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he was too ill to report to police for questioning.

Outside of Thailand it may seem odd that a monk should be able to defy law-enforcement officials so brazenly. But a law which forbids arrest of a monk in his robes, for fear it would mar the sanctity of the clergy, has repeatedly put police in an awkward position. Authorities are also reluctant to force a showdown with the monk's thousands of supporters, fearing violence.

Buddhism is the national religion and one of three core pillars of Thai society along with the monarchy and nationhood. Monks occupy a privileged position and are granted many concessions, including not paying taxes and being exempt from arrest until they are defrocked.

Their position in Thai society was reflected in the police operation  they paused the raid to allow the monks to eat their once-a-day meal at 11 a.m.

"Since this morning, we have given full cooperation to the police," temple spokesman Phra Sanitwong Wuttiwangso told an afternoon news conference on the temple grounds. But he said groups of followers were refusing to let police enter certain areas. "A number of followers, no matter what we tell them, they will not listen. They are asking (police) for consideration, because the abbot is ill. He has not fled the temple."

The main gates to the temple, a futuristic construction resembling a golden UFO-like dome, were blocked with shuttle buses brought in by the monk's followers. Police still managed to enter in as thousands of devotees held up signs condemning the police for what the devotees say is a politically motivated investigation.

Dhammachayo leads the largest religious sect in Thailand and has a cult-like following. He first got into trouble two years ago when it became known that the former head of the Klongchan Credit Union Cooperative, a Dhammakaya devotee, had donated such large sums to the temple that it sent his business into insolvency.

The official was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

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Associated Press writer Gabrielle Paluch contributed to this report.

Department of Special Investigation officers and monks negotiate with temple authorities as they serve an arrest warrant at Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Pathum Thani province, north of Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police entered the sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Department of Special Investigation officers walk past Buddhist devotees with temple authorities as they serve an arrest warrant at Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Pathum Thani province, north of Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police entered the sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Buddhist monks and devotees pray and block a road outside the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Pathum Thani province, north of Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police entered the sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Buddhist devotees sit outside the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple as police serve an arrest warrant for it's abbot in Pathum Thani province, north of Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police entered the sprawling Buddhist temple complex after wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling $14 million. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)
Bangladesh police arrest suspect in attack on publisher

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP)  Police in Bangladesh's capital say they have arrested a suspected member of a banned Islamist group accused of attacking and killing atheist writers.

Authorities produced suspect Mohammed Sumon Hossain in court Thursday, after arresting him Wednesday night near Dhaka's airport.

Police counter-terrorism chief Monirul Islam told reporters that Hossain was a member of the banned Ansarullah Bangla Team.

He said Hossain was charged with taking part in an attack in October on publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul, who worked on books by a prominent atheist writer who was killed in a separate attack.
China's president looks to boost relations with Serbia visit

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP)  Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Serbia this week in an effort to further boost relations with the friendly nation and assert China's intention to radically increase its presence in the Balkans and Europe.

The first visit by a Chinese president in more than 30 years, Xi's trip to Belgrade has been hailed here as "historic." During his three-day stay starting Friday, Xi will hold meetings with top officials and visit a Serbian steel plant purchased by a Chinese company.

The visit is "a significant milestone for consolidating the traditional friendship between China and Serbia, deepening mutual political trust and promoting the practical cooperation between the two countries," Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Xinghai said in Beijing.

Serbia's Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said some 20 economic and other agreements will be signed during Xi's stay. "It is a big event for us," Vucic said.

From Serbia, Xi will travel to Poland where he will ink deals on finance, aviation, science and education. Poland has sought to develop trade and business ties with China, where it sees a large market and a counterweight to strictly regulated business ties within the European Union.

Xi will wrap the tour in Uzbekistan, where he will attend a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit focusing on the fight against terrorism and crime.

China has been seeking opportunities to deepen ties to the region  several meetings of southeast European countries and China have been held in the past years and accompanied by investment projects  and boost relations with the EU.

The Asian economic power is interested in energy, infrastructure and other big projects to fuel its economy at a time when labor costs are rising at home, undermining its exports, its traditional economic strength. Chinese investors have hoped to increase their presence in the region where Western companies may be reluctant to take too many financial risks.

In Serbia, China has built a bridge over the Danube in Belgrade, moved to revitalize a power plant and agreed to help modernize the railway connecting Hungary's capital, Budapest, with Belgrade. Some local financial experts have complained that the infrastructure projects have been financed by Chinese credit and built using a Chinese workforce without much actual cash investment in the local economies.

In April, China's Hebei Iron and Steel Group signed a 46 million-euro ($52 million) agreement to buy the loss-making Zelezara Smederevo near Belgrade that was previously owned by Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel and which has long struggled to find a buyer.

The deal was closely watched by the EU  Serbia is a candidate country for EU membership  amid concerns about overcapacity in the steel sector, which European steelmakers blame partly on a glut of cheap Chinese steel.

Foreign policy expert Aleksandra Joksimovic explained that by investing in infrastructure and other projects in southeast Europe China is seeking to "position itself strategically toward Europe with regards to economy."

"China's interest in Europe has grown significantly in recent years," Joksimovic said. "The EU does not mind Serbia's cooperation (with China) as it is also looking for common interests with China in the economic sphere."

Chinese Assistant FM Liu noted that Serbia is well-placed geographically, bordering many countries. Serbia is pushing for reindustrialization while Chinese companies have the technology and experience, which hails a win-win future, Liu said.

Liu praised Serbia's role in helping build cooperation between China and countries of southeast Europe and supporting China's "One Belt One Road" initiative  a sweeping plan to deepen trade relations with neighboring countries and open new markets.

Eager for foreign investment, Serbia has been struggling economically since the wars of the 1990s' when the country was under international isolation for its war-mongering policies. Belgrade has proclaimed joining the EU its strategic goal, but it has also sought to maintain close ties with both its traditional ally Russia and China.

China's HBIS group has pledged a multi-million investment in the Zelezara Smederevo plant, which employs some 5,000 workers. U.S. Steel ran the company from 2002-2012, before reselling it to the Serbian state for a symbolical price of $1 due to losses.

In EU member nation Poland, a freight train connection has been established between the central Polish city of Lodz and the Chinese Chengdu province, considered by Poland to be crucial for developing trade. China is Poland's biggest trading partner in Asia and the third largest partner in import: in 2014 the bilateral turnover was $ 25.5 billion, including only $2.3 billion in Poland's export to China.

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16 Libyan militiamen killed in 2 IS attacks near Sirte

BENGHAZI, Libya (AP)  At least 16 Libyan militia fighters have been killed in two attacks by the Islamic State group as pro-government forces try to dislodge the extremists from Sirte, their last stronghold in the country, officials said on Thursday.

The bombings were part of a wave of suicide attacks launched by IS to stall the initially fast progress of the anti-IS forces, who are led by militias from the western city of Misrata.

IS counter-attacks have killed nearly 180 militia fighters since the offensive began in early May.

In recent weeks, the militias have managed to take over large areas of Sirte, including the air base, the port, and a number of barracks. Videos and pictures from the city showed militiamen knocking down a central stage used by IS militants to behead and shoot opponents. Officials said that they have cornered the militants inside a small area of town around the sprawling convention center that the group turned into its headquarters.

However, some of the militants appear capable of striking from behind front lines, possibly by disguising themselves among the families escaping the fighting, said Ahmed Hadia, the head of the media center of the anti-IS operation.

On Thursday, the spokesman of Misrata hospital, Abdel-Aziz Essa, told The Associated Press that 10 fighters were killed and seven injured when a suicide bomber struck a police station in the early hours in Abu Grain, a village located on a crossroad that connects the coastal cities with the south.

A day earlier, Hadia said that the operation room has lost contact with a six-member scouting unit inside Sirte. Hours later, IS posted pictures online of the bodies of young men in uniform in the back of a pick-up truck, and described them as members of the Misrata forces. Hadia said that two of the men were identified as belonging to their forces.

He said that the IS fighters who had managed to escape Sirte "could be a more serious threat than the fighters we are currently surrounding."

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Group: Ethiopia's security forces killed over 400 protesters

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP)  Ethiopian security forces have killed more than 400 people in a crackdown on protests in the Oromia region since November, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

Tens of thousands of others have been arrested, the rights group said in a new report , citing the accounts of 125 protesters, witnesses and others.

The student-led protests were sparked by a government plan to expand the municipal boundaries of the capital, Addis Ababa, into Oromia, where farmers fear they will lose their land. The development proposal has since been retracted.

The security forces used live ammunition for crowd control repeatedly, killing one or more protesters at many of the hundreds of protests over several months, according to Human Rights Watch. Many of those killed were students, including children under 18, the group said.

"Ethiopian security forces have fired on and killed hundreds of students, farmers and other peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for human life," said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation and hold security force members accountable for abuses."

There was no immediate comment from the Ethiopian government.
Revolutionary Guard, Kurdish insurgents battle in Iran

BAGHDAD (AP)  Iran's Revolutionary Guard has battled armed members of an insurgent Kurdish group, leading to fatalities.

A report Thursday by Iran's semi-official Fars news agency quoted Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, the chief of the Guard's ground forces, as saying the clashes happened Wednesday near Oshnavieh, a predominantly Kurdish town in Iran's West Azerbaijan province near its border with Iraq and Turkey.

Pakpour did not identify the insurgents. However, Mohammed Nazif Qadiri, a member of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, told The Associated Press that the fighters belonged to his organization.

Both sides gave conflicting death tolls from the fighting. Pakpour said the Guard killed 12 insurgents while three of its members died. Qadiri said the Kurds killed over 12 Guard members, including a colonel.
In Sweden, Bosnian man barred from Europe has sought asylum

STOCKHOLM (AP)  A 46-year-old Bosnian man who is banned from entering Europe's passport-free area has sought asylum in Sweden, authorities said Thursday.

Police spokeswoman Ewa-Gun Westford said the man, whom she didn't identify, was registered in the Schengen Information System (SIS) on suspicion of unspecified criminal activity.

"France has put a ban on him. I cannot say why because it is shrouded in secrecy," said border police spokesman Leif Fransson. The man arrived Monday by plane from Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Malmo, Sweden's third largest city.

Both Westford and Fransson declined to identify him.

"He seemed nervous as he stood in the queue at the border control so we took him out and checked his documents," Fransson told The Associated Press. "He said he came to Sweden as a tourist. After we told him there was a hit in the (SIS), he said he wanted to seek asylum."

In January, Sweden was one of several European Union members that re-introduced border controls to help manage the flow of migrants. The Scandinavian nation was a top destination for asylum-seekers entering Europe last year.

In an email to The Associated Press, Sweden's immigration agency confirmed the man had sought asylum and that the case would be expedited.

Westford said Sweden's security service SAPO had been informed, calling it "a normal procedure."

However, Neither Fransson nor Westford could confirm the Sydsvenskan daily's description of the Bosnian as being a Muslim radical.
In tense France, man detained suspected of attack plots

PARIS (AP)  A psychologically troubled man with links to radical Islam has been detained in southern France suspected of plotting possible attacks on American and Russian tourists and police, authorities said Thursday, amid renewed fears about Islamic State threats to France.

The man has been under surveillance for radicalism after bragging online about wanting to kill people, and has an "unstable" psychological profile, a security official said. He was detained by intelligence agents earlier this week at the train station in the medieval city of Carcassonne with a knife and a hammer, the official said.

The security official called it a routine matter as police and intelligence services seek to avert a repeat of deadly Islamic State attacks on France last year.

Police officers and residents walk with a banner reading "Homage to the two slain colleagues Jessica and Jean-Baptiste" during a white march in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, Thursday, June 16, 2016. French police officials Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his companion Jessica Schneider were killed Monday by an Islamic State extremist. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)

A judicial official said the man told investigators he wanted to attack tourists and later police. Both officials spoke only on condition of anonymity to be able to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The incident came the same week that an extremist claiming allegiance to IS stabbed two police officials to death in a Paris suburb.

Hundreds of police, friends and neighbors marched silently Thursday to honor the victims, police commander Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his companion, police administrator Jessica Schneider.

Their faces solemn and lips closed, the crowd marched from Mantes-la-Jolie, where Schneider worked, to Magnanville, where she and Salvaing were stabbed at their home Monday night.

Their 3-year-old son survived the attack, which rattled France's leadership as the country is on high alert for new extremist violence.

Attacker Larossi Abballa was killed in a police raid. Three people with links to Abballa are in custody and being questioned by anti-terrorism investigators.

French police have described growing fear after multiple attacks targeting security officers.

Police officers and residents walk to pay homage to the two slain police officials during a white march in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, Thursday, June 16, 2016. French police officials Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his companion Jessica Schneider were killed Monday by an Islamic State extremist. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)

A French police officer holds a rose and an candle to pay homage to the two slain colleagues during a white march in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, Thursday, June 16, 2016. French police officials Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his companion Jessica Schneider were killed Monday by an Islamic State extremist. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)

Police officers walk to pay homage to the two slain colleagues during a white march in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, Thursday, June 16, 2016. French police officials Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his companion Jessica Schneider were killed Monday by an Islamic State extremist. (AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu)
The Latest: Gunman tried to buy body armor before attack

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP)  The Latest on the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida (all times local):

5:30 p.m.

The owner of a gun shop in Florida says the gunman in the Orlando nightclub shootings came to his shop to buy body armor and 1,000 rounds of ammunition about five weeks before the rampage.

A mourner signs the shape of a heart for the media while leaving the funeral service for Kimberly Morris, one of the victims of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Kissimmee, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Robert Abell, co-owner of Lotus Gunworks in Jensen Beach, says the shop declined the sale because the customer raised suspicions by requesting a high grade of body armor typically used by law enforcement.

Abell says the young man left empty-handed and that the shop alerted the FBI, but since no sale was made, the shop did not check the man's ID and had no name to give authorities.

Abell says store staff realized the customer was nightclub shooter Omar Mateen only after seeing reports about the carnage in Orlando.

___

4:50 p.m.

The flag flew at half-staff at a cemetery outside Orlando for one of the first burials of one of the 49 victims of the shooting rampage at the city's Pulse nightclub.

A line of a couple dozen mourners surrounded a black hearse as the body of Kimberly "KJ" Morris was loaded in and taken for burial at Osceola Memory Gardens Cemetery in Kissimmee, Florida.

The 37-year-old Morris moved to Orlando months ago and worked at the club as a bouncer.

Jessica Frazier was an acquaintance of KJ and knew her from Pulse. Frazer says she was always very positive, no matter what was going on.

___

4:10 p.m.

President Barack Obama says it's going to take more than the military to prevent terrorist attacks like the ones that have occurred most recently in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando.

Obama is speaking after meeting with families of those shot and killed early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Obama says the attacks were not conducted by sophisticated cells, but by deranged individuals. And while the motivation may have been different than what led to attacks in communities like Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut, the instruments of death were similar.

He says those killed and injured were gunned down by a single individual with a powerful assault weapon. Earlier in the day, White House spokesman Eric Schultz reiterated the administration's support for legislation that would ban assault weapons.

___

4 p.m.

President Barack Obama says the families of the 49 people who were killed in the Orlando nightclub shooting "could be our families" and "are part of the American family."

Obama adds that his visit Thursday to the grieving Florida city reminds everyone of "what is good."

Obama spoke after meeting privately with loved ones of those who were killed Sunday, including many young people in their 20s and 30s.

He says the families' grief is "beyond description."

Obama was joined by Vice President Joe Biden.

___

3:50 p.m.

President Barack Obama has concluded his meeting with survivors and the families of victims killed in Sunday's nightclub shooting in Orlando.

The president is visiting Orlando to express solidarity with the grief-stricken community.

The White House says that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden also met with the owners and staff of the Pulse nightclub who were working when the attack occurred. Two employees were killed in the attack.

The president and vice president have also had the chance to meet with local law enforcement officials to thank them for their work in responding to the attack, which killed 49 and injured more than 50.

___

A JetBlue crew member says on a Facebook post that people on a plane to Orlando wrote notes and hugged a woman who is said to be the grandmother of one of the victims in the shooting at a gay nightclub.

The airline would not name the woman but confirmed that Facebook post was made by a crew member.

In the Facebook post, Kelly Davis Karas said the grandmother was "distraught, but met us with kindness and gentleness."

The crew member passed around a paper so people could write notes and says they had page after page of long messages offering condolences, peace, love and support.

The crew member identified the flier as the grandmother of Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, one of the 49 people killed in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. He was 20 years old.

As people left the plane they offered their condolences.

The crew member wrote: People are kind and people do care."

___

3:40 p.m.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have laid wreaths at a makeshift memorial to nightclub shooting victims in downtown Orlando.

Under rainy skies, the two walked slowly up to a sea of flowers, signs and American flags and kneeled low to place the white wreaths.

Obama and Biden are in Orlando on Thursday to meet with survivors and the families of victims slain the massacre at the Pulse nightclub.

___

The medical examiner in Orlando says he doesn't believe the 49 people who died in the Pulse nightclub shooting suffered because they didn't move after being felled.

Dr. Joshua Stephany said Thursday that medical examiners determine suffering by how much a victim moves after being shot.

He says didn't see evidence that the victims had moved.

He says it looked like time had stopped in the club following the massacre.

Drinks looked like they had just been poured, checks looked like they were about to be paid, TVs were on in the background, food was half-eaten and fans were swirling.

He described it as surreal.

___

3:30 p.m.

Republican Sen. John McCain says President Barack Obama is "directly responsible" for the mass shooting in Orlando because Obama has allowed the growth of the Islamic State group on his watch.

McCain  who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election  made the comment to reporters Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday's attack and some of the survivors.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting U.S. enemies ahead of American's own people. Trump also has suggested that Obama himself might sympathize with radical elements.

Democrats criticized Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves.

McCain is seeking a sixth term in the Senate from Arizona.

___

Ohio State University has changed its mind about having its mascot march in an upcoming Ohio parade celebrating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month.

The university spirit team coaches had earlier cited safety concerns after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Florida that left 49 dead as the reason for pulling Brutus Buckeye from this weekend's Pride festival in Columbus. But in a statement Thursday afternoon, OSU said that after "additional consultation and reviews," Brutus would indeed participate in the parade, along with President Michael Drake and other university officials.

The statement didn't say why school officials changed their mind about Brutus' participation, and spokesmen Ben Johnson declined to comment further.

Columbus police have said security will be increased for this weekend's events.

___

3 p.m.

The medical examiner in Orlando says he was able to identify the last of the 49 victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting only after finding the victim's wallet at the club.

Dr. Joshua Stephany said Thursday that there was no identification with 25-year-old Geraldo Ortiz-Jimenez when he was brought to the medical examiner's facilities.

The medical examiner's office doctors were able to identify many of the other victims through photo IDs or family descriptions of tattoos or jewelry.

Stephany said when he went out to the club he noticed a loose wallet.

A police officer procured the wallet for him and it turned out it belong to Ortiz-Jimenez.

___

2:15 p.m.

Hundreds of people are gathering outside the Amway Center in downtown Orlando as President Barack Obama meets with survivors and family members of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Brittany Woodrough was waiting in the 95 degree heat, hoping to see the president. She called 19-year-old Jason Benjamin Josaphat, one of the victims, a close friend.

She says she prays for his family and can't believe that she lost a good friend. She says Obama's visit makes it real.

Forty-nine people died when the gunman attacked the Pulse nightclub early Sunday and 53 were wounded.

___

2:05 p.m.

President Barack Obama is meeting with survivors of the Orlando nightclub shooting and the families of the victims in downtown Orlando.

Obama arrived in the afternoon at the Amway Center, where the NBA's Orlando Magic play. He's expected to spend several hours meeting in private to offer condolences.

Vice President Joe Biden is joining Obama for the meetings.

Before sitting down with families and survivors, Obama and Biden met with law enforcement officials. The White House says they thanked the officials for their response to the attack Sunday at a gay nightclub.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Florida Rep. Corrine Brown joined Obama on Air Force One for the flight to Orlando, but are not participating in his meetings with those affected by the shooting.

___

The owner of the nightclub a gunman attacked is starting a fundraising drive for her employees.

Pulse owner Barbara Poma said Thursday that several fundraising efforts are underway to help the survivors and victims' families from the massacre, but none are affiliated with the club.

She says many people have called asking how they can help Pulse employees.

Poma says money raised by the Pulse Employee Recovery Fund will go directly to the nightclub's workers.

___

1:15 p.m.

The medical examiner who oversaw the 49 autopsies of the victims of the Pulse shooting says he kept their bodies separated from the gunman's body.

Dr. Joshua Stephany said in a statement Thursday that the body of gunman Omar Mateen was being held in a building separate from the victims.

He also says the gunman's autopsy was conducted in a separate building from the victims.

Stephany says he decided to do that not because of any requirement but because he thought it's the right thing to do.

The medical examiner says his staffers were able to conduct autopsies on the all victims, as well as identify their bodies, within 72 hours after Sunday morning's shooting.

___

(Corrects day statement was made to Thursday, not Wednesday)

12:50 p.m.

President Barack Obama has arrived in Orlando to console those mourning the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Air Force One landed at Orlando International Airport at midday. Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer were meeting him on the tarmac.

The White House released few details about how Obama is spending the afternoon in Orlando. But he was expected to meet in private with families of the victims and survivors of the attack. Obama also planned to thank first responders and to speak about the need to stand with Orlando's gay and lesbian community.

Twenty-nine-year-old Omar Mateen opened fire inside a gay nightclub early Sunday, leaving 49 people dead.

Vice President Joe Biden is also traveling to Florida on Thursday to spend time with victims' families.

___

12 p.m.

Comcast NBCUniversal is donating $1 million to a fund helping nightclub victims' families and survivors.

The company lost four employees and had two others injured in the shooting.

Company officials said Thursday they were making the donation to the OneOrlando fund in the wake of the Pulse massacre that left 49 people dead. Among the dead were two employees who worked at the Universal Orlando Resort's theme parks and two employees who worked at the Telemundo station in Orlando.

Another two victims used to work at the Universal theme parks, and two other Universal employees were hospitalized with injuries.

Since it was started on Tuesday, the OneOrlando fund has raised at least $4.6 million and is growing.

___

Messages of hope have been extended to the Orlando police officers who responded to this week's gay nightclub shooting by Colorado colleagues who know the horrors they faced.

Aurora Police Lt. Stephen Redfearn was among the first on the scene after a gunman opened fire at a movie theater in his Denver suburb in 2012. Redfearn came up with the idea for a video in which he and other members of his department say they stand with Orlando.

Redfearn says messages he received in 2012 from other officers helped, and he wanted to show Orlando the same support.

Orlando police tweeted a link to Redfearn's video and expressed thanks.

Twelve people died in Aurora in 2012. In Orlando, 49 people died before the gunman was killed.

___

10:35 a.m.

Six people wounded in the attack on a gay nightclub are still in critical condition at a hospital.

Orlando Regional Medical Center said Thursday that three people are in guarded condition. That's an improvement from a couple of days ago when five people were in that condition.

Twenty-three people in all are still at Orlando Regional.

Forty-nine people were killed and more than 50 wounded when Omar Mateen opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub early Sunday.

The motive for his attack is still unclear. He pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a 911 call, his ex-wife said he was mentally ill and his father has suggested he was angry with gays.

___

10:20 a.m.

CIA Director John Brennan says the agency has found no connection between the Orlando gunman and any foreign terrorist organization.

Testifying before the Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, Brennan said the Islamic State will continue to try to inspire lone wolf attacks.

Brennan says he has seen in Orlando, San Bernardino and elsewhere that the group is attempting to inspire attacks by sympathizers who have no direct links to them.

He said, however, that while the CIA is sharing intelligence with the FBI to help identify potential lone-wolf attackers, the agency's responsibility is to gather information about operations overseas.

___

9 a.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she is concerned about hatred against gays and lesbians.

Referring to the nightclub shooting in Orlando, the chancellor told reporters on Thursday that while not all details of the attack had been fully investigated, "we know one thing: the attacker was fully aware that he would meet lesbian and gay people in the nightclub  and the massacre was exactly targeted at these people."

Merkel also expressed concern about increasing homophobic sentiments in Germany. She said that life in open and free societies "must be shaped by respect for the other  no matter what he believes, no matter what he looks like and no matter whom he loves."

___

8:30 a.m.

A visitation has been held for one of the victims of the massacre at a gay Orlando nightclub, beginning the long procession of rainbow-hued sendoffs.

On Wednesday night, the casket for Javier Jorge-Reyes was taken inside the funeral home. Outside, a crowd of drag queens, motorcyclists and others came to pay their respects.

Ezekiel Davis  or, as he's known to some, Sister Anesthesia Beaverhausen  was dressed in a nun's habit. He said: "We're just here to spread love and joy and try to put an end to all the hate."

Cora Bath said she was there to support the grieving family in her city. She added: "We're going to stand united."

___

7:40 a.m.

President Barack Obama wants to offer solace and healing to a distraught community during a visit to Orlando, even as the political world turns the shooting into a fresh excuse to fight about terrorism and gun control.

Obama faces a tragedy whose causes are still murky. Even as the families of 49 victims prepare to bury their dead, it's unclear exactly what led a 29-year-old Muslim born in New York to open fire in a gay nightclub where some have said he might have been a regular patron.

In Orlando, Obama plans to meet with families of the victims, as well as with the doctors, paramedics and other first responders who came to their aid. He is also expected to speak publicly during his visit.

___

7:30 a.m.

Sunday's mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub that left at least 49 people dead had Oprah Winfrey asking questions instead of answering them Wednesday night.

Tapping the chest of an Associated Press reporter to emphasize her point, Winfrey inquired: "What will be the number? What number is high enough to get our attention, so that we will say, 'Enough'?"

Winfrey was on the arrivals line Wednesday night in Los Angeles at the premiere of "Greenleaf." She produces and acts in the TV drama. It will be broadcast on her OWN network.

She seemed eager to speak about the Orlando massacre.

She says: "One side says 'Guns don't kill people. People kill people.' ... But are we a country that really believes that assault weapons should be made available to anybody? Are assault weapons necessary? I just say, 'Enough.'

___

7:30 a.m.

The coordinator for Chicago's upcoming gay pride parade says organizers will hire dozens more off-duty police officers than they did last year after city officials asked them to beef up security in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida.

Richard Pfeiffer says 160 off-duty officers and other security professionals will work the parade. Last year there were 70.

Security has been increased in gay communities in Chicago and around the country since a gunman killed 49 people at an Orlando club. Chicago police say they'll provide additional parade security. Police say there's been no threat made against the city's gay community.

FBI spokesman Garrett Croon says in a statement Wednesday that the agency is working with Chicago police in establishing security measures for the pride parade.

___

7:30 a.m.

New York City's police commissioner says there have been a number of threats made against gay bars and nightclubs in the city, but none appear to be credible.

Commissioner William Bratton says Wednesday that the threats were made by "cowards" who came out of the woodwork after Sunday's shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida that killed 49 people.

Bratton says there are no known, credible threats against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in New York.

He says police will thoroughly investigate each of the threats and police treat all of them seriously.

Bratton says there will also be an increased police presence at the city's gay pride parade on June 26. He predicts this year's parade will be the largest in the city's history.

___

3 a.m.

In the final hours of his life, Orlando gunman Omar Mateen apparently made a series of Facebook posts in which he raged against the "filthy ways of the west."

That's according to a Senate committee.

As the grief-stricken city of Orlando prepares to bury the first of the 49 who perished at the Pulse dance club, a Senate Committee has asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg for help uncovering the trail of hate Mateen left behind in cyberspace.

The call comes as President Barack Obama prepares to visit Orlando on Thursday. On Wednesday, drag queens and motorcyclists paid their respects at a visitation for Javier Jorge-Reyes, beginning the long procession of rainbow-hued sendoffs for Mateen's victims.

President Barack Obama hugs Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs upon the president's arrival at Orlando International Airport, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. Obama is in Orlando today to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and meet with families of victims of the attack. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel via AP) MAGS OUT; NO SALES; MANDATORY CREDIT

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden place flowers down during their visit to a memorial to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Orlando, Fla. Offering sympathy but no easy answers, Obama came to Orlando to try to console those mourning the deadliest shooting in modern U.S history. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama looks at a t-shirt that was presented to him by Orlando, Fla. Mayor Buddy Dyer, center, as Orange County, Fla. Mayor as Teresa Jacobs watches on the tarmac upon his arrival at Orlando International Airport, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. Obama is in Orlando today to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and meet with families of victims of the attack. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama waves as he boards Air Force One, Thursday, June 16, 2016, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Obama will visit Orlando, Fla. to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and meet with families of victims of the attack. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

A mourner leaves the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes on Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A sign reflects a message of unity Wednesday, June 15, 2016 on Interstate 4 northbound, just south of exit 60, in Orlando. The city and nation is still feeling the effects of the June 12 mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub  Pulse. (Corey Perrine/Naples Daily News via AP)

Mourners carry flowers into the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A mourner wipes her eye after leaving the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Mourners gather outside the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

A mourner carries flowers into the visitation for Pulse nightclub shooting victim Javier Jorge-Reyes Wednesday, June 15, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

President Barack Obama returns a salute as he boards Air Force One, Thursday, June 16, 2016, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Obama will visit Orlando, Fla. to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and meet with families of victims of the attack. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama is silhouetted as he walks up the stair while boarding Air Force One, Thursday, June 16, 2016, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Obama will visit Orlando, Fla. to pay respects to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and meet with families of victims of the attack. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden visit a memorial to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Orlando, Fla. Offering sympathy but no easy answers, Obama came to Orlando to try to console those mourning the deadliest shooting in modern U.S history. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

A mourner signs the shape of a heart for the media while leaving the funeral service for Kimberly Morris, one of the victims of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Kissimmee, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Mourners wear shirts bearing the image of Kimberly Morris, one of the victims of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, as they leave Morris' funeral service Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Kissimmee, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Mourners embrace during a graveside burial for Kimberly Morris, one of the victims of the Pulse nightclub mass shooting, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Kissimmee, Fla. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden visit a makeshift memorial to the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Orlando, Fla. Offering sympathy but no easy answers, Obama came to Orlando to try to console those mourning the deadliest shooting in modern U.S history. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden arrive to place flowers at a memorial in Orlando, Fla., Thursday, June 16, 2016, in honor of people killed in the shooting at a gay nightclub. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama walks with Vice President Joe Biden during their visit to a makeshift memorial at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Orland, Fla., honoring those killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via AP) MAGS OUT; NO SALES; MANDATORY CREDIT
Romania: ex-president's brother gets prison for bribery

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP)  A court has upheld a four-year prison sentence for the brother of Romania's former president on charges of influence-peddling, ruling he took a bribe from the son of a convict in return for promising to secure his early release.

The Court of Appeal in Constanta on Thursday upheld an earlier sentence for Mircea Basescu on Thursday on charges that he took a 600,000 euros ($672,000) bribe from Fanica Anghel, the son of Sandu Anghel, serving a sentence for attempted murder.

Prosecutors said Basescu, the brother of Traian Basescu, who was president from 2004 to 2014, took the money and promised Anghel he could get his father's sentence reduced.

Marian Capatana, a politician convicted of being accomplice, was sentenced to three years in the case.
Croatian lawmakers topple the prime minister and government

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP)  Croatia's parliament voted overwhelmingly Thursday to oust Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic, triggering the fall of the government and raising the prospect of an early election in the European Union's newest member state.

The vote in the 151-seat assembly was 125 for the ouster, 15 against and two abstentions.

Croatia, which joined the EU in 2013, will now face months of uncertainty and political bickering despite an urgent need to reconstruct its ailing economy.

FILE- In this Friday, Feb. 19, 2016 file photo, Croatian Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic, speaks with journalists as he arrives for an EU summit in Brussels. Croatian lawmakers were debating on Thursday, June 16, 2016 whether to oust Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic amid a government deadlock that has fueled prospects of early elections in the European Unions newest member country.(AP Photo/Francois Walschaerts)

Oreskovic, a Canada-educated financial expert who speaks Croatian with a heavy English accent, said he was "sorry" he was ousted only five months after taking office. He said he will serve as acting prime minister until a new government is elected.

"I came in with the best intentions to help my homeland," he said, adding he didn't expect his mandate to end the way it did. "Who would have expected this? I have global experience."

"I am a little sad because I think we could have achieved more," he added.

Parliament acted on the motion filed by the conservative Croatian Democratic Union, the senior party in the ruling "Patriotic Coalition." The conservatives have said Oreskovic proved incapable of leading the country amid deep economic and social problems.

The Croatian Democratic Union, known as HDZ, which led the ruling coalition, wants to reshuffle the government with a new premier. The left-wing opposition has called for early elections as the way out of the crisis and announced collecting enough votes in the parliament to dissolve it.

Lawmakers will now have 30 days to form a new government or face a snap election.

HDZ has been locked in a dispute with its main coalition partner, the Most party, which had backed Oreskovic, seeking an expert as prime minister and not a party political figure. Until recently Oreskovic led the large global pharmaceutical company Teva.

The Most party lawmakers said that after Oreskovic's ouster, they will support the opposition bid to dissolve Parliament and force early elections. Party official Miro Bulj said "we are going to elections, submitting signatures is a technical matter."

Oreskovic, with no party affiliation, lost the support of the ruling conservatives after he clashed with their leader, Tomislav Karamarko, who has been accused of conflict of interest due to his links with a lobbyist for Hungary's state oil company MOL, which has been in conflict with the Croatian government.

Karamarko on Wednesday stepped down from his deputy prime minister post, pledging to oust Oreskovic and collect enough votes in the parliament to form another government with a new premier.

Oreskovic told the parliament on Thursday that the real reason for his ouster was that he started resolving the dispute over managing rights in the joint company between the Croatian INA and MOL.
No $5 million African leadership award this year, group says

JOHANNESBURG (AP)  Once again, there is no winner this year of a $5 million award for African leadership.

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation announced Thursday that no former African leader had met the "very high bar" for one of the world's richest prizes. The Ibrahim Prize has been awarded just four times in the decade since it was established.

Candidates are African heads of state or government who have left office in the past three years, been democratically elected and served their constitutionally mandated term. They must also show "exceptional leadership."

The award honors role models on a continent where many leaders have stayed in power for decades.

In an interview with The Associated Press, the prize's founder, British mobile phone magnate Mo Ibrahim, had tart words for a few current African leaders.

"Look at what's going on in Burundi. The oppression there is just unacceptable," he said of the deadly violence since President Pierre Nkurunziza last year decided to seek a third term that critics called unconstitutional.

And in Congo, "what do you say to Kabila?" Ibrahim said. "He's pushing his country recklessly into a difficult situation." The opposition fears November elections will be postponed to keep President Joseph Kabila in power beyond his mandate.

Ibrahim, who was born in Sudan, also criticized leaders who crack down on gays instead of focusing on larger issues like infrastructure development and economic reform.

"Hey guys, get a life," he said. He noted President Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, where gay sex is a criminal offense: "Don't tell people whom they should love."
Pakistan, Afghan official in talks to ease border tensions

ISLAMABAD (AP)  Pakistan's foreign ministry says Islamabad and Kabul are engaged in talks to deescalate tensions at a main border crossing between the two neighboring countries following this week's deadly clashes.

Outbreaks of shooting at the Torkham crossing have killed two Afghan and one Pakistani border guard and wounded at least 20 on both sides.

Spokesman Nafees Zakaria with Pakistan's foreign ministry told reporters in Islamabad on Thursday that he hopes the matter will be resolved soon.

A Pakistan army soldier stands guard in the Pakistani tribal area of Khyber near the Torkham border post between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Renewed clashes overnight at a Pakistani-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

He says the shooting first erupted after Pakistan started building a gate on its side of the Torkham border to curb illegal cross-border movement. He says Pakistan plans to build seven more such gates along the porous 2,200 kilometer (1,375 mile) -long border.

Torkham, a usually busy crossing, has remained closed because of continuing tensions.

Pakistani army spokesman Lt Gen. Asim Bajwa briefs the media regarding the Torkham border gate construction on the Pakistan-Afghan border crossing during a press conference addressing the ongoing military offensive in tribal areas and clashes at the border crossing, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. The renewed clashes overnight at the Pakistan-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

Pakistan army troops patrol near the Torkham border post between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Renewed clashes overnight at a Pakistani-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

Pakistan army troops patrol in Pakistan near the Torkham border post between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Renewed clashes overnight at the Pakistani-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

A Pakistan army soldier stands guard in Pakistani tribal area of Khyber near Torkham border post between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Renewed clashes overnight at a Pakistani-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)

People protest against Afghanistan carrying placards paying tribute to a Pakistani soldier who was killed during a recent clash with Afghan forces, in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Renewed clashes overnight at a Pakistani-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. Placard on top left reads "down with Afghanistan." (AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)

Afghanistan-bound trucks park near the closed Pakistan-Afghanistan border post Torkham, Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Pakistan. Renewed clashes overnight at a Pakistani-Afghan border crossing killed an Afghan border guard and wounded five, an Afghan official said Wednesday, as Islamabad dispatched more troops to the volatile boundary amid an escalation between the two neighbors. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)
3 missing students found safe after night in Everglades

MIAMI (AP)  The U.S. Coast Guard says three college students have been found safe in the Florida Everglades.

On its official Twitter page, the Coast Guard announced that Everglades National Park Service searchers found the three students Thursday morning and that "no medical concerns" were reported.

Earlier Thursday, Petty Officer Mark Barney said a helicopter crew had been searching for the Florida International University students after learning they had not returned from a trip collecting water samples in the Everglades on Wednesday.

The Coast Guard was notified Wednesday night, and a helicopter crew searched for them. The search resumed Thursday morning.

Barney says the students were in an 18-foot to 23-foot Mako boat.
Campaign ad hints at Australian lawmaker shooting 2 rivals

CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  An Australian lawmaker is being criticized for a campaign ad suggesting he shot dead two political rivals that was posted online days after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Independent candidate Bob Katter is making no apologies for his 58-second ad, which resembles a Western film parody and ends with him blowing smoke from a revolver barrel as two men lie spread eagle in the Outback dust.

The men, wearing stockings over their faces and shirts emblazoned with the names of Australia's two major political parties, had erected a sign advertising "Australia for Sale." The online ad ends with Katter's anti-foreign investment slogan: "Australia is 'NOT' for Sale."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who leads a conservative coalition government, condemned the ad that is running ahead of general elections on July 2.

"The advertisements were in the worst of taste and Mr. Katter should apologize and withdraw them," he told reporters Thursday in Sydney.

But the Outback lawmaker, known for wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat to Parliament House and widely referred to as "Mad Bob Katter," described the ad as "screamingly funny" and dismissed criticisms as "political correctness."

He said the ad had been finalized more than a week earlier and suggested by Thursday he still had not heard about the weekend shooting by a lone gunman at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub in which 49 were killed.

"I don't know what's going on in the media," he told Seven Network television.

Katter's gay half-brother, Carl Katter, who is a candidate for the center-left Labor Party, also condemned the ad.
Virginia cop: Shooting of teen at car wash was self-defense

CHESTERFIELD, Va. (AP)  A Virginia police officer charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of an 18-year-old at a car wash said Thursday that he acted in self-defense and broke down in tears as he recalled learning the teen had died.

Richmond Police Officer Cobb sobbed loudly as he discussed being told that Paterson Brown Jr. had died last October after being shot by the officer when he was off duty, the Richmond Times-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1ZUjvqZ ) reports. Chesterfield County Circuit Judge David Johnson had to call a 10-minute recess so the officer could regain his composure and continue testifying.

Video footage shown to jurors earlier this week showed Brown getting into the officer's car and driving it into the washing bay. Officials say Cobb told him to get out and later shot Brown a single time during an altercation. Cobb wasn't on duty at the time.

Cobb said Thursday that Brown refused commands to stop moving and made a sudden motion across his waist that made him think Brown was reaching for a weapon. Cobb said he didn't intend to kill Brown "but to stop the threat."

Prosecutors have said that Brown was unarmed and that the officer had no reason to shoot the teen. They called 18 witnesses over two days and showed jurors two recorded police interviews with Cobb on the day of the shooting.

A former gas station clerk who was working next door to the car wash testified earlier this week that the teen appeared incoherent and to be on drugs. Toxicology experts said Brown's blood contained an ingredient of marijuana. Paramedics found a bag of marijuana on Brown as well as pills used to treat anxiety.

Juan Carrillo, a friend of Brown's who was called by the defense to testify Thursday, said he had been with Brown when he robbed another high school student at gunpoint in 2014. Carillo said he doesn't know what happened to that gun after the robbery, but said Brown posed no threat on the day he was killed.

"He wasn't threatening nobody," said Carrillo, who was with the teen when the incident happened.

Jurors were expected to begin deliberating on Thursday.

Richmond Police have said that Cobb is on administrative leave without pay and that an internal investigation won't start until the court case is complete.

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EU opens procedure against Poland's logging in old forest

WARSAW, Poland (AP)  The European Union has opened a review of whether Poland might be breaching environment protection regulations with a recent decision to increase the volume of logging in the ancient Bialowieza Forest.

Poland's Environment Minister Jan Szyszko has ordered extensive logging, saying it would fight the spread of bark beetle, which has killed some spruce trees. He insists the logging is closely consulted with the EU environment authorities.

Enrico Brivio, a spokesman for the European Commission, said Thursday in Brussels that an infringement procedure has been launched against Poland out of concern that the logging may endanger bird habitats in the forest that includes some of Europe's oldest woodland and is on the UNESCO list of world heritage.

On Poland's invitation, EU and UNESCO experts visited the forest and inspected the logging earlier this month.

Brivio said that Poland has one month to reply to the concerns but did not say what consequences it might face. The procedure may ultimately lead to bringing Poland before the European Court of Justice and to substantial fines.

Poland said it has not yet received any notice of the procedure being launched, but keeps furnishing the commission with required information.

Environmentalists, who have protested the logging to the European Commission, welcomed the infringement procedure.

"The Polish government has the responsibility to protect this ancient forest that is home to thousands of plants and animal species - cutting down trees is no way to safeguard it for future generations," said a statement signed by Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund and five other organizations.

They argue that, while giving no guarantee of success in fighting the bark beetle, the large-scale logging would have a negative effect on the integrity of the forest and would be "especially damaging for species dependent on dead wood" such as some rare kinds of woodpeckers, owls, plants and fungi.

"It is estimated that around 50 percent of biodiversity within the Bialowieza Forest is dependent on dead wood," the environmentalists said in their statement.
Poland's defense minister calls major joint exercise success

DRAWSKO POMORSKIE, Poland (AP)  A major exercise conducted by NATO members and partner nations in Poland successfully demonstrated joint capabilities of defending the region from a rising threat in the east, Poland's defense minister said Thursday.

Antoni Macierewicz and foreign diplomats watched the conclusion of the exercise, dubbed Anakonda-16, the biggest to be held on Polish soil in 27 years of democracy. It was launched June 6, at a time of heightened security concerns in the region, after Russia annexed the Crimea Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and began backing pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine.

"This exercise confirms that we are safe," Macierewicz said after the exercise.

He said Poland is contributing to the greatest military alliance in history that is "countering aggression that rises and threatens the whole world and creates a real structure of threat, coming from the East."

Russia says that any presence of NATO troops close to its borders is a threat to its security and has warned it will take steps in response.

Guns pounded and helicopters hovered overhead in the massive land and air drill Thursday that involved an armored combat group, supported by the artillery and air forces, on the Drawsko Pomorskie test range in northwestern Poland.
British Labour lawmaker dies after shooting attack

LONDON (AP)  A lawmaker who campaigned for Britain to stay in the European Union was killed Thursday by a gun- and knife-wielding attacker in her small-town constituency, a tragedy that brought the country's fierce, divisive referendum campaign to a shocked standstill.

Jo Cox, a 41-year-old Labour Party legislator who praised the contribution of immigrants to Britain and championed the cause of war-scarred Syrian refugees, was attacked outside a library in Birstall, northern England, after a regular meeting with constituents.

Police would not speculate on the attacker's motive, but Clarke Rothwell, who runs a cafe near the scene of the slaying, told the BBC and Britain's Press Association that the assailant shouted "Britain first!" several times. Police did not confirm that account.

RECROP OF LON812 FILE In this May 12, 2015 file photo, Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox poses for a photograph. British lawmaker Cox has been injured in a shooting incident near Leeds, in West Yorkshire, England, it has been reported, Thursday June 16, 2016. (Yui Mok/PA via AP, File) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

Witnesses described a man shooting Cox several times and then stabbing her as she lay on the pavement. Police said they had arrested a 52-year-old man and were not looking for anyone else.

"Our working presumption ... is that this is a lone incident," said Dee Collins, acting chief constable of West Yorkshire Police.

British security officials said the shooting didn't appear to be related to international terrorism, but domestic terrorism has not been ruled out.

Residents identified the suspect to the BBC and other media as Birstall resident Tommy Mair. Neighbors said Mair was a quiet man who did gardening jobs for local people.

Violence against British politicians has been rare since Northern Ireland's late-1990s peace agreement. Cox was the first serving member of Parliament to be killed in a quarter-century, and figures from all parts of the political spectrum expressed deep shock.

Both the Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe campaigns suspended activity ahead of next week's vote over whether Britain should remain a part of the 28-member bloc. Prime Minister David Cameron canceled a speech and rally in Gibraltar, and flags on British government buildings were lowered to half-mast.

"This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news," Cameron said. "We have lost a great star. She was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart."

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said "the whole of the Labour Party and Labour family  and indeed the whole country  will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today."

"Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve," he said.

It was unclear whether the attack was directly related to the referendum campaign, which has stirred deep passions as Britons argue over their place in Europe, the scale of immigration and the future of their country.

The rival sides have been canvassing feverishly ahead of what is expected to be a close vote and Cox had been campaigning for the "remain" camp.

It wasn't clear whether Cox had been deliberately targeted. A 77-year-old man was also wounded, though it was unclear how he sustained his injuries.

Britain's Press Association news agency quoted a witness, Hithem Ben Abdallah, as saying Cox got involved in a scuffle between two men in Birstall, a small market town some 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of London.

Abdallah said one of the men was fighting with Cox and then a gun went off twice and "she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding" on the ground.

Rothwell, the cafe worker, told the BBC he believed Cox had been shot and stabbed multiple times.

"Three times she was shot, the initial time which then she dropped to the floor and two more times," he said. "The third time he got close proximity, he shot her around the head area."

"In the meantime he was stabbing her as well. He was stabbing her with his knife," Rothwell said.

"He was shouting, 'Put Britain first!' He shouted it about two or three times."

Shopkeeper Sanjeev Kumar told the BBC he saw a woman lying on the ground "bleeding from the mouth and nose," with two women trying to help her.

Cox spent many years working for aid groups including Oxfam and Save the Children, visiting problem-plagued areas, including Darfur and Afghanistan. She was elected to the House of Commons in the May 2015 general election and headed Parliament's Friends of Syria group.

She was one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the subject of the Syrian civil war, and was critical of Britain's reluctance to deepen its military involvement against the Islamic State group as part of efforts to end it. But she abstained last year when Parliament voted to launch airstrikes on IS targets in Syria, saying a more wide-ranging solution to the conflict was needed.

In her first speech to Parliament last year, Cox spoke of how the area she represented had "been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan."

"While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us," she said.

Immigration has been a flashpoint in the referendum campaign, with many "leave" supporters eager to curb the number of migrants to Britain by leaving the EU, which operates on the principle of free movement of people between member states.

Cox was an enthusiastic supporter of the "remain" cause in the referendum, and on Wednesday campaigned on the River Thames in London with her husband and two young children. Her husband, Brendan Cox, posted images on Twitter of the family in an inflatable dinghy, waving a flag supporting continued British EU membership.

"Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love," Brendan Cox said in a statement after the slaying.

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her," he said. "Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the killing was "an assault on everyone who cares about and has faith in democracy." German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the incident tragic, while French President Francois Hollande sent "condolences and compassion" to Cox's family and loved ones, and expressed his "full solidarity" with the British people.

No serving U.K. member of Parliament has been killed since 1990, when the Irish Republican Army killed Conservative lawmaker Ian Gow with a booby-trap bomb placed under his car outside his English home. A former lawmaker, Donald Kaberry, was injured in an IRA bombing in 1990 and died the next year.

In the past two decades, two other British lawmakers have been attacked during their "surgeries," regular meetings where constituents can present concerns and complaints.

Labour legislator Stephen Timms was stabbed in the stomach and injured in May 2010 by a female student radicalized by online sermons from an al-Qaida-linked preacher.

In 2000, Liberal Democrat lawmaker Nigel Jones and his aide Andrew Pennington were attacked by a man wielding a sword during such a meeting. Pennington was killed and Jones injured in the attack in Cheltenham, England.

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Associated Press writers Paisley Dodds in London, Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE In this May 12, 2015 file photo, Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox poses for a photograph. British lawmaker Cox has been injured in a shooting incident near Leeds, in West Yorkshire, England, it has been reported, Thursday June 16, 2016. (Yui Mok/PA via AP, File) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

A forensics officer takes photos of a female shoe, at the scene after Labour MP Jo Cox was left in a critical condition following being shot and stabbed in an attack in her constituency, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police say British lawmaker Jo Cox has died after being shot in the in the town of Birstall, part of the area she represented. Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police says authorities can't discuss any motive for the shooting yet but they have made an arrest and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

A forensics officer takes photos of a female shoe, at the scene after Labour MP Jo Cox was left in a critical condition following being shot and stabbed in an attack in her constituency, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police say British lawmaker Jo Cox has died after being shot in the in the town of Birstall, part of the area she represented. Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police says authorities can't discuss any motive for the shooting yet but they have made an arrest and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

Items on the ground at the scene after Labour Member of Parilament Jo Cox was shot and injured in an attack, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday June 16, 2016. Both sides in the British referendum debate Thursday suspended campaigning after Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was seriously injured in a shooting near Leeds. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT
Public pays respects to former GOP senator and Ohio governor

CLEVELAND (AP)  Ohio Gov. John Kasich and other elected officials and former state office holders paid their respects Thursday to former U.S. senator, Ohio governor and Cleveland mayor George Voinovich.

The 79-year-old Voinovich died in his sleep last Sunday at his home in Cleveland.

The public was invited to pass by Voinovich's casket in the Cleveland City Hall rotunda before a program to honor the well-respected Republican.

Ohio State troopers stand vigil over the body of former U.S. Senator, Governor of Ohio and Mayor of Cleveland George Voinovich in the Cleveland City Hall rotunda, Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Cleveland. (Gus Chan/The Plain Dealer via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT; NO SALES

Kasich, a fellow Republican, called Voinovich a mentor he got to know well since being elected in 2010.

Attorney General Mike DeWine, also a Republican, called Voinovich a tough politician who knew what it took to win elections, but didn't forget what came next.

"He always managed to do what he needed to do, while staying true to his integrity, to his morality, to his faith," DeWine said. "George knew that what really mattered was what you did with the office after the election."

Betty Montgomery, a former Republican state auditor and attorney general, said Voinovich was guided by his principles, his faith and his love of family.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Voinovich spent more than 40 years in public office as a state representative, a county auditor, a lieutenant governor, a county commissioner, mayor, governor and finally two terms as a U.S. senator. He was to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next month.

A funeral Mass for Voinovich is scheduled for Friday morning at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Euclid.

Janet Voinovich, wife of George Voinovich, greets well wishers at the memorial service for her husband, the former U.S. senator, Ohio governor and Cleveland mayor in the Cleveland City Hall rotunda, Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Cleveland. (Gus Chan/The Plain Dealer via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT; NO SALES
The Latest: Kerry, Rasmussen express condolences

LONDON (AP)  The Latest on the shooting of a British lawmaker in a town near the city of Leeds (all times local):

10:40 p.m.

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A forensics officer takes photos of a female shoe, at the scene after Labour MP Jo Cox was left in a critical condition following being shot and stabbed in an attack in her constituency, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police say British lawmaker Jo Cox has died after being shot in the in the town of Birstall, part of the area she represented. Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police says authorities can't discuss any motive for the shooting yet but they have made an arrest and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

Secretary of State John Kerry and Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen are expressing their condolences to family and friends of the British Parliament member who was shot and stabbed to death.

Kerry, who was traveling in northern Europe on Thursday, said the attack on Jo Cox was "an assault on everybody who cares about and has faith in democracy."

Rasmussen called the killing "a true shock."

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9:00 p.m.

Former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011, says she and her husband are grieving over the British Parliament member who was shot and stabbed to death on Thursday.

Giffords, who was critically injured by a gunshot wound to her head while meeting with constituents, praised Jo Cox as "courageous, young and a hard-working public servant. She was a rising star, a mother and a wife."

Cox was killed by a gun- and knife-wielding attacker in her small-town constituency near Leeds, England, amid Britain's divisive campaign on whether to leave the European Union.

Giffords said in a statement: "I don't remember the constituent meeting where I was shot in the head and nearly lost my life, but the scores of such events I and so many others have hosted represent the importance of a democracy connected to its citizens."

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6:35 p.m.

European Union finance ministers have paid silent tribute to a British lawmaker who was shot and killed a week ahead of a referendum on whether Britain should leave the EU.

At talks in Luxembourg Thursday, eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem said ministers "observed a moment of silence in our meeting, out of respect for her."

He said "the U.K. is a beacon for peaceful politics and we hope that the British public, the people of the U.K., can make their choices serenely and in a safe way next week."

Labour legislator Jo Cox was attacked and killed Thursday in northern England. A 52-year-old man has been arrested. Police believe it is a "lone incident" and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack.

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5:20 p.m.

Police say British lawmaker Jo Cox has died after being shot in the in the town of Birstall, part of the area she represented.

Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police says authorities can't discuss any motive for the shooting yet but they have made an arrest and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack.

They say a man was also injured but is expected to survive.

Groups on both sides of the referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union have suspended campaigning.

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3:45 p.m.

British Prime Minister David Cameron says he has cancelled a planned pro-European Union speech in Gibraltar after a lawmaker was shot in a village near the city Leeds.

Labour Party lawmaker Jo Cox was shot and seriously wounded earlier Thursday, Britain's Press Association reported. A 52-year-old man has been arrested.

Groups on both sides of the British EU referendum said they have suspended their campaigns.

Cameron was scheduled to make a two-hour visit to Gibraltar Thursday to seek votes to keep Britain in the EU in the June 23 referendum. But he wrote on Twitter "I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar."

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3:20 p.m.

Groups on both sides of the British EU referendum have suspended their campaigns after the shooting of a British lawmaker.

The "remain" and "leave" campaigns said Thursday that campaign events will be stopped for the rest of the day.

Further details are expected shortly.

There has been feverish campaigning ahead of the June 23 referendum on whether or not Britain should leave the European Union.

Prime Minister David Cameron had been expected to speak on behalf of the "remain" camp on Gibraltar. His Downing Street office did not have details on his plans.

Labour Party lawmaker Jo Cox was shot and seriously wounded earlier Thursday, Britain's Press Association reported. A 52-year-old man has been arrested.

Police have not revealed details about the incident near Leeds.

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2:50 p.m.

Britain's Press Association reports Labour lawmaker Jo Cox has been injured in a shooting near Leeds.

The PA was quoting eyewitness Hithem Ben Abdallah as saying Cox got involved in a scuffle between two men in the village of Birstall on Thursday. Abdallah said one of the men was fighting with Cox and then a gun went off twice and "she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding on the floor."

After around 15 minutes, the shop owner said emergency services arrived and tended to her with a drip.

Police say a "serious incident" has taken place, but didn't immediately identify the victim or provide any more details.

Cox's assistant confirmed to the PA she had been attacked.

Items on the ground at the scene after Labour Member of Parilament Jo Cox was shot and injured in an attack, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday June 16, 2016. Both sides in the British referendum debate Thursday suspended campaigning after Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was seriously injured in a shooting near Leeds. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

A forensics officer takes photos of a female shoe, at the scene after Labour MP Jo Cox was left in a critical condition following being shot and stabbed in an attack in her constituency, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Police say British lawmaker Jo Cox has died after being shot in the in the town of Birstall, part of the area she represented. Acting Chief Constable Dee Collins of West Yorkshire Police says authorities can't discuss any motive for the shooting yet but they have made an arrest and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

Police at the scene after Batley and Spen Member of Parliament Jo Cox was shot, in Birstall, West Yorkshire, England, Thursday June 16, 2016. Both sides in the British referendum debate Thursday suspended campaigning after Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was seriously injured in a shooting near Leeds. (Nigel Roddis/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

In this May 12, 2015 photo, Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox poses for a photograph. Britain's Press Association says Labour lawmaker Jo Cox has been injured in a shooting near Leeds, England, it has been reported, Thursday June 16, 2016. (Yui Mok/PA via AP, File) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

RECROP OF LON812 FILE In this May 12, 2015 file photo, Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox poses for a photograph. British lawmaker Cox has been injured in a shooting incident near Leeds, in West Yorkshire, England, it has been reported, Thursday June 16, 2016. (Yui Mok/PA via AP, File) UNITED KINGDOM OUT
University textbook omits content on sexual orientation

LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP)  A Christian university in Virginia has ordered custom textbooks that omit a section on sexual motivation and orientation.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1UAKEep) reports that Liberty University instructor Heather Elaine Medvedenko told students via email that Christian scholars should be "allowed to filter material through a biblical worldview." She said the content was deleted only for a specific psychology class.

The incident came to light after a student noticed the omission.

The private university in Lynchburg said in a statement that deleted content is reviewed to ensure that it is covered in other courses.

The textbook's author told the newspaper that he did not object to the deletion.

Jeffrey Nevid of St. John's University in New York says instructors often customize text materials to meet their needs.

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Ex-Israeli defense chief to challenge Netanyahu

JERUSALEM (AP)  Israel's newly resigned defense minister said Thursday he will challenge Benjamin Netanyahu in the country's next election, accusing the Israeli prime minister of scaring the public with exaggerated security threats and allowing a "radical minority" to take over the government.

With his comments, Moshe Yaalon completed his transformation from one of Netanyahu's closest and most trusted advisers into one of his most serious challengers.

Yaalon, a former military chief, was forced to resign last month after Netanyahu expanded his coalition government and offered the defense post to Avigdor Lieberman, a firebrand leader of a hard-line nationalist party. Netanyahu and Yaalon had been at odds following a series of disagreements between political hard-liners and military leaders, with Yaalon backing the military.

FILE - In this Monday, Feb. 16, 2015 file photo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, speaks with Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon during a ceremony for new Israeli Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot at the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem. Israel's newly resigned defense minister has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of exaggerating the country's security threats to distract attention from other issues. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

In his first major address since stepping down, Yaalon accused Netanyahu of using scare tactics to exaggerate regional threats against Israel and caving in to extremists.

"Knowing the strategic situation of Israel in detail, and the military's power and capabilities, I can say that today and in the foreseeable future there is no existential threat on the state of Israel," Yaalon said.

"Therefore, it is expected of the leadership to stop scaring the citizens of Israel and giving them the sense that we are on the brink of a second Holocaust," he added, speaking Thursday at the Herzliya Conference, an annual gathering of the military and political elite.

"What I am truly worried about are not the weapon trucks traveling from Syria to Lebanon, nor Iran's attempts to terrorize us. Israel can handle these threats," Yaalon added. "What I am worried about are the cracks in Israeli society, and the breaking down of fundamental values."

He accused the government of tolerating incitement against judges, threatening press freedom and suppressing dissent, and said that the "violent and racist discourse of a radical minority" has infiltrated the mainstream and the leadership and threatens "to roll us down to the abyss."

Israel "needs change," he said, adding the will seek the prime minister's job in the next elections, which are to take place by 2019. He did not say whether he would challenge Netanyahu for the leadership of the ruling Likud Party, or join a new party to press his campaign.

Netanyahu accused Yaalon of contradicting his recent opinions expressed while the former defense minister was still in office.

"It is impossible to express full confidence in the leadership when you are inside and to say the absolute opposite when you're outside," Netanyahu said.

"True leadership doesn't deny threats," the premier added. "It sees them and prepares to deal with them and that is exactly what we will continue to do."

Separately, former Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, also gave a speech Thursday, calling for Netanyahu to be ousted.

Barak, who is now out of politics, said Netanyahu's Likud was been taken over by an "extreme ideology" that instead of pursuing peace with the Palestinians is leading Israel toward a "one-state" reality in which Israel becomes an apartheid-like country or a "binational state" with a Jewish minority.
Hong Kong bookseller recounts detention in mainland China

HONG KONG (AP)  A Hong Kong bookseller gave an explosive account of being seized at a border by Chinese authorities, then blindfolded and spirited away to be confined in a room for five months of interrogation and surveillance. His detailed testimony directly contradicted official accounts of what happened to the five booksellers whose disappearances sparked international concern.

Lam Wing-Kee's revelations to the media Thursday  made in defiance of Chinese authorities  were the first detailed account of what happened to the men, who worked for a publisher of gossipy books on China's Communist leadership that are banned on the mainland. His testimony is sure to further fuel fears Beijing is tightening its grip on Hong Kong and undermining its considerable autonomy.

Lam told a packed news conference in Hong Kong that the disappearances were a "blatant violation of the one country, two systems" policy that governs Beijing's relationship with Hong Kong, under which the former British colony retains civil liberties such as freedom of speech unseen in mainland China.

Freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee listens to reporter's questions during a news conference in Hong Kong Thursday, June 16, 2016. Lam detailed his experience in custody in mainland China during his months long disappearance that has raised concern in Hong Kong that mainland authorities are undermining the territory's autonomy and rule of law. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

"If I myself, being the least vulnerable among the five booksellers, remained silent, Hong Kong would become hopeless," said Lam, who unlike some of the others does not have family members on the mainland.

"It took me much courage and two sleepless nights to consider, but I decided to share the whole story with you, and tell the whole world that this incident is not only about myself or the bookstore, it's about the core values that Hong Kong people need to safeguard," he said.

Lam, who returned to Hong Kong on Tuesday, went missing eight months ago after crossing into the mainland and then resurfaced earlier this year on a Chinese television channel with some of the others to confess to some crimes, an appearance that he said was forced to make.

He was one of the minor characters in the saga of the missing booksellers, which gained worldwide attention because two other men involved had foreign citizenship and were suspected of being abducted by Chinese security agents working outside mainland China.

Amnesty International's Hong Kong director, Mabel Au, said, "Lam Wing-kee has blown apart the Chinese authorities' story. He has exposed what many have suspected all along: that this was a concerted operation by the Chinese authorities to go after the booksellers."

Lam said he was seized on Oct. 24 by a "central special investigation team" after crossing from Hong Kong into the neighboring city of Shenzhen in mainland China. He was taken to a police station and held in a cell overnight. The next morning, he said he was blindfolded for a 13-hour train ride to the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai.

Police in the border city of Shenzhen did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment on Lam's testimony.

Lam said for five months, he was kept under 24-hour surveillance by rotating two-man teams in a 200-300 square foot (19-27 square meter) room. He said he was interrogated about the identities of the publishing company's authors, but he couldn't tell them because he didn't know.

Publisher Gui Minhai, a Swedish national, went missing from his holiday home in Thailand about the same time as Lam, while chief editor and British passport holder Lee Bo disappeared from Hong Kong in December.

Lam is one of the last to return to Hong Kong. Lee, Cheung Chi-ping and Lui Por returned earlier. All four asked police to cancel missing person cases for them. Lam said he was told to do so by the people holding him. Gui remains detained in mainland China. In a tearful televised appearance earlier this year, Gui said he returned to China because he felt guilty about a decade-old fatal hit and run accident.

He was made to sign a document agreeing not to contact his family or hire a lawyer. He was also forced to sign a confession that he broke the law by mailing his company's books to people on the mainland. It was used as the script for his television appearance, he said.

He said his interrogators also demanded he hand over his list of clients as a condition of his release. They let him return to Hong Kong only if he agreed to return with a hard drive containing the list. He planned to go back Thursday with it but changed his mind and decided to speak out instead.

During his time in detention, Lam never came into contact with the others. But on Thursday morning he said he spoke to Lee, who told him he had handed over names of at least 500 customers, most of them in mainland China. Lee also told him he was kidnapped, contradicting earlier statements he gave to police and his wife that he went to the mainland on his own.

In a statement, the Hong Kong government said police were investigating.

"Law enforcement agencies of the mainland and overseas do not have the authority to enforce laws in Hong Kong," it said. If officers from other jurisdictions "take law enforcement actions in Hong Kong, this will contravene Hong Kong laws and is unacceptable."

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Associated Press writers Kelvin Chan in Hong Kong and Louise Watt in Beijing contributed to this story.

Freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee, right, is accompanied by pro-democracy lawyer Albert Ho after giving a news conference in Hong Kong Thursday, June 16, 2016. Lam detailed his experience in custody in mainland China during his months long disappearance that has raised concern in Hong Kong that mainland authorities are undermining the territory's autonomy and rule of law. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Freed Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee stands before giving a news conference in Hong Kong Thursday, June 16, 2016. Lam detailing his experience in custody in mainland China during his months long disappearance that has raised concern in Hong Kong that mainland authorities are undermining the territory's autonomy and rule of law. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
Clinton wins endorsement of the AFL-CIO

WASHINGTON (AP)  Hillary Clinton on Thursday won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation, giving her a powerful voter turnout engine against Donald Trump. The Republican businessman swiftly accused labor leaders of selling out members to a candidate he said was aligned with Wall Street.

The exchange underscored Trump's efforts to win over blue-collar workers who typically support Democrats, especially those in Midwest battleground states whose wages have stagnated and have been hurt by a decline in manufacturing jobs.

The AFL-CIO's general board voted to endorse Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a move that had been expected after Clinton secured enough support among delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.

CORRECTS LOCATION TO VIRGINIA AIR AND SPACE CENTER FROM VIRGINIA AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM - Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gestures during a panel discussion on national security, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Va. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

"Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. "Throughout the campaign, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to the issues that matter to working people, and our members have taken notice."

A short time later, Trump fired back with a statement that said the endorsement was a sign the union federation "no longer represents American workers."

"Instead," he added, "they have become part of the rigged system in Washington, D.C., that benefits only the insiders."

For months, Trump has denounced "stupid" trade deals that he says hurt U.S. workers and pledged to penalize companies for sending jobs overseas. For that reason, he predicted Thursday, the AFL-CIO's members would vote for him "in much larger numbers than" Clinton in November's general election.

Trump's statement included a number of falsehoods the billionaire businessman has repeated in recent weeks as he seeks to draw a contrast with Clinton. Among them was the incorrect allegation that Clinton's immigration proposals would "completely open America's borders in her first 100 days in office."

Trump also said that if elected, Clinton would implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. While Clinton promoted the agreement dozens of times as secretary of state, she has since said she cannot support the deal in its current form.

She has said she backs trade deals only if they fulfill a three-pronged test of creating "good" jobs, raising wages and improving national security.

Trump also misleadingly claimed that as secretary of state, Clinton "racked up a $1 trillion trade deficit with China." In her role as the nation's top diplomat, Clinton had no direct control over the difference in the cost of U.S. imports from China versus its exports to the nation.

Trump issued a second statement later Thursday afternoon blaming "Clinton's global trade policies" for the fact that the "nation's current account trade deficit hit its highest mark in 7 years." He was referring to a report from the Commerce Department Thursday saying that the current account trade deficit jumped 9.9 percent in the first quarter to $124.7 billion  its highest level in more than seven years.

He also repeated his false claim that Clinton supports the TPP, saying "there is no doubt she would enact it if given the chance  yet more betrayal of union voters whose jobs would vanish as a result of this deal."

Clinton has won the endorsements of many of the AFL-CIO's largest unions in the past year, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Teachers, paving the way for the AFL-CIO to back her campaign.

The labor federation represents 12.5 million members and is a potent force in Democratic politics and voter turnout. Union leaders have been gearing up for a general election showdown against Trump, whom they portray as a threat to working families even though he fared well among blue-collar voters during the GOP primaries.

"This election offers a stark choice between an unstoppable champion for working families and an unstable charlatan who made his fortune scamming them," said Lee Saunders, the president of AFSCME and the chair of the AFL-CIO political committee.

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Colvin reported from Dallas, Texas. Associated Press writer Lisa Lerer in Washington contributed to this report.

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VA benefits chief retiring; was suspended in relocation scam

WASHINGTON (AP)  The acting head of the Veterans Benefits Administration said Thursday he is retiring, three months after he was suspended for allowing two officials to manipulate the agency's hiring system for their own gain.

Danny Pummill said in a note to employees that he will leave the Department of Veterans Affairs next Thursday. Pummill was suspended without pay for 15 days in March for his role in a relocation scam that has roiled the agency for more than a year.

The VA said Pummill failed to exercise proper oversight as two senior officials, Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens, forced lower-ranking employees to accept job transfers and then took the vacant positions themselves  keeping their senior-level salaries while reducing their responsibilities.

FILE - In this Nov. 2, 2015 file photo, Danny Pummill, currently acting head of the Veterans Benefits Administration, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Pummill is retiring, three months after he was suspended for allowing two officials to manipulate the agency's hiring system for their own gain. (AP Photo/Molly Riley, File)

Pummill leads an agency with a $2.7 billion annual budget that provides disability and life insurance benefits to more than 10 million veterans.

He joined the VA in 2010 after a 33-year Army career, including two years as deputy assistant secretary of the Army for medical and health operations.

He took over as acting VBA chief last October after Allison Hickey resigned amid fierce criticism of the agency's problem-plagued disability benefits program. The number of claims pending for more than 125 days soared from about 180,000 at the start of 2010 to more than 611,000 by March 2013.

In a blog post this week, Pummill said the VBA has made significant improvements to the benefits program despite an unprecedented increase in demand. By the end of 2015, the backlog was reduced to about 75,000, he said.

VBA decided more than 6 million medical issues for veterans in 2015  double the number of medical decisions decided in 2009.

Pummill's top deputy, Tom Murphy, will replace him as acting VBA leader and VA undersecretary.

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US lawmakers take aim at North Korea over terrorism

WASHINGTON (AP)  The United States treats North Korea as a pariah for its record on many issues: nuclear weapons, human rights, cyberattacks and money laundering among them. But not for terrorism.

Lawmakers in the House are pushing to change that with legislation to have North Korea designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, alongside Iran, Sudan and Syria, eight years after it was taken off the list to smooth the way for aid-for-disarmament negotiations that collapsed soon after.

A bill approved by a House committee Thursday calls for the State Department to report to Congress within 90 days on whether a list of purported acts by North Korea, including assassinations of dissidents and weapons sales to militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, constitute support for international terrorism. It's the most serious effort yet by lawmakers to get North Korea redesignated, but the legislation still has to clear the full House and Senate, and there's little time left in the congressional calendar for passage.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, who introduced the bill, said North Korea had been taken off the list for "completely diplomatic reasons" and had "conned" the U.S. He said it was time to put the country back on.

Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the committee's top-ranking Democrat, said the bill would press the administration to conduct a review of the evidence against North Korea. He described the North as "reprehensible" but added, "there's a fine line as to whether they may or may not be a state sponsor of terrorism."

A State Department survey of terrorism worldwide published this month said North Korea "is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts" since the bombing of a South Korean airliner in 1987 that killed all 115 people on board.

If North Korea was redesignated, it would not necessarily have an economic impact. North Korea is already sanctioned to the hilt  including tough new U.S. measures imposed after a nuclear test explosion in January. The effectiveness of sanctions also requires cooperation from China, the North's main trading partner.

But a terror designation would intensify Pyongyang's isolation and further entrench a U.S. policy of cranking up the pressure on Kim Jong Un's government until it agrees to restart negotiations about denuclearization.

Victor Cha, who was director for Asia affairs in the George W. Bush White House, said a redesignation would complete a 180-degree about-turn by the Obama administration on how to deal with North Korea.

"It came in as an administration more positively pre-disposed to engagement than any other and will end its two terms with the toughest sanctions of any previous U.S. government," Cha said.

The Treasury Department this month resorted to one of its most aggressive measures: designating North Korea as a "primary money-laundering concern" to isolate the nation completely from the U.S. financial system and starve it of funds. A proposal currently under Treasury review would leave foreign banks at risk of exclusion from the U.S. market if they handle North Korea-related transactions. U.S. banks are already barred from dealing with North Korea.

North Korea was taken off the list in October 2008 in the last months of the Bush administration, an attempt to salvage a disarmament accord after the North relented on nuclear inspection demands. But the dispute over inspections persisted, and North Korea pulled out of the accord entirely in April 2009.

The test of whether a nation is taken off the list is meant to be whether it has supported international terrorism during the preceding six-month period. But politics plays a major part.

Cuba was designated during the Cold War mainly for its support of leftist guerrillas. It was finally taken off last year, as Washington and Havana moved to normalize relations after decades of hostility. The terrorism list was a particularly charged issue for Cuba because of the U.S. history of supporting exile groups responsible for attacks on the island.

North Korea has proved less amenable to rapprochement than nations like Cuba, Myanmar and Iran.
Julian Castro returns to Texas under vice president rumors

AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  Julian Castro is returning home to San Antonio Friday swarmed by the same speculation as when the 41-year-old left Texas for Washington two years ago: Is he vice-presidential material?

Even as President Barack Obama's housing secretary tries tamping down talk of becoming Hillary Clinton's running mate this fall, Castro is headlining the Texas Democratic Convention under rumors that his name remains on a short list of contenders. But that chatter isn't the only noise.

Castro, who was born in San Antonio but whose grandmother is from Mexico, is one of the most high-profile Hispanic politicians in the country. Some Democrats believe Donald Trump, who has suggested that some Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals and called a judge's Mexican heritage grounds for moving a trial, will send minority voters flocking to Clinton even if a Latino candidate isn't on the ticket with her.

FILE - In this Oct. 15, 2015 file photo, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, left, speaks during a campaign event for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, right, in San Antonio. Castro is returning home Friday, June 17, 2016, swarmed by the same speculation about whether he could be Hillary Clinton's running mate this fall. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Other possible picks, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, could help Clinton carry key swing states. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez also offers Clinton a potential Latino running mate, as well as a liberal who could help unify disheartened Bernie Sanders supporters.

Even some rooting for Castro say Trump's once-unlikely ascension as the presumptive Republican nominee may have changed which contenders make the cut.

"You have to be realistic in the sense that Trump is going to provide a lot of impetus to Hispanics to get out and vote," said Garry Mauro, who is Clinton's state director in Texas and is a former state land commissioner. "If you read the national press the urgency of a Hispanic on the ticket seems to be diminishing."

Castro, who was elected mayor of San Antonio in 2009 at age 35 and held the job for five years, has campaigned for Clinton since the early stages of her White House run. His identical twin brother, Rep. Joaquin Castro, is another up-and-comer among Democrats and railed against Republicans last week over making the Library of Congress continue using the word "alien" in reference to immigrants.

Julian Castro is not even two years into a job that makes him the youngest member of Obama's cabinet and has deflected questions about whether he might join the 68-year-old Clinton on the ticket.

Harvard-educated, telegenic and a charismatic speaker, Castro's political ceiling has long been a subject of speculation, but his fast rise has also begun confronting some pushback. A coalition of progressive groups, some of which have supported Sanders, have criticized Castro since April over his Housing and Urban Development office selling mortgages to Wall Street in the aftermath of the housing and foreclosure crisis.

Some Democrats in Congress and liberal Super PACs, including the Latino Victory Fund, have hit back and criticized progressives of targeting their own.

Even if Clinton doesn't need Castro, Texas Democrats do. Even in Washington, Castro remains the biggest star of a beleaguered state party that hasn't won a statewide office since 1994 and was pummeled again in 2014 when Wendy Davis ran for governor. He will deliver the keynote speech to what is the nation's largest Democratic state convention, where some still hope he may return one day to run for governor.

"He's clearly a star in the party across the country," said Manny Garcia, deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party. "He's got an amazing track record right now. We certainly hear all the chatter."

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Family's excruciating Orlando journey ends in forgiveness

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP)  Andrea Drayton woke up Sunday to a mother's worst nightmare when her phone buzzed with a text message: Her daughter Deonka was at a club in Orlando, there was gunfire and Drayton needed to come to Florida fast.

Drayton, her husband, Shepherd, son Shepherd III and daughter Alexia piled into the family car and began an excruciating early morning journey from South Carolina to Orlando, where a gunman had opened fire at a gay nightclub in an attack that left 49 victims and the killer dead.

Drayton called the friend of her daughter's who had sent the text. The friend said "a bomb went off."

In this Wednesday, June 15, 2016 photo, Andrea Drayton looks over family photos that show her daughter, Deonka Drayton, a victim of the recent mass shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Drayton, her husband, Shepherd, son, Shepherd III, and daughter, Alexia, piled in the family car and began an excruciating early morning journey south from South Carolina to Orlando, where a gunman had opened fire at a gay nightclub killing 49 and wounding scores of others before being killed by police. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

"I couldn't understand what she meant with that," Drayton recalled, realizing later it was a police explosive used to distract the shooter.

The family found only chaos when they arrived in Orlando on Sunday afternoon. They called hospitals. They asked police and others if they had seen 32-year-old Deonka Drayton. They held up pictures of her. Nothing.

They found their way to a senior center set up a few blocks from the Pulse nightclub for families who couldn't find their loved ones.

Finally, around 10 p.m. on Sunday, they were among the first families to hear. Deonka was among the dead.

Anger, sadness and disbelief welled up inside them.

They went back to their small hotel room with a view of a busy freeway. They carried Deonka's black book bag with them. Inside was her Bible, stuffed with scribbled notes about Jesus and questions about life.

The family talked and cried and discussed the anger they all felt.

Days later, on Wednesday night, as they waited for Deonka's body to be released to them so they could take her home to Eastover, South Carolina, they forgave.

"We forgive the shooter. We talked about it," said Deonka's father, a pastor who runs a nonprofit that helps the poor and elderly. "Hatred will find a way to destroy you, so we forgive the shooter. It wasn't very hard to do. Anger was in me and there was no place to release it. Forgiveness was the way to release it."

Deonka, whom the family called Dee Dee, had struggled through some hard times in her life but was starting to find happiness, the family said.

A devoutly religious couple from a town of just over 800 people outside of Columbia, Deonka's parents struggled with their daughter's homosexuality at times. But the bond of family endured.

"We loved her for who she was," her mother said.

The family was so close, Deonka had her little sister Alexia's name tattooed on her arm.

Deonka's brother, 25-year-old Shepherd III, said he spent hours reading his sister's poems and was always impressed with her profound intelligence.

Sitting on the hotel room bed, 15-year-old Alexia riffled through her sister's Bible and remembered her smile, her choppy laugh that everyone noticed. They talked all the time, shared funny videos and had the same favorite color: blue.

"It was her goal to go to school. She didn't have a chance to do everything she wanted to do," Alexia said, "and now I want to do it for her."

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Kelli Kennedy contributed to this report from Miami.

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Follow Jason Dearen on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/JHDearen
Zambia: Several Somali nationals suffocate in truck

LUSAKA, Zambia (AP)  Police and a witness say several Somali nationals have died from suffocation in a container truck in Zambia.

Copperbelt Police Commissioner Charity Katanga said officials stopped the truck in Luapula province after banging sounds were heard.

Witness Humphrey Kapapula told the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation that bodies were strewn on the ground at the scene and that more than 30 frail-looking survivors said the truck had no ventilation.

The Somalis had been loaded into the truck with bags of beans and groundnuts.
Ukraine 'outraged' by UN chief's remarks on Russia

UNITED NATIONS (AP)  Ukraine's U.N. ambassador said Thursday he is "completely outraged" by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's comments in a prepared speech saying Russia has a critical role to play in ending the conflict in his country.

Volodymyr Yelchenko said Ban's prepared comments for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia show he has lost "any moral right" to say anything about the conflict in Ukraine.

He said he doesn't understand how the U.N. chief "can say such things which sort of praise the role of Russia in settling the conflict in Ukraine when the Russian Federation is the main player in aggressing Ukraine and in keeping this conflict boiling."

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, listens to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon during their talks at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St.Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, June 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

In the prepared speech circulated by the United Nations, Ban said Russia as a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council has "a critical role to play" in addressing "pressing global issues, from ending the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, to safeguarding human rights and controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The United Nations later circulated the speech the secretary-general actually delivered which made no mention of Ukraine.

Yelchenko said Ukraine is sending a protest letter to the 193-member General Assembly asking for a correction and explanation. Ukraine's U.N. Mission said after the actual speech was circulated that "we have sent a letter asking to clarify this situation."

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said "we're not going to walk back from what we said." He urged everyone to read the entire speech, but said "I'm not going to analyze or respond to criticisms that may have been received."

Fighting in eastern Ukraine broke out in April 2014 after Ukraine's Russia-friendly president was ousted following months of street protests and Russia annexed Crimea  a move that led to crippling Western sanctions on Russia.

A February 2015 agreement has helped reduce fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces, but frequent clashes have erupted and efforts to reach a political settlement have stalled.

Yelchenko also criticized Russia's crackdown on human rights in Crimea and said Ukraine has circulated "a number of letters describing how the Russian Federation is building up the nuclear potential in Crimea."

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meet at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, June 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
Russia assails NATO's move to deploy troops near its border

BRUSSELS (AP)  Russia's ambassador to NATO warned Thursday that the alliance's decision to station additional forces near the Russian borders will undermine European security.

Alexander Grushko's comments Thursday followed a meeting of NATO defense ministers, who agreed to deploy four multinational battalions on a rotational basis to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The allies also discussed establishing a Romanian-led multinational "framework brigade" of ground troops to help defend the Black Sea area.

"Those measures significantly erode the quality of regional security, in fact turning central and eastern Europe into an arena of military confrontation," Grushko said. He added that NATO's decision "directly infringes on our legitimate security interests" and "won't be left unanswered."

Members of the U.S. Army take part in a military exercise 'Iron Wolf 2016' at the Training Range in Pabrade some 60km.(38 miles) north of the capital Vilnius,, Lithuania, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Iron Wolf 2016, the part of the annual multinational Exercise Saber Strike held in Lithuania, is running in June in Rukla and Pabrade, two training areas of the Lithuanian Armed Forces. In total, over 5 thousand soldiers from 7 NATO allies are training at the same time in Lithuania this year. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

The alliance has halted cooperation with Russia amid the Ukrainian crisis and held exercises in the Baltics to reassure its eastern members worried about Russia's intentions.

Grushko also criticized NATO's pledge to offer non-lethal assistance to Ukraine, saying it could encourage its reluctance to abide by the Minsk peace agreement. The deal has helped reduce hostilities in eastern Ukraine, but fighting has continued and a political settlement has stalled.

More than 9,300 people have been killed in fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, which erupted in April 2014 weeks after Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

Soldiers from NATO countries attend an military exercise 'Iron Wolf 2016' at the Training Range in Pabrade some 60km.(38 miles) north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Iron Wolf 2016, the part of the annual multinational Exercise Saber Strike held in Lithuania, is running in June in Rukla and Pabrade, two training areas of the Lithuanian Armed Forces. In total, over 5 thousand soldiers from 7 NATO allies are training at the same time in Lithuania this year. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

A member of the Lithuania's Army takes part in a military exercise 'Iron Wolf 2016' at the Training Range in Pabrade some 60km.(38 miles) north of the capital Vilnius,, Lithuania, Thursday, June 16, 2016. Iron Wolf 2016, the part of the annual multinational Exercise Saber Strike held in Lithuania, is running in June in Rukla and Pabrade, two training areas of the Lithuanian Armed Forces. In total, over 5 thousand soldiers from 7 NATO allies are training at the same time in Lithuania this year. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)
Obama to meet with key Saudi official on Friday

WASHINGTON (AP)  The White House says President Barack Obama will meet with Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Friday with the conflicts in Yemen and Syria among the topics of discussion.

Obama and the deputy crown prince are also expected to review Saudi Arabia's efforts to make its economy less reliant on oil revenues.

The crown prince has already met with members of Congress as well as Secretary of State John Kerry. White House spokesman Eric Schultz tells reporters aboard Air Force One he'll also meet with Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
House nixes bid to bar illegal immigrants from military

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Republican-led House on Thursday narrowly defeated an attempt to bar young immigrants living in the country illegally to enlist in the armed forces, as opponents tied the measure to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Lawmakers voted 211-210 to reject an amendment by Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., to the annual defense spending bill. He said he wanted to close what he called a "backdoor amnesty program" created by President Barack Obama without approval from Congress.

Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., linked Gosar's amendment to Trump's characterizations of immigrants and the candidate's proposals to deport those illegally in the United States. Trump also wants to build a wall along the Mexican border.

FILE - In this Feb. 17, 2015 file photo, Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., speaks at an immigration rally in Phoenix. The Republican-led House on Thursday, June 16, 2016, narrowly defeated an attempt to bar young immigrants living in the country illegally to enlist in the armed forces, as opponents tied the measure to Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Gallego said: I am glad to see that some Republicans are rejecting the tired, anti-immigrant policies promoted by the likes of Donald Trump."(AP Photo/Matt York, File)

"I am glad to see that some Republicans are rejecting the tired, anti-immigrant policies promoted by the likes of Donald Trump," Gallego, a former Marine who served in Iraq, said.

The potential recruits were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. They are protected from deportation under the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. They also receive temporary work permits, renewable every two years as long as they meet certain requirements. Federal officials have said the program is not a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship.

The Pentagon announced nearly two years ago that DACA beneficiaries would be allowed to enlist in a trial program that had been open only to legal immigrants who had unique language, medical and cultural skills.

Gallego said weeks ago the House Armed Services Committee approved a compromise that affirmed the secretary of defense's authority to allow any immigrant to enlist, including DACA beneficiaries, if it's determined to be in the national interest.

Gosar said the Pentagon told him that 141 DACA immigrants have used that path to join the military. But the program was never supposed "to be utilized for the benefit of illegal aliens," according to Gosar, who said they can be granted citizenship if they are deployed to a combat zone for at least one day. He said his amendment would have returned the program to its original intent.

"The president has relentlessly amended immigration law by executive fiat and executive edict. And this is another time," said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a frequent critic of the Obama administration's immigration policies who supported Gosar's proposal.

A separate but similar amendment to Gosar's by King would have blocked the Pentagon from using any money to enlist DACA beneficiaries. It failed on a vote of 214-207.

Gallego also opposed King's amendment. "Your patriotism is more important than your papers," he said.

Following the votes on the immigration amendments, the House decisively passed the $575.7 billion defense spending bill, 282-138.

The White House threatened Tuesday to veto the bill, which maintains a ban on moving prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility to the United States. It also denies the use of any money for the construction or modification of a facility in the U.S. to replace the prison at Guantanamo.

The prohibition, which has been included in prior defense bills, has prevented Obama from fulfilling a campaign pledge to shutter the facility.

The Pentagon's request for a new round of military base closures is denied, according to the bill.

The legislation also continues a strategy for boosting the Pentagon's budget by billions of dollars that the Obama administration has condemned as a gimmick.

The bill shifts nearly $16 billion from the account for wartime operations to pay for more weapons, troops and maintenance, a move the Pentagon has sharply criticized as gambling with money needed to support troops in combat. It mirrors an approach taken by the House last month when it passed the annual defense policy bill, which authorizes spending for the military.

Republicans have said the increase in spending is badly needed to halt a decline in the combat readiness of the armed forces. They expect the war account will be replenished early next year by the new president.

But the White House veto threat warned that adding more money for defense could create more problems than it solves unless there are corresponding increases in subsequent years. The funding approach advocated by the House invites "a significant, unacceptable risk of creating a future hollow force, in which force structure exists, but the resources to make it ready do not follow," according to the White House statement.

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The Latest: Trump mixes up mechanical animals in Dallas

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Latest on Campaign 2016 (all times EDT):

10 p.m.

Donald Trump joked about riding a mechanical bull at a rally in Texas Thursday  but seemed a little confused by the concept.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak during a rally at Gilley's in Dallas, Thursday, June 16, 2016. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

"I read about this place," Trump told a crowd at Gilley's Dallas South Side Ballroom. "Where's that horse?"

Trump appeared to be referring to the venue's mechanical bull. The original Gilley's and its bull were featured prominently in the 1980 movie "Urban Cowboy."

Trump predicted his ride would be a smash in the news.

"Hey, you want to hit the papers tomorrow? Let's get that horse. I'll ride that horse," said Trump. "The problem is, even if I make it, they'll say I fell off the horse and it was terrible."

Trump was also inspired by a protester's cowboy hat and suggested selling a "Make America Great Again" version.

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9:30 p.m.

Donald Trump is marking the one-year anniversary of his presidential campaign launch with a rally in Texas that is offering a heavy dose of nostalgia.

The presumptive Republican nominee spent much of the rally Thursday night at a Dallas concert space recounting his victories during his party's hard-fought primary, offering a state-by-state recap.

He says, "This is the one-year anniversary, and hopefully we're going to make it a worthwhile year."

Trump did not mention by name one of his former rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz  who won the Texas primary handily and has yet to endorse Trump.

Trump told the crowd he expects winning the general election against likely rival Hillary Clinton in November to be more difficult than the primary because of a dishonest press.

He says: "You know, it's funny. I didn't love the press during the primaries, but now it's, like, brutal."

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3:46 p.m.

Republican national security official Richard Armitage is supporting Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over GOP hopeful Donald Trump.

Clinton's campaign says the George W. Bush's former deputy secretary of state has endorsed her candidacy.

He told Politico that Trump "doesn't appear to be a Republican" and "doesn't appear to want to learn about the issues."

Armitage refused to confirm his support for Clinton to the Associated Press.

He is the most prominent Republican to back Clinton. Dozens of foreign policy and national security experts signed a letter earlier this year opposing Trump but few have openly said they will vote for Clinton. They say Trump's views on international affairs are inconsistent and would make the country less safe.

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1:28 p.m.

Republican Donald Trump is slamming AFL-CIO leadership for its decision to endorse his likely rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The likely GOP nominee in a lengthy statement accuses the AFL-CIO of selling out its members by endorsing a candidate he alleges is "the enemy of working people."

He says, "The leadership of the AFL-CIO has made clear that it no longer represents American workers."

Trump goes on to predict the union's members will wind up voting for him in much larger numbers than Clinton in November, despite their union's endorsement.

He adds that Clinton's ties to Wall Street means she "is the enemy of working people." Trump vows to "fight harder for American workers than anyone ever has."

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11:16 a.m.

Hillary Clinton has won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation, in another sign of her consolidation of the Democratic party heading into next month's Philadelphia convention.

The AFL-CIO's general board voted to endorse Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a move that had been expected since Clinton had secured enough support among delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The labor federation includes 12.5 million members and is a potent force in Democratic politics. Union leaders have been gearing up for a general election showdown against Republican Donald Trump, whom they portray as a threat to working families.

The AFL-CIO had withheld its endorsement during the primaries as Clinton was challenged by Sanders.

Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reach out to him after a rally in the South Side Ballroom at Gilley's in Dallas, Thursday, June 16, 2016. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

CORRECTS LOCATION TO VIRGINIA AIR AND SPACE CENTER FROM VIRGINIA AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM - Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gestures during a panel discussion on national security, Wednesday, June 15, 2016, at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, Va. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Leader of closed nonprofit pleads guilty to fraud charges

MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The politically connected executive of a now-defunct nonprofit pleaded guilty Thursday to multiple federal fraud charges and could face decades in prison.

Bill Davis, 65, admitted that he used funds from Community Action of Minneapolis to pay for a vehicle in his name and personal expenses  including trips to the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. He also admitted directing the organization to pay his son a consultant's fee for work he wasn't doing.

Without a plea agreement from the government, he pleaded guilty to all 16 counts against him  including mail fraud, wire fraud, theft from a program receiving federal funds and conspiracy to commit such theft.

His attorney, Susan Gaertner, said Davis decided to take responsibility for his mistakes and did so with a "heavy heart."

"He is very sorry for the conduct that you heard about in the courtroom today," she said.

Davis was allowed to remain free pending sentencing. A date for that hasn't been set.

U.S. Attorney Andy Luger called the guilty plea a "just result" and said in a statement that instead of improving people's lives, Davis "stole from those in need to line his own pockets."

Davis spent 24 years as chief executive of Community Action of Minneapolis, which provided utility assistance and other social services to low-income people. He and his son, Jordan, were indicted last year for allegedly siphoning at least $250,000 from the organization for personal use.

Davis also admitted directing the group to pay his son a consultant's fee for work he didn't do, saying that as chief executive he thought that "no one would challenge me."

Jordan Davis, a Minneapolis police officer, has pleaded not guilty to six counts, including conspiracy to commit theft. His trial is scheduled to start next week.

As Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Svendsen and U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz pressed Bill Davis for details about the alleged conspiracy between father and son, the elder Davis said: "To say we sat down and developed a structure for him to get paid, that didn't happen."

When Gaertner was asked if Bill Davis pleaded guilty to help his son, she said: "I'm sure, like any parent, the effect your decisions have on your loved ones is always going to be part of the equation."

Some Democratic lawmakers  including U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison and state Sen. Jeffrey Hayden  were among Community Action of Minneapolis' board members. They have denied knowledge of any wrongdoing, and Davis admitted he didn't seek the board's permission for the personal expenditures.

Davis also has a longstanding association with Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, whose administration conducted audits of the nonprofit that exposed questionable spending of taxpayer money.

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Suspect in 2014 Puerto Rico murder caught in Massachusetts

LEOMINSTER, Mass. (AP)  The U.S. Marshals Service says it has captured a man in Massachusetts who is suspected in a 2014 slaying in Puerto Rico.

Marshals and state police arrested 21-year-old Ramon Torres-Vazquez at a Leominster (LEH'-min-stuhr) hotel on Thursday morning.

Authorities say he faces charges including first-degree murder in connection with a killing in Coamo, Puerto Rico, in October 2014.

Marshals say he obtained a fake Massachusetts driver's license and was living under an alias. He was tracked to the hotel after investigators in Puerto Rico forwarded a tip to the U.S. Marshals Service office in Worcester (WUS'-tur).
Security ramped up for upcoming US gay pride events

CHICAGO (AP)  The huge crowds expected to attend gay pride parades around the United States in the coming weeks will be greeted by more police officers and ramped-up security measures as a means to protect them in the wake of the mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Florida.

While many federal and local authorities around the U.S. say they have not received information on any credible threats, Houston is investigating a threat that was made against the parade in a tweet. Meanwhile, authorities from Denver to Chicago to New Orleans are tightening security with bag searches, more police officers and private security workers and more crowd-control barriers.

In Chicago, where nearly 1 million people have attended the pride parade in previous years, better security  including 200 additional uniformed and plainclothes officers  will be assigned to this weekend's PrideFest and next weekend's parade out of "an abundance of caution," Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Thursday.

FILE - In this June 28, 2015 file photo, Members of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Veterans Association march with a large U.S. flag during the Chicago Pride Parade in Chicago. The coordinator for Chicago's 2016 upcoming gay pride parade said Wednesday, June 15, 2016, that organizers will hire dozens more off-duty police officers than they did last year after city officials asked them to beef up security in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

Parade organizers themselves also are providing additional security at the city's request  hiring 160 off-duty police officers and other security professionals, 70 more than worked the parade last year.

The FBI also said it would take an active role, gathering intelligence on any possible threat to the parade and sharing that information with Chicago police. The FBI also echoed Johnson's plea to the public to quickly report any suspicious activity.

Houston police also are increasing security for the city's gay pride parade on June 25. Acting Police Chief Martha Montalvo said the department is investigating a threat that was made in a tweet earlier this week that indicated there would be a "massive shooting" at the parade.

"We take all threats seriously and we are investigating it and we have notified and are working in conjunction with the FBI," she said. "But at this point I don't have anything solid in terms of specifics."

In Denver, organizers of this Sunday's PrideFest, said the 300,000 people expected to attend will see more fences, more searches of bags and other security measures.

"We're making security a top priority," said organizer Debra Pollock, chief executive officer of the GLBT Community Center of Colorado, which is holding that city's event.

And in New Orleans, city officials say that security will be beefed up this weekend in the popular French Quarter for the city's annual gay pride celebrations, announcing that large numbers of police officers and state troopers will be on duty.

It's unknown how last weekend's rampage at Orlando club Pulse that left 49 people dead will affect attendance at the popular parades and festivals.

But in Chicago, the parade coordinator Richard Pfeiffer said the attack may increase attendance for the 47th parade.

"Our history shows that we beat back hate like this by coming out and coming together and being in public," he said. "The feedback we are getting is that more people want to come out (to demonstrate) they won't be pushed back into the closet."

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Associated Press writers Steven K. Paulson in Denver, Cain Burdeau in New Orleans and Juan A. Lozano in Houston contributed to this report.

FILE - In this June 28, 2015 file photo, people smile and gesture during the annual Chicago Pride Parade in Chicago. The coordinator for Chicago's 2016 upcoming gay pride parade said Wednesday, June 15, 2016, that organizers will hire dozens more off-duty police officers than they did last year after city officials asked them to beef up security in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson speaks about security measures at this weekend's gay pride festival and next weekend's gay pride parade during a news conference Thursday, June 16, 2016 in Chicago. Johnson said that there's no information about any credible threat to the parade but that the additional uniformed and plainclothes officers will be dispatched out of "an abundance of caution," after the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida. (Brian Jackson/Sun Times via AP)/Chicago Sun-Times via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT, MAGS OUT, NO SALES; CHICAGO TRIBUNE OUT
AP Interview: New Ukraine PM vows reform, blames Russia

WASHINGTON (AP)  Ukraine's new prime minister vowed Thursday to root out corruption and urged Russia to abide by a peace agreement meant to end a two-year conflict between Moscow-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces.

Volodymyr Groysman spoke to The Associated Press in an interview one day after meeting with Vice President Joe Biden and other U.S. officials. Biden announced that the Obama administration, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, was pledging $220 million in assistance this year to help the former Soviet nation implement reforms.

Change has been slow in the two years since the previous Ukrainian government fell amid pro-Western protests. Ukraine has been shaken by Russia's annexation of Crimea and lost more than 9,300 people in fighting with the separatists in the eastern part of the country. But critics say domestic changes also have stalled amid political infighting and say corruption remains a major problem.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman gestures during an interview with The Associated Press, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Washington. Groysman vowed to root out corruption in his struggling nation and urged Russia to abide by the terms of a cease-fire agreement in the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In the interview, Groysman dismissed the criticism and blamed Russia for most of Ukraine's ills.

"Ukraine is a victim of aggression from the Russian Federation," said the 38-year-old Groysman, whose past experience includes serving as mayor of a provincial city and being parliament speaker.

Groysman said he was working to deregulate the economy, make the judicial branch more independent, increase good governance and transparency, and privatize state enterprises. "We must target not only those who are corrupt, but also the system so that new corruption does not replace old corruption," he said.

Groysman said he was hopeful that in the near term, Ukraine would receive the next $1.7 billion loan installment from the International Monetary Fund as part of a $17 billion bailout package.

Groysman accused Russia of violating a shaky cease-fire under a peace accord negotiated in 2015 by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany. Groysman said Russia must ensure that all the weapons in eastern Ukraine are pulled back and that fighting stops completely before Ukraine passes the necessary legislation to hold an election in the separatist-held areas, as stipulated by the accord.

"Normalization of the Donbass now fully depends on decisions made by the Russian Federation," Groysman said, referring to the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

Moscow denies it is backing the rebels in Ukraine and says Kiev must first hold the vote in order to advance the peace process.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman is interviewed by The Associated Press, Thursday, June 16, 2016, in Washington. Groysman vowed to root out corruption in his struggling nation and urged Russia to abide by the terms of a cease-fire agreement in the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Chilean senator jailed in corruption case

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP)  A court in Chile has ordered the jailing of a senator who is targeted by an investigation into possible bribery and tax fraud.

Thursday's appeals court ruling affects conservative Sen. Jaime Orpis, who had been subject to house arrest by a lower court.

It's the first time that a lawmaker has been jailed since Chile's return to democracy after its 1973-1990 dictatorship.

Investigators are determining whether to bring charges against Orpis and other politicians suspect of illegal campaign financing using false receipts from companies under investigation for tax evasion.
The Latest: Ohio governor pays respects to late US senator

CLEVELAND (AP)  The Latest on a memorial service for former Ohio governor and U.S. Senator George Voinovich (all times local):

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Ohio Gov. John Kasich (KAY'-sihk) and other elected officials and former state office holders have paid their respects to former U.S. senator, Ohio governor and Cleveland mayor George Voinovich.

The 79-year-old Voinovich died in his sleep last Sunday at his home in Cleveland.

The public was invited to pass by Voinovich's casket Thursday in the Cleveland City Hall rotunda before a program to honor the well-respected Republican.

Kasich, a fellow Republican, called Voinovich a mentor he got to know well during since being elected in 2010.

Attorney General Mike DeWine, also a Republican, called Voinovich a tough politician who also stayed true to his integrity and morality.

A funeral Mass for Voinovich is scheduled for Friday morning at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Euclid.

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10:30 a.m.

The public is paying its respects to former U.S. senator, Ohio governor and Cleveland mayor George Voinovich.

The 79-year-old Voinovich died in his sleep last Sunday at his home in Cleveland.

The public has been invited to pass by Voinovich's casket Thursday in the Cleveland City Hall rotunda and attend a brief program to honor the well-respected Republican.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Voinovich spent more than 40 years in public office as a state representative, a county auditor, a lieutenant governor, a county commissioner, mayor, governor and finally two terms as a U.S. senator. He was to be a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next month.
Lawmakers read Stanford rape victim's letter to attacker

WASHINGTON (AP)  A bipartisan group of lawmakers read the wrenching letter of a woman whose attacker was given a six-month jail term after sexually assaulting her behind a dumpster on the Stanford University campus last year while she was unconscious.

The victim's emotional statement in open court to the defendant, former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, powerfully details how the assault has devastated her life. It was widely shared online and drew national attention to the case.

The expression of solidarity with the victim was led by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., who was joined by more than a dozen others. It took almost an hour to read.

The case has attracted widespread attention and outrage after Turner, 20, was given such a short sentence.

"The sexual predator received a paltry sentence of six months in county jail, of which he will serve only three," Speier said in her introduction. "We are not moved by the judge, who said a longer sentence would have a 'severe impact' on the offender. We are not moved by the felon's father, who said that his son should not serve jail time for '20 minutes of action.'"

The letter describes, in often painful words, the anguish and pain that the assault, investigation, trial and testimony brought upon the woman.

"What he did to me doesn't expire, doesn't just go away," the women said in her statement. "It stays with me, it's part of my identity, it has forever changed the way I carry myself, the way I live the rest of my life."

Both Turner and the victim were intoxicated on the night of the incident.
Nicaragua expels 3 US government officials

WASHINGTON (AP)  The United States said Thursday that Nicaragua has expelled three American government officials.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the officials were kicked out of the Central American country Tuesday. He said such action could set back U.S.-Nicaraguan relations on trade and other matters.

Kirby said the officials were on temporary duty status in Nicaragua and only recently arrived there.

Later Thursday, the Nicaraguan government released a statement it said it had sent to the State Department about what it called an "unfortunate incident." It said two of the U.S. officials expelled were conducting anti-terrorism and anti-drug work in the customs field without the approval of the Nicaraguan government. It did not reference the third official.

Kirby said the U.S. has complained to Nicaragua's ambassador in Washington, Francisco Campbell. He wouldn't say if the U.S. might take reciprocal action.
Jo Cox remembered as tireless campaigner and aid worker

Jo Cox fought against poverty and discrimination in developing countries, worked in Parliament for a solution to the civil war in Syria and campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union. In charity work and politics, she took up causes across the globe, from some of the world's most dangerous countries to her home constituency in Yorkshire.

"I've been in some horrific situations where women have been raped repeatedly in Darfur. I've been with child soldiers who have been given Kalashnikovs and kill members of their own family in Uganda," the Labour Party lawmaker told the Yorkshire Post last December. "That's the thing that all of that experience gave me  if you ignore a problem it gets worse."

Cox was killed Thursday by a gun- and knife wielding attacker in her small-town constituency, one week before what would have been her 42nd birthday.

In this May 12, 2015 photo, Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox poses for a photograph. Britain's Press Association says Labour lawmaker Jo Cox has been injured in a shooting near Leeds, England, it has been reported, Thursday June 16, 2016. (Yui Mok/PA via AP, File) UNITED KINGDOM OUT

A day earlier she had campaigned on the River Thames in London with her husband and two young children. Her husband, Brendan Cox, posted images on Twitter of the family in an inflatable dinghy, waving a flag supporting continued British EU membership ahead of the June 23 referendum.

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy and a zest for life that would exhaust most people," Brendan Cox, said in a statement Thursday after her death was announced by police.

Besides her career in politics, Jo Cox described herself on her personal website as an avid runner, cyclist and mountain climber.

She was elected to the House of Commons last year as a Labour Party lawmaker representing the constituency of Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire. She divided her time between the family's houseboat on the Thames and a home in Batley and Spen.

In Parliament she made finding a solution to the Syrian civil war a top priority. She was critical of Britain's reluctance to deepen its military involvement against Islamic State militants, but abstained in a vote on airstrikes because she said the plan didn't devote enough attention to stopping the "brutality" of President Bashar Assad.

"I'm not against airstrikes in principle," she said. "In fact, as part of an integrated strategy for Syria they are almost certainly a necessary part. But airstrikes are a tactic not a strategy, and outside a strategy I fear they will fail."

Cox grew up in West Yorkshire in a working class home. Her mother was a school secretary and her father worked in a toothpaste factory in Leeds.

When she finished her studies at Cambridge in 1995, she was first in her family to graduate from a university. But she described her years at Cambridge as difficult, telling the Yorkshire Post that is where she realized that "where you were born matters."

"I didn't really speak right or know the right people," she said. "I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year. To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years."

After university she spent a decade working in various roles for Oxfam, the British aid agency. She then joined Sarah Brown, the wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on a campaign to reduce the number of women dying in pregnancy and childbirth. She also worked with several other charities, including Save the Children, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the anti-slavery group The Freedom Fund.

For four years she chaired the Labour Women's Network, a group campaigning for more women to run for political office.

Cox initially backed Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership after Ed Miliband resigned. She later said she regretted that decision and instead voted for one of his opponents, Liz Kendall.

Corbyn on Thursday praised Cox's record of public service and humanitarian work.

"Jo Cox died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve," he said. "It is a profoundly important cause for us all."
CIA director: US hasn't been able to curb IS global reach

WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. battle against the Islamic State has not yet curbed the group's global reach and as pressure mounts on the extremists in Iraq and Syria, they are expected to plot more attacks on the West and incite violence by lone wolves, CIA Director John Brennan told Congress on Thursday.

In a rare open hearing, Brennan gave the Senate intelligence committee an update on the threat from Islamic extremists and shared his views on a myriad of other topics, including encryption, Russia and Syria.

Brennan said IS has worked to build an apparatus to direct and inspire attacks against its foreign enemies, as in the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels  ones the CIA believes were directed by the top IS leaders.

CIA Director John Brennan testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 16, 2016, before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Islamic State. Brennan said that the Islamic State remains "formidable" and "resilient," is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for its territorial losses in the Middle East. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

"ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West," Brennan said, using a different acronym for the group.

"Furthermore, as we have seen in Orlando, San Bernardino and elsewhere, ISIL is attempting to inspire attacks by sympathizers who have no direct links to the group."

Brennan said the CIA has not been able to uncover any direct link between the Orlando shooter and a foreign terrorist organization.

He said the U.S.-led coalition has killed IS leaders, forced the group to surrender large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and that fewer fighters are traveling to Syria and others have defected.

While the group's ability to raise money has been thwarted, it still generates at least tens of millions of dollars every month, mostly from taxation and sales of crude oil on black markets in Syria and Iraq.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," he said.

He said IS is slowly cultivating its branches into an interconnected global network and that the number of IS fighters now far exceeds what al-Qaida had at its peak.

The CIA estimates there are 18,000 to 22,000 IS fighters in Syria and Iraq  down from about 33,000 last year. The branch in Libya, with between 5,000 and 8,000 fighters, is the most advanced and most dangerous, but IS is trying to increase its influence in Africa, Brennan said.

He said Boko Haram is now the IS branch in West Africa and has several thousand fighters. Brennan described the IS branch in the Sinai as the most active and capable terrorist group in Egypt, attacking Egyptian military and government targets as well as foreigners and tourists, such as in the downing of a Russian passenger jet last October.

The Yemen branch, with several hundred fighters, has been riven with factionalism. And the Afghanistan-Pakistan branch, also with hundreds of fighters, has struggled to maintain its cohesion, in part because of competition with the Taliban, he said.

The issue of encryption arose several times during the nearly two-hour hearing.

Law enforcement officials say data encryption is making it harder to hunt for terror suspects and intercept their messages. They say they need access to encrypted communications and that tech companies should maintain the ability to unlock the data from their customers.

They face fierce opposition from Silicon Valley companies that say encryption safeguards their customers' privacy rights and protects them from hackers, corporate spies and other breaches.

Lawmakers have weighed in on both sides of the dispute and are working to find the appropriate role for government in an area where the private sector operates the internet.

Committee chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said the "feud between the tech companies and the intelligence community and law enforcement has to stop."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that requiring companies to build back doors into their products to weaken strong encryption will put the personal safety of Americans at risk. "I want to make it clear I will fight such a policy with everything I have," Wyden said.

In the House, wary lawmakers on Thursday rejected a measure that would have prohibited the U.S. government from searching the online communications of Americans without a warrant. The vote came days after the mass shooting in Florida. Opponents of the amendment to the annual defense spending bill said the measure would have blocked investigators from searching lawfully collected information to determine whether the Orlando gunman had contacted terrorists overseas.

The CIA chief embraced a bill that seeks to set up a commission to bring together intelligence, law enforcement and the business and tech communities to work on the issue.

Brennan also expressed his views on other issues:

RUSSIA

Brennan said Russian military forces have bolstered Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and are carrying out attacks against the U.S.-backed forces trying to unseat him. He said Assad is in a stronger position now than he was in June 2015 and that the agreed cessation of violence is "holding by a thread."

TORTURE

Brennan said individuals within the CIA have been held accountable for problems in the agency's former detention and interrogation program set up after Sept. 11. He said he could elaborate in a classified setting.

TWITTER

Brennan confirmed a May report in The Wall Street Journal that the data mining company, Dataminr Inc., had ended its contract with the CIA.

The New York-based company, which monitors information streaming across Twitter and sends alerts to clients, continues to provide data to Russia Today, a television network backed by the Russian government.

CIA Director John Brennan testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 16, 2016, before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Islamic State. Brennan said that the Islamic State remains "formidable" and "resilient," is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for its territorial losses in the Middle East. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Judge reiterates Kansas AG Kobach unable to encumber voting

WICHITA, Kan. (AP)  A judge is standing by his earlier ruling that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has no legal right to bar people from casting ballots in local and state elections because they registered to vote using a federal form that did not require proof of citizenship.

In a ruling made public Thursday, Shawnee County District Judge Franklin Theis rejected Kobach's request that he reconsider an earlier decision. Theis said in January that the right to vote under state law is not tied to the method of registration.

Two weeks after that decision, Brian Newby, the new executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, added a documentary citizenship requirement on the national voter registration form for residents of Kansas, Georgia and Alabama. Newby unilaterally changed the national form without approval from the agency's commissioners.

That change prompted Kobach to ask the judge to reconsider his ruling.

But Theis said in this week's ruling that if challenging "overreaching governmental conduct" could be circumvented because a law or regulation is later changed, then there could "never be any efficient or practical check on the abuse of power by a governmental official." He also noted that Newby's action has been challenged by a coalition of voting rights groups.

The order was signed Tuesday, the same day a federal judge's order in a separate case went into effect that requires more than 18,000 Kansas residents who registered at motor vehicle offices without citizenship documents to be registered for federal elections. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals refused last week to block the temporary injunction.

That federal court order is expected to eventually affect 50,000 voters before the November election.

It is unclear what impact the state court's latest ruling will have on instructions Kobach sent to county elections officials Tuesday that said the voters who registered at motor vehicle offices without providing citizenship documents should not be allowed to vote in local and state races.

Kobach said in an emailed statement from his office that Theis' order fails to address the "mootness problem" that has existed in the case for nearly five months, an apparent reference to the action taken by Newby to require the citizenship documentation.

"Nor does he possess jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place," Kobach said. "I'm confident that his decisions will be reversed on appeal due to the multiple legal errors contained in them."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents voters in both the federal and the state cases, said Thursday its lawyers are trying to determine their next legal steps.

"We have a judgment out there that says you don't have any legal authority to do what you are doing, secretary of state, and nonetheless the secretary of state is ignoring that," said Doug Bonney, chief council for the ACLU Foundation of Kansas. "And we have to figure out how we deal with it. That is what we are trying to do right now."

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states must accept and use the federal voter registration form, and an appeals court ruled in 2014 in a lawsuit filed by Kobach that states could not force the commission to require residents to provide proof-of-citizenship documents on the national form.

Kansas law has required voters to provide proof of citizenship since January 2013.
Lawsuit: Notre Dame displaying stolen early American art

PITTSBURGH (AP)  The University of Notre Dame is displaying $575,000 worth of early American art that was stolen from a man 20 years ago, according to a lawsuit filed by the man's son.

Scott Leff and his wife filed the lawsuit last month, accusing the Indiana university of buying his father's art collection more than a decade ago from a New Mexico dealer, who bought it from Jay Leff's ex-wife.

Jay Leff's ex-wife pilfered his art collection in 1996 after he filed for divorce, according to the lawsuit. Scott Leff reported the theft to Pittsburgh police that year, according to a police report included in the lawsuit. Jay Leff, a retired bank president and art collector, died in 2000.

Scott Leff is seeking the art's return or damages equal to its current value.

"Even if Notre Dame acted innocently, unknowingly and in good faith, plaintiffs retain sole lawful title to the Leff Figurines and their property rights remain senior to those of Notre Dame," the lawsuit said.

But the university said in correspondence with Scott Leff that he has no proof of ownership and did nothing to get the art back for 20 years.

Dennis Brown, a university spokesman, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the school acquired the figurines in good faith from a reputable seller and is "confident in its ownership of full rightful title" to them.
US Open at a glance

OAKMONT, Pa. (AP)  A brief look at the rain-suspended first round Thursday of the U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club:

LEADING: Andrew Landry is at 3 under with one hole left to complete his round.

PURSUING: Masters champ Bubba Watson and Danny Lee are a shot back. Four other players are another stroke behind at 1 under.

SHOT OF THE DAY: Lee Westwood holed out with a wedge on No. 14 for eagle.

KEY STAT: Only half the field set foot on the course before play was called  after rain delays of 1 hour, 19 minutes and 2 hours, 26 minutes  and only seven players were under par when play was called.

NOTEWORTHY: Play was suspended three times, enabling only nine players to post a complete round, the lowest number in a first round since the 2009 Open at Bethpage.

QUOTEWORTHY: "You've got to be kidding me! How is that in the bunker?" Jordan Spieth, after a near-perfect approach shot on the 17th hole rolled all the way across the green and down into a bunker.
Two-minute silence for MP Jo Cox held at Tooting by-election count

A two-minute silence has been observed at the Tooting by-election count as t he murder of Labour MP Jo Cox cast a "dark shadow" over the process of electing the newest member of the Commons.

Mrs Cox, who was the MP for Batley and Spen, died after being shot and stabbed in the street outside her constituency advice surgery in Birstall, West Yorkshire.

Labour councillor and junior doctor Rosena Allin-Khan is seeking to retain the Tooting seat for Labour after it was vacated by Sadiq Khan following his election as London's mayor.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan joins Labour party candidate Dr Rosena Allin-Khan outside Tooting Broadway Station

Her main rival for the south London seat is Tory Dan Watkins, who unsuccessfully stood against Mr Khan in the general election last year.

Mr Khan stood down as MP for Tooting after defeating Tory Zac Goldsmith in the City Hall contest in May.

Paul Martin, the acting returning officer in the constituency, said the silence was to allow everyone involved in the count to "reflect upon this awful loss".

He said: "The murder of Jo Cox has shocked the entire country, and it has hit home particularly hard in Tooting where right now the community is in the process of selecting a new member of parliament to represent their interests.

"It is our duty and responsibility to continue with this by-election, but clearly a very dark shadow has been cast over these proceedings."

Dr Allin-Khan and Mr Watkins have both described Mrs Cox's death as "shocking" and said their thoughts and prayers were with her family and friends.

Mr Khan, who had been the area's MP since 2005, held Tooting with a majority of 2,842 over Mr Watkins - a local businessman - at the general election.

The by-election result will be closely watched by Jeremy Corbyn's critics in the Labour Party, but coming a week before the EU referendum, the campaign has been overshadowed by the closing stages of the Brexit battle.

Born and raised in the area, Dr Allin-Khan works as an emergency doctor at St George's Hospital and is also deputy leader of Wandsworth Labour group.

Mayor of Wandsworth Richard Field paused the count to observe the silence.

For two minutes the excited chatter and rustling of ballot papers stopped as people bowed their heads.

Taking to the stage at Wandsworth Town Hall, Mr Field said: "As the returning officer, I wanted to express the sadness everyone involved in this by-election has felt today at the dreadful death of Jo Cox, and to convey our deep-felt condolences to those closest to her.

"The impact of this tragic event is being felt right across the country, but it has a very deep resonance here in this room as the votes are counted for Tooting's new member of parliament."
Decision expected in multimillion-pound Saudi royal 'secret wife' case

The Court of Appeal decides today whether the ''secret wife'' of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia can keep a multimillion-pound award handed to her by a controversial judge.

Palestinian-born Janan Harb, 68, won a package of cash and property worth over 20 million last November.

Mr Justice Peter Smith, sitting at London's High Court, accepted her assertions that Prince Abdul Aziz, son of the late king by another wife, had agreed to the huge payout.

Janan Harb, the 'secret wife' of the late Saudi monarch King Fahd

Lawyers for the prince are asking the appeal judges - Lord Dyson, Master of the Rolls, sitting with Lord Justice Moore-Bick and Lord Justice McFarlane - to quash the ''unsustainable'' award.

Ms Harb says the prince entered into the agreement to ''buy her silence'' over her relationship with his father.

She says the agreement was reached when the prince met her at the Dorchester Hotel in London on June 20 2003, while the king was seriously ill.

The prince denies her claim.

But Mr Justice Smith ruled that, although her behaviour was ''unattractive'', Ms Harb was ''telling the truth'' about the agreement.

He declared she was entitled to 12 million, plus interest, and two luxury flats in Chelsea, south-west London, worth around 5 million.

Lord Grabiner QC, for the prince, said Mr Justice Smith failed to analyse the evidence properly.

The judge also wrote a ''shocking letter revealing possible bias'' against Blackstone Chambers, the legal chambers which provided the barristers representing the prince.

Lord Grabiner QC said the letter was prompted by a newspaper article by Lord Pannick QC, a member of the chambers who appeared for the prince at an early stage in the Harb case.

Lord Pannick's article criticised the judge's handling of an unrelated case involving British Airways, in which the judge recused himself after demanding to know what had happened to his own luggage on a flight home from Florence.

Lord Pannick had written that the case ''raises serious issues about judicial conduct that need urgent consideration by the lord chief justice....''

In response, the judge wrote to Anthony Peto QC, one of two heads of Blackstone Chambers, saying: ''The quite outrageous article of Pannick caused me a lot of grief and a lot of trouble.''

He added: ''I will no longer support your Chambers please make that clear to members of your Chambers. I do not wish to be associated with Chambers that have people like Pannick in it.''

Lord Grabiner told the appeal judges the ''shocking and indefensible'' letter was clear evidence of possible bias against the chambers and could have affected the outcome of the Harb case.

There was also a real possibility that the judge became biased against the prince after he failed to attend court in person to give evidence.

Charles Hollander, QC, for Ms Harb, argued the appeal should be dismissed.

He said the judge had been entitled to reach a judgment in favour of Ms Harb on the evidence before him and there was lack of any real evidence of bias .

Mr Justice Smith has agreed ''to refrain from sitting'' pending the outcome of the appeal.

And the Judicial Conduct and Investigations Office (JCIO) has been investigating the British Airways matter.

Ms Harb had told the judge she was aged 19 when she married King Fahd in a secret ceremony under sharia law in March 1968 at the Al Sharafiya Palace.

But members of the king's family were opposed to their relationship because she was from a Christian family in Palestine, and she was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1970.
Hundreds of British IS fighters returned to UK and 85 killed in Syria

At least 85 British jihadis and fighters involved in Syria's bloody civil war have been killed, according to the Defence Secretary.

Michael Fallon confirmed around 850 people linked to the UK and regarded as a security threat are now believed to have taken part in the conflict.

While just under 50% are thought to have returned to the UK, more than 10% have been killed, Mr Fallon said.

Mohammed Emwazi known by the nickname Jihadi John was one of the British extremists killed in Syria.

High-profile British deaths have included Mohammed Emwazi, who became known as Jihadi John after he appeared in propaganda videos from terror group Islamic State (IS) in which British and US hostages were murdered. He was killed in a drone strike last year.

Not all of those fighting in Syria have joined IS, which still retains strongholds in Syria despite increased military pressure.

Shadow Foreign Office minister Diana Johnson said the "grim reality" for those lured to join IS, also referred to as Daesh and Isis, had been highlighted by the figures.

But ministers must do more to explain how the 400 or so "homegrown extremists" are being managed following their return to the UK, Ms Johnson insisted amid concerns that available powers are not being fully used.

Cabinet minister Mr Fallon, in a letter to Ms Johnson, said: "Approximately 850 UK-linked individuals of national security concern have travelled to take part in the Syrian conflict.

"Just under half of these have returned and over 10% have been killed.

"This number includes all those of national security concern who have travelled to take part in the conflict, not just those who have affiliated themselves with Daesh."

He added: "Those returning to the UK after training or fighting with groups such as Daesh can expect to be rigorously investigated to ensure that they do not pose a threat to our national security.

"If the authorities believe they have committed criminal offences, they will be prosecuted."

Mr Fallon disclosed the latest update after Ms Johnson pressed the Government to reveal the number of UK men and women who have travelled to support IS in Syria and those who have returned.

Labour's Ms Johnson told the Press Association: "These figures show the grim reality for the UK citizens who have been lured into joining Isis - it's not glamorous, it's not exciting and you are very likely to end up either dead or tortured.

"But there is also a real issue here about the 400-plus fighters who have gone out to Syria and returned.

"These homegrown extremists pose a serious risk.

"Last year the Government introduced new powers to manage these extremists when they return, but the Government keeps refusing to say how often, if at all, these powers have been used.

"The Government needs to explain what they are doing to manage the risk these individuals pose."
Formula One has a clear conscience - Bernie Ecclestone

Bernie Ecclestone insists Formula One has a "100 per cent" clear conscience despite the sport facing criticism upon its arrival in Azerbaijan ahead of the oil-rich state's first race.

A number of campaign groups, Amnesty International being the most recent, have called on the sport to take a public stance against Azerbaijan's human rights record.

In a statement released on Wednesday night, Amnesty International said: "Formula One should use its influence and publicly call on the Azerbaijan authorities to end their crackdown on human rights."

Bernie Ecclestone insists Formula One has a clear conscience

But when asked if Formula One has a clear conscience ahead of Sunday's race on the streets of capital city Baku, Ecclestone, 85, replied: "Absolutely, 100 per cent."

Top-ranking Formula One officials met with Sport For Rights - another campaign group who urged Ecclestone to speak out against President Ilham Aliyev's regime, and call for the release of political prisoners - last Monday. Further discussions have also been planned.

"Yes, we are [taking the issue seriously], of course," added Ecclestone, who was not present at the talks . "We have been in correspondence and we have assurance from here that they are looking into all these things.

"We listen, obviously, and if people have got a genuine complaint there is not a lot we can do, because in all fairness I think you would get into trouble in most countries if you were very, very anti some government or political people, or in fact anybody, so it is not quite as easy as that."

Human Rights campaigners have accused Aliyev's regime of wrongful imprisonment of journalists and bloggers, freezing financial public resources and restrictive legislation.

They also claim that media outlets critical of Aliyev's government have been harassed and intimidated and subsequently forced to close, while four journalists have also died in custody since 2005, according to Sport for Rights.

Ecclestone added: "The minute people tell me what human rights are then you can have a look at them and see how and when and where it applies. Do any of you know what human rights are?"

When it was put to Ecclestone that some journalists had been prosecuted for speaking out against the regime, he replied: "So they should. It depends what they say. You say they write negative things. It depends what they write.

"I tell you what we ought to do - as far as we are concerned - not have any races where there is corruption in the country. Can you tell me where we are going to be racing?

"There are a lot of people starving in the world and you would think they have got something to complain about."

Baku will stage the inaugural race against the picturesque backdrop of the old city walls just seven days after the Canadian Grand Prix. At nearly four miles in length, it is the second longest on the calender.
Jeremy Clarkson and James May back David Cameron on Britain remaining in EU

Jeremy Clarkson and James May have said Britain remaining in the EU is one of only three things they agree on.

The former Top Gear presenters were speaking as they met Prime Minister David Cameron in the west London office of their TV production company.

Clarkson said to the PM: "It's an extraordinary thing that James and I only agree on three things, which is sandwich spread is delicious, the old Subaru Legacy Outback is a good car and Britain staying in."

Prime Minister David Cameron meets Jeremy Clarkson and James May in west London.

During an informal talk with Mr Cameron over cappuccinos in Stronger In-branded mugs and croissants, Clarkson added: "I have not, with the greatest of respect, heard one politician say anything that's caused me to change my mind.

"There's huge numbers that don't understand and get confused. Really, it's my gut."

Clarkson has previously declared being in favour of Remain, saying it would be "better to stay in and try to make the damn thing work properly".

Clarkson said he felt there were "compelling" reasons for leaving.

But, he added: "They're not compelling enough for me to say I want to drive a Morris Oxford, which is what would happen."

May said: "If I'm honest, it's a gut feeling for me as well.

"There are too many people who think we will be alright... but that's just not true."

The pair discussed the effects of Brexit on the UK car industry and Mr Cameron said manufacturers would face tariffs on exports to the continent in the event of vote to leave.

He said: "I've spent a lot of time in different car plates in the last few years and if you look at Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar, Ford they are all doing well in Britain.

"They are all expanding, they are all making more, they are all selling more and if we were out - like America was out and with a trade deal like them - they would actually face a tariff on every single car they send to Europe."

Clarkson added that his fellow presenter Richard Hammond was filming in France for the trio's new Amazon Prime show and was still undecided on how to vote.
Probe into missing pensioner Sylvia Stuart now murder inquiry

A pensioner who went missing after her husband was stabbed to death is believed to have been murdered, police have said.

Peter Stuart, 75, was found with multiple knife wounds in woodland near his home in Weybread, Suffolk.

Police searching for his wife Sylvia Stuart, 69, have said her disappearance "is now being treated as a murder enquiry".

Police searching for Sylvia Stuart, pictured, will carry out searches between her home and Tilbury, Essex

Officers are carrying out searches between the Stuarts' home and Tilbury, Essex, where suspect Ali Qazimaj lived.

A Suffolk Police spokesman said: "Drivers may see police activity on roadsides between Weybread and the Tilbury area over the next few days as officers on the enquiry extend searches to potential stopping places between the Stuarts' home and Essex."

Officers previously said there was "very little hope" that Mrs Stuart would be found alive. It has now been more than two weeks since she was last seen.

"While search officers in Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire have been working together in the UK, we're also continuing to work with international law enforcement on the hunt for Ali Qazimaj," Detective chief superintendent Simon Parkes said.

Mr Qazimaj, a Kosovan immigrant, went on the run around 24 hours after Mr Stuart's body was discovered on Friday June 3.

The 42-year-old, who goes by the name Marco Costa, caught a ferry from Dover to Calais at around 6:30pm on Saturday June 4. He was unaccompanied on the journey.

Police are working with European authorities and have launched legal proceedings to obtain a European Arrest Warrant for Mr Qazimaj.

Mr Parkes said: "He is a suspect in a murder investigation in which someone was repeatedly stabbed - we have to assume he may be dangerous. We have no way of knowing if he is armed."

He continued: "We know that he was living in Tilbury in Essex and that he has been working in Purfleet as a forklift driver."

Mr Qazimaj's car, a silver Citroen C3, was found near the ferry terminal in Dover at around midnight on Sunday.

Members of the public are warned not to approach him but to call 999 immediately if he is seen.

He is described as white, around 5ft 6ins, with brown eyes and dark brown, greying hair.

Mr and Mrs Stuart were captured on CCTV walking into Goodies Farm Shop in Wood Lane in Pulham Market at around 10.20am on May 29.

Police are appealing for anyone who saw the couple or Mr Qazimaj to come forward.

A 61-year-old man from Leicester was arrested on suspicion of murder and released on bail to return to Martlesham Police Investigation Centre on August 3.
Britain helps EU temper "head-in-the-clouds" mentality -German defence minister

BERLIN, June 15 (Reuters) - Britain must stay in the EU to temper Germany's "excessive enthusiasm" on European matters, France's "great pathos" and Italy's "art of improvisation", German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday.

Praising Britons "scepticism", "understatement" and "grandiose pragmatism", she echoed other senior German politicians who have become more vocal in recent weeks about wanting Britain to stay in the 28-member bloc.

"If Britons were to leave the EU, this heads-in-the-clouds mentality would dominate," she told weekly Die Zeit.

Britons vote on June 23 and opinion polls over the past few days have shown support tipping towards leaving, a step that could rock the EU as well as the unity of the United Kingdom.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said it would be better for Britain to wield power from within the bloc than outside.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned last week Britain would not be able to continue to benefit from the European single market like Norway or Switzerland if it quit.

Von der Leyen also told Die Zeit she rejected criticism from EU sceptics that ever-deeper integration was an end in itself.

"But whoever wants to take advantage of a political alliance, a common market with 500 million people must be prepared to pay the price for that and combine a part of their own sovereignty in a joint project," she said.

Also on Wednesday, Germany's economic institute DIW said Brexit was likely to knock half a percentage point off growth.

On security, von der Leyen said she expected Europe's influence to drop if Britain were to leave, because there would only be one vote for Europe on the U.N. security council.
FBI probes Craigslist ad in San Diego referring to Orlando massacre

June 15 (Reuters) - The FBI is investigating a threatening message posted on Craigslist in San Diego that referred to the shooting rampage at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, officials said on Wednesday.

Darrell Foxworth, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's San Diego division, confirmed that the agency was looking into the post, but declined to provide further information when reached by phone.

Local broadcaster KGTV said San Diego police were also examining the message, which was posted in the men-seeking-men section of Craigslist in San Diego.

"Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name. Those people were walking diseases, bug chasers, and thank god for AIDS and 9-11 and now Orlando. San Diego you are next," the message read, according to KGTV.

A viewer took a screenshot of the message, which included a picture of a revolver being fired, and sent it to the news outlet before it was flagged and removed from the website, KGTV reported.

A San Diego police spokeswoman said the department was preparing a statement to provide to media.

A gunman opened fire at the Pulse club in Orlando on Sunday, killing 49 people and wounding dozens more in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Healthcare service providers Envision, AmSurg to merge

June 15 (Reuters) - Envision Healthcare Holdings Inc and AmSurg Corp have agreed to an all-stock merger that would create a healthcare service provider with a proforma market value of about $10 billion, the companies said on Wednesday.

The deal comes at a time when consolidation among health insurers and hospitals is placing downward pressure on costs throughout the industry.

The merged entity, called Envision Healthcare Corp, would offer services from pre-hospital care to acute, post-acute and outpatient care, the companies said in a statement.

Under the agreement, Envision shareholders will get 0.334 AmSurg share for each share held, the companies said. Envision shareholders would own about 53 percent of the combined company, with AmSurg investors holding the rest.

Envision shares fell 8 percent to $25.43 in extended trading, while AmSurg's stock rose 1.6 percent to $78.73.

The combined company, to be headed by AmSurg Chief Executive Christopher Holden, will have an enterprise value of about $15 billion, based on Envision and AmSurg's share prices as of Tuesday's close.

Reuters reported last week, citing sources, that the two companies were in advanced merger talks.

Nashville, Tennessee-based AmSurg provides outsourced physician services to hospitals and other healthcare providers. It also operates more than 200 walk-in surgery facilities for patients who do not need overnight stays.

Envision, based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, also provides outsourced services, along with medical transportation services.

The deal is expected to result in synergies of $100 million within three years after it closes at the end of 2016, the companies said.

"The transaction is expected to be accretive to the two companies' combined adjusted earnings per share in 2017 and double-digit accretive in 2018," they said.

Evercore and Barclays are Envision's financial advisers for the deal, while Guggenheim Securities and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC are advising AmSurg.
Women lead calls for gun control in post-conflict Bougainville

By Catherine Wilson

ARAWA, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, June 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - G utted buildings are left to decay in the tropical heat of Arawa, a town hit by battles during a decade-long civil war that engulfed the Bougainville islands of eastern Papua New Guinea in the 1990s.

The blackened ruins are testament to war, but the peaceful rhythm of daily life has returned to the former Bougainville capital, which is ringed by rainforested hillsides.

In the early morning, trucks piled with sacks of potatoes and taro are unloaded at the central market, and women open stalls selling boiled eggs, rice balls and cassava puddings.

But 15 years after a 2001 peace agreement, which included a disarmament process, the islands are still awash with weapons, putting communities at risk. And it is women leading calls to banish guns from their villages and towns.

"The time of using the gun is over. During the conflict we held guns. Now that the peace process is in place, there is no need for guns," Lydia Morisa, a woman who lost her brother-in-law in a gun shooting last year, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Morisa, an assertive middle aged woman with a scarf taming her thick hair, is from Domakungwida, a village near Arawa with traditional thatched dwellings, meeting houses and a strong adherence to indigenous customs.

The conflict, known locally as 'the Crisis', erupted in late 1988 as local anger grew about the impact of the huge Panguna copper mine managed by Bougainville Copper Ltd, a subsidiary of mining multinational Rio Tinto.

Some Bougainvillean landowners and residents said the mine caused environmental damage, and they resented an influx of foreign workers and profits from the huge open cut mine leaving the island. Their demands for compensation were unmet.

The uprising forced the closure of the mine. Papua New Guinea blockaded Bougainville in 1990 and a civil war raged at a cost of 15,000-20,000 lives, or 10 percent of the population, until a ceasefire in 1998.

AWASH WITH GUNS

Nestled in a valley in the Crown Prince Range of mountains, Panguna is now a landscape of gutted former mine buildings and abandoned rusting machinery, slowly disintegrating into the forest. The noise and dust of the mine's round-the-clock operation have been replaced by the sound of villagers at work under clear blue skies.

But the air of peace belies the problem of continued violence in some Bougainville communities, fuelled by the availability of guns.

The United Nations-led weapons disposal process was deemed only half successful after its conclusion in 2005.

An estimated 1,600 guns were surrendered by armed groups, such as the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and Bougainville Resistance Force, according to the Australian Defence Force, part of peace monitoring force deployed by Papua New Guinea's former colonial ruler.

But some factions neither signed the peace agreement nor relinquished their arms. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reported in 2008 that at least 3,000 Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) used during the conflict were never surrendered.

Weapons were common in Morisa's village when her brother-in-law was accused of sorcery and gunned down in October last year. In retaliation, a relative shot the person believed to have ordered the killing. The violence escalated as homes were burnt down.

But the local community - its women especially - refused to stand by in the face of such violence. The affected families met to work out a resolution to the conflict, while women retrieved the guns used in the killings and handed them over to clan chiefs for safekeeping.

Then they signed a traditional peace deal. "We came to sign the memorandum of agreement that there would be no more killings and no more guns used for any other purposes, even the killing of pigs. There must not be any sound of guns in the area," said Rosemary Dekaung, a Domakungwida resident.

The incident came four years after more than 1,000 women and girls, led by the Leitana Nehan Women's Development Agency (LNWDA), a local non-government organisation, gathered in the capital, Buka, to protest against the threat of arms to daily life in Bougainville's mostly rural communities.

Helen Hakena, LNWDA's director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that guns featured in incidents of domestic violence, land disputes, and violence related to accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, which are common on the islands.

Women often bear the brunt of the abundance of guns on the island, sometimes even losing land that is rightfully theirs.

"This is a matrilineal society and women own the land, but women cannot speak up to claim their land because (frequently) the opposing party are known to have guns. So land ownership goes to the wrong people," Hakena said.

The capacity of law enforcement agencies to respond to gun crime is limited by a stipulation in the peace agreement that the police are unarmed.

Local women's organisations say residents are also reluctant to give up their weapons because of uncertainty about the region's political future. Within the next four years, Bougainville, with huge copper reserves, is due to hold a referendum on independence from Papua New Guinea.

"Some are holding on to their guns because they want to see the final destiny of Bougainville. We want to see that what we fought for has been achieved," said Josephine Kauona, chair of the Tunaniya Open Learning Centre, a grassroots education project in Arawa.

Many in Bougainville see the island's long struggle for self-determination as a struggle for justice and particularly freedom from external control over politics and the region's mineral wealth, added Rosemary Moses of the Bougainville Women's Federation.

INCLUDING WOMEN AND CLANS

But the current lack of gun control could jeopardize the referendum and its outcome.

"We would like to make our own choices, we do not want people with guns to force us to vote the way they want. We want freedom of expression, freedom of decision," Hakena said.

Despite their central role in persuading combatants to lay down arms to end "the Crisis", women have been left out of official consultations about weapons and disarmament, activists say.

"In terms of being written on paper... it is there, but in practice it's not happening. In our walk towards nationhood, women need to be participating fully and making decisions," said Moses.

And greater consultations with clan leaders, often the main authority in rural areas where government presence is minimal, is essential if gun crime is to be addressed at the grassroots.
Canadian lawmakers vote to make national anthem gender neutral

OTTAWA, June 15 (Reuters) - Canadian lawmakers voted on Wednesday to alter the country's national anthem to make the lyrics gender neutral, a move that comes as the new Liberal government focuses on being more inclusive toward women.

The bill would change the English version of "O Canada" to remove the words "in all thy sons command" and replace them with "in all of us command."

The changes, brought forward as a private member's bill by a Liberal Party lawmaker, passed easily in the House of Commons, which is controlled by the Liberals. It now goes to the appointed Senate, which generally approves measures passed by the elected House.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made gender inclusivity a focus since he was elected last October and named an equal number of men and women to his 30-member Cabinet. It was the first time gender parity had been achieved by Canada's team of ministers.

Status of Women Minister Patty Hajdu, speaking before the vote, said the change was an important step toward ensuring inclusivity in Canada's cultural symbols.

"I think it's really important as a very strong symbol of our commitment to gender equality in this country," she told reporters.

Some Conservative lawmakers opposed the change, which they said was being made without adequate consultation with Canadians. The former Conservative government suggested changes to the anthem's lyrics in 2010, but backed off after a public outcry.

The song was composed in 1880 and the original lyrics were in French. The English-language version, which is not a direct translation from French, was penned in 1908 and tweaked over the years. It was adopted as Canada's official anthem in 1980.
Saudi prince seeks to repair ties, promote business on U.S. visit

By Warren Strobel and Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's powerful deputy crown prince held a full day of meetings with U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, part of a visit aimed at restoring frayed ties with Washington and promoting his plan to wean the kingdom away from oil revenue.

Mohammed bin Salman, son of Saudi Arabia's King Salman, is expected to meet U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday.

Lawmakers said his discussions on Wednesday, including meetings with the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees and House Speaker Paul Ryan, emphasized his push to help end Saudi dependence on oil by 2030.

"I know that there are tremendous cultural challenges that he'll have to overcome, but if he's 50 percent successful, it will be something," said Republican Senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Foreign Relations committee.

The "Vision 2030" plan relies on an expanding private sector, selling shares in the Saudi state-owned oil company and reducing government subsidies. It faces obstacles in the kingdom's conservative religious establishment and a population used to government largesse.

"It was a fairly compelling vision. It was an interesting, detailed and engaging presentation of his economic vision, and then how that translates to regional stability," said Senator Chris Coons, a Democratic foreign relations committee member.

Prince Mohammed's U.S. tour, expected to last more than 10 days and include stops in California and New York, comes amid increasing tensions in the U.S.-Saudi alliance.

The U.S. Senate on May 17 passed a bill allowing the families of Sept. 11 attack victims to sue Saudi Arabia for damages.

The White House has threatened to veto the measure, and CIA Director John Brennan said on Sunday he expects 28 classified pages of a U.S. congressional report into the attacks to be published, absolving Saudi Arabia of any responsibility.

Globally, the Saudis are unnerved by Obama's nuclear agreement with archrival Iran, and want Washington to do more to help oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The 30-year-old Prince Mohammed, despite his youth and his title of deputy crown prince, wields tremendous influence in Saudi Arabia and is also defense minister.

Corker said the prince raised concerns over the United States opening to Iran and Russia's attempt to increase its Middle East role.

"He did a good job of laying out some of the complications that have arisen ... relative to our dealings with Iran and the fact that people in the region are turning toward Russia as a second ally."
U.S. to give Ukraine $220 million in new aid -White House

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The United States will give Ukraine $220 million in new assistance this year, the White House said on Wednesday.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman of the new aid in a phone call on Wednesday in which Biden expressed strong support for Groysman's reform efforts and commended him for steps his Cabinet has already taken in its first two months in office.
Aluminium premiums adjust to life after the queues: Andy Home

By Andy Home

LONDON, June 15 (Reuters) - Japanese aluminium buyers are locked in talks with producers over the level of physical premiums to be paid for shipments in the third quarter.

The opening salvoes suggest the premium will fall slightly from the second-quarter level of $115-117 per tonne over London Metal Exchange (LME) cash prices. nL4N18Z2L4

Wherever it settles, it will be within the $90-117 range that has held since the third quarter of last year.

This marks a return to some sort of normality after premiums went supernova over the course of 2014. Japanese premiums hit a record high of $425 in the second quarter of 2015.

It's the same with physical aluminium premiums elsewhere. The Midwest U.S. premium, as assessed by S&P Global Platts, is currently 7.75 cents per lb ($171 per tonne), down slightly from 8.90 cents at the start of the year. The decline has been both gradual and orderly.

That is also a far cry from the volatility of 2014 and 2015, when the Midwest premium peaked at over $500 per tonne.

Aluminium premiums show every sign of reverting to the relatively low, relatively stable conditions that prevailed prior to the fireworks of the last five years.

They have, in other words, fully de-linked from the queues to load out metal from LME warehouses.

Graphic on physical aluminium premiums:

http://tmsnrt.rs/1PtnUeN

ATTACKING THE QUEUES

The exact linkage between aluminium premiums and waiting times at key LME good-delivery locations such as Detroit and the Dutch port of Vlissingen remains a contested issue.

Aluminium users were never in any doubt that the aggressive queue-management schemes of LME warehouse operators such as Metro (Detroit) and Pacorini Metals (Vlissingen) were the direct cause of the explosion in physical premiums.

Producers and warehouse owners argued that there was more than just queues in the mix, pointing to both shifts in the physical market, such as the steady contraction of U.S. smelting capacity, and rampant demand for financing aluminium.

It was, after all, financiers rather than manufacturers who were caught in the queues as they sought to move large tonnages of metal to cheaper off-market storage.

The LME itself has always taken a cautious middle ground in the debate, accepting queues were indeed one element, but not necessarily the only one, in the premium explosion.

But the LME has repeatedly tweaked its rules to reduce and eliminate queues in its warehouse network, lifting load-out requirements, introducing a linked load-in-load-out obligation on operators with queues and more recently moving to cap the amount of rent payable in a queue.

The ratcheting up of these measures has largely worked. There is now only one load-out queue for aluminium in the system.

THE LAST QUEUE

As of the end of last month the queue to get aluminium out of warehouses operated by Pacorini Metals at Vlissingen stood at 336 days.

It has flexed considerably wider over the last couple of months from just 116 days at the end of February.

That's down to the shuffling of metal in reaction to spread tightness on the LME's aluminium contract over the course of February and March.

Vlissingen received 120,325 tonnes of fresh warranting activity in those two months, all of it flowing into Pacorini warehouses. At the same time 174,150 tonnes of aluminium was re-warranted, reducing the amount of metal in the load-out queue.

That pattern reversed once the spread tightness passed, the Dutch port seeing 656,000 tonnes of aluminium cancellations over the second half of March and April, all of them acting to lift load-out times again.

Vlissingen now holds 944,725 tonnes of aluminium, of which 756,325 tonnes, or 80 percent of the total, is in the form of cancelled warrants awaiting load-out.

The key take-away from all this toing and froing, however, is that there has been minimal impact on physical premium levels.

That may reflect a change of operating model by warehouse operators in reaction to the LME's increasingly draconian measures.

Consider, for example, the other queue at Detroit, which has somewhat mysteriously disappeared over the last two months.

Detroit currently holds 189,825 tonnes of LME-registered aluminium, of which 154,200 tonnes is in the form of cancelled warrants.

The LME's most recent monthly report detailing stocks by operator showed Metro holding 153,375 tonnes (all metals) at the end of May, by some margin the largest concentration in the city. Of that total all but 350 tonnes was in the form of cancelled warrants.

Quite evidently, Metro still has a lot of aluminium sitting in its sheds, most if not all of it in the form of cancelled warrants but certainly enough to form a load-out queue.

But as of the end of last month there was no queue at Detroit, according to the LME.

The only plausible inference is that the owners of that cancelled aluminium haven't allocated delivery times to collect their metal.

Which suggests some sort of rental deal has been struck with the warehouse operator. That would be in stark contrast to the days when those in the queue would be forced to pay the maximum rental charge.

Queues, it seems, are no longer the only revenue metric when it comes to warehousing LME-registered aluminium.

A HEDGEABLE FUTURE

So is that it? Will premiums revert to their previous rather boring pre-queue norm, immensely important for physical buyers and sellers the world over but with only marginal influence on the "all-in" aluminium price?

Not quite because it is clear that it is not just warehouse operators who have changed their behaviour.

The new aluminium premium contracts launched by CME in response to manufacturers' distress about the widening disconnect between LME basis and "all-in" price are flourishing.

The Midwest U.S. contract <_0AUP:_>, for example, has already notched up 740,175 tonnes of trading in the first five months of this year.

Proof that the market has started to hedge its exposure to the physical premium despite the relative calm of the last few quarters.

And these contracts may yet prove to be valuable tools because the entire aluminium market is adjusting to life after the queues.

LME stocks are still steadily falling. Off-market inventory is almost certainly rising.

As these two trends play out, the aluminium market is becoming more opaque, which means that a physical squeeze, whatever its origins, may be hard to spot in advance.
U.S. attorney in Manhattan probes Bangladesh Bank cyber heist -source

By Mark Hosenball

June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has opened an investigation of the cyber heist of $81 million from Bangladesh Bank's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a law enforcement source said.

Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, is investigating the February crime, in which criminals used the SWIFT fund-transfer network to steal money from Bangladesh's central bank.

Bharara's office declined to comment.

The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly.

The investigation by the federal prosecutor comes as the FBI and other government agencies are seeking to guard against other cyber thefts.

The Federal Reserve and other financial regulators last week told banks to review cyber-security protections against fraudulent money transfers in the wake of the Bangladesh Bank heist. The FBI last month privately urged banks to look for signs of attempted cyber thefts.

Last week, an FBI official speaking in Washington said the agency is investigating "a number of different tentacles" but does not yet know who committed the Bangladesh crime. The Bangladesh police and other law enforcement agencies also are investigating the largest known cyber heist from a bank.

A U.S. congressional committee has launched a probe into the New York Fed's handling of the heist.
New York State Senate confirms Vullo as top financial regulator

By Suzanne Barlyn and Rama Venkat Raman

June 15 (Reuters) - The New York State on Wednesday confirmed Governor Andrew Cuomo's pick to become the state's top financial regulator.

The confirmation vote for Maria Vullo, Cuomo's nominee for superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), was unanimous.

Cuomo, a Democrat, nominated Vullo in January. Her appointment is effective immediately. Earlier on Wednesday, the New York Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on Vullo's nomination and recommended that she be confirmed. Last week, the New York Senate's banking and insurance committees also held separate hearings about Vullo.

Vullo, a lawyer who represented banks, described herself during recent state legislative committee meetings as "pro-business and pro-consumer."

She has been running the NYDFS as its acting superintendent since February.

Vullo will succeed former NYDFS Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky, who left the agency last year.

Under Lawsky, NYDFS earned a reputation as an aggressive regulatory body that extracted hefty fines from global banks and other financial institutions.
Tahir spins South Africa to victory over West Indies

June 15 (Reuters) - Leg-spinner Imran Tahir became the first South African to claim seven wickets in a one-day international as the Proteas demolished West Indies in St Kitts on Wednesday.

Tahir served up a rich variety of deliveries to claim 7-45 from nine overs as the Proteas won by 139 runs, dismissing the bewildered West Indies for 204 in 38 overs at Warner Park.

Earlier, Hashim Amla scored 110 off 99 balls to notch his 23rd career ODI century, sharing an opening partnership of 182 with Quinton de Kock (71) to set the visitors on their way to a formidable 343-4.

West Indies made a bright start in reply with openers Johnson Charles and Andrew Fletcher compiling a quickfire 69 before the latter holed out at deep mid-wicket for 21 from the last ball of the ninth over to give Tahir his first wicket.

The result was never in doubt once Charles, who scored 49, was sent packing in the 13th over.

Tahir's haul included the scalp of World Twenty20 hero Carlos Brathwaite, who was clean bowled by a wicked googly for a golden duck.

In his 58th match, Tahir became the fastest South African bowler to reach 100 ODI wickets, and the fourth quickest overall.

Tahir said he had not realised he needed only two wickets to crack the century until a pre-match phone call from his wife.

"I'm grateful she reminded me," the 37-year-old said. "I'm really pleased."

West Indies captain Jason Holder offered no excuses.

"We weren't good enough today and were totally outplayed. We didn't bowl well, especially the first 10 overs," he said.

South Africa's victory leaves the triangular series evenly poised, with the Proteas, West Indies and Australia all on two wins from four matches.

South Africa, thanks to two bonus points, lead the standings with 10 points, followed by Australia on nine and West Indies on eight.

The series shifts to Barbados for three more matches from Sunday and the hosts face the biggest challenge if they are to make the June 25 final.
Incoming Philippines government says to resume talks with Maoist rebels

MANILA, June 16 (Reuters) - Philippine President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has agreed to resume formal peace negotiations with Maoist-led rebels in Oslo next month, one of Duterte's senior advisers said on Thursday, after the talks stalled four years ago.

The Philippines began talks with the communist National Democratic Front in 1986 to resolve one of the world's longest-running insurgencies, which has killed more than 40,000 and stunted growth in the Philippines over almost 50 years.

Jesus Dureza, Duterte's peace adviser, said the agreement came after two days of informal talks with Europe-based exiled rebel leaders in Norway.

"We will recommend the release of all political prisoners to Duterte once he assumes the presidency and both sides will work for an interim ceasefire to boost the formal resumption of peace talks in the third week of July in Oslo," Dureza told reporters.

The tough-talking Duterte formally takes office on June 30. A former mayor of Davao City, he is the first president from the southern Philippines, where the rebellion has been fought, since the late 1960s.

Dureza said the two sides were "very optimistic" the talks would succeed after Duterte agreed to appoint to his Cabinet two left-wing members supported by the rebels, with another two positions promised.

There was no immediate comment from the communist rebels.

Brokered by Norway, the peace talks stalled four years ago when outgoing President Benigno Aquino declined to free political prisoners, including members of the rebels' negotiating team who had been arrested.

Renato Reyes, secretary-general of left-wing group Bayan (Nation), said his group hoped Duterte would approve the release of sick and elderly prisoners on humanitarian grounds.

More than 500 political prisoners are being held, including 19 members of the rebels' negotiating team.

Duterte promised during the presidential election campaign to end all insurgencies in the Philippines, including a more violent conflict with Islamist rebels that has killed more than 120,000 people and displaced 2 million over the past 47 years.
Russia says two-day ceasefire begins in Syria's Aleppo

MOSCOW, June 16 (Reuters) - On Moscow's initiative, a two-day "regime of calmness" was introduced in Syria's largest city of Aleppo, beginning from Thursday, the Russian defence ministry said.

One of President Bashar al-Assad's biggest goals has been capturing all of Aleppo, which has been divided for years into rebel and government sectors. It had a pre-war population of more than two million.
Poland - Factors to Watch June 16

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):

DATA

Poland's statistic's office to release May data on employment and corporate sector wages at 1200 GMT.

PEKAO

Italy's UniCredit Polish unit Pekao holds shareholders' annual general meeting at 0930 GMT.

IDEA BANK

Idea Bank, owned by Polish billionaire Leszek Czarnecki, sold its debt-collecting company GetBack for 825 million zlotys to Emest Investments controlled by private equity funds, Rzeczpospolita daily said.

COAL

The share of coal in Poland's electricity generation could fall to 50-60 percent from around 80 percent currently, Rzeczpospolita daily quoted energy minister as saying.

PZU

Poland's anti-corruption agency CBA raided the offices of the state-run insurer PZU on Wednesday and secured documents related to an IT project, which could have cost the company 200 million zlotys, Gazeta Polska Codziennie daily said.

PGNiG

Poland has the highest cost of LNG regasification in the region - around 1.1 euro for 1 MWh in short term supplies and around 2.1 euro for long-term deliveries, Rzeczpospolita daily said.

ENERGY

Poland's new law on renewable sources of energy will allow for burning more wood together with coal in coal-fuelled power stations, Gazeta Wyborcza daily said.

****Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.****
Czech Republic - Factors To Watch on June 16

PRAGUE, June 16 (Reuters) - Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Czech financial markets on Thursday. ALL TIMES GMT (Czech Republic: GMT + 2 hours) =========================ECONOMIC DATA========================== Real-time economic data releases.................... Summary of economic data and forecasts........... Recently released economic data.................. Previous stories on Czech data............. **For a schedule of corporate and economic events: http://emea1.apps.cp.thomsonreuters.com/Apps/CountryWeb/#/2E/events-overview ==========================NEWS================================== COALITION: The Czech interior minister on Wednesday signed a contested plan merging top anti-corruption units in the police that is at the centre of a row shaking the centre-left government. Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka said he would meet next Wednesday with both the Interior Minister Milan Chovanec from his social democratic party and Finance Minister Andrej Babis, chairman of the ANO party, to solve the issue. Story: Related stories: CEE MARKETS: Central European assets mostly firmed on Wednesday, rebounding after a plunge the previous day prompted by concerns over the outcome of Britain's June 23 referendum on whether to stay in the European Union or leave. Story: Related stories: ---------------------- MARKET SNAPSHOT ------------------------ Index/Crown Currency Latest Prev Pct change Pct change close on day in 2016 vs Euro 27.074 27.048 -0.1 -0.28 vs Dollar 23.995 24.113 0.49 3.48 Czech Equities 817.58 817.58 1.16 -14.51 U.S. Equities 17,640.17 17,674.82 -0.2 1.23 Pvs close or current levels vs prior domestic close at 1500 GMT For real-time stock market index quotes click in brackets: Warsaw WIG20 Budapest BUX Prague PX For updates on CEE currencies TOP NEWS -- Emerging markets Prague Newsroom: +420 224 190 477 E-mail: prague.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (Reporting by Prague Newsroom)
Rescuers struggle to save beached whales in Indonesia

JAKARTA, June 16 (Reuters) - Indonesian rescuers worked on Thursday to save a pod of beached whales that got trapped in a mangrove swamp at low tide, fisheries officials said.

Villagers in the area in the east of Java island were helping fisheries staff trying to lead the 30 or so whales, most of which were believed to be young pilot whales, back to sea.

Several of the whales had died after being hurt in the shallows and many of the others were weak, officials said.

"The residents are trying to push the active whales back toward deeper water ... but some are still stuck," Deddy Isfandi, a fisheries official in the coastal town of Probolinggo, told media.

Another fisheries official, Wahid Noor Azis, told Reuters seven of the whales were calves while the biggest of the adults was up to four metres (13 feet) long.

The officials said they did not know why the animals ventured into the mangrove swamp. Residents said whales were rarely seen in the area.

Whale beachings, while unusual, have been seen in other parts of Indonesia.
UAE says its war in Yemen "practically over"

DUBAI, June 16 (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates' involvement in more than a year of war in Yemen is "practically over", a top diplomat was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

The UAE is key member of a Saudi-led military coalition which intervened in Yemen in March 2015. It backs the exiled government against the armed Houthi movement, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE fear is a proxy for their regional arch-rival, Iran.

"Our position today is clear: the war is practically over for our troops," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash was quoted as saying in a closed-door speech by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed's official twitter account.

"We are looking at political arrangements and our political role now is to empower the Yemenis in the liberated areas."

A Houthi missile killed more than 60 Gulf Arab troops stationed in central Yemen in September, including 52 Emiratis, the worst loss ever suffered by the UAE military.

UAE troops led a Yemeni government offensive against al Qaeda fighters in April, expelling them their base in the southern port city of Mukalla.
Russia's VTB sees no significant losses from Mozambique default

MOSCOW, June 16 (Reuters) - Russia's VTB does not expect any significant losses from its operations in Mozambique despite experiencing problems with a major loan, VTB Chief Executive Andrei Kostin told Reuters in an interview.

Mozambique Asset Management (MAM) borrowed $535 million from VTB to build shipyards in Maputo and the northern town of Pemba in expectation of a rapid takeoff in the offshore gas sector.

But MAM missed a May 23 deadline for its first loan repayment of $178 million.

VTB said this month it had shared the bulk of its $535 million loan to MAM, a state firm, with investors active in that region. It did not disclose which investors.

VTB, along with Credit Suisse, also helped to arrange a $622 million loan for maritime security projects for Proindicus, a state-owned firm owned by the defence and interior ministries and state security service.

"Mozambique was not a bad deal and given even the current situation possible losses are in line with expected profit. We have a portfolio sold out on the market so any significant losses for the bank should not be expected," Kostin said.

"We are in talks with Mozambique. Our position is that the country should serve, pay off, honour its obligations."

Kostin said he saw the African continent in general as a "high risk zone" but one where operations should continue.
Post-Islamic State Iraq should be split in three - top Kurdish official

By Maher Chmaytelli and Isabel Coles

ERBIL, Iraq, June 16 (Reuters) - Once Islamic State is defeated, Iraq should be divided into three separate entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed, with a state each given to Shi'ite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, a top Kurdish official said on Thursday.

Iraqi troops have expelled Islamic State from some key cities the militants seized in 2014, and are advancing on Mosul, the largest city under IS control. Its fall would likely mean the end of the group's self-proclaimed caliphate.

But even if Islamic State was eliminated, Iraq would still be deeply divided. Sectarian violence has continued for years and a power-sharing agreement in Baghdad has only led to discontent, deadlock and corruption.

Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain "under one roof".

"Federation hasn't worked, so it has to be either confederation or full separation," Barzani told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday in the Kurdish capital Erbil. "If we have three confederated states, we will have equal three capitals, so one is not above the other."

The Kurds have already taken steps towards realising their long-held dream of independence from Iraq, which has been led by the Shi'ite majority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, following a U.S.-led invasion.

They run their own affairs in the north and have their own armed forces, the Peshmerga, which have been fighting Islamic State militants with help from a U.S.-led coalition.

Sunnis should be given the option of doing the same in the provinces where they are in the majority in the north and the west of Iraq, said Barzani.

"What we are offering is a solution," he said. "This doesn't mean they live under one roof but they can be good neighbours. Once they feel comfortable that they have a bright and secure future, they can start cooperating with each other."

His father has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence this year as the region is locked in territorial and financial disputes with the central government.

Baghdad has cut off payments from the federal budget to the KRG to try to force the Kurds to sell crude produced on their territory through the state oil marketing company and not independently. The Kurds also claim the oil region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, as part of their territory.

FEARS FOR MOSUL

Barzani said that the Sunnis' feeling of marginalisation by the Shi'ite leadership had facilitated the takeover of their regions by Islamic State militants.

In addition, Iraq endured months of wrangling and chaos over a government reshuffle that was to curb corruption. In May, frustration over the delays culminated in the unprecedented breach by protesters of the Green Zone, which houses parliament, government offices and many foreign embassies.

Ahead of the battle for Mosul, Barzani said the city's communities should agree in advance on how to handle the aftermath. Mosul's pre-war population of 2 million was mostly Sunni, but included religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis, Kurds and Turkmen.

Almost all non-Sunnis fled the Islamic State takeover, along with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who could not live under the militants' harsh rule or could not endure Baghdad's financial blockade imposed on IS-held regions.

"I think the most important part is how you manage Mosul after Daesh is defeated," he said, referring to an Arabic name of Islamic State. "We don't want to see the gap of liberation and then a vacuum, which probably will turn into chaos."

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that 2016 would be the year of "final victory" over Islamic State with the capture of Mosul.

The army, counter-terrorism forces and Shi'ite Muslim paramilitary fighters backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition are also in a major operation to retake the mainly Sunni city of Falluja, an hour's drive from Baghdad.
BRIEF-Intu Properties confirms talks with Australia's QIC over Intu Merry Hill deal

June 16 (Reuters) - Intu Properties Plc :

* Response to media comment

* Intu confirms that it is in advanced discussions with QIC regarding potential acquisition of QIC's 50 per cent interest in Intu Merry Hill in West Midlands

* If acquisition were to proceed, consideration is likely to be around 410 million pounds and would be funded through a combination of new debt and existing resources

* Whilst discussions are ongoing, there can be no certainty that any transaction will be undertaken.
Russia finmin says to increase borrowing while cutting budget deficit

ST PETERSBURG, Russia, June 16 (Reuters) - Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Thursday his ministry will need to increase the volume of borrowing even while cutting the country's budget deficit.
Pro-Brexit Conservatives denounce UK finance minister, Bank of England

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Pro-Brexit former Conservative party leaders and finance ministers said on Thursday the Treasury and Bank of England had failed to provide balanced analysis in the campaign ahead of next week's EU membership referendum.

Former Conservative leaders Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, and former finance ministers Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, said the economic authorities had failed to present a fair case of the consequences of leaving the European Union.

Both the finance ministry and Bank of England have said Britain could lapse into recession if it leaves the EU, and that sterling could fall sharply.

Advocates of Britain leaving the EU say these analyses fail to take into account the positives that might result, with Britain relieved of burdensome EU regulation and able to forge its own trading relationships.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney sent a barbed response to a letter from another "Leave" campaigner, Conservative Member of Parliament Bernard Jenkin, saying all public comments by Bank officials were in line with the central bank's duties.

Jenkin said Bank officials were prohibited from making further public comment on the referendum. Carney said Jenkin's letter "demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of central bank independence".

Chancellor (finance minister) George Osborne's warning on Wednesday of an emergency budget in the event of an EU exit was "born of desperation", the former leaders and finance ministers said in a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

"No responsible Chancellor would seriously propose any such thing," they said.

"This is a shocking and cynical attempt by the Leave campaign to try to muzzle independent expert opinion, which is rightly warning of the serious dangers of Britain leaving Europe," Stronger In Europe campaigner and Labour MP Wes Streeting said in a statement.

The rival "Leave" and "Remain" camps are campaigning ahead of the June 23 vote, with opinion polls suggesting the result will be close.
Weightlifting-Kazakhstan's Ilyin denies doping charges

ALMATY, June 16 (Reuters) - Celebrated weightlifter Ilya Ilyin has denied taking banned substances after he was named among four Kazakh gold-medal winners from the 2012 London Olympics to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in their reanalysed samples.

Ilyin, the men's 94kg champion, and female lifters Zulfiya Chinshanlo (53kg), Maiya Maneza (63kg) and Svetlana Podobedova (75kg) all failed tests, the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) said on Wednesday.

"I think we will be able to prove the complete absurdity and inconsistency of the allegations against me," the 28-year-old Ilyin wrote on his Instagram page, describing the IWF announcement as "a thunderstorm on a sunny day".

Kazakhstan's Weightlifting Federation said in a statement that while it was the responsibility of athletes to adhere to anti-doping regulations, it would help them appeal the charges.

The four Kazakh lifters and six from other countries, including seven medal winners from London, were expected to be contenders at the Rio de Janeiro Games in August but have all been provisionally suspended.

Ilyin, who also won gold at the 2008 Beijing Games, tested positive for dehydrochloromethyltestosterone and stanozolol when the International Olympic Committee reanalysed samples from the last Olympics, the IWF announced.
Islamic State committing genocide against Yazidis -U.N.

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, June 16 (Reuters) - Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes, United Nations investigators said on Thursday.

Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognised genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf.

The U.N. report, based on interviews with dozens of survivors, said the Islamist militants had been systematically rounding up Yazidis in Iraq and Syria since August 2014, seeking to "erase their identity" in a campaign that met the definition of the crime as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

"The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing," it said.

The 40-page report, entitled "They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis", sets out a legal analysis of Islamic State's intent to wipe out the Kurdish-speaking group, whom the Sunni Muslim Arab militants view as infidels.

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions.

"The finding of genocide must trigger much more assertive action at the political level, including at the (U.N.) Security Council," Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the commission of inquiry, told a news briefing.

"Almost two years since the attack on Mount Sinjar, nothing has been done to save those people," he said, referring to the heart of the Yazidi region in northern Iraq stormed by Islamic State in August 2014.

Commission member Vitit Muntarbhorn said it had "detailed information on places, violations and names of the perpetrators", and had begun sharing confidential testimony with some national authorities aiming to prosecute militant citizens.

The independent commissioners urged major powers to rescue at least 3,200 women and children still held by Islamic State (IS or ISIS), mainly in Syria, and to refer the case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution.

Iraq and Syria also have a duty to prevent, punish, and prosecute genocide, having ratified the Convention, they said.

Historical victims of genocide include Armenians in 1915, Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.

"ROAD MAP FOR PROSECUTION"

"ISIS made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide," said another investigator, Carla del Ponte.

"Of course, we regard that as a road map for prosecution, for future prosecution. I hope that the Security Council will do it because it is time now to start to obtain justice for the victims," added del Ponte, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor.

The five permanent members of Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - have agreed on the need to fight ISIS, "so it should be no problem at all to have a decision that a prosecution can be done," she said.

Islamic State, which has proclaimed a theocratic caliphate - based on a radical interpretation of Sunni Islam - in areas of Iraq and Syria under its control, systematically killed, captured or enslaved thousands of Yazidis when it overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014.

At least 30 mass graves have been uncovered, the report said, calling for further investigations.

Islamic State has tried to erase the Yazidis' identity by forcing men to choose between conversion to Islam and death, raping girls as young as nine, selling women at slave markets, and drafting boys to fight, the U.N. report said.

Yazidi women are treated as "chattel" at slave markets and some are sold back to their families for $10,000 to $40,000 after captivity and multiple rapes, according to the report.

Militants have begun holding "online slave auctions", using the encrypted application Telegraph to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls, "with details of their age, marital status, current location and price"," it said.
Court orders Bulgaria to pay Russia over cancelled nuclear project: officials

SOFIA, June 16 (Reuters) - An international court has ruled that Bulgarian state energy firm NEK should pay nearly 550 million euros ($620 million) in compensation to Russia's Atomstroyexport for a cancelled nuclear power project, Bulgarian officials said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said the arbitration court ruling meant NEK would have to pay for one nuclear reactor and needed to decide together with Atomstroyexport what to do with it.

Russian state company Rosatom said in a statement it is satisfied with the decision.

The ruling was made at a court in Geneva under the auspices of the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce.

Bulgaria, a European Union country, had been under pressure from its Western allies about its energy dependence on Moscow.

It contracted Atomstroyexport in 2006 to build two 1,000 megawatt reactors at Belene on the Danube River, but abandoned the project six years later, after failing to attract western investors for the 10 billion euros ($11 billion) scheme.

Options now include approaching the European Commission for advice on whether to install the reactor, or to seek an agreement with the Russian state nuclear company to resell it to a third party, Borisov told reporters.

"The arbitration ruling in its essence says that NEK and Atomstroyexport should sit together and decide whether they will build that reactor, whether they will sell it and be done with it," Borisov said.

"I am personally very content with the arbitration court's objectivity. I was fearing heavy sanctions or fines, but nothing of that sort happened," he said.

Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova said Bulgaria received the decision, which ran to over 700 pages, late last night and that NEK will approach Atomstroyexport in the coming days to seek a solution.

Petkova said the court has ruled that NEK should cover the funds the Russian state company had spent to produce equipment for the project, but has rejected claims for additional works and damages from lost profits.

Atomstroyexport had sought more than 1 billion euros in compensation from NEK over the cancellation of the Belene plant.
U.S. officials say American Muslims do report extremist threats

By Kristina Cooke and Joseph Ax

June 16 (Reuters) - Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week.

"They don't report them," Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. "For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this."

But FBI director James Comey said, "They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

"It's at the heart of the FBI's effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks," Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings.

Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington field office, told Reuters on Wednesday that the agency has a "robust" relationship with the local Muslim community. FBI agents operating in the area have received reports about suspicious activity and other issues from community members.

Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said the city's Muslim community has been cooperative in reporting "red flags."

"I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things," Downing told Reuters. "What we say to communities is that we don't want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behavior."

Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has conducted several studies on Muslim-Americans and terrorism, disputed Trump's criticism.

"To claim there is no cooperation is false and defamatory to the Muslim-American community," Kurzman said.

Kurzman said a January 2016 study by himself and colleagues at Duke University's Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that many law enforcement agencies had made progress in establishing trust with local Muslim-American communities.

But the study also found some tensions. In one focus group described in the study, Muslim-American participants debated when to report activity when they were unsure how to detect imminent violence.

"The group participants expressed concern that police would be more likely to encourage a plot in order to make an arrest," the authors wrote, "rather than to divert people onto a nonviolent path that community members and family members would prefer."

One imam interviewed for the project told researchers he felt that his "trust is not being reciprocated" by U.S. government officials.

The imam told the researchers that after he attended a meeting with federal law enforcement officials designed to increase cooperation, he went to the local airport, was held for hours at security and missed his flight, the study said.

A Reuters review of court records also produced examples of Muslim-Americans informing law enforcement of possible radicalization within their families.

Suspecting that her then 17-year-old son, Ali Amin, was radicalizing, Amani Ibrahim followed the advice of a local imam and reported her fears to law enforcement officials, according to court records. In August 2015, Amin was sentenced to 11 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State after he helped a schoolmate travel to join the extremist group.

In 2014, the sister of Abdi Nur contacted Minneapolis police to report her younger brother missing. She later showed federal agents messages she received, in which he said he had "gone to join the brothers" and promised to see her in the afterlife. Nur has been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group, but is still at large.

And in 2014, Adam Shafi's father, Sal Shafi, told officials in the U.S. embassy in Cairo that he was worried his son was radicalizing after Adam went missing during a family trip in Egypt.
Poundland boss will not stay on to tackle Steinhoff bid

By James Davey

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - The boss of Poundland is not planning to delay his retirement next month even though the British discount retailer faces a possible takeover bid from South African group Steinhoff.

Steinhoff has bought 23 percent of Poundland and is considering a full cash bid for Europe's biggest single price discounter, which on Thursday reported a 13.5 percent fall in full-year profit.

"I don't see, as I sit here this morning, any change that is necessary to that plan," Jim McCarthy told reporters after Poundland published its results. McCarthy, Poundland's chief executive for the last decade, is due to step down on July 1.

He will be succeeded as CEO by Kevin O'Byrne, a former Kingfisher and Dixons Retail executive. O'Byrne joined Poundland in April as CEO designate. McCarthy will formally leave the business after the annual shareholders' meeting in September.

McCarthy, who has a 3.5 percent stake in Poundland, declined to comment on Steinhoff's move, saying takeover rules prevented him from doing so.

Steinhoff, a $22 billion furniture conglomerate, on Wednesday confirmed it was considering a full cash bid for Poundland in its latest attempt to expand in Europe.

The South African group, which owns Bensons Beds and the Harvey's furniture chains in Britain, has lost out in two other takeovers in Europe this year. It failed to win Britain's Home Retail, which owns Argos, and was unsuccessful in a bid for Darty in France.

With no firm offer on the table Poundland has told shareholders to take no action.

Under British takeover rules, Steinhoff has until July 13 to announce a firm intention to bid for all of Poundland.

Poundland, which in the UK sells everything for a pound, made an underlying pretax profit of 37.8 million pounds ($53.5 million) in the year to March 27.

That was below analysts' forecasts which ranged from 39.9 million pounds to 51.8 million pounds and was down from 43.7 million pounds in 2014-15.

Poundland said it was hurt by subdued trading, adverse currency moves and the distraction of integrating the 99p Stores chain it bought for 55 million pounds last year.

"We see the current time as one of trough earnings for a group that, if it sees through its potential in the UK, Ireland and Spain, has the capability to be materially more profitable," Shore Capital analyst Clive Black said.

"No doubt shareholders will have this in mind should Steinhoff's interest progress."

Poundland's shares were up 3 percent at 205.8 pence by 0850 GMT, valuing the business at 550 million pounds.

Though the stock is up 16 percent over the last week it is still down 34 percent year-on-year. Poundland listed at 300 pence in 2014.

Underlying sales in 2015-16 increased 9.3 percent to 1.21 billion pounds, while, sales at stores open over a year fell 3.9 percent. Underlying sales in the 11 weeks to June 11 increased 28.6 percent. The dividend was down 19 percent to 3.65 pence.

"I would have loved to have left the business on top of frothy numbers, that's what I'm used to," McCarthy said.

But he also said after a challenging year the company would benefit from the 99p Stores chain purchase, which increases Poundland's UK and Ireland store numbers to about 900 and provides it with significant opportunities for growth.

"To have this extra firepower at a time when the market is competitive and consumers are becoming increasingly demanding I think is a good place to be," he said. ($1 = 0.7060 pounds)
EU allows Iran's state carrier to resume flights in bloc

By Julia Fioretti

BRUSSELS, June 16 (Reuters) - Iran's state airline, which has just reached an agreement with Boeing Co to purchase new jetliners, can resume flights in the EU, the European Commission said on Thursday.

Iran is dangling the prospect of significant business for Western planemakers as it emerges from decades of sanctions.

While the European Commission, the EU's executive, said Iranair could resume flights, some of the carrier's aircraft would remain on the EU's safety blacklist.

"I am happy to announce that we are now also able to allow most aircraft from Iranair back into European skies," said EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc. The Commission said the decision followed a visit to Iran by the EU executive in April.

The Commission also removed Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air, a major buyer of Airbus and Boeing jets, from its safety blacklist.

Iranair will be allowed to fly all of its planes in the EU except the Boeing 747-200s, Boeing 747SPs and Fokker 100s, the Commission said.

Iran needs an estimated 400 jets to renew its fleet and prepare for projected growth, according to Iranian and Western estimates.

Tehran said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with Boeing for the supply of jetliners, reopening the country's skies to new U.S. aircraft for the first time in decades.

The Iranian flag carrier also agreed in January to buy 118 jets worth $27 billion from Airbus and is discussing further orders with Boeing.

The decision to remove Lion Air from the EU blacklist could also potentially lead to the Indonesian carrier buying more planes, analysts have said.

Lion's five airlines operate a combined fleet of more than 200 aircraft, mostly Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s. The company, which plans a stock exchange listing possibly early next year, has around 500 more aircraft on order, and expects to take delivery of 40 aircraft this year.
Zimbabwe doctors say insurers owe $220 mln, will now take cash only

HARARE, June 16 (Reuters) - Doctors in Zimbabwe will no longer accept patients with medical insurance from July 1 due to insurers owing them $220 million, the main doctors' association said on Thursday, leaving thousands to pay cash or rely on underfunded state hospitals.

Most doctors in Zimbabwe run private practices and some also put in hours at private and state hospitals. Government-run hospitals, used by the majority of Zimbabweans, often lack basic medicines and specialist doctors and are largely shunned by patients on health insurance.

The southern African nation has more than 20 registered health insurers serving about 800,000 members, according to the Association of Health Funders of Zimbabwe (AHFoZ), which represents health insurance firms.

In a statement, the Zimbabwe Medical Association (ZiMA)accused AHFoZ of failing to pay or delaying payments to doctors, who were nonetheless forced to pay taxes on funds they had not received.

"As a result of the above, health insurance firms currently owe health services providers an estimated $220 million," ZiMA said in the statement.

"From the 1st of July 2016 all privately practicing medical doctors will not be accepting health insurance (medical aid cards) from their patients until further notice."

ZiMA president Agnes Mahomva would not say how many doctors would comply with ZiMA's decision or the number of patients that would be affected.
Merkel says expects Slovakia to act as "honest broker" on migrant issue

BERLIN, June 16 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday that she expected Slovakia to be an honest mediator on migrant issues when it takes over the European Union's rotating presidency in July.

"I have no doubt that when it comes to the agenda we have ahead of us - and that now means above all dealing with the Mediterranean route from Libya - that Slovakia will be an honest broker and that it will, with the presidency, unite the member states of the European Union," she said.
Federal plan for northern Syria advances with U.S.-backed forces

By Tom Perry

BEIRUT, June 16 (Reuters) - As an alliance of U.S.-backed militias advance against Islamic State in northern Syria, their political allies are making progress of their own towards a new federal system of government which they hope will take root in newly captured areas.

The autonomous federation being planned by Syrian Kurdish parties and their allies is taking shape fast: a constitution should be finalised in three months, and possibly sooner, to be followed quickly by elections, a Kurdish official said.

While Kurdish groups insist this is no separatist bid, it is set to redraw the map as U.N. diplomacy fails to make any progress towards ending the war that has splintered Syria into a patchwork of separately-run areas.

In so doing, it is likely to deepen the concerns of NATO member Turkey about growing Kurdish influence in northern Syria, a region whose once unfamiliar Kurdish name - Rojava - has now entered the Middle East's political lexicon.

The plan had taken on even greater significance since the Syria Democratic Forces alliance, which is spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG militia, mounted a rapid new advance westwards this month into Islamic State's last foothold at the Turkish border.

It holds out the prospect of more areas being included in the federation, plans for which were first unveiled in March.

The idea of newly-captured territory joining the "Democratic Federal System for Rojava - Northern Syria" was discussed last week with members of a local council set up to run the IS-held city of Manbij, a target of the campaign.

"We gave them an idea about the plan we are working on, and expressed to them our desire for Manbij to be part of the democratic federal area after its liberation," said Hadiya Yousef, a senior Kurdish official who is co-chair of an assembly that is overseeing the project.

"There was an optimistic view towards the matter. They liked the plan," she told Reuters in an interview. But she added that given the temporary nature of the council, any decision would have to be taken later on by a more permanent one.

An official with the Manbij city council, who declined to be named, told Reuters they expected the federal system to be tabled to them but they were not authorised to make such a decision. It would be up to the expanded council to be formed at a later date to decide on such matters, the official in the council's media office said.

Kurds are scattered in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, where the Kurdistan Regional Government represents the closest the Kurds have come to a state of their own.

YPG FIREPOWER AND INFLUENCE

The political federation for northern Syria builds on three self-ruled regions carved out by the YPG since Syria descended into conflict in 2011 in an uprising to topple President Bashar al-Assad. It has already grown, expanding last year to include the town of Tel Abyad that was captured from Islamic State by the YPG in October.

The YPG has been the most effective partner for the United States against Islamic State in Syria. Yet Turkey views it as a terrorist group due to its ties to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is waging an insurgency in southeast Turkey.

The SDF's establishment last year resulted in Arab militias formally joining the YPG in the U.S.-backed campaign against IS - an important consideration as they push into areas that are majority Arab.

But while the YPG has publicly take a back seat, analysts say it still wields the most firepower and influence.

Syrian Kurdish groups have made no secret of their aim to link up their two autonomous regions, or cantons, in northeastern Syria with one further west - Afrin. All that's preventing them is the 80 km stretch of territory at the Turkish border held by IS near Manbij and further west by Turkey-backed rebel groups that are hostile to the YPG.

The Kurdish politicians at the heart of the effort say it will safeguard the rights of all ethnic groups, allowing communities to govern themselves and serving as a model for an eventual solution to the Syrian war.

But it has encountered broad opposition, including the United States, the Syrian government in Damascus, and the Syrian opposition to Assad.

NO AGREEMENT YET ON FLAG

Yousef said meetings had been held in the United States, Russia and Europe to explain the plan, and to assure them that the aim was not to establish an independent state.

Letters had also been sent directly to U.S. President Barack Obama and the U.N. envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, who left the main Syrian Kurdish political party, the PYD, out of peace talks earlier this year in line with Turkey's wishes.

"We expect acceptance of this plan and we are working to win international, domestic, and regional support," Yousef said.

Speaking by telephone from Syria, she said the constitution to be known as "the social contract" was nearly complete.

Any area wishing to join the federal system would have to agree to this contract, whose features include equal rights for women that will guarantee joint leadership of all administrative bodies - and a form of socialist economy.

Pending issues included the design of a new flag to be flown alongside the Syrian flag, the location of the main legislative council - to be known as the Peoples' Conference - and the administrative borders of areas in the new system.

"Within three months we should have finished all preparations and frameworks for the social contract," she said.

Once approved by the 151-member assembly which Yousef co-chairs, preparations will start for elections to take place three months later.
One child killed, three wounded by air strikes in eastern Libya - resident

BENGHAZI, Libya, June 16 (Reuters) - Air raids in the eastern Libyan city of Derna killed one child and wounded three more, a resident and medical sources said, the second time in a week that civilians have been killed by strikes there.

Military forces allied to Libya's eastern government have been carrying out regular air strikes in Derna which they say are targeting al Qaeda-linked militants.

The strikes on Wednesday hit the seafront promenade in Derna, resident Abdessalem al-Tajouri told Reuters. Last Thursday an air strike hit a residential area in Derna, killing a woman and three children.

Ahmed al-Masmari, a spokesman for the eastern military, said Derna residents had been helping al Qaeda and had to "take responsibility for their actions".

"We have warned residents in the city of Derna through statements from the operations room and the military headquarters not to cover up for al Qaeda or allow them to use residential districts to store weapons and ammunition."

Derna has long had a strong Islamist presence, and became a base for Islamic State militants in 2014. Rival Islamists and other local forces retook control of the city last summer and pushed Islamic State from its last footholds in Derna earlier this year.
Obama meets Orlando massacre survivors, assails homegrown terrorism

By Bernie Woodall and Roberta Rampton

ORLANDO, Fla., June 16 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Thursday met survivors of a massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub and relatives of the 49 people killed and said the United States must act to control gun violence and fight what he called homegrown terrorism.

"I held and hugged grieving family members and parents, and they asked, 'Why does this keep happening?'," Obama told reporters, before urging Congress to pass measures to make it harder to legally acquire high-powered weapons like the semi-automatic rifle used in the attack on Sunday.

"I'm pleased to hear that the Senate will hold votes on preventing individuals with possible terrorist ties from buying guns," he said.

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Orlando, Florida, four days after a U.S.-born gunman claiming allegiance to various Islamist militant groups carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

During the shooting rampage the gunman, Omar Mateen, exchanged text messages with his wife, it was reported on Thursday, as well as posting on Facebook and placing a phone call to a television station. Police killed Mateen, 29, a U.S. citizen born in New York to Afghan immigrants.

Obama, who has visited mass shooting victims' families in towns from San Bernardino, California, to Newtown, Connecticut, since he has been president, laid flowers at a memorial for the victims of the attack on the Pulse nightclub.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack but U.S. officials have said they do not believe Mateen was assisted from abroad. CIA Director John Brennan told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday that the agency had "not been able to uncover any direct link" between Mateen and militants abroad.

A married couple also claiming allegiance to Islamic State shot dead 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December.

ORLANDO MOURNS

Wakes were held on Thursday for at least four victims - Kimberly Morris, Anthony Luis Laureano Disla, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera and Roy Fernandez, as Orlando braced for what was expected to be two weeks of somber events.

More than 300 people, including Florida Governor Rick Scott, came to the viewing for Ortiz-Rivera, who was born in Dorado, Puerto Rico. He was 36 when he was killed during a night of dancing to celebrate a friend's new house - his husband had stayed home that night in the couple's apartment.

"He was in a Snapchat video that's out there, dancing away, so we know he had some fun before the madness," said his cousin, Orlando Gonzalez.

Twenty-three of the 53 wounded remained hospitalized, six in critical condition, according to the Orlando Regional Medical Center.

One of Mateen's Facebook messages during the attack, apparently referring to air strikes against Islamic State by the United States and its allies, said: "You kill innocent women and children by doing us air strikes ... now taste the Islamic State vengeance," according to U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, who asked Facebook to turn over material from Mateen's accounts.

CNN reported, citing a law enforcement official it did not identify, that Mateen had also exchanged text messages with his wife, Noor Salman, during the three hours he was holed up in a bathroom inside the nightclub. Salman is under investigation to find out whether she knew about Mateen's plans ahead of time.

Florida news website TCPalm reported that Mateen, who worked as a security guard, was frequently suspended while he was in junior high and high school, and was passed to the next grade despite poor academic performance. It cited records from St. Lucie County schools.

CONGRESS UNDER PRESSURE

The attack sparked a new debate over how the United States responds to Islamist militant violence at home and abroad, with Republican Senator John McCain telling reporters on Thursday he viewed Obama as "directly responsible" for the Orlando attack because of his failure to prevent the rise of Islamic State.

Shortly afterward, McCain said on his official Twitter feed that he was referring to Obama's national security decisions, "not to the President himself."

Mateen carried out the slaughter with an assault weapon and handgun that had been legally purchased although he had twice been investigated by the FBI for possible connections with militant Islamist groups.

Obama reiterated his frustration over the failure of Congress to pass any gun control measures in more than two decades. The massacre put pressure on Congress to act.

After a marathon of speeches by Democrats on Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday, a Democratic senator said Republicans had agreed to hold votes on measures to expand background checks and prevent people on U.S. terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

No formal deal between the parties for votes was announced, and it was unclear when and how the Senate would proceed with the votes, which would be amendments to an appropriations bill funding the Commerce and Justice departments. Even if votes are scheduled, it is unclear whether any of the bills could gain enough support to pass the Senate.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said the chamber would most likely vote on four gun control measures on Monday.

Republicans, who currently hold a 54-person majority in the 100-seat Senate, have blocked a number of Democratic-backed gun control measures over the years, saying they infringed on Americans' constitutional right to bear arms.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also joined the gun debate, announcing on Wednesday he would meet the National Rifle Association to talk about barring people who are on terrorism watch lists from buying guns.
Hong Kong bookseller says associate "abducted" by China authorities

HONG KONG, June 16 (Reuters) - One of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing under mysterious circumstances last year said on Thursday he had been detained for more than eight months by Chinese authorities and that another of the five had been abducted from Hong Kong.

Lam Wing-kee told a news conference his colleague, Lee Bo, who went missing from Hong Kong, had been abducted and said "cross-border enforcement actions" by mainland Chinese authorities in Hong Kong were "not acceptable".

The five booksellers, linked to the shop Causeway Bay Books, went missing from late last year. All of them later surfaced in China in police custody.
A decades-long battle over gun control in the United States could reach a critical stage next week in the U.S. Senate amid signs that Americans are more willing to accept limited restrictions after a Florida nightclub massacre.

It is far from likely any new measures will be approved in the short term. But the Orlando mass shooting and remarks from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that perhaps something should be done this time have fostered a mood that has made the unlikely seem at least remotely possible.

As President Barack Obama was in Orlando consoling the survivors of a rampage by a gunman who claimed allegiance to Islamic State militants, the U.S. Senate moved closer to scheduling votes on limited gun control measures.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut helped secure the promise of gun amendment votes after waging a 15-hour filibuster

As always, Democrats were challenging Republicans to vote for new restrictions and reject pressure from the National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobby that has been known to punish politicians who thwart its will.

Filibusters have become rare in the Senate, but U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and fellow Democrats set the U.S. Capitol abuzz by talking on the Senate floor for nearly 15 straight hours to demand that Congress act on gun control.

They ended their speeches before dawn, citing a Republican pledge to hold votes soon on measures to expand background checks on gun buyers and prevent people on U.S. terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

Welcoming the Senate's plans for votes, Obama said in Orlando: "Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense."

Gun control is a potent issue in U.S. politics. Republicans, who control the Senate, have blocked Democratic-backed gun control measures over the years, saying they infringe on the right to bear arms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

A string of mass shootings across the United States in schoolhouses, churches, movie theaters and other public places has failed to break the deadlock.

Murphy wants a vote on legislation that prevents people on the terror watch list and the no-fly list from buying guns

The last major gun control measure was a ban in 1994 on semi-automatic assault weapons such as the one used in Orlando on Sunday. The ban expired 10 years later.

But Americans now seem increasingly ready to limit firearms after 49 people were shot to death in Orlando, although that may be a short-term response to the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

About 71 percent of Americans, including eight out of 10 Democrats and nearly six out of 10 Republicans, favor at least moderate regulations and restrictions on guns, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from Monday to Thursday. That was up from 60 percent in late 2013 and late 2014.

While the Senate is expected to vote on Monday, according to John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican, any move taken could be moot. Paul Ryan, the House of Representatives speaker, injected a note of caution at his weekly news conference.

Anti-gun activists held a vigil at the Capitol Wednesday during the filibuster

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week that 'Nobody wants terrorists to have firearms'

Trump surprised political observers when he said he was going to talk to the head of the National Rifle Association about legislation to keep people on the terror watch list from getting guns

The new push for gun control took off after the Orlando massacre Sunday

"We don't take away a citizen's rights without due process," said Ryan, the top U.S. elected Republican. "If you have a quick idea in the heat of the moment that says let's take away a person's rights without due process, we're going to defend the Constitution."

TALKING TO NRA

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 election, who has been endorsed by the NRA, jumped into the gun debate by saying he would meet with NRA leaders to talk about barring people who are on terrorism watch lists from buying guns.

"I'll be looking at it very, very seriously - the terror watch list and the no-fly list, I'm going to be talking to the NRA about that and starting a real dialogue. I think a lot of people agree with me but I want to really hear what they have to say," Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night.

Democrats were deeply skeptical that Trump's word signaled any sort of shift toward more Republican support for Democratic-backed gun control proposals.

'We've got to do it right,' said House Speaker Paul Ryan, who raised concerns about tipping off terrorists they were under investigation

"He is going to meet with the NRA. ... What's he going to come out saying? 'Oh the NRA and I agreed we shouldn't have terrorists have guns,' but doing nothing about it," U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York told reporters.

No formal deal was announced, but Senate Republican aides said lawmakers were working on possible amendments to an appropriations bill funding the Commerce and Justice departments.

"We'll try again today to move forward with amendments from both sides and once there is an agreement to do so we'll update everyone," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor. He chastised Democrats for their 15 hours of speeches, calling it a "campaign talkathon."

A senator from Connecticut, Murphy made an impassioned plea for action, saying his own strong desire for change stemmed from the slaughter of elementary school children at Sandy Hook in his home state in December 2012.

"When we began, there was no commitment, no plan to debate these measures," he said during the 15th hour of the filibuster. Murphy noted that holding votes did not guarantee gun restrictions would pass.

A similar scenario played out on the Senate floor in December following a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 people. Then, competing amendments by Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican Cornyn on curbing weapons sales to people on terrorism watch lists failed. Those measures are likely to be among those voted on again by the Senate.

Cornyn said on Thursday he had reintroduced his proposal, which would require court approval within three days for a government ban on an individual's attempt to buy a gun.

Democrats have said Cornyn's plan is unworkable.

House Speaker Paul Ryan cited reservations by the FBI director, telling reporters Thursday, 'If we do this wrong like the president is proposing we could actually blow our ongoing terrorism investigation.'
Nigeria's Buhari is well but will extend UK holiday until Sunday -vice president

ABUJA, June 16 (Reuters) - Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who travelled to Britain for a holiday and treatment for an ear infection, is very well but will extend his break until Sunday, the vice president said on Thursday.

"He is in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning," Yemi Osinbajo told reporters in the capital, Abuja.
VW bets on electric cars, services to recover from crisis

By Andreas Cremer

WOLFSBURG, Germany, June 16 (Reuters) - Volkswagen will invest billions of euros in electric cars, ride-hailing and automated driving to become a world leader in green transport by 2025, it said on Thursday, as it reshapes its business following its diesel emissions scandal.

Europe's biggest carmaker said it would fund "the biggest change process in the company's history" with an efficiency drive, including integrating components businesses that currently employ 67,000 people in 26 locations worldwide.

But a lack of detail in the programme, dubbed "TOGETHER - Strategy 2025", left some analysts cold, and Volkswagen (VW) shares fell as much as 4.3 percent.

"The announcements by VW look great on paper but no one can say for sure how demand for electric mobility will develop," said Commerzbank analyst Sascha Gommel.

"There are worthy elements among the plans but it's probably also a marketing exercise by VW to tell the public that they have gotten the message" to change after its scandal, said Gommel, who has a "hold" recommendation on the stock.

VW is battling to recover from the biggest business crisis in its 79 year history after admitting in September to cheating U.S. diesel emissions tests. The German company has set aside $18 billion to cover the cost of vehicle refits and a settlement with U.S. authorities, and analysts expect more fines and costs.

The scandal has cast a shadow over the entire market for diesel cars, which account for about half of new vehicle sales in Europe, and has ramped up pressure on VW to cut costs at its namesake brand, which lags the profitability of rivals.

Spelling out a new strategy ahead of its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, the company said it planned to launch more than 30 electric vehicles over the next decade, forecasting they would account for about a quarter of group deliveries by 2025.

While VW sold almost 10 million vehicles last year ranging from upmarket Audis and Porsches to cheaper Skodas and Seats, it built just 67,000 fully or part-electric cars.

The company also said it would build a services business encompassing areas such as ride-hailing and car-sharing that it expects to generate billions of euros in sales by 2025, as well as hiring another 1,000 software engineers to help develop its own autonomous driving and battery technologies.

Chief Executive Matthias Mueller said the transformation would require a "double-digit billion" amount of investment, funded by an efficiency drive aimed at delivering around 8 billion euros in annual savings.

VW said it would tackle costly complexity in parts and slim down its bloated 340-model range as well as review its portfolio of assets and brands which industry observers said could lead to the sale of "non-core" businesses such as Ducati motorbikes or its diesel engines business for machinery.

But Mueller gave few details, saying they would be announced by the company's brands in due course, though he added the VW brand was counting on a "pact for the future" with unions to be agreed by the autumn, aimed at both boosting competitiveness and preserving jobs.

Some analysts said VW's move to embrace new technologies was merely catching up with rivals such as Daimler and BMW, while cost cutting would take time to boost profits.

INVESTIBLE, OR NOT?

Critics, including activist investor TCI, have urged VW to take more radical action to cut costs.

Some have also called for the company to tackle a complex ownership structure, in which the founding families, German state of Lower Saxony and unions all have strong voices.

Investors are braced too for the results of an investigation into who was responsible for, and who knew about, the emissions test cheating.

"For me, this is not an investible stock. That is really to do with the corporate governance issues, which they still haven't addressed," Kevin Lilley, European equities fund manager at Old Mutual Global Investors, said on Wednesday before the strategy announcement.

He said a "cosy relationship" between key shareholders meant "this company never reaches proper profitability."

But Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said the new strategy showed encouraging signs.

"Has VW changed? While only time will tell, there is certainly evidence that this is the case," he said, retaining a "buy" rating on VW shares.

VW said its plan aimed to improve its operating return on sales before one-off items to 7-8 percent by 2025 from 6 percent in 2015. But DZ Bank analyst Michael Punzet was not impressed.

"Without any additional details on planned measures as well as on Dieselgate, we stick to our sceptical view on VW," said Punzet, who recommends selling the stock.

Mueller reaffirmed VW's expansion and investment plans for North America and China, adding he expected China would be the main market for its new electric cars.
Surfing-Iran becomes 100th member of International Surfing federation

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Six years after an Irishwoman rode the waves off Iran's coast to the bemusement of locals the country has become the 100th member of the International Surfing Association (ISA) federation.

Easkey Britton's visit to the country in 2010 inspired a local surf movement on Iran's Baluchestan coast, so much so that the Iran Surfing Federation was formed this year and even women are participating, fully covered and wearing hijabs.

The unlikely rise of the sport in the Islamic country has been welcomed by the ISA who describe Iran's membership as a landmark moment in the global growth of surfing.

"This decision is rich in symbolism for us, both in terms of the milestone of recognising the ISA's 100th member, but also in showing surfing's ability to help bring unity through sport," ISA president Fernando Aguerre said in a statement.

Other nations to join the ISA are Haiti, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh.

Britton founded the website Waves of Freedom after returning to Iran in 2013 to surf with local women -- a trip that led to acclaimed documentary Into the Sea featuring Britton surfing with Iranian snowboarder Mona Seraji and swimmer Shahla Yasini.

"Witnessing the birth and rapid emergence of surfing in Iran has shown me how the sport can be a unique lens to facilitate a deeper understanding of the world around us and each other," Britton said in a statement.

"Ultimately, it can be developed to create a space and opportunity for connection across cultures and a positive relationship with the marine environment."
Czech Republic investing 200 mln euros in ICBC Europe fund

BEIJING, June 16 (Reuters) - The Czech Republic has agreed to invest 200 million euros ($223 million) in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's (ICBC) central and eastern Europe fund to support operations in the country, the bank said on Thursday.

ICBC said last month it was setting up the 1 billion euro fund to invest in projects in central and eastern Europe aligning with China's interests, in "inter-connection projects and other infrastructure and international capacity cooperation projects".

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang first proposed such a fund last November as part of China's "One Belt, One Road" strategy to expand the country's economic and political influence in a region seen as a gateway to the European Union.
Nigeria's Buhari is well but will extend UK break until Sunday -vice president

ABUJA, June 16 (Reuters) - Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who travelled to Britain for a holiday and treatment for an ear infection, is well but will extend his break until Sunday to rest, the vice president said on Thursday.

The 73-year-old former military ruler flew to London on Monday last week to see an ear, nose and throat specialist after being examined by two doctors in Nigeria who, according to Buhari's spokesman, "recommended further evaluation, purely as a precaution".

"He is in perfect health and ready to resume work on Monday morning," Vice President Yemi Osinbajo told reporters in the capital, Abuja. He said he had spoken to Buhari late on Wednesday.

"He should take a day or two off in London and rest a bit and come back hale and hearty on Sunday and be ready for work on Monday," said Osinbajo, adding that the president was "in good condition" and "very well".
Roche skin cancer drugs "too expensive", says UK cost agency

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Roche's two-drug combination of Cotellic and Zelboraf for melanoma was rejected by Britain's healthcare cost agency NICE as "too expensive" on Thursday, in contrast to the green light given in April to a rival cocktail from Novartis.

Both treatments are designed for people with advanced disease who have a particular genetic profile, known as BRAF V600 mutation-positive melanoma.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said Roche's combination offered life-extending benefits but compared to alternatives it cost too much.

The list prices of the two drugs in Britain are 4,275.67 pounds ($6,022) and 7,000 respectively for 28 days, although Roche would have offered a discount for Zelboraf.

By comparison, the list price of Novartis' Mekinist and Tafinlar combined is 10,080 pounds, and Novartis also offered a discount.

The size of discounts offered to NICE are commercially confidential.
Black box from crashed EgyptAir plane retrieved

By Lin Noueihed and Ahmed Aboulenein

CAIRO, June 16 (Reuters) - Search teams retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir flight MS804 on Thursday in a breakthrough for investigators seeking to explain what caused the plane to plunge into the sea, killing all 66 people on board.

The Airbus A320 crashed into the Mediterranean early on May 19 on its way from Paris to Cairo.

Since then, search teams have worked against the clock to locate the wreckage and recover the two black box recorders crucial to explaining what went wrong, before they stop emitting signals in about a week.

Egypt's investigation committee said in a statement that a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search was forced to salvage the device in stages because it was extensively damaged, but was able to retrieve the memory unit.

"The vessel's equipment was able to salvage the part that contains the memory unit, which is considered the most important part of the recording device," the statement said.

Egypt's public prosecutor ordered that the recovered device be handed over to Egyptian air accident investigators for analysis.

Two specialist vessels, John Lethbridge and Laplace, are continuing to search for the second black box, which contains the flight data recorder. They have yet to detect signals from that device but have identified the location of the main parts of the wreckage.

The black boxes are usually located in the tail, so finding the wreckage and one of the devices narrows the search.

The investigation committee said on Monday the black boxes were expected to stop emitting signals around June 24. That would make the second device harder to find because the plane crashed in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean, about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) below the surface.

With only limited amounts of wreckage and human remains found before Thursday's breakthrough, Egypt's investigators have had little to go on.

They said on Monday that radar imagery obtained from the Egyptian military had confirmed previous reports based on Greek and British radar data indicating that the plane had swerved sharply to the left, then spun 360 degrees to the right before disappearing from radar.

That conclusion is important, one aviation source has said, because it goes some way to excluding the possibility that the plane was brought down by a mid-air explosion.

No group has claimed responsibility for bringing down the plane, but investigation sources have said that it was too early to rule out any explanations, including terrorism.

MOWING THE LAWN

Having found the wreckage, salvage teams will begin a process known as "mowing the lawn," covering the area in parallel tracks using a deep-sea robot fitted with a camera and grabbing arm, marine salvage experts said.

If intact, the cockpit recorder should reveal pilot conversations and any cockpit alarms, as well as other clues such as engine noise. But crash experts say it may provide only limited insight into what caused the crash, especially if the crew was confused or unable to diagnose any faults.

For that, investigators probably need access to the second black box containing data from the aircraft systems. Finding that will be the main priority, experts said.

Besides the black boxes, key components to be sought include the aircraft's flight computers which sent out error messages alongside others indicating smoke alarms before the plane crashed.

The crash is the third blow since October to Egypt's travel industry, which is still reeling from the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.

A Russian plane crashed in the Sinai Peninsula last October, killing all 224 people on board in an attack claimed by Islamic State. In March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked by a man wearing a fake suicide belt. No one was hurt.

The Egyptian-led investigation team, already assisted by investigators from France's BEA air accident investigation agency, will now be joined by two representatives of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

"The NTSB investigators and their technical advisors will be providing assistance with download of the recorders," an NTSB spokesman said on Thursday in an emailed statement.

Egypt said on Monday it had accepted a request by the NTSB to have representatives join the investigation team.

The plane's engines were built by a consortium led by the U.S. firm Pratt & Whitney. The country where the engines were built is often invited to take part in an air crash investigation, although it is not compulsory.
Singapore Temasek forms Americas' advisory panel as eyes investments

SINGAPORE, June 16 (Reuters) - Singapore's state investment group has formed an advisory group comprising executives from multinational companies including PepsiCo and Honeywell International as it seeks to expand in the Americas.

The Temasek Americas Advisory Panel (TAAP) is being chaired by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and members include Pepsi Co's CEO Indra K. Nooyi and Honeywell's CEO David M. Cote, it said in a statement late on Thursday.

The panel held its inaugural meeting on June 14-15 in New York. Temasek formed a similar advisory group for Europe in January.

"Our TAAP members will provide us with the benefit of their experience and insights as we seek opportunities against the backdrop of an increasingly challenging global macro environment," said Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara, Temasek's President and Head of Americas.

Sandrasegara recently took over as head of Americas from former Credit Suisse banker Boon Sim who left the position in May.

Temasek, a major global investor with stakes in Standard Chartered, Chinese banks and Singapore's top companies, managed about S$266 billion ($197 billion) as of March 31, 2015.

The bulk of its portfolio is still in Asia, but in recent years it has been increasing investments in North America, Europe and Latin America.
Azerbaijan's Pasha Bank mulls debut $200 mln Eurobond in 2016

TBILISI, June 16 (Reuters) - Pasha Bank, one of the largest banks in Azerbaijan, is considering launching a debut Eurobond worth around $200 million this year, the head of its investment banking department said on Thursday.

Ivan Uglyanitsa told Reuters the Eurobond would have a maturity of three to five years.

"We would like (a yield) of 5 percent or below, some 150 basis points above (Azerbaijan's) sovereign (Eurobond) yield curve," he said in the Georgian capital.

Pasha Bank does not need to borrow in a foreign currency, but wants to take advantage of a "window of opportunity" while debt markets are growing and yields are falling, Uglyanitsa said.
Ukraine agrees to Russian request to extend deadline in bond case

KIEV, June 16 (Reuters) - Ukraine's Finance Ministry has agreed to a request from Russia to extend a filing deadline in a lawsuit over a $3 billion bond that has become yet another sore between the former allies since Ukraine sought closer ties with the European Union.

Russia filed the lawsuit against Ukraine at London's High Court in February demanding repayment of the Eurobond, which matured in December last year.

Ukraine, which insists Russia must accept restructuring terms agreed with other foreign creditors, submitted its defence in May. Russia has since asked to extend a June deadline to file its formal response to July 15, the Finance Ministry said.

"Ukraine has been willing to consent to that request and therefore awaits service of the reply within that time period," it said on Thursday.

Russia's Finance Ministry was not immediately available for comment. Moscow's legal representative in London declined to comment on the case.

Ukraine argues that the original loan agreement was invalid because Russia applied economic and political pressure on it in 2013, forcing it to accept Moscow's financial support instead of striking up closer ties with the EU.

"Ukraine welcomes the opportunity in these proceedings to lay out the full facts and matters concerning the period leading up to and following the issuance of the December 2013 Eurobonds," the Ukrainian Finance Ministry said.
Post-Islamic State Iraq should be split in three - top Kurdish official

By Maher Chmaytelli and Isabel Coles

ERBIL, Iraq, June 16 (Reuters) - Once Islamic State is defeated, Iraq should be divided into three separate entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed, with a state each given to Shi'ite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, a top Kurdish official said on Thursday.

Iraqi troops have expelled Islamic State from some cities the militants seized in 2014, and are advancing on Mosul, the largest city under IS control. Its fall would likely mean the end of the group's self-proclaimed caliphate.

But even if Islamic State was eliminated, Iraq would still be deeply divided. Sectarian violence has continued for years and a power-sharing agreement has only led to discontent, deadlock and corruption.

Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain "under one roof".

"Federation hasn't worked, so it has to be either confederation or full separation," Barzani told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday in the Kurdish capital Erbil. "If we have three confederated states, we will have equal three capitals, so one is not above the other."

The Kurds have already taken steps towards realising their long-held dream of independence from Iraq, which has been led by the Shi'ite majority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, following a U.S.-led invasion.

They run their own affairs in the north and have their own armed forces, the Peshmerga, which have been fighting Islamic State militants with help from a U.S.-led coalition.

Sunnis should be given the option of doing the same in the provinces where they are in the majority in the north and the west of Iraq, said Barzani.

"What we are offering is a solution," he said. "This doesn't mean they live under one roof but they can be good neighbours. Once they feel comfortable that they have a bright and secure future, they can start cooperating with each other."

His father has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence this year as the region is locked in territorial and financial disputes with the central government.

Baghdad has cut off payments from the federal budget to the KRG to try to force the Kurds to sell crude produced on their territory through the state oil marketing company and not independently. The Kurds also claim the oil region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, as part of their territory.

FEARS FOR MOSUL

Barzani said that the Sunnis' feeling of marginalisation by the Shi'ite leadership had facilitated the takeover of their regions by Islamic State militants.

In addition, Iraq endured months of wrangling and chaos over a government reshuffle that was to curb corruption. In May, frustration over the delays culminated in the unprecedented breach by protesters of the Green Zone, which houses parliament, government offices and many foreign embassies.

Responding to Barzani's comments, Sunnis said his plan to divide Iraq would be difficult to implement. Sunnis are scattered all over Iraq and demarcating the boundary of any Sunni entity could set off a new wave of strife.

Unlike the Kurds who are concentrated in the north and northeast, Sunnis are present in significant numbers in the Shi'ite heartland south of Baghdad and near Basra, in the south.

"Dividing Iraq means more destruction, more violence and more wars," Hassan al-Shwerid, a Sunni MP who heads the parliamentary panel on foreign relations, said in Baghdad.

Abdul Rahman Sultan, a member of the provincial council of Mosul's Nineveh province, said giving more powers to the regions to run their own affairs, replicating the model of the Kurdish self-rule region, would be a better solution than partition.

"There will be conflicts over land and over resources," he added, speaking in Erbil, where the council has taken refuge after Islamic State's takeover of Mosul.

"After defeating Daesh, the Iraqis should sit together and reach common ground on how to jointly run the country and not how to divide it," said a Sunni parliamentarian in Baghdad, Ahmed al-Misari. "If we want a united Iraq then all its communities should have equal rights."

The government spokesman did not reply to several requests for comment.

Ahead of the battle for Mosul, Barzani said the city's communities should agree in advance on how to handle the aftermath. Mosul's pre-war population of 2 million was mostly Sunni, but included religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis, Kurds and Turkmen.

Almost all non-Sunnis fled the Islamic State takeover, along with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who could not live under the militants' harsh rule or could not endure Baghdad's financial blockade imposed on Islamic State-held regions.

"I think the most important part is how you manage Mosul after Daesh is defeated," he said, using an Arabic name for Islamic State. "We don't want to see the gap of liberation and then a vacuum, which probably will turn into chaos."

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi expressed hope at the end of last year that 2016 would be the year of "final victory" over Islamic State with the capture of Mosul.
Civilians stuck inside IS-held Falluja at risk of disease -WHO

By Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD, June 16 (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of civilians stranded inside Islamic State-controlled Falluja are at risk of disease outbreaks as Iraqi government forces press their assault to retake the city, a World Health Organization (WHO) official said on Thursday.

Islamic State has tightened control over civilian movement in central Falluja, where an estimated 40,000 people are stuck with little water or food, as commandos from an elite counter-terrorism force inch closer to the city's main government building more than three weeks after the offensive began.

The ultra-hardline militants, who by U.S. estimates have lost almost half of the northern and western territory they seized when Iraqi forces partially collapsed in 2014, have used residents as human shields to slow the military's advance and thwart an international air campaign backing them.

Falluja, an hour's drive west of Baghdad, is seen as a launchpad for Islamic State bombings in the capital, making the offensive a crucial part of the government's campaign to improve security, although U.S. allies would prefer to concentrate on IS-held Mosul, Iraq's second largest city in the far north.

Children inside Falluja have not received immunisations since the militants took control in 2014, Ala Alwan, WHO's regional director for the eastern Mediterranean, said during a visit to Iraq.

"The low level of immunity coupled with poor hygiene conditions raises the risk of disease outbreaks, such as measles," he said in a statement, and hundreds of pregnant women were also in urgent need of reproductive health services.

Aid groups providing food, water and other supplies to escapees lack access to the city itself. Falluja was besieged by government forces for around six months before the current advance began, prompting the United Nations and rights groups to warn of an imminent humanitarian crisis.

The number of people displaced from Falluja has reached 53,000, according to U.N. statistics. Alwan said they also struggled to access health services due to "inadequate levels of funding for the health sector".

The humanitarian community this year requested $861 million to assist 7.3 million Iraqis in need across the country, but so far it has only received 31 percent of this amount.

WHO has set up a healthcare centre and mobile clinics to serve displaced people, and is operating disease early-warning sites across Anbar province, where Falluja is located, to detect and respond to possible outbreaks, Alwan said.

Iraq said on Monday it had made arrests as it investigates allegations that Shi'ite Muslim militiamen helping the army recover Falluja had executed dozens of Sunni Muslim men fleeing the city, whose population is mainly Sunni.

The participation of militias in the battle of Falluja alongside the Iraqi army had already raised fears of sectarian killings.

Falluja is a historic bastion of the Sunni insurgency against U.S. forces that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, and the Shi'ite-led governments that followed.

Enemies of Islamic State have launched major offensives against the jihadists on other fronts, including a push by U.S.-backed forces against the city of Manbij in northern Syria.
Merkel: Slovakia will act as "honest broker" on migrants

BERLIN, June 16 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday that she expected Slovakia to be an honest mediator on migrant issues when it takes over the European Union's rotating presidency in July.

Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said in May that Slovakia's failure to admit its quota of 1,500 refugees under a European Union plan would hobble its ability to lead when it assumes the rotating EU presidency in July.

"I have no doubt that when it comes to the agenda we have ahead of us - and that now means above all dealing with the Mediterranean route from Libya - that Slovakia will be an honest broker and that it will, with the presidency, unite the member states of the European Union," she told a news conference.

Slovakia's Prime Minister Robert Fico, speaking at the same news conference after a meeting with Merkel, said Slovakia took its responsibility as EU president seriously, and would not foreground its own disagreements over migration issues.

"We intend to be an honest and sincere broker for those partners who have different opinions," Fico told reporters. "We will do all we can to ensure that our EU presidency is successful."

He said Slovakia intended to focus in its presidency on issues where EU members were already largely in agreement, including the need to defend the bloc's external borders, the so-called "Blue Card" aimed at expanding legal immigration options for skilled workers, and efforts to curb illegal migration from Africa.

"We know we cannot abuse the presidency by putting our interests above those of the overall union," he said.

Merkel said her meeting with Fico had shown that it was possible to have disagreements on some issues and still have constructive dialogue on others.
Italian pensioner who lost money in Pop Vicenza crisis kills himself

MILAN, June 16 (Reuters) - An Italian pensioner who lost his savings in crisis-hit regional lender Banca Popolare di Vicenza committed suicide after falling ill and growing worried about medical costs, police said.

Antonio Bedin, 69, shot himself on Wednesday night in Montebello Vicentino, a town near Vicenza in the north eastern Veneto region, officers said.

"It's not at all certain that the death is connected to the loss of hundreds of thousands of euros invested in Popolare di Vicenza," Vicenza chief prosecutor Antonino Cappelleri told Reuters by phone.

"The inquiry will ... help shed light on this."

He said an investigation is routinely carried out in the event of a suicide.

In December, another pensioner who had lost more than 100,000 euros in the government-brokered rescue of four small banks hanged himself at his home near Rome, triggering an outpouring of public anger.

Cappelleri is leading a separate investigation into allegations Popolare di Vicenza artificially inflated the price of its stock and lent money to its own customers to buy its shares.

New senior managers at the bank have said they were fully cooperating with authorities.

Thousands of ordinary Italians have seen their life savings go up in smoke by a string of bank crises in recent months as lenders grapple with the effects of a harsh three-year economic recession.

Popolare di Vicenza's 119,000 shareholders, mostly retail investors, were hit hard when the bank cut the value of its stock to 0.1 euros apiece in an April initial public offering from 48 euros a year earlier.

The fund raising failed to attract investor demand and the bank was rescued by recently created bailout fund Atlante, which acquired a 99 percent stake in the lender.
Vietnam jet goes missing while searching for lost pilot and fighter jet

HANOI, June 16 (Reuters) - A Vietnamese coastguard plane, which was searching for a missing fighter jet and its pilot, disappeared off the radar on Thursday, state media and a military official said, the second such setback in three days.

The CASA C212 plane carrying nine people went missing off the northern province of Haiphong province about noon local time, local media reported, citing military and provincial sources.

The coastguard plane was joining thousands of people looking for a pilot who went missing with a Sukhoi SU-30 MK2 fighter jet on Tuesday along the central part of the country coastline.

A military official working on the rescue confirmed the plane was missing and the numbers on board but requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

He said the CASA plane was descending in order to approach objects the crew believed were the search targets.

A senior military official in charge of the search did not answer his phone when contacted by Reuters. A coast guard official in charge of media said he had no official information to confirm the news.

One of the two pilots flying the Sukhoi jet was rescued from the sea on Wednesday. Coastguards, border guards, navy, air force and fishermen have searching for the aircraft and the second pilot for two and a half days.

Vietnam has suffered a series of mishaps in the past two years with ageing helicopters.
Nigeria's top economic body welcome decision to end naira peg -spokesman

ABUJA, June 16 (Reuters) - Nigeria's National Economic Council, the country's top economic body, welcomed on Thursday the central bank's decision to adopt a flexible exchange rate policy, a spokesman said on Thursday.
Air strikes hit rebel-held parts of Aleppo hours into truce -monitor

BEIRUT, June 16 (Reuters) - Air strikes hit rebel-held parts of Aleppo just hours into an announced 48-hour ceasefire and fighting carried on in and around the northern Syrian city, monitors and witnesses said.

Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the civil war with a population of more than two million people, has been divided for years into rebel and government sectors. Capturing the city is one of President Bashar al-Assad's key strategic objectives.

Russia, an ally of Syria, announced the truce there on Thursday but did not say which parties had agreed to it. There has been no public comment on the truce announcement from Assad's government or factions fighting his forces.

The Britain-based monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said aerial bombardments and rockets hit a number of neighbourhoods in the opposition-held sector, killing seven people.

"There were strikes on a number of residential areas causing fires and damage. The truce was supposed to have come into effect at 12 midnight, but now there is no truce," Bebars Mishal, a civil defence chief working in rebel-held areas of Aleppo told Reuters.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said an air strike had put one of Aleppo's biggest hospitals out of service.

It was not immediately clear if strikes had hit the 64-bed MSF-supported Omar Bin Abdulaziz hospital directly or nearby, and the extent of damage was not known.

MSF condemned the continued attacks on healthcare facilities in Syria on its Twitter account and said it was "extremely worried about (the) potential impact on people's access to healthcare" in the city.

Two residents in Aleppo said there had been a number of barrel bombs dropped from helicopters and aerial attacks on Thursday within the city.

The opposition-held part of Aleppo has been cut off in the past two weeks from the outside world as an escalation in air and artillery strikes on the only road in has made journeys perilous and put hundreds of thousands of people under effective siege.

Despite the truce, fierce fighting between government forces and rebels took place overnight around this road, known as the Castello road, with heavy government shelling of the area, the Observatory said.

A Reuters witness said jets and helicopters have been continuously seen in the skies above the Castello road since dawn.

Rebels have since midnight also fired rockets into government-held territory in Aleppo, the Observatory said.

Fighting and air strikes continued in the countryside around Aleppo.

North of Aleppo, air strikes have hit the villages of Anadan, Hayan and Hariyatan. South of Aleppo, ferocious fighting went on between rebels and government and allied forces, which include fighters from Lebanese group Hezbollah. This area has seen territory lost and gained by both sides this week.

Humanitarian organisations said the fighting was making it impossible to deliver aid.
Human Rights Watch says more than 400 killed in Ethiopia protests

By Aaron Maasho

ADDIS ABABA, June 16 (Reuters) - Ethiopian security forces killed more than 400 people in their bid to quell protests that wracked the Horn of Africa country's vast Oromiya province since November, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.

Plans to allocate farmland in Ethiopia's largest region surrounding the capital for development sparked fierce demonstrations in November and spread for months, in the country's worst unrest in over a decade.

Ethiopia has long been one of the world's poorest nations but has taken impressive strides to industrialise its agrarian economy in recent years. However, reallocating land is a thorny issue in the country of 90 million people whose majority are subsistence farmers.

Authorities scrapped the land scheme in January, but protests and arrests continued.

The government rejected the findings of the report, saying there was no evidence to back up the death toll it cited.

In the 61-page report, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Addis Ababa deployed its military and used live ammunition for crowd control repeatedly as the protests spread, "often with little and no warning".

The watchdog said tens of thousands have also been arrested during the crackdown, whose scale was described as unprecedented by witnesses in the report titled "Such a Brutal Crackdown: Killings and Arrests in Response to Ethiopia's Oromo Protests".

"The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation, and hold security force members accountable for abuses," said Leslie Lefkow, the watchdog's deputy Africa director.

Government spokesman Getachew Reda said HRW had "plucked its numbers from thin air", adding a domestic rights watchdog had carried out its own report. That body tallied 173 deaths.

"Even one person is one person too many. The government regrets the fact that people are killed because these were avoidable deaths," he said at a press conference on Tuesday.

"But we believe in many parts of Oromiya where the protests were quite common, security forces conducted themselves in a very professional and responsible manner."

The protests were a rare expression of dissent in a country where police are feared as heavy-handed and the government is seen as repressive.
Truck queues back up after fighting closes Afghan-Pakistan border

By Mehreen Zahra-Malik and Jibran Ahmed

TORKHAM BORDER CROSSING, Pakistan, June 16 (Reuters) - H undreds of trucks lined roads leading to the normally bustling Torkham border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan on Thursday, with drivers increasingly frustrated at an impasse between the two countries over their disputed frontier.

Pakistan is going ahead with plans to build a barrier at the crossing, saying that it is necessary to keep out Islamist militants sneaking in from Afghanistan.

But Afghanistan rejects the Durand Line border drawn up in 1893, and the row over a solid recognition of that boundary led to armed clashes between the neighbouring countries on Sunday that killed four people.

"We're just sitting here waiting for some good news," said Musa Jan, an Afghan truck driver from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, stuck in Pakistan since Sunday night.

"We just want this to end so we can go home and get back to making an honest living."

Hundreds of brightly painted trucks lined both sides of the road at the end of the Khyber Pass, unable to deliver their cargo. The smell of rotting fruit filled the air, and drivers sheltered from the sun under their vehicles during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Thousands of vehicles normally pass through the crossing every week, making it a vital trade link between the countries.

A ceasefire agreed by Afghanistan and Pakistan is holding, but the weekend skirmishes reflected strained relations between them in recent months.

Afghanistan, struggling to contain a stubborn insurgency led by Taliban militants, blames Pakistan for harbouring fighters and allied networks on its territory.

Pakistan denies it supports militants, and says it is building the gate at Torkham to stop the movement of militants coming the other way, from Afghanistan.

"In the past there would be small skirmishes, but nothing like this," said one guard at the crossing, Shafi Ullah, referring to the weekend clashes.

"But we will build this gate at all costs. ... There is terrorism, there are blasts - it all comes from that side (Afghanistan)."

Pakistan's top foreign policy official, Sartaj Aziz, told parliament on Thursday that Afghan forces started the clashes.

"There has been no aggression or provocation by Pakistan," Aziz said.

Afghan officials, however, blame Pakistan.

"The past three times, Pakistani forces attacked us and our forces were in a defensive position and defended themselves and our soil," said Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for Afghanistan's Nangarhar province where Torkham is located.

Afghanistan's ambassador in Islamabad, Omar Zakhilwal, on Thursday accused Pakistan of reneging on ceasefire terms that he said included halting construction of the gate.

Zarwaid Khan, a Pakistani border guard, said construction of the gate was continuing and there was no fighting on Thursday, although he said the situation was still "delicate".
Labor powerhouse AFL-CIO backs Clinton, vows 'targeted campaign'

By Kouichi Shirayanagi

June 16 (Reuters) - The largest labor federation in the United States, the AFL-CIO, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday, vowing to throw the full weight of more than 50 unions representing 12.5 million members behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

"Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. "We will run a sophisticated, targeted ground campaign. And with the dire consequences Donald Trump poses for America's working families, it has to be."

While the federation generally does not endorse a Democratic candidate until there is an official nominee, Trumka has warned for months that he believes Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump would be disastrous for working people if elected.

After the endorsement, Clinton pledged to spend more on public infrastructure and to fight to improve schools. She vowed to increase the federal minimum wage, offer paid family leave and ensure that women receive equal pay.

"As president, I will stand proudly with the AFL-CIO and fight to protect the rights and values that helped build the mighty American middle class. Workers will always have a seat at the table and a champion in the White House," Clinton said in a statement.

The AFL-CIO has already run digital ads criticizing Trump's candidacy and will now work to boost Clinton's campaign on the ground. Working America, one AFL-CIO affiliate that deals with nonunion workers, already has teams in crucial so-called battleground states.

In response to the federation's endorsement of Clinton, Trump's campaign said the AFL-CIO no longer represents the interests of American workers. "I will fight harder for American workers than anyone ever has," Trump said in a statement.
Texas loses again in effort to stop Syrian refugee resettlement

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas, June 16 (Reuters) - A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to Texas' bid to halt the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the state, saying it did not have the authority to set immigration policy and had failed to show that a private relief effort was unlawful.

Texas has lost a series of court decisions since filing a federal lawsuit in December in response to the International Rescue Committee's plan to resettle six refugees fleeing Syria's civil war.

U.S. District Judge David Godbey ruled on Thursday that the federal government, not individual states, had the power to set immigration policy, and found that Texas brought no plausible argument to back its claims that the relief agency was acting illegally in bringing the refugees into the state.

"This ruling is a strong rebuke of unconstitutional efforts to block refugee resettlement," said Cecillia Wang, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project and the IRC's lead counsel.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement: "I am disappointed with the court's determination that Texas cannot hold the federal government accountable to consult with us before resettling refugees here."

The Obama administration has pledged to take in 10,000 people fleeing the conflict in Syria. Resistance to that policy initially was generally muted, but gained momentum after the Islamic State's attacks on Paris in November.

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott was one of the first of more than 30 U.S. governors, mostly Republicans, seeking to block the resettlement on the basis of security worries.

Abbott has expressed concerns that U.S. security screening is ineffective and could allow people with ties to terrorism to be admitted.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission had argued that the federal government and the relief agency violated their statutory duty under a law called the U.S. Refugee Act to consult with the state in advance of placing refugees in Texas.

"The court previously determined that the Refugee Act does not confer a private right of action for the states to enforce its provisions," Godbey wrote.
Swiss warning to UBS and Credit Suisse to raise billions in bonds

By Joshua Franklin

ZURICH, June 16 (Reuters) - Switzerland's two largest banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, are likely to need to raise billions of Swiss francs in bonds to meet new capital rules, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) said on Thursday.

Regulations aimed at preventing Swiss banks becoming "too-big-to-fail" (TBTF) and requiring taxpayer bailouts in the event of failure means large lenders must hold capital equivalent to 5 percent of their total assets while healthy by the end of 2019.

Solving the TBTF problem has been a priority for U.S. and European regulators after several banks, including UBS, were rescued by the state during the financial crisis.

The leverage ratio aims to curb bank risk-taking by putting a cap on debt levels, and at least 3.5 percentage points of this leverage ratio must be made up of high-quality Tier 1 common equity (CET1), the SNB said.

It warned UBS and Credit Suisse in its annual financial stability report that this means they could need additional going-concern capital of around 10 billion Swiss francs ($10.3 billion) each.

Tier 1 capital is loss-absorbing on a "going concern" basis, when the financial institution is solvent.

"The big banks could cover the bulk of this capital requirement by issuing high-trigger CoCos, as both of them already almost meet the 3.5 percent CET1 capital requirement," the central bank wrote in the report.

Contingent convertible bonds, known as CoCos, can be converted into a bank's equity in a crisis.

UBS and Credit Suisse, which the SNB considers systemically important to the Swiss economy, must also meet a 5 percent "gone-concern" leverage ratio, which applies where a bank must be wound down following insolvency.

For this the pair could also each have to issue instruments totalling 20 billion to 25 billion Swiss francs or replace debt that falls due with bail-in instruments, the SNB said.

Credit Suisse said it already had a programme underway to replace some of its existing capital stock with higher-quality assets that would meet the new rules.

Meanwhile, UBS said in a statement that it disagreed with a number of depictions in the SNB report, which it said "does not point out anything materially new".

The SNB said the new national requirements made Switzerland one of the leaders internationally for imposing a "regulatory loss-absorbing capacity" on its banks.

Switzerland prides itself on having more stringent rules than other countries and will often gold-plate international rules with a "Swiss finish", which helps it to sell itself, and its banks, as a safe haven for the world's wealthy.

The SNB said UBS and Credit Suisse had improved their capital situation further over the past year on both the risk-weighted capital ratio side and the leverage ratio side.

Under Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam, Credit Suisse raised around 6 billion francs in fresh capital last year.
Credit Suisse finds no wrongdoing by ex-banker linked to Brazil probe

By Guillermo Parra-Bernal and Tatiana Bautzer

SAO PAULO, June 16 (Reuters) - Credit Suisse Group AG said an internal investigation has found no evidence that a former banker, Sergio Firmeza Machado, used his position at the bank to help his father funnel illicit campaign donations to Brazilian politicians as part of a sweeping corruption scandal.

Firmeza Machado's father Sergio, a former senior executive at state oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA , has told prosecutors he helped raise at least 100 million reais ($29 million) in legal and illegal funding for political parties as head of Transpetro SA, the company's ship leasing and gas transport unit, between 2003 and 2015.

The older Machado avoided jail after signing a plea deal in the so-called "Operation Car Wash" probe, which is investigating political kickbacks, money-laundering and graft at state firms that began in 2003.

The banker and his two brothers also cut similar plea deals, helping shed light on how their father funneled payments to ruling coalition parties and senior politicians.

In excerpts of a plea deal made public by the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Firmeza Machado admitted opening an account at HSBC Holdings Plc's Swiss unit around 2006 to help his brother Expedito receive "donations" from their father that came from bribes paid by Transpetro contractors.

Firmeza Machado also said his brother sought his advice on how to reinvest money that contractors wired to the account. He acknowledged maintaining occasional contact with members of the companies that paid bribes.

However, Firmeza Machado testified that none of the events under investigation were related to his job at Credit Suisse.

Red flags popped up inside Credit Suisse about a year ago when Firmeza Machado, 38, discussed with senior staff the legal situation of his father, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

After months of checks in which Firmeza Machado's emails, personal investments and activities were analyzed, Credit Suisse staff in Brazil found no sign of wrongdoing, the source added.

In a statement to Reuters on Wednesday, Credit Suisse said it conducts regular compliance checks on all employees. Such checks found no evidence of wrongdoing or any sign of conflict between Firmeza Machado's work and the bank's internal rules.

Efforts to contact media representatives for Firmeza Machado were unsuccessful. Rio de Janeiro-based Tortima, Tavares & Borges Advogados, the law firm representing Machado and his children, declined to comment beyond the plea deal.

HSBC did not comment on Firmeza Machado's Swiss account.

ROSE THROUGH RANKS

Sergio Firmeza Machado, who joined Credit Suisse in 2000 when he was 22, left in April as part of a global restructuring of its fixed-income activities.

After starting as a junior analyst, Firmeza Machado rose through the ranks, joining the fixed-income desk in 2004 and becoming an executive director at Credit Suisse's local unit in 2012.

The banker formed part of a team that helped underwrite dozens of loans to companies bracing for Brazil's initial public offering boom between 2005 and 2008.

Staff at Credit Suisse had full knowledge of Firmeza Machado's ties to his father and the Machados were not Credit Suisse clients, the source said.

In the plea deal made public on Wednesday, his father accused interim President Michel Temer of seeking campaign donations stemming from the kickback scheme at Petrobras, as the state oil company is known, for one of his party's mayoral candidates four years ago.

Temer has adamantly denied the older Machado's accusations.

Temer was vice president until last month, when President Dilma Rousseff was suspended from office to face trial in the Senate on charges of breaking budget laws.

Newspapers leaked part of the older Machado's testimony after the Supreme Court validated it in May. His accusations rocked the incoming Temer administration, forcing the early departure of two cabinet ministers.

($1 = 3.4721 Brazilian reais)
Italian firms sign deals in Russia

ROME, June 16 (Reuters) - Italian companies signed deals with Russian firms on Thursday at a forum in St Petersburg where Italian organisers expect agreements worth billions of euros.

The Italian Conoscere Eurasia association said five contracts, two memorandums of understanding and two letters of intent were signed.

"The potential value of orders with Italy today and tomorrow will be a few billion euros in total," it said in a statement.

The European Union imposed sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 and stepped them up as the Kremlin backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. However, the sanctions apply mainly to some Russian banks and oil companies.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker defended his decision to attend the St Petersburg forum, saying it was common sense to talk despite lingering tensions.

Italian companies in the construction, start-up financing, energy, electricity technology and infrastructure sectors signed Thursday's deals. No value was given for any of them.

Memorandums of understanding were signed between builder Salini Impregilo and Russia's Rosavtodor to develop road infrastructure, and between building firm Pizzarotti and the North Caucasus Development Corporation.

Italian cable maker Prysmian agreed to supply Russian power generation firm Rosseti with extra-high voltage cables produced at its Russian plant at Rybinsk, Prysmian chief executive Cesare Biggiogera told Reuters by phone from Russia.

"There is no exact figure attached to the agreement, but we can expect around 50 million euros ($56 million) additional (annual) revenues thanks to today's accord," Biggiogera said.

Rosseti also signed up with Italian firm CESI to set up a development and testing centre for electrical technology. Tesmec agreed to provide Rosseti with technology for electricity lines.

Financing firm Mikro Kapital and lender Gorod Deneg signed a contract to set up and run a fund to give guarantees to investors in start-ups. Amusement rides company Zamperla agreed to plan an amusement park in the Stavropol area.

Builder Codest, engineering firm Tenova and Silarus signed a letter of intent to build a metalised silicon plant in Russia. Codest signed another with Maire Tecnimont and Azot to build a fertiliser factory in Western Siberia.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is due to attend the forum, as are Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi and executives from utility Enel, defence group Leonardo-Finmeccanica , tyremaker Pirelli and pasta maker Barilla.

Italian export credit agency SACE said separately it had signed an agreement with Russia's state development bank VEB to help Italian companies in Russia, where SACE said it was looking into potential projects worth about 1 billion euros.
Italy's Fincantieri signs 4 bln euro deal to build ships for Qatar

ROME, June 16 (Reuters) - Fincantieri has signed a deal worth almost 4 billion euros ($4.47 billion) to build seven ships for Qatar, the Italian state-controlled shipbuilder said on Thursday.

Fincantieri will supply the Gulf state with four corvette warships, two support vessels and an amphibious landing platform dock, and will provide support services in Qatar for 15 years after delivery, the company said in a statement.

All the ships will be built in Italian shipyards, with construction beginning in 2018.

Italy's defence company Leonardo-Finmeccanica will supply electronics and weapons systems for the ships and will receive around a third of the value of the deal, or more than 1 billion euros, a company official said.
More than 1,000 suspect cases of yellow fever in DR Congo - WHO

GENEVA, June 16 (Reuters) - The Democratic Republic of the Congo has reported 1,044 suspected cases of yellow fever since March, including 71 deaths, up from three probable cases and 57 laboratory-confirmed a week ago, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.

In the latest tally, 61 of the cases have been laboratory-confirmed in the Congo, formerly Zaire, following importation of the mosquito-borne virus from Angola, the United Nations health agency said in its latest weekly update on the outbreak.
Venezuelan businessman pleads guilty in U.S. over PDVSA bribe scheme

June 16 (Reuters) - A Venezuelan businessman has pleaded guilty to charges arising out of his participation in a scheme to corruptly obtain contracts from Venezuela's state oil company, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

Roberto Rincon, 55, pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to two counts including conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act over his role in a scheme involving officials at Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA).
German regulator to resubmit proposal to EU on vectoring

FRANKFURT, June 16 (Reuters) - Germany's telecoms regulator will try again to persuade the European Commission to approve Deutsche Telekom plans to use its existing copper wiring to connect homes and offices to its high-speed fibre-optic broadband network.

Competitors including Vodafone complained the plan would leave them dependent on the Deutsche Telekom network and unable to tailor how they attracted customers.

The technology, known as "vectoring", only works when applied to a whole bundle of copper cables, meaning that individual lines cannot be unbundled physically to give access to alternative operators.

Rivals would get 'virtual' access to the 'local loop' copper network, but the Commission said this arrangement would deny the degree of control necessary to differentiate their retail offers from those of Deutsche Telekom.

With Deutsche Telekom owning the network and rivals paying to get access to it, competitors would struggle to offer choices on price or quality.

The German regulator said it had withdrawn its proposal and would submit a new one early next week.

The European Commission said in a statement: "The Commission was concerned that the proposal would not be in line with EU telecoms rules, which encourage competition on telecoms markets, technological development and ultimately a high quality of services for consumers."

Former national network monopolies such as Deutsche Telekom and Britain's BT say the application of new copper-based G.fast technology is a far cheaper and quicker way to get more people hooked up to high-speed broadband than aiming to run new fibre into every building.

But rivals say that an independent fibre-optic network would give all players equal chances.

They have warned that initiatives such as vectoring could slow the roll-out of much faster, but also more expensive, fibre-optic connections. In Germany alone the cost of such a network is estimated at up to 80 billion euros ($89 billion).

Deutsche Telekom's Chief Executive Tim Hoettges told shareholders last month that its competitors should stop moaning and start investing.
Ugandan soldier kills four women, three children at barracks -army

KAMPALA, June 16 (Reuters) - A soldier shot dead four women and three children in a barracks in Uganda's capital Kampala on Thursday, a military spokesman said.

Sergeant Isaac Obua "has just gone bonkers" and was himself killed, military spokesman Paddy Ankunda said in a Twitter post.

Another unidentified soldier told a local television station the killer, part of a medical team, had been trying to attack his wife under the "influence of alcohol and possibly marijuana".

"Fortunately the wife escaped but those who were within proximity of the scene fell victim," the soldier said.
Venezuelan pleads guilty in U.S. over PDVSA bribery scheme

By Nate Raymond

June 16 (Reuters) - A Venezuelan businessman pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges stemming from what the U.S. Justice Department called a large, ongoing investigation into bribery at Venezuela's state oil company.

Roberto Rincon, 55, pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to two counts including conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act over his role in a scheme involving officials at Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA).

Rincon, who was president of Texas-based Tradequip Services & Marine, was arrested in December along with another Venezuelan businessman, Abraham Jose Shiera Bastidas, for conspiring to pay bribes to PDVSA officials to secure energy contracts.

The guilty plea, ahead of a trial set for next week, was the sixth in what the Justice Department said was an ongoing probe involving PDVSA, the exclusive operator of oilfields in the economically struggling OPEC country.

An indictment filed against Rincon in December alleged that five PDVSA officials received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes made through wire transfers, mortgage payments, airline tickets and, in one case, whiskey.

From 2009-14, more than $1 billion was traced to the conspiracy, with $750 million to Rincon, a Venezuelan citizen who lives in Texas, according to court documents.

In pleading guilty, Rincon admitted that he and Shiera agreed to the pay bribes to ensure their companies were placed on PDVSA bidding panels, enabling them to secure lucrative energy contracts, prosecutors said.

In his plea agreement, Rincon also admitted to failing to report on his 2010 federal tax return over $6 million in foreign dividend income he received from a Venezuelan corporation he owned, prosecutors said.

Shiera, who lives in Florida and owned multiple U.S.-based energy companies, pleaded guilty in March. Four other individuals have also pleaded guilty in the case, including three former PDVSA officials.

Rincon, who has been in custody since his arrest, is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 30.

Caracas-based PDVSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has previously said it was the target of a smear campaign by opponents who are trying to link it to corruption.
IMF says delays publication of report on British economy after MP shooting

WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund said it had delayed the publication of a staff report on the British economy by 24 hours following the shooting of a British member of Parliament earlier on Thursday.

The report had been scheduled for publication on Thursday, Washington time.

The report, a regular assessment, was due in the run-up to Britain's June 23 vote on whether to leave the European Union.

Both the leave and remain campaigns suspended their operations after the shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox.
Truck queues back up after fighting closes Afghan-Pakistan border

By Mehreen Zahra-Malik and Jibran Ahmed

TORKHAM BORDER CROSSING, Pakistan, June 16 (Reuters) - H undreds of trucks lined roads leading to the normally bustling Torkham crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan on Thursday, after deadly clashes between the countries forced it to close.

With the smell of rotting fruit filling the air, drivers expressed frustration as their cargoes perished in the heat due to an impasse between the countries over their disputed frontier.

Four people were killed in the fighting on Sunday, an escalation of the dispute over Pakistan's plan to build a barrier at the crossing to stop Islamist militants coming in from Afghanistan.

That plan has angered Afghanistan which rejects the colonial-era Durand Line border drawn up in 1893 and does not want a solid recognition of the boundary.

"We're just sitting here waiting for some good news," said Musa Jan, an Afghan truck driver from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, stuck since Sunday night on the Pakistani side of the crossing, on the edge of the Khyber Pass through the towering Spin Ghar mountains.

"We just want this to end so we can go home and get back to making an honest living."

Hundreds of brightly painted trucks lined both sides of the road, providing shelter from the sun for drivers, many of whom had crawled under their vehicles to wait.

Thousands of vehicles normally pass through the crossing every week, making it a vital trade link between the countries.

The weekend skirmishes have strained an already tense relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Afghanistan, struggling to contain a stubborn insurgency led by Taliban militants, blames Pakistan for harbouring fighters and allied networks on its territory.

Pakistan denies it supports militants, and says it is building the gate at Torkham to stop the movement of militants coming the other way, from Afghanistan.

"In the past there would be small skirmishes, but nothing like this," said one guard at the crossing, Shafi Ullah, referring to the weekend clashes.

"But we will build this gate at all costs ... There is terrorism, there are blasts - it all comes from that side (Afghanistan)."

Pakistan's top foreign policy official, Sartaj Aziz, told parliament on Thursday that Afghan forces had started the clashes.

"There has been no aggression or provocation by Pakistan," Aziz said.

Afghan officials, however, blame Pakistan.

"The past three times, Pakistani forces attacked us, and our forces were in a defensive position and defended themselves and our soil," said Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for Afghanistan's Nangarhar province where Torkham is located.

Afghanistan's ambassador in Islamabad, Omar Zakhilwal, accused Pakistan of reneging on ceasefire terms that he said included halting construction of the gate.

Zarwaid Khan, a Pakistani border guard, said that construction was continuing and there was no fighting on Thursday, although he said the situation was still "delicate".
Campaigners to fly drone with abortion pills across Irish border

By Umberto Bacchi

LONDON, June 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Pro-choice groups plan to fly a drone carrying abortion pills from Ireland to Northern Ireland in protest against restrictions on terminations on both sides of the border, activists said on Thursday.

Organisers said the move was intended as a show of solidarity between women facing some of the strictest abortion laws in Europe.

In Ireland and Northern Ireland, abortion is permitted if the mother's life is in danger. In Northern Ireland, it is also allowed if there is a permanent or serious risk to a woman's mental or physical health.

But in the rest of Britain, abortion is legal up to 24 weeks into pregnancy and can be carried out at a later stage if the mother's life is at risk or if there are indications the baby will suffer a serious disability.

"The abortion drone will mark the different reality for Irish women to access safe abortion services compared to women in other European countries where abortion is legal," pro-choice groups behind the protest said in a statement.

The drone drop, planned for next Tuesday, comes two months after a court in Belfast, Northern Ireland, handed a suspended prison sentence to a woman who bought abortion drugs online.

Campaigners have long called for a relaxing of the abortion laws in Northern Ireland, where the maximum penalty for inducing an abortion is life imprisonment.

In Ireland, a traditionally Catholic country, a complete ban on terminating a pregnancy was lifted in 2013 after large street protests from both sides.

In June a U.N. panel ruled that Ireland's regulations subjected women to discriminatory, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment after a woman complained she was denied treatment and forced to choose between carrying her baby with a fatal congenital defect to term and going abroad for an abortion.

Campaigners said the drone, scheduled to fly over the Newry River, will drop abortion pills which a number of non-pregnant women are expected to take. Organisers said consuming abortion pills was legal unless they were taken for the purposes of a termination.

"The purpose of taking the pills is to show they are safe because in the North (Northern Ireland) there is a lot of scaremongering around the issue," said Courtney Robinson, a spokeswoman for Labour Alternative, one of the four pro-choice groups involved in the protest.
Air strikes shatter Russian attempt at Syria Aleppo truce

By Lisa Barrington and Suleiman Al-Khalidi

BEIRUT, June 16 (Reuters) - Air strikes hit rebel-held parts of Syria's Aleppo city on Thursday just hours into a 48-hour ceasefire announced by Russia to try to curb weeks of intense fighting, as government forces battle for control of the whole city.

Russia, an ally of President Bashar al-Assad, announced the brief truce in the northern Syrian city on Thursday but did not say which parties had agreed to it. In a statement on Thursday night it said the ceasefire was holding.

However the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said aerial strikes hit neighbourhoods in the opposition-held sector and that there were reports of one death and some injuries.

Rebels had also fired rockets into government-held territory in Aleppo, the Observatory said, and fighting and air strikes continued in the surrounding countryside. Moscow said fighters from the Nusra Front, al Qaeda's Syrian branch, opened fire on several Aleppo districts in the last 24 hours.

Bebars Mishal, a civil defence chief working in rebel-held Aleppo told Reuters that strikes on residential areas had caused fires and damage. "The truce was supposed to have come into effect at 12 midnight, but now there is no truce," he said.

The international focus in Syria in recent weeks has partly shifted to the conflict with Islamic State, as government forces and their enemies have made gains at the expense of the ultra-hardline Islamist militants on several fronts.

But the separate hope of foreign powers - that the wider civil war could also be resolved - has broken down.

Hundreds of people have been killed in Aleppo since peace talks broke off, as Assad seeks to regain control of the city which was Syria's largest before the conflict erupted in 2011 and is now split between rebel and government sectors.

Russian-backed Syrian forces have sought for months to control all supply routes into the city. An escalation in air and artillery strikes in the past two weeks on the last supply route, the Castello road, has put hundreds of thousands of people under effective siege.

Mercy Corps, which runs the largest non-governmental aid operation inside Syria, said the increased bombardment had effectively cut aid to rebel-held areas of Aleppo for the longest period since the war began, driving up food prices and choking efforts to ease the plight of residents.

AIR STRIKE SHUTS HOSPITAL

The Observatory said fierce fighting between government forces and rebels took place overnight near the road, with heavy government shelling of the area. A witness said jets and helicopters were seen continuously in the skies above the Castello road since dawn.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said an air strike had put one of Aleppo's biggest hospitals out of service. It was not immediately clear if strikes had hit the 64-bed MSF-supported Omar Bin Abdulaziz hospital directly or nearby, and the extent of damage was not known.

Despite the ongoing violence, U.N. humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland described the announcement of the Aleppo truce as a "first step" in addressing humanitarian needs.

He said recent progress in getting aid to besieged towns elsewhere in Syria gave some hope for improvement, and said several countries including Russia felt a "psychological barrier has been broken" with recent aid breakthroughs, including in the town of Daraya, southwest of Damascus.

Russia's Defence Ministry said that a truce in Daraya had been extended by 48 hours until midnight on June 18.

But Egeland said the opening for aid "could end tomorrow" and that not one siege had yet been lifted.

Fighting has flared across the country since the demise of a U.S.- and Russian-brokered February ceasefire that underpinned the peace talks.

Syrian state media said rebels in Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, had used "poisonous substances" on government troops, causing respiratory problems, on Wednesday, without specifying the type of chemical used.

The spokesman for Jaish al Islam, a dominant rebel faction in the area, said the government was lying. He said the government was the party using chemical weapons, saying it was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in the same area in 2013.

The government describes all factions fighting against it as terrorists, although only two groups -- Islamic State and Nusra Front -- are proscribed by the United Nations.

John Brennan, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said Russia and Syria had been fighting both groups, but "a large proportion of their strikes are directed against what we consider to be the legitimate Syrian opposition that are trying to save their country from Bashar al-Assad".

Speaking at a rare public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan said Islamic State had tens of thousands of fighters around the world, far more than al Qaeda at its height, but he expected the group to rely increasingly on "guerrilla tactics" to make up for battlefield losses and constrained finances.

Islamic State militants have committed genocide against the Yazidi minority in Syria and Iraq, an independent U.N. Commission of Inquiry said.

Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognised genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf.
Libya SWF adviser says execs who invested in derivatives were financially "illiterate"

By Sujata Rao

LONDON, June 16 (Reuters) - Top decision makers at Libya's $67 billion sovereign wealth fund were "illiterate" in terms of investment with little knowledge of the derivatives instruments purchased on the advice of Goldman Sachs, an adviser to the fund told a court on Thursday.

In a closely watched case in the City of London, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) is attempting to claw back $1.2 billion from the U.S. investment bank from nine disputed trades carried out in 2008.

The LIA argues that the U.S. bank took advantage of its financial naivety by first gaining its trust, then encouraging it to make risky and ultimately worthless investments.

Goldman Sachs, which denies all the allegations, maintains that the trades in question "were not difficult to understand". It has pledged to defend itself against the LIA's claims, describing them as "without merit".

Robert Miles, a lawyer acting for Goldman, noted while questioning a witness called by the LIA that Mohamed Husain Layas, the Libyan fund's now deceased executive director, had worked in banking for over 30 years, including a stint on the board of Bahrain-based Arab Banking Corporation (ABC).

He said the Bank ABC statements showed the institution provided a series of complex financial products to clients and also traded such instruments, indicating Layas had been familiar with these products.

But London-based financial consultant Ali Baruni, who advised the LIA between April and September 2007, described Layas as "illiterate in terms of investments".

Baruni said he had resigned after the fund ignored his advice and invested in certain products recommended by Goldman Sachs. He resumed working with the LIA as a consultant in 2013, he told the court.

His witness statement, seen by Reuters, shows he has held several banking and consultancy roles since 1978, including at Bankers Trust and the Saudi American Bank.

Appearing as a witness for the LIA, Baruni told the court:

"I have talked to Mr Layas about some investments, but not derivatives, investments in equities, fixed income and real estate and whatever and his level of sophistication on all of those was very basic."

"I would be astonished if he had any understanding of derivatives," he added.

Baruni said in his witness statement that by the autumn of 2007, the LIA's senior management had begun to place too much trust in Goldman Sachs, leading the fund executives to "behave in an unprofessional manner".

Goldman Sachs says its relationship with the LIA was at all "material times an arm's length one" between banker and client.

Miles said there was no evidence to say the LIA had been "financially illiterate" when it made the investments.

"You have no basis for that, it's just advocacy," he told Baruni, noting that Hatim Gheriani, another LIA official who had led the alternative investment team and then became CIO, was an experienced banker whose career prior to the LIA included working at Commerzbank in London.

Baruni replied that he had "never heard Mr Gheriani speak to me with any level of sophistication on derivatives, valuation of equities or almost any other field of investment".

Gheriani whose LinkedIn page shows he worked at HSBC Middle East between 2010-2014 after his stint at the LIA, could not be reached for comment.

Libya set up the LIA in 2006, aiming to invest reserves accumulated from oil revenues and to integrate its economy into the international financial system after years of sanctions.

Abdulfatah Enaami, who was head of direct investments at the LIA between April 2008 and June 2012, took the witness stand after Baruni.

Enaami, now employed by the state-run Libyan Foreign Bank told the court that meeting international bankers after sanctions on Libya were lifted had been a new experience for Libyan officials.

He said the fund had been under the impression it would be buying direct shares in companies but had instead received "something else synthetic that we couldn't understand".
Euro zone to integrate further regardless of Brexit - Dijsselbloem

By Francesco Guarascio

LUXEMBOURG, June 16 (Reuters) - The 19 countries sharing the euro zone will strengthen their cooperation in all necessary fields regardless of the outcome of the British referendum on European Union membership next week, the head of the euro zone group of finance ministers said on Thursday.

The ministers meeting in Luxembourg for regular talks did not formally discuss what may happen in the event of a British vote to leave the EU in the 23 June vote, but they looked at how the euro zone should strengthen its cooperation.

"We had a discussion about what we need to do, independent of Brexit, in the euro zone," Dutch finance minister and chair of the Eurogroup Jeroen Dijsselbloem told a news conference after the meeting.

"That was a very fundamental debate and it showed a great sense of urgency, a great sense of common goals and targets which is to strengthen what we have," he said.

"It was very much about how we should deal with the growing concern in our electorates of the effects of the European projects, more specifically the euro project, and there is a very, very strong commitment and determination to take steps forward," he said.

The ministers' approach appears to clash with calls from the chairman of European Union leaders, Donald Tusk, to put further EU integration on hold for now as plans for tighter cooperation only fuelled eurosceptic sentiment in Europe.

Tusk, who will chair a summit of EU leaders at the end of June, just days after the British vote, said on May 30 that "obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm."

But Dijsselbloem said the atmosphere among the euro zone ministers was different, even if the next integration steps won't be dramatic.

"In the current political climate they won't be historic, dramatic steps forward but they will be steps forward, inevitable, unquestionable. We will take the project further, we will deepen our cooperation, make it stronger to deliver what people want from us, which is basically security in economic terms or otherwise," Dijsselbloem said.

He did not clarify which projects would have to be accelerated, but noted more work needed to be done on fiscal and banking rules.
Colombia's FARC rebels ready to return to war if talks fail -president

MEDELLIN, Colombia, June 16 (Reuters) - Colombia's leftist FARC rebel group is prepared to return to the battlefield, especially in urban areas, if peace negotiations with the government fall apart, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Thursday.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have been holding peace talks for three-and-a-half years in an effort to put an end to more than five decades of war in the Andean country.

"We have ample information that they are prepared to return to war and urban war, which is much more destructive than rural war," Santos said at the World Economic Forum's Latin America meeting in Medellin.

"That is why it is so important we reach a deal," the president said, adding he was confident a peace accord would be ready soon.
India remains an island of pluralism in a world driven by bigotry. That thought will astonish The New York Times. It will also make India's self-styled secular cabal apoplectic.

India in the jaundiced view of Western newspapers took a sharp right turn when the Narendra Modi government assumed office. They made dire predictions: there will be communal riots. Muslims and Christians will be persecuted. The country will go up in sectarian flames. Two years later, The New York Times and the equally sanctimonious Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post have enough egg on their face to make an omelette.

Facts are no longer sacrosanct for some newspapers. They fix the narrative and then mould the "facts" to fit that narrative. In good old-fashioned terms, it's called agenda-driven journalism.

Facts

So what are the facts? Incidents of communal violence actually declined in 2015 (630 incidents) over 2013 (694 incidents). Ah, but there was Dadri, wasn't there? There was and it shamed the Hindu mob who lynched Akhlaq - an act of criminalilty whether or not he was eating, storing or selling beef.

But one Dadri does not make a majoritarian state. Muslims in India remain the most pampered minority anywhere in the world. In Europe, Muslims face a vicious backlash over refugees.

In the United States, the Republican party's presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has demonised Muslims.

Muslims are the most pampered minority in India. (Reuters)

In India, in sharp contrast, Muslims are allowed to keep their personal laws, including triple talaq, banned even in most Muslim-majority countries like the Middle East and East Asia.

Muslims pray unhindered in mosques across India, often on public pathways. The Hindu majority goes quietly about its business, respectful of the pious, especially in this holy month of Ramzan.

Of course there are wrinkles in this story: in Uttar Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, West Bengal and elsewhere communal tension simmers.

Most of it is driven by politicians whipping up emotions to polarise communities.

And yet, Muslims in India enjoy privileges minorities in other countries can only dream of. They have their own subsidised universities. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that Muslims have first rights over India's natural resources. Muslims set the agenda in electoral politics in several states.

Parties like the Trinamool Congress treat West Bengal's 28 per cent Muslim "minority" with kid gloves, offering sops and even Ramzan food packs.

The Samajwadi Party mollycoddles its 19 per cent Muslim minority, looking the other way when they riot.

The Congress regards Muslims with particular benevolence. Its liberal, secular mission is to "protect" minorities from big, bad majoritarian India.

The result of 60 years of such protection? Muslims are India's poorest, most backward group - worse off than even scheduled castes, according to both the Sachar Committee and Mishra Commission reports. All of this has made India a "minoritarian", not a majoritarian country.

Hindutva

But isn't the BJP reversing 60 years of poverty-inducing minoritism with soft and hard Hindutva? Haven't Sadhvi Prachi and Yogi Adityanath demonised Muslims in the same way as Trump has in America? Of course they have.

But just as Trump's irresponsible rhetoric doesn't make the United States a majoritarian country, the rantings of Sadhvi Prachi and Yogi Adityanath don't make India a majoritarian country either.

Muslims in India don't need the paternalistic protection of the Congress, TMC, SP, RJD, AAP and other parties that preach liberal secularism but practice a dishonest minoritism that does nothing to raise Muslims from the economic and social morass they have been stuck in for decades.

The warm embrace of parties practising counterfeit secularism has kept then trapped in that morass.

In a majoritarian country, laws discriminate against minorities. In India they don't. Quite the contrary, they often end up discriminating against the majority community in states like Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal.

In a majoritarian country, minorities face persecution not just from the state but from the majority community. In India, they don't - and when they do it is the exception, not the rule.

Tradition

When a Shabana Azmi is refused a flat in Mumbai or Muslim boys are unjustly locked up without trial, it reflects on India's flawed cultural tradition of segregated housing on the one hand and an antiquated criminal justice system on the other, not majoritarianism.

Does that mean the BJP is innocent of practising majoritarianism in the past? Obviously not. The BJP rode to power in 1998 on the back of LK Advani's rath yatra in 1990 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

Polarisation of majority votes was a central electoral strategy that catapulted it from two MPs in 1984 (when the party was just four years old) to 182 MPs in 1998.

But now that it is in office with 282 MPs, it must abandon the impulses of the past. A new generation of Indians born in the 1990s want development, jobs and growth. They are religious but not communal.

If Shaira Bano, who is fighting a triple talaq case against her husband Rizwan Ahmed, lived in Turkey (which, like 21 other Muslim countries, has abolished triple talaq), she'd have got secular justice by now.

In India, she is reduced to pleading for Muslim personal law to be reformed to give women like her equal rights.

Had India been a majoritarian country, outdated Muslim personal laws would have been reformed despite protests from influential Muslims.

In minoritarian India, even the BJP doesn't dare do that and give Shaira Bano justice.
A report issued Wednesday by the ACLU of Virginia seeks to educate voters about what it says is the undue power of commonwealths attorneys and to encourage more candidates to seek the office.

Unparalleled Power, a 32-page report, says that commonwealths attorneys  the top prosecutors in 120 Virginia localities  ran uncontested for office in 72 percent of elections from 2005 to 2015. Forty percent of the offices did not have a single contested race during that period, the study found.

Local, elected prosecutors in Virginia hold tremendous influence over the criminal justice system but face few challenges to their authority, according to the ACLU.

Culpeper County had one uncontested election for commonwealths attorney from 2005 to 2015: in 2011 when former Republican prosecutor Gary Close ran unopposed, according to the State Board of Elections.

Surrounding counties with uncontested races during that same 10-year period include Fauquier and Rappahannock counties, according to the ACLU report.

Fauquier County Commonwealths Attorney James Fisher ran unopposed as a Republican in the 2011 and 2015 elections while in 2007 former prosecutor Jonathan Lynn faced no electoral competition. Fisher has been in office five years.

Rappahannock County Commonwealths Attorney Arthur Goff ran unopposed as an independent in 2011 and 2015, according to the state board of elections, while former prosecutor Peter Luke, also an independent, was uncontested in 2003 and 2007.

The most tenured commonwealths attorney in Virginia  with 48 years in office  is Democrat Paul Ebert, representing Prince William, Manassas city and Manassas Park city, according to the ACLU report. Ebert won with 53 percent of the vote last year, defeating a Republican candidate, according to the state board of elections.

Orange County Commonwealths Attorney Diana Wheeler, an independent, is the 32nd most tenured prosecutor in the state with 13 years in the elected constitutional office. In the past four elections, shes been contested twice, according to the state board of elections.

The report says commonwealths attorneys powers include deciding whether a case will go to trial and, if so, as a misdemeanor or felony; insisting a defendant be kept in jail before trial without bail; requiring a jury trial over the objection of the defendant; and withholding information such as police reports and witness statements about a case from the defendant.

For years, commonwealths attorneys have opposed common-sense reforms to Virginias criminal justice system, the ACLU report alleges. Instead, Virginias prosecutors have lobbied the General Assembly to ramp up the failed war on drugs.

The prosecutors, says the ACLU, have an important self-interest in opposing change: Virginias draconian sentencing laws  from mandatory minimums to the abolition of parole to jury sentencing  fundamentally shift influence over outcomes from judges to prosecutors.

The report says that only commonwealths attorneys have the authority to decide how many charges a person will face at trial and whether those charges will carry mandatory minimum sentences. Because the vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains, a prosecutor is more likely to decide a criminal defendants fate than a judge or jury, the ACLU says.

Prosecutors, however, strongly disagree with much in the study.

None of us had any idea this was coming along; we had no idea we have unparalleled power, said La Bravia J. Jenkins, the Fredericksburg commonwealths attorney and president of the Virginia Association of Commonwealths Attorneys.

The premise of this report is totally off-base, and so slanted as to be inaccurate, she said. For instance, she said the defendant also has a choice in whether a case goes to trial: He or she can accept a plea agreement or not, Jenkins said after scanning the report.

Also, she said each side decides whether they want a jury trial. Its not unparalleled, because the defendant has a parallel power to demand a jury trial, Jenkins said. We will study it more and maybe just address each of the charges individually at a later time.

Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, said that although both the defendant and the prosecutor can ask for a jury trial, a defendant may be reluctant to do so, because juries, unlike judges, arent allowed to see presentence reports or the sentencing guidelines. This means that juries often recommend harsher sentences than called for under the guidelines. Prosecutors can seek their right to a jury trial as a means of pressuring a defendant to accept a plea agreement, she said.

The report says that once elected, local prosecutors often stay in office for decades wielding broad discretion in how cases are handled while also lobbying aggressively against reforms to the criminal justice system that polls show the public supports.

Several local (commonwealths attorneys) have held the same office for more than 40 years, with one in six having been in office for more than 20 years, the report says.

Also, elections for commonwealths attorneys are held with those for other local offices in off-year elections with no federal or statewide races on the ballot. Voter participation can more than double when other, more prominent races help to drive turnout.

The ACLU report looked at Culpeper County in comparing voter participation in off-year elections. In the 2012 presidential election, 65 percent of Culpeper voters turned out. Thats the same year newcomer Megan Frederick beat veteran assistant prosecutor Paul Walther in a special commonwealths attorney election after Close resigned earlier in 2012.

Last year, an off-year, 34 percent of Culpeper County voters turned out to vote in a three-way contested race for commonwealths attorney. Walther beat Frederick and local defense attorney Monica Chernin.

The report concludes, The interactions between (commonwealths attorneys) and the voters who put them in office may decide whether Virginia enacts meaningful criminal justice reforms.

By engaging with (commonwealths attorneys), cultivating reform-minded candidates and showing up at the polls, voters can reclaim the power and change a broken criminal justice system, the ACLU report contends.
Some species eat their young. Virginia Republicans are eating their elders.

Del. Scott W. Taylors upset of Rep. J. Randy Forbes, R-4th, in Tuesdays 2nd District Republican primary is another anti-establishment thunderclap in Virginia politics, two years after Dave Brat ousted U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 7th District GOP primary.

Ultimately, what it shows is the voters overall disgust with Congress, said Robert D. Holsworth, a veteran political commentator, formerly at Virginia Commonwealth University.

It shows that the traditional value of seniority means very little to the Republican base right now.

Taylor will compete against Democratic activist Shaun D. Brown in the Republican-leaning district in November.

Larry Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, says there is a distinction between Brats ouster of Cantor and Taylors upset of Forbes on Tuesday night.

The Cantor defeat was a scream from the Republican base, Sabato said. The rejection of Forbes by 2nd District Republicans is more like  Huh. Who do you think you are? 

Taylor, a former Navy SEAL, successfully argued that the people of the 2nd District, based in Virginia Beach, wanted a fresh start. He rebuked Forbes for abandoning his 4th District in a quest for safer political turf.

Taylor projected a very good image, Sabato said. He also had a non-ideological argument: Im from this district and the other guy isnt. 

Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a partisan Democrat, had said in July 2014 that he was devastated by Cantors primary defeat because of the effect on Virginias influence in Congress.

Now Forbes is out, and with him Virginia loses the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.

Forbes had said his seniority was vital for defense-rich Hampton Roads, but 2nd District voters did not buy the argument. Taylor crushed Forbes by nearly 5,800 votes in Virginia Beach, the heart of the 2nd District.

McAuliffe did not release a statement Wednesday about Forbes defeat. But former Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a veteran of the Virginia Republican establishment, tweeted Tuesday night that he was sorry to see Forbes lose.

This is another huge loss of leadership and influence for Virginia in Washington. Strange times, he wrote.

Between retirements and primary defeats, Virginia will have turned over at least six of its 11 House seats between Cantors resignation in August 2014, and January 2017, when the next Congress is sworn in.

The turnover, while bringing fresh blood to Washington, has had an enormous effect on the Virginia delegations seniority in Washington.

Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-10th, chose not to seek re-election in 2014, retiring after 17 terms in Congress. He had been one of the powerful so-called cardinals, chairmen of House Appropriations subcommittees in charge of federal spending.

Wolf was succeeded by Rep. Barbara J. Comstock, R-10th, a former state legislator. Comstock now is trying to fend off Democrat LuAnn Bennett in November. The race bears watching because Comstock has distanced herself from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in the ethnically diverse district.

Rep. Jim Moran, D-8th, another senior member of House Appropriations, also chose not to seek re-election in 2014 after representing his Northern Virginia district since January 1991. He was succeeded by Rep. Don Beyer, D-8th, a former lieutenant governor.

In June 2014, Brat knocked off Cantor, who had represented the 7th District since 2001 and who might have been in line to succeed then-Speaker of the House John A. Boehner, R-Ohio.

This year, Reps. Scott Rigell, R-2nd, and Robert Hurt, R-5th, are not seeking re-election.

Forbes departure to run in the seemingly more favorable 2nd District means the 4th District also will have a new congressman in January  either state Sen. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, or Republican Mike Wade, the Henrico County sheriff.

Rep. Robert J. Wittman, R-1st, will be a heavy re-election favorite in November, but he, too, hopes to leave the Virginia delegation. Wittman plans to seek the GOP nomination for governor next year.

The most senior remaining members of Virginias U.S. House delegation are Reps. Robert W. Goodlatte, R-6th, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Robert C. Bobby Scott, D-3rd, ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. Both have represented their districts since January 1993.

Other states are cheering, Sabato said. Some of their members of the House today are more influential than they were yesterday  or last year.

Ultimately, its the peoples choice, he added. Some voters might prefer more frequent turnover in the states U.S. House delegation, as a protection against potential arrogance or corruption.

The downside, he said, is that the state loses clout.

(804) 649-6645

Twitter: @AndrewCainRTD
Just ask a few people who would know. The days of summer bring intense concerns for our children living in poverty, when they are on vacation from school.

***

Marilyn Olds has lived in Creighton Court for more than 50 years, and she serves as a tenant representative on the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authoritys board of commissioners. She has seen life and too much death in what she describes as a war zone within a war zone.

When asked about her concerns for children living in poverty during the summer months when school is out, Olds snaps back with an answer that is charged and raw:

Summer is not a vacation season. Its a fearful season. There is no fun in the sun.

As her public housing neighborhood heats up each summer, she says, she sees the crime rate going up and the violence spiking off the chart. Children are kept indoors, or perhaps they are allowed to play in the small front yard of their housing unit.

From her vantage point, standing at ground zero, Olds mourns a loss for the whole community. There should be a freedom of just being children. But our children have already been robbed of that.

***

Throughout the year, David Young sees the concerns for children living in poverty from his position as the executive director of the FRIENDS Association for Children, located in the heart of Gilpin Court.

Young says that at FRIENDS, our largest program focus is early childhood education and school readiness. But we also serve school-age children, by reinforcing their academic development both with our after-school programs and our summer programs.

Responding to the question about his concerns for children living in poverty over the summer months, Young refers to a vast amount of research showing the impact of summer learning loss  also called summer slide. Children living in poverty fall behind in their reading and math skills over the summer at a significantly greater rate than do children from affluent families.

One recent commentator, John Joines, CEO of a Missouri-based community action program, picked up on Youngs concern:

(The) idyllic image of summer vacation, however, is the stuff of lore for poor kids across the country. For them, summer is not a happy, carefree time, but a season of risks and setbacks that include academic backsliding, limited access to healthy meals, and a lack of adult supervision.

Assessing the situation around him, Young says, While there is no easy or quick remedy to address this problem, we do know that the primary solution to breaking the cycle of poverty is education.

So he continues to work, alongside others, to provide and increase the access these children have to the valuable resources needed to help them grow and learn.

***

School lets out, and the students go home for the summer. Except for the students who dont have a home. These are the students that Britni Higginbotham works with on a year-round basis as a homeless education specialist with the Richmond Public Schools.

To homeless students, school is not just an educational center; it is a hub for community support made available under the federal McKinney-Vento homeless assistance program.

The McKinney-Vento Act protects the right of homeless children and youth to get to, stay in, and be successful in school, while they or their families are homeless. As of June 1, as the McKinney-Vento headcount for the 2015-16 school year to that point, the Richmond Public Schools had identified 1,725 students or their families who were homeless.

Higginbotham says, For our students experiencing homelessness, school is an essential safety net providing basic daily necessities such as food, shelter and safety, among other numerous wrap-around services. The coming of summer can easily threaten this already tenuous support structure.

Thats why, according to Higginbotham, she and the other members of her team work throughout the school year, planning ways to support our students experiencing homelessness throughout the summer.

Yet, as Higginbotham emphasizes, despite all best efforts, during the summer months our students experiencing homelessness face challenges accessing resources due to the level of crisis and instability accompanying their homelessness.

Thats summertime for the students without a place to call home.

***

As is clear from these few snapshots, for the children living in poverty in Richmond, summer can be a season of fear. It can be a season of risk and setback. It can be a season of crisis and instability.

Will the summer of 2016 prove to be any different? It can be, if we join together with the many others who are already working to make life better for our children living in poverty. We can all help to make it a season of greater hope.

Mike Sarahan is a freelance writer and a community volunteer. He can be reached by email at michaelsarahan@gmail.com.
As a Marine, youre taught to never leave a man behind.

Thats why Marine Lance Corporal Terry Sharpe, known as the Walking Marine, is walking 22 days for a total of 300 miles.

He wants to bring awareness to the suicide rate of the estimated 22 veterans who take their own lives each day  the equivalent of one every 65 minutes, according to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

As a country, we are leaving many good men behind by not helping them with their struggles and allowing them to get to a point where they think suicide is the answer, said Sharpe. We must do a lot better to help our veterans, especially those who are suffering the most.

The 65-year-old veteran  who is walking from his hometown of Summerfield, North Carolina along with his friend Ken Wilson to the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C.  began the trek June 1 and plans to land in the nations capital on June 22. Wilson lost a son, a military veteran, who committed suicide, Sharpe said.

When Sharpe arrived in Culpeper Thursday afternoon, it was day 16 of his 22-day hike. This is Sharpes third annual trek since 2014.

A handful of veterans greeted the Walking Marine at the Ole Country Store on U.S. 29 around 12:45 p.m. On Friday, Sharpe heads to the town of Remington where hell attend a reception and dinner.

With weathered skin, Sharpe welcomed the nearly 90-degree, humid temperatures as fellow veterans encouraged him to rest in the shade to escape the scorching sun.

Equipped with a heavy-duty backpack with the American and Prisoners of War/Missing in Action flags attached, flapping in the wind behind his head, Sharpe will soldier on to his D.C. destination by next week. Along the way, several American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans organizations have provided shelter and food for Team Sharpe as he passes through various towns.

Once in D.C., Sharpe would like to deliver his message to lawmakers to help veterans in need.

Some reasons veterans commit suicide may be attributed to depression, survivors guilt, self-blame for mission failure, impaired thinking caused by alcohol or substance abuse, altered worldview due to post traumatic stress and/or traumatic brain injury, medical experts determined.

In 2012 alone, 6,500 former military personnel have killed themselves and more than 69 percent of all veteran suicides were among those 50 and older, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Coming home from war, a six-month deployment on a ship or simply transitioning from a life in uniform to a life without one can be difficult and the various state and federal systems set up to deal with this transition and life after military services are unable to meet the need, reads a statement on walkingmarine.com. The challenges of adjustment and transition, post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injuries, and physical disabilities, all need to be addressed especially as these things result in barriers to education, employment, health care and overall individual well being.

Culpeper American Legion Post 330 member Ken Highland, Army National Guard, called Sharpes mission outstanding.

Its a very difficult transition from the military, said Highland, a non-commissioned officer, who used to counsel veterans contemplating suicide.

Everything changes after leaving the military. People dont understand how hard it is for veterans to transition from the military. The adjustment is brutal. Nowadays people are talking about mental health more, but [suicides have] always been there, but never recognized.

Asked what advice hed give to veterans contemplating suicide, Sharpe said hed tell them they are not alone and that your fellow veterans are here for you.

You owe it to those who could not return or who could not soldier on to live the life they wanted to live. You owe it to your brothers and sisters in arms to seek out help and to overcome the challenges, shared Sharpe. With the plethora of social media and other contacts, reach out to your comrades and ask for help. It does not make you weak to ask, it is the mark of a strong person to ask for help.

Sharpe noted the dangers of walking on heavily-traveled roads where vehicles constantly whiz past him.

A lot of the walk is dangerous. The shoulders are pretty narrow and many times I wind up walking in uncut grass where you cannot see the hazards. The safest way for me to walk is against traffic and that means going north on [U.S.] 29 southbound, explained Sharpe.Sharpe begins his daily routine around 7 a.m., walking an average 14 miles each day. A support vehicle  equipped with supplies, safety equipment, and personal items  follows Sharpe.

After quitting high school, Sharpe went to work at a service station in South Hill where he also hauled moonshine to Rocky Mount, North Carolina to earn some extra cash. While hitchhiking to Summerfield one day, Sharpe caught a ride from a Marine who just arrived back from Vietnam.

Thats all it took to inspire Sharpe to join the Armed Forces.

He too enlisted in the Marines in March 1968. After returning home from Vietnam, Sharpe completed high school, receiving his diploma in 1974.

Since Vietnam, Sharpe has held several jobs: milking cows, construction, textile mills and selling large tires.

For more information about Sharpes mission visit walkingmarine.com.

Rhonda Simmons can be reached at rsimmons@starexponent.com or (540) 825-0771 ext. 125.
STAUNTON-Economic development leaders in the metro region shared the outlook for people, housing and jobs with 140 community members and business leaders at this years Economic Development Outlook & Business Appreciation Breakfast. The event was hosted by the Greater Augusta Regional Chamber of Commerce and held at the Holiday Inn Staunton Conference Center on Wednesday morning.

Our small, but mighty metro region is definitely performing, Amanda Glover, Augusta Countys Director of Economic Development, said.

However, to find people to fill 645 new jobs in the region thanks to new projects, the region needs to work on its workforce pipeline. The region has a tight labor market, and 3.2 percent unemployment. She said she knows employers in the area are probably finding a challenge in hiring the staff they need.

According to Glover, thanks to the In Demand Job campaign, which was the vision of the late Dennis Burnett, the region will attract employees. ValleyCareerHub.com will also be a vital tool in the workforce pipeline. She added that for every one job which requires a masters degree, two jobs are needed that require a bachelors degree, and seven more jobs require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelors.

So we have a lot of jobs out there that were going to need and that youre going to need, Glover said.

In the last year, Glover said, the Blue Ridge Community College Foundations and BRCCs Career Connect program enabled 400 high school students to visit area industries and high-growth jobs. The program showed the students that a college degree is not necessary to earn a high salary. The community college education is still valuable in the region.

In March, Farm to Work highlighted Augusta Countys status as the second largest agricultural county in the state of Virginia. This event was specifically targeted to help our smaller producers that are throughout the county, Glover said. Buyers were invited to build relationships with smaller farms in the county.

The region also saw the launch of the Shenandoah Beerwerks Trail.

We know that craft beer, in particular, and beer in general is hotter [economically] than its ever been, Glover said. Six breweries call Augusta County and the cities of Staunton and Waynesboro home. The trail unites the six trails, as well as six other trails in Harrisonburg and Lexington.

The City of Stauntons Director of Economic Development Billy Vaughn said he, Glover and the city of Waynesboros Director of Economic Development Greg Hitchin were going to team up and tell the audience what is happening in the metro region and what they think is going to happen in the future.

Vaughn said he would talk about people, housing and jobs in the Valley. Since 2013, the regions population has grown by 2.3 percent, according to Vaughn.

We outpaced Roanoke and Bristol, Vaughn said. Thats important. Thats truly important. Roanoke grew by 1.7 percent and Bristol by -1.4 percent. By 2020, the region is expected to see a 7 percent increase in population, or 140 more people per mile per month in the Valley. Since 2010, the region has experienced growth when it comes to the construction of new single family homes every year except 2012.

Weve seen a lot of single-family development over that five-year period, Vaughn said. The regions annual percent change from year to year is positive. If were going to have more people [by 2020], we need more housing. Annual construction of single-family homes is expected to double by 2020.

As for jobs, other metro regions saw a sort of a rollercoaster effect. They saw increases, but also declines in employment.

We didnt see great increases in employment, but again we didnt see great losses either. So thats very, very important, Vaughn said. In the Valley, manufacturing, retail and health care are important parts of the employment base. Manufacturing jobs earn an average weekly salary of $1,100.

Vaughn said that local government is a key player as well. The average weekly salary for a local government employee is only $78 more than in agricultural and farming.

Vaughn asked the audience to look to the future and guess what position will bring the highest annual salary in the region. Several answers were given, but were incorrect. Cyber Security or information security will bring $106,000 annually to employees in that field.

Job growth will continue to rebound with a focus in manufacturing and retail trade, Vaughn said. Logistics will also pay a role.

Glover said the audience saw that the region has all numbers headed in the right direction when it comes to employment. New projects in the region total $87.1 million in capital investments and are bringing 645 jobs.

Did you know that half of the U.S. work force worked in small business? Hitchin said. The U.S. federal government considers a small business to have less than 500 employees. The U.S. is home to 28 million small businesses.

Hitchin said 70 percent of new businesses in the region are around two years later, 25 percent make it to 15 years. Since 1990, 4 million jobs have been eliminated by large companies, while small companies have added 8 million jobs. The metro region has seen 11 new businesses since the second quarter of 2014.

We recognize that small business is big business, Hitchin said. The areas economic development departments recognize that staring a new business can be an adventure or a path full of unexpected twists and turns.

Now new business owners have a resource in the Valley: www.ValleyBusinessStartUp.com. Through the site, Hitchin said new business owners can become more knowledgeable of government involvement, tips on writing a business plan, what to call a new business and a resource guide.

While each of our offices are always open to talk about your business idea, whether youre starting a new business, trying to expand your business, starting a new line in your current business, we hope that youll use this resource and the guide that it gives you to starting your business or expanding your business to help you along the way, Hitchin said.

The breakfast ended with announcement of the winners of this years Dennis Burnett Community Excellence Awards by Chamber President Linda Hershey. This years awards were designed by Waynesboros Valley Precision Inc., and awarded to Damon Strickland, Cari Orebaugh, Dick Halterman and Kathleen Heatwole.

Strickland, general manager of the Stonewall Jackson Hotel in downtown Staunton, was born and raised in Chesapeake and came to Staunton two years ago. He serves as secretary on Project GROWS board of directors and vice president of the YMCA of Stauntons board of directors, and is a member of several other boards.

Orebaugh, communication specialist for MillerCoors, was born and raised in the Valley. She graduated from Turner Ashby High School in Rockingham County and James Madison University. When she joined Shenandoah Valley Partnership as an executive assistant, she became Burnetts trusted advisor, according to Hershey. Orebaugh was recently recognized as one of the Shenandoah Valley Business Journals Top 10 under 40.

Halterman, owner of Murphy Business Brokers & Appraisal, was born and raised in the Valley and graduated from Virginia Tech. He is the founder of the Come In Get Acquainted Regularly Club, which meets monthly. Burnett often attended CIGAR Club meetings.

Heatwole, vice president of planning of development at Augusta Health, began her career in 1980 as an assistant administrator for Waynesboro Community Hospital, and helped to lead the initiative to rename Augusta Medical Center as Augusta Health.

Rebecca J. Barnabi is city editor of The News-Virginian and can be reached at (540) 932-3568 or rbarnabi@newsvirginian.com.
This week, UK diplomats, in collusion with other senior EU figures, rubber-stamped a decision to open the next stage of negotiations for Turkeys accession to the EU.

The EUs migration commissioner has said that Turkey now has the road open to join the European family.

Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Gisela Stuart have written to David Cameron, urging him to clarify the Governments position. Does he still want to pave the road from Ankara to Brussels, or has he changed his mind? If he has, then he must pledge to veto Turkeys membership of the EU, and block the imminent granting of visa-free travel to nearly 80 million Turkish citizens.

Commenting, Vote Leave Chief Executive Matthew Elliott said:

David Camerons furious insistence that Turkeys accession is not an issue in this referendum is looking increasingly bizarre  only yesterday, a spokesman for the Turkish government dismissed his claims as rhetoric to reassure voters.

Its very clear that accession negotiations are rapidly accelerating, and if Cameron refuses to guarantee he will veto their membership then the public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Syria and Iraq is to Vote Leave on 23 June.

The Turkish Government has today slammed as spin claims by David Cameron that Turkish accession is not on the cards.

The European Commission yesterday announced that Turkish membership talks are being conducted at an accelerated pace.

This confirmed a report that David Cameron has agreed to a quickening of accession talks, which could begin as early as the day after the referendum.

David Cameron strongly supports Turkish accession at the earliest moment.

Turkey is set to join the EU in the near future: we are paying them 1 billion to join.

The Turkish Government has today slammed as spin claims by David Cameron that Turkish accession is not on the cards.

A report in The Times this morning notes that: Diplomats, including those from the UK, yesterday rubber-stamped a decision to open the next chapter of Turkeys accession negotiations by the end of the month. Mr Cameron insists that Turkeys accession is not an issue for the future as on its present rate of progress it would not be ready until the year 3000. A spokesman for the Turkish government dismissed that yesterday as rhetoric to reassure voters.

The European Commissioner for Migration and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, has said that Turkey now has the road open to join the European family.

The European Commission yesterday announced that Turkish membership talks are being conducted at an accelerated pace.

In a press release, the European Commission has announced that The Commission tabled the Draft Common Position on Chapter 33 (financial and budgetary provisions) in the Council on 29 April, enabling the Council to decide on the opening of this Chapter by end of June. In addition, preparatory work continues at an accelerated pace to make progress on five Chapters.

The Commission issued a detailed statement on the rapidly accelerating progress of Turkish accession this morning. Part of this process will occur at the end of June, just after the public votes.

This confirmed a report that David Cameron has agreed to a quickening of accession talks, which could begin as early as the day after the referendum.

The Financial Times reported this week that: Turkeys EU membership talks are set to be given a boost within a fortnight, after Britain abandoned its attempt to freeze the process of opening a new negotiating chapter with Ankara until after its EU referendum At a meeting of diplomats on Tuesday morning, Britain was the only member state to refuse to give its consent for talks to begin with Ankara on financial and budgetary issues, in spite of its traditional standing as one of the biggest champions of Turkish membership talks. However, Londons resistance only lasted a few hours, which means the formal opening of talks is expected on June 24 or 30, in line with the Turkey-EU deal.

David Cameron strongly supports Turkish accession at the earliest moment.

David Cameron strongly supports Turkish accession. In 2010, Cameron said he was angry at the slow pace of Turkish accession, that he was the strongest possible advocate for EU membership for Turkey, and that I want us to pave the road from Ankara to Brussels. In 2014, he said that: In terms of Turkish membership of the EU, I very much support that. Thats a longstanding position of British foreign policy which I support.

The Government admitted it supported Turkish accession during the campaign. In April, the Europe Minister, David Lidington, said: The UK supports Turkeys EU accession process.

The British public will not get a vote on the accession of Turkey to the EU. The European Union Act 2011 allows the Government to ratify EU accession treaties without a referendum. There was no referendum on the accession of Croatia to the EU in 2013.

The Government opposes giving the British people a say. As the Minister for Europe, David Lidington, said in 2011: A few years ago, 10 new member states joined the European Union at the same time. I believe that their combined population then was 73 million, which is slightly greater than Turkeys population is now. I do not believe that anybody in this country argued at that time that a British referendum on those accessions was right.

Turkey is set to join the EU in the near future: we are paying them 1 billion to join.

Turkey is due to join the EU in the next few years, having already signed a deal with the EU to prepare for accession (European Commission, March 2016, link).

It is set to receive over 1 billion of UK funds to help prepare it for membership.

The new European Council building contains chairs and building space for Turkey when it joins.
Social work students often share the common passion of wanting to improve the lives of those around them.



If I meet someone who has a problem, Im not happy until I help them, says Ngozi Ivare, a second-year Dalhousie student in the Bachelor of Social Work Distance Delivery Program. I love helping people and I love social work.



This past spring, Ngozi and other Dalhousie Social Work students had the incredible opportunity to connect with social work students from the University of Greenland.



Gaining perspective from another lens



Every May, Dalhousie students from the Bachelor of Social Work Distance Delivery program come to campus for a two-week residency. This provides students a chance to connect with faculty and staff and collaborate with their classmates face-to-face.



This year, Dalhousie University and the School of Social Work opened its doors to social work students from the University of Greenland as well.



It was a meaningful cross-cultural exchange, explains Professor Gail Baikie. Both groups of students share a passion for social justice and are curious about the similarities and differences within the contexts of social work, but also about how these issues are perceived and responded to.



A unique opportunity



It has been exciting,says Mia Siegstad, one of the students from Greenland. It has been interesting to meet new people and see how social workers in Canada do their work.



The students visited Halifax from May 4-11. The visit exposed them to a host of experiences simply not available to them in Greenland.

They dont have trees in Greenland, which I found fascinating, says Pam Birch, also a second-year Dalhousie student in the Bachelor of Social Work Distance Delivery Program. We take that for granted every day, it was useful to take a breath and see things from a different perspective. While the students from Greenland visited Halifax they experienced a host of different things including a visit to Africville, a tour of the upcoming SeaStar Child and Youth Advocacy Centre by project coordinator Christina Shaffer and a tour of Laing House, a peer support organization for youth living with mental illness.



The Greenland students also did presentations on the social issues they face on a daily basis. This allowed the Dalhousie students to engage with colleagues from a different culture and explore issues that are not as prevalent in Canada.



Just hearing how they describe themselves was powerful, says Pam. They have more problems than most people might be used to but they smile through it all.



Moving forward



Hearing from the Greenland students was a great opportunity and a privilege, says Ngozi. Its going to affect my social work career, knowing what challenges people go through, because here in Canada we feel like we have a lot of challenges but it doesnt compare to what we saw in the Greenland students presentations. From the presentations Ngozi, Pam and the other Dalhousie students learned that Greenland faces many hardships. Not only are their taxes very high, but they have a high poverty rate, many issues revolving around alcohol and drug abuse and sadly an extremely high suicide rate.



The visit was eye-opening for both the students from Greenland and Dalhousie. Dr. Baikie explained that it is important for students to recognize that social work exists throughout the world but that there are also cultural differences.



With opportunities like these, we become more enlightened social workers.


The horrific murder of nearly 50 individuals at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida early Sunday morning is the sort of event that shakes souls, burdens hearts and  in its fearful ripple effects  threatens to push people apart.



Thankfully, in cities and countries around the world, the opposite seems to be happening. At rallies, gatherings and vigils, people have been coming together to remember those who lost their lives, console one another and show solidarity with and support for LGBTQ individuals and communities, as well as all those impacted by the tragedy.



On Dals campuses, at the request of President Richard Florizone, the rainbow Pride flag was flown starting Monday, with standard flags lowered to half mast.



As well, Dal hosted two community vigils Monday evening. The Agricultural Campus welcomed community members from across Truro and Bible Hill to its outdoor amphitheatre, with more than 120 people attending. In Halifax, a group of approximately 35 students, staff and faculty gathered in LeMarchant Place ahead of a larger Halifax Pride rally taking place on the Commons.



Its hard to find the words to put it into context, said President Florizone, who attended the Halifax gathering. Our hearts, our thoughts, our prayers go out to all the people who were injured or killed in that incident, and to their families it shows that theres still so much work to do to create really diverse, inclusive and safe places for all people.



Norma Williams, Dalhousies executive director of diversity and inclusiveness, spoke of how what happened in Orlando flies in the face of important gains made for not just LGBTQ individuals (same-sex marriage, adoption rights, etc.) but for the broader cause of inclusion.



Our voices can be stronger than the voices of hate, she said. I would encourage all of us to remember that and support that.



One of the students in attendance was Muhammed Ngallan, a first-year Social Work (distance) student who immigrated to Canada from The Gambia five years ago. A practising Muslim, he was deeply upset by the events in Orlando and wanted to attend the vigil to show support for Halifaxs LGBTQ community.



Part of his motivation, as well, was knowing the individual behind Sundays hate crimes identified as a Muslim.



As a Muslim myself, knowing this was in the month of Ramadan, theres nothing more contradictory to what this time is supposed to mean: love, unity, togetherness, said Muhammed. I came here because I wanted to be part of whatever it is he was against."

(Halifax photo: Ryan McNutt. Truro photo: Joey Smith, Truro Daily News.)


Dal President Richard Florizone has been seeing even more of the Dal community than usual lately: following six straight days of Halifax convocations, totaling 15 ceremonies, he leapt straight into his second annual year-in-review sessions.



If I accidentally shake your hand and bestow you an honorary degree, youll forgive me, he joked at the start of the first session, held in the McCain Buildings Scotiabank Auditorium on Studley Campus last Tuesday, June 7.



Launched last year, the annual Inspiration and Impact events are an opportunity for President Florizone and his senior leadership team to share progress on the universitys Strategic Direction as well as gather feedback and answer questions from the Dal community. (This year, Dr. Florizone also incorporated his 30-minute presentation into his annual Halifax community meeting, held on Thursday, July 9.)



Across the four events  one on each of universitys campuses: Studley, Carleton, Sexton and the Agricultural Campus in Truro  nearly 350 individuals turned out to hear Dr. Florizone offer highlights from each of the Strategic Directions five priority areas: Teaching and Learning, Research, and Service (the three core areas of our mission, as Dr. Florizone described them), plus Partnerships and Reputation as well as Infrastructure and Support.





Scenes from sessions across campuses: (clockwise from upper left) Studley, Sexton, Carleton and the Agricultural Campus. (Studley photo Danny Abriel, other photos Erin Stewart.)

Im three years into my presidency, and were halfway through the period covered by our Strategic Direction that we defined together as a community said Dr. Florizone in his Studley Campus presentation. Were seeing some progress, and there are other challenges that we still need to get underneath.



But most importantly for me, were seeing in areas like diversity, innovation and entrepreneurship that when we work together as a community  with true partnership and engagement, both internally and externally  we really can make progress on some of our greatest opportunities and challenges.



Sharing insights and stats



Throughout his presentation, Dr. Florizone presented stats and insights from the forthcoming Strategic Direction Progress Update, due to be published on Dal's Strategic Planning website following its presentation to the Board of Governors later this month.



Under the Teaching and Learning header, Dr. Florizone highlighted some of the new programs launched or in the works, from Medical Physics to the new minor in Black and African Diaspora Studies, as well as the fact that nine Dal programs earned full accreditation in their reviews this past year. He noted that while Dals overall enrolment has held steady  at a time when other universities are struggling somewhat  student retention remains an area of focus, as Dal lags behind its U15 peers across Canada in the percentage of undergraduate students who continue into their second year.

The numbers have been basically flat over the past couple of years, but our analytics on this and the attention paid to it has significantly improved, said Dr. Florizone, explaining how the university has been working to identify groups and attributes of students most at-risk of not returning. We can then develop programs that we can take to donors and alumni and say, We want you to help our students to be as successful as you were.



Under Research, Dr. Florizone placed particular emphasis on the number of high-profile research awards Dal faculty have received over the past year: the Killam Prize for Axel Becke, Dals first Trudeau Fellowship for Jocelyn Downie, six new Canada Research Chairs and five new inductees into the colleges of the Royal Society of Canada. Physicist Jeff Dahn, recipient of one of the inaugural Governor Generals Innovation Awards, was highlighted in a feature video  one of several throughout the presentation that helped bring the different strategic focus areas to life.



Watch: Inspiration and Impact feature videos



Later, Dr. Florizone shared an anecdote that came out of his 100 Days of Listening, the process that kicked off his presidency in 2013 and which shaped the priorities of the Strategic Direction.



Dal is the leading medical/doctoral university in the region. We train more Nova Scotians than any other university in the region, we do more than 80 per cent of all publicly-funded research in the province but there was a bit of this mood out there that saw Dal as elite and aloof. Ive always said elite I dont mind  it speaks to excellence  but aloof Im not crazy about. But it reflects the sense that Dal hasnt reached its full potential to act as a leading light in this region.



Continuing into Service, Dr. Florizone discussed the importance of sharing Dals successes and ongoing community impact, such as the work of community clinics in Law, Social Work and Dentistry that touch the lives of thousands every year. And he also highlighted Dals growing efforts to position the university at the heart of the provinces innovation ecosystem, from growing co-op terms (which have increased 15 per cent over the past two years) to the thousands of students and companies engaging with the universitys three sandbox spaces for emerging entrepreneurs.



Conversations with the community



President Florizone concluded each presentation with a scan through the two support areas of the Strategic Direction. For Partnerships and Reputation, he discussed key partnerships with government (27 federal visits to campus this past year) and Dals alumni and donors, which contributed more than $32 million in 2015-16 to support programs and initiatives on campus  the highest total in four years. In Infrastructure and Support, he highlighted forthcoming construction projects on campus (the new fitness centre, the upcoming IDEA Building on Sexton Campus) and the universitys varied efforts to support and grow diversity and inclusiveness within the community.



Its a fundamental value of the university, said Dr. Florizone, noting accomplishments from the past year including the hiring of Dals first executive director of diversity and inclusiveness and the completion of the first Dalhousie Census. In a video, the Elders in Residence program, launched last fall, was featured.





At each session, the presentation was followed by a question-and-answer period, with members of Dr. Florizones senior leadership team  such as Provost Carolyn Watters and Vice-President Finance and Administration Ian Nason  helping address audience questions. Topics ranged from graduate student funding support and storytelling to medical partnerships and fossil-fuel divestment.



In response to one question about the Strategic Direction, Dr. Florizone offered his advice for how Dal staff and faculty can incorporate its ideas into their daily work.



When I talk externally about what this plan is all about, I simplify it sometimes to be about what I call the four Rs: retention, our students and their success; research, our priority research areas; returns to society, that giving back to the community; and respect, thats diversity/inclusiveness. And what I try and do is keep those four Rs in my head at all times its a useful tool think about our work in those terms.



Each session concluded with a reception for attendees  but not before Dr. Florizone offered his gratitude for their work over the past year.



I want to thank you for your passion and commitment to Dal, he said. All this success is your success.

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The three-year "Long Term of Settlement agreement" was signed between RNAIPL and Renault Nissan India Thozhilalar Sangam (RNITS) that would come into effect retrospectively from April 1, 2016.

Chennai: Renault Nissan Automotive India Private Limited (RNAIPL), whose plant is located in Oragadam on the outskirts of Chennai, on Wednesday, signed a wage agreement with its employees' union that guarantees salary hike of Rs 18,000 over the next three years.

The three-year "Long Term of Settlement agreement" was signed between RNAIPL and Renault Nissan India Thozhilalar Sangam (RNITS) that would come into effect retrospectively from April 1, 2016. The agreement expires on March 31, 2019. Together, the manufacturing plant and R&D facility have created more than 40,000 jobs.

Colin MacDonald, CEO of RNAIPL, said, "Employees are the driving force for the sustainable growth of Renault-Nissan. So, the company places great importance on establishing a workplace that maximizes the performance of all. This will also help build a sustainable and performing organization."

The Chennai manufacturing facility is one of the largest plants in the Renault and Nissan Alliance and started operation in March 2010. The Alliance has invested Rs 61 billion till date and introduced 32 new Renault, Nissan and Datsun models and derivatives to its production line.

The plant caters to both domestic and international markets and has developed into India's second-largest car exporter with more than 600,000 units shipped to

106 countries since 2010. Earlier this year the factory reached the production milestone of one million cars and recently, started third shift operations in response to increasing demand for its products.
The Tata Group announced a tie-up with ride-sharing company Uber Technologies to offer the drivers and owners on Uber platform comprehensive vehicle purchase and financing solutions, among other benefits.

Hyderabad: App-based taxi aggregator Uber is keeping its options open to have its own payment wallet in India despite its current collaboration with Paytm that allows riders to pay digitally.

"We recently announced our partnership with Paytm and I think part of Uber's success and strategy is to work with local companies. From my perspective, I... like to have local partnerships to make the service available to our customers," Eric Alexander, Head of Business, Uber Asia, said when asked about the proposal of having its own payment wallet.

"We are happy to continue with that. I am not going to say that (dropping the idea of having own wallet). We always got our options open."

About surge pricing, Alexander's take is it is determined by supply-demand position at a given point of time and the pricing is done by computer-generated algorithm.

A senior official of Uber had recently told PTI that it was evaluating options to have its own payment wallet as it finds that the two-factor authentication (2FA) imposed by the Reserve Bank of India becomes cumbersome for its riders while making payments through credit or debit cards.

On the procedural part, he said the pricing is done automatically by the system depending on supply and demand at one point and the company does not have any "ill intention to make extra money using surge pricing".

"It is not something that we at Uber control. It is not someone sitting at a computer that they decide to turn on the surge. It is purely a market-based algorithm. Surge is not something that we want use to make extra money," he said.

"It is a technology solution to allow riders that they are willing to pay the price at that point of time to get a car."

On the company's expansion plans, he said right now Uber services are available in 27 cities and the figure may go up to 50 in the current year. On the issue of compliance of local or various state laws, he said the taxi aggregator is working with various state governments.
Minister of state for finance Jayant Sinha on Friday told the Lok Sabha that 50 per cent of the smaller firms are not paying taxes.

Hyderabad/New Delhi: Its official. India has a huge parallel unaccounted economy as the newly released tax data by the government indicates that just 2.88 crore people have filed returns in FY12-13  2.27 per cent of Indias population.

Of this, a small percentage actually pays income-tax as 89 lakh of salaried people and 1.4 crore of business people reported less than Rs 5 lakh income.

As per income-tax rules, an individual cannot escape from paying income-tax if he earns more than Rs 5 lakh (after basic threshold and claiming deductions for HRA/Section 24, Section 80C, 80D, 80CCF).

If the tax data is considered along with the tax threshold post-deductions, it shows that an unbelievable number of over 98 per cent of Indians earn less than Rs 5 lakh a year or little less than Rs 45,000 a month.

Of this, only 8.74 lakh people have reported business income of over Rs 5 lakh  a number which is most difficult to believe as there are lakhs of small businesses with a fairly decent income.

The number of those who filed returns is much less than the number of people who have PAN. According to the government, nearly 4.86 crore individuals have PAN cards. However, only 47 per cent of them have filed income-tax returns, while 63 per cent have skipped it.

Minister of state for finance Jayant Sinha on Friday told the Lok Sabha that 50 per cent of the smaller firms are not paying taxes and the government has taken revolutionary steps to ensure there is no tax evasion.

After the criticising by famous French economist Thomas Piketty, the government has made public data related to taxpayers such as total number of taxpayers, income disclosed in returns by various categories of taxpayers and the number of PAN holders.

Mr Piketty had raised the debate on unequal wealth distribution in the world with his best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. However, Mr Piketty was not impressed with the amount of data released on Friday. They (India) released detailed data by income range for one year only (2012-2013).

For the entire period 2000-2015, the only data that was released is at the aggregate level, total numbers of taxpayers, total tax revenue, etc. In order to study the evolution of income distribution we would need to have the detailed data by income range for all years, he said.
The pact to develop the Chabahar port and other infrastructure was inked last month during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Persian Gulf nation. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: Indian steel companies will export rails worth USD 150 million to Iran next month as part of a pact between the two countries for developing railway and other infrastructure at strategically important Chabahar port.

"The maiden consignment of rail from India worth USD 150 million would be sent to Iran in July," a top official told PTI after Ambassador of Iran to India Gholamreza Ansari called on Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on June 16.

The consignment of rails will be shipped by steel companies, the official said, adding that both Gadkari and Ansari deliberated on taking further the historic pact between the nations on the strategic Chabahar Port in southern Iran which will give India access to Afghanistan and Europe bypassing Pakistan.

The pact to develop the Chabahar port and other infrastructure was inked last month during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Persian Gulf nation. Gadkari last month said that India would invest billions of dollars in setting up industries -- ranging from aluminium smelter to urea plants -- in Iran's Chabahar free trade zone.

Also, railway PSU IRCON will build a rail line at Chabahar to move goods right up to Afghanistan. The rail links are being built so that the land-locked Afghanistan can get access to the Iranian port as an alternative to the Pakistani port of Karachi.

The official said that a meeting is also "scheduled next month between Shipping Minister and his Iranian counterpart to develop a workplan for industrial needs and investments needed for Chabahar free trade zone".

The focus will be setting up industries in the Chabahar free trade zone. Besides the bilateral pact to develop the Chabahar port for which India will invest USD 500 million, a trilateral agreement on transport and transit corridor has also been signed by India, Afghanistan and Iran, which the Prime Minister said could "alter the course of the history of the region".

Also, Gadkari has been stressing that the distance between Kandla and the Chabahar port is less than the distance between New Delhi and Mumbai and the pact would enable India quick movement of goods first to Iran and then onwards to Afghanistan and Russia through a new rail and road link.

"Over Rs 1 lakh crore investment can happen in Chabahar free trade zone," he had said. Earlier this week Gadkari had said that India would be able to save Rs 45,000 crore per annum on urea if it sets up a plant at Chabahar in Iran, negotiations for which are on to get gas on lower price adding that Iran has cheap natural gas and talks are on to get gas at less than USD 2 per mmBtu.

India Ports Global Pvt, a joint venture of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and the Kandla Port Trust, will invest USD 85 million in developing two container berths with a length of 640 metres and three multi cargo berths.

The Indian joint venture company will invest more than USD 85.2 million in development of the port. India's Exim Bank will provide a credit line of another USD 150 million. Chabahar port, located in the Sistan-Baluchistan Province on Iran's southern coast, is of great strategic utility for India.

It lies outside the Persian Gulf and is easily accessed from India's western coast. The port project will be the first overseas venture for an Indian state-owned port. The Jawaharlal Nehru port, India's biggest container port, holds a 60 per cent stake in Indian Ports Global while the Kandla port has the remaining 40 per cent.
New Delhi: The looming expiration of an emergency liquidity measure introduced during Indias 2013 currency crisis comes at a risky time for the rupee, with about $20 billion in deposits expected to leave the country as global investment appetite worsens. Analysts warn that the rupee already Asias worst performing currency against the US dollar this year  continues to look vulnerable ahead of September, when dollar term deposits that India raised from citizens abro-ad in 2013 start to mature.

The outflows, though widely anticipated by both markets and policymakers, will present a near-term currency challenge for Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan, whose position is also up for renewal in September. Its a well anticipated event and the flows are largely known. Still, investors will be watching this carefully to see how the Reserve Bank handles the liquidity situation, said Luke Spajic, head of portfolio management emerging Asia at PIMCO.

Dr Rajan announced the initiative to shore up foreign reserves soon after taking over the RBI in Sep-tember 2013, when fears of US Fed rate hikes punished vulnerable emerging markets such as India. Under the programme, banks were incentivised to offer dollar deposits to Indian citizens abroad  through instruments kno-wn as foreign currency non-resident bank depo-sits  in a scramble to boost liquidity and regain the confidence of foreign investors.

The RBI then exchanged those dollars for rupees at lucrative rates for bank-ers. With about $28 billion in deposits maturing in September through to November, the RBI must provide dollars to the banks so they can pay back those depositors. Dr Rajan said last week he expected $20 billion in outflows in September to November, more than three times the outflow volumes seen over a three-month period. He will need to manage those outflows carefully at an especially tricky time for global markets with US rate hikes and worries about China and low oil price.
Mumbai: Tiger Shroff and Disha Patani recently shot for a musical single titled 'Befikra' in Paris. The makers have given a sneak peek into the track composed by Meet Bros and produced by T-Series.

Not just another love song! #Befikra @dishapatani @tseries.official @pareshshirodkar A video posted by Tiger Shroff (@tigerjackieshroff) on Jun 15, 2016 at 6:34am PDT

Last week, Tiger had released a short clip from the rehearsals of his single and wrote, "Happy feet rehearsals! Coming soon faster than we can dance @sambombay."

Happy feet  rehearsals! Coming soon faster than we can dance  @sambombay A video posted by Tiger Shroff (@tigerjackieshroff) on Jun 5, 2016 at 4:35am PDT

The duo, who are steadily dating since a year, have often been spotted dining together at popular suburban joints. Recently, Tiger was quizzed whether the two are finally willing to make it official, he said, Kaash! She is too good for me. I'm the most un-cool person. I wish someday someone will like me.

Disha, is all set to make her Bollywood debut in Neeraj Pandey's 'M S Dhoni: The Untold Story' opposite Sushant Singh Rajput.

Tiger Shroff, who is basking in the success of his recent release 'Baaghi: A Rebel For Love', is gearing up for the release of his next, 'A Flying Jatt' opposite Jacqueline Fernandez. He has also been roped in for Remo D'Souza's 'ABCD 3'.
Mumbai: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has informed the Bombay High Court that Jiah Khan's death was caused by "suicidal hanging" based on "oral, documentary, scientific and cyber forensic evidences".

The CBI was replying to a petition filed by Jiah's mother Rabia Khan, who sought a special investigation team (SIT) to probe the case. She also demanded that the CBI approach the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for help.

The Bombay High Court has asked Rabia Khan, mother of former actress Jiah Khan who had allegedly committed suicide in 2013, to file within two weeks a rejoinder in response to a CBI affidavit in the case.

The bench headed by Justice Naresh Patil gave this direction while hearing a petition filed by Rabia seeking a probe by Special Investigation Team (SIT) into Jiah's death. The matter would now be heard after two weeks. Jiah's boyfriend and actor Sooraj Pancholi is facing the charge of abetting the suicide.

The special court had last month adjourned the trial after Rabia moved the high court seeking stay on the trial, pending hearing of her petition demanding the SIT probe.

In her petition in the HC, Rabia sought SIT probe because she alleged that CBI, which is currently investigating the case, had concurred with the findings of Mumbai police that it was a suicide case and not homicidal death. She had earlier moved the Supreme Court seeking a SIT probe, but the apex court had asked her to approach the high court.

"The trial in the lower court is not proceeding in a proper manner and there are likelihood of accused (Sooraj) being discharged in the case," Rabia's petition said.

According to her, the CBI, "due to reasons best known to it", has been vehemently opposing appointment of special public prosecutor in the case by Maharashtra government.

Rabia's lawyer Subhash Jha had argued that investigation should be handed over to the SIT as CBI has also in its charge sheet said the death was not homicidal, despite forensic evidence suggesting otherwise.

The actress's mother had petitioned the high court against CBI categorising Jiah's death on June 3, 2013, as suicidal and not homicidal. She prayed for setting up a SIT to probe the case afresh.

Sooraj was arrested on June 10, 2013, for abetting Jiah's suicide, but released on July 2 that year, after the high court granted him bail.

On June 3, 2013, the body of 25-year-old Jiah was found hanging from the ceiling of her house by her mother. According to the charge sheet, Jiah had returned from Sooraj's house that morning, where she had been staying the previous two days.
People who got two servings of whole grains per day had lower risks of coronary heart disease. (Photo: Pixabay)

Bumping up whole grain intake even slightly may lower the risk of death from heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases, according to review published Tuesday in The BMJ.

The new report echoes a study released Monday in the journal Circulation in which every additional serving of whole grains cut cardiovascular disease-related death risk by 9 percent and cancer death risk by five percent. One serving of whole grains can be a half-cup of cooked brown rice, cooked oatmeal, or cooked 100 percent whole grain pasta, or one slice of 100 percent whole grain bread.

The BMJ review covered 45 studies involving more than 700,000 people altogether, and 100,000 deaths during follow-up. Researchers found the biggest difference in risk between people who ate two servings of whole grains per day and those who ate none. People who got two servings per day had lower risks of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease, death from stroke, cancer, respiratory disease, infectious disease and diabetes.

The current study provides the most comprehensive assessment of whole grain intake and mortality to date and suggests that there are benefits of eating large amounts of whole grains for many different disease and mortality outcomes, including respiratory and infectious diseases which were not assessed in previous reviews, said lead author Dr. Dagfinn Aune of Imperial College London.

Most likely the whole package of beneficial components in whole grains is the key, and therefore it is important to eat more whole grain foods rather than increasing intake of single nutrients from supplements, Aune told Reuters Health by email.

Breakfast cereals, whole grain breads and bran were associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, he said, but specific grain types havent been studied in as much detail as whole grains in general.

The Circulation paper is very similar to the one in BMJ because both especially find lower mortality of cardiovascular disease, said Cecilie Kyro of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center, who coauthored an editorial alongside The BMJ review.

Increasing whole grain intake will be beneficial for most people, especially in countries where intake in low, like the U.S. and UK, Kyro told Reuters Health by email.
With the projected worldwide increase of people with diabetes, the cost of keeping those people from becoming disabled may be high. (Photo: Pixabay)

Advances in healthcare and medicine are helping people with diabetes live longer, more active lives than in previous generations, according to a new study. It's been known that life expectancy for diabetes patients has been increasing - but their quality of life hasn't been well studied.

Have they been living longer, but in a disabled state? The answer wasn't clear, said senior author Dr. Edward Gregg, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

He and his colleagues tried "to pick apart whether people with diabetes are actually having more active and healthy fulfilling lives than their predecessors," he told Reuters Health.

The researchers compared data from a U.S. study of 50- to 70-year-olds born between 1931 and 1941 and another group born from 1942 to 1947. Altogether, 1,367 had diabetes and 11,414 did not.

Overall, people born later had more years of life and more years of life without being disabled. They also had a later onset of diabetes and spent less time being disabled.

The findings were presented at the American Diabetes Association meeting and released simultaneously in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. "What were seeing is that lifespans are increasing and mortality rates are decreasing over time," said Gregg. "Really the most substantial finding is the number of active years is increasing."

The results take into account the possibility that some people may become disabled but later improve, he told Reuters Health. "The newer cohort had more active years in part because they are less likely to become disabled in the first place, but once they get there they may come out of it," Gregg said.

The study can't tease out the specific reasons why people born later are having longer and more active lives. "We do know some very basic things can make a big difference," Gregg said. Those include follow-up health appointments, managing risk factors like blood pressure and cholesterol levels, exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.

The study did have limitations, however. For example, participants in the studies were only followed until age 70, Dr. Evelyn Wong, of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, cautions in an accompanying editorial.

With the projected worldwide increase of people with diabetes, the cost of keeping those people from becoming disabled may be high, she writes. In view of the increasing prevalence of diabetes, "studies to investigate the costs associated with this postponement of disability" should be considered, Wong adds.
The findings were published in the journal Work and Occupations.

Washington: Women who go to college intending to become engineers stay in the profession less often than men, because they tend to feel marginalised,

especially during internships or team-based educational activities, a new study has found.

In those situations, gender dynamics seem to generate more opportunities for men to work on the most challenging problems, while women tend to be assigned routine tasks or simple managerial duties, researchers said.

The negative group dynamics women tend to experience during team-based work projects makes the profession less appealing, they said.

"It turns out gender makes a big difference. It is a cultural phenomenon," said Susan Silbey from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

As a result of their experiences at these moments, women who have developed high expectations for their profession - expecting to make a positive social impact as engineers - can become disillusioned with their career prospects.

Overall, about 20 per cent of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women, but only 13 per cent of the engineering workforce is female, researchers said.

Numerous explanations have been offered for this iscrepancy, including a lack of mentorship for women in the field; a variety of factors that produce less confidence for female engineers; and the demands for women of maintaining a

balance between work and family life, they said.

For the study, researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students to keep twice-monthly diaries. The students attended four institutions. This generated more than 3,000 individual diary entries that researchers systematically examined.

What emerged was a picture in which female engineering students are negatively affected at particular moments of their educational terms - especially when they engage in team-based activities outside the classroom, where, in a less structured environment, older gender roles re-emerge, researchers said.

This crops up frequently in the diary entries. To take an example, one student named Kimberly described an episode in a design class in which "two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced

them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop. We heard the girls complaining about it...".

Such experiences lead to a problem involving what the researchers call "anticipatory socialisation."

The women in the study, researchers observed, are more likely than men to say they are entering the field of engineering with the explicit idea that it will be a "socially responsible" profession that will "make a difference in people's lives."

The findings were published in the journal Work and Occupations.
An elderly couple in China chose to have a stylish fashion shoot to mark 64 years of their marriage. Wang Lijin, 95, from Handan in Hebei, organised the shoot for his wife Huang Caozhen as a tribute to their love story that has spanned decades.

Lijin first met Caozhen, who used to work as a seamstress, in 1952 when he commissioned her to make him a new suit. The two soon fell in love and got hitched later that year. Caozhen has been making her husbands suits ever since, reports Hebei Daily. Their special photo shoot led to a warm family get-together where Lijin thanked his wife, mother of their children and grandmother of their grandchildren for her love and companionship.

The pair soon became local celebrities after their pictures, which had been posted on Weibo earlier, were plastered on billboards across cities in Hebei as an advert for true love. Well, we couldnt agree more after looking at their photos. You can check them out below:

(Photo: Weibo)

(Photo: Weibo)

(Photo: Weibo)

(Photo: Weibo)

(Photo: Weibo)

(Photo: Weibo)
One 86-year-old womans good manners have won her fame on the internet after her grandson shared proof that she is polite even to Google. Ben John was left amused when he chanced upon May Ashworths (his grandmother) laptop and saw her politely worded search request to the internet giant.

(Photo: Twitter)

The 25-year-old had gone to his grandmas house to do his laundry when he decided to use her computer to pass his time. He found that not only was the laptop switched on but it also displayed what his nan had typed into Google: "Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you."

Actually Bens grandmum likes to watch TV and was curious about when programmes were made. As television shows still use Roman numerals on their credits to show the year of the program, she decided to seek answers via Google search.

Here are some of the responses to Ben's tweet.

(Photo: Twitter)

(Photo: Twitter)

(Photo: Twitter)

It made me chuckle so I thought I'd take a photo and put it on Twitter for my friends to see. I didn't expect so many other people to see it! Ben told the BBC.

I asked my nan why she used 'please' and 'thank you' and it seemed she thinks that there is someone - a physical person - at Google's headquarters who looks after the searches, he adds.

The screen shot went so viral on social media that it even came to the notice of Google itself. Google UK tweeted Bens account with a sweet message that read: "In a world of billions of searches, yours made us smile."

(Photo: Twitter)
KOCHI: The Special Investigation Team probing murder of Jisha, the dalit LLB student in Kuruppampady near Perumbavoor, has inspected an abandoned house near the residence of the victim on Sunday. The probe team has inspected the house on the suspicion that the assailant might have used the place, located around 100 metres away from the house of the victim, for hiding after committing the crime.

Sources said inspection has not yielded any concrete proof to back the suspicion. The building was in a dilapidated condition with broken tiles and open doors. The probe team also conducted physical examination of a slew of workers from other states on Sunday. The physical examination was held at the traffic police station in Perumbavoor, sources said. The purpose was generally to find out if any of them are carrying an injury mark in their body that would give a clue to the accused in the case, source said.

Police examined migrant workers who were believed to have been employed in the vicinity of the Jishas house. The probe team is also planning to question the mother and sister of Jisha in coming days seeking clarifications in connection with the statements given by them to the probe team earlier, sources said.
Hyderabad: Installing CCTVs and deployment of anti-chain snatching teams on roads seems to have had no effect in controlling chain-snatching in the city. At a time when the city is gearing up for Ramadan and Bonalu, chain-snatchers are also making their presence felt with continuous snatchings. In the last 24 hours six chain-snatching cases were reported in the city and two of them are in Secunderabad.

Though the figures are very less compared to previous years, the increase in the incidents in the last 24 hours is worrying the public. Each police station has anti-snatching teams in the Hyderabad commissionerate area, while around 65 chase and catch teams and anti-snatching squads are operating in Cyberabad commissionerate.

Police said the number of incidents have come down with the installation of CCTVs, intensive patrolling in sensitive areas and the deployment of anti snatching teams. "We have increased vehicle checkings and are making the presence of cops felt to deter snatchers," north zone DCP B. Sumathi said. Police said the gang could be a part of the Bavaria gang or from outside.

Despite police initiatives, the gangs struck at Karmanghat, Nacharam, New Bhoiguda and East Marredpally on Wedne-sday and at Addagutta and near the Mahankali temple at Secunderabad on Thurs-day. Snatchers are targeting women during the morning from 5 am to 7 am and at night from 7 pm to 9 pm.

On Thursday, at around 5.30 am, Laxmi, 49, a petty shop owner in Addagutta, was robbed by snatchers who came to her shop as customers and fled with her chain. The victim said that her tali weighing 4 grams was of gold, and the chain rolled gold.

Around 6.25 am Chandrakala, 38, a housewife, was robbed by snatchers, near the Mahankali temple, when she came out to dump garbage. The men fled with her 2.5 tola gold chain. On Wednesday snatchers struck at New Bhoiguda and snatched the five tola gold chain of 57-year-old R. Sujatha. They also robbed 59-year-old Vedavalli at East Marredpally of her 5 tola gold chain. A housewife lost her 2.5 tola gold chain in Karmanghat, while another housewife was relieved of her 2 tola gold chain at Nacharam.
Bengaluru: Even a year after a rape case was filed by the daughter of a retired IAS officer against her brother-in-law, the Criminal Investigation Department sleuths have reportedly not got any substantial evidence against the accused.

In April last year, the 29-year-old daughter of former IAS officer, who held a top post in the state bureaucracy, had filed a rape and dowry harassment case with the Indiranagar police. As the alleged incident took place in Mysuru, the city police had transferred the case to their Mysuru counterparts. Later, the case was referred to the CID.

The investigating team, which has questioned several people in connection with the case, have reportedly not got any clinching evidence against the accused to establish that there was a rape. According to sources in the CID, even after a detailed investigation, they could not stumble on any substantial evidence to prove the offence.

Its more than a year and the investigation is still on. We have questioned all the accused in the case and have also recorded the statement of the complainant and her family members. Even the medical and forensic reports have not given any major lead. The case will be decided in a few days and mostly, B report would be submitted to the court, an official said.

It is also learnt that the senior officers in the CID directed the investigating team to probe the case thoroughly and come to a conclusion, as the team suggested there was no material evidence in the case.

As per the complaint, the incident took place on November 11, 2014. A complaint was filed five months after the incident in April 2015. In such cases, it is difficult to establish evidences. We have to bank upon circumstantial evidence and statements of witnesses. Both have not yielded any results in this case, the official added.

The woman had stated in her complaint that her husbands elder brother Dr Harsha Basappa had raped her in November 2014, when she was an eight months pregnant. He had allegedly frightened her to silence. In addition, she had also accused her in-laws of harassing her to bring dowry of Rs 45 crore.

Her father-in-law, Dr C B Murthy, runs the reputed Basappa Memorial Hospital in Mysuru. The police had registered cases under IPC sections 341 (wrongful restraint), 307 (attempt to murder), 376 (rape), 498 (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) and other sections against her in-laws.
The proposal for seeking one-time budgetary support of Rs. 286.57 crore as sent to the central government about a year ago. (Representational image)

New Delhi: The Centre has sanctioned Rs 258 crore for restoration of infrastructure of Jammu and Kashmir Police that was damaged during the 2014 deluge.

The decision was taken following a request by the Jammu and Kashmir government to the Home Ministry, official sources said.

The proposal for seeking one-time budgetary support of Rs. 286.57 crore under Security Related Expenditure (SRE) for the restoration of infrastructure of Jammu and Kashmir Police damaged during floods in September 2014 was sent to the central government about a year ago.

Subsequently, the proposal was deliberated by the Department of Expenditure in the Ministry of Finance. Now, the Ministry of Finance has recommended release of 90 per cent of the amount i.e. Rs. 258 crore and remaining 10 per cent will be contributed by the state government, the sources said.

However, the central assistance will be restricted to Rs 258 crore with any additionality or escalation in the costs or cost components to be borne by the Jammu and Kashmir government.

The Finance Ministry also set a few more conditions like no overlapping of funding for the items agreed for onetime relief, with funding, if any, under any other scheme.

There should be convergence for the items agreed for onetime relief, under other schemes, if available, to the extent possible. Besides, funds will be released on reimbursement basis as per the SRE scheme guidelines.

The permanent restoration of infrastructure shall be completed approximately within one year and the expenditure shall be booked in two financial years, the sources said. The fund release for the purpose shall be restricted accordingly and no further extension of the funding period shall be allowed, they added.
New Delhi: BJP favours holding simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha and state assemblies and has written to the Standing Committee of Parliament in this regard.

The suggestion was mooted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help save precious time and money spent in electioneering.

"BJP president Amit Shah has written to the Standing Committee on Law and Justice for holding simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections," a senior BJP leader said.

Shah has also called for a larger debate among various political parties for holding polls to Lok Sabha and state assemblies concurrently and asked the Election Commission to explore such a possibility, the sources said.

The parliamentary standing committee had in its report on the Feasibility of Holding Simultaneous Elections to House of People (Lok Sabha) and State Legislative Assemblies favoured holding of simultaneous polls saying it would help reduce expenditure, end policy paralysis and save time.

The EC is not averse to holding simultaneous polls either and the matter is under consideration of a Group of Ministers headed by Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

Making a strong pitch for it, the Prime Minister had said that due to frequent elections things get delayed and stalled and a lot of time is spent on elections. He also said a number of opposition leaders have met him and sought a way out.

The Standing Committee had in its report said the prospects of holding simultaneous elections needed to be weighed and deeply considered by all political parties, but admitted that gaining consensus may be difficult.

The AIADMK has supported the idea in principle and so has the Asom Gana Parishad. The SAD said it supports the idea but has doubts on certain issues like mandate delivering a hung Assembly.

Congress and Trinamool Congress have rejected the idea, saying "ideal as it may sound" is "impractical and unworkable". The NCP too said that the proposal is "not feasible". The CPI said the "proposal looks ideal" but there are practical problems such as need for mid-term polls.

The Law Commission in one of its reports presented to the government in 1999 had also supported the idea of simultaneous polls.
Vijayawada: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu turned a teacher on Thursday and taught a lesson on moral values and the evil of greed to students of class IX at ASR Zilla Parishad high school at Atukuru village near Vijaywada.

"I am here not as a Chief Minister but as a social servant," Naidu told the excited pupils in the classroom, after launching the "Vidyanjali" programme of the Government of India. He not only read out a moral story from the 'Panchatantra' but also explained the meaning of it.

"Greed is evil. It only leads to sorrow," he said. He also went on to explain the importance of true friendship.

"Money comes and goes but a true friend remains forever. Similarly, human beings are part of the nature. God has given us everything. If we use them properly, we will not face any problem. But if we are greedy, we will face problem," Naidu said.

He asked students to work hard and remain honest. "You should not get depressed in times of trouble. You should also not get overjoyed," he said.

Interacting with students, Naidu posed questions to them on the lesson he taught. "Do you know anyone in the state who got into trouble because of his greed and corrupt deeds?" Naidu asked a student who replied that he could not recall.

To this the CM said, "So you are not following the current affairs. You should be aware of what's happening in the state or the country. Read newspapers regularly and also read good books. It not only helps you gain knowledge but also leads to betterment of your life".

"By reading books like 'Panchatantra', you get mentally rejuvenated and grow up as a good citizen," he added.

Pointing to his Additional Secretary A Rajamouli, the CM said the former studied in the same school and worked hard to become an IAS officer.

"He is of Uttar Pradesh cadre but now working with me," Naidu said, introducing the officer to the wards. State HRD Minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao also participated.
Virender Tawde was arrested by the CBI from Panvel in Navi Mumbai last week in connection with the murder of the 67-year-old anti-superstition crusader. (Photo: PTI)

Pune: The CBI custody of Virendra Tawde, an accused in the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, was on Thursday extended till June 20 by a local court.

Tawde, arrested by the CBI from Panvel in Navi Mumbai last week in connection with the murder of the 67-year-old anti-superstition crusader, was produced before Judicial Magistrate First Class V B Gulve-Patil on the expiry of his earlier remand.

CBI lawyer B P Raju sought further custodial interrogation of the accused, saying he was not cooperating with the investigating agency. Subsequently, the court extended his CBI custody till June 20.

Tawde, an ENT surgeon, is an activist of the Sanatan Sanstha which has come under the scanner for the murders of Dabholkar, communist leader Govind Pansare and rationalist M M Kalburgi. He is the first accused to be held in the nearly three-year-old case.

Dabholkar was shot dead by two unidentified men while he was on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge here on August 20, 2013.

Tawde and another Sanatan Sanstha activist Sarang Akolkar wanted to eliminate rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2009 itself, but they dropped the plan due to the Margao bomb blast that took place in the same year, CBI sources had on Wednesday said, citing evidence pieced together by the agency.

Tawde, suspected to be the brain behind the murder conspiracy, kept on planning a hit on the activist along with Akolkar. The plan was finally executed on August 20, 2013, they said.

The CBI is probing the Dabholkar murder case, which was handed over to it in May 2014 by the Bombay High Court. The NIA is handling the Margao blast case.

The sources also said Tawde hated Dabholkar for his relentless campaign against superstition. He also allegedly played a key role in the 2009 Sangli-Miraj riots. The Sanstha has denied any role in Dabholkar's murder and termed Tawde's arrest as "mysterious".
Indore: People may soon be able to donate shares and bonds through D-MAT accounts to Madhya Pradesh's six temples, including Ujjain's famous Mahakaleshwar temple, on the lines of the Tirupati-Balaji temple in Andhra Pradesh, a senior official said on Thursday.

"We are thinking of opening D-MAT accounts in the name of Ujjain's Mahakaleshwar temple, Omkareshwar temple in Khandwa district, Bijasan devi temple at Salkanpur in Sehore district, Maihar devi temple in Satna district, the Khajrana Ganesh temple of Indore and Ram Raja temple at Orchha in Tikamgarh district," MP's Religious Trusts and Endowments Department's Additional Secretary Rajendra Singh told PTI.

"With this, devotees can donate shares and bonds to these temples," he said. The move is aimed at enhancing the income of these temples.

Singh said the department has written a letter to the concerned district collectors where these temples are situated to examine the scheme and send their opinions. On the basis of their report, rules and regulations would be framed for the scheme.

After opening of the D-MAT accounts and receiving shares and bonds in donations, the temple's administrative committee will decide on when to encash them. The income generated through this mode will be deposited in the temple's account.

The Ujjain's Mahakaleshwar temple, one of the 12 Jyotirlings in the country, is among those popular temples which receive maximum offerings in the form of cash and jewellery.

Mahakaleshwar temple committee's administrator and Ujjain's Additional Collector R P Tiwari said after getting guidelines from the state government on the issue, the process to open D-MAT account of the temple would be initiated.
Ahmedabad: Hardik Patel's family was put under house arrest and seven women from the community were detained on Thursday for sloganeering and demanding his immediate release.

The action was taken when Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel was addressing a gathering in the jailed leader's hometown, Viramgam, in the district.

The police action drew flak from the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti, which spearhead the quota agitation, even as the women were later let-off and Hardik's family was released after the CM's programme ended.

As a precaution ahead of the CM's visit, Hardik's family, who lives in the town, was kept under house arrest till the programme ended today afternoon, Viramgam town Police Inspector Vishwarajsinh Jadeja said.

"We detained seven women as they started shouting slogans when the CM was delivering her speech at Shala Praveshotsav (school enrolment) programme. We released them after the programme ended in the afternoon," Jadeja said.

"To stop Hardik's family from creating any trouble during CM's visit, we kept his father (Bharatbhai), mother (Ushaben) and sister (Monika) under house arrest. The house arrest was later lifted after the function ended," he said.

Meanwhile, on seeing the women chanting slogans during her speech, Anandiben said reservation will not solve problems as there is no substitute to hard work.

"Reservation alone is not the solution. People want to bypass hard work and wish to get a high ranking job, such as Superintendent of Police. They must first apply for a post of lower ranking job, such as a constable, and then climb to higher position with hard work," Patel told the gathering.

The police action on women and Hardik's family drew flak from the members of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS), which is spearheading the agitation for the inclusion of Patels under OBC quota for reservation.

According to a PAAS member and Hardik's close aide Dinesh Bambhaniya, the government is suppressing the voice of Patel community.

"This is clear violation of our rights, as our women are not allowed to speak. We also condemn the unlawful detention of Hardik's family, who were under house arrest since late yesterday night," Bambhaniya alleged.

He was recently released on bail in a sedition case filed against Hardik and five of his aides (including Bambhaniya) by the city Crime Branch here.
Hyderabad: A meeting of the working group of BRICS countries on employment generation and other issues would be held in Hyderabad on July 27 and 28, Union Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said here on Thursday.

The meeting of the working group is preparatory for a BRICS meet to be held in Delhi, he said.

Dattatreya, who recently attended the International Labour Conference in Geneva, said the focus of the Union Government and other countries is on employment generation.

"The initiatives of the NDA government to spur growth are helping in generating employment. The Narendra Modi government favoured an inclusive growth," he said.

The Labour Ministry would set up 100 model career centres in the country in partnership with the public and private sector, he said.

A modern employment exchange would be opened in Hyderabad in the third week of July, he said adding, job seekers and employers, who have registered on the National Career Service (NCS) portal of the Labour Ministry, would be brought on to a single platform on the occasion.

The state governments would be asked to come on board the NCS portal and a system to provide jobs to lakhs of job seekers, Dattatreya said.

As many as 3.60 crore job seekers, 27,195 skill providers and 8.29 lakh employers, besides 50 placement organisations, have joined the portal.

Through the portal, 45,912 have been provided jobs against 81,000 vacancies, he said.

"This is a small answer to those who are asking what did the government do in the last two years," he said.

The ESI Medical College at Sanatnagar here would be run from 2016-17, he said.

He thanked Union Health Minister J P Nadda and the Medical Council of India for giving the required permissions to the college.
The flight which was scheduled to fly to Mumbai after landing at BPIA was cancelled. (Photo: PTI)

Bhubaneswar: A Mumbai-bound IndiGo flight with 178 on board was on Thursday grounded at Biju Patnaik International Airport (BPIA) as the aircraft suffered bird-hit before landing at the airport.

However, the flight landed safely and all the passengers on board were unhurt, sources said.

According to sources, the Kolkata-Bhubaneswar-Mumbai IndiGo flight 6E 293 was grounded in the morning at the airport after a bird hit the left wing of the aircraft.

The flight which was scheduled to fly to Mumbai after landing at BPIA was cancelled.

The passengers were shifted to a Delhi-bound IndiGo flight, which left for Mumbai.

The passengers reportedly expressed displeasure over the incident, sources informed.
Kanpur: The Mathura clashes could have been avoided if the Akhilesh Yadav government had followed the High Court order in a timely manner, Uttar Pradesh governor Ram Naik said on Thursday.

Voicing concern over the clashes that left two policemen among 29 dead, the Governor said whatever happened in the district was unprecedented. "The death of two police officers besides the other people is a matter of grave concern," he told reporters here.

Naik said that if the Allahabad High Court's order for removing encroachment at Jawahar Bagh had been followed, the clashes could have been avoided. "We saw what happened when the state government could not implement the Allahabad High Court's orders for removing encroachment at Jawahar Bagh. If the court's directions had been followed in a timely manner, we could have avoided such an incident," he said.

Naik, who had directed the government to issue a status paper on illegal encroachments in the state yesterday, said that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had apprised him of details of the Mathura incident.

Naik said the government should take back possession of such properties and get the illegal occupants evicted in order to ward off recurrence of Jawahar Bagh-type incidents anywhere in the state.

In various districts, illegal occupants have grabbed government land and local courts have also issued eviction order from time to time but to no avail, Naik had said in a release on Wednesday.

In a letter to the chief minister, Naik had asked the state government to issue a 'white paper' on illegal encroachment on land of parks, grazing grounds, ponds and public buildings by individuals or organisations, a Raj Bhawan release said on Wednesday.
Tanzil Ahmed was deputy superintendent of police with the NIA. (Photo: ANI)

Lucknow: The Special Task Force (STF) of Uttar Pradesh police has arrested an active member of the Munir gang wanted in the murder case of National Investigation Agency (NIA) officer Tanzil Ahmed.

Atiullah (22), a native of Bihar, was arrested following an encounter near Barauli bridge under Banna Devi police station in Aligarh last night, an STF release said on Thursday.

Atiullah, who was carrying a cash reward of Rs. 50,000, was wanted in 11 criminal cases. A .32 bore pistol and cartridges were recovered from his possession, the release added.

Atiullah, who had come into contact with Munir during the 2012 Aligarh Muslim University elections, has told the police that both had fled the city in September, 2015 following a murder on the AMU campus, the release added.

Subsequently, he had met Munir in Nepal but was not aware of his whereabouts since then, the release said, adding that a case has been registered and further investigation was on.

Tanzil Ahmed was gunned down by armed assailants in Bijnor district in Uttar Pradesh on the night of April 2 when he was returning home with his wife and two children from a wedding.

The post-mortem report said Ahmed had received 21 bullet injuries. His wife Farzana too succumbed to bullet injuries 10 days after the incident in AIIMS in New Delhi.

The main accused in the case, Munir, a resident of Sahaspur and a history-sheeter, is still on the run.

Ahmed had handled several cases related to the banned Indian Mujahideen (IM) outfit, including the arrest and probe of the outfit's India chief, Yasin Bhatkal.
Pune: Sanatan Sanstha activists Virendra Tawde and Sarang Akolkar wanted to eliminate rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2009 itself, but they dropped the plan due to the Margao bomb blast that took place in the same year, CBI sources alleged on Wednesday, citing evidence pieced together by the agency.

Two Sanatan Sanstha workers - Malgonda Patil and Yogesh Naik - died when the bomb they were ferrying to Margao, Goa, accidentally exploded in November 2009. Akolkar, one of the accused in the blast, case is absconding since then.

"As per the documentary evidence and investigation till now, Tawde and Akolkar wanted to kill Dabholkar in 2009. However, they had to drop the plan after two Sanatan Sanstha workers died when the bomb, they were ferrying to Margao, accidentally went off," they said.

The Central agency is probing the Dabholkar murder case, which was handed over to it in May 2014 by the Bombay High Court. The NIA is handling the Margao blast case.

Tawde, an ENT surgeon, was arrested from Panvel, Navi Mumbai last week for the murder of the 67-year-old anti superstition crusader. He is the first accused to be held in the nearly three-year-old case.

Tawde, suspected to be the brain behind the murder conspiracy, kept on planning a hit on the activist along with Akolkar. The plan was finally executed on August 20, 2013, when Dabholkar was shot dead by two unidentified men while he was on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge here, they said.

In another revelation, the sources said workers of the Goa-based right-wing outfit were present near the bridge when the murder took place.

The sources said Tawde hated Dabholkar for his relentless campaign against religious superstition. He also allegedly played a key role in the 2009 Sangli-Miraj riots.

The Sanstha has denied any role in Dabholkar's murder and termed Tawde's arrest as "mysterious".
New Delhi: After a controversy broke out over purported "tutoring" of witnesses in Ishrat Jahan case, senior Home Ministry official B K Prasad on Thursday rejected the allegation and claimed to have conducted a "free and fair" enquiry.

Prasad, an Additional Secretary in the ministry and who has been given an extension for two months till July, is at the centre of a row after a newspaper report claimed that he was "tutoring" witnesses.

The newspaper also uploaded the conversation in public domain where he is purportedly conveying the questions as well as answers to one of the witnesses questioned by him in connection with an enquiry related to missing documents in Ishrat Jahan case.

Prasad, who is looking after the Foreigners division, said, "First of all, it is unethical to record my conversation that also with another officer without my permission and knowledge."

He said no evidence has been produced establishing that the officer testified by him was being tutored during the alleged conversation. "All officers enquired by me are or have been senior officers in the government and are fully capable of answering questions relating to the probe on their own and there is no question of the alleged tutoring.

"I have conducted a free and fair enquiry which my enquiry report will reveal," he said in a statement.

Reacting to the report, Congress leader and former Home Minister P Chidambaram said the news report "comprehensively exposed the fake controversy" created by the NDA government on the two affidavits filed by the central government in the case.

"The moral of the story is that even a doctored report (of the Inquiry Officer) cannot hide the truth. The real issue is whether Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed in a genuine encounter or a fake encounter. Only the trial of the case, pending since July 2013, will bring out the truth," he said.

Prasad led one-man inquiry committee yesterday submitted its report where it said that four of the five missing documents continue to be untraceable.

The panel said that as per then Joint Secretary, the papers were part of the file which went to his seniors but not found when the file returned to him. Chidambaram was the Home Minister then.

The inquiry panel, however, made no reference to Chidambaram or anyone in the then UPA government.

Based on the statements of 11 serving and retired officers, including the then Home Secretary G K Pillai, the 52-page report said the documents went missing between September 18-28, 2009.

The second affidavit, which was different from the first one, and filed before Gujarat High Court on September 29, 2009, had said there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that Ishrat was an LeT operative.

The papers which went missing are office copy of the letter and enclosure sent by the then Home Secretary to the Attorney General on September 18, 2009, office copy of the letter sent by the them Home Secretary to the AG on September 23, 2009, draft further affidavit as vetted by the AG, draft further affidavit amended by the then Home Minister on September 24, 2009 and office copy if the further affidavit filed with the Gujarat High Court on September 29, 2009.

The paper which was retrieved from a computer hard disk was the letter sent by the then Home Secretary to AG on September 18, 2009.

Ishrat, Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in the encounter with Gujarat Police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

The Gujarat Police had then said those killed in the encounters were LeT terrorists and had landed in Gujarat to kill the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Sources said in his statement to the Ishrat inquiry panel, retired IAS officer Deverakonda Diptivilasa had reportedly said the documents were part of the file which he sent to the seniors during the deliberations before the second affidavit related to the alleged fake encounter case was filed.

However, the five documents were not found in the file when it returned, Diptivilasa, who was the then Joint Secretary (Internal Security) in the Home Ministry, learnt to have told the panel.

Sources said Home Ministry officials have detected about the five missing documents in 2013, when the UPA was in power but it was never flagged as the fair copies were intact then.

The first affidavit was filed on the basis of inputs from Maharashtra and Gujarat Police besides Intelligence Bureau where it was said the 19-year-old girl from Mumbai outskirts was an activist of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba but it was ignored in the second affidavit, Home Ministry officials said.

The second affidavit, claimed to have been drafted by Chidambaram, said there was no conclusive evidence to prove that Ishrat was a terrorist, the officials said.

Pillai had claimed that as Home Minister, Chidambaram had recalled the file a month after the original affidavit, which described Ishrat and her slain aides as LeT operatives, was filed in the court.

Subsequently, Chidambaram had said Pillai is equally responsible for the change in the affidavit.
Patna: The Patna High Court on Thursday ordered interim stay on the inspection of private B.Ed colleges carried out by the state government.

Justice V Nath ordered that inspection should be kept in abeyance till the next date of hearing on June 21.

The stay came on a petition of B R Ambedkar college, a private B.Ed college of Gaya.

The petitioner contended that the probe of these private B.Ed colleges could be done only by NCTE (National Council for Teachers Education) and not by the state government.

The Bihar government had decided to crackdown on B.Ed colleges from where reports of irregularities in awarding degree regularly come in.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had recently said a probe is underway to ascertain if the degree awarded by B.Ed colleges in the state are genuine or not.

"All B.Ed colleges are being probed to ascertain if classes are held in these colleges or degrees are distributed illegally," he said at an event in Purnea district on Monday last.

The crackdown on B.Ed degree colleges followed merit muddle in Intermediate examination in the state.
New Delhi: Taking strong objection to Hindutva leader Sadhvi Prachi's recent statement calling for a "Muslim-free" India, the All India Imams Council on Thursday staged a protest demanding an FIR against the VHP leader.

Known for courting controversies, Sadhvi had recently claimed the mission of a Congress-free India has already been "accomplished" and it is now time to rid the country of Muslims.

"The statement was not only unconstitutional and offensive in nature but will also harm the secular fabric of our nation and intending to communal polarization and promoting enmity between two different communities," Mafti Hanir Ahrar Qasmi, General Secretary of the Imam council said.

Members of the Imam Council staged a demonstration at Jantar Mantar here and later submitted a memorandum to National Commission of Minorities in this regard.

"We demand immediate registration of FIR with proper penal sections against Sadhvi and also a ban on her public meetings within the country since she has been continuously making the society boil on communal lines," the memorandum said.

The protesters also demanded action against Bajrang Dal leaders who had recently organised an arms training camp which triggered a war of words among political parties in Uttar Pradesh.

"We demand that all weapons from Bajrang Dal be seized and the arms' license of all concerned be cancelled," the memorandum said.
New Delhi: BJP on Thursday said the media report about alleged tutoring of a witness on how to answer questions related to missing Ishrat Jahan case files does not absolve former Home Minister P Chidambaram of his "role" in the change of affidavit to dilute the "fact" that she was terrorist.

It also said that the senior MHA official at the centre of the row has also issued a statement rejecting the charge of tutoring and pointed out that it was admitted by former home secretary G K Pillai that some files had gone missing.

"Unfortunately, Congress feels that one of the newspapers has given them another springboard to prove that Ishrat Jahan had no LeT link. It does not absolve Chidambaram's role on changing the affidavit and Congress' trade-off between national security and political interest," its national secretary Sidharth Singh said.

Another party secretary Shrikant Sharma also attacked Congress after it accused the government of "fixing" the probe into the missing files.

Noting that there were many "evidence", including reports of IB and the FBI of the US, to prove that she was a terrorist, Sharma said Congress' comments today were part of its efforts to prove that she was not a terrorist.

"Instead of making such claims, Congress should apologise to the country," he said.

He alleged that whether it was Batla House encounter case or the Ishrat case, Congress had expressed sympathies with terrorists as he noted that the party leaders had gone to the houses of those killed in the Batla case to sympathise with their families.
Chennai: Did the state unit of BJP underestimate Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaas personal equation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi or was it rather hasty when it took on her during the recent Assembly election, especially raising the CM inaccessible issue? Nevertheless, post poll and after Ms Jayalalithaas Delhi visit the state leaders are left with no option but to justify her meeting with PM.

This sudden embarrassment apart, the party here finds itself on sticky wicket on several crucial issues like the Katchatheevu, releasing of seven convicts in the 1991 Rajiv Gandhi assassination case and corruption remark. As various political parties including the ruling AIADMK demand the Centre to retrieve Katchatheevu and thereby end the killings of innocent Tamil Nadu fishermen by the Sri Lankan navy, the BJP claims retrieval would not resolve the fishermen's problems.

Retrieving Katchatheevu is not a solution. That's why we are talking about encouraging deep sea fishing, BJP state general secretary Vanathi Srinivasan explained.

The row over this uninhabited islet in the Palk Strait, ceded to Sri Lanka by the then PM Indira Gandhi through the Indo-Sri Lankan maritime agreement to settle maritime boundary in the Palk Strait, with her counterpart Srimavo Bandaranaike, has become emotive with the Sri Lankan government refusing to give up the islet.

It is not just the Centre even the state government has the onus to prevent the killings of our fishermen. It could hold talks with them and find out why they cross the boarders. State could evolve a concrete plan for the fishermen, BJP state president Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan said.

As to granting remission to Rajiv Gandhi assassins, the party here wants them released as per law. Though Mr Modi visited the state thrice and addressed four rallies during the run up to the Assembly election, he neither directly targeted Ms Jayalalithaa nor made any veiled references. And post Ms Jayalalithaa's meeting with PM, the party is unable to respond to opposition charge over party's national chief Amit Shah who accused the AIADMK of being the most corrupt while campaigning in the state.

Interestingly, only Union ministers: Nirmala Sitharaman and Pon Radhakrishnan who are from TN called on the CM at the Tamil Nadu House. Mr Radhakrishnan who earlier said he would step down if Colachel port was not established, had sought the CM's support for the project.
Visakhapatnam: A young IPS officer allegedly committed suicide by shooting himself with his service revolver at his residence cum office at Paderu in Vizag Agency on Thursday morning.

ASP (Paderu) K Sasi Kumar, 2012 batch IPS officer, allegedly shot himself at his residence, but authorities maintain that the fire arm accidentally went off and the bullet hit him in the right temple

At around 6 am on Thursday a gunshot was heard at the ASP's residence. He was immediately rushed to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The police found bullet injuries on ASP' head.

"We are not sure whether it happened accidentally or done intentionally. The Visakhapatnam (Rural) SP has rushed to the spot and we are examining the case," North Coastal Zone Inspector General of Police Kumar Vishwajeet said.

Sources said Sasi Kumar assumed office around four months back and he was an efficient officer. Though the cops didn't find any suicide letter, they are suspecting that it was a case of self killing. The matter was reported to the DIG (Visakha Range) Ch Srikanth. Sasi Kumar was first posted as ASP, Allagadda and he was transferred to ASP Paderu and he was native of Erode of Tamil Nadu.

Superintendent of Police (Visakha Rural) Rahul Dev Sharma said that the incident took place when Sasi Kumar was checking its functioning. The cops have registered a case and investigation is on.
Hyderabad: The Director General of Civil Aviation has turned down the AP governments proposal to declare Tirumala a no-fly zone. Union civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju has clarified that it is not feasible to declare no-fly zones over pilgrim centres.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandra-babu Naidu had written to Mr Raju, asking that Tirumala be declared a no-fly zone. The TTD had requested the state government for the same after two recent incidents of planes flying over Tirumala, affecting the sentiments of devotees.

The state government in its letter had informed the Centre that as per Agama Shastra, it was inauspicious to fly over Tirumala. However, the civil aviation minister wrote back that the ministry had also got no-fly requests from Sriha-rikota SHAR, Mahendr-agiri Space Centre in TN, Taj Mahal in Agra, Ayodhya in UP, Sabarim-ala in Kerala and the Golden Temple Trust in Punjab, and all the proposals had been turned down.

Only the Rashtrapati Bhavan, nuclear stations and other top national establishments are no-fly zones for security reasons.

As it is, due to the hilly terrain and forests, it is difficult for flights to land and take off at Renigunta. The Civil Aviation Ministry stated that if Tirumala was declared a no-fly zone, it would lead to further problems. And as the Renigunta airport was being developed as an international airport, announcing a no-fly zone would compound it further.

During former Chief Minister N. Kiran Kum-ar Reddys regime too the Centre had declined such a proposal.

The reason for deman-ding a no-fly zone above the abode of Lord Venkateswara is that nothing should be above God. Even VVIPs like the President and Prime Minister avoid taking helicopters to Tirumala and use the road. A cable car project was also shelved because of resistance from Agama Shastra experts.

Officials said that usually pilots of commercial flights avoid flying over Tirumala due to the sentiment.
Hyderabad: The Telangana state industrial sector has received a major boost in the form of the Union commerce ministry approving two industrial corridors along two major highways in the state.

The ministry gave in-principle approval to proposals submitted by the TS government on setting up industrial corridors along Hyderabad-Warangal and Hyderabad-Nagpur highways.

The TS government submitted detailed project reports for the two corridors to the Centre last year. The government received a communication from the ministry granting in-principle approval.

With this, the TS government is just a step away from securing a final approval from the union Cabinet. Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao had proposed the two major industrial corridors with the aim of holistic development of the state.

The proposed corridors will accommodate oil refining, textiles, handlooms, handicrafts, paper units, mining, engineering, livestock, agro-based industries, poultry and other small and medium enterprises.

These segments have potential to generate self-employment and job opportunities to lakhs of people. The added advantage for both these corridors is the presence of several professional colleges and other educational institutions churning out qualified manpower.

The industries department had been relentlessly pursuing the issue with the commerce ministry. The state government has also sought a dry port and railway facility for speedy transportation of industrial production.

The government hopes to give a boost to economic activity in Ranga Reddy, Nizamabad, Nalgonda, Warangal, Medak and Adilabad districts with these two industrial corridors.
Nellore: Terming the recurring incidents of Chinese troops entering Indian territory as transgression, not incursions, Union defence minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday emphasised that clarity over the Line of Actual Control would bring down tension between the troops on both sides that patrolled the areas.

The minister was reacting to a question on the recent intrusion of Chinese troops in Arunachal Pradesh during a media conference here. He was taking part in the Vikas Parv programme organised by the local BJP unit to highlight the achievements of the NDA government in its two-year rule.

Mr Parrikar said that both sides committed mistakes frequently since there was no demarcation and they returned after senior military officers took up the matter with their counterparts.

Responding to a question on beheading Indian soldiers by Pakistani troops in 2010, he said that the NDA was not in power then and would retaliate immediately without any hesitation if such incidents were repeated now.

He said that security forces had neutralised 50 infiltrators in the recent past, besides the four infiltrators neutralized on Thursday. Mr Parrikar asserted that the NDA government was committed to bringing back black money but absence of bipartisan agreements with several countries across the globe was affecting the progress. He added that officials were visiting these country to enter into agreements for mutual cooperation to overcome the problem.
Hyderabad: Telangana Congress has decided to petition Assembly Speaker S. Madhusudhana Chary and Council Chairman Swami Goud seeking disqualification of the three party MLAs and two MLCs who joined the TRS.

Similarly, the Congress high command will move a petition before Lok Sabha Speaker seeking disqualification of Nalgonda MP Gutta Sukhender Reddy. The MP and five legislators had joined the TRS recently.

Sources in the Congress said that necessary documents and documentary evidence was being prepared to seek disqualification of Miryalaguda MLA N. Bhaskar Rao, Khammam MLA Puvvada Ajay Kumar and Makthal MLA Rammohan Reddy and MLCs Farooq Hussain and M.S. Prabhakar. The CPI plans similar action against its lone Deverkonda MLA Ravinder Kumar Ramavath.

Though CLP leader K. Jana Reddy moved petitions against earlier defectors, the Speaker is yet to take action. Congress has also moved the High Court in this regard.

AICC general secretary in-charge of TS affairs Digvijay Singh, who is on a two-day tour of the state, held discussions in this regard with TPCC chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy and Mr Jana Reddy.

It is learnt Mr Singh asked party leaders to pursue pending anti-defection cases and take them to their logical end. Interestingly, all Congress legislators, in open defiance of Anti Defection Act, joined the TRS by accepting pink khandwas from TRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao and other TRS leaders.

Mr Sukhender Reddy did not wear the pink khandwa publicly on Wednesday, but he and other Congress leaders did so when they called on the Chief Minister at his camp office.

Sukender Reddy tried to evade evidence. If he had decided to quit Congress why did he not wear pink khandwa at the public meeting? It only shows how cunning he is. Unlike the Assembly Speaker, the Lok Sabha Speaker takes prompt action if defection is proved. Probably the TRS doesnt want early byelection, said Mohd Ali Shabbir, Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council.

Meanwhile, Mr Sukhender Reddy refuted Mr Singh charge and asserted he would resign MP seat at an appropriate time. I did not quit for the sake of contracts. Digvijay should look back at the own party affairs. Palvai Govardhan Reddy fielded his daughter as Independent candidate defying party in last polls, he said.

TPCC vows to fight for better compensation

The Congress has decided to fight for better compensation for all those displaced due to various irrigation and other projects in TS.

Terming the TS governments GO on land acquisition, which was struck down by the HC) as clueless AICC SC cell president Koppula Raju said UPA land acquisition policy framed under the leadership of Congress president Sonia Gandhi provided succour to farmers and others.

Sonia Gandhi provided huge relief to farmers through the land acquisition policy. We will fight for its implementation so that farmers and others get better relief and rehabilitation package, he said, addressing a workshop on land acquisition at the Gandhi Bhavan here on Thursday.

Gadwal Congress MLA D.K. Aruna alleged that the government was using brokers to forcibly take over agriculture and other lands under the Palamur irrigation project.

On pretext of redesigning irrigation projects, money is being looted. CMs office decides and selects contractors for the projects. Farmers are duped in the name of land acquisition, she alleged.

Ms Aruna also demanded carving of new Jogulamba district from the present Mahbubnagar district. Lashing out at the TRS government for its anti-farmer policies, TPCC chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy said, GO 123 is a curse on Telangana farmers. Congress will fight for safeguarding the rights of farmers in the state.

He said that the state government was deceiving farmers using this GO and was trying to bypass the Central laws on land acquisition. Stating that UPA-II had in 2013 brought a comprehensive land acquisition law with full guarantee of interests to the farmers, Mr Uttam Kumar Reddy accused the state government of ignoring it now.








The PFA: June 16, 2016 - France needed last-gasp goals from Antoine Griezmann and Dimitri Payet to snatch a 2-0 win over Group A minnows Albania and secure their passage to the Round of 16.





The hosts looked anything but Euro 2016 favourites as they struggled past a side ranked 42nd in the world, and were very nearly on the end of a major upset with Albania rattling a post.





But just as Albania looked set to register their first ever point at an international tournament, substitute Griezmann came to France's rescue with less than a minute to go.





Then in stoppage time West Ham star Payet, back on his old Marseille stomping ground, curled in his second goal in two matches to secure their place in the knockout stages.





All France had to show for a worryingly flat first-half performance were two Payet free-kicks, both headed over by Olivier Giroud, and a blocked shot from Anthony Martial after he was put through by Payet.





Albania predictably began by defending deep but, perhaps sensing some French nerves, they began to venture forward and Ermir Lenjani tried his luck from 30 yards but his effort flew high and wide.





Moments later full-back Elseid Hisaj went on the overlap and pinged in a low cross which Hugo Lloris had to gather as Armando Sadiku threatened to get a toe onto the ball.





Ten minutes before half-time Albania won a corner and Ledian Memushaj's low delivery caught the French by surprise, with Lenjani only denied a shock goal by a deflection.





Martial was sacrificed at the break with Paul Pogba, a surprise exclusion from the starting line-up, summoned from the bench.





France improved immediately - not that they could get much worse - and just 30 seconds into the second half Giroud swung in a cross and youngster Kingsley Coman glanced a header just past the post.





Yet they still had to survive another major scare in the 52nd minute when Memushaj beat Hugo Lloris but saw his effort come back off the foot of the post.

The ball rebounded to the floored striker but he knew little about it as it bounced off his head and narrowly wide.





Pogba had a chance to break the deadlock shortly after when he slid on to meet an inviting cross from Payet only to blaze over.





Giroud then headed wide before the Arsenal striker went closer still when he nodded Patrice Evra's cross against the Albanian woodwork.





A late onslaught saw Laurent Koscielny fluff a close-range header, N'Golo Kante denied by a deflection and Andre Pierre Gignac nod wide.





But with 90 minutes almost up Albania's rearguard finally slipped up, leaving Griezmann unmarked to head home Adil Rami's cross.





Then Payet repeated his trick against Romania on the opening night when he jinked into the box and curled home to secure a victory which was far more hard-earned than the scoreline would suggest.




Hyderabad: US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumps recent statement indicating that H-IB visas would be restricted, and his administration, if elected, would revisit the Optional Practical Training programme authorisation for F-1 visa holders, has created apprehensions among engineering graduates who are dreaming of higher education in the the United States.

Although Mr Trump seems to have softened his stand since then, students and parents are closely watching as to who, Mr Trump or Ms Hillary Clinton, would become the US President after November 18 polls.

Incidents of several Indian students belonging to Silicon Valley University and North-Western Polytechnic University being sent back from US airports and deportation of about 300 Indian students who had joined the University of Northern New Jersey in the last six months are still fresh in students' minds.

Students here are now adopting a wait-and-watch approach instead of immediately pursuing their US study plans after completing graduation.

Infographic

A student from a leading private engineering college in the city, who will be heading to the United States in August for his Masters, said many of his friends were keenly following developments in the United States.

Some of them had postponed their plans for the Fall admissions (September 2016) and had decided to explore the option of Spring admissions (January 2017) hoping that better clarity will emerge in the next few months.

The authorities have tightened visa norms and quite a number of applications are being rejected. Bank statements and financial documents of candidates are now being thoroughly checked in view of the January incidents when Telugu students were found to be heading to varsities in the United States solely relying on part-time jobs to pay their tuition fees, he said.
Mumbai: Home minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday accepted Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis' suggestion to set up a Central Marine Police Force to protect the sea, coast, ports and other vital institutions. Mr Singh, who was here to review security for the coastline, reviewed recommendations from officials and ministers.

Referring to the 26/11 Mumbai attack, Union home minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday said that creating a stronger coastal policing system would help the Coastal Guard, that protects coastal waters.

He stressed the need to guard not only industrial and commercial establishments as well as strategic installations, but also the entire coastline. Mr Singh said the coastline was made more secure with static sensors and Automatic Identification System receivers on the coast and radars operated by the Coast Guard. Mr Singh said 38 more radars would be installed for gapless surveillance. Mr Fadnavis suggested that marine policing was a specialised job and therefore a Central Marine Police Force was vitally necessary. Mr Singh has reacted positively to the suggestions made by Mr Fadnavis. We have located land in Gujarat for setting up a central maritime police academy that will specialise in training (for) marine policing, said Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi.
Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar will finally come face-to-face. Mr Parrikar could not meet Mr Rao during his Delhi visit as he was preoccupied, while the CM couldnt attend the Defence Ministers programme for about the same reason. This would be the first time meeting between the two, and Mr Rao will be prepared.

The Defence Minister, after inaugurated a hospital, has scheduled four hours to meet citizens. He would then meet the Governor and the Chief Minister. The top issues on the agenda are the exchange of land and approval of alternative routes.

The CM is expected to take up the AOC Gate issue, the flyover from Jubilee Bus station to Rajiv Rahadari, defence lands for roads and laying of pipelines in sensitive army lands etc.

Sources close to the CM said that Mr Rao will also take up the issue of shifting of Defence stations from the heart of the city to other locations in a phased manner.

Though it has decided to retain the Secretariat in the existing location, the TS government is eyeing the Parade Grounds land, and is ready to offer alternative site, the sources said.

Earlier, the government had sought the Bison Ground for construction of the new Secretariat. Malkajgiri MP Ch. Malla Reddy said, The state government will be requesting the Defence Minister to pass orders on all roads, especially regarding the night restrictions. We want all the roads kept open for public at least till alternative arrangements are in place. For land exchange the state government is willing to give large parcels in Ranga Reddy district.

The Defence Minister will land at the Hakimpet Air Force station in the morning; he is scheduled to spend four hours in Secunderabad Cantonment visiting the AOC, Telangana sub area followed by the inauguration of the cantonment hospital.

Mr Parrikars first meeting will be with stakeholders who will include GHMC officials. Minister K.T. Rama Rao will represent the state government.

Mr Malla Reddy and MLAs will discuss the alternative roads issue and the land swap proposal.

This is to be followed by another meeting with Railways officials on the MMTS 2 land issue at Bolarum; the Army has been refusing to part with land to lay tracks for the MMTS.
Visakhapatnam: Twenty-nine-year-old IPS officer K. Sasi Kumar allegedly committed suicide by shooting himself with his service revolver inside his office chambers at Paderu in Vizag Agency on Thursday morning.

Kumar, a 2012-batch IPS officer from Tamil Nadu, was posted as assistant superintendent of police at Paderu in January 2016. Police claimed that his revolver accidentally went off when the ASP was checking the firearm, and the bullet hit his right temple. The sound of the firearm discharging was heard from his chambers at around 6 am.

IPS officers death handed over to CID

The sound of the firearm discharging was heard from K. Sasi Kumars chambers at around 6 am on Thursday and the sentry on duty rushed in to check.

He found Kumar lying in a pool of blood beside his service weapon. The ASP was rushed to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injury.

This was Kumars third posting after a stint as ASP (Greyhounds) and ASP, Allagadda, in Kurnool district. Superintendent of pol-ice (Visakha Rural) Rah-ul Dev Sharma said that they were not sure wh-ether it was accidental or intentional.

Few police sources, however, on condition of anonymity said that it appeared to be a case of suicide but there was no clarity on it yet. Appa-rently a suicide note was also recovered from the spot but official sources are not clarifying.

Kumar was a 2008 batch Engineering graduate (BE, Electronics) from Anna University. His father, Mr Kuppu Swamy, is a farmer and her mother Mylammal is a housewife. He was born and brought up in the Satya-mangalam area of Coim-batore and his parents currently live at Ranga-samudram in Erode district of Tamil Nadu.

Later in the day, his body was shifted to KG Hospital in Vizag for post-mortem and his family informed. District collector N. Yuvaraj, commissioner of police T. Yoganand and other IAS and IPS officers paid homage to the officer at KG Hospital.

Refusing to disclose further details, Mr Rahul Dev Sharma said that the case had been handed over to the CID soon after the incident. The CID team visited the spot for collecting evidence. The ASPs family members arrived on Thursday evening and the body is expected to be flown to his home town on Friday morning.
Lucknow: While a fierce battle for power is playing out between major political parties in the state of Uttar Pradesh which goes to polls next year, a different kind of competition is being fought quietly in the orchards of Haji Kalimullah between Narendra Modi and Akhilesh Yadav. The celebrated mango grower has named mango varieties after the Prime Minister of the country and the UP chief minister, setting the stage for a sweet battle of taste between the two varieties.

Kalimullah, a Padma Shri awardee is famous for growing scores of mango varieties and naming them after celebrities in the town of Malihabad, which is around 35 kms from Lucknow.

"I have to say the Akhilesh aam (mango) is far sweeter than the Modi aam, but the Modi aam's taste is more sublime," the 75-year-old Padma Shri winner told NDTV in an interview.

Some have accused Kalimullah of trying to cash in on the upcoming elections by naming his mangoes after political figures, but he begs to differ.

"If popularity was the objective, I would have named them after my sons. My intention is to reflect the beauty of the characters they are named after," he said.

Kalimullah, a Class VII drop out has earned recognition far and wide for his innovations and dignitaries from all over the country go to Lucknow to visit his orchards.

Last year, he made headlines for naming a variety after the Prime Minister, when asked what inspired him to do so, he said Modis gesture of inviting heads of SAARC member nations to his oath taking ceremony endeared the Prime Minister to him.

Kalimullah has earlier named his mango varieties after Aishwaryia Rai and Sachin Tendulkar, he christens different varieties after people who have excelled in their areas of work so that they are always remembered.

On how he develops the varieties, Kalimullah said unlike others who develop it through grafting process, he crosses flowers and sows their seeds as every seed is different from the other.

Nevertheless this is a very arduous process and the success rate is low but the ones that succeed are worth spending time and energy as they grow into rare samples, he had said.
Aditya Reddy, a recent engineering graduate, said many of his friends were seeking information about Masters studies in Australia. (Representational image)

Hyderabad: The United States is currently the most sought-after destination for higher studies but students here are increasingly exploring opportunities in Australia and Canada. This is evident in the increasing number of inquiries and walk-ins noticed at overseas consultancies, especially in the past five months.

Aditya Reddy, a recent engineering graduate, said many of his friends were seeking information about Masters studies in Australia.

Students and parents are exploring Australia. The enrolment might not be bigger, but interest is growing, which can be gauged from the information gathering exercise at student recruitment agencies in the twin-cities, he said.

N.L.N. Reddy, CBIT chief placement officer, said the United States will remain the dream destination. But yes, Australia and Canada are generating a lot of interest, he said.

Overseas consulting expert A. Subhaker said part-time work rules were flexible in Australia. A student can work for 40 hours per fortnight unlike in the US where off-campus part-time jobs are illegal, he said.

He said many top consultancies had been getting 40 to 50 inquiries about Australia study every month in the last five months (January-May), which is almost a 50 per cent jump compared to last year. About 30,000-40,000 students from India went to Australia for higher study last year.
Railway minister Suresh Prabhu greets his Cabinet colleague Sanjeev Kumar Balyan, minister of state for agricultural, as the latter arrives for the ICAI-organised investor awareness programme in Kochi on Thursday. (Photo: ARUNCHANDRA BOSE)

KOCHI: The renovation work of the Harbour Terminus railway station would be completed before March next year, Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu told reporters on Thursday. Since the renovation of the station was a very popular demand, instructions would be issued to railway officials to complete work this year itself if possible, he said after inaugurating a slew of railway projects at the Ernakulam south railway station.

The minister also said the historic old railway station in Ernakulam would be developed as a model station with the support of the state government. The development of the old station would be taking into account the bird sanctuary in the close vicinity of the station. It would be developed as one of the greenest stations in the country, he added. Mr. Prabhu also said discussions would be held with the state government on rehabilitating the families staying in railway property.

The minister also denied reports about a lobby based in Chennai sabotaging the railway development projects in the state. There is no such lobby in the railways, he said. The minister also refuted the allegations that the Railways had been showing discrimination against Kerala. The allocation of Kerala in the railway budget was increased by 217 per cent last year compared with the previous years, he said.

Mr. Prabhu said 400 railway stations in the country had been identified to be developed as signature entities of the cities in which these stations were located. The project would be implemented in public- private-partnership model with the support of public sector undertakings. He said the Railways had initiated the work of providing wi-fi services in railway stations and the facility had been introduced in Ernakulam south station.

The railway stations in Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Thrissur and Kozhikode would be provided with wi-fi facility in the next phase. The minister formally dedicated the electrification of Cheruvathoor-Shornnur route besides inaugurating the new railway station at Nilambur Road station. The minister also inaugurated the emergency medical services centre, AC waiting room and new vegetarian cafe at Ernakulam south station. KV Thomas MP, MLAs Hibi Eden, PT Thomas and several others attended the function.
Rain has washed away metal topping on the Godimalla road, at Alampur. It now takes an hour to travel 17 km. (Photo  P. SURENDRA)

Hyderabad: The quality of roads built for the upcoming Krishna Pushkaralu is abysmal, and a few roads have been totally ruined by the recent rains in the vast Mahbubnagar district.

The Panchayat Raj department was sanctioned Rs 64.27 crore to build 60 metal roads, with bitumen or cement toppings, from the existing highways to the newly-proposed ghats.

Officials began the work immediately after the money was sanctioned. It is said that 15 per cent of proposed roads have been constructed leading to the banks of the river Krishna.

The government has proposed to have 52 Pushkar ghats, 35 of them new. The government has sanctioned Rs 100 crore to build the bathing ghats and repairs to the panchayat raj guest houses apart from the roads.

So far, the Panchayat Raj officials have completed works of worth Rs 9.16 crore at several places. But the work has been of such poor quality that the metal roads were badly damaged.

The new roads at Godimalla near Alampur were badly damaged before they could be topped with bitumen or cement. Ironically, several existing roads were damaged by the heavy vehicles used to build the new roads. Several village roads in Alampur and Itikyala mandals were damaged due to this.

Panchayat Raj engineer-in-chief M. Satyanara-yana Reddy said that he along with special chief secretary S.P. Singh would visit all the ghats and check the quality in works.

We will take action against erring contractors if their work is of low quality, he said. The departments superintending engineer M. Raghu said the recent rain had impacted the new roads. We are rectifying the problem and taking measures to ensure that it does not happen again, he said.

Traffic crawling at 20km/h

The state government has proposed to build 35 more pushkar ghats in Mahbubnagar district in addition to the 17 ghats on the banks of the Krishna.

Although the government was thinking of distributing the expected rush of pilgrims to the Krishna Pushkaralu to the new ghats, they are bedevilled by poor connectivity.

A few proposed ghats in Alampur, Maktal, Gadwal and Kolhapur mandal have poor quality roads leading up to them. The Godimalla ghat in Alampur mandal is 17 km from the Alampur temple. The road is so bad that it takes one hour to cover the distance.

The path  it cannot be called a road  faces bottlenecks in some villages on the way. Roads and Panchayat Raj officials are repairing damaged culverts, which has further affected the roads. Traffic crawls at about 20kmph in some villages in Itikyala and Alampur mandals.

Mr Krishna Reddy and Mr Kodanda Ramaiah from Godimalla asked who would come to these remote places for a holy dips. Road connectivity is very poor. The village has two roads, one from the highway and another from Alampur. Another route is totally damaged. The Alampur road is only one for pilgrims. The single roads may not suit them, they said.
VIJAYAWADA: Union minister M. Venkaiah Naidu said in Vijayawada on Thursday that the Centre will increase the number of medical colleges across the country.

The Union ministers re-marks, made during his visit to BJPs state office in Vijayawada, over the proposed increase in the number of medical colleges in the country has attracted the attention of the medical community from the two Telugu states.

Speaking on the occasion, he said the aforementioned decision of the government was taken keeping in view the demand for doctors and health services. He also sa-id the government has de-cided to open medical colleges in every district, both in public and private sector. The new medical colleges will be affiliated to government hospitals located in the district headquarters.

Welcoming Mr Venkaiah Naidu's statement, Medical Council of India (MCI) member from Telangana, Dr K. Ramesh Reddy said that there is a need for more doctors in India but there is unequal distribution of colleges and seats at present. The medical colleges are mainly concentrated in Maharashtra, Ka-rnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala and Pu-ducherry, Dr Ramesh Re-ddy said and added that despite 53,000 joining the profession per year across the country the demand could not be met.


INSV Mhadei received by MCGV Retriever. An Indian Navy photo

NEW DELHI (PTI): Braving rough seas whipped up by the South West monsoons, Indian Navy sail boat Mhadei with an all-women crew on Tuesday sailed into Port Louis in Mauritius, 20 days after it had set off from Goa.



This is the first open ocean voyage by an all-women crew on any vessel of the Indian Navy.



Lieutenant Commander Vartika Joshi, a naval architect, is the first woman skipper of Mhadei. The boat is crewed by Lieutenant P Swathi, Lieutenant Pratibha Jamwal (Air Traffic Control specialists), Lieutenant Vijaya Devi, Sub Lieutenant Payal Gupta (both education officers) and Lieutenant B Aishwarya, a naval architect.



The 2,100 nautical miles voyage was covered by Mhadei in 20 days, a statement by the Navy said.



The timing of the voyage was chosen to expose the crew to rough weather that they are likely to encounter during their attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 2017.



Mhadei encountered winds of up to 35 knots and a swell of up to 5 m during the onward leg from Goa to Mauritius.



This adequately met the training aims of the voyage. The strenuous journey also provided the crew with an opportunity to consolidate their theoretical and practical training undergone so far.



The return journey from Port Louis to Goa is slated to commence on June 24. Mhadei is expected to arrive in Goa in early July.


New Delhi: The AAP has removed its MLA Alka Lamba as party spokesperson after she "deviated from party line" while making a statement on Transport Minister Gopal Rai being relieved of the charge.

Although the party refused to comment on the development calling it an "internal matter", sources said the Chandni Chowk MLA was asked to quit the post.

Lamba came under fire after giving a statement that Rai had been "relieved" of the portfolio so that the AAP government's premium bus scheme could be investigated by the Anti-Corruption Branch in a free and fair manner. The opposition BJP had approached the ACB demanding a probe into this matter.

The ruling AAP had maintained that Rai was divested of the Transport portfolio on his request that he had undergone a surgery.

Reacting to the development, Lamba, who is also a parliamentary secretary, said she was a disciplined worker and respected the party's decision.

"If I have inadvertently made any mistake then I will surely do penance for it so that my party, which has been fighting corruption, does not get harmed because of me," she wrote on Twitter.

Party sources said the AAP MLA had been warned several times for her statements and comments on social media, which were not in sync with the party.

"Lamba had been given instructions not to talk or post anything if she was not aware of the party line. In the past 7-8 months, she had been warned several times. In this matter when Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was already speaking, there was no need for her to make a statement which was incorrect," a senior party leader said.

AAP's Delhi unit convenor Dilip Pandey said the Transport Minister was relieved of the post purely on health grounds and one should not connect wrong dots.

"His health was really bad and the party is very concerned about him. He still spends around 95 per cent of his time in hospitals. The organisation decided to relieve him of the portfolio which consumes a lot of time and energy. This could allow him to concentrate on his health," he said.

On June 14, Rai was relieved of the charge of the Transport department as sought by him on health grounds, even as the Opposition BJP and Congress termed it a fallout of an ACB probe into the AAP government's app-based premium bus service scheme.

Rai refuted the allegations saying that he quit solely on health grounds. He also "voluntarily" presented himself before ACB and claimed that the probe agency was "totally clueless" about how to substantiate the graft charges in the scheme.
New Delhi: A delegation of five opposition parties, including JD(U), CPI(M) and NCP, will on Thursday visit Kairana where it will meet residents and address a gathering of civil society, alleging that BJP's claim of exodus of Hindus and subsequent visit by a party team have created "anxiety and tension" in Western Uttar Pradesh.

"They (BJP) have tested the waters in Godhra and Muzaffarnagar riots and seen the results and are in search of (an opportunity for) doing the same before the upcoming UP Assembly election," JD(U) general secretary KC Tyagi said in a statement.

Condemning BJP president Amit Shah's statement on "exodus" of Hindus in Kairana, the opposition parties alleged that the statement has created tension in the area.

The delegation which will visit Kandhla and Kairana include JD(U) lawmaker KC Tyagi, CPI(M) lawmaker Md Salim, CPI's D Raja, NCP lawmaker DP Tripathi and RJD spokesperson Manoj Jha.

"They will meet with all sections of the society and address a gathering of civil society in Kairana. Members of the delegation took strong exception to and emphatically condemned the statement made by Shah about Kairana exodus," Tyagi said.

A nine-member BJP team today visited Kairana to review the situation over alleged migration of Hindus that has set off a political slugfest even as Congress said the BJP leadership has been "totally exposed" after a party lawmaker's U-turn on the issue.

The fact-finding team was announced by Amit Shah on Monday during the course of its National Executive meeting in Allahabad after BJP lawmaker Hukum Singh alleged there was a communal angle to the 'migration' from Kairana in Shamli district in UP where elections are due next year.

Hukum Singh, who had recently alleged that several Hindu families have been forced to migrate from Kairana following atrocities from "one particular community", did a volte face on Tuesday, saying that it was "not communal" in nature but had more to do with the law and order situation.

Earlier in the day, JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav cautioned against any attempt to foment communal tension ahead of the Assembly polls.

"People from Kairana did come to me. They told me that what all they (BJP) are saying is a lie. It is nice that they (BJP) have made a U-turn from what they have earlier said. Soon there will be elections in UP, there should not be any tension on communal divide," he said.
Thiruvananthapuram: The Congress factions have demanded a total revamp of the party from the grassroots-level instead of a cosmetic surgery.

The committee headed by KPCC vice-president V. D. Satheeshan will hold a meeting on Thursday to plan a policy statement to strengthen the party.

The AICC leadership has invited 50 state leaders to New Delhi to discuss the party affairs next month. The lower rung of the party had no role so far in decision-making which was done by the top leaders.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi would decide on organisational elections and party revamp, said a senior KPCC spokesperson.

The high command plans to make changes in all the states. The recommendations of the KPCC camp executive held at Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Development Studies (RGIDS) at Neyyar Dam would be incorporated in the policy statement. On Thursday, a draft policy will be prepared which would be discussed in the next KPCC meeting, said a KPCC general secretary.

Apart from Mr Satheeshan, the other members of the committee are former deputy speaker Palode Ravi, KPCC treasurer Johnson Abraham, KPCC general secretaries P. M. Suresh Babu and Sajeev Joseph and KPCC secretary Mannar Abdul Latheef.
Chandigarh: The Election Commission on Wednesday asked to appear before it the three candidates who contested the Rajya Sabha polls in Haryana and also those who filed a complaint with the poll body alleging the pen provided for marking the votes was "replaced".

"They (the complainants) have given their complaint to EC... I will listen to their version. We have requested them to come for an inquiry," state's Chief Electoral Officer Vijay Singh Dahiya said.

Congress, INLD and Independent candidate RK Anand had moved EC, alleging someone had changed the original pen provided by the election officials with another one for a while which resulted in some votes being declared as invalid.

State Congress President Ashok Tanwar, who had filed a complaint on behalf of his party, said, "EC has called us as we had filed a complaint. All three candidates - (Union Minister) Birender Singh, Subhash Chandra and Anand have also been called."

Congress had claimed it was a "conspiracy" by BJP-RSS to defeat Anand, a candidate backed by it, and demanded countermanding of the election to both the Rajya Sabha seats, while INLD had alleged that Congress leader BS Hooda and BJP were "responsible" for the 14 votes of party legislators being declared invalid, leading to the victory of BJP-supported Independent candidate Subhash Chandra.

A team of the Election Commission had on Tuesday visited the Assembly secretariat in Chandigarh for an inquiry into the matter.

The Haryana Vidhan Sabha Secretary RK Nandal, who was the Returning Officer for the polls, had on Tuesday said there was very "rare chance" of the pen provided for marking the votes being changed.
Patna: JD(U) on Thursday decided not to renew party membership of former party MLA Usha Sinha, wife of controversial Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) Chairman Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh, who was allegedly involved in the +2 examination muddle.

"Usha Sinha's membership of the party will not be renewed," Bihar JD(U) President Basistha Narayan Singh said.

Sinha was not occupying any position in the party and since membership drive was on, it had been decided that her membership would not be renewed, he said. Sinha was a former JD(U) MLA from Hilsa in Nalanda district.

Wife of former Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh, she has been made a co-accused in the toppers scandal.

Both have gone into hiding and evading arrest after a warrant was issued against them by the Court.

Bihar JD(U) President said since a government inquiry was going against her, it was decided not to keep her in the party.

Sinha, who joined as Principal of Ganga Devi Women College in Patna, has already been replaced by senior professor Kanchan Chakhaiyar after Magadh University decided to appoint him for the position.

Her husband, an ex-BSEB chairman is alleged to be the kingpin of the scam which was exposed by media by conducting interview of toppers of Arts and Science streams Ruby Rai and Saurabh Shreshta respectively, who gave unconvincing replies to very simple questions.
Panaji: A day after Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar disclosed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi assessed from him the impact of Arvind Kejriwal's public meeting, AAP leader Ashutosh on said PM Modi was "scared" of his party's expanding footprint.

"This is exactly what we were saying all along. This (fear) is also related to the move to disqualify 21 Delhi AAP MLAs. (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi is scared of AAP," he said.

Parsekar had on Tuesday said that the Prime Minister asked him about the recent public meeting conducted by Delhi Chief Minister and AAP National Convener Arvind Kejriwal in the coastal state and its impact.

"Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) asked me about (the) recent (Arvind) Kejriwal (public) meeting and if (it will have) any future impact...(and) I said...no," he had told reporters here after returning from New Delhi.

Ashutosh said, "Modi's inquiry with the Goa CM clearly indicates that he is scared of AAP...the way the party has been spreading across the country, including Punjab and Goa". AAP has already announced its plan to contest the 2017 Goa Assembly elections.

In his well-attended maiden rally last month, Kejriwal had lashed out at BJP and Congress.

"We have made our mark in Goa. Everyday we are improving our position in Goa. People have decided to reject BJP and Congress party this time (during upcoming polls)," he said.

Kejriwal also criticised the Goa chief minister over reinstatement of the latter's brother-in-law Dilip Malvankar, who was arrested earlier by ACB under graft charge, in state government service.

"BJP came to power on the promise of zero tolerance towards corruption. But recently Parsekar reinstated his own brother-in-law (Malavankar) who was caught accepting bribe. The people of Goa have decided that they will not have a CM who is openly supporting corruption," the AAP leader said.

Malvankar, a senior officer at the Goa Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC), was suspended in August 2015, after the ACB caught him while allegedly accepting bribe of Rs. one lakh for allotment of land in Tuem Industrial Estate.

Amid protests by the Congress, Goa Forward and NCP against the reinstatement, Parsekar has defended the move saying, "law is equal for all and Malvankar's was one of many such cases where suspended officials are reinstated".
Chennai: Governor K. Rosaiah will address the Tamil Nadu Assembly on Thursday, outlining the priorities of the AIADMK Government in its second consecutive term.

Mr Rosaiah will address the Assembly at 11 am on Thursday after which the House will be adjourned til lFriday. The Business Advisory Committee headed by Speaker P. Dhanapal will meet to finalise the tenure of the Assembly session. On Friday, the House is likely to be adjourned for the day after paying condolences to Thiruparankundram MLA Seenivel, who passed away a week after he won the Assembly elections.

The motion of thanks to Governor's address is likely to begin on Monday and continue till Thursday, when the Chief Minister will reply to the motion of thanks.
Union minister Ravisankar Prasad hugs Karthick from Pinarayi village who sustained injuries from an alleged CPM attack. BJP district secretary S Suresh, P.K. Krishnadas, Sivada, another victim and BJP state president Kummanam Rajasekharan, look on.

Thiruvananthapuram: Union Information Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has flayed the CPM policy of preventing the Opposition, including the BJP, from functioning in Kannur district. Inaugurating a protest meeting at the martyrs square at Palayam here on Thursday against the CPM violence in Kannur, he asked Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to control his party workers and restore democracy.

He said the people of Kerala had voted the CPM to power with the hope of maintaining peace and harmony. But unfortunately, even children and women were facing violence which cannot be tolerated.

The BJP is in power at the centre and in 15 states. The BJP has not prevented the CPM from working anywhere. Mr Pinarayi is responsible for the states affairs and not central CPM leaders like Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat, he said and stopped his speech mid-way when the customary prayer at Palayam Juma Masjid was relayed through the mike.

State BJP president Kummanam Rajasekharan said Pinarayi village was not the chief ministers property. Mr. Vijayan is spreading false campaigns against national womens commission chairperson Lalitha Kumaramangalam who visited the village two days ago to study the situation, he said.
Welcome to Operation Polarisation, Season Two, in Uttar Pradesh. Season One, launched with the Muzaffarnagar riots in August-September 2013 and ending in Narendra Modis declaration of Amit Shah as the man of the match, had a great run. With the state likely to vote as early as February 2017, the BJP is leaving no stone unturned in an attempt to match its 2014 performance. Despite the fact that the BJP hasnt been in power in the state since 2002 and in the past two Assembly polls ended up a distant third, its breathtaking performance in the Lok Sabha polls makes the party a strong contender for power in the state. Failure to match  or come close  to the magical figure of 2014 would seriously dent the BJPs image and its bid to secure another term in 2019.

As a combo of communal campaign and development spiel worked for Mr Modi and the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections, it was only to be expected that this formula would be dusted and remodelled for the necessities of 2016-17. The bare outlines of this was visible at the BJP national executive meeting in Allahabad last weekend when Mr Modi was emphatic in using the D-word while Mr Shah stirred the communal cauldron by terming the so-called exodus from Kairana as an eye-opener. A revelation it indeed was as it established that the BJP was again resorting to the use of a two-faced campaign and speaking with a forked tongue. For once, the BJP cannot deflect the blame on fringe forces as the party president is not anything but the official voice of the party.

After its claim of an extensive Hindu exodus from the western UP town was established as grossly exaggerated, the BJP will undoubtedly have to temper its Kairana script. But this doesnt mean that it will stop attempts at widening the communal schism in the state. Issues like the Moradabad riots and Dadri lynching incident may be against all tenets of political morality, but the BJP and the Sangh Parivar have a considered view evolved over many decades that promoting social prejudice and levelling populist charges is the best avenue for its growth. Whether one likes it or not, one section of Hindus can be visualised nodding their heads in appreciation at Sanjeev Balyans assertion that after all, Mohammed Akhlaq and his family alone would not have consumed the animal whose meat was sent to the Mathura lab. As storing and eating beef is illegal in UP, the police should investigate the matter and book all Muslims of the village, he said.

There is ample reason to believe that the respite after Hukum Singhs claim boomeranged on the BJP will last only till the time the party doesnt get another occasion to vitiate the atmosphere. In the absence of dramatic positives from various initiatives of the Narendra Modi sarkar, it is certain promissory development slogans will alone not secure the state. For the moment, Mr Modi is limiting himself to promising development of the state the way he did in 2014. In Allahabad, Mr Modi also used several politically correct words in his fabled seven-word code for party workers. But when the party chief referred to Kairana from the same venue without a fact check, will party workers take Mr Modi at face value?

The BJP has curiously trained all its guns on the Samajwadi Party and made little reference to Mayawati and the Bahujan Samaj Party. It will be incorrect to read a potential understanding between the BJP and BSP into this. On the contrary, the BSP is now regarded as the frontrunner in UP. The BJPs offensive solely against the SP and the UP government is merely a ploy to garner the anti-incumbency sentiment and position itself as the main alternative. In the normal way, as power has alternated between Ms Mayawati and the Yadav clan since 2002, the BSP would be the natural recipient of the rising anti-SP disposition in the state, and the BJP is trying to elbow out the BSP from public perception.

The BJP is also directing its offensive against SP as it is more identifiably entrenched among Muslims. Projecting the SP as its main foe, the BJP estimates, will enable it to consolidate the Hindu votebank by accusing the SP of appeasing Muslims. Though Muslims have supported the BSP too, the Yadav clan is seen as consistent cultivators of the community. The BJP would prefer if Muslims cast their lot completely with a single party and dont opt for tactical voting seat by seat and going with the candidate with the best chance of defeating the BJP.

What is crucial, however, in the BJP gameplan is the solution it eventually finds to its leadership dilemma in the state. There are two clear choices: First, it can opt for the Maharashtra, Haryana or Jharkhand models, where votes were sought in the name of Mr Modi. Inversely, the polls in UP can also be contested after projecting a chief ministerial candidate the way the party did in Assam. The BJPs predicament stems from the fact that it doesnt have a credible and popular local face in the state.

The names that have been floated so far have at least one, if not more, factors ranged against them. Among those that are being considered, Smriti Irani is possibly the most charismatic, but securing acceptability for her in the party and the Sangh will test the sparse persuasive skills of the Modi-Shah duo. The risks of seeking votes in the name of Mr Modi are ample, specially if the gamble fails. Just two years ahead of another parliamentary contest, a bloodied nose will be a setback to Mr Modis vanity and the partys prospects. Deciding the set of issues with which it will seek a mandate is the least of the BJPs anxieties at the moment.
Sections of the Congress Party in UP evidently want Varun Gandhi to be drafted into the Congress. The demand has been voiced by a general secretary of the state unit. That itself doesnt mean much, for designations are given out of expediency these days, and do not necessarily conform to a persons stature. Nevertheless, the demand is so out of the ordinary that it merits some attention.

Varun is as much a Nehru-Gandhi as his first cousins Rahul and Priyanka, but he chose to swing to the BJP. Those in UP who want him to be in the Congress to revive the partys fortunes in the state overlook the fact that Varun had shot into prominence in the BJP some years ago after making flaming hot communal speeches against the Muslim community. It is for the Congress to decide  if it takes the demand with any seriousness  how these past speeches will play with the minority voter in the Assembly polls next year.

The BJP had grasped at Varun and made him a general secretary only because he was a Nehru-Gandhi. That was to cock a snook at Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. Since then the saffron party has shelved him. His utility for them seemed over with remarkable swiftness. If Varun recants his earlier known views, he could certainly be eligible to be in the Congress. Of course, asking for him indicates a lack of confidence in Rahul Gandhis abilities.
The space agency had earlier sent 10 satellites into orbit in a single mission in 2008.(Representational Image)

Bengaluru: Indian Space Research Organisation will launch a record 20 satellites in a single mission on June 22 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-C34 will be used to carry the satellites, including India's earth observation spacecraft Cartosat-2, from the Second Launch Pad(SLP) of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 09.25 AM, ISRO said today.

"Mission Readiness Review (MRR) committee and Launch Authorisation Board (LAB) will meet in the days to come, after reviewing, clearance will be given for the countdown," a senior ISRO official told PTI.

The space agency had earlier sent 10 satellites into orbit in a single mission in 2008. PSLV-C34 will launch 19 co-passenger satellites together weighing about 560 kg at lift-off into a 505 km polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO). ISRO said the total weight of all the 20 satellites carried on board PSLV-C34 is about 1,288 kg.

The co-passengers include satellites from the US, Canada, Germany and Indonesia as well as two satellites from Indian Universities. The mission would carry LAPAN A3 of Indonesia, BIROS of Germany, SKYSAT GEN 2-1 of US, MVV of Germany among the micro satellites, ISRO sources had earlier said.

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Researchers from British universities of East Anglia and Reading -- and from four Indian institutions: the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS) Bangalore, the Indian National Centre for Climate Information Services (INCOIS) Hyderabad , the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) NOIDA NCR and the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) Chennai, will embark on June 24 from Chennai on the Indian research vessel Oceanographic Research Vessel ORV Sindhu Sadhana. Simultaneously other researchers from India and the University of Reading will fly out in a British research aircraft to make observations in the atmosphere.

The scientists will combine oceanic and atmospheric measurements to monitor weather systems as they are generated, in an Rs 80 crore (Pounds sterling 8 million) project, one of the biggest scientific studies of the Indian monsoon.

Explains Professor P N Vinayachandran, of the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore who will lead the field experiment on board ORV Sindhu Sadhana:

"The main objective of this project is to study the contrasting coupled ocean atmosphere system in the southern Bay of Bengal. The western part of the southern Bay of Bengal falls under the rain-shadow region whereas the easter part receives large amount rainfall. In two previous expedition carried out my Indian during 2009 and 2012, the western part was investigated in detail. Scientific objectives of BoBBLE have been drawn from the Continental Tropical Convergence Zone (CTCZ) programme conducted during 2009 and 2012 with support from Department of Science and Technology and Ministry of Environment and Forests . The focus of this year's experiment will be on the eastern part of the Bay of Bengal. Earlier, India had conducted Bay Of Bengal Monsoon Experiment (BOBMEX) in the northern Bay of Bengal during 1999 and Arabian Sea Monsoon Experiment (ARMEX) in 2002 to understand the role of these respective regions on monsoon rainfall over India."

"The complete suite physical, chemical and biological parameters will be measured during BoBBLE from east of Sri Lanka into the eastern Bay of Bengal. The data set will be used to understand features of the ocean and the overlying atmosphere lying under contrasting monsoonal regions, marked by a rain shadow zone to the east of Sri Lanka in the west and rainy regions in the eastern Bay of Bengal. The results will also be used to enhance the performance of ocean models in India."

Says University of East Anglias School of Environmental Sciences' lead researcher Prof Adrian Matthews: The Indian monsoon is notoriously hard to predict. It is a very complicated weather system and the processes are not understood or recorded in science. We are aiming for a better understanding of the actual physical processes. What we have now are imperfect models for predicting monsoon rainfall when it hits land, so this will create better forecasts."

He adds Ultimately, the goal is to improve the prediction of monsoon rainfall over India. This will be enormously beneficial for Indias subsistence farmers, who need to know when and how much rain will fall. This would then enable them to change the timing of how they plant their crops.... Nobody has ever made observations on this scale during the monsoon season itself, so this is a truly ground-breaking project."

The project is called the Bay of Bengal Boundary Layer Experiment (BoBBLE). In addition to the two universities, the UK participants include the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton. The team will spend a month at sea  with data from the 250-mile stretch of international water beamed back to using mobile phone signals daily. Scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) will release underwater robots to monitor how ocean conditions influence monsoon rainfall. Researchers will use this data to create computer models of the ocean to determine how it affects weather systems and rainfall over India.

The project is funded the Indian Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the (UK) Natural Environment Research Council, the Newton Fund, and the UK's Met Office.

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A Singapore design team has created a jacket that massages your muscles and attempts to correct your posture. (Representational image)

A Singapore design team claims to have come up with a solution to coping with aches and pain in the office - a jacket that massages your muscles and attempts to correct your posture.

Controlled by a mobile app and able to run for around three hours after a USB charge, 'Aira' uses air pressure devices inside the jacket which expand to target pressure points and produce the sensation of a massage.

Lin Wei Liang, the CEO of designers TWare, said the jacket was a practical office aid for people who had developed posture problems from sitting at a desk for lengthy periods or spent too long hunched over a mobile device.

"What we have here is much more invisible, discreet, something that you can wear just like a normal hoodie or jacket, and yet you can get that massage without people noticing," he told Reuters.

Lin said his company was in the process of securing a patent for the jacket, which retails at $119 and has been developed with more than $75,000 of funds raised using crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.

However, not everyone is convinced. Physiotherapist Michelle Tong agreed it could be used to de-stress but was unsure about its ability to treat pain.

"You question whether the person would develop a tolerance to it," she told Reuters.

"Each time they're using it, they end up having to apply a high pressure each time, just to get the same effect, as you would if you were taking painkillers for the long-term."

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The FCC has already been taking some steps that would change how broadband providers act

WASHINGTON: A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the government's "net neutrality" rules, preserving regulations that force internet providers such as Comcast and AT&T to treat all online traffic  everything from Netflix and cat videos to games and downloads  equally.

The 2-1 ruling is a sweeping victory for the Obama administration and the consumer groups and internet companies that have pushed net neutrality for years. The Federal Communications Commission's rules block internet service providers from favoring their own services and disadvantaging others; blocking other sites and apps; and creating "fast lanes" for video and other data services that pay for the privilege.

On technical grounds, the ruling upholds the FCC's authority to regulate broadband service as a utility, much like phone service, and to forbid what it considers unreasonable practices. It applies equally to wired broadband providers like cable companies and mobile ones such as Verizon.

TOUGHER REGULATION DOWN THE ROAD

The net neutrality rules have been in effect since June, and the court's decision isn't going to change how the internet works tomorrow. But the FCC has already been taking some steps that would change how broadband providers act. The ruling could pave the way for tougher restrictions on cable and phone companies that affect what services they offer, which consumer data they can use and how, and what they can charge.

The providers who filed the lawsuit say they'll appeal.

"This decision is huge for the FCC's authority," said Marvin Ammori, a longtime net-neutrality advocate. "We won big on everything." That sets the stage for what Ammori and several analysts see as the next big battle. That will likely involve "zero rating"  the practice of exempting preferred video services from customer data caps.

Comcast, for example, lets you can watch video at home with its Stream service with no danger of bumping against your data cap (if you have one). T-Mobile's Binge On program lets you watch any video you want from Netflix and many other providers without counting it as data use. Net-neutrality advocates say these types of practices are unfair and tilt the market toward certain favored providers.

Other consequences are more difficult to gauge. Christopher Yoo, a professor of law, engineering and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, said the ruling could mean higher prices for some services, while providers might drop others altogether.

NET NEUTRALITY'S LONG SLOG

"I think everyone has to be shocked at the magnitude of the FCC victory," said MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett. But it was a long time coming.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had previously struck down similar rules from the FCC  twice  although at the time the FCC based them on a different and more tenuous claim of legal authority.

The FCC shifted tactics and moved to treat broadband as a utility after President Barack Obama publicly urged the commission to protect consumers by doing so. Providers like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T said the resulting rules threaten innovation and undermine investment in broadband infrastructure.

The telecom industry made its case mainly on technical grounds. It argued that broadband is an "information service" and not a utility, because providers offer both internet access and services such as email. Under current law, information services are also exempt from net-neutrality regulation.

But the same court ruled that the FCC was justified in reclassifying broadband as a telecom utility because consumers see broadband as a pipe for internet service and a way to get online to use "third-party" services like Gmail and Netflix.

A SLAP AT BROADBAND PROVIDERS

"Given the tremendous impact third-party internet content has had on our society, it would be hard to deny its dominance in the broadband experience," Judges David Tatel and Sri Srinivasan wrote in a 115-page majority opinion that denied all challenges to the rules.

"Over the past two decades, this content has transformed nearly every aspect of our lives, from profound actions like choosing a leader, building a career, and falling in love to more quotidian ones like hailing a cab and watching a movie," the judges said. "The same assuredly cannot be said for broadband providers' own add-on applications."

In a lengthy dissent, Judge Stephen Williams wrote that the FCC "fails to offer a reasoned basis" for its view that giving preferential treatment to customers who pay for faster service is a problem. By regulating broadband service like "natural monopolies," Williams said the FCC provides "little economic space for new firms seeking market entry or relatively small firms seeking expansion through innovations."

Tatel and Srinivasan were appointed by Democratic presidents  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively. Williams was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Opponents of the ruling are already calling on Congress to restrict its reach, but experts say it's unlikely such a law would pass before the election.

"We have always expected this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court, and we look forward to participating in that appeal," said David McAtee, AT&T senior executive vice president and general counsel, in a statement posted on the company's website.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler praised the ruling as an affirmation of the government's power to keep the internet open for all consumers.

"After a decade of debate and legal battles, today's ruling affirms the commission's ability to enforce the strongest possible internet protections both on fixed and mobile networks  that will ensure the internet remains open, now and in the future," Wheeler said.

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Other organisations targeted by Russian spies include network of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees.

Russian government hackers breached the computer network of the Democratic National Committee to obtain the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, say the officials.

Reported by BBC, the hack did not expose financial or personal information, however, hackers were able to read all email and chats.

The DNCs computer network was infiltrated in a serious incident, said chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. She also pointed out that a cyber security firm has been hired to help, to kick out the intruders and secure our network.

However, Russia denied the DNC hack.

In a statement to Reuters Moscow, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlins spokesman said, I completely rule out a possibility that the [Russian] government or the government bodies have been involved in this.

The official said that hackertwo separated sophisticated adversaries who had access to the DNC network has been expelled in a major compute cleanup campaign.

Cyber security firm CrowdStrike said, Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian governments powerful and highly capable intelligence services.

Other organisations targeted by Russian spies include network of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, US official said in a statement, reported by The Washington Post.

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Addis Ababa: More than 400 people have been killed in Ethiopia since November in a crackdown on anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch said Thursday, but the government immediately dismissed the claims.

"Tens of thousands" more were also arrested by security forces in "widespread protests in the Oromia region since November 2015," the US-based HRW said.

The protests were sparked by plans to expand the capital into outlying farmland.

The report, titled "Such a Brutal Crackdown", was based on over 125 interviews with protestors and those caught up in the violence.

It spoke of the "government's use of excessive and unnecessary lethal force and mass arrests, mistreatment in detention, and restrictions on access to information to quash the protest movement."

The demonstrations were triggered by a government plan to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa into Oromia. The project was dropped on January 12 but protests continued for weeks.

But government spokesman Getachew Reda dismissed the report, saying that HRW, "is very generous with numbers when it comes to Ethiopia" and attributed any violence on the part of security forces to "bad apples".

"The government feels regret that people are killed," he said.

'Weights tied to testicles'

Reda said the Human Rights Council of Ethiopia, a non-governmental organisation, had said 103 people died.

"Why couldn't they come up with others' names? Because those names don't exist," Reda said.

HRW however said it along with other organisations had "identified more than 300 of those killed by name and, in some cases, with photos", and it was not a case of isolated pockets of violence.

Some of those arrested and later released told HRW they were "tortured or mistreated" inside prison, with several women alleging they were raped.

"Some said they were hung by their ankles and beaten; others described having electric shocks applied to their feet, or weights tied to their testicles," HRW said.

With at least 27 million people, Oromia is the most populous of the country's federal states and has its own language, Oromo, distinct from Ethiopia's official Amharic language.

"Ethiopian security forces have fired on and killed hundreds of students, farmers, and other peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for human life," HRW's deputy Africa chief Leslie Lefkow said.

"The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation, and hold security force members accountable for abuses."
The accused was visiting Florida when she murdered her two little kids. (Photo: YouTube screenshot)

Miramar: Authorities have released new details from a 911 call made last week by the cousin of a Philadelphia woman who admitted to suffocating her two children during a visit to Florida.

The Miami Herald reports that in the eight-minute call released on Monday by Miramar police, Neisha Nettleford told the operator, "Honestly, I think they are dead."

Nettleford made the call last Wednesday, the same day the children were suffocated. She called police after Sophia Hines contacted her and told her to come home.

Nettleford said she was scared and would not go inside the house. Hines' lawyer said that Hines had postpartum depression and was off her medication the day of the suffocations.

Hines has been charged with two counts of premeditated murder. She remained in Broward County Jail on Tuesday.
A police officer stands guard as a vehicle leaves from the airport hangar of Mexico's Attorney General office, in Mexico City, after the arrival of drug lord Hector El Guero Palma. (Photo: AP)

Mexico City: A top drug-trafficking accomplice of Joaquin Guzman aka 'El Chapo', was arrested in Mexico on Wednesday for his alleged role in two murders, shortly after he was returned from the United States after completing a prison sentence for distributing cocaine.

Hector 'El Guero' Palma was a former partner of Guzman, the head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel who is now fighting extradition to the United States from a Mexican prison. Palma was rearrested by officials on his repatriation to Mexico for his "probable responsibility in two homicides" that occurred in the small Pacific state of Nayarit, according to a statement from the attorney general's office. Further details were not immediately available.

He was transferred to the Altiplano maximum security prison, from which his fellow drug lord Guzman managed to escape in 2015 before being recaptured. In the absence of Guzman, Mexican officials appear to be increasingly wary of Palma, given his ties to the Sinaloa cartel.

Palma, who first served five years in Mexico's maximum-security Puente Grande prison, was extradited to the United States in 2007. He played a key role in the cartel, which became famous in the 1980s for trafficking cocaine from Colombia in association with the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Palma served most of a 16-year sentence, which was reduced because of good behaviour, said Kristi Rodriguez, from the US penitentiary in Atwater, California.
Washington: Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week.

"They don't report them," Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. "For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this."

But FBI director James Comey said, "They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

"It's at the heart of the FBI's effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks," Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings.

Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington field office, said on Wednesday that the agency has a "robust" relationship with the local Muslim community. FBI agents operating in the area have received reports about suspicious activity and other issues from community members.

Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said the city's Muslim community has been cooperative in reporting "red flags."

"I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things," Downing said. "What we say to communities is that we don't want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behaviour."

Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has conducted several studies on Muslim-Americans and terrorism, disputed Trump's criticism. "To claim there is no cooperation is false and defamatory to the Muslim-American community," Kurzman said.

Kurzman said a January 2016 study by himself and colleagues at Duke University's Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that many law enforcement agencies had made progress in establishing trust with local Muslim-American communities.

But the study also found some tensions. In one focus group described in the study, Muslim-American participants debated when to report activity when they were unsure how to detect imminent violence.

"The group participants expressed concern that police would be more likely to encourage a plot in order to make an arrest," the authors wrote, "rather than to divert people onto a nonviolent path that community members and family members would prefer."

One imam interviewed for the project told researchers he felt that his "trust is not being reciprocated" by US government officials.

The imam told the researchers that after he attended a meeting with federal law enforcement officials designed to increase cooperation, he went to the local airport, was held for hours at security and missed his flight, the study said.

A Reuters review of court records also produced examples of Muslim-Americans informing law enforcement of possible radicalisation within their families.

Suspecting that her then 17-year-old son, Ali Amin, was radicalizing, Amani Ibrahim followed the advice of a local imam and reported her fears to law enforcement officials, according to court records. In August 2015, Amin was sentenced to 11 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to Islamic State after he helped a schoolmate travel to join the extremist group.

In 2014, the sister of Abdi Nur contacted Minneapolis police to report her younger brother missing. She later showed federal agents messages she received, in which he said he had "gone to join the brothers" and promised to see her in the afterlife. Nur has been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist group, but is still at large.

And in 2014, Adam Shafi's father, Sal Shafi, told officials in the U.S. embassy in Cairo that he was worried his son was radicalizing after Adam went missing during a family trip in Egypt.

Adam Shafi soon rejoined his family, but was arrested in July 2015 after trying to board a flight to Turkey from San Francisco airport. He was charged with attempting to provide material support to al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked group in Syria.
Washington: Lawmakers backing the release of the 28 still-secret pages of a 2002 congressional report about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are asking House Intelligence Committee leaders to declassify them by simply publishing them in the Congressional Record.

President Barack Obama has promised to release at least part of the documents, which are believed to address possible Saudi connections to the hijackers. Obama has asked the national intelligence director to review the classified pages.

Republican Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina said in a statement Wednesday that he has introduced a resolution to enable the House Intelligence Committee to declassify them.

Neither the congressional inquiry nor the subsequent 9/11 Commission found any evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials knowingly supported the Sept. 11 attackers.
Many Muslims in America now fear backlash due to the Orlando massacre. (Photo: YouTube screenshot)

Fort Pierce: Since the Orlando massacre, the small Muslim community of Fort Pierce, Florida -- the killer's hometown -- has found itself the target of hate-filled insults and abuse.

"Scumbags!" -- the phrase is hurled from a pickup truck rolling by the Fort Pierce Islamic Center, housed in what was once a church.

As the faithful arrive at the center, passing cars honk and their occupants fling out profanity-laced slurs against Islam and the prophet Mohammed -- including not-so-veiled death threats.

Fort Pierce's only other mosque, located along a highway, is in a totally anonymous building behind an auto dealership.

But anyone who didn't know of the Islamic Center's existence before Sunday's bloodbath at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, can't miss it now.

Journalists and TV crews are camped outside for several hours a day, drawing attention to the center where the killer, Omar Mateen, attended mosque as recently as last Friday.

"We're scared," said Bedar Bakht, a taciturn Pakistani in his 50s who prepares the evening Iftar dinner at which the faithful break their daylong fast during this Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Many stay until nearly midnight for what is normally a time of celebration, but now they leave the building in groups when it is time to go home -- as a precaution, Bakht said.

"A couple of weeks down the line, things will be back to normal. But right now it's new. People are calling, leaving stupid messages," he said.

'Ashamed'

This is the second time this house of worship has received unwelcomed publicity.

Moner Muhammad Abusalha, the first American suicide bomber in Syria's civil war, used to frequent the center before leaving for Syria where he was killed in May 2014.

Mateen, who apparently knew Abusalha, claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group after opening fire in Pulse, a popular Orlando gay club, early Sunday.

The bodies of 49 people were recovered after police stormed the club and shot and killed Mateen.

"We're cool people. We never had any problems. But because of what that guy did, we're ashamed," said a man in his 50s as he left the building.

"It used to be a night where everybody would celebrate. Now look, there's nobody. Only three people," said the man.

In the end, several dozen people turned out for the Iftar dinner, well shy of the hundred or so people who normally attend.

"I think I cooked too much," said Bakht.

Yussef Thorne, one of only a few black Muslims in the Fort Pierce community, alluded to Mateen as he arrived: "I'm a Muslim and I'm one of no fear. I come to pray. (...) And I pray for him, too."

'Destroyed almost the whole family'

Not even Mateen's father, Seddique Mateen, is so forgiving.

"If he hadn't done this horrible act probably I would, but right now I don't forgive him," Mateen, dressed in a coat and tie, told reporters.

"I don't know what, why he did it, but it's unforgiven to hurt their own family, we live in the United States as a family," he said.

Mateen said his thoughts are with the victims, and also with his three-year-old grandson.

"He destroyed almost the whole family," he said.

Omar Mateen's wife, Noor Zahi Salman, went to the family's apartment late Monday to retrieve some belongings.

In this low-rent apartment complex, brightened by the glittering sun and palm trees, few knew Mateen, except by sight.

"He didn't talk to anybody, to my knowledge. He was just passing," said Herbert Johnson, a resident of the Woodlawn Condominium.

Mateen's psychological state remains a mystery, as was the nature of his connection to homosexuality.

Several witnesses have described him as a young man who used gay dating aps, who had made advances to another man and was a regular at Pulse.

But he was totally unknown at Tattle Tails, one of the few gay bars in the St Lucie and Fort Pierce area, adjoining cities on the Florida's Atlantic coast.

Patrick, a bartender at Tattle Tails who did not want to give his full name, said he had never seen Mateen in his 10 years as a patron and employee of the bar.

The bar's owner and other servers didn't remember having crossed paths with Mateen either, he said.

In fact, Patrick said he could not remember a customer who had said they were Muslim.

The Orlando massacre exposed, tragically for families who were learning for the first time the sexual orientation of their deceased loved ones, that gays are not always accepted in the Hispanic community.

But among Muslims, the taboo is often even more pronounced.

While he expressed solidarity with the victims, Seddique Mateen publicly condemned homosexuality.

At the Islamic Center, Bakht considered the question. "Gay Muslims? I haven't met any. Maybe they're hiding."
The Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since 1959 after a failed uprising in Tibet. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama told US President Barack Obama that he is not seeking independence of Tibet from China and hoped that talks with the Chinese government would resume soon, the White House said.

"The Dalai Lama stated that he is not seeking independence for Tibet and hopes that dialogue between his representatives and the Chinese government will resume," the White House said.

"The President and the Dalai Lama agreed on the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the United States and China," said the statement issued after the two Noble laureates met at the Map Room of the White House, which was described as a personal meeting.

During the meeting, the Dalai Lama condoled Obama over shooting in Orlando on Sunday. Obama commended the Dalai Lama for his efforts to promote compassion, empathy, and respect for others.

The two leaders discussed the situation for Tibetans in China, the White House said. Obama expressed support for the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions and the equal protection of human rights of Tibetans in China.

"The President lauded the Dalai Lama's commitment to peace and nonviolence and expressed support for the Dalai Lama's 'Middle Way' approach," the White House said.

Obama in his meeting encouraged meaningful and direct dialogue between the Dalai Lama and his representatives with Chinese authorities to lower tensions and resolve differences.

"In this context, the President reiterated the longstanding US position that Tibet is a part of the People's Republic of China, and the US does not support Tibetan independence," it said, adding that the two agreed on the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the US and China.
Washington: President Barack Obama thanked the Dalai Lama on Wednesday for offering condolences after 49 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in modern US history, as the pair once again angered China by meeting at the White House.

It was Obama's fourth White House meeting with Tibetan spiritual leader, whom Beijing accuses of leading a campaign to split the region off from the rest of China. The Dalai Lama says he simply wants a higher degree of autonomy under Chinese rule.

China condemned the meeting after the White House listed it on Obama's public schedule. The meeting was closed to news media coverage, but the White House released on its Flickr account a photo by the president's official photographer of the two men greeting each other.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Obama has "warm personal feelings" toward the 80-year-old Dalai Lama and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Obama also appreciates his teachings and believes in preserving Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions, Earnest said.

The Dalai Lama led a minute of silent prayer for the shooting victims during a visit at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington on Monday, the day after a gunman opened fire at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding dozens more.

"The president thanked the Dalai Lama for his expression of condolences about the terrorist attack in Orlando over the weekend," Earnest said.

China strongly disapproved of the meeting. Its Foreign Ministry said it had made "solemn representations" to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and expressed its "firm opposition."

"We need to emphasize that the Tibetan issue is China's internal affairs and other countries do not have any right to interfere with this," spokesman Lu Kang told a daily media briefing.

"The 14th Dalai Lama is not simply a religious figure but a political figure in exile who has been conducting secessionist activities internationally under the pretext of religion," the statement said. "If President Obama meets with Dalai Lama, it will send the wrong signal to Tibetan separatist forces, and it will undermine the mutual trust and cooperation between China and the U.S."

Lu urged Washington to "stick by its promise of recognizing Tibet as part of China, and not support Tibetan independence or any separatist activities."

Earnest reiterated Wednesday that U.S. policy toward Tibet remained unchanged.

"Tibet, per U.S. policy, is considered part of the People's Republic of China, and the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence," he said. "Both the Dalai Lama and President Obama value the importance of a constructive and productive relationship between the United States and China. All of those were policy positions of the United States before the meeting occurred. Our policy hasn't changed after the meeting."

China also blames the Dalai Lama and others for inciting a wave of self-immolations among Tibetans in recent years. Dozens have set themselves on fire while calling for the return of the Dalai Lama or for Tibetan independence.

Obama held the meeting in the Map Room, instead of the Oval Office, because the Dalai Lama is not a head of state.

The president had been scheduled to travel to Wisconsin on Wednesday for his first campaign appearance with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton following his formal endorsement of her last week. But the event was postponed after the Orlando shooting, creating room on Obama's schedule to meet with the Dalai Lama, who was already visiting Washington.

Obama planned to visit Orlando on Thursday to pay tribute to the victims and meet with their loved ones.
The earlier proposal of eight F-16s to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD 699 million was heavily subsidised. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Pakistan's bid to purchase used F-16 fighter jets from Jordan might not be easy as it would require an approval from the US and be subject to end-use monitoring, officials here have said.

"While we are not going to speculate on reports that Pakistan may look to purchase used F-16s elsewhere, we would note that under US law, any re-transfers of US-origin defence items to a third party require approval from the US Government, may require Congressional notification, and would be subject to end-use monitoring," a State Department official said.

The official, who requested anonymity, was responding to a question on reports that Pakistan is considering buying used F-16 jets from Jordan after its plan to buy eight of them from the US at a highly subsidised rates fell through because of the opposition from lawmakers in the US Congress who want Islamabad to take strong action against the Haqqani network.

"The proposed terms and conditions of the Letter of Offer and Acceptance for this proposed sale of F-16 aircraft expired on May 24," the official said.

"Pakistan did not accept the offer to purchase F-16s from the United States, and the terms of the sale have expired," another State Department official said.

"We are now going for a third-party transfer of F-16s and have an offer from Jordan," Pakistan Defence Secretary Alam Khattak had said last week.

"We refer you to the Government of Pakistan to speak to their decision and future defence procurement plans," the US official said when asked about Khattak's statement.

The official was not aware if the US has received such a request from Jordan and Pakistan.

However, it is believed that there could be options for Pakistan to explore the possibility of procuring F-16 from the United States at its full price.

The earlier proposal of eight F-16s to Pakistan at an estimated cost of USD 699 million was heavily subsidised, to which the US lawmakers led by Senator Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had objected.

Informed sources argue that if Pakistan wants to pursue the sale, it could start a fresh talk with Lockheed Martin the manufacturer and negotiate a new full price for the F-16s it wants to buy.
Several hundred supporters, led by Laura Kanter, at right, marched to Sasscer Park after a vigil at Calle Cuatro Plaza in support of the Orlando shooting victims. (Photo: AP)

San Diego: A chilling post on free advertisement website Craigslist has threatened an Orlando-style massacre in California's San Diego city, saying, "you're next", in an eerie warning that has prompted an FBI probe.

A KGTV news station viewer saw the post in the men-seeking-men section of the Craigslist San Diego personal advertisements. He took a screenshot and sent it to the TV station before the post was flagged and removed.

The post was titled, "We need more Orlando's (sic)," and it was accompanied by a photo of a hand firing a revolver with a bullet coming out of the barrel.

"Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name...San Diego you are next...," the post read.

The screenshot was then sent to the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) and the FBI. SDPD Lt Scott Wahl emphasised that police have had extra officers on patrol in places where people gather in the wake of the Orlando shooting.

FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth was quoted as saying that the bureau's Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the Craigslist posting.

"This is something that's very serious, very concerning to all of us, especially given what's happened recently in Orlando," said Foxworth.

"We are going to use all lawful means available to us, so if we have to go out and get a search warrant, we will do that. If it doesn't require a search warrant, we're going to do whatever it takes to do it in a lawful and legal matter," Foxworth said.

Foxworth said there are no known credible threats to San Diego right now, but they are always keeping watch.

The post comes days after Afghan-origin Omar Mateen carried an assault rifle and a pistol into a gay club in Orlando in the wee hours of Sunday and killed 50 people while injuring 53 others. He was later shot dead by the police.
Hillary Clinton alleged that Trump's remarks have become inflammatory in the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack by an Afghan-origin American youth. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Ridiculing Donald Trump over his fixation with the phrase "radical Islam", presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said her Republican rival's "reckless" ideas like banning Muslims from entering the US would put the country in greater danger.

Clinton alleged that Trump's remarks have become inflammatory in the aftermath of the Orlando terrorist attack by an Afghan-origin American youth. 68-year-old Clinton said it is apparent that Donald Trump does not seem to grasp any of the issues.

"He has been fixated on the phrase, and I quote, 'radical Islam', as if those are magic words that, once uttered, will stop terrorists from coming after us," she charged.

Trump, she alleged, wants to ban all Muslims from entering our country and suspend immigration from large parts of the world.

"His comments have become even more inflammatory in recent days. This approach isn't just wrong; it is dangerous," Clinton said in a major policy speech on terrorism in

Virginia.

"Of course we want to keep our country safe. But I want to underscore we rely on partners in majority Muslim countries to help us fight terrorists. We need to build trust in Muslim communities here at home to counter radicalisation and the one wolf phenomenon," she argued.

Clinton said Trump's claim on birth of the Orlando shooter who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub was factually wrong.

"As has been pointed out, the terrorist in Orlando was not born in Afghanistan, as Trump claims, he was born in Queens, New York, only miles away from where Donald Trump himself was born," she said.

"A ban on Muslims would not have stopped this attack. Neither would a wall. I don't know how one builds a wall to keep the Internet out. So not one of Donald Trump's reckless ideas would have saved a single life in Orlando. It's just more evidence that he is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief," she said.

In a passionate speech, Clinton said the US deserves a Commander-in-Chief who will provide smart, steady leadership. She said if elected in the November general elections her top priority would be to identify and stop attacks by lone wolves, like the one on Orlando over the weekend resulting in deaths of 49 people.

"As President I will make identifying and stopping lone wolves a top priority. We will assemble a team from across the government, private sector and our communities to get on top of this challenge," Clinton said.

Clinton said as president she will make sure that the law enforcement and intelligence professionals have all the resources they need.

"Second, we do need to stop terrorists from getting their hands on the tools to carry out attacks so easily, especially assault weapons, military- style assault weapons, that have no place on our streets," Clinton said as she laid out her action plan to prevent a repeat of Orlando-type mass shooting by a self-radicalised youth.
ASEAN members the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as Taiwan, have competing claims to parts of the South China Sea. (Photo: AFP)

Manila: Chinese pressure was blamed on Thursday for a stunning diplomatic U-turn by Southeast Asian Nations that saw them retract a statement sounding alarm over Beijing's island building in the South China Sea.

The chaotic events at the end of a meeting of foreign ministers from China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Tuesday have led to allegations of bullying by Beijing.

The document, released by ASEAN member Malaysia and described as a joint statement from the bloc, warned developments in the hotly contested South China Sea could "undermine peace, security and stability".

The statement specified "land reclamation" as a source of tension, a clear reference to China's massive island building activities where it is trying to cement a claim to almost the whole sea.

But just hours later, Malaysia said the grouping was retracting the statement for "urgent amendments", but offered no reason. Various participants have since given conflicting explanations over what happened.

An ASEAN diplomat who was present at the meeting in the Chinese city of Kunming said that China had put the screws on some Southeast Asian nations to get them to withdraw their support.

"The usual factor, pressure from China," said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, when asked why unity crumbled.

"I suspect the two countries that opposed the statement were Cambodia and Laos."

'Crude, arrogant'

Singapore's Straits Times newspaper also reported on Thursday that the joint statement was "scuttled by the Chinese, who lobbied its friends in the grouping to block" it.

"Malaysia releasing it was a manifestation of the extreme frustration of the original five ASEAN members plus Vietnam at the particularly crude and arrogant behaviour of the Chinese," the Straits Times reported an ASEAN official as saying.

The Philippines also said Thursday that there had originally been unanimous support within ASEAN for the strongly worded statement.

"By the time the meeting ended, there was an agreement among ASEAN foreign ministers. They agreed on the text of the ASEAN statement and they agreed it would be released," Philippine foreign affairs spokesman Charles Jose told reporters in Manila.

Jose said the statement was then retracted after the meeting had ended and most foreign ministers, including the Philippines' Jose Rene Almendras, had left the venue to start returning home.

Jose would not be drawn on whether Chinese lobbying was to blame, but insisted Malaysia's initial release had not been in error.

Asked why Malaysia gave the statement to the media, Jose said: "That was the point where there was consensus among ASEAN to have that statement. So by the time it was released, there was agreement."

Indonesia said on Wednesday the release -- titled "Media statement by the ASEAN foreign ministers" -- was issued by mistake, and that it was only meant to be a "media guideline".

China has responded to the controversy by insisting there had not been unanimous support for the original statement.

"It is clear that if ASEAN wants to issue an official statement, such statement will be based on consensus," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Wednesday.

ASEAN disunity

The events have been widely seen as another example of ASEAN's inability to present a united front toward China as it dramatically expands its presence in the waterway.

China claims nearly all of the sea -- home to some of the world's most important shipping routes and of vast military importance.

ASEAN members the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as Taiwan, have competing claims to parts of the sea.

While the Philippines and Vietnam have been particularly critical, Laos and Cambodia have been generally regarded as preferring to side with their giant neighbour and benefactor.

In 2012, ASEAN foreign ministers failed to release a joint statement for the first time at the end of their annual gathering, with the Philippines blaming event host Cambodia for blocking criticism of China.

Laos this year has the rotating presidency of ASEAN, and will host a series of meetings over the coming months in which the South China Sea will inevitably be a hot talking point.
Beijing: Acknowledging that India is "inching closer" to get membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Chinese official media on Thursday said if New Delhi is admitted into the elite grouping, "nuclear balance" between India and Pakistan will be broken.

Stating that India's entry into Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", an article in the state-run 'Global Times' however said China could support India's inclusion in the 48 member nuclear club if it "played by rules".

Read: India will not join Nuclear Suppliers Group alone: Pakistan

Written by Fu Xiaoqiang, research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the article a second in as many days by the same daily highlights China's strident and vocal opposition to India's entry into NSG and concerns that its all weather ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'."

"New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month," the article said mentioning for the first time India's progress in getting support from Mexico and Switzerland.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article titled "Beijing could support India's NSG accession path if it plays by rules".

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.

"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.

"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," it said.

Read: Countries resisting India's bid to join NSG soften stand

"As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region," it said.

The reason why India has scored a big win in garnering support for its NSG membership from some countries is because Washington has started to treat New Delhi as part of the US alliance, the write-up said.

"It was only several years ago that Modi could not even get a US visa, but now he has visited the US more often than any other country during his two years in office," it said.

The US recognised New Delhi as a "major defence partner" during Modi's recent visit, meaning that the White House has given India the treatment as a US military ally, it said.

The article said that over the years, the US has been "bending the rules" to back India's nuclear projects.

"Against the backdrop of Washington's accelerated pace of promoting its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, it will be highly likely to keep supporting New Delhi's nuclear ambitions, in order to make it a stronger power to contain China," it said.

Read: As Modi comes calling, Mexico backs India's bid to join NSG

The attitude of the US has had and will undoubtedly have an impact on some other nations. For those countries which also wish to put a finger in the pie of India's market, many of them begin to back India's NSG membership, or at least not oppose it, the article said in apparent reference to majority of the countries in the NSG supporting India's entry.

"However, as a country that has signed neither the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG," it said.

Read: China opposes India's entry into NSG, wants Pakistan too

"That's why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to India's membership," it said.

The article made no mention of problems faced by Pakistan in getting into the NSG due to its past record of proliferating the nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea, where as India is seeking entry into group based on clean non-proliferation record.

"As a crucial defender of the international system against nuclear proliferation, China does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules," the article said without referring to Beijing's own nuclear power cooperation with Islamabad in supplying a number of nuclear reactors, including two 1100 mw reactors currently under construction in Karachi.

Read: NSG membership: Pursuing own policy, not concerned about Pak, says India

"For those countries that are developing nuclear technology without the acceptance of the international community, perhaps counting them into the non-proliferation mechanism will better safeguard nuclear security," it said.

But at the same the article said China backs India's entry if a fair and just principle is worked out through consensus. "Yet before that, a fair and just principle must be made through common consensus of all current members of the NSG, rather than the US and India's reckless pushing at the cost of rule-breaking".

"So far, all NSG members have signed the NPT. So the question is, if any non-signatory of the treaty wants to join the group, under what condition can it be accepted? If such a standard is to be made one day, then it will be possible for both India and Pakistan to become part of the group," it said.

"Beijing welcomes New Delhi playing a role as a major power in global governance, including producing positive effect in a nuclear non-proliferation organisation," it said.

"As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhi's path toward the club," it said.
St Petersburg, Russia: European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker defended his decision to attend an economic forum in Russia on Thursday, saying it was common sense to talk to Moscow despite lingering tensions over the Ukraine crisis.

Juncker said he was aware that some people might not approve of his visiting Russia for talks at a time when EU sanctions on Moscow remained in place, but that he thought it was the right thing to do.

He said he was expecting "frank" talks with President Vladimir Putin on a range of subjects.
Paris: A French naval ship is leaving the search for the remains of an EgyptAir jet that crashed in the Mediterranean, now that another specialized undersea search vessel is in the area and has located wreckage.

A French Navy official said today that the Laplace has finished its mission in agreement with Egyptian authorities. The Laplace detected signals from one of the plane's flight recorders last month.

Another ship, the John Lethbridge, operated by US company Deep Ocean Search, arrived on Sunday. Egyptian authorities said on Wednesday the ship had spotted and obtained images from the wreckage under water.

The Paris-Cairo flight crashed May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast, killing all 66 people aboard. The cause of the crash remains unclear.
In 2014, IS jihadists massacred Yazidis in Sinjar, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee, and capturing thousands of girls and women as spoils of war. (Photo: AFP)

Geneva: Islamic State jihadists are still committing genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria, United Nations rights investigators said Thursday.

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing," Paulo Pinheiro, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Syria said in a statement.

"ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities," he added, using another acronym for the jihadist group.

The Yazidis are neither Muslims nor Arabs and follow a unique faith despised by IS. The Kurdish-speaking minority is mostly based around Sinjar mountain in northern Iraq.

In 2014, IS jihadists massacred Yazidis in Sinjar, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee, and capturing thousands of girls and women as spoils of war.

The UN warned last year that the group appeared to be committing genocide against the Yazidis, but the COI's report "They came to destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis", published Thursday, was more conclusive.

Based partly on interviews with survivors, the report found that IS "sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment."

The group was holding Yazidis in conditions "that bring about a slow death," and was transferring Yazidi children from their families to live with IS fighters, "cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community," the report said.

It showed that men and boys over 12 were separated from their families, and those who refused to convert to Islam were killed, while thousands of women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold in slave markets.

The report said some 3,200 Yazidi women and children were currently being held by IS, mainly in Syria, where the females were used as sex slaves and the young boys were being indoctrinated and trained as fighters.
Egyptian Armed Forces spokesman shows part of the wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804. Human remains retrieved from the crash site of EgyptAir Flight 804 suggest there was an explosion on board. (Photo: AP)

Cairo: A search team on Thursday recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean last month in a major step towards establishing the cause of the tragedy.

The device was found broken into pieces but the salvage experts managed to retrieve the recorder's crucial memory unit, Egypt's civil aviation authority said.

Officials are preparing to transfer the recorder from a search vessel in the Mediterranean to Egypt for analysis, a statement said.

The cockpit voice recorder keeps track of conversations and other sounds in the pilots' cabin.

The breakthrough came hours after a deep-sea robot located pieces of the main body of the plane at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Airbus said the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery of why the plane went down with 66 people on board en route from Paris to Cairo nearly a month ago.

"The first photos of the wreckage do not allow to establish any scenario of the accident," an Airbus statement said.

"Only the black boxes could contribute to a full understanding of the chain of events which led to this tragic accident."

Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo to crash on May 19, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.

The search vessel John Lethbridge, equipped with an underwater robot, arrived in Egypt last week to begin searching an area around 290 kilometres (180 miles) north of the Egyptian coast.

The robot discovered pieces of the fuselage at "several sites", the Egyptian board of inquiry said late Wednesday.

A source close to the investigation told AFP that the robot, operated by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, had found "small fragments" of the plane.

Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the Mediterranean by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers.

Limited battery life

Search teams are still looking for the flight data recorder, which gathers information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane.

The area where the plane crashed is believed to be about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) deep and the black boxes should have had enough battery power to emit signals for four to five weeks.

France's aviation safety agency has said the EgyptAir plane transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.

On Monday, Egyptian investigators confirmed that the aircraft had made a 90-degree left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the sea.

Investigators were able to narrow down the search site thanks to an emergency signal sent via satellite by the plane's locator transmitter when it hit the Mediterranean.

The passengers on the plane were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a boy and two babies.

Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board.

The crash came after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula last October that killed all 224 people on board.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack within hours, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.

IS has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in both France and Egypt.

In October, foreign governments issued travel warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of security at its airports after IS said it downed the Russian airliner over the Sinai with a bomb concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled onboard.
Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain "under one roof". (Photo: AP)

Erbil, Iraq: Once ISIS is defeated, Iraq should be divided into three separate entities to prevent further sectarian bloodshed, with a state each given to Shi'ite Muslims, Sunnis and Kurds, a top Kurdish official said on Thursday.

Iraqi troops have expelled ISIS from some key cities the terrorists seized in 2014, and are advancing on Mosul, the largest city under ISIS control. Its fall would likely mean the end of the group's self-proclaimed caliphate.

But even if ISIS was eliminated, Iraq would still be deeply divided. Sectarian violence has continued for years and a power-sharing agreement in Baghdad has only led to discontent, deadlock and corruption.

Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) Security Council and son of KRG President Massoud Barzani, said the level of mistrust was such that they should not remain "under one roof".

"Federation hasn't worked, so it has to be either confederation or full separation," Barzani told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday in the Kurdish capital Erbil. "If we have three confederated states, we will have equal three capitals, so one is not above the other."

The Kurds have already taken steps towards realising their long-held dream of independence from Iraq, which has been led by the Shi'ite majority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003, following a U.S.-led invasion.

They run their own affairs in the north and have their own armed forces, the Peshmerga, which have been fighting ISIS terrorists with help from a U.S.-led coalition.

Sunnis should be given the option of doing the same in the provinces where they are in the majority in the north and the west of Iraq, said Barzani.

"What we are offering is a solution," he said. "This doesn't mean they live under one roof but they can be good neighbours. Once they feel comfortable that they have a bright and secure future, they can start cooperating with each other."

His father has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence this year as the region is locked in territorial and financial disputes with the central government.

Baghdad has cut off payments from the federal budget to the KRG to try to force the Kurds to sell crude produced on their territory through the state oil marketing company and not independently. The Kurds also claim the oil region of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, as part of their territory.

Barzani said that the Sunnis' feeling of marginalisation by the Shi'ite leadership had facilitated the takeover of their regions by ISIS terrorists.

In addition, Iraq endured months of wrangling and chaos over a government reshuffle that was to curb corruption. In May, frustration over the delays culminated in the unprecedented breach by protesters of the Green Zone, which houses parliament, government offices and many foreign embassies.

Ahead of the battle for Mosul, Barzani said the city's different communities should agree in advance on how to handle the aftermath. Mosul's pre-war population of 2 million was mostly Sunni, but included religious and ethnic minorities including Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis, Kurds and Turkmen.

Almost all non-Sunnis fled the ISIS takeover, along with hundreds of thousands of Sunnis who could not live under the terrorists' harsh rule or could not endure Baghdad's financial blockade imposed on ISIS-held regions.

"I think the most important part is how you manage Mosul after Daesh is defeated," he said, referring to an Arabic name of ISIS. "We don't want to see the gap of liberation and then a vacuum, which probably will turn into chaos."

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that 2016 would be the year of "final victory" over ISIS with the capture of Mosul.

The army, counter-terrorism forces and Shi'ite Muslim paramilitary fighters backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition are also in a major operation to retake the mainly Sunni city of Falluja, an hour's drive from Baghdad.
Women are for child-rearing, boys are for pleasure is a common saying across many parts of Afghanistan. (Photo: Youtube screenshot)

Tarinkot: The Taliban are accused of using child sex slaves to attack police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the cultural practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- for military gain.

The subculture of keeping boys for personal servitude and sexual pleasure is a centuries-old practice in Afghanistan, which observers call one of the most egregious violations of human rights in the country.

How widespread is it?

"Women are for child-rearing, boys are for pleasure" is a common saying across many parts of Afghanistan.

The ancient custom, banned under the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule, has seen a resurgence in recent years. It is said to be widespread across southern and eastern Afghanistan's rural Pashtun heartland, and with ethnic Tajiks across the northern countryside.

Powerful warlords, commanders, politicians and other members of the elite often keep "bachas" as a symbol of authority and affluence.

Bachas, dressed as women, are widely used by these men as dancers at private parties and are sexually exploited.

Bacha bazi is not widely seen as homosexual behaviour -- popularly demonised as a deviant sexual act, prohibited in Islam -- and is largely accepted as a cultural practice.

How has it been allowed to flourish?

Tight gender segregation in Afghan society and lack of contact with women have contributed to the spread of bacha bazi, rights groups say.

Several other factors such as an absence of the rule of law, corruption, limited access to justice, illiteracy, poverty, insecurity, and the existence of armed groups have also resulted in the spread of bacha bazi, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said in a report in 2014.

AIHRC points out that Afghanistan's criminal law prohibits rape and pederasty, but there are no clear provisions on bacha bazi.

"There is a gap and ambiguity in the laws of Afghanistan regarding bacha bazi and the existing laws do not address the problem sufficiently," the report said.

"Many of the perpetrators have connections with the security organs and by using power and giving bribes they get exempted from punishment."

Where do the boys come from? And what happens to them afterwards?

Bachas are typically aged between 10 and 18. Sometimes they are kidnapped, says AIHRC, but often desperate poverty drives their families to sell them to abusers.

"The victims of bacha bazi suffer from serious psychological trauma as they often get raped," AIHRC's report said.

"Such victims suffer from stress and a sort of distrust, hopelessness and pessimistic feeling. Bacha bazi results in fear among the children and a feeling of revenge and hostility develop in their mind."

In turn, many adolescent victims are said to grow up to have boy lovers of their own, repeating the cycle of abuse.

"In the absence of any services to recover or rehabilitate boys who are caught in this horrendous abuse, it's hard to know what happens to these children," said Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International.

"We have heard anecdotal reports that many grow up to keep their own bachas, perpetuating the revolving door of abuse."

How is bacha bazi impacting Afghanistan's security situation?

Bacha bazi is having a detrimental bearing on the perpetual state of conflict in Afghanistan, helping the Taliban to infiltrate security ranks in provinces such as Uruzgan, officials say.

The abusive practice in security ranks also undermines support for NATO-trained Afghan forces.

"To date, the US has provided over $60 billion in assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), including nearly $500 million to the Afghan Local Police," the US Congress said in December.

"Predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police could undermine US and Afghan public support for the ANDSF, and put our enormous investment at risk."

The practice also continues to embolden the Taliban's desire to reassert sharia law in Afghanistan and is fuelling their insurgency.

"Such wild abuses of the predatory mujahideen forces in the early 1990s drove the popularity of the austere Taliban, helping them sweep to power across most of the country. Similar behaviour of the government forces after 2001 is also helping to inspire the insurgency," a Western official in Kabul told AFP.

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The vessel was tailing two Indian naval ships that were participating in ongoing Malabar naval drills. (Photo: YouTube screenshot)

Tokyo: A Chinese navy spy ship on Wednesday entered Japans territorial waters for the first time in over a decade while tailing two Indian naval ships during trilateral Malabar naval exercise attended by the US, India and Japan.

Japanese P-3C patrol aircraft spotted the Dongdiao-class intelligence vessel sailing in territorial waters to the west of Kuchinoerabu Island at around 3:30 am (1830 GMT Tuesday), Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshige Seko told reporters.

The ship travelled on a southeasterly bearing and left Japans territorial waters south of the prefectures Yakushima Island around 5 am, Kyodo news agency quoted Seko as saying.

It was for the first time that a Chinese spy ship was detected in Japanese water since a submarine was spotted in 2004. The latest intrusion came less than a week after another Chinese naval vessel sailed near islands at the centre of a Tokyo-Beijing sovereignty dispute in the East China Sea.

The Chinese military vessel moved in after an Indian ship sailed into Japans territorial waters as it participated in a Japan-US-India joint exercise, Defence Minister Gen Nakatani told reporters.

A senior Foreign Ministry official lodged a protest with the Chinese Embassy here over its military activities in view of latest intrusion.

We are concerned about the Chinese militarys recent activities, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters. Japanese officials said they are analysing Chinas possible motives behind the two actions. The government will continue to exert every effort in warning and surveillance activities in the waters and airspace surrounding the country, Seko said.

As to the spy vessels case today, the Defense Ministry said it entered the waters while tracking two Indian naval ships that were participating in ongoing Malabar naval drills.

In Beijing, Chinese officials defended the naval vessels entry into the waters, saying the passage was in line with the principle of freedom of navigation and international rules.

Under international law, ships of all countries, including military ones, are entitled to the right of innocent passage through territorial waters as long as it would not undermine others security.

There is no need to provide notification or to get authorisation in advance, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in Beijing.

So if Japan insists on hyping up this issue in the media, we have to question its motives.
Although the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab police had registered an FIR against the alleged attackers of the Pathankot airbase and their abettors, not a single person has been charged in this regard. (Photo: PTI)

Lahore: The Jaish-e-Mohammed leader who gave directions over phone to the terrorists during the attack on the Pathankot airbase has reportedly managed to flee to Afghanistan from Pakistan, an official said.

"The alleged JeM handler who communicated by telephone more than two-dozen times with the terrorists in Pathankot before they carried out the attack on the airbase on January 2 has managed to cross into Afghan border," a member of the Joint Investigation Team probing the attack said on Thursday.

He said the JeM handler, who is in late 20s, was in the tribal area of Pakistan when he communicated about 18 times with the terrorists.

"The law enforcement agencies tried to trace him (in the tribal belt) but there are reports that he managed to escape to Afghanistan," he said, without disclosing the JeM leader's identity.

Read: Probing Pathankot attack, NIA to examine JeM's role in other strikes

Interestingly, during interrogation JeM chief Masood Azhar claimed that the handler of the Pathanokot operation had quit the organisation sometime ago.

"Azhar disowns the JeM handler (to prove his innocence)," another source privy to the development said.

He said the investigation agencies have been under "immense pressure" from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to thoroughly probe the matter and come up with "true facts" of the Pathankot incident.

Although the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab police had registered an FIR against the alleged attackers of the Pathankot airbase and their abettors, not a single person has been charged in this regard.

The FIR was registered in the CTD police station Gujranwala under sections 302, 324 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code, and sections 7 and 21-I of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

The FIR says Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval informed authorities that the four attackers had come from Pakistan and had "probably crossed the border adjacent to the Pathankot general area".

The NSA says the terrorists made phone calls to cell phones and belonged to a proscribed organisation. Five terrorists and seven Indian army personnel were killed in a gun battle at the Pathankot airbase.

The attack occurred just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a 'surprise' visit to Sharif on his birthday on December 25 and the occasion of his granddaughter's wedding - a move that appeared to promise better ties between the two countries in future.

Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz also confirmed that one of the mobile phone numbers linked to those who attacked the airbase had been traced to the JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur, some 400-km from Lahore.

JeM chief Azhar, who has been named by India as the mastermind of the airbase attack, had been under protective custody since January 14.

Aziz said that Azhar, along with a few other operatives of JeM, had been kept under protective custody and that some of the JeMs premises had been sealed.

He said action would follow against Azhar and others the moment evidence became available. However despite the Pathankot visit of five-member JIT team of Pak Punjab government headed by CTD Additional Inspector General of Police (IGP) Tahir Rai, no progress has been made in the investigation so far.
US President Barack Obama greets Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama at the entrance of the Map Room of the White House in Washington. (Photo: PTI)

Beijing: China on Thursday said President Barack Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama has "violated" US' promises on not supporting Tibetan independence and warned that it will hurt bilateral cooperation.

Reacting to Obama's "private meeting" with the Dalai Lama at the White House, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing that, "Tibet affairs are China's domestic affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere".

"No matter in what way the US leader met with the Dalai Lama, the meeting violated the US promises of acknowledging Tibet as a part of China, not supporting Tibet independence and not supporting separatist activities," Lu said.

"Such a meeting will hurt China-US mutual trust and cooperation," he said. On Wednesday, China lodged a strong diplomatic protest with the US over the meeting.

Lu said the 14th Dalai Lama was not a purely religious figure but a political exile who has long engaged in "anti- China separatist activities under the guise of religion" and the essence of his "middle way" approach is "Tibet independence". Obama has hosted the 80-year-old spiritual leader four times since coming to office.

In Wednesdays meeting, he met the Dalai Lama in the historic Map Room of the White House. The meeting was closed for the press. The Tibetan spiritual leader also did not speak to the battery of reporters waiting for him.

"The President has spoken publicly in the past about his warm, personal feelings for the Dalai Lama. The president has articulated his appreciation for the Dalai Lama's teachings, and believes in preserving Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters after the meeting yesterday.

Earnest said the personal nature of their meeting would explain why the President received the Dalai Lama in the White House residence, as opposed to the Oval Office, for example.

"And I would just reiterate once again that the US's position, as it relates to Tibet has not changed. Tibet, per US policy, is considered part of the People's Republic of China. And the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence," he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Putin and other leaders pose for a photo ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Ufa last year. (Photo: PTI)

Islamabad: Pakistan on Thursday said it will become a member of six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) next week, opening new avenues for the country to secure funds for energy and infrastructure projects.

The SCO is scheduled to hold a summit on June 23 and 24 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan where Pakistan will join the group, Foreign Office spokesman Nafees Zakaria said.

The SCO membership will pave way for opening new avenues for Pakistan to secure funds for energy and other infrastructure projects, Zakaria was quoted as saying by the Express Tribune.

"A full SCO membership will help Pakistan strengthen its role in regional and global politics, economies and infrastructure by promoting regional connectivity through the One Belt One Road and Eurasian Economic Union projects," Zakaria said.

The SCO summit held in Ufa in Russia last year approved inclusion of India and Pakistan to the list.

SCO Secretary-General Rashid Alimov this week said that India is likely to attain full membership of the SCO within a year.

The SCO currently has six member states - China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, with Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as observers, and Belarus, Turkey and Sri Lanka as dialogue partners.

India and Pakistan are expected to be elevated as regular members.
Ashiq Malik, medical superintendent at the government hospital in Multan where Ali is being treated, said that the victim received burns to around 60 percent of his body.. (Photo: AFP)

Multan, Pakistan: A Pakistani woman who allegedly threw acid on her boyfriend causing life-threatening injuries after he refused to marry her, officials said Thursday, and was arrested in a rare case of a woman attacking a man.

Momil Mai, a married mother-of-four, had been in a relationship with 25-year-old Saddaqat Ali, who was also married, for several years, police near Multan city in Punjab province said.

Mai was demanding Ali make her his second wife, officials said. Polygamy is legal though rare for men in conservative Muslim Pakistan, however a woman would have to divorce before being allowed to marry again.

"On Wednesday night, Ali went to see Mai as usual and she threw acid on his body after he once again refused to marry her," Bashir Ahmed, a local police official, said.

Ali had time to turn, he said, with the acid burning his back but not his face.

Ashiq Malik, medical superintendent at the government hospital in Multan where Ali is being treated, said that the victim received burns to around 60 percent of his body.

Doctors are fighting to save Ali's life, he said.

A criminal case was registered against Mai, whose current husband is a labourer, after a complaint by Ali's family.

Acid attacks, which disfigure and often blind their overwhelmingly female victims, have long been used to settle personal or family scores in Pakistan, with hundreds of cases reported each year. It is rare for a woman to attack a man.

Acid is readily available in agricultural southern Punjab because of its use in farming.
Colombo: India-Sri Lanka relations have moved ahead from "being focussed on the past" after President Maithripala Sirisena took over from his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa in January 2015, the Indian envoy said on Thursday.

Indian High Commissioner YK Sinha said bilateral ties have become robust and entered a new phase with highest-level engagements.

Recalling a flurry of high-level visits between the two South Asian neighbours across the Palk Strait, Sinha said ties entered a new phase since Sirisena took over from Rajapaksa. He said relations have moved ahead from being focused on the past.

After Sirisena's ascent to power, there have been several high-level visits between India and Sri Lanka starting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2015, which marked the first visit to the island-nation by an Indian leader since 1987.

Sirisena has twice visited India since January 2015. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe also made his first overseas visit to India, Sinha said.

Delivering a lecture on 'India-Sri Lanka relations in the 21st Century' at the Bandarnaike Centre for International Studies, Sinha said bilateral trade between the two nations have formed the cornerstone in the growing relationship.

Contrary to perceptions, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries have been most fruitful, he said. Sri Lankan exports have grown 13 times since the FTA was signed in 1999. This will show who has benefited most, the Indian ambassador said.

Sri Lanka and India enjoys a robust partnership and New Delhi is Colombo's largest partner in defence training, he said.

On the fishermen issue, Sinha said it was a humanitarian issue with implications on the livelihoods of those involved. Negotiations are continuing to try and resolve the issue of fishermen of the two countries crossing the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), he said.

He said Sri Lanka's security is in India's interest. India stresses the need for reconciliation in Sri Lanka through a negotiated political settlement where all communities can agree. This must be within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, Sinha said. Sirisena has taken steps to reconcile with the Tamil minority.

Several confidence-building-measures such as the release of Tamils-owned lands, lifting of travel restrictions to the North and de-escalating the military presence have been taken since January as part of efforts to ensure reconciliation after three decades of civil war with the LTTE that claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks. (Representational Image)

Tarinkot: The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of "bacha bazi" -- paedophilic boy play -- to infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults told AFP.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where "bacha bereesh" -- or boys without beards -- widely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

Read: Bacha bazi: Afghan subculture of child sex slaves

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacks -- at least six between January and April alone -- that have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

"The Taliban are sending boys -- beautiful boys, handsome boys -- to penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen," said Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai, who was Uruzgan's police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

"They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forces -- bacha bazi," he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanai's view saying "it's easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers".

A police check-point in Afghanistan. (Photo: YouTube screenshot)

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

The insurgents are using bachas as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

He said the attacker was the checkpoint commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

"He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive. I pretended to be dead," said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

"As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: 'Everyone is dead'."

'Addiction' to boys

The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

"We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operations -- all grown men with beards," a Taliban spokesman told AFP.

The insurgents have long denied using children in combat, a claim repeatedly debunked by rights groups and the government.

Survivors of insider attacks who spoke to AFP, including Matiullah, suggest the Taliban are exploiting the institutionalisation of bacha bazi in police ranks for military gain.

Practically all of Uruzgan's 370 local and national police checkpoints have bachas -- some up to four -- who are illegally recruited not just for sexual companionship but also to bear arms, multiple officials said.

Some policemen, they said, demand bachas like a perk of the job, refusing to join outposts where they are not available.

Horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys, many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment -- often because there is no other escape from exploitative commanders.

Many who have tried to escape have been dragged back with trumped up charges of Taliban links, two senior provincial judges told AFP.

Boys have also spurred a deadly rivalry between policemen, with officials reporting incidents such as a public gunfight this year between two commanders in Gezab district as one of them angrily accused the other of "stealing" his bacha.

"To restore security in Uruzgan, we will first have to separate policemen from their bachas," one of the judges said.

"But if they are told to reform their ways, a common reply is: 'If you force me to abandon my boy lover, I will also abandon the checkpoint'. The Taliban are not blind to notice that this addiction is worse than opium."

'Male rape'

Bacha bazi, which the US State Department has called a "culturally sanctioned form of male rape", peels away the masculine identity of boys in a society where the sexes are tightly segregated.

In conservative areas women are mostly invisible in public -- and often unattainable due to steep bride prices. Bachas supplant the role of women, adopting a feminine gait and sometimes wearing makeup and bells on their feet.

Many in Uruzgan see bacha bazi neither as paedophilia nor homosexuality, which is forbidden in Islam. If social norms had a pecking order, violating boys would be seen as far more ethical than violating women.

"Bacha bazi is pervasive sexual slavery of children, seen widely as a cultural practice and not a crime," Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International, told AFP.

"Since it is mostly practised by those in positions of power -- warlords, commanders, politicians -- it is hard to stamp out. It appears sustained partly by the fact that access to women is limited."

Insider attacks by child slaves have also been reported in recent years from neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar provinces, where bacha bazi is prevalent.

But the tactic appears more deep rooted in Uruzgan, where the boys are widely flaunted as a totem of affluence, with some officials openly displaying cellphone images to AFP of their "handsome bachas".

"Come see my beautiful bacha," said Naqibullah, a police commander in Dehjawze village near the provincial capital Tarin Kot, boasting that he had been holding the teenager for two years.

With a touch of kohl on his eyes, and bleached blond curly hair poking out of his embroidered hat, the boy sat in a corner of the checkpoint surrounded by opium farms, quietly refilling tea glasses for Naqibullah's guests.

'Predatory behaviour'

"Commanders prowl neighbourhoods for young boys. We are scared of dressing up our children or buying new clothes that will make them attractive," said Nader Khan, a tribal elder in Dehrawud.

Khan's 13-year-old nephew was taken captive earlier this year by Naqibullah, a local commander not related to the Dehjawze official, when his family sent him to deliver bread for policemen. He was released only after angry tribal elders besieged the governor's office in Tarin Kot.

Governor Mohammad Nazir Kharoti told AFP he ordered Naqibullah's arrest but he was released in less than a month because he was needed for combat duty.

"It is difficult to implement the law 100 percent when we are faced with a war situation," Kharoti said, without elaborating on the case.

Afghanistan's interior ministry refused to confirm or deny that bachas were being used in insurgent attacks, but said it was committed to police reforms and acknowledged that "bacha bazi within the ranks of police is a serious crime".

The practice has put the United States and its NATO allies, who have spent billions of dollars to build Afghan forces, in a precarious position.

The US Congress last year voiced concern over "predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police", prompting watchdog agency SIGAR to launch an investigation that is still ongoing.

The head of a government affiliated agency in Uruzgan showed AFP two letters from the attorney general in Kabul, one last year and another dated January, ordering a separate probe into sexual abuse and the illegal recruitment of child conscripts.

"We haven't been able to visit even one checkpoint to investigate," he said, speaking in hushed whispers in his own office.

"Do you think police commanders will leave us alive if we probe their crimes?"
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday dared Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to order a CBI or ACB probe into the solar energy policy announced by his government.





He also demanded action against Lieutenant Governor for the over Rs 150 crore loss of revenue to Delhi government when the city was run by the LG under Presidents rule in 2014-15.



Kejriwal wrote a letter to the LG informing him about the solar energy policy announced by the Aam Aadmi Party government. He asked him to get an FIR registered against the policy through the Anti Corruption Branch (ACB), which is controlled by the LG.



I hope you and Modiji would send your CBI & ACB for investigation of the Solar Policy, he wrote.



This solar policy is being talked about around the world. Many resident welfare associations in Delhi have welcomed it. Even UN Climate Change has appreciated the move. Please ask Prime Minister Narendra Modi to allow CBI to conduct a raid against Satyendar Jain for coming up with such a wonderful policy," he added.



Kejriwal said the Comptroller and Auditor Generals report on the Delhi government during Centre's rule in 2014-15 shows revenue loss and other irregularities of Rs 159 crore.



Will LG register an FIR against himself for such a huge loss? he tweeted.



Later in the day, a Delhi BJP delegation submitted a memorandum to the LG and requested him to get an FIR registered by the ACB or the Central Bureau of Investigation into the alleged Rs 400 crore Delhi Jal Board water tanker scam.



The BJP said the fact-finding committee set up by the Delhi government had submitted its report with proof to the Delhi government in July, 2015.



Water Minister Kapil Mishra had written a letter to the Chief Minister in this context and also submitted the report of the committee but the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal sat over the file for 11 months, the memorandum said.



Hence from legal point of view he is guilty of protecting the persons involved in the scam. Besides this, it is also a matter of investigation that why Kejriwal Government did not cancel the agreement with tanker supply companies?" it added.
India's entry into the NSG will "shake" the strategic balance in South Asia and make it a "legitimate" nuclear power, leaving behind China's all-weather ally Pakistan, Chinese official media said today as it kept up its strident stand against India's inclusion in the grouping.





In a second article in as many days, state-run 'Global Times' highlighted China's vocal opposition to India's entry into the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and concerns that its all weather-ally Pakistan will be left behind because "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'".



India's entry into the NSG will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region", the article said.



It, however, said China could support India's inclusion in the nuclear club if it "played by the rules".



"The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken," said the article written by Fu Xiaoqiang, research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.



"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article.



At the same time, the article said, "New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month."



"However, as a country that has signed neither the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG," it said.



"That's why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to India's membership," it said.



A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that India's admission into the NSG would "jeopardise" China's national interest and touch a "raw nerve" in Pakistan.



"If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use," said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by People's Daily.
China today said President Barack Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama has "violated" US' promises on not supporting Tibetan independence and warned that it will hurt bilateral cooperation.





Reacting to Obama's "private meeting" with the Dalai Lama at the White House, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing that, "Tibet affairs are China's domestic affairs and no foreign country has the right to interfere".



"No matter in what way the US leader met with the Dalai Lama, the meeting violated the US promises of acknowledging Tibet as a part of China, not supporting Tibet independence and not supporting separatist activities," Lu said.



"Such a meeting will hurt China-US mutual trust and cooperation," he said.

Yesterday, China lodged a strong diplomatic protest with the US over the meeting.

Lu said the 14th Dalai Lama was not a purely religious figure but a political exile who has long engaged in "anti- China separatist activities under the guise of religion" and the essence of his "middle way" approach is "Tibet independence".



Obama has hosted the 80-year-old spiritual leader four times since coming to office. In yesterday's meeting, he met the Dalai Lama in the historic Map Room of the White House. The meeting was closed for the press.



The Tibetan spiritual leader also did not speak to the battery of reporters waiting for him.

"The President has spoken publicly in the past about his warm, personal feelings for the Dalai Lama. The president has articulated his appreciation for the Dalai Lama's teachings, and believes in preserving Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic traditions," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters after the meeting yesterday.



Earnest said the personal nature of their meeting would explain why the President received the Dalai Lama in the White House residence, as opposed to the Oval Office, for example.



"And I would just reiterate once again that the US's position, as it relates to Tibet has not changed. Tibet, per US policy, is considered part of the People's Republic of China. And the United States has not articulated our support for Tibetan independence," he said.
Speculations were today rife about Congress planning to make three-time Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit the party's chief ministerial nominee for next year's assembly election in politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, once its stronghold.





Election strategist Prashant Kishor had recommended that Dikshit should play a major role in the party's poll campaign in the state as she is a prominent Brahmin face and could help Congress regain support of the electorally sizeable and significant community, whose support determines the poll outcome in several seats.



The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress, shifted allegiance to BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of Mandir-Mandal politics. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawati's BSP in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community.



Dikshit is scheduled to meet Congress President Sonia Gandhi later in the day.

There was a buzz that 78-year-old Dikshit, who ruled Delhi from 1999 to 2014 before being thrown out of power by the AAP could be Congress' Chief Ministerial candidate. Sheila Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Congress leader from UP Uma Shankar Dikshit, who served as Union minister and governor for a long time.



The Congress is trying to regain the lost ground in UP where currently it has just 30 MLAs in the 403-member assembly. Congress could win only two seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls represented by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi respectively.



The Brahmin community plays a significant role in election outcome in central and eastern UP as it is the dominant caste in these areas.
Chinese pressure was blamed today for a stunning diplomatic U-turn by Southeast Asian Nations that saw them retract a statement sounding alarm over Beijing's island building in the South China Sea.





The chaotic events at the end of a meeting of foreign ministers from China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations on Tuesday have led to allegations of bullying by Beijing.



The document, released by ASEAN member Malaysia and described as a joint statement from the bloc, warned developments in the hotly contested South China Sea could "undermine peace, security and stability".



The statement specified "land reclamation" as a source of tension, a clear reference to China's massive island building activities where it is trying to cement a claim to almost the whole sea.



But just hours later, Malaysia said the grouping was retracting the statement for "urgent amendments", but offered no reason. Various participants have since given conflicting explanations over what happened.



An ASEAN diplomat who was present at the meeting in the Chinese city of Kunming told AFP that China had put the screws on some Southeast Asian nations to get them to withdraw their support.



"The usual factor, pressure from China," said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, when asked why unity crumbled.



"I suspect the two countries that opposed the statement were Cambodia and Laos."Singapore's Straits Times newspaper also reported today that the joint statement was "scuttled by the Chinese, who lobbied its friends in the grouping to block" it.



"Malaysia releasing it was a manifestation of the extreme frustration of the original five ASEAN members plus Vietnam at the particularly crude and arrogant behaviour of the Chinese," the Straits Times reported an ASEAN official as saying.



The Philippines also said today that there had originally been unanimous support within ASEAN for the strongly worded statement.



"By the time the meeting ended, there was an agreement among ASEAN foreign ministers. They agreed on the text of the ASEAN statement and they agreed it would be released," Philippine foreign affairs spokesman Charles Jose told reporters in Manila.



Jose said the statement was then retracted after the meeting had ended and most foreign ministers, including the Philippines' Jose Rene Almendras, had left the venue to start returning home.



Jose would not be drawn on whether Chinese lobbying was to blame, but insisted Malaysia's initial release had not been in error.




After being locked in a bitter censorship row, the drug-themed Bollywood film 'Udta Punjab" will hit the screens as scheduled tomorrow with the Supreme Court and Punjab and Haryana High Court today paving the way for its release but its online leak sparked a fresh spat.





Anurag Kashyap, the film's co-producer who has been at the forefront of a battle with the Censor Board, and several filmmakers also appealed to people not to watch it online.



The Supreme Court refused to entertain the plea of an NGO seeking stay on the film's release and asked it to approach Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter.



The Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh starrer that delves into how a large number of youth in Punjab have succumbed to drugs had also triggered a political slugfest and multiple legal battles.



A vacation bench of justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and L Nageswara Rao granted liberty to the NGO, Human Rights Awareness Association to approach the High Court with its prayer.

"We are not interfering in the matter. We are not going into the merit. Liberty granted to the petitioner to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court which is seized of the matter," the bench said. The Bombay High Court had already cleared the film with a cut.



In Chandigarh, the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissed two petitions filed against the film's release.



The vacation bench of Justice M Jeyapal dismissed the petitions, counsel for the producer said.



"Based on the report submitted today, the high court has taken a decision that the film will be released tomorrow and then dismissed the petitions filed against the release of the movie," counsel Sanjay Kaushal said.



He said the high court noted that the film did not glorify drugs. "Drug menace can be there in any state and the film does not glorify drugs," said the counsel.



Amicus curiae advocate Sujoy Kantawala, who watched the movie on the directions of the high court, also presented his report to the bench.



"I have clearly mentioned in my report which was read out in open court that there is absolutely nothing in the film which could lead any such sort of apprehensions which the petitioner entertained," he said.



As the film was set hit the theatres tomorrow, the online leak of the film prompted Anurag Kashyap to say that he believed it was a case of vested interests "trying to demoralise" the filmmakers in their fight.



The film's producers yesterday lodged a complaint with the cyber crime police in Bandra yesterday.



The entire film has been leaked on various torrent websites with 'for censor' written on the top left corner of the copy, as questions cropped about about any role by the Censor Board in this regard.



"I am not sure whether it was a CBFC copy. But if it's a censor copy then it's a shame on CBFC, it reflects very badly on them. Piracy is an an issue, which we all have been fighting for a very long time," superstar Aamir Khan said.



CBFC chief Pahlaj Nahalani, on his part, said "rumours" about the online leak should not be believed. "Please understand the procedure rather than believing in rumours," he said.
The ghost of anti-Sikh riots continued to haunt Congress leader Kamal Nath despite his giving up charge of poll-bound Punjab with his political rivals stepping up attack and demanding filing of a case against him.





On his part, the former union minister and his party rejected reports that he was asked to resign in view of the controversy surrounding him and that he did it on his own volition so that attention is not diverted from issues facing Punjab.



Congress' face in Punjab and former Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh came to Kamal Nath's defence saying he had done a gracious thing by his resignation but maintained that had he continued also "there would not have been any difference".



On Sunday, Kamal Nath was appointed as General Secretary and given charge of both Punjab and Haryana. He resigned last night as in charge of Punjab, which goes to polls next year, in the wake of rivals targeting him on the issue of riots.



Akali Dal leader and Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today attacked Kamal Nath saying his exit "vindicated" the stand of his party that 1984 Sikh carnage was a "deep rooted conspiracy" of Congress party to "butcher of innocent" Sikhs.



"Kamal Nath was reluctant to accept this post because of his guilty consciousness' owing to his role in massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs," Badal alleged on the sidelines of Sangat Darshan programme in Malout Assembly constituency.



He alleged Kamal Nath could not "muster the courage" to face people of state who were well aware of his role in this "barbaric holocaust" of Sikhs.



However, Badal said that the people of state in general and Sikhs in particular would never forgive Kamal Nath and other leaders of his party who had "planned and executed this heinous carnage", which was a dark spot in the entire history of India.



The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is trying to make inroads into the state in the next year's Assembly elections, also joined the attack on the Congress leader.



It claimed victory over his resignation and demanded that an FIR be registered against Kamal Nath in the Gurudwara Rakabganj Sahib in which two Sikhs were burnt to death in 1984.



After its persistent pressure, the Congress had to sack Kamal Nath, the AAP said claiming it was an "acceptance" of defeat.



"Two Sikhs were killed in the incident. So Kamal Nath is also responsible for it as he was their leader. This is an insult to the law.



"By merely tendering resignation does not absolve Kamal Nath from the charges and he should be tried for murder and chargesheet should be filed at the earliest," said AAP leader and lawyer H S Phoolka, who has been fighting for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots victims. He said the role of Kamal Nath has never been investigated.



Talking to media, Kamal Nath rejected reports that he was asked to step down as General Secretary in-charge of Punjab and said he quit to ensure that attention was not diverted from the issues affecting the state.



He denied that Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked him to quit the post, adding that she understood the reasons he gave in his letter to the party to step down as in-charge of Punjab.



"I called Rahul Gandhi and told him I am sending the letter...I read him the letter. He told me to send it to the Congress President...I called Sonia Gandhi and told her that this is in the interest of the party and we should not let them use this politics," he said.



Kamal Nath said Gandhi spoke with him again after she received the letter and told him that "well if this is your reason, fine."



On being asked whether he was forced to step down as the in-charge after allegations over his role in the anti-Sikh riots resurfaced, the senior-most Lok Sabha MP wondered why the issue of his alleged role in the riots was being raked up after 32 years. He said the Nanavati Commission which investigated the anti-Sikh riots had absolved him.



"It is nothing but a political ploy to divert from the real issues. There was an adjournment motion on which Akalis spoke, L K Advani of BJP spoke. No one pointed fingers at me," he said.



He claimed that the real issues affecting Punjab such as drugs, farmer plight, mis-governance are being ignored.



Responding to a poser on a letter reportedly written by his former Cabinet colleague M S Gill, Kamal Nath said he never raised the issue of 1984 riots with him when they were Cabinet colleagues nor in the Cabinet.



Gill had yesterday described his appointment is akin "rubbing salt on wounds".

Kamal Nath rejected suggestions that the Nanavati panel absolved him due to 'lack of evidence'. He said the report should be read in its entirety.



The Congress veteran said he was at the Rakabganj Gurudwara near Parliament House after he was told that a crowd had gathered here.



He said that policemen at the scene asked him to engage the crowd till reinforcements arrived. "I left as soon as I saw the reinforcements arrive," he said.



Senior Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma also defended Kamal Nath saying he resigned "on his own volition" anguished over the "mischievous" campaign against him by opponents regarding the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.



Talking to media, Sharma dismissed suggestions that the Congress buckled under pressure to replace him and insisted that the "dishonest, perverse, and mischievous" narrative by opposition against him was done with an eye on elections.



Replying to questions, he, however, made it clear that Kamal Nath continued to be the AICC General Secretary in charge of Haryana.



Reports earlier quoting party's chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala had it that Nath had resigned as General Secretary of the AICC.

Asked about the AAP's charges against Nath, Sharma said AAP has "no credibility and has an opportunistic agenda" and was targeting the Congress leader with an eye on polls...

"The demand to reopen cases is ridiculous because there is no case ever. You cannot reopen which does not exist", he said when asked about the AAP demand.

Maintaining that Kamal Nath is the senior-most member of the Lok Sabha, who has also been party General Secretary and Union Minister, Sharma said that he decided to quit "out of his anguish" after being "condemned day in and day out despite being not guilty".


A media report that the head of the inquiry into the missing Ishrat Jahan files had allegedly tutored a key witness set off a freshstorm today with Congress pushing for suo motu action by Supreme Court, accusing the Modi government of creating a "fake controversy".





Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi "hotly denied" that a senior official in his ministry allegedly tutored an officer on how to answer questions relating to missing files in Ishrat Jahan 'fake encounter' in Ahmedabad while BJP said it does not absolve former Home Minister P Chidambaram of his "role" in the change of affidavit to dilute the "fact" that she was terrorist.



B K Prasad, the Additional Secretary and the official in question, said no evidence has produced establishing that the officer identified as Ashok Kumar testified being 'tutored' during his alleged conversation. "I have conducted a free and fair enquiry which my report will reveal," he said in a statement.



Chidambaram, a senior Congress leader, accused the Modi government of creating a "fake controversy" over two affidavits filed in the Ishrat Jahan case and preparing a "doctored" report on the missing files.



In a statement, Chidambaram said the news report "comprehensively exposed the fake controversy" created by the NDA government on the two affidavits filed by the central government in the case.



"The moral of the story is that even a doctored report (of the Inquiry Officer) cannot hide the truth. The real issue is whether Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed in a genuine encounter or a fake encounter(in Ahmedabad). Only the trial of the case, pending since July 2013, will bring out the truth," he said.



The B K Prasad-led one-man inquiry committee yesterday submitted its report where it said that four of the five missing documents continue to be untraceable.



A report in a daily newspaper today alleged that Prasad not only told a witness the questions he would ask but also suggested to him what answers he should give --that he had not seen any of the missing documents.



Chidambaram said the news report completely vindicated the position that he had taken on the two affidavits in the Ishrat Jahan case.



Nineteen-year-old Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed in an alleged fake encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad involving the city police on June 15, 2004.



The first affidavit (August 6, 2009) disclosed the "intelligence inputs" that had been shared by the central government with the state government.



Chidambaram said Judge S P Tamang in his report (September 7, 2009) found that Ishrat Jahan and three others had been killed in a "fake encounter".



"The report caused an uproar in Gujarat and elsewhere.The first affidavit was misinterpreted and misused to defend the encounter. It was, therefore, necessary to clarify the first affidavit.



"Hence, a 'further affidavit' was filed on September 29, 2009) clarifying that intelligence inputs 'do not constitute conclusive proof and it is for the state government and the state police to act on such inputs'," he said.



Congress spokesman Anand Sharma alleged that the government was preparing a "doctored" report on the missing files in the Ishrat case.



This "fixing" was the work of the "dirty tricks department" of the government which is coordinated by the PMO, he told reporters in Delhi.



"The investigation has been 'fixed'. This was simply a show. The nation has to realise now we have a dirty tricks department coordinated by PMO," he said claiming that the whole attempt is to "deflect and divert" attention from issues before the Gujarat High Court in the case.



The BJP said the officer at the centre of the row has also issued a statement rejecting the charge of tutoring and pointed out that it was admitted by former home secretary G K Pillai that some files had gone missing.



"Unfortunately Congress feels that one of the newspapers has given them another springboard to prove that Ishrat Jahan had no LeT link. It does not absolve Chidambaram's role on changing the affidavit amd Congress' trade-off between national security and political interest," its national secretary Sidharth Singh told reporters.



Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi rubbished the newspaper report.

"I hotly deny tutoring of witnesses. Files in the Home Ministry are never lost. They might get misplaced. But I am confident they will be located somewhere. The file (is) in Home Ministry," Mehrishi told reporters in Mumbai.
Heavenly Bodies, an exclusive show of 4 of Raja Ravi Varmas paintings, was recently held by Gallery G in association with The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation. Apart from the fact that they come from the celebrated artist, what made these paintings even more special was the fact that they had been embellished by Olaf Van Cleef, belonging to the well-known Van Cleef jewellery family and a consultant at Cartier.





The event, a pop-up store of sorts, included limited edition trays, mousepads and keystands all crafted for the occasion to enhance the 4 masterpieces by Raja Ravi Varma, namely Laxmi, Saraswati, Ahalya and Hamsa Damayanthi. The pieces had been adorned by Olaf Van Cleef using swarovskis and other precious gems, with careful attention to detail, making it a visual delight.



Olafs deep-rooted connection with the country can be traced back to his mother who spent much time in India. Olaf himself first came here with her when he was 14 and kept returning. He now lives between Paris and Puducherry.



Most of his topics are Indian-inspired drawings that are watercolours highlighted by Chinese ink.



The paintings are in pastel colours and great attention is given to details. The themes of most of these paintings are Hindu gods and goddesses as well as scenes from Hindu mythology but now he has moved to Buddhist figures inspired by his first trip to Bhutan.



I love India...the colours, the smell, the light in the sunset. I also love the personality of Indians and their courage. I love the importance they give to their family. I admire their kindness and the respect they have given me. I try to depict through my paintings how much I love them too, said the accomplished man.



Some of the highlights in his career include 21 celebrated exhibitions in the past decade and a number of lectures across the globe.



His works reflect his love for India in general and Kolkata in particular. Regarding his connection with Indian gods and his art, he added, Its mostly my passion for jewellery that gives inspiration to paint the gods. This is where I can finally mix my art and precious stones, and then of course, I like Indian gods. They are all so beautiful and young.
Varsha Kaul was 15 days old in April 1990 when her family fled Srinagar. One evening, the terrorists came to our house and surrounded it. They took away my uncle Bharat Bhushan Kaul saying they wanted to ask him some questions. They threatened to shoot anyone who intervened. Everyone was very afraid, she says.



At dawn, Kauls body was found hanging from a tree outside their home. The 28-year-old government employee had just been engaged and was to get married a month later.



In the late 1980s, an armed rebellion broke out in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, seeking independence from India.



The militants often targeted the minority Hindus and attacks and threats saw most of the 3,50,000 Pandits, as they are also known, fleeing for safety to the Jammu region and elsewhere in India. Today, there are only 2,764 Hindus left there.



My family was planning to go to Jammu as the situation in the valley had deteriorated. They thought theyd go for a few months and return once the situation improved. But after my uncle was killed, they performed his last rites, loaded their belongings onto a truck and left, Varsha says.



The situation here kept worsening and we could not return. We were afraid that if we came back, we would meet the same fate as my uncle.



It took her 26 years to visit the valley again I met Varsha Kaul and her mother Kiran Kaul last week while they were visiting their former neighbours in their village in Budgam district, not far from Srinagar. Although they are on a short visit, hopes have been rekindled that they can return permanently to the valley.



The state government  a coalition of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules at the Centre, and the regional Peoples Democratic Party  has vowed to bring the Pandits back.



The authorities said they would set up secure enclaves for returning migrants where they can live safely, but the plan has hit a roadblock, with many accusing the government of trying to create Israeli-type settlements in Palestine.



Following criticism, the government did an about-turn  Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti insisted that she was only talking about providing the Pandits with transit lodging until they built their own homes, but not many in the valley are willing to take her word for it.



And in what could prove a big headache for the authorities, rival Kashmiri separatist leaders Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik and Syed Ali Shah Geelani have, in a rare show of unity, joined hands to oppose the plan.



We want the Pandits to come back, every Kashmiri Muslim agrees on that. We believe that its a humanitarian issue. The Pandits have every right to return and the government should give them handsome compensation to help them settle, Mirwaiz Farooq told the BBC.



But we are opposed to the exclusive settlements because that will create a deep wedge in the Kashmiri society. Keeping the Pandits segregated in secluded areas with security barricades will create walls of hatred, this is not the right approach.



At the Friday prayers at Srinagars Jamia Mosque, he tells his supporters about the government plan and explains why they need to be opposed. His followers nod in agreement.



Surprisingly, also in agreement with Mirwaiz Farooq are many of the Pandits who chose to remain in the valley during the quarter century while militancy raged or who returned in the last few years.



Lalita Dhar, 65-year-old retired schoolteacher who relocated to Jammu in 1989 after threats from Muslim militants, has been living for the past 18 months in the Sheikhpora camp set up by the government for the returning Hindu migrants.



In a two-bedroom apartment that she and her daughter share with another family, Dhar says she feels like she has been caged.



Caged birds



Before we left, we lived in Srinagar and we had excellent relations with our Muslim neighbours. They helped us, protected us against the militants. I want to go back and live there but we had to sell the family house to survive. I dont like it in the camp here. I feel like a caged bird, she says.



People from all religions and communities should live together, we should be able to mingle freely. Then we can fly like free birds.



Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, who decided to stay on, get married and raise two children in the volatile valley despite death threats from militants, says 95% of Hindus who migrated have sold their homes and land, so obviously they cant return to their previous homes.



Also, he says there is little connection between the Pandits and the present generation of Muslim youths, which means the returning Hindus will not find the going easy.



In the past few years, the insurgency has abated, Kashmir is largely bustling, and the summer months have seen tens of thousands of happy Indian tourists descending on the picturesque valley, but, as Tickoo says, things can go wrong in a moment.



In 2008, there were days of protests over a government decision to allot some land to the Amarnath Hindu shrine board. As a Hindu then, I felt very unsafe here. My Muslim neighbours looked at me in a way which made me feel like I was back in the 1990s when the militancy was at its peak.



Tickoo says the people who migrated will not be able to deal with the pressures of life in the valley and are likely to run away again at the first sight of trouble.



The authorities will have to support them, they will not be able to live scattered in the valley so they will need to be given space, he says, but adds that we dont want to live in ghettos.



I think the answer is in creating smart cities where 50% of homes should be reserved for the Pandits, the remaining can house Muslims, Sikhs or anyone else who chooses to stay there. Then we will be able to rebuild a truly composite society here.



International New York Times
Cashing in on the burgeoning real estate market in Bengaluru, VitrA, a Turkey-based sanitaryware brand, is betting big on key projects and is focusing on major builders to reach out more customers.





For us, India is going to be a major market because of its vast geography. Initially, we targeted the retail market in India. From past six to eight months, we are focusing on major real estate players who are coming with big projects with minimum 300 to 1,000 flats. We are in talks with builders, making presentations and inviting them to our showrooms, so that we can reach out to more customers, VitrA Country Manager Serhan Ates Yagiz told Deccan Herald.



VitrA, a leading brand of Turkish industrial group Eczacibasi, with 42 companies has 11,730 employees.



Founded in 1942, Eczacibasis core sectors are building products, healthcare and consumer products. VitrA manufactures 5 million units of sanitaryware, 3,50,000 bathtubs, 3,70,000 bathroom furniture, 3 million faucets and 2.5 million bathroom accessories every year.



Yagiz claimed that 50% of the companys production is exported to over 75 countries worldwide for sale in 150 exclusive showrooms and over 2,000 sales points.



In India, VitrA embarked its journey in January 2015, presently follows a partnership model, under which select distributors establish dealerships in their respective regions. It has 10 distributors, 90 dealers and has presence in 25 cities and aims to reach 44 cities by the end of this year.



Yagiz was in the City to launch the first bathroom fittings store located at MP & Son, Banshankari third stage. Its latest brands are Memorial, Istanbul, Metropole, Water Jewels, Nest, T4 collections among others.



With the launch of the new store, we aim at bringing our internationally acclaimed and innovative bathroom culture to Bengaluru. We aim to be among the top three import brands in the premium bathroom products market in India by 2020, Yagiz added.
Newly appointed in-charge of Uttar Pradesh Congress, Ghulam Nabi Azad, on Thursday accused the BJP of trying to foment communal passion and create a Gujarat-like situation in UP.



Speaking to reporters here, Azad, who replaced Congress general secretary Madhusudan Mistry as the state in-charge, also hinted that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra could step out of Amethi and Raebareli to campaign for the party in the forthcoming Assembly polls in the state due early next year. We have to fight the communal forces. The Congress does not indulge in politics of religion...we are for maintaining the secular fabric of the country, he said.



War of words



Azad said that the BJP wanted to foment communal passion in the state to gain political mileage. The former union minister also said that Rahul Gandhi could assume the charge of the party in the very near future but added that party chief Sonia Gandhi would remain their undisputed leader. He said that the Congress would take up cudgels on behalf of the farmers and the weaker sections of the society and fight for them.



Earlier, Azad was accorded a rousing reception upon his arrival here after becoming the state in-charge. A large number of banners and hoardings had been put up from the airport to the party headquarters here by party workers.



UP Congress chief Nirmal Khatri was, however, absent during Azads meeting with the state party leaders fuelling speculations that he was sulking following reports of his ouster.



Other constituencies



He also said that Priyanka could campaign for the party in constituencies other than Amethi and Raebareli.


India does not think that the US Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as "global strategic and defence partner" is a setback.



The Congress-led Opposition mounted an attack on the government for this development following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's US visit. However, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said it was too early for any conclusion as legislative process in the US Congress was a long one. Swarup said, "The US had recognised India as a 'major defence partner' in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit there last week."



The preparation of National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) by the US Congress was a process distinct from the decision of the US Government to recognise India as a major defence partner. Two days ago, Republican senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the Act, which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner. It could not get the nod of the Senate, mainly because of procedural and internal petty political issues, according to McCain, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.



New Delhi's position is that these legislative moves are not linked with the recent joint India-US statement of June 7 following the PM's visit.



Swarup said the preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers. "The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content," he said .



"A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US Government . It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US," the MEA spokesperson said.
Tata group and tech-based car hiring company Uber on Thursday announced that they have joined hands to offer driver partners on the Uber platform a comprehensive vehicle purchase and ownership solution.





As per the agreement, owners and drivers will now be able to buy Tata cars such as Indica and Indigo, gain access to customised and flexible financing from Tata Capital Financial Services and Tata Motors Finance. They can also avail insurance from Tata AIG.



Announcing the partnership, Eric Alexander, Head of Business, Uber Asia said, Partnering locally with a company like Tata will help us develop entrepreneurship in India. Through this we want to give Uber drivers flexible loans in one stop shopping. This way we are trying to create a micro entrepreneurial ecosystem that allows the drivers to have flexible working hours.



He said that Uber with its presence in 27 cities in India wants to double the number by the end of the year.



However, Alexander, answering a question on Ubers controversial surge pricing, which causes fare rates to automatically increase, when the taxi demand is higher than drivers, said that Uber strictly adheres to local laws.



Surge is simply designed in a way to allow the consumer to hire a car when it is hard to find one. Uber is not in control to turn on or turn off surge. It is purely a market-based algorithm, he explained. However, feigning ignorance of various state-level laws that might be regulating surge. I work very close with the local government to work with the rules, Eric said.



This is a pan-India initiative which was rolled out from here. Over the next year, this initiative will help over 20,000 drivers to start their own business on the Uber platform, said Madhu Kannan, Member Group Executive Council and Group Head for Business Development and Public Affairs, Tata Sons. Tata will help Uber assist many more drivers who were hitherto rejected by the financial institutions to avail loan with less cumbersome application process.
The Janata Dal (United) on Thursday expelled its controversial leader Usha Sinha from the party after an arrest warrant was issued against her and her husband Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh.



Lalkeshwar Singh is the former chairman of the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB).

Usha was JD (U) MLA from Hilsa in Chief Minister Nitish Kumars hometown Nalanda from 2010 to 2015.



At present, she is the principal of Ganga Devi Mahila College in Patna and is believed to have gone on medical leave ever since the police, probing the toppers scam, are trying to apprehend her.



Ushas name figured in the scam when some junior officials apprehended by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) revealed that it was Usha who, on behalf of her husband, used to collect money from conduits after rates of toppers were finalised at her residence.



Another mystery



During raids, her degree also came under scanner as it was found that Usha completed her matriculation at the age of eight, graduation at the age of 12, BEd at the age of 13 and postgraduation at the age of 15.



Though the police have conducted numerous raids at their different hideouts, the absconding couple could not be arrested.



May fly to London



On Wednesday, the court of chief judicial magistrate issued an arrest warrant against them while Senior SP (SSP) of Patna Manu Maharaj has sought the help of CID and airport authorities to help nab them.



We suspect that the underground couple could flee to London as one of their sons is settled there, said the SSP, who is heading the SIT probing toppers scam.



HC order on BEd course



Meanwhile the Patna High Court on Thursday stayed Bihar governments order to probe the BEd degrees offered by different colleges in the state. Justice V Nath passed the order after Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar College in Gaya challenged the Bihar government order in the high court.




Udta Punjab will be released as scheduled on Friday with the Supreme Court and the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Thursday paving the way for its release.



The Punjab and Haryana High Court, too, rejected a petition seeking stay on the film on the same day. The movie showing drug problem in Punjab had its fair share of trouble with the CBFC suggesting a number of cuts to different scenes.



On Thursday, Punjab-based NGO Human Rights Awareness Association approached the apex court, contending the film showed the state in bad light. A vacation bench of Justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and L Nageswar Rao questioned the locus standi of the petitioner and asked him to approach the high court already hearing a petition in this regard.



The apex court, however, took exception to excessive use of expletives in the film. The language is very, very obscene. You can have your own review and delete these scenes. We are handicapped. We have not seen the movie, but are these words actually necessary, the bench asked senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, representing Anurag Kashyaps Phantom Films, the co-producer of the movie.



Maintaining that the film deals with drug problem in Punjab, the counsel said the expletives should be seen in totality, not in isolation. She also pointed out that the filmmakers themselves applied for A certificate for the movie. She also submitted that the disclaimers, as directed by the Bombay High Court, would be shown about the language used.



Senior advocate Subramonium Prasad, representing the NGO, contended that the Bombay High Court on June 13 cleared the film after going through the script only and set aside the cuts suggested by the CBFC. He said Punjab would suffer as the movie showed serious law and order problems.



However, the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which heard the petition along with a plea by a local advocate, ruled that the movie does not depict Punjab in bad light.


The Karnataka government may have managed to stall the police constables strike on June 4, but a Bengaluru-based non-government organisation has complained to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) against the human rights violations.





Janaadhikaara Sangharsha Parishath (JSP) has filed the complaint about ill-treatment of police constables by senior police officers.



In the complaint, the NGO said, They (constables) work in the lowest echelons of the police in Karnataka. They are ill-treated by their senior officers to do menial jobs at their homes and work for long hours without any paid leaves. They get low salaries as compared to other states, resulting in low morale and humiliation, that in turn, leads to ill-treatment of the common man when they approach the police stations.



The JSP members have also complained against the state government for arresting V Shashidhar, who was fighting against the inhuman treatment meted out to the constables. Shashidhar, who had voluntarily retired as a constable in 2000, had called for the police strike.
Minister of State for Agriculture Krishna Byre Gowda on Thursday said the state is ready to provide any extent of land for setting up of a mega fertiliser plant proposed by the Union government in North Karnataka.





Speaking to reporters here, the minister said the Union government is misleading the public by stating that the state government has refused to provide land. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had written to Union Fertilisers and Chemicals Minister H N Ananth Kumar in this regard, he said.



The Centre is also taking credit for the neem-coating urea being provided to farmers, an initiative of the UPA government, he claimed.


Activist T J Abraham, who had filed a complaint with the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in the Hublot wrist watch case, has approached the Governor seeking sanction to prosecute Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Public Works Minister H C Mahadevappa.





On May 13, 2016 Abraham had complained to the ACB that L Raghu, Executive Engineer, Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) had gifted a Hublot watch each to Siddaramaiah and Mahadevappa.



The complainant stated that Raghu, who is in-charge Executive Engineer for the Kempegowda Layout residential layout project of the BDA, wanted to appease Mahadevappa and Siddaramaiah to reject the Lokayukta police's request for prosecution sanction order in disproportionate assets case against him.

In his petition to the Governor Vajubhai Vala, Abraham said that the ACB had not acted even 45 days after his complaint.
A young Assistant Superintendent of Police posted in Paderu in Visakhapatnam Agency area was found dead Thursday at his office-cum-residence under mysterious circumstances.



Initial reports suggested that K Sasikumar committed suicide by shooting himself with his service revolver, but authorities insisted that he died of accidental discharge of the firearm. The bullet hit his right temple.



Attendants posted at the bachelor officers residence said they heard a gunshot at about 6 am in the morning. They found him unconscious on his desk profusely bleeding from the head wound.



The officer was immediately rushed to a local hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries. His body was later shifted to King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam.



We are not sure if it was accidental or intentional, Visakhapatnam DSP Rahul Dev Sharma said. We have asked a senior officer to submit a report after investigating the causes of the tragic death.



Maoist operations



A native of Erode in Tamil Nadu, Sasikumar assumed office about five months ago and was said to be active in anti-Maoist operations. The 2012 batch IPS officer was posted as ASP in Allagadda in Kurnool district and was subsequently transferred to Paderu.



Andhra Pradesh Home minister Chinnarajappa, who rushed to Visakhapatnam, said the state lost a promising young officer.



Sasikumar was very active and made sincere efforts to curb Maoist activities in the tribal region, he said, offering condolences to the officers family.




Its not just humans who get a blood transfusion. A Great Dane in Tamil Nadu donated blood to a pomeranian in Mumbai and saved his life on Thursday.



The three-year-old pomeranian, weighing about 13 kg, contracted a chronic infection, urgently needing a blood transfusion. Its owner, James Dhillon, a resident of Mumbai, frantically called Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (TANUVAS) and requested the authorities for canine blood to save his dog since he could not find it in Mumbai.



TANUVAS has a full-fledged blood bank for dogs. We assessed the health condition of the infected pomeranian. The infection was obstructing secretion of blood and its packed cell volume (PCV) had plummeted to 10% as per the records submitted by James, S Prathaban, Head of the Department, Veterinary Clinical Medicine, Madras Veterinary College, who handled the case, told DH. Pointing out that a dog should have 35% to 40% PCV, Prathaban said, The pomeranians life would be in danger when it loses even 1% of PCV. We immediately called the owner of the 45-kg Great Dane named Simba, who agreed to donate its blood.



After hearing that blood is available for my son (pomeranian), I took a night flight on Wednesday and reached the veterinary university early morning to collect it, Dhillon said.

The Great Dane is donating blood for the second time in less than a year. According to TANUVAS authorities, a healthy dog can donate blood three times a year.




Disqualification of 21 Aam Admi Party (AAP) MLAs in the Delhi Assembly looms large with the President refusing to give assent to a bill to exclude the post of parliamentary secretary from the purview of office-of- profit.





However, closer home, 11 Congress MLAs in Karnataka who have been appointed parliamentary secretaries to assist various cabinet ministers face no such threat.



The JD(S)-BJP coalition government in 2006 amended the Karnataka Legislature (Prevention of Disqualification) Act to exclude the post of parliamentary secretary from the purview of the office-of-profit clause.



The then Governor T N Chaturvedi had initially sent the amendment bill back, but the legislature passed it once again and sent it to Raj Bhavan. Chaturvedi gave his assent to the bill.



Chief Minister Siddaramaiah appointed 11 MLAs as parliamentary secretaries in November last year to satisfy legislators who had missed ministerial berths.



They are entitled to such salaries and allowances as are admissible to a minister of state rank under the Karnataka Ministers Salaries and Allowances Act, 1963, secretariat sources said.



Vijayapura MLA Makbul S Bagwan, one of the 11 parliamentary secretaries has been assigned to assist Urban Development Minister Vinay Kumar Sorake. Bagwan said he has been discharging his duties allotted to him regularly. Recently, the minister asked me to monitor the functioning of Municipal Reforms Cell, which I did and submitted a report, he said.



Sandur MLA E Tukaram, who has been assigned to assist Public Works Minister H C Mahadevappa said he helps the minister by collecting information that need to be furnished in legislature.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday set in motion the exercise for a Cabinet reshuffle by discussing a list of names for induction with the Congress top brass.



The names of the probable ministers and those likely to be dropped are expected to be finalised on Friday, when Siddaramaiah meets Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Digvijaya Singh, AICC general secretary incharge of party affairs in the state.



The exercise has to be completed by Friday as Sonia and party vice-president Rahul Gandhi are scheduled to fly out of the country on Saturday. The chief minister will be accompanied by KPCC president G Parameshwara during the parleys.



On Thursday, Siddaramaiah met Sonias political secretary Ahmed Patel. The chief minister followed it up with a discussion with Mallikarjuna Kharge, Congress floor leader in the Lok Sabha.



A large number of ministers were camping in Delhi to lobby for retaining their ministership, while several legislators were in the capital to get approval for a berth in the ministry.



Siddaramaiah is struggling to finalise the list as those who would be dropped from the council of ministers may indulge in dissident activities.



Delegation of MPs



A delegation of Congress members of parliament from Karnataka comprising R Dhruvanarayana, Muddahanume Gowda, B N Chandrappa and D K Suresh met senior party leaders Oscar Fernandes and Kharge here and demanded that Revenue Minister Srinivas Prasad should not be dropped from the council of ministers.



State Cong chief post



As the party top brass also asked the chief minister to suggest names for the post of State Congress chief, he is learnt to have recommended the following five names: Power Minister D K Shivakumar, Food and Civil Supplies Minister Dinesh Gundurao, Information Technology Minister S R Patil, Agriculture Minister Krishna Byregowda and Animal Husbandry Minister A Manju.



However except Shivakumar and Patil, all of the others expressed their unwillingness to accept the post, sources in the party said.



Hectic activity at CMs house



A day after Chief Minister Siddaramaiah announced at a meeting of the Council of Ministers that he would reshuffle the Ministry, his official residence in Bengaluru was abuzz with activity on Thursday.

Legislators and ministers made a beeline to the chief ministers residence to make their presence felt, reports DHNS from Bengaluru.



Rannebennur MLA K B Koliwad made no secret about his visit. I have been elected to the Assembly five times. I feel I should be given an opportunity to be part of the Cabinet and serve in the government, he said.



Legislators H Y Meti and Anil Lad too waited patiently for an audience with the chief minister. Siddaramaiah left for New Delhi in the afternoon by a special flight. Several senior ministers are already camping in the national capital lobbying to ensure their continuity in the Cabinet.



The likely in and out list



Legislators who the chief minister, during talks with Kharge, proposed to induct into the ministry: S S Mallikarjun, Priyank Kharge, Motamma, M Krishnappa, Pramod Madhwaraj, H Y Meti, Kagodu Thimmappa, Ramesh Kumar, Ramesh Jarkiholi, N A Haris, Rudrappa Lamani, K B Koliwad, Narayanaswamy, P M Narendraswamy and D Sudhakar. He suggested that the following ministers can be dropped: Baburao Chinchansur, Vinaykumar Sorake, Shamanur Shivashankarappa, Parameshwar Naik, Ambarish, Srinivas Prasad, Shivaraj Tangadagi, Satish Jarkiholi, Qamarul Islam, Krishna Byregowda, Dinesh Gundurao, R V Deshpande, Abhaychandra Jain, Kimmane Ratnakar and S R Patil.
Three UN Special Rapporteurs on Thursday urged India to repeal the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), which they claimed was being increasingly used to obstruct civil society's access to foreign funding.



They said the government's actions fail to comply with international human rights norms and standards. The comments came against the backdrop of recent suspension of permission given to Indira Jaising-led Lawyers Collective to collect foreign funds on charges of violation of FCRA.



We are alarmed that FCRA provisions are being used more and more to silence organisations involved in advocating civil, political, economic, social, environmental or cultural priorities, which may differ from those backed by the government, the Rapporteurs said. The UN Rapporteurs who made the remarks are Michel Forst (human rights defenders), David Kaye (freedom of expression), Maina Kiai (freedom of association).



Politically motivated



They said they were alarmed by reports that the suspension was "politically motivated" and was "aimed at intimidating, delegitimising and silencing" Lawyers Collective for their litigation and criticism of governments policies.



Calling for repeal of FCRA, they said civil society must have the ability to do their job without being subjected to increased limitations on their access to foreign funding and the undue suspension of their registration on the basis of burdensome administrative requirements imposed on those organisations in receipt of foreign funds.


Police on Wednesday arrested two male parents for barging into a private school in Kurubarahalli, northwest Bengaluru, and abusing women teachers. The parents said they were protesting against the managements diktat to buy uniforms and textbooks at high prices.



Suresh Kumar and Kempegowda were among parents who were protesting in front of the St Antonys School on Tuesday. Their children have been enrolled into the school under the Right To Education (RTE) quota. They said the management had demanded Rs 19,000 towards uniforms and textbooks from each of them.



The Principal Secretary for Primary and Secondary Education, Ajay Seth, had clarified earlier this week that parents of RTE-quota children must pay for uniforms and textbooks and that the school was not obliged to provide them with these items. He also stated that parents could buy the items from a store of their choice and that schools could not force them to purchase from it.



A few women teachers complained to the police that the two men barged into the school and used foul language against them. A senior police officer said the parents of children enrolled into the school had formed an association. He claimed that the two men did abuse the women staff members. We arrested them based on the complaints by a few teachers. We are verifying their claim of being RTE activists, he said.



Nagasimha G, an RTE activist, denied that the parents assaulted the school staff. He said they would take up the matter with the government as parents were unable to bear the expenses. He said they had made representations to the Karnataka State Child Rights Protection Commission about the matter.


A real estate agent was brutally murdered by a six-member gang at a Cafe Coffee Day outlet in Vijayanagar, west Bengaluru, on Thursday evening as other customers watched in horror.



Police suspect the associates of a slain gangster. Mahesh, 34, a resident of Mathikere, had gone to Vijayanagar to meet a friend Rakshith. The two men entered the CCD outlet at Hosahalli near Manuvana around 6.30 pm. The gang, which was closely tailing him, barged into the restaurant and attacked the two men with lethal weapons. Presuming Mahesh to be dead, the gang fled the spot.



Mahesh was rushed to a nearby hospital but he died minutes later as he had massive injuries in the abdomen, back and head. Rakshith sustained injuries on his hands and abdomen. Police suspect that Mahesh was murdered over an old rivalry by associates of slain history-sheeter Harsha.



Mahesh and Harsha were once close friends and ran a video game parlour. They earned Rs 10 lakh a month but parted ways following financial disagreements, police said.



On April 20, Harsha was attacked by unidentified men on Pipeline Road in Vijayanagar. He didnt survive. Maheshs associates were suspected to be involved in the murder. Mahesh was also an accused in a murder reported in Yeshwantpur.


A family has spoken of their horror after they were held by airport security in Dubai for two hours because of their sons insulin pump.

Rachel Humphrey, whose 14-year-old son George (both pictured) has type 1 diabetes, said they were not allowed to board their connection flight from Dubai International Airport to London Heathrow after returning from the Maldives.

At the security gate, staff requested Georges insulin pump to be disconnected and put through the X-ray machine. But hospitals and insulin pump manufacturers advise that insulin pumps are not exposed to electromagnetic radiation because it may interfere with the devices motors.

Mrs Humphrey, from Waterlooville in Hampshire, showed the official documentation and explained removal of the pump and subjecting it to the X-ray machine could cause medical consequences.

Staff refused to accept her explanation and escorted the family to the airport police room where they were held for two hours.

Mrs Humphrey said she felt the staff were highly discriminative and were incredibly rude. She added: [They] showed no compassion or willingness to understand, help or support us.

The issue was resolved after a doctor at the airport medical centre confirmed it was unsafe to detach the pump.

Mrs Humphrey said the stress and upset had caused her sons blood glucose levels to rise and he was very distressed.

Staff then allowed the family to continue to travel with the insulin pump attached but the spare pump was confiscated and held by Emirates airline staff until they arrived at Heathrow.

Since arriving back in the UK, Mrs Humphrey has complained to the airport and Chris Garto, the executive vice president of operations at Dubai Airport.

Garton responded, saying: You will be pleased to learn that I met with the head of Dubai Police security operations and airport Medical Services yesterday to understand why our procedures were not followed on your return journey.

It was agreed all would reinforce the established procedures with staff. The well-being and safety of our passengers is of paramount importance and we greatly appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention.

Mrs Humphrey has started a petition calling for a standard policy on insulin pumps in all airports.

Over 2,300 people have signed the document and Mrs Humphrey said: The comments received from other insulin pump users reveal indisputable evidence that confusion regarding insulin pumps at airport security is prevalent and a global issue, which not only causes stress for the diabetic but can also quickly become a life-threatening emergency.
The diabetes drug Victoza (liraglutide) significantly reduced the risk of major cardiovascular events and death in adults with type 2 diabetes in a new trial.

Victoza, a GLP-1 receptor analogue, lowered the risk of cardiovascular death, non-fatal myocardial infarction (heart attack) or non-fatal stroke by 13 per cent when compared to placebo.

This makes Victoza, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, the second diabetes drug to demonstrate such heart benefits. Eli Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheims drug Jardiance was the first.

The LEADER trial involved 9,430 participants, who were followed for a median of 3.8 years. All the patients had type 2 diabetes and were at a high risk of cardiovascular disease before the study. They were randomly assigned to receive Victoza or placebo in addition to standard care.

As well as having a 13 per cent reduced risk of major cardiovascular events, participants in the Victoza group also had a 22 per cent lower risk of death from heart disease.

Study author Professor Steve Bain said: Liraglutide is the first GLP-1 therapy that has been shown to significantly reduce the risk of major CV events and represents great progress in our understanding of liraglutides clinical profile.

Given the important link between diabetes and CV complications, it is important to be able to trust that any diabetes treatment prescribed does not add to that risk. The study findings for liraglutide have surpassed our expectations in providing us with a tool that can effectively help to treat patients type 2 diabetes and control blood sugar levels, with the additional reassurance of reducing CV risk.

After three years, the Victoza group also had greater reduction in HbA1c and were able to achieve sustained weight loss.

Krogsgaard Thomse, Executive Vice president and Chief Science Officer of Novo Nordisk, added: We are very excited by the LEADER trial results that demonstrate a significant reduction in major cardiovascular events among type 2 diabetes patients treated with Victoza, including all-cause death. For us, this marks the beginning of a new era where our R&D focus will go beyond glucose control.

Both groups experienced adverse events, but the most common side effect among the Victoza group was gastrointestinal upset, which led to the discontinuation of Victoza in some patients. There were also more cases of pancreatic cancer in the Victoza group, but this was not deemed statistically significant.

The findings were presented at the American Diabetes Associations 76th Scientific Sessions (ADA 2016) and also published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is working on what it calls the largest expansion of Domain Name System (DNS) in the world, with its new Generic Top-level Domain program (gTLD). The non-profit organisation, known as the address book of the web, is also looking to increase the usability of the internet in various vernacular languages, through the introduction of Internationalised Domain Names or IDNs.

Now, before we get into what all of the above means for India, and the future of the internet in the country, let us first discuss some key functions and responsibilities of ICANN. As noted above, ICANN is the address book of the internet. Just to put this in context, when you type in a websites address on your browser, what the machine sees is not the domain names, but instead it sees a bunch of numbers that you may identify as IP addresses. ICANN maintains and administers the registries containing these unique addresses across the world ensuring the security, stability, and integrity of One Internet where we can find each other.

From L to R: Rajiv Bansal (CEO, NIXI), Udaya Narayana Singh (Chair, Neo-Brahmi Gen Panel for ICANN), Samiran Gupta (India Head, ICANN)

Until recently, the internet and ICANN were under the oversight and protection of the US Government. This governance essentially stopped countries like China & Russia from interfering in the functioning of the Open web. Now, all that is going to change drastically. The Obama administration in the US has recently given a thumbs up to a plan submitted by ICANN, which frees the organisation from US oversight. Instead, ICANN is now looking to be the independent body that governs the internet through a multistakeholder model involving internet users, Governments, civil society, organisations, industries, and academic communities. Unless the US Congress decides differently, ICANN has till September to formulate a plan that will forever change the nature and future of the internet.

Commenting on the development, ICANN India Head, Samiran Gupta said, The process of the US moving away is still on, but lets assume if it were to happen, the way you see ICANN today, what you see from the outside will not change. It will still continue to function the way it does. However, the oversight part will be from the community of users, rather than the Government. Thats what changes. Theres a fairly complex structure that has been created so that no one community or one group of people, or group of Governments can take control over this process. What you are also witnessing is the emergence of new governance structures and you know its history being made in some sense. There are certain powers that the community will get, for example to be able to request the removal of board members. So, those rights and responsibilities have been defined in the proposal put up to the Government. Now, its gone into a political space, so, we will see what happens. Although the move seems to be one that will free the internet from governmental clutches, some are also viewing it as an open invitation for authoritarian regimes to manipulate ICANNs processes and the functioning of the internet.

Now that you know what ICANN is, lets talk about their expansion plans. ICANNs new gTLD program is an initiative that is enabling the largest expansion of the domain name system. Top-level domains (TLDs) are the letters found at the end of an Internet address. They fall into one of two categories: those that represent countries/territories (known as country code TLDs or ccTLDs) and those that do not (generic TLDs or gTLDs). Through the program, the number of gTLDs will increase from 22 to more than a thousand. To give you a few examples, gTLD addresses could have extensions such as .futbol, .bharat, .brand, .Paris, .Cab, etc. According to Gupta, Asia will be the key contributor to the gTLD program and the next billion users on the internet.

As far as increasing multilingual support for the internet is concerned, ICANN is looking to implement IDNs. An Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) uses a particular encoding and format to allow a wider range of scripts to represent domain names. Until late 2009, Top-Level Domains were restricted to only the Latin letters a to z without accents or symbols. Aer 2009, IDN TLDs were introduced in other scripts including Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic scripts. When implemented in India, IDN will encourage non-English speaking communities to access the internet in their language.

Commenting on the same, Rajiv Bansal, CEO of the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), said, The Indian Government is very supportive of these initiatives. Almost all applications of the internet are carried out through domain names and the ability to access them in local languages will further spearhead our development.
Secure Property Development and Investment reported preliminary figures from its annual results on Thursday, including an 88% increase in total asset value to 126m, from 67m.

The AIM-traded southeastern Europe-focused property and investment company said this reflects the acquisition of prime real estate with blue chip tenants in the region.

It also indicated a 61% increase in revenues to 5.9m, with 5.2m derived from rental income, utilities and services income from tenants, 0.4m from net sales of residential units and 0.3m from the sale of electricity produced at its Greek photovoltaic park.

Secures gross asset value per share at year-end was 1.35, down from 1.81, with it said reflected in part the open offer share issue in 2015.

2015 was yet another transformational year for SPDI, as evidenced by the 88% increase in the asset value of our portfolio to 121 million and a 61% boost to our revenues to 5.9 million, said CEO Lambros Anagnostopoulos.

This step-up has been a result of our three acquisitions made during the year in line with our strategy to diversify and broaden our geographic spread across South Eastern Europe, taking advantage of prime locations, strong covenants with blue chip tenants on long term rental contracts that can be secured at attractive high yields.

Anagnostopoulos said during the first half of 2016, Secure continued in the active management of its portfolio by taking advantage of opportunities to secure compelling transactions and consolidate its presence in more attractive property types and geographies.

This is evidenced by our sale of our Linda Residences portfolio in Bucharest and entering an agreement to sell our Terminal Brovary Warehouse in Kiev, the proceeds of which will contribute to our growth plan.

 I look forward to reporting further in our upcoming FY 2015 results and also to the year ahead as we work on maximising the potential of our South Eastern European real estate portfolio, Anagnostopoulos added.
British Prime Minister was supposed to make the case for a pro-European Gibraltar

British Prime Minister David Cameron has cancelled a planned pro-European Union speech in Gibraltar after a Labour MP was shot in a village near the Leeds.

Labour Party lawmaker Jo Cox was shot and seriously wounded in an attack earlier Thursday, Britain's Press Association reported. A 52-year-old man has been arrested.

Groups on both sides of the British EU referendum said they have suspended their campaigns.

It's right that all campaigning has been stopped after the terrible attack on Jo Cox. I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

Cameron was scheduled to make a two-hour visit to Gibraltar Thursday to seek votes to keep Britain in the EU in the June 23rd referendum. But he wrote on Twitter "I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar."

The West Yorkshire MP Cox remains in a critical conditon.

The mother-of-two , who represents Batley and Spen, was speaking to locals in Birstall near Leeds when she was set upon by the gunman.

An eyewitness said: 'Three times she was shot, the initial time, then she dropped to the floor and two more times. The third time he got close proximity he shot her round the head area.'

Ms Cox's husband Brendan Cox posted this photo of his wife shortly after the attack:
Jo Cox, a Labour MP, has died after she was shot twice and stabbed at Birstall in her West Yorkshire constituency, with a male suspect arrested shortly after the attack.

Reports said Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was shot and stabbed. A man was also thought to have been stabbed, the BBC reported.

The man arrested in connection with the attack was named locally as Thomas Mair, 52, who lived alone on the Birstall's Field Head council estate.

"At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition," West Yorkshire Police said in a statement.

"A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries.

"Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area. There are no further details at present.

"Police presence in the area has been increased as a reassurance to the community."

It is understood the 41-year-old MP had been holding a surgery at Birstall Library before the attack.

She was taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary but a doctor had already pronounced her dead before she arrived in hospital.

The attack occurred in the area around the towns library, where Cox held advice surgeries.

Cafe owner Clarke Rothwell, who witnessed the attack, said he heard a "loud popping noise that sounded like a balloon burst - a loud balloon", the BBC report added.

"When I looked round there's a man stood there in his 50s with a white baseball cap on and a jacket with a gun, an old fashioned looking gun in his hand," he said.

"He shot this lady once and then he shot her again, he fell to the floor, leant over shot her once more in the face area.

"Somebody tried to grab him, wrestling with him and then he wielded a knife, like a hunting knife, just started lunging at her with a knife half a dozen times. People were screaming and running from the area".

It was reported that Cox was caught in an altercation between two men. The extent of her injuries was not immediately clear.

Eyewitness Hithem Ben Abdallah was in a cafe next door to the library at the time, reports quoted him as saying that two men were seen to be having a disagreement, with one suddenly pulling a gun from his bag.

He said that after a brief physical scuffle, the unarmed man stepped back, which is when Cox became involved.

Another witness told the Dewsbury Reporter that the scene is swarming with armed police, and is cordoned off by police tape.

Cox has been the MP for the Batley and Spen constituency since the 2015 general election.

She was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015. However, in the election she voted for the Blairite candidate Liz Kendall and announced in May 2016 that she regretted nominating Corbyn.
In the 12 months ended 30 April, revenues jumped 448% to 18.6m. However, the adjusted loss before interest and tax widened to 10.5m from 5.4m in 2015, with sales and marketing costs up to 12.9m from 3.5m as Purplebricks continued to grow its brand.

Still, the company insisted that the UK business would move into profit in the current financial year.

Purplebricks, which is backed by fund manager Neil Woodford, said customers were responding well to its hybrid model and noted that it sold properties worth nearly 2.8bn in the year, with a further 1.7bn sold subject to contract.

Chief executive Michael Bruce said: "In just our second full year of operation we are leading change in an industry that has long been stagnant and is only now waking up to the opportunities and threats posed by technological advance and changing consumer behaviour. While others are following we have retained our leading position, with 62% of the non-traditional estate agency market and look to replicate this success in Australia.

The company said Australias 3.3bn market was a compelling proposition, as market sellers there are currently charged around 5,900 to list their properties on online portals.

Peel Hunt said: Given the low-cost hybrid offering from Purplebricks it is well placed to continue to dominate online competitors and take share from traditional high street agents in both the UK and Australia.

The shares have had a strong run in 2016, rising by c50%, which compares to the traditional agents falling by an average of 10%.

At 0950 BST, Purplebricks shares were up 2.7% to 134.84p.
Wireless remote tracking and monitoring products company Starcom launched a new security tech product on Thursday - Watchlock Pro. The AIM-traded company said Watchlock Pro is a more advanced version of the Watchlock - a reporting padlock that provides real-time alerts, and was awarded Physical Security Product of the Year Award at IFSEC 2012.

Escher Group Holdings said it has improved its existing mobile-loyalty solution for Irish independent chain Insomnia Coffee with a new frictionless prepay function.

Secure Property Development and Investment reported preliminary figures from its annual results on Thursday, including an 88% increase in total asset value to 126m, from 67m. The AIM-traded southeastern Europe-focused property and investment company said this reflects the acquisition of prime real estate with blue chip tenants in the region.

SKIL Ports & Logistics' shares are down more than 10% as its full year pre-tax profit docked in at 138,000, well down from the prior-same-period's 729,000 profit. Revenue was nil, and the company booked an operating loss of 2.2m, from a loss of 1.9m, both of which were more than offset by finance income of 2.4m, from 2.7m.

Shares in Pennant International are up almost 6% after it won a second contract from Lockheed Martin Mission Systems Corp, and issued a very upbeat trading statement for 2016 and 2017. The latest contract and phasing of others meant Pennan't order book stood at more than 45m, with delivery scheduled as to 17m in 2016, 18m in 2017 and 10m in 2018.

Healthcare services provider Totally has acquired About Health Ltd for up to 7.7m, at the same time booking a full year pre-tax loss of 0.41m, from a loss of 0.44m. The company, whose revenue fell to 0.58m, from 0.61m, said the deal would be earnings enhancing with both revenue and profit growth potential.

Falcon Acquisitions, an investment company, raised 163,000 after placing shares on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), it reported on Thursday. The company placed 815,000 ordinary shares at a price of 20p per share.

Wizz Air's second most senior management executive, executive vice president John Stephenson, has resigned from the ultra-low cost airline despite the seemingly encouraging conditions for the company. Stephenson, who joined Wizz in 2006 as chief commercial officer after almost a decade at easyJet, will step down with effect from 24 August.

Full year revenue rose at Redcentric, an IT service provider, boosted by organic growth and two acquisitions. Revenue increased 16% to 109.5m in the year to 31 March 2016, representing 8% organic growth. Recurring revenue grew 17% to 90.2m including 11% organic growth. Recurring revenue represented 82% of the total.

Online estate agency Purplebricks reported a surge in full-year revenues but losses widened significantly as sales and marketing costs swelled. In the 12 months ended 30 April, revenues jumped 448% to 18.6m. However, the adjusted loss before interest and tax widened to 10.5m from 5.4m in 2015, with sales and marketing costs up to 12.9m from 3.5m as Purplebricks continued to grow its brand.
Digitimes Research: Major notebook vendors and ODMs see over 30% on-month growth in May

Digitimes Research estimates that worldwide top-5 notebook brand vendors and top-3 ODMs both enjoyed 31% on-month shipment growth in May because of preparations for new notebook models and growing demand for Chromebooks.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the largest vendor in May in terms of shipments. Lenovo ranked second due to its weak performance in emerging markets; however, the China-based vendor's shipments were only 500,000 units short of HP's. Dell dropped from number one in April to number three in May, but its shipments in the month were the highest monthly performance of the year so far. Asustek Computer and Acer both enjoyed better performances in May than in April, Digitimes Research's figures showed.

With HP's increased shipments and Dell's stable orders, the top-3 notebook ODMs together achieved on-month growth of 31% in May and the volume was flat from May a year ago. This is the first time the top-3 ODMs were able to escape from an on-year decline in seven months.

With orders from HP and Lenovo increasing around 600,000 units from April, the second-largest ODM Compal Electronics achieved an on-month shipment growth of 33% in May, performing the best among the top-3 ODMs. Quanta Computer also achieved an on-month shipment growth of 31% because of orders for Chromebooks from several brand vendors.

Content from this article was part of a complete Digitimes Research Chinese-language report that has not yet been translated into English. If you are interested in an English version of the report or wish to receive more information about the report, click here to contact us and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Digitimes Research also provides quarterly tracking services for market sectors such as China Smartphone, China Smartphone AP, Taiwan ICT and Taiwan FPD. Click here for more information about Digitimes Research Tracking services.
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RSV: Nationwide Children's Hospital helping find new treatments

Experimental RSV vaccines and possible treatments are being tested in preclinical studies at Nationwide Children's Hospital and other hospitals.
New Delhi has decided to expand cooperation with Taiwan in the fields of aviation, agriculture and allied services amidst signs of strain in India's relations with Mainland China. A meeting of the union cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday approved signing of the Air Services Agreement between India and Taiwan. The government also gave its ex post facto approval to a memorandum of understanding between India and Taiwan for cooperation in the field of agriculture and allied sectors, official sources said after the meeting. India, however, maintains a `One-China' policy and does not have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. India and Taiwan do not have formal embassies in each other's capitals. The India Taipei Association in Taipei and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in New Delhi serve as representative offices of the two nations in each other's capitals. The People's Republic of China does not recognise Taiwan - officially the Republic of China - as a separate nation. It also does not maintain ties with the nations that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Air services between India and Taiwan were so far governed by a MoU exchanged between Air India Charters Limited (AIRL) and Taipei Airlines Associations (TAA), the government stated in a press release issued on Wednesday. The new Air Services Agreement signifies an important landmark in the civil aviation relations between India and Taiwan, and has the potential to spur greater trade, investment, tourism and cultural exchanges between the two parties, it added. The other MoU approved by the union cabinet on Wednesday provides for cooperation in agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, fisheries, aquaculture and food processing. The other MoU provides for cooperation in the fields of agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, fisheries, aquaculture and food processing, genetic resources as well as environmental sustainability. Both sides will encourage the private sector in both countries to enter into cooperation in these areas. The cooperation between the two sides involves exchange of visits, information, technology and training and also expansion of agricultural trade while reducing trade barriers. Under the MoU, a Joint Working Committee will be constituted to identify priority areas of mutual interest and follow up on the progress of implementation of the activities identified by both sides. The MoU will be initially signed for a period of five years and shall be automatically renewed for a subsequent periods of five years unless either party expresses its desire/intention to terminate it.








Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca worker held in Geneva

An information technology worker at the Geneva offices of Mossack Fonseca, the offshore law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal, has been arrested in the hunt for the whistleblower behind the biggest ever leak to journalists.

Early last year, an individual using the alias John Doe approached the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, offering data from the internal files of Mossack Fonseca. The leak led to the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister in April this year and sparked international protests over the use of tax havens by financial and political elites.

''A procedure has been opened by the public ministry of Geneva following a complaint made by Mossack Fonseca,'' a spokeswoman for the city prosecutor confirmed on Wednesday afternoon. She said further information would follow in due course. The person arrested has not been named.

Uncertainty surrounds the reasons for the arrest. Suddeutsche Zeitung believes that the person arrested is not the newspaper's source. Bastian Obermayer, who jointly led the investigation at the German paper, told The Guardian, ''According to our information this is not John Doe.''

The source has not revealed their identity but has offered to cooperate with law enforcement.

Mossack Fonseca is accusing its employee of information theft and breach of trust, a lawyer for the firm told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

Asked if the accused was John Doe, lawyer Thierry Ulmann said, ''All hypotheses are open. What we know is that data was taken via his computer in Geneva and that this IT worker had full access privileges.

''It's on this basis that we have filed a complaint for data theft and breach of the law firm's trust. Very detailed investigations are being undertaken by Geneva police to analyse the digital traces and shed light on this theft of data.''

The IT worker's two lawyers, Thomas Barth and Roman Jordan, said their client ''denied all of the accusations against him''.

A search is understood to have been conducted at Mossack Fonseca's Geneva office and IT equipment has been seized.

The case is being overseen by magistrate Claudio Mascotto, who previously intervened over the Panama Papers.

In April he oversaw a swoop on the Geneva Freeport, during which a 18-million Modigliani painting allegedly looted by the Nazis was seized.

The identity of the true owners of "Seated Man with a Cane", currently the subject of a legal battle, was revealed by the Mossack Fonseca leak.

Published on 3 April 2016, the Panama Papers revealed the tax-haven companies used by 12 heads of state, more than 100 politicians and their relatives, political donors, companies put under sanction by the US and Europe, convicted criminals, and drugs and arms dealers.

More than half of the 214,000 companies whose details were leaked in the cache of 11.5m documents were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.

The data was passed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington and shared with media organisations around the world.
There has been a significant increase in the number of homeowners in the county registering with the Mica Action Group following the broadcast of an RTE investigation into the problem.

The presence of mica is believed to be causing blockwork in houses across the country to crumble.

The Mica Action Group (MAG) said the two weeks since the broadcast of the Prime Time programme has seen a huge increase in homeowners coming forward who believe their homes may be affected; the number now sits at around 350.

The problem has seen blockwork on hundreds of homes crumble and the presence of the mineral muscovite mica has been discovered in many of the affected houses. While most of the houses are in Inishowen, MAG believe many homeowners have not come forward yet. A number of homeowners have taken a legal challenge against Buncrana quarry company Cassidy Brothers over the problem.

Minister for Housing and Urban Renewal Damien English is to come to Donegal next Monday to meet members of MAG and local councillors to discuss the issue.

Phil McDaid, MAG chairman, said that in the weeks since the programme aired, the number of homeowners who made contact to indicate they believe they are affected has risen by about 25 per cent, to about 350. The numbers are continuing to rise on a daily basis and come from homeowners across the county, he said.

A large number of homeowners sat down to watch the programme with their families and contacted us afterwards to say that the programme had prompted them to inspect their homes and led them to realise that they too are also affected by defective blocks, he said. He said the groups dedicated phone number and email have never been busier.

The programme highlighted serious shortcomings in the manufacturing, regulation and inspection of concrete block production in Ireland and clarified that blocks delivered on to the market over many years were not suitable for purpose, having low cement content, high levels of mica and high water content, resulting in low block strength, high friability and high susceptibility to freeze-thaw action, he said. Anyone who watched the programme has seen the results  some homes now abandoned, insurance withdrawn, cannot be sold and have no value. This is not to mention the attendant issues - anxiety, stress, hopelessness, depression, anger and feelings of having been let down by the providers of the materials, the council, regulatory bodies, mortgage provides and the government.
This Week's Highlights

Tonight seems to be the night for local performing arts academies to showcase their talents: the Strabane Arts Academy Variety Show is at The Alley in Strabane while On Cue Performing Arts Academy present Musically On Cue at An Grianan Theatre, Letterkenny. Also tonight, junior infant students from St Marys National School, Stranorlar perform What The Ladybird Heard at The Balor, Ballybofey and comedy Handbag Positive plays The Millennium Forum in Derry,

Staying with The Forum, popular Johnny Cash tribute show Cash Returns is there on Friday. Saturday sees the first of Original Sinners, a new monthly original music night at The Alley in Strabane.

Lisa Hannigan plays The Balor, Ballybofey on Sunday while comedian Russell Kane is at The Alley in Strabane.

Danny Carnos Mathematical Mysteries is an educational and entertaining mix of maths, theatre and digital technology: thats on in The Millennium Forum, Derry on Tuesday morning. And rounding off the week is comic hypnotist Adrian Knight who brings his Youre Back On The Stage show to The Forum on Wednesday.

Lisa Hannigan

Its one of the biggest gigs of the summer here in The Balor this Sunday as chart topper and bona fide Irish music star Lisa Hannigan returns to Ballybofey.

This will be her fourth visit: she first played here as far back as July 2008 prior to the release of her debut solo album Sea Sew. And what an album it was. It went double platinum and was nominated for the Choice Music Prize in Ireland as well as the Mercury Prize in the UK. On the back of its success, Lisa played bewitching guest spots on the likes of Later...with Jools Holland, The Late Late Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Colbert Report.

Lisas follow-up album Passenger went straight in at No. 1 in its first week of release and earned her another Choice Music Prize nomination.

Theres a new album in the works due for release round about September, so fans of Lisa can look forward to the airing of some new material as well as the catalogue of favourites from the previous two albums. Really looking forward to this one: Lisas gigs are always one of the years musical highlights.

Lisa Hannigan plays The Balor, Ballybofey this Sunday June 19 at 8pm. Support comes from highly rated Dublin outfit Ye Vagabonds. Tickets are 22 from 0749131840 or www.balorartscentre.com. At the time of writing, theres a few left but not many, so get on the phone or online quick smart.

Original Sinners

Original Sinners is the name of a new monthly original music night that will take place over the summer in the confines of the cafe bar at The Alley Theatre in Strabane.

Theres an abundance of creative musical talent around the NorthWest and its hoped that this will provide a showcase for original musicians and maybe act as a springboard towards bigger things. Its not genre-specific  all types of music are welcome. The one requirement is that it must all be original. Hosted by Ciaran Gallen, the first Original Sinners night is this Saturday, June 18. Subsequent dates are programmed for July 2 and August 6, with proceedings kicking off at 8pm each night. Admission 5.

If youre a performer of original music and are interested in taking part in one of the future Original Sinners nights, contact Nicola Bonner on 048 71384760 or nicola.bonner@derrystrabane.com.

Earagail Festival Music

The 2016 Earagail Arts Festival is just around the corner.

The official festival launch took place a couple of weeks ago and tickets are on sale for all festival events at 0749120777 and www.eaf.ie.

This week well take a look at the music on offer. Theres a couple of mini festivals within the festival with the Earagail Arts Festival curated Mountain Stage at Arramore Islands Swell Festival July 9-10 and the Donegal International Folk & Roots Weekendin Letterkenny from the July 14-17.

Donal Dineen headlines the Mountain Stage on Saturday, July 9. Headlining on the Sunday is Reverend Peytons Big Damn Band, a dirty, grungy, foot-stompin country blues band from Brown County, Indiana, USA.

Included in the line-up for the Donegal International Folk & Roots Weekend are Haitian roots band Chouk Bwa Libete, Andy Irvine & Chris Wood and Richard Dawson.

All fine acts but the standout for me has to be Dublin four piece trad folk outfit Lynched who combine four part harmonies with arrangements of uileann pipes, concertina, Russian accordion, fiddle and guitar

Theyre very much the coming young tyros of the Irish folk scene right now. On the same bill are English folk band Stick In the Wheel and only 15 admission for these two (Friday June 15th) is a bargain.

Outside of these two mini-festivals th two other gigs that stand out for me are The Lost Brothers (Balor, Ballybofey Thursday, June 21) are one of the current darlings of the Irish music scene. You can hear theinfulences of Van Morrison and Paul McCartney in their timeless crafted melodies and compelling lyrics. With four highly acclaimed albums under their belt, theyve been championed by the likes of Richard Hawley and Glen Hansard and have appeared on the Levon Helms Midnight Ramble and the BBC Electric Proms.

The following night, Friday 22nd, sees The Henry Girls play a home gig on the village green in Malin.

The three McLaughlin sisters are phenomenally popular and happily disprove the notion of a prophet never being accepted in his home town, as their delicious harmonies and soulful yet folky melodies are equally appreciated at home and abroad.

Theres loads more besides so be on the lookout for the EAF2016 brochure or log on to www.eaf.ie
Halloween creatures  owls, crows and bats  all live at Crossroads, and that makes us very happy, for these scary animals make a positive contribution to the habitats of the preserve. We don't even mind black cats, IF they are kept indoors. Feral and outdoor cats are exceedingly harmful to wildlife ... and that's not a superstition! But to tamp down superstitions, we at Crossroads will spend the week demystifying Halloween creatures.

On October 28, 2022, at 6 p.m. will be our Evening with Owls. The Open Door Bird Sanctuary will be at Crossroads, offering a one-hour presentation followed by the opportunity to meet and greet live birds. Learn all about owls and the other incredible birds in the care of the Sanctuary!

Down through the centuries, in many cultures throughout the world, owls have been associated with evil and death. Truth is, owls probably are not smart enough to be evil. But researchers agree that owls are about as dim as the nighttime forests in which they hunt.

Owls don't need to be smart. They have everything else going for them. They are muscular. They fly silently. Their huge eyes enable them to see in the dark. Their beaks and talons are strong and wickedly sharp. But their sensitive ears are what make owls extraordinary hunters.

Most people assume that the plumicorns (a.k.a. "horns) of an owl are its ears. Not so.

The actual ears lie under feathers on the sides of the head, and they aren't symmetrical. Because one ear is higher than the other and the ears are unequal in size, sound is different from different directions, helping owls locate prey, which they do almost unfailingly, even in total darkness.

Owls do not smell their prey. As with most birds, the sense of smell is insignificant, if it exists are all. Great Horned Owls frequently prey on skunks. Enough said.

But well-developed intelligence? Researchers have observed owls beating their wings on bushes to try to flush out little birds. Is this learned behavior? Is it problem-solving?

Maybe.

For the most part, owls do not have a lot of problems to solve. They appropriate abandoned nests of other birds, so they don't need building skills. They are stealthy by nature, and they pounce on and usually catch anything they hear, so they don't need hunting techniques.

In spite of ghost stories, legends of American First People, and superstitions from Europe and India, hooting owls do not foretell impending death, although their nocturnal calls are spooky. We hear them now and then this time of year, but we will regularly hear those eerie calls at Crossroads in January or February.

In contrast to owls, crows are noisy all year round and they are amazingly intelligent. They can learn. They can remember. They can solve problems. They can even identify individual humans. And they detest owls, though whether this is innate or learned behavior is not clear.

Those curious about crows will want to attend the Crossroads Book Club on Wednesday, October 26, at 10:00 a.m. This month, the book Crow Planet, Essential Wisdom for the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt will explore the fascinating world of these remarkable birds. The program is free and open to all, whether or not they have read the book.

So bring the family to our program on owls, learn about crows at the Crossroads Book Club, or learn about bats at our pre-school Junior Nature Club on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. or our Family Science Saturday program at 2:00 p.m. Costumes are encouraged but not required at Junior Nature Club and Science Saturday, and adult visitors are welcome.
I like privacy as much as the next person. I dont want anybody tapping my phone or peeking through my windows. Im even irked that whenever I go online to shop for, say, chainsaws or hiking boots, every other web site I go to afterward reminds me of my interest in these products.

But as an advocate for open government, I am troubled by the extent to which public officials are using privacy in order to shut down access to public information. They say its necessary because the public cant be trusted not to do horrible things.

One manifestation of this was the decision last year to remove records of dismissed cases from the states online court records system. The change was supported by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who like me was a member of a committee that looked into the issue. (I opposed the change.)

Vos argued that the information had to be removed to keep people from using it to discriminate against others whose names appear on the system, officially known as Wisconsin Circuit Court Access (WCCA). For instance, if employers learn that someone was accused of a crime, even if it was dismissed, they will refuse to hire that person. Yet Vos also told the group that he regularly hires ex-cons in his various businesses, and finds them to be excellent workers.

And that gets to the heart of the matter: pure arrogance. Those who want to purge public information believe: I am a good person who knows that not every charge is valid and even actual convictions shouldnt be used as a basis for judging future behavior. But other people are not nearly as good as I am and will discriminate brazenly and illegally. So we must keep them from obtaining this information.

Yet purging information from WCCA, which many people incorrectly call CCAP, means that the system no longer provides a comprehensive picture of what happens in our courts. Right now, for instance, every former prosecutor whose last case ended more than two years again has a 100 percent conviction rate, since all of the cases that did not lead to a conviction have been purged from public view.

Currently awaiting scheduling (and likely passage) in the Wisconsin Legislature is a bill with broad bipartisan support to greatly expand the availability of expungement of criminal convictions, which entails sealing court files and removing information from WCCA. Again, this is being done to protect those who have been convicted against the unfair and irrational judgments of members of the public.

Recently, a state appellate court ruled that judges can order the redaction of dismissed eviction cases from WCCA. The court bought hook, line and sinker the argument advanced by Dane County Circuit Court Judge Frank Remington, who said he wished he had the authority to order this purge because everyone goes on to CCAP and just simply assumes that if someone files an action, you must be guilty of something and you can never sort of break away and get a fair shake.

Neither Remington nor Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg, who wrote the ruling, offered any evidence in support of their contention that people other than themselves lack the capacity to reach fair conclusions about a dismissed eviction case. Instead, the public, in their view, is little more than an insensate mob eager to latch onto any excuse to discriminate.

In 2015, concerns about privacy  or so they said  led lawmakers to end the requirement that significant donors to political campaigns disclose where they work. As Wisconsin Democracy Campaign noted at the time, This makes it much more difficult for the media and the public to know whether employees of a specific company are all giving to a candidate in the expectation that their candidate will do the company a favor if that candidate wins.

Now, Vos and other GOP lawmakers are pushing a bill that would allow winners of the state lottery to remain anonymous. They say it is needed to protect lottery winners from harassment. Yet the bills proponents, Vos included, have offered no evidence of any actual harassment endured by lottery winners. None.

The director of the Wisconsin State Lottery, Cindy Polzin, opposes the change, saying releasing winners names helps prevent fraud. Indeed, the nonprofit investigation news outlet Wisconsin Watch last year published a story about suspicious repeat lottery winners that could not have been written were it not for access to winners names.

But the proponents of shielding names are determined to force this change. Just because you win the lottery, bill sponsor Rep. Gary Tauchen (R-Bonduel) declared, it shouldnt mean you lose your right to privacy.

A handful of other states have passed bills to shield the names of some lottery winners. In Delaware, Ohio and South Carolina, all winners can remain anonymous. But in New Jersey, then-Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a similar measure, saying it would undermine the transparency that provides taxpayers confidence in the integrity of the Lottery.

Perhaps the most outrageous recent example of secrecy in the name of privacy is the news that Jake Patterson, the man convicted of abducting 13-year-old Jayme Closs and killing her parents, has been moved to an out-of-state prison whose location is not being disclosed, according to a state Department of Corrections spokesperson, for his safety. So now Wisconsin is officially sending people to secret prisons to protect their privacy. Dont ask, because the state wont tell.

In April, I attended the annual summit of the National Freedom of Information Coalition in Dallas, Texas. One theme that came up was the embrace of privacy as a justification for keeping official state secrets.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, said there have even been cases in which information on officer-involved shootings is being withheld on grounds of officer privacy. He told that group, If you label something as pro-privacy, theres almost nothing the legislature and judges will not affirm.

He added; I sometimes think if you told people today that you wanted to create a book with everyones name, address, and phone number and put it on peoples doorsteps, youd be tarred and feathered.

I dont mind if the law keeps people from installing secret cameras in my house. But when the state of Wisconsin decides to disrupt my life by filing bogus charges against me that are later dismissed, I bloody well want for there to be a record of it. I will trust that others can look at it and see that it was dismissed without assuming that I must have been guilty of something.

In fact, I have never met a single person who did not think that he or she had the ability to make rational judgments about people who are accused or even convicted of crimes, or who have been the subject of an eviction action. But many of them believe their fellow citizens are too stupid and too mean to do the same.

The evocation of privacy as a justification of official secrecy is really just part of a larger push on the part of public officials to limit what the public can know about the actions and inactions of government. It serves their own interests more than anybody elses.
The 1st Battalion, 13th Aviation Regiment welcomed a new command team during a change of command and responsibility ceremony for the Swift and Deadly unit.

Lt. Col. Kevin E. McHugh, 1st Battalion, 13th Aviation Regiment commander, assumed command from Lt. Col. Romeo R. Macalintal, Jr., and Command Sgt. Maj. George S. Webster assumed responsibility from Command Sgt. Maj. Ronald K. Graves, as the unit colors passed from Macalintal, to Col. Woodard B. Hopkins, 1st Aviation Brigade commander, to McHugh, signifying the command change during a ceremony on Howze Field Friday.

Hopkins presided over the ceremony and welcomed the new team while he bid farewell to the outgoing team, and expressed his full confidence in McHughs and Websters leadership.

Today, one of the leading units in training excellence bids farewell to their command team and welcomes the new team, said the 1st AB commander. My initial impression of both of these leaders is that they respect and value this team, and I expect nothing less than excellence in the years to come for the Soldiers and civilians of the 1-13th under their leadership. I am confident that the Swift and Deadly battalion is getting an outstanding command team.

McHugh graduated from George Mason University in 1997 and was commissioned in the Armor Branch. It wasnt until 2000 that he came to Fort Rucker to attend the Aviation Captains Career Course and complete the Initial Entry Rotary Wing course.

Throughout his career, hes held multiple leadership positions across the globe, including battalion assistant S-3 and B Company flight operations officer for the 2nd Bn., 52nd Avn. Regt. at Camp Humphreys, South Korea; commander for the D/58th Avn. Regt., also at Camp Humphreys; as well as a observer/trainer for the Aviation Heavy Lift and Tactical Operations Center at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Louisiana.

McHugh comes to Fort Rucker from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served as a senior Aviation trainer in the Mission Command Training Program, and has served in multiple deployments, including with the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division as the brigade Aviation officer and chief of operations in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2007-2009; as well as the brigade S4 and executive officer for the 7-101st General Support Aviation Battalion in support of Operation Enduring Freedom from 2010 to 2012.

On the field to your front stands a group of our nations finest, said McHugh during the ceremony. They are Soldiers, some who have recently raised their right hands, and others who have and continue to serve for a purpose that is bigger and broader than themselves.

They display dedication and the opportunity to lead a group of this caliber  I am truly humbled and honored to be here to day, he continued. To the Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 13th Aviation Regiment, you look absolutely flawless  thank you for doing what you do each and every day in support of our mission. It is my honor and privilege to assume this position, and I look forward to continuing the legacy of this great battalion.

Webster also has a distinguished military career, entering the Army in 1994 and attending Advanced Individual Training at Fort Rucker where he became a 15P, Aviation operations specialist.

Hes held numerous operational and leadership positions, including operations specialist, Aviation operations chief, range control shift leader, recruiter, command Aviation NCO-in charge, Air Traffic Control operations chief and operations sergeant major.

Hes served across the world, from Fort Drum, New York, and Fort Hood, Texas, to Camp Humphreys, South Korea to Camp Doha, Kuwait.

Im excited and humbled to be part of the Golden Hawks team and I look forward to carrying on a mission that (Macalintal and Graves) have been responsible for leading, said the incoming command sergeant major.

Both Graves and Macalintal expressed their utmost confidence in the incoming command team.

Ive been fortunate enough to serve with Webster before and Im sure the Army got it right when selecting you to take responsibility for this outstanding unit, said Graves.

As the honor of leading the 1-13th comes to a close, Ive been assured that the Swift and Deadly battalion will get to Soldier on with exactly the type of leaders needed to take this organization to further heights, added Macalintal. To Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs. McHugh, and Command Sergeant Major and Mrs. Webster, good luck, and I know youll do just fine.
Alabama House of Representatives District 90 Chris Sells, Representative District 91 Barry Moore and Alabama Senator of District 31 Jimmy Holley were guests at Wednesdays luncheon hosted by the Republican Women of Coffee County.

The representatives spoke briefly about the conviction of Mike Hubbard, who was convicted of 12 felony counts of ethics violations for using his public office for personal gain.

Were facing some problems in this state, Sells said. We just had a situation that were getting over right now. Its ours -- mine and Barrys -- more than anything to turn this into a positive.

Sells said that with the election for the Speaker of House approaching, along with the governors election coming in two years, it was important for the state to elect someone who will be minded like we are.

The House member also commented on the need for ideas with longevity.

I think there are some positive changes coming, Sells said. Most of us are going to be okay, but our children and grandchildren are not going to have a chance if we dont do something. Ive been hearing some great ideas for next year, but I want something for the next 20 yearslong term ideas.

Moore also commented on the recent conviction on Hubbard, whom Moore calls a dear friend.

Its certainly difficult, Moore said. The situation were in right now, going forward, we have to lead in the House. We have to find a speaker, someone to get behind -- someone to support. I was saddened by Mikes verdict, Ill tell you that. It broke my heart; hes a friend of mind. And my loyalty if Im on your team, Im on your team. Now, Im not saying he did everything right, but laws are on the book to protect the people, and in this case the ethics laws are in place to protect us.

The House representative gave an example of setting a speed limit to 55 miles-per-hour, and someone is driving 56 down that road. Moore said while the sheriff is legally in the right to write a ticket if someone is driving 56 miles-per-hour, he doesnt expect the sheriff to do that every time.

How we enforce laws sometimes can be abused, Moore said. So we like to see some common sense in enforcement, and what we see not is really extreme. It makes me nervous for Republicans. Im not saying Mike wasnt running a 75 in a 55, maybe he was. I wasnt on the jury. I didnt hear everything. But at the end of the day weve still got to lead. Maybe we have to revisit some of these issues, I dont know, but at the end of the day we expect some common sense, and then theres always unintended consequences of the laws you pass, whatever that may be.

Moore also talked about the need to come together within the Republican Party, as well as the need to understand the differences between the Republican and Democratic parties.

Theres two ways to do this thing, Moore said. And Ive found the best way to do it is to vote your convictions, understand your differences and work through them.

Moore said he has several Democratic friends and he works with in efforts to understand their stance on issues to ultimately come to a mutual achievement for the state.

Senator Holley said that while the state had several issues in the year, it was also a good year.

Holley spoke briefly about some of the successful legislation passed in the last year, including raise in the education budget for the first time since 2008.

He also mentioned the 4% pay raise for education employees, and getting $16 million in the Alabama Volunteer Pre-K Kindergarten Program.

The senator also mentioned the slight increase to Medicaid program, along with the new legislation for allowing cameras on school busses, a voluntary motion Holley said many schools systems plan to implement.

It was a bad year, no doubt about it, but it was a good year also, Holley said. What was so good about it, in my minds eye, is the fact that our tax revenue is finally turned around.
A Daleville man faces multiple sexual assault-related charges in connection with the molestation of a 7-year-old girl.

Daleville Police Chief Harvey Mathis said police arrested Vidal Emmanuel Rudolph, 33, of Daleville, and charged him with felony sexual abuse of a child less than 12 and three felony counts of first-degree sodomy. Mathis said the victim was a 7-year-old girl.

Mathis said the offenses were reported to Daleville in April by officials at Flowers Hospital after the victim had gone to the facility for treatment. He said the offenses had been under investigation for over a month until Rudolphs arrest earlier this week.

Officials with the Southeast Alabama Child Advocacy Center assisted the Daleville Police Department in making the arrest.

Rudolph was taken to the Dale County Jail and held without bond until his first appearance in court. Mathis did not know if bail had yet been set.
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BLACKROCK student Philip McGuinness was recently honoured by the Spanish Embassy in Ireland for achieving the top mark in the country in Leaving Cert Spanish.

Philip who sat the Leaving Cert this time last year is currently studying Spanish and History at Trinity College Dublin.

Although he had been delighted with his Leaving Cert result, Philip says he was still surprised to receive the call,

I found out in March when I got a call from the De La Salle School during a lecture. I couldnt believe it, you never expect to be acknowledged on a National scale.

Philip was subsequently invited to meet the Spanish Ambassador to Ireland last month accompanied by his parents Philip and Elizabeth and the Principal of the De La Salle in Dundalk.

We were given a warm reception with food and drink along with the other prize-winners there on the day. They introduced me to the Ambassador himself, a man named Jose Maria Rodriguez Coso, the Education Officer of the Spanish Government in Ireland and a representative of the Government of Castilla y Leon. I also met with the Chief Examiner for Spanish from the SEC.

I was given a glass trophy acknowledging my achievement and I was then told that as part of my prize, I was to be taken for a 4 day visit to the region of Castilla y Leon (just north of Madrid), to cities like Salamanca, Segovia and Valladolid.

Having studied Spanish since first year, for Philip there was an immediate connection, hence his decision to pursue the language at third level

I was drawn to the language almost immediately. It made sense to me, the words, the construction and most importantly, the pronunciation. Spanish, closely related to the other Romance Languages, had many words and phrases that I could already recognise.

I also knew that it could prove useful down the line. I knew for certain that I wanted to study a language at University, be it, English, Irish or Spanish and I eventually settled on Spanish because of the range and variation of learning on offer. It also provides me with options in the future, should I want to become a teacher or go on a do a PhD.

As well as studying History and Spanish at TCD Philip is also putting his considerable experience to good use by tutoring exam students, something which he very much enjoys,

I like using my own experience to help others and to make the exam a less daunting experience. I also enjoy seeing students take an extra interest in the language. Languages, in particular, transcend exams entirely. Its like imparting a new life skill to someone.

I take on small groups of Junior Cert and Leaving Cert students and I try to tailor the grind to their individual needs. If they are struggling with a particular area, we will address it! I also provide them with simple, straightforward notes that help to pare down the course slightly for them as well as providing them with useful techniques that they can utilize on the day of the exam.

I aim not to try to cover all areas of the course in each session. Each area of the exam feeds into the next. Its my aim to cover key vocabulary, verbs and improve sentence construction. Comprehension and basic translation skills area also important. I would also aim to improve the elaborative skills of students from what they have already learned in class.

And for students approaching their exams at this time Philip has some good advice,

I always found that vocabulary was the key, I made out lists of words that I could learn in small bites as I went along. Listening to the language being spoken also helps your reading of the language. I read Spanish language articles online on things that interested me such as sport. It doesnt seem like such a chore then.

There is also scope to be unique when preparing for the exam. Prepare quirks, individual to you that you can use for the written part of the exam. Basics are the most important; numbers, dates, and basic vocabulary go a long way in securing a great grade!

Philip is continuing to offer private grinds right throughout the summer months and beyond for all those preparing for exams in the forthcoming academic years. For more information you can contact him at mcguinp1@tcd.ie or at 0879601689.
We celebrate the start-ups that grow their businesses to great success, and we recognise the visionary business owners who inspire us with their dream and do things differently.

But what about the business owners who did not start the business and are running with a vision set by someone else? Im talking about the franchise owners and those brought in to run a start up or SME that has already had the hard yards put in to get it off the ground. Are they less deserving?

Starting a business is seriously tough. Most fail. You need to think of everything, and most of that time is spent before you can start to make any money. It is a massive learning curve and it takes guts. Even the smartest founders with the best plans know that there is an element of risk involved in a starting a new business.

So when someone starts a business and it does well, does it deserve praise and recognition? Absolutely!

The unsung heroes

But just as making a start-up successful requires incredible skill, tenacity, guts and hard work, so does keeping the business successful and growing it. Enter our other heroes: business owners who take an existing business to a new level of growth and progress.

Sure a franchise owner or owner of an existing business does not need to go through the tough start-up phase (a phase that only business founders will ever appreciate the intensity of). But they do need to be able to work with what someone else has created. They dont have the luxury of championing their own vision for the business, creating the reputation that they want the business to have, or designing the fundamentals of what make the business what it is. Sure they can influence these and change them over time. But they need to do it in a way that stays true to the core of the business that was created by the founder.

In many ways this is a blessing, but it is no small feat to take an established business and build on the vision that someone else developed. The business owners who do this well should be celebrated too.

A fresh approach

They might move a business away from doing things the way they have always been done. Being new to the business gives them fresh eyes to see the potential for growth that perhaps the original business owner or franchisor could not (as we know, its difficult to work on your business when you are in your business). They bring a revived energy, different personality and perspective, and new considerations, because they inject a dose of themselves into the business.

If you are a business owner who has walked into a business that is already established and have taken it further than it would have gone before you took the reigns  well done! Or you are a franchise owner who saw the value in buying into a proven formula and have added your own ideas and vigour to grow the business  I take my hat off to you!

Treat your business as a new business

And if you are the founder of your own business, you would do well to look at the example of those successful business owners who are not founders. Step into their shoes for a moment and consider how they might take your business to the next level if they were in charge. Here are some considerations:

Create partnerships that will benefit both businesses  look at a joint venture with a business that can complement your offering

Should you consider a rebrand or a refinement of your messaging and offering?

Is your business ready to expand?

Consider a review of your target customers  can this be refined or can you include additional targets?

Look at what you currently offer  is there potential for upselling or perhaps you could consider an expansion of the current service?

Build your profile on social media  determine your key messages and build on what has been previously done by integrating your own vision and personality.

Develop and implement a local area marketing plan  consider building your business locally with your own identity as the face of the business, this should include networking events and Chamber membership as an example.

Introduce training programs to build confidence and get the best performance from your employees.

Get the right people involved  either employ the right people or engage consultants to undertake tasks that you are not confident in or have limited understanding of.

See your business through the eyes of your customers.

Think about taking on a business coach to help you to develop and implement your goals within a set timeframe rather than parking ideas for now.

Understand that any business can benefit from renewed vision, perspective and a revived personality. So when it comes to owning an existing business or taking on a franchise, I say go for it. And if you are the founder of your business, its time to treat it as a new business to see your business level up!

About Belinda Bow

Belinda Bow is the founder of Green Chilli Marketing and recently launched the Green Chilli Marketing Franchise opportunity for talented marketers to have a successful career and work life that fits in with their lifestyle. Belinda is a Certified Practicing Marketer and an Associate Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute.
Startups that fail to exercise resource parsimony or understand the job their customers want to get done will not survive against larger companies and risk falling afoul of investors, a prominent strategy expert has warned.

In Sydney last month to participate in the World Business Forum (25 to 26 May), Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, set aside time to speak with Dynamic Business about startups and other small businesses.

Ahead of her presentation on the increasing irrelevance of sustainable competitive advantage (you can read about that here), she identified some key challenges for small businesses as well as tips for not only surviving but also thriving in a turbulent business environment:

Forget foosball teams

What we are going to see happen in Silicon Valley is that firms with massively high burn rates will suffer once venture capitalists become less willing to throw money at them. When venture capitalists back trucks up to your companys front doors and unload money, you can be fooled into thinking its great to have foosball teams, on-site masseuses and whatever else. You forget that the minute someone puts money into your company, the clock is ticking until they want it back. If you dont have a scalable business, its going to be very difficult to accomplish that.

Exercise resource parsimony

In the last few years a lot of people have forgotten entrepreneurship 101, which advocates resource parsimony. That means being as creative as you can about how to get resources, rather than digging further into your pockets. In other words, you should spend your imagination before you spend your money. Also, dont over-invest in fixed costs and dont limit yourself to a particular configuration of technology or assets because its likely to change. Think to yourself: can you leverage the resources of others; can you pay for things on a variable basis rather than taking on fixed costs; can you manage your cash flows very precisely so you know how many units you have to sell to cover your fixed costs.

Find your niche

Small businesses need to look for the early warning signs of big changes in their industry. I interviewed someone at Sony around ten year ago, and he said the company used to supply 55,000 businesses, all of which were mom and pop electronic stores. Well, the world changed and there was a complete inversion of the supply chain so that only a handful of companies mattered to Sony  Best Buy, Walmart, Radio Shack and a few others. Consider the small bookstores which have closed due to Barnes and Noble, and the fact that Toys R Us is closing down local toy shops. Consider also Amazon  theyre affecting everybody. Small businesses can win in these kinds of situations by finding niches that really appreciate what they do and are willing to pay for it, and by overserving their customers in a way that a larger, less personal entity is unable to.

Know your customers

For a competitive advantage, small businesses really need to understand the jobs their customers are trying to get done. Lets take the case of a hardware store. There are two basic market segments youre selling to and they want completely different things. One is the DIY home renovators who need need advice and guidance. Then you have the professional contractors who just want to buy supplies, load their truck and drive off. In this situation, you should probably consider which customer you really want to serve. Alternatively, if you want to serve both, you really have to have a different service delivery function. Its important not to confuse what the customer wants to get done and what you can offer them.

Budget for change

Small business operators need to budget for necessary updates and upgrades. When a small business is founded, things tend to be a bit rushed, a bit makeshift. However, if the business is going to be sustainable, the operator need to consider the funding necessary to bring it up to a certain standard. Entrepreneurs can be caught by surprise if they need to update their systems or physical plant but realise they didnt budget for it.

Access to assets

Small businesses have more opportunities to break into areas that previously required massive amounts of scale and asset intensity. Two guys in a garage can have global reach whereas 40 to 50 years ago that would have been unthinkable. The advantage that small firms have today is that the focus has shifted from ownership of assets to access to assets.
Council Leader speaks of 'senseless hatred'

Ealing has joined other West London councils and raised a rainbow flag to remember victims of the Orlando attack.

Omar Mateen entered Pulse nightclub on Sunday and gunned down 50 members of the gay community. The attack in Florida was the worst mass shooting in recent US history.

The rainbow flag represents the LGBT community.

Ealing's Council leader, Cllr Julian Bell, said:



"The appalling atrocities in Orlando over the weekend have touched us all and our heartfelt condolences go out to the families and friends of the victims involved.

"Ealing is a vibrant and diverse borough with strong community cohesion and we will not tolerate discrimination.

"We are flying the Rainbow flag at half-mast in honour of those who have lost their lives and been injured by an act of senseless hatred, and to show our support for the annual Pride Festival this month".

15th June 2016
Retire to the Cotswolds at Fair Acres in Honeybourne

House-hunters looking for the perfect place to spend their retirement are discovering that they can downsize to the home of their dreams on the edge of the Cotswolds  at Taylor Wimpeys Fair Acres development in Honeybourne, Worcestershire.

Surrounded by exclusive villages and with the stunning backdrop of the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty less than two miles down the road, Fair Acres offers a unique opportunity to enjoy Cotswold living for a great-value price!

Honeybourne itself offers a wonderful community-centred lifestyle packed with activities and events. Theres a village hall, a parish allotment scheme, a pottery and even a nature centre for a great day out with the grandkids, as well as miles of footpaths through the countryside to enjoy.

Whats more, idyllic rural life is complemented by exceptional transport connections thanks to Honeybournes direct rail services to London Paddington and road links to the historic and cultural attractions of nearby Evesham and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Moving in later life neednt be stressful either  as customers downsizing to a new home at Fair Acres can take advantage of Taylor Wimpeys easymover scheme, which sees the housebuilder help find a buyer for their existing property, generally within a matter of a few weeks and sometimes in as little as a fortnight - theyll even pay your estate agent fees as part of this incentive!

Alternatively, for those trading up to a new home at Fair Acres, Part Exchange sees them receive an agreed offer price for their current home, based on the average of independent professional valuations, and with Taylor Wimpey acting as their cash buyer, they can stay in their old place until their new house is ready.

Anne Wallace, Regional Sales and Marketing Director for Taylor Wimpey, says: Honeybourne is a popular place for people to move to for their retirement and with its varied range of amenities and leisure opportunities as well as its idyllic location, its easy to see why.

Id urge anyone hoping to retire to the Cotswolds to come along to Fair Acres and see what we have to offer, as these new homes arent going to be available for very long!

Theres a superb selection of new homes currently available to reserve at Fair Acres including three-bedroom houses from 228,995 and four and five-bedroom detached designs from 374,995 and 409,995 respectively.

Fair Acres boasts a picturesque setting in Honeybourne, with beautiful countryside views in a popular area close to the Cotswolds town of Chipping Campden and the village of Broadway.

Honeybourne is a peaceful village with a wealth of community facilities on the doorstep, while the nearby market town of Evesham boasts a range of amenities, including the Riverside shopping centre and supermarkets.

The development is just minutes away from Honeybourne train station for direct services to London Paddington, as well as Worcester, Evesham, Oxford and Reading. Meanwhile, there is easy access to the A44 for those travelling by car, and a regular bus service operates between Honeybourne and Evesham.

To find out more about retiring to the Cotswolds at Fair Acres, property-seekers can visit the Sales Centre, located off Weston Road, Honeybourne, WR11 7QJ, and open Thursday to Monday from 11am to 5pm. Alternatively, visit taylorwimpey.co.uk.
Seven San Francisco museums where the food is as good as the art

An art museum is as much about the experience as it is about the individual exhibits themselves. The sights and sounds - the overall ambiance - can help create a memorable visit to a place of inspiration and creativity. In San Francisco, the dining establishments are also considered part of the art.

San Francisco abounds with fascinating art museums that are also rich in dining experiences. This city and its museum restaurants will pull you in with creative offerings and upscale, sustainable dining experiences sure to delight the palate and the eye.

In Situ at SFMOMA

First on the menu is In Situ, the newest restaurant at SFMOMA, which opens to the public for lunch and dinner in June 2016. Chef Corey Lee has previously received three Michelin Stars, and now he is serving up a brand new dining experience. In Situ will have a revolving menu that, over the course of a year, will feature 90 dishes. Some items call for ingredients that are only available for a few weeks each year. sfmoma.org

Cafe Asia at Asian Art Museum

Civic Center's Asian Art Museum overflows with cultural treasures and its restaurant, Cafe Asia, aims to complement the collection. Cafe Asia does not require you to pay museum admission to enjoy its rich Asian cuisine, but the experience is nevertheless designed to accompany a gallery visit  taking your day from exceptional to outstanding. From Japanese Curry Chicken to Seaweed Salads to its limited edition dong po rou (pork belly), served in honor of the "Meat-Shaped Stone" on display with the Emperor's Treasures, Chef Melinda Quirino's menu will give you a memorable dining experience. asianart.org

de Young Cafe at de Young Museum

Fresh is the rule at de Young Cafe inside the de Young Museum, where the ingredients are sourced locally and the farming connections are sustainable. Chef Lucas Schoemaker from McCalls Catering directs the establishment and provides a rotating, seasonal menu that will appeal to many tastes (don't miss the Summer Squash + Sundried Tomato Quiche or the Black Mission Fig + Blue Cheese Flatbread). After you wander in from Golden Gate Park, you'll appreciate how the relaxed dining area goes perfectly with the lush, natural scenery. From morning nibbles to mid-day noshes, de Young Cafe serves up creative elegance with exceptional taste. famsf.org

Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen at Contemporary Jewish Museum

From its original location on 24th Street, Wise Sons has expanded into the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the menu keeps downtown locals coming back. You'll find everything from house-made bagels to double-baked rye, and the smoked pastrami is piled high to keep your belly full while you wander the galleries at CJM. Don't miss the Babka or Rugelach; when served alongside coffee or tea, it will keep you smiling and yearning for more Jewish comfort food. Wise Sons Jewish Deli is open for lunch and doesn't require museum admission. thecjm.org

SEAGLASS Restaurant at the Exploratorium

Located along Pier 15, the Exploratorium's SEAGLASS Restaurant combines fresh, local produce with one fine waterfront view. Your experience at SEAGLASS will always be unique due to the ever-changing menu, and each of your visits will further solidify your appreciation for Chef Loretta Keller's approach. Touted as family-friendly yet inventive, SEAGLASS will encourage minds of all ages to appreciate nature's bounty and expand the horizons of all that creative comfort food can become. exploratorium.edu

Legion of Honor Cafe at Legion of Honor

Situated on Lands End and Lincoln Park  one of the most beautiful settings in the city  Legion of Honor Cafe at Legion of Honor has delightful dishes that pair well with the exceptional surroundings. Chef Lucas Schoemaker, also famed for his menu at de Young Cafe, provides rich, nourishing dishes that honor American and European cuisines. Many dishes are named after notable designers. Order up a James Galanos sandwich or a Diana Vreeland salad  you won't be disappointed. famsf.org

Bryant Terry, Chef-in-Residence at Museum of African Diaspora

Chef Bryant Terry doesn't have a dining area at the Museum of African Diaspora, but his ingenious approach to food has made him well-known and respected nonetheless. Terry hosts pop-up events in the museum, as well as throughout the community. He often focuses on food activism and farming, while encouraging people to blend flavors and styles. As you may expect, art and culture is an important part of his teaching style, and it blends in beautifully with the museum's photography galleries, sculptures and craft work. To plan your museum visit to coincide with one of Terry's outstanding dining events, check the website for upcoming presentations. moadsf.org

For information on reservations, activities and more, visit sanfrancisco.travel.
On Monday of this week, Donald Trump revoked the media credentials of journalists working for the Washington Post covering his events. This follows on the heels of his blacklisting of multiple other national media outlets including Gawker, BuzzFeed, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast, and Huffington Post.

Trump, who describes himself as having very strong, very thick skin, is clearly afraid of the sort of scrutiny that a viable free press in the USA demands of anyone running for president, particularly one running on a major party ticket. Its no surprise, of course. Its a common characteristic of bullies. Those who bully are invariably pathetic, insecure creatures who can only succeed by squashing anyone who they perceive as a threat.

But, surprising or not, this sort of action must be answered powerfully by those in a position to do so and no individual or organization is better-positioned to answer powerfully than our national media outlets. And now is the time for them to do just that.

Its important because Donald Trump has unleashed the most vile sort of rhetoric ever seen in modern American politics. Journalist Jared Yates Sexton recently attended a Trump rally and his tweeting during that experience revealed the seamy, un-American underbelly of our country. Vendors selling t-shirts that say TRUMP THAT BITCH! and Hillary sucks but not like Monica. Followers chanting Hurt him! Hurt him! as a protester is removed from the rally. Its shocking and an embarrassment to our country.

Trumps ascent is more than just an embarrassment. What far too many Americans fail to see is patently obvious to people in other countries. In my recent travels to Canada and Ireland, I was frequently asked how this could happen. People in other countries are terrified that Americans will put a man in control who will start World War III. And Im hearing from others around the world, as well.

But Trump can be stopped. He MUST be stopped. And our national media groups can play a central role in that. All other media outlets should abandon their coverage of Trumps public appearances. They should put aside their crass clamoring for ratings and step up to do what is right for America by showing solidarity with the Washington Post and others by refusing to cover his campaign appearances until the credentials of the blacklisted outlets are restored.

After more than a year of giving Trump free exposure  $2 billion worth, in fact  there are signs that this is already starting to happen. For the first time during this election cycle, Fox, MSNBC, and CNN all cut away from their non-stop coverage of a Trump rally to cover remarks being given by Sec. Hillary Clinton and CNNs Jake Tapper has been hitting Trump hard for several months now.

There is a real opportunity for our Fourth Estate to do something revolutionarily patriotic: to hold a fascist culpable for his hideous denigration of our country and its values. This is a moment in time when a good journalist with ethics and a deep love for our country can make his or her career by exposing Trump for the madman that he is; to be our generations Edward R. Morrow.

The rest of the world is watching us. Trump must not only be defeated by Hillary Clinton, he must be crushed. He must face a drubbing so epic and profound that no other candidate for our nations highest office (or any other office for that matter) ever again has the gall to drag our country into the historical slime pit previously occupied by evil people like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and Pol Pot.

Donald Trump will be that person unless we stop him. The time is now. Its time for those who exercise their all-American right of a free press to stand up and do their civic duty.

Now.

[CC photo credit: Jennifer Moo | Flickr]
Late in the Granholm administration as Michigans economy was at its worst thanks to the Bush recession, the state legislature passed a law requiring teachers to give up 3% of their paycheck to fund their retirement account, something they had never had to do in the past. The America Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Michigan Education Association (MEA) sued the state on the basis that teachers were being asked to pay in advance for benefits they may never receive.

The teachers won round after round of court battles all the way up to the state Supreme Court in 2012 where the case languished on their docket for two years. In the meantime, Republicans passed a replacement law that gave teachers an opt-out option. The teachers sued over this law, too. Last year, the state Supreme Court ruled the 2012 replacement law WAS constitutional and sent the 2010 case back to the Court of Appeals to determine if the new law rendered the 2010 law moot or impacted it in any way. During this time, fees collected from teachers between 2010 and 2013  more than $550 million  were held in escrow.

Last week, in yet another victory for teachers, the Appeals Court upheld their decision on the 2010, moving the teachers one step closer to receiving the money that the state illegal withheld from their paychecks and thats where we are today. What is unknown at this point is whether or not Gov. Snyder will once again waste taxpayer money fighting this case in the state Supreme Court.

The MEA has a petition asking Gov. Snyder to stop using tax dollars to screw teachers out of the more than half-billion dollars they are owed. You can sign the petition HERE.

Heres the text of the petition:

Two men  Governor Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette  stand between more than 200,000 Michigan school employees and the money that a state appeals court has ruled is rightfully theirs. Sign this petition today! Tell Governor Snyder and Attorney General Schuette to return the $550 million stolen from Michigan school employees! For five years, MEA and AFT Michigan have fought long and hard to force the state to return money that was illegally deducted from school employees paychecks from 2010 to 2012, when a law mandated that all school employees contribute 3 percent of their salary through an involuntary payroll deduction to fund retiree health care (a benefit that they were not guaranteed to receive). During that time, more than $550 million was taken from school employees  and thanks to our legal action, held in an interest-bearing escrow pending an outcome to this case. Now, for the second time, a court has ruled Public Act 75 unconstitutional. But Snyder and Schuette may appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court  a complete waste of time and taxpayer resources in their efforts to continue attacking school employees. The move would further deny school employees the return of their compensation unlawfully taken by the state. We cant let that happen. We are so close to bringing this legal battle to an end  if Snyder and Schuette dont appeal. The recent court victory is proof of the fact that strength in numbers wins. Were giving this all weve got, and were not stopping now. Urge Snyder and Schuette to respect the courts ruling and not appeal this case! They have less than 40 days left to decide whether theyll appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court. Lets keep the pressure on. TAKE ACTION by signing this petition, which well hand-deliver to their offices. And dont forget to share this far and wide with family, friends, colleagues and anyone else who believes that school employees deserve their money back.

Please sign the petition and show your solidarity and support for our teachers while saving our state precious funds that can be put to GOOD use elsewhere.
A coalition of technology companies and advocacy groups earlier this week wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging it to open a public investigation into zero-rating practices, in which mobile providers allow some video or music providers to be excluded from data caps.

The group, which includes Common Cause, Etsy, Foursquare, Mozilla and Upworthy, called on the FCC to examine the zero-rating practices of AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile and Verizon to determine whether those practices harm competition.

Zero rating profoundly affects Internet users choices, the letter stated. Giving ISPs the power to favor some sites or services over others would let ISPs pick winners and losers online  precisely what the open Internet rules exist to prevent.

The FCC is evaluating how to apply net neutrality rules to zero-rating practices, as the open Internet rules did not explicitly extend those rules to zero-rating policies. Over the past year, a number of major carriers have developed zero-rating plans.

Ruling Expected

FCC Chairman Wheeler was aware of the concerns raised in the letter, he said.

I hope no one has a doubt in where we stand on a fast, fair and open Internet, and the inquiry continues, he said.

At the root of it all is the question of the open Internet order and the scope of the open Internet order, Wheeler said. Hopefully we are moments away from the courts decision on that.

He was referring to alawsuit filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2015 challenging the FCCs open Internet rules. The shift back to common carrier regulation and the classification of broadband Internet as a public utility would stifle innovation, lead to higher consumer cost and chill investment, the suit alleged.

A ruling in that case is expected any day now, according to FCC spokesperson Kim Hart.

The FCC sent letters to AT&T, T-Mobile and Comcast seeking information about their respective plans, such as T-Mobiles successful Binge On plan, which offers several major content providers, including Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and HBO Now, that dont count against the cap.

Kicking the Can

The controversy has emerged because the issue of zero rating was not addressed directly during the debate on net neutrality, Jeremy Malcolm, senior global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The FCCs rule-making on net neutrality didnt place an outright ban on zero rating, and frankly that was the safest option for an agency previously known to have overreached its authority, he told the E-Commerce Times. But by holding back from regulating zero rating, it also left some real harms unaddressed.

An example is the pay-for-play zero-rating schemes that charge content providers to zero rate their content, Malcolm noted.

Verizons FreeBee Data 360 program, which launched in beta earlier this year, allows content providers to offer some or all of their content without applying data caps. The plan operates on a per-gigabyte pricing model.

It is open to anyone and is nondiscriminatory, Verizon spokesperson Rich Young told the E-Commerce Times.

A second FreeBee plan that started earlier this allows content providers to offer free mobile video clips, audio streaming or app downloads on a per-click basis. That beta launched with Hearst, AOL and Gameday providing per-click content to 1,000 test subscribers.
Just one quantum computer running artificial intelligence algorithms would be capable of connecting pretty much all the devices on the planet, Android creator Andy Rubin told an audience at the Bloomberg Technology Conference on Tuesday.

Rubin, who also launched Googles efforts in robotics, is now CEO of Playground, which together with Redpoint Ventures has invested in an unnamed startup working on quantum computing.

Working in concert, AI and quantum computing could yield a conscious intelligence that would underpin every piece of technology, Rubin suggested.

New computing platforms emerge every 10-12 years, and the next platform will be based on data and people training AI systems to learn, Rubin said.

Yes, were moving towards intelligent solutions, some of which will be locally controlled and others network controlled, on the edge of the network or in the cloud, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

But that intelligence just applies to the function of the device, McGregor told the E-Commerce Times. Its not like your toaster is going to be able to perform quantum mechanics.

Taking Baby Steps

Rubins vision extrapolates the way the Internet of Things could evolve.

Internet-connected household appliances already are available on the market, as are Web-connected hubs such as Amazons Echo and Googles Home.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are battling for dominance in the smart home market, which will hit nearly US$122 billion by 2022, according to Markets and Markets.

Those companies, along with major automakers around the globe, also are fighting for position in the connected car market, which is projected to hit more than 70 million units by 2020, according to Global Industry Analysts.

Google, Microsoft and Facebook are working on AI technology and machine learning. More than 80 of the worlds 100 largest enterprise software companies, by revenue, will have integrated cognitive technologies into their products by the end of this year, Deloitte Global predicted. Those technologies include machine learning, natural language processing and speech recognition.

Meanwhile, IBM is racing ahead to make Watsons AI capabilities widely available. It recently opened access to its quantum processor, the IBM Quantum Experience, which runs on the IBM Cloud, to the research and scientific communities.

IBM also is working on ways to mass produce quantum computer processors, a technology Rubin reportedly considers necessary for his vision of the future.

IBM and other large companies  including Oracle, Salesforce, Google and Microsoft  also are working to leverage IoT.

The industrys going at a frantic pace right now, driven by the potential of the applications  especially in the industrial IoT applications like smart cities, autonomous vehicles, healthcare and industrial automation, McGregor said.

Were already seeing new processing architectures emerge, like those from IBM and KnuEdge, which are enabling technologies, but we are still at least a few decades away from the Minority Report scenario, McGregor noted.

No One AI to Rule Them All?

Rubins vision of one overarching intelligence running everything is reminiscent of some other failed predictions, observed Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. One could do this  but competition, differences between nation states, privacy concerns and latency will more likely result in a lot of [such intelligences running different devices].

That said, most connected things will likely be linked in some way, both for data acquisition and control, he told the E-Commerce Times. Still, it will take a number of years to replace existing standalone solutions with better-integrated AI alternatives.

Expect a 20-year window for this vision to play out, Enderle suggested, and places like Korea, China and Japan will move more quickly than the United States does.

Should one intelligence actually end up running things, that system will be substantially more intelligent than we are, he pointed out. At some point it may call our intelligence artificial.

AI recently has been the target of grave concerns from luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil and others.

The AIShield is an effort to create a defense if AIs should get out of hand, Enderle said, and that effort should be better supported than it currently is, given the nature of nation states and the possibility of an AI doomsday device.
Facebook this week said it would make several procedural changes to its Trending Topics feature to quell concerns that the results could be steered in a particular political direction, even though it has found no evidence of bias.

The company will retrain workers in the Trending Topics department and institute additional oversight and control to make sure trending stories are selected fairly, said Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch.

Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature, he noted. Our data analysis indicated that conservative and liberal topics are approved as trending topics at virtually identical rates.

Facebook will update the terminology in its guidelines to make it clearer, provide refresher training to emphasize that Trending Topics should not be selected based on ideology, provide additional oversight of the review team, and add rapid escalation should a problem arise, Stretch said.

The company no longer will rely on outside websites and news outlets to validate whether a story is worthy of inclusion, he added. It also will remove the ability to assign importance levels to certain stories and will expand the help desk to provide more information on that.

Insider Claims

Conservative topics often were suppressed in the Trending Topics section, according to a report published earlier this month by Gizmodo. Stories about Facebook also were discouraged.

Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, wrote to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, demanding a response to the allegations.

That led to ahigh-profile confab between Zuckerberg and some of the leading figures in conservative media, including The Blaze founder Glenn Beck.

As part of Facebooks public response, Stretch sent an extensive defense of its practices to Thune.

Id call it fence mending, said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at thePoynter Institute.

Facebook wanted to show that it was open to dialogue with critics and will re-examine business practices, he told the E-Commerce Times.

Thune was not seeking to provide any legislative solution to the problem, just more transparency into the process, he said, praising the companys response to his concerns.

Private companies are fully entitled to espouse their own views, so I appreciate Facebooks efforts to address allegations of bias raised in the media and my concern about a lack of transparency in its methodology for determining trending topics, he said.

Facebook has offered a more detailed description of the methodology it uses to come up with Trending Topics, Thune noted. We now know the system relied on human judgment, and not just an automated process, more than previously acknowledged.

Transparency Needed

Facebook is in a very difficult situation because members always will see it as tainted, and if it tries to correct the problem, members from the left will accuse it of overcorrecting, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

Honestly, I dont see an easy way out of this now, he told the E-Commerce Times. The only way you can possibly try to prove nonbias is have somebody create an algorithm that is truly independent.

The companys prior arguments that it was unbiased based on the use of computerized algorithms are not bulletproof because, depending on how they are written, they can tilt in a more liberal or conservative direction, he added.

The ACLU has questioned whether Facebook needed to be more transparent about how it decides what is trending.

When I see a list on the side of a newspaper site that says most read or most shared, I assume thats a relatively dumb algorithm that is simply counting up clicks, said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

Overstepping the First Amendment

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called Thunes inquiry into question on First Amendment grounds.

Its commendable that Facebook is making internal changes and being more transparent about how it produces the Trending Topics section, but it remains improper under the First Amendment for a senator to inquire into what amounts to Facebooks editorial practices, said Sofia Cope, an EFF staff attorney.

So while some good appears to have come from Sen. Thunes letter, that shouldnt give other government officials the green light to do the same thing in a similar situation, she told the E-Commerce Times.

Facebooks editorial decisions are protected under First Amendment case law, Cope said in a blog post published earlier this month. In a 1974 case, Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot tell a private publisher what to print or not print, nor can the publisher be punished for making certain editorial decisions.

However, it would behoove the company to be more transparent about its content policies, she said.

The EFF has criticized Facebook in the past for how it enforces its terms of service, including which posts it chooses to delete, images it censors, or users who are tossed from the service because of some violation.

The organization tracks the actions of various social media companies atonlinecensorship.org.
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Another mass shooting in America. This one was at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., which left 49 people dead in what many are calling the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Mass shooting and U.S. history are words that should never go together. And yet, we have heard them many times before, especially where our schools are concerned, and we sadly may hear them again.

Words like ignorance, discrimination, and terrorism are embedded in our vernacular these days, especially when the conversation is about the LGBT community. Minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day, these words are spoken and heard around the kitchen table, in public conversations, and on television.

The politicians come next. They make speeches from airports or the campaign trail, in front of state capitols or in the nations capital. Microphones in hand, they make their statements to their constituents. They always begin with their sadness and prayers for the families of the victims, and then they move on to how they would stop the madness. They end with how the other party always gets in the way. Another tragedy, another political opportunity.

Young people, especially K-12 students, shouldn't have to worry about a shooter."

Social media is always abuzz following this news. People with genuine concern and empathy post temporary profile pictures to symbolize their unity with the communities that have lost their loved ones. And Facebook, for one, has complied, offering us the opportunity to post an image overlay to our profile pictures, be it the French flag, the American flag, the rainbow flag, or some other nod to the latest tragedy. But when we read trending stories and the commentsbe they about politicians, the presidential campaign, or a gorilla incident at a zoowe can see where the hate starts. We can see it starts with us. It might begin with just a few people and a slow burn, but evil often seems to follow.

It is said that for every positive statement a child hears, he receives 10 that are negative. And when it comes to negativity, social media is a force multiplier. But long before social media came crashing like a meteor into our lives, hatred was a presence. We have long sat around the dinner table using foul language to describe people who dont look like us or yelled outrage at the TV screen because we thought some group believed it deserved special treatment. The LGBT community has certainly been on the receiving end of this hate and discrimination.

When I was a child, parents didnt have to worry about the 24/7 media reporting of negative stories. Kids ran around outside, rode their bikes, and played in the woods without concern. The only people chasing us were our friends during a game of hide-and-seek. Today, many children, even in the safest communities, dont play outside without adult supervision. They dont feel free to run and ride their bikes with their friends because someone might hurt them.

No matter how hard, painful, or tragic the events of this week were, we must move forward for our students."

It is devastating and heartbreaking to think that 49 peopleLGBT or straightwent out on a Saturday night and never made it home. Many were young and had families, and most were in the prime of their lives. The rest of us should be thankful for the chance to live another day and for the families we have around us. We should send our thoughts and prayersnot our animosityto the victims and those they left behind.

And when we are pointing to some deep, dark shadow in the nightwhat Im calling evilwe should really be thinking about what we say publicly and privatelyon social media, around the dinner table, or inside the schoolhouse walls. Our words matter. Our children are always watching, listening, and learning from what we say.

The sorrow many of us have felt since the massacre is profound. Regardless of whether one is LGBT or straight, most of us know what its like to be at a club on a random Saturday night having fun with our friends. Those of us who are old enough remember when we worried only about a designated driver and having a good time. Young people, especially K-12 students, shouldnt have to worry about a shooter.

I came out roughly 20 years ago. My first words to my sister Trish were, Dont tell Mom. I really dont plan on telling too many people about this. Now, with a doctoral dissertation and a book on safeguarding LGBT students under my belt, I guess the secret is out. Rather than sensing progress, the tragedy in Orlando makes many of us in the LGBT community feel like weve been forced to retreat.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the actor, composer, and star of Broadways Hamilton, paid tribute to the victims in Orlando, at the 70th annual Tony Awards on Sunday just hours after the shooting, by declaring in his acceptance speech for best score, Love is love is love is love is love.

No matter how hard, painful, or tragic the events of this week were, we must move forward for our students. They are the ones who can help end some of this madness as long as we teach them about diversity, acceptance, and, yes, loving their fellow studentsbefore its too late. Our words matter.
Ely, Cambridgeshire is best known for its majestic cathedral dubbed the 'Ship of the Fens' because it dominates the flat landscape. The city, which is the second smallest in England, is about 14 miles north-northeast of Cambridge and about 80 miles by road from London.

13:33, 25 OCT 2022
Guilty plea from Liverpool man who tried to import cannabis

A Liverpool man will be sentenced in August after admitting trying to import cannabis to the Isle of Man.

41-year-old Gary Burrows, who's from Huyton, appeared at the Court of General Gaol Delivery at Douglas Courthouse this week.

He pleaded guilty to producing the Class B substance on February 6th and possession of it with intent to supply.

Social enquiry reports have been requested before he's sentenced on August 3rd - he's been remanded at the Isle of Man Prison until that date.
Second candidate to stand for Middle in General Election

Bill Shimmins is the second candidate to announce he'll be standing for Middle in this year's General Election.

He's declared his intention to stand for the House of Keys saying it's as a result of his 'passion for the social and economic welfare of the Island'.

He will leave his job as managing director at the Isle of Man Bank later this year after working in the banking sector for 34 years.

The Glen Vine resident says he hopes to use his business experience to 'overcome complex issues' and use his skills for the 'benefit of all'.
Guide leader 'humble' after MBE from Queen

A local woman who's dedicated 50 years of her life to Girl Guiding says she feels "humble" after receiving an MBE.

Diane Haigh received the accolade in the Queen's Birthday Honours List - she became a 'Guide Guider' in 1963.

Three other people from the Isle of Man also gained honours including Allan Bell, Clare Christian and Rosemary Mazzone.

For the last 17 years Diane's been helping Rainbows, Brownies and Guides at the First Ballaugh Unit:

She says she won't be stopping in her bid to help young girls achieve their potential and become good citizens:

Media

Diane Haigh
EPO President Benoit Battistelli has today sent the following message of condolence to Michelle Lee, Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), following recent events in Orlando:

"On my personal behalf and on behalf of the European Patent Office, please accept our sincerest condolences following the recent tragic events in Orlando.

Here at the EPO we are all deeply shocked by this abhorrent act and would like to express our deepest solidarity with you, all those at the USPTO and the people of the United States.

As you know, Europe knows the shocking nature of indiscriminate violence and we understand all too well the grief that such acts can impose. There is simply no place for such blind hatred in our respective democracies and we stand united with you at this immensely difficult time. Please rest assured that our most heartfelt sympathy goes to the victims, their relatives and friends.

Yours sincerely,

Benoit Battistelli

President"
The best way to recover from a ransomware attack is to execute a carefully practiced incident response plan. So easy to say, so difficult to do correctly. In fact, many organizations have no plan ...
(Vancouver, BC - June 16, 2016) A new study published today in the journal Blood has identified a protein that could diagnose chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGvHD), a serious, long-term complication that affects some patients after a blood and bone marrow transplant. The work was led by researchers in the Michael Cuccione Childhood Cancer Research Program at BC Children's Hospital and the University of British Columbia.

Early diagnosis is key to preventing the life-long impact of cGvHD, but currently no such test exists. In search of a diagnostic test, researchers found elevated levels of a protein, CXCL10, in the blood of transplant recipients around the time they developed cGvHD. Testing a transplant patient for this protein could provide the early diagnosis physicians urgently need.

"Diagnostic tests are desperately needed to make blood and marrow transplants safer," says Dr. Kirk Schultz, the study's principal investigator, scientist at BC Children's Hospital and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia. "At this time, there are no good tests to diagnose cGvHD and the disease can only be identified too late when it is already established. If we can diagnose it earlier and better, then treatments can be used to stop it before it becomes a chronic, disabling disease."

CGvHD develops after a blood and bone marrow transplant, which is the only effective treatment for some children suffering from childhood leukemia. The disease occurs when immune cells in the donated blood and marrow cells recognize the child's cells as foreign and launch an immune attack against them.

"A child with leukemia can be cured with a blood and marrow transplant but then has to suffer a life-long disease, cGvHD, which causes a major decrease in their life expectancy and quality of life," says Dr. Schultz.

In the study, researchers compared blood samples from two groups of adult patients, 170 who developed cGvHD and 180 who did not. They analyzed the samples to identify proteins in the blood that could be an early sign of the disease, finding elevated levels of the inflammatory protein CXCL10. This protein appears to impact a patient's normal immune cells, preventing the body from fighting cGvHD.

CGvHD can damage the skin, liver, lungs and digestive tract. Patients with cGvHD are at greater risk for range of issues including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and endocrine (hormone) abnormalities.

CGvHD affects approximately 30 to 50 per cent of blood and bone marrow transplant recipients. Over 1,500 children and adults receive a blood and marrow transplant each year in Canada.

This study is one of the largest analyses to date, with 350 participants at 16 Canadian, American, German and Saudi Arabian institutes. Further study is necessary before a diagnostic test for cGvHD can be put into clinical use.

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Dr. Kirk Schultz is senior clinician scientist and head of the Michael Cuccione Childhood Cancer Research Program at BC Children's Hospital, and professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of British Columbia.

Funding:

This research was made possible by support from BC Children's Hospital Foundation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, CIHR/Wyeth Clinical Research Chair in Transplantation. The study was carried out through the Chronic GvHD Consortium, which is funded through the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN), an initiative of the Office of Rare Diseases Research (ORDR), National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and the National Cancer Institute. Additional funding and support from the Deutsche Jose Carreras Leukamie-Stiftung, the Canadian National Transplant Research Program, the Office of Research in Women's Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon.

Read More:

Kariminia, A. et al. Heterogeneity of chronic graft-versus-host disease biomarkers: the only consistent association is with CXCL10 and CXCR3+ NK cells. Blood http://dx.doi.org/10.1182/blood-2015-09-668251 (2016).

Contact:

Jane Campbell, BC Children's Hospital Research Communications

Tel +1-604-875-2000, ext. 4547

email: jcampbell@cfri.ca
Preliminary tests have demonstrated that a new device may enable existing breast cancer imagers to provide up to six times better contrast of tumors in the breast, while maintaining the same or better image quality and halving the radiation dose to patients. The advance is made possible by a new device developed for 3D imaging of the breast by researchers at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Dilon Technologies and the University of Florida Department of Biomedical Engineering.

In breast cancer screening, mammography is the gold standard. But about half of all women who follow standard screening protocol for 10 years will receive a false-positive result that will require additional screening, particularly women who have dense breast tissue. Used in conjunction with mammography, imaging based on nuclear medicine is currently being used as a successful secondary screening alongside mammography to reduce the number of false positive results in women with dense breasts and at higher risk for developing breast cancer.

Now, researchers are hoping to improve this imaging technique, known as molecular breast imaging or breast specific gamma imaging, with better image quality and precise location (depth information) within the breast, while reducing the amount of radiation dose to the patient for these procedures.

According to Drew Weisenberger, leader of the Jefferson Lab Radiation Detector and Imaging Group, a new device called a variable angle slant hole collimator provides all of these benefits and more. When used in a molecular breast imager, the device has just demonstrated in early studies to capture 3D molecular breast images at higher resolution than current 2D scans in a format that may be used alongside 3D digital mammograms.

"These results really focus on the breast. We hope to build on this to perhaps improve the imaging of other organs," Weisenberger said. The new device replaces a component in existing molecular breast imagers.

While a mammogram uses X-rays to show the structure of breast tissue, molecular breast imagers show tissue function. For instance, cancer tumors are fast growing, so they gobble up certain compounds more rapidly that healthy tissue. A radiopharmaceutical made of such a compound will quickly accumulate in tumors. A radiotracer attached to the molecule gives off gamma rays, which can be picked up by the molecular breast imager.

"You can image that accumulation external to the breast by using a gamma camera," said Weisenberger.

Current molecular breast imaging systems use a traditional collimator, which is essentially a rectangular plate of dense metal with a grid of holes, to "filter" the gamma rays for the camera. The collimator only allows the system to pick up the gamma rays that come straight out of the breast, through the holes of collimator, and into the imager. This provides for a clear, well-defined image of any cancer tumors.

The variable angle slant hole collimator, or VASH collimator, is constructed from a stack of 49 tungsten sheets, each one a quarter of a millimeter thick and containing an identical array of square holes. The sheets are stacked like a deck of cards, with angled edges on two sides. The angle of the array of square holes in the stack can be easily slanted by two small motors that slide the individual sheets by their edges. The result is a systematic varying of the focusing angle of the collimator during the imaging procedure.

"Now, you can get a whole range of angles of projections of the breast without moving the breast or moving the imager. You're able to come in real close, you're able to compress the breast, and you can get a one-to-one comparison to a 3D mammogram," Weisenbeger explained.

In a recent test of the system, the researchers evaluated the spatial resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio in images of a "breast phantom," a plastic mockup of a breast with four beads inside simulating cancer tumors of varying diameter that are marked with a radiotracer. They found that using the VASH collimator with an existing breast molecular imaging system, they could get six times better contrast of tumors in the breast, which could potentially reduce the radiation dose to the patient by half from the current levels, while maintaining the same or better image quality. The test results match a published paper that predicted this performance via a Monte Carlo simulation.

The collimator was built at Jefferson Lab and the test results were analyzed at the University of Florida with funds provided by a Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund grant from the Commonwealth of Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology, and with matching support provided by Dilon Technologies.

The test results were presented at the 2016 Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Annual Meeting in San Diego on June 13. The technologies developed for the Variable Angle Slant Hole Collimator are included in two filings to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

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Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, a joint venture of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc. and PAE Applied Technologies, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Jefferson Lab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
Astronomers from Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and ESO have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA to observe one of the most distant galaxies known. SXDF-NB1006-2 lies at a redshift of 7.2, meaning that we see it only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The team was hoping to find out about the heavy chemical elements [1] present in the galaxy, as they can tell us about the level of star formation, and hence provide clues about the period in the history of the Universe known as cosmic reionisation.

"Seeking heavy elements in the early Universe is an essential approach to explore the star formation activity in that period," said Akio Inoue of Osaka Sangyo University, Japan, the lead author of the research paper, which is being published in the journal Science. "Studying heavy elements also gives us a hint to understand how the galaxies were formed and what caused the cosmic reionisation," he added.

In the time before objects formed in the Universe, it was filled with electrically neutral gas. But when the first objects began to shine, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, they emitted powerful radiation that started to break up those neutral atoms -- to ionise the gas. During this phase -- known as cosmic reionisation -- the whole Universe changed dramatically. But there is much debate about exactly what kind of objects caused the reionisation. Studying the conditions in very distant galaxies can help to answer this question.

Before observing the distant galaxy, the researchers performed computer simulations to predict how easily they could expect to see evidence of ionised oxygen with ALMA. They also considered observations of similar galaxies that are much closer to Earth, and concluded that the oxygen emission should be detectable, even at vast distances [2].

They then carried out high-sensitivity observations with ALMA [3] and found light from ionised oxygen in SXDF-NB1006-2, making this the most distant unambiguous detection of oxygen ever obtained [4]. It is firm evidence for the presence of oxygen in the early Universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Oxygen in SXDF-NB1006-2 was found to be ten times less abundant than it is in the Sun. "The small abundance is expected because the Universe was still young and had a short history of star formation at that time," commented Naoki Yoshida at the University of Tokyo. "Our simulation actually predicted an abundance ten times smaller than the Sun. But we have another, unexpected, result: a very small amount of dust."

The team was unable to detect any emission from carbon in the galaxy, suggesting that this young galaxy contains very little un-ionised hydrogen gas, and also found that it contains only a small amount of dust, which is made up of heavy elements. "Something unusual may be happening in this galaxy," said Inoue. "I suspect that almost all the gas is highly ionised."

The detection of ionised oxygen indicates that many very brilliant stars, several dozen times more massive than the Sun, have formed in the galaxy and are emitting the intense ultraviolet light needed to ionise the oxygen atoms.

The lack of dust in the galaxy allows the intense ultraviolet light to escape and ionise vast amounts of gas outside the galaxy. "SXDF-NB1006-2 would be a prototype of the light sources responsible for the cosmic reionisation," said Inoue.

"This is an important step towards understanding what kind of objects caused cosmic reionisation," explained Yoichi Tamura of the University of Tokyo. "Our next observations with ALMA have already started. Higher resolution observations will allow us to see the distribution and motion of ionised oxygen in the galaxy and provide vital information to help us understand the properties of the galaxy."

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Notes

[1] In astronomical terminology, chemical elements heavier than lithium are known as heavy elements.

[2] The Japanese infrared astronomy satellite AKARI had found that this oxygen emission is very bright in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which has an environment similar to the early Universe.

[3] The original wavelength of the light from doubly ionised oxygen is 0.088 millimetres. The wavelength of the light from SXDF-NB1006-2 is stretched to 0.725 millimetres by the expansion of the Universe, making the light observable with ALMA.

[4] Earlier work by Finkelstein et al. suggested the presence of oxygen at a slightly earlier time, but there was no direct detection of an emission line, as is the case in the new work.

More information

This research was presented in the paper entitled: "Detection of an oxygen emission line from a high redshift galaxy in the reionization epoch" by Inoue et al., published in the journal Science.

The team is composed of: Akio Inoue (Osaka Sangyo University, Japan), Yoichi Tamura (The University of Tokyo, Japan), Hiroshi Matsuo (NAOJ/Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan), Ken Mawatari (Osaka Sangyo University, Japan), Ikkoh Shimizu (Osaka University, Japan), Takatoshi Shibuya (University of Tokyo, Japan), Kazuaki Ota (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom), Naoki Yoshida (University of Tokyo, Japan), Erik Zackrisson (Uppsala University, Sweden), Nobunari Kashikawa (NAOJ/Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan), Kotaro Kohno (University of Tokyo, Japan), Hideki Umehata (ESO, Garching, Germany; University of Tokyo, Japan), Bunyo Hatsukade (NAOJ, Japan), Masanori Iye (NAOJ, Japan), Yuichi Matsuda (NAOJ/Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan), Takashi Okamoto (Hokkaido University, Japan) and Yuki Yamaguchi (University of Tokyo, Japan).

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of ESO, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world's most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world's largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become "the world's biggest eye on the sky".

Links

Research paper - http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso1620/eso1620a.pdf

Photos of ALMA - http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/search/?adv=&subject_name=Atacama%20Large%20Millimeter/submillimeter%20Array

Contacts

Akio Inoue

Osaka Sangyo University

Osaka, Japan

Email: akinoue@las.osaka-sandai.ac.jp

Masaaki Hiramatsu

NAOJ Chile Observatory EPO officer

Tel: +81 422 34 3630

Email: hiramatsu.masaaki@nao.ac.jp

Richard Hook

ESO Public Information Officer

Garching bei Munchen, Germany

Tel: +49 89 3200 6655

Cell: +49 151 1537 3591

Email: rhook@eso.org
WASHINGTON -- What if private companies could obtain some coverage to protect their foreign investments in developing countries against crippling infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola?

The possible path to offering disease outbreak guarantees is an idea being posed by two global health researchers who suggest that a mechanism for establishing such an instrument could be tied to public health investments.

Writing in the Journal of Health Care Finance published online today, global health science and security expert Rebecca Katz, PhD, PhD, an associate professor in Georgetown's School of Nursing & Health Studies, and Richard Seifman, JD, MBA, an international health consultant formerly of the World Bank, say there is a circular relationship between foreign investments and the ability of a country to fight an infectious disease.

"Foreign companies may be wary of investing in a location that lacks the capacity to mitigate the consequences of disease or exposes workers to dangerous pathogens," write Katz and Seifman. "Yet, many nations lack the resources to build sufficient capacity to prevent, detect and respond to disease without sufficient investments and improve economic status."

Katz and Seifman propose a solution that would incentivize potential investors while at the same time encourage development of public health systems to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks.

The two propose that guarantees to potential external investors be provided through an existing mechanism called the "Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency" (MIGA), part of the World Bank Group.

MIGA is designed to guarantee private investors concerned about risks, which impact the decision of whether or not to invest. The researchers say its Articles of Establishment provide flexibility in interpreting what these risks might be and in calculating the premiums required for coverage of such risks.

"We are trying to propose innovative methods to incentivize the development of the public health infrastructure to prevent, detect and respond to infectious disease threats," explains Katz. "We think MIGA might be one way to do this."

Katz and Seifman suggest that such an innovative mechanism would significantly induce the beneficiary country to take reasonable steps to establish the core elements of a public heath system ("core capacities") set forth by the World Health Organization's International Health Regulations. This part of the MIGA Agreement would be reinforced by a "breach of contract" clause.

"There is much work to do to explore the possibility of expanding MIGA coverage to deal with public health emergencies, but public health emergencies are here to stay, the public sector cannot do it alone, and the external private sector has much to lose or gain, depending on what core capacities in health are in place," conclude the authors.

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About Georgetown University Medical Center

Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) is an internationally recognized academic medical center with a three-part mission of research, teaching and patient care (through MedStar Health). GUMC's mission is carried out with a strong emphasis on public service and a dedication to the Catholic, Jesuit principle of cura personalis -- or "care of the whole person." The Medical Center includes the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing & Health Studies, both nationally ranked; Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, designated as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute; and the Biomedical Graduate Research Organization, which accounts for the majority of externally funded research at GUMC including a Clinical and Translational Science Award (UL1TR001409-01) from the National Institutes of Health.
In the Canadian province of Quebec, a study of more than 26,000 trees across an area the size of Spain forecasts potential winners and losers in a changing climate.

The study, published today in the journal Science, shows that boreal forests in far-northern latitudes may one day act as a climate refuge for black spruce, the foundational tree for the northwoods ecosystem - a major source of the world's paper; home to caribou, snowshoe hare, lynx, and sable; and nesting site for dozens of migratory bird species.

"During this century, the northwoods will experience some of the Earth's largest increases in temperature," says Loic D'Orangeville, postdoctoral researcher at Universite du Quebec a Montreal and Indiana University, who led the collaboration of scientists from six institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

Northern boreal forests are a crucial part of the global climate puzzle, comprising nearly 30 percent of the Earth's forested area and storing at least 20 percent of its carbon. The study's tree ring analysis revealed these forests' sensitivity to changes in temperature and precipitation.

"A warming climate increases the amount of water boreal forests need to survive," explains D'Orangeville. "It's possible that only a relatively small part of North America's boreal forest will have enough water to compensate for the increased demand."

North of a certain latitude (broadly 49 degrees North), the study showed, warming melts snow earlier and lengthens the growing season: good news for tree growth. "Right now - June and July - is when most of the annual tree growth takes place in the boreal forest," says D'Orangeville. Climate models predict that by 2050, the growing season in the study area will have expanded by 3 weeks.

South of the 49th parallel, however, warming and the lengthened growing season are more likely to cause drought stress that could overwhelm black spruce. The researchers say this may explain increased tree mortality already being observed in the region.

"But as you move northwards, temperatures cool, and evaporation diminishes," says D'Orangeville. As climate warms through 2070, more than two-thirds of the forested territory just above the 49th parallel should still be showing a positive response.

"This part of the forest could adapt to climate change in our lifetime, if future warming stays below the temperature threshold," says Neil Pederson, co-author of the study and a senior ecologist at Harvard Forest. "But the future cannot be perfectly predicted." And, he cautions, unpredictable factors, such as the recent mega-fires in boreal regions of western Canada and Alaska, could disrupt this dynamic.

Still, the study offers a note of hope. "In a world where many ecological forecasts appear dire for plants, animals, and people," says Pederson, "identifying areas that could serve as potential havens for biodiversity during potentially tumultuous times is good news."

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The Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM) is a public French-language university with an international reputation. Dynamic and innovative, UQAM excels in a number of areas, including the arts and multimedia, psychosocial health issues, communications, the environmental sciences, the cognitive sciences, economics, international studies, literature and education. UQAM offers nearly 300 undergraduate and graduate programs. It is recognized for the quality of its programs, its socially conscious research and its innovation in the arts.

The Harvard Forest, founded in 1907 and located in Petersham, Mass., is Harvard University's outdoor laboratory and classroom for ecology and conservation, and a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site funded by the National Science Foundation. Its 3,700 acre property is one of the oldest and most intensively studied research forests in the U.S. More information can be found at http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/.

For photos and the embargoed paper in Science, contact Clarisse Hart. After the embargo lifts on June 16 at 2pm ET, visit http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/press-resources-boreal-forest-climate-refuge-616.
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease that affects multiple organs. SLE severity is highly variable, and this variability is known to be partially dependent on ancestral background. Notably, African Americans are at a higher risk of developing SLE and suffer from a more severe form of the disease compared with European Americans. In this issue of JCI Insight, Laurence Menard and colleagues at Bristol-Myers Squibb investigated differences in immune cell characteristics that may contribute to SLE severity in African Americans. Menard and colleagues isolated B cells, a group of immune cells that are known to be involved in SLE pathogenesis, from SLE patients and healthy volunteers. They demonstrated that B cells from African American patients expressed more proteins that are characteristic of activated B cells than European American patients. These differences were not attributable to differences in disease severity or medication. Taken together, these findings suggest that the enhanced activation of B cells in African American patients may contribute to SLE severity.

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TITLE:

B cells from African American Lupus patients exhibit an activated phenotype

AUTHOR CONTACT:

Laurence Menard

Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

Email: laurence.menard@bms.com

View this article at: http://insight.jci.org/articles/view/87310?key=658fa178ad951d612d36

JCI Insight is the newest publication from the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a nonprofit honor organization of physician-scientists. JCI Insight is dedicated to publishing a range of translational biomedical research with an emphasis on rigorous experimental methods and data reporting. All articles published in JCI Insight are freely available at the time of publication. For more information about JCI Insight and all of the latest articles go to http://www.insight.jci.org.
Radiation therapy is commonly used to reduce tumor size and improve symptoms of non-small cell lung cancer. While initially beneficial, many patients will eventually relapse with metastatic tumors. Last year, two immunotherapies that improve anti-tumor T cell responses by inhibiting the PD-1 pathway were approved for non-small cell lung carcinoma. However, it is not yet known if combining immunotherapy with traditional radiation therapy will improve outcome for lung cancer patients. In this issue of JCI Insight, researchers from the NYU Langone Medical Center and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute used a genetically engineered mouse model of non-small cell lung cancer to examine the efficacy of treatment with radiotherapy and a PD-1 inhibitory antibody. The research group, led by Alec Kimmelman and Kwok-Kin Wong, showed that combination therapy improved survival when used as an initial therapeutic approach. However, using anti-PD1 therapy for tumors that had relapsed after radiation therapy showed no benefits. In addition, tumors that lost expression of the tumor suppressor Stk11/Lkb1 (serine/threonine kinase 11/liver kinase B1), which is mutated in approximately 20% of non-small cell lung cancers, did not benefit from combination therapy. These murine lung cancer model findings may help guide future translational studies examining combination radiotherapy and checkpoint blockade.

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TITLE:

Synergy of radiotherapy and PD-1 blockade in Kras-mutant lung cancer

AUTHOR CONTACT:

Alec C. Kimmelman

NYU Langone Medical Center

Email: alec.kimmelman@nyumc.org

Kwok-Kin Wong

Dana Farber Cancer Institute

Email: kwong1@partners.org

View this article at: http://insight.jci.org/articles/view/87415?key=847925dc628067f0323c

JCI Insight is the newest publication from the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a nonprofit honor organization of physician-scientists. JCI Insight is dedicated to publishing a range of translational biomedical research with an emphasis on rigorous experimental methods and data reporting. All articles published in JCI Insight are freely available at the time of publication. For more information about JCI Insight and all of the latest articles go to http://www.insight.jci.org.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disorder that results in demyelination of neurons. The FDA-approved drug fingolimod (Gilenya, FTY-720) modulates signaling by the bioactive lipid sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P), which is linked to MS pathogenesis. Fingolimod treatment reduces relapse rates and neurologic disability in many individuals with MS; however, the drug is less effective in some patients. In this issue of JCI Insight, May Han of Stanford University and colleagues tested the hypothesis that genetic variants of the cell surface receptor that responds to S1P, S1PR1, may influence the efficacy of fingolimod. In mouse MS models, fingolimod protected control mice from central nervous system damage, but was not effective in animals expressing an S1PR1 variant that could not be modified by phosphorylation. Mutant animals had elevated expression of CCR6, a molecule that promotes migration of inflammatory cells, in the central nervous system. Treatment of these mice with fingolimod and an antibody targeting CCR6 delayed disease progression. The results of this study indicate that S1P1R variation may underlie differential patient responses to fingolimod treatment.

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TITLE:

Effects of sphingosine-1-phosphate receptor 1 phosphorylation in response to FTY720 during neuroinflammation

AUTHOR CONTACT:

May Han

Stanford University School of Medicine

Email: mayhan@stanford.edu

View this article at: http://insight.jci.org/articles/view/86462?key=db6d525f8bfdfbfc89d9

JCI Insight is the newest publication from the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a nonprofit honor organization of physician-scientists. JCI Insight is dedicated to publishing a range of translational biomedical research with an emphasis on rigorous experimental methods and data reporting. All articles published in JCI Insight are freely available at the time of publication. For more information about JCI Insight and all of the latest articles go to http://www.insight.jci.org.
'The second detection of the gravitational waves from merging black holes is very important. The foundation for the gravitational-wave astronomy is becoming stronger and more reliable,' says Valery Mitrofanov, Professor of the Physics Department of the Moscow State University.

Studies are conducted within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) -- a team of more than 1,000 scientists from the United States and 14 other countries, including Russia. Among the Russian scientists of the LIGO Collaboration is also the staff of the Physics Department of the Moscow State University: Head of the Moscow group, professor of physics of oscillations, Valery Mitrofanov, professors of the Faculty of Physics, Igor Bilenko, Sergei Vjatchanin, Mikhail Gorodetsky, Farid Khalili, Sergei Strygin, assistant Leonid Prokhorov. The development of the detectors and the data analysis involve more than 90 universities and research institutes. About 250 student participants also contribute significantly. LSC detectors network includes LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector.

'It is important that the second signal has been generated by the black holes with the relatively small masses, which better corresponds the astrophysicists' predictions. Now we can be more confident that the first event was not a rare exception,' reports Farid Khalili, Professor of the Faculty of Physics of the Moscow State University.

'Gravitational waves, these flying pieces of space-time curvature, from something exotic became a common source of the new information about the universe and opened the era of gravitational astronomy,' describes the situation Sergey Vjatchanin, Professor of the Physics Department of the Moscow State University.

In contrast to the signal recorded on the first detection of gravitational waves, which was clearly visible with the noise on its background, the second signal was weaker and not clear in the noise. However, the scientists were able to 'filter' it with the help of a special technique.

Physicists have come to the conclusion that the observed gravity waves were generated by the two black holes of 14 and 8 solar masses in the last fraction of a second before they merged to form a single, more massive rotating black hole of 21 Solar masses.

During the merger which occurred about 1.4 billion years ago the amount of the energy equivalent to roughly one solar mass has become a gravitational wave. The recorded signal was produced on the last 27 turns of black holes before they merge. The detector in Livingstone recorded the event 1.1 milliseconds before the detector in Hanford, which allows to give a rough estimate of the location of the source on the celestial sphere.

The first detection of gravitational waves, announced February 11, 2016, was a milestone in the development of physics. It confirmed the prediction of the general relativitytheory that Albert Einstein made in 1915, and marked the beginning of the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy. Detection of the two signals within four months of the first Advanced LIGO observations cycle allows predicting how often the signals of the gravitational waves may be detected in the future. Both discoveries were made possible thanks to the more refined Advanced LIGO detectors, which are more sensitive than the first generation of the LIGO detectors and can significantly increase the amount of the probed the universe. The next cycle of observations is scheduled for autumn this year. It is expected that by that time further improvement of the LIGO detectors' sensitivity will be able to enlarge the volume of the probed Universe 1,5 - 2 times. It is also expected that in the second half of this observation cycle the Virgo detector will become operational.

'The new result marks the conversion of LIGO from an extremely expensive scientific experiment into the instrument for the continuous extraction of the otherwise unavailable information about the structure of the Universe,' says Mikhail Gorodetsky, professor of the Physics Department of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. 'The repeating detection of gravitational waves gives a powerful impetus for the creation of a new generation of gravitational wave detectors for the further study of the Universe all over the world,' concludes Sergei Strygin, Associate Professor of the Physics Department of MSU.

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Moscow Ligo Scientific Collaboration group

Russia is represented in the Ligo Scientific Collaboration (LS?) with two research groups: the group of the Physics Department of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and a group of the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Nizhny Novgorod).

The Moscow group was founded and until recently was headed by Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Borisovich Braginsky -- the world-famous scientist, one of the pioneers of the gravitational-wave research in the world. The research group included professor of physics of oscillations: I.A. Bilenko, S.P. Vjatchanin, M.L. Gorodetsky, V.P. Mitrofanov, F.Y. Khalili, senior professor S.E. Strygin and assistant L.G. Prokhorov. The immeasurable contribution to the study is made by students, graduate students and technical staff of the department.

The Moscow University group is involved in the project since 1992. From the outset, the main efforts were directed at improving the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors, determination of fundamental quantum and thermodynamic sensitivity constraints for the development of new measurement methods. Theoretical and experimental studies of Russian scientists were embodied in creating detectors which allowed to directly observe gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.

The Moscow University research group is presently involved in the development of the next-generation gravitational wave detectors which will replace the current detectors and will provide a significant increase in sensitivity, enabling to detect gravitational wave signals almost on the daily basis. One of such projects is the LIGO-Voyager, which is supposed to use 150 kg of test masses made of monocrystalline silicon, cooled to the temperature of about 120 K, as well as significantly increase the optical power of the interferometer's arms and use compressed light. An important area of research to increase the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors is the transition from a traditional interferometer scheme recording the displacement of the test mass mirrors to the new scheme allowing better suppression of the quantum fluctuations of light. For example, to the scheme of quantum tests masses speed measurement, proposed by the Moscow State University. The prototype of such a detector is being created at the University of Glasgow.

LIGO

LIGO Observatory was conceived, built and operated by the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology (Caltech and MIT) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the USA. The discovery (the report was accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters) based on the data of these two detectors was made collectively by the LIGO scientific collaboration (it also includes the GEO collaboration and Australian Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy consortium) and the Virgo collaboration.

VIRGO

The VIRGO Collaboration consists of more than 250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: 6 of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France; 8 of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy; 2 of the Netherlands (Nikhef); (Wigner RCP) from Hungary; POLGRAW group from Poland and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), which provides the VIRGO detector's work near Pisa in Italy.
Monash University and Woodside today announced the launch of a new Innovation Centre, bringing together the University's pioneering research and design capabilities with one of Australia's leading oil and gas companies. The partnership aims to drive significant advances in the energy sector, bringing positive economic benefits to Australia.

Officially opened by the Hon. Josh Frydenberg, Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia, the Woodside Innovation Centre incorporates cutting-edge technology with exceptional expertise in both engineering research and design, and IT.

Woodside will contribute AUD $10 million over five years toward the Centre - the largest corporate philanthropic gift in the University's history. The Centre will establish a globally connected innovation hub that rapidly accelerates advances in materials engineering, additive manufacturing and data science.

Woodside engineers and Monash researchers together will develop and test prototypes in the laboratory, aiming to lead to new applications for the energy and other industries. State-of-the-art technology includes a selective laser melting (SLM) 3D printer - the most precise and dimensionally correct 3D printer available - capable of manufacturing components used in oil and gas plants.

Monash Vice-Chancellor Professor Margaret Gardner AO said the University was very pleased to be partnering with one of Australia's leading oil and gas companies.

"This partnership will build on the University's record of innovation in engineering and IT to provide practical solutions for Australian industry.

"The Woodside Innovation Centre demonstrates Monash University's commitment to connecting our world-leading research with industry. We are grateful to Woodside for such a generous contribution to establish the Centre that will have a national and global impact," Professor Gardner said.

The Innovation Centre forms part of Woodside's FutureLab network throughout Australia.

Mr Shaun Gregory, Woodside's Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer welcomed the collaboration.

"Launching an innovation centre at Monash adds to our existing network of FutureLabs at Curtin University and the University of Western Australia in Perth.

"Launched last year, our FutureLabs are building an ecosystem of scientific and technological innovation through collaborations with research institutions, start-ups, entrepreneurs and adjacent leading industries.

"Our vision for our Monash centre is for us to rapidly advance commercial opportunities through materials engineering, additive manufacturing and data science.

"We are really excited about collaborating with researchers and experts from Monash to identify opportunities to solve real-life challenges we face at Woodside," Mr Gregory said.

Professor Frieder Seible, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice President (Enterprise) and Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Information Technology said the Innovation Centre demonstrates the capability of Monash researchers to collaborate with industry specialists like Woodside.

"Today's important innovation drivers are New Materials, New Manufacturing Methods, and Data Analytics, exactly the three pillars of the Woodside Innovation Centre. Monash engineering and information technology research and expertise is leading in all three areas, in particular in the additive manufacturing of duplex and super duplex stainless steels. With 3D printed components rapidly coming online, Monash is at the forefront of the next generation of manufacturing capability in Australia.

"In addition, Monash has Australia's most advanced 3-D visualisation environment for fully immersive analytics of big data sets. These leading capabilities provide Woodside engineers, embedded at the Centre's lab, the opportunity to transfer that technology back to the workplace.

"Through this partnership, we will train the next generation of exceptional engineers and IT professionals to deal with tomorrow's challenges and advances," Professor Seible said.

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For more information contact Monash Media & Communications + 61 3 9903 4840 or media@monash.edu

About Woodside

Woodside is an Australian oil and gas company with a global presence, recognised for its world-class capabilities - as an explorer, a developer, a producer and a supplier.

Woodside's producing LNG assets in the north-west of Australia are among the world's best facilities, including the North West Shelf Project and Pluto LNG Plant.

Woodside's proven track record and distinctive capabilities are underpinned by more than 60 years of experience, including more than 30 years of experience as operator of the landmark Australian project, the North West Shelf.

The company's exploration portfolio includes emerging and frontier provinces in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, the Atlantic margins and Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Woodside holds a portfolio of significant interests in Western Australia, Canada and Timor-Leste and a growing network of partnerships.

Woodside's technology strategy is focused on competitive advantage through innovative solutions to business problems. By innovating, Woodside has maintained its position as a leader in the Australia oil and gas industry.

For more information on Woodside, visit http://www.woodside.com.au or follow Woodside on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Enclosed in a case of moist jelly, most minute frog embryos take their time emerging from the protective coating; but not the spawn of tree dwelling Agalychnis callidryas (red-eyed treefrogs). When the eggs find themselves under attack by predatory snakes, the tiny embryos can burst out of their eggs in as little as 6s before dropping to safety in water below. 'This escape hatching is a mechanism for running away from a really important predator', says Karen Warkentin from Boston University, USA. But she was unsure how the tiny animals made their escape. Explaining that most frog embryos liberate themselves by releasing enzymes from hatching glands on their heads that slowly degrade the egg membrane, Warkentin thought that it was unlikely that treefrog embryos used the same approach, because the hatching process was so swift and the egg membrane remained largely intact. 'We had seen them thrashing around and we thought they were somehow breaking out of the egg', she recalls. So when Mark Seid at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama, got access to a high-speed camera, Warkentin grasped the opportunity to reveal the mysteries of the treefrog embryos' escape in fine detail. Warkentin and her colleagues publish their discovery that the escapologist embryos rapidly release egg membrane degrading enzymes from their snouts that digest a small hole in the structure that the tiny escapee can wriggle through to freedom in Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

Fortunately, Warkentin and Seid had no difficulties collecting newly laid frog spawn from a nearby experimental pond overhung with accessible foliage. The duo then allowed the eggs to develop for 5days before gently prodding them to trigger breakouts. 'One of the first and most interesting behaviours that we observed was shaking', recalls Kristina Cohen, who also noticed the embryos repeatedly opened and closed their mouths before the egg membrane ruptured. 'Following this... you see fluid start to leak from the location in the membrane that is just in front of the embryo's snout', says Cohen, who recalls how the embryo then plugged the rupture by lodging its snout against it, before wriggling through in a bid for freedom. The embryos had made a hole in the membrane without even touching it. 'Once we saw that, we thought it was probably enzymatic', says Cohen. But where was the enzyme being released from?

'We came up with this very low-tech experiment', says Cohen, describing how she spun the embryos around in the egg after they had been trembling and gaping for a few seconds to find out where the rupture formed: 'If you don't perform the manipulation at the right time it doesn't work', says Cohen. However, when she timed the rotation perfectly, a hole appeared in the membrane next to where the embryo's snout had been originally located. The embryos must be releasing enzymes from somewhere on their heads to liberate themselves from the egg membrane.

Searching for hatching glands over the surface of the embryos' heads with a scanning electron microscope, Cohen successfully located tightly packed clusters of the glands on the embryos' snouts. Then, she painstakingly collected detailed scanning transmission electron microscopy images of the cells from embryos before they hatched and images of tadpoles immediately after they had successfully broken out. 'Getting those images was indeed a lot of work', says Warkentin, recalling how Cohen's patience was eventually rewarded when the images revealed that the hatching gland vesicles had released their contents just seconds before hatching.

So, red-eyed treefrog embryos evade snake predators by rapidly releasing enzymes from hatching glands concentrated on the snout at one specific location to rupture the egg membrane and produce an aperture through which the embryo can wriggle in a matter of seconds in a life-and-death bid for survival.

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REFERENCE: Cohen, K. L., Seid M. A. and Warkentin, K. M. (2016). How embryos escape from danger: the mechanism of rapid, plastic hatching in red-eyed treefrogs. J. Exp. Biol. 219, 1875-1883. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.139519

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In summer 2011, University of Colorado Cancer Center investigators Joaquin Espinosa, PhD, and Matthew Galbraith, PhD, taught a summer symposium on gene expression at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York. As part of the three-week course, one of their students, Joel Perrez-Perri from Dr. Pablo Wappner's lab at the Instituto Leloir in Buenos Aires, Argentina, presented data from experiments on fruit flies describing the role of the histone acetyl-transferase TIP60 (aka KAT5) in regulating the expression of genes controlled by a protein known as HIF1A. Now five years later, in summer 2016, studies resulting from this seemingly obscure finding have resulted in a paper published today in the high-impact journal Cell Reports showing the role of TIP60 in allowing human colorectal cancer cells to survive at the oxygen-poor centers of tumors.

"Tumors often can't grow the new blood vessels needed to supply themselves with the oxygen that most tissues would need to grow. In order to survive in low oxygen - in conditions of hypoxia - tumors produce the protein HIF1A. In human tumors, hypoxia and high expression of HIF1A are both predictors of bad outcomes," says Galbraith, now an Instructor of Pharmacology at the CU School of Medicine.

If it were possible to silence HIF1A, many cancers would succumb to hypoxia. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find drugs that inhibit the function of HIF1A. To circumvent this problem, scientists around the world are performing research to identify auxiliary proteins inside the cell required for HIF1A activity - referred to as cofactors - that could be more amenable to pharmacological inhibition.

At the time of the serendipitous summer encounter, the labs led by Espinosa in Colorado and Wappner in Buenos Aires were employing vastly different approaches to identify HIF1A cofactors. While Galbraith and Espinosa used human cancer cells grown in petri dishes, Perez-Perri and Wappner employed fruit flies, an organism frequently used as a model due to ease of genetic manipulation. Efforts in the Espinosa lab led to the identification of an enzyme known as CDK8 that is required for much of HIF1A activity in cancer cells. Efforts in the Wappner lab led to the identification of TIP60, also an enzyme, required for HIF1A activity in flies. The power of these discoveries resides in the fact that enzymes are a type of proteins whose activities can be more easily manipulated with medicines (unlike the action of the gene HIF1A itself). In fact, such drugs are already available to shut down the activity of CDK8 and TIP60.

In 2013, Galbraith and Espinosa published their findings in the prestigious journal Cell and embarked on a collaboration with the scientists in Buenos Aires to investigate whether TIP60's role in the response to hypoxia in flies was conserved in human cancer cells.

"It was a nice coincidence and a great opportunity to collaborate with fellow scientists in Argentina, the country where I was born, raised and received my education," Espinosa says. "I invited Joel to come to our lab in Colorado to spend a few months learning how to work with human cancer cells."

What they found is that the role of TIP60 is conserved in human colorectal cancer cells, which require HIF1A, CDK8 and TIP60 to form small tumors in the lab.

"By depleting CDK8 and TIP60 in colorectal cancer cells, we shut down more than 60 percent of the cellular activity of HIF1A, and this suffices to block their tumor-initiating ability," Galbraith says.

As with much basic research, Perez-Perri's stay in the Espinosa lab generated as many questions as answers, many having to do with molecular mechanisms by which TIP60 promotes HIF1A activity. This line of study was pursued in the Espinosa lab by graduate student Veronica Dengler. Dengler's work showed that HIF1A and TIP60 work together to turn on many genes inside the cell nucleus, including key genes required for the cellular adaptation to hypoxia. In collaboration with scientists from Madison, WI, led by Dr. Danette Daniels at the biotech Promega, the team demonstrated that HIF1A and TIP60 interact physically with each other inside cells.

"What I love about this project is that it illustrates the power of collaboration and training efforts. In order to make these important discoveries, we assembled a team of scientists from Buenos Aires, Colorado and Wisconsin, in academia and industry, to work with two graduate students located 6,000 miles apart," Espinosa says.

"This study absolutely demonstrates the importance of basic research," Galbraith says. "Here we had something in a fruit fly that didn't have any obvious connection to cancer and it turns out to be an important player in one of the most critical networks of cancer survival signaling."

The researchers hope their work will stimulate additional interest in exploring the function and possible inhibition of TIP60 and CDK8 in the context of cancer.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. - Every year, more than 23,000 youth leave foster care after turning 18 and begin adulthood. Unlike their peers who can depend on family who serve as support systems, those coming out of foster care have to be more self-sufficient and often face elevated risks of homelessness and poverty. Clark Peters, assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri, says youth in foster care need not only financial education but guidance as they grow their experience obtaining and managing money to successfully navigate the path to adulthood.

"Unlike young adults who learn about money from their parents, foster youth transition to adulthood without such financial experience," Peters said. "More importantly, they usually lack opportunities to learn from early mistakes that are so common when it comes to understanding finances. Their circumstances provide little room for error as mistakes and miscalculations end up having significant negative effects, as they are often just one financial mistake away from a terrible situation."

In his latest study, Peters examined the challenges former foster youth had gaining income and how they coped with these challenges. Participants in the study were drawn from those enrolled in Opportunity PassportTM, a matched savings program aimed at helping young people improve their financial capability when transitioning from foster care. Participants in the study completed interviews on current living circumstances, employment and household information as well as their overall financial well-being.

While nearly all participants in the study had work experience, most struggled with low wages and irregular hours, making it difficult to escape poverty. Most of the participants also had little access to financial opportunities that other children often receive, such as receiving allowances for doing chores or encouragement from a family member to save money. When income and savings fell short, the participants were not able to turn to families for financial help.

By understanding the financial challenges former foster youth face, Peters found that in order to help former foster youth succeed in their transitions to adulthood, they need support and guidance in managing money. He says those working in child welfare need to prioritize financial matters in the services they provide. Caseworkers need to understand the financial issues facing young adults and be able to discuss and teach such matters to youth before they transition to adulthood. Youth in foster care need opportunities to earn, spend and save money while still in care.

"States need to provide resources for continued financial guidance to young people aging out of care," Peters said. "Providing financial education may be helpful, but without training, without the ability to put lessons to use, financial literacy will not yield benefits later in life, when it really matters." Peters added that the research has led to a partnership between Missouri's Children's Division and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to improve how child welfare agencies elevate financial capability among vulnerable families.

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The study, "Foster Care to Adulthood: Role of Income," recently was published in the Journal of Public Child Welfare. Margaret Sherraden, Founder's Professor of Social Work at University of Missouri-St. Louis and Ann Marie Kuchinski, research associate at Georgia Regents University were co-authors for the study. Peters has a joint appointment in the Truman School of Public Affairs and a courtesy appointment in the MU School of Law. The School of Social Work is part of the MU College of Human Environmental Sciences. Opportunity PassportTM is a program of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 16, 2016 - Rocky S. Tuan, Ph.D., has received a research grant from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to continue his work on a 3D microphysiological system (MPS) to be conducted on board the International Space Station (ISS) to evaluate the accelerated aging and degeneration process of bones that occurs in space.

"Studying such rapid progression of the disease offers great advantages to developing treatments for osteoporosis faster and more effectively, in ways that are not possible on Earth," said Dr. Tuan. "Our research will benefit not only the health of astronauts for long stays in space on the ISS or a future journey to Mars, but also will help people on Earth, providing capabilities for the screening of drug therapies, enhancing personalized medicine, and developing bioreactor technologies for tissue engineering."

The award is part of the 3D Microphysical Systems for Organs-On-Chips Grand Challenge by CASIS, which was chosen by NASA in 2011 to be the sole manager of the ISS U.S. National Laboratory. Monday's announcement was made at the White House Organ Summit.

Dr. Tuan is director of the Cellular and Molecular Engineering Lab and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He is internationally known for his research in stem cell biology, musculoskeletal tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and for his innovative leadership role in biomedical education. He also is associate director of Pitt's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and director of the Center for Military Medicine Research.

"We are particularly appreciative of the research award from CASIS as recognition of our work on developing veritable models for skeletal tissues that may be used to understand the mechanisms of disease and to expedite drug screening for degenerative conditions such as osteoporosis and osteoarthritis," Dr. Tuan said.

The award was accepted by Peter Alexander, Ph.D, and Riccardo Gottardi, Ph.D, on behalf of Dr. Tuan and the University of Pittsburgh research team.

Under Dr. Tuan, Pitt's Center for Cellular and Molecular Engineering focuses on the science of treating injuries and diseases of the musculoskeletal system, utilizing nanotechnology and mechanobiological principles in combination with bioreactor and biomaterials technologies, including 3-dimensional printing, for functional skeletal tissue engineering and regeneration.

The MPS project has been partially funded by the Ri.MED Foundation, a collaboration between Italy's government, the University of Pittsburgh, and UPMC. The foundation, based in Palermo, Italy, promotes, supports and leads biomedical and biotechnological research projects, with emphasis on the translation of innovative results into clinical practice.

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About the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

As one of the nation's leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1998. In rankings recently released by the National Science Foundation, Pitt ranked fifth among all American universities in total federal science and engineering research and development support.

Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region's economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see http://www.medschool.pitt.edu.

http://www.upmc.com/media

Contact: Rick Pietzak

Phone: 412-864-4151

E-mail: PietzakR@upmc.edu

Contact: Gloria Kreps

Phone: 412-586-9764

E-mail: KrepsGA@upmc.edu
University of Utah materials science and engineering associate professor Mike Scarpulla wants to shed light on semiconductors -- literally.

Scarpulla and senior scientist Kirstin Alberi of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, have developed a theory that adding light during the manufacturing of semiconductors -- the materials that make up the essential parts of computer chips, solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs) -- can reduce defects and potentially make more efficient solar cells or brighter LEDs. The role of light in semiconductor manufacturing may help explain many puzzling differences between processing methods as well as unlock the potential of materials that could not be used previously.

Scarpulla and Alberi reported their findings in a paper titled "Suppression of Compensating Native Defect Formation During Semiconductor Processing Via Excess Carriers," published June 16 in the journal, Scientific Reports. The research was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Semiconductors are pure materials used to produce electronic components such as computer chips, solar cells, radios used in cellphones or LEDs. The theory developed by Scarpulla and Alberi applies to all semiconductors but is most exciting for compound semiconductors -- such as gallium arsenide (GaAs), cadmium telluride (CdTe), or gallium nitride (GaN) -- that are produced by combining two or more elements from the periodic table. GaAs is used in microwave radios in cellphones, CdTe in solar panels, and GaN in LED light bulbs.

The fact that compound semiconductors require more than one chemical element make them susceptible to defects in the material at an atomic scale, says Scarpulla, who also is a University of Utah electrical and computer engineering associate professor.

"Defects produce lots of effects like difficulty in controlling the conductivity of the material, difficulty in being able to turn sunlight into electricity efficiently in the case of solar cells or difficulty in emitting light efficiently in the case of LEDs," he says.

For nearly a century, researchers have usually assumed that the numbers of these defects in semiconductors were uniquely defined by the temperature and pressure during processing. "We worked out a complete theory that couples light into that problem," Scarpulla says.

The team discovered that if you add light while firing the material in a furnace at high temperatures, the light generates extra electrons that can change the composition of the material.

"We ran simulations of what happens," Scarpulla says. "If you put a piece of a semiconductor in a furnace in the dark, you would get one set of properties from it. But when you shine light on it in the furnace, it turns out you suppress these more problematic defects. We think it may allow us to get around some tricky problems with certain materials that have prevented their use for decades. The exciting work is in the future though -- actually testing these predictions to make better devices."

The team is working to apply their theory to as many semiconductors as possible and testing the real world results. For example, the team believes this could improve the efficiency of solar panels that use thin films of cadmium telluride and even those made from silicon.

"It's really cool to be working on this fundamental problem in semiconductors," says Scarpulla. "Most of the ideas were worked out decades ago, so it is really exciting to be able to make a contribution to something fundamental. It feels like we have shined light onto a new path and we don't know how far it will take us."

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This news release and a photo may be downloaded from: http://unews.utah.edu/let-there-be-light/
LOGAN, UTAH - Two professors of mechanical engineering at Utah State University will receive grants from the U.S. Department of Energy totaling $5.8 million for nuclear energy research. The news came in a Tuesday announcement from DOE officials who awarded more than $35 million to 48 university-led nuclear research and development projects around the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program, or NEUP. Quick Read

Two USU College of Engineering professors of mechanical and aerospace engineering will receive major grants from the DOE's Nuclear Energy University Program. (NEUP)

Professor Heng Ban will receive a $5M grant to oversee research into accident-tolerant nuclear fuels - an increasingly relevant topic since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the development of light water reactors.

Professor Barton Smith will receive an $800,000 grant to improve computer models that predict how reactor cooling systems behave in an accident scenario.

Heng Ban, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, will receive a $5 million grant to study nuclear fuel safety and performance. Ban and an international team of collaborators including universities, industry, national labs and government regulatory agencies will conduct a series of experiments on newly designed nuclear fuel materials that are safer and more tolerant to conditions similar to those that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.

Ban says the research will advance our understanding of fuel behavior and performance in accident conditions and provide experimental and computational tools for DOE's Accident Tolerant Fuels program. The research will focus on several key technical areas that are critical to the safety of nuclear power generation.

His collaborators include USU College of Engineering Assistant Professors Ling Liu and Ryan Berke who will investigate how the extreme temperatures common to nuclear reactors affect the cladding material that encases nuclear fuel pellets.

Ban says the findings could also lead to significant progress toward benchmarks for model validation - a much-needed resource worldwide - using combined computational and experimental research.

Many of the experimental phases of the research will take place at Idaho National Laboratory's Transient Reactor Test Facility, or TREAT. This complex west of Idaho Falls, was originally designed to test reactor fuels and structural materials and will be used in the coming years to test accident-tolerant fuels and supporting structures.

USU Professor Barton Smith will receive $800,000 to provide experimental flow data for assessing the accuracy of computer models. The experiments will be for natural convection flow through parallel channels and mimic flow through a nuclear reactor during accident scenarios. The findings will ultimately help improve computer models that predict how reactor cooling systems behave in an accident scenario.

Smith will collaborate with Mark Kimber, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University.

In addition to DOE's NEUP grants, the agency awarded millions in additional funding to help promote innovative nuclear technologies toward commercialization and into the market.

"Nuclear power is our nation's largest source of low-carbon electricity and is a vital component in our efforts to both provide affordable and reliable electricity and to combat climate change," said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a prepared DOE statement. "These awards will help scientists and engineers as they continue to innovate with advanced nuclear technologies."

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Researcher Contact: Heng Ban 435-797-2098, heng.ban@usu.edu

Researcher Contact: Barton Smith 435-797-3278, barton.smith@usu.edu

Media Contact: Matt Jensen 435-797-8170, matthew.jensen@usu.edu
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the University of Turku have developed an easy-to-use and affordable blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) test. The testing device enables ordinary consumers to check that the water at their beach is free of cyanobacteria toxins. A commercialiser is now being sought for this rapid biodegradable testing device.

The cyanobacteria testing device, which is suitable for mass production and the size of a bank card, can be used both by consumers and authorities. The disposable, paper-based testing device can identify the occurrence of the most common cyanobacteria toxins, such as microcystins and nodularins.

"The cyanobacteria test requires only a few drops of water and indicates the result within 15 minutes. If two red lines appear on the display, the water contains cyanobacteria toxins. One line means that the water sample is toxin free," explains VTT Senior Scientist Liisa Hakola.

As lake and sea waters warm up, the annual summer monitoring of blue-green algae blooms begins. Toxins are present in approximately every second blue-green algae bloom and you cannot detect by visual inspection alone whether the cyanobacteria in the water is toxic or not.

"Even after the blue-green algae disappear, the water might contain toxins for a while. With the device, you can quickly check that the water is safe to use," says Markus Vehniainen, Researcher at the University of Turku.

The joint project of the University of Turku and VTT aimed to meet the need of consumers to obtain up-to-date information about the state of their water bodies by developing an affordable, fast and easy-to-use-solution. If transferred to an automated testing platform, the assay would also be suitable for applications requiring particular measurement sensitivity, such those for testing drinking water around the world.

The cyanobacteria test has been developed as part of a project to create new knowledge and business from research ideas funded by Tekes. It has been found to work also in natural water samples, and a commercialising company is currently being sought so that the test can be made available to consumers.

The national algal bloom monitoring bulletin published by the Finnish Environment Institute gives a general picture of the state of the water bodies in Finland and Jarviwiki monitors the occurrence of blue-green algae in individual lakes and water bodies. Such detailed information on water quality has not previously been available.

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Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhgwaOS_-ek

Further information:

VTT

Liisa Hakola, Senior Scientist

Tel. +358 40 841 5978

liisa.hakola@vtt.fi

University of Turku

Markus Vehniainen, Researcher

Tel. +358 45 638 5811

markus.vehniainen@utu.fi

Further information on VTT:

Olli Ernvall

Senior Vice President, Communications

+358 20 722 6747

olli.ernvall@vtt.fi

http://www.vtt.fi

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd is the leading research and technology company in the Nordic countries. We use our research and knowledge to provide expert services for our domestic and international customers and partners, and for both private and public sectors. We use 4,000,000 hours of brainpower a year to develop new technological solutions. VTT in social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter @VTTFinland.
Amplifying testimony she delivered before a Senate hearing in March, Susan Landau says the FBI's approach is outdated and that the agency needs to invest more in '21st century investigative savvy'

Worcester, Mass. - June 12, 2016 - In an essay to be published on June 17, 2016 in Science magazine Susan Landau, professor of cybersecurity policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), argues that the FBI's recent and widely publicized efforts to compel Apple Computer to write software to unlock an iPhone used by a terrorist in California reflects an outdated approach to law enforcement that threatens to weaken the security of all smartphones, potentially putting the private information of millions of smartphone users at risk and undermining the growing use of smartphones as trusted authenticators for accessing online information.

[To request a copy of the essay, please contact Science at 1-202-326-6440 or scipak@aaas.org.

The Science essay grew out of testimony Landau delivered in March before a hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee [Landau's testimony begins at 3:35:44]. In that forum, Landau countered the argument of FBI director James Comey that encrypted devices (which Comey has characterized as "warrant-proof spaces") hinder the agency's ability to investigate crimes. Landau says the FBI is looking at smartphones through a 20th century lens, a perspective that is particularly troubling given the potential for smartphones to either replace or augment static passwords as authenticators for logging into computers or accessing online accounts.

Login credentials are a favored target of hackers, Landau says, since they can provide access to valuable data and leave computer systems open to attack. More and more, companies like Facebook and Google and even some high-level government agencies are using smartphones as authenticators to make online resources significantly more difficult to breach. But for smartphone authentication to be effective, smartphones, themselves, must be secure.

Landau says the FBI's efforts to weaken smartphone security reflect its outdated approach to investigating crime and its inadequate resources for conducting modern cyber investigations. Landau argues that the agency needs to invest in building up its own "21st century investigative savvy," including creating "an investigative center with agents with deep technical understanding of modern communications technologies and computer science."

With the ability to develop new surveillance approaches and tools matched to the latest advances in communications technologies, the agency will no longer need to seek to weaken the devices that people, corporations, and government agencies worldwide depend on to securely communicate, transact business, and transmit sensitive information.

###

Before joining the WPI faculty in 2014, Landau was a senior staff privacy analyst at Google and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She is the author of Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (MIT Press), which won the 2012 Surveillance Studies Book Prize from the Surveillance Studies Network. With Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of public-key cryptography, she wrote Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press 1998; revised in 2007), which received the 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award and the 1999 IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession. She has written about security issues in Science, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Scientific American, and other publications. She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she was inducted into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame in October 2015.

About Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Founded in 1865 in Worcester, Mass., WPI is one of the nation's first engineering and technology universities. Its 14 academic departments offer more than 50 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science, engineering, technology, business, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts, leading to bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees. WPI's talented faculty work with students on interdisciplinary research that seeks solutions to important and socially relevant problems in fields as diverse as the life sciences and bioengineering, energy, information security, materials processing, and robotics. Students also have the opportunity to make a difference to communities and organizations around the world through the university's innovative Global Projects Program. There are more than 45 WPI project centers throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.
Written by ACM





*Strasbourg/CoE/Angelo Marcopolo/- PanEuropean CoE's Committee of Ministers' President in office for the period of May - November 2015, Ambassador/Permanent Representative of Estonia, Katrin Kivi, speaking to "Eurofora" just after opening an International Conference on "Human Rights in Culturally Diverse Societies", earlier this (Monday) Afternoon, stressed, on the Topical Issue of the Migrant Crisis, that, while Refugees must be Protected, Nevertheless, Time has come to Make it Clear Who are Real Refugees, and who are simply Economic Migrants, or even Smugglers and Traffickers.



But Estonian CoE Presidency's Priorities, for the Period of May - November 2016 are mainly Focused on Children, as well as on the Internet, she added, advancing also on a Controversial aspect of the recent Deal between EU Commission and Big American Web Providers, that "a Good Balance has to be Found", between Freedom of Expression and Public Authorities' actions Extending far Beyond propaganda of Terrorism or Violence, but concerning also the so-called "Hate Speech" debate, where various NGOs have recently Warned against Risks of Abuse by Private Companies' interference, out of the Established Legal Procedures, (See Infra).



-----------------------------



Even if she speaks a good French, (Proud of having even been awarded the prestigious Honorific title of "Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Merite" back on 2012 by France at Tallin, while she served as Ambassador in Denmark after having worked as No 2 in the Estonian Embassy in Paris earlier-on, Nevertheless, Ms Kivi accepted to Speek in English for "Eurofora"s version in this language, standing under the serious-looking eyebrows of World-famous former Brittish Prime Minister Winston Churchil's Statute, placed at the entrance of CoE's Press Room, (See relevant Photo)...



Kivi is the 2nd Senior Official from Estonia to be Interviewed by" Eurofora"s co-Founder, after that Baltic Country's Experienced, former long-time Estonian Parliament President, Mrs Ene Ergma (2003 - 2014), an AstroPhysician Scientist, graduated from Moscow University, an Astronomy Professor and Member of the Academy of Sciences , currently Chairwoman of the Parliament's Space Research Committee, who has Chaired also CoE's prestigious PanEuropean Bi-Annual Summits of Speekers of National Parliaments, (See, also our relevant Publications at "TCWeekly", "SNS", etc).



But Estonia was also Home of World Famous Chess Player Paul Keres, one of the Strongest GrandMasters in History, particularly between 1944 - 1963, who often Headed the Team of former USSR in various European, International or Olympic Games' Tournaments, but also a Writer and always Topical Theoritician, that Ambassador Kivi reminded to "Eurofora", pointing also at some comparatively Younger Estonian "very Talented " Chess Players Internationaly known.



----------------------------------

CoE's CONFERENCE AND MIGRANTS' CRISIS

--------------------------------------------------



- "Why this (CoE's) Conference Now ?", "Eurofora" invited the new sCoE's President-in-office to Explain from the outset.



- "We (CoE's 47 Member Countries, with 850 Millions of Citizens) Need thist Conference, which is very Timely, Because in our Societies of Today you need Respect of Rule of Law, Democracy and Human Rights for Everybody, for Each one" living there, she Stressed.



- Indeed, Recently, "among the People in Our Societies you Find very Different Individuals". And "we (CoE) are Speaking" particularly "about the Rights of Immigrants and Minorities here" (in this Conference), since "We have to Respect all These People. This Can only Contribute to Make our Societies Stronger", she pointed out in Reply.



- "Do you think that Recent (2015-2016) Events about the Mass Migration Crisis, through Turkey and via (EU + Shengen Member) Greece, might have made things Harder, or are there also Other real Causes ?", "Eurofora" asked further.



- "Why do you think that it might have made things Harder ?", the Estonian Ambassador stroke back, with a Smile... Despite the Notorious Problems of Security vis a vis several ISIL's Deadly Terroists found Hidden among those who came from Turkey through Greece, etc, an obvious OverCrowding with More than a Million of Asylum Seekers/irregular Migrants suddenly arriving inside the EU in just a Few Months' Time in the Biggest Population Displacement since World War II, considering also the often commented Fact that, Unlike various Other, Previous Refugees' Waves in Europe's Past, this Time the Quasi-Totality of this Exceptionaly Massive Migrtation, (at least partly Due also to some Turkey's Controversial Selection, mutatis-mutandis, mainly of Muslim and Less Educated Migrants, mostly Single, without their Families, and a Large Part comming even from the Maghreb and/or Pakistan/Afghanistan or Bangladesh etc, but Not only from War-stricken and Suffering by ISIL's Terrorism Syria/Iraq), added to the Unprecedented Jan. and Spring 2016 Brutal Attacks against mostly Poor Young European Girls by organized Mobs of various Migrants in Koelna nd other Cities in Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmarkl and Austria, recently Repeatedn also at Darmstadt, Near Frankfurt and Strasbourg, and at the UK, etc., even Against Minors aged Only 14 Years Old, as large-public Media reported.



- "It's enough to just Read most Media in Europe recently", "Eurofora" simply observed...



- Indeed, "the Europe of Today is Facing various Challenges : We have the Migrants/Refugees' Crisis, Terrorism, Economic issues, etc", CoE's President in office acknowledged.



=> - "So We Need Solidarity, Better Cooperation, and Coordination of our different Policies", she advised. "Because", at any case, "We have to Treat those People with Respect, as long as they have Reached our Continent", Ambassador Kivi noted.



- Practicaly "Nobody dares say anything against the Real Refugees, since most of them have faced War, ISIL's Terrorism, Distructions and other serious Threats", particularly at the Syria-Iraq areas. "But, as you know, the Borderline is about Other People who have come inside this very Exceptional, Mass Displacement, and, as Greece might have made some Errors, proving Initially unable to Control alone that Massive Move comming through Turkey, which may have Played some Games, the point is that Europe has had that Crisis, and there are many European People's Concerns about how this Other Part, of Social or Economic irregular Migrants, might Behave, integrate or not. Don't you think that , sometimes, such problems might be Bad, First of all Against the Real Refugees, who are the First to be Affected by such Issues ?", "Eurofora" queried.



- "Well, there is No Doubt that the Real Refugees Need our (Europe's) Protection and Help", the Estonian CoE Presidency's Top Diplomat agreed. "In that sense, it's Not Only a European Concern, it's a Global Concern", she Added, Enlarging the scope of that Topical Issue in its Real Dimension, (which obviously Includes also International Community's Duty to make Stronger Efforts for the Fight against ISIL's and other Islamist Extremists' Deadly Terrorism, as well as for Peace, particularly in Syria).



>>> - "But, taking into account of all those Various Migrants who have Reached our (European) Continent now, We (EU/CoE) have to Make it Now Clear : - Who are the Economic Migrants, Who are the Refugees, and What People may Profit by Smuggling and Human Trafficking, because it's a very, very Serious Issue", Ambassador Kivi underlined in Reply.



-----------------------------

+ CHILDREN :

----------------------------------



+ In Addition, "there are, also, More than 10.000 Unaccompanied Minors, among these People, who have "Disappeared" already, but there is also the Rest of the Global Amount of all those Unaccompanied Children to take care", she noted, (evoking a really Strange, and probably, at least partly Tragic Issue, currently Investigated by a CoE Assembly's Rapporteur from Italy, and due to be discussed in Publc at a Plenary Session of the PanEuropean body in Strasbourg asap, as "Eurofora" has been earlier told by competent MEPs).



=> - "It Means : Better Coordination among Our Security Services, and Parliaments, Politcians and Governments, in order to Make it Clear Who is Who (Comp. Supra), and How to Help" ... For that purpose, "We Need adequate Policies", including on "Development and Technical Assistance" to concerned 3rd Countries, "where Everybody should Participate and do properly their part", she concluded.



--------------------



+ "Children are also Part of Your Priorities", observed on this occasion "Eurofora", concerning Estonia's officialy anounced Plan for its May - November 2016 Chairmanship of COE('s Highest Political body, that of its Committee of Ministers.



- "Yes", indeed, "this is one of Estonian Presidency's Key Periorities", the Chairing Ambassador/Permanent Representative to the CoE, confirmed in reply. "Speaking of the Children, in the Context of the Estonian Presidency (of COE's Committee of Ministers : 5 - 11/2016), We want to pay More Attention mainly on 3 Issues :"



- " (a) Children in the Digital Environment, (b) Children in the Migration Crisis, and (c) Children's Participation :" I.e. "Encourage Children to Participate in Everyday Life, and How to Help them also when they are Involved in different Legal Procedures, f.ex. in Courts, as Victims, Defenders or for Testimony-giving, etc, in the Best Possible Way", she specified, (speaking of another Socialy and Humanly Sensitive area, on which, by a Coincidence, "Eurofora" co-Founder's Father had Worked during almost All his Life as a Director of the Administration of Courts Specialized in Children's cases, some of which can, indeed, be among the Hardest and more Delicate, as he had several Times described in concreto).



- In this regard, "Everyone is Aware of the Risks that our Children may Face in a Digital Environment, as well", (Internet, Mobile Phones, CDs, etc). This is added to the "Migrant Crisis" (Comp. Supra), as part of "Global Issues". "This is why Estonia is also organizing an Event in New York, during UNO's General Assembly" meetings "on September" 2016, "because we have also the UNICEF's Presidency" at the same time. "But, in Tallin, we plan to organize anOther Event, at the Begnning of November, to Address those 3 Issues concernng the Children (Comp. Supra), and to Guarantee CoE's Endorsement of proposals which would have been drafted during the Estoniian Presidency".

-----------------------

INTERNET

------------------------------



- By the way, "Your CoE Presidency's Priorities Focus on Internet issues", for which Estonia is "a Landmark Country", observed further "Eurofora", (who had been Impressed in the Past by an Estonian Collegue Journalist's veery Performant Digital Tools, and, Recently, even by the Introduction of Internet Voting in Estonian Elections), inviting Ambassador Kivi to "HighLight" briefly the Main Points of what could be Expected from the PanEuropean Organisation during the Period of Spring - Autumn 2016 (5-11/2016 : which coincides also with ougoing US President Obama's reported Intention to Try to Forge a set of Global Rules on the Web during the Last Months of his Term of Office, i.e. before January 2017).



- "Related to the Internet and Human Rights, which stand Both Off-Line and On-Line, it's about, f.ex. Promoting COE's Convention on "Cyber-Crime", (which will hold in November an Anniversary International Conference in Strasbourg), while, already, "Last Friday, CoE's Secretary General (Thornbjorn Jagland, from Norway : a Country participating at the Same "Nordic Council" as Estonia), "was paticipating in Euro-DIG, in Brussels, with many other Stakeholders, about Internet Governance", she Started to Reply.



- Naturally, "this is Global, but the (PanEuropean, 47 Member States-strong) CoE has a Wonderful Toolbox", concerning Internet, "and it has Created Many Legal Binding Standards", the Estonian Presidency's representative pointed out with Enthousiasm.



- In this regard, currently, "the Aim is to make some Order in this Jungle, because, as I said Earlier Today in my Introductory Remarcks" to the above mentioned CoE's Conference (Comp. Supra), f.ex., Hate Speach Off-Line is Hindered, but Hate Speech On-Line should be also dealt with as a Crime too", she argued.



- "So, We (CoE's Presidency by Estonia) are Addressing the Internet Freedom of Expression Issues at the Beginnning of September, Together with the German Presidency of the (Euro-Atlantic) OSCE, with which we ae making a Joint Conference on the 9th of September in Strasbourg, Ambassador Kivi Topicaly pointed out at"Eurofora".



- In this regard, "Eurofora" asked CoE's President-in-office if she thought that there might be a "Hope" to find some "SafeGuards" in order to Address the Serious Concerns for possible Risks of Abuse, recently Expressed by various NGOs, f.ex. in E-Mails send to Medias, including "Eurofora", wheer they Strongly Criticized, precisely, that Part of a Recent Deal between EU Commisioner Vera Joureva and Big American Web Provider Companies, which related Not to Terrorist or other propaganda for Violence, (that almost Everybody Agreed to Tackle), but just the Delicate Issue of Distinguishing among Citizens' (and Journalists') Freedom of Expression, and the so-called "Hate Speech". Indeed, both Christian and Securlar NGOs, f.ex. from the UK, as well as American and European NGOs for Internet Freedoms, often Consulted by the EU in Bussels, Denounced what they felt to be a Risk for an "Orwellian-like" Oppression of Political Dissidents throughout the Web, if even some Anonymous and UnAccountable Employees of Private Companies could f.ex. Block Access to a Website, Erase a Publication on-line, Out of any Legal Procedure under ECHR's supervision, (which, on the Contrary, applies to all CoE's Member State' activitiess).

Among various other Cases, f.ex.,, a Christian NGO said that he suddenly found its Website practicaly Blocked, under fallacious pretexts given only a Long Time Afterwards, while a Swedish Journalist saw her Video-Reportage Erased at the Internet, (before being Restored, Later-on, after Many People's Protests, almost at the Same Time that a Student was reportedly Excluded from a University's Lectures on Pretext of his Criticism against Homosexuals' Demand not only for Same Sex "Mariage", but also for Children Artificialy born or "Adopted" by them, according to some Controversial and UnPopular Laws.



>>> - "I think that We (COE) must Find a Good Balance, by Protecting the Freedom of Expression, and also the Actions of our Authorities how to Avoid" Violent or Hate Speech at the Internet, CoE's President-in-office Stressed in Reply to "Eurofora"s Question on the Controversial Part of such Recent EU/CoE Deals with Big Companies providing Web Access and various Digital Infrastructures.







(../..)











--------------------------------















***















("DraftNews", as already send to "Eurofora"s Subscribers/Donors, earlier. A more accurate, full Final Version might be Published asap).















***
hey everyone, i need help.

my girlfriend in england is trying to come out to vancouver. she is filipino which is unfortunate in this example because the odds are totally stacked against her, seemingly purely because of her ethnicity.

she did everything right in the application for volunteering as a nurse here, she has found a place and been approved, paid for a medical (way more expensive because she's filipino) and had every check. we were certain she was in until she got denied the other day and we are both gutted.

the reason she was denied was because they basically think she is going to run off. there is nothing to suggest this, they said her travel history was one thing, because she travels alot, i pointed out she has never outstayed her visa, which surely is a good thing. another thing was family, she has no family ties anywhere but the phillipines, surely that is a good thing? she has nowhere to run to?

i'm not sure this is the right place to ask, her visa is a bit different to the IEC but we really need advice. we are going to reapply and even offer to book a return flight a year after her stay to show she will be returning to the phillipines but worry this might not be enough.

the main point is it seems that the government just take money off filipinos even though they know they will not be letting them in after.

does anyone have any advice? i have their denial letter and can answer any other questions for someone willing to help.

thankyou!
You are unlikely to really get anything out of the Consulates. AccBgb laid out the particulars.With an Elective Residence Visa you cannot engage in any work in ItalyHouse or Lease (Seems they don't want you to wander about aimlesslySubstantial Income (As stated, but I will further qualify, it can be as much as $4000 per person per month per the notorious Miami Consulate, but the others are shy and keep things to themselves. ) Documentation would include things like Pension statements, 401K statements, Social Security statements, Bank Statements. Basically you are creating a picture of your Net Assets to demonstrate you can fully support yourself.The rest off the items are just misc paperwork. Things like background check (which you have to get and pay for yourself) Certain documents officially translated into Italian. EctYou make an appointment for a date 3 months before the date you plan to depart for Italy.You say you will retire in three years. So for now, if you feel you may be a little light on the financial side, you make a plan to stash away money to improve that. Decide when you want to buy a house, or whether you plan to lease one for a year. If your going to buy, you can find tons of houses to examine on the web. Pick a region, google houses for sale xxx and some agents will pop up. Start learning Italian. If you have not been to Italy at least a few times already, make trips.Assuming you are successful in all this, they will grant you an Elective Residence Visa. They when you get to Italy, you submit all the same paperwork all over again to get what they call the Permisso di Siggorno, and after processing that, you will be an official Italian resident! Don't worry. Its all really really fun to do!!
Nearly 2.3 million Texans live within a half-mile of an active oil or gas well, compressor or processor, which could put them at risk of health ailments, a nonprofit environmental group said Wednesday.

Data released by Earthworks shows Texas has nearly 400,000 such oil and gas operations, with 904 schools and 78 hospitals within a half-mile of such facilities, which the environmental group describes as being within a threat radius. And 82 Texas counties exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys cancer risk level of concern, according to a companion analysis by Clean Air Task Force.

Counties in the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian Basin generally had cancer risks that exceeded the EPAs level of concern  meaning the countywide cancer risk equaled or exceeded 1 in 1 million, according to Clean Airs analysis. These included Karnes, La Salle, DeWitt, Dimmit, Frio, Gonzales, Live Oak, McMullen, Webb and Wilson counties. Bexar County was not among them.

Whether someones health is affected by emissions from oil or gas operations depends on how close that person is to the facility and the weather conditions, said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor in Texas A&M Universitys atmospheric sciences department who researches the shale booms effect on air quality.

Actual health effects can, but may not, materialize immediately, Schade said Wednesday in an email to the San Antonio Express-News. Since human individuals have a wide range of sensitivities, some are unaffected, while others suffer.

Schade said there are limited studies addressing health effects from the shale boom ... Many health effects have to be characterized as potential because there are few, if any, statistics that would reveal a direct relationship between emissions and effects.

Earthworks unveiled an interactive mapping tool Wednesday showing locations of active oil and gas operations in every state across the country and detailing how many residents, schools and hospitals are within a half-mile of those sites.

The data can be viewed not only for specific states but also individual counties. And it provides granular detail on the scope of oil and gas activities in the states drilling patches, such as the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas and the Permian Basin in West Texas.

The Oil and Gas Threat Map, as its called, allows anyone to search their address to find out if they live within the threat radius. The interactive map can be viewed by anyone at no cost.

What we want to come out of this is people to realize that theyre living with this pollution, said Earthworks spokesman Alan Septoff. Some people just dont know. And something should be done about it.

Sister Elizabeth Riebschlaeger, a nun with Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word who lives in the Eagle Ford Shale and has been an environmental advocate for residents across the region, praised Earthworks efforts to map active oil and gas operations, and to quantify how many people live in close proximity to those facilities.

She called the public release of such information long overdue.

This has mapped the entire state of Texas, which really needed to be done, said Riebschlaeger, who lives in Cuero in DeWitt County. Consciousness is often lacking, because people live their lives from within their little fishbowls, you know? And thats their world. But this kind of objective analysis puts things in perspective.

Urban populations are, for the most part, unaware of what people in rural communities have been putting up with, she said. So this is a call to all of us as responsible Americans to demand that this industry stop avoiding the truth ... and take responsibility for what they can do.

Texas oil and gas industry is one of the heaviest regulated industries in the nation when it comes to health and safety, said Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, an oil and natural gas advocacy group.

Unfortunately, there is little room for compromise with organizations whose sole purpose is to stop the development of hydrocarbons in our state and country, Longanecker said in an email to the Express-News late Wednesday. Their misuse of information is commonplace and will continue to be a core component of their anti-oil and natural gas agenda.

The American Petroleum Institute, a national trade association for the oil and natural gas industry, did not immediately respond to Earthworks analysis, saying it is evaluating the data.

Americas Natural Gas Alliance, which represents independent natural gas exploration and production companies, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

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.

Wichita County in North Texas was reported to have the most active oil and gas facilities of any county in Texas  17,298 in all. Andrews County, near the West Texas city of Midland, had the second-highest, totaling 12,340. That was followed by Ector County, the home of the West Texas town of Odessa, which had 10,645 oil and gas facilities.

Houstons Harris County had the highest number of residents living within a half-mile of such operations, however  466,150 residents in all, the analysis showed. Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley ranked second, with 143,850 residents living within a half-mile of such facilities. Bexar County ranked fifth statewide, with more than 56,000 residents living within the defined half-mile risk area.

Houstons Harris County also had the most schools  104  located within a half-mile of active oil and gas operations, the most of any county in Texas. That was followed by Hidalgo County, which had 67 schools within a half-mile of such facilities. Bexar County had the sixth highest number of schools  27  within the half-mile threshold.

Hidalgo County had eight hospitals within a half-mile of oil and gas operations, more hospitals than any other county in the state. That was followed by Harris County with six hospitals. Bexar County had only one hospital in a half-mile radius of such a facility. That name of that hospital was not included in the report.

Laredos Webb County had the most land falling within a defined threat radius  1,302 square miles.

Awareness of the location of oil and gas operations is just the first step, Sister Riebschlaeger said.

The very frustrating next step  and some people have found this out as individual families, because they were suffering from what was surrounding them  is to try to do something about it, she said. And thats when all kinds of doors get slammed in their faces.
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SAN ANTONIO  Texas gun retailers expect to see a spike in firearms sales as officials debate whether to enact bans on high-powered assault rifles in the aftermath of a shooting Sunday at a gay nightclub in Florida that left 49 people dead.

The fear of tougher firearm regulations typically sends gun sales soaring after mass shooting events such as the Dec. 2 attack in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 or the Dec. 14, 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut that killed 26, including 20 children under the age of 7.

This year was already shaping up to be a lucrative one for the U.S. firearms industry. Federal background checks for firearm purchases, considered a reliable indicator of firearm demand, surged 29.2 percent to 11.7 million during the first five months of this year compared with 8.9 million during the same timeframe last year, according to data from the FBIs National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Election-year fears among prospective gun owners that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton - who has called for a ban on assault rifles in the wake of the Orlando shooting - could enact tight restrictions on firearm ownership may also drive gun sales traffic and push firearm manufacturers stock higher, BB&T Capital Markets analysts said in a note published Monday.

Stocks for gunmakers Sturm Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. surged 8.9 percent and 10 percent, respectively, on Monday after the shooting. Sturm Ruger & Co stock has retreated since then but is still up 2.3 percent so far this week, closing at $58.71 Wednesday. Smith & Wesson also lost those gains, closing up 5 cents a share at $21.48 Wednesday.

Some gun retailers say they have already seen boosts in sales and foot traffic this week, following a similar pattern from recent prominent shootings.

Its what we call a barn burner, said Jerry McCall, owner of Texas Guns in San Antonio, referring to sales on Monday and Tuesday.

Many customers at area gun stores sought semi-automatic weapons similar to the AR-15-style assault rifle used by Omar Mateen at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando out of fear that lawmakers would enact bans or restrictions on the weapons, retailers said.

Its not the Orlando shooting that has caused the spike, said Robert Nagel, owner of Nagels Gun Shop in San Antonio. Its the threat of banning the private ownership of semi-automatic firearms by the president that is causing the spike.

Gun sellers also reported selling to atypical customers on Monday and Tuesday. Jonathan Hirsch, owner of Adelbridge & Co. in San Antonio, said he has sold semi-automatic rifles to mothers and handguns to LGBT customers he doesnt normally see during the past two days. He said sales at his store are up about 35 percent over the past three days.

They dont feel safe and theyre trying to protect themselves, Hirsch said.

How long the surge in gun buying depends on how long lawmakers debate restrictions on firearms, retailers said. Senate Democrats led by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, began a filibuster Wednesday demanding action on gun violence and both Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump have expressed support for preventing people on the nations terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms.

Its definitely a panic, Hirsch said. Its just how long will it last and how intense will the panic be is the question.

Hirsch likened the current climate to that of December 2012, when he said his store saw sales increases following the re-election of President Barack Obama and the Dec. 14, 2012 shooting in Newtown.

Im not here to capitalize on panic, Im not here to sell fear, but this is the same situation. Were going into an election cycle and then we have the act of a maniac terrorist and its setting up to be similar, Hirsch said. I hope it doesnt happen, I dont want to profit off of it but were here to supply customer demand and thats what we want to do.

Not all San Antonio gun sellers have seen a surge in foot traffic and, consequently, gun sales connected to the national debate over banning semi-automatic guns.

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.

Johnny Dury, an owner of Dury's Gun Shop, said his customers have engaged in more investment buying of firearms they believe will increase in price as the November election nears, mirroring price increases during the 2008 and 2012 elections. His buyers also worry that if Clinton is elected, shell appoint justices to the U.S. Supreme Court that could rule unfavorably on gun rights.

Thats a big concern for the people that we deal with and that scares them to death, Dury said. Then, youve got a whole generation of stuff youre not going to be able to change.

Demand for firearms typically rise after mass shooting events. After the San Bernardino shooting in December, federal authorities performed more than 3.3 million background checks for people seeking to purchase firearms that month, according to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Thats a 43.5 percent jump from 2.3 million in December 2015.

But, the number of background checks completed annually has also jumped more than 158 percent from 2005 to 2015, indicating long-term growing demand. About 23.1 million background checks were completed in 2015 compared to almost 9 million in 2005. And, 2016 is on pace to beat 2015.

In the not-terribly-gun-shy Texas, federal firearm background checks jumped 22.8 percent from 601,956 during the first five months of 2015 to 739,396 during the same timeframe this year, background check data shows. The FBI completed more than 1.5 million Texas-based checks in 2015.

Gun manufacturers have also significantly bolstered their inventory within the past decade, producing 10.8 million firearms in 2013 compared to 3.3 million in 2003, according to the latest available data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

jfechter@express-news.net

Twitter: @JFreports

This article was corrected to reflect the closing price for Smith & Wesson on Wednesday.
The city of Cibolo is considering a $110 million, 7-mile toll road to help ease congestion in the area.

City Council members voted 7-0 Tuesday night to allow City Manager Robert Herrera to pursue a partnership with the Texas Turnpike Corp., a private toll road company that has legislative authority to build and operate toll roads in the state of Texas.

As presented, the four-lane road would stretch from FM 1103 at Wagon Wheel Way south to Interstate 10, a couple of miles east of Loop 1604.

The project would be entirely financed by the corporation, which could have the expressway operational in a fraction of the time it takes to get roads funded and built through Texas Department of Transportation or Metropolitan Planning Organization, city officials said.

A citizens committee that included supporters and critics of the idea spent two months studying the feasibility of the project before voting unanimously to recommend that the city proceed with developing the plan.

Mayor Allen Dunn said there will be public hearings to discuss the plan, once its ready, and it will be presented at civic clubs and homeowners associations before the plan goes to the council for a final vote.

John Crew of Dallas, majority owner and chairman of the corporations board of directors, spoke about the TTC plans for the road, should they be given the go-ahead.

It will be a limited access, high-speed facility that lets you get in and out of your community, Crew said. Its about moving people and alleviating the congestion youre currently dealing with. This would be a needed facility.

The toll road, he said, would cost travelers about $0.30 cents a mile, or $2.10 to drive the entire length.

The designed route would offer two lanes in each direction with a bridge over FM 78 and another bridge over the railroad tracks. Crew said there would be a speed limit of 55 mph on the northern portion near FM 1103, but it could jump to 70 mph past the bridge.

Traffic figures Crew shared show a traffic count of 120,000 vehicles a day on Interstate 35 in the Cibolo area, between 35,000 and 40,000 a day on I-10, and roughly 17,000 a day on FM 1103.

Wed need 5,000 to 6,000 cars per day (on the toll road), to start, he said, which the corporation thinks is doable.

Crew said he was first introduced to city officials when he presented the tollway concept at a January 2015 meeting in Seguin. The corporations previous venture  a proposed 27-mile toll road in North Texas between Greenville and Garland, to alleviate gridlock along Interstate 30  was turned down last year.

If given the green light, the corporation would have to negotiate with landowners to acquire the 42 parcels of land the road would cross. Construction is expected to take about 18 months, officials said.

The concept is, we have Cibolo growing at a phenomenal rate, Crew said. When I tell (residents) that I can save them 45 minutes, would you give me $2, they say, Yes.

That seems a little high, but by the time we get this built, and given the continual growth in Cibolo, that would be pretty comparable to expect, he added. Weve got to pay for a pretty extensive bridge to build to get over the railroad track and FM 78. Its got to save time, or people wont use it, he added.

jflinn@express-news.net
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The Historic and Design Review Commission denied a request Wednesday from the owner of a 1950s warehouse just south of downtown to remove its historic landmark designation.

James H. Schuepbach said the 50,000-square-foot concrete block building should not have been designated historic by the city in 1988.

He said he has 3.5 acres of adjacent land under contract for purchase, for a total of 5 acres, with plans to raze the warehouse and build a mixed-use project with 264 housing units and 10,000 square feet of retail and office space.

In my personal opinion, I dont think this is historic, Schuepbach said.

The structure at 1334 S. Flores St. reflects a midcentry industrial style that was typical for the area, according to a statement of significance on file with the citys Office of Historic Preservation. HDRC commissioners noted that other industrial buildings in the nearby Southtown area had been redeveloped for commercial uses. They said Schuepbach failed to present a compelling argument that maintaining the structure as a designated landmark posed an economic hardship.

In other action, the commission ruled in favor of a request for the city to pursue landmark designation of a craftsman bungalow house, believed to be about 100 years old, at 255 Brahan Blvd., near Fort Sam Houston. Although the owner submitted an application for demolition in March, with plans to redevelop the property, several neighbors want the house preserved.

The commission also gave final approval of plans for Confluence Park, a 3.5-acre project overseen by the nonprofit San Antonio River Foundation just northwest of Mission Concepcion on the near South Side.

Ground was broken in May for the park at 310 W. Mitchell St., to serve as an outdoor learning center for visitors and school groups where San Pedro Creek flows into the river.

The project, with a projected two-year construction phase, will include a 30-foot-tall pavilion as its focal point, a multipurpose room with solar panels and a vegetative green roof, and areas demonstrating five native Texas ecotypes, including grassland, West Texas desert and live oak savannah.

The park, with a projected cost of up to $12 million, also will feature a large water-catchment system, paved walkways linked to riverside hike-and-bike paths and surface parking with environmentally friendly permeable cover.

shuddleston@express-news.net

Twitter: @shuddlestonSA
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WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, in a media blitz since the Orlando massacre, said hes speaking out increasingly about terrorist threats in part because of the toll they have taken on Latinos.

He noted that most of the 49 victims at the Orlando, Florida, nightclub were Latinos and that San Bernardino, California, where 14 people died in a terrorist attack in December, is a predominately Latino city. He added that one of the victims a month earlier in the Paris mass shooting, Nohemi Gonzalez, was an American Latina studying in France.

The issue of terrorism and domestic terrorism is having a significant impact on the Latino community, said Hurd, R-Helotes. This is a topic and an issue that is rising as a priority for Latinos.

No evidence has surfaced that Latinos have been a target recently because of their heritage. At the Orlando gay club, it happened to be Latin music night, and the toll of victims reflected the citys heavy Puerto Rican population and included four Mexican citizens and a man from the Dominican Republic.

For Hurd, whose sprawling district is predominately Latino, the attacks offer an added incentive to talk about terrorism as he fights to hold his seat in an election that could be heavily influenced by demographics.

Hurd was elected in 2014 in a district that stretches from San Antonio to the El Pasos outskirts. He is challenged in November by Pete Gallego of Alpine, whom he defeated in the last election by 2,422 votes.

Hurds re-election might have been problematic anyway, given that he represents a district that has bounced four congressmen from office in a decade.

But the emergence of Donald Trump has brought added challenges for Hurd, given Trumps ongoing barbs at people of Mexican heritage, his plan to build a security wall along the border and his vow to establish a deportation force to remove some 11 million undocumented immigrants from the United States.

Trumps remarks this week about Muslims in America and his insinuation that President Barack Obama identifies with radical Islamists and was somehow complicit in the Orlando attack has further complicated matters for congressional Republicans seeking re-election.

Gallego asserted that Hurds criticisms of administration policies on terrorism have been Trump-like and that Hurd has been remiss in not speaking more forcefully about Trumps remarks aimed at Latinos.

Gallego contended that Hurds frequent interviews of late are unlikely to help his re-election chances, given sentiments aroused by Trump.

Mr. Hurd can snort and paw at the air and neigh all he wants. But at the end of the day, he doesnt work on behalf of the people of the district, Gallego said.

While some in the GOP were speaking out against Trump, many Republicans were hurrying through the Capitol and ducking into elevators to avoid questions about their partys new leader.

In an interview, Hurd said he was disappointed in comments from Hillary Clinton as well as from Trump.

Youre not going to solve this problem by banning guns or banning Muslims, he said.

Pressed on Trumps remarks, Hurd replied, All the comments on both sides, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are unhelpful on this issue.

Hurd had conducted 15 interviews from Sunday to Wednesday while writing two op-eds. As a member of the Homeland Security Committee and the only former CIA operative in Congress, he has established credibility in matters related to terrorism.

Hurds general message has been threefold: The United States needs to more aggressively take this fight to the doorsteps of the terrorists, do a better job of countering the ideology of Islamic extremists and find ways to get solid information into the hands of local law enforcement.

The latest shooting has prompted some vulnerable Republicans to express willingness to reopen the debate about gun control, including banning people on some federal watch lists from purchases.

Hurd has not seemed supportive thus far on stricter gun rules, calling proposals a distraction from the larger issue.

Gallego, meanwhile, has the luxury of not committing to specific proposals while watching Trump potentially boost Latino turnout.

I grew up with guns. Im comfortable with guns. But I do think we need to have a real conversation and not just yell at each other, he said.

Gallego argued that Trumps comments and negativity and frankly his entire philosophy have permeated places I would have thought impossible.

He added: If youre block-walking in the colonias of Eagle Pass, people will tell you, We dont vote much because our lives really dont change. This year they say they are voting because he (Trump) doesnt like us.

bill.lambrecht@hearstdc.com
Moments before officially announcing Wednesday that they had reached an agreement on a new labor contract, San Antonio Police Officers Association President Mike Helle embraced Mayor Ivy Taylor, telling her the deal, more than two years in the making, was long awaited.

Flanked by City Council members, key city executives and Helle, Taylor told San Antonio news media and onlookers that the city and police union had reached a mediated settlement that would become a new contract once approved by the unions membership and council members.

Police officers will receive the pay raises that they deserve while, for the first time in city history, theyll also contribute to the cost of health care for their families, Taylor said. This will allow us to balance public safety spending with other important needs and priorities of the community.

The details of the agreement, according to a San Antonio Express-News exclusive report Tuesday, include a 3 percent lump-sum bonus later this year, and then 14 percent salary increases over the subsequent four years, and a reduction from 10 years to eight in the so-called evergreen clause, which keeps most of the contracts terms intact after the agreement expires.

City Manager Sheryl Sculley, who had sought to wipe out the evergreen clause altogether, said she was able to recommend an 8-year term because it includes a clause that insurance premiums would increase by 10 percent each year that a contract remains in evergreen status.

Under the new contract, however, officers themselves would never pay premiums. Nor would they pay premiums for their spouses and children if they opt for the high-deductible consumer-driven plan. They would only pay monthly premiums for their spouses and children if they opt for the value plan.

Sculley said at the news conference that neither side accomplished everything it wanted but the city accomplished some key objectives.

Primarily, for the first time, uniformed personnel would share in the cost of their health care, she said.

When it was Helles turn to speak, he first took a moment to shake the hands of the assembled officials. He made a point of jokingly brushing off Deputy City Manager Erik Walsh, who was the top city official involved in the day-to-day negotiations with the police union. Walsh chuckled at the gesture.

Its a good day today, and I have to give extreme credit to the mayor, Helle said. If yall know, weve been contentious for the last two, two-and-a-half years with the people that are standing behind me. It hasnt been pleasant. But that was the position we found our organization in, and we had to defend our principles.

The city and SAPOA had intermittent negotiations over a new contract spanning back to 2014. They traded countless proposals and seemed poised in the fall of 2015 to reach an agreement, but things fell apart at the citys insistence to decimate the contracts evergreen clause. Then the city aggressively pushed forward on its lawsuits against the police union, as well as the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association, asking the courts to declare the evergreen clause a violation of the Texas Constitution.

Political consultant Colin Strother, who previously worked for members of the council but no longer does, said that, from an outsiders perspective, SAPOA appears to have done well for itself.

I get that the city got just enough that they can claim a victory, but I dont know how any objective person could look at this and see anything but a huge victory for SAPOA, he said. Whats unfortunate is that it didnt have to be like this. For what could liberally be called an incremental change in the contract, I dont see why that couldnt have been done pretty early.

During the ensuing weeks, union officials will work to educate their 2,150 members on the details of the contract in advance of an expected August vote. If the membership votes to approve the deal, the full City Council will hold its own vote.

Given that nearly every member of the council flanked Taylor as she made the announcement on the steps of City Hall on Wednesday, it appears likely that shell have more than enough support to approve the contract.

I think we can all agree its time to move forward, Taylor said at the news conference.

Now, the spotlight pivots to the firefighters union, which has yet to begin negotiations. President Chris Steele did not return a phone call seeking comment.

jbaugh@express-news.net

Twitter: @jbaugh
Free speech rights for and against Donald Trump will be protected when he makes his first campaign visit to San Antonio on Friday, Police Chief William McManus said Tuesday.

Hundreds of people  friends and foes of Trump  are expected to converge on the Northwest Side to demonstrate their views about the presumptive GOP presidential nominee during his closed-door fundraising event at Oak Hills Country Club.

McManus said the San Antonio Police Department is absolutely prepared for clashes, but I dont believe that our San Antonio folks are going to mimic what went on in other parts of the country.

I have faith in our community to protest, and protest peacefully, McManus said. Those planning to show their disapproval of Trump, that is their right  and we will facilitate that right.

The nearly 200-acre private club will be off limits to the public during Trumps midday visit for an invitation-only luncheon with ticket packages costing from $500 to $250,000. After the event was disclosed last week, several organizations and hundreds of individuals turned to social media to declare they will protest Trumps visit  or seek to welcome him.

Because Trump is afforded Secret Service protection, that will be the lead law enforcement agency controlling the event. Police, who have been coordinating with the Secret Service for several days, will have a subordinate role, McManus said.

We support Secret Service. Well provide traffic- (and) crowd- control, that sort of thing, McManus said.

Details about where crowds would be allowed to gather were not complete yet, he said. The clubs main entrance is on Fredericksburg Road, which has sidewalks, but its unclear if that would be where demonstrators were allowed.

We havent gotten to that level of detail yet, the chief said.

On Facebook, nearly 2,000 people have said they will attend a protest of the visit organized by local community group Maestranza. The protesters plan to gather outside the country club at 11 a.m., according to their event page.

Trumps San Antonio visit  between other fundraising stops in Dallas and Houston  will come amid the three-day Texas Democratic Convention that convenes Thursday at the Alamodome. The simultaneous GOP and Democratic events pose no logistical problems for police, McManus said.

jgonzalez@express-news.net

Twitter: @johnwgonzalez
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Longshorewoman Andrea Gardner is headed to the Texas Democratic Convention in San Antonio with a heart full of hope thanks to an unlikely source: the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

She sees a chance for Democrat Hillary Clinton to win the Texas vote for the White House by virtue of Republicans being poised to nominate the billionaire businessman with a propensity for remarks that offend.

Given who the Republicans have picked for their nominee, I think its very possible, Gardner, 61, who lives outside of Houston, said of Clintons chance of taking Texas. If they had a more reasonable, viable candidate, then I would say that it would probably be a lot tougher.

A Clinton victory in the red Lone Star State is seen as a long shot as a practical matter, but the presidential matchup is driving hope among many of the more than 9,400 delegates expected at the Alamodome for the nations largest Democratic state convention.

The convention will be gaveled in Thursday and will be in full swing Friday, when Trump is scheduled to be in San Antonio for a fundraiser that will lend immediacy to Democrats efforts to draw a contrast with Republicans.

Democrats are working to showcase themselves as in line with Texas families on key issues including health care, education and immigration reform. Theyve taken aim at Trump on issues including his support for a wall on the border with Mexico. Differences on guns could be in the spotlight in the wake of the horrific shooting in Orlando, Florida.

After failing to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994 and finding themselves a minority in the Legislature, Democrats are highlighting the performance of Democratic city and county leaders, such as Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner.

Theyll take aim at the current crop of statewide elected Republicans, said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, convention chairman. GOP troubles include securities-fraud charges against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has predicted hell be vindicated.

Were eager to contrast our values and our agenda with the Republican agenda thats dictated by Donald Trump, said Castro, a Democratic star along with his twin brother, Julian, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Julian Castro, a featured convention speaker, has been mentioned among possible choices for a Clinton running mate, and the brothers have long been seen as potential statewide candidates.

Even absent an unlikely Texas win by Clinton, Democrats still nursing a hangover from Wendy Davis crushing loss in the 2014 governors race to Republican Greg Abbott are hoping for progress.

They hope a Clinton-Trump matchup could narrow the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Texas. Some down-ballot races could turn in their favor if Trumps campaign drives up Latino votes for Democrats or depresses voting by Republicans who cant embrace Trump.

Clintons campaign wont be putting big money into Texas, said Garry Mauro, a leader in her Texas campaign, but Democrats still see opportunity.

Texas is not a battleground state, but demographically there are ways that Texas could end up in play because we are a very diverse state. His numbers have got to get a lot better with Hispanics, blacks and women or Hillary will carry Texas, Mauro said.

Mauro and Jacob Limon, Texas director of U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders campaign, have urged their candidates backers to unite at the convention for the battle ahead. They cite the nightmare specter of a Trump presidency as more important than any differences that remain between the presumptive Democratic nominee and the socialist senator from Vermont.

The presidential race was cast in dramatic terms by Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert, the first African-American to hold his office.

For the first time since King George, this country is faced with a choice of whether to be with or against a tyrant, a bigot, a dictator. You cannot be for America unless youre against Trump. You cannot be for the Constitution, freedom of speech, equal rights for all, uplifting the disabled, for our veterans, if you are for Trump, Calvert said as several hundred San Antonio Democrats gathered Monday to set the tone for the state convention.

High school teacher Rick Trevino, who was a lead organizer in San Antonio for Sanders Texas primary campaign, urged party loyalists to appeal to Trump supporters both before and after the November election.

There are lots of Republicans who do not want to vote as Republicans any more, said Trevino, secretary for the Bexar County Democratic Party. We have to open up our doors.

Bexar County Democratic Chairman Manuel Medina said this years gathering marks the first time since 1968 that the state convention is taking place in San Antonio in a presidential election year.

We worked hard to bring the convention to San Antonio. All elected officials got behind this. County Judge Nelson Wolff led the effort and brought in the state party (leaders) to the Alamo Bowl and hosted them that day. We got 10,000 signatures from Democratic primary voters at the polls, Medina said But what I think did it was we offered a 24-hour hospitality suite, because at the end of the day, this is a party.

pfikac@express-news.net

jgonzalez@express-news.net

Twitter: @pfikac
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A Texas appeals court has thrown out a gag order that prohibited bikers charged in a deadly Waco melee last year  and their lawyers  from talking to the media.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals  the state's highest criminal court  issued an order Wednesday that lifted a stay that had been in place since August, when the court ruled that the gag order was wrong but allowed it to stay in place pending further consideration.

The gag order challenge was supported by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and several media companies, including The Associated Press and the Hearst Corp., which owns the San Antonio Express-News.

Nine people were killed and about two dozen wounded in the May 2015 gun battle that officials say began as a turf war between the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle clubs. Nearly 200 people were charged with conspiring to engage in organized crime.

The gag order was imposed when biker Matthew Clendennen and his lawyer, Clint Broden, were told by a state district judge - months after the arrests - that no one involved in the case would be permitted to speak further with the media.

The judge said the order was put in place to safeguard the case, but Broden and others contend the order was fueled by prosecutors who sought to stop bikers from telling their side of the story after authorities held a series of press conferences.

Today, almost a year after the gag order was entered, the Court of Criminal Appeals, in a unanimous decision, lifted the stay and restored Mr. Clendennen's First Amendment rights, Broden said in a statement.

While Mr. Clendennen certainly does not welcome the publicity that has surrounded this case, neither will he allow the police and the district attorney's office to manipulate the public unchecked, he said.

Broden said that prosecutors sought the gag order after they had launched an unprecedented publicity offensive to scare the public with horror stories of roving biker gangs.

Sgt. Patrick Swanton, of the Waco Police Department, said that his department has already said all that needs to be said.

We don't comment on the rhetoric defense attorneys use trying to protect their clients who have been arrested for criminal offenses, Swanton said.

The district attorney's office did not respond to a request for comment.

dane.schiller@chron.com
A Salvadoran man was sentenced to more than five years in prison for assaulting a Border Patrol agent south of Carrizo Springs, the agency announced Tuesday.

Saul Ernesto Carcamo, 39, was sentenced to 63 months in prison earlier this month, according to online court records. According to the Border Patrol, the assault happened in February 2015 after an agent saw Carcamo and another man, both of whom were in the country illegally, jumping a fence on a ranch in southern Dimmit County.
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Daniel Mehler knew that he would lose, but the self-proclaimed stoner lawyer from Colorado challenged Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood to a mixed martial arts fight last week on Facebook anyway.

I think Nico is a bully, Mehler later told me. Everybody talks about, Oh, hes a black belt. And its like, OK, hes a bully. Ive had my ass kicked in life before. It wouldnt be the first time.  Hell, if he wants to run around like a bully, someone has to tell him where to stick it.

That might sound imprudent.

But Mehler, who paid for law school by farming marijuana in Denver and now brands himself the Dopest Lawyer in Town, is fed up with what he considers an unseemly habit of the district attorney: using social media to humiliate and intimidate perceived enemies, a behavior otherwise known as cyberbullying.

Ironically, LaHood has publicly campaigned against this online scourge.

In a statement on Wednesday, LaHood texted, I do not engage in Cyber Bullying.  All my comments are in response to other peoples posts.

Unfortunately, Im also part of this story. LaHood has attacked me online in reaction to columns Ive written about his stances on public policy. An example is a recent column that questioned his plan to arm his criminal investigators with assault rifles.

Chasnoff has a reputation for agenda writing and the community knows it, LaHood commented on the column itself. He has a Facebook account that does not allow anyone to chime in or comment unless he gives them permission. Now how is that transparent journalism?  he is the journalistic bully and I will not put up with his antics.

This comment echoed texts that LaHood sent to me personally, messages in which he called me dishonest and challenged me to a town hall debate about assault rifles.

Also, accept me as a friend on your Facebook so we can dialogue in open for everyone to see, he texted. Its not honorable to have a page that no one can comment on unless you have accepted them as your friend. You signed up for your job so you should be a man and stand behind and answer for what you write.

This odd request is something Ive not experienced in more than a decade of covering elected officials: a goading to argue online by someone in high office who recently acknowledged that he takes to Facebook in fight mode.

On Monday, a day after the massacre of 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, by a man wielding an assault rifle, LaHood again was in fight mode, posting on Facebook a bitter defense of Christianity.

LaHoods message inspired thousands of likes and a flood of praise. The district attorney soaked up the love but reacted harshly to any dissent.

One commenter rudely recalled LaHoods arrest about two decades ago for trying to sell Ecstasy pills to an undercover agent at a strip club while in possession of a firearm.

Im not sure how to call you an idiot and hypocrite and be politically correct, the district attorney responded.

Another gadfly in the religious soup was John Foddrill, a local conspiracy theorist ignored by most public officials.

LaHood, however, lashed out.

John Foddrill Sr you are a fool and a coward, LaHood wrote. You have no honor and dignity.  I dare you to meet with me and the Feds!!! You wont so go back to watching tv in your underwear.

Another commenter called Foddrill a backward ass redneck. LaHood responded with hahaha  Thank you so much and I needed that laugh.

Foddrill then accused LaHood of cyberbullying.

hahaha! LaHood responded. Cyber bullying? Are you that deranged  I think its hilarious when bullies like you fold, like a cheap suit, when people stand up to you.

This exchange stands, however, as a rare instance in which Foddrill is correct. LaHoods behavior is bullying, the sort that moved Mehler to invite a whupping just to make a point. (LaHood did not respond to Mehlers challenge to fight to raise money for the charity of your choice.)

He ought to be above engaging online commenters in ways that are woefully beneath the position hes holding, Mehler said. We have rapists and murderers running around this city, and our district attorney is sitting up in his ivory tower requesting guns to protect himself while he engages in Internet commentary wars.  He absolutely has better things to do.

Have some dignity, man, the stoner lawyer added. You dont have to engage everyone who disagrees with you, and especially in such a virulent way.

bchasnoff@express-news.net
CAIRO  Wreckage of an EgyptAir Paris-Cairo flight that crashed in the Mediterranean last month, killing all 66 people on board, has been found in several main locations, the Egyptian-led investigation committee said Wednesday.

The wreckage was pinpointed by a seabed search-and-retrieval vessel that joined the search last week. Investigators have seen photographs from one of the locations, the committee added.

EgyptAir flight MS804 crashed into the Mediterranean roughly 180 miles north of the Egyptian coast on May 19. The reason for the crash remains unknown.

The search team and investigators on board the retrieval vessel, the John Lethbridge, will now draw up a map of the locations, and the investigation committee is meeting to agree on its next steps, it said.

Wednesdays discovery comes two weeks after a French navy vessel detected signals from one of the planes so-called black boxes.

The boxes, which record flight data and sounds from the cockpit, will be crucial to working out why the plane came down. The investigation committee this week said they were expected to continue transmitting a signal until June 24.

The committee has now also confirmed earlier reports from Greek authorities that the plane swerved to the left and then spun in a circle to the right immediately before crashing.

It was not immediately clear whether any of the wreckage located Wednesday was in the same area where the signals from the black box were detected.

Search and rescue teams have so far recovered small pieces of debris and body parts, which are being examined by investigators.

Egypts civil aviation minister has said he believes terrorism is a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet.

Leaked flight data indicated a sensor detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the planes cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

The crash came almost six months after a Russian passenger jet broke up in midair shortly after takeoff from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypts Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board.

Russian authorities said that incident was caused by a bomb. The Islamic State extremist group, which operates in Sinai, claimed responsibility and published a photograph of a soft drink can that it said had been filled with explosives and smuggled onto the flight.

Egyptian authorities have yet to complete their investigation into that crash, although President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi has said it was an act of terrorism.
WASHINGTON  Donald Trump said Wednesday that people on the terror watch list should be barred from buying firearms, putting himself in the center of a gun-control debate in Congress revived by the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

Trumps stance, expressed in a Twitter post, departs from the positions of the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association, whose endorsement Trump frequently boasts about on the campaign trail. His tweet could be read to support measures pushed by Democrats and opposed by Republicans in Congress, reflecting the unusual nuances of an issue that touches on public safety and civil rights beyond the Second Amendment.

I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns, Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, wrote Wednesday morning on Twitter. His comment came three days after 49 people were killed when a gunman who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State stormed an Orlando nightclub.

On the same morning, a group of Democrats took to the Senate floor in a filibuster to protest the lack of improvement in gun safety measures in recent years.

Ive had enough, said Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., who spoke on and off for about six hours Wednesday. I couldnt just come back to the Senate this week and pretend like this is business as usual.

The Democratic legislation, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, would seek to prevent individuals on the governments terror watch list from purchasing guns on the recommendation of the Justice Department alone. Feinstein unsuccessfully proposed a similar measure last year, after 14 people were killed by an Islamic extremist couple in San Bernardino, California.

The legislation she is now proposing goes even further, covering not just people on the watch list at the time of purchase, but anyone who had been on the list in the preceding five years. The Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, had been on the list but was removed after an FBI investigation turned up no evidence that he was plotting any crimes.

NRA officials said on Twitter that they would be happy to meet with Trump, but that the group had not changed its position: Withholding guns from people on the terrorist watch list would give the government too much power to deny people their Second Amendment right.

The group has supported a competing measure put forward by congressional Republicans, led by Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, that would prohibit gun sales to suspected terrorists  but only if federal prosecutors could demonstrate probable cause to a judge within three days of the purchase. Democrats say that burden is too high.

The NRA believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms, period, Chris Cox, the executive director of the groups Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement. At the same time, due-process protections should be put in place that allow law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watch list to be removed.

Trumps campaign did not clarify Wednesday how far his proposal would go or articulate which of the dueling measures  Cornyns or Feinsteins  Trump most agrees with.

Democrats were not counting on Trumps support and almost seemed not to want it. They have been more than happy to associate him with the NRA, which Democrats view as the biggest obstacle to gun control. Asked about the coming meeting between Trump and the group, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said, Well, he should go spend more time with them.

Republicans are under pressure to show some action in response to the Orlando shooting, and Cornyn said he was working with Feinstein on a potential compromise. But Feinstein, speaking to reporters after a classified briefing on the Orlando shooting that Cornyn also attended, said she doubted a deal would be reached. As for Trumps role, she was dismissive.

Oh, Trump just makes everything worse, Feinstein said.

Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that while the Democratic legislation was a very promising step in the right direction, none of the proposals currently under consideration go far enough.

We need to require background checks for all gun sales if we truly want to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists and other dangerous people, Lowy said.

Lowy added that he still does not entirely understand what Trump is proposing.

You certainly cant enact the tweet into law, he said.
How would you feel about climbing into a vehicle that was built in 1929 (thats 4 years older than I am folks, and Im old) and not only traveling at more than 90 miles per hour, but close to 2,500 feet in the air to boot?

Well, I did just that a few weeks ago at the Beaver County Airport.

In this day of supersonic air travel, its hard to believe that Orville and Wilbur Wrights Kitty Hawk flight was just a little more than 100 years ago.

And commercial airline travel, that carries more than 3 billion people and $6 or $7 trillion worth of cargo yearly, had its shaky beginnings 10 years later in 1914, when Tony Jannus flew a man from St. Petersburg, Florida, across the bay to Tampa for only $400.

In 1918, the U.S. Post Office established air mail service and Army pilots carried the mail.

In 1925 Congress, hoping to stimulate commercial air service, took air mail from the Army and gave it to private contract carriers. One of these contracts, for service between Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland, was awarded to Henry Ford.

Ford airlines

Around 1923, Mr. Ford had invested $2,000 in the Stout Metal Airplane Co. of Detroit, which was experimenting with making planes out of Duralumin instead of the customary wooden frames covered with fabric.

Ford built the Detroit Municipal Airport  one of the first in the nation  and a building at the airport for the Stout firm, and by 1925, had bought the Stout Company, which became a Ford division.

Stout built an eight-passenger, all metal plane with a 150 HP V-12 Liberty engine, the 2-AT Pullman, that performed well.

Called the Maiden Detroit, the 2-AT and others like it were flown by the Ford Air Transport Service carrying freight between Ford factories in Chicago and Detroit and were used on Fords mail route when it began in February 1926.

Stout himself had also established an air service that used the 2-AT machines to carry passengers and freight. Chicago-based National Air Transport, later to become United Airlines, bought out Stout Air Service in 1928.

New designs

Ford and Stout recognized that larger planes were needed and Stout set about redesigning the 2-AT.

About this time Wright Aeronautical was building the J4, 200 HP, nine-cylinder radial engine, and Anthony Fokker, a Dutch aircraft manufacturer, had built a high-winged, steel-framed monoplane with plywood skin on the wings and fabric on the fuselage that was powered by three Wright J4 engines.

Fokker flew his plane to Detroit in 1925 to compete in a reliability tour sponsored by Ford, and Stouts men spent a night measuring it.

Fokker won the tour that year but later claimed that Ford had stolen the idea for the Ford Tri-Motor from him, an accusation that Stout denied.

In Stouts own words, We revised our Liberty-engine plane by widening the wing ten feet in the center section, rounding off the fuselage up front, and putting one engine in front and a side engine in the leading edge of each wing.

Tin Goose

Every outside surface was covered with corrugated aluminum, leading to the planes nickname, The Tin Goose.

Inside the passenger cabin, a single row of six leather and cane seats ran along each side of the fuselage and open luggage racks ran the length of the interior above each row of seats. The seats could be easily removed if freight was to be carried.

Successful airliner

Called the 3-AT, the new plane was underpowered. Henry Ford lost faith in Stout and he was promoted to a publicity position. Ford engineers then came out with the 4-AT with more powerful Wright 300 HP engines that worked well.

Soon 400 HP Pratt & Whitney engines were adopted that allowed even more payload and the Ford Tri-Motor became the first commercially successful airliner in America.

Flying history

The 4-AT that I flew on made its first flight on Aug. 21, 1929. It then belonged to Eastern Air Transport, a small company that had a contract to carry mail between New York and Florida  connecting many cities along the east coast and later becoming Eastern Airlines.

It flew for Cubana Airlines in 1930 and then for many years operated in the Dominican Republic. Returning to the States in 1949, the plane did some barnstorming and crop-dusting before being modified for aerial firefighting.

In 1973, while giving rides at airshows, a bad storm ripped the Ford loose from its ground moorings and wrecked it. The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) acquired the wreck and spent 12 years restoring it to first class flying condition and it now flies all over the country, giving rides.

Public rides

On Memorial Day weekend, EAA brought the 1929 Ford Tri-Motor airplane to the Beaver County Airport just a few miles east of here across the Pennsylvania state line where rides on the craft were offered to the public.

The event was sponsored by The Air Heritage Museum whose combined aircraft restoration shop and air museum is located in its own hanger at the airport. Thanks to Donna Kelly of Air Heritage, I was invited to fly on the Ford on Thursday and I jumped at the chance.

Copilot

I was on the second flight that day and was lucky enough to be assigned to the copilots seat where I was able to watch the pilot, Bill Thacker, put the craft through its paces.

Both Bills and my side windows were open and the breeze, and the roar of the engines right outside came in.

We flew at less than 2,500 feet at about 90 MPH, and it was easy to see the ground below and to pick out landmarks.

We were in the air less than half an hour and circled south to the Ohio River, over VanPort and Beaver, then back over Fallston and Patterson Heights to Chippewa and the airport, where Bill sat her down with scarcely a bump.

Really a fun ride and a unique experience.
Doris the Dorset has reached the end of the road.

There will be no more surprise visits, looking out the window to see the Dorset sheep wandering up my sidewalk. No more belly laughs upon seeing Doug fixing the spot where she surely escaped, at the very moment she shows up beside him, on his side of the fence.

She conquered every single pen, every pasture, every gate.

When Doug called her that dumb sheep, I reminded him she sure didnt look so dumb to me.

Shearing Doris recently revealed an udder filled with numerous lumps, immobile and of various sizes. There was no way to spin this into anything good. Ive tried and triumphed before, but I knew better this time.

A perfect mama to not only her lambs, but to all, Doris was the queen bee. The flock leader, especially when grain or hay was involved, she surely knew how to make me laugh.

Never easy

Why does this day have to come? And why sooner for the good ones than the ones who can be mean as dirt?

Dad once bought a calf from the Keets family when my sister Debi showed every indication she would work hard at making a 4-H show champion. The nose of the young calf was all pink with black dots so perfectly placed it seemed as though Mr. Keets himself had painted them on, so instantly the calf was named Freckles.

Freckles wore the best halter Debi could find, my big sister leading her on long walks every day. That heifer charmed us all with her sweet disposition.

Though she did indeed do very well in the show ring, it no longer mattered if the trophy was awarded, because Freckles was a star.

As a milk cow, she first delivered a bull calf, to our disappointment. Theres always next time for a heifer calf, we said. Freckles was first in the milking parlor, where she wished to linger, never having learned she was part of a herd. She was sleek and shiny and showy, so what if a little bit of extra patience in moving her along was required?

She did not breed back the first time. Nor the second. She finally showed a positive in the herd pregnancy check. All of us, including our dad, breathed a sigh of relief, for the sake of my sister who loved that sweet cow.

There were problems with the delivery. The calf (of course a beautiful little heifer) didnt make it. Mastitis in one quarter would clear up, only to show up again in a couple of weeks. It became clear Freckles was not going to breed back.

My sister insists the sweet Holstein was taken to a wonderful Amish family, allowed to roam with no fences to hold her, the children riding her like a young pony. Freckles is forever young and sleek and shiny.

Goodbye

The night before Doris was about to take that trip, I went to say my goodbyes. Through all of her escapes, all we had to do was call her name and she would come, easily following us back through the pasture gate. She enjoyed busting out, and only once a day.

I scratched her forehead.

Doris, there will be a truck coming to take you for a ride in the morning. I sure am gonna miss you.

Doris looked me in the eye, and I could have sworn she was trying to tell me something.

The next morning, as the truck left our farm, it suddenly became clear: I bet she still had a few tricks up her woolly sleeve. I was cheering for her Houdini greatness to soldier on, busting out at the first stop sign when no one was looking.

And now, I figure, Freckles has a pal on that lovely farm with no fences for Doris to fuss about.
OBERLIN, Ohio  At the 2015 Lorain County Fair, Firelands FFA Adviser Shanna Finnegan recruited exchange student Pablo Barranco to join Firelands FFA after meeting him with his host family, Chad and Amy Grude of Wakeman. Barranco, from Seville, Spain, immersed himself in American culture and schooling, maintaining a 4.0 GPA and getting involved in cross-country, track, and FFA.

Barranco won an FFA jacket for being the first of his classmates to memorize the FFA Creed  which he memorized in Puerto Rican Spanish as well as English.

He won the county and sub-district public speaking contests, qualifying him for the Ohio FFA speaking contest where he placed fifth.

Barranco logged over 200 hours of FFA activities including leadership activities, community service, fund-raising and attending the national and state FFA conventions. He developed a strong relationship with Matthew Klopfenstein, former Ohio FFA President, who invited Barranco on stage to help him deliver his retiring address. Barranco returns to Spain the third week of June for his senior year and plans to attend college in the United States in 2017.

  

WELLINGTON, Ohio  Recently the Wellington FFA chapter held its annual Food For America event at Westwood Elementary School. Chapter members taught the younger students where their food comes from, and the students participated in a petting zoo with many different types of animals. There was also a station about fishing and tractors. The elementary students also received goody bags with items donated from the dairy association.
GROVER HILL, Ohio  Over the past few years, the northwestern part of Ohio has become the focus for much of the states water quality concerns.

Paulding County grain and livestock farmer Terry McClure has lived and farmed in the Western Lake Erie Basin all his life  and hes well aware of the harmful algae thats showing up in Lake Erie.

Hes been an advocate for better conservation from the start, and a few years ago, he became one of the first farmers in the state to voluntarily open his fields to edge-of-field testing.

Research project

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Ohio State University are collecting and analyzing water runoff from certain fields on his farm, to determine how much nutrients are leaving, and identify different farming practices that influence nutrient loss.

So far, scientists have collected about three years of base data, and are beginning to run experiments to compare and contrast different farm practices.

There are many variables that affect the results, but in the end, there will be some clear answers.

And answers are what McClure and his family want  so they know whats really happening  and how to adjust. Theyve taken a big risk, but feel its better than relying on other research, which was based on modeling and assumptions.

Right or wrong, we need an answer here, McClure said. We dont know what were going to find. It might be pretty damning evidence we find, but we need to know.

The results

Terry and his son, Ryan, along with Terrys father, Darwin, have been making conservation-minded improvements to the farm since Darwin started farming in about 1955. Over the years, theyve grown the operation to include a contract swine finishing operation, and most recently, a beef finishing operation.

The livestock are housed in modern barns, and most of the manure is injected when applied to fields. Tillage is kept to a minimum, with a combination of no-till and light-duty tillage, and the McClures use buffer strips, cover crops and tile drainage to control water flow.

When they apply fertilizer, the focus is on the right time and rate, and making sure it has good contact with the soil.

Drainage efforts

In truth, water drainage and conservation have long been part of the regions history  going back to the time when it was known as the Black Swamp, and later drained by settlers and early farmers.

Darwin, who will turn 81 this summer, doesnt go back quite that far, but he remembers the work his family and other farmers did to tile the area, and make it better for farming and conservation.

At first, farmers tried to plow, he said, and many were losing dirt and finding the ground turned to an almost cement-like soil when it rained. Over the years, tiles have improved, the yields have improved and so has the water management.

Even in Terrys time, he remembers as a boy, watching the federal government come in and channelize the creeks, and the installation and replacement of outdated field tile.

Now, hes committed to keeping the land productive, and making sure nutrients stay where theyre needed.

Industry leaders

But conservation is just one thing this progressive farm is known for. Another is leadership.

Long before he opened his farm to research, Terry was president of Ohios largest farm organization  the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, in the early 2000s, and is a former board member of American Farm Bureau. Ryan is currently president of the Paulding County Farm Bureau, and is a director on the Ohio Pork Council.

Today, the farm balances both crop and livestock production, finishing about 18,000 head of swine a year for Cooper Farms, and about 180 head of Holstein beef, under the name West Branch Cattle.

Getting to those numbers took time, and some risk.

Darwin and his wife, Sharon, raised hogs on the farm in the farms early days  but nowhere near as many, and not with the same efficiency.

Terrys parents did not always have the best memories of raising hogs, and when he decided to finally build a commercial barn in 2004, they werent sure of the decision.

His mother, in particular, remembered the hard work of having to carry five-gallon buckets of water from the house to the barn, because the water at the barn was frozen, and trying to keep baby piglets warm during winter, by bringing them inside the furnace room.

More efficient

But the new barns solved those problems and brought new efficiencies, like automated feeding and climate control. The modern barns allow the McClures to raise more swine, with less time.

Its all due to efficiency and building things that are controlled, compared to doing it by hand, said Ryan.

But Terry said they still go into the pens at least twice a day, to check on the welfare of the hogs and make sure that none are down. Visitors cant enter the barns, for biosecurity reasons, but they can get a good view of whats inside, through a large viewing window inside the barn.

Finishing beef

On the beef side of the farm, the McClures buy 300-pound feeders and finish them inside a barn equipped with automated feeding. The finished cattle are sold to a packer in Michigan.

Ryan originally started with three head of beef when he was a boy, worked his way up to 30 head, and now finishes 180. The larger herd size lets him contract his sales, and because his barns have become more efficient, he can feed more cattle in the same or less time.

On the crop side of things, the McClures continue striving toward better yields and better conservation, while remaining open to growth and adding new ground when it makes sense.

We farm a new piece of dirt every year, Ryan said. Some years, more than others.

This year will see tighter margins than farmers saw a few years ago, but the McClures kind of expected it.

We expect this in a commodity world, Terry said. Its almost an expectation that times are good, and then theyre going to be not so good.

Looking ahead

The McClure family continues to grow. Ryan and his wife, Nikki, have four children of their own, and the oldest two are starting to help on the farm.

And the McClures have a good adviser, with Darwin still active on the farm. Terry said his dad knows which farms were well cared for over the years, and points them out when they drive past.

In general, there are a lot of farms in the area making conservation improvements, as they try to find answers to the nutrient issue.

Terry has seen a lot of teamwork, among farmers, industry and the government.

Im very proud of the Western Lake Erie Basin  the way we went at this, he said. The key here is to keep everybody working together, and well improve things.

Related coverage:

USDA says voluntary water quality efforts are working, supports additional steps (March 29, 2016).
A vote to leave the EU could lead to a collapse of the UK, according to speakers at a Brexit debate hosted by Old Mill accountants earlier this week.

But it could also snatch Great British democracy back from the hands of an unaccountable EU Commission.

Held at the Royal Bath & West Showground, the debate attracted more than 300 attendees, and revealed some surprising shifts in voting intentions.

According to Old Mill chairman Mike Butler, upon arrival 53% of delegates who voted said they would vote Leave on 23 June, with 25% wanting to remain and 22% undecided.

However, after the debate 56% voted to exit, while 33% said remain, and only 11% remained undecided.

"We seem to have been very successful in helping people make up their mind, with slightly more of the undecided persuaded by the remain speakers," said Mr Butler.

"The implications of remain or leave for the farming community are considerable, so its vital that voters have as much information as possible, rather than unhelpful political rhetoric and spin."

Scotland rethinking UK departure

Remain campaigner and former MP Tessa Munt said a vote to leave could result in Scotland rethinking a departure from the UK and potentially spark unrest in Ireland due to new border controls.

She also warned that it would remove the level playing field between the unified nations and urged voters to consider what was likely to happen to Defra funding without the EU.

"Defra is the smallest government department and it is not protected from spending cuts: Will it be able to go to the chancellor and get that money?"

However, Michael Seals MBE, farmer and chairman of the National Fallen Stock Company, said the UK did not even have its own agricultural policy, but an EU policy not of its design.

"The very concept of a pan-European legal system that tries to co-define and regulate everything related to agriculture is fundamentally flawed," he argued.

"We have one rule for all, which is perfect for none."

Clawing back the power from the EU

Both Brexit campaigners argued that a vote to leave would mean clawing back the power from the EU, making the British government accountable for its decisions for the first time in 40 years.

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP said that although the UK joined the EU for trade it had now become a European state.

"It has the powers of a state, its laws are our laws, its rules overrule our laws and only the unelected commission has the right to propose new laws or suggest the repeal of old ones," he said.

"Our democracy is long term; we have had it for 800 years, we should not give it away to an unelected bureaucracy."

But Sir Peter Kendall, chairman of AHDB and former NFU president, warned that the UK government would always focus on urban voters as those were the votes needed to get into power.

"Being part of Europe and having the support of the French, German and Irish farmers is vital. If we leave, farming will be throwing itself into the biggest experiment of our lives."

EU protects farmers

That union of farmers within Europe protected British farmers interests, said Mrs Munt.

"Some 20% of the French population describes itself as farmers and therein lies our protection."

The problems UK farmers experienced were more to do with gold plating of EU policy by our government, she added.

"The regulations around abattoirs arrived from the EU as four sides of A4; when it left our government, it was 84 pages long."

But Mr Rees-Mogg insisted that farmers were represented in the UK, with 25% of MPs representing rural areas.

"This puts farmers in a better position than car manufacturers, steel manufacturers and many other businesses. This makes you one of the most powerful groups in the UK."
Agriculture faces many challenges ranging from climate change to rising food demand due to population growth.

On 7 June MEPs adopted an own-initiative report on how technological innovation could help to increase agricultural productivity in a sustainable way.

Report author Anthea McIntyre, a UK member of the ECR group, answered questions about it during a live broadcast on the the EU Parliament's Facebook page.

McIntyre insisted that innovation could be used for every type of agriculture: "We have to ensure all our farmers can benefit from technological innovation."

She also favoured cooperation between farmers and scientists: "I want to very much see farmers involved in creating things, benefiting from technology, but also steering the way, actually identifying particular problems theyve got. Its not just in the lab."

The report identifies several domains where research should be encouraged and supported, for example when it comes to plant breeding techniques.

"Plant breeding already has saved a land about the size of Latvia," said the MEP.

"We can produce more on less land. That means that we are not destroying all biodiversity, which we want to maintain on our planet."

McIntyre also stressed the importance of water management: "Its frightening agriculture uses 70% of the world's fresh water.

"The first thing is to improve the breeding of crops so we have crops that require less water, but also look at the precision of irrigation techniques."

The MEP also addressed people's fears about using technology in agriculture.

"There are lots of techniques that people would welcome if they understood a bit more about it," she said. "We need to have a much wider debate to look at the techniques that are available and see how we can benefit.

"We also need to look at both the risks and potential benefits."
Last year the Young Farmers Clubs of Ulster (YFCU) and the Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) embarked on a joint land mobility initiative to get more young people into farming.

This scheme has taken another step forward following the completion of a survey to identify the scale of the problem in Northern Ireland.

Speaking after a meeting held recently between the two organisations, UFU President Barclay Bell said: "In the second half of last year the UFU and YFCU developed initial plans for the introduction of a land mobility initiative, similar to the pilot scheme that was already in place in the Republic of Ireland (RoI) at that time.

"The objective is to put older farmers facing the challenge of succession in touch with younger farmers wanting to get into the industry.

"From the outset, it was essential to identify the size of this problem so the UFU funded a survey of 440 UFU members from all sectors of the industry and all parts of Northern Ireland.

"This survey has now been completed and has clearly shown that almost half of those surveyed had not identified a farming successor."

Many looking for a full-time chance

YFCU President, Roberta Simmons, added: "It is clear that there are many young people working on a part-time basis in the industry looking for a first opportunity to become a full time farmer.

"It was also evident that many farm families find this a very difficult matter to discuss despite the lack of a succession plan posing an obvious and real problem for the farm business.

"The need for and availability of good, relevant information and advice was highlighted.

"We have noticed that their awareness of options to provide long-term succession solutions or their implications is low.

"Many farmers do not want to retire fully and instead are relying on short-term measures to cope as their level of activity reduces in their later years."

In concluding, both stated that the two organisations have started working on the operational detail of this land mobility scheme and how it will be funded.
A high-level delegation from the Punjab government has paid a visit to the UK to assess British pig production and genetics as the Indian state intends to develop its burgeoning pig sector.

The visit was organised by the British Pig Association in conjunction with AHDB Pork and included trips to pig breeding firms, a feed mill, an abattoir and AHDB Pork, where they were given presentations on the economics of the UK pork sector as well as pig health and welfare.

The visitors also went to APHA Weybridge and Kent University to look at research into pig breeding, including embryo transplant.

AHDB Pork senior export manager Jonathan Eckley said: "They are seeking our pig genetics and management systems as they want to improve productivity, welfare and product quality.

"Punjab has been taking the lead in the modernisation of Indian agriculture and already produces 76,000 tonnes of pork on a yearly basis.

"We also spent some time discussing the different production methods used in the UK and how these could be applied in Punjab.

"It was a very successful visit. The delegation went away with a huge amount of information which they will need to evaluate to determine which systems and practices best suit the conditions in India. Of course, all the pig breeding stock in India is of British origin.

"In addition to the requirement for breeding stock, training programmes and technical support were discussed during the visit.

India is one of the markets AHDB Pork export is targeting; it has tremendous scope particularly in hotels, restaurants and Internet shopping.

Meat consumption in India is increasing by 14% per year.
Harrison & Hetherington have today announced that they will be handling the dispersal sale of the elite Millington Limousin herd.

The herd, based on Ashcourt Farms Millington Grange Estate near York, will be sold at Borderway Mart in Carlisle on August 19. The Millington females have been bred for size, strength, structure and muscle and their quality has taken the herd into the breeds top 10 per cent.

In total, 170 head of cattle including calves will be going under the hammer, giving buyers a rare opportunity to buy some of the best Limousin genetics in the UK.

H&H auctioneer James Little said: "It has been an important herd for a number of years and this is a major Limousin sale.

"Harrison & Hetherington are delighted to have received instructions to conduct the sale.

"There has been a lot of emphasis on the health status of the Millington herd, registered as a high health herd and with the genetics on offer this sale is sure to attract interest from across the UK and Ireland."

The Millington Limousins herd is being totally dispersed as a result of a change and restructuring of Ashcourt Farms farming policy. The herd owned by Bob Bousfield and family and managed for five years by Ian Nattress, comprises 50 pedigree Limousin cows.

Limousin stock bull Ecran was imported from France in 2011 to improve the female bloodlines, many of which included in the sale.

Also Greenwell Fieldmaster was purchased from Procter Farms in 2012 to add size and frame.

In 2014, the herd added stock bull Norman Hawk, sired by Claragh Franco, from Carlisle's February sale, and Spittalton Imij, sired by Haltcliffe Vermount, who was purchased privately in the September. The additions were brought in to add shape and muscle to the herd.

Foundation females include Ronick Nestle, full sister to the famous Ronick Hawk, whose bloodlines are dominant in the herd.

Progeny of Brockhurst Option, such as Millington Davina, Supreme Champion at the Royal Show as a maiden heifer in 2009, have sold for a top price of 28,000 guineas.

Millington Highlight

Other notable females include the multi-award winning Millington Highlight, by Wilodge Vantastic out of the great breeding female Brockhurst Option.

Millington Highlight was reserve Supreme Champion at the Great Yorkshire as an in calf heifer in 2014 and with a Calf at Foot in 2015.

She was also Interbreed Champion at Driffield in 2015 and Interbreed Champion at the 2014 Lincolnshire Show, following in the footsteps of full brother Millington Hawk at the 2013 event.

The herd scooped the North East Limousin Clubs Extra Large section of the herd competition in both 2014 and 2015. Yearling heifer Millington Joyous took the best young heifer title last year and Spittlaton Imij won best stock bull in the competition.

Millington herd manager, Ian Nattress, said: The herd has won many accolades and the dispersal sale is a rare opportunity for buyers to get their hands on animals of exceptional quality.

"The bloodlines and genetics have been carefully nurtured and the sale will allow other herds to benefit from these."

The Millington Limousins are performance recorded with the British Limousin Cattle Society for liveweight gain every 100 days until the animal is 500 days old. Bulls and heifers are scanned once a year for muscle and back fat at approximately 13 months of age. The herd is also monitored by the Biobest Herd Health Scheme for Johnes and BVD and Millington is in a 4 year TB area.
Lamb and beef farmers across north Wales played host to a delegation of leading Danish food writers this month.

This was part of a press tour organised by Hybu Cig Cymru  Meat Promotion Wales (HCC) to show Scandinavian consumers the outstanding natural environment where Welsh Lamb and Welsh Beef is reared.

Scandinavia is a growing export market for PGI Welsh Lamb in particular.

HCC has worked with retailers in both Sweden and Denmark to develop the market for premium Welsh meat, and has produced lamb recipe booklets featuring Michelin-star-winning chef Morten Falk.

During the tour, a group of Danish food writers, including leading bloggers and newspaper journalists, visited Ty Newydd, the farm of Tecwyn and Janice Jones at Nebo near Pentrefoelas.

They witnessed the dramatic scenery where their lamb is reared, as well as seeing their award-winning herd of beef cattle.

They also visited Daphne Tilleys farm at Henllan and her cutting plant in nearby Denbigh, as well as sampling a superb selection of lamb dishes at the Bryn Williams at Porth Eirias restaurant in Colwyn Bay.

One of the journalists taking part in the tour, Mads Schytte who writes for the Gastromand website, was keen to pay tribute both to the farmers who hosted them during their visit, and the stunning natural environment.

"The hosts were extremely warm and welcoming. It made a great impression on all of us," said Mads. He added: "I was surprised by the country and even more so by the lamb!"

HCCs Market Development Executive, Alex James, has been central to the bid to promote PGI Welsh Lamb in Scandinavia.

He said: "Tours such as this offer food writers the chance to see the outstanding natural environment in Conwy and Denbighshire, and to meet farmers such as Tecwyn Jones and Daphne Tilley who have such a passion for producing meat of the very highest quality.

"Our hope is that the journalists who visited will become ambassadors for Welsh Lamb, and help raise its profile in Denmark."

What is PGI Welsh Lamb?

It's the product of a unique landscape that has been blessed for centuries with ideal natural ingredients.

This blend of nature's finest, coupled with traditional farming practices that span generations, have helped produce high quality meat to be consumed around the world.

In recognition of these unique qualities the European Commission (EC) has awarded Welsh Lamb and Welsh Beef the coveted status of Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).

This puts Welsh Lamb and Welsh Beef in the same elevated company as Italian Parma Ham and other speciality and protected food name products from around the world.
A new agricultural sector survey reveals confidence amongst farmers at all-time low in 2016.

Hit by economic down turn, a collapse in oil prices, soaring input costs and the Russian export ban, confidence amongst farmers is at an all-time low, new results from agricultural co-operative Copa & Cogeca's survey in the first quarter of 2016 shows.

Copa & Cogeca Secretary-General Pekka Pesonen said: "Our agricultural barometer confirms that European farmers are really feeling the pressure.

"They are being squeezed by low farm gate prices and high input costs.

"Prices for most agricultural commodities have fallen over the past year, and no significant price recovery is in sight.

"Due to the highly volatile marketplace, the Russian ban on EU farm exports as well as the collapse in oil prices which has put downward pressure on commodity prices and an unpredictability in Chinese demand leading to further volatility, farmers remain pessimistic about their short-term and long-term prospects."

Lowest level for UK farmers in 6 years

Farmers confidence in the United Kingdom is at its lowest level in 6 years.

Short-term and midterm confidence are both negative and below the levels recorded in 2012, a disastrous year for UK agriculture.

Falling farm gate prices and market price volatility have contributed to a drop in farmer confidence.

In terms of expectations for the future, farmers believe that regulation and legislation, CAP reform, output prices and input prices may have a negative impact on their business.

In 2016 Q1, the national confidence index fell from +9 to -14. All sectors are less confident in the short-term than they were 6 months ago.

The arable, horticultural and mixed sectors are those that have suffered the most from the decline in confidence.

Mid-term confidence has also decreased across all sectors compared to 6 months ago, the only exception being the poultry sector.

Only the Danes and Swedes remain optimistic

The survey was carried out in the first quarter of 2016.

It is carried out twice a year in eleven countries and over 8000 farmers were interviewed.

In 9 of the 11 EU Member States (Belgium - Flanders, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom) farmers confidence about the current and future situation had fallen, the survey found.

Concerns about implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and red tape also caused many difficulties for farmers and growers.

Only 2 of the 11 Member States  Denmark and Sweden - were more optimistic about the current and future situation.

"I consequently urge the EU Commission and Farm Ministers to take action when they meet at the end of June.

"Additional support is crucial and new markets for our quality produce must be found.

"I also urge negotiators to find ways to establish normal political and trading relations with Russia when Commission President Juncker & Russian President Putin meet in the margins of the St Petersburg economic forum," Pesonen said.
To celebrate the quality and taste of the Welsh food that farmers produce, NFU Cymru is holding an event on Wednesday, 22 June 2016, with Assembly Members and invited guests at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay.

Stephen James, NFU Cymru President said: "Wales is home to a very diverse range of high quality produce, that we, as farmers and food producers, are rightly proud of.

"During the event we will explain to Assembly Members how there is tremendous potential to grow the market for what we produce in Wales, both within the UK and further afield, by playing to our strengths, expertise, knowledge and climate."

NFU Cymrus celebration of Welsh food will take place in the Oriel of the Senedd and Stephen James will host the lunchtime event which has kindly been sponsored by Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs, Lesley Griffiths AM.

As well as Stephen James and Lesley Griffiths AM, the Chairman of Food and Drink Wales Industry Board, Andy Richardson has kindly agreed to speak briefly about his vision for achieving the Welsh Governments growth target for the food and drink sector in Wales and the role farmers play in realising this target.

He will also discuss how Welsh farmers and the food and drink industry can work together sustainably.

30% increase in farming growth

Stephen James said: "The Welsh Government has set itself, and the agricultural industry, a target to see a growth in the food and farming sector of 30% in terms of turnover to 7billion and a 10% growth in Gross Value Added to 1.4billion, by 2020.

"It is encouraging to see this recognition given to the food and drink sector."

Mr James continued: "We will use our event in the Senedd to highlight to Assembly Members how these ambitious targets can be achieved, if the Welsh Government and the food supply chain work together; and one area where we might do this is through public sector procurement."

In conclusion Mr James said: "I do appreciate that Wales has idyllic conditions for creating some of the worlds finest food, however, as part of this event, we must also recognise those farmers in different climates that produce food that it is virtually impossible for us to grow.

"Therefore everything that cannot be locally sourced for our event will be sourced in line with Fair Trade Wales protocols to show our support for Fair Trade Wales."
Over 350 children from primary schools across East Anglia returned to the East of England Showground to learn about the harvesting process.

In March this year, the showground was a hive of activity when the same pupils planted vegetables at the Grow Your Own Potatoes event, hosted by Kids Country, the education arm of the East of England Agricultural Society.

Woodston PrimaryThe children dug up their potatoes, beetroots, carrots and lettuces, and were keen to see how well their produce had grown over the 3-month growing period.

Local farmers, Farmer Clive and Farmer Luke were on hand to explain how the produce is sorted and packaged before it is sold.

The children then set to work making potato salad and tasting their home grown produce, which they then took home to share with their families.

The event was supported by Gs Fresh, Albert Bartlett, My Fresh and Produce World. A produce weigh-in was conducted to determine the winners of the Student Grower of the Year and Overall School of the Year awards  both were won by the pupils of Woodston Primary School, Peterborough.

Guy Thallon, Head of Research, Development and Innovation at Produce World, explained why his team gets involved in projects like the Kids Country Grow Your Own Potatoes event: "It was fantastic to see the children so excited about the produce they had grown, each year the yields seem to get better and better!

"At Produce World we want to inspire children to learn about where their food comes from, and education days like the Kids Country Grow Your Own Potatoes event go a long way in achieving this."
Welsh Conservatives have raised concerns that the Welsh Government does not have a current policy to eradicate bovine tuberculosis (TB), and called on them to 'end their dithering' on the issue.

Earlier this week, the NFU Cymru published Government figures which revealed a staggering year on year increase of 78% in the number of cattle slaughtered in Pembrokeshire as a result of bovine TB.

Speaking in the Senedd Chamber yesterday, Deputy Leader and Shadow Spokesperson for Rural Affairs, Paul Davies AM, addressed the Leader of the House and urged the Government to bring forward its strategy for tackling TB.

He said: "Given that the Welsh Government has suspended its vaccination programme, its quite clear the Welsh Government does not have a policy to eradicate Bovine TB and in the circumstance, can you please encourage the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs to bring forward a statement on this issue as soon as possible?

"Welsh farmers urgently need to understand exactly what the Welsh Governments approach for dealing with bovine TB will be in this Assembly."

The NFU Cymru report showed that in the 12 months up to the end of February 2016, a total of 2523 cattle were culled due to bovine TB in Pembrokeshire alone, whereas for the same 12 month period up to end of February 2015 this figure was 1412 cattle lost from the county.

Speaking outside the Senedd Chamber, Mr Davies added: "The Welsh Government cannot continue to dither on this issue. Any strategy needs to be hammered out with the close involvement of farmers, farming unions, scientists and rural communities.

"We must ensure that a programme to combat this virulent disease is all-encompassing and permanent, ending once and for all the financial and emotional strain on Welsh farmers."
The latest figures from the Welsh Government show the number of herds in Wales under restrictions from TB is at its lowest level since 2006.

The Welsh Government has published its quarterly TB data which gives a picture of the disease situation across Wales.

The data also shows 94.6 per cent of herds in Wales were TB free during the first quarter of 2016, which means over 200 less herds were under restrictions because of a TB incident compared to three years ago.

This comes as news today that the Welsh Conservatives have raised serious concerns to the Government about the current policy to eradicate bovine tuberculosis (TB), and called on them to 'end their dithering' on the issue.

The Cabinet Secretary has however since responded to critics, saying: "Bovine TB is a serious animal health issue and I am committed to building on our long term efforts to eradicate this disease in Wales.

"I welcome the latest data, which reaffirm the fact we are seeing some progress towards achieving this goal, with a continued downward trend in the number of TB breakdowns.

"Of course the TB picture across Wales is a complex one. It is often assumed the increase in the number of cattle slaughtered means the disease is on the rise.

"In actual fact the increase in the number of cattle slaughtered is down to changes to cattle controls and surveillance measures, which has improved the way we detect and eliminate the disease in our herds."

Tackling all sources of infection

The Cabinet Secretary added: "Our TB Eradication Programme is making use of the armoury against the disease.

"This includes the testing of cattle, strict biosecurity, movement control and enhanced management of TB breakdowns.

"This approach is aimed at tackling all sources of infection and is clearly having an effect.

"The latest statistics show the number of new herds with TB in the 12 months to March 2016 reduced by 14%.

"I will continue to monitor and review the picture across Wales and am committed to taking a science led approach when considering all options on the way forward."

The Welsh Government publishes its quarterly TB data through the TB dashboard, which provides the information in a visual and easy to understand format.

The dashboard shows the disease situation across Wales and demonstrates the progress the TB eradication programme has made.
Ryan Quarles said many ag initiatives are underway

By Diego Flammini

Assistant Editor, North American Content

Farms.com

At a meeting with members of the Bowling Green Noon Rotary Club, Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles said the state should be proud of its agricultural contributions.

We are one of the nations leaders when it comes to farming and what you can do with it, he said, according to the Bowling Green Daily News. Farming is a story about small towns. Its a story about family farms. Its a story that almost every American can relate to if you go back far enough in your family tree.

Quarles said the United States is producing more food with less land and credits Kentucky farmers, research and innovative agricultural practices for it.

During the meeting, Quarles also touched on developing alternative crops, notably industrial hemp.

Industrial hemp has a future in our state. Its a crop that connects our past to our future. He added that over 4,000 acres of hemp have been planted and the department will also study hops, canola and chia.

He discussed the issue of people in Kentucky going to bed without a meal, and the anti-hunger initiative thats being worked on.

Some early solutions are helping farmers harvest unmarketable produce, he said. Some edible food goes to waste because of a few blemishes. That produce could be harvested and taken to food banks.
"If elected I will work hard to ensure primary producers have access to new and existing markets, appropriate infrastructure to enable industry to meet the needs of a booming market and funding for greater research and development within industry," she said.
"For reasons of probity and process integrity, the NT government cannot discuss any aspect of Ord Stage 3 until such time as the request for proposal process has been completed and the government has reached a decision around the next steps," the spokesperson said.
She also has more than 20 years' experience in the private sector, working in the mining and grain industry in a variety of commercial and legal roles, including iron ore company Crosslands Resources, which is owned by Mitsubishi Corporation.
What was it like to be an Oath Keeper? John Zimmerman can tell you
The DOJ said in a court filing this month that Biomet breached a 2012 deferred prosecution agreement based on conduct in Brazil and Mexico.

A status report filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on June 6 also cited Biomets failure to maintain an effective FCPA compliance program.

Breaches of the DPA could expose Biomet to criminal prosecution for FCPA violations. But in the same court filing, the DOJ said it is talking to the company about a resolution that would avoid a trial.

Biomet entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement in March 2012. The DOJ later extended the DPA twice during a federal investigation.

In the March 2012 enforcement action, Biomet paid $22.7 million to settle FCPA-related offenses. That included a criminal fine of $17.3 million to the DOJ and the three-year DPA with a compliance monitor. It also disgorged $5.5 million to the SEC to resolve civil FCPA allegations.

In July 2014, the SEC subpoenaed Biomet for documents relating to certain alleged improprieties in the companys Brazilian and Mexican operations. Biomet had disclosed the allegations to the DOJ and the SEC three months earlier.

In March 2015, the DOJ extended the DPA and the compliance monitors appointment for an additional year.

Zimmer bought Indiana-based Biomet last year for about $14 billion. The orthopedic device maker is now known as Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc.

In March this year, Zimmer Biomet said it agreed to extend the DPA again.

In the court filing this month, the DOJ said its discussions with Biomet to resolve the DPA breaches without a trial are ongoing.

The DOJ said it isnt now seeking any hearings or other relief.

In the 2012 enforcement action, prosecutors said Biomet bribed doctors at government hospitals in Argentina, Brazil, and China from 2000 to 2008. It paid more than $1.5 million and disguised the payments as commissions, royalties, consulting fees, and scientific incentives.

Biomets March 26, 2012 DPA is here (pdf).

* * *

Heres the full text of the DOJ Status Report filed in USA v. Biomet Inc in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Case No. 12-cr-80):

The government submits this Status Report in response to the Courts March 21, 2016 Order requiring the government to file an updated status report on or before June 6, 2016.

1. On March 26, 2012, Biomet, Inc. (Biomet), entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with the government. Pursuant to the terms of the DPA, the government agreed to defer prosecution of Biomet if the company satisfied its obligations under the DPA, including the obligation to implement and maintain a compliance and ethics program designed to prevent and detect violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 15 U.S.C.  78dd-1, et seq. (the FCPA) and other applicable anti-corruption laws throughout its operations. (DPA,  7.) The DPA had a three-year term and could be extended for up to one year if the government determined, in its sole discretion, that Biomet had knowingly violated any provisions of the DPA. (Id.,  2.) Biomet also agreed that an independent compliance monitor would review Biomets compliance program to determine whether it was reasonably designed and implemented to detect and prevent violations of the anti-corruption laws and was functioning effectively. (Id., Attach. D  8.) As described in a prior filing in this case (Dkt. #5 at pp. 2-3), the government extended the DPA and the independent compliance monitors appointment for one additional year.

2. On March 18, 2016, the government filed a status report with the Court stating that the government was considering whether Biomet had breached the DPA based on conduct in Brazil and Mexico that was disclosed by the company in 2014 and based on Biomets failure to implement and maintain a compliance program designed to prevent and detect violations of the FCPA and other anti-corruption laws. The Court ordered that the government file an additional status report on or before June 6, 2016.

3. On April 15, 2016, the government notified Biomet that the government had determined that Biomet had breached the DPA based on the conduct in Mexico and Brazil and based on Biomets failure to implement and maintain a compliance program as required by the DPA. Biomet has represented that it is committed to continuing to cooperate, and the government and Biomet have been in discussions to resolve this matter which would obviate the need for a trial. Those discussions are ongoing.

4. At this time, the government does not seek any hearings or any other relief.

____

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. Hell be the keynote speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
Image courtesy of PDVSAThe owner of multiple U.S.-based oil and gas services companies pleaded guilty Thursday to bribing officials at Venezuelas state-owned energy company to win work and speed up contract payments.

Roberto Enrique Rincon Fernandez (Rincon), 55, of The Woodlands, Texas, pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, one count of violating the FCPA, and one count of making false statements on his 2010 federal income tax return.

Sentencing is set for September 30.

Rincon was arrested in December 2015 after a grand jury in the Southern District of Texas returned an 18-count indictment against him.

Also indicted then was Abraham Jose Shiera Bastidas (Shiera), 53, of Coral Gables, Florida.

Rincon supplied Petroleos de Venezuela SA or PDVSA with $500 million in oil equipment a year, becoming one of the state oil firms most important contractors, according to former senior executives of the oil firm, the Wall Street Journal said in December.

Hes the sixth defendant to plead guilty as part of a huge investigation by U.S. authorities into bribery at Venezuelas state oil company. The DOJ said Thursday the investigation is ongoing.

Shiera pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA and commit wire fraud, and one count of violating the FCPA.

His sentencing is scheduled for July 8.

Shiera was arrested in Miami on December 16.

Four others have pleaded guilty. They include a former employee of Shiera and three men who worked for PDVSA.

Moises Abraham Millan Escobar, 32, of Katy, Texas, was Shieras former employee. He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA for bribing PDVSA officials.

In December 2015, the three former PDVSA employees  Jose Luis Ramos Castillo, 38, Christian Javier Maldonado Barillas, 39, and Alfonzo Eliezer Gravina Munoz, 53, all from Katy  pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering.

When they worked for PDVSA, Ramos, Maldonado, and Gravina took bribes from Shiera and Rincon in exchange for help winning contracts from the energy company.

The three admitted they conspired with Shiera and Rincon to launder the bribe money.

Gravina also pleaded guilty to making false statements on his 2010 federal income tax return. He failed to report bribe payments he received from Shiera, Rincon, and others.

The DOJ said Thursday that Rincon and Shiera worked together to bid for equipment and services contracts with PDVSA through their various companies.

Beginning in 2009, they agreed to bribe PDVSA officials to make sure their companies could bid for contracts and be paid before other PDVSA vendors.

Rincon admitted Thursday he didnt report on his 2010 income tax return more than $6 million in foreign dividend income. The money came from a Venezuelan corporation he owned.

_____

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. Hell be the keynote speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
In 1972, I joined the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and worked as a British diplomat in embassies across the world. Now, I've started a second career by writing a series of 'diplomatic' crime thrillers. Here are 10 ways I believe being a diplomat affected my novels.

Jean Harrod

The single job that influenced me. In the 1990s, I was the British Consul in Indonesia and responsible for British citizens there. I dealt with a terrorist kidnapping, missing backpackers, boats capsizing, planes and trains crashing, murder, fraud, and other crimes involving Britons. Liaising with Indonesian police, I learnt about their investigations, forensics, and even found myself in the morgue identifying bodies from passport photos. That's when the idea of writing diplomatic crime thrillers began.

Plots. I draw on my knowledge of the people of a country, their culture and problems to come up with plots. My first novel, Deadly Diplomacy, was set in Australia, around the murder of a British businesswoman negotiating a multi-billion dollar deal with the Chinese. My second, Deadly Deceit, is set in the Caribbean Islands of the Turks and Caicos. It tells a dark tale of illegal migration and Haitian voodoo.

The opportunity to really get to know a country. My plots and characters are fictional, but I bring my knowledge of a country to the story, and what it was like to be a diplomat there at a specific time in history. Each novel has a different plot and is set in a different country, but the main characters run through the series. Whenever my heroine, diplomat Jess Turner, turns up, murder and mayhem follow.

Characters. I met many interesting people of all different nationalities, from Presidents to road sweepers, to teachers to nurses. My characters are a mix of all those people.

A unique series. I thought creating a heroine, who is a diplomat, would bring a completely different angle to the crime genre. It hasn't been done before, as far as I'm aware.

An international dimension. I learnt how different Governments and countries worked, and about international organisations. I bring this international knowledge to my novels.

I take my readers into the Foreign Office to explain how things work in London and our embassies overseas to give them a different perspective.

Novel writing is not easy. It requires much re-writing and editing. My diplomatic career of writing reports, speeches, press releases, and briefing for Ministers, gave me the grounding and self-motivation to write my novels.

Confidence. My diplomatic training as a spokesperson, Deputy High Commissioner, and Deputy Governor, has given me the confidence to take on public speaking. Now, I give talks about my life as a diplomat, my travels, and my second career as a novelist.

Time to read. Back before the internet, good TV and global communications, we had to amuse ourselves in far flung embassies. I'd loved crime thrillers since my teens, having been brought up on Agatha Christie, and spent my evenings reading. The course was set for my crime writing future.

Deadly Deceit, will be available from 16 June from High Street bookshops and Amazon Books. E-books for Kindle, Kobo and I-tunes are available for pre-order now.

Please visit my website www.jeanharrod.com for more information about my novels.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival started yesterday and it boasts an impressive programme of movies from around the world.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

The festival is celebrating its landmark 70th year and will showcase 161 feature films from forty-six countries and feature twenty-two world premieres.

While there are films from around the world showing at the festival, we take a closer look at some of the British films that you need to watch out for.

- Away

Away marks the return of David Blair to the director's chair for his first feature film since The Messenger last year.

Away is one of the British films that's not to be missed at the festival and will be receiving its world premiere this week.

The movie sees Blair team up with Timothy Spall and Juno Temple, who take on the central roles of Joseph and Ria. They are two of the most exciting British acting talent around and I cannot wait to see them share the screen together.

Matt Ryan, Susan Lynch, Tony Pitts, Reece Noi, and Terry Stone will join Temple and Spall on the cast list.

Away follows two lost souls seeking solace under the lights of Blackpool. It is set to be a touching and heart-wrenching drama and one of the British films on the programme that I am looking forward to the most.

- Bliss!

There are some exciting female filmmakers on the programme at Edinburgh this year and Rita Osei is one to watch out for. Osei is set to make her feature film directorial debut with Bliss, which will have its world premiere at the festival.

Osei is no stranger to the director's with short films Too Much Love, Room to Let and The Curry Club already under her belt and I am exciting to see her make the transition into features for the first time.

Bliss will introduce us to the acting talents of Freya Parks, who takes on the central role of Tasha Robson. While the actress has appeared in Creation and Jane Eyre, this is the biggest film role of her career and could be a major breakthrough role for her.

Parks is joined on the cast list by David Leon, Montserrat Lombard, Reece Noi, Joshua Osei, and Lars Arentz-Hansen.

Tasha Robson, 16, has run away from home! While she rides the waves aboard the large ferry heading from South Shields, England to Scandinavia in search of her unknown father, "The Viking" all is less than calm in the Robson household.

The festival will boast many directorial debuts from exciting new filmmakers and Bliss! really is being tipped as a movie that is not to be overlooked.

- Brakes

Brakes is another of the British movies that will receive its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival this year as Mercedes Grower takes up the director's chair for the first time.

Grower is best known as an actress with a string of film and television roles under her belt, but Brakes will see her make her directorial debut.

As well as being in the director's chair for Brakes, Grower has also penned the film's screenplay and will take on the role of Layla.

She has assembled a terrific cast for the movie as Julian Barratt, Julia Davis, Noel Fielding, Kerry Fox, Paul McGann, Steve Oram and Roland Gift are set to star.

Brakes is a raw, dark comedy about endings and beginnings. A failed relationship is rarely predicted but always reviewed, and the film adopts this reverse narrative. Split into two halves, the film follows the tumultuous stories of nine couples.

It plunges straight into the brutal and absurd endings of their relationships, and travels back in time to the moment when the spark of love between them first emerged. Using London as there matchmaker, each of their stories is unique, yet familiar to us all.

- Kids In Love

Kids In Love is a movie that is set to hit the big screen here in the UK at the end of August and is another film that will receive its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Chris Foggin is another up and coming filmmaker to watch out for as he is set to make his feature film directorial debut with Kids In Love.

Foggin is no stranger to the director's chair with short films Queen of Hearts and That Night and a segment of Stars in Shorts already under his belt. I am looking forward to seeing him make the leap into features and there's already some excitement building around Kids In Love.

The movie also sees Sebastian De Souza and Preston Thompson show off their writing skills for the first time. As well as penning the screenplay, the duo is also on the cast list alongside Will Poulter, Alma Jodorowsky, Jamie Blackley, and Cara Delevingne.

A group of friends live their lives in London, imitating art and enjoying a fast-paced lifestyle.

If you are a fan of the coming-of-age genre of film, then Kids In Love is a movie not to miss at the festival and when it is released into cinemas later this summer.

- Starfish

Joanne Froggatt is one of my favourite British actresses and she is set to return to the big screen with her latest film project Starfish, which will receive its world premiere at the festival.

Starfish will mark the return of Bill Clark to the director's chair for what will be the second feature film of his career; it comes nearly a decade after he made his debut with The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey.

Starfish marks the first time that Clark has teamed up with Froggatt, who will take on the central role of Nicola Ray.

She is joined on the cast list by Phoebe Nicholls, Tom Riley, Michele Dotrice, Simon Bamford, and Daisy Moore.

Starfish is based on the true-life story of Tom (Riley) and Nicola Ray (Froggatt), whose lives changed overnight and beyond recognition when Tom contracted a rare and life-threatening illness. Tom survived, but at a price.

Starfish is an independent British Film and is promising to be touching and powerful family drama.

- The White King

If you like your dystopian drama, then The White King is a movie that you cannot afford to miss during the Edinburgh International Film Festival as Alex Helfrecht and Jorg Tittel team up in the director's chair.

The White King marks the feature film directorial debut of both Helfrecht and Tittel, who have previously worked together on the short project The Sip.

As well as being in the director's chair, the duo has also penned the film's screenplay, which is an adaptation of the novel by Gyorgy Dragoman.

Agyness Deyn continues to build her acting career and takes on the role of Hannah. She is joined on the cast list by Jonathan Pryce, Olivia Williams, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Greta Scacchi, and Fiona Shaw make up the impressive cast list.

The White King is a futuristic tale that follows Hannah, who joins her son on his mission when the pair are labelled as traitors. The movie mixes elements of science fiction, drama and adventures and, for me, is one of the stand out films on the programme.

The movie will receive its world premiere at the festival and I cannot wait to see what Helfrecht and Tittel deliver.

Other British movies that are not to be missed include The Carer, Moon Dogs, and White Island.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival runs from 15th - 26th June.
Helen Mirren has boarded the cast of Fast and Furious 8.

Helen Mirren

In March, the 70-year-old actress announced she was eager to star in the action film franchise and had made her feelings known "many times" and it has now been confirmed she has finally been granted her wish.

Speaking of her career choices, she told Elle magazine: "I like to be serious. Of course, having said that I'm about to do 'Fast and Furious 8'. But that's for the fun of it. So maybe that's what I want as well, some fun and some relevant, serious, important movies."

Few details have been revealed about her casting, however, Mirren made it clear she would only star in the movie if she was allowed to do some driving.

She added: "I've always rather loved driving. I said, 'I'll be in it, but only if I'm allowed to drive if I do drive in it.' But we'll see."

And when she first made her feelings known about appearing in the franchise she teased she'd love to be a getaway driver and had already demonstrated her skills when she went on the popular motoring show 'Top Gear'.

She said: "My great ambition is to be in a 'Fast and Furious' movie.

"I so want to be a mad driver in a 'Fast and Furious' movie ... my claim to fame is I always do my own driving. I was on 'Top Gear', and I did [my lap] in a very good time."

After Mirren made her plea to star in the film executive producer Vin Diesel, who also stars in the franchise as protagonist Dominic Toretto, said: "She is on the list. Be careful what you wish for, Helen!"

Details surrounding the plot are being kept tightly under wraps until nearer the release date next year, although the cast have already started shooting scenes in Iceland.

The film will feature the return of Michelle Rodriguez as she reprises her role as Letty, while Lucas Black and Tyrese Gibson will continue to play Sean and Roman in the next instalment, respectively.

Ludacris will also return as Tej, Dwayne Johnson will play Hobbs and Jason Statham will play Deckard Shaw once again.

Mirren is no stranger to action and was seen in 2010 starring in 'Red' alongside Bruce Willis, John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman and the sequel in 2013.

Mirren impressed in her role as a gun-wielding, veteran assassin called Victoria.
Woody Allen is set to return to the director's chair this September with his latest film Cafe Society.

Cafe Society

As well as being in the director's chair, Allen has also penned the film's screenplay in what is his first feature since Irrational Man last year.

This new movie sees the director team up with actress Kristen Stewart for the first time and reunites with Jesse Eisenberg - they take on the central roles of Vonnie and Bobby Dorfman.

This is also the third collaboration between Stewart and Eisenberg, who have already worked together on Adventureland and American Ultra. And you can see them in action in some great new images from the film:

Allen has brought together another fantastic cast as Steve Carell, Jeannie Berlin, Blake Lively, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll and Ken Stott are all on board.

Set in the 1930s, Woody Allen's bittersweet romance Cafe Society follows Bronx-born Bobby Dorfman (Eisenberg) to Hollywood, where he falls in love, and back to New York, where he is swept up in the vibrant world of high society nightclub life.

Allen has delivered some terrific films during his career and I am looking forward to seeing what he delivers with Cafe Society.

Cafe Society is released 2nd September.

by Helen Earnshaw for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Queen have uploaded footage of their performance with Adam Lambert at the Isle of Wight Festival this week, which saw some incredible response from media and critics.

As the closing headlining set, the group dedicated their performance to those affected by the Orlando mass shooting in LGBTQ+ nightclub Pulse.

Lambert said: "This song is dedicated to those who lost their lives last night in Orlando, Florida, and anyone who has been a victim of senseless violence or hatred."

Following the show came the news that Queen would be doing their first concert in Israel, with the band and Lambert set to take to the stage in Tel Aviv's Park Hayarkon on September 12.

Brian May commented: "This is an amazing opportunity at last to bring Queen music live to thousands of folk who have been devoted to our music for years. Can't wait."

Lambert added: "I am excited to perform with Queen in Tel Aviv for the first time, and we're looking forward to giving everyone a show to remember."

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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Britain's Prince William was told off by Queen Elizabeth at the Trooping the Colour ceremony.

Duchess Catherine and Prince William

The 33-year-old royal was scolded by his grandmother at this year's annual event on Saturday (11.06.16), when he knelt down to talk to his two-year-old son Prince George whilst they made their appearance as a family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, London, according to Hello! magazine.

The 90-year-old monarch's gesture, which saw Her Majesty nudge the Duke of Cambridge in the arm before gesturing for him to stand up, was captured when her Birthday Parade was aired.

The father-of-two - who has George and 13-month-old daughter Princess Charlotte with his wife Duchess Catherine - swiftly stood up, whilst his younger brother Prince Harry, 31, appeared to let out a little chuckle at his misfortune.

However, Harry was scolded for finding the telling off amusing.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Cambridge has admitted he received a "b******ing" from the Queen for his mischievous ways when he was younger.

Speaking previously about his childhood, he said: "[Peter Phillips and I] were chasing Zara around who was on a go-cart, and [we] managed to herd Zara into a lamppost and the lamppost came down and nearly squashed her.

"And I remember my grandmother being the first person out at Balmoral to come running across the lawn in her kilt. She came charging over and gave us the most almighty b******ing, and that sort of stuck in my mind from that moment on."
Mario Testino says photographing Britain's royal family is like shooting nudes.

Mario Testino with Kate Moss

The Peruvian fashion photographer - who has lived in London since the 1970s - has shot the family on several occasions, most recently taking pictures of everyone when Prince William and Duchess Catherine had their daughter Princess Charlotte christened at Sandringham.

For Testino the methods he uses to shoot the family and his naked models is the same because they share a "similar essence".

Speaking to Vanity Fair magazine, he said: "The royals are like the essence of the country. And a nude is like the essence of a human being. So even though they appear quite different, they have a similarity.

"They represent something fundamental that inspires me, and which I apply to my work in different ways."

Testino, 61, has been a favourite of the royal family for many years and has been entrusted to capture some of their most important occasions.

He photographed William's 21st birthday, Catherine and William's engagement portraits, and he even did a photo shoot with William and his brother Prince Harry's late mother Princess Diana for Vanity Fair back in 1997.

Testino is pleased that the British royal family - headed by Queen Elizabeth - is so popular right now with the UK public and around the world.

He said: "The royals seem to be, especially in countries such as England, a constant - families that have existed as part of the country for a very, very long time."

During his career, Testino has photographed a bevy of supermodels such as Kate Moss, Gisele Bundchen and Karlie Kloss in the nude.
Prince Harry has written a letter to the major of Orlando to offer his "sincere condolences" following the mass shooting in the city.

Prince Harry

The British royal penned a handwritten note to Buddy Dyer to tell him he stands with him and the residents of the Florida city following the terrorist attack on LGBT nightclub Pulse at the weekend which left 49 people dead and 53 wounded.

Harry spent most of May in Orlando as he attended the Invictus Games, a paralympic-style event for injured service men and women, and he developed a great affection for the American location while he was there.

In the letter - written on embossed paper with the Kensington Palace mark - he said: "I wanted to write and express my most sincere condolences to the people of Orlando after the horrific attack on the Pulse nightclub on Sunday (12.06.16).

"Having just spent time in Orlando I know what a warm and welcoming community it is. In spite of this senseless act, I have no doubt that the love and friendship of your city will remain strong."

The 31-year-old prince - the brother of Prince William - also praised all the police officers and emergency services who worked at the scene to rescue survivors and bring an end to the carnage.

The letter continued: "I would also like to pass on my deepest admiration to the law enforcement officers who attended the nightclub during the attack for their extraordinary bravery and professionalism.

"Our thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones at this most difficult of times. You are all in our prayers as you face the days and weeks ahead."

During his time in Orlando, Harry - whose father, Prince Charles, is heir to the British throne - described the city as "incredible place with so much energy". While there he took in many of its' tourist attractions, such as Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom and rode on the theme park's famous Splash Mountain log flume.
There's something quite fascinating about the prison genre. It's existed for some time now, through HBO series Oz and ITV series Bad Girls, but it's never quite been as prominent within the world of television as it is today. What once would have been a tough sell internationally is now adored by millions who flock to streaming services to binge, and keep up the tradition of settling down on the sofa each week to catch the latest episode.

Wentworth / Credit: Foxtel

On top of that, the two leading prison drama series (at least in the US, Australia and the UK from what I can see) both focus on female ensemble casts - Wentworth Prison and Orange is the New Black. In a world still to this day dominated by men and patriarchy, it's refreshing to see such an incredible array of female talent allowed to shine and flourish.

Orange is the New Black / Credit: Netflix

In being such big small screen trailblazers, both shows have managed to convince those not only behind television series, but those in Hollywood that audiences will come to watch stories involving women, as well as straight, white men. Changes are happening and shifts are taking place, slowly but surely.

When we spoke to Danielle Brooks who plays Taystee in Orange between the first two seasons of the series, she hit the nail right on the head when questioned about the show's popularity.

She explained: "I think the diversity [makes it successful]. I feel like people don't just relate to people who are similar to them, I feel like people are relating to people that are actually - the world would say 'very polar opposites'. Because the show is so diverse, you're getting to watch the 'chocolate girls' play alongside each other and learn that they're totally different, and that they aren't all the same, we're not all the same as well as with the white women and the Hispanic women.

"I feel like it's also diverse in the sense of age too, and gender, and sexual preference, as well as the balance of comedy and drama."

Credit: Netflix

It's a spot-on sentiment, and one that some of the cast of Wentworth Prison have also echoed in our past interviews with them.

Celia Ireland who plays Liz Birdsworth in Wentworth said of both her own show and Orange: "These shows are really making a mark and I think it's ostensibly, apart from the fact that the storylines are good and the performances are strong, and as a whole unit they're really interesting to watch, but the fact that 90% of the cast is women is still really an amazing hook for the show."

As well as that we see many important topics and issues confronted head-on. Prison system corruption, crooked cops, homosexuality and transgender inmates are just four examples of what we've seen explored, paving the way for a world now more suited to talking about these topics in real life.

Credit: Foxtel

So why are the shows so successful? Because they're unafraid of paving their own way rather than following formulas that have worked before. They're something new and refreshing and unique, and the acting is on another level from some of the most talented women we've ever had the pleasure of watching on the small screen.

Orange is the New Black returns for its fourth season on Netflix from June 17. Wentworth Prison is currently airing in Australia and returns for its fourth season in the UK later this year.

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

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The actor has recently been killing it when it comes to her airport style game by working the combination of a bohemian, easy-to-wear dress with chic accessories. Case in point is this outfit of an adorable polka-dotted sheer number with an on-trend, off-shoulder detail. A floppy hat, aviators and her trusty Hermes Birkin tote complete her look. Note how while the dress is easy-breezy and flirty, its the structured accessories that keep the look polished. Scroll down to see our pick of products that will help you nail your own airport style.

Trim fedora, Accessorize

Silk overlay, Rs. 11,050, Encrustd

Cotton dress, Marks & Spencer

Satchel tote, Rs. 3,860, Lavie

Eyelet dress, Rs. 2,990 Cover Story

Aviator sunglasses, Rs. 6,490, Ray-Ban

Wool fedora, FCUK

Photograph: Yogen Shah
Fashion apparel and accessories company Global Brands Group posted positive net revenue for the 15 months period, ended March 31, 2016, to $4.1 billion owing to macro environmental factors like a warm winter in North America, depreciation in Euro and exit from certain underperforming brands.

Core operating profit for the period was $75 million, while net profit was $25 million. Total margin posted for the period was $1,379 million or 33.5 per cent of the revenue. The margin continued its upward trend during the reporting period.

During the reporting period, we continue to sharpen our focus on our key product categories and high-performing brands, while expanding our platforms where relevant, Dow Famulak, president and COO of the company commented.

Global Brands Group posted positive net revenue for the 15 months period, ended March 31, 2016, to $4.1 billion owing to macro environmental factors like a warm winter in North America, depreciation in Euro and exit from certain underperforming brands. Core operating profit for the period was $75 million, while net profit was $25 million.#

Our kids category remains a highly successful franchise delivering consistently positive results, while our footwear and accessories business also performed well, particularly our key footwear brands, he said.

We made excellent progress with expanding the direct-to-consumer reach and increasing the product offering of our key controlled brands, such as Frye, Spyder and Juicy Couture. Under Seven Global, we extended the David Beckham brand to menswear product category through a partnership with Kent & Curwen, and recently to the men's grooming category through a partnership with the premium men's skincare brand Biotherm Homme, he added.

Additionally, the group CEO and vice chairman, Bruce Rockowitz said, Going forward, we expect our new licenses and brands will have a positive impact on revenue. We also expect the margin to continue its upward trend due to our emphasis on higher-margin businesses. (MCJ)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk - India
Pact Organic, a brand making organic and Fair Trade Certified basics, announced its launch in 460 participating Target locations and on Target online across the US.

The brand will be selling men's undershirts and boxer briefs, which are the first of its kind to be Fair Trade Certified, along with apparel for women and children in Target stores online and in-store.

Pact Organic's undershirts and underwear are made from cotton sourced from Chetna Organic, a cooperative of 15,000 organic cotton farmers in India who practice non-GMO organic agriculture.

Pact Organic, a brand making organic and Fair Trade Certified basics, announced its launch in 460 participating Target locations and on Target online across the US. The brand will be selling men's undershirts and boxer briefs, which are the first of its kind to be Fair Trade Certified, along with apparel for women and children in Target stores online and in#

Pact Organic's mission is to change the apparel industry for good by upholding the high environmental and social standards of Fair Trade USA and the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS). Our launch in Target as its first Fair Trade Certified apparel brand represents the growing voice of the conscious consumer and the success of a larger movement transforming the way apparel is made," said Brendan Synnott, CEO, Pact Organic.

By offering premium basics made with Fair Trade Certified cotton, Pact Organic is proving that quality, business and ethics go hand in hand, said Maya Spaull, director of innovation, Fair Trade USA.

Founded in 2009, Pact Organic makes super soft organic cotton basics. Pact Organic's vision is to transform the apparel industry for good by connecting buyers to makers with a traceable supply chain that empowers its people. (HO)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
In the wake of complaints by domestic synthetic and rayon or man-made fabric (MMF) producers against import of undervalued Chinese fabrics, the government has initiated an investigation under the supervision of Directorate General of Anti-Dumping and Allied Duties, according to a report in The Times of India."The government has started an anti-subsidy investigation for MMF fabric from China, which has been flagged by the industry," Anil Rajvanshi Chairman of Synthetic & Rayon Textile Export Promotion Council (SRTEPC) said in Surat recently at a roadshow for an upcoming global buyer-seller meet for MMF and textiles.

In the wake of complaints by domestic synthetic and rayon or man-made fabric (MMF) producers against import of undervalued Chinese fabrics, the government has initiated an investigation under the supervision of Directorate General of Anti-Dumping and Allied Duties, according to a report in The Times of India. "The government has started an#

"We have filed an anti-subsidy application. Representatives from the government will visit companies in Surat to get the cost data of the production. Thus, we expect that the Chinese fabric imports will attract around 25 per cent anti-subsidy duty," Rajvanshi said.This country specific duty, also known as a countervailing duty, on imports is imposed to offset subsidies provided by other nations and is intended to make prices of domestic products competitive. Importing countries also have other options, such as imposing anti-dumping duty, to make domestic prices at par.The import of Chinese fabrics is around 7 per cent of the total volume of fabrics manufactured in India, Rajvanshi said, alleging that MMF is imported by undervaluing the prices in the range of Rs 6 to Rs 8 per metre.The SRTEPC chairman said they had information around 200 containers of fabrics were being imported from China every day. Chinese exporters were taking the benefit of under-invoicing to destabilize Indian manufacturers."In recent months MMF manufacturers in Surat were facing the brunt of import of undervalued fabrics from China. Around half of power loom weaving machines have been shut down, rendering over two lakh workers jobless. The production of polyester fabric has reduced from 4 crore metre per day to around 1.80 crore metre per day. (SH)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Pakistan's Senate Standing Committee on National Food Security and Research on Wednesday recommended the imposition of Regulatory Duty (RD) on the import of cotton bales from India. The committee, which met under the chairmanship of Senator Syed Muzaffar Hussain Shah, observed that import of cotton lint from India via Wagha border despite sufficient stock in the country would adversely affect cotton growers.The committee urged the Finance Ministry to direct Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) to impose RD on import of cotton from India, Pakistani newspapers have reported. A senior official of Ministry of Commerce informed the committee that presently approximately 400,000 cotton bales are available in the country.Shah said that arrival of new cotton crop in the market has already started therefore import of cotton from India will substantially add to the existing cotton stock. Cotton Commissioner Dr Khalid Abdullah informed the committee that Pakistan is importing extra long staple cotton from the US and some other countries and wondered why the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA) is urging for import of cotton from India.He said Pakistan's cotton acreage has declined by 12.7 per cent but in Punjab the acreage was 14 per cent short of the target. He claimed that the APTMA's imports through land routes caused a loss of Rs 22 billion to Pakistani farmers last year.The APTMA also came under fire from Minister for National Food Security Sikandar Hayat Bosan who said that the Association was instrumental in shifting the subject of cotton to the Ministry of Textile, which is not capable of handling the issues of agriculture and growers.Bosan said the APTMA was importing cotton from India claiming that it was extra-long staple, but that kind of cotton is not grown by India and only the US and African countries grow that variety.

Pakistan began importing cotton from India earlier this year after rains and pests destroyed much of its crop. (SH)

Pakistan's Senate Standing Committee on National Food Security and Research on Wednesday recommended the imposition of Regulatory Duty (RD) on the import of cotton bales from India. The committee, which met under the chairmanship of Senator Syed Muzaffar Hussain Shah, observed that import of cotton lint from India via Wagha border #

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week.

Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week. At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark #

At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark 10 and 10.1 new functions, and new AccuPlan cutting and plan software, as well as Gerber integrated solutions for apparel industry customers.

Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week. At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark #

AccuMark 10.1 offers enhanced pattern design and development, marking, nesting, and spread and cut planning, while Gerber integrated automation solutions enable apparel manufacturers to meet the challenges of mass customisation, or made-to-measure environments and optimising inventory levels.

Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week. At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark #

Earlier this year, Gerber had announced newest product family in software solutions to further speed and streamline workflows and open more channels of communication throughout the supply chain.

Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week. At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark #

In recent years, Gerber Technology is paying extra attention to emerging economies like Vietnam. In order to meet various demands in these markets, Gerber is strengthening highly professional teams aiming at providing quality service and leveraging its global resource to solve local challenges.

Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week. At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark #

Gerber develops and manufactures its products from various locations in the United States and Canada, and has additional manufacturing capabilities in China. (RKS)

Gerber Technology, the world leader in integrated software and automated solutions for the apparel and industrial markets, will hold Gerber New Product & Integrated Solutions Conferences in Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by the end of this week. At both the full-day conferences, Gerber experts will present Gerber AccuMark #

Fibre2Fashion News Desk  India
Yesteryear actor and Suriya's father Sivakumar has said, he never wanted to become an actor and that was not his ambition.

In an interview to Times of India, the actor, who is considered as legendary by many, has said painting is his primary passion and that he is a better painter than an actor.

Sivakumar was into arts and painting, right from his school days.

"When my classmates were writing the alphabets, I would be drawing shapes out of those letters - cow, goat, train, tree and so on. I could draw things after observing them just once. I used to draw the spinal cord correctly when I was in sixth standard.

I wanted to get into engineering after SSLC, but I was advised by my seniors that if I wanted to be the best student in my field, I should be taking up painting," the 74-year-old has said.

Though college for fine arts was a rarity at his time, the one, which he studied in was already 150 years old, according to the actor.

"Interestingly, the arts college was already 150 years old then. But those who knew about it referred to it as 'bommai college'," he told the leading daily.

But, he learnt about the hardship involved in arts when he was in Coimbatore.

"In Coimbatore, I used to look in awe at a 60-foot hand-drawn cut-out of Sivaji put up in front of Royal Theatre. I used to think that if a man could draw such a huge painting, he must be among the world's greatest artists.

But all those notions were shattered. Painting a 60-ft cut-out would take at least a week, and the shoulders would hurt like anything. But for all that effort, he (the painter) would be getting only 150. I realised the art was great, but it did not command any respect. I did not want to toil all my life, so, I joined the College of Fine Arts the next year," he has said.

Also Read: Throwback: When Arvind Swamy Forced Superstar Rajinikanth To Sleep On The Floor!
Rumours about the health of superstar Rajinikanth, who is in the US now, sent his fans into a tizzy today, but the actor's office assured he was fine.

"He is taking rest in the US. He is happy and is vacationing with his family. There is no need to believe rumours," his publicist said.

As it is night in the US now, the Lingaa actor may take to his social media page, Twitter to reach out to his fans later, he said adding that false news about the Kabali star had been flashed in some online portal.

The 'rumours' about their icon's health caused concern among his fans who took to the social media, flooding it with enquiries about him.

The 65-year-old actor, who was recently honoured with Padma Vibushan, has finished his soon to be released gangster drama Kabali and is already working on ace director Shankar's 2.O, a sequel to the duo's earlier hit Enthiran.

Also Read: IN PICS: Miss India UAE Nivetha Pethuraj Is A Huge Fan Of Ilayathalapathy Vijay!
Akshay Kumar, who will be making his Tamil debut in the upcoming sci-fi thriller 2.O, has said, there is only one superstar in the country and that is Rajinikanth.

The clarification came when the host of a promotional event addressed the Hindi actor as 'superstar Akshay Kumar'.

"The lady here announced my name as Superstar. But there is only one Superstar in the country and that is Rajinikanth sir," Akshay has said, according to a report from Deccan Chronicle.

Akshay, who plays the main antagonist in the movie, has said it is an honour to work with Rajinikanth in a straight Tamil flick.

"It is an honour working with Rajini sir in a straight Tamil movie - it is like a dream come true. I am very happy about it and eagerly awaiting the response of people here after its release. I want to be part of more South films."

When asked about his love for Chennai, Akshay has said, "I have shot a few films here in the city including 'Sabse Bada Khiladi', and 'Meri Biwi Ka Jawaab Nahin' with Sridevi madam, which released a long time ago. There's been a big gap since, but I'm happy I got the chance to shoot '2.O' here."

The 48-year-old actor has said happiness and good food are the secret behind his fit body.

"Happiness and good food are the secret of my fit body. I always insist on having dinner before sunset and not eating anything after that. You should work out for an hour daily. If you cannot give even one hour to your body in 24 hours, kill yourself!"

On his favourite South Indian food, Akshay has said, he loves masala dosa and coconut chutney.

"I love masala dosa, upma, coconut chutney and many South Indian dishes. My favourite rice dish is bisi bele bath."

Also Read: IN PICS: Miss India UAE Nivetha Pethuraj Is A Huge Fan Of Ilayathalapathy Vijay!
The EEA Agreement is the mainstay of the cooperation between Norway and the EU. The Agreement includes a common goal to work together to reduce social and economic disparities in Europe. Norway contributes to this through the EEA and Norway Grants. For the period 2014-2021, Norway will provide approximately EUR 2.8 billion in support to 15 EU member states. The Grants are allocated to sectors that are crucial for development in the beneficiary country, and where there is potential for, and interest in, cooperation with Norway.

The five areas identified for funding under the Grants both supplement and complement the areas supported by the EU Cohesion Fund:

#1 Innovation, Research, Education and Competitiveness

#2 Social inclusion, Youth Employment and Poverty Reduction

#3 Environment, Energy, Climate Change and Low Carbon

#4 Culture, Civil Society, Good Governance and Fundamental Rights

#5 Justice and Home Affairs

Beneficiary states from the Danube Region (amounts received in million EUR):

Bulgaria: 210.1

Croatia: 103.4

Czech Republic: 184.5

Hungary: 214.6

Romania: 502.5

Slovenia: 37.7

Slovakia: 113.1

Sursa: danube-region.eu




-- Construction of $650 million combined cycle power plant (CCPP) and LNG tank

-- Demonstrated its high-quality construction technology through $5.6 billion in contracts of energy plants over the past decade since entering into Latin America

SEOUL, South Korea, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --POSCO E&C (CEO Han Chan-kun) is set to construct a 380MW Colon-based combined cycle power plant and a 180,000m3 LNG tank.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160615/380034

On May 26, POSCO E&C held its groundbreaking ceremony at the construction site in the Telfers industrial complex in Colon, Panama and has begun construction on the Colon CCPP.

The Colon CCPP project will build an LNG CCPP along with a 180,000m3 LNG storage tank to supply fuel at Colon, which lies near the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, and is about 70km north of Panama City, the capital of the Republic of Panama. With a construction cost of $650 million, the power plant will be completed in July 2018 and the LNG tank in May 2019.

The Colon CCPP is the largest of its kind in Panama, with a generation capacity that will allow for approximately 300,000 households to use electricity simultaneously. Once completed, the power plant will provide a stable supply of electricity to the industrial complex near Panama Canal and the Colon area.

"The project is the result of efforts to establish trust with the ordering parties in Latin America over the past decade," said Han Chan-kun, CEO of POSCO E&C, stressing the important aspect of the project. "It will be a great chance for us to showcase the high-quality construction technology of E&C across the world."

POSCO E&C entered into the energy plant market of Latin America in 2006 for the first time among domestic construction companies, with the construction of a coal-fired power plant (CFPP) in Ventanas, Chile, which was awarded by AES. The company successively won contracts of Campiche and Angamos CFPP in Chile in 2007 and Kallpa and Chilca Uno CCPP in Peru in 2009. By achieving a total of $5.6 billion in Latin America over 10 years since it made its first foray into the area, POSCO E&C has demonstrated its quality construction technology throughout the world and is endeavoring to solidify its position as one of the major players in Latin America's energy plant market.
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO--(Marketwired - June 15, 2016) - Julio Cesar Diaz Witwicki, Founder and Director of Simple Trading Corporation Limited and leading expert within the technology and finance industries across Latin America, sees the expected 4% growth in the Peruvian Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as confirmation of a healthy economy and its emerging status as one of the strongest investment opportunities in South America.

Peru's mining-fueled economy, ores and minerals make up over 50% of total exports, continues to stay ahead of metal prices through increased production with large scale projects such as the expansion of Cerro Verde copper mine set to push Peru to the No. 2 ranking in the global copper market. Since the beginning of 2016, copper and iron ore prices have been on the rise -- stimulating Mr. Witwicki's positive outlook for a continued primary sector recovery. However, the economy is not only growing in the primary markets but is also in the non-primary sectors.

Secondary markets such as telecommunications and financial services now account for close to 40% of Peru's GDP. Witwicki anticipates, that with further modernization and increased competitiveness, the services sector will continue to benefit from growing confidence in the strength of the overall economic expansion and fiscal stability in 2016 and 2017. He references the industry sector, representing nearly 35% of GDP, which produced increased employment in industrial areas spurred by widespread technology upgrades. As falling unemployment and robust domestic demand continue, Julio's believes current dynamic market trends, commercial possibilities, and sound economic potential will attract insightful investors to Peru.

Looking forward to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement with the United States, signed in February 2016, Julio Cesar Diaz Witwicki notes it contains no import quotas, nor tariff rates, allowing for Peru to both increase and diversify exports to the United States. TPP also offers direct access to new markets in Asia and Oceania such as Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Vietnam which will spark private investment as Peruvian companies seek to purchase equipment to streamline production -- resulting in a greater profit margin for businesses.

Peru, at 4%, is the only economy accelerating among Pacific Alliance member countries: Colombia and Mexico, both with 2.5%, as well as Chile, with 1.5%. According to Witwicki, building both primary and secondary markets is generating strength and confidence indicating economic modernization, commodities abundance, improved economic and political governance are helping Peru to emerge as one of the most stable economies for investment in Latin America.

Julio Cesar Diaz Witwicki, an expert in Peruvian, Mexican, and Uruguayan financial markets, is founder and director of Simple Trading Corporation Limited, specializing in trading platforms for investors, brokers, and corporate institutions, allowing them to reliably access the global market. He is Chief Manager of Publicity and Marketing for PRODEP S.R.L. and its affiliated companies as well as acting advisor for many other financial firms. Witwicki values his philanthropic achievements as much as he does his business successes, and actively participates in outreach events of nonprofit organizations igniting the entrepreneurial spirit of underserved youth, including the DESEM Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs and Junior Achievement Worldwide.

Julio Cesar Diaz Witwicki -- Financial and Technology Expert: http://www.JulioCesarDiazWitwickiNews.com

Julio Cesar Diaz Witwicki -- Outlines Key Strategies to Trade Forex: http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/Julio+Cesar+Diaz+Witwicki+--+Outlines+Key+Strategies+to+Trade+Forex/11723981.html

Julio Cesar Diaz Witwicki -- Chilean Economy Exceeds Experts' Forecast: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/julio-cesar-diaz-witwicki-chilean-034658856.html

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Contact Information

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www.ControlPROnline.com
DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND--(Marketwired - June 15, 2016) - Your Trade Choice, a leading Forex broker based in New Zealand, offers in-depth information about various Forex strategies based on specific global markets to increase the rate of success traders are able to achieve. These approaches are unique to specific situations, and are determined by how currency pairs behave based on that market. Developing distinct tactics allows clients to create profitable transactions while reducing the risk involved regardless of which foreign exchange they choose to trade in.

The Forex market is open 24 hours a day, with all of the countries trading during specific times, enabling more people to get involved in this lucrative industry. Each market impacts the next one, and certain currency pairs provide somewhat predictable behavior at specific times a day. Therefore, an investor must alter their strategy to fit the chosen currency pair and the time of day in which they are trading. With volatile pairs such as GBP/USD, large swings in movement increase the profitability of a trade. The risks involved when placing a stop before the initial price actions have taken place, can cause a lack of profit if not handled correctly. Another consideration is whether to engage in end-of-day or intra-day trading. The time between when the New York market closes and the Asian market opens is known as the end of the day, and traders can consider trends from the whole day. It is often considered the ideal time for new traders to practice on a live market with decreased risk, and Your Trade Choice provides educational tools on how to capitalize on this strategy. Experienced investors often complete transactions during intra-day, which happens over shorter timeframes.

One strategy applied in all situations will not provide consistent results due to the changes in the market. Instead, a successful trader will develop a portfolio of tactics to be utilized in various situations with predictable outcomes. An investor must learn how to use the right approach and adapt to the changing conditions, which not only requires an understanding of the various strategies available but being knowledgeable about the industry as well. Your Trade Choice is one of the few broker firms that focuses on educating clients to enhance their ability to succeed in this business. The brokerage offers resources to novice and experienced traders in their own language as well as a personal advisor to assist them in specific transactions.

Your Trade Choice features a state of the art MT4 platform while providing 24-hour assistance for a premiere trading experience. The brokerage is a leader in the financial services industry, enabling clients to trade in the foreign exchange and Contracts For Difference (CFD) markets. Over the years in the industry, the company has developed a wide range of unique services tailored to professional trading platforms and foreign exchange transactions around the world. Your Trade Choice offers resources for private clients as well as institutions, providing advisors who are equipped to offer credible advice to everyone they serve.

Your Trade Choice -- Leading Provider of Forex & CFD Trading: http://yourtradechoicenews.com

Your Trade Choice -- Offers Advice for Beginner Forex Traders: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/your-trade-choice----offers-advice-for-beginner-forex-traders-2016-05-26-0160017

Your Trade Choice -- Welcomes Mexican Economic Growth: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trade-choice-welcomes-mexican-economic-033154901.html

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Embedded Video Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGC90UazG8Q

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Haven announces opening of new European headquarters in Basel, Switzerland

BASEL, Switzerland, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Haven is pleased to announce the opening of its Switzerland office, which will function as the center of European operations. Haven provides logistics technology to the world's largest commodity traders, food producers, and CPG companies. Located in Basel, Switzerland, the new office will focus on serving clients throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150304/179635LOGO

Philipp Schaeuble, General Manager Europe, will be heading the new office, bringing with him more than 14 years of experience in the European freight industry. Marek Fausel, previously Head of Ocean Freight at Panalpina Switzerland, will be joining as the Vice President of Operations Europe.

"We are excited to announce that veterans Philipp Schaeuble and Marek Fausel will lead Haven's European expansion," said CEO Matthew Tillman. "Haven is committed to giving our customers the best experience by combining well-respected industry leaders such as Philipp and Marek with great technology."

"After a successful launch in February, it's time to expand. We are looking forward to intensifying our capabilities with both customers and carriers. Our product meets a real need and addresses the real technical challenges facing the industry, to the advantage of everyone involved," says Schaeuble.

Haven enables shippers to easily source capacity with all major shipping lines - more than 1200 of the world's leading logistics providers - at over 4500 destinations. The new Switzerland office expands Haven's European focus and enhances account management capabilities for a growing global customer base.

About Haven, Inc.

Founded in 2014, Haven is a venture-backed company with offices in Singapore, Switzerland, and San Francisco. Haven's technology enables effective, streamlined global trade through the automation of freight sourcing and documentation. For more information, please email info@haveninc.com or visit http://haveninc.com




Vast Resources PLC / Ticker: VAST / Index: AIM / Sector: Mining



16 June 2016 Vast Resources PLC ('Vast' or 'the Company')



Subscription of 1.25 million by Crede and issue of Associated Warrants Potential Conversion under Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument Notice of General Meeting



Vast Resources PLC, the AIM-listed resource development and production company, announces that a Circular including a Notice of General Meeting was yesterday posted to shareholders. The General Meeting is to be held at 14:30 on 1 July 2016 at the offices of Paul Hastings (Europe) LLP, Ten Bishops Square, Eighth Floor, London, E1 6EG. A copy of the circular and Notice of General Meeting will also be available to view on the Company's website www.vastresourcesplc.com.



The definitions that apply throughout this announcement can be found later in the announcement, after section 9.



1. Introduction Crede



On 4 January 2016, the Board announced that the Company had entered into an agreement with Crede according to which Crede agreed to subscribe for new Ordinary Shares and associated Warrants to raise up to 5.0 million, with the subscription price being the closing bid price on the Trading Day prior to the date of subscription. On 6 January 2016, it was further announced that the Managers, including certain directors of the Company and their associated companies and/or trusts, as permitted by the Subscription Agreement, had agreed to invest an aggregate principal amount of 0.5 million to subscribe for Ordinary Shares at the Issue Price, together with warrants to subscribe for Ordinary Shares exercisable at 1.04 pence each, or otherwise on the same terms as the Warrants, as provided for in the Warrant Instrument and further explained below, at any time until 3 January 2021.



The Subscription Agreement provides for an investment of up to 5.0 million in the Company through the issue of Ordinary Shares to Crede in four separate tranches, occurring at 90-day intervals, with each tranche being equal to 1.25 million in quantum.



156,250,000 new Ordinary Shares, which make up the first tranche of the Subscription Shares, were issued by the Company to Crede on 4 January 2016, using the Directors' existing share issuance authorities, conditional on Admission, at the Issue Price per Ordinary Share, together with 156,250,000 Warrants to acquire Ordinary Shares in the Company exercisable at any time until 3 January 2021 at a price calculated according to the terms of the Warrant Instrument, summarised further below.



The exercise of Warrants issued to Crede on 4 January 2016 was intended to be covered by the Company's Pre-Existing Authorities. Due to a fall in the Company's share price, the Pre-Existing Authorities were insufficient to meet the conversion of the Warrants issued to Crede on 4 January 2016. In respect of the new Ordinary Shares to be issued, which could not be issued under the Pre- Existing Authorities, being 121,702,286 Ordinary Shares, the respective Warrants have been cancelled and the Company has issued to Crede 121,702,286 new Ordinary Shares under the Crede Authorities. Following the issue of the 121,702,286 new Ordinary Shares, the remaining number of Ordinary Shares which can be issued to Crede on a non-pre-emptive basis under the Crede Authorities is 949,726,714.



Following this exercise and cancellation Crede no longer holds any Warrants from the 156,250,000 issued to it under the initial subscription. Further details on the terms of the Warrants are provided in section 4 below.



Darwin Capital



On 16 May 2016, the Board announced entry into the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument with Darwin Capital according to which Darwin Capital agreed to make a loan to the Company of 650,000, and has agreed that on any single date between 16 June 2016 and 16 August 2016, the Company may request and Darwin Capital shall have the right to make an additional loan to the Company in an amount up to 350,000 (repayable on 10 October 2016 and otherwise on the same terms as the initial loan), which may be provided only with Darwin Capital's consent.



Under the terms of the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument, the Company has covenanted to pay to the order of Darwin Capital fifty (50) per cent of the outstanding principal amount of the 650,000 loan note plus accrued interest on 10 July 2016 (or earlier upon acceleration or early redemption pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument). As further explained below, in the event that the Company does not pay such amount to Darwin Capital on 10 July 2016, then amongst other things, at any time from 10 July 2016 to 10 January 2017 (the 'Conversion Period') Darwin Capital shall be entitled to convert all of the then outstanding and unpaid total principal amount of the entire loan notes and accrued interest into fully paid Ordinary Shares at the conversion rate set out in the Darwin Senior Loan Note Agreement (the 'Conversion').



2. Background Tranche I



The Tranche I Shares and Tranche I Warrants were issued on 4 January 2016 within Pre-Existing Authorities available to the Company. Subsequent issues of Subscription Shares and associated Warrants are conditional, inter alia, on sufficient share issuance authorities being approved by Shareholders.



At a general meeting of the Company held on 9 February 2016, the Directors were granted: (i) the authority to allot Subscription Shares up to an aggregate nominal amount of 1,071,429 to Crede; (ii) the authority to allot relevant securities in connection with the grant of awards to directors and officers of the Company under the Company's share appreciation rights scheme up to an aggregate nominal amount of 250,000; and (iii) the general authority to allot relevant securities up to an aggregate nominal amount of 500,000, each for a period of twelve (12) months following the General Meeting.



Pursuant to the Subscription Agreement, the Company has committed to using all reasonable endeavours to procure sufficient Shareholder authorities are in place to complete the Subscription.



Tranche II



The Tranche II Shares together with Warrants were not issued to Crede as to do so would have resulted in them holding twenty (25) per cent or more of the Ordinary Shares on a fully diluted basis, which, without the prior written consent of the Company, is a breach of the maximum investor provisions of the Subscription Agreement more fully set out below. The decision to not give consent was taken in order to reduce further dilution to existing shareholders. The cancellation of the Tranche II Shares does not affect the contractual rights and obligations between Crede and the Company in relation to the Tranche III Shares.



Tranche III



Due to the movements in the share price of the Company, the authorities granted to the Company at the general meeting of the Company held on 9 February 2016 may not be sufficient to allow the Company to issue the Tranche III Shares to Crede together with the Tranche III Warrants. In order to issue the Tranche III Shares to Crede together with the Tranche III Warrants on the next Subsequent Investment Date, being 4 July 2016, the Company is obligated under the Subscription Agreement to seek, for the reasons explained below, further authority to allot and to disapply pre-emption rights in respect of that issuance.



Darwin Conversion



The Company anticipates it will utilise part of the amount drawn down from Crede in respect of the Tranche III Shares to pay the amounts due to Darwin Capital on 10 July 2016 pursuant to the terms of the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument. In the event that the Company does not repay the amount due to Darwin Capital on 10 July 2016, either because the Company is not granted the authority in respect of the Tranche III Shares and it is unable to issue those shares to Crede or otherwise, Darwin Capital will as a result have the right to exercise the Conversion. The Company is therefore seeking the authorities to allot and to disapply pre-emption rights to issue Ordinary Shares to Darwin Capital in the event that the Company is unable to pay the amounts due to Darwin Capital on 10 July 2016 and Darwin Capital exercises the Conversion. Further details of the Conversion and the amounts payable to Darwin Capital under the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument are set out below.



Other authorities



The Company is further seeking to refresh its existing allotment authority and to disapply pre-emption rights up to an amount of 500,000 until the next annual general meeting of the Company. A summary of the Resolutions is set out below. The Directors have convened the General Meeting at which Shareholders will be asked to consider and, if thought fit, pass the Resolutions.



Purpose



The purpose of this letter is to provide you with further information on the Financing and the Resolutions seeking, inter alia, the authority to allot shares and to disapply pre-emption rights.



The amount payable for the Tranche III Shares, being the third tranche of payments due from Crede under the Subscription Agreement, is already contractually due pursuant to that Subscription Agreement and the purpose of the equity finance to the Company by Crede has already been explained both in the Company's announcement of 4 January 2016 and in the circular to shareholders of 20 January 2016. This is therefore not an additional financial requirement. The reason why authorities are now being sought for the Tranche III Shares is because of the fall in the Company's share price which has resulted in the situation that the authorities granted for the Tranche III Shares at the general meeting of 9 February 2016 are no longer sufficient.



The Loan, which was made on 16 May 2016, did also not itself represent an additional source of finance over what had already been committed and previously authorised. The investment of Tranche II Shares from Crede, which had been contractually committed in the Subscription Agreement, was cancelled and the Loan partially replaced the funds that would have been received by the Company in consideration for the Tranche II Shares together with the associated Warrants. The need for authorities in connection with the Loan arises from the term of the Loan under which in the circumstances explained below, if the Loan is not repaid on its due dates Darwin Capital has the right to the repayment of the Loan together with interest and premium by the issue of Ordinary Shares of the Company.



The cash provided through the issue of the Tranche III Shares, should this be authorised by the Shareholders, is anticipated to be used partly for the repayment of half of the Loan and the balance will be applied for the general working capital of the Company, including in particular on the Manaila Polymetallic Mine. Although the need for the authorities now requested from shareholders arises from a combination of the fall in the share price and the cancellation of Tranche II Shares and therefore supports a cash raising of less than was originally authorised at the general meeting of 9 February 2016, the overall cash required by the Company has increased for several reasons.



The recent major fall in copper and lead prices has reduced cash flow from Manaila. Cashflow has been further affected by the reduced concentrate grade at Manaila as a consequence of extreme cold weather in the first quarter of this year, and the commissioning of the second mill and flotation line to facilitate production of separate copper and zinc concentrates. Currently zinc is being recovered in the copper concentrate, which results in a penalty and lower price for the copper concentrate. The production of separate copper and zinc concentrates will result in larger concentrate quantities, better quality and higher prices.



Cash flow from Manaila and subsequently from Baita Plai had been calculated to fund a significant part of the Company's capital expenditure and this has now been reduced for the reasons described above in the case of Manaila, and in the case of Baita Plai the delay in restarting whilst awaiting the mining sub- licence. Fortunately, following the delayed completion of the merger between the Company's Romanian subsidiaries, the granting of the sub-licence at Baita Plai is now expected very soon.



3. Reasons to vote in favour of the Resolutions The Company is required to have the appropriate authorities to honour the Subscription Agreement entered into with Crede and the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument with Darwin Capital. To breach these requirements would jeopardise the Subscription and the Loan and could result in the Company not being able to complete its capital expansion objectives, thus reducing its ability to operate Manaila and Baita Plai at full capacity and preventing additional investment in other projects identified for evaluation. In addition, under the Subscription Agreement there is a positive contractual obligation on the Company to use all reasonable endeavours that it has sufficient subsisting shareholder authority to issue the Tranche III Shares and the Tranche III Warrants.



Having secured the funding from Crede and Darwin Capital, Shareholder support for the share price is now sought to ensure that the future tranche of Subscription Shares are issued at increasing, not decreasing, share prices.



In the event that the Resolutions are not passed, there would be a number of consequences including, without limitation, as set out below:



1. If Resolutions 1 and 4 are not passed with respect to the issuance of the Tranche III Shares and the Tranche III Warrants, the Company will have the right to terminate the Subscription Agreement in accordance with its terms. On termination of the Subscription Agreement all of the Company's material obligations to Crede, except the indemnity given by the Company to Crede Capital, will fall away under the terms of the Subscription Agreement*. In addition, the Company would be required to identify alternative sources of funding, which could include an open offer, to meet, among other things, its obligations to Darwin Capital under the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument. 2. If Resolutions 2 and 5 are not passed with respect to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument, the Company will not have the requisite shareholder authority to issue Relevant Securities to Darwin Capital should the Company fail to pay the amounts due on 10 July 2016 under the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument and Darwin Capital exercises the Conversion thereunder. In addition, if Resolutions 2 and 5 are not passed then, under the terms of the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument the Company will be required to promptly deposit the second half of the loan due for repayment in October 2016 into escrow which will reduce the available working capital of the Company. * The obligations of the Company to Crede under the Subscription Agreement relating to fees and expenses, notices, and confidentiality will continue after termination of the Subscription Agreement



4. The Subscription Subscription Agreement



Under the terms of the Subscription Agreement, the Company will issue Ordinary Shares to Crede, on the next Subsequent Investment Date, being 4 July 2016, with that tranche being equal to 1.25 million in quantum and with the subscription price being the closing bid price on the Trading Day prior to the date on which the Ordinary Shares are subscribed for. Crede will also be issued (following the issue of the Tranche III Shares on the next Subsequent Investment Date being 4 July 2016) with one (1) Warrant for every one (1) Subscription Share issued to it.



The Subscription Agreement includes warranties from the Company customary for an agreement of this nature and also an indemnity from the Company to Crede in relation, inter alia, to the Company's covenant to Crede that it shall use all reasonable endeavours to ensure that it has sufficient shareholder authorities in place to meet its obligations to allot and/or grant Relevant Securities free of all pre-emptive and other similar rights and restrictions at the relevant times.



The Subscription Agreement requires the Company to obtain the consent of Crede to further issues of shares other than pursuant to the Subscription Agreement or in relation to existing publicly disclosed commitments until ninety (90) days after the subscription of the fourth tranche of 1.25 million.



The allotment and/or grant of Relevant Securities pursuant to the Subscription Agreement and the Warrant Instrument, is conditional, inter alia, on there being sufficient share issuance authorities in place. The Company agreed to convene a general meeting in February 2016 (which in the event was held on 9 February 2016) and subsequent general meetings, if required, to seek authorities to issue Relevant Securities under the terms of the Subscription Agreement.



Maximum Crede Holding



Under the terms of the Subscription Agreement, Crede, without the prior written consent of the Company, shall not subscribe for any Subscription Shares on any Subsequent Investment Dates if such subscription would, if completed by Crede, when aggregated with interests it already then holds pursuant to its holding of Ordinary Shares and Warrants, result in Crede holding twenty five (25) per cent. or more of the Ordinary Shares (calculated on a fully diluted basis).



Terms of the Warrants



On the Issue Date, one (1) Warrant has been, and at each Subsequent Investment Date, one (1) Warrant will be, issued to Crede for every one (1) Subscription Share subscribed for. Each Warrant will entitle Crede to acquire new Ordinary Shares, with a five-year exercise period. The terms of the Warrants are covered in full under the Warrant Instrument entered into by the Company.



For each Warrant, Crede may either (i) subscribe for one (1) new Ordinary Share at an exercise price equal to one hundred and thirty (130) per cent. of the closing bid price on the day prior to the Issue Date or each Subsequent Investment Date; or (ii) subscribe for such number of new Ordinary Shares calculated by dividing the aggregate Black Scholes Value of the Warrants held and to be exercised by Crede by the closing bid price of Ordinary Shares on the Trading Day two (2) days prior to the date on which the notice of exercise of the Warrant(s) is issued, at a price per Ordinary Share equal to the nominal value of 0.001 per Black Scholes Conversion Share payable in full on the Trading Day the Warrant is, or Warrants are, exercised.



The Company has the right to call the Warrants to be exercised at any time if the Ordinary Share price is trading at a twenty five (25) per cent. premium to the exercise price of the Warrants described in part (i) of the above paragraph for a period of twenty (20) consecutive trading days and the average daily trading volume of Ordinary Shares during this period exceeds 200,000 in value.



Black Scholes Conversion



In the event that Crede elects to undertake a Black Scholes Conversion, the number of Warrants it wishes to convert will be valued at the Black Scholes Value, converted to an equivalent number of Ordinary Shares valued at the applicable closing bid price of the Ordinary Shares on the Trading Day two (2) days prior to the date on which Crede issues the notice to exercise the Warrant(s), and such number of Ordinary Shares will be issued to Crede and the applicable Warrants cancelled.



In such event, Crede will pay the nominal value of 0.001 per Black Scholes Conversion Share on the Trading Day of the Black Scholes Conversion.



The Directors note that the relative economic benefit to Crede of exercising the Warrants for cash versus undertaking a Black Scholes Conversion is dependent on the Company's share price. Assuming the market price of the Ordinary Shares rises, there will be a price at which the economic benefit of a conventional exercise of the Warrants exceeds the economic value received through a Black Scholes Conversion. By way of example, according to the Directors' calculations, for the Tranche 1 Warrants the economic value to Crede of conventionally exercising the Warrants exceeds the economic value derived from the Black Scholes Conversion when the market price of the Ordinary Shares exceeds approximately 1.73 pence (at an assumed risk-free rate of two (2) per cent. based approximately on the current market rate on 5-year US Treasury Bills).



Commission



For each subscription of Subscription Shares (including the Tranche I Shares) by Crede, a commission ('Commission') equal to ten (10) per cent. of the aggregate purchase price for the relevant Subscription Shares may become payable by the Company to Crede in the event that Crede subsequently subscribes for Black Scholes Conversion Shares, under the terms of the Warrant Instrument. The Commission payable shall not exceed the nominal value of 0.001 per Black Scholes Conversion Share payable in respect of the Black Scholes Conversion Shares then being issued after deduction of the commission by way of administration fee also payable on such issue (see below). The payment of such Commission is subject to further conditions and payment mechanics as detailed in the Subscription Agreement. In no circumstances will the Commission payable exceed ten (10) per cent. of the purchase price of the Ordinary Shares to which such Commission relates.



The Subscription Agreement further provides that in the event that Crede subscribes for Black Scholes Conversion Shares the Company shall also pay to Crede a commission by way of administration fee on the issue of such Black Scholes Conversion Shares equal to ten (10) per cent. of the nominal value of 0.001 payable for such shares.



5. The Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument Under the terms of the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument, Darwin Capital has agreed to make a loan to the Company of 650,000, and has agreed that on any single date between 16 June 2016 and 16 August 2016, the Company may request, and Darwin Capital shall have the right to make, an additional loan to the Company in an amount up to 350,000, which may be provided at Darwin Capital's sole discretion.



The Company promises and covenants to pay to the order of Darwin Capital: (i) fifty (50) per cent of the outstanding principal amount of the 650,000 loan note and all other payment obligations relating to this amount, including all accrued and unpaid interest on 10 July 2016, or, earlier, upon acceleration or early redemption pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument; and (ii) the outstanding principal amount of the entire loan note (including the additional 350,000 loan note) and any other payment obligations relating to this amount including all accrued and unpaid interest on 10 October 2016 or earlier, upon acceleration or early redemption pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument. Interest on the principal amount of the loan notes shall accrue at the rate of twenty (20) per cent per annum and is payable in cash arrears on 10 July 2016 (in relation to the outstanding principal amount of the 650,000 loan note and all other payment obligations relating to this amount) and on 10 October 2016 (in relation to the outstanding principal amount of the entire loan note and all other payment obligations relating to this amount). The maximum amount payable to Darwin Capital pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument on default by the Company is 877,874, payable in shares valued by reference to the share price of the Ordinary Shares on the day of Conversion.



The Company may, if they wish, prior to 10 July 2016, redeem in cash on ten (10) days' notice, the full amount of the entire loan amount outstanding for a redemption price equal to one hundred and five (105) per cent. of the then outstanding amount of the loan including all interest payable on that amount.



In the event that (i) fifty (50) per cent. of the principal amount of the initial 650,000 loan note and all interest accrued thereon is not paid in full on 10 July 2016 by the Company (the 'First Default') or (ii) the remainder of the principal amount of the entire loan note and other payment obligations are not paid in full on 10 October 2016 by the Company, on the day following 10 July 2016 or 10 October 2016 (as applicable) (the 'Second Default'): (i) the principal amount of the entire loan notes shall be one hundred and twenty (120) per cent. of all outstanding payment obligations; (ii) the maturity date of the entire loan notes shall be extended to 10 January 2017 (if the First Default occurs) or 10 April 2017 (if the Second Default occurs) (each such period being the day following 10 July 2016 and 10 January 2017 or the day following 10 October 2016 and 10 April 2017, as applicable, being the 'Conversion Period'); and (iii) interest shall continue to accrue in respect of the principal amount during the Conversion Period.



At any time during the Conversion Period, Darwin Capital shall be entitled to convert all of the then outstanding and unpaid total principal amount of the entire loan notes and accrued interest into fully paid Ordinary Shares at the conversion rate, being the principal amount and accrued interest being converted, divided by the conversion price (being an amount calculated with reference to the average price of an Ordinary Share on 16 May 2016 or the price of an Ordinary Share in the twenty (20) trading days prior to the expiry of the Conversion Period).



The Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument provides that in the event that the Company has less than 600,000,000 authorised and unissued Ordinary Shares available for issue on 1 July 2016 then, following the earlier of 10 July 2016 or the day the 1.25 million is received from Crede in consideration for the issue of Tranche III Shares, the Company shall promptly deposit the second half of the loan due for repayment in October 2016 pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument into escrow.



Pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument, the Company undertakes to Darwin Capital, so long as any part of the loan to the Company is outstanding, to comply with the obligations to Crede (including the issue of shares) in relation to Tranche III to satisfy any payment obligations of the Company under the Darwin Senior Loan Instrument.



The Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument contains warranties given by the Company to Crede which are customary for an agreement of this nature.



6. Interim Results The Company released its interim results on 31 December 2015 for the six (6) months ended 30 September 2015.



7. Operational Update Zimbabwe



Pickstone-Peerless Gold Mine ('PPGM') (50% owned)



PPGM is producing higher than expected grades and milling tonnages are significantly above the original design capacity of the plant. In April and May 2016, the total tonnage milled has exceeded twenty thousand (20,000) tonnes per month in both months, producing in excess of two thousand nine hundred (2,900) ounces of gold during this period.



A better understanding of the ore bodies is being developed as the open pits are expanded and the grade control drilling provides additional information to that obtained from the resource definition drilling during the feasibility study stage. Additional potential ore sources are also being evaluated within the existing mining lease.



Co-operation between mine management, the artisanal miners, and the authorities has seen the artisanal miners relocated to other areas and the mine able to operate throughout the mine lease area.



PPGM's stakeholders may be considering improvements and additions to the existing oxide plant which would form part of the expansion of the processing facilities that will handle the higher-grade sulphide ore to be mined when the oxide resources are depleted.



The newly promoted General Manger, formerly the Plant Manager, and the newly appointed Mining Manager, have settled in very well and a cohesive and enthusiastic team has emerged at PPGM.



Giant Gold Mine ('GGM') (50% owned)



The success and progress at PPGM has encouraged the Company and Grayfox to consider developing GGM where there is currently an inferred resource circa half a million ounces of gold. We have secured additional information from third parties and further exploration drilling now needs to be undertaken in order to upgrade and increase the known level of resources at the mine. Artisanal miners working in the area will need to be relocated and consultations with their representatives have commenced. GGM provides the Company with the potential to develop a second significant gold mine. Management will now focus on this objective.



Romania



Manaila Polymetallic Mine ('MPM') (50.1% owned)



MPM achieved a reasonable performance in its first quarter of operation ended December 2015. The second quarter ended March 2016 has seen the mine face a number of challenges that have impacted performance. These challenges, summarised below, are being addressed:



1. Extreme cold weather in January and February 2016 affected recoveries as the heating of the flotation facility and cells was not adequate and it was not possible to upgrade the heating system in time. The heating system will be upgraded for the next winter. It is often the practice to cease operations during the extreme cold periods, however, the Company elected to continue production in order to instil a culture of 'the mill never stops' apart from maintenance and breakdowns. 2. With a single mill and float line operational, MPM was producing a single copper concentrate with a high zinc concentration. The zinc incurred a penalty on the price of the concentrate and no credit/payment was received for the zinc and lead. 3. A second mill and flotation circuit existed at the plant, but both required significant refurbishment and upgrading. In addition, the already working mill had to be relined for the first time during this period. 4. The refurbishment of the flotation circuit is designed to produce a separate copper and zinc concentrate in order to remove the penalty in the copper concentrate and to receive value for a zinc concentrate. It is expected that this will be operational by late June 2016. 5. Tests undertaken at the technical university in nearby Cluj-Napoca indicated that a change in reagents and the separated flotation circuits should result in improved recoveries, a clean copper concentrate, and a second zinc concentrate. However, initial application of the test outcomes to the plant did not achieve the results expected. 6. Following these various further tests, an analysis has been undertaken on the recommendation of polymetallic metallurgical consultants and the consultants are now on site at MPM to assist management in achieving improved recoveries and separated concentrates. The enlarged prospecting licence granted to MPM, as announced on 30 March 2016, will allow the Company to evaluate whether it is possible to extend the open pit resources at the mine, and to extend the open pit mine life, which could provide MPM with the ability to install a new milling and flotation facility at the mine thereby saving transport costs on the ore and waste between the mine and the processing facility at Iacobeni.



Baita Plai Polymetallic Mine ('BPPM') (80% owned)



The delay in obtaining the right to mine at BPPM has been very frustrating for the Company. Not only has it delayed cash flow generation from what management believes to be the Company's most valuable asset, but also monthly dewatering and maintenance costs are being incurred. The Company remains wholly confident that it will obtain its due right to mine at BPPM, but it has had little control over the speed of the judicial process or over the bureaucratic delays within state owned Baita SA and the Ministry of Economy.



In order to assist shareholders to form an assessment of where the Company stands in relation to this it may be helpful to outline in somewhat more detail than would be customary the processes and events that have been experienced to date and the final steps that yet lie ahead.



Prior to the Company's involvement, Mineral Mining SA ('MM'), the original holder of the head-licence at BPPM, was in administration and by reason thereof was forced to transfer the head-licence to Baita SA, the local state owned mining company, against an undertaking by Baita SA to grant a sub-licence (known in Romania as an association) back to MM should MM become solvent (the 'Protocol').



After the Company became interested in BPPM through an option over shares in MM it received the following local legal advice:



1. The way to satisfy the condition of the Protocol as to solvency, MM having been adjudicated bankrupt, was to merge MM with the Company's Romanian subsidiary, African Consolidated Resources SRL ('AFCR'), under a little used part of the Romanian Insolvency Code whereby MM was subsumed within AFCR and ceased to exist as an independent company. 2. When the solvency condition was satisfied, AFCR then had an enforceable right against Baita SA for a sub-licence. 3. In any case the Protocol was void ab initio for several reasons. 4. Notwithstanding the advice that the Protocol was void, the swiftest way to obtain the right to mine at BPPM was to follow the Protocol and obtain contractual engagement by following the merger process. The legal process for the merger was started in February 2015 and at the time specialist insolvency lawyers advised AFCR that the process should be complete by May 2015. It was on this basis that the purchase of BPPM went ahead.



In the event, the previous management of Baita SA were uncooperative and the whole legal process - which involved eighteen (18) separate court hearings - was spun out until a final non-appealable Court of Appeal decision was reached in November 2015 finally confirming the merger (announced 30 November 2015) and the termination of the bureaucratic process following this decision only occurred in February 2016.



While the legal proceedings were taking their course, the Company was attempting in parallel to bypass the legal process by negotiation with government. The miners' sit-in (announced 26 August 2015) provided an opportunity to meet with the President of the Romanian National Mining Agency, a Secretary of State at the Ministry of Economy and the Minister of Economy who between them promised a swift resolution of the matter by agreement (see announcement 2 September 2015). This resulted in a new agreement, independent of the litigation, announced on 23 November 2015.



Unfortunately, shortly after this the then government was removed and the Secretary of State and the Minister of Economy were replaced. The new Minister and Secretary were not familiar with the background of the situation, and it has taken a long time to promote a proper understanding of the facts.



Since February 2016 there has been new management at Baita SA, and it has become evident to the Company that there is now no opposition in principle from any quarter to the Company receiving the sub-licence. The new Secretary of State verbally confirmed to the Company in February 2016 that the sub-licence would be granted upon clarification of the current position which would take up to sixty (60) days, thus giving the Company the expectation of delivery no later than April 2016.



Notwithstanding this, progress has however remained disappointingly slow. The following are examples of the reasons:



1. One of the senior directors of Baita SA was in hospital or incapacitated for some five (5) weeks, which meant that under the bureaucratic Romanian system Baita SA was not able to hold any Board meetings at all during that period. 2. Meetings at the Ministry of Economy have taken a long time to arrange due to other pressures on Ministry officials and the straightforward difficult of finding times when one key official or another was not absent on holiday or on assignments. 3. Officials at the Ministry of Economy, whilst accepting the principle of the grant of the sub-licence pursuant to the Protocol, had no clear understanding of the detail involved and seemed to be acting on different information than that known to be factual by the Company. 4. More particularly, the previous management of Baita SA had materially overcharged for dewatering costs prior to the Company's involvement. The amount that will become immediately legally due to Baita SA by MM on grant to MM (now AFCR) of the sub-licence is subject to a judicial audit that is still ongoing. However, in the interim the court has ordered that the maximum amount due and payable immediately on the grant of the sub-licence is approximately Lei 2.5m (a.$620,000) and AFCR have offered to pay this sum into an escrow account against delivery of the sub-licence. 5. However in Baita SA's official accounts there is an amount shown as due and payable of c.Lei 6.9m. The current management of Baita SA accept that only Lei 2.5m is legally immediately due on grant of the sub-licence, but that fact has never been communicated to the section of the Ministry of Economy within whose remit the shares in Baita SA lie, which even now officially has only seen the accounts of Baita SA showing a Lei 6.9m liability apparently due and payable immediately. The Ministry has had no understanding as to why AFCR should not be paying Lei 6.9m or why even the Lei 2.5m is only payable against the grant of the sub-licence. The lack of provision of this information about the Baita SA accounts has only been revealed to the Company in the last week and clearly provides a reason for the lack of understanding in the Ministry.



The up to date position is that Baita SA has now mandated its General Manager to confirm the current position officially in writing to the relevant section of the Ministry of Economy. The Company is in advanced discussions to procure the additional funding required for the deposit in the escrow on terms which are currently considered acceptable to the Company.



The Company believes that official clarification of the agreed facts with the assistance of Baita SA for the benefit of the Ministry of Economy should deliver real progress. It is intended that Lei 2.5m be placed in a suitable bank account on escrow in order to secure the immediate obligations that will arise on receipt of the sub-licence so that the sub-licence can be issued without delay.



8. General Meeting The Notice of General Meeting posted to Shareholders convening the General Meeting to be held at the offices of Paul Hastings (Europe) LLP, Ten Bishops Square, Eighth Floor, London E1 6EG at 2.30 pm on Friday 1 July 2016 proposes the following Resolutions described below.



Authority to grant relevant securities pursuant to the Subscription Agreement



An ordinary resolution (Resolution 1) is being proposed in order to authorise the Directors to grant Relevant Securities to Crede or its nominees in connection with the payment of 1,250,000 due by Crede for the Tranche III Shares in accordance with section 551 of the Act up to an aggregate nominal value of 1,250,000. The section 551 authority granted therein will expire on 10 July 2016.



Authority to grant relevant securities pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument



An ordinary resolution (Resolution 2) is being proposed in order to authorise the Directors to grant Relevant Securities to Darwin Capital (or its nominees) in connection with the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument in accordance with section 551 of the Act up to an aggregate nominal value of 600,000. The section 551 authority granted therein will expire at the conclusion of the next annual general meeting of the Company.



General authority to allot relevant securities



An ordinary resolution (Resolution 3) is being proposed in order to grant general authority in accordance with section 551 of the Act to the Directors to allot Relevant Securities (other than pursuant to Resolutions 1 and 2) up to an aggregate nominal value of 500,000. The section 551 authority granted therein will expire at the conclusion of the next annual general meeting of the Company.



Disapplication of pre-emption rights



The provisions of section 561(1) of the Act to the extent that they are not disapplied, confer on shareholders rights of pre-emption in respect of the allotment of equity securities which are, or are to be, paid up wholly in cash.



Accordingly, a special resolution (Resolution 4) is being proposed to disapply statutory pre-emption provisions in connection with the allotment of equity securities to Crede (or its nominees), in connection with the Subscription, up to an aggregate nominal value of 1,250,000. The authority granted therein will expire on 10 July 2016.



A special resolution (Resolution 5) is being proposed to disapply statutory pre- emption provisions in connection with the allotment of equity securities to Darwin Capital (or its nominees) in connection with the Loan up to an aggregate nominal value of 600,000. The authority granted therein will expire at the conclusion of the next annual general meeting of the Company.



A special resolution (Resolution 6) is being proposed to disapply statutory pre- emption provisions in connection with the allotment of equity securities in connection with a Rights Issue (as defined in the Notice of General Meeting which forms part of this Circular) and more generally pursuant to the authority that is sought under Resolution 3, up to an aggregate nominal value of 500,000. The authority granted therein will expire at the conclusion of the next annual general meeting of the Company.



9. Recommendation The Directors believe that the Subscription, and the passing of the Resolutions are in the best interests of the Company and Shareholders, taken as a whole. The Directors unanimously recommend the Shareholders to vote in favour of the Resolutions as they and their 'associates' have undertaken to do, in the case of Resolution 1, as a requirement of the Subscription Agreement, in respect of their own beneficial holdings of Ordinary Shares representing, in aggregate, 301,181,086 Ordinary Shares, being approximately 12.24 per cent. of the issued ordinary share capital of the Company at the date of this announcement.



Definitions



The following definitions apply throughout this announcement unless the context otherwise requires:



'Act' the Companies Act 2006 (as amended)



'Additional Financing Shares' the 62,500,000 Ordinary Shares subscribed for by the Managers pursuant to the Additional Financing



'Additional Financing' the subscription for the Additional Financing Shares made on 5 January 2016 for 0.5 million at the Issue Price (together with associated warrants) by the Managers



'Admission' the admission of the Tranche III Shares to trading on AIM becoming effective in accordance with the AIM Rules



'AIM Rules' the AIM Rules for Companies governing the admission to and operation of AIM published by the London Stock Exchange as amended from time to time



'AIM' the market of that name operated by the London Stock Exchange



'Articles' the articles of association of the Company (as amended from time to time)



'associate' shall in respect of a Manager, bear the meaning ascribed to it in paragraph (c) of the definition of 'related party' in the AIM Rules as if the relevant Manager fell within paragraphs (a) and/or (b) of such definition, or as otherwise publicly disclosed by the Company as being 'associated' companies of a Manager, and 'associated' shall be construed accordingly



'Baita Plai' or the Baita Plai polymetallic mine in 'Baita Plai Polymetallic Mine' Transylvania, Romania



'Black Scholes Conversion Shares' Ordinary Shares to be issued to Crede pursuant to a Black Scholes Conversion



'Black Scholes Conversion' a subscription by Crede for Ordinary Shares in the Company pursuant to a conversion of Warrants into Ordinary Shares at the nominal value of 0.001 per Black Scholes Conversion Share in accordance with the Warrant Instrument



'Black Scholes Value' or 'Warrant the value of a Warrant calculated using Conversion Value' the Black-Scholes model as developed in 1973 by Fischer Black, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, using the Economic Research Institute's Black Scholes calculator, where the volatility shall be 135 per cent., the term of the Warrants shall be deemed to be 60 months (regardless of the then actual remaining term of the Warrants), the stock price shall be the closing bid price per Ordinary Share on the Trading Day immediately preceding the Issue Date or the Subsequent Investment Date (the 'Relevant Closing Share Price') and the option price shall be 130 per cent. of the Relevant Closing Share Price



'Board' or 'the Directors' the directors of the Company, as at the date of this announcement



'City Code' the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers



'Closing Share Price' the closing bid price per Ordinary Share on the Trading Day immediately prior to the Issue Date and each Subsequent Investment Date, as applicable, as shown by the London Stock Exchange Daily Official List for such Trading Day



'Conversion' has the meaning given to it in Paragraph 1 (Introduction) of this announcement



'Conversion Period' has the meaning given to it in Paragraph 1 (Introduction) of this announcement



'Crede Authorities' the authorities granted to the Company in respect of the Crede Funding, as approved by shareholders at the General Meeting of 9 February 2016



'Crede' Crede CG III Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Crede Group, LLC, a company incorporated in Bermuda and whose registered office is at Clarendon House, 2 Church Street, Hamilton HM11, Bermuda



'Crede Funding' Subscription by Crede for new Ordinary Shares for an aggregate subscription amount of up to 5 million and the issue of associated warrants on the terms set out in the company's announcement on 4 January 2016



'CREST' the relevant system (as defined in the Uncertified Securities Regulations 2001 (SI 2001 No 3875)) for the paperless settlement of trades and the holding of uncertificated securities, operated by Euroclear UK & Ireland Limited, in accordance with the same regulations



'Darwin Capital' Darwin Capital Limited, a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands (Registration No. QH-282152) which has its registered office at Suite #7, Grand Pavillion Commercial Centre, 802 West Bay Road, Grand Cayman, PO Box 10250, KYI - 1003, Cayman Islands



'Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument' the senior loan note instrument dated 16 May 2016 and made between the Company and Darwin Capital Limited



'Enlarged Share Capital' the issued ordinary share capital of the Company as enlarged by the issue of the Tranche I Shares and the Additional Financing Shares



'FCA' the Financial Conduct Authority of the UK



'Financing' the Subscription and the Loan



'Form of Proxy' the form of proxy which accompanies the Notice of General Meeting, for use in respect of the General Meeting



'FSMA' the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (as amended) and regulations made pursuant thereto



'GBP' or '' Pounds sterling, being the lawful currency of the UK



'General Meeting' the general meeting of the Company, convened for 2.30pm on Friday 1 July 2016, notice of which has been posted to shareholders



'Grayfox' Grayfox Investments (Private) Limited



'Group' together the Company and its subsidiary undertakings



'HMRC' Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs



'Issue Date' 4 January 2016



'Issue Price' 0.8 pence per New Ordinary Share



'Loan' the initial loan and any additional loan on the terms agreed between the Company and Darwin Capital pursuant to the Darwin Senior Loan Note Instrument



'London Stock Exchange' London Stock Exchange plc



'Managers' includes the Directors, senior executives and/or consultants of the Company or its subsidiaries who participated in the Additional Financing, including companies or trusts associated with such individuals, further details of which are set out above



'Manaila' or 'Manaila Polymetallic the Manaila polymetallic mine in Suceava Mine' County, Northern Romania



'Notice of General Meeting' or the notice convening the General Meeting 'Notice' as has been posted to shareholders



'Official List' the Official List of the UKLA



'Ordinary Shares' the 2,459,888,916 ordinary shares of 0.001 each in the capital of the Company in issue as at the date of this announcement



'Pre-Existing Authorities' the Company's authority to dis-apply pre-emption rights in respect of the issue of new Ordinary Shares which was in place prior to the General Meeting on 9 February 2016



'Prospectus Rules' the rules made by the FCA pursuant to sections 73A(1) and (4) of FSMA



'Record Date' 29 June 2016



'Registrar' Capita Asset Services PXS, 34 Beckenham Road, Beckenham, Kent BR3 4TU



'Regulatory Information Service' a service approved by the London Stock Exchange for the distribution to the public of AIM announcements and included within the list on the website of the London Stock Exchange



'Relevant Closing Share Price' has the meaning given within the definition of 'Black Scholes Value' or 'Warrant Conversion Value' above



'Relevant Securities' Ordinary Shares and/or rights to subscribe for or convert any security into Ordinary Shares



'Resolutions' the resolutions to be proposed at the General Meeting as set out in the Notice of General Meeting



'Shareholders' the registered holders of ordinary shares in the capital of the Company



'Strand Hanson' Strand Hanson Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales with registered number 2780169, whose registered office is at 26 Mount Row, London W1K 3SQ, the Company's nominated and financial adviser



'Subscription Agreement' the agreement dated 4 January 2016 between the Company and Crede relating to the Subscription



'Subscription Shares' the Ordinary Shares subscribed for and to be subscribed for by Crede pursuant to the Subscription Agreement, including the Tranche III Shares



'Subscription' the subscription on the terms agreed between the Company and Crede pursuant to the Subscription Agreement



'Subsequent Investment Date' each 90 day anniversary of the Issue Date, or, if any such date is not a Trading Day, the next following Trading Day, and save as varied in accordance with the Subscription Agreement



'Trading Day' a day on which dealings in domestic equity market securities may take place on AIM



'Tranche I Shares' the Subscription Shares issued to Crede on the Issue Date pursuant to the Subscription Agreement



'Tranche I Warrants' the Warrants issued to Crede on the Issue Date pursuant to the Subscription Agreement



'Tranche II Shares' the Subscription Shares that were to be issued to Crede on the Subsequent Investment Date immediately following the Issue Date pursuant to the Subscription Agreement



'Tranche III Shares' the Subscription Shares to be issued to Crede, conditional on Admission, on the next Subsequent Investment Date being 4 July 2016



'Tranche III Warrants' the Warrants to be issued to Crede on the next Subsequent Investment Date being 4 July 2016



'UK' the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland



'UKLA' the FCA acting in its capacity as the competent authority for the purposes of Part VI of FSMA



'US$', 'USD' or 'Dollar' United States of America dollars, being the lawful currency of the USA



'Vast' or 'Company' Vast Resources plc, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 05414325



'Warrant Instrument' the warrant instrument dated 4 January 2016 constituting the Warrants



'Warrants' the warrants to subscribe for Ordinary Shares issuable under the Warrant Instrument, including the Tranche III Warrants



** ENDS **



For further information visit www.vastresourcesplc.com or please contact: Vast Resources PLC



Roy Pitchford (Chief Executive Officer) +40 (0) 372 988 988 - Romania Office +40 (0) 741 111 900 - Romania Mobile +44 (0) 7793 909 985 - UK Mobile



Strand Hanson Ltd - Financial & Nominated www.strandhanson.co.uk Adviser +44 (0) 20 7409 3494 James Spinney James Bellman



Daniel Stewart and Company PLC - Joint www.danielstewart.co.uk Broker +44 (0) 20 7776 6550 Martin Lampshire David Coffman



Dowgate Capital Stockbrokers Ltd - Joint www.dowgatecapitalstockbrokers.co.uk Broker +44 (0) 1293 517744 Jason Robertson Neil Badger



St Brides Partners Ltd www.stbridespartners.co.uk Susie Geliher +44 (0) 20 7236 1177 Charlotte Heap



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: Vast Resources plc via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2021063]



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16 June 2016 AIM: AAU



EXPLORATION UPDATE - KIZILTEPE



Ariana Resources plc ('Ariana' or 'the Company'), the gold exploration and development company operating in Turkey, is pleased to provide an update on exploration of the Kiziltepe Sector of the Red Rabbit Gold-Silver Project in Western Turkey ('Red Rabbit'). Kiziltepe is being advanced towards production through a 50:50 Joint Venture ('JV') with Proccea Construction Co. ('Proccea'). The project is on target for first production in late H2 2016.



Highlights:



* New vein system discovered near the boundary of the waste-rock dump site at Kiziltepe: initial sampling has returned rock-chip grades including 5.27g/t Au + 21.5g/t Ag, 4.87g/t Au + 8.0g/t Ag, 2.01g/t Au + 10.6g/t Ag, with more detailed mapping and sampling underway.



* Planning for the drilling programme in July and August is at an advanced stage and environmental permissions to drill have been granted.



* Drilling contract to be finalised imminently and team preparing drill-sites in advance.



* Karakavak operating licence recently renewed until mid-2020, enabling the Company to drill within this prospect area; advanced planning for drilling at this location to commence.



Dr. Kerim Sener, Managing Director, commented:



'We are very pleased to report on progress of our Summer exploration programme at Kiziltepe, which will be focused on drilling extensions to the current resource with the objective of further resource growth. In addition to the Exploration Target we have already developed at Arzu Central, which will be tested in the upcoming drilling programme, we are excited by the discovery of a new vein system near the boundary of the waste-rock dump site (Figure 1). This vein system was revealed as a result of earthmoving activity at that location. Initial sampling from this area has returned several high-grade rock-chip results, which are now being followed up. Due to its proximity to the waste- rock area, we are planning on initial drill-testing at this locality towards the end of the 2016 drilling programme. We are also very pleased to have been granted a significant extension to our operating licence for the Karakavak prospect, located 10km to the northeast of Kiziltepe, enabling us to drill at this locality for the first time.'



Figure 1, which can be accessed by clicking on or pasting the following link into your web browser: http://hugin.info/138153/R/2020997/750748.pdf is a summary map of planned 2016 drilling target areas and gold-silver prospects within the Kiziltepe Sector of the Red Rabbit Project.



Contacts:



Ariana Resources plc Tel: +44 (0) 20 7407 3616



Michael de Villiers, Chairman



Kerim Sener, Managing Director



Beaumont Cornish Limited Tel: +44 (0) 20 7628 3396



Roland Cornish / Felicity Geidt



Beaufort Securities Limited Tel: +44 (0) 20 7382 8300



Jon Belliss



Panmure Gordon (UK) Limited Tel: +44 (0) 20 7886 2500



Adam James / Tom Salvesen



Editors' Notes:



Dr Kerim Sener, BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD, is the Managing Director of Ariana Resources plc. A graduate of the University of Southampton in Geology, he also holds a Master's degree from the Royal School of Mines (Imperial College, London) in Mineral Exploration and a doctorate from the University of Western Australia. He is a Fellow of The Geological Society of London and has worked in geological research and mineral consultancy in Africa, Australia and Europe. He has read and approved the technical disclosure in this regulatory announcement.



About Ariana Resources:



Ariana is an exploration and development company focused on epithermal gold- silver and porphyry copper-gold deposits in Turkey. The Company is developing a portfolio of prospective licences selected on the basis of its in-house geological and remote-sensing database, on its own in western Turkey and in Joint Venture with Eldorado Gold Corporation in north-eastern Turkey. Eldorado owns 51% of this joint venture and are fully funding all exploration work on the JV properties, while Ariana owns 49%. The total resource inventory within this JV is 1.09 million ounces of gold.



The Company's flagship assets are its Kiziltepe and Tavsan gold projects which form the Red Rabbit Gold Project. Both contain a series of prospects, within two prolific mineralised districts in the Western Anatolian Volcanic and Extensional (WAVE) Province in western Turkey. This Province hosts the largest operating gold mines in Turkey and remains highly prospective for new porphyry and epithermal deposits. These core projects, which are separated by a distance of 75km, are being assessed as to their economic merits and now form part of a Joint Venture with Proccea Construction Co. The Kiziltepe Sector of the Red Rabbit Project is fully-permitted and is currently in construction. The total resource inventory at the Red Rabbit Project and wider project area stands at c. 525,000 ounces of gold equivalent.



Beaufort Securities Limited and Panmure Gordon (UK) Limited are joint brokers to the Company and Beaumont Cornish Limited is the Company's Nominated Adviser.



For further information on Ariana you are invited to visit the Company's website at www.arianaresources.com.



Ends



Figure 1: http://hugin.info/138153/R/2020997/750748.pdf



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: Ariana Resources plc via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2020997]



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BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- XebiaLabs (http://www.xebialabs.com), a recognized leader in DevOps and Continuous Delivery software tools, today announced the opening of its DevOps Leadership Summit at the iconic EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The DevOps Leadership Summit is a full day event bringing together some of the most advanced DevOps experts sharing best practices and enterprise case studies. The event features industry thought leaders and authors Dave Farley and Andrew Phillips, along with DevOps experts from companies such as ING, KPN, NJM Insurance Group, Rabobank, DUO, Stater and Wirecard.

"We are excited to bring together such an exceptional group of industry experts and welcome our customers from around the world," said Derek Langone, CEO of XebiaLabs. "Attendees will have the opportunity to learn from some of the most experienced Continuous Delivery experts, discuss complex enterprise DevOps use cases and network with their peers throughout the event."

The event opens today, June 16th 2016 at 9am. To view the full agenda and learn more about the DevOps Leadership Summit, please visit www.xebialabs.com/devops-leadership-summit/.

About XebiaLabs

XebiaLabs develops enterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and DevOps software, providing companies with the visibility, automation and control they need to deliver software faster and with less risk. Global market leaders rely on XebiaLabs to meet the increasing demand for accelerated and more reliable software releases. For more information, please visit http://www.xebialabs.com.

Media Contact:



Victor Cruz

Principal

MediaPR

vcruz@mediapr.net




Sadayoshi Yokoyama, Toshiko Watanabe DENSO CORPORATION Phone: 81-566-25-5594 Fax: 81-566-25-4509 sadayoshi_yokoyama@denso.co.jp toshiko_watanabe@denso.co.jp

KARIYA, JAPAN, June 16, 2016 - (JCN Newswire) - DENSO Corporation has formulated ECO VISION 2025, its 10-year environmental policy and action plan to help resolve environmental and energy issues and conduct business in harmony with nature. DENSO's ECO VISION policy, which was first launched in 1997, has been in place for nearly 20 years.In fiscal 2015, DENSO achieved its fiscal 2016 targets for CO2 emissions with a reduction of 66% based on its basic unit,(1) compared with fiscal 1991, and with a reduction of 19% on a global basis compared with fiscal 2011.DENSO's ECO VISION 2025 outlines three targets (Target 3) to be achieved by 2025 and also outlines 10 specific action plans (Action 10) to achieve these targets in the areas of products, factories, employees, and management.Energy 1/2Contribute to permanent maintenance of global environment by the technologies that can solve the problems of global warming, energy and resources.DENSO will attempt to halve automotive CO2 emissions by developing new technologies and products to improve fuel efficiency and use various fuels in vehicles.Moreover, at its factories, DENSO will implement Energy Just-in-Time (JIT) activities and logistic control to respond to fluctuations in production, thereby cutting its energy consumption and reducing CO2 emissions by half.Clean x 2Comply with laws and promote continuous improvement in order to provide reassurance to all stakeholders and remain a corporation that grows with the society.To gain the confidence of all stakeholders, DENSO will continuously strive to improve ways to halve the impacts of environmentally hazardous substances that it uses and its industrial emissions and waste. DENSO will also contribute to improving air quality in the regions where it operates by developing technology to reduce vehicle exhaust emissions, as well as decrease waste and water usage at its factories and throughout its logistics chain. Moreover, DENSO will provide its employees with a wider range of environmental learning programs to encourage them to become more aware of the global environment and take action to help create a sustainable society.Green x 2Realize a society with sharing nature's wisdom and benefit in order to take over rich natural environment to the next generation through cooperate activity aiming at symbiosis with nature.To pass on a rich natural environment to future generations, DENSO will promote green environmental businesses, such as biofuel research and agricultural support, and enhance factory greening to conduct business in harmony with nature. In each of its operating regions and companies, DENSO will implement social action programs and hold events under the theme of the environment to encourage its employees to raise their environmental awareness and engage in environmental activities. Furthermore, DENSO will help build environmentally friendly communities.Through the activities stated in DENSO ECO VISION 2025, DENSO will create new environmental values, preserve the planet, and prepare a bright future for future generations.(1) Basic unit = CO2 emissions divided by sales)Related linksDENSO ECO VISION 2025: http://www.globaldenso.com/en/ecovision/CSR Report 2015: http://www.globaldenso.com/en/csr/report/2015/About DensoDENSO Corporation, 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 and employs nearly 140,000 people. Consolidated global sales for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2014, totaled US$39.8 billion. Last fiscal year, DENSO spent 9 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.densomediacenter.com.Source: DensoContact:Copyright 2016 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
ANTWERP, Belgium, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Independent Research Recognizes Scriptura Engage as a Strong Performer

Inventive Designers announced today that Forrester Research Inc. has recognized their customer communications management (CCM) platform Scriptura Engage as a Strong Performer.

In its June 2016 report "The Forrester Wave': Customer Communications Management, Q2 2016" the firm states that "Scriptura Engage is a good short list candidate for point-of-service communications and general correspondence".

For inclusion in this evaluation, the software solutions must support all three document segments (interactive, on demand and structured); have innovative solutions or significant market share; and generate strong customer interest. All solutions, including Scriptura Engage, were assessed on different criteria including product functionality; as well as product strategy and installed base.

Scriptura Engage received its highest scores in the evaluation for the CCM product strategy, industry and global reach, document input, design and creation, and business, collaboration and channel support criteria. Style and brand governance through an asset repository, resulted in the highest score for the user interaction with document system criterion.

Based on its scores in the evaluation, Inventive Designers was positioned as a strong performer. "Scriptura Engage is architecturally modern" writes author Craig Le Clair in the report.

"We're enthusiastic to enter the Wave report as a Strong Performer, because we believe it affirms our strategy and roadmap," said David Geleyn, Product Manager for Scriptura Engage "Our technology is helping the strategic CIO to simplify the legacy for customer communications in a complex environment, while partnering with the line-of business owners to provide better customer experience."

"We are proud to be a Strong Performer in the Wave," adds Klaas Bals, CEO. "Scriptura Engage is the proof that strong solutions delivered by very specialized and compact teams can compete with established players. Some companies are looking for other solutions in the area of document output and customer communications. We believe we offer a proven, open and future-proof alternative to the established Leaders in the market."

About Scriptura Engage:

Scriptura Engage helps companies in banking, insurance and utilities improve their transactional customer communications by automating and simplifying the creation, delivery and interactivity of communications. It helps companies converting from pure print to multichannel and giving business users autonomy in - usually very IT and legacy bounded - tasks.

The software suite allows you to improve communication processes, reduce costs, and deliver highly relevant communications.

Scriptura Engage is developed by Inventive Designers, a Belgian based company operating in 32 countries and active on the market for over 20 years.

Learn more at https://www.scripturaengage.com/analyst-report/forrester-wave-2016

Contact:

Joke Dehond

+32-34254000 (US 011-3234254000)

jdehond@inventivegroup.com


PRAG (dpa-AFX) - Czech producer prices continued to decline in May, though at a slower-than-expected pace, figures from the Czech Statistical Office showed Thursday. The industrial producer price index fell 4.8 percent year-over-year in May, just below economists' expectations for a 4.9 percent decrease. However, it was worse than the 4.7 percent drop in April. Among the main industrial groupings, prices of energy plunged the most by 10.2 percent annually. At the same time, construction work prices climbed 1.0 percent. On a monthly basis, producer prices went up 0.4 percent in May. Separately, the statistical office announced that import prices declined at a faster pace of 7.1 percent yearly in April, following a 5.9 percent fall a month ago. The decline was largely driven by a 35.4 percent slump in mineral fuels, lubricants and related product prices. Month-on-month, import prices dropped 0.3 percent in April, reversing a 0.2 percent rise in the preceding month. Export prices slipped 4.7 percent annually and by 0.3 percent monthly in April. 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.
Elects Jacques de Saussure as Chairman

WALTHAM, Massachusetts, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --EuroSite Power Inc. (OTCQX: EUSP, the "Company"), an On-Site Utility solutions provider, offering clean electricity, heat, hot water and cooling solutions to healthcare, hospitality, housing and leisure centers in the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe, is pleased to announce Mr. Jacques de Saussure will join the board of directors and has been elected Chairman effective July 1, 2016.

Dr. Elias Samaras, EuroSite Power's Chief Executive Officer noted, "We are thrilled to welcome Jacques de Saussure to our board and look forward to benefitting from his expert guidance during our next phase of growth as he takes over as board Chairman. Mr. de Saussure's decades of experience in the European financial industry will be a wonderful resource as we deploy EuroSite Power's On-Site Utility model to the European continent."

An expert in asset management and wealth management, Mr. de Saussure joined Pictet Group in 1980 and was elected partner in 1987. He served as Senior Managing Partner of the Pictet Group from 2010 until June 2016. Founded in Geneva in 1805, Pictet is today one of Europe's leading independent wealth and asset managers, with EUR 437 billion of assets under management and custody as of year-end 2015.

Mr. de Saussure is a member of the board of the Swiss Bankers Association, and has also served as vice chairman of the Swiss Stock Exchange, which merged into SIX group in 2008, where he remained member of the board until 2010. He attended the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and graduated with a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in 1975 before going on to obtain a Master's degree from MIT's Sloan School of Management in 1978.

Dr. Samaras, who has been acting interim Chairman of the board, will remain Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Company's board of directors.

On-Site Utility

EuroSite Power sells the energy produced from an onsite energy system to an individual property as an alternative to the outright sale of energy equipment. On-Site Utility solution customers only pay for the energy produced by the system and receive a guaranteed discount rate on the price of the energy. All system capital, installation, operating expenses and support are paid by EuroSite Power.

About EuroSite Power

EuroSite Power Inc. is committed to providing institutional, commercial and small industrial facilities with clean, reliable power, cooling, heat and hot water at lower costs than charged by conventional energy suppliers - without any capital or start-up costs to the energy user - through On-Site Utility energy solutions.For more information about our unique efficient power solutions please visit www.eurositepower.co.uk and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, as disclosed on the Company's website and in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015. This press release does not constitute an offer to buy or sell securities by the Company, its subsidiaries or any associated party and is meant purely for informational purposes. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, even if subsequently made available by the Company on its website or otherwise. The Company does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

Investor Contact: Media Contact: Ariel F. Babcock, CFA Paul Hamblyn EuroSite Power Inc. EuroSite Power Inc. +1 781.466.6413 +44 792.085.9540 ariel.babcock@eurositepower.co.uk paul.hamblyn@eurositepower.co.uk

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eurosite-power-announces-new-board-member-300285484.html
LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Vision Direct has released its very first summer campaign. The campaign continues the story of Gizmo, canine star of the brand's Christmas advert, who's off to sunny Malaga for a family holiday.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160614/378907 )

Vision Direct has been working closely with the video production team at Tanami to release its first summer campaign. The ad sees the return Gizmo, who will be jet-setting across Europe for a summer adventure filled with fun and romance.

The campaign is designed to show just how easy it can be to get the contact lenses you need while you are away from home.

"Fall in love with our fast European delivery" was chosen as the ad's tagline, to showcase the company's superfast delivery to addresses across Europe

The full length 1'20' advert will be available to watch online from Wednesday 15th June on YouTube, Facebook and VisionDirect.co.uk

Ashley Mealor, Chief Marketing Officer at Vision Direct, said: "In a recent survey we found that 35% of our customers didn't know they had the option to order lenses whilst they were away. We wanted to remind everyone just how easy it can be to get the lenses you need, even when you're far from home. In fact, our superfast delivery service will reach most European destinations in two to three days."

The ad will be promoted across all of the company's social media platforms, including both Facebook and Twitter, along with a 30 second version which will feature as a Facebook advert over the next few months.

The ad can be viewed on http://www.visiondirect.co.uk/pug-holiday and via Vision Direct's YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/visiondirectUK from Wednesday 15th June.

Notes to editors

1. About Vision Direct

Vision Direct is Europe's largest online contact lens supplier, stocking over 1 million lenses from world leading brands, including Focus Dailies, Air Optix and Acuvue Moist. Vision Direct is dedicated to making the purchase of contact lenses easy, quick and affordable. It offers free, fast delivery and seven days a week customer support, as well savings of up to 42% against high street opticians. Customers can order their lenses through the UK Vision Direct website, http://www.VisionDirect.co.uk, any of its European web properties, or by calling the telephone number, +44(0)207-768-5000. Customers can also benefit from a free repeat prescription and reminder service, and receive free eye care advice from Vision Direct's resident optician.

2. Adverts are featured in full on the Vision Direct microsite http://www.visiondirect.co.uk/pug-holiday

For further information, please contact:

Amy Pritchett, Outreach Manager, Vision Direct

Tel: +44(0)20-8099-5366 (office) - Mon - Friday 9am to 5:30pm

Email: amy.pritchett@visiondirect.co.uk



Address: 6 Camden High Street, London, NW1 0JH

Website: http://www.visiondirect.co.uk


CAMPBELL, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Friendable, Inc. (OTC PINK: FDBL) ("Friendable" or the "Company"), today announced an additional increase in the use of its app among the college age and above demographics over the last 12 hours, as global superstar Jennifer Lopez mentioned the Company on her official Facebook page.

"On Wednesday, Hollywood icon Jennifer Lopez invited her 45.5 million Facebook fans to check out the Friendable app, reflecting on the app's appearance in her recent music video Ain't Your Mama," said Robert Rositano, Jr. Chief Executive Officer of Friendable. Mr. Rositano continued, "Last week we were fortunate to see a few posts from Austin Mahone, which fired up the younger crowd to take notice, and I'm excited to say that we are now seeing additional downloads and social buzz among adults in the 18-year-old and above age bracket. We attribute this to our increased focus on social media in general, additional brand exposure across various market segments, and of course our recent celebrity affiliations."

Our team has one goal: increasing shareholder value by attracting more users and providing an experience which encourages them to spend more time in the app, which we believe will ultimately attract advertising revenue. We believe we are making significant advances in each of our focus areas and will continue to analyze and strengthen our initiatives for growth.

About Friendable:

Friendable, Inc. is the mobile-social network focused on the future, rather than sharing the past, where it's all about having location specific and nearby opportunities to connect with others. The Friendable brand represents a friends-first approach and takes all the pressure off for its users, making it simple to make new connections, create meetup style events or simply tell others what you are "Friendable for." Then, based on shared interests and location, users can engage with what makes sense for them. Increased user interactions will allow Friendable to offer advertising and sponsorship opportunities to local venues and businesses, and begin to generate revenue by providing these venues with location specific opportunities to reach potential customers when it matters most: when they are nearby and looking for something to do or someone to do it with. As of April 2016 Friendable has over 1 million downloads and 700,000 registered users.

For more information about Friendable, Inc. please visit:

www.Friendable.com

For Additional Investor Information and to Receive Company Updates:

http://www.friendable.com/fdbloptin

Visit our social media properties at:

Facebook: http://facebook.com/friendable

Twitter: twitter.com/friendableapp

Instagram: instagram.com/friendableapp

Cautionary Language Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. The words or phrases "would be," "will allow," "intends to," "will likely result," "are expected to," "will continue," "is anticipated," "estimate," "project," or similar expressions are intended to identify "forward-looking statements." Actual results could differ materially from those projected by Friendable, Inc. The iTunes rankings should not be construed as an indication in any way whatsoever of the future value of the Friendable's common stock or its present or future financial condition. The public filings of Friendable, Inc. made with the Securities and Exchange Commission may be accessed at the SEC's Edgar system at www.sec.gov. Statements made herein are as of the date of this press release and should not be relied upon as of any subsequent date. Friendable, Inc. cautions readers not to place reliance on such statements. Unless otherwise required by applicable law, Friendable, Inc. does not undertake, and Friendable, Inc. specifically disclaims any obligation, to update any forward-looking statements to reflect occurrences, developments, unanticipated events or circumstances after the date of such statement.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=3022648



CONTACT:

Investor Relations & Financial Media:

Ticker Media Group

585-301-7700

info@TickerMediaGroup.com



COMPANY:

Friendable, Inc.

(855) 473-7473

Info@friendable.com




One of the UK's Oldest Pawnbroking Chains Uses Data Erasure Software to Permanently Erase Data from Used Electronics Sold in 187 Retail Stores

ATLANTAand LONDON, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --Pawnbroking has historically been a traditional business with the core of its revenue coming from loans and cash advances. As digital devices and technology have become central to everything consumers do today, pawnbrokers have evolved their business model and the types of goods offered to include the sale of used electronics.

According to Apex Insight, the pawnbroking industry has shown considerable growth in recent years - reaching over 2,000 stores across the UK. However, a 2014 investigation led by UK's Channel 4 - exposing two pawnbrokers who failed to wipe data before reselling smartphones - reiterated the potential of both financial and reputational damages that could arise in such instances.

To prevent similar data breaches for its own customers, H&T Group which trades as H&T Pawnbrokers, one of the largest pawnbroking chains in the UK, has joined forces with Blancco Technology Group to permanently erase data from all used laptops, smartphones and tablets sold in its 187 retail stores. Through the partnership, H&T Pawnbrokers will use a combination of the patented Blancco 5 solution, along with the Blancco 5 Mobile and Blancco Cloud solutions, to safeguard the privacy of its customers.

Mark Harrold, Commercial Manager of H&T Pawnbrokers, stated, "Our customers, and in particular, those using our buyback services look and buy very differently today than they once did - they're younger (mid-thirties in age), more tech savvy and highly aware of and sensitive to privacy risks. To keep H&T Pawnbrokers' 119-year-old reputation intact and serve our customers' new set of needs, we knew that data erasure and mobile diagnostics software would be vital. Working with Blancco Technology Group allows us to prove our commitment to our customers and reassure our stakeholders as to the strength and growth of our business model moving forward."

Additionally, H&T Pawnbrokers will tap into the added diagnostic features of the Blancco 5 Mobile Diagnostics solution in order to maximize the overall performance and resale value of its smartphone and tablet inventory. "When technology enables us to keep our customers' mobile devices running optimally and prevent the leak of sensitive, confidential data, that translates to increased sales, customer loyalty and retention for our business," said Robbie Fowle, Head of Marketing for H&T Pawnbrokers. "By delivering these added benefits, Blancco Technology Group has proven itself to be an invaluable business partner."

"Just because something is second-hand doesn't mean it has to be second-rate," said Pat Clawson, CEO, Blancco Technology Group. "By using our data erasure and diagnostics solutions, H&T Pawnbrokers is vowing to its customer base that the used electronics they take home will run smoothly, have longer lifecycles and won't compromise their personal privacy. And it's saying so with absolute certainty."

Unlike other data erasure vendors, Blancco Technology Group is the only one who could provide a tamper-proof certificate verifying all data has been permanently removed, solidifying its readiness to comply with security regulations.

About Blancco Technology Group

Blancco Technology Group is a leading, global provider of mobile device diagnostics and secure data erasure solutions. We help our clients' customers test, diagnose, repair and repurpose IT devices with the most proven and certified software. Our clientele consists of equipment manufacturers, mobile network operators, retailers, financial institutions, healthcare providers and government organizations worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alpharetta, GA, United States, with a distributed workforce and customer base across the globe.

Blancco, a division of Blancco Technology Group, is the global de facto standard in certified data erasure. We provide thousands of organizations with an absolute line of defense against costly security breaches, as well as verification of regulatory compliance through a 100% tamper-proof audit trail.

SmartChk, a division of Blancco Technology Group, is a global innovator in mobile asset diagnostics and business intelligence. We partner with our customers to improve their customers' experience by providing seamless solutions to test, diagnose and repair mobile assets. SmartChk provides world-class support, pre and post implementation, allowing our customers to derive measurable business results.

About H&T Pawnbrokers

H&T Pawnbrokers is the UK's leading pawnbroking company established in 1897 in London with over 180 stores throughout the UK. Discount secondhand Jewellery is a trading format of H&T Pawnbrokers and offers an extensive range of individually selected secondhand gold, diamond, gemstone and silver jewellery as well as high-end watches. In addition to pawnbroking and jewellery retail, the stores are also able to offer jewellery valuations and repairs, jewellery purchase, foreign exchange services, personal loans, Western Union money transfer and cheque cashing. Find us on www.handt.co.uk. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Media Contacts:

SHIFT Communications for Blancco Technology Group (US)

David Heffernan, Account Manager

T: (617) 779-1839

E: blancco@shiftcomm.com

SAY Communications for Blancco Technology Group (Europe)

Robert Hickling, Senior Account Manager

T: 44 (0) 20 8971 6427

E: blancco@saycomms.co.uk

Blancco Technology Group

Ragini Bhalla, Senior Director of Global Communications

T: (678) 829-8465

E: ragini.bhalla@blanccotechgroup.com

H&T Pawnbrokers

Robbie Fowle, Head of Marketing

T: +44 (0) 20 8225 2744

E: Robbie.fowle@handt.co.uk
PUNE, India, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

ReportsnReports.com adds "Thrombocytopenia - Pipeline Review, H1 2016" market research report complete with comparative analysis at various stages, therapeutics assessment by drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type, along with latest updates, and featured news and press releases. It also reviews key players involved in the therapeutic development for Thrombocytopenia and special features on late-stage and discontinued projects.

Complete report on H1 2016 pipeline review of Thrombocytopenia with 52 market data tables and 15 figures, spread across 178 pages is available at http://www.reportsnreports.com/reports/594620-thrombocytopenia-pipeline-review-h1-2016.html .

The report also reviews key players involved in the therapeutic development for Thrombocytopenia and special features on late-stage and discontinued projects. The report enhances decision making capabilities and help to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage. It strengthens R&D pipelines by identifying new targets and MOAs to produce first-in-class and best-in-class products.

Companies discussed in this Thrombocytopenia Pipeline Review, H1 2016 report include 3SBio Inc., Amarillo Biosciences, Inc., Amgen Inc., Baxalta Incorporated, Bayer AG, BioLineRx, Ltd., Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Bolder Biotechnology, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Cellerant Therapeutics, Inc., Eisai Co., Ltd., Genosco, Hansa Medical AB, Immunomedics, Inc., Intas Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine Co., Ltd., Merck & Co., Inc., Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Myelo Therapeutics GmbH, Neumedicines Inc., Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., PhytoHealth Corporation, Prophylix Pharma AS, Protalex, Inc., Rigel Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Shionogi & Co., Ltd., STATegics, Inc., UCB S.A. and ViroMed Co., Ltd.

Order a purchase copy of this report @ http://www.reportsnreports.com/Purchase.aspx?name=594620 .

Drug Profiles discussed in this research are Antibody for Autoimmune Disorders and Inflammation, avatrombopag, BBT-059, BI-655064, BL-8040, BMS-986004, CLT-009, eltrombopag olamine, fostamatinib disodium, GL-2045, GSK-2285921, Hetrombopag Olamine, interferon alfa, lusutrombopag, MK-8723, Monoclonal Antibody to Agonize TpoR for Thrombocytopenia, Monoclonal Antibody to Antagonize FcgR1 for Inflammatory and Autoimmune Disorders, Myelo-001, NMIL-121 , Oligonucleotides to Activate miRNA-150 for Thrombocytopenia and Anemia, PBF-1509, PEG-VM501, PHN-013, PRTX-100, Recombinant Enzyme to Inhibit Immunoglobulin G for Autoimmune Diseases, rivaroxaban, romiplostim, romiplostim biosimilar, SKIO-703, SM-101, Small Molecules to Inhibit BLVRB for Thrombocytopenia, Small Molecules to Inhibit PF4 for Heparin Induced Thrombocytopenia, STST-4, thrombopoietin, Tromplate, TXA-302, UCB-7665 and veltuzumab.

Scope of this report: The report provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Thrombocytopenia and reviews pipeline therapeutics for Thrombocytopenia by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources and key players involved Thrombocytopenia therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects. The research covers pipeline products based on various stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages. The report features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which includes, product description, descriptive MoA, R&D brief, licensing and collaboration details & other developmental activities and assesses Thrombocytopenia therapeutics based on drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The report summarizes all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects with latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for Thrombocytopenia.

Another newly published market research report titled on Leishmaniasis (Kala-Azar) - Pipeline Review, H1 2016 provides comprehensive information on the therapeutic development for Leishmaniasis (Kala-Azar), complete with comparative analysis at various stages, therapeutics assessment by drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type, along with latest updates, and featured news and press releases. It also reviews key players involved in the therapeutic development for Leishmaniasis (Kala-Azar) and special features on late-stage and discontinued projects. Companies discussed in this research are Advinus Therapeutics Ltd., Anacor Pharmaceuticals, Inc., BioLingus AG, Dafra Pharma International Ltd., iCo Therapeutics Inc., ManRos Therapeutics, Matinas BioPharma Holdings, Inc., Mologen AG, Nanomerics Ltd, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited and Zydus Cadila Healthcare Limited. Leishmaniasis (Kala-Azar) Pipeline market research report of 113 pages is available at http://www.reportsnreports.com/reports/523430-leishmaniasis-kala-azar-global-clinical-trials-review-h1-2016.html .

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16 June 2016



Serabi Gold Plc ('Serabi' or the 'Company')



AGM Statement



Serabi Gold plc (AIM:SRB, TSX:SBI), the Brazilian focused gold mining and development company, advises that at 11.00 am today (UK time), it will be holding its Annual General Meeting.



The following is the text of the statement that will be made by Mr. Mike Hodgson the Chief Executive of the Company. Highlights of the statement are:



* Gold production for the second quarter of 2016 from the Company's Palito and Sao Chico Mines continues to follow the trend set by the first quarter of 2016. * Underground exploration programmes for production planning and resource extension are about to commence. * Geophysics programmes for Currutela, Piaui and new tenements located to the west of Sao Chico planned for the second half of 2016.



The Company has also released today a new video update of operational progress at its Palito and Sao Chico Mines. This update can be accessed by using the following link:



http://www.brrmedia.co.uk/broadcasts- embed/57612cb2e94e69ed4a4770a3/event/?livelink=true



'As I noted in April's first quarter operational update, gold production from our Palito and Sao Chico Mines continues to be excellent with the second quarter following the trend set by the first quarter of 2016 and our strong finish to 2015. The first quarter yielded gold production of 9,771 ounces, a record level since operations commenced in 2014. At this current time and barring any unforeseen circumstances, I anticipate that gold production for the second quarter will be at a similar level. This puts us well on target to achieving our guidance for the full year of 37,000 ounces.



'Mining at Palito continues to progress well. As I noted earlier this year we have expanded the mine horizontally and opened up two key new sectors being the Senna and Chico da Santa zones. In addition, we have also had success with some smaller zones within the deposit that can be accessed from existing ramp development. These are adding further improvement in the levels of gold production that we can achieve from each vertical metre. This in turn allows us to slow down the rate at which further deepening of the mine is required, meaning that we can replace vertical development with horizontal development generating cost and efficiency benefits, as well as helping to increase the potential life of the mine.



'At Sao Chico, we have found a very good solution to the geological complexity of the deposit that hindered the mining and extraction rates experienced in 2015. Mine production continues to focus on the central portion of the Main Vein where we have the greatest confidence in the down-dip extension and we are continuing to push the ramp down towards the 84mRL, some 150 metres below surface. From here we will establish underground drill locations to assess the further extension at depth, as well as the potential strike extensions to the east and west of the Central Zone. The short term plan at Sao Chico has been to secure production for up to eighteen months in advance, consistent with our successful approach at Palito. This establishes an adequate cushion to allow time for us to concentrate on assessing the potential strike extensions and parallel structures. These ensure that we can maximize the benefit of existing development in the longer term. Serabi has purchased an underground exploration drill rig which has now arrived at site and following commissioning will start on this work. A contractor operated underground drill rig is also now on site that will assist with accelerating the programme over the next four to five months.



'A similar programme will also be undertaken at Palito once the initial phase of work is completed at Sao Chico. Initially work will focus on the extension at depth of the Main Zone comprising the G1, G2 and G3 veins, but will also look for parallel structures which lie between the Main Zone and Palito West and Chico da Santa with the expectation that a number of small but viable veins will be identified that can be easily accessed from the existing mine development.



'During this second quarter we had anticipated to have a third ball mill commissioned and operating. However, the failure of a key component in one of the other mills has delayed this start up because, to keep production going we borrowed the trunnion bearing from the third mill. A new bearing has now been delivered and the commissioning of the third mill will start in the coming week. Despite this small setback, our recent production has not been impacted and illustrates the requirement for building contingency and flexibility when operating in the more remote locations, which in this instance has allowed the Company to maintain operations at close to maximum levels.



'The gold price has clearly been favourable over recent months, and whilst our focus for 2016 is to use cash flow to retire the borrowings that the Company has with Sprott, we have been able to set aside some funding for the start of the next stages of wider exploration activity at Palito and Sao Chico. This will involve a down-the-hole electromagnetic survey at Palito using the past drilling undertaken at the Currutela and Piaui prospects. The contractor is due to arrive on site during July and we anticipate the programme and subsequent evaluation of results taking some three to four months to complete. It is intended that this work will allow the Company to better plan the next stage of exploration drilling that is anticipated to be undertaken during 2017.



'At Sao Chico a surface Induced Polarisation programme will be undertaken over an area to the west of the original Sao Chico exploration tenement. Serabi has secured the exploration licences over this area and feels it offers excellent potential for hosting strike extensions of the current Sao Chico veins. Results are expected to be available towards the end of 2016. Both geophysical programmes are using well established techniques to identify conductive bodies and sulphide mineralisation as pathfinders to locating gold occurrences which are associated with these features.



'Whilst operations are going very well, and I remain optimistic for the remainder of 2016, being essentially a single asset entity and operating in a relatively remote region of Brazil, there will continue to be challenges. Whilst many economic commentators expected to see the Brazilian currency continue to decline during 2016, in the face of an uncertain political climate and a weakening economy, it has however confounded expectation and strengthened. It appears that there remain strong inflows of currency into the country, and whilst these may include investment from multinational companies having to support their local businesses, this will place pressure on our reported US Dollar costs should the situation continue. At this time it remains unclear how the political situation will resolve itself and how this will impact on the perceptions of Brazil. However, neither this, nor the concerns over Zika, are having any current impact on our operations.



'Palito is now in a steady state and Sao Chico, having entered Commercial Production in January 2016, is performing in line with our expectations. I am often asked what the next move is for the Company. I am far from complacent about our two existing mines, but I feel that we are now able to divert some time and resources to growing the Company. We have already implemented the first part of the potential for organic growth by starting to evaluate some of the potential within our existing tenement holdings. This is, however, a process that will take time but, if successful it will provide an opportunity for resource and production growth at a relatively low cost. We will also continue to look at the opportunity for potential acquisitions of other projects. The recent surge in gold prices has started to change seller expectations supported by the recent rally in valuations ascribed to Canadian listed junior development and exploration companies which appear to have out- paced the UK market. I am keen to grow the Company, as I believe that we will benefit from greater critical mass and runway to attract wider investor support and a concurrent re-rating of the Company's shares in due course. Nevertheless, I constantly reiterate that Serabi will only consider acquisitions that management feels will genuinely increase value for shareholders. Whilst a strong market is good for all of us and should be welcomed after the experience of the last few years, I have concern that some valuations and expectations may spiral and become unrealistic.



'Before closing I would like to acknowledge again the support and commitment of our major shareholder, Fratelli Investments and the Company's loyal and experienced management team. We have low staff turnover and I can only put this down to creating a work environment that, whilst challenging, is rewarding and has brought people together with a strong sense of common purpose.'



Enquiries:



Serabi Gold plc



Michael Hodgson Tel: +44 (0)20 7246 6830



Chief Executive Mobile: +44 (0)7799 473621



Clive Line Tel: +44 (0)20 7246 6830



Finance Director Mobile: +44 (0)7710 151692



Email: contact@serabigold.com



Website: www.serabigold.com



Beaumont Cornish Limited Nominated Adviser



Roland Cornish Tel: +44 (0)20 7628 3396



Michael Cornish Tel: +44 (0)20 7628 3396



Peel Hunt LLP UK Broker



Matthew Armitt Tel: +44 (0)20 7418 9000



Ross Allister Tel: +44 (0)20 7418 9000



Blytheweigh Public Relations



Tim Blythe Tel: +44 (0)20 7138 3204



Camilla Horsfall Tel: +44 (0)20 7138 3224



Copies of this release are available from the Company's website at www.serabigold.com Forward-looking statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements regarding the estimation of mineral resources, exploration results, potential mineralization, potential mineral resources and mineral reserves) are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often identifiable by the use of words such as 'anticipate', 'believe', 'plan', may', 'could', 'would', 'might' or 'will', 'estimates', 'expect', 'intend', 'budget', 'scheduled', 'forecasts' and similar expressions or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, without limitation, failure to establish estimated mineral resources, the possibility that future exploration results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, the price of gold and other risks identified in the Company's most recent annual information form filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities on SEDAR.com. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement.



Qualified Persons Statement



The information contained within this announcement has been reviewed and verified by Michael Hodgson, CEO of the Company. Mr Hodgson is an Economic Geologist by training with over 25 years' experience in the mining industry. He holds a BSc (Hons) Geology, University of London, a MSc Mining Geology, University of Leicester and is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and a Chartered Engineer of the Engineering Council of UK, recognizing him as both a Qualified Person for the purposes of Canadian National Instrument 43-101 and by the AIM Guidance Note on Mining and Oil & Gas Companies dated June 2009.



Glossary of terms



The following is a glossary of technical terms:



'Au' means gold.



'assay' in economic geology, means to analyze the proportions of metal in a rock or overburden sample; to test an ore or mineral for composition, purity, weight or other properties of commercial interest.



'development' - excavations used to establish access to the mineralised rock and other workings



'DNPM' is the Departamento Nacional de Producao Mineral.



'grade' is the concentration of mineral within the host rock typically quoted as grams per tonne (g/t), parts per million (ppm) or parts per billion (ppb).



'g/t' means grams per tonne.



'granodiorite' is an igneous intrusive rock similar to granite.



'igneous' is a rock that has solidified from molten material or magma.



'Intrusive' is a body of igneous rock that invades older rocks.



'on-lode development' - Development that is undertaken in and following the direction of the Vein



'mRL' - depth in metres measured relative to a fixed point - in the case of Palito and Sao Chico this is sea-level. The mine entrance at Palito is at 250mRL.



'saprolite' is a weathered or decomposed clay-rich rock.



'stoping blocks' - a discrete area of mineralised rock established for planning and scheduling purposes that will be mined using one of the various stoping methods.



'vein' is a generic term to describe an occurrence of mineralised rock within an area of non-mineralised rock.



Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange, nor any other securities regulatory authority, has approved or disapproved of the contents of this news release.



ENDS



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: Serabi Gold plc via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2021122]



B4T0YL7R41



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- On the same day Veniam, the company building the Internet of Moving Things, was lauded by CNBC as one of the 50 most forward-thinking companies in America by CNBC, and won the 2016 Best Auto Mobility Product/Service at the TU-Automotive Awards.

"We are very honored to have been selected among hundreds of very innovative companies and solutions," says Joao Barros, co-founder and CEO of Veniam. "These awards signal a very important moment for our young company, as we work to bring Veniam's vehicle mesh networks to the many unconnected fleets in the United States, Europe and Asia," Joao explains.

Veniam's innovative solution looks at vehicles not just as machines that carry people and goods, but rather as active nodes of the Internet that can expand wireless coverage and serve as mobile sensors for smart city applications.

Veniam was selected among 750 competitors as one of the 50 most innovative companies in America by the fourth annual Disruptor 50 from CNBC. Ranked on the 28th position, Veniam went from building the world largest network of connected vehicles in Porto, Portugal, and supporting more than 4 million internet sessions to delivering key managed services for intelligent transportation systems and urban services in NY and Singapore.

The judges of the TU-Automotive Awards 2016, the most prestigious and anticipated awards in the connected car industry, elected Veniam as the Best Auto Mobility Product/Service, after analyzing 400 nominations from all over the world. "It was a significant innovation with an even greater potential (...) It is so much more than a mobility product," the judges said.

Veniam proprietary IP from more than a decade of world-class research builds on existing wireless standards (Wi-Fi, 4G LTE and DSRC) and leverages the 5.9 GHz frequency band reserved by the FCC and the USDOT for intelligent transportation systems. Developed in collaboration with top universities, such as University of Porto, University of Aveiro, CMU, and MIT, Veniam's full stack platform includes all the hardware, software, and cloud components required to build networks of vehicles and other moving things, while supporting unprecedented smart city services.

"The future of mobility and the quality of life in our cities depend on our ability to make the most out of the existing infrastructure, including the excess capacity of the world's 1.2 billion vehicles," says Joao. Vehicles are ideal wireless hotspots and mobile sensors at street level, because they can be found everywhere and have large batteries that keep recharging.

Since its creation, Veniam has won several relevant awards: 'best new venture' at the WBA 2015 Wi-Fi Industry Awards; 'best new innovative product idea most likely to succeed' within the 2015 CableLabs; winner of the 2015 Red Herring Top 100 North America award; named to FierceWireless "Fierce 15" Top Wireless Company List 2015; Gartner Cool Vendors in Smart City Applications and Solutions in 2015.

About Veniam

Veniam turns vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots and builds vehicular networks that expand wireless coverage and collect terabytes of actionable data. Veniam's game-changing solutions ensure that all mobile workers and assets are securely connected, no matter where they are or at what speed they are moving. Our hardware, software and cloud components are delivering managed services to intelligent transportation systems in NY and Singapore, as well as in the world's largest network of connected vehicles, which includes taxis, waste collection trucks and the entire public bus fleet in Porto, Portugal, offering free Wi-Fi to more than 400,000 active customers.

With offices in Silicon Valley, Porto, and Singapore, Veniam is backed both by leading venture capital firms such as True Ventures and Union Square Ventures, and by the corporate investment arms of Verizon, Cisco, Orange, Yamaha Motors and Liberty Global.

www.veniam.com | https://twitter.com/veniamworks | https://www.linkedin.com/company/veniam-lda

Media

Alexandra Vieira

Veniam

M: +351 968690182




TOLEDO, Spain, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Medical distributor Presurgy S.L. tapped to oversee distribution of UroLift System, which is highlighted at The Spanish National Congress Of Urology (AEU) as an effective treatment for men with enlarged prostate.

The UroLift System treatment for enlarged prostate is to be showcased tomorrow (June 17) at the Spanish National Congress of Urology meeting in Toledo, Spain, with a poster presentation outlining local experience. This comes following the presentation of the four-year durability results of the multi-national L.I.F.T. randomised study and the two-year results of the multi-national BPH6 randomised study in March at the European Association of Urology Congress in Munich. These promising results are presented as NeoTract announces the appointment of a urology specialist distributor for UroLift in Spain: Presurgy S.L.

The news comes as the EAU Guidelines for male lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) upgraded the rating for UroLift data to the highest possible classification, Level 1A, and as NeoTract, Inc., a medical device company focused on addressing unmet needs in the field of urology, announces key gains in European government healthcare system reimbursement in multiple markets.

In the UK, UroLift is now being offered by 17 publicly-funded NHS hospitals following positive NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidance based on a review of the economic and clinical benefits and revised tariff coding in September of last year. In Denmark, UroLift is being offered in a growing number of Government-funded hospitals following a trial at Herlev Hospital in Copenhagen.

NeoTract's EMEA Vice President and General Manager, Justin Hall, says: "Following the recent positive evaluation by NICE in the UK, we want to deliver a similar model as we've used in the UK to Spain. Our aim is to showcase how the national healthcare system - from primary care to hospitals - in Spain can make significant cost and efficiency savings using UroLift. By partnering with a urology specialist distributor, Presurgy, to deliver that on our behalf, we believe we will enjoy wider take up in Spain."

"Daily, we see evidence of increasing demand across Europe from patients and their partners for the UroLift System, a less invasive, true day case procedure that can be carried out under local anesthesia, avoids the otherwise common negative impact on sexual function, and rapidly improves quality of life for couples whose lives are severely impacted by BPH. UroLift's safety profile, clinical efficacy and substantial care pathway cost savings were recognized last year by the UK body and are now more than persuasive as weoperate under ever more complex and demanding government healthcare-funding arrangements across Europe. Today, payors rightly demand the most rigorous economic and clinical data to support the adoption of new technology. Our new Level 1A endorsement from the EAU, based on our robust mid range clinical data,will further progress our mission to make this life-changing treatment available to all suitable men with BPH across Europe."


For the one month period ended 31 May 2016, the Company's NAV increased by 1.8% while the share price increased by 2.8% (all in sterling). The Company's benchmark, the Russell 1000 Value Index, increased by 2.2% for the period.



The largest contributor to relative performance during the month was stock selection in the industrials sector. Notably, our underweight to the machinery industry and stock selection in the aerospace & defence industry proved to be beneficial. Stock selection in consumer discretionary also added to relative performance as non-benchmark holding, Dollar General Corporation, outperformed after beating consensus earnings estimates. An underweight to the energy sector and stock selection in materials and financials also added modestly to relative returns for the month.



The largest detractor from relative performance was stock selection in the information technology sector, with notable detractors including our non-benchmark positions in Lenovo Group and Motorola Solutions. In regards to Lenovo, the company reported weaker than consensus quarterly earnings, primarily due to weakness in its smartphone business segment. Stock selection in the consumer staples and health care sectors also modestly dampened relative performance for the month.



Transactions/Options



Transactions: During the month of May, we initiated multiple transactions within the energy and health care sectors. In energy, we reduced our allocation to Pioneer Natural Resources and initiated new positions in Suncor Energy and Anadarko Petroleum. In health care, we exited our position in AbbVie and increased our allocation to Pfizer and AstraZeneca. Notably, the Pfizer and AstraZeneca transactions were partially funded by reducing the Company's cash allocation during the month.



Options: As at 31 May 2016, the Company's options exposure was 18.85% and the delta of the options was 90.89%.



Positioning

The Company is currently overweight to the health care, consumer discretionary, industrials, materials and consumer staples sectors. We are underweight to the financials, energy, utilities, information technology and telecommunication services sectors.
BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, MI -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- PROGREEN PROPERTIES, INC. (PROGREEN) (OTC PINK: PGEI) is pleased to announce that our new website has gone live on the new domain, www.ProGreenUS.com. We've taken all of the company's avenues of communication and put them together in one place. As part of our commitment to transparency, the company's share structure is posted on the homepage and will be updated during the first week of each month. Other information including SEC filings, press releases, blog posts and twitter updates will also be posted immediately on the website. Pictures and videos will be posted as they become available. Every effort will be made to keep shareholders well informed and up-to-date with the company's activities.

"This is a big step forward for the company, resulting in a considerable improvement in our ability to communicate with our investors, as well as with the general public at large," says Jan Telander, President.

About ProGreen Properties, Inc.

PROGREEN PROPERTIES, INC. (PROGREEN) (OTC PINK: PGEI) based in Bloomfield, Michigan, is engaged in the business of acquiring, refurbishing and upgrading residential real estate into modern affordable homes, offered for sale with Land Contracts to buyers still unable to obtain conventional credit. The company has also recently entered into property investments in Baja California, Mexico and will be intensifying this activity, with the aim of creating a sustainable income stream for many years to come.

This press release might contain information, which may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. 'Forward-looking statements' are based upon expectations, estimates and projections at the time the statements are made that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=3022781



For further Information, please contact:

Jan Telander

President and CEO

jan@progreenproperties.com

Phone: 1 (248) 805-3652




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Gowest Gold Ltd. ("Gowest" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: GWA) is pleased to provide an update on the Company's development plans for its 100% owned Bradshaw Gold Deposit ("Bradshaw"), part of its North Timmins Gold Project ("NTGP").

The Company:

-- has received all of the permits required to begin Advanced Exploration ("AE") work at Bradshaw; -- is advancing discussions to secure all required contracts and funding to allow for the mining and processing of the AE bulk sample; and, -- is progressing on detailed engineering work in advance of the start of the AE bulk sample collection.

Gowest's President and CEO, Greg Romain, said, "After a lengthy and thorough review, we have received the critical permits that will enable us to take the next major step towards the development of the next new gold mine in the Timmins Gold Camp. Our strategy is to optimize project efficiencies, accelerate timelines and lower both up-front and overall project costs. The Bradshaw, which forms part of the Company's large land package and includes numerous additional mineralized targets, is a high-grade gold deposit with significant potential for growth along strike and at depth."

Permits

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change ("MOECC") has completed its Environmental Assessment of Gowest's AE program and issued the final permit required for the Company's AE work that includes the removal of a bulk sample. Permit approvals have also been received from the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines ("MNDM") and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources ("MNR").

Technical Work

The Company's detailed engineering work is ongoing in advance of the site preparation, ramp construction and underground development work required to extract the bulk sample. This includes optimizing the methods and route to most efficiently mine the bulk sample.

Funding

The Company has ongoing positive discussions with lending groups to fund the removal and processing of the bulk sample from selected portions of the underground deposit. The Company is also in discussions with contractors to participate in the development of the mine, reducing start-up cash requirements by deferring a significant portion of mining costs until revenues are available from the sale of gold produced from the bulk sample.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical disclosure in this press release has been prepared and approved by Mr. Kevin Montgomery, P.Geo., Gowest's Manager of Exploration and a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101.

About Gowest

Gowest is a Canadian gold exploration and development company focused on the delineation and development of its 100% owned Bradshaw Gold Deposit (Bradshaw), on the Frankfield Property, part of the Corporation's North Timmins Gold Project (NTGP). Gowest is exploring additional gold targets on its +100-square-kilometre NTGP land package and continues to evaluate the area, which is part of the prolific Timmins, Ontario gold camp. Currently, Bradshaw contains a National Instrument 43-101 Indicated Resource estimated at 2.1 million tonnes ("t") grading 6.19 g/t Au containing 422 thousand oz Au and an Inferred Resource of 3.6 million t grading 6.47 g/t Au containing 755 thousand oz Au. Further, based on the Pre-Feasibility Study produced by Stantec Mining and announced on June 9, 2015, Bradshaw contains Probable Mineral Reserves, using a 3 g/t Au cut-off and utilizing a gold price of US$1,200 / oz, totalling 1.8 million t grading 4.82 g/t Au for 277 thousand oz Au.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain certain "forward looking statements". Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this news release and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise.

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Contacts:

Gowest Gold Ltd.

Greg Romain

President & CEO

(416) 363-1210

info@gowestgold.com



Gowest Gold Ltd.

Greg Taylor

Investor Relations

905 337-7673

416 605-5120

gregt@gowestgold.com




Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Live Engagement Platform Boosts Event Engagement by 380 Percent and Connects Event Data to Marketing and Sales Pipelines

DoubleDutch, the global leading provider of Live Engagement Platform, today announced HGA, an award winning, UK based agency that specializes in live events and corporate video production, design and digital content, has been using DoubleDutch to extend the shelf life of live events for its clients. By leveraging the DoubleDutch platform to create socially-centric event experiences, HGA has increased audience engagement at live events by more than 380 percent for clients including Travelodge, Shop Direct and Nationwide Building Society. Ian Austin, Digital Project Manager for HGA will discuss the agency's success with DoubleDutch at the DoubleDutch Live Engagement Tour in London on June 21.

"We started using DoubleDutch because we were simply trying to find ways to make events last for longer than just one day," said Ian Austin, Digital Project Manager, HGA. "DoubleDutch has not only helped us achieve this goal of extending the life of events by up to 10 months, but it's proven to be a powerful platform in transforming analog events into digital, social experiences. With DoubleDutch, our clients have been able to capture event data that can finally be measured and managed and accelerates their marketing and sales pipelines."

With DoubleDutch, HGA has delivered the following results for clients including:

HGA client Nationwide Building Society saw an 83 percent app adoption rate among its 524 attendees at its Customer Service Operations Conference (CS&O).

This was a 382 percent increase in total attendee app adoption, up from a 17.3 percent app adoption in 2014.

Out of 437 active users, 350 of them qualified as "engaged" (10+ engagement actions per day, per user).

In terms of attendee experience using the application, 96.9 percent of users rated the app "good to excellent."

88.8 percent believed the app was of good use to them in their role outside of the event, and 93.3 percent stated the app helped them engage with the event.

"HGA's success with DoubleDutch points to a larger industry trend of digital agencies looking to provide clients with technology that provides them with control, insightful data and actionable metrics to ultimately justify event spend and improve conversion rates," said Alexander Draaijer, GM International of DoubleDutch. "With HGA's impressive roster of clients, we're looking forward to learning how live events are digitized across a range of industries."

As a result of its successful event production, HGA was recognized with two prestigious industry awards for its work with Shop Direct (Conference and Incentive Travel's Retail event of the year 2015; UK Conference of the Year Award). These awards cited HGA's innovative use of digital marketing solutions, particularly use of the DoubleDutch platform, as a driving force and major deciding factor in being named winner. The third award win was for "Best Use of a Digital Platform" at the CIPR Inside Story Awards, collected by HGA's client Nationwide Building Society. The award recognized the effective use of its Annual Awards event app as a tool to drive engagement among colleagues from across the UK. The strategy, implementation and overall support was provided and led by the digital team at HGA, underpinned by the power of the DoubleDutch platform.

The DoubleDutch Live Engagement platform offers HGA clients a meaningful way to collect data, manage event energy, guide the attendee engagement journey and report on business revenue results. At the core of each live event is a mobile Live Engagement Event App, which amplifies what is happening and energizes attendees to engage. It gives attendees, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors a channel by which they can interact with each other and augment the physical experience.

The DoubleDutch Live Engagement Platform

The DoubleDutch Live Engagement Platform is an ecosystem of applications, integrations, and performance metrics that allow event organizers and marketers to digitize live event experiences, capitalize on engagement signals, and supercharge business outcomes. These engagement signals are distilled down into insights that can be used to unlock a new class of marketing and sales leads, trigger targeted campaigns based on show floor activities and interests, and enable personalized sales follow-ups in near real time. The suite of DoubleDutch Live Engagement applications allows event owners and marketers to manage engagement and participation, insert sponsor and exhibitor communications and offer detailed analytics applications to monetize and optimize business results.

About DoubleDutch

DoubleDutch believes in the power of digitizing live engagement to supercharge business outcomes. The DoubleDutch Live Engagement Platform powers events, conferences, and trade shows for more than 1,700 customers including Forbes, Humana, LinkedIn, Novartis, Nationwide, SAP, UBM and Urban Land Institute. The company has been named one of Deloitte's 500 fastest growing companies in North America, AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies, and Forbes' 10 Hot Companies to Work for in San Francisco. DoubleDutch is based in San Francisco with additional U.S. offices in Phoenix and Portland and a global presence in Amsterdam, London and Hong Kong.

About HGA

HGA is an award-winning creative communications agency specialising in Live Events, Film Video, Digital and Design. HGA's ethos is to challenge the ordinary creating innovative, effective, unforgettable moments that make a lasting impression and that achieve outstanding results for clients. For the last 28 years, HGA has delivered compelling and award winning propositions for clients through the execution of game-changing events, jaw-dropping films, immersive digital solutions and stunning design campaigns.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005325/en/

Contacts:

Blanc Otus

Jennifer Pierce, +1 415-856-5152

doubledutchpr(at)blancandotus(dot)com
Studies Published over the Last 10 Years Report Reductions in Cervical Pre-cancers and Other HPV-related Diseases

Merck (NYSE:MRK), known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, announced today that in a systematic review conducted of the global impact and effectiveness of GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant], substantial reductions were observed in HPV 6/11/16/18-related infection, genital warts, Pap abnormalities and cervical pre-cancers. This evaluation of 58 effectiveness and impact studies published during the past 10 years examined the use of GARDASIL in routine vaccination programs in Australia, Europe, North America and New Zealand, and will be presented for the first time during an oral session at the European Research Organization on Genital Infection and Neoplasia (EUROGIN) congress in Austria. A paper detailing this review was also published online on June 14 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID).

Following introduction of vaccination programs with GARDASIL, the earliest impact of the vaccine was seen in the reduction of genital warts. Reductions in genital warts were observed in all nine countries included in this review (based on 28 publications), with declines occurring as early as one year after vaccine introduction in Australia and Germany. Reductions in HPV 6/11/16/18 infection, assessed in 14 publications from five countries (Australia, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and the United States), were also observed shortly after vaccination; for example, reductions in HPV 6/11/16/18 infection were seen within four years in several studies from Australia and the United States. Subsequently, as successive birth cohorts began cervical screening, reductions in cervical pre-cancers were observed within 3-5 years of vaccine program implementation in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden and the United States.

GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] is indicated for use in females 9 through 26 years of age for the prevention of cervical, vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers caused by HPV types 16 and 18; genital warts caused by HPV types 6 and 11; and precancerous or dysplastic lesions caused by HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18. GARDASIL is also approved for use in males 9 through 26 years of age for the prevention of anal cancer caused by HPV types 16 and 18, for the prevention of anal dysplasias and precancerous lesions caused by HPV types 6, 11, 16 and 18, and for the prevention of genital warts caused by HPV types 6 and 11. GARDASIL is contraindicated in individuals with hypersensitivity, including severe allergic reactions to yeast, or after a previous dose of GARDASIL.

The review identified 58 studies published from January 2007 through February 2016 that met the pre-specified criteria for assessment of the real-world impact of vaccination with GARDASIL on HPV-related disease. These studies were conducted in nine different countries (Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, France, United States, Canada and New Zealand) with varying degrees of HPV vaccination coverage, among populations of different ages, and used different study methods and disease endpoints. Studies reporting only on the bivalent HPV vaccine were excluded. GARDASIL was predominantly, but not exclusively, used in all publications reviewed. Short-term endpoints (reduction in HPV infection and genital warts) and medium-term endpoints (reduction in Pap abnormalities and cervical pre-cancers) were assessed. Cervical cancer, however, was not identified because most vaccinated cohorts have not yet reached ages when cervical cancer is typically diagnosed. Thus the anticipated benefit of vaccination on certain HPV-related cancer rates cannot be fully determined yet, because of the long latency periods following exposure to HPV.

In this review of the studies, decreases in the prevalence of HPV 6/11/16/18 infections, genital warts, Pap abnormalities and cervical pre-cancers were observed among females in their teens and 20s subsequent to the introduction of GARDASIL. Decreases were generally highest in younger populations, reflecting a lower likelihood of pre-existing HPV infection at time of vaccination, supporting global recommendations for routine use of HPV vaccine in adolescents.

"Based on this comprehensive review of studies published during the past 10 years since the licensure of GARDASIL, reductions in HPV infections as well as reductions in the prevalence of HPV 6/11/16/18-related diseases, as noted by decreases in Pap abnormalities, cervical pre-cancers, and genital warts, were detected within four years after vaccine introduction," said Professor Suzanne Garland, M.D., director of microbiological research and head of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases, The Royal Women's Hospital, Victoria, Australia, who will present these data at EUROGIN and is lead author on the CID publication. "Despite the progress we have made with Pap screening and vaccination, cervical cancer and other HPV-related diseases are still a public health issue in both developed and developing nations, which underscores the need for comprehensive HPV vaccination programs in adolescents before they're at risk of contracting the virus," added Garland.

Results varied depending on the vaccine coverage (percent of the population who had been vaccinated), breadth of the immunization program (the age range of those vaccinated and whether catch-up vaccination was included), the number of doses received, the study design, and the disease outcome assessed. The overall impact on the population was greatest in countries that achieved high vaccination rates soon after the introduction of GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] and in the youngest cohorts. For example, in Australia, a country with 3-dose vaccination coverage of 73 percent among adolescent females, prevalent HPV 6/11/16/18-related infection decreased by 86 percent in females 18-24 years of age after three doses within six years of vaccine introduction, compared to unvaccinated women during the same timeframe. Furthermore, a 92.6 percent reduction in genital warts diagnosed among females <21 years of age was observed four years after the vaccine program was initiated. Within four years of vaccine introduction in Australia, reductions in cervical pre-cancers were seen in females 11-27 years old at the start of the vaccination program in 2007 and who received all three vaccine doses, with declines ranging from 57 percent in females 15-18 years old to 5 percent in females 23-27 years old. Reductions in disease endpoints were generally lower in older individuals and in countries with lower vaccine coverage. For example, in the same Australian study where a 92.6 percent reduction in genital warts was observed in females <21 years of age, the reduction in genital warts in females 21-30 years of age was 72.6 percent. Reductions in genital warts were <50 percent in teens 15-19 years old in France and Germany where vaccine coverage was much lower than Australia.

"These data reinforce that GARDASIL is important in the fight against cervical cancer and certain other HPV-related cancers and diseases, however the full public health potential of HPV vaccination of males and females is not yet realized even after a decade of use," said Jacques Cholat, M.D., president of Merck Vaccines. "Increasing HPV vaccination rates and access to the vaccine has the potential to make an even greater impact globally."

Systematic review of 58 peer-reviewed publications

This review synthesized available data assessed through a systematic search of PubMed and Embase for peer-reviewed manuscripts from January 2007 through February 2016. The search identified observational studies that reported on the impact or effectiveness of GARDASIL on HPV infection, genital warts, cervical abnormalities and pre-cancers. Both vaccine effectiveness and impact aim at evaluating 'real-life benefit' and are typically measured through observational studies. Vaccine impact denotes the population-prevented fraction of infection or disease and is assessed by comparing prevalence or incidence in the vaccine era to a comparable population from the prevaccine era or by measuring population-level trends over time. Vaccine effectiveness corresponds to the proportion of infection or disease prevented among vaccinated individuals, and is estimated by comparing the incidence in vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals within similar populations. After screening 903 papers, 58 publications from nine countries met the pre-specified inclusion criteria.

Important information about GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant]

GARDASIL does not eliminate the necessity for women to continue to undergo recommended cervical cancer screening. Recipients of GARDASIL should not discontinue anal cancer screening if it has been recommended by a health care provider.

GARDASIL has not been demonstrated to provide protection against diseases from vaccine and non-vaccine HPV types to which a person has previously been exposed through sexual activity.

GARDASIL is not intended to be used for treatment of active external genital lesions; cervical, vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers; cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia (VIN), vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia (VaIN), or anal intraepithelial neoplasia (AIN).

GARDASIL has not been demonstrated to protect against diseases due to HPV types not contained in the vaccine.

Not all vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers are caused by HPV, and GARDASIL protects only against those vulvar, vaginal and anal cancers caused by HPV Types 16 and 18.

GARDASIL does not protect against diseases not caused by HPV. Vaccination with GARDASIL may not result in protection in all vaccine recipients.

Select safety information for GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16 and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant]

GARDASIL is contraindicated in individuals with hypersensitivity, including severe allergic reactions to yeast, or after a previous dose of GARDASIL.

Because vaccinees may develop syncope, sometimes resulting in falling with injury, observation for 15 minutes after administration is recommended. Syncope, sometimes associated with tonic-clonic movements and other seizure-like activity, has been reported following vaccination with GARDASIL. When syncope is associated with tonic-clonic movements, the activity is usually transient and typically responds to restoring cerebral perfusion.

GARDASIL is not recommended for use in pregnant women.

The most common adverse reaction was headache. Common adverse reactions that were observed among recipients of GARDASIL at a frequency of at least 1.0 percent and greater than placebo were fever, nausea, dizziness; and injection-site pain, swelling, erythema, pruritus and bruising.

Dosage and administration for GARDASIL

GARDASIL should be administered in 3 separate intramuscular injections in the deltoid region of the upper arm or in the higher anterolateral area of the thigh over a 6-month period with the first dose at an elected date, the second dose 2 months after the first dose, and the third dose 6 months after the first dose.

About GARDASIL

GARDASIL is approved for use in 132 countries. To date, more than 208 million doses have been distributed worldwide.

About HPV and related cancers and diseases

In the United States, human papillomavirus (HPV) will infect most sexually active males and females in their lifetime. According to the CDC, there are approximately 14 million new genital HPV infections in the United States each year, half of which occur in people 15 through 24 years of age. For most people, HPV clears on its own, but for others who don't clear the virus, it could lead to cancers and other diseases in males as well as females, and there is no way to predict who will clear the virus.

In women, HPV causes virtually all cervical cancer cases of which an estimated 70 percent are caused by HPV types 16 and 18. Each day another 35 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer in the United States about 12,900 women per year. HPV also causes approximately 70-75 percent of vaginal cancer cases and approximately 30 percent of vulvar cancer cases. HPV types 16 and 18 cause an estimated 65% of hpv-related vaginal cancer cases and 75% of hpv-related vulvar cancer cases. Additionally, there are an estimated 3 million abnormal Pap results, many of which are caused by HPV, that require follow-up each year in the United States.

HPV causes approximately 85-90 percent of anal cancers in both males and females, and HPV types 16 and 18 cause an estimated 85% of those cases. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 2,600 men and 4,600 women in the United States will be diagnosed with anal cancer in 2015, and overall rates have been increasing. There is no routine screening recommended for the general population to screen for anal cancer.

HPV causes approximately 90 percent of genital warts in both males and females. There are approximately 360,000 cases of genital warts each year in the United States. Treatment of genital warts can be painful, and they may recur after treatment, especially in the first three months. Approximately 3 out of 4 people get them after having genital contact with someone who has genital warts.

About Merck

For 125 years, Merck has been a global health care leader working to help the world be well. Merck is known as MSD outside the United States and Canada. Through our prescription medicines, vaccines, biologic therapies, and animal health products, we work with customers and operate in more than 140 countries to deliver innovative health solutions. We also demonstrate our commitment to increasing access to health care through far-reaching policies, programs and partnerships. For more information, visit www.merck.com and connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statement of Merck Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA

This news release of Merck Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA (the "company") includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of the company's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

Risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to, general industry conditions and competition; general economic factors, including interest rate and currency exchange rate fluctuations; the impact of pharmaceutical industry regulation and health care legislation in the United States and internationally; global trends toward health care cost containment; technological advances, new products and patents attained by competitors; challenges inherent in new product development, including obtaining regulatory approval; the company's ability to accurately predict future market conditions; manufacturing difficulties or delays; financial instability of international economies and sovereign risk; dependence on the effectiveness of the company's patents and other protections for innovative products; and the exposure to litigation, including patent litigation, and/or regulatory actions.

The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additional factors that could cause results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the company's 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K and the company's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) available at the SEC's Internet site (www.sec.gov).

Please see Prescribing Information for GARDASIL [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16, and 18) Vaccine, Recombinant] at https://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/g/gardasil/gardasil_pi.pdf and Patient Information for GARDASIL at https://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/g/gardasil/gardasil_ppi.pdf

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005242/en/

Contacts:

Merck

Media:

Pamela Eisele, 267-305-3558

Deb Wambold, 215-652-2913

or

Investors:

Teri Loxam, 908-740-1986

Justin Holko, 908-740-1879
Former Rubicon Project Executives Jay Stevens and Oliver Whitten to serve as Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Operating Officer

Adform (www.adform.com), the independent and open full stack advertising technology company serving media agencies, trading desks, brands and publishers globally, today announced Jay Stevens and Oliver Whitten have joined its executive team, serving as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Chief Operating Officer (COO) respectively. Mr. Stevens will begin immediately. Mr. Whitten will join in August, following the completion of his duties at Rubicon Project. These two appointments will report directly to Adform CEO, Gustav Mellentin.

As CRO, Jay Stevens will have responsibility for driving global revenue across all Adform markets, including Europe, the U.S., Asia Pacific and Latin America. Prior to joining Adform, Mr. Stevens served as general manager, international for the Rubicon Project, where he successfully built and managed the company's expansion efforts outside of North America.

Oliver Whitten, Adform's new COO, will scale global commercial operations, leading the business in Europe as well as global client service, operations and business development. In this capacity, Mr. Whitten will build on Adform's considerable success as Europe's biggest advertising technology company. Prior to joining Adform, Mr. Whitten served as Rubicon Project EMEA SVP and managing director, where he led a team of more than 80 staff members and oversaw revenue for Rubicon Project's business across 20 markets. He also managed the central international operations teams supporting all markets outside of the U.S.

"I'm excited to join Adform, the only independent technology provider that serves the entire digital advertising value chain with a transparent business model. Adform's end-to-end platform includes products for brands, agencies and publishers, and I'm looking forward to expanding the offering globally. I've also been very impressed by the robust scope of Adform's tech stack, the significant investment in development, and the size of the engineering team behind it. Adform's commitment to technology and service stands out as key areas where Adform has a history of differentiating itself in a crowded market and is a strong draw for Oliver and myself," said Mr. Stevens.

"I have long been in awe of the technology stack produced by Adform's first-class development team. They have built deep functionality into a platform that serves all participants in the market, across all screens. As brands and agencies shift greater portions of spend to digital channels, this depth of technology, coupled with the hands-on support they provide to clients, is a winning formula. It's gratifying that Adform has opted to buck the industry trend of rolling back support and is, instead, expanding it. As the complexity of digital advertising increases, ad-tech providers need to work as partners with their clients, and that is precisely Adform's approach," said Mr. Whitten.

Recently, Adform raised $21.5 million in new funding to expand its workforce, and to open new offices in Asia Pacific and Latin America. "Publishers, agencies and advertisers around the world want seamless technology and transparent technology vendors because it eliminates costly friction. We're excited to have Jay Stevens and Oliver Whitten join our ranks. Their experience and expertise will help take Adform to the next level as a global leader in the digital advertising ecosystem," said Mellentin.

Adform will be in Cannes for the upcoming creative festival, June 19 to 24. To book a meeting, go to http://cannes2016.adform.com.

About Adform

Adform is the independent and open full stack ad-tech platform that encompasses data, creativity and trading, servicing media agencies, trading desks, brands and publishers globally.

All of Adform's solutions are modular and easily interoperate with all major technologies used throughout the digital advertising ecosystem.

Among the world's largest private and independent advertising technology companies, Adform was founded in Denmark in 2002 and has offices in 18 countries throughout Europe, North America and APAC and over 700 employees globally.

Visit http://www.adform.com or http://join.adform.com for more information.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005298/en/

Contacts:

Media

For Adform

Dana Casalino, 646-760-2038

dana@kitehillpr.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Sabina Gold & Silver Corp. (TSX: SBB) ("Sabina" or the "Company") announces that it has received the report (the "Report") of the Nunavut Impact Review Board ("NIRB" or the "Board") to the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs (the "Minister") in relation to Sabina's proposal (the "Proposal") relating to its Back River Gold Project in Nunavut, Canada (the "Project").

In its Report, the NIRB recommended to the Minister that the Project not proceed to the licensing and permitting regulatory phase at this time but indicated that the proposal could be reconsidered once more information is provided to address uncertainties regarding effects predictions and mitigation measures, particularly with respect to caribou and climate change.

The Report follows a lengthy regulatory process during which the NIRB reviewed Sabina's Environmental Impact Statement, which ran approximately 15,000 pages and included numerous technical studies and reports. The regulatory process included a six-day public hearing in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

During the public hearing, the Project received broad support from the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, Kitikmeot communities and federal and territorial government agencies. In its Report, the NIRB acknowledges the general support for the economic benefits that are expected to accrue to the Kitikmeot region if the Project were to proceed.

"We are studying the Report and reviewing the NIRB's recommendations as we seek to continue to move the Project forward," said Bruce McLeod, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sabina. "The Report is over 300 pages long and it will take some time for us to review and analyze the Report in detail," said McLeod. "We remain confident that the concerns of the Board can be addressed and resolved through further consultation and collaboration with stakeholders."

"We fully appreciate the central importance of caribou in the North," said McLeod. "Obviously, climate change is a matter that impacts everyone - and Northern Canada is more heavily impacted than other places. These are values and concerns we share. Sabina will be considering these issues carefully as it continues its review of the NIRB report."

Under the provisions of the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement, the next step in the Project review process is for the Minister to review the NIRB's report. Sabina is reviewing its options, including a request to the Minister to refer the report back to NIRB for further consideration.

Conference Call

The Company will be holding a conference call on Thursday June 17, 2016 at 6:30am Pacific time.

PARTICIPANT TELEPHONE NUMBERS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Canada/USA TF: 1-800-319-4610 Toronto Toll: +1-416-915-3239 International Toll: +1-604-638-5340 Callers should dial in 5 - 10 min prior to the scheduled start time and simply ask to join the Sabina call.

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp. is a well-financed, emerging precious metals company with district scale, world class undeveloped assets in one of the world's newest, politically stable mining jurisdictions: Nunavut, Canada.

Sabina recently released a Feasibility Study on its 100% owned Back River Gold Project which presents a project that has been designed on a fit-for purpose basis, with the potential to produce approx. 200,000 ounces a year for approx. 11 years with a rapid payback of 2.9 years. At a US$1,150 gold price and a 0.80 exchange rate, the Study delivers a potential after tax internal rate of return of approximately 24.2% with an initial CAPEX of $415 million.

In addition to Back River, Sabina also owns a significant silver royalty on Glencore's Hackett River Project. The silver royalty on Hackett River's silver production is comprised of 22.5% of the first 190 million ounces produced and 12.5% of all silver produced thereafter.

The Company has approximately $45 million in its treasury and is currently amending the budget and plans for 2016.

Qualified Person

Wes Carson, P.Eng, Vice-President, Project Development for the Company has reviewed and approved the technical disclosure in this news release in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

Forward Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (the "forward-looking statements"), including our belief as to our ability to address and resolve the concerns of the NIRB through further consultation and collaboration with stakeholders. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the future circumstances, outcomes or results anticipated in or implied by such forward-looking statements will occur or that plans, intentions or expectations upon which the forward-looking statements are based will occur. While we have based these forward-looking statements on our expectations about future events as at the date that such statements were prepared, the statements are not a guarantee that such future events will occur and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors which could cause events or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks, uncertainties, assumptions and factors include, among others, the actions by government and regulatory authorities, such as NIRB. In addition, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Known risk factors include risks associated with exploration and project development; the need for additional financing; the calculation of mineral resources and reserves; operational risks associated with mining and mineral processing; fluctuations in metal prices; title matters; government regulation; obtaining and renewing necessary licences and permits; environmental liability and insurance; and other risks and uncertainties, including those relating to the Back River Project and general risks associated with the mineral exploration and development industry described in our Annual Information Form, financial statements and MD&A for the fiscal period ended December 31, 2015 filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and available at www.sedar.com. Although we have attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results 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, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. We are under no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable securities laws.

Contacts:

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp.

Nicole Hoeller

Vice-President, Communications

1 888 648-4218

nhoeller@sabinagoldsilver.com



Sabina Gold & Silver Corp.

Bruce McLeod

President & CEO

604 998-4175

604 998-1051 (FAX)

www.sabinagoldsilver.com




BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - Sohu.com Inc. (SOHU) said that the special financing committee of its Board of Directors has informed the Board that the Financing Committee has decided to stop considering Indicative Proposal from Charles Zhang, the Company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. The Financing Committee informed the Board that it instead will seek and consider alternative financing options for the Company. The special financing committee was formed in response to the Company's receipt of a preliminary non-binding indicative proposal from Charles Zhang, the Company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, for an investment by a special purpose entity to be formed by Dr. Zhang and a third-party private equity firm to be identified by Dr. Zhang. The company cautioned investors and others that there is no assurance that any alternative financing transaction or transactions will be identified or completed. 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.
DURHAM, NC -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Amundi Smith Breeden today announced that Amundi Global Chief Investment Officer Pascal Blanque is the recipient of Institutional Investor's 2016 European Manager Lifetime Achievement Award. Amundi Smith Breeden is the North American headquarters for Amundi, Europe's leading asset manager and a top-ten global investment manager.

Institutional Investor's European Lifetime Achievement Awards celebrate Europe's most honored asset managers, investors and companies. The Manager Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes European money managers who have delivered exceptional performance, risk management and service.

"I am honored to have my work recognized and to be included among such distinguished winners. I thank those who nominated me and Institutional Investor for this prestigious award," said Mr. Blanque.

"I can think of no one more deserving of this recognition than Pascal," said Patrice Blanc, Chief Executive Officer of Amundi Smith Breeden. "For more than two decades, Pascal has conducted in-depth research and written extensively on monetary issues, the functioning of financial markets and the philosophical foundations of economics. We are proud to collaborate with Pascal and his team of investment professionals in service to our clients," Mr. Blanc concluded.

With a call for nominations, Institutional Investor reaches out to the financial industry to nominate honorees for the Achievement Awards. The awards were presented on June 15, 2016 in London. Additional information about the awards, winners and ceremony may be found at http://www.iieuropeawards.com/winners.php.

As Global CIO of Amundi Group, Mr. Blanque has put his theories into practice to offer Amundi's clients investment solutions that address the significant challenges of the current economic and financial environment.

In addition to serving as Amundi's Global Chief Investment Officer, Mr. Blanque is Head of Institutional Business, and a member of the Amundi Group Executive Committee since February 2005. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of CPR AM in January 2007. From 2000 to 2005, he was Head of Economic Research and Chief Economist of Credit Agricole. Before joining Credit Agricole, Mr. Blanque was Deputy Director of the Economic Research Department at Paribas (1997-2000) following four years as a strategist at Paribas Asset Management in London (1992-1996). He began his career in institutional and private asset management at Paribas in 1991.

An economist and financial historian, Mr. Blanque is the author of several contributions. His research interests and academic work focus on monetary issues, the functioning of financial markets and the philosophical foundations of economics. His books include Essays in Positive Investment Management, Money, Memory and Asset Prices, The Social Economy of Freedom and Philosophy in Economics, all published and distributed by Economica and Brookings Institution Press. His publications in international journals and specialized newspapers include numerous articles on financial history, economics and policy making. He taught and conducted research at Ecole Normale Superieure, Ecole Polytechnique and Paris-Dauphine University. He is a member of the French Societe d'Economie Politique and The 300 Club based in London.

Mr. Blanque was awarded European CIO of the Year 2013 by Funds Europe, a business strategy magazine for Europe's asset management professionals.

Mr. Blanque studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He is a graduate of Paris's Institut d'Etudes Politiques and holds a PhD in Finance from Paris-Dauphine University.

About Amundi

Amundi is the No.1 European Asset Manager and in the Top 10 worldwide(1) with AUM of more than $1 trillion worldwide(2).

Located at the heart of the main investment regions in more than 30 countries, Amundi offers a comprehensive range of products covering all asset classes and major currencies.

Amundi has developed savings solutions to meet the needs of more than 100 million retail clients worldwide and designs innovative, high-performing products for institutional clients which are tailored specifically to their requirements and risk profile.

The Group contributes to funding the economy by orienting savings towards company development.

Amundi has become a leading European player in asset management, recognised for:

Product performance and transparency;

Quality of client relationships based on a long-term advisory approach;

Efficiency in its organisation and teams' promise to serving its clients;

Commitment to sustainable development and socially responsible investment policies.

(1) No.1 European asset manager based on global assets under management (AUM) and the main headquarters being based in Europe- Source IPE " Top 400 asset managers" published in June 2015 and based on AUM as at December 2014.

(2) Amundi figures as of 31 March 2016.

Amundi Asset Management, Societe Anonyme with a registered capital of EUR 596 262 615 - Portfolio Manager regulated by AMF under number GP 04000036 - Registered office: 90, boulevard Pasteur, 75015 Paris, France - 437 574 452 RCS Paris

About Amundi Smith Breeden, LLC

Amundi Smith Breeden is the North American investment headquarters for Amundi. With ~$10 billion in assets under management, the firm manages a range of U.S. fixed income strategies and contributes to global fixed income portfolios managed by Amundi investment professionals in Europe and Asia. Smith Breeden, now Amundi Smith Breeden, was founded as a research-driven institutional asset management firm specializing in the major U.S. fixed income sectors. The firm has a 30+ year history of pioneering work in developing and applying quantitative financial analysis to valuing and trading fixed income securities, including Agency and non-Agency mortgage-backed securities and corporate credit.

Contacts

Amundi Smith Breeden

Robin Schoen

Robin Schoen Public Relations

215.504.2122

rschoen@robinschoenpr.com



Amundi

Natacha Sharp

Press Relations Department

011.33.1.76.37.86.05

natacha.sharp@amundi.com




VENICE, FL -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Advanced Credit Technologies, Inc. (OTCQB: ACRT) has issued the following update on the company's business and information objectives going forward in the second quarter of 2016.

Advanced Credit Technologies, Inc. is pleased to announce it has agreed in principal to have Toronto based Zoompass (www.zoompass.com) facilitate its financial services processing for its various verticals, and to also include the TurnScor Pre-Paid Card. As the market expands and diversifies, prepaid card products are increasingly in demand by both the unbanked as well as the more seasoned banked population. This increased activity is demanding considerable attention from financial institutions, which are benefitting by making these cards more attractive to consumers. According to a recent study from Mercator Advisory Group, Inc., consumers loaded $276.7 billion onto prepaid cards last year and the organization predicts that number to exceed $568.4 billion by 2016. That makes it the fastest-growing non-cash method of payment in the United States.

"The explosive growth in this part of the financial services arena is why partnering with Zoompass, a leading global financial services company and developer of one of the leading white label mobile wallet solutions in the market today, creates such a powerful combination. Zoompass's ability to offer products in all the channels opens up significant opportunities, such as payroll cards, student university cards, travel cards, and affinity cards makes them a natural fit with our marketing goals," said Chris Jackson CEO of Advanced Credit.

Chris Jackson further stated, "Partnering with a company like Zoompass gives us the flexibility we need in the market place, the resources to go global, and still give customers the personal touch."

"This is one of the hallmarks of our company," stated Rob Lee, CEO, Zoompass Inc. "We pride ourselves on going the extra mile for customers and clients alike, and we're really excited to help Advanced Credit Technologies, Inc. get their cards into the market place. This is a growing space and our virtual wallet truly compliments the card program. We're extremely motivated to get these programs launched to start deriving revenues for both companies."

About Zoompass

Zoompass Inc. is a leading financial services technology company with a unique place in the Fintech space as both a technology platform provider and physical prepaid card provider. Zoompass provides businesses and government complete program management services for a wide range of open loop Visa and MasterCard prepaid and virtual card accounts. Zoompass enables businesses to provide their customers with a number of open loop card choices including, gift cards, incentive cards, check replacement cards and online virtual card accounts. The company also provides advanced mobile technology, enabling businesses to provide their customers with a white label mobile wallet solution, like Zoompass, with the ability to manage their card balances, bill pay, transfer funds and perform card to card money transfers in real time using their mobile devices. For more information about Zoompass, visit www.zoompass.com.

Safe Harbor:

From time to time, the Company may issue news releases that 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, and is subject to the safe harbor created by those sections. This material may contain statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. For those statements, the Company claims the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statement provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and any amendments thereto.

Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, goals, assumptions, or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements." "Forward-looking statements" are based upon expectations, estimates and projections at the time the statements are made that involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated.

Contact:

Chris Jackson

chris@turnscor.com

612-961-4536




FOREST CITY, IA--(Marketwired - June 16, 2016) - Winnebago Industries, Inc. (NYSE: WGO), a leading United States recreation vehicle manufacturer, announced that Robert M. Chiusano was elected chair of the Company's board of directors effective June 15, 2016. Mr. Chiusano will continue to serve as the chair of the Human Resources Committee until at least December of 2016. Mr. Chiusano has been a member of the board of directors since October of 2008. He assisted in the assembly of the Company's strong management team, including the appointment of Michael Happe as president and chief executive officer in January 2016. Prior to joining Winnebago Industries board, Mr. Chiusano was the chief operating officer, Commercial Systems, for Rockwell Collins, Inc., a provider of communication and aviation electronic solutions for commercial and military applications.

At the June 15, 2016, board of directors meeting Larry Erickson stepped down as chair of the board of directors and informed the board of his intention to retire from the board at the conclusion of his current term in December of 2016. Mr. Erickson has served as chair since August 2015, lead independent director from December 2011 to August 2015, and as a director since January 2005. Jerry N. Currie, who has served on the Board of Directors since 1996, also announced his retirement at the end of his current term in December of 2016.

The change in chair is part of a transition plan, with Mr. Erickson indicating he will assist Mr. Chiusano during his remaining months on the board. Mr. Happe said, "I congratulate Mr. Erickson on his leadership over the last year and throughout his 11 year tenure as a director. His steady guidance helped the company remain productive and focused during the recent transition in leadership. I also want to thank Mr. Currie for his many years of service to the Company. All of us here at Winnebago wish Larry and Jerry well in their coming retirement. I am confident that Bob's commitment to excellence, enthusiasm for our employees and customers, and knowledge of the company will be invaluable as we move forward together in the future."

Mr. Erickson said, "I am proud to have been a part of Winnebago's growth and evolution into a leading U.S. manufacturer of recreation vehicles. Our dedicated employees and management team have put the Company on a solid footing, and I am confident that Winnebago is well positioned for its next phase of growth and development. I've thoroughly enjoyed working with our board of directors, and I couldn't be more pleased that Robert has stepped up to take on this new leadership role."

About Winnebago Industries

Winnebago Industries, Inc. is a leading U.S. manufacturer of recreation vehicles, which are used primarily in leisure travel and outdoor recreation activities. The Company builds quality motorhomes, travel trailers, and fifth wheel products. Winnebago Industries has received the Quality Circle Award from the Recreation Vehicle Dealers Association every year since 1996. The Company's common stock is listed on the New York and Chicago Stock Exchanges and traded under symbol WGO. Options for the Company's common stock are traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. For access to Winnebago Industries' investor relations material or to add your name to an automatic email list for Company new releases, visit http://investor.wgo.net.

Media Contact:

Sam Jefson

641-585-6803

sjefson@wgo.net



Investor Relations Contact:

Samantha Dugan

641-585-6160

sdugan@wgo.net
TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Following a year-long selection process, recipients of the 2016 Tang Prize are now about to be announced over four days of press conferences. The announcements will begin on June 18 with the prize in Sustainable Development. A live stream of the announcement will be available on the prize website (www.tang-prize.org) and YouTube, starting each day at 10:00 a.m. Taiwan time (GMT+8).

This year is the second awarding of the international prize, which celebrated its inaugural year in 2014. According to the prize foundation's CEO Jenn-Chuan Chern, 20% to 70% more nominations were received this year as compared to 2014, indicating broader recognition and participation from the international community. It also suggests a positive response to the inaugural 2014 prize winners.

The Tang Prize in Sustainable Development recognizes individuals or institutions who have made extraordinary contributions to the sustainable development of human societies, especially through groundbreaking innovations in science and technology. As many as three recipients in the category will receive a cash prize of up to US$1.24 million. In addition to the cash prize, a grant of approx. US$311,000 is awarded per category.

Gro Harlem Brundtland was awarded the very first prize in Sustainable Development in 2014 for her numerous contributions to the field. She led the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) from 1984 to 1987. "Our Common Future," also known as the Brundtland Report, was published in 1987, and became a seminal text for its definition of the term 'sustainable development.' The Brundtland Report and Earth Summit have continued to influence subsequent UN conferences, including Rio+20 and the COP meetings.

Founded in 2012 by Samuel Yin, the Tang Prize awards achievements in four categories: Sustainable Development, Biopharmaceutical Science, Sinology, and Rule of Law. Yin founded the Tang Prize in a spirit of humanitas inspired by the Nobel Prize, which was founded nearly 100 years previous. He saw that the world today was facing problems categorically different and more global from those we faced just a century ago: climate change, new and dangerous diseases, clashes of cultures and mindsets. He saw also the importance of education, one of the core values of the Tang Prize, in driving social progress.

Nomination and selection of laureates is conducted by Taiwan's highest academic institution, the Academia Sinica. Recipients are chosen on the basis of the originality of their work along with their contributions to society, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, gender, and political affiliation.

Beginning with Sustainable Development on June 18, the newest round of awardees will be announced live streaming on June 18-21, 2016, and will receive the medal, diploma, and cash prize at the award ceremony on September 25 in Taipei.

About Tang Prize

Dr. Samuel Yin, chairman of Ruentex Group, founded the Tang Prize in December of 2012 as an extension of the supreme value his family placed on education. Harkening back to the golden age of the Tang Dynasty in Chinese history, the Tang Prize seeks to be an inspiring force for people working in all corners of the world. For more information on the Tang Prize and its laureates, please visit www.tang-prize.org

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=3022875



Contact Person/Email

Jocelyn Chen

Blake Brownrigg

E-mail: Email Contact




MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- J.A.G. Mines Ltd. (JAG) (TSX VENTURE: JML) and its subsidiary Olitra welcome with great interest the recent announcement made by the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Mr. Pierre Arcand, offering his support to a new oil project in the region of Temiscouata (Lower St-Lawrence). Specifically, it is a project of the company Squatex Energy and Resources Inc., and it is located near Rimouski.

JAG and its subsidiary are strongly involved in this region, unexplored prior to their arrival in 2006. Since then, JAG and Olitra have made important exploration works to assess the conventional hydrocarbon potential of this vast region of the MRC of Temiscouata. These works were directed by the geologist Marc Richer-Lafleche, Ph.D. of the "Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS)". Because of their geographical position between the three borders (Quebec, Maine and New Brunswick), the JAG properties are situated close to transportation infrastructure (roads, port, etc.), and they cover 222 606 hectares (556 515 acres). They are also located immediately south of the discovery of oil, condensates and natural gas by Squatex Energy and Resources Inc. in the Rimouski sector. (Well Masse #2).

The geologist Marc Richer-Lafleche wrote: "Scientific studies demonstrate that the source of the hydrocarbons found in various deposits of the Bas St-Laurent and Gaspesie would be located in Ordovician units rich in organic material in depth. Conceptually, the presence of coral reefs and coarse sandstone related to Gaspe sandstones observed on the properties of JAG and Squatex would potentially be hydrocarbon reservoirs. To support this hypothesis, JAG and Olitra conducted Soil-gas surveys on its properties and from a database of over 3264 samples, of a high resolution gravimetric survey, of a radiometric gamma survey, of audio-magnetotelluric surveys and of a structural study, three exploration targets have been prioritized and one of them runs along the Squatex property which is the host of the well Masse #2.

Considering that the stock market is not currently very favourable for the financing of important exploration works, JAG and its subsidiary favour rather an association with financial partners for the resumption of the works on its Temiscouata properties, which are at an advanced stage of exploration.

The TSX Venture Exchange accepts no responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contacts:

Pierre Gevry

President

J.A.G. Mines Ltd.

514-849-7336

pierregvry@gmail.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- InMed Pharmaceuticals Inc. ("InMed" or "the Company") (CSE: IN)(OTCQB: IMLFF), a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the research and development of novel, cannabinoid-based therapies, is pleased to announce today the appointment of Mr. Eric A. Adams as CEO, President and as a member of the Board of Directors. Mr. Adams is a seasoned biopharmaceutical executive with over 25 years' experience in company and capital formation, global market development, mergers & acquisitions, licensing and corporate governance.

Mr. Adams states, "I'm excited to join InMed at this stage of its development. The assets developed to date by Dr. Sazzad Hossain, InMed's Chief Scientific Officer, and his research collaborators have significant potential for success. InMed's proprietary bioinformatics drug candidate database, its cutting edge cannabinoid biosynthesis program, and active drug development programs in epidermolysis bullosa, glaucoma and other promising disease targets provide an incredibly strong platform for the company's growth through both direct and licensed revenue models; there are short- and medium-term value driving milestones for InMed in all of these areas. We plan to monetize these assets and continue to fund development of important cannabinoid-based drugs for diseases with high unmet medical needs. I look forward to working with the management team and Board to build a successful, diversified drug development company that will tap into the vast potential of cannabinoid therapeutics and contribute to the understanding and commercialization of this important and largely undiscovered class of drugs."

Mr. Adams previously served as CEO at enGene Inc., which he led from a nascent start-up to becoming a venture capital-backed leader in gene therapy. Prior to enGene, he held key senior roles in global market development with QLT Inc. (Vancouver), Advanced Tissues Science Inc. (La Jolla), Abbott Laboratories (Chicago), and Fresenius AG (Germany). Mr. Adams is well regarded in the Canadian biotech industry for his service as a strategic advisor to a number of early-stage biotech companies, as a previous Chairman of BIOTECanada's Emerging Company Advisory Board and for his extensive generosity in mentoring biotech entrepreneurs. He is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States and holds a Masters of International Business from the University of South Carolina and a Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Southern Indiana.

Chris Bogart will be stepping down as Interim CEO and resuming his role as SVP of Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations. Additionally, InMed announces it has accepted the resignation of Paul Brennen as a Director of the Company, effective today. The Board wishes to thank Mr. Brennan for his efforts.

About InMed

InMed is a pre-clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that specializes in developing novel therapies through the research and development into the extensive pharmacology of cannabinoids coupled with innovative drug delivery systems. InMed's proprietary bioinformatics drug candidate identification platform, biosynthesis manufacturing, and accelerated drug development pathway are the fundamental value drivers of the company.

For more information, visit www.inmedpharma.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward-looking statements and information based on current expectations. These statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. Although such statements are based on management's reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that such assumptions will prove to be correct. We assume no responsibility to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances.

Additionally, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause InMed Pharmaceuticals actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information contained herein.

All forward-looking information herein is qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement, and InMed Pharmaceuticals disclaims any obligation to revise or update any such forward-looking information or to publicly announce the result of any revisions to any of the forward-looking information contained herein to reflect future results, events or developments, except as required by law.

These risks and uncertainties include, among others, the possibility that clinical trials will not be successful, or be completed, or confirm earlier clinical trial results, risks associated with obtaining funding from third parties, risks related to the timing and costs of clinical trials and the receipt of regulatory approvals.

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDER HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Contacts:

InMed Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Chris Bogart

SVP, Corporate Strategy & Investor Relations

604.669.7207

chris@inmedpharma.com

www.inmedpharma.com




NORWALK (dpa-AFX) - Xerox (XRX) announced that, following the completion of its separation into two publicly traded companies. the Business Process Outsourcing company will be named 'Conduent, Inc.' and the Document Technology company will continue to be called Xerox Corp. With approximately $7 billion in 2015 revenue and 96,000 employees worldwide, Conduent will be a Fortune 500 scale business process services company with expertise in transaction-intensive processing, analytics and automation. With approximately $11 billion in 2015 revenue and approximately 39,000 employees, Xerox will be a Fortune 500 scale company with a diverse portfolio of hardware, software and services supporting governments and commercial enterprises from small to large. 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.


The MSCI EM Europe 10/40 Index returned -6.6% in May in US dollar terms.



The Emerging Europe universe struggled in May giving up some of the gains of the last three months. While the region's equity markets have enjoyed one of the strongest starts to a year in a decade and some of the strongest outperformance relative to global equities in almost two decades, emerging markets overall reacted negatively to Federal Reserve minutes that were more hawkish therefore putting a possible June rate hike back on the table.



Within the region, and within emerging markets overall, Greece was the best performer returning +12% in US dollar terms. Greece rallied as the country continued to make progress towards a bailout programme. Conversely, the Russian equity market fell by almost 6% in May, but remains a strong performer in the year to date. Turkey fell by almost 14% in May as politics continued to dominate the headlines in that country. April's speculation turned into May's reality as President Erdogan dismissed the Prime Minister early in the month. These events drove the currency lower leading to its worst month since December 2013, which, interestingly, was also full of political risks too.



Focus on: KazMunaiGaz, Alpha Bank and Halkbank



In Greece, the expected Eurogroup approval of the First Review of the Third Memorandum (bailout programme), along with the indication of IMF support helped drive that market higher. The Company benefited from its position in Alpha Bank. We remain positive on our holding in Alpha Bank which, along with the Greek economy and assets, stands to benefit from a finalized bailout package.



Our position in KazMunaiGaz in Kazahkstan benefited the Company as Brent rose to over $48 and even briefly traded above $50 for the first time since October 2015. We like the stock given it is deep value, has a very large cash pile and is a potential M&A target.



Conversely, weighing on the Company was Halk Bank in Turkey, which as a state bank, has been under pressure with regards to the flare up in the political situation in May. We remain positive on the stock because it has one of the highest profitability levels at one of the cheapest valuations in the sector.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 16, 2016) - Xtra-Gold Resouces Corp. (TSX: XTG) (OTCBB: XTGRF) ("Xtra-Gold" or the "Company"),is very pleased to announce latest channel sampling results from the Cobra Creek Gold Corridor prospect, on the Company's wholly- owned Kibi Gold Project, located in the Kibi - Winneba greenstone belt (the "Kibi Gold Belt"), in Ghana, West Africa. Highlights of the recently implemented outcrop stripping / channel sampling program include:

saw-cut channel sample composites grading 23.62 grams per tonne ("g/t") gold over 5 m, including 67.9 g/t gold over 0.9 m (KBCS023-46); and 20.48 g/t gold over 4.58 m, including 35.47 g/t gold over 1.9 m (KBCS023-47) from newly exposed breccia zone within central portion of High Grade Gold Shoot fold structure;



High Grade Gold Shoot extended 40 m to NE, to total strike length of approximately 110 m, with saw-cut channel sample composites grading 12.0 g/t gold over 4.3 m, including 39.7 g/t gold over 0.85 m (KBCS023-12); and 4.1 g/t gold over 7.93 m (KBCS023-2);



new high grade shear structure discovered along NW flank of High Grade Gold Shoot with channel sample composites grading 10.26 g/t gold over 3.37 m, including 34.3 g/t gold over 0.75 m (KBCS092-3); and 13.17 g/t gold over 3.15 m, including 31.5 g/t gold over 0.95 m (KBCS092-4);



new auriferous structure discovered along SW extension of R2 high resistivity trend spatially associated with the Main Shear structure, approximately 625 m southwest of the High Grade Gold Shoot, returning saw-cut channel intercepts of 1.07 m grading 23.6 g/t gold (KBCS090-V4) and 3.85 m grading 4.62 g/t gold (KBCS090-10).

The Cobra Creek Gold Corridor project corresponds to an approximately 550 m wide, NE- trending, multi-structure braided shear zone system traced to date over an approximately 850 m strike length. The quartz feldspar porphyry ("QFP") hosted mineralized corridor encompasses at least 9 auriferous shear zones ranging from approximately 1 m to 25 m in apparent width. Gold mineralization exhibits strong spatial association with 2 prominent NE-ENE high resistivity trends appearing to reflect broad zones of strong iron carbonate (+/- silica) alteration. Approximately 1.8 km long by 300 m to 800 m wide, anomalous gold-in-soil trend spatially associated with the structural corridor.

The present surface sampling results correspond to a mechanized outcrop stripping / channel sampling program implemented from mid-October 2015 to early April 2016 on the Cobra Creek Gold Corridor project; with the exploration work designed to further delineate the High Grade Gold Shoot located at the NE extremity of the Main Shear structure and to test the SW extension of the approximately 1,100 m long R2 high resistivity trend spatially associated with the Main Shear structure.

Table 1: Saw-Cut Channel Grade Composites Cobra Creek Gold Corridor Project Sample

String ID From

(meters) To

(meters) Sampled

Length

(meters) Gold Grams

Per Tonne Shear ID / Comments KBCS023-45 2.9 6.8 3.9 12.61 High Grade Shoot - Breccia including 6.15 6.8 0.65 23.20

KBCS023-46 2.0 7.0 5.0 23.62 High Grade Shoot - Breccia including 6.1 7.0 0.9 67.90

KBCS023-47 4.12 8.7 4.58 20.48 High Grade Shoot - Breccia including 5.9 7.8 1.9 35.47

KBCS023-48 3.0 7.55 4.55 15.11 High Grade Shoot - Breccia including 3.0 4.0 1.0 22.00

KBCS092-3 0.35 3.72 3.37 10.26 New Parallel Shear including 1.65 2.4 0.75 34.30

KBCS092-4 0.0 3.15 3.15 13.17 New Parallel Shear including 0.0 0.95 0.95 31.50

KBCS092-5 0.0 1.1 1.1 19.35 New Parallel Shear KBCS023-2 1.72 9.65 7.93 4.10 High Grade Shoot - NE KBCS023-11 0.0 3.95 3.95 3.91 High Grade Shoot - NE KBCS023-12 0.0 4.3 4.3 12.00 High Grade Shoot - NE including 1.4 2.25 0.85 39.70

KBCS023-13 0.0 2.4 2.4 5.20 High Grade Shoot - NE including 1.68 2.4 0.72 13.25

KBCS023-38 0.0 0.62 0.62 27.90 High Grade Shoot - NE KBCS090-V4 0.0 1.07 1.07 23.60 Main Shear - SW KBCS090-5 0.0 1.02 1.02 10.10 Main Shear - SW KBCS090-10 0.0 3.85 3.85 4.62 Main Shear - SW Notes: Reported intercepts are channel string lengths; true width of mineralization is unknown at this time. Due to irregular bedrock surface the reported saw-cut channel intercepts are sample intersection lengths irrespective of mineralization topography and may not represent true width of mineralization.

A total of 258 saw-cut channel samples totaling 200.4 m were collected from 106 channel strings ranging from 0.4 m to 9.65 m in length; over approximately 2,600 square meters of stripped bedrock exposure. Of the 258 bedrock channel samples collected: 69 (27%) returned less than 0.1 g/t gold; 85 (33%) returned gold values between 0.1 g/t to 1 g/t; 55 (21%) between 1 g/t and 5 g/t gold; 20 (8%) between 5 g/t to 10 g/t gold; 22 (8%) between 10 g/t and 30 g/t gold; and 7 samples (3%) returned values over 30 g/t gold (67.9 g/t maximum).

Outcrop stripping successfully extended the High Grade Gold Shoot ("Blowout") over an approximately 40 m distance to the northeast, in addition to exposing a strongly auriferous structural breccia within the central portion of the shoot. The NE-trending, strongly pyritized crackle breccia extending over an approximately 20 m strike distance and ranging from 0.4 m to 5 m in apparent width returned high grade channel intercepts of 5 m grading 23.62 g/t gold, including 67.9 g/t gold over 0.9 m (KBCS023-46); and 4.58 m grading 20.48 g/t gold, including 35.47 g/t gold over 1.9 m (KBCS023-47). A total of 6 channel strings encompassing 21 saw- cut channel samples totaling 16.76 m were collected from the breccia zone with individual assay values ranging from 2.2 g/t to 67.9 g/t gold; and the length weighted average grade of all 21 samples being 19.91 g/t gold. The southwestern extremity of the breccia zone sits immediately adjacent to the rock chip channel intercept of 6.7 m grading 32.32 g/t gold, including 82.22 g/t gold over 2 m in scout trench TCK002 (November 12, 2012 news release).

Latest channel sampling efforts established the High Grade Shoot over an approximately 110 m strike length and up to approximately 15 m in apparent width; with geological mapping to date appearing to indicate that the high grade gold mineralization occurs in hinges of folded quartz / Fe-carbonate / tourmaline veins hosted along a shallow SW-plunging fold structure, and associated fold axis crackle breccia.

The outcrop stripping program also yielded a new high grade shear structure along the NW flank of the High Grade Gold Shoot. Channel sampling across the folded quartz / Fe-carbonate / tourmaline veining exposed over an approximately 12 m strike length returned mineralized intercepts of up to 3.37 m grading 10.26 g/t gold, including 34.3 g/t gold over 0.75 m (KBCS092-3); and 3.15 m grading 13.17 g/t gold, including 31.5 g/t gold over 0.95 m (KBCS092-4). The parallel structure lying approximately 25 m northwest of the High Grade Gold Shoot lies along the northwest margin of the prominent R2 high resistivity trend spatially associated with the Main Shear structure.

Channel sampling of folded quartz / Fe-carbonate / tourmaline veining over an approximately 15 m strike distance on a stripped outcrop lying along the SW extension of the R2 high resistivity trend spatially associated with the Main Shear structure, approximately 625 m southwest of the High Grade Gold Shoot, returned saw-cut channel intercepts of 1.07 m grading 23.6 g/t gold (KBCS090-V4), 1.02 m grading 10.1 g/t gold (KBCS090-5), and 3.85 m grading 4.62 g/t gold (KBCS090-10). Of considerable exploration interest is the presence of a flat-lying chargeability (IP) anomaly centered on the resistivity trend approximately 115 m vertically below the auriferous veining.

A 2,000 m diamond core drill program was initiated on the Cobra Creek Gold Corridor project on June 7, 2016. The first pass drilling program is designed to test up to 10 priority drill targets including 3 major high-grade gold shoots ("blowouts"), including: High Grade Gold Shoot; L17600N Shoot; and Lightning Shoot. Refer to the Q2 2016 Corporate Presentation on the Company's website at www.xtragold.com for further details on the Cobra Creek Gold Corridor project.

QA/QC

Yves P. Clement, P. Geo, Vice President, Exploration for Xtra-Gold is acting as the Qualified Person in compliance with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") with respect to this announcement. He has prepared and or supervised the preparation of the scientific or technical information in this announcement and confirms compliance with NI 43-101. All samples in this news release were analyzed by standard fire assay fusion with atomic absorption spectroscopy finish at ALS Ghana Limited, in Kumasi, Ghana; an ISO 9001:2000 certified laboratory operated by ALS Chemex. Xtra-Gold has implemented a rigorous quality assurance / quality control (QA/QC) program to ensure best practices in sampling and analysis of drill core, trench channel, and saw-cut channel samples, the details of which can be viewed on the Company's website at www.xtragold.com.

About Xtra-Gold Resources Corp.

Xtra-Gold is a gold exploration company with a substantial land position in the Kibi Gold Belt. The Kibi Gold Belt, which exhibits many similar geological features to Ghana's main gold belt, the Ashanti Belt, has been the subject of very limited modern exploration activity targeting lode gold deposits as virtually all past gold mining activity and exploration efforts focused on the extensive alluvial gold occurrences in many river valleys throughout the Kibi area.

Xtra-Gold holds 5 Mining Leases totaling approximately 226 sq km (22,600 ha) at the northern extremity of the Kibi Gold Belt. The Company's exploration efforts to date have focused on the Kibi Gold Project located on the Apapam Concession (33.65 sq km), along the eastern flank of the Kibi Gold Belt. The Kibi Gold Project (Zone 2 - Zone 3) maiden mineral resource estimate produced by Xtra-Gold in October 2012 represents first ever NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate generated on a lode gold project within the Kibi Gold Belt. The NI 43-101 Technical Report entitled "Independent Technical Report, Apapam Concession, Kibi Project, Eastern Region, Ghana", prepared by SEMS Explorations and dated October 31, 2012, is filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

The TSX does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. This news release includes certain "forward- looking statements". These statements are based on information currently available to the Company and the Company provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Forward- looking statements include estimates and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives or goals, including words to the effect that the Company or management expects a stated condition or result to occur. Forward- looking statements may be identified by such terms as "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "estimates", "may", "could", "would", "will", or "plan". Since forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results relating to, among other things, results of exploration, project development, reclamation and capital costs of the Company's mineral properties, and the Company's financial condition and prospects, could differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements for many reasons such as: changes in general economic conditions and conditions in the financial markets; changes in demand and prices for minerals; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; technological and operational difficulties encountered in connection with the activities of the Company; and other matters discussed in this news release. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Company's forward-looking statements. These and other factors should be considered carefully and readers should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by the Company or on its behalf, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

Contact Information

For further information please contact:

James Longshore

Chief Executive Officer

416-366-4227

E-mail: info@xtragold.com

Website: www.xtragold.com
KARLSRUHE, Germany, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

ICIS is very pleased to announce its launch of a price assessment for the national emissions trading scheme in China. On a weekly basis, the company is assessing how Chinese and international companies value Chinese Certified Emission Reductions (CCERs), a unit that can be used to comply with the Chinese national emissions trading scheme that is poised to launch next year.

In its first assessment on 16th June, the bid/offer spread for a CCER delivered in March 2018 that is eligible for compliance at time of delivery was assessed at 8-12CNY/t. The weekly assessment is offered free of charge for ICIS China carbon market clients, and can be received by non-clients with a one week delay by registering on https://analytics.icis.com/golden-ccer-price-report/.

"Our Golden CCER price assessment is the first time the market gets transparency on expected costs in the national market in China. The Chinese government expects more than 7,000 companies to participate in this market - so our weekly publication should help a lot of entities to manage their costs and make better decision", says Jan Ahrens, Business Director Carbon Analytics.

First transactions

We are happy to announce that Shell Energy (China) Limited, the trading entity for Shell in China, and SPDDR Carbon Asset Management Centre have agreed to pursue the 1st Golden CCER trade for a fixed price. The deal was announced at the 7th Earth Temple Forum in Beijing earlier today. This transaction shows support of the national market and we hope it will encourage more Golden CCER transactions in future.

"We see this initiative of ICIS as very positive for the development of the Chinese carbon market and hope that our deal is just the start of more trading in the run-up to the national ETS", says Mr. Yao Fuming, Director of the SPDDR Carbon Asset Management Centre.

For more information contact: Amy Holland

About ICIS

ICIS is the world's largest petrochemical market information provider and has fast-growing energy and fertilizer divisions. We provide information and intelligence for global carbon markets through utilizing a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative research, as well as expert opinion to deliver detailed insight into emissions and carbon trading schemes. Our Timing Impact Model is the cornerstone of our analysis and provides clients with a more rounded perspective than conventional approaches. This gives our subscribers a competitive advantage over their competitors. ICIS offers products that cover the California/Quebec, RGGI, EU, South Korea, and China carbon markets.

With a global staff of more than 800, ICIS has employees based in Houston, Washington, New York, London, Montpellier, Dusseldorf, Karlsruhe, Milan, Mumbai, Singapore, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Yantai, Tokyo and Perth. Some 350 of ICIS's staff are journalists engaged in reporting market prices and news, and ICIS is fully committed to upholding the highest journalistic principles of verification, corroboration and authentication. ICIS has a compliance framework that along with its methodologies and business processes adheres to the requirements of the IOSCO PRA Principles.

About Reed Business Information

At Reed Business Information we provide information and online data services to business professionals worldwide. Customers have access to our high-value industry data, analytics, information and tools. Our strong global brands hold market-leading positions across a wide range of industry sectors including banking, petrochemicals and aviation where we help customers make key strategic decisions every day. RBI is part of RELX Group Plc, a leading global provider of data, information and solutions for professional customers.

About RELX Group:

RELX Group is a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries. The group employs about 28,000 people of whom half are in North America. RELX PLC is the London Stock Exchange listed vehicle for holding shares in RELX Group. Shareholders in RELX PLC own a 52.9% economic interest in RELX Group. RELX NV is the Amsterdam Stock Exchange listed vehicle for holding shares in RELX Group. External shareholders in RELX NV own a 47.1% economic interest in RELX Group. The total market capitalisation of the two parent companies is approximately 24.1bn/30.5bn. Its shares are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RUK and ENL. www.relx.com

Further information about ICIS can be found at www.icis.com.

For further information about this release, please contact:

Amy Holland

Marketing Manager, ICIS

Email: amy.holland@icis.com

Direct: +1 (713) 525 2673


BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Amid the continuing expansion of casino gaming throughout the country, state legislators and gaming operators will discuss "how much is too much?" in a special panel at the July 29-31 Summer Meeting of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States.

State Sen. Lou D'Allesandro of New Hampshire will moderate the July 29 Committee on Casinos panel that includes the following prominent speakers:

John Finamore, Senior Vice President, Penn National Gaming

Brian Hansberry, President, Delaware North, Gaming

Sara Rayme, Senior Vice President, American Gaming Association

Bobby Soper, President, Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority

John Taylor, Chairman, Twin River Management Group

The panel discussion will focus on the definition of saturation, balancing the need for fiscal revenues and the needs of operator success, the differences between types of casinos, and legal and regulatory issues in gaming states.

In addition to legislators, confirmed speakers for the NCLGS Summer Meeting include regulators, attorneys, casino operators, lottery and pari-mutuel experts, and suppliers. The public can register to attend the Summer Meeting by clicking here.

The Summer Meeting begins July 29 with topical committee meetings and sessions that cover problem gambling, casino saturation, the future of lotteries, Indian gaming, and Internet gaming, among others. Other roundtable Discussions will focus on the gaming experience in Massachusetts, gaming taxation, and gaming policy. Attendees will also be able to participate in an on-site visit to Plainridge Park, the only casino currently operating in Massachusetts.

Visit https://www.nclgs.org/meetings.html for the full program and registration, and to make reservations by July 5 at the host Boston Marriott Newton to enjoy the special NCLGS rate of $149 per night (or call 800-228-9290).

Sponsorship opportunities, as well as scholarship opportunities for legislators, are still available. Contact Melissa Triplett at mtriplett@spectrumgaming.com or 609-926-5100 for details. The NCLGS Summer and Winter meetings are organized and produced by Spectrum Gaming Group.

NCLGS is a non-partisan organization of state lawmakers that meets on a regular basis to discuss issues in regard to gaming. NCLGS does not support or oppose gaming, but supports effective regulation and sound state policies, and is a source of nonpartisan data on issues of gaming legislation and regulation. The NCLGS Foundation, the educational and research arm of NCLGS, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Department of Canadian Heritage

The Honourable Melanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, today announced funding of $5 million to Ottawa 2017 (Celebrations Ottawa Inc.). Minister Joly was accompanied by Jim Watson, Mayor of Ottawa, and Guy Laflamme, Executive Director of the Ottawa 2017 Bureau.

Through this investment, Ottawa 2017 will offer a diverse range of activities to highlight the 150th anniversary of Confederation in Canada's Capital Region. Residents and visitors are invited to show their pride in being Canadian and participate in 12 full months of bold, immersive and inspirational experiences.

Ottawa 2017 events will include the celebration of foreign national days, performing arts presentations highlighting Canada's provinces and territories, an underground multimedia experience projected in one of Ottawa's future light rail transit stations, a Canadian videogame competition projected in monumental proportions onto buildings across the city, and a host of activities related to the 125th anniversary of the Stanley Cup, a national treasure.

The 150th anniversary of Confederation gives Canadians the opportunity to get involved in their communities and to celebrate together our shared values, our achievements, our majestic environment and our country's place in the world.

To make 2017 a memorable year of celebrations for all Canadians, the Government of Canada will continue to invest in Canada-wide, regional and local projects to increase Canadians' awareness and invite them to participate in the many events taking place throughout the year.

Quick Facts

-- The major themes of the Government of Canada's vision for the 150th anniversary of Confederation are diversity and inclusion, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, environment and youth. -- The Canada 150 Fund, with a total budget of $210 million, was created in April 2015. -- Through this fund, the Government of Canada will continue to invest strategically in activities that support the 150th anniversary vision and promote the direct involvement of Canadians. -- Ottawa 2017 (Celebrations Ottawa Inc). is a Canadian not-for-profit corporation created to plan and deliver the celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation in Ottawa in 2017. -- CIBC is the lead partner for Ottawa 2017 celebrations and will be celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2017.

Quotes

"To promote the 150th anniversary of Confederation in Canada's Capital Region, Ottawa 2017 will provide a range of activities that will highlight our cultural diversity, the beauty of our region and the rich legacy of Indigenous peoples. I invite all Canadians to take part in these activities, which will leave all of us with lasting memories."

- The Honourable Melanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage

"Ottawa will be the centre stage of celebrations in 2017, as a record number of Canadians are expected to visit the nation's capital for Canada's 150th anniversary. This investment by the Government of Canada is a strong vote of confidence in our city, and will enable us to deliver a number of exciting new events that will attract Canadians from coast to coast to coast and visitors from around the world to Ottawa to mark this milestone in our country's history."

- Jim Watson, Mayor of Ottawa

"The Ottawa 2017 Bureau has been working closely with our partners to ensure that the celebrations we are planning in the nation's capital for Canada's 150th birthday are complementary to national celebrations and annual events and festivals in Ottawa, as well as representative of all Canadians, including youth and new Canadians. With the Government of Canada's support, we will showcase Ottawa from an avant-garde perspective and create energizing moments for the millions of Canadians that will take part in these historic celebrations."

- Guy Laflamme, Executive Director, Ottawa 2017 Bureau

Associated Links

Canada 150

Community Infrastructure Program

Canada 150 Logo and Typeface

Ottawa 2017

Stay Connected

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Contacts:

Pierre-Olivier Herbert

Press Secretary

Office of the Minister of Canadian Heritage

819-997-7788



Media Relations

Canadian Heritage

819-994-9101

1-866-569-6155

PCH.media-media.PCH@Canada.ca



Ottawa 2017

Denise LeBlanc

Manager, Media Relations

613-858-1506

denise.leblanc@ottawa2017.ca




LAVAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Typhoon Exploration Inc. (TSX VENTURE: TYP) ("Typhoon") is pleased to announce that exploration works are still ongoing on the Monexco Property (100%-owned), located approximately 30 kilometers north-east of the town of Chibougamau, inside the Plan Nord territory.

EXTENSION OF WARRANTS EXPIRY DATE

The company announces that subject to obtaining all required regulatory approvals, it will extend until December 30, 2019 the expiry date of 1,400,000 Warrants, issued pursuant to a private placement completed on December 30, 2014.

The Warrants were expiring on December 30, 2016, but this date could be extended for an additional 36 months. Each Warrant will entitle its holder to purchase one (1) common share of Typhoon at a price of 0.10$.

ABOUT TYPHOON EXPLORATION INC.

-- Typhoon Exploration Inc. only has 35,426,791 shares outstanding. -- Association on the Fayolle Project (Abitibi, Rouyn-Noranda): Hecla Quebec Inc. owns 50% / Typhoon owns 50% -- Association on the Aiguebelle-Goldfields Project (Abitibi, Rouyn- Noranda): Agnico-Eagle Mines Limited owns 49% / Typhoon owns 51% -- Monexco Project (Chibougamau, Plan Nord territory): 100%-owned by Typhoon

The common shares of Typhoon Exploration Inc. are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "TYP".

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:

David Mc Donald

President & CEO

450.622.4066

dmcdonald@explorationtyphon.com

www.typhoonexploration.com




COCONUT GROVE, FL -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Extended stay travelers, families and small groups are invited for an unveiling of elevated comfort at the Residence Inn Miami Coconut Grove, as the hotel introduces its new Two-Bedroom Apartment Suites this season. The hotel near the University of Miami now offers the ideal Florida haven for extended stay guests.

The expansive, new 750-square-feet Coconut Grove suites are designed with the needs of today's travelers in mind, including in-suite perks like complimentary Wi-Fi, and a free hot breakfast buffet every morning. Each traditional, two-bedroom apartment suite features one master bedroom with a plush queen bed, a second bedroom with queen bed, and a spacious living room with sleeper sofa, accommodating up to six guests, from families to small groups.

Extended stay travelers will feel right at home with a dining area, and fully equipped kitchen that includes a stainless steel stove, refrigerator and microwave. Guests can cook up meals from the comfort of their own private suite anytime, while enjoying apartment-level comfort in the heart of Coconut Grove. Each morning, the hotel also offers up a freshly prepared breakfast buffet, featuring eggs, waffles, pastries, fresh fruit, coffee and tea to start things off.

Modern bathrooms with brightly lit vanities and premium bath amenities complete the at-home experience, while the living room and bedrooms each provide convenient outside terrace access. Contemporary custom furnishings, Florida-inspired decor and natural lighting create a sense of quiet calm and comfort throughout each apartment suite.

Blending the best of the Residence Inn's thoughtful amenities and services, with the style, comfort and space of a modern apartment, the hotel's new expanded suites represent the perfect refuge for extended stay Miami Florida travelers, families, friends and small groups staying in Coconut Grove. For more information and to check for the best available rates, or book the latest deals in Coconut Grove, visit the hotel website.

About the Residence Inn

Ideally located and brimming with convenient amenities, the Residence Inn Miami Coconut Grove is tailor-made for extended-stay travelers. Its 140 suites have all been renovated, and include full kitchens and extra space for working, relaxing, and sleeping. Each hotel suite includes large flat-screen TVs. One and Two Bedroom Suites feature sleeper sofas, adding flexibility to every trip. Pets are welcome at the hotel with pet-friendly amenities. Guests can start the day with a delicious free breakfast, or head to the fitness center for an invigorating workout. Travelers are invited to relax by one of the hotel's two sparkling pools, to soak up the Miami sunshine. For guests who want to explore the area, the hotel is near the University of Miami, as well as the shops and restaurants in Coral Gables and other areas of interest.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=3022954



CONTACT:

Residence Inn Miami Coconut Grove

2835 Tigertail Avenue, Coconut Grove, Florida 33133 USA 1-305-285-9303

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/miaco-residence-inn-miami-coconut-grove/




WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The United Nations entity tasked with promoting gender equality has appointed Academy Award-winning American actor Anne Hathaway as global Goodwill Ambassador. A long-standing supporter of women's and girls' rights, Ms. Hathaway will shine light on the issue of the unequal burden of care work in the home as one of the key barriers to gender equality, UN Women said in a news release. 'I feel honoured and inspired by this opportunity to aid in advancing gender equality. Significant progress has already been made but it is time that we collectively intensify our efforts and ensure that true equality is finally realized,' said Hathaway. She will advocate for the adoption and implementation of policies worldwide that will bring measurable change, including affordable childcare services and shared parental leave at both government and corporate levels. Hathaway previously served as an advocate for Nike Foundation and travelled to Kenya and Ethiopia to raise awareness on child marriage. In 2013, Hathaway provided the narration on Girl Rising, a CNN documentary film, which focused on the power of female education as it followed seven girls around the world who sought to overcome obstacles and follow their dreams. 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.
OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- There's a new crop of reality stars hitting screens everywhere this summer: The Real Gummies of the Black Forest. Ferrara Candy Company's Black Forest Organic brand is bringing a very privileged family of gummy bears, The Organics, to life in the brand's first-ever national marketing campaign. With three "episodes" launching this summer, viewers will get up close and personal with The Organics family in the reality-style web series as they tackle deliciously real topics including family dinnertime, getting "enhancements," and peer pressure.

"Our Black Forest Organic gummies are USDA certified organic, certifiably delicious and totally real, with no artificial flavors or colors. Giving our gummies their very own reality series was the perfect way to demonstrate just how real they are," said Jill Manchester, SVP Marketing and Brand Strategy, Ferrara Candy Company. "We're excited to officially introduce the 'small in stature, yet full of tude' Mr. & Mrs. Organic, Junior, and Sis to the world and invite fans to follow along as their lives unfold in front of the camera in the Black Forest."

The series premiered with the release of Episode One, "Dinner," on Black Forest Organic's social channels (Facebook and Instagram) and nationally online via digital video. In Episode One, viewers join the family around the dinner table. Mr. and Mrs. O along with their daughter, Sis, and son, Junior, are having a conversation sparked by Junior's innocent question about what it means to be 'An Organic Gummy.' In the process, he lets something slip that gets Mr. Organic into a little hot water and chaos ensues. Episode Two, "Enhancements" and Episode Three, "Streakers," will air later this summer. Fans can also follow along on Black Forest's social channels to learn more about each of the members of The Organics family and what makes them tick.

"Being an Organic comes with its duties and obligations," said Mrs. O, Mom on The Real Gummies of the Black Forest. "Mr. O and I take extreme pride in being an Organic and we go to great lengths to make sure our children understand what that means, as well. When Black Forest Organic came to us wanting to make a reality show about our family, we were truly honored. After all, not all gummy families can say they are America's Best Tasting Gummy Bear(1), certified organic and certifiably delicious!"

All Black Forest Organic candy is certified USDA Organic by Quality Assurance International, an authorized certifying agent. The USDA Organic seal indicates that the candy contains at least 95% organic ingredients and is made without the use of toxic persistent pesticides and GMOs. The seal also requires organic candy to be made in its own dedicated manufacturing line to prohibit the co-mingling with non-organic products. The candy is gluten and fat free, with no artificial flavors and colors from natural sources like carrots, turmeric and red beets. Available in four and six-ounce bags, the four-ounce organic candies retail at the affordable price point of $1.29-$1.99 per pack.

To learn more about Black Forest Organic and the Real Gummies of the Black Forest, please visit http://www.blackforestusa.com/meet-the-organics. Use the product locator on the website to find Black Forest Organic candy near you. Follow the Real Gummies of the Black Forest on Instagram (@black_forest_organics), Facebook, and YouTube.

About Ferrara Candy Company, Inc.

Headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., Ferrara Candy Company is a leading general line candy manufacturer, created by the merger of Ferrara Pan Candy Company, Inc. and Farley's & Sathers Candy Company, Inc. in 2012. The Company manufactures a robust portfolio of branded and private label confections that consumers love. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.ferrarausa.com.

(1) 70% of consumers chose Black Forest Organic as best tasting among five leading gummy bear brands. Ferrara Candy Company engaged an outside research firm to perform the national taste preference test.

Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=3023016



Kelly Jones

kjones@legendpr.com

(646) 459-9652




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Augusta Industries Inc. (the "Corporation") (TSX VENTURE: AAO) is pleased to announce that, further to its press release of April 21, 2016, FOX-TEK Canada Inc. ("FOX-TEK"), the Corporation's wholly owned subsidiary, entered into a Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America, Inc. ("Mitsubishi") an affiliate company of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd based in Japan.

Pursuant to the terms of the MOU, FOX-TEK will be partnering with Mitsubishi with respect to its plans to design and build a commercial grade pilot monitoring system for waste water treatment.

Upon the successful completion of the pilot program, FOX-TEK will enter into a definitive licensing agreement with Mitsubishi for its DMAT software solution. The approximate value of the licensing agreement will be USD$1,250,000 over the term of the agreement. The terms of the licensing agreement will be agreed to by the parties upon the completion of the pilot program.

"We believe that both Mitsubishi and FOX-TEK will bring to clients a technology that will have a great potential," said Allen Lone, Chief Executive Officer of Augusta Industries Inc. "We are thrilled to move forward with such a project, this being one of many other potential opportunities that both companies will explore further."

About the Corporation

Through its wholly owned subsidiaries, Marcon International Inc. ("Marcon") and FOX-TEK, the Corporation provides a variety of services and products to a number of clients.

Marcon is an industrial supply contractor servicing the energy sector and a number of US Government entities. Marcon's principal business is the sale and distribution of industrial parts and equipment (Electrical, mechanical and Instrumentation.) In addition to departments and agencies of the U.S. Government, Marcon's major clients include Saudi Arabia-Sabic Services (Refining and Petrochemical), Bahrain National Gas Co, Bahrain Petroleum, Qatar Petroleum, Qatar Gas, Qatar Petrochemical, Gulf of Suez Petroleum, Agiba Petroleum and Burullus Gas Co.

FOX-TEK develops non-intrusive asset health monitoring sensor systems for the oil and gas market to help operators track the thinning of pipelines and refinery vessels due to corrosion/erosion, strain due to bending/buckling and process pressure and temperature. The Corporation's FT fiber optic sensor and corrosion monitoring systems allow cost-effective, 24/7 remote monitoring capabilities to improve scheduled maintenance operations, avoid unnecessary shutdowns, and prevent accidents and leaks.

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.

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on assumptions, uncertainties and management's best estimates of future events. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements are detailed from time to time in the Corporation's periodic reports filed with the Ontario Securities Commission and other regulatory authorities. The Corporation has no intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contacts:

Augusta Industries Inc.

Allen Lone

President, CEO

(905) 275-8111 Ext 226

atlone@fox-tek.com




HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Erdene Resource Development Corp. (TSX: ERD) ("Erdene" or "Company"), is pleased to announce its shareholders voted in favour of all items of business brought before them at the Company's Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders ("AGM") held on June 14, 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Details of the AGM are provided below, and a webcast of the AGM presentation is available here.

Appointment of Board and Executive

At the AGM, shareholders voted in favor of Erdene management's nominees to the board of directors, with details of the vote as follows:

Nominee Votes For % For Votes Withheld % Withheld ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Akerley 46,528,199 99.99% 2,450 0.01% Dr. Anna Biolik 46,522,409 99.98% 8,240 0.02% William Burton 46,528,199 99.99% 2,450 0.01% John Byrne 46,514,984 99.97% 15,665 0.03% J.C. (Chris) Cowan 46,524,349 99.97% 6,300 0.01% T. Layton Croft 46,515,699 99.97% 14,950 0.03% David Mosher 46,515,699 99.97% 14,950 0.03% Philip Webster 46,513,209 99.96% 17,440 0.04%

"We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Anna Biolik and David Mosher to our Company's board of directors. Their combined experience in business development, government relations, and mining in foreign jurisdictions will add strength as we advance our core gold projects in southwest Mongolia," said Peter Akerley, Erdene's President and CEO. "Anna has over thirty years of public and private sector experience and is one of the foremost Canadian experts on Central Asian business and diplomacy, having acted as Canada's first resident Ambassador in Mongolia, while David is a gold mining executive with over thirty-five years of experience in mine and company building in foreign jurisdictions, including Russia and Burkina Faso."

Following the AGM, Erdene's board of directors appointed its executive officers for the coming year, namely: President and Chief Executive Officer - Peter Akerley; Chairman of the Board - Chris Cowan; Vice President and Chief Financial Officer - Ken MacDonald; and Corporate Secretary - Suzan Frazer.

Auditor Re-Appointed

KPMG LLP was re-appointed Auditor of the Company to hold office until the next AGM or until its successor is duly appointed.

Approval of Unallocated Options under the Company's Incentive Stock Option Plan

At the AGM, shareholders also approved all unallocated options issuable under the Company's incentive stock option plan.

About Erdene

Erdene Resource Development Corp. is a Canada-based resource company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of base and precious metals in underexplored and highly prospective Mongolia. The Company holds four exploration licenses and a mining license in southwest Mongolia. These include: Altan Nar - an extensive, high-grade, near-surface, gold-polymetallic project that the Company is advancing toward a production decision, however the Company has not yet completed a mining study to support the technical feasibility and economic viability of Altan Nar; Bayan Khundii - an earlier-stage, high-grade gold discovery made in Q2-2015; Khuvyn Khar - an early-stage, copper-silver porphyry project with multiple drill targets and significant copper intersections; Zuun Mod - a large molybdenum-copper porphyry deposit; and Altan Arrow - an early-stage, high-grade, gold-silver project. In addition to the above properties, the Company has an Alliance with Teck Resources Limited on regional, copper-gold exploration in the prospective Trans Altay region of southwest Mongolia. For further information on the Company, please visit www.erdene.com. Erdene has 121,040,992 issued and outstanding common shares and a fully diluted position of 134,407,820 common shares.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain information regarding Erdene contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements may include estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, guidance or other statements that are not statements of fact. Although Erdene believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Erdene cautions that actual performance will be affected by a number of factors, most of which are beyond its control, and that future events and results may vary substantially from what Erdene currently foresees. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration results, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. The forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The information contained herein is stated as of the current date and is subject to change after that date. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

NO REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS RELEASE

Contacts:

Erdene Resource Development Corp.

Peter C. Akerley

President and CEO

(902) 423-6419



Erdene Resource Development Corp.

Ken W. MacDonald,

Vice President Business Strategy and CFO

(902) 423-6419

info@erdene.com



Website: www.erdene.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ErdeneRes




The results of Government Accounts for 2015 have now been published and the accounts forwarded to the Icelandic parliament Althingi. The current balance for the year was positive by ISK 20.0 billion, which accords with budget forecasts. By comparison, in 2014 the current balance was positive by ISK 46.4 billion.Revenues in 2015 somewhat exceeded budget estimates. This is due to dividends paid by financial undertakings and higher tax bases resulting from increased economic activity, which were taken into consideration in the supplementary budget. Expenditures exceeded budget allocations somewhat, as increased allocations were approved with the year's supplementary budget to meet, among other things, higher wage expenditures following bargaining agreements with public employees and wage arbitration decisions, the Treasury's taxes on financial income and other aspects.The primary balance for the year was positive by the equivalent of 3.8% of GDP, compared to a positive primary balance of 5.3% in 2014.In 2015 the Treasury had a net funding surplus equivalent to 1.9% of GDP, compared to a surplus of 3.9% the previous year, much in line with the expected result. The budget estimated a net funding surplus of around 1.1% of GDP, and the Supplementary Budget a funding surplus of around 1.9%. Strong growth has supported an increase in purchasing power"Stability in the economic environment, strong GDP growth and actions taken by the government in recent quarters have given strong support for increasing purchasing power among the general public and improved the Treasury's performance. Following the policy of fiscal responsibility, the objective was a positive overall Treasury balance in 2015, and this policy is reflected in the balance which has been achieved through effective actions," says Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs Bjarni Benediktsson regarding the outcome of government accounts. The ongoing Treasury debt build-up was brought to an end in 2014, with the first budget bill since 2007 not anticipating a deficit outcome.The Minister emphasised the importance of continuing to pay down debt, reducing the Treasury's debt service burden and creating scope to get to work on various urgent projects and obligations. "This will deliver major benefits for Icelandic society as time progresses. The task we face now is to insure continuing improvement in fiscal matters," the Minister added. The five-year Statement of Fiscal Policy and Fiscal Strategy Plan for the public sector, presented to the Althingi this spring, is intended to reinforce economic equilibrium and stability for corporates and households, as well as the public sector. "In so doing we open up possibilities for improvements and better services for the general public, while at the same time providing stronger support for the economic upswing and improving standards of living for Icelanders."Electronically endorsed accountsFor the third year in a row, the Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs, the Director General of the Financial Management Authority and the Auditor General all endorsed the Government Accounts with electronic signatures, using digital certificates. Iceland is among the first countries to endorse its Government Accounts in this manner.Government Accounts in their entirety, with the accompanying breakdown and notes, are accessible on the website of the Financial Management Agency fjs.is.Attachment:https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=575810
MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Note to Editors: There is a photo associated with this press release.

Under the name of DCMTL Development, for District Central Montreal, a major project is being launched to revitalise some of the key iconic industrial clothing and textile manufacturing buildings, and catalyze a larger movement in the Acadie-Marche Central neighbourhood.

Nestled between the western parts of Acadie and the southern parts of Ahuntsic, near major highways, metro stations and AMT stops, DCMTL Development aims to help the neighbourhood become an up-and-coming epicentre of new office spaces for entrepreneurial, growing, and established companies in industrial buildings transformed into a revitalized business district.

This project represents an overall investment of approximately $20 million over the next five years. "We don't need to look very far to see great examples of neighbourhoods that have re-invented themselves: New York's Meatpacking District, SoHo, and Brooklyn are great case studies south of the border. Closer to home we can think about Toronto's Fashion District, or note impressive movement in Griffintown here in Montreal. We hope to bring new life to one of Greater Montreal's most centrally located, yet forgotten business centres," Said Frederick Lizotte, DCMTL Development's Vice President of Commercial Development.

Located between Saint-Laurent and Highway 15, and between Fleury and Legendre, DCMTL Development will become a new urban signature with its initial renovations to buildings at 9500 Meilleur, 1401 Legendre, and at 55 and 350 Louvain West. "High tech, digital, communications, professional services, human resources, culinary, SMBs, and financial services will be some of the main vectors for growth as the neighbourhood transforms from its origins in sewing and manufacturing into a thriving sought-after business address for young and growing companies," added Lizotte.

AN UNBEATABLE OFFER

In order to attract start-ups, SMBs, and growing companies as tenants, a number of owners have launched DCMTL Development with an unbeatable commercial lease offering of just $10/sqft (gross), which includes heating and electricity.

Lizotte added that "One of the most attractive things about this offering is that besides the unbeatable ask of $10/sqft, building owners are also footing the bill of up to $30/sqft for tenant improvements. This is sure to attract entrepreneurs and start-ups looking for their first offices, as well as established companies of all kinds that have had enough of over-paying for their office space, and have seen such fixed costs eat away at their profitability, and even threaten their sustainability."

PROMOTIONAL SUPPORT FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES

As a promotor for the creation of a new technological, creative, and business hub that relies on exchange and collaboration, DCMTL Development will help to shine a spotlight on local businesses in order to grow their visibility beyond the neighbourhood and outside Greater Montreal through economic development initiatives and events. The DCMTL brand was created by a young, entrepreneurial company with an office in the neighbourhood: Kika Marketing, founded by Annika Panzini. Her team will lead the DCMTL community relations initiative whereby local businesses will be offered free visibility via their exclusive blog at DCMTL.com.

Mr. Lizotte and Ms. Panzini concluded by confirming their long-term resolve for opening one of Montreal's best-kept secrets for business, under the name of DCMTL.

ABOUT DCMTL Development

Today's "District Central" was born in the sixties to the fashion industry, and has grown up striving to become the city's next commercial hotspot. DCMTL Development is a movement that is revitalizing an entire neighbourhood; its online magazine curated by the creative minds at www.kika.ca aims to be the voice that keeps a virtual finger on the pulse of all that's happening in the Central District hood and greater Montreal. Check www.dcmtl.com regularly to learn more about news in the neighborhood including new arrivals, activities & events, featured businesses, and other news.

Facebook

@dcmtlblog

To view the photo associated with this press release, please visit the following link: http://www.marketwire.com/library/20160616-DCMTL_800.jpg

Contacts:

Source:

Frederick Lizotte

VP Commercial Development - DCMTL



Info:

Colin Danby

Director - Cohn & Wolfe

514-845-7060

colin.danby@cohnwolfe.ca




Regulatory News

Genomic Vision(Paris:GV)(FR0011799907 GV), DNA molecular combing specialist that develops tests for the diagnostics market and tools for the life sciences research market, today announces that the IDAHO clinical trial launched at the end of 2015 in France, which aims to validate the integration of the oncogenic, i.e. high-risk, human papillomavirus (HPV-HR) as an indicator of the severity of cervical lesions and the risk of developing cervical cancer, was presented by Professor Christine Clavel, project coordinator, via an oral presentation at the Eurogin (EUropean Research Organisation on Genital Infection and Neoplasia) Congress held in Salzburg, Austria, from June 15 to 18, 2016.

The integration of HPV-HR DNA in a host's genome is considered to be a key stage in the progression of precancerous lesions into cancerous lesions in the cervix. The aim of this study is to determine whether the integration of HPV-HR DNA in patients' genomes is a sufficient diagnostic (severity of lesions) and prognostic (risk of progression of lesions) indicator. Genomic Vision's molecular combing technique is currently the only one that allows the frequency of the integration of high-risk HPV-HR to be detected, in a direct and high resolution manner.

The IDAHO clinical trial comprises two phases:

The first phase began in December 2015, and aims to show that the integration of HPV is a biomarker for diagnosing high-risk precancerous lesions that require appropriate treatment to be defined. The number of patients to be included in this study has been able to be reduced from 3,500 to 1,550 thanks to the new technical developments of the HPV test by molecular combing, which now detects 14 high-risk HPV instead of the initial 5.

During the second phase, women who test positive for HPV infection with no declared lesions or with low-grade lesions will be monitored for 3 years. This will make it possible to validate the integration of HPV DNA as a prognostic biomarker.

Professor Christine Clavel, molecular biologist in the Biopathology laboratory at Reims University Hospital, who presented the study at the conference, says: "This innovative approach should enable us to better understand the integration of high-risk HPV in the host's genome, notably in terms of the frequency of the integration. Indeed, HPV infections being frequent but often temporary, current HPV tests are sensitive but not specific enough to detect high-grade lesions. Searching for new biomarkers, identifying among HPV-positive women those who will actually develop a precancerous lesion, remains crucial. If the results of this study are conclusive, we will then be able to consider viral integration to be an efficient diagnostic and prognostic tool enabling cervical cancer screening to be optimized and the best course of treatment for the patient to be determined.

Upcoming financial publication

2016 half-year results, Tuesday, July 26, 2016* (before trading)

* indicative date, which may be subject to change

ABOUT GENOMIC VISION

Founded in 2004, Genomic Vision is a DNA molecular combing specialist that develops tests for the diagnostics market and tools for the life sciences research market. Using its innovative technology that allows the direct visualization of individual DNA molecules, Genomic Vision detects quantitative and qualitative variations in the genome that are at the origin of numerous serious pathologies. The Company is developing a solid portfolio of tests that initially target breast and colon cancers. Since 2013, the Company has marketed the CombHelix FSHD test for identifying facioscapulohumeral dystrophy (FSHD), a myopathy that is difficult to detect. It is marketed in the United States through a strategic alliance with Quest Diagnostics, the American leader in diagnostic laboratory tests, and in France directly by the Company. Genomic Vision has been listed on Compartment C of Euronext Paris since April 2014.

ABOUT MOLECULAR COMBING

DNA molecular combing technology significantly improves the structural and functional analysis of DNA molecules. DNA fibers are stretched over glass slides, as if "combed", and uniformly aligned over the entire surface. It is then possible to identify genetic anomalies by locating specific genes or sequences in the patient's genome using genetic markers, a technique developed by Genomic Vision and patented under the name Genomic Morse Code. This exploration of the entire genome at high resolution via a simple analysis enables the direct visualization of genetic anomalies that are undetectable by other technologies.

For further information, please go to: www.genomicvision.com

ABOUT THE REIMS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL

In keeping with public service values, the Reims University Hospital ("Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Reims", or "CHU de Reims") strives to meet one goal: to provide, through its 15 medical departments, excellent care and high-quality treatment to all patients in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France. The Reims University Hospital also works hard to maintain its positioning as a university hospital and to promote the involvement of its medical staff in innovative research projects. Professor Christine Clavel and Doctor Veronique Dalstein, molecular biologists in the Reims University Hospital's Biopathology laboratory, headed by Professor Philippe Birembaut, have for many years been involved in research into HPV infections and use of the HPV test in clinical practice, notably in cervical cancer screening. This area of research is part of the Eastern France Cancer Research Cluster's virus and cancer focus. Their research work in this field has received domestic and international acclaim.

For further information, please go to: www.chu-reims.fr

Member of CAC Mid Small, CAC All-Tradable and EnterNext PEA-PME 150 indexes

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616006095/en/

Contacts:

Genomic Vision

Aaron Bensimon, Tel.: +33-1-49-08-07-50

Co-founder, Chairman CEO

investisseurs@genomicvision.com

or

Kalima

Relations Presse

Estelle Reine-Adelaide

Florence Calba

Tel.: +33-6-17-72-74-73 +33-1-44-90-82-54

era@kalima-rp.fr

or

LHA

Investor Relations US

Anne Marie Fields, Tel.: 212-838-3777

SVP

afields@lhai.com

or

NewCap

Investor Relations Strategic Communications

Dusan Oresansky Emmanuel Huynh, Tel.: +33-1-44-71-94-92

gv@newcap.eu
According to the latest research study released by Technavio, the global cloud direct video recorder (DVR) market is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 30% until 2020.

This research report titled 'Global Cloud DVR Market 2016-2020', provides an in-depth analysis of market growth in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. This market research report also includes up to date analysis and forecasts for various application segments, including satellite, IPTV, and hybrid.

Request sample report: http://bit.ly/212d1qs

"With the growing prominence of IPTV, an increasing number of households will likely replace their satellite DVRs with IPTV DVRs in the future. Furthermore, hybrid DVRs will grow rapidly as these are compatible with both, satellite and IPTV connections. This segment will pose as the most attractive market for vendors during the forecast period," said Ujjwal Doshi, one of Technavio's lead analysts for consumer electronics research.

Global cloud DVR market by type 2015

Satellite 37.67%

IPTV 33.18%

Hybrid 29.16%

Source: Technavio research

Global satellite cloud DVR market

In 2015, the satellite cloud DVR market was valued at USD 560.7 million. The market for satellite DVRs is rapidly declining due to the increasing popularity of more advanced technologies like IPTV DVR and hybrid DVR. Consumers from North America and Western Europe are rapidly upgrading their satellite DVRs to these latest technologies due to which this segment's share will likely decline during the forecast period.

However, the declining market share in North America and Europe has coincided with increasing acceptance of satellite DVR in developing countries like China, India, and Brazil. This segment offers high-value proposition to vendors and they are likely to invest on STB hardware to provide DVR and other traditional functionalities integrated with cloud services to compete against IPTV services, which have similar functions.

The market is experiencing significant growth in Africa, the Middle East, and South America where the penetration of satellite DVRs is relatively low.

Global IPTV cloud DVR market

In 2015, IPTV cloud DVR market was valued at USD 493.9 million. The increasing demand for IPTV has fueled the growth of the IPTV DVR segment worldwide. People are opting for IPTVs, as the DVR can store the video content received in the form of IP packets. With video on demand services becoming the mainstream of IPTV use, the penetration of cloud DVR is going to increase during the forecast period.

An IP-based platform provides significant opportunities to personalize the TV viewing experience and makes it more interactive. Operators can include interactive program guides that enable subscribers to search for content by the title or the actor's name. TV operators also provide picture-in-picture functionality that allow viewers to surf for content without closing the program that is currently being viewed. This platform also enables viewers to look at a player's statistics while watching a game. It allows viewing of the content through a different perspective by controlling the camera angle.

Global hybrid cloud DVR market

In 2015, the hybrid cloud DVR market was valued at USD 434.1 million. Hybrid cloud DVR is a combination of IPTV and hybrid DVRs. It supports normal satellite input and signal transmitted through the internet. This segment is considered to be the future of global cloud DVR through which one can access the internet and over-the-top services and store on demand content.

Its rapid market growth is propelled by the need to spend time with family in a fast-paced world. Hybrid DVR can store- broadcast as well as broadband content from the consumers' television. The technology is versatile as DVR enables the TV to be used for accessing the internet and receiving satellite broadcast.

Vendors are innovating new services such as on-demand services, push-video on demand, and specialized internet access to increase the average revenue per user (ARPU). DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) services range from free-to-air to pay-TV.

Browse related reports:

Global Video Surveillance Market 2016-2020

IPTV Market in France 2015-2019

Global TV Subscription Market 2015-2019

Set-Top Box Market in Brazil 2015-2019

Purchase any three reports for the price of one by becoming a Technavio subscriber. Subscribing to Technavio's reports allows you to download any three reports per month for the price of one. Contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and a link to our subscription platform.

About Technavio

Technaviois a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.

Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005036/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

US: +1 630 333 9501

UK: +44 208 123 1770

www.technavio.com

media@technavio.com
Technavio's latest global contactless smart cards market in the banking sector 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.

"One of the major drivers in the market is the need for a tamper-resistant information storage system. Cards embedded with magnetic tapes only store information about end-users' accounts. These cards can be easily tampered with, which can result in loss of information or data. This also increases the chances of identity theft. However, contactless smart cards are tamper resistant as information stored on them can only be accessed with a PIN, which is difficult to decode," said Amrita Choudhury, one of Technavio's lead industry analysts for enterprise application

Technavio's market research study identifies the following three emerging trends expected to propel the global contactless smart cards market in the banking sector:

Emergence of multi-application smart cards

Introduction of hybrid smart cards

Increased adoption of electronic purses

Emergence of multi-application smart cards

With advances in technology, many vendors such as Gemalto are offering multi-application smart cards. These cards have shared storage and information processing. They have the ability to perform multiple applications such as access control, verification, and identification of an individual. Blue from American Express is a smart card that provides users with additional security while shopping online and booking tickets. In a key development, Santander University has provided multi-application smart cards to its students for many applications such as transit ticketing, parking access, secure access to computers, and electronic purses for vending machines. Santander University has also implemented online authorization to allow students to make quick and secure payments.

Introduction of hybrid smart cards

Hybrid smart cards come with a dual-interface, a combination of contactless and contact interfaces, on a single card. Such cards have shared storage and processing of information, thus eliminating the need to carry multiple cards. Hybrid smart card authentication requires smart card middleware, a smart card, a smart card reader, and a smart card PIN. As data and information can be consolidated on one smart card, it provides ease of handling. The availability of hybrid cards will lead to the increased adoption of contactless smart cards, which will support further market growth until 2020.

Increased adoption of electronic purses

An electronic purse is a contactless payment card that can replace the use of currency while making monetary transactions. These cards are issued by banks and are preloaded with monetary funds. Electronic purses can be swiped at merchant POS systems and the value of the transaction is deducted from the card. Monetary funds can be transferred to the payment card using an ATM or via net banking. These cards help make quick monetary transactions. They make payments easier and secure for customers and merchants. Electronic purses integrated with contactless smart cards can help to store and transfer monetary funds. The growing demand for electronic purses will result in a greater demand for contactless smart cards in the future.

Browse related reports:

Smart Card Market in Europe 2015-2019

Global Contactless Smart Cards Market 2016-2020

Global Smart Card Market in the Telecom Sector 2015-2019

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Washington D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - June 16, 2016) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced insider trading charges against a former software company executive and three close friends who made more than a half-million dollars based on his illegal tip about an upcoming merger.

The SEC alleges that Christopher Salis, then a global vice president at SAP America, received thousands of dollars in kickbacks for tipping Douglas Miller in advance of SAP's impending acquisition of Concur Technologies. Miller tipped his brother Edward Miller and mutual friend Barrett Biehl as they rushed to open online brokerage accounts and make risky, short-term trades in Concur call options so they could profit substantially when the deal was publicly announced.

"When corporate insiders exploit confidential information to enrich themselves and their friends, they undermine the level playing field that is fundamental to our capital markets," said Scott W. Friestad, Associate Director in the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "As this and recent cases demonstrate, we are working aggressively to root out and identify insider trading by connecting patterns of trading to sources of material nonpublic information."

According to the SEC's complaint filed in federal court in Indiana:

Salis tipped Douglas Miller in the summer of 2014 when he became aware of plans for the SAP-Concur merger.

At the time, the Millers were strapped for cash as co-owners of a car wash with mounting debts. After being tipped by Salis, Douglas Miller referred to the Concur options trades as "our possible savior" and added, "This is what we all need to weather any storm and put us on top bro! Just make sure your [sic] a squirrel and sock it away  I hope were [sic] dancing in the streets in the next 4-5 Weeks!"

When a brokerage firm would not accept cash and an electronic transfer would take days to clear, the Millers obtained cashier's checks and drove a half-hour to the nearest branch office to deposit the money and trade as quickly as possible.

Douglas Miller also placed trades in his parents' account and another friend's account, and Salis repeatedly accessed the Millers' online brokerage accounts to monitor the trades.

Hours before the public announcement, Douglas Miller began making plans to sell the options, telling a brokerage representative that he was "just trying to prepare [himself] if something happened."

Kickbacks to Salis included at least $10,400 in cash he received only weeks after the merger announcement when he visited Douglas Miller. Concerned about detection, Salis deposited some of the money before heading to the airport with the rest. He later texted Miller: "I am through security . . . Ps. Half in my bag, half in my pocketsno problem."

Salis's startup company later received approximately $80,000 from Miller and his family.

The SEC also has linked Salis and Douglas Miller to suspicious trades in 2007 that were made in advance of a tender offer for a company called Business Objects, where Salis worked at the time. Salis and Miller are charged with this additional count of insider trading in the SEC's complaint, which alleges illicit profits of more than $42,000.

The SEC's complaint charges Salis, Douglas Miller, Edward Miller, and Biehl with violating Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Salis and Douglas Miller also allegedly violated Section 14(e) and Rule 14e-3 of the Exchange Act.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by Brianna Ripa, Amy Friedman, Adam Gottlieb, and Carolyn Welshhans with assistance from John Rymas in the Market Abuse Unit's Analysis & Detection Center. The case has been supervised by Mr. Friestad and Robert A. Cohen, co-chief of the Market Abuse Unit. The SEC's litigation will be led by Kevin C. Lombardi and Cheryl Crumpton. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.


WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - After repeatedly declaring that he will not run for re-election this year, Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., seems to be reconsidering. Rubio pledged not to seek re-election to the Senate when he announced his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination but could change his mind after speaking with longtime friend Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera. Lopez-Cantera, who is running for the Republican nomination in the race to replace Rubio, told Politico that he urged the current Florida Senator to reconsider running for his seat. Following the conversation with Lopez-Cantera on the heels of the mass shooting in Orlando on Sunday, Rubio told reporters on Wednesday that he may change his mind. 'Obviously, I take very seriously everything that's going on, not just Orlando, but in our country,' Rubio said. 'I've enjoyed my service here a lot.' He added, 'So I'll go home later this week, and I'll have some time with my family, and then if there's been a change in our status I'll be sure to let everyone know.' Rubio currently faces a June 24th deadline to file to run in the Florida Senate race, which is a week from Friday. The primary election is scheduled for August 30th. If Rubio decides to run, he will have the advantage of being the incumbent but may face renewed criticism for skipping key Senate votes. (Photo: Gage Skidmore) 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.
PARIS, June 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Acquisition expands geographic footprint and consumer technology development capability

Cambridge Consultants, the innovative product development firm and part of the Altran group, has announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Synapse, a US West Coast business, to further increase its geographic presence for its growing global client base. The acquisition will allow for the combined firms to create one of the world's largest and most capable innovative product development companies with significant presence on both coasts of the US. This acquisition, combined with Cambridge Consultants, will grow the Innovative Product Development activity revenues of Altran by 50 % by the end of 2016 (on a proforma basis), and fits within Altran's '2020. Ignition' strategic plan under which Cambridge Consultants is doubling its scale and enhancing its geographic reach in the US and Asia.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130408/607421 )



From its headquarters in Seattle, WA, Synapse specialises in solving complex engineering challenges and developing products that transform its clients' brands and accelerate advances in technology; a natural fit with Cambridge Consultants' reputation for truly innovative product and service development, built over the past 60 years. Synapse brings considerable track record in the development of products aimed directly at the consumer market and has recently delivered projects for clients such as Nike, Microsoft and Samsung.

Over the past four years, Cambridge Consultants has doubled the scale of its global operations and, to keep up with market demand, has set an ambitious target to double again by 2020 with a global workforce of over 1,000 product development and technology specialists. This acquisition accelerates it towards achieving that ambition, with a presence in Europe, both coasts of the US and in various locations in Asia. Cambridge Consultants already works for many blue-chip companies around the world including Novartis, Philips and Hitachi.

"This acquisition is a major milestone for our Altran 2020. Ignition strategy, allowing us to further expand the Cambridge Consultants model as part of our innovative product development activity, as well as establish a strong footprint in the US and particularly on the West Coast," declared Dominique Cerutti, chairman & CEO of Altran.

Commenting on the deal, Cambridge Consultants CEO Alan Richardson said: "When we first met with colleagues at Synapse we realised that we shared the same vision of the future, and similar skills, expertise and culture, but different geographic footprints that were complementary. Synapse has a rich heritage in developing technology-driven consumer products and strengthens our reach both geographically and in this key market segment. Our success has been enabled by having highly engaged staff in the same way that Synapse has built its business by offering its staff 'the best job you ever had'. Both organisations have an award-winning reputation as employers, which is illustrative of the similar cultures we have. This deal is great news for both firms, but even better news for clients who now have access to the enhanced capabilities of the joined organisations."

Redwood Stephens, president of Synapse, said: "After getting to know the leadership team at Cambridge Consultants, we quickly realized they have a similar people-centric approach to how they run the business. We have the same ambitions to tackle the most challenging product development projects and to create a work environment that promotes lifelong learning at all levels in the organization. Together the two firms will offer an exciting place to work that has even more growth opportunities for our talented employees." Ross Collins, founder of Synapse, will join the board of Cambridge Consultants as a director and Redwood Stephens becomes the president of Cambridge Consultants' US West operations.

Recruitment of talented staff remains a key priority for Cambridge Consultants across all locations.

Cambridge Consultants has a track record of creating high-value organisations built around disruptive technology, developed by its staff. Four of Cambridge's 15 billion-dollar-capitalisation firms - Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR), Xaar, Vectura and Domino Printing Sciences - are among those spun off by the company. With the expansion of its US presence, it will be bringing its venturing activity to the US.

This acquisition (which comprises the business assets of Synapse) is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to be completed in Q3 2016.

Legal and Financial Information

Cambridge Consultants/Altran advisors:

- M&A: Messier Maris Associes

- Legal: K&L Gates

- Financial and Tax Vendor's Due Diligence: Ernst & Young LLP

Sell-side advisors:

- Sell-side advisor: Cascadia Capital LLC

- Legal: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

http://www.altran.com/finance/financial-releases/pr/2016/altrans-cambridge-consultants-acquires-synapse-to-create-global-product-development-powerhouse.html#.V2LTOqLsRSg

Press contact

+33-1-46-41-72-10

press@altran.com
Regulatory News:

Technip (Paris:TEC) (ISIN:FR0000131708) (ADR:TKPPY) and FMC Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: FTI) today announced that the companies executed a Business Combination Agreement (BCA) on June 14, 2016 regarding their proposed merger announced on May 19, 2016. The execution of the BCA follows conclusion of the required work council consultation process in Europe.

"With the signing of the BCA, we have reached an important milestone paving the way to building a unique offering, driving change by redefining the production and transformation in the oil and gas industry," said Thierry Pilenko, Technip Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, who will serve as Executive Chairman of the combined company, TechnipFMC.

Doug Pferdehirt, President and Chief Operating Officer of FMC Technologies, who will serve as the CEO of TechnipFMC, added, "The combination of FMC Technologies and Technip is an exciting opportunity for both companies to shape the future of the oil and gas industry by accelerating technology innovation, integrating and improving project execution and reducing costs for customers. Having concluded the consultation process so quickly is a testament to the logic and strategic rationale of this merger."

The BCA is available on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) website as an EDGAR filing and on the websites of Technip and FMC Technologies.

The transaction is expected to close in early 2017, subject to the approvals of Technip and FMC Technologies shareholders, regulatory approvals and consents, as well as other customary closing conditions.

The companies will combine in an all-stock merger transaction to create a global leader that will drive change by redefining the production and transformation of oil and gas. Each company's shareholders will own close to 50 percent of the combined company.

In addition, Bpifrance supports the transaction and has confirmed to Technip and FMC Technologies that all its governing bodies have approved the terms of the support agreement, in particular the commitment to vote in favor of the resolutions regarding the transaction which will be submitted to Technip's shareholders' meeting, subject notably to Technip Board of Directors' favorable recommendation. Given that it had previously been agreed that Bpifrance will have a seat on the board of directors of TechnipFMC, Bpifrance will retain its Technip shares until the completion of the transaction, with the ability to increase its shareholding up to a maximum 6% of the share capital of TechnipFMC, on a fully-diluted basis, for a two-year period starting at completion of the transaction.

Transaction Highlights

Strategic Highlights Creates a leader in Subsea, Surface and Onshore/Offshore, driven by technology and innovation Builds a comprehensive and flexible offering across each market from concept to project delivery and beyond Accelerates growth: broader portfolio of solutions will increase innovation, improve execution, reduce costs and enhance customer success The combined company will be called TechnipFMC. It brings together two complementary market leaders and their talented employees, building on the proven success of their existing alliance, enabling rapid integration.

Financial Highlights Combined 2015 revenue of $20 billion and EBITDA (1) of $2.4 billion; $20 billion backlog on March 31, 2016 All-stock transaction: Technip shareholders to receive 2.0 shares of the combined company for each share of Technip; FMC Technologies shareholders to receive 1.0 share of the combined company for each share of FMC Technologies; TechnipFMC to be listed on the New York and Paris stock exchanges Expected to deliver at least $400 million in annual pretax cost synergies in 2019 Significantly accretive to both companies' earnings per share One of the strongest balance sheets in the industry



(1) EBITDA before restructuring, impairment and other exceptional items as defined by both companies in their respective previous public filings

About Technip

Technip is a world leader in project management, engineering and construction for the energy industry. From the deepest Subsea oil gas developments to the largest and most complex Offshore and Onshore infrastructures, our 32,500 people are constantly offering the best solutions and most innovative technologies to meet the world's energy challenges. Present in 45 countries, Technip has state-of-the-art industrial assets on all continents and operates a fleet of specialized vessels for pipeline installation and subsea construction. Technip shares are listed on the Euronext Paris exchange, and its ADR is traded in the US on the OTCQX marketplace as an American Depositary Receipt (OTCQX: TKPPY). Visit us at www.technip.com

About FMC Technologies

FMC Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: FTI) is the global market leader in subsea systems and a leading provider of technologies and services to the oil and gas industry. We help our customers overcome their most difficult challenges, such as improving shale and subsea infrastructures and operations to reduce cost, maintain uptime, and maximize oil and gas recovery. The company has approximately 16,500 employees and operates 29 major production facilities and services bases in 18 countries. Visit www.fmctechnologies.com or follow us on Twitter @FMC_Tech for more information.

Important Information for Investors and Securityholders

Forward-Looking Statements

This communication contains "forward-looking statements". All statements other than statements of historical fact contained in this report are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), and Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act"). Forward-looking statements usually relate to future events and anticipated revenues, earnings, cash flows or other aspects of our operations or operating results. Forward-looking statements are often identified by the words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "plan," "intend," "foresee," "should," "would," "could," "may," "estimate," "outlook" and similar expressions, including the negative thereof. The absence of these words, however, does not mean that the statements are not forward-looking. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, beliefs and assumptions concerning future developments and business conditions and their potential effect on us. While management believes that these forward-looking statements are reasonable as and when made, there can be no assurance that future developments affecting us will be those that we anticipate.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements include failure to obtain applicable regulatory or stockholder approvals in a timely manner or otherwise; failure to satisfy other closing conditions to the proposed transactions; failure to obtain favorable opinions from counsel for each company to the effect of how FMC Technologies SIS Limited (to be renamed TechnipFMC plc) ("TechnipFMC") should be treated for U.S. tax purposes as a result of the proposed transaction; risks associated with tax liabilities, or changes in U.S. federal or international tax laws or interpretations to which they are subject, including the risk that the Internal Revenue Service disagrees that TechnipFMC is a foreign corporation for U.S. federal tax purposes; risks that the new businesses will not be integrated successfully or that the combined companies will not realize estimated cost savings, value of certain tax assets, synergies and growth or that such benefits may take longer to realize than expected; failure to realize anticipated benefits of the combined operations; risks relating to unanticipated costs of integration; reductions in client spending or a slowdown in client payments; unanticipated changes relating to competitive factors in the companies' industries; ability to hire and retain key personnel; ability to successfully integrate the companies' businesses; the potential impact of announcement or consummation of the proposed transaction on relationships with third parties, including clients, employees and competitors; ability to attract new clients and retain existing clients in the manner anticipated; reliance on and integration of information technology systems; changes in legislation or governmental regulations affecting the companies; international, national or local economic, social or political conditions that could adversely affect the companies or their clients; conditions in the credit markets; risks associated with assumptions the parties make in connection with the parties' critical accounting estimates and legal proceedings; and the parties' international operations, which are subject to the risks of currency fluctuations and foreign exchange controls.

All of our forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties (some of which are significant or beyond our control) and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from our historical experience and our present expectations or projections. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties that affect the parties' businesses, including those described in FMC Technologies' ("FMC Technologies") Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and other documents filed from time to time by FMC Technologies and TechnipFMC with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") and those described in Technip S.A.'s ("Technip") annual reports, registration documents and other documents filed from time to time with the French financial markets regulator (Autorite des Marches Financiers or the "AMF"). We wish to caution you not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any of our forward-looking statements after the date they are made, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by law.

No Offer or Solicitation

This communication is not intended to and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to subscribe for or buy or an invitation to purchase or subscribe for any securities or the solicitation of any vote in any jurisdiction pursuant to the proposed transactions or otherwise, nor shall there be any sale, issuance or transfer of securities in any jurisdiction in contravention of applicable law. No offer of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act and applicable European regulations. Subject to certain exceptions to be approved by the relevant regulators or certain facts to be ascertained, the public offer will not be made directly or indirectly, in or into any jurisdiction where to do so would constitute a violation of the laws of such jurisdiction, or by use of the mails or by any means or instrumentality (including without limitation, facsimile transmission, telephone and the internet) of interstate or foreign commerce, or any facility of a national securities exchange, of any such jurisdiction.

Additional Information

Important Additional Information Will be Filed with the SEC

TechnipFMC will file with the SEC a registration statement on Form S-4, which will include the proxy statement of FMC Technologies that also constitutes a prospectus of TechnipFMC (the "proxy statement/prospectus"). INVESTORS AND STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THE PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS, AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS TO BE FILED WITH THE SEC, IN THEIR ENTIRETY WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT FMC TECHNOLOGIES, TECHNIP, TECHNIPFMC, THE PROPOSED TRANSACTIONS AND RELATED MATTERS. Investors and stockholders will be able to obtain free copies of the proxy statement/prospectus and other documents filed with the SEC by the parties through the website maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov. In addition, investors and stockholders will be able to obtain free copies of the proxy statement/prospectus and other documents filed with the SEC on FMC Technologies' website at www.fmctechnologies.com (for documents filed with the SEC by FMC Technologies) or on Technip's website at www.technip.com (for documents filed with the SEC by Technip).

Important Additional Information Will be Made Available in an Information Document

Technip will prepare an information document to be made available in connection with the Technip meeting of stockholders called to approve the proposed transaction (the "Report"). INVESTORS AND STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THE INFORMATION DOCUMENT, AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS TO BE PUBLISHED ON THE TECHNIP WEBSITE, IN THEIR ENTIRETY WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT FMC TECHNOLOGIES, TECHNIP, TECHNIPFMC, THE PROPOSED TRANSACTIONS AND RELATED MATTERS. Investors and stockholders will be able to obtain free copies of the information document from Technip on its website at www.technip.com.

Important Additional Information Will be Made Available in an Prospectus Prepared in accordance with the EU Prospectus Directive

TechnipFMC will make publicly available a prospectus, prepared in accordance with the EU Prospectus Directive 2003/71/EC, with respect to the issuance of new shares as a result of the proposed transaction and their admission to trading on the regulated market of Euronext Paris (including any supplement thereto, the "Admission Prospectus"). INVESTORS AND STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO CAREFULLY READ THE ADMISSION PROSPECTUS, AND OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS, IN THEIR ENTIRETY WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT FMC TECHNOLOGIES, TECHNIP, TECHNIPFMC, THE PROPOSED TRANSACTIONS AND RELATED MATTERS. Investors and stockholders will be able to obtain free copies of the Admission Prospectus from TechnipFMC when available.

Participants in the Solicitation

FMC Technologies, Technip, TechnipFMC and their respective directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the stockholders of FMC Technologies and Technip, respectively, in respect of the proposed transactions contemplated by the proxy statement/prospectus and the report. Information regarding the persons who are, under the rules of the SEC, participants in the solicitation of the stockholders of FMC Technologies, and Technip, respectively, in connection with the proposed transactions, including a description of their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be set forth in the proxy statement/prospectus when it is filed with the SEC. Information regarding FMC Technologies' directors and executive officers is contained in FMC Technologies' Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015 and its Proxy Statement on Schedule 14A, dated March 25, 2016, which are filed with the SEC and can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above. Information regarding Technip's directors and executive officers is contained in Technip's Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2015 filed with the AMF and can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160616005614/en/

Contacts:

Technip

Investors

Aurelia Baudey-Vignaud, P: +33 (0) 1 85 67 43 81

abaudeyvignaud@technip.com

or

Elodie Robbe-Mouillot, P: +33 (0) 1 85 67 43 86

erobbemouillot@technip.com

or

Media

Christophe Belorgeot, P: +33 (0) 1 47 78 39 92

cbelorgeot@technip.com

or

Laure Montcel, P: +33 (0) 1 49 01 87 81

lmontcel@technip.com

or

FMC Technologies

Investors

Matt Seinsheimer, P: 281.260.3665

investorrelations@fmcti.com

or

Media

Lisa Albiston, P: 281.610-9076

media.request@fmcti.com

or

Lisa Adams, P: 281.405.4659

media.request@fmcti.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Avrupa Minerals Ltd. (TSX VENTURE: AVU)(FRANKFURT: 8AM) reports that it has today filed the technical report prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") on the Slivovo gold-silver project in Pristina, Kosovo (the "Report"). The Report supports the disclosure made by the Company in its news release on May 5, 2016 entitled "Avrupa Minerals Announces Initial Gold Resource at Slivovo, Kosovo". There are no material differences in the mineral resources contained in the Report from those disclosed in the news release.

The Report dated May 31, 2016 is entitled "NI 43-101 Technical Report on the Slivovo Gold - Silver Project, Pristina, Kosovo" and was prepared by independent "Qualified Persons" (as that term is defined in NI 43-101) under the direction of Richard Buerger, MAIG, BSc. of Melbourne, Australia and Gary Giroux, P.Eng, M.A. Sc. of North Vancouver, Canada.

The Report is available for review on both SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and the Company's website (www.avrupaminerals.com/projects/kosovo/slivovo_gossan/).

Avrupa Minerals Ltd. is a growth-oriented junior exploration and development company focused on discovery, using a prospect generator model, of valuable mineral deposits in politically stable and prospective regions of Europe, including Portugal, Kosovo, and Germany.

The Company currently holds nine exploration licenses in three European countries, including six in Portugal covering 3,821 km2, two in Kosovo covering 47 km2, and one in Germany covering 307 km2. Avrupa has three joint ventures, two in Portugal and one in Kosovo:

-- The Alvalade JV, with Colt Resources, covering one license in the Iberian Pyrite Belt of southern Portugal, for Cu-rich massive sulfide deposits; -- The Covas JV, with Blackheath Resources, covering one license in northern Portugal, for intrusion-related W deposits; and -- Avrupa's partner at the Slivovo Gold Project in Kosovo is presently advancing the Project by funding and operating a pre-feasibility study.

Avrupa is currently upgrading precious and base metal targets to JV-ready status in a variety of districts on their other licenses, with the idea of attracting potential partners to project-specific and/or regional exploration programs.

For additional information, contact Avrupa Minerals Ltd. at 1-604-687-3520 or visit our website at www.avrupaminerals.com.

On behalf of the Board,

Paul W. Kuhn, President & Director

This news release was prepared by Company management, who take full responsibility for its content. Paul W. Kuhn, President and CEO of Avrupa Minerals, a Licensed Professional Geologist and a Registered Member of the Society of Mining Engineers, is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 of the Canadian Securities Administrators. He has reviewed the technical disclosure in this release. Mr. Kuhn, the QP, has not only reviewed, but prepared and supervised the preparation or approval the scientific and technical content in the news release.

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:

Avrupa Minerals Ltd.

1-604-687-3520

www.avrupaminerals.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Irving Resources Inc. (CSE: IRV) ("Irving" or the "Company") announces that it intends to conduct a non-brokered private placement to raise approximately $802,200 by the issuance of up to 5,730,000 units (the "Units") at a price of $0.14 per Unit (the "Private Placement"). Each Unit will be comprised of one common share of the Company and one share purchase warrant (the "Warrants"). Each Warrant will be exercisable for one common share of the Company at a price of $0.20 per share for a period of two years from the date of issue.

The Company plans to use the net proceeds of the Private Placement to fund potential acquisitions of mineral properties in Japan and for general working capital purposes.

The Company also wishes to announce that Mr. Kevin Box has been appointed to the Company's Board of Directors. Mr. Box has worked as a GIS Analyst specializing in mineral exploration for over 14 years. He is currently the GIS and Research Manager for Novo Resources Corp. His expertise in utilizing GIS techniques to analyze geological data played a significant role in the discoveries of the Beatons Creek gold deposit in Western Australia (Novo Resources Corp.), the Springpole gold deposit near Red Lake, Ontario (Gold Canyon Resources Inc.), and the Rattlesnake Hills gold deposit in Wyoming (Evolving Gold Corp). Mr. Box is also a veteran of the US Army where he worked in Logistics and Management.

About Irving Resources Inc.:

Irving, through a subsidiary, holds Project Venture Agreements with Japanese Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation ("JOGMEC") for joint exploration programs in the United Republic of Tanzania and the Republic of Malawi. In addition, the Company has recently incorporated a subsidiary in Japan, Irving Resources Japan GK, and intends to pursue its own mineral property activities in Japan.

JOGMEC is a government organization established under the law of Japan, administrated by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan, and is responsible for stable supply of various resources to Japan through the discovery of sizable economic deposits of base, precious and rare metals.

Additional information can be found on Irving's website: www.IRVresources.com.

Akiko Levinson, President & Director

Forward-looking information

Some statements in this news release contain forward-looking information (within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation) including, without limitation, statements as to the intention to conduct the Private Placement. Such forward-looking information is subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements including, without limitation, the risk that the Private Placement may not be completed in the amount or on the terms as expected or at all.

THE CSE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Contacts:

Irving Resources Inc.

(604) 682-3234 or Toll Free: 1 (888) 242-3234

(604) 682-0537 (FAX)

info@IRVresources.com




VAUDREUIL-DORION, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Immunotec Inc. (TSX VENTURE: IMM), a direct-to-consumer company and leader in the nutritional industry (the "Company" or "Immunotec"), today announced its second quarter financial results for Fiscal 2016. All amounts in this press release are denominated in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.

"We are pleased to report that total revenues for the quarter exceeded $25.0M for the first time in Company history. This performance is the result of superior teamwork and dedication on the part of our field associates, employees and valued suppliers", said Charles L. Orr, Chief Executive Officer of Immunotec.

PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS

Network sales for the three- and six-month periods ended April 30, 2016 reached $23.4M and $44.5M compared to $18.2M and $34.5M for the corresponding periods of the previous year, an increase of $5.2M or 28.9% and $10.0M or 29.2%. Excluding currency fluctuations, the Company recorded an increase in network sales in Mexico of 38.6% and 33.0%, in the United States of 27.0% and 28.9%, and, in Canada of 11.1% and 6.9% for the three- and six-month periods ended April 30, 2016 relative to the corresponding periods of the previous year.

"The increase of our Sponsoring numbers are above 30% in all of our key markets, which indicates a strong momentum for the quarters ahead" said Patrick Montpetit, Chief Financial Officer of Immunotec. "We are confident that we are on track to achieve $100.0M in revenues for fiscal 2016".

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenues and sponsoring (1) For the periods ended April 30, Three-months Six-months ---------------------------------------------------------- ('000s of C$) 2016 2015 Variation 2016 2015 Variation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Network sales 23,418 18,170 28.9% 44,548 34,475 29.2% Other revenue 2,168 1,798 20.6% 3,982 3,412 16.7% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 25,586 19,968 28.1% 48,530 37,887 28.1% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Network sales in key markets in local currency 2016 2015 Variation 2016 2015 Variation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mexico ('000s of Mexican pesos) 159,142 114,834 38.6% 294,441 221,362 33.0% United States ('000s of US$) 6,014 4,735 27.0% 11,402 8,847 28.9% Canada ('000s of C$) 3,036 2,733 11.1% 5,867 5,489 6.9% Sponsoring(1) of new customers and consultants in key markets (# of people) 2016 2015 Variation 2016 2015 Variation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mexico 17,376 12,847 35.3% 31,453 23,526 33.7% United States 5,842 4,384 33.3% 10,139 7,608 33.3% Canada 2,041 1,534 33.1% 3,998 3,023 32.3% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 25,259 18,765 34.6% 45,590 34,157 33.5% ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Margins before expenses, as a percentage of revenues, remained stable at 76.5% for the three- month period ended April 30, 2016 compared to 76.4% for the same period in the prior year. Margins before expenses decreased slightly from 76.6% in the six-month period ended April 30, 2015 to 75.6% for the six-month period ended April 30, 2016. The small decrease is due to a combination of the product mix sold; negative fluctuations in exchange rates and increases in raw materials prices from suppliers.

Adjusted EBITDA(1) for the three- and six-month periods ended April 30, 2016 amounted to $2.0M or 7.8% of revenues and $3.2M or 6.5% of revenues compared to $1.4M or 7.0% of revenues and $2.5M or 6.6% of revenues for the same periods of the previous year.

Net profit for the three- and six-month periods ended April 30, 2016 was $0.6M and $0.9M compared to $0.3M and $1.2M for the corresponding periods of the previous year. Total basic and fully diluted net profit per common share for the three- and six-month periods ended April 30, 2016 was $0.008 and $0.013 compared to $0.005 and $0.017 for the corresponding periods of the previous year.

(1)Refer to the "NON-GAAP MEASURES" section. The definition of Sponsoring and the Adjusted EBITDA reconciliation to Net profit is shown below. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Results of operations For the periods ended April 30, Three-months Six-months ------------------------------------------------ ('000s of C$, except for share and per share data) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenues 25,586 19,968 48,530 37,887 Cost of sales 6,002 4,717 11,853 8,869 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Margin before expenses 19,584 15,251 36,677 29,018 Expenses 17,798 14,031 34,333 26,832 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Operating income 1,786 1,220 2,344 2,186 Net finance expenses 773 793 778 451 Income taxes 445 104 660 560 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net profit 568 323 906 1,175 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total comprehensive income 402 891 718 1,340 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total basic and diluted net profit per common share 0.008 0.005 0.013 0.017 Weighted average number of common shares oustanding during the period Basic 69,751,103 69,097,995 69,516,943 69,015,556 Diluted 69,909,755 69,101,596 69,534,198 69,019,133 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Calculation of adjusted EBITDA 1 For the periods ended April 30, Three-months Six-months ------------------------------------------------ ('000s of C$) 2016 2015 2016 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Net profit 568 324 906 1,175 Add: Depreciation and amortization 166 168 346 322 Net finance expenses 773 793 778 451 Other expenses 38 6 484 9 Income taxes 445 104 660 560 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjusted EBITDA 1,990 1,395 3,174 2,517 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- as a % of Revenues 7.8% 7.0% 6.5% 6.6% ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Immunotec Inc.

Immunotec is a Canadian-based company that develops, manufactures, markets and sells research-driven nutritional products through direct-to-consumer sales channels in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, the Dominican Republic, the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Company offers an extensive family of nutritional, skin care and wellness products targeting health, weight management, energy and physical performance.

Please visit us at www.immunotec.com for additional information.

The Company files its continuous disclosure documents, inclusive of its year end results, on the SEDAR database at www.sedar.com and on the Company's website at www.immunotec.com. The common shares of the Company are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker symbol IMM. 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.

This Press Release should be read in conjunction with the Company's most recent unaudited interim condensed consolidated financial statements and the Management discussion and analysis which can be found at www.sedar.com

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: Certain statements contained in this news release are forward looking and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, known and unknown. For information identifying known risks and uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, please refer to the heading Risks and Uncertainties in Immunotec's most recent Management's Discussion, which can be found at www.sedar.com. Consequently, actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results expressed in these forward-looking statements.

NON-GAAP MEASURES: This Press Release contains non-GAAP measures which do not have a standardized meaning under International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS"). We use earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ("EBITDA"), as this measure allows management to evaluate the operational performance of the Company. EBITDA does not have any standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS and is therefore unlikely to be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers. EBITDA should not be considered an alternative to profit (loss) in measuring the Company's performance, nor should it be used as an exclusive measure of cash flow. This measure does not represent the funds available for the repayment of debt, the payment of dividends, reinvestment or other discretionary uses, and should not be considered in isolation or as substitutes for other measures of performance calculated according to IFRS. The Company uses these non-GAAP measures because they provide additional information on the performance of its commercial operations. Such tools are frequently used in the business world to analyze and compare the performance of businesses; however, the Company's definition of these metrics may differ from those of other businesses.

Adjusted EBITDA and Sponsoring

-- Adjusted EBITDA corresponds to EBITDA as defined above less elements that management considers to be outside the scope of its normal activities and therefore not reflective of how management views performance measurement. Management believes that this metric is necessary in order to isolate commercial operations from items which it believes merit separate examination when assessing performance. Consistent improvement in adjusted EBITDA is one of management's primary objectives. -- Sponsoring means the activity in which independent Consultants sponsor new Consultants and Customers; the sponsored Consultants themselves may sponsor new Consultants or Customers and so forth. This is referred to as a Consultant's "organization" or "downline". The Consultants are compensated for sales generated by their organization, based on their qualification and rank. Successful Independent Consultants assume the responsibility to train, support and communicate with their downline.

Contacts:

Immunotec Inc.

Patrick Montpetit, CPA, CA, CF

Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer

(450) 510-4527




Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 16, 2016) - Westminster Resources Ltd. (TSXV: WMR) (OTC Pink: WMRSF) (FSE: TQ08W1) is pleased to announce the signing of a letter of intent to acquire four mineral claims located east of Yellowknife in the North West Territories.

The claims are adjacent to the 92 Resources Corp. Hidden Lake project. One claim is situated to the East of, and adjacent to, the 92 Resources Corp. ground covering the LU Dyke, which returned values up to 3.06% Li2O, as reported in a news release of June 7, 2016. The remaining two claims are situated adjacent to the 92 Resources Corp. ground on the Southwest. The claim boundaries extend to the proposed limits of 'Yellowknife Pegmatite Belt' that 92 Resources Corp. published as an attachment to a news release dated June 7, 2016.

The fourth claim, located approximately 10 kilometres south of the 92 Resources Corp. Hidden Lake property, covers an area of pegmatite dykes on the shoreline identified by Dave White, P.Geo., QP for this news release. Mr. White's observations are:" There are small coarsely-crystalline to pegmatite felsic dykes underlying the Reid Lake claim. We only looked at the dykes along the shoreline and observed low concentrations of a yellow micaceous mineral that may be Li-bearing. There may be larger pegmatitic dykes inland as the claim lies within the trend of the 'Yellowknife Pegmatite Belt'."

The Reid lake claim is a few kilometres on possible strike from the Ann (REID) lake occurrence, listed in the NORMIN database as showing id: 085ISW0011, and recently plotted on a map by 92 Resources Corp. as part of a news release dated June 7, 2016. The NORMIN showing information includes reference to a non-43-101 compliant resource: "drilling in 1956 (AR 082243) intersected the dyke at depths of over 100 m and demonstrated continuity in width and grade. A possible resource of 3,335,600 tons grading 1.92% Li2O is reported in GSC publication "Canadian Deposits Not Currently Being Mined" (1989); estimate is from Lasmanis* **

*Potential quantities and grades are conceptual in nature. There has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

** A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves and the issuer is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or reserves. Further work must be carried out to verify all historic information before a resource estimate is possible.

Westminster has agreed to pay a non-refundable cash payment of $15,000 on signing the LOI and will have 20 business days to conclude a definitive agreement. Thereafter, the Company must pay, subject to TSXV approval, a further $10,000 and issue 2,500,000 common shares to the vendor for a 100% interest.

Glen Indra, President of Westminster, stated: "Lithium is one of the most exciting commodities in mining today; the price is increasing year over year and with the rapid growth in the electric car industry we see a great future in the lithium mining and exploration space. Two of these new projects directly border 92 Resources recent high grade sampling of 3.06% Li2O and are thought to be in the same "Yellowknife Pegmatite Belt". The Ann (Reid Lake) occurrence is particularly appealing in nature due to the past work and results showing a larger system of Li2O. The Company plans on sending a crew to the property upon closing of the definitive agreement to begin field work".

The Technical contents of this release were approved by Dave White, P.Geo., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. The property has not yet been the subject of an NI 43-101 report.

Exploration on the Guayacan, Gold, Silver and Copper project in Sonora Mexico is ongoing and field observations continue to document the district scale size of the hydrothermal system.

ON BELHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

WESTMINSTER RESOURCES LTD.

"Glen Macdonald"

Director

For further information regarding Westminster Resources Ltd., please contact Bill Conlin at 604-608-0400, Toll free: 1-877-608-0007.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release may contain forward-looking information which is not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking information involves risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events, results, performance, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Forward-looking information in this news release may include, but is not limited to, the Company's objectives, goals or future plans. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, those risks set out in the Company's public documents filed on SEDAR. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information, which only applies as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by law. Neither TSX Venture exchange nor its Regulations 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.
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Brookfield New Horizons Income Fund (CSE: BIF.UN) (the "Fund") announces a distribution of C$0.20 per unit for the quarter ending June 30, 2016. The distribution will be paid on or before July 15, 2016 to holders of record on June 30, 2016.

Brookfield Investment Management (Canada) Inc., an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and an affiliate of Brookfield Investment Management Inc. ("collectively "the Firm") is the manager and investment manager of the Fund.

The Firm provides real assets public securities strategies including global listed real estate and infrastructure equities as well as corporate credit and securitized credit. With over $16 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2016, the Firm manages institutional separate accounts, registered funds and other investment products for clients, including financial institutions, public and private pension plans, insurance companies, endowments and foundations, sovereign wealth funds and high net-worth investors. Headquartered in New York, NY, the Firm and its affiliates also maintain offices in Boston, Chicago, London and Toronto.

The Fund uses its website as a channel of distribution of material company information. Financial and other material information regarding the Fund is routinely posted on and accessible at www.brookfieldim.com.

The Firm is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global alternative asset manager with $240 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2016. For more information, go to www.Brookfield.com.

For more information, please visit www.brookfieldim.com.

Contacts:

Investor Relations

(855) 777-8001

funds@brookfield.com

www.brookfieldim.com




TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- BlackRock Asset Management Canada Limited ("BlackRock Canada"), an indirect, wholly-owned subsidiary of BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE: BLK), today announced the final June 2016 cash distributions for the iShares Premium Money Market ETF. Unitholders of record on June 17, 2016 will receive cash distributions payable on June 30, 2016.

Details regarding the final "per unit" distribution amounts are as follows:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fund Name Fund Ticker Cash Distribution Per Unit ($) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- iShares Premium Money Market ETF CMR 0.01368 ------------------------------------------------- CMR.A 0.00479 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Further information on the iShares ETFs can be found at www.blackrock.com/ca.

About BlackRock

BlackRock is a global leader in investment management, risk management and advisory services for institutional and retail clients. At March 31, 2016, BlackRock's AUM was US$4.737 trillion. BlackRock helps clients around the world meet their goals and overcome challenges with a range of products that include separate accounts, mutual funds, iShares (exchange-traded funds), and other pooled investment vehicles. BlackRock also offers risk management, advisory and enterprise investment system services to a broad base of institutional investors through BlackRock Solutions. As of March 31, 2016, the firm had approximately 13,000 employees in more than 30 countries and a major presence in global markets, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East and Africa. For additional information, please visit the Company's website at www.blackrock.com/ca - Twitter: @BlackRockCA - Blog: www.blackrockblog.com/can.

About iShares ETFs

iShares is a global leader in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with more than a decade of expertise and commitment to individual and institutional investors of all sizes. With over 700 funds globally across multiple asset classes and strategies and more than US$1 trillion in assets under management as of March 31, 2016, iShares helps clients around the world build the core of their portfolios, meet specific investment goals and implement market views. iShares funds are powered by the expert portfolio and risk management of BlackRock, trusted to manage more money than any other investment firm.(1)

(1) Based on US$4.737 trillion in AUM as of 3/31/16.

iShares ETFs are managed by BlackRock Asset Management Canada Limited.

Commissions, trailing commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with investing in iShares ETFs. Please read the relevant prospectus before investing. Fund securities are not covered by the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation or by any other government deposit insurer. There can be no assurances that the fund will be able to maintain its net asset value per security at a constant amount or that the full amount of your investment in the fund will be returned to you. The fund is not guaranteed, its values change frequently and past performance may not be repeated. Tax, investment and all other decisions should be made, as appropriate, only with guidance from a qualified professional.

Contacts:

Contact for Media:

Maeve Hannigan

416-643-4058

Maeve.Hannigan@blackrock.com




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Group Ten Metals Inc. (TSX VENTURE: PGE)(FRANKFURT: 5D31) (the "Company" or "Group Ten") announces that Tom McCandless, Eugene Spiering and Brian Cloney have resigned from the board of directors of the Company. Dr. McCandless has also resigned from the role of COO, and Mr. Spiering from the role of V-P Exploration.

"I would like to thank Tom, Gene and Brian for their contributions to the Company. We wish them the very best in their future endeavours," commented Michael Rowley, CEO of Group Ten.

About Group Ten Metals Inc.

Group Ten Metals Inc. is a mineral exploration company focused on exploration for deposits of gold, platinum group metals (PGM), nickel, and copper and in emerging districts with proven world-class potential. The Company holds the high-grade Black Lake / Drayton gold project in the Rainy River district in northwest Ontario, and also controls a premier land position in the Kluane Ultramafic Belt in the southwest Yukon Territory where it adjoins Wellgreen Platinum Ltd's Wellgreen deposit.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors, GROUP TEN METALS INC.

Michael Rowley, President & Director

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.

Statements which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future.

It is important to note that actual outcomes and the Company's actual results could differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, economic, competitive, governmental, environmental and technological factors that may affect the Company's operations, markets, products and prices. Readers should refer to the risk disclosures outlined in the Company's Management Discussion and Analysis of its audited financial statements filed with the British Columbia Securities Commission.

Contacts:

Group Ten Metals Inc.

Michael Rowley

President & Director

(604) 681 1568




VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 06/16/16 -- Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund (the "Fund") (TSX: BPF.UN) is pleased to announce the voting results from its annual general meeting of unitholders held on Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A total of 6,562,950 units and other securities with voting entitlements for the Fund (together, the "Voting Units") were represented at the meeting, being 27.68% of the Fund's issued and outstanding Voting Units. Detailed results of the ballot votes are provided below:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Votes Votes Votes Votes Proposal For For % Withheld Withheld % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Election of William C. Brown as Trustee 6,410,878 98.45% 100,829 1.55% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Election of W. Murray Sadler as Trustee 6,410,011 98.44% 101,696 1.56% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Election of David L. Merrell as Trustee 6,367,515 97.79% 144,192 2.21% ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

At the meeting, by a vote by show of hands, KPMG LLP was appointed as the auditor of the Fund for the ensuing year and the Trustees of the Fund were authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditor.

The trustees of the Fund approved the contents of this press release.

 Boston Pizza Royalties Limited Partnership. All Boston Pizza registered Canadian trademarks and unregistered Canadian trademarks containing the words "Boston", "BP", and/or "Pizza" are trademarks owned by the Boston Pizza Royalties Limited Partnership and licensed by the Boston Pizza Royalties Limited Partnership to Boston Pizza International Inc.

Contacts:

Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund

Jordan Holm

Senior Vice President of Investor Relations

604-303-6083

investorrelations@bostonpizza.com

www.bpincomefund.com




Air New Zealand Ltdhas released its latest monthly market conditions figures. For the financial year to date, Group-wide yields were down 1.6% compared to the same period last year.Air New Zealands short haul yields were down 1.9%. On the other hand, long haul yields were up 1.9%.In May 2016, the airline carried 1,071,000 passengers. This was 4.1% higher, compared to the same period last year.The biggest increase was on Air NZs Americas / UK routes, where domestic market demand increased by 11.6%.Air New Zealand reported a net profit of $316.87 million at 31 December 2015.
Zaius, a Boston, MA-based CRM built for business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers, closed an $8m funding round.

The round was led by _Underscore.VC, with participation from Leaders Fund and existing investor Matrix Partners.

The company will use the new funds to grow sales and marketing and expand partnerships.

Led by Mark Gally, CEO, Zaius provides a B2C CRM software platform that enables direct-to-consumer marketers to unify all customer interaction data in a single dashboard, understand key revenue-drivers and automate customer touch points across every channel.

Customers include Nine West and Easy Spirit, as well as innovative e-commerce businesses like Moda Operandi.

FinSMEs

16/06/2016
Restore Cryotherapy, an Austin, Texas-based cryotherapy service provider, raised $1m in funding.

Backers included Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, professional athletes like Jeff Foster and other individuals in the medical profession and angel investors.

The company intends to use the funds to expand its existing presence from 2 stores to 7 stores over the next 6 months.

Co-founded in 2015 by Jim Donnelly and Steve Welch, Restore Cryotherapy opened two different concept stores offering whole body cryotherapy, IV drip therapy, oxygen therapy, compression therapy and other wellness services. Developed in the 1970s in Japan to help rheumatoid arthritis patients, whole body cryotherapy involves getting into a chamber at -240oF for up to 3 minutes. Natural and safe, Cryotherapy helps to decrease inflammation, increase cellular survival, and reduce pain.

Current locations are in Austin, Round Rock and Charlotte will be followed by the opening of services in Lakeway, TX, Houston, TX and an additional one in Charlotte, NC in the next month.

FinSMEs

16/06/2016
Collokia, a Montevideo, Uruguay- and San Francisco, CA-based collaboration platform, secured $1.3m in seed funding.

The round was led by Globant and Fundo Pitanga, a Brazilian venture capital firm.

The company will use the funds to expand commercial operations and continue to build out the platform for use in key vertical markets, starting with the IT development industry.

Founded in 2014 by Pablo Brenner, former Global VP of Innovation at Globant, and Jayson Minard, former Technologist at Prezi and CTO at Abebooks (an Amazon.com company), Collokia is advancing a machine learning based platform  in development and testing since 2014 and currently available for beta customers  to improve collaboration processes between co-workers by enabling improved access to information and knowledge, via a combination of plug-in technology and Artificial Intelligence.

The companys plugins run in the natural work environment collecting information, identifying patterns, and mapping employee decision-making to provide contextual support. Machine learning algorithms analyze the collective experience and automatically connect people with other colleagues, research, solutions and sources of knowledge  when they need it.

FinSMEs

16/06/2016
Bengaluru - Standard Charted Bank on Wednesday levelled allegations of collusion between liquor baron Vijay Mallya and consortium of banks led by SBI, during the hearing of its interlocutory application seeking vacation of the Debt Recovery Tribunal interim order, preventing it from

transacting with British liquor giant Diageo Plc.

Making submissions before DRT Presiding Officer C R Benakanahalli, SCB's counsel G Krishnamurthy argued that the fact that Mallya did not object to the interim order passed by DRT preventing SCB's transaction with Diageo Plc stands clear 'testimony' to collusion between the liquor baron and banks.

Elaborating, he said, "When DRT passed the interim order, preventing any transaction between Diageo Plc and SCB, Mallya did not object to it - This stands clear testimony to a collusion between Mallya and banks."

"Mallya could have objected to the interim order, but did not do it. Why he did not object? Because it served his purpose as the interim order prevented the sale and transfer of UBHL shares that were to be acquired by Diageo who had issued a guarantee to SCB for around Rs 877 crore loan to Watson, a holding company of Mallya," Krishnamurthy added.

Diageo, the world's largest spirits maker which acquired control of United Spirits (USL) in 2012, had issued a guarantee to SCB for a $135 million (around Rs 877 crore) loan to Watson to release certain United Breweries Holding Limited (UBHL) shares that were to be acquired as part of the

deal.

The company, in their statement, had said that the risk had arisen due to default by Watson in May and DRT preventing sale or any other transfer of such UBHL shares in June as part of the enforcement process pending further orders following the petition by bankers.

Responding to SCB's allegations, the bankers' Counsel, in a counter argument, said, "If the bankers had colluded with Mallya, we would not have been waging a court battle against the high-profile defendent."

Making submissions before the tribunal, Krishnamurthy pleaded for vacating its interim order to allow transaction between Diageo Plc and SCB.

Submitting the grounds for vacating the interim order, Krishnamurthy argued that the DRT does not have the power to hear the case where the two entities were based in foreign companies and were not party at the time the transaction deal was struck.

Earlier, Diageo Holdings Netherlands counsel also pleaded before the tribunal for vacating the interim order, barring Mallya from withdrawing $75 million exit buyout by it under a deal, on the grounds that the bankers haven't made it a party either in their original application and interlocutory application.

Diageo Holdings Netherlands on June 3 had filed an interlocutory application seeking vacating of DRT's order barring liquor baron Vijay Mallya from withdrawing $75 million exit buyout by it under a deal till disposal of SBI's

case against him over loan default.

"Since the bankers have not made us (Diageo Plc) a party, either in their Original Application or Interlocutory Applications, and hence we humbly plead before the Lordship to vacate the order, as we are no way connected with the case," said Sondhi, Counsel for Diageo Netherlands.

DRT had barred Mallya from withdrawing $75 million exit payment from Diageo till the disposal of the case over the loan default by Kingfisher Airlines.

It had restrained Diageo and United Spirits Limited, owned by the UK-based firm, from temporarily disbursing the amount to Mallya who worked out the deal under a severance package.

However, $40 million of the $75 million severance package deal had already been disbursed, following which the bankers' consortium had sought directions from the Tribunal to attach the amount before it.

Following a directive of the Tribunal, Diageo Plc and its two subsidiaries submitted the details of severance package deal, in which the bankers figured out that $40 million of the $75 million was parked in the account held by Mallya in New York-based J P Morgan Bank.

On May 17, DRT directed J P Morgan Bank not to disburse to $40 million and asked it to "attach" (submit) before it statements of accounts held by Mallya in the bank.

Kingfisher had filed application for submitting objections to all the facts pertaining to the case.

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 in the UK.

The beleaguered businessman has been declared a proclaimed offender by a special PMLA court in Mumbai on a plea by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with its money laundering probe against him in the alleged bank loan default case.

The next hearing was posted for June 17.
Pictures  both still and video  of a man riding atop a moving Maruti Gypsy with a telescopic gun, happily gunning down blue bulls or nilgai in the barren fields of Mokama Taal in Bihar, have stirred the conscience of a large number of people.

The public display of his shooting skills, and the killing of hundreds of animals has created quite a controversy. After Union Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi picked up the issue and trained her guns at her colleague in the government, Environment and Forest Minister Prakash Javadekar, and the Bihar Government for the alleged killer lust, the controversy blew out in the national media.

The shooter, Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, and his companion, who till other day were basking in the glory, chose to retreat from the barren fields of Bihar.

By his own account to Firstpost, Khan killed over 250 nilgai in Bihar as part of his free social service before returning home. The killing continues, for as he says anyone is free to kill them, and his task is being now taken over by the ordinary residents of the state. As the shooting of these animals fuels controversy, a look at Khan's own track record reveals that it is not any less controversial.

In 1991-92, he was arrested by the Karnataka police for supplying weapons to Maoists who operated along the Andhra Pradesh-Odisha border. Patel Sudhakar Reddy, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), was also arrested along with him.

The Hindu reported, The police are also not ruling out the possible nexus of the arms dealer with naxalites. This came to light when the Andhra Pradesh police arrested arms dealer Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, who was accused of supplying arms to naxalite leader Patel Sudhakar Reddy. According to the police, the naxalites had used their contacts with arms dealers to procure different kinds of weapons.''

While Khan was subsequently chargesheeted, he managed to secure his release by allegedly moving political levers in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. He then purchased safari land in Tamil Nadus Bokkapuram, bordering the Bandipur National Park, from where he would organise wildlife shootings for rich clients not only in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh but also in other parts of India. He would use telescope-mounted rifles to kill faraway animals.

Khan had another brush with the law in 2005, when the Karnataka CID (Forests) caught him for his shooting expeditions, which is a punishable act under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Although the case was dropped by the CID (Forests), Khan had by that time earned a degree of notoriety even among his ilk of game hunters.

Former Additional Director General of Police of Karnakata KSN Chikkerur, who earlier held the charge of IG CID (Forest), said that in 2005 that he had received information that Khan had developed the property in Bokkapuram.

I knew his past criminal activities and he was also known as a poacher. I sent an alert to all concerned in police because he was frequently spotted travelling through our area. We had doubts and kept an eye on him. But our problem was that the crimes he committed were registered in the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. Andhra Police has those details. What I can tell you about Khan is that he is a very trigger happy man, Chikkerur said.

Two years ago, Khan came under the lens of the Himachal Pradesh authorities and wildlife conservationists when he killed two leopards in Thunag-Mandi, although his specific task was to put down a man-eating tiger. Incidentally, Himachal Pradesh governments decision to invite Khan in 2014 to kill the man-eating tiger was in complete violation of the Wildlife Protection Act and the regulations governing the National Tiger Task Force. The standard operating procedure to kill a man-eater  whether a tiger or a leopard  is that only a shooter under the employment of a state governments forest department could legally do so.

Khan, however, dismissed all charges against him: "Jab aap kam karte hain toh koi pathar phenkte hain (When you work, then people through stones at you). Some baseless cases were registered against me but all those have ended in acquittal. Even Tamil Nadu chief minister was sentenced and her case is pending in the Supreme Court. Toh hum toh bahut chote hain (compared to her I am too small a person). As on today, there is no case pending against me. Charges against me were motivated. Currently I have been caught in the cross fire between two central ministers (Maneka Gandhi and Prakash Javadekar).

He claims that he had gone to Bihar from Hyderabad on an invitation from the Bihar government, because he is an authorised shooter. While it has been suggested that the shooter, he or anyone else, were paid Rs 1,500 per kill, Khan says he does it (for) free".

"I belong to a royal family. I do this as social service. I kill tiger, I kill elephant to help poor farmer families. I tranquilise leopard, tiger, bear and so on as required. I give training in tranquilising (animals) to the forest department. I go to Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, basically wherever the government invites me, Khan said.

In Bihar he is said to have been invited by JD(U) MLC Neeraj Kumar.

In March this year, 53 wild boars were shot down in Chandrapur forest by the same legal hunter. He had been recalled to shoot 50 more in April. The local forest department was not consulted and they complained to the Maharashtra government about the consequences of this terrible action.

There are 120 tigers in the forest and their main food is wild boar. The local forest department assessed that after this massacre, it would be difficult for the tigers to find their natural prey. They said that the chances of them lifting cattle, goats and even young children from the villages in the forest would now go up exponentially. Faced with this problem, the Maharashtra environment minister immediately cancelled the kill orders. There were suggestions that the union ministry of forest and environment pushed for the killing of the boars.

The animal rights activists argue that what makes the decision of the central government even more worrisome is that by declaring an animal as vermin, not only do they permit its killing, but don't assume responsibility for the disposal of the carcasses either.

This means that the hunter can keep the dead animal and harvest the body for whatever purposes. Nilgai's meat is considered a delicacy by some people and they will all be either heading to Bihar or looking for opportunities to get it killed in other areas.

All this is dangerous and can potentially open the floodgates for hunting of wild animals in all other states. The poachers can claim that the body parts or trophy had been obtained from Bihar. By including these animals in the list of vermin, there is no end to the damage that the food chain and the overall ecology will suffer.
Srinagar: Four militants and a soldier were killed as Army foiled an infiltration bid on Wednesday, the second such attempt in three days, in Tangdhar sector near the Line of Control in Kashmir.

"Army foiled an infiltration bid in Tangdhar sector of Kupwara district near the LoC Thursday morning. Two militants were killed in the initial exchange of firing while a soldier was injured," an army official said.

He said the soldier, who was injured in the ongoing operation, later succumbed to injuries.

The official said two more militants were killed in the counter-infiltration operation.

On Tuesday, an infiltration bid was foiled in Machhil sector of Kupwara district.

The two-day operation left one militant dead while one soldier laid down his life.

Four other jawans were also injured in the operation.
Mumbai: Maritime terrorism is a big threat with huge economic implications and the government is carrying out a security audit of all major and non major ports to identify vulnerable points in coastal security, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said on Thursday.

"The vulnerability of our coasts was exposed in 1993 when explosives were smuggled to Raigad and then in 2008 when terrorists attacked Mumbai," the HMO tweeted Rajnath as saying at a meeting in Mumbai to review coastal security.

"We need to make our coastal security foolproof and impregnable," he further tweeted.

"Maritime terrorism is a big threat and it has huge economic implications," Rajnath said at the meeting.

On coastal security after the deadly 26/11 attacks, he said, "Many initiatives have been taken to strengthen our coastal security post 2008 attacks on Mumbai."

"We are securing the Indian coastline by creating a chain of Radars and Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers," he further tweeted.

Referring to Coastal Security Scheme (CSS), the Home Minister said, "After the success of CSS 1 and 2 we are preparing concept paper for CSS 3. We need your inputs for CSS3".

Rajnath also said that, "To identify vulnerable points in our coastal security we are carrying out security audits of all major and non major ports".

Indian Coastguard is working to integrate the fisherman community through Community Interaction Programme, he said.

Home ministers and top officials from nine coastal states (West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat) and four Union Territories, (Daman & Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Inter-State Council Secretariat (ISCS), Registrar General of India, Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Shipping, Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries and Indian Coast Guard are participating in the meeting.
The Delhi police have punctured Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's allegations against Delhi L-G Najeeb Jung of shielding two BJP leaders in the murder case of New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) legal officer MM Khan. This has come as a temporary relief for the L-G, against whom the Delhi CM had earlier levelled charges of bribery and corruption. The police have also given a clean chit to the two BJP leaders.

"As per our investigation, nothing has come up. There is no link between the BJP leaders and the murder of MM Khan. The allegation made against them is not correct," Delhi police said in a media conference in New Delhi on Thursday.

The controversy related to Kejriwal blaming the L-G of shielding the BJP MP Mahesh Girri and NDMC vice chairman Karan Singh Tanwar emerged from a letter written by the Delhi CM to the L-G.

Highlights of Kejriwals letter to Jung:

-The letter accuses the L-G of shielding BJP MP Mahesh Girri and NDMC vice chairman Karan Singh Tanwar.

-Kejriwal has told Jung that he has heard that PM Modi is happy with him.

-Kejriwal alleged that the L-G didn't let police question them (Girri and Tanwar).

-He accused him of using the Delhi police to save them, as it works under the Centre.

-The AAP supremo alleged that he would falsely implicate leaders from his party.

What the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) said:

Holding back-to-back press conferences on Thursday afternoon, AAP lashed out at the BJP alleging that the latter has links with the murder of Khan. The party has demanded immediate arrest of Tanwar.

AAP leader Dilip Pandey asked, Why were the BJP leaders not quizzed? If Karan Singh Tanwar is not arrested, we'll believe that the BJP is guilty of Khan's murder.

The case:

MM Khan, reportedly known as an honest and upright officer in the NDMC was murdered near his residence at Jamia Nagar allegedly by hired killers on 16 May. Khan was in charge of a Rs 140 crore recovery case related to a hotel at Connaught Place.

After the police arrested seven people allegedly involved in the murder, it was revealed that the owner of Connaught Hotel, Ramesh Kakkar hired killers to eliminate Khan. The reason, as told by the police, was that Kakkar was unwilling to pay the dues (licensing fees) to NDMC. Khan was murdered a day before he was scheduled to pass the final order on the hotel lease terms.

Last year in February, the hotel had been sealed by the NDMC on grounds that licence fees amounting to Rs 140 crore had not been paid to the council. It had been de-sealed after the matter reached the High Court. Khan had been appointed as the estate officer to look into the matter.

The investigation had further revealed that the accused Kakkar wrote to the L-G six days before Khan was murdered alleging that Khan was acting in an arbitrary, unjust and biased manner. Prior to this, Tanwar too complained to Jung on similar lines.

Khans murder highlighted the deep-rooted corruption within the NDMC. One of the country's biggest civic bodies, there had been allegations of corruption against NDMC, including corruption in the construction of buildings during the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

The AAP had also demanded the sacking of NDMC mayor Ravinder Gupta in an alleged bribery case, claiming that Gupta demanded cash from a builder.

NDMC vice-chairman counters:

Karan Singh Tanwar told a news channel: I have been an eyesore for Arvind Kejriwal and the AAP since I got appointed as vice-chairman of the NDMC. Kejriwal and his MLAs openly called me a "murderer". Kejriwal is mentally sick and has been levelling allegations even against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He needs treatment. I'm planning to file defamation case.

AAP's stand:

The Kejriwal-Jung row over Khan's murder is likely to escalate, as the AAP has decided to take the BJP leaders head on.

"It's clear that the BJP is hand-in-gloves with the culprits. The L-G is supporting them. We'll go to the roots of the matter and won't let the accused go scot-free," an AAP leader said.
The CBI custody of Virendra Tawde, an accused in the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, was on Thursday extended till 20 June by a local court.

Tawde, arrested by the CBI from Panvel in Navi Mumbai last week in connection with the murder of the 67-year-old anti-superstition crusader, was produced before Judicial Magistrate First Class V B Gulve-Patil on the expiry of his earlier remand.

CBI lawyer B P Raju sought further custodial Interrogation of the accused, saying he was not cooperating

with the investigating agency. Subsequently, the court extended his CBI custody till

20 June.

Tawde, an ENT surgeon, is a activist of the Sanatan Sanstha which has come under the scanner for the murders of Dabholkar, communist leader Govind Pansare and rationalist M M Kalburgi.

He is the first accused to be held in the nearly three-year-old case.

Dabholkar was shot dead by two unidentified men while he was on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge on 20 August, 2013.

Tawde and another Sanatan Sanstha activist Sarang Akolkar wanted to eliminate rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2009 itself, but they dropped the plan due to the Margao bomb blast that took place in the same year, CBI sources had said on Wednesday, citing evidence pieced together by the agency.

Tawde, suspected to be the brain behind the murder conspiracy, kept on planning a hit on the activist along with Akolkar. The plan was finally executed on 20 August, 2013, they said.

The CBI is probing the Dabholkar murder case, which was handed over to it in May 2014 by the Bombay High Court. The NIA is handling the Margao blast case.

The sources also said Tawde hated Dabholkar for his relentless campaign against superstition. He also allegedly played a key role in the 2009 Sangli-Miraj riots.

The Sanstha has denied any role in Dabholkar's murder and termed Tawde's arrest as "mysterious".
Former cabinet secretary TSR Subramanian and Union HRD minister Smriti Irani and their war of words, over making the draft on National Education Policy public, is far from over.

Earlier this month, Subramanian, who had been appointed by the HRD ministry to head the panel for evolution of NEP, however, insisted that the committee report as well as inputs of the states must be put forth in public domain. Subramanian wrote to Irani and asked her to make contents of the report public or else he would do it himself.

Speaking to Shishir Tripathi of Firstpost, Subramanian said, "It was not a threat; they have put it in a different manner. We advised the ministry that report should be in the public domain. It has no secrets involved. It was a suggestion. The fact is that I told them that this should be in the public domain....but, I've not said 'or else' kind of thing. I said I hope you'll do it; otherwise I'll have to do it."

According to The Indian Express, the 217-page report contains close to 90 suggestions including reinstating detention of students beyond Class V, setting up an all-India cadre of educational services on the lines of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), inculcating values and nationalistic pride in school students and allowing foreign universities to set up campuses in India in collaboration with Indian institutions, among other things. The main issue, according to this report in DNA, started when Subramanian raised his objection to the three-language formula, and objected to Smriti Irani's ministry using the word 'tolerance' towards Indian diversity.

"How can anyone say that we should tolerate Indian diversity? It should rather be that we 'accept' the Indian diversity," Subramanian was quoted as saying in his final draft to the HRD ministry. The draft education policy also challenges the ministry's intention and its stand on Right to Education Act and University Grant Commission (UGC). In fact, Smriti Irani's ministry has faced public flak over controversies related to radical changes made in educational institutions.

In fact, when asked what did he think were the pressing concerns in the education sector, Subramanian told Firstpost, "The first of two key problems we had to address was quality of education. There is a deterioration of quality over time, so we had to address that. In fact, the quality is pathetic, the data about education was not correct. During our research startling numbers came out. We have a serious issue with quality. The second was a more subtle nuanced kind of problem: inclusivity. We found that those coming from regional language stream were not pursuing higher education. There were unequal chances for them of getting acceptance in higher education. We found out the problems being faced particularly by three groups  below poverty line (BPL), economically and socially backward class and scheduled caste (SC) and tribes (ST) and other backward castes (OBC).

In an exclusive report, Shishir further spoke to the former cabinet secretary and reported that the committee believed there is no possibility of improving the quality of our school education unless we restore the credibility of our teachers.

The Minister's remarks came a day after Subramanian, who headed the government-appointed panel which drafted the report. Smriti Irani was not going to sit quietly after all this and in a solid rebuttal, the Union Minister said that the draft report will be made public only after its recommendations are shared with states and "not just for the sake of headlines."

This education policy will not become a legacy of one individual who seeks a headline," she replied. "It is the property of one lakh ten thousand villages, over 5000 blocks, over 500 districts, over 20 states that have given it to us with the confidence that any recommendation that comes to us will be shared with them before it is made a draft policy," the HRD minister added.

She said when the process of drafting NEP was initiated, it was promised that before putting anything in public domain, the opinion of states would be taken.

She was asked about Subramanian's letter in which he wanted the report to be made public.

Clearly unhappy with Subramanian's demand, Irani said that when the process of drafting NEP was initiated, it was promised that before putting anything in public domain, the opinion of states would be taken.

"It is true, that on 27 May we got some recommendations, but still state governments have to express their opinions. So to present an incomplete thing before the people, I feel, would be an injustice. More so because we have been working in cohesion with the states, and to break this bridge just for the sake of a headline (is not proper)," Irani replied.

The Minister asserted that she would not "renege on her promise to state governments" that they will have a voice in the policy, before it is dedicated to the nation. When contacted for his comments, Subramanian said the views of the states as well as the committee report were all inputs for drafting of the NEP and he strongly felt that "all of them should be in public space".

He, however, emphasised that the Centre is the only entity competent to prepare the policy, the PTI reported.

The Subramanian panel had last week submitted a 200-page report containing about 90 recommendations to uplift the standards of in primary and higher education sector. Subramanian said that the committee started started working on the draft report on 1 November and before that, the ministry had an assessment exercise, listing 33 issues in the education sector, asking various institutions to organise seminars etc. "So, this was the preparation by the ministry. We got those documents and around 5000-6000 responses; most were grievances. However, there was also a large number of positive, detailed suggestions from various quarters which we used as the base. We were given two months time to go through them but we felt we needed more time because before forming the policy and before assessing the documents we had to go behind what was those documents premised upon as we couldn't have used their conclusions. We had to derive our own conclusion. So we got an extension till March. We met 400-500 people  professors, academics, vice chancellors, NGOs, industry associations, education associations, charity organisations, press secretaries and more during the entire exercise to get their view points."

With inputs from PTI
Syangja: Nepalese grandfather Durga Kami brushes his bushy white beard, puts on his school uniform and, with the aid of his walking stick, trudges for over an hour to class for another day of learning.

Poverty prevented Kami finishing his studies as a child and achieving his goal of becoming a teacher.

Now 68, the father of six and grandfather of eight goes to school six days a week to complete his studies and escape a lonely home life following the death of his wife.

Walking into the Shree Kala Bhairab higher secondary school and the buzz created by 200 children is a welcome contrast to the hush of the isolated one-room home, with its leaking roof and frequent power cuts, where Kami lives in Syangja district, some 250 km (155 miles) west of Nepal's capital Kathmandu.

"To forget my sorrows I go to school," said Kami, one of the oldest students in Nepal, in the classroom where he studies alongside 14 and 15-year-olds.

Kami, whose children have all left his hilltop home, first went to Kaharay primary school where he learnt to read and write with the seven and eight year olds before leaving after finishing grade five with the 11-year-olds.

Shree Kala Bhairab teacher DR Koirala then invited Kami to his school, which provided the grandfather with stationary and a school uniform including grey trousers, blue striped tie and white shirt.

"This is my first experience teaching a person who is as senior as my father's age," Koirala said. "I feel very excited and happy."

The school scholarship does not stretch to cover food, though, meaning Kami's breakfast of rice with a fermented green vegetable known as 'Gundruk' must sustain him until dinner.

The 20 children in his grade 10 class have dubbed Kami 'Baa', which means 'father' in Nepali, but despite his age their elderly class mate joins in all activities, including volleyball in the schoolyard.

"I used to think 'why is this old man coming to school to study with us?' but as time passed I enjoyed his company," Kami's 14-year-old class mate Sagar Thapa said.

"He is a little bit weak in studies compared to us but we help him out with that."

Kami said he wanted to study until his death, adding he hoped it would encourage others to ignore age obstacles.

"If they see an old person with white beard like me studying in school they might get motivated as well," he said.
People watching the performance of Keralas newly elected Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government in its first three weeks are confused with ministers sending conflicting signals.

While Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and his cabinet colleagues in the CPI (M) batted for development, the ministers belonging to Communist Party of India (CPI), the second largest constituent of the LDF, focused on sustainable development with emphasis on environmental protection.

The discord came to the fore within a week of LDF assuming power. What touched off the discord was Electricity Minister Kadakampally Surendrans suggestion to revive the controversial 163 MW Athirapally hydroelectric project, proposed across the Chalakudy River more than three decades ago, for meeting the rising gap between power supply and demand.

It snowballed into a conflict with Pinarayi backing the project and its key ally opposing it. While CPI state secretary Kanam Rajendran pointed out the impropriety in the CPM move to push the project which was not included in the ruling fronts election manifesto without discussing it in the LDF, his colleague and Agriculture Minister V S Sunilkumar went a step further and said that his party would not change its stand against the project under any circumstances.

While this forced Surendran to backtrack on his statement saying that he will not pursue any project that the people did not want, the Chief Minister warned his CPI colleague to confine strictly to issues relating to his department and added that matters to be discussed at the LDF will be done so.

However, the Greens opposing the project joined the issue reviving the old development vs environment debate. Stating that it will not only kill the natural Athirapally waterfall but also wreak ecological havoc around the region, the environmentalists have vowed to oppose the project at all costs.

A nonchalant Pinarayi said he will not compromise with blind, extreme and unscientific environmental fundamentalism that the state has been witnessing over the years. He said that his governments objective was to ensure environment conservation without hurting the development of the state.

However, the CPI has termed it as a right wing development approach which was not in tune with the Marxist ideology. The Agriculture Minister demonstrated his partys commitment to environmental conservation by ordering farming in two wetland sites identified for setting up an international airport and an eco-tourism project.

Though the farmers and the environmentalists have hailed the decision to grow paddy in 500 acres of land acquired for the airport project at Aranmula in Pathanamthitta district and 378 acres of land at Kumarakom in Kottayam district for the eco-tourism project, the CPM or even the captains of industry have not taken the move seriously.

This is perhaps because they think that farming in land held in the possession of the promoters of the two projects will not be possible without recovering the land or forcing the owners of the land to do the cultivation. The current laws allow neither, says peasant activist Fr Thomas Peelianickal.

But does this not send a wrong signal to the investors? Curiously leaders of the industry bodies are not overly concerned about the brewing conflict between the two major allies in the ruling front as it is a common feature whenever the LDF comes to power. The rift between the two had led to even open confrontation many times.

Raja Sethunath, chairman of the Kerala Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the chief minister this time was strong and he would deal with these issues firmly. He told the Firstpost that they were confident that Pinarayi would steer the state to the path of development.

The chief ministers warning against environmental fundamentalism is a clear message to the investors that the state government would strike a balance between development and environmental protection. Development in a land scarce state like Kerala is not possible without certain compromises. We are sure that the new government would ensure it without upsetting the ecological balance, Raja said.

He said that the Chamber would soon submit a vision document to the government for the industrial development of the state. He said that they were hopeful that the new government would give a big boost to the industrial development.

The chamber views the Chief Ministers decision to go ahead with many mega projects like the Vizhinjam multipurpose port at Thiruvananthapuram, SmartCity project at Kochi, industrial corridor between Kochi and Coimbatore and the electronic park at Amballoor initiated by the previous United Democratic Front (UDF) government as positive signals.

Many of these projects were opposed by the LDF while in opposition. Pinarayi himself had alleged graft in the award of contract for constructing the port at Vizhinjam to Adani Ports and SEZ while party veteran V S Achuthanandan had termed many conditions in the agreement between the detrimental to the interests of the state.

However, the Chief Minister gave a go-ahead to the project without seeking any change in the conditions when Adani Ports CEO Karan Adani called on him in the state capital on June 9. Similarly, his decision to speed up land acquisition for laying the LNG gas pipe line and widening of national highways is in variation with the stand LDF took while in opposition.

Former Labour Commissioner and Chamber of Commerce and Industry Secretary, A J Rajan views this as a sign of pragmatism driving the new Chief Minister. He said that Pinarayis decision to resolve the Mullapperiyar dispute with Tamil Nadu through talks was an example of his pragmatic approach.

There is no point in continuing with decades-long legal battle after the Supreme Court ruling in favour of Tamil Nadu over raising the height of the century-old dam. The only course open to the state is to find a solution to the issue by taking the neighbouring state into confidence. Pinarayi has taken the right step, says Rajan.

The retired IAS officer, who has held many important positions in the government, feels that the stagnant industrial sector would witness a revival if Pinarayi continues as the Chief Minister for the next five years.
In a press conference on Thursday, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) brought up the issues of Kamal Nath's resignation and the murder of MM Khan, the late legal officer of New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC).

Speaking on Kamal Nath's resignation, AAP leader Dilip Pandey said that the Congress was forced to withdraw him because of continuous pressure, due to his alleged involvement in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

Cong forced to withdraw Kamal Nath as party's incharge for Punjab polls due to continuous pressure:Dilip Pandey, AAP pic.twitter.com/cJP3XzVpkZ  ANI (@ANI_news) June 16, 2016

He further said that the Congress had accepted their defeat in the Punjab polls.

This is a clear indication of Congress's acceptance of their defeat in Punjab polls: Dilip Pandey, AAP pic.twitter.com/7HWDVJHPi8  ANI (@ANI_news) June 16, 2016

Quoting the Nanavati Commission report, the party said that Nath was present during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and that the case on him be reopened. Staying on the subject, the party also demanded that Capt Amarinder Singh quit.

In a severe salvo style that AAP is known for, in its conferences, Pandey accused the BJP of having links with the murder of MM Khan, asking why the party's leaders weren't quizzed. The party also demanded the arrest of NDMCs vice-chairman Karan Singh Tanwar. "If Karan Singh Tanwar is not arrested, we will believe that the BJP is guilty of Khan murder," Pandey said and added, "We have provided enough evidences against Tanwar. He wrote a letter to Lt. Governor Najeeb Jung to seek Khan's removal. Then why is Delhi Police saving him? It is working like a spokesperson of the BJP."

Khan was allegedly offered a Rs three crore bribe by Kakkar to turn the Rs 140 crore hotel dispute in his favour but the officer refused, resulting in his murder. Khans murder has highlighted the deep-rooted corruption that reeks through one of the countrys biggest civic bodies. For almost three decades, the NDMC has time and again been subjected to various allegations of corruption, mostly involving real estate and building construction issues. In 2015, as many as four top NDMC officials were sent to prison on charges of corruption relating to the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

It has also been alleged that hotelier Ramesh Kakkar had allegedly hired the killers to eliminate Khan.

The AAP has also been demanding the sacking of NDMC mayor Ravinder Gupta in an alleged bribery case, even as complaints have been mounting against Karan Singh Tanwar by his own colleagues, who blamed him for halting NDMCs eviction drive against squatters in popular market complexes.

A Times Now report said that Arvind Kejriwal has been alleging that Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung was shielding Karan Singh Tanwar and BJP's Maheish Girri (in the MM Khan murder case) and that Jung didn't allow them to be questioned. Girri said that he was "shocked" that Kejriwal mentioned his name in the murder case and challenged him to join him for an open debate at the Constitution Club on 19 June. "If he cannot prove any links, he should resign," Girri said.
Aam Aadmi Party, on Tuesday night, suspended party spokesperson Alka Lamba for two months, for "stepping out of party lines", reported Times Now.

Alka Lamba had told reporters outside the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB's) office that Transport Minister Gopal Rai had been relieved of the portfolio, as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal wanted to ensure a fair probe into the premium bus service scheme, reported The Indian Express. Lamba's statement, however, was in sharp contrast with the AAP government's claim of why Rai had stepped down from the post  they claim it was due to health reasons.

Post her suspension, Alka Lamba took to Twitter, saying that she respected her party's decision and apologised for her actions.

               ,           1/1  Alka Lamba (@LambaAlka) June 16, 2016

    ,                   1/2

 !  Alka Lamba (@LambaAlka) June 16, 2016

Following a complaint made by BJP MLA Vijender Gupta regarding the premium bus service scheme, Kejriwal had asked Rai to appear before the ACB with all relevant documents at the earliest, instead of waiting for any action to be initiated.

The AAP leader had said on Monday that he was prepared to go to jail if charges of corruption in the app-based premium bus service scheme were proved, reported Z News.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday confirmed that they had identified one of the two shooters who gunned down rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2013, reported The Times of India. The officials didn't release the name of the alleged shooter, but mentioned that he was a resident of Satara and that the assailants had borrowed the motorcycle on which they traveled, from arrested Sanatan Sanstha member Virendrasinh Tawde.

The report also suggested that the gunman (identified by the CBI) could also have been involved in the Govind Pansare murder case.

The report quotes an official as saying that the alleged shooter and an accused in a bomb blast case in Goa Sarang Akolkar have both been missing since 2009.

On Wednesday, PTI reported that Hindu Janajagruti Samiti member Virendra Tawde and Sarang Akolkar wanted to eliminate rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2009 itself, but they dropped the plan due to the Margao bomb blast that took place in the same year, CBI sources said on Wednesday, citing evidence pieced together by the agency.

Two Sanatan Sanstha workers - Malgonda Patil and Yogesh Naik - died when the bomb they were ferrying to Margao, Goa, accidentally exploded in November 2009. Akolkar went absconding since then.

"As per the documentary evidence and investigation till now, Tawde and Akolkar wanted to kill Dabholkar in 2009. However, they had to drop the plan after two Sanatan Sanstha workers died when the bomb, they were ferrying to Margao, accidentally went off," they said.

According to a report by The Indian Express, Sarang Akolkar had conducted a dry run of the attack on Dabholkar.

CBI officers were quoted saying that they had evidence of Akolkar's visit to Pune in June 2013 where he had held a meeting with Tawde.

Tawde, an ENT surgeon, was arrested from Panvel last week for the murder of the 67-year-old anti-superstition crusader. He is the first accused to have been arrested in the nearly three-year-old case.

Tawde, suspected to be the brain behind the murder conspiracy, is said to have hatched the plan to murder the activist along with Akolkar. The plan was finally executed on 20 August, 2013, when Dabholkar was shot dead by two unidentified men while he was on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge in Pune, they said.

In another revelation, the sources said workers of the Goa-based right-wing outfit were present near the bridge when the murder took place.

The sources said Tawde was unhappy with Dabholkar for his relentless campaign against religious superstition. Tawde also allegedly played a key role in the 2009 Sangli-Miraj riots.

The Sanstha has denied any role in Dabholkar's murder and termed Tawde's arrest as "mysterious".

With inputs from PTI
A formidable ray of hope that the GST is likely to see the light of the day soon could not have come at a better time for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government. This at a time when the Congress is struggling hard to revive its political significance.

Just a day after BJP's two-day National executive Committee concluded in Allahabad on Monday, where its resolve on GST was informally discussed on the sidelines, finance ministers of all states came together on Tuesday in Kolkata to almost unanimously announce their support for the passage of this single biggest economic reform bill.

The news and timing of the Kolkata resolution was music to the Modi governments ears. It tasted particularly sweet to the top leadership for four reasons.

First, it all happened in skillful guidance of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who has been pursuing for the passage of this constitutional amendment bill for over a year and half;

Second, a Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee played host to the meet of the finance ministers to resolve contentions of states;

Third, it comes around a time when Modi government is celebrating two years in power and the world is keenly watching the developments on this front, particularly the Prime Minister's ability to fulfill his economic reforms resolve;

Fourth it is an ominous sign to the Congress whose obstructionist attitude has held up the bill in Rajya Sabha for about a year. The meet unanimously rejected one of Congress' key demands that 18 percent cap in GST be inserted in the Constitutional Amendment Bill, as impractical and uncalled for. The Congress would now risk total isolation if it does not come to board and give credence to the voices of its own state governments.

Two days ago Firstpost had reported that the ruling BJP was all set to take on the Congress head on, if it continues to create unreasonable hurdles: "The Congress's bluff has to be called now. Let the Congress have the courage to issue a whip and vote against the bill. If it does so, it will risk international condemnation. The world is waiting for the GST Bill," a senior minister had said.

The way Modi government has proceeded on the matter, waiting patiently to build a consensus, waiting for its turn to see change in political equations in the states and its consequent bearing on national politics, favorable arithmetic in Rajya Sabha is significant. It means that the ruling party strategists have learnt their lessons from the past mistakes it made in aggressively pushing for the land acquisition bill without building favorable public opinion and consensus among the states. In GST, the government is going step by step, prudently using all available institutional tools while trying to garner as much support as it can.

It was also interesting that while finance ministers meet was on in Kolkata where Tamil Nadu expressed some of its reservations as a manufacturing state, Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa was meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi. The meeting was most 'cordial'.

What is to be noted is that Jayalalithaa's reservations about the bill are financial and not political. As a manufacturing state Tamil Nadu will suffer some losses and "loss of fiscal autonomy", under the proposed GST regime. She has presented her charter of demands to the Prime Minister, in which her government position on GST is also articulated. Will Jaylalithaa be fully be on board (AIADMK has 13 MPs in Upper House) to support the bill in "national interest" or stage walkout? Either way that would help government although the BJP strategists are counting on AIADMK's support.

At least three Union ministers including Nitin Gadkari, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Nirmala Sitharaman called on Tamil Nadu chief minister.

Usually it is the chief minister who goes to Central minister's offices but in her case the protocol was just reversed. Foreign secretary has been asked to take up Indian fishermen's issues with Sri Lanka during his visit there and let Jayalalitha know of the outcome. Her other demands would be given due consideration. On her part while she presented a thick list of memorandum of demands she thanked the Modi government for support in several areas. A healthy personal rapport between Modi and Jayalalithaa might reflect on GST.

A process of give and take is likely to follow in due course. What the head of empowered committee of finance ministers, West Bengal Finance Minister Amit Mitra said was noteworthy that they will all meet again in the second week of July for further deliberation. The meet has been timed just ahead of the beginning of Monsoon Session of Parliament, whereby all possible dots could be joined to ensure passage of the bill in Rajya Sabha.



Since the GST is a Constitutional Amendment Bill, the BJP needs two-third of the total members of the Upper House present and voting (163 votes in a full house) and the higher of 50 percent of the Upper House (123 out of 245 votes). The passage of this Bill will have to be followed by a ratification of the Bill by a majority of states. After this, the central GST and the integrated GST legislations will have to be passed by Parliament and state GST laws by states by the end of the year.

However, behind that exultation the party has preferred to maintain caution until the Bill actually clears its parliamentary hurdle. Jaitley maintained that "there is no deadline on GST implementation. But we can say that a broad consensus on its implementation has been achieved and we are moving with positive intent." The government is hoping that if the bill is passed in the upcoming Monsoon Session then it could be implemented from next fiscal.

Jaitley or Modi government's buoyancy perhaps comes from the belief that they might have now effectively checkmated Congress' continuing obstructions.

Another Union minister, who is in thick of government strategy, said, "We have exhausted all avenues available under the Indian parliamentary constitutional system. We have done everything possible we could to convince the Congress to let it pass. It has also gone through many Standing Committees and Select Committees, been debated and discussed inside and outside of Parliament. If the Congress does not support the passage of the GST Bill, it will have only two other options either to issue whip to its members to reject the bill or create ruckus in the house. Either way they will be exposed."

He, however, hopes that better sense will prevail in the Congress party and that it "had taken lessons" from the way people have responded to its obstructionist politics.

What makes ruling BJP leaders happier is that the Left parties are also on board to support the GST. The Left's victory in Kerala could prove good news for Modi government, at least in this limited context.
By resigning as the party general secretary and giving up charge of Punjab and Haryana, senior Congress leader Kamal Nath  and one of the few who managed to save their skin in the 2014 defeat of the party in the general elections  has stirred a hornet's nest.

Despite his intentions to pre-empt and save the battered Congress from any more damage  as his appointment as the in-charge of Punjab ahead of the Assembly elections in the state next year has come under immense public flak because of the stigma of 1984 riots that he still carries  he may just have underscored the partys insensitivity and laid it open in front of the public at such a crucial moment.

Is this how bankrupt the party has become in terms of leadership? They had to pick up the one allegedly tainted in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots to prepare for an election in the state of Punjab?

Soon after Kamal Nath's appointment, Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal had said, "It is an unbelievable brazen act of insensitivity towards Sikhs and crass and vulgar disregard of national opinion on the guilty of the massacre of thousands of innocent Sikh children, men and women by Congress goons in November 1984. I just cannot believe a political party can be so brutally insensitive to the sentiments of Sikhs."

With eyes on forthcoming assembly polls next year, Congress president Sonia Gandhi appointed Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kamal Nath as general secretaries respectively for Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, which was seen as an important organisational revamp.

However, little did the Congress realise that Kamal Nath's appointment would backfire. Soon after that, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in Punjab, and the Aam Admi Party (AAP) had gone all guns blazing at the former Union minister. Eminent lawyer and an AAP leader, HS Phoolka had said, "The Congress is rewarding Kamal Nath for obeying (then Prime Minister) Rajiv Gandhis orders during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi."

Phoolka is well known for spearheading the crusade to seek justice for the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots of New Delhi, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Nearly 2,733 Sikhs were killed in the riots and over 50,000 were displaced within two days. Though the Nanavati Commission, investigating the riots, eventually absolved Kamal Nath of any wrongdoing during the 1984 riots, he has been alleged, by at least two eye-witnesses of the riots, as being present in the mob outside Gurudwara Rakabganj in New Delhi that attacked the devotees on 1 November, 1984, the day after Indira Gandhis assassination.

One is a certain individual who resided in the Gurudwara, and was called Mukhtiar Singh (with reference, the Nanavati Commission report).

The other is Sanjay Suri, a staff reporter with The Indian Express, who told the Commission that he saw Kamal Nath at the head of a mob of about 4,000 outside Gurudwara Rakab Ganj. On Suris testimony, the Commission noted, "The mob was making attempts to enter the Gurudwara. But the Congress Member of Parliament [Kamal Nath], and other leaders of the Congress Party were able to keep them under control."

Suri, a first-hand observer and now CNN-News18's Editor in Europe in his book '1984: The Anti-Sikh Violence and After' has narrated riveting account of facts related to the riot. In the book, he raised questions about Kamal Naths presence at Rakab Ganj gurdwara. After he quit as the party general secretary and gave up charge of Punjab on Wednesday, Kamal Nath said, "Till 2005, not a single public statement, complaint or FIR was ever made against me and the first time my name was ever mentioned in any forum was 21 years after 1984." He added that the Nanavati Commission, set up by the previous NDA government, "after proper investigation fully absolved me."

Reacting to the developments, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra reportedly told ANI, "Way he (Kamal Nath) has tendered his resignation it's clear that he was somewhere guilty in 1984 riots."

Phoolka, in a tweet, said:

Kamal Nath's resignation does not absolve him of murder, neither does it absolve Badal from his responsibility to reopen Kamal Nath case.  H S Phoolka (@hsphoolka) June 15, 2016

Nath, 69, a nine-time Lok Sabha member from his pocket borough Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh, has close ties with the NehruGandhi family, which goes back his close association with Indira Gandhis son Sanjay, who was his schoolmate at Doon. Despite the ups and downs that the party has faced in all these decades, Kamal Nath has remained loyal to the family and the Congress.

However, the Sikhs havent forgiven him. Globally too, they have protested against him on many occasions. That is precisely why his appointment in the first place was being derided as "insensitive." Thats egregious considering that the Congress party is in serious danger of being wiped out from the states as even in the recently-concluded Assembly elections in five states, it could win only in one.

Moreover, across the country, leaders big and small, are deserting the party to either form their own or join the Opposition. The most recent case is that of former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Ajit Jogi, who has quit the party after building it in the newly-formed state of Chhattisgarh at the opening of the new millennium. Is it pure insensitivity on the part of the Congress top brass where they have no idea what the people at the grassroot level are going through? Or is it merely the ivory tower syndrome? Or perhaps, the bankruptcy of leadership has left them with no choice?
It was during the thick of campaigning just before the 2016 Assam Assembly polls I met Anjan Dutta. Around noon, while I was still unsure about the meet, Dutta called me up to meet him at the Nandanban Resort in Jhanji on the outskirts of Amguri.

A carnival-like atmosphere was already built up at Amguri with the crowd getting bigger to get a glimpse of Congress leader and actor Raj Babbar, who had landed there for the Congress poll campaign.

After my three-hour long wait at Jahanjis Nandanban resort, on the outskirts of Amguri, Dutta walked into the resort apologising for keeping me waiting too long. "The poll season is too hectic, you see. Time is a rarity," Dutta said with a smile on his face.

That was the only time I met Dutta, the man who revolutionalised Assams transport sector as minister in the Tarun Gogoi government and pumped in much life to the dilapidated Assam Tea Corporation. That was also possibly the last interview he gave to any journalist from a major news outlet.

When Dutta passed away on Thursday in New Delhi after a brief illness, Assam lost one of its finest ministers it ever had if not a mass leader. The day I decided to meet him was 1 April, a Friday.

The wait, however, was fruitful.

Over a cup of coffee, the discussion ranged from dynastic politics, the rise of BJP in Assam, the Narendra Modi wave, the disastrous Lok Sabha election results, the dwindling popularity of the Congress among the tea community, the infiltration from Bangladesh, the AIUDF factor, Himanta Biswa Sarma leaving the Congress and the possibility of him becoming the chief minister in the future.

"I am not am ambitious person. My responsibility now is that my party forms the government. Whatever role I would have to play that will depend on the high command. I am a soldier of the Congress party," Dutta had said when asked if he had any chief ministerial ambitions.

For a man who was having a breezy schedule air-dashing to every nook and corner of the state as the star campaigner of the Congress party, he was fairly calm and calculated in his responses. Dutta first came to major limelight when he successfully revived the almost dead Assam State Transport Corporation as the transport minister in Tarun Gogoi's first cabinet in 2001 and brought immense credibility to the Gogoi-led government.

Another fact that the portfolio was held by Pradip Hazarika in the earlier AGP government, his foremost opponent when it comes to the Amguri seat, was an icing on the cake. Having held the industry portfolio simultaneously, he was even credited with reviving the Assam Tea Corporation to some extent. The financial mess created by the previous Asom Gana Parishad government only helped the Congress government to improve its public image due to Dutta's stellar performance.

Surprisingly those high scores did not help him electorally as he lost to Hazarika in 2006. The result had even stunned the sharpest of pollsters. The 64-year-old Dutta had a sea-saw equation when it came to winning from his Amguri seat. He had won the constituency thrice in 1991, 2001 and 2011. The former Congress president often faced tough challenge from AGP's Hazarika, who is also a three-time MLA. In fact, Hazarika defeated Angkita this time in the Amguri seat.

Dutta had a fairly clean political career, which however had to face the test of time, due to his name allegedly getting involved in the Saradha scam. Dutta was questioned twice by the Central Bureau of Investigation in November 2014 and in March last year. The agency even raided his office in August 2014. The former Congress state chief though always maintained that he was open to probe and had not indulged in any unethical income.

Dutta was admitted to Apollo Hospital in New Delhi on 12 May with complaints of severe chest infection before the counting of votes for the Assam Assembly Election 2016 on 19 May. The humiliating defeat that the Congress faced in Assam immediately ignited a quiet mutiny against the state leadership forcing Angkita to openly praise Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal for the kind words for her father during his speech after he was sworn in.

"Respect !! While the CM Shri Sarbanada Sonawal choose to offer prayer for the speedy recovery of APCC President, some Congressi inside Rajiv Bhawan is busy in a signature campaign. A person is in ICU, spare your political conspiracies," Angkita wrote on her Facebook page.

Dutta was appointed as the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee president on 13 December 2014 when Sarma and his followers were at the peak of their dissidence against then chief minister Tarun Gogoi. Although Dutta did not succeed in holding Sarma back, the party had opted to brazenly disregard the loss created by Sarma's exit. This bravado perhaps proved too costly as the results in the recently held Assembly polls showed.

Dutta's sudden demise is no wonder shocking but it is unlikely to cause much change politically. The Congress party is already at its nadir after being forced out of its 15-year-rule in the state. There is little doubt that even before the mourning gets over, the potential successors will begin their own version of game of thrones to outdo the other to grab the chair. And the options are wide open this time as many of the so-called bigwigs from former Union minister Paban Singh Ghatowar to three-time state minister Prodyut Bordoloi have tasted defeat recently. Then there are other leaders like former minister Rockybul Hussain, former Speaker Pranab Kumar Gogoi and even ex-chief minister Tarun Gogoi who managed to retain their constituencies but the road isn't easy for them either. There is a possibility that the Congress high command might even go for a relatively young leader to try and see if the party's dwindling fortunes can be revived.

Politics apart, Dutta was also a journalist at heart. He was the editor of Mahekiya Anubhuti and was known as a prolific writer. Samaye Kubai Jai is a collection of his editorials that was published by Aank Baak Publication in 2011.

It is immaterial to discuss whether the chief ministership would have come in Duttas way or not. But, he would be remembered as a peoples leader and the man who saved Assam State Transport Corporations thousands of employees and their families from misery. Even his enemies wouldnt deny that.
Lucknow: Newly-appointed AICC in-charge of Uttar Pradesh Ghulam Nabi Azad on Thursday said the 2017 Assembly elections in UP will be a fight between "secular and communal forces" and dismissed suggestions that Rahul Gandhi will be made leader of the state.

He also hoped that Priyanka Gandhi will campaign outside party bastions of Amethi and Rae Bareli.

"It would be a fight of principles and a direct contest between secular and communal forces," said the former Union Minister.

Azad, who arrived here to a rousing reception by party workers, was talking to reporters after his day-long

interactions with senior party leaders and office-bearers.

Regarding Rahul Gandhi, Azad said the Congress vice-president will be elevated "at the decided time" and

hence, there was no question of making him the leader of UP.

To a query, Azad, who had yesterday favoured Priyanka campaigning outside Amethi and Rae Bareli, once again hoped that she would take time out for the other parts of the state.

He also said the party will declare the name of its chief ministerial candidate at the "right time" as there was "no dearth of faces" for the post.

"But, the selection will be on the basis of leadership qualities and capabilities and not on caste and communal lines," he said.

His remark came amid speculation that Congress was planning to project 78-year-old, three-time Delhi Chief

Minister Sheila Dikshit as its CM aspirant in UP.

Azad, for whom this is the fourth stint as in-charge of party affairs in UP, said this time around, he saw the state moving towards "communalism."

"Congress has always advocated secularism. It will fight whichever party comes before it to safeguard secularism," he said.

Azad, who has his task cut out, said his top priorities include strengthening the party at the ground level and hoped that Congress will get a new lease of life in the state this time.
New Delhi: The CPM on Thursday accused the BJP of whipping up Hindutva ahead of the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls and said it was promoting "the cult of an authoritarian leader."

Commenting on the 12-13 June National Executive meeting of the BJP in Allahabad, an editorial in the CPM journal People's Democracy said the event confirmed the "division of labour" between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah.

"While Modi harped on 'vikas' and his government's commitment to push forward development, Amit Shah spoke about the Hindutva issues such as the alleged exodus of Hindus from Kairana in western Uttar Pradesh," said the CPM.

"Modi promised to make Uttar Pradesh a developed state if the BJP is voted to power. Amit Shah, on the other hand, laid out the well-tested Hindutva agenda," it said.

The CPM said BJP MP Hukum Singh's allegations that 346 Hindus had been forced to flee Kairana town by Muslims was found to be spurious by the administration and the media.

"It was found that most of the people in the list had left the town years ago in search of better jobs and livelihood. A few were not alive at present...Though the Kairana exodus theory has been effectively debunked, the very fact that the BJP national leadership took it seriously and sent an eight-member team of MPs to enquire into the matter shows the way the communal agenda would be raised in the run-up to the (Uttar Pradesh) elections," it said.

The editorial said the other aspect of the BJP meeting was the "concerted bid to propagate and build up Modi's supreme leadership of the party and the government...

"What is in the making is the building up of the cult of an authoritarian leader."
WASHINGTON Islamic State's "terrorism capacity and global reach" have not been reduced, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said on Thursday, adding that the group has tens of thousands of fighters around the world, far more than al Qaeda had at its height.

John Brennan told U.S. lawmakers in a rare public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in a stronger position than he was a year ago, bolstered by Russian air strikes against moderate opposition.

"Despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism and global reach," Brennan testified, using an acronym for the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS.

"We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks," Brennan said, days after a gunman, who expressed allegiance to Islamic State, killed 49 people in Orlando, Florida.

Brennan's testimony raised questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. position on Syria that Assad must leave power and its strategy to "degrade and ultimately defeat" Islamic State.

He told the panel that the CIA had not yet found direct links between the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, and any international terrorist organization.

But he said, as in Orlando and the attack in San Bernardino, California, last December, Islamic State is attempting to inspire attacks by sympathizers, even as it explores ways to send operatives to the West via refugee flows, smuggling routes and other methods of travel.

He called such lone wolf attacks "an exceptionally challenging issue for the intelligence community."

Islamic State will likely change its strategies to make up for battlefield losses and constraints on its finances, he said, and it would probably rely more on "guerrilla tactics," including high-profile attacks outside territory it holds in Iraq and Syria.

"The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly," he said.

INTERNATIONAL CLOUT

The CIA is concerned about the growth of Libya as a base of operations for Islamic State militants, who have 5,000 to 8,000 fighters there, Brennan said.

"That is very concerning, particularly since Libya is right across from Europe on the Mediterranean with refugee flows that are going there," he said.

Brennan said the number of Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria had dropped to 18,000 to 22,000 from the CIA's estimate last year that they may have had as many as 33,000.

Giving updated estimates of the group's international clout, he said there were "several hundreds, if not over a thousand" hard-core fighters in the Sinai, as well as several hundred in Yemen and hundreds in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as "maybe 7,000 or so" in Nigeria.

"Nigeria's another country where Boko Haram is now Islamic State of West Africa, where you have several thousands of individuals who are also on the march waving the ISIL banner," Brennan said.

Months after Islamic State attacks that caused mass casualties in Paris and Brussels, Brennan said European Union countries were still not where they needed to be in terms of intelligence sharing.

The CIA and the European Unions Counter-Terrorism Group have been discussing ways to improve the sharing of intelligence on terrorist threats in the wake of the attacks, Brennan said.

Questioned about the broader crisis, Brennan told lawmakers he believed Assad's government had been strengthened with Russia's support.

"A year ago, (Assad) was on his back foot as the opposition forces were carrying out operations that were really degrading the Syrian military. He is in a stronger position than he was in June of last year" as a result of Russian support, Brennan said.

He said a large proportion of strikes by Russia and the Syrian government were directed at what Washington considers to be the moderate opposition fighting Assad.

(Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Toni Reinhold)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
WASHINGTON Reprising his frequent role of "consoler in chief," President Barack Obama will fly to Orlando on Thursday to meet with survivors of the massacre at a gay nightclub and families of some of the 49 people killed.

The White House said Obama's visit to the Florida city where Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to Islamic State during a three-hour rampage through the Pulse nightclub, was not about the gunman but comforting the victims of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

"This will be, I think, an emotional trip," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, saying Obama would offer condolences on behalf of the nation.

"The president recognizes that he is a symbol for the rest of the country. But it would be impossible for him not to be personally affected by these kinds of conversations," Earnest said.

A long list of mass shootings has marked Obama's 7-1/2 years in the White House.

Obama most recently met with grieving families in December in San Bernardino, California, after a married couple inspired by Islamic State killed 14 people. He has visited with victims of mass shootings in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and South Carolina.

"Somehow this has become routine," he said last October before meeting privately with victims of a shooting at an Oregon community college where nine people were killed.

"This is a political choice that we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America," he said.

Obama has often said his toughest time as president came after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.

"Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad," Obama said in January, tears rolling down his cheek, as he launched a push to make gun control an issue in the Nov. 8 election to succeed him.

After Newtown, Obama proposed more background checks for gun sales and pushed to ban more types of military-style assault weapons - a tall order in a country where the constitutional right to own guns is fiercely defended.

He failed to convince enough lawmakers to back the restrictions, and blamed them for being in thrall to the National Rifle Association, the powerful U.S. gun lobby.

The Florida shooting has aroused new debate on gun purchases in the United States, after it emerged that Mateen was legally able to buy an assault rifle even though the FBI had investigated him in the past for possible ties to Islamist militant groups.

Obama said Sunday's massacre was "a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub."

"We have to make it harder for people who want to kill Americans to get their hands on weapons of war that let them kill dozens of innocents," he said on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Peter Cooney)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Tarin Kot, Afghanistan: The Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of bacha bazi paedophilic boy play to infiltrate security ranks, multiple officials and survivors of such assaults said.

The ancient custom is prevalent across Afghanistan, but nowhere does it seem as entrenched as in the province of Uruzgan, where "bacha bereesh"  or boys without beards  widely become objects of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders.

The Taliban over nearly two years have used them to mount a wave of Trojan Horse attacks  at least six between January and April alone  that have killed hundreds of policemen, according to security and judicial officials in the province.

"The Taliban are sending boys  beautiful boys, handsome boys  to penetrate checkpoints and kill, drug and poison policemen," said Ghulam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai, who was Uruzgan's police chief until he was removed in a security reshuffle in April amid worsening violence.

"They have figured out the biggest weakness of police forces  bacha bazi," he told AFP.

The assaults, signifying abuse of children by both parties in the conflict, have left authorities rattled, with one senior provincial official who echoed Rogh Lewanai's view saying "it's easier tackling suicide bombers than bacha attackers".

The killings illustrate how bacha bazi is aggravating insecurity in Uruzgan, a remote province which officials warn is teetering on the brink of collapse, unravelling hard-won gains by US, Australian and Dutch troops who fought there for years.

The insurgents are using bachas as honey traps, said 21-year-old Matiullah, a policeman who was the only survivor from an insider attack in Dehrawud district in spring last year.

He said the attacker was the checkpoint commander's own sex slave, a teenager called Zabihullah. Late one night, he went on a shooting spree, killing seven policemen including the commander as they slept.

"He brought the Taliban inside and poked all the bodies with rifle butts to see if anyone was alive. I pretended to be dead," said Matiullah, who now works as a tailor, pointing out a gash on his forehead.

"As his Taliban accomplices gathered our weapons and ammunition, Zabihullah declared: 'Everyone is dead'."

'Addiction' to boys

The Taliban, who banned bacha bazi during their 1996-2001 rule, roundly denied deploying any underage boys for insider attacks.

"We have a special mujahideen brigade for such operations  all grown men with beards," a Taliban spokesman told AFP.

The insurgents have long denied using children in combat, a claim repeatedly debunked by rights groups and the government.

Survivors of insider attacks who spoke to AFP, including Matiullah, suggest the Taliban are exploiting the institutionalisation of bacha bazi in police ranks for military gain.

Practically all of Uruzgan's 370 local and national police checkpoints have bachas  some up to four  who are illegally recruited not just for sexual companionship but also to bear arms, multiple officials said.

Some policemen, they said, demand bachas like a perk of the job, refusing to join outposts where they are not available.

Horrifying abuse at checkpoints makes the boys, many unpaid and unregistered, hungry for revenge and easy prey for Taliban recruitment  often because there is no other escape from exploitative commanders.

Many who have tried to escape have been dragged back with trumped up charges of Taliban links, two senior provincial judges told AFP.

Boys have also spurred a deadly rivalry between policemen, with officials reporting incidents such as a public gunfight this year between two commanders in Gezab district as one of them angrily accused the other of "stealing" his bacha.

"To restore security in Uruzgan, we will first have to separate policemen from their bachas," one of the judges said.

"But if they are told to reform their ways, a common reply is: 'If you force me to abandon my boy lover, I will also abandon the checkpoint'. The Taliban are not blind to notice that this addiction is worse than opium."

'Male rape'

Bacha bazi, which the US State Department has called a "culturally sanctioned form of male rape", peels away the masculine identity of boys in a society where the sexes are tightly segregated.

In conservative areas women are mostly invisible in public  and often unattainable due to steep bride prices. Bachas supplant the role of women, adopting a feminine gait and sometimes wearing makeup and bells on their feet.

Many in Uruzgan see bacha bazi neither as paedophilia nor homosexuality, which is forbidden in Islam. If social norms had a pecking order, violating boys would be seen as far more ethical than violating women.

"Bacha bazi is pervasive sexual slavery of children, seen widely as a cultural practice and not a crime," Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International, told AFP.

"Since it is mostly practised by those in positions of power  warlords, commanders, politicians  it is hard to stamp out. It appears sustained partly by the fact that access to women is limited."

Insider attacks by child slaves have also been reported in recent years from neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar provinces, where bacha bazi is prevalent.

But the tactic appears more deep rooted in Uruzgan, where the boys are widely flaunted as a totem of affluence, with some officials openly displaying cellphone images to AFP of their "handsome bachas".

"Come see my beautiful bacha," said Naqibullah, a police commander in Dehjawze village near the provincial capital Tarin Kot, boasting that he had been holding the teenager for two years.

With a touch of kohl on his eyes, and bleached blond curly hair poking out of his embroidered hat, the boy sat in a corner of the checkpoint surrounded by opium farms, quietly refilling tea glasses for Naqibullah's guests.

'Predatory behaviour'

"Commanders prowl neighbourhoods for young boys. We are scared of dressing up our children or buying new clothes that will make them attractive," said Nader Khan, a tribal elder in Dehrawud.

Khan's 13-year-old nephew was taken captive earlier this year by Naqibullah, a local commander not related to the Dehjawze official, when his family sent him to deliver bread for policemen. He was released only after angry tribal elders besieged the governor's office in Tarin Kot.

Governor Mohammad Nazir Kharoti told AFP he ordered Naqibullah's arrest but he was released in less than a month because he was needed for combat duty.

"It is difficult to implement the law 100 percent when we are faced with a war situation," Kharoti said, without elaborating on the case.

Afghanistan's interior ministry refused to confirm or deny that bachas were being used in insurgent attacks, but said it was committed to police reforms and acknowledged that "bacha bazi within the ranks of police is a serious crime".

The practice has put the United States and its NATO allies, who have spent billions of dollars to build Afghan forces, in a precarious position.

The US Congress last year voiced concern over "predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police", prompting watchdog agency SIGAR to launch an investigation that is still ongoing.

The head of a government affiliated agency in Uruzgan showed AFP two letters from the attorney general in Kabul, one last year and another dated January, ordering a separate probe into sexual abuse and the illegal recruitment of child conscripts.

"We haven't been able to visit even one checkpoint to investigate," he said, speaking in hushed whispers in his own office.

"Do you think police commanders will leave us alive if we probe their crimes?"

How widespread is 'Bacha Bazi'?

"Women are for child-rearing, boys are for pleasure" is a common saying across many parts of Afghanistan.

The ancient custom, banned under the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule, has seen a resurgence in recent years. It is said to be widespread across southern and eastern Afghanistan's rural Pashtun heartland, and with ethnic Tajiks across the northern countryside.

Powerful warlords, commanders, politicians and other members of the elite often keep "bachas" as a symbol of authority and affluence.

Bachas, dressed as women, are widely used by these men as dancers at private parties and are sexually exploited.

Bacha bazi is not widely seen as homosexual behaviour  popularly demonised as a deviant sexual act, prohibited in Islam  and is largely accepted as a cultural practice.

How has it been allowed to flourish?

Tight gender segregation in Afghan society and lack of contact with women have contributed to the spread of bacha bazi, rights groups say.

Several other factors such as an absence of the rule of law, corruption, limited access to justice, illiteracy, poverty, insecurity, and the existence of armed groups have also resulted in the spread of bacha bazi, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said in a report in 2014.

AIHRC points out that Afghanistans criminal law prohibits rape and pederasty, but there are no clear provisions on bacha bazi.

"There is a gap and ambiguity in the laws of Afghanistan regarding bacha bazi and the existing laws do not address the problem sufficiently," the report said.

"Many of the perpetrators have connections with the security organs and by using power and giving bribes they get exempted from punishment."

Where do the boys come from? And what happens to them afterwards?

Bachas are typically aged between 10 and 18. Sometimes they are kidnapped, says AIHRC, but often desperate poverty drives their families to sell them to abusers.

"The victims of bacha bazi suffer from serious psychological trauma as they often get raped," AIHRC's report said.

"Such victims suffer from stress and a sort of distrust, hopelessness and pessimistic feeling. Bacha bazi results in fear among the children and a feeling of revenge and hostility develop in their mind."

In turn, many adolescent victims are said to grow up to have boy lovers of their own, repeating the cycle of abuse.

"In the absence of any services to recover or rehabilitate boys who are caught in this horrendous abuse, it's hard to know what happens to these children," said Charu Lata Hogg, a director at London-based charity Child Soldiers International.

"We have heard anecdotal reports that many grow up to keep their own bachas, perpetuating the revolving door of abuse."

How is bacha bazi impacting Afghanistan's security situation?

Bacha bazi is having a detrimental bearing on the perpetual state of conflict in Afghanistan, helping the Taliban to infiltrate security ranks in provinces such as Uruzgan, officials say.

The abusive practice in security ranks also undermines support for NATO-trained Afghan forces.

"To date, the US has provided over $60 billion in assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), including nearly $500 million to the Afghan Local Police," the US Congress said in December.

"Predatory sexual behaviour by Afghan soldiers and police could undermine US and Afghan public support for the ANDSF, and put our enormous investment at risk."

The practice also continues to embolden the Taliban's desire to reassert sharia law in Afghanistan and is fuelling their insurgency.

"Such wild abuses of the predatory mujahideen forces in the early 1990s drove the popularity of the austere Taliban, helping them sweep to power across most of the country. Similar behaviour of the government forces after 2001 is also helping to inspire the insurgency," a Western official in Kabul told AFP.
Yangon: Myanmar and India vowed on Thursday to cooperate on issues of border security and stability, sources with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

The pledge came as Myanmar Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi met Ajit Doval, the Indian National Security Adviser who is visiting Nay Pyi Taw as a special envoy of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Their discussions also covered development of long-term advantages from road connectivity between the two countries.

In June last year, there were clashes between the Indian Army and the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) near the Myanmar-India border.

The Myanmar Army then assured India it would not tolerate any rebel groups on its soil. Doval last visited Myanmar in June 2015.
Nay Pyi Taw: The new Myanmar government will effectively spend the budget on higher living standards and economic growth, President U Htin Kyaw said on Thursday.

Speaking at the first meeting of the Financial Commission in capital Nay Pyi Taw, U Htin Kyaw, who is also the commission chairman, revealed the amendment to the 2016-17 budget, which was drawn up according to the cabinet structure of the previous government, will be submitted to parliament for approval, Xinhua news agency reported.

U Htin Kyaw promised increased spending on education, health and social welfare to ensure more human resources, adding that development policy would be focused on the implementation of rural development, electrification, poverty alleviation and infrastructural development.

A 5 per cent commercial tax placed on mobile top cards has collected 7.5 billion kyats ($6 million) revenue to be spent on sectors that directly contribute to public interest, he added.

While including the budgets for the new Ministry of the Office of the State Counsellor and the Ministry of Ethnic Affairs, the expenditures for the ministries are being cut by 2 per cent, the commission's vice chairman U Myint Swe, who is also vice president, told the commission.

Another commission vice chairman U Henry Van Thio, who is also vice president, disclosed that over 1 billion kyats ($1 million) has been allocated to regions and states for the present 2016-17 fiscal year.
Paris: Several hours after the Paris attacks, three teenagers smoked pot and ate fries with a "normal guy" who turned out to be jihadist Salah Abdeslam, news reports said Thursday.

Abdeslam is the only surviving member of the 10-man jihadist team that attacked a string of Paris bars and restaurants, a concert hall and the national stadium on 13 November, 2015, leaving 130 dead.

After dropping off three suicide bombers at the stadium, Abdeslam abandoned his car in the Montmartre neighbourhood then headed for the rundown southern suburb of Chatillon, where he spent several hours with the youths.

They said he had a Belgian accent and introduced himself as Abdel.

"He seemed like a normal guy with nothing to do," a 17-year-old told L'Obs news weekly, which gave him the pseudonym Tom.

"We started talking, he was nice," Tom said, adding that the encounter began at around 1 am, half an hour after police stormed the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 people perished.

The teenagers, who also spoke to the all-news channel BFM TV, described Abdeslam as calm as they sat in the stairwell by the ninth floor of a highrise apartment block, sharing a few joints and eating takeout from a McDonald's near the building.

L'Obs said the spot was known as a rendezvous point for cannabis deals.

Abdeslam may have been wearing his suicide belt at the time, with one teen saying the down jacket he was wearing was "bulky" and "looked strange".

An unexploded suicide belt bearing Abdeslam's DNA was found in the area 10 days after the attacks.

"He told us his car had a wheel clamp and he had to wait for his cousins in Barbes to come for him," one of the boys told BFM TV, referring to a Paris neighbourhood with a large immigrant population.

"He told us he was going to marry his girlfriend soon, in a few months," he said.

Abdeslam also told the boys he was a tramway maintenance worker in Belgium.

'No particular emotion'

As they chatted, the boys' smartphones began vibrating with reports of the attacks.

Abdeslam looked over the shoulder of one of the boys who was watching an amateur video of people escaping from the Bataclan.

"He didn't show any particular emotion. He looked at it, said it was sad. He seemed to realise what was happening," the youth said.

They left him in the stairwell at around 4 am, L'Obs said.

Two days later, the teenagers saw Abdeslam's face on television and went to the police.

The jihadist is thought to have left for Brussels at dawn with two Belgian accomplices who managed to get through several checkpoints along the way.

After four months on the run, Abdeslam was arrested on 18 March in Molenbeek, a Brussels neighbourhood notorious for being a hotbed of Islamic extremism where he grew up.

He was transferred to France to face terror charges on 27 April.

Abdeslam has told investigators that he was supposed to blow himself up but changed his mind.

He refused to answer questions in his first interview with a French anti-terror judge on 20 May.
Islamabad: Pakistan's foreign ministry says Islamabad and Kabul are engaged in talks to deescalate tensions at a main border crossing between the two neighbouring countries following this week's deadly clashes.

Outbreaks of shooting at the Torkham crossing have killed two Afghan and one Pakistani border guard and wounded at least 20 on both sides.

Spokesman Nafees Zakaria with Pakistan's foreign ministry told reporters in Islamabad on Thursday that he hopes the matter will be resolved soon.

He says the shooting first erupted after Pakistan started building a gate on its side of the Torkham border to curb illegal cross-border movement. He says Pakistan plans to build seven more such gates along the porous 2,200 kilometer (1,375 mile) -long border.

Torkham, a usually busy crossing, has remained closed because of continuing tensions.
Geneva: Pakistan has demanded before the UN Human Rights Council that its mechanisms should respond to human rights violations and the loss of precious lives due to drone strikes on its territory, it was officially announced on Thursday.

In a meeting of the UN Human Rights council in Geneva, Pakistan's permanent representative Tehmina Janjua stressed that the council and its mechanisms should respond to human rights violations on the Pakistani territory which is in violation of its sovereignty, a foreign ministry statement read.

She emphasized that the drone strikes were also a violation of UN Charter, international law including human rights and humanitarian law.

Pakistan has repeatedly stressed that use of armed drones or remotely piloted aircrafts is a breach of human rights, in particular, the right to life.
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It looks like Samsung has some different plans for notifications LED. According to a leaked user manual, Samsung is working on a new feature called as SmartGlow that has a ring-type LED indicator on the back of Samsung phones.

The manual describes SmartGlow as an alternative to the notification LED that is situated on the back of the device around the camera lens. Smart Glow can be configured by users to display priority notifications of different colors, based on the type of notifications such as phone call, e-mail, text message etc. In addition, the ring unit can also be doubled as a flash when required. Users will be able to customize Smart Glow by assigning specific colors to certain contacts which would be a handy feature as you can know about the notifications even when the phone is rested facing down.

The light ring will also light up when the battery is low and it will work as a guide when taking selfies with the rear camera by turning blue when the users face is in the field of view. It is speculated that Smart Glow feature might show up first on the Samsung Galaxy J2 (2016).

source | via
Since the beginning of March, oil prices have increased nearly 40%, lifting share of offshore drillers ENSCO PLC (VAL), Seadrill Ltd (SDRL) and Transocean LTD (RIG 1.83%) along the way:

There's no denying that higher oil prices are good for the offshore industry. However, short-term increases won't translate to improved prospects for offshore drillers anytime soon. And that means it's probably not time to buy shares of these companies just yet. Here's why.

Operating results, backlogs continue to weaken

Even as oil prices have returned to near $50 recently, and a number of global supply interruptions seem likely to keep prices near or even above that level for the foreseeable future, the financial and operating results that offshore drillers reported this past quarter paint a picture of weakness. Here's a look at the financial results and contracted backlog for Seadrill, ENSCO, and Transocean last quarter:

Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Company Revenue Net income Backlog Revenue Net income Backlog* Seadrill $891.0 $88.0 $4.3 $1,244.0 $448.0 $5.1 ENSCO $814.0 $175.3 $5.2 $1,163.9 $324.7 $5.8 Transocean** $1,341.0 $255.0 $14.6 $2,043.0 $398.0 $15.5

As you can see, all three companies reported weaker financial performance across-the-board last quarter, which may seem obvious considering that first quarter oil prices were the lowest the world has seen in well over a decade. However, that wasn't the biggest driver behind the deteriorating performance for offshore drillers, but more of a symptom of the long-term impact of low prices: Oil producers aren't contracting for much new offshore work at all right now.

Offshore oil won't turn on a dime

One only has to look at the contracted backlogs reported by Seadrill, ENSCO, and Transocean last quarter to see this playing out. For well over a year now, contract backlogs at offshore drillers have gone backwards, as drillers continue to work through contracts they signed in prior years. Sure, there has been some new work awarded in recent months, as we saw from Seadrill's earnings report, but it's nowhere near enough to offset the work that gets completed each quarter.

As things stand today, most oil companies that contract with offshore drillers are still focused on cutting capital spending, and that's likely to continue through the end of 2016 at the very least. So far, there's been zero evidence that $50 oil is changing any minds on that. To the contrary, a recent move by Statoil ASA shows how averse drillers are to spending on oil and gas field development today.

Statoil still had Seadrill's West Hercules under contract through the end of the year, but instead of putting the vessel to work in the Aasta Hansteen gas field off the Canadian coast as it had been planning, the company instead chose to cancel the remaining term with Seadrill and pay the company $61 million. To not drill.

Not only will Statoil save about $33 million to terminate the contract early, but it will also defer tens of millions of other costs related to starting up the Aasta Hansteen field at a later date. With oil and gas prices still far below historical levels, it's likely that more producers will follow suit, putting off expensive offshore development simply to make ends meet this year.

Eventually offshore will recover, but it's unclear who the winners will be

There's no getting around the reality that the oil and gas reserves found offshore will be a necessary source of energy in the years and decades to come. But one only has to look at the boom and bust history of the industry to remember that it can be dangerous jumping into the wrong companies too quickly. Case in point? The 70-plus oil and gas producers which have filed for bankruptcy over the past year or so.

Now I'm not predicting that Seadrill, ENSCO, or Transocean will end up bankrupt before the market recovers, but at things stand today, these companies are living on backlogs that won't last forever, and they all have substantial debt obligations that must be met as well. So what's an investor to do?

For now, I plan to stay on the sidelines, looking for evidence that producers are coming back to the offshore oil patch, and ready to spend to develop those resources. When they do, I'll be a buyer. But before then, I'm not willing to risk any more cash on an offshore driller that doesn't make it through the downturn. And as things stand today, it's just too early to tell who the winners -- and losers -- are going to be.
Image Source: Getty.

According to industry-watchers, the question of which is the better buy, Fortinet or Check Point Software Technologies , is a no-brainer. Check Point's consensus share price target of $86.91 is a mere 3% above its current price, while Fortinet's target of $41.19 a share is 22% above Tuesday's closing price of $33.75. But there a couple of other considerations.

First, relying strictly on analysts to determine what is, or what isn't, an appropriate investment is rarely a good idea. Second, Fortinet has opted to forego earnings for now to fuel its impressive top-line growth, while Check Point CEO Gil Shwed prefers a slow but steady approach. High-flying sales gainers will always be more attractive to some investors, but consistent growth also has a place for the more risk adverse.

Image source: Fortinet.

The case for Fortinet

Fortinet reported a 34% jump in sales in the first quarter to $284.6 million, marking its third straight quarter of 30% or more top-line improvement, and that streak will likely continue. Fortinet founder and CEO Ken Xie's initiative to drive end-to-end platform solution sales is already beginning to pay dividends thanks to its new-ish security fabric architecture.

The security fabric platform gives Fortinet customers the ability to monitor all points of their enterprise, including multivendor networks and cloud-based, big data security threats. This solution got a boost recently with its deal to buy cloud, Internet of Things, and advanced analytics security provider AccelOps for$28 million (though that price could rise to $32 million if it meets performance objectives).

Fortinet's deferred revenue and billings also bode well for a continued string of quarterly revenue increases. Deferred revenue climbed to $837.2 million in Q1 -- a 39% year-over-year improvement -- and billings of $330.5 million were 30% higher than a year ago. Both results point to a strong and growing revenue pipeline.

However, fueling Fortinet's impressive top-line growth has come at a steep price, as demonstrated by Q1's $3.43 million loss, compared to last year's meager (but still positive) $1.56 million net profit. What makes Fortinet's spending spree worrisome is that $147.4 million equal to 52% of total sales went to sales and marketing. Those high costs will continue to eat into Fortinet's bottom line, unlike one-time investments in infrastructure or developing new products.

Image source: Check Point Software Technologies.

The case for Check Point

Check Point has its own streak of revenue gains, though its sixth straight quarter of at least 9% top-line growth doesn't sound quite as impressive as Fortinet's. But Check Point's comparatively slow sales improvements only tells part of its story. It, too, saw a nice bump in deferred revenue last quarter -- that figure grew 14% to $883 million -- and Check Point is also gaining momentum from a recent offering: high-end, data center security appliances.

With the growth of the cloud, IoT, and big data, the amount of information being amassed and securely stored in data centers is growing exponentially. Naturally, one of the leading concerns of tech and business executives is ensuring all that data is secure. Data centers are the right market to target, and according to Shwed,Check Point's new offering "got off to a great start in the marketplace."

Check Point is also delivering on another key initiative: Driving recurring revenue via subscription sales. Though software updates and maintenance continue to make up the majority of Check Point revenue -- $193.4 million of its $404.3 million in total sales last quarter -- subscription revenues climbed over 18% to $88.13 million, easily making that the fastest growing of its three primary divisions.

Here's another factor Check Point has going in its favor: It continually makes a profit. Last quarter's GAAP (including one-time items) net income of $0.95 a share was a 10% year-over-year improvement. Shwed's emphasis on slow but steady growth may not wow the Street as Fortinet's does, but there's something to be said for being consistently profitable.

Though they're peers, the differences in how Fortinet and Check Point go about their businesses are striking. So which is the better buy? For investors comfortable with risk and inevitable stock price swings, Fortinet comes out on top. But for risk-averse investors who still want consistent (albeit slower)growth, Check Point is spot on.

The article Better Buy: Fortinet Inc or Check Point Software Technologies? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Tim Brugger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Check Point Software Technologies. 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.
Investors in their 60s should seek out strong dividend-paying stocks that feature low-risk businessmodels.American Tower (NYSE: AMT), Retail Opportunity Investment Corp. (NASDAQ: ROIC), and FactSet Research System (NYSE: FDS) all fit those criteria perfectly. Here's why older investors should seriously consider adding these three stocks to their portfolio.

The ultimate wireless winner

Smartphones are rapidly replacing landlines around the world and billions of internet-enabled devices are expected to come online over the next few years as theInternet of Thingstrend ramps up. While there are a number of ways that investors can profit from this growth,American Tower is a great choice for risk-averse investors.

Image source: Getty Images.

American Tower is organized as a real estate investment trust(REIT) and it buys or builds cell towers all around the world. The company then leases out space on its towers to several local wireless carriers at the same time under long-term contracts. That provides the company with predictable amounts of revenue and profits that help to reduce risk.

Given the ever-increasing consumer demand for bandwidth and coverage,American Tower has had no problem growing atdouble-digit rates. That has provided the company with plenty of capital to reinvest in the business while also paying a continually rising dividend.

AMT Dividend data by YCharts.

American Tower's financial statements look poised to flourish thanks to continued consumer demand for mobile data and the upcoming 5G rollout. While American Tower's dividend yield of 1.9% is on the low side for a REIT, its profit growth trajectory should provide investors with an attractive total return profile. That makes American Tower a great company for even conservative investors to get to know.

A leading data aggregator

Money managers know that it is impossible to make smart investing decisions without accurate information. That's why they all happily pay up to get their hands on up-to-date data that is provided by companies such as FactSet Research System.

FactSet, in particular, collects information from hundreds of different sources and then provides tools that help users make sense of the data. The company's system is so helpful that hundreds of hedge funds, banks, insurers, and more pay a hefty subscription fee to have access. With a customer retention rate around 95%, it is clear that FactSet is doing something right.

Its subscription business model has worked out beautifully for investors. Even during the depths of the financial crisis, FactSet was able to pass along price increases to its customers. That allowed its revenue, profits, and dividend to grow even while the financial markets were in meltdown.

FDS Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts.

Understandably, Wall Street thinks highly of FactSet's business model and has awarded its stock a high earnings multiple. Despite that, I still think FactSet's stock is worth buying today since its financials have proven to be so resilient. Adding in a dividend yield of about 1.2% is just icing on the cake.

This REIT has a winning formula

Successfully navigating the retail landscape is tough given the growth of e-commerce sales. However, Retail Opportunity Investments (ROIC) has found a unique way to insulate itself from the ever-changing landscape. The vast majority of its shopping centers are located near affluent communities that are densely populated and anchored by grocery stores. The company believes that shopping centers that fit this description will be highly desired by tenants since nearby space is limited and wealthy consumers make weekly trips. Those factors allow ROIC to maintain occupancy rates that exceed 97% and charge regular rent increases.

Image source: ROIC investor presentation.

Thus far, it looks like ROIC's hunch is right on the money. Its revenue, profits, and dividend have all steadily marched higher over time. In turn, ROIC's investors have enjoyed returns that far outpace the REIT sector in general as measured by the iShares US Real Estate ETF (NYSEMKT: IYR).

ROIC Total Return Price data by YCharts.

More recently, many retail REITs have pulled back over concerns of rising interest rates and a slowdown in retail spending. That's giving investors a chance to buy into ROIC at a nice discount. Throw in a dividend yield of 3.8% and I think this is an ideal income stock for conservative investors.

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Brian Feroldi owns shares of American Tower, FactSet Research Systems, and Retail Opportunity Investments. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends American Tower, FactSet Research Systems, and Retail Opportunity Investments. The Motley Fool has the following options: short October 2017 $120 calls on American Tower and long January 2019 $80 calls on American Tower. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Qualcomm , the biggest mobile chip maker in the world, has been ceding market share to Taiwanese rival MediaTek over the past few years. In the smartphone application processor market, Qualcomm's market share fell from 52% in 2014 to 42% in 2015, according to Strategy Analytics. During that same period, MediaTek's share rose from 14% to 19%.

MediaTek lured OEMs away from Qualcomm with cheaper chips. Although MediaTek couldn't match the speed of Qualcomm's top-tier Snapdragons in premium devices, its low- to mid-range chips were appealing to smaller smartphone makers with paper-thin margins.

Image source: MediaTek.

Qualcomm bears generally believe that MediaTek's growth, combined with the rise of first-party chips from Apple , Samsung, and Huawei, will eventually sink the chipmaking business, which generates most of its revenue. However, Qualcomm bulls should note that MediaTek isn't as mighty as it's often portrayed and that a dramatic political shift in Taiwan could dull its competitive edge.

How is MediaTek really doing?

MediaTek shares fell nearly 50% over the past 12 months due to sluggish smartphone sales. Approximately 60% of the company's revenue comes from smartphone chips. An earthquake in southern Taiwan in February also disrupted shipments from its top contract manufacturer TSMC and weakened its March sales.

MediaTek's sales fell 9.4% annually last quarter toNT$55.9 billion ($1.7 billion), which was in line with its own guidance. However, its operating margin fell from 16% a year ago to 8%, due to higher expenses across the board, and net income plunged 38% to NT$4.4 billion ($136 million). However, MediaTek remains more profitable than Qualcomm's chipmaking division, which had an operating margin of just 5% last quarter.

For the rest ofthe year, analysts expect MediaTek to post double-digit sales growth fueled by rising demand for 4G smartphone chips in China. But MediaTek's margins are also expected to keep contracting due to tough competition from Qualcomm and China Spreadtrum Communications.

Caught in the political crossfire

MediaTek's greatest weakness is the fact that it's a Taiwanese company that relies heavily on the Chinese market. The pro-unification KMT party, which controlled the presidency for the past eight years, heavily promoted cross-strait business ties with the mainland. But the pro-independence DPP party took control earlier this year, resulting in a bitter chill between the two adversaries.

Taipei, Taiwan. Image source: Getty Images.

MediaTek knows that to expand and match Qualcomm's scale, it needs more direct investments from mainland China. China's state-controlled Tsinghua Unigroup has been tryingto buy a stake in MediaTek, but that investment was blocked by the Taiwanese government on grounds of national security and IP protection. Tsinghua CEO Zhao Weiguo has stated that if cross-strait investment rules were relaxed, he wanted to discuss a merger between MediaTek and Chinese fabless chipmakers Spreadtrum and RDA Microelectronics to counter Qualcomm.

Tsinghua previously offered to buy 25% stakes in three chip test and packaging firms in Taiwan -- ChipMOS Technologies, Silicon Precision Industries, and Powertech Technology -- but those investments were all blocked for similar reasons. Taiwanese regulators notably allowed TSMC to build a new $3 billion plant in China, but only on the condition that the chips produced there remained several generations older than those produced onthe island.

Why that impasse helps Qualcomm

To understand why MediaTek's struggles help Qualcomm, we should remember that while the chipmaking business (QCT) generates most of the company's revenue, most of its profits come from its high-margin patent licensing (QTL) business.

Last quarter, Qualcomm's QTL unit had an operating margin of 87% and generated a whopping 98% of its pre-tax earnings. This means that the QTL unit can offset losses that the QCT unit takes, enabling Qualcomm to produce chips at lower margins to widen its moat against MediaTek. MediaTek also can't produce similar-quality chips as Qualcomm's on the same margins, since Qualcomm's bigger operations enable it to utilize economies of scale. That scale is especially valuable in the Internet of Things market, where cheap chips are sold at paper-thin margins.

The only way MediaTek can compete against Qualcomm's business model is to become bigger with investments from mainland China or give in to mergers with Chinese chipmakers. But aslong as Taiwan's government calls Chinese investments "Trojan horses," that probably won't happen.

Qualcomm's not out of the woods yet

MediaTek's slowdown and the regulatory hurdles it faces might help Qualcomm, but the chipmaker still faces plenty of other near-term challenges. The QCT business continues to lose share to first-party chips, and its recent loss of some of Apple's iPhone modem orders to Intel could exacerbate that decline. Meanwhile, the QTL business remains under pressure from defiant OEMs and regulators, which claim that Qualcomm's fees are too high.

Nonetheless, Qualcomm investors should realize that MediaTek isn't as dangerous as some analysts claim. The same pressures that are hurting Qualcomm's QCT business are likewise hurting MediaTek, but Qualcomm has more room to sacrifice its margins to preserve market share.

The article Is Qualcomm's Biggest Rival Running Out of Steam? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Leo Sun owns shares of QCOM. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends AAPL and QCOM. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2018 $90 calls on AAPL and short January 2018 $95 calls on AAPL. The Motley Fool recommends INTC. 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: Getty Images.

In investing, as in the rest of life, there are generally driving forces behind events. When a stock gets sold off, for example, it's often for valid reasons. However, after investors bid down the value of a stock that pays dividends, others can get sucked in by a now enticing-looking yield, or a seemingly attractive P/E ratio.

The average dividend yield of the S&P 500 at the moment is about 2.1%, so a stock that yields 4% might be expected to tempt income investors, as well as those looking to bet on apotential rebound.

Here are two such stocks yielding above 4%, but if you're considering buying them to await a comeback, think twice. And if you bought them awhile back and are holding on, hoping for a miracle, think three times -- the yield doesn't seem worth the risk.

Fall out of The Gap

It's been one brutal year for those invested in The Gap Inc. ; its share price has been chopped nearly in half. A stock that dished out incredible market beating returns in the 1990s and early 2000s has come crashing back to earth, and its growth story is as shaky as ever. But one side effect of that is a dividend yield that has risen to 4.8%.

Consider the retailer's first quarter, when its total sales dropped to $3.44 billion compared to the prior year's $3.65 billion. Worse yet, comparable-store sales took a 5% year-over-year decline. The truth is that less product is selling in brick-and-mortar stores, and Gap, likemany retailers, is feeling the pain.

The company's rough top-line results from Q1 were followed by a poor May result, which didn't help the retailer start the second quarter on a better note. Gap reported its sales for the four-week period that ended May 28 declined 5%year-over-year to $1.18 billion from $1.25 billion -- and comparable-store sales for the period were down 6%.

While the Gap's management has steadfastly asserted that it can turn things around, investors must consider the reality that the company's best days are behind it. Consider, by contrast, that Spanish fast-fashion retailer Inditex, known for brands such as Zara, reported first-quarter sales that had surged 12% and started the second-quarter strong with a 15% year-over-year increase in sales since the beginning of May.

Then look at the growth -- or lack thereof -- of Gap's top and bottom lines over the past decade. If you see this as the chart of a company you believe in long-term, think again. Investing in this retailer could easily be trying to catch a falling knife as its top and bottom line have stagnated long-term and declined in recent years.

GPS Revenue (Annual) data by YCharts

Avon falling

Another company singing a similar tune is Avon Products , which has shed roughly 85% of its value in the past half-decade, yet boasts a dividend yield of nearly 6%. That means the company is either a strong buy and turnaround candidate, as one analyst from Jefferies recently opined, or another falling knife that investors should best avoid.

One issue for many investors and analysts is the company's low retention rate for its representatives; only 60% of the firm's active representatives have been with the company for at least a year and a half, according to Morningstar. It's just a fact that Americans have grown fairly skeptical of direct sellers, which is partly, in my opinion, why the company now focuses on generating the bulk of its income outside of the U.S. market. (It sold 80% of its North American business toCerberus in December.) One factor complicating that transition is that its representatives in emerging markets generally aren't selling Avon's products exclusively.

Further, outside of its representative selling model, Avon is facing increasing pressure from global beauty-care manufacturers such as Unilver, Procter & Gamble and L'Oreal, which have taken a bite out of its Brazil market share.

Avon has tried to adapt to the new realities. As noted, it sold off most of its North American business. It has taken steps to slash its workforce, cutting 7% in March. And while its premium products face immense macroeconomic headwinds in Brazil -- now its largest market -- management is putting a high priority on exploring ways to drive sales in China higher.

If the company can successfully hit its cost-cutting targets, improve the engagement and retention of its representative army, and gain traction in China, it might very well reward investors willing to accept such high risk. For me, though, it's simple. This company faces a multitude of headwinds, a sketchy selling model, and increased global competition. As such, high dividend notwithstanding, there are simply better stocks out there that investors should chose from instead.

The article 2 Dividend Stocks Yielding Above 4% -- That You Should Probably Sell originally appeared on Fool.com.

Daniel Miller has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Procter & Gamble. 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: Getty images.

Coffee consumption is booming over the last several years, and this steaming-hot industry is offering delicious opportunities for profitable growth. Let's take a look at two leading players in the business, Starbucks and Dunkin' Brands , in order to find out which one is a better purchase for investors right now.

Financial performance

Starbucks is considerably bigger than Dunkin' Brands; the coffee juggernaut is expected to make $21.45 billion in sales during the fiscal year ending in September of 2016, versus nearly $855 million in forecasted sales for Dunkin' Brands this year. As of March 2016, Starbucks owns 23,921 stores around the world, While Dunkin' Brands has 1,833 Dunkin' Donuts stores and 7,638 Baskin-Robbins units on a global scale.

Growth tends to naturally slow down as a company gains size over time. Besides, Starbucks sells its products for higher prices than Dunkin' Brands, and this should theoretically mean a smaller potential market for Starbucks. However, Starbucks is still doing much better than Dunkin' Brands in terms of overall financial performance.

Starbucks is doing an amazing job at driving growth via multiple venues at the same time. Store base expansion is mostly focused on emerging markets: The company has over 2,000 stores in 100 cities in China, and it's adding over 10 new stores in the country every week. Importantly, Starbucks is also increasing sales at the store level via menu innovations and penetrating new day parts, which produces consistently growing same-store sales.

Image source: Starbucks.

Starbucks is a market leader in areas such as mobile order and pay. The company has 19 million users in its mobile platform in the U.S. alone, and mobile transactions represented approximately 4% of total transactions last quarter, a strong sequential increase of 40%. According to management, mobile is not only replacing traditional orders, but it's also driving incremental growth, especially during peak hours.

The company is delivering impressive financial figures: Starbucks produced $5 billion in revenue last quarter, a year-over-year increase of 9%. Global comparable-store sales grew 6% on the back of a 4% increase in the average ticket and 2% increase in traffic. Sales in China grew by a staggering 18% during the quarter.

Dunkin' Brands, on the other hand, delivered a more modest increase of 2.1% in total revenue during the first quarter of 2016, while comparable-store sales in the U.S. grew 2% at Dunkin' Donuts and 5% at Baskin-Robbins. The company's guidance is for total revenue to increase by 4% to 6% during the full 2016 year.

Almost 100% of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins stores are franchised, and this allows the company to expand its store base with minimal capital expenditures, since store opening expenses are paid by franchisees. Besides, this business model is conveniently flexible, especially when it comes to international store openings. The company believes it has enough room for nearly 30,000 stores worldwide over the long term, indicating that Dunkin' Brands still has enormous potential for expansion.

Image source: Dunkin' Brands.

Management is targeting comparable-store sales growth in the U.S. to be in the range of 2% to 4% over the next five years, while total net new unit development is estimated to be between 4% and 6% per year. Total revenue growth is forecasted to be in the mid-to-high single digits over this period, so even if Dunkin' Brands can deliver according to expectations, everything indicates the company will continue lagging Starbucks over the middle term.

Valuation

Investment decisions are not just about picking the best-performing companies, it's of utmost importance to keep valuations in mind. Even a top-quality company can be a mediocre investment if the price is too high, while an average business trading at conveniently low valuation levels can deliver attractive returns over time.

When it comes to Starbucks and Dunkin' Brands, valuation levels aren't very conclusive. Dunkin' Brands looks cheaper in terms of dividend yield and forward price to earnings, while Starbucks is more attractively valued when it comes to trailing price to earnings, price to earnings growth, and price to sales ratios.

Company Div. Yield Trailing P/E Forward P/E PEG PS Starbucks 1.46% 33 25 1.74 4.1 Dunkin' Brands 2.66% 37 19 2.9 5.1

Data source: SEC filings and FinViz.

Starbucks is a superior business delivering better financial performance than Dunkin' Brands, chances are that's not going to change any time soon, and there is no clear advantage for any of the two companies in terms of valuation. I'd pick Starbucks over Dunkin' Brands as the most caffeinated stock in the sector nowadays.

The article Best Coffee Stock: Starbucks vs. Dunkin' Brands originally appeared on Fool.com.

Andres Cardenal has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Starbucks. 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.
DNA. Image source: Getty Images.

Using DNA-based technology to battle Zika virus? That's what two companies are doing -- but in very different ways. Intrexon's approach is to genetically modify mosquitoes that can carry the Zika virus. Inovio is working on a DNA-based vaccine for the virus. While it's too early to know which company will emerge as the bigger winner in the battle against Zika, one of the stocks looks like the better pick for investors. Here's how Intrexon and Inovio stack up.

The case for Intrexon

There are several things investors might like about Intrexon. The biotech is pulling in plenty of money, with 2015 revenue of $173.6 million. That revenue is growing rapidly as well: Last year's results reflected a hefty jump of 141% compared to 2014.

Intrexon uses its synthetic biology technology in multiple ways. It develops targeted gene therapies to battle several diseases. Intrexon uses DNA technology to increase the productivity and quality of crops and livestock. The company isdeveloping microbial cell lines for bioconversion of methane to compounds with higher carbon content that could be more efficient and cost-effective energy sources. Intrexon also uses its technology toreduce the use of natural resources that are being rapidly depleted.

If that sounds like a lot for a relatively small company to tackle, you're right. Intrexon doesn't try to go solo on all these efforts, though. The company has several joint ventures and what it calls exclusive channel collaborations (ECCs) to partner with other organizations. With the ECCs, Intrexon provides the biotechnology expertise while the partners receive an exclusive license and supply market and product development know-how.

All this sounds great, but what are the drawbacks with Intrexon? The biggest negative is that the company is still losing a lot of money -- $84.5 million last year. And that figure is more than the $81.8 million loss from 2014. What's even worse is that Intrexon started out 2016 by losing a whopping $64.4 million in the first quarter alone.

And serious questions have been raised about whether Intrexon's core technology is really contributing to the company's revenue at all. Most (if not all) of Intrexon's revenue appears to be coming from acquisitions rather than its own technology.

Despite the controversy, Wall Street analysts have generally positive takes on the stock's growth potential.Intrexon's shares are more than 40% lower than their Aug. 2015 levels, thanks in no small part to concerns about the company's core technology. If it can overcome these worries, even a modest rebound could produce nice returns for investors.

The case for Inovio

Like Intrexon, Inovio has seen its revenue grow tremendously. The biotech reported total revenue of $40.5 million in 2015, a year-over-year increase of almost 290%. Practically all of the revenue, though, stemmed from collaborative development agreements and grants rather than products on the market.

Inovio's Zika virus vaccine has received plenty of attention lately even though the vaccine is still in pre-clinical testing. The company's lead product is cervical dysplasia vaccine VGX-3100. Inovio plans to begin a phase 3 pivotal trial this year. Analysts think that VGX-3100 could hit peak annual sales of around $500 million if approved.

The biotech also claims multiple candidates in its pipeline, although they're all in early-stage development. INO-3112, acombination of VGX-3100 and a DNA-based immune activator, caught the attention of AstraZeneca's MedImmune division. MedImmune is collaborating with Inovio on a couple of phase 1 studies of INO-3112 focusing oncervical cancer and head and neck cancer.

Inovio's pipeline could provide some positive catalysts in 2016. The company expects to report interim data froma phase I study of INO-5150 in treating prostate cancer as well as interim data from a phase 1 study of INO-1400 in treating breast, lung, and pancreatic cancer later this year.

Losses continue to be the story for Inovio, but the situation is improving. It lost $29.2 million in 2015, but that was better than the $36.1 million loss from the prior year.

Analysts in general have a brighter outlook for Inovio than they do for Intrexon. That optimism likely comes largely from the prospects for VGX-3100 and Inovio's position as a leader in the race to develop a Zika virus vaccine.

Better buy

Inovio's stock is up big year to date, while Intrexon's is down. Over 29% of Intrexon's float has been sold short compared to 16% for Inovio. Following the crowd isn't always the best strategy, but in this case, I agree with the apparent market consensus that Inovio is the better pick.

VGX-3100 is promising, as are several other candidates in Inovio's pipeline. The biotech appears to be in pretty good shape to fund operations long enough to wrap up the phase 3 study of its lead product. My hunch is that Inovio's stock could get more boosts from results to be announced later this year.

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, it's too early to know for sure which company will be the big winner in the fight against the Zika virus. However, if I had to place a bet right now, my money would be on Inovio.

Inovio, like Intrexon, isn't without its risks. VGX-3100 might run into problems in phase 3. Early-stage results for other vaccines might be disappointing. Issues could emerge with the Zika vaccine. All that being said, I still like Inovio's chances and think this could be a good pick for long-term investors.

The article Better Buy: Intrexon Corporation vs. Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. originally appeared on Fool.com.

Keith Speights 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.
There's $20 million waiting on the Moon. You just have to get there to claim it.

Artist's concept of SpaceIL's Lunar Lander, one competitor for Alphabet's Google Lunar XPRIZE. Image source:SpaceIL.

Last year, we introduced you to SpaceIL, the Israeli space tech start-up that will attempt to ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the moon next year. If it succeeds in landing a rover on the moon, traveling at least 500 meters across the surface, and beaming back high-definition video to prove its accomplishment, SpaceIL will win Alphabet's Google Lunar XPrize competition -- along with the $20 million prize that comes with a first-place finish.

Get your money for nothing and your [flight checks] for free...

Easy money, right? Well, not so fast. It cost NASA tens of billions of dollars to put the first man on the moon in 1969, and somethingon the order of $137 billionover the course of the entire Apollo lunar program. Even today, with rocket launches more or less routine, SpaceIL thinks it will need to raise about $50 million in funding to win Alphabet's $20 million prize.

Plus, SpaceIL might not even win the competition, because now there's a second company running close on its heels.

Moon Express could be a contender

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that privately owned, Cape Canaveral-based Moon Express Inc. is close to winning approval from U.S. regulators to launch its own lunar mission. Like SpaceIL, Moon Express will be competing to win Alphabet's XPrize. Unlike Israel-based SpaceIL, if Moon Express wants to reach the moon, it needs to do more than just reach escape velocity from Earth's gravitational field; it also needs to escape the dense layer of red tape blanketing U.S.-based companies.

Currently, the U.S. has no established regulatory regime for approving private missions to the Moon (or to Mars, Jupiter, or any other heavenly bodies, for that matter). That's because the only real legislation governing such missions is the 1967 United Nations "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space,including the Moonand Other Celestial Bodies."And that treaty was drafted primarily to regulate the actions of nation-states operating off-Earth -- not companies incorporated within them.

We discussed this treaty in a column last year, and the upshot of it appears to be that private missions are kosher if they are:

performed "for the benefit and in the interests of all countries on Earth"

conducted for "peaceful purposes"

not making claims of "national appropriation" and

performed under the "authorization" and subject to the "continuing supervision" of a state party to the Treaty -- such as the U.S. government.

Here in the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration is responsible for "authorization and continuing supervision" of U.S. rocket launches into Earth orbit. Accordingly, the FAA is taking the lead on an interagency review among several government offices, all of which want to review Moon Express's application to send a suitcase-size MX-1 lander and its payloadto the Moon next year.

Complicating matters is the fact that Moon Express, although headquartered at Cape Canaveral, isn't actually planning to launch from the U.S. at all. Instead, it's planning to depart from New Zealand riding a 52-foot Electron rocket manufactured by Rocket Lab Ltd.(which, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, is a privately owned company operating out of Auckland, NZ, that manufactures "rocket systems and space systems").

What this means to investors

The FAA is expectedto issue a ruling on Moon Express's application, and begin putting a regulatory system in place for similar future requests by other companies, in a matter of weeks or months. Thus, it appears that even if the government dawdles, Moon Express should have its approval in plenty of time to attempt a 2017 launch.

Assuming approval is forthcoming, it will set the stage for other missions to the moon, to asteroids, and even for SpaceX's planned 2018 mission to Mars. With a regulatory system in place, and a clear path to approval, more and more companies -- publicly traded companies, not just privately owned Moon Express and SpaceX -- should feel more confident about planning their owns missions to open up space to commercial exploitation.

As it turns out, all we really needed to do to kick-start space travel was apply the profit motive to the endeavor. So kudos to Alphabet for putting up the first $20 million prize to get the process started.

What's that glitter on the Moon up there? Could it be... gold? Image source: Getty Images.

The article First Private Moon Landing Slated for 2017 originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributorRich Smithdoes not own shares of, nor is he short, any company named above. You can find him onMotley Fool CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handleTMFDitty, where he's currently ranked No. 309 out of more than 75,000 rated members.Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A and C shares). 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.
Americans have been feeling pessimistic toward the U.S. economy thanks in part to a decrease in median household income since President Obama took office. In the first quarter of this year, the economy grew at just 0.5% annualized pace.

U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President Javier Palomarez said on the FOX Business Networks Cavuto: Coast-to-Coast despite the economic challenges that continue in a slow-growth environment, Hispanic businesses have found a way to be successful.

The United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, as we stand right now, represents 4.1 million Hispanic-owned firms in this country that collectively contribute over $661 billion to the American economy, Palomarez said.

According to Palomarez, Hispanics are creating new companies at a rate of three to one compared to the general market.

The tip of the proverbial spear in terms of economic growth is the Hispanic entrepreneurial community, Palomarez told host Charles Payne.

Small businesses accounts for nearly two-thirds of all net new jobs and 55% of all jobs in America, to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Palomarez said the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce will support any presidential candidate that values the importance of those businesses.

We need to stay focus on ensuring that our economy is vibrant, is healthy and continues to grow, Palomarez said.
Image source: IBM.

The rise of cloud computing has upended business models and forced many technology companies to make major changes. International Business Machines is one such company. The IT giant has been investing heavily in cloud computing over the past few years. The 2013 acquisition of cloud infrastructure company SoftLayer gave IBM the foundation on which to build its cloud platform, and a slew of additional acquisitions since then have fleshed out the company's cloud offerings.

I think that many investors misunderstand IBM's cloud strategy. While Amazon's AWS gets a lot of attention for its massive scale, IBM is going in a different direction. At a recent conference held by Bank of America, Robert LeBlanc, IBM's senior vice president in charge of the cloud business, discussed at length the company's strategy. Here are three things LeBlanc said that investors need to know.

Being big isn't that important

Amazon is by far the largest player in the infrastructure-as-a-service market, dwarfing all of its competitors, including IBM. AWS is close to reaching a $10 billion annual revenue run rate, while IBM aims for SoftLayer to generate $1 billion of revenue this year. It's unlikely that IBM will ever be able to catch up with Amazon, but LeBlanc insists that size doesn't matter all that much:

AWS, being so much bigger than its competitors, may get better prices on components, but from the perspective of the customer, size only matters up to a point. As long as a cloud infrastructure provider is large enough to handle a client's workload, choosing a larger provider carries no direct benefit. Amazon has aggressively cut its cloud pricing over the years, but smaller competitors like Microsoft have promised to match those cuts. Comparing prices is not exactly straightforward, but it doesn't appear as though AWS has a clear pricing advantage, at least on average.

The cloud infrastructure business is unlikely to be completely dominated by one company. IBM's SoftLayer is a small player relative to Amazon, but it's large enough to successfully drive the rest of IBM's cloud business.

It's all about services

Cloud infrastructure is the most commoditized portion of the cloud computing market, and for IBM, it's a necessary component to its cloud strategy. IBM's real focus, though, is on providing high-value services built on top of its infrastructure. LeBlanc explains: "So the infrastructure is very much required to get there and it's the value services you can build on top like Cognitive and IoT and blockchain and others that really start to bring the value to the client. And that's where a lot of clients are willing to invest, because they know that that's where ultimately they need to get to."

Through Bluemix, the company's platform-as-a-service powered by SoftLayer, IBM offers a wide variety of cloud services, like Watson and other analytics solutions. The company's vast services business is also shifting toward the cloud, helping enterprise clients transition to and manage their cloud infrastructures.

IBM's general strategy is to focus on areas where the company can differentiate itself and build a durable competitive advantage. Competing on price in the cloud infrastructure market doesn't make much sense for IBM.

Owning the stack

SoftLayer still runs mostly on x86 processors, but IBM has begun adding its own Power processors as well. Power is designed for workloads that are highly parallelizable, making IBM's processors extremely efficient for certain types of tasks. The cloud can be viewed in layers: There's the underlying hardware, the cloud platform that runs on top of it, and the software that clients ultimate use. IBM is unique in that it's involved in each layer, which can be a major benefit, according to LeBlanc: "So having an understanding all the way down to the silicon enables us to build a fully integrated stack. And then [you] can have the right level of optimization and performance to really meet the needs of some of these large workloads that clients more and more are going to have running on the cloud."

Further, LeBlanc points out that different workloads require different optimizations. Analytics, for example, is very different from a mobile application backend. Being able to optimize for a specific workload at all levels is a point of differentiation for IBM.

Cloud computing, while far more mainstream today than it was five years ago, is still in its early stages. IBM was not a first mover in this space, and it will never be the largest cloud infrastructure provider. But IBM has adopted a strategy that makes sense given the strengths of the company.

The article IBM's Cloud Strategy: 3 Things You Need to Know originally appeared on Fool.com.

Timothy Green owns shares of International Business Machines. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon.com. The Motley Fool owns shares of Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends Bank of America. 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: Pioneer Natural Resources.

Investing in the oil and gas industry over the past year has been like playing a game of craps: it could pay off big, but the bottom could fall out at any time. The issue is that oil prices remain so volatile; it is incredibly difficult to ascertain what can shock the market, or how a company might respond to remain afloat. Instead of trying to invest based on market conditions, though, we can identify companies that have taken steps to capitalize on rising oil prices, while protecting themselves against unexpected price drops. Take Pioneer Natural Resources , which has improved cost efficiencies and laid out a strategic plan for increased production in 2016. All in all, Pioneer is a strong target for investors looking to roll the dice on oil. Here's why.

Fifty-dollar oil

In its first-quarter report, Pioneer indicated that it expected to add five to 10 horizontal rigs when oil reached $50 per barrel. After several painful months that saw oil dip into the mid-$20 range, it has finally surpassed the $50 mark. But as oil moves higher, companies will feel incentivized to increase production, thereby flooding the market and potentially sending oil back into the forties or even lower. This should be a cause for caution, but Pioneer's leadership, at least publicly, appears to be bullish on the company's ability to effectively operate within current market conditions.

Chairman and CEO Scott D. Sheffield certainly hasn't minced words in this respect, stating: "We have the financial flexibility to prudently manage through the current commodity price downturn and quickly ramp up drilling activity when prices improve. We expect to add five to 10 horizontal rigs when the price of oil recovers to approximately $50 per barrel and when our outlook for oil supply/demand fundamentals is positive."

The rub here is that Pioneer still needs to feel confident that oil will remain at $50 or higher, and that's where we, as investors, need to feel confident about price stability. Unfortunately, with all the potential geopolitical and economic shocks to the market, it is nearly impossible to judge where oil will be in a year, let alone next month. Instead, we have to make an educated guess on how a company is positioned to perform regardless of oil price.

Image source: Pioneer Natural Resources investor presentation.

Primed for takeoff

Pioneer remains one of the biggest stakeholders in the Permian Basin, a major oil-producing region in West Texas. It is the largest acreage holder in the Spraberry/Wolfcamp area, with a combined 800,000 acres. The company expects its production in the region to grow by 33% in 2016, which is a major factor in its projections of 12% production growth this year.

Pioneer is putting all of its marbles in the Permian basket in 2016, mainly because of its substantial position, but also because of the company's relatively low operating costs in the region. Pioneer's drilling costs in its Permian plays have decreased 32% between 2014 and the first quarter of 2016, driven mainly by efficiency gains and low service costs. This has enabled it to drive production to 222,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, or BOE/D, during the first quarter, almost entirely from the Permian Basin. To drive this point home, Pioneer's executive VP Joey Hall saidthe company is planning to allocate nearly 90% of its $2 billion budget in 2016 to operations in the Permian.

To bolster production potential, Pioneer recently agreed to purchase 28,000 acres in the Midland Basin within the Permian fromDevon Energy(NYSE:DVN). PXD plans to expand drilling in the area by 42% by the end of the year, bringing the rig count to 17. Along with the announcement, the company raised its 2016 budget from $2 billion to $2.1 billion and is planning to purchase adjacent areas to expand its horizontal wells.

On top of that, the company is sitting on $2.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents, expects $1.4 billion in annual operating cash flow for 2016, and will receive $500 million in July 2016 from the recent sale of its Eagle Ford Shale midstream business. Assuming oil prices remain above $40, the strong financial position these moves put Pioneer in should allow the company to increase production without increasing debt. This is key, as it makes paying off $940 million in senior note maturities in July 2016 and March 2017 possible as well.

Investor takeaway

Pioneer is by no means out of the woods: $3.65 billion in long-term debt will remain a burden as the company aims to bring more production online. The company's financials appear to be on sound footing, though, and its strong position in the Permian is a major asset on which to build. The price of oil will remain the single greatest factor affecting its future stock price, but Pioneer has a relatively solid balance sheet and a sound strategy to garner future investment.

The article Pioneer Natural Resources Betting Big on the Permian Basin originally appeared on Fool.com.

David Lettis 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.
Rite Aid Corp. reported Thursday a fiscal first-quarter loss of $4.6 million, or breakeven on a per-share basis, compared with earnings of $18.8 million, or 2 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Excluding non-recurring items, adjusted earnings per share were 1 cent, below the FactSet consensus of 5 cents. The drug store chain said revenue rose 23% to $8.18 billion, missing the FactSet consensus of $8.24 billion. Retail pharmacy revenue grew 0.4% to $6.7 billion. Same-store sales increased 0.4%, with pharmacy sales rising 0.1% and front-end sales growing 1.2%. As of the end of March, the FactSet consensus was for same-store sales growth of 2.8%. "Our challenge was pharmacy reimbursement rate pressure, which we were unable to offset largely due to drug purchasing efficiencies that did not meet our expectations," said Chief Executive John Standley. "While drug cost reductions will continue to be short of our expectations in the near term, we anticipate improvements over the second half of the fiscal year." The company said its merger with Walgreens Boots Alliance is still expected to close during the second half of 2016. Rite Aid's stock, which was still inactive in premarket trade, has slipped 0.3% year to date, while the S&P 500 has gained 1.4%.

Copyright  2016 MarketWatch, Inc.
Image source: Joyent.

On Thursday morning, South Korean electronics giant Samsung announced an unexpected buyout deal. The company is buying San Francisco-based cloud computing veteran Joyent, hoping to build a larger online services operation around the new asset. Samsung will now compete head-to-head with the established cloud computing trio of Amazon.com , Microsoft , and Rackspace .

Will Joyent's expertise plus Samsung's economies of scale add up to a winning combination?

Examining the evidence

First of all, let's make it clear that Joyent isn't exactly a giant in the cloud computing market. A veteran, sure, but not a titan of the industry. Its internet-as-a-service product is popular enough to be rated in Gartner's Magic Quadrant roundups -- but tends to fall short on both vision and execution in those graphs. Samsung's involvement won't bolster Joyent's vision much, though the execution axis should get a boost.

Instead, Joyent prides itself on technology leadership. This is the company behind the increasingly important Node.js web programming framework, and an early adopter of container-based computing platforms. On its own splash page, Joyent prefers to focus on these achievements rather than counting or naming important customers.

Image source: Samsung.

The competitive landscape

So no, Samsung is not buying an instant racehorse that will hit the ground running. It's more of a proven talent still looking for its first big win. Maybe Samsung's highly trained jockeys and deep corporate pockets will make it happen, but not right away.

For the time being, Amazon's AWS tools will continue to run far ahead of anyone else. Microsoft's Azure Cloud runs a distant second. The software giant promotes its cloud service as a faster path to deployment for companies that prefer Windows-based solutions, and also underscores its allegedly superior development tools. So far, most corporations have voted with their wallets in Amazon's favor.

As for Rackspace, that company seems to have given up on its own cloud services and settled for a supporting role in this market. As a shareholder, I'm not entirely comfortable with this decision -- but it might be the only viable path forward for a former leader in the cloud services space.

What's next?

Joyent drops Samsung into the race far behind even Rackspace. The container twist could set Samsung's efforts apart from the leaders of the pack, but it's much too early to tell. It's an interesting move for the long term, but I wouldn't sell Amazon or Microsoft shares in a panic over this rising rival. And I'm holding on to my Rackspace shares as well.

Detailed terms of the acquisition have not been published, and Joyent is a privately held company. Most of whatever Samsung is paying for the company will end up in the pockets of venture capital investors. The usual regulatory processes will have to run their course, and the companies didn't provide an expected closing date.

There's no rush, anyway. If Samsung makes something out of Joyent, the payoff will come several years down the road.

The article Samsung Is Buying Joyent -- Should Amazon and Rackspace Be Shaking in Their Boots? originally appeared on Fool.com.

Anders Bylund owns shares of Rackspace Hosting. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Amazon.com. The Motley Fool owns shares of Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends Rackspace Hosting. 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.
There's no denying that higher oil prices are good for the offshore industry. However, short-term increases won't translate to improved prospects for offshore drillers anytime soon. And that means it's probably not time to buy shares of these companies just yet. Here's why.

Since the beginning of March, oil prices have increased nearly 40%, lifting share of offshore drillers ENSCO PLC , Seadrill Ltd and Transocean LTD along the way:

Operating results, backlogs continue to weaken

Even as oil prices have returned to near $50 recently, and a number of global supply interruptions seem likely to keep prices near or even above that level for the foreseeable future, the financial and operating results that offshore drillers reported this past quarter paint a picture of weakness. Here's a look at the financial results and contracted backlog for Seadrill, ENSCO, and Transocean last quarter:

Q1 2016 Q1 2015 Company Revenue Net income Backlog Revenue Net income Backlog* Seadrill $891.0 $88.0 $4.3 $1,244.0 $448.0 $5.1 ENSCO $814.0 $175.3 $5.2 $1,163.9 $324.7 $5.8 Transocean** $1,341.0 $255.0 $14.6 $2,043.0 $398.0 $15.5

Revenue and net income in millions. Backlog in billions. *Backlog data is from most recent prior sequential reporting period, not year-ago quarter. **Transocean net income is adjusted based on non-cash asset writedowns from 2015 quarter. Data source: company filings.

As you can see, all three companies reported weaker financial performance across-the-board last quarter, which may seem obvious considering that first quarter oil prices were the lowest the world has seen in well over a decade. However, that wasn't the biggest driver behind the deteriorating performance for offshore drillers, but more of a symptom of the long-term impact of low prices: Oil producers aren't contracting for much new offshore work at all right now.

Offshore oil won't turn on a dime

One only has to look at the contracted backlogs reported by Seadrill, ENSCO, and Transocean last quarter to see this playing out. For well over a year now, contract backlogs at offshore drillers have gone backwards, as drillers continue to work through contracts they signed in prior years.Sure, there has been some new work awarded in recent months, as we saw from Seadrill's earnings report

As things stand today, most oil companies that contract with offshore drillers are still focused on cutting capital spending, and that's likely to continue through the end of 2016 at the very least. So far, there's been zero evidence that $50 oil is changing any minds on that. To the contrary, a recent moveStatoil ASA shows how averse drillers are to spending on oil and gas field development today.

Statoil still had Seadrill'sWest Herculesunder contract through the end of the year, but instead of putting the vessel to work in theAasta Hansteen gas field off the Canadian coast as it had been planning, the company instead chose to cancel the remaining term with Seadrill and pay the company $61 million. Tonotdrill.

Not only will Statoil save about $33 million to terminate the contract early, but it will also defer tens of millions of other costs related to starting up the Aasta Hansteen field at a later date. With oil and gas prices still far below historical levels, it's likely that more producers will follow suit, putting off expensive offshore development simply to make ends meet this year.

Eventually offshore will recover, but it's unclear who the winners will be

There's no getting around the reality that the oil and gas reserves found offshore will be a necessary source of energy in the years and decades to come. But one only has to look at the boom and bust history of the industry to remember that it can be dangerous jumping into the wrong companies too quickly. Case in point? The 70-plus oil and gas producers which have filed for bankruptcy

Now I'm not predicting that Seadrill, ENSCO, or Transocean will end up bankrupt before the market recovers, but at things stand today, these companies are living on backlogs that won't last forever, and they all have substantial debt obligations that must be met as well. So what's an investor to do?

For now, I plan to stay on the sidelines, looking for evidence that producers are coming back to the offshore oil patch, and ready to spend to develop those resources. When they do, I'll be a buyer. But before then, I'm not willing to risk any more cash on an offshore driller that doesn't make it through the downturn. And as things stand today, it's just too early to tell who the winners -- and losers -- are going to be.

The article These 3 Offshore Oil Stocks Are Up 19% or More Since March: Why It's Not Time to Buy
Image source: Getty Images.

This week, NXP Semiconductors said that a Chinese private-equity consortium is buying the company's standard products division, adding $2.75 billion to NXP's coffers. On Wednesday, credit rating bureau Moody's followed up on this move, saying that NXP's various ratings now are on a positive watch across the board. Yes, these two events are closely related.

Moody's based its analysis on the division sale, hoping to see NXP sinking the additional cash into debt repayment."Should NXP use a significant portion of the Divestiture net proceeds to repay senior secured debt, the senior unsecured rating could be upgraded," the firm said.

NXP's net long-term debt currently stands at $7.5 billion, nearly 3.4 times the company's trailing EBITDA earnings. Taking most of the $2.75 billion cash payment from the standard products separation, and applying it to accelerated debt payments, could bring that debt-to-EBITDA ratio below 2.2. If the ratio falls below 2.5 and remains stable at that level for a significant time, Moody's would consider boosting NXP's credit ratings.

NXP's corporate credit rating currently stands at Ba1 in the Moody's system. That's the highest rating in the speculative category, and one click below investment grade. Moving up would let NXP refinance its existing debt under better terms. That's also good news for any future debt-fueled acquisition plans, or other further dips into the debt pool.

The segment separation is scheduled for early 2017, as is Moody's expectation of falling debt to EBITDA ratios. The positive outlook also assumes that the Freescale integration will continue to flow smoothly, and that NXP's free cash flows will remains strong despite headwinds from an unpredictable global economy.

On the other hand, the firm would remove the positive outlook and keep NXP at the top-end speculative spot if the divestiture falls through, or if regulatory approvals come with overly onerous closing conditions. And if the Freescale merger process falls apart, the rating could fall deeper into speculative territory.

NXP isn't exactly walking on eggshells here. The Freescale combination is proceeding nicely so far, and is setting the stage for a massive push into automotive computing just as that industry reaches a boiling point.

In my view, the upsides outweigh the risks here. Moody's clearly agrees, or the rating outlook would not have been moved to the positive side this week.

The article What You Need to Know: NXP Semiconductors NV Credit Ratings Are Moving Up originally appeared on Fool.com.

Anders Bylund has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends NXP Semiconductors. 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: Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc.

What:Shares of Nu Skin Enterprises Inc. were up 10.6% as of 12:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, after the personal-care products company announced a large investment from a new Chinese partner and raised its second-quarter revenue guidance.

So what: More specifically, Nu Skin has entered into an agreement for a $210 million strategic investment from Ping An ZQ China Growth Opportunity Limited, which consists of a consortium of Chinese investors led by Ping An of China Securities (Hong Kong) Company, Ltd., and a group of additional investors affiliated with ZQ Capital Limited.

Per the terms of the investment, Ping An ZQ China Growth Limited is purchasing $210 million in aggregate principal amount of 4.75%, four-year convertible senior notes with an initial conversion price of $46.50 per share.

Nu Skin CEO Truman Hunt stated: "We are honored to have the support of Ping An and ZQ Capital as we look to accelerate our growth and development in China. Ping An and ZQ Capital bring significant local market knowledge and valuable expertise that we believe will positively impact our long-term growth opportunities in this important region."

Now what: According to Nu Skin CFO Ritch Wood, the investment should also be accretive for Nu Skin shareholders, as the company plans to use the proceeds not only to invest in its China operations, but also to repurchase common stock throughout the remainder of this year.

In addition, based on the successful introduction of Nu Skin's "ageLOC Me" skin-care system in China last week -- including selling out of a limited supply in the country -- Nu Skin anticipates second-quarter revenue will be at the high end of, or slightly above, its previous guidance of $560 million to $580 million.

As it stands, given Nu Skin's encouraging new partnership and early success launching products in this key growth market, it's no surprise to see the market aggressively bidding up shares today.

The article Why Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. Stock Popped Today originally appeared on Fool.com.

Steve Symington 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: Shake Shack.

One of the most-interesting facets of the current bull market is the extent to which stocks manage to bounce back from short-term challenges in trading. Major market benchmarks fell sharply Thursday morning, and investors seemed concerned by the Federal Reserve's assessment of the U.S. economy as being vulnerable to potential problems like the possible British exit from the European Union.

Yet even though the Dow was down almost 170 points at one point during the trading session, stocks bounced back despite the gloomy mood. By the end of the day, the Dow and S&P 500 were both up between a third and a half percentage point. Many individual stocks did better, and Shake Shack , Viacom , and QLogic were among the best performers in the market on Thursday.

Shake Shack rose 5% after the new burger chain received positive comments from an analyst firm. Buckingham Research noted that, even though Shake Shack has seen its stock fall substantially from its IPO price, the burger chain has already inspired a loyal following that gives the company almost cult-like status among its customers.

That kind of marketing success based on word of mouth and popular perception is almost impossible to create artificially, and it speaks to the growth potential that Shake Shack has as it aims toward making expansion plans a reality. With fewer than 100 locations, Shake Shack has plenty of room to expand before having to worry about saturation. If its new locations can sustain the momentum of its popularity, then Shake Shack investors could get the last laugh.

Viacom finished up 7% in the wake of a partial resolution of a dispute between Sumner Redstone and company executives. Redstone, who controls a majority of the voting rights for Viacom, elected five new directors to the Viacom board. Among those replaced was Chairman and CEO Philippe Dauman. Redstone looked for a Delaware court ruling to confirm that he had the authority to replace the directors in accordance with the bylaws of the company.

Some will argue that the move can't take effect until a formal special meeting of the shareholders of the company takes place; but any such moves would only delay the inevitable. Investors, meanwhile, appear pleased that the long-standing issue is starting to get resolved, regardless of the actual outcome.

Finally, QLogic gained 9%. The company agreed to a merger bid from Cavium for $1.36 billion, which values QLogic at roughly $15.50 per share. The terms of the bid include $11 per share in cash for QLogic shareholders, along with just less than a tenth of a Cavium share for every QLogic share held. QLogic executive chair Christine King said that, "the scale of operations of a nearly $1 billion revenue business will allow the combined company to deliver better solutions for customers."

Meanwhile, Cavium expects that the deal will be accretive to its adjusted earnings by next year, giving the company a chance to add QLogic into its mix, and scale up in the data center and storage markets. For QLogic shareholders, cashing out of more than 70% of their stake at a premium to where the stock traded previously looks like a reasonably good deal going forward.

The article Why Shake Shack, Viacom, and QLogic Jumped Today originally appeared on Fool.com.

Dan Caplinger 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.
The Trump campaign is publicly touting the tremendous success of its nascent fundraising effort with contributions pouring in to its coffers, but the money men on the ground and working the phones to convince potential donors to support the real estate tycoons presidential ambitions are providing a more sobering assessment, the FOX Business Network has learned.

According to several Trump campaign operatives interviewed by FOX Business, they are having a difficult time raising money from even reliable GOP donors. These fundraisers, known as bundlers because their job is to accumulate large contributions in so-called soft money that can surpass federal limits, also worry that a money drought will extend beyond the current tumult to hit the Trump campaign and ultimately doom the presumptive nominee particularly in battleground states where hes likely to face a barrage of negative ads, and a formidable voter-outreach effort from his likely Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The concerns of these fundraisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity with FOX Business, were contradicted by Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, who said in an email There are no (fundraising) concerns whatsoever. The money is pouring in and Mr. Trump has received tremendous support. She declined to provide how much the campaign has raised so far; the campaign will have to file its next fundraising report on Monday June 20.

Clinton has vastly outspent and outraised Trump at least so far in the 2016 race. As of the latest filing Trump has lent his campaign $43 million, and received approximately $14 million in unsolicited donations. Clinton, on the other hand, has raised $204 million for her campaign and has a goal to raise as much as $1 billion.

The Trump operatives cite several reasons for their fundraising difficulties including some of the candidates recent incendiary comments about a federal judges nationality, to structural problems within the campaign itself, which only began raising money in May and thus doesnt yet have a coherent infrastructure for the massive donor-outreach effort that most modern presidential campaigns entail.

Indeed, Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens tells FOX Business that he would like to raise money for Trump, but still doesnt know what Super PAC he should be giving to. Super PACs are the fundraising vehicles where donors can make unlimited soft-money contributions.

Trump fundraisers say some potential GOP donors are being cautioned by advisers that they shouldnt publicly support Trump given some of his statements about immigration and terrorism since they run public companies and might see a backlash from consumers.

These fundraisers also say Trumps past campaign rhetoric is making it difficult for them to woo donors. During his successful run for the GOP nomination, Trump eschewed outside money, while attacking his opponents for accepting checks from major donors who want to influence them in office. Trump also made his own private wealth he says hes worth $10 billion--a selling point on the campaign trail as a symbol of his success and that he cant be swayed by the donor class.

If hes so rich, he should finance his presidential campaign as well, said a GOP donor.

On Thursday, for example, Trump is in Dallas, Texas, attending a major GOP fundraiser sponsored by the Republican National Committee. But people associated with the event say its already hitting snags. The RNC was forced to change venues at least once fearing protesters would disrupt the reception, where guests were asked to cough up as much as $250,000 for a couple to attend as part of the chairmans circle.

But one Dallas-based Trump fundraiser alerted people on social media that if they were balking at contributing even the minimum amount--$2,700 for adults and $500 for a young professional  he would figure out a way to get them into the event without the donation.

People are having a hard time writing checks for this guy, said a major Trump bundler involved in the Dallas reception. If they write a check theyre holding a tissue while they write it.

Of course, Trump fundraising could pick up with the change in the news cycle, or if recent polls showing Clinton with a modest lead, begin to tighten. Some Trump fundraisers say theyve seen increased interest from donors after the recent terrorist attack in Orlando, Fla., which may convince some donors to support Trumps campaign themes such as banning Muslim immigration, and better border protection.

Trump has also tried to make the case that he doesnt need to raise as much money from donors because his outsized personality helps him generate so much free advertising time through television appearances and social media.

But campaign finance experts say both candidates will receive plenty of free media coverage during a presidential election, and that well-placed and expensive negative ads reach far more people than cable television appearances. With that, they say, Trump will have to change his style to be less incendiary to attract more people from the traditional GOP donor base.

Well I think most Republican donors want to come around and support the Republican nominee and defeat Hillary Clinton, so we can have conservative judges appointed, said Fred Malek, the finance chairman of John McCains 2008 presidential campaign. However, every time they start getting comfortable, Trump takes a few steps backwards and it makes it difficult for people to come around to him.
On Monday, the Obama administration released new guidelines for the forgiveness of specific student loans. This program would forgive student loan debt incurred by those who can prove they were the victims of scams perpetrated by for-profit colleges that used fraudulent or illegal methods to convince the student to enroll. While there are federal lawsalready in place for this, the application process is difficult, plus few people know the program even exists. These guidelines would make it easier to apply for this type of forgiveness, but they are still under consideration. If finalized, the new program would not go into effect until July 2017.

Under the new plan, students would also be able to ask for debt forgiveness if they can show one of the following:

The school had a court judgment against it

The school breached their contract with the student

The school made a "substantial misrepresentation" about their offerings, graduate job prospects, or the debt the student would take on

Under this proposal, students would be able to seek debt forgiveness up to six years following their discovery of the school's wrongdoing, an increase from the current two-year limit.

However, applicants may not have their entire debt forgiven. Instead, the Department of Education will examine the applicant's claim and determine how much harm they incurred due to the school's actions. This will be translated into a percentage of their student loans that will be forgiven.

The proposal will be finalized in November.

If you want to settle outstanding debts for less than what you owe, try our debt settlement tool.

This article was provided by our partners at moneytips.com.

Read More From MoneyTips:

43% Of Federal Student Loans Are Not Being Repaid

Should Colleges Pay for Student Loan Defaults?

Graduating With Debt Affects Student Retirement
Over a week ago, a Massachusetts woman turned to Facebook to ask for birthday cards for her soon-to-be 19-year-old cousin, who has autism. On Monday, delivery trucks brought in more than 5,000 cards for the young woman, adding to the haul that had been delivered every day since Friday.

Hallee Sorenson, of Bangor, Maine, was stood up by her friends at her bowling alley birthday party last year. Her cousin, Rebeca Lyn, posted a photo of Sorenson sitting alone at a balloon-decorated table. The Facebook post received over 236,000 views.

Allyson Seel-Sorenson, Hallees mom, told the Bangor Daily News that theyve received more than 6,000 cards and the familys garage is packed with mail.

We have been getting entire trucks for just Hallee they even sent one on Sunday, Seel-Sorenson told the newspaper. Its unbelievable. Im laughing at it, and then Im crying.

Though the family has stressed they do not want birthday presents, some well-wishers have sent presents. Seel-Sorenson said they appreciated the gifts including a handmade afghan crocheted by a grandmother in California but do not plan to keep the vast majority of them.

Well pick a few things for Hallee and her sister to keep, put aside a few things for Christmas and the rest well donate, she told the Bangor Daily News. They are keeping the afghan.

The Facebook post, which included the familys home address, concerned some supporters, who called the Bangor Police Department.

The Bangor PD showed up last night at 9:30 because a caller from Arkansas was worried about us because our home address is out there now, Seel-Sorenson told the newspaper. So out these poor two cops had to come in the rain to check on us. This is 9:30 at night.

According to the Bangor Daily News, Seel-Sorenson has been careful shielding her daughter to the sudden excitement, but one thing did bring a pleasant reaction Sorensons picture on the cover of the newspaper at the supermarket.

She said, Its all me!! Its Hallee! Seel-Sorenson told the Bangor Daily News. She got that one.
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Mars Chocolate North America announced a recall Tuesday for certain varieties of Combos snacks, as they may contain undeclared peanut allergens.

In a notice posted on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website, the recall was enacted because certain lots of wheat flour from supplier Grain Craft has the potential to contain low levels of peanut residue. The notice stated that the amount of peanut exposure from use of the flours and affected products is considered to be low and not expected to cause adverse health effects in the vast majority of peanut allergic consumers.

On Monday, Kellogg Company issued a similar recall for more than 20 products, including Keebler cookies.

Mars has not received any reports of illness related to products covered in the recall. The vast majority were sold in the United States, while the remainder were shipped to Bahamas, Jamaica, Virgin Islands-St Thomas, Antigua, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

Affected Combos products have a best before date ranging from March 2017 to April 2017 on the back of the package.

The products affected include:

Description: COMBOS CHEDDAR CHEESE PRETZEL - FAMILY PEG PACK - 6.3 OZ - 12/CA; Item # 10099128; UPC: 41419420058

Code date:

613EAALB01

613EBALB01

613ECALB01

613FAALB01

613FBALB01

614FAALB01

614FBALB01

614FCALB01

Best before date: 3/2017





Description: COMBOS PIZZERIA PRETZEL - MEDIUM BAG - 6.3 OZ - 12/CA;Item #10099130; UPC: 41419420065

Code date:

613FBALB01

613FCALB01

613GAALB01

613GBALB01

614DCALB01

614EAALB01

614EBALB01

614ECALB01

Best before date: 4/2017



Description: COMBOS CHEDDAR CHEESE CRACKER - FAMILY PEG PACK - 6.3 OZ - 12/CA;Item #10099132; UPC: 41419420072

Code date:

614AAALB01

614ABALB01

614ACALB01

614BAALB01

Best before date: 4/2017





Description: COMBOS PEPPERONI CRACKER - FAMILY PEG PACK - 6.3 OZ - 12/CA; Item #10099135; UPC: 41419420089

Code date:

614BAALB01

614BBALB01

614BCALB01

614CAALB01

Best before date: 4/2017





Description: COMBOS BUFFALO BLUE CHEESE PRETZEL - FAMILY PEG PACK - 6.3 OZ - 12/CA; Item #10099141; UPC: 41419420119

614CAALB01

614CBALB01

614CCALB01

614DAALB01

614DBALB01

Best before date: 4/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS PIZZERIA PRETZEL - 15 OZ - 8/CA; Item #10109566; UPC: 41419780473

Code date:

613FBALB01

613FCALB01

Best before date: 4/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS CHEDDAR CHEESE PRETZEL - 15 OZ - 8/CA; Item #10109569; UPC: 41419780480

Code date:

613EAALB01

613EBALB01

614FAALB01

614FBALB01

Best before date: 3/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS CHEDDAR CHEESE CRACKER - 15 OZ - 8/CA; Item #10109577; UPC: 41419780497

Code date:

614AAALB01

614ABALB01

614ACALB01

Best before date: 4/2017





Description: COMBOS SWEET AND SALTY CARAMEL CREME PRETZEL - FAMILY PEG PACK - 6.0 OZ - 12/CA; Item #10117851; UPC: 41419780879

Code date:

613GBALB01

613GCALB01

Best before date: 4/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS CHEDDAR CHEESE PRETZEL - WAREHOUSE CLUB SINGLES DISPLAY CASE - 1.80 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item # S1317100; UPC: 41419714713

Code date:

613EAALB01

613EBALB01

613ECALB01

Best before date: 3/1/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS PIZZERIA PRETZEL - WAREHOUSE CLUB SINGLES DISPLAY CASE - 1.80 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item #S1317500; UPC: 41419714751

Code date:

613FBALB01

613FCALB01

613GAALB01

614DCALB01

Best before date: 4/1/2017





Description: "COMBOS" SNACK BUFFALO BLUE CHEESE PRETZEL - SINGLES - 1.80 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item #S4743000; UPC: 41419474303

Code date:

14CAALB01

614CBALB01

614CCALB01

614DAALB01

Best before date: 4/1/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS CHEDDAR CHEESE PRETZEL - SINGLES - 1.80 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item # S7147100; UPC: 41419714713

Code date:

613ECALB01

613FAALB01

613FBALB01

614FAALB01

614FBALB01

614FCALB01

Best before date: 4/1/2017





Description: COMBOS PEPPERONI PIZZA CRACKER - SINGLES - 1.70 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item #S7147300: UPC: 41419714737

Code date:

614BAALB01

614BBALB01

614BCALB01

Best before date: 4/1/2017





Description: COMBOS SNACKS CHEDDAR CHEESE CRACKER - SINGLES - 1.70 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item #S7147400; UPC: 41419714744

614AAALB01

614ABALB01

614ACALB01

614BAALB01

Best before date: 4/1/2017



Description: COMBOS PIZZERIA PRETZEL - SINGLES - 1.80 OZ - 18 CT - 12/CA; Item #S7147500; UPC: 41419714751

Code date:

613GAALB01

613GBALB01

614DCALB01

614EAALB01

614EBALB01

614ECALB01

Best before date: 4/1/2017



Consumers who have purchased affected products should return the product to the store where they purchased it for a full refund. Consumers with questions or concerns may call the following toll-free number: 1-800-556-7881. This number will be operational Monday through Friday, 8:30 am to 5:00 pm (EST).
A Tokyo suburb will help women cover the cost of freezing their eggs in a pilot program aimed at tackling the nation's declining birth rate.

The Japanese city of Urayasu, about 9 miles east of Tokyo, is allocating $850,000 over three years to fund the research project conducted by Juntendo University Urayasu Hospital.

The hospital hopes that preserving the eggs would encourage women to give birth when they are ready instead of giving up having children.

Dr. Iwaho Kikuchi of the hospital said Thursday that using public funds to support this kind of study may be a first in the world.

The average cost of such procedure is around $4,700 to $5,700, but a woman will only pay 20 percent of the cost with the subsidy. Women between the age of 25 and 34 who live in Urayasu, also home to Tokyo Disneyland, are eligible to participate.

Kikuchi said 12 women are in the process of starting the freezing process, and about two-thirds of them or their husbands have some sort of health issue.

The success rate of pregnancy from frozen eggs is slim. If a woman freezes eggs at the age of 25, the chance of successfully giving birth is 30 percent. At the age of 34, it drops to 20 percent.

Japan has been struggling to boost the nation's declining birth rate, which would depress the working population and increase the financial burden on them as the baby boomer generation retires.

Urayasu mayor Hideaki Matsuzaki called the low birthrate a national problem.

"In general, pregnancy and childbirth is an individual issue. But when the situation has become this far, I consider it a social problem," Matsuzaki said. "I view using public expenditure as the right thing to do."
An 8-year-old Ohio girl is doing her part to help raise money for cancer research by setting up a kissing booth with her pooch, Marley. Addi Gehres, of Grove City, lost her grandmother to cancer just two months after she was born.

She may not remember her grandmother, but she knows how much she loved her and everything she wanted to do for her -- to see how it impacts others is just something that is beyond words for us parents, Keith Gehres told WKBN.

The Gehres have participated in Pelotonia, a non-profit biking fundraiser, for the past six years, and have also set up garage sales to raise money for the cause, WKBN reported. At their most recent sale, Addi gathered her yellow lab Marley and set up shop.

My favorite thing about Marley is hell lay on your feet when youre cold, Addi told WKBN.

The family said Marley has yet to meet a stranger, and since Addi doesnt mind sharing him with others if it means raising money for a good cause.

I think its good to help people because their families must be very worried about them and they want them to get better, Addi told WKBN.

Addi and Marley have raised $500 so far.


A Connecticut woman who got poison ivy in her eyes is getting the viral treatment after her younger sister posted photos of her swollen face on Twitter. Emily Petrozza, 21, noticed poison ivy on her arm after going fishing with friends.

It wasnt until after she took her contacts out and her face began to swell that she became concerned, NBC Connecticut reported.

Petrozzas younger sister, Lauren, snapped a few photos before bed and said she was woken up by her crying saying she needed to go to the doctor.

Emily sent more photos to Lauren from the clinic that showed her eyes swollen shut, which quickly found their way to Twitter.

I think its funny, Lauren told NBC Connecticut. I thought people in my town would get a kick out of it. But I guess everyone else did too.

According to Buzzfeed, Emily has since recovered from the incident.

The post, which was shared June 13, has more than 61,000 favorites and 35,000 retweets. Memes quickly followed.


Francesca Franny Dinicola, is a straight-A student with a passion for dancing, but the 13-year-old hasnt been able to perform for months due to a rare syndrome. In September 2015, Dinicola was at a sleepover with friends when she bumped her leg on the corner of the bed while on her way to the bathroom.

Soon after her leg began to swell and a hematoma, or collection of blood outside of a blood vessel, formed. After several weeks Dinicola continued to experience pain, and was given a boot to wear to protect the hematoma and help it heal. In January, when there was no noted improvement, doctors recommended surgery.

After the surgery is when the nightmare began, Gena Dinicola, the teens mother, told FoxNews.com. It was a disaster. She was in so much pain.

The swelling and bruising got worse and the incision wasnt healing properly. Dinicola was also left in a tremendous amount of pain.

I couldnt walk, I couldnt shower, I couldnt go to school, she told FoxNews.com. The teen was also bedridden because her foot was so sensitive to touch and pressure.

It burned a lot, it stung, it feels like shooting pain and stinging. It feels like pins and needles, she said, describing the pain she was in. The sensitivity was so intense that Gena had to start bathing her daughter and said simply squeezing water from a loofah over her leg would leave her screaming in pain.

Doctors ran a battery of tests and scans but could find nothing physically wrong with her leg. They were baffled as to what was causing such excruciating pain until a physical therapist recommended that Gena take her daughter to Childrens Specialized Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. At the hospital, Dr. Katherine Bentley, the director of the chronic pain program, diagnosed Dinicola with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS).

This really is a diagnosis of exclusion, Bentley told FoxNews.com. So though it feels frustrating to go to all these doctors and have all these tests we have to make sure that all these things we are testing for are not there.

CRPS is a type of amplified pain syndrome that can affect anyone, but mostly presents in high-achieving adolescent females. It usually occurs after and illness or an injury.

What we believe happens is when we have pain, the nervous system has a pain response and for people in chronic pain or amplified pain the response just doesnt stop. The feedback look doesnt turn off and in fact it gets worse, Bentley said.

In reaction to the pain, patients usually favor the part of the body that is affected, Bentley said. They avoid touching it or putting weight on it which can actually exacerbate the problem.

Doctors arent sure why the syndrome strikes high-achieving individuals.

[They] are usually doing great academically, in terms of sports, psychologically, in terms of friends, socially and then when something like [an injury] happens, it becomes very debilitating andaffects their whole lives, Bentley said.

The psychological stress of worrying that an injury can take away the things they love, like dancing in the case of Franny, doesnt help and may lead to a physical reaction like amplified pain.

The Childrens Specialized Hospital has a rigorous in-patient therapy program to help cure patients. In Dinicolas case, she was hospitalized for more than six weeks before being released on June 11. Dinicolas routine at the hospital began with pool therapy for an hour followed by meditation. She had two hours of physical therapy with two or three hours of occupational therapy plus individual and group psychological counseling.

Patients are taught several coping mechanisms from distraction to breathing techniques. They play games to help them concentrate on something else other than the pain they are in. For example, Dinicola played a card game with her therapist and had to walk on a balance beam away from the card table and back in order to play the next hand. The psychological aspect of the program involves teaching patients their body is okay.

This program helped me learn that the mind and body are connected, Bentley said. With Franny, she had two MRIs she had an ultrasound, she had a lot of testing done and everything was normal. So I can say, Franny, I know your left can handle your weight, but we just need to stand on it. Some of it is just reassurance.

During her time in the hospital, Dinicola went from being immobile to being able to run. She still has slight pain but her mother said there has been a remarkable improvement.

At first I had to help her, and the nurses had to help her shower. She is doing that on her own. I just want her to gain back her confidence. I want her to go back to dance. I want her to go back to the things she loves, Gena said.

Gena hopes to raise awareness about this relatively unknown condition so that other parents dont spend months with their children in pain and with a cloud of uncertainty following them around.
The next time you open a can of chickpeas, dont pour the liquid down the drainstash it in your fridge. That fluid, known as aquafaba, has become quite a sensation online. That's because it can be used as a vegan alternative to dairy and eggs in everything from meringue to mayonnaise. If you're curious about this new trend but want some more info before trying it, here are five things you should know about aquafaba.

There are two ways to get it

Aquafaba can be the water you used to boil bagged pulses (lentils, beans, and peas, like chickpeas), or it can be the liquid from canned versions of these foods. It seems to work best when it's derived from beans or chickpeas. With a little whipping, the liquid develops a fluffy texture that resembles whipped egg whites, whipped cream, or milk foam.

RELATED: Switching to a Vegan Diet? 12 Things You Need to Know

It's a brand new trend

Unlike quinoa or kale, aquafaba isnt a food thats been around for decades and suddenly became hot. According to Aquafaba.com, the story starts with a French cook named Joel Roessel, who began experimenting with the liquid from canned goods in search of an egg alternative in 2014, and wrote about his results on his blog. In February of 2015, two French scientists posted a video on YouTube in which they whip the liquid from canned chickpeas into a foam, and made chocolate mouse.

An American engineer named Goose Wohlt was inspired by their video and discovered the liquid could be used in place of eggs to create a vegan meringue, reports The New York Times. Wohlt posted his findings in a Facebook group and with the help of an excited vegan community, coined the liquid aquafaba, a combination of the Latin words for water" and "beans." The trend took off from therebig time.

RELATED: Delicious Vegan Recipes

Nutrition info is limited

Because aquafaba is so new, its nutrition analysis isnt readily available. I can only find one source to date: Aquafaba.com, which raised funds to have the liquid tested by a lab. The analysis found that a chickpea-derived aquafaba contains about 3 to 5 calories per tablespoon, but is not a significant source of carbs, protein, fat, vitamins, or minerals. Further research may reveal antioxidants, B vitamins, or other beneficial compounds that weren't included in the initial analysis. But for now, the biggest benefits of aquafaba are that its plant-based, naturally gluten-free, low in calories, and can mimic the consistency of ingredients like eggs and dairy for those who choose or need to avoid them.

Youll probably need a sturdy mixer

Most of the videos and recipes online use a KitchenAid mixer with a balloon whisk. A hand mixer is another option, although it will generally take longer, and you likely wont achieve the same consistency as a stand mixer. While blenders typically won't work because the speed of the blades destroys the foam, some online posts claim to have made aquafaba by vigorously shaking the liquid in a sealed jar.

RELATED: What the Heck is Nooch and Why Is Everyone Talking About It?

Simple ways to use it

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of watching a chef from the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone create a simple yet delicious chocolate mousse, starring aquafaba and melted dark chocolate. Another easy option is ice cream typically made with aquafaba, frozen fruit, and honey. But youll find dozens upon dozens of recipes online. I recommend using these three rules of thumb: 1) Look for pulses that don't contain added salt, especially if you're using a larger amount of liquid. 2) Keep added sugar to a minimum, and use natural or less processed options. 3) Choose recipes packed with superfood ingredients, including fruit, fresh herbs and spices, dark chocolate, nuts, and seeds.

RELATED: 3 Hearty Vegan Recipes Even Meat Eaters Will Love

The process of making aquafaba is pretty cool, so if you haven't tried it yet, give it a go, have fun, and keep it healthy. (And if you're looking for nutritious recipes to use up the chickpeas and beans, check out my recipes featuring pulses.)

This article originally appeared on Health.com.
Yesterday I startled many, and pleased tons of others by saying, I believe the assault weapons ban in this country should be reinstated. That's because I believe the gun control issue is not simply black and white -- but complicated. I said I was still in favor of the Second Amendment and even concealed carry. Still, I knew Id get comments like these.

@GretchenCarlson's whinny (or is that supposed to be whiney) ass should leave the air waves forever."

"Your anti American comments today were among the stupidest I've ever heard."

"I did not realize she was that stupid!

I also had comments with tons of f bombs, but its not the first time Ive faced criticism for standing up for what I believe in.

In my book, "Getting Real, I write about standing up when people called me fat, when people called me stupid for winning Miss America, and when people called me a bimbo for working at Fox News.

That kind of intolerance is no doubt why politicians sometimes don't say what they really think. They also sometimes dont say what they really think because of re-elections. However, that could now be changing. We have Donald Trump advocating people on the terrorist watch list or the no fly list to not be able to buy guns. Republicans Senator Rob Portman and Congressman Bob Dold are urging the same ban. Maybe its time for more of us to start getting real, and come together to actually get things done.
At every mention of the Orlando LGBTQ massacre I choke up; my emotions range from anger to fear and sadness. For a while I feel inconsolable.

I also felt that way on June 16, 1976 when black schoolchildren in Soweto, South Africa, were gunned down by the police and military of their own country as they engaged in a peaceful protest.

Then as now the senseless atrocity and bloodshed may have some redemptive quality. The trauma of Orlando and Soweto can never be erased but we may choose to be redeemed by them.

Every terrorist act like the one in Orlando causes many of us to reflect on our place within the human family. Our own sexuality, spirituality, religion, gender, family of origin and love of country inform that story which reveals our uniqueness and membership in the human family. Beyond the cheap grace of labeling one another, the choice of where to place yourself on the human landscape is where redemption is welcomed or not.

I was born in South Arica to a father of proud British and Scottish heritage and a mother whose lineage was Palestinian, Russian and British.

I did not recognize it at the time, but our family spread across the world made me aware that we were part of something bigger than our own nuclear unit.

I am also a gay man and after being sent to the United States to avoid imprisonment in South Africa for refusing to serve in a military that murdered its own people I became an undocumented person; a so-called illegal human being. To some I was a double illegal  gay and undocumented.

I am also ordained in the Episcopal Church even though my work is now beyond the borders of institutional religion. Ive been blessed to work with remarkable Americans who are Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Native American among others.

An indelible mark has been left on my understanding of life by the generous, welcoming hospitality that so many Americans offered me when I arrived in this country and Ive been a proud citizen of the United States of America for two decades.

Like most of us I am shaped and formed by many influences. Like most people one or two labels do not begin to describe who I really am. So where are the openings for redemption to be found?

It begins by uttering the truth that this massacre intentionally targeted people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. To speak that truth is both liberating and illuminating. It is also important to name the truth that the terrorist targeted Puerto Rican and Latino people. And yes he wrapped his act of terror in the mantle of Islam.

Images of thirteen year old Hector Pieterson, the first of the Soweto students to be gunned down in the streets flashed across the world long before the advent of social media. They were murdered because they were black children and youths. Those who killed them acted on behalf of a government who claimed that the Christian and Jewish scriptures blessed their violent policies designed to enshrine a theology claiming that black people were less human than others.

The numbing tragedy of that day laid bare the truth that hatred, violence and death dressed up in religious language has no future. Apartheid and those who supported it around the world  explicitly or implicitly -- were revealed to be morally bankrupt. The tragic blood of children shifted the human consciousness. Suddenly young people on college campuses in South Africa, the United States and elsewhere joined newly charged movement to end apartheid and replace it with a free and democratic country. They were joined by Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders within South Africa and around the globe who said every human life was of inestimable value.

The redemptive moment was to say No more. For in declaring that something is wrong and intolerable you have to declare what you would like to help create.

So what does it mean to say that no human life is disposable, unimportant or unwanted? How does the terror unleashed by the Orlando killer open a space for redemption?

It might mean reading aloud the name of each person killed in Orlando remembering that they could be your son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin, co-worker, neighbor, fellow congregant, mom or dad. It might mean asking how you would console a real or imagined friend whose loved one was killed because they are part of the LGBTQ community or because they are Puerto Rican or Latino  or just because theyre American. Or perhaps just because they are human as we are.

Redemption may be discovered in refusing to live with labels that diminish or claim that an entire religion is culpable. It may be discovered in attending that community project that members of a church, synagogue and mosque are collaborating on.

Redemptive moments emerge when we are awakened to a truth that is larger than us, a truth that makes us remember we are part of a larger human family than we imagined, a connection to one another that transcends any religious orthodoxy. Redemption always lies beyond our own self. Some would say in the generosity of a God.

So which side of the human and spiritual equation do you and I want to live on? Do we want to say that a human life is disposable because of sexuality, religion, race, gender, national origin or any other factor? I do not wish to live on that impoverished and sinister plane.

I choose stand with you and all affected by the massacres of the Sowetos and Orlandos of the world because only together can we each help to create a safer world where we name and celebrate our differences and our profound need for one another. That is redemptive.
Last month, state, industry and education leaders in the United States injected a breath of fresh air into our political system. Amid escalating polarization between presidential candidates, 28 bipartisan governors and 77 leading CEOs and educators from across the country asked Congress to fund K-12 computer science education. And now bipartisan congressional leaders are getting behind this issue with over 135 Republican and Democrats coming together to ask the Appropriations Committee to prioritize K-12 computer science education funding.

So why are these leaders rallying behind this cause and bringing together diverse areas of the country from New York City to Little Rock? Because these communities and these leaders realize that not only prosperity in the United States, but also security, increasingly depends upon our citizens knowing how to meaningfully participate in the digital age.

Cyber warfare against the United States is on the rise with numerous countries attempting to gain access into our computer networks, government and private. These attacks can occur countless times every hour from sources worldwide. Clearly, the defenses required to repel these attacks are immense and constantly evolving.

However, recent reports show that the United States is not providing the resources or opportunity for citizens to adequately fill the increasing demand for cybersecurity careers.

This reality is jeopardizing the cybersecurity of our country, putting our national defense, businesses, and personal information at increased risk.

In the most egregious of many recent examples, last year China engaged in a successful cyber attack on the Office of Personnel Management. These attacks are unlikely to subside.

Economically, the stakes are equally high. Investment in K-12 computer science education is essential to ensuring our future workforce is equipped with the skills needed to fill critical U.S. jobs and keep America competitive for decades to come.

Here at home, computing occupations are now the largest source of all new wages, accounting for more than 500,000 currently unfilled computing jobs in the U.S.

Nevertheless, last year our colleges and universities produced fewer than 50,000 computer science graduates. This isn't likely to change without a robust emphasis on computer science in our K-12 educational system.

Currently only 1 out of 4 U.S. schools teach meaningful computer science. And even though the number of students taking advanced placement (AP) computer science has almost doubled in the past two years, less than 10 percent of high schools in the United States teach it. Among the small fraction of U.S. students who take AP computer science, only 20 percent are female and even fewer are Black or Hispanic.

Our international competitors on innovation, talent and trade increasingly recognize the value of computer science education. Just recently Japan announced a new policy that will ensure that every student will learn computer science within the next five years. Germany is considering a similar proposal. The United Kingdom and Australia have already made computer science a compulsory part of education.

Code.org has partnered with more than 120 school districts across the United States - including the largest in the U.S. - and has 25 regional partners that are on the front lines of this grassroots-led movement.

Recently Code.org brought together 400 teacher leaders from across the country for preparation on how to prepare the next wave of teachers across the country. These districts, local partners and teachers will train about 30,000 teachers next year. And Code.org isn't the only organization working toward scaling computer science  numerous organizations such as the National Math and Science Initiative and Project Lead the Way are also bringing computer science to local communities across the United States. These seed investments are largely supported by private industry.

These privately supported programs are a great start. However, our computer science education deficit is significant and the cost of not preparing our workforce for current threats and the future economy is immense. School districts seeking to add or increase their computer science education curriculum should be able to count on the federal government as a financial partner in this endeavor.

A relatively small investment in our future will bolster our national security, spur business investments in our communities and keep the United States as a leader in computer science.

When computing is the largest and fastest-growing source of all new wages in the US, the return on this investment is immense. And with our national security at stake, the alternative is not an option we can afford.

Our initiative is bipartisan, the need is real and the benefits are tangible.

Congress should act now.
Horror. Sadness. Shock. And then fear.

This was the procession of sentiments coming from Afghan-Americans who watched this week as a killer and terrorist who murdered 49 people turned out to be one of their own.

This is a tragedy. And no one can believe it, said one friend whose family fled southern Afghanistan when the Russians invaded and found safety in America in the 1980s.

But in this moment of grief is also a shiver of fear that a country to which they belong is now turning its sights on them and those who share their faith. And in this moment of terror is a time to define who we are as Americans.

Do we believe that blocking all members of a world religion would keep us safer? Do we speak seriously about a blanket ban on members of a faith whose sons and daughters serve in and out of uniform at war? Are we prepared to keep out of this country Afghan and Iraqi Muslims who risked their lives each day to be the eyes and ears and voice of U.S. soldiers on the battlefield?

So far, the answer is no. As Gallup noted at the end of last year, a majority of all groups say Muslims are loyal to the U.S.

Gallup also found that a majority of all religious groups in the U.S. disagree with the statement that Muslims living in this country are sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

In fact American Muslims have served their country in what George W. Bush called the War on Terror these past fifteen years. And when America said to its citizens of Afghan heritage back in 2001 that it needed their help on the battlefield, there was no them. Only us.

I spoke recently with an interpreter who served America at war in Afghanistan. No one in her family wanted her to go back to a country they had risked their lives to flee. But she went back anyway because she thought her country, America, needed her and she wanted to make a difference.

In 2011, she nearly lost her life for her country while on a special operations night raid targeting terrorists in Afghanistan. She still has not recovered from the surgeries she needs to use her arm again.

What does it say that she now fears for her mothers safety when her mother goes to her local mosque to pray during the holy month of Ramadan? That she tells her mother not to wear her head scarf because she notices the dirty looks she has been getting when they are out in public.

Is it not enough to nearly lose your life on the battlefield to prove you are American? Now you have to lose your faith?

This is not about Muslims as a group; this is about us as a nation. And who we are as the United States of America, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all  not just for some depending on their religion.

Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. These words belonged to President Ronald Reagan. In 1981.

Afghan-Americans have served this country since the start of the war in and out of uniform. They have contributed as translators, development experts, local eyes and ears and advisers.

Former First Lady Laura Bush continues to lead the Afghan Womens Council out of Georgetown University and just published a book on the courage and grit of Afghan women, some of whom have found new lives in America.

Afghans and Iraqis who risked their lives alongside American forces face death threats at home and Sen. John McCain continues to fight for their entrance to the United States. Neither Senator McCain nor First Lady Laura Bush could be accused of not having Americas best interests at heart in their actions.

We are a nation born of the idea that our values and our principles have the power to make us stronger and safer.

Those who serve America on the battlefield should not have to worry about their familys safety on the home front. And banning one religious group is not an expression of our patriotism, but a departure from our values.
People claiming to have hacked the Democratic National Committee have released what they say is the party's playbook for running against Donald Trump.

The over 200 pages of purported opposition research aimed at the "divisive and dangerous" Trump surfaced just days after Russian hackers breached DNC databases. The "Donald Trump Report" was created on Dec. 19, before Trump even won his first primary.

Gawker obtained the documents. A Romanian hacker named "Gucifer 2.0" claimed credit, saying this was just "one of the many thousands" of documents acquired through hacking the DNC.

The contents include many familiar lines of attack, including Trump's controversial remarks, past failed business deals, "dangerous" political policies and attitudes toward women.

Read more on WashingtonExaminer.com
CIA Director John Brennan, in a chilling warning on the Islamic States growing influence, told lawmakers Thursday that U.S.-led efforts to strike at the terror group have not hampered its terrorism capability and global reach  a message that stands in stark contrast to President Obamas more upbeat assessment earlier this week.

Brennan, testifying in a rare open hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said ISIS likely will intensify terror attacks around the world even as its core fighters come under pressure in Iraq and Syria, including by deploying operatives for further attacks on the West.

The group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel, Brennan said.

The testimony offered unnerving context to Obama's comments on Tuesday. The president said the anti-ISIS campaign is firing on all cylinders and the group is under more pressure than ever before, while conceding theyre gaining traction elsewhere.

Brennen echoed the president in detailing the groups territorial losses in Iraq and Syria. He said theyre struggling to replenish fighters and getting squeezed financially.

However, he said ISIS is resilient and likely will adapt, and warned coalition gains in Iraq and Syria are not blunting its capacity to carry out deadly operations abroad.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach, Brennan testified. The group's foreign branches and global networks can help preserve its capacity for terrorism regardless of events in Iraq and Syria. In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.

Further, he said the terror massacre in Orlando last weekend  the worst U.S. homeland attack since 9/11  shows ISIS is still working to inspire attacks by sympathizers who have no direct links to the group.

He said ISIS is gradually cultivating its various branches into an interconnected network. The branch in Libya is likely the most advanced and most dangerous, he said, warning Libya could become another base to carry out attacks in Europe and other locations. He said ISIS is trying to increase its influence elsewhere in Africa as well.

Brennan also estimated the total ISIS force size in Iraq and Syria has slightly reduced since early 2016 -- but the affiliates have thousands of adherents. He estimated between 5,000 and 8,000 ISIS supporters are in Libya, about 7,000 are in Nigeria, and hundreds more are in Yemen and Afghanistan.

Still, he said the U.S.-led coalition has made progress combating the group, which has had to surrender large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and has lost some of its leaders in airstrikes. ISIS has struggled to replenish its ranks of fighters, Brennan said, because fewer of them are traveling to Syria and others have defected.

He said the group's ability to raise money has also been curtailed, although the group still continues to generate at least tens of millions of dollars in revenue each month, mostly from taxation and from sales of crude oil.

Like Obama, he said the group is on defense.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A Democratic senator ended a nearly 15-hour-long filibuster on the Senate floor early Thursday, part of an effort to force a vote on gun control legislation following Sunday's terror attack in Orlando.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., yielded the floor at 2:11 a.m., 14 hours and 50 minutes after he began speaking. Murphy kept up his filibuster to a mostly empty chamber, save for 38 Democratic senators who joined him and made their own speeches throughout the day. Two Republican senators, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, also made remarks.

Democrats were seeking a vote on two amendments to an underlying spending bill. One, proposed by Murphy, would expand background checks. The other, proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would let the government bar sales of guns and explosives to people it suspects of being terrorists.

Republicans argue that Feinstein's bill denies due process to people who may be on the terror list erroneously and are trying to exercise their constitutional right to gun ownership.

Near the end of the filibuster, Murphy said that Senate leaders had promised "a path forward" for floor votes on the legislation, but did not elaborate further.

As he began to speak Wednesday morning, Murphy said he would remain on the Senate floor "until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together," and evoked the Newtown school shooting in his state in 2012.

"For those of us that represent Connecticut, the failure of this body to do anything, anything at all in the face of that continued slaughter isn't just painful to us, it's unconscionable," Murphy said.

Separately Wednesday, the National Rifle Association reiterated its support for a bill from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would let the government delay firearms sales to suspected terrorists for up to 72 hours. Prosecutors would have to persuade a judge to block the transaction permanently, a bar Democrats and gun control activists say is too high.

The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to co-workers. But he was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.



Efforts to compromise between the Cornyn and Feinstein bills collapsed within hours of surfacing in the Senate Wednesday, underscoring the extreme difficulty of resolving the divisive issue five months to the election.

Meanwhile, Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said it was working on a compromise with Toomey.

By the end of the day Wednesday, Toomey, who is facing a tough re-election race this fall, had introduced legislation that would direct the attorney general to create a new list of suspected terrorists who could be barred from buying weapons. But Democrats immediately rejected that idea, saying it would create too much of a backlog.

Fox News' Chad Pergram and the Associated Press contributed to this report.


A former CIA officer and diplomat who has repeatedly denied playing a role in one of the most notorious U.S. counterterrorism programs is set to become the only American held accountable for it -- and claims the Obama administration has abandoned her.

Sabrina De Sousa, who is stuck in Portugal and awaiting extradition to Italy over her alleged role in the rendition of a terror suspect years ago, claims the State Department has ignored repeated requests to intervene on her behalf. She and her lawyers are particularly critical of Hillary Clinton, who still has not commented on the case.

Mark S. Zaid, an attorney who previously worked with De Sousa, told FoxNews.com his firm made multiple efforts to reach out to the State Department -- specifically then-Secretary of State Clinton -- and that every time we were completely rebuffed with silence.

He said one of his letters was even "deceptively" classified to limit my ability to create a public furor over how Sabrina had been and continues to be mistreated.

De Sousa, a naturalized American from India, was arrested in Portugal last October and earlier this month lost her latest court bid to halt her extradition to Italy. She faces four years in prison there over her alleged role in the rendition of a suspected terrorist 13 years ago.

De Sousa has launched numerous unsuccessful bids over the years to clear her name, but has received little known help from the government she served for more than a decade.

If shes sent to prison, she would become the first CIA officer and U.S. diplomat imprisoned over the controversial rendition program.

Implemented under President George W. Bush, the program transferred terror suspects to other countries for detention and interrogation. De Sousa, along with about two dozen other CIA agents and an Air Force official, were convicted in absentia in Italy in 2009 on kidnapping and other charges related to the abduction of Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, known also as Abu Omar, under the rendition program.

Omar, a radical cleric, was taken while walking down a street in Milan and flown to Egypt where he was held prisoner for four years without a trial before eventually being released. Omar claims during that time he was tortured.

Omar also was convicted in absentia in Italy of criminal association for the purposes of international terrorism and sentenced to six years in prison. Prosecutors claim he collaborated with 13 other suspected terrorists between 2000 and 2003 with the intent of carrying out terrorist attacks around the world.

Around the time of the rendition, De Sousa, 60, worked under diplomatic cover and was stationed in Milan.

On the specific day in question, though, De Sousa claims she was chaperoning her sons school ski trip in northern Italy  about 200 miles from Milan.

De Sousa recently detailed her frustration over the situation to VICE. During the in-depth interview, she didnt pull punches at who she thinks is hurting her shot at freedom.

There needs to be an explanation instead of a no comment, De Sousa said about Clintons careful avoidance of the issue. She already has the issue of Benghazi, which was diplomatic. And now we have a U.S. diplomat going to prison, thats two things.

De Sousa believes Clinton could still do the right thing.

I think the most important thing Secretary Clinton can do now is comment, De Sousa told VICE. So going in, if she becomes president, then at least everyone knows her position on it.

A State Department official told FoxNews.com that they are aware of the De Sousa situation:

We have seen reports that a Portuguese Court has acceded to the Italian governments request for the extradition of Sabrina de Sousa. We refer you to the Italian and Portuguese governments for further information.

De Sousas extradition was recently raised during a European Parliament hearing where a resolution was passed calling upon member states to formally investigate Europes role in U.S. renditions.

Ana Gomes, a member of the European Parliament, called De Sousa a scapegoat and said those truly responsible for renditions were being protected.

VICE also spoke with Abu Omar, who said he supports a pardon or immunity for De Sousa.

The irony isnt lost on De Sousa.

A former agency employee said to me  How embarrassing is it going to be for the CIA when the terrorist starts to support you in this whole story? she reportedly said.

Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, told FoxNews.com that they "can not comment on the specifics of a case that is working its way through the legal systems of two other countries" and deferred "any questions to the U.S. government agencies."
Lawmakers on Wednesday ramped up pressure on the House Intelligence Committee to declassify 28 pages of a 2002 congressional report about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by publishing them in the Congressional Record.

President Barack Obama had previously promised to release part of the documents, which are believed to address possible Saudi government connections to the hijackers. National Director of Intelligence James Clapper was to review the classified pages in 2014, but their contents have remained a secret.

"I have read these pages and can say that while their release will not harm national security, the contents are critical to our foreign policy moving forward," Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., said in a statement. "That is why I have introduced a resolution that would enable the House Committee on Intelligence to declassify the 28 pages ... It is more critical than ever for the American people to know what led to the tragic attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and I urge my colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee to release the pages."

Reps. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., co-sponsored the resolution, which calls for publishing them in the Congressional Record under the protection of the Constitution's speech or debate clause. The purpose of the clause is to protect lawmakers from intimidation by the executive or judiciary branches and reinforce the separation of powers among the three branches of government.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, said that while the Constitution's speech or debate clause protects members of Congress, it does not protect sources and methods that may be compromised by inappropriately revealing classified information.

"I support release of the 28 pages, but only after appropriate redactions are made to safeguard intelligence sources and methods," Schiff said. "It is also important to note that the 28 pages are also a Senate document, so it would be inappropriate for us to act unilaterally and without their concurrence."

Neither the bipartisan congressional inquiry nor the subsequent 9/11 Commission found any evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials knowingly supported the terrorists who orchestrated the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. However, lawmakers and relatives of victims insist theres reason to further probe the possible Saudi links.

CIA Director John Brennan told a Saudi TV station over the weekend that he thinks the documents will clear the Saudi government of any possible wrongdoing.

"I think the 28 pages will be published and I support their publication and everyone will see the evidence that the Saudi government had nothing to do with it," Brennan said in an interview with Arabiya TV, according to Reuters.

Brennan insists the 28-page section is just a preliminary review.

"It was found later, according to the results of the report, that there was no link between the Saudi government as a state or as an institution or even senior Saudi officials to the Sept. 11 attacks," he explained.

Saudi Arabias government has threatened to pull billions of dollars from the U.S. economy if the plan is enacted.

Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government says it has been "wrongfully and morbidly accused of complicity" in the attacks, is fighting extremists and working to clamp down on their funding channels. Still, the Saudis have long said that they would welcome declassification of the 28 pages because it would "allow us to respond to any allegations in a clear and credible manner."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Republican Sen. John McCain said Thursday he misspoke after initially calling President Obama "directly responsible" for the mass shooting in Orlando, because of the rise of the Islamic State on his watch.

McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election, made the comment Thursday while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sunday's attack and some of the survivors.

"Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obama's failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq," a visibly angry McCain told reporters in the Capitol as the Senate debated a spending bill.

"So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies," McCain said.

After McCain took heat on those comments from Democrats, he clarified on Twitter that he was referring to Obamas national security decisions and not the president himself.

He later issued a written statement saying: I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the President himself. As I have said, President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people and injured more than 50 in the attack at a gay nightclub. The 29-year-old Muslim born in New York made calls during the attack saying he was a supporter of the Islamic State.

In the aftermath of the shooting, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has accused Obama of putting U.S. enemies ahead of Americans. Trump also was accused of suggesting that Obama himself might sympathize with radical elements.

Democrats criticized Trump and some Republicans tried to distance themselves from his remarks.

Before McCain clarified, Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said McCain's "unhinged comments are just the latest proof that Senate Republicans are puppets of Donald Trump."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
President Obama met Thursday with the families of Orlando terror attack victims as part of a solemn visit to a community still recovering from Sunday's massacre that left 50 people, including the gunman, dead.

The visit comes four days after Omar Mateen opened fire at Pulse nightclub early Sunday in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

After Obama met with families of the victims, he and Vice President Biden met with the owners and staff of the nightclub who were working the night of the attack.

Obama said in remarks after the meeting that the city was "shaken by an evil, hateful act." But today, he said, "most of all, there is love."

Obama used his remarks to once again call for gun control measures in Congress. He said while the U.S. will work to destroy ISIS, "it's going to take more than just our military."

"Our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist ... to buy extraordinary powerful weapons and they can do so legally," Obama said.

"Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families," Obama said, before calling on lawmakers to "rise to the moment and do the right thing."

Obama's remarks come as Republicans and Democrats debate gun control measures in the wake of the attack. Some Republicans have shown a willingness to crack down on access to guns for those on terror watch lists, but remain opposed to any move to ban assault weapons.

Many Republican lawmakers say the focus should be on the terror threat from radical Islam, and not gun laws.

"This is not a gun control issue. This is a terrorism issue," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The White House says President Obama will meet with Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Friday with the conflicts in Yemen and Syria among the topics of discussion.

Obama and the deputy crown prince are also expected to review Saudi Arabia's efforts to make its economy less reliant on oil revenues.

The crown prince has already met with members of Congress as well as Secretary of State John Kerry. White House spokesman Eric Schultz tells reporters aboard Air Force One he'll also meet with Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

The visit also comes after the Senate passed legislation that would allow families of Sept. 11 victims to sue the Saudi government, despite Saudi objections. The bill sets Congress on a collision course with the Obama administration.
A nasty court fight between film icon George Lucas and Chicago environmentalists over a proposed art museum in the city could have the Star Wars creator saying, Help me, Obi-Rahm, youre my only hope.

Lucas is fighting to build a futuristic art museum on the Chicago lakefront, and has enlisted the help of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to keep the project alive. The mayor and other supporters see it as a huge economic boon and tourist draw.

But a local environmentalist group called Friends of the Park wants to blow it up like the Death Star, and has filed suit. They don't object to The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in theory, but do not want it built on lakefront property they maintain is protected parkland.

A federal court hearing had been scheduled for Wednesday as part of their tortuous legal battle, but has since been rescheduled for Aug. 11.

Museums can save a community, Laura L. Lott, CEO of the American Alliance of Museums, said in a statement last month supporting the project. As Chicago and Illinois face their own budget struggles, a small but vocal group is coming perilously close to blocking a golden opportunity for the community.

Those behind The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art say it will celebrate the power of visual storytelling in a setting focused on narrative painting, illustration, photography, film, animation and digital art -- and create more than 1,800 jobs at no cost to taxpayers in the process.

Lucass wife, Mellody Hobson, also says she finds the environmentalists lack of faith disturbing.

As an African-American who has spent my entire life in this city I love, it saddens me that young black and brown children will be denied the chance to benefit from what this museum will offer, Hobson said, according to the Chicago Tribune.

However, Friends of the Parks says it doesnt object to the museum in principle, just to its positioning on the lakefront.

We continue to remind Chicagoans that we would love to have the Lucas Museum locate in our great city with all of the attendant economic benefits, and there are many suitable sites to make that happen somewhere other than our lakefront, Juanita Irizarry, executive director of Friends of the Parks, said in a statement last month.

Lucas is not fighting for the project alone, and has picked up vital support from the Chicago mayor.

Emanuel's Empire recently struck back against the rebel environmentalists by asking an appeals court to throw out the case. The hearing has been repeatedly postponed.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, Emanuels office also has offered his support to a separate project dear to the hearts of Chicago environmentalists -- which would significantly expand the lakefront parkland -- if the group drops its suit.

There have been reports that Friends of the Parks was mulling dropping the legal action, but the group released a statement last week denying that, apparently taking a lesson from Admiral Ackbar and sensing a trap.

Contrary to recent reports, our board remains fully united on the preservation of our lakefront and ensuring that the public trust doctrine is not ignored," Irizarry said.

Hobson says the legal fight has caused them to look for a new hope in a galaxy far, far away and consider other cities. The Los Angeles Times reported that the San Francisco Bay area was being considered as a possible alternative.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Pocket dials can be embarrassing. Pocket Facebook posts can be worse.

Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustanys staffers learned the hard way after accidentally posting a private conversation via Facebook Live earlier this week. According to The New Orleans Times-Picayune, the staffers were unaware they were streaming from a mobile device for over two minutes as they bluntly discussed the congressmans political rivals.

The conversation between the Republican congressman and his staffers, which has since been deleted, focuses on his Senate campaign and two of his GOP opponents, Louisiana State Treasurer John Kennedy and Rep. John Fleming. They are vying for the seat of Republican Sen. David Vitter, who is stepping down.

In video preserved for posterity on the newspapers website, Boustanys advisers complain Kennedy is good at staying on message.

I was just really hoping he would say something dumb in private, one aide says.

Another responds, That would be awesome, I would email every reporter I know.

Boustany, who is pictured momentarily, says he spoke to a New Orleans doctor supporting him  but only in private because the doctors son works for Fleming.

It is not clear where the conversation took place and who was present because most of the recording shows the ceiling of an office.

However, Flemings camp raised ethics questions.

A spokesman for Flemings campaign told The New Orleans Advocate, It is very disappointing that Congressman Boustany would break congressional ethics rules by mixing his taxpayer-funded office with his political operation. He has a lot of explaining to do.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and other top Republicans pushed back Thursday on growing calls from Democrats to ban people on terror watch lists from buying guns, even as Donald Trump and other GOP figures opened the door to discussing it.

Calls for action have increased in the wake of the terror massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando that left 50 people, including the gunman, dead on Sunday. The gunman, Omar Mateen, had been on a watch list for 10 months before being removed.

We want to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again. Everybody wants that," Ryan told reporters Thursday. "But as we look at how to proceed, we also want to make sure that we're not infringing upon people's legitimate constitutional rights. That's important.

Ryan's comments come a day after Trump indicated potential support for new gun laws in this area.

I will be meeting with the N.R.A., who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee tweeted Wednesday.

Whether Trump would support an outright ban or just a delay for gun sales for those on watch lists is not clear.

That is the sticking point right now in the Senate.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other Democrats are pushing a measure to ban those on no-fly lists from purchasing weapons.

But Republicans worry about such a measure infringing on gun rights for someone wrongly included on such a list.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, has a dueling measure to delay a gun sale for 72 hours, but require prosecutors to go to court to show probable cause if they want to block the sale permanently.

Cornyns bill has been backed by the NRA.

Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Charles Grassley, of Iowa, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, have a measure that would notify law enforcement if anyone investigated for terrorism in the last five years tries to buy a gun -- in addition to making other changes.

Democrats drew more attention to their version of the legislation Wednesday night as Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., held the floor along with colleagues in a nearly 15-hour filibuster that lasted into the early hours Thursday.

"We can't just wait, we have to make something happen," said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., at an emotional news conference where Democrats joined family members of people killed in the nation's recent mass shootings. "These are people bound by brutality, and their numbers are growing."

But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blasted Murphy's filibuster as a "campaign talk-a-thon" that did nothing but delay potential votes.

Cruz also slammed Democrats, saying on the Senate floor the Democrat effort was nothing more than a political distraction that avoided the real issues.

I find it ridiculous that in response to an ISIS terror attack, the Democrats go on high dudgeon that we've got to restrict the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, Cruz said. This is not a gun control issue, this is a terrorism issue.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called Cornyn's bill a "wolf in sheep's clothing" and said it would allow "every terrorist to get a gun." Clinton's spokesman, Brian Fallon, called Cornyn's bill a "smokescreen."

Cornyn responded angrily.

"That's an incredibly ignorant thing for her to say," Cornyn said. "That anybody can be denied their constitutional rights without due process of law and without the government coming forward and establishing probable cause, that's simply un-American."

A possible bipartisan compromise was proposed by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. Toomey said Wednesday his bill would prevent potential terrorists from getting a gun, while providing an extra layer of due process that the Democratic bill lacks.

I have drafted legislation that takes the best features from both of the previous proposals, effectively preventing terrorists from being able to purchase guns, while also safeguarding the rights of innocent Americans who are mistakenly put on the list, Toomey said.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department backed a ban on gun sales to those on watch lists.

The amendment gives the Justice Department an important additional tool to prevent the sale of guns to suspected terrorists by licensed firearms dealers while ensuring protection of the departments operational and investigative sensitivities," a DOJ official said in a statement.

The DOJs stance is a departure from past warnings from FBI Director James Comey, who reportedly has said a ban could alert terrorists they are being investigated.

Ryan cited those remarks when talking to reporters.

As the FBI director just told us the other day, and I think he said this publicly, if we do this wrong, like the president is proposing, we can actually blow our ongoing terrorist investigations. So, we want to get this right, so that we don't undermine terrorist investigations, Ryan said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Weve been here before, proclaimed Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., on the Senate floor at 6:44 p.m. ET, seven hours and 23 minutes into a tag-team Democratic filibuster on firearms.

The here to which Udall refers is the aftermath of a mass shooting where Democrats proclaim its high-time Congress get serious about the carnage and guns. The geographical here hopscotches the country, insidiously latching a macabre appellation to each venue: Killen, Texas; San Ysidro, Calif.; Blacksburg, Va.; Fort Hood, Texas (twice); Tucson, Ariz.; Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Charleston, S.C.; San Bernardino, Calif.; Orlando, Fla.

The American people are seeing shooting after shooting and not seeing change, said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., at 7:05 p.m., seven hours and 45 minutes into the jawboning. I cant believe were going to let this happen again.

Heinrichs remarks reflect the customary disposition of Democrats following each of these grisly incidents. Its a feedback loop. Nothing ever seems to happen. Yet each time, Democrats claim this is the time things will be different.

After Newtown, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that things change quickly here in Washington. Theyve changed for gay marriage. Theyre changing for immigration and they will change for gun safety sooner than you think.

Well, one changed.

And so Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., exasperated since the bloodbath at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012, headed to the Senate floor at 11:21 a.m. Wednesday with little fanfare.

Murphy began to talk.

Ive had enough, said Murphy. Im going to stand here and hold the floor while we give our colleagues time to try to find a path forward.

Democrats wanted votes on gun control measures during debate to the Commerce/Justice/Science spending bill.

This raises the question of whether Democrats pursued a failed political and policy strategy on firearms over the years.

Why does the system not work when 75 percent of Americans say that they support these pieces of legislation? asked House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., about the Democrats tactics.

So whats wrong?

The voter needs to follow through on their conviction. If they think that they want this legislation, they ought to stop voting for people who oppose it, said Hoyer.

Its unclear if Murphys filibuster will change anything. But the filibuster was a different gambit.

The Senate allows for unlimited debate. That means once a senator commandeers the floor, theyre in control until they turn it over to someone else -- sometimes out of exhaustion. But, a senator cant sit down or abandon the floor and still maintain the floor.

During recent Senate talkathons, senators increasingly relied on a cadre of colleagues to prowl the floor, ready to grant them a vocal reprieve. Senators are allowed to yield for a question from another senator without relinquishing the floor. Thus, Murphy would turn to another senator and state I yield to Senator ______ for a question without losing my right to the floor. Then the other senator would start in, usually ending a 15-minute soliloquy with an solitary interrogative of Murphy. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., used this tactic during his nearly 13-hour filibuster in March 2013. Same with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, during his 21-hour talkathon (technically not a filibuster) in the fall of 2013.

But all the while, Murphy remained on his feet. Its customary for Senate pages to bring a glass of ice water to each desk when a senator is speaking. But Murphys desk was bereft of water  perhaps not to tempt the senator.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., joined Murphy in solidarity during the filibuster. The floor belonged to the Connecticut Democrat. But Booker didnt leave the chamber or sit down in support of his colleague.

If you cant leave the Senate floor, you cant put say good night to your kids. Cruz epically read Green Eggs and Ham as a bedtime story to his daughters during his protracted oratory. They watched at home on C-SPAN2.

Murphy faced a similar conundrum just before 8:30 p.m. when he looked up to see his seven-year-old son Owen watching from above in the gallery. Murphys wife Cathy was also nearby along with four-year-old son Rider.

The senator addressed Owen.

A, youre supposed to be in bed, admonished Murphy. B, Im sorry I missed pizza night.

Murphy then had a personal message for his son.

I hope youll understand why Im doing this, continued Murphy. For those of us who are parents, this is deeply, deeply personal.

Murphy had parting words for Owen.

Go to bed! hollered the senator, drawing laughter from the gallery.

Around 1:35 a.m., Murphy had reason for optimism about his effort. He told the Senate there would be votes to expand background checks to gun shows and to bar those on the terrorist watch list from getting firearms.

Murphy concluded his remarks at 2:11 a.m., 14 hours and 50 minutes after he started. Its the ninth-longest speech in modern Senate history.

I hope that this means something, said Murphy as he left the chamber.

Murphy declared that he held up better than I thought during the filibuster. But there would be no rest.

He already missed pizza night. And Murphy wasnt going to skip out on Owens last day of first grade Thursday.

The senator said he was due at Owens school at 8:30 a.m.

Capitol Attitude is a weekly column written by members of the Fox News Capitol Hill team. Their articles take you inside the halls of Congress, and cover the spectrum of policy issues being introduced, debated and voted on there.
The acting head of the Veterans Benefits Administration said Thursday he is retiring, three months after he was suspended for allowing two officials to manipulate the agency's hiring system for their own gain.

Danny Pummill said in a note to employees that he will leave the Department of Veterans Affairs next Thursday. Pummill was suspended without pay for 15 days in March for his role in a relocation scam that has roiled the agency for more than a year.

The VA said Pummill failed to exercise proper oversight as two senior officials, Kimberly Graves and Diana Rubens, forced lower-ranking employees to accept job transfers and then took the vacant positions themselves -- keeping their senior-level salaries while reducing their responsibilities.

Pummill leads an agency with a $2.7 billion annual budget that provides disability and life insurance benefits to more than 10 million veterans.

He joined the VA in 2010 after a 33-year Army career, including two years as deputy assistant secretary of the Army for medical and health operations.

He took over as acting VBA chief last October after Allison Hickey resigned amid fierce criticism of the agency's problem-plagued disability benefits program. The number of claims pending for more than 125 days soared from about 180,000 at the start of 2010 to more than 611,000 by March 2013.

In a blog post this week, Pummill said the VBA has made significant improvements to the benefits program despite an unprecedented increase in demand. By the end of 2015, the backlog was reduced to about 75,000, he said.

VBA decided more than 6 million medical issues for veterans in 2015 -- double the number of medical decisions decided in 2009.

Pummill's top deputy, Tom Murphy, will replace him as acting VBA leader and VA undersecretary.
More than a dozen countries participating in a program that allows visitors into the U.S. without a visa are not sharing terrorists identities and other vital information as required by law, according to a watchdog report raising concerns on Capitol Hill about yet another major security gap.

This is very dangerous because for the most part, these are allies, some of which have pockets of Islamic radicalism, Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., chairman of the House national security subcommittee, told FoxNews.com.

The Visa Waiver Program lets business travelers and tourists with passports from 38 countries fill out a basic online form to enter the U.S. The biographical questionnaire can be filled out at the airport.

Last year, Congress tightened measures requiring those countries to supply identities of suspected terrorists and the criminal history of those wishing to enter the U.S. Theoretically, the information is then heaved into law enforcement databases to be checked when travelers apply for a visa or waiver.

Yet the Government Accountability Office found more than a third of VWP countries are not sharing terrorist identity information or criminal history. The report says: While VWP countries may share information through other means, U.S. agency officials told GAO that information sharing through the agreements is essential for national security.

While the list of specific countries in non-compliance is classified, the proliferation of radical ideology has shown the terror threat can emanate from just about anywhere. According to a House Homeland Security Committee report, three of the top 10 countries supplying the Islamic State with people are VWP countries.

The problem is Islamic Jihad is not confined to the Middle East but is throughout Europe including in those countries participating in the program, DeSantis said.

Gaps in information-sharing emerged in the wake of last years Paris attacks, in which the attackers were known to French intelligence yet not on U.S. watch lists. The Orlando terror attack, while committed by a U.S. citizen, has only heightened concerns about who is traveling to and from the U.S.

The VWP program, established in 1986, allows nationals of certain countries to enter the U.S. as temporary visitors for up to 90 days without having to obtain a visa and thus undergo an in-person interview at a U.S. consulate. The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Spain and France are among the countries participating.

DeSantis said current measures still dont go far enough in weeding out vulnerabilities in the system.

Two areas of concern are: citizens of VWP countries who originate from terror-tied regions and those who have become radicalized in VWP countries.

Belgian citizens from neighborhoods associated with radicalization, for instance, can travel freely under the waiver program. And while the recently passed law technically prevented foreign nationals who have traveled to Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya and other countries of concern from using the program, the Obama administration in January announced it would let certain individuals who have traveled to those countries utilize the VWP.

Another concern is that hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from VWP countries have overstayed their visas after entering the U.S.

In its report, the GAO also found the Department of Homeland Security did not institute timeframes for the new requirement and was five or more months passed statutory deadlines on Congressional reports.

While DHS concurred with the findings in the report, the agency said each country in the program has different capabilities and priorities and anticipates the timeline will vary by country. The estimated completion date is September 2016.

A DHS spokesman, in a statement to Fox News, also noted that the U.S. is still getting data from partner countries:

"The Department of Homeland Security is committed to ensuring that the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) continues to promote secure, lawful trade and travel with our best foreign allies. ... All 38 VWP countries share information with the United States that enhances our ability to detect and prevent terrorists or criminals from entering the country. The agreements referenced in the GAO report are designed to supplement pre-existing channels."

But the net result of the delays is a gaping hole in national security, according to Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan.

The administration has been saying Americans are more secure because of information sharing, but the program is worthless if its not being implemented, Vaughan told FoxNews.com. The deception exposes us in a way which is very dangerous.

The threat of terrorists exploiting the VWP is nothing new. Noted cases include those involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as the would-be 20th hijacker on 9/11 and attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid.

According to 9/11 final report, for terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons.
If you are hoping to meet an alien then you may be in for a very long wait, according to astronomers at Cornell University.

The experts say that it could be 1,500 years before alien contact with Earth and will present their research at the American Astronomical Societys meeting in San Diego Thursday.

We havent heard from aliens yet, as space is a big place  but that doesnt mean no one is out there, said Cornell student Evan Solomonides, who will present the research paper, in a statement.

Related: Real-life 'X-Files'? CIA posts trove of UFO documents

The astronomers research is based partly on deconstructing the Fermi Paradox described by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, when he noted that aliens have had plenty of time to make contact with Earth. The Cornell experts paired this analysis with the Mediocrity Principle devised by 16th-century mathematician Copernicus, which says that Earths physical attributes are not unique and that natural processes are likely common throughout the cosmos, so it could take a while for aliens to discover us. The resulting equation gives a 1,500-year estimate for contact.

Its possible to hear any time at all, but it becomes likely we will have heard around 1,500 years from now, said Solomonides. Until then, it is possible that we appear to be alone  even if we are not. But if we stop listening or looking, we may miss the signals. So we should keep looking.

The research paper A Probabilistic Analysis of the Fermi Paradox is co-authored by Yervant Terzian, Cornells Tisch Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy.

Related: 'Laser cloak' could hide Earth from evil aliens

The Cornell researchers explain that extraterrestrials could receive radio and TV signals from Earth, which have been travelling from our planet for the last 80 years. Aliens, however, would likely find these transmissions indecipherable, according to Solomonides, who says they would need to decode the light waves into sounds, then parse 3,000 human languages to interpret the message.

Despite these challenges, the scientists say that Earths broadcast signals have reached every star within about 80 light years from the Sun  about 8,531 stars and 3,555 earthlike planets. Our Milky Way galaxy alone contains 200 billion stars, they note.

The astronomers suggest that Earth might encounter an alien civilization when around half of the Milky Way has been signaled in 1,500 years.

Related: 2015 was a big year for Canadian UFO sightings, report says

This is not to say that we must be reached by then or else we are, in fact, alone, said Solomonides. We simply claim that it is somewhat unlikely that we will not hear anything before that time.

David Kipping, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the research, told FoxNews.com that the search for alien life is much broader than radio and TV signals, encompassing, for example, the search for artifacts within and beyond our solar system.

The professor used the example of KIC 8462852, a distant dimming star in the constellation Cygnus, which sparked debate about a possible 'alien megastructure.'

Related: Alien megastructure? Dimming star may have less exotic explanation

Kipping describes himself as "agnostic" with regard to the possibility of alien life. "We don't have any evidence right now for extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy," he said.



Nonetheless, the search for alien life continues to fascinate. In April, for example, celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking joined forces with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and investor Yuri Milner in an ambitious plan for seeking life in outer space.

The $100 million project is aimed at establishing the feasibility of sending a swarm of tiny spacecraft, each weighing far less than an ounce, to the Alpha Centauri star system.

In January the CIA offered a peek into its X-files, shining a spotlight on a series of once-classified UFO documents. The UFO documents, which date primarily from the 1940s and 1950s, are among hundreds that the CIA declassified in 1978.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
Since the Andrea Doria sank 40 miles off the coast of Massachusetts 60 years ago, 16 divers have lost their lives trying to explore it, spurring one company to examine it in another, safer way: in a manned submersible.

The Christian Science Monitor reports new sonar imaging shows the "Mount Everest of shipwrecks" is far more deteriorated than anyone knew. "It looks so dramatically different," Stockton Rush tells the AP.

Rush's company, OceanGate, spent two days taking sonar images of the famous shipwreck. Those images were presented during a press conference Monday, reports the Boston Globe.

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Most noticeably, it appears a large chunk of the Andrea Doria's bow broke off sometime in the past two years. "Imagine it as a collapsing cave," Rush says.

"Once the cave loses its basic structure, it deteriorates very quickly." OceanGate planned to spend a week taking images of the shipwreck, but serious fog, winds, and waves forced the company to pack it in early.

It plans to return next year to continue the work and hopes to create a "virtual model" of the Andrea Doria wreckage to help divers navigate the ship as it continues to deteriorate.

OceanGate says such a model could save lives. Countless divers have risked death taking the 240-foot dive in freezing, fast-moving waters to explore the shipwreck, leading to the "Mount Everest" nickname.

Nearly 1,700 people were aboard the Andrea Doria, which was coming from Italy, when it collided with another boat and sank in 1956. Forty-six Doria passengers were killed.

(A diver disappeared while exploring the wreck last summer.)

This article originally appeared on Newser: 'Everest of Shipwrecks' Is in Bad Shape
A new frog mating position, only the seventh type ever observed, has been discovered in the monsoonal forests of India.

Bombay night frogs (Nyctibatrachus humayuni) mate by having the male straddle the female without grasping her, and releasing sperm over her back. The female then lays her eggs, allowing the sperm to run down her back and fertilize the eggs.

"Species such as the Bombay night frog, which are endemic to small regions (most often outside protected areas and threatened with anthropogenic activities), definitely require conservation prioritization," study leader Sathyabhama Das Biju, an amphibian researcher at the University of Delhi, told Live Science in an email. "Therefore, natural history studies not only provide necessary information for planning effective conservation strategies, but also highlight unique frogs, such as the ancient night frogs that exhibit highly diverse reproductive behaviors."

Related from LiveScience: See Photos of the Bombay Night Frogs in Mating Positions

Wet and wild

Bombay night frogs mate only during monsoon season nights, and only in the vegetation overhanging flooded forest streams in India's Western Ghats. This made fieldwork a "very challenging experience," Biju said. Researchers had to find the male frogs by listening for their calls and then standing in the fast-flowing streams with infrared camera equipment, trying to keep the electronics from getting rained on while they documented the frog sex.



Often, the frogs' attempts would end with the amphibians falling into the water. They usually returned to their original spots to finish mating, Biju said, but these interruptions stretch out the mating encounter by several wet, uncomfortable hours. "Various venomous snakes" share habitat with the frogs as well, Biju said.

The research team spent 8 hours a night for about 40 nights between 2010 and 2012 documenting the Bombay night frog nightlife. They successfully recorded 13 complete breeding sequences and multiple partial sequences to reveal the new mating position.

New straddle

Before these observations, researchers knew of six types of amplexus, the name for frog mating behavior. Very few frog species reproduce via internal fertilization; rather, most use the amplexus position (a male-female embrace) to release sperm and egg in close proximity for external fertilization. Most species use either inguinal amplexus (the male grasping in front of the female's back legs with his front legs) or axillary amplexus (the male grasping behind the female's front legs with his front legs).

Other options include "straddle" (the male's pelvis over the female's head), "glued" (the male stuck to the female's rump with abdominal excretions), "cloacal apposition" (male and female rear-to-rear, facing away from one another) and "cephalic" (male on top of female, front feet grasping her throat).

Researchers dubbed the new position the "dorsal straddle." It isn't clear whether this mating position offers advantages over any others; fertilization rates of inguinal amplexus (which evolved very early in frogs) and axillary amplexus are similar, Biju said, and more research is needed to determine the pros and cons of various positions.

"Since genus Nyctibatrachus represents an ancient group of frogs with [the] presence of several interesting forms of reproductive behavior, it would be all the more interesting to study how such diversity may have evolved within this group," Biju said.

In another first, the researchers videotaped snakes eating frog eggs  a phenomenon not before observed in India.

The researchers reported their findings today (June 14) in the open-access journal PeerJ.

Copyright 2016 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Wildlife conservation experts have announced that the number of gorillas has increased in one part of a national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, representing a spark of hope in a landscape of otherwise bad news about the large primates.

Experts from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), as well as the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature, found that in one section of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, gorillas increased to 213, up from 181 five years before.

The scientists found eight solitary male gorillas and 17 groups of gorillas in their count.

Related: Tiger population estimate sparks controversy

They were counting Grauers gorillas, a gorilla subspecies, and besides this spot, the news otherwise is not good. In fact, the decline of Grauers gorillas has been catastrophic, the WCS says: in the past two decades, the population has gone from 17,000 to only 3,800. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers this subspecies of gorilla to be "endangered."

The WCS blames this decline on the loss of the creature's habitat, mining for minerals like cobalt, hunting, and civil unrest.

Its that big picture that makes the news about the slight increase in one corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo all the more important, the WCS says.

Related: Watch this endangered monkey 'chat' with a camera

The results are very encouraging given the dire situation of the Grauers gorilla across its range and show that where there is sufficient investment this great ape can be saved from extinction, Richard Tshombe, the WCS country director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said in a statement. This shows what can be done if resources and political will are there to conserve gorillas.

Follow Rob Verger on Twitter: @robverger
A tourist from China was fined $1,000 for walking off a boardwalk at Yellowstone National Park and collecting thermal water, apparently for medicinal purposes, park officials said Wednesday.

A witness reported seeing the man break through the fragile, rock crust surrounding the Mammoth Hot Springs area. The witness took photos of the man that were turned over to park rangers, officials said.

The incident came only a week after an Oregon man died after falling into one of Yellowstone's hot springs.

The Chinese tourist told rangers he did not read the safety information given to him when he entered the park. The man, whose name was not released, reportedly wanted the water for medicinal purposes, said park spokeswoman Charissa Reid.

Reid said in an emailed response to questions about the case the "stiff fine" was levied in large part because of "the irreplaceable nature of the thermal feature."

The 2.2 million-acre park has seen a string of incidents over the past month where tourists got into trouble.

Some got too close to wildlife and several others walked off boardwalks near hot springs.

On June 7, 23-year-old Colin Nathaniel Scott of Portland slipped on gravel and fell into scalding, acidic water after leaving a boardwalk in the Norris Geyser Basin. Park officials were unable to recover his body.

A day after Scott's death, six people received $130-citations for walking off trail in the Grand Prismatic Springs area.

Park regulations require visitors to stay on trails and boardwalks for their own safety as well as to protect Yellowstone's natural resources. It is a violation of federal regulations to collect any park resources.
Following a problematic first year in operation, Malaysias first Islam-compliant airline has been banned from flying.

Regulators announced Monday they had permanently grounded Rayani Air, Malaysias first sharia-compliant airline, months after it was suspended from flying for breaching aviation regulations.

The airline made international headlines when it launched in December last year for operating flights according to strict tenants of Islamic law, such as banning alcohol and serving only halal-certified food, saying prayers before takeoff and requiring female flight crew to wear hijabs.

Non-Muslim passengers were welcome to fly with the airline but were forbidden from wearing revealing clothing.

In April, Malaysias Department of Aviation launched an inquiry into Rayani Air  which operates two Boeing 737-400s  following a string of complaints by passengers about flight delays and last-minute cancellations.

Then, the airlines pilots went on strike over unpaid wages, while more controversy followed when passengers complained theyd been handed handwritten boarding passes for Rayani Air flights, sparking security concerns.

Malaysia's Department of Aviation said this week Rayani Airs Air Operator Certificate had now been revoked.

The departments director-general Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said the government took that step because safety and security of the aviation industry is of paramount importance.

In a separate statement, the Malaysian Aviation Commission said the airline had breached the conditions of its Air Service Licence and lacks the financial and management capacity to continue operating as a commercial airline.

Passengers who have bought a ticket with Rayani Air and are now unable to fly can file a complaint with the airline and request a refund, the commission said.

Rayani Air was based in the Langkawi archipelago on Malaysias east coast and flew to the capital Kuala Lumpur and the northern city of Kota Bahru.

Bukti Boarding Pass Pakai Tulisan Tangan, Rayani Air Terancam Sanksi https://t.co/85AKbwt27A pic.twitter.com/KX5BQCy770  flightzona (@flightzona) April 7, 2016

It had been planning flights to Mecca for the Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages.

Rayani Airs founder Ravi Alagendrran said: The revocations came at the peak of our negotiations with investors for the acquisition of equity in Rayani Air on realisation that the present owners and their management are no longer fit to revive the airline."

The qualified and strong management team of its new investors would revive and manage the airline much better than us, he added.

The story originally appeared on news.com.au.
What can you say to a woman whose 20-year-old grandson has been shot dead by a madman? What can you do to help a grieving grandmother as she flies to Orlando to attend his funeral?

You can show compassion. You can say you care.

On Tuesday, Kelly Davis Karas, a JetBlue flight attendant was serving the grandmother of Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, one of the 49 people who were killed in the terrorist massacre at the Pulse nightclub on Sunday.

Today my dear friend Melinda and I had the sad privilege of attending to his grandmother on our flight as she made her journey to Orlando to join her family during this unspeakable time, Karas wrote on Facebook.

Knowing she was making this hard journey alone, JetBlue employees made sure to be at her side every step of the way.

But Karas and Melinda did much more than help the woman to her seat and stay comfortable during the flight.

I had the idea to pass around a piece of paper to everyone on board and invite them to sign it for this grieving grandmother, she wrote. I talked it over with Melinda and she started the process from the back of the plane. As we took beverage orders, we whispered a heads up about the plan as we went.

Halfway through, Melinda called me, Kel, I think you should start another paper from the front. Folks are writing PARAGRAPHS. So I did. Then we started one in the middle. Lastly, running out of time on our hour and fifteen minute flight, we handed out pieces of paper to everyone still waiting.

When the plane landed, there was much more than a single sheet of paper with a long list of signatures. Instead, Karas wrote, we had page after page after page after page of long messages offering condolences, peace, love and support.

And then, after Karas announced on the intercom, JetBlue stands with Orlando, and asked for a moment of silence in the grandsons memory, something even more amazing happened.

As we deplaned, EVERY SINGLE PERSON STOPPED TO OFFER HER THEIR CONDOLENCES, she wrote. Some just said they were sorry, some touched her hand, some hugged her, some cried with her. But every single person stopped to speak to her, and not a single person was impatient at the slower deplaning process.

I will never forget today. #Orlandoproud

JetBlue spokeswoman Morgan Johnston confirmed to CNN that the heartwarming story is real: "We can confirm that these are our crewmembers, and that the story appears to be an accurate account of one of our flights from yesterday morning."

Karas Facebook post has since been shared over 77,000 times.
June 15, 2016

Mr. Mark Zuckerberg

Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer

Facebook, Inc.

1601 Willow Road

Menlo Park, CA 94025

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:

The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is examining the June 12, 2016 terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida. It is my understanding that Omar Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content. I appreciate Facebooks support of the law-enforcement investigation into this attack and previous attacks. While Facebook is not a target of the Committees inquiry, I respectfully request your assistance with the Committees inquiry.

According to information obtained by my staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen. On June 12, 2016, Mateen apparently searched for Pulse Orlando and Shooting. Mateen also apparently posted America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state..I pledge my alliance to abu bakr al Baghdadi..may Allah accept me. He then posted The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west and You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance. In a final post, Mateen apparently wrote, In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa.

In addition, my staff learned that in May 2016, Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists and on June 4, 2016, Mateen apparently searched Baghdadi Speech. My staff has also learned that Mateen apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FBI searches, including searching for specific law enforcement offices.

As the Committee examines the attack and considers legislative proposals to address homegrown extremism, I respectfully request your assistance with the Committees inquiry given Mr. Mateens use of Facebook. I ask that you please provide all Facebook data on Mr. Mateens activities on his account and any affiliated Facebook accounts, including but not limited to activity logs, Facebook timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts. In addition, I request that appropriate company staff arrange a briefing with Committee staff on the information available to Facebook prior to and during this terrorist attack. Please provide this briefing and material as soon as possible but no later than 5:00 p.m. on June 29, 2016. When delivering production sets, please produce to Majority staff in room 340 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and to Minority staff in room 613 of the Hart Senate Office Building.

The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is authorized by Rule XXV of the Standing Rules of the Senate to investigate the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness of all agencies and departments of Government.[1] Additionally, S. Res. 73 (114th Congress) authorizes the Committee to examine the efficiency and economy of operations of all branches and functions of the Government with particular reference to (i) the effectiveness of present national security methods, staffing and processes.[2] For purposes of this request, please refer to the definitions and instructions in the enclosure.

Sincerely,

Ron Johnson

Chairman
In the hours after he blasted his way into an Orlando gay nightclub, and with his victims lying dead or wounded around him, Omar Mateen took to Facebook to pledge his loyalty to ISIS and threaten more attacks on the civilized world, a key lawmaker privy to the gunmans posts told FoxNews.com Wednesday.

Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded 53 inside Pulse early Sunday, died when a SWAT team stormed the club. But in the roughly four hours between his initial rampage and his death, the 29-year-old radicalized Muslim broadcast his twisted message of hate on social media, according to Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wisc.

CLICK HERE TO READ SEN. JOHNSON'S LETTER TO FACEBOOK

I pledge my alliance to (ISIS leader) abu bakr al Baghdadi..may Allah accept me, Mateen wrote in one post early Sunday morning. The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic state vengeance.

Mateens social media accounts were taken down before they could be widely viewed by the public, but Johnsons committee investigators have uncovered some or all of them. The senator has also written a letter to Facebook executives expressing concern about Mateens postings and asking for more information on his activities.

It is my understanding that Omar Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content, read Johnsons letter. According to information obtained by my staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen.

The posts uncovered by Johnsons committee shed light on Mateens actions in the hours that followed his 2 a.m. raid on the nightclub. Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer MCX rifle and a handgun, shot his way past an off-duty cop and sprayed bullets throughout the club, which was packed with more than 300 revelers when he arrived. Some escaped, many died or were wounded and scores more waited out the horrific ordeal, knowing each moment could be their last.

As survivors cowered in darkened rooms, praying and texting police and relatives, Mateen accessed his Facebook account to search for media reports, using search words such as Pulse Orlando and Shooting. An FBI source told FoxNews.com he also made 16 phone calls from inside the club after the bloody spree began. Investigators are tracking down each of the recipients of those calls.

Mateen proclaimed his hatred for Westerners in one Facebook post uncovered by Johnsons committee.

America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic state, Mateen wrote.

In his final post, Mateen made an ominous prediction.

In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa.

Besides looking for information on himself, Johnson noted Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the jihadist couple behind the Dec. 2 San Bernardino attack, used the search term Baghdadi Speech, and scouted for posts by local law enforcement and FBI, Johnson told FoxNews.com.

Johnson called on Facebook to hand over all information the company has on Mateen for review and to brief his committee on all of Mateens activity logs, Facebook timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts by June 29.

Facebook officials confirmed to FoxNews.com they have received Johnsons letter.
A Disney official said Wednesday the company plans to thoroughly review its alligator warning signage around a resort where a 2-year-old boy was killed by a reptile that snatched him out of shallow water.

The company official spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because Disney has yet to prepare a formal statement on the matter.

Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said his department and the state wildlife agency would look into the issues of warning signs around Seven Seas Lagoon at The Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, where Disney had posted no swimming signs but no warnings about the presence of alligators.

Dive teams on Wednesday afternoon were able to recover the body of the toddler completely intact. Demings said that the body was in water roughly six feet deep, 10-15 yards from the edge of the lagoon where the child had been wading Tuesday night.

The sheriff later identified the boy as Lane Graves, who was on vacation with his parents, Matt and Melissa Graves, and his four-year-old sister. They had traveled to Disney World from Elkhorn, Neb. The sheriff said he and a Catholic priest delivered the grim news to the family.

Sheriffs spokesman Jeff Williamson said at an early Wednesday morning news conference that the boy wasnt swimming in the water when the alligator snatched him.

The boy's father tried and failed to pry his son from the alligator's jaws, leaving him with cuts and scratches, Demings said. The parents quickly alerted a lifeguard, but the lifeguard was too far away from the scene of the attack to help the father.

Disney is now under fire for not warning visitors about the possibility of alligators in the lagoon that many vacationers visit on a daily basis.

According to WESH 2 News, only one alligator warning sign was spotted on the property and that was at a small pond. The station reported the sign read, "Do not feed or go near the alligators," along with a picture of an alligator and a snake.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Disney removes alligators from the water routinely.

"We definitely will work with everyone involved to try to determine if there's something we can learn, if we can do something better," agency director Nick Wiley said.

Wiley said witnesses estimated that the alligator was 4 feet to 7 feet long. One of the five gators that searchers removed from the water may have been responsible for the attack, he said.

Wildlife officials say the attack was a rarity in a state with a gator population estimated at 1 million. But it still shocked visitors in a city built on tourism.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Lanes death is the first alligator attack on Disney property since a reptile bit the legs of an 8-year-old boy at Disneys Fort Wilderness campground in 1986. The boy survived that attack.

The beach where the reptile grabbed the child is part of the luxury Grand Floridian resort, across the lake from Magic Kingdom. The lake, which stretches over about 200 acres and reaches a depth of 14 feet, feeds into a series of canals that winds through the entire Disney property.

Though Florida has grown to the nation's third-most populous state, fatal alligator attacks remain rare. Before Lane Graves' death, 23 people had been killed by wild alligators in Florida since 1973, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission statistics.

Disney beaches remained closed through Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The FBI on Wednesday called for the public's help in nabbing the state's "most prolific serial killer," who committed at least 12 homicides, 45 rapes and dozens of burglaries across the state in the 1970s and 1980s.

The FBI and Sacramento County officials announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the man known as the "East Area Rapist" and "Golden State Killer" who has eluded authorities for 40 years.

At a press conference Wednesday in Sacramento, authorities called him the "most prolific" serial killer in the state's history.

"The victims and their families deserve justice," FBI Special Agent in Charge, Monica Miller, told reporters.

The unknown man -- who authorities say is between 60 and 75 years old today -- began his brutal crime spree in the summer of 1976 by breaking into homes in Rancho Cordova and Carmichael, California, both suburbs of Sacramento.

The suspect -- described as a white male and approximately 5"10 with blonde hair -- would enter the homes by prying open a window or door while his victims slept. Once inside, authorities said the man would tie up couples and rape his female victim before taking small items from the home -- including coins, cash, identification and jewelry. Some victims reported receiving telephone calls from the suspect after the crimes.

Authorities said Monday the man mainly targeted single women -- many with children -- and young couples. His female victims ranged in age from 13 to 41, and he would often bring his own bindings with him, like shoe laces, officials said.

In 1978, his crimes turned deadly. The man shot and killed a young Sacramento couple, Brian and Katie Maggiore, while they were walking their dog in Rancho Cordova. Evidence left at the scene pointed to the East Area Rapist, officials said. After the murder, the suspect committed rapes in Stockton, Modesto, Davis, and the East Bay Area of California.

Between 1979 and 1981, he raped and murdered several people, including couples, in Southern California, according to the FBI. These victims were tied up in the same manner as the Sacramento area rapes and their homes were also ransacked.

After July of 1981, no additional incidents related to the East Coast Rapist and Golden State Killer were reported until the rape and murder of 18-year-old Janelle Lisa Cruz in Irvine, Calif., in May of 1986.

Cruz's murder was the last known crime related to the Golden State Killer.

Authorities also said Monday that the unknown man may have had an interest or training in military or law enforcement techniques as he was familiar and proficient with firearms.

The digital media campaign launched Wednesday includes a webpage as well as digital billboards throughout the country.

Anyone with information on the Golden State Killer is urged to call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or submit information to the FBI's online tip line.

FoxNews.com's Cristina Corbin contributed to this report.
Federal investigators continued Wednesday to methodically retrace Orlando terrorist Omar Mateens recent activities and contacts, while zeroing in on his wife, who may have known about her husbands evil plan well before he burst into a gay nightclub in Orlando and killed 49 people.

Although a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida would neither confirm nor deny that a grand jury has already begun investigating the case, an FBI source told FoxNews.com on Tuesday that a panel was already targeting Noor Salman, 30. Veteran federal prosecutors said that would be consistent with expected procedure.

In terms of the wife, she could be charged with aiding and abetting, being a co-conspirator, or making false statements to federal investigators, depending on what she did, said John Malcolm, director of the Heritage Foundations Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. For example, if she knew her husbands plans and was with him when he purchased the firearms, helped him to scope out the joint, covered up evidence or lied to investigators about what she knows, that could lead to an indictment.

If charges are brought, the indictment could remain sealed for a period while the grand jurys investigation expands to other possible co-conspirators, said Malcolm, who also is a former Justice Department attorney.

Federal prosecutors could keep a grand jury open for weeks or months, using the investigative body as a way to gather evidence and subpoena witnesses who must testify under oath, Malcolm explained.

Once prosecutors indict someone, the investigative phase of their case is over, so sometimes prosecutors delay bringing an indictment to keep their investigation going, Malcolm said, noting that if Sundays terror attack at Orlandos Pulse nightclub was part of a larger terror plot, the scope of the probe could grow.

If Salman drove her husband to the scene so he could scout targets, or accompanied him to purchase firearms, knowing of his plans, then under federal law, she is just as guilty as he is of the crimes, even though she didnt pull the trigger, law enforcement sources explained.

Though officially federal law enforcement spokespeople have refuse to say what might happen to Salman, an FBI source told FoxNews.com that Salman could be charged as though she committed 49 murders and 53 attempted murders, as her husbands co-conspirator.

Although Salman, who has not spoken to reporters and is in an unknown location, reportedly is cooperating with federal investigators, law enforcement is closing in on Salman and her history with her husband, who committed the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

They also are interviewing her family members, including her mother and sisters, who still live in Salmans childhood home in Rodeo, Calif., in addition to neighbors and other associates. The Associated Press reported that three FBI agents visited Salman's family home Tuesday and spoke with her mother.

Salman, whose family is originally from the Palestinian Territories, was married twice, the first time in a marriage arranged by her parents in their homeland. She wed Mateen on Sept. 29, 2011, after meeting him online. They have a 3-year-old son.

Marriage documents held by the Contra Costa County Recorder's office show Salman was born in the U.S. to parents who became naturalized citizens in 1984. She has three sisters.

Mateen also was previously married. His first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, married Mateen in 2009 after meeting him online.

Yusufiy told reporters that Mateen was mentally unstable and abusive. She said she left him shortly after their marriage, but did not formally divorce him until June 21, 2011.

Legal analysts say if charges are brought against Salman, her defense team could try to claim she was controlled and abused by Mateen or invoke spousal privilege  even though her husband is dead. But those arguments would be tough to make if her level of involvement proves substantial, and an indictment on charges that could potentially carry the death penalty my make her more willing to keep cooperating, legal experts said.
A former Miss North Dakota was found dead Tuesday in her Minneapolis home.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that police were called to Samantha M. Edwards' home at around 7:30 a.m. and discovered her body.

Edwards, 37, was crowned Miss North Dakota USA in 2003.



Investigators are waiting on the Hennipin County Medical Examiner's Office to determine the cause of her death, Minneapolis police spokesman John Elder said.

KMSP-TV reported that the cause of Edwards death is still under investigation. Police havent named any suspects in the case.

The Miss USA and Miss Teen USA organization sent their condolences to Edwards family in a Facebook message.

Edwards family and friends setup a GoFundMe page to help out with the funeral expenses. The page has raised more than $17,000 as of early Thursday.

(She) was one of the most vibrant, crazy, compassionate, loyal balls of energy you could ever come across in life, Jessica Dereschuk, one of Edwards friends, said on a GoFundMe page.

A conversation with her could either leave you full of adrenaline or utterly exhausted. She was a spitfire and with Sami you never knew what she'd throw your way - but you always knew she would be there for you. She was awesome like that, she added.

Click for more from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Legal experts have some unsolicited advice for Disney World, where an alligator pulled a toddler to his death Tuesday: Settle with the boy's family, and do it fast.

The Orlando, Fla., theme park's reputation as a carefree and family-friendly destination was shattered when 2-year-old Lane Graves was killed in a shallow lagoon near his family's resort rental. The tragedy left parents Matt and Melissa Graves, of Elkhorn, Neb., heartbroken and the iconic company, experts say, dealing with a legal nightmare.

"They knew about the alligators. They had reports from employees concerned about the alligators and yet they did nothing," said attorney Michael Steinger of the Florida-based law firm Steinger, Iscoe & Greene. "When you know of this danger and you fail to take action  and more so you invite guests to come to that beach to watch a movie on the sand  you have to take responsibility for the inherent danger on the lake that youre aware of."

The artificial lake at Disneys Grand Floridian Resort and Spa, where the Nebraska family was staying, covers 200 acres and is home to an unknown number of Florida's 1.3 million alligators.

While wildlife officials say alligator attacks on people are not common, the resort did not post any gator warnings in the immediate area where the boy died -- only "no swimming" signs near the lagoon.

Legal experts say the lack of warning and mechanisms in place to keep alligators away from guests could create enormous liability for Disney, which attracts 55 million visitors per year.

"A simple no swimming sign doesnt cut it, in light of knowing theres wild animals and children on the property with no way to defend themselves," said Florida personal injury lawyer Nicholas Gerson.

"They [Disney] were negligent based on a potential failure to warn and failure to act reasonably under the circumstances," Gerson said.

"Its certainly a huge damages case and one that Disney is going to want to deal with privately," added Gerson. "How do you put a number on a childs life?"

Disney said in a statement that all employees at the most populated theme park in the world were devastated by the "tragic accident."

Our thoughts are with the family. We are helping the family and doing everything we can to assist law enforcement," said Jacquee Wahler, vice president of the Walt Disney World Resort.

In the wake of the boy's death, the resort removed and killed five alligators from the lake. According to reports, Disneys policy is to monitor the size of the gators in that lagoon, with those exceeding four feet targeted for removal. A spokesman was not immediately available to comment Thursday on the policy.

Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News' senior judicial analyst, said Disney will likely attempt to quietly settle the matter out of court -- though a lawsuit has not yet been filed.

"Disney does not want to litigate this. Disney, which portrays itself as the most family friendly major resort corporation on the planet, would like to settle this case," Napolitano said. "When you invite someone onto your property for the purpose of conducting a commercial transaction with you, you -- the property occupier -- have the highest duty of care to that person under the law."

"That means to warn them about all known or likely dangers and to protect them for all known or knowable dangers," he said.

Napolitano also said that Disney's insurance carrier will "really be on the hook."

"The insurance carrier will inspect the land and probably order changes before the litigation ever happens," he said, adding that post-accident changes to enhance safety cannot be used against a defendant to prove wrongdoing.

"If Disney is self-insured, then their own internal people are going to say, 'We have to fix this right away because we have a death problem, an image problem and soon a market share problem if people are afraid to come to our hotel,'" said Napolitano.

Mark Bederow, a New York-based attorney, said Disney may not have taken the appropriate measures -- like posting signs or installing barricades -- because that "might lessen the 'magical experience' of Disney."

But, Bederow said, "Expect major adjustments in Disney policy and for Disney to settle this as quickly and quietly as they can with a very large check."
At least 75 dogs were rescued from a Michigan home over the course of two days after a neighbor complained of constant barking and a foul odor, authorities said.

The St. Clair County Sheriff's Animal Control Division initially responded Tuesday to the home in Cottrellville Township, about 50 miles northeast of Detroit. The homeowner let them into the house, where the county's animal control officer and two deputies found the dogs covered in urine and feces.

"I can't recall in the last almost 30 years, 75-plus dogs free roaming in the first floor of a house," St. Clair County Sheriff Tim Donnellon told WXYZ. "That's new for us."

The Times Herald of Port Huron reported that around 55 dogs were removed on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the animal control officer returned to the home to remove the remaining dogs, but was initially denied entry. Animal control officers and sheriff's deputies returned with a search warrant late Wednesday afternoon.

The dogs removed from the house include Norwegian buhunds and norrbottenspets, and Norwegian spets mixes.

Authorities initially said the residents of the house had moved to Michigan from Colorado in the home of breeding the dogs for sale. However, Donnellon said the residents were breeding, showing and rescuing the dogs, but were not selling them.

No charges have yet been filed in the case, though Donnellon said the investigation into what he called "inhumane" conditions was ongoing.

"I thought maybe they had 15 dogs and I'm shocked to learn now they had over 70, saidn neighbor Greg Bosel, who made the initial complaint. "I just found out shortly ago and it's mind boggling. The home is not that big."

The Times Herald reported that some were taken to the county animal shelter. The Colorado-based Norwegian Buhund Club of America arranged temporary housing for others.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from The Times Herald.
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez declared a state of emergency Wednesday as a wildfire in a mountain range raged with no containment.

According to KOAT-TV, Martinez has placed the National Guard on standby and ordered state agencies to help local officials in the affected areas. Fire officials have urged the Chilili area to evacuate ahead of the quickly-spreading inferno.

The wildfire started in the Manzano Mountains Tuesday and has already burned about 2,000 acres.

New Mexico is fighting the fire with two 20-person hotshot crews, 4 helicopters, 2 lead planes, 1 air attack, 6 single engine air tankers and 6 larger air tankers, according to KOAT-TV.

The Torrance County Sheriffs Office ordered voluntary evacuations once the fire started to move. About 50 homes have already been evacuated.

The U.S. Forest Service said its unclear how many structures the fire as consumed.

Fire crews were having trouble fighting the flames Tuesday because the inferno was moving too fast. Officials are hoping that the fire line holds and that air attacks would be able to stop the fire from spreading so quickly.

Residents in the area are worried that the fire will continue to spread.

"The fire is not that far from our property. It's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 4 miles. It's really deceiving," Ryan Steffens told the TV station. "I think that this thing is definitely close enough that I need to keep tabs on it."

Some residents have livestock and land in the region. Manuel Urban told KOAT-TV that his family was ready to move, along with his livestock, should the fire threaten his land.

"The only thing I'm worried about is the wind, because if it picks up, then there's nothing that is going to stop that fire," Urban said.

Officials have directed residents to Facebook for information on the Dog Head fire.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, the cause of the fire has yet to be determined. Forest Service spokeswoman Arlene Perea said they will investigate once the fire calms down.

Click for more from KOAT-TV.
Authorities in California are investigating a Craigslist ad that threatened to carry out an Orlando-style massacre in San Diego.

10News reported that a viewer discovered the advertisement in the men-seeking-men section of the Craigslist San Diego personal ads, took a screenshot of it and sent it to the station.

According to the station, the post is title We need more Orlandos (sic), and is accompanied by a hand firing a weapon.

"Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name. Those people were walking diseases, bug chasers, and thank god for AIDS and 9-11 and now Orlando. San Diego you are next, the post read.

10News forwarded the screenshot to the San Diego Police Department and the FBI.

San Diego police Lt. Scott Wahl said the department will investigate the ad. Wahl said that police have extra police officers on patrol in place where people are known to gather in wake of the Orlando massacre.

FBI Special Agent Darrell Foxworth told the station that the bureaus Joint Terrorism Task Force is also investigating the post. He said law enforcement officials will band together to find out who made the threat.

"This is something that's very serious, very concerning to all of us, especially given what's happened recently in Orlando," Foxworth added.

He also told 10News that federal authorities receive thousands of similar complaints across the country.

"We are going to use all lawful means available to us, so if we have to go out and get a search warrant, we will do that. If it doesn't require a search warrant, we're going to do whatever it takes to do it in a lawful and legal matter," he explained.

Foxworth insisted that there are no known credible threats to San Diego.

According to Fox 5 San Diego, Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman echoed Foxworth in saying there no known threats to San Diego.

The San Diego Police Department is aware of (the) recent post on Craigslist (which) has since been removed, she said. We are investigating collaboratively with our law enforcement partners. The latest information remains (that) there are no known credible threats to the San Diego region.

Omar Mateen murdered at least 49 people and wounded 53 more at Pulse nightclub in Orlando early Sunday in the worst mass shooting in modern American history.

Click for more from 10News.
Employees at a Florida gun shop declined to sell Orlando nightclub terrorist Omar Mateen bulk ammunition last month after seeing him engage in suspicious behavior, according to a published report.

Staff at Lotus Gunworks of South Florida, located in Jensen Beach near Mateen's home, told The Wall Street Journal that Mateen had also asked for heavy-duty body armor of a type typically used by law enforcement. The store does not sell body armor.

Robbie Abell, the store's co-owner, said that Mateen spoke on the phone in a Middle Eastern-sounding language and was repeatedly texting on his phone.

"[He] just seemed very odd, Abell told the Journal. The questions he was asking were not the normal questions a normal person would be asking."

Employees eventually turned Mateen away.

"If something is suspicious, its our discretion, Abell said. We are the gatekeeper."

Federal investigators say that in the week before he murdered 49 people at the Pulse nighclub in Orlando, Mateen visited another gun shop, where he purchased a pistol and a .223 SIG Sauer semiautomatic rifle.

The Journal also reported that Mateen had been kicked out of a training academy for would-be corrections officers in 2007 after he allegedly threatened to bring a gun onto the academy's campus.

One former cadet said Mateen referenced the 2007 shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, in which 32 people were killed, and said "something like that could happen here in the academy class."

Another former classmate told the Journal Mateen threatened to shoot his classmates after his hamburger touched pork at an academy cookout. That classmate, Susanne Coburn Laforest, said Mateen "flipped out", told people not to laugh at him, and said "he was going to come back and shoot us."

However, representatives of the school and the local sheriff's office said they had no record of any disciplinary actions involving Mateen.

Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.
Despite Donald Trump's claim this week that the Muslim community has failed to report terror threats, U.S. officials said Muslims have relayed critical tips to investigators time and time again.

I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things, Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Dept. and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, told Reuters. What we say to communities is that we dont want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behavior.

In addition, the FBI described its relationship with the Muslim community as robust, according to a spokesman for the bureau's Washington field office. FBI agents in the area reportedly have received a string of tips from Muslims about suspicious activity.

One day after the massacre at Orlando's Pulse Nightclub that left at least 49 people dead and more than 50 others wounded, Trump spoke to CNN about the attacker linked to the Islamic State terror group. For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this, Trump said.

Reuters found numerous court records that showed Muslims reporting threats in recent years, some from within their own families.

One example: Amani Ibrahim, who warned law enforcement about her own son, 17-year-old Ali Amin. He was sentenced last summer to more than a decade in prison for conspiring to support ISIS after investigators found that he helped a classmate travel to join the terror group.

Speaking at a news conference, FBI director James Comey said Muslims do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

Click for more from Reuters.
In 2013, Olga Kay had five YouTube channels, 550,000 subscribers and 50 million video views. She also had panic attacks.

I remember waking up and thinking, Oh God. I have to make five videos today, she says. I was working non-stop but there was something in me that wasnt being fulfilled.

That something turned out to be socks with ears.

Kay had always been a sock enthusiast, but she could never find socks that felt alive and told a story. She posted a YouTube video showcasing sketches of socks with funny faces and floppy ears. A few minutes later, she had her first customer and a new business was born.

MooshWalks now sells tens of thousands of socks a year, she says, which can be purchased on her website, Amazon Exclusives and in 13 select stores across the U.S. So how did a former Ringling Bros juggler turned YouTube star, with zero business experience, become a sock mogul? Here she shares the secrets of her success.

1. Make the customer king (or queen).

When I started the company, I wanted it to have the best customer service. Now I have customers who come back seven or eight times because of it. Each design of MooshWalk socks is a different character with a name and backstory. I include a signed, personalized card so that my customers not only buy my product -- they adopt it. If someone has problem with their order, they get it handled right away. Sometimes I run specials where I sign the packaging of socks. I also try to engage with my customers individually on social media when I have time.

2. Mind the gaps.

Dont follow trends. You have to look at the industry that youre pursuing and figure out whats missing. How can you stand out? Where are the gaps? I didnt want to start another colorful sock company -- I wanted my socks to be unique. Nobody was creating socks with ears so I was able to fill a need people didnt even know they had. Find for your own gaps and fill them with awesomeness.

Related: Study: High-End Clothes Can Improve Your Performance

3. Learn to be lean.

Like most small entrepreneurs, I build my business from paycheck to paycheck. Whatever money I make, I invest right back into the company. So Ive needed to figure out creative ways to cut corners. Free marketing is one good way. Im lucky because I already have a fan base on social media to market to, but I also want to reach people who dont know me. To do this I give away a free pair of socks each month to someone who has joined my mailing list. Ive also set up an ambassador system that rewards my customers with free socks and coupon codes when they send business to my website.

4. Dream about your dream while youre awake.

When you wake up every morning, your first thought should be, What am I passionate about? How can I make my company better? If youre not passionate about your idea, maybe its not worth your time. Every morning I wake up thinking, What can I do that will make MooshWalks stand out and be different?

5. Listen to your customers.

You can learn so much from your customers. Try to meet and engage them as much as possible. For example, some of my customers told me that they couldnt wear my socks with skinny jeans, so I asked my manufacturer to make some pairs without the ears. Ive also learned a lot from potential buyers. Before I re-launched MooshWalks last year, I opened a pop-up shop in Los Angeles to see how strangers reacted to my socks. Talking to them, I realized I was focusing so much on my core audience of teen girls that I was neglecting other markets. Now youll find mom, dad and baby socks on my site.

Related: How an Unlikely Clothing Brand Is Sewing Up an Untapped Market

6. Share the love.

Ive learned that most successful business people are excited to share their knowledge, not withhold it. Thats why when people with drive and passion come to me with a business question, Im happy to give away all my secrets and tell them exactly what I do. True satisfaction for any human is to help someone else. It makes us feel like weve done a good deed. But its also good business. When I give other entrepreneurs a solution to a problem, Ill likely be the first person theyll want to help back.

7. Be everywhere.

Some people think you shouldnt sell your product in too many places for fear of oversaturating the market. I used to agree, and sold my socks exclusively on my website. Not anymore. Ive learned that different people shop in different ways. And if you can be there when theyre doing those things, you win

8. Reward your best customers.

Personally, I love rewards programs -- I like to spend money and get free money back. And Im not alone. My loyalty program has been very popular. If a customer buys a couple pairs of socks, she qualifies for free shipping. If she buys five pairs, she qualifies for 25 percent off. If she buys six pairs, she gets a free pair. People love to be rewarded for accomplishing something, and a loyalty program does just that.

Related: 6 Must-See Motivational YouTube Videos

9. Fail forward and never stop learning.

As a small-business owner, you will make so many mistakes and burn through a lot of money. Dont let it discourage you and give up. If you fall backward, its harder to get up. Fall on your face and youre one step closer to figuring out another way. I love failing -- it makes me smarter, stronger and more likely to get creative. At the start of my business, I lost money sending new socks to customers who said they didnt receive them. I quickly learned to set up a tracking system so that didnt happen again.

10. Have a reason why.

You need to have an answer to why youre starting a business. And it cant just be to make money. Your business will require 200 percent of your brainpower and, as in my case, a lot of your own personal savings so that you can constantly innovate. To keep you motivated, you have to be driven by a purpose. I grew up very poor in a small Russian village. I could never afford the latest fashion trends, so I made the best with whatever I had to work with. The reason I created MooshWalks was to give girls the ability to stand out and be unique. Thats my why.
Authorities in Southern California said Wednesday that a Navy SEAL had been arrested on suspicion of beating and stabbing a man to death about an hour after the two were involved in a fistfight.

Santa Monica police Lt. Saul Rodriguez said Theo Andrew Krah, 28, was arrested in San Diego Monday in connection with the unidentified mans death.

Rodriguez said officials were called to the Santa Monica Pier Saturday to break up a fistfight between Krah and the man at about 4 p.m. Nobody was arrested or injured, he said.

About an hour later, the other man was found dead about a half-mile from the pier, suffering from head trauma and multiple stab wounds, police said. The man died at 4:40 a.m. Sunday at a local hospital.

The Los Angeles Times reported the victim was a Santa Monica resident, but had no further information.

Rodriguez said Krah and the victim didnt know each other prior to Saturdays fistfight. Krah is currently being held on $2 million bail.

Krah enlisted into the military in 2012. Navy spokesman Zach Keating in San Diego told the LA Times that Krah was award a Korean Defense Service medal after his time in South Korea. He also earned a sea service deployment ribbon.

Keating was only able to confirm that Krah is a petty officer 2nd class assigned to a West Coast-based special warfare unit. The Naval Special Warfare Command is described as a small, elite force.

Keating said the Navy is cooperating with the Santa Monica police in the investigation.

The paper reported that Navys Crime Investigation Service has also launched a probe into Krahs arrest.

Click for more from the Los Angeles Times.
One man is missing and another man was injured after a boat collision Wednesday in a Vermont bay, authorities said.

Colchester police Lt. Doug Allen said two power boats collided on Malletts Bay at about 6:30 p.m.

Officials told the Burlington Free Press that there were four people on one boat and two on the second. The boat with four people sank, but they all made it back to shore.

The second boat was damaged, but didnt sink. One person on that boat was hurt and the other is still missing.

According to the paper, a U.S. Border Patrol helicopter and rescue personnel searched several hours for the missing man. One diver entered the bay, but wasnt able to find him.

Police said the crash was nothing more than an accident.

Police said search efforts will increase with more divers and boats Thursday morning.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Warren Buffett doesnt dole out advice to just any audience. Though he often gets invited to give remarks at colleges and universities, he saves his wisdom for addresses to small-business owners -- or those who aspire to become entrepreneurs.

At last weeks Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program graduation at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, N.Y., and again this week at the White Houses United State of Women Summit, Buffett offered his number-one tip for business success. At 85, the Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO has learned the value of quality customer service.

Related: Warren Buffett: 5 Things You Can Learn From the Man Who Invested $1 Billion in Apple

He also believes in the importance of women in business, which led him to speak at Tuesdays summit. Read on for Buffetts top pointer for young entrepreneurs, as well as other lessons hes learned over his career.

1. Hire women.

Buffett made the point that for much of Americas history, women did not have the same opportunities for work as men, which limited the nation from achieving its full potential.

It was like somebody playing with one hand tied behind their back, he said.

Growing up, Buffett says he was unsettled by the discrepancy between expectations for men and women. Buffett had two sisters, both of which were just as intelligent as him, and whom he joked had better personalities and better looks, but unlike him, they were expected to marry young -- and marry well.

Sixty years after noticing this unfair phenomenon, in 2003, Buffett was talking with his wife about whom he might hire for a new director role. His wife suggested a woman, Charlotte Guyman. He immediately agreed.

And I said, Bingo! Buffett said. I knew that the moment my wife said it, but it just hadnt gone through my head yet.

Buffett admitted that he had not immediately considered Guyman, mainly because she was a woman. He emphasized the importance of diverse perspectives in leadership.

We now have six women that each are CEO of an important company, he said of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. Of the younger crew of directors, three out of five are women. And therell be more.

2. Delight your customers.

When moderator Dina Habib Powell asked Buffett about the most important piece of advice for entrepreneurs, he underscored the difference between merely satisfying customers and delighting them.

If theres one thing to remember: Delight your customer, Buffett said. If they could write this on their mirror so that they saw it in the morning when they got up every day -- they could write it in Sharpie, they could write it in lipstick, they could write it in soap.

He noted that how much a product costs matters less than the service someone provides when selling it.

If youve been treated well and honestly, if youve been delighted by the person youre doing business with, youre going to return to that person, he said. You also have to treat the people who work with you well, because theyre your intermediaries many times to that customer. You want them to feel that same way.

Related: 5 Things Warren Buffett Does After Work

3. Have fun.

At 85, I tap dance to work every day, Buffett said. It isnt because theyve cut off my social security or anything, its because I get to do what I love with people I love, and it doesnt get any better than that.

Whenever Buffett meets with college students, he imbues them with this advice from his own (very fortunate) life.

I just tell them, find your passion, find the job that you would hold if you didnt need to have a job, so that every day is fun, Buffett said. Because if youre having as much fun as Im having at 85, and I hope you do, theres nothing like it.

Watch the video from the United State of Women Summit below. The panel featuring Buffett (along with small-business owners Carla Walker-Miller and Ayo Megbope) begins six hours and five minutes into the video.
Being an entrepreneur is challenging in many regards and one of them is managing the ups and downs that come from starting and running a business. It is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to become deflated or depressed and feel like they have nobody to turn to.

Since mindset and dealing with adversity is so critical to success, and given recent horrific events that have happened here in the U.S., I am compelled to share a very personal experience with you.

My senior year at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania was a grueling one, to say the least. I had been interviewing for investment banking and other jobs for about five months straight -- about 75 different companies in total -- before accepting, in mid-February 1995, an offer to work for investment banking firm Montgomery Securities after graduation.

So, when my boyfriend at the time, Justin, suggested that I join him and a few friends in Florida for spring break in early March, it didnt take me long to relay my answer: No way.

Related: 7 Traits That Will Help You Overcome Adversity

I was exhausted and all I wanted to do was go to my dads house in the north suburbs of Chicago and relax for a week. I was always independent and didnt feel the need to be attached to my boyfriend for Spring Break, so I sent him on his way to Florida with his friends and returned back to Chicago.

A few days into the break, the phone rang at my dads house. When I answered, a sketchy sounding man said that he was a detective and wanted to speak with my father. My dad wasnt home at the time, so I said that he wasnt available and offered to take a number. He wouldnt leave it.

A few hours later, he called back again and I got a distinct feeling that something was wrong. He grilled me on when my father would be available, but wouldnt tell me what the call was regarding or leave any contact information.

After another hour, the phone rang again. I was on edge, but this time I recognized the voice on the phone. It was Justins father.

Carol, he said. Justins been in a car accident.

My heart dropped into my stomach. Is he ok? were the first words that I could mutter.

No, he said. Hes been killed.

I cant remember a lot of what was said next, but learning that my 21-year old boyfriend of a year-and-a-half, as well as another friend, had been killed by an out of control driver on a vacation where, should I had made a different decision, would have very likely placed me in that very car was a life changing moment in every sense of the word.

You often cant control circumstances, but you can control how you react and respond to them.

To say that the days and weeks that followed were dark and bleak wouldnt begin to scratch the surface. I didnt know how I would pull it together and survive. But every day, I reminded myself that I did survive; I wasnt in that car.

You can say it wasnt meant to be for me in that car. You can say that my independence saved me. Nobody will ever know. But the why didnt matter. What mattered was what I learned and that I chose to move forward.

What doesnt kill you makes you stronger.

That was more than 20 years ago, but the lessons from that experience remain today. Since that time, I, in my life that I am sure appears amazing to many, have endured my mothers illness and death, my stepmothers illness and death, my fathers death and my own three-year battle with a debilitating illness. I have had people lie to me, steal from me, cheat me, harass me and treat me poorly for all sorts of reasons. But the one choice in every circumstance that remained mine and mine alone is the power to choose how to respond and how to carry on.

Related: 6 Principles for Overcoming Entrepreneurial Adversity

I have lived the mantra of getting knocked down seven times and getting up eight. That car accident didnt kill me, literally or figuratively, so I use that strength and the lessons learned from all of the other less-than-pleasant life moments to cope and find another way or path.

So, when things arent going well, no matter how difficult that moment in time may seem, I know that I can find a way to make it through. As the saying goes, no matter the situation, this too shall pass.

You can plan, but you cant plan for everything.

There is a Yiddish proverb that says, Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht, which in English translates to Man plans, God laughs. While I am a serious advocate of planning, circumstances are often out of your control. This means that you need to be flexible, adaptable and willing to pivot and deal with what comes to you, even if it comes out of left field.

Rely on yourself.

While its great to have partners, advocates and confidantes along the way, the only person you need to fully rely upon is yourself. You have no idea when someone that you depend upon may or may not be there, so dont put your success or your sense of self in someone elses hands. Use your resources and your network, but at the end of the day, its up to you to take care of yourself. Whether you like it or not, people will come in and out of your life- sometimes by choice, sometimes by the grace of God.

Related: 5 Things About Overcoming Adversity That Athletes Can Teach Entrepreneurs

I hope that the next time that you face an obstacle in business or life, that you are down or that you are going through your darkest days that my story and these lessons may provide some strength for you to carry on another day. If whatever issue you have faced has not killed you, let it make you stronger.
In The Business of Good, serial and social entrepreneur Jason Haber intertwines case studies and anecdotes that show how social entrepreneurship is creating jobs, growing the economy, and ultimately changing the world. In this edited excerpt, Haber explains why the generation born between 1980 and 2000 could be the most entrepreneurial people yet.

The entrepreneurial nature of the Millennial generation -- those born between 1980 and 2000 -- is stunning. Millennials have disregarded the life and career flowchart that was so formally laid out by the Baby Boomers. But Millennials arent keen on waiting. It isnt in their DNA. They dont wait for taxis, they take Uber. They dont wait for emails, they text. They dont wait to work up the corporate ladder, they start their own business. So it should come as no surprise that they have no interest in waiting to make a difference. They inherited a flawed world and have a zeal to repair it thats unique to their generation. Its as if the generation has been hardwired to believe in the fierce urgency of now.

Everything is about today. The moment. The instant. The Millennials are an on-demand instant-gratification generation that has become emboldened by technology and molded by world events. So if they dont wait for anything in their lives -- why should they wait when it comes to making a difference?

They shouldnt. And with social entrepreneurship, they dont have to. A study released in summer 2014 found that 94 percent of Millennials are interested in putting their skills to work to benefit a cause. More than half wished their employer had more programs engineered for giving back.

Millennials are all about engagement. This fact is reflected in their unique brand of activism. In the 1960s, for example, activism was about disengagement -- boycotts. Today, Millennials use the inverse approach -- buycotts. This generation will use their role as a consumer to make a point, philanthropist and investor Jean Case told me.

Some say theyve become the most prized (and perhaps feared) consumer group of all time, and their habits are surprisingly different from past generations. Consider the findings from the 2015 Millennial Impact Project:

84 percent of Millennials made a charitable donation in the past year, and 70 percent volunteered for a cause.

48 percent of Millennials have donated to a giving campaign promoted by their employer at some point.

Millennials are 27 percent more likely to donate to a cause if their manager does, but 46 percent more likely to donate if a coworker asks them to.

Millennial employees find value in using their pro bono skills for good. Most Millennial employees volunteer between one and ten hours a year.

77 percent of Millennial employees are more likely to volunteer if they can leverage their skills or expertise.

Millennials also want to know that their involvement means something. The Millennial Impact Project found that 79 percent of Millennial employees who volunteered through a company-sponsored initiative felt they made a positive difference.

This generation believes that profit and purpose can go hand-in-hand. Unlike previous generations, whose pursuits of money and excess are well documented, Millennials have far different goals. Its no longer simply about making money, and thats an extraordinary shift in thinking.

I think Millennials realize that money as a be-all and end-all doesnt equal happiness, Scott Harrison, founder of charity: water, told me. Scott would know. Almost all of his 80 percent domestic staff members are Millennials.

Millennials are known for turning down well-paid internships or jobs in favor of an opportunity that allows them to have a greater impact. Mathew Paisner, CEO of AltruHelp, a website that connects aspiring social entrepreneurs to local opportunities, noticed that 75 percent of his applicants were willing to decline Fortune 500 opportunities to instead join his venture. Its hard to imagine Generation Xers or Baby Boomers following the same course of action.

They wouldnt. No other generation would. But Millennials are different. The pioneering CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, is keenly aware their unique composure. When you look at the Millennials value system, what Millennials want, they want to have meaning in work, he said. They want to understand that the company theyre working for is not just building products and selling products.

We have had a chance to truly appreciate the link between the local and the global, says Alex Swallow, chief executive of the Small Charities Coalition, and a Millennial himself. At the global level, we are more likely to have traveled abroad, to have friends from other countries, or simply to have grown up with the internet for a core part of our lives. At the local level, we are more likely to have moved away from our communities. The social enterprise and charity sectors, I think, benefit from having people like this who have an understanding of the larger picture.

Time magazine labeled the Millennials The Me Me Me Generation. It sounded like a stinging indictment until you read the subtitle. They are narcissistic, overconfident, entitled, and lazy, but they just might be the new Greatest Generation.

Comparing any generation to the members of the Greatest Generation is a tall order. They waited on breadlines during the Great Depression, and held the lines at Omaha and in the Ardennes. The Greatest Generation has always been held up as the generational exemplar. For 70 years they were unmatched in their fortitude and in their achievements. Now, for the first time, a rival generation has emerged. The challenges it faces are completely different, but in many ways they are eerily the same. Both faced an uncertain and violent world, handed to them by their forefathers. Both had a strong faith that the best days for our country and for them lay in the future. And this new generation, the Millennials, has the verve to make an impact on the world larger than any generation that came before it.

While accepting his partys nomination for a second term in office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt looked out at the delegates and declared, Here is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

So, too, can it be said about Millennials. For this generation has its own rendezvous with destiny.
The Orlando shooter, we have learned, beat and abused his wife. President Obama tells us these are the acts of a mentally disturbed man and we must ramp up to keep it from happening again. The reality, however, is that the shooter's actions proved him to be a devout Muslim who abided by the teaching from the Quran on how one should discipline a disobedient wife.

The rest of the country, and especially Christians, are the true enemy, in the view of the left -- and the downtrodden must stick together through thick and thin.

The political left is once again manufacturing a false narrative to keep the public in the dark about Islamic terror. The latest example comes from the tragedy in Orlando and CNN news anchor Don Lemon. Lemon, as an openly gay member of the press corps, is in a position of power to lead the narrative about what happened at Pulse, when 49 members of the LGBT community were summarily executed by an adherent to Islam.

Hours after the shootings, Lemon said, "The shooter in Orlando is clearly someone who has distorted Islam."

Like others in the press and the LGBT community, he refused to call a spade a spade and instead opted for a "let's wait and see" attitude with regard to the killer. , with very few exceptions, has a propensity to view homosexuals and Muslims with the same lens -- both as persecuted populations in the United States. Posts charging that one must not call the attacker a Muslim because Islamophobia is as bad as homophobia are making the rounds online. Their view is clear: The rest of the country, and especially Christians, are the true enemy, and the downtrodden must stick together through thick and thin.

Why is it that the LGBT community never challenges Islam, but actually defends it, even after Sunday's massacre? While Islam's condemnation of LGBT people is in the strongest of terms -- no mosque will allow a gay marriage on its premises, no imam will ever officiate a gay marriage -- the reaction of the LGBT community is often a collective yawn. The penalty for engaging in homosexuality in Islam is not condemnation, or a refusal to bake a cake, but rather death in the most painful way possible. This is what true Islam looks like -- and it's not pretty.

It's time for a wake-up call to Mr. Lemon and others of his ilk. Omar Mateen was a Muslim. He followed the directives of Sharia to the letter. Not only did he kill homosexuals, but he did it in the manner Mohammed required: long, arduously, torturously. And while there are a number of different strains of Islam, many which publicly eschew violence, there is only one Sharia. These ancient laws that draw upon Islamic scripture have not changed. Nor has the violence contained within.

Mateen was not observing ISIS or al Qaeda directives when he murdered 49 people. He was exercising his duties as a Sharia-compliant Muslim. One can speculate about his reasoning in committing this horrific act, and my suspicion is that he was seeking absolution from a life that would be viewed by Islamic adherents as sinful. His only path to redemption was in carnage. That is the true nature of Islam -- the true nature which our president refuses to acknowledge. We continue, instead, on a course of political correctness, quite literally bowing in humility for even thinking that perhaps the problem lies within Islam itself.

Americans have bought the lie that we somehow must bow at the feet of those who wish to kill us. President George Bush did it a mere six days after this country was brought to its knees on 9/11. He prostrated himself at the local mosque and participated in a prayer service of a faith and an ideology which wants nothing less than our complete and utter destruction.

Now Lemon, the U.S. press, and gay rights groups throughout the country are bowing as well to the god of Islam. The "facts" as they see them have no basis in reality. The press, law enforcement, and the FBI continue the narrative that Mateen could not have perpetrated such an act without holding membership in ISIS, al Qaeda, or another militant group. They roll out imams, CAIR representatives, and the president himself to say that this was merely an act of hate that happened in a vacuum; that perhaps he was mentally ill; perhaps he was having a bad day; perhaps if he hadn't been allowed to purchase guns ... The nonsense goes on and on.

Mohammed said to kill homosexuals with no exceptions. "Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him." How is this unclear?

This ideology is perpetuated every day in Sharia-observant mosques throughout the country. In a jarring example, just a few miles down the road from Orlando in the suburb of Sanford, Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar told those at the Husseini Islamic Center in 2013 that the appropriate manner for dealing with homosexuals was to kill them, as that is the compassionate response. "Death is the sentence," he said. "We know there's nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence."

Omar Mateen was not a Christian. He was Muslim. He was not a conservative. He was a registered Democrat. Oh, how he let the left down!

But President Obama, Don Lemon, Hillary Clinton, and others tell us to wait and see. We should not be asking what happened to radicalize the Muslim that would make him do this. Instead, we should ask why we are determined to turn a blind eye to a full frontal assault.

Where does let's wait and see get us? With 9/11, we said wait and see. The Boston bombings came and went. Let's wait and see. Fort Hood. Chattanooga. San Bernardino. Orlando. "Let's wait and see." These are all acts of Islamic terror perpetrated on American soil, in most cases by American Muslims.

What more does one need to see before we look our enemy full in the face and demand that the messages of Sharia and violent jihad no longer be taught in Islamic centers and mosques? What more has to happen before President Obama and Hillary Clinton stop telling the American public to close its eyes and ignore what the killer plainly announced to the authorities -- an allegiance to Allah and the Islamic State?

The facts don't fit neatly into the agenda of the left. Omar Mateen was not a Christian. He was Muslim. He was not a conservative. He was a registered Democrat.

Oh, how he let the left down! He wasn't at all what they needed him to be.

These acts of terror are not a hijacking of Islam from the peaceful religion that it was designed to be. Rather, these acts are the true face of Islam, and until we acknowledge it for what it is, we will continue to be the victims who bow at the feet of our attackers.

Mark Christian, M.D., is the founder and executive director of the Global Faith Institute and is an Egyptian emigre to the United States and a convert to Christianity. His father and uncle remain high-ranking leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his former home of Cairo.
A man verbally attacked a mother for publicly breastfeeding her baby inside a Connecticut Target store, and video of the encounter went viral, Fox-61 reported Tuesday.

Video of the Monday outburst was posted online by Jessie Maher, who was sitting in the cafe section of the Torrington, Conn. store, feeding her young child around 11:30 a.m.

Before she began filming, a man stared at Maher and called the public breastfeeding [expletive] disgusting, Maher wrote on Facebook.

Cant you do that somewhere else? the unidentified man angrily asked Maher, she wrote.

Maher, of Canton, Conn., said she told the man she had the right to breastfeed her child and that he should walk away.

In the video, the man asks a Target employee for a refund after witnessing Mahers breastfeeding, later accusing the mother of being disrespectful.

Because Im feeding my baby, this man is going crazyand Im shaking, Maher can be heard saying quietly.

Another customer soon comes to Mahers aid, telling her that feeding her baby is a beautiful moment.

A line of Target employees later separate Maher from the man. One employee gestures toward the man, apparently asking him to leave.

Connecticut law protects women who choose to breastfeed in public. Target corporate policy also allows for breastfeeding in their stores.

The video recorded 2.5 million hits as of Tuesday morning.

Torrington is located 30 miles west of Hartford.
Escalating Russian and Syrian regime air attacks and a virtual cut-off of supplies to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo are threatening to make the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II even more disastrous, according to aid groups, many of which believe the United Nations has been siding with President Bashar al-Assad at the expense of hundreds of thousands of starving citizens.

Aleppo, the biggest center of resistance to the Assad dictatorship, is facing hundreds of air attacks and is almost encircled by hostile forces. Bombings and assaults have apparently also increased substantially in other besieged areas where, according to the United Nations, a trickle of aid supplies have finally gotten through, after months and even years of U.N. inaction.

While the violence escalates, frustrations are rising with those long-ineffectual U.N.-led efforts to get little more than a token amount of aid to a million already-besieged Syrians, who are mostly surrounded by Assad regime forces, as U.N. sponsored peace talks remain in a diplomatic coma.

Increasingly, Syrian aid organizations are charging the U.N. with taking sides with the Assad regime in the five-year-old conflict, delivering the vast bulk of its billions in humanitarian aid only to government-controlled areas and letting the regime have an effective veto over aid deliveries outside its zone of controla conclusion that has been echoed in the U.N.s own internal evaluations.

For its part, the U.N. is starting to claim that the long period of blocked aid supplies inside contested areas of Syria is starting to end.

At a brief press briefing yesterday, U.N. Deputy General Jan Egeland declared that supply convoys have recently reached 15 of 18 areas considered by the U.N. as besiegedothers consider more than 40 to be in or near that conditioncalled it a big step forward, compared to two out of 15 throughout 2015. The U.N., he said, hopes to reach the remainder either partially or fully, either once or several times, in coming days.

At the same time, Egeland acknowledged that we are acutely aware that it is partial delivery. Medical supplies, especially surgical equipment and burn equipment, were still being removed from shipments, he saidand most importantly, not a single siege has been lifted on our watch.

Things are getting worse, asserted Valerie Szybala, executive director of the Syria Institute, a non-partisan think tank studying the conflict, who told Fox News that increased attacks on long- beleaguered Syrian communities were a sign they were being punished for the few U.N. aid deliveries that had recently gotten through.

Szybala pointed to the southern community of Daraya, cut off from food and medical assistance for four years by the Syrian regime, which finally received a U.N. aid convoy on June 9. Daraya has since been hit, she said, by some 60 Syrian regime barrel bombs per day.

A new Siege Watch report jointly sponsored by Szybalas organization and a Dutch peace group, Pax, among other things charges that the without international action to break, de-escalate, or seek criminal accountability for the sieges being waged against civilians in Syria, the numbers affected will continue to grow.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SIEGE WATCH REPORT

Certainly that was looking more likely in Aleppo, where some 300,000 civilians opposed to the regime could be trapped by the tightening encirclement, according to Syrian medical workers, and casualties are mounting.

Military experts consulted by Fox News note that the latest Russian and Syrian regime assaults on the pro-resistance sections of the city are not leaving any escape corridors for civilians to flee the violence, as they have at other locations in the past.

They are setting conditions for the full encirclement of the city, said Genevieve Casagrande, an analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a tactic that her colleague, Jennifer Caffarela, put down to the rag-tag capabilities of Assad regime ground forces, which have a difficult time reclaiming urban territory.

At the same time, the ISW analysts saw Russian warplanes as taking an increasingly aggressive role in the Aleppo campaign. In the past, observed Casagrande, the Syrian regime has targeted civilian targets because they did have the ability to be precise. The Russian forces have that ability, and they are precisely targeting civilians.

Indeed, aerial attacks and bombs are targeting everything alive in the city, according to Dr. Osama Abo El Ezz, General Surgeon and Aleppo Coordinator of the Syrian American Medical Society, who spoke to journalists earlier this week at a teleconference arranged by the U.S.-based humanitarian organization Mercy Corps.

Any assembly for civilians, be it a market, a street market, a school, is a direct target, El Ezz said, adding that hospitals and community centers have also been struck.

In all, El Ezz and two medical colleagues on the teleconferenceone of them had just emerged from performing surgery at an underground facility in Aleppoclaimed that some 600 air assaults, including nearly 300 air-to-ground rocket attacks, had taken place in the previous week, leaving 47 dead, including women and children. Many more have severe injuries that leave them unlikely to survive.

They described a situation of unremitting agony, where only three trauma centers and two other hospitals, staffed by no more than 25 doctors, remain to deal with the carnage, where decisions to let victims die of their wounds are made on the spot, and where basic utilities, like electricity, are lacking.

Since the Russian intervention and the continued Russian shelling of Aleppo, the nature of injuries has worsened dramatically, said El Ezz. This might be because of the nature of the weaponry that the Russian airforce is using in their shelling and attacks. Most of the injuries are usually multiple injuries.

At least two of the hospitals were also attacked in the past week alone, according to a doctor in Aleppo, known only by the pseudonym of Abdulaziz and described as research director of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organization.

If this continues like this we [will] run out of all of hospitals inside our city, Abdulaziz said.

All of the medical workers agreed that Russian as well as Syrian air forces were involved in the deliberate civilian attacks, although they could not offer specific examples.

The concern about deliberate targeting is now so great, the medical workers said, that hospitals no longer provide their location coordinates to United Nations humanitarian coordinatorsa method formerly used to guarantee they would not be struck in bombing raids.

Every time we think that the situation in Syria cant get worse were proven wrong, declared Andrea Koppel, Mercy Corps vice president of global engagement and policy, who chaired the teleconference. Mercy Corps normally provides assistance to some 570,000 people monthly in Syria, including about 75,000 in Aleppo.

She called for unfettered and sustained access for humanitarian organizations everywhere in Syria to carry out their relief work--but something like the very opposite seemed in the cards, certainly in Aleppo.

In fact, Koppel said, last week we sent in 31 trucks of humanitarian aid into northern Syria but we werent able to send a single one into Aleppo city. A combination of the Russian and Assad regime air attacks and anti-tank weapons have meant that relief convoys no longer can travel the road to the city without assault.

According to Assaad al Achi, executive director of Baytna Syria, a Danish supported civil society movement, nothing bigger than a small car can make the trip, and even then, drivers call the last remaining major road into Aleppo the road of death.

(Mercy Corps officials said, however, that they had managed to stockpile perhaps a months worth of food supplies in Aleppo in advance of the supply cutoffbut that would only be for 75,000 people.)

Whats happening in Aleppo is a source of shame for the international community, summarized El Ezz.

Increasingly, Syrian aid organizations that oppose the regime, and a number of their international counterparts, feel that what is happening ought to be a source of shame for the U.N.

In a report released yesterday, a coalition of 58 Syrian organizations specifically called out the world organization for a serious breach of the humanitarian principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality in its Syrian operations, due to its excessive kow-towing to the Assad regime.

Among other things, they charged the world organization with low-balling the number of people in besieged areas around the country who needed humanitarian aid, and of knuckling under to regime threats that it would end permission for U.N. operations to continue in Syria if it did not follow regime orders on where to deliver humanitarian assistance and where to ignore humanitarian needs.

Early attempts to bypass the Assad regimes refusal to allow humanitarian aid to be channelled anywhere except through the capital, Damascus, their report says, were actively opposed by parts of the U.N.

CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT

Even though U.N. officials often cited safety concerns in failing to send aid to towns where the regime opposed delivery, the report notes, the U.N. has driven through towns that have not received aid in months in order to deliver aid to other towns.

The Syrian organizations urged Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to draw a line with the Assad regime to focus on the impartial delivery of aid to those most in need. Failing that, the report recommended that the U.N. should withdraw from cooperation with the Syrian government.

Instead, it looked like the regime and its sponsors were redrawing the battle lines to deprive additional tens of thousands of Syrian civilians of humanitarian support.

George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter: @GeorgeRussell or on Facebook.com/George Russell
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Britain's Press Association reports Labour lawmaker Jo Cox has been injured in a shooting near Leeds.

The PA was quoting eyewitness Hithem Ben Abdallah as saying Cox got involved in a scuffle between two men in the village of Birstall on Thursday. Abdallah said one of the men was fighting with Cox and then a gun went off twice and "she fell between two cars and I came and saw her bleeding on the floor."

After around 15 minutes, the shop owner said emergency services arrived and tended to her with a drip.

Police say a "serious incident" has taken place, but didn't immediately identify the victim or provide any more details.

Cox's assistant confirmed to the PA she had been attacked.
The Graves family left an upscale Omaha neighborhood for a relaxing vacation at a Disney resort in Orlando when tragedy struck.

Lane Graves, the youngest member of the family, was playing at the edge of a lagoon Tuesday night when an alligator dragged him under the water. Graves dad, Matt, tried to fight the beast to no avail. The two-year-old's body was recovered Wednesday afternoon after a frantic, all-out search by authorities failed to find the boy in time.

They are very shaken up, extremely shaken up, Orange County Sheriffs Office spokesman Jeff Williamson told reporters. Imagine if it were you? What would you be?

Matt Graves is chief data officer for Infogroup, a marketing company based in Papillion, Nebraska. Infogroups chairman, Michael Iaccarino, said he was stunned and heartbroken about the familys unspeakable loss.

He added, Matts family is the light of his life, and his familys anguish is our own.

Matt Graves also has served on the board of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce since 2013. We stand ready to assist him, his wife and family as they grieve the loss of Lane, the chamber's President and CEO David Brown said in a statement.

Matt, his wife, Melissa, their four-year-old daughter, Ella, and Lane were members of St. Patricks Parish, where Ella attends school. The parish asked for prayers for the family.

Gov. Pete Ricketts said in a statement that no family should ever have to experience such horror.

While family members havent spoken publicly, they released a message through Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings.

They do appreciate all the prayers that have gone towardto allow us to do our jobs to recover their son, so that they can move forward at this time with a proper burial, Demings said.

Grief counselors and victim advocates were with the family throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


U.S. lawmakers want to cut off funds to United Nations-run schools where a new documentary shows kids as young as 13 declaring they want to kill Jews and join ISIS.

The documentary, The UNRWA Road to Terror: Palestinian Classroom Incitement," shows children as young as 7 in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) expressing support for terrorism. One clip shows a 13-year-old Palestinian student chanting With Allahs help I will fight for ISIS, the Islamic State.

Members of Congress and sources with knowledge of pending legislation told FoxNews.com that lawmakers are looking to introduce bills cutting off funding from such schools before Congress adjourns this summer.

Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said major reform is needed to UN schools.

It is a crime against humanity, an outrage, and does not in any way prepare the Palestinian population or future generations of Palestinians for peace with Israelis, Lamborn told FoxNews.com. It is unacceptable that the international community, including the United States, is funding UNRWA without demanding change.

According to State Department figures, the U.S. provided $390 million to help fund UNRWA in 2015.

The Congressional push comes as Israelis mourn four civilians killed in a Tel Aviv restaurant last week by two young Palestinians from the West Bank.

Israeli officials have pointed to links between Palestinian calls for violence and the murders.

The documentary shows incitement across several schools.

"We have to make war to prove we are stronger than the Jews," said a 7-year-old girl who is shown in the film saying the line in the classroom of a UN school in Jerusalem.

"Right now I am prepared to be a suicide bomber," says a 13-year-old shown in the film at another UN school.

Another student, who is identified in the film as a 10-year-old who goes to a UN school in Bethlehem, is shown saying, "We need to take steps to kill them, and they will retreat and we will advance.

Documentary producer David Bedein told Fox News that he and his organization, Center for Near East Research have been researching UNRWA for nearly 30 years. He linked the content of the film to the potential Congressional push.

The U.S. government sponsored the peace process, yet the same U.S. government undermines any hope of peace by funding problematic UN schools, he said.

A leading Palestinian human rights expert told FoxNews.com that the film was accurate.

"The film accurately portrays UNRWA schools advocacy of violence remains rampant dictated by teachers who run the U.S.-funded UNRWA schools," said Palestinian human rights activist and political analyst Bassam Eid.

UN officials attacked Bedein and other critics. UNRWA spokesperson Christopher Gunness said Fox News is again being duped by David Bedein.

Gunness said that Bedein had mixed up UN schools with other Palestinian schools where incitement may occur, but which are not run by the UN.

He shows teachers claiming they are UNRWA teachers when in fact they are not and he plays the same tricks with students, often misrepresenting what they say in slanted translations.

But Gunness added UNRWA uses the same curriculum as the PA and the Israeli Education Ministry for schools in the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem. He emphasized that textbooks in question had been found to be largely free of incitement in U.S. State Department studies.

Gunness also told Fox News that the students had been intentionally led with questions such as how much do you hate Jews?

A State Department spokesman said the department had called on UNWRA to investigate the allegations made in the film.

Weve looked into the allegations contained in the referenced film and discussed with UNRWA the need for the agency to do the same, the spokesman explained.

Echoing UNRWAs sentiments, the State Department spokesman also claimed that allegations raised by this individual filmmaker in the past have been debunked.
Authorities in Toronto continued their hunt Thursday for a capybara that escaped at a zoo, days after crews finally caught its partner in crime.

The search for the animal, a member of the worlds largest rodent species, has become something of a urban myth, with hundreds of reported sightings across the city, The Toronto Star reported.

Its an observation game, Ben Lovatt, one of the volunteers looking for the animal said.

There had been two capybaras on the loose, nicknamed "Bonnie adn Clyde," but one was successfully captured on Sunday in what was called a team effort. Searchers spotted the animal in High Park, where the zoo is located.

The capture of the first capybara was simple. The animal was located, searchers opened up a large cage provided by the zoo, and the capybara strolled in.

The city told The National Post it was unclear when the missing capybara would be captured.

You should probably ask the capybara that, Nathalie Karvonen, the director of the Toronto Wildlife Center said.
One person were killed and another injured after a man when on a stabbing spree Thursday at a medical clinic in Calgary, Canada, officials said.

Calgary police told CBC News they were called to the Perpetual Wellness Chinese Medical Centre in norhwest Calgary around 2:35 p.m. local time and found a deceased man in addition to a man and woman with non-life-threatening injuries.

The woman was taken to hospital and the man was treated at the scene and then taken into custody, police told CBC.

The stabbings appeared to be "domestic in nature," according to police.

Emma Wong, the manager at Essential Eyewear on the main floor of the building, told CBC News the area has seen incidents before, but "nothing like this."

"In the past we've had gunshots, we've had knife fights, but never a fatality like this," she said.

Police officers, paramedics and firefighters all responded to the scene, The Calgary Herald reported.

Stuart Brideaux, with Calgary EMS, told the Calgary Herald that paramedics arrived on scene with police around 2:40 p.m. local time and assessed two patients.

One person, an adult, was declared deceased and not transported, Brideaux told the newspaper. We did take a woman believed to be in her mid-50s to the Sheldon Chumir with a minor soft-tissue injury.

Click for more from CBC News.

Click for more from The Calgary Herald.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Two Russian intelligence gathering ships are currently shadowing U.S. Navy and other NATO vessels operating in the Baltic Sea during a major international exercise this month, according to U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James G. Foggo III, leading the exercise.

What we have seen is shadowing by two Russian intelligence vessels since we left port in Tallinn, Estonia on June 5th, Foggo said. He added that the Russian ships have been well behaved but have refused to communicate with the U.S. Navy despite coming as close as one mile at times with U.S. and allied vessels.

Foggo also commands the U.S. Navys 6th Fleet, responsible for the waters around Europe, and spoke to reporters on a conference call Wednesday while on his command ship, USS Mount Whitney, currently steaming off the coast of Poland.

The exercise, BALTOPS 2016, is in its 44th year and includes more than 40 ships from 17 nations and some 6,000 sailors, airmen and marines conducting training operations from June 3-19. Non-NATO counties Finland and Sweden are also participating.

According to other NATO officers on the conference call, Russia normally likes to take a peek at the exercise, but tensions were heightened this year as NATO announced plans to deploy troops to Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression in the region, which Russia says violates longstanding treaties between Russia and the West.

Russias annual uninvited participation in the large Baltic naval exercise comes with less intensity this year compared to 2015, according to Foggo, but what concerns him is Russias recent announcement to conduct its own large-scale exercise in the near future without sharing any of the details. Western forces are typically more open with Russia about their own exercises.

Last week, a delegation from the U.S. Navy met its Russian counterparts in Moscow to discuss the current Baltic Sea exercise, and had candid and frank discussions about how to operate professionally [and] not get in each others way, Foggo said, calling the meeting productive.

He added, We didnt want any surprises. We actually put our schedule for the exercise on the web. But the Russians have not returned the favor, according to Foggo.

Frankly, it would be nice to see some of that transparency on the Russians part.

Foggo said the Russians have a habit of conducting sudden large-scale surprise or snap exercises in the region that can make people nervous.

Russia announced this week it would be launching one of these snap exercises soon.

Were wondering where thats going to be, Foggo said, adding that hed seen reports on Russias announcement of a big exercise in the coming days.

Previous large-scale Russian exercises have turned into invasions. In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea under the guise of a sudden snap military exercise.

In addition to the large multi-national naval exercise in the Baltics, the U.S. Army and NATO allies are conducting the largest exercise in Poland since the end of the Cold War involving some 30,000 troops from 24 different countries. Foggo said he did not know which exercise was drawing Russias ire.

According to Foggo, Russian activity this time around the Baltic exercise is certainly, nothing like we saw with the close fly-by of USS Donald Cook [in April] right here in the Baltic Sea.

Foggo thought the media attention brought against Russia when its warplanes buzzed the U.S. Navy destroyer in April in the Baltic Sea might have made Russia change course.

I dont think they want to be seen that way, said Foggo. That might have caused the change in their behavior.

When asked if the buzzing of the USS Donald Cook by Russian warplanes in April came up during the meeting between U.S. Navy and Russian officials last week in Moscow, Foggo said that type of interaction was discussed but declined to disclose any specifics.

The vice admiral said he has seen a little Russian air activity operating near his ships.

Foggo said he saw for the first time with his own eyes a Russian Su-24 strike aircraft Tuesday night fly over his command ship and a Royal Navy helicopter carrier nearby. That would have been the same type of Russian jet that buzzed the Navy destroyer in April.

They stayed at altitude and conducted a standard reconnaissance of an at sea flotilla, Foggo said, adding that the Russians operated in a safe and professional manner. He said a Ka-27 Helix helicopter was also spotted Wednesday morning near allied vessels.

I personally think the Russians have changed their calculus, since April, Foggo claimed. He said Russia was still finding other ways to protest the large Baltic exercise.

The operations on Finnish soil were greeted with disdain by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, according to Foggo. He said Finlands foreign minister had been meeting with Lavrov in Moscow during an amphibious landing in Hanko, Finland, the first of three landings taking place this month.

U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers also have taken part in the Baltic exercise to launch quick strike mines and give other allied ships the opportunity to practice mine clearance operations, which has uncovered some unexploded mines and torpedoes dating back to the World War II era. It was real world training, said Foggo.

The vice admiral said he had not seen any signs of Russian submarines operating near his forces, but warned in a recent article that the technology gap between Russia and the U.S. was closing fast.

These are not the [Russian] submarines we faced during the Cold War, Foggo said in a recent article in the U.S. Navy Institutes Proceedings Magazine.

There may be fewer of them, but they are much stealthier, carry more devastating weaponry, and go on more frequent and longer deployments than before. The submarines of the Russian Federation are one of the most difficult threats the United States has faced. This threat is significant, and it is only growing in complexity and capacity, he said.

Russian submarine deployments are up 50% in the past few years according to a recent report quoting the former head of the Russian Navy.

Foggo said there is particular concern in the Black Sea where Russia is adding four more Kilo-class submarines to the two already in place. A similar Kilo-class submarine entered the Mediterranean and launched a Kalibr cruise missile into Syria, another concern about the growing Russian military threat in the region.

We need to remain vigilant, Foggo said.

The presence of Russian military forces this month around the large multi-national naval exercise in the Baltics is not new according to NATO officials who say they've seen Russians trailing allied vessels for decades.

When I was a junior officer on a submarine in 1983, the Russian AGI [intelligence ship] used to wait for us when we came out of Charleston, South Carolina and they were right at the limit of our territorial waters, said Faggo.
The USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier in the eastern Mediterranean operates thousands of miles away from Orlando. But the brutal killings in Florida, committed in the name of the terror group ISIS, resonated with the 5,000 sailors on board the massive ship.

What were doing here is about stopping that ideology from spreading around the world, Truman pilot Paolo Singh, who has conducted some 150 missions, told me. The more we can keep that from happening, the more Im willing to keep on doing it.

In fact, during some seven months at sea, the Trumans jet fighters have dropped over 1,500 bombs on ISIS targets. During that time, they say, ISIS-held territory has been rolled back.

Reflecting on the Orlando attacks, Bret Batchelder, the Admiral of the Trumans Carrier Group told us, I would offer that we keep in mind that the fight that were fighting here is against people like that. He added, That makes it a fairly just cause.

The massive war machine is kept running by a lot of busy, mostly young people, who service the planes, make the meals, and keep the vessel ship-shape, including Danielle Outland from Walnut Creek, California.

We work hard every day, we stay dedicated, we stay strong, she told me. She went on to say with a seasoned view beyond her 20 years, Times get tough some times. But you just realize the bigger picture is what were doing for the people back home.

The Truman was actually extended a month after logging more than 6 months in the Persian Gulf fighting ISIS. The sailors will be back in their home port of Norfolk, Virginia in mid-July. As dedicated as they are, it sounds like they cant wait to take a break.

When I asked Matthew Simon of Bastrop, Texas, who works to keep the jet fighters flying, if he was eager to get home, he replied with a wide grin, Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Im ready. Its time.

Unfortunately its not time yet to call time on the war on ISIS.
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Ukraine's U.N. ambassador says he is "completely outraged" by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's comments in a speech saying Russia has a critical role to play in ending the conflict in his country.

Volodymyr Yelchenko said he doesn't understand how the U.N. chief "can say such things which sort of praise the role of Russia in settling the conflict in Ukraine when the Russian Federation is the main player in aggressing Ukraine and in keeping this conflict boiling."

He said Ban's prepared comments for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Wednesday show he has lost "any moral right" to say anything about the conflict in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Yelchenko said Ukraine is sending a protest letter to the 193-member General Assembly asking for a correction and explanation.
Vietnamese state media say a search plane carrying nine people has gone missing while attempting to locate a pilot from a crashed fighter jet.

The Thanh Nien newspaper said the maritime patrol aircraft lost contact Thursday afternoon about 44 nautical miles (81 kilometers) southwest of Bach Long Vi island, off the coast of the northern port city of Haiphong.

It quoted local official Do Duc Hoa as saying that vessels have been sent to the area where the search plane lost contact, but were hampered by strong winds and high waves.

The nine people on board are among 1,500 personnel sent to search for the pilot, whose Russian-made Sukhoi Su-30 MK2 jet fighter crashed Tuesday on a training flight. One other pilot from the jet was rescued Wednesday.
Holiday Inn to Debut in Thailands Eastern Seaboard Business District Si Racha

June 16, 2016 // Franchising.com // InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the world's leading hotel companies, has signed a management agreement with Origin Property PCL to develop Holiday Inn & Suites Siracha Laemchabang.

Set to open in 2018, the hotel will mark the brands entry into the town of Si Racha along the East coast of the Gulf of Thailand, offering a mix of 300 rooms and long-stay suites for leisure and business travellers.

The hotel will be part of Origin District, a mixed-use development comprising *three residential towers and a retail mall designed to serve business travellers visiting industrial estates in the area, as well as expatriates living and working in Si Racha for extended periods. An hours drive from Bangkok and conveniently located along Sukhumvit Road, Holiday Inn & Suites Siracha Laemchabang will offer guests easy access to key commercial and retail districts, hospitals, banks and international school such as the Kasetsart Si Racha Campus, placing it in a great position to cater to visiting faculty and family members of students throughout the year.

Leanne Harwood, Vice President, Operations, South East Asia and Korea, IHG, said: Over the years, Si Racha has developed considerably into a leading industrial estate and economic zone in Thailands Eastern Seaboard. Its close proximity to two of the busiest container ports in South East Asia, Laem Chabang Port and Si Racha Harbour, has drawn an influx of expatriates and business travellers to the district and we see a huge potential for an internationally-branded hotel in the area to cater to the rise in demand for quality accommodation. We are delighted to partner with established developers Origin Property PCL to bring our Holiday Inn brand into Si Racha and are confident that Holiday Inn & Suites Siracha Laemchabang will prove to be a top choice for business and leisure travellers alike 

In the hotel, there will be an all-day dining restaurant where families can make the most of the Holiday Inn signature Kids Eat & Stay Free programme* and enjoy nutritionally-balanced meals during their stay. Guests will also be able to wind down after a busy day at work at the hotels pool, lobby lounge or through a work-out at the fitness club. The hotel will also feature five meeting rooms and a business centre.

Mr.Peerapong Jaroon-ek, Chief Executive Officer, Origin Property Public Company Limited said:With its strong infrastructure and convenient location, Si Racha presents an ideal opportunity to expand our hospitality portfolio. We are pleased to partner with IHG to develop our first hotel and have decided to brand it a Holiday Inn as it is one of the most recognised hotel brands in the world which is consistently known for its comfortable and high quality accommodation. With the brand's heritage, together with IHG's experience in operating great hotels and our proven expertise in real estate investment, we are confidence that the hotel will be well-received when it opens its doors in 2018.

IHG currently has nine Holiday Inn hotels open in Thailand, and another four more hotels in the development pipeline. Across the country, IHG has 18 hotels open across five brands: InterContinental,Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Expressand Hotel Indigo, with a further 15 hotels in the pipeline due to open over the next three to five years.

*The Origin District mixed use development will feature Notting Hill condominium, Kensington residential condominuims and Porto bello Mall

About IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group)

IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) [LON:IHG, NYSE:IHG (ADRs)] is a global organisation with a broad portfolio of hotel brands, including InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, HUALUXE Hotels and Resorts, Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts, Hotel Indigo, EVEN Hotels, Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites andCandlewood Suites.

IHG franchises, leases, manages or owns more than 5,000 hotels and 742,000 guest rooms in almost 100 countries, with nearly 1,400 hotels in its development pipeline. IHG also manages IHG Rewards Club, the worlds first and largest hotel loyalty programme with nearly 94 million members worldwide.

InterContinental Hotels Group PLC is the Groups holding company and is incorporated in Great Britain and registered in England and Wales. More than 350,000 people work across IHGs hotels and corporate offices globally.

Visit www.ihg.com for hotel information and reservations and www.ihgrewardsclub.com for more on IHG Rewards Club. For our latest news, visit: www.ihg.com/media and follow us on social media at: www.twitter.com/ihg, www.facebook.com/ihg and www.youtube.com/ihgplc.

SOURCE IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group)

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PizzaRev Signs Agreement with Surfside Coffee to Bring Fast-Casual Pizza Concept to South Florida

June 16, 2016 // Franchising.com // LOS ANGELES - PizzaRev, a fast-casual pizza concept backed by Buffalo Wild Wings, announced today that it signed a franchise agreement with Surfside Coffee, LLC to develop 45 restaurants across greater Miami. The groups first location is projected to open at the Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, one of South Floridas most sought-after shopping destinations.

This is the 23rd group of major restaurant brand operators PizzaRev has partnered with to expand the fast-casual pizza franchise across the country. Based in Miami, FL, Surfside Coffee, LLC, operates one of the largest Dunkin Donuts franchise networks in Florida. The group is backed by Fireman Capital Partners, LLC (FCP), a private equity firm, and led by Chris Mellgren, CEO. Mr. Mellgren brings a wealth of experience in the space having developed multiple highly successful franchise networks across the US.

Ive been very interested in the fast-casual pizza category for quite some time and have been looking for a concept that I believe in and that aligns with my views of what a brand means to its guests and its employees, said Mellgren. I have found that brand in PizzaRev and am excited to bring the concept to Florida.

There are more than 200 PizzaRev locations in various stages of development across the country. The brand currently operates 38 corporate and franchise locations throughout California, Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Mexico.

Chris and the FCP team have the passion and restaurant experience that make them ideal partners to bring PizzaRev to the sunshine state! said Nicholas Eckerman, co-founder, President and COO. We look forward to our continued East Coast expansion with franchise partners who share our food-forward mission and commitment to giving back to the communities we serve.

PizzaRev continues to expand in the U.S. and internationally with support from partner Buffalo Wild Wings Inc., who in 2013 announced an equity-investment in PizzaRev and announced an increase in their stake in 2014. The award-winning concept has been named one of the 10 Brands to Watch by CNBC and has ranked in the Fast Casual Top 100 Movers and Shakers for three straight years. Most recently, PizzaRev was honored with the 2016 HALO Award, recognizing restaurants that have made meaningful contributions to a healthy, active lifestyle.

About PizzaRev

PizzaRev is a "build-your-own" fast-casual pizza concept that has reinvented the way America eats its favorite food. Guests are empowered to fully customize a personal-sized 11" pizza for one price. Homemade dough options, flavorful sauces, all-natural cheeses, and more than 30+ artisanal toppings, everything is on display at PizzaRev and assembled right before your eyes. The pizzas are then fired in a 900-degree, stone-bed oven which produces a thin and crispy Roman-style pizza in just three minutes. Los Angeles-based PizzaRev was founded in 2012; the executive team possesses a combination of Fortune 500 operating experience and high-profile restaurant management.

PizzaRev is currently franchising and announced a strategic partnership with Buffalo Wild Wings in 2013. The company currently operates 38 locations with 200 additional franchises under development across Mexico, Washington, D.C. and 17 states: AZ, CA, CO, FL, GA, MA, MN, NE, NJ, ND, NV, NY, OH, SD, TN, TX and UT.

Visit www.PizzaRev.com for the latest company news and location information. You can also find PizzaRev on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram.

SOURCE PizzaRev

Media Contact:

Monica Rutkowski

Director of Marketing & PR

805.418.5606

monica.rutkowski@pizzarev.com

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Keith And Keely Mann Scholarship For Professional Achievement Awarded To Brooklyn Teen

"We're honored to support the mission of the Uncommon Schools' goal to enable low-income students to attend and graduate from college."

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The Keith and Keely Mann Scholarship for Professional Achievement, designed to recognize the next generation of innovative business leaders has been awarded to a teen set to graduate from the Uncommon Charter High School in Brooklyn, New York.

The newly established annual scholarship aims to ensure that low-income students have the means to attend a four-year college and is open to all graduating seniors enrolled in the Uncommon Charter High School. Applicants are asked to write a 1,000-word essay about how a college degree will assist them in the future. Keith Mann, an education advocate, believes that identifying and rewarding strong leaders is crucial to their success.

"We're honored to support the mission of the Uncommon Schools' goal to enable low-income students to attend and graduate from college." Mann extended congratulations to the teen and his family, "I'm happy for Travis and his family, it is an honor to provide a scholarship to such a promising young leader."

This year's winner of the award, Travis, will use the scholarship to attend the State University of New York at Buffalo.

About Keith Mann

Keith Mann has worked in the search industry for over 15 years, is an expert in hedge fund compensation and staffing and hiring strategy. In 2009, Mann established Dynamics Search Partners, a search firm dedicated to servicing alternative investment firms across the United States, Europe and Asia. Keith Mann serves as the CEO of DSP.

About Uncommon Charter High School

Uncommon Schools establishes and manages urban charter public schools across Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York serving over 14,000 students in grades K-12. Uncommon schools aim to prepare low-income students to attend and graduate college.

For more information, please visit http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160125006525/en/Keith-Mann-Announces-2016-Scholarship-Professional-Achievement

Contact Info:

Name: Keith Mann

Organization: Dynamic Search Partners



Source: https://angel.co/keithmann

Release ID: 119744

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Ultraweb Marketing, Inc Launches New Website Design

The redesigned site includes new learning center resources and a host of other features to serve clients better, reports http://www.ultrawebmarketing.com.

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Ultraweb Marketing Inc, a premier full-service web design and marketing agency based in Boca Raton, Florida, has recently announced the launch of their newly-redesigned website. The new Ultraweb site includes a host of features that will assist the company in better serving their clients, including new learning center resources designed to teach business and website owners about the basics of web design, search engine optimization, and other techniques that will boost their online presence.

"Living in the digital era means that the tides of marketing have turned, and having a strong online presence is critical for companies who want to avoid drowning in the sea of competition in their market," said Brad Besner, the founder of Ultraweb Marketing. "Because we specialize in web design and marketing, our team wanted to create and launch a website that is not only extremely attractive, but also helps clients understand what goes into constructing a compelling web presence that allows them to get found by their target market and connect with people who want to buy from them. We sincerely believe our new design achieves that goal."

Both current and future clients can head to Ultraweb Marketing to find their new resource center, which has blog posts explaining the complexities of advertising, marketing, social media and website design. In addition, the new website design helps clients see Ultraweb's full suite of offerings in full detail, giving in-depth explanations of what each service entails and how it can help a business owner create a better, stronger online presence.

As Besner goes on to say, "Whatever our clients need for their business, we want them to be able to see it at Ultraweb Marketing. It has always been our mission to help improve our clients' online businesses by allowing them to have access to our proven skills and expertise and giving them nothing short of top-notch service. Creating and launching this new website design is just one of the ways that we can demonstrate how committed we are to serving our clients better."

About Ultraweb Marketing, Inc:

Ultraweb Marketing, Inc is run by search engine and web design experts who deliver marketing solutions that work. They have been using their proven skills and expertise since 2007 to create success online for themselves and their clients. Their team provides a full suite of web design and marketing services for those who would like to create a meaningful online presence.

For more information, please visit http://www.Ultrawebmarketing.com

Contact Info:

Name: Brad Besner

Organization: Ultraweb Marketing, Inc

Address: Boca Raton, FL, 33432

Phone: (800) 835-6759

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/ultraweb-marketing-inc-launches-new-website-design/119783

Release ID: 119783

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Monrovia Family Dentistry Launches Exclusive Dental Care Plan For Local Patients

Private membership plan helps bridge the growing gap in dental coverage, publishes monroviafamilydentistry.net

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According to a statement released last year by U.S. News & World Report, approximately 40 percent of Americans are currently without dental insurance, leading to a growing gap in the receipt of preventative care. Those falling into this category cite cost and lack of access to coverage as their primary reasons for not having a dental plan. In response to this issue, Dr. Mark Sanford of Monrovia Family Dentistry has launched the practice's revised in-house dental plan.

Said Dr. Sanford, "Recent legislature changed the way our country views health insurance, but all those regulations fall a bit short when it comes to dental coverage. Many families are now forced to put off much-needed dental care in order to keep up with their medical insurance requirements. At the same time, a number of the dental policies available fail to cover all the treatments patients are bound to need. Our new in-house plan is designed to bridge the gap, making dental care more affordable for our patients."

Monrovia Family Dentistry's coverage plan is an offering available exclusively to the practice's patients. Rather than holding members to deductible requirements and monthly premiums, the plan is based on an annual flat-rate membership fee. Upon payment of this annual fee, patients receive complimentary twice-yearly x-rays, exams and cleanings. A 20 percent discount is applied toward all additional treatments.

The practice provides general, restorative and cosmetic services as well as sedation dentistry for those experiencing excessive anxiety over treatment. Staff members have received additional training in order to cater to pediatric patients. Periodontal therapies and orthodontic services are likewise offered. Emergency care is available both during and after normal business hours.

Concluded Dr. Sanford, "We are proud to offer this from Monrovia Family Dentistry in an effort to encourage proactive dental care. Medical and oral health work in conjunction to create overall wellness, so we believe patients should have equal access to coverage for both. We invite new patients to visit us online to schedule a free consultation and learn more about the services we offer. We also extend a variety of special offers to new and existing patients, which are changed periodically. Additional details are available on our website."

About Monrovia Family Dentistry:

Established in 2011, Monrovia Family Dentistry serves patients in the greater Indianapolis area with a variety of dental, periodontal and orthodontic treatments as well as preventative care. The practice is dedicated to providing reliable and affordable care for patients of all ages in a safe, comfortable environment.

For more information, please visit http://www.monroviafamilydentistry.net/

Contact Info:

Name: Dr. Mark Sanford

Organization: Monrovia Family Dentistry

Phone: (317) 548-3788

Source: http://marketersmedia.com/monrovia-family-dentistry-launches-exclusive-dental-care-plan-for-local-patients/119779

Release ID: 119779

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Rentokil North America Announces Multi-Year Contract With CDC to Combat Zika Virus

Leading Pest Control Company to Implement Program Targeting Mosquitoes Capable of Disease Transmission

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Rentokil North America, and its pest control companies Rentokil Steritech, Ehrlich, Presto-X, and Western Exterminator, have been awarded a contract by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct a vector control program to help control the species of mosquitoes that carry Zika virus. The requirements of the program are to provide pest control services for the term of two years, subject to government review. The anticipated period of performance runs June 3, 2016 through June 2, 2018.

The species of mosquito likely to carry Zika virus (Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) are container-breeding mosquitoes that prefer to live in and around human dwellings. Rentokil North America will employ their network of more than 4,000 pest experts and technicians alongside their multifaceted team of technical resources to systematically target affected or high-risk areas. Additionally, a key component of the contract includes support services that entail community outreach, surveillance and inspection, and planning support for the distribution of materials and educational information.

"We're pleased that the CDC has chosen to partner with us to support the fight against the spread of this very serious virus," said John Myers, CEO of Rentokil North America. "Our business is focused on protecting people and enhancing lives and our involvement allows us to provide the areas affected most with our world-class service to protect those at risk from the dangers of this disease."

According to the CDC, Zika virus is transmitted primarily to people through the bite of infected mosquitoes, although sexual transmission has also been documented. There is currently no vaccine or treatment for Zika. The most common symptoms of Zika are fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis (red eyes). In previous outbreaks, the illness has typically been mild with symptoms lasting for several days to a week after being bitten by an infected mosquito. However, the Zika virus infection in pregnant women can result in microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects. Zika also has been linked to Guillain-Barre syndrome, an uncommon sickness of the nervous system in which a person's immune system damages the nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis.

For additional information on preventing the spread of Zika, mosquito prevention, and treatment, please visit www.rentokil-steritech.com and www.cdc.gov/ziki/.

###

About Rentokil North America:

Rentokil North America, which also owns pest control brands Rentokil Steritech, Western Exterminator, Presto-X Pest Control and Ehrlich Pest Control, provides commercial and residential pest control to customers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico through its expertly trained team of technicians. Rentokil North America's approach focuses on a technician-customer partnership to ensure the highest quality pest control service which includes a comprehensive pest management solution encompassing pest control, termite and bed bug inspections, vegetation management, bird management solutions, mosquito control, and fumigations. Rentokil North America is a division of Rentokil Initial plc. a leading business services company, operating globally in more than 66 countries. For more information, visit www.rentokil-steritech.com.

About the CDC:

CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same. CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation's health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats, and responds when these arise.

For more information, please visit http://www.rentokil-steritech.com

Contact Info:

Name: Justin Luedecker

Organization: Rentokil North America



Source: http://marketersmedia.com/rentokil-north-america-announces-multi-year-contract-with-cdc-to-combat-zika-virus/119673

Release ID: 119673

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Arabian Peninsula Adventure New Tour Launched to United Arab Emirates and Oman

A new Arabian Peninsula tour has been announced for dates in November 2016, February and November 2017. The tour starts in Dubai and travels across Oman discovering historic towns, fishing villages and camel markets, as well as taking in the stunning landscapes.

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A new Arabian Peninsula small group tour has launched, to be offered in November 2016 and February and November 2017.

Run by the American tour company Original World, the tour offers a diversity of landscapes and experiences including visits to five of the seven United Arab Emirates, as well as an overland adventure across Oman to see the spectacular Musandam Peninsula, the colorful subtropical city Salalah, the oasis city Nizwa, capital city Muscat, and the Jabal Akhdar Mountains. Travelers will also spend time in the famed Wahiba Sands, where there is opportunity for interaction with the Bedouin culture.

Complete details can be found on the official tour website: The Arabian Peninsula Tour

The tour offers an opportunity to learn about Arab Culture and explore fascinating diverse sites. Original World underscores that the locations are safe areas where the locals are friendly and the landscapes are stunning. Travelers will find the juxtaposition of traditional and modern life fascinating to see, and will enjoy a tour that is adventuresome but not difficult to participate in.

The hotels included in the tour are high quality, four stars. The vehicles are new models with air conditioning and seat belts; always more seats than group members for spacious comfort. The tours are led by university educated, highly experienced, charming guides.

The tour begins with arrival in Dubai, and then visits three additional Emirates: Sharjah, Ajman and Ras Al Kalmah before continuing on to Oman, where participants enjoy the pristine Musandam Peninsula town of Khasab and experience the fjords that can be found there. Travelers will also experience traditional fishing villages, a renowned camel market, an oasis, the desert, mountains and fascinating forts and museums.

The 15 day tour swings thru Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and then Al Ain, another Emirates, before returning to Dubai. A pre-tour option to the Gulf States (Kuwait, Bahrain and Doha) is offered at a special add-on price. The group tour is limited to a maximum of 12 people. Original World also offers private tours.

This tour will be of interest to readers who are passionate travelers looking for another exotic destination that maintains a traditional culture, is exciting yet very comfortable travel.

For questions and to book this tour, email inquire@originalworld.com. Alternatively, call toll free 888 367 6147; if calling from outside the United States, call 415 381 5861.

For more information, please visit http://originalworld.com/Oman_United_Arab_Emirates_travel/index.shtml

Contact Info:

Name: Barbara Sansone

Email: inquire@originalworld.com

Organization: Original World Inc

Address: 38 Villa Ave

Phone: 415-360-5152

Release ID: 119723

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Sometimes, in the pursuit of so-called progress, we overlook some of the sticking plaster that has cemented and held firm the City of Londons reputation for first-class asset management over the years.

We take it for granted when we should not. Or we ignore it because we are searching breathlessly for the latest investment gizmo.

Last week, I had the privilege to attend a drinks reception hosted by the directors of The City of London Investment Trust  a 1.2bn fund that quietly goes about its business of delivering long-term growth in income and capital for shareholders.

It is very much part of Londons sticking plaster and does not get the praise it should do.

Maybe it is too conservative by half, not racy enough (to sell to investors) or of the moment. Or maybe it is not passive enough in an investment era where passive investment is all the rage.

The reception was held in the East Crypt beneath Guildhall in London, a medieval crypt that dates back to Edward the Confessor (1042).

Its marvellous stained glass windows depict Geoffrey Chaucer, William Caxton, Sir Thomas More, Sir Christopher Wren and Samuel Pepys. If you get the chance, pay it a visit  it will take your breath away.

London continues to surprise me at every twist and turn. It should do the same for you.

All the trusts directors were present, including Philip Remnant, who has been chairman for going on five years.

A jolly affair it turned out to be and quite rightly so, for there was much to celebrate. Fifty years  yes, half a century  of unbroken dividend increases for shareholders to enjoy, a record unrivalled by any other investment fund or trust registered in the UK.

And, the cream on the cake: 25 years of successful investment management under the guiding hand of Job Curtis, a 54-year-old fund manager with asset manager Henderson.

There are not that many fund managers in the City who survive 25 years with their investment reputation intact, although Mr Curtis, a modest man, refuses to boast about his success. Instead, he prefers to praise the 12-strong global equity income team at Henderson that he is part of  and which feeds into the investment process underpinning The City of London.

Although the trust can trace its routes back to 1860, when the company was formed as City of London Brewery Company Limited, it was not until 1968 that it became a fully fledged investment vehicle.

Undergoing a couple of other transmogrifications  first The City of London Brewery and Investment Trust Limited and then in 1982 TR City of London Trust plc  it finally became The City of London Investment Trust plc in October 1997.
Mark Barnett, the head of Invesco Perpetuals equities team, said investors should expect a short-term pause in the UK economy in the event of a Brexit vote, but is confident the UK would cope in the long-term.

Speaking during an Invesco panel debate today (16 June), Mr Barnett  who manages Invescos 5.8bn Income fund  said the UK economy will adapt to change and cope with whatever outcome it is presented with.

He said there is unlikely to be an Armageddon situation if the British public votes to quit the EU, adding: The best kinds of businesses will be able to cope with these kinds of challenges.

Despite this, Mr Barnett argued the initial reaction will be a negative one in the equity market, and said he expected there to be a knee jerk fall in the currency of 5 to 10 per cent.

Currency is the key thing to watch, he said, adding however the countervailing forces of a weakened sterling is the larger companies with earnings outside of the UK could benefit from tail winds of currency translation. We are not panicking about the outcome or making any rash judgments. Mark Barnett

The question is will that be followed by a rally in the markets as people wait for the dust to settle?

He added: We are not panicking about the outcome or making any rash judgments, and we are certainly not changing the methodology of how we put the portfolios together.

Michael Matthews, Invescos fixed interest fund manager, said: I think if there is a Brexit outcome then the moves could be significant, though its hard to know what it will mean.

With an already fragile economy and high amounts of illiquidity in the markets, he said if you add all the elements together it points to a significant negative outcome for risk markets.

We havent made any significant changes to prepare for a Brexit outcome, Mr Matthews added.

He said positioning to a more defensive portfolio would involve selling assets which yield between 3 to 6 per cent and buying government bonds which yield next to nothing instead.

There will probably be a policy response from central banks on the back of an exit, he said, pointing to the European Central Banks corporate bond program, which was installed to try to mitigate some of the weakness.

Jonathan Brown, Invescos UK equities fund manager and small cap specialist, said he would not want to make a binary bet on the market, adding: That is not how I invest or how investors expect me to invest their money.

However, he said it is not all bad, pointing to potential opportunities which had recently cropped up in the domestic market, such as property.

Mr Barnett echoed this, adding the falling share price had incited him to add little bits of stocks from the UK real estate sector.

He said it was difficult to distinguish whether sector weakness was linked to issues in the underlying economy or whether it was Brexit related, but said certain areas were starting to pop up which were looking more interesting for investments, such as retailers and leisure companies.
Emerging markets are unlikely to ever again experience the sector-wide outperformance seen at the beginning of this century, according to Neptunes chief economist and chief investment officer James Dowey.

He said despite the entire sector being relied upon to outperform developed markets in previous years, future returns would be isolated to select countries.

An investor would have gained a 370 per cent return from an equal-weighted index of Bric markets between 2001 and 2011. But Mr Dowey said while individual countries may do well, sector-wide returns of the past are highly unlikely.

My view is that its almost inconceivable that we return to the types of outperformance that we saw in the 2000s decade in emerging markets, and we need to be strongly cognisant of that.

He said the politics and economics of individual countries now vary greatly, and common factors that encouraged growth are no longer as consistent.

Emerging markets, on an individual basis and largely around political events, still have this capacity to be extremely volatile  both on the upside and the downside. You only have to look at Brazil over the past six months or so as an example.

What Im referring to is a broad asset class of outperformance and I think it was powered heavily by a psychological dynamic; what I find inconceivable is that that dynamic could be constructed again in the near term. It would stretch the credulity of investors too much. Theyve lived through the past five years of disappointment.

However, Mr Dowey did recommend looking to the past when determining emerging markets outperformance, as they tend to alternate with developed markets.

Emerging market stocks outperformed developed market stocks in the 1900s, the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1970s, and in the other five of the 10 decades developed markets delivered superior returns, he noted.

Ewan Thompson, manager of Neptunes Emerging Markets fund, said acronyms like Bric were unhelpful because theyre different economies driven by different factors.

Theres a lot of things in emerging markets that isnt a Bric, he added.

The 7.2m Neptune Emerging Markets fund returned 1.6 per cent over three years, while the IA Global Emerging Markets sector declined by 3.8 per cent during the same period, according to FE Analytics.
Stock market carnage ahead of the EU referendum poses a serious risk to retirees who, thanks to pension freedoms, are heavily exposed to equities.

The FTSE 100 fell to its lowest level since February this week, following an unexpected swing in the polls in favour of a leave vote in next weeks vote.

Aegon Irelands managing director Barry Cudmore warned this fall alone could put a serious dent in the income of retirees living off drawdown rather than an annuity.

When the markets take a dive, people living off their savings are particularly exposed, he pointed out.

People entering retirement following the pension freedoms in April 2015 could have lost two years of retirement income as a result of the 12 per cent FTSE fall in the following 12 months, so a 5 per cent fall over the past five days is a serious risk for those drawing down an income from their savings or drawdown plans. A 5 per cent fall over the past five days is a serious risk for those drawing down an income from their savings or drawdown plans. Barry Cudmore

He urged retirees in drawdown to understand the role of markets in the products, adding they must be ready to change the income taken each year to reflect market performance, or risk running out of money later in life.

Advisers played a big part in helping those customers who want to keep their money invested, but do not want to be exposed to the downside risks of market exposure, Mr Cudmore argued, adding there are options that lessen the need for constant income adjustments.

While this could be read as a reason to buy an annuity, this would not be from Aegon, which sold off its 9bn annuity book to Legal & General and Rothesay Life earlier this year.

However, it did last year launch guaranteed drawdown products as an alternative to annuities.

These combine exposure to markets with a guarantee to pay the customer an annual income of no less than 4.05 per cent of the value of their investment.

Aegons regulatory strategy director Steve Cameron told FTAdviser the product was in between an annuity and a traditional, non-guaranteed drawdown product, although he admitted the take up was slow so far.

Part of the reason for that is it is really quite innovative in the marketplace. We know that theres a lot of latent consumer demand for this kind of guarantee, but advisers are not quite used to it yet, he said, adding only Axa and MetLife offered similar products in the UK.

Gary Nettleingham, managing director of Catalpa Financial Planning, said market risk, particularly sequencing risk, were inherent in every drawdown plan, and something that the majority of his clients moving into drawdown were initially unaware of.

Regarding guaranteed drawdown products, he agreed there is an appetite for them, with more and more likely to enter the market.
The abolition of EU-wide production quotas in 2017 will herald an uncertain era for sugar beet, prompting many to reconsider growing the crop. But how can growers make this important decision?

When the EU sugar regime ends in October next year, sugar beet, like any other commodity, will be more exposed to volatile world markets, creating greater market pressure as processors battle for business with other European and international sugar producers.

The 2016/17 price cut (from 24/t to 20.30/t) shows the impact difficult market conditions are already having, and many growers hope there will be no repeat when the 2017/18 price is announced (expected to be within the next couple of months).

See also: Sugar beet area on the rise in the West

Whatever the next contract deal holds, there needs to be a strong business case to continue growing the crop. Keeping it in the rotation because it has been there for generations is scant justification, and the potential rotational advantages beet offers (see panel) may be available from other crops.

Do the sums

The relationship between cost of production per tonne and price is by far the biggest determinant of profitability and should be the prime consideration when examining beets future, says Norfolk-based agricultural consultant Robin Limb.

Only when this has been calculated can growers compare beet against alternative crops and make a considered decision about its future, he says.

Yield inevitably is a key driver, and Mr Limb believes growers need to be achieving 70-80t/ha regularly.

Charles Whitaker, partner at management consultancy Brown & Co, says cost of production varies widely  from 18/t-27/t  depending on farming system, soil type, yields and many other characteristics often beyond the growers control.

Beet contract negotiations The NFU and British Sugar are currently negotiating the 2017/18 beet contract, with a decision likely soon. Three main contract options are being discussed, including: maintaining the status quo fixed price agreed before sowing; a multi-year fixed price for a three-year period; a price linked to markets and to price at the date of delivery.

Some growers may well be able to produce beet at low cost, but its not possible to get the whole 7.5m tonnes of crop at that level, given the inherent variation across beet growing areas.

Yield variance in sugar beet is still quite significant, with some struggling to get over 55-60t/ha consistently, yet others can regularly achieve 75-90t/ha. Farmers have got to look at where they stand and whether the margin is comparable to other break crops.

While maximising yield is important, Andersons consultant Nick Blake says there is no magic yield target and points out some high-yielding crops come from businesses with a higher cost structure while lower-yielding crops may be grown at relatively low cost.

You have to consider yield, gross margin and total cost of production, but also calculate the marginal cost of production compared with alternative crops.

The net margin of wheat at current prices may be comparable to beet at 20/t, but you cant assume you will be better off swapping beet for another crop if you end up incurring other costs in the process.

Capital investment

With most sugar beet harvested by contractors, it is those businesses that carry the greatest financial burden of capital investment.

Anyone with their own equipment thinking of quitting beet production needs to consider a number of potential tax implications before doing so (see below). Equally, farms looking to continue must also consider future capital demands.

Ask yourself whether you are living off depreciating assets, such as an old beet drill. Is a replacement needed and is there enough margin available to justify doing so? says Mr Blake.

Consider impacts of beet

A number of other rotational benefits and potential drawbacks of growing beet also need to be considered. Below are some issues to consider:

Pros Cons Spring crop: Environmental benefit from overwintered stubbles (ties in with stewardship schemes)

Allows extra time for grassweed control

Broadens range of chemistry used across the rotation

Open canopy in spring can benefit ground-nesting birds Difficult to prepare seedbeds and establish crops when land is cold/ wet in spring. Young crops also vulnerable to dry springs. Long harvest window spreads workloads Harvesting difficulties and potential soil damage when conditions are wet. Possible damage to tracks/handling areas. Yield penalty on following crops can be considerable Returns organic matter to topsoil and deep rooting can improve structure Light land prone to wind-blow before crop is established Opportunity to add value by grazing sheep on tops after harvest Limited crop competition against weeds Breaks the cycle of pests, diseases and weeds in combinable crop rotations Diminishing chemistry available in future Reduces pressure on grain storage requirements and combine capacity Needs suitable areas for storage/handling/loading  often in wet conditions Long growing season  benefits from summer rain when other crops do not. New varieties better at growing for longer in season. Can be tricky to establish a crop after late-lifted beet.

Alternative options

Growers keen to keep beet in the rotation but looking to reduce their involvement with the crop have a number of options, including:

Renting land to another grower  not an option for everyone, but there are still some opportunities (eg, British Sugar and other specialist growers).

Grow/rent land for energy beet to supply an anaerobic digestion plant  limited to farms close to an AD facility. Rents comparable to sugar beet land rents.

Change the way beet is grown in-house  consider different crop management, early lifting, reducing quota, limiting beet rotation to only easiest working land, outsourcing key operations (drilling, harvesting), other haulage options (eg, BS haulage scheme), etc.

Allowing a specialist grower to grow beet under licence is also worth considering. Given the general economic pressure on the sector, Mr Whitaker believes that if the beet price remains at or around cost of production, more beet may be grown under licence by specialist producers in future, in a similar way to carrot or potato production.

The specialist grower might pay a licence fee of typically about 150/acre (350/ha-400/ha) in return for the right to grow beet on that land, he explains.

Specialist growers and large-scale arable operators are likely to be farming more land under Contract Farming Arrangements, where greater investment in equipment and technology can generate greater yields and margins from beet and other combinable crops than smaller units where its difficult to justify such investment at current returns.

By having access to better equipment, agronomy techniques and skills, it may be possible to produce higher yields from the same land, while the farmer retains the rotational advantages beet offers and remains an active farmer for tax purposes, he adds.

Mr Whitaker also suggests no-till/strip tillage systems have significant potential to reduce sugar beet establishment costs, although acknowledges this requires significant capital investment, so is likely to be more suited to specialist growers.

The timing of harvesting can have a big effect on following crops  so where beet is to remain, Mr Blake says farmers should consider whether it is worth taking a reduced beet yield and gross margin by lifting earlier, offsetting that with a smaller yield penalty on any following crop.

Tax considerations

If the decision is taken to quit beet production, there are various tax issues to consider, says Mark Balfour, partner at Larking Gowen chartered accountants.

Foremost is the timing of any machinery sale, as this can potentially incur a hefty tax bill, he says.

Most people will have claimed full tax relief [Annual Investment Allowance] on the acquisition of new machinery, which means sale proceeds are fully taxable through a balancing charge.

The tax rate depends on how the business is structured and on its profitability. Sole traders and partnerships, for example, may face a tax rate of 45% where total income exceeds 150,000, whereas limited companies currently pay 20%  and this will drop to 19% from next April.

Its only a 1% drop, but if youre contemplating selling expensive kit, it might be worth deferring any sale to get the reduced rate.

One way businesses other than companies can mitigate tax bills is to use the farmers averaging provisions that allow profits to be averaged out over two years.

The accounting year-end also plays a big role in the timing of any sales, says Mr Balfour. Selling at the start of a new accounting period, for example, can give more time before the tax on sale proceeds has to be paid, which may ease cashflow.

Ideally you should dispose of assets in any year when profits arent going to be very good.

Farmers who bought equipment on a hire purchase-type arrangement should also ensure sufficient cash is available to pay any outstanding HP liability and the tax bill on full sale proceeds.

There is an added layer of complexity for machinery funded through a joint venture or share farming arrangement, as other parties have to be consulted to reach a deal for that share of the kit. For example, they may opt to buy out the remaining share or pay a hire fee for a couple of years.

Joint venture or shared arrangements are increasingly used to buy expensive kit that is often used for only a limited period each year, so it could be a way for anyone to continue in beet production but spread the capital cost of doing so.

Case study: Andrew Blenkiron, Suffolk

Sugar beet remains an important part of the rotation at the 4,400ha Euston Estate, where 250ha (625 acres) is in the ground with a variety of combinable and root crops.

Some 16,000t of beet is produced annually for the Bury St Edmunds plant, at a consistent five-year average yield of 65t/ha. We aim to produce as close to quota as possible as its not worth over-producing, says Andrew Blenkiron, who manages the estate.

Most drilling is done in-house, but a local contractor does about 25% to ensure crops are sown in good time and also harvests the crop.

Weve got very little equipment tied up and have spare combine capacity to grow more wheat or rape, so it would be relatively easy to bail out if we wanted to. But we are keen to stick with beet, largely for the rotational benefits it provides. We also graze finishing lambs on the tops after harvest, which adds value.

Mr Blenkiron has calculated beets cost of production on the farm and says that even at 20/t it is still possible to make a slim positive margin. Its not just about the beet price, but the price of alternative crops too, he says

We have cut out oilseed rape altogether for the second season, but continue to look at the economics on a year-by-year basis.

Our area of irrigated root crops is about as high as we can go, so sugar beet is the next most-viable alternative. Its possible to get late-harvest bonuses on about 60% of land, so its a highly suitable crop for us to grow.

Changes have been made to the rotation to minimise the effect on following crops after it was realised several years ago that there was a significant yield penalty in late-sown wheat after beet. Some wheat is still sown after early (September) lifted beet, but other land now goes into April-sown forage maize for a nearby AD plant.

We are not trying to rush a crop in, so can leave time for the soil to improve. It has revolutionised the way we grow beet.

Since this change, the five-year average wheat yield has increased from 5.5t/ha to 9t/ha, he notes.

Case study: Teddy Maufe, north Norfolk

Sugar beet has been grown at Branthill Farm on the Holkham Estate for 70 years, but tenant farmer Teddy Maufe has halved the area this season in response to the low contract price and is prepared to drop it completely if the 2017/18 price is not high enough.

Some 50ha (120 acres) is in the ground on the 445ha holding, destined for the Wissington factory in Kings Lynn. Crops are drilled with the farms 17-year-old machine, with all lifting done by a contractor. We used to harvest and haul our own beet, but stopped having our own harvester, which we shared with a neighbour, about 12 years ago and sold our lorry eight years ago, says Mr Maufe.

Average yields are nudging 70t/ha (28t/acre) but did hit a record 86t/ha (35t/acre) last year due to exceptional growing conditions.

The rotational benefit of providing an entry for spring barley is one of the main reasons for keeping the crop. However, Mr Maufe says the price needs to increase  otherwise he will reduce the area further or stop growing it altogether.

The farms light, sandy soil over chalk and its maritime microclimate are ideal for malting barley, but are less suited to beet, he says. Lack of water is our biggest problem and means we are never going to achieve the big yields seen on heavier land.

He acknowledges there can also be compaction and rooting problems in spring barley that follows beet harvested in wet conditions, especially on headlands. Farm roads can sometimes take a hammering from beet trailers and lorries, requiring expensive repair, he adds.

Mr Maufe says the price has to be at least in the mid-20s per tonne to make beet worth growing in future. If that price could be achieved, he would aim to keep the area at about 60ha. But any price below that would see the area cut further, and he would drop it completely if it fell below 20/t.

We have other break crop options available to us in the form of maize and wholecrop rye for a local AD plant. Im not prepared to keep growing beet long term at the current price.
Story Highlights 58% of Democrats say candidates have good ideas; 46% of Republicans agree

Before March, Republicans much more positive about candidate ideas

Independents are the most cynical; just 38% agree

PRINCETON, N.J. -- As the two major political parties have settled on their presumptive presidential nominees, Democrats (58%) have become significantly more likely than Republicans (46%) and independents (38%) to say any presidential candidate has come up with good ideas for solving the most important problem facing the U.S. From November to February, Republicans were the most positive on candidates' ideas for solving the nation's No. 1 problem. The two partisan groups were tied from March through May.

Gallup first asked this question last November and has updated it monthly since January. The most recent measurement was June 1-5, prior to the Orlando mass shooting. Gallup uses this question as a follow-up to a question asking Americans, in an open-ended fashion, to name the top problem facing the U.S.

As of the most recent June asking, the Republican nomination had been decided. Bernie Sanders was still battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, although Clinton's nomination was all but assured at that point.

The trend in Republicans' responses to some degree parallels the narrowing of their party's field of candidates. Last November and in the first two months of this year, the Republican field was crowded. A significant drop in Republicans' positive views in March took place after the field narrowed with the withdrawal of Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee. At the time of the March survey, however, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich were still campaigning against Donald Trump. It is possible that the negative turn in the tone of the GOP debates in March affected Republicans' perceptions of their candidates and their ideas.

Trump's two remaining challengers -- Cruz and Kasich -- both dropped out in early May just before that month's May 4-8 survey, but Republicans' views changed little in that poll. Another significant downturn in Republicans' positive views of candidate ideas took place in June, with Trump entrenched as the nominee.

On the Democratic side, no specific event coincided with the uptick in Democrats' positivity in the March survey. Clinton's main competition, Sanders, has continued campaigning up through this week's final primary in Washington, D.C., and Democrats have become even more positive still this month. Both Democrats and Republicans began paying more attention to the race in March.

Since February, independents have been less likely than Republicans or Democrats to say that any candidate has come up with good ideas for solving problems. This reflects independents' lack of strong allegiance to either party or a specific candidate.

Despite these significant shifts in how each party's constituents feel about candidates having come up with good ideas, the overall trend in this measure has stayed fairly stable. The exception to this pattern came in February, when -- reflecting the uptick in both Republicans' and Democrats' positive responses -- the "good ideas" percentage rose to 52%, the highest figure recorded for any month. By March, however, the overall trend had settled down, and although it is a little more negative in June, has not varied substantially. This reflects the fact that as one group of partisans became more positive, the other group became more negative. The overall trend shows that half of Americans at this juncture do not think any candidate has come up with good ideas for solving the nation's top problem.

Implications

Republicans' and Democrats' perceptions of whether presidential candidates have come up with good ideas for solving the most important problem facing the U.S. have shifted notably over the course of the past eight months. The percentage of Republicans saying candidates have come up with solid plans to address the nation's most pressing issue dropped about 20 percentage points from February to June, while the percentage of Democrats holding that view rose by about the same amount from January to June.

It's not entirely clear what has driven these shifts. Clearly, the fact that the number of Republican candidates has gone from many to one could be a factor. About three in 10 Republicans now view Trump unfavorably, and given that there are no other GOP candidates in the field, these individuals could be the ones who now say that no candidates have good ideas for solving the nation's top problem. More broadly, the June data could simply reflect the fact that Democrats are more satisfied with the ideas generated by Clinton (and perhaps Sanders) than Republicans are about ideas generated by Trump.

Clinton has been the expected Democratic nominee for months now, although with dogged competition from Sanders. Her victories in the June 7 primaries that essentially sealed her status as the Democratic nominee occurred after Gallup's June update, thus this does not help explain why Democrats are more positive this month.

Whatever the reasons, the current data are an apparent plus for Democrats -- if they can translate their partisans' positive feelings about candidates' (presumably their candidate's) ideas for solving the big problems into enthusiasm and turnout on Election Day.

Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted June 1-5, 2016, with a random sample of 1,027 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of 308 Republicans, the margin of sampling error is 6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of 386 independents, the margin of sampling error is 6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of 313 Democrats, the margin of sampling error is 6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.
Story Highlights More than one in four have a great deal, quite a lot of confidence

Level of confidence unchanged since 2013

Liberals, conservatives share similarly low level of confidence 

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' confidence in banks is unchanged from a year ago and remains below 30% for the eighth straight year after tumbling during the 2007-2009 recession. The 27% of U.S. adults who now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the institution is slightly higher than the lows during the Great Recession and its aftermath. However, confidence in banks has been essentially at this level the past several years.

The current percentage of adults who say they have confidence in banks is just half of what it was in 2004 when 53% expressed confidence in the institution. The record high was 60% in 1979. In addition to those expressing high confidence in banks, nearly half of Americans say they have "some" confidence in them, while about a quarter (26%) have "very little" or no confidence.

About half of Americans expressed confidence in banks in most polls in the 1980s, but confidence suffered in the early 1990s after the Savings and Loan crisis, with confidence ranging from 30% to 37%. But by the late '90s, confidence improved, ranging from 40% to 44%. Confidence in banks gained in the early 2000s, reaching a majority level by 2004.

Like most institutions, confidence in banks began to fall in 2005 and 2006 as Americans' satisfaction with the way things were going suffered. By 2007, with housing prices starting to fall after peaking in 2006, banking confidence dipped to 41%. It then fell further to 32% in June 2008, after the recession began but before the October 2008 financial crisis. By June 2009, just 22% of Americans had confidence in banks, slightly worse than today.

Conservatives, Independents, Liberals Share Similarly Low Level of Confidence

Although railing against big banks has been the rallying cry of liberal Democrats such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, among the general population, conservatives and Republicans are no more likely than liberals and Democrats to have high confidence in banks.

About a quarter of Americans in each of the main political party and ideology groups say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in banks. They differ in the percentages expressing low confidence, which is slightly higher for Democrats and liberals than for their Republican and conservative counterparts.

Confidence in banks differs a bit more among income groups. Adults whose households earn less than $30,000 annually (33%) are slightly more likely than those in the middle (24%) and higher (22%) income brackets to express high confidence in banks.

Americans' Confidence in Banks, by Self-Identified Party Affiliation Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in banks -- a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little. A great deal/Quite a lot Some Very little/None (vol.) % % % Republicans 26 55 17 Independents 24 44 32 Democrats 27 48 24 Conservatives 27 50 23 Moderates 25 50 24 Liberals 25 44 30 $75K+ 22 56 21 $30K-$74.9K 24 52 24 Less than $30K 33 36 29 (vol.) = Volunteered response Gallup, June 1-5, 2016

Bottom Line

The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis continues to affect Americans' views of the banking industry. Despite some signs of economic recovery, views of the economy's overall health remain negative, and Americans are not much more willing to express confidence in banks.

Low confidence in banks is not unprecedented, and Americans' views of the institution have recovered in the past from severe dips. However, past events such as the Savings and Loan Crisis paled in comparison to the wide-ranging effects of the 2008 financial crisis that led the economy to depths unseen since the Great Depression. Regaining Americans' trust in recent years, then, appears to be a heavier lift for the banking industry. And it is unclear when -- or if -- Americans' confidence in banks will be restored to what it was a decade ago.

Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted June 1-5, 2016, on the Gallup U.S. Daily survey, with a random sample of 1,027 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.

Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.

Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.
'Elder Scrolls Online' Latest News, Rumors & Update: Three New DLCs On The Way? Things You Need To Know

Zenimax will be releasing multiple DLC packs for "Elder Scrolls Online," all of which were meant to perk up the playing prowess of gamers.

The packs will be smaller DLCs to reward dedicated players who return to the game intermittently, providing them with added flexibility and options ranging from character customization and improved game play.

Smaller DLC packs to maintain players

Game directors Matt Firor spoke with IGN recently, revealing the new DLCs. Elder Scrolls Online players can look forward to an Argonian Dungeon package and a barber shop which would allow players to customize their character in the game.

The third DLC is player housing which has been something requested by players. The third DLC for "Elder Scrolls Online" will be reportedly available by the first quarter of 2017.

Worth noting is that the DLC packs are smaller which Zenimax has admitted to purposely doing. The whole ploy behind it is to have the players forward to something each time new content is released.

The move is something that Firor hopes will stir up a trend which would see players expecting something new in the event that they take some time off and have nothing to look forward to when they return.

Added episodes and quests

While the mentioned "Elder Scrolls Online" DLCs seem to be focused more on satisfying player demands, episodes and quests are still in the mix. Apparently this is what Firor was referring to when he said that players could look forward to something new after resting a bit due to a variety of reasons.

Dark Brotherhood DLC now available

One notable DLC that Zenimax has release for "Elder Scrolls Online" is the Dark Brotherhood pack. The new DLC is now officially out for both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

The Dark Brotherhood DLC will allow players to join the most notorious guilds in Tamriel and return to the Gold Coast as cited by Ubergizmo.
CSULB alum wins gold at the 38th Long Beach Marathon  which was his first
A pair of art exhibits now on view in Albany pay tribute to the work of Lynn Powers, the mid-valley watercolor artist, graphic designer, teacher and 35-year Albany resident who died unexpectedly on March 1, at 65 years old.

Her husband Jim and family, along with The Albany Arts Commission and Gallery Calapooia, decided to honor her by sharing her artwork at the pair of exhibitions, titled "Lynn Powers: A Life in Full Color." The exhibits opened earlier this month at Albany City Hall and Gallery Calapooia, where she was a founding member.

To celebrate the life and art of Powers, two special receptions will be held Saturday night back-to-back at each gallery. A trolley is available to shuttle visitors between the two downtown Albany galleries.

The exhibitions display more than 60 of her paintings, posters and art teaching boards that were framed and hung in the galleries by Jim Powers and their friends Susan and Jim Bourdet and Rachael Bourdet Oehler.

"She's never had an exhibit of this many paintings in one place, so people have only seen one or two at a time or three at most," Jim Powers said.

A series of six floral paintings, titled "The Powers Flowers," are on display for the first time.

Jim says Lynn used the term "to wallow in color," to describe how she worked in many washes of color, over and over again with one painting. Viewers may see the hundreds of layers of color she used to give the painting life, he said.

"I always felt she was trying to look for the soul of the plant or the person she was painting," Jim added.

Linda J. Herd, vice president of Gallery Calapooia and chair of the Albany Arts Commission, says Powers was well-known for her portrait paintings and graphic design work.

"She designed many of the River Rhythms posters. She also designed the city of Albany logos and fire and police logos," Herd said.

She was co-owner of Creative Catalyst Productions Inc., a company where she helped create educational art videos for working artists. Last year, she was named one of the up-and-coming artists in the United States by Watercolor Artist Magazine.

"My mother spent a lot of time watching her mom," said Ben Powers, her son. "My grandmother (Jan Kunz) is one of the world's most acclaimed watercolorists."

Powers also enjoyed taking pictures of people and was always looking for an interesting face, particularly older ones  people who had experienced full lives. "One of her paintings is of a woman who is 106 years old," Jim said.

At the time of her death, she was working on the first portrait in a series of "Strong Women of Albany," named "Pharaba," after the woman featured. It would be Lynn's final painting.

While going through her paintings for the exhibition, Jim says he found at least three versions of that same painting where she had redone the entire portrait.

"She was very tenacious and unwilling to settle for less than what she wanted," Jim said.

"The sadness I still carry now is in the last two or three weeks of her life she had come to the realization that she had developed her own style that was uniquely hers, and she was really ready to go with it," he added.

"One of the things we're all so sad about is what we would have seen, if my mother had a little more time to get her work out there," Ben said.

City Hall is attracting more visitors than usual with the exhibition, Herd said.

"It's the first time I've seen people at an opening stand close to paintings and study them. That made me feel pretty good," Jim Powers said.

Although people knew her work focused on watercolors, Ben Powers said viewers of the exhibits will be surprised by the diversity of the work on display.

"It almost felt like there were ten artists we were looking at," he said.

The family chose not to sell her original artwork. Seventy of her paintings have been digitized and are available for purchase, so more people can enjoy her art, Jim Powers said.

Proceeds from those sales will go to the Lynn Powers Art Fund in the Albany Public Schools Foundation. This was a way the family could keep her spirit alive, because art education in public schools was important to her, Jim said.

Ben Powers, who lives in Portland, is also in the process of creating a separate foundation that will provide artists with technology to promote themselves. One such technology is currently being used at the participating galleries, a virtual tour of Lynn's home studio and the exhibits, available via text message on smartphone (text Lynn to 24587) and online.

"That's very much in keeping up with Lynn's mission to be able to support artists in what they do," Herd said.

Jim and his children Ben, Kyna, Kelly and grandchildren will be joined at the receptions by Lynn's 94-year-old mother and family members from both sides traveling from California and the East Coast.

Herd expects many friends, mid-valley artists and Lynn's fellow Oregon Watercolor Society members will also attend the celebration.

"That's really what this is, a celebration of Lynn's life and sharing the beauty she brought to us and everybody in Albany and surrounding areas," Herd said.

"It's a chance for the community and the people who loved her to be in one place and acknowledge that," Jim said.
Is Trump the greatest candidate? Well, no  but consider the alternative.

Ambassador Stevens was horrifically tortured to death over seven hours; his pleas for help ignored. The Butcher of Benghazi then deliberately lied about the cause, asking what difference does his agonizing tortures make? and claiming we didnt lose a single person in Libya. No decent person could act that way; only a depraved monster could.

She has been the consistent enabler of her husbands sexual predations and demonizer of his victims  hypocrisy rampant. Even one classified email on her private server is a felony punishable by 10 years prison; shes had dozens. (Gen. Petraeus  are you listening?) She is corruption personified  does anyone believe Goldman Sachs paid $650,000 just to listen to a screech owl?

Fired from her first job on the Watergate investigation for dishonesty (by a Democrat), flunked the District of Columbia bar exam twice, all the Arkansas scandals, Travelgate, Vince Foster, etc. Secretary of state? Russian reset, pivot to the Pacific, Middle East and Libya  all resounding flops. The Butcher of Benghazi has botched up every legit thing shes ever been involved with  an incredible record of incompetent bungling.

If this vile creature is the best candidate the Democratic Party can come up with, it should consider closing up shop. I honestly dont know what a Trump presidency would be like, but Ive got a pretty good idea what a Butcher of Benghazi one would be  and Ill take my chances with The Donald.

Jonathan A. Hayes

Corvallis (June 12)
Its become obvious to most that a strong need exists for housing in Philomath.

Real estate listings are sparse and those offered at a reasonable price often sell fast. Buildable land pretty much does not exist in the city limits. The lots that are for sale often feature constraints and issues for home builders.

Some people who want to live in town buy lots with existing houses, but then knock them down to build what they really want.

Chapel Drive LLC has applied to the city requesting for the annexation of 159 acres that ultimately could add up to 660 homes to Philomaths footprint over the next 10 to 20 years. Based on the average size of an American household, thats a population increase of 1,700 or more.

If this sounds familiar to Philomath residents who have been around a while, annexation efforts involving the same applicant were voted down in 2005 and 2006.

Were back at this to take another swing at it, Butch Busse of H&R Homes said during a Philomath Community Network meeting Thursday. The last time we gave this a shot, it didnt do so well but there were a lot of issues and it sounds like everythings laid down a lot better.

The property is situated north of Chapel Drive, east of the high school and middle school campuses, and Philomath City Park, south of Applegate Street residences that stretch from 24th to 30th Street, and west of residences on South 30th from Applegate to beyond Southwood Drive.

A public hearing on the annexation application is planned for 7 p.m. Monday at Philomath City Hall. Public hearings will also be held on another annexation request involving Skirvin Farms and the rodeo grounds, and code language changes regarding the location of a correctional facility.

The Lowther annexation in 2005 was defeated by a 78-22 margin at the polls. Resubmitted as the Chapel Drive annexation in 2006, 69 percent of voters said no.

Annexation applications begin with the planning commission discussion and open houses. If approved, it moves forward to the city council. If the council determines that it meets all applicable criteria, then it goes on the ballot.

The states recent passage of Senate Bill 1573 allows cities to annex land without a public vote, provided certain conditions are met. However, the Philomath City Council voted unanimously at a May 23 meeting to uphold the citys charter and continue to send annexations out to a vote of the people.

That process has not changed at all and frankly, I think as long as thats in the city charter, thats the right way to go about it, Philomath City Manager Chris Workman said.

Corvallis filed a lawsuit in Benton County Circuit Court arguing that SB 1573 is unconstitutional in part because it does not comply with state constitutional provisions limiting legislative authority. The lawsuit also argues that the bill represents an unconstitutional limit on the right of local voters to enact and amend their own city charters.

We do not believe its constitutional and we believe it infringes upon a citys right to govern itself through its charter, Workman said. Both annexations (Chapel Drive and Skirvin Farms) will go through the same process as in 2005 and 2006, and even the same process that the Hartz annexation went through just a few months ago.

The Chapel Drive property includes 110 developable acres with single-family residences no smaller than 7,000 square feet in size, which equates to six homes per acre. Current plans also include a small five-acre neighborhood commercial location that could accommodate retail of some sort, such as a convenience store. A network of trails and pocket parks are also incorporated into the most recent design.

During last weeks Philomath Community Network meeting, Busse listened to concerns and suggestions on topics such as traffic, trails, impact on schools, demands on water, neighborhood characteristics and communicating with the public.

Schools superintendent Melissa Goff, police chief Ken Rueben, city manager Chris Workman, fire chief Tom Miller and chamber director Shelley Niemann were among those on hand along with other community leaders such as Lauri Lehman of Strengthening Rural Families, former mayors Van Hunsaker and Dale Collins, police volunteer Marcia Gilson, the librarys Ashley Folgate and various city representatives and community members.

Busse mentioned at least a 10-year build-out on the project and said there is a bit of a pent-up demand already here with 80 or so units over the first year. Busse admitted those were only estimates, saying its hard for me to throw that dart right now because we have so much more engineering work to do.

The first phase of development has already started through the clearing of trees, but that involves property already in the city limits. The plan is for homes to begin going up later this summer.

Were about 30 days from getting the permits in hand and well be immediately going to dirt on that, Busse said.

The property in the city limits still needs to be recorded and broken up into 17 lots, but Busse said H&R Homes should be able to pull a permit on one and build a model home for people to see before the annexation vote arrives in November.

If the annexation occurs, the second phase would be constructed east of Philomath City Park and south of residences along Applegate Street. An entry point from the north would be on 26th Street, which runs just past Peace Lutheran Church.

The Philomath Community Network meeting started to get into specific questions and concerns, which prompted Workman to say that the entire plan could look different after annexation.

The tendency is to try to look at specific intersections and specific areas and thats important to do, but at the same time, these guys have got to get the property annexed into the city before they can really start spending money to look at the best way to solve these issues, Workman said.

If approved, then the process would involve the submission of a site design to begin the next phase. The city planner and staff would then start to get into specifics.

This is just a concept as of right now, Workman said while people looked over a proposed design. So you dont want to hang your hat on this is what it will be, this is what were voting on  were not. What the votes going to be in November is do we want to annex this 159 acres into the city so that the developers can start looking at how theyre going to develop it and what thats going to look like?

You dont want to vote just for a blank slate, you want to know what the plan is, he added. But youve also got to know the plan could change pretty substantially.

Busse said its in the best interest of the developers to put together a site design thats attractive to the community and potential home buyers.

What wont change is the need for the utilities and the improvements that we have to have, Busse said. Were not going to come back and say, we got annexed so were going to try to nix all these little things the community needs. For one, the citys not going to let that happen  we want to make this project look right and be serviceable.

Joan Swanson, city finance director, said the desire would be to build slowly so that proper infrastructure could be established.

I think with the area, like Butch was saying, theres a pent-up demand.  The first two phases might be a little bit larger but then you may see some smaller phases coming in after that, said Ben Williams with DOWL, an engineering firm working on the project. For 660 units over 10 years, that would be an average of 66 lots per year. Thats probably about right, or it might even be a little bit heavy based on how many building permits youre issuing per year right now.

Workman didnt immediately know but estimated the number of building permits over the past year at 14 or 15.

Really when youre building out, its market driven, Williams said. The last thing you want to do is have 100 lots sitting there vacant with no houses  youre always trying to build out based on what your absorption can be for that year.

I think 10 years would be very optimistic and I think Butch would be ecstatic about that from a business aspect but its probably going to be a little bit more extended than that, Williams added. I would anticipate probably in the 15 (years) range and maybe your last phase may be pushed out even further.

Naturally, growth will also be dictated by capacities involving city services, such as water treatment.

If were not ready to expand or the school district needs another year, we take all that into account, said Workman, adding that there would be no formal number because of the natural constraints that come into play.

I just want them to understand that were not here to drastically change the community overnight, Busse said when asked what he wants local residents to know about this annexation request. We just want the opportunity to work here and provide the utilities to the project and everything in the proper manner and I know it would benefit the school district.

Busse said the addition would provide a positive impact on some of the issues faced by the school district as well as local businesses through new life and growth in the community.
Telekom : Bomb scare at Telekom's offices

Bonn Police explosives experts were called in when a suspect bag was found but it was a false alarm.

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Several hundred employees at Telekoms head office in Beuel had to evacuate the building yesterday lunchtime. A bomb alert was triggered when an abandoned bag was found at the Starbucks Cafe in the new wing of the Telekom complex on Ramersdorfer Landgrabenweg. A wide area at the site was cordoned off and police closed Landgrabenweg to traffic.

Police explosives experts arrived around 1.30pm and prepared their robot. It then entered the building and screened the bag. To do this, the robot had to first move the bag in front of a specially prepared wall where it was x-rayed. The all clear was given at around 2.30pm. The bag contained only mens clothing and cosmetic products. There was no bomb.

According to unconfirmed information there was a Finnish name on the bag. There were no Telekom employees or visitors with that name.
Bad Godesberg : Saturdays demonstration cancelled

Melanie Dittmer has cancelled her demonstration but Bonn stellt sich quer still plans to hold one.

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Police said yesterday that the right wing extremist Melanie Dittmer will now not hold a demonstration on Saturday in Bad Godesberg after all. The alliance Bonn stellt sich quer has therefore also cancelled its counter-demonstrations, which were to be held close to the circular flower-bed on Rheinallee. The alliance will still hold a demonstration on Saturday at 1pm in front of the train station in Bad Godesberg.

Dittmer had once again used the deadly attack on Niklas P as justification for a demonstration. Police had banned her from starting the demonstration at the circular flower-bed at the junction of Rheinallee and Rungsdorfer Strae and had allocated her another site nearby. She was also banned from leading and from speaking at the demonstration. According to information on the internet, Dittmer withdrew her application because international speakers had cancelled. She said she would now hold the demonstration in September.
Carter Announces More U.S. Support for Afghan Forces

By Cheryl Pellerin DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2016  U.S. forces in Afghanistan now will be able to boost support for Afghan conventional forces with more firepower and by accompanying and advising them on the ground and in the air, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said this morning in Brussels.

The secretary spoke during a news conference after this week's NATO defense ministers conference, his fourth as defense secretary and the last such meeting before the July 8-9 NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland.

Based on his recommendations and those of Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Carter said, President Barack Obama decided to grant more flexibility to U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year.

More Proactive Support

The new authority means U.S. troops can more proactively support Afghan conventional forces in two critical ways: with more American firepower, especially through close air support, and by accompanying and advising Afghan conventional forces on the ground and in the air, he explained.

"In practical terms, this means U.S. forces will have more opportunities to accompany and enable Afghan conventional forces, just like we have already been doing with Afghan special operations forces," the secretary said.

Enabling Capabilities

"As I told my fellow defense ministers," Carter added, "this supports our ongoing counterterrorism and force-protection missions there [and] NATO's Resolute Support mission, because a more capable Afghan force only makes our [deployed] forces  more secure, and it will help the Afghans  as we prepare for the U.S. and NATO missions in 2017."

Carter said U.S. defense budget planning includes full funding for Afghan national defense and security forces through 2020, and that he learned today from NATO counterparts that they also intend to provide funding through 2020 for the Afghan national security forces.

"Regarding U.S. troop levels for future years," the secretary said, "the current plan announced last August is for 9,800 U.S. service members to remain in Afghanistan for most of this year and  to draw down that number to 5,500 by the end of the year."

Since then, he said, other nations also have decided to commit to having forces in Afghanistan beyond this year.

"This commitment will be part of NATO's flexible regional approach to the Resolute Support mission," Carter said. "The United States will continue to lead the NATO effort in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and we will continue to provide coalition partners with sufficient enabling capabilities needed for their own presence, particularly in northern and western Afghanistan."

Counter-ISIL Fight

On the U.S.-led coalition campaign to deliver a lasting defeat to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Carter said he and the ministers agreed that ISIL's parent tumor in Iraq and Syria and its metastasis are among the leading sources of instability emanating from NATO's southern flank.

The effort has received contributions from nearly every NATO member, Carter added, but every nation and the NATO alliance itself need to do more.

"At this ministerial, we discussed specific ways that NATO could contribute more directly to the counter-ISIL campaign, including by providing NATO [Airborne Warning and Control System] aircraft and by conducting training and defense capacity building for the Iraqi security forces in Iraq rather than in Jordan," he said.

With his French and British counterparts, Carter discussed recent momentum in the counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria.

Three Major Operations

The coalition is supporting local, capable and motivated forces on the ground in three major operations, all of which are putting a stranglehold on ISIL and applying pressure on multiple fronts, the secretary said.

"In western Iraq we're assisting the Iraqi security forces in Iraqi operations under the leadership of Prime Minister Abadi to retake Fallujah," he added. "In Northern Iraq, we're also supporting the ISF in operations to isolate and pressure Mosul."

In Northern Syria, Carter said, the coalition is enabling Syrian-Arab coalition forces working to envelop Manbij City, an operation that's critical for helping seal the Turkish border and cut off the flow of foreign fighters in and out of Syria.

"Another challenge emanating from NATO's southern flank is the migrant and refugee crisis, which NATO is helping address in the Aegean Sea," the secretary said. "Soon, the United States will be contributing to that NATO activity by sending the USNS Grapple to support it."

NATO's Eastern Flank

On NATO's eastern flank, after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, NATO took initial actions that included enhancing the NATO Response Force and standing up the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, Carter said, noting that these were good first steps.

"We agreed that NATO would further strengthen its posture to deter and if necessary defeat any aggressor across the full spectrum of conflict [and] we've seen results since then," he added.

The secretary called this an important alliance commitment to deterrence, one that is in addition to bilateral efforts such as the U.S.-European Reassurance Initiative. Details will be finalized in Warsaw, he said.

"More needs to be done," he added, "particularly to bolster the readiness and capabilities of key NATO units that might be called upon in a crisis."

That requires resources and rebuilding basic military skills that have atrophied in parts of the alliance over the past quarter century, he said.

Writing a New Playbook

"Since the Wales summit [in 2014], NATO forces have been adapting and writing a new playbook for the 21st century," the secretary said. "We've been innovating to counter new challenges like cyber and hybrid warfare, integrating conventional and nuclear deterrence, and adjusting our posture and presence so that we can be more agile in responding to new threats."

Meanwhile, he added, NATO is helping support the resilience of its partners against Russian aggression and coercion. In Ukraine, NATO has stood up a trust fund to help the Ukrainian armed forces in areas like cyber, logistics, medical support and countering improvised explosive devices.

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Progress Made in Slow, Tough Fight for Fallujah, OIR Spokesman Says

By Lisa Ferdinando DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2016  Iraqi forces, backed by coalition strikes, are making "slow but steady" progress in the tough fight to take back Fallujah, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve said today.

Iraqi security forces continue to "tighten the encirclement" around Fallujah in the effort to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, said Army Col. Christopher Garver, who spoke to Pentagon reporters via teleconference from Baghdad.

"In Fallujah, we continue to see slow, but steady, progress on different axes around the city," he said.

Brigades of two Iraqi divisions are clearing Fallujah suburbs to the north, while one of those divisions is also clearing neighborhoods to the southeast, Garver said. Meanwhile, he added, Iraqi units and Anbar tribal fighters are clearing toward the north and toward the east, heading to the city.

'Foothold' in Fallujah

Iraqi counterterrorism service members, commandos and federal police units are inside the southern edge of Fallujah, Garver said. "They have a foothold in the southern corner or the southern edge of the city," he told reporters. "But it's been a significant fight to grab that foothold, and so they're continuing to try to expand."

Fighting remains intense in Fallujah, especially on the southern side, he said.

Coalition strikes continue to attack ISIL targets inside the city, Garver said. In the last seven days, he added, there have been 19 coalition strikes inside the city.

"We have hit tactical units and fighters, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade teams, mortar systems, recoilless rifles, air artillery pieces, and [ISIL] vehicles," the colonel said.

In addition to the coalition strikes, the Iraqi air force continues to attack targets in support of the Iraqi ground forces, Garver explained.

"The fighting also remains slow and careful because of the civilian situation inside the city," he said. "We've seen reporting that approximately 40,000 civilians from the greater Fallujah area have been evacuated."

Progress Elsewhere in Iraq

Iraqi units continue to clear pockets of ISIL fighters on the north side of the Euphrates River while securing areas that have already been cleared, Garver said.

From Hiit to Juba, units from three Iraqi army divisions and members of the counterterrorism forces have "repelled multiple local disrupting attacks and made steady progress clearing [ISIL] influence," he said.

Focusing on Fallujah and Mosul, Iraqi forces continue the "slow, difficult, dangerous work of clearing IEDs and booby-traps, fighting off localized attacks, and engaging pockets of [ISIL] fighters where they find them," the colonel said.

Closing in on Syrian Town of Manbij

In Syria, the Syrian-Arab coalition and allied forces have encircled the city of Manbij and are cutting off lines of communication to the area, Garver said.

Those forces have seized control of the outer roads to prevent any ISIL resupply or reinforcement, Garver said, noting that Manbij, with roads running north-south and east-west, is a "crossroads" for ISIL communications.

"The fighting for Manbij has continued to be significant and, at times, heavy," he said, adding there are reports of ISIL holding large groups of civilian hostages and forcing hostages to fight.

In the last seven days, the coalition has conducted 73 strikes in support of the effort to take back Manbij, Garver said.

"Coalition strikes have also destroyed three [ISIL] command-and-control nodes, which we assess as degrading [ISIL] enough to cause the fighters to fall back into the city," he said.

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AF Chief: Joint Force in Excellent Shape, But Needs Resources, Prioritization

By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, June 15, 2016  The joint force is in excellent shape, but leaders must pay attention to it, Air Force Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, the Air Force chief of staff, told the Defense Writers Group here today.

Welsh  a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  spoke to the group as one of his last public acts in office. He retires later this month after 40 years in uniform.

But the general didn't look back, and he said his service is well-placed to counter future threats.

Transnational, Multidomain Threats

Welsh said he agrees with Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that transnational, multidomain threats will be the hallmark of conflict in the future.

"Compared to any other service, the Air Force is already operating transnationally and across domains today," he said. "We cross a lot of boundaries."

Aircraft, by their nature, are a transnational asset, he said, noting that aircraft launching from the United States can cross a number of combatant commands. The Air Force also does multidomain operations every day, he added.

The Navy is another service with this expertise in its DNA, Welsh said. He noted the Navy is launching sorties from the Mediterranean Sea to the Middle East, crossing the boundary from U.S. European Command into U.S. Central Command's area of operations.

"But what we need to do as a joint force is how do we bring all that together," he said. "The other services do the same thing -- we just do it on a broader scale day to day. The American military is used to dealing with transnational and multidomain conflict, the general said, but military leaders need to make sure the command and control systems and sensor networks are capable of connecting across all lines.

Prioritization of Planning, Resources

The Joint Chiefs are worried about prioritization of planning and prioritization of resource assignment as they look at problems that straddle geographic lines, Welsh told the writers.

"If you take Russia as an example, if someone asks, 'What's the issue with Russia, and what's our plan for action if the next Russian action should occur?' It's not just U.S. European Command, which is where everybody tends to look," he said. "European Command is worried about any engagement with Russia, but so is Central Command, so is Pacific Command, so is Strategic Command, Northern Command  everybody is worried about it."

The question then becomes how the military balances the priority for planning and resources across all those lines. "The chairman really has to be the one, along with the Joint Staff, to do that direction and prioritization," Welsh said. "That's what General Dunford is talking about."

Joint Force is Healthy

The joint force is really healthy, the general said -- able to execute the strategy well and amazingly capable. "If you look at the results of joint operations over time, they are pretty darn good," he said. "There is no one on Earth that's as capable as the American military."

The joint force has the same problem the Air Force has, the general said. "We're short on people in many areas," he explained. "We need to modernize. We just have got to realize that for the tasks we've been given, there needs to be a certain level of resources assigned to it, or change the tasking."

The last is not something military leaders decide, Welsh said.

"If we decide that the United States is not going to be as engaged and use its military as it has for the last 50 or 60 years, OK," he said. "Then we will tell you what the military needs to look like to do whatever the nation wants us to be able to do. But you can't expect to keep using us the way we've been used over the last 50 years and cut the size of the force and limit our ability to modernize it. That combination doesn't work."

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U.S. Department of Defense

Press Operations

News Transcript

Presenter: Colonel Christopher Garver, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman; June 15, 2016

Department of Defense Press Briefing by Col. Garver via teleconference from Baghdad, Iraq

CAPTAIN JEFF DAVIS: Alright good morning everybody and good morning to you Colonel Garver just want to make sure you can hear us and we can hear you.

COLONEL CHRISTOPHER GARVER: I can hear you just fine, Jeff.

CAPTAIN JEFF DAVIS: Pleased to be joined today form Baghdad by the public affairs officer for CJTF, Operation Inherent Resolve, Colonel Chris Garver.

Chris, we'll turn it over to you for opening comments and then we'll come back here for questions.

COL. GARVER: All right. Thanks, Jeff.

Greetings from Baghdad, Pentagon Press Corps. It's good to see everybody again today. I've got an opening statement regarding major ongoing operations, and then I'll take your questions.

Now, the campaign to defeat Daesh across the breadth and depth of the combined area of operations in both Iraq and Syria continues. If we could bring up the map, please.

So as I discuss this, I'll focus first on Iraq in the Euphrates River Valley, star one and star two, and then I'll focus in the Tigris River Valley, star three, and then I'll move over to Syria, star four. Thank you, control room.

In Fallujah, we continue to see slow by steady progress on different axis around the city. The ISF continues to tighten the encirclement around Fallujah City. Brigades of two Iraqi divisions, the first division and the 14th division, are clearing the Fallujah suburbs to the north. The Iraqi 1st Division is also clearing neighborhoods to the southeast of Fallujah.

South and west of the Euphrates River, units of the 8th and 7th Divisions and the Anbar tribal fighters are clearing toward the north and toward the east, heading toward Fallujah City.

Counterterrorism service, Iraqi commandos and federal police units are inside the southern edge of the city itself. The fight against Daesh inside the city remains a slow, difficult fight, with Daesh continuing to offer stiff resistance with machine guns, indirect fire and IEDs and mine field belts.

Yesterday, Daesh attempted to attack these units with two vehicles outfitted as vehicle-borne IEDs. One was defeated by a coalition terrain denial strike -- it was stopped by a crater caused by one of our strikes -- and the second was defeated by fires from the unit.

The fighting remains intense inside the city, especially on the southern side. Coalition continues to attack Daesh targets inside the city in support of the ISF.

In the last seven days, we have conducted 19 strikes inside the city. We have hit tactical units and fighters, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade teams, mortar systems, recoil-less rifles, anti-air artillery pieces, and Daesh vehicles. In addition to the coalition strikes, the Iraqi air force continues to attack targets in support of their ground forces as well.

The fighting also remains slow and careful because of the civilian situation inside the city. We've seen reporting that approximately 40,000 civilians from the greater Fallujah area have been evacuated. The Iraqi government and international organizations are working to support those who have left.

Elsewhere in the central Euphrates River valley, units continue to clear pockets of Daesh fighters on the north side of the Euphrates and secure those areas already cleared from counterattacks. From Hiit to Juba, units from three Iraqi army divisions and the CTS have repelled multiple local disrupting attacks and made steady progress clearing Daesh influence.

So the Iraqi security forces' main effort has moved to Fallujah and to Mosul. These units continue to conduct the slow, difficult, dangerous work of clearing IEDs and booby-traps, fighting off localized attacks, and engaging pockets of Daesh fighters where they find them. Daesh also continues to attempt suicide attacks with suicide vests and VBIEDs in this area. We continue to provide strikes in support of these operations. Yesterday, we conducted a dynamic strike near the town of Durab supporting these forces.

In northern Iraq, in the Tigris River valley, the Iraqi army brigades that launched from Makhmour two months ago, also resumed the attack to the east, seizing the towns of Koabit Jabur and Nasir. Resistance from Daesh fighters has been generally moderate, consisting of small-arms fire, indirect fire and VBIED use. Fighting continues in this area as the ISF clears these towns and continues the drive to the west. The coalition conducted 50 strikes in the last seven days and four strikes yesterday in support of this attack.

Secretary of Defense Carter announced on Monday that AH-64 Apaches had engaged a Daesh target in the fight for the first time since October, 2014. As you know, the Apaches have been here since then in a primarily force protection role. Monday early morning, Apaches engaged and destroyed a VBIED near Qayara. The Apaches remained well behind the forward line of troops and engaged with VBIED with the Hellfire missile, destroying it. All the aircraft returned safely after the mission.

The Iraqi government approved the use of Apaches, and as with all strikes, cleared and approved the fire. The Apaches provide another platform with significant capabilities into the already potent mix of aircraft and weapons systems the coalition is employing to defeat Daesh.

Shifting to Syria, the Syrian-Arab coalition-led attack of the Syrian Democratic Forces continues to advance on the city of Manbij. The SAC and other forces on the attack have encircled Manbij and are conducting the isolation phase, cutting off lines of communication into and out of the city. Manbij has improved roads running through the city north-south and east-west. Literally, it is a crossroads for Daesh lines of communication. And the SDF forces have seized control of those outer roads to prevent reinforcements and resupply from reaching the Daesh fighters in the city.

The fighting for Manbij has continued to be significant and at times heavy. Daesh continues to defend the area with machine guns, indirect fire, and IEDs. We've seen estimates of hundreds of Daesh fighters still in Manbij and they're continuing to defend the city. There are also indications that Daesh may be holding large groups of civilians as hostages and forcefully compelling citizens into fighting for them, as we have certainly seen before.

The SAC-led force is exercising great care in its application of firepower against Daesh in the city to avoid collateral damage and especially civilian casualties.

In the last seven days, the coalition has conducted 73 strikes in support of this attack. Coalition strikes have also destroyed three Daesh command and control nodes, which we assess as degrading Daesh enough to cause the fighters to fall back into the city.

Finally, I'd like to show a video of a recent coalition strike against an up-armored VBIED that took place in Fallujah on May 28th. We've talked before about these VBIEDs, and how they're designed to protect the driver as he pilots the vehicle towards a suicide attack.

In the video, you can see a truck that has been turned into an armored vehicle by bolting metal plates on the body of the vehicle, resulting in a very boxy shape. You can clearly see the metal plate that has been attached to the front of the vehicle as an additional shield.

The vehicle was detected by coalition surveillance and tracked on its movement before it was employed against an Iraqi Security Forces unit.

After the strike, the size of the explosion indicates the vehicle is filled with a significant amount of explosives.

So, roll the video, please.

(VIDEO PRESENTATION)

COL. GARVER: All right, thank you, DVIDS.

And with that, I'll take your questions -- for Bob, Lita, whoever is in the front row.

CAPT. DAVIS: We start today with Joe Tabet, from Al Hurra.

Q: Colonel Garver, I would like to -- to hear from you if -- if you could confirm this information that the coalition has given the YPG some restrictions to stay away from the Turkish border 50 -- 15 kilometers, to stay 15 kilometers away from the Turkish border, and mainly from Azaz to -- (inaudible).

Could you confirm that? Is that true?

COL. GARVER: The -- it's inaccurate, because the plan to reseize Manbij and clean Daesh out of that area is an SDF and Syrian-Arab coalition-led plan. It is not a coalition plan.

We're providing support, we help negotiate with the Turkish government and the -- you know, the other forces involved in the area.

But it is not a coalition plan. It is a SAC-led plan, it is an SDF plan.

Q: If I'm wrong -- so, I understand from you that the YPG has a freely -- can move freely along the Turkish border, the Syrian-Turkish border.

Is that -- is that accurate to say that?

COL. GARVER: Well, any member of the SDF would need to coordinate its movements with its own commander.

In this case, on this operation, the Syrian-Arab coalition is leading this attack. So, if a YPG unit wanted to move somewhere, it would need to clear that with its chain of command.

Again, not the coalition. This is a SDF, but Syrian-Arab coalition-led operation. So, if any YPG unit or any of the other forces that are a member of the SDF, because it's not just the YPG -- if any of the other forces wanted to move somewhere, they would clear that through their chain of command.

Q: Thank you, sir.

CAPT. DAVIS: Next we go to David Martin.

Q: Chris, the Apaches, are they -- had -- have they now been forward deployed to a new base up north, closer to the -- closer to Mosul?

COL. GARVER: Well, -- (inaudible) -- talk specifics, David, clearly, but there are Apaches located in different locations in the country.

CAPT. DAVIS: Courtney Kube.

Q: Hey, Chris. I want to ask about Fallujah. But just on the Apaches, so can you give us an idea of -- I think Secretary Carter announced that there was one strike that was carried out by Apaches. I don't remember if it was Monday, maybe, in -- near Makhmour. Have there been more strikes at least by Apaches?

COL. GARVER: No, that strike is the only strike that the Apaches have participated in up to this time.

Q: And then on Fallujah, when you say -- I think you said that they -- the CTS and the ISF have breached the southern edge, I think it was, of Fallujah. So can we say now that they are inside the actual city of Fallujah?

COL. GARVER: Yes, that is accurate. They are inside. They have a foothold in the southern corner or the southern edge of the city. But it's been a significant fight to grab that foothold, and so they're continuing to try to expand. As you always do when you enter into a city, you've got to grab a foothold and then push in.

We've seen the Iraqis like to push towards the center, seize the center and then fight outward. We saw them to do that in Fallujah, we've seen them do that in other place. So there's got -- you know, you've got to get in with that initial foothold to get it. But they've got that now, yes.

Q: (inaudible) -- stage now of Fallujah or are they still in sort of the encircling? And then have you -- and I know you guys don't like to talk about timelines, but can you give us any sense, now that they've actually breached the city, of -- of any kind of estimates of how long it might actually take to clear the city?

COL. GARVER: So on your first question -- I think I remember your first question. The -- yes, we can say that they are inside the city. But the encirclement of the city is still rolling out. We call that the isolation phase. That's still going on to prevent Daesh reinforcements, resupply -- (inaudible) -- fighters up and down the Euphrates River Valley or all the way from up in Mosul or elsewhere in -- in Iraq to come in to try to reinforce them.

We want to prevent that. We've got federal police and the PMF units on the outside completing that -- that isolation and also clearing, you know, the neighborhood and the suburbs on the outside as well. Inside in the city, though, they've started that attack into the center of the city, yes.

Second question was -- what's your second question again? Sorry, Courtney.

Q: That's okay. Just any kind of rough timeline on how -- how -- is it weeks or months for the -- how long the clearing phase might take?

COL. GARVER: And as you said, you know, we -- we don't like to estimate timelines. We've seen this -- this operation has been going on in this phase for approximately three weeks now. It's a tough fight and it gets tougher the closer we get into the city, the harder it gets. The distances that they move on a daily basis, the closer they get in, it gets -- they get smaller and the meters that you gain become tougher to gain, they become more significant as we get them.

But what we saw in Ramadi was once they got into the center of the city, things sped up in the clearing operation. So we haven't seen that yet and we're certainly looking for that. But I can't put a timeline on it. The -- but -- but we're -- we want this to go as quickly as we can and we want to, you know, provide them the support that they need to help that happen.

Q: Thank you.

CAPT. DAVIS: Next, we'll go to Andrew Tilghman of the Military Times.

Q: Hi, colonel.

Two questions on the Iraq side. One is Fallujah, the military base south of Fallujah that the Marines used to call Camp Fallujah -- are there any American advisers at that facility these days?

COL. GARVER: Andrew, that's a great question. I don't know off the top of my head. I would have to go back and take a look. I don't think so, but I would need to go back and check. We can go back and check that for you.

Q: I think you said that the Apaches up by Mosul were used in the town of Qayara. Could you elaborate a little bit on what's going on in Qayara? I mean, -- (inaudible) -- if that's a city of some strategic importance on the western side of the river. Is that -- have the Iraqi forces taken that? Is the fighting ongoing there? And is -- can you talk a little bit about the importance of that city?

COL. GARVER: Well, the VBIED was destroyed actually near Qayara, which I kind of just use as a reference point, and that's how we listed it on our strike release when it came out, because it wasn't inside the city itself. It was near Qayara.

The two towns that were taken near there -- Masour and the other town, they're close to Qayara. The attack is coming from east to west, and it's going to have to keep working toward Mosul as those forces -- (inaudible). But I don't want to get into specifics of defensive future operations or, you know, -- (inaudible) -- value of any future -- (inaudible) -- in that area -- (inaudible) -- the way that we talk about it -- (inaudible).

CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Next, we'll go to Carla Babb, Voice of America.

Q: Hi, colonel. Thanks for doing this.

I have three quick topics to touch on. In Fallujah, my apologies if you said this, but when did they enter the south -- the southern part of the city? What day was that when the ISF entered Fallujah?

COL. GARVER: I think it was in the last couple of days. I'd have to go back and take a look to figure out the exact time, but it was within the last couple of days.

Q: And how many ISF are part of this operation currently, versus the number of estimated Islamic state fighters that -- that you estimate to be in there?

COL. GARVER: We've estimated the size of -- you know, we've seen different estimates of the size and number of Daesh inside the city. And clearly, you know, our strikes are having an effect on them. And so as we conduct those, we try to figure how many bad guys there are. We don't have a definitive number to tell you.

As for the number of SDF (sic ISF)involved, I don't want to give a specific number. I don't want to talk about specifics. But we've got multiple brigades from four different divisions; plus we've got CTS -- (inaudible) -- police, Anbar tribal fighters, all involved in the operations. Significant force that the Iraqis have put together to conduct this attack on Fallujah.

Q: Would it be safe to still say that hundreds of Islamic state fighters remain in Fallujah? Is that an accurate description?

COL. GARVER: That's I think an accurate estimate. We don't know exactly, and that's part of as they get in and they fight and we strike from the air, and we've got, as we talked about last week, ISR -- (inaudible) -- figure out how many bad guys are in there. We don't have a definitive number. So I think that's I think a close estimate -- (inaudible) -- some of the -- (inaudible).

Q: Thanks. And then on Baghdadi, do we have an update on whether or not al-Baghdadi has been hit or killed?

COL. GARVER: The -- I'll say what I had said to several of you yesterday. I don't have any specific to put out on that. We don't have any confirmation of that.

But I will say I went back and did a little more research, and the day he -- that news article claimed that we struck Raqqah -- and the way it described was a big strike, a massive strike -- we did not hit Raqqah on that day. On Friday the 10 of June, we didn't strike in Raqqah on that day. We did the next day with two small strikes, but the way they described it, we did not conduct that strike.

So I can't confirm one way or another. We don't know for sure. The fight against Daesh continues whether he is or not. But as you know, we've been targeting senior leaders of Daesh and if we've got an opportunity to get him, we would take it.

Q: And then my final question is on Manbij, something you said about the -- some of the citizens being forced to help Islamic State fighters fight. How have you been able to determine which citizens are being forced to stay and which are doing so willingly?

COL. GARVER: That'll certainly be one of the challenges as the Syrian Arab forces and the rest of the SDF approach the city and actually start to fight. If you're pressed into service, I would recommend throwing down your gun and throwing up your hands and then don't fight. If you fight, they're going to fight back.

And as we've seen in these attacks, Daesh is not doing well on the battlefield every time we mount an offensive against them. We saw that in the initial parts of this attack in northern Syria, we've seen that inside Iraq in multiple locations.

So if I were pressed into service and I didn't really want to fight for Daesh, I would surrender the first opportunity I got. I would drop my gun, I'd raise my hand and I would start yelling, "I surrender." And if you're, you know, a hardcore Daesh fighter and you're going to stand and fight, you're probably going to get killed or captured.

CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Thanks. Next to June from Reuters.

Q: Hi, Chris. Can you give us an update on the humanitarian situation in Fallujah? What's -- how -- how is ISIS treating the civilian population? Are they being allowed to leave? Are they being trapped there? And then if they are allowed to leave, what's the interaction between the Sunnis who are leaving and the Shia arm groups that are there?

COL. GARVER: Well, clearly the humanitarian situation is something that everybody is looking carefully at, the humanitarian assistance groups that are here under the -- you know, the umbrella of the U.N. and the coalition is looking at this in an advisory role. And the, importantly, the Iraqi -- the government is looking at this carefully.

We had an outflow, if you will, kind of a standard outflow of -- (inaudible) -- reported 4,000 to 5,000 a day of people flowing out of not just the city of Fallujah, but the surrounding area as well. That had tripled back in the last 24 hours or so a little bit, but they -- they -- the estimates are somewhere around 40,000 citizens that have -- that have gone out.

The ones inside the city is -- you know, we're still concerned about and the ISF is still concerned and -- (inaudible). So -- (inaudible) -- significant flow into -- kind of getting out past the lines, if you will. The flow goes out through the fighters and -- and -- (inaudible) -- into a safer area -- (inaudible) -- is ongoing.

Talk about the safety of the Iraqi citizens. For the most part, the 40,000 people. There's -- (inaudible) -- things for the most part, that it is -- that they're being treated with respect. There have been some reports of this is not treating us -- (inaudible) -- with respect.

The prime minister -- as we talked about last week, the prime minister has ordered an investigation. And during the news in the last couple of days, there has been an announcement that there have been of some arrests in regards of how the people are treating by both the ISF and by the -- (inaudible) --.

So, it appears to us that the government is taking it seriously, and we think that that's the right course, because you know -- (inaudible) -- can be an issue.

But for the most part, they are coming out of the city in -- (inaudible) -- area have been fed well and it's a big problem period. It's a big problem and the Iraqis are struggling to recruit that. For the most part, people are being treated with respect.

Q: Just one other question. You referred to the ISIS fighters who were killed or captured.

What is the infrastructure to deal with the ISIS fighters who were captured? Has there been some sort of, like, detention center set up? Or what -- what's the plan to deal with them?

COL. GARVER: Talking about in Iraq or in Syria?

CAPT. DAVIS: In Iraq, she said.

COL. GARVER: Okay. The Iraqis are processing, and -- as you would, under the law of armed conflict, they're processing individuals -- when citizens pull out, they have to separate and screen to make sure that the good guys are separated from the bad guys, as one would expect.

When they're capturing fighters on the battle field, they are processing them from -- (inaudible) -- in accordance with the laws of armed conflict, something that we assess in our training.

But it's not a coalition role. This is a -- an Iraqi government role. The Iraqi government is in communication with the ICRC -- (inaudible) -- any specific questions to them, because it was -- it is an Iraqi-led, an Iraqi government issue in there.

Q: Do you have an estimate on how many fighters have been captured in Iraq.

COL. GARVER: I -- I don't, off the top of my head. I don't have an estimate.

CAPT. DAVIS: Okay, next to Nancy Youssef.

Q: Hi, Chris. To follow up on June's question, do you have any estimates of how many have been arrested in the Fallujah operations?

And also, does U.S. have any visibility on those detainees at all?

COL. GARVER: I'm sorry, I don't have an estimate of that. It's something we can go back and kind of see if we do need -- if we can put together with the Iraqi-led operation -- (inaudible) -- in dealing the processing and all of that.

When it comes to visibility, we're aware that we are not in -- we're not performing detention operations nor directly advising detention operations.

So, we maintain awareness if we can. We have advisers who are seeing, you know, down on the ground, with their divisions -- (inaudible) -- advisers are elsewhere. We're seeing this happen, but we don't have anybody specifically looking into it.

Q: And then, one of the things we'd heard in the run up to the operation in Fallujah was that -- suspicions from the Iraqi government that a lot of the -- those who involved in the bombings in Baghdad were coming in from Fallujah.

And yet, since these operations began, we have continued to see bombings in Baghdad. If I understand correctly, last Thursday, there were two suicide bombings in Baghdad.

I'm curious if the U.S. has any assessment about where these bombers are coming from. Are they coming from Fallujah? Are they residing in Baghdad? Do you have any idea how they're able to launch these attacks on Baghdad and from where?

COL. GARVER: (inaudible) -- we're looking at that closely with them as well. We are looking at what information and intelligence we can provide to the Iraqis to help them figure that out. I think you've got potentially bombers coming from different locations. We're certainly looking to see if the fighting in Fallujah has the effect that so many in the Iraqi government hope it will in terms of reducing the number of attacks on Baghdad.

But as you point out, there are still attacks going on in Baghdad. But as we gather information, and if we get actionable intelligence, and it were to indicate that the attack was coming from somewhere else, not from Fallujah -- (inaudible) -- or -- (inaudible) -- figure out where these attacks are coming from, then we will definitely share that with the Iraqis and help them deal with that problem.

Q: One question on Manbij, please. If I heard you correctly, I got -- if I understood you correctly, it seems that there is not as aggressive fighting in Manbij. And I'm curious if there's an assessment that ISIS is dedicating resources or fighters to protect Raqqah instead. Is there any indication that they've made a decision to try to protect Raqqah at the expense of Manbij?

COL. GARVER: Don't know if that is their intent, if they've decided to protect -- (inaudible). It's hard to rate their effort one way or another. We -- (inaudible) -- they're still fighting hard to try to keep -- try to keep Manbij. We've seen -- (inaudible) -- into Manbij from the outlying areas, and as the forces have encircled Manbij, close those lines of communications running out of Manbij. So we've seen forces kind of flowing back into the city.

So, as they -- (inaudible) -- area, as they're working their way in, I wouldn't say it's -- (inaudible) -- but they have gained -- (inaudible) -- that fighters are falling back into the city. So -- (inaudible).

Q: Thank you.

CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Next to Lucas Tomlinson from Fox News.

Q: Colonel, just to follow up on June and Nancy's questions. You said that you've seen reports of some people -- some civilians leaving Fallujah that are not being treated with respect. But some of the reporting has been well beyond that -- some mass killings, fresh graves. Can you talk about those reports? Are you seeing primarily Iranian-backed Shia militias taking reprisals against some of these Sunni civilians leaving Fallujah?

COL. GARVER: (inaudible) -- we've seen the reporting of that. We have not seen that specifically. We are out in -- we're not out in an enforcement role investigating to figure that out. We don't have advisers with the PMF to -- (inaudible) -- our understanding of what they're doing -- (inaudible).

The -- but the prime minister has acknowledged that that is (inaudible). He has launched an investigation into the -- (inaudible). We've seen reporting that -- that several arrests have been made. And I don't know the scope or scale of any of that yet -- (inaudible) -- that investigation -- (inaudible) -- better idea.

I've seen -- (inaudible) -- reporting that it's very -- (inaudible) -- in scale and -- (inaudible) -- localized -- (inaudible). I don't know where the truth -- (inaudible).

Q: (inaudible) -- coalition that Iranian-backed forces, including Kasim Solimani's deputy, leading forces who have, you know, fought U.S. troops for years inside Iraq are carrying out some of these attacks. Is there concern that this is a -- a problem?

COL. GARVER: Well, we saw -- we saw inappropriate behavior. We saw -- (inaudible) -- last year around Tikrit. But clearly, it is a problem, something we're going to watch carefully. And in terms of who's doing it, we don't want anybody to do it. We don't think anybody who's inside Iraq should be, you know, conducting these types of behavior. You know, as citizens come out of Fallujah, they should be treated with respect and get them the help. That's the whole point.

Any -- (inaudible) -- fighting inside Iraq take their orders from the prime minister and should be part of that chain of command should be working towards helping the citizens of Fallujah, no matter who they are. That's what -- (inaudible).

CAPT. DAVIS: (inaudible) -- time -- we're having a hard time hearing. Are -- is your audio of us okay?

COL. GARVER: Yes. Lucas was a little soft at the very beginning of his question, but other than that, we have great -- we've got great audio.

CAPT. DAVIS: We're not hearing you well for some reason.

STAFF: DVIDS -- (inaudible) -- satellite and -- (inaudible) -- backup.

CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. All right. Well, I think we've only got a couple more questions anyway, so we'll press on rather than try to reconnect.

Brian Everstine from Air Force Magazine.

Q: Hi. At the beginning, you highlighted the Iraqi air force joining the fight in Fallujah and conducting airstrikes. I was wondering if you could quantify that? How many strikes have they flown? How many missions? And you said they're flying in support of their ground force, does that qualify -- are they flying close air support for advances on the city?

COL. GARVER: They are flying close air support missions. They're flying other deliberate flights as well. I don't have the numbers. They're -- (inaudible) -- tied into the coalition process. They directly control their own -- (inaudible) -- conducting strikes where they want. I don't have a specific number. We -- we have a -- there's an air control system that operates here in Iraq. We work within that, but we don't plan their missions as a part of our what we call air -- (inaudible).

They fly their missions -- (inaudible). I can tell you they have -- (inaudible) -- and they have armed helicopters that fly -- (inaudible) -- as well. But those -- (inaudible), we saw them flying in Baiji, we saw them -- we can see them flying in -- up near Mosul, we've seen them flying -- (inaudible).

CAPT. DAVIS: Yes, we were -- there was question here whether you said F-15s or F-16s?

COL. GARVER: F-16. F-16. That's the aircraft that the Iraqi -- (inaudible).

CAPT. DAVIS: Got it. We'll go to Tolga Tanis from --

Q: Hi. Hi, colonel. This is Tolga Tanis with -- (inaudible). Can you give an update regarding -- I mean, beyond this -- the clashed in Manbij between some civilian groups and the SDF forces, what is the estimate of the SDF, for example, who is attacking the town right now?

And is there any SDF soldiers who entered the city yet? Or if not, what's the -- what's the concern of the SDF right now to take over the city?

COL. GARVER: Well, the Syrian Arab coalition, part of the SDF, that whole forces is I believe about 3,500 fighters -- (inaudible). The -- no -- nobody on the attack has gotten into the city yet. They are around Manbij, but they have not entered the city yet. They still have to fight their way up to the city -- (inaudible) -- looking for them to kind of get that -- (inaudible) -- into the city, as we talked about earlier, and -- (inaudible). But they haven't -- (inaudible). Nobody is in the city of Manbij yet.

CAPT. DAVIS: Okay. Any other questions?

I apologize, everybody, for the audio. We'll try and figure out what caused that and hopefully at least get a clean copy of this posted for you.

Chris, any final comments from you?

COL. GARVER: Nope. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to everybody today. And General Chalmers is on the schedule -- our deputy commander is on the schedule for next week, so he'll be the briefer. But look forward to talking to everybody then.

CAPT. DAVIS: Thank you to Colonel Garver.

And thank you, everybody.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/800223/

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U.S. Department of Defense

Press Operations

News Transcript

Presenter: Secretary of Defense Ash Carter June 15, 2016

Press Conference with Secretary Carter at NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ASH CARTER: I told Peter he didn't need to introduce me, because I -- presumably, I was who you thought would be here, which is why you came.

But in all seriousness, good afternoon, and it's good to be back here in Brussels for my fourth defense ministerial as secretary of defense, and the last one before next month's Warsaw Summit.

And I have to begin, however, by saying that this gathering comes at a time of tragedy for our country in the United States, after this weekend's despicable act of terrorism in Orlando, Florida.

And I want to thank all the ministers here who reached out to me to offer their condolences on the occasion of this tragedy. It meant a lot all of us to have our friends say that to us.

The attack, sadly, we now know touched our Department of Defense, as we now know that Army Reserve Captain Antonio Brown was among those killed in this act of hate.

So, our hearts go out to Captain Brown's family, his friends, his fellow soldiers, to the loved ones of all the victims of Sunday's attack. We need to stand strong with them, as we do with the people of Orlando, the LGBT community affected by this event.

As I told my fellow defense ministers, this only underscores the need for an alliance of principled and like-minded members backed by strength. That's what NATO is -- and the need to defeat ISIL, defend our people, and counter other challenges to decency and civilized conduct, by both states as well as non-state aggressors.

The counter-ISIL campaign was, of course, a topic of fellow -- my fellow ministers, and I discussed over the last day and a half as ISIL's parent tumor in Iraq and Syria, and its metastasis are among the leading sources of instability emanating from NATO's southern flank. There, the United States is leading a coalition to deliver ISIL a lasting defeat, with contributions from nearly every NATO member.

And we need to do more, not only as individual nations, but as an alliance. The sooner we defeat the ISIL cancer at the source, the safer we'll make our homelands and our people.

As I said after our last ministerial in February, it's worth exploring how NATO, as an organization, could make a meaningful contribution to the coalition. And here, at this ministerial, we discussed some specific ways that NATO could contribute more directly to the counter-ISIL campaign, including by providing NATO AWACS aircraft and by conducting training and defense capacity building for the Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq, rather than in Jordan.

I also discussed with my French and British counterparts, recent momentum in the counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria. There are three major operations ongoing in which the coalition is supporting local, capable and motivated forces on the ground. All these operations are putting a strangle-hold on ISIL, applying pressure on multiple fronts.

In Western Iraq, we're assisting the Iraqi Security Forces in operations to retake Fallujah under the -- that is Iraqi operations under the leadership of Prime Minister Abadi.

In Northern Iraq, we're also supporting the ISF in operations to isolate and pressure Mosul. And in Northern Syria, we're enabling Syrian-Arab coalition forces working to envelop Manbij City.

Now, the last one is particularly critical for helping to seal the Turkish border and cut off the flow of foreign fighters in and out of Syria -- a challenge that affects all NATO member nations.

Another challenge emanating from NATO's southern flank is the migrant and refugee crisis, which NATO is helping to address in the Aegean Sea. And soon, the United States will be contributing to that NATO activity by sending the USNS Grapple to support it.

Let me now turn to Afghanistan, which we discussed earlier today, and where I shared an important decision that President Obama recently made that reaffirms our commitment to security and stability in Afghanistan.

On my and Chairman Dunford's recommendation, the president decided to grant additional flexibility to U.S. forces in Afghanistan as they carry out our current strategy this year.

Specifically, the U.S. commanders on the ground will be able to maximize the use and effectiveness of our troops and capabilities there in supporting the Afghan forces -- especially in those instances where their use can generate strategic effects on the battlefield.

We will say -- to say it differently, more proactively support Afghan conventional forces in two critical ways. One, with more American fire power, especially through close air support. And two, by accompanying and advising Afghan conventional forces on the ground and in the air.

In practical terms, this means that U.S. forces will have more opportunities to accompany and enable Afghan conventional forces, just like we have already been doing with Afghan Special Operations forces.

As I told my fellow defense ministers, this supports our ongoing counter terrorism and force protection missions there, as well as NATO's Resolute Support mission, because a more capable Afghan force only makes our forces deploy to their support more secure. And it will help the Afghans at an important moment for the country, enabling them to improve circumstances on the ground and buying down risk as we prepare for the U.S. and NATO missions in 2017.

Indeed, the United States, like many NATO countries, is considering 2017 and beyond. In this, there should be no doubt about our commitment to Afghanistan because we've already made a financial commitment for one thing, which is key. Our budget planning contains full funding for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.

I was pleased today to hear from NATO counterparts the good news that they too intend to provide funding to sustain the ANDSF through 2020 like the United States does.

Regarding U.S. troop levels for future years, the current plan announced last August is for 9,800 American service members to remain in Afghanistan for most of this year. And subsequently to maintain several locations in addition to Kabul, but to draw down that number to 5,500 by the end of the year. And since then, we've been pleased to have other nations decide to commit. This has lasted since the president made that decision last year.

Since then, we have been very pleased to have other nations make the decision to commit forces in the future in Afghanistan beyond this year, a very important and welcomed development. This commitment will be part of NATO's flexible regional approach to the resolute support mission. The United States will of course continue to lead the NATO effort in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and we will continue to provide coalition partners with sufficient enabling capabilities needed for their own presence, particularly in northern and western Afghanistan.

I'm sure that the success NATO has had in Afghanistan, the new authorities provided by U.S. forces by the president for this fighting season, as well as planning for future years will all be discussed more at the Warsaw summit next month.

Turning to NATO's eastern flank. We also discussed what the alliance is doing to deter and defend against Russian aggression because here too, NATO must do more. As all of you know after Russia illegally annexed Crimea, NATO took some initial actions like enhancing the NATO response force and standing up the very high-readiness joint task force.

But as I said in February, while these were good first steps, we could be doing more as an alliance to set the condition for credible deterrence. And so we agreed that NATO would further strengthen its posture to deter and if necessary defeat any aggressor across the full spectrum of conflict. We've seen results since then, for example, in our discussions this week about NATO's enhanced forward of a four battalions in the Baltics and Poland, it became clear to not only the United States but also Germany and the United Kingdom would be making key contributions. I expect that we won't be the only ones.

This is an important alliance commitment to deterrence, one that's in additional to bilateral efforts like the U.S.-European Reassurance Initiatives. And I look forward to seeing the details finalized in Warsaw.

Still as I emphasize to my colleagues, more needs to be done particularly to bolster the readiness and capabilities of key NATO units that might be called upon in a crisis. That requires resources of course. We haven't had to prioritize and practice deterrence in Europe for 25 years, and while I wish it were otherwise, now we do.

There are some basic military skills that have atrophied in parts of our alliance over that past quarter century, and we need to rediscover them.

And it doesn't mean we'll be using the same playbook NATO used in the 20 -- 20th century, though. Quite the opposite. Since the Wales Summit, NATO forces have been adapting and writing a new playbook for the 21st century.

We've been innovating to counter new challenges, like cyber and hybrid warfare, integrating conventional and nuclear deterrence and adjusting our posture and presence so that we can be more agile in responding to new threats.

And I expect we'll see the results of all this in Warsaw next month.

Meanwhile, NATO is also helping support the resilience of its partners against Russian aggression and coercion. IN Ukraine, NATO has stood up trust fund to help the Ukrainian armed forces in areas like cyber, logistics, medical support and countering improvised explosive devices.

Bilaterally, just to remind you, the United States has also provided over $600 million in security assistance to Ukraine since the conflict there began in 2014, to strengthen Ukraine's internal defenses, support the operational needs of its forces, and promote key defense reforms.

And after my meeting today with Minister Poltorak, and his excellent and far-reaching presentation to the ministers, I'm confident these reforms in Ukraine are moving forward.

Before I take your questions, I want to briefly touch on an area that's at the intersection of addressing threats to NATO from its southern and eastern flanks, and that is collaboration with the European Union.

We discussed this at Secretary General Stoltenberg's suggestion last night at dinner. And it's clear that the scope and scale of challenges facing this alliance demands a higher degree of partnership between it and the EU. And the more links between them, from our point of view, the better.

In that regard, I do want to touch on something I discussed with my U.K. counterpart, Secretary Fallon. While the question of the so-called Brexit is, of course, a decision for the British people, as President Obama has said, the United States supports the U.K. remaining in the European Union. And I would just note that there's a strategic reason for that.

Here at NATO, we know the strategic value that unity and cohesion brings to our alliance. It's part of what makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The same is true for the EU. For the greater unity and cohesion each organization has, the better they're able to work together in the ways that we discussed at dinner last night, and that makes a strategic difference.

With that, I'll take your questions.

STAFF: We'll start with Lita Baldor of the AP

Q: Hi, thank you, Mr. Secretary. We understand that during your discussions earlier today, that you indicated that the United States is taking a new look, another look at its troop levels in Afghanistan.

I was hoping you could talk a little about that? And also talk about whether or not this decision to continue the regional approach, you know, adds to that discussion, and gives some, I guess weight to the idea that by keeping the regional phases open, that the U.S. could use additional troops in order to keep that going effectively?

SEC. CARTER: Sure.

First of all, just to go back in time, the plan way back was for a Kabul-only presence. And our president decided last year that that was inadequately taking advantage of the opportunity provided by all of the progress that has been made in Afghanistan. And for that reason, decided to -- as a U.S. decision, to maintain presence in other locations outside of Kabul.

Okay, so that was a while ago. And what is new in the meantime from that is first of all, so many of these NATO countries have subsequently indicated to us that they would and today confirmed that they would at Warsaw -- made commitments also to be present in this constellation so to speak of non-Kabul sites after 2017 which is extremely welcomed from the U.S. point of view. And I think it is a good decision by the NATO partners.

And in addition to that, the president just made an important decision from the one I mentioned. With respect to making best use of the force presence in Afghanistan during this fighting season which is going on right now, and that is also a welcomed decision made on the basis of General Dunford's and my recommendations. But the advice of our SACEUR and EUCOM Commander, and also General Nicholson are important.

Looking forward at the present, our plan is to maintain that lighter than Kabul presence to provide enablers to the allies who have indicated a desire to stay so that we can provide them that enabling support which is essential for them to be able to stay at a level of 5,500 next year. That's the current plan.

The president has indicated consistently over this time is that -- as history indicates, he is willing to look on the basis of circumstances in Afghanistan, at the U.S. -- both authorities and force presence. I'll expect he will do that again as the year goes on. He has expressed a willingness to do that but that was a not a topic of discussion in today's meeting per se, but I was very pleased to have confirmed the desire of allies to stay the course in 2017.

There is one other thing I should mentioned, we have been talking about authorities and troops levels and locations -- there is one other thing which is the critical variable of financial support for the Afghan Security Forces. That is -- I was able to tell them something -- we have put in our own budget, but a number of them confirmed that they had done that too for the future. Remember, that's really critical.

So all that is an important set of commitments by the allies here in going into Warsaw. I'm sure that much of that will be confirmed and clarified when we get to Warsaw. It's a good thing because it gives us the best opportunity to take advantage of what NATO has done in Resolute Support over these years and the success it's had in getting Afghanistan heading in a direction to be able to provide itself internal security and also not be a source of terrorism for all the rest of us.

STAFF: Next question is from DPA, Alexander Meyer Goodall.

Q: Hi, could you say more about the decision that NATO is planning to take at Warsaw as far as support to the anti-ISIL coalition, specially the AWACS deployment? Are you satisfied with the planned support and would you like to see NATO do more?

SEC. CARTER: I'd like to see NATO do more. And I say that not to -- I like the things that we were discussing today, and I hope the heads of state approve both the AWACS and the defense capability building and training aspects.

But I believe there's still more that NATO could do, even as I believe there's -- there's going to be more that each of us as individual nations can do to hasten the destruction of ISIL.

As we learn more, as we see more opportunities, as we build the capacity of the local forces that can hold and then govern territory that is now tyrannized by ISIL -- as all that occurs, we're getting more and more opportunities to do more and accelerate the campaign.

And NATO can be a part of that, beyond the things that we discussed today. So, I hope they get encouragement at Warsaw to keep accelerating as an organization, as all the rest of us are doing individually.

Because the secretary general is very -- very articulate about the ways in which NATO as NATO can make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. It has force generation capability. It has the ability for smaller nations to have a way of plugging into the coalition more easily.

So, there are lots of advantages to having NATO involved in the counter-ISIL campaign. We certainly welcome that.

STAFF: Kevin Baron, from Defense One. Right here, in the front row.

Q: Hi, Mr. Secretary. To add to that question, can you be more specific on NATO? Because we're talking more trainers and AWACS, and that sounds a lot like just a small extension of what the coalition is already doing, not getting NATO into combat more directly.

Is there more specific that you want from NATO? And did you make any asks of individual member countries, or do you have questions for them beyond NATO?

SEC. CARTER: Sure. Yeah, good both -- Kevin, first of all, with respect to the first one, they are -- they happen -- those two things that we discussed happen to be high value contributions.

That is, what -- so, let me take the defense capability building. And what Iraq is going to need in the future is the capability -- let's take Fallujah. Or in the past now -- or still in the present, Ramadi, Hit, Rutbah and so forth. As these places are retaken by the Iraqi Security Forces, there's going to be a need for the ability to sustain that progress.

That's the only way you make -- you don't create the conditions for something else like ISIL, to come back again, which none of us wants.

So, that's a pretty critical role. I only say that because -- in no way, to me, is that a secondary role. And it happen -- and it's a critical one, and it happens to be one that NATO is very good at.

So, I think that's very important.

And same, also, with AWACS. And you know, if you're flying an air -- an AWACS airplane around in a war zone, I'm sure that feels risky. And we certainly consider that we put people at risk in all of these circumstances.

But that's really important, too, because it's very important for all of us to have a continuous air picture there -- both as an alliance, because Turkey is on the border, so there's a border issue, and because of our air operations in order to make sure that they're safe and effective.

And so, for both of those -- those are important contributions. Now, I'm willing -- I'm -- there's more we could ask for. Yeah, yeah, thing -- well, things that -- that the -- the logistics combination -- sorry, the NATO combination will be uniquely good at. Logistics is another one.

So -- so, these are important contributions. And I -- I only say that, because you're suggesting that they're peripheral in some way. They're not. They're -- all this stuff is very important to getting victory and sustaining victory.

STAFF: Tomas Belasky

Q: Secretary, could you confirm please the details of the U.S. contribution to the NATO's enhanced force presence in Baltic state in Poland? Is it going to substitute what the United States have been doing in this country until now and what was announced by the U.S. before as a,for example, the increased European Reassurance Initiative? And would the U.S. be the framework nation for the NATO battalion in Poland?

SEC. CARTER: Okay, a lot in there.

Let me back up to the beginning. Enhanced forward presence, and what is the United States already committed to doing, and then we will get on to the decision making in Warsaw about the -- I think what you're getting at in the latter part of your question is the four battalions issue.

But let me start -- just to remind you as you probably know, for everybody's benefit that the United States through the European Reassurance Initiative -- which is four times in the budget we've requested from Congress what it was last year. So we have quadrupled the spending on that.

Among other things, a continuous persistent presence of a additional brigade -- and armored brigade combat team in Europe on a persistently present basis, that's a new capability. They are on top of the two brigades already in Europe. Additionally, a combat aviation brigade likewise on a persistent rotational presence in Europe, that's new. And finally, the propositioning of the equipment for an armored brigade combat team. So those are the things -- among many other things, but they're the big ones affecting ground forces to which I think is your question -- funded by the ERI, although the ERI funds lots of other things besides presence, it exercises the capabilities, and investments, and all kinds of things.

Now to get to the four battalions, and NATO has agreed that to have four persistently present NATO battalions in the three Baltic states and Poland, that much has been decided. And I'm sorry, it has also been decided -- the United States has decided and has volunteered to be a framework question to get to the last part of your question. And Germany and the United Kingdom I believe are considering that also, I'm sure there will be a fourth.

And a number of countries have indicated a willingness to be part of the sourcing, and that gets to the second part of your question, it hasn't been decided what the sourcing of all those battalions. That will be a NATO decision made possibly before Warsaw, but I'm not sure. But the point for certain is that they're going to be four NATO battalions, that's where they're going to be, that decision has been taken and the United States firmly supports that decision as it has agreed to be a part of that.

It hasn't been decided which of the framework nations in which country, that's the kind of thing that will come with sourcing decisions and all of the participants are identified.

STAFF: We have time for one last question right here.

Q: Radio Romania Public Station.

Sir, you are talking about four battalions, but you -- we have a decision for a battalion, a multi-national framework for it in Romania for safe -- for a NATO presence in the Black Sea. You know, the -- (inaudible) -- which comes from Moscow, for Romania, who has also Deveselu, you know, the anti-ballistic missile.

What is the position of the United States on this decision? We will decide it -- you will decide in Warsaw or this battalion in Romania?

SEC. CARTER: The -- that decision, I believe -- and I'm going to have to get confirmation on that, for you.

I believe that decision has been taken by the alliance as a whole. I'll get you the details on that, but I don't think there's anything new on that. But since it's your particular interest, I'll make sure Peter gets you an answer on that.

STAFF: All right, thanks, everybody.

SEC. CARTER: Thank you.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/800230/

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UAE to Withdraw From Anti-Houthi Military Operations in Yemen

Sputnik News

23:24 15.06.2016(updated 23:34 15.06.2016)

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said that the United Arab Emirates is withdrawing from the anti-Houthi military operation in Yemen.

DUBAI (Sputnik)  The United Arab Emirates is withdrawing from the anti-Houthi military operation in Yemen, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan said Wednesday.

"Our standpoint today is clear: war is over for our troops; we're monitoring political arrangements, empowering Yemenis in liberated areas," the crown prince said on Twitter.

The statement comes after last week, an UAE military plane crashed in Yemen's Aden province, killing both pilots on board.

Since 2014, Yemen has been engulfed in a military conflict between the government headed by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and Shiite Houthi rebels, supported by army units loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Since March 2015, the United Arab Emirates, as part of the Saudi-led coalition, has been carrying out airstrikes against Houthi positions in Yemen at President Hadi's request.

 Sputnik

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Poland Could Send Troops to Iraq, Kuwait to Fight Against Daesh

Sputnik News

19:34 15.06.2016

Poland plans to make a contribution to the international US-led coalition fighting against Daesh terrorist group by sending troops to Iraq and Kuwait, the head of the National Security Bureau, Pawel Soloch, said Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said that Warsaw could send four F-16 fighter jets to the Middle East for reconnaissance operations in the region before the forthcoming July NATO summit in the Polish capital.

"Contingents could be sent to Kuwait and the Republic of Iraq, with supportive infrastructure in other countries in the region," Soloch said, as quoted by Polsat News TV channel.

He added that Warsaw could sent F-16 fighter jets and 150 soldiers to Kuwait for participation in reconnaissance activities and 60 more could be sent to Iraq to train local forces.

According to Soloch, Polish troops could be sent abroad only after the approval of country's President Andrzej Duda while the request for such an approval has already been sent to him.

A US-led coalition of over 60 nations has been conducting airstrikes against Daesh targets in Iraq and Syria since 2014.

 Sputnik

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Romania Will Propose Multinational Black Sea Brigade at NATO Summit

Sputnik News

19:15 15.06.2016

Romania will propose the creation of a multinational brigade for the Black Sea region at NATO's upcoming summit in Warsaw, Poland, Romanian Ambassador to the United States George Cristian Maior said on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The Black Sea brigade would be based on the concept of the rotational multinational brigade to be deployed to the Baltic states and Poland by 2017, Maior explained.

"Taking into account the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw, the idea put forward by Romanian and other allies [is] to create a multinational brigade based on this headquarters which is located in Romania for reinforcing the southern part of the eastern flank," Maior stated at an Atlantic Council forum on Black Sea security.

"Romania is willing to put resources into this [multinational brigade]," Maior noted, adding, "I think this will add to the overall concept of a certain deterrence in the wider Black Sea area."

After Tuesday's NATO defense ministers' summit, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that the alliance agreed to deploy four multinational battalions to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. The ministers also agreed on measures to enhance defense and deterrence in the Black Sea region.

NATO has been bolstering its military presence in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea since the outbreak of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine in April 2014, in response to what it considers to be Russia's aggressive foreign policy.

Russia 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.

 Sputnik

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Moscow Slams NATO-Kiev Talks on Increased Military Presence in Black Sea

Sputnik News

18:43 15.06.2016

Moscow is concerned about NATO-Ukraine discussions on Kiev's role in the Alliance's increased military presence in the Black Sea region, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said Wednesday.

GENEVA (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak said Ukraine was discussing potential participation in the NATO buildup in the Black Sea.

"We are closely following this discussion and hope that it will not bring about an increase in risks in the region. We reserve the right to take adequate counter actions against that," Karasin told RIA Novosti.

The deputy minister stressed that Moscow was gravely concerned about the possibility of Kiev joining the NATO Black Sea force.

NATO has been bolstering its military presence in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea since the outbreak of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine in April 2014, in response to what it considers to be Russia's aggressive foreign policy.

Russia 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.

 Sputnik

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Poland to Send 4 F-16 Jets to Middle East Prior to July NATO Summit

Sputnik News

16:44 15.06.2016

Poland is likely to send four F-16 fighter jets to take part in a reconnaissance mission in the Middle East prior to the NATO summit scheduled to be held in Warsaw on July 8-9, Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  In mid-February, the head of Poland's National Security Bureau, Pawel Soloch, said that the country could send at least four Polish F-16 jets to participate in an air alert mission in Syria.

"I hope that the four F-16 which are to take part in a reconnaissance mission, will be deployed at bases in the Middle East even before the NATO summit," Macierewicz said at a press conference following the NATO defense ministers' two-day meeting in Brussels, as quoted by the Onet news portal.

According to Macierewicz, all the preparations for the mission have been completed, the crew is ready for departure.

Syria has been in a state of civil war since 2011, with the army loyal to President Bashar Assad fighting several opposition factions and militant organizations, including Daesh, which is banned in Russia, the United States and many other countries.

A US-led coalition of over 60 nations has been conducting airstrikes on Daesh targets in Iraq and Syria since 2014.

 Sputnik

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US, Norway Allocate $30Mln to Clear Iraq, Syria of Daesh's Mines

Sputnik News

16:44 15.06.2016(updated 16:45 15.06.2016)

Washington and Oslo decided to allocate nearly $30 million to help defuse explosives planted by Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The United States and Norway have launched a demining initiative to clear parts of Iraq and Syria from explosives planted by Daesh terrorists, the US Department of State said in a press release on Wednesday.

"Under this new initiative, the United States intends to provide an additional $10.8 million this year to clear portions of Iraq liberated from ISIL [Daesh] occupation and spend up to $8 million next year to do the same in liberated portions of Syria," the release stated.

Norway will allocate an additional $9.8 million for mine action in 2016, with a particular focus on aiding Iraq and Syria. In addition, Oslo intends to increase its financial support for global demining by $15 million in 2017, according to the release.

The State Department added that the United States and Norway will host a ministerial-level demining conference this fall during the UN General Assembly.

Daesh is a terrorist group outlawed in the United States, Russia and numerous other countries. The infamous group has seized large areas in Syria and Iraq and declared a caliphate on territories under its control.

 Sputnik

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NATO Allies Intend to Fund Afghan Defense Forces Until 2020

Sputnik News

15:43 15.06.2016(updated 15:52 15.06.2016)

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter welcomed on Wednesday the NATO counterparts' commitment to providing financial support to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in the period until the end of 2020.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The NATO mission to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces was launched on January 1, 2015 as a follow-up on the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) combat mission, which completed at the end of 2014. NATO foreign chiefs agreed in December 2015 to sustain the RSM presence during 2016.

"I was pleased today to hear from NATO counterparts the good news that they, too, intend to provide funding to sustain the ANDSF through 2020, like the United States does," Carter said.

Earlier in the day, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance will continue its support mission to Afghanistan and is committed to supporting the country's national security forces

On Thursday, US media reported that the Obama administration would give US forces broader authority to advise conventional Afghan troops with missions the same way they have been assisting Afghan Special Forces personnel.

Afghanistan is struggling with a political, economical and social crisis as it attempts to tackle the Taliban's insurgency. The situation in the country has worsened in recent months, with the Taliban launching offensives in major cities.

 Sputnik

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Balkans Look to NATO as Russia's Influence Wanes

by Daniel Schearf June 15, 2016

As NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels discuss efforts to deter Russian aggression, rising tensions not seen since the Cold War will be on the minds of central and eastern European foreign ministers gathering Thursday in the former Yugoslavia.

The agenda of the annual meeting of the Central European Initiative (CEI) in Banja Luka aims to focus on Europe's migration crisis as well as business, transportation, and energy issues.

But the 18-member state group is expected also to discuss plans by some Balkan nations to join NATO, the Euro-Atlantic military alliance whose expansion Russia has deemed a threat to its security.

NATO foreign ministers in May signed the Accession Protocol for CEI member Montenegro, paving the way for Podgorica to become the defense alliance's 29th member as soon as July.

Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia are also pursuing NATO membership, while Russia's strongest ally in the region, Serbia, is so far remaining neutral. Albania and Croatia became NATO members in 2009.

Pushed towards NATO

NATO expansion in the region underscores Balkan security concerns but also Moscow's waning influence in the former zone of Soviet influence.

"For Russia it's something like a very telling signal... that it's losing it's traditional influence it had lost with many countries in eastern and central Europe," says Moscow State University's Institute of International Relations' Viktor Mizin. "And, now it's the turn of [the] Balkans," he adds.

While all the Balkan countries looking to join NATO began their efforts years ago, Russia's aggression in Ukraine has only spurred the drive toward NATO, says Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based independent military analyst and visiting researcher at Uppsula University in Sweden. "And, I think it's a clear [example] of Russian 'successes' in foreign policy when the most closest allies to Russia are trying to escape from it as soon as possible," he tells VOA's Moscow Bureau via Skype. "Of course, it's the result of Russia's 'successes' in Ukraine and Crimea," he adds.

Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and ongoing military support for rebels in eastern Ukraine sparked calls for stronger deterrence in NATO's eastern European members.

NATO ministers Tuesday agreed to station four battalions on a rotational basis to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Russia responded with snap, nationwide military exercises. Last May, Russia stationed three military divisions on its western border.

"There is no doubt that the expansion of NATO in the Balkans will worsen already strained relations between Russia and the military alliance," says expert for the Russian International Affairs Council Ilya Kravchenko.

Montenegro, last straw?

Moscow has threatened economic and diplomatic retaliation if Montenegro joins the alliance and is likely to step up its media propaganda to the region as well.

"In response to NATO's expansion in the Balkan region, the Kremlin will try to manipulate Serbian populations in Montenegro or Macedonia, reviving their discontent against the government," says Kravchenko. Economic "punishment" is quite likely, he says. "In fact, Russian officials can impose measures that will result in tourism decrease in these former Yugoslav republics. We already know how it works in the cases of Egypt or Turkey," says Kravchenko.

But while Russian aggression is an expressed concern among some in the Balkans, it is not the main reason they want to join NATO.



Joining NATO is seen as a step toward eventual membership in the European Union, says Mizin. "But I think, unlike for example Poland or the Baltic states where the political class, the elites really felt themselves threatened or just bullied by Moscow, I think in the Balkans it's more, if you wish, cynical because they are expecting probably more subsidies, more money from NATO. Pretty much like they are expecting on the economic dimension from the European Union," adds Mizin.

But, joining NATO is not just about money and economics for the Balkans, says Golts.

"Joining NATO is very important step showing that these countries are ready to be robust members of [the] Euro-Atlantic community, that they understand and accept all rules, they accept the idea of superiority of the law, they accept the idea of division of powers within society, they accept the idea of elections without any limitations," he said.

The Central European Initiative was founded in 1989 to support European integration. Its 18 member states include a number of NATO and EU countries as well as Ukraine.

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Yemeni Children in Line of Fire

by Heather Murdock June 15, 2016

Some Yemeni citizens are livid because the United Nations removed the Saudi-led coalition from a list of countries accused of violating children's rights in Yemen. They say bombs continue to fall on civilian homes, hospitals and schools.

The cease-fire declared two months has not slowed the violence, according to Yemeni political analyst and journalist Nasser Arrabyee.

"There was no cease-fire. The warplanes are hovering over us all the time, around the clock," Arrabyee said Wednesday from his home in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a. "And sometimes bombing here or there."

By removing the coalition from its list, adds Arrabyee, the U.N. is "officially supporting war crimes."

All warring parties in Yemen have been accused of abusing the rights of children and other civilians, and Saudi Arabia says the U.N. report ignores their rivals' crimes.

"The report did not show the figures provided by the legitimate Yemeni government that highlights the use of children by Houthi militias in combat," said Saudi-led coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Ahmed Assiri last week in Riyadh, according to the Saudi Gazette. It "did not highlight the number of children killed in combat, planting mines and transferring ammunition and explosives."

The coalition has been fighting Houthi militants and their allies in Yemen for over a year, supporting the internationally recognized Yemeni government in an ongoing civil war. The Houthis are supported by former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Iran; they control much of the nation, including Sana'a.

Saudi Arabian authorities say an Iranian ally in power on their southern border is a threat to their sovereignty, and maintain they are also fighting to protect Yemeni people from their regional rival.

"[Iran] is not stopping threatening Saudi Arabia or supporting the militias with weapons and trying to undermine our stability," said Hamdan al-Shehri, an adviser at Saudi Arabia's foreign affairs ministry.

Since the cease-fire went into effect April 11, Doctors Without Borders says it has treated more than 1,500 people wounded in fighting in one city alone, Taiz.

"None of the warring parties appear to be making an effort to prevent casualties among civilians," the organization said in a statement on Tuesday.

UN-Saudi row

The U.N. report on crimes against children says nearly 2,000 children were killed or injured in Yemen in 2015, and more than 750 young boys were recruited to fight. More than 100 schools and hospitals were attacked that year, it says, and all parties share the blame.

In a copy of the report on the U.N. website, the Saudi-led coalition is named as one of the parties that kill or maim children, and attack schools and hospitals, saying 60 percent of the child casualties were attributed to coalition airstrikes.

But last week, the United Nations announced it would remove the coalition from the report's annex, setting off a firestorm of criticism from human rights organizations.

"We urge you to place the Saudi-led coalition back on the list annexed to your report, and state publicly that your office is committed to an impartial list, based on evidence, not politics," reads an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, signed by more than 35 human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam. "Children whose lives are devastated by armed conflict deserve nothing less."

Last week, the secretary-general said the coalition was removed from the list due to "undue pressure" exerted by member states in the form of threatening to cut funding to humanitarian programs.

"I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many U.N. programs," Ban said. "Children already at risk in Palestine, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and so many other places would fall further into despair."

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UN Envoy: Terrorism, Electoral Crises Thwart Central Africa Progress

by Margaret Besheer June 15, 2016

Electoral crises and terrorism are undoing efforts to promote stability and development in Central Africa, the top U.N. diplomat for the area warned Wednesday.

"There are political tensions of concern ... in Central Africa linked to recent or upcoming electoral processes," Abdoulaye Bathily, the head of the U.N. Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA), told the Security Council. "This undermines the ongoing work to consolidate stability, development and democracy."

Post-election crises have caused bloodshed in Burundi and the Republic of Congo, while there are fears the next presidential election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could do the same.

Bathily said the Central African Republic, which held successful presidential and legislative elections this spring, is just beginning its long, difficult road to stability.

"Armed groups still control large parts of the country," he said, "and the government is in need of the full political, programmatic and financial support of the international community to ensure the re-establishment of state authority throughout the country."

Threat of armed groups

But perhaps the biggest threats to peace and prosperity in this region are the ones posed by Boko Haram militants and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Chad and Benin have formed a multinational task force to fight Boko Haram, which has killed, kidnapped or displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Lake Chad Basin since 2009.

Bathily said the collective efforts have reduced Boko Haram's ability to attack at will, but the group continues to pose a "serious threat" to regional stability. He urged the international community to support the joint task force politically, logistically and financially.

The envoy also warned about a surge in attacks from the LRA, which has attacked towns in northeastern DRC and significantly stepped up its activities in the eastern CAR this year.

Bathily warned the LRA has reportedly been "extending into areas that had previously seen little to no LRA movement." He noted the group is attacking larger and less isolated areas and kidnapping an increased number of children. The roving group is notorious for its use of child soldiers.

Uganda, which provides the bulk of an African Union regional force fighting the LRA, plans to draw down its 3,000 troops by the end of this year. Bathily warned that if the Ugandan soldiers are not replaced, it could create a vacuum for the LRA as well as other armed groups.

Humanitarian crises

The United Nations says Boko Haram-related violence in Cameroon's Far North Region has sparked a "grave" humanitarian crisis.

There are nearly 170,000 internally displaced persons, as well some 65,000 refugees from Nigeria who are also fleeing the terror group. Separately, eastern Cameroon is hosting more than 250,000 refugees from the CAR.

In the Central African Republic, more than half the country's population, about 2.3 million people, require humanitarian assistance. There are also nearly a million people who are either internally displaced or refugees.

In Chad, hunger is the enemy. More than 1 million people are expected to be food insecure this year because of Boko Haram violence around Lake Chad and poor rainfall.

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Israeli F-35 pilots head to US to begin training

Iran Press TV

Thu Jun 16, 2016 3:57PM

The US Air Force (USAF) is set to start training the first cadre of Israeli F-35 fighter pilots from next month, despite the stealth aircraft's substandard performance in tests due to software issues.

The four pilots are led by the commander of the Israeli air force's first F-35I squadron and will begin simulator and ground-based training at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.

Three more pilots will join the program shortly thereafter and by the middle of the next year 12 pilots will have completed the approximately 100-day training program conducted by the USAF.

The pilots will then head back to the occupied Palestinian lands for actual flight training on Israeli F-35s, the first two of which are slated to be delivered later this year.

"We have 12 pilots selected, and by 2018, we'll have selected another 10 to 15 pilots," the Israel's F-35 project manager told Defense News on Thursday. His name was kept confidential for security reasons.

Meanwhile, the aircraft's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, is reportedly working to set up a local logistics center in at Nevatim Air Base in Israel's Negev desert in order to establish the regime's self-sufficiency in F-35 maintenance, overhaul and repair.

Due to Israel's involvement in many regional conflicts in the Middle East, Lockheed Martin and Israeli officials are exploring ways to accommodate the risks of wartime interruption in the aircraft's maintenance.

One way, according to the Israeli air force, is to make use of Lockheed Martin's Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) that allows the jet's operators to maintain the aircraft through its projected 55-year lifespan.

The F-35I project director said "a lot" of airmen are already undergoing maintenance training at the regime's Eglin Air Force Base since late last year.

The news comes amid uncertainty surrounding the aircraft's development due to its many deficiencies.

According to J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester, software bugs have dogged the $400 billion project often referred to as the world's most expensive weapon.

In May, Gilmore revealed that five out of six US Air Force F-35 Joint Strike fighter jets failed to take off in a mock test and couldn't boot their software.

US Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, the F-35 program chief, said in late may that the jet has faced more delays in initial operational testing and will not come any sooner than 2018.

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NATO accuses Russia of military activities at bloc's borders

Iran Press TV

Thu Jun 16, 2016 10:39AM

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has defended the military alliance's planned deployments in Poland and three Baltic states, saying they are aimed at deterring Russia.

NATO intends to deploy four "robust" battalions in Poland as well as the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia as tensions are rising with Russia.

On Thursday, Stoltenberg accused Russia of seeking to create a "zone of influence" at NATO's borders. He said NATO had detected "aggressive" maneuvers by Russia, urging action to confront it.

"We are observing massive militarization at NATO borders - in the Arctic, in the Baltic, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea," Stoltenberg said in an interview with the German daily Bild.

"We are registering aggressive, unannounced, large-scale maneuvers on the Russian side. Therefore, we must act," Stoltenberg added.

NATO recently launched its biggest-ever joint maneuvers in Poland to the west of Russia, a move that was immediately condemned by Russian authorities.

Moreover, the alliance recently began operating a missile system in eastern Europe, further angering Moscow.

Chairman of the defense committee of Russia's State Duma, Vladimir Komoyedov, said on Tuesday that his country would initiate countermeasures against NATO's deployment of four battalions close to Russian borders.

The Kremlin also accused NATO of seeking to "intentionally create panic" about Russian military drills in order to justify its deployments.

"Not a single action within the military training of the Russian army, including an expected operability test, violates international agreements and treaties," Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

"The real aim of allegations about the Russian military threat is to intentionally create panic and maintain the image of a treacherous enemy, fighting which can provide colossal military budgets," he added.

NATO has stepped up its military buildup near Russia's borders since it suspended all ties with Moscow in April 2014 after Crimea re-integrated into the Russian Federation following a referendum.

Senior officials in Moscow have repeatedly accused NATO of seeking confrontation, describing its military buildup as a security threat to Europe.

Russia has also accused NATO of following an expansionist policy to include countries in the Western Balkan region, saying the move directly harms Russia's strategic interests in the area.

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Kremlin Propaganda In Czech Republic Plays Long Game To Sow Distrust In EU

June 16, 2016

by Tony Wesolowsky

Sowing distrust and disbelief in Europe and its institutions is the main aim of Russian propaganda in the Czech Republic, according to a new study.

And unlike the attention-grabbing tactics used during the Soviet era, according to research conducted by two academics at Masaryk University in the eastern Czech city of Brno, Moscow is playing a sophisticated long game in the Central European country.

"When you mention propaganda, most people imagine posters, drawings, and videos aimed at eliciting some kind of emotion and altering views," explains Milos Gregor, one of the study's authors. "It turns out those kinds of manipulative techniques are rarely used. The techniques are much more sophisticated and subtler, employed over time to change views and opinions."

The approach is also not isolated to the Czech Republic. Brussels is so concerned with Kremlin efforts to mold minds across the EU that it set up its first operation to counter Russian propaganda in March 2015. EU leaders, especially in the Baltic states, have been alarmed at how Moscow has used its media to gain support for its views and policies.

In the Czech media sphere, ad hominem attacks, finger-pointing, and outright fabrications are all elements in the propaganda practiced by pro-Kremlin Czech news websites, according to Gregor. He stresses that Kremlin propaganda efforts are not as focused on challenging individual facts, but rather "framing the debate" in a way that is sympathetic with Moscow's goals.

Migrants Bad, Ukraine Not So Much

The study looked at four news websites, which the authors of the study found disseminate the most pro-Kremlin news. In particular, the study focused on how these sites covered the migrant crisis in Europe, as well as the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine.

Russian propaganda is exploiting the migrant crisis in hopes of sowing distrust in European institutions and its elites, the study found. On the other hand, in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, where Russian actions are said to be fueling tensions, if not worse in eastern Ukraine, Russian propaganda seeks to minimize such perceptions.

"Articles on the migrant crisis were very emotional, using lots of emotional techniques, spreading rumors, appealing to fear, etc. In contrast, with the conflict in Ukraine, or Syria, in these articles the events were downplayed perhaps to leave the reader with a sense it was not such a big problem or not such a horrible event as first may appear," Gregor explains.

Gregor says information and articles critical of EU or U.S. policy are fine as long as they are grounded in fact. That, Gregor says, is not the case with Russian propaganda.

"The fact that someone criticizes the European Union doesn't mean, of course, that they're serving Russia or that they are paid by the Kremlin," Gregor explains. "Of course the European Union has taken political steps that we can criticize, and that doesn't mean it tactically serves the Kremlin.

"We focused on whether criticism of the European Union was, let's say, fair and factual or whether manipulative techniques were employed, either with labeling, demonization of an 'enemy,' or something along those lines," he adds.

Outspoken Or Manipulative?

Speaking at a press conference earlier this week in Prague to unveil the study, its other author, Petra Vejvodova, also stressed the sophistication of Kremlin efforts, saying they rarely if ever blatantly back Moscow policy or its leaders.

Vejvodova noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was cited in only 30 percent of the material examined by the study. That put him third behind Czech President Milos Zeman and Finance Minister Andrej Babis.

The four websites examined in the study are the Czech version of Sputnik, a Kremlin-controlled news services operating in several countries, two openly pro-Russian sites, AC24 and Svet kolem nas (World Around Us), and Parlamentni listy (Parliament Papers).

The inclusion of Parlamentni listy has stirred some controversy.

Daniel Kaiser, a commentator at Echo24.cz, noted it had by far the largest readership of any of the five sites in the study. "Even the casual reader will notice that this portal is open to all, the more outspoken and emotional, the better," Kaiser wrote.

Naturally, the head of the publishing company behind Parlamentni listy didn't agree with its characterization as pro-Kremlin. "Why were we included among the pro-Kremlin websites? Because we are a big and influential organization, which obviously bothers someone," Jan Holoubek told iDNES.cz. "More important for us is our 300,000 readers. Let each make up his mind himself."

Gregor says content on the site was found to have employed the same "manipulative" techniques as the openly pro-Kremlin sites, even more so in some coverage of foreign news.

Activists in the Czech Republic say the best way to counter Kremlin propaganda is to raise awareness, especially among youth.

The NGO Clovek v Tisni (Person In Need) is offering schools an audiovisual study program on propaganda, which has reportedly met with great interest from educational administrators.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/czech-kremlin-propaganda- plays-long-game-sow-eu-distrust/27802234.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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Afghanistan Seeks Russian Helicopters Delivery After Request - Deputy FM

Sputnik News

21:39 16.06.2016

Afghanistan seeks to secure the delivery of Russian helicopters and increased military support from Russia as soon as possible, Afghan Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai told Sputnik on Thursday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier on Thursday, Karzai, who is attending a round table discussion organized by the Russian International Affairs Council, said that Afghanistan had sent an official request to the Russian Security Council for the delivery of helicopters to Kabul.

"We have had discussions with our Russian colleagues and partners. We will continue to have more discussions, tomorrow, we will seat down and have more discussions. I think timing is really depending on them. It depends on our Russian colleagues. But we have asked for this assistance to be delivered as soon as possible. But hopefully it will be done soon," Karzai said.

Afghanistan has the capacity to accept a large number of Russian helicopters, he added, stressing that the country is seeking to start collaboration with Russia as soon as possible, which possible involved the delivery of other military equipment.

"We have provided a list [of military equipment] to our Russian colleagues. And I think it is rather early for me to talk about details in that list. But we have provided a very clear and concise list from National Security Council colleagues. And we would like to conduct an assessment on what there will be provided and how soon it will be provided," he said.

Afghanistan is in a state of political and social turmoil, fighting the continuing Taliban insurgency, while other extremist groups, such as the Islamic State, outlawed in many states worldwide including Russia, have expanded their activities in the country.

 Sputnik

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Update: air strikes against Daesh

16 June 2016

British forces have continued to conduct air operations in the fight against Daesh

Latest update

- Monday 13 June  Typhoons provided air support to Iraqi forces engaged in close combat in Fallujah, striking five terrorist strongpoints.

- Tuesday 14 June  Typhoons conducted further air attacks against Daesh positions in Fallujah, and near Qayyarah; a Reaper also attacked four targets near Qayyarah.

- Wednesday 15 June  Typhoons destroyed seven terrorist teams during continued fighting in Fallujah.

Detail

Whilst Royal Air Force Tornado GR4s have undertaken reconnaissance missions over Syria and Iraq, Typhoon FGR4s and Reapers have in recent days provided close air support to Iraqi and Kurdish security forces conducting offensive operations in Fallujah and around Qayyarah.

On Monday 13 June, a pair of Typhoons assisted Iraqi troops as they engaged in very close combat inside Fallujah. Our aircraft delivered four precision attacks, all with Paveway IV guided bombs, that destroyed five strongpoints defended by Daesh terrorists armed with machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades and an anti-tank gun.

The Typhoons continued operations over Fallujah the following day, and again worked very closely with the Iraqi units hitting five terrorist positions including sniper and machine-gun teams. In northern Iraq, around Qayyarah, a second Typhoon flight and a Reaper supported Iraqi and Kurdish units. The Typhoons attacked a Daesh-held building with a Paveway IV, while the Reaper conducted four attacks: a GBU-12 guided bomb was used against a group of terrorists gathered at a weapons stockpile, and three mortars were attacked in turn with Hellfire missiles. The Reaper also tracked the arrival of a truck-bomb and observed it being concealed inside a garage  this surveillance enabled a successful attack to then be delivered by a coalition aircraft which destroyed the vehicle.

Two Typhoon flights saw action over Fallujah on Wednesday 14 June, and between them they conducted seven successful attacks with Paveway IVs. Again all were in very close support of Iraqi ground forces, accounting for terrorist teams armed with heavy weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, and a 23mm anti-aircraft gun.

Previous air strikes

1 June: Reapers were in action again, one patrolled the skies above Qayyarah, where a camouflaged set of loaded rocket launch rails were spotted and destroyed with a Hellfire missile. A second Reaper patrolled over eastern Syria and western Iraq, and located a terrorist check-point on the Iraqi side of the border, west of Al Qa'im, which was stopping the free movement of traffic. Again, a Hellfire missile was employed and the check-point successfully attacked.

Two Tornado missions provided reconnaissance and close air support to Iraqi forces around Fallujah. One pair of Tornados used Paveway IVs to conduct simultaneous attacks on two Daesh-held buildings close to a canal to the south of the city; one building housed a terrorist sniper team, the other a recoilless anti-tank artillery piece. Both targets were destroyed by direct hits. The second Tornado flight successfully silenced a heavy-machine-gun positioned in a third Daesh strongpoint after it opened fire on the advancing Iraqi troops.

2 June: Three successive flights of Tornado GR4s and Typhoon FGR4s provided close air support to Iraqi units on the southern outskirts of the city. One Tornado flight conducted four attacks with Paveway IV guided bombs, striking a bunker and three teams of terrorists armed with an anti-tank gun, rocket-propelled grenades and a heavy machine-gun. A second Tornado mission delivered simultaneous attacks on two Daesh-held buildings, then a third bombing attack on a heavy machine-gun position that had opened fire on Iraqi troops. The Typhoon flight dealt with a further artillery piece, using a Paveway IV.

In northern Iraq, another pair of Typhoons struck a group of terrorists spotted advancing towards peshmerga positions near Kisik, then headed to an area south-east of Mosul where they used three Paveways to attack more extremists mustering in and around a large warehouse.

3 June: Operations over southern Fallujah continued when a pair of Typhoons conducted Paveway attacks on two Daesh strongpoints which had opened fire on Iraqi forces with machine-guns and other weapons. Two Reaper remotely piloted aircraft patrolled over the city the following day, exploiting their long endurance and excellent surveillance capabilities to provide persistent overwatch for the Iraqi troops on the ground.

During the course of Saturday, the Reapers delivered five attacks, using two GBU-12 guided bombs and three Hellfire missiles, against two machine-gun teams, two Daesh firing positions and a tunnel network. They also provided assistance to five other air strikes conducted by coalition fast jets on terrorist positions.

5 June: Tornados were again in action over southern Fallujah. A factory producing improvised truck-bombs was struck with a pair of Paveway IVs, destroying two vehicles that were being prepared for use, and two further attacks with Paveways accounted for two anti-tank weapons.

6 June: Royal Air Force Typhoon FGR4s continued to provide close air support to the Iraqi operation to liberate Fallujah. A coalition surveillance aircraft spotted a group of Daesh terrorists taking up position in a building to the west of the city, allowing them to be quickly targeted by the Typhoons using a Paveway IV guided bomb. In northern Iraq, intelligence had located a large truck-bomb factory near Mosul and two RAF Tornado GR4s armed with 1000lb Enhanced Paveway II guided bombs were tasked with its destruction. A single EPW II destroyed the factory.

7 June: Operations around Fallujah continued when Tornados successfully attacked a weapons and ammunition stockpile hidden to the south-east of the city.

8 June: Tornados conducted three attacks to support Iraqi ground forces engaged in firefights with terrorists inside Fallujah. Despite the close proximity of the Iraqi forces, the GR4s were able to deliver simultaneous attacks with Paveway IVs against two strongpoints housing Daesh machine-gun and artillery teams. They then struck a further machine-gun position when it also opened fire on the Iraqis.

Typhoons also contributed to the Fallujah operations, using Paveway IVs against two groups of Daesh extremists armed with a light machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenades. In northern Iraq, another Typhoon mission successfully attacked a Daesh-held building east of Mosul, whilst a Reaper used a GBU-12 bomb to demolish a building where another coalition surveillance aircraft had observed terrorists unloading supplies. A second Reaper patrolled over Syria and employed a Hellfire missile to destroy a Daesh truck travelling at speed on the open road south of Raqqa.

9 June: Royal Air Force Tornado GR4s continued to provide close air support to Iraqi ground forces fighting to liberate Fallujah. One Tornado flight conducted successful attacks using Paveway IV guided bombs against four Daesh-held buildings from which terrorists were directing machine-gun fire at the Iraqi forces. A second Tornado mission used a Paveway IV to destroy a building west of the city, within which a terrorist armed vehicle was reported by nearby Iraqi troops to be concealed.

10 June: A Reaper worked in close conjunction with other coalition aircraft to engage Daesh rocket and mortar teams operating near Qayyarah. The Reaper provided support to two coalition strikes on rocket positions, then used its own Hellfire missiles and a GBU-12 guided bomb against a further set of rocket launchers and a mortar. A Typhoon FGR4 flight was also operating near Qayyarah, and they conducted attacks against five targets: three buildings where Daesh extremists had been spotted gathering and two more rocket launcher positions. North-east of Mosul, another pair of Typhoons destroyed a heavy machine-gun team with a Paveway IV. To the south, Tornados again provided close air support over Fallujah, using their Paveways against three strongpoints which housed two machine-gun teams and a group of terrorists armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

11 June: An RAF Reaper continued to hunt terrorist rocket and mortar teams around Qayyarah, conducting three attacks with Hellfire missiles.

12 June: Another Reaper patrolled over Qayyarah, and also fired three Hellfires, its targets were two terrorist vehicles and a group of Daesh fighters. Typhoons were also active nearby, and used Paveway IVs to attack two groups of terrorists caught in the open and two Daesh-held buildings. A Typhoon mission also joined Tornados operating over Fallujah; the Typhoons used one Paveway IV against a machine-gun position, whilst the Tornados delivered five very precise attacks in very demanding circumstances, with Iraqi troops extremely close to the terrorist targets. Paveway IVs were used to destroy a rocket team, an anti-tank gun, a heavily armed pick-up truck and a heavy machine-gun team, whilst a Brimstone missile silenced a light machine-gun.

During Sunday night, a pair of Tornados armed with 1000lb Enhanced Paveway II guided bombs conducted a carefully planned strike on a factory to the south-west of Qayyarah where truck-bombs were being built by Daesh. Four EPW IIs hit their targets accurately and initial reports suggest the mission was a success.

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Coalition Concerned Over Afghanistan, Pakistan Border Clashes

by Ayaz Gul June 16, 2016

NATO's Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan says it is concerned about recent military clashes between Afghan and Pakistani border forces, and is urging both countries to resolve differences through diplomatic negotiations.

Afghan and Pakistani forces have intermittently exchanged heavy gunfire since last Sunday, leaving at least four soldiers dead and more than 40 wounded. The shooting has, however, stopped since late Wednesday when the two sides declared a cease-fire.

Risk of escalation

The potential for escalation worries the mission, said the coalition spokesman in Kabul, U.S. Army Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, on Thursday.

"We continue to watch it very closely and we are concerned about it but believe, overall, that this has got to be a diplomatic negotiation," he added.

On Wednesday, the Afghan parliament urged the U.S.-led military coalition to honor its bilateral security agreement with Kabul and come to the assistance of Afghan forces in the conflict with Pakistan.

Cleveland, however, said the coalition is not mandated to undertake such actions.

"From a Resolute Support standpoint, no. Again, remember our role is to conduct, train, advise and assist to help the Afghans as they are fighting the Taliban," he said.

Torkham crossing

The conflict erupted after Pakistan began construction of a new gate at the busy Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan as part of its plans to strengthen border "management systems." Kabul defended its military retaliation, saying the facility was being built in disputed territory.

Sartaj Aziz, a foreign policy adviser to Pakistan's prime minister, told the parliament on Thursday the government is determined to complete construction of the gate and other such facilities at all established crossing points to stop the infiltration of terrorists and militants across the 2,600-kilometer border with Afghanistan.

"This measure is also vital for our efforts to combat terrorism It is also important to dispel the impression being created by Afghanistan that Pakistan was violating any bilateral agreement or understanding. In any case, undertaking any construction work on our side is the prerogative of the government of Pakistan," Aziz said.

He told lawmakers he has discussed the issue with Afghanistan's national security adviser by phone and invited him along with the Afghan foreign minister to visit Pakistan for further discussions.

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Eritrea Says More than 200 Ethiopians Killed in Border Clash

by Henok Fente June 16, 2016

The government of Eritrea says its forces killed more than 200 Ethiopian troops and wounded more than 300 during fighting Sunday and Monday in a contested border area.

There has been no independent confirmation of the figures, released by Eritrea in a government statement Thursday.

In an interview with VOA's Horn of Africa Service, Ethiopia's Communications Minister Getachew Reda suggested the figures are inaccurate but stopped short of denying them.

"A retreating army and an army in disarray under normal circumstances does not have a sense of what happened," he said.

He also said Ethiopia has no interest in disclosing its assessment of damages during the battle.

Both countries have claimed the upper hand in the fighting, which took place in the area of Tsorona, an Eritrean town that was a flashpoint during the border war the countries fought between 1998 and 2000.

Eritrea said Thursday that its forces "quashed" the Ethiopian attack and forced the troops to retreat beyond their starting points.

Ethiopia has said its force drove back an Eritrean attack and chose to withdaw from the site of the clash "once our objective was achieved."

US urges restraint

The U.S. Department of State expressed concern over the military action, calling on both sides to exercise restraint.

"We also urge both Ethiopia and Eritrea to cooperate in promoting stability and sustainable peace in the region," U.S. Department of State spokesman John Kirby said in a statement Tuesday.

Eritrea has appealed to the United Nations Security Council to condemn what it called a military offensive by Ethiopia.

The border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia killed an estimated 70,000 people. Since then, the two countries have fought periodic battles on their boundary, the most recent before this week coming in 2012.

Both governments accused the other of starting the latest battle to distract attention from political problems and internal opposition.

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ISIL-Linked Hacker Pleads Guilty to Providing Material Support

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wednesday, June 15, 2016



Ardit Ferizi, aka Th3Dir3ctorY, 20, a citizen of Kosovo, pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkemaof the Eastern District of Virginia to providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a designated foreign terrorist organization, and accessing a protected computer without authorization and obtaining information.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin, U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente of the Eastern District of Virginia, Assistant Director in Charge Paul M. Abbate of the FBI's Washington Field Office and Special Agent in Charge Michelle S. Klimt of the FBI's Jacksonville, Florida, Division made the announcement.

"Ferizi admitted to stealing the personally identifiable information of over 1,000 U.S. servicemembers and federal employees, and providing it to ISIL with the understanding that they would incite terrorist attacks against those individuals," said Assistant Attorney General Carlin. "The case against Ferizi is the first of its kind, representing the nexus of the terror and cyber threats. The National Security Division will continue to use an all-tools approach to combat this ever-evolving blended threat, and we will identify, disrupt and prosecute any individual who provides material support to ISIL, no matter how they do so."

"Ferizi endangered the lives of over 1,000 Americans," said U.S. Attorney Boente. "Cyber terrorism has become an increasingly prevalent and serious threat here in America, both to individuals and businesses. However, cyber terrorist are no different from other terrorists: No matter where they hide, we will track them down and seek to bring them to the United States to face justice."

"Ardit Ferizi launched a cyberattack to gain access to the identities of U.S. military personnel, which he shared with members of ISIL in an attempt to incite terror attacks," said Assistant Director in Charge Abbate. "No matter how a person supports a terrorist group like ISIL, whether on the battlefield or in the cyber world, the FBI will identify, disrupt and bring them to justice for placing lives at risk."

"This case demonstrates the importance of strong partnerships with law enforcement agencies worldwide," said Special Agent in Charge Michelle S. Klimt. "Cybercrime knows no boundaries and our efforts to dismantle these operations would be impossible without international collaboration. The FBI will continue to vigorously investigate these crimes and work with our international partners to track down and arrest those who steal from our nation and citizens."

Ferizi, who was detained by Malaysian authorities on a provisional arrest warrant on behalf of the United States, was charged by criminal complaint on Oct. 6, 2015. The criminal complaint was unsealed on Oct. 15, 2015. Ferizi subsequently waived extradition.

Ferizi admitted that on or about June 13, 2015, he gained administrator-level access to a server that maintained the website of a victim company located in the United States, which also contained databases with personally identifiable information (PII) belonging to tens of thousands of the victim company's customers. Between June and August 2015, Ferizi provided unlawfully-obtained PII to ISIL member Junaid Hussain, aka Abu Hussain al-Britani, he admitted. According to the statement of facts, on Aug. 11, 2015, in the name of the Islamic State Hacking Division (ISHD), Hussain posted a tweet that contained a document with the PII of approximately 1,300 U.S. military and other personnel that Ferizi had taken from the victim company and provided to Hussain. The document stated, in part, that "we are in your emails and computer systems, watching and recording your every move, we have your names and addresses, we are in your emails and social media accounts, we are extracting confidential data and passing on your personal information to the soldiers of the khilafah, who soon with the permission of Allah will strike at your necks in your own lands!" Ferizi admitted that he provided the PII to ISIL with the understanding that ISIL would use the PII to "hit them hard."

At sentencing on Sept. 16, 2016, Ferizi faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for providing material support to ISIL and a maximum sentence of five years for accessing a protected computer without authorization and obtaining information. The maximum statutory sentence is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes, as the sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the court based on the advisory sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors. As part of the plea, Ferizi also agreed to a stipulated order of removal to Kosovo, his country of citizenship, upon completion of his criminal sentence.

The FBI's Washington Field Office and Jacksonville Division investigated the case. The case is being prosecuted by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Van Grack of the Eastern District of Virginia and Trial Attorney Gregory Gonzalez of the National Security Division's (NSD) Counterterrorism Section, with assistance from Trial Attorney Vincent A. Citro of NSD's Counterterrorism Section and Trial Attorney Matthew Walczewski of NSD's Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. The Malaysian authorities and the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs also provided significant assistance.

16-689

National Security Division (NSD)

USAO - Virginia, Eastern

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Pentagon Unleashes Cyber Effort to Counter Militants on Battlefield

by Carla Babb June 15, 2016

The Pentagon has launched a new cyber task force to counter the Islamic State group, and officials say it is creating advantages both in cyberspace and on the battlefield.

The task force, JTF-Ares, was developed in May and is in its "initial operation phase," U.S. Cyber Command spokesman Joe Holstead said.

The military has carried out several cyber offensive operations against IS militants, which experts say have produced many coalition successes in the last few months.

"There's no bang, and there's no explosion, but it does give you a military advantage," said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

During Secretary of Defense Ash Carter's latest news briefing at the Pentagon, he said the U.S. military was looking to "accelerate" the cyber war against IS in order to "physically and virtually isolate" the terror group.

Holstead said the new task force is a part of that acceleration effort, using both operations and intelligence professionals from all military branches to "improve efficiencies" and unify cyber efforts for a "focused and sustained cyberspace campaign in support of the broader counter-ISIL [Islamic State] efforts in Syria and Iraq."

A defense official, speaking to VOA on the condition on anonymity, confirmed Wednesday that specific cyber tools were being developed and integrated into the coalition battle, but declined to give details because of operational sensitivities.

Disruptive effects

Carter has said the U.S. is using cyber attacks to interrupt IS command and control, to cause the militants to lose confidence in their networks and to overload their networks so that they can't function. Some penetrations have interrupted supply chains or sent enemy combatants to the wrong places, according to Lewis, who directs the CSIS Strategic Technologies Program.

Colonel Chris Garver, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS in Iraq and Syria, told VOA on Tuesday that the coalition had reaped the benefits from this disruption of networks through both cyber attacks coming out of U.S. Cyber Command and kinetic attacks on the ground.

"Just as when we attack a radio station, the disruption by cyber attacks fits into that," Garver said in a phone interview from Baghdad. "It's harder to count than the bombs we drop, but it certainly has an effect."

Garver told reporters last week via teleconference that the coalition had seen changes in the terror group's communication structure as multiple attacks on its networks forced the use of other means of transferring information.

IS leaders communicate with their fighters by cellphones, push-to-talk radios, internet applications and emails. On the battlefield, the coalition has focused on bombing IS headquarters to destroy large amounts of communications devices at once, but strikes do not always happen immediately.

"We may be listening, we may be watching," Garver told reporters, "and we may not hit that right away because we want to keep using that to gather intelligence."

Eliminate or infiltrate

Speaking with VOA, Garver added that the same concept was true in cyber warfare against IS.

"Say you've identified a jihadist website," he said. "You can zap it, or before you lay waste to it and let them know it's been hacked, you may choose to infiltrate their networks without ever letting them know you're doing it."

Before launching an attack against IS or the Taliban  either a physical attack or a cyber raid  U.S. defense officials must follow a process that leads them to decide whether such action outweighs the intelligence benefit that could be gained by continuing to listen and watch the enemy, according to experts and an official inside the department.

"It's a question every time," Lewis of CSIS told VOA.

Lewis said cyber attacks against IS are "relatively new" because U.S. Cyber Command previously lacked the capacity to launch these types of assaults.

He said the military had increased its expertise by putting a lot of resources into developing both the doctrine and the workforce that could carry out these attacks.

"It's a matter of prioritizing, and if it's a priority, you find a way to get the experts and tools you need," a defense official told VOA on the condition of anonymity.

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CIA Director: IS Working To Deploy Militants For Attacks In West

June 16, 2016

by RFE/RL

CIA Director John Brennan says the extremist Islamic State (IS) group is attempting to deploy fighters in the West to carry out further attacks, drawing from a pool of tens of thousands of militants throughout the world that outnumbers that of Al-Qaeda at the height of its reach.

Brennan's testimony at a June 16 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing came just days after an IS sympathizer shot and killed 49 people in an Orlando gay nightclub -- the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

"We judge that ISIL is training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks," Brennan told the hearing, using another acronym for the group. "ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West."

Brennan added that the IS group likely is attempting to smuggle militants into Western countries, possibly posing as refugees or through normal, legal travel.

He said that the group has suffered significant losses in Syria and Iraq but is nonetheless capable of carrying out attacks across the globe.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan said.

"The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower, and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly," he added.

Brennan said that the CIA has not found any direct links between Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old gunman who carried out the June 12 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and any foreign terrorist organization though he pledged allegiance to the IS group during the attack.

Brennan called the attack in Orlando a "heinous act of wanton violence" and an "assault on the values of openness and tolerance" that are essential to the United States as a nation.

President Barack Obama and federal law-enforcement officials have said that Mateen, the son of immigrants from Afghanistan, appears to have been radicalized at least in part through extremist information disseminated on the Internet.

Brennan said in his June 16 testimony that the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS militants in Syria and Iraq is working to counter the group's "expansive propaganda machine."

He said the organization primarily uses the social media sites Twitter and Tumblr, as well as the messaging app Telegram, to disseminate its propaganda and that "it relies on a global network of sympathizers to further spread its messages."

Brennan said that he is concerned about Libya serving as a platform for IS militants to carry out attacks in Europe and elsewhere.

"The branch in Libya is probably the most developed and the most dangerous," he said. "We assess that it is trying to increase its influence in Africa and to plot attacks in the region and in Europe."

Asked about the broader security crisis in the region, Brennan said that Russia's military backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has strengthened his hold on power.

"A year ago, [Assad] was on his back foot as the opposition forces were carrying out operations that were really degrading the Syrian military," he said. "He is in a stronger position than he was in June of last year."

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/islamic-state-cia- brennan-attacks-west/27802907.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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McCain Stands Down: Congress Reaches Compromise on Russian Rockets

Sputnik News

22:02 15.06.2016(updated 03:14 16.06.2016)

The Senate war over Russian rocket engines appears to be over, as lawmakers have agreed that an all-out boycott benefits no one.

Debate over this year's US defense budget centered around the purchase of Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines. Designed and manufactured by NPO Energomash, the rockets are a key element of the Atlas V launch vehicles, providing a cost-effective alternative to the Delta IV, Washington's only other current option.

Arizona Senator John McCain led a charge to ban the Russian-made engines, citing security concerns.

Now McCain has backed down. Reaching a compromise, the Senate Armed Services Committee presented an amendment to the defense policy bill that places an end date of 2022 for the RD-180's use, and limits the number that the US military can purchase to 18.

"I supported this compromise because it contains a legislative cutoff date for the use of Russian rocket engines," McCain said in a statement.

"It does not alter other important space launch provisions in the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act]. It provides for a sustainable path to achieve the broadly shared goal of assured access to space, competition in national security space launch, and ending our dependence on Russian engines."

The amendment was presented by Bill Nelson, a Democratic senator from Florida.

"We never want to get to the position that we just have one rocket company, because if something happened, you want to have a backup," Nelson said, according to Defense News.

"We have got to get satellites into space to protect our national security, and we've got to do it over this period of time from now until the end of 2022."

The US government is hoping that American companies like SpaceX will perfect their own rockets. For the time being, the Delta IV rocket is the only viable US-made option, but its hefty price tag led to charges that abandoning the cheaper RD-180 would be financially irresponsible.

"Using Delta when an Atlas will do is like burning $100 million on the back lawn for fun. That's how big the price difference could be for some missions," Loren B. Thompson, a senior defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, said.

A Delta IV launch costs approximately 35% more than an Atlas V launch.

"If Delta gets grounded like SpaceX rockets were last year, and Russian engines can't be used, then there will be no way of orbiting satellites critical to America's defense."

On Monday, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told Defense News that he thought the debate had been "healthy" and "positive."

"We don't have to agree. Our job is to provide the best military advice we can give based on the reality of the time. And if Congress disagrees with it, they make a decision about what they will authorize and appropriate, and we move onto the next annual cycle," he said.

"Everyone wants to get off the RD-180 engine, the Russian-built engine, as soon as we possibly can. Everybody wants the same things. But there are disagreements from all parties, on the best way to get from here to there."

 Sputnik

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Japan Plans to Improve Defense Against N Korean Missiles Within 5 Years

Sputnik News

15:29 15.06.2016(updated 15:31 15.06.2016)

Japan plans to improve its defense against North Korean nuclear and missile threat within five years through modernization of Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missile system, local media reported Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Modernization will begin next year and will include missiles of increased range and the ability to hit several targets simultaneously, the source in the military told NHK TV channel.

Japan defends from North Korean missiles using the US-supplied PAC-3 systems, warships equipped with Aegis interception system and SM3 missiles.

By the spring of 2017, Japan together with the United States plans to finalize the SM3 Block 2A missile, which development has been launched in 2006. Combat deployment of these missiles was initially scheduled for 2018.

Tensions over North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs escalated after Pyongyang said on January 6 that it had successfully carried out a hydrogen bomb test and put a satellite into orbit on February 7. The moves violated UN Security Council resolutions, and prompted the United Nations as well as the United States to impose sanctions.

 Sputnik

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China prohibits exports of dual-use technologies to North Korea

Iran Press TV

Wed Jun 15, 2016 6:14PM

China has banned exports of several technologies that could be used for both military and peaceful purposes to North Korea, in reaction to Pyongyang's nuclear program.

Ring magnets, high strength aluminum alloys, laser welding equipment, and several compounds that can be used to produce nuclear and chemical weapons are among the "dual use" prohibited goods, according to a statement issued by China's Ministry of Commerce late Tuesday.

China has been North Korea's most important ally and largest trading partner, but it backed UN sanctions against Pyongyang in a Security Council vote in March 2015, in reaction to its neighbor's nuclear tests and long-range missile launches.

North Korea declared itself a nuclear power in 2005 and carried out four nuclear weapons tests -- in 2006, 2009, 2013 and 2016.

Pyongyang also launched a long-range rocket February this year, which it said was aimed at placing an earth observation satellite into orbit. The US and South Korea denounced the move as a cover for an intercontinental ballistic missile test.

North Korea says it is strengthening its defense capabilities to protect itself against hostile countries, including the US, accusing Washington of plotting with regional allies to topple its government.

The country has been targeted with international sanctions over its nuclear and missile activities. Back in March, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved the toughest sanctions on Pyongyang in two decades.

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The Government of Iraq-AC-208 Sustainment, Logistics, and Spares Support

Media/Public Contact: pm-cpa@state.gov

Transmittal No: 16-25

WASHINGTON, Jun 14, 2016 -- The State Department has made a determination approving a possible Foreign Military Sale to the Government of Iraq for AC-208 sustainment, logistics, and spares support. The estimated cost is $181 million. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale today.

The Government of Iraq has requested a possible sale of a five-year sustainment package for its AC/RC-208 fleet that includes: operational, intermediate, and depot-level maintenance; spare parts; component repair; publication updates; maintenance training; and logistics. Also included in this sale are Contract Logistics Services (CLS), training services, and Contract Engineering Services. There is no MDE associated with this possible sale. The total overall estimated value is $181 million.

The purchase of this sustainment package will allow the Iraqi Air Force (IqAF) to continue to operate its fleet of eight C-208 light attack and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft beyond the June 2016 end of its existing CLS contract. Limited IqAF maintenance capability necessitates continued CLS. Ultimately, the goal is for the IqAF to become self-sufficient in the areas of aircraft maintenance and logistics training. Iraq will have no difficulty absorbing this support.

The proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security goals of the United States by helping to improve a critical capability of the Iraq Security Forces in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region.

The principal contractors will be Orbital ATK in Falls Church, Virginia, and Flight Safety International in Flushing, New York. There are no known offset agreements proposed in connection with this potential sale.

Implementation of this proposed sale will not require the assignment of any additional U.S. Government or contractor representatives to Iraq.

There will be no adverse impact on U.S. defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale.

All defense articles and services listed in this transmittal have been authorized for release and export to the Government of Iraq.

This notice of a potential sale is required by law and does not mean the sale has been concluded.

All questions regarding this proposed Foreign Military Sale should be directed to the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, pm-cpa@state.gov [1].

-30-

Source URL: http://www.dsca.mil/major-arms-sales/government-iraq-ac-208-sustainment-logistics-and-spares-support

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No US Allies Prepared to Send Troops to Aid Fight Against Daesh in Libya

Sputnik News

01:18 16.06.2016

US Special Envoy for Libya Jonathan Winer said that the allies of the United States are not considering sending military forces to support the internationally-backed Libyan GNA against Daesh.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  The allies of the United States are not considering sending military forces to support the internationally-backed Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) against the Islamic State (ISIL, or Daesh), US Special Envoy for Libya Jonathan Winer told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"No foreign nations [are] planning to send military forces to aid Libya," Winer told the committee on Wednesday. "I am not aware of anything beyond [a] training and equip mission center."

Winer also denied that the US Department of Defense was preparing to send ground forces into Libya.

"I don't know of a military campaign in Libya being contemplated," he stated.

Winer also admitted that the GNA was not yet securely established across Libya despite it making some progress in recent months with US assistance.

"There are lots of grounds for pessimism. There are also grounds for optimism and real progress Could the advances of the past few months be reversed? Yes the progress is fragile. We are still in a fragile place," he explained.

Additionally, Winer told the committee that the US government was in talks with the Tobruk House of Representatives forces that have so far refused to join Libyan government forces fighting the Islamic State around the eastern city of Sirte.

Years of instability in Libya have created a political and security vacuum that was filled by Islamist militants. Daesh gained a foothold in the country by capturing cities along the coast. In spring, armed forces loyal to GNA began fighting for control of Sirte.

 Sputnik

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Russian Army to Receive Further 55 Multirole Su-30SM Fighters by 2019

Sputnik News

14:15 15.06.2016

Russia's Armed Forces will receive another batch of 55 Su-30SM multirole fighters by 2019, the production director of Russia's Irkut Corporation, Sergei Yamanov, said Wednesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in June, Yamanov said that the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, belonging to the Irkut Corporation aircraft manufacturer, has supplied 61 Su-30SM jets to the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Russian Navy's naval aviation.

"Before the end of 2018, the Irkutsk Aviation Plant will produce and supply another 55 planes for the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Russian Navy. The total number of Su-30SM jets will come to 116, with 88 for the aerospace forces and 28 for the naval aviation," Yamanov said.

The Su-30SM is produced by the Irkut Corporation under a contact with the Russian Defense Ministry. The Su-30SM has been supplied to the Russian Armed Forces since 2012.

The Su-30SM is a 4+ generation fighter jet, developed by Russia's Sukhoi Aviation Holding Company. It is a two-seat derivative of the earlier Su-27UB (NATO reporting name: Flanker) capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground missions with a wide variety of precision-guided munitions. The aircraft features thrust-vectoring engines to enhance maneuverability.

 Sputnik

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'We Are Coming': Syrian Army Showers Daesh With Warning Leaflets in Raqqa

Sputnik News

20:58 15.06.2016(updated 21:04 15.06.2016)

The Syrian Army and its allied forces, with support from Russian air support and the Syrian Air Force, made advances in the direction of Al-Thawrah in Raqqa province, a source in the Syrian Army told Sputnik.

The source said that the troops advanced by 5 km from Al-Thawrah after a series of successful assaults on Daesh terrorists.

The militants were getting support from fighters coming from Salamiyah in the province of Hama.

"The Syrian Army eliminated 15 militants along with their field commander, as well as destroyed their military vehicles," the source told Sputnik.

Moreover, the Syrian military aircraft dropped leaflets over Raqqa and the surrounding area, in which the country's military command for the last time offered the terrorists a chance to lay down their arms and surrender to the troops.

The leaflet consists of two pages and has the following text:

On the first page it says, "This will be the end of each terrorist who will go armed against the army and people."

Immediately below this text there is an image of dead militants.

Under the photo of dead terrorists written in big bold letters is the following: "We are coming."

At the end, there is a signature of the high command of the Syrian Armed Forces.

On the second page there is a written appeal:

"Militant! The moment of truth is here. The world is changing rapidly. The Army is advancing. Think about it, waiting can cost you your life. Do not hesitate; hurry to surrender your arms, to save your live and your future."

At the end, there is the same signature of the high command of the Syrian Armed Forces.

Earlier in June, the Syrian army entered the Raqqa province after advancing in a major offensive against Daesh militants.

The Syrian government has had no presence in Raqqa since August 2014. Liberating the city, where some believe Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is living, has long been seen as key to crippling the terrorist organization.

 Sputnik

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Hundreds of Daesh Militants Remain in Manbij Amid Offensive - Pentagon

Sputnik News

18:57 15.06.2016(updated 18:58 15.06.2016)

Hundreds of Daesh militants are still inside the northern Syrian city of Manbij as the Syrian Democratic Forces backed by the US-led coalition try to recapture the city, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesperson Army Col. Christopher Garver said on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Syrian Democratic Forces troops have seized some of the outer roads to cut Daesh terrorists off from potential reinforcements and supplies, but Garver said fighting around the city remains "significant."

"We've seen estimates of hundreds of Daesh fighters still in Manbij and they are continuing to defend the city," Garver told reporters in a press briefing.

Garver said there are indications the terrorist group may be holding "large groups of civilians as hostages" and forcing them to fight for them.

Daesh terrorists are using machine guns, indirect fire and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the fighting, he added.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Operation Inherent Resolve reported that the US-led coalition had conducted six airstrikes near Manbij on Tuesday, hitting Daesh tactical units and destroying five of the group's fighting positions.

 Sputnik

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Germany Denies Reports of Bundeswehr Special Units Deployed in Syria

Sputnik News

15:58 15.06.2016(updated 16:02 15.06.2016)

There are no German troops or advisers present on the Syrian territory, a German Defense Ministry spokesperson told Sputnik on Wednesday.

BERLIN (Sputnik)  On Tuesday, Al Mayadeen television channel reported that dozens of German special forces troops entered Syria, joining French and US troops that are participating in a military operation near the city of Manbij in Aleppo province.

Following the news, Syrian state SANA news agency reported that Damascus condemns the presence of French and German special forces in the north of the country, citing a Syrian Foreign Ministry source.

"There are no Germans troops in Syria, not at all. No advisers, no troops, nobody," the spokesperson said.

"There are no special forces deployed [in Syria]. We do not have any units there," the Defense Ministry spokeswoman said earlier at a press briefing, adding that she could "firmly deny these claims" on behalf of the ministry.

 Sputnik

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US Warns of 'Consequences' for Syria Cease-fire Violations

by Nike Ching, Isabela Cocoli June 15, 2016

The United States says its patience is running out and is calling for Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to respect a fragile cease-fire.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is accusing Russia and the Syrian government of selectively enforcing the cease-fire, while Assad's forces continue their campaign to retake Aleppo, the largest city in the country and a UNESCO world heritage site.

"It is very clear that the cessation of hostilities is frayed and at risk and that it is critical for a genuine cessation to be put in place," Kerry said Wednesday in Oslo, Norway.

He added, "Russia needs to understand that our patience is not infinite, in fact it is very limited with whether or not Assad is going to be held accountable."

"So we have made it very clear, that unless we get a better definition of how this cessation is going to work, how it will be enforced, who is applies to, how it is applied, we are not going to sit there while Assad continues to offensively assault in Aleppo and while Russia continues to support in that effort," he said.

Kerry said members of the Syrian opposition will also be held accountable for the continuance of fighting.

Cease-fire has largely collapsed

The February cease-fire has largely collapsed and little progress is being made to negotiate a political transition that is supposed to begin on August 1.

Syria's civil war has claimed more than 280,000 lives and has forced millions to seek refuge, mainly in Europe. The fighting started with the repression of anti-government protests in March 2011.

Kerry visited Norway for the annual Oslo Forum meeting that convenes senior conflict mediators and high-level decision-makers, as well as analysts and experts to share their experiences, identify challenges and reflect on mediation practice.

Kerry also met Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for talks on Syria and the Iran nuclear deal.

The Oslo Forum is co-hosted by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Switzerland-based private diplomacy organization.

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UN human rights panel concludes ISIL is committing genocide against Yazidis

16 June 2016  The Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) [also known as ISIL and Da'esh] is committing genocide against Yazidis that amounts to crimes against humanity and war crimes, a United Nations-mandated human rights inquiry reported today.

"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing," Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, emphasized in releasing the report They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis.

"ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities," he said in a press statement issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Per the Commission's mandate, the report focuses on violations committed against Yazidis inside Syria, where it found that thousands of women and girls are still being held captive and abused, often as slaves.

The Commission also examined how the terrorist group forcibly transferred Yazidis into Syria after launching its attacks on northern Iraq's Sinjar region on 3 August 2014. The information that was collected documents evidence of intent and criminal liability of ISIS's military commanders, fighters, religious and ideological leaders, wherever they are located, the Commission said.

The findings are based on interviews with survivors, religious leaders, smugglers, activists, lawyers, medical personnel, and journalists, as well as extensive documentary material, which corroborate information gathered by the Commission.

"ISIS has sought to erase the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community," according to the report.

ISIS separated Yazidi men and boys older than 12 years old from the rest of their families, and killed those who refused to convert, in order to destroy their identity as Yazidis. Women and children often witnessed these killings before being forcibly transferred to locations in Iraq, and thereafter to Syria, where the majority of captives remain, the Commission found.

Thousands of women and girls, some as young as 9 years old, have been sold in slave markets, or souk sabaya, in the Syrian governorates of Raqqah, Aleppo, Homs, Hasakah and Dayr Az- Zawr. ISIS and its fighters hold them both in sexual slavery and in slavery, the report says, with Yazidi women and girls being constantly sold, gifted and willed between fighters.

"Survivors who escaped from ISIS captivity in Syria describe how they endured brutal rapes, often on a daily basis, and were punished if they tried to escape with severe beatings, and sometimes gang rapes," said Commissioner Vitit Muntarbhorn.

The Commission also heard accounts of how some Yazidi women and girls committed suicide to escape the cruel torment.

The report noted that ISIS, which considers the Yazidis to be infidels, has publicly cited the Yazidis' faith as the basis for the attack of 3 August 2014 and its subsequent abuse of them.

The Commission said that ISIS has referred to the Yazidi as a "pagan minority [whose] existence [] Muslims should question", adding that "their women could be enslaved [] as spoils of war."

"ISIS has made no secret of its intent to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, and that is one of the elements that allowed us to conclude their actions amount to genocide," said Commissioner Carla del Ponte.

Mr. Pinheiro stressed that there must be no impunity for crimes of this nature, recalling States' obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent and to punish genocide. The Commission repeated its call for the Security Council to urgently refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court, or to establish an ad hoc tribunal to prosecute the violations of international law committed during the non-international armed conflict.

The Commission further noted that, with no path to international criminal justice available, it is likely that the first such prosecution of ISIS crimes against the Yazidis will take place in a domestic jurisdiction. It is essential, that States enact laws against genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Commission stated.

The Commission also urged international recognition of the genocide, and said that more must be done to assure the protection of the Yazidi religious minority in the Middle East, as well as the funding of care, including psycho-social and financial support, for victims of the genocide.

The Commission, which in addition to Mr. Pinheiro, Ms. del Ponte and Mr. Muntarbhorn also includes Karen Koning AbuZayd, Special Adviser on the Summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants, was mandated by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2011 to investigate and record all violations of international law in Syria.

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Erdogan's Letter to Putin Means 'Ankara Ready to Open New Page' With Moscow

Sputnik News

21:42 15.06.2016(updated 22:14 15.06.2016)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on the occasion of Russia's national holiday, sending him a letter in which he expressed hope for the improvement of ties between both countries. In an interview with Radio Sputnik, Turkish politicians from various parties commented on the issue.

Relations between Moscow and Ankara deteriorated after a Turkish F-16 fighter downed a Russian Su-24 bomber over Syria on November 24, 2015. Following the incident, Russia imposed restrictive measures against Turkey, including sanctions in trade, tourism and investments.

"I repeatedly said that we need to separate relations in the spheres of commerce and politics and that we need to appreciate and support the proximity which exists between our nations and economic cooperation," former Turkish Minister of Economy Mustafa Elitas told Sputnik.

According to the politician, Erdogan's letter signifies Turkey's readiness to open new page in bilateral relations. He expressed his hope that the countries will be able to return to a strategic partnership they had before the incident.

"The Russian side has already made steps toward reconciliation and there was a meeting with the head of the Turkish foreign ministry. The crisis in the relations can be resolved through such bilateral steps that demonstrate the good will of the parties. I hope that our relations will improve. They must improve," the politician stated.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia wants to resume relations with Turkey but expects concrete steps from Ankara, including an apology and compensation for the downed Russian plane. According to the Russian President, Ankara's claims are not enough for the normalization of ties between the two countries.

"Normalization of Turkish-Russian relations is in the national interests of both countries, and crucial to ensuring stability in Syria, the Caucasus, the Black Sea region," deputy from the oppositional Republican People's Party Utku Cakrozer told Sputnik.

"Both countries are important geopolitical players. The conflict between them, on the one hand, leads to delays in the resolution of the Syrian crisis, on the other, negatively affects their own national interests," the politician stated.

Member of the Nationalist Movement Party MuharremVarl also supported this point of view saying that Turkey should maintain good relations with its neighbors.

"These are countries which we can develop trade and maintain economic cooperation with, we need them as partners. So I hope that these letters will be well received by the Russian side and will activate diplomatic contacts between the two countries," the politician concluded.

Earlier, Prime Minister of Turkey Binali Yildirim also wrote a letter to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in which he expressed hope that, "in the near future, cooperation and relations between the two countries will reach a level that is essential for the common interests of our peoples."

 Sputnik

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White House Gives Ukraine $220 Million In Aid For Reform Efforts

June 16, 2016

by RFE/RL

The White House says it will give Ukraine $220 million in new aid this year to support Kyiv's economic, political, and energy reform efforts.

The badly needed aid for the war-shattered country was announced on June 15 after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman by phone.

The White House said the aid will help Ukraine "strengthen democratic institutions and the rule of law, reinforce the foundations for sustainable economic growth, and respond to humanitarian needs."

Among the items on Hroysman's "ambitious reform agenda," the White House said, is an acceleration of customs reform, an ongoing fight against corruption through reform of the justice sector, and implementation of constitutional amendments adopted by Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada on June 2.

Hroysman intends to increase "support for independent media and civil society," it said, and extend decentralization across Ukraine to improve the government's delivery of services and increase citizen engagement.

Hroysman has also committed to energy reforms, including establishing competitive gas and electricity markets in line with European Union standards, diversifying sources of energy away from Russia, and privatization of state energy agencies.

The White House said that on June 9 the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation approved up to $62.5 million in financial support for two private equity funds that will invest in Ukraine across a number of sectors, including agribusiness, health care, infrastructure, retail, consumer goods, and real estate.

These two investments are in addition to previous corporation financial commitments to Ukraine totaling $185 million, according to the White House.

U.S. aid to Ukraine since 2014 has totaled $1.3 billion, it said, including $112 million in humanitarian assistance for civilians affected by the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the east.

The U.S. government has also provided $2 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine, and on June 3 approved an agreement allowing Ukraine to use a third of a $1 billion guarantee in coming months.

"These loan guarantees help Ukraine stabilize its economy and protect the most vulnerable households from the impact of needed economic adjustment," the White House said.

Separately, Hroysman's senior economic adviser, Ivan Miklos, told Reuters on June 15 that Ukraine hoped the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will release $1.7 billion in delayed aid this year in two installments as Ukraine adopts reforms sought by the global lender.

Miklos, who was visiting Washington, said Ukraine hoped to get the first installment of IMF aid of $1 billion next month, an amount that he said would suffice to keep the economy stable.

However, efforts to get reform legislation through the Rada continue to lag, he said.

"There is not sufficient ownership of reform" in parliament, he said. "There is not sufficient understanding that the reforms are necessary."

With reporting by Reuters

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/white- house-gives-ukraine-220-million-aid-reform- efforts-groysman-biden-imf/27801511.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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The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has announced that it will auction two lots of 100MHz in the 3.5GHz spectrum band as it looks to accelerate 5G deployment in the country.
The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany will be holding a candlelight vigil on Sunday for the victims in the Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub shooting early last Sunday morning that left 49 dead and 53 wounded.

The Rev. Becky Crites said the service will also honor the nine people killed a year ago as they attended a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Crites said parishioners wanted to offer a place for prayer and support for the communities affected by violence.

We didnt see anyone else offering something  we want to offer a space for some prayers to be lifted up, Crites said.

Crites said the service would have an ecumenical format, welcoming all and not including portions of the churchs usual services, such as the Eucharist, that might make some people uncomfortable.

This will be open to the whole community and will have a more ecumenical heart, Crites said. I wouldnt want to keep anyone away.

Attendees should not expect political speeches or arguments about issues beyond the violence of the events, she said.

This will not be a platform for agendas  just a place to pray for those two communities and the whole nation, Crites said.

The vigil will begin at 7 p.m. and will last 45 minutes to an hour  though people will be welcome to stay longer and talk if they wish, Crites said.
A new portrait will soon grace the halls of the Pittsylvania County Circuit Court Clerks office, thanks to a group effort from Vic Ingram, Mark Heath and the friends and family of H.F. Haymore Jr.

Haymores portrait was unveiled at Mount Hermon Volunteer Fire Department on Friday evening with his family. Commissioned from Chatham artist Mark Heath by Ingram, Faye Haymore said that it couldnt be any more perfect.

H.F. Haymore Jr. was the Pittsylvania County Clerk of the Circuit Court for 32 years before he retired last year, running unopposed every time after his initial election in 1983.

Haymore has always been incredibly active in the community. He currently serves on the boards of Roman Eagle Memorial Home, the Danville Cancer Association and Virginia Crime Commission Board and he is chairman of the board at Mount Hermon Volunteer Fire Department.

Ingram said that he was inspired to have this portrait done because he believes that, You need to do good things for good people while theyre still alive to enjoy them.

Haymore is the epitome of a community servant. He does so much for so many people, and does not ask or accept anything in return, according to Ingram.

Every penny that went into the $2,366 portrait came from people who felt that Haymore deserved recognition for his years of public service. Ingram got a list of people who might be interested from Faye, and said that the money came together really quickly.

As people, we tend not to honor people and say good things about people while there here to hear it, said Ingram. Most of the people who donated to the portrait felt like when someone dedicates their life to something like the clerks office, they should be honored.

The portrait will hang in the clerks office, with the permission of current Clerk Mark Scarce.

I couldnt believe it, Haymore said. It almost looked like I could speak. He really did a great job, and it really blew me away. Its been a pretty humbling experience.
VANCOUVER, June 15, 2016 - Lupaka Gold Corp ("Lupaka Gold" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: LPK) (FRANKFURT: LQP) is pleased to announce that it has entered into loan agreements with a group of third-party individuals and Gordon Ellis (CEO), Darryl Jones (CFO), and Stephen Silbernagel (Director), who are Company Insiders (collectively, the "Lenders"), pursuant to which the Company has agreed to borrow a total of C$470,000 (the "Loan").

The proceeds will be used for the payment of concession fees and trade payables in connection with the advancement of the Company's mineral properties and for general working capital purposes. The Loan is unsecured and will bear simple interest at the rate of twelve percent (12%) per annum, calculated and payable semi-annually with the first interest payment due on December 31, 2016 and each subsequent payment due each six months thereafter. The Loan and accrued and unpaid interest shall be repaid in full on or before the date that is two years after the Closing Date.

Commented Gordon Ellis, President and CEO, "The Company is in the process of completing definitive documents with Pandion Mine Finance, LP relating to the funding of the Invicta Gold Project." Mr. Ellis added that, "The funds raised from this loan will help meet time-sensitive obligations and maintain our accelerated development timelines while we work to put project financing in place."

The Company has agreed to issue to the Lenders a total of 2,350,000 non-transferrable warrants, such number being equal to the amount of the Loan divided by $0.20. Each warrant will entitle the holder to purchase one common share of the Company at a price of C$0.20 per share for a period of two years following the Closing Date. The warrants and any shares issued pursuant to the exercise of the warrants will be subject to a statutory hold period under Canadian securities laws expiring four months and a day after the Closing Date. The completion of the Loan and issuance of the warrants is subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

Gordon Ellis, Darryl Jones and Stephen Silbernagel are directors and officers of the Company and their participation in the Loan is considered to be a "related party transaction" as defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 ("MI 61-101"). The transaction will be exempt from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 as neither the fair market value of the subject matter of, nor the fair market value of the consideration for, the transaction, insofar as it involves such persons, will exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization.

An additional C$280,000 in Loan subscriptions is also available to qualified investors through Red Cloud Klondike Strike Inc.'s ("Red Cloud KS") funding platform (www.redcloudks.com), subject to TSX Venture Exchange acceptance.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as the term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy of this news release.

About Red Cloud Klondike Strike Inc.

Red Cloud KS is a 'new concept' capital markets advisory firm dedicated solely to the mining sector. The Red Cloud KS team uses its global network of capital markets specialists and extensive experience in the many facets of the business to help companies identify alternative sources of capital and quality actionable growth/divestiture opportunities, and to generate and maintain important relationships with key investors.

Red Cloud KS recently launched the world's first regulated equity crowd funding platform for mining. The signature online investment platform offers a unique alternative method of accessing capital as it enables accredited investors to directly participate in security offerings, and provides issuers the access to a fresh pool of investors in a streamlined, secure, online process. Red Cloud KS is registered as an Exempt Market Dealer in all provinces of Canada, as well as the Yukon, and is subject to applicable securities regulations.

About Lupaka Gold

Lupaka Gold is a Peru-focused gold explorer and developer with geographic diversification and balance through its interest in asset-based resource projects spread across three regions of Peru.

The Company's 100%-owned Invicta Gold Project is located approximately 120 kilometres by road north of Lima. The resource estimate for Invicta shows a Measured resource estimate of 131,000 tonnes grading 6.65 grams per tonne ("g/t") gold equivalent for 28,000 contained ounces of gold. As well, the Invicta resource estimate shows an Indicated resource estimate of 8,513,000 tonnes grading 3.43 g/t gold equivalent for 939,000 contained ounces of gold and an Inferred resource estimate of 2,534,000 tonnes grading 2.90 g/t gold equivalent for 236,000 contained ounces of gold.

The Company holds an option to earn a 65% interest on the Josnitoro Gold Project from Hochschild Mining plc The project is located approximately 600 kilometres by road southeast of Lima in the Department of Apurimac, southern Peru. Historical work on the disseminated gold zones includes over 170 shallow drill holes and extensive surface trenching.

Lupaka Gold holds a 100% interest in the Crucero Gold Project, a 5,500 hectare gold property located in southern Peru. Crucero has an Indicated mineral resource estimate of 1,003,041 ozs Au contained in 30,919,873 tonnes at 1.02 gpt gold (capped) and an Inferred mineral resource estimate of 1,027,806 ozs Au contained in 31,201,648 tonnes at 1.03 gpt gold (capped). These mineral resource estimates have been constrained by a conceptual pit shell in order to confirm reasonable prospects of economic extraction as set out in the CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves and NI 43-101.

Visit the Company's profile at www.sedar.com or its website at www.lupakagold.com

Qualified Person

The technical information in this document has been reviewed and approved by Julio CastaAeda Mondragon, MAIG, the President of Lupaka Gold Peru S.A.C., a Peruvian subsidiary of the Company, and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. Mr. CastaAeda has verified the scientific and technical information, including sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information or opinions contained in this news release.

The Invicta Gold Project resource estimates referred to in this news release are disclosed in the technical report dated April 16, 2012, titled "Technical Report on Resources, Invicta Gold Project, Huaura Province, Peru", and prepared by SRK Consulting (U.S.) Inc., which is available at www.sedar.com under Lupaka Gold Corp.'s profile.

The Crucero A-1 mineral resource estimates referred to in this news release are disclosed in the technical report with effective date January 17, 2013, amended and re-stated October 22, 2013, titled "Technical Report for the Crucero Property, Carabaya Province, Peru", and prepared by Tetra Tech WEI Inc. and SRK Consulting (Canada) Inc., which is available at www.sedar.com under Lupaka Gold's profile.

Cautionary Note Regarding the Invicta Production Decision

The decision to commence production at the Invicta Gold Project and the Company's plans for a mining operation as referenced herein (the "Production Decision and Plans") were based on economic models prepared by the Company in conjunction with management's knowledge of the property and the existing preliminary estimate of measured, indicated and inferred mineral resources on the property. The Production Decision and Plans were not based on a preliminary economic assessment, a pre-feasibility study or a feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability. Accordingly, there is increased uncertainty and economic and technical risks of failure associated with the Production Decision and Plans, in particular the risk that mineral grades will be lower than expected, the risk that construction or ongoing mining operations are more difficult or more expensive than expected, the risk that the Company will not be able to transport or sell the mineralized rock it produces to local custom toll mills on the terms it expects, or at all; production and economic variables may vary considerably, due to the absence of a detailed economic and technical analysis according to and in accordance with NI 43-101.

Forward Looking Information and Regulatory Endnotes

Certain disclosures in this release, including statements regarding the Company's intention to complete the Loan financing and the use of proceeds from such financing as well as the Company's mineral resources estimates constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. In making the forward-looking statements in this release, the Company has applied certain factors and assumptions that the Company believes are reasonable, including that the Company is able to obtain regulatory approval of the financing and is otherwise able to complete the financing. The Company's assumptions with respect to mineral resource estimates include all of the key assumptions and parameters on which such estimates are based, as described in the applicable technical report referred to in this news release. However, the forward-looking statements in this release are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause future results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements. Such uncertainties and risks include, among others, financing risks, delays in obtaining or inability to obtain required regulatory approvals, inability to complete the Loan, that mineral resources are not as estimated and unexpected variations in mineral resources, grade or recovery rates as well as the risks described in the Company's annual information form, which is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. 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. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.







Contact



Lupaka Gold Corp.

Investor Relations

+1 (604) 681-5900


LONDON, June 16, 2016 - Serabi Gold Plc (AIM:SRB, TSX:SBI), the Brazilian focused gold mining and development company, advises that at 11.00 am today (UK time), it will be holding its Annual General Meeting.

The following is the text of the statement that will be made by Mr. Mike Hodgson the Chief Executive of the Company. Highlights of the statement are:

Gold production for the second quarter of 2016 from the Company's Palito and Sao Chico Mines continues to follow the trend set by the first quarter of 2016.

Underground exploration programmes for production planning and resource extension are about to commence.

Geophysics programmes for Currutela, Piaui and new tenements located to the west of Sao Chico planned for the second half of 2016.

The Company has also released today a new video update of operational progress at its Palito and Sao Chico Mines. This update can be accessed by using the following link:

http://www.brrmedia.co.uk/broadcasts-embed/57612cb2e94e69ed4a4770a3/event/?livelink=true



"As I noted in April's first quarter operational update, gold production from our Palito and Sao Chico Mines continues to be excellent with the second quarter following the trend set by the first quarter of 2016 and our strong finish to 2015. The first quarter yielded gold production of 9,771 ounces, a record level since operations commenced in 2014. At this current time and barring any unforeseen circumstances, I anticipate that gold production for the second quarter will be at a similar level. This puts us well on target to achieving our guidance for the full year of 37,000 ounces.

"Mining at Palito continues to progress well. As I noted earlier this year we have expanded the mine horizontally and opened up two key new sectors being the Senna and Chico da Santa zones. In addition, we have also had success with some smaller zones within the deposit that can be accessed from existing ramp development. These are adding further improvement in the levels of gold production that we can achieve from each vertical metre. This in turn allows us to slow down the rate at which further deepening of the mine is required, meaning that we can replace vertical development with horizontal development generating cost and efficiency benefits, as well as helping to increase the potential life of the mine.

"At Sao Chico, we have found a very good solution to the geological complexity of the deposit that hindered the mining and extraction rates experienced in 2015. Mine production continues to focus on the central portion of the Main Vein where we have the greatest confidence in the down-dip extension and we are continuing to push the ramp down towards the 84mRL, some 150 metres below surface. From here we will establish underground drill locations to assess the further extension at depth, as well as the potential strike extensions to the east and west of the Central Zone. The short term plan at Sao Chico has been to secure production for up to eighteen months in advance, consistent with our successful approach at Palito. This establishes an adequate cushion to allow time for us to concentrate on assessing the potential strike extensions and parallel structures. These ensure that we can maximize the benefit of existing development in the longer term. Serabi has purchased an underground exploration drill rig which has now arrived at site and following commissioning will start on this work. A contractor operated underground drill rig is also now on site that will assist with accelerating the programme over the next four to five months.

"A similar programme will also be undertaken at Palito once the initial phase of work is completed at Sao Chico. Initially work will focus on the extension at depth of the Main Zone comprising the G1, G2 and G3 veins, but will also look for parallel structures which lie between the Main Zone and Palito West and Chico da Santa with the expectation that a number of small but viable veins will be identified that can be easily accessed from the existing mine development.

"During this second quarter we had anticipated to have a third ball mill commissioned and operating. However, the failure of a key component in one of the other mills has delayed this start up because, to keep production going we borrowed the trunnion bearing from the third mill. A new bearing has now been delivered and the commissioning of the third mill will start in the coming week. Despite this small setback, our recent production has not been impacted and illustrates the requirement for building contingency and flexibility when operating in the more remote locations, which in this instance has allowed the Company to maintain operations at close to maximum levels.

"The gold price has clearly been favourable over recent months, and whilst our focus for 2016 is to use cash flow to retire the borrowings that the Company has with Sprott, we have been able to set aside some funding for the start of the next stages of wider exploration activity at Palito and Sao Chico. This will involve a down-the-hole electromagnetic survey at Palito using the past drilling undertaken at the Currutela and Piaui prospects. The contractor is due to arrive on site during July and we anticipate the programme and subsequent evaluation of results taking some three to four months to complete. It is intended that this work will allow the Company to better plan the next stage of exploration drilling that is anticipated to be undertaken during 2017.

"At Sao Chico a surface Induced Polarisation programme will be undertaken over an area to the west of the original Sao Chico exploration tenement. Serabi has secured the exploration licences over this area and feels it offers excellent potential for hosting strike extensions of the current Sao Chico veins. Results are expected to be available towards the end of 2016. Both geophysical programmes are using well established techniques to identify conductive bodies and sulphide mineralisation as pathfinders to locating gold occurrences which are associated with these features.

"Whilst operations are going very well, and I remain optimistic for the remainder of 2016, being essentially a single asset entity and operating in a relatively remote region of Brazil, there will continue to be challenges. Whilst many economic commentators expected to see the Brazilian currency continue to decline during 2016, in the face of an uncertain political climate and a weakening economy, it has however confounded expectation and strengthened. It appears that there remain strong inflows of currency into the country, and whilst these may include investment from multinational companies having to support their local businesses, this will place pressure on our reported US Dollar costs should the situation continue. At this time it remains unclear how the political situation will resolve itself and how this will impact on the perceptions of Brazil. However, neither this, nor the concerns over Zika, are having any current impact on our operations.

"Palito is now in a steady state and Sao Chico, having entered Commercial Production in January 2016, is performing in line with our expectations. I am often asked what the next move is for the Company. I am far from complacent about our two existing mines, but I feel that we are now able to divert some time and resources to growing the Company. We have already implemented the first part of the potential for organic growth by starting to evaluate some of the potential within our existing tenement holdings. This is, however, a process that will take time but, if successful it will provide an opportunity for resource and production growth at a relatively low cost. We will also continue to look at the opportunity for potential acquisitions of other projects. The recent surge in gold prices has started to change seller expectations supported by the recent rally in valuations ascribed to Canadian listed junior development and exploration companies which appear to have out-paced the UK market. I am keen to grow the Company, as I believe that we will benefit from greater critical mass and runway to attract wider investor support and a concurrent re-rating of the Company's shares in due course. Nevertheless, I constantly reiterate that Serabi will only consider acquisitions that management feels will genuinely increase value for shareholders. Whilst a strong market is good for all of us and should be welcomed after the experience of the last few years, I have concern that some valuations and expectations may spiral and become unrealistic.

"Before closing I would like to acknowledge again the support and commitment of our major shareholder, Fratelli Investments and the Company's loyal and experienced management team. We have low staff turnover and I can only put this down to creating a work environment that, whilst challenging, is rewarding and has brought people together with a strong sense of common purpose."

Enquiries:

Serabi Gold plc

Michael Hodgson Tel: +44 (0)20 7246 6830 Chief Executive Mobile: +44 (0)7799 473621



Clive Line Tel: +44 (0)20 7246 6830 Finance Director Mobile: +44 (0)7710 151692



Email: contact@serabigold.com

Website: www.serabigold.com





Beaumont Cornish Limited

Nominated Adviser

Roland Cornish Tel: +44 (0)20 7628 3396 Michael Cornish Tel: +44 (0)20 7628 3396



Peel Hunt LLP

UK Broker

Matthew Armitt Tel: +44 (0)20 7418 9000 Ross Allister Tel: +44 (0)20 7418 9000



Blytheweigh

Public Relations

Tim Blythe Tel: +44 (0)20 7138 3204 Camilla Horsfall Tel: +44 (0)20 7138 3224

Copies of this release are available from the Company's website at www.serabigold.com

Forward-looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements, other than of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements regarding the estimation of mineral resources, exploration results, potential mineralization, potential mineral resources and mineral reserves) are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often identifiable by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will", "estimates", "expect", "intend", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts" and similar expressions or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, without limitation, failure to establish estimated mineral resources, the possibility that future exploration results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, the price of gold and other risks identified in the Company's most recent annual information form filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities on SEDAR.com. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement.

Qualified Persons Statement

The information contained within this announcement has been reviewed and verified by Michael Hodgson, CEO of the Company. Mr Hodgson is an Economic Geologist by training with over 25 years' experience in the mining industry. He holds a BSc (Hons) Geology, University of London, a MSc Mining Geology, University of Leicester and is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining and a Chartered Engineer of the Engineering Council of UK, recognizing him as both a Qualified Person for the purposes of Canadian National Instrument 43-101 and by the AIM Guidance Note on Mining and Oil & Gas Companies dated June 2009.

Glossary of terms

The following is a glossary of technical terms:

"Au" means gold.

"assay" in economic geology, means to analyze the proportions of metal in a rock or overburden sample; to test an ore or mineral for composition, purity, weight or other properties of commercial interest.

"development" - excavations used to establish access to the mineralised rock and other workings

"DNPM" is the Departamento Nacional de Producao Mineral.

"grade" is the concentration of mineral within the host rock typically quoted as grams per tonne (g/t), parts per million (ppm) or parts per billion (ppb).

"g/t" means grams per tonne.

"granodiorite" is an igneous intrusive rock similar to granite.

"igneous" is a rock that has solidified from molten material or magma.

"Intrusive" is a body of igneous rock that invades older rocks.

"on-lode development" - Development that is undertaken in and following the direction of the Vein

"mRL"  depth in metres measured relative to a fixed point  in the case of Palito and Sao Chico this is sea-level. The mine entrance at Palito is at 250mRL.

"saprolite" is a weathered or decomposed clayrich rock.

"stoping blocks"  a discrete area of mineralised rock established for planning and scheduling purposes that will be mined using one of the various stoping methods.

"vein" is a generic term to describe an occurrence of mineralised rock within an area of non-mineralised rock.



Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange, nor any other securities regulatory authority, has approved or disapproved of the contents of this news release.


TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - June 16, 2016) - Victoria Gold Corp. (TSX VENTURE: VIT) "Victoria" or the "Company" is pleased to announce that pursuant to the terms of the financing announced on April 20, 2016, Electrum Strategic Opportunities Fund L.P. ("Electrum") has elected to exercise their right to nominate one person to the Company's board of directors, and in doing so, the Company has approved and appointed Heather White, P. Eng. to the board of directors effective immediately.

Ms. White is an independent consultant providing a broad range of professional services to a variety of companies in the mining sector. She has over 20 years of experience in the mining industry where she has served in senior operating and executive roles with such major companies as Vale Canada, Voisey's Bay Nickel Company, Inco Ltd. and NOVAGOLD Resources. Ms. White holds a Bachelor of Mining Engineering degree from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario and is an active member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario and the Canadian Institute of Mining.

"Victoria is pleased to welcome Heather to the Board. Her experience working on numerous mining operations and projects around the world, with significant time in Canada's North, will be valuable as we continue to advance our Eagle Project up the value chain to production," said Sean Harvey, Board Chair.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Paul D. Gray, P.Geo., as the Qualified Person.

About the Dublin Gulch Project

Victoria Gold's 100%-owned Dublin Gulch gold property is situated in the central Yukon Territory, Canada, approximately 375 kilometers north of the capital city of Whitehorse, and approximately 85 kilometers from the town of Mayo. The Property is accessible by road year-round, and is located within Yukon Energy's electrical grid. The Company has constructed and maintains a 100 person all-season camp at the project site.

The Property covers an area of approximately 555 square kilometers, and is the site of the Company's Eagle Gold Deposit. The Eagle Gold Deposit is expected to be Yukon's next operating gold mine and includes Probable Reserves of 2.3 million ozs of gold from 92 million tonnes of ore with a grade of 0.78 grams of gold per tonne, as outlined in a National Instrument 43-101 feasibility study.

About Olive-Shamrock

The Olive-Shamrock target Olive lies 2 kilometers (km) from the proposed infrastructure at the Eagle Gold Project, along the Potato Hills Trend, importantly, drilling and surface trench results to date indicate the existence of near-surface, high-grade potential feed into Eagle operations. Metallurgical testing has indicated that the high-grade Olive-Shamrock Zone is amenable to heap leach recovery at the same crush size as Eagle Project feed.

Olive-Shamrock is defined by a broad gold/arsenic in-soils geochemical anomaly and lies on the intrusive-sediment contact of the Potato Hills Trend (as does the Eagle Deposit) and is punctuated by several historically exploited high-grade sulphide veins. The Olive area was mined on a small scale from shallow shafts and adits in the early 1900's and via placer mining in creeks draining the area. The Olive vein system is located near the top of Olive Gulch and consists of gold-bearing quartz-scorodite-arsenopyrite vein material centralized in a shear zone structure. More detail and a current summary of all Olive-Shamrock Zone exploration can be found on the Company's website.

Cautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statements

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange, nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this discussion, other than statements of historical facts, that address future exploration drilling, exploration activities, anticipated metal production, internal rate of return, estimated ore grades, commencement of production estimates and projected exploration and capital expenditures (including costs and other estimates upon which such projections are based) and events or developments that the Company expects, are forward looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include metal prices, exploration successes, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
TSX.V: SCZ

FSE: 1SZ

/NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES./

VANCOUVER, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd. ("Santacruz" or the "Company") (TSX.V:SCZ) reports that, in connection with its previously announced short form prospectus offering of units ("Units") at a price of C$0.40 per Unit (the "Offering"), it has amended its agreement with Haywood Securities Inc. ("Haywood"), on behalf of a syndicate including M Partners Inc. (collectively, the "Agents"), to increase the amount of the Offering from 26,500,000 Units to up to 32,500,000 Units for aggregate gross proceeds of up to $13,000,000.

The number of additional Units that may be acquired under the option granted to the Agents (the "Agents' Option") has also been increased from 3,975,000 Units to 4,875,000 Units for aggregate proceeds of up to $1,950,000. The Agents' Option is exercisable, in whole or in part by Haywood, on behalf of the Agents, giving notice to the Company at any time up to 48 hours prior to the closing date.

As previously disclosed, each Unit will consist of one common share of Santacruz (a "Common Share") and one-half of one transferable common share purchase warrant (each whole common share purchase warrant, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant will entitle the holder to acquire one Common Share (a "Warrant Share") at a price per Warrant Share of C$0.55 for a period of 30 months from the date of issuance.

The net proceeds of the Offering will be used by the Company to restructure the obligations owing by the Company under its current Pre-Paid Forward Silver Purchase Agreement with JMET LLC (the "Silver Prepayment Agreement") and for general working capital purposes.

Completion of the Offering is subject to certain conditions, including the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange, and the closing by the Company of the proposed Silver Prepayment Agreement restructuring.

About Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd.

Santacruz is a Mexican focused silver company with a producing silver mine (Rosario); the right to operate a silver mine and mill facility (Veta Grande); an advanced-stage project (San Felipe); one exploration stage project (the Gavilanes property) and three early stage exploration properties including the El Gachi property, the Minillas property and the Zacatecas properties. The Company is managed by a technical team of professionals with proven track records in developing, operating and discovering silver mines in Mexico. Our corporate objective is to become a mid-tier silver producer.

'signed'

Arturo Prestamo Elizondo,

President, Chief Executive Officer and Director

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities of the Company in any jurisdiction. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the "United States" or to "U.S. persons" (as such terms are defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act, and any applicable state securities laws, or the availability of an exemption therefrom.

Forward looking information

Certain statements contained in this news release, including information concerning the Offering, the use of proceeds thereof and the Silver Pre-Payment Agreement restructuring, constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions. In making the forward-looking statements included in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including, but not limited to, the assumption that regulatory approval of the Offering and the Silver Pre-Payment Agreement restructuring will be obtained and satisfaction of all conditions precedent for the completion of the Offering and the Silver Pre-Payment Agreement restructuring in a timely manner; that the Company will be able to raise additional capital that the proposed exploration and development will proceed as planned; and that market fundamentals will result in sustained silver, lead and zinc demand and prices. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to prove not to be valid or reliable, that the Company's financial condition and development plans change, delays in regulatory approval, risks associated with the interpretation of data, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's continuous disclosure filings filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law.

Financial outlook information contained herein about the Company's prospective costs of production and sales prices is based on assumptions about future events, as described above, based on management's assessment of the relevant information currently available. The purpose of such financial outlook is to provide information about management's current expectations as to the anticipated results of its proposed business activities for the coming quarters. Readers are cautioned that any such financial outlook information contained herein should not be used for purposes other than for which it is disclosed herein.

Rosario Mine

The decision to commence production at the Rosario Mine was not based on a feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability, but rather on a more preliminary estimate of inferred mineral resources. Accordingly, there is increased uncertainty and economic and technical risks of failure associated with this production decision. Production and economic variables may vary considerably, due to the absence of a complete and detailed site analysis according to and in accordance with NI 43-101.

Veta Grande Mine

The decision to commence production at the Veta Grande Mine was not based on a feasibility study on mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability. Accordingly, there is increased uncertainty and economic and technical risks of failure associated with this production decision. Production and economic variables may vary considerably due to the absence of a complete and detailed site analysis according to and in accordance with NI 43-101.

SOURCE Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd.
P

-Option to acquire 100% of a Clayton Valley Fork Li Project completed -Clayton Valley hosts North America's largest Lithium Carbonate production evaporation operations derived from Lithium Brines -Technical Team (exploring) Potential for fault derived structural traps that may contain Lithium-Rich Brine -Corporate objective is to develop an economic Lithium Brine Project -Exploration planning nearing completion; ground work slated for Summer/Fall 2016 -OTCQB Listing completed USA Trade Symbol: PAWEF, Frankfurt: P7JF -The company has a well-diversified project portfolio of Platinum Group Metals and Lithium Projects -The company's 100% owned River Valley PGM resource is one of the largest undeveloped primary PGM resources in Canada River Valley PGM Project

June 16th, 2016, Vancouver, Canada - Pacific North West Capital Corp.. ("PFN", the "Company") (TSX.V: PFN; Frankfurt: P7J.F; OTCQX: PAWEF further to the company's previous news release (PFN April 25th, 2016 News Release), the Clayton Valley Forks Li Project ("CVF") is comprised of 73 claims for a total of approximately 583 hectares (1440 acres) and is located on the west side of Lithium X's South

expansion Project in Clayton Valley.



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 1: Company claim blocks in the Clayton Valley area of Nevada

(Figure 1 is a company made composite and not intended for redistribution. The company accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of other claim blocks other than the claim block associated with the Clayton Valley Forks Li Project)

Mr Barr Chairmen and CEO of PFN stated "With the completion of this acquisition, our company has acquired its first strategic USA Lithium Brine asset. The Clayton valley Fork Li Project is situated in North America's only Lithium Brine producing area, where approximately 4% of the world's supply of Lithium Brine is produced. Due to growing demand, decreasing supply and increasing price of Lithium, Clayton Valley has become host to one of the largest project acquisitions and staking rushes in recent Nevada history. We look forward to developing and implementing an aggressive exploration and development program on this strategic project."

The Property is strategically located south of the Silver Peak Lithium Mine operated by Albemarle Corp. Pure Energy Minerals Ltd.'s Clayton Valley South project is situated on the east side of Clayton Valley and the Clayton Valley Forks Li Project is situated on the opposite side of the valley, the west side.

The company plans to test for Lithium-Bearing Aquifers thru the Project Area. The company's technical team believes that geological structures of the sediment-filled Clayton Valley basin, underlying the claims, contains sediments that, based on previous work in the area, have the potential to lead to new Li discoveries. The geological environment appears similar throughout the basin, but the company's technical team is reviewing all available data, to build an exploration plan that is slated to begin the Summer/Fall of 2016.

The project is situated over an area that is believed to contain favourable geology, faults, ground water and possible Lithium-Bearing source rocks. The west side of the north-south trending Clayton Valley Basin lies within a geological belt of right lateral deformation, near the western edge of the Basin and Range geological province. The project area also a straddles the Walker Lane wrench fault zone, which is still active today. Aerial photos reveal strong faults on the mountains west of the project that roughly trend northerly-southerly. This faulting system may have formed structural traps which could contain accumulated lithium rich brines. Upcoming exploration programs will focus on geophysics and drilling.

Further announcements will be forthcoming, with regard to the projects near completion, further exploration and development plans, as well as other acquisitions in Canada and the United States.

Nevada the Lithium Hub

Nevada Building a Future for Green Energy Manufacturing

The Nevada government is actively embracing the Lithium Energy market and future ventures. In March 2016 the Nevada Board gave final approval to the Faraday Futures $1 Billion dollar electric car factory in North Las Vegas. Once this plant is operating it is estimated that it will create over 4500 jobs for the area. Tesla received over $1.25 Billion in tax incentives from the Nevada government to start up their $5 Billion Giga-factory in Reno, Nevada. The Nevada government is backing the new growth in the Lithium-ion battery and electric car market. Future projected market growth will also increase the need for Lithium-ion batteries. At present, the Clayton Valley area produces 4% of the world's Lithium Carbonate production.

Clayton Valley is located in Esmeralda County of Nevada, host to the Albemarle Corporation's Silver Peak Lithium Mine and Brine processing operations. The mine has been in operation since 1967 and remains the only Brine based Lithium Producer in North America. The new project acquisition in Nevada will allow the company a project in an area that is well known for its Lithium Carbonate production. Clayton Valley is a centralized location in Nevada with highway access, power infrastructure, water and local labour. The company's new Lithium Brine Project will be approximately 3.5 hours away from Tesla's Gigafactory, which has a planned annual Lithium-ion battery production capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours per year by 2020. The CV West Li project is located approximately 3 hours north of the Faraday Electric Car Factory to be operated in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Clayton Valley was one of the few locations globally known to contain commercial-grade Lithium-Enriched Brines.

About The Company's Lithium Division

The company's new Lithium Division will focus on the acquisition, exploration and development of Lithium Projects in Canada. In the United States, the company will use its wholly owned U.S.A subsidiary to acquire and develop projects in active mining camps in Nevada, Arizona and California.

Management believes that these New Age Metals, Lithium, PGM's and Rare Earths, have robust macro trends with surging demands and limited supply. Going forward, this new division will explore for the minerals needed to fuel the demand for energy storage and other core 21st Century Technologies.

In addition to the Lithium Brine potential of the CV West Li Project in Nevada, the company has and is developing Hard Rock Lithium Projects in Canada (April-21st-2016-PFN- Clayton Valley). The Lithium One Project in southeast Manitoba: May-3rd-2016-PFN-Completes-acquisition-Lithium-One- is located 8.5 kilometers south of the Tanco Mine Site, North America's richest and longest operating Hard Rock mine for Tantalum, Lithium and Cesium. Recently, PFN adds another Manitoba site: May-24th-2016-PFN-grabs-Lithman-West-Lithium-Project, along with a 3rd site: June-15th-2016-Pacific-North-West-Capital-Acquires-4th-100%-Owned-Lithium-Project-Lithman-North.

Lithium and Platinum group metal prices have improved dramatically in recent months. Lithium supplies remain in deficit relative to their demand. Both metals groups are used for the expanding worldwide automobile industry (conventional and electric). In the case of PGM's, demand is increasing for Autocatalysts, a key component for reducing toxic emissions for automotive, gasoline and diesel engines. In regards to Lithium, there is an ever increasing demand for batteries in cellphones, laptops, electric cars, solar storage, wireless charging and renewable energy products.

About the company's Platinum Group Metals Division

Achievements to date and future plans for River Valley are outlined below as follows:

1.PFN currently has 100% ownership in the River Valley Project, subject to a 3% NSR, with options to buy down 2.Completed exploration and development programs on the River Valley property include more than 600 holes drilled since year 2000 and several mineral resource estimates and metallurgical studies; 3.Results for the current (2012) mineral resource estimate are below; 4.2015 drill program confirms new high grade T2 discovery

5.Exploration and development plans outlined for 2016 6.Ongoing strategic partner search for River Valley project 7.Results for the most recent Metallurgical Study are summarized below:

- Prepared by Tetra Tech (formerly Wardrop)

- High Confidence: Measured plus Indicated = 72% of total

- Reported on PdEq basis: Pd=40% & Pt=20% of the payable metals

- Pd to Pt ratio = 2.5:1; Cu to Ni ratio = 3:1

- High Grade potential, particularly in the north part of River Valley deposit

- Resources under evaluation for development potential as open pit mining operation



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8.Results for the 2015 discovery drill program on the T2 target are as follows:

-Drill hole intercepts much higher than the average grade of current mineral resource estimate

-Possible new mineralized zone at the north end of the River Valley deposit

-Show potential to take the River Valley PGM Project in a new direction

-More drilling required



Click Image To View Full Size

9. Exploration and Development Plans for 2016

-Mineral prospecting and geological mapping on surface -Drill programs targeted to add more higher grade -Geological interpretation and 2D/3D modelling of all drill and surface results -Application to the OPA's Junior Exploration Assistance Program (JEAP) for 33% refund of all exploration expenditures up to $300,000. -Strategic Partner Search for River Valley -River Valley exploration programs begin in early July 2016

QUALIFIED PERSON

The contents contained herein that relates to Exploration Results or Mineral Resources is based on information compiled, reviewed or prepared by Dr. Bill Stone, Principal Consulting Geoscientist for Pacific Northwest Capital. Dr. Stone is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical content.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

" Harry Barr " Further Information: Tel: +1.604.685.1870 Fax: +1.604.685.8045

Email: info@pfncapital.com, or visit www.pfncapital.com

Harry Barr 67 Burtch's Lane, Rockport, ON, K0E 1V0

Suite #522, 5525 West Boulevard, Vancouver, BC, V6M 3W6

Chairman and CEO

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements. This release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements may differ materially from actual future events or results and are based on current expectations or beliefs. For this purpose, statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements include statements in which the Company uses words such as "continue", "efforts", "expect", "believe", "anticipate", "confident", "intend", "strategy", "plan", "will", "estimate", "project", "goal", "target", "prospects", "optimistic" or similar expressions. These statements by their nature involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially depending on a variety of important factors, including, among others, the Company's ability and continuation of efforts to timely and completely make available adequate current public information, additional or different regulatory and legal requirements and restrictions that may be imposed, and other factors as may be discussed in the documents filed by the Company on SEDAR (www.sedar.com), including the most recent reports that identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake any obligation to review or confirm analysts' expectations or estimates or to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - Jun 16, 2016) - Aura Silver Resources Inc. (TSX VENTURE:AUU) ("Aura Silver" or the "Company") sadly reports that Company director Eric Craigie passed away recently. Eric served as a director since the Company's inception in 2003 and was previously Vice President, Exploration. Eric provided valuable counsel on the strategic direction and governance of the Company over the past thirteen years. The Company's Greyhound property was first prospected by an exploration team led by Eric and Paul Pitman, Manager of Canadian Operations during the mid- 1990's, which led to the Company's interest in the project.

Eric graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology in 1968. He embarked on his career with Gulf Minerals exploring for uranium in the barren lands of Saskatchewan in the early days of the major Canadian uranium discoveries. After Gulf ceased its Canadian operations, Eric joined BP Canada in the mid-70's, based in Toronto. He continued exploring for uranium until the mid-80's, mostly in the Baker Lake and Coppermine River areas of the Northwest Territories and subsequently, he explored for gold, copper and diamonds with BP. Since the early 1990's Eric worked as a consulting geologist and also co-founded a number of junior private and public companies including Aura Silver while working on projects internationally, as well as within Canada. He possessed excellent technical skills and careful judgement and made key observations that helped evaluate many mineral properties. His independent and carefully thought-through advice and contributions in both the boardroom and field were appreciated. Eric's enthusiasm for work carried over into being a loyal, steadfast and trustworthy friend to many of his colleagues. He will be missed.

About Aura Silver

Aura Silver is a TSX Venture listed company engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of precious metal prospects in Canada (100% owned Greyhound project) and in Oaxaca, Mexico (100% owned Taviche project). Aura Silver has 113,830,844 common shares outstanding.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:

This press release may contain forward looking statements that are made as of the date hereof and are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions which involve risks and uncertainties associated with our business including the uncertainty as to whether further exploration will result in the target(s) being delineated as a mineral resource, capital expenditures, operating costs, mineral resources, recovery rates, grades and prices, estimated goals, expansion and growth of the business and operations, the private placement financing activities of the Company, plans and references to the Company's future successes with its business and the economic environment in which the business operates. All such statements are made pursuant to the 'safe harbour' provisions of, and are intended to be forward-looking statements under, applicable Canadian securities legislation. Any statements contained herein that are statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements require us to make assumptions and are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. We caution readers of this news release not to place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements as a number of factors could cause actual results or conditions to differ materially from current expectations. Please refer to the risks set forth in the Company's most recent annual MD&A and the Company's continuous disclosure documents that can be found on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Aura Silver does not intend, and disclaims any obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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.
GATINEAU, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - June 16, 2016) -

NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES.

Nouveau Monde Mining Enterprises Inc. ("Nouveau Monde" or the "Corporation") (TSX VENTURE:NOU)(OTC PINK:NMGRF)(FRANKFURT:NM9) announces the closing of a non-brokered private placements, of a total of 5,312,000 units, at a price of $ 0.25 per Unit, for an aggregate proceeds of $ 1,328,000 and the second one of a total of 3,243,532 common shares issued as flow-through shares, at a price of $ 0.30 per Flow-Through Share, for an aggregate proceeds of $ 973,060. The total proceeds raised in the financing is 2,301,060 $.

Each unit is comprised of one common share of the Corporation and one-half of one common share purchase warrant. Each whole common share purchase warrant shall entitle the holder thereof to subscribe for one common share of the capital stock of the Corporation, at a price of $ 0.35 per common share, for a period of 12 months following the closing.

The proceeds of the offering will be used by Nouveau Monde for its working capital, initiate the work program leading to the feasibility study and to incur exploration expenses on the Matawinie property. Registered Exempt Market and Broker Dealers in Canada received cash payments of $ 39,250 and 62,400 broker warrants to purchase up to 62,400 common shares in the capital stock of the Corporation, at a price of $ 0.25 per common share, within a delay of 12 months after the closing and 78,832 broker warrants to purchase up to 78,832 common shares in the capital stock of the Corporation, at a price of $ 0.30 per common share, within a delay of 12 months after the closing. All securities issued under the financing are subject to a restricted period of four months and a day, ending on October 16, 2016 under applicable Canadian securities legislation. As a result of the financing, the Corporation will have 65,131,441 common shares issued and outstanding.

The Corporation expects to be able to file shortly all required documentation to satisfy the conditional acceptance of the TSX Venture Exchange pursuant to the Units Offering.

The securities issued under the first tranche of the Units Offering have not been registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933 (the "Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold absent registration under the Act and applicable state securities laws or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements thereof. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction or an exemption there from.

Grant of options

The Corporation announces the grant of a total of 275,000 options to consultants. Each option shall entitle its holder thereof to subscribe for one common share of the Corporation, at a price of $0.30 per common share, for a period of five years from the date of grant. These options will vest one quarter at issuance and by period of three months until March 16th 2017. These options were granted in accordance with the terms of the current stock option plan of the Corporation.

Invitation to a Press Conference

Nouveau Monde is pleased to invite all media representatives and investors to a press conference to release the results of the NI43-101 Preliminary Economic Assessment on the Tony block of the Matawinie project. The press conference will be held on Wednesday June 22nd 2016 at 10h30am at:

Maison du Developpement Durable Salle du Parc 50, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest Montreal, QC, H2X 3V4

This announcement is not for release, publication or distribution, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States (including its territories and possessions, any state of the United States and the District of Columbia). This announcement is not an offer of securities for sale into the United States. The securities referred to herein have not been and will not be registered under the Act, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States, except pursuant to an applicable exemption. No public offering of securities is being made in the United States.

The statements herein that are not historical facts are forwardlooking statements. These statements address future events and conditions and so involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ from those currently projected. The Corporation does not assume the obligation to update any forwardlooking statement.

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.
/NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES/

CZN-TSX

CZICF-OTCQB

VANCOUVER, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - Canadian Zinc Corporation (TSX: CZN; OTCQB: CZICF) (the "Company" or "Canadian Zinc") reports that in connection with its overnight marketed public offering previously announced on June 15, 2016, it has entered into an underwriting agreement with a syndicate of underwriters led by Paradigm Capital Inc. and Canaccord Genuity Corp. and including Dundee Securities Ltd. (collectively, the "Underwriters") to sell 28,000,000 common shares of the Company (the "Common Shares") at a price of C$0.25 per Common Share (the "Common Share Price") and 4,000,000 flow-through common shares of the Company (the "Flow-Through Shares") at a price of C$0.25 per Flow-Through Share (the "Flow-Through Share Price") for aggregate gross proceeds of C$8,000,000 (the "Offering").

The Company has also granted the Underwriters an over-allotment option to purchase up to 4,800,000 in any combination of Common Shares and Flow-Through Shares at the Common Share Price and Flow-Through Share Price, exercisable, in whole or in part, at any time up to 30 days after the closing date of the Offering for additional gross proceeds of up to C$1,200,000.

The net proceeds from the sale of Common Shares will be used to fund definitive feasibility and development programs for the Prairie Creek Project, exploration programs at both the Prairie Creek Project and the Company's Newfoundland properties as well as for general working capital purposes.

The gross proceeds from the sale of Flow-Through Shares will be used to incur eligible Canadian Exploration Expenses and flow-through mining expenditures, as defined under the Income Tax Act (Canada), that will be renounced in favour of the purchasers with an effective date of no later than December 31, 2016. The funds are intended to be used to fund exploration programs on the Prairie Creek Project and the Company's Newfoundland properties.

The Offering is scheduled to close on or about July 7, 2016, and is subject to receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including, but not limited to, the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange (the "TSX"). The Offering is being made pursuant to a short form prospectus filed in each of the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick. The Common Shares and Flow-Through Shares sold pursuant to the Offering will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements.

About Canadian Zinc

Canadian Zinc is a TSX-listed exploration and development company trading under the symbol "CZN". The Company's key project is the 100%-owned Prairie Creek Project, a fully permitted, advanced-staged zinc-lead-silver property, located in the Northwest Territories. Canadian Zinc also owns an extensive land package in central Newfoundland.

The Prairie Creek Mine contains a partially developed infrastructure including a 1,000 tonne per day flotation mill, workshops, accommodations, and support facilities. The Company holds a Type "A" Water Licence which, along with previously issued permits and licences, permits the operation of a mine at Prairie Creek. A positive updated Preliminary Feasibility Study was completed in March 2016. The Company also continues the Environmental Assessment process as part of its application to upgrade the access road into the Prairie Creek Mine for use on an all season basis.

Canadian Zinc also owns an extensive land package in central Newfoundland that it is exploring for copper-lead-zinc-silver-gold deposits. These include the South Tally Pond project (Lemarchant deposit); Tulks South project (Boomerang-Domino and Tulks East deposits) and Long Lake project (Long Lake deposit). The Company's exploration strategy in central Newfoundland is to continue to build on its existing polymetallic resource base with the aim of developing either a stand-alone mine, similar to the past-producing mines at Buchans and Duck Pond, or a number of smaller deposits that could be developed simultaneously and processed in a central milling facility.

Cautionary Statement  Forward-Looking Information:

Certain disclosure in this release, including statements regarding the completion and terms of the proposed Offering and the use of proceeds therefrom constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. In making the forward-looking statements in this release, the Company has applied certain factors and assumptions that the Company believes are reasonable, including that the Company is able to satisfy conditions of the Offering and obtain the required regulatory approvals of the Offering. However, the forward-looking statements in this release are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause future results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements. Such uncertainties and risks include, among others, inability to satisfy conditions of the Offering and delays in obtaining or inability to obtain required regulatory approvals. 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. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

This press release has been reviewed and approved by Alan Taylor, P.Geo., COO & VP Exploration and director of Canadian Zinc who is a Non-Independent QP under NI 43-101

SOURCE Canadian Zinc Corp.
SHARE Jerry Lackey/Special to the Standard-Times Jerry and Mary Lawhon live at Lawhon Hill in Coke County.

By Jerry Lackey

Jerry Lawhon, 84, retired to his ranch headquarters in 1995 from a lifetime of training and racing horses.

He claims to be the mayor of Lawhon Hill, the name he gave his ranch in the northeast corner of Coke County and south of Blackwell where he tends his horses.

"Jerry's granddad had the first Livery Stable in San Angelo, and the passion for horses must have been passed down," said his wife, Mary "Sug" Rowland Lawhon. "He stands a thoroughbred and a quarter horse stud that he breeds to outside mares as well as to his own mares."

Lawhon, who grew up in Irion County, spent most of his life training and racing horses in New Mexico, Louisiana, Texas and Florida.

Mary, who retired from teaching in 1992, is a descendant of the Richards family. Her grandfather, Tad Richards, was born Sept. 2, 1879, near Oak Creek only a few miles north of Lawhon Hill.

"Our granddads knew each other," Lawhon said as they looked at family scrapbooks.

Tad Richards and Eva Tallant were married on Aug. 16, 1901, and they moved from New Mexico to Runnels County, not far from where Richards was born.

One of their four children was Mable Richards, who married Claude Rowland. They had three children: Blake Rowland, Caludett Rowland Brunson and Mary Rowland Lawhon.

Mary and Jerry Lawhon have been married 58 years. They have two children: Kelly Lawhon Perry and Lynn Lawhon, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

In 1926, Mary's grandparents, Tad and Eva Richards, built their permanent home on a sandy knoll in the Oak Creek Valley. A painting in the Lawhon living room depicts the two-story Spanish-style house of white stucco with a red-tiled roof. A balcony overlooked the front yard.

With the current drought, a daily chore for Lawhon is hauling water and hay to the horses.

"I remember the drought of the 1950s," he said. "This one (2011) is beginning to make it not look so bad."

Mary Lawhon pointed out a newspaper clipping from the 1949 Standard-Times in which Tad Richards was interviewed. "The 1917-18 drought hurt worse than any other," he told reporter Ruth Little.

Richards said he was almost wiped out by that drought. "Because of the long dry spell, crops failed, and cattle died," he said.

"He had borrowed all he could from surrounding banks. The bankers refused to lend him any more money on promises of next season's crops," Mary Lawhon said.

"Drought and bankers have given me more trouble than anything else," Richards told the reporter.

He became infuriated with one banker who refused to extend him credit, his grandson told Old West magazine writer Betty Thomason. He shook his finger in the banker's face and promised him, "I'll be eating steak when you're still eating chili!"

"Dad had to sell a piece of land that to his regret later became part of a productive West Texas oil field. But it was not long afterwards that he acquired land that it took 15 houses on his place for his farm and ranch workers," said Mary's mother, Mable Rowland, in another account.

By the 1950s, oil was discovered on the Richards ranch.

After Richards died in 1961, the estate was divided among the children.

"We still have my mother's part of the ranch. As a matter of fact, Jerry pastures his mares and colts there," Mary Lawhon said. "Unfortunately, the part of the ranch where the old Spanish-style house was located was sold after Granddaddy died. The weather and vandals have wrecked it, and it makes me so sad."

"But we still have wonderful memories of the times we spent there," she said, "and the good thing about that, weather nor vandals can't take those happy times away!"
SHARE

By Robert Channick Chicago Tribune (TNS)

CHICAGO  After a 71-year run in Chicago, Johnson Publishing is getting out of publishing.

The company said Tuesday it has sold Ebony, its iconic African-American lifestyle magazine, and the now digital-only Jet magazine to Clear View Group, an Austin, Texas-based private equity firm, for an undisclosed amount.

Johnson Publishing will retain its Fashion Fair Cosmetics business and its historic Ebony photo archives, which remains up for sale. The deal, which closed in May, also included the assumption of debt.

A family-owned business throughout its history, Ebony has documented the African-American experience since it first hit newsstands in 1945. It has shaped culture ever since, coming into its own as it reported from the front lines of the civil rights movement during the 1960s in powerful photos and prose.

In recent years, though, Johnson Publishing has seen declining media revenues as it struggled to evolve from print to digital platforms.

Linda Johnson Rice, chairman of Johnson Publishing and daughter of founder John Johnson, will serve as chairman emeritus on the board of the new company.

This is the next chapter in retaining the legacy that my father, John H. Johnson, built to ensure the celebration of African-Americans, she said in a statement Tuesday.

The new publishing entity, Ebony Media Operations, will maintain the magazines Chicago headquarters and its New York editorial office, as well as much of the current staff, according to Michael Gibson, co-founder and chairman of African-American-owned Clear View Group.

It is the first investment in the publishing business for Clear View.

We made this purchase because this is an iconic brand  its the most-recognized brand in the African-American community, said Gibson, 59. We just think this is a great opportunity for us.

Cheryl McKissack, who has served as chief operating officer since 2013, will assume the role of CEO of the new publishing entity under Clear View, operating out of the magazines Chicago office. Kierna Mayo is stepping down as editor-in-chief of Ebony to pursue other opportunities, Gibson said.

Chicago-based Kyra Kyles, who has headed up digital content for Ebony and Jet since last June, will add the role of editor-in-chief of Ebony, Gibson said.

When we make an investment, thats what we look for  a strong team that can actually run the company, Gibson said. Were not managers or experts by any stretch of imagination in the media business. What we bring to the table is very strong networking and the ability to raise financing and the ability to establish a vision for the company.

Desiree Rogers, the former social secretary for President Barack Obama who has been steering Johnson Publishing since 2010, will remain CEO, focusing on the cosmetics business, which represents about half of the companys total revenue.

The overall strategy of separating these two distinct businesses  media and cosmetics  will ensure that both iconic brands are positioned for future investment and growth, Rogers said in a statement.

Under Rogers, Johnson Publishing made a number of moves in an effort to shore up finances. Those included taking on a minority partner in 2011, and taking the money-losing weekly digest Jet out of print circulation in 2014.

In January 2015, Johnson Publishing put its entire photo archive up for sale, hoping to raise $40 million. The historic collection spans seven decades of African-American history, chronicling everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Sammy Davis Jr.

The collection is still for sale, Rogers said Tuesday.

While the publishing industry continues to face headwinds  year-over-year magazine revenue is down 9 percent through April, according to Standard Media Index  Gibson said Ebony will remain in print for the foreseeable future. At the same time, he recognizes the need to ramp up digital growth.

Theres a lot of good reasons to keep the print, Gibson said. That will always be our anchor. We want to grow the digital platform more consistently with both Ebony and Jet.

Gibson also sees opportunity in leveraging and expanding Ebonys events business. But in the end, the greatest asset he acquired was the legacy of a brand, one which he hopes will be influential for years to come.

Its a dream come true, Gibson said. Growing up, we had Ebony and Jet in our household all along. You knew you made it when you made it to the cover of Ebony or Jet. It is just exciting  I pinch myself every morning.
In this Tuesday, May 31, 2016 photo, Chef Alon Shaya, proprietor of Shaya Restaurant, talks to customers at his restaurant in New Orleans. In 2015, Shaya opened his namesake restaurant, a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation in May named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

SHARE In this Tuesday, May 31, 2016 photo, from left, Moroccan carrots with chermoula and mint, labneh, lutenitsa, lamb ragu hummus with crispy chickpeas and pita bread, sit on a table at Shaya Restaurant, in New Orleans. In 2015, Shaya opened his namesake restaurant, a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation in May named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) In this Tuesday, May 31, 2016 photo, lunchtime customers sit at the bar at Shaya Restaurant in New Orleans. In 2015, Shaya opened his namesake restaurant, a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation in May named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) In this Tuesday, May 31, 2016 photo, lamb ragu hummus with crispy chickpeas, sits on a table at Shaya Restaurant, in New Orleans. In 2015, Shaya opened his namesake restaurant, a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation in May named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. In 2015, Shaya opened his namesake restaurant, a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation in May named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) In this Tuesday, May 31, 2016 photo, Chef Alon Shaya, proprietor of Shaya Restaurant, makes house made pita at his wood fired oven at the restaurant in New Orleans. In 2015, Shaya opened his namesake restaurant, a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation in May named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

By REBECCA SANTANA, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP)  Chef Alon Shaya's unlikely love affair with Louisiana started years ago.

"My first cookbook was Emeril (Lagasse's) 'Louisiana Real & Rustic,'" said the chef, who was born the Tel Aviv, Israel suburb of Bat Yam. "I always thought that one day I could come and cook in Louisiana. It just seemed like this mystical place to me."

While Lagasse made his name by excelling at the city's classic Creole cooking, Shaya has forged a different path since arriving in New Orleans more than a decade ago. In 2015, he opened his namesake restaurant , a bustling Israeli eatery on chic Magazine Street that the James Beard Foundation last month named the Best New Restaurant in the U.S. The food harkens back to dishes he grew up with, drawing on culinary influences from places as diverse as Yemen, Bulgaria, Morocco and Turkey.

There's the lutenitsa, a spicy Bulgarian relish Shaya learned to make from his grandmother, and the shakshuka, a North African dish of eggs, chili peppers, tomatoes and onions.

"The fact that Israel is made up of so many people from so many backgrounds allows that food to attract several different types of people from different backgrounds," Shaya said. "That's kind of the magic of it."

Shaya's family moved to the U.S. when he was 4, settling in Philadelphia. He attended the Culinary Institute of America and then honed his craft at various restaurants. But a friend encouraged him to move to New Orleans in 2003. With a fulltime job at Harrah's Hotel, Shaya also worked on his days off at Restaurant August for famed New Orleans chef John Besh .

Then came Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Shaya evacuated with Besh and the two watched as the city was consumed by water from the failed levees. He quickly returned, doing what he could to help. Shaya recalls cooking red beans and rice with ingredients from a looted Wal-Mart, feeding volunteers who were helping rebuild Willie Mae's Scotch House , and struggling to reopen the steakhouse where he was then the head chef. At times, he slept in Besh's car.

"Those moments throughout those few weeks changed my life forever," Shaya said. "It made me very loyal to the city because I felt like I was really needed down here, like I was a part of something that was just way bigger than myself or way bigger than some cool recipe that I could pick up along the way."

A city that could have been just another became home and Shaya decided to open his first restaurant, Domenica, in 2009, and its sister eatery, Pizza Domenica, five years later. As he describes it, he was "gung-ho, 100 percent Italian." His wife even called him Alonzo.

Then in 2011, he traveled to Israel with other chefs.

"I'm walking through the markets and listening to people talking and I can almost hear my grandmother's voice. I see the foods I grew up eating. ... This light went off inside saying 'Why do I never cook any of this stuff?'" he said.

When he returned, he started sneaking Israeli influenced dishes onto the menu at Domenica  a head of roasted cauliflower served with whipped feta cheese was extremely popular. He also served a lamb Bolognese on a bed of whipped tahini with crostini sprinkled with za'atar.

"I was calling hummus 'ceci puree,'" he said, referring to the Italian word for garbanzo beans. "Before you know it, the menu at Domenica was looking very emotionally torn."

Eventually, he decided it was time to open an Israeli restaurant, imagining a small, neighborhood eatery in the Mid-City area. Instead his partner, Octavio Mantilla took him to the chic  and expensive  Magazine Street locale, complete with a courtyard and an upstairs private dining room.

A little over a year later, the hummus seems to be paying the bills.

It can take weeks to get a prime dinner reservation. The restaurant is only the second in New Orleans to win the James Beard Foundation's Best New Restaurant award (Peche Seafood Grill won in 2014).

The restaurant's success is no surprise to Liz Williams, the head of the city's Southern Food & Beverage Museum, who said New Orleans has a long history of embracing food from other regions.

Snowballs, seen as a quintessential New Orleans dessert, came from Sicilians who emigrated during the 1800s, bringing with them flavored syrups at a time of newly manufactured commercial ice, she said. Many of the city's po boy shops now offer pickled vegetables, and Williams says she's found shrimp Creole flavored with lemongrass  both reflections of the city's Vietnamese influence.

Shaya says he isn't done yet  there's another part of his upbringing he wants to embrace in the town he calls home.

"Deep down inside I would love to open a Philly cheesesteak place someday, but that's not going to happen anytime soon."

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Follow Santana on Twitter @ruskygal.

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A look at chef behind New Orleans Israeli restaurant

NEW ORLEANS (AP)  A look at Alon Shaya, the executive chef and partner of the award-winning Shaya restaurant in New Orleans:

 HISTORY: The restaurant Shaya opened Feb. 13, 2015.

 OTHER RESTAURANTS: Executive chef and business partner of New Orleans' restaurants Domenica and Pizza Domenica.

 AGE: 37

 PETS: Has a dog named 'Ceci,' after the Italian word for garbanzo beans

 FIRST WORDS AFTER WINNING JAMES BEARD AWARD: "Who would have thought 'hummus in New Orleans?'" he told guests at the awards dinner. "New Orleans is the best food city in the world right now. We have so many wonderful things going on."

 FAVORITE FOODS TO COOK AT HOME? Creole foods like jambalaya, gumbo, sweet potato souffle, red beans and rice, braised beans with ham hocks. "I've fallen in love with Creole and Cajun food."
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By John Ingle

The channel catfish is the third most sought out species for anglers fishing in Texas waters.

It also is one of the most easily recognized fish for children and adults. If you asked a youngster to describe a catfish they will tell you it has whiskers like a cat, hence its name.

The channel catfish also has spots, a forked tail and a slimy skin used for protection. Some people have found out the hard way catfish also possess spines, which can be sharp as needles.

Channel catfish spawning occurs when water temperatures reach around 75 degrees, usually late spring in our area lakes. Nesting sites are secluded areas where males are able to guard the nest and fry from predation. Fry feed on small insects while adults feed on whatever they can get down their gullet.

Anglers use a variety of baits to target channel catfish many of them being homemade and having a pungent smell. Stink bait or punch bait are some of the choice names describing channel catfish bait; it's also something you don't want to drag in the house.

The night crawler is probably the most used and easiest baits to obtain for catfishing.

Fishermen also bait holes, broadcasting soured grain over an area to lure catfish. This technique usually increases the odds of catching some fish. During the summer, this technique used at night can help you fill your stringer and beat the heat.

Anglers have several methods to target channel catfish, with pole and line being the preferred method for young anglers. The more experienced anglers looking to fill their freezer can use trotline, jugline and throwline to chase catfish in larger reservoirs.

The statewide bag and length limit for catfish in any combination of channel and blue catfish is 25 fish per day with a minimum length of 12 inches.

The regulations vary from community fishing lakes to reservoirs, so make sure you check the regulations on the particular body of water you are fishing. These regulations are in place to protect the fishery and provide ample fishing opportunities for everyone to enjoy.

The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department hatchery division contributes tremendously to the success of the channel catfish fishery in the state. Drivers travel throughout the state stocking hatchery-reared fish to enhance existing populations.

One of the main goals is to maintain put-and-take fisheries in small urban reservoirs where natural production will not meet angling needs. The Neighborhood Fishin' Program should come to mind for San Angelo anglers. The bank stabilization project downtown has suspended this program for the time being.

The San Angelo fisheries office has completed the Angler's Guide to West Texas. This guide covers reservoirs from San Angelo to El Paso and is free to the public; you can come by the office and pick one up or download it from http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/publications/fishboat/fish/freshwater/ or www.facebook.com/tpwdifsanangelo.

Navico regional sales manager John Schweitzer is presenting a Lowrance Electronics seminar in San Angelo at SpringHill Suites conference room at 6:30 p.m. July 16th. Dean's Marine and Pro Line Trolling Motors are sponsoring the seminar, so bring your HDS units for the latest upgrade.

John Ingle is a senior fisheries technician with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. For more information on fishing opportunities and fisheries management, contact the Inland Fisheries office.
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By Rashda Khan, Rashda.Khan@gosanangelo.com / @Rashda_SAST

As the July 2 city runoff election draws closer, the race is heating up. Incumbents and the audience didn't pull any punches at a forum for runoff candidates at the Pachyderm Club's monthly luncheon Wednesday.

Police Chief Tim Vasquez started things off by thanking the club. "I want to thank you for allowing us to speak today," he said. "As you know I have asked for a live debate, so the voters could get true and accurate information about me and my opponent. He has refused to debate me, so I truly appreciate this opportunity."

Vasquez also brought up priorities and said that while he was taking steps to become a better chief  by pursuing higher education and serving on boards  his opponent Frank Carter was "starting up his first sideline as a hunting guide ... launching his second sideline, a construction rock business ... buying land and building a new office for his side business."

"Having dedicated the past 12 years to this position, and my entire career to the SAPD, I can tell you that it is a full-time job that doesn't allow for serious, outside business interest," Vasquez said.

His opponent spoke right after. "I spent the first 12 years of life at the police department married to it and trying to make ends meet," said Carter, with 24 years of service with SAPD. "My wife runs the business now and I have very little impact in it. ... Policing is what I do."

In finishing, Carter also said, "my actions speak louder than my words. Throughout my career, I have been characterized as fair and consistent.

"If elected, every person will be treated the same regardless of what side of town you live on, how much you money or how little you have," he said. "I'm not a politician. You see what you get."

A woman in the audience questioned the chief about his extracurricular activities.

Vasquez said he plays in a band, but that is a hobby and not a job.

"So you don't get paid?"

"I do get paid, but I don't do it for the money," Vasquez replied.

Carter then added the hunting business Vasquez mentioned "is something I do on my vacation time."

Incumbent Elizabeth Grindstaff, who is facing Lane Carter for the Single Member District 5 council seat, has a platform that includes the city's trash contract, water challenges and Goodfellow Air Force Base. "My experience, my knowledge are valuable," she said. "These are not activities for rookies."

During his turn, Lane Carter said the current City Council, including Grindstaff, has a tax-and-spend bureaucratic mind-set. "They have voted to raise every fee that's come across council," he said, adding that while he doesn't have a degree in urban planning and has never worked for the city, he still has experience. "I have had a small business and still do. I pay fees, I pay taxes."

A vigorous question-and-answer session followed each set of candidate presentations. One of the most repeated questions this elections season came up again  what do the police chief candidates foresee becoming a major issue for San Angelo?

"I think one of the major concerns will be the Ports-To-Plains," a corridor project linking parts of the U.S. to Mexico, Frank Carter said. "We need to start preparing now for that. ... The cities that have the interstate traffic through there, you can see the problems they deal with. We need to start focusing on that now and be prepared."

A man on the board of the Ports-To-Plains Alliance asked Carter to further explain his point.

"Interstate traffic like you have in Abilene brings in more homeless people and drug trafficking trade directly from Mexico," Frank Carter said.

The man replied: "I'd say there's significant confusion on your part."

Vasquez went next and said he is not concerned about Ports-To-Plains because it is 20 to 25 years away. "One of the biggest issues we face as far as a police department is continued population growth and decrease of roughly 13 to 14 percent sales tax revenues and trying to do more with less.

"We have to have the staff and personnel to address those issues that come with along with increasing population."

He said the biggest obstacles include a shortfall of personnel and lack of money to address such a shortfall.

The council candidates were asked about Hickory Aquifer and related direct potable reuse project. For once both candidates agreed that the city's aging water treatment facility is likely to fail soon and aging water lines prone to leaks and breakage should be prioritized over a new project.
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By Joe DiMiceli

I had a friend, Aubrey, who seems to have terminated our relationship; at least I haven't heard from him lately. Aubrey and I share many things; we are both senior citizens, both college-educated professionals, both hardworking retirees, and we both have a love of books, which was how we originally made contact.

What we don't share is our respective political beliefs: Aubrey is right of center, and I am left of center. What I would find troubling is if he terminated our friendship because of our different political beliefs. In this acrimonious, uncivil and idiotic presidential campaign, we seem to have gone to extremes of partisanship and ideological purity to the extent that even casual relationships are affected.

One dispute I had with Aubrey was over climate change. He believes it is a hoax, and I believe it is science; there was no gray area. Assuming that we both have the same information, this situation implies that one of us is rational and the other is irrational, but which one? Do you know why you believe what you believe?

This is a vexing question that I have been wrestling with for 50 years. In the 1960s, when I was an undergraduate, I subscribed to the much maligned "toilet training" theory of political preference. If your mother tried to toilet train you too early, you became an anal retentive conservative. Conversely, if your mother was more casual in her approach to toilet training, you would more likely be a "free flowing" liberal. The only reason I subscribed to this somewhat facile and dubious theory was that there was nothing else.

Yet here it is 50 years later and the toilet training theory is still going strong. In the latest iteration, there was a data analysis of the social differences between East and West Germany. It seems the commies (East Germany) had strict rules regarding toilet training that produced, ironically as the commies are traditionally associated with the left, a country of anal retentive conservatives. The West Germans had few social rules and produced a country of liberals.

After reading this, I am ready to throw in my lot with the toilet training advocates. After all this time, with no alternative available and considerable clinical evidence in support of toilet training as an identifier of political preference, I am a reluctant believer.

This is really bad news. Although there are exceptions, this implies that political preference is irrational and might as well be in our genes (which it isn't).

To use myself as an example, knowing my mother as a fastidious person, the absence of any political thought or exposure in my early life and my uninformed attachment to the political right in boyhood, toilet training was the only likely source I had for my political "feelings" (not knowledge). It took many years and a lot of exposure to liberal ideas (living in Manhattan and attending the New School really helped) to shed myself of my toilet training biases.

Unfortunately, most people live under a political umbrella that reinforces their respective biases. They don't know that there is another way or, at least, they don't know that there is another way because that other way doesn't have enough force and repetition to overcome their gut feelings (again, not knowledge).

I have always maintained that politics (for the other guy) is irrational, and this is how it might break down: In the Republican Party, if you are rich (making more than $250,000 per annum) then that party's policies and platform make perfect sense and you are not irrational. But the majority of people who identify as Republicans are not rich and that party's policies do not reflect their needs (protection for Social Security and Medicare etc.). They are in the wrong political party and this paradox drives political scientists (and this writer) crazy.

This cohort seems to be following its toilet training rather than its self-interest and often finds itself defending untenable positions that don't reflect either its self-interest or even logic. Do you really believe that if we just make the rich richer it will solve all our problems? This leads to a rejection of facts and a descent into ad hominin (personal) attacks (think: Donald Trump).

The Democrats too are slaves to their toilet training, but the needs and aspirations of the (largely unrich) Democratic cohort are consistent with the policies and platform of the Democratic Party. The wealthy members of this cohort are motivated by empathy for the underprivileged and disadvantaged rather than greed and power. Thus the absence of internal conflict or inconsistency.

This phenomenon has been explored by many authors including Jonathan Haidt in "The Righteous Mind" and Thomas Frank in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" but the most important (and chilling) book on this topic is "Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics" by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. These authors describe a political archetype that is closer to Jack the Ripper than a normal voter.

These authoritarian archetypes feel threatened by almost everything: blacks, gays, Latinos, the mainstream media etc. To relieve these anxieties they seek power either directly or through surrogates (elected officials). They are implacable in their (toilet training originated) beliefs and totally impervious to persuasion. They treat facts as theories (they really mean hypothesis) and treat conspiracy theories as gospel. Constantly defending the indefensible, they are in a permanent state of attack mode (Democrats, take note) and neither reason nor compromise are possible.

For these people, politics is more like religion, and I would never attack a person's religion, believing that with enough facts and conviction I could convert them; ain't gonna happen. Sorry to be so bleak, but this is a really, really bleak political season.

Joe DiMiceli is a retired college professor living in San Angelo. Contact him

at socrateslite@gmail.com.
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By Cal Vick

Just as one drop can change an ocean forever, so just two words now signal the one act that can prevent the world's greatest nation from SPI  suicidal political implosion.

Those two words are outlaw re-election to Washington, D.C., after one longer term. One term of corruption-free service for this nation  not for party power perpetuation nor personal career propulsion. Those two words  outlaw re-election to D.C.  changes forever the future promise of this republic.

Other than the systemic bribery culture of Washington, the major prevalent debilitating political malady keeping American society in frustrated turmoil is the alarming level of nonparticipation and public apathy resulting from our disgusting American political scene.

The absolutely essential intentional wise selection of constitutionally principled leadership in D.C. with serious concern for this whole nation's future can never happen so long as most of those who do think and vote are simply thinking "delivery boys" for expected D.C. payola as bribery for their loyal vote.

No nation with politics keyed to the mortal guiles of a wayward self-serving electorate in exchange for their vote can ever expect to be more than what their elected unrestricted greedy mortal manipulators will allow their enslaved greedy mortal charges to become. No responsible family structure, no respectable nation.

The reason the life span of democratic nations is historically not much past two centuries is likely what America is experiencing right now.

We have been taught to place our trust in our world class Constitution.

But our 500 elected lawyers in Congress have, as long prophesied, so sophisticatedly manipulated the meaning of our Constitution that the resulting laws, culture and mechanics of governing America are unconstitutionally controlled and manipulated at will from Washington.

Instead of self-governance primarily by the several separate states as powers were specifically reserved to them in the Constitution, that "elite 500" in D.C. are now using this nation's own wealth creating capability to divide and enslave each half of this whole nation as servile unthinking clones.

Constant hawking of "spread the wealth" by some of our gutless, unprincipled, cowardly politicians has served to enslave one half sucking up to D.C. for handouts and to enslave the other half as the puppet achievers forcefully taxed to pay all the bills.

This ingrained cultural D.C. political sickness sets the stage for some manner of politico-economic meltdown as our "elite 500" is blindly leading America past $20 trillion national debt, mostly scuttled as bribes for long gone re-elections to D.C.

This is the hour when one drop of power strategically placed in our Constitution as Amendment No. 28 by our thinking achiever patriots could change our fears and disgust to high hopes for America's future.

That one drop of power can emerge from the state rights under the little known fifth article of our Constitution, which gives the 50 states the right to convene, propose and ratify, by three-fourths majority, any amendment they collectively deem necessary and prudent for the preservation of this republic, America. Yes, this nation can be jerked from the jaws of consuming ignorance from political greed in D.C. by ordinary citizens like you.

Twenty-seven amendments have been instigated and perfected by the U.S. Congress under Article 5 since 1787 but not yet one has been instigated by state-called convention.

It is time for this one drop of power to be dropped into the infernal maverick political caldron of Washington politics by the 28th amendment at least including:

1. No re-election to Congress after one eight-year term.

2. Repeal the 17th Amendment giving back state rights to appoint their own two senators.

You can help. Movement is already underway for state convention. Click conventionofstates.com for your duty roster. Start expecting a bright light on America's horizon. God bless our patriots.

Cal Vick lives in San Angelo.
political constituency in the country, there are things you cant say and expect to get elected. You cant endorse gun control in Tennessee. You cant make light of climate change in Seattle. In Arlington, Va., where I live, you have to watch what you say about affordable housing.To question the suburban countys ambitious subsidized housing goals is to risk alienating what is perhaps the most vocal lobby in town. I know that the citizens of Arlington who advocate for expanded housing opportunity dont think of themselves as power brokers. They dont put big sums of money into campaigns. Theyre almost always quiet and polite. But they are in possession of a sacred cow, and they know how to milk it.I dont say this as a criticism, just an observation. There are worse things for a county to be obsessed with than providing decent shelter for working people who need it. But the uniformity of elite opinion sometimes precludes constructive debate on a subject for which the best policy choices are far from clear.Theres no doubt that Arlington has a housing problem. Back in 2000, it had more than 20,000 places to live that were deemed affordable to low- and moderate-income residents just on the basis of market price. Since then, more than 13,000 of these units have disappeared, casualties of Arlingtons emergence as an upscale destination for affluent young professionals. That leaves at least 7,000 less-fortunate people, many of them employed in the county, who cant afford to live there.Arlingtons elected officials have been promising to do something about this for more than a decade. In 2005 the county board passed an ordinance directing residential developers either to create affordable housing in their new projects or to pay a fee into an affordable housing fund. The majority of them chose to pay the money, and by 2014 the county had amassed more than $12 million in the fund while falling far short of the annual affordable housing targets.So in 2015 the board unanimously approved an affordable housing master plan, committing to the creation of 400 new units every year, eventually reaching the number that existed before the rapid decline began. Some of this housing would be created through loans to private developers who agree to make their apartments affordable; some would rely on bonus density awarded in exchange for making portions of a new project rent-reduced.The master plan won widespread approval even though it wasnt apparent how the target of 400 units per year might be reached. Over the previous five years, Arlington had been averaging about 220 new affordable units annually and in some years far less, despite relatively generous outlays from the housing fund. There was no estimate of how much the county might need to spend in coming years to reach its goal.There is one way to create affordable housing without spending much public money, and thats through mandatory inclusionary zoning. Its a simple idea: You just require a developer to promise a fixed number of affordable units in order to get a project approved.Its not hard to see the appeal of this to financially strapped communities, but its a risky game. If you set the mandate too high, projects dont pencil out and buildings dont get built. If the developer agrees to participate but theres a high ceiling on income eligibility, then the project may be a nice gift to a few middle-income families but do virtually nothing for the poorer ones who need help the most.These are issues that local governments all over the country are wrestling with right now. This month, San Francisco will vote on a ballot measure that would mandate developers to set aside 25 percent of new dwelling units in designated parts of the city for rent-burdened families. In San Francisco, 45 percent of all tenants are paying more than half their incomes for rent; anything above 30 percent is generally considered a burden. Were not necessarily talking about poor people here: Some units would be available to anyone making less than 140 percent of the median area household income. For the San Francisco area, that comes to $128,000 for a family of four.The ballot measure has drawn the opposition of Mayor Ed Lee, who thinks more can be accomplished through density bonuses than through rigid set-asides. Lee fought against putting the 25 percent mandate on the ballot, but lost the argument to the Board of Supervisors. In Lees view, a quarter of all the projects currently being planned in some neighborhoods wont be built if the measure passes.San Francisco actually has had an inclusionary zoning law since 2002, and it has been a flop. It mandates a 12 percent affordable set-aside, but allows developers to escape the mandate by paying a fee to the city. As in Arlington, this is what they have done. A study by the research firm BAE Urban Economics found in 2014 that after 12 years the San Francisco law had brought in $58.8 million in developers fees and had generated 1,560 units. Thats better than nothing, but its a drop in the bucket for a city facing an affordability problem in virtually every neighborhood.Just about every city that has tried an inclusionary zoning law in recent years has had a similar experience. In some cases, the results have been much worse. According to BAE, Chicagos inclusion law produced $19 million in 11 years, but only 760 affordable units. Thirteen years of inclusionary zoning in Seattle brought the city $31.6 million in fees and a grand total of 56 units. As the urbanist Daniel Hertz wrote recently, inclusionary zoning has been more powerful as a symbol than as a way of helping people.its possible to argue that the problem isnt inclusionary zoning but flabby and loophole-ridden laws. Virtually all the laws passed since 2000 have allowed developers to pay their way out of the mandate. Maybe if you passed a law with some real carrots and some real sticks, you might get somewhere. That question may be answered in the coming years in New York City.After winning election in 2014 on a platform that pounded away at affordable housing, Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed through the city council a law that imposes mandatory set-asides of 20 to 30 percent in a whole range of neighborhoods that will be rezoned to encourage the construction of multifamily projects. The goals of this effort arent merely ambitious; theyre enormous. The mayors plan aims to create or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over a period of 10 years, at an estimated cost, public and private, of $41 billion. Years from now, the mayor declared as he signed the bill into law, we will look back on this as a watershed moment when we turned the tide to keep our city a place for everyone.Whether 200,000 is an achievable number is open to debate. No one disputes that New Yorks law will generate quite a bit of subsidized housing -- far more than any city has been able to build in the recent past. What else it may generate is also a debatable question.Among those who have opposed the law are community activists who argue that it will mostly produce housing for the middle class, not the neediest class. The median income for a family of four in the New York area is $86,300. Some of the new units will go to people earning more than this amount -- as much as 115 percent of the median in some cases. The exact numbers will be determined by the city council members representing each district. But families with an income of $40,000 or less may get only about a fifth of the new or reclaimed units.Making New York affordable for the middle class is, on its own, a desirable objective. But critics of the law believe the true beneficiaries will be affluent renters who will occupy 70 to 80 percent of the units in buildings built under the set-aside. Many of them will pay whatever the market can bear to live in luxury units in projects that wouldnt have been built prior to the laws passage. Critics worry that it will drive up rents of the older properties in the surrounding neighborhoods, displacing more of the poor than will be affordably housed under the new rules. They may or may not be right; at this point, nobody knows.Despite the uncertainties, theres little doubt that mandatory inclusionary zoning is emerging as the solutionfor a lot of large cities. This will continue even in the absence of any solid evidence that it works. Im inclined to agree with Daniel Hertz and his fellow urban critic Joe Cortright of the City Observatory that the affordable housing problem may not be fully solvable at the local level. Hertz and Cortwright argue that the ultimate answer might have to be federal action: Curtailing the federal tax deduction for home mortgages and using the money to pay for moderate-income rental vouchers, for example, would raise billions of dollars almost instantly. Of course, that isnt politically possible, so theres limited value to discussing it at this point.But debating the issue in all its complexities is something any community ought to do as it ponders options for confronting a worsening problem. That discussion will be painful in itself, but its better than starting with assumptions whose validity no one has yet managed to establish.
Control of the Iowa Senate is up for grabs this fall. Democrats currently have a 26-24 majority, a meager margin Republicans are eager to erase. Given the circumstances, youd expect both parties to press hard to win every available seat. But thats not the case. Half the Senate seats are up in November, but in nine of the 25 contests, one of the major parties hasnt bothered fielding a candidate.Thats more common than you might think. When filing deadlines had passed in the first 27 states this year, one party or the other had failed to run candidates in nearly half the legislative seats -- 45 percent, according to Ballotpedia, an online politics site that tracks races and ballot initiatives. Nearly all incumbents can rest easy in Georgia, because 80 percent of the races there will be uncontested.In recent years, its been common for a third to 40 percent of state legislative seats to lack major party competition. Its even worse during primary seasons, meaning legislators win re-election simply by showing up. In the four states that held legislative elections last year, 56 percent of the races went uncontested in the fall.There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, redistricting has left most legislative seats lopsided in favor of one party or the other. Why bother running if you figure that more than half the voters are already against you? Also, potential challengers know that incumbents have huge advantages in terms of resources. So they choose to wait until the right moment to run. The percentage of seats that are actively contested goes up in years when one party or the other believes the wind will be at its back -- 2008 for Democrats, for example, or 2010 for Republicans.People who recruit candidates -- legislative leaders and party officials -- also pick their battles. They are much more concerned with getting quality candidates in place in districts that look winnable than they are in making sure theres a warm body occupying every slot on the ballot.That may be a mistake, says Steven Rogers, a political scientist at St. Louis University who studies uncontested elections. You cant win a race if you dont put someone on the ballot. In most races in most years that doesnt matter, but politics is a game full of surprises. An especially weak presidential candidate, for instance, can open up a lot of potential races at the legislative level. If Democrats dont have candidates on the ballot in states where they dont like Donald Trump, they may be leaving seats on the table, Rogers says.In Iowa, officials with both parties say they are perfectly content with their recruitment strategy, even if they have already conceded 36 percent of the races. In that state, we feel great about candidate recruitment, says David Griggs, national political director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. Hes encouraged by the quality of the candidates on the ballot.
All government programs are not created equal.That was clear in California several years ago when the state started pushing people on welfare to participate in programs designed to help them get and keep jobs. The details of the programs were left up to the counties. While some made big gains in employment and government savings, others didnt seem to make any meaningful change.Riverside County, for example, made participation mandatory and focused on getting people into the workforce quickly, increasing the earnings of single-parent welfare recipients by 55 percent over two years . Los Angeles County, on the other hand, emphasized education and training over job placement, which led to a mere 4 percent increase in participants' income. But L.A. County eventually changed its program to model Riversides and employed twice as many people in two years than it had in the previous six.This convinced people at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), which aims to spread evidence-based solutions to persistent problems, that such programs can be reproduced on a larger scale. That's why they're launching  Moving the Needle , a competition for governments looking to implement evidence-based ideas.It's not that common to find programs that produce this kind of impact, said Jon Baron, vice president of evidence-based policy at LJAF.LJAF is not alone in worrying that too many government resources have been wasted on programs and policies that lack proof of success. More and more , researchers are pointing out that while brand-new solutions to age-old problems might generate excitement, they don't always work. As the pressure to make wise fiscal decisions intensifies, policymakers have been increasingly trying to identify measures that make the most of taxpayer dollars. This competition points to some of the ideas they may be looking for.Applicants can choose from a list of 13 evidence-based programs or propose their own. The existing programs touch on ways to drastically shorten the process for college students applying for financial aid; connect older, less tech-savvy people to local job opportunities and help people quit smoking.Each of the five winners will receive, on average, $1 million to 1.5 million for technical assistance and quality control, which translates to staff training on protocols and procedures as well as data collection. But grantees are required to cover the cost for the actual implementation, which include salaries for involved staff members.The winning grantees must also agree to a thorough evaluation of the program by a third party.I think it is a great idea to support quality implementation of programs, said Sharon Mihalic, director of Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, which reviews and ranks evidence-based programs, in an email. Without this type of support, programs often fail.Depending on the program, LJAF will remain involved with the grantees for a number of years to evaluate their impacts. This could range from two to eight years, if they pick the pre-approved programs, or even more.That means there may be a change in leadership during the duration of the program. But the hope is that the programs -- and their positive outcomes -- will defend themselves.It's not foolproof, said Baron, but the evidence can help ensure longevity of the program even as administrations change.
Whent resigns

'3,000 steps backward'

'Change in culture'

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf abruptly fired interim Police Chief Ben Fairow on Wednesday, six days after hiring him to replace a chief who resigned amid a sexual misconduct scandal in the department.Schaaf said she removed Fairow from the top post after she "received information that has caused me to lose confidence in Ben Fairow's ability to lead the Oakland Police Department at this particular moment in time." She said it was a mistake to install him."I own the mistake I made, and the important thing is I'm fixing it. I'm fixing it quickly, and I'm not trying to hide," the mayor said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.The sudden dismissal highlighted the chaos and uncertainty that has seized City Hall and the Police Department as officials grapple with a bizarre internal investigation that centers on an underage sex worker and her interactions with multiple Oakland police officers and sworn personnel from several other law enforcement agencies.On Wednesday, the San Francisco Police Department became the latest agency to open an internal investigation into whether its officers had relations with the young woman at the center of the scandal. The Richmond Police Department is also conducting an internal inquiry. Also Wednesday, the Alameda County district attorney's office reported that one of its inspectors had been put on administrative leave in connection with the case.Schaaf had named Fairow as the interim chief late last Thursday night after announcing that Police Chief Sean Whent had resigned for personal reasons, and the mayor refused to comment on whether Whent's resignation was connected to the sex scandal."With the abrupt resignation of Sean Whent last week, we sought to have seamless leadership of the Oakland Police Department and selected an individual who understood the dynamics in Oakland and who, based on his previous employment with OPD, could hit the ground running," Schaaf said.On Wednesday, Schaaf said Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa would assume the role of interim chief as the city searches for an outside candidate to lead the department.Five Oakland police officers were placed on leave as the investigation into the sex worker's dealings continues, and two of those officers resigned in May.The mayor said Wednesday that her administration was doing a background check of Fairow on Monday when certain information was learned that prompted her decision to fire him. She wouldn't disclose what the information was, citing a state law that requires confidentiality for internal police investigations.But later Wednesday, BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey issued a public statement saying he welcomed Fairow back to his job, and that Fairow had informed him that he had an extramarital affair more than a decade ago -- "none of which precludes him from serving as a sworn law enforcement officer or as one of my deputy chiefs."Fairow served for 21 years in Oakland's Police Department before moving to become deputy chief at BART police, where he came under fire last year for the death of Sgt. Tom Smith, who was inadvertently shot by a colleague.In a federal lawsuit filed in May 2015, Smith's widow, Kellie Smith, who was a BART police officer at the time of the shooting, accused Fairow of denigrating his rank and file and even calling them "pussies" when they asked for additional training.Fairow could not be reached for comment Wednesday.Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth said at the news conference that they are trying to ensure stable leadership over a department that for years has cycled through police chiefs."We will take our time to make sure that (whoever) is put in has the complete trust of the rank and file," Landreth said.But critics say the mayor has concealed the reasons behind Whent's departure and refused to discuss it even with other city officials.Her silence has infuriated Councilwoman Desley Brooks, who roundly attacked the mayor during a Public Safety Committee meeting Tuesday at City Hall.Brooks said that Whent's ouster, coupled with a sex worker's explosive allegations that she had sex with several Oakland officers while she was underage, showed that it's "abundantly clear the administration is unable to look out for the best interests of this city."Councilman Larry Reid on Wednesday expressed his disenchantment and frustration with the latest sudden leadership change."You take 10 steps forward, and then you take 3,000 steps backward," Reid said. "We're going backward, not forward."The Public Safety Committee is now pondering whether to endorse a November ballot measure that would create a citizen police oversight commission and give it broad powers to discipline officers -- and terminate the chief.News of Fairow's removal came just hours after civil rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin held their own news conference, saying they may ask a federal judge to intervene in hiring and recruitment at the struggling department. The department has been operating under a Negotiated Settlement Agreement and federal oversight requiring it to make improvements since 2003. That year, the city settled a major lawsuit after findings that four officers beat West Oakland residents and planted evidence. Chanin and Burris were the plaintiffs' attorneys in that case."Officers should not be involved in consorting with prostitutes and passing a young girl around like she's a rag doll," Burris said at the news conference. "We've come to the conclusion that the supervisors have not done their jobs, that institutional checks and balances were not in place."Rattled by a spate of disciplinary cases that all involved officers hired after 2013, the city is now conducting an official audit of its recruitment process. Chanin said he wants a non-redacted version of the audit for himself, Burris, the department's independent court monitor, and federal Judge Thelton Henderson, who has overseen the department ever since 2003 -- the year that Oakland settled the lawsuitIf Oakland's audit is not released soon or if it seems flimsy, then Burris and Chanin say they will push for a court order that would allow Henderson and his appointed monitor and compliance director to steer the hiring of new police."There is undoubtedly a change in culture of Oakland Police Department which cannot be ignored," Burris said.He and Chanin believe the department's problems stem at least partly from an aggressive effort to boost its ranks, which began under former Mayor Jean Quan, and picked up when Schaaf promised to have 800 police officers in Oakland by the time she leaves office."I think there's been a general rush to fill up Oakland with more police officers," Chanin said.Burris said that one new recruit had been pushed through the academy, even though supervisors knew he had a problem with alcohol abuse.Schaaf, who has adamantly expressed her disgust over the scandal, said she is determined to "weed out people not morally fit to serve as Oakland police officers."The scandal spread to other departments after the teen, who uses the alias Celeste Guap, told several media outlets that she had sex with two dozen officers from various agencies.."It's not enough to say we are going to prosecute these people to the fullest," Burris said. "The real question is how are we going to make sure this does not happen again."
On Wednesday, in the morning, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey departed Brisbane for an official visit to Cunnamulla.

Following, at Cunnamulla State School, the Governor, with Mrs de Jersey, unveiled a plaque to commemorate the officially opening of the Industrial Resource Technology Centre and addressed guests, and then toured classrooms.

In the afternoon, at Paroo Shire Chambers, Cunnamulla, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey received a briefing on local issues from Council and community representatives and met community members.

Following, at the Cunnamulla Fella Centre, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey were greeted by staff and student leaders from Sacred Heart Parish School, and then received a briefing on Centre operations, met staff and toured facilities.

In the afternoon, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey returned to Brisbane.
Description

GIS  16 June 2016: An agreement, aiming to revive the Coordinating Committee on the alleviation of poverty in Rodrigues, will be signed between the Ministry of Social Integration and Economic Empowerment and the Rodrigues Regional Assembly (RRA) today at La Residence, in Rodrigues.

The Minister of Social Integration and Economic Empowerment, Mr Prithvirajsing Roopun, is currently in Rodrigues in that context and also to hold discussions on the Social Register of Mauritius (SRM) with the Chief Commissioner of Rodrigues, Mr Serge Clair. The Minister is accompanied by the Permanent Secretary of his Ministry, the chairman of the Board of the National Empowerment Foundation (NEF), as well as a UNDP Expert and Resource Person based at the Ministry of Social Integration and Economic Empowerment.

The signature ceremony is being preceded by a workshop on Results-Based Management and the Monitoring and Evaluation System. Organised jointly by the RRA and the NEF, the workshop is initiating members of the RRA and the NEF on sound and efficient management of services, projects and programmes.

The Agreement

It is expected that the agreement will further reinforce cooperation with the RRA and enable an enhanced harmonisation of the actions of the Rodrigues NEF as well as the actions of the RRA. With the forthcoming Marshall Plan for Poverty Alleviation, which was announced in January 2015 to combat poverty and social exclusion in Mauritius and Rodrigues, both institutions will be called upon to elaborate a common strategy to respond to the needs of the needy while at the same time respecting the specificities of Rodrigues.

The Marshall Plan will cover social protection; social housing; social inclusion and community development; and employment and sustainable livelihood/economic opportunities, amongst others.

SRM for Rodriguan vulnerable families

As regards the SRM, during a meeting held on 15 June 2016 between Minister Roopun and the Rodrigues Chief Commissioner, the possibility of extending the registration process to vulnerable families from Rodrigues so that they are included on the SRMs database of families living in extreme poverty was explored.

It is recalled that the SRM has been set up since 2012 and lists out potential and actual beneficiaries of social programmes. The SRM is not only crucial to help provide assistance to those who deserve, but it also serves as a database to help Government prepare its allocation for resources and ensure that poverty and exclusion are gradually reduced and eliminated.
Are you a new @amazonecho user? Discover the new https://t.co/RaPSu3hhsG Alexa skill. https://t.co/h22bEfxXlthttps://t.co/GnGgKD7lCx  ms.gov (@msdotgov) June 13, 2016

When smartphones first erupted on the scene, governments were slow to realize the potential of offering mobile applications to better connect to their constituents. Over the years, the app has become a technological mainstay for any state or local organization, and the thought of not having one now seems almost comical.But there is another shift coming, not unlike the disruptive smartphone, and two states are taking the lead to embrace the next thing: the voice-activated digital assistant.At first glance, the idea of having an Amazon Echo tied to government offerings seems more like a novelty than anything else, but in Mississippi and Utah the technology is adding real value to voice-activated devices.For the citizens of Mississippi, that value is directly tied to the states MyMS platform , which was designed to help keep residents current on things like vehicle registrations, license renewals and paying taxes. With the help of what's being called an Alexa skill, users of the popular Echo digital assistant can vocalize their questions and expect an accurate and reliable answer.Dana Wilson, general manager with the state's NIC subsidiary Mississippi Interactive, said the tool brings the same usefulness as the states mobile application without the need to pick up a smartphone or log into a program.This iteration of Mississippi.gov we decided to incorporate that Alexa skill into MyMS, to combine the two, she told. On top of that, we wanted to put in some educational features. You can ask it what the state flower is and for it to tell you a Mississippi story or fact, and it will tell you that the first heart and lung transplant was done in Jackson, Miss., etc.Additionally, the state agency phone directory is included in the functions of the skill. While the feature wont allow Alexa to connect users to a particular employee within a certain department, Wilson said there are plans to continue building onto the capabilities.It could get down to the agency level," she said. "Of course, we would need approval from the CIO if that was something he wanted to do, but we are always looking at ways to enhance the service.Past these capabilities, Wilson said there is conversation around making the tool useful in other ways as well. One idea is to translate the functions of the MDOT Traffic mobile app to the Amazon device. The mobile app currently allows users to establish a travel zone, say between home and work, that they would like to receive incident notifications for. If there is an incident, accident or roadwork within that geo-fence, youll get a push notification on your cellphone that lets you know you should reroute, she said. We would like to do something similar where we could incorporate that application with the Amazon Alexa skill in Mississippi to ask Alexa if there is an incident on my way to work, specific to the geo-fence they set up in the application.Wilson reported that around 100 people have asked roughly 300 unique questions using Alexa on their home devices.For Utah, the first state to launch an Amazon Echo solution in late April , the Alexa skill has taken a different form altogether. Residents practicing for a driving test have a new study buddy.Dave Fletcher, Utahs chief technology officer, said the newly unveiled skill allows users to verbally interact with the Echo device to better prepare for the real thing.Its really just the first step, I think, toward a different way of interacting digitally, he said. Voice interaction is going to continue to see an uptick. ... This is just sort of the initial round, like when we first released our iPhone app; there wasnt a whole lot out there, but the whole environment has changed.Much like Mississippis skill, Utah's test preparation feature is only a portion of the larger offering. Utah also built in its own educational feature, which allows the digital assistant to recall current and historical information.Fletcher said Utah is looking at other ways various agencies can leverage the Echo moving forward. He also said a number of other states have expressed an interest in developing their own Alexa skills.Weve had that discussion with agencies and theyve talked about some ideas, he said. So I think this is just the first step.
(TNS)  Amidst a push to make data more available to the public, East Baton Rouge Parish residents can now find expanded voting and land records online.Wednesday, the city-parishs information services department gave an update on various technological efforts from the past year and provided a look into future projects, including an updated emergency app.The parish has combined data from the Louisiana Secretary of States office with its own online maps to allow users to view precinct-by-precinct election breakdowns . The state has long reported the precinct breakdowns, but the parish has visualized the data, which shows, for example, blooms of support for Republican David Vitter around Central and the southeast of the parish in the last gubernatorial election in a parish that otherwise generally supported the victor, Democrat John Bel Edwards.The public also can see which areas of town leaned toward Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in the March Democratic primary or view the results of the Republican primary in which multiple candidates, including presumptive nominee Donald Trump, claimed support in various parts of the parish.The maps also track local races, like for the Baker city council, as well as seats in the state Legislature.While most of the data is for recent races, the parish has included a few historical votes, such as the 2012 presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, which drew a sharp divide along Florida Boulevard.The parish also has integrated Centrals city records into the geographic information system , said GIS manager Warren Kron. It allows users to search for various land records, and Kron expects to see use from appraisers, the assessors office and public works employees.Real estate guys use this like crazy, he remarked in an interview after his presentation to city-parish staff.Land records for Baton Rouge, Baker and unincorporated areas of the parish were all previously entered into the GIS, and Kron hopes to finish later this year with the inclusion of Zacharys data.The parish also is preparing to launch a new smartphone app, which will allow the public to keep track of disasters. The Red Stick Ready app will be available during hurricanes, floods and winter storms as well as human disasters such as a dangerous tanker spill or active shooter, said Information Services Director Eric Romero.The app will show road and school closures and disseminate information on where to pick up sandbags or find a Red Cross shelter.Users can download the app now, but Romero cautioned that it still needs a final update. He hopes to have a finished project soon, perhaps as early as next week.The final step will smooth out some issues with the apps maps, which will show weather and traffic conditions.The information services department also touched on a few other recent projects aimed at streamlining government services  such as partnering with Googles traffic app Waze and developing real-time 911 tracking for police  and on efforts to make more information available to the public online, such as tax rolls and other items at Open Data BR and the city-parishs annual budget
Facebook launches suicide prevention feature

Election toolkit for officials

White House honors maker movement leaders
1. Cheaper systems

2. Ability to plan ahead and plan smarter

3. Collaborative marketing

COLUMBUS, OHIO  Who cares about Arlington, Va.?Or rather, the question for Intelligent Community Forum Co-founder Robert Bell was something like: How can we make people care enough about Arlington to make them want to locate a business there, when Washington, D.C., is just one river away?Its a common problem for a city official trying his or her hand at economic development for a community that exists in the shadow of a much larger city. These places are often bedroom communities  a place to live, not a place to work. So why would a business choose to locate there when there's an urban core so close by?Bell had a thought for Arlington, and all the cities like it: Perhaps the proximity to a big city could be a strength instead of a weakness.Theres a much bigger picture when you sell, and you can work with your competitors, if you will, Bell said on June 15 at the 2016 Intelligent Community Forum Summit in Columbus, Ohio.It turns out there are many positives to be gained when cities within a metropolitan area work together on projects involving technology and economic development. Bell discussed those benefits during the summit with several representatives from cities that have taken a regional approach to growth:When two companies merge, they often do so because working together means they can eliminate redundancies and reduce costs while maintaining or improving quality.The same thing can happen with cities, especially when it comes to technology. Just ask Tom Weisner, mayor of Aurora, Ill. When his city wanted to buy new technology for its police department, it went to neighboring Naperville and asked if it was interested in the same upgrades.We joined together with Naperville so that our combined buying power was almost double, Weisner said. We were able to save about $5 million apiece.  Plus, bringing their skills to the table and our skills to the table, we were able to make a better buy.They arent the only ones. The cities of Gahanna, Whitehall and Bexley outside Columbus worked together to lay down fiber to deliver high-speed Internet for all three. Tom Kneeland, mayor of Gahanna and its former CIO, said that it saved time  the cities applied jointly for state funding to complete the project  and gave the cities the ability to work together and find other ways to save money.Thats the other thing about cooperating with neighbors. The city officials who have done it say it adds more perspective to the process, and more brains can often come up with better solutions. Dana McDaniel, city manager of Dublin, Ohio, said that working with a nongovernment partner  the Columbus-based Battelle Memorial Institute  helped his city buy its own fiber network and install it.Its almost like free consulting, he said.Cooperation between neighboring governments can also help them plan further out into the future. Thats what the Canadian city of Hamilton, Ontario, found when it set out to create a transportation plan looking out not just two years or five, but 50.Hamilton, a transportation hub between Toronto and Buffalo, N.Y., went to the provincial government to begin the process. But the city didnt go alone  it took Toronto too.We can talk about technology and how its advancing right now, driverless cars and the trucking industry and the rail industry  it gives us a chance to be true partners with the province, but without Toronto at the table using its leverage, I doubt that we wouldve been able to convince them to do this kind of [planning], said Chris Murray, Hamiltons city manager.In Aurora, Weisner found a smaller way to plan for the future. By linking up his citys fiber Internet network to Napervilles, the two cities were able to establish a sort of quid pro quo backup system. If Napervilles 911 call center goes offline, Aurora will pick up the slack and vice versa.What Bell found when working with Arlington was that the towns proximity to the District of Columbia could be a selling point  by choosing Arlington, a business could take advantage of all that town had to offer while staying within arms reach of the bustling capital city.And if multiple cities around a metro area can work together on such initiatives, they can brand the region as a whole and benefit from it. Its about marketability; though each city is individually competing against each other for business, they all benefit from a singular effort.That means some work on the ground as well, in order to make an individual community more desirable to live and work in. Aurora has done that by investing in the arts.We want to share what Chicago provides," he said. "We want to benefit regionally from that, [so we want] to make sure that we are a center for the arts and culture much like Chicago, and to attract young millennials."Murray thinks one of the most important things is to make sure a community is welcoming of the kinds of people it wants to bring in. You can have the best technology around, you can have the greatest housing stock around, affordable and all, but at the end of the day, people who move families to your community dont want to live in the community because of issues related to racism or issues related to  all the things that cause problems, he said.Ben Blanquera, vice president of delivery and experience for the business ecosystem Columbus Collaboratory, pointed to his organizations work with local businesses on new technology as an example of how to transform collaboration into a regional brand. The Collaboratory took huge databases of customer feedback from businesses in the area and developed a system that is able to identify sentiments and extract keywords for the corporate client  essentially turning an overwhelming amount of information into a usable resource.And it was all done locally. Its a Columbus, Ohio, technology.Along the way, weve [gone from being] the partner of a major technology partner and were now seen as a leader in this knowledge-based technology," Blanquera said. "And by the way, really smart people want to be in that space. So were now positioning ourselves to attract the kind of people who want to do these kind of things.And in purely practical terms, youve just created a purely competitive advantage for companies across this region, said Bell.Absolutely, said Blanquera.
(TNS)  Orange County, Calif., Sheriff Sandra Hutchens rescued a proposed cybercrime investigations unit from being cut out of next years budget on Tuesday when she told supervisors that local businesses are being increasingly hacked, defrauded and ransomed by online scammers.Cybercrime has become such a major issue impacting our businesses, Hutchens said at the budget hearing. That is the future of the crime were facing in America.County CEO Frank Kim had recommended removing the proposed investigation unit to save money after county staff revealed last week that low sales tax revenue payments from the state could leave Orange County with $20 million less than expected to fund law enforcement operations.But Hutchens argued that the unit is needed because the departments economic crimes detail  which investigates credit card and identity theft, Internet fraud and investment scams  is overloaded.California had more cybercrime victims and loss than any other state last year, accounting for almost 15 percent of the nations Internet crime, resulting in $195 million in losses, according to an FBI report. Yet a county budget report states, there is currently no local law enforcement agency in Orange County prepared to investigate a major cyber-intrusion crime.In addition to policing Internet fraud and data hacks, the new cybercrime unit would investigate online bullying and child porn, Hutchens said. The new unit calls for one sergeant and one investigator at a cost of $341,545 next year.Supervisor Shawn Nelson called the cybercrime problem significant. Chairwoman Lisa Bartlett said her office has been called often by locals who have been defrauded online.Supervisor Todd Spitzer voted to restore the unit to the budget, but warned that piecemeal budgeting made it difficult to make decisions that favored the countys long-term fiscal health.The boards Tuesday votes are nonbinding. The board will vote to approve its 2016-17 budget on June 28.
Brazilian journalists have played down Bernie Ecclestone's warning that the Interlagos race in November could be the last.

F1 supremo Ecclestone triggered alarm this week when he said: "It could be that the grand prix in Brazil this year is the last."

But experienced Brazilian journalist Victor Martins told UOL's Grande Premio programme that the 85-year-old Briton's threat is "puerile and childish".

"At the end of the day, Brazil has a contract until 2020 at least," he said.

And Martins' colleague Gabriel Curty added: "F1 always complains about breaches of contract, so it does not seem logical that now he (Ecclestone) wants to break such a long agreement."

(GMM)
Hermann Tilke has played down fears F1's newest venue in Baku might not be safe enough.

As the sport's travelling circus set up in the historic Azerbaijan capital this week, two respected journalists wondered whether F1 had compromised safety by green-lighting the fastest ever street circuit.

Roger Benoit, writing for Blick, said the sport is preparing for its "most dangerous weekend" with speeds set to match or perhaps even surpass those seen at Monza.

"At those speeds, with walls on both sides and run-off scarce, the risk of serious consequences is great," agreed Livio Orrichio, writing for Brazil's Globo.

And as the drivers and engineers did their customary pre-weekend 'track walks', one unnamed source told Spain's El Confidencial: "The walls are everywhere. It is a very dangerous circuit."

But circuit architect Hermann Tilke said safety has been taken seriously in Baku.

"The corners are fast but very smooth with soft walls, the same technology as is used on the American ovals," he said.

As for the extremely high speeds and the lack of run-off areas, Tilke answered: "That's up to the FIA.

"They sent their delegate (Charlie Whiting) here and worked hard to make it safe."

(GMM)
The findings of the report show that it is technically possible to absorb grid power fluctuations by connecting electric vehicles to the power supply. The research results will in future help to link electric mobility with the energy industry.

Partners Volkswagen AG, Lichtblick SE, SMA Solar Technology AG and the Fraunhofer Institute Wind Energy and Energy System Technology (IWES) have submitted the final report from the INEES research project (Intelligent integration of electric vehicles into the power grid for the provision of system services).

The supply of electrical power is undergoing a fundamental change. Increasing numbers of local, flexible unitssuch as photovoltaic systems, combined heat and power plants, and so ongenerate electricity; however these are often dependent on different variable factors such as sunlight or wind levels.

In addition to fluctuations due to varying power consumption, disparities in the electricity network can occur. At the same time, batteries in electric vehicles offer large storage potential and thus can offer an additional way to compensate for these fluctuations.

The INEES research project, which ran from 1 June 2012 to 31 December 2015, investigated the possibility of achieving a balancing and stabilizing effect on the power grid using a pool of electric vehicles.

Pooling batteries of electric vehicles offers a power storage capability of significant size suitable for mass consumption, which can compensate for fluctuations in the power grid. The vehicles could store excess electricity as well as put surplus energy back into the power grid.

For the one-year fleet trial, SMA Solar Technology AG developed a bi-directional DC-charging station designed as an experimental system in a small production run of 40 devices. Volkswagen AG equipped 20 e-up! battery-electric vehicles (earlier post) with a bidirectional charging function and built in a communication link between the charge controller and the Volkswagen backend computer center.

A mobile phone app was developed as a user interface. Participants in the fleet trial could use this app to see how their personal driving behaviour and the requirements of the electricity market are linked together. They allowed their vehicle battery to be used to support the power grid while basically experiencing no restrictions to their everyday mobility.

An incentive system, developed in the form of a SchwarmStrom (electricity from a cluster, earlier post) bonus, also contributed to the project. Participants received this as soon as they allowed some of their battery capacity to be released for general use.

Lichtblick, an energy and IT company, integrated the released electricity from the vehicles into the energy market using its SchwarmDirigent control software.

The study showed that electric vehicles can provide a safe and secure power reserve for the power grid with a short reaction time.

However, further analysis showed that the provision of balancing electric power by an electric vehicle pool is not economically viable under current conditions.

Planned legislative changes, further technical developments and the transformation of the energy system can significantly improve the economic factor in the future. The Fraunhofer Institute IWES analysis of the distribution networks load has shown that only network grids that are already heavily used today can expect short term shortages. In the medium term fluctuations in demand need to be allowed for when expanding the network.

The INEES research projecta German lighthouse project in electric mobilitywas funded by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety.
Researchers at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWCWD), China Lake report on a solvent-free process for the conversion of 2,3-Butanediol (2,3-BD)a renewable alcohol that can be prepared in high yield from biomass sugarsto a complex mixture of 2-ethyl-2,4,5-trimethyl-1,3-dioxolanes and 4,5-dimethyl-2-isopropyl dioxolanes. A paper on their work is published in the journal ChemSusChem.

The purified dioxolane mixture exhibited an anti-knock index of 90.5, comparable to high octane gasoline, and a volumetric net heat of combustion 34% higher than ethanol.

The solubility of the dioxolane mixture in water was only 0.8 g/100 mLnearly an order of magnitude lower than the common gasoline oxygenate methyl tert-butyl ether.

The dioxolane mixture has potential applications as a sustainable gasoline blending component, diesel oxygenate, and industrial solvent.

Resources
The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) has awarded New Flyer a contract for up to 550 heavy-duty 40-foot Xcelsior diesel electric hybrid buses. ( Earlier post .)

The contract includes a firm order for 90 Xcelsior XDE40 buses valued at approximately US$50 million, with options for an additional 460 units over the next 5 years. All buses will be delivered between the period of 2017 to 2020. The order will replace older vehicles in SEPTAs current fleet with newer, more fuel efficient Xcelsior XDE40 buses.

SEPTA currently serves more than 168 million annual riders with a fleet of 1,387 vehicles in fixed route service in the Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties.

New Flyer has delivered more than 1,130 heavy-duty transit buses to SEPTA since 2002 and is currently delivering 35 MiDi buses under a contract that was awarded in September of 2015.
GREENSBORO  For most of his professional life, Stephen Gee quietly enhanced the citys arts.

Thirty years ago, Gee co-founded what became the downtown Broach Theatre Company with Hall Parrish and David Bell. He also acted and directed with Greensboro-based Touring Theatre of North Carolina.

Gee died May 6 of cancer at age 60.

Local arts leaders and supporters honored the accomplishments of Gee and others Wednesday at ArtsGreensboros annual meeting at Revolution Mill.

The marketing and fundraising agency posthumously gave Gee its highest local award presented to artists, named for longtime arts supporter Betty Cone.

It is right that this truly professional artist, who gave so quietly and generously to Greensboro almost all of his life, receive the Betty Cone Medal of Arts, said Brenda Schleunes, Touring Theatres founder and producing artistic director, who nominated Gee for the award.

Deana Ray of Winston-Salem accepted the award on her brothers behalf. Gees friends smiled, applauded and wiped tears.

The whole point of art is that your legacy lives on beyond what you do now, said Florence Gatten, chairwoman of ArtsGreensboros board.

Jancie Reinbold, a music teacher who leads the cultural arts department at Western Guilford High School, received the Arts Educator of the Year Award.

Tammy Larrick, art teacher at Millis Road Elementary School, was named runner-up.

ArtsGreensboro celebrated other accomplishments as well:

This year, its ArtsFund drive will provide grants to 60 nonprofit arts organizations, teachers and artists in Greensboro and High Point. Among the organizations are the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, Eastern Music Festival, Triad Stage and Community Theatre of Greensboro.

Money raised also supports other arts activities, such as marketing and fundraising work, Fun Fourth and Festival of Lights.

The National Folk Festival returns Sept. 9-11 for the second year of its three-year residency. Co-produced with the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the free downtown festival brings a mix of multicultural entertainment and attracts more than 100,000 visitors.

The new Jan Van Dyke Performance Space is under construction in the Greensboro Cultural Center, thanks to Van Dykes $1 million gift before she died of cancer in July. ArtsGreensboro will manage the venue when it opens Oct. 1.

ArtsGreensboro received $25,000 in matching funds to present the Levitt AMP Greensboro Music Series. The free 10-concert series in Barber Park continues to present a diverse lineup of artists.

ArtsGreensboro also faces challenges, said Tom Philion, president and CEO.

With 15 days left in its annual drive, the ArtsFund has raised about $850,000 toward a $1.1 million goal.

To help achieve that goal, the Cemala Foundation has provided a $50,000 challenge grant. To qualify, ArtsGreensboro must raise a matching $50,000 in new or increased gifts.

If you have already given, consider giving a little bit more to help push us over the top on this campaign, Philion told supporters.

ArtsGreensboro has had to adapt to nationwide changes in fundraising, Philion said. More gifts are earmarked for specific projects and causes, while unrestricted gifts for general operating support have declined.

The time has come for ArtsGreensboro, in partnership with its key stakeholders, to take a strategic look at what the future holds, Philion said.

As a result, it will make a new strategic planning effort a priority for the next nine to 12 months, Philion said.

Is there a path to a more sustainable revenue stream to support the venues and arts institutions of our great city? he added. How can we help lead a discussion about a more comprehensive cultural plan for Greensboro and, perhaps, the broader Triad to ensure the best and most efficient use of resources that will help the arts thrive?
WASHINGTON  When she was first approached about working on a restaurant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Carla Hall sensed it was fate knocking. The chef, author and The Chew co-host had just started to research her next cookbook on soul food.

I saw it as a sign, said Hall, taking a break from her latest project, Carla Halls Southern Kitchen, a Nashville hot chicken joint that was still in dress rehearsals last week ahead of its grand opening in Brooklyn on June 17.

This is so perfect and so important, Hall continued about the museum gig, and I was so excited about all the research I had been doing on my own that I wanted to be a part of it.

Hall has officially been hired as consulting chef  or culinary ambassador, in the Smithsonians parlance  for the North Star Cafe, a 400-seat cafeteria-style restaurant in the museum, set to open Sept. 24 on the National Mall. The principals involved in North Star expect it to rival Mitsitam Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian, an award-winning cafeteria on the Mall that broke the mold for museum dining.

The day-to-day operations of North Star will be jointly handled by Thompson Hospitality  the countrys largest minority-owned food-service provider  and Restaurant Associates, which runs most of the cafes on Smithsonian properties. Restaurant Associates and Thompson beat out two other bidders for the 10-year contract to provide food at the African American Museum. Museum officials wouldnt comment on whether celebrity chefs were attached to the other bids.

Thompson Hospitality had a personal connection to Hall, 52, who interned at the company, based in Reston, Va., more than 20 years ago after she completed her training at LAcademie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Md. Benita Thompson-Byas, senior vice president of joint ventures for Thompson, reached out to Hall in late 2014 to see if the TV star and chef might be interested in working on North Star.

How often can you say that youre actually a part of such an important place that everybody from all over the country is going to come and see? Hall said in explaining her reasons for accepting the job.Like Mitsitam, North Star (named for the star that slaves followed to freedom) will have stations dedicated to different culinary regions. North Stars four regions were identified with the help of Jessica B. Harris, a respected author and researcher on African-American food ways. Harris and the Smithsonian initially laid out the regions to help guide companies bidding for the museum gig. The regions are the Agricultural South, the Creole Coast, the North States and the Western Range.

Using those geographical outlines as a guide, Thompson Hospitality, Restaurant Associates, museum curators and Hall have been identifying ingredients, flavors, dishes and historical figures to direct their menu planning. Theyre trying to achieve a delicate balance between maintaining historical accuracy and serving food that would appeal to, say, a family of four from the Midwest.

As one example, George Conomos, vice president of operations for Restaurant Associates, explained that the Son of a Gun Stew found on the Western Range menu had a more colorful name among African-American cowboys: Son of a B---- Stew. The original dish also featured cuts of beef that settlers couldnt sell: lungs, tripe and other offal. The stew at North Star will feature a more diner-friendly meat: braised short ribs.

The cowboys, they didnt have a lot of stuff to work with, Conomos said. They did eat a lot of secondary cuts of meat, or stuff we wouldnt normally eat.

Museum visitors can expect two to three dishes per station, plus sides and salads, Conomos said. The Agricultural South station, which celebrates the regions role as the breadbasket of Southern cooking, is expected to serve buttermilk fried chicken with black-pepper cornmeal waffles, Brunswick stew and other dishes. The Creole Coast station, which highlights the unique blend of cultures along the Gulf Coast, plans to offer shrimp and grits with smoked tomato butter and crispy tasso as well as a pan-fried catfish po boy, among other dishes. The North States station, which emphasizes the fusion of Northern ingredients and Southern cooking techniques, hopes to serve a Philadelphia-style pepper pot stew and an oyster pan roast, somewhat like the one served at the Grand Central Oyster Bar.
GREENSBORO  Two music events this weekend will give downtown visitors an early sample of what the annual Eastern Music Festival offers.

On Friday, a trio from the popular Creole band BeauSoleil will perform at The Crown at the Carolina Theatre.

The concert will feature brothers Michael and David Doucet and Mitchell Reed of the Grammy Award-winning Louisiana band.

It will be the fourth of seven concerts in this years EMF Fringe series of alternative music. The series began in May, in advance of the main classical festival and school at Guilford College, which run from June 27 to July 30.

EMF Fringe is designed to give music-lovers an introduction to EMF, said John Davis, the EMF board member who is responsible for programming this years Fringe series.

What we are looking for with Fringe is a way to show that there are lot of highly trained, often classically trained musicians who have taken a different route with their music, Davis said.

On Saturday, EMF Fringe will bring back last years popular downtown Chamber Crawl.

Four ensembles will perform a free series of mini-concerts in nine restaurants and other venues along South Elm Street.

EMF created the Chamber Crawl in partnership with Classical Revolution Greensboro, a group that aims to bring classical music to unexpected places.

The Chamber Crawl is intended to be a fun approach to music, with the groups and the audiences moving up and down the street, Davis said.

Last years first Chamber Crawl attracted people who came downtown just for the event, Davis said.

About 150 people gathered at Gibbs Hundred Brewing Company for the finale.

They went into places they had not been before, and wouldnt have gone without the music, Davis said.
Politicians, marketers and media moguls pay serious attention to this countrys Latino residents.

The medical community is starting to do so, too.

Despite its size, this segment of the population has until very recently been somewhat ignored by health care providers and researchers, said Dr. Carlos J. Rodriguez, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. Thats unfortunate, because Hispanics health is vital to the public health of the nation.

The more than 55 million Hispanics  defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as individuals of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South American, Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race  currently living in the United States account for 17 percent of the total population and constitute the nations largest racial or ethnic minority. To illustrate: Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez and Hernandez are among the 15 most common surnames in this country.

While there are still traditional concentrations of Puerto Ricans in the New York area, Cuban Americans in South Florida and people of Mexican heritage in the Southwest and California, the geographical distribution of the Hispanic population has changed dramatically in recent years. Hispanics now represent at least 9 percent of the population in 24 states and the District of Columbia. As for the future, the Census Bureau projects that by 2060 Hispanics  or, as some prefer, Latinos  will number 119 million, or 28 percent of the national total.

But whether the goal is getting votes, selling products, attracting audiences or tracking health trends, treating the Hispanic population as a single, homogenous community can be hazardous to success.

Hispanics are a diverse ethnic population, varying in race, national origin, immigration status and a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic factors, said Rodriguez, who was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in New York City. The diversity among U.S. Hispanics presents many challenges.

In medicine, those challenges include overcoming some major gaps in research data.

An incomplete understanding of Hispanic populations in academic research has produced a lack of comprehensive data addressing Hispanic health, Rodriguez said. Many surveys have examined Hispanics as an aggregate group without identifying their background or origin, and while there is a greater availability of data on Mexican Americans, which may simply reflect their larger numerical presence within the United States, it may not be appropriate to extrapolate that data to other Hispanic groups.

An initiative paid for by the National Institutes of Health called the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, or HCHS/SOL, is filling in some of those gaps. The largest study of Hispanic health ever conducted in the United States, it enrolled more than 16,000 adults living in San Diego, Chicago, Miami, and the Bronx, New York, who self-identified as being of Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Central American or South American origin. It has found, for example, that the percentage of people with asthma ranged from 7.4 percent among those of Mexican ancestry to 35.8 percent among those of Puerto Rican descent and that the percentage of individuals with high blood pressure ranged from 20.3 percent among those with South American heritage to 32.2 percent among those with Cuban origins.

Rodriguez, a cardiologist who also holds a masters degree in public health, has analyzed data collected by HCHS/SOL to investigate heart disease and stroke among Hispanics, a high-risk population for those disorders.

Among his findings in a 2015 study were that nearly half of Hispanic adults with high cholesterol were unaware of it and that less than one-third of those who were aware received treatment. A study published in April indicated that Hispanics had higher rates of a potentially serious heart-pumping problem than other populations but that fewer than 5 percent of those with the condition knew they had it.

Lack of awareness is a problem with roots at different levels for Hispanics, including access to care and patient-provider difficulties such as language barriers or cultural insensitivity that may contribute to these gaps, Rodriguez said. That needs to change, since awareness is the first step in prevention.

Rodriguez also was the lead author of a 2014 science advisory from the American Heart Association that provided a comprehensive overview of cardiovascular disease and stroke among Hispanics and recommended specific, culturally appropriate strategies that health care providers, researchers and policymakers could use to improve heart health and treatment in the both the Hispanic population at large and in subgroups by country of origin.

Given the number of Hispanics in the United States, its critical that we pay more attention to these individuals, Rodriguez said. No population can be left behind if we are to improve the health of the entire country.
RODEO, California  She was a sweet, pretty California girl with Palestinian roots who left an arranged marriage only to find love with a man who committed the worst mass shooting in modern U.S history.

Little by little, details have begun to emerge about 30-year-old Noor Zahi Salman, who grew up in the small suburb of Rodeo, California, tucked in the dry hills near the oil refineries 25 miles northeast of San Francisco.

Her romance with Omar Mateen  security guard, bodybuilder and Muslim  began online, according to a neighbor, and they were married on Sept. 29, 2011, near her hometown, according to public records. The couple has a 3-year-old son.

Early Sunday, the 29-year-old Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded.

Authorities believe Mateen's wife knew about the plot ahead of time, said an official who was briefed on the progress of the case but insisted on anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. The official said investigators are reluctant to charge her only on the basis of possible advance knowledge of her husband's plans.

Three people identifying themselves as FBI agents visited Salman's childhood home in Rodeo on Tuesday and spoke with her mother, said Jessie Rojas, a next-door neighbor.

In Fort Pierce, Florida, where Salman and Mateen lived, Salman made a brief visit to their first-floor apartment late Monday, escorted by police and her brother-in-law. Her father-in-law said she came to retrieve clothing. She did not speak with reporters. She has otherwise been in seclusion.

According to marriage documents on file in the Contra Costa County Recorder's office, Salman was born in the United States while her parents' birthplaces were listed as "Palestine."

It's unclear when her parents, who served as witnesses for the wedding, came to the United States, but their naturalization papers allowing them to stay in the country were approved in 1984.

No one answered the door at the Salman home Tuesday, but neighbors who know the 2004 graduate of John Swett High School in nearby Crockett said they find it hard to believe she had anything to do with the massacre.

Jasbinder Chahal, who has lived across the street from Salman's childhood home for the last 15 years, said Salman is "very nice...not the smartest, but she was beautiful.

"You know, some kids after high school, they open up the box and the world is theirs. She was inside the box, just pack it up and get married," said Chahal.

"They had a small wedding and took lots of pictures here at the house," said Chahal. The marriage license says the ceremony took place in Hercules, California, and that an imam officiated.

Of Mateen, Chahal said, "He was shorter than her and did not seem very friendly."

Chahal said Salman's mother, Ekbal Salman, was deeply upset when she visited her Monday night and said she feared for the safety of her daughter and grandson.

Salman's parents tried to shelter their four girls as they grew up.

"Noor never played in the street, and the girls were never allowed to drive," Chahal said.

The neighbor quoted Salman's mother as saying Mateen also kept her daughter from driving, until he recently allowed her to take a test to get her driver's license.

Salman's marriage to Mateen was her second, said Chahal. Mateen had previously been married as well.

Her first marriage had been arranged in the Palestinian Territories by her parents, said Chahal, adding that the union did not work out.

"He was in Chicago and they were living there, but they were not married long," Chahal said. "They had cultural differences since she grew up here and was American."

Mateen had met his first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, online, too. They married in 2009 after a whirlwind romance.

Yusufiy, who immigrated to the United States from Uzbekistan, has told reporters that Mateen was mentally unstable and abusive during their brief relationship.

She said she knew quickly that the marriage had been a mistake and she left him a few months later. The couple didn't divorce, though, until June 21, 2011  just three months before Mateen married Salman.

On one of her sister's Facebook pages  next to a family photo  there is a box with the words: "Solidarity with Gaza."

Salman rarely came home to visit after she married because Mateen would not let her, Chahal said. She quoted Salman's mother telling her that Mateen even tried to keep the daughter from traveling home to see her father when he was sick.

The younger Salman managed to scrape together the money to visit before her father died in a local hospital, Chahal said.
North Carolina students performed the worst theyve done in more than 20 years on national tests of reading and math performance  showing how much achievement has declined since the pandemic. Reading and math scores in the state dropped from three years ago for fourth- and eighth-grades on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. The results released on Monday by the U.S. ...
Oops. Photo: Steve Debenport

A man who was feeling reeeeal good after eating at a Denver Thai restaurant this weekend had to sheepishly ask the staff to return the $1,088 tip that just about made his servers year. Bee Anantatho, owner of Thailicious, tells the Denver Post her restaurant has been amassing a pretty loyal clientele lately, so she and her employees thought maybe some particularly enthralled customer had decided to show his gratitude by leaving a 1,800-percent cash tip on about a $60 tab.

Understandably, the waiter was so happy, but she said something felt intuitively off, so she suggested they not cash it out just yet  in case the guy returned. Which he promptly did the very next morning, now full of regrets. He said, Im sorry, I was drunk, Anantatho recalled. He didnt know he put all the money he had in the checkbook. He admitted hed thought some of the multiple $100s he left had been singles (like, maybe the U.S. Mint had started printing $1.00 bills or something?).

In the end, Anantatho felt sorry for the guy, so she refunded the full amount, and feeling like he owed them, he handed her $100 to cover his dinner and the tip. Forty bucks doesnt come to much, all things considered here, once you factor in the tipped minimum wage is $2.13 and the amount is split among the staff, but Anantatho at least feels like she did right. I think he will come back, she told the paper, possibly to the servers chagrin.

[Denver Post]
There are few better places to have a late-afternoon drink than Achilles Heel. Photo: Adrian Gaut

Perhaps day drinking is no longer the acceptable leisure activity it once was during the era of the three-martini lunch. But this is no time to let the buzzkills harsh your mellow: Summer, which officially arrives on Monday, is prime afternoon-boozing season in New York  the time for a 2 p.m. Dark n Stormy or four. Even better: Now you can officially drink before noon on Sundays, too! Whether youre brunching or taking a weekday afternoon off, here are 15 spots for all day-drinking occasions, from an outdoor space to enjoy the sun to a dive to escape from it.

Achilles Heel

When the sun starts to set and fills this room with warm light, the bar is particularly handsome, especially when youve got an Americano or martini in hand. And its a great place when its a bit quieter during the afternoon  the bar opens at 4 p.m. on weekdays, and noon on weekends. Theres also an ambitious food menu, which changes daily but might include bavette steak and rice, fava bean and anchovy toast, and always cheese, charcuterie, and oysters.

The Gatehouses at Kings County Distillery

Kings County Distillerys new bar, cafe, and tasting room are located in the historic Gatehouses, a medieval revival structure that was painstakingly restored. (Full disclosure: One of the owners is a New York editor.) It includes an outdoor area, and in the its five oclock somewhere spirit, booze starts flowing at 8 a.m.

La Sirena

At Mario Batalis expansive hotel restaurant, drinks are available as early as 7 a.m., and the sprawling patio has plenty of tables, all of them reserved for walk-ins. Stake one out, drink endless spritzes or Vesper martinis, and enjoy the Meatpacking scene. Dishes like the braciole and desserts such as honey-walnut semifreddo will keep your stomach occupied.

Nowadays

This place is like the adult version of your childhood friends awesome backyard. Its entirely outdoors, so hours depend on the weather, but theres decent beer and a lack of pretension, and the team running it also oversees Mister Saturday, so they really know how to have a good time. The food is backyard-barbecue standards, like burgers and hot dogs, and the drinks list consists of accessible local beers and wine.

Lavender Lake

Housed in a former carriage house, this Gowanus bar (an excellent place for grown-up birthday parties) has a large, enclosed outdoor area where you can enjoy local beers (Other Half, Finback) and solid, creative cocktails like the U.S.S. Eldridge (Owneys rum, cold-pressed orange-peel oil, honey simple syrup, and grapefruit bitters). On weekdays, it opens at 4 p.m. for late-afternoon drinking, but 2 p.m. on weekends for a proper day-boozing session.

Tacoway Beach

Everyones favorite fish-taco stand relocated to the Rockaway Beach Surf Club last summer, with the added benefits of beach-friendly cocktails (a pina colada, of course, and a margarita) and an outdoor patio.

Thai Rock

Or avoid the madness at Tacoaway Beach and check out this Thai restaurants patio. Plus, there are spring rolls stuffed with carrot, cabbage, and bean noodle and, if you want something spicier, fried roti bread with massaman-curry dipping sauce.

The Brooklyn Barge

This new spot for seasonal dining on the water opens at 11 a.m. daily and has a full bar, which makes it the next best thing to a midday booze cruise this side of the East River. There are share plates like harpooned shrimp and Old Bay French fries if you just want to snack, as well as more substantial options including garlic shrimp tacos and a Jamaican jerk grilled-chicken sandwich.

Alta Linea

Alta Lineas sole purpose is for outdoor dining and drinking  its a seasonal concept. Located on the patio of the High Line Hotel, the Chelsea restaurant offers brunch on weekends, a prime time to stake out a table and enjoy a refreshing frozen lemon sgroppino made with limoncello, vodka, and prosecco. Note: The restaurant will launch weekday lunch, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., on Monday.

Lois

Day drinking is not a time for making complicated decisions over long wine lists, which is why this bright and cheerful East Village bar  where everything is on tap and available for tasting  is the ideal wine bar for an afternoon tipple or eight during the weekends, when it opens at noon.

Fort Defiance

Theres just something right about drinking a pina colada at Fort Defiance on a hot summer afternoon. That might be because its the best one in town; it also has a lot to do with the restaurants lived-in decor and location near Red Hooks breezy waterfront.

Clementes Maryland Crab House

At the edge of southern Brooklyn, Clementes is a classic New York summer spot thanks, in no small part, to its all-you-can-eat crab feasts and expansive deck. Its ideal for a festive afternoon: Unlimited crabs are offered on Monday and Tuesday for $35 per person, but a dozen will only set you back $33.

Diamond Dogs

The Astoria bar has a bigger backyard and cheaper drinks ($5 to $8 for mostly local beers, and cocktails hover around $10) than local favorite Sweet Afton, so its a good place to go in Queens late in the afternoon.

Blind Tiger Ale House

Blind Tiger looks like an ordinary tavern, but its got a great selection of craft beer. (Do note that it gets quite crowded during happy hour.) The draft list changes regularly, but includes beers from Founders, local hops enthusiasts Other Half, and Austins reliable Downeast Cider.

Birdys

The retro Bushwick bar serves cheap house drinks  just $7 or $5 during the happy hour that runs until 9 p.m.  and serves unpretentious drinks like whiskey sours and the Rob Roy. Theres now a sidewalk patio, too.
Bold stance. Photo: Grace Restaurant/Facebook

The typical hospitality-industry gun debate is over whether customers can bring their weapons inside with them, but a Maine restaurant owner has just announced a bold, Thought Policey extension of her ban to include more than the physical firearms. In a Facebook post earlier this week, Anne Verrill made open-carrying semiautomatics at her two Portland restaurants, Grace and Foreside Tavern, effectively a moot point by saying anyone who even supports owning that kind of gun is no longer welcome at her establishments. Next to a picture of an AR-15 (a gun similar to the one Omar Mateen used in Orlando), she wrote:

If you own this gun, or you condone the ownership of this gun for private use, you may no longer enter either of my restaurants, because the only thing I want to teach my children is love.

She tried explaining her reasoning, adding in part:

You dont privately own this weapon to protect your family, or to hunt. I understand that I may be offending members of my community, but this is a human issue, not a gun owners issue, or a second amendment issue, it is about humans. I cannot, in good conscience, accept anyone inside of my restaurants who believes that this is ok. Love is love, and only light can drive out darkness. I would be ashamed, as a parent and a human, if I did not use this platform to speak up. How many people have to bury their loved ones before we say together, no more.

Local media say the ban provoked immediate outrage, and even a little confusion about how it would be carried out, from gun-rights activists. They blasted it as clear discrimination and made statements explaining how Verrill has really stepped in a pile of it with this move. This drove several to make their own piles by writing the obligatory one-star review on Yelp or Facebook.

Verrill ultimately pulled the post Wednesday (she says the comments got too nasty), but now says the vitriol spewed in response validates her fears. She posted a new message yesterday afternoon defending the original, adding she doesnt care if you have 12 hunting rifles if youre a law-abiding person. I want people to not have the power to own weapons of war, she says. If you do not understand why I do not want a weapon designed to kill at that kind of rate of speed in my restaurants then there is nothing I can do about that.

[NECN]
Zadies Oyster Room steamed oysters. Photo: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine

Long before he instigated a bone broth craze with Brodo, Hearths Marco Canora had set his sights on oysters. I was hell-bent on opening a big, Grand Central Oyster Bar-type place, he says. Hed even become, like a dutiful grad student, a regular presence at the New York Public Library, poring over old menus. All the oyster houses had the same catchphrase: Oysters served in every style.  Its a motto hes revived at Zadies Oyster Room, Canoras redo of his Fifty Paces wine bar, where he serves the bivalves seven different ways, including steamed with butter and vermouth. The cooking method prevents the shellfish from drying out; why reserve it for clams and mussels?

Mouse over or tap the image to read more.

On the menu at Zadies Oyster Room; 413 E. 12th St., nr. First Ave.; 646-602-1300; $16.50.

*This article appears in the June 27, 2016 issue of New York Magazine.
Unmixed (left) and mixed (right) noodles at Madam Zhus. Photo: Jed Egan/Jed Egan

The uptick in new Sichuan restaurants in the last ten years has also occasioned a rise in reputation-making fiery food, which diners measure in doses of crushed garlic, chile peppers, and Sichuan peppercorns. But while raw heat and escalating spice is the draw, of course, excellence is not just a function of how much pain line cooks can dole out to customers, and dan dan noodles, which can often be served too sweet with sugar or stingy with spice, have become the benchmark for craftsmanship in the Sichuan kitchen. Here are the three best versions in the city.

The Absolute Best 1. Hao Noodle and Tea by Madam Zhus Kitchen

401 Sixth Ave., nr. W. 8th St.; 212-633-8900 Dan dan is the quintessential Sichuanese street food, in which a tangle of fresh, just-boiled noodles is dropped into a fragrant puddle of soy sauce, meat, and finely chopped green scallions with vivid red chile oil, the all-purpose Chengdu condiment used to make all of that starch come alive with body and heat. An untold number of blue-collar variations exist; sometimes greens are added, or the meat is deglazed with a splash of sherrylike Shaoxing wine. Some dan dannoodle masters even subscribe to an origin story most English-speaking food writers disbelieve: that the noodles owe as much of a cultural debt to the neighboring Chongqing as they do to Chengdu. (They point to the inclusion of certain regionally appropriate forms of preserved mustard greens in older recipes.) Zhu Rong, the restaurateur whose New York menu spans handsome Shanghainese and Cantonese dishes in addition to some deft Sichuanese menu pyrotechnics, is a proponent of this idea. And as a result, Madam Zhus house dan dan noodles are unlike any other rendition served around town. Rongs recipe isnt mala xiaomian, mind you  that souped-up, cabbage-y dan dan variant from Chongqing. These noodles involve almost no broth and are skinnier, thanks to structural support provided by egg white, gluten, and tapioca. Like the best ramen, they have a slight alkaline tang, and exact ratios and recipe proportions depend on the weather. Bowlfuls arrive slicked with pork fat, but otherwise no meat. The kitchen pulverizes Sichuan pepper and passes it through sieves, so you get an ultrafine powder rather than hulls like popcorn kernels. The result means the flavor blends in better and imparts more of a faint buzz rather than an obliterating numbness. The broth also gets a creamy texture from sesame and a sharp rush from a glug of black vinegar. True to the dishs roots as a roadside snack, bowls are small but contain a tantalizing balance of several flavors, the best of which include minuscule tidbits of preserved greens and pungent morsels of chile peppers.

2. Little Pepper

18-24 College Point Blvd., at 18th Ave., College Point; 718-939-7788

The most important aspect of Little Peppers bright, buoyant noodles is advertised on the illuminated yellow box right out front: a cherubic, welcome-banner-wearing chile. The pepper in question  and the restaurants mascot  is tien tsin, the kind that are sold dried and fried by the billions in Sichuan food. The peppers appearance, for the most part, is relegated to the deeply flavored and colored oil that comes from a slow, controlled toast (its a cherry-cola bronze shade known in the trade as cockroach color, writes Chinese food scholar Fuchsia Dunlop), but the broad, linguine-like noodles are also dotted with a few nutty chile seeds. That oil pools on the surplus of broth in Little Peppers bowls, which are deeper and bigger than the competitions, with glistening swirls of dark and light soy sauce at the edges. A plentiful amount of ground pork adds a nice lardy sheen, which youll want to mix in as soon as it hits the table.

3. Szechuan Cuisine

6218 18th Ave., nr. 63rd St., Bensonhurst; 718-331-8866

A handful of kosher pizza parlors and old-guard Italian pastry shops dot this particular stretch of 18th Avenue, where Szechuan Cuisines grand-opening flags have been rustling in the lower Brooklyn breeze since last summer. The restaurants proprietor likes to ask first-timers if they ended up there because of spicy food. The answer is often yes, and its easy to see why: Some diners excavate nuggets of poached fin fish from underneath smothering heaps of vivid red chiles, while others drag tripe and beef tendon with chopsticks through garlicky chili oil. And, of course, most order the dan dan noodles, which are doled out in huge portions and garnished with a mound of crisp, salty meat. Stalks of bok choy appear on top, trailing soft green leaves, and the mala, or numbing component, takes the form of a slow and almost surreptitious burn. It pairs well with the binder of sesame that gives the springy noodles a little extra thickness, in addition to bite.
Timeline for One UI 5 rollout revealed: Galaxy S and Z models to get it by the end of the year
The Samsung Gear Fit2 is now on sale in Canada. Carrying a price tag of $250, the wearable device is currently only available at Samsung Experience Shops in the country.

Interestingly, in a press release last week, Samsung made an announcement related to the fitness band's launch in Canada (as well as several other markets). However, the latest announcement - which comes from the Canadian subsidiary of the South Korean company - suggests that it's only now that the device has gone on sale in the country.

Color options include black, blue and pink. Other outlets will start selling the device starting Q3 2016. In addition to the Gear Fit2, Samsung Canada also announced the availability details for the Gear IconX - head to the Source link below to know more.

Source | Via
Haitis electoral council announced on Jun. 6 that new first-round presidential elections would be held in October after a commission found widespread fraud and irregularities in the previous vote. The prospect of the new vote  to be held alongside dozens of parliamentary seats still up for grabs  has raised questions about how it could be funded. The previous elections  determined to be too marred by fraud and violence to count  cost upward of $100 million, with the bulk of the funding coming from international donors. But now, donors are balking. Last week the State Departments Haiti Special Coordinator Ken Merten said that if elections are redone from scratch than it would put U.S. assistance in jeopardy. It could also call into question whether the U.S. will be able to continue to support financially Haitis electoral process, Merten added. In a separate interview, Merten explained: We still do not know what position we will adopt regarding our financial support. U.S. taxpayers have already spent more than $33 million and that is a lot. We can ask ourselves what was done with the money or what guarantees there are that the same thing will not happen again. So, what was done with the money? Could the same thing happen again? To begin with, that figure seems to include money allocated in 2012  years before the electoral process began. Local and legislative elections, which former president Michel Martelly was constitutionally required to organize, failed to happen. A significant share of this early funding likely went to staffing and overhead costs as international organizations or grantees kept their Haiti programs running, despite the absence of elections. Its also worth pointing out that many millions of that money never went to electoral authorities, but rather to U.S. programs in support of elections. In April 2013, USAID awarded a grant to the DC-based Consortium for Elections and Political Processes. In total, $7.23 million went to the consortium before the electoral process even began. An additional $4.95 million was awarded in July 2015, a month before legislative elections. The consortium consists of two Washington, DC-based organizations, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In a January report to Congress, the State Department explained further what some this money went towards: 1. the creation and implementation of 26 Electoral Information Centers (EICs)  to provide information to the general public on the electoral process. 2. training more than 100 journalists in several departments on topics such as the international standards for elections  3. Funding through INL supported election security. [INL is the State Department of States Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs - HL] 4. USAID also supported the creation of a new domestic election observation platform that helped build greater transparency into the electoral process by establishing a grassroots coalition of reputable and well-trained domestic observers  Some funding also went to increasing womens participation in the electoral process. But its questionable what the return on that $12.18 million really was. Not a single woman was elected to parliament  though it now appears as though at least one was elected, only to have her seat stolen through the bribing of an electoral judge. In terms of providing information to the public about the elections, participation in both the legislative and presidential elections was only about a fifth of the population. The money spent on local observers may have been more successful, but not for U.S. interests. The local observer group, the Citizen Observatory for the Institutionalization of Democracy, led by Rosny Desroches, agreed with other local observation missions that a verification commission (opposed by the U.S.) was needed to restore confidence in the elections. The U.S. spent millions training local observers, only to later ignore their analysis. Instead, the U.S. has consistently pointed to the observation work of international organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS) and the EU. The U.S. also provided $1 million to the OAS for their observation work. Perhaps its not a surprise the funding didnt have the intended effect. A 2012 evaluation of NDI conducted by Norways foreign development agency found that about 4 out of every 10 dollars went to overhead, staff in Washington, DC, or to the expatriate country director who made more than a quarter of a million dollars. The U.S. contributed $9.7 million to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) basket fund for elections. The UNDP controlled the pooled donor funds and also funds contributed by the Haitian government (more than any other individual donor). Funds were used to print ballots, train workers, and for other logistical operations. However, its important to note that $3 million of these funds were distributed in 2012 and 2014, well before any election would take place. An additional $7.57 million went to the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) for logistical operations for the elections, mainly distributing and picking up ballots before and after the election. After the August legislative elections were plagued by violent groups that shut down voting, UNOPS shifted strategy for the October election. In certain hot spots, ballots would not follow the normal procedures for transportation to the tabulation center. Instead, UNOPS would bypass the chain, picking up electoral information at 67 voting centers and bringing the materials straight to Port-au-Prince. According to diplomatic sources, UNOPS threatened to pull out entirely if additional funds for this measure were not given. The U.S. awarded $1.8 million to UNOPS on Sep. 29, 2015. An additional $1.77 million was given to UNOPS in December, but the second-round presidential election never took place. Though it was clear to many that the elections would not be held given widespread condemnation by local observers and civil society groups, the U.S. and others in the international community insisted the second round go ahead. With protests increasing, they moved forward and distributed electoral materials for an election that was never going to happen. This strengthened Martellys bargaining power over the opposition, but meant millions of dollars were spent for no reason. In total, funding to UNOPS, UNDP, OAS, IFES and NDI totaled $30.45 million. This is the vast majority of the $33 million the U.S. says it contributed to the electoral process. Additional funds were also awarded through the State Department for election-related security. So yes, the U.S. spent over $30 million on Haitis elections, but not all of that went directly to the elections or was even spent wisely in supporting them. Its clear it would take far less for the U.S. to support a Haitian-led electoral process next October. And perhaps the best reason for the U.S. to continue to fund the election, if Haiti requests such support, is that it was the U.S. and other actors in the international community that pushed ahead and put millions of dollars into a fatally flawed electoral process that Haitians have now determined was irreparably marred by fraud. The problem is not that Haitians wasted U.S. taxpayer dollars by scrapping the election results; its that the U.S. was throwing good money after bad. Thats something that can be fixed. All grantee funding data is from USASpending.gov. This article was originally published on the CEPRs Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch blog.






Haiti - Diplomacy : The Core Group concerned about the institutional vacuum





In a note dated June 15, Sandra Honore, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the other members of the international community in Haiti represented in the "Core Group" (the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the United States of America and the European Union, and the Special Representative of the Organization of American States) "take note of the opening of the second ordinary session of Parliament in accordance with the Constitution. The 'Core Group' expresses concern that no measures have been taken to ensure institutional continuity beyond 13 June as provided for in the 5 February Agreement https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16533-haiti-politic-the-details-of-the-agreement-from-a-to-z.html



The 'Core Group' calls on the National Assembly to take action and reach a solution which avoids an institutional vacuum, and facilitate the return to constitutional order through the holding of elections without further delay. It urges all actors, political parties, candidates and their supporters and others to maintain calm and to refrain from violence."



Note that since June 15, 2016 the former provisional President Jocelerme Privert whose mandate came to end on June 14 at midnight according to the agreement of February 5, ensure the defacto presidency of Haiti, pending a decision of the National Assembly on the institutional continuity.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17748-haiti-politic-jocelerme-privert-remains-in-power.html



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Elections : Electoral theater tour...





In the framework of the preparation efforts of the electoral process in support of the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah) support the work of the Forum theater troupe "Les Rescapes" in its outreach activities against electoral violence and voter education, particularly women and young people who will vote for the first time.



This third tour of participatory theater "Chimen kwaze pou lape" began earlier this week and will continue through five departments: the Artibonite, North, West, Central Plateau and South until July 8, 2016.



This theatrical tour, which promotes social dialogue and the importance of the democratic system, covers topics such as voter turnout and non-violence. During the performances, the audience is invited to climb on stage to become "agents of change". This specific technique of "forum theater", developed in Haiti by "Les Rescapes" invites the audience to participate and find on stage, solutions to important problems, to conclude the play by solving the problems presented with professional actors. Each community visited offers innovative solutions to solve their problems. The representations are for all Haitians, regardless of sex or social class and promote national dialogue, the importance of voting, especially for young people, with a particular focus on young women.



Tour schedule :

Wednesday 15: St-Louis du Sud

Thursday 16: Cavaillon

Monday 20: Grande Riviere du Nord

Tuesday 21: Bahon

Thursday 23: Marchand Dessalines

Friday 24: Petite Riviere

Monday 27: Belladere

Tuesday 28: Lasacahobas

Wednesday. 29: Fonds Verrettes



July 2016

Monday 4: Delmas

Tuesday 5: Petionville

Wednesday 6: Martissant

Thursday 7: Cite Soleil

Friday. 8: Carrefour



Learn more about the Forum Theatre :

Created by Augusto Boal in 1960 in Brazil, the forum theater attempts to provide solutions to social problems by actively engaging the audience that replace the characters on stage. The "Les Rescapes" were trained in the technique of participatory theater in 2012 by the Swiss actor/director Fabrice Bessire. Since they use this technique as an advocacy tool to strengthen the capacity of communities to identify their own solutions to deal with problems such as including communal violence, women's place in society, sexual violence and gender-based, child trafficking, mob justice and electoral violence.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Politic : The G8 loses one of its members...





In a letter addressed to his colleagues of G8 dated Wednesday, the Notary Jean-Henry Ceant, former presidential candidate under the banner of "Renmen Ayiti" [came 6th with 39.005 votes or 3.63% of votes) announced them that he was forced to leave the G8, born November 2, 2015...



"[...] Dear compatriots and friends, our meetings and exchanges within the G-8 have greatly enriched me, they proved me that construction in the diversity that I have always advocated can enable us to succeed. This experience too short, inclines me to believe that if the Haitians demonstrate good faith, transcendence, setting aside private interests in favor of higher interests of the Nation, we are able to change the data and redirect the boat towards the happy achievement of the national destiny.



In this context, the G8 had a duty to rule on this conjoncture flavored with failure and chaos. Failing to convince you, dear comrades, I am compelled to dissociate myself from the group"



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Politic : Senators asked the PM to no longer engage the Haitian State





Following the end of the term of 120 days of the President a.i. Privert Tuesday, June 14 at midnight under the terms of the agreement of 6 February), two Senator President of Senate Commissions : Carl Murat Cantave (Health Board) and Youri Latortue (Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission) wrote to the Prime Minister asking him not to continue to engage the Haitian government until the void left by the expiration of the mandate of provisional President is filled.



Letter of Senators :

"The Presidents of the Standing Commissions signatories of the Present address you their respects and take the opportunity to enjoin you to kindly instruct the sectors and sub-sectors Ministerial, under your supervision not to continue to engage the Haitian government in their areas of intervention, until the void left by the expiration of the mandate of the provisional President, is filled.



Relying on your sense of responsibility, they ask you to accept, Mr. Prime Minister, the expression of their highest consideration.



Senator Carl Murat Cantave

President of the Health Commission



Senator Youri Latortue

President of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission



CC: Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes (CSC / CA)

Unit for Combating Corruption (ULCC)

Central Unit of Financial Intelligence (UCREF)"



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Published on 2016/06/15 | Source

While waitress 'A' reported JYJ Park Yoo-chun for rape, another waitress from the same bar made a statement.

Advertisement

TV Chosun "News Breaker" talked about the issue with Park Yoo-chun.

An interview was had with a waitress from the said bar.

The waitress asked what the problem was and the waitress said, "Usually we go out for round 2 but this time round 2 happened in the bathroom. You don't usually get paid for having round 2 in the bathroom".

"If the atmosphere isn't great, then the customers and waitresses don't hang out together because the customers usually ask for the waitresses to get changed".

The question, "Why did the waitress make such an accusation?" came up and the waitress said, "Because he didn't take her out for round 2 and finished in the bathroom".

Another waitress was asked how she saw this matter and she said, "It's not rape. If it was, we would have heard the scream from outside and we have a lot of people working here".

Detective Baek Ki-jong from the Soo-seo Police Station said, "If 'A' wasn't raped but only said so because of her individual feelings, it only makes out that she sued him under baseless evidence so it would make her guilty of calumny. Calumny faces a heavy penalty".

Meanwhile, Park Yoo-chun's agency made a statement:

"This case has made Park Yoo-chun a criminal just because he is a Hallyu star and because several media reported false accusations without checking the background for more information. This is an example of, "Don't ask or never mind" media play. Even when he was sued by the so-called victim, we asked the police to find out the truth behind this. When reports about this came out on the 13th, the police investigations weren't even going on and nothing was official. However, baseless reports started pouring out and in one day, our side had been affected severely. We aren't fighting with the victim but with the media".
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Published on 2016/06/15 | Source

OCN's new Friday & Saturday drama, 'Squad 38' held a press confrerence in the afternoon on June 15 at Time Square in Yeongdeungpo, Seoul.

Advertisement

Seo In-guk is responding to the photocalls at the venue.

Meanwhile, in "Squad 38", a tax collector and a legendary conman join forces to scam delinquent tax payers of their money. The drama is written by Han Jeong-hoon and directed by Han Dong-hwa. The delightful crime show is set to begin on June 17th at 11PM.
Harlow is a former New Town in Essex with a population of 86,000. Located in the upper Stort Valley, it was built in the decades after the Second World War to ease overcrowding and London and provide homes for people bombed out during the Blitz. It includes Britain's first pedestrian precinct and first modern residential tower block, The Lawn. Old Harlow, the historic part of the town, was mentioned in the Domesday Book. David and Victoria Beckham's former home, Rowneybury House, nicknamed 'Beckingham Palace', is nearby.

11:52, 25 OCT 2022
1300apprentice Churchill Education Data#3 DLA Piper

quo;I need a pay rise! These words may be heard all too frequently by HR professionals, but fortunately a significant 71% of voters in this years HRD Employer of Choice survey either agreed or strongly agreed their employer paid satisfactory remuneration. Thats not to say there arent challenges to remaining market competitive on remuneration.This year's top performers in the remuneration category were (in alphabetical order) 1300apprentice, Churchill Education, Data3 and DLA Piper.HC spoke to Jane Kennedy, CEO of 1300apprentice who said that operating in the not-for-profit area throws out unique challenges when considering remuneration. "While it is possible to find out the wage brackets for the various roles within our industry, it is the flexibility of conditions and family-friendly arrangements that people respond to" she said. "Each employee is an individual and wherever possible a package that suits the individual is devised. There is constant review of the industry standards and a genuine effort made to deliver competitive wages and outstanding conditions.In the survey, HR professionals shared their thoughts on the remuneration challenges that they are facing. One reader noted: The not-for-profit sector has been hit hard with FBT changes. Employers in social services and healthcare were also struggling to keep up with employee expectations. One respondent in a social services role wrote: The sector in general does not pay amazingly but you work for the love of enriching the lives of others.And even though the broader Australian economic outlook might be cautiously optimistic, in some instances this is not enough  especially in multinational corporations. One respondent suggested: Global directives may impact on the local operation's ability to reward on performance.Few things in business are more contentious than what people are paid  and while HR consultants continuously downplay the importance of financial reward, clearly employees value what they are being paid above almost everything else. In some instances, it can act as part of an effective retention strategy, as this reader pointed out: I strongly agree that my employer pays staff at a high level and this is one of the many reasons I have chosen to remain with this company for many years.Other employers have mixed in non-financial recognition to the remuneration on offer. One employee wrote: My employer offers competitive packages plus a great longevity program which provides rewards including bonuses, iPads, additional leave, sabbaticals, and a personal training and development fund.Top-performing companies for remuneration (in alphabetical order):
By Jessica Isaacs | [email protected]

Photos by Jeff Green

Friends and neighbors of the Blowing Rock community joined the folks at Premier Sothebys International Realty for the ribbon cutting and grand opening celebration of its newest locations on Sunset and Main streets on Tuesday afternoon.

We were extremely pleased with the turnout, said Don Blair, managing broker for Sothebys in Blowing Rock. We had a great group  clients, friends and town officials. It was a really excellent response.

The ribbon cutting was held at the Sunset Drive office and receptions followed at both locations.

We want everyone to know that we have two offices in town to serve our clients. Sunset is now one of the gateways into Blowing Rock from the new U.S. Highway 321 widening project, so we are convenient to people that are coming into town, Blair said. Our office on Main Street is there to serve a lot of the people that like to walk downtown.

Blair said the Sothebys team made the grand opening a priority in order to be sure the community was welcomed to join the celebration.

Everybody enjoys having a little party, and thats exactly what this was all about, he said.

Blair had one message for folks in the High Country: Were here and were open for business.

Premier Sothebys is the real estate division of the Naples, Fla.-based The Lutgert Companies, which opened the 1,800-acre Linville Ridge development in 1982. Serving as the exclusive marketing and sales brokerage of many other high-end developments, Premier Sothebys represents buyers and sellers of luxury homes and condos in Florida and North Carolina.

Premier Sothebys is an independent franchise of Sothebys International Realty, the latter of which was founded by the famed Sothebys auction house in 1976, several years after The Lutgert Companies started its real estate division.

Click here to read our Business Spotlight on Sothebys.

For more information, contact either Blowing Rock location:

Sothebys on Sunset:

159 Sunset Drive

828-414-9400

Open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1-5 p.m. on Sundays

Sothebys on Main:

1127 Main Street

828-295-0776

Open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1-5 p.m. on Sundays





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Blue Ridge Parkway Ranger Programs: June 22-26

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Cone Manor  Milepost 294

10:30 am  Informal Upstairs Tour at Cone Manor

From 10:30-12:00, the second floor of Cone Manor will be open for a do-it-yourself tour. Rangers will be on hand to answer questions.

Thursday June 23, 2016

Cone Manor  Milepost 294

10:30 Childrens Hour

Activities may include storytelling, traditional games, and/or hands on simple crafts. An adult or older responsible attendee must stay with children in order for them to participate (best suited for ages 4  12)

Friday, June 24, 2015

Cone Manor  Milepost 294

10:30 am  Informal Upstairs Tour at Cone Manor

From 10:30-12:00, the second floor of Cone Manor will be open for a do-it-yourself tour. Rangers will be on hand to answer questions.

Saturday June 25, 2016

Cone Manor  Milepost 294

10:00, 11:00, 2:00, 3:00 -Upstairs Tours at Cone Manor

Ranger led tours of the second floor of the former home of Moses and Bertha Cone. Tour is approximately 45 minutes long and reservations are required. To reserve a tour: call 828-295-3782 or sign up at the NPS information desk at the Manor House. Reservations are accepted beginning at 10:00am Friday for the upcoming weekend only. No advance reservations, please.

Julian Price Campground Amphitheater  Milepost 296

7:00 p.m.  Wanted: Dead or Alive! Lets Decide

Insects are the most abundant lifeform on Earth, and whether you love them or hate them, you cant live without them, so come learn about what they do for the planet.

Approximately 45 minutes in length

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Cone Manor  Milepost 294

10:00, 11:00, 2:00, 3:00 -Upstairs Tours at Cone Manor

Ranger led tours of the second floor of the former home of Moses and Bertha Cone. See Saturday (above) for details.

On the Same Page Festival Read Announced: Pretending to Dance

(West Jefferson)  On the Same Page Literary Festival is pleased to announce this years Festival Read  Pretending to Dance by international best-selling author Diane Chamberlain. Festival Read events will begin August 4, and culminate with Chamberlains participation in 2016s On the Same Page Literary Festival, which takes place September 13 through 17.

Chamberlain has written 24 books, frequently set in North Carolina. They are complex stories about family, compassion and forgiveness with strong elements of mystery and suspense. Pretending to Dance is no exception. Prior to her writing career, Chamberlain was a medical social worker and a psychotherapist in private practice, working primarily with adolescents. She is currently at work on her 25th novel, also set in North Carolina.

Everyone who has read Pretending to Dance has had wonderful things to say and we are excited about sharing it with our book-loving Festival community  its time to start reading, commented Jane Lonon, Executive Director of the Ashe County Arts Council. Books are available for lending at the Ashe County Public Library and for purchase at the Arts Council gift shop.

Events will begin with the Festival Read Kick-Off on Thursday, August 4, at2:00 p.m. at the Ashe County Public Library. Books will be available to borrow or purchase at the kick-off and refreshments will be provided. On following Thursdays at 2:00 p.m., the Festival will present Festival Read Conversationsabout themes from Pretending to Dance hosted by area experts on our topics:

Aug 25: Conversation on Adoption Issues

Sept. 1: Conversation on Family Dynamics/Secrets

Sept. 8: Conversation on End-of-Life Issues

The Festival Read Wrap-Up Discussion will take place on Wednesday, September 14, at the Ashe County Public Library at 4:00 p.m.

Diane Chamberlain will appear at the On the Same Page Literary Festivalon Thursday, September 15, at 2:00 p.m., at the Ashe County Public Library. She will also be at a Lunch With An Author event at 12 noon on Friday, September 16, and on the discussion panel at Saturday, September 17s On the Same Plate luncheon at 12:30 p.m.

On the Same Page, Ashe County, NCs Literary Festival, celebrates its ninth year in 2016 with award-winning authors and plans for a Festival filled with reading, writing workshops, music and more. This years Festival is scheduled for Tuesday  Saturday, September 13  17. The Festival is sponsored by the Ashe County Public Library and the Ashe County Arts Council and is supported with major funding from Skyline Membership Corporation and many individual donors  the Page Turners. On the Same Page is also funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. The County of Ashe and the Town of West Jefferson also support On the Same Page.

This years Festival authors include: Darnell Arnoult, Diane Chamberlain, Judy Cook, Elliot Engel, Georgann Eubanks, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Jeremy Hawkins, Charlie Lovett, Beth Macy, Sarah Shaber, and Kevin Morgan Watson. See the website www.onthesamepagefestival.org for details about times and locations of events. Most are free and open to the public; some require reservations/tickets.

Shop at Fourth Daughter in BE to Support Womens Fund Friday

Fourth Daughter | Social in the Studio

Friday, June 17th & Saturday, June 18th

10am  1pm

Brunch for a Bunch

Coffee & Chai with pastries, fruit, chocolate, & Prosecco

1pm  5pm

Sip and See

Wine with cheese and charcuterie

*Please carpool if possible*

www.fourthdaughter.com

Fourth Daughter

274 Highland Circle

Banner Elk, North Carolina 28604

828-898-3414

828-260-1373

[email protected]

TOO BUSY IN JUNE?

Join us Friday, August 19th and Saturday, August 20th

10am  5pm

Discount to Womens Fund of the Blue Ridge Members

Vacation Bible School at Mt. Vernon Baptist June 27-30

VBS at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church  Come join us for June 27  30 from9:00  12:15 for this Over-The-Top, Underground Adventure at Cave Quest VBS! Together we will learn what it means to have HOPE, COURAGE, DIRECTION, LOVE and POWER when we FOLLOW Jesus! The first 100 families to register by June 15, 2016will receive a free download of this years music!! Be sure to stop by or go online at http://mvbcb.org/ministries/ mvbckidz/ to register today and join us at Cave Quest VBS!

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By Jesse Wood

When Sara Bartlett turned 16 years old, her father, David Bartlett, owner of The Speckled Trout in Blowing Rock, told her to jump in the car. Saras birthday surprise was waiting for her down the mountain.

On the short drive, Sara fell asleep before waking up at the Hickory Regional Airport to her father saying, You are going to go flying today. Oh boy, she exclaimed.

Before then, Sara had never really thought about flying. But here on her 16th birthday she was picking between a Cessna and a Piper Cub airplane for her first incentive flight. She selected the Piper Cub, which in retrospect she thought was crazy because it was the oldest plane out there.

That first flight eight years ago was mind-blowing and she hasnt looked back since.

I just came back awestruck, said Sara. I was so excited and so into it.

Today, she is a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. Recently commissioned, Sara graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which Time Magazine once dubbed the Harvard of the Sky for its specialization in aviation education, this past May.

After starting out as a clueless cadet at risk of being kicked out of ROTC at Embry-Riddle for being an unambitious college student, Bartlett began to take a serious approach to life and her education. In her time in ROTC, Bartlett persevered through the ranks to become one of only 42 people in her class of 300 to be commissioned. On top of that, she was one of only three women in her class to be commissioned.

Both of Saras parents, David Bartlett and Marybeth Dandrea, are obviously excited that Sara found her calling and pursued it through lifes ups and downs. I am tickled pink that she is happy, Bartlett said. Yes. I am a proud daddy.

During his childhood, Bartlett said he was never exposed to much of anything, so he felt inclined to introduce her to visceral moments like flying a plane. I wanted her to have confidence and experience things that I never experienced, Bartlett said. And you know, the main reason was I knew she would love it.

Mom, of course, is just as proud of her daughter.

I think its amazing, Dandrea said. I am just really happy for her and the opportunity.

But as moms are wont to do, Dandrea was hoping for something more like a desk job. In fact, Sara was initially on track through ROTC and Embry-Riddle to specialize in unmanned aircraft systems, one of four positions that cadets are shuffled into based on a variety of criteria.

While Sara enjoyed the culture and camaraderie of the Air Force, in the back of her mind, Sara wanted to fly planes  from thousands of feet up in the air. She wanted the calm, exhilaration of the birds eye view. She wanted to be a combat systems operator  and not control a drone from a remote location.

Two weeks prior to being commissioned and prior to graduation, Sara received the phone call she was hoping for. Headquarters called down and offered to bump her up from unmanned aircraft systems to the more-coveted combat systems officer.

I got that phone call and was over the moon, Sara said.

She said shes going to be a navigator like Goose in the 80s flick, Top Gun. She wont be controlling the fighter plane, but shell be in the air organizing missions and communicating with the fighter pilot and other aircraft in the vicinity.

As the summer continues, Sara will head to Pensacola, Fla., to learn how to fly in the United States Air Force. Depending on the particular plane shell be instructed to learn, Sara said she will be learning to fly  or even better, getting paid to learn to fly  for at least the next 2  years.

She hopes to fly either a F-15e or any variation of the C-130.

Born and raised in the High Country and a graduate of Watauga High School, Sara said the best decision she made was to attend a school hundreds of miles away. She also said she didnt let other peoples preconceived notions alter her horizon, and she didnt let fear hold her back.

If you let yourself be scared of everything, you wont do anything, Sara said. I think a lot of it is you just gotta jump.

That and being surrounded by a supporting cast of family and friends.

Thank you mom and dad and awesome family and friends, Sara said.

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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.

June 6

INCIDENT: A male suspect, 32, of 329 Creek View Lane in Boone, was charged with OFA FTA poss marij >  to 1  oz and M-carry concealed weapon. He was held under a $2,500 bond and will appear in court on June 29.

June 7

INCIDENT: Larceny of auto parts and accessories was reported at 138 Hill Road in Zionville.

ARREST: A female suspect, 19, of 428 Blue Bird Lane in Boone, was charged with trespassing and will appear in court on July 5.

ARREST: A male suspect, 22, of 124 Quail Ridge Lane Apt. B in Boone, was charged with OFA FTA and child abuse. He was held under a $15,000 secured bond and will appear in court on July 1.

ARREST: A male suspect, 50, of 733 Forest Hills in Boone, was charged with simple assault and will appear in court on Aug. 3.

June 8

INCIDENT: Simple assault was reported at Butterfly Place in Deep Gap.

INCIDENT: Possession of drug paraphernalia and probation violation were reported at 179 Lola Perry Road in Zionville.

ARREST: A male suspect, 28,of 325 Mitchell Hill Lane in Elk Park, was charged with DWI and will appear in court on Aug. 1.

ARREST: A female suspect, 47, of 982 Howard Edmisten Road in Sugar Grove, was charged with FTA. She was held under a $750 secured bond and will appear in court on June 28.

June 9

INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 201 Isaacs Drive in Vilas.

INCIDENT: Breaking and entering and larceny from buildings were reported at 1119 Brownwood Road Unit 3 in Deep Gap.

INCIDENT: Larceny from buildings and breaking and entering were reported at 220 Owl Rest Lane in Deep Gap.

INCIDENT: Drug violations were reported at 6000 Meat Camp Road in Todd.

INCIDENT: Use foreign license while DWLR in NC, DWLR and possession of marijuana paraphernalia were reported in the parking lot of Smoke Tree Lodge in Banner Elk.

ARREST: A male suspect, 20, of 135 Gene Honeycutt Road in Todd, was charged with felony possession of methamphetamine. He was held under a $5,000 secured bond and will appear in court on July 8.

ARREST: A male suspect, 41, of 995 Snyder Branch Road in Todd, was charged with drug violations and will appear in court on July 8.

ARREST: A male suspect, 40, of 211 Powell Street in Mountain City, was charged with drug violations. He was held under a $500 secured bond and will appear in court on July 8.

ARREST: A male suspect, 38, of 793 Pine View Trail in Kissimmee, Florida, was charged with use foreign license while DWLR in NC, DWLR and possession of marijuana paraphernalia. He was held under a $750 secured bond and will appear in court on Aug. 1.

June 10

INCIDENT: Larceny and vandalism were reported at 1119 Brownwood Road Apt. 3 in Deep Gap.

INCIDENT: Vandalism was reported at 100 Guy Ford Road in Sugar Grove.

ARREST: A male suspect, 35, of 244 Devils Den Road in Banner Elk, was charged with OFA FTA.

ARREST: A male suspect, 40, of 469 Grandfather Road Unit C in Banner Elk, was charged with two counts of M-school attendance law violation and will appear in court on July 15.

ARREST: A female suspect, 42, of 469 Grandfather Road Unit C in Banner Elk, was charged with two counts of M-school attendance law violation and will appear in court on July 15.

ARREST: A male suspect, 29, of 300 Mountain View Baptist Church Road in Deep Gap, was charged with failure to pay child support. He was held under a $1,165 bond and will appear in court on June 16.

June 11

INCIDENT: Larceny from buildings was reported at 5660 U.S. Highway 421 N in Vilas.

June 12

INCIDENT: Calls for service were reported at 220 Sunrise Ridge in Vilas.

INCIDENT: Injury to personal property and underage consumption of alcohol were reported at 892 Fallview Lane Unit 2 in Boone.

INCIDENT: Larceny from motor vehicle was reported at 145 Rocky Road in Banner Elk.

ARREST: A male suspect, 42, of 311 E Circle Drive in Boone, was charged with two counts of contempt of court/perjury/court violations. He was held under a $4,000 secured bond and will appear in court on Aug. 15.

ARREST: A female suspect, 33, of 1251 Brookshire Road in Boone, was charged with felony larceny/remove theft device. She was held under a $3,000 secured bond and will appear in court on July 13.

ARREST: A male suspect, 29, of 7727 Kenneth Lane in Charlotte, was charged with injury to personal property and consumption of alcohol by 19/20. He was held under a $1,500 secured bond and will appear in court on Aug. 1.

ARREST: A male suspect, 18, of 783 Rainbow Mountain Road in Boone, was charged with consumption of alcohol by

ARREST: A male suspect, 19, of 321 Majesco Drive in Boone, was charged with consumption of alcohol by 19/20. He was held under a $500 secured bond and will appear in court on Aug. 1.

June 13

INCIDENT: Damage to property was reported at 190 Bettys Circle in Deep Gap.

INCIDENT: Simple physical assault was reported at 1033 Seven Oaks Road in Boone.

INCIDENT: Missing person was reported at 2132 Hardin Road in Boone.

ARREST: A female suspect, 30, of 338 Brook Hollow Road in Boone, was charged with school attendance law and probation violation. She was held under a $1,000 secured bond and will appear in court on July 15.

ARREST: A male suspect, 64, of 338 Brook Hollow Road in Boone, was charged with FTA OFA. He was held under a $2,000 secured bond and will appear in court on July 25.

ARREST: A male suspect, 34, of 1042 Peak Road in Creston, was charged with simple assault and will appear in court on Aug. 1.

ARREST: A female suspect, 30, of 2114 Longhope Road in Todd, was charged with FTA OFA. She was held under a $428 secured bond and will appear in court on July 7.
We must strengthen defence co-operation within the European Union because the security situation both in our eastern and southern neighbourhood has changed, Prime Minister Juha Sipila (Centre) said following his meetings with President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls in Paris on Wednesday.

Finland and France have issued a joint statement urging the European Union to develop its common defence and security policy further and to enhance its co-operation with Nato.

We, together with France, hope that there is common political will in the EU member states to broaden co-operation from crisis management to protecting Europe and the Europeans, he added, according to a press release from the Finnish Government.

Sipila estimated that the European Council in June and the Nato Summit in July should create political momentum for developing the co-operation. Co-operation is important especially in the areas of maritime safety, countering hybrid threats and supporting partners in training and exercises, he said.

The Finnish Government reveals in the press release that the discussions between the heads of state also broached on a number of topical EU issues, such as counter-terrorism, immigration and EUUK relations, and the economic conditions in Finland and France.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Alain Jocard  AFP / Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
Detectives were continuing to question a man in his 30s at Shankill Garda Station last night (Stock picture)

A man was being questioned last night after gardai found cannabis worth more than 500,000 during a raid in Shankill.

The significant discovery was made when officers conducted a planned raid on a house in the Heronford Lane area.

Gardai were shocked to find 400 cannabis plants growing on the ground floor of the house.

They also discovered around 700 plants growing in the basement.

Surprised

Neighbours in the usually quiet area were surprised when several units of garda investigators arrived to conduct further examinations.

Although garda technicians are still analysing the plants, detectives believe the entire haul has a street value of more than 500,000.

Detectives were continuing to question a man in his 30s at Shankill Garda Station last night.

Senior sources said he is not a high-profile criminal.

"He has been totally under the radar," a source told the Herald.

"He wouldn't be a well-known figure in the drug world, but he has popped up for some things.

"There may be files being prepared or further prosecutions down the line."

The raid will be seen as a significant victory in the war on drugs.

A garda spokesman said the raid was "part of an ongoing operation targeting the cultivation of cannabis in the south Dublin area.
Gda Donal Maguire didnt know he was doing wrong Picture: Collins

A garda harassed a sergeant by sending her a Valentine card, emails and a friend request on Facebook despite numerous warnings from his superiors.

Gerardine Small, prosecuting, told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that Gda Donal Maguire's harassment of the woman was not disputed. Rather, the jurors were told they would have to determine if he was suffering from a mental disorder at the time.

Gda Maguire (40), of Rock Road, Bundoran, Co Donegal, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two counts of harassing the woman in Dublin on dates between February 18 and March 11, 2012 and between August 1, 2012 and February 4, 2013.

Det Supt Walter O'Sullivan said Gda Maguire first met the sergeant at the Dublin station where he worked in 2011.

In February 2012, the woman received a Valentine card signed by the accused which stated he never dreamed how wonderful his life could be until the day "you came along".

He said she meant the world to him and he signed it with "love and eternal gratitude".

He had also transcribed the poem, The Cloths of Heaven, by WB Yeats on to the card.

The sergeant spoke with Gda Maguire privately, saying they were both married with children, she had no romantic interest in him and if he did it again she would report him.

She believed that would be the end of the matter, but he continued to contact her through email via the garda Pulse system.

One email began: "I love you and I want all your life into mine."

The woman contacted her superior and he spoke with Gda Maguire, who said he was very fond of the woman and had not meant to upset her. He said would not contact her again.

There was no communication for six months until she received an email, again via pulse, from Gda Maguire.

She was angry, but ignored it, but the following day she received another. At this point she realised she would have to make a formal complaint.

She reported the emails and Gda Maguire was disciplined. The emails continued, which resulted in his access to the system being revoked.

Gda Maguire turned up at a 10km race the sergeant was running in and her colleagues saw him staring at her.

Two weeks later she received a friend request from him on Facebook.

That was the final contact before the seriousness of the harassment was escalated and investigated as a criminal offence.

Psychiatrist

The sergeant was granted annual leave following the Facebook contact, as her superiors believed she was not in "a fit position to do her work".

Det Supt O'Sullivan agreed with Ronan Kennedy, defending, that when Gda Maguire was interviewed in June 2013, he said he was infatuated with the woman.

Gda Maguire had difficulty understanding what he had been doing was wrong.

He accepted that, following the interview, both he and his colleagues had concerns for Gda Maguire's well-being.

Ms Small told the jury it would hear this morning from consultant psychiatrist Dr Brenda Wright. She would testify that, in her view, Gda Maguire "didn't know what he was doing was wrong, was unable to appreciate the wrongness and was unable to refrain".

The trial continues today before Judge Elma Sheahan and a jury of three women and nine men.
Dublin TD Kate O'Connell has said she'd like to see a referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment "tomorrow".

But she conceded that she can't argue with a citizen's convention discussing the matter first, saying politicians with more experience "obviously think it's a good idea".

Independent Children Minister Katherine Zappone - who is in favour of repealing the amendment that gives equal status to the life of a woman and her unborn child - has predicted that a vote won't happen until the end of 2017.

Fine Gael's Ms O'Connell believes Ms Zappone is being realistic.

"I wish it could happen tomorrow but that's not possible ... These things have to run their course. If a citizen's convention is what has been decided is the best course of action by the Taoiseach, well I have to accept that," she told the Herald.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said he doesn't believe a referendum on the Eighth Amendment would pass if it was held as early as October this year.

He said that there first needs to be a debate around what would replace it and pledged to bring a memo to Cabinet next week to establish the citizen's convention.

Debating

Ms O'Connell said she's not opposed to the idea of the convention debating the issue.

"I think those that have more experience than I do obviously think it's a good idea," the first-time TD said.

"The worst thing we could do is to rush into something, because if it's rushed into and it's not done right it'll be a 'No' vote and we will continue exporting the problem," she added.

Ms O'Connell said she believes abortion should be a woman's choice, albeit with strict term limits.

She said it should be "free, safe and legal and, to quote Doctors for Choice: 'As early as possible and as late as necessary'."
She's seen the world of politics up close and personal thanks to her marriage to Fine Gael TD John Deasy, but Maura Derrane has said she has no wish to follow her husband down that road.

The RTE host (45) and John (48) tied the knot in 2005 and had their son, Cal, in 2014.

Maura said the couple rarely discuss their careers with each other when they get home from work.

"A career in politics? No, absolutely not. I can give you a definite 'no' on that," she told the Herald.

"No way. I'm really happy with what I do. We have very different careers. We have very different pastimes. It's great."

Speaking at the launch of McElligott's Honda Ladies' Day at Listowel Races, Maura said the only career similarity she shares with her husband is that they are both in the media spotlight.

"The only thing we have in common work-wise would be that we are both in the public eye," she said.

"We have very private lives and we don't really cross over into other people's careers, and that's probably the best way.

Wishes

"We don't sit around talking politics every day or talking television every day. We go to work, do the job, and that really is it."

Maura became a mother later in life, having Cal when she was age 43. She previously revealed that she sometimes wishes she had had her son when she was younger so she could have given him a sibling.

"Now that he's a bit older, it would have been nice to have another child. I'm not going to, I'm too old," she said.

The McElligott's Honda Ladies' Day will take place on September 16 on the second-last day of the racing festival, with the best-dressed lady receiving a cheque for 1,000.
The field in the Dublin Mountains where gardai will search for Philip Cairns remains Picture: INM

This is where gardai are expected to begin digging for the body of missing schoolboy Philip Cairns.

The land in the Dublin Mountains is now at the centre of the garda investigation into the abduction of the Rathfarnham schoolboy.

It's understood that this isolated field was once the site used by paedophile Eamon Cooke, who died aged 79 earlier this month, to transmit a signal for his pirate radio station.

Sources have said that a number of witnesses have told gardai that they saw Cooke using a digger on the property over 30 years ago when he positioned a radio signal repeater.

It has been claimed that the serial child abuser concealed a container 20ft underground on the site, where he also once kept a caravan.

Gardai are preparing to carry out a forensic search of the property as part of their efforts to locate the remains of the missing boy.

Philip disappeared on October 23, 1986, while walking back to Colaiste Eanna, where he had been a first-year student for just over a month. His schoolbag was found six days later in a laneway yards from his home on the Ballyroan Road, in Rathfarnham.

Landowner

Now it has emerged that detectives made a preliminary visit to the site yesterday and have reportedly spoken to the current landowner - who had no connection with Cooke and is not suspected of any involvement with any crime.

A woman in her 40s has recently come forward to tell gardai that she saw the schoolboy being beaten unconscious by Cooke in his radio studio in Inchicore on the day he went missing.

Last month, Cooke confirmed to detectives on his deathbed that he knew Philip Cairns and that the boy had been in his radio studio. It is understood that gardai also independently corroborated aspects of the woman's story.

It's now believed that Cooke may have persuaded another of his young victims to dump the bag in a laneway the following week.

Detectives launched an appeal last night at Tallaght Garda Station after the woman came forward with new information in recent weeks following his death. Detectives would not confirm if Cooke is the main suspect in the disappearance of the 13-year-old Dublin schoolboy - but they do believe people have vital information to solve the horrific case.

Superintendent Peter Duff said the new information resulted in 160 new "lines of inquiry" being opened.

"From our inquiries, I believe there are people who were young at the time who may have information in relation to Philip's schoolbag, and for whatever reason did not come forward," he said.

"I am conscious that due the passage of time and changing circumstances, that these people may now be in a position to assist.

"This may be playing on their minds. I would ask these people to now come forward."

Information

The detective stressed that people with information would be treated "sensitively and discreetly".

"We're anxious to hear from anybody who may have knowledge how the schoolbag came to be in the laneway, who may have seen it being put there or who observed it there at anytime," he said.

"For the sake of Mrs Cairns and her family, who have been suffering for 30 years, it is important we bring this investigation to a conclusion."

Supt Duff said there was DNA found on the schoolbag at the time of the disappearance and that with new technology they can "focus on the DNA more so".

The garda said a large number of people have come forward with information in recent days and are being interviewed on an ongoing basis.

"We are getting to people who have contacted us and assessing whatever they have to offer," he said.

Gardai last night would not be drawn on Cooke's direct involvement with the disappearance and also could not "confirm or deny" if the people gardai would like to come forward were connected to Cooke.

Supt Duff added that searches are "a while away". He maintained that gardai would need to "pinpoint a search area" to conduct searches in the Dublin Mountains.

Detectives also praised the woman, who delayed coming forward with information at the time in fear of Cooke, for contacting gardai with the new information.

"At the time of the incident the person that came forward was a very young child," Supt Duff said.

"It took some time for the person to be able to provide specific information to us. That information was provided earlier this year. We are treating that witness very sensitively.

"I commend her for coming forward, even after the passage of time, to say she had information," he added.
A Trinity College researcher has revealed harrowing details of her mother's treatment in a hospital and nursing home to highlight the need for a new approach to caring for the elderly.

Dr Sabina Brennan heads Trinity's NEIL Research Programme, which looks at areas including dementia.

She was speaking at a conference on long-term care held in Dublin when she revealed her own family's story.

Dr Brennan's mother, Colette O'Reilly, was hospitalised in 2013 and spent time in an acute hospital.

Dr Brennan claimed that during her stay her mother had been "chemically restrained" because she had been walking the hospital corridors, seeking to go home.

"I can tell you from my two-and-a-half year journey with my mum that we should be ashamed, utterly ashamed, of how we treat older adults in Ireland," said Dr Brennan.

"I arrived in between 10 or 11am and I found my mum in a chair beside her bed, with her knuckles on the floor, slumped over. Her mouth was open and she was drooling.

Terrified

"She was aware, but she was completely immobile."

The sedation had made it difficult for her mother to talk, and she was terrified as a result of the medication, Dr Brennan claimed.

She said that in another incident during her hospital stay, Mrs O'Reilly was left in pain for 11 hours because the nurse was unable to prescribe painkillers other than one dose of paracetamol.

"How can a nurse chemically restrain my mother in one incident and not relieve her pain in another? Something is radically wrong," said Dr Brennan.

A number of worrying incidents also happened in a nursing home where Mrs O'Reilly had spent time and which violated her human rights, Dr Brennan claimed.

These included one occ-asion when staff forgot to feed Mrs O'Reilly while she was with family members.

"I'm doing this to make the future different for my children. I don't want them to live through this with me," said Dr Brennan.

"I hope we can influence policy."
Our Ladys Hospital, where the body of a nurse was found in a room used by parents of sick children

The body of a nurse who died in tragic circumstances may have lain undiscovered for up to two days at a Dublin children's hospital.

The nurse, who was in her early 30s, was found on Tuesday morning in one of the rooms in Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin.

It is understood that the nurse was last seen on duty on Sunday.

It's believed that she was found in one of the rooms in the hospital which are set aside for parents' accommodation.

When her body was discovered, efforts were made to resuscitate her, but it was too late.

Tragedy

Gardai have now launched an investigation into the death, but are satisfied that there was no foul play involved.

A senior officer has confirmed that they were treating the death as a tragedy.

The investigation will include an examination of how a member of staff was in possession of a key for a parents' room.

Parents are given accommodation in a special section of the hospital.

Some parents whose child is a patient can be allocated a room but leave their belongings behind if they return to their home for few days.

In those situations the room is unlikely to be visited by staff.

The nurse's body was found in one of these room used occasionally by parents of sick children for resting.

She is understood to have completed her shift at the hospital on Sunday and then went into the room, which was unoccupied at the time.

Initial inquiries suggest that she died a short time later.

Her body was not discovered until Tuesday.

Staff at the hospital are understood to be devastated by the death of their colleague.

A spokeswoman for the hospital confirmed the death of a staff member.

"Our thoughts, prayers and deepest condolences go out to the staff member's family and friends and colleagues here Our Lady's Hospital," the spokesperson said.

"The hospital will be making no further comment as it is the subject of a garda investigation."

The General Secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), Liam Doran, said the union had no comment.

He said he was aware of the incident and said it was a terrible tragedy.
Washington County Football: What to watch and who will win in Week 9
Business / Companies

by Chido Chikuni

The continued liquidity crunch being experienced in country could be a result of illicit financial deals by some people in the business community who are unwillingly failing to deposit their proceeds in their bank accounts.Section 11 of the Bank Use Promotion Act requires business people to deposit their profit in their bank accounts. The Act stipulates that: 'Every trader, and parastatal shall, unless it has good cause for not doing so, deposit in an account with a financial institution, no later than the close of normal business hours on the day following that on which the cash is received or on the next banking day, cash that is surplus to the requirement of the trader.'Recent reports from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) have it that cash deposits have declined by an average of 40 percent during the month of May 2016. Such a wide margin decrease in cash deposits is a big threat that can cause further cash shortages and economy decline due to limited flow of the money.Most foreign business people like the Chinese, Indians and Nigerians operating in Zimbabwe have been fingered for externalizing cash to their home countries. This has actually worsened the cash crisis in the country. President Robert Mugabe was spot on when he advised the Chinese business people to deposit their proceeds in our local banks. It would be wiser if all investors both local and external deposit their profits in their bank accounts. Certainly, this will allow smooth circulation of cash in the economy. As it stands, most business people are either smuggling their profits to their respective countries or withholding it at their homes or business premises.Investors should be more concerned with doing business that support and promote growth of the economy there are operating in rather than derailing the efforts of developing that nation. All those found guilty of illicit financial flows should be severely penalized as this is contributing to the destabilization of the economy left, right and center.On the other hand, banks should try to moderate their arbitrary charges. High banking charges create financial burdens especially for low income earners. People should not hesitate to deposit their hard earned cash in their bank accounts. High banking charges scare aware depositors thereby disturbing the smooth circulation of cash in the economy. Bank charges should accommodate even those in the informal sector who may want to safely keep their profits in their bank accounts.If both informal and formal workers put an effort to deposit their funds in their accounts, the risk of withdrawal limits will also be minimized. It wouldn't be fair if one deposits a certain amount of money but will be limited to withdraw it because of limited cash in those banks. It is therefore everyone's responsibility to deposit their proceeds in order to permit constant circulation of money in the market.However, it is heartening that most retail and wholesale shops have introduced point of sale (POS) purchases at their outlets. Fuel dealers should also emulate the use of POS purchase and introduce them at their filling stations. This is a safe way of transacting as people would not be forced to travel around with large amounts of money reserving it for fuel. Big retail and wholesale shops that do not have POS machines should be encouraged to do as this a better way of trying to manage the current liquidity crunch.Unfortunately, the economic challenges that the country is encountering are being twisted into political issues by the opposition parties. The government has been busy layering constructive measures to control the issue of cash crisis, but most opposition parties have been shooting down the ideas. Instead of proffering substantive solutions that support government policies and programmes, opposition MDC party led by Morgan Tsvangirai was also busy making noise in the streets inciting innocent Zimbabweans to resist governments' efforts.-------chido chikuni
News / Africa

by Staff reporter

Former president Thabo Mbeki's brother, Moeletsi Mbeki, would even blame the drought on the ANC, said the party's spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa.Kodwa was responding to a recent statement by Mbeki during a Daily Dispatch Dialogue in which he said the ANC officials who came to his brother's house to ask him to resign should have been tried for treason."He lives in his own world. Obviously he is detached from reality. One of the things we invite him to do is to ask people who know better," Kodwa said."He likes giving speeches and he does it without doing research. Because of his desperation to demonise the ANC, he finds every fault including drought; now that it's winter he will [probably] blame the ANC."Mbeki told News24 that people were dying in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) because the ANC failed to give an explanation for the recent ousting of former premier, Senzo Mchunu.Removed a premierHe said the Mchunu's axing was an example of the ANC's unilateral decision-making without giving explanations."We have to follow the law and the Constitution. We cannot have personal preference. If we don't follow the Constitution, we end up with the situation starting to emerge in KZN..."The president is not elected by ANC but by parliament. Only parliament can remove the president of the country, otherwise we create the chaos. We can see the precedent. The KZN (ANC) just removed a premier with no explanation given," he said.Kodwa, however, said the ANC did not owe Mbeki an explanation.False allegations"He thinks the struggle is inherited. Just because he is the brother of a member doesn't mean we have an obligation to explain our decisions. His allegations are false," Kodwa maintained.The Daily Dispatch newspaper reported that during his speech, Mbeki said the ANC had proved it was capable of acting just as the National Party government had acted towards black South Africans.He said Marikana demonstrated the ANC had capacity to use force, the Daily Dispatch reported."The importance of Marikana was that the ANC demonstrated that it could gun down its former supporters and there would be no uprising," Mbeki said.
News / Education

by Brenda Ziga

Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko yesterday lauded churches for complementing Government's efforts in delivering quality education to Zimbabweans.Officially opening Howard High School girls' hostel and matron's house in Chiweshe yesterday, Mphoko said one of the challenges Government faced in the education sector was the construction of infrastructure."The construction of Howard High School girls' lodge is a true testimony of how schools from time immemorial have been immensely contributing towards the enlightenment of our communities both spiritually and academically."Today, Zimbabwe is celebrated as having the highest literacy rate in Africa as a result of the Government, churches and the private sectors' collaborative efforts towards ensuring that our people are educated," he said.Mphoko urged the private sector to complement Government's efforts to build schools in rural and new resettlement areas."Schools need to be built to accommodate pupils, especially in the rural areas and newly resettled farms."When churches like the Salvation Army join Government in the building of school infrastructure, it is a challenge other key stakeholders like the private sector need to take up and also play their part as this is part of their corporate social responsibility," he said.Mphoko said responsible authorities may partner with the private sector to form good relationships to construct school infrastructure."Responsible authorities may need to court the private sector and form smart partnerships, and construct school infrastructure under the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) arrangement."In the Zim-Asset, which is the Government's socio-economic blueprint, it is stated that, whilst the nation prides itself with a literacy rate of 92 percent, there is need to ensure that schools are built and equipped particularly in the newly resettled areas," he said.Mphoko commended the Salvation Army for enhancing the security of the girl child."It is pleasing to note that the construction of this girls' lodge enhances the security of the girl child. The girls will be decently accommodated and afforded a conducive learning environment that promotes academic excellence."One of the challenges that the rural girl child has to contend with, is walking long distances to school, exposing her to potential abuse."This development augurs well with Government strategy on the empowerment of the girl child and advocacy on gender parity in all spheres of life," he said.Mphoko urged pupils not to leave the country after completing their studies as some were subjected to abuse in foreign countries."I urge you not to leave the country in the name of seeking 'greener pastures' because there are no green pastures out there but there are 'red pastures' as you will face abuse and xenophobia," he said.Mphoko also toured Nyachuru Primary and Secondary schools in Mashonaland Central.
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News / Local

by Staff Reporter

A kombi driver appeared before Harare magistrate Fadzai Mtombeni facing charges of culpable homicide.The driver, Costa Gono, is accused of 'killing' a Zanu PF youth league member who tried to attack him after seeing Mugabe at Harare International Airport.According to NewsDay, the incident happened after ferrying the deceased, Tapiwa Chibvunze of Waterfalls from Harare International Airport, where he had gone with others to welcome President Robert Mugabe.Mugabe was coming from Japan.The court heard that the accused driver was being attacked by Mugabe's supporters and tried to flee the scene.Gono allegedly "sped off while dragging the now deceased and another supporter, who was hanging from his wing mirror," Newsday reported.The prosecutor told the court that the accused "failed to stop despite realising that his actions could cause the death of the two supporters, who were still hanging precariously onto the kombi."According to the publication, the deceased fell then fell and sustained severe head injuries, bled profusely and died before admission at hospital.
Eighty-four years after JRD Tata heralded the birth of civil aviation in India by operating the maiden flight to Mumbai from Karachi via Ahmedabad; 63 years after government assumed ownership of Air India and Indian Airlines; and 25 years after private airlines were allowed to operate in Indian skies, the country finally has a national civil aviation policy (NCAP)  approved by the Narendra Modi government on June 15.

Intriguingly, in a country that operated its first international flight on June 8, 1948, when most airlines now dominating the Indian skies did not even exist, the delay is inexplicable. It is difficult to surmise as to why the country functioned all these years without a defined national aviation policy. Was it lack of vision? Or, was it driven by the socialist philosophy that aviation, deemed as an elitist industry till not long ago, deserved no attention?

The political masters overlooked the fact that by not creating an environment conducive for the aviation industrys growth through clear-cut policies they had put India to a great disadvantage even though global experiences had shown that the aviation industry acted as a catalyst for economic development. The early-starter advantage that JRD Tata had provided India had been frittered away by our political masters.

Read | Fliers to wait till July 1 for lower fee on excess baggage

Whatever be the cause, in retrospect, one can only assess and rue the humongous harm the procrastination has caused because even after the need for a national policy was realised in the early 1990s, the policy had remained in the works for 25 long years. The biggest setback has been in the global standing of India in the industry because the only reason why India receives attention from foreign carriers is for exploitation of its burgeoning market and not for any significant contribution. It wouldnt also be incorrect to say that our market has to a large extent been responsible for fuelling the growth of several carriers in the Gulf and South East Asia.

In a marked reversal of mindset, the NCAP now seeks to make air travel affordable by aiming to have 300 million domestic passengers by 2022 from the present 80 million to become the third-largest civil aviation market in the world.

Read | New civil aviation policy focuses on capping fares, regional connectivity

The NCAP, as an indirect bonanza, will also achieve a larger objective of ending the ad hocism that has existed in the sector. The contentious 5/20 rule (five years of domestic operations and a fleet of 20 aircraft to become eligible for international operations) which delayed the NCAP announcement has been one example of ad hoc policy-making to benefit a particular airline. As a compromise, the NCAP has replaced it with 0/20, doing away with the need for the five-year stipulation to be eligible because all older private airlines were aggressively campaigning against its total abolition.

Even if some aviation analysts may fault the NCAP by identifying areas left unaddressed, it is a praiseworthy effort because it encompasses all major operational facets, particularly the concept of regional connectivity and development of Maintenance Repair & Overhaul (MRO). Both these areas have enormous potential waiting to be exploited.

Read | Vistara, AirAsia India look to expand fleet size to 20 planes as rules eased

Considering Indias geographical spread and fast-growing economy the huge potential for business and leisure travel in tier two and three cities has remained unharnessed because most airlines have largely concentrated on main cities because of high traffic density and higher fares. With concessions like no airport charges, reduced excise duty on aviation turbine fuel and state governments desirous of flights in tier two and three cities required to bear the cost of security, fire services and other amenities, the operational cost for airlines will reduce. This innovative thinking has enabled the government to cap the fare on a one-hour regional connectivity flight to 2,500. The concept of Viability Gap Funding for airlines, if operational costs exceed the capped fare, should ignite interest in airlines to lease smaller aircraft and enhance air connectivity. Achhe din are thus in the offing for people of small cities. Likewise, for the policy on MRO. Hitherto, Indian carriers with the exception of Air India were sending aircraft to Singapore, Sri Lanka, Dubai, etc, for major maintenance. With incentives granted under the NCAP, MROs established in India will not only enable execution of maintenance work at relatively low costs but also generate employment. It will only be a question of time before Indian MROs establish themselves and are able to undertake maintenance of aircraft of foreign airlines too  effectively reversing the current trend.

Absence of policy had also enabled the political leadership to recklessly dole out seats to foreign airlines under bilateral agreements, far in excess of requirement, thus not only giving them a head start but also facilitating a stranglehold of foreign carriers on the Indian market  hindering the growth of Indian carriers on several routes as they get ready to mount services.

Read | Flyers, airlines get fare deal in aviation policy

One only hopes that with the NCAP in place, the Indian aviation industry will gain strength, the governments desire of making air travel affordable will be achieved in quick time, and the nation will soon realise what the delay of almost three decades in evolving the NCAP has cost the country.

Jitender Bhargava is former executive director, Air India

The views expressed are personal
I have been a teacher at a Delhi University (DU) college for the past 15 years. In this period, we have been subjected to an unprecedented number of changes in the course structure, curriculum, and grading mechanisms, and each time teachers have been forced to accept what was presented to them as a fait accompli. One may be surprised to learn that in the last academic session, DU had three different courses during the three-year course for undergraduate students, with three different marking schemes. Such has been the plethora of changes  from semester to FYUP (four-year undergraduate programme) and then to CBCS (choice-based credit system). Meanwhile, government policies over the past few years have meant that ad hoc teachers have not become permanent even after seven to eight years of teaching, and permanent teachers are awaiting promotion due to them since 2009.

Read: UGC relents but teachers to continue their boycott

In the midst of all this, on May 4 the ministry of human resource development brought out a gazette notification via the University Grants Commission, which is the only grant-giving agency in the country which has been vested with two responsibilities: Providing funds and coordination, determination and maintenance of standards in institutions of higher education, stating that university teachers would now have to take 14, 16, 18 lectures a week, depending on their designation, apart from tutorials and administrative work, which would account for another six hours per week. Why is this significant? First, the UGC notification talks of 600 annual teaching hours, which is impossible even if one teaches all seven days of the week and takes no leave in the year. The guidelines now expect even more work in less time. Second, the notification makes tutorials optional and outside direct teaching hours. Tutorials have always been included in direct contact hours, and now in one stroke the UGC and the ministry have ensured that 5,000 ad hoc teachers would be jobless in DU alone, and in many departments, even permanent faculty would become surplus. Tutorials enable more focused discussion in smaller groups, and are a critical part of our social justice mechanism. Many students from deprived communities who hesitate to speak up in class are much more open in tutorials, which play a major role in their overall performance. With so many young colleagues already bearing the brunt of contractual ad hoc appointment, this notification has taken away their jobs and left them overqualified for many others  all this despite being armed with MA/MSc, MPhil and PhD degrees, with quality publications and even authored books to their credit.

For another 3,000 teachers, the gazette notification is just another step backward in the six-year-old battle for promotion. It is bad enough that university teachers are the only government employees denied a time-bound promotion; worse, the 2010 notification asked teachers to accumulate points retrospectively as part of a newly devised system that sought to quantify teaching, research and administrative activities. The initial notification has been amended twice, and each time things have become worse. The third amendment in the form of the May 4 notification now even seeks to dictate the journals and magazines in which one can get research papers and articles published. In a system where a majority of college teachers are deprived of the chance of supervising PhD students, where access to journals and other research material is limited due to high costs, proper research often remains a pipedream, and quantifying teaching and research is next to impossible.

Read: Heres why DU teachers are out on the streets again

There is, of course, a larger picture behind all this. There has been a 55% cut in the budgetary allocation for the education sector. The Occupy UGC movement over the last one year has been protesting against the reduction in fellowships and student scholarships. Governments are clearly focusing on higher education in the private sector, while reducing the outlay for the public sector. There have been recent reports that foreign universities will now design the syllabi for Indian universities in the attempt to move up the global education ranking. However, the reality is starkly different. Institutions are overcrowded with a 1:20 student-teacher ratio (the gazette notification would bring that to 1:40), while globally the top 100 educational institutions have a maximum teacher-student ratio of 1:9. No educational dream can be realised when teachers take 24 classes a week (including tutorials) against the global norm of 8-10, and crucially it cannot be fulfilled without an infrastructural backup. The infrastructure that was promised to universities and colleges after the OBC expansion has not seen the light of day; meanwhile, classrooms are overcrowded, with more than 100 students in a room equipped to handle 50 becoming the norm rather than the exception. The available space in colleges is being converted into temporary classrooms, and even in DU semester exams are conducted by constructing tents in college grounds. Teachers, expected to churn out research, have no workspaces or laptops and, in fact, have to fight for an inch of space in staffrooms, as they gobble down a cup of tea between consecutive classes. Overall, there is a serious lack of a conducive atmosphere for an effective teaching-learning process.

Read: DU: Results likely to get delayed as teachers refuse to check papers

In the light of these draconian notifications, DU teachers, supported by their colleagues countrywide, have decided to boycott evaluating answer papers of undergraduate exams since May 24. We are aware that the results may get delayed, and this may impact final-year students as they prepare for jobs or further education. Our students are our world, our pride, and they have been subjected to enough mayhem over the past few years. It is time to put our foot down against the anti-student and anti-teacher government policies and stand in solidarity as we fight for our very survival. Enough is enough.

Madhumita Chakraborty is assistant professor of English at Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening), University of Delhi

The views expressed are personal
Zameel Currim, the fifth generation owner of the 156-year-old umbrella manufacturer and dealer, Embrahim Currim and Sons, takes us through the history of umbrellas, the shop, and the market

Finding your way to Chhatri Bazaar is not as easy as searching for it on Google Maps and tracing a route. In fact, chances are, you wont be able to locate it at all. Literally named as the umbrella market (chhatri is Hindi for the umbrella), it is situated on Princess Street, right before Dawa Bazar  the wholesale medicine market. When we visit Chhatri Bazar, it is packed with people prepping for the upcoming monsoon.

We are greeted by Zameel Currim, the fifth-generation owner of a 156-year-old umbrella manufacturing and dealing store: Ebrahim Currim and Sons. Its chaos at the moment, naturally. The monsoons are on us and school children will now start coming in for rainwear. Other customers will want their broken umbrellas replaced with new ones, says Zameel. Given its age, the shop holds sentimental value for many of its existing customers. For instance, Zameel recalls, an aged customer was insistent his grandchild get his first umbrella from Currims because he, too, got his first from there.

Did you know?

>>Ebrahim Currim and Sons, as the family claims, is perhaps the oldest firm in India to trade in umbrellas. They started in 1860. Ebrahim Currim, the founder, started out by setting up a small umbrella repair shop in Bazar Gate Street, Ballard Estate, Fort. Later, he started dealing in umbrellas imported from England.

The shop is situated on Princess Street, right before Dawa Bazar  the wholesale medicine market. (Photo: Satish Bate/HT)

>> A rise in the demand for their products led the Currims to shift their base from Ballard Estate to Jumma Masjid, Princess Street. In 1902, Ebrahim founded the National Umbrella Factory at Jail Road, Umerkhadi (near Byculla), along with his sons Rahimbhai, Ramjanally, and Goolamally. Ebrahims eldest son even went to England to study the modern methods of manufacturing umbrellas. His family, back home, applied the manufacturing techniques he learnt. Soon, they founded and developed brands such as Stag, Globe, Dragon and Peacock; Stag remains the most popular of them. The factory, now at Reay Road, Sewri, packages finished products in preparation for the monsoons.

>> When Ebrahims company became popular, other umbrella traders started opening their shops next to his, slowly forming Chhatri Bazar as we know it today. The current shop is the biggest in the area, and is situated in the Rahim building, which dates back over a hundred years.

The oldest umbrella at Currims is the Grandpa Brolly that dates back to 1902. (Photo: Satish Bate )

>> The company has branches beyond Mumbai, in Chennai and Calicut. Interestingly, before the branch opened in Calicut, apparently, a majority of the people on the Malabar Coast used palm leaves as protection against the sun and the rain. Zameel claims it was Ebrahim who introduced umbrellas to the region.

>>Umbrellas were first made from cane that was imported from China. They were later converted to brass since the metal didnt corrode. Soon, manufacturing moved to steel. Today, a special kind of fibre  which is resistant to water, rust and decay  is used. The most commonly used fabric is nylon.

A rise in the demand for their products led the Currims to shift their base from Ballard Estate to Jumma Masjid, Princess Street. (Photo: Satish Bate/HT)

>> Today, umbrellas open and shut with the help of a coil spring. The earlier umbrellas utilised flexible ribs, popularised by English industrialist, Samuel Fox. The frame was built of solid steel ribs with flat spring stretchers coupled in pairs. This enabled the frame to automatically shut, and was the first sign of assisted automation (closes on its own). Although it is now uncommon in the cities, the demand for these is big in rural areas courtesy its sturdiness.

KNOW YOUR UMBRELLAS
Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, lead actors of Udta Punjab, among other celebrities from Bollywood have urged their fans not to waste two years of their hard work by watching the pirated version of the film and instead watch it only in the theatres.

Read: Udta Punjab leaked online, producers file complaint with cyber cell

Guys please please do not waste 2 years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears.. Please watch #UdtaPunjab in only in theatres..  Alia Bhatt (@aliaa08) June 15, 2016

It's a genuine request from the bottom of my heart. That's all I can say. Until then see you at the theatres #piracydimaadi  Alia Bhatt (@aliaa08) June 15, 2016

Shahid, who will be seen playing a rockstar named Tommy Singh in the film, also tweeted.

Blood and sweat of many in this film. It's been your battle as much as ours. Now is the time you can show it. Watch UdtaPunjab in theatres  Shahid Kapoor (@shahidkapoor) June 15, 2016

It's a film from the heart made for you all. And now it's in your hands. #piracydimaadi make it count you all. love and gratitude.#letitfly  Shahid Kapoor (@shahidkapoor) June 15, 2016

The controversial film Udta Punjab was leaked online on Wednesday, two days ahead of its scheduled release in theatres. The Abhishek Chaubey directorial -- which has been in news for the makers run-in with the censor board -- was available on torrent websites for illegal download.

However, soon the download links were removed due to a copyright complaint.

Visibly upset with the online leaks, Bollywood celebrities including Karan Johar, Shraddha Kapoor, Varun Dhawan and Sonakshi Sinha requested people to head to the theatres to watch Udta Punjab, based on drug abuse in the Indian state of Punjab.

Heres what tinsel town celebrities had to say:

Please watch #UdtaPunjab in the cinema this weekend! Don't succumb to online leaks!! An honest film needs an honest audience....#LetItFly  Karan Johar (@karanjohar) June 15, 2016

Viruses in the Udta Punjab online leaked links that crashes systems !!!What a way to fight this disgusting menace !!! #PiracyDiMaaDi'  Arjun Kapoor (@arjunk26) June 15, 2016

A big #dishoom to the Pirates. Go watch #UdtaPunjab only in the theatre https://t.co/kdB13kaaVe  Varun JUNAID dhawan (@Varun_dvn) June 15, 2016

Shocking how #UdtaPunjab has been leaked online. That too a censor copy. A lot of hard work goes into making a film pls say NO to piracy!  Sonakshi Sinha (@sonakshisinha) June 16, 2016

Movie theatres r filled with dreams and entertainment,don't kill them ! say no to piracy #UdtaPunjab at a theatre near u   Sidharth Malhotra (@S1dharthM) June 16, 2016

Films are made with the hard work & passion of everyone involved in creating them. Please don't support piracy.  Shraddha Kapoor (@ShraddhaKapoor) June 16, 2016
Actor Sidharth Malhotra, who is currently shooting for his upcoming film Reloaded along with actor Jacqueline Fernandez in Miami, made sure that it was not all work and no play for him. The actor took time out to try some jet boating.

It was a thrilling experience and I thoroughly enjoyed jet boating in Miami, says the actor.

Actor Sidharth Malhotra took his crew along when he went jet boating.

Not only did he try the adventure sport himself, but also took his team along. Sidharth is an adventure junkie and wanted to try this out. He had recently been to New Zealand, where he tried sky-diving and bungee jumping, among other things. In fact, he also took some members of the crew along with him, says a source, close to the actor.

#Shady #Sid #miami #beach A photo posted by Sidharth Malhotra (@s1dofficial) on Jun 14, 2016 at 12:39pm PDT

Read: Katrina doesnt take her position for granted: Sidharth Malhotra

Meanwhile, the actor is already on to his next film, which is going to be a murder mystery. The film is a remake of the 1969 movie, Ittefaq with the same title starring Rajesh Khanna and Nanda. I am really excited to work on this project. The script is brilliant, adds Sidharth.

My NeW view #Miami #shoot A photo posted by Sidharth Malhotra (@s1dofficial) on Jun 1, 2016 at 1:22pm PDT
Irrfan Khan is currently in Singapore to promote his Hollywood film Inferno, which is based on Dan Browns book by the same name. But recently, the actor took out time from his busy schedule to meet one of his fans.

A source close to Irrfan says, When Nuranisah Jalaludin found out that Irrfan is in Singapore, she reached out to him via Twitter, and requested him to meet her. She has been interacting with Irrfan on Twitter for a while now. The actors team managed to arrange a meeting between them, which thrilled her to no end. On meeting Irrfan, she broke into tears, and expressed her admiration for him. She even gifted Irrfan a box of chocolates and a card.

Read: Irrfan Khan on Udta Punjab: The whole country has become a censor board

Irrfan, too, was happy to meet his fan. After the interaction, he tweeted, Thanks for coming by @DinNisah :-) God Bless !!(sic)

Irrfan is currently busy promoting his new movie with Tom Hanks. (Twitter)

Read: Irrfan Khan: I will play heroine in a film where Kangana Ranaut is hero

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Producers of drug-themed drama Udta Punjab, slated for Friday release, on Wednesday lodged a complaint with cyber police alleging that the film was leaked online. In their compliant lodged with the cyber crime police in Bandra, they stated the film was uploaded before its release by some unidentified persons.

Police are tracing the IP address through which the movie was allegedly uploaded, an official said without elaborating. The film stars Shahid Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Alia Bhatt and Diljit Dosanjh.

Additional commissioner of police (Crime) KMM Prasanna confirmed the news. Sources said the complaint was filed under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act and under various sections of the Copyright Act. The FIR was filed by Satyajeet Mukharjee from Phantom Films Pvt Ltd.

Read | Udta Punjab in Punjab-Haryana HC: Screening held, feedback awaited

On Wednesday afternoon, it emerged that the Abhishek Chaubey directorial -- which has been in news for the makers run-in with the censor board -- was available on torrent sites for illegal download. However, soon the download links were removed due to a copyright complaint, the websites read.

The film stars (from r) Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh.

As per multiple online platforms which had snapshots from the leaked copy, one could say it was a copy of the film submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) as it also featured some scenes which the censor board had objected to.

There were also reports that the leaked copy had a run-time of two hours 20 minutes. Scheduled to hit the screens on June 17, Udta Punjab has been allowed to release with one cut and A certificate by the Bombay high court.

(With inputs from agencies)
Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder chairperson of Bharti Enterprises, has been elected as the head of International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), based in Paris, France.

Mittal is the third Indian business leader to head ICC in its near-hundred year history of being the worlds oldest and most respected global business organisation.

He takes over from Terry McGraw, chairman emeritus of S&P Global, who will now become ICCs honorary chairperson.

The ICC World Council elected the new leaders after a voting held on Thursday in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Bharti Enterprises said in a statement.

I am honoured at being given the opportunity to lead this prestigious global institution and look forward to working with our members. There is an urgent need to restore trade and investment as a driver of growth and jobs, particularly in the developing world and this will be a focus of my tenure, Mittal said.

Mittal serves on many international bodies and think-tanks. He is currently the chair of the World Economic Forums (WEF) Telecommunications Steering Committee. He is also a member of the India-US, India-UK and India-Japan CEO forums.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked tax officials to knock on the doors of people whose income statements dont reflect the size or grandeur of their property, but they must do so in a gentle and friendly manner, a top government official said on Thursday.

Such cold calls by taxmen are part of several suggestions Modi made at a conference of revenue officials, where the Prime Minister also set a target of doubling the countrys taxpayer base to 100 million. He did not give a deadline.

Successive governments have struggled with under-reporting of taxes, seen as a major hurdle in expanding state revenues, as well as with growing undisclosed incomes, or what is known as black money, to avoid taxation.

A 2015 Credit Suisse survey said India had 185,000 dollar-millionaires but officially only about 150,000 people are known to have an annual income of above Rs 5 million.

The Prime Minister asked the officers that in case you know a person who has a big fancy house, but his income is not reflective of the same, do not hesitate to ask him about how he funded this, revenue secretary Hasmukh Adhia told Hindustan Times, quoting Modi.

Adhia said Modis suggestion would be treated with utmost importance.

At his hour-long interaction with revenue officials, Modi did a bit of math to show that of the 250 million households in the country 150 million were agriculturalists, who do not have to pay tax.

This still leaves us with 10 crore (100 million) households, minister of state for finance Jayant Sinha told reporters after the meeting with Modi, who did not set a deadline to achieve the target.

Modi told the officers that they must reduce trust deficit with soft and sober behaviour.

If you become taxpayer-friendly, then taxes will automatically come to you, he told the conference.

Given that 92% of tax was deducted at source of income, came from advance tax or through self-assessment, Modi said, it should allow a substantial number of 42,000 tax officers to focus more on direct tax collection.

Modi asked tax officials to focus on five pillars of administration -- revenue, accountability, probity, information and digitisation (RAPID) -- and move towards digitisation.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Police on Friday questioned Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe leader Shingi Munyeza over his comments about bond notes on social media.Munyeza - a prominent businessman based in Harare - has been using social media such as Twitter to express his frustration over the deteriorating economic situation in the country.He has issued three statements titled, 10 Points Plan to Run Zimbabwe Limited, What I would have done with $200 million facility and Severe Turbulence ahead.The statements painted a gloomy picture of the Zimbabwean economic crisis that is manifesting itself through a serious cash crisis. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe will introduce bond notes in October to deal with the crisis.Munyeza confirmed that the detectives who questioned him for several hours wanted to know why he said the bond notes were infamous."Indeed, I was summoned to the ZRP Law and Order section by Assistant Commissioner [Chrispen] Makedenge on Friday where I initially had discussions for much of the day from 10:30am onwards," Munyeza said."I reiterated to them that I am a law-abiding citizen who is very concerned about the status of our economy, which requires urgent and immediate structural reforms to avoid further impoverishment of citizens of this country."He added: "I also narrated my long history of commitment to working for the economic prosperity of this country through the various roles and capacities I have been involved in over the past 20 years."It would be amiss for people like me to be silent and not alert both government and fellow citizens of the predicament we are in if I had a vantage point of understanding the crisis."Munyeza said church leaders had a responsibility to alert the vulnerable on any danger that awaited them."Among some of the questions they raised, they wanted to understand why I had referred to the bond notes as infamous' and I reiterated to them that the generality of the public do not want these bond notes and I was only voicing the cry from the people," he said."There is need for government to build trust and confidence with the people, particularly where there are policy shifts and pronouncements. A total transformation of the economy is required to get out of this quagmire."Munyeza added: "After understanding my position and my intention, they were satisfied and we had a progressive discussion further."I committed to them that I would continue on the same vein to give voice to the voiceless in a patriotic, responsible, factual and truthful manner."Police spokesperson, Senior Assistant Commissioner Charity Charamba could not be reached for comment yesterday.President Robert Mugabe's government is increasingly coming under pressure for alleged mismanagement and mis-governance, with several religious groups last week calling on the 92-year-old leader to retire to save the country from further collapse.Mugabe last week claimed the bond notes would revive the economy.
In the address to the United States Congress on June 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the evolving global situation as a war of multiple transitions and economic opportunities, growing uncertainties and political complexities, existing threats and new challenges which, contrary to his advocacy of closer relations with the US, make it imperative India retains its strategic autonomy, policy options, and the freedom of manoeuvre.

India and the US do share interests and concerns and China is the main worry. Except the US is distanced from China by the Pacific Ocean and inclined, therefore, to accommodate Beijing, while for India it is an immediate and potent threat best kept in check by India joining in a coalition of rimland states  Asean, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, with the US featured as a extra-territorial balancer. Regarding terrorism, the US will pressure Pakistan only about suppressing the Haqqani Taliban active in Afghanistan.

In technology cooperation the reality is starker. In a decade of high-flying rhetoric, not a single R&D project has materialised. But expensive technology extraneous to Indias naval needs  the electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) for aircraft carriers is offered in the hope its sale will help amortise US investment in it. But Indias priority  American assistance in designing and developing a combat aircraft jet engine, is made contingent on India first buying 90 1970s-era F-16s/F-18s off the shelf, and producing another 200 aircraft under licence. This is called Open Sesame for high-technology trade in the future.

Given the thrust of the US technology cooperation, it is imprudent to even contemplate imperilling ties with Russia, and doing without the leased Akula-II nuclear-powered attack submarine and Russian involvement in strategically sensitive programmes, such as the Arihant SSBN. Besides, given that the bulk of the conventional armaments with the Indian armed forces are of Russian origin, an aggravated Kremlin could shut down Indian capabilities if it chose to. Indeed, Moscow has already given notice it will rethink its role in sensitive Indian defence projects and about leasing a second Akula if New Delhi signs the foundational accords formalising a security relationship with Washington.

But India has pressed ahead and finalised the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA). It seems to be only a differently worded version of the standard Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement detailed in the US Defense Departments Directive 2010.9 of April 28, 2003. The reimbursement of costs will require Indian base commanders, as has happened in Pakistan that has a logistics support agreement with the US, periodically to justify to US authorities the quality and costs of the support and services provided. In Enclosure 2 of this directive, Section E2.1.10 spells out the Logistics Support, Supplies, and Services, inclusive of base operations support (and construction incident to base operations support), [and] storage services. This refers to the pre-positioning of stores and supplies and constitutes a basing provision. Implicit is the fact of the US providing security for its assets and personnel, necessitating parts of Indian military bases coming under US control and violating Indian sovereignty. Should India assume the responsibility for protecting such US military presence in India, the Indian intelligence agencies, armed forces, central and state police, and the paramilitaries will face an internal security nightmare to pre-empt and prevent attacks by domestic and international Islamic terrorist outfits on US personnel. The situation could get politically fraught very fast.

The explanation that the Indian military will be able to access far-flung US bases begs several questions: Whether the Indian military mounts many out-of-area operations and, if they mean to, wouldnt a more cost-effective long-term solution be Indian bases in the Agalega Islands of Mauritius and on the northern Mozambican coast, an agreement with Sultan Qaboos to stage out of Oman, and independently to use Nha Trang in Vietnam, and Subic Bay and Clark air base in the Philippines  all options available to India?

Americans anticipate that with LEMOA in the bag, the other two foundational accords  Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA) and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA)  will follow. Indian officials claim CISMOAs usefulness in counter-terrorism activity. But it is something Russia is wary of, as it will allow the US to plug into the communications system linking Indian aircraft to submarines, enabling remote spoofing of the communications hardware in the Akula SSNs. This is too risky for Moscow not to consider a pull out, which move could end in firming up a formidable Russia-China-Pakistan triad. With India and US getting together, China will be more determined to deny India entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, leave alone as permanent member into the UN Security Council.

The prime ministers appeal for US investment in Indias manufacturing sector too may not work out to our advantage just yet. He seems unaware that the Obama administration initiated the in-sourcing policy using coercive tax measures to compel American companies to bring back capital invested abroad and to create jobs in the US. So, how did India get the impression that Obama means to benefit India? Sure, the US would happily continue importing Indian talent, nurtured at the Indian taxpayers expense, to do technology work.

The problem is with Modis personalised diplomacy wedded to his vision for the country as a subsidiary power. He further believes that India should make friends and that friends mean well. Except, Western leaders will be friendly, but ultimately pocket contracts worth tens of billions of dollars (for six nuclear reactors, in Obamas case), and otherwise advance their national interests, leaving India to wax eloquent about shared democratic values.

Bharat Karnad is professor, Centre for Policy Research. The views expressed are personal.
NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has decided to take its offensive to the three Municipal Corporations in Delhi.

The party, which will contest the municipal elections scheduled for 2017, has decided to up its ante against the BJP-ruled corporations by appointing councillors as coordinators in each corporation.

In the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, Rakesh Kumar, who was allegedly beaten up by BJP councillors at a joint session of the three corporations on Thursday, has been appointed the coordinator. The names of the other two coordinators will be decided soon.

All party MLAs, who are nominated members to the corporations, have been asked to attend all meetings of the corporations.

The Delhi government has the power to nominate MLAs to the three corporations. They form 5% of the total strength of the municipal house.

There are five nominated MLAs in the north and south corporations and three in east. Apart from theses AAP members, the party has around 10 councillors  independents who support the party and five who won in the municipal by-polls in May. Rakesh Kumar is among the independent councillors.

The party is very serious about the municipal elections next year and is putting all its efforts to have a good showing. All our nominated MLAs will now have to attend each meeting and raise relevant issues, said a senior party leader.

The corporations meet at least once a month.

AAP has regularly been taking up issues of alleged corruption and delay in payment of salaries of municipal employees.

Last week, it raised the issue of corruption in building of two flyovers by the municipal corporation in the city, and on Wednesday it was the issue of alleged corruption in three MCD hospitals. AAP held the BJP responsible for it.

Three hospitals of MCD had been awarding contracts for sanitation to an individual firm without any open tendering process. This is a case of corruption in the BJP-ruled MCD, AAP Delhi convener Dilip Pandey said. He alleged that the cases were from Hindu Rao, Kasturba Gandhi and Rajan Babu TB Hospitals.
NEW DELHI: The opposition intensified its attack on the ruling Aam Aadmi Party over the parliamentary secretary issue on Wednesday with leader of the Opposition in the Delhi assembly Vijender Gupta threatening to move the Lokayukta office with a complaint and Congress Ajay Maken accusing the government of misleading the people.

Gupta said he would file a case before the Lokayukta court.

Despite having no authority under Articles 102 (1), 191 (1) and Sec 15 of NCT of Delhi Act 1991, Kejriwal unconstitutionally and illegally appointed 21 parliamentary secretaries. The CM formally administered them the oath of office despite the fact that the CM has no such authority under the constitution. The CM got all of them allotted rooms in the secretariat through the government. They were provided official transport, allowances and other facilities at par with the ministers, said Gupta.

Gupta said that the election commission will disqualify the 21 MLAs but CM Arvind Kejriwal should also be punished. Gupta said the parliamentary secretary post had been challenged in several courts across the country, including the Supreme Court.

Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken picked up faults in the defence put up chief minister Kejriwal. He said while pointing out that both the Congress and BJP government appointed parliamentary secretaries, the CM failed to mention that they were attached to the chief minister and not ministers.

He (Kejriwal) named several parliamentary secretaries appointed in Delhi, including HKL Bhagat to Nand Kishore Garg to me. Even after counting names since independence, he couldnt recall more than 5-6 names. But within a month after coming to power he appointed 21 AAP legislators to the post, said Maken.

The Congress leader, who held the post of parliamentary secretary to then chief minister Sheila Dikshit, between 1999-2001, said the AAP convenor appointed almost one-third of the total strength of the House as parliamentary secretaries to keep his flock together.

Either it was for lust for power, or to prevent the MLAs from leaving the party along with party dissidents Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, Maken said.

Citing example of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who quit as Member of Parliament and got herself re-elected from Rae Bareli Lok Sabha Constituency, Maken advised Kejriwal to get the popularity of his legislators tested.
NEW DELHI: A 25-year-old Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) head constable shot himself with a country-made pistol at the forces headquarters at the CGO Complex in south-east Delhi on Wednesday morning.

Police said Hemant Kumar shot himself inside the office lavatory around 10 am. No suicide note was found but police suspect personal or family issues forced him to commit suicide.

Senior officers are baffled how Hemant managed to dodge the security and take the weapon inside. Preliminary enquiry showed Hemants bag was scanned but he was not frisked on entry.

The police say the security personnel normally do not frisk regular office staff as they know most of them personally.

A senior officer said Hemant lived with his parents at Krishna Nagar in east Delhi. Hemant joined the CRPF in 2012 and was posted in the media and news clipping collection section at the headquarters.

On Wednesday morning, Hemant reached office and put his bag and other belongings on his table. A few minutes later, he went inside a lavatory on the ground floor. Colleagues heard a gunshot and rushed to find his body soaked in blood. Hemant was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival, the officer said.

Nupur Prasad, additional DCP ( south), said that an inquest proceeding had been initiated. We are in touch with Hemants family members to know what forced him to take the step. Hemant was recently engaged and his wedding was scheduled in October-November this year, she said.
NEW DELHI: The English examination of the first -year BA programme of Delhi Universitys School of Learning (SOL) was cancelled on Wednesday after the paper was allegedly leaked.

This is the second time the SOL paper had to be cancelled. The economics paper was cancelled on June 12.

Students were informed that the paper was cancelled half an hour after the examination started. For Wednesday s examination, students had gone to centres as far as Narela and Budh Vihar

The students had been allotted centres in far-flung areas. After students had reached the centres, they were told the paper had been cancelled. This puts physical, mental as well as economic strain on students, said Harish Gautam, a member of Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS)  the student union at SOL.

Some students had travelled as far as 40 kilometres, commuting for at least three hours, to reach the centre. The union will protest against the paper leak on Thursday.

The authorities confirmed the paper had been leaked. The paper, in which around 55,000 students had to appear, has been scheduled for June 24 at 9 am. An FIR has been lodged.

At around 2.15 pm, we got to know about the paper being leaked on WhatsApp. We cancelled the paper and sent S MS to all students. The paper has been rescheduled, said CS Dubey, director, SOL.

Teachers at SOL said paper leaks had become frequent because the examination was conducted at government schools .The examination department should conduct the exam at colleges. Also there is no proper monitoring system, said a teacher who did not want to be named.
NEW DELHI: In his second letter to the lieutenant-governor in the past three days, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal asked Najeeb Jung to get the Delhi governments solar policy probed by the anti-corruption branch or the CBI since it has received worldwide acclaim.

In the letter, Kejriwal accused L-G Jung of saving BJP MP Mahiesh Girri and NDMC vice chairman Karan Singh Tanwar in the murder case of a legal adviser of the civic body, MM Khan.

He said Jung had beautifully saved Girri and Tanwar from questioning by police which, he said, must have pleased Modi.

Now Modiji is fully assured that no matter how much lumpenism BJP men partake in, no one will be able to do anything. You will save them. And you will keep on framing Aam Aadmi Party by lodging false cases, he said.

Kejriwal had written to Jung on Monday, saying Prime Minister Modi would never make him the vice-president despite all the illegal, anti-people and unconstitutional things you might do on Modi jis instructions.

In Wednesday s letter, Kejriwal says that since the solar policy is earning praise from several quarters, it should be Jungs and Modis next target.

The (solar) policy is being discussed throughout the world. Greenpeace has praised it. Even UN climate change has termed it as a big step. Please conduct a CBI raid on Delhi power minister Satyender Jain by telling Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the letter states.

MP Mahiesh Girri challenged Kejriwal to prove the charges.

If he manages to prove the charges, I will quit politics, otherwise he should do so. I have absolutely no connection with the case. It just happened that I was in the L-G office when a person had come with some documents related to the case. I did not bring that complainant. These are diversionary tactics by Kejriwal to deflect attention from the parliamentary secretary issue, Girri said.

Later, at a press meet, Kejriwal trained guns on Modi over the issue of the President refusing to sign a legislation that sought to keep the AAP governments parliamentary secretaries out of the purview of the office of profit.

I request Modiji with folded hands, Kejriwal told the media, literally folding his hands. Your fight is with me. Beat me if you wish, do whatever you want to me but do not harass the people of Delhi.

Dont try to stop the good work being done in Delhi, he added. (With inputs from agencies)
NEW DELHI: The magisterial probe constituted by the Delhi government has concluded that the children were denied food by Shiv Sagar restaurant in Connaught Place despite the fact that they were ready to pay for the same.

Delhis deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia, had ordered a sub-division magisterial probe into the matter.

Sonali Shetty, a resident of Dehradun, had flown to Delhi, with her nine-year-old son to celebrate her husbands birthday. They had come for a family dinner to Shiv Sagar, at Janpath, when they met a few street children at the traffic signal and decided to invite them to dinner.

Sources said the government will decide on what action would be taken against the restaurant after going through the report.

From the aforementioned facts and circumstances it is evident that despite the fact that the food was being paid for, the children were denied entry by the restaurant because they were poor and dirty. This refusal clearly establishes discriminatory behaviour of the restaurant management and staff against the children on socio-economic basis, the conclusion of the inquiry report said.

Such an act violates the human rights and fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India, and is against its spirit and essence, it added.

We will go through the report and abide by what the government demands of us. We, however, reiterate our version, said a senior employee of the restaurant.

Following the incident, the restaurant owners had denied the charges saying the woman started abusing the staff after they refused to give free food to the underprivileged children.

We do not discriminate against anybody, but we do not want anyone to create a scene inside the restaurant. The woman told my staff that we should feed the children for free because they are underprivileged, when we denied she created a scene. She was aggressive and misbehaved with our employee and that is why she was asked to leave, said Vidur Kanodia, owner of the restaurant, said on Sunday.

We have CCTV footage which shows that the family and the children were allowed inside. The children, however, started creating ruckus. For the benefit of other customers, as a restaurateur I have the right to deny service to people who cause inconvenience to others, a senior staff said, on condition of anonymity.

Shetty, however, claims the poor children were not allowed to enter the restaurant, and the staff manhandled and abused them. We just wanted to feed the children as a part of a family celebration, but the restaurant pushed us out because these children were poor. Even after so many years of independence, our mindset hasnt changed. How will we develop if we continue to judge people on the basis of their socioeconomic background, said Shetty.
NEW DELHI: An unfazed Arvind Kejriwal launched a fresh offensive against the BJP and Congress on Wednesday, citing precedents since 1953 to defend 21 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators facing disqualification for holding dual paying posts as parliamentary secretaries.

Kejriwal addressed a press conference to target the two political rivals over the issue that has led to a fresh confrontation between the AAP government and the Narendra Modi government.

The fate of 21 AAP MLAs, appointed as parliamentary secretaries, hangs in balance after President Pranab Mukherjee refused to give his assent to a bill passed by the Delhi assembly last year seeking to insulate the legislators from the purview of the office-of-profit law.

The Constitution prohibits legislators or parliamentarians from holding any positions with monetary of other benefits.

Former chief minister Shahib Singh Verma appointed BJP MLA Nand Kishore Garg as his parliamentary secretary on May 7, 1996. Sheila Dikshit appointed Ajay Maken, who is now criticising the government, as parliamentary secretary, said the visibly agitated chief minister who has had several run-ins with the Centre over officers appointment, files and governmental jurisdiction since storming back to power last year.

Then it was constitutional and when we do it, it turns out to be unconstitutional.

The Delhi government also made public copies of orders by previous governments appointing the parliamentary secretaries, appointed in many states by the ruling parties to rehabilitate legislators without portfolios.

In 1953, Delhi had three parliamentary secretaries in HKL Bhagat, Kumari Shanta Vasisth and Shiv Charan Dasgupta, Kejriwal said adding that the 21 parliamentary secretaries are the eyes, ears and hands of the AAP government who have been tasked with important duties.

They are highly qualified people in different fields, starting from MBA to engineering and not illiterates like in other parties. Mohalla clinics are product of their hard work. They are helping in mapping of schools for infrastructure improvement, visit hospitals to help patients.

Reacting to the charges, Maken accused the Delhi chief minister of concealing facts.

He named several parliamentary secretaries appointed in Delhi including HKL Bhagat to Nand Kishore Garg to me. Even after counting names since independence, he couldnt recall more than 5-6 names, Maken said.

He (Kejriwal) also didnt clarify that both the BJP and Congress governments appointed parliamentary secretaries to the chief minister and not ministers.

Nand Kishore Garg, appointed during the BJP government in 1997, said he was was the parliamentary secretary to the CM and not to the government.

For my tenure of 10 months, I never enjoyed any perks.
NEW DELHI: The Election Commission will take up the issue of 21 Delhi MLAs holding unconstitutional posts at a hearing likely to be held next month.

According to EC sources, replies of all 21 AAP MLAs on the issue have been received and sent to the complainant, Prashant Patel for his comments.

Once the replies from both sides are received, the election commission will call a hearing on the issue, an EC official said.

The hearing comes in the wake of the President rejecting the amendment to the Delhi Members of Legislative Assembly ( Removal of Disqualification) Act, 1997 passed by the Delhi Assembly.

Patel, a Delhi-based lawyer had petitioned the Presidents of fice asking him to take action against the creation of 21 unconstitutional posts of parliamentary secretaries by the Delhi government.

AAP MLAs who had been designated as parliamentary secretaries had informed the EC that their post was similar to that of an intern, or a volunteer assistant attached to a cabinet minister. They had also underlined that they were not being remunerated.

If the EC declares the 21 MLAs disqualified that will pave the way for fresh poll.

The AAP defended the creation of the posts, saying the parliamentaries secretaries were not withdrawing any benefits. Political opponents have targeted the ruling party for making an unprecedented number of MLAs, 21, parliamentary secretaries ministers.
NEW DELHI: The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) will put all monitoring data from sewage treatment plants (STP) online for the public.

The performance of all 36 STPs will be monitored and the data will be published online, which will be open to the public for viewing and analysis. Rs 8.21 crore has been allotted for the project which will measure all important parameters of water quality such as PH, biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, TSS and ammonia. This decision by the Delhi Jal Board fulfils the long-standing demands of water activists and NGT technical committees from across the country, a statement issued by the Delhi government said.

The DJB said it will now move to comprehensive urban and landscape planning, hydraulics, structural design and GIS mapping to ensure that every water work is designed for the benefit of the community.

According to DJB officials, the administrative approval for sewer lines in Najafgarh, Gokalpuri, Mustafabad and water pipelines in Matiala was given.

Water minister and DJB chairman Kapil Mishra said, For the first time in India, the data and performance of the sewage treatment plants run by a water utilities board or state will be open to the public. This is bringing transparency and openness in governance, and bringing power to the people.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

A self-confessed Harare sex worker is nursing injuries after she was bashed by hired fellow sex workers for snatching another woman's husband.Tricia Ngoroyemoto was stripped and assaulted by eight hookers hired by Daphine Chivhunga, for snatching her husband Tapiwa Chivhunga.Tricia was taken to her apartment at Franton Court along Josiah Chinamano Avenue where the hookers took part of her fashion wears and got away with US$360 in cash.She sustained head and body injuries and the case was taken to Harare Central police station."Honestly speaking, I never slept with Daphine's husband only that she suspected me after she came and found me seated in his car," said Tricia."She hired eight ladies from Kennedine Court along Central Avenue and they stripped me, forced me to walk with no clothes on as they assaulted me."My head is still aching and I sustained wounds on my back and abdomen after one of the ladies attacked me with a pair of scissors."One of my friends is the one who is dating Tapiwa's friend and Daphine concluded that I was bedding him since he was left with me as the two were spending some time."I reported the case to the police and Daphine reasoned with the officers and paid me US$400 to replace my stolen US$360."They never paid me anything to cover medical expenses and I am still in pain that I cannot hook up men to have money for my rentals," said Tricia in tears.However, H-Metro found Tricia in the arms of one of her clients nursing her injuries and she asked permission to dress up for the interview.Daphine confirmed the incident."The best person to talk to is Tricia and she is the one who should tell you why she decided to snatch my husband; she got what she deserved and I have nothing to apologise for," said Daphine.
NEW DELHI: Police have arrested six people for allegedly duping the United India Insurance Company by making false medical claims with forged medical papers.

The police said that the men  identified as kingpin Vishal Gupta (40) and his associates Ganesh Kumar (32), Dr Pankaj Bhardwaj(28 ), Deepak Sharma (38), Amit Kumar (22) and Nikunj Kumar (25) had forged 66 medical claims and made the insurance company pay them Rs 58 lakh.

The matter came to light after one R Subramaniyum, director of Vipul Med Cap, TPA Pvt Ltd, filed a complaint alleging that someone had extracted Rs 56 lakh from their company on false medical claims. The company found that in the months of March and April, there was a sudden increase in medical claims.

When the company decided to investigate the authenticity of such claims, they found 33 of them to be false and an amount of Rs 28 lakh encashed fraudulently once and Rs 30 lakh the next time. The matter was reported to the police.

During investigation, it was found that no one had applied for any medical claims. The claim bills provided from the hospitals concerned and the same were found to be forged. The details of accounts in which the claim amount was transferred were also verified. We found that major transactions had taken place from United Insurance Company in the accounts of Deepak Sharma and Amit Kumar, DCP, south, Ishwar Singh said.

The men were traced and nabbed. During questioning they spilled the beans on their associates, he added.
NEW DELHI: The Vishwa Hindu Parishads cow protection wing appears to be bearing down on the Centre to create a separate ministry for bovine welfare, urging the government to set a deadline for it.

The renewed push by the Bharatiya Govansh Rakshan Samvardhan Parishad was aimed at reminding the Narendra Modi government of its poll promise to save the countrys bovine progeny, considered sacred by Hindus.

The VHP is affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)  considered the ideological fountainhead of the BJP which too has been championing the cause of cow protection.

Beef consumption has become a controversial issue in the country after fringe groups and self-styled protection groups started targeting people they accuse of slaughtering cow.

Several BJP-ruled states have enacted stringent legislations to stop cow slaughter and beef consumption, which activists and opposition political parties say discriminates against Muslims, Christians and lower-caste Hindus who rely on the cheap meat for protein.

A senior functionary of the cow protection organisation told HT that creation of a separate ministry was essential to ensure a total ban on cow slaughter, beef consumption and protection of Indian breeds, some of which face the threat of extinction.

He said the ministry can be on the lines of the separate department raised to rejuvenate the Ganga, considered the lifeline for millions of people in northern India.

The issue of cow protection will be raised during the monsoon session of Parliament, he said adding that MPs are being approached to lend their voice to the cause. A similar exercise was launched last year without much success.

Another functionary HS Savla stressed on the scientifically proved health and environment benefits of rearing cows and said there was a misconception that Indian breeds do not produce milk in quantities comparable to foreign ones like the Jersey or the Swiss cows.

Indian breeds such as Gir, Sahiwal are far superior.

A senior RSS functionary said contemporary problems of global warming, drought and declining food production can be mitigated by encouraging bovine rearing.

India should aspire to be number one in milk production and exports, instead of meat. There are numerous scientific studies that prove the advantages of not consuming beef, he said.

The renewed push for cow protection comes in the wake of forensic tests confirming that beef was found in the house of Mohamad Ikhlaq, a Muslim man lynched by a mob in Dadri last year for allegedly slaughtering a calf and consuming its meat.

With right-wing groups demanding a criminal case against Ikhlaqs family for alleged cow slaughter, the issue is likely to dominate Uttar Pradeshs political landscape in the run up to the assembly polls early next year.

The killing of Ikhlaq had sparked a nationwide debate on growing religious intolerance under the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre. Critics often accuse the Modi government of not doing enough to rein in fringe groups targeting cattle traders across the country.

In March, two Muslim cattle-traders including a minor were hanged from a tree in Jharkhand. One among the five arrested over the incident is a member of a cow protection group.

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NEW DELHI: BJP leader and New Delhi Municipal Council vice-chairman Karan Singh Tanwar on Wednesday said he will sue AAP leaders Surinder Singh, Dilip Pandey and Amanatullah Khan for allegedly targeting him in a lawyers murder case.

I will file defamation suit against these three -- both criminal and civil cases. I am being portrayed as a murderer in the NDMC lawyer murder case. I am being targeted by Arvind Kejriwal ever since I became vice-chairman of NDMC. My flawless political career is being tarnished for the past one month. Should I be hanged for writing a letter for the benefit of people who come to me? he said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Tanwar said the AAP was playing ridiculous and bad politics on the murder of MM Khan, a legal adviser to NDMC who was shot dead near his house in Jamia Nagar last month.

Kejriwal and his party are twisting the facts of the case. They are levelling baseless allegations against me just to malign the image of my party and diverting the attention from the real culprits, the BJP leader said.

AAP MLA Surinder Singh said he stood by his allegations against Tanwar.

If speaking the truth makes him file cases against me, I dont care. He has already filed one case against me here, one complaint in the Election Commission and another in Haryana. I fought enemies at the border and will fight traitors like him inside the country. He can file 10 cases against me but I wont get scared. He has a hand in getting a truthful officer murdered. The BJP should suspend him. I will speak the truth without getting scared, Singh said.

Tanwar demanded probe into call details, bank accounts of Kejriwal and his party MLA and NDMC member Surinder Singh to determine their relations with the accused hotel owner.
The Arvind Kejriwal government on Thursday approved the formation of 2,972 Mohalla Sabhas across the 70 assembly constituencies in Delhi. Aimed at decentralization of governance, development works worth R350 crore under the Citizen Local Area Development (C-LAD) will decided through mohalla sabhas.

The R350-crore fund will be distributed equally among all the Mohalla Sabhas. The number of sabhas will vary depending on the size of the constituency. There will be 40-70 local units in each constituency, sources said.

The Delhi cabinet, which approved the decision, also cleared the proposal to appoint two coordinators for each mohalla sabha -- one male and one female -- who will be local residents of that area.

The coordinators will organize and facilitate monthly mohalla sabha meetings. The revenue department will soon notify the decision, paving the way for the organisation of the Mohalla Sabhas.

Besides choosing development projects, the Mohalla Sabhas will coordinate with different government agencies for the execution of local development projects, identify and facilitate beneficiaries for welfare schemes such as old-age pension, and resolve grievances with the help of local officers.

The idea is to empower the citizens to discuss, deliberate and decide on the works to be undertaken in their locality. The Delhi government conducted a pilot project of Mohalla Sabhas in 11 districts last year. Local residents were delegated the power to take decisions under C-LAD fund for executing development works in their areas. Based on the success of pilot project the government has decided to form Mohalla Sabhas in all parts of the city, an official said.

Read: AAPs mohalla sabha proposal is impractical for cities like Delhi

Officials said the government conducted a detailed ground survey based on the inputs gathered from local citizens, public representatives and local officials according to which mohalla sabhas have been demarcated.

GIS mapping of each mohalla was done by a dedicated team of experts using satellite maps and data was collected during the ground survey through My Tracks-a google enabled android application to ensure precision in delimitation, an official said.

The government has also signed an MoU with Janaagraha, a Bangalore-based organisation specializing in citizen participation platforms, for the development of a dedicated software for the Mohalla Sabhas to ensure digital/IT enabled systems for better coordination and execution of works that will be demanded by the Mohalla Sabhas.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has removed its Chandni Chowk MLA, Alka Lamba, from the post of party spokesperson for deviating from the official line while commenting on the resignation of former Delhi transport minster, Gopal Rai.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday after Rai and AAP legislators met the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) chief in connection with the complaint against app-based premium bus service, Lamba said the Delhi chief minister told Rai to step down to make way for a fair probe.

Read | Delhi: Gopal Rai gives up transport ministry, Satyendar Jain takes over

Well placed sources said these statement did not go down well with the party leadership.

Her statement was in deviance from the established line taken over the issue by the government and the party. Her statement gave credence to the oppositions voice, a senior AAP leader said, adding the legislator has been informed about the party decision.

The Delhi government had issued a formal statement that Gopal Rai was relieved of the transport department on health grounds after he underwent a surgery to remove a bullet that was stuck in his spine for past two decades. The opposition however raised questions over the move, pointing out that Rai was still managing four other portfolios.

Lamba deviated from the party as well as the government line on Rais stepping down. It has been made clear several times that Rai (was) asked to be relieved because of his health. The allegations made against him for the bus aggregator app policy are laughable and he did not step down because of them. It was not a matter of competence or corruption but of health. Rai is a very senior member of the party. He is part of the decision-making bodies in the party and is a very senior minister. It came as a shock to the government and the party that such comments had been made about his resignation, said a senior AAP leader.
Delhi University teachers who have been boycotting evaluation of undergraduate examinations for last 20 days in protest against new UGC norms, on Thursday decided to resume the exercise for final year students.

A decision in this regard was taken at a General Body (GB) meeting of the Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA).

The teachers today decided to end the boycott for final year students (FYUP batch). However, we will continue to boycott the evaluation for first and second year students. The same will be applicable for ongoing admission process and staff council meetings, a DUTA statement said.

The teachers have been boycotting evaluation of UG examinations since May 24 in protest against amendments to UGC regulations that, they argue, will lead to job-cuts to the tune of 50 per cent and drastically decrease pupil-teacher ratio in higher education.

The new gazette notification has increased the workload for assistant professors from 16 hours of direct teaching per week (including tutorials) to 18 hours, plus another six of tutorials, bringing the total up to 24 hours. Similarly the work hours of associate professors have been increased from 14 to 22.

Terming it to be an unethical mode of protest, students had urged the teachers to end the boycott fearing delay in results.

The varsity authorities had also urged the teachers to resume the exercise saying any further delay can jeopardies the career of students and also adversely affect the reputation of the university.

The teachers, however, decided to continue with their protest and also boycott the ongoing UG admission process.

The GB decided to continue with boycott till June 20 following which the executive will decided the future course of action.

The teachers will also take out a candle light vigil on Saturday evening demanding HRD ministry rolls back the decision.

Yesterday, Higher Education Secretary V S Oberoi said the direct teaching work load has been restored to 16, 14, 14 hours per week for Assistant Professors, Associate Professors and Professors respectively. This was done through necessary amendments to the UGC norms. PTI GJS RCJ RG RCJ
A 38-year-old businessman was strangulated to death allegedly by a gang of robbers, who first sedated the victims parents with chloroform and attacked him when he resisted, at a farmhouse in south Delhis Chhatarpur area on Thursday morning.

The incident took place around 2.30 AM, when the gang gained access to the two-storey farmhouse through a window eluding the security guard deployed at the main gate of the colony and first sedated the elderly couple sleeping on the ground floor, a police official said.

They robbed them of cash and jewellery, following which around three gang members went on to the first floor, where they confronted the victim, Rohan Gupta.

They tried to sedate Rohan with chloroform but that did not work and when he tried to fight back, he was attacked and later one of them strangulated him, the official said. The incident came to light when a neighbour called up police assuming that a quarrel had broke out in the family.

The police team which rushed to attend the call soon evaluated the actual situation and called for reinforcement, following which the entire farmhouse was surrounded and all its entry and exit points were blocked, the official said.

While five of the accused, identified as Ajay, Vipin, Vinod, Shivnath and Vinod Kumar, were arrested, one of their accomplices is believed to have escaped.

A case of murder and dacoity has been registered and the five arrested persons are being interrogated, additional DCP (south) Nupur Prasad said.

From preliminary investigation, it emerged that the accused had conducted recce before executing the crime. They had keenly observed the movements of the Guptas but the attack on Rohan was unplanned, an official privy to the investigation said.

The investigators are probing if any of the accused persons were aware of the layout of the farmhouse, had worked there before or known to any of the former domestic help or staff members of the Guptas.

The previous crime record of the gang members are also being scanned, the official added.
In partial relief for students and the administration of Delhi University, protesting teachers on Thursday decided to evaluate answer sheets of final-year students. Teachers said the exception had been made only for final-year students and the boycott of the evaluation process will continue.

The teachers are protesting against the UGC Gazette Notification (3rd Amendment), which would have increased the workload and let to retrenchment of ad-hoc teachers.

On Wednesday, the University Grants Commission rolled back the changed workload criteria. Since the panel did not take any action on the Academic Performance Indicator (API) the teachers are continuing their protest.

The agitating teachers have not only boycotted the evaluation process but have also refused to participate in the ongoing admission process and the staff council committee as well.

Read more: Uncertainty over Delhi University results as teachers continue protest

The evaluation boycott has been on since May 24, leading to fears that the announcement of undergraduate courses results, which usually come out by June 30, will be delayed this year, affecting the curriculum progress.

The admission process for the undergraduate courses would begin by the end of next week. Teachers are responsible for the verification of documents during admission as well as other related operations.

However, for the final-year students, the four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) batch, teachers have promised to complete the evaluation within a week.

They are demanding a complete withdrawal of the API point system that forms the basis of the promotions of the teachers.

Read more: Protesting teachers now threaten to boycott DU admission process

It is unfortunate that the government had decided to continue with the API based promotion scheme (PBAS), despite its proven adverse impact on teaching, learning and research, as well as the service conditions of teachers by large scale denial of promotions for the last eight years, said Nandita Narain, president of the

Delhi University Teachers Association.

The teachers had said the boycott will continue till June 20. The future course of action will be decided after a general body meeting.

To express their discontentment, teachers will hold a candle light vigil at Mandi House on Saturday.

For teachers both the workload and API issues are important. We cannot talk of one at the cost of the other. We will continue our protest till all our concerns on API are addressed, said Ashwini Shankar, teacher at Deshbandhu College.
Close on the heels of the inter-examination toppers muddle, another seemingly major scam has been unravelled in Bihar, this time at the Bhim Rao Ambedkar Bihar University (BRABU), headquartered at Muzaffarpur in north Bihar.

Around 30 students enrolled in second year of BRABUs Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA) course for session 2013-16 have been declared pass, even though they had not written a single word in their answer sheets.

The results of the candidates were declared recently.

The startling irregularity was revealed during an inquiry conducted by the university officials after getting numerous complaints from students. The university authorities have now served show causes notices on and summoned the examiners concerned.

Confirming the development, examination controller-cumproctor of BRABU Satish Kumar Rai said action would be taken against those found responsible for the major irregularity.

The matter came to light when the students applied for the scrutiny of their marks. When the answer sheets were taken out, we found that not a single word has been written on 30 answer sheets. But, passing marks have been awarded to them. All these answer sheets are of LND College of Motihari in East Champaran district, he said.

Rai said a list of examiners concerned had been prepared before summoning them. The answer sheets are of practical examination, in which written and practical examination both are held, said the examination controller.

This is not the first time that marks have awarded on the blank answer sheets in BRABU.

The varsities examination department had hogged the limelight last year, when marks were allotted on 40 odd blank answer sheets of final year examination of homeopathy.

The court of chief judicial magistrate issued warrants against former Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) chairman Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh and his wife Usha Sinha in the Bihar intermediate toppers scandal.
The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has finally revoked its affiliation to the VR College in Vaishali, which was accused of manipulating the results of its students in the intermediate examinations held this year. Students of the institution will be accommodated in neighbouring plus-two schools.

Patna divisional commissioner Anand Kishor, who is the acting chairman of the BSEB, told HT that the action was taken on the basis of the report of an inquiry conducted by former board secretary Hassan Waris. A show-cause had been served to VR College, and it was supposed to reply by June 15. However, it did not do that. Today, we decided to permanently cancel its affiliation, Kishor said.

Waris report, which was submitted on May 2, spoke in detail on how the college had worked miracles with the examination results. The college produced four of the states 18 toppers in the Class 12 science and arts streams this year. One of the meritorious students was none other than the daughter of the college proprietor, Amit Singh.

The laboratory, library and classrooms of VR College didnt seem like they were ever used. When the committee members asked for records, they received none. They couldnt produce the records even when we gave them time, the Waris committee report said.

Read: Baccha Roy, fugitive owner of Vaishali college, surrenders

The board also set up a three-member inquiry committee comprising board secretary Anup Kumar Sinha, deputy secretary Kameshwar Prasad Singh and Waris to investigate four other Vaishali colleges that have come under the scanner. These institutions are the Sant Kabir Mahant Ram Dayal Das College, Sanjay Singh Plus-Two Higher Secondary School, Ram Videshi Singh Mahavidyalaya and Vasudeo Singh College.

The committee is expected to submit its report in 10 days.

Sources said there was a lot of evidence against VR College and the other institutions to prove that the results were manipulated in connivance with board officials. The ambit of the inquiry will be widened as and when we get more information on the wrongdoings of other colleges, an official said.

The board on Wednesday suspended 24 officials, including two who are already under arrest, and served showcause notices to three others. A cleaning-up exercise is on, and we would like to undo the damage done to the board and the state, said BSEB secretary Anup Kumar Sinha.

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News / News

by Staff Reporter

A local school head has approached the civil court in Harare seeking the custody of their four children he had with his ex-wife.Cornelius Chimwanda dragged Emillia Benhura to court where he expressed dissatisfaction over the manner their children were being raised.But Benhura said Chimwanda had no right to do that as he initially failed to help towards the upkeep of the same children.The magistrate Gamuchirai Siwardi ordered Benhura to bring the children to court and deferred the matter to a later date.
The CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government is planning to make vaccination compulsory for school admissions and has decided to take strict action against those who campaign against preventive vaccines.

The government has been forced to take action after the rate of vaccination dipped in Muslim-dominated areas like Malappuram.

Last year, eight children from the district died of diphtheria which was supposedly almost eradicated from the state.

As a preliminary step, the government will conduct a survey to collect the vaccination status of children in different parts of the state. The information collected through schools will be handed over to local self-government institutions within a month.

We will seek the help of local bodies for the survey. Once we get the reports we will take action, state education minister C Raveendranath said.

Vaccination details of the child will be mandatory for admissions to schools. Government hospitals have been instructed to check the vaccination status of children and issue necessary certificates.

According to the state health ministry, 35% children between one and five years of age and 20% in the age group of seven to 16 in the district were never vaccinated in Malappuram district whereas the immunization rate is well above 95%in both age groups in the rest of the state.

The Indian Medical Association and Indian Academy of Pediatrics have asked the state government to take strict action to contain the misinformation campaign. Otherwise, it warned, some of the eradicated diseases may stage a comeback in the state.

According to the central governments universal immunization programme, 10 diseases are covered under free immunization in the country Polio, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, tetanus, mumps, rubella tuberculosis, Hepatitis A and B.

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Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Wednesday announced creation of a Higher Education Fund to help talented students in the state who remain deprived of higher education due to lack of money.

Chouhan, while launching state-level School Chalen Ham Abhiyan at Silwani in Raisen district on Wednesday, said laptops will be given to 17,000 students on securing over 85 % marks in class 12 examinations.

The CM said the students, who could not avail benefits under the laptop scheme last year, will also be given laptops this year.

Cycles will be given to students going to other villages for study and money for uniforms will be deposited in their parents accounts, he said.

To enhance enrollment in government schools, the School Education Department has drawn a four-phase-long campaign. Currently, the second phase is going on.

It is the resolve of the state government to ensure that no child remains out of school. For this, a well-planned campaign is being conducted in the state with assistance of promoters comprising societys responsible people and volunteers, Chouhan added.

He said this years examination results show that the level and quality of education had increased in states government schools. He said the pass percentage of government schools was over 57 % whereas that of private schools was 49 %.

A class 3 student  Sumit Thakur  from Silwani government primary school handed over a letter to the chief minister informing that his parents had died, he was being looked after by his grandmother who is very poor and he wished to study further.

Chouhan directed the district collector to ensure that he is being taken care of without any problems. He told Sumit that his education was now onwards responsibility of the state.
The call letters for the State Bank of India (SBI) probationary officer (PO) examination 2016 can be downloaded from the official website from June 22, according to the latest notification issued by the bank. In the recruitment notification issued earlier, the bank had given June 14 as the date from which the call letters for the online preliminary examination can be downloaded.

Steps to download the call letters:

1) Go to the official website of SBI

2) Click on the career

3) Click on the link for SBI PO 2016 call letter

4) Log in with the required details (registration number and password/date of birth)

5 Call letter will be displayed on the screen

6) Take a print-out of the same.

SBI will not send any hard copies of the call letters. All candidates are required to print a copy of the admit card and carry it to their examination hall along with an ID proof. Without the call letter, the candidates will not be allowed to enter the examination hall.

The preliminary examination will have objective type questions of 100 marks. This test would be of 1 hour duration consisting of 3 sections. The English language section will have 30 questions and will carry 30 marks while the quantitative ability and aptitude section will have 35 questions and 35 marks each.

Read more | 2200 SBI PO jobs: Application process begins, to end on May 24

Candidates need to qualify in each of the three sections by securing passing marks to be decided by the bank. Adequate number of candidates in each category as decided by the bank (approximately 20 times the numbers of vacancies subject to availability) will be shortlisted for the main examination.

The application process for 2,200 SBI probationary officer jobs had begun on May 4 and continued till May 24.

Of the total 2,200 vacancies, 1,028 posts are for general candidates, 590 jobs are reserved for Other Backward Class (OBC) candidates, 351 seats are for Scheduled Castes (SC) and 231 seats are for the Scheduled Tribes (ST) candidates.

Read more: SBI Clerk 2016 preliminary exam results expected soon

The examination will be held in two phases: 1) preliminary and 2) main. The shortlisted candidates in the main examination will be called for a group discussion and interview. The preliminary exam will be conducted on July 2, 3, 9 and 10 and result will be declared on July 18.

Note:

Last date for printing your application: July 9, 2016.

Candidates should regularly visit the authorised SBI website for details and updates.

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In April 2015, a few months into his home-dining experience, The Bohri Kitchen (TBK), 28-year-old Munaf Kapadia received a text from a top boss at Google India, his employer then. The executive learnt of Kapadias venture from an in-flight magazine and was impressed by the cultural insights one could draw from the culinary offering. Thats when I realised that my little home experiment is no longer a pet project, says Munaf, who gave up his lucrative job in August last year to expand TBK. In my four-and-a-half-year stint at Google, I never got the kind of recognition that TBK got me in a short period of time.

The Bohri Kitchen, a pop-up that invites guests to sample the best of Bohri cuisine at Kapadias Colaba home, launched 15 months ago. Its popularity caught the fancy of foodies looking for something out of the ordinary, and serious restaurateurs, notably Riyaaz Amlani of Impresario, who went on to include their kheema samosas in the menu of his eatery, Social. TBKs latest milestone is a soon-to-be-launched first outlet at a suburban mall (in Inorbit Mall, Malad, on July 6).

Munaf Kapadi with his mother Nafisa at their Colaba home (Photo: Kunal Patil/HT)

We won the retail space in a competition for women entrepreneurs, called Pink Power, hosted by Inorbit Mall. We wouldve never been able to afford the rent at this stage otherwise, says Munaf. When a judge asked Munafs mother and head chef of the enterprise, Nafisa, if she was aware of another Worli-based namesake, she told them that it was their central kitchen. Her response was greeted with applause.

Kitchen un-confidential

Munaf had been toying with the idea of showcasing Nafisas cooking skills for years before his venture even took shape. I wanted her to stop watching TV and put her culinary skills to good use. Once her children grew up, she had too much idle time, says the 28-year old, who began his venture by emailing 50 friends on a Saturday afternoon in December 2014, calling them over for a paid meal. Within four hours, we were sold out. The three-course Sunday lunch was a hit, and my mothers Kaju chicken and paratha won praises, he recalls.

Read: Can home chefs survive the cut-throat professional cooking?

This is also when Munaf taught his mother to stalk prospective guests on Facebook. Inviting strangers over for a meal can be tricky. So we devised a way to moderate who gets to come with our no serial killer policy. The plan was simple: the lunch would be announced on TBKs Facebook page, those interested would RSVP with their name, number and a short bio. Kapadias mother would then run an online background check and satisfactory profiles would be confirmed.

Mutton undhiyu (Photo: The Bohri Kitchen)

Sweet beginnings

For the 58-year-old Nafisa, cooking for a big group is no big deal. Born into a large family in Bycullas Bohri Mohalla and married into a joint family, churning out a meal for 14 to 15 people was routine. I started cooking when I was 15. My mother was a very good cook, and I picked up the recipe for her special dal gosht. After I got married, my mother-in-law taught me to scour for the best ingredients from the Byculla market, says Nafisa. She also credits her mother-in-law for her mutton undhiyu (vegetables and mutton slow-cooked with spices) and mutton chikoli (multiple pulses, mutton and vegetables with shreds of roti). While Nafisa was confident of her craft, she wasnt sure if her house favourites would fly with guests  many of whom had never sampled Bohri food. When a guest actually hugged her after a meal out of gratitude, her insecurities were put to rest, says Munaf. He also credits his father, Turab Kapadia, for sourcing ingredients from carefully vetted vendors in Colaba and Crawford Market. Over time, Turabs exhaustive market research, in the literal sense, has resulted in knowledge of where to source the best lamb, for instance, especially if it was to be turned into Nafisas star attraction, Raan in kaju masala.

Read: Chef Saransh Goila wants to take his butter chicken global

Extra helping

TBK slowly forayed into delivery, but the execution was initially riddled with glitches. Nafisa tried training cooks, but failed, and the quality suffered. Thats when I realised that I am good at marketing, but when it comes to operations, which is 80 per cent of the business, Im an amateur, admits Munaf. The answer to his problems came in the form of angel investor, Gurmeet Kochhar. The two met at NH7 Weekender in Pune last year and, within a month, Kochhar helped TBK launch its delivery service and set up a kitchen in Worli.

The Bohri Kitchens Thaal-in-a-box

But replicating Nafisas delectable dishes on a large scale remained a challenge. The first time we got a one-star rating on a delivery app, Munaf was so upset he shut the site down, says Kochhar. He asked for a sit-down meeting with Nafisa, and went over the recipes meticulously. Installing cameras in the kitchen to allow Nafisa monitor operations from her Colaba home helped. But to retain her magic touch, the first batch of every dish is sent to her for tasting every day and, only after her approval is TBK open for order.

To crack the delivery business, Munaf is following food trends, and working on giving his menu a healthier twist. My parents belong to a generation that appreciates rich food, but my siblings and I are health-conscious. So, we will soon introduce a healthier but equally tasty menu. We are also working towards introducing a version of our Thaal-in-a-Box for weight watchers,

Follow the Bohri Kitchen on facebook.com/thebohrikitchen; or visit thebohrikitchen.com; The Bohri Kitchens first outlet will open at Inorbit Mall, Malad (W)

5 home chefs to know in Mumbai

1) Gitikas Pakghor

Gitika Saikia is an Assamese food evangelist, promoting mostly tribal dishes through pop up lunches.

Contact: gitikasaikia@gmail.com

2) The Bawi Bride

Parsi specials By Perzen Patel who is on mission to make Parsi food accessible around India.

Contact: perzen.patel@gmail.com

3) Ananya Banerjee

Banerjee specialties include Bengali and Ethiopian pop-ups.

Contact: artyananya@gmail.com, 98204 00222

4) Aparna Surte

Surte specializes in Korean kitchen dining experience.

Contact: aparnasurte@gmail.com

5) Grandma Mookerjees Kitchen

Auroni Mookerjee serves Bengali food with a European twist.

Contact: 99309 62938
The Gujarat high court has allowed termination of 22-week pregnancy of a 14-year-old rape survivor, holding abortion was in the best interest of the teenager.

After careful inquiry of the medical opinion on feasibility of the pregnancy as well as social circumstances faced by the victim, this Court is of the opinion that termination of pregnancy requires to be permitted, which is in the best interest of the victim, Justice Sonia Gokani said in an order given last week.

The victims fragile health and poor haemoglobin level require that a team of doctors examines her once again and also ensure her safety, she maintained.

The girl, from Rajkot, had moved a special criminal application seeking Court permission, at the earliest, to terminate her pregnancy of 22 weeks citing her age and in the larger interest of justice. Continuance of pregnancy would cause grave injury to her health and well being, it said.

The HC relied on an order of the Supreme Court in the case of Chandrakant Jayantilal Suthar vs State of Gujarat where the apex court had held the best interest of the victim as the benchmark for passing orders in such cases.

Gokani said, In the present set of circumstances, the Courts decision has to be guided by the best interest of the victim alone and not of the stakeholders nor of the guardian.

It can be noticed that the patient has severe anaemia with 6.5 per cent haemoglobin and pregnancy of 22 weeks and 3 days as on June 7. The medical opinion suggests termination can be carried out with the order of the Court and after correction of anaemia with due risk of the procedure.

As per the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, termination of pregnancy can be done up to 20-week of pregnancy.

A rape case was filed on May 22, 2016 in Rajkot mahila police station after the victims parents came to know their daughter was pregnant.

The accused, a 21-year-old youth who was known to the girl, was later arrested and is currently behind bars.

The victims parents first moved a Court in Rajkot for termination of pregnancy. However, the Rajkot Court denied nod for the medical procedure following which they approached the HC.
The central government cancelled on Thursday the registration of Sabrang Trust run by social activist Teesta Setalvad.

The ministry had earlier temporarily suspended the registration of the non-governmental organistaion under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) that governs the foreign funding of such groups.

The ministrys order said that during an inspection of the NGO, it emerged that the trust indulged in many activities that were in violation of the FCRA. The home ministry began a comprehensive probe in April 2015 against a number of NGOs including Sabrang.

The ministry said Teestas NGO spent an amount of Rs 50 lakh on another company, Sabrang Communications and Publishing Private Limited, which is not registered under the FCRA. The FCRA prohibits activities carried out by Sabrang Communication as self-owned media and publishing company.

Sabrang also transferred an amount of Rs 2.46 lakh from its account designated for receiving foreign funding to its domestic account which again is not allowed and is treated as misutilisation of funding.

The decision to cancel registration of NGO Sabrang Trust was taken after considering and examining all matters, a ministry of home affairs source told IANS.

Setalvad and her NGOs are on the forefront of civil society campaign against atrocities committed on Muslims during the Gujarat riots of 2002. Her criticism of the Gujarat government then led by Narendra Modi on the riots issue, resulted in bitter war of word between the activist and the BJP.

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Over a century ago, musician Abdul Karim Khan migrated from Kairana to Dharwad in Karnataka to establish the Kirana Gharana as a musical ideology that presumably forms the line of actual control between Carnatic music and Hindustani classical.

What followed was a movement that revolutionised Indian music as we know it.

Today, a list released by a 78-year-old local BJP MP has brought another instance of migration from the same town in Uttar Pradesh. But this, in utter contrast, has struck a decidedly discordant note among the people of the state in the run-up to the upcoming state assembly polls.

The legislator, Hukum Singh, produced a list of over 350 Hindu families who left the town allegedly under threat from Muslim gangs. The comparison, quite obviously, was to the infamous exodus of Pandit families from Kashmir in the 1990s.

Read | In Kairana, BJP team says many more families ready to leave

The district administrations door-to-door campaign may have punched a sizeable hole in Singhs list, but it cant be denied that the gangs of Kairana  headed by two Muslims  are a dreaded reality. The controversy has highlighted the law-and-order crisis in Uttar Pradesh, touched up with a slight shade of communal colour.

It cant be denied that the gangs of Kairana  headed by two Muslims  are a dreaded reality. (Virendra Singh Gosain/ HT File Photo)

At the centre of the controversy is Mukeem Kala, accused of killing two businessmen whose families figure in Singhs complaint. By the time the gangster was nabbed in connection with the robbery of a Tanishq jewellery showroom in Saharanpur on October 19, 2015, he was already facing 14 murder cases. He is accused of killing 11 Muslims and three Hindus.

Read | Mukeem Kala: The man behind Kairana exodus continues reign of terror from jail

Kala was initially jailed in Muzaffarnagar jail, but when he began acquiring a cult following among the residents of nearby Jaanpura  his native village  the authorities shifted him and 24 accomplices to Maharajganj jail. Another reason for his prison transfer was extortion calls allegedly made on his behalf to businessmen in Kairana  one of which was traced to Muzaffarnagar jail.

Kala entered the world of crime in 2010 by joining the gang of Mustafa from Gangoh, Saharanpur. His first crime  a robbery at Panipat in Haryana  helped him become one of the gang leaders most trusted lieutenants.

In December 2011, Kala became the gang leader after Mustafa was killed in an encounter. Since then, over 30 cases of looting, robbery, murder and extortion have been registered against him across Kairana, Shamli, Dehradun, Panipat and Baghpat districts.

One of Kalas gang members, Furkan, formed a splinter group in 2013. Both Kala and Furkan carried out three sensational killings in August 2014, cited by Singh to illustrate the alleged threat posed by Muslims to Hindus.

This, however, is where the BJP MP goes mute.

Read | Hukum Singh sticks to Hindu exodus, releases list for Kandhala

A general view of Alkala Mohalla in Kairana, Uttar Pradesh. (Virendra Singh Gosain/ HT File Photo)

The last census of Kairana put the population at 89,300, with 80.74% Muslims and 18.34% Hindus. The town has, till now, symbolised a melodic co-existence between the two communities. In the same month when the businessmen were killed, 200 to 300 Muslims volunteers helped Hindu Kawaria pilgrims in keeping with local tradition. After the third killing, the town locked itself down in protest for 12 days.

One of the factors that helps preserve the communal harmony in Kairana is the fact that a majority of both its Hindu and Muslim populations hail from the backward Gujjar community. This finds reflection in politics as well. Despite being a Muslim-dominated town, Kairana handed Singh  a Hindu Gujjar  four consecutive poll triumphs since 2014. His appointment as an MP in 2014 necessitated a bypoll that was won by Munawar Hasan, only the second Muslim to win the seat till then.

More significantly, Kairana remained unaffected when riots broke out in neighbouring Muzaffarnagar ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The few Jat families in the town faced no threat, though the main aggressors in the communal riots hailed from their community.

However, as Kairana seems to have set the discourse as the state gears up for the upcoming polls, it remains to be seen whether the town will descend into violence in the months to come  or stick to its Kirana tradition of harmonious existence.

Also read | HT Interview: I still stand by my list, says Kairana MP on Hindu migration row
The bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh to create the new state of Telangana in March 2014 was the most difficult decision of the then UPA government, former union minister Jairam Ramesh has told HT.

...the bifurcation of Telangana turned out to be the most difficult, most agonising and as it turned out, the most thankless decision, said Ramesh, whose latest book Old History New Geography: Bifurcating Andhra Pradesh has hit the stands.

Ramesh also indicated that YS Rajasekhara Reddys death in a chopper accident was a turning point in the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. I have written in my book that YSRs death gave KCR life. YSR was a strong, resourceful and a daredevil leader. His death orphaned the Congress party in Andhra Pradesh. The other decisive point was home minister P Chidambarams statement on December 9 2009 at 11.30 PM that gave boost to the demand of Telangana, said Ramesh, who was earlier an MP from Andhra Pradesh.

The statement had come in the backdrop of TRS party chief K Chandrasekhar Raos ongoing fast.

The former minister, who played a key role in preparing the Andhra Pradesh bifurcation bill, admitted that there was a division in the Congress party on the contentious issue but also accused the Narendra Modi-led government of depriving the people of Andhra Pradesh.

BJP leader LK Advani earlier wrote a letter saying we oppose the creation of Telangana. But later they became a great supporter of the Telangana movement. Now, Modi had betrayed the people of Andhra Pradesh as commitments made by Modis predecessor, Manmohan Singh of special category status were not honoured by the NDA government. NDA has not supported the building of the new capital. Modi is doing his best to undercut Naidu. BJP is trying to discredit TDP in Andhra. It is not implementing the reorganisation law.

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Union HRD minister Smriti Irani has posted an open letter on Facebook saying she will not accept trolls and will continue to do her job after a Twitter spat with Bihar education minister Ashok Choudhary turned ugly.

Their verbal duel that started on Tuesday after Choudhary reminded Irani about the new education policy that was scheduled to be announced by 2015 end. As the two ministers continued their war of words on the social media platform, users trolled them throughout the day.

As the politician mumbled apologies and explained his position regarding the twitter spat to my state leader on the mobile while our contingent drove back from Bhagalpur last night; I watched his supporters trend a hashtag in my name, irrespective of their netas public apology, she wrote in the letter signed as Aunty National late on Wednesday.

Read: Oh dear! Irani spars on Twitter with minister

As those who scream murder and whip themselves up into a feminist frenzy at the drop of a hat tried to endear themselves to me on Twitter, I reflected on the near Jerry Maguire like moment that was upon me, she said.

The human resource development minister went on to describe the struggle that girls and working women have to endure every day but are asked not to speak up because It is not worth it. Nuksaan tumhara hoga, ladke ka kuch nahi bigadega.

Irani also alluded to the row over her appointment in the Narendra Modi cabinet by enumerating her achievements as a politician saying yet some intellectual says anpad the minute you are given the opportunity to serve as HRD Minister.

And suddenly the rules change. You, the creature who on every podium exalts the right of women to speak their mind is told dont speak your mind. Ignore the trolls no matter how high they serve in their political systems. Ignore public attempts to humiliate you through sexual innuendos kyunki nuksaan tumhara hoga unka kuch nahi bigadega, she said.

Irani, whose letter was shared 1,868 times and attracted at least 400 comments, added that she will not apologise about who she is and the hard work she puts in. She also gave a list of things she completed as the HRD minister.

So while many working women battle this challenge in confined working spaces, I spat it out on twitter for my office travels with me. But then there are some who say why talk about yourself at all, surely one day they shall realise the amount of work you have done, she said.
In the olden days, the Christian nuns in Goa used egg whites to starch their clothes. They did not know what to do with the yolks, so they used them to make a sweet dish. Over time the instinctive cuisine evolved into a seven-layer dessert that came to be known as Bebinca, ostensibly named after a Portuguese desert.

If only those nuns of yore could have known this: on Wednesday, Pope Francis, for his dinner at the Vatican, was served the Bebinca, along with 12 other dishes, all cooked by Indian chef Vikas Khanna. I used a pizza oven to make the Bebinca. I could not make all seven layers, I made only four, Khanna told HT over the phone from the Vatican. It has not sunk in yet that I served the Pope a dish created by the Christians in Goa.

The other 12 dishes were also taken from the cuisines developed by Indian Christians in the catholic regions. Khannas favourite among them is the vegetable stew made at Mother Teresas Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. It is made in mustard oil with paanch phoran, a mix of five spieces. Vikas personally dried, roasted, and powdered the five spices.

Vikas Khanna presents his book to Pope Francis. (HT Photo)

After handing over the 13 dishes to the office of the Pontiff, which alone serves food to the Pope, Khanna got to spend seven to eight minutes with Pope Francis and gave him his book, Utsav. It is a 1,200-page, 15-kg tome that brings together dishes of 26 festivals and 50 ceremonies from different parts of the country. The book is organised according to the calendar; Christmas, therefore, comes in the end.

A photo from Vikas Khannas book Utsav shows a Muslim woman with her children dressed as Santa Claus. (HT Photo)

The Pope rifled through the pages right down to the Christmas section, which also has a photo of a woman in a burkha carrying a child in her lap and holding anothers hand. Both the children are dressed as Santa Claus. The Pope, who often talks about the importance of pluralism in society, spent time looking at the photo. He said it is really beautiful, said Khanna.

The chef spent three days preparing the Popes dinner, with a crew that only spoke Italian. Khanna therefore downloaded a new Google app, which did the trick for him. Everything you speak into that app gets spoken back in Italian. Meri to vaat lag gai (I got screwed), said Khanna with a chuckle, but its been the most awesome three days of my life.

The dinner was a culmination of a discussion Khanna started years ago with the Vatican about the hunger initiative, which is close to the Popes heart. His people were delighted that a chef was talking about hunger. At the end of their meeting, the Pope gave Khanna a rose ring. Im going to savour it the rest of life, says Khanna, who attended the mass before leaving the Vatican.

Dinner highlights

1. Mother Teresas Holy breakfast vegetable stew: Kolkata

2. Amitar Khar: spiced green papaya from Assam

3. Fish Paturi in banana leaf: West Bengal

4. Chicken Shagoti: Goa

5. Mutton Ishtew with appams: Kerala

6. Lamb Vindaloo with sannas: Goa

7. Green papaya chutney: West Bengal

8. Prawn Pulao: Goa

9. Dodol: Goa

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Opinion / Columnist

With his party seemingly in turmoil, MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai's health problems have led to all sorts of speculation, but only within the confines of Southern Africa. The rest of the world appears to have shown no interest.The circumstances surrounding Morgan Tsvangirai's admission and subsequent release from a Harare hospital this week remain somewhat unclear. Initial suggestions were that the "suspended" MDC-T leader was hospitalised due to food poisoning, but the Zimbabwe's The Herald newspaper reported on Tuesday that personal and political problems were responsible, and even quoted hospital officials as saying that he had suffered "a mental, and maybe a nervous breakdown."It seemed plausible, given that he and his estranged wife Elizabeth Macheka, are now living separately. The bigger factor was that the turmoil within the Zimbabwean party has taken its toll. Factional fighting has torn the fragmented MDC-T apart in recent months, with Tsvangirai's secretary-general Tendai Biti leading a revolt that has seen a spate of alleged suspensions and expulsions from the organisation.However, reports of a nervous breakdown had their credibility undermined when Tsvangirai emerged from hospital a day later looking fit as a fiddle, and he even took questions from journalists at his Highlands home in the afternoon."Is it illegal for a person to simply fall sick?" he interjected when questions over his general health persisted. It was a fair point, and one that appeared to rubbish suggestions he was no longer fit to continue as the party leader.But the media speculation didn't end there. The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) and Zimpapers newspapers  all controlled by the Zanu PF-led government  claimed on Wednesday night that the former prime minister sneaked out of Harare's Trauma Centre and Hospital without paying the $2,600 bill for his treatment.A report was allegedly made at Avondale Police Station and a docket opened after Tsvangirai reportedly left the hospital via a laundry room and made his escape in a getaway vehicle readied for him by aides in the car park. aI can't believe that ZBC actually had a story on my purported failure to pay my hospital bills," the 62-year old was quoted as saying on newzimbabwe.com. "For the record, my bill has been taken care of and it was not a humongous bill that needed treasury involvement."He continued: "Anyway, we all know that this too shall pass. I am encouraged to share with you a scripture I was reading this evening  2 Corinthians 4: 17-18. 'For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen; since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal'."While there is plenty of propaganda and seemingly inaccurate reports in Zimbabwean media, there has been no coverage of the embattled Tsvangirai's latest struggle on any major global news website outside of Africa, and it is this he should find even more insulting.Let us not forget, this is a man who has, at times, fought single-handedly against the tide of Zanu PF oppression, survived assassination attempts, and been jailed unconstitutionally on numerous occasions. By contrast, international coverage of his opponent Robert Mugabe's increasing health problems has become almost obsessive.
Kolkata



The Bengal BJP is all set to pass a special resolution in its state committee meet highlighting the plight of minorities who are under constant attacks from Islamist militants in Bangladesh.

It also plans to initiate a state-wide movement condemning the attacks in the neighbouring country.

According to BJP sources, the special resolution will also stress allegations that fundamentalists from Bangladesh are finding shelter in Bengal.

On June 7, HT reported that Bangladeshi minorities have reached out to the saffron camp by holding meetings with the BJP and RSS leaders in Kolkata.

The partys state committee meeting is scheduled in Siliguri on June 17 and 18 in the presence of central leaders, including party national general secretary and Union health minister J P Nadda and joint general secretary (organisation) Shiv Prakash. The state unit will also write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to prevail on the Sheikh Hasina government to ensure protection of Hindus in the neighbouring country.

We are all set to pass a special resolution in our state committee meeting regarding attacks on minorities in Bangladesh. We are concerned and condemn what is happening in Bangladesh, Dilip Ghosh told HT.

A delegation of minority leaders from the neighbouring country met me and other BJP leaders in Kolkata. They do not want to run away from their country but stay on and fight for their safety and rights. We must help them. We also appreciate the Bangladesh governments recent crackdown in fundamentalists, Ghosh added.

State BJP leadership also said that turmoil in Bangladesh is having direct fallout in Bengal as terror elements are seeking in and obtaining shelter in the state.

Militants have killed more than 30 people since early last year, ranging from atheist bloggers and liberal academics to gay rights campaigners, foreign aid workers and members of minority communities, prompting authorities to launch a nationwide anti-militant clampdown.

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The Congress on Thursday accused the Prime Ministers Office of running a dirty tricks department amid reports that a senior official may have manipulated a probe into the alleged disappearance of documents related to the controversial Ishrat Jahan case.

A report in the Indian Express said a home ministry official tried to tutor a witness to defame former home minister P Chidambaram in the case, potentially setting the stage for a fresh round of political bickering over the 2004 killing of four suspected terrorists including 19-year-old Ishrat in Ahmedabad.

Several Gujarat police officials were later charged by the CBI for staging a fake encounter.

The missing documents relate to preparation of an affidavit that did not mention Ishrats terror links and filed by the previous Congress government in the Gujarat high court. An earlier affidavit had linked the 19-year-old Mumbai girl and the three others to the Laskar-e-Taiba.

The BJP-led government accuses the previous Congress regime of exonerating Ishrat of terror charges to suit its political agenda of targeting Narendra Modi, who was the Gujarat CM when the encounter took place in Ahmedabad.

The Congress latched on to the report to get back at the BJP.

There is a dirty tricks department running at the top echelons of the government which is coordinated by the PMO, party spokesperson and lawmaker Anand Sharma said.

Their job is to leak and fabricate documents, carry out surveillance of political opponents and officers. Even judges have not been spared, he said.

Chidambaram also accused the BJP-led government of creating a fake controversy over the missing documents.

Taking full responsibility for filing the second affidavit, he said it was absolutely the correct thing to do.

The moral of the story is that even a doctored report (of the inquiry officer) cannot hide the truth. The real issue is whether Ishrat Jehan and three others were killed in a genuine encounter or a fake encounter, he added.

BJP national secretary Sidharth Singh, however, said the news report does not absolve Chidambaram of his role in changing the affidavit to dilute the fact that Ishrat was a terrorist.

In February this year, former home secretary GK Pillai said the second affidavit was changed at the political level hinting at his then boss Chidambaram.

Home minister Rajnath Singh told the Lok Sabha in March that crucial documents pertaining to preparation of the second affidavit were missing and it included the draft affidavit corrected by Chidambaram.

Singh asked additional secretary BK Prasad  the officer named in the news report -- to probe how the documents went missing.

The news report reproduced a taped conversation purportedly between Prasad and Ashok Kumar, earlier a director in the home ministry and now a joint secretary in commerce ministry.

Prasad allegedly told Kumar the answers he was seeking for his report, which was submitted to the government on Wednesday.

Union home secretary Rajiv Meherishi said in Mumbai that the conversation was misinterpreted. Jumping to conclusions by hearing only one official and without having understood the response from the other side was uncalled for.

Prasad told HT on Thursday that there was no evidence to establish that Kumar testified after being tutored during his alleged conversation.

Besides, all officers examined by me are or have been senior officers in the government and fully capable of answering questions related to the probe on their own and there is no question of tutoring, said Prasad.

In his report, Prasad said it appears that documents were removed knowingly or unknowingly, or misplaced between September 18 and 28, 2009 when Chidambaram was the home minister.

I have conducted a free and fair enquiry which my enquiry report will reveal, he said in a statement later.

Kumar, however, refused to respond to the allegations saying he was not authorised to speak to the media.

A probe by a Gujarat metropolitan magistrate in 2009 found that Ishrat and three others were killed in a fake encounter. The CBI had later charged several Gujarat police and Intelligence officers of murder in the case.
The Shiv Senas strong arm tactics were on display again as a party zila parishad or district council member assaulted an official of Central Bank of India in the drought-hit Yavatmal district on Wednesday.

The Sena claimed that Pravin Shinde was protesting against the banks malpractices in handing out crop loans to farmers.

WATCH (15/6/16): Local Shiv Sena leaders slap a bank employee in Yavatmal (Maharashtra)https://t.co/oQOPEEaToa  ANI (@ANI_news) June 16, 2016

Shinde and the local party unit were protesting against the banks refusal to give farmers the due loans. The bank was forcing farmers to go to agents and approving only those loans which were pushed by agents. When questioned, the bank employee started behaving arrogantly, leading to a ruckus, a Sena leader said.

The Sena has stood by Shinde so far and decided not to carry out any action against him on the issue.

The cause was just. Often, on such occasions, a Shiv sainik gets emotional. Its the way the party functions, another Sena leader said.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) submitted to a Pune court on Thursday a list of six names it believes are linked to rationalist Narendra Dabholkars murder.

All six people -- including an ENT surgeon, Virendra Tawade -- are members of rightwing group Sanatan Sanstha. The CBI has already arrested Tawade, whom it refers to as the architect in the murder case, while four others, who are also suspects in a 2009 Margaon blast, are absconding. Another suspect has been interrogated in rationalist Govind Pansares murder, too, according to a source.

Read: Tawades arrest an international conspiracy; BJPs actions anti-Hindu: Sanatan

Tawde was arrested by the CBI from Panvel last week. Seeking an extension of his custody, CBI lawyer BP Raju informed judicial magistrate VB Gulve-Patil that the accused was not cooperating in the investigation and his further custodial interrogation was necessary. The court later extended the CBI custody of the right-wing activist till June 20.

The names of the suspects emerged when the CBI scrutinised an email exchange involving Tawade.

The CBI told the court that Tawade was asked by an unidentified Sanatan activist through an email to focus on Dabholkar just before the rationalists murder. Around two-three months before Dabholkar was executed, Tawade received an email from an unidentified ID. Through the email, Tawade was asked to concentrate on Dabholkar, CBI counsel BP Raju said.

According to the CBI, some of the suspects have frequently changed their identities to evade arrest and used code language to exchange information.

A CBI source said a witness identified Tawdes Sanatan Sanstha accomplice Saran Akolkar as the shooter in the Dabholkar killing after going through sketches of suspects.

Dabholkar (67), a leading anti-superstition activist, was shot dead by two unidentified motorcycle borne assailants at point blank range in Pune in 2013.

Sanatan Santha, while denying the involvement of its members in the Dabholkar murder, has accused the CBI of hatching a conspiracy to malign its name.

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Agra

A court ordered a DNA test on the body of alleged Mathura violence mastermind Ram Vriksh Yadav on Thursday after questions were raised over the identification of the sect chief.

The court of the ninth additional sessions judge in Mathura observed that no family member or associate of Yadav identified his body and asked the police to get a DNA test through preserved samples.

The judge also ordered the chief medical officer to assist the police so that the identification of the body could be established by law.

Yadav died after his hut caught fire in the rioting that followed a police anti-encroachment drive against members of his cult in Mathuras Jawahar Bagh, police said. He was identified among the 11-odd charred bodies in the park, where the rioting killed 29 people.

In court, police presented a one-page identification statement of Yadavs body by Harnath Singh, who is currently in jail over the Mathura violence.

The court said the post-mortem of the unidentified body was performed three days after the death. The sessions judge said Jawahar Bagh was close to the offices of local administration and police, who spoke to Yadav before his death and would be able to identify him.

The judge further observed some close associates of Yadav managed to leave Jawahar Bagh along with their families despite the presence of hundreds of police officers.

The court said the identification of a burnt body could lead to false conclusions even in cases where it is performed by family members.

As tooth and scalp samples of the deceased were preserved, a DNA test could easily be performed, the judge said.

In its order, the court directed station officer, highway police, to obtain the samples from the district hospital for the purpose of conducting the DNA test.

The judge asked the samples be sent to a forensic lab along with those collected from a close relative of Yadav to firmly establish the identity of the deceased.

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Keralas ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) is planning to hold yoga sessions throughout the state on June 21, the International Yoga Day, to steal the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) thunder.

The communists are in no mood to sit idle when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be leading the nation in a specially-organised session in Chandigarh to mark the day. Last year, the United Nations General Assembly decided to observe June 21 as the International Yoga Day after the PMs suggestion in this regard.

The decision to hold the sessions comes after the partys celebration of Sri Krishna Jayanti and Ganeshotsav. It even erected resting places for teeming Ayyappa devotees across the state.

Party workers, known atheists, usually skip such events. But the latest move is aimed at checkmating the BJP.

Though CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury once castigated yoga saying its postures resembled a dogs movements it seems his cadres have realised the importance of the ancient exercise regime to cleanse the body and mind.

In state capital Thiruvananthapuram, a two-hour-long live demonstration will be held by 500 trained party workers drawn from various parts of the state. Similar sessions will be held in all district headquarters as the party does not want to leave any ground to saffron forces.

The party-controlled Indian Martial Arts Academy in Peravur in north Keralas Kannur district customised a yoga regime called secular yoga omitting loud chants of Om and other mantras last year. Instead of mantras, in the tailor-made Secular Yoga session, mellifluous music accompanied the asanas or postures.

Secular Yoga has identified 30 asanas omitting delicate ones like surya namaskar where a practitioner has to invoke Lord Surya.

In the academy, classes were initially free but now it is planning to levy Rs 500 for eight classes in a month.

It is not meant to emulate any other organisation. To practice yoga its not necessary one has to believe in a particular religion or custom. We want to help our workers suffering from new-age maladies and make them physically and mentally strong, academys director E Rajeevan said.

He added that his academy, which conducted a mega yoga session in party stronghold Kannur in January this year, will enroll more workers in the coming days.
India has to comply with nuclear non-proliferation rules and have an independent foreign policy for China to support its bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), state media said on Thursday, laying down the rules for New Delhi to fulfil its aspiration.

New Delhi is not qualified to be a member of the NSG but is inching closer to entering the nuclear trading group with Washingtons support so as to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities, said an opinion piece in the nationalistic tabloid Global Times.

China can push Indias case too but there are riders, it said, indicating that becoming the USs military ally will not help New Delhis case with Beijing.

Read: NSG? What NSG? Warm birthday greetings from Modi to Chinas Prez Xi

As long as all NSG members reach a consensus over how a non-NPT member could join the NSG, and India promises to comply with stipulations over the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons while sticking to its policy of independence and self-reliance, China could support New Delhi's path toward the club, said the piece by Fu Xiaoqiang of the influential state-run think tank, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR).

The state-controlled media has focussed on Indias NSG bid and Chinas position but has been looking at the issue through the Pakistan prism  how Islamabad will lose out if New Delhi enters the nuclear club, and If India can become a member, why cant Pakistan?

Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken. As a result, Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region, the article said.

Yet before that, a fair and just principle must be made through common consensus of all current members of the NSG, rather than US and India's reckless pushing at the cost of rule-breaking.

Read: Indias NSG bid will touch raw nerve in Pakistan, endanger China: State media

Fus article described India as a defence ally ally of the US and said is it is getting American support  and this is clearly not something that Beijing likes.

Over the years, the US has been bending the rules to back India's nuclear projects. Against the backdrop of Washington's accelerated pace of promoting its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, it will be highly likely to keep supporting New Delhi's nuclear ambitions, in order to make it a stronger power to contain China, it said.

China, the article said, is a crucial defender of the international system against nuclear proliferation. It added: China does not wish to see the political and legal foundation of global nuclear security to be challenged by any party who does not abide by rules.

The article further said: So far, all NSG members have signed the NPT. So the question is, if any non-signatory of the treaty wants to join the group, under what condition can it be accepted? If such a standard is to be made one day, then it will be possible for both India and Pakistan to become part of the group.

The article did not mention that it is China which has consistently helped Pakistan build its nuclear technology and plants; the same Pakistan that is not a signatory to the NPT.
All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary and newly-appointed in charge of Uttar Pradesh, Ghulam Nabi Azad, on Thursday hinted at elevation of party vice-president Rahul Gandhi to the top post at an appropriate time and a bigger role for Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, saying he hoped she would campaign beyond Amethi and Rae Bareli in the 2017 assembly elections in UP.

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will become party president at one point. So far the campaigning is concerned, Sonia Gandhi (even if she ceases to be party president) and Rahul Gandhi as party president or vice-president will campaign for the party.

He added, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has been working for the party in Amethi, Rae Bareli and has also campaigned in adjoining districts like Pratapgarh. We hope she will certainly take out time to campaign beyond these constituencies.

Azad, who was here on the first day of his visit to Lucknow after being appointed the partys state in charge to achieve Mission UP, raised the hopes of his party men.

He declared that the victory in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka had come as a ray of hope when the party was reduced to nearly a zero in 1977. This time, the Congress revival will begin from the 2017 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, said Azad.

Asked about projecting a Brahmin as a chief ministerial candidate, Azad said the Congress did not believe in caste-based leadership.

Azad also attacked the BJP, saying the party had tried to unnecessarily play up the Kairana and Bisara incidents at its national executive meet that concluded in Allahabad on Monday.

He called upon his party men to tighten their seat belts to work for the 2017 assembly elections. He also gave a subtle warning to the leaders who camped in New Delhi, saying only those who worked at the grassroots level would be given priority.
At least four militants and an Indian Army soldier were killed when security forces foiled an infiltration attempt in Tangdhar sector near the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir on Thursday.

This was the second such bid foiled by the security forces along the LoC in Kashmir in three days.

The gun battle began when the army spotted some movement in the area. According to officials, a group of militants near the LoC who were trying to cross into the Indian side of Kashmir but were interrupted by the army.

Earlier on Tuesday, an infiltration bid was foiled in Machhil sector of Kupwara district. One soldier and a militant were killed in the two day operation. Four other soldiers also sustained injuries in the operation.

Last month, the army predicted that this summer would see an increase in such infiltration bids.

Official figures for 2016 have touched 45 for the first four months, a sharp spike from the 35 terrorists who crossed the Line of Control in 2015.

In the last week of May, two separate attempts were foiled by the army, leading to six militants being killed. However, one soldier was also killed in the operation.

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Within days of appointing its senior leader Kamal Nath the general secretary in-charge of poll-bound Punjab, the Congress party found it had painted itself into a corner by overlooking past allegations that he had a role in anti-Sikh violence of 1984, party sources said on Thursday.

While party leaders in Delhi maintained that since Nath had been cleared of all charges there was no problem with appointing him in-charge of Punjab affairs, sources in the Punjab Congress said the move was seen as insensitive in a state where the 1984 carnage remains an emotive issue.

He was deployed for his unparalleled organisational skills and vast experience. After what happened in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, we have to do whatever we can to revive the party, a senior leader said in New Delhi justifying the appointment. Party sources said Nath was roped in for Punjab for his election and resource management capabilities.

With the Aam Aadmi Party, seen as a strong contender in the state, and the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal and Bharatiya Janata Party combine raking up the 1984 violence after Naths appointment, the former union minister wrote to party president Sonia Gandhi late on Wednesday asking to be relieved of the charge.

Party sources said that the Congress wants the election campaign in Punjab to focus on the drug addiction problem, governance deficit and the farmers distress in the state. With Kamal Nath at the helm, we would have been left firefighting and answering questions about 1984. AAP is a party that wont stop at anything. They would have been everywhere waving black flags each time he came to Punjab, a senior leader from the state said.

On Wednesday afternoon, before he wrote to Gandhi, Nath met a key party strategist where the issue of his resignation was settled. Nath on Thursday said that the Nanawati commission had absolved him of all charges that were first raised only in 2005.

The party continued to defend the former union minister on Thursday. AAP has not credibility. Their statement for reopening the case after 32 years is ridiculous because there was no case, party spokesperson Anand Sharma said.

He stepped down on his own because his appointment was being used to create a smokescreen for what is happening in Punjab, Sharma said.

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Kerala police have arrested an Assamese man in connection with the brutal rape and murder of a woman, a Dalit Kochi law student, on April 28 that shook the state.

Additional DGP B Sandhya, who headed the investigation, confirmed the arrest but said details could be divulged only after the identification parade. We have arrested a person. The DNA test of the accused confirmed the samples taken from the body, she said.

Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan confirmed that police achieved a breakthrough in the case which bore chilling similarities with the gangrape of a 23-year-old in Delhi four years ago.

After the Left Democratic Front came to power in the assembly elections last month, a new investigation team was constituted under Sandhya.

Read | Neighbour among three detained for rape-murder of Kerala womanP

Police detained Amiyr-ul Islam two days ago at a labour camp near Palakkad. Sources said Islam was a drug addict suffering from a sexual disorder.

The 29-year-old was brutally attacked, stabbed and raped. Her mother had found the womans body at their home with her intestines pulled out.

No other family should undergo such a situation. He should be given death sentence, said the mother who worked as a domestic help to bring up her second daughter. Her elder daughter was married off.

After the crime, Islam fled to Assam but later came back and joined a labour camp in Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, sources said, adding the sandals he abandoned near the victims house helped crack the case.

Sources said the prime motivation for the murder was an incident that occurred at least two weeks before the crime. He was loitering near a bathing ghat of women where he was apprehended by women, including the victim, and was manhandled.

He started stalking her and waited for an opportunity to attack her, sources said.

Read | New team to probe rape-murder of Dalit law student in Kerala: CM Pinarayi
Union home minister Rajnath Singh on Thursday said that while maritime terror posed a major threat to India, the countrys coastline is now more secure due to a slew of initiatives taken by the government.

We are securing the Indian coastline by creating a chain of radars and automatic identification system (AIS) receivers. Consequent upon the implementation of these important initiatives, our coasts are far more secure now, Rajnath Singh said while chairing the second coastal security review meeting here.

He said the vulnerability of Indias coasts was exposed in 1993 when explosives were smuggled from Raigad and later in 2008 when Pakistani terrorists sneaked into Mumbai to carry out their deadly attacks.

However, he assured, after the 26/11 Mumbai terror strikes, many initiatives were taken to beef up coastal security, including security audit of all major and minor ports, to identify the vulnerable points.

Besides a chain of static sensors and AIS along the coast and radars operated by the Indian Coast Guard at 45 locations, another 38 more radars are planned to be installed to ensure a gapless surveillance of the entire 7,516-km coastline, he said.

The minister said while the Indian Navy is overall entrusted with maritime security, including coastal and offshore, the Indian Coast Guard is responsible for coastal security in territorial waters, including areas patrolled by coastal police comprising state marine police.

Addressing the meet, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis suggested the formation of a new Central Marine Police Force to protect sea, coast, ports and vital institutions and a high-tech e-surveillance of all landing points and non-major ports.

Singh said the Centre would seriously consider suggestions received from the coastal states and UTs.

He said an in-principle approval had been accorded to set up a National Marine Police Training Institute in Gujarat and State Marine Police Training Centres in police training academies in all states and UTs.

For e-surveillance, the Maharashtra Chief Minister suggested that while the Centre could bear the capital expenditure, the states could foot the operational expenses.

Ge urged that under the universal service obligations, all GSM service providers should be asked to provide services till five-nautical miles from the coast to the sea.

The meeting also discussed expeditious implementation of various coastal security schemes, institutional set-up in states/UTs to review coastal security, constitution of state maritime boards, security of non-major pots, single-point mooring, coastal mapping and security of Indian islands.

Besides, issues like issuance and distribution of biometric identity cards and card readers to fisherfolk, colour coding of boats, monitoring of fish landing points and crossing of Internatinal Maritime Boundary Line by fishermen were discussed.
The Bombay high court on Thursday rejected the bail plea of former Maharashtra minister and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Chhagan Bhujbal, who is presently in jail in a money laundering case.

Bhujbal on Tuesday approached the high court seeking bail citing a critical heart ailment after a special PMLA court rejected his bail plea earlier.

As per reports, Bhujbals counsel argued that the 69-year-old leader was suffering from a terminal illness which needed immediate treatment.

The special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court on May 13 rejected Bhujbals bail plea.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had arrested Chhagan Bhujbals associate and chartered accountant Sunil Naik in May in connection with the case.

The ED is probing Bhujbal, his son Pankaj and nephew Sameer in the case concerning a contract given to a builder in 2005 without inviting tenders when he was the states PWD minister.

The Maharashtra Anti-Corruption Bureau had earlier filed two FIRs against the Bhujbals and others under the provisions of the PMLA to probe the Delhi-based Maharashtra Sadan scam and the Kalina land grabbing case.
Mother Teresas planned sainthood is in an uncharted place as the miracle attributed to her was denied by the so-called cured person, says Britain-based author Aroup Chatterjee, whose work on the Albanian-born nun questions the very basis of her work in the City of Joy, for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mothers sainthood is in an uncharted place as a retraction or denial of a miracle by the cured has never before happened in the history of the Catholic Church, Calcutta-born Chatterjee, who describes himself as a militant atheist, writes in an updated version of Mother Teresa - The Untold Story that was released in the eastern metropolis earlier this week.

The reference is to Monica Besra, a tribal living in a remote village about 500 km from Calcutta (as the author consistently refers to the city rather than the renamed Kolkata). It was claimed that on September 6, 1998, a day after the first anniversary of Mother Teresas death, she had been cured of a massive tumour after two nuns tied on her body an aluminium medal that had been in contact with the Mothers dead body, and prayed all night.

Soon after Mother Teresas beatification on October 19, 2003, Besra challenged the miracle and said she was cured by medicine.

After the retraction, Chatterjee, a London-based physician writes, he sent messages to the postulator of Mother Teresas cause, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, asking how the Vatican would deal with this conundrum. I suggested that they should start afresh with a new miracle.

But, says the author, despite the unprecedented rejection of the miracle by the cured and by every other quarter, including doctors and the government, the Vatican gave two fingers to Indian opinion and secretly proceeded with canonisation.

In December 2015, the Vatican announced that Mother Teresa was well on her way to becoming a saint in September 2016 as a second miracle was proven -- a Brazilian man had been cured of brain tumour/abscess when his wife is said to have prayed to her.

As I had expected, this time they chose a different hemisphere and a different continent. Also, the identity of the cured will be kept a secret till the last moment, though the cure happened in 2008. The Vatican does not want to repeat the mistakes it made with Besra, Chaterjee writes.

He also says that the selection process for the Nobel Peace Prize is deeply flawed and being opaque and beyond criticism has made it even more susceptible to influences, .

Although the Peace Prize has had some worthy recipients, especially the institutional ones...I believe the award is deeply flawed. Being opaque and beyond criticism has made it even more susceptible to influences. I am not convinced that it has an effective fact-checking machinery either, as its methods are somewhat quaint, Chatterjee says.

(Facebbok/Aroup Chatterjee)

He notes in this context that Mother Teresas year of birth is one the few things in her life that is not shrouded in mythology, but the Nobel Committee has got that wrong.

In one of their main official handouts, given to institutions about various peace laureates, it is given as 1914 when it should be 1910, Chatterjee writes.

The Peace Committee is now on an over-correction drive and is desparately seeking out non-white and non-Christian recipients. The sentiment is well-meaning, but flawed. Some worthy people have got the prize (such as Malala Yousafzai and Shirin Ebadi) but mostly recipients have been non-worthy, such as Wangari Maathai and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, he writes.

So, how did the book, first published in 2003, come about?

If anything, I was positively inclined toward her. But, by 1988, three years after I went to the West, as soon as I mentioned Calcutta, people started talking about her and leprosy, beggers and destitutes, limbless people lying on the street, et cetera, Chatterjee told IANS in an interview.

I was mystified and perturbed. So I wanted to look into it..still I thought she was a superb lady who was not faultless, but somehow, this image of Calcutta had permeated the world imagery, he said. I thought it was probably a kind of offshoot or a corollary of her image and it was not her doing.

In 1994, Chatterjee approached the production company of Pakistani British writer Tariq Ali for making a documentary on Mother Teresa and the outcome was the BBC production, Hells Angel, presented by journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens. Chatterjee describes it as the very first attempt to challenge the Teresa myth on television.

I obviously thought I wont let go here...lets delve into the ladys activities and all that, Chatterjee said.

The result was an account The Times Higher Education Supplement described as Necessary, Well-Documented.

Its a historical document. If in 100 years someone wants to research this woman, they can come to my book, they will have to love her or hate her, Chatterjee said.

How did he anticipate the response to the books re-release?

I have to do what I have to do. People have taken so many risks for so many things, it would be cowardly of me to back out, Chatterjee responded.
Shamli district magistrate Sujeet Kumar has contradicted the BJP claim of exodus of Hindus from Kairana. Kumar, in his report to the state government, said that barring three families, who left the west UP town due to extortion or related crimes, the remaining 343 families mentioned in BJP MP Hukum Singhs list, either had different reasons to leave the area or are still staying there.

The properties of those three families who left are still safe, the DM report reads.

Of the 346 families mentioned, 67 left nearly 10 years back and another 179 left four to five years back. 73 families had left during the last three years due to business, medical or educational needs, the DMs report says.

Of the families mentioned in the BJP list, 16 people have died.

The DMs report also says the BJP list has seven duplications while five families left after retirement.

The report also says that some families started living within 10 km radius.

Interestingly, the BJP fact-finding delegation that reached Kairana on Wednesday has upheld Hukum Singhs charges that have been trashed by the UP government.

Kairana, with a population of 86,000, shot into the limelight after BJP parliamentarian Hukum Singh raised the bogey of Hindu exodus, releasing a list of 346 families who allegedly migrated over the years from the town, around 100 km from Delhi.
Veena and Vani, 13-year-old Siamese twins with conjoined heads, have been abandoned by their parents after doctors said an attempt to separate the Hyderabad girls would kill them.

With the girls attaining puberty, caring for them has become difficult for the staff of Niloufer childrens hospital, where the twins have been living for the past decade. They will be shifted to a home run by the women development and child welfare department of the Telangana government by the Niloufer authorities.

The parents -- N Murali and Nagalaksmi, who are daily-wage workers from Beerusettigudem village in Warangal district -- are not keen to take their girls home. They have virtually disowned Veena and Vani. They hardly visit to see the daughters, Niloufer Hospitals superintendent Dr Suresh Kumar told HT.

Last week, a team of neurosurgeons and reconstructive surgeons from New Delhis All India Institute of Medical Sciences informed the hospital that a separation surgery was highly risky.

They sent us report last week, saying the surgery is risky as the twins share important blood vessels and nerves in the head. If surgery is performed, it may prove fatal or give them neurological debility, Kumar said.

The hospital had informed the parents about the possible complications. If they want us to go ahead, we will take the risk. If they say no, we will ask them to take the girls to their home, he said.

The parents were to give their opinion on Tuesday but did not turn up. They would give them some more time before taking a decision on the twins, the hospital superintendent said.

While Murali was not available for comments, hospital sources said he had set some terms -- a government job, house with air-conditioned room to keep the twins and two acres of land  to take his daughters home.

If the parents refuse surgery, Veena and Vani would have to lead their life with their heads fused. May be they will ask for separation when they turn 18, as had happened in the case of Iranian conjoined twins in 2003. Unfortunately, the Iranians died soon after the complicated surgery, Kumar said of Ladan and Laleh Bijani.

According to media reports, doctors had begged with the Bijani sisters not to go ahead with surgery but they insisted on the controversial operation that led to their deaths.

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As pulses continued to soar to touch up to Rs 200 per kg, intelligence agencies were today asked to crack down on cartels, while futures trade was curbed to check speculation and buffer stock was hiked over 5-times to 8 lakh tonnes to boost supply in a multi-pronged approach.

Efforts were also beefed up to sell larger quantities of pulses at highly-subsidised rates through government agencies and outlets, but any favourable results were hardly visible in the retail and wholesale markets.

Urad dal was selling at as high as Rs 196 per kg, while chana was also seen moving closer to Rs 100 per kg level. Tur dal continued to rule high at Rs 166 per kg, while moong and masur were being sold at Rs 125 and Rs 105 per kg, respectively, as per the latest government data.

In some high-end markets in cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the prices of pulses were even higher.

Taking forward the decisions taken at a high-profile meeting chaired by finance minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday, the Food Ministry decided to enhance the buffer stock of pulses from 1.5 lakh tonnes to 8 lakh tonnes.

Markets regulator Sebi joined hands by banning any fresh futures market position in chana, the only commodity among pulses where such trading was allowed.

At the outlets of the government agencies, further stocks were added to sell pulses at subsidised rates, including at Rs Rs 60 per kg for chana (gram) dal and 120 per kg for urad and tur dal.

Concerned over rising prices, Consumer Affairs Secretary Hem Pande held a meeting with the officials of Department of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the Income Tax, the Enforcement Directorate and Intelligence Bureau (IB).

He also interacted with state government officials of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi via video conferencing and asked them to be alert to check hoarders.

I have asked all of them to pull up their socks and ensure that no artificial rise in pulses prices take place, Pande told reporters after the meeting.

Enforcement agencies have also been directed to check cartelisation and hoarding of pulses, he added.
Udta Punjab will hit the theatres on Friday as scheduled after a high court refused on Thursday to stall the release of the controversial drug-themed film that has triggered a political slug-fest in the poll-bound state.

The Supreme Court also refused to entertain the plea of an NGO seeking stay release of the film that had earlier fallen foul of the censor board for allegedly portraying Punjab in a bad light and glorifying drug abuse.

The Punjab and Haryana high court gave the final clearance to the Shahid Kapoor-starrer, dismissing two petitions against the film.

Drug menace can be in any state and the film does not glorify drugs, said Sanjay Kaushal, the counsel of the films producer Phantom Films.

The Bombay high court had earlier allowed release of the film with just one scene deleted as against nearly 90 cuts sought by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). The censor boards suggestions had triggered a backlash against its chief Pahlaj Nihalini whom many accuse of toeing the BJP-led governments agenda while certifying films.

Read: Udta Punjab leaked online, producers file complaint with cyber cell

The Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) accused Punjabs ruling alliance of BJP and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) of trying to influence the censor boards decision to hide the states drug abuse problem that has allegedly crippled a generation.

Advocate Sujoy Kantawala, who watched the movie as the amicus curie of the Punjab and Haryana high court, also presented his report to the bench.

I have clearly mentioned in my report which was read out in open court that there is absolutely nothing in the film which could lead any such sort of apprehensions which the petitioner entertained. The movie gives the social message that drugs are a menace. If you consume drugs you can lose your loved ones in future and its basically a thing you dont want to do in life.

Read: Make changes in Udta Punjab promos as per Bombay high court order: Delhi HC

The high courts ruling came in response to a plea by Jalandhar-based advocate Wattan Sharma who said the film had done negative branding of Punjab and its people and was therefore unfit for exhibition.

Another petition was filed by the Punjab State Commission for Women chairperson Paramjit Kaur Landran alleging that the movie portrayed women in an obscene manner.

Earlier in the day, the apex court asked the NGO to approach the high court over the films release.

We are not interfering in the matter. We are not going into the merit. Liberty granted to the petitioner to approach the Punjab and Haryana high court which is seized of the matter, a vacation bench of justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and L Nageswara Rao said.

On Wednesday, the CBFC issued a fresh release certificate to the film citing that the movie is suitable for exhibition, but only for adults.

Advocate Sujoy Kantawala, who watched the movie as the amicus curie of the Punjab and Haryana high court, also presented his report to the bench.

I have clearly mentioned in my report which was read out in open court that there is absolutely nothing in the film which could lead any such sort of apprehensions which the petitioner entertained. The movie gives the social message that drugs are a menace. If you consume drugs you can lose your loved ones in future and its basically a thing you dont want to do in life.

The high courts ruling came in response to a plea by Jalandhar-based advocate Wattan Sharma who said the film had done negative branding of Punjab and its people and was therefore unfit for exhibition.

Another petition was filed by the Punjab State Commission for Women chairperson Paramjit Kaur Landran alleging that the movie portrayed women in an obscene manner.

The apex court asked the NGO to approach the high court over the films release.

We are not interfering in the matter. We are not going into the merit. Liberty granted to the petitioner to approach the Punjab and Haryana high court which is seized of the matter, a vacation bench of justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and L Nageswara Rao said.

(With agency inputs)

(With agency inputs)

.
The Supreme Court on Thursday declined the plea of an NGO to put on hold the release of the film Udta Punjab and asked Human Rights Awareness Association to approach the Punjab and Haryana high court.

The NGO had on Thursday sought urgent hearing on its petition, claiming the film on drug abuse in the border state depicted Punjab in a bad light. A vacation bench of justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and justice L Nageswara Rao, however, asked it to first get the petition cleared from the registry.

Appearing for Phantom Films, senior counsel Meenakshi Arora said the Central Board for Film Certification had already given the certificate and the film had been released overseas. The film would be released across 8,000 screens countrywide on Friday.

Read | Udta Punjab leaked online, producers file complaint with cyber cell

The petition came after the Bombay HC on June 13 overturned a controversial suggestion by the censor board seeking 13 cuts to the movie which it deemed offensive to peoples sensibilities and a threat to the countrys integrity.

Do not act like a grandmother. Change as per the times now, a bench of SC Dharmadhikari and Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi said in its order, hailed by the film fraternity as a landmark judgment.

Besides asking the producers to delete a scene which shows the lead character, a drug-addicted rock star played by Kapoor, urinating in public, the court also ordered modification of a disclaimer by deleting a reference to Pakistan.

Read | Make changes in Udta Punjab promos as per Bombay high court order: Delhi HC

The board had also asked for all references to Punjab be deleted but didnt get its way. The boards suggestions had sparked a debate on creative freedom, with the film fraternity and even politicians joining in.

The border state is due for polls early next year and the ruling SAD-BJP combine are battling anti-incumbency and charges of corruption. The film was removed from reality, the Punjab government had said. The Congress and Aam Aadmi Party accused the government of being in denial about the drug menace.

The Shiromani Akali Dal leaders were benefiting from drug trade and had allowed it to thrive, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had said.

Watch: How Shahid Kapoor got that chiselled body for Udta Punjab

After Udta Punjab cleared, Pahlaj Nihalani says CBFC has no meaning now, doors opened for vulgar films
Speculations were rife on Thursday about the Congress planning to make three-time Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit the partys chief ministerial nominee ahead of next years assembly election in politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.

Election strategist Prashant Kishor had recommended that Dikshit play a major role in the partys poll campaign in the state as she is a prominent Brahmin face and could help the Congress regain support of the electorally sizeable and significant community, whose support determines the poll outcome in several seats.

Read: Three previous instances where the Congress goofed up during polls

The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress, shifted allegiance to the BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of Mandir-Mandal politics. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawatis BSP in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community.

A top Congress source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told NDTV that the party is closing in on Dikshit as the possible CM candidate, with party chief Sonia Gandhis daughter, Priyanka Gandhi, leading the campaign.

Read: Modi targets corruption, dynasty in UP poll pitch

Dikshit (78) was scheduled to meet the Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Thursday.

Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Congress leader from UP Uma Shankar Dikshit, who served as Union minister and governor for a long time.

The Congress is trying to regain the lost ground in UP where currently it has just 30 MLAs in the 403-member assembly. Congress could win only two seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls represented by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi respectively.

Read: Ahead of UP polls, will communal politics harm Kairanas secular harmony?

The Brahmin community plays a significant role in election outcome in central and eastern UP as it is the dominant caste in these areas.
A Congress worker was killed and five were injured in a clash between two factions in Madhya Pradeshs Jabalpur district on Thursday over an alleged objectionable caricature of party president Sonia Gandhi.

The incident occurred outside Vijay Nagar police station around 3am. Congress worker Guddu Verma was killed. Three of the injured, including two workers and an advocate, have been hospitalised and are critical, SP Inderjeet Bakalwar said.

A caricature of the Congress president posted on a WhatsApp group, Vijay Nagar Fans Club, sparked the violence.

The two groups gathered at Ahimsa Chowk and a heated argument took place which soon turned into violent clashes.

Around 3.30am, Congress councillor Jatin Rajs supporter, Umesh Verma, was allegedly stabbed outside Vijay Nagar police station.

Five others, including advocate Prashant Naik and Rajs supporters were injured in the violence.

We used force multiple times to disperse the two groups near the Vijay Nagar police station, but members of both groups returned again to indulge in violence, Bakalwar said.

Bakalwar said case of assault and rioting has been registered against the Congress councilor Jatin Raj and supporters.

No arrests, however, have been made yet, he added.

When contacted, Jabalpur district Congress president Dinesh Yadav confirmed that the man killed in the violence was a Congress worker.
In 1981, Lakshmi Singh  the late mukhiya of Khendra in the extremist hotbed of Palamu district  went against the grain by planting trees in fallow land spread over seven acres. Nine years later, Maoists killed him because they considered him an upper caste landlord who exploited Dalits in the village.

Somehow, Singhs family managed to make ends meet. However, when it was time for young Khushboo to be married off in 2005, the late village heads widow had no money to arrange for a ceremony. Singhs foresight, however, came to her rescue. She sold the trees to organise a grand wedding worthy of their daughters name.

In 1996, Maoists killed Nezam Mukhiya  the head of Khairodohar village in the same district  after branding him a spy. Fortunately, he had also planted trees over 10 acres of barren land a decade ago. When Nezams daughter attained marriageable age in 2006, the family sold half the trees to a timber merchant and conducted a gala wedding for her.

The families of both Singh and Nezam have more in common than similar stories. Both the village heads had taken local green crusader K K Jaiswals advice of planting trees in the fallow land of rain-shadowed Palamu  something that eventually came to the aid of their families.

The 59-year-old crusader had stressed then that as both Singh and Nezam possessed no monetary savings, the trees could prove to be valuable fixed deposits for the future. It was a tough call to take, considering that rural folks of those days believed that the government takes over any farmland you dare plant trees on.

Today, Jaiswals words have come to the rescue of not just the families of Singh and Nezam, but also hundreds of other villagers who have taken to converting fallow land into jungles.

Jaiswal launched his green crusade from Palamus Daali panchayat, his birthplace, in 1976. Today, it has spread to 18 Indian states  besides the neighbouring countries of Nepal and Bhutan. Till now, the crusader has reportedly distributed around 31 lakh saplings at his own expense among residents of various states.

Jaiswals motivational speeches on treating trees as fixed deposits have earned him multitudes of followers in rural areas. Unlike other environmentalists, Jaiswals philosophy allows people to cut trees whenever they run short of money. Jungles may be the nations wealth, but the trees on a farmers land are his wealth. He has every right to cut them when required. Every tree is worth 10 sons to a farmer, the environmentalist says.

Though various government agencies and NGOs have felicitated Jaiswal for his efforts, its Chipko movement leader Sundar Lal Bahugunas words that he cherishes the most. You are doing a wonderful job of spreading environmental awareness in a backward, tribal-dominated state like Jharkhand. Your efforts should fetch you more awards and recognitions, says a letter from Bahuguna, which adorns the wall of Jaiswals drawing room in Daltonganj.

Government officials also sing the green crusaders praises. His efforts have generated a mass movement on tree plantation in the rain-shadow areas of Jharkhand and Bihar, says Laxmi Narayan Damor, former regional chief conservator of forests, Jharkhand.

Jaiswal believes that planting trees is the only way to ensure the planets survival. I am sure the third World War will be for water. The only way to avert the war is by planting trees. Today, we are forced to carry water in pet bottles. Very soon, we will be travelling with our own oxygen cylinders, he cautions.
Three lions will spend the rest of their lives in captivity after authorities found them guilty of killing three people last month at Gujarats Gir National Park amid mounting concerns over rising man-animal conflict across India.

Officials analysed the pug marks and faeces of 17 lions during a 25-day captivity and found human remains from the excreta of an adult lion and two lionesses.

It brought us to the conclusion that the male lion attacked, killed and ate humans while two other sub-adults only ate some leftover body parts. These sub-adults were not involved in attacking and killing humans, said AP Singh, chief conservator of forest for Junagadh division.

The male lion will be kept in a cage at Sakkarbaug zoo on the outskirts of Junagadh and the two lionesses will be kept locked a forest department rescue centre.

The precautions are necessary because once an animal turns a man-eater, they are prone to prey on human as the hunt is often easier, officials said. The other 14 lions will be released into the national park.

The forest department drive began after three people --- a 14-year-old boy, a woman aged around 50 and a 61-year-old man --- were mauled to death by the felines in April and May.

This marked first time in decades that lions had attacked the local population in Indias only reserve for the big cat. Villagers used to consider them divine and felt honoured if the lions paid them a visit.

But after the attacks, around 100 farmers from Kodiya village submitted a memorandum to local officials, requesting the administration capture and relocate three prides  nearly 30 lions  that have made this area their hunting grounds.

They received support from the political class, including members of the ruling BJP, who suggested that residents be allowed to carry firearms for emergencies.

The park has 523 lions, according to last years census, but rising numbers has meant almost half of that number lives outside the 1,412 square-km sanctuary.

Wildlife experts say one of the main reasons for lions straying out of the sanctuary is shortage of prey on account of illegal mining and thinning of forest cover. Lions attacked us while we were plucking lemons from our orchards, said Lakha Vala, a farmer.

In 2013, the Supreme Court ordered Gujarat to relocate some lions to other states to prevent the population from being hit all at once by a natural disaster or disease. But Gujarat has resisted moving any of the lions, saying it does not trust other states to protect the big cats.
Chief minister Vasundhara Raje inaugurated Ajmers toy bank through video conferencing on Thursday and donated 101 toys.

The Ajmer administration plans to collect around 20,000 old toys10 toys for each anganwadi centre during a month-long campaign and distribute them at anganwadi centers and government schools across the district under the initiative.

The chief minister said toys were basic instruments for the development of a childs fantasy, thoughts and creativity. Toys are vital tools that help foster the mental, physical, emotional and social development of boys and girls, she said, adding that a cloth bank should also be launched in the state on similar lines to make clothes accessible to the deprived people. Rajasthan is known to have extreme climatic conditions, especially with and unkind winters. A cloth bank could help people survive the chilly winter months.

Interacting with children through video conference, Raje said: Smiles on your faces are the best reward I have received during my present tenure. She advised children to learn at play. You are our future assets, so learn good things and become good citizens, she said.

The chief minister asked Ajmer collector Gaurav Goyal to make arrangements for toys in paediatric ward of the JLN Hospital and also told him to send the flowers presented by the children to Jaipur.

After the inauguration, Goyal to reporters: Toys will not only aid in development of children, but will also inculcate in them habit of sharingThey are important extensions of a young child and would help him/her to explore and discover new things about the world around them and about themselves.

The first toy bank in the state was set up in Nagaur. With 28,000 toys in the bank, Nagaur has shown the road to other district collectors to start such banks in their areas to bring smiles on the faces of hundreds of deprived children, said Raje.
A much-talked-about new ad smashes gender stereotypes in India. Around the world, too, fashion is becoming more and more inclusive, says designer Masaba Gupta

Coco Chanel famously said, Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening [around us]. Which brings us to how fashion is now reflecting the gender-equality movement.

Also read: The big debate: Will Indian fashion embrace body diversity?

Women, today, occupy more roles of power and responsibility, walking into boardrooms with their three-inch heels and designer bags. I believe getting rid of the divide between men and women will truly establish what it is to be equal. Fashion is increasingly acting as a weapon of change, inspiring ideas that blur that division, albeit in a subliminal manner.

Recently, clothing e-commerce giant Jabong released an ad that depicted men boldly sporting red eyeshadow, hair tied in plaits, and nose and ear jewellery. A woman in the ad, in turn, wears a turban. The brands tagline is Be you, and I think the ad captures that essence while playing around with gender fluidity. Im really glad a mass market player took on the onus of addressing the concept.

Of late, weve seen models of both genders strutting down the catwalk wearing clothes that are traditionally not meant for their gender. Weve also had menswear shows feature skirts, dresses and tunics. Runway outings by designers such as Dhruv Kapoor of DRVV, Arjun Saluja of Rishta, and Ruchika Sachdeva of Bodice have celebrated and experimented with androgyny. Dhruvs 2013 Lakme Fashion Week showcase included straight tunics with side slits that can be worn as a dress by women or layered over pants by men.

Selfridges, the high-end departmental store in the UK, took the idea to the next level. At its Oxford Street store in London, it combined mens and womens departments into three floors of unisex clothing. With this, they hope to break free of gender norms, and create a shopping experience without boundaries.

"Just Come Here" A photo posted by Jaden Smith (@christiaingrey) on Jan 25, 2016 at 3:20pm PST

Transgender models continue to walk the ramp for design stalwarts. Lea T, after being discovered by Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci in 2010, went on to become his muse. Closer home, Nikkiey Chawla, Indias first transexual model, walked at the Milan Fashion Week last year.

Fashion campaigns, too, have become more androgynous. In Louis Vuittons latest womenswear ad, actor Jaden Smith proudly flaunts a skirt. Of course, its not the first time Smith has showed off his gender-fluid style. Remember the Vogue Korea photoshoot in which he posed shirtless, wearing a skirt and a red flower tucked behind his ear?

All of it points in one direction: We are now welcoming a world where fashion is not bogged down by binary gender norms. The trend is moving beyond symbolising its wearers identity or gender. Its now being accepted by the mainstream as more of a look, both on the catwalk and the high street.

Also read: Designer Masaba Gupta asks if the end of luxury is near

But the movement isnt just restricted to clothes. Big beauty players have caught on to it. For instance, Clark Sonic has unisex beauty products and devices, something which supermodel Naomi Watts swears by.

At the end of the day, the real goal of fashion is to create clothes that make you feel as comfortable as possible, inside and out  no matter what your gender.

As I always say, if it fits you and looks good on you, its for you.

Gupta is a leading fashion designer. She tweets as @MasabaG
Dhanak

Cast: Hetal Gadda, Krrish Chhabria, Vipin Sharma

Director: Nagesh Kukunoor

Rating: 3/5

There is something incredible happening around us, but we dont know it yet. Call it magical realism or our inability to spot a rainbow (Dhanak), we keep marching ahead with our blinkers on. But, Pari (Hetal Gadda) and Chotu (Krrish Chhabria) are not like us, not anymore.

They live in a small mud house near the desert in Rajasthan where life is as difficult as it can be. Pari has been failing her exams for two years to study in the same class as her brother Chotu. The young boy will be turning nine soon and his sister believes that her idol, Shah Rukh Khan, who appears on the posters of an eye donation campaign, can help restore blind Chotus vision before his birthday. Now, they need to meet Khan who is shooting at the other end of Rajasthan.

Read: SRK touched by Kukunoors Dhanak, congratulates its child actors

Read other film reviews here

Unlike most road movies, Dhanak is not about any inward journey for its lead characters. Undeniably innocent, their approach to life is pure and full of trust. They believe in a house with walls of sweets, and sing folklore with foreigners. They fight to prove Shah Rukhs supremacy over Salman. And, to walk across Rajasthan is just another sport for them.

This may prove dangerous because the barren lands stretched on both sides of the road can trick you into believing things that arent there.

Pari and Chotu meet some strange characters on their journey to Jaisalmer. (YouTube)

As you journey with Pari and Chotu, you may meet an American singing an ode to peace, or you can run into a tribal woman with a gun. Your luck can save you from an approaching dust storm, or it may land you straight in the laps of a godwoman. Its a world where only your conscience can save you.

The cocky Chotu lives in a state of denial about his disability, but his courage infuses hope in others. He is always hungry and asks for chocolates from strangers without being ashamed of it. On the other hand, Pari is mature and full of gratitude. But, she is not someone who wouldnt act her age. Her indomitable spirit sails her through the thick of times.

Chirantan Das cinematography impresses in Dhanak. (YouTube)

The kids talk a lot and that shifts the focus from the people they meet on their road trip. Repetitive conversations make some of the most interesting characters of the film go unnoticed.

Director Nagesh Kukunoor explored Rajasthan in Dor like never before, and the same style of cinematography and character placement can be seen in Dhanak. Long shots capture sand sliding like water with minimal props. The frames rarely look crowded as enough space is allotted to the background. The secondary characters could have been given more depth though.

Watch: Trailer of Nagesh Kukunoors Dhanak

Thanks to its use of fusion, Dhanak slowly grows on you. And, who knows, Chotu and Pari may help you in shedding that tough exterior youve been burdened with.

Interact with Rohit Vats at Twitter/@nawabjha

Follow @htshowbiz for more.

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PUNE: The testimony of a key witness in the Narendra Dabholkar murder has raised serious questions about the conduct of the Maharashtra police who, while probing the case in 2013, chose to ignore crucial details that form a central part of the CBIs investigation.

In his statement, recorded before a magistrate under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), the witness, a resident of Kolhapur, said he had told the police about Dr Virendra Tawades alleged murder plan soon after Dabholkar was killed on August 20, 2013.

According to the witness, who was once associated with the right-wing group Sanatan Sanstha, the Kolhapur police and Anti-terrorism Squad (ATS) did nothing after he alerted them about Dabholkars alle ged killers. The witness, who was approached by the CBI after it took over the probe, was brought to the agencys Belapur office to confront Tawade.

Reacting to the witness testimony, Dabholkars son Hamid said, Its very unfortunate that the police did not act on the witness statement. Had they acted on it promptly, my fathers murder case would have been solved immediately and we could have saved Govind Pansares life too.

The Dabholkar family has ter med the CBIs arrest of Tawade a step in the right direction. The previous CongressNCP government did not heed us when we repeatedly said that [Sarang] Akolkars face resembled one of the sketches issued by the police. Akolkar, a Sanatan activist, has been declared absconding by the National Investigation Agency, which i s probing t he 2009 Madgaon blast case. On October 16, 2009, two Sanatan Sanstha activists were killed while allegedly transporting the bomb through Madgaon. A special court in Madgaon acquitted six of the 11 people associated with the organisation, citing a lack of evidence, while the others, including Akolkar and Patil, are still at large.

The witness has testified that when he met Akolkar in 2013, the latter was carrying a revolver. According to the witness, Tawade and others knew the exact whereabouts of Dabholkar. The witnessed also said that after Dabholkars murder, he shared his apprehensions about Tawade and others with police inspector Shrikant Mohite and an ATS officer. I told the ATS officer that I am willing to testify in court if required. He said ok but did nothing about it, the witness said, according to a report in Mumbai tabloid.

Reacting to the witness testimony, BJP spokesperson Keshav Upadhye said the Congress-NCP government was not serious about the Dabholkar murder case.

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MUMBAI: On Sunday, it will be fifty years since a young Bal Thackeray along with a handful of others broke a coconut to signify the formation of an organisation called the Shiv Sena.

Five decades from that day, Thackerays son Uddhav is now firmly in-charge of the party, in power in the city, state and centre. Speaking to HT, Uddhav and his elder son and heir apparent Aaditya reflected back on the journey so far, saying that while the party had evolved, its ideology hadnt.

A measure of the change that has swept the party was also a statement from Aaditya, signifying how the Thackerays traditional remote control might finally be shed. Let the people and party decide if I should join the legislative politics, he told HT on Wednesday.

Excerpts from an interview:

Sena completes 50 years and you have been witness to the Senas journey. Are you satisfied with where the Sena stands now?

Uddhav: I am satisfied with one thing, that the Sena is a party which has fought against injustice and never accepted any compromise. In these 50 years, many waves came and went but we remained firm where we stood.

What is the Senas biggest achievement in all these years?

Uddhav: Try and take the Sena out of the citys history and peoples lives and see how things stand. Be it social work, community work, from helping people in times of need to helping parents with their kids admission, try and imagine how it would be had the Sena not existed. The Sena provides a sense of security to people, especially in Mumbai.

One of the Senas biggest planks was introducing the city to politics around the son of the soil. As part of it, various communities were targeted - from South Indians to Gujaratis to North Indians. Somewhere, this targeting has harmed the citys liberal image. Dont you think so?

Uddhav: These allegations were made against us, but they had no impact on the Sena. Those who have seen the Sena at work know what it stands for. Those who pretend that they dont know what the Sena stands for, keep misleading the people.

The Shiv Sena has, over the last few years, undergone quite an image transformation. Today, the Sena is often seen taking up issues which are requisites of a modern city, be it having a nightlife or restaurants on the rooftop.

Uddhav: We have not changed our image or ideology. The way in which we present our ideology has changed. The language and discourse has to evolve with every passing generation. The discourse during my grandfathers times was not retained during my fathers time and so on.

Aaditya: The core ideology has remained the same but the way in which it has been implemented, the medium of communication has also changed. Such flexibility has helped us remain relevant for 50 years.

The Sena took advantage of controversies while staging violent agitations for the sons of soil. In the past few years, the perception is that Mumbai is losing out to cities like Gurgaon, Noida and Bangalore in attracting companies and investment. Do you think that is a fallout of your agitation?

Uddhav: Mumbai is not losing out to those cities. However, important offices based out of Mumbai have been deliberately shifted to other cities, like the Air India office. You might say I am being controversial, but the Centre has made efforts deliberately to reduce the citys significance.

Aaditya: In fact, it was after the infrastructural projects by our government, like the citys 55 flyovers, that the citys suburbs saw growth and development. In the early 1990s, ease of doing businesses meant that you must pay up to gangsters if you got a new car or started a new business. We were the ones who made the city safe for businesses to flourish by ending gang wars.

The relationship between the Sena and violence is intriguing. You have justified the use of violence if it has been towards a cause.

Uddhav: You must separate agitations from violence. If someone is not paying heed to our agitations, what should we do?

Under you, this has also changed. The Sena is not as violent a party as it used to be.

Uddhav: This is what I am saying, that there have been misperceptions about the Sena. Whatever you call it, agitations or violence, the Shiv Sena is a force. This saved the city in the 1993 riots. It is now helping the people in dry villages of Marathwada by carrying out drought-relief works. You criticize the force if things go out of hand, but then you must also applaud it for the times it has been doing positive.

When you took over the party and handled the 2002 civic polls full-fledged, there were a lot of questions about your leadership. Now, your party is in power in Mumbai,

in the state and at the Centre. You even fought against the Modi wave and emerged with the second highest numbers. Are you more assured about your leadership now?

Uddhav: I never think of my own leadership. The people who doubted my leadership and raised questions need to think about it now. I have never considered myself as a leader. I know that the Shiv Sena is a strong force which needs to be channelised for the benefit of my city, state and country.

The relations between the Sena and BJP have reached new lows, even making allegations. Your party was accused of corruption.

Uddhav: Those are only allegations. Nothing has been proved. We can also make such allegations and if we do, there will be only mud-slinging. However, we have maintained dignity so far. Their (BJP) government is in power. They even conducted inquiries into the de-silting inquiries and road works. What did they find? In fact, I want them to conduct more such probes so that people know that no Shiv Sainik is involved in any sort of corruption.

What next for the Sena now?

Uddhav: Whatever works we have taken up, we want to finish them off soon. In fact, this is what I said, that it is because of our focus on 80% social work and 20% politics that we didnt come to power earlier. We both fought the Congress and opposed it, and did that together until the Lok Sabha polls. In fact, when Modi was declared the Prime Ministerial candidate, we were the first ones to back him.

Many often feel that now that the two of you have struck power, you must ensure there is better coordination to ensure good governance, rather than skirmishes every day.

Uddhav: Definitely, yes. I dont criticise only for the sake of it. I feel that we must advise them and ask them to correct any wrong steps that we take.

Aaditya: Both parties have mass bases and are in government. Hence, it is important that both are heard publicly. If we are against the destruction of Aarey forest or the land acquisition process, we have to speak out. It is important the views of both parties are known to their supporters.

But, shouldnt there be a better mechanism to ensure these debates within the government dont lead to a bitter tussle?

Uddhav: There are issues that must be discussed within close confines, which are discussed that way. But, if there are issues which affect people, then I must come out and make our stand clear. But, if our private objections dont have any impact, then we will have to come out and make ourselves heard. For instance, I criticised the railway tariff hike. This was an issue affecting the masses. I dont travel by trains. If I wouldnt have spoken out, people would have slammed me for keeping quiet. They havent voted my party to power for keeping quiet.

Often, you are the first one to criticize the government, even before the opposition parties react to it.

Uddhav: You might think that I am an opponent but I have to speak for people to know that I have a different view. I may have an alliance but I havent merged my party with the BJP.

You have seen generations of the BJP leadership, from Vajpayee to Advani to Mahajan and Munde. Dont you think this is a difference between the current BJP leadership and then?

Uddhav: Back then, the generation wanted to learn. Atalji would personally call, Advani would call, he would often drop in, Mahajan was like a brother to me. Id say that the current leaders are sarvagunasampana (The one with all the virtues). They dont need anyone.

Why Sena couldnt win power on its own, like other regional parties such as Telugu Desam Party and Trinamool Congress?

Uddhav: There is a big difference between others and us. Balasaheb didnt quit any other party to create the Sena. We have never pursued 100% politics, always 80% social work, 20% politics. Had we focused solely on politics, we could have probably come to power single-handedly. Take a look around and youll see the fate of those who have in the past and continue to only focus on 100% politics.

The Thackerays have always maintained that they wont occupy any position of power. But, do you think that could change with Aadityas generation?

Uddhav: Neither did Balasaheb tell me to do this (shy away from all posts) nor did I tell Aaditya. This is a personal choice. Let Aaditya decide if he wants to occupy such a post.

Aaditya: We have always been very active in politics even if we have been out of legislative politics. My father, in fact, takes feedback from people and tells the government what must be done. So, not opting for a post doesnt mean we take a backseat. But then it is up to the people and the party to decide.

Politics is increasingly getting personalised like the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Do you think it is a good step? Your editorials, in fact, cautioned BJP against such politics.

Uddhav: Much of that depends on who the person is and what his ideology is. If the person is good, his ideology is good, then it is definitely better than going astray. If we practice people-centric politics, then the responsibility of that person is heightened since he has to weigh his words and ensure that each of his promise comes true or else people will lose faith in democracy. The ultimate power is in the hands of the people.

Will the 2017 BMC polls signal change? Indications are that you and the BJP will fight separately.

Uddhav: There has been no talk between us regarding the BMC polls yet. As we come closer to the date, serious discussions on it will begin.

The BJP has started preparations seriously. Theyve also made a committee consisting of senior state and national leaders.

Uddhav: They are well within their rights to do so. They had made such committees in Delhi, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

The Modi government has completed two years amidst much fanfare. Are you satisfied with the governments performance?

Uddhav: They themselves have publicised their achievements and told the people what theyve done, so there is no need for me to comment on it. The government is for the people. So, you must ask the people if they are satisfied with its performance or not.

You had proposed several big projects for the city including development of the eastern waterfront, but they all seem to be getting stuck at some point or the other.

Uddhav: I gave them a proposal on how to develop the waterfront. They even made a committee on it but no one knows what happened to it. This used to happen with the earlier government and now it is happening with our government too. Then, how have things changed? Desh badal raha hai, theek hai. But, I dont know if Mumbai and Maharashtra are changing.

In the 50 years of the Sena, history is witness that whenever there has been a split in the Sena, the party has come out stronger. What could be the challenges for the party in the future?

Uddhav: Call it good fortune or bad, but the entire picture is clear to all-who are ours and who are not.

But, do you think its time to create some new friendships?

Uddhav: After all that has happened, we are wary of even calling someone a friend. One wonders if there is anyone worthy of being friends with.

During the last assembly elections, MNS chief and cousin Raj Thackeray had said that there was a dialogue between your party and the MNS on coming together. Do you see that happening in the future?

Uddhav: I have already said that we are now clear on who our friends and enemies are. Hence, there is no confusion left in the minds of the people and the Shiv Sainik.

You seem to harbour national ambitions, considering you are fighting elections in other states.

Uddhav: So far, we used to not fight seriously in other states because we didnt want to cause a split in Hindu votes, which was only causing us a loss. But, those who garnered votes on the basis of Hindutva dont seem to be doing enough to take the cause forward. We will now take time to establish ourselves in these states but we are ready.

How do you think the party is shaping up in the coming years? Will your agenda change or remain the same?

Uddhav: Sena was formed by Balasaheb for the people. We will continue to be among the people, wont chase the power.

Aditya: The Sena is unique in the sense that it doesnt fit into any fixed square of definitions. We will stick to our ideology which evolves with changing times.
Students and teachers in Mumbai schools were shocked to find photos of education minister Vinod Tawde published on the Class 10 aptitude test reports given to them on Wednesday.

The reports carrying the results of the first-ever aptitude test - assessing students skills and i  interests  were given to students along with the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exam mark sheets.

The ministers picture is juxtaposed next to some text explaining why the test was conducted for the first time in Maharashtra along with a congratulatory message from the minister. More than 15 lakh students from the state took the test in February.

Academicians called it a tacky move to publish a politicians image on a document meant for academic record. A students document is not a place for self-promotion or propaganda, said a senior teacher from an aided school in Andheri, on condition of anonymity. Teachers refused to be named fearing they will be punished for criticising the photograph.

Another teacher said students were confused when they saw the ministers photo. Initially, students believed they had received someone elses report because they did not recognise the minister, said a teacher from a Chembur school. Shreya A, a student from Shree Ram School, Andheri, said, I wondered why the photograph was published on the report.

Other teachers worried if the document will be accepted by international institutes. Often students want to attach information about other exams they have appeared for to add weight to their college application, especially to foreign universities, said a school principal from Dadar.

Tawde, however, said the photograph has been added as a personal message to the students. The photo is just a tool for effective communication, to reach out to students with an appeal to choose the career path suited to them, said Tawde. The aptitude test is a unique initiative carried out by the education department under this (BJP) government, Tawde said.

The aptitude test:

Skills and interests of more than 15 lakh students were tested in February. This is the first time that the state education department had conducted this test.

The objective was to help students make informed career choices after testing their heir skills and interests, and not let parents to force their choice on students

On April 26, students received an online report on their performance. A counselling helpline-8275100001 is active from May 3 to guide them further.

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Air India has prohibited its cabin crew from taking leave during Haj season when the national carrier flies passengers for their pilgrimage to holy cities in Saudi Arabia.

A circular sent to employees on June 9 said that cabin crew should not apply for leave between August 4 and October 16. Strict compliance please, the circular said.

Air India chairman and managing director Ashwani Lohani declined to comment on the decision to ban leave. Sources in the airline, however, said the decision indicated that there was a shortage of cabin crew and that the airline plans to increase the number of Haj flights this year. While the schedule for this Haj season has not been released, the airline operated 230 flights carrying approximately 40,000 pilgrims in two phases last year.

Members of the cabin crew who were upset with the decision said that the management had taken an unrelenting stand on the issue when it was discussed a few days back. Since last year the crew has been denied leave during Diwali, Christmas and now the Haj season. If there is such a serious manpower crunch why dont they hire? said a senior air hostess.

Last week, citing safety issues, the airline had barred employees from being deployed on the same flight with family members. Many Air India flight crew members have relatives working in other positions; many pilots are married to colleagues who could be posted for work in the same flight. Some have children and siblings working in the same airline. There seems to be an effort to harass the crew by denying them family time, said a flight purser.

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LOS ANGELESThe Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC) is criticizing an anti-performer ballot initiative that would allow private citizens to sue performers who work without condoms, and has joined with Californians Against Worker Harassment to oppose the measure.

In a letter to Secretary of State Alex Padilla opposing the measure, APAC President Chanel Preston attacked the initiative as dangerous, and asks Californians to vote against the measure.

Legalizing harassment, she says, is not a California value.

Eric Paul Leue, executive director of the Free Speech Coalitionand campaign manager for Californians Against Worker Harassment, the committee formed to oppose the measureapplauded APAC for its work.

Were proud to stand with APAC, AIDS Project LA, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the San Francisco Democrats, the California Republicans, and so many of the other advocates and organizations who have spoken out against this initiative. California is a leader in workers rights, protections for women and respect for LGBTQ communities. We once again call on Michael Weinstein to respect the performer communitys safety, and pull the initiative before anyone is hurt.

The full text of the letter is below:



Dear Secretary Padilla,



The Adult Performer Advocacy Committee (APAC) urges California voters to OPPOSE the pending ballot initiative Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act.

APAC is the only group in the adult film industry led by, and comprised solely of, adult performers. We advocate on behalf of performers, and work to maintain and improve safe working conditions in the adult film industry by giving performers organized representation in matters that affect our health, safety, and community.

This proposed initiative will not make adult film performers or workers in our industry safer. Instead it will threaten our safety and violate our privacy by enabling anyone in California to file dangerous and costly lawsuits against performers who exercise choice, and, most disturbingly, expose our home addresses and legal names.

Over the past few years, performers have widely opposed this and similar measures, which seek to take choice away from performers over their own bodies. Performers are not opposed to regulation, or to the use of condoms, in addition to our current testing protocols. But these decisions are highly personal, and can not be imposed upon us without our consent.

While the proponent of the initiative claims to be interested in our protection, he has repeatedly dismissed our very real concerns about how this initiative would impact our bodies and well being. When performers have disagreed with him, the proponent has tried to bully and threaten us, to silence our voices, and to trample our rights. He has spent millions of dollars to collect signatures for this initiative, yet has never once come to the table to discuss our needs as workers in this industry with us.

The adult industry is one of the most inclusive and protective work environments for LGBTQ people. This measure would expose performers and other vulnerable workers in the industry to lawsuits, leaving us open to stalkers, extortion and other forms of harassment.

No other worker in California can be sued by the general public or be subjected to such a public form of harassment.

Legalizing harassment is not a California value.

For these reasons, we strongly urge California voters and legislators to oppose this initiative.

Sincerely,

Chanel Preston

President
Although the death of 106 people after consuming spurious hooch in Malwani last year swung the police and excise department into action, it hasnt dissuaded the local residents from consuming liquor.

One of them is Ramchandra Arijan, who works as a cleaner with the civic body and was among those hospitalised after drinking the poisonous concoction. I dont drink as much now. I ensure the liquor has government licence, said Arijan. He cannot stop drinking. He has just switched to country-made liquor, said his sister. There is a fight every day. Even after getting a new lease of life, he does not care enough, said Arijans mother-in-law Jyoti Saket, who lost her husband to the tragedy.

A little away from Arijans house, the Kanojias are to come to terms with the loss of their sons Dinesh and Kamlesh. The family moved to Mumbai from Uttar Pradesh three decades ago. The duo worked at an incense stick workshop and a scrap-dealers warehouse. After their death, their father Ram Dular has set up a pan shop. Kamleshs widow Anita has started a makeshift tea-stall to add to the meagre family income. Dineshs wife Poonam works as house help. The future of their eight children seems bleak. My sons did not drink hooch on a daily basis. That day [June 18, 2015], they went for a get-together with friends. Bhagwan ko hamare ghar se kisiko lena hi tha, ek ko toh baksh deta [God could have spared at least one life from our family], said Ram Dular.

While the family got Rs2 lakh compensation, which they have invested for the childrens education, the major worry is the safety of the children. Theirs is the only house in the lane surrounded by workshops. Local residents complain of drug addicts strolling around, which is another issue after alcoholism. We have enrolled the children to a school in Gujarat. They should not grow up here, said Sonu, Dineshs mother.

He gave his family more in his death than in life, said a neighbour of Hari Kamanis widow, referring to the Rs1 lakh compensation the family got after the tragedy.

Several affected families have moved out of the slums, with most women taking up their husbands jobs or working as house help.

Pinki Kamani is one of them. With her two-year-old son tied to her waist, Kamani works at five households in the area. She earns Rs3,000 a month, of which Rs1,000 goes for the house rent. I have loaned half the compensation to an auto driver. The rest is in a bank. I need the money for my childs future, said Kamani.

Mainavati Mudaliyar (right) outside her house. (Pratham Gokhale/HT)

Among the families of the victims lives Mainawati Mudaliyar, the mother of Mamata Rathod, who was arrested in the case for selling hooch. For other women from Rathodi, Mudaliyar is not the mother of an accused, she is just a neighbour who looks after her daughters children -- eight-year-old Rakesh and a five-year-old girl Preeti. Mudaliyar works for a clothes pin unit and earns Rs30 for every sack and is often helped by her neighbours in completing the assignment.

After Rathods arrest, Rakesh had to drop out of school. He has high fever, but Mudaliyar has little money to get him medicines.

The family of Raju Tapkar, another accused, lives in the same house, from where he was arrested. His son Satish, 18, lives there with his mother Madhavi, who is speech impaired. Satish collects scrap material from the area, while his mother does odd jobs.

The Malwani police station is a few minutes away from the slums. The police admit their counselling sessions for those who survived the incident have proved to be futile. Explaining the reason behind the failure, Airjan said, While cleaning sewage, we have to get into filth. The alcohol allows us to do our job, which is impossible otherwise.
Union home minister Rajnath Singh, along with senior officers from the ministry and home minister of nine coastal states, will hold a review meeting on coastal security at the Sahyadri guesthouse on Thursday

Expeditious implementation of the coastal security scheme, security of non-major ports, single-point mooring, coastal mapping, security of islands, distribution of biometric cards and colour coding of boats will be discussed in the first session. The Indian Coast Guard, coastal states and union territories will also give a presentation on the steps taken by them to ensure coastal security and their requirements.

The meeting will be attended by Kiren Rijiju, minister of state for home affairs, chief ministers or home ministers from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and union territories, including Daman, Diu and Dadra, along with officials from the state and central security agencies. The inter-state council secretariat (ISCS), registrar general of india, ministry of defence, ministry of shipping, department of animal husbandry, dairy and fisheries, Indian Coast Guard are among the agencies participating in meeting.

The officials will also review and deliberate on the security threats to the coastline, the gaps in intelligence gathering, full-proof maritime security, and framing of new legislation to strengthen the existing laws.

There will be a discussion on various coastal security issues. We review the coastal security every three months with officials from the Coast Guard, Marine Police and Indian Navy at state-level meetings. We will give our suggestions and recommendations in the meeting, said Swadheen Kshatriya, chief secretary, Maharashtra.

Review meetings have become a routine affair in coastal states, after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, which exposed major security lapses along Mumbais coast.
Exxon Automation Pvt. Ltd, the company given the online registration work for degree courses in the University of Mumbai, said they did not get enough time to develop the website.

Read more: MU gives students time till June 25 to register online

Degree college registration: MU website crashes again

The website crashed on Tuesday, the first day of registration, and has been working erratically since then.

According to Prasad Bandivdekar, director of the information technology firm, they were given the contract to develop an online process for enrolment, eligibility and migration of students, on June 7, while the registration process was scheduled to start on June 14, leaving just seven days to create the system.

He said though they managed to develop the system before the online registration started, they did not get time to test it before opening it up for registrations.

While the website was inaccessible to students for a few hours on the first day, it had slowed down on Wednesday and Thursday. Bandivdekar said the system had failed because of the heavy traffic on the website.

There was no technical glitch in the system. However, the servers were not able to handle the load on the website. While we were prepared to handle around 2 lakh applications, on the first day, we received as many as 3 lakh hits on the webpage, he said.

Initially, the company had installed 10 servers to handle the traffic and later added 15. The servers didnt crash on the first day. We had switched them off for an upgrade, said Bandivdekar.

The Mumbai-based company, founded in 1996, said they have done several projects in other universities and education boards across the country, including the Maharshtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary and have experience handling heavy online traffic. The company director said they couldnt do a trial of the servers , as a project of this scale usually requires a month to complete.

A senior university official agreed there was a delay in the bidding process. The tenders to develop a system to handle enrolment, eligibility and migration of students were floated on May 20, just five days before the HSC results were declared. The final contract between MU and Exxon was signed on June 8.

For last four years, the process was handled by the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL) - a state-run company. This year, the university opted for a competitive bidding process, in a bid to get rid of MKCL. The university has had several disputes with MKCL. We are trying to move away from it now, said a senior varsity official.

According to sources, several companies had participated in the bidding process. However, only three - Exxon, MKCL and Hindustan Computers Ltd - matched the varsitys criteria. The university said within three years, it would acquire the system developed by the contractors and manage the admissions and examinations on its own.

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BEIJING: Soldiers from the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) were patrolling the Chinese side of the disputed frontier with India along Arunachal Pradesh, Beijing said on Wednesday, dismissing reports that hundreds of its troops had crossed the border last week.

Around 250 P LA soldiers reportedly crossed the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh on June 9, reports had quoted unnamed Indian defence officers as saying.

The incursion by Chinese troops was temporary and they went back to their own territory within hours, the reports had said. The India-China border has not been clearly demarcated. This was a regular patrol on the Chinese side of the LAC , foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said.

It is rare for incursions to take placeor at least to be reportedin the eastern sector along Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims and shows on maps as south Tibet.

The Indian defence officers said this was the first incursion in the region this year. India and China have an unresolved, heavily militarised border running about 3,488 km. Much of the confusion arises, according to diplomats and experts, because the border is not delineated, leading to competing claims.

China s foreign ministry reiterated the same point while dismissing the reported incursion.
NEW DELHI: The BJP will try to build a narrative for the Uttar Pradesh elections over the next three months and decide if it should have a chief ministerial candidate only around September.

Till then, the saffron party will rely on the troika of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Rajnath Singh and party chief Amit Shah to lead their campaign in the state. Simultaneously, it will also carry out quiet surveys to help assess if its campaign strategy struck a chord with UPs 14 crore-plus voters. The state will go to polls early next year.

Shah intends to touch base with booth-level party workers. PM Modi, on the other hand, will address at least one rally every month in UP. Rajnath Singh, also the Lucknow MP, will travel to his home state a lot more frequently.

This should give us a better understanding of our strengths and weaknesses by September. Our campaign will pick momentum after monsoon and by that time, we will be in a position to take a call on whether or not to project a CM face, a BJP functionary said.

For now, the BJPs strategy is to keep the home minister at the forefront of its UP campaign. Singhs seniority and stature would discourage the chief minister aspirants in the party from creating trouble. It would also give them hope that the party could eventually name them as its chief ministerial candidate, particularly since the home minister has made it known that he wasnt in the running for the chief ministers job. However, it will not be an easy choice for the BJP in September as well.

Sultanpur MP Varun Gandhi, whom internal surveys have shown as the first choice for the post, is not on the best of terms with the partys leadership. Union human resource development minister Smriti Irani is an outsider and Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath is too polarising a figure to be asked to lead the party.

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A 45-year-old man allegedly shot dead his 22-year-old daughter, suspecting that she was having an affair with a man from the neighbourhood, at Garhi Azampur village of Greater Noida on Friday.

During the altercation, the mans wife also sustained a bullet injury and had to be rushed to a hospital.

The police said Devendra, a farmer, used a countrymade pistol to shoot his daughter Rita. She was declared brought dead at Kailash Hospital in Sector-27 in Noida.

Devendras wife, Sarsa, 42, is presently undergoing medical treatment at Yathartha Hospital. Her condition is not stable yet.

The police said Devendra shot his daughter in the chest and Sarsa in her pelvis.

Prima facie, Devendra suspected that his daughter was having an affair with a man in their neighbourhood.

They quarrelled on Friday morning, after which Devendra shot his daughter and wife. Two bullets were fired from the weapon, said Ravindra Rathi, station house officer, Dankaur police station.

Rathi said the victims father fled the spot soon after the incident.

We have filed an FIR for murder and attempt to murder against Devendra. As of now, we are trying to find him, said Rathi.

The police said Sarsas relatives filed the complaint in connection with the incident.

Their neighbours were not willing to divulge any details about the fight. The identity of the man involved in the affair is not clear as of now, said Rathi

At Yathartha Hospital, doctors said Sarsa was being operated upon. A team of doctors are currently treating Sarsa. We can only be sure if she is out of danger after conducting the operation, said the hospital staff.
A five-year-old boy from Jalandhar has been abducted from inside the Golden Temple premises in Amritsar, three weeks after a similar incident involving an infant.

The child, Vishu, had gone missing after being separated from his father at the community kitchen on Tuesday. The kidnapping came to light after the closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera footage showed a woman taking him away from the shrine, following which a case was registered.

The childs mother, Radhika, said: On May 14, my husband and son had gone to partake of langar. There my son got separated. We searched for him at many places. Later, we scanned the footage of CCTV cameras installed in the shrine, where we clearly spotted a woman taking away our son.

E-division station house officer (SHO) inspector Sanjeev Kumar said: We are looked for the child and the accused. Our teams are working around the shrine and other suspected areas. Pictures of the accused and the child have also been circulated.

Besides seeking CCTV footage from the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the police have also uploaded the pictures on social networking sites to get clues about the accuseds whereabouts.

On May 23, a three-month-old child of a Ferozepur-based couple was abducted by a woman from the Golden Temple. After the police procured the CCTV footage and circulated the accuseds pictures, she was nabbed and the child was rescued from Ludhiana within three days. Couple of years back, another five-year-old child was abducted, but later abandoned by the accused.
Raninder Singh, the son of Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh, failed to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday.

He took exemption on medical grounds.

The ED had summoned Raninder in connection with its probe against him for alleged foreign exchange management act (Fema) violations and holding of untaxed foreign assets.

In the summons issued by ED assistant director Ajai Singh 10 days ago, Raninder was asked to appear before the agency to explain the alleged movement of funds to Switzerland and the creation of a trust and a few subsidiaries in the tax haven of British Virgin Islands.

LIED UNDER OATH: I-T DEPT

The ED initiated action following a complaint by the income tax department which claims that Raninder lied under oath to the department about trusts allegedly owned by him in British Virgin Islands.

Read: Capt Amarinders son gets notice for lying about foreign bank accounts

The income tax department had found that Raninder was the settler (donor) of the Jacaranda Trust, the UK, and owner of business entities Mulwala Holdings Limited, Limerlock International Limited, Chillingham Holdings Limited and Allworth Venture Holdings Limited.

The authorities in the British Virgin Islands informed the department that the business entities were holding substantial financial assets, including bank accounts in HSBC, Geneva, and properties in the UK and Dubai.

The authorities provided the I-T department with a copy of the trust deed which showed that the settlement was made on July 22, 2005, in British Virgin Islands between Raninder and HSBC Trust Company Limited. Raninder acted as a trustee.

Read: Capt Amarinder slams Jaitley for fraud notice against his son

NOTHING TO HIDE: RANINDER

Soon after the summons were issued, Raninder said that he had nothing to hide and was willing to cooperate on the issue. This was already being looked into by the income tax authorities. We have nothing to hide and we will fully cooperate with the enforcement directorate, he said.

In March, Ludhianas chief judicial magistrate Ranjeev Kumar had issued a notice to Raninder for lying to the income tax department about his foreign bank accounts. Acting on a criminal complaint by income tax deputy director (investigation) Amit Dua against Raninder for giving false information, the Ludhiana court asked him to file a reply on July 26, the next date of hearing.

The income tax department had found that the former chief ministers son was a direct beneficiary of assets maintained and controlled through foreign business entities.

When the department confronted Raninder with this information last year, he denied having any foreign bank accounts. Later, the department filed a complaint against Raninder under Sections 181 (false statement on oath) and 177 (furnishing false information) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 277 (false statement in verification) of the Income Tax Act.

AAP TURNS UP THE HEAT

The Aam Aadmi Party has been gunning for Capt Amarinder Singh over this issue. AAP MP Bhagwant Mann said that Amarinder had no moral authority to continue in politics after the ED summons to Raninder in the case in which he (Amarinder) had also been named.

In March, the AAP had made revelations about Amarinders familys Swiss bank accounts in which lakhs of dollars were transferred when the latter was chief minister of Punjab from 2002 to 2007. Mann said the documents procured by AAP indicated that Raninder and Amarinders wife Preneet Kaur, who was also the Patiala MLA, had opened bank accounts in Switzerland to transfer money.

Read: Capt plea of political vendetta against Raninder holds no ground: BJP
Perception can be a game changer and the Congress with its long history of winning elections should know that. The unsavoury controversy over the appointment of senior leader Kamal Nath as general secretary in-charge of a predominantly Sikh state where the 1984 riots are raked up every election to embarrass the Congress and the emotive issue still evokes strong reactions among the community was a controversy the party could ill afford.

Having lost two state elections in a row and facing the formidable challenge of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and its aggressive publicity machine in the upcoming polls, the Congress had roped in Kamal Nath, a political sharp-shooter who is known for his inter-personal skills and has successfully anchored state elections in Delhi, to tide over the partys troubled campaign in Punjab.

Starting from bad publicity to Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singhs North America visit to his face-off with strategist Prashant Kishor to the partys rout in the recent state elections, the Congress has been hurtling from one crisis to another. But the flip-flop on Kamal Nath only shows how the Congress high command and state leadership lacked foresight in appointing him. Amarinder, who cannot wash his of the ill-advised move, may say public perception should be based on truth and not myth but an old warhorse like him should know he cannot win elections by losing the perception game. And, it is not always based on reports of inquiry commissions.

Read: Kamal Nath quits as Congress Punjab in-charge over 1984 riots allegations

Read: No Delhi Sikh, except Phoolka, ever complained against Kamal Nath: Capt

Capt underestimated 84 baggage

Amarinders defence of both Jagdish Tytler and Kamal Nath is based on his personal audience with Sikhs after the riots during his stay in Delhi for four days. But the charge sticks on them nevertheless. According to party sources, Amarinder enjoyed a good rapport with his Doon school junior and wanted Shakeel Ahmad, a loyalist of his predecessor Partap Singh Bajwa, booted out. But he underestimated the damage the baggage of 1984 could inflict on his partys poll prospects.

Several Punjab Congress leaders have sounded the high command that the 1984 issue still remains an inflammatory one and can be used by the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal-BJP alliance and the AAP to take on the party. Had the party consulted its Punjab leaders before Naths appointment, it could have saved it the blushes. Just like in neighbouring Haryana, where the party faced the spectacular embarrassment of its party MLAs using the wrong pen to face disqualification of their votes for the Rajya Sabha elections. The Congress had gone ahead with its decision of supporting RK Anand despite former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda making his disappointment amply clear.

In the face of a weakened high command and emboldened regional satraps like Hooda and Amarinder, the Congress needs heavyweights like Ghulam Nabi Azad (appointed UP in-charge), Kamal Nath and even Kishor to ensure its writ still runs in states. But its decisions cannot be unmindful of the ground realities.

As for Amarinder, he has more in his list of personal woes. His son on Thursday refused to appear before the Enforcement Directorate, citing health concerns. Amarinders own health does not permit him to brave the heat and dust of Punjab to sustain an election campaign that has started way too early. Or as his critics say, he has burnt himself out holding rallies to oust Bajwa.

Read: Kamal Naths appointment cruel joke on Sikhs: AAP

Didnt ask for Naths removal: Capt

Chandigarh: Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh said on Thursday that he had not asked the party high command to remove Kamal Nath as general secretary in charge of Punjab.

Nath called me and said he was opting out owing to his self-respect and pride. I did not recommend his name as I was not asked to. Nor have I asked for his removal, he said.

On the partys flip-flop, Amarinder said Delhi Sikhs did not blame Kamal Nath. He said Sheila Dikshit was sworn in as Delhi chief minister when Kamal Nath was Delhi Congress in-charge. Who thought that (Delhi chief minister) Arvind Kejriwal, (anti-Sikh riots lawyer and AAP leader) HS Phoolka and (Punjab chief minister) Parkash Singh Badal would malign him after 32 years? Nath has put in his papers on his own. Any self-respecting man would have done that, including me, Amarinder said.

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At least 12 persons have been booked for allegedly assaulting a five-member police team when it sought to arrest a man for drug-peddling at Daulewala village near here on Wednesday. This is the second such reported incident this month from this village, infamous as a haven of the illicit drug trade.

Heres what happened in the latest instance. The police team from the anti-narcotics cell, led by assistant sub-inspector (ASI) Judge Singh, got a tip-off that Baljit Singh Baba, 45, was openly selling illicit drugs; and it raided his house. Baba, his sons Amarjit Singh and Satnam Singh, and his nephew Harjinder Singh, are already facing drugs-related charges.

As soon as we reached his house, Baba threw away a drug packet from his hand and ran; but we saw him call someone from his mobile phone, Judge Singh said, But we nabbed him. Thats when at least 12 villagers with sticks and swords came to his defence and overpowered the cops, taking Baba away. The villagers also thrashed the cops and tore the uniform of a constable, Nachhattar Singh.

A panchayat member, seeking anonymity, confirmed the incident, and said Baba and his family were known to be in the drug business.

Also read I Udta Punjab: State govt welcomes any effort for drug awareness

The police have now booked Baba, his two sons and two nephews, daughter-in-law, among others for assault on government officials and others charges, at the Fatehgarh Panjtoor police station that covers the area.

Earlier, on June 1, a police team from Fatehgarh Panjtoor led by station house officer (SHO) Shiv Chand was overpowered by some villagers in Daulewala when they went to arrest a proclaimed offender, Tirlok Singh, in a drug case. Here too, as soon as the police had taken him into their custody, villagers had started pelting the cops with stones and facilitated his escape.

Read I Facts, figures and falsehoods of states drug problem

On May 24, a team of cops from crime investigation agency (CIA) staff too were left embarrassed. They had gone to arrest some men for a robbery at a house at Butter Kalan village, but the gangsters fled in a cops car after opening fire. The police had tried to conceal the incident by not mentioning the car-snatching incident in the first information report (FIR).

What happens in Daulewala...

Daulewala village, 17 km from Moga, is notorious for drug-peddling. Even children here have been found involved in the business, say cops pleading anonymity.

As a large number of the villagers are involved in this business, they oppose the cops whenever they go for a raid, a police officer said. He claimed more than 10 such incidents had been taken place in a span of three years when the police have had to return embarrassed from Daulewala.

At one time around two years ago, police had installed a board at the entrance of the village declaring that it was infamous for drugs; it warned the people entering the village to stay away from drug peddlers. It was removed after villagers complained of stigma.

Asked about the apparent inefficiency of the police, senior superintendent of police (SSP), Moga, Harjit Singh Pannu said, What could the police do if the whole village comes to the defence of a drug peddler? We will further strengthen the police force.

Also read I Akali govt benefits from drug trade in Punjab: Rahul Gandhi

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HOLLYWOOD, CA  Plush Talent has signed veteran adult performer Katja Kassin to its roster.

Katja Kassin shot her first porn scene in Germany in May of 2002, and since then has been nominated and won a slew of industry awards.

"Im excited to be shooting again. I missed all my friends and family in the adult industry," says Kassin. Im happy that I found Plush Talent to work with for my return.

Scottie Platinum from Plush Talent commented, "I am looking forward to working with Katja. I've always privately been a huge fan of her work, and I'm honored that I get to work with such an industry great."

Directors and producers interested in booking Kassin should contact Scottie via email at [email protected]

Plush Talent is a fully licensed and bonded agency, (LIC #TA-000213308). You can visit their website at PlushTalent.com.
As its all set for Union finance minister Arun Jaitley to lay the foundation stone of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Amritsar on June 19, the state government is making all efforts to make the ceremony a grand affair.

As the government has selected 60 acres of land in Manawala on the National Highway-1 for the IIM campus, a lot of buzz is seen at the location these days.

Besides setting up of three stages, nearly 10,000 chairs have been put at the venue. A brand new entry road, 100 acres of parking area for buses, 28 acre parking area for the cars are being set up to ensure a grand show.

The function, which is attaining all the hype in the city and officers are busy to make it a hit, will be attended by Union HRD minister Smriti Irani, besides the Union finance minister.

Other than Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, all cabinet ministers, MLAs and senior leadership from both, the Akali Dal and the BJP, will attend the event.

The government will also be inviting staff members and students from various universities in Punjab.

The venue is seeing a lot of activity as the leaders of both the BJP and the Akali Dal are making rounds to the venue to ensure that all goes smooth.

On Tuesday, principal secretary to chief minister SK Sandhu also visited the venue and took meeting of the officers to know about the preparations made for the function.

Cabinet minister Bikram Majithia also held a meeting with officials on Wednesday to know about the arrangements made.

Notably, Jaitley had announced IIM for Amritsar in 2014 budget, but there was a delay in finding suitable land for the institute, causing delay in the foundation laying ceremony.

With the government transferring 60 acres land to the IIM, now its all set for Amritsar to have a building that will be completed in coming years.

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Questioning Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) chief Captain Amarinder Singhs authority to give clean chit to senior leader Kamal Nath on 1984 riots issue, AAP spokesperson Sukhpal Singh Khaira on Wednesday said the appointment of Kamal Nath as Congress in-charge was like rubbing salt into wounds of entire the Sikh community.

Who is Captain to distribute clean-chits to everybody involved in the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi, particularly in the light of the fact that no meaningful investigations have been conducted for the past 32 years to ensure justice to victims. I fail to understand in what capacity he is distributing these clean chits, said Khaira at a press conference here.

Khaira said that as everybody is aware, the Nanawati Commission had pointed a finger of suspicion against Kamal Nath for his nefarious role in the riots.

Two important witnesses too have deposed against the Congress leader, who was present at the site of the crime. Most importantly, the affidavit filed by Sanjay Suri, an eminent journalist, before the Ranganathan Mishra Commission in 1985, stating that Kamal Nath was present on the scene of crime in 1984, clearly points a finger on his role that needs to be investigated deeply, said the AAP spokesperson.
Hot on the heels of police busting a child trafficking gang on Tuesday, there was another incident involving the kidnapping of a 22-day-old child later in the evening. However, as cops went all out to rescue the child belonging to Batala Devi, it turned out that the accused had kidnapped the baby only because he suspected his wife of having an affair with Batala Devis husband.

Police acted swiftly, rescuing the child within 24 hours of the abduction from Surjit Nagar at Giaspura on Tuesday evening. The mother, Batala Devi, lodged a complaint at the Focal Point police station. As soon as the case was registered, police formed teams to carry out the rescue, with no information whatsoever about the kidnapper.

Acting on secret information, sub inspector Rajinder Prashad with his team on Wednesday, nabbed the accused at the Ludhiana railway station.

As it happened, the accused Purshottam Kumar, told a bunch of surprised cops during interrogation, that he was suspicious of his wife having an affair with the babys father and so had decided to abduct the child. Both the families are migrant labourers.
Hitting back at Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, who had stated that Rahul Gandhi is carrying anti-Sikh legacy, Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) senior leader Sukhjinder Singh Lali Majithia said it was a well-known fact that Badal is a biggest culprit of the Sikh community.

Addressing a press conference at the district rural Congress committee officer, Majithia said, Badal should be asked what relations he has with those who mixed poison with water that was given to the Sikh protesters during Jaiton Da Morcha. He even got Sikhs arrested in large number during emergency.

Everybody knows that Badal was the chief minister of Punjab when Sikh-Nirankari clash took place in Amritsar in 1978, which claimed lives of 13 Sikhs and laid the foundation for militancy in the state. Badal and his ministers conspired to ensure the clash for his political ends, he added.

Holding him responsible for Operation Bluestar, the PPCC leader said, The fact that Badals party is responsible for Operation Bluestar and anti-Sikh riots cannot be ignored. Badal and the BJP leaders should introspect the role they played during the tragic episode.
Punjab Congress Kisan and Khet Mazdoor Cell on Thursday announced to offer a bowl brimmed with blood of farmers and labourers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and gherao him during his visit to Chandigarh on June 21 to observe International Yoga Day.

While interacting with media persons, the cells state chairman Inderjit Singh Zira, who kicked off a tour on Thursday from Amritsar to collect blood of debt ridden farmers and farm-labourers across the state, alleged that they have chalked out the program as the PM is sucking blood of members of both the communities by implementing policies which are against their interests.

He said, The condition of farmers and labourers has deteriorated so much so that daily 4-5 persons are committing suicide. Despite being biggest contributors in the central pool of foodgrain, Punjabs farmers are struggling for their livelihood now.

India used to import petrol and diesel from Iraq while would import Basmati rice from India. But Modi stopped importing petroleum products from Iraq and replaced it with Syria. As a result, Iraq stopped purchasing Basmati from India, thereby pushing the farmer community of Punjab into deep mess, he added.

He said Modi had vowed to implement report of Swaminathan commission, which is the only solution to farmers crisis, and waive debt on them, but he forgot that. So, we will offer him the blood to remind him of the promise he had made in the election manifesto and awaken him to redress the condition of farmers who are opting to end their precious lives. We will also gherao him, he added.

Detailing about the programme, Zira said they have divided all districts into seven zones and blood will be collected from two farmers of each zone. He said he would visit to Barnala, Bathinda and Mansa districts on Friday to collect the blood.

At the office of Amritsar district Congress committee (rural), he collected the blood of farmer Raghbir Singh, resident of village Sairon (Amritsar district), and Ranjit Singh, resident of village Gaddiwind (Tarn Taran district).
A month after its employees allegedly thrashed a sewadar (volunteer) brutally, the Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) has suspended the accused employees.

The incident is very unfortunate and we strongly condemn it. We have suspended both the persons, said SGPC additional secretary and spokesperson Daljit Singh Bedi on Wednesday.

Bedi said SGPC chief Avtar Singh Makkar has also announced that they will ensure free treatment of the sewadar.

The Amritsar police, meanwhile, registered a case against accused Yaadwinder Singh, Satnam Singh and their two unidentified accomplices under Section 325 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) at the E-division police station.

Victim Gurpartap Singh, who is currently admitted at the local Guru Nanak Dev Hospital, had been performing sewa at the langar (community kitchen) hall of the Golden Temple for the past four years. On May 12, he was allegedly pushed into a room of the building and brutally beaten up by two SGPC employees, who accused him of mobile theft.

Gurpartap, who is nursing severe injuries on his legs and arms, told reporters on Wednesday that he was beaten up by an iron rod, but neither the SGPC nor the city police paid any heed to his initial complaints.

I was sitting near the langar hall when sewadar Yaadwinder Singh asked me to bring tea. Suddenly, he got angry and asked me if I had stolen any mobile phone. I denied that, but he did not listen to me and took me to the upper floor of the building and started beating me. Later, SGPC employee Satnam Singh and two other persons reached there and they all beat me up brutally, he alleged.

I was shocked to see the condition of my son. His legs and arms have been badly injured. We want justice, said Gurpartaps father, Rajesh Kumar. Originally from a Hindu family, Gurpartap had adopted Sikhism and later got baptised.

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Punjabs sonologists (doctors who do ultrasound scan on pregnant women, besides patients) are in disagreement with the state government a day after the Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, Faridkot, gave them June 30 deadline to register for a competency test.

Describing the test notification arbitrary, the Punjabs sonologist association on Wednesday decided to challenge it in the Punjab and Haryana high court next week.

The Pre-conception and Prenatal Diagnostics Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994, allows any MBBS-degree-holder to become sonologist without the basic qualification of MD in radiodiagnosis and gynaecology or additional training. The new PCPNDT rules in 2014, however, prescribed six-month compulsory training. Problem arose when the sonologists who did not have basic qualification were asked to clear the competency test before December 31, 2016, to be able to run their centres from 2017.

In case they fail, they will have to undergo six-month training after being selected through postgraduate (PG) entrance test. With the deadline just six months away, the state government on Monday began the signing up process, which has got 900 sonoligists, most of whom run private diagnostic laboratories in the state, worked up.

Punjab sonoloigst association president Dr GS Gill said forcing the test on experienced doctors who had trained many radiologists was unacceptable, especially when their petition challenging the central rules was in the high court and to be heard next month. The sudden notification has forced us to file a separate petition challenging it next week, he said.

Another member of the association, Dr HS Mann said Delhi, Karnataka, and Himachal Pradesh had scrapped the competency test at the intervention of respective high courts.

Punjab principal secretary for health Vini Mahajan, however, said the test was based on a nationwide consensus to give the country proficient sonologists. Moreover, it is only for those without basic qualification in radiology or gynaecology, she said, If they have long experience, one assumes theyd be confident about the test.

If the Punjab and Haryana high court or the Supreme Court scrap the test, we will comply, she added.

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Every episode of the popular 90s show, Tenali Rama, showcased a short story with a moral lesson. However, the tales were far from being preachy. Wit and humour were the USP of the show which was directed by TS Nagabharana.

The stories were based on works by writer Kamala Laxman, while late cartoonist RK Laxman made the illustrations for the show. Tenalis ability to solve problems with his wit and humour was a big hit among the audience, says actor Vijay Kashyap, who played Tenali Ramakrishna. Tenali was appointed as the jester in the court of Krishnadevaraya, the emperor of Vijayanagara.

Read: Yatra: The series that showcased the uniqueness of a train journey

Actor Anang Desai, who played the role of King Krishnadevaraya, says that shooting for the show in Bengaluru and Hampi was a great experience. (YouTube)

Anang Desai essayed the role of the king, and he loved the banter between Rama and him. It was a big deal to be part of a show which had creative inputs by the Laxmans. It was a novel experience for me to shoot in the south, says Desai. The unit shot for 55 days for 13 episodes of the show. They shot in Hampi for around 10 days and also in a village near Bengaluru. The palace and courtroom were created inside the Bengaluru Palace, Bengaluru. Desai feels the the script and stories were strong. The light heartedness and mirth in the show helped. We imparted wisdom without sounding too preachy, says Desai.

Read: Chunauti: This 1987 TV show was the first to capture the campus life

Recalling the experience of working on the show, Kashyap says, Meeting the Laxmans was wonderful. RK Laxman was an intellectual and warm human being. The casting director and producer had seen my work and knew about me. I was supposed to shave my head, and grow a long ponytail for the role. The producer got worried if a barber would be available on the sets to shave my head regularly, so we dropped the idea. Eventually, we used a wig.

Kashyap, who wanted to do research about the role, asked film-maker Shyam Benegal for advice. He says, Shyam babu told me to read comic books on the character and take it from there. I asked Laxmanji the same question too. Kashyap and Anang knew each other since their days at National School of Drama. Vijay was my senior, and we also were part of a professional theatre group. We had worked on several plays together. We had a comfortable working relationship, says Desai.

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British lawmaker Jo Cox, 41, died on Thursday after being shot and stabbed in her constituency in northern England, prompting the suspension of campaigning for next weeks EU referendum. Below are details of Coxs life:

Read: Pro-EU British MP dies after stabbing, shooting attack in constituency

1) Cox was born in the northern town of Dewsbury in 1974, and grew up in the parliamentary constituency she represented.

2) She attended Cambridge University, becoming the first in her family to attend university, graduating in 1995.

3) Cox worked in North Carolina on US President Barack Obamas 2008 election campaign, as well as working in Brussels for Member of the European Parliament Glens Kinnock.

4) She also worked in senior roles for aid agency Oxfam, and later on a campaign to prevent deaths in childbirth with Sarah Brown, the wife of former British prime minister Gordon Brown.

5) Cox was married with two young children.

6) Following her election to parliament in 2015, Cox was outspoken in support of Britains membership of the European Union. Responsible debate is paramount, she wrote on her website at the start of the referendum campaign in February. I fear, however, that we wont get it. What I do know is that Britain should be engaged and leading in Europe not disengaged and waving goodbye.

7) In her first speech after becoming an MP she praised the positive impact immigration has had on her constituency, Batley and Spen, a semi-rural area near the city of Leeds in northern England that has seen high levels of immigration from South Asia. Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir, she said in the speech on June 3 last year.

While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.

8) Cox co-chaired a parliamentary group Friends of Syria. The groups stated aim is: To build a greater understanding in Parliament of the current conflict in Syria and to allow parliamentarians to discuss the diplomatic, humanitarian and military options for UK policy.

9) In May this year, she criticised Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama for putting the Syrian civil war on the too difficult pile. She abstained in a December 2015 vote on whether to approve air strikes in Syria.

10) Cox was one of the 36 Labour Members of Parliament who nominated Socialist Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after the resignation of Ed Miliband following the partys defeat in last years general election. She later voted for a different candidate and in May this year criticised the partys performance in local elections.

Jeremy needs to personally recognise that this isnt good enough, she told the BBC on May 6. He needs to take responsibility, he needs to set out a route map to power in 2020.
Senate Democrats claimed a small victory early Thursday, forcing the US upper house to consider legislation to help keep guns out of the hands of terrorism suspects.

The move, which could break a years-long logjam on gun control, follows demands for action after the weekend massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Florida.

Democrats took to the floor of the Republican-controlled Senate on Wednesday to launch a procedural obstruction, known as a filibuster, to press colleagues to accept so-called no-fly no buy legislation.

Under it, people on watch lists or no-fly lists would be barred from buying firearms.

The filibuster was led by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where a 2012 school shooting left 20 children dead.

Im at my wits end, said Murphy, as he began on Wednesday morning his hours-long takeover.

Im going to remain on this floor until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together.

Murphy, with support from 40 senators including Republican Pat Toomey, spent hours discussing ways to reduce gun violence.

At 1:53am (0553 GMT) on Thursday, he claimed victory on Twitter.

I am proud to announce that after 14+ hours on the floor, we will have a vote on closing the terror gap & universal background checks, Murphy wrote.

The chambers Republican and Democratic leaders agreed on a path forward to get votes ... on a measure to assure that those on the terrorist watch list do not get guns, as well as an amendment that would expand background checks to sales at gun shows and on the internet, Murphy said.

The filibuster captured the attention of our nation, Booker said early on Thursday.

How many of our childrens dreams must be destroyed by gun violence before we do the common-sense things that we agree on to begin to shrink those numbers? he asked.

When you attack one American, you attack us all.

Republicans breaking ranks

A Senate measure that would have stopped FBI terror suspects from buying firearms and explosives failed in December, with every Senate Republican but one voting in opposition.

Some Republicans appear to be reconsidering, including congressman Bob Dold, who is locked in a tough re-election fight in Illinois.

Thoughts and prayers are not enough, Dold said Tuesday on the House floor. Its time for action.

Republican Toomey, whose bill to expand gun sale background checks failed in 2013 and again in 2015, worked with Democrats in a bid to break the gridlock.

On Wednesday Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced a measure that would give the US attorney general authority to block the sale of guns or explosives to known or suspected terrorists.

A US government report shows that known or suspected terrorists have passed background checks for gun sales more than 90% of the time since 2004.

Republicans largely oppose legislation that would deny weapons to people on such lists, arguing it would infringe on the Second Amendment rights of everyday Americans, including those who may have been placed unfairly on suspect lists.

Studies however show a large majority of Americans support such limits.

Trump and NRA

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday said he hoped to address the terror watch list gun ban -- a softening of the steadfast gun-right stance he showed throughout the campaign.

Trump may have changed his views after investigators found that the Orlando shooter legally bought his guns after he had been investigated for terror connections and reportedly placed on a watch list.

This may put Trump on a collision course with the powerful National Rifle Association, which has said that restrictions like bans on gun purchases by people on watch lists are ineffective, unconstitutional or both.

A Trump tweet on Wednesday read: I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.

The group answered that they would be happy to meet with the Republican flagbearer.

The NRA believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms, period, NRA spokesperson Chris Cox said in a statement.

Anyone on a terror watch list who tries to buy a gun should be thoroughly investigated by the FBI and the sale delayed while the investigation is ongoing.

Trumps Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton supports the limits.

Surely we can agree, if the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you should not be able to buy a gun with no questions asked, she said.
LOS ANGELESTwo new DVDs featuring Sarah Vandella are set for release.

If youve ever wanted to party with me in your own home, now is your chance, Vandella said. Both DVDs are like a party in a box. All you need is someone to watch with or even go solo, and let the good times roll!

Aura Productions latest release, Fuck Party Vol. 2, features threesome and foursome action. Sarah is paired with Jayden Jaymes and Justice Young in the follow-up to the hugely successful original Fuck Party. The movie also stars Charley Chase, Diamond Foxxx, Adriana Nicole, Alison Tyler, Dava Foxx, Van Wylde, Sophie Dee, Mariah Milano and Derrick Pierce.

Desire Films All Girls All the Time #2 features plenty of sapphist sex. Sarah is paired with London Keyes, and they just cant get enough of each other. All Girls All the Time #2 also stars Nicole Aniston in a solo scene. It also features girl-on-girl twosomes with Alix Lynx in scenes with Vanessa Cage and Nicole Aniston, along with Nikita Von James taking on Britney Amber. Pick up your copy today at your local adult store or favorite online e-tailer.

Get Sarah on your set by contacting her talent manager Mark Schechter of ATMLA at [email protected] or (8180 825-1239.
In the aftermath of the Orlando killings, the US is taking another shot at fixing its notoriously lax gun laws to prevent weapons from falling in wrong hands, such as suspected terrorists.

Senate Democrats won a small victory in that battle on Thursday, extracting the promise of a vote on two crucial legislations on the issue after a 15-hour emotional speech-athon.

Ive had enough of the ongoing slaughter of innocents, and Ive had enough of inaction in this body, Democrat Chris Murphy said starting the speech-athon, called a filibuster.

He vowed to remain on the Senate floor until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together. And that came on Thursday with the Republican leadership promising a vote.

Democrats have sought two legislative changes  one, prevent those on terror watchlists, such as Orlando massacre perpetrator Omar Mateen, from buying weapons.

And two, extend background checks to cover buyers at gun shows and exhibitions and on the internet, who are currently not covered, to turn away criminals and the mentally ill.

The US Congress tried the terror block last after the San Bernardino shootings in December, but failed. And the background checks effort failed after the Newtown school massacre in 2012.

Both efforts were foiled by the powerful gun lobby led by the National Rifle Association, which turns any gun control effort into an attack on the constitutionally-mandated right to bear arms.

President Barack Obama, who was travelling to Orlando to meet survivors, relatives, victims and first responders, has been pressing for these changes and renewed his call after Orlando.

He spoke on Tuesday of a need to make sure that we think about the risks we are willing to take by being so lax in how we make very powerful firearms available to people in this country.

Obama expressed frustration at the NRA, saying it accuses him of ignoring terrorism if he speaks of gun control, and others accuse him of ignoring gun control if he focusses on terrorism.

Gun law reformers may have their best shot yet this time, having found an unlikely ally in presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has backed calls for blocking terrorists.

He supported what is widely called the no fly, no buy clause, which says those on the terror watchlist, and prevented from flying, should be barred from buying arms as well.

I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns, Trump said in a tweet.

This is one of few issues on which he agrees with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who has said if youre too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America.

They continue to spar over other differences stemming from the Orlando carnage  such as Trumps call for suspending immigration from areas known to have exported terrorism to the US.

But they may have found one other area of agreement recently  the use of the phrase radical Islam, which Trump and other Republicans insist is the first step towards tackling terrorism.

Obama disagrees vehemently, arguing that using the phrase for terrorists  who, he says, are rank criminals and thugs  amounts to granting them the legitimacy they crave.

But Clinton appears to have moved closer to Trump on this, saying recently, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. Im happy to say either.

Malik Mujahid, a Chicago area imam, said Clinton erred. Michigan politician Rashida Taleb has said, I was taken aback that for the first time, she actually sounded like him.
The government of Pakistans restive Khyber-Pakhtunkwa province has set aside funds in its annual budget for conducting a census of the transgender community, whose members have been the target of a string of brutal attacks.

Provincial finance minister Muzafar Said, who belongs to Imran Khans Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf party, announced the allocation in the state assembly while presenting the budget for 2016-17.

The government said on Tuesday it will allocate Rs 200 million ($2 million) for the census and a separate housing scheme for transgender people. The minister said the government intends to set up special wards for transgenders in several hospitals of the province.

But the proposals were greeted with criticism by the community. Nadra Khan of the Shemale Association in Mansehra, where a transgender person was attacked last week, questioned the proposal to set up a rehabilitation center for the community.

We do not need rehabilitation, she said. We need gainful employment and protection like any other citizen of the state.

Others questioned the motive of the census and said such an exercise would be a waste of money since the government had already allowed them to be registered as transgenders on their national identity cards.

The proposal for special wards in hospitals, however, was welcomed. Transgender people have pressed authorities for equal treatment in hospitals and medical centers, which they say is consistently denied to them.

Last month, rights activist and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Trans-Action Alliance coordinator Alesha died because of delays in treatment at a public hospital after she was shot six times.

She succumbed to her injuries as doctors debated whether Alesha should be admitted as a man or a woman and who would treat her. The media coverage of the incident triggered a debate on the treatment of transgender people by Pakistani society.


Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent more than $600,000 of public funds on a six-day trip to New York, including $1,600 on a personal hairdresser, according to a newly released expense report.

The trip to the UN General Assembly last fall also included $210 in laundry services, $1,862 in meals and nearly $20,000 to move and store furniture.

Attorney Shachar Ben Meir obtained the expense report after suing Netanyahus office and the Foreign Ministry. He said that he requested the information in late October from Netanyahus office and was then referred to the ministry. After he was told to wait for three months, he sued both offices in a Jerusalem court.

Its my money and I want to know what is being done with it, he said.

The report, which he shared with The Associated Press on Thursday, threatened to reinforce the unflattering reputation Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, have gained for enjoying an expensive lifestyle out of touch with common Israelis.

It did not include charges for Sara Netanyahu on the trip. Police already have recommended that she be indicted for inflated household spending and misusing state funds on private meals and care for her ailing father.

Last month, a Jerusalem labour court awarded $30,000 in damages to a former employee of Mrs. Netanyahu who claimed he faced yelling and unreasonable demands.

In 2013, the premier was chided for spending $127,000 in public funds for a special sleeping cabin on a flight to London. He also ran up a $2,700 bill that year for ice cream, mostly vanilla and pistachio.

The court documents note that the trip also incurred a charge of $1.5 million for a flight, although it did not specify whether the flight was for the Netanyahus only or for staff as well.

Netanyahus spokesman declined comment.
The cockpit voice recorder from crashed EgyptAir flight MS804 has been found by search teams who were forced to salvage the device over several stages as it was damaged, the Egyptian investigation committee said on Thursday.

It said in a statement that a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search had, however, been able to recover the memory unit from the so-called black box.

The flight data recorder gathers information about the speed, altitude and direction of the plane, while the cockpit voice recorder keeps track of conversations and other sounds in the pilots cabin.

Frances aviation safety agency has said the EgyptAir plane transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.

Investigators have said it is too soon to determine what caused flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo to crash on May 19, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.

The search vessel John Lethbridge, equipped with an underwater robot, arrived in Egypt last week to begin searching an area around 290 kilometres north of the Egyptian coast.

The robot discovered pieces of the fuselage at several sites, the Egyptian board of inquiry said late yesterday.

Some wreckage had already been pulled out of the Mediterranean by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers.

The black boxes of Air France Flight 447, which crashed in 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean, were located nearly two years later and recovered from a depth of almost 4,000 metres.


Croatias government fell Thursday after Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic lost a confidence vote in parliament, in a serious blow to the countrys nationalist rulers after only five months in power.

Dpeaker Zeljko Reiner said that of those present 125 deputies in the 151-member parliament backed the no confidence motion while 15 were against and two abstained.

If a new government is not formed within 30 days, parliament will be dissolved and the president will call snap elections.
The father of a young woman killed in the Paris massacre last November is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter, claiming that the companies provided material support to extremists in violation of the law.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the Paris attacks, filed the suit on Tuesday in the US district court in the Northern District of California. The suit claims the companies knowingly permitted the Islamic State (IS), referred to in the complaint as ISIS, to recruit members, raise money and spread extremist propaganda via their social-media services.

The Gonzalez suit is very similar to a case brought against Twitter in January by the widow of a contractor killed in an attack in Jordan. It includes numerous identical passages and screenshots, although the lawyers in the cases are different.

In statements, Facebook and Twitter said Wednesday the Gonzalez lawsuit is without merit, and all three companies cited their policies against extremist material. Twitter, for instance, said that it has teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate.

Facebooks statement read, in part, that if the company sees evidence of a threat of imminent harm or a terror attack, we reach out to law enforcement.

Google, meanwhile, said it wont comment on pending litigation, but noted that it has clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users.

Under US law, internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides a legal safe harbor for companies like Twitter and Facebook; it states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

But it isnt clear if that legal defence will suffice in this case. Ari Kresch, a lawyer with 1-800-LAW-FIRM who is part of the Gonzalez legal team, said in an email that the lawsuit targets social media companies because of the behaviour they enabled, not what they published.

This complaint is not about what ISISs messages say, he wrote. It is about Google, Twitter, and Facebook allowing ISIS to use their social media networks for recruitment and operations. The Gonzales complaint also alleges that Googles YouTube shared revenue with IS from ads that ran with its videos.

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agrees that the legal safe harbour might not shelter social-media companies in such cases. Twitter may not succeed in quashing the similar lawsuit filed in January on those grounds, Wittes argues. But he said Twitter could still prevail because the causal link between its alleged support for extremists and the attack is very weak.
Search operations for the EgyptAir jet that went missing last month have discovered wreckage in the Mediterranean sea.

A French naval ship  the Laplace  detected one of the flight recorders last month after which an American vessel, the John Lethbridge, located and obtained images of the wreckage.

The discovery comes after investigators warned on Monday that signals from the planes black boxes would stop operating by the end of the month.

Read | A race against time: EgyptAir black boxes to stop emitting signals on June 24

The area of sea where it crashed is believed to be about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) deep and its flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder should have had enough battery power to emit signals for four to five weeks.

The Paris-Cairo flight had crashed on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast, killing all 66 people aboard. The cause of the crash remains unclear, although a terror attack has not been ruled out.

The route taken by the EgyptAir flight that crashed en route to Cairo on May 19. (AFP)

The Laplace will leave the operation now, having finished its mission in agreement with Egyptian authorities i.e., finding the signal using acoustic detection systems to listen for the pings emitted by the flight recorders, Frances aviation safety agency said.

The agency further said the aircraft transmitted automated messages indicating smoke in the cabin and a fault in the flight control unit minutes before disappearing from radar screens.

Investigators were able to narrow down the search site thanks to an emergency signal sent via satellite by the planes locator transmitter when it hit the Mediterranean.

Among the wreckage are pieces that make up the cabin.

On board were 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis, two Canadians, and citizens from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. They included a boy and two babies.

Seven crew and three security personnel were also on board.

The crash occurred after the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypts restive Sinai Peninsula last October that killed all 224 people on board.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that attack within hours, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.

IS has been waging a deadly insurgency against Egyptian security forces and has claimed attacks in both France and Egypt.

Some wreckage was retrieved from the Mediterranean last month, along with belongings of passengers on board flight MS804, but no bodies have been found so far.

The plane crashed between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast after disappearing suddenly from radar screens.

In October, foreign governments issued travel warnings for Egypt and demanded a review of security at its airports after IS said it downed the Russian airliner over Sinai with a bomb concealed in a soda can that had been smuggled on the plane.
The Jaish-e-Mohammed leader who gave directions over phone to the terrorists during the attack on Pathankot airbase has reportedly fled from Pakistan to Afghanistan, an official said.

The alleged JeM handler who communicated by telephone more than two dozen times with the terrorists in Pathankot, before they carried out the attack on the airbase on January 2, has managed to cross into Afghan border, a member of the joint investigation team (JIT) probing the attack told PTI on Thursday.

He said the JeM handler, who is in his late 20s, was in the tribal area of Pakistan when he communicated about 18 times with the terrorists.

Read: Pakistan unconvinced by Indias evidence on Pathankot attack

The law enforcement agencies tried to trace him (in the tribal belt) but there are reports that he managed to escape to Afghanistan, he said, without disclosing the JeM leaders identity.

During his interrogation, JeM chief Masood Azhar claimed the handler of the Pathankot operation had quit the organisation sometime ago.

Azhar disowns the JeM handler (to prove his innocence), said another source privy to the development.

He said investigation agencies have been under immense pressure from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to thoroughly probe the matter and come up with the true facts of the Pathankot incident.

Although the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of Punjab Police registered an FIR against the alleged attackers of the Pathankot airbase and their abettors, not a single person has been charged.

The FIR was registered in the CTD police station in Gujranwala under sections 302, 324 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code, and sections 7 and 21-I of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The FIR says Indias National Security Adviser Ajit Doval informed authorities that the four attackers had come from Pakistan and had probably crossed the border adjacent to the Pathankot general area.

Doval said the terrorists made phone calls to cell phones and belonged to a proscribed organisation.

Five terrorists and seven Indian military personnel were killed in a gun battle at the Pathankot airbase. The attack occurred just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a surprise visit to Lahore to wish Sharif on his birthday on December 25 and the occasion of his granddaughters wedding  a move that appeared to promise better ties between the two countries in future.
The wife and son of Chinas former security chief Zhou Yongkang, the senior-most leader to be jailed on corruption charges in decades, have been sent to prison after being convicted of bribery and related accusations, state media reported on Thursday.

Zhou Bin, the son of Zhou Yongkang, a member of the elite Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Chinas (CPC) Politburo -- was given a 18-year prison term by a court in central Hubei province, which accused him of taking bribes and making illegal business transactions.

He was also fined a massive $53.5 million.

Zhou Yongkangs wife, Jia Xiaoye, was sentenced to nine years in prison and fined 1 million yuan for accepting bribes and taking advantage of her favourable position.

This is the latest instance of President Xi Jinpings three-year-old anti-corruption drive netting high-profile and well-connected suspects within CPC cliques.

Zhou Yongkang was sent to jail for life in June 2015 for taking bribes, abusing his power and deliberately disclosing state secrets, and it was widely expected his immediate family members would be prosecuted and punished.

He was considered the leader of a faction that wielded immense power within the CPC and in the oil industry during his time as standing committee member, and before that as an influential player in state-owned petrol companies.

His sons indictment was expectedly focussed on large-scale corruption.

Zhou Bin was fined 350.2 million Yuan ($53.5 million), while all assets he illegally obtained shall be confiscated, according to the verdict by Yichang City Intermediate People's Court, official Xinhua news agency reported.

The verdict mentioned the role his father played in the deals.

Zhou Bin and his father accepted property worth 98 million Yuan and sought benefits for others by taking advantage of the elder's posts. Zhou Bin used his father's influence to obtain advantages for others through other officials and accepted 124 million Yuan in property, the verdict said.

Some say Xi has used the anti-corruption drive to weed out political opponents and their family and friends to gradually consolidate his grip over the government and the CPC.

Officially, however, the CPC says it is continuing with Xis high-profile anti-graft drive by targeting both tigers and flies -- the terms assigned to different officials depending on their ranks and levels of corruption. The popular campaign has so far shown little sign of losing momentum.

A state media report said in March a total of 22 Chinese ex-officials at the ministerial level or above, including Zhou Yongkang, were prosecuted last year while 41 were the subject of formal investigations, up from 28 in 2014.

All in all, 54,249 officials were investigated for their involvement in 40,834 graft cases in 2015, a slight drop from 2014, when 55,101 officials were probed in 41,487 cases, a Xinhua report said.

On the flies end, more than 20,500 grassroots officials from the agricultural sector as well as land acquisition, social insurance, education and medicare services were investigated and punished, the report said.
Britain agreed to give Indian researchers access to the neutron scattering facility of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire during science and technology minister Harsh Vardhans visit.

Vardhan, who participated in the fifth India-UK Science and Innovation Council Meeting here during his two-day visit, told reporters the access will immensely benefit India. India will invest Rs 26.5 crore as part of the nano mission programme of the science and technology department .

It was also decided to set up an India-UK Networked Centre for solar energy linked to Indias renewable energy mission and Britains Supergen Program. For this, India will invest Rs 50 crore over five years, with a matching contribution from the Research Council UK under the Newton-Bhabha program.

As the leader of the international solar alliance, India will set up its headquarters in New Delhi. Britain is also the partner country for the technology summit in New Delhi in November, Vardhan told journalists at the Indian high commission.

Referring to the June 23 referendum on Britains future in the European Union, Vardhan said it is a matter for the British people to decide. But given the follow-ups and commitment from the British side over the past two years, he did not see any hurdles in continuing cooperation, whatever the outcome of the referendum.

Vardhan said under the Newton-Bhabha program, the two sides had agreed on a collaborative program on energy efficiency in built environment as a part of the Smart Cities mission.

The ministry of earth sciences, India and NERC-UK are working on large observational campaign involving UK aircraft and Indian ships accompanied by surface observations primarily to address the role of small scale processes to address variability of the Indian monsoon, leading to improved prediction of monsoon from short range to seasonal time scale, he said.

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Hall of Fame star Nikki Benz announces that she is premiering her self-produced interracial release Isiah Loves Nikki exclusively at her official site NikkiBenz.com. This is the first interracial release Nikki has self produced and released.

The busy feature star is also appearing tonight and tomorrow, June 15 and 16 at the Cabaret, 5401 Leopard St., in Corpus Christi, Texas 78408. She then heads to the City of Industry to headline June 24 and 25 at Spearmint Rhino, 15411 Valley Blvd, City of Industry, CA 91746.

For a limited time, members can join Nikki's site for $19.95 a month (usually $25+) using this special code.

2016 has been one of Benz's biggest years in adult. Not only was she inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame in January but she was just named the first ever Brazzers Ambassador (and contract star). In April she became a Fleshlight girl. She also completely redesigned her official site and released her first directorial video Girls Love Nikki (starring Phoenix Marie, Tasha Reign, London Keyes, Abella Danger, Ana Foxx, and Annika Albrite). She stars in a new scene on Brazzers with Nicole Aniston plus the Ghostbusters parody Nut Busters with Romi Rain, Monique Alexander and Ana Foxxx coming in July.

"I can't think of a much bigger year in my career: a Fleshlight Girl, Brazzers contract star and spokesperson and a new official site," Nikki stated. "I am very proud of my accomplishments so far this year. Isiah Loves Nikki is a must-have for your Nikki Benz collection. I put a lot of work into the scenes that I self produce and direct. I have a lot of chemistry with Isiah Maxwell and I think it shows in the scene. The #BenzMafia fans are going to love it and I am extremely excited to exclusively offer it through NikkiBenz.com."

Nikki is one of the most followed porn stars on Twitter with 815,000 followers. She is an adult industry social media sensation with over 1.2 million likes on Facebook, and 1.3 Instagram followers.

Fans who cannot meet Nikki Benz at her club appearances can meet her online at her next exclusive members only chat on Tuesday, June 28, at 8 p.m. PST/11 p.m. EST at NikkiBenz.com. Nikki's site is part of the popular VNA Network.
A UN investigative panel on Syria says the Islamic State group is committing genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes against the Yazidi community in Iraq and Syria, and wants countries to do more to stop it  hoping to build a legal case on top of political condemnation from countries like the United States.

The Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued its first report Thursday specifically looking at IS crimes against Yazidis after the extremist groups attack on unarmed Yazidi communities in northwestern Iraq in August 2014. Many Yazidis were taken into Syria, and over 3,200 Yazidi women and children are still captive, the report said.

The 41-page report, based on 45 interviews with survivors, religious leaders, activists, medical staffers and others, seeks to put allegations of rape, sexual slavery and other crimes in a wider context of crimes against humanity and genocide by alleging that such practices are part of a IS strategy to wipe out the Yazidis, whom the radicals see as infidels.

ISIS abuse of Yazidi men, women and children amounts to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, commission chair Paulo Pinheiro told reporters in Geneva. IS statements and conduct show the group intended to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar in whole or in part, he said, and the genocide is ongoing.

The UN estimates that some 5,000 Yazidi men were killed by IS militants when they took control of Iraqs northwest two years ago and thousands more people, mostly women and children, were taken into captivity. Most of the Yazidi population  some 400,000 people  was displaced.

While countries like the United States, at a political level, have alleged IS genocide against Yazidis, the report seeks to bolster a possible legal case against those responsible and encourage the U.N. Security Council to hand the matter to the International Criminal Court or a separate ad hoc tribunal.

We regard this as a road map for prosecution, said commission member Carla Del Ponte. It is time now to start to obtain justice for the victims.

The UN Security Council should consider engaging its Chapter 7 powers  which could authorise the use of force, the report said.

It also cited slave markets in Syria where Yazidi women and girls are sold exclusively to IS fighters and says that within the last year, IS has begun holding online slave auctions with an encrypted application to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls.

The report mentions cases of boys over 7 years of old captured, taken from their families and indoctrinated, pointing to one instance of a boy being brainwashed by an ISIS commander and ordered to kill his own father. It described IS fighters treating women as chattel, with some women being bought and sold a dozen times.
Jo Cox, a popular first-time Labour MP from West Yorkshire and a Remain in EU supporter, was battling for life after being stabbed and shot by a man in her constituency, sending shock waves across Britains political establishment.

Cox, 42, is the MP from Batley and Spen, nearly 340 km north of London. She was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary after being attacked in the market town of Birstall around 1pm GMT.

The Vote Leave and Remain groups campaigning for the June 23 referendum on Britains future in the European Union suspended their campaign for the day after the attack. MPs and others said they were shocked and shaken by the incident.

Sanjeev Kumar, a shop-owner near a library where Cox was meeting constituents, told BBC he heard of the incident from customers and went out to see Cox lying in a pool of blood on the pavement.

Police at the scene after Batley and Spen Member of Parliament Jo Cox was shot, in Birstall, West Yorkshire. (AP)

Other witnesses said they saw Cox being hit by a white man of medium height who was wearing a baseball cap and grey clothes. The MP was targeted after she became involved in an altercation between two arguing men, they said.

West Yorkshire police said: At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition.

A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries. Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area.

Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said their thoughts were with her, while other shocked MPs hoped she would pull through.

It's right that all campaigning has been stopped after the terrible attack on Jo Cox. I won't go ahead with tonight's rally in Gibraltar.  David Cameron (@David_Cameron) June 16, 2016

Cox, a former aid worker with Oxfam, is married and has two children. She is an active member of parliamentary groups working on Palestine, Pakistan, Kashmir and Yorkshires regional economy.

Oxfam is deeply shocked to hear the news. Our thoughts and sympathies are with Jo and her family at this difficult time, said Mark Goldring, Oxfam GBs chief executive.

The incident renewed concern over security for members of parliament, who regularly meet constituents in their local offices. Such attacks are rare in a country that has considerably less security for political respresentatives than India.

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Detectives in the Bangladesh capital on Thursday announced the arrest of a suspected member of the banned Ansarullah Bangla Team for his alleged involvement in an attack on a secular publisher last year.

Police produced Mohammad Sumon Hossain, who has several aliases such as Shihab, Sakib and Saiful, before journalists in the detective branch headquarters in Dhaka amid a nationwide crackdown on militants.

Hossain was arrested on Wednesday night from near Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, said Monirul Islam, head of a police counter-terrorism unit. He said Hossain directly took part in the attack on publisher Ahmed Rashid Tutul last October because he had published books by a prominent Bangladeshi-American writer who promoted atheism.

Tutul survived the attack in his office in Dhaka. Two of his friends were seriously injured.

The police official said Hossain was an employee of a private company in the port city of Chittagong. No other details were released about him.

Islam said detectives learnt about Hossain from two other suspected militants who were arrested earlier this week from Kamrangir Char area near Dhaka. They gave us many vital information and we acted on the basis of that, he said.

Hossain was in a list of suspected militants allegedly involved in such attacks that was announced by the Dhaka Metropolitan Police last month. Police also announced a bounty of 200,000 takas for the capture of Hossain.

On the day of the attack on Tutul, another group separately killed another publisher in his office in Dhaka. We have got information about who led the other group that was involved in the killing of publisher Faisal Arefin Deepan, the official said.

Two men, Sharif and Selim, coordinated the attacks on Tutul and Deepan, he said.

Tutul and Deepan were targeted as they published the works of Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy, who was hacked to death in Dhaka University campus in February last year. His wife was injured in the attack.

The Ansarullah Bangla Team had claimed responsibility for the blogger killings while another group, Ansar al-Islam, which claimed to be the Bangladesh chapter of Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, also issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attacks.

Since last year, atheist bloggers, members of minorities, foreigners and free thinkers from various sections of society have been attacked and killed, and the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for many such attacks.

But the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said the IS doesnt have a presence in the country. The government says homegrown terrorists tied to the Jamaat-e-Islami party are behind such attacks.

The Jamaat-e-Islami, a key partner of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) headed by former prime minister Khaleda Zia, has denied these charges.
President Barack Obama will come face to face with the heartbreaking aftermath of Americas deadliest mass shooting when he visits Orlando on Thursday to comfort grieving families and thank emergency medical crews.

Obama, travelling with vice-president Joe Biden, will offer his condolences to families of 49 people killed in Sundays shooting at a gay nightclub in the central Florida city. Another 53 people were wounded.

The White House said Obama will also confer with emergency medical crews and hospital staff who worked feverishly to patch together broken bodies and save lives in the chaotic hours after the massacre by gunman Omar Mateen, who was shot dead when police stormed the club.

This will be, I think, an emotional trip, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Wednesday.

Obama also wants to make clear that the country stands with the people of Orlando, stands with the LGBT community in Orlando, as they grieve for their loss, Earnest said.

As the city geared up to receive the president, the process of saying goodbye to the dead began.

The first wake was held on Wednesday. It was for a 40-year-old man named Javier Jorge Reyes.

More wakes and funerals are expected later this week.

Given the circumstances, US authorities have warned that threats against Muslims will not be tolerated, and could be prosecuted. Mateen was Muslim. Instead, officials asked the public to help in the investigation.

Civil rights violations are a priority for the FBI, assistant special agent Ron Hopper told reporters. We will investigate reported incidents against individuals based upon any class, any protected class, to include race, religion, and sexual orientation.

US attorney Lee Bentley said, Making these threats is not only wrong, in most cases, making these threats is illegal. Stop it. Any threats like this detract from what were doing in law enforcement.

Members of the small Muslim community in Mateens hometown of Fort Pierce say they have endured profanity-laced taunts in recent days  and even death threats.

Were scared, Bedar Bakht, a Pakistani in his 50s who worships at the same mosque attended by Mateen, told AFP.

The shooting shocked many and the lack of an apparent motive has left the Orlando community struggling to find closure.

In a 911 call during the attack in the early hours of Sunday, Mateen pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group, and Obama said he was radicalised by reading extremist propaganda online.

But witnesses also say he was a regular at the Pulse gay club, and was using gay dating apps.

He appears to have been an angry, disturbed, unstable young man who became radicalised, said Obama.

Authorities refused to comment on reports that Mateens wife would face charges over her alleged knowledge of his intentions to carry out an attack, calling any talk of charges

premature.

CNN said on Wednesday that federal prosecutors planned to present evidence to a grand jury, including that Mateens 30-year-old wife Noor accompanied him to the gun store and the club on what may have been a mission to plan the attack.

The woman claims she tried to talk her husband out of the attack and did not know of a specific plot, CNN said, citing unnamed law enforcement officials.

Authorities, however, refused to comment on their discussions with her.

Orlando has been through the wringer this past week, starting with the shooting and killing of a popular musician after a concert. The shooter killed Christina Grimmie, a finalist on the popular singing contest The Voice last year, before turning the gun on himself.

Then on Wednesday, a toddler was snatched by an alligator at a Disney resort hotel, his body resurfacing a day later.

The past three or four days have been horrendous for our community, Orange County mayor, Teresa Jacobs, said on Wednesday.
US President Barack Obama was set to visit Orlando on Thursday to meet with survivors of the Orlando massacre at a gay nightclub and relatives of the 49 people killed as authorities weighed whether to charge the assailants wife.

Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old US citizen born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents, also wounded 53 people in a three-hour-long rampage inspired by Islamic State militants that stands as the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has interviewed Mateens second wife, Noor Salman, who knew of his plans, according to a law enforcement source, and prosecutors were preparing to present evidence against her to a federal grand jury.

Salman has not commented publicly since the attack, which began around 2 am early Sunday.

I can assure you that were working with our law enforcement partners to find out everything that we can about what happened at the Pulse nightclub, Lee Bentley, the US attorney for Floridas middle district said on Wednesday. We are using all law enforcement and legal tools to reconstruct not only the events of that night but the events of the past several months.

Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, will travel to Orlando in the latest in a long list of trips he has taken to console victims of mass shootings during his 7-1/2 years in office. In December 2015, a married couple inspired by Islamic State shot dead 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

This will be, I think, an emotional trip, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest told reporters. The president recognizes that he is a symbol for the rest of the country. But it would be impossible for him not to be personally affected by these kinds of conversations.

Mateen claimed allegiance to a variety of militant Islamist groups, including some at odds with each another, in a series of phone calls to 911 emergency services and a local cable television news channel during his rampage.

He appears to have self-radicalized and no evidence has emerged so far that his actions were directed by any outside groups, Obama has said.

Mateen carried out the slaughter with a legally purchased assault weapon and handgun despite twice being investigated by the FBI for alleged connections with terrorist groups.

Renewed debate on gun control

The mass shooting renewed debate in Washington about gun control. Some Republicans including presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, suggested that people on federal watch lists who are banned from flying on commercial jets should not be allowed to purchase firearms.

US senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, ended a filibuster after nearly 15 hours early Thursday morning, saying Republicans agreed to hold votes on measures to expand background checks and prevent people on U.S. terrorism watch lists from buying guns, the Washington Post reported.

Democrats have been unsuccessful in trying to pass national-level gun control measures after past mass shootings, including the 2012 attack on a Connecticut elementary school that left 26 people dead, including 20 young children.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right to own firearms, which has been passionately defended by the powerful National Rifle Association as well as many Americans.

The NRA said on Wednesday it agreed that terrorists should not be allowed to own firearms but made clear it believed people on watch lists should have an official right to appeal their status.

The first memorial for a victim of the massacre, a wake for Javier Jorge Reyes, was held on Wednesday evening at a funeral home near a four-lane highway just south of Orlando.

Motorists honked their support for those attending, including many who held signs or wore T-shirts reading: Orlando Strong, an echo of the Boston Strong slogan after that city was hit by a deadly bombing attack in 2013.
Campaigning for next weeks EU referendum in Britain was suspended on Thursday after a pro-European lawmaker was reportedly shot and stabbed in her constituency in northern England.

Jo Cox, 41, a mother-of-two who represented the opposition Labour party, was left bleeding on the pavement after the incident in Birstall in Yorkshire, the Press Association cited an eyewitness as saying. She later died at a hospital.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Twitter that he was utterly shocked by the news of the attack on Jo Cox. The thoughts of the whole Labour party are with her and her family at this time.

Cox, who was elected for the first time last year, was a supporter of Britain staying in the EU in the referendum on June 23, although it was not clear if the attack had anything to do with the campaign.

Sky News television quoted unconfirmed reports from witnesses that the shooter shouted Britain first -- possibly a reference to British sovereignty, although there is also a far-right party called Britain First.

Both sides of the referendum race announced they would stop campaigning for the rest of Thursday.

We are suspending all campaigning for the day. Our thoughts are with Jo Cox and her family, the official Stronger In Europe campaign said on Twitter.

A spokesperson for the rival Vote Leave group, which is backing a so-called Brexit, said that their battle bus had stopped campaigning for the day.

The battle bus that Boris was on is turning back to London, he told AFP, referring to lead campaigner Boris Johnson, the Conservative former mayor of London.

The Daily Telegraph reported Johnson as describing news of the attack as absolutely horrific.


A suspected member of the Islamic State group was arrested in Sweden this week but is being held by migration authorities because he has asked for asylum, officials said on Thursday.

The 46-year-old Bosnian, described by Swedish media as an Islamic State jihadist, arrived in the country on Monday with his four children.

The Sydsvenskan newspaper, which broke the story, said he had been flagged as a suspect in the Schengen Information System (SIS) -- Europes system for sharing national security data -- at Frances request.

He had flown into Malmo airport in southern Sweden from the Bosnian city of Tuzla carrying a recently-issued passport in his own name.

Noticing he seemed nervous as he passed through customs, border officials questioned him and confirmed his identity.

The man then demanded asylum and, despite being a suspected jihadist, was transferred to an immigration detention centre as Sweden considers the Geneva Convention on refugees to take precedence over police matters.

Any individual is entitled to do this, Migration Office spokesman Fredrik Bengtsson told AFP. This does not prejudge the decision that will be taken after his case is examined.

Police criticised the decision to hand the man over to immigration officials, saying he should have been deported.

As soon as these people play their wildcard and say Asylum!, the gates of paradise open for them, Sydsvenskan quoted border police chief Leif Fransson as saying.

Another Schengen country, France, has already assessed him as dangerous and decided he should be banned (from Schengen member states). Sweden cannot serve as an entry gate, he added.

Sydsvenskan reported that in 2010 the man had been arrested while living in Bosnia after a search of his home found arms and jihadist propaganda.

He had also been arrested in Turkey in February, suspected of having fought for IS, the regional newspaper added. He was deported back to Bosnia where police had seized his passport and banned him from leaving the country.

As a Bosnian national he has an extremely slim chance of winning asylum as his country, a candidate for EU membership, is considered safe by many of the blocs members.

Sweden took in the most asylum seekers per capita of any EU country last year. Most of the 160,000 arrivals were Syrians fleeing the countrys brutal five-year war.
President Barack Obama was on Thursday set to visit Orlando to meet survivors and families of 49 people killed in the worst mass shooting in US history even as Democrats forced the Senate to consider legislation to keep guns out of the hands of terror suspects.

Obama, accompanied by vice-president Joe Biden, will travel to Orlando in the latest in a long list of trips he has made to console victims of mass shootings during his seven-and-half years in office.

This will be, I think, an emotional trip, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. The president recognises that he is a symbol for the rest of the country. But it would be impossible for him not to be personally affected by these kinds of conversations.

Obama recently met grieving families in December in San Bernardino, California, after a married couple inspired by the Islamic State killed 14 people. He has visited victims of mass shootings in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Washington and South Carolina.

Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old US citizen born to Afghan immigrants, pledged allegiance to the IS during a three-hour rampage at the Pulse gay nightclub that killed 49 people on Sunday.

The FBI has interviewed Mateens second wife, Noor Salman, who knew of his plans, and prosecutors were preparing to present evidence against her to a federal grand jury.

The shooting renewed debate about gun control. Some Republicans, including presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, suggested people on federal watch lists who are banned from flying on commercial jets should not be allowed to purchase firearms.

Senate Democrats claimed a small victory after Republicans in the US upper house agreed to hold votes on measures to expand background checks and prevent people on terror watch lists from buying guns.

Democrats stalled Senate proceedings to push for tougher gun control laws and spoke on the floor throughout the night. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy ended the blockade after nearly 15 hours.

Republicans, who have a majority in the Senate, have over the years blocked gun control measures, saying they step on the right to bear arms as guaranteed under the Constitution.

With Republicans and the National Rifle Association gun lobby under pressure to respond to the massacre, Trump said he will meet the NRA to discuss ways to block people on terrorism watch or no-fly lists from buying guns. Omar Mateen had been on such a list.

The initial shock over the deadliest mass shooting in recent history has given way to a vicious political brawl in Washington and on the campaign trail. A day after Obama criticised him for using the term radical Islam, Trump defended his stand and argued the phraseology makes a big difference in the war against terror.

It makes a difference and it makes a big difference because unless youre willing to discuss and talk about the real nature of the problem and the name of the problem, radical Islamic terrorism, youre never going to solve the problem, Trump told a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

Were trying to be nice. We have a President who wants to be so politically correct that he doesnt want to use the term radical Islamic terrorism, doesnt want to use it, said Trump, known for his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Trump also said his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is blindly following Obama. Then crooked Hillary Clinton gets up the other day, and she wouldnt use the termBut I was hitting her hard on it. Very hard. And finally, she gets up and she said, I would use it.

Since the shooting, Trump has expanded his call for temporarily barring foreign Muslims from entering the US and insinuated Obama sympathised with or even supported terrorists.
TORONTO: Nearly 15 years before he became the first Indian-origin premier (the equivalent of a chief minister) of a Canadian province, Ujjal Dosanjh was booked on a flight to travel to India.

Dosanjh had decided to fly Air India as a gesture of defiance against pro-Khalistani elements in Canada that had called for a boycott of Indias national carrier. But prior to departure, pressed by his wife, Dosanjh cancelled the reservation.

Days later, he awoke to the news that the flight, Air India 182 on board the aircraft named Kanishka, had disintegrated mid-air, in what turned out to be the worst aviation terror incident before 9/11.

Dosanjh reveals this for the first time in his just published memoir, Journey After Midnight: India, Canada and the Road Beyond.

Dosanjh had been criticised by Khalistanis as a traitor and an arch enemy. We were sure this was sheer coincidence. Surely, the extremists would not have designed their most evil deed around me, a small fry in the scheme of things. Their target was India, the idea of India as pluralistic, secular and united. Then again, killing two birds with one stone would not have hurt the effort, he writes.

Dosanjh details his upbringing in Punjab, leaving for England and settling in Canada. Not only did he become premier of British Columbia, but after moving on to federal politics, became Canadas health minister in 2004.

An opponent of the Khalistan movement in Canada, Dosanjh survived a murderous attack on February 8, 1985.

In 1983, he had travelled to India and had an acrimonious exchange with separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the Golden Temple and met then PM Indira Gandhi.

Replying to a letter he sent her after Operation Bluestar, Gandhi wrote: Few decisions in my long political career were sadder than the one to ask our troops to clear the terrorist hideout which was misusing the refuge of the Golden Temple. It was a duty I owed to the nation and the Sikh community .

As Khalistani extremism rears its head in Canada again, Dosanjh said in an interview: This kind of thing is going to remain for a long time..

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NEW DELHI : Washington and Islamabad are heading for another geopolitical divorce. The US National Security Councils South Asia man, Peter Lavoy, and the special representative for AfPak, Rick Olson, were in Islamabad until Saturday in an attempt to salvage what is left.

The US Congresss decision last week to not subsidise the sale of F-16 fighters was another nail in the coffin. Pakistan responded by saying it wouldnt accept the last batch of eight. This, in turn, follows the US drone strike that killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the Inter-Services-Intelligence favoured candidate for the leadership of the Taliban, in late May.

The US Congress soured on Pakistan after US soldiers found and assassinated Osama Bin Laden in Abbott a bad in 2011. The White House continued to bat for Islamabad. It had three reasons for doing so.

One, it saw Pakistan as the indispensable partner of its grand design for a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and Kabul. Two, it sought another deal over Pakistans tactical N-warheads which it saw as a loose nukes threat. Finally, it saw a pair of reasonable interlocutors with there-election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and appointment of General Raheel Sharif as Pakistans army chief, both in 2013. On all three counts, US policy is at a dead end.

Rawalpindi has been especially two-faced over Afghanistan. The US has wearied, as Christine Fair of George Washington University has written, of Pakistan sproving itself unable or unwilling to bring the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table . The Pakistani military has had no interest in the sort of negotiations that the US seeks as it feels Kabul wlll be theirs eventually. After the US persuaded Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to kowtow to Rawalpindi, the generals backstabbed him last spring with a new Taliban offensive.

When the US took out Mansour, a strike that took place inside Pakistani territory and which Rawalpindi was not forewarned about, it was a sign White Houses expectations on the Pakistan military delivering the Taliban are so low they didn t care about the fallout. The US had been trying to entice the Pakistani military to dismantle its tactical nuclear arsenal as its small, dispersed warheads were seen as prime targets for terrorist capture. It tried to entice Pakistan with anuclear deal on the lines of one given to India in 2009. Pakistan military rejected six versions of the deal, insisting on a carbon copy of Indias. While Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had the right ideas but no authority to implement them, General Sharif is rigid adherent to Rawalpindis orthodoxy regarding the Taliban and India.
LOS ANGELESLayla Sin is the star in the newest release from Penthouse, Downtown and Dirty.

In addition to performing as a contract star, Sin also acts as a brand ambassador for Penthouse.

The movie features a boy/girl scene with Jay Smooth that should delight Layla fans.

This movie has so many things I love: Penthouse, Skye directing, Jay and his cockthats the kind of day any girl will look forward to! Layla said. The whole movie turned out really well. There will be no need to fast-forward in this one!

The movie was directed by Skye Blue and also features Jessa Rhodes, Dana DeArmond, Bianca Breeze, AJ Applegate and Aria Alexander.

Earlier this month, Sin and Penthouse agreed to a one-year extension of her exclusive contact. Recently, she traveled to Hungary to shoot for Penthouse, and later this month she will head to Israel for a series of promotions with Penthouse.

Upcoming DVDs starring Layla including Seduction (Penthouse), which features a scene she did with Jenna Sativa, and Hot & Horny Sorority Girls, which has a Layla/Jessa Rhodes scene.

To contact her about a directing a scene, email [email protected]

Follow her on Twitter (@realLaylaSin) and Instagram (laylasin).
WASHINGTON: Nominating contests for the 2016 US presidential election ended on Tuesday with Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic party primaries in Washington DC, the last fight.

Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee with 2,800 delegates, more than the 2,383 required, but her sole rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders, has not yet exited the race.

Clinton and Sanders met briefly after the Tuesday primaries in Washington. Sanders campaign described the meeting constructive and the Clinton campaign said it was positive.

But the two were never alone in the room. They were joined by Sanderss wife Jane Sanders and his campaign manager Jeff Weaver and Clintons campaign chairman John D Podesta and her campaign manager Robby Mook. According to The New York Times, Clinton used the meeting to figure out what will it take to acquire Sanderss endorsement. Sanders, on the other hand, tried to gauge Clintons commitment to his pet progressive goals such as higher minimum wages, affordable college education and open Democratic primaries.

Having won nearly 1,900 delegates himself, Sanders feels emboldened to prolong the race to win crucial concessions and commitment from Clinton.

The battle for the White House, otherwise, is being waged aggressively by Clinton and Trump. President Barack Obama, said to be itching to hit the campaign trail for her.
LONDON: Rival camps took to the Thames on Wednesday to enlist support as the Remain in EU camp made a forceful plea to learn from the success of federalism in India and to vote to stay in the 28-nation bloc during the June 23 referendum.

Four lawmakers  two MPs and two members of the House of Lords  debated the question Would Brexit benefit India . They included Bob Blackman and Archibald Hamilton for Vote Leave, and Stephen Pound and Dolar Popat for Remain. Making a forceful plea for Britain to remain in the EU, Labour MP Pound said :Don t be terrified of EU sf ed era li sm; look at Indias successful federalism. Britain s bilateral ism with India will suffer if we vote to leave EU . On claims that Britain was better off trading with the Commonwealth than the EU, Pound said it is not an either, or.

Hamilton, who was defence minister in Margaret Thatcher government, said Britain was unable to have a free trade deal with India due to EU membership. Noting India is the third largest investor in Britain, Pop at highlighted the Make in Indiaprogramme and said Indian firms came to Britain to access the 500 million-strong EU market. Blackman said it was unfair Indian professionals have to go through hoops to get a visa, while unskilled EU nationals could walk in.

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ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is looking to hire lobbying firms in Washington after a gap of nearly eight years, seeking to refurbish its image in the US at a time of deteriorating relations between the allies, two government officials said on Tuesday.

Ties have strained particularly after a US strike that killed top Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansour last month in a drone attack in Pakistan.
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama lit into presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and other conservatives over their escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric, telling them in his angriest remarks on the issue yet thats not the America we want.

We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States to bar all Muslims from emigrating to America, O ba ma said after a meeting of his national security council on Tuesday. He added: We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests that entire religious communities are complicit in violence.

Trump, who has suggested a temporary ban on immigration from areas of the world with a proven history of terrorism against the US and its allies after the Orlando shootings, hit back at the President, saying Obama was more angry with him than the shooter and implying, as he has before, the President was not as committed to fighting terrorism.

On Monday, Trump had said the President doesnt have a lot of anger at what happened to these wonderful people (the victims of Orlando shooting).

Trump and others in his party have also questioned Obamas counter-terrorism efforts, saying he wont even use the phrase radical Islam to describe the threat. Obama hit back, barely concealing his annoyance :Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.

And he went beyond, We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests that entire religious communities are complicit in violence.

Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer--they were all US citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith? Weve heard these suggestions during the course of this campaign.

Malik Mujahid, a Chicago area imam, said Trump is using a general sense of fear and insecurity stemming from the San Bernardino attacks last December and the Orlando shootings to stoke Islamophobia in the hope of rallying his supporters.

But Trump, Mujahid argued, may have overplayed his hand. The imam said these attacks on the community have strengthened its resolve to fight back: it has encouraged Muslim voters to become more active and the response to Islamophobia is getting organised. Trump, who first called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US in the aftermath of the San Bernardino attacks, has ratcheted up the rhetoric since the Orlando shootings. After extending his call of suspending entry to Muslims for areas with proven history, he held the community responsible for these incidents. Muslim communities must cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad, he said.
DOHA: Qatar is to deport a Dutch woman who was convicted of adultery and given a one-year suspended sentence after she reported being raped while on holiday in Doha. The 22-year-old, known only as Laura and who was not in court, was also fined 3,000 Qatari riyals ($800) and will be deported once she pays the fine, court officials said.

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WASHINGTON: Two groups of Russian hackers, working for competing government intelligence agencies, penetrated computer systems of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to emails, chats and a trove of opposition research against Donald Trump, according to the party and a cybersecurity firm.

One group placed espionage software on the committees computer servers last summer, giving it unimpeded access to communications for about a year.

The committee called in Crowd Strike, a cybersecurity firm, early last month after the Democratic Party began to suspect an intrusion.
WASHINGTON: The FBI is said to be considering filing charges against Orlando shooter Omar Mateens wife Noor Zahi Salman, who reportedly suspected he was planning an attack at the Pulse gay nightclub.

Salman has told FBI investigators she tried to stop Mateen but he left, saying he was only meeting friends, according to NBC News. few hours later, Mateen opened fire at the Orlando nightclub.

But Salman, 30, who married Mateen in 2011, failed to warn authorities. She is now cooperating with investigators who fear she may stop if criminally charged or placed under arrest.

Sal man has told investigators, according to multiple reports, she had accompanied Ma teen on one of his trips to scope out Pulse, and he bought ammunition and a holster in front of her. Salman, raised in a Palestinian-descent family in California, and Mateen met on a dating site, as he did his first wife Sitora Yusufiy. They married in September 2011 after Mateens divorce. Salman has not spoken publicly about their relationship.
William Polk Rayner was a dandy. A tall man with jet-black eyes and hair, he cut a dashing figure in old El Paso in his black Prince Albert coat and gray pin-striped pants pulled over fancy Mexican boots. Wearing a broad-brimmed hat or a high silk topper, he was a familiar sight on the streets and in the gambling halls. The best dressed badman in Texas was considered one of the handsomest men in El Paso. He sat a horse like a true equestrian and spent much of his time horseback riding with some of the finest ladies in El Paso society. He was affable, educated, entertaining, apparently affluent and generally respected.

He was, after all, a man with the credentials of a gentleman. His father, Kenneth Rayner, was an eminent North Carolina planter with a distinguished record as both public servant and agriculturist. A man of undoubted ability, Kenneth Rayner entered politics in the 1820s as a Jacksonian Democrat. He served in the North Carolina legislature and spent six years in the U.S. Congress. His political interests moved him into the Whig Party, where he came very close to being nominated for vice president in 1848. But Rayners career in Congress was stormy. Although he rarely spoke on the floor of the House, when he did he commanded attention with his eloquence and fire. He had a volatile temper, was frequently embroiled in quarrels, and once got into a fistfight with a colleague from North Carolina in the House chamber.

At first a Unionist, he switched his loyalties in 1860 and supported secession. He was not happy with Jefferson Davis, however, and secretly became involved in a Southern peace movement in 1863. After the war ended, he supported Andrew Johnson and even wrote an anonymous biography of him in 1866. In 1869, he moved his family to Tennessee and four years later to Mississippi, where he owned plantations. An attorney by training, though he had never practiced law, he was nominated to the Mississippi Supreme Court the same year he arrived in the state, and the next year, despite Rayners opposition to Reconstruction, President U.S. Grant named him a judge of the CSS Alabama Claims Commission. In 1877, he became solicitor of the treasury and held that post until he died.

Kenneth Rayner enjoyed the reputation of a warm-hearted, capable and honorable man, but he remained volatile and impulsive to the point of instability in the minds of many. In these respects, at least, Will Rayner was a lot like his father. Family connections opened doors for the dapper newcomer to Texas and might well have ensured his success. His fathers political connections may have enabled Will Rayner to secure the position of customs collector at Clinton, Texas, where he remained for a time. But once on his own, the younger Rayner developed a taste for the rougher side of frontier life. He reportedly worked as a Texas Ranger and a peace officer elsewhere in Texas before he showed up in El Paso about 1882. Rumor had it he had killed a man in Fort Worth.

Whatever the truth about his peregrinations, Rayner was reputed to be an expert with both rifle and revolver. In 1882, he joined the El Paso police force under James B. Gillette and cultivated the friendship of Assistant Marshal Edward Scotten. Rayners brother Hamilton joined him for a while at El Paso. In March 1884, Judge Rayner died, and apparently the boys mother joined them in Texas. Later that spring, Ham Rayner took the marshals job in Hunnewell, Kan. Ed Scotten followed him to Hunnewell as assistant marshal, and when Scotten was killed and Ham Rayner wounded in a gunfight with cowboys there in August 1884, Will Rayner and Frank Scotten hurried to Hunnewell to take up the fight. Things were quiet by the time they arrived, and the Rayners soon returned to El Paso.

No longer a peace officer, Rayner tried his hand at gambling. He was a familiar sight on the El Paso sporting scene, eventually taking a job as a dealer at the Gem Saloon, an upscale gambling emporium and theater operated by George Look and J.J. Taylor. Off duty, he courted El Pasos ladies and charmed a certain element that was impressed by his bravado and cocky good humor.

But Rayner had a dark side. He had an officious manner and frequently butted into matters that were none of his business. More troubling, he imagined himself a Southern gentleman and a dangerous man with a gun. When drinking, his confidence turned to braggadocio. Drunk, he inevitably looked for a fight. On at least two occasions, he was arrested for assault while drinking. The problem was serious enough that he tried to deal with it, and for a time he stayed sober. But many local citizens still gave him a wide berth, and on the night of April 14, 1885, their worst fears came true.

El Paso was still a wide-open town despite its size, and it enjoyed a reputation for fast living. Its proximity to the Mexican border and Paso Del Norte (now Juarez) made it a haven for hard cases and neer-do-wells. Early in 1885, a local peace officer was killed in one of the many brothels, and the accused were transferred to Presidio County for trial on a change of venue. The trial required the presence of both El Pasos marshal, Sam Boring, and the county sheriff, J.H. White, as well as most of El Paso Countys law enforcement officers. On the evening of April 14, the only lawman in El Paso was a jailer named Charles M. Buck Linn. Linn was a former Texas Ranger and a friend of Will Rayners. He was generally well behaved but, like Rayner, had a mean disposition when drinking. That night he was drunk.

Linn was nursing a grudge against a man named Sam Gillespie who had voiced the opinion around town that Linn should be indicted by the grand jury for beating a prisoner in his charge. Drunk and informed of Gillespies remark, Linn sent word to Gillespie that he intended to kill him. Gillespie was game. He armed himself, and when Linn appeared he wasted no time pulling his pistol in full view of the intoxicated jailer. Linn quietly withdrew, sobered enough by the sight to have second thoughts, and disappeared into the Gem Saloon, where he met Rayner. The two men were soon touring the towns saloons, drinking heavily and making a nuisance of themselves wherever they went.

Near midnight, Rayner and Linn returned to the Gem. At some point in the evening, Rayner had learned that a man named Harry Williams, who fancied himself a bad man, had just arrived in town. When Rayner and Linn entered the Gem, Rayner waved his pistol and shouted: I hear a fighting man named Harry Williams came to town today. Where is he? I will make the damn bluffer wade the Rio Grande! George Look noticed the boisterous behavior of the pair and mentioned it to his partner, J.J. Taylor, with the remark that they were likely to have trouble with Rayner.

Look sought out Tom Ashton, a friend of Williams and a well-known confidence man, and warned him to keep Williams out of the way until Rayner sobered up. At first, Ashton nonchalantly remarked: Let them go at it. I dont care. But he kept Williams in his room that night. Look and Taylor watched Rayner and Linn for a few minutes, then walked into the theater, which was filled with black soldiers from the 10th Cavalry who were passing through El Paso en route to Arizona. Look and Taylor sat down near the back of the theater, and had been there only a few minutes when Rayner strolled in, drew his revolver, waved it over his head, and shouted, Where is that SOB who came to town tonight?

Rayners display caused quite a commotion among the soldiers, but when he turned around he saw Look and Taylor. Quickly, he holstered his pistol, took off his hat, bowed low, and said, Excuse me, gentlemen, excuse me.

fter leaving the theater, Rayner returned to the bar and swaggered along a row of spectators chairs against the wall, slapping a pair of gloves against his leg and goading the customers, one by one, even striking several on the face with the gloves. Among the patrons sitting there was Wyatt Earp, by then well known in sporting circles and among the six-gun set. Earp was in town to visit his old friend from Tombstone, Lou Rickabaugh, who now ran a gambling hall in El Paso.

According to Earps possibly embellished account, he watched Rayner closely as he approached. At one point Rayner drew his gloves through his hand, slapped his palm with them, and said, I suppose you know that when a Southern gentleman goes hunting trouble, he likes to take his gloves along? He sometimes find them useful.

The kind of trouble youre heading into right now, Rayner, cant be handled with gloves, said Earp.

Rayner paused, then invited Earp to have a drink with hits. The two proceeded to the bar, where Rayner suggested they place their weapons on the bar. He did so, but Earp remarked that he didnt carry a gun, and opened his coat to prove the point. In that case, Rayner remarked, I ought to buy wine. After finishing off his wine, Rayner picked up his pistol, left Earp at the bar, and proceeded into the gaming room.

If any of this happened  and it all may have been the fantasy of Wyatt Earp since there is no corroborating evidence other than the fact that Earp was there that night  Rayner soon shifted his attention to other prey. Wyatt, joined by his friend Dan Tipton, the Nevada gunman who had been with Wyatt in Tombstone and was now working with the U.S. Customs Service in El Paso, followed Rayner into the gaming room in time to witness the next act of the drama.

Robert Bates Cowboy Bob Rennick was a stranger in El Paso, but he was no stranger to trouble. A quiet man without any brag in him, he was nevertheless a truly dangerous man, with no need to prove himself to any one. He had a quick temper and was well acquainted with guns. A muscular man of medium height and florid complexion, he brought a reputation as a hard case to town with him. George Look described him as a very hard character, really one of the hardest desperadoes in this country at the time, but little known here. That evening, however, he looked the part of a cowboy in his broadbrimmed white hat, as he sat at the faro layout of a dealer named Robert Cahill. Unarmed and unassuming, he was minding his own business when Rayner approached the table.

Apparently, the conspicuous display of Rennicks white hat drew Rayner to him. The room was crowded when Rayner stepped up behind Rennick and began to thump the brim of the strangers hat with his fingers. Are you a fighter? Rayner mocked.

Rennick shifted in his seat and turned toward Rayner. No, he said evenly. I am no fighter, and I want no trouble.

You look like a fighter. You have a white hat on, Rayner persisted. What are you so pale about? You look like a fighter.

At that point, A.P. Criswell, who ran the gambling concession at the Gem, stepped up to Rayner and asked him to stop harassing Rennick.

Am I wrong? Rayner queried.

Criswell responded in the affirmative and again urged him to cease plaguing the stranger. At that point, Rayner held out his hand to Rennick, shook hands with him, and said, 1 apologize.

For an instant, it seemed the confrontation was over. Some of Rayners friends  but not his drunk friend Linn, the jailer  tried to lead him away, but he would not leave. He kept saying over and over again that Rennick was a fighter and that he would have to kill him. Finally, he pulled away and confronted Rennick again. Cahill, the dealer, left his layout long enough to pull Linn to the door of the theater, explaining later that he wished to get Linn away from Rayner in order that I might get Rayner home.

As Rayner kept up the barrage of insults, Rennick continued to say that he was not a fighter. The tension was strong, and Cahill, having succeeded in separating Linn from Rayner, moved quickly to Rayners side and pulled him toward the bar, which was separated from the gaming room by large screens with archways and swinging doors. One of the doors was open, the other closed. Rayner tried to get Cahill to turn him loose, but the young dealer manhandled him out of the room with the assistance of others, pushing him through the open door as far as the first pool table in the bar.

While Rayner was being led away, Rennick remarked, I have been imposed upon long enough, and I wont stand for it. He slid off the stool he had been sitting on and shifted into the lookout chair next to the table so that he could watch the door. He spotted a pistol in the open drawer of the faro table, stepped down from the chair and took it out of the drawer and put it into his pocket. He then asked Criswell if the back door was open. Criswell advised him to go out over the theater stage.

Rayner, still in the grasp of Cahill, was tall enough to see over the screens, and he saw this activity. Struggling to get free, he said, The SOB has got a pistol, and I am liable to have trouble with him. Rennick headed for the closed door, while in the other room Cahill scuffled with Rayner. Turning on Cahill, Rayner screamed: Turn me loose you SOB. Do you want to see me murdered? At that point, he pulled free, jerked his revolver, and pushed open the closed door just as Rennick approached it from the other side.

Rayner and Rennick faced each other at a distance of six feet. Rayner fired immediately. Rennick stepped back, dropped to his knees and, holding the revolver with both hands, returned the fire. Rayners shots went wide. Rennicks first bullet struck Rayner in the left shoulder, and as he turned, a second slug tore through his body from hip to hip. Rayner stumbled back into the other room, emptying his gun into a pool table.

When the melee broke out, Linn started toward the back room from the bar and fired several shots in the direction of Cahill. He had seen Cahill scuffle with Rayner, but he could not see Rennick. Therefore, he apparently assumed that Cahill had shot Rayner. Cahill, who was unarmed, ran past Linn and out the front door of the saloon into the street, pursued by Linn, who fired at Cahill again as he ducked into the Ranch Saloon down the street. Linn then followed and disappeared into the Ranch himself.

Rayner, in the meantime, stood dazed beside the pool table. He then walked out through the front of the saloon to the street, where he got onto a streetcar and laid down on a seat. Rennick, with the revolver still hanging by his side, followed him to the door, but Look caught up to him, took him by the shoulder, and told him to go on out back and get out of the way.

Look entered the streetcar and found the badly wounded Rayner lying on the seat with his arms folded. Tell my mother I died and died game, he said quietly. Look called for help, and Rayner was soon carried away, in pain but still alive. Dr. A.L. Justice examined him and knew the wounds were fatal.

Rennick wasted no time. He left by the back way and crossed the river into Paso Del Norte, but the drama at the Gem Saloon was not over yet. Linn was still searching the saloons for Cahill and threatening to kill him on sight. Cahill managed to elude Linn and returned to the Gem a few minutes after Rayner was removed. He was out of breath and still very much agitated. He rushed through the bar and into the back room, where he asked Jim Gregory, one of the bartenders, to take over for him at the faro table because Linn was looking for him. He then asked Criswell to keep Linn out of the gambling room.

Cahill was understandably shaken by the string of events and asked for a pistol. Dan Tipton gave him a .45. Whatll 1 do? Cahill asked. I never was in a gunfight in my life. According to one account, Wyatt Earp advised him to leave and assured him that Linn could be quieted. Cahill said he would not run, whereupon Earp supposedly gave him the following advice: All right. If youre going to make your fight take your time. Hell come shooting. Have your gun cocked, but dont pull until youre sure what youre shooting at. Aim for his belly, low. The gunll throw up a bit, but if you hold it tight and wait until hes close enough, you cant miss. Keep cool and take your time.

Look remembered the incident differently. He said Cahill retrieved his pistol from the money drawer of his faro table (which raises the possibility that Rennick had returned the revolver to the drawer after shooting Rayner and that the same pistol was used in two gunfights) and started back toward the front door. Look overtook him and persuaded him to sit down in a chair near the billiard tables. He gave him the same advice Earp claimed to have given him: to get out of there and avoid trouble. But while the two men were talking, Linn staggered through the front door.

Whether Wyatt Earp tutored him or not, Cahill was ready. He moved toward Linn and called out for him to throw up his hands. Linn kept coming toward the back of the room. Cahill called out twice more for him to throw up his hands, without effect. When Linn did not respond, Cahill fired four shots in quick succession, followed by a fifth. Linn went down with the first shot. He was hit twice, once through the heart and once through the bowels and spinal column. He was dead almost instantly.

The following day, a hearing was held in the Cahill-Linn fight. The testimony of Jim Gregory, Frank Gaffenberg, Wyatt Earp, Dan Tipton, Francis Jessie Boyd and A.P. Criswell (all men who had witnessed desperate encounters before) demonstrated clearly that Cahill had defended himself from a drunk and irrational man. The young dealer was released upon payment of $10 bond and never indicted.

The Rayner-Rennick shooting still had to be sorted out, however. On April 18, the El Paso Times reported that Rayner still lingers on his death bed. At a late hour last night his temperature was 104 degrees and his pulse 150. The pain in his wounds was slight, as he had been kept under influence of opiates. Fatal inflammation seems to have begun and any hopes of recovery has been despaired of. He yet speaks intelligently and keeps a clear head.

Rayners condition prompted Frank E. Hunter, the county attorney, to visit him with pen and paper to take a statement from him. Rayner was uncooperative. What do you want this for, Frank? he asked. When the attorney replied that it was his duty to take a statement in case something happened to him, Rayner replied, Why? I aint going to die. When Hunter persisted, Rayner told him flatly: Well, I aint going to give it to you. If I die, that settles it; but if I dont die, I will tend to that little business myself.

Rayner lingered on in great pain for some weeks. A few days after the shooting, William J. Fewel met Dr. Justice on the street and asked how Rayner was doing. When Justice said that he would surely die, Fewel proclaimed: I am damned glad of it. He ought to have been killed years ago. Fewel apparently had second thoughts because when he had walked on for almost half a block, he turned and shouted back to the doctor, Oh Doc, if Bill gets well, what I said dont go.

Friends notified Hamilton Rayner of his brothers condition, and he and their mother arrived on the evening of April 19 by train. Rayner lasted until 7 a.m. on June 7, 1885. He died without ever making a public statement about the shooting. He was buried two days later.

The editor of the El Paso Times searched for meaning in his passing: The high social standing of the family, the reputation and historical associations thrown around him, the advantages of education, and the physical perfections which Nature endowed with him, were rare opportunities which should have pressed him forward to an honorable and worthy aim. That they did not, the Times deemed inexplicable, and blamed the tragedy on the actions of a mind diseased and wandering from his plane of reason.

To his credit, Rennick had remained in Paso Del Norte throughout the long weeks of Rayners fight for life. A day or so after the shooting, Rennick had sent for George Look, who met him on the acequia bridge in front of an old brewery opposite the Mexican Central Depot. Look recalled that Rennick came out of the cane brakes, on the acequia banks at that place. I told him to come back over the river, which he did, and he was placed under $10 bond.

On April 19, the El Paso Times reported: The Texas Cowboy, as he has been styled, who shot Rayner, is quietly sojourning in Paso Del Norte, Mexico, waiting the development of things on this side. Mr. Rennick instead of being the proverbial cowboy, is a quiet unassuming man, well-to-do and well connected in Texas, and while he explores the necessity for the dreadful tragedy which resulted in the shooting of Rayner, he is confidently waiting the earliest time when he can have the matter judicially investigated in the courts of El Paso county.

On June 26, 1885, in justices court, a hearing was held before Justice of the Peace Lewellyn H. Davis. A.P. Criswell took the stand first and recounted the events from the moment that Rayner accosted Rennick until the shooting. Criswells brother, M .W. Criswell, another Gem Saloon gambler, added a few details, and Cahill recounted his part in the Rayner-Rennick affair, without mentioning his own fatal encounter with Linn. Although other witnesses had been subpoenaed, no others were called. Rennick declined to make a statement. Davis then ordered that Rennick be bound over to the district court for trial in September 1885.

Rennick was soon a free man, and he never stood trial. On June 28, the Times reported that Rennick was exonerated because the dreadful necessity of killing his opponent was forced upon him. He left El Paso after that, and his trail faded into oblivion except for a few bits and pieces. A few nights after the gunfight at the Gem, three masked men pushed their way into the back room of the saloon, apparently intent on robbing the faro bank.

Look recalled: They walked up to the faro table and threw their guns down on it. One of the players jumped up, and the man with the shotgun jumped back, and the gun went off, accidentally, I presume, cutting the ear off of this fellow Harry Williams, the powder burning his face very badly, the load of buckshot hitting the layout and glancing into the lookouts knee, Bob Cahill, leaving quite a number of buckshots in his leg. Both parties ran each way, the robbers running back out, and the dealers and players running out the front way, leaving the room empty.

A few nights after that, Look said, three men came out of the cane brakes near the bridge at the spot where he had met Rennick and entered Bossiliers Brewery in an attempted robbery. Again, however, plans went awry. Bossilier grappled with the man with the shotgun, who he recognized as Rennick, and was about to take the gun away when another of the robbers shot the brewery owner in the head. Look recalled that he had later met Rennick in Monterey, Mexico, and that Rennick had admitted that he was the man with the shotgun in both bungled robbery attempts. Rennick apparently remained in Mexico. In 1909, an El Paso newspaper article on the Rayner-Rennick fight said that Rennick was still living in Mexico City, a hopeless morphine addict.

Bob Cahill also left El Paso. During the gold rush, he went to Alaska, got rich in Nome, and eventually moved to New York City. Ham Rayner, who was described by one old-timer as one of the most vain men I ever knew, eventually moved back to El Paso, where he became a perennial candidate for public office and something of a local celebrity.

In the long run, the Gem Saloon shootout made little difference in the community. The El Paso Lone Star deplored what had happened in an editorial the day after the fight and called for strict enforcement of the no-gun ordinance of the town as a means of ridding El Paso of men who glory in being called bad. The Herald was more philosophical: The victims have no one to blame but themselves. Their train of life collided with loaded revolvers and they have gone down forever in the smashup.

Rayner and Linn were not the first to die in a burst of gunfire in El Paso, and they would not be the last. Bass Outlaw, John Wesley Hardin, John Selman, Manny Clements and more would spill their blood in El Paso saloons and on her streets before the violence subsided more than 20 years later. Such sanguinary affairs as those in the Gem Saloon that April night in 1885 became the metaphor that defined the West for generations, even for many who saw the passing of the frontier firsthand.

Indeed, the myth of the Wild West became a contributing factor to the violence itself, as men like Will Rayner saw their badman image as something to be promoted, often at their own expense. A bizarre sense of honor that took mens lives grew out of that glorification of violence, and the liquor induced delusions of small men were somehow transformed into legends of honor. The reality was almost always more sordid, and usually less honorable.

This article was written by Gary Roberts and orginally published in the June 1992 issue of Wild West magazine.

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Shortly after the Civil War began in April 1861, a feisty 60-year-old met with President Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, and asked for a commission in the Confederate army. He was a graduate of West Point, he said, and wanted to serve his country. Davis took the man at his word, but refused to give him the requested commission because of his age. Instead he offered him a job as a drillmaster for new recruits. Such a post would never do for John Hill Hewitt. He felt he was worthy of much more, so he turned down Daviss offer and returned to what he did best: writing songs and managing theaters. In the process he earned for himself lasting distinction as the Bard of the Confederacy, and perhaps served his country better than he ever would have as a soldier.

Hewitt was not merely an aging man with patriotic pride when he met with Davis. He was one of the countrys best-known songwriters, the first native-born American to receive international fame for his songs and, before the rise of Stephen Foster, the countrys most popular tunesmith. He was also a playwright, dramatist, poet, and essayist, as well as a concert musician adept at the piano, organ, and flute. Hewitt embodied the restless can-do spirit of a young America. He had grown up with the fledgling republic, and had personally witnessed some of its most important technological firsts. As a boy in August 1807, he was on hand the first time a steamboat sailed on the Hudson River. In the early 1830s he rode the first train to be pulled out of Baltimore by a locomotive, and in 1844 he was present when William Morse sent the first telegraph message from Baltimore to Washington.

Though his life would become identified with the South, Hewitt was a native Northerner. Born in New York City in 1801, he was the eldest son of John Hewitt, a prominent New York musician who had led the orchestra at the court of King George III of England before coming to America. The elder Hewitt did not want his son to follow in his musical footsteps, and apprenticed him with various tradesmen. But young Hewitt would not be prenticed and kept running away. Finally, when he was 17, he decided he wanted a military career, and with help from some of his fathers friends, he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Hewitt could not buckle down to his studies at West Point, and when he reached the end of the program, he didnt have the grades to graduate. When the superintendent advised him to repeat his final year, Hewitt accused him of treachery and challenged him to a duel. Others wisely intervened and the duel never occurred. Hewitt resigned from the academy, but in his own mind he was a West Point graduate.

The same year that Hewitt left West Point, his parents separated, and his father invited him to become the leading songwriter and musician for a theatrical company he had formed. Hewitt agreed to meet the troupe in Augusta, Georgia, but the enterprise never got off the ground. Soon after the company arrived in Augusta, the theater where it was to play caught fire and all their instruments and props were lost. Crestfallen, the troupe broke up. Hewitts father returned to New York, but Hewitt had fallen in love with the South. I loved the genuine hospitality of the Southerners, he later wrote in his autobiography. He decided to stay in Augusta, where he opened a music store, selling instruments and giving lessons on the piano and flute.

Although Hewitt was often invited to the homes of his affluent pupils, he felt snubbed by the students fathers because they did not invite him to participate in their political discussions after the meal. Upon being invited to dinner, he wrote, I was expected to provide music for ladies while they gossiped, instead of joining the men in stimulating conversation. Hewitt attributed this ostracism to the low opinion Southerners typically held of mechanics and laborers, which included musicians.

Hewitt desperately wanted to be accepted in these social circles and so, after spending only a year in Augusta, in 1824 he moved to Columbia, South Carolina, to study law. Scandal involving a music student cut short his stay. Hewitt claimed he had been out riding with one of his female pupils when a storm suddenly came up. The two had found shelter in a deserted cottage, and though they wanted to leave as soon as the storm subsided, a prowling bear made that impossible. It wasnt until the next day that a search party found them in the cottage. Hewitts explanation was unconvincing, and he was soon on his way out of town. He took a job in Greenville, South Carolina, as a music teacher at the Baptist Female Academy and moonlighted giving private music lessons and editing a literary journal.

In 1825, while Hewitt was still in Greenville, he wrote what would become Americas first international song hit, The Minstrels Returnd from the War. Later that year, he traveled to Boston, where his brother James had kept up the family music-publishing business. James wasnt very impressed with the song, but published it anyway, albeit without copyrighting it. It was a costly mistake. The Minstrels Returnd became a worldwide hit and earned Hewitt the title father of the American ballad. His brother later confessed that by not copyrighting the song, they had lost at least $10,000 in royalties, which in todays money, would have been at least $1 million. (Interestingly, in the 1940s, the Minstrels Returnd was the mystery tune on a radio quiz show called Stop the Music. The contestant who correctly identified it won $30,000.)

The Minstrels Returnd was what is now called a parlor song  a tune that required only a limited vocal range, could be played on the parlor piano by anyone with a little training, and dealt with a theme that was becoming universal in the first half of the 19th century  the separation of families due to emigration, military service, or death. Hewitt would continue to write successful songs on this model during the 1830s and 1840s.

Hewitt returned to Boston in 1827 after his fathers death, and took up residence. There, he met and married his first wife, Estelle Mangin, with whom he eventually had seven children. In 1828, the newspaper he was working for went out of business, and the jobless songwriter headed south with his wife. He soon found a job in Baltimore as a newspaper and magazine editor, and began writing plays, poems, and songs on the side. But once again he ran into trouble  this time with another writer who lived in Baltimore at the time, one Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1833 both Hewitt and Poe entered a literary contest held by The Visitor, one of the newspapers Hewitt was editing. Hewitt entered a poem under a nom de plume. Poe entered a prose piece called Manuscript Found in a Bottle and a poem titled The Coliseum. The judges awarded Poe the $100 first prize for his short story, and Hewitt the $50 first prize for poetry, but only because they felt the two first prizes should not go to the same contestant. Because Hewitt had previously criticized Poes abilities, Poe believed he had rigged the poetry award. When the two met by chance on the street, tempers flared and they began throwing punches.

Intensely competitive by nature, Hewitt seemed to resent success in others. Years later he wrote that Poes reputation was undeserved. He accused Poe of plagiarizing The Raven from an old English poem. And still smarting over being bested in the short story contest, he accused Poe of adapting Manuscript Found in a Bottle from Samuel Taylor Coleridges Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Hewitt was equally uncharitable toward other successful performers. Of matinee idol Henry Russell, who in the 1840s toured America and held audiences spellbound with his songs, Hewitt said his act was little more than a bombast, and dismissed Russell as nothing more than an expert at wheedling applause from an audience. He was particularly vicious toward Harry Macarthy  whose song The Bonnie Blue Flag rivaled Dixie as the Confederacys unofficial national anthem  calling him a plagiarist and a coward.

Personal shortcomings were not enough to keep Hewitt from becoming the Confederacys most prolific songwriter and a successful theater manager. In November 1861, seven months after Davis rebuffed his request for a military commission, Hewitt became manager of the Richmond Theater, a position he held until 1863. During that time he wrote some of his best-known songs, including Rock Me to Sleep Mother, which was issued four separate times, and the music for All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight, which was reissued on five separate occasions and which one music historian regarded as arguably the best song to come out of the war. The lyrics of All Quiet, written by Northerner Lamar Fontaine (the pseudonym of Ethel Lynn Elliot Beers), tell the story of a pickets last moments as he walks patrol, a soldier whose death will not count in news of the battle because he is only one of the men and not an officer. The soldiers lonely death resonated in the hearts of millions of Northerners and Southerners. Although the words were set to music by several composers, it was Hewitts setting, said one music historian, that unobtrusively allow[ed] the disconsolate text to speak directly to the listener, and immortalized it as the most poignant song of the war.

While he was manager of the Richmond Theater, Hewitt met the Queen Sisters  a singing and acting group  and their manager-father, Alfred Waldron. The girls, along with their three brothers, were the darlings of the South, and they captivated Hewitt. After leaving the Richmond Theater, he moved back to Augusta to manage the concert hall and work with the Waldron family. There, he wrote many musical plays and dramas for the Waldrons  comedies such as The Exempt! Or Beware of the Conscript Officer, and two of his best-known musical plays: a patriotic operetta called The Vivandiere, which debuted another of his best songs, The Valiant Conscript, and a satire, King Linkum the First, which characterized Abraham Lincoln as a henpecked husband. He dedicated his well-received song You Are Going To The Wars, Willie Boy! to one of the sisters, Fannie Waldron. In 1864, he wrote another of his best-known songs, Somebodys Darling, which became so popular its publisher, Herman Schreiner, couldnt keep up with orders. Modern audiences can still hear its haunting melody in the 1939 MGM film Gone With the Wind.

Hewitts personal life underwent profound changes over these years. His wife Estelle died in 1860, and three years later he married Mary Alethea Smith, who would give him four more children.

In April 1865, Hewitt began a music publishing business in Augusta, but the venture collapsed after the war. Unable to find work, he returned to Virginia where he found work at female institutes, finishing schools for girls. He continued to change jobs regularly until 1874, when he moved back to Baltimore and opened his own music school, the Baltimore Academy of Music. As in the past, he earned additional money by writing for newspapers and local journals, and writing plays and musicals such as The Revellers, a work reflecting the growing temperance movement in the late 19th century. He also began work on his autobiography, Shadows on the Wall, or Glimpses of the Past, eventually publishing it in 1877.

Though he was aging, Hewitt remained indefatigable, writing songs, musical plays, and revising older works almost until his last days. In his late 80s he was still walking five miles a day. Time finally caught up to him in 1888: he fell down the stairs and broke his hip. He never recovered fully and remained housebound until he died a year and a half later on October 7, 1890. In one of lifes little ironies, it was the same date on which his longtime rival Poe had died in 1849.

Hewitts career, said historian Richard Harwell, is the story of music in the Confederacy. The songwriters early works spoke to Americas coming of age and the social changes that impacted on families; his wartime songs chronicled the tragedy that tore families and the country apart; and his postwar tunes reflected the countrys Victorian morality. He was, in the opinion of many musical historians, one of Americas most prodigious composers, dramatists, musicians, and writers. He composed more than 300 songs, and 18 of his wartime tunes were published as sheet music. He unquestionably earned the title Bard of the Confederacy, and in the words of music historian N. Lee Orr, Visiting with him and his music for a time deepens our understanding of the story of Americas music.

This article was written by E. Lawrence Abel and originally appeared in the October 2003 issue of Civil War Times magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!
John Samuel Tieman

Clarinetist, Specialist 4

June-December 1970

02J20, CLARINET was my Military Occupational Specialty. As an artist, I served my country. Beyond that, I did nothing either heroic or noteworthy. In truth, Im a far better veteran than I ever was a soldier. And thats how you know Im really a war veteran. That Im not a wanna-be. Nobody ever lies about being an Army clarinetist. They lie about being a scuba-diving Green Beret ninja, who flew a B-52 before joining the SAS Foreign Legion Marines.

I volunteered on February 17, 1969, and after Basic at Fort Polk, La., I was stationed at Fort Wolters in Texas with the 328th Army Band. I was a parade soldier, a specialist 4, who also loved playing first-chair clarinet in a 30-piece orchestra.

Being stationed in the States wasnt bad. Frankly, we were the envy of manysuch as the time we played this gig at the Fort Worth Home For Unwed Mothers. Nothing happenednot that we let the guys back at the base think otherwise. Of such are legends born.

By 1970, with less than a year to serve, I never thought Id go to Vietnam. Then came the Cambodian invasion. For 174 days, 1 hour and 22 minutes, I was stationed at the 4th Infantry Divisions base camp, Camp Radcliff, at An Khe in the Central Highlands, in the Division Band. In those 174 days, we saw more than 100 rocket and sapper attacks. Some nights, Charlie would lob a rocket in just to keep us awake. One night, sappers blew up 17 helicopters.

The band members central functions were as artist and guard. During a Red Alert, we served as guards for the headquarters company. At other times, we functioned as perimeter guards, generally assigned to either a tower or a foxhole.

Our gigs could range from the prosaic to the exotic. Our band covered the entire II Corps Tactical Zone, and we got around.

A typical day started shortly after dawn. We might do a police call or a sweep to try to flush out sappers who were still hiding in camp after the previous nights attack. The band would usually play a job during the day, an awards ceremony for example. If we performed outside of camp, we might take a Chinook to someplace like Nha Trang. Or we might join a convoy going east through the An Khe Pass or west through the Mang Yang Pass.

I hated the Mang Yang Pass. I hated how steep the sides were, how narrow the road was. When we entered, we had to pass The Frenchmens Graveyard, the last resting place of Groupement Mobile No. 100. It was wiped out in June 1954, right where we were driving in June of 1970.

In the evening, we might pull guard duty. On average, I stood duty every third night, but toward the end of my tour, it was every other night. Any soldier who has pulled guard duty in a combat zone can tell you how it ranges from the boredom of staring at the field in front of you, to the shock of hearing an explosion behind you. Some of my most vivid memories are of guard duty. An explosion over my shoulder. The Red Alert siren. Knowing a sapper must be right there somewhere, but having no idea where.

Like other soldiers, our band members found themselves assigned to all manner of general duty, from filling sandbags to painting artillery shells, from cleaning rifles to repairing the hooch.

But, aside from these combat duties, our primary purpose was to provide music. From the ancient Romans to Army bands deployed to Iraq, music has been used to signal, to encourage, to entertain and to comfort.

Our gigs could range from the prosaic to the exotic. Our band covered the entire II Corps Tactical Zone, and we got around.

On the prosaic side, we played change-of-command ceremonies. Most of these Ive long forgotten. But a few I remember, like the time we played for a firebase so small that we had to set up in the surrounding minefield. I still remember that little red flag by my left front. That and someone pointing to a clump of trees and mentioning the Viet Cong sniper last night. Forty years later, I can close my eyes and still see that clump of jungle.

Then there was the exotic. Like the night we played at a party for the Dragon Lady, the wife of the province chief, a beautiful woman dressed in tailored, tiger-striped fatigues. She commanded an all-female unit. For that gig, we convoyed through the Mang Yang Pass to someplace near Pleiku. We played one song and spent the night in an old Foreign Legion barracks. The decadence of such gigs was never lost on us.

Our piano player, Pfc Dick Bittner, used to refer to these scenes as cartoons. One time we played a welcoming ceremony for these grunts walking into the base campand I mean they came right out of the bush and into Stars and Stripes Forever.

Speaking of decadence, Id be less than candid if I didnt say that many of us comforted ourselves with drugs, alcohol and prostitutes. Such was life as an Army clarinetist at Camp Radcliff. Only years later did it strike me as paradoxical that I would go to a supply bunker and requisition a bandoleer and a box of reeds.

I got out of Vietnam, and the Army, on December 7, 1970. I was 20 years old. I rarely played music after coming home. A source of joy, a clarinet, had became a source for traumatic memory.
General George S. Patton was a flamboyant commander who was not content to wait on the sidelines. So when the plans for the Allied conquest of the island of Sicily called for a British army to capture the key port of Messina, Patton decided he would get there first.

by Eric Ethier

Inside Seventh Army headquarters on the southern coast of Sicily, a scowling Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr., greeted Lieutenant General Omar Bradley with bad news. Weve received a directive from Army Group, Brad, Patton said between puffs on a cigar. Montys to get the Vizzini-Caltagirone road in his drive to flank Catania and Mount Etna by going up through Enna. This means youll have to side-slip to the west with your 45th Division.

My God, Bradley replied angrily, you cant allow him to do that!

But Patton had nothing else to say on the subject. Sorry Brad, he said evenly, but the changeover takes place immediately. Monty wants the road right away.

To Patton, Bradley, and just about every other senior United States Army officer, British General Sir Bernard Montgomery got his way entirely too often. This time, just four days into Operation HUSKY (the code name for the Allied Invasion of Sicily), Montgomery had convinced 15th Army Group Commander General Sir Harold Alexander to grant his Eighth Army exclusive use of a highway previously promised to the Americans. Patton and Bradley considered the decision an insult to American military prestige.

On July 10, 1943, Allied ships had deposited Pattons Seventh U.S. Army on the beaches along the Gulf of Gela, on Sicilys southwest coast. Montgomerys British Eighth Army went ashore to the east, south of Syracuse. The Allies targeted the city of Messina, at the northeast tip of the triangular island. Capturing Sicily would eliminate persistent Axis attacks on nearby Mediterranean supply routes, and if Messina could be taken quickly, the invaders would snare thousands of Axis prisoners and gain a convenient jump-off spot for the upcoming invasion of Italy.

By July 13, Bradleys II Corps had advanced inland to within 1,000 yards of the Vizzini-Caltagirone road (Route 124)a major transport route that cut east to west across the center of the island. Meanwhile, dug-in German troops had blunted Montgomerys advance up the islands east coast, hemming Eighth Army in on the plain of Catania between towering Mount Etna and the sea. In a sudden change of plan, Montgomery decided to send a flanking force west around Etna. To do so he needed Route 124, and Alexander, who had overall command of HUSKYs ground forces, gave it to him. The Americans, one of Pattons frustrated staff officers said, were left to sit comfortably on our prats while Montgomery finishes the goddam war!

The British generals thought little of American fighting ability. In February, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommels Afrika Korps had thrust across the hot sands of North Africa and smashed through inexperienced and poorly led U.S. troops at Tunisias Kasserine Pass. The unfortunate performance of the young Americansmany of whom had never before seen battledistressed the British commanders. Alexander declared, they lack the will to fight. Montgomery believed they have no confidence in their Generals.

In the wake of the disaster at Kasserine Pass, the Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, sent Patton to Tunisia to take over U.S. II Corps. Patton quickly injected discipline and his fighting spirit into the corps and led it to victories at Gafsa and El Guettar. In mid-April as the Tunisian Campaign neared its end, Patton left the corps in Bradleys hands and returned to French Morocco to take part in planning for the Sicily operation.

Despite the Americans improvement on the battlefield, Alexander and Montgomery remained unimpressed. For their part, Patton and many of his colleagues resented British impertinence, especially on the part of Montgomery. Arrogant, self-centered, and pushy, the 56-year-old general in the natty black beret irked his colleagues with outlandish statements and demands. In many ways he was not unlike Patton. At the age of 58, Patton was deeply religious, swashbuckling, human dynamo who strutted around in a polished steel helmet with a pair of ivory-handled revolvers strapped to his waist. His vigor was always infectious, his wit barbed, his conversation a mixture of obscenity and good humor, Bradley wrote. He was at once stimulating and overbearing. George was a magnificent soldier.

By the time he waded ashore on Sicily, Pattons antipathy toward his British counterparts had also come to affect his relationship with his boss, Eisenhower. Pattons long-time friend had the difficult job of holding together the young Anglo-American alliance. But Patton felt that American interests and honor too often took a back seat to British demands. God damn all British and all so-called Americans who have their legs pulled by them, Patton wrote in his diary in Tunisia. Ike is more British than the British and is putty in their hands . . . .

For the first invasion of the Axis home turf, Patton commanded the new Seventh U.S. Army, including Bradleys II Corps. Patton welcomed the chance to assert U.S. military might. Initially scheduled to land on the islands northern coast and capture Sicilys capital Palermo, American troops expected to go on the offensive in Sicily. But Montgomery favored a less dispersed landing to the south and in the end, his plan won out. Patton still expected Seventh Army to make its mark. But to Alexander, it was clear that Eighth Army would have the glory of capturing the more obviously attractive objectives of Syracuse, Catania, and Messina . . . .

From the outset Eighth Army strategy left little room for Patton to operate, and Montgomery essentially imposed his will on Alexander. Montgomery reasoned that if the Americans could simply hold firm against any action from the west I could then swing hard with my right with an easier mind. If they draw enemy attacks on them my swing north will cut off enemy completely. Two days later, Alexander transferred use of Highway 124 to Montgomery. They gave us the future plan of operations, Patton wrote bitterly, which cuts us off from any possibility of taking Messina.

Patton considered himself, with good reason, the best damn ass-kicker in the U.S. Army, but he accepted this outrageous decision without a protest. This was not the time to raise a fuss. For the moment he saved his invective for his diary. Ike has never been subjected to air attack or any other form of death. However, he is such a straw man that his future is secure. The British will never let him go.

Yet Patton did not simply give up Highway 124 with a smile. He slyly secured authorization to expand the American perimeter west. Patton had his eyes set on Palermo, and, ultimately, Messina. The next day Patton and Major General Lucien K. Truscott, who headed up the 3rd Infantry Division, discussed a westward reconnaissance in force toward Agrigento and Porto Empedocle. Truscott felt that Alexander would not object to such a move, and Patton, Truscott wrote, with something of the air of the cat that had swallowed the canary, agreed . . . . Patton had his foot in the door and he meant to swing it open.

On July 16 Alexander issued another directive that positively infuriated Patton. The order stipulated that Montgomerys Eighth Army would advance on Messina on three fronts. The Americans were officially left with the distasteful task of protecting Montgomerys left flank. Alexander lamely authorized Seventh Army to capture Agrigento and Porto Empedoclesomething Truscott had done that very day. Patton blamed Montgomery. Monty is trying to steal the show, he wrote to his wife, Beatrice, and with the assistance of Divine Destiny [Eisenhower] may do so . . . .

Patton had had enough. Alexander clearly had no intention of assigning Seventh Army anything other than mop-up duty in Western Sicily, while Montgomerys Eighth marched to Messina and glory in the east. Patton felt his superior lacked any conception of the power or mobility of the Seventh Army. On July 17 he climbed aboard a B-25 and flew to 15th Army headquarters in Tunisia to confront Alexander. Patton told the army group commander in no uncertain terms that he wanted his army unleashed. He explained it would be inexpedient politically for the Seventh Army not to have equal glory in the final stage of the campaign. Patton asked for authorization to drive north to split the Axis forces and to clear out remaining resistance in the west. Alexander agreed, providing Seventh Army hold a crucial road network near Caltanissetta in the center of the island. If I do what I am going to do, Patton confided to his diary, there is no need of holding anything, but its a mean man who wont promise, so I did.

Patton wasted no time putting his new plan into action. He created a Provisional Corps under the command of Major General Geoffrey Keyes, his deputy commander, and sent it northwest towards Palermo while Bradleys II Corps set out for the north coast, knifing across the islands center through tough German defenders. Facing light resistance from largely dispirited Italian troops, Keyes troops moved so fast that often the German and Italian 88s [88mm anti-tank guns], which they captured en route, had not been pointed around or set up to shoot against them. On July 22 Truscotts Division entered Palermo after covering an astonishing 100 miles in just 72 hours. Wild celebrations and ebullient Sicilians greeted the Americans. Support for Italys Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini was nowhere to be seen. The next day the 45th Division of Bradleys II Corps reached the coast at Termini, 25 miles to the east. Until he took matters into his own hands, Patton wrote in his diary, Monty was trying to command both armies and getting away with it. Now Seventh Army was making its mark.

Meanwhile, Patton pushed his personal competition with Montgomery to comical new heights. On July 25 he flew across the island to Syracuse for a meeting with Alexander and Montgomery. On seeing his erstwhile British rival, Patton noted, I made the error of hurrying to meet him. He hurried a little too, but I started it. At the end of the conference, during which, Patton noted, he didnt receive lunch, Monty gave me a 5 cigar lighter. Some one must have sent him a box of them. When Montgomery visited Palermo a few days later, Patton sent an escort to meet him at the airport and greeted him at his headquarters with a full band. I hope Monty realized that I did this to show him up for doing nothing for me on the 25th, Patton wrote.

At Syracuse, Montgomery surprised Patton by suggesting that Seventh Army capture Messina. While Keyes and Bradley had raced across Sicily, Montgomerys Eighth Army had become completely bogged down in the east. Dug-in German troops continued to hold Montgomery at Catania, while his circling movement west around Etna proceeded slowly. With Seventh Army now poised, cat-like, ready to strike east, Montgomery realized that Patton was best positioned to take the city. Besides, by attacking east Patton would relieve the pressure on Eighth Army and allow him to finally punch past Catania.

Patton doubted Montgomerys motives, but he needed no further urging. This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake, he wrote to 45th Infantry Division Commander Major General Troy Middleton. We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race. Montgomery made little of this race, but to Patton it became a personal crusade to win acclaim and respect for his much-maligned troops. British soldiers and officers undoubtedly wanted to beat the Americans into Messina. But Patton definitely hyped the contest.

On July 25, 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III, supported by leading Italian political figures, deposed dictator Benito Mussolini, and Italy began to negotiate peace terms with the Allies. (Italy would pull out of the Axis in September.) As German commanders planned to evacuate Sicily, Patton and Montgomery began squeezing Axis defenders into the islands northeast corner. Eighth Army continued to probe German defenses at Catania while Canadian and British troops drove in a left hook around Etnas western slope. To the north, the 1st and newly arrived 9th American Divisions advanced east from the islands rugged center, while the 3rd Division attacked down the north coast road. The mountains are the worst I have ever seen, Patton wrote on August 1. It is a miracle that our men can get through them but we must keep up our steady pressure. The enemy simply cant stand it, besides we must beat the Eighth Army to Messina.

On August 3, Patton stopped by an army hospital outside Nicosia and chatted with several injured soldiers; All were brave and cheerful, he noted. Then he encountered a 1st Division infantryman who seemed unhurt. Patton asked him what was wrong. I guess I cant take it, the soldier replied. Patton erupted. Cursing the soldier as a coward, he slapped him with his gloves and pushed him out of the tent. Such men, Patton wrote, should be tried for cowardice and shot. A week later at another hospital Patton came across another alleged nervous patient, a private in the 13th Field Artillery Brigade whose case was diagnosed as severe shell shock. Again Pattons anger overcame him; again he slapped and cursed the soldier. I cant help it, he said, but it makes my blood boil to think of a yellow bastard being babied. Patton didnt realize the seriousness of what he had done, but the incidents would soon change his life and career.

Pattons relentless push for Messina also took its toll on his relationship with Bradley, a straight-laced subordinate who deplored Pattons use of profanity and flamboyant style of command. He traveled in an entourage of command cars followed by a string of nattily uniformed staff officers, Bradley wrote. His own vehicle was gaily decked with oversize stars and the insignia of his command. These exhibitions did not awe the troops as perhaps Patton believed. Instead, they offended the men as they trudged through the clouds of dust left in the wake of that procession. Where Patton was eager to outshine Montgomery, Bradley failed to see the point in capturing Palermo. Certainly there was no glory in the capture of hills, docile peasants, and spiritless soldiers, he wrote. To Bradley, racing Montgomery to Messina was equally unnecessary, for However rapidly we pushed into that city, we could not cut the enemys escape route across to Italy.

Yet Patton wanted more than a cheap victory over Montgomery. Despite galling BBC reports (soldiers called them Badly Biased Comments) that the Seventh Army has been lucky to be in western Sicily eating grapes, the capture of Palermo had been a publicity coup for Pattons army. The troops morale soared. The Americans non-stop marching and ability to operate tanks and other armored vehicles in rough terrain began to open the eyes of their Eighth Army counterparts. Capturing Messina promised more of the same.

As the final phase of the Sicily Campaign heated up, Patton drove his officers to push as hard as they could. Troina fell on August 6. To the south, British forces captured Adrano andfinallyCatania. Fighting a brilliant rearguard action, German army units crept back from their narrowing front toward the beaches of the Straits of Messina. There, German and Italian ships waited to ferry troops and equipment across the two-mile passage to the Italian mainland.

In an effort to by-pass enemy positions and speed up his advance, Patton authorized two amphibious landings along the north coast. On the night of August 7-8 Americans swept ashore virtually unopposed behind German lines at St. Agata. At the same time, troops from Truscotts 3rd Division launched an attack on the high ridges inland and took 1,500 prisoners, bringing Seventh Army 12 miles closer to Messina. The second landing nearly proved a disaster. Truscott felt he would not have time to get his infantry up in time to support it, and wanted to postpone the attack for one day. Bradley agreed. But Patton was having none of it. Messina lay around the corner, and this wasnt the time to slow down. Early on August 11 elements of Truscotts 30th Infantry regiment went ashore at Brolo, 12 miles behind a German front. The Americans were quickly pinned down on a hill just above town. Nearly 30 hours passed before the balance of Truscotts troops could relieve them. Progress had again been made, but at a high price.

On August 13 American troops captured Randazzo. To the south, British and Canadian troops forced the Germans from the slopes of Mt. Etna. Axis forces flooded toward Messina. On the night of August 15-16 Montgomery tried an amphibious landing of his own, putting elements of his commando and armored units ashore at Scaletta, just eight miles from Messina.

Patton ordered a third leap-frog operation for that same night, but by then American troops were moving so fast that they had already passed the scheduled landing site by the time the ship borne force arrived. Around 10:00 p.m. on August 16 elements of Truscotts 3rd Division entered bomb-scarred Messina. Patton immediately notified Eisenhower and Alexander, and called Bradley to tell him we would enter Messina in the morning at 1000 hours.

Early the next morning as the last of the Axis troops slipped off the island, Patton met Truscott, Keyes, and a host of reporters on a hill outside town. What in hell are you all standing around for? he bellowed. Bradley remained conspicuously absent. This is a great disappointment to me, Patton later wrote, as I had telephoned him, and he certainly deserved the pleasure of entering the town. But Bradley wanted no part of Pattons pomp and ceremony. Minutes later, a procession of army vehicles led by Pattons command car roared into Messina, chased all the way by exploding shells fired by Axis guns on the Italian mainland.

After fighting their way over mined roads and around blown-up bridges in the early-morning hours, Lieutenant Colonel J.M.T.F. Churchills British commandos reached the city only to find the Americans already there. At about 10:30 a.m., Patton pulled into the city square just as a squadron of Brigadier J.C. Curries British 4th Armored tanks rumbled into town. Both Churchill and Currie had brought along a set of bagpipes to celebrate beating the Americans into town. I think the general was quite sore that we had got there first . . . . Patton wrote. Currie climbed out of his Sherman tank to shake hands with a glowing Patton. It was a jolly good race, Currie said with a smile. I congratulate you.

Pattons victorious, hell-for-leather drive on Messina restored some luster to an otherwise badly managed campaign. Rather than firmly coordinating the moves of Seventh and Eighth Armies, Alexander had vacillated, first backing down to Montgomery and then allowing, almost forcing, Patton to set his own course. Poor decisions, such as the reassignment of Highway 124 to Montgomery (and poor air cover over the Messina Straits), ultimately cost time, and allowed Axis ships and ferries to evacuate roughly 60,000 Italian soldiers, 40,000 Germans, 10,000 vehicles, and 17,000 tons of equipment from the islandall of which would soon be used against the Allies in Italy.

The race had significant, if less tangible, repercussions for Patton and American fighting men. The fast-moving Seventh Army had proved itself the equal of Eighth Army and set a new standard in mobile warfare. The Americans, Montgomery admitted after the war, had proved themselves to be first-class troops. It took time; but they did it more quickly than we did.

Patton was entirely satisfied with his own performance. Of course, had I not been interfered with on the 13th of July by a full change of plan, he wrote to his wife, I would have taken Messina in ten days, but then I would have had to turn back to get Palermo, so it all came out O.K. Although Alexander would continue to rate British troops above the Americans, Patton had effectively exorcised the demons of Kasserine Pass.

Yet the Sicilian campaign almost ended Pattons 34-year army career. Reports of the two slapping incidents made their way to Eisenhower and, even worse, a small group of reporters. Eisenhower was furious. He ordered Patton to apologize to the soldiers involved and warned him that such behavior will not be tolerated in this theater no matter who the offender may be. Meanwhile he asked the reporters to refrain from publishing the story for the good of the Allied cause. Patton was his best general and would be needed again. They agreed.

The story finally broke in November but Eisenhower refused to relieve his old friend. Still, the public furor over the slapping incidents doomed Patton to many months of glum idleness while the war passed him by. Eisenhower dropped him from consideration for command of American ground forces in the inevitable invasion of European honor that eventually went to Bradley. When Patton finally returned to action in France in command of Third Army in August 1944, he was subordinate to both Bradley and Montgomery. Yet to Patton, that was secondary. Destiny had beckoned him and he would soon become, as one German officer said, the most feared general on all fronts.

Eric Ethier formerly served as an editor on the staffs of American History and Civil War Times Illustrated. He now writes from his home in Rhode Island.
Old Ironsides, flagship of the U.S. Navy, beats

a hasty retreat in the face of secessionist plots.

BY ETHAN S. RAFUSE

Baltimore boiled with defiant secessionist zeal in April 1861. On the 19th, an anti-Union mob attacked a unit of Massachusetts troops passing through the Maryland port city en route to Washington, D.C. Before the month was over, Southern sympathizers had temporarily cut rail and telegraph connections between Baltimore and the Federal capital. Talk of Maryland seceding grew louder, and rumors of plots and conspiracies against Federal authority flew fast and free.

South of Baltimore at Annapolis, Captain George S. Blake watched the growing turmoil carefully. As superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, he was concerned about the schools growing vulnerability. Even more, however, he worried about potential dangers to a national treasure in his care: the U.S.S. Constitution, better known as Old Ironsides.

The Constitution was serving as the academys training ship. In 1858, when the number of cadets had exceeded available dormitory space, academy administrators had acquired the sloop Plymouth as a live-aboard school ship, but the vessel was too small from the beginning. By 1860, the frigate Constitution had taken her place.

The ship brought more than just extra berths. She was the most famous vessel in the navy. Old Ironsides had won her nickname during the War of 1812, when, in a victorious battle against the British H.M.S. Guerriere, the English cannonballs bounced harmlessly off the American ships oak hull. When the Constitution came to the academy, one observer remarked that such a vivid reminder of Americas naval glory would exercise a salutary influence on the minds of the pupils.

The qualities that made the Constitution so inspirational also made her a tempting prize for Confederate sympathizers. The week after the April 14 fall of Fort Sumter, off Charleston, South Carolina, to Confederates, Blake heard rumors that Maryland secessionists were plotting to make the Constitution the first ship of war to hoist the flag of the Confederacy.

Under orders from Navy Secretary Gideon Welles to defend the Constitution at all hazards, Blake intensified measures to protect the ship. He sent a small armed schooner to patrol the Severn River and Chesapeake Bay. When, on April 20, a vessel carrying troops commanded by Brigadier General Benjamin F. Butler arrived at Annapolis, Blake went aboard to meet the general. Wont you save the Constitution? he asked.

Yes, answered Butler, thinking of the Federal governmental document, that is just what I am here for.

Are those your orders? a relieved Blake replied. Then the old ship is safe.

Realizing at last what Blake had meant, Butler informed him that he had no orders regarding the ship. Nevertheless, he assigned a contingent of troops to protect the Constitution and offered to assist if it became necessary to evacuate the ship.

Butlers troops were sufficient to deter saboteurs. But Blake realized they would soon be needed at Washington. Besides, it was just a short-term solution. To secure the academy and the Constitution against attack would require so large a troop presence that maintaining regular instruction would be impossible. So, on the 20th, Blake ordered the ship, the schools trophies and memorabilia, and the acting midshipmen (as the cadets were known) to New York City. As if to confirm Blakes fears, that very day the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia, was evacuated.

Overseeing the voyage to New York would be Lieutenant George Washington Rodgers, scion of one of the nations foremost naval families; Oliver Hazard Perry and Matthew C. Perry were his uncles, and the commandant of midshipmen was his brother, Christopher. Receiving orders at 6:00 a.m. on the 21st, Rodgers and the Constitution set out under tow by the steamer on which Butlers troops had arrived, the Maryland.

Just when it seemed the old ship had escaped the clutches of secessionists, she suddenly encountered a trickier foe: Severn River mud, which briefly captured the ship twice. To make matters worse, a false report arrived indicating secessionists were placing obstructions in the outer channel to prevent the Constitution from passing. Rather than try to force the vessel free, Rodgers chose to pipe down the ship and wait for the tide to free her.

The next day brought new frustration. Early in the morning the ship broke free, but a heavy squall quickly drove her back into the mud. At 4:30 p.m., a steamer finally freed the Constitution and towed her to deeper water, where she anchored for the next three days. To lighten the ships load for the voyage north, Rodgers sent the ships heavy guns aboard another vessel on the 23d.

It was around noon on the 26th when the Constitution reached open water. An uneventful three-day sail brought her to the New York Navy Yard, where she remained until May 8, when she left for her final destination, Fort Adams at Newport, Rhode Island. The rest of the schools faculty and staff reached Newport on the 9th, and less than a week later classes resumed.

The academy remained in Newport for the rest of the war but, despite efforts by Northern politicians to obtain a permanent relocation, the school and the Constitution returned to Annapolis in 1865. The old ship would remain in service at the academy until 1871, but not so Blake. He stepped down as superintendent in September 1865, replaced by Union war hero Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. Perhaps Blake was a hero in his own right, however. He could truthfully say he had saved the Constitution.

Ethan S. Rafuse is a doctorial candidate in history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Fate consigns most people to lives of quiet anonymity, choosing only a favored few to shape an eras epochal events. In the case of Silas S. Soule, a young Massachusetts abolitionist, fate was unusually fickle. It placed him at center stage for several historic moments, then, as if tired of his presence, killed him before he was 30 and left his name among the soon-to-be-forgotten.

Soule was born in 1839. His father, Amassa Soule, was a fanatical abolitionist and religious zealot. That combination set the Soule household apart from its neighbors, and Silas spent a great deal of his youth defending himself against charges of being a damned Bobolishionist.

In 1854, New England abolitionists formed the Emigrant Aid Society to help settle the Kansas Territory andnot incidentallybring it into the Union as a Free State. Silas father answered the societys call for pioneers, and by the end of the year the Soule family had taken up residence near Lawrence, Kan. Upon the familys arrival, Amassa Soule immediately established his household as a way station on the underground railroad. Silas, at 15, began escorting runaway slaves from Missouri through Lawrence, and north to freedom.

By the time Silas was 18, Missouri slavers on one side and New England abolitionists on the other had armed themselves and were openly fighting for the territorys future. The bitter struggle became known as Bleeding Kansas. Young Soule quickly learned to handle a Kansas Biblethe deadly Sharps carbine that abolitionists had sent west in crates marked Bibles. He also mastered hit-and-run tactics and became notorious as one of Kansas most-feared Jayhawkers.

In 1859, Soule played a major role in one of the border wars most celebrated incidents. That January, 20 Missouri bushwhackers, seeking to recover runaway slaves, crossed the border into Kansas. They came upon and captured Dr. John Doy, a Lawrence physician and abolitionist, while he was escorting 12 escaped slaves to Oskaloosa. The slavers took their captives back to Weston, Mo., where they sold the blacks back into slavery and tried Doy, under Missouri law, for helping the slaves escape. Although Doy had not been in Missouri and hence could not have broken its law by helping the slaves, a Missouri jury quickly convicted him, and the judge sentenced him to five years at hard labor. Doy appealed his conviction, but while his lawyers argued the case, he sat in a St. Joseph jail cell.

Suspicious of Missouris courts, a group of Lawrence men, including young Silas Soule, set out to free the abolitionist physician. When they reached St. Joseph, their leader, Major James B. Abbott, dispatched Soule to reconnoiter the jailhouse. The affable Soule charmed his way into the jail by convincing its keeper that he was carrying a message from Doys wife. Once inside, Soule took careful note of the jails layout and of the room where Doy was being held. The jailer, he learned, lived alone and had only one sentry outside to sound the alarm in case of trouble. Soule met with Doy, and while the jailers attention was elsewhere, he slipped a note into the doctors cell. It said simply, To-night, at twelve oclock.

When Soule reported back, the raiders realized their chances of successfully taking the jail by force were slim and changed their plans. At the appointed hour, they approached the building by pretending to have captured a horse thief. They asked the jailer, named Brown, to lock up the man until morning. After some argument, Brown admitted them. Once inside, they quickly disarmed the hapless jailer and freed Doy.

With Doy in tow, the raiders left the jail and headed for the Missouri River, which they intended to cross in boats previously cached for the purpose. At the rivers edge, they discovered one of the boats was leaking. Two policemen walking their beat came along and, not recognizing Doy, obligingly held a lantern while one of the jailbreakers bailed the boat with his hat. When the boat was safe to board, they pushed off, crossed the Missouri and made good their escape.

Within six months of returning Doy to his grateful family in Lawrence, Soule was involved in another, even more daring rescue attempt. John Brown, the fanatical abolitionist, had frequently visited the Soule household in Lawrence during the border wars, bringing runaway slaves for the underground railroad. When Brown failed in his crazed attempt to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., on October 18, 1859, Colonel Robert E. Lee captured and delivered him to Charlestown, to be tried by state court. Virginia authorities quickly convicted Brown and, on November 2, Judge Richard Parker sentenced him to hang. The judge ordered that the execution take place one month later, on December 2.

Almost immediately after Browns capture, some of his New England financial backers began planning his rescue. Richard Hinton, an abolitionist newspaper reporter, knew of Soules acquaintance with Brown and his role in the Doy rescue. Hinton traveled to Lawrence, met with Soule and recruited him into the plot. Returning east, the two abolitionists set out to recruit 75 to 100 men, who would take the jail by force. They ran into trouble, however, securing funds. There was also opposition from within the group by those who felt that a direct assault on the jail would surely fail. In response to the problems, the conspirators scaled back their rescue plans and began searching for ways to free Brown through guile and deception. In November, they began converging on Charlestown.

The raiders traveled separately to avoid arousing suspicion. Some passed themselves off as stockmen, others as laborers or land seekers. After going through Harrisburg, Pa., they gathered in Hagerstown, Md., where they made their final preparations.

James Montgomery, commander of the raid, dispatched H.C. Seaman to scout the hills around Martinsburg, Va., where they planned to take Brown after the break-out. Mindful of Soules success in the Doy rescue, Montgomery ordered Soule to Charlestown to collect intelligence about Browns confinement and the situation within the community.

Soule arrived in Charlestown sometime in mid-November. As he had done in St. Joseph, he managed to get inside the jail where Brown was being held. Exactly how he did this is unknown, although it is believed that local police arrested him for public drunkenness. Once inside, he turned his boyish charm on the jailer, John Avis, and wheedled a meeting with Brown.

His old friend had greatly changed from his Kansas days. Browns hair had turned white, and he wore a long beard. The fire had not left his eyes, however, and he still dreamed of freeing the slaves and bringing the Lords revenge upon their owners. He had devised a new strategy for destroying the peculiar institution, but it did not include his being rescued. He understood the power of martyrdom and was prepared to die if it would bring an end to slavery. He adamantly refused to be saved. Soule had failed in his mission.

Soule drifted back to Kansas, and then to Colorado. In December 1861, he joined Company K, 1st Regiment, Colorado Infantry. On November 29, 1864, he found himself in command of a cavalry company, on a bluff overlooking a peaceful Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, Colo. The 3rd Colorado Volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivingtona preacher turned bloodthirsty soldierhad been ordered by the politically ambitious territorial governor to conduct a punitive expedition against the Cheyenne. Chivington located the Indian camp at Sand Creek and, notwithstanding its peaceful inhabitants, decided to attack it. Soule argued against the plan, calling it outright murder.

In the end, Soules arguments failed and one of the worst massacres in American history followed. Ordered to accompany Chivington, Soule remained steadfast in his opposition to the assault. When the colonel gave the order to charge, Soule checked his men, forbidding them tofire upon the village. Other commanders obeyed Chivington, and their soldiers killed and mutilated more than 200 Cheyenne, mostly women and children. Later, when Chivington publicly branded him a coward, Soules men came to his defense, praising his courage in the face of Chivingtons infamous order.

The Sand Creek atrocities shocked the nation, even in the midst of the Civil War. The army convened a committee of inquiry in Denver to investigate Chivingtons actions. Westerners loyal to the fighting parson threatened anyone they thought might testify against him, and the hearings were held in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Nevertheless, Soule testified forcefully against Chivington. His comments were crucial to the committees findings. When the hearings ended, the committee branded Chivingtons raid at Sand Creek a cowardly and coldblooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy, and the face of every American with shame and indignation.

Soule was not alive to hear the committees vindication of his actions. Following his testimony, there was a disturbance near his home in Denver, where he was serving as the citys provost marshal. When Soule investigated, he was shot down by Charles W. Squiers of the 2nd Colorado Cavalry, who may have been hired to kill him by forces loyal to Chivington. Squiers eventually fled to California and was never tried for the crime.

Soules description of the events at Sand Creek produced a wave of indignation in the East. By the end of 1865, widespread revulsion at the Armys tactics produced a peace offensive on behalf of the Indians. Congress derailed the Armys plans to campaign against the Indians with thousands of troops no longer needed to save the Union. The subsequent Indian wars were brutal enough by anyones standards, but the Army did not fight a war of extermination. Silas Soules testimony had helped save lives.

This article was written by Bruce M. Lawlor and originally appeared in Americas Civil War magazine.

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BY DONALD LANKIEWICZ

Although a brilliant naval historian and noted theorist on the importance of sea power to national defense, Alfred Thayer Mahan hated the sea and dreaded his duties as a ships captain.

HE WAS PERHAPS the most celebrated naval historian of his era, an influential promoter of United States naval and commercial expansion during Americas rise to world power in the late nineteenth century. As the author of numerous articles and books, including the landmark The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan was widely regarded as a brilliant naval theorist. From his writings, readers would never have guessed, however, that the renowned champion of the United States Navy hated the sea, and while an active-duty naval officer, lived in constant fear of ocean storms and colliding ships.

Mahans fear of accidents at sea was not unfounded. During a forty-year naval career that began as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1856, he was involved in numerous maritime mishaps. As a young first lieutenant in 1861, Mahan was named the executive officer of Captain Percival Draytons 11-gun USS Pocahontas, and immediately set a dubious standard for his budding career. Captain Drayton was familiar with his new junior officer and noted in his diary that Mahan was young enough not to have too fixed ways and is quite clever. Drayton, however, had never seen Mahan handle a ship.

On November 7, 1861, a small Union fleet assaulted Fort Walker at Port Royal, South Carolina, a Confederate stronghold on the edge of Draytons hometown that was commanded, as chance would have it, by his brother Thomas. Delayed by a storm and mechanical problems, the Pocahontas arrived on the scene after the other ships had pounded the fort into submission. As his vessel moved through the water to join the rest of the flotilla in Port Royal Sound, Lieutenant Mahan became engrossed in observing his superior officer, who was deep in thought over the fate of his defeated brother inside the pulverized fort. Mahan enjoyed studying human emotions and expressions, but as the Pocahontass deck officer that day, he should have been watching the direction in which his ship was drifting. Suddenly, the Pocahontas slammed into the anchored Union sloop Seminole. The vain executive officer deflected any blame for his slip-up by suggesting that the fault lay with his superior, Captain Drayton, who, he sarcastically noted, had done a good deal of staff duty; had less than the usual deck habit of his period.

Following this incident, Mahan served ten months on blockade duty before the Navy Department assigned him to teach seamanship at the Naval Academy, which had been transferred from Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island, as a wartime precaution. Mahans effectiveness as a teacher of seamanship proved to be as questionable as his own ability to handle a ship; he later recalled the humiliation and bad luck of having to teach subjects such as knotting, which he considered unworthy of his time. Mahan, who rated himself intellectually superior to almost everyone, was not well liked by his students, and during his 13 months in Newport, he rapidly began to dislike his chosen profession.

Mahan reluctantly returned to sea duty and soon built upon the shaky record he had established while serving on the Pocahontas. His lack of confidence in handling ships was apparent from his reaction to a successful, routine maneuver in 1869. Returning from target practice in the Pacific Ocean aboard the USS Iroquois, Mahan managed to bring his ship back into Japans Yokohama Harbor without hitting another vessel. Vanity excited, he wrote of the experience on the Iroquois, which was, however, an exception, not the rule.

In 1874, Mahan ran the USS Wasp into a barge at the ships anchorage in Montevideo, Uruguay. He also was responsible for doing slight damage to an Argentinean warship during a storm off Buenos Aires on November 3, 1874. More embarrassing than these accidents, however, was the time that Mahan clumsily wedged the Wasp into a dry dock caisson at Montevideo, where it remained stuck for ten days. This absurd episode prompted Mahan-biographer Robert Seager II to comment that Alfred Thayer Mahan may be the only commanding officer in the history of the U.S. Navy rendered hors de combat by a dry dock.

Only his family and his few friends ever knew about the emotional and physical turmoil that enveloped Mahan each time he took command of a ship. On one occasion he confessed to his wife Ellen that he sometimes feared breaking down under the uncongenial load of the captains labor. You have no idea, he said, how hard it is to keep these ships straight. Mahan well knew, and often admitted later in life, that he had chosen the wrong career. Nonetheless, he persevered.

Soon after Mahan took command of the USS Wachusett in 1883, he added to his unfortunate record, according to a young officer aboard named Hugh Rodman, by colliding with a bark under sail, which without question had the right of way. It was our duty to keep clear. The astonishing accident, Rodman later remembered, occurred on a smooth sea in broad daylight. The greatest naval strategist the world has ever known, he wrote, was not a good seaman. The other vessel was sighted broad off our starboard bow, distant several miles. Yet we collided with her and were badly damaged . . . . Rodman also recalled that when another of the Wachusetts officers was questioned about the unnecessary collision, he sarcastically replied, Why, the Pacific Ocean wasnt big enough for us to keep out of the other fellows way.

Commander Mahan remained with the Wachusett until the old warship was mercifully decommissioned in September 1885, after which he began a stint lecturing on naval tactics and history at the newly-established Naval War College in Newport. By the time Mahan took charge of his last command, the USS Chicago, in 1893, he had been regularly shifted back and forth between sea duty and classroom assignments. Although he much preferred life on land, this situation helped neither his self-confidence nor his skills in navigating a ship.

With each mishap at sea, Mahan felt greater stress. He often asked his wife to pray for him that he may be upheld through the remnant of the cruise. Aboard the Chicago, Captain Mahan seldom left the bridge when in the vicinity of other vessels, and his self-induced anxiety caused him constant stomach irritation. His powerful fear of the sea and possible collisions with other ships left him close to a nervous breakdown and caused him to begin to consider seriously an early retirement.

On May 27, 1893, Mahans fears were once again realized. In a minor accident, the Chicago, with Mahan on the bridge, had a brush with the USS Bancroft, a Naval Academy training ship, at the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn. Neither vessel was seriously damaged, but this latest mishap unnerved Mahan and kept intact his record of having grounded, collided, or otherwise embarrassed every ship (save the Iroquois) he ever commanded.

Shortly after the Chicago-Bancroft collision, Mahan injured his knee and lower leg, causing him to be placed on the restricted-duty list. It was a welcome respite for the commander, who had grown weary of the active pursuit of the sea and its new naval monsters. His recuperation also kept him out of trouble. He reported with some relief to his daughter, Ellen, on July 9, 1893: The doctor says I must go on the sick list for a fortnight and keep my leg perfectly quiet, so if the Chicago does anything amiss in that time I shall not be the culprit.

While the injured captain was on leave, the Chicago was involved in another collision. The captain of the British tanker Azov crashed his ship into the Chicago as it was anchored in the Scheldt Estuary in the Netherlands. Mahans crewobviously well drilled in emergency proceduresprevented major damage to their unlucky ship by quickly plugging the gashes left by the tanker.

By early December 1894, Mahan had had enough. For several years he had been writing with much success, when time permitted. He knew that his greatest accomplishments would come not as a naval officer, but as a writer and historian. Few of the men who had actively served with him could argue with the logic of this conclusion. By the time of his death in 1914, Mahans reputation had long transcended the limited circles of the U.S. Navy. His true talents as a naval strategist and historian were borne out in the 137 scholarly articles and 20 books he had written, and his The Influence of Sea Power had altered modern naval planning.

It is ironic that one so knowledgeable about naval warfare could at the same time serve for forty accident-prone years on the vast seas that he feared and detested. But his long-forgotten legacy of reckless and almost comical seamanship has rightly been dwarfed by the tremendous positive effect he had on the U.S. Navy. *

Donald Lankiewicz is a free lance writer and former history teacher who has contributed to leading history and social studies publications.

* * * * * * *
During Amelia Earharts ill-fated 1937 round-the-world attempt, the famed Golden Age flier dubbed Lady Lindy relied on the press to keep her in the public eye. Before that last flight, she was quoted as referring to her Lockheed 10E Electrafunded by Purdue University, where she taughtas a flying laboratory. But her globe-girdling attempt had less to do with science than self-promotionnot surprising, since Earhart was married to, and touted by, publicist George Putnam.

Today aviators with round-the-world ambitions are much more intimately involved in keeping followers abreast of their progress. For example, Lady Lindys modern-day namesake, Amelia Rose Earhart, a photogenic 31-year-old former TV reporter, set up a Twitter account with the hashtag flywithAmelia before beginning her public quest to become the youngest woman to circumnavigate the earth in a single-engine airplane. Her 24,300-mile journey with co-pilot Shane Jordan in a Pilatus PC-12 ended on July 29. During the 17-day trip, fans could easily track this latter-day Earhart via Twitter and her Facebook page, and in the process they were also encouraged to contribute to the Fly With Amelia Foundation founded by the pilot, which provides scholarships to young women interested in flying.

When Matt Guthmiller set out in a Beechcraft Bonanza A36 on May 31 from El Cahon, Calif., the 19-year-old MIT student was aiming to set a new record for the youngest person to fly solo around the world. He flew 29,000 miles, finishing his journey on July 14 and earning a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Guthmiller, who started writing code in the fifth grade, was also raising funds for code.org, a nonprofit website that educates would-be coders, and he updated followers around the world through Twitter and Facebook postings. As Guthmiller noted after his journey, My real goal is to inspire other young people to attempt things of a similar magnitude.

But the tragic story of 17-year-old Indianan Haris Suleman, who died with his father near Pago Pago in American Samoa in July, reminds us that globe-girdling flights are still inherently dangerous. Like Guthmiller, Haris had hoped to break a recordfor the fastest circumnavigation in a single-engine plane with the youngest pilot in command. He and his dad Babar had launched a blog, including a GPS map that enabled followers to track their progress. Their trip also aimed to raise funds for a charity, Citizens Foundation, which has built hundreds of schools in Pakistan. According to a newspaper account, Haris last tweet, posted only a few hours before the Hawker Beechcraft he was piloting crashed into the ocean, included a photo of a sunset at Pago Pago, referring to it as one of the top 5 places Ive been this summer. A memorial service was held at sea for father and son on July 27.


The warrior Nana may have been an octogenarian, but his unrestrained presence in southwestern New Mexico Territory in the summer of 1881 filled white folks with old fears as quickly as a flash flood fills an arroyo. By mid-August, a combined military and civilian party had taken the field to stop or at least contain the Warm Springs Apache leader and his marauders. Nana, believed to be about 80 and afflicted with arthritis, had launched a spectacular raid that June in response to wrongs that he had suffered. Most of Nanas resentment stemmed from a mid-October 1880 Mexican militia ambush at Tres Castillos in Old Mexico. The great Mimbres Chief Victorio and close to 80 other Apaches had been massacred there, though Nana and his followers had been able to evade the ambushers and escape into the Sierra Madre. If, 10 months later, the makeshift American posse hoped to achieve another Tres Castillos, Nana had other ideas. He planned to turn the tables on them and remind them that Apaches knew a thing or two about carrying out an ambush.

Although not a chief, Nana was an important Mimbres leader who was as old as the hills at the time of his famous raid.

Nanas raid began when he and his wide-ranging warriors (less than 40) attacked a surveying crew in northern Chihuahua, Mexico, in late June 1881. They then fought their way north through the Sacramento, San Andreas, San Mateo and Black Range mountains. By August 17, the ancient warrior was in the vicinity of Hillsboro, New Mexico Territory. On the 18th, the Apaches shot their way through the small mining community of Gold Dust without injuring anyone. The raiders then half-heartedly struck the Trujillo Ranch, about five miles south of Hillsboro. The half-blood owner was suspected of supplying the Apaches with arms and ammunition. Nobody was injured there either, but the Indians continued south to attack Perry Ousleys ranch; they burned his place and killed him.

Next, the raiders moved past Tierra Blanca Creek to Absolom D. Irwins ranch, about three miles north of Lake Valley. (The present-day ghost town of Lake Valley is at a different site.) Absolom was away on business, but his wife, Sally, and their five children made a run for it. Some of them got away, but Sally was severely beaten and a baby was snatched from her arms. Although Absolom arrived in time to put out the ranch house fire, his family was gone. Believing them captured, he rode to Lake Valley to give the alarm.

In response to the recent atrocities, a posse formed at Hillsboro and arrived at Lake Valley by the night of the 18th. When someone reported seeing Indians seven miles away on Berrenda Creek, the Lake Valley Mining Company superintendent, George Daly, took charge of the posse. Support was solicited from Lieutenant George Washington Smith at a nearby military encampment. Smith had been dispatched with elements of Companies B and H of the 9th Cavalry, with orders to block the Apaches passage south. Somewhat reluctantly, Smith and the black troopers joined up with Dalys civilian posse, some of whose members were full of bravado by the time they left William Cottons saloon shortly after midnight. Accounts vary as to the number in the party, but a fair estimate would be 16 to 20 so-called buffalo soldiers and 20 civilians.

The force followed Berrenda Creek and then a creek known today as Pollock Creek, which dipped into Dry Gavilan Canyon. That canyon in turn ran into Gavilan Canyon, which is where, at 10:30 a.m. on August 19, Nana ambushed the Americans. Accounts vary as to exactly what happened, but it is certain that Lieutenant Smith and Daly, the leaders, were killed in the opening salvos. Apparently, Smith was unhorsed in the first volley, but he was helped back on his mount, only to be mortally shot. Bullets struck several other soldiers and civilians as well, causing some of the men  including Sergeant William Baker of Company H  to flee. Sergeant Brent Woods of Company B rallied what men he could and even advanced before calling for an orderly retreat. The wounded were also evacuated. Under Woods direction, the ambushed party threw up rock barricades and fought the Apaches for about six hours.

One or two more civilians were killed after Dalys death, and several others were wounded, including newlywed miner George Gamble, of Lake Valley. His beautiful bride, Jesusita Pachedo de Parra, and her parents were told that George was dead, but he later showed up at their door, which was lined with black crepe. Among the soldiers, saddler Thomas Golding and Privates James Brown and Monroe Overstreet of Company B were killed. Two other B privates were wounded  William Hollins took a bullet through the lungs but would survive (and be discharged when his term expired five months later), and John William was shot in the thigh (and four months later his leg was amputated). Wesley Harris of Company H was shot in the right breast.

Indian casualties were not reported, but small pools of blood in the canyon battlefield indicated that at least a few of the warriors had been killed or wounded. Realizing that more 9th Cavalry soldiers were on their way, Nana fled late in the afternoon of the 19th with many of his pursuers horses, some of their supplies and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition. Indeed, Sergeant Richard Anderson of Company H came along with the balance of the late Lieutenant Smiths command, and they were joined by Lieutenant Charles Taylor and Captain Byron Dawson. Daly was found shot four or five times and mutilated, with sticks stuck into his body. Smith was found lying on his face with his back and arms burnt. His face had been slashed, with his nose, ears and other body parts cut off. The lieutenants mustache was found hanging in a nearby bush. Both the civilians and soldiers on the scene heaped praise on Sergeant Woods, agreeing that the 30-year-old sergeants performance had prevented total disaster. Thirteen years later, Woods received the Medal of Honor for his actions in Gavilan Canyon.

Although it was late in the day, the reinforced military-civilian force continued its pursuit of Nana, while Sergeant George Turpin of Company H transported the dead and wounded to Fort Bayard. While Turpins escort detachment was stopped at John Brockmans Mill, on the bank of the Mimbres River, one of the wounded men died.

Late on the 19th, near Lake Valley, Apaches mortally wounded a Mexican sheepherder while his companion made his way to the village of El Colorado. Other parting shots before Nana returned to Mexico were fired between Cookes Canyon and Mule Springs, when the Apaches reportedly attacked a group of woodcutters, killing at least four of them. The raiders captured 12-year-old Manuel Chacon and 14-year-old Juan Chacon. In Las Cruces, Apaches attacked a wagon, killing six Mexicans and severely wounding the lone survivor.

In two months, old but relentless Nana and his followers had ridden about 3,000 miles and fought a number of battles and skirmishes while suffering minimal casualties. Much of the stock that had been taken at Gavilan Canyon was eventually traded to Juhs band when the two Apache groups met in the mountains of Mexico a few months later. Nana would surrender to Brig. Gen. George Crook in March 1883, bolt the reservation with Geronimo two years later, and surrender again to Crook in March 1886. After spending the last 10 years of his life as a prisoner, Nana would die at Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory, in 1896.

This article was written by Lee A. Silva and originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Wild West magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Wild West magazine today!
A new and rather stunning operation being considered by scientists in China involves performing full-body transplants. This would replace every part of the human body in order to help paralytic patients.

Dr. Xiaoping Ren, an orthopedic surgeon at Harbin Medical University in China, who was involved in the first-hand transplant in the U.S. in 1999, said that he is gathering a team to take up the tests for the study. He has already tried out his ideas on mice and cadavers. However, the mice lived for just a day after the experiment.

Experts are firm that it is not possible to sever and then reconnect a spinal cord. Many others say that the procedure is unethical and "reckless". It is possible for the recipient to die if the surgery fails.

Hence, many doctors have slammed Ren's idea for an operation. They call it impossible.

Dr. Huang Jiefu, a former deputy minister of health in China, said in an interview in November that when the spine is cut, the neurons "cannot be reconnected, so it's scientifically impossible."

"Ethically it's impossible," Dr. Huang added. "How can you put one person's head on another's body?"

His plan is to "remove two heads from two bodies, connect the blood vessels of the body of the deceased donor and the recipient's head, insert a metal plate to stabilize the new neck, bathe the spinal cord nerve endings in a gluelike substance to aid regrowth and finally sew up the skin."

"For most people, it's at best premature and at worst reckless," said Dr. James L. Bernat, a professor of neurology and medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College.

China is accused of disproportionate national ambition and state funding that refuses to give priority to ethics and instead looks at results.

"The Chinese system is not transparent in any way," said Arthur L. Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University. "I do not trust Chinese bioethical deliberation or policy. Add healthy doses of politics, national pride, and entrepreneurship, and it is tough to know what is going on."

Even Chinese scientists are concerned.

"I don't want to see China's scholars, transplant doctors, and scientists deepening the impression that people have of us internationally, that when Chinese people do things they have no bottom line - that anything goes," said Cong Yali, a medical ethicist at Peking University, referring to Dr. Ren's plans.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
According to World Health Organization cancer agency all "very hot" drinks are probably can cause cancer.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) had beforehand appraised coffee may cause cancer yet has changed its opinion.

It now says "no "no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect" of coffee drinking.

"(This) does not show that coffee is certainly safe ... but there is less reason for concern today than there was before," Dana Loomis, the deputy head of IARC's Monograph classification department told a news conference.

These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of oesophageal cancer and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible, said Dr. Christopher Wild, Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

They also had some useful advice for people who drink hot beverages.

Certainly wait a few minutes more before drinking your drink, the IARC said.

Studies in locationsuch as China, Iran, Turkey and South America, where teais traditionally consumed extremely hot (at about 70 C), discovered that the risk of oesophageal cancer rose with the temperature at which the beverage was consumed.

Scientist explained in an interview that while they couldn't figure out the mechanisms behind why hot drinks may cause cancer, there is some proof that they may destroy the cells in the esophagus or cause them to go out of control. They said the WHOs new thinking on hot beverages should be taken more seriously and people should be more aware about the temperatures of various beverages they drink.

In its latest study, the agency noted that some studies revealed coffee drinkers had a lower risk for cancers of the liver and womb. For more than 20 other cancers, the evidence was inconclusive.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
In one of the biggest worldwide study of its kind, analysts looked into more than 6,000 reef overviews in 46 nations over the globe and found 15 'splendid spots'  places where, against all the chances, there were significantly more fish on coral reefs than anticipated.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, battling a tight re-election race, on Monday promised an A$1 billion ($740 million) fund for the reef, which scientists say is suffering common coral bleaching due to climate change around the world.

Reefs are hugely threatened. I saw my own field site melt down and completely die, says Julia Baum from the University of Victoria. The danger is that we lose hope, or we feel like theres nothing to be done. Thats why this study is so important. It shows that the end state of people relying on and using coral reefs doesnt have to be reef degradation.

The study also identified 35 "dark spots", from Jamaica to Tanzania, where there were fewer fish than expected.

Its really nice when you can shine a powerful analytical light on whats going well, says Nancy Knowlton, a self-described ocean optimist based at the Smithsonian Institution. We want to start talking about things that are going well in conservation.

Given the widespread depletion of coral reef fisheries globally, we were really excited to find these bright spots that were faring much better than we anticipated, said lead author Josh Cinner from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. These bright spots are reefs with more fish than expected based on their exposure to pressures like human population, poverty, and unfavorable environmental conditions.

Co-author, Professor Nick Graham of Lancaster University says globally, coral reefs are in decline and current strategies for preserving them are insufficient.

"Our bright spots approach has identified places we did not previously know were so successful, and the really interesting thing is that they are not necessarily untouched by man," he says.

"We believe their discovery offers the potential to develop exciting new solutions for coral reef conservation."

"Importantly, the bright spots had a few things in common, which, if applied to other places, might help promote better reef conditions."

The study was published in Nature and the study had 39 scientists from 34 different universities and conservation groups, including three affiliated with Stanfords Center for Ocean Solutions.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip have been married for almost 69 years, and sometimes they look like they have dropped from a fairytale.

However, there is a catch. They have never displayed affection for each other publicly. Why doesn't the Duke of Edinburgh, who turned 95 on Friday, not hold the Queen's hand in public?

Right from the beginning, the couple has built up a solid marriage that has remained steadfast since 1947. At first the public was not too keen that their Princess should marry Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, as they felt that he did not cut the ice. Still, the royal couple tied the knot, and have held together since then.

But in public, it seems to be hands off---unless the Prince holds out his hand to her during a walk.

Why not? Is there something wrong in holding hands? Do they feel embarrassed? Is there a remote possibility of their marriage being on the rocks?

Not in the least! "If we regard the Queen's record-breaking reign as a success - and I think most of us do - Prince Philip is the co-author of that success," royal biographer Giles Brandreth explained to Radio Times. "The Queen wears the crown, but her husband wears the trousers. He is the power behind the throne - shrewd, steadfast, never-failingly supportive."

It's only that Prince Philip believes in the age-old "stoic values". He is a "pragmatist" unlike his "romantic" son Prince Charles, explained royal biographer "I once asked Prince Philip about the reported differences between him and his eldest son, Prince Charles," Brandreth wrote. "He acknowledged 'one great difference' between them. 'He's a romantic,' he said, 'and I'm a pragmatist - that means we do see things differently.' He paused before adding, with a shrug, 'And because I don't see things as a romantic would, I'm unfeeling.'"

Strangely, their grandson, Prince William, also does not hold wife Kate Middleton's hand when they go out for official royal functions. Is he a pragmatist too?

Not really. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge do exhibit "public display of affection," or PDA informally. However, they do not touch each other when they come out on official engagements.

Royal etiquette expert Myka Meier said that even though there has been no royal guidebook on PDA, Prince William and Kate do not show it, because they happen to be representing Queen Elizbeth II.

"The likely reasoning is more that while travelling on a tour such as the India trip, technically the couple are working representatives of British Monarchy," she said. "The couple are likely to show very little PDA, if any, to remain professional during their designated roles abroad."

One thing they do have in common is---singing. The love for music was passed through the ages. You can listen to the King and Queen sing and decide whether they are involved in a love duet or not.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A group of Kyoto University-based researchers in Japan suggests that cats have basic knowledge of physics and understanding of the cause-effect relationship.

Earlier studies revealed that feline creatures make use of their keen sense of hearing to predict the presence of hidden objects. This ability allows various species in the cat family to anticipate the presence of their hidden prey.

In the recent study published in the journal Animal Cognition, the Japanese researchers tested their hypothesis whether cats could predict an object's hidden presence in a box based on rattling noise when the box was shaken. Moreover, they also wanted to find out whether their feline subjects have the slightest understanding of physical laws by expecting a falling object from the box after flipping it upside down.

"Cats use a causal-logical understanding of noise or sounds to predict the appearance of invisible objects," said Saho Takagi, lead author of the study, The Register reported.

In the experiment, 30 domestic cats were exposed to shaken boxes with and without any accompanying noise. When these boxes were flipped upside down, some hidden objects inside the box fell to the floor while others did not. In all four scenarios, only two complied with the basic laws of physics- a rattling shaken box yielding a dropped object and a non-rattling shaken box with nothing. The noise-producing boxes without a dropped object and silent boxes yielding a falling object seemed to violate physics.

The cats also appeared to stare longer at the rattling boxes than at the silent ones suggesting that they may have expected the presence of hidden object based on the sound. Furthermore, the cats stared longer at the boxes flipped upside down but yielded no falling object which they may have found confusing as such scenarios are not in line with basic laws of physics.

Scientists think that cats are well-equipped with advanced hearing ability that make them excellent predators. With their naturally endowed ability, cats would make use of sound to infer or predict their prey's location or hidden presence at night, Science Daily reported.

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
L ondon has close to 200 street markets, ranging from those with just a sprinkling of fruit and veg stalls, to famous tourist centres, to specialist flower and artisan food markets.

There are few nicer ways to spend a sunny morning than wandering along Columbia Road in Bethnal Green with an armful of flowers, or sorting trash from treasure at Chrisp Street, Poplar.

But would you want a house in one of these streets, dealing with the crowds, the noise, the early morning vans and late-night litter?

It is ace, says Abi Smith, 23, who has rented a flat on Chapel Market, a rare bubble of authenticity in the heart of Islington, since last summer. It is full on but there is a sense of community and I know the traders, and there are some great characters. She gets good deals on fruit and veg but she wishes the bloke who sings to his customers all day would learn some new songs.

At the Woodberry Down new homes development in Finsbury Park, there are regular summer farmers' market days, with a weekly market to come

Even Abi, an account executive for a public relations firm, finds it hard to cope with the 5.30am clatter, six days a week. But buyers on a budget could get a good deal. Simon Deen, head of new homes at Aston Chase estate agents, says homes in the middle of a market street are 10 to 15 per cent cheaper than similar properties a few streets away.

Fans of hustle and bustle

Because of the noise and the fact that flats tend to be above commercial premises they work well for young buyers who like the activity and colour, says Deen. He advises buyers seeking a better investmentto try a few streets away from well-known markets.

Being near, rather than in a market adds value. It is a lifestyle thing, being able to stroll out on a Saturday and enjoy a market is a very nice thing to do. Deen is talking about major markets such Camden and Portobello, which attract tens of thousands of visitors during a weekend.

A more civilised option is to buy near one of the weekly farmers markets spreading rapidly across London. They are smaller, quieter, and attract a different sort of shopper. Homes near Pimlico Road Farmers Market, for instance, will go up in value. Property developers are even creating marketplaces within some new developments as community space. Berkeley Homes is leading the way, introducing regular foodie markets at two of its current schemes.

Woodberry Down in Finsbury Park has few local shops but there are regular summer farmers market days, and as the scheme develops Berkeley plans to build a square with a weekly market. At Royal Arsenal Riverside, in Woolwich, residents began to organise a farmers market last year. The event now attracts more than 2,000 visitors per day, and, since March has been held fortnightly.

Residents began to organise a farmers' market beside the Royal Arsenal Riverside in Woolwich

At Wembley, developer Quintain hosts a weekly Wednesday market in the aptly named Market Square. James Hyman, head of residential agency at Cluttons, said the concept is a win-win for local residents and developers.

It is a very clever, sensible offering, and a lot more interesting than setting up a Tesco Metro, or whatever. It is an easy win, and it is something that will happen more and more. And traders can add stalls and make it an ever-more interesting place.

A great market could have a transformative impact on local values. Look at what Borough Market has done to an area that had nothing much 10 or 15 years ago, says Hyman.

At Royal Arsenal Riverside, in Woolwich, residents began to organise a farmers market last year. The event now attracts more than 2,000 visitors per day, and, since March has been held fortnightly. / Hayley Bray Photography

Broadway market is a Hackney hipster heaven

Over five or six years Broadway Market in Hackney has also been transformed, from a few tired stalls to a hipster heaven. Anne Currell, chief executive of Currell estate agents, believes prices in its immediate vicinity have increased by an extra eight or nine per cent above price rises in the rest of the area thanks to the high-profile market.

It is not just the market, it is all the other things it supports  the boutique shops, the cafes and pubs.

But like Aston Chases Simon Deen, Currell feels the best place to house hunt is not on the front line but a few streets back from the market. When you are walking along the market it is easy to think that this would be a most amazing place to live. But I cant imagine who would enjoy that early morning noise. The real value is within quarter of a mile. You still get the vibe, but you dont get the disruption.

However, while a two-bedroom flat near Broadway Market would cost an estimated 600,000 to 650,000, an identical home on the street itself would cost around 575,000 to 600,000. The saving might sweeten the pill.
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Mobile Message Manager Tops Flyte Systems' Digital Signage Lineup at HITEC

Flyte Systems Expands Product Offering Beyond Hotel Flight Information to Include Hotel EventDisplay, InfoBoard, Meeting Room Signage and Mixed-Use Building Directories

Flyte Systems tapped its parent company, Industrial Television Services (ITS), for an expanded product line of digital signage solutions for hospitality and related businesses. At HITEC in New Orleans, June 20  23, Flyte Systems will showcase a family of advanced display services that go beyond hotel flight information to smooth the travel experience. Topping Flyte Systems innovation list is the Mobile Message Manager, which lets authorized staff update digital signage guest messaging anywhere, anytime from any mobile device. Click here to request information on Flyte Systems' travel and guest information services.

Flyte Systems is coming to HITEC 2016 with a new lineup of digital signage services and systems, said Vice President Scott Triphahn. We deliver much more than airline information today. We drew on our parent company ITS to create display solutions that meet the information needs of virtually any hotel or related business. The first innovation is Mobile Message Manager. This enables hotel operators to instantly change and create digital signage messaging remotely and in real time from a handheld device so meeting information, wayfinding, and events are always current. Managers can provide guests with the most up to date information without having to divert staff from guest facing duty. Applications include informing guests of last minute promotions and specials, shuttle schedules, welcome messages, and weather and travel related events to name a few.

Other new digital signage solutions from Flyte Systems include enhancements to InfoBoard and Hotel EventDisplay. EventDisplay is a reader board of property events that can include property maps and touch screen wayfinding to get conference attendees to their venue faster. EventDisplay can also include individual meeting room signage outside each room, providing confirmation to attendees that they have reached their correct destination. EventDisplay is simple, fast and easy to update centrally. We will implement EventDisplay displays and room signage as a standalone installation or integrated with our InfoBoard display, said Triphahn.

Hotels and other business use InfoBoard as a digital concierge for wayfinding, property event information, local area attractions, flight information, and boarding pass printing. InfoBoard is a digital touchscreen virtual concierge that provides guests with options for area event searches, property outlet menu options, a dining directory, as well as EventDisplay functionality, Triphahn said. Mixed use businesses use InfoBoard to combine a building directory with property and local area attractions for visiting business people. InfoBoards property-customizable format is available in multiple installation options that include wall mounted or freestanding enclosures for greater flexibility to match a variety of lobby design formats.

Flyte Systems continues to smooth the travel experience, but now does it with many more tools to keep travelers on time and in the right place, Triphahn said.

Flyte Systems is a division of Industrial Television Services (ITS), based in Chicago. ITS is a respected digital signage solutions company with more than 50 years of experience specializing in real-time information delivery.

Flyte Systems provides low-cost property promotions, local events, and flight information

Flyte Systems suite of products that serve the traveling public includes:

FlyteBoard displays live flight information for one or more airports. It can be customized with Doppler radar, local traffic, and guest messaging to create an all-in-one travel dashboard. Flyte Board can be wall, floor, or ceiling-mounted and is ideally suited for passenger terminals, lobbies, restaurants, airport parking, convention centers and other off airport venues.

FlytePass combines real-time flights with free, secure boarding pass printing. It is available for both iMac & Windows computers and can be neatly packaged within a kiosk with options to match your decor.

FlyteChannel lets guests view live airport flight information comfortably from their in-room television.

FlytePad is a mobile-ready service that delivers real-time airline information via the iPad.

EventDisplay professionally formats your meeting & events schedule on custom branded digital display. Flight information and wayfinding can also be included for the convenience of your traveling guests.

EventChanne l shows property events and specials on the guests TV.

l shows property events and specials on the guests TV. AmenityBoard lets hotels boost revenue by displaying and promoting onsite amenities anywhere.

lets hotels boost revenue by displaying and promoting onsite amenities anywhere. InfoBoard is an interactive touch screen that saves labor, provides greater guest service, and generates revenue with flight information and much more.

Many hotels and resorts also use Flyte Systems applications to increase revenue with innovative marketing approaches for distressed travelers. For tips on how to generate revenue by providing guests with Flyte Systems airline information, please log on to the Flyte Systems website at www.flytesystems.com.

About Flyte Systems

Flyte Systems is a division of Industrial Television Services (ITS), based in Chicago. ITS is a leading digital signage solutions company with 55+ years experience specializing in real-time information delivery. Flyte Systems was formed in 2007 to offer real-time, web-based travel technology solutions. Flyte Systems provides subscription-based, environmentally responsible airport flight information and digital signage displays for the hospitality, convention center, digital signage industries, and related businesses. The companys solutions deliver accurate, instant, airport-centric updates of flight information  not just FAA-provided departure times that may be inaccurate when there is a ground delay. Flyte Systems solutions enable properties to differentiate themselves and boost repeat business with 'glance-and-go' content and property promotions. Its products use Energy Star-compliant digital displays to help significantly reduce energy consumption and eliminate unnecessary trips to the airport. Clients include Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, Starwood, Westin, IHG, Days Inn, Hotel Sofitel, independent properties, convention centers, and transportation centers.

Contacts:

Flyte Systems

Sandra Ries

Flyte Systems

Phone: 877-Go-Flyte / 877-463-5983 or 847-671-4793 (International)

Email: sandra.ries@flytesystems.com

www.flytesystems.com

Media Contact

Julie Keyser-Squires, APR

Softscribe Inc.

609 SW 8th St., Suite 600

Bentonville, AR 72712

Phone: 404-256-5512

Email: Julie(at)softscribeinc.com

www.softscribeinc.com
Hotel History: Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana

1. Hotel Monteleone (1886), New Orleans, Louisiana (570 rooms)

The oldest hotel in the French Quarter is the Hotel Monteleone, with its ornate baroque facade, which was built in 1886 in the Beaux-Arts architectural style. It remains one of the few longstanding family-owned hotels in the U.S.

Antonio Monteleone arrived in New Orleans from Sicily in 1880 and set up his cobbler's shop on Royal Street. In 1886, he bought a small hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets and merged it with the Commercial Hotel. Since then, the Hotel Monteleone has expanded five times. In 1908, when 300 new rooms were added, the hotels name was changed from the Commercial Hotel to the Hotel Monteleone. When Antonio Monteleone died in 1913, his son Frank assumed the management and added 200 more rooms in 1928, just before the Great Depression. One of the few family hotels to survive the Depression years, the Hotel Monteleone remained unchanged until the fourth expansion in 1954 when the original building was demolished for a new building that contains guestrooms, ballrooms, dining rooms and cocktail lounges. In 1964, the fifth and final major expansion added more guestrooms, and a Sky Terrace with a swimming pool and cocktail lounge.

The hotel's famed grandfather clock still chimes in the lobby surrounded by shimmering chandeliers, polished marble floors and gleaming brass lamps. The legendary Carousel Bar & Lounge revolves every fifteen minutes and the elegant Queen Anne Ballroom hosts fashionable parties and memorable events. Some of Americas most renowned authors including Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Truman Capote were frequent visitors.

References to the Hotel appear in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tatoo and Orpheus Descending; Rebecca Wells'Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Altars Everywhere; Richard Ford's A Piece of My Heart; Eudora Welty's A Curtain of Green; Gerald Clarke's Capote: A Biography; Earle Stanley Gardner's Owls Don't Blink; Ernest Hemingway's Night Before Battle and Harry Stephen Keeler's The Voice of the Seven Sparrows.

More recently, famous authors like Anne Rice, Stephen Ambrose and John Grisham have made the Hotel Monteleone their home when visiting New Orleans. In June of 1999, the Monteleone was designated an official landmark by the Friends of the Library Association. The Plaza and Algonquin in New York are the only other hotels in the United States that share this honor.

The Hotel Monteleone's Carousel Piano Bar & Lounge is the only revolving bar in New Orleans. The 25-seat bar turns on 2,000 large steel rollers, pulled by a chain powered by a one-quarter horsepower motor at a constant rate of one revolution every 15 minutes. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Carousel Bar was the site of a popular nightclub, the Swan Room, where musicians such as Liberace and Louis Prima performed. The Carousel Bar celebrated its 60th anniversary in July 2009.

The Hotel Monteleone is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the Preferred Hotel Group and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

*excerpted and expanded from my book Built To Last: 100+Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi, AuthorHouse 2013.

2. Available Now: Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry

If you want to order an autographed hardcover copy (with dust jacket), send a check for $43.00 to:

Stanley Turkel

147-03 Jewel Avenue

Flushing, N.Y. 11367

Be sure to include your mailing address.

About Stanley Turkel, CMHS

Stanley Turkel was designated as the 2015 and the 2014 Historian of the Year by Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This award is presented to an individual for making a unique contribution in the research and presentation of hotel history and whose work has encouraged a wide discussion, greater understanding and enthusiasm for American History.

Turkel is a well-known consultant in the hotel industry. He operates his hotel consulting practice serving as an expert witness in hotel-related cases, providing asset management and hotel franchising consultation. He is certified as a Master Hotel Supplier Emeritus by the Educational Institute of the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

Stanley Turkel is one of the most widely-published authors in the hospitality field. More than 275 articles on various hotel subjects have been posted in hotel magazines and on the Hotel-Online, BlueMauMau, HotelNewsResource and eTurboNews websites. Two of his hotel books have been promoted, distributed and sold by the American Hotel & Lodging Educational Institute (Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry and Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi). A third hotel book (Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York) was called "passionate and informative" by the New York Times. His fourth hotel book was described by the New York Times: Nostalgia for the Citys caravansaries will be kindled by Stanley Turkels... fact-filled... Hotel Mavens: Lucius M. Boomer, George C. Boldt and Oscar of the Waldorf.

All of these books can be ordered from the publisher by visiting www.stanleyturkel.com.



Stanley Turkel, CMHS

917-628-8549

stanturkel@aol.com

www.stanleyturkel.com
Studio 6 Opens 100th Location

G6 Hospitality today announced the opening of its 100th Studio 6 location in Colorado City, TX. This milestone property is a new construction extended stay Studio 6 featuring the brand's new award-winning 'Phoenix' design.

The newly-built Studio 6 is located at 940 Interstate Highway 20 West (exit 215) in Colorado City, TX. It is owned by Mukesh Bhakta and operating under the entity PK Rock Hospitality, LLC. Bhakta has been an operator of the iconic brands for more than 15 years, and built the first franchise Studio 6 in Port Arthur, TX, in 2001. Currently, Bhakta operates nine additional properties located throughout the states of Texas and Louisiana.

"G6 Hospitality is thrilled to celebrate the opening of its 100thStudio 6 alongside our long-term partner and friend Mukesh Bhakta, who has been a dedicated partner and a loyal friend of our brands for many years," said Dean Savas, Executive Vice President of Franchise and International Development, G6 Hospitality.

This brand new extended stay property consists of 64 rooms featuring elements of the brand's award-winning "Phoenix" design, which incorporates sleek wood-effect flooring, flat-screen televisions, pedestal beds, granite bathroom countertops and a bold color scheme. Additionally, the Studio 6 Colorado City offers all the amenities and services guests need for a comfortable extended stay, including a fully-equipped kitchen with pots, pans, dishes, microwave, refrigerator, guest laundry, cable TV, available Wi-Fi, and parking.

G6 Hospitality, management company of the iconic Studio 6 and Motel 6 brands, was acquired by Blackstone Group in October 2012. Since then, Blackstone has invested nearly a half-billion dollars in the brands. By the end of 2015, G6 Hospitality reported record growth of 26 percent. Additionally, the company continues aggressive renovations of its network, featuring an all-new, modern room design that is not only more aestheticly pleasing, but also more functional and energy efficient. It is a new standard that is raising the bar for the economy lodging segment.


Earlier this month, while on tour in Europe, Freddie Gibbs was arrested in France as the suspected perpetrator of a rape that had allegedly taken place in Austria some time in 2015. He was arrested in France, right before he was about to take the stage at the Rex in Toulouse.

He has been in a French jail until today, as his lawyer has now reported, via the Daily Mail, that a French court has ordered that Gibbs be released on 50,000 ($56,000). His release comes a week before his extradition hearing on June 23.

After appearing in court last week, Gibbs lawyer stated that his client categorically denies the allegations made against him by Austria and is even very surprised that Austria is taking this on a year later, just as he is on tour in Europe.

Gibbs will presumably remain in France until he awaits next weeks court date, when hell face the prospect of being moved to a jail in Austria.

[via]

Freddie Gibbs
There were times when Laura Mvula was convinced that she would never release another album. Which is why she is feeling so good about The Dreaming Room.

I was so new to the cliches of the music industry. Laura Mvula laughs out loud and then pauses for a moment to collect her thoughts.

Id hear someone mention second album syndrome, she adds, and Id have to ask what it meant. I wish I hadnt learned quite so deeply, because I definitely took it to heart  as though I was guaranteed to struggle, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Laura breaks into another throaty laugh. She has an unusual, yet endearing, habit of punctuating statements  no matter how dark  with a giggle. Which is just as well: because life has been rather cruel to her recently.

2013s Sing To The Moon was a startling debut by anyones standards. With its success, Mvulas life changed beyond recognition: she went from being a receptionist in a 9 to 5 job, to a ubiquitous presence on stage, screen, and just about everywhere else. But as her star rose inexorably, so too did her issues with acute anxiety.

Panic attacks became the norm, to the point where being alone in a room was impossible. Her marriage ended. Her confidence was shot. And the prospect of a follow-up couldnt have been further from her mind. So perhaps, as The Dreaming Room hits shelves, those infectious chuckles make complete sense.

The reason I sound so positive and joyous right now is the I can hardly believe its happened, she admits. Id decided beforehand that I couldnt do an album  I wouldnt tell anyone that, of course, wouldnt verbalise it  but in my mind I was sure I had nothing to say. How was I going to deceive the world into thinking there was something there? I assure you that if we were talking 18 months ago, Id be telling you to write it off  to take Sing To The Moon and tell Laura Mvula fans that that will be all.

How does she feel now about her debut?

I dont regret it, she slowly begins. But I feel like I misled a lot of people. They got excited about something that was very neatly packaged. Thats not a bad thing, but it was very digestible and very harmless. Even in terms of the frequencies it played at, it didnt hit you hard  the nuances were in the form of string arrangements.

UPLIFTING TRIUMPH

With a degree in composition, Laura is as technically accomplished a writer as youll find  which, in itself, brings its own considerable challenges.

Ive heard people say, Oh, theres the girl who takes herself too seriously, and Unh, shes classically trained, she laughs. And then I start to overthink it, that maybe I need to dilute things, or find ways to reach an audience that might not necessarily listen otherwise. But when I started to think like that  even though it was only for a little while  well, man, it really messed me up. It just wasnt the way to go  it felt like hitting my head against a brick wall.

Instead, it was a case of taking things slowly; the first track she completed was Overcome, complete with a contribution from the legendary Nile Rodgers.

We met on the red carpet of the BRIT Awards. He said hed like to work with me one day, but I assumed thats just something someone in showbiz says. She roars with laughter. Do you know people actually say, Oh darling, we must do lunch, yah yah yah? That shit actually happens! But anyway, he got in touch a year later and asked what the biggest song on the record was, because he wanted to help.

It was a dream-like moment, hearing the passion for what Im doing in his voice. I hate the word infectious, because it just sounds like a disease to me, but the way he spreads the feeling youre doing something wonderful, that its the best thing hes ever heard, that youre amazing  you really do feel youve got something special.

The album alternates between dark defiance and uplifting triumph.

Thats the magic of it, isnt it? she marvels. It came out of such a dark time, but the beauty of the journey was that, running throughout the process, was something very precious. Even though you might end a day having done five bars of music  and youre not even sure its what you really want to say  the next day you might do twice as much. And then it comes alive.

Indeed it does...

Advertisement

The Dreaming Room is out on RCA Records on June 17.
WASHINGTON - The future of oil and gas drilling in the U.S. Arctic faces a critical test as the White House considers whether to continue leasing undersea fields off Alaska's remote northern coastline.

For decades, oil workers have drilled into the frozen tundra of northern Alaska, tapping a reserve that once accounted for close to a quarter of the nation's oil production. But as the flow of oil from those fields has declined, companies like ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell looked out to the iceberg-packed waters of the Arctic Ocean.

Now, the Obama administration will decide whether the potential benefit to U.S. energy security outweighs both its commitment to reduce the country's carbon emissions and the potential risk of an oil spill in what are perhaps the country's harshest and most remote waters.

Since Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced in March that lease sales along the Atlantic coastline were off the table, attention has shifted to the Arctic as energy industry trade groups and environmentalists try to sway the White House. That has sparked concern among oil companies operating in Alaska that their opportunity to drill off northern Alaska could be finished.

More Information Global energy resources north of the Arctic Circle Oil: 90 billion barrels estimated (13 percent of undiscovered conventional resources) Natural Gas: 1.7 trillion cubic feet estimated (30 percent of undiscovered conventional resources) Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration See More Collapse

Kara Moriarty, president of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, which represents companies such as Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil, said she thought canceling the lease sales "would be incredibly shortsighted. The environmentalists should go look at what the forecasts show about where their energy is going to come from."

For now, lease sales are scheduled in 2020 and 2022 for fields off Alaska's Arctic coast in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. But those lease sales remain under review. Even if approved, the administration has warned that development and operations would be under strict oversight from government inspectors to ensure minimal danger to Arctic wildlife.

A coalition of environmental groups that includes the Sierra Club and the Alaska Wilderness League was preparing this week to deliver a petition with 1 million signatures opposing lease sales in the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which oversees offshore drilling, Greenpeace senior researcher Tim Donaghy said.

Their demands follow a meeting of world leaders in Paris in December at which close to 200 countries agreed to put carbon emission controls in place to keep the planet from warming no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

"We've discovered more than enough oil to put us over that limit," Donaghy said. "Looking for more oil at this point is counterproductive."

Efforts to tap the federal waters off northern Alaska stretch back to the 1980s, but companies have produced only one commercially viable well. Last year, Shell announced it was pulling out of the U.S. Arctic, despite having already spent billions of dollars, amid litigation from environmental advocacy groups like Greenpeace and a historic bust in crude prices.

Companies including Exxon Mobil Corp., BP and ConocoPhillips have also relinquished offshore leases in the U.S. and Canadian Arctic, effectively ending any prospect of any development there for years to come.

For the oil industry that remains on the North Slope region of Alaska, offshore drilling is a lifeline. The amount of oil moved through the famed Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which runs 800 miles south to the port of Valdez, is down to less than 600,000 barrels a day, from more than 2 million barrels a day in the late 1980s, according to Aleyska, the company that operates the pipeline.

The hope among those working in remote outposts like Prudhoe Bay is that once oil prices rebound, as some analysts predict, companies will be there to bid on the leases. At stake is an industry that is critical to the Alaska economy. With oil revenues down since the bust, the state government is now running a $4 billion budget deficit and is talking about imposing a state income tax for the first time in decades.

"I know (the oil companies) won't be there if they don't have access," Aleyska spokeswoman Michelle Egan said. "Historically, there's been a lot of interest in that area."

Only 1,200 miles from the North Pole, the vast majority of the North Slope is wilderness, uninhabited by man and ruled by caribou and wolves. But along the region's coastline live native Inupiat, who trace their history on the land back millennia.

The village of Point Lay, population 247, sits in perpetual sunlight this time of year, its people still hunting walrus and bowhead whales to feed their families, tribal president Marie Tracey said.

The fear is an oil spill, like BP's Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico, would kill off the marine and bird life upon which the village depends for its survival. But native leaders are far from unified on the issue, with native-owned corporations like the Arctic Slope Regional Corp. pressing for development that protects the ecosystem, but also delivers the oil revenues to tribal members.

But Tracey and other native leaders opposing the new leases say the risk of a spill is too great.

"We have our food source out there in the ocean, and if there's an oil spill out there, there's no scientific proof they clean it up," Tracey said. "It would take days, if not weeks, for the Coast Guard to get up here."

For now, it's unclear whether the Obama administration will award new leases. At a Senate hearing last month, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management director Abigail Hopper demurred when asked to describe which way her agency was leaning on the Arctic drilling. But before Hopper could leave, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, asked about a tweet from the agency's account.

It included a photo of Hopper meeting with Tracey and other native Alaskans, saying, "Great meeting w/ Tribal Council of Native Village Point Lay & @alaskawild reps re: opposition to #Arctic drilling."

"I looked at it, and it doesn't necessarily show me there's impartiality within BOEM," Murkowski said. "How do we not conclude that the die is already cast?"
In a surprising turn for the housing market, single-family home sales jumped 10 percent in May, the biggest year-over-year increase since winter 2014.

The springtime boost was concentrated in properties that sold for between $150,000 and $500,000, new data from the Houston Association of Realtors show. The higher and lower ends of the market saw declines.

A greater supply of homes for sale compared with last year is drawing out buyers who no longer have to compete as hard to get a house under contract, Mario Arriaga, the association's chairman, said Wednesday.

"The bidding wars were keeping a lot of people interested on the sidelines," he said. "Now that the inventory has increased and we're getting back to more of a normalized market, we're seeing a lot of those people come forward."

Buyers in May closed on 7,343 homes. The median price was $225,000, flat from a year earlier.

Even as the Houston economy struggles with fallout from the oil price collapse, home sales are up 3.6 percent so far this year, according to HAR, which analyzes sales handled through the Multiple Listing Service primarily in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties.

Arriaga's assistant is an example of the type of buyer propelling this region's housing market, even as thousands of oil and gas workers are losing their jobs and low oil prices are forcing companies into bankruptcy.

After a stint as missionaries in Ecuador, Naomi Swenson and her husband moved to the Houston area last fall because they have family here. They also like the warm weather and relatively good wages.

Sellers hold cards

When they started shopping for a house a couple of months ago, the couple was under the impression it was a buyer's market. They quickly realized sellers had more of the upper hand, particularly with homes in the $200,000 price range.

"Houses were coming on the market on a Thursday and already were 'option pending' on Saturday," Swenson said. "It was really surprising how fast the homes are going. For our bracket, we were really taken aback."

Inventory in May was 3.6 months, flat compared to April but 21 percent higher than a year ago. Measuring inventory in months provides a gauge of the market's heath. Anything under 6 months is generally considered a seller's market.

The supply boost is helping take some of the pressure off prices, which have risen sharply in recent years, especially inside Loop 610.

Barton Smith, an economist who has been studying the local housing market for several decades, believes real estate here has yet to feel the worst of the downturn. He's not predicting anything close to what Houston saw in the 1980s, but he warned of slower times ahead.

"It probably got a bit overpricey, so there's likely to be a correction of that," said Smith, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Houston.

Demographic changes, however, are helping lift demand.

Millennial buyers between 25 and 34 make up a larger percentage of the Houston population compared to the nation overall and have taken out more mortgages as a percentage of the market here than they have on a national level, based on data from Realtor.com, a national real estate listing site.

"Houston has a higher percentage of the older half of millennials active in the purchase market, representing a third of the transactions. I bet that's a big shift," said chief economist Jonathan Smoke.

Boomers make changes

Baby boomers, especially those wanting to downsize or move closer in, are also driving sales.

Low mortgage rates, too, are giving shoppers more buying power, especially in places like Houston where prices haven't appreciated as rapidly as they have in other hot markets.

Swenson and her husband are scheduled to close Friday on a 10-year-old house with three bedrooms they found in the Wimbledon Falls subdivision of the Tomball area.

The house was in the couple's price range, but they were able to get it for less than asking price because it had been on the market more than a month.

"I don't know what's up with this house," Swenson said. "I think it's meant for us."
Texas' state leaders are very focused on attracting business investment, but according to a new analysis, they're not taking advantage of a big potential return available to them right now: Spending on education.

According to the Perryman Group, an economic consultancy based in Waco, each incremental dollar spent on public education increases economic output over the long term by $49.69. The study uses the methodology behind a 2007 cost-benefit analysis conducted by researchers at Columbia University, and takes into account direct private spending, government revenues, and reduced social welfare needs generated by adults who had a better-funded education as children.
You knew him as Ross of "Friends," the voice of the neurotic giraffe from the "Madagascar" series and, more recently, as a Kardashian (Robert, not Kim) in "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" miniseries. Now David Schwimmer is embarking on his first recurring television role in more than a decade with AMC's gritty new series "Feed the Beast."

A crime drama set in the Bronx, Schwimmer plays a widowed father and former restaurant owner/wine sommelier who's suddenly caught in the middle of an organized crime ring. His life and his son's depend on erecting a new establishment that's a financial success, though he must first overcome his own painful history.

Schwimmer, 49, spoke with The Times about returning to series TV, becoming a father and the soft spot he now has for Robert Kardashian.

Q: What made you want to take on the role of a grieving, alcoholic single father in "Feed the Beast"?

A: Really, my heart just went out to the guy. Tommy's a single parent raising a mixed race, 11-year-old boy, and they both survived this horrible tragedy of losing the love of his life and his boy's mother. The boy hasn't spoken in a year since witnessing his mother being killed. I was attracted to the role of being a father because now I am one. I haven't really had the opportunity to play a dad since I've become one, except very briefly as Kardashian in the O.J. thing, but this explores that in much more depth.

Q: AMC is now synonymous with two of the decade's most celebrated series: "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." The bar is pretty high. Any pressure?

A: While this show is unique because of the whole cooking aspect and getting a restaurant on its feet, it is a one-hour drama in the traditional sense of "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." It is character-driven, there's a crime aspect, and dark comedy comes out of it. It's just going to be a question of getting eyeballs on it, because there's so much to choose from now.

Q: Are you a foodie?

A: I actually just had this conversation with a writer from Food & Wine. I asked her what qualifies a person to be a foodie? ... She then asked, 'Once you arrive in a city, do you immediately seek out the most interesting restaurant in the city?' I said, yeah, and then she said, 'You're a foodie.' That was proof, I guess, I am a foodie.

Q: What were the challenges of playing Kardashian, or at least playing him empathetically?

A: I tried not to have any preconceptions about who he was. I was trying to excavate who this man was. All I knew when I was watching the trial, it was always like, who is this white guy sitting next to O.J. the entire time? He was on the defense team but I didn't get what he did - I mean, he wasn't cross-examining anyone. And all the other egos in the room overshadowed him. The attention was on the flashier players. Kardashian seemed to be this private, modest, quiet player that I wanted to know more about.

Q: Since "Friends" ended in 2004, you've done film, theater, TV cameos and directed. Where do you feel most at home?

A: I feel equally comfortable on stage as I do in television or film. I don't really have a strategy. Maybe if I did I'd be a much bigger film actor or star, I don't know. I go with my gut when I read material - sometimes it's a film, a play, a cameo, a television series. I've always thought of this career as a very, very long one. I hope to be doing it until I can no longer see, walk, whatever. Maybe even then I'll be able to take a role - "Scent of a Woman 2."

Q: The success of "Friends" has been a blessing and a curse.

A: It's a paradox for sure. On one hand, I'm typecast, or there is the danger of being seen or believed as that one character. On the other hand, it was a piece of pop culture and television history, and it provided financial security. For any actor or artist, financial stability is a huge blessing. ... There's not a day that goes by that I'm not grateful.

Q: Have you noticed that since "Friends" was released on Netflix it's now resonating with millennials?

A: I've noticed. It's really lovely to think it's appealing to a new generation. My daughter's 5 - will it still appeal in a decade? I'm sure my daughter or her friends will be more than happy to tell me when they get there.

Q: "Feed the Beast" is your first return to a TV series since "Friends." So you once again get to develop a character with a potentially long arc.

A: Right, fingers crossed the show is picked up for another season. I've always been fascinated by the job of a wine sommelier. Like what kind of person becomes a somme? What I learned from one of my close friends here in the city who is a top somme is that there is no one path. It was fun to invent Tommy's back story and figure out what his journey was from the streets of Queens to this job.

Q: He's so troubled, it's impossible to reconcile with the voice of Melman the goofy giraffe from "Madagascar."

A: First, I'm really thrilled to hear that, and I hope others have a similar experience where they can watch this new guy that I'm trying to create. I'm also highly aware that there will be some people who will not be able to distinguish that this is a different character. It's OK. It's happened my entire career. Even when I did "Band of Brothers," or "The Iceman," it's like, 'Oh, that's Ross in World War II!' Or whatever they want to say.
A 43-year-old man claimed he shot and killed his wife and teenage daughter in self-defense after they tried to attack him with knives at a home in south Houston.

The shooting happened about 2:45 a.m. in the 15100 block of Alkay near Anderson, said Sgt. Brian Chebret, a homicide investigator with the Houston Police Department.
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Portions of Texas 146 reopened Thursday morning about an hour after a crash forced a shutdown of the freeway near the Fred Hartman Bridge.

The two-vehicle wreck happened about 9 a.m. on southbound Texas 146 near the bridge heading into La Porte from Baytown, according to Houston TranStar.
To close a $95 million budget shortfall in the Houston school district, interim Superintendent Ken Huewitt has proposed cutting 130 central-office jobs, scrapping controversial teacher bonuses, and decreasing funding for campuses to spend on staff, supplies and other expenses.

The school board is scheduled to vote Thursday on the $1.8 billion budget, which spares nearly all teachers' jobs, based on preliminary data.

"We tried to stay away from the classroom as much as we could," said Glenn Reed, the Houston Independent School District's general manager of budgeting.

The district's financial woes stem largely from HISD for the first time being considered so property wealthy that it owes money to the state. The situation sets up an unusual predicament for the Houston school board: It now is supposed to call an election asking voters to authorize sending the so-called "recapture" payments to the state. The district estimates having to forfeit $162 million in local property tax revenue.

If the school board refuses to call the election or if voters reject approval of the payments, the state education commissioner is charged with detaching pricey commercial properties from HISD and assigning them to poorer school districts to be taxed at their rates. The detachment scenario has never happened, according to the Texas Education Agency.

"To a certain extent we're picking our poison," said Scott McClelland, chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership's education committee and Houston president of the H-E-B grocery chain.

Voters in Galveston ISD rejected authorization for recapture payments in 2006 - marking the only failed election, according to the state education agency - but later granted approval when the commissioner invoked the detachment statute.

The recapture system, known as Robin Hood, was designed to promote equity, but the number of districts considered property wealthy has ballooned to more than 200.

Lawmakers traditionally have adjusted the formula to keep HISD, the state's largest district, from tipping into recapture, but they failed to do so during the last legislative session. HISD officials note that although the district includes wealthy businesses, more than 80 percent of its students come from low-income families.

House Speaker Joe Straus called in early June for a committee to study school funding before lawmakers reconvene in January. The San Antonio Republican noted HISD's situation in his announcement, which followed a May ruling from the Texas Supreme Court declaring the school-finance system constitutional. HISD had joined about 600 districts in suing the state.

Apollo program nixed

Huewitt's budget proposal abolishes the district's "Apollo" reform program, which spread an extra $20 million among a few dozen of the lowest-performing schools. The money was used for tutors and extending the school day. Instead, Huewitt has pitched revamping the district's funding system to target more campuses, giving the most extra money to those with the highest concentration of low-income students, who may struggle more academically.

All schools would take a cut of $179 per student under Huewitt's plan, but the losses would be mitigated by shifting federal dollars designated to help low-income students.

At the central office, 80 jobs currently staffed would be eliminated, and 50 vacant positions would be closed, according to data provided by the district Wednesday. The employees losing positions can apply for other district jobs, and some already have landed them, according to interim chief financial officer Sherrie Robinson.

About 360 tutoring positions, part of the Apollo reform program, also were slashed, but many tutors have landed jobs as teaching assistants, Reed said.

Another major cut, saving $10 million, essentially ends the district's performance bonus program for teachers. Money, however, already has been allocated to pay bonuses in early 2017 for last school year.

Cuts vary at campuses

The impact of the campus-level cuts is less clear because principals in HISD craft their own budgets. Reed said Wednesday that only a handful of teachers appeared to still lack jobs.

In some cases, principals no longer will hire retired teachers on a part-time basis to tutor students or will wait until later in the year to bring them on board, said one of the district's chief school officers, Sam Sarabia.

Principals also reduced front-office staff and expect to cut spending on technology, library books and supplies, Sarabia said.

The board also must wrestle with how to cut another $6 million that Huewitt's staff says would have been saved by cutting some bus routes and standardizing bus schedules. The latter would have changed the times that schools start and end. Huewitt, however, told principals in an email June 7 that he was scrapping the idea following criticism.

The district could dip into its main savings account to cover the costs, but Huewitt's proposal already calls for taking $10 million from a smaller reserve fund that would be left with $5 million. The main rainy-day fund has roughly $250 million, keeping money on hand to cover payroll before state funding comes in.
A Texas appeals court has thrown out a gag order that prohibited bikers charged in a deadly Waco melee last year - and their lawyers - from talking to the media.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals - the state's highest criminal court - issued an order Wednesday that lifted a stay that had been in place since August, when the court ruled that the gag order was wrong but allowed it to stay in place pending further consideration.

The gag order challenge was supported by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and several media companies, including The Associated Press and the Hearst Corp., which owns the Houston Chronicle.

Nine people were killed and about two dozen wounded in the May 2015 gun battle that officials say began as a turf war between the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle clubs. Nearly 200 people were charged with conspiring to engage in organized crime.

The gag order was imposed when biker Matthew Clendennen and his lawyer, Clint Broden, were told by a state district judge - months after the arrests - that no one involved in the case would be permitted to speak with the media.

The judge said the order was put in place to safeguard the case, but Broden and others contend the order was fueled by prosecutors who sought to stop bikers from telling their side of the story.

"Today, almost a year after the gag order was entered, the Court of Criminal Appeals, in a unanimous decision, lifted the stay and restored Mr. Clendennen's First Amendment rights," Broden said in a statement.

Broden said that prosecutors sought the gag order after they had "launched an unprecedented publicity offensive to scare the public with horror stories of roving biker gangs."

Sgt. Patrick Swanton, of the Waco Police Department, said that his department has already said all that needs to be said.

"We don't comment on the rhetoric defense attorney's use trying to protect their clients who have been arrested for criminal offenses," Swanton said.

The district attorney's office did not respond to a request for comment.
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State Sen. Rodney Ellis appears poised to secure the Democratic nomination for Harris County Precinct 1 commissioner, after he announced endorsements Wednesday from more than half of the precinct chairs tasked with making the selection.

Ellis is vying to replace longtime commissioner El Franco Lee, who died in January with his name still on the March 1 primary ballot, leaving 125 precinct chairs to choose his replacement. The candidate who earns majority support will be unopposed in November.

Commissioner Gene Locke, who was appointed to finish Lee's term, is seen as Ellis' top opponent heading into the June 25 vote. Several others, including City Councilman Dwight Boykins, have expressed interest in the seat.

Ellis' 65 endorsements - two more than what would be needed to win if everyone eligible shows up to vote - do not guarantee his victory, as precinct chairs could either switch allegiance or fail to attend the nominating meeting.

However, University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus said, "It certainly looks pretty good for Ellis."

The county commissioner job is highly coveted despite often being low-profile. In urban Precinct 1, which covers much of Houston, the commissioner represents 1.2 million people and controls a $200 million budget. Commissioners have a base annual salary of nearly $170,000.

Ellis' endorsement list can be seen as a show of strength in the homestretch of the nontraditional campaign, signaling to precinct chairs that they ought to think about lining up behind the likely winner. Yet it also provides the senator's opponents with a road map to his supporters, whom they could attempt to sway.

"We sort of assume that Locke and Boykins will be making calls to everyone on that list trying to get them to change their minds," said Grant Martin, Ellis' general consultant.

Locke and Boykins both questioned the validity of Ellis' list.

"I've seen the list, and my response is: politics, politics, politics," Locke said. "I believe that the list that Sen. Ellis released is not accurate."

Asked what was inaccurate, Locke said, "I've talked to the precinct chairs, and they tell me a different story."

Boykins questioned Ellis' endorsements on Facebook. The councilman has not formally announced his candidacy because of concern that doing so could force him to resign from City Council under a state "resign-to-run" provision.

Martin said Ellis' campaign collected cards pledging support from 61 of the 65 endorsers. They received a verbal confirmation from the other four.

To win, a candidate needs the backing of a majority of the precinct chairs who attend the Democratic Party's June 25 executive committee meeting.

If no candidate wins outright in the first round, the top two vote-earners will advance to a runoff vote.
GALVESTON - .The media spotlight that shined brightly on a shark bite suffered by a Kerrville girl came as no surprise to Galveston Beach Patrol Chief Peter Davis, but it still troubled the veteran official.

The girl was floating on a ring float in knee-deep water Tuesday about 5:30 p.m., splashing the water with her feet. A school of tiny fish swarmed around her, dozens of them leaping out of the water, a sign that they were fleeing a predator, Davis said.

A shark bit the girl in the left calf. Her father immediately heard his daughter cry out, scooped her into his arms and dashed for the shore, the tiny fish beating against his legs as he crashed through the surf.

Davis said the shark was likely snapping at what it thought was a fish. A Galveston Health District spokesman said the girl would recover from her injury.

Davis understood the public interest in the shark bite, but he was puzzled why so little media attention was given to the death of a man who had drowned a day earlier.

The answer may lie in the outsized place in the human psyche held by sharks and other predators, said George Burgess, director of the international Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida Campus in Gainesville, Fla.

The public fascination with sharks persists even though true shark attacks are rare and shark deaths even more so. About six people are killed annually worldwide by sharks, Burgess said. In Texas, the shark-bitten girl, whose name has not been released, was the first shark victim this year and only the 42nd person to be injured by a shark since 1837, according to the International Shark Attack File.

Humans are arguably a bigger threat to sharks. Commercial and recreational fishing as well as a market for shark fins has driven at least five species of sharks to the edge of extinction.

Profiting through fear

Shark Week, Discovery Channel's week devoted to sharks, is an artifact of how large sharks loom in the public mind and the media. Shark Week began in 1988 and is cable television's longest running program, according to TV.com.

Burgess is gratified as a scientist to see the life of sharks explained in a television program, but is dismayed by Shark Week's focus on sharks' ferocity. "As we have seen, shows like Shark Week, which are money makers, they go for the lowest common denominator, which is fear," Burgess said. "That's pretty much playing to the cheap seats."

He laments that Shark Week doesn't spend more time delving into the less fearsome aspects of the lives of sharks.

"It's more fascinating when you get down to the nitty gritty," Burgess said. "They are special animals in what they've got going for them," explaining that they are a perfect predator that has survived for millions of years.

Like Shark Week, the media seizes on shark attack stories because of the public's fascination with frightening creatures that are able to harm humans.

"It comes down to a thought process that we as humans are above any danger," Burgess said. "We deserve 100 percent safety in our minds because we manipulated the world around us."

Sharks, alligators, grizzly bears and other predators are creatures that are outside human control and can puncture that sense of safety, he said.

'Summer of the Shark'

The fear generated by sharks can sometimes translate into media excess, such as the Summer of 2001, which a Time Magazine cover infamously dubbed the "Summer of the Shark."

A summer of frenzied media coverage of shark attacks began July 6, 2001, when 8-year-old Jessie Arbogast was bitten by a bull shark in shallow water on a beach near Pensacola, Fla.

Immediately after the attack a New Yorker lost his leg to a shark in the Bahamas.

A surfer was attacked July 15 about 6 miles from the beach where Arbogast was attacked.

The shark story consumed the media until terrorists flew two hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11., even though there were fewer shark attacks in 2001 than the previous year.

After the "Summer of the Shark," Burgess called a conference of editors and producers to discuss the excessive coverage.

"The take-home message to scientists like us was, 'get over it,' " Burgess said. "We are always going to run headline stories with shark attacks because that's what pulls people's chains."
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BRUSSELS - U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has told NATO allies America will take a new look at its plans to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year, a British official says, a fresh indication that U.S. involvement in the country is not waning in the final months of Barack Obama's presidency.

British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Wednesday that "Carter told us the troop numbers and the dispositions are being looked at again."

The American reassurance to NATO allies comes on the heels of Obama's decision last week to give the military wider latitude to support Afghan forces against the Taliban, both in the air and on the ground.

'Willingness' to rethink

Far from ending the two wars he inherited from the Bush administration, Obama is wrestling with an expanded set of conflicts as his presidency nears an end, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, with no end in sight. In Afghanistan, a Taliban resurgence has upset Washington's exit strategy, which called for troop reductions from 9,800 to 5,500 by the end of 2016.

But Carter told reporters that Obama has indicated his willingness to re-examine force levels based on the intensified fight against the Taliban and Carter expects Obama to do that as the year goes on.

Carter's comments came as NATO allies agreed to extend their Afghanistan training mission and keep troops in all four sections of the country in 2017.

'Flexible' approach

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the allies "will have what we call a flexible regional approach."

The alliance also is "now working on the final decisions for our exact force numbers into 2017. So that's something we will decide later on this year," Stoltenberg said.

The U.S. troop-cutting plan is facing renewed scrutiny in light of the Taliban's resurgence. Former U.S. commanders have urged Obama to keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan into next year.

NATO's decision to maintain a regional presence essentially shelves earlier plans to consolidate forces in and around Kabul, the national capital, next year. NATO will retain its hub-and-spoke system, which has headquarters in Kabul and Bagram, German troops working with Afghan forces in the north, Italian troops doing the same in the west, and U.S. forces in the southern region around Kandahar and in the east in Jalalabad.

A senior NATO diplomat said officials believe NATO will get commitments for the $5 billion needed to fund the current number of Afghan security forces through 2020.
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SAN ANTONIO - Longshoreman Andrea Gardner is headed to the Texas Democratic Convention in San Antonio with a heart full of hope thanks to an unlikely source: presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

She sees a chance for Democrat Hillary Clinton to win the Texas vote for the White House by virtue of Republicans being poised to nominate the billionaire businessman with a propensity for remarks that offend.

"Given who the Republicans have picked for their nominee, I think it's very possible," Gardner, 61, who lives outside of Houston, said of Clinton's chance of taking Texas. "If they had a more reasonable, viable candidate, then I would say that it would probably be a lot tougher."

A Clinton victory in red-state Texas is seen as a long shot as a practical matter, but the presidential matchup is driving hope among many of the more than 9,400 delegates expected at the Alamodome for the nation's largest Democratic state convention.

The convention gavels in Thursday and will be in full swing Friday, when Trump is scheduled to be in San Antonio for a fundraiser that will lend immediacy to Democrats' efforts to draw a contrast with Republicans.

Democrats are working to showcase themselves as being in line with Texas families on key issues, including health care, education and immigration reform. They have taken aim at Trump on such issues as his support for a wall on the border with Mexico. Differences on guns could be in the spotlight in the wake of the horrific nightclub shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people.

After failing to win a statewide election in Texas since 1994, and finding themselves a minority in the Legislature, Democrats are highlighting the performance of Democratic city and county leaders, such as Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner.

State GOP troubles

They will take aim at the current crop of statewide elected Republicans, said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, convention chairman. GOP troubles include securities-fraud charges against Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has predicted he will be vindicated.

"We're eager to contrast our values and our agenda with the Republican agenda that's dictated by Donald Trump," said Castro, a Democratic star along with his twin brother, Julian Castro, secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Julian Castro, a convention speaker, has been mentioned among possible choices for a Clinton running mate, and the brothers long have been seen as potential statewide candidates.

Even absent an unlikely Texas win by Clinton, Democrats still nursing a hangover from Wendy Davis' crushing loss in the 2014 governor's race to Republican Greg Abbott are hoping for progress.

They hope a Clinton-Trump matchup could narrow the gap between Republicans and Democrats in Texas. Some down-ballot races could turn in their favor if Trump's campaign drives up Latino votes for Democrats or depresses voting by Republicans who cannot bring themselves to embrace Trump.

Clinton's campaign will not be putting big money into Texas, said Garry Mauro, a leader in her Texas campaign, but Democrats still see opportunity.

"Texas is not a battleground state, but demographically there are ways that Texas could end up in play because we are a very diverse state," Mauro said. "His numbers have got to get a lot better with Hispanics, blacks and women or Hillary will carry Texas."

Sanders, Clinton camps

Mauro and Jacob Limon, Texas director of U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders' campaign, have urged their candidates' backers to unite at the convention for the battle ahead. They cite the "nightmare" specter of a Trump presidency as more important than any differences that remain between the presumptive nominee and the self-proclaimed socialist senator from Vermont

The presidential race was cast in dramatic terms by Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert.

"For the first time since King George, this country is faced with a choice of whether to be with or against a tyrant, a bigot, a dictator. You cannot be for America unless you're against Trump. You cannot be for the Constitution, freedom of speech, equal rights for all, uplifting the disabled, for our veterans, if you are for Trump," Calvert said as several hundred San Antonio Democrats gathered Monday to set the tone for the state convention.

High school teacher Rick Trevino, who was a lead organizer in San Antonio for Sanders' Texas primary campaign, urged party loyalists to appeal to Trump supporters before and after the November election.

"There are lots of Republicans who do not want to vote as Republicans any more," said Trevino, secretary for the Bexar County Democratic Party. "We have to open up our doors."
AUSTIN  Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will bring his Republican presidential campaign to two Houston-area events Friday, including a public rally in the conservative GOP stronghold of The Woodlands, leaving authorities scrambling to ramp up security for expected protests that have grown nationally in recent days over his remarks on immigrants and Muslims.

Trump's campaign said the New York real estate tycoon will appear at a private 5 p.m. fundraiser at the River Oaks home of prominent lawyer Tony Buzbee, followed by a 7 p.m. campaign rally at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott Hotel and Convention Center that is expected to draw as many as 5,000 supporters, along with an undetermined number of protesters.

On Thursday, Trump will keep much the same schedule in Dallas, where he will attend a private fundraiser hosted by Ray Washburne, a vice-chair of Trump's national Victory Committee, followed by a campaign rally at Gilley's Southside Ballroom.

In addition to the Dallas and Houston events, Trump is scheduled to attend a private fundraiser Friday afternoon in San Antonio before he flies to Houston. He will depart Texas to attend weekend campaign rallies in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Trump campaign officials said they hope to raise as much as $4 million in Texas. They said former Gov. Rick Perry is expected to accompany Trump at the private events in Houston and San Antonio, and the invitation-only crowd is expected to include many leading Texas GOP donors who will pay from $5,000 to $250,000 to attend.

The stops, marking Trump's first visit to Texas since he became the presumptive Republican nominee last month and his second rally in The Woodlands in a year, come as he faces growing criticism from Democrats and Republicans over his renewed calls for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration into the United States in the wake of Sunday's attack on an gay nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people and left 53 others wounded.

Trump last campaigned in Dallas in September 2015, officials said.

Within hours of Trump's Wednesday announcement, some GOP officials in Dallas said they planned to skip his rally to attend another party event for state candidates. And critics in both Houston and Dallas pledged large protests in both cities at each stop.

Harris County GOP officials did not immediately return phone calls Wednesday about Trump's visit.

"We still plan to protest his event in River Oaks, and we're calling all our friends in Montgomery County to make sure there is a turnout there to greet him," said Dr. David Michael Smith, a spokesman for Houston's June 17 Coalition, which is organizing the Harris County protests on behalf of 10 local groups that have criticized Trump's views as bigoted and racist.

At the same time, Trump fans in the Houston area said they plan to turn out in large numbers as a show of support for his tell-it-like-it-is, political-outsider campaign.

"It's time we elect someone who isn't afraid to speak his mind, because the politically correct culture that we now have in office is dooming this country to failure," said Ryan Burton, a Clear Lake supporter who said he plans to attend the Friday rally in The Woodlands. "These protests are an attempt to silence Mr. Trump's right to free speech."

If Trump wins the GOP nomination at his party's national convention in Cleveland in July, as expected despite nagging rumors of an effort by some Republicans to block his selection, Trump will face Democrat Hillary Clinton in the November general election.

In a statement on Wednesday announcing the Texas visits, Trump campaign officials acknowledged that security at both public events in Texas will be tight, as it has been at previous appearances since protesters have been showing up en masse at events in other states to disrupt the candidate's speeches.

Trump campaign officials offered no additional details on either public event.

Officials at the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, which will oversee security at The Woodlands event, said they will meet Thursday with the U.S. Secret Service to plan those details.

Wednesday's announcements of the two rallies came within hours after various Texas media outlets in Austin and Dallas had reported that Trump appeared to have scrubbed plans for public events while in Texas because he had been unable to find venues, an unusual twist for the presumptive GOP nominee in one of the most-Republican states in America.

Officials at large-capacity civic centers in Fort Worth, Irving and Garland said Wednesday they were unable to accommodate Trump because they could not adequately plan security and logistics for the crowds his visit was expected to attract, with less than a week's notice. Convention center officials in Houston and surrounding cities said they had not been contacted or did not have availability.

Venues for this week's two public rallies have a much smaller crowd capacity than the location of his last visit in February, which by some estimates drew more than 10,000 people to the Fort Worth Convention Center. The Woodlands center says on its website that it can seat about 5,000, and Gilley's said its capacity is about 3,800.
After a spate of violent deaths, terrorism and a rising homicide rate, Texas Republicans, conservative to the core, banned citizens from carrying handguns in cities in the Lone Star State.

The law they adopted in 1871 remained in force for over a century.

Fast forward 145 years: Almost 3,000 gun-related deaths occur in Texas each year and in 2014, approximately 750 Texans were murdered using firearms, according to the nonprofit Texas Gun Sense.

Yet today our state not only permits licensed open carry; it has some of the laxest gun laws in a nation with some of the laxest gun laws in the world.

Law enforcement at the federal and state level is hamstrung by inadequate resources, vague laws that are hard to enforce such as the licensing requirement for gun dealers, and no comprehensive FBI database of gun owners. In addition, there need to be laws with teeth at the federal level to keep guns out of the hands of persons with dangerous mental illness and terrorists, and to keep off the market assault weapons that are designed for military use.

On the state level, Texas does not limit the number of firearms that can be purchased at one time, or regulate the transfer or possession of assault weapons or large-capacity ammunition magazines, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. It should. Texas also should require the reporting of lost or stolen firearms, and currently does not, according to Andrea Brauer, executive director of Texas Gun Sense. And "gun sense" is exactly what this snapshot of lax gun laws does not add up to.

With such a weak national and state regulatory environment, we turn to local law enforcement to be our standard-bearer. Granted, local law enforcement operates within the broader context of state and national policy and shares its constraints, but Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson and the Houston Police Department have the advantage of knowing the community that they seek to protect. They see the pain in the tear-stained faces of the parents of children whose lives are taken by guns in the hands of irresponsible or criminal operators. They hear the cries at funerals of those who are killed with illegal weapons.

As state leaders don't appear serious about protecting us from gun violence, local law enforcement should make sure it is using every tool in its tool kit to combat gun violence. The Houston Police Department, our front line in the war against gun violence, already works closely with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to keep illegal guns off the streets and out of the hands of criminals. Every effort should be made to tighten this collaboration.

Anderson should continue to diligently prosecute charges that are in her purview: theft of a firearm; felon in possession of firearms; and illegal carry of a handgun without a license. Our federal and state judges should refuse to accept plea deals and use sentencing force when necessary.

Some opponents of stronger enforcement of gun laws make an unorthodox argument when they point out that there are too many minority men behind bars and, arguably, a more aggressive stance by law enforcement could aggravate this problem. But we need to draw a line in the sand. While low-level drug offenses should be decriminalized, gun violations deserve cultural scorn and law enforcement's biggest hammer. We must convey in the strongest terms possible our community's growing unease with gun violence.

Over the years, we have developed a heightened intolerance for drunk driving, and the new attitudes provide cultural guideposts for law enforcement. For instance, three-time drunk driving offenders are no longer as common as they once were. Similarly, a cultural shift would help law enforcement crack down on illegal guns.

When we as a society accept on a deep level the need for reasonable regulation of guns, only then can our state reclaim the progress made over a century ago and reject the assumption that an abundance of guns will keep our citizenry safe. By relentlessly hammering on crimes within its limited jurisdiction involving the use of weapons, local law enforcement can lead the way.
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Barbara Jordan

Regarding "Jordan's words surface in immigration debate" (Page A1, Saturday), all this talk about 'What Would Barbara Jordan Do' brings to mind the crocodile tears some Republicans have been shedding for those allegedly most harmed by illegal immigration: African Americans.

Rather than speculating about what one distinguished but deceased African American would say, we might look at what millions of live ones say. According to a March 2013 Pew Research Center poll, more than 8 in 10 non-Hispanic blacks (82 percent) favored letting illegal immigrants stay if they meet certain requirements; about half of blacks (52 percent) said illegal immigrants should be able to apply for citizenship. Just following the Democratic party line? Well, if the other party, from its presumptive presidential nominee on down, is spewing racial and ethnic hatred, do you have much choice?

Walter Kamphoefner, Bryan

Helping Monarchs or not?

Regarding "Monarch highway" (Page A17, Saturday), at first glance, the idea of six states joining together to provide sustenance to migrating Monarch butterflies, along the length of the Interstate 35 corridor, seems rather reasonable.

However, I wonder about the consequences of planting milkweed and other flowering plants, along the highway.

Given the volume of traffic on I-35, north and south daily, through six states, that's a lot of cars, trucks, windshields and grilles for Monarchs to avoid.

John Murrell, Kingwood

Seriousness needed

Regarding "Trump, Clinton on attack: Study in contrasts" (Page A12, Monday), Donald Trump clearly implied that President Obama has a secret pro-terrorist agenda in a conversation of "Fox & Friends" on Monday. He then acted surprised when the Washington Post printed the natural corollary of that statement in a headline and revoked the press credentials of the paper. He is getting as bad as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey in his inability to deal with a free press.

I think that the time has come to cut off his microphone. I urge the entire press corps to stop reporting on him; just cut him off. Don't cover his rallies, don't report the inanities he utters and don't treat him like a serious person - until he actually acts like one.

Steve McAleavy, Houston

Celebrating moral courage

Regarding "Holocaust Museum marks 20 years, pays tribute to the Bielski brothers" (Page F6, Sunday), thank you for the great article in Sunday's Beliefs section. I had a special grand tour of the museum the week before it opened at the invitation of Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza. It was for Archdiocese clergy and all ministers. My grandfather was a Bielski.

Boleslaus J. Zientek, Houston

Nothing new under the sun

Regarding "Gun silence/Cowardice, not the Second Amendment, prevents Congress from acting on gun safety" (Page A22, Wednesday), the editorial headline brings to mind this by Richard Harris in "Annals of Legislation," New Yorker, 1968: "Probably the most distinctive characteristic of the successful politician is selective cowardice."

Robert Wells, Houston
Using religion

Regarding the Tom Toles cartoon "What ties it all together" (Page A13, Tuesday) depicts"hate" as the tie that connects terrorism, Islamophobia and homophobia. The cartoonist could have used the word "religion" instead of "hate."

Religion use to be about love, but today it is more often about hate. It is sad that powerful leaders such as presidential candidates, Islamic terrorists and certain lieutenant governors use religious doctrine to justify their messages of hatred. It is sadder still that good, loving people allow them to get away with it and remain in positions of power and influence.

Richard P. Cate, Houston

Looking inward

Regarding "'Homegrown' terrorism" (Page A1, Tuesday, A1), I recently watched a documentary about the 43 Mexican students who disappeared in 2014, students whom, per the film's sources, were possibly murdered by a collusion between their local government and a drug cartel.

As the credits rolled, I sat in shock of the victims' story, the pure evil of their terrorizers. Another shock hit, though, when that same day it was reported that a shooter in Orlando had killed 49 people, all with weaponry he purchased easily and legally.

Many Americans scoff at other countries as homes of crooked politicians who make our own representatives seem civil. But when it comes to U.S. gun reform, delusion and stubbornness have proven just as deadly as corruption.

Edward Santos Garza, Houston

Moral failures

Recent national and local media coverage has underscored a point that must be in many of our minds concerning the low expectations that we have of our public officials. For example, much of the carnage in the terrible attack in Orlando was inflicted by the assault rifle that the attacker legally purchased in this country.

For years many of our federal legislators, either threatened or allured by the NRA's influence on elections, have voted down attempts to forbid the sale of assault weapons to the public. Also, the recent destructive flooding in Houston and Harris county has revealed that officials charged with seeing that developers adhere to flood-control laws have not done their jobs well, owing to the political influence of developers. Similarly, chemical plants in our area have been able to evade laws governing safe practice because of the failure of regulatory bodies to enforce these laws.

In all of these areas, the terrible damage done to the citizenry by the moral failure of our public officials is painfully clear. Why do we not insist that our officials put the welfare of the public above their personal self-interest? There should be a great public outcry against the venality and pusillanimity of official behavior like this.

Mike Keller, Houston
I am tired. Tired of having to constantly defend my faith. Tired of being associated with the horrific acts of someone who completely misrepresents Islam. Tired of widespread misunderstanding that has led many to link me with a madman simply because I am a Muslim.

Here's what should not be misunderstood about me: I believe that what happened in Orlando is a tragedy. I believe the gunman's apparent intolerance toward gays is unacceptable. And I believe no one has the right to take anyone else's life based on hate. Some of my best friends are gay, and the thought of losing any of them to the hands of some maniac purely based on his ignorance and intolerance is terrifying. Though the world has associated Omar Mateen's actions with Islam, what happened in Orlando was not about Islam.

Here are some things I do as a Muslim: Our greeting in Islam, "Assalamoalaikum," means, "Peace be upon you." One of the five fundamental requirements of my faith is to give a percentage of my annual income to someone in need. Another one is to fast during the month of Ramadan; one of the purposes of fasting is to remind myself that I should be grateful for what I have because many in the world do not have things that I take for granted, and that I should help those who cannot help themselves. The faith that I have been following my entire life teaches me to treat everyone with love and respect, even if they do not respect me and even if they mistreat me. It teaches me tolerance and acceptance of those who are different, even though many a time, people around me do not accept me because I call myself a Muslim.

Ask yourself this question: If someone associated themselves with any faith other than Islam, would you observe their actions and then determine that everyone who follows that faith must be the same as the one person you observed? In other words, if someone who claims that they are, let's say, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or atheist commits a mass murder, would you assume that all Christians, Jews, Buddhists or atheists believe that mass murder is acceptable? Would you believe that all Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or atheists need to be eliminated or banned from the United States because of the terrible actions of a few? We have all seen some terrible people who have done unspeakable things and who also claim to be Muslim. We have all also seen terrible people do unspeakable things and also claim faith in other religions.

Islam's principles do not advocate going into a gay club and killing innocent people. Islam's principles do not advocate intolerance; quite the opposite.

What this man did was wrong, and I know he will be held accountable for his actions by the God he claimed to believe in. We cannot stop this problem by spewing more hatred. Hatred - and ignorance - is what started this. So please, the next time you think that all Muslims should be "eliminated" because one person is so full of hate that he thinks it's OK to kill 49 innocent people, know that I, and the vast majority of the 1.6 billion Muslim people in the world do not agree with the actions of this man, and we cannot and will not allow ourselves to be associated with him.

We, too, are saddened and shocked by this heinous crime, and we also do not understand. We also join you in prayer, and we will also stand up and advocate for everyone's rights as human beings alongside you. We do not want this to happen, and we are tired of having to publicly condemn it because, well, is this really something that needs to be said? Do I really need to say that I believe mass murder is wrong because someone who I don't know and have nothing to do with claims to have something in common with me, a total stranger to him? Unfortunately, I do.

If you have any questions about Islam, I encourage you to reach out to your Muslim friends, coworkers and neighbors. I am sure that they would be more than happy to share from firsthand experience what Islam is really about.

Peace be upon you.

Mohi, a Houston native, is a teacher in the Katy Independent School District.
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OTTAWA  MPs should be "incentivized" to procreate, a Liberal MP said, as a new report Wednesday suggested minor changes to make Parliament family-friendly and passed up recommending a four-day schedule for now.

Toronto MP Arif Virani, 44, told The Huffington Post Canada that balancing family life with the job of a member of Parliament has proved to be more challenging than he expected.

Virani, who represents the riding of ParkdaleHigh Park, has two young children, Zakir, 5, and Nitin, 2, who remain with their mother during the week while he shuttles back and forth each weekend from Ottawa, leaving Friday afternoon and returning Monday mornings.

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Liberal MP Arif Virani speaks in the House of Commons on Friday April 22, 2016 in Ottawa. (Photo: Adrian Wyld/CP)

It's an "incredibly hard" and "not ideal" situation, Virani said.

"Everyone prepares you for how to win a nomination and win an election, but no one prepares you for how to be an MP, really," he said.

"It's a great job, don't get me wrong, but it's a demanding job."

Balancing family duties and work obligations is no easy task, especially for new MPs and those with young families.

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A new parliamentary committee report, tabled Wednesday, recommended some incremental ways to make the Commons more inclusive, efficient and family-friendly but it didn't go as far as some MPs wanted.

No agreement on eliminating Friday sittings

The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs said it couldn't come to an agreement on eliminating Friday sittings, and by extension increasing sitting hours Monday through Thursday, and it had no recommendations to make on electronic voting in the chamber. It said it may later study proxy voting to allow those who are sick or unable to be in Ottawa to cast a vote in the chamber.

Last March, Government House Leader Dominic LeBlanc told reporters Parliament should be modernized to encourage parents of young children to run for office, and he hoped have changes in place by the fall.

Personally, LeBlanc said, he favours shutting down the Commons on Friday, because those 4.5 hours of sittings "don't offer a maximum use of an MP's time."

He also suggested doing away with a rule that essentially prevents MPs from going home to have dinner with their families in Ottawa or to meetings off Parliament Hill for fear a procedural motion could be made and votes called in the House with less than half an hour's notice.

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Dominic LeBlanc speaks at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa on Wednesday, May 11, 2016. (Photo: Sean Kilpatrick/CP)

The committee made several unanimous recommendations that could help those with families plan their schedules a bit better. They suggested holding votes, whenever possible, right after question period, rather than in the evenings  except for Thursdays when afternoon votes often disrupt MPs' travel arrangements back to their ridings.

The committee also recommended tabling the House of Commons calendar six months ahead of time so MPs could plan in advance and suggested avoiding long sitting blocks  such as five weeks  in Ottawa that are "not conducive to productive parliamentary work."

It also tasked the Commons information security branch with finding a way for family members and staff to access any changes in an MP's mobile electronic calendar. And it asked the governing body of the Commons, the Board of Internal Economy, to be a little less transparent on the use of an MP's travel points because "family members have felt reluctant, if not discouraged, from making use of a travel point to visit a spouse or parent." MPs are allowed to share their travel points with family members to help encourage family reunification.

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The committee announced that it will further study the idea of a parental leave or family leave to help provide flexibility to members in the late stages of pregnancy, to new mothers or parents or to those who serve as primary caregivers.

MPs do not pay into the employment insurance system and are excluded from receiving its benefits.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau laughs as he poses with local candidate Arif Virani and his son during a campaign stop at a bar Tuesday, October 13, 2015 in Toronto. (Photo: Paul Chiasson/CP)

Virani said he hoped Friday sittings would be eliminated, electronic voting adopted, and a new parental-leave benefit plan brought in so MPs could spend time with their young children.

"I think if you had access to parental leave, then maybe that would be an incentive to get on with the business of procreating, which is the type of thing a lot of people would like to do but they are not able to because they have to put their entire personal life on hold while they are getting on with the business of being a parliamentarian," he told HuffPost this week.

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Some young professionals may shy away from politics because the compensation may be lower than what they are receiving in the private sector, Virani said, but he suggested that they may also decline offers to run because they feel they can't do the job while they're raising children.

When that happens, he said, a very talented cohort of Canadians is completely excluded.

'We work seven days a week'

Virani, a new MP, told HuffPost he doesn't understand why the House sits on Friday. As a parliamentary secretary to the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, Virani has to be in the Commons on Fridays to answer questions on the minister's behalf, something he said he enjoys and would miss.

Instead of being with his family and his constituents, Virani spends four out of every five Fridays in Ottawa, while 70 per cent of his colleague are back home, or on their way there.

Politicians will, of course, make "political hay" of the issue if Friday sittings are cancelled, he said. But he is aghast at the statements by some opposition colleagues who argue that parliamentarians should work five days a week like most other Canadians.

"That is a fallacious argument," he told HuffPost over a sandwich grabbed for dinner in the parliamentary cafeteria between votes on Monday. "We work seven days a week. If the Canadian public thinks that when we are not in Ottawa, we are not working, then I guess we are only working for a 127 sitting days, because that's the only time we're here."

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Time to modernize how MPs vote

Virani also thinks Parliament should move into the 21st century and vote electronically. "If you speed up the manner of voting, you can save time and allow us to do other work," he said.

"People elected us on the basis of that kind of demographic change, that kind of generational shift, [and] that comes with the duty to reflect the fact that the chamber should also embody some of those ideals or ideas that some of the younger, fresher people are presenting.

"One of the things we look at is  the way things have been done for 30 years and  we say, 'Why are you doing it that way?"

For some MPs, though, the current system generally works well, and eliminating Friday sittings by, for example, extending sitting hours to midnight from Monday to Thursday, would mean a more difficult work-life balance.

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Conservative MP Ben Lobb speaks in the House of Commons in 2014. (Photo: Facebook)

Conservative MP Ben Lobb, a new father also struggling with the work-life balance, is one of several Conservative MPs with young children. His son, Calvin, is nine months old, and his spouse lives with him in Ottawa while on maternity leave, so he has a different set of considerations than Virani's.

Lobb, who has been an MP since 2008, sees no problems with Friday sittings. He'd rather have shorter hours Monday to Friday so he can be with his son for bedtime.

The MP for HuronBruce praised the recent change of scheduling votes right after question period, rather than late in the evening.

"That's one thing I hope will be in there," he told HuffPost, before the report as tabled.

"I know some members have talked about getting rid of Friday, but I don't think that's going to make a big difference."

"Canadians expect that when the House is sitting, it sits for five days."  Tory MP Ben Lobb

As a backbencher, Lobb sees the value of the 4.5 hours of sitting on Fridays. Not only is there another question period and a chance to hold the government's feet to the fire, but it's also one additional day for MPs to discuss private members' business  legislation that doesn't emanate from the government and which all MPs, with the exceptions of ministers and parliamentary secretaries, can propose.

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Getting rid of Friday sittings would mean one less day of debate, and fewer chances that a backbencher's bill could be referred to committee for further study and passage into law, Lobb noted.

"For an opposition member, that is a pretty important thing," he said. "Canadians expect that when the House is sitting, it sits for five days."

Lobb notes that if House hours are extended, the staff will have to become shift workers and there will be increased security costs. Marc Bosc, the acting clerk of the House of Commons, suggested, however, that eliminating a day or adding hours would have "little impact" on operational cost.

"I think the way we are doing it now is a good way and has been in place for as long as it has been around."

'More consistent weeks' needed

Lobb travels back to his riding as best he can. He often leaves on Friday and returns on Sunday, but that may change when his wife returns to work. His current journey takes him 4.5 to 6.5 hours each way.

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What would be helpful, he said, is for the House schedule to be organized in more consistent blocks of weeks so MPs could focus their energy uninterrupted in Ottawa and then go to their ridings and focus their energy for several weeks at a time, he said.

"I'm not advocating for more time in Ottawa or more time in the constituency, just  more consistent weeks," he said.

"If you decided in your life that you wanted to bring a little child into this world, you owe that child your time and your care, right? The people voted you in, and you owe it to them to do the best job you can for them. So that requires you to get really smart and really intelligent about how to manage your time."

NDP MP Christine Moore holds her daughter Daphnee just outside the House of Commons,on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Tuesday, March 8, 2016. (Photo: Fred Chartrand/CP)

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Lobb praised NDP MP Christine Moore, who has a daughter the same age as his son. Moore recently led the charge to have an on-call nanny service on the Hill  which MPs pay for out of their own pocket.

The child care service was announced to MPs on Monday  two days before the committee's report suggesting it be established.

Less than a week after giving birth last fall, Moore was back on the campaign trail. She has become a champion for young mothers in the Commons, arguing in favour of paternity leave, electronic voting for those on sick leave and longer sitting weeks in Ottawa to help cut down on travel time.

"I think Christine Moore is a shining example of a mom, and an MP and does a pretty damn good job of balancing her time," Lobb said.

He also mentioned Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who has three kids, and announced to her staff that she intends to leave the office most days at 5:30 pm, go off line to have dinner with her family, and resume her duties about 8 p.m.

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"She did he best thing for her, her job, her family and her geography, and I respect that. And I think each MP has to do that," he said.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna speaks with her son before a swearing in ceremony Wednesday Nov.4, 2015. (Photo: Justin Tang/CP)

And it's not just members with young children, Lobb noted. Many other MPs have parents who rely on them for care.

"Maybe they don't live with them, but they are in a nursing home with doctors appointments. Even if they are MPs, they are still sons and daughters, and they still have a responsibility to their parents. So there is no one answer. There is really 338 answers for each one.

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"I think you just have to do what is best for you and your family. That's probably the best way to sum it up."

Liberal MP Larry Bagnell, the chair of the committee studying ways to make the Commons more family friendly, acknowledged that there are strong disagreements between MPs on major issues.

His committee studied legislatures across the country, as well as in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden, and heard from 29 witnesses  unions, staff of MPs, MPs with children, former MPs who had young children but left Parliament because of the ensuing difficulties, a group that wants to increase women's participation in politics, he said.

This is an interim report, the Liberal MP from the Yukon cautioned.

Committee may study heckling, decorum

"We're only going to do some recommendations on things that weren't huge and that we could agree on early. And things that we couldn't, we put forward for further study."

For example, the committee may study heckling and decorum in the House of Commons and further discuss a gender-sensitive safety audit it hopes the Board of Internal Economy conducts, relating to panic buttons stationed outside the parliamentary precinct, gender-neutral toilets and more change tables where need be.

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Bagnell, an MP from 2000 to 2011 but out of the House for one term before winning re-election again last fall, told HuffPost he learned a lot of interesting things during the committee's study.

"I didn't know that Australia and England have two houses basically, so they can give more MPs a chance to speak, they can speed up the work and not have to sit as long.

"I didn't know that Sweden voted electronically, where you push a button and they do in 30 seconds what we do in 10 minutes.

"I didn't know that Sweden voted electronically, where you push a button and they do in 30 seconds what we do in 10 minutes."  Liberal MP Larry Bagnell

"I didn't know that Sweden didn't allow ministers in [the legislature] and that ministers are given an MP for their riding and that MP does debates and votes and so the minister can actually do a good job of being a minister, full time. And in Sweden as well, I think they only meet Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday."

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"I was a bit surprised that we sit longer than a lot of parliaments, in Canada and around the world," he added. "There is certainly a lot of work to do, so if you take away Fridays, there is a trade-off  you have to pick up that work somewhere, and then that affects other people."

Bagnell said he's intrigued by the idea of two lower houses and the committee may revisit the topic later.

David Natzler, clerk of the British House of Commons, told the committee they've had an "alternate chamber," known as Westminster Hall, since 1999 that is based on the Australian example.

The clerk of the Australian House of Representatives, David Elder, testified that country has had two chambers since 1994. The Federation Chamber is essentially a parallel debating chamber, where legislation can't be introduced or voted on. It simply considers matters sent to it by the House of Representatives, sits about a third of the same time and, as the committee's report concluded, relieves time pressures in the main chamber.

Second chamber needed?

Elder said the Australian House of Representatives sits about 70 days a year  four days a week for 18 to 20 weeks in two-week blocks, with some longer breaks in between.

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The British House of Commons sits about 150 days over 34 sitting weeks, mostly from Monday through Thursday.

The New Zealand House of Representatives sits about 90 days over 30 sitting weeks, and only on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays.

In contrast, the Canadian House of Commons sits five days a week  about 135 sitting days a year over 26 weeks.

Should the House decide to have a second chamber, Bagnell noted, the infrastructure will soon exist. The House is scheduled to move into temporary digs in the West Block while the current chamber undergoes a renovation in the Centre Block. When that's complete, Canada could have two functioning lower houses pretty easily, he said.

Bagnell told HuffPost there is no recommendation on electronic voting because there was no consensus. "Some people really felt that it was important to stand up and cast your vote," he said.

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The case for standing up instead

He also acknowledged a less-often-discussed truth.

Sometimes, MPs don't really know what they are voting for and standing up helps members' make up their mind.

"In private members' business, maybe it's something you don't know anything about but you know someone who does, who you trust, and so if they vote before you that helps you, and in electronic voting you wouldn't have that," he said.

Bagnell also noted his surprise on learning that party whips in New Zealand occasionally vote on behalf of the entire caucus.

"You don't even need the people in there, you just need the four whips who say this party is voting for this, this party is voting for that," he said, laughing.

"I said we could tell our press that and they would say, Why are we paying the rest of you?'"

There are a lot of big ideas to discuss, but the Liberal chair said the point is to have an inclusive Parliament that represents all demographics.

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"One of our MPs has six kids. If you didn't have [them], then you wouldn't have their concerns and their challenges in life represented in Parliament, so that's why we are trying to make it more accessible and remove barriers that might [discourage] them from running for office," he said.

ALSO ON HUFFPOST:
Are Canadas bankers losing faith in the housing market?

Thats a legitimate question to ask, given what some of the countrys most prominent Big Bank execs have been saying  and doing.

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Take Brian Porter, for instance. The CEO of Scotiabank recently said he was a little concerned about housing prices in the greater Vancouver area and Toronto, and announced his bank had cut back on mortgage lending in those two cities. (An unusual move for one of Canadas biggest lenders, to say the least.)

Meanwhile, Porter has put his own home up for sale. According to Better Dwelling, hes selling his luxury townhouse in a converted church in Torontos uber-swanky Rosedale neighbourhood.

Porter is reportedly asking $3.95 million for the home he paid $3.586 million for just six months ago  a roughly 10-per-cent increase in half a year. In financial circles, they call this profit-taking  selling while the price is high.

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Meanwhile, Bank of Montreals chief operating officer, Frank Techar, has also listed his Toronto home  an 1898 mansion located in Rosedale, according to Better Dwelling.

The 9,000 sq.-ft., six-bedroom, nine-bathroom home is on the market for $11.7 million, according to the listing realtor.

Techars move comes after a BMO report in April sounded the alarm about accelerating house-price growth in Toronto and Vancouver.

"Odds are that if this kind of price growth (especially Vancouver) continues, it will end badly  but that still looks to be sometime down the road," BMO senior economist Robert Kavcic wrote in a client note.

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Kavcic had predicted back in 2014 that the housing market would enter a protracted slump around 2018, thanks to changing demographics (i.e., fewer young homebuyers). But that was before house prices started rising at a 30-per-cent annual pace in Vancouver and a 15-per-cent annual pace in Toronto, raising new concerns about affordability and household debt.

Still, the idea that things will end badly is controversial, even within BMO. Its chief economist, Doug Porter, has been arguing that theres plenty holding up high house prices in Canadas hottest cities.

Porter recently listed off newspaper headlines predicting a housing-bubble burst that went back as far as 2008.

"Hey, forecasting is hard," he quipped. "But let's not give a pass to some of these scaremongers who have been dead wrong."

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Based on some recent developments, it seems some top bankers themselves could be in that dead wrong group.

Also on HuffPost
With a week left until the British vote on whether or not to leave the European Union, polls suggest the odds of a Brexit are on the rise.

Thats got many experts finally taking the situation seriously, trying to figure out what the impact on the world will be if the EU loses its second-largest economy (after Germany).

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Canada wont be impacted nearly as much as most European countries, and certainly not as much as Britain itself.

But according to a new study from the OECD, flagged by the C.D. Howe Institute, Canadas economy would be 0.25 per cent smaller in 2018 after a Brexit than it would have been had the British voted to Bremain. (Yes, these are the actual terms theyre using.)

To put that in dollar figures, thats about $4 billion in economic activity that wont happen in Canada if Britain Brexits.

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But that financial pain wont be evenly distributed. According to National Bank Financial (NBF), Ontario and Newfoundland are at greatest risk from a Brexit.

Nearly 7 per cent of Newfoundland's exports and more than 5 per cent of Ontarios exports go to the U.K., NBF found. Thats roughly double the Canadian provincial average of 3 per cent.

The U.K. is Canadas third most important export market, and at $25 billion a year, the bilateral two-way merchandise trade relationship is nothing to sneeze at, NBFs director of public sector research and strategy, Warren Lovely, wrote in a client note.

A prospective slowing in the already torpid pace of global growth following a Brexit is hardly welcome news for a small open economy like Canada.

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And Canada could also take an economic hit simply by virtue of being part of the worldwide financial system.

Anything that threatens to destabilize a global financial centre (in this case, London) could have knock-on effects across the globe, Lovely wrote.

But there is a silver lining here  if only a speculative one.

A Brexit could see other EU nations take in more imports from Canada, as some may wish to make an example out of Britain in order to deter others from following suit, Lovely suggested.

Canadas political leadership isnt waiting around to see if that happens. The federal Liberals have come out strongly against Brexit.

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EU technocrats praised Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for loudly advocating for the U.K. to remain in the union.

"I believe we're always better when we work as closely as possible together and separatism, or division, doesn't seem to be a productive path for countries, Trudeau said last month.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau. (Photo: Canadian Press)

Finance Minister Bill Morneau warned earlier this week that tens of thousands of jobs at Canadian companies in the U.K. are at risk if Brexit happens.

The Canadian companies that set up shop in Britain did so on the assumption that they were setting up in the EU and had access to that market, Morneau noted.

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The Bremain side was leading in polls through much of the referendum campaign, but recent polls have showed the Brexit side gaining and taking the lead.

A poll of polls put together by The Economist on Wednesday found the leave side leading the remain side by two percentage points, with 44 per cent of Britons saying they would like to leave the EU and 42 per cent saying they want to stay.

Also on HuffPost
For centuries, humans have looked to the stars and asked, Are we alone? We might be now, but astrophysicist Adam Frank says that wasnt always the case.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, the professor at the University of Rochester said a trillion extraterrestrial civilizations have potentially existed over the course of cosmic history  and thats a pessimistic estimate.

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His theory derives from an equation by Frank Drake in 1961. The Drake equation was meant to determine how many potential civilizations existed on other planets, but back then there was not enough information to solve it. Now, we have access to some of the necessary data.

The equation looks like this: N = R*  fp  ne  fl  fi  fc  L

And heres what all those letters mean:

N is the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy that we might be able to communicate with

R* is the average rate at which stars are born in our galaxy

fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets

ne is the number of those planets that can support life

fl is the fraction of those planets where life appears

fi is the fraction of life-bearing planets where intelligent life appears

fc is the fraction of intelligent civilizations that emit signals of their existence into space

L is the length of time that these civilizations send out signals.

After the Kepler spacecraft discovered an extraordinary 1,284 new planets last month, the number of confirmed exoplanets rose to over 3,000. Twenty-one of them have the potential ability to sustain life, according to NASA.

Frank, along with astronomer Woodruff Sullivan, were able to fill in parts of the equation using this new knowledge about stars and planets that exist outside of our solar system. They published their findings in a report for the journal Astrobiology in May.

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Astrophysicist Adam Frank. (Photo: Brandon Vick/University of Rochester)

What our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high, Frank wrote in the New York Times.

Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first.

Frank explained that even knowing just three out of the seven factors in the equation is enough to prove their theory.

Given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxys planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borers on the irrational, he said.

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Dont get too worried about an alien encounter, though  Frank said that it will be a long time before we have the relevant data necessary to confirm whether or not extraterrestrial life currently exists.
Supplied

Dave Gallop wanted to help Fort McMurray, Alta., recover from the massive wildfire that swept through the city last month. But he didn't think it would jeopardize his health.

The B.C. resident took a job with ServiceMaster Restore at the beginning of June to help clean up homes in the city.

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He told The Huffington Post Alberta employees were given no information or warnings about health risks related to cleaning rooms coated in a layer of potentially toxic ash.

"My lungs are in rough shape  still ash making its way out," Gallop said. He added that the company failed to provide proper safety equipment.

Two men in ServiceMaster T-Shirts clean Fort McMurray buildings without safety gear. Their faces have been blurred to protect their identity. (Photo: Supplied)

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"I keep wiping brown residue out of my nose, seems to build up a few times over the day. My palms are constantly clammy and sweating.

"I feel tired all the time, dried out."

After doing some research, Gallop became worried about the possible health dangers in Fort McMurray. But when he brought his concerns up with his superiors, it didn't go over well.

The provincial government has acknowledged that some Fort McMurray buildings may contain asbestos and other toxic materials, advising workers dealing with ash should have respirators, eye protection and no exposed skin.

'You can leave if you don't like it.'

He claimed his employers refused to discuss the issue any further and told him, "'You can leave if you don't like it.'"

"I did not stop telling them it was wrong and that people could die in future from what was happening," he said.

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"My lungs are in rough shape  still ash making its way out."

After arguing with his employers, he was let go. He was never given any specific reason for being fired.

Gallop provided a copy of his contract to CBC News, which makes no mention of any potential risks on the job.

HuffPost Alberta has reached out to ServiceMaster Restore for comment.

Right to refuse risky work

The Alberta government released a statement Tuesday, reiterating that all occupational health and safety legislation (OHS) continue to apply during Fort McMurray rebuilding efforts.

The province said workers can refuse work that could pose an "imminent danger".

A worker wears full protective gear while cleaning up debris from around storm drains in front of destroyed homes in Fort McMurray. (Photo: Darryl Dyck/Bloomberg via Getty)

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Gallop said he wished he had been given more information before taking the position. He accused the company of putting profits over people.

"I still would have taken the job if I knew the health risks, and I knew that I was properly protected, and that the project was managed by competent people, not a rush job driven by pure greed, he said. But he acknowledged his own fault in how things transpired.

"I did no research before leaving and I know nothing about the work, so I trusted these people's directions entirely  at first."

The Alberta government confirmed to the National Post that it is investigating OHS complaints made about ServiceMaster.

Also on HuffPost:
NDP MP Nathan Cullen rose in the House of Commons Thursday to deliver an emotional tribute to Jo Cox, a British lawmaker who was shot and killed.

Cox was shot in Birstall, northern England, the town she represented. The Labour MP was pronounced dead in hospital.

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Cullen, his voice cracking, said Cox was a "mom of two beautiful children and a friend, a dedicated Labour MP and a long advocate of human rights in Britain and around the world."

'Lone incident'

"Jo used her voice for those who have none. She dedicated her passion to those who needed it most and she harnessed her limitless love, even and especially for those who allowed hate to consume them," he said.

"Her husband Brendan said it beautifully: 'She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, that our children are bathed in love and that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her.'

"To Brendan, to Jo's beautiful children, we express our deepest condolences."

Earlier, Cullen tweeted that he was praying for his friend after the attack.

Praying for my friend @Jo_Cox1 who was shot by a radical rightwing attacker today in UK. Shocked at the violence https://t.co/D6WOYWPC2g  Nathan Cullen (@nathancullen) June 16, 2016

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Emma Pyke, Cullen's assistant, told The Huffington Post Canada that he first met "the amazing Jo Cox" about three years ago at a leadership conference near Washington, D.C.

"At the time, Jo was contemplating whether to run or to start a NGO," Pyke said via email. "By the time they left the conference, shed decided to run. Jo and Nathan remained in touch since then."

A 52-year-old man has been arrested in the shooting. Police believe it is a "lone incident'' and are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attack.

With files from Ryan Maloney and The Associated Press

Also on HuffPost
Microsoft has become the first known multinational corporation to get involved in the marijuana industry  at least legally.

Its involvement won't be very direct  the company behind Windows wont be selling bongs and hemp seeds anytime soon. But it has partnered with Kind Financial, a California startup that builds software for seed-to-sale tracking of marijuana production.

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 Proud to announce KIND Government Solutions with #Microsoft - Check out the coverage - https://t.co/k3fGd4wlaypic.twitter.com/VyPKlYRYnK  KIND Financial (@kind_financial) June 16, 2016

Kind also provides financial software for this sector of the economy, which has been having serious problems dealing with major financial institutions (for obvious reasons). It also builds software that helps companies stay compliant with the many different regulations that cover legalized weed.

Microsofts partnership with Kind, announced in a press release on Thursday, will allow the companies to deliver these types of tracking products to governments that are regulating marijuana businesses, through Microsofts Azure Government, a cloud-computing platform.

Marijuana is legal for recreational or medicinal purposes, or both, in 20 U.S. states. Canadas federal government has promised to introduce nationwide marijuana legalization legislation in the spring of 2017.

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It's still illegal in the U.S. at the federal level, and its prohibition is enforced under numerous international treaties, making multinational companies like Microsoft hesitant to get involved  despite the potentially large sums of money to be made.

Yet in statements to the press Thursday, Microsoft sounded like the company assumes widespread legalization of marijuana is in the cards.

We do think there will be significant growth [in the marijuana business], Kimberly Nelson, Microsofts executive director for state and local government solutions, told The New York Times.

As the industry is regulated, there will be more transactions, and we believe there will be more sophisticated requirements and tools down the road.

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CNBC notes that Microsoft founder Bill Gates voted in favour of marijuana legalization in his home state of Washington, when the state voted on the issue in 2012.

"It's an experiment, and it's probably good to have a couple states try it out to see before you make that national policy," he said at the time.

Also on HuffPost
Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher are going to be parents again! The former That 70s Show co-stars are expecting their second child together. The couple already has a 20-month-old daughter named Wyatt Isabelle.

Ashton genuinely lights up when talking about Wyatt and the little one on the way, a source told People. Everything about being a father is natural to him.

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Kunis and Kutcher welcomed their first child in October 2014 and tied the knot the following summer.

Its not surprising that the two are quickly expanding their family. Back in October, Kunis told Business Insider that she absolutely wanted to have more kids. Then, in May, the 32-year-old star reiterated that sentiment while on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

A number of celebrities who became first-time parents in 2014 are also expecting their second child this year. This includes Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis, and Kerry Washington and Nnamdi Asomugha.

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Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes also became parents again this year after welcoming their first daughter in September 2014.

A photo posted by Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) on Nov 7, 2015 at 4:50pm PST





While Kunis and Kutcher have kept their daughter Wyatt out of the limelight, they are no strangers to talking about her and their new roles as mom and dad.

Following Wyatt's birth, Kutcher gushed about fatherhood on Conan, saying: It's unbelievable. It's the greatest thing on earth. As soon as this child was born I immediately wanted to call my parents and just apologize because I never knew how much they loved me.

Kunis similarly opened up about motherhood with Business Insider in October. Everything is different, she said, from the fact that you're so happy when you get six hours of sleep to the idea of being responsible for this incredible, living breathing little human being that you can't believe is yours.

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Clearly Kunis and Kutcher are two very happy parents. We cant wait to meet their newest addition later this year!

Also on HuffPost
Among the 49 victims of the Orlando mass shooting on June 12 was Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, a two-time cancer survivor and mom of 11 kids.

The 49-year-old Brooklyn native was shot and killed at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Florida, where she was out dancing with her 21-year-old son Isaiah Henderson.

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According to McCools sister-in-law Ada Pressley, the mom sacrificed herself to save her sons life when the gunman, Omar Mateen, began shooting. Brenda saw him point the gun. She said, Get down, to Isaiah and she got in front of him, Pressley told New York Daily News.

She was shot dead. Thats how much she loved her kids. If it werent for her, hed of been shot.

Just hours before she died, McCool posted a video from the dancefloor of the nightclub. She loved to dance, Robert Vance Pressley, McCools ex-husband, said. She was selfless, always giving of herself. All the kids in the neighborhood were part of her extended family.

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Henderson, who survived the shooting, was separated from his mother after she was shot. He and his family did not learn that McCool had died until Monday, June 13.

After receiving the tragic news, the 21-year-old blamed himself for his mothers death. He had to watch his mother die, Khalisha Pressley, McCools oldest daughter, told NBC News. He saw everybody getting killed. He feels it was his fault.

Remembering her mother, Pressley added that McCool was the sweetest lovingest person in the world.

My So Called Life star Wilson Cruz, whose mother was McCools stepsister, also spoke out after hearing the news of her death. On Facebook, he described the 49-year-old single mom as a proud and fierce advocate for her LGBT family. She spoke passionately about how much she loved her children.

A GoFundMe page has now been set up by Farrell Marshall, one of McCools sons, to help raise money for her funeral arrangements, as well as to help support McCool's youngest children.

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All I ask is for prayers and whatever you can to help me and brothers sisters to be able to pick up the pieces where she left off, Marshall wrote on the fundraising site. You will forever be in our hearts. Always. I truly love you so much MOM!

In three days, the site has raised over $50,000 for McCools children.

Also on HuffPost
CP

A Tory motion calling on the federal government to "free the beer" was shot down after Liberal MPs voted against it.

On Tuesday, Liberal and Bloc MPs voted against an opposition motion put forward by B.C. MP Dan Albas, the Tories' critic for interprovincial trade. The NDP and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May voted in favour of Albas' motion, but it was ultimately defeated 184-131.

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Eliminating inter-provincial trade barriers is smart policy. Let's get on with it. @DanAlbas  Elizabeth May (@ElizabethMay) June 15, 2016

Albas' motion was responding to a New Brunswick judge's "groundbreaking" ruling in the case of a man who was arrested for importing liquor from Quebec.

In April, Judge Ronald LeBlanc threw out all charges against Gerard Comeau for bringing in 14 cases of beer and three bottles of liquor to New Brunswick from a Quebec border town. The Canadian Constitution Foundation, which was part of Comeau's defence team, expected the case to go all the way up to the Supreme Court.

A 'priority' for the feds

Albas' motion called on the federal government to do just that. It asked the government to refer LeBlanc's ruling to the Supreme Court and recognize that Canadians have the constitutional right to trade with fellow Canadians.

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"This is the largest opportunity we have to strike down a whole host of trade barriers starting with the free trade of beer, which is why we call it the free the beer campaign," Albas told Kelowna Now.

The Tories packaged Albas' motion as part of their "free the beer" campaign.

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said referring the ruling to Canada's top court would not be effective, according to CTV News, adding that the government does not want to "pit one region against the other." However, like Albas, he believes the internal trade agreement needs to be modernized.

"It is a priority for this government, because we understand the importance of having free trade within Canada," Bains said in the House on Tuesday. "It is good for our economy, it is good for small businesses, and it is good for consumers. This will remain a priority as we continue to grow the economy."

With files from The Canadian Press

Also On HuffPost:
JGI/Jamie Grill via Getty Images African American people reading menu at restaurant

While some restaurants in Ontario will start posting calories on menus in 2017, a new study suggests a simple traffic light beside food items will steer you to make healthier choices.

According to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, adding traffic lights to menus could cut calorie consumption by 10 per cent. The study, which was published in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, was done over a six-week period with 803 orders and 249 participants.

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Calorie labelling appears to be effective in an online environment where consumers have fewer distractions, and the simpler traffic-light labeling seems as effective as standard calorie numbers, lead author Eric M. VanEpps said in a statement.

In the U.S., restaurants, movie theatres and vending machines will all require calories marked on their food and drink items starting May 2017. Some states like New York have already started this process at restaurants.

And of course, seeing a scary red label next to those burgers and fries may persuade you to get a salad instead, but VanEpps' research suggests any type of warning sign (including just putting a calorie amount in numbers) will work.

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The similar effects of traffic light and numeric labeling suggests to us that consumers are making decisions based more on which choices seem healthier than on absolute calorie numbers," he noted.

And while this study was conducted with employees ordering lunch from a specially-designed portal, for a lot of us, eating unhealthy and racking up those calories often happens when we eat out.

If you're the type of person who regularly buys lunch or dinner, saying no to bread (we know, this sucks), ordering dressings on the side and combining appetizers are all good ways to cut back.

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Federal Liberals now say that the so-called Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria in light of an independent report from the United Nations.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion confirmed the position in question period Thursday, two days after Liberal MPs voted against a Conservative motion that sought to label ISIS atrocities with the same term.

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"Today for the first time, an independent report by the UN Commission has concluded that genocide was committed by the so-called Islamic State against the Yazidis," Dion said. "Given this evidence, our government believes that genocide against the Yazidis is currently ongoing."

This undated file image posted online on Jan. 14, 2014 shows ISIS fighters marching in Raqqa, Syria. (Photo: File/The Canadian Press via The Associated Press)

Dion said the federal government is again calling on further, urgent action from the United Nations Security Council.

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Veteran Tory MP Jason Kenney said it was unfortunate it took the "stubborn minister so long to realize the facts that have been staring the world in the face."

Shortly before voting against the motion Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons that the determination on what is or is not genocide must be done objectively by the UN, not partisan politicians.

Four Liberal MPs strayed and voted with Tories, New Democrats, and Bloc MPs in supporting the motion.

The report from the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, based on dozens of interviews with survivors, summarizes in graphic detail the "ongoing genocide" against the Kurdish-speaking religious community of 400,000 people at the hands of ISIS. Testimonies included recollections of mass killings and the sexual slavery of women and girls.

The report summary states:

ISIS has sought to destroy the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community, and erasing their identity as Yazidis.

The report concludes survivor testimonies "clearly demonstrate" the extremist group's intention to "destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar."

A number of recommendations were put forward, including that the UN Security Council consider invoking Chapter Seven powers that allow the use of military force.

#ISIS crimes against #Yazidis qualify as genocide. States have an obligation to prevent and punish genocide. pic.twitter.com/WnSMe6RtoO  UN Geneva (@UNGeneva) June 16, 2016

But government's shift on the matter did not quell criticism from Tories who earlier blasted Trudeau, Dion, and other Liberals for failing to recognize what they say is beyond debate.

Kenney said that while he appreciated Dion's reflection on the UN report, he also found the foreign minister's statement "insufficient." ISIS' atrocities are not just affecting Yazidis, Kenney said, but other indigenous minorities in the region.

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Kenney urged Dion to join allies such as the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom in recognizing the "broader genocide of Daesh."

The foreign affairs minister said Canada's position is the same as its top allies, and said the government has taken the lead by pushing the UN Security Council and tripling the amount of troops training Kurdish forces on the ground.

"I find it disturbing that the minister of foreign affairs is so profoundly misinformed on a matter of such great moral importance," Kenney said, noting other allies apply the term genocide to what ISIS is doing to other minority groups including the Assyrians, Armenians, and Christians.

Kenney said recognizing a wider genocide would mean following "Canada's natural moral conscience."

Tories press for combat mission

Michelle Rempel, the Tories' immigration critic, rose to press the Liberals to accelerate the asylum applications of Yazidi victims, as recommend by the UN. She said Immigration Minister John McCallum could provide refuge with "one stroke of a pen."

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McCallum called her claim "a bit far-fetched," but said the situation is being taken very seriously.

"We are studying it, we are welcoming a number of Yazidis into Canada in coming weeks, and we will work very hard to do more, not just for Yazidis but for other endangered groups in difficult-to-reach territories of the world," McCallum said.

"Have the Liberals denied genocide to avoid restoring and extending Canada's anti-Daesh combat mission?"

Peter Kent, the Tories' deputy foreign affairs critic, used the occasion to press Liberals to restore the air combat effort against ISIS. He charged that Liberals have refused to speak the word genocide for months because if they "acknowledged the horrifically obvious, Canada would be obliged to do something."

"Is that the real reason? Have the Liberals denied genocide to avoid restoring and extending Canada's anti-Daesh combat mission?" Kent asked.

Dion said Liberals actually acted with "a lot of strength," again pointing to the amount of training forces on the ground.

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"I call upon all my colleagues to support the plan that Canada is making on the ground to help these populations," he said.

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When the country's finance ministers meet in Vancouver on June 20 to discuss expanding the Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan (CPP/QPP), there will be a lot on the line for Canadian workers and business owners. But it's not too late to put the brakes on a proposal that will destroy jobs, hold back wages and even push some businesses over the edge in years to come.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, "Well, of course small businesses are against this idea. They will simply incur an additional payroll tax with no associated benefit."

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All very true, yet this proposal goes well beyond our 109,000 member businesses. It affects employees just as much as it affects small- and medium-sized businesses. It's time to set the record straight once and for all, and to expose the weak and tired arguments being rolled out in support of CPP expansion.

First and foremost, this is not your mom and dad's CPP crisis. Not by a long shot.

Advocates of CPP expansion would have you believe there is a full-on retirement crisis unfolding. This is simply not the case.

When Paul Martin set out to increase CPP contributions back in the 1990s, it was because the fund had been mismanaged and depleted by political short-sightedness for a generation. Significant premium hikes were necessary to save a plan that was severely underfunded (I note that CFIB members supported increased premiums at that time).

The CPP fund is actually in relatively good shape today, with enough in the kitty to cover retirees for 75 years to come. But advocates of CPP expansion would have you believe there is a full-on retirement crisis unfolding as we speak, crossing any and every demographic.

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This is simply not the case.

Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, prior to being elected as an MP, co-authored a book entitled The Real Retirement, in which he and fellow author Fred Vettese wrote that the retirement savings crisis was a myth. For those committed to evidence-based policy-making, I urge them to consider minister Morneau's finding:

"Canadians are actually doing better than they think in their retirement planning -- and are better off than many of the experts are telling us," Morneau noted.

So are current seniors living in poverty? The evidence suggests quite the opposite. In fact, Canada has one of the lowest senior poverty rates in the industrialized world. And even if there were a large population of Canadian seniors living poor, a CPP hike would not help -- it would put exactly zero dollars in their pockets.

Those who are close to retirement and have made contributions to CPP over their working life will see little gain from CPP expansion, and at the lowest end of the income spectrum, increased CPP benefits will be offset by reductions in other income supports, such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

The government giveth, and then promptly taketh away.

Simply put, it will take 40 years for increased CPP contributions to result in the full increase in benefits . None of the proposals would be of any help for those at or near retirement age today.

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Aside from this uncomfortable truth, a CPP hike would eliminate any help and reductions middle-income earners have received under the new government. We have to remember that additional CPP benefits are not free or even coming out of general government revenue. Any proposal to hike CPP essentially boils down to forcing you to take some of your money today to set aside for your benefit 40 years from now.

While research suggests that 17 per cent of Canadians may not be saving enough for their own retirement, a CPP hike would require everyone to put more of their income into the CPP basket.

For young people already confronting increasing levels of student debt, an overcharged housing market and a high cost of living, this is simply a financial kick in the teeth.

For most, that would mean reducing the amount they are already saving in a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) or tax-free savings account (TFSA), or perhaps setting aside for their mortgage or kid's education. Even some unions admit that requiring employers to increase their share of the CPP will result in lower wages or foregone employee raises. There truly is no free lunch.

This doesn't exactly sound like a great way to buoy the middle class. For young people already confronting increasing levels of student debt, an overcharged housing market and a high cost of living, this is simply a financial kick in the teeth.

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Moreover, Ontario appears bent on ramming through its unpopular and controversial Ontario Retirement Pension Plan (ORPP), which represents a damaging and costly double-whammy to workers and employers in the province should it come alongside an expanded CPP.

There are many better ways to help Canadians save more for retirement, if that is really the goal. Optional savings vehicles (e.g., RRSPs, TFSAs) should be promoted, as polls show these are preferred means of retirement savings over an expanded CPP/QPP program. They offer benefits that are just not available through CPP/QPP: better rates of return; broader transferability after death, etc. For businesses that have the ability to offer retirement savings plans to employees, they need more flexible, low-cost options, such as Pooled Registered Pension Plans, which are already in place in Quebec.

For Canadian workers, what can you do to let governments know that taking more money out of your pocket is a terrible way to help you save for retirement?

Visit RetirementReality.ca and check out the facts and figures, use the calculator to see exactly how much more money will be coming off your paycheque if this plan goes through and then sign the petition to voice your opposition to CPP/QPP expansion.

Finance ministers have given themselves until December to arrive at a decision on CPP/QPP expansion, one way or another.

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We've studied the issue from every angle and the straight truth is this: there's no need to wait another minute to pull this bad idea off the table.

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Stoyan Nenov / Reuters Children line up for food at a makeshift camp for migrants and refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni, Greece, April 20, 2016. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov

June 20th is World Refugee Day. Observed for the first time in 2001, this day draws attention to the urgency and extremely difficult conditions faced by 60 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) around the world. This June 20th, I pay tribute to the courage and hope shown by these millions of refugees.

The number of refugees and displaced persons is on the rise globally. For example, half of Syria's population are now refugees or internally displaced, in a tragedy unfolding before our eyes. Syria is not alone; elsewhere in the Middle East, the situation is also dire in Iraq and Yemen, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians refugees are in need of help. Many refugees are making their way to countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, countries already overwhelmed, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have tried to cross the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Too many have died in their attempts to find security.

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We must also raise awareness of situations that, all too often, don't get enough press. In Asia, over 50 years of conflict in Myanmar has resulted in over 1.4 million refugees and displaced persons. Pakistan faces a dual crisis, given the large number of refugees it has taken in (over 1 million Afghan refugees in December) and the steadily rising number of IDPs (590,000 in 2015). In South America, one of the world's largest populations of IDPs is in Colombia, as the result of a long civil war that only now appears close to ending.

In Africa, including in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing conflict, drought, and political crises. And yet the plight of refugees in African countries is barely noticed by the international community. There is also a very worrisome and very real problem of radicalization in refugee camps. These camps are being used by terrorists for recruiting young people. The promise of a better life is often used as a tool to radicalize these refugees who have no other viable options.

We also need to think about future generations, as too many children are caught in conflicts and humanitarian crises.

We also know that climate change will lead to the forced migration of millions of people, exacerbating the current crisis. According to some estimates, we could see 200 million climate migrants by 2050. Some population displacement will come directly as a result of rising sea levels or extreme weather events that leave some regions uninhabitable, aggravating food insecurity. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recently stated that the number of people displaced each year by natural disasters will soon be much higher than those displaced by conflict. Canada should make stronger commitments on the climate change front. A good first step would be to rejoin the UN Convention to Combat Desertification that the Conservatives had withdrawn from.

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Although Canada played a significant role by taking in over 25,000 Syrian refugees last year, they account for less than one per cent of the world's refugees. I believe Canada must do more and become a global model. Canada should increase its acceptance of refugees, regardless of their home country. A refugee is a refugee, regardless of their origin. Settling a larger number of refugees each year is just one solution Canada could consider. Canada should also provide increased humanitarian assistance in crisis situations, and increase its development assistance in fragile states.

We must also empower local actors working to better the lives of their communities. In addition to regular support for Canadian and international humanitarian organizations, Canada should support local organizations in crisis zones that are doing much of the work, without funding or support. In Syria I know of several local relief organizations that continue to help their community, despite the dangers of the conflict. These brave individuals need our help.

We also need to think about future generations, as too many children are caught in conflicts and humanitarian crises. I have asked Canada to support the creation of the Education Cannot Wait Fund, and I am disappointed that the government did not announce a contribution for this initiative when it attended the World Humanitarian Summit a few weeks ago.

Finally, Canada and other donors must address the root causes of forced migration. This means applying concrete and viable political solutions to prevent conflict and fight climate change. One way to do this is to support the inclusion of women in conflict prevention initiatives. I am proud to have encouraged the other members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development to conduct a study on women, peace and security, and I hope to see Canada adopt the recommendations coming out of that study.

Many challenges await us. This June 20th, we must do better for refugees, both at home and abroad.

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Aaron Josefczyk / Reuters Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Pittsburgh, PA June 11, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk

Most North Americans think of themselves as tolerant and accepting of persons of diverse backgrounds. But despite this conviction, the expression of racism remains quite pervasive in our society. We're frequently exposed to it in the media (especially social media), in schools, in our place of work and/or at dinner tables and other social gatherings.

A Leger survey conducted in March 2015 for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation saw some one in three Canadians admitting that often or sometimes they hear racist comments about Black persons, Muslims and/or Aboriginals.

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A September 2014 Leger survey reveals that some 62 per cent get upset when they hear a racist remark from a friend or family member. Despite this admission, it's likely that when racist views are expressed by people we know it elicits more indifference than anger.

Some 35 per cent said they had witnessed a racist incident in the previous year. One in three Canadians admit to sometimes making racist remarks, one in four admit laughing at most racist jokes and a similar share agree that "many racial stereotypes are accurate."

Men are far more likely than women to make racist remarks and hold racist views. Yet, relatively few Canadians have been called racist with nine in ten saying that they have never been the object of such an accusation. Perhaps most of us are persuaded that an occasional racist remark doesn't make someone a racist.

Thankfully, for the most part, it would seem that those who harbor racial prejudices do not act upon them. Good sense dictates that such thoughts be suppressed. Demagogues insist that withholding prejudice is frequently done to be politically correct.

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For several decades, educators and policy-makers have repeatedly reminded us that racism is unjust and destructive. So while we may be too forgiving of ourselves, our friends and our family members when it comes to the occasional racist remark, we wisely hold our leaders to a higher standard and particularly our elected officials. Even if, regrettably, some of us expect less from ourselves, we expect better from them.

It's never easy to defend politicians that repeatedly utter racist remarks in public. In Canada doing so would likely disqualify someone from holding the highest public office. Currently that does not appear to be the case in the United States.

The presumptive Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump's remarks about the ability of an American-born, Latino origin Judge to rule objectively on a case involving one of Trump's projects clearly foments prejudice amongst Americans. US Republican House speaker Paul Ryan has stated that "claiming a person can't do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of racism."

Such statements have placed leading Republicans in a situation where they must defend the indefensible. Despite his disavowal of the comments, Ryan added that we have more common ground on the policy issues of the day, and we have more likelihood of getting our policies enacted with Trump.

In short, Republicans appear to be able to live with leaders that practice the politics of racism. Ryan made a spurious distinction between Trump's mouth and heart saying that he was not willing to call Trump a racist even he qualified his remarks about the Judge as such (it is worth noting that Trump repeated the remarks about the judge on several occasions).

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New York Republican and leading Trump supporter Lee Zeldin contended that even if Trump's statement was racist he didn't make it to imply that he was superior because he is white and the judge is Mexican. In other words, if Trump wasn't evoking racial superiority than he really can't be accused of racism.

Racism shouldn't be dismissed as mere opinion that gets pushed aside because presumably some higher political interest is at stake. In democracies, political leaders must offer the example to others when it comes to the fight against racism for which history has too often demonstrated just how heavy a toll this blight can exact upon societies.

Let's remain hopeful that the vast majority of Americans know this and will ultimately demand much better from their political leaders.
Huskystudio_se via Getty Images The human body wrapped in a gay flag which symbolises a muslim gay person.

In the wake of the Orlando gay night club shooting, many Muslims condemned the dastardly act of terrorism that took away 49 precious and beautiful lives. Many have also dissociated the actions of the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, from Islam. However, umpteen condemnations are necessary but not sufficient to address the deep-rooted heterosexism and homophobia within conservative Muslim circles.

Religious leaders cannot condemn the actions of extremists but condone and perpetuate the rhetoric that pushes those at the fringes, who deal with inner demons and have imbibed a narrative of martyrdom and heroism, towards aggression and violence.

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It is also important to not let such leaders relinquish their responsibility in inflicting pain through severe cognitive dissonance on vulnerable LGBT Muslim youth. This is especially true in the wake of the Orlando gay bar shootings, when suddenly American Muslim leaders have begun to express solidarity with the LGBT community but have done next to nothing to support LGBT Muslims.

Even now, some Muslim leaders are more concerned about protecting an Islam that has been ossified on LGBT issues instead of the genuine concerns of living, breathing LGBT Muslims.

Take for instance the comments by Hamza Yusuf, an American Muslim religious leader on LGBT Muslims in a recent CNN interview. When prodded on gay Muslims who feel ostracized from mainstream Islam, he simply asserted "we are committed to Abrahamic morality," and instead of talking about creating safe spaces, he tritely mentioned that there is "absolutely no compulsion in religion."

For him the genuine human desire for intimacy, affection and companionship is construed as "certain lifestyles" and he ignores the grass roots changes taking place in Muslim circles, through Muslim LGBT safe spaces in North America, Pride Parades in Turkey and LGBT Muslim affirming scholarship, by claiming that, "the vast majority of Muslims would never accept the lawfulness of an active homosexual lifestyle."

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He views the story of Lot's people in the Qur'an, a story about inhospitality and coercion, and one which has to be stretched through analogical deduction to superimpose on the lives of LGBT persons, to be "pretty explicit in its condemnation of the act." Ignoring the limited medical knowledge of past Muslim scholars along with their socio-cultural norms, he views Islamic jurisprudence as a body of frozen rules, when he asserts that, "we have a long tradition of jurisprudence that defines it as unlawful."

He is concerned that young LGBT Muslims "want full recognition of their lifestyle" and tries to foist a one-size fits it all prescription by asserting, "I know that people can live celibate lives, I did it myself for many years." However, he cannot generalize his own experiences and foist his own whims on a life affirming Islam that is mindful of the genuine needs of human beings. Indeed, the overarching Islamic objective is the welfare of human beings and not the unnatural suppression of their genuine human desire for affection, intimacy and companionship.

Downplaying the death punishments in the 3 Sunni and the Shia school of jurisprudence, he claims that, "there's no specific punishment in the books of fiqh (Islamic laws) that relate to homosexuality per se." It seems like a PR move on his part to refer to liwat as "illicit sexual relations" instead of "homosexuality," which is ubiquitously used in Muslim circles. In doing so, he is limiting the usage of the word "homosexuality" to same-sex attraction and not conduct.

He also downplays the death punishment by claiming that, "they are legal fictions because they are impossible to prove." However, instead of defending classical legal manuals on the death punishment, perhaps he could work towards ending the draconian punishments that are meted out in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It is clear from the words of such scholars that they are more concerned about protecting abstract legal rules from past centuries than about living, breathing human beings. It is also clear that much of their language is framed as a PR exercise to deflect criticism and to relinquish their own responsibility in inflicting harm on their fellow co-religionists.

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Instead of such defensive posturing, the need of the hour is to go beyond the necessary condemnations and actually undertake community initiatives that seek to draw Muslim, LGBT and those at the intersection, the LGBT Muslim community, together. Such initiatives could include joint rallies against hate, inter-faith events that promote diverse LGBT affirming voices and community events where people get to know each other directly at a human level instead of being coloured by the biases of conservative community leaders.

In short, in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings, Muslim leadership has to go beyond mere condemnations to actually have community engagement with the LGBT community and especially LGBT Muslims by creating safe spaces and to move from reluctant tolerance to full fledged acceptance.
Bilderbuch via Getty Images The Ottawa River and Victoria Island, Canada

There is currently a battle brewing over the proposed construction of a massive condo, office and retail project on the Chaudiere Falls and Islands, located on the Ottawa river behind Parliament Hill.

The project, dubbed "Zibi" (the Algonquin word for river) and led by Windmill Developments with financial support from Dream Corporation, seeks to create a high-density district on the islands. It has received support from the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau as well as praise from various local, green-oriented organizations.

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There is one problem, though: the falls and islands are sacred, unceded Algonquin territory.

And opposition to Windmill's Zibi is clear enough. In November 2015, the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador (AFN-QL), which represents 43 Aboriginal Communities, passed a resolution opposing the project. And then in December, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) passed its own resolution opposing the project at its Special Chiefs Assembly. Of the 10 federally recognized Algonquin First Nations in the Ottawa River watershed, nine are officially opposed to Zibi. Certainly, there is nothing even close to consensus amongst Algonquin First Nations when it comes to putting up condo and office buildings on what they recognize as a sacred site.

There is also considerable opposition to Windmill's plans from non-indigenous organizations. Concerned citizens' group such as Free the Falls and Stop Windmill have been organizing in support of the opposing Algonquin Nations. And several unions, including CUPE's Aboriginal Peoples' Council, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Public Service Alliance of Canada-National Capital Region, which is my union, have expressed solidarity with the opposing Algonquin First Nations.

Meanwhile, the national capital region Greenspace Alliance has stated that: "The Chaudiere and Albert Islands are in the core of the national capital. Their rededication as a natural area, in recognition of indigenous claims, would be a powerful act of Reconciliation."

To be sure, the above-mentioned Algonquin-sponsored resolutions are very clear in support of an alternative vision -- namely, the installation of an Algonquin Nation Cultural Park and Historic Commemoration Site under the care of an Algonquin-controlled institution. This echoes the vision of the late William "Grandfather" Commanda, the Algonquin Elder who long advocated for "Asinabka" -- the restoration of the falls and islands to nature. And of course, to make such as project a reality would require critical support from the federal government, which has been very vocal recently about supporting reconciliation with Canada's indigenous people.

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"I find it unconscionable that our capital city, to this day, does not have an institution of national significance dedicated to Canada's indigenous people."

As Algonquin Elder Albert Dumont has written, "We are told over and over again in recent times that a 'new relationship of honour and mutual respect is at hand' between us, the First Nations and the settler communities. If Canadians are OK with a sacred site such as Asinabka (Akikodjiwan) being violated in the most despicable manner by the construction of highrise buildings upon it, then their warped definition of 'reconciliation' is very different than mine."

The Chaudiere Islands would, in fact, be the ideal location for an Algonquin Nation Cultural Park and Historic Commemoration Site. Situated between the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, the islands are surrounded by national institutions, including the Parliament of Canada, the Supreme Court, the National Gallery, the Museum of History, the War Museum and a complex of federal office buildings that is home to the department responsible for Canada' indigenous peoples. The islands are are also across from Nepean Point, that wonderful bluff overlooking Ottawa and Gatineau with the statue of French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who himself witnessed Algonquins in ceremony at the falls in 1613.

As it turns out, there is already an existing design based on Grandfather Commanda's vision, produced by none other than the renowned indigenous Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal, perhaps best known for designing the stunning Museum of History (formerly the Museum of Civilization) just across from the Chaudiere Islands.

In an interview with the Canadian Geographic in April, Mr. Cardinal was very critical of Windmill's Aboriginal outreach over the Zibi project, stating: "It's a sham. It's like they're stealing your car, but doing it while saying 'We love you, We're with you, We're on board with your vision.'"

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The Commanda-Cardinal vision is available on the City of Ottawa website, and envisions significant greening of the islands, the removal of hydro dams from the falls, and the creation of an Indigenous cultural centre and meeting place.

How can civic or political leaders stand indifferently when sacred Algonquin territory is being sold off as condos?

It's grand and bold, and can undoubtedly serve as a guide for the alternative vision for the islands being advocated by Algonquin First Nations. Indeed, contrast renderings for Cardinal's plans with the "little Manhattan" Windmill is proposing for the islands -- the differences are stunning.

Furthermore, as a settler, a denizen of Ottawa and a federal public service worker, I find it unconscionable that our capital city, to this day, does not have an institution of national significance dedicated to Canada's indigenous people. It's 2016, after all.

How can civic or political leaders state at the beginning of so many meetings and conferences held in Ottawa these days that "we acknowledge we are standing on unceded Algonquin territory," yet stand indifferently when sacred Algonquin territory is being sold off as condos?

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Either one understands that a people's land is sacred, or one doesn't. Sacredness is not for sale, not for development, period. If someone wants to make a bundle of profits, no matter how green the project, at least take if off sacred land. The sacred Chaudieres site, which has been abused by industry for over a century, is in need of remediation, not redevelopment for private profit.

The only question is: will the new federal government work with Algonquins to turn this vision into a reality?

One hopes that with Justin Trudeau's commitment to changing Canada's relationship with indigenous peoples and his recent vow to fully support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the federal government will stop private developers from grabbing sacred indigenous territories without their prior consent and move toward implementing a bold vision for the Chaudiere Islands instead.

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Drew Angerer via Getty Images ORLANDO, FL - JUNE 15: A makeshift memorial for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, near Orlando Regional Medical Center down the street from the crime scene, June 15, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. The shooting at Pulse Nightclub, which killed 49 people and injured 53, is the worst mass-shooting event in American history. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

When I think about the massacre in Orlando this past weekend, my heart breaks. The senseless loss of so many innocent lives is horrifying, but there are some aspects to this tragedy that are equally shocking.

I'm devastated for the victims, their friends and families. My heart goes out to them and I can only wish them love, peace and strength. I want to encourage everyone affected to seek help, whether in the form of emotional support from loved ones or with professional therapy. The more support, the better.

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Now, I'm having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the assailant, an obviously deranged man, had been interviewed by the FBI not once, but twice, and yet was still not considered to be a threat. How could that have happened?

Even worse than that, I really can't understand how someone who'd been investigated on more than one occasion by the FBI was still able to purchase an assault rifle, with which he carried out his cowardly and monstrous acts.

I've been following the news, and what the intelligent, informed, experienced people are saying is that the motivations of this gunman were likely to be highly complex.

I'm dumbfounded by the fact that assault weapons are actually available to anyone other than the military or SWAT teams. What in heaven's name does an ordinary citizen need with an assault rifle? It seems to me that the name itself most aptly defines its function: assault.

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I'm revolted, but not at all surprised, that the Republican presidential candidate chose to capitalize on this unspeakable tragedy to spout more of his xenophobic rhetoric and to "appreciate the congrats about being right" about it being a "terrorist" act.

It terrifies me to think that a misguided, misinformed, misogynistic, hyper-aggressive, ultra-narcissistic individual could be the future president of the U.S. Heaven help us if that ever comes to pass.

I've been following the news, and what the intelligent, informed, experienced people are saying is that the motivations of this gunman were likely to be highly complex. For example, he'd pledged allegiance to a number of different groups during the attack; many of which had contradictory philosophies.

It's important to note that the assailant, Omar Mateen, had been frequenting the club where he'd waged his attack, and had been on multiple gay dating sites. He'd spent much more time in the club than would be required for someone merely casing the joint.

For someone who supposedly hated LGBTQ people, he sure looked a lot like someone who was exploring these aspects of his sexuality.

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Instead of seeing this man as a radicalized religious terrorist, we could consider the possibility that his ambivalence about his sexuality and his shame about his preferences made him despise and want to punish those people whom he desired. It certainly wouldn't be the first case of this happening.

I've been hearing some people ranting about the problems with religious extremists, when they were discussing this attack, and I found this to be tremendously distasteful, especially when it doesn't appear that religion was a significant factor. According to his first wife, Mr. Mateen wasn't particularly religious.

It's important to note that the majority of the recent "lone wolf" attacks on large groups of people in America have been carried out by individuals with mental disturbances; not by radicalized individuals from any religious groups.

Why are we not doing more to identify these mentally disturbed individuals and to make sure that they aren't armed, especially with, of all things, assault weapons?

I've learned, since the attack, that the U.S. has no program for de-radicalizing disenfranchised youth. Imams in the U.S. are taking it upon themselves to work with disaffected youth and to make sure that they aren't caught in the net of ISIS.

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In England, there are programs in place to help young people who are tempted toward violent radicalism to redirect their energies toward something positive. Why can't something like that be set up in the U.S.?

It breaks my heart that the gun lobbyists will use this massacre as "evidence" of why we need more guns, not fewer.

Mateen was a man who brutally beat his first wife, whom he isolated and terrorized, and who had to be rescued by her parents. Today, she calls him "mentally unstable," and she should know.

Apparently, his second wife wasn't allowed to have a license or drive a car until just recently, and he also kept her away from her family, depriving her of their support. This isn't the pattern of a terrorist; it's the classic pattern of a sociopath and wife-abuser.

Tragically, there are a lot of very disturbed individuals in our society today. They're of every religion, colour and ethnicity. They're filled with rage and hatred, and they have a strong urge to be destructive.

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The last thing we need is to put assault weapons into the hands of the most mentally unstable, deranged members of society, but inexplicably, that's exactly what we're doing.

It breaks my heart that the gun lobbyists will use this massacre as "evidence" of why we need more guns, not fewer. In fact, here in Canada where there are far fewer guns, there's a whole lot less gun violence than in the U.S.; even less than the population difference would explain.

Things are so polarized in the U.S. these days that the Republicans in congress refuse to cooperate with just about any initiative President Obama tries to put forward, and they're doing it just to be spiteful. No matter how hard the president tries to ban assault rifles, for example, congress stubbornly refuses to budge.

Who loses? Only the people being killed by those weapons that are ending up in the hands of these deranged assailants; only the victims' families, and friends, and colleagues, and society as a whole.

But hey, the Republicans in congress can continue to be spiteful and make it impossible for the president to do society a world of good. These congresspeople should be ashamed of themselves, each and every one.

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I'm furious at the politicians, lobbyists and everyone else who continues to ignorantly insist that there's a good reason for people in this day and age to be armed to the teeth.

Study after study shows that owning a gun makes a person less safe, not more so. It's a proven fact. Pro-gun people can dispute it as much as they want, but it won't make it any less true.

I keep thinking, how many more people have to die before the insanity finally stops? Somebody in a position of authority has to stand up and say, "Enough!" I'm waiting desperately to hear who that will be.

Finally, I just want to say that I've always believed that love is the best thing in the world, and that it's what makes us better people and the world a better place. More love is always a good thing. I really don't care who loves whom, as long as they're bringing more love to the world.

Anyone who has a problem with two people sincerely loving one-another should just get over it, already. Love is not only meant for procreation; it's for creating connections, unity, harmony, peace, compassion and caring. It's 2016, for goodness' sake. The more love, the better.

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Omar Mateen was a hater. He hated women, gays, Jews and blacks, among others. My response to this hateful person and to people like him? I'm telling everyone who'll listen to kiss the people they love that much more.

Please sign up here for my free monthly wellness newsletter. July is all about being your best self and living your best life.

Listen to my new podcast with the brilliant writer and comic-book creator, David Hopkins. We discuss the value of learning and the importance of empathy.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS A man walks through the crowd holding a sign during a vigil and memorial for victims of the Orlando nightclub shootings near the historic Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, Monday, June 13, 2016, in New York. State and city officials, LGBT community members, and others gathered as a show of solidarity with the victims and survivors of the Orlando nightclub shootings, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

The day after the killings in Orlando I heard Stevie Wonder's "You are the Sunshine of My Life" on the radio. I used to sing that song to my daughter every day when we first brought her home. It made me think about those 49 mothers and fathers who must have their own favorite song that makes them think of their sons and daughters.

Like everyone else, I was stunned by the senseless killings. To paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda's sonnet at the Tony Awards, hate is hate is hate, no matter what name we give it: terrorism, domestic terrorism or hate crimes.

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Sadly, all over the world we have mourned, ceaselessly. For me it all started in Paris. I was saddened by the death of a close friend at the same moment in time. I didn't think it could get any worse. And then, of course, it did.

What makes us hate has been theorized since the beginning of time. Shakespeare wrote about hate and violence. But what is rarely discussed is what we need to do beyond the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

It all starts with how we run our business, our schools and our governments. I can only tell you what I am going to do to facilitate change. I know I can't change the world, but I can change the lives I touch every day.

My team and I are committed to inclusion. We are all made up of diverse families, religious beliefs, ethnicities and sexual orientations. We are a good team and want to work for good.

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To me inclusion is the most important driver of business today. Without inclusion we lose our creativity, our drive and our resourcefulness, because by accepting that people are different from us we acknowledge we are not perfect and that we can always learn from others.

The steps to inclusion we teach in our programs are three-fold. My research has proven that inclusion occurs when Learning = EQ + IQ in a culture.

Step 1: Teach people in your culture to achieve their goals by understanding how each prefers to listen, to learn and how to influence.

Step 2: Teach people the emotional intelligence of your organization by demonstrating how in your culture you accept and give feedback, and how and why you have difficult conversations in your culture.

Step 3: Teach your culture's IQ, which is how decisions are made morally and ethically, and how this is expected to influence performance.

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In the workplace we need to abide by this unassailable truth: inclusion is not just a soft skill in which we count numbers and make up job titles. Inclusion is inseparable from our humanity and -- if ignored, dismissed or thought of as "soft" -- will isolate people.

Albert Einstein said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." I am not sure that anything will stop the senseless taking of life, but I will continue to fight for diversity and inclusion.

It's our humanity that makes us who we are. Lip service further denigrates the horror in Orlando. We can and must be moved.

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Do you take pride in your job, in the company you work for and your workplace?

Most people will instinctively respond, "Of course I do!" But, do you really?

It seems that every workplace has a sign in the kitchen that says, "Your mother doesn't work here. Please clean up after yourself." Because, for whatever reason, many employees are completely willing to leave the sink filled with their dirty dishes, the counter messy and the coffee pot empty.

What does it say about you when you are comfortable just walking away, leaving your mess for someone else to clean up?

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I was in a public washroom at an airport recently. Canadian airports are incredibly clean, thanks to the staff at those airports. They do a great job and I certainly appreciate it. But I don't treat the washroom with disrespect just because I know someone will clean up after me. But it seems that not everyone thinks that way. Some people leave the toilets in a disgusting state. They leave water, soap and whathaveyou all over the counter tops. I had to stand a few inches away from the sink, because I knew that the water from previous guests would end up on my shirt and pants.

Would you leave your bathroom at home like that? Of course not. At least--I hope not!

It's a matter of pride. Pride in terms of the way you are seen by others, pride in the company you work for, and pride in what you do.

When people ask you what you do for a living, do you hang your head? Do you use the word "just" as in, "I'm just a clerk"? Why not tell others what you do, proudly, instead of with embarrassment and a lack of pride?

One of my favourite stories (and I'm really not sure if this is just folklore) is about a custodian at NASA. Apparently, John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA in the 60s, and he saw a custodian sweeping the floor. He asked him what he was doing and the custodian replied, "I'm helping to put a man on the moon!"

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True story or not, it illustrates the point that everyone can take pride in what they do. The custodian didn't demean or belittle the value of his work. He walked tall and did his job well because he had pride.

We had a tenant in one of our apartment units who vacated this week. She left the apartment filthy. I couldn't imagine inviting people over to my home and having them see me live that way.

Pride in my appearance means that I brush my teeth, comb my hair and have a shower before I go to work, before I leave my home, before I have friends over. That's not vanity. It's me saying, "I am taking care of myself because I'm worth it." I am proud of myself.

I keep my house clean, my car clean and my desk clean. I know that whether they mean to or not, guests and coworkers will judge me and my abilities on what they see. I don't want my guests to be afraid to eat my food, or my coworkers to think that I can't do my job properly because of the way I have presented myself.

I know that my desk, my body, my car and my house will get dirty just as fast as I can keep them clean, but I have pride in my possessions and I want them to look nice.

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My job, desk and workplace is where I spend the bulk of my day. I want to say proudly that I work for X company and I do Y there. I want you to look at my workspace and my cleanliness as a reflection of the care I put into my job.

The next time you wash your hands in a public washroom, clean up after yourself. When you go shopping at the mall, bring your cart back to the cart corral. Wipe the kitchen counter at the office, put your dishes away. Comb your hair, tuck in your shirt. Speak nicely about your job and your company and your work.

The world is judging you, whether you want people to or not. Be proud of who you are, where you live and what you do.
This is my first Father's Day as a father. My daughter, Sitara Patricia, was born a few weeks ago at a hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side. I work with UNICEF at its New York headquarters, but have spent most of my UN career in the field -- in civil conflicts including Liberia, Angola, Central African Republic -- as well as being deployed on UNICEF emergency missions such as the Nepal Earthquakes, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the Haiti Earthquake and South Sudan's civil conflict.

As with most births, nothing went terribly wrong, but then again, nothing went according to plan. A natural delivery became a long, drawn-out labour that required 48 hours of close medical attention by doctors and nurses, my wife hooked up to the latest technology, which monitored every detailed aspect of her health and that of the baby.

At a certain point, the latest drugs were injected to speed up cervix dilation, and when the dilation happened much too quickly, both an epidural and more drugs to slow the dilation were injected. All under the careful eyes of medical staff and computer monitors. The next day, after hours of trying to deliver naturally, the doctors recommended a caesarian section due to the position of the baby's head.

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Within minutes, my wife was wheeled into a pristine operating room, surrounded by a medical team, anaesthetized and the c-section began. In no time at all, our daughter was delivered into my wife's arms, crying to show that she was happy and healthy. And the breastfeeding began ...

Contrast this with the experience of a woman I met while on emergency mission with UNICEF to South Sudan, just two years ago in June 2014:

The baby boy is only four hours old when we meet -- born on a thin, foam single mattress that lies on a mud-dirt floor, inside a small, makeshift plastic sheet shelter in the early morning darkness of Mingkaman, the massive site for internally displaced persons in South Sudan.

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Kuei and the mid-wife from the UNICEF-supported health clinic in Mingkaman IDP site holding her four-hour old son. Photo: UNICEF/Kent Page

The plastic shelter is too low to stand-up in, and apart from the mattress, there is little else inside. The mud floor is damp and it is clear that rain floods the shelter during the heavy thunderstorms prevalent at this time of year. It is hot and humid in this cramped space, the air thick and heavy.

Sitting on the mattress, holding her newborn wrapped in a thin cloth on her lap, the mother of the newest displaced baby born in South Sudan that day is tired, happy and proud. Kuei is nineteen years old and this is the first baby for her and her husband, 23-year-old Kang. Kuei is already breastfeeding her son, which is critical because a breastfed baby has at least a six times greater chance of survival than a non-breastfed baby.

Kuei breastfeeding her four-hour old son. Photo: UNICEF/Kent Page

Kuei was about four months pregnant when she and her husband had to run for their lives in December 2013 from the violence and fighting around their hometown of Bor in South Sudan's Jonglei State. They fled their village with only a few clothes as possessions, hiding and sleeping out in the open by the Nile River for weeks before finally crossing the river to the relative safety of the Mingkaman in neighboring Lakes State.

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South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world -- even before the eruption of the current conflict and the displacement of more than 1.3 million people. But upon arriving in Mingkaman, Kuei went to the UNICEF-supported, Health Link maternal and primary health care clinic, established as an emergency measure at the internally displaced persons site.

"I went to the antenatal clinic yesterday," says Kuei. "I was seen by the midwife who told me that it was my time to give birth soon but the waters had not broken." At the clinic, the mid-wife gave Kuei a clean delivery kit which turned out to have likely been a life-saver. The kit includes items to help ensure sanitary and safe conditions for a woman in labour and for those assisting with the birth. It contains a plastic sheet, soap, a two-sided clean razor blade for cutting the umbilical cord, cord ties, and pictorial instructions on how to deliver a child.

Kuei and her 4-hour old baby son (and a mid-wife (on left) from the UNICEF-supported health clinic in Mingkaman IDP site. Photo: UNICEF/Kent Page

"Then I came back to my shelter and the labour started at night," continues Kuei. Her mother-in-law stayed with Kuei while Kang went searching for help. But everything happened so fast that by the time he got back, Kuei's mother-in-law had already helped Kuei give birth in the 4 a.m. darkness on the foam mattress on the dirt floor of her temporary plastic sheeting shelter. Everything in the clean delivery kit came in handy for Kuei and her mother-in-law. In fact, the clean delivery kit was all they had; no hospital, no medical staff, no monitors, no medicine. The delivery kit is simple, but effective, and it helped ensure the safe delivery of Kuei and Kang's baby in the darkness, against all odds.

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I am proud to work for UNICEF, which in addition to the provision of clean delivery kits, also provides emergency reproductive health supplies to all health partners working in Mingkaman, and supports community social mobilization activities and radio public service announcements so that women are aware of the importance of ante- and post-natal care, of giving birth in a health clinic and of breastfeeding. UNICEF does this, and much more, daily in South Sudan and many other countries around the world where innocent people are caught in civil conflict or affected by natural disasters.

This Father's Day, I will be enjoying some daddy-time with Sitara and my wife. But I will also be thinking of Kuei, Kang and their son, who will be two years old now. I hope that Kang is also enjoying some daddy-time with his son, with Kuei sitting beside them -- and that they are all safe, happy and healthy.

Kent Page is Senior Communication Advisor for UNICEF. Based in New York City, he is originally from Mississauga, Canada.
I wasn't sure how to approach the news that 'Master of Lies' Jean-Claude Juncker has been drafted in by David 'Scourge of Pensioners' Cameron to make a major intervention in the referendum campaign next week. Why would the Prime Minister call in his boss, the President of the European Commission, a man with a less than exemplary reputation?

You Have Done Poorly, My Young Apprentice

Photo: Number 10 via Wiki Commons

Juncker was forced to resign as Prime Minister of Luxembourg as the result of a spy scandal, which involved illegal operations conducted by SERL, the country's intelligence service. According to the former director of SERL, at one point the service had over 300,000 active files in a country with a population of 500,000. Luxembourg's parliamentary investigation committee found that Juncker did not treat the intelligence service seriously enough, and most of the time did not even want to know what was going on.

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Among other lurid allegations, German newspapers reported that when word reached Juncker that one of his senior civil servants could be involved in serious activities in the paedophile community, Juncker tried to turn the allegations into a "joke", asking the man concerned whether he was aware that there was a "whorehouse" in his local city that could satisfy his urges instead.

Everything Is Not Proceeding As I Have Foreseen

Photo: Zinneke via Wiki Commons

I simply could not fathom the move. Why would David Cameron ask Juncker for help? A man about whom he once said:

"Jean-Claude Juncker has been at the heart of the project to increase the power of Brussels and reduce the power of nation states for his entire working life. He is not the right person to take this organisation forward."

Juncker is the man whose appointment David Cameron fought tooth and nail to block. Surely he would only call in the support of someone he once regarded as the enemy of Europe if he knew that Juncker could deliver a decisive campaign blow? Is Juncker going to try to bribe the British people with some hastily conceived but impossible to deliver exemption from freedom of movement? Is he going to promise to grant us super-special-best-friend status within the EU? Or is he going to unleash upon us an almighty wrathful vengeance and try to terrify us into remaining?

I couldn't figure it out, until I remembered something else that David Cameron said in 2014, when he was trying to block Juncker's appointment:

"It's important that the people involved understand that we need reform in Europe and it doesn't matter how hard I have to push this case. I will take it all the way to the end."

David Cameron is finally going to make good on a promise. It's taken him two years, but at long last he's going to reform the EU. By having Britain leave. And he wants to make absolutely certain we leave with this, his final act of sabotage of the Remain campaign. It's the only explanation for bringing in Juncker, a man who has said the following things:

On Sovereignty

"Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?"

On The Dominant EU

"There is a single legal personality for the EU, the primacy of European law, a new architecture for foreign and security policy, there is an enormous extension in the fields of the EU's powers"

On Openness

"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious...I am for secret, dark debates"

On How The EU Really Works

"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back"

On Lying

"When it becomes serious, you have to lie"

On Democracy

"There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties"

The final remark explains why Mr Juncker is intervening in a British referendum: he has a fundamental problem with democracy. This is the man the Austrian newspaper, Der Standard once dubbed the 'Master of Lies'. The man who presided over the explosion of Luxembourg's use as a tax haven by multi-national corporations. The man David Cameron once tried to block because he is too much of an EU insider who instinctively resists reform. That the Prime Minister should call upon Mr Juncker tells us everything we need to know about his belief in the outcome of this referendum.

And when Mr Juncker makes his intervention, remember that he was nicknamed the 'Master of Lies' for a reason. Re-read what he's said about lies, democracy and secrets. I suspect Mr Juncker will try a combination of carrot and stick. He will try to threaten our economy, perhaps with David Cameron standing next to him, smiling, as he has done with so many foreign leaders who have attempted to bully the British people. But I suspect that Mr Juncker will also promise concessions, maybe to look closely at the principle of freedom of movement. You only have to recall the nickname our European partners have given him to understand that he is not a man to be trusted.

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When David Cameron was trying to block Mr Juncker becoming President of the EU Commission, the Guardian reported concerns that the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg might have a drinking problem. The paper quoted an unnamed EU diplomat who said:

""His alcohol consumption has been raised by a number of leaders since the parliamentary elections."

He certainly seems somewhat tired and emotional at this important summit meeting of European Leaders, and seems to have misjudged what the various dignitaries would find funny or appropriate:

Europe's Most Powerful Man

This is not a man whose judgment we can trust. Whatever the final form of Mr Juncker's major intervention, the British people will not be fooled. We have one opportunity to leave the European Union and will not allow ourselves to be taken in by the overblown threats or the last-minute, empty promises of a desperate man.

Long before Brexit The Movie, there was Euromania, a popular crowd-funded documentary made in 2014 by Dutch filmmaker Peter Vlemmix. This is not a campaign film, it cannot be accused of referendum bias, and offers a Dutch perspective on the EU. Before dismissing Mr Vlemmix as a Little Englander -- sorry -- a Little Dutchlander, give it a watch and see exactly what Darth Juncker is trying to protect:

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So this is it. The vote of a generation. The ballot to end all ballots. The one poll to rule them all. Make no mistake. This one simple task will change history forever. One choice. That's it.

Or so we're told.

Because our politicians and their media platforms are all about simple choices, and simple solutions.

Simple solutions like you know, killing terrorism. Bombing an idea.

Because having an open debate on how to counteract a movement that started with oil deals struck by the West with Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, that led to a rise in income inequality and the subsequent spread of radical wahhabism that found its way to Afghanistan in the 1970s & 80s where it was exacerbated by Cold War politics and the ongoing global dependence on oil at the expense of lower income Middle Eastern families is, you know, really complicated. So we'll just keep fighting terrorism. Be it the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or ISIS / ISIL / Daesh.

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Pictured: Consequences of a simplified approach to dealing with Middle Eastern unrest. Credit: BBC

Simple solutions like you know, fixing the UK economy by cracking down on benefits.

Because the fact that positioning ourselves as a global economy based heavily on both foreign investment and financial markets inevitably opens us up to the mercy of global fluctuations not to mention corporate influence, which means we can't get too heavy about collecting all that tax corporations really should be paying us is also, you know, really complicated. So, we'll just keep going after all those semi-employed people at the bottom of the food chain who really shouldn't be claiming their benefits anymore.

Pictured: A far less fundamental problem than Sarah next door who only has 3 kids but claims for 4. Credit: CNN

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Now, politicians and those media platforms have a new Simple Fight. A solution to all the various EU problems. You know, those EU problems that we all struggle with day to day? Those ones.

According to said politicians, we've got two choices.

We Leave. Possible side effects: World War III, destruction of NHS, Shrinking of military (despite WWIII), George Osborne to raise taxes, because....we'll all have less money.

We Remain. Possible side effects: Ongoing slavish devotion to a bureaucratic empire that models itself on Hitler's Germany, the Roman Empire. More (non EU...?) Immigration.

It could perhaps be argued that, amongst all the hysteria, once again we're being given a bit of an oversimplified argument. Here's the thing:

It took Greenland three years to leave the EU.

They voted out in 1979. It took them three years to leave. Mostly owing to ongoing debates about their one major industry, fishing. Greenland has a population of 56,000.

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If we vote leave, that actually has to be approved by the EU.

So....for those who hate the fact that politicians in Brussels call the shots: our actually leaving will ultimately depend on politicians on Brussels, calling the shots.

So wait, who's in charge at the EU?

More to the point: how many people actually read this 44 page intro doc before taking to social media? It's only a Google search away.....Credit: Screen grab/ authors own

Well, up to a point we are. The UK has the third most MEPs, led by Germany and France. We also have an equal number of votes alongside Germany and France, and considerably more clout than any other country at the table. More power to propose new legislation, enact changes, push reforms, enable-

Wait, but what about all this talk of constantly having to compromise?

Well, the UK are only on the winning side of votes in the EU 65% of the time.

Why only 65% of the time?

Because there are 73 UK MEPs, of which a full 24 are from UKIP.

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Surprise! Credit: Class Online

Yep, the vote leave people. Having somehow got themselves elected as MEPs, the UKIP group only show up to vote 60% of the time. When they do, they vote to their political, not to the UK agenda. In fact, the Labour and Conservative MEPs are in the high 70-80% of the winning side of votes every time.

So-

So as is stands the UK is among the most influential members of the most powerful trading alliance on Earth. We have the clout to demand systematic reform, employment change, immigration change, we have the potential capability to put forward just about anything.

Except that wasn't really explained to the voting public. By the politicians, or the media. Domestic elections far more important and all. So now, UKIP have the majority of the UK say in the EU. And they're not being very inspiring.

No one in Westminster is going to admit to that balls-up. No one in Westminster's going to admit that we've always had a tonne of clout in the EU, we've just sort of....ignored it.

Or, that voting to remain could be the first step in looking a lot more seriously into just how much information politicians and news outlets actually give us.

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Or, that voting to remain could lead to fundamental reforms and a less bureaucratic, more direct involvement with the EU decision making system.

That's not going to fit into a headline though, is it?

So instead, we'll go back to Gordon Brown running laps of cathedrals talking about peace, Osborne threatening us with a tax slap and Bob Geldof (that great political mind and voice of the millennial generation) getting drunk in a dinghy.
Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures."

Afloat, we are, so let us not lose our ventures. There is no doubt about the urgency of the times, crucial decisions being made on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world. Dan Jarvis,MP, wrote recently: "Britain faces its most important week since the end of the Second World War". We get that; we are trying not to sleepwalk through it. But even at this eleventh hour, who has all the facts and who can we believe?

At a recent referendum debate in a small church in West London, the frustrations of the audience were summed up in a final comment from one questioner: "Why have we been left with this complex decision, anyway?" Emma Reynolds, MP for Wolverhampton North East, explained in her clear, calm and logical presentation of the case for Remain, that the reasons behind the referendum were more to do with solving Tory fractures within the party than any 'great' move towards democratic participation. David Harley, former Deputy Secretary General of the European Parliament, spoke reasonably about the EU as a community of values, not just interests, "founded after the dark days of the War". He presented a sensible, unemotional argument in favour of an EU that needs to and can be reformed, of a UK government that needs reform, and of the fractures in our society that this issue has unveiled, and the urgency to restore equality and to heal. "It's a very frightening period for Europe; never have there been so many populist movements; do we ally to prevent the escalation of unrest, or not?"

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As for this referendum upon whose sea we are now afloat: Margaret Thatcher once quoted Lord Atlee as saying, "Perhaps the referendum is a device of dictators and demagogues", and, that Edward Heath considered the idea "abhorrent". And yet here we sit, a nation of 64 million, voting next week in "the most crucial poll of our lives". Have we been snafued in our decision-making by a kind of demagoguery appealing to people's emotions, fears and biases? Is this how the decision for the future will be made?

We have heard so much about the "Super State" soon to be led by the Germans if our EU membership continues; the need to 'take back' sovereignty", "take back our country", "take back control"- control of borders, control of laws, control of businesses.

Before we vote to "take back control" we need to think long and hard who exactly will be in control, the audience in West London asked, and who do you trust with that control? Will Britain take back control from the 1%? Will Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson protect Britain's most important baby, the NHS? Or will that baby be thrown out with the bathwater too, along with businesses, security and allies? Are we the people going to have control, like we have now?

There are holes in every argument. Sometimes the good guys look like the bad guys, so we need to be very clear on one thing: "Europe is an incredible dream: to see nations that murdered each other just two generations ago, working together in peace and unity ....let's not lose this dream now"(Avaaz).

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Before we build a Trump-like wall, make a decision from whence there is no turning back, before we pull the plug on Unity in Europe, pull up the drawbridges and fill up the moat, as Robert Frost wrote:

"Before I built a wall... I'd ask to know.

What I was walling in or walling out".
Postnatal Depression (PND) has been, for me, one of the most difficult things that I have ever had to deal with: the struggle to talk to anyone about it who understood, the stigma which suggests that you are somehow completely incompetent and your baby isn't safe with you and getting out of bed in the morning when all you want to do is cry.

Postnatal depression affects 1 in 5 new mothers and is characterised by taking place either during pregnancy or up to 1 year after their child is born. That statistic is staggering isn't it, but that's not all! 7 in 10 downplay their symptoms and 1 in 10 dads also get postnatal depression; so why does talking about it seem so embarrassing and hard if there are just so many of us who feel the same way?

I started documenting my fitness and health journey on Instagram from about 8 weeks after my son was born and I have always maintained that I would speak honestly and openly about my PND throughout. It is amazing, and also simultaneously worrying, to see how many women message me daily to tell me that I'm so brave to speak out about it, how they feel the same and are struggling too but have no support either within their family, community or healthcare system.

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From my own perspective the support I had from my health worker was terrible, the support from my midwives was actually one of the triggers for my postnatal depression and when I eventually went to the doctors they put me on anti-depressants so quickly that I'm not sure I even finished my sentence! Is this truly the reality of dealing with depression in new mothers? I even, hideously, got invited to a course called "Making the most of motherhood" to try and help deal with my postnatal depression - the title alone made me cry.

There are so many reasons for this uncomfortable feeling around talking about PND, the following are just a handful of examples:

There is huge pressure from modern society to be a "supermum" and to bounce back from your pregnancy and labour within days without a single complaint or maternity pad in sight. I think this is often made worse from both the older generations who keep on saying "it wasn't like this in our day, we didn't have it so easy"... so unhelpful! But also the celebrities who snap back to shape and are out of their house within days in their pre-pregnancy jeans and glossy hair. This puts so much pressure on new mums who don't have an army of cooks, nannies and trainers to help them. How are we supposed to open up and say that we are struggling?

I believe that there is worry from the mum herself that if we say we can't cope that we will be put on some list and our children will be taken away from us. This is a genuine fear that I had for months and months; even when I had gone to the doctor I felt that if I said too much they would take Rupert away from me. But this isn't the case in the majority of cases, your baby is in the best place with you and only if the baby were unsafe would this even be considered.

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If someone hasn't experienced depression before, PND is so difficult to comprehend. It isn't like you have a broken arm or leg to show to people, an internal battle is just that, internal and for this reason it is just so hard for people to get their head around. At some point most family and friends will either say or think: "ok, enough now, just get on with it" or something along the lines of "you are so blessed, you should just realise how lucky you are" and my all time favourite: "all mums feel like that"! Yes I know how lucky I am but this doesn't stop us hurting and quite frankly I really hope all mums don't feel like this.
Poll finds that Leave voters disproportionally deny mainstream science. But without a fact-based debate, the referendum could be decided on the wrong grounds.

At polling stations on 23 June, about half of the people may vote for Britain to leave the EU.

You may well be one of them.

What may surprise you, though, is that according to an exclusive ComRes survey, almost half of your fellow Leave voters think the theory of evolution is questionable, while one in five doesn't believe in man-made climate change.*

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That should frighten you because it means that many Leave voters are wilfully choosing to disregard facts.

The ComRes survey also shows that Leave voters are 70 per cent more likely than Remain voters (36% vs 21%) to be against windfarms (though I presume they are fine with blowing off mountain tops to mine for coal for example), and 15 per cent more likely to support fracking on British soil.

So - to put it bluntly - if you are a climate change denier, sceptical about science and the theory of evolution, against renewable energy and for fracking Britain, you will have plenty of company in the Leave camp.

However, if you're not comfortable in such company, you may want to re-think your position.

Facts are boring

Leave voters' attitude to facts is part of the reason the Leave campaign continues to make emotive statements that aren't grounded in reality: arbitrary allegations about Europe together with fear mongering tactics on security and immigration designed to draw on people's visceral fears.

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One of the highest profile examples came earlier in the month, when Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston loudly quit the Leave campaign because of its false claims that Brexit would free up 350 million a week for the NHS. Sir Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, pointedly described the Leave camp's claim as "misleading" and one that "undermines trust in official statistics".

The UK statistics watchdog and the Treasury have urged Vote Leave to stop using this preposterous NHS claim which Wollaston branded "simply not true", but the campaign has so far refused and for what now seems like a very good reason: As shown in the ComRes poll, Leave voters are less likely than Remain voters to be deterred by an appalling lack of fact-checking.

The problem with a debate based on facts is, seemingly, that it's a little bit boring and unengaging. And that may be why the Remain campaign has seemed to stumble in recent weeks. Many of the latest polls show the Leave campaign several percentage points ahead of Remain.

By pounding the table with spurious arguments about unelected Brussels burdening us with regulations, the Leave campaign can avoid discussing facts and instead appeal to hard-wired instincts of English exceptionalism crafted over centuries to buttress the moral fibre of the Empire.

In the energy and environment sectors, for those who value a fact-based debate, it should be obvious that Britain's energy security is strong because it belongs to a large EU bloc - and that cleaner beaches, drinking water and air all resulted from European rules which helped the UK shed its reputation as the "dirty man of Europe".

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Britain's energy future

Energy and climate change, however, have unfortunately not been major points of debate in the run-up to the referendum.

Part of the reason is that the topics require more than Trump-esque shouts for attention, which the Leave campaign has been disproportionately fond of, thus giving undue space to extremists peddling modern versions of the Roman Inquisition attacks on Galileo.

Serious topics require careful examination of the facts - and if we'd had such a fact-based debate, it would be clear to most that remaining in the EU is the best choice for Britain's future and for the climate.

After all, as reported by David Smith of the Sunday Times, since Britain joined the European Community in 1973, its GDP is up 62 per cent in real terms compared with 42 per cent for France, 35 per cent for Germany and 15 per cent for Italy. Surely it wasn't just English exceptionalism at play?

Our European future makes us stronger on climate; stronger on renewable energy; stronger on science and, indeed, stronger on facts.

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Europe isn't perfect, but it amplifies Britain's voice on the global stage and ensures the country continues to prosper in partnership with its neighbours. Rather than leaving it, we should try to influence it more and indeed lead it. The alternative is to sit on the side-lines together with the Rupert Murdoch's of the world, in un-splendid isolation while practicing deceit in denying climate change and science.

If you instead believe that climate change is an existential threat to human civilization; if you believe renewable energy's time has come; and if you believe in science and facts, get out to vote Remain on 23 June.

* ComRes interviewed a representative sample of British adults by telephone between 29th May and 5th June 2016, from which were drawn 809 adults who intend to vote to leave the EU and 809 adults who intend to vote to remain in the EU.
The recent news that a 2 year old boy has been killed after being snatched by an alligator in Orlando, Florida has left most of us feeling sick and distressed. I woke to hear that his body has been recovered and felt absolutely devastated for the family whose lives will never be the same again.

And then another feeling crept in. Despair. Despair at the thought that this family may well be vilified on social media. Will they somehow be blamed for letting their toddler play at the edge of a lake containing alligators? Will they be abused just as we've seen with two other shocking events involving young children in the past few weeks?

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Image courtesy Pixaby.com

Three Weeks Ago

When a 4 year old child fell into a zoo's gorilla enclosure in Cincinnati, a 450lb male gorilla called Harambe dragged the child through water and displayed some aggressive behaviour. The zoo's bosses made the decision to shoot dead the gorilla in order to save the child.

A few days later a 7 year old boy in Japan was ordered out of his parent's car on a mountain road after he had been caught throwing stones at cars and people. He was left by a forest infested with bears as punishment. His parents drove off to teach him a lesson and when they went back to get him he had gone, disappearing for 7 days. Yamato Tanooka was eventually found safe and well at a disused military base shelter.

Abuse

Both of these stories were horrific but ultimately both children were rescued and survived their ordeal.

What was perhaps more sickening, even more than the incidents themselves, is the callous and abusive behaviour on social media of both these parents.

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Within hours of the video footage at the zoo going live, there were petitions and pages being set up to obtain justice for the gorilla. There was utter condemnation of the mother and messages urging her children be taken into care. Others went further demanding that the parents be shot. The abuse was so frantic and awful that the child's mother had to delete her Twitter and Facebook account and go into hiding.

Children can be curious, determined and lightening quick. They can get up to all sorts in the blink of an eye. Who hasn't experienced that heart-pounding moment when you've turned around only to find them gone? Even if it's for 10 seconds, it is a scary and desperate moment.

The incident in Japan was harder to understand. Yes, it was stupid and absurd to leave a child alone by a bear infested forest even for a small amount of time. But who hasn't become exasperated by their child for constantly misbehaving? Who hasn't tried to find a new way to discipline or treat their child in the vague attempt to change or modify their behaviour?

The parents didn't mean to lose their child for 7 days, they wanted to teach him a lesson. When Yamato was found, his father said, "Our behaviour as parents went too far, and that's something I'm extremely regretful about. I thought that what I was doing was for his own good, but, yes, I realise now that I went too far."

Do these parents also need to experience the constant abuse online from others who seem to serve as self-imposed judge and jury? Surely the realisation that their child could have been killed by a decision that they'd made is enough of a punishment to endure.

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Image courtesy Pixaby.com

Judgment by Social Media

So why have so many people expressed such utter outrage and hatred on social media of these two incidents? What makes anyone think that it's OK to abuse another person from the safety of hiding behind their computers or phones? Where is the empathy and compassion? The parents of all 3 recent incidents will be berating themselves for the rest of their lives over that one fleeting moment that we as parents all experience.

Surely the torment of reliving those awful days, asking themselves over and over what they should and could have done differently, is punishment enough for all of these parents.

Surely we need to ask ourselves whether it could well have been us that lost sight of our child for a fleeting moment or whether it could well have been us who lost our temper with our children.

If a 60 second snapshot of our lives was uploaded to social media to be judged could we be certain that our behaviour as parents would be perfect or would it most likely be flawed?

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My heart goes out to the family of 2 year old Lane Graves. Unlike the previous two incidents, they have experienced the most horrific moment of losing their child in the most horrendous situation. I hope that at some point in the future they can find some peace.

But even more than this, I pray that they are treated with understanding, compassion and empathy, that they are not judged on social media.
It's a year since Pope Francis published Laudato Si' - On Care for our Common Home, the first papal letter devoted to the need to protect God's creation from environmental damage such as climate change.

Few 'encyclicals' (to use the official parlance) have provoked so much advance attention. Newspapers and broadcasters prepared lengthy coverage of the 40,000-word letter. Fossil fuel executives scripted their excuses. Even US presidential candidates took notice, with Catholic politicians Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum questioning the Pontiff's authority on 'issues of science' and urging him to stick to theology, seemingly unaware they were denouncing a theological tour de force.

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In the encyclical, the Pope implored us to change the way we operate our politics, economies, and societies, arguing that the costs fall on people in the world's poorest communities. He called for a cultural revolution, in which we "regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world".

Laudato Si' was also extraordinary in that it was addressed to every person on the planet, rather than just the Catholic Church. And the world listened. Leaders from around the globe instantly welcomed what UN climate chief Christiana Figueres described as a clarion call. French President Francois Hollande stated his hope that "the special voice" of the Pope would be heard in all continents, not just by believers.

The Holy Father made no secret of his intention to influence the negotiations at the Paris climate change conference which followed the encyclical's release, praying for "a positive outcome to the present discussions, so that future generations will not have to suffer the effects of our ill-advised delays." Francis explicitly referred to the 1992 Rio Summit - a predecessor to Paris - which he described as prophetic for its time, but which had led to insufficient action.

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The Pope intended that this time round would be different. Laudato Si' had a palpable presence from the start of the Paris Conference. Multiple heads of government cited it and praised it in their opening speeches. The UK government told CAFOD that the encyclical acted as "an important intervention which helped to create the momentum required to deliver an ambitious outcome" and the Ambassador to the Holy See Nigel Baker claimed with certainty that the document set the stage for the Paris Agreement. The result was an accord which launches a new era of action, committing us to preventing the loss of more homes, livelihoods, and lives to the changing climate.

Laudato Si' also had a profound impact on Catholics in the UK. Unprecedented interest was shown by parishioners across the country - politically, intellectually, and spiritually. More than 40,000 people signed a petition to the Prime Minister launched by CAFOD and our Scottish and Irish partners SCIAF and Trocaire on the day of the encyclical's publication. This was added to 900,000 signatures gathered by the Global Catholic Climate Movement in the run-up to Paris. Nearly 8,000 copies of a guide to help people reflect on the encyclical have been ordered and hundreds of Catholics have attended study days we've organised around England and Wales. Perhaps most impressively, dozens of campaigners took the road to Paris to demand action - by train, by bike, or by foot - sometimes literally underneath a Laudato Si' banner.

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As the poster boy hero of the Brexit movement, Nigel Farage is less bronze god and more brass monkey.

It seems from his recent outing on the Thames that he also has something of a Poseidon complex, wafting down the river on his stately barge pronouncing on the state of the EU fisheries policy and gathering around him another group of hapless Brits with an axe to grind over our membership of Europe.

I'm not sure what part Bob Geldof plays in this rather tortured metaphor. Probably Bluebeard heading out on the waves to shout "avast!" at the chinless landlubber guffawing his way through the waves.

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And shout he did, loudly voicing the truth about Farage and his band of not very merry men (with a few women thrown in for balance, assuming they've cleaned behind the fridge of course).

In what is sure to become known as the Thames 'Waterloo moment', Geldof let rip at Farage, pointing out a few home truths about his performance as an MEP and in particular his position on a little thing called the EU Fisheries Committee.

Geldof was incensed, as many of us are, that it's the very same Nigel Farage that sits on that committee. The one that could actually make a difference to the problems he went on the water to complain about. A difference that he could be making if he bothered to show up once in a while.

The fishers Farage was claiming to support were merely there as props in his latest performance. People he has otherwise demonstrated barely concealed contempt towards by his own inaction on their behalf.

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As Sir Bob and Greenpeace have highlighted, by April last year Farage had only attended 1 out of 42 meetings of the committee. Odd then that he should claim to be a champion of fisher folk when it seems he's mainly the champion of taking his EU salary and sitting in the pub with a pint.

As far as UKIP's characterisation of migrants crossing the channel to scrounge on the state is concerned, it seems they have a rather good example of this in their own midst.

Indeed UKIP's 24 MEPs trouser nearly 2m in salaries every year. Taking money out of an institution they treat with contempt and yet are happy to be elected to. Preaching about waste in Brussels whilst at the same time contributing to the pile of pointless expense, disenfranchising all those they were elected to represent as part of this Faustian bargain.

This is one of the reasons we've seen so little reform in the EU over the past several years. Electing MEPs who are openly hostile to the EU and refuse to engage with its processes is not only counterproductive, it's also undemocratic and undermines the process of representation in the EU parliament.

Farage is testament to this. Far from carrying him on their shoulders down the Thames as their trusted representative, the fishermen on that boat should have thrown him in the drink with all the other discards.

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This lack of democratic accountability is even more ironic considering UKIP's fondness for criticising the EU for the very same thing. Yet they and Farage have time and again demonstrated how little they care for legitimate democracy.

Just recently they complained to the electoral commission about an extension of the voter registration deadline after the government website crashed. Instead of joining every other party in encouraging people to take part in the democratic process, they whinged and threatened legal action, as seems to be their default position when anyone disagrees with them.

The only council UKIP ever took brief control of in Thanet has all but collapsed as members refuse to accept consensus between themselves and other councillors, flouncing out as soon as they don't get their own way.

Farage himself showed how little he cared for accountability and strength of character over his promise to resign his leadership role just after UKIP lost the Thanet South election. A few days later he'd un-resigned and was placing himself back on his own purple throne, proving just how much of a personality cult UKIP really is.

Today rumours have emerged about him possibility accepting a seat in the House of Lords in a post Brexit Britain, installing his backside in one of the most undemocratic institutions in Europe, thus neatly sidestepping the annoying technicality of an election.

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This all of course depends on an out vote on June 23rd, but even if we vote to remain, Farage has floated the idea that we should have another referendum almost immediately. Obviously in Farageworld we print ballot papers in bulk and run the vote fortnightly until he gets the result he wants.

This is the definition of democracy according to Farage's UKIP and many others on the Brexit side. Rules of equitability, fairness, accepting the will of the people and sticking to your word don't apply to him and his cabal. He lives by principles of grand gestures, photo ops, faux responsibility and nose in the trough politics.

This is all part of the reason why EU reforms have been so difficult to achieve. Electing people like this only serves to perpetuate the inefficiencies and stagnation they claim to despise, whilst excluding us as a nation from the decisions being made on our behalf.

All somewhat at odds with the Brexiteer mantra of not wanting to be ruled by 'faceless bureaucrats'. Our MEPs may have faces, but if they constantly set them against the principles of the EU, and in many cases don't even attend parliament, how can they properly represent our interests?

As revealed by Greenpeace, the interests that Farage was protecting on the Thames were not of small fishers, but those of wealthy fish barons, like the part owner of one of the lead trawlers in his aquatic stunt, convicted in 2012 of one of Britain's largest fishing frauds.

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This is a glimpse of a UK outside the EU, controlled by millionaires (even though Farage railed against Geldof for being the very same) who'll only engage with issues they'll see as furthering their own interests.

It'll be their way or no way. A grim joyless society where anything these people don't like or don't understand will be squeezed and bruised by a process of disinformation and fear, until it's dead or departed.

Like so many societies before us, we could easily sleepwalk into a state of semi-permissive totalitarianism, convinced that it's good for us and that our masters have our best interests at heart.
Now that Hilary Clinton has clinched the presidential nomination (and we can only pray the presidency), making her the first woman ever to do so, our surprise over the high-heels story a few weeks back seems justified. Our shock was that there still existed a law enabling employers to demand women wear heels. We thought we were beyond that. But more and more frequently there are examples of ways in which women are again being pushed from the public sphere. And the kicker is that in some cases, even women seem to be welcoming it.

Not always. When Hitchin Girls' School allegedly told GCSE pupils to lengthen their skirts so as not to provoke exam invigilators, there was understandable outrage. Why should the onus be on girls to account for the behaviour of grown men? Why is it the girls' fault that they are being objectified? Of course it isn't. Such a notion is just a stone's throw from the good old 'she was asking for it' assertion, the belief that rape is excusable if the girl was wearing a short skirt. (Or passed out, if you're Brock Turner.) Fortunately, most of us these days, agree that this is absurd.

But not Chariot For Women. Supposed to launch in Boston this April, now stalled, it is just one of a number of emerging Uber alternatives offering female only drivers to female (and children) only passengers. At first glance, in the light of various cases of rape and assault by some Uber drivers, this may sound like a good thing. It offers women a way in which to avoid that threat of violence from an unknown man. But aside from the misdeed of casting all men as potential rapists, it does exactly the same thing as the school skirts. It puts the onus on women to change, to adapt, to modify themselves in order to account for the behaviour of men.

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Of course right now the idea is fledgling. And the service is optional. But where might it lead? Will we start to feel the need for segregated train carriages, too? To female-only buses? Or perhaps women should just sit at the back of the bus? If they don't, are they asking for it? Such ideas are the beginning of marginalization, of pushing a gender that has fought so hard for equality, back to the edges.

Already, such measures on transportation exist in Dubai, Iran, and India, amongst others. This is perhaps not a surprise in countries where women's rights are frequently disregarded. But during research for my new novel, Chains of Sand, I discovered that it exists too in democratic, egalitarian Israel. Between 1997 and just a few years ago, there existed in Jerusalem Mehadrin bus lines, which while public, catered for the ultra-orthodox Jewish community and therefore obliged women to enter and exit and sit at the back. In 2011 the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that gender segregation was unlawful and abolished these Mehadrin lines. But on many routes the segregation remained. Now it was self-enforced by religious groups, but the imperative just as strong, so that women who refused to comply were often harassed, in some cases seriously.

We see religiously motivated segregation in the UK too: The shrouds imposed on Muslim women while their men walk free in the summer heat. Luton's Islamic school that allegedly segregated staff. Even in the more orthodox synagogues of my own Jewish community, one of the biggest tensions for me is that women are not allowed to sit with men.

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While these things remain voluntary in society, while it is a choice, the poison is not lethal. Because feminism, for me at least, is all about choice. Not forcing women to be the same as men, or vice versa, but ensuring that both sexes have equal access to all areas of citizenship. As soon as we start accepting however, that they don't - that a man's crime toward a woman should be in any way expected, or accepted - then there is a problem. A problem endemic to our fundamental approach to gender. And a terrible precedent.

At Glastonbury this year, organizers have introduced The Sisterhood - a stage staffed by, performed on, and attended by women only, or those who identify as women. The explanation is that in a world where women still face oppression, they need a "secret space" in which to share their stories and find ways to fight it. But by shutting men out of the experience, out of the conversation, they are again casting all men into the role of oppressor, and burdening women alone with the 'secret' task of dealing with it.
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?" That is the question that British voters will be asked in one week's time. I overwhelmingly believe that yes, Britain most definitely should remain a member of the European Union. The easiest way to explain why I think that is to refute some of the claims made by those campaigning for leave. So, here goes:

"We're full up, we can't cope with any more immigrants"

The net migration figures for 2015 were just released and they showed that just over 300,000 more people came to Britain last year. A huge proportion of this number came from the EU and that's because anyone with a European passport has the right to live and work in any of the 28 member states. Looking at those numbers might make you wonder if that is sustainable and if, say, our schools and hospitals can cope with a population increase of that size each year.

Evidence shows that the majority of EU migrants come here to work and contribute over 2 billion a year to the British economy. Some of that 2 billion could easily pay for increased investment in our schools and hospitals, and let's be honest they could do with the extra cash.

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"EU migrants are stopping me from getting work."

There is a reason that so many choose to come to Britain and a huge part of that has to be the availability of work. Unlike much of Europe, the UK is doing okay: there are plenty of jobs and contrary to popular belief, an Eastern European migrant getting a job doesn't really effect anyone else's employment opportunity - in fact whilst there are now more migrants in the British workforce, there are also now more Brits in work than ever before.

Plenty have lost out due to the forces of globalisation and whilst that is of little comfort to those who are out of work, pulling up the draw-bridge and shutting the borders will do little to help that. British history is full of migrant populations undercutting the local populace. The Irish that displaced the British are now being displaced by the Polish.

If there is any truth in the claim that European migrants will undercut local workers by working for less than the minimum wage, then the real enemies here are the unscrupulous employers, not the migrants, and we should focus our energy on enforcing the minimum wage, not kicking the migrant.

The reality is that declining wages are a result of the global economic crisis, not immigration, and an increase in immigration is a sign of Britain's recovery, not our decline.

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"We should be able to control our own borders"

Yes, we should, and we do. Okay, so any European can come and live and work in Britain but unlike the majority of EU member states, we are not part of the Schengen borderless zone. This means that when you land at Heathrow you need to get your passport out. Another advantage of our EU membership is that we have actually moved our border across the channel. As anyone who has taken the Eurostar will know, when you board a train in Paris, British border guards check your passport in France, not Britain, and similarly when you board a ferry in Calais, UK Border Force staff patrol the UK border. If we left the EU, France would quite rightly ask Britain to move its border back to Britain.

Just a quick note here about the current refugee crisis from Syria and North Africa. Refugees risking their lives to come to Europe do so out of complete desperation. We should be embracing them with open arms. But the fact that so many arrive in Europe is nothing to do with our membership of the EU. We and other EU member states accept refugees as signatories of the United Nations Refugee Convention. And for what it's worth, the general policy of the EU for dealing with refugees is to try and share the burden. If we leave the EU, I can see more refugees being waved through the EU straight to the British border. If immigration concerns you, leaving the EU will actually only see the numbers go up.

"Europe forces all these directives on business"

Part of being in a single market is having a single set of rules for buying and selling. That means that you can be sure that you're getting like-for-like no matter where in the market you buy it. And so it is with the European Single Market. Directives and regulations are necessary to ensure that you, the consumer, get a fair deal. If we left the EU, the Directives wouldn't go away, in fact we would be forced to comply with them if we ever wanted to trade with other EU countries, but unlike now, we would have no say over these Directives as we would have no seat at the table.

"Europe would want to trade with us anyway"

The Leave campaign started out by making an economic argument like this one but quickly changed tack when they realised that they couldn't win and for good reason: the economics of leave just don't stack up.

Currently, around 50 per cent of Britain's exports go to the EU whereas only around eight per cent of EU exports come back to the UK. That's hardly a level playing field.

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Even if the other EU-27 members did agree to continue free trade with the UK, they are unlikely to do so unless Britain continues to allow freedom of movement of people, just as Norway and Switzerland have to. This would be inconceivable for the 'outers' as immigration is the other major pillar to their campaign.

But let's just think about this for a second: why would the other 27 EU nations agree to give Britain the same terms of the free market when Britain wouldn't have to follow the other rules of the club or pay into the budget? The simple answer is: they wouldn't.

"We should be able to negotiate our own trade deals"

There was a company on the TV this week complaining that they couldn't sell their hovercrafts to Brazil because the duties were too high as Europe had no free trade deal with Brazil. If we left the EU, the argument goes, we would be able to negotiate our own trade deals with countries like Brazil and Australia and help small businesses grow.

There are two major flaws with this argument: firstly, Britain currently sends 50 per cent of its exports to the EU and also benefits from preferential agreements made between the EU and over 50 other countries which helps with the other 50 per cent. Second, being a member of the EU does not stop us making our own trade deals - just as we did with China last year. But usually we can get a better deal when we're part of an EU wide one.

Put simply, the EU is a market of 500 million people which means it can drive a much better deal for Britain than Britain ever could alone. If the EU can't get a deal with Brazil, why would Britain?

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"We shouldn't have to bail out Greece"

Firstly, why not? It is in our interests to ensure another country doesn't go bankrupt. What may be a Greek problem will quickly become a European and then a British one too. Second, our contribution to any Greek bailout was because of our IMF membership, not the EU and third, a bit of perspective please: it was only in the 1970s that Britain had its hand out for an international bail out. What goes around...

"They were wrong about the Euro; why should we trust them on this?"

Who exactly is 'they'? If 'they' are the British establishment, no British government has ever advocated joining the Euro. Whilst Tony Blair's New Labour came close, the official line was that the Euro had to pass Gordon Brown's five economic tests, and it never did.

If 'they' are the IMF and other economists or think-tanks, yes, many of them did advocate joining the Euro. But the IMF tends to be right more often than it is wrong, and despite the doomsayers' predictions, the Euro still survives.

What you can be sure of though, should there be another shock that destabilises the Euro -- such as a member state leaving the EU -- Britain certainly wouldn't be immune to that. In or out, we still rely heavily on European markets and the Euro and we would feel the pain just as much as the Eurozone would.

"Britain should take back control and not be governed by faceless bureaucrats"

This is one of the most popular complaints I hear and focuses primarily on the democratic deficit of the EU institutions. There is plenty to be said of the make up of the Commission and how laws are made in Europe, and certainly something that could be improved. But faceless bureaucrats they are not, and Britain is hardly controlled by them.

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Let's take this apart in two steps: firstly, that Britain should take back control. A friend of mine who knows a thing or two about the workings of the EU once said to me that Brits always underestimate their influence in Europe whereas the Italians always overestimate theirs. The free-trade area that is now the European Union is very much a UK model. It was the UK that advocated enlargement of the Union from 15 to 25, to 27 and then to 28 and last time I checked it was Britain that was pushing for the Commission to re-open accession talks with Turkey. Don't forget that Britain has specific, treaty-bound opt-outs from some of the most contentious parts of the EU treaties: significantly the Euro and Schengen (and of course Cameron's new opt-out from 'ever closer union'). This doesn't paint a picture of a country that has lost control, but rather one that exerts great influence and will usually get its way when push comes to shove.

Second, those faceless bureaucrats. Here is where a little institutional knowledge comes in handy. No, you didn't vote for the members of the Commission, but you did vote for the governments that appointed them and the Members of the European Parliament that approved their appointment. The Commission comes up with draft laws, but these are voted on and approved or rejected by a mixture of co-decision between the directly elected European Parliament and the Council of Ministers from each member state government. Then there is the newly created European President, currently Donald Tusk, who was elected by the heads of government from across the EU, the European Council. Underpinning all of this are the treaties, most notably the Treaty of Lisbon, which states what the EU can and can not do. These treaties have been signed and ratified by each member state's parliament, including the UK Parliament. Every step of the way, EU law is ratified in some form by either directly elected MEPs or through national governments and parliaments.

So there we have it. Take any of the main arguments from the leave campaign and you can tear them apart quite easily. But there are also many positive reasons why we should vote to remain, be they economic or political -- I'll save those for another day.

For me, it all comes down to what kind of country Britain is and what kind of country I want Britain to be.

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We have always been an outward looking, free-trading, visionary nation. We have contributed to much of the modern international order, from free trade to human rights and international law. We have never turned our backs on the world. Now is not the time to turn inwards and say 'enough'. Sure, the EU has its problems, but Britain should be leading the campaign to reform it, not destroy it.

That is why I am voting to remain, and I hope you do to.
"Misleading" and "absolutely wrong" is how the Prime Minister describes 'Leave' campaigners who suggest Turkey could join the European Union. Unfortunately for him, it's Mr Cameron who has in fact been "misleading" and "absolutely wrong" - and we have the evidence to prove it.

The PM is correct to say the UK has a veto over Turkey joining the EU, but what does a veto mean if the Government is unwilling to use it? Absolutely nothing. It is quite clear the UK would not use its veto over Turkish membership when push comes to shove; this is because the Prime Minister, the Government and the Civil Service support Turkey joining the EU.

At this point it is necessary to point out exactly what David Cameron said in 2010. He gave a speech to the Turkish Parliament in which he said "I'm here to make the case for Turkey's membership of the EU." However, when queried on his position this year by the House of Commons Liaison Committee, he claimed: "I'll be absolutely frank with you: I don't think the accession of Turkey to the European Union is remotely on the cards. I don't think that will happen for decades." He hardened his position later in the campaign by arguing Turkey would not join the EU before "year 3000". (This is hard to imagine because according to Busted we'll all be living under water by then)

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It is perfectly acceptable for the Prime Minister to change his mind over Turkey, but it is clear Cameron has not changed his view at all. This becomes all too apparent when you look at official Government policy.

On the Government's own website (gov.uk), under the section relating to the British Embassy in Turkey, it states the following: "We work on a wide range of issues including Turkey's bid to join the European Union......We have a dedicated team working on projects to improve Turkey's prospects of joining the EU." So, the Government's policy is abundantly clear - it wants Turkey to join the EU, and is actively assisting Turkey in its efforts. This isn't merely giving them a helping hand; the Government has a team of civil servants to fulfil the Government's objective of an EU which includes Turkey!

One of the programmes the Government runs in relation to Turkey is the 'Reuniting Europe Programme'. According to its website: "the overall aim of the programme is to support countries in the Western Balkans and Turkey on their path towards EU accession".

Not only is the UK aggressively campaigning for Turkey to join the EU (and Cameron is trying to mislead us), so is the EU itself. It's giving Turkey enormous sums of money, with a large proportion of this money coming from British taxpayers! In addition to the money the UK is giving to Turkey via the EU, the UK is funding additional programmes in Turkey worth between 1 million and 1.5 million per year.

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EU programmes in Turkey are funded through the 'Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance'. Turkey will have received 9.249 billion through this programme by 2020. To put this figure in perspective, the UK only spends 2 billion every year on legal aid, which ensures people are not convicted of crimes they did not commit.

Some may say this is money well spent, but let us just look at the detail. This money pays for projects in Turkey including 'reducing noise levels in cities' - if only we had such a luxury in the UK! It also 'assists the milk production sector' at a time when UK dairy farmers are on the breadline - along with a huge number of other Turkish farming subsidies for poultry, red meat, fruit and vegetables. Our farmers are being sacrificed while at the same time Turkish farmers are having a party.

The UK veto over Turkey joining the EU is non-existent, as the UK Government will never use it, in reality the UK is the biggest cheerleader for Turkey to join. Some say Turkey must satisfy conditions before it can join, but this was a requirement for Croatia to join. Croatia didn't meet these standards but were allowed in anyway, because the rules are not important to the EU, all they care about is power and the larger their superstate the better. If you don't want a country with an awful human rights record to exert political influence over the laws of this country, then you must vote to Get Britain Out.
A young boy from Afghanistan who arrived in Calais unaccompanied. Unicef/Geai

Sexual exploitation. Forced labour. Trafficking. These are horror stories that no child should experience - and they're happening on our doorstep, every day.

These are the unbearable findings of a new Unicef study, released today, that reveal the scale of violence and exploitation that children are facing in the wretched camps in Northern France, like Dunkirk and Calais.

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Many are children who have made the perilous journey across Europe, fleeing bullets and bombs, only to face more suffering and despair. They are desperately close to reaching a safe home with their families waiting for them here in the UK - and yet these children are finding themselves stuck in these dangerous camps for months on end.

From my trips as a Unicef Ambassador to Lebanon and Jordan, I have seen the hardships that children displaced by war face every day. Children like Majid who at just 12 years old is the sole breadwinner for his family of nine people. Children like Omaymah who has fought tirelessly for her right to an education and continues to fight for the same for other girls around her.

Michael met with children displaced by war in Jordan Unicef/Matas

The difference is the children I met are with their families. They still have their loved ones around them to protect them from the daily challenges they face. But in Calais and other parts of Northern France, many children don't have that safety. They are alone.

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The stories from these children are incredibly hard to hear.

But we must listen to what they are saying. And we must do something to help.

Stories from young Ethiopian, Eritrean and Kurdish women and girls, describing instances of rape, of how the exchange of sex is being used to gain promise of passage to the UK, or to pay for their journey across Europe. Stories from Afghan boys forced to work to pay the traffickers the 'entry fee' they insist on before they are even allowed to stay in these squalid camps and inevitably putting themselves in danger whilst doing so.

Today the cost of crossing the English Channel has never been higher. Unicef's research estimates that smugglers and traffickers are now charging between 4,000 and 5,500 per person but for unaccompanied children, unable to pay these huge sums of money, this has forced them to take even more significant risks from committing crimes to raise the money to hiding in the back of refrigerated lorries.

11 year old Ilad, from Syria, arrived in Calais alone Unicef/Geai

So what can be done?

Right now we know that there are at least 157 unaccompanied refugee children in Calais who have the right to be reunited with family members in the UK. The government has said that unaccompanied children should be brought to the UK if they have family here, but these children's cases are moving too slowly.

This should be a quick process and could be a quick win for the government, as it were, to ensure that at least the most visible of the many unaccompanied refugee children struggling to survive across various European countries are safe.

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Unicef UK's campaign is asking the Government to ensure that these 157 children's cases are processed as quickly as possible and that sufficient resources are dedicated to making the family reunion process function more effectively. We need to ensure that children receive reliable information, in a language they understand, about this process and have access to quality legal assistance so that their requests to be reunited with their families can be submitted as quickly as possible.

The government can change this, right now.
Matt Dunham/PA Wire

This blog is an edited version of the speech delivered by HRH The Duke of Cambridge at the London 2016 Founders Forum on Thursday 16 June

The first thing I should say is that I've recorded England vs Wales at home so that I can watch it when I'm back there later, so please don't anyone give away the score to me in the next hour. I mean it. If you have an app on your phone to alert you to goal, you know what to do! I would ask you to switch off your phones, but you're probably the wrong audience to ask that to.

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I must admit, like most people my age, I'd struggle without my smartphone - for news, sports, music and the odd bit of gaming. And technology is a big part of my working life, too. As an air ambulance pilot, I love the fact that the helicopter I fly is fitted out with some of the life-saving medical equipment; and I consider social media to be central to how the Royal Family communicates in the 21st Century.

A lot is said publicly about the challenges that new technologies - particularly the Internet - can create for people, in terms of the spread of extremism, invasions into our privacy, and the security of our data. Social media has also been the subject of scrutiny, for the way in which it can create a platform for trolling and other vicious behaviour. But while new technology can of course create new problems, it is my belief that innovation in technology is a force for good, and that these advancements can do a lot more good than the harm that is often talked about.

That is why it is a privilege to be addressing all of you here today, because you are the people who have the opportunity to advance the good that is possible.

I turn 34 next week. Every year of my life has seen huge changes in the way we communicate, do business, form relationships, and choose governments. These changes have made the world more transparent, our communities more engaged, and the barriers between cultures and countries easier to cross.

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It is you in this room, and those who back you, who have done more than almost anyone else to shape this new world around us. Already I see that you are doing much to think ambitiously about how what you have created can still be celebrated in 100 or 200 years time. The Founders Pledge - if successful, which I hope it will be - will embed a habit of philanthropy among entrepreneurs. And many of you have already collaborated with charities and causes, including my own Royal Foundation, to reach new audiences in innovative and thoughtful ways.

There is one issue that I want to ask for your assistance and energy, to help turn from a worrying challenge to an exciting opportunity - and that is how we protect children online. Children and young people use the Internet more than almost any of us, but are too young, inexperienced or lacking in the maturity of adults to make the right judgments about what is and what is not safe.

The particular issue that I ask for your help to tackle is bullying. From a young age, I have detested bullying in all its forms.

As Catherine and I started our family a few years ago, I was alarmed about the increasing reports of online bullying that were making headlines around the world.

From the girls developing eating disorders after being subjected to a campaign of abuse on social media, to the teenage boys who took their own lives following constant targeting - as a parent myself, I was appalled.

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What we were seeing was that social media and messaging had transformed bullying from something that was not only the torment of the classroom and playground, but something that followed you home as well - to the one safe haven that children should have.

I have to admit that at first I worried that technology companies might not be doing enough on this issue.

But as I looked into this more, I realised that technology was also doing something positive. It was bringing the quiet and often hidden tragedy of bullying into the open where we could finally see it.

To school-age children today, there is no difference between their online and offline lives. Bullying is bullying, wherever it happens.

But now - thanks to the transparency that technology brings - we have the opportunities for others - friends, teachers, even strangers - to intervene; to speak up for the victims and to speak out against the bullies. Digital technology is creating new opportunities for positive and encouraging stories to be shared and to let vulnerable people know that they are not alone.

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I have set up a taskforce chaired by Brent to develop a new, positive strategy to combat bullying. We want to build on the good work that is happening around the technology sector, to make it better aligned and future proofed.

I am delighted with the enthusiasm we have had, and the extraordinary array of people that Brent has assembled. Sadly he knows no-one at Apple yet but I'm trying to introduce him to someone. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but by this time next year we expect to have a plan in place to achieve fundamental improvements in online safety for bullied children.

So today I ask you for your ideas, your support, and your engagement with Brent's taskforce to tackle bullying. Please do take the opportunity to get involved.

I believe that, by your coming together creatively and openly to tackle bullying, you will be creating an enduring model for how the Internet should progress into the next stage of its development.

The Internet is new - for the general public, it's barely 20 years old. So what we do now will mould this technology forever - so we must get our next steps right. I think we have a chance to show that on this issue of bullying, technology can do more than create a patch for a problem it has presented; let's instead create an enduring, positive shift in our culture that could not have happened without technological advancement.

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Each week John* and his four colleagues meet with their manager to discuss workloads, responsibilities, and to decide exactly who does what task. This approach seeks to blend each individual's strengths and weaknesses across the whole team.

The approach is a 'win win' one that works well for both employer and employee. John's employer has flexibility to deploy the right skills at the right time as well as being able to adapt to changing circumstances and business needs. Team members find themselves supported in ways that harness their talents, expertise and experience.

For John, who is in his late 20s and lives in the north of England, and has a learning disability, the opportunity was life changing:

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Working and having a meaningful job has given me a lot of confidence. I can travel down to London by myself and I can do things I always dreamed of doing...I also give training to the organisation about employing people with a learning disability.

John shared his experience at a recent roundtable event supported by the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group. The debate brought together disabled people, parliamentarians, charities and businesses to address the question of how to improve employment prospects for people with a disability.

We know that of the 5.7 million disabled people of working age, 4 million are working yet a further 1.3 million who have the potential to work are unemployed. In addition, 46% of disabled people have jobs compared to 79% of their able-bodied peers. The 33% gap is not only consistent with the previous year but also disguises important variations such as a smaller gap for young people aged between 16-24, and a much wider gap for those aged between 50-64.

When employment is a positive choice for disabled people - rather than something driven by benefit cuts - it can help to improve health outcomes, wellbeing, social inclusion and life chances. Along with the obvious economic benefits, the focus must be on jobs that are sustained over time. A job that quickly breaks down because the right support was not in place does not benefit either employees or employers.

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However, while workplace discrimination is covered under the Equality Act 2010 (making it illegal to discriminate against employees on the grounds of disability), there is some way to go before attitudes catch up as a recent Lords Select Committee identified. Part of the problem lies with the perceptions of what disabled people can or cannot contribute. Last year, for example, a poll of 100 MPs by social care provider Dimensions asked if the politicians agreed that almost everyone with learning disabilities is capable of being supported into paid and productive employment - only 40% did.

Disabled people in our debate voiced concerns that job centre advisors do not fully understand their abilities or signpost them to suitable opportunities. In addition, they said that the short job interview process does little to enable people to fully demonstrate their capability for a job. Instead we need alternatives like skills-based recruitment and reverse job fairs that bring employers to disabled people, as well as work trials.

Our event underlined the need for truly worthwhile opportunities. As John said in response to a suggestion that people with learning disabilities could undertake administrative tasks in offices: "I want to do something meaningful, not just [paper] shredding".

As for what is being done to solve the disability employment gap, the Conservative Party came to government with a manifesto commitment to halve the disability employment gap. The spending review set out an ambition to "transform policy, practice and public attitudes" towards disabled people in work.

However, there are now concerns over the delayed timetable for government's green paper on disability and employment. The impact of reductions to Access to Work grants (funding that helps you do your job if you have a disability or health issue) and a cap on the value of these grants will affect disabled people in different ways. This cap, as Action on Hearing suggest, risks reducing access to support for people with high value support needs. The impact of the cap will need to be closely monitored.

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Progress includes the NHS pledge to become a progressive employer by taking on more people with learning disabilities. NHS chief executive Simon Stevens said last year:

This isn't just the right thing to do for people with learning disabilities; it's the right thing to do for the NHS as a group of organisations, helping us to deliver better care for everyone.

In social care, like the NHS, employing disabled people brings clear benefits. Disabled people bring their own experiences and insights to the job that can help to improve service delivery, as well as shifting negative public perceptions about care services. However, despite these obvious benefits, the overall numbers of disabled people employed within social care is low - on average two per cent of the social care workforce is known to have a disability.

Similarly, the government's Disability Confident scheme, whilst a welcome initiative, requires further traction with only 600 employers signed up. This focus is not about setting quotas but we do need many more organisations prepared to lead the way, to model good practice and to share learning.

So how do we reach a tipping point when, through a critical mass of employers, good practice becomes the norm?

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Alongside the challenge to employers, it is clear that government should play a stronger role. The Resolution Foundation argues that disability and employment is an area of social policy which is struggling to progress because of the narrow focus on benefits (to reduce public spend). With attention largely on moving people off benefits, insufficient attention is paid to sustaining employment. The Resolution Foundation also describes the current system as being unresponsive to changing need and circumstances.

As disability charity the Papworth Trust has described, employment and support allowance requires disabled people to take a leap into the unknown. If a job does not work out then individuals risk losing Employment Support Allowance (ESA) for up to a year. The Papworth Trust is campaigning for a time limited automatic entry route back onto ESA for claimants to remove this disincentive.

The long-awaited green paper on disability and employment will, when announced, offer the opportunity for a genuine conversation between policy makers, disabled people, businesses and charities. At our recent debate, John concluded: "When it comes to it, it's all about reasonable adjustments". With the right support in place, and an inclusive organisational culture, there is no reason why disabled people should not be represented at all levels of every organisation.
I had an EU debate with the Conservative MP for Epsom and Ewell Chris Grayling on Saturday.

This was one of the many debates that I've had over the last few weeks on the subject of whether or not we should stay in the EU. My very first debate was with the rookie MP for Sutton and Cheam and the more recent one, against a veteran member of her majesty's cabinet. Despite the drastic differences in political experience between these MPs, both debates were strikingly similar. In standard fashion, both debates included our pitches as to why we should stay or go, took questions from the audience, and debated. The obvious takeaway from each debate, however, was this: when pressed to answer the simplest of questions like 'What would post-Brexit look like for our economy'? neither of my opponents could articulate a clear response. Amongst the many questions that need answering by Brexiteers: what will our trading relationship with the UK look like, is a fundamentally important one that needs to be answered. This is especially critical since over three million jobs and nearly half of all UK exports are dependent on trade with the EU. A valid explanation is something the British people deserve to hear while they evaluate the facts before casting their votes on the 23rd of June.

The inability to articulate an alternative trading model for Britain goes far beyond just these two MPs; in the last few months, we've heard various Brexit leaders hypothesise possibilities of modeling nearly a dozen different countries. Fighting fact with fantasy has become a hallmark of the Leave campaign's identity. The undisciplined communication shortcomings of the Leave campaign was perhaps best summed up recently by pro-Leave MP Kate Hoey being unable to name a single credible independent study that suggests we'd be better off leaving the EU. For a referendum being dubbed as one of the biggest decisions of our lifetimes, how can we possibly take the Vote Leave campaign seriously when they can't present viable alternatives or evidence to reinforce their claims?

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Another element to their chaotic communications strategy is their bizarre counterclaims against every single international organisation and think tank that warn of negative consequences from a Brexit. In just the last few months, a plethora of globally respected banks, companies, academics, experts, firms, and organisations have cautioned that Brexit would be a wrong direction for the UK to take.

The list includes:

Airbus

Asda

The Bank of England

BlackRock

BT

Centre for Economic Performance (LSE)

easyJet

HM Treasury

IBM

The IMF

The Institute for Fiscal Studies

Marks & Spencer

The OECD

Oxford Economics

PricewaterhouseCoopers

Royal Society

Vauxhall Motors

Universities UK

The World Bank

Talking about the referendum on his show, the BBC's Andrew Marr asked my debate opponent Mr. Grayling quite pointedly, 'You have no big international organisations on your side, do you?' to which Mr. Grayling replied 'Well what I think you have to do is follow the money, Andrew.' To borrow a line from the famous film, Jerry Maguire, I say to Mr. Grayling and the entire Leave campaign to please, 'Show me the money.' Because beyond the rhetoric-laced talking points about how we need to 'take back control' and are 'better off without them', we haven't seen a slice of evidence to back these statements.

The Brexit leadership network is fragmented by an unholy union of climate change deniers, chauvinists and conspiracy theorists--turning their campaign into a circus similar to that of this year's American GOP presidential primaries. Boris Johnson's Trump-like call for a TV reporter to 'Shut up' during his speech at a Leave event and asking for members of the audience to cut off the journalist during a live broadcast, on top of his thinly veiled racist comments directed at President Obama, are a symbolic summation of this sideshow.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, in comparison to the rest of the world, our economy has done relatively well. But make no mistake about it, the volatile status quo of global markets keep our recovery process fragile. A huge part of this recovery can be attributed to trade with our European partners and receiving tens of millions of pounds in investment from this relationship every single day.

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Time and again throughout this campaign, we've experienced a flurry of studies, warnings, and facts from reliable independent experts from around the world who favour remaining in the EU. And time and again Vote Leave have attempted to distract the British people with rousing rhetoric, hoping they don't pay attention to the fine print. As the famous saying goes, 'You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig'. In the coming days before the vote, don't let their fantasies dissuade you from the facts. As much as Vote Leave would like to make this referendum about patriotism and sovereignty, this is really about what path best suits Britain's future.
With both the Stronger In and Vote Leave campaigns full of fear mongering and scare stories, the EU referendum, even for those involved in politics, is becoming extremely tedious. But the Leave campaign's inability to provide the electorate with facts, and the replacement of facts with guesswork, is characterised by a Vote Leave leaflet that has been making its rounds across the country.

Vote Leave claim that the NHS would benefit from an extra 100 million every week if Britain voted Leave next Thursday. But, with a pro-austerity, Conservative government at the helm, a Brexit would undoubtedly damage the NHS. In the event of a Brexit, it is likely, with Tory infighting unlikely to stop, Boris Johnson would ascend to the throne of leader of the Conservative Party, if Cameron fell. Johnson has previously called for the privatisation of the NHS, claiming that people would value the system more if they paid for it. To trust Johnson with the existence of the NHS is ludicrous, let alone expecting him to pump more money into it. Even the so-called 'compassionate Conservatives' have reduced the NHS to crisis, with junior doctors taking industrial action, fewer nurses and the amount of people waiting more than 4 hours in A&E being the highest since 2004. Vote Leave are attempting to use the NHS and TTIP to further their case, but with the current government and a prospective Labour government both saying the NHS would be exempt from any TTIP deal, it is difficult for Brexiters to be taken seriously on this issue.

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The audacity of Vote Leave to give warnings over the economy is even more laughable than their claims on the NHS. The British market is showing jitters already, with Leave ahead in the last 6 polls by an average of 4 points. Big losses have already been had across Europe, with the FTSE 100 down to its lowest point since February and the pound down by 1% already. With the market already on its way to another downturn, how Leave can make such ridiculous claims that a Brexit would create 300,000 new jobs is beyond the realms of my imagination. With Britain's leading trade unions getting behind Labour's call to vote Remain, a Brexit would go nowhere close to creating jobs, as businesses withdraw investment from Britain and smaller businesses have to let staff go. Regardless of the inevitable economic shock that would be felt across Britain, Brexiters claim that we would still have access to the single market is undermined by the fact that Britain would still have to adhere to EU rules to stay in the common market. As a share of exports, Britain's economy is largely dependent on the EU due to decimation of British industry and lack of manufacturing growth.

While a Brexit would inevitably damage the British economy, and that of many countries in Europe, Vote Leave's claim that British security is being damaged by our membership of the European Union is somehow even more ludicrous. The loss of shared intelligence with other EU member states and the loss of access to the European Arrest Warrant would cause a major dent in British security confidence. Our borders have been bolstered by the European Arrest Warrant, which has been used in conjunction with over 13,000 arrests involving the UK since 2004. Without the sharing of intelligence and ability to bring some very dangerous criminals from across Europe to justice, British security would be damaged, terrorism would be more likely to succeed and our families and friends would be in danger.

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It is in no doubt that Vote Leave is trying to make this debate about immigration. As one of the most important issues to voters in the last couple of decades, it is important that Stronger In, and particularly Labour In for Britain, listen to the electorate's concerns if they want to have any legitimacy in the debate. But, the Vote Leave obsession with Turkey joining the European Union is also totally unfounded. The mass amount of democratic, economic and social criteria included in the Copenhagen criteria means that Turkey will not be joining the EU any time soon. This alongside tensions with Cyprus that don't seem to be making progress, Turkey's concerning human rights record and a lack of domestic support in Turkey itself for membership is leading to the assumption that Turkey have some years to go until they can even have a chance of joining the European Union. Even if all these problems are cleared up, which they show no sign of doing, every member of the EU has a veto for new members during the accession process, including Britain. With public support in most EU states overwhelmingly against Turkish membership, it is unlikely that any European government would risk their popularity by not using their veto if it was such a large issue in their country.
One of the most prominent rallying cries from those who'd have the UK depart the European Union is to take 'control of our borders'. It sounds like a straightforward enough proposition, but it's an overly simplistic argument that could potentially lead to our borders being far more difficult to control than they are now.

Today the UK has only one land border with another country. It is between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland: two Member States of the European Union. The border is governed by a long standing agreement that enables the free movement of people between the two countries, a factor that has been important for cordial relations for over 90 years. That arrangement was also important in securing the peace that Northern Ireland has now enjoyed for getting on for two decades, after nearly three of violence between those seeking a United Ireland and those wishing to remain part of the United Kingdom.

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Should the UK leave, then that open border would not be able to remain, not if we are to have 'control of our borders'. This is not only for want of preventing illegal immigrants from entering via that route from the European Union, but also for seeking to control the potential movement of people who've moved to Ireland and become Irish citizens, and who under the current arrangements can come to the UK.

If current rules remained in place then people from Poland, Romania and the rest of the EU could come to the UK via that route as Irish citizens, quite legally, unless the law were changed of course. Remarkably, prominent Brexiter and Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers has claimed that in the event of a Brexit that the rules governing the border between the Republic and the North would remain unchanged. Hardly a policy to secure 'control of our borders'.

If we left the EU then that might not be the only land border that would need policing. Another might be created between England and Scotland. If the UK as a whole were to vote to leave, but a majority of Scots elected to stay, then there would be firm grounds for a new referendum on Scottish independence. Should that lead to a break up of the Union then Scotland would seek membership of the EU and there would be another land border that would need to be subject immigration controls equivalent to those at Heathrow and Dover, that is if we wish to have 'control of our borders'.

Given the roll back of social and environmental safeguards that will likely follow a Brexit (EU critics have for a long time described these as 'red tape' that holds us back), then the progressive and green nation of Wales might similarly find its population seeking a vote on independence. Brexit is a mainly English agenda and in a diminished UK that lacked the tempering effect of Scotland's social justice agenda on British politics, the Welsh might see a better future in the EU with a Celtic group that included Ireland and Scotland. The largely Conservative and English Brexiters seem oblivious to the rancor generated by many of their policies in Wales and Scotland and Brexit could be the trigger that leaves them in a future union that is between only themselves and Northern Ireland.

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Should that happen, in say twenty years' time, then a third land border would be created, further upping the challenge of 'controlling our borders'. By then, who knows what scale of movement of people might be underway, given the impacts of among other things climate change and the nexus of economic and social challenges that will be its companions. Should the national consciences of Ireland, Scotland and Wales lead them to take refugees fleeing future wars or environmental change, where will that leave England's borders?

Somewhere down the line we might find Boris Johnson as a modern day Hadrian, proposing a new barrier to defend against threats from an untamable north. Maybe Nigel Farage has ambitions to go down in history as a modern day Offa, setting out on epic earthworks to separate England and Wales as the Mercian King did in the 8th Century.

Johnson's Wall and Farage's Dyke lack the romance of their historic antecedents, but if they wish to take 'control of our borders', that might well be where we are heading. Ridiculous? Well, all sorts of absurd excesses are justified in populist politics based on 'control of our borders'. The most likely Republican candidate for the US Presidency has in part built his political base on promises of a new wall to separate his supporters from Mexico.

Right now the UK is surrounded by sea and has one land border with a friendly country that is part of the same political union. People mostly enter from other countries by sea and air through well-run ports. Should we leave the EU that could come to an end and a very different situation arise. In the fractured UK that risks following a Brexit England's borders will include not only airports, ports and motorways, but A-roads, B-roads and unclassified lanes, not to mention remote woods, moorlands and river valleys.
Donald Trump may use the exposure of his campaign to launch a media network, hopefully with the tagline, "We Report, You Won't Believe How Amazing This Reporting Will Be; It'll Blow Your Mind, Folks." John McCain *blamed* President Obama for the Orlando attacks, but it's important to remember that McCain is a statesman because he doesn't think President Obama *sympathizes with the attackers.* And staunch Bernie Sanders supporter Raul Grijalva endorsed Hillary Clinton, something that could have been avoided if the Democratic Party allowed open Raul Grijalvas and let independents participate in its Raul Grijalvas. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, June 16th, 2016:





Happy Make America Great Againiversary...

OBAMA'S LATEST ON OUR PECULIAR CUSTOM OF ROUTINE MASS MURDER SPREES - The president in Orlando just now: "Those who were killed and injured here were gunned down by a single killer with a powerful assault weapon. The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown, but the instruments of death were so similar, and now another 49 innocent people are dead. Another 53 are injured. Some are still fighting for their lives. Some will have wounds that will last a lifetime. We can't anticipate or catch every single deranged person that may wish to do harm to his neighbors or friends or co-workers or strangers, but we can do something about the amount of damage that they do. Unfortunately, our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist, or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown, to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons, and they can do so legally."

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Gwen Moore introduced legislation to drug test rich people who claim big itemized deductions on their taxes.

SENATE TRIES TO HASH OUT GUN BILL THAT HOUSE WILL PROBABLY KILL - Everyone enjoy your National Moment. Karoun Demirjian: "Senate leaders are hashing out the details of an agreement to hold votes on gun-control measures that are likely to pit Democrats and Republicans against each other. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday said that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) indicated early in the morning that he would allow votes on 'two important gun safety measures' as part of a pending bill to fund certain government agencies, including the Justice Department. McConnell said that nothing was finalized but that leaders would 'try' to schedule votes on proposals 'from both sides.'  Democrats have been angling for votes on a measure written by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would deny firearms and explosives to anyone the attorney general suspects of being a terrorist  On Thursday, McConnell strongly hinted that Republicans would be offering an alternative to Feinsteins legislation from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) that would give the attorney general the power to deny firearms to terrorists only if she could prove within a 72-hour window that there was probable cause to do so." [WaPo]

NO KIDDING: SUPPORT FOR ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN JUMPS - Jeremy Silk Smith: "Support for a nationwide ban on assault weapons increased in the wake of the Orlando mass shooting that killed 49 people, especially among Republicans, a new poll shows. The CBS News poll , conducted over the two days following the shooting, shows 57 percent of respondents favor banning assault weapons, a 13 percent increase from a previous CBS News/New York Times poll that was conducted a few days after of the San Bernardino shooting that killed 14 people. But support for an assault weapons ban climbed the most among Republicans. In December, 25 percent of Republicans supported an assault weapons ban, but in the most recent poll, 45 percent of Republicans are in favor." [Roll Call]

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The House Appropriations Committee is cutting the EPA's budget because apparently its bungling of the Flint water crisis was caused by too much funding.

DELANEY DOWNER - Chloe Pfeiffer: "The number of people receiving food stamps has fallen again, continuing to decline past last year's record low of 45.7 million participants. This could be a sign that the economy is improving - higher employment means fewer people receiving unemployment and other benefits. But it's also likely driven by people losing eligibility even if they're still unemployed, a result of states becoming more and more stringent in their approach to non-working adults." Also, this is a federal law -- though some states carry it out with more gusto than necessary. [Business Insider]

Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It's free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to huffposthill@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill

TEAM TRUMP NOT CRAZY ABOUT THE RNC - The feeling is mutual, it would seem. Also, surprise surprise: Donald Trump doesn't like homework. Ken Vogel, Eli Stokols and Alex Isenstadt: "While Trump had promised Priebus that he would call two dozen top GOP donors, when RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh recently presented Trump with a list of more than 20 donors, he called only three before stopping, according to two sources familiar with the situation. Its unclear whether he resumed the donor calls later...Several Trump allies said their distrust [of the RNC] spiked this week when they learned that Rick Wiley, who was fired from the campaign last month, had been spotted in the RNCs Capitol Hill offices and had participated in a Tuesday RNC conference call...Trumps campaign has sought to exert influence over the RNC by signaling its preference that party contracts be withheld from some firms that worked for Trump opponents or on the so-called #NeverTrump movement to block him from the nomination...Three operatives who have worked with the campaign suggested that Wileys recent hiring by the RNC may have been partly a power play by Trumps campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in his power struggle with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who had pushed for Wiley to be fired from the campaign." [Politico]

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Brett Baier asked the Dalai Lama if he's ever seen Caddyshack.

GRIJALVA BACKS CLINTON, WAS MAJOR SANDERS BACKER - But, but, the Hillary indictments are coming any day, now! Ben Kamisar: "Rep. Raul Grijalva, one of Bernie Sanders's few supporters in Congress, has endorsed Hillary Clinton as Democrats continue to push for unity around her presidential campaign. The Arizona congressman and co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus was the first member of Congress to support the Vermont senator's presidential bid back in October. He has been a key ally for Sanders, serving at times as a cable news surrogate and as one of the campaign's picks for the party's platform drafting committee. ..'With voting completed in the final Democratic Primary, it is now time for the Democratic Party to unify. For all of us who supported Bernie from the beginning, whether we considered ourselves progressives or independents or just Americans tired of being on the outside looking in, the most important thing now is to beat Donald Trump in November,' he said." [The Hill]

TRUMP SPENDING TIME IN RED STATES FOR FUNDRAISING - Maybe he should instead be calling more of those people on Reince Priebus' list. Maggie Haberman: "Donald J. Trumps campaign schedule is being driven by his fund-raising needs, prompting him to appear in heavily Republican states like Georgia and Texas and diverting his attention from battlegrounds where Hillary Clinton is spending her time. Mr. Trumps aides, scrambling to raise money to compete against Mrs. Clintons cash juggernaut and extensive donor network, have scheduled fund-raisers in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Texas this week. The private events for donors were often scheduled first, followed by his campaign rallies, according to two people involved in Mr. Trumps fund-raising who insisted on anonymity. Even some of Mr. Trumps appearances in battleground states have been tied to fund-raisers: A New Hampshire rally on Monday night was planned in conjunction with a fund-raiser in Boston, but both events were canceled after the deadly shooting in Orlando, Fla., on Sunday." [NYT]

You know what's really going to sway the rampant xenophobe mulling over whether to vote Trump? A Richard Armitage endorsement: "Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush, says he will vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, in one of the most dramatic signs yet that Republican national security elites are rejecting their partys presumptive nominee. Armitage, a retired Navy officer who also served as an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, is thought by Clinton aides to be the highest-ranking former GOP national security official to openly support Clinton over Trump." [Politico's Michael Crowley]

Other defections: "Arne Carson, the Republican former governor of Minnesota, told CityPages on Wednesday that no human being in history has been more vetted than Clinton while Trump 'has taken campaigning to a new low.' Mike Treiser, a former Mitt Romney staffer, said that 'in the face of bigotry, hatred, violence, and small-mindedness, this time, Im with her.' As conservative writer Ben Howe put it, 'I am a fiscal conservative and I am a social conservative. That will not change. But I will not vote for an egomaniacal authoritarian. Nope.'" [HuffPost's Alana Horowitz Satlin]

HILLARY NABS UNION ENDORSEMENT, SURPRISING NO ONE - The question is whether the AFL-CIO can keep its rust belt members in line this November -- also if Richard Trumka keeps his mustache and its magical GOTV properties. Dave Jamieson: "The countrys largest federation of labor unions formally endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday, assuring that organized labor would devote its considerable resources to keeping a Democrat in the White House for another four years. The AFL-CIOs board voted to approve a Clinton endorsement after the groups political committee recommended the move on Friday. A clear majority of the AFL-CIOs member unions had already endorsed the likely Democratic nominee on their own, many as early as last year. But the surprisingly close primary challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) led several major unions to wait out the endorsement process, while a handful chose to back the self-described democratic socialist over Clinton. The former Secretary of State finally secured the necessary support from member unions after her insurmountable delegate lead recently made her the presumptive nominee." [HuffPost]

It's sometimes easy in this Ted Cruz, Donald Trump age of ours to lose sight of the wonderful crankypantsiness of John McCain: "President Barack Obama is directly responsible for the Orlando, Fla., massacre, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) charged Thursday. McCain, one of the Senates most hawkish members and long a vigorous advocate of military intervention in the Middle East, said Obama was at fault because he pulled troops from Iraq too soon and failed to respond more vigorously to the rise of the so-called Islamic State, according to the Associated Press and numerous reporters who listened to him." [HuffPost's Mike McAuliff]

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@SenJohnMcCain: To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obamas national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself

BECAUSE YOU'VE READ THIS FAR - Here's a cat eating ice cream. That's it.

COMFORT FOOD

- A very interesting take on Donald Trump, courtesy of Japan.

- You wanna see a ton of crabs?

- The parenting happiness gap is a thing.

TWITTERAMA

@emmaroller: when I am president people who use online contact forms instead of just listing their emails will be put in the stockades

@PaulBlu: On this day.

June 16, 1858: Lincoln gives House Divided speech.

June 16, 2015: Trump descends escalator, gives "they're rapists" speech.
Over the past two days, in an effort to bring Americans context on the mass shooting in Orlando, well-meaning media, such as NPR, have presented a range of views in its programming, from the statements of the presidential contenders, to a coterie of imams advising on Islam and tolerance to LGBT activists citing the ways in which LGBT population almost always gets scapegoated for societal ills.

Across the spectrum, listeners have caught the buzzwords: extremism, religiosity, Islam, Christian, mentally ill, repression, homosexuality -- all of the same language also shouted television, on the Internet and on the street. But in the those talking points, cultural, political and activist leaders have once again missed the point entirely, trotting out the same old identity politics to divide us further into camps. When really, our problem does not deal with marginalization, or the civility of one group over another.

The problem with gun violence in the United States is the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Because, let's face it: without a gun, or specifically, a .223 caliber AR type rifle and 9mm semiautomatic pistol, Omar Mateen would still be a confused radical and 50 people would still be alive.

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What I would like to know instead: since when does the second amendment trump our First Amendment rights? Or even our basic right to live and breathe in America?

Since never. Not unless one was fighting for the country. A simple search brings up the Second Amendment in its original format: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Simple enough. In times of defense of country, as when the U.S. Constitution was signed in 1787 just after the end of the American Revolution, people have the right to keep and use guns. Over the years, however, many interest groups, espousing the same identity politics as they now do, have attempted to interpret that amendment to fit their varying needs. Most of the time, gun safety prevailed.

In the United States v. Cruikshank (1876), after a Ku Klux Klan militia were convicted of massacring an armed group of Republican freedmen, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions, ruling that the Second Amendment did not restrict private citizens from denying other citizens the right to keep and bear arms. "The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence", wrote Chief Justice Morrison Waite, in a decision that, on the surface, favored white protectionism from black militias.

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More than 50 years later, the Supreme Court was more explicit. In United States v. Miller (1939), it ruled that the federal government and the states could limit any weapon type not having a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia". In that case, a bank robber had challenged that the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a tax and the registration of certain firearms.

However, in the 21st Century of unlimited freedoms, as more and more disenfranchised people live in fear of each other, they lobby against the "nanny state", afraid of the government taking away their Constitutional right to bear arms. In turn, Congress and the courts have pacified them.

After a series of decisions in favor of gun rights in the first ten years of the new millennium, in Caetano v. Massachusetts last March, the Supreme Court reiterated its earlier rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010): "The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding" the Court stated in a per curiam decision. In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote, that "if the fundamental right of self-defense does not protect Caetano, then the safety of all Americans is left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming people than about keeping them safe."

Since Caetano was decided, the U.S. has experienced only gun massacres (in which four or more people were killed), including the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which resulted in 49 deaths -- a respite from 2015. However, since the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, CT, there have been 998 mass shootings in the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive. Among those targeted: school children, Muslims, born-again Christians, teachers, movie-goers, straight people, university students, black people, white people, dancers and LGBT people.

Last night, hundreds of LGBT rights supporters stopped Christopher Street in its tracks for a vigil, stating that they needed to be outside a place that gave them strength, as many do for Pride every year. While they chanted "no hate", the NYPD in full counterterrorism gear, which includes an assault rifle, watched over them.

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Less than 10 hours from now, I will be sworn in as a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.

So tonight, instead of writing this, I should be upstairs picking out my outfit and setting my alarm clock. Or I should be going through the checklist of this latest and final round of required USCIS paperwork.



And, really, if we're talking 'shoulds' here, I should be excited to wave some flags and sing some anthems. I should be happy.



Despite the divided and vitriolic state of things in this election year, I am not entirely unhappy.

More than happy, after almost 30 years of living in the USA, I'm incredulous.



One winter night 29-and-a-half years ago, I stood on a freezing pavement outside JFK Airport.



Earlier, on the seven-hour transatlantic plane journey, I had been so petrified that I had chawed my right thumbnail to the point of bleeding. After the seemingly endless immigration queue, I trekked across the arrivals terminal where my newbie questions and odd accent obviously ticked off the airport information woman.

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Then, standing outside on the pavement, I hoisted my rucksack higher and kept gawking the wrong way as I waited for my upstate-bound bus that I assumed would drive down the left -- not the right -- side of the road.



I had $200 cash in my jeans pocket and of course, back then, there were no credit cards or cell phones or Plan Bs. On that freezing December night, I would never have believed that, on a future night, the middle-aged me would sit here on the eve of my citizenship fretting about my middle-aged bedtime.



But even more preposterous would be the prospect of me sitting here with my laptop, in my armchair, in my house, in my town and neighborhood.

The key word here?



"My."



See, on that pavement outside JFK, almost nothing was mine. That $200 in my jeans pocket? The night before my departure, I had borrowed it from a family member. My jean jacket -- which turned out to be useless for a New York winter -- was a left-behind from an ex-boyfriend.



More important: When you come of age in a country where the female script has already been written for you, when you spend most of your young-adult life and brain power trying to squish yourself into that square-peg role and life, you can barely pronounce that possessive pronoun, "my."



Now, if I have any advice for contemporary newbie immigrants, it would be this: A new country does not auto-spawn a new you.



Long after I had settled in here, for years and years, those voices still drifted across the Atlantic. Those old fingers wagged. Those old teeth clicked and tut-tutted: Oh! No! That's not for rural and working class girls like you.



Then, a decade or two in, those voices began to fade. No, scratch that. "Fade," isn't the right infinitive here. Those voices got overlaid, got shouted down by a new script that said, "Heck, girl, why not you?"



These days I wonder if that sassy voice was there all along. All it needed was a much larger and more anonymous amphitheater.



Now, even in these most uncivil and un-civic of American times, I find myself quoting from one of my favorite authors, who, incidentally, has cited his American citizenship ceremony as one of the most emotional events of his life.



In his bestselling book, "Cutting for Stone," Ethiopian-born physician-writer Abraham Verghese wrote:



That's the thing about America, the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity make up for all the others. I've had my share of angels.

Me, too, Mr. Verghese. And, lucky me, my angels were loud and insistent -- even when I was trying very hard not to listen. Even when it was much easier to stay stuck in that not-for-girls-like-me comfort zone.

As I sit here writing this, I could list those angels' names, the folks who saw something in me and gave me a chance to prove my professional and personal chops.



But enough about me.



Tomorrow will be all about patriotism, citizenry and nation-hood. Tomorrow will be all about country.

Dare I say it yet?

My country.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:
Organic reach is down and your social media strategy has stagnated, which means you are looking for a way out of it. So what can you do when you need to get more followers interested in your brand?

People tend to have two choices. They either use some of the secrets that'll boost their organic reach, or they succumb to the ads that claim to offer X number of followers for a small amount of money. Here are five reasons why you should never buy followers to increase your organic reach on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other social media network.

1.Nothing to do with you

Your current crop of followers means something because they are your customers and they are your clients. You might have never met them, but they have started to follow your brand for a reason. And that's why they continue to engage with your updates.

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Bought followers have no idea what your brand stands for or what it sells. They are there just to make up the numbers. You are not going to get any engagement from them.

2.Engagement is down on Facebook

One of the nuances of declining organic reach on Facebook is that the more unengaged your followers are the more your overall engagement rate goes down. What this means is that your stuff is less likely to appear in news feeds, thus ruining your engagement rate further because fewer of your customers will actually see what you are posting.

That's what happens when you buy followers.

3.You become a platform for spam

Once you start to incorporate bought followers into your community, you become a platform for spam. Once those followers are inside your community they can target your genuine customers. They will target them with their own spam. And this is going to benefit them. Many companies are using marketing companies that use these tactics.

If your brand becomes known for spamming followers with irrelevant nonsense, they are going to stop following you.

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4.Your reputation gets jeopardized

There's nothing worse than being discovered buying fake followers. It's humiliating for your brand because it proves that you're unable to actually bring real people to your brand. It shows that you have something wrong with your brand that you have been unable to fix through conventional means.

Your online reputation is everything, especially these days where one of the pillars of a great brand is transparency.

And people will find out eventually. It's only natural because fake followers are easily spotted through their profiles. They tend to come from strange third-world nations and their profiles are surprisingly insufficient, with some of them not even coming up with a profile picture.

5.It's goes against the terms of conditions

The simple fact is that buying followers is against the terms of service of practically every major social media network. They have strong policies against it because they know that fake followers impact their bottom lines. Investors are not going to stand for fake followers because they can adversely affect the stock price of a company, and therefore the overall value of that company.

Social media networks are becoming increasingly effective at unveiling brands that have bought fake followers. Sooner or later, you will get caught.

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Conclusion

Buying fake followers can not only destroy your brand it can put your entire company at risk. Getting banned from Facebook and Twitter over fake followers can compromise your future because you no longer have access to two major marketing channels.

Now imagine trying to make a company successful under those conditions.

Social media brand building takes a lot of time and effort, but if you are smart about it you can still be successful, even when dealing with all this competition.
During the development stages of a mobile app, the timeline can get behind. This may lead to rushed protocols and a few key elements, like security, lacking in effectiveness. Developers need to take the necessary time to make sure apps are not capable of being breached. Smartphones are costly, and malicious malware, worms and viruses can disable them - rendering them useless.

Create the Right Language in Framework

If the language used in your app's framework is not correct, attackers can easily find a loophole to weasel in and gain access to control the app. This leaves users vulnerable to attacks on personal devices and the theft of any personal information that may be stored within the app. In some cases, simple modifications to the language development teams use can prevent these attacks from occurring.

Conduct Breach Tests

Hire hackers to breach your own app. The only way to know if it's penetrable is to test it. Each hacker should use a different approach so that the app can show the ability or inability to counter the attack, alert developers, or not react to the attack at all. Knowing how safe your app is by testing it from a hacker's perspective is one of the best modes of creating a safe mobile app.

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Control Permissions Manually

A big issue with mobile apps is that users are not always given the option to control the permissions an app is requesting. Some want access to social networking websites, email addresses, and home addresses. If you use a mobile banking account, an important feature is the ability to set a permission control to automatically logout each time the app is closed.

Now, if you are one to always tap "accept" when you are asked to accept the terms and conditions of using the app without reading the text, you may be in trouble. There is information in those disclosures that will tell you what information an app wants and what it will be used for. Do not hit accept if you have read the terms of use and/or privacy policy and do not agree to all of the terms.

Protect your Device Too

When you are developing an app, it is always a good idea to encourage your users to have an outside mobile security program installed. The backup in security is helpful and can prevent a user's device from being compromised as they can be prompted of the attempted attack and to remove the app from their device immediately. It is estimated that about 5 billion Android apps are susceptible to security attacks.

Any devices using the same app should all have additional security back-ups in-place. Device protection is just as important as developers creating secure apps.



Personal Information Safety

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Questions surrounding personal information security, especially with mobile banking applications, exist. Sensitive personal information can be accessed in the event of a banking app security breach. In most cases, attackers go directly at the bank's protocols rather than an individual device due to the ability to gain access to thousands, if not millions, of customers' private banking information. Most banks have made adjustments to their apps, specifically after a breach, to prevent attacks from occurring.

Secure Shopping Carts

Applications that require users to make a purchase should have secure shopping carts. Major retailers, like Starbucks, have had breaches to their payment systems on mobile applications. Hackers are able to go into the payment system and copy the account numbers or credit card numbers used and steal them for their own use. Shopping carts should be tested prior to launching a mobile app to ensure that it is secure.



Developers Use Minimal Personal Information

Some apps really do want too much information. It can almost seem like an intrusion on your personal life. Giving up too much personal information to an application makes it more at risk for an attack. Attackers want the most information they can get from a person as possible. The less an app asks for, the less useful the information is to hackers.

Final Word
Charters schools, when first proposed in the late 1980s, were envisioned as a way for public school systems to experiment with educational options. Some still play this role. However over the last two decades charter schools have largely evolved into a way to make money from public dollars, either through for-profit charter school corporations or for well-paid CEOs of supposedly not-for profit charter school networks.

Thanks to big pushes by the Bill and Melinda Gates, Walton Family, and Broad foundations, California now has over 1,200 charters schools enrolling about seven percent of the state's students. That includes about sixteen percent of the students in Los Angles and twenty-five percent in Oakland. The number keeps growing even though there is no proof that charters perform better than regular public schools. Three recent stories about Charter Schools and the school deform movement should make readers ask, "Is this what they mean by school reform?"

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Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (Alliance), the largest charter school chain operating in Los Angles, California faces an investigation for using public funds to while trying to defeat a teacher-led union drive at its schools. A special committee of the California Legislature ordered the state auditor to investigate Alliance and the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). The charter chain, which serves 11,000 students in 27 taxpayer-funded but privately operated schools, has received hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. The committee wants to know how much public money was diverted into the fight against teachers who wanted to unionize and how CCSA acquired contact information for students and their families that they used in the anti-union campaign. The anti-union campaign reportedly included illegal surveillance of union activists, interference with meetings, phone calls to parents attacking teachers involved in the campaign, blocking teacher emails, and retaliation against organizers. State Senator Tony Mendoza (D), who initiated the move against Alliance charged, "The purpose of those funds is to educate children inside the classroom -- not to intimidate teachers and parents."

Teachers organizing the union drive at Alliance filed legal complaints with the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). Following a review of the charges, PERB attorneys filed four unfair labor practice complaints against Alliance and Los Angeles County Judge James Chalfont issued two restraining orders against the anti-union activities.

Groups associated with the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) are pouring money into legislative campaigns trying to elect a pro-charter majority in California.

According to California's Secretary of State pro-charter forces spent more than $3 million on contested races. More than $1 million is being used to influence voters in just one state senatorial district. According to Colin Miller, acting Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the CCSA, the group's top legislative priority is to make it easier to open new charter schools and expand existing schools.

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The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the Broad Foundation recently announced finalists for the 2016 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools. Two of the charters are based in Texas, IDEA Public Schools and YES Prep. IDEA, which was founded by Teach for America graduates, operates 44 schools in south and central Texas with more than 24,000 students. YES Prep operates fifteen middle and high schools with approximately 10,000 students, all in the Houston area. YES Prep previously received the Board Prize in 2012. The third nominee is Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy Charter Schools network based in New York City. The award winner will be announced June 27 and will receive $250,000.

The IDEA network's motto is "No Excuses" and it claims that it has a 100% graduation rate for the last fifteen years and that since 2007 100% of its graduates are accepted into college. Amazing!

These results sound almost too good to be true, until you look a little deeper. IDEA pre-sorts its applicants to weed out potentially difficult students. According to the network's student handbook, students with a history of disciplinary problems that include a criminal offense, a juvenile court adjudication, or other disciplinary problems can be excluded from enrollment. Once a student is accepted, IDEA uses other methods to convince weaker students to leave. All IDEA enrollees must pass fifth and eighth grade state test to be promoted. One report found that IDEA's key to its miraculous success was to enroll "lower percentages of economically disadvantaged students, special education students, bilingual education students, [and] students requiring modifications or accommodations on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), and students scoring below average on the TAKS mathematics or TAKS readings tests." The report also concluded "If we consider the number of students starting in the 9th grade as the cohort of students of interest, then the percentage of IDEA students entering post-secondary institutions of higher education is, at best, around 65% for the cohort of 9th grader students in 2009." By my calculation, 65% only equals 100% in the charter school alternative universe.

The motto for YES Prep is "Whatever It Takes." "Whatever It Takes" apparently has multiple meanings. In June 2014, Houston police arrested the 28-year old principal of one of the YES Prep schools for cocaine possession. Network officials declared that YES Prep maintains the "highest standards of integrity and personal responsibility for all of our employees" and announced, "We have suspended the employee in question and are cooperating with local authorities on this issue." The network had to take action against staff and cooperate with local authorities again in April 2015 when two of its young male teachers were accused of inappropriate sexual relationships with students. This time YES Prep agreed to review its "policies and procedures" and to work with the Texas Education Agency and State Board of Education in an effort to stay proactive. YES Prep has a history of recruiting un-prepared teachers through a partnership with Teach for America.

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But my favorite nominee for the Broad Award is Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy Charter Schools. Moskowitz's greatest "Success" this year has probably been weathering a series of scandals. Success is New York City's largest charter school network. About 11,000 children attend its thirty-six schools. The network receives federal and state funding and free space from New York City for all of its schools. Among other things it is accused of discriminating against students with disabilities in a legal complaint filed by parents and New York City Public Advocate Letitia James. The network is also accused of protecting staff members who act inappropriately toward children and families. A video, filmed in fall 2014, showed a first grade teacher ripping up the paper of a young African-American girl and sending her to the "calm-down chair" when she gets a math problem wrong. After the incident surfaced, the teacher was suspended temporarily, but was returned to the classroom and her role as a Success Academy mentor in less than two weeks. In another document incident, In the principal of a Success Academy school was forced to take a leave of absence after it became public that the school had a "got to go" list of difficult children officials wanted to transfer out of their program. Two weeks later the former principal was working as a teacher in a different Success Academy school.

Meanwhile, a Success Academy in-house promotion has apparently backfired. CEO Eva Moskowitz hired an "ethnographer" to study her charter school network. When the researcher suggested "It seems possible if not likely that some teacher cheating is occurring at Success on both internal assessments and state exams," the project was dropped, the researcher was fired, and he was banned from visiting network schools. Stefan Friedman, a Success spokesperson, responded to the charges, "we conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence to substantiate his speculation."

From July 8-10, educators, parents, and activists will rally in Washington, DC for three days of action in defense of public education. Featured speakers include author Jonathan Kozol, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, and Diane Ravitch. On July 8 there will be a People's March for Public Education and Social Justice. Save Our Schools is organizing a conference for July 9 to be followed by a July 10 Coalition Summit and organizing session. The program for the rally and meetings includes full, equitable funding for all public schools; safe, racially just schools and communities; community leadership in public school policies; professional, diverse educators for all students; child-centered, culturally appropriate curriculum, and no high-stakes standardized testing.
Keeping the Money Flowing

These days, lamenting the apparently aimless character of Washingtons military operations in the Greater Middle East has become conventional wisdom among administration critics of every sort. Senator John McCain thunders that this president has no strategy to successfully reverse the tide of slaughter and mayhem in that region. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies bemoans the lack of a viable and public strategy. Andrew Bacevich suggests that there is no strategy. None. Zilch.

After 15 years of grinding war with no obvious end in sight, U.S. military operations certainly deserve such obloquy. But the pundit outrage may be misplaced. Focusing on Washington rather than on distant war zones, it becomes clear that the military establishment does indeed have a strategy, a highly successful one, which is to protect and enhance its own prosperity.

Given this focus, creating and maintaining an effective fighting force becomes a secondary consideration, reflecting a relative disinterest -- remarkable to outsiders -- in the actual business of war, as opposed to the business of raking in dollars for the Pentagon and its industrial and political partners. A key element of the strategy involves seeding the military budget with development projects that require little initial outlay but which, down the line, grow irreversibly into massive, immensely profitable production contracts for our weapons-making cartels.

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If this seems like a startling proposition, consider, for instance, the Air Forces determined and unyielding efforts to jettison the A-10 Thunderbolt, widely viewed as the most effective means for supporting troops on the ground, while ardently championing the sluggish, vastly overpriced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that, among myriad other deficiencies, cannot fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm. No less telling is the Navys ongoing affection for budget-busting programs such as aircraft carriers, while maintaining its traditional disdain for the unglamorous and money-poor mission of minesweeping, though the mere threat of enemy mines in the 1991 Gulf War (as in the Korean War decades earlier) stymied plans for major amphibious operations. Examples abound across all the services.

Meanwhile, ongoing and dramatic programs to invest vast sums in meaningless, useless, or superfluous weapons systems are the norm. There is no more striking example of this than current plans to rebuild the entire American arsenal of nuclear weapons in the coming decades, Obama's staggering bequest to the budgets of his successors.

Taking Nuclear Weapons to the Bank

These nuclear initiatives have received far less attention than they deserve, perhaps because observers are generally loath to acknowledge that the Cold War and its attendant nuclear terrors, supposedly consigned to the ashcan of history a quarter-century ago, are being revived on a significant scale. The U.S. is currently in the process of planning for the construction of a new fleet of nuclear submarines loaded with new intercontinental nuclear missiles, while simultaneously creating a new land-based intercontinental missile, a new strategic nuclear bomber, a new land-and-sea-based tactical nuclear fighter plane, a new long-range nuclear cruise missile (which, as recently as 2010, the Obama administration explicitly promised not to develop), at least three nuclear warheads that are essentially new designs, and new fuses for existing warheads. In addition, new nuclear command-and-control systems are under development for a fleet of satellites (costing up to $1 billion each) designed to make the business of fighting a nuclear war more practical and manageable.

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This massive nuclear buildup, routinely promoted under the comforting rubric of modernization, stands in contrast to the presidents lofty public ruminations on the topic of nuclear weapons. The most recent of these was delivered during his visit -- the first by an American president -- to Hiroshima last month. There, he urged nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles to have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them.

In reality, that logic of fear suggests that there is no way to fight a nuclear war, given the unforeseeable but horrific effects of these immensely destructive weapons. They serve no useful purpose beyond deterring putative opponents from using them, for which an extremely limited number would suffice. During the Berlin crisis of 1961, for example, when the Soviets possessed precisely four intercontinental nuclear missiles, White House planners seriously contemplated launching an overwhelming nuclear strike on the USSR. It was, they claimed, guaranteed to achieve victory. As Fred Kaplan recounts in his book Wizards of Armageddon, the plans advocates conceded that the Soviets might, in fact, be capable of managing a limited form of retaliation with their few missiles and bombers in which as many as three million Americans could be killed, whereupon the plan was summarily rejected.

In other words, in the Cold War as today, the idea of nuclear war-fighting could not survive scrutiny in a real-world context. Despite this self-evident truth, the U.S. military has long been the pioneer in devising rationales for fighting such a war via ever more modernized weapons systems. Thus, when first introduced in the early 1960s, the Navys invulnerable Polaris-submarine-launched intercontinental missiles -- entirely sufficient in themselves as a deterrent force against any potential nuclear enemy -- were seen within the military as an attack on Air Force operations and budgets. The Air Force responded by conceiving and successfully selling the need for a full-scale, land-based missile force as well, one that could more precisely target enemy missiles in what was termed a counterforce strategy.

The drive to develop and build such systems on the irrational pretense that nuclear war fighting is a practical proposition persists today. One component of the current modernization plan is the proposed development of a new dial-a-yield version of the venerable B-61 nuclear bomb. Supposedly capable of delivering explosions of varying strength according to demand, this device will, at least theoretically, be guidable to its target with high degrees of accuracy and will also be able to burrow deep into the earth to destroy buried bunkers. The estimated bill -- $11 billion -- is a welcome boost for the fortunes of the Sandia and Los Alamos weapons laboratories that are developing it.

The ultimate cost of this new nuclear arsenal in its entirety is essentially un-knowable. The only official estimate we have so far came from the Congressional Budget Office, which last year projected a total of $350 billion. That figure, however, takes the modernization program only to 2024 -- before, that is, most of the new systems move from development to actual production and the real bills for all of this start thudding onto taxpayers doormats. This year, for instance, the Navy is spending a billion and a half dollars in research and development funds on its new missile submarine, known only as the SSBN(X). Between 2025 and 2035, however, annual costs for that program are projected to run at $10 billion a year. Similar escalations are in store for the other items on the militarys impressive nuclear shopping list.

Assiduously tabulating these projections, experts at the Monterey Center for Nonproliferation Studies peg the price of the total program at a trillion dollars. In reality, though, the true bill that will come due over the next few decades will almost certainly be multiples of that. For example, the Air Force has claimed that its new B-21 strategic bombers will each cost more than $564 million (in 2010 dollars), yet resolutely refuses to release its secret internal estimates for the ultimate cost of the program.

To offer a point of comparison, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the tactical nuclear bomber previously mentioned, was originally touted as costing no more than $35 million per plane. In fact, it will actually enter service with a sticker price well in excess of $200 million.

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Nor does that trillion-dollar figure take into account the inevitable growth of Americas nuclear shield. Nowadays, the excitement and debate once generated by President Ronald Reagans Star Wars scheme to build a defense system of anti-missile missiles and other devices against a nuclear attack is long gone. (The idea for such a defense, in fact, dates back to the 1950s, but Reagan boosted it to prominence.) Nevertheless, missile defense still routinely soaks up some $10 billion of our money annually, even though it is known to have no utility whatsoever.

We have nothing to show for it, Tom Christie, the former director of the Pentagons testing office, told me recently. None of the interceptors we currently have in silos waiting to shoot down enemy missiles have ever worked in tests. Even so, the U.S. is busy constructing more anti-missile bases across Eastern Europe. As our offensive nuclear programs are built up in the years to come, almost certainly eliciting a response from Russia and China, the pressure for a costly expansion of our nuclear defenses will surely follow.

The Bow-Wave Strategy

Its easy enough to find hypocrisy in President Obamas mellifluous orations on abolishing nuclear weapons given the trillion-dollar-plus nuclear legacy he will leave in his wake. The record suggests, however, that faced with the undeviating strategic thinking of the military establishment and its power to turn desires into policy, he has simply proven as incapable of altering the Washington system as his predecessors in the Oval Office were or as his successors are likely to be.

Inside the Pentagon, budget planners and weapons-buyers talk of the bow wave, referring to the process by which current research and development initiatives, initially relatively modest in cost, invariably lock in commitments to massive spending down the road. Traditionally, such waves start to form at times when the military is threatened with possible spending cutbacks due to the end of a war or some other budgetary crisis.

Former Pentagon analyst Franklin Chuck Spinney, who spent years observing and chronicling the phenomenon from the inside, recalls an early 1970s bow wave at a time when withdrawal from Vietnam appeared to promise a future of reduced defense spending. The military duly put in place an ambitious modernization program for new planes, ships, tanks, satellites, and missiles. Inevitably, when it came time to actually buy all those fancy new systems, there was insufficient money in the defense budget.

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Accordingly, the high command cut back on spending for readiness; that is, for maintaining existing weapons in working order, training troops, and similar mundane activities. This had the desired effect -- at least from the point of view of Pentagon -- of generating a raft of media and congressional horror stories about the shocking lack of preparedness of our fighting forces and the urgent need to boost its budget. In this way, the hapless Jimmy Carter, elected to the presidency on a promise to rein in defense spending, found himself, in Spinneys phrase, "mousetrapped," and eventually unable to resist calls for bigger military budgets.

This pattern would recur at the beginning of the 1990s when the Soviet Union imploded and the Cold War superpower military confrontation seemed at an end. The result was the germination of ultimately budget-busting weapons systems like the Air Forces F-35 and F-22 fighters. It happened again when pullbacks from Iraq and Afghanistan in Obamas first term led to mild military spending cuts. As Spinney points out, each successive bow wave crests at a higher level, while military budget cuts due to wars ending and the like become progressively more modest.

The latest nuclear buildup is only the most glaring and egregious example of the present bow wave that is guaranteed to grow to monumental proportions long after Obama has retired to full-time speechmaking. The cost of the first of the Navys new Ford Class aircraft carriers, for example, has already grown by 20% to $13 billion with more undoubtedly to come. The Third Offset Strategy, a fantasy-laden shopping list of robot drones and centaur (half-man, half-machine) weapons systems, assiduously touted by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, is similarly guaranteed to expand stunningly beyond the $3.6 billion allotted to its development next year.

Faced with such boundlessly ambitious raids on the public purse, no one should claim a lack of strategy as a failing among our real policymakers, even if all that planning has little or nothing to do with distant war zones where Washingtons conflicts smolder relentlessly on.

Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harpers Magazine. An Irishman, he has covered national security topics in this country for many years. In addition to numerous books, he co-produced the 1997 feature film The Peacemaker and the 2009 documentary on the financial crisis, American Casino. His latest book is Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (just out in paperback).

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Hollywood has a problem. It's largely run by rich straight white men who, for the most part, champion the work of other straight white men. According to well publicized statistics, if you're a black, Hispanic, female or LBGT actor of director you've not been invited to the party. Getting jobs, good jobs, Oscar potential jobs, is nearly impossible.

In the last twenty years there have been twelve black Oscar winners. Only five have been in the acting category. There were two directors, one for documentary feature and one for documentary short subject. Four winners were in the music and writing categories, and there was one producer. In the last ten years, just ten black actors received Oscar nominations, while two black directors were nominated (in the feature category). Shockingly, not one black actor has been nominated in the past two years, spawning the #oscarssowhite social media backlash and calls for a boycott of the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony.

The last woman to win an Oscar for Best Director was Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for THE HURT LOCKER. She is also the last woman to be nominated in that category. Prior to her, Sofia Coppola was nominated in 2003 for LOST IN TRANSLATION.

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In the Best Picture category, in the last ten years, just five films with a mostly black cast and/or central theme have been nominated. Overall, the stats for Hispanics are pretty dismal as well.

(For a more in depth look at the statistics of "Hollywood's Diversity Problem" please check out the results of research performed by The Adrienne Shelly Foundation)

Contrast that with Broadway in just the last year alone and you get a starkly different picture, one that screams of diversity and inclusion. One of the four best plays was written and performed exclusively by black women. Two of the five Best Musical nominees were black productions, as was one of the four nominated best musical revivals. And all four musical acting awards went to to black actors. The overall nominees list was quite diverse as well; seven other individual nominees were actors of color, as were two directors in the Best Play and Musical categories.

Women fared well as well across many categories, most notably in a production like WAITRESS, with its ground-breaking all-female creative team (full disclosure: my late wife Adrienne Shelly, who was killed in 2006, wrote and directed the film on which this musical is based).

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The obvious question is, how can the two communities be such polar opposites when it comes to diversity? The answer isn't clear. But what is clear is there's a desperate need for the power brokers in Hollywood to own up to the fact that there's a shameful dearth of black, Hispanic and female talent in front of and behind the klieg lights. And that needs to change.

"Think of tonight as the Oscars, but with diversity," host James Corden said in his opening monologue. "It is so diverse that Donald Trump has threatened to build a wall around this theatre."
This piece -- written before Hillary Clinton's excellent critique of Trump's suitability to be in charge of American foreign policy -- has run in newspapers in Virginia's very Republican 6th congressional district (from Lynchburg to Harrisonburg and beyond). Whereas Hillary's critique focused mainly on "temperament," the different argument of this piece focuses on Trump's ignorance.

The world is a complicated place (even more so than when I worked in American national security circles during the neo-cold war years of the 1980s). Making the right policy decisions is therefore a great challenge.

And the stakes are high - war and peace, life and death - not only for us Americans but, because of the power and leadership role of the United States, for everyone on earth.

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Which is why we Americans should take note of the intense alarm our friends around the world have expressed at the fact that one of the two people who might be our next president is Donald Trump.

The United States has been the world's greatest power for most of the past century. And though the U.S. has made a few costly mistakes, one of the reasons for our success is that, over the decades, capable people labored to establish a set of relationships with other nations and a generally workable framework of international organizations that have given the United States and the world a reasonable degree of peace, stability and prosperity.

That's why we would rightly be highly skeptical of any presidential nominee -- even if it were one deeply knowledgeable and brilliant in the realm of foreign affairs - who proposed major upheavals in those enduring frameworks of American policy. Not that the collective judgments of American statesmen and experts couldn't conceivably be improved, but just that those judgments ought not lightly be overturned.

But if the presidential nominee proposing these major changes in America's enduring positions, far from being an expert, is someone whose every utterance bespeaks a level of ignorance shocking in a potential president--well, then we can well understand the alarm of our friends around the world.

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And we, the citizens of the United States, should share that alarm.

Two examples.

A mainstay of American foreign policy for more than half a century has been a determination to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The U.S. was a leader in the creation of the important Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has helped lessen the global dangers of nuclear war.

But back in March, Donald Trump suggested that it might be better for Japan and South Korea to develop their own nuclear arsenals to defend themselves against their nuclear neighbors, rather than continuing to depend - as they have now for generations - on the American nuclear umbrella. (And a few days later, Trump indicated more generally that he thought it would be good if more nations possessed nuclear weapons--thus rejecting the well-considered judgments of more than a half-century of American policy-makers.)

The Japanese and South Koreans were reported to be "shocked" and "bewildered" by Trump's pronouncement.

Another even more long-standing bedrock of American foreign policy has been the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the years since the end of the cold war - the simmering confrontation with the Soviet Union that formed the context of which NATO was formed -- NATO has continued to be a non-trivial part of the system for protecting American and Western interests and values, aiding in operations in such places as Bosnia and Afghanistan.

With his assertion that NATO is "obsolete," Trump set off another set of alarms among nations that have long been among America's best friends.

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The responses from diplomats in Europe and Asia suggest that Trump's proposed overhaul of American foreign policy would leave the U.S. not with more influence in the world, but less.

Similarly with many of his provocatively belligerent remarks directed at other nations with whom we have important relationships--such as Mexico, China, and the nations of the Islamic world. Why would they feel safe if the nation that is far and away the world's most powerful dealt with others in the spirit that Trump is expressing? An America that saw its foreign relations so much in terms of "victories" would be likely to drive the rest of the world to band against the United States.

It has long been understood that nations should conduct themselves in the world in careful, measured, and predictable ways because there is so much at stake in keeping the peace (and no police to break up fights). That's why diplomats speak as they do, minimizing friction, keeping things moving smoothly.

Mr. Trump, apparently thinking he knows better, offers the very opposite approach.
Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump once again turned towards bigotry in the wake of this weekend's massacre in Orlando, Florida, reiterating his call for a ban on Muslim's entering the United States. Republicans, including party leaders, once again attempted to run away from questions about Trump's bigotry.



This was a repetition of a scene from last week, when House Speaker Paul Ryan seemed to be trying to act surprised when he was forced to respond to Trump's racist comments about a federal judge. After Trump argued that the presiding judge in a fraud case involving Trump University was inherently biased because of his parents' Mexican heritage, Ryan called it "the textbook definition of a racist comment" but refused to drop his endorsement of his party's presumptive presidential nominee.



Instead of dropping their support, Ryan and many of his fellow Republicans, along with conservative pundits, have suggested that Trump simply needs to pivot, as though his bigotry were an isolated incident that could be swept away by focusing on other issues.



As Trump's campaign turns one year old today, we should recognize that these are not isolated incidences of bigotry. Nor is Trump's racism a new facet of his personality that emerged along with his political aspirations. Over four decades, Trump has associated with and befriended racists, been repeatedly accused of discrimination, and made racist remarks and used racism to garner publicity, all while consistently denying that he harbors any prejudice. Not only is Donald Trump racist, he's an individual who views racism as a tool for both profit and publicity.



Trump's Racism: A Tool For Publicity



Trump's recent political aspirations have been fueled by his role as the country's foremost birther, questioning whether President Obama is a natural born American citizen and eligible to be president of the United States. This accusation was not simply a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Instead, it was designed to feed the bigotry of the president's opponents.



A second strand of this bigotry that Trump has played into was questioning the president's faith and suggesting he might be a secret Muslim.



Finally, Trump gleefully questioned the president's academic credentials, suggesting that something might be untoward in his college transcripts. According to Trump, Obama was unqualified to attend Columbia or Harvard Law School and was only accepted to these prestigious institutions because of his race.



Trump's birther bigotry, which began in March 2011 during an interview on Good Morning America, garnered him significant publicity, including a widely broadcast press conference after the president released his "long form" birth certificate in 2011. While Trump was mercilessly mocked for his position, in particular at that year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, it also gave him a new platform on the Right, elevating him as one of Obama's foremost critics. There was repeated speculation he might run for president himself in 2012, and when he ultimately decided not to enter the race eventually nominee Mitt Romney prized his primary endorsement.



Trump's path to the Republican nomination in 2016 can be traced directly to this entry into political fray during the 2011 race, when he emerged as a principal critic of President Obama.



The use of racism to garner publicity is not a new tool for Donald Trump.



In 1989, after the brutal rape of a woman in Central Park, five African-American teens were convicted of the crime. Years later, when DNA evidence called into question the conviction, all five were released from prison and received a $41 million settlement from New York City.



Before the initial trials had even begun, Trump used the case to stoke racial tensions in the city, spending $85,000 to run full-page ads in four newspapers including The New York Times and the Daily News. With bold headlines, the ads called for New York to "bring back the death penalty."



Yusef Salaam, one of the young men Trump insisted receive the death penalty told The Guardian that Trump was the "firestarter." Civil rights attorney Michael Warren says Trump "poisoned the minds of many people who lived in New York and who, rightfully, had a natural affinity for the victim."



Trump biographer Michael D'Antonio told The Guardian:

I think he knew what he was doing by taking a side, and I think he knew he was aligning himself with law and order, especially white law and order. I don't think that he was consciously saying 'I'd like to whip up racial animosity', but his impulse is to run into conflict and controversy rather than try to help people understand what might be going on in a reasoned way.

More than twenty years later, long after the five were exonerated, Trump was still defending his attacks on the five young men, tweeting in 2013, "Tell me, what were they doing in the Park, playing checkers?"



He also bragged to a biographer following the city's settlement with the five men who had been wrongly convicted, "I think people are tired of politically correct. I just attacked the Central Park Five settlement. Who's going to do that?"



Like with his birtherism, Trump used the Central Park jogger case to stoked racial tensions in New York and to earn publicity for himself.



Trump's Racism: A Tool For Profit



Businesses run by Donald Trump have long faced accusations of racist behavior.



John O'Donnell, former president of the Trump Plaza Casino, wrote in a tell-all book that the GOP nominee once told him, "Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day."



Trump responded by telling Playboy magazine that his former employee was a "f**king loser." However, he also said, "The stuff O'Donnell wrote about me is probably true."



Another former Trump employee has claimed that black staff were hidden from Trump when he visited the casino with his wife. "When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor," said Kip Brown, a former livery driver. "It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back."



Racism in Trump corporations was not confined to its owner's remarks and personal behavior. While fighting against a proposed Native American casino in New York that would have competed against his Atlantic City properties, Trump took out anonymous ads featuring photos of "drug paraphernalia" whose copy read, "Are these the new neighbors we want?" It continued: "The St. Regis Mohawk Indian record of criminal activity is well documented."



In 1973, Trump Management Corporation was accused by the federal government of discriminating against potential tenants based on race. According to a report in The New York Times, the Justice Department sued Trump's company for refusing "to rent or negotiate rentals 'because of race and color.' It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available."



The evidence was substantial. "One rental agent said Trump's father had told him not to rent to blacks and that he actually wanted to reduce the number of African Americans in his buildings." In addition, "three doormen said they had been instructed to deflect blacks who came to Trump buildings to apply for apartments."



In typical Trump fashion, he countersued the Justice Department for $100 million. The Huffington Post reported:



[Trump's lawyer] called up the federal official in charge of the case -- J. Stanley Pottinger, the head of DOJ's Civil Rights division -- to demand that the lawyer handling the lawsuit be fired. Pottinger told The Huffington Post that his reaction at the time was "I don't think so. That's up to me and that's not going to happen. I called [lawyer] Donna [Goldstein] into my office and said, 'Keep up the good work.'" The suit, which Pottinger called a "media gimmick done for local consumption," was dismissed and the judge criticized Cohn for "wasting time and paper from what I consider to be the real issues" - discriminating against blacks in apartment rentals.

In 1975, Trump settled the case, pledging not to discriminate and to provide the Urban League with a list, updated weekly, of available apartments in the properties.



Three years later the Justice Department again cited Trump's discriminatory practices. The New York Times reported, "The Federal Government charged yesterday that Trump Management, which owns 15,000 apartment units in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, was continuing to discriminate against blacks although it had signed a court stipulation not to do so."



Trump's casino properties also faced legal challenges based on their discriminatory behavior. The Trump Plaza Casino was fined $200,000 after managers removed African-American and female dealers at the request of allegedly mob-connected high roller Robert LiButti, who "loudly complained about their presence when he was playing."



According to documents unsealed in an open records request, "LiButti had, on multiple occasions, berated blacks and women using what one state official described as the "vilest" language -- including racist slurs and references to women in obscene terms -- and ... the Trump Plaza, in order not to lose his substantial business, sought to accommodate him by keeping the employees away from his betting tables."



Trump claimed he didn't know LiButti, stating in 1991, "I have heard he is a high roller, but if he was standing here in front of me, I wouldn't know what he looked like."



LiButti's daughter told Michael Isakoff of YahooNews that this was a lie. "Of course he knew him," she said. "I flew in the [Trump] helicopter with [Trump's then wife] Ivana and the kids. My dad flew it up and down [to Atlantic City]. My 35th birthday party was at the Plaza and Donald was there. After the party, we went on his boat, his big yacht. I like Trump, but it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father. That hurts me."



Trump's denial of contact with Libutti was also put in doubt by his former employee John O'Donnell, who recounted "a meeting between Trump and LiButti aboard Trump's private helicopter, a Super Puma, in the spring of 1988," where Trump "agreed to pay [LiButti] $500,000 for a racehorse named Alibi."



LiButti wasn't the only racist Trump has associated with.



Trump Racism: Mentors, Friends, and Supporters



During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump has received an unprecedented level of support from a number of white supremacists and other assorted bigots. During the primary campaign, he was criticized for initially refusing to disavow the bigotry of former Klan leader David Duke, who endorsed his candidacy. When confronted by CNN's Jake Tapper, Trump responded:



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Just so you understand. I don't know anything about David Duke, OK? I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don't know. I mean, I don't know -- did he endorse me or what's going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. And so you're asking me a question that I'm supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.

Only later did Donald Trump disavow Duke's endorsement, claiming to have been unaware of who the hate group leader was.



Trump's racist supporters also include Nazis, white supremacists like Richard Spencer, and even secessionists such as Michael Hill.



In truth, Trump has spent his entire adult life consorting and befriending racists. One of his best friends and his lawyer throughout the 1970s and 80s was Joe McCarthy council Roy Cohn, who built his legal practice in New York City. They were often seen socializing together at New York hot spots such as Le Club and Studio 54. It was Cohn who defended Trump against the housing discrimination lawsuits in the 1970s.



Cohn acquired a legendary reputation for bigotry, "often us[ing] the words s**c, n****r and f*g."



It was Cohn who introduced Trump to Roger Stone. Since the introduction, Stone spent years on Trump's payroll. According to Media Matters:



Stone tweeted that commentator Roland Martin is a "stupid negro" and a "fat negro," commentator Herman Cain is "mandingo," and former Rep. Allen West (R-FL) is an "arrogant know-it-all negro." He also tweeted that commentator Al Sharpton is a "professional negro" who likes fried chicken, asked if former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was an "Uncle Tom," and referred to himself as a "nigga" with a Nixon tattoo.

Anthony Senecal has worked for Donald Trump for almost 30 years, first as his butler at his Mar-A-Lago club, then as the property's in house historian. A March profile in The New York Times describes his role a the property: "Few people here can anticipate Mr. Trump's demands and desires better than Mr. Senecal, 74, who has worked at the property for nearly 60 years, and for Mr. Trump for nearly 30 of them."



Senecal also has a history of posting violent and racist content on Facebook writing things such as a comment that President Obama "should have been taken out by our military and shot as an enemy agent in his first term !!!!!"



He also called for a "second American revolution" because this "might be the time with this kenyan [sic] fraud in power!!!!!" Additionally Senecal has referred to the president as an "unfeeling sack of camel feces."



Associating with any one of these individuals would not necessarily be an indictment against the GOP nominee. But over the course of his career Donald Trump has never had any qualms about consorting professionally and personally with racists.



Trump Racism: His Personal Thoughts



Trump's own views on racism are also revealing. In an NBC special titled, "The R.A.C.E., the acronym for the Racial Attitudes and Consciousness Exam" Trump told the network:



'A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. I think sometimes a black may think they don't have an advantage or this and that. . . . I've said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.'
An illustration of Safe Horizons Streetwork client, and homeless dad, Gio, his daughter Heaven and wife Alyssa. Illustration by Hayden Yund

Gio is 23 years old. He is Puerto Rican. Hes also the father of a 2-year-old little girl. His wife is currently pregnant with their second child. They are homeless.

And hes aware that others may view his reality, and homeless people, unfavorably. I think they see us as scumbags. That we arent good people. That homeless dads shouldnt be parents. That we cant support our children.

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Last summer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani fueled the anti-homeless sentiment, advising law enforcement to chase em out of the city in reference to homeless people on the street. Additionally, some media outlets continue to refer to homeless people disparagingly as bums. When messages like these are so prevalent, you can begin to see why a young homeless man like Gio thinks society is against him.

Gio is a regular at Safe Horizons Streetwork Project, a drop-in program for homeless youth. Director Francis Aponte-Veras reflects on his experience, So many people think that if youre homeless that you cant be a good father. Hes really struggled in life at times and didnt have it easy. But he is an amazing father. I think its important for people to understand how hard he tries. His baby is a happy baby. She loves him.

Heaven loves her purple sandals and the click-clack sounds they make when she walks. Photo by Michael Polenberg

Gio was just 14-years-old when his life was turned upside down. While living in Puerto Rico, his grandmother became seriously ill and was no longer able to care for him. As a result, she sent him to New York City to live with his birth mother. The city lights, crowds and fast pace were a stark contrast to the small and tropical community Gio was used to in his native town of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico.

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Two years later, Gio was in foster care. His mother was abusing drugs and he was taken from her.

Statistically, young people are at greater risk of becoming homeless if their parents struggle with substance abuse or have mental health problems. As a result of becoming homeless, Gio moved around from Staten Island, to Manhattan, to the Bronx. He was forced into adulthood at a young age. "Becoming homeless was life-changing. I went from having a home to not having anything and having to find benefits and resources on my own as a kid. It was hard. I had no one to guide me and a couple of times I got denied. It was frustrating. I wanted to give up, Gio said.

The homeless system can best be described as a tangled web, within a tangled web, within a tangled web. It can be extremely difficult to navigate. This is why drop-in centers are so vital. They try to untangle that web as much as possible, acting as a one-stop shop to give young people a pathway to self-sufficiency.

At Safe Horizon's Streetwork Project, for example, not only do young people have access to clean clothes, a hot meal, showers and a place to rest, but there is a housing coordinator on site to try and link young people to housing. There are also support groups, counselors and even a psychiatrist for those dealing with mental illness.

For those young people who are parents, the Streetwork staff do their best to provide the tools needed to meet their childrens needswhether that means helping them to obtain necessary baby items like diapers, a stroller or clothes that they otherwise might not be able to afford, or holding support groups for parents.

Some might say that starting a family when youre homeless is irresponsible. But the truth is that young consenting adults are going to have sex. This is not something anyone can police or control. The role of an advocate or case worker is to help that young person make an informed decision by thinking through the pros and cons of having a child. This means asking questions that will really get young people to critically think about what becoming a parent entails: What do you imagine will happen once you have a baby? Who is your support system? How will you buy formula and clothes? Once there is a child in the situation, the focus shifts to supporting the parent in being the best parent they can possibly be and most importantly, ensuring the well-being of that child.

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When I met Gio and his family, 2-year-old Heaven was drawn to drums and her parents would encourage her to play. Photo by Michael Polenberg

When Heaven was born, Gio's wife Alyssa said that the father-daughter bond was instant, "When they put her on my chest, she was extremely fussy. But as soon as they put her with Gio, she was so calm."

Even though the young family calls city shelter home, they are actively looking for an apartment. The search for an apartment in a safe neighborhood can be a long and arduous process for many homeless people. Not only are rents very expensive and vacancies extremely limited, but criteria like "good credit" can serve as a daunting barrier for homeless people who have often spent years with little or no income. While there are short-term rental subsidies in New York City for homeless people, it has been well-documented that many landlords refuse to accept these vouchers.

Despite these struggles, Gio is cherishing conversations with his 2-year-old baby girl which usually go something like Yes. No. Give Me. Mine. And what parent of a young child cant relate to that?

More than anything, he wants to provide Heaven with anything she needs. I never want her to feel that daddy or mommy cant get it.

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To all the fathers who have ever had to cope with trauma and its effects, we salute you on this fathers day. We recognize your struggle and are here to support you as you continue on your journey from crisis to confidence.
This article first appeared as an op-ed on my column in Forbes.



Bemoaning the state of innovativeness, Peter Thiel-- don of the PayPal mafia, Silicon Valley VC, and most recently revealed as the nemesis of Gawker -- remarked, "We asked for flying cars. Instead, we got a hundred and forty characters. It seems Thiel's moans have been heard by no less than Google/Alphabet's Larry Page, who has quietly been investing in, not one but, two flying car start-ups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk. Page, of course, has only taken a page out of the books of other pioneering legends, who have shared this strange obsession. The obsession dates back even to pioneering legends who knew a tad more about cars than Messrs. Page and Thiel; Henry Ford tried his hand at it and even managed to get a person killed in his own pursuit of a flying car. Of course, the industry is far from take-off; the only successful situation involving a flying Ford I am aware of is of Ron Weasly flying a 1962 Ford Angilia to rescue Harry Potter in The Chamber of Secrets. But I digress...

Many readers would be surprised to learn that there is, indeed, a fledgling flying car industry. I visitedTerrafugia, based outside Boston, last year and got a look at their product. While impressed by the technology, their vision for where it is going and the passion behind "creating the transportation of the future today," I was still left asking:



Who asked for flying cars?

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Silicon Valley high fliers, of course, are asking for it. They have, after all, been obsessed with cars of many kinds -- self-driven, electric, enabled by iPhone commands. Given that so much of Silicon Valley travels in company buses (arguably, a more efficient and greener mode of transport than any of these alternatives) I am a bit alarmed at the prospect of a proliferation of new car options, especially of the flying kind.

If I were Larry Page, I would, first, ask: is there a sufficient and urgent unmet need for it?

Furthermore, are there other needs that are both unmet and urgent and over time will have an effect on Silicon Valley's bottom line? This may get us about as far as one can think from flying cars.

Let's talk about flying toilets.
This article first appeared in The Guardian.



The UN General Assembly committed to "eliminate poverty in all its forms everywhere" by 2030, when it met in New York last year. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched with much fanfare, endorsed by heads-of-state, celebrities and CEOs. Thanks, to a campaign on Twitter, Instagram and the like, the SDGs launch was the top trending topic in the US during the assembly.

Now, the headlines have moved elsewhere. Heads-of-state have returned to other pressing matters. The celebrities who spoke up for the SDGs - Usain Bolt, Jordan's Queen Rania and Beyonce - have moved on to other tweetable events.

A recent survey paints a sobering picture of business engagement with the SDGs. Only 37% of corporate respondents in the US said they were planning to engage with them.

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Additionally, the top three goals of possible interest to business were: SDG 13: climate action; SDG 8: decent work and economic growth; SDG 12: responsible consumption and production - all classic public goods. My worry is that they are vulnerable to a tragedy-of-the-commons: each CEO, has a unilateral incentive to under-engage since the benefits are so diffuse and shared so widely.

Given that 2030 is not that far, when one considers the magnitude of the goals, it is worthwhile asking, which of the many stakeholders can maintain the momentum? Whose incentives are most closely aligned with achieving the goals and who has the resources to execute at scale across countries?

The answer is unavoidable: global business, as a stakeholder group, is best positioned to take the lead.

Supported by the Citi Foundation, we at The Fletcher School, Tufts University have launched Inclusion Inc. We engage in research, analysis and in-depth conversations with key business decision-makers, from CEOs to sustainable development officers. Our purpose was to understand how they are integrating investments in sustainable development into their strategic mix. In this series, I'll share highlights of what we're learning and the implications for business and development sector leaders.

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To get started, consider two rules of the road en route to 2030.



The SDGs cannot succeed without business leadership

A few macro-realities:

The World Bank recently moved the goal posts by shifting the poverty line from $1.25 (88p) a day to $1.90 (1.34) a day. A close to 50% increase in the poverty threshold makes getting to the goals even harder.

In the case of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it could be argued that China's state-led initiatives alone, explain the dramatic reduction in poverty thus far. With China slowing down, the next phase will require progress more evenly across other developing countries. Emerging markets have been coping with slow growth for five consecutive years. With challenging socio-political contexts prevailing in most of them, governments in the developing world will struggle to deliver.

Governments in developed economies are also handicapped, with a plethora of domestic challenges, slow growth and declining productivity.

Since it accounts for 90% of the world's jobs and 60% of global GDP, the private sector has a disproportionate degree of leverage and potential to fill the gaps. Considering the $3 tn (2.1tn) a year price tag by some estimates, to accomplish the SDGs and with governments having reneged on past commitments to the MDGs', another deep-pocketed stakeholder must step in. Sustainable development depends on sustainable business.



Sustainable development serves sustainable business interests

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According to estimates from McKinsey, there could be a $30tn (21tn) consumer market in 2025 in emerging markets. But as these markets experience slow growth and currency devaluations, the $30tn prize seems more distant. In the longer-term, the failure to close many of the gaps in getting to the SDGs would cause the realised value of these markets to fall far short of the estimates. Missing the goals will lead to significant "trapped value". As Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon put it: "The case is clear. Realising the Sustainable Development Goals will improve the environment for doing business and building markets."

How the SDGs can help business orchestrate action

Our research highlights why companies invest in sustainable development, and why they don't invest enough. The most frequently cited motivation was that of mitigating business risk from disrupted operations, supplies or reputational damage. The need to adhere to industry norms of transparency, traceability, environmental responsibility came in second, with winning share and establishing a beachhead with future customers as the third. The more readily measurable and the more immediate the issue, the more highly motivating it is.

Balanced against these motivating factors are the barriers. A top barrier to taking action is the complexity of the context in most developing regions. With partnerships with local actors essential for execution, companies find it hard to work with and coordinate across so many disparate multi-sector stakeholders.

The SDGs offer an organising framework for partners to agree to a common end-point and then work backwards from. Having a publicly declared goal helps keep partners motivated to follow through or face significant reputational risk - and thus mitigate the tragedy of the commons.

The biggest risk is if companies find it too lofty and too much of a "UN initiative" or one best left to governments - and disengage. It requires imagination to make the link between sustainable business and sustainable development. Each CEO should imagine the world of 2030 with and without progress on the goals and what the differences would be for their respective companies.

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Acting like a wounded and cornered beast, ExxonMobil has launched what appears to be a blatantly retaliatory and frivolous lawsuit against Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey.

Beneath a very thin veil, this legal maneuver by Exxon is seemingly an effort to intimidate any and all who seek to hold the oil giant accountable for its multi-million dollar campaign to attack climate science and sow doubt through decades of deception.

Just to remind everyone  17 Attorneys General are investigating what Exxon knew about climate science and when, as well as what the company has done to potentially mislead policymakers and the public in order to delay action to address climate change.

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Exxon has claimed that there has always been uncertainty within the company about the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change.

Yet, as InsideClimate News and the LA Times and Columbia School of Journalism and the Center for International Environmental Law and other investigations have pointed out, Exxon and others in the oil industry had advanced knowledge of the link between fossil fuel combustion and global warming decades ago.

And DeSmog uncovered an Exxon document that unequivocally stated the companys knowledge in the late 1970s. Read DeSmog's investigation: There is no doubt: Exxon Knew CO2 Pollution Was A Global Threat By Late 1970s

Here is the key document we uncovered, a 1980 report, Review of Environmental Protection Activities for 1978-1979, produced by Imperial Oil, Exxons Canadian subsidiary.

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It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels... There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere. Technology exists to remove CO2 from stack gases but removal of only 50% of the CO2 would double the cost of power generation." [emphasis added]

"There is no doubt." Yet the company went on to peddle doubt and denial both directly, and through pumping at least $30 million of funding distributed to dozens of think tanks and front groups that have cast doubt on or outright denied climate science.

FROM THE DESMOG RESEARCH DATABASE: ExxonMobil's Funding of Climate Science Denial

So now Exxon is suing Massachusetts AG Healey in an effort to block her subpoena that would compel Exxon to hand over 40 years of internal communications with many of those Exxon-funded front groups.

Hmmm if the company is so proud of its climate science legacy, then what do they have to hide?

Exxon filed the lawsuit in a notoriously industry-friendly jurisdiction in Fort Worth, Texas, where the company also brought a similar suit against Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker for the same reasons.

In its 33-page filing against Massachusetts AG Healey, Exxon lays out what it sees as the facts about the efforts of Attorneys General to prudently investigate the companys historical relationship with climate science.

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The first of the Facts that ExxonMobil lays out in making its case is that 20 Attorneys General, led by New York AG Eric Schneiderman, held a press conference in New York City dubbed AGs United for Clean Power.

The horrors! Yes, this is in fact a fact. Twenty courageous AGs bravely stepped in front of cameras and microphones  a press conference!  to rail against Washington gridlock on climate policy and announce their leadership efforts to find ways to hold the oil industry accountable for its insidious work to block climate policy action at the federal and state levels over the past several decades.

So Exxons first fact oddly confirms the legitimate and ordinary efforts of state AGs to work together to get things done in the absence of Washington leadership. In short, to identify and hold accountable those who have encouraged doubt and distraction in order to delay action on the most pressing issue of our time.

Over the ensuing five pages of its Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, Exxon proceeds to list 34 more facts that rehash the details of the March 29, 2016 press conference. Seriously, five pages of quotes and facts pulled from a very public, YouTubed press conference imagine the hourly rate these Exxon attorneys earned for transcribing cherry-picked quotes?

So lets sum this up  here we have a frivolous SLAPP-like lawsuit filed by a massive multinational oil company in an industry-friendly Texas jurisdiction seeking the courts heavy-handed smackdown of a totally reasonable investigation (known in legal parlance as a Civil Investigative Demand or CID) launched by the attorneys general of 17 states.

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And Exxon is seeking the courts protection because

AGs held a press conference and launched formal investigations into potential fraud. AGs consulted scholars of climate denial at nonprofit groups, and law firms with expertise in fraud cases, in order to prepare to launch their investigations.

Like AGs tend to doon the daily in their service to represent the publics interest.

Thats it. Oh, and Exxon thinks this legitimate investigatory process to assess potential fraud against the American people somehow interferes with the companys constitutional rights.

Except fraud isnt protected under the First Amendment, as AG Healeys office confirmed to EcoWatch today:

The First Amendment does not protect false and misleading statements in the marketplace, Healeys communications director Cyndi Roy Gonzalez said in a statement provided to EcoWatch. [Elliot Negin from UCS has previously expanded on the reasons why Exxon is off the mark with its First Amendment defense in this EcoWatch piece.]

EcoWatch also got a response to the lawsuit against Healey from Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for New York AG Eric Schneiderman:

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It is deeply troubling that Exxon has taken the extraordinary step of refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena sent in the course of a serious fraud investigation. The law is clear: The First Amendment does not give any corporation the right to commit fraud.

Exxon is seemingly crying wolf  and bullying its critics  instead of facing the music for its admittedly anti-social pollution and its anti-science PR and lobbying campaigns.

Since when is it a crime for Attorneys General to hold press conferences together, or talk to experts on any particular issue in the course of their work to protect the public interest? (Hint: Since never.)

But here we go. Here is Exxons bullying allegation of harm to its free speech rights as a non-human corporate being:

Attorney General Healey has deprived and will continue to deprive ExxonMobil of its rights under the United States Constitution, the Texas Constitution, and the common law. ExxonMobil therefore seeks a declaration that the CID violates ExxonMobils rights under Article One of the United States Constitution; the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution; Sections Eight, Nine, and Nineteen of Article One of the Texas Constitution; and constitutes an abuse of process under the common law. ExxonMobil also seeks an injunction barring enforcement of the CID. Absent an injunction, ExxonMobil will suffer imminent and irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law.

Heres the real reason Exxon filed this complaint.

The company knows that responding to these frivolous charges will not only be time consuming for the Attorney Generals office in Massachusetts, but it also could have a chilling effect on any other states that want to probe Exxons decades of deception on climate science to determine if those efforts were potentially fraudulent.
Photo Credit: Brent Stoller

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*****

Welcome back to ADVICE!

I spent the last 11 days on my honeymoon in Italy seeing the sites, walking the streets and carb-loading on the best food I've ever eaten. I now resemble The Nutty Professor.

And while it was worth every calorie, and it was a trip of a lifetime, it's good to be home...

(Questions have been modified for space and clarity.)

My girlfriend and I have been together for eight months now, but she told me that she doesn't want to be in a relationship because she suddenly wants to be single again. I am very confused, because she also said that she loves me. I don't know what I should do. Can you give me any advice?

--Jonathan; LA

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Jonathan, you are not alone. I know what you're going through. I've been dumped, I've had my heart broken and I've been utterly confused by the opposite sex.

And that's where my first piece of advice comes in:

Accept that love doesn't make sense.

The insanity of love is a good thing when you're falling into it. Actually, it's probably the best part. There are no words to explain the experience, and it wouldn't be as much fun if there were. You're excited, and giddy, and the only way to convey how you're feeling is to smile.

Where this bewilderment becomes a bad thing, however, is when it all falls apart. That same perplexity that made the fall so intoxicating is what makes the aftermath so devastating and disorienting. It's impossible to tell down from up. What was once this perfect conglomeration of love gets broken into a million pieces of anger, sadness and confusion. The whole is no longer greater than the sum of its parts.

Whenever a situation turns south, the inclination is to deconstruct it in hopes of understanding what happened. This is wise, as doing so teaches us what went wrong and how we can avoid those same mistakes in the future.

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But there's also an emotional component to the process. It allows us to rationalize, to blame, to make the debacle fit into a pretty little box. This is what happened, this is why it happened and this is whose fault it is.

There's a belief that if we can make sense of something, we'll be OK. It's how we cope. When we can reconcile it in our head, the rest of our body can follow and we can move on.

Given what's happened with your girlfriend, your confusion is understandable, if not expected. She loves you, yet she wants to break up with you. It doesn't add up.

Unless you look at it as something other than a math equation, because it's anything but. And while accepting that love is an insane endeavor won't solve everything, it will push you one step closer to being able to get over the breakup.

Which brings me to my second piece of advice:

Accept that someone can have feelings that are diametrically opposed yet simultaneously true.

In other words, it's possible for your girlfriend to both love you and want to break up with you. This is an idea that often gets lost in relationships, despite the fact that we readily acknowledge it in other aspects of life.

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Take weight loss, for instance. Say a guy wants to drop a few pounds, but doing so requires that he gives up french fries. He likes french fries, but he also likes (the idea of) losing weight. So he has a choice. And if he commits to losing weight, his desire to eat french fries isn't diminished; it's just outweighed (pardon the pun) by his desire to be healthier.

It's the same thing with love -- it's all a matter of degrees. For eight months, your girlfriend's desire to be with you was stronger than her desire to be single. Now, the tables have turned. It doesn't (necessarily) mean that her love for you has vanished or even lessened; it means that her emotional priorities have shifted.

And in my opinion, that's not something you want to fight. Even if you could change your girlfriend's mind in the short term, the idea of being single is likely to resurface for her in the future. It's not a desire that dies easily.

If she's thinking about being single -- and thinking about it enough to actually tell you -- she's probably already checked out of the relationship. And the last thing you want is to be with someone who doesn't want to be with you.

COMING WEDNESDAY: I'm Dating a Married Man

Need more ADVICE? Check out the most recent installments:


"Many assumed that applicants from China, in particular, would have had a lot of formal test preparation, given the country's long history of the civil service examination and the powerful role of the gao kao for admissions today. As a result, they expected higher scores." -- Julie Posselt

How do the admissions decision makers in U.S. Higher Education institutions decide which international graduate students get in? Is the process fair? How do the metrics used to assess Chinese applicants differ from those used to assess American students? Despite the fact that international students have driven the rising applications, enrollment and degrees awarded in US graduate education, the practices and policies related to candidate selection have not received much media attention to date. Julie Posselt's new book, Inside Graduate Admissions Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping (Harvard University Press Jan 2016), aims to change that by giving us a revealing behind the scenes look at the people who decide who gets in.

The Global Search for Education welcomes Julie Posselt. In my interview with Julie, she discusses the ambiguities surrounding the admissions review process for students based on her firsthand observations and interviews with admissions faculty in ten top-ranked US institutions - what she learned and what she recommends is done to improve student review and assessment.

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You reveal that some programs might have different GRE standards for applications from different regions. What might this tell us about the process of graduate admissions as a whole?

Admissions is cognitively, professionally, politically fraught work that often happens after hours because the days are full this time of year. As one philosopher in the study put it, "This is hard work. We are competent, intelligent people doing our best."

I did find that faculty calibrates international students' GRE scores using what they know about national cultures of test preparation. Many assumed that applicants from China, in particular, would have had a lot of formal test preparation, given the country's long history of the civil service examination and the powerful role of the gao kao for admissions today. As a result, they expected higher scores. To some degree, this is reasonable: students from China do have, on average, the highest GRE scores in the world.

When looking at American students' files, most professors didn't similarly contextualize GRE scores according to the educational opportunities or barriers a student had experienced. More commonly, professors formally or informally set a single and very high GRE score and/or GPA threshold for the purposes of initial review. They would then leave it to individual professors to advocate for students who might fall below that threshold. This little set of routines constitutes a serious blind spot for equal opportunity due to the deep inequalities in K-12 and undergraduate education. Graduate programs receive applicants after at least sixteen years in an educational system that stratifies at every level.

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One important thing that this highlights about admissions as a whole is that merit, as an idea and standard for admission, is not monolithic or fixed. I'm persuaded that merit has to be malleable.



"I think everyone has to take responsibility for reducing implicit bias. I also think that admissions committee composition matters. In more diverse committees, and I don't just mean diversity on gender and race here, professors corrected each other on outdated assumptions or potentially biased remarks." -- Julie Posselt



Should the metrics used to assess International applicants be different than those used to assess American students?

Graduate programs don't have separate tracks for international and US students, so in that respect, the metrics used to evaluate prospective students should not be different. However, professors understandably worry about possible language barriers for students whose first language is not English, and their worries are particularly acute in departments that rely on graduate students to teach undergraduates and/or support faculty research. The TOEFL, personal statement, and interviews provide additional information about English language skill.

What do test results not tell admissions officers about international students? How did the officers you interviewed describe the challenges they face when trying to assess a candidate from these countries holistically?

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When I asked my interviewees a standard question about what makes admissions hard, the most frequent response was the challenge of "incomplete information." Two common responses concerned their uncertainty about the quality of many colleges and universities outside the US and the extent of GRE preparation an applicant has received. When interpreting an international student's GRE score, faculty reviewers frequently drew upon what they knew about the culture of test preparation in a country. It was not uncommon for them to consult with colleagues outside of the committee to learn more about the quality of education that a student was likely to have received at undergraduate institutions with which they were unfamiliar.



"Change processes of any sort often require disagreement, and taking a fresh look at entrenched ideas about merit and diversity, in particular, can seem like a political minefield. Many preferred to avoid so-called 'uncomfortable conversations' even if such conversations were what exactly what's needed." -- Julie Posselt

You claim that white males "dominate" in graduate admissions. What impact could this have on our higher learning institutions? Is this something we should seek to change?



White males were the majority on admissions committees because they comprise the faculty majority in most elite academic departments and elite colleges and universities. I firmly believe that people can learn to see beyond their own interests, become aware of subconscious biases, and stand together across the social identities that tend to separate us from each other. But there is also research evidence and common sense that we implicitly tend toward people like ourselves, and that many tend toward the comfort of what is known and familiar over anything that represents change. My research found several types of preference for sameness, and found that the process as a whole -- even without reviewers specifically revealing obvious preference for whites or males as people -- was stacked in favor of criteria that privileged whites and males.



I think everyone has to take responsibility for reducing implicit bias. I also think that admissions committee composition matters. In more diverse committees, and I don't just mean diversity on gender and race here, professors corrected each other on outdated assumptions or potentially biased remarks. An increasingly popular way some departments are dealing with this in the short term, while we work to increase the diversity of the professoriate, is to involve current graduate students or program alumni in the admissions process.

Standardized tests have had a lot of negative press. From your research, were the admissions officers assessing applicants holistically?

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I did not see much holistic review happening in the initial round of reviews. Many expressed concern that close reading at that point would be too time consuming. However, they did holistically review files of applicants who made the finalist list, or the "short list." At this stage, they opened their eyes to the very minutiae in applications that their initial review tried to ignore. With their eye on the future of their discipline and department, they would try to divine evidence within the application of who might grow to become a leading scholar for their field.



"The pattern here is that professors want to strip away some of the variation that comes from culture and national origin to ease interpretation of international students' files and compare them with American applicants." -- Julie Posselt

What are the biggest obstacles in reforming the admissions practices of higher education institutions? Why is it so hard for them to make changes?

Inertia is a powerful force and, in the programs I observed, probably the primary obstacle to reforming admissions. The professors in my study and their departments were doing well by the standards of their fields, which made any change seem risky and unnecessary. Change also requires time and effort, two commodities they felt were in short supply.

A related barrier is that a commitment to collegiality--a true cornerstone of faculty culture-- can ironically make professors averse to activities that might introduce disagreement. Change processes of any sort often require disagreement, and taking a fresh look at entrenched ideas about merit and diversity, in particular, can seem like a political minefield. Many preferred to avoid so-called "uncomfortable conversations" even if such conversations were what exactly what's needed.

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What would you recommend is done to improve assessment of international students in American Higher Education institutions?

My participants named specific things that would help them assess international students: First, on college transcripts, they wanted to see international colleges and universities offer a conversion to the US four-point scale with which they are familiar.

Relatedly, I heard a common wish for letters of recommendation to be written in the same style that American letters are written. Reviewers might not love the effusive style of American letters, but when they received a more subdued letter from an international student, it was difficult to determine whether the subdued tone reflected less enthusiasm about the student on the part of the letter writer or a general cultural norm of writing more subdued letters about even top students.

And finally, more information about the extent of test preparation a student has received and about their fluency with English would help overcome skepticism that test scores from international students are less trustworthy signals of future academic performance.

As you can see, the pattern here is that professors want to strip away some of the variation that comes from culture and national origin to ease interpretation of international students' files and compare them with American applicants.

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(All Photos are courtesy of Shutterstock Prasit Rodphan/hxdbzxy/ukschools)



C. M. Rubin and Julie Posselt

Join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. MadhavChavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. EijaKauppinen (Finland), State Secretary TapioKosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Geoff Masters (Australia), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Professor Manabu Sato (Japan), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (LyceeFrancais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.

The Global Search for Education Community Page
Bill of Rights

As I write this, there is a filibuster currently going on in the Senate. Senator Chris Murphy and other Democrats launched this filibuster to draw attention to the fact that suspected terrorists in America can still legally buy guns. Murphy represents Connecticut, where the Newtown massacre happened, and thus he feels very strongly about the issue of gun control.

Republicans, at least as of this writing, seem more willing to compromise on the issue than they've ever been before. Bills with a similar objective have been rejected by a (mostly) party-line vote in the very recent past, in fact. But the outrage over what happened in Orlando is tangible, and the GOP seems to actually realize it this time. Even Donald Trump says he's about to meet with the National Rifle Association in an effort to convince them to support banning suspected terrorists from legally buying guns. This is a significant shift from the party that has been refusing to do just that for the past few years.

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But I have to say, while all this seems laudable at first glance, the underlying (and bipartisan) disdain for the United States Constitution is extremely worrisome. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about the Second Amendment here, but rather the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Here are the relevant clauses: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...." (Fifth Amendment); and "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...." (Fourteenth Amendment).

It's always a little tricky to oppose such popular legislation, and that is even more true when the idea comes from your side of the political spectrum. But I have to say I am with the American Civil Liberties Union on this one. From an article written just this past December, the A.C.L.U.'s director of their National Security Project wrote:

Last night, in response to last week's tragic attack in San Bernardino, California, President Obama urged Congress to ensure that people on the No Fly List be prohibited from purchasing guns. Last week, Republicans in Congress defeated a proposal that would have done just that. "I think it's very important to remember people have due process rights in this country, and we can't have some government official just arbitrarily put them on a list," House Speaker Paul Ryan said. There is no constitutional bar to reasonable regulation of guns, and the No Fly List could serve as one tool for it, but only with major reform.

I'd go one step further, personally. If we're going to have a No-Fly List and a Terrorist Watch List to provide security for American citizens, then we need to codify such programs by passing a constitutional amendment which clearly spells out the limits and scope of such programs. To me, there is simply no other constitutional way to achieve this goal.

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Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that such pre-emptive security measures are inherently a bad thing. And I'm certainly not arguing that suspected terrorists should be able to easily acquire high-powered weapons. I'm not "pro-terrorist" in any way, shape, or form. Just to be clear.

But I am arguing that what we've got now is blatantly unconstitutional. And it appears nobody else is even willing to make such an argument, at the moment. Republican Senator Pat Toomey, who is trying to forge a compromise between the two parties on the issue, stated his concerns today:

What we need is a process that would block terrorists from being able to purchase a firearm and at the same time, make sure there's a mechanism whereby someone who gets wrongly put on a list has a chance to clear their name and you know, get their Second Amendment right.

He falls short of questioning the constitutionality of such lists in the first place, but rightly points out that the due process to get taken off the lists is currently woefully inadequate. Even the National Rifle Association seems to now be singing the same tune:

The N.R.A.'s position on this issue has not changed. The N.R.A. believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms, period. Anyone on a terror watchlist who tries to buy a gun should be thoroughly investigated by the F.B.I. and the sale delayed while the investigation is ongoing.... At the same time, due process protections should be put in place that allow law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watchlist to be removed.

Both of these statements fail to make the truly constitutional argument about the concept of the lists themselves. Which is a shame, because it's almost impossible to argue for their constitutionality.

There are many of these blacklists that the government now keeps. The two most often referenced in the debate are the No-Fly List and the Terrorist Watch List. Both are incredibly secretive in nature, making even knowing how many people are on the lists almost impossible to determine. The most recent numbers I could find showed that there were 47,000 people on the No-Fly List as of 2013, and 800,000 people on the Terrorist Watch List as of 2014. But it's really anyone's guess how extensive either list is, due to the secrecy surrounding who is on these lists.

The criteria for inclusion on the lists is also secret. Few people have any idea they're on the list until they attempt to fly on a plane, for the most part. Mistakes abound. Just on the smaller No-Fly List, the number of prominent people who have been mistakenly listed is a long one, and includes members of the U.S. Congress itself (the most famous being Edward Kennedy, who was apparently matched up with the vague "T. Kennedy" even though his legal name was not Ted or Teddy). And that's only the shorter of the two blacklists.

The A.C.L.U. is challenging the No-Fly List in court. From the same article:

Separately, the government made two basic arguments in its defense of the No Fly List, both of which the court rejected. First, it argued that U.S. persons had no constitutionally protected right to fly. In August 2013, the court disagreed, holding that constitutional rights are at stake when the government stigmatizes Americans as suspected terrorists and bans them from international travel. Second, the government asserted that national security concerns meant the government couldn't confirm or deny whether people were on the No Fly List, and it couldn't give them reasons or a hearing before a neutral decision-maker. This is absurd as a practical matter and violates due process as a constitutional matter. Practically speaking, people know they are on the No Fly List when they are banned from flying and surrounded -- and stigmatized -- by security officials publicly at airports. Some of our clients were told they would be taken off the list if they agreed to become government informants. Again, the court agreed with us and held that the government's refusal to provide any notice or a hearing violates the Constitution. As a result, the government announced in April that it would tell U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents whether they are on the No Fly List, and possibly offer reasons. Unfortunately, the government's new redress process still falls far short of constitutional requirements. In our case, it refuses to provide meaningful notice of the reasons our clients are blacklisted, the basis for those reasons, and a hearing before a neutral decision-maker. Much as before, our clients are left to guess at the government's case and can't clear their names. That's unconstitutional.

Now, the Founding Fathers didn't explicitly list the right to fly anywhere in the Constitution. Airplanes wouldn't exist for over a century, when the document was written. But the right to freely travel on public conveyances is definitely covered by the word "liberty" in the due process clause. Banning a citizen from flying is restricting their liberty. Period. And that is only supposed to happen after due process of law has been followed.

The No-Fly List and the Terrorist Watch List turn the legal concept of "innocent until proven guilty" on its head. The government -- without any legal due process whatsoever -- puts people on the lists merely because it suspects them of wrongdoing or evil intent, and then it is up to them to try convincing the government to remove their names. That is constitutionally topsy-turvy, which is why it's disappointing that even conservative Republicans and the N.R.A. refuse to make this case (where are all the Libertarians when you need one?).

Blacklisting people from flying is one thing, but blacklisting people from buying a gun is another, because of the Second Amendment. The courts have declared that individuals have the constitutional right to own and purchase guns. So taking that right away becomes even more problematic, legally speaking. There are several classes of people who are banned from owning or purchasing guns already, but each has some form of legal process that has to happen before such a ban takes place. Violent felons are restricted from owning guns, but they are already felons -- in other words, they were previously convicted of a felony in a court of law. The gun ban is part of their punishment. People with mental problems usually have some sort of competency hearing in court, or at least their lawyers can press for one if they are involuntarily deemed a risk by a doctor. Dangerous threats (such as stalkers or domestic abusers) are dealt with by restraining orders -- issued by a judge.

But no one included on the blacklists has had any such legal proceeding. The government makes a determination that you are too dangerous to fly, and bingo, you're on the list. You are not even informed of this decision by the government, and they certainly don't have to present evidence for why you should be blacklisted to any judge (much less give you the opportunity to rebut their evidence). Until the government was challenged in court (and embarrassed by Teddy Kennedy in public), there wasn't even a process for being able to prove you were mistakenly included at all. And currently, this process is completely inadequate (which is why the A.C.L.U. is still fighting it in court).

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The entire concept of governmental blacklists is completely unconstitutional. But, as people back to Abraham Lincoln have pointed out, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. This feeling is often invoked in a time of war, when the government sees fit to curtail certain rights. But we are currently in what can only be called a generations-long conflict. The other side does not wear uniforms or follow the Geneva Conventions. Therefore the government might need to take measures in the name of national security. Rational people would all agree, most likely.

Such measures have already curtailed the freedom of movement for some citizens, who are not allowed to board a commercial airline. What is now being discussed (with a filibuster to draw the nation's attention) goes even further and would deny citizens one of the rights explicitly spelled out in the Bill of Rights itself. This all might be a necessary and commonsense reaction to the very real threat of terrorists having access to military-style weapons.

Fortunately for us all, there is a remedy to reconcile the passion some are now feeling on the issue with our founding document. It's spelled out in the Constitution itself, in fact. What is absolutely necessary for the continuation of such blacklists as the No-Fly List and the Terrorist Watch List -- and for any expansion of them to ban gun sales -- is that a constitutional amendment be drafted to grant the government what would otherwise be an unconstitutional power. The usual argument against a constitutional amendment probably wouldn't apply, because due to public outrage it would probably be pretty easy to get both Congress and the state legislatures to quickly ratify such an amendment. Due process would be included to get folks like the N.R.A. (and the A.C.L.U.) on board. It would achieve the Democratic goal of stopping terrorists from easy access to weapons. Constitutional amendments are -- by design -- hard to pass, and we haven't seen one succeed in two decades. But "it's too hard" or "we just don't do that anymore" are not valid excuses for attempting to pass some legislative shortcut that will eventually (almost inevitably) be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

If America does have a consensus that we're all basically OK with the concept of governmental blacklists, and that we further approve of curtailing constitutional rights for people on such lists, then it should be relatively easy to get the necessary votes in Congress and the statehouses. And then, once enshrined in the Constitution itself, there would be no further questions of the legality of such blacklists. If it's in the text of the Constitution (as an amendment) then it is, by definition, constitutional.

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Chris Weigant blogs at:
I walked up the cement sidewalk anticipatory, sweaty-palmed, wide-eyed. It was my first day on the job. But this wasn't just any job: it was my first real doctoring job, and it was at an Ivy League university. It felt like all eyes were on me. Judging my soul. Reading the uncertainty in my eyes. Seeing my inner being and deeming me unworthy. They must know that I'm new here, I thought to myself. Just act normal, don't let them notice you. Be confident! Stand up straight, don't look down. Try to fit in!

As I approached the doors to the hospital, white coat crisp and blemish-less, hair perfectly coiffed and jaw clenched, something caught my eye, or someone. A black, elderly gentleman sat resting on a rusted metal chair next to a large cart that advertised "kettlecorn" and he had his gaze fixed on me. Oh my goodness, he's reading me too, I thought to myself. But then something softened. I realized how tightly pursed my lips had been as they melted into a little smile. And in a flood of emotion, right there on that hot cement sidewalk, I began to process.

Something about the simplicity of this man's demeanor, the unapologetic nature of his gaze free to take up his surroundings as he pleased, the repetitive nature of his work obvious as he sat slumped in a chair that looked like it had seen better days, which he yet seemingly took pride in, owning that sidewalk. It all made me recount my own very humble beginnings. I thought of the number of shoulders I had literally and figuratively stood on to get this point, now standing on this historic cement ground to serve patients and why I'd been allowed to do so.

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I thought about my late grandmothers who would sit down conversing with us in our mother's tongue, Kikuyu, a Kenyan dialect. In their little village homes, they would repeat time and again scriptures from the Bible exhorting and blessing us and reminding us how much they'd been praying for us since the last time they saw us. And how they continued to pray for us on end. I thought about the back-breaking work they did as farmers, tilling the land with hoes and other tough manual labor throughout their lives even up until a ripe old age. I thought about my family members in Kenya, so many of whom had not had the chance to attend college, let alone pursue tertiary degrees. I thought about my parents who put us through school typically sacrificing their own happiness and physical well-being, including multiple separations of our immigrant family across US/ Kenya borders so that "the girls could go to school." Tears welled up in my eyes. Oh great, now this man definitely thinks I've gone mad, I thought. I gave him a nod, and a bigger smile, which he returned, then I walked by his little cart and into the hospital feeling centered.

I am an immigrant and during this immigrant heritage month, I am excited to be celebrating my background and the beautiful ways in which it has influenced my reality today. When patients see my last name that sounds nothing like the way it's spelled embroidered above my white coat pocket, it stirs innumerable conversations about Africa. Coming from one of the many cultures that use the term "Baba" for "father" or "grandfather" allows me to speak to my patients with a quiet understanding of what it means to not be able to put their loved one in a nursing home because that would be the equivalent of abandonment in their culture of origin. All in all, over the past several years of treating diverse patients, I've learned that different is good. And that we all have something to learn from one other, with our respective backgrounds, whether we are the doctor with the funny name in the long white coat taking care of patients or the man sitting on the sidewalk selling kettlecorn to his hungry patrons. At a time when hatred seems to be running at an all time high, it is critical that we embrace our individual differences and the ways in which we can grow, learn from and build one other. For those interested, we can all participate in this celebration of one-ness by going to the page at http://welcome.us. I hope to see you there.

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House Speaker Paul Ryan released a new "anti-poverty" plan last week that would only make it tougher for poor and working families to get by. As expected, the plan cuts from public programs that help low- and moderate-income Americans, while protecting tax cuts for the very wealthy. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote, "It looks more like an agenda for creating poverty than reducing it."

But one section of the plan has received less attention than it deserves.

Deep in Ryan's proposal is a push for something called "Social Impact Financing," also known as "Pay for Success" or "Social Impact Bonds." Ryan's not alone -- some local and state governments are showing interest in these types of financing schemes. Pay for Success is complicated, but long story short: it's an alternative to funding social services the tried-and-true way, with public spending.

In place of public money, these schemes rely on capital from investors, such as Goldman Sachs or Bank of America. The investors provide up-front funds for critical preventive services, like pre-k or prisoner rehabilitation, with the expectation of a return on their investment. The idea is to bring the virtues of private markets to government, or as Ryan's plan puts it, "drive innovation and competition in the social-service sector."

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But as we've seen in many public goods, competition can be damaging. For example, unregulated charter school growth is disrupting public school systems across the country and putting many into fiscal crisis.

Without careful consideration, this sort of financing could introduce a number of risks into public spending, including perverse incentives, a failure to serve the neediest cases (called "creaming"), or a distortion of success measures. It also could limit our imagination about solutions to social problems like extreme poverty and homelessness -- due to the way they're structured, Pay for Success programs typically do not address the complex root causes of many of our social problems. Experiments are already raising eyebrows: initial results from a Goldman Sachs-funded early education program in Utah have come under serious question.

In the Public Interest recently released a tool to help advocates better understand these new alternatives to public financing. With A Guide for Evaluating Pay for Success Programs and Social Impact Bonds in hand, communities can ask tough questions about Pay for Success's impact on the public, especially on our most vulnerable populations.

Ultimately, these schemes allow us to continue to underinvest in public goods and services, a root cause of many of our social problems. Poor and working families deserve much better. Prevention-focused public funding is much simpler and cheaper than kicking the can further down the road.
Candles lit by members of the LGBTQ community burn as they pay tribute to the victims of the mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, U.S., in Kenya's capital Nairobi June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

Orlando officials didn't hesitate to brand the appalling and heinous massacre at a gay nightclub, domestic terrorism. The key word is domestic and using that word to describe the killing of at least 50 persons in the worst killing spree in American history as a home grown terror act is a huge departure from past practice. In almost all cases of mass shootings the last few years, officials have searched long and hard to ferret out any possible foreign ties by the shooter to "radical Islamic" groups. In the Orlando mass killing, Orlando officials and the FBI, even after branding the massacre "domestic terrorism," didn't depart from the scrip and quickly speculated that the alleged shooter, Omar Mateen, whose family is from Afghanistan, may have had "radical Islamic leanings."

This may well prove to be the case as more details unfold about his life here. But no matter what influences drove him to his maddening act, Mateen is not Afghani. He was born, raised and educated in America, and even worked in some capacity in a security job. This makes his bloody act yet another grim case of not simply an act of domestic terrorism, but made-in-America terrorism.

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Despite the years of carnage from these type of shootings, it's still hard for many to come to grips with this bitter truth. This was painfully evident following the mass killing of fourteen persons in San Bernardino last December. FBI officials were initially loath to call the killings domestic terrorism. When they did finally brand the killings, terrorism, they made it clear that the killings would be investigated as a terrorist act "inspired by foreign terrorist organizations."

However, this still begged the question of calling the massacre exactly what it was, namely domestic terrorism. The main alleged shooter in San Bernardino, as Mateen, was born, raised and studied in America. He was also a public employee. The still nagging reluctance to label these massacres "domestic terrorism" fits in with the by now well-established pattern of officials and virtually all GOP leaders to avoid at all costs using the term. The only exception is when those who commit mayhem and murder are Muslim. And according to numerous studies they are the rare exception since the overwhelming majority of those who commit targeted mayhem in this country are non-Muslim, invariably, white male, with a checkered history of crime, mental instability, and deeply influenced by right-wing rants. In Mateen's case, there were reports that a possible motivation for his rampage was his offense at gays.

The refusal to consistently brand acts such as Mateen's, "domestic terrorism," strikes to the heart of how many Americans have been reflexively conditioned to regard terrorism. It's almost always related to the Middle East and the perpetrators are presumed to be Muslim. The FBI's working definition of what constitutes terrorism is: "Terrorism is an act done or threatened to in order to try to influence a public body or the citizenry, so it's more of a political act."

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Even when South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof plainly wrote that he had an animus toward blacks and acted out that insane animus by gunning down multiple black churchgoers, he still did not reach the elevated bar to rate being branded a "domestic terrorist." The same held true for alleged Colorado Springs Planned parenthood clinic shooter Robert Lewis Dear who despite plainly targeting the clinic and giving the reason why, he also didn't rate the label. Instead, the ritual was to officially whitewash, and air brush, the mass carnage they wreak with ritual condolences and prayers for the victims and their families.

The consequence of refusing to stray one jot from the textbook definition of who is a terrorist and what is terrorism on U.S. soil has consequences beyond disarming, confusing and in effect putting even more Americans in harm's way from home-grown terrorists. It also is overloaded with a heavy mix of political calculation and cynical manipulation. A big part of which has been to take pot shots at President Obama for allegedly turning a blind eye toward the threat on America's shores of radical Jihadist influenced groups. Obama is routinely denounced by GOP ultra-conservatives, and the Fox News scare machine, for supposedly refusing to use the term, "Jihadist terrorists," for fear of offending Muslims.

Whether it's shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic, a center for the developmentally disabled, or any other domestic target, there's simply no political incentive to call the shooters "domestic terrorists." This crashes hard against the official narrative that made-in- America terrorists and terrorism constitute minimal or no real threat to life and property here. This danger supposedly only comes from a foreign group, Muslim of course.

Orlando officials departed from that script by calling the nightclub massacre exactly what it is, "domestic terrorism." This departure is a much needed step toward coming to grips with the lethal threat of made-in-America terrorism.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of Let's Stop Denying Made in America Terrorism, (Amazon Kindle) He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network.
By: LB Adams





Image Source: Unsplash

I had thought to begin this piece with a bunch of statistics regarding the numbers of women-owned businesses in America and quotes about how many businesses are begun each day by women. I thought better of it. Those stats are easy to find, if you want them. What I'd like to give you is less hard numbers and more authentic facts.

I am an entrepreneur. About three years ago I was faced with a gigantic life decision - to keep doing what I had been doing, which was fine. Or, to do something that would feed my soul, and hopefully my family, but would be incredibly risky. I chose the latter and to quote Mr. Frost, "...that has made all the difference."

I've been a lifelong entrepreneur without actually realizing it. As a young teen, I babysat, I sold greeting cards and even produced theatrical events, to which I would (mostly unsuccessfully) attempt to sell tickets. After high school, I went to New York City and studied acting and theatre. There is no more entrepreneurial venture than being a hungry actor. It's an excellent testing ground for selling yourself and an existential exercise in self-knowledge. I can draw a direct line from those experiences and the education I received to the venture in which I'm now embroiled.

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[Read More: Five Keys of the Entrepreneurial Mindset]



There is a synchronicity to the timing of the creation of my business. I couldn't have started it in Upstate New York, where my family and I were living in 2012. There wasn't enough diversity or industry. Charleston, South Carolina, now, is an excellent place to be an entrepreneur. Because of women-centric organizations, it's an excellent place to be a female entrepreneur. There will always be people and politicians who will treat me and my company as less than, because I am a woman - the struggle is real and it's ongoing. It doesn't stop or even detour me. Frankly, it makes succeeding all the more satisfying.

One of the things that make my journey richer and more satisfying is the people I've met along the way. Men and women both have provided me with knowledge and friendship and insight. I have been fortunate to meet the most amazing people with a staggering array of skills. People who run multi-million dollar companies and others who have less clues than I, are all part of the landscape of my experience so far. I've met some total jerks as well, but thankfully the jerk-to-awesome ratio is pretty low.

Sometimes, I am surprised to find I have an actual business. I have real clients who pay actual money for the products and services I provide. It's breathtakingly risky and exciting and educational. In the first days, the only person I had to bounce ideas off was my yellow Lab, Brooklyn. She's an excellent listener but not so great on the phones. Everyday I learn something I didn't know I needed to know. It's very like becoming a parent. You can read the books, listen to the experts and do all the research but the moment you hold that new child in your arms, you are filled to the brim with the knowledge that you actually know nothing, except love... and maybe a little fear.

I love the business I've birthed, but the truth is that being an entrepreneur is not for everyone. As an actor, I was often cautioned to do or be anything else if I possibly could. The same goes for entrepreneurialism. If you can be happy/satisfied/content doing anything else, you absolutely should. Being a business owner is not for the feint of heart. You must be supremely confident in your why because the odds are hugely stacked against you. I knew that when I started and I know it now. It changes nothing.

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There are many reasons I chose to become an entrepreneur. I've bought into the American dream and I'm willing to hardscrabble in the wilderness to build it. I believe in possibilities. I want to provide a lifestyle to which my family is not currently accustomed. I want riches and fame. I dream of making an impact on the world. I want all of that, and more. Mostly though, I want to show my daughter that the world is open to her. She is almost 12 now and has a growing awareness of the world and what it means to be a girl in it.

I want her to see that her mom works hard and fails and works harder and succeeds. I want her to know that she can be a maker. I want her to be able to compete and feel confident in what she knows and the woman she'll become. I want her to learn to revel and rejoice in the things that make her unique and know that she can make a place for herself. I want to craft a legacy.

--



LB Adams is the Founder of Practical Dramatics, headquartered in Charleston, SC. Her company uses theatre skills to help humans to grow greater conversations with other humans.
* This article was originally printed in Playbill on June 13, 2016

I am Eric Ulloa, and I am in the cast of Broadway's "On Your Feet!" I am also a playwright and librettist. My play 26 Pebbles is taken from my experience in Newtown, CT, after the horrific Sandy Hook School shooting and the weeks of interviews and conversations I had with just about anyone who would speak to me there.

Yesterday, the nightmare of gun violence finally hit home as 50 innocent people were killed at a gay nightclub in my adoptive home of Orlando, FL, the city where I attended college at the University of Central Florida.

Yesterday was also my first time performing at the Tony Awards.

These two moments should have never met, yet somehow they did. Here's what my mind can make of it for now...

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We Danced

I'm onstage at the Tony Awards singing and dancing. To my right is Gloria Estefan singing the last portion of our number along with the rest of my cast. In front of me are celebrities witnessing this moment that has been 10 years in the making. Every year watching it on TV and saying, "Next year, I'm gonna be on that stage." My mind is racing, my hands are shaking, my cheeks hurt from smiling so hard, yet my heart is painfully sore.

Suddenly, the music changes and I hear that familiar beat. The thump thump thump of the speaker that drums away everything else. The walls begin to light up different colors to coincide with the music. I look to my left and there are men dancing with their arms flung in the air. I look to my right and I see the drag queen making her way to the stage, vodka soda in hand. I take off my shirt and stuff it into the back of my jeans, fling my own hands in the air and realize that I'm back in the place where it all began. I am back in Orlando, the city that shaped the gay man I would be.

Just as fast as I get there, I'm suddenly back onstage at the Beacon and the number is over and the audience is cheering. I can't believe I have finally accomplished this. My mother and father are back in Florida with eyes full of tears watching their eldest son fulfill his dreams. My siblings with their own children now, are pointing at the screen saying, "Look, there's Tio Eric!"

My god, my heart. It hurts.

The applause starts to build into a cacophony of noise and suddenly it's just the sound of sirens pouring down the street. Mothers and Fathers with tears in their eyes are running past police barricades praying that their child still has a future of dreams left. Brothers and Sisters are pointing at lists of the injured and deceased with wildly varied expressions of horror or relief.

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How could this happen here? All these people wanted to do was dance. How could an evening of dancing end this way?

As long as the day has been, the Tonys comes and goes so quickly and we are back on the bus headed to the Marquis Theatre to change into our celebratory wear, as an evening of parties and laughter is imminent.

I check my phone for the first time since we got onstage and there are hundreds of notifications. Offerings of congratulations and praise come at me from every corner of this world. Yet every time the phone buzzes I'm back in Orlando.

I'm watching everyone check their phones to see if there's any word yet on their missing friends. I'm watching people post a picture of themselves and their loved one who just died so senselessly. Too many Facebook pages are turning into memorial pages too quickly. How did this happen? How in our community? Our safe haven. The place that accepted me when my parents were still grappling with their son who had just come out of the closet.

These answers may never come and this pain will take some time to morph into something manageable. Here's what I do know: Last night was for Orlando. Last night was for my LGBT family.

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On May 6th, 2016, the New Columbia Statehood Commission presented to the public a draft Constitution of what will be the state of New of Columbia, or the 51st state in the Union. The DC Council created the New Columbia Statehood Commission in 2014 to coordinate the District's statehood initiatives (DC Law 20-481). The Commission is an independent agency within the District government that provides support to the Statehood Congressional Delegation, the Mayor, and the DC Council in promoting statehood for the residents of the District of Columbia. The Commission is comprised of five members: DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, US Senator Paul Strauss, US Senator Michael D. Brown, and US Representative Franklin Garcia.

The New Columbia Statehood Commission met on April 21, 2016, and voted on a new plan designed to reinvigorate the DC statehood effort. The proposal, announced by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser at the Emancipation Day Breakfast on April 15, would put a DC statehood advisory referendum on the November 8, 2016 ballot.



The path DC is pursuing to achieve statehood is the Tennessee Plan. A plan that has been successful in achieving statehood for a number of states, including one of the last states to join the union, Alaska, in 1959. This plan has 4 steps that the Commission plans to pursue. First, it will draft a new state Constitution, second, it will have citizens answer the question whether they want to be a state, third, it will define the new state's boundaries, and finally it will adhere to a republican form of government (a representative democracy). These are the four items the voters will have to consent to by voting on them in November, when they go vote for a new President.

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To help it achieve these efforts, the Commission has a process to engage all residents of the city. One of the highlights of this process will be a Constitutional Convention that will start on June 13th. The Convention is an opportunity for any city resident to review the language of the draft Constitution, and make suggestions to the Commission. The Convention is scheduled for 3 days: June 13th, June 17th, and June 18th. DC residents can attend any, or all dates, and hear speakers, participate in lectures, forums, and give their input on the process. On June 24th, the members of the Commission will meet to approve any proposed changes to the draft Constitution at a public meeting. The final version of the Constitution will then be submitted to the DC Council at the end of June. The DC Council has until the 8th of July to send it to the DC Board of Elections, so that the initiative can make it to the November 8th ballot for the voters to consider it.

With the potential for a new President that strongly supports statehood for the District of Columbia, and a new Congress, many expect this to be the opportunity citizens in support of the DC Statehood movement have been waiting for.

More information about the process and the Constitutional Convention can be seen at: statehood.dc.gov.
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Hispanic boys praying in church

Dear Conservative Christian family,

I understand, because I've seen it on your faces, that people like me leave you feeling confused, and possibly even disgusted.

Being the son of two pastors, I was taught to love the sinner, but to hate their sin. The first time I saw two men kissing I hated, like a good Christian, what they had done and hated that I had to watch.

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And like you, the one thing about my disposition that I didn't want to be true was my attraction for men. But as I dashed into adolescents my attractions surfaced. My body became my enemy. In many ways, I am as much a part of you, as I am the LGBT+ community.

I've seen through Facebook, twitter, and various article online, that many conservative Christians are asking one question: "Why are we being blamed for the Orlando shooting?"

Conservative Christians are being lumped in with the homophobic shooter, ISIS, and religious radicals because, to the LGBT+ community, these are the groups who maintain the system that produces homophobia.

I'd like you to understand that homophobia is not only demonstrated by the shooters, the rapists, the boys who punched me in the park, or the uncle who called me a 'fucking faggot.' Homophobia, at its core, is hatred that changes the way LGBT+ people value themselves.

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The true effects of homophobia don't exist on the external surface where crime is committed. They rest in the fabric of the human soul who has been taught that they aren't as good, intrinsically, as their heterosexual neighbor.

When the messages of your churches and the sermons you clap for; when the messages you deliver as our parents, leaders, and well-intentioned friends negatively shift the way we, people of the LGBT+ community, feel about our version of love, our relational offering, or our position in this world [as God's children], the system of homophobia is working through you.

The blossoming of homophobia is violence, while the root system is the cultural/religious mindset that's comfortable branding an entire group of people as relationally inferior, spiritually immature, as well as socially and sexually deviant.

I know internalized homophobia well.

When I discovered that I was bisexual, I immediately believed God was going to kill me, an eternal life in hell.

Can you imagine what that felt like for me, a 12 year-old who loved God so deeply?

Homophobia taught me:

I am less valuable than a straight person.

I am not clean emotionally, romantically, or spiritually. I am a perverted boy.

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Homophobia literally distorted my self-worth. I hated myself.

The voice of the shooter, the same voice we project onto God, had made its way into my self-dialogue, "Kill him!"

I needed to avoid the once-and-for-all mistake-of loving a man, so I prayed for God to kill me. And when God wouldn't, I reached for suicide.

You see, when you use 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' to make yourself morally peaceful while loving a 'sinner' like me, you're giving ordained permission to and normalizing the same hatred that burgeoned in the young shooter's heart and fueled my desperation for suicide. Both the shooter's disdain and my self-hatred developed over time- starting with a small religious seed of instructions: "...hate the sin."

But it doesn't stop there. The mindset of 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' has tricked even you.

Love cannot be in cahoots with hatred. For example, how can you love me and hate my Hispanic skin at the same time? In this light, your claims of loving me (while hating how I love) feel like a sham. I know you mean well, but do you remember what genuine [unconditional] love feels like?

Contrary to many of your beliefs, open and affirming ministers are not passive figures that have brought a new problem into the Church, namely a weak theology that validates homosexuality.

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The problem has been in your churches for decades. It's in your sanctuaries and its metastasizing violence outside your walls. The problem is a silent machine producing the willingness to hate.

For instance, I feel the small seed of hatred at work when you ask me to block you from seeing my kisses or when I am welcome in your conservative churches, yet kept from sacraments like communion and marriage.

Or when you say you love me, and yet you defend bills that deny me total equality, socially and politically. Your sentiments sounds like love, but look like hatred shrouded in conditional acceptance.

Is it possible that you've blurred the distinction between tolerance and unconditional love?

I feel foolish for trusting you this long.

The painful set of circumstances is that 'Love the sinner, hate the sin' is a moral cornerstone that insulates you from the body of people who have been emotionally and spiritually burned by your iron. You often criticize us for building shade that allows us to withstand your demoralizing heat.

Where else are we to find true, unconditional love if its not in the arms of the same gender? Without our sanctuaries, where would you have us turn? Thank God for open and affirming churches, our cohesion as a gay community, and sanctuaries like the Pulse.

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Many of us in the LGBT+ community are not asking you to abandon your religious values, like many of you are asking us to drop our sexuality. We're simply asking for camaraderie.

We are all part of the same family at our truest core. Can we work together? Can we participate as comrades in the healing process?

I truly understand how 'hating sin' feels like it could produce religious stability or moral certitude. It's imperative, however, that we acknowledge that the hatred of mankind, our hatred, is causing death, not life. It's producing separateness, not communion.

Can you help us build a world without hate? If we can accomplish this side-by-side, we could very well eradicate the divisions that keep us attacking one another. We may even save lives.
By Jessica Toste and Brad Palmertree

The safety needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer students turned paramount Sunday when a man walked into a gay nightclub and embarked on the worst shooting in U.S. history.

If the symbolism of this atrocity taking place at a bar is lost on you, let us assure you it is not lost on the LGBTQ community. Bars and nightclubs have long served as some of the only spaces where queer people have felt safe. To be sure, this tragedy brings up issues that need to be addressed by our political system -- like gun violence and domestic terrorism.

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But it's also time to stop ignoring the slurs and name calling that happens in school hallways. It's time to stop diminishing the affirmation and acceptance of queer people for fear of making someone uncomfortable. It's time to stop forgetting that our very existence continues to be a hard-won battle.

Let's use this time to address the hate against LGBTQ people that continues to run rampant in our society. Hate that trickles down into our schools.

The need for a safe space starts at school for LGBTQ students.

These safe spaces might be as informal as a supportive teacher or a group of close friends. If they are lucky enough to have support from the school's administration, some might form or join an inclusive and affirming student-led organization like a Gay-Straight Alliance. These are great places for a young person who is struggling to find comfort and support.

Unfortunately, this isn't enough. Every space should be a safe space for an LGBTQ young person.

If you're an educational professional walking into a school or a classroom, ask yourself: As millions of LGBTQ young people step out into the world today, what kind of world do they see? Do we want them to exist in a world where their community members and school leaders waste time, energy, and resources arguing about transgender people making someone "uncomfortable" in a bathroom? Do we want them to exist in a world where months of vicious political hate and vitriol at their community's expense is earmarked by a mass shooting of historical proportions? What are you doing to educate against this hate in your classroom, school and community learning spaces?

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As an educational leader in your community, you are in a unique position to mitigate against the harmful effects of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policy proposals while promoting acceptance, compassion, and humanity.

The first steps to an LGBTQ-affirming school environment begin within. Does your school promote an environment of acceptance? Does your overall philosophy of learning and community intentionally include historically marginalized groups of people?

Second, does your school have written policies that include the needs of LGBTQ students and staff? Are LGBTQ students and staff protected from discrimination, harassment and violence? A strong policy should detail how students and staff report and respond to such instances. Trans and gender non-conforming youth should also have policies affirming their ability to use names, pronouns, dress codes and school facilities in a way that corresponds to their gender identity.

Third, great policies beget great programs. Is there a GSA or other similarly named student organization that emphasizes love and acceptance of all students, especially those who need it most? School counselors and therapists should be well-equipped to work with the needs of LGBTQ youth. Prom and other school dances should be open to all, regardless of whom they bring or what they wear.

Finally, the practices of teaching and classroom management have never been more important. In an increasingly diverse and open world, educators have the ability to build bridges between identities and communities. How do you react when a student physically or verbally harasses another student because of their LGBTQ identity? Classroom conversations can be built in an effort to "call-in" negative behavior and attitudes. Include LGBTQ people and events in your curriculum. Health teachers should include issues that are inclusive of the unique needs of LGBTQ adolescents. The movement for LGBTQ rights should be taught alongside other historical civil rights movements. For examples of how to easily do this, GLSEN's Ready, Set, Respect! (Grades K-5) and Safe Space Kit (Grades 6-12) can be downloaded.

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While many have argued that marriage equality marked the end of the need for an LGBTQ rights movement, the community is under no illusion it has suddenly become safe to exist as a queer person. LGBTQ youth are still being exiled from their homes. Trans women of color are still being murdered. LGBTQ couples are still wary of holding hands in public.

When the largest mass shooting in U.S. history happens in what has always been a safe space for our community, that is terrifying. That is numbing. That is enraging.

Let's prove to all our students that school can be their safe space.

.......................................

An earlier version of this article appeared in The Hechinger Report.

Jessica Toste, PhD, is a Public Voices Fellow and an assistant professor of special education at the University of Texas at Austin. She serves as chairwoman of the Austin Chapter and National Advisory Council of the Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
According to a recent report, 9 cities "from Spain to China" nine cities will soon have "more bike lanes, improved public transit, and financial incentives are pushing cars out and encouraging city dwellers to take to the streets...on foot. In an effort to reduce emissions, improve health, and promote a cleaner environment, these nine cities are making the move to becoming car-free and pedestrian-friendly."

In a very real sense the shift from an industrial to an information society and now to the age of creativity and innovation the raison d'etre for revisiting the American love affair with the automobile is here. By embracing the new shift to smart and sustainable cities we are beginning to open the door to new thinking about the architecture of our cities and renewing their place in our lives.

Some believe the decline of our cities started in 1939 at the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, N.Y. The most popular exhibition was The World of Tomorrow in the General Motors Pavilion. It featured an enormous model of a City of the Future, complete with elevated freeways, on-ramps and off-ramps and gleaming skyscrapers separated by miles and miles of asphalt.

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For General Motors and for the rest of America, the vision became reality as more and more roads were built across the country and more and more families were able to purchase their own automobiles.

Only now, almost a decade later, are we beginning to change the lens in our camera, and see the need for a new and vastly different vision of our future and the role of cities.

According to author Charles Handy author of The Age of Unreason, we live in a paradoxical time. The more high tech our world, the more high touch we are becoming. The more global, the more intensely local our focus needs to be. The more competitive our markets, the more cooperation is a critical element in developing our business strategies.

One of the more interesting paradoxes, particularly for cities struggling to define "smart growth" solutions, is that the more we live and work in cyberspace, the more important real place becomes.

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If the product of this new age is knowledge or ideas or technological solutions - the more people rub shoulders with one another, with people generally, the more productive they become. A cities public spaces and its cultural districts become incubators of creativity, the source of innovative products and services.

If we are to capitalize on this paradoxical shift by which telecommunications becomes a substitute for transportation, we must renew our sense of place and rethink our attitudes and our policies toward civic life, the village green, and the fundamental and historical reason for the city; to bring people together in harmony with one another and with their environment for economic gain and glory.

Fortunately, a new breed of architects, planners and developers is beginning to pencil in that new vision of America in the Information Age. It is a bold vision that deals with the crises of growth and the current development sprawl, while returning to a cherished American icon; that of a "compact, close-knit community." According to Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, the next paradigm could well be much more than the return to the close-knit community of small town America, with its village greens and mixed-use zoning. It could be a spiritual return to the kind of community enjoyed by the earliest Americans.

Tessie Naranjo of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico defines community as "the human dwelling place." It is where the people meet the needs of survival and where they weave their webs of connections. Native communities are about connections because relationships form the whole. Each individual becomes part of the whole community, which includes not just the human population, but also the hills, mountains, rocks, trees and clouds.

Until recently, advances in telecommunications and transportation have contributed to our disconnectedness, rather than cemented us as a people; atomized our sense of community, rather than provided us a sense of place. Yet without a cultural center, a shared history or a commitment to neutral goals and visions, there is little to cement communities together.

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Co-authored by David Auten, author, blogger and speaker for Debt Free Guys and host of Queer Money.



We move into your neighborhoods and fix up our houses like Martha Stewart on Kabmucha. Our cars are always new and newly polished. We use words like "gentrify" and "fabulous". Who are we? We're the rich gay couple you see on TV.

Does art imitate life, though?

We're Often Overcompensating

Those of us in the queer community who drive today's conversation came into our own at an interesting time. As with most cultures and people, a maturation takes place. The queer com-munity has always existed. We were critical warriors in Ancient Greek and Roman cultures (see The Band of Thebes in Ancient Greece). Other cultures, such as the Native Americans, consid-ered us as special, often being called two spirited beings.

Religions for the most part, however, have done their best to spread around the globe its view of us as unnatural and deviant, despite homosexuality being ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. With America's founding placed firmly on the pillars of Puritanism, the New World lead the charge of queer discrimination.

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Something interesting happened in Jack Kerouac's America, though; an open gay and lesbian subculture sprouted. While the hipsters of the 50s, the Beatniks, accepted and embraced the queer community, our government jailed us, locked us in mental institutions, treated us with electroshock therapy and killed us to make us go away. It never reconciled that it is straight people who make gay babies.

This oppression came to a head in 1969 in New York City when the brave queer community de-cided it wouldn't take it anymore. Such was borne the Pride movement and parades have never been the same since. With this post-sexual-liberation-liberation, the queer community said it was here and queer and society better get used to it.

The 1980s, unfortunately, ushered in the AIDS crisis. While not started by or relegated to the queer community, AIDS became known as the "gay disease," which only served to extend its threat on straight and queer people alike longer than necessary.

With the critical threat of the government, society and AIDS in control by the 1990s and 2000s, many of us in the queer community could be free to be who we want to be. That was, of course, after we left our parent's homes.

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Grade school and high school were challenging for us. The minute the school bully smelled the slightest scent of gay, the targets frequently suffered until June of their 18th year of life.

It's with that history that many of us in the queer community, knowingly and unknowingly, ra-tionalize our poor financial decisions. Our community is an adoptive family. Queer doctors and lawyers live and socialize with retail and salon queens. Often to make up for feeling disenfran-chised in our youth, we attempt to present a life of success by spending.

This spending usually focuses on the outward displays of life; homes, cars, vacations, that many perceive as the rewards of success. We're driven to outspend our straight peers to give the per-ception we've overcome our oppression. These are often not the wisest financial decisions.

We're the Original DINKS

Since the days of being labeled the dandy in the stylishly furnished apartment are long gone, many in the queer community are settling down in our own non-traditional ways. The fact that we can finally legally marry is just icing on the cake.

Long-term queer relationships have been increasing in tandem with the increase in queer ac-ceptance. Many of us have been together for 20 years or more. While us natural DINKS are able to adopt children, we're not as likely to have children as our straight peers.

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Personally many of our straight friends exercise fiscal responsibility they never had pre-children, especially pre-marriage. No longer is every dollar they earn subject only to their whims. Since 1 + 1 became 3, a fair chunk of change is now directed to the needs of their third, fourth and fifth.

With the cost of raising a child to the age of 18 being $245,000, a cost most queer individuals or couples don't have, one would think we would be far ahead when it comes to assets and sav-ings. Despite often not having such expenses, recent studies show that queer couples tend to have only about $6,000 more saved compared to our straight counterparts, far less than $245,000.

Most queer couples haven't experienced the fiscal maturation of our straight peers. We use this seemingly extra money to travel well, live well and drive well. Unfortunately, we're not known to use it to save well or retire well. This may very well be a hangover from the AIDS epidemic phi-losophy of eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die.

Our Discrimination

Unfortunately, discrimination still exists today. Take for example employment. A study based out of the U.K. showed that, all else being equal, a gay man must spend $54,000 U.S. dollars to help his career stay on par with his peers. Whether the gay man spends that money to keep up with his peers or not, it costs him dearly.

40% of all homeless youth today identify as LGBTQ. This can have long-term, irreparable con-sequences. Studies show that youth homelessness increases the change of adult homelessness for the same individual "by a factor of 26". This means that without the proper help or motivation, those who find themselves part of the 40% of homeless youth may never find a home or a house of their own.

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One year ago, a white supremacist shot and killed nine parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A little less than a week ago, another shooter consumed with hate shot and killed 49 people at the Pulse night club in Orlando, Florida, wounding 53 more.

Overwhelmed as we are by last weekend's massacre in Orlando, we still feel the anguish of Charleston. In truth, we feel the anguish of terrorist attacks all over the world in recent months - in Paris, Tel Aviv, San Bernardino and elsewhere. But it's not only anguish that we feel. It's also anger that we have not been able to do more as a society to keep lethal weapons out of the hands of haters and extremists, whether motivated by a white supremacist ideology, a radical interpretation of Islam, or blind hatred of Muslims, LGBTQ people, or others.

It is vitally important for all of us to stand together in solidarity, and to comfort those who mourn. But it is not enough.

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Let's use the Charleston anniversary as an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to ensuring that we, as a nation, are doing all we can to fight haters, extremists, and the threat they pose to our communities.

Taking action is more necessary now than ever before.

Consider that in 2015, domestic extremists killed more people in the U.S. than in any previous year since 1995. And in 2015, for the first time, nearly as many Americans were killed by domestic Islamic extremists as by white supremacists. Sadly, the killings continue unabated.

Last year, an unprecedented 80 U.S. residents were linked to terror plots and other activity motivated by Islamic extremist ideology. They were either arrested, charged or otherwise publicly identified for their involvement in crimes ranging from providing support, attempting to fund or traveling to join terrorist groups abroad, or planning or assisting in plots here at home. Even with the exceptional work done by law enforcement agencies at every level to protect Americans, we were fortunate that there were not more lone wolf attacks.

The threat posed by white supremacists and anti-government extremists is equally urgent. In 2015, among other attacks and plots we witnessed an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon and arrests of members of a white supremacist cell plotting to attack synagogues and African-American churches in Virginia. Law enforcement also disrupted an anti-government extremist plot to overthrow the government of West Virginia by force.

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Charleston, Orlando, and countless other less high profile attacks and plots offer clear evidence that firearms are the deadly weapons of choice for extremists in the homeland. We must also make it more difficult to obtain firearms through increased waiting periods, safety restrictions, and limitations on purchases - especially of assault-style weapons.

It is true that none of these steps can guarantee our safety, but they would certainly make us safer. There appears to be an emerging bipartisan consensus around this issue. President Obama has repeatedly emphasized the need for legislation to curtail access to assault weapons, and this week Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said "nobody wants terrorists to have firearms." We urge leaders in both parties to prioritize this issue immediately. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein and many others have said, it is inconceivable that a person can be relegated to the no-fly list, but they are free to purchase many weapons without any hindrance. This must end.

Denying extremists and haters access to weapons is not the only legislative measure that we should consider. The United States does not have a federal domestic terrorism statute. It's time for Congress to hold hearings to examine whether we need one. And there is work to be done at the state level to ensure that all people are protected by comprehensive and inclusive laws to combat violence motivated by hate and extremism. This will not stop terrorism, but it will ensure that we can use the full force of the law to serve justice upon those who terrorize people simply because of what they believe, where they're from or who they love.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that the best way to protect ourselves against extremists is to reach people before they become extremists. Anti-bias education is critically important.

It's still time to mourn the lives lost in Orlando, but it is also time to roll up our collective sleeves and get to work. We have seen how crises pull communities together, and we have learned that we cannot afford merely to be bystanders. There is something each and every one of us can do to make a difference.

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Banning the Washington Post from covering his campaign rallies isn't just a sign of Donald Trump's distrust of the press. Reporters are an early warning system. History shows that politicians who turn against the media and cut off their access don't stop there.



Remember Richard Nixon. Nixon made no bones about it -- he hated the press, made life difficult for reporters, put members of the press on his "enemies list." He tried to block publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times. His vice president Spiro Agnew denounced the press in a famous 1970 speech as "nattering nabobs of negativism." Recordings of Nixon's White House conversations are filled with his attacks on the press and disparaging comments about them.

In the end, the press still uncovered his crimes. Nixon's hatred of the press reflected his paranoia and contempt for all his opponents and for the rule of law.

Several people have asked me recently if I ever had my press credential revoked. It is revealing that the only place that I have run into problems with press credentials has been China where the Chinese government monitors the overseas and domestic press closely and tries to exert control by approving and rejecting reporter visas and residence permits. That creates huge obstacles to reporters trying to do their jobs, especially when it comes to holding the Chinese government and its leaders accountable.

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Sound familiar?

In 1989 I was sent to China by the Boston Globe to report on the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre. The Chinese refused to give me a reporting visa so I flew to Hong Kong and entered as a tourist. When they asked my occupation, I put down "English teacher." I think the Chinese visa officials in Hong Kong knew that I was a journalist; many of them were angry about the massacre and wanted it reported. From 2002-2005 I was the China Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal based in Beijing. The Chinese refused to issue visa for some of our reporters whose earlier stories about China they didn't like. At one point we feared they might shut down the Wall Street Journal office because of our aggressive reporting on the SARS outbreak, which China was covering up. In the end they backed off, though we had to be careful we didn't imperil our Chinese sources who were giving us information. A few years ago when I was an Executive Editor at Bloomberg News, the Chinese refused to issue visas for me, other editors, and a number of our reporters because they were angry about Bloomberg's prize-winning investigations of the hidden wealth of China's top leaders. It made covering China much more difficult--which was what the Chinese intended. The New York Times has faced the same obstacles.

Banning the Post from his rallies can only hurt Trump. Most stories on rallies report simply what the candidate said and maybe some audience reaction. Reporters are resourceful and they will get the news. The danger for Trump is that this controversy distracts people from his political message--unless of course he sees political advantage in attacking the press, which I suspect he does.

I took my journalism class to New Hampshire in February to cover a Trump rally and was shocked when, a few minutes before Trump appeared, an announcer came on over the loudspeaker declaring that that "while Mr. Trump respects the First Amendment" he wouldn't tolerate any cat-calls or jeers. If anyone started protesting during his speech, the announcement said, the crowd should surround the protester and security would eject them. In all my years covering campaigns I never encountered anything like that. As we have seen, Trump rallies are now places where protesters are routinely ejected and violent clashes are now taking place.

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In a press conference last month, Trump noted that his approach to the press would stay the same if he were elected president. "Yeah, it is going to be like this," said Trump, whose campaign has also banned the likes of Politico, Buzzfeed, and the Daily Beast. "You think I'm going to change? I'm not going to change."
It's just Paige Wood and Steven Dies up there, the duo known as The Peach Kings. They are the center of attention during their opening performance on Cyndi Lauper's recent Detour tour at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There's no other band members, just Paige, Steven, and a guitar. There's no stage props. There's no big LED video screens. There's nothing besides Paige and Steven in front of the draping red curtain. This is their most vulnerable of performances, all eyes are on them. The only way they could be any more vulnerable is if they were literally naked on stage. But, even if in this most exposed of performances, this pair gets lost in themselves and in the music, transforming into their own theatrical story.

The two met in San Francisco after Paige made the move from New York and was looking for a place to live, and ended up in a room available by Steven's brother, who would also lend the idea that Paige and Steven should start a band together. "His brother was fast bestie of mine," describes Paige Wood. "He was one of those friends that his influence was strong, so any suggestion he made, I took to heart. He said, 'When you meet my brother, you guys should be in a band together'. We literally met and the first time we played anything together we wrote like three songs or something. After that, we started playing music, formed a band, and moved to L.A. together."

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The sound of The Peach Kings is this very gritty, yet sultry vibe that can go to all these different places, but Paige's vocals are the thread that ties it all together. It's like a dance, with much of the band's influence simply from the guitar and how the vocals move swimmingly with it.

It's like the energy of Paige and Steven conjures up this new character of its own that has a story and everything. The Peach Kings' music could be the soundtrack to a movie, with subplot and character development in each song. No song is derivative to another, with each painting pictures in the listeners' mind of these characters, places, and universes set in this alternate dimension. "We had a really long drive from Vancouver to Nashville to meet up with Cyndi," says Steven Dies. "We had this new notebook that said, 'This notebook belongs to _______'. So, we're like, okay, who does this notebook belong to. Let's come up with a character. Who is this character? What do they do? Where do they come from? Just going off of that, thinking of it like a movie in someone who you'd be interested in following along."

With the sound of The Peach Kings bordering on everything from rock to funk, and from soul to hip-hop, Paige Wood and Steven Dies are a dramaturgical musical unit without being overdramatic. It's the vibe the band that hits the most emotive aspects of their music. Sometimes a dance isn't just with footsteps, and the energy of this duo takes them to another world that is real to both them and their audience, and they're connection to each is the center of their universe. "I think that if it's ever not going well or at a moment where one of us messes up," says Steven Dies. "It's like the crowd kind of disappears and we disappear into each other. We're here together. We're on stage doing this right now. Let's just keep doing this, you and me, let's just get through this song."

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I'll never forget the day I lost my wife, twenty five years ago.

I had spent the day sightseeing with relatives visiting from out of town, and on the drive back felt my pager buzz. It was the office calling. I called back expecting a list of updates and to-do's, and maybe a memo that needed my sign-off; instead, my assistant, voice shaking, told me that my wife Donna Lee had been in a terrible car crash, and that I needed to head straight to the hospital.

A nurse greeted me as I walked into the ER. Working my career in healthcare, including in Senior positions in the Federal Government, I've walked into countless hospitals before, usually addressed as Dr. Moritsugu, Sir, or, later in my career, Surgeon General; that day, I was just Ken.

She escorted me to a small, private room, offered me coffee, and tried to brace me for what I was about to hear. She was picking her words carefully, but it didn't look good. Next came a trauma surgeon--they had stabilized her vital functions, but there had been severe head trauma--and then came the chaplain, unsummoned. I already knew. Finally, the neurosurgeon entered. Her heart was still beating, but she'd lost blood flow to the brain: Donna Lee, my wife, was dead.

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By then our family had gathered, and the nurse escorted us to the trauma room. They had cleaned Donna Lee from her injuries and she looked so peaceful, as if she were just sleeping. But I knew better.

I don't remember how long I stayed at her side--it might have been minutes; it felt like days. When I did finally leave her, the neurosurgeon walked me down the corridor and gently raised the question: what would you like to do? I knew what he meant, too. My mind immediately raced to a conversation Donna and I had had years before, where we both decided together that we wanted to be organ donors upon our deaths. The decision wasn't easy, but at least it wasn't complicated. I knew what she wanted, and I was privileged to make it happen.

Her heart went to a man in Tampa, Florida, and her pancreas and one kidney to a teenage boy in D.C. who was on the verge of dropping out of school because of his illness. Her other kidney went to a hospital custodian, her liver to a woman in Pennsylvania, one cornea to a woman in Baltimore and the other to a lifetime civil servant. Then, four years later, our wounds only just starting to close, it happened again, this time to my daughter Vikki Lianne--again in a car crash. Twice in four years.

While we had had a positive experience donating my wife's organs four years before, frankly, this time we were conflicted. We were pro-organ donation, but we didn't know what Vikki would have wanted. Ultimately, we decided to donate her organs and tissues, but it was only after we made that decision that my older daughter told us that she and her sister had had a discussion after my wife died and that Vikki stated that she too wanted to be an organ and tissue donor. We were not aware of that discussion when we had to decide, and we easily could have decided not to; knowing her intention would have made the decision so much easier. Today, ORGANIZE has built technology tools that allow anyone to share their donor wishes publicly on social media to ease the donor family experience and ensure that next of kin can always make as informed a decision as possible. It would have made our experience so much easier when Vikki passed.

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Our family lost two beautiful lives, and we ended up saving eight others through the miracle of transplantation. It's easy to connect with the human story, of people helping people and families helping families. But there's something else that is often overlooked. For any donation to happen, there needs to be perfect coordination across healthcare professionals, from donor hospital nurses to administrators to organ recovery coordinators to transplant centers. Stories about donation are often told as one hero making a singular decision to register as a donor; in truth, they come from finely coordinated teams of people. Unfortunately, there are as many times when that doesn't work as when it does.

Having served two tenures as US Surgeon General, I'm no stranger to public health. I can tell you from professional and personal experience that it's tricky - there are many stakeholders, generally all equally passionate, but each with their own forces acting upon them, not always in perfect harmony. Organ donation begins with people, individuals who decide to become organ donors, but it doesn't end there. There are public safety officers who bring patients to the emergency room, nurses and physician assistants in donor hospitals who must identify and refer donation-eligible deaths, transplant recovery professionals and transplant coordinators from organ procurement organizations that discuss donation with next of kin, and surgeons and surgical teams from the transplant centers who perform the actual operations.

With so many links in the chain, even one minor misstep can result in a missed opportunity. When Donna Lee died in 1992 there were about 29,000 people on the organ transplant waiting list. When Vikki Leanne died in 1996, there were 49,000 people; today, in 2016, there are more than 120,000 people on that list. Despite the more than 31,000 transplants that occurred last year, approximately 22 people die every day while waiting. While the system certainly produces some heartwarming stories, it also produces far more heartbreaking ones than it should--these just don't get told as loudly.

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The organ recovery system has room to improve, and the goal of saving as many lives as possible through organ donation should be prioritized above all else. There are numerous opportunities and ways to increase organ donation, and through that, organ transplantation. More people will gain a new life, an improved quality of life, and be able to reenter, enjoy, and contribute back to society. All of us, working together, can achieve this goal.
Why do some brands appear so much more authentic than others?

The quest for brand authenticity among marketers has become akin to the search for the Holy Grail--a fool's errand that ends in frustration. Authenticity is a subject that is endlessly debated, poorly defined and universally desired. A new study by public relations firm Cohn & Wolfe cites three key characteristics tied to brands that are authentic. It includes "reliability," "respectfulness," and "reality."

In his new book, Start with the Future and Work Back: A Heritage Management Manifesto, author Bruce Weindruch and CEO of The History Factory, outlines ways in which the world's best organizations are tapping into their own unique inventory of experiences--their heritage- as a means of telling an authentic brand story.

Heritage management enables companies to tap into the abundant wellspring of authentic stories that lie within every organization's history. It can communicate an authentic brand story, unify distinct organizational cultures in the midst of a merger, or tell an old story in a new way to captivate and inspire employees.

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Weindruch offers tips about ways past behavior can be the best predictor of the future, and how heritage can be a useful tool in reassuring employees during times of stress that their company successfully overcame similar challenges in its past, and can do so again. Heritage can also be a powerful mirror that reflects the truth about an organization's track record on diversity, or whether its customer-first positioning is simply a slogan or part of its DNA.

Even Startups Have History To Be Mined

In some cases, an organization's heritage inventory spans hundreds of years, as is the case with The Hartford Insurance Company whose roots go back to 1810. In others, such as with a hedge fund, it may only go back two decades. And at a Silicon Valley Unicorn company (where the arc of history is short), decisions made last week are part of that organization's unique and authentic brand narrative and heritage. With today's accelerating pace of business change, fast moving companies like Tesla, PayPal and Amazon have already made history, disrupting longstanding industries such as automotive, payment services and retail.

Reaching Back into Your Archive Can Support Today's Reputational Claims

Another way to preserve heritage is to build an archive that can be used to offer indisputable evidence that the image you're trying to project, the values you espouse, and the reputation you defend are not only legitimate, but also completely warranted. You want to demonstrate that you're an innovative company? Or that you've been at the forefront of environmental preservation over the course of your history? Well, often the proof can be found within your own archival assets, which can then be repurposed to validate your claims.

The Power of the Collective Consciousness in Storytelling

Among the best chroniclers of any organization's story narrative are the men and women who have worked there over the years. Oral histories derived from current employees and retirees are a powerful way to gather context about important periods of historical change within any organization. Nothing will get a group of employees more engaged or emotionally connected to an organization than hearing the authentic stories of a past leader, or even a previously unsung hero (a rank and file employee) who made a unique contribution that bent the curve of history, shaping the organization of today.

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Why Anniversaries Matter

In a world where many businesses fail within their first five years, commemorating a significant anniversary represents another powerful form of Heritage Management that's an authentic way to support your brand. Huntington Bancshares, which is celebrating its 150th year in 2016, is a case in point. Among the 200 oldest banks in the United States, the Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington is using its sesquicentennial to engage its employees and other stakeholders around the stories imbedded within its history.

It's an inspiring example of how the men and women of Huntington and its predecessor banks, through grit and determination, built an organization that was able to survive the Panic of 1893, the Panic of 1907, the Great Depression and the Great Recession of the past decade, and went on to become one of the largest banks in the Midwest. This narrative of growth and success also links to the future, as the company recently announced plans to buy FirstMerit Bank in a deal that would make Huntington the largest bank in Ohio, and an emerging contender in Chicago and Wisconsin.
Businessman Taped Mouth

I was emotionally tortured as a teenager. I'm sure people who knew me in those days would be shocked to hear me proclaim that. Honestly, it shocks me now that I look back as a decently well-adjusted adult and realize the cruelty that I experienced. In light of the recent attacks on LGBT people in Orlando compared to the almost near silence of many religious people, I need to speak out to them and say, "this is the moment where you do not remain silent."

In my small Southern Indiana hometown in the late 80s and early 90s, church was the center for many young people's social lives. It certainly was mine. Unfortunately, I was the church golden boy with a dark secret. I was gay, and in that culture there could almost be nothing worse.

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The homophobic atmosphere was already in place before puberty kicked in. As a child I sat through numerous sermons about the evils of homosexuality while people around me quietly said "amen." I remember once someone spotted a very brave same sex couple holding hands at the mall. It was quite the Sunday morning gossip, and we prayed for those depraved men. My church was "progressive" and some men were growing out their hair and getting an ear pierced, but certainly not the ear that signified you were gay. The right side was the correct side, I think. Maybe it was the left -- which ever side George Michael's ear wasn't pierced.

So when the hormones hit me, and the realization was undeniable, I knew I was in very grave trouble. I hid it at first, but the guilt was too great. Eventually, I confessed to a few, and this set in motion a series of years where a handful of locally well-respected men "counseled" me. Or, as I now see it, tortured me.

Perhaps it's a hard story to swallow. I was a good-looking and gregarious kid. I grew up in a nice house with nice clothes. Eventually, I packed my car and drove off to college (an event I now believe saved my life) and everything seemed just fine. Torture?

As I was becoming who I was going to be, there were multiple authority figures whom I trusted completely sitting me down on a regular basis over the course of years essentially telling me I was innately perverted and that if I couldn't somehow figure it out, I would literally burn in a pit of fire forever. I really believed that for a while. In a desperate attempt to rid myself of...well...myself, I started attending Exodus Ministries meetings, a now defunct "pray away the gay" organization. There the mental abuse continued. I was usually all smiles while in church, but no one ever saw me sitting in my car weeping, which happened a lot. I'd just sat through a torture session, after all.

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A lot of time has passed. I'm sure those people's memories of the things they said to me are no big deal. I would guess people still in that community all these years later oppose same sex marriage and freely vocalize it. I'm sure their language about LGBT people has been modernized a bit, but they still openly oppose the "lifestyle choice" and feel fine about their own "sincerely held beliefs." In other words, they are still maintaining that atmosphere ripe for the same subtle torture I was put through. Whether they know it or not, it's an atmosphere that also gives birth to Omar Mateens. Even though he was an Islamic extremist, all homophobic words and actions feed this fire and are complicit in the Orlando shootings.
The United States and Colombia have together achieved extraordinary advances in the fight against narcotics trafficking and transnational organized crime. Unfortunately, there are many outdated misconceptions about U.S.-Colombian cooperation on counter narcotics and the economics of the drug trade that show fundamental misunderstandings of the goals and accomplishments of U.S. security assistance in Colombia.

The architects and implementers of Plan Colombia always understood that helping Colombia build stronger, more capable institutions was the best way to strengthen governance and deny criminal groups space in which to operate. Preventing cocaine consumption in the United States was never the sole aim of Plan Colombia, but part of a broader plan to reduce production in Colombia and demand in the United States. It is noteworthy that U.S. cocaine consumption dropped by 50 percent in the past decade.

As those Colombian institutions were improving over a decade, aerial eradication of coca provided the safest, most effective means to check, and reduce, narcotics production in Colombia. From 2007 to 2012, aerial eradication was primarily responsible for a 53 percent reduction in Colombian coca cultivation. The pressure aerial eradication placed on FARC finances contributed greatly to bringing the FARC to the negotiating table seeking a resolution to the armed conflict. At the same time Colombian institutions grew stronger, allowing the government to assert greater control over its territory, dramatically improve security for its citizens, and vastly reducing crime. In 2015 Colombia had its lowest homicide rate in 40 years, and kidnappings have fallen by 90 percent since 2002.

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Interviews with thousands of captured and demobilized traffickers demonstrate that aerial eradication imposed dire costs on criminal groups, who went to extreme lengths to disperse their coca crops to remote areas where aerial eradication was prohibited. Narcotics traffickers hated aerial eradication because it was effective.

Within the U.S. government, the concept of a "war on drugs" was jettisoned years ago in recognition that narcotics trafficking is but one source of profit for organized criminal groups. Instead, U.S. security assistance programs increasingly gravitated toward a balanced approach against organized crime utilizing all available tools to reduce the combined societal harms caused in source, transit, and destination countries. These efforts seek to prevent the vast ecological damage caused by growers and traffickers who clear cut forest and dump precursor chemicals and the violence caused by traffickers as they defend territory and conduct extortion and murder-for-hire. These criminal activities leave behind money in Colombia that fuels corruption and undermines licit economic activity.
The Battle To Defeat Islamic State In Libya And Rebuild The Country From ScratchBy Giacomo Tognini and Khairuldeen Makhzoomi

ISIS militants in the city of Sirte. Source: ABC News

Five years since Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year rule came to an end in the heady days of the Arab Spring, what once seemed like the beginning of a bright future for Africa's richest country instead collapsed into chaos. Its leaders are struggling to establish a unity government that can reconcile the country's warring factions and battle the common enemy of the Islamic State. Even with the unity provided by the threat of IS, there are stark challenges ahead to ensure a secure and democratic Libya.

Months of negotiations between the country's rival parliaments in the capital of Tripoli and the eastern city of Tobruk produced a unity government last December. Led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj, the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) established itself in the capital in May. Despite gaining the approval of the previous parliament in Tripoli and the kaleidoscope of local militias loyal to it, the GNA has yet to receive a mandate from Tobruk and its forces, the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) under the control of the mercurial General Khalifa Haftar.

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Libya has been dominated by small militias and city-states since a national government broke down in 2014, but they are slowly setting aside their differences to fight the expanding reach of the Islamic State. IS has established a "maritime Mosul" in the coastal city of Sirte -- Gaddafi's hometown -- and enjoys the allegiance of former Al-Qaeda jihadists in Tunisia. Many regional and foreign officials, including the Obama administration and its European allies, have acknowledged the need to develop specific strategies to combat IS' influence in Libya.

The fight will be challenging. As the political deadlock persists, IS continues to carry out terrorist activities and has launched several attacks on Libyan Christians. In February 2015 IS executed 21 Christian Egyptians on a Libyan beach, and in its most recent attack last March it struck across the border in Tunisia, killing more than 54 civilians and members of Tunisian security forces, including a young girl.

The United States, which played a central role in the NATO aerial campaign that helped oust Gaddafi in 2011, has returned to the fray. In February, a U.S. air strike on the seaside town of Sabratha targeted an IS leader linked to attacks in Tunisia last year. The same month, American Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presented a military plan that calls for as many as 30 to 40 airstrikes in four major areas in Libya. The plan hopes to cripple the group's major bases outside Iraq and Syria, and President Obama acknowledged days later that the U.S. "will continue to use the full range of tools to eliminate ISIL threats" wherever they may be.

ISIS Attacks in Libya July 2014 to mid-May 2016, casualties include deaths and injuries. Sources: Reuters, CNN, Libya Herald

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European countries have also joined the fight, with the United Kingdom deploying its Special Air Services on undercover missions to help combat IS forces. Last month, a memo leaked to the Guardian confirmed that SAS members had been aided by Jordanian intelligence, adding that Jordan's King Abdullah had addressed members of the U.S. Congress about his country's involvement in the Libyan crisis. Last week over 20 countries, including regional powers and Libya's neighbors, met in Vienna for a conference on countering IS in Libya. They pledged to recognize the GNA as the legitimate government and explored the possibility of removing the 5-year-old arms embargo on the country. In a dramatic departure from earlier policy, even Russia and China backed the plan.

Foreign military personnel -- including French, British, Italian, and American forces -- have been spotted by Libyan media carrying out reconnaissance missions and collaborating with local militias. The U.S. is already engaged in a campaign of drone strikes against IS in the country, and shifted more surveillance drones there for intelligence gathering. American and French special forces have deployed to the airport in the eastern city of Benghazi, which may reopen soon to bring in Western arms and supplies to aid the war effort.

Benghazi is under the control of Haftar's LNA, which, unlike its western rivals, possesses an air force. A high-ranking Gaddafi ally until the 1980s, when he fled to collaborate with the CIA, Haftar returned during the revolution and recently scored a string of important successes in the east. After pacifying Benghazi in April and expelling the presence of Ansar al-Sharia, Libya's al-Qaeda affiliate, the LNA moved west to target IS and Islamist forces in Derna and Ajdabiya.

His heavy-handed approach is not popular everywhere in the country. The LNA still refuses to recognize the GNA's authority, and Prime Minister Serraj wants Haftar to halt military operations until all anti-ISIS forces can unite under the leadership of new GNA defense minister Mahdi al-Barghathi. This ignores the wishes of Libya's foreign partners, who repeatedly stress the need to give Haftar an important role in military operations. In the west, the LNA has skirmished with militias from Misrata, a powerful city-state that supports the GNA. Further sowing distrust is Haftar's recent decision to allow Gaddafi loyalists to return to the country and contribute to the anti-ISIS effort, including an alliance with pro-Gaddafi tribes in the east. Even the dictator's widow, exiled in Oman, was allowed home.

There is still hope for reconciliation, as the LNA-aligned Tobruk parliament is planning to hold a new vote soon to endorse the GNA. The parliament's speaker, Aguila Saleh Issa, faces foreign sanctions and could join the GNA in exchange for more positions for easterners. In the south, a peace agreement brokered in November halted fighting between Tuareg and Toubou tribes, who declared support for the GNA. After a series of battlefield setbacks, Misratan forces took the town of Abu Grein from ISIS last month, launching a campaign to reach Sirte. They entered the city last week after a lightning offensive, and a battle is now raging at the heart of ISIS' Libyan stronghold

The anti-ISIS effort could be the catalyst to unite and rebuild Libya, but much work remains. Marginalized groups like the Amazigh still reject the GNA and desire further autonomy, and foreign powers are still disunited in their support, with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates staunchly supporting Haftar's LNA.

Map of territorial control in Libya as of May 2016. Source: The Economist

The problems do not end there. According to former UN Special Coordinator Peter Bartu, Libya is unlike any other post-conflict country in the world. "I was so struck by how strange and different Libya seemed that I felt that it required special measures," he says. "Libyans have really struggled with [the idea of] representation, and I think part of the struggle is because of that unique experience under Gaddafi."

Gaddafi's 42 years of quixotic rule virtually abolished all the country's institutions, replaced with a veneration of the "Brotherly Leader" and his peculiar ideology. "You had no institutions and it was really the most radical democratic experiment anywhere, so they don't understand parliaments or elected representatives," says Bartu. "[Libyans] find it hard to relate to decision-making mechanisms that aggregate preferences and sometimes might go against what you think is right."

Unlike neighboring Tunisia, where Islamist parties approved a liberal constitution, Bartu believes Libya's Islamists present a different challenge. "When I was dealing with Ansar al-Sharia in 2011 they were very fixed in their ideas," he says of his experience mediating for the UN in Benghazi. "They are Salafist [and] have a very limited view of government, they'll accept an election for ruler or leader but [not] for parliament because legislation comes from the Quran, not from any other source."

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Libyans still have to come to terms with how to reconcile with Gaddafi-era officials and provide a role for them in rebuilding the country. "Everyone had worked for Gaddafi, like the Ba'athists in Iraq -- what role do you have in future Libya for people who had blood on their hands, were corrupt or just bureaucrats who had been part of the original system?" asks Bartu. "There's now more than a million and a half [Libyans] who are still outside the country, who are needed in the reconstruction [but] don't feel they have a place to come back."

Despite the seeming abundance of chaos, there are islands of stability that afford a measure of hope. "There are a whole range of quite positive local government arrangements emerging right across the country, like local village councils, local municipalities," says Bartu. "[They've been] able to stay away from the fighting and run their communities quite successfully, which is really terrific for Libya moving forward."

Long accustomed to rugged individualism in the face of a brutal regime, Libyans must come together to construct a democratic state from scratch and defeat the scourge of ISIS. The group rapidly gains strength from former al-Qaeda members in the area by the day, and unless a unified intervention begins soon, it might become too late for foreign powers to intervene.

If Libyans can set aside their differences to eliminate the terror of the Islamic State and liberate Sirte, they will be one step closer to fulfilling the promise of the 2011 revolution. Then comes the hard part: building a democratic state that serves all Libyans, not just those of your hometown, religion, or ethnic group. Unlike Gaddafi's fictitious version of direct democracy, the most radical democratic experiment in history could yet prove to be in Libya.

Khairuldeen Al Makhzoomi is a researcher at the Near Eastern Department of UC Berkeley. He holds a degree in Political Science and Near Eastern Languages and Literature from UC Berkeley. Currently working on a research " Obstacles to National Reconciliation in Iraq ", the founder of "United 4 Iraq" Facebook page. Khairuldeen also writes for Berkeley Political Review. Email Address: k.makhzoomi@berkeley.edu

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Life is stressful. No doubt about it. Everyone handles stress differently. There are so many factors that impact an individual's reactions and approaches to life. The recent Willis Towers Watson Staying@Work survey found that more employers have adopted a broader view of workforce health that includes physical, mental, emotional, and financial health. According to the survey, 64% of U.S. employers say that by 2018, they will focus on developing a workplace culture that supports employee well-being as a primary strategy to boost health engagement; only 34% stated it was a core strategy yin 2015.

As we continue to recognize Employee WellBeing Month (EWM), let's bring awareness to two critical areas of a person's overall well-being: emotional wellness/well-being and mental health. Is there a difference between the two? I looked at a variety of sources, and learned that there are differences; however, they are very much interrelated and, typically you can't have good mental health without positive emotional well-being.

Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices, all impacted by biological factors, life experiences, and family history. Mental health involves aspects of cognitive thinking, including forming opinions, making decisions and using logic. Whereas mental health involves cognitive thinking and information processing, emotional health involves being able to express your emotions in an appropriate way.

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Good emotional well-being, typically, is demonstrated by an individual who has positive self-esteem, doesn't act impulsively, functions well in society, and meet the demands of everyday life. Mental health is the ability to properly think and process information while emotional health is your ability to appropriately express feelings. The choices you make on a daily basis involve both mental and emotional processing - your cognitive reasoning may be influenced by the way you feel about a certain situation.

Emotional health issues directly impact a company's business. Some organizations have adopted the emotional health of their employees as a priority. This can include addressing stress management, resiliency, mindfulness, and social engagement. A survey by Fidelity Investments and The National Business Group on Health (NBGH) showed that employers are focused not only on promoting workers' physical health at work, but also mental and emotional health, with 87% of employers surveyed offering emotional or mental well-being programs in 2016. 54% of employers offer stress management programs -- the most popular emotional well-being program -- and 12% more plan to in 2017. In addition, 27% of employers offer resiliency training, which are programs to help employees manage setbacks in their lives (either in the workplace or outside of work), and another 20% plan to add such training next year.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has started to move into the corporate world, along with yoga and other stress-reducing techniques. MBSR is offered to employees in organizations like Aetna, Google, General Mills, US Military, Intel, Goldman Sachs, Target, and others, often as part of a continuum of well-being offerings.

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A workplace environment that supports individuals in their emotional and mental health have documented results from everything from lowering health-care costs, relieving stress, improving sleep, reducing chronic pain, and positively addressing depression and anxiety disorders. For example, Aetna, has had some success with its meditation and yoga programs. On average, the many employees who have participated in at least one class have reported a 28% reduction in their stress levels, a 20% improvement in sleep quality and said they have gained 62 minutes of productivity per week per person.

Integrating mental health and emotional well-being initiatives into all of an organization's health and wellness activities is really important. A healthy workplace is one where individuals feel valued and supported, provides a positive workspace, and shows respect for all aspects of a person's life. In other words, movement toward "holistic" wellness programs. Companies pursuing this strategy tend to view their well-being program as part of their culture and as an element of the overall brand. We are seeing more companies step up their efforts to integrate emotional well-being, social connectedness and job satisfaction with their more traditional efforts to support physical health."

As we celebrate Employee WellBeing Month, of which WorldatWork is a proud supporter, let's remember all of the components of well-being, including sound mental and emotional health. Attention to these components will help to enhance employees' overall wellbeing.
US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden place flowers for the victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub Sunday at a memorial at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Florida, June 16, 2016. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

"This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if thats the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well."  President Barack Obama, June 12, 2016

"We have to face the fact that meaningful gun control has to be a part of homeland security . . . We need to do something to minimize the opportunity for terrorists to get a gun in this country."  U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, June 14, 2016

"I am proud to announce that after 14+ hours on the floor, we will have a vote on closing the terror gap & universal background checks."  Tweet by Connecticut Senator Christopher Murphy, June 16, 2016

Inaction is not an option. In the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history we can and must do everything in our power to end this scourge of terror, hate and bullets that fly across our land killing and maiming and breaking hearts and traumatizing communities with ever increasing frequency. How can inaction continue to be an option in the face of senselessness and intolerance fueled by guns? We must act to save our countrys soul and the lives of our people  all of our people.

The June 12 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was both our nations worst act of terrorism since 9/11 and a hate crime. In that it was all too common: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are too likely targets of hate crimes in America. A large number of victims were gay people of color who were celebrating Latin Night in what many said they trusted and believed was a desperately needed safe space. But as we have seen over and over again, America is running out of safe spaces. Not Pulse. Not Bible study at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Not an office holiday party in San Bernardino. Not a movie theater in Aurora. Not a dorm or university hall at Virginia Tech. And not a first grade classroom in Newtown, Connecticut, in a country where hate, bigotry, terrorism, and mental illness collide with unfettered access to these weapons of war that leave us with no hiding spaces unless we do something now.

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Connecticut Senator Christopher Murphy couldnt face the families of the children of Sandy Hook unless he did something. The Senate filibuster he led in the aftermath of the Orlando slaughter lasted for more than 14 hours before there was bipartisan agreement to allow a vote on two common sense amendments that would make all of us and our nation safer. Creating a No Buy List so that the more than 800,000 people on our terror watch lists cannot legally buy guns in America should be an easy decision for all of us. Closing the loopholes in existing background checks to reach sales at gun shows and through the internet to keep more criminals, would-be terrorists, and others from buying guns should be another easy decision. The evidence is clear that expanded background checks work. A recent study found that a Connecticut law that expanded background checks on all handgun purchases helped achieve a 40 percent reduction in gun homicides during the first 10 years following the laws enactment. These are measures the majority of Americans strongly support  and its long past time that Congress followed the will of the people instead of the will of the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers whose profits are soaked in the blood of our people.

The majority of Americans also support reinstating the ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines that have been used time and time again -- to kill the innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the innocent people in the Aurora movie theater, the innocents in San Bernardino, and now Orlando. Why should it be perfectly legal to buy an AR-15 in a Five Guys parking lot in Vermont the day after the massacre at Pulse with no background check and no paperwork at all? Weapons designed for war are now as easy to buy as a loaf of bread. Since 1963 more than 176,000 children have died from gun violence in America  over three times more than all the soldiers killed in action in the Vietnam War and every external conflict since. Our children have a right to grow up in a caring and decent society that protects their right to live and learn in safety. That right must take precedence over anyones right to own assault weapons or high capacity magazines that have nothing to do with self-defense or hunting and have no place in the hands of non-military and non-law enforcement personnel. Without these weapons of war how many would be alive today? How many Newtown or Aurora or Orlando victims would have survived?

Senator Murphy said while paying tribute to Sandy Hook victims teacher Anne Marie Murphy and 6-year-old Dylan Hockley before ending his filibuster at 2:11 a.m. this morning: It doesnt take courage to stand here on the floor of the United States Senate for two hours or six hours or 14 hours. It takes courage to look into the eye of a shooter and instead of running, wrapping your arms around a six-year-old boy and accepting death as a trade for just a tiny little-itty piece of increased peace of mind for a little boy under your charge. Senator Murphy then asked his colleagues a question we should all ask our elected officials in the upcoming days: If Anne Marie Murphy could do that, then ask yourself: What can you do to make sure that Orlando or Sandy Hook never happens again?

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Unless we want to give up and agree that the only way to survive our nations gun violence crisis, which goes on and on and on in this land of ours, is for every adult, teenager, and child in America to own a gun, we need to provide common sense safety solutions like a No Buy List, universal background checks, and a ban on assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines  now. Our children are afraid for their friends, their families, and themselves. And this needs to change. We all need to stand up until we are heard and laws are changed. Contact your Senators right now to urge them to support these common sense safety solutions all of us so desperately need. Please act now.
When it was first designated 10 years ago, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands was the world's largest marine reserve. Since then, the sanctuary has been eclipsed in size nine times by new protected areas. Last year was a landmark in ocean conservation history as countries around the world safeguarded or committed to protect more than 965,000 square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) of critical ocean habitat.

This year, native Hawaiian groups are calling on the U.S. to expand Papahanaumokuakea from 140,000 square miles (363,000 square kilometers) to 625,507 square miles (1.62 million square kilometers)--an area almost four times the size of California--an expansion that would once again make Papahanaumokuakea the biggest marine reserve in the world.



(Photograph by David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton)

If President Barack Obama heeds the calls, he'd be following in the footsteps of six previous presidents--including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush--who have protected areas of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

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A larger Papahanaumokuakea would add protections to key ecosystems, including more open ocean waters, deep-sea habitats, and offshore seamounts (underwater mountains). The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the waters around them are home to more than 7,000 species of marine life. Scientific expeditions to these islands continue to yield the discovery of several new species of fish, invertebrates, and algae. And some areas covered by the proposed expansion are populated exclusively by species found nowhere else on Earth, scientists say, including a black coral, the world's oldest known living organism--which started growing 4,265 years ago, around the same time the ancient Egyptians were building their pyramids.

The string of islands and atolls that run northwest from Nihoa, a 170-acre islet about 160 miles northwest of Kauai, also host one of the largest groupings of tropical seabirds in the world--14 million birds from 22 species--5.5 million of which breed in the area annually. Scientists say that 11 of those species are vulnerable to extinction and that broadening Papahanaumokuakea would provide critical protection of their breeding, nesting, and nurturing sites.

To many Hawaiians, Papahanaumokuakea is a sacred area, the source of all life and where the spirits return after their earthly hosts die. In the Hawaiian view of the universe, humans appeared after islands, waters, flora, and fauna, and it is therefore our responsibility to protect these resources.



(Photograph by David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton)

Hawaiians also use this uninhabited region to carry on the ancient practice of voyaging, in which crews on traditional sailing canoes use a technique called way finding to navigate the ocean by observing the sun, moon, stars, and natural environment.

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A new wave of Hawaiians is following these traditions, which include marking the sightings of migratory seabirds, leaping fish, and areas where marine life or birds are especially numerous. Sustaining such practices and knowledge depends on a healthy ecosystem.

The call to protect these practices by expanding Papahanaumokuakea started earlier this year with a letter to President Obama signed by seven prominent Hawaiians, including William Aila, deputy director of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, and Nainoa Thompson, a master navigator and president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

A broader group including lawmakers, mayors, city councils, traditional fishermen, veterans, and conservationists is also urging monument expansion. The group calls itself the Puuhonua Coalition, using a Native Hawaiian word that means a place of sanctuary. Not coincidentally, Puuhonua is the word that the late Louis "Buzzy" Agard, a locally renowned environmentalist and respected elder, used to describe his hopes for what is now Papahanaumokuakea.

The group started collecting letters and petitions in support of the expansion in April. A petition started by surfer, photographer, and shark attack survivor Mike Coots gathered more than 40,000 signatures from around the world in just one month. More than 100,000 letters and petitions have been collected so far.

The case for expansion is buttressed by the steady increase in reserves worldwide since Papahanaumokuakea was established on June 15, 2006. Chile, Kiribati, New Zealand, Palau, and the U.K. have announced sanctuaries, fully protecting 2 percent of the world's oceans.

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While that's encouraging, it's not nearly enough, according to many marine scientists who strongly believe it is necessary to protect a representative 30 percent of the world's ocean if we are to safeguard biodiversity and support jobs in various sectors.

Fully protected marine reserves convey benefits beyond their boundaries because marine life moves in and out of these protected areas to feed, breed, and otherwise maintain balance in the oceanic web of life. By expanding Papahanaumokuakea, President Obama can lock in those benefits for one major area and prompt other world leaders to start dreaming even bigger.
As horrific as the shooting at The Pulse in Orlando was, and it was absolutely horrific, some of the comments being made by religious leaders in its aftermath are even more frightening. Yes, the sentiments expressed in the name of religion by fundamentalist ministers may have been rare, but the fact that they exist at all should give us pause.

Rachel Maddow, on her show Tuesday evening (14 June 2016), highlighted two of the most extreme cases imaginable. The first were comments from Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California. Just hours after the mass carnage in Orlando, Jimenez preached a sermon entitled "The Christian Response to the Orlando Murders." During the sermon he asked: "Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?" He went on to answer his own question by saying, "Um no, I think that's great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight."

Not content to stop there, Jimenez went even further: "The tragedy is that more of them didn't die. I'm kind of upset that he didn't finish the job."

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This hateful message was echoed by the words of Pastor Steven Anderson from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Anderson claimed that there was both good news and bad news arising from the Orlando massacre. "The good news is that there's 50 less pedophiles in this world because these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles. That's who was the victim here. The Bible says that homosexuals should be put to death in Leviticus 20:13.... The bad news is that a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive."

Let's ignore the completely baseless assertion that both Jimenez and Anderson made that gays and lesbians are more likely to be pedophiles than are straight individuals. And let's ignore their factually incorrect claim that all of those who died were either gay or lesbian.

Instead, let's focus just for a minute on their belief that we should celebrate the violent deaths of gay and lesbian human beings because their reading of the Bible says it should be so. Leviticus is a fascinating portion of the Bible and it provides penalties for at least 76 separate acts, many of which "require" the death penalty.

Do Jimenez and Anderson really advocate that if a man has sex with his neighbor's wife, both should be put to death (20:10)? Or that capital punishment is the appropriate punishment for cursing either of ones parents (20:9)? Or that a blasphemer should be stoned to death (24:16)?

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Do they believe it imperative that people obey the orders set forth in Leviticus making it improper to cross-breed animals, to plant more than one type of crop in a field and to wear clothing woven from more than one material (19:19)?

Of course they don't believe all of these things. Like so many fundamentalist preachers, they seem comfortable picking and choosing which parts of the Bible they opt to read literally, which parts they read with a more nuanced eye and which parts they simply ignore.

Behavior of this type, behavior perhaps best described as hypocrisy, is both self-serving and gives religion a bad name. Yet, there is very good reason to believe that the vast majority of religious leaders, leaders from the vast array of the faiths present in the world, don't practice hypocrisy of this sort.

The more than 14,000 religious leaders in the United States who are members of The Clergy Letter Project recognize this point and turn to religious texts for reasons other than legal or scientific guidance. These religious leaders recognize the value of all religions and, more importantly, recognize the value inherent in all human beings.

These religious leaders are unwilling to pick sentences and phrases from their sacred texts to condemn others. Rather they believe that life is precious and should be celebrated, that diversity can enrich us rather than divide us.

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The Clergy Letter Project, as it has done previously when it condemned Islamophobia, is taking a stand against homophobia. Homophobia is wrong, it is divisive and it is both demeaning and hateful. It is particularly unsettling when the language of religion is used to promote such odious and harmful behavior.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on June 14, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

We live in troubling, sometimes terrifying, times. The number of mass shootings this country has experienced in recent years has been such a horrendous and tragic thing, and so has the violence and hatred all over the world. But what is most scary of all is the reaction of some of our politicians and their followers. I am, of course, speaking of Donald Trump and his angry devotees: they apparently believe that all the members of a religion should be blamed and penalized for the actions of a tiny number of sick, violent people who claim to follow that religion.



Donald Trump is a small-minded, egomaniacal, dangerously unstable, racist, fascist thug. But scarier still is what terrorists and foreign dictators will do to take advantage of such a man's knee-jerk temperament if he is president of the United States. We would live in a country where hate and violence would keep ratcheting up and become the everyday norm instead of the exception, both here and around the world. We cannot afford to have this unstable and nasty man be our president.



That's why Democratic Party unity at this moment in history is so damn important. But it needs to be the right kind of unity, the kind that both wings of the party take seriously, not just the Bernie wing. We need a unity that motivates activists and disappointed Bernie voters to be involved in this election and the fight against Trump.



For those D.C. establishment types who want to write off the #FeelTheBern movement as an irritating aberration comfortably dispensed with, you aren't getting it. And I say that as a longtime beltway Democrat who came to town with the Clintons in 1992, and was neutral in the primary. The overthrow of the Republican establishment and the surprising endurance of the Bernie movement in the Democratic Party is a sure sign that Americans are eager for some big political change. Party leaders should not ignore this challenge and act as if everything is business as usual. Big change is coming. We should embrace it and do everything in our power to make sure that change is not driven by a Trumpian movement full of racism and ugliness.



So before going any further in analyzing things, let's congratulate that cranky old socialist with the wild hair for shaking things up and raising the issues that needed to be raised. In spite of being an unknown to most of the country, a profoundly unconventional candidate who embraced an unpopular label and made it acceptable in American politics, a candidate with hardly any endorsements or institutional support or donor class aid, Bernie shook up a political party he had never even been a member of until he entered the race. In spite of his age, he spoke for a younger generation. Bernie deserves enormous praise, credit, and -- most importantly -- respect from Hillary Clinton and her campaign.



The best way to assure Democratic victory in November, and a successful Clinton presidency, is to embrace the heart and soul of Bernie's message and platform: to challenge the wealth and power that dominate our economy and democracy. Democrats should not be focused right now on lecturing Bernie to get out. He has plenty of time to do that in his own way and on his own timeline. Instead, we should all be thanking him for his strong campaign that inspired millions of people who had felt disconnected and alienated from politics.

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The party platform should be negotiated in a way that makes Bernie's people feel good about the language (which I think, by the way, is happening); the vice-presidential pick should be someone who gets Bernie's supporters fired up for the tough campaign ahead; and Hillary should, as I have written before, embrace her inner Bernie and be fiery about speaking truth to power. In order to beat Trump, we are going to need the enthusiastic support of the Bernie movement, especially the young people he inspired. We will need their help as volunteers, their passion on social media, their online contributions, and yes, we will need their votes. The Clinton campaign won't get those votes by trying to force Bernie and his supporters to their knees. Hillary needs to make clear that Bernie's cause and passion is her own.



To my friends in the Bernie movement: I am so proud of you and I respect you enormously for fighting so hard to change America. But I also want to say this: any theory of change that involves letting Donald Trump become elected because Hillary isn't good enough is a deeply flawed theory, utterly unsupported by history. I am old enough to remember how disappointed I was when Teddy Kennedy didn't win the primary against Carter in 1980, and the argument being made afterward that if Reagan were elected, things would become so bad under him that the country would swing to the left four years later. It sure didn't work out that way.

Our country has been so much worse off economically, for two generations, as a result. I also remember the argument being made in 2000 that Gore was no different than Bush. The people who argued that were dead wrong, and we got eight more years of radically worsening climate change, a disastrous war in Iraq, the nightmare of Katrina, and the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression as a result. And as bad as Reagan and Bush were, Trump -- racist, violent, nasty Trump -- will be far worse than anything we saw from them.



The way you make progressive change in this country is to elect people who progressives have some leverage over. Tax increases on the wealthy in 1993 and 2013, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 20 million more Americans getting health insurance, Family and Medical Leave, DACA, increases in the minimum wage, more restrictions on greenhouse gases, and dozens of other good changes in policy that happened in the last quarter century were only possible because the progressive movement had some amount of leverage over Presidents Clinton and Obama and Democrats in Congress. What leverage would we have over a President Trump and a rightwing Republican Congress? Almost none. We would be fighting one desperate, defensive battle after another.



This is the kind of man Donald Trump is:



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U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends the National Rifle Association's NRA-ILA Leadership Forum during their annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S., May 20, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein

Back in May when the NRA endorsed Trump at their annual meeting, I said I wasn't sure that either side gained that much by an endorsement that in the past never occurred until nearly the end of the presidential campaign. And while I don't like to indulge in Trump-like 'I told you so's,' thanks to the terrible night in Orlando, it's beginning to look like the Trump-NRA partnership may be more of a millstone than a milestone for both sides.

As soon as it came out that the shooter had not only pledged fealty to ISIS during the attack, but had been interviewed by the FBI, Trump mounted his 'we have to fix this, we have to fix that' horse and basically supported denying terror 'suspects,' no matter how suspect, access to guns.

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Taking away gun access to anyone other than a convicted felon, habitual drug user, crazy person or fugitive (in other words, the 'prohibited' categories used to deny 4473 transactions by the FBI,) is an absolute no-no when it comes to Gun-nut Nation, in particular the NRA. The closest the NRA will come to any degree of compromise on this issue is their support of a bill introduced by an NRA Senatorial puppet, John Cornyn (R-TX), which basically says that someone who is on the Terror Watch List must wait three days to get a gun, during which time either a decision is made to deny the transfer or the gun walks out of the store.

This is the same procedure which is currently in place with FBI-NICS when a gun purchaser may or may not actually fall into a 4473 'prohibited category' and the FBI needs additional time to decide which way the decision should go. And the overwhelming number of these three-day delays are ultimately approved simply because the information needed by the FBI to make a final determination simply isn't there. Cornyn's bill mandates a three-day delay window, but since it really doesn't create any kind of mechanism for figuring out whether someone on the No-Fly List or Terrorist Watch List might be a threat if he could get a gun, the bill doesn't change anything at all. Which is why the NRA supports the measure, because they love gun-control laws that don't do anything to control firearms access at all.

Now here comes Trump, who no matter what issues he grabs, immediately becomes the veritable bull in a china shop, and invariably hurts himself more than he helps. He attacked a Federal judge whose parents, not him, were from Mexico, and his support among Hispanics, if he had any support, disappeared. He told LGBT that he was their 'best friend,' because if they can scratch up the $100,000 membership fee they can join his Palm Beach club. And what he got for that bit of comic relief was a ringing denunciation from the Christian Rght, whose support for Trump stands right now at 62 percent, and by the way, these same voters supported Romney to the tune of 79 percent.

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But running alongside their newly endorsed candidate is even more problematic for the NRA. They don't have to worry about the liberals, they'll thrive on that until the cows come home. It's the chickens that could come home to roost from the Right if Fairfax appears to be bending, because it wouldn't be the first time that other gun-owning organizations challenged the NRA.

Back in 2014, a bunch of Gun Crazies walked into a Chili's with their ARs and AKs, the NRA chastised them for their 'weird' behavior, and then quickly issued an apology when the emails and phone calls started rolling in. Take a look at comments made by Larry Pratt, who happens to head something called Gun Owners of America, who has also tangled with the NRA. He makes Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox sound absolutely benign.
Trump may have a mental disorder ("Trump's Mental Disorder-It's Time The Media Investigates"; McAdams, "The Mind of Donald Trump"), though Hillary only tells us he is "temperamentally unfit" to be president.

The media refuses to recognize Trump's possible disorder and, instead, uses synonyms or adjectives to describe his daily offerings, such as, he doesn't get it; he doesn't understand; he knows better; it's his strategies like telling Republicans to keep quiet and he will do it alone; he does not understand; the press is racist, not him; he will build a wall across our southern border; President Obama is complicit in terrorism in what occurred in Orlando; jurists of Mexican, Muslim heritage, or even women on the bench cannot be fair and impartial to him and his positions; instructing his campaign to refuse press credentials for the Washington Post; his campaign also talking about a Trump media empire; telling us it is none of our business what is in his tax returns; and not letting any of the billion+ Muslims worldwide into our country. This list continues to grow daily despite its common denominators of being disgusting, dangerous and yet at the same time delusional. As columnist Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune has written (Perspective, "Why people vote for Trump-The enduring appeal of false hopes" (June 16, 2016, p. 17)), "Even when he's [Trump] reading prepared speeches, they consist of clouds of verbal smoke."

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But more incredulous is that Trump supporters believe his behavior does not fall in line with the worst of the world's leaders. Examples include Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator and founder of fascism; Adolph Hitler who was responsible for the murder of millions; and Muammar al-Gaddafi, the Libyan revolutionary ruling by his own decree, nationalizing the oil industry and creating sharia as the basis for the legal system in Libya. Each was despicable in his own way(s) that history has detailed in great measure in countless words, books, stories and headlines over the decades. History has given us other despots that have ruled similarly throughout the world. But each arose to power based on stoking fears of the populace; lies; mistruths; half-truths; the importance of self and self-expression rather than country; and controlling what the electorate receives through a free press.

And we can't forget the actions of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to the fears that he stoked of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside our government and elsewhere. Look at the lives and careers his actions ruined. Sounds awfully familiar now that Trump is suggesting the consideration of racial profiling.

We are now on the precipice of adding Donald J. Trump to all this lineage... unless either the Republican Party or, more likely, the American electorate come November's elections does something about him never rising to leadership of the free world.

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While imposed by the 1942 order of FDR after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the title to this piece also references the Japanese internment camps during World War II, the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the interior of the country. This affected roughly 110,000 to 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry that lived on the Pacific coast, 62% of which were United States citizens. There was even an admission (made in 2007) that the U.S. census Bureau aided in the internment by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. Finding out decades later, history now tells us the internment was considered more the result of racism than any security risk posed by Japanese Americans. [One of these individuals as a child was actor George Takei of Star Trek fame (Sulu)]. All this sounds quite familiar in today's terms, just substitute what Trump is saying about Muslim Americans and Muslims worldwide for those whose heritage was Japanese in the 1940s. Must we not learn from history to never repeat it?

Yet, the media has given short shrift to the underpinnings of this dangerous elixir -- a possible mental disorder combined with unwarranted self-indulgence, incompetence, tyrannical behavior, and incomprehensible-and without foundation-preaching called the Republican presumptive presidential nominee. It is time once and for all to call out the media, and for the media to then report, that Trump is inimical to a society and country built on immigrants and inclusiveness. Yes, to be sure, we must be observant, protective and vigilant of our freedoms and security inside the shores bounding our country. But we don't do it with racism, bigotry and self-worth without any credibility. Trump, however, now stands to align himself with those leaders called or shown to have been unfit to lead in countries outside our borders.

A critical investigation into Trump by the media by comparing him to those vicious rulers that have gone before -- as a measuring stick -- is necessary and prudent if Americans are to be educated and informed before election day. We are all tired of the Media, as is true with Republican leadership, of going on bended knee to Trump without such a critical examination.

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I was twelve when I first learned about homosexuality.

My family was on vacation in Provincetown, Massachusetts; we were visiting my uncles, Joel and Ray. The thing is, only Joel was a blood relation to my father.

In Provincetown, a Gay Mecca during the summer months, I saw men holding hands with men and women holding hands with women. Suddenly the idea both Joel and Ray were my dad's brother didn't hold much weight.

So, homosexuality was explained to me, and that was that. I shrugged, and everyone went on with their life.

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Children are basically open-minded sponges waiting to be told what to think of the world around them. Since no one was telling me to stare, hate, or feel uncomfortable in Provincetown, I quickly surmised everything must be OK. The situation didn't seem to be doing anyone or anything any harm, it was just people acting in a way I wasn't overly familiar with.

Everywhere I looked, I saw acceptance. No one stared, no one judged, no one pointed fingers or accused. Everyone walked around as if the situation were entirely normal.

Which, in Provincetown, it was.

Which, in life, it should be.

Cut to my adult life.

I have a very stupid... I guess I'll call him "friend," although "acquaintance" or "someone I tolerate" might be more appropriate. He once asked quite angrily, "What if my son sees some man wearing a dress? How am I supposed to explain that?"

All I could think was, "Did you have to explain the first black person they saw?"

If he did, I imagine the conversation would be, "Well, some people are white, some are black, and there are a multitude of ethnicities across the planet."

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Or, to take that one further: some men wear dresses. Big whoop. Some men like men, most men like women. Some women like women.

It really is that simple. Prejudice has to be taught; it is not an inherent condition.

Which means my stupid friend was exposing his own insecurities, not actually worrying about his child.

Which brings me to my point: following the Orlando massacre, everyone is talking about gun control, ISIS, homophobia, and radical Islam. Why is no one talking about Omar Mateen's parents?

One week prior to the Orlando carnage, the Internet was aflame with outrage over rapist Brock Turner's parents.

(Rightfully so, I might add.)

Why isn't the same scrutiny happening here? It's becoming fairly obvious Omar Mateen might have been a closeted homosexual, someone who couldn't find acceptance at home or in his community. As one of my friends put it, "It was easier for him to be branded a member of ISIS than gay."

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Omar's father, Mir Seddique, said Omar "saw two men kissing and got very angry."

The only thing that would fuel such anger is a lifetime of being told it is wrong to be homosexual. That comes from upbringing. It could come from religion, or general familial intolerance.

So what made Omar angry about two men kissing? The fact they were comfortable enough to express their love freely while he could not? Maybe a fantasy that they were accepted by their families, where he would not be? The knowledge he couldn't go to his father, Mir Seddique Mateen, and discuss sexual orientation with him?

While those questions are speculation, there is absolutely a direct connection between homophobia and his childhood. As stated: children are not inherently bigoted, it has to be taught. Omar had to be raised under a roof of prejudice.

In an interview following the shooting, Mir Seddique said: "God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality, this is not for the servants."

That is a frightening, and telling, quote.

You cannot prevent someone from hearing racial or homophobic slurs, but you can teach kids to understand not to use them. You can (and should) raise your kids to love people no matter their race, religion, or orientation. If he had been brought up on a foundation of acceptance, Omar wouldn't have been filled with self-loathing. He wouldn't have been a clear-cut example of "We hate in others what we see in ourselves."

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Bad parenting was to blame for rapist Brock Turner, and poor parenting has to take the blame for a homosexual man so torn up by his orientation he had to lash out in anger.

If Omar's parents had told him: "We will love you no matter who you love," forty-nine innocent people would still be alive.
By Elizabeth Renter

Despite what you've read, you and other millennials aren't all that unique. You'll have to deal with many of the same financial decisions younger adults have been facing for decades, even if you're making some of those decisions -- like starting a family -- a little later. And like generations of young adults before you, you are newcomers to term life insurance.

You might not need life insurance at all. If you have no dependents and money saved that could cover your funeral costs and any additional burdens your death might cause, you can go without. But if your death would put someone at a financial disadvantage, coverage is a very good idea.

You can't purchase life insurance as easily as you summon an Uber or text for a pizza delivery, but if you decide you need it, you can safeguard your assets and the people you care about with a little education, a little effort and surprisingly little money.

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1. Life insurance serves many purposes

If someone depends on you financially, there's a good chance you'd leave them in a bind if you died without a life insurance policy. Even if you don't have a spouse or children, you might share financial accounts with a loved one. Or, you might help care for a sick family member or contribute toward your family's housework and bills.

People buy life insurance to pay the costs of their deaths -- both immediate and long-term. It can:

Cover funeral and memorial costs.

Replace your income.

Help your loved ones hire people to provide services you provided.

Pay off mortgage, credit card, loan and other debts.

Pay your children's college tuition.

Leave an inheritance.

If you're wondering about student loan debt, the government forgives federally guaranteed student loans in the event of a borrower's death. Private loans might be another story: Some lenders offer a death discharge and others don't, so check with your lender.

2. Term life insurance is cheapest when you're young

At this age, you can buy a high-value term life insurance policy for less than a gym membership. A healthy, tobacco-free 25-year-old can purchase a 20-year, $500,000 term life policy for about $15 per month, according to NerdWallet's analysis of average life insurance rates. If you don't have big expenses to cover after you've died, like a mortgage or college education for children, you might not need $500,000. If you decide you need a lower amount, it will cost even less. Even if you're not in top shape, you can pay less than $25 per month.

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As you get older and your health risks increase, you'll pay more. Buying now locks in your rate for the length of your policy. If you're planning to have a family down the road and have no other urgent need for life insurance, you could wait so your policy is sure to last until your children are adults, or you could pay a bit more for a policy with a longer term. Both options will mean you pay a little bit more. A 20-year, $500,000 term life policy would only cost about $16 at age 35 or $30 by age 45, but will be close to $65 by age 55.



3. Getting a policy will not be instantaneous

Many life insurance companies haven't kept pace with technology and your do-it-yourself generation, according to NerdWallet life insurance expert Amy Danise. Some still don't offer online quotes and instead direct you to an agent -- very old school.

"People, and especially young adults, want to be able to purchase things quickly once they've made a buying decision, and get quick or instant product delivery," says Danise. "With most life insurance purchases, the application process can take several weeks and can involve answering the same questions over and over."

You can find online term life insurance quotes, but be prepared to follow your initial application with at least a few phone calls and a medical exam.

4. Life insurance isn't a one-size-fits-all solution

Your ideal life insurance policy probably isn't the same one that's right for your parents. Online tools like this one can help you nail down the best policy specifics given your needs. Base your coverage amount on the things you want your policy to pay for in the event of your death. The term -- or length of time it covers -- should be based on how long those costs will last.

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For example, if you don't have children and have no plans for them, you may be buying a policy to cover your funeral costs and debts. If you have a 30-year mortgage, it makes sense to purchase a life insurance policy that would be in place as long as you're responsible for that loan. Likewise, if you're purchasing a policy to care for your aging parents in the event of your death, the term would reflect how long they might be dependent on your assistance.

As you shop for your first life insurance policy, there's much to learn about this important part of long-term financial planning. Don't be afraid to ask questions as you look for the right plan -- it's a purchase you'll live with for years to come.
By Doug Frantz

There will never be enough development aid to solve all the problems in the poorest countries. If we are to lift the last 800 million people out of extreme poverty we will need to find new ways to mobilize resources beyond the traditional assistance from wealthy governments in the form of loans, grants and other concessions.

Government assistance remains vital. The billions of dollars donor countries pour into developing countries every year are critical both in terms of actual aid and as a catalyst for mobilizing private sector funds and underpinning the efforts of developing country governments and civil society. Yet there is a consensus that the role of development aid must adapt to changes in the geography of poverty and to the new lens of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Change is hard for many people - and organizations - to accept. This is particularly true when the waters are muddied by misunderstandings, even among well-meaning people, and when the stakes are so high. So it is essential to set the record straight on the changes taking place around development aid and the reasons for them.

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The global standard for measuring the financial help provided by donor countries to support development is Official Development Assistance. ODA, as it is called in development circles, has provided both an essential measure of the volume of assistance and a means for civil society and others to assess performance.

For more than 50 years, the task of keeping track of ODA and making it effective has been the province of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental agency comprised of 34 developed countries. Within the OECD, the work has been conducted by the organization's Development Assistance Committee.

In February, development and finance ministers from the countries that belong to this committee took a series of long overdue steps to improve the consistency of reporting on aid and strengthen development effectiveness. They addressed difficult issues such as the need to define more clearly the limited use of ODA for military expenditure and human rights, including the need to prevent sexual violence in fragile and conflict situations. And they took steps to clarify how ODA can be used to help refugees within the borders of donor nations.

Some non-governmental organizations deeply committed to development were alarmed. They worried that this would open up the use of ODA to pay the soaring costs of the millions of refugees who have made their way to Europe, or to finance military activity.

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In sum, a handful of well-intended organizations feared these changes would mean less money for the most vulnerable and marginalized people around the world. The concerns are misplaced. If they are allowed to persist and expand, the misinformation could undermine support for development aid at a time when public backing is needed desperately.

The most-debated change by the OECD committee involved the use of ODA to support certain peace and security operations. The rationale for the decisions made was straightforward: in limited circumstances, the military has a role to play, for instance by training partner military members to curb abuses, such as violence against women, or by improving the speed and effectiveness of responses to humanitarian crises. The change was driven by the recognition that failing to address these issues can make development harder - or impossible.

The new directive also spelled out that certain, very limited activities intended to prevent violent extremism, like education and research and building judicial capacity and rule of law, could also qualify as ODA.

Equally important to understanding the new rules is recognizing what did not change. Long-standing prohibitions against using development assistance to finance military equipment or promote the donor's security interests remain in place. Financing activities combatting terrorism is generally excluded from official assistance.

And there was no change to the rule that prevents the cost of hosting and processing refugees being counted as ODA beyond the first year of a refugee's stay. The committee understood the pressure that millions of refugees have placed on governments, but it stood firm against allowing aid to be used to pay the costs for longer than a year.

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Aid spent on refugees in host countries more than doubled in 2015 to $12 billion out of net ODA of $131.6 billion. Yet even with these refugee costs subtracted, ODA rose 1.7% in real terms from 2014.

The outcome of the conflicts driving migration and destabilizing economies will not be decided on the battlefield. The outcome will be determined in classrooms, workplaces, government offices and in the perceptions and beliefs of individual people.

Government assistance won't solve all of these problems. But delivered smartly, development assistance has a vital role to play in building a safer, more stable world. In order to fulfil that role, development assistance must evolve to turn today's challenges into tomorrow's opportunities.
by Emma Baccellieri



Democratic operative David Brock now runs CREW, the organization that has filed suit against 10 dark money groups. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)



Even with a tax status that says "social welfare group," a nonprofit organization's spending record can still reveal plenty of political activity.

Sometimes too much. Ten politically active nonprofits are the subject of new civil complaints filed with the IRS by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog group based in D.C. and run by Hillary Clinton ally David Brock. All 10 are 501(c)(4) organizations, a tax designation for "social welfare" nonprofits that aren't required to disclose their donors. And all 10, according to the complaints, violated rules that bar (c)(4) groups from devoting more than 50 percent of their resources to political activity.

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Nine of the 10 groups used their political spending to support Republican candidates in races for governorships, Senate seats and other offices. CREW also filed criminal complaints accusing six of the 10, calling on the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate whether the groups lied to the IRS.

Uncovering this duplicitous behavior can be difficult, noted Paul S. Ryan, deputy executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. Nonprofits are not required to file their Form 990s -- their tax paperwork -- until long after the spending in question has occurred. And with lax enforcement by the government and hazy definitions in the law, many groups appear to push the envelope when it comes to trying to influence elections.

"The whole reason we've seen an explosion of use and abuse of 501(c)(4) organizations is that they don't have to disclose where they're getting their money," Ryan said. "We're not seeing effective enforcement, so it's tough to know how much illegal activity's going on. But the sense is that there's a lot, and that the amount of illegal activity by 501(c)(4)s has been growing."

In December, OpenSecrets Blog analyzed the political activity of 24 nonprofit groups that exceeded this 50 percent spending limit between 2008 and 2013. The 10 nonprofits cited by CREW Wednesday appear to have engaged in many of the same spending practices as the groups we examined then.

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Some have used "attributable spending," which involves making grants to other nonprofits that then use the money for political activity. Many have sponsored "issue ads" that they classify as educational rather than political by virtue of the fact that they do not directly call on viewers to vote for a specific candidate -- though they often call out candidates by name and reference their track record on various subjects.

Most of the 10 groups are registered in states that haven't been the focus of their spending. For instance, the Legacy Foundation Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) based in Iowa that concentrated its spending on the Nebraska Senate race, benefiting Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and the Arizona gubernatorial race. The group spent more than $700,000 on these races, or 69 percent of its total spending. Similarly, the American Dream Initiative is based in Virginia, but the bulk of its outlays -- more than $500,000, or 83 percent of its total spent -- went to the Texas gubernatorial race. The name of the group's executive director might ring a bell: Dan Backer, the campaign finance lawyer behind the 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC Supreme Court decision.
Exactly 25 years ago, on June, 17, Poland and Germany signed Treaty of Good Neighbourship and Friendly Cooperation. It was a milestone for Polish-German relations, which for hundreds of years were very strained. It is a miracle, how the hostility changed into friendship and peaceful cooperation of two nations. Gdansk and its people took an important role in healing the wounds and building our common, better future in united Europe.

June 17, 1991. Prime Minister Jan K. Bielecki and Chancellor Helmut Kohl signing the Treaty

As a kid, I didn't like Germans. It was a very common attitude then in Poland. We all watched a TV series "Four tankmen and a dog". What today can be consider just as a pure pro-Soviet propaganda, was for us, boys growing up in the 70s., a fairy-tale about the adventures of WWII. And Poles indeed had reasons to hate Germans, just to mention 6 million Polish casualties of the war, or total destruction of many cities.

But hatred, no matter of reasons for it, is never a solution for the future. It leads only to more suffering and vicious circle of evil. The reconciliation between Poland and Germany is one of the most amazing, unique political processes that took place in the post-war Europe. It is the process we need to remind today, when so many people in so many countries forgot about the atrocities of war, calling for more divisions and isolation among nations.

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What began in 1965, required vision, leadership and courage of many great Poles and Germans. Against all the odds, in 1965 The Pastoral Letter of the Polish Bishops to their German Brothers was published. Just 20 years after we war ended, Polish bishops were brave enough to write "we forgive and ask for forgiveness". The society of Poland was shocked and Communist authorities of Poland reacted with anger and propaganda campaign. But the seed was sown for good and many people cared for it to bring us fruit. Here I would like also to mention Stanislaw Stomma, a liberal Catholic, independent Politician and visionary, who had engaged in relations with Germany as early as in 50s.

Another man I want to mention is late Burgermeister of Bremen Hans Koschnick. This great friend of Gdansk and Poland supported the reconciliation and engaged in building bridges among our nations very early. He was the one who in 1976 signed an agreement for cooperation of Gdansk and Bremen, first such a document signed after the WWII. My city was an area of competition between Germans and Poland for centuries and a place where WWII began, so it was a big step forward for both sides.

Kniefall von Warschau, Warsaw genuflection of Willy Brandt in 1970, was a groundbreaking gesture on the path to better relations, leading to great events at the end of 80s. and beginning of 90s. I remember great emotion in November 1989, when I heard about meeting of Tadeusz Mazowiecki (first Prime Minister of democratic Poland) and Chancellor Helmut Kohl for the mass of reconciliation in Krzyzowa. In this time of political turn, relations between Poland and Germany accelerated, leading directly to signing the Treaty of Good Neighbourship in 1991. On the Polish side it was signed by prime minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, a native of Gdansk.

Together we have done a great job for this 25 years. We started to understand each other, and our cooperation got closer than ever. Germany is our important friend in the European Union, both countries being important trade partners, people from both countries travelling, visiting, working, making friends regardless of borders and history. We can be really proud for what we achieved!

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The District of Columbia held the final primary of the year, which Hillary won by 57%, and a long year it was starting with Iowa on February 1st. Since the campaigns began in April of 2015 the media has often reported nonsense and skewed their coverage depending on the prevailing winds and what often appeared to be personal biases.



Democrats held 57 primaries and caucuses; Hillary Clinton won 34 and Bernie Sanders won 23. What the media failed to make clear throughout the process is for a Democratic candidate it is nearly impossible to get the needed delegates for nomination with only pledged delegates. They kept reporting on the size of the crowds attending some of Senator Sanders' rallies as if that meant he was winning.



The media hyped what Senator Sanders called his 'revolution' without bothering to research if it was actually happening. A simple look at voting patterns and comparisons to the last Democratic contested primaries in 2008 would have put an end to that line of inaccurate reporting. Senator Sanders didn't bring out a whole slew of additional new voters.



The total number of people who voted in Democratic contests in 2016 was 27,834,835. Clinton got 15,805,136 and Sanders 12,029,699 so Clinton had nearly 4 million more votes than Sanders. Compare that to the Clinton/Obama contest in 2008 when the total votes cast were 35,915,549 split evenly with about 18 million each. Clearly Sanders didn't excite more voters to come out. One could even make the case many Hillary voters stayed home because after Super Tuesday in March, even if the media didn't acknowledge it, they understood Hillary would be the nominee.

If there was a 'revolution' it was Hillary's as many would consider her being the first woman in 240 years to be the nominee of a major political party in the United States and the odds-on favorite to be our 45th President the real revolution. Let us not forget we still can't pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) putting women into the Constitution. Clinton's win would bring smiles to the faces of those women who began the 'revolution' as suffragettes with the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls and continued it with strong women like Shirley Chisholm, Geraldine Ferraro and Bella Abzug.

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The media continuously reported there was no passion for Hillary assuming 16 million who voted for her did so without passion. Well they got my vote wrong as it was done with total passion for Hillary and I know many of the 16 million others felt the same.

Looking back 2008 was an even harsher campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than this year's between Sanders and Clinton. The attacks were stronger and in some cases more personal. But the difference is apparent in how this year's campaign is ending. On June 7, 2008 after a tough campaign Hillary Clinton spoke to her supporters making a graceful exit from the primaries and giving her full endorsement to Barack Obama including asking her supporters to do the same. She then campaigned her heart out for him.

So far this year we aren't seeing anything like it from Bernie Sanders. He continues to suggest he has led a revolution without any proof he has. On the afternoon of his losing the final primary he sounded like an angry old man repeating his stump speech and attacking the Democratic Party of which he isn't even a member. He gave no indication at all were it not for the Democratic Party he couldn't have run. They opened their doors and their voter files to him. It was a performance totally lacking in grace.

It is not the issues he talks about aren't valid but as so many have said it's not enough to recite a litany of problems without having any real solutions to solving them. A NY Times columnist said it best when suggesting Sanders is the Windows 95 of politicians. As of the end of the campaign he is the past and others will be responsible for finding the solutions for the 21st Century to the problems he brings up.

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I'm tired of being a target.

According to Merriam-Webster, a target is "a place, thing, or person at which an attack is aimed." On Sunday, more than 300 people were the target of a terrorist attack by a religious fundamentalist in the worst mass shooting in American history.

He took his hate out on an LGBTQ nightclub, and he certainly wasn't the first to do so. New Orleans, 1973, comes to mind for some, though I'm thinking something more recent - like last month.

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In May, North Carolina state leaders signed legislation to "protect" children from "molesters" - aka transgender people. Ted Cruz has said letting transgender students have equality in schools is "inflicting" them on other people.

Attacking us as an infliction on society, deviants to be feared: These words and deeds make me and every other transgender person a target. Screw Donald Trump. He wants me to be afraid of Muslims? Cruz and his kind have caused more devastation for transgender people in this country than ISIS ever has, even now.

The Orlando shooter is dead; Cruz lives on.

Even on my best days I feel as if the rest of the world has their sights on me, and perhaps rightly so. I am statistically quite the aberration - that's just math. We are biologically programed to notice things that are different than the norm. That's how gazelles keep from getting eaten by the lions.

It happens every day, and part of me has gotten used to it, I guess. Stares at the park when my daughter calls me "Daddy" from the swings. Second glances when they see that the face at the drive-thru pick-up window doesn't match the voice that ordered at the speaker. Their eyelids tightening just a bit when the male name on my credit card doesn't match the female one I made the reservation with.

In this sense, I am a target, though I'd be lying if I said I usually thought of it that way. I came to accept long ago that I will always be the subject of others' questions unasked yet still internally answered in their head. A target because I am different and obviously so.

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Logically, I know most of them do not hate me. There are worse things than being a target for people's never-ending curiosity. A student and a teacher, both in spirit and in title, I know that education is what moves us forward.

Cruz does not want to be educated - and he is not alone.

Donald Trump calls Mexicans "rapists" and people applaud. Mike Huckabee wants Islamic mosques monitored for possible terrorist activity and people applaud. Spewing hate and ignorance, they prey on the weak and the powerless to feed their followers.

For it's not just that the governor of North Carolina wants children to be protected from molesters - he wants to them to be protected from ME. A man and now woman that has spent three decades of my life working with and defending children, and because I've chosen to transition I'm suddenly not fit to be near children.

Screw you, Governor McCrory. I've done more for the youth of this country than you ever will.



But this is what makes me wonder if I am a target. The goddamn governor of North Carolina wants kids to be afraid of me. He wants they and their parents to see me coming and wonder if I'm going to molest them. Do they?

Those people that stare at me, the ones with questions behind their eyes: Which ones process my existence as yet another difference in the sea of humanity? And which ones believe the hate coming from the likes of Trump, Cruz and Huckabee?

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Muslims? Catholics? Baptists? No, it's not that simple. I know too many people of faith that have kept theirs with me. Although I guess in some ways that does make it simple: I don't know who I can trust - none of us do.

Every damn person I meet for the first time I have to wonder if they're just curious, or if they're truly taking aim at me metaphorically - or literally. It's a terrible way to live, whether you're transgender or not.

For this is about far more than just being transgender: It's about everyone who's been a target for all the demagogues and hate-mongers that want to justify their ignorance with manufactured fear. Mexicans, Muslims, anyone that's different. So many of us across the country: labeled, pilloried, targeted - and Sunday shot - for the crime of being different.

According to the Department of Justice, there are more than a quarter-million hate crimes in America every year. Every day nearly 700 people across this country are attacked or brutalized because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.

Their blood, the blood of every human being shot in Orlando is on Cruz and Trump's hands, as it is everyone that supports their brand of hate. They made us a target.

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They are the ones that make - indeed want to make - transgender people, minorities, and anyone who is different afraid to leave their home. All of us, forced to wonder if this will be the time the slander, lies, and hate and actually lead to violence.

Maybe this is the arrogance of my old straight, white male privilege leaking out, but I had that right - and I want it back.

And I plan to take it.

Last week I was feeling tired - and today I still am. Today I am also feeling angry - and tomorrow I still will be. But what I will not be - what I will never be again - is scared.

Last week my odds of dying in a terrorist attack were one in 20 million, and today they still are. I will not be afraid of a lunatic with a gun, nor of those that use hate and lies, instead.

I chose not to be scared. But it's more than that; I will not be silent, any longer.

On my very best days I am what I aspire to be: funny, erudite, poignant, and all those other things that people tell me I am. I want to be that woman, because that woman is what has gotten me this far and I am loathe to lose her.

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But I will no longer try to justify my existence to those that who would deny it to me. I am tired of people's suppositions, hate and and ignorance being submitted for fact.

I will never pick up a gun. I hate them; Columbine, Newtown and now Orlando have only made that loathing more certain. But there are other ways to fight, other ways to retaliate against those who would conspire to take my humanity from me.

Whether you want to call it the mightiness of the pen, or consider Mark Twain, who advised never to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel, the simple truth is this: I will not be a target.
A protestor raises a placard as people gather at Federal Square to show their solidarity with the Orlando shooting victims, in Melbourne on June 16, 2016.The assault, which left 50 people dead including the shooter, is the worst mass shooting in modern US history, and has triggered an outpouring of grief but also defiance in the gay and lesbian community in the United States and around the world. / AFP / SAEED KHAN (Photo credit should read SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

There is a culture of hatred in our midst, targeting our LGBT community. It is not some remnant of a generation soon to pass, nor merely a product of the fringe. To some degree, it is born in the halls of our own offices of government offices, and lauded by some of our own so-called leaders.

Westboro Baptist Church "leaders" have announced that they are coming to our City Beautiful, Orlando, to "protest" at the funerals of our friends and neighbors whom we lost in the terror attack/hate crime on our LGBT community at Pulse. But even their demented cries of "God hates f****" won't be as loud as the deafening silence against such hatred exhibited by so many elected officials, and even worse, that barely-audible sound of pen on paper signing hatred into law.

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Florida Governor Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Senator Marco Rubio have spoken out against mass murder perpetrated on the LGBT community this weekend, though often conveniently excluding the LGBT detail. But they have launched legal attacks themselves against this community for years now. They have not apologized, and they have not committed to do better. They have cried crocodile tears for the cameras. That's all.

A few months ago, Rick Scott removed protection from discrimination for LGBT foster youth in Florida. Pam Bondi wasted $500,000 of our tax dollars fighting tooth and nail to stop marriage equality from coming to Florida -- all the way to the Supreme Court. Marco Rubio dismissed same-sex couples who wanted to start a family as a "social experiment," and fought against their right to foster children in our state.

They have attempted to normalize, and even mandate, discrimination against the LGBT community. Now they ask how a gay nightclub could be under attack, how such a horrific hate crime could happen in our home state. They should be asking who created this culture of hatred, now that more than 100 innocent people, their friends, their families, and our entire community, must pay the hefty price.

I am heartbroken. But I am also furious -- not only about what has happened on Sunday morning, but about what has happened continuously to an innocent, victimized group of decent people throughout the years. I am frustrated at a society that makes members of my own staff nervous to hold their same-sex partners' hands in public, for fear they could be shamed, hurt, or even killed. (None of them will ever be able to forget that the killer's father suggested that the killer's action was triggered by seeing two men showing affection in a public place.) I am frustrated at right-wing media who ask questions like "was it a terrorist attack OR a hate crime?" or "why hasn't the President launched [yet another] attack against ISIS?" rather than reporting on the hatred and discrimination against gays and lesbians that still thrives.

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Young or old, male or female, black or white, English-speaking or Spanish-speaking, gay or straight, WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS. Whatever your religion, whatever your age, we have to put hatred and discrimination in the rear-view mirror. It has no more place in the 21st century than slavery, or cannibalism. It's the year 2016. Enough, already.

Today, I ask everyone to acknowledge that this wasn't just an attack on my home, on our beautiful city of Orlando. This was an attack on our LGBT community. Forty-nine people were murdered for no reason other than their sexual orientation. The fundamental benefit of every civilized society is a sense of personal safety. Our LGBT friends deserve that as much as anyone else. We must organize against hatred and defeat it -- and anyone who would perpetuate it.

NO H8.

Courage,
By Anonymous

This post originally appeared on Revelist.

Trigger warning: This essay contains graphic imagery of rape and abuse.

I had just turned 21 when he raped me. I had a very fulfilling social life as a college junior, writer and editor, scholar, and member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. I brought smiles to those who knew me -- and he still raped me.

I met him at a party in March 2013. We locked eyes, and it felt like we'd known each other forever. He had a familiar swag, like someone I would meet back home in Atlanta. I'd adjusted really well to life in North Carolina, but I still embraced any thing that reminded me of home.

That night, we danced and exchanged numbers before we went our separate ways.

We began texting and talking on the phone, and I learned a lot about him over the next few weeks. He'd moved to North Carolina in 2013 to start a new job. He had no family or friends in the area, but was a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

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He'd connected with some nearby fraternity brothers, which was how he ended up at the party where we met. I thought I'd found something special: He was a dad, funny, good to talk to, and very southern like me. After a few weeks, I decided to visit him in Asheville, N.C.

Driving over two hours alone to a place I'd never been before made me nervous, so I gave my sorority sister his full name and address. Then I took off, driving to the North Carolina and Tennessee border to see a guy I'd met twice and thought I'd built a connection with. I couldn't have been further from the truth.

I arrived late at night, so we went to sleep soon after I got there. I asked him to keep his distance while we slept, and he did. We hung out the next day, and learned more about each other. He had some sexist beliefs, like thinking women shouldn't hold leadership positions, especially in church.

As a burgeoning feminist, I was even more surprised that his mother, a single mother, told him that women aren't meant to be a part of the clergy or lead based on her interpretation of a scripture.

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His beliefs about a woman's 'place' should've been a sign. But being naive, I thought that there had to be more to him than his nonsensical beliefs. After dinner, we went back to his place and talked more. Time flew by, and I realized I'd stayed too late and wouldn't have enough daylight to safely drive two hours.

Against my better judgment, I decided to stay the night and leave early in the morning. I thought he'd stop when I said no like the night before. He didn't take no for an answer this time. I moved across the bed multiple times to get away from him, but he wouldn't relent. I pushed him away and asked him to stop.



He grabbed me and pinned me down instead. I knew what was coming, but I decided not to fight him because I didn't want to make myself a victim. I didn't cry because I didn't want him to know he's the reason for my tears. I didn't try to fight him off. He had already won, but I needed to keep some kind of power, even if was only over my display of emotions.

Ques, or members of the same fraternity as my rapist, often say "Running from it will not save you." I have no idea what this actually means, but it's always brought up in a sexually suggestive situation -- and it was all I could think of in that moment.

It hurt to have him inside me, but I couldn't move. I felt frozen seeing the face of someone who once reminded me of home putting me through a new kind of hell. I couldn't believe that he was doing this to me.

And then the humiliation got worse.

When he felt himself about to climax, he flipped me over and came on my back. He smiled and chuckled as he got out of the bed and handed me a towel to clean myself up. I had never felt so dirty in my life. I felt like one of those girls in cheap pornos that I would never tell anyone I've seen before. At least they agreed to that type of sex. He left me to clean up his mess like I wasn't worthy of chivalry -- or at the bare minimum, consent.



I didn't get much sleep after. How could I be laying next to someone like this? I darted out of his apartment as soon as I saw the tiniest sliver of sunlight. When I returned to school, I stayed in my room for a week.

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I went to class, but I couldn't bring myself to be in any other space with other people. My roommate knew something was up, but thankfully she didn't pressure me to tell her. I just couldn't utter, "He raped me."

A list of questions kept running through my mind: Why did I go to his house? Why didn't I just leave when I planned to? Why did I stay when I realized he wasn't going to take my no? Why didn't I fight back? Did not fighting back make him think I was asking for it?

Who would believe me if I reported what happened? How would reporting it affect everything he's worked hard to attain? Who was I to ruin his life? How would this affect his daughter? I grew up without my dad around so could I live with knowing that I would be the reason that another little girl grew up without her dad?

These were the questions I asked myself for an entire week before I was able to tell someone what happened. These are the questions that I still ask myself to this day. I still have no answers, so while I eventually told my sorority sisters, I've never filed a report and I never will.



I can silently deal with the pain he's caused me, but this would ruin him publicly.

I didn't report my assault like the majority of rape victims. On average, only 33% of rapes are reported, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN).

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My attack also happened while I attended an HBCU, which may be an underlying reason why I didn't report my attack. Sexual assaults are less prevalent on the campuses of HBCUs but they do happen, according to a 2010 federal study conducted by RTI International.

Similarly, a BuzzFeed article published in January suggests that the familial environment and respectability politics at HBCUs keep female students from reporting their assaults. Staying silent is a way to protect the smaller percentage of Black men who also attend.

This notion was cemented when a Spelman student sparked a national conversation by anonymously speaking out against her Morehouse rapist. My thoughts, and I suspect that the thoughts of many other women who have been attacked while attending an HBCU, mirrored the words of Dr. Angela Amar, who told an NPR reporter, "It's like you don't want to turn in the 'brother' that's doing well."

I couldn't press charges against him and be the reason for his demise. I couldn't be the Delta who told on a Que. I couldn't stomach being the reason he lost his career and all that he had worked hard to get away from in Texas. Most importantly, I couldn't live with knowing that my allegations could force a little girl to grow up with her dad living freely.

I didn't even want to think about the possibility of his daughter traveling to a prison to see him. I convinced myself that I kept quiet for her.

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But, I'll admit that it's hard to accept that the men -- Morehouse men for Spelman sisters and Omegas for Deltas -- in our community who swear to support and protect us are the ones we need protecting from.

The case of an unnamed woman raped behind a dumpster near Stanford University took me back to that moment three years ago. I completely understand the mental strife an assault causes. Fortunately, she pursued criminal charges against her attacker.

She persevered, even with the odds stacked against her getting justice. Less than 1% of rapists are convicted and incarcerated, according to RAINN; Brock Turner will soon join that ridiculous club, since he'll only serve three months of a six month sentence.

Her letter to Turner reminded me of my attack and the damage it caused to my sense of worthiness. I allowed my experience to silence me, but she mustered the strength to use her voice -- and now I'm using mine.

My rapist didn't ruin my life but he caused great damage. His attack made me question so many things -- deciding to go to college out of state, joining a sorority against my grandmother's wishes, potentially bringing aspiring Deltas into Greek life knowing they might meet the same fate, studying hard and partying harder, 'roadtripping' to those parties and deserving this because my mother and two older sisters were raped too.

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I wish I could go back and change some of my decisions but I can't. I can only remind myself that my rape doesn't define me and try daily to convince myself, and the world, that I am worthy of pure love always, all ways.

___________________
Rainbow flag against sky during gay pride parade



Demonizing minorities is no response to tragedy.

The Capital Pride festival proceeded Sunday on Pennsylvania Avenue near the U.S. Capitol in the shadow of hate-fueled violence. Pride weekend was underway when the awful news from Orlando hit. We reeled from the greatest mass shooting in American history while staffing Pride booths, hosting out-of-town guests, expressing our freedom. The backlash has always been with us. We mourn. We remember. We fight on. We celebrate our resilient capacity for joy.

Broadway's big night went on amid the specter of death. "America is what we the people make of it," said First Lady Michelle Obama via tape at the Tony Awards as she and the President described the musical Hamilton, which won eleven awards including three for black actors playing white figures from the American Revolution. In a performance from the show, Daveed Diggs as Lafayette said to Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hamilton, "Immigrants: we get the job done!"

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The cheers for that line contrasted starkly with efforts by conservatives, who made a renewed attack on immigrants, unfazed by the fact that the Orlando shooter was born and raised in America. Killers who are white and Christian are portrayed as mentally ill. Those from racial or religious minorities are treated as emblematic of a threat to the homeland posed by the Other. The political arsonist who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee poses as a firefighter coming to the rescue, echoing 1933 Germany.

Attempts at gay erasure by the media were quickly evident following the massacre. The original New York Times report failed to mention that Pulse is a gay venue. British columnist Owen Jones walked out of a Sky News interview when the host refused to acknowledge that the deadly attack was against gay people.

LGBT groups denounced hatred and organized vigils. BuzzFeed began posting the stories of the victims. President Obama, who ordered flags flown at half staff, once again found words for the unspeakable. In New York, people gathered outside the Stonewall Inn.

The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity stated, "This tragedy cannot be neatly categorized as a fight between the LGBTQ community and the Muslim community." Gay Muslims cannot separate their gay selves from their Muslim selves. Those who dismiss intersectionality as liberal thought policing ignore the intersections we inhabit: Not only gay Muslims, black lesbians, and transgender women of color, but gay, white, and privileged. America is a nation of intersections.

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The promotion of hate, and the use of religion as a cover for it, is not led in this country by Muslims. We must ensure that those who promote hate and thrive on it pay a price in political defeat for the great social harm they are doing.

Muslims are my neighbors and colleagues and friends. I have loved a Muslim. Muslims have died serving our country and rescuing people on 9/11. As you would treat them, treat me.

LGBT folk have been on the receiving end of group blame ourselves. As a community we cross all demographic lines. We must tell the scapegoaters: you will not do this in our name. All in our nation must confront hate-driven violence together. This cannot be used as the latest pretext by one intolerant segment of the population to push for supremacy.

When gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny used to talk about the "American Taliban," he was not talking about Muslims. He was talking about what he called "nuttyfundamentalist" Christians. And let us be clear: we are not talking about Christians in general, any more than Islamist terrorists represent Muslims in general. A few decades back, when serial killer Ted Bundy was brought to justice for his murders of women, no one blamed white heterosexual men generally. Such slanders are reserved for minorities. It is up to us to combat hatred and ignorance in our daily lives, after the media spotlight moves on.

We grieve in many ways. I listen to Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," which author Thomas Larson calls "The Saddest Music Ever Written," and try to imagine what the club goers faced that night. One fine response to an unfathomable loss is suggested by the desecrated venue beyond the police tape in Orlando. In hope and defiance, we dance.

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Anyone who watched the GOP Presidential process knows that Donald J. Trump is, to be , charitable, issue challenged. But what he does not know can hurt you and the country.

Was he aware that the nuclear agreement with Iran is not a bilateral U.S. - Iran agreement but rather also has France, the UK, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union as signatories? He can rip it up on his first day but they will not follow him into new negotiations. The U.S. will be odd man out.

Did he understand that Japan and Korea are adherents to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) of witch the U.S. and well over one hundred other nations have signed and have renounced such weapons before he suggested their acquiring them would be a good idea.?

Could he also be ignorant of the fact that NATO is likewise a treaty signed by the president and ratified by Congress and cannot be changed without its members consent? Could he name half of NATO's members?

Could he possibly not know that his suggestions that torture be used on terrorists and that their families be killed in retaliation are violations of international treaties and would make him punishable as a war criminal?

Is he unaware that all duly signed and ratified treaties are, by Article VI of the Constitution, the "supreme law of the land" and cannot be changed by executive fiat? Is he further aware that the same Article VI prohibits any religious test for a public office in the U.S.?

Is he so ignorant of the Constitution and the legislative process that he does not know the Affordable Care Act is a law and therefore believes he can unilaterally repeal ObamaCare on his first day in office"

"full faith and credit" clause in the and start an international monetary crisis.

Is he aware that Amendment XIV to the Constitution forbids the seizure of private property such as remittances from Mexicans working in the U.S. and U.S. citizens of Mexican origin to fund his wall?

Is he likewise aware that loose talk about negotiating to lower the federal debt could violate the "full faith and Credit" clause of Article IV of the Constitution.

Has he ever studied or even read the Constitution.

We need to know more about Donald John Trump from his hidden tax returns to his fraudulent business practices. But knowing what he clearly does not know is damning in itself.
Senior members of the Senate health committee on Wednesday released two separate reports from the governments independent watchdog finding the Food and Drug Administration lacks a clear plan to help the agency keep pace with the science behind the drugs and medical devices it regulates and to ensure its three centers are working together to efficiently review life-saving medical products.

Senate health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander said, These reports demonstrate the need for Congress to pass smart laws and then conduct rigorous oversight to ensure that an agency tasked with safeguarding the health of Americans isnt falling behind. As we work to pass the most important legislation this year in 21st Century Cures, I will also be working to ensure FDA carries out provisions of the 2012 law that were intended to help its centers work together and help the agency keep up with the fast pace of science.

Senior Senate health committee member, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said, I authored the provisions of the 2012 law that required GAO to conduct this review because I want to make sure that FDA keeps pace with the medical innovation that holds so much potential for treating and curing devastating diseases like cancer and Alzheimers. Todays reports reveal deep and concerning cracks in FDAs foundation. This is not a matter of FDA not having enough moneythis is about FDAs culture. I hope FDA takes GAOs recommendations to heart and moves quickly to adopt commonsense reforms to better measure and manage how FDA fulfills its public health mission.

The Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act was signed into law in 2012 following bipartisan support in Congress and required the FDA to develop a plan to ensure the agency is keeping up with the fast pace of science and the new medical products it is tasked with regulating. To improve the agencys ability to review groundbreaking drugs and medical devicesfor example, combination medical products like a heart stents that also deliver blood thinners to prevent clots the legislation also required the FDA to develop a strategic integrated management plan to improve coordination between its three centers overseeing medical products: biologics, drugs, and medical devices. Congress included both of these provisions in the 2012 law after hearing from frustrated patients and makers of innovative drugs and medical devices about a slow, unpredictable review process at the FDA.

The first report from the Government Accountability Office finds the FDA is not measuring whether or not the agency is making progress in keeping up with the science behind the drugs and devices it regulateswhat is called regulatory sciencenor is it accounting for the $504 million the agency spent from FY2010  2014 on regulatory science. According to Wednesdays report, FDA does not have the information necessary to track funding and conduct strategic planning agency-wide for its regulatory science priorities because most of the centers and offices did not collect information on the FDA priority areas that were addressed by the projects they funded. The GAOs recommendations, which have been endorsed by the Department of Health and Human Services, are to both develop and document measurable goals, including targets and time frames and systematically track funding across its regulatory science priority areas.

The second report finds serious gaps in the FDAs strategic plan, which was required by Congress in FDASIA to help the agency coordinate between its three centers and bring life-saving drugs and devices to patients more quickly. The GAO found the FDAs plan presents high-level information on goals and performance measures for medical product oversight, but lacks detail on how it will be used or implemented. GAO continued, The absence of a documented long-term plan for medical product oversight may hinder FDAs efforts to address emerging issues that require center collaboration, such as access to quality data and developing requirements for combination products  [F]ormal strategic planning is needed for medical products.

The GAO recommends that the agency use a strategic plan that involves all agenciesespecially as Americas researchers are creating new and innovative medical productsadding, Emerging issuesincluding increasingly complex medical products such as combination products, the need for integrated information systems, and the increased hiring demands for specific scientific knowledgego beyond the expertise of a single medical product center and highlight the growing importance of strategic planning across medical products. Advances involving new diagnostic tools, treatments, and cures require collaboration in order to be successful.
In the wake of yet another bizarre and uniquely American mass shooting, we once again we find ourselves bombarded by copypasta Facebook rants and half-literate pleas by experts on television.

Depending on your preferred source for news and deep thinking, what happened in Orlando proves that: 1. We need less guns 2. We need far more guns 3. Foreign Muslims are going to kill us all 4. American-born males are the greatest threat to our nation 4. Something about abortion legislation and double standards 5. Donald Trump would be a swell president.



Of course, the most important takeaway from this tragedy is that it was a heinous act of hate -- dare we say, terrorism? -- which shows that the homeland is still vulnerable and requires more money for security.

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We would like to take this opportunity to remind our readers that, in all likelihood, they will most likely die from heart disease. Or maybe in a car accident. A few might perish from self-inflicted gunshot wounds or diabetes. But very, very few reading this sentence right now -- we'd wager zero percent, actually -- will die from anything that could be even vaguely connected to "terrorism," that strange, almost meaningless abstract concept which we continue to spend so much money "fighting," year after year.

In case you didn't read the memo that the NSA illegally intercepted, we live in a giant, miserable panopticon security state that feeds on irrational fear.

We don't need more "security," 5.1 million Americans already have security clearances; that's more people than the entire population of Norway. And please, save your laments about "if only the FBI did this" and yadda yadda -- good grief, according to Human Rights Watch, U.S. government organizations are "directly involved" in most high-profile terror plots on U.S. soil.

Even the TSA, despite being up to its eyeballs in "anti-terror" funding, fails 95 percent of airport security tests.

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It's security theater, my friends. And the tickets are pricey.

Type strange messages on Facebook until your fingers turn blue about how Orlando shows __________. That is your constitutional right. But for Pete's sake, stop buying into this insane "domestic terrorism" narrative. Is the boring vanilla terrorism not scary enough now? Or is it because people are beginning to realize that their student debt will kill them, and not "the terrorists"?
This won't be the last.

Half a week into the Orlando tragedy, this reality remains pretty much unacknowledged, as cause-seekers focus on security and ISIS and the specific mental instability of Omar Mateen, who, as the world knows, took 49 precious lives and injured 53 others at the nightclub Pulse in the early hours of June 12.

Was it terrorism? Was it a hate crime? Apparently there's a media obsession with categorizing murder. No, this was faux-war, as all our mass killings are, waged by an army of one or two or a few. And it won't be the last. Mass killings are part of the social fabric - still shocking, still horrifying, but becoming more and more . . . "normal."

Tighter security won't stop them. Destroying ISIS won't stop them. Banning immigrants won't stop them. Maybe nothing will - though I don't believe that. I do believe in karma, which is to say, the idea that what goes around comes around. If we act with violence, violence will come back to haunt us.

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Only when the U.S. news media can put its murder stories in a context that includes inner reflection, rather than simply casting about for some external evil to blame - e.g., the killer had a Muslim name, so it must be terrorism - do we have, I believe, a hope of transcending the violent culture we've created.

There's nothing particularly mysterious about this. What goes around usually comes back around in fairly obvious ways. For instance, the day after the killings, Rachel Maddow spent part of her show on MSNBC discussing how Mateen's fantasy ISIS connection seemingly fit in with the terror organization's global game plan, quoting an ISIS social media post to its followers in the West:

"If you can kill a disbelieving American or European, especially the spiteful and filthy French or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever, from the disbelievers waging war, kill him in any manner or way however it may be."

Maddow described this as a tactical change for ISIS: "Stay where you are in the West and commit attacks there. Kill civilians in your home country." She also talked about how the U.S. is at war with ISIS and has been "dropping bombs on ISIS targets" in Iraq and Syria since the summer of 2014. She made this point coolly, matter-of-factly, giving no hint that she understood that bombs cause a lot of carnage, often killing everyone in the vicinity, including children. Outrage and grief only entered her voice when her reporting turned to ISIS, because . . . my God, what they were promoting was sick beyond belief.

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However, their tactical change also struck me as brilliant, in that they had found a way to "drop bombs on Western targets" without having an air force. This was, you might say, improvised shock and awe, borrowing a phrase from the U.S. war machine, which launched a shock-and-awe bombing campaign on Iraq in 2003. The term comes from a 1996 publication by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance:

"The intent here," they wrote, "is to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives."

In March of 2003, the U.S. launched its invasion of Iraq - a.k.a, the Big Mistake - with some 1,700 air sorties over the country that killed thousands of Iraqis. Out of this monstrous mistake, and all that followed, ISIS eventually emerged, and started striking back. This sort of karma is so obvious, you have to make a serious effort not to notice it.

But the hell Mateen unleashed at the Orlando nightclub hardly reduces to something this simple. His fantasy connection to ISIS may have been no more than a fragment, at best, of his motivation. Like every mass killer, he was deeply, deeply troubled and seething with social grievances - in his case, homophobia, likely permeated with self-hatred.

The only way to protect ourselves from such a person before he's committed a crime is to create a surveillance-saturated, endlessly suspicious - and, of course, increasingly fortified and armed - social structure, which probably won't work anyway, but will surely poison our social bedrock, which is trust.

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And as long as the only way we attempt to understand mass murder is on his (or her) own terms, independent of all social context, we will fail to prevent . . . the next one, and the one after that.

The starting place, I think, is to understand that committing mass murder is psychologically the same as waging war. "The defining characteristic of mass murder is not that it's senseless or random," I wrote in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings three and a half years ago, "but that the victims (at least some of them) were murdered for purely impersonal reasons. They had significance as symbols, not individuals."

The murders are not personal. The killer is employing what's known as the "principle of social substitutability" -- substituting a particular group of people for a general wrong.

"The rampage shooters see themselves as moralistic punishers striking against deep injustice," Peter Turchin explains in his essay "Canaries in a Coalmine." ". . . it is usually a group, an organization, an institution, or the whole society that are held responsible by the killer.

"On the battlefield," he wrote, "you are supposed to try to kill a person whom you've never met before. You are not trying to kill this particular person, you are shooting because he is wearing the enemy uniform. . . . Enemy soldiers are socially substitutable."

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Under official circumstances, we glorify this sort of behavior. And this glory permeates the American social structure, creating a sort of standing permission for every troubled individual - every potential army of one - to wage war against a self-perceived wrong. Added to this standing permission is the dumbfounding availability of automatic weapons - and suddenly mass murders happen every couple of months.

Throw in one further irony. Mateen had worked for nine years as a security guard at G4S, the largest security firm in the world, which at one time had charge over the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. As The Atlantic noted, he was part of the security system that's supposed to protect the public from . . . people like him.

- - -

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
The fate of Harambe, the 17-year-old gorilla who was shot dead in a Cincinnati zoo on May 28, has inspired much debate. Some adamantly defend the zoo workers' actions, while others point to the hypocrisy of outrage when many sentient animals are killed each day without drawing any attention whatsoever. Seeing Harambe's face as an innocent animal who was so quickly sacrificed has undeniably struck a chord with many. So, despite some claims that animal rights is the least important issue, the attention that the gorilla's life received indicates that people are ready to hear the truth: Non-human animals are sentient beings with lives that do, in fact, matter.

All this is another indication of how interest in the issue of animal rights has grown significantly in the past half-century. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, nearly a third of Americans now believe that non-human animals should be given the same rights as people. That's a considerable increase since 2008, when only a fourth of Americans shared this view.

Taking full consideration of this is pretty awe-inspiring. I chose to be vegetarian as a kid because I felt motivated to protect animals, and so much has changed since I felt like I was the only vegetarian in the world as I grew up in the 1990's in small town Alabama. We're quickly making progress, yet animals are literally being tortured to deliver meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, and fish to dinner plates. Even worse is happening to some for fur and other animal byproducts that humans can easily and comfortably live without. It's clear that people are concerned, and the following reasons show why animal rights should be a central topic of debate.

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Established Sentience in Non-Human Animals

Imagine desperately needing to move, yet you were confined to a cage where you had to live in your own urine and feces, never experiencing simple pleasures beyond fear and pain. Many farm animals experience that and worse tortures. Being sentient beings, they are aware of their needs and wants; they fight for their lives to the end.

This isn't simply imagining what it would be like. Animal sentience is an established fact. Psychology Today reported in 2013 that we've had plenty of data for a while to declare that non-human animals are sentient beings. The prominent scientists at the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness declared that many non-human animals are conscious. It's been shown that animals can worry and lose sleep. Like people, non-human animals will fight to live, and many species have problem-solving capabilities.

A Staggering Number of Beings Who Suffer

If you're like me, you get upset and even outraged when you see just one person suffer, and you do what you can to help them. Now imagine that happening a billion times over. Given that the sentience of many non-human animals is widely accepted, people should care deeply about preventing the massive amounts of suffering that are currently being inflicted on animals. In the U.S. alone, each year more than 78 billion sea animals and over eight billion land animals are killed for food. That's not millions, but billions. That ends up to a tragic, extreme amount of suffering among sentient beings every single day in the country.

Interconnected Issues

No one issue facing the world is entirely independent of the others. The case for animal rights also stands alongside other forms of prejudice as an issue that needs to be addressed. Having prejudice against others for their citizenship, race, sexual orientation, gender, or species can have far-reaching effects on society.

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An intersectional approach to animal rights is key. Social justice advocate and writer Christopher-Sebastian McJetters recently stated, "Intersectional justice isn't some 'sect' of veganism. Framing it as such is reductive and overly simplistic. Intersectionality is an analytical approach that challenges the root causes of oppression through the lens of people who live daily with multiple intersecting oppressions...people who often lack the social, sexual, economic, and academic mobility of those who needlessly antagonize and harass them."

Public Health

It's not just animals' lives that are at stake when we disregard animal rights as a core issue. Life on earth as we know it is at stake. Livestock production is posing a rather big risk to human health through the overuse of antibiotics. When bacteria become resistant to the antibiotics because of their overuse, the effectiveness of the medicine is compromised. Also, the high amount of pollution of both water and land caused by livestock production threatens human health.

The Environment

The damage that's being done to the planet by animal agriculture is extreme. Environmental advocates like Al Gore and James Cameron decided to go vegan because of this staggering harm. Approximately 30 percent of the world's ice-free land surface is used to farm chickens, pigs, and cows for slaughter and human consumption. Furthermore, this livestock production, which includes eggs and dairy, takes up more than a third of the fresh water in the world. Time reports that livestock production has a bigger impact on Planet Earth than any other activity humans do.

At least 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, according to a report that was released by the United Nations. That's more than the combined emissions from all forms of human transportation, including cars, planes, and trains. Since it's widely believed that we need to act soon before there's no turning back on global warming, this is a solid reason all need to be concerned about the harm caused by a disregard for animal rights.

Where We're at Now

Some leading politicians seem to be getting the message about the importance of animal rights, but we have a long way to go. No current Republican Presidential frontrunners seem to have addressed the issue of animal rights in a serious way, although Donald Trump did seem to mock the cause in a Tweet, stating, "Ringling Brothers is phasing out their elephants. I, for one, will never go again. They probably used the animal rights stuff to reduce costs." Hillary Clinton's campaign website claims that the way our society treats animals is a reflection of our humanity, even going on to state, "Hillary has a strong record of standing up for animal rights." Meanwhile, the website of Bernie Sanders doesn't address the issue, but Zach Groff, a protester who interrupted Bernie's May 2016 rally in California said, "He claims to be a progressive, but you cannot be a progressive if you oppose animal rights." Sanders did receive a recent 100 percent rating for his voting on animals in a Humane Society report.

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Legs and feet beside spilled popcorn in movie theatre

There I was, on the Wednesday after the massacre at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, having a fairly hard time of it. Hate crimes are hard to process, and at this magnitude even more so. Beyond that bare fact, one of the murdered was an old friend: the bouncer, KJ Morris. We'd been young butches together fifteen years ago; I taught her to tie a necktie. Compounding the hardness, for me, was the tension and upset my Black and Latinx and other POC friends and family were feeling as the racism of the attack continually went unrecognized. White gays all over the internet talked about "LGBTQ people feeling unsafe now" in ways that suggested this was new news for some of the cis white folks, or something they thought was past. Exhausted and a meter past the end of my patience, I tapped out for a few hours of self care in the form of an escapist heist movie and a tub of popcorn as big as my head.

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I am always in time for the previews because I am a compulsive earlybird, but today I wished like hell I'd been delayed. Because there on the screen, smack in the middle of the previews for a movie called Bad Moms starring Mila Kunis, Christina Applegate and Kristen Bell was a joke about murdered trans man Brandon Teena. Some of the other moms are having a go at Mila Kunis for the bra she thinks of as her "sexy bra," and one of them says "I don't even want to touch it....You got a very Boys Don't Cry thing happening right now."

In case you're not familiar, Boys Don't Cry is the title of a movie about the short life and brutal death of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was raped and then murdered in a small town in Nebraska, because people found out he was transgender. In the movie, there's a short scene in which Brandon is shown binding -- the common term for trans guys using a lycra undershirt or ace bandage to make their chests look flat, and therefore more like a man's chest. Not content to make a joke about a compression bra looking like the adaptive devices trans guys use to be able to get through the world with a measure more safety and comfort in a world that hates us, Bad Moms went all the way there and camped out by using the title of this movie about a real-life transphobic murder as the joke.

There I sat in the movie theatre, open mouthed, trying to understand what I'd seen. Trying to parse the idea that in order to add a seventh insult to the six previous tepid ones about Mila Kunis's mom-bra, the writers of this major motion picture had thought it would be just fine to invoke the brutal rape and murder of a trans man. The idea that at no point in all the times that all the people involved in the making of a movie saw this -- in script, when the actors said it live, watching the day's footage, in editing, and who knows how many more times nobody stopped and said "Hey, maybe we shouldn't make a cheap joke out of a hate crime?" And then -- and then! -- not content with only inflicting this re-traumatization on people who volitionally went to see Bad Moms, they put it in the trailer. This is one of the very best and most enticing moments of the film, that means. Look, would you, how good they are at hate crime jokes.

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Of course none of this is new. Transphobic jokes have been a staple of movie "humor" for quite a while, and there has been endless sport made of how hilarious it is for a man to don a dress, ha ha, or how revolting it is for these characters of human beings to discover that their cute girl date has (or may at some point have had) a penis. I don't remember a movie ever using an actual transphobic hate crime as joke fodder before this, and certainly not in the trailer, but maybe this is another example of how we remain blind to certain instances of prejudice because they don't resonate personally.

In the wake of hate crimes like the massacre in Orlando, I see a lot of hand-wringing on social media and in the news media. Self-described "allies," in this case straight white cisgender people, engage is a little round of "how could this happen?" How, Mildred? It happens because we're still allowed to be a punchline and nobody gives a damn. It happens because tens of thousands of people will see this movie, in which Kristen Bell -- who has been all over Twitter since Sunday with pro-"LGBT" tweets -- is apparently fine to make hate crimes against trans people a punchline in a major motion picture. Thanks for the pithy comments but I think I can safely say, Kristen, that we don't need allies like you at all. Nor Christina Applegate, who has been doing the same on social media and stars in the same movie. Apparently that concern for "the LGBT community" only extends as far as it doesn't cause a problem with their paychecks.

I was so stunned by what I'd seen on the screen that I immediately convinced myself I had been mistaken about what I'd heard. I'm tired, I'm emotional, I was crunching my popcorn -- surely not. But when I went online later to find out what I'd misheard, I found that I'd heard right the first time. There it was, right there, a throwaway joke about one of the first hate crimes against a trans person ever to get any media attention at all -- the rape and murder of a boy of twenty-one, absolutely and entirely because he was transgender. Ha. Ha, ha.

No? Not funny? How about that fifty people were murdered Sunday and a further fifty hospitalized because they were at a gay Latinx night at a club? Is that funny? I might need some help understanding which hate crimes are funny. Because I just don't see the damn joke in any of them. Another trans woman of color was murdered in new Orleans last weekend, the fourteenth this year so far, and she was just coming out when she was killed. What she would have brought to the struggle for liberation, we'll never know.

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I'm more tired, more scared, and more frustrated with empty "allyship" than I started this week (which is saying something). I can't see how change is going to come, not like this. And I cannot imagine, not even at the limits of my ability, how anyone can still look around and say "how could this happen?" about hate crimes against queer people, trans people, black and brown people, women, and on, and on. It's because we're dehumanized every day in the media. It's because the joke isn't on us, it is us. How are we supposed to teach children to stand for justice and equality when they're surrounded daily with endless, reinforcing messages that only some people's lives are important and others are fine to make a joke about, even if those lives have been brutally snuffed out way too soon? How did this happen, you're asking? Just listen, really listen, for one entire day to everything that flows into your eyes and ears, and notice what's erased too. Notice whose experience is treated as real and valid, and who never gets represented (or only as a joke). Take a look at how media and ads and everything we live among reinforces who to take seriously and who it's safe to ignore, especially when no one's totaling up ally points and handing out cookies.
[Article originally posted June 15, 2016 at approx 5:45 ET p.m.]

[Addendum: My source has now been in direct communication with Noor Zahi Salman. She says that she has read this article. She states in a text which I have seen that instead of blaming her, since she had nothing to do with the shooting, shouldn't the people who sold the guns take some blame? She writes all she wanted "was a home, family, and peace -- for the media to say these lies isn't right."

[A friend, who is with her, adds: "It is not an easy time for her ... and having a child ask a mother 'where is daddy' can't be easy and for New York Post to show her son's face is not right." Text added June 16 at approx 12:15 ET a.m.]

Original Article [June 15, 2016] :

Virtually everything in the media about Noor Zahi Salman, Omar Mateen's wife, is from anonymous government sources. They lie in situations like this.

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Such anonymous sourcing helped facilitate the lies used to invade Iraq and countless other horrific policies. They're doubly dangerous during a panic, consider that after government anthrax killed people in 2001, Andrew Sullivan talked about using nuclear weapons.

And the government has a lot of incentives to lie about this case. They failed to keep people safe. So, what to do? Blame the wife. Blame the Muslims. They didn't alert us. They are suspect. Potentially, all of them. That's what Trump -- and Clinton in more subtle ways -- are saying.

I didn't need to be in contact with people who know Noor Zahi Salman to know that, but it helps.

In fact, I am in touch with a friend of hers who is in regular contact with people around her now. This means I am probably in closer touch with the actual facts of the case than the zillion media outlets blaring whatever it is "sources" are telling them to blare at you. In so doing, they are smearing a woman who was questioned by the most powerful government in the world, smeared on the largest media outlets as a virtual accessory to mass murder -- all without the benefit of a lawyer.

She is apparently telling people around her that virtually everything you're hearing about her is a lie.

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Some examples:

NBC claims: "The Orlando gunman's wife feared he was going to attack a gay nightclub overnight Saturday and pleaded with him not to do anything violent -- but failed to warn police after he left, NBC News has learned."

Noor Zahi Salman is apparently saying she didn't have any idea of an attack.

NBC claims: "In addition, she said she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster, several officials familiar with the case said."

Noor Zahi Salman is apparently saying she didn't do that. She says it might be possible that they went shopping together -- and she went to buy food or clothing and he might have gone to a gun store. In any case, why is this on her? Why are people focusing on her and not the "security" firm G4S that employed Mateen? How is it that the FBI is suddenly off the hook?

The Daily Beast claims: "Noor Zahi Salman also reportedly drove Mateen to the gay nightclub Pulse to case the place before he killed 49 people there on Sunday night."

Noor Zahi Salman is apparently saying that she never drove him to the club and that in fact, she doesn't like to drive at all.

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ABC claims: "After Noor Mateen began to answer questions, agents administered a polygraph test to determine whether she was telling the truth."

Noor Zahi Salman is apparently saying she offered to take a polygraph but the government declined.

What we apparently have is severe logrolling between media and government -- where government sources hide behind anonymous quotes and media hide behind anonymous sources. So, basically, they can mutually absolve each other and publish most anything that will benefit the both of them.

Seriously, what's the justification for using anonymous sources on this story? My justification for using my anonymous sources is that they are scared. The only thing the government sources driving this story are afraid of is that they will be held responsible for their words.

We're not seeing a free-for-all in terms of everyone speculating as they please. There might be justification for that: Bring on the government stenographer, then bring on the false flag theorist. No, what we're seeing are directed leaks laying out a pattern of smearing an individual, smearing a community and getting the government and media off the hook for the fact that 50 people are dead.

Some friends of Noor Zahi Salman are apparently speculating that what actually happened was that Omar Mateen was about to be outed as gay -- and went nuts. This could have broader implications since "Israel surveils and blackmails gay Palestinians to make them informants." That clearly is speculative. But far more responsible than speculation that is streaming forth from your TV.

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I know more, including an allegation about how the government treated Noor Zahi Salman that would turn your stomach.

I'm not telling all I know now because I have reason to believe it might make the family and friends uncomfortable.

See what I did just there? I was forthright with you, my reader, while respectful of my sources.

Big media propagating anonymous government allegations about Noor Zahi Salman distracts from their own failure to protect the public from attacks.

Instead, it fingers the Arab and Muslim communities as responsible. And that's a message that is being articulated in ways crude and subtle from our "leaders":

Says Donald Trump: "But the Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what's going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn't turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction."

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More subtly, says Hillary Clinton: "Since 9/11, law enforcement agencies have worked hard to build relationships with Muslim-American communities. Millions of peace-loving Muslims live, work, and raise their families across America. They are the most likely to recognize the insidious effects of radicalization before it's too late, and the best positioned to help us block it. We should be intensifying contacts in those communities, not scapegoating or isolating them." Clinton pretends to be against "scapegoating" when that's exactly what she just did. Most just let it slide because it's not as crass as Trump's formulation of much the same idea.

Most subtle still is President Obama: "Since before I was President, I've been clear about how extremist groups have perverted Islam to justify terrorism. As President, I have repeatedly called on our Muslim friends and allies at home and around the world to work with us to reject this twisted interpretation of one of the world's great religions."

I don't know Noor Zahi Salman. I have not had the opportunity to speak to her directly. I don't know for certain how forthright of a person she is, though even through media reports, several people who have known her have said she's upstanding. My immediate source I believe is very reliable. Things are rushed, there maybe misunderstandings here. Noor Zahi Salman is quite likely in shock, she may be honestly misspeaking, especially when in a coercive environment before threatening government agents.

Now, would I like more sources to confirm what I'm writing? Yes, I would, but I think it would be irresponsible to let what are likely falsehoods contaminate the public mind on virtually every major media outlet given the limited capacity to communicate directly with Noor Zahi Salman at this time.

Correction: This article originally stated "Noor Zahi Salman is apparently 'free', but with an electronic bracelet." That sentence has now been removed. In fact, my source now tells me that she doesn't have a electronic bracelet on her, she has rather been told by the FBI to keep a phone they gave her. My source states: "The FBI was waiting for a search warrant and that apparently didn't come as fast as they wanted so they asked if they could search the apartment. She said she had nothing to hide and signed something allowing them to take her phone, ipad, and a camera. Again, she said she had nothing to hide and they could have them. The FBI gave her a cell phone to carry with her in the mean time (and possibly in place of a bracelet as a tracking device). After she gave the authorization to take the items is when they said she was free to go." [Correction added June 16 at approx 11:05 ET a.m.] To clarify: I believe that the misunderstanding over the electronic bracelet occurred because Noor Zahi Salman and/or a friend or relative offered for the FBI to put a electronic bracelet on her as a condition of release, but the FBI was willing to let her go if she checked in with a phone. This would seem to speak to the level of her cooperation. [June 16 at approx 3:15 ET p.m.]
ORLANDO, FL - JUNE 15: A Puerto Rican flag is left at a makeshift memorial near Orlando Regional Medical Center, down the street from the crime scene at Pulse Nightclub, June 15, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. The shooting at Pulse Nightclub, which killed 49 people and injured 53, is the worst mass-shooting event in American history. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

On Sunday, I woke up earlier than usual, brimming with the excitement about marching in the Puerto Rican Day Parade alongside LGBTQ honorees. After 50 years, the parade was dedicated for the first time to family unity and LGBTQ rights--a huge milestone and symbolic step forward for our country, where many people still deny our rights and equality.

Then I saw the devastating news of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a state that is home to more than 1 million Puerto Ricans (a third whom lives in Orlando), including my family (and even myself when I was 5 years old). It happened during a"Latin night", when hundreds of people were dancing and celebrating Pride Month.

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My heart and soul broke. As a young, gay, Latino, I feel so deeply connected to the lives lost--and the pain and fear inflicted on two of my communities at once.

I can't help but think: This could have been me. This could have been any of us.

There is no evidence that the Latino community was a specific target of this attack, but it has devastated thousands of Latinos and Puerto Rican families who lost their loved ones. About half of the victims in this massacre were Puerto Rican, and around 90 percent were Latinos. Many victims were family members or friends of people I know, like Jonathan Camuy. These were queer, bright, promising young lives of color taken away too soon. Nuestros hermanos y hermanas.

It was not only a reprehensible attack on LGBTQ people, but an act of barbarity against every one of us. Florida is grieving. Puerto Rico is grieving. The LGBTQ community is grieving. The United States and the world are grieving.

As a 25-year-old Puerto Rican gay man who came to the mainland two years ago seeking a better future, this has struck me in a profound way. I can find few words to explain my feelings of frustration, anger, and sorrow.



Photo by Luis Carle

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What happened in Orlando was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S history. It is one of the darkest chapters in our LGBTQ history.

But we cannot give up. Now, our attention should be focus in helping the families and all the people affected.

However, we also must redouble our work to create meaningful change that will transform and eradicate the root causes of these tragedies--violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity, with a particular attention to people of color.

Take the issue of gun violence in this country, which claims 33,000 lives per year. We all know what we should be doing; we must come together and call on our leaders to challenge the status quo and the gun lobby.

And while we secure concrete progress, we must change hearts and minds as we seek to eliminate the animus that our LGBTQ lives with every day and manifests in so many ways--through bullying, physical intimidation, discrimination, exclusion, or systematic and institutionalized violence.

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Throughout my childhood, I suffered firsthand the cruelty of bullying and hate towards me and my family. I was screamed at, beaten, and sexually harassed. My experience is not unique. LGBT people from all walks of life have very similar stories, with different vulnerabilities that stem from the intersection of race, gender and economic status. Let's remember for a moment the particular risk and violence transgender Americans face every day, including last year, which was the deadliest year with more than 21 brutal murders of trans women, most of whom were women of color.

We also need to speak out against the hateful, bigoted, homophobic and racist rhetoric coming from some politicians and public figures who contribute to a toxic environment that allows and encourages this kind of violence in the first place.

My Puerto Rican compatriot Ricky Martin recently tweeted "I'm gay and I am not afraid", and we all should embrace that resilient spirit that has raised us in moments of hardship.

Unfortunately, I am terrified. This attack just confirmed for me what I have long felt: It is not always safe to be us--to walk, to dance, and to live freely as ourselves. We still face threats of violence against our bodies, dignity, and lives for being who we are and who we love.

But I know we cannot succumb to that fear. While we must remain vigilant, we must also be defiant, trumping hate with love and showing that our strength lies in our values of inclusion and respect. As Hillary Clinton said this week: "We have to stand together. Be proud together. There is no better rebuke to the terrorists and all those who hate."

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STONEWALL INN, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES - 2016/06/12: An attendee of the rally places a bouquet of flowers at a shrine to the fallen along the facade of The Stonewall Inn. In tribute to the memory of the 50 dead and dozens wounded in the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (FL), hundreds of members of the NYC LGBT community and supporters rallied near The Stonewall Inn in Manhattan's West Village to place flowers at a makeshift shrine to the fallen, rally for peace and stand in solidarity. (Photo by Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Columbine. Virginia Tech. Fort Hood. Tucson. Aurora. Newtown. Navy Yard. Isla Vista. Charleston. Umpqua. Colorado Springs. San Bernardino.

And now Orlando is etched into the list of places in America that have been forever scarred by gun violence.

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In the aftermath of each of these deadly mass shootings, we express our horror, our prayers for the victims and survivors, our condolences, our thanks to the courageous first responders -- and of course, we must and we should. But words are not enough.

After the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School four years ago, I was convinced that Congress would finally take action to address that epidemic of gun violence that kills more than 30,000 Americans every year. But only four Republicans were willing to join with 51 Democrats and independents, and so commonsense gun safety legislation was once more derailed.

That's why I am so proud that Senator Chris Murphy - joined by his Connecticut colleague, Senator Richard Blumenthal - took to the Senate floor with a simple message: Enough is enough. The Senate must address this issue with a vote.

We may not be able to prevent every tragedy, but there is so much we can do to save lives and protect our communities. And we can do it while still protecting the Second Amendment. We should start by taking these six commonsense steps right now:

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We can pass legislation to prevent a suspected terrorist from buying firearms or explosives.

We can pass legislation to keep military-style weapons off our streets. These are weapons of war, and they do not belong in our communities.

We can expand background checks - an idea supported by almost 90 percent of the American people and a majority of NRA members - which will help keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.

We can pass the Gun Violence Intervention Act, which would allow families to go to court to seek a "gun violence prevention order" to temporarily stop someone who poses a threat to themselves or others from purchasing or possessing a gun.

We can increase funding for the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), an important grant program that helps communities plan how best to prevent and respond to acts of terrorism.

We can protect our children by investing in the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, which helps schools develop school safety plans and provide critical safety training to school personnel.

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We need a layered defense to protect our communities from criminals and terrorists who want to inflict mass casualties, and that is what these proposals would provide.

We know that tough gun safety laws work. We have seen it in other countries, like Australia. And we have seen it in my state of California which - after passing sensible laws - saw a 56 percent drop in gun violence between 1993 and 2010, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

People deserve to feel safe in their communities. They deserve to feel safe at work, at school, at a shopping mall, at a movie theater, at a health clinic, at a night club.

As elected officials, we take an oath to protect and defend the American people. Right now, we are failing at our most basic task - keeping our children and our families safe from harm.

It isn't enough for us to keep lamenting these tragedies. The people of Orlando, San Bernardino, Isla Vista, Newtown and so many other communities want more than words. They want action. And they want it now.
Walker's Legacy Founder & CEO, Natalie Cofield, launched the first Houston Black Women and Entrepreneurship Roundtable Discussion on June 10, 2016. Walker's Legacy was founded in 2009 by Cofield. Her inspiration was Madame C.J. Walker, civil rights activist, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Walker was the first African-American woman to become a self-made millionaire, by selling black hair products and training women all over the United States to be sales beauticians.

Walker's Legacy is a professional collective designed to build an eco-system of support for women of color in business. They partnered with the National Women's Business Council (NWBC) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Advocacy to conduct a research initiative centered on African American Women-Owned Businesses. The main purpose of the roundtable is to explore the unique challenges and opportunities for Black women entrepreneurs. New York City, New York and Washington, DC are also scheduled for similar roundtables.

I had the distinct privilege of attending the Houston roundtable and the opportunity to dialogue with several of the panelist: Tiko Reynolds-Hausman, President of TKO BizSolutions, Inc., Elaine Barber, President & CEO of the Greater Houston Black Chamber of Commerce, Marguerite Williams, Sr. Relationship Manager, Vice President of Wells Fargo Bank's Business Banking Group, Zawadi Bryant, CEO and Co-Founder of Nightlight Pediatric Urgent Care, and Vanessa Wade, PR Expert and Founder of Connect The Dots PR. The panel discussion was moderated by Natalie Madeira Cofield, founder of Walker's Legacy.

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Ms. Cofield's mission for Walker's Legacy could be summed up in one word, mentorship. When asked about Black women being excluded from industry discussions about existing opportunities, she replied, "No room at your table? I'll make my own table so big that you have to ask me to come to yours." Her passion for mentorship and business success for Black women was evident. Her hard work and efforts are recognized worldwide for bringing women of color together to discuss the issues that they face as business owners. Walker's Legacy has been key in educating Black women about assuming a position of power in the marketplace.

During the breakout sessions, attendees were broken up into three groups, and we discussed our motivation for going into business, our barriers and opportunities to gain access to capital, and challenges that Black women-owned businesses experience that is unique to women of color.

On a Personal Note...

On a personal note, I recently wrote a blog, Women-Owned Businesses Increase, But Not Their Bottom Line, based on the research done by U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce in their report, Wake-Up Call, Opportunity Lost. So it was interesting to actually hear the statistics mentioned again at this roundtable. The glaring elephant in the room in regards to that report was that the average annual receipts for U.S. business owners who were African American or Black Women Owned in 2012 were $27,753 versus the $637,675 of their male counterpart. I got one comment on that article, and he proposed the myth that if we only worked harder, we too could enjoy the fruits of the land.

I left the event encouraged and curious to see what the roundtable conversations started for Houston-based African American women-owned businesses. It is my hope that it would be the catalyst for an entrepreneurial revolution of sorts for future discussions where local women of color gather to discuss strategies that level the playing field in the marketplace. In the words of Madame C.J. Walker, "There is no royal flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it for if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard." It has been my observation that working hard is not our problem, but working together has been an issue. Walker enlisted the help of women all over the nation in promoting and selling her product. When we become serious about the value of being a business collective (Black women business owners united), we will be an entrepreneurial force to be reckoned with in the marketplace. I witnessed that at Houston's Houston Black Women and Entrepreneurship Roundtable Discussion, it is my prayer that the discussion continues.

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(Sri Lankan Poson pandal at Aluthgama at night)

Did you know that on June 20, during the next full moon, it's Poson Poya Day in Sri Lanka? Like with every full moon (or Poya Day) during the year, Sri Lankan Buddhists celebrate different aspects of Buddhism. Poson is especially regarded, like Vesak, because it represents the introduction of Buddhism to the island country. The Sri Lankan festivities are a remarkable sight. If you are traveling, doing business, or are a native Sri Lankan, remember these important Poson points:

Brief History of Poson:

Over 2000 years ago during the 3rd century BC, the son of India's King Asoka, Arahat Mahinda, came to Sri Lanka. Converting King Devanampiyatissa, Sri Lanka went through a social transformation. A principal symbol during this event is Mihintale; a mountain 220 km (135 mi) north of the modern-day capital, Colombo, 15 km (9mi) west of Anuradhapura. It's the location where Mahinda, the missionary monk of the kingdom, preached Sri Lanka's first Buddhist sermon to the king, which formally introduced Buddhism. Anuradhapura is an ancient capital and one of Sri Lanka's eight UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Imagery for Visitors:

Let's imagine the scene as you first arrive in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo. You're entranced by the bright pandals which are colorfully painted stationary structures with tens of thousands of multicolored lightbulbs. The pandals portray various scenes from the Jataka tales which serve to teach and enlighten the public about the previous births and lives of Gautama Buddha. Siddhartha Gautama was a prince in the 5th century BCE who came across the unfortunates outside the palace: sickness, old age, suffering, and death. From there he journeyed to reach Enlightenment. Upon reaching it, he taught others of a Middle Path, between sensual indulgence and the extreme asceticism. As a businessperson you don't have to understand the scenes, but it is a beautiful sight to behold and one well worth viewing while they are illuminating the evening streets.

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Places to go:

The ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, and the Kelaniya Temple are specific areas of Poson celebration. Sri Lanka has a long and intriguing history. Impress your potential business partners with your knowledge of the ancient ruins and the significance of the different temples. As you travel by three-wheeler, bus, or car, observe see roadside dansals handing out food and drink. Enjoy the food, culture and socializing.



(Anuradhapura during Poson)

Customs:

A custom during Poya days is the lighting of intricate paper lanterns shaped like stars or lotus flowers known as kudus. For Western travelers, showing appreciation in the beauty of the pandals or kudus will instill a sense of respect for culture. Poson is a high-traffic time with thousands on the streets. In addition, just like any other Poya day, businesses are usually closed, and alcohol and meat sales are forbidden.

Take time to enjoy the customs and culture as you further your cross-cultural relations. It's important for Western business visitors to have a basic understanding of the Poson customs as you share your business ideas and values. Embrace Sri Lankan customs by participation to build trust inspire respect and create long-lasting business relationships.

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Protestors along a Kenyan street. Elections should not mean destroying every gain made over the previous years. PHOTO | TONNY OMONDI | NATION MEDIA GROUP



This article has been co-authored with Dr. Francis Ole Kaparo, an opinion leader in Kenya.

Kenyans, and friends of Kenya, are once again hoping that the five-yearly ritual of elections will not take the form of widespread ethnic violence and destruction of property. However, recent intransigent positions over the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) are a cause for apprehension and concern.

The social and economic effects of the 2007 election dispute are still being felt, and key sectors of the economy, including tourism, are still struggling. The violence had also left its scar on the survivors in the form of anxiety and post-traumatic stress. Statistics on sexual and gender-based violence show that whenever election-related violent conflict occurs, it is the innocent women and children who suffer most.

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As a development partner of Kenya, and guided by the core values of respect for human rights, diversity, equality and inclusion, the United Nations (UN) family is determined to do all it can to help prevent a recurrence of violence and conflict.

The UN in Kenya is currently supporting institutions to deliver a free, fair and peaceful election, with an eye on the welfare of the most vulnerable populations. It recognizes the adverse effects of violence on the poor, especially women and children, and believes that respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the right to peacefully assemble, is critical to fostering democracy and dialogue.



Through the current electoral support project entitled Strengthening Electoral Processes in Kenya (SEPK), supported by the European Union (EU), the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the UN is supporting institutional strengthening, professional development, procurement and the use of information and communication technology for the 2017 elections.

The UN is also working with various stakeholders such as the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), faith-based organizations, and civil society groups towards peace building, conflict prevention, and on early-warning and response mechanisms.



These investments will only yield fruit if there is a genuine desire to carry out a peaceful election. For those seeking elective office, the elections must not be a zero-sum game, and the welfare of the country must supersede individual gain.



Kenyans must start believing that elections do not mean destroying every gain made over the previous five years, and that political contestation is possible without violence. The youth must decide to carve out a better future for themselves and say no to politicians who misuse their energy and enthusiasm.



It must not be lost on them that the heaviest toll from election violence is always on the poor youth, most of whom are already affected by lack of opportunities and have little hope of coming out of poverty.



These young populations provide a demographic edge for economic prosperity, but they are also a powder keg, especially when political self-interests clash, that ignites violence and lawlessness. Today, there is no greater need than that of investing in their future in order to stay the country from degenerating into chaos whenever elections approach.



Kenya has made significant of strides in attracting foreign direct investment. For instance, the Tenth World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference that was held in Kenya last year cemented Kenya's global significance and reinforced the belief that Kenya is open for business. However, a politically charged and polarized environment does not bode well for a conducive environment that attracts new investors, while at the same encouraging the old ones to stay put.

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With Kenya hosting several high-level meetings in the coming months; such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) on 17-22 July 2016; Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) on 27-28 August 2016 - the first time the conference is being held outside Japan - and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (GPEDC) 28 November - 1 December 2016; the political violence will not help the country's image - that of a stable destination that attracts tourists and investors. Kenya must continue to gain the confidence of the international community by demonstrating that it can handle the demands of democratic space.

Efforts that are being made to ensure that Kenya has a peaceful, credible, free and fair election, such as the recent formation of the parliamentary joint select committee to unlock the IEBC impasse, are a welcome step. The work being done by the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) to ensure a peaceful, harmonious and integrated society should be supported by all.

While ultimately it is the people of Kenya who will chart the course that the country takes through the institutions they have put in place, the UN will continue to remind the leaders of sides of the political spectrum of Kenya, of their obligation to the poor and vulnerable.



As the official election campaign period approaches, we must choose the dove of fraternity and mutual concession over the hawk of belligerence and mutual destruction.
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke on Wednesday toured the future Family Justice Center which is currently under construction in an existing building at 911 Eastgate Loop. Mayor Berke was joined by City Council District 6 Representative Dr. Carol Berz, as well as Chattanooga Police Chief Fred Fletcher and Assistant Chief Tracy Arnold, Family Justice Center Director Dr. Valerie Radu, FJC partners from Helen Ross McNabb, and city of Chattanooga Chief Operating Officer Maura Sullivan.

The future Family Justice Center began construction earlier this year and is slated to open by the end of October. The Family Justice Center is currently residing in a temporary location at 5741 Cornelison Road until the permanent location is open.

"Domestic violence is a real issue in our country, state, and city," said Mayor Berke. "We know that nationally, one in three women will experience some type of violence at the hands of her partner, at some point in her lifetime. And currently here in Chattanooga, over 30 percent of our total violence crime is family violence or sexual assault. This is unacceptable."

Mayor Berke continued to explain the importance of having one place for survivors of family violence to go to obtain the services.

"We want to ensure that survivors have a convenient and welcoming place to get the help they need," said Mayor Berke.

In addition, Mayor Berke talked to the group about the economic impact of family violence and praised the hard work of his Council for Women, which is co-chaired by Councilwoman Berz and Rep. JoAnne Favors.

Dr. Valerie Radu, executive director of the FJC, provided the tour of the under-construction center, pointing out where each partner office would be located and praising both the design of the Center as well as the co-location of services.

"Having so many partner organizations in one place means survivors dont have to experience the frustration of going to several different places," said Dr. Radu. "And not only will the FJC make it more convenient for survivors to access services, this space was designed to make people feel comfortable and welcoming."

During the tour, CPD Chief Fletcher discussed the changes currently underway in the police department to provide more services to victims, including the recent hire of Caroline Huffaker as victim services coordinator and two new positions on the horizon.

In the summer of 2013, the city of Chattanooga received a three-year grant to research a Family Justice Center to serve the area. An advisory committee conducted research and held several public forums throughout the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014. In August of 2014, the city hired Dr. Valerie Radu as executive director.

If you or someone you know is suffering from family violence, please call the LOCAL Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault CRISIS HOTLINE at 755-2700. Help is available seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and its completely confidential.






A huge lesson is to raise money at the appropriate time. We didn't understand our value proposition. We didn't even have a fully baked-out product. We weren't ready. So we failed.

Every time I started a business it was because I saw them as good short-term financial opportunities. In hindsight I realize none of these businesses lasted because it wasn't authentic. I didn't feel like they were my legacy or something I could really leverage my strengths with.

Lessons in raising money and making money were shared by the guests on today's Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show.

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The show follows the journeys of founders who share 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

Listen to the full interviews with David and Omar by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here.



(And download any of the past shows here.)

Clips from their interview are below.

David Comisford is an entrepreneur currently focused on higher education and ed tech. David was named to the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 for his work in launching the EduSourced software platform. His previous startup was Frewg, a regional online textbook rental service.

While building EduSourced, David learned some lessons around getting funded:

David: We weren't ready to scale when we first took investors money, which tells me that we took the money too early, but I didn't know that at the time.

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Taking money from investors meant that there was pressure to scale, and pressure to hire, and that hire included a high-powered sales executive, but we did this without understanding our own value proposition.

Steve: You mean that's who your investors were telling you to hire? Go hire a sales exec to scale?

David: Yeah. I can understand from the outside looking in, that would seem to make sense, bring somebody in who's done that before, but we didn't understand our value proposition. We didn't even have a fully baked-out product. We weren't ready to layer a sales team on.

The huge lesson for me was to raise money at the appropriate time (or from people who have patience at the appropriate time).

To hear the clip, click here

Omar Zenhom is a former educator and the co-founder of The $100 MBA and the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, a webinar platform for online business owners.

Earlier in his career, Omar had a series of what he calls side hustles, including a fashion company. The experience taught him that being a founder isn't just about the money:

Omar: Every time I started a business it was because I saw them as good short-term financial opportunities. Then I realized none of these businesses were having any kind of longevity because I can't add value to them in a way that it has meaning to me.

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I didn't really ask, "How can I add my strengths to any business?" I just saw an opportunity and ran with it. It was working and it was profitable so I continued to do it.

Then I realized I don't want to do this anymore. It wasn't authentic. I didn't feel like this is my legacy or something I can really leverage my strengths with.

To hear the clip, click here

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David launched his first startup, Frewg college textbook rentals, while in college:

David: Initially Frewg was a hobby. Over time it became an online book rental platform serving Ohio. We developed a simple algorithm for pricing the textbooks, predicting when a price would fluctuate, when a book would go out of print, that kind of thing. We weren't reliant on a wholesaler, which was interesting. Most people in that business work with wholesalers.

Steve: How did you learn about the economics of the business?

David: Initially we learned by doing simple stuff like going to the bookstore and getting information out of them about what do they pay for a book. I took 5 or 10 different textbooks, got their pricing, and then went and compared it to what I could sell them for.

To hear the clip, click here

Between Frewg and EduSourced, David tried starting a startup dedicated to digital textbook content. Here's why it failed:

David: No one really cared about our solution. That was the biggest reason why it wasn't going to work. I don't think I would have known that if I hadn't talked to people.

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Steve: No one cared, meaning the students?

David: The students weren't my market. It was the faculty that had to adopt the textbooks.

Steve: So this sounds like a multisided market. There were students, there was faculty, there were content providers, there were re-sellers, there were authors. There were about 20 moving parts.

David: Exactly. I didn't know when I started how far in over my head I would have been.

It was interesting learning to recognize defeat, and not even think of it as defeat, but think of it as, "I tried this. I had a concept. I developed it as much as I could."

To hear the clip, click here

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Omar was a teacher before becoming an entrepreneur. Here's why he left his teaching job:

Omar: The moment that really clicked for me is I was asking for a promotion that I thought I deserved. The person I was replacing, I was already doing their job for over a year.

I realized that, hey, what if I left today? I put in so much work into this institution. I've put in policies. I've built structure to this place and I can't take anything with me. I have no legacy, I have nothing to show for it."

To hear the clip, click here

As a founder, Omar learned to leverage his strengths. Here's what happened with a podcast he launched before the $100 MBA:

Omar: I realized I'm not a good interviewer. I didn't take it as seriously as I should have. I thought podcasting was a great idea. I believed in the medium, and I just said, hey this is easy. Just get on the mic and talk to people. I didn't really have a strategy.

After 46 episodes we decided to close it down. I realized I wanted to utilize my ability to teach. I never saw a business podcast that teaches. I saw interview podcasts. I saw discussion podcasts with panelists.



But I wanted to do what Coffee Break French or Coffee Break Spanish does, where they have a regular 15-, 20-minute lesson on how to learn that language.

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I knew that if I was on the mic teaching, I would have a competitive advantage.

To hear the clip, click here

Listen to my full interviews with David and Omar by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)

Next on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere: Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

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.
By Chioma Okwudiafor,

Programs Analyst (Education and Communications), Oando Foundation

"As I hid under my pillow in our little house in Buni Gari, a small town in the farthest part of Northern Nigeria, the sound of gunshots and loud cries of babies and their mothers filled the air. In the blink of an eye, the dreaded insurgents had burnt down my village. My father and brother were killed; my school at the entrance of the village was razed. At the break of dawn, my mother and I packed sparse clothing, and sadly I said goodbye to the only home we had known as we began our journey into the unknown. A once lively 12-year-old girl with the whole world ahead of her: I was now a girl with dashed hopes. My name is Amina and millions of children like me around the world suffer this fate."- Amina Ali, 12, Nigeria



Education is a fundamental human right, which is crucial to the realisation of all other human rights. Years of conflict and civil unrest have negatively impacted the education sector, leaving millions of children like Amina deprived of educational opportunities. On the day of the African Child, 2016, our call to action as a foundation set up by Nigeria's largest independent company in the energy industry is clear: conflict should never be a barrier to education. There is no excuse for giving children a lifetime of disadvantage.

One of conflict's particularly potent effects on education is the increase in attacks on schools. As children, teachers, and school buildings become the targets of attacks, parents fear sending their children to school. Girls are particularly susceptible to sexual violence and abduction. Statistics from the National Emergency Management Agency of Nigeria reveal that the conflict in Northern Nigeria has left over 10,000 schools damaged, 19,000 teachers displaced and 800,000 children without access to education. Humanitarian crisis is escalating in several parts of the world and the amount of aid allocated to education is dwindling. Collective action and advocacy from all stakeholders is key to cushioning the effect of conflict on education. That's why we are a part of the Global Business Coalition for Education. We need organizations that represent key private sector investors in education to strengthen and elevate efforts lead by business.

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The Oando Foundation and Educate A Child (EAC) partnership is a sterling example of how organisations can partner to protect the rights of children in conflict-ridden areas. With a mandate to improve the quality of learning in schools across Nigeria, the Foundation is enrolling 60,000 out-of-school children in school by 2018. We are bridging the gap caused by conflict and providing access to quality education. In northern Nigeria, the enrolment ratio of girls to boys range from 1 girl to 2 boys and 1 to 3 in some states. With the rise in the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs), there is a need to address the obstacles to social and economic reintegration, educational attainment faced by the IDPs.

EAC is co-funding projects in 46 schools across nine Northern Nigerian states, through the Foundation's Adopt-a-School Initiative. Results from Oando Foundation's project interventions in Adamawa, Bauchi and Taraba states show that majority of IDPs flee to neighbouring communities whose education systems and structures are already weak and face limited capacity to support new intakes. Oando Foundation is strengthening and improving the capacity of schools to absorb IDPs and out of school children. As part of a series of planned interventions, the Foundation's distributed education starter kits to help reintegrate children in school. Working with state governments and institutions like the USAID Education Crisis Response in Nigeria, our efforts will help mainstream children like Amina to formal school and provide them with educational resources to re-enroll.

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The Foundation is embarking on out-of-school enrolment drives in the communities and ensuring that walk-in centres are created in each adopted school. By 2018, our interventions will place 60,000 out of school children in schools and improve learning environments for over 75,000 public primary schools across Nigeria by enhancing educational infrastructure. We will also build capacity for teachers and community members as well as award scholarships to students with special focus on girls from our adopted schools, to serve as a further incentive to complete primary education and transition to secondary school. Now, on Day of the African Child, we are calling on business leaders everywhere to support learning for all children in Africa -- and across the world.
By Moses Owen Browne Jr., A World At School Global Youth Ambassador



On 16 June 1976 Hector Pieterson was shot during a peaceful demonstration in South Africa about the imposition of the use of Afrikaans and English in schools. He was 13 years old. Forty years later, we mark this day - The Day of the African Child - by encouraging young people to step forward and speak up about the issues that affect them.



I believe education can change the world, no matter what. Education can take us into the future that we long dreamed of. What matters most to me is training, teaching and mentoring young people so they can be active creators of the future they want.



A World at School has laid the foundation for real-time advocacy in the 21st century. A World at School provides the tools and creates the platform and modules we need as young education advocates to take our destiny into our own hands. I am passionate about education and this unique organization inspires me to continue to support my fellow young people, street children and out of school kids to see education as the only way forward from poverty and discrimination.



We can no longer sit back and watch millions of children perish in poverty without an education; we must use this day to reecho our calls for governments around Africa to prioritize education.

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia was a great challenge for not just the government, communities and teachers but also national and international organizations responding to the epidemic. Education was one of the forgotten casualties of the Ebola outbreak, like in so many emergencies around the world. Many students have not returned to the classroom since Liberia was declared Ebola free in late 2015. This is in part due to the trauma of loss and greater poverty - many lost their parents and guidance and now lack the financial capacity to restart school so they ending up at work instead.

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The education system in Liberia was weak even before the Ebola outbreak, with more than 70% of our schools destroyed during the country's bloody civil war, and most school going children were denied the opportunity of acquiring basic education and enrolment. Liberia's Poverty Reduction Strategy papers of 2008 note that many of our teachers were killed and others fled to exile in fear of being killed in the war.

Liberia's existing schools are in a perilous state. More than half of the country's schools have no water supply and 43% lack working toilets. Where there are toilets, one is often shared by more than 100 pupils. With nearly 60% of children never attending school, Liberia stands as the second worse country in the world for the percentage of children not in education. The challenges are obvious, yet our government contributes a pitiful 10% to education when the target for public spending on education 20%.

We must therefore mark the Day of the African Child in 2016 for young people to call for action against this terrible neglect for education, their futures, and the future of Liberia. We will be using this moment to echo young voices, and call on the government to ensure that young people are protected, and their needs are prioritized.



This year we will also focus specifically on the need to protect children's education in the aftermath of an emergency like Ebola. In partnership with It Takes A Village Africa this Thursday we will be celebrating with a number of events to help raise youth voices. We will host speeches from high school students on education in emergencies and diverse performances including dramas, dance and refreshments.

We will Parade through the principle streets of Monrovia to the capitol building and present the #SafeSchools petition calling for the government in Liberia to support the Education Cannot Wait Fund and increase their contribution to the overall education budget. This day will present a platform for awareness-raising and calling for the national government's attention to the plights of all children, especially for education in emergencies.



I believe we have a massive opportunity to make a difference for every single child, beginning with the education systems in Africa. This is the time for us to take decisive steps and shoulder the responsibility for educating our children.

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Funding from the players of the People's Postcode Lottery has enabled Theirworld to expand its Global Youth Ambassador programme across Africa. A World at School Global Youth Ambassadors are a network of young people campaigning in their schools, communities and countries for action to get every child into school and learning.
Last night, on my way home from work -- at a gay-owned business -- I told my wife, "Maybe I ought to write a blog on Orlando, you know, 'as a gay-owned business ...'"

I am cofounder of EnviroMedia, a communications firm that focuses on environment and public health, and my last blog post was on water infrastructure. This morning, I'm writing about the murder of 49 LGBT people and their friends in a business that provides sanctuary to the LGBT community.

Breathe.

As a gay-owned business, EnviroMedia and its staffers are committed to the following:

-We stand with Orlando -- the 49 murdered; 44 injured (and counting) and the people saving their lives; their families and friends; Pulse nightclub; and the LGBT and Orlando communities in general.

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-We are more proud than I ever could have imagined of our recent certification by the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) as an LGBT Business Enterprise.

-We stand with MBA Orlando (the NGLCC Orlando affiliate chamber) and our colleagues here at home at the Austin Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

-We stand with companies like Fare, JetBlue, Aetna, and, yes, even Chick-fil-A (I never thought I'd ever, ever be typing those words), that have been helping victims, families and friends, and blood donors in Orlando.

-When EnviroMedia received its NGLCC certification last month, I never dreamed our first public mention of it would be in a blog that includes the word "murdered."

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On Sunday morning, when I heard the news from Orlando of another mass shooting, my stomach turned. Our house guest from Boulder relayed the news over breakfast, and it wasn't until we were taking her to the airport that we learned the murders happened at a gay nightclub. My stomach twisted even more. The murderer hates LGBT people, including me, my wife, and my friend.

After all that sank in -- that there's another mass shooting, but this time aimed at people like me and my wife of 21 years -- I started to wonder, what do we do now, as a gay-owned business?

On Sunday, the day of the murders, I wanted to tweet something from EnviroMedia, but I second-guessed myself. I sent this text to our PR manager (straight, married mom) at 4:50 p.m.: "Sorry to bug you on Sunday. As gay-owned biz that is newly certified by national gay/l chamber of commerce, should EnviroMedia tweet something today? Later? I'm heartsick and don't want to come close to appearing opportunistic. Just being silent doesn't seem right either." I missed a call-back from her, and moments later found her voice mail message. She could barely get her recommendations in because she was crying. But what great recommendations she had.

We sent this Tweet first thing Monday morning: EnviroMedia stands with our @NGLCC colleagues and friends in #Orlando during this tragic time.

Then we had our weekly Monday morning staff meeting. Before we went into business as usual, I asked the staff, "Considering what happened over the weekend in Orlando, what do we do as a gay-owned business?" Our staff (aka: "EnviroMedians") were heartsick and angry. It is from my fellow EnviroMedians that I got the recommendation to use the word "murderer" and not "shooter" or "terrorist."

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I also asked my staff, "As a business that focuses on public health, what do we do?" So Tuesday morning we Tweeted this: Is #gun violence a public #health issue? Absolutely. #WeStandWithYouOrlando #OrlandoShooting #Orlando #AR15

It's worth mentioning that EnviroMedia is a new marketing vendor for CDC, and has been working with the Texas Department of State Health Services since 2000. We have yet to see a campaign related to the public health implications of gun violence. We've worked on traffic safety (distracted driving, motorcycle safety, seat belt protection for children and teens, impaired driving), hurricane preparedness, West Nile Virus, immunizations, tobacco prevention, flu prevention, obesity prevention. But never gun violence prevention.

On Monday, at about 2 p.m., I got a call from our clients at Fare, a rideshare service quickly expanding from Phoenix to Austin and beyond. The call was from one of the Fare cofounders. He and his cofounder wanted to donate $1 for every ride in Austin to the families of Orlando victims to help with their funeral expenses. More tears kept us from being able to articulate what work needed to be done. We pulled ourselves together and EnviroMedians and Fare pulled together a fundraising campaign.

Proceeds will go to Equality Florida's GoFundMe campaign to support victims of the Pulse shootings (murders). Since Sunday, Equality Florida has raised $4.2 million toward its $5 million goal. It will be reached no doubt. So thank you Fare for joining businesses like JetBlue, Aetna, Chick-fil-A and others to do what you can and #StandWithOrlando.

When launching EnviroMedia in 1997, we became certified with the State of Texas as a "Historically Underutilized Business" because we are woman-owned. I always cringed a bit with words like "underutilized" and even "woman owned." After all, aren't I just a business owner? But now, for the first time, a woman has become the presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party (can't we just say "first female presidential nominee" already?). So, I'm starting to wear the "woman-owned business" designation more proudly. I want to inspire other women and girls to become business owners, and to see a day when we aren't under the "underutilized" umbrella.

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In 2007, I was asked to be featured in an LGBT magazine. Though I was "out" to coworkers, family and friends, I have to admit my stomach twisted (our stomachs twist a lot). But I thought about my young, gay cousin and other LGBT people one and two generations behind me and I knew I could not and would not hide by saying "no thank you" to the LGBT magazine. So, I'm super proud of EnviroMedia's new NGLCC certification and of my fellow EnviroMedians who chose to work for our gay-owned company. I'm proud of our clients at Fare.
"It is obvious now that key politicians and public servants supportive of the Jubilee administration have never read, or at least have never understood, the Constitution of Kenya." - Macharia Gaitho.

"If you're not going to use your free speech to criticize your own government, then what the hell is the point of having it?" - Michel Templet.

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." - Harry Truman.

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Over the last three months, the world has seen a Kenya whose top leadership has once again been implicated in the murder of a vocal critic -- Jacob Juma. The world has heard said government offer its rehearsed vacuous riposte; that it will "leave no stone unturned in efforts to bring (the) perpetrator/s of the businessman's murder to justice."

Immediately after investigation efforts that raised more questions than answers about Mr. Juma's murder, the global public was treated to a Jubilee government that had zero compunction about unleashing deadly force against citizens exercising their constitutional right: that of demonstration against a certifiably corrupt and incompetent election body (IEBC) just as the country heads into the presidential elections in 2017.

Images of the sub-human treatment and deaths of Kenyans, mostly from the opposition (CORD Party), at the hands of fellow Kenyans -- police and paramilitary (GSU) forces -- sporting the latest anti-riot gear but sans the requisite training looped endlessly on TV monitors across the world.

The brutal images in Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa etc. evoked memories of Sharpeville in the 60s; Ferguson or Baltimore in 2015; Paris in 2015 & 2016 and the many other global flashpoints that have become symbols of police brutality and/or of governments -- national, state and local -- struggling to hold onto power, gain legitimacy and/or win the (international) public relations campaigns.

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The ill-advised PR campaign was illustrated on May 16, when in response to my comments on the blatant brutality of the Kenyan police and their disproportionate use of force against the protestors, a member of the Digital Communication in the Office of the President facebooked me a rather misguided interpretation of a Reuters-Africa story -- ostensibly justifying the brutal police response. Unfortunately for the spokesperson, they were howling at the moon because what the world saw contradicted their narrative: Endless cycles of the man in a green hoodie (Boniface Manono?) being pummeled senseless by a militarized police force.

The Government of Kenya appears unable to strike the balance between respecting the constitutional rights of its critics AND maintaining law and order. Given the history of Kenya's response to political dissension, it is more probable than not that the mayhem and death that has erupted during the protests have been a direct result of the highly politicized, now-militarized and poorly trained law enforcement apparatus. It is the foregoing combination of factors that has resulted in the disproportionate response and use of deadly force against those exercising their constitutional right.

The official spin on the use of deadly force -- protecting property and business -- while plausible and understandable, does not justify the taking of lives -- some innocent and others already subdued and obviously powerless. It certainly does not justify firing live bullets at children!

Property and businesses can be rebuilt and losses covered by insurance.

Lost lives and limbs cannot be resurrected or reattached.

In the exchange with the State House spokesperson, the discussion oscillated between whether or not the green hoodie-wearing protestor had succumbed to the beating seen around the world and the body count; the latter a macabre practice if ever there was one. The government sought to lower the number of lives lost while the opposition sought to increase the tally!

The heightened national malaise of the past three months climaxed in early June with the rather curious, almost blasphemous presidential pronouncement that "God has more important things to do for Kenyans than the IEBC issue". This line by President Uhuru Kenyatta was preceded by his prolonged; seemingly permanent silence over the social media postings of the deceased government critic Jacob Juma; postings that adversely mentioned both the president himself and his deputy as complicit.

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Silence in the face of obvious injustices is tacit approval of said injustices.
AR-15 rifles are displayed on the exhibit floor during the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S., on Friday, May 20, 2016. The nation's largest gun lobby, the NRA has been a political force in elections since at least 1994, turning out its supporters for candidates who back expanding access to guns. Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If there's anything still bewildering about mass shootings in America, it's just how un-bewildering they've become. The front page of the New York Times went all-caps for this one, trying maybe to stir something in us. And yet, we can reread the headline, WORST SHOOTING IN US HISTORY, over and over without feeling much shock, or even surprise.

Of course this one was the biggest one. Nothing changed since last time. Why wouldn't it happen again?

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In the coming days, we'll ritualistically stick our two cents into the national gunshot wound, making sense of this the only ways we know how. Some of us on the internet. Others in line at the grocery store, or in testy intergenerational chats. But the chances of real reform seem remote.

It's like we can't even agree that mass killings are preventable. We offer more prayers for the victims. More anger at the perpetrator. Deeper outrage toward the institutions that permitted the crime. But ours is the only country in the world that doesn't see the correlation between having a lot of guns, and having a lot of people who use those guns to kill people.

We've become a nation entirely clear on its feelings about mass shootings but totally unwilling to accept its responsibility for them. Think of the last handful of suggestions you've heard on the mass-shooting problem:

We need mental health reform, but also mandatory minimum sentencing for those same sick people who use guns. How would we know which is better? There's no data.

Our intelligence agencies failed us in their background check of an American citizen, but states don't want the federal government overreaching by interfering at gun shows either.

Americans are in agreement on wanting tougher background checks. But where they're not in agreement is on the question that really matters: If we finally realized that having a lot of guns is killing us, would we be willing to give them up?

I own a rifle myself, but if my right to range time on a Saturday, or my right to self-protection, or my right to defend against overreach from the federal government (depending on your argument) impinges on the rights of another human to be alive at a nightclub in Orlando, then our rights are unevenly balanced. Those are rights that need readjusting.

Firearms didn't make a violent man kill 49 people in Orlando this week. But they did give him reach. And we have to decide, right now, whether our own need for reach, for supposed security and independence has produced a state of affairs in this country that we can be proud of.

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Forget what you believe about guns and freedom, guns and masculinity, guns and self-sufficiency. Could you explain to the families of the dead why you deserve your right to bear arms? Why it had to be -- to paraphrase Jefferson -- the blood of their sons, their daughters, their partners and friends that watered your own personal Liberty Tree?

I don't entirely understand why I'm suggesting this. Gun ownership is the most reflexive, deeply entrenched issue in our country. More than freedom of speech. More than abortion. And the case for sensible gun control has been made a hundred times before, by people more eloquent than me.

But I can't find myself not saying something. We need sensible gun regulation now. We needed it last week. And if you agree, then we share a collective responsibility to demand it. Because silence in the face of a tragedy this preventable is complicity.

______________________
ASSOCIATED PRESS A woman worships a cow as Indian Hindus offer prayers to the River Ganges, holy to them during the Ganga Dussehra festival in Allahabad, India, Sunday, June 8, 2014. Allahabad on the confluence of rivers the Ganges and the Yamuna is one of Hinduismas holiest centers. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

NEW DELHI -- The Vishwa Hindu Parishad wants the Modi government to create a separate ministry dedicated to protecting cows.

The Hindustan Times reported today that the Bharatiya Govansh Rakshan Samvardhan, VHP's cow protection wing, is urging the Bhartiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre, to set a deadline for creating such a ministry.

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Since the Modi government came to power in May 2014, leaders from the BJP as well as from Hindutva groups such as the VHP, and its affiliate, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, have brought the issue of cow protection to the fore.

The VHP wants such a cow protection ministry to ensure a total ban on cow slaughter and beef consumption, and is pushing lawmakers to bring up the issue during the Monsoon session of Parliament, a senior VHP worker told HT.

A similar attempt was made last year as well, the newspaper reported, but not with much success.

The VHP and RSS also believe that such a ministry is needed to protect those Indian breeds of cow, which are are facing extinction, and to improve the milk production.

India should aspire to be number one in milk production and exports, instead of meat. There are numerous scientific studies that prove the advantages of not consuming beef, an RSS functionary told HT.

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"I have never downloaded a film on torrent, i don't know how to. yes occasionally i have seen downloaded films borrowed from friends and found a way to pay for them later, by buying them on DVD or blurray, and when i say this i also say that no one can stop your right to download a film. This time its a different fight, its a fight against censorship and if you are that audience that always downloads a film, then i won't ask you to not do that , please do, but wait till saturday which is the day you would normally download a film. Piracy happens because of lack of access and in a world of free internet, i do not have a problem with it. My problem is that this time its a case of vested interests trying to demoralise people from fighting for their rights. So all downloaders of Udta Punjab , i urge, wait till saturday till you decide to not pay for the film, don't download and share , curb the curiosity for two more days. Thank you for reading this.
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The first look of the female lead of Mohenjo Daro, Ashutosh Gowariker's epic drama starring Hrithik Roshan, was unveiled today online.

The film, a historical love story, will mark the Bollywood debut of Pooja Hegde, a former model. A runner-up at the Miss India Universe 2010 pageant, she made her acting debut in the Tamil superhero film Mugamoodi (2012), followed by the Telugu films Oka Laila Kosam (2014) and Mukunda (2014).

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Here's a still that introduces Hegde's character in the film.

The film, that also has Kabir Bedi playing the villain, is set to open in theatres on August 12 and has music composed by Academy Award winner AR Rahman.

Meanwhile, Ajay Devgn's upcoming action drama Shivaay, scheduled for a late October release, also put out some promotional material on Thursday.

Devgn, much like Roshan, introduced the first look of his leading lady in the film, Sayyeshaa.

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While Hegde has no family connections in Bollywood, Saayeshaa is the grand-niece of legendary actors Dilip Kumar and Saira Banu.

However, in an interview with Mumbai Mirror, the actress vehemently denied that her family legacy played a part in her getting the female lead in Shivaay.

She said, "Ajay sir liked my photographs and I auditioned for the film. The screen test had two of the major scenes from the film. I didn't get this film for my family connections."

Shivaay releases in theatres worldwide on October 28.

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Hindustan Times via Getty Images MUMBAI, INDIA - SEPTEMBER 23: (R- L) BJP Leader Vinod Tawde and Shiv Sena spokesman Sanjay Raut addressing press after the BJP-Sena executive committee meeting at Dadar on September 23, 2014 in Mumbai, India. Both parties said that they were firm on continuing the alliance as they resumed the deadlocked seat-sharing talks for Maharashtra Assembly polls. (Photo by Satish Bate/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Class X students in Maharashtra, along with their parents and teachers, were taken aback when they received a separate certificate for having passed their Kalchachni or the recently-introduced vocational guidance and selection test, which bore a photo of the Maharashtra Education Minister, Vinod Tawde, along with a brief message by him.

The certificates were distributed along with the original SSC mark sheets.

Maha education minister Vinod Tawde has printed his photo on aptitude test certificates of 10th standard students! What do u make out of it?  nikhil wagle (@waglenikhil) June 16, 2016

According to Mid-Day, with this novel idea of his, BJP's Tawde managed to reach out to over 13 lakh households across Maharashtra.

Teachers and other professionals associated with educational institutions in Maharashtra called the move a "publicity gimmick".

A school's trustee told The Times of India, "The Kalchachni certificate mentions the student's name, roll number and suggests a field suitable to his/her aptitude. What is the need for Tawde's photograph there? This is completely unacceptable and it seems to be a self-promotion campaign."

My photo has been printed with my quote and this is called direct and effective communication with students.

Bunty Shelke, Nagpur's Youth Congress leader, said, "If a photo had to be there on the certificate then it should be of the student. We will demand answers from the education board on how such a thing has been allowed."

However, an unrepentant Tawde said: "First of all, it is not a mark sheet, it's a certificate. My photo has been printed with my quote and this is called direct and effective communication with students. The aptitude test is a good initiative which is helping the kids and the Congress could never think of anything like this for years. It is sad that rather than appreciating something positive, they are making an issue out of it."
In support of Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinsons efforts in Computer Science Education and Career and Technical Education, the Department of Education and the Department of Career Education along with the governor will be announcing the expansion of Learning Blade for schools in Arkansas. The Arkansas Public School Resource Center will lead this effort. Learning Blade is created by Chattanooga-based Thinking Media.

The Learning Blades focus on STEM education will offer Arkansass students new and exciting opportunities to learn real-world computer science concepts," said Governor Hutchinson. "This program will help our young learners master the fundamentals required for an array of specialized and highly-competitive STEM careers.

"This effort, along with my computer science initiative, is putting Arkansass students in an even better position to land tech-driven jobs. As the computer coding movement in Arkansas continues to gain momentum, I look forward to even greater numbers of students taking on the skills needed for these challenging and rewarding fields.

As the governor noted, in this age of technology, people with a basic knowledge of computer programming will never lack opportunity. Connecting this knowledge to the many careers that employ these skills open doors to a whole world of possibilities, said officials. The state of Arkansas, through the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, has made a move to lead the country in making a supplemental STEM career awareness system available at no cost to all middle schools in the state.

The online technology, Learning Blade, introduces computer science and STEM careers to students in a format demonstrating the benefits in society. According to BLS data, by 2024, there will be over 126,000 Computer Science and STEM careers in Arkansas.

Learning Blades technology has proven to increase student interest in STEM careers with over 70 percent of participating students indicating that they learn about new careers through Learning Blade while over 35 percent are more likely to consider STEM as a future career. In the recent pilot in Arkansas over 70 middle schools in AR signed up to receive Learning Blade licenses to supplement STEM activities. Many have participated in the free, easy to access training sessions that are being provided.

The Learning Blade system is organized into missions that focus on societal issues, enabling students to participate in engaging lessons that explore problems such protecting web sites and social media from attacks, predicting a flu outbreak by using data and social media, building an environmentally-sound orphanage after a major earthquake or solving energy and transportation needs in a particular city. Learning Blade also provides teachers with feedback on student skills, while demonstrating the relevance of academics in real-life contexts for students.

Learning Blade has been validated as a supplemental tool for increasing STEM career awareness and interest by Battelle Education and recommended by a panel of educational experts in the ACT 2014/2015 Condition of STEM report.

In the implementation of Learning Blade for Arkansas, the Arkansas Public School Resource Center will be the lead organization to facilitate its use. Our work infusing career and technical coursework into an innovative school design means that students knowledge of STEM careers has to be established prior to high school entry," said Scott Smith, executive director of APSRC. "Learning Blade not only met this need, but it has improved STEM literacy in over 70 pilot schools that we helped to manage.

Schools nationwide have used the Learning Blade system in over 28 states since it launched three years ago. Arkansas governor and the state have a leading approach to getting more students in the Computer Science and STEM careers, said Sheila Boyington, president, Thinking Media. Offering our innovative digital platform statewide provides effective STEM career awareness to students with an opportunity to get on track for high demand careers, and that is our goal.

Additional partners in this project include Battelle Education, TATA Consultancy Services, STEMconnector, Million Women Mentors and Lightweight Innovation for Tomorrow.






Buhler JV and freshman football will not be defeated

The Buhler JV squad capped its unbeaten season with a 34-22 victory at McPherson Monday night with help from members of the freshman team.
If You Go To Oak Street Beach Today, You'll Have More Fun Than These 1930 Chumps

By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 15, 2016 8:32PM



Photo via Library of Congress

It's effing hot out todayalmost 90 degrees, and it feels like 96, according to AccuWeather. If you're planning to beat the heat at Oak Street Beach this afternoon, we don't blame you. And, bonus: You'll actually taking part of a noble Chicagoland tradition. (Two traditions, if you're also playing hooky Ferris Bueller-style.) In 1930, Chicagoans were flocking to Oak Street Beach too, though in higher-coverage swimsuits and more oppressively dense crowds, as you can see in the photo above.

The crowding effect is no optical illusion. Present-day Oak Street Beach gets packed in the summer months, but it was even more crowded back in 1930, with "congestion" issues acknowledged by the Chicago Parks District. From the early 1920s through 1934, the beach got an estimated 55,000 visitors on hot summer daysroughly the population of modern-day Uptown. To make matters worse, the beach was smaller back then. So many people, so little space, such hot weather! Why are the people in that photo smiling?!

Since the 1930s, Oak Street Beach has improved. It's been extended with a landfill of sand imported from the Indiana Dunes. As of 2012, Oak Street Beach was 6.25 acres, according to a Chicago Parks District spokesperson. That's nowhere near the size of Chicago's biggest beach, 45-acre Montrose Beach, but it's still better than it once was.

Bottom line: There's never been a better time in history to go to Oak Street Beach on a Wednesday afternoon. If the people in the photo above could talk, that's what they would all shout at you.
Ex Gov. Pat Quinn Pushes For Chicago Mayoral Term Limits

By aaroncynic in News on Jun 15, 2016 9:29PM



Former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn speaks at a voter registration drive at Union Park in 2015. Photo by Aaron Cynic.

Former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn kicked off a petition drive this week to impose term limits on the mayor of Chicago, as well as one which would provide for the election of a Consumer Advocate, who would  represent the citys beleaguered consumers and taxpayers.

The office of Chicago Mayor belongs to the people of Chicago, and our referendum to put term limits on the mayor will open the doors of City Hall and let the people in, Quinn said in a press release. The people should tell the Mayor what the rules are, instead of the Mayor telling us.

If successful, the petitions would put two binding referendums on the Nov. 8 ballot. If passed, the measures would automatic effect for the 2019 mayoral election. Quinn said that the petitions, being promoted under the banner of a group called Take Charge Chicago, both have precedent, and that Chicago mayors "enjoy unusual power over the legislative branch."

Unlike the chief executives of our nation and state, the Chicago Mayor appoints City Council Committee Chairs, runs City Council meetings and fills aldermanic vacancies, reads the website. This added power requires the added check of term limits to restore balance in City Hall.

The elected Consumer Advocate would replace the current position of Commissioner of the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protectionan appointed one. The advocate would be charged with promoting a healthful environment, protecting Chicago taxpayers and consumers from unfairness and inequality, and monitoring FOIA request compliance. The salary would be slightly less than that of the Commissioner, at $133,545 a year.

Quinn also took some shots at Gov. Bruce Rauner, who defeated him in the 2014 election cycle. When I left the Governors office the unemployment rate had declined or been stable for 25 straight months, Quinn told the Big John Howell Show on WLS. Now we have six straight months of unemployment going up and an unbalanced budget with deficit spending galore. Its not good.
by Deena Kamel Yousef, Bloomberg, and Caitlin Bronson



Investigators found the main wreckage sites of EgyptAir Flight 804, which crashed last month over the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board.



A search team provided images of the Airbus Group SE A320 jetliners remains to authorities, Egypts Ministry of Civil Aviation said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday, without specifying the locations. The wreckage was found by the John Lethbridge, a vessel from Deep Ocean Search Ltd. that joined the hunt to scan the ocean floor, the ministry said.



The discovery marks a significant step forward as investigators seek the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders that are essential to piecing together what caused the Cairo-bound flight from Paris to fall from the sky. The so-called black boxes are expected to continue emitting signals until June 24, according to the aviation ministry. Without the pings, which were initially detected two weeks ago, locating the devices becomes more difficult.



It will also have bearing for the lead underwriter for the plane, XL Catlin, which insured the $18 million hull.



Officials have said the crash was almost certainly the result of terrorism, and the discovery of the plane may aid that final determination. And of course, the eventual insurance payouts from XL Catlin will depend largely on that cause.



If it does appear that the crash was a deliberate act of terrorism, it must be certified. If that is in dispute, it may be difficult for insurance companies to settle payouts.



For example, the gunning down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 near the Russia-Ukraine border complicated insurance coverage due to a wartime exclusion that is often included in aviation hull and liability policies. While it is unlikely the EgyptAir crash was the result of an act of war, certain other exclusionsperhaps for terrorism may apply.



Liability costs may also vary depending on victims nationalities, as governments differ over how citizens can sue airlines for damages.



The loss of the EgyptAir jet is just the latest in a long line of aviation tragedies in recent years, including two Malaysia Airlines crashes and the purposeful crash of a Germanwings aircraft last year.



Searchers will draw a map for the wreckage distribution spots and plan how best to handle the wreckage in the coming period, the ministry said in the statement.



Radar images show the plane bound deviated from its course, veered sharply left and then rolled to the right in a complete circle before plunging into the sea, according to Egyptian investigators, confirming earlier statements from Greek officials. The aircraft also broadcast a series of error messages minutes before contact was lost. The crew didnt send a distress signal.



The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board joined the Egypt-led investigation this month. The probe also includes French air-accident specialists. The French ship La Place earlier received signals from the seabed in the search area, Egypt said.



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Insurer, broker for EgyptAir 804 revealed



Families of MH370 flight rush to file lawsuits ahead of insurance treaty deadline
Don Ross doubled down on his work and was able to complete his program in just eight weeks.

Pittsfield Adult Learning Center Graduates 40



A total of 40 students received certificates on Wednesday. More photos can be found here. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Today is your day and you will not allow anyone or anything to ruin it.

Ritza Fernandez stood at the podium in the auditorium in Crosby Elementary School on Wednesday night in front of a families, friends, and the graduating Pittsfield Adult Learning Center class.

Repeat after me, she said, "today is your day and you will not allow anyone or anything to ruin it."

For Fernandez nothing was going to hold her back. She never got her high school diploma and instead spent the last 12 years raising her four children. But last February she got in her head that she wanted to get her high school equivalency. She took control in setting goals and planning for the future.

On Wednesday some of those goals were reached.

"Today, this moment, started with an idea, a vision, a need to continue our education. And because we push forward we were able to accomplish our graduation," Fernandez said.

The students all had different stories, from an immigrant trying to bring his family to a safer country, to parents, to those whom the traditional high school setting didn't work. What they have in common, though, is that each one walked in or called the adult learning center on their own volition.

"All of our graduates need to be commended for making a full commitment to changing the course of their lives. This is no easy undertaking because it requires moving past the fear of the unknown. The first step on moving forward on life's requirements is to identify our fears and what is holding us back. Many of the students entering the adult learning center fear failure or they fear success or a combination of both," Director Paul Gage said.

Lorraine Akor had a fear of math. She couldn't get it and failed tests. But, after trying multiple times she finally passed.

"She first identified her fear and acknowledged that it was holding her back from completing her HiSET [high school equivalency test]," Gage said. "In the end, she realized that it really comes down to hard work. So Lorraine studied every day, using every available math resource. She used her teachers to get there in whatever way. After failing the math test multiple times, Lorraine finally passed on Jan. 6, 2016."

Gage asked the students to identify and acknowledge their fear because "in doing so, this will always lead to a better version of you."

The class was the 40th in the center's history providing students with high school equivalency and adult diplomas. Superintendent of Schools Jason McCandless calls it the best graduation in the school system because he knows each student in the class got there through determination.

"Each one of you looked yourself in the mirror and said 'I am worth the work. I am worth the hours. I am worth facing my fears. I am worth the dedication. I am worth the hassle. I am worth creating this opportunity for myself," McCandless. "That spirit that has taken you this far will take you wherever you want to go."

He quoted Barry Switzer in saying it is amazing how many people were born on third base but they go through life thinking they hit a triple. To put that is other terms, McCandless said a certain presidential candidate claims to have pulled himself up by the bootstraps but was educated in private schools, put through college, and then starting life with $2 million in a trust fund. There are many people who don't recognize the opportunities that were granted to them, McCandless said, and that's why he has respect for those in the adult learning center.



Ritza Fernandez told her classmates to celebrate the day and never let others hold them back. "There are people who have to make their own opportunities and I can tell you the people who make their own opportunities, the people who look themselves in the mirror and say 'I don't care what the people behind be say, I don't care what the people to the side of me say, I know I am worth a second chance," McCandless said.

Getting through the program wasn't easy. It didn't start easy when the students had to build the courage to pick up the phone and inquire about it and it wasn't easy to get through it.

"There were probably many days when you were sure if you could get to class but you got there. I'm willing to bet there were tests you never thought you'd pass or math you thought you'd never understand. Or work you never thought you'd get done. But you did," School Committee Chairwoman Yon said.

A total of 40 students graduated the program this year.

"I'm sure all of the challenges you faced were different. But, I do know that all of these challenges were major obstacles for each and every one one you. Whether it was your family obligations, your work obligations, maybe you needed to work two jobs or multiple other obligations. We need to remember that each of these took you time and attention and you needed to find balance to ensure that you succeeded in your educational goals that you chose to do, you yourself chose to do and not like the obligations in your life," City Council President Peter Marchetti said.

And getting through it matters. Tina Schettini received her general equivalency diploma through the program, when it was housed in the Mercer Building, in 1986. She went onto four years of college and now works as a senior special program coordinator. Schettini says most people wouldn't even know she had graduated in an atypical high school setting.

"It doesn't matter we are going to go great places because of who we are individually not because of the certificate or the place that it originated. This is really when you journey begins and you are going to do great things," Schettini said.

The ceremony included balloons and cheers from families and friends of the graduates as they received their certificates from Yon.
Where To Celebrate LGBTQ Pride This Year, Because Love Still Wins

By Rachel Cromidas in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 15, 2016 7:37PM

Love still wins, every damn timeeven if the revelry around this year's Pride Month is tempered by the LGBTQ community's collective grief over the horrific shooting of more than 100 gay nightclub patrons in Orlando last weekend.

We believe it's possible to grieve the Orlando tragedy, honor the victims, stand in solidarity with LGBTQ Chicago and celebrate pride all at once. No matter how you choose to do this, we've got a round-up of some of our favorite Pride Month events, all coming up over the next two weeks. Stay strong, Chicago.



Christina Lohman

Pride Fest: Ah, Pride Festthe city's well-meaning attempt to curb Pride Parade crowds and their drunken revelry by giving them another weekend to party is back again the weekend before the official Pride Parade. This year's LGBTQ-themed street fair runs June 18 and 19 at 3200 North Halsted Street, with a $10 suggested donation, and Jordin Sparks is headlining. But count on finding more parties next weekend along the parade route.



The Backlot Bash: Andersonville's biggest excuse to go wild is back this year for two weekends of parties and events: June 16 through 19 and June 24 through 26. The gigantic festival for queer women, located just off Clark Street, will feature guest performances by Lisa Loeb and Taryn Manning during Pride weekend this year. Other pre-pride events coming up this weekend include a comedy night with Gina Yashere at Laugh Factory and a party at Seven Lounge with Real L Word stars Sada Bettencourt and Whitney Mixter, who finally got rid of her dreadlocks.



Dyke March, photo by Eric Allix Rogers/Chicagoist Flickr Pool

30 Queer Plays in 60 Straight Minutes Our favorite annual show from the Neo-Futurists, devoted to gender and sexuality, is playing Thursday, June 23 at 7:30 p.m., Friday June 24 and Saturday, June 25 at 11:30 p.m. and Sunday, June 26 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $25 with all proceeds going to the Broadway Youth Center. If you're not familiar with the Neo way, buy a ticket now and prepare for a fast-paced hour of thought-provoking and hilarious original plays, all under two minutes each, cribbed from the performers' lives.



Proud to Run 2016: If you're really more of a morning person, head to Montrose Beach at 8 a.m. for a 10K, 5K or walk to celebrate LGBTQ pride and benefit Trans Tech Social Enterprises, About Face Theatre, and the Center on Halsted.

The Chicago Dyke March: The annual Chicago Dyke March is returning to Humboldt Park this Saturday, June 25, to celebrate grassroots queer activism and women who love women with a short march, followed by a party in the park. Think of it as a more chill, less-corporate version of Lakeview's parade. The march, now in its 20th year (!) begins at 2:00 p.m. at the southwest corner of Western Avenue and Division Street and ends in the park. Anyone can join in, but be respectful of the event's purpose!



Gay & Lesbian Pride Parade. Photo by Benjy Lipsman.

Chicago Pride Parade: The 47th Annual Chicago Pride Parade kicks off at noon Sunday, June 26 at Montrose Avenue and winds its way down Halsted Street and Broadway through Buena Park, Lakeview and Lincoln Park. The parade gets bigger and bigger every year, and this year the city is expecting over one million people to attend the Lakeview festivities.

Pride At Montrose is bringing the party to Montrose Harbor (601 W. Montrose Dr.) all day Sunday, with DJ sets and performances by "Derrick Carter, GUCCIROXX, Kaycee Ortiz, CHANCES DANCES!, DJ Gemini Jones, Slo 'Mo and more," according to the events page. The event is co-hosted by the Chicago Black Gay Men's Caucus, the AIDS Foundation Chicago, and others.
City Outlines Plans For Ramped-Up Security At Pride Events

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jun 16, 2016 9:25PM



Getty Images; Photo: Chung Sung-Jun

The Chicago Police Department announced ramped-up security last Sunday following after the Orlando massacre, in which 49 clubgoers, plus the shooter, were killed at gay nightclub Pulse in Orlandothe deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The department elaborated on Thursday in further detail how that security would be deployed for upcoming Pride events.

The department, alongside Federal Bureau of Investigation and city officials, announced that hundreds of additional officers will be stationed throughout Pride Fest and at the Pride Parade, which is scheduled for Sunday, June 26, at noon. Patrols will dispatched as some combination of uniformed officers, plain-clothes officers, bike patrols and K-9 units. The city will also be coordinating with state and federal law enforcement organizations, including the FBI and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

Rich Guidice, Managing Deputy Director of Operations for the Chicago Office of OEMC discussed the partnership: "Since the tragedy in Orlando, OEMC and the Chicago Police Department have met several times and we have adjusted resources and increased security measures so that the focus can remain on what Pride Fest and the Pride Parade are all about: the celebration of our LGBT community."

Superintendent Eddie Johnson reiterated that the department has not received any credible intelligence of threats against the LGBTQ community. "However, out of an abundance of caution following recent events, more resources have been deployed to the communities hosting these upcoming events, as well as near CTA stations, high-traffic areas in downtown and along the lakefront to ensure the safety and security of everyone involved in these large events," he said in a statement released Thursday.

The announcement was welcomed by Pride Parade coordinator Rich Pfeiffer. "We have had a great working relationship over the years with OEMC, CPD and CFD to make sure the necessary resources are in place to provide a memorable and safe experience for everyone at the Parade, and this year is no exception," he said.
Man Kicked In Head By Police Released, Then Arrested Less Than 24 Hours Later

By Mae Rice in News on Jun 16, 2016 8:22PM



Crime scene tape (Photo by LukaTDB via Shutterstock)

Update below: A man who was kicked in the head by a police officer during a Monday arrest documented in a viral video was released from police custody with no charges filed on Wednesday. He was then re-arrested Thursday, less than 24 hours after his release, according to police and the Sun-Times. Charges against Shaquille O'Neal are once again pending, police said.

The arrest comes after outcry from the Fraternal Order of Police, Chicago's police union. In a Wednesday statement on the union's website, titled "Unacceptable Events," the FOP writes that something went "terribly wrong" with O'Neal's case because he was released without being charged with "aggravated battery" of his arresting officers.

O'Neal's arresting officers were hospitalized after the arrest. Both were bitten during the arrest, one on the finger and the other on the arm; one officer also suffered what FOP president Dean Angelo told the Sun-Times consisted of bruises left by a chokehold.

O'Neal was hospitalized after the arrest, too, because an arresting officer kickedor as others have put it, stomped onO'Neal's head, leaving O'Neal unconscious. The officer who kicked O'Neal has been relieved of police duties pending an investigation from the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA).

One portion of the police union's statement reads:

As with any investigation involving an injury to one of our own, we are very, very concerned when the person responsible is not held accountable. As members of the Chicago Police Department, we are more than tired of being considered by some to be second class citizens and not worthy of the same protections under the law guaranteed to any other citizen.

This is an extremely bold claim from the Chicago Police, accused of systemic racism by pretty much everybody.

Before discharging O'Neal, police said they found him in possession of three Ziploc bags of heroin. O'Neal was arrested while on parole for a previous drug conviction, FOX reported.

---

Update, June 17: O'Neal, 23, was charged with four felonies on Thursday, according to a spokesperson for the Cook County State's Attorney's office. In relation to his Monday arrest, in which he was kicked in the head, he was charged with aggravated battery to a police officer, aggravated battery by strangulation and possession of a controlled substance. He was also charged with aggravated battery of an officer and resisting arrest in relation to Thursdays arrest.

---

Here's the video of O'Neal's arrest:




Press Release: Statement by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at the Conclusion of her Visit to Norway

Press Release No. 16/285

June 16, 2016

Ms. Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), made the following statement today in Oslo:

It is a great pleasure to be in Norway, my first visit as the Managing Director of the IMF.

I had the privilege of meeting Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Minister of Finance Siv Jensen, Governor of Norges Bank ystein Olsen, and their colleagues.

I was pleased to take part in the Norges Banks 200th Anniversary Symposium on the interaction between monetary policy and financial stability, together with a strong gathering of policymakers and academics from around the world. My remarks focused on a key lesson from the global financial crisis: managing spilloversstriking the right balance between domestic objectives and external stability.

The authorities have made intensive efforts to address the oil and gas prices shock, which has taken a toll on the Norwegian mainland economy. The key challenge is to manage the transition away from oil dependence. Norway is to be commended for lending a hand to refugees. At the same time, the recent strong influx of asylum seekers presents new challenges. Their timely integration into society and employment is critical so that they can contribute positively to the Norwegian economy.

I also commended Norway on its significant contribution to global stability and economic development around the world, including through its contribution to IMFs financial resources as well as its valuable support for the Funds assistance to low-income and developing economies and capacity development.

I would like to thank the authorities and the Norwegian people for their gracious hospitality.
Ross Simmons steps down as IID general counsel to become special counsel

Imperial, California - The Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors met Tuesday in closed session and gave direction to General Manager Kevin Kelley to accept the resignation of Ross Simmons as general counsel and appoint him as special counsel to the board. In addition, Kelley was directed by the board to retain El Centro attorney Frank Oswalt as interim general counsel and to initiate the recruitment of a permanent general counsel to succeed Simmons.

On behalf of the board and the agency, I am grateful for Ross service and pleased that he will continue in this new capacity at IID, Kelley said. He was committed, worked diligently and has made significant contributions to the district.

Its been an honor to serve as general counsel, and to do so longer than I expected, said Simmons. I am proud of the quality Legal Department that I leave behind, which will ensure a seamless transition, and I look forward, as special counsel, to providing continuity in key areas that are important to IID and the public that it serves.
Secretary of State John Kerry's Meeting With Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez

Washington, DC - Secretary Kerry met with his Venezuelan counterpart Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, today on the margins of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States.

The two had a constructive discussion about the current political, economic, and humanitarian challenges facing Venezuela. Secretary Kerry expressed U.S. support for the dialogue facilitated by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, former Dominican President Leonel Fernandez, and former Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, as an important means to bring together the government and opposition to establish common understandings that can resolve the crisis. He also underscored the importance of upholding democratic and constitutional processes. Secretary Kerry and Foreign Minister Rodriguez also agreed to continue discussions that focus on establishing a positive path forward in the bilateral relationship.
The Chicagoist will be launching later but in the meantime please enjoy our archives.
Secretary of State John Kerry's Meeting With Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif

Oslo, Norway - Secretary Kerry met today in Oslo with his Iranian counterpart Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. The two discussed progress on the continuing implementation of the JCPOA, including issues related to banking and relief of nuclear-related sanctions.

The two also addressed the situation in Syria, where the Secretary stressed the need for full access for humanitarian aid and a nationwide Cessation of Hostilities. As always, the Secretary raised the status of Americans still missing or detained by Iran.
U.S.-Norwegian Demining Initiative

Washington, DC - Today in Oslo, the United States and Norway announced the U.S.-Norwegian Demining Initiative.

This effort reflects a new chapter in our longstanding partnership to address the humanitarian impact of landmines and unexploded ordnance that is saving lives and helping post-conflict communities around the world rebuild.

Under this new initiative, the United States intends to provide an additional $10.8 million this year to clear portions of Iraq liberated from ISIL occupation and spend up to $8 million next year to do the same in liberated portions of Syria. Norway is announcing its intent to provide an additional $9.8 million for mine action this year, with a particular focus on Iraq and Syria, and plans to increase its financial support for global mine action by $15 million next year.

The initiative, built upon the Global Demining Initiative for Colombia announced earlier this year and led by the United States and Norway, also marks the first step toward establishing a broader regional partnership to safely clear landmines and unexploded ordnance in post-conflict countries, as envisioned at the May 13 U.S.-Nordic Leaders Summit.

Protecting civilians and supporting post-conflict recovery is a shared foreign policy priority for the United States and Norway, as reflected in our work together clearing explosive remnants of war in Colombia, Iraq, Laos and elsewhere. The United States and Norway will convene a ministerial-level demining conference this fall on the margins of the UN General Assembly in order to secure commitments on humanitarian mine action from other governments and private sector partners, and thereby help further the cause of international peace and security.

The United States is the worlds largest single financial supporter of efforts to clear unexploded ordnance and landmines. The United States has contributed more than $2.5 billion since 1993 to over 90 countries around the world through more than 60 partner organizations to reduce the harmful effects of at-risk, illicitly proliferated, and indiscriminately used conventional weapons of war.




This Isnt Our Last Love Letter



Dear Don Don,

Way back in 92



I walked into the room and knew



Never felt this way before



I shook your hand while gazing into your eyes



And the feeling grew



As I took a seat I knew



A love that would have my heart



Forever



I knew



Way back in 92





They say love at first sight doesnt always last or isnt true



We were the exception to that rule



Our love had no where to hide



A spark set fire



As if this is how the universe started





I never doubted our love or what we could do



Together we grew



Forming a bond everlasting



That became our glue



My euphoria was YOU



Im eternally grateful for the love and life we shared



For how fortunate we were :



to have and to hold

through sickness and in health

Til death do us part



Until we are together again



This isnt our last love letter



I love you with all my heart and soul



Yours forever,



Deirdre (Mrs. Hank Snow)





Im fortunate to have fallen in love with, marry and make a life with the sharpest, coolest, funniest, most rare, bad ass, tender loving, loyal man on the planet, my husband Don Imus.









A True American Hero

I dont know why it has been so hard for me to write about my dear friend Don Imus.



I certainly know what he meant to me, my family, my charity, my hospital and the millions of fans that listened and loved him for so many years.



I keep reading all the beautiful condolences that people are writing about how much a part of their lives were effected by listening to him over the years.

But what most people dont talk enough about is what he did for all of us.

In every sense of the word, he was an American Hero. His work with children with so many different illnesses and his dedication to their future was unmatched by anyone I have ever known or heard about.



Besides raising over $100,000,000 for so many causes, he took care of young people for over 20 years in a state where he could not breathe. Along with his incredible wife Deirdre, he created a world where children were not defined by their disease. That was a miracle! He was a miracle.

I will miss him ever day for the rest of my life.

I was blessed to be a part of his and Deirdes life.

No one will ever do what he did.

I love you Don Imus - A TRUE AMERICAN HERO





David Jurist

IMUS IN THE MORNING

FIRST DAY BACK!
Watch: Snake Attacks Owner As She Tries To Release It From Cage
Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the

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The first look at the Tupac Shakur biopic has been released on the late rapper's 45th birthday.

Opening with his mother Afeni Shakur (The Walking Deads Danai Gurira) giving advice to her son, the All Eyez on Me teaser features Tupacs early life in East Harlem and Baltimore and foreshadows the tragedy that couples his monumental success in the hip-hop game. This aint just about you. Like all black men, you have a bullseye on your back," she says. "They are going to give you the tools that you need to destroy yourself.

All Eyez on Me is the long awaited biopic of the West Coast rap legend, starring relatively unknown actor Demetrius Shipp Jr as Tupac, who was fatally shot in Las Vegas back in 1996. The film has been trapped in development for years with several directors dropping their names from the project. His mother Afeni, who served as the film's executive producer, passed away last month. She was 69-years-old.

Checkout the teaser trailer for All Eyez On Me! June 16th is Tupac's birthday. What's your favorite Tupac song? A video posted by Big Boy's Neighborhood (@bigboysneighborhood) on Jun 15, 2016 at 10:58pm PDT



Watch the full teaser for All Eyez on Me above. The film is scheduled to hit theaters on November 11, 2016.
Nearly Half Of Chicago Residents Can't Afford Their Housing

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jun 16, 2016 4:29PM



Getty Images; Photo: Joe Raedle

The study also finds that city residents consider housing affordability a serious problem at rates higher than national responders: 73 percent among Chicago residents compared to 60 percent nationally. (Oddly, just 58 percent of suburban Chicago residents considered it a serious problem, which is a bit lower than the national average.)

The study also found disparities in how groups view the housing crisis along local, racial lines. African-Americans are particularly skeptical about a housing rebound. Among African-Americans in the Chicagoland area, a mere 12 percent believe the crisis is over; and more than double that number (26 percent) believe the worst is yet to hit. Comparatively, 21 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of whites consider the crisis is over; and 19 percent of Hispanics and 14 percent of whites say the worst is yet to come.



MacArthur Foundation

"Housing is more than shelter; research shows that stable, affordable housing is a lifeline to educational success, health and well-being and economic security," MacArthur President Julia Stasch said in a press release. "There is a solid foundation of helpful policies, but more needs to be done to preserve and increase the supply of affordable housing and to address the loss of income that contributes to increased demand."

Chicagoans agree that more needs to be done, too, according to the study. Seventy percent of city residents responded that either "a great deal or a fair amount" can be achieved; and the same percentage claimed that elected leaders, at the federal level, need to address housing affordability.

The study defined affordability along the same parameters as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which requires a household to spend no more than 30 percent of income on rent and utilities in order to be considered affordable. Finding were based on interviews by conducted by Hart Research Associates with 1,200 adults throughout the country plus 303 adults in Chicago and 300 adults in the Chicago suburbs.

The news arrives less than a month after another study concluded that Chicago households need to earn $76,000 annually in order to afford rent.
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After Bee Gees member Barry Gibb pulled out of Coldplays Glastonbury headline set, the rumour mill has been turning rapidly, fans feverishly predicting who could fill the guest slot.

According to The Daily Star (so take this with a pinch of salt), previous collaborator Rihanna is expected to join the group on the pyramid stage.

A source told the paper: "Rihanna plays London and Coventry over the festival weekend but there's a Glasto-shaped gap in her schedule on Sunday, June 26. You never know.

Famously, Rihanna teamed up with Chris Martins motley crew for the song Princess of China on the album Mylo Xyloto, released in 2011.

Music festivals guide 2016 Show all 20 1 /20 Music festivals guide 2016 Music festivals guide 2016 Horizon Where: Bansko Ski Resort, Bulgaria When: 12-17 March Price: From 175 Line Up: Ame, Goldie, Nina Kraviz, John Talabot, Lady Leshurr, Craig Charles Music festivals guide 2016 Live At Leeds Where: Leeds, UK When: 30 April Price: 32.50 Line Up: Jess Glynne, Circa Waves, Mystery Jets, Band of Skulls, We Are Scientists Music festivals guide 2016 Primavera Sound Where: Barcelona, Spain When: 1-5 June Price: 175 Line Up: Radiohead, LCD Soundsystem, Sigur Ros, PJ Harvey, Tame Impala, Beach House, Suede, The Last Shadow Puppets Primavera Music festivals guide 2016 Best Kept Secret Where: Hilvarenbeek, The Netherlands When: 17-19 June Price: 147.50 Line Up: Beck, Editors, Two Door Cinema Club, Beach House, Bloc Party, Caribou, Half Moon Run Best Kept Secret Festival Music festivals guide 2016 Glastonbury Where: Worthy Farm, Somerset When: 22-26 June Price: 220 Line Up: Coldplay, Muse, Jeff Lynnes ELO, PJ Harvey, Jess Glynne (TBC) Music festivals guide 2016 Roskilde Where: Copenhagen, Denmark When: 25 June-2 July Price: 2,020 DKK Line Up: LCD Soundsystem, New Order, PJ Harvey, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foals, Tame Impala, Savages, Skepta, Tenacious D Simon Frsig Christensen / Roskilde Festival Music festivals guide 2016 Hideout Festival Where: Zrce Beach, Croatia When: 26-30 June Price: From 152.90 Line Up: The Martinez Brothers, Joris Voorn, Waze & Odyssey Hideout Festival Music festivals guide 2016 Bilbao BBK Where: Bilbao, Spain When: 7-9 July Price: From 69 Line Up: Arcade Fire, Pixies, Tame Impala, Foals, New Order, Hot Chip, Father John Misty, Years & Years, Wolf Alice Music festivals guide 2016 Open'er Where: Gdynia, Poland When: 29 July-2 August Price: From 130 Line Up: Bastille, Florence + the Machine, Foals, LCD Soundsystem, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The 1975, The Last Shadow Puppets, Wiz Khalifa Open'er Festival Music festivals guide 2016 Electric Love Where: Plainfeld, Austria When: 7-9 July Price: 119 Line Up: Alesso, Zedd, Tiesto, Chase & Status, Steve Aoki, Knife Party Music festivals guide 2016 Melt! Where: Ferropolis, Germany When: 15-17 July Price: From 136 Line Up: Two Door Cinema Club, Disclosure, Jamie xx, Sleaford Mods, Skepta, Jamie Woon Music festivals guide 2016 Sziget Where: Budapest, Hungary When: 10-17 August Price: From 215 Line Up: Bastille, Bloc Party, M83, Sigur Ros, Bring Me the Horizon Music festivals guide 2016 Flow Where: Helsinki, Finland When: 12-14 August Price: 165 Line Up: Sia, New Order, The Last Shadow Puppets, Jamie xx, M83, Chvrches, Four Tet, Stormzy, Daughter, The Kills Flow Festival / Jussi Hellsten Music festivals guide 2016 Rock En Seine Where: Paris, France When: 26-28 August Price: From 119 Line Up: TBC Music festivals guide 2016 Oasis Where: Marrakech, Morocco When: 16-18 September Price: From 110 Line Up: Bicep, Derrick May, Tale of Us, Dixon, Dusky, Hunee Music festivals guide 2016 Latitude Where: Henham Park, Suffolk When: 14-17 July Price: 205.50 Line Up: The Maccabees, The National, New Order, John Grant, Beirut, Father John Misty, Chvrches, Grimes Music festivals guide 2016 Bestival Where: Robin Hill, Isle of Wight When: 8-11 September Price: 190 Line Up: The Cure, Major Lazer, Hot Chip, Fatboy Slim, Craig David, Years & Years, Wolf Alice, Tourist, Katy B Music festivals guide 2016 Isle of Wight Where: Newport, Isle of Wight When: 9-12 June Price: From 186 Line Up: Queen + Adam Lambert, Stereophonics, Faithless, Iggy Pop, Adam Ant, Buzzcocks, Sigma, Jess Glynne Music festivals guide 2016 Citadel Where: Victoria Park, London When: 17 July Price: From 54 Line Up: Sigur Ros, Caribou, Lianne La Havas, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats Music festivals guide 2016 End of the Road Where: Larmer Tree Gardens When: 2-4 September Price: 195 Line Up: Joanna Newsom, The Shins, Animal Collective, Bat for Lashes, Teenage Fanclub, Devendra Banhart, Savages, Cat's Eyes Sonny Malhotra

Meanwhile, the Bee Gees leader has reportedly expressed his disappointment in not being able to perform but explained how a close family member had fallen ill.

Also headlining the festival are the likes of Muse and Adele. If you dont fancy watching any of the above, there are plenty of fantastic other bands playing at the same time, Glastonbury having recently revealed stage timings.
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The amount of food wasted by Tesco rose 4 per cent in the year ending April 2016 to the equivalent of around 119 million meals.

The figures have emerged after Dave Lewis, Tesco chief executive, gave a speech calling for businesses to do more to tackle food waste, including making public the amount of food that gets thrown away.

Tesco is the only supermarket to disclose how much food it wastes. It started to disclose the numbers in 2013 in an effort to improve transparency and better identify the areas of the food chain where food was going missing.

Dave Lewis, who took the helm at the UK's biggest supermarket in 2014, told the Global Summit of the Consumer Goods Forum: When I arrived at Tesco, we were the only UK retail company to publish our food waste data.

"What the data shows is that its clear where we need to focus our efforts  nearly three years after we announced it, we are still the only UK retailer publishing our data.

Tesco said in its annual report in April that the amount wasted increased from 55,400 tonnes in the year ending 2015 to 59,400 tonnes in the year ending 2016, or the equivalent of 119 million meals, if a meal weighs 0.5kg.

It defines waste as any product that isn't used to feed humans, including the 17,800 tonnes of bakery food sent to animal feed or other waste sent for anaerobic digestion, where it is turned into energy.

Tesco does not send any wasted food directly to landfill.

Waste from beer, wines and spirits were also blamed for the rise. The amount wasted equals one in every 100 food products sold by Tesco in the year to April 2016.

Not all Tesco departments wasted more food than last year. Produce waste was down 2 per cent on last year. Tesco has introduced more "wonky" or imperfect vegetables that might have previously been thrown away because they do not look aesthetically "perfect".

An extended range of wonky vegetables called Perfectly Imperfect was launched in stores in February. Lewis said that the healthiest food, like fresh produce, is often the most wasted. In the UK around 800,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and salads are wasted annually.

The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Show all 10 1 /10 The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Sugary soft drink - 330ml - 138 calories Walk off: 26 minutes. Run off: 13 minutes. JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Standard chocolate bar - 229 calories Walk off: 42 minutes. Run off: 22 minutes. Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Chicken and bacon sandwich - 445 calories Walk off: 1 hour 22 minutes. Run off: 42 minutes. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods One quarter of a large pizza (449kcal) Walk off: 1 hour 23 minutes. Run off: 43 minutes. Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Medium mocha coffee - 290kcal calories Walk off: 53 minutes. Run off: 28 minutes. Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Packet of crisps - 171 calories Walk off: 31 minutes. Run off: 16 minutes. Evan-Amos/Creative Commons The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Dry roasted peanuts - 50g - 296kcal Walk off: 54 minutes. Run off: 28 minutes. Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Iced cinnamon roll - 420 calories Walk off: 31 minutes. Run off: 16 minutes. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods One bowl of cereal - 172 calories Walk off: 31 minutes. Run off: 16 minutes. Getty Images The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods Blueberry muffin - 265 calories Walk off: 48 minutes. Run off: 25 minutes. Isabelle Hurbain-Palatin/Creative Commons

Tesco has also pledged to redistribute all of its edible food waste to charity by 2017.

A record 9,070 tonnes of food, including 8,084 tonnes of surplus food from retailers and manufacturers, were served up as meals by charities, according to FareShare, a food redistribution charity.

Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Co-op work with FareShare to pass on food that is still good to eat, but has gone through as waste because it was over-produced, labelled wrongly, or passed a short shelf life.
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A vote to leave the EU should trigger immediate Government action to deport European criminals and block the automatic entry of EU citizens into the UK, Vote Leave has said.

Setting out a roadmap for the Government in the event of a vote for Brexit, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and their allies said that legislation should also be brought in before 2020 to exempt the UK from all EU laws and to sever the country from trade agreements made by Brussels.

Dismissing David Camerons warning claims that Brexit could result in a decade of uncertainty as the UK embarks upon a tortuous renegotiation of its relationship with the EU, the Vote Leave campaign claimed that a UK-EU trade deal could be thrashed out by the end of this Parliament in 2020.

The campaign group set out six bills they want to see introduced by the end of this Parliament  in a move dubbed the Brexit Queens Speech.

At the centre of their programme for government is legislation to sever the UK from the authority of the European Court of Justice  a move campaigners claimed would allow Britain to remove more criminals  and a new immigration bill to end the automatic right of EU citizens to come to the UK. Meanwhile, the European Communities Act would be repealed before 2020, which would mean EU treaties no longer form part of UK law.

In Brussels, informal negotiations with the EU could begin immediately after the vote, they said, and only after these preliminary discussions would it be necessary to activate Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union  the mechanism by which a member state formerly negotiates its exit from the bloc.

A new finance bill to abolish the 5 per cent rate of VAT on energy bills will be introduced, as will legislation to increase NHS spending by 100m a week.

There is no mention in the proposals of the economic consequences of Brexit. Most independent economists predict that a vote to leave will force the government to cut spending on public services like the NHS as a result of an economic downturn.

 What to believe about the EU referendum

Chris Grayling, Leader of the House of Commons and Leave campaigner, said: After we vote leave, the public need to see that there is immediate action to take back control from the EU. We will need a carefully managed negotiation process and some major legislative changes before 2020, including taking real steps to limit immigration, to abolish VAT on fuel and tampons, and to end the situation where an international court can tell us who we can and cannot deport. A vote to leave on 23 June is a vote for action, and the Government will need to respond quickly.

The Leave campaigns plan  viewed as further evidence that its leaders see themselves as a government-in-waiting, was laid out on the same day George Osborne published illustrative details of an emergency Budget, including 30bn in tax increases and public spending cuts, that would be required to manage the likely economic fallout of a Brexit vote.

In his last Prime Ministers Questions before the referendum next Thursday, David Cameron told MPs that far from being able to spend more, Britain would have a huge hole in our public finances.

If we vote out, the experts warn us that we will have a smaller economy, less employment, lower wages and, therefore, lower tax receipts, he said. Nobody wants to have an emergency Budget. Nobody wants to have cuts in public services. Nobody wants to have tax increases.

But I would say this: there is only one thing worse than addressing a crisis in your public finances through a Budget, and that is ignoring it. If you ignore a crisis in your public finances, you see your economy go into a tailspin and you see confidence in your country reduced. We can avoid all this by voting remain next week.

What has the EU ever done for us? Show all 7 1 /7 What has the EU ever done for us? What has the EU ever done for us? 1. It gives you freedom to live, work and retire anywhere in Europe As a member of the EU, UK citizens benefit from freedom of movement across the continent. Considered one of the so-called four pillars of the European Union, this freedom allows all EU citizens to live, work and travel in other member states. What has the EU ever done for us? 2. It sustains millions of jobs A report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, released in October 2015, suggested 3.1 million British jobs were linked to the UKs exports to the EU. What has the EU ever done for us? 3. Your holiday is much easier - and safer Freedom to travel is one of the most exercised benefits of EU membership, with Britons having made 31 million visits to the EU in 2014 alone. But a lot of the benefits of being an EU citizen are either taken for granted or go unnoticed. What has the EU ever done for us? 4. It means you're less likely to get ripped off Consumer protection is a key benefit of the EUs single market, and ensures members of the British public receive equal consumer rights when shopping anywhere in Europe. What has the EU ever done for us? 5. It offers greater protection from terrorists, paedophiles, people traffickers and cyber-crime Another example of a lesser-known advantage of EU membership is the benefit of cross-country coordination and cooperation in the fight against crime. What has the EU ever done for us? 6. Our businesses depend on it According to 71% of all members of the Confederation of British Influence (CBI), and 67 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the EU has had an overall positive impact on their business. What has the EU ever done for us? 7. We have greater influence Robin Niblett, Director of think-tank Chatham House, stated in a report published last year: For a mid-sized country like the UK, which will never again be economically dominant either globally or regionally, and whose diplomatic and military resources are declining in relative terms, being a major player in a strong regional institution can offer a critical lever for international influence.

A spokesman for Britain Stronger In Europe said the Leave campaign do not have a credible plan for Britain's future.

All they offer is a leap in the dark that will put our economy at risk, he said. They want to quit Europe with no idea about what comes next. That will mean years of uncertainty that will risk jobs, risk investment and lead to higher prices in the shops. The only way not to risk it is to vote Remain on 23 June.

The EU referendum debate has so far been characterised by bias, distortion and exaggeration. So until 23 June we were running a series of question and answer features that explain the most important issues in a detailed, dispassionate way to help inform your decision.

What is Brexit and why are we having an EU referendum?

Will we gain or lose rights by leaving the European Union?

What will happen to immigration if there's Brexit?

Will Brexit make the UK more or less safe?

Will the UK benefit from being released from EU laws?

Will leaving the EU save taxpayers money and mean more money for the NHS?

What will Brexit do to UK trade?

How Brexit will affect British tourism

What will Brexit mean for British tourists booking holidays in the EU?

Will Brexit help or damage the environment?

Will Brexit mean that Europeans have to leave the UK?

What will Brexit mean for British expats?
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Donald Trump is not famed for his geographical knowledge. From using footage from the Moroccan border in a TV advert promoting the wall he plans to build on the Mexican border to most recently calling Belgium a city, geography is not the presumptive presidential Republican nominees strongest suit.

As such, Hillary Clinton has jumped on his latest geographical blunder after Mr Trump declared: Belgium is a beautiful city, during a rally in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday.

Ms Clinton has responded by sharing a video on Twitter titled, A message from your possible next president on: geography. The caption reads, "Belgium: Donald Trump's favourite 'city.'"

People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Show all 8 1 /8 People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Miley Cyrus 'God he thinks he is the f***ing chosen one or some shit!  Honestly f*** this sh*t I am moving if this is my president! I dont say things I dont mean!' Jemal Countess/Getty Images People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Whoopi Goldberg 'I dont think thats America. I dont want it to be America. Maybe its time for me to move you know' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Samuel L. Jackson 'If that mother**er becomes president, Im moving my black ass to South Africa' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Raven Symone 'My confession for this election is, if any Republican gets nominated, Im gonna move to Canada with my entire family. Is that bad? I already have my ticket. I literally bought my ticket, I swear' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Cher 'If he were to be elected, I'm moving to Jupiter' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Neve Campbell 'Im terrified. Its really scary. My biggest fear is that Trump will triumph. I cannot believe that he is still in the game ... [I'll] move back to Canada' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Jon Stewart 'I would consider getting in a rocket and going to another planet, because clearly this planets gone bonkers' People who will flee America if Donald Trump wins Randy Blythe 'He could just be a clown. If he is the president, though, I am leaving America 'till he's gone'

This isnt the first time Mr Trump has made his views about the country of Belgium known. Rather than calling Belgium a "beautiful city", in January he instead said Brussels had become a hellhole.

You go to Brussels - I was in Brussels a long time ago, 20 years ago, so beautiful, everything is so beautiful - its like living in a hellhole right now, he said in a TV interview with FOX Business Network.

Representatives for Mr Trump and Ms Clinton did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, has died after being shot and stabbed in West Yorkshire.

Ms Cox was attacked outside of a library in her constituency in Birstall near to where she held her weekly surgery. She was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary.

Her death was confirmed by West Yorkshire Police at a press conference. Temporary chief constable for West Yorkshire, Dee Collins, told the news conference: I am now very sad to have to report that she has died as a result of her injuries.

At 1.48pm Jo Cox was pronounced deceased by a doctor who was working with a paramedic crew that were attending to her serious injuries."

A Labour Party statement said: The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family - and indeed the whole country - will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve.

Her husband, Brendan Cox, has called on people to fight against the hatred that killed her.

He said: "Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo's friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love, and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

"Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full."

Born in Batley, Ms Cox went on to study at Cambridge University. She became the first of her family to graduate from university in 1995.

A former aid worker, she campaigned in economically deprived and war-torn countries across the world on issues such as discrimination and poverty.

Before entering politics, Ms Cox held a number of roles, including as an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was a former head of humanitarian campaigning for Oxfam. She was also the national chair of the Labour Womens network, worked with charities such as Save the Children, acted as a senior advisor to the anti-slavery charity the Freedom Fund and as an advisor to Sarah Brown.

Ms Cox was a vocal advocate for those affected by the Syrian crisis and abstained in the contentious vote on allowing British military action in Syria. She backed the Dubs amendment before it was defeated in the House of Commons that would have allowed the UK to accept 3,000 child refugees stranded in camps in Europe.

 Jo Cox MP speaks on Aleppo crisis

On her Twitter biography, she described herself as a mum, proud Yorkshire lass, boat dweller, mountain climber and former aid worker.

Recommended Read more Man arrested after Labour MP Jo Cox shot in West Yorkshire

A rising star within the Labour Party, Ms Cox had been in Parliament for just over a year but there was already talk of her having a future as a minister.

She lived on a boat moored in Wapping, London and split her time between there and her constituency. Ms Cox was praised as a dedicated MP and tireless campaigner locally, nationally and internationally.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

Beverley and Holderness MP Graham Stuart said Ms Cox was one of the warmest most likeable people you could meet.

The charity War Child UK praised Ms Cox as a brilliant advocate for such important issues.

Ms Cox is survived by her husband Brendan Cox, a former executive at Save the Children, and their two children.
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The husband of murdered MP Jo Cox has called on people to fight against the hatred that killed her.

Ms Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, died after being shot and stabbed outside of a library in her constituency in Birstall, west Yorkshire near to where she held her weekly surgery.

Recommended Read more Tributes pour in for MP Jo Cox who has died after being shot

The 41-year-old was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary. Her death was confirmed by West Yorkshire Police in a press conference this afternoon.

In a statement, Brendan Cox said: "Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo's friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.

"Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.

"She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn't have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.

"Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full."

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

Ms Cox, the former head of humanitarian campaigning at Oxfam, met her husband Brendan, a former executive at Save the Children, while they were both working in the aid industry. He was Gordon Browns adviser on international development when he was Prime Minister.

Temporary chief constable for West Yorkshire Dee Collins told the news conference on Thursday: I am now very sad to have to report that she has died as a result of her injuries.

At 1.48pm Jo Cox was pronounced deceased by a doctor who was working with a paramedic crew that were attending to her serious injuries."

Born in Batley, Ms Cox went on to study at Cambridge University, graduating in 1995. She was the first out of her family to graduate from university.

A former aid worker, she campaigned in economically deprived and war-torn countries across the world on issues such as discrimination and poverty.

A rising star within the Labour party, Ms Cox had been in Parliament for just over a year but there was already talk of her having a future as a minister.

She lived on a boat moored in Wapping, London and split her time between there and her constituency. Ms Cox was praised as a dedicated MP and tireless campaigner locally, nationally and internationally.

Politicians on all sides have paid tribute to the popular MP and both sides of the EU referendum debate have abandoned campaigning for the day.

The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family - and indeed the whole country - will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today, the Labour Party said in a statement.

 Jo Cox confirmed dead

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: "We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Cox's death was a "tragedy" and said his thoughts were with her family.

Former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Cox was one of the "liveliest, bravest and most passionate MPs".

The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said her heart breaks for Cox's family.
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The man arrested over the killing of Labour MP Jo Cox is believed to have had long-term links with a hard-right group based in London which had been campaigning for many years for Britain to leave the European Union.

Get the latest updates on Jo Cox's death via our liveblog

Thomas Mair was named as a supporter in an online publication of the Springbok Club, an organisation which has defended the white supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa.

Witnesses to the fatal attack on Ms Cox say they heard Mair shout Britain First as the MP was shot and then stabbed. The organisation Britain First, which was founded by former members of the British National Party, has denied that Mair was associated with it and say they condemn the killing.

The link between Mair and the Springbok Club goes back ten years when its online magazine, the Springbok Cyber Newsletter, was inquiring about the whereabouts of Thomas Mair, from Batley in Yorkshire [who] was one of the earliest subscribers and supporters of S.A. Patriot who has moved from his address in the Fieldhead Estate district of the town.

 Cox murder suspect arrest

The leading article for June 2016 Springbok Cyber Newsletter, which describes itself on its website as being pro-free market capitalism and patriotism and anti-political correctness, was, however, devoted to Britain and the referendum. It started: On Thursday, 23rd June 2016 all British voters will have the opportunity to vote on the future of their country. They can vote either to remain entrapped in the artificial and retrograde European Union, or to regain their sovereign independence....

The article ends by declaring: But we should not only be concentrating at the negative aspects of remaining in the EU. Our campaign should be primarily positive and optimistic for a future outside the EU. The motto of the Patriotic Forum (an umbrella grouping of patriotic organisations which the Springbok Club is part of) is Out of Europe and into the World. There is a golden future waiting for Britain out there once the country returns to its traditional vision of looking towards the Open Seas and its ethnic brothers and sisters in the Commonwealth around the globe. The days ahead will inspire us!

It is not known if Mair had renewed his connection with the Springbok Cyber Newsletter.

In May 2010 Mair was himself in the news. In an interview with the Huddersfield Daily Examiner he talked about getting work at a local park after being referred to a clinic for adults with mental health problems.

Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Floral tributes and candles are placed by a picture of slain Labour MP Jo Cox at a vigil in Parliament square in London AFP Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Tributes to Labour Party MP Jo Cox are placed on her houseboat in Wapping in London REUTERS Jo Cox tributes - in pictures The Union flag at half-mast on top of Portcullis House in London after Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (2R) and deputy leader Tom Watson (L) light candles as they attend a vigil to slain Labour MP Jo Cox in Parliament square in London AFP/Getty Images Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and deputy leader Tom Watson (rear) arrive to leave tributes at Parliament Square PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures People leave St Peter's Church after a vigil in memory of Jo Cox REUTERS Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Flowers left at Parliament Square opposite the Palace of Westminste, following the death of Labour MP Jo Cox PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures People react as they look at tributes left for Labour Member of Parliament Jo Cox in Parliament Square, London REUTERS Jo Cox tributes - in pictures A man writes a message at Parliament Square PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures People stop to look at tributes left at Parliament Square opposite the Palace of Westminster PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures A woman arrives to lay flowers at a statue to Joseph Priestly in Birstall near to the scene where Labour MP Jo Cox was shot AFP/Getty Images Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Tributes at Parliament Square opposite the Palace of Westminster PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures A woman places candles in tribute to Labour Party MP Jo Cox REUTERS Jo Cox tributes - in pictures A member of the public signs a memorial for British MP Jo Cox in Parliament Square, London EPA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures People sign messages of condolence for MP Jo Cox during a vigil in Parliament Square in London Getty Images Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Flags at half mast outside Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, after Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in the street outside her constituency advice surgery in Birstall PA Jo Cox tributes - in pictures People arrive in Market Square with floral tributes after the death of Jo Co Getty Images Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Floral tributes are placed in Market Square next to the statue of Joseph Priestley following the death of Jo Cox Getty Images Jo Cox tributes - in pictures Floral tributes are brought to the scene after the death of Jo Cox Getty Images Jo Cox tributes - in pictures A police officer carries bunches of flowers at the scene of the shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall REUTERS

He said: I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world. Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common mainly caused by long-term unemployment.All these problems are alleviated by doing voluntary work. Getting out of the house and meeting new people is a good thing, but more important in my view is doing physically demanding and useful labour.

Neighbours described how he would do gardening chores for local people.

David Pickles said: He's lived there longer than me and I've lived here since 1975. I still can't believe it. He's the last guy I would have thought of.

He's just quiet. He kept himself to himself. He lived by himself. He's been on his own for about 20 years.

Another neighbour, who did not want to be named, said: We've known him quite a lot of years. I've known him since I was young. He lived with his grandmother in that house, she died a few years ago. He was a bit of a loner. It's a bit of a shock - he did everyone's gardens.

I can't say a wrong word about him, he was so quiet. It's come as a shock to everybody.
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Politicians have paid tribute to the MP Jo Cox, who has died after being shot and stabbed in her constituency.

The Labour MP for Batley and Spen was attacked in Birstall near Leeds where she was holding her weekly MP surgery at a local library. She was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary where she was initially reported to be in a critical condition.

Politicians on all sides have paid tribute to the popular MP and both sides of the EU referendum debate have abandoned campaigning for the day.

In a statement, the leader of the Labour party Jeremy Corbyn said: "The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family  and indeed the whole country  will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.

"Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all.

"Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

"In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.

The deputy leader of the party Tom Watson said "the whole of the Labour movement is devastated at Jo's death".

It is hard to comprehend how a compassionate, principled and beautiful person can be taken away from us so cruelly. It's even more devastating because she was doing what she did best - serving her constituents.

We grieve her loss. Our love and prayers are with Brendan and Jo's family.

The Prime Minister said Cox's death was a "tragedy" and said his thoughts were with her family.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne said his thoughts were with her husband and children.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had previously worked with Ms Cox described her as "the most vivacious, personable, dynamic and committed friend you could ever have."

"She went to some of the most dangerous places in the world. The last place she should have been in danger was in her home town.

"People will say that this does not happen in Britain. This should not happen in Britain. And we must resolve that this will never again happen in Britain.

"This is a devastating day. And it is a devastating blow to our democracy."

Former leader of the Labour party Ed Miliband said she was "full of life and joy".

Former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Cox was one of the "liveliest, bravest and most passionate MPs".

Fellow Labour MP Jess Phillips said she was "amazing" and that her heart was broken, while Stella Creasy said she was "one of a kind".

Boris Johnson said he was "sad and shocked" to hear of Cox's death.

The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, said her heart breaks for Cox's family.

Broadcasters Nick Robinson and Owen Jones also paid tribute to Cox.

Prior to being an MP, Cox was an aid worker who campaigned in war-torn countries on issues such as discrimination and poverty. She had previously held roles as an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was the former head of humanitarian campaigning for Oxfam.

Cox was elected as a Labour MP in 2015 and was considered a rising star within the party. She has been a vocal supporter of the Remain campaign during the EU referendum and on Wednesday was pictured with her husband and two children on the Brexit flotilla debate.
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Jo Cox was regarded by Labour colleagues as one of the brightest stars among the intake of MPs who joined the Commons at last years general election.

The 41-year-old former head of humanitarian campaigning at Oxfam made a mark by calling repeatedly for Britain to do more to help the victims of Syrias civil war. She remained in regular contact with former colleagues in the aid world who are working to help refugees in the region. She called Commons debates on the plight of the refugees and believed the UK Government should do more both to help the victims and use its influence to bring an end to the conflict.

Get the latest updates on Jo Cox via our liveblog

She met her husband Brendan, a former executive at Save the Children, when they both worked in the aid industry. He was Gordon Browns adviser on international development when he was Prime Minister.

 Jo Cox MP Maiden Speech

The couple live on a boat moored at Wapping, near Londons Tower Bridge, with their two young children. She divided her time between there and her Batley and Spen constituency in West Yorkshire, where she grew up and still has family. Highly active locally, she had a majority of 6,057 at last year's election.

Recommended Read more Eyewitnesses describe moment MP shot outside constituency office

The strong campaigner for women's rights was one of the MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership last year to widen debate in the party even though they had no intention of voting for him. She admitted she regretted her decision after Labour managed only mixed results in the local elections in May, describing them as a terrible missed opportunity.

A strong supporter of EU membership, she used an interview with The Independent last month to urge Jeremy Corbyn to do more to mobilise the partys supporters behind a Remain vote. It turned out to be a prophetic warning; since then, the opinion polls suggest that many working class Labour voters are shifting to the Leave camp.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

Ms Cox regarded herself as on the left and not a Blairite even though she backed Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate, in last years leadership contest. Although seen as one of Mr Corbyns many critics inside the Parliamentary Labour Party, she insisted she was a critical friend who wants him to run an inclusive Labour Party with a message that reached out beyond its traditional base.

She told The Independent: Some of the people around him are very good at talking to the movement that helped propel Jeremy to power in the party  a really important constituency who are passionate, principled and excitedThey cannot be blind to the fact that that is not enough of a constituency or coalition to get us into power.

Ms Cox hinted that Mr Corbyn should stand down voluntarily before the next general election if he could not show that Labour was a government-in-waiting. She said: The clock is ticking. If we dont change tack, many Labour MPs will not be Labour MPs after the 2020 election. It is not just Jeremy; we are all on probation. The future of the Labour Party is. We need to show there is a role for the Labour Party and we are a government-in-waiting.
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In a tragically short 15 months as an MP, Jo Cox, who was been killed at the age of 41, made her mark as one of the brightest and best of the MPs elected for the first time at last years general election.

Many newcomers struggle to stand out from the Commons crowd, but the former head of humanitarian campaigning at Oxfam made an instant impact. She called repeatedly for Britain to do more to help the victims of Syrias civil war. She knew what she was talking about: she was still in regular contact with friends and former colleagues in the aid world working to help refugees in the region.

She set up a parliamentary group on Syria and staged Commons debates on the plight of the refugees. She argued forcefully that the UK Government should be doing more both to help the victims and use its influence abroad to bring an end to the Syrian conflict.

Shortly after she was elected in May last year, Ms Cox posted her first tweet as an MP, describing it as an emotional moment.

Ms Cox spent 10 years in the aid world, dangerous work which often took her to conflict zones. She met her husband Brendan, a former executive at Save the Children, while they worked in the aid industry. He became Gordon Browns adviser on international development while he was Prime Minister. Ms Cox worked closely with his wife Sarah Brown as director of the Maternal Mortality Campaign to prevent mothers and babies dying needlessly in pregnancy and childbirth.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

The couple lived on a converted barge moored at Wapping, near Londons Tower Bridge, with their two young children. She divided her time between there and her Batley and Spen constituency in West Yorkshire, where she grew up and still had family. Highly active locally, she won a majority of 6,057 at last year's election and regarded it as a dream job to represent her area at Westminster.

She was educated at Heckmondwicke Grammar School and Cambridge University. Before working in the aid world, the strongly pro-EU Ms Cox worked as head of key campaigns for the Britain In Europe and political adviser to the Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock.

She joined Oxfam in 2002, as head of their EU Office in Brussels, and became head of policy and advocacy in 2005. A strong campaigner for womens rights, she chaired the Labour Womens Network for four years. Ms Cox urged Jeremy Corbyn to take a tougher line against supporters who attack his critics on social media. She received sexist comments and remarks about her appearance after criticising him.

Ms Cox was one of the MPs who nominated Mr Corbyn for the Labour leadership last year to widen debate in the party even though they had no intention of voting for him. She admitted that she regretted her decision after Labour managed only mixed results in the local elections this May, describing them as a terrible missed opportunity.

In an interview with the Independent last month, Ms Cox urged Mr Corbyn to do more to mobilise the partys supporters behind a Remain vote in the EU referendum. It was a prophetic warning; recent opinion polls suggest that many working class Labour voters are shifting to the Leave camp.

Ms Cox described herself as on the left of the party and definitely not a Blairite even though she backed Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate, in last years leadership contest. She was seen as one of Mr Corbyns many critics inside the Parliamentary Labour Party, but insisted she was a critical friend who wanted him to run an inclusive Labour Party with a message reaching beyond the traditional base.

She told the Independent: Some of the people around him are very good at talking to the movement that helped propel Jeremy to power in the party  a really important constituency who are passionate, principled and excitedThey cannot be blind to the fact that that is not enough of a constituency or coalition to get us into power.

Ms Cox hinted that Mr Corbyn should stand down voluntarily before the next general election if he cannot show that Labour is a government-in-waiting. She said: The clock is ticking. If we dont change tack, many Labour MPs will not be Labour MPs after the 2020 election. It is not just Jeremy; we are all on probation. The future of the Labour Party is. We need to show there is a role for the Labour Party and we are a government-in-waiting.

An independent-minded spirit who did not want to be put into a category, Ms Cox will be remembered for putting her principles before traditional party politics. In a very short space of time, she brought expertise and passion to the Commons which MPs and ministers will hopefully remember when they take decisions about Syria in future.
The Most Glamorous Pop-Up Ever: Diner En Blanc 2016 Announced

By Anthony Todd in Food on Jun 16, 2016 6:01PM



Last year's Diner En Blanc. Photo via Diner en Blanc Chicago.

What do you get when you combine fabulous gourmet picnic food, secret locations, a massive waiting list and about 3000 people dressed in their finest white garb? You get Diner en Blanc, the coolest, most exclusive pop-up dinner around.

Started in Paris in 1988, Diner en Blanc (Dinner in White) is an annual gathering that takes place in cities around the world. Diners are only told where to gather, and are then escorted to the secret site. Chicago sites have previously included Federal Plaza, the Art Institute and the Lincoln Park Zoo Boardwalk.

This year's dinner will take place on Aug. 12, 2016. Last year, 1600 people came, and this year, they're expecting to have about 3000 attendees.

The price hasn't been announced yet, and tickets can be very, very hard to get. Those who've attended in the past get first priority, but your best bet is to either get referred by someone who has been before or get on the waiting list right now. You'll have to dress in head-to-toe white and bring a bunch of stuff (including your picnic, table, two white chairs, white tablecloth, and white cloth napkins) but if you manage to make the cut, you're in for a magical night.
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Among many things, Jo Cox will be remembered as a popular MP who campaigned tirelessly on global issues.

Ms Cox, 41, was attacked in her constituency in Birstall in West Yorkshire near to where she held her weekly surgery. She was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary in a critical and serious condition but died of her injuries soon after.

Syria was an issue close to Ms Coxs heart and was one of her cornerstone campaigning issues. The politician routinely called upon Britain to do more to help the victims of Syrias civil war.

Most recently on 3 May, Ms Cox called an Urgent Question on the situation in Aleppo in Syria.

In her empowering speech, she called for Britain to protect civilians and to deliver aid and air drops to besieged communities in Syria. In her own words in the speech, Sometimes all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

In October 2015 she co-authored, alongside Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, an article in The Observer which argued British military forces could come to an ethical solution to the Syrian conflict. She went on to both launch the all-party parliamentary committee on Syria and become its chair.

In October, she abstained from the vote for UK military intervention in Syria because she was against the strategy of intervention.

Born in Batley, the Yorkshire native is the first in her family to graduate from University.

Prior to embarking on a career in politics, Ms Cox worked as an aid worker for a decade. Holding a number of high-profile roles, she was the head of humanitarian campaigning for Oxfam and an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Bonnie Greer has called Nigel Farage a "straight-up racist" and compared the UKIP leader to Hermann Goring.

The 67-year-old American-British playwright, who supports the remain campaign, posted a photo of Mr Farage standing in front of a line of migrants titled Breaking point on Twitter.

The tweet was captioned: Even Trump wouldn't pose in front of a picture like this. Nigel Farage is a straight-up racist.

Greer then posted the same image of Mr Farage again but this time, it included a Hermann Goring quote.

A spokesperson for UKIP told The Independent: It is an absurd ahistorical thing to say. Maybe she should read up on Godwin's law.

Goring was a leading member of the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitlers Second-in-Command. After helping Hitler gain power in 1933, he became the second most powerful man in Germany. He founded the Gestapo in 1933 and later became the minister in charge of the Four Year Plan.

Godwin's law is an Internet adage which asserts that, As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches.

Gorings original quote is: If you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
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The ultra-right nationalist group Britain First has claimed it would absolutely not condone the attack on Jo Cox.

Her attacker reportedly shouted "Britain First" as he stabbed and shot her to death. And, though there is nothing to suggest any direct link with the group, the attack has shone a spotlight on the political party that has courted controversy.

The BNP off-shoot, founded just five years ago, has acquired a paramilitary style image: with countryside training camps for members and pledges to take direct action against global Islamic jihad.

 Britain First protest outside East London Mosque

It has appealed to former soldiers to join up  with images of guns and skulls on its website and the slogan "Isis hunting club" emblazoned on its merchandise.

On the day of Ms Cox's death, the front of its site showed pictures from the group's recent "Activist Training Camp, where members practised fighting techniques and posed in camouflage clothing.

The site is also littered with anti-immigrant and negative stories about Muslims. Examples include:

The Britain First website carries news headlines which paint Muslims in a bad light

The group has tried to take advantage of the refugee crisis

Headlines under the site's 'News' section include:

Stories also attack the "Muslim London Mayor" Sadiq Khan

The group asks for donations from the public to 'get our country back'

Some fear that the group and its poisonous right-wing ideology may have influenced Ms Coxs killer.

The group's leader, Paul Golding, has claimed that the attacker could have shouted 'You need to put Britain first'.

Over the last year she has been at the forefront of the campaign to help Syrian refugees and pressurise the Government into accept Britains "fair share" of asylum seekers.

Activists at a 2016 training camp in Snowdonia (Britain First)

Founded just five years ago  by two former BNP members  Britain First has been highly adept at appealing to the most extreme elements of Britains right wing.

The group even has a wing called the Britain First Defence Force, which has attracted widespread condemnation for staging marches the group calls Christian Patrols in which members in green uniforms carry white crosses, while shouting anti-Islamic slogans.

Britain First leader Paul Golding, centre, seen here at a training camp in Wales. He was previously the BNPs communications officer. (Britain First)

They have also been involved in Mosque invasions and have staged protests outside the homes of alleged Islamists.

At one stage its members  complete in military style uniforms  offered to provide personal protection to the Ukip leader Nigel Farage. The offer was ingored by Farage who has no connection to the group, and has actively sought to distance himself and Ukip from it.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

But the group has also had some success nationally, and garnered a large online following. On Facebook the groups page has 1.4 million likes, meaning the far-right group has more followers on the social network than any political party in the UK. The Conservatives currently have the second largest following with 550,000 followers, while Labour has 480,000.

During a 2016 March through Luton, on one of the groups 'Christian Patrols', the group walked through the town centre with white crosses. Leader, Paul Golding, and Deputy, Jayda Fransen were subsequently arrested and banned from Luton. (Britain First/YouTube)

The group boasted of reaching 1 million supporters on its website, claiming the milestone indicated genuine popular support of its ideals, policies and views. However, this has been largely attributed to the frequent populist and sentimental posts on the page, many of which have little to do with the groups core message.

At the 2014 European elections, founder members Dowson and Golding stood as Britain First candidates in Wales and Scotland. The group urged voters in England to vote for UKIP.

During the campaign in Wales, the group used images of murdered soldier Lee Rigby in their campaign, using the phrase remember Lee Rigby on ballot papers. The electoral commission subsequently apologised to the dead soldiers family.

Speaking about the group, Lee Rigbys mother said: Their views are not what Lee believed in and has no support from the family.
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A Labour MP has been killed after being shot and stabbed whilst holding an advice surgery for her constituents.

Jo Cox, the MP for Batley and Spen, was attacked outside a library in the town of Birstall, West Yorkshire, where she was holding the event.

Eyewitnesses report that the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying bleeding on the pavement after the incident.

Recommended Read more Woman jailed for 15 years for Stephen Timms murder bid

She was subsequently airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary. Her condition was initially reported as serious but she ultimately died.

West Yorkshire Police said a 52-year-old man had been arrested.

At 12.53 today, police were called to a report of an incident on Market Street, Birstall, where a woman in her 40s had suffered serious injuries and is in a critical condition," a spokesperson said.

A man in his late 40s to early 50s nearby also suffered slight injuries. Armed officers attended and a 52-year-old man was arrested in the area. There are no further details at present.

Police presence in the area has been increased as a reassurance to the community.

At a press conference later in the afternoon, the force's acting chief constable added: "We are not in a position to discuss any motive at this time. We are not looking for anyone else in connection with this incident at present."

The attack is believed to have been a one-off, she said.

 Jo Cox MP Maiden Speech

A number of eyewitnesses suggested that the killer shouted "Britain first" during the assault. Other reports suggest the MP may have intervened in an altercation.

They also said the assailant appeared to be using an adapted replica or homemade gun of old-fashioned appearance.

Witness Daniel Blyth, 38, a company director from the town, told the Yorkshire Post newspaper that the assault was unusual.

I saw seven police cars racing up Leeds Road towards Morley. They were unmarked BMWs, he said.

There are two helicopters flying overhead. It all seems very dramatic. I have heard that two people have been shot but Im not who are why. Its all very unusual for Birstall.

Ms Cox chaired the All Party Parliamentary Group on Syria and was a backbencher.

Birstall Library where the incident occurred (Google)

She was elected in 2015 and previously served on the Communities and Local Government Select Committee.

A number of MPs have been subject to assaults while going about their work in recent years.

East Ham MP Stephen Timms was stabbed twice during a constituency surgery at a library in May 2010. The attacker, Roshonara Choudhry said she had been influenced by Al Qaeda and that her attack had been in revenge for the Iraq War.

Mr Timms suffered potentially life-threatening wounds but recovered and continued as an MP.

In January 2000, Cheltenham MP Nigel Jones was injured in an attack at his local office by constituent Robert Ashman with a samurai sword. That MPs assistant, local councillor Andrew Pennington was killed in the attack.

David Cameron tweeted: The death of Jo Cox is a tragedy. She was a committed and caring MP. My thoughts are with her husband Brendan and her two young children.

 Ambulances in Birstall after MP Jox Cox shot

Jeremy Corbyn MP, Leader of the Labour Party said: The whole of the Labour Party and Labour family - and indeed the whole country - will be in shock at the horrific murder of Jo Cox today.

Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity. She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen  where she was born and grew up.

Jo was dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights  and she brought those values and principles with her when she became an MP.

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all.

Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.
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Regarded as one of the brightest stars among the new intake of MPs at the last general election, Jo Cox, who was killed after being shot and stabbed in her West Yorkshire constituency, is being remembered as a passionate campaigner for humanitarian issues, a champion of womens rights and loyal figure to her constituents.

The 41-year-old MP of Batley & Spen represented the area she grew up in and remained an active member of the community.

Locally, she won a majority of 6,057 at last year's election and regarded it as a dream job to represent her area at Westminster.

The strongly pro-EU Ms Cox also worked as head of key campaigns for the Britain In Europe and as political adviser to the Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock.

On Twitter, Cox described herself simply as: "Mum. Proud Yorkshire Lass. Labour MP for Batley and Spen. Boat dweller. Mountain climber. Former aid worker."

Ms Cox, her husband and their two children promoting Remain on the Thames (Jo Cox/ Twitter ) (Jo Cox/ Twitter)

Participating in the annual Parliamentary Tug of War (Jo Cox/ Facebook)

Supporting Macmillan Cancer Support in her constituency Batley & Spen (Jo Cox/ Facebook)

Jo Cox in the Commons, June 2015

Hundreds of people gathered at the parish church in Birstall to remember their local MP in a service mainly of silence, readings, music and prayers.

The Bishop of Huddersfield, the Rt Rev Dr Jonathan Gibbs, told the packed congregation: "None of us, I suspect, could believe the news when we heard it this afternoon.

"We still can't believe it as we come tonight overwhelmed by shock and grief and a tremendous sense of loss but, above all, in many ways, we're still numb."

"She grew up in this community, she lived for this community, she served this community and, in the end, she gave her life for this community."

He said he knew two things about Ms Cox. The first was that she was "a woman who was utterly committed to serving others".

The other, he said, was that she was "someone who was deeply committed to her own family as a wife and a mother".

She joined Oxfam in 2002, as head of their EU Office in Brussels, and became head of policy and advocacy in 2005. A strong campaigner for womens rights, she chaired the Labour Womens Network for four years.

She and her husband Brendan, a former executive at Save the Children, lived on a boat moored at Wapping, near Londons Tower Bridge, with their two young children.

Her husband called on people to fight against the hatred that killed her in an emotional tribute to his wife.

Visiting Forget Me Not Children's Hospice in Huddersfield (Jo Cox/ Facebook)

Visiting her local fish and chip shop (Jo Cox/ Twitter ) (Jo Cox/ Twitter)

Visiting West End Juniors in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire (Jo Cox/ Twitter ) (Jo Cox/ Twitter)

Politicians on all sides have paid tribute to the popular MP and both sides of the EU referendum debate have abandoned campaigning for the day.

The leader of the Labour party Jeremy Corbyn said: "Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace."

She was described by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as a "bright star, no doubt about it".

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had previously worked with Ms Cox, described her as "the most vivacious, personable, dynamic and committed friend you could ever have."
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Britain First has denied involvement in the attack on Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall, west Yorkshire  and the group's leader has said he would like to see the person who carried it out "strung up by the neck on the nearest lamp post."

The 41-year-old politician has died after she was shot and stabbed outside Birstall library, where she was holding an advice surgery for constituents.

Following reports that a man shouted "Britain First" as he attacked Ms Cox, the group issued a statement describing the claims as hearsay from unconfirmed sources, according to a statement on the political group's website.

"Britain First obviously is NOT involved and would never encourage behaviour of this sort," said the statement, released before the politician's death was announced. "As an MP and and a mother, we pray that Jo Cox makes a full recovery."

There is LOTS of use of words such as apparently and allegedly, said the statement. That hasnt stopped the media publishing multiple articles condemning Britain First for somehow being involved.

Paul Golding, the groups leader, said in a video statement: This is a terrible day for our democracy, for our parliamentary system.

Were nothing to do with it, he said. We hope that this person who carried it out is strung up by the neck on the nearest lamp post. Thats the way we view justice.

Mr Golding said the words 'Britain First' could have been taken out of context by the media.

Were in the middle of a referendum campaign. What this person said - was he referring to an organisation? Was this person referring to a slogan? Was he just shouting out in the middle of an EU debate: Its time we put Britain first?

I hear this every day - its the name of our party, yes, but I hear Ukip people, I hear Nigel Farage - thats the kind of language thats being utilised in the campaign.

Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley and Spen (PA)

Two separate named witnesses have said the attacker said "Britain First", including 38-year-old Graeme Howard, who told the Guardian the attacker "was shouting 'Britain first' when he was doing it and being arrested."

Clarke Rothwell, who was reportedly within yards of the attack in Birstall, told the Examiner that the man shouted Britain First, Britain First.

The police would not confirm to The Independent whether they were investigating this but said they will be holding a press conference shortly.

A 52-year-old man has been arrested, according to police. He has been named locally as Tommy Mair, according to the BBC.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

Britain First accused the media of deliberately trying to incriminate them and emphasised the uncertainties in reports.

But none the less the BNP off-shoot, founded just five years ago, has deliberately cultivated a paramilitary style image: with countryside training camps for members and pledges to take direct action against global Islamic jihad.

It has appealed to former soldiers to join up  with images of guns and skulls on its website and the slogan Isis hunting club emblazoned on its merchandise.

 Jo Cox MP Maiden Speech

Some fear that the group and its poisonous right wing ideology may have influenced Ms Coxs killer. Over the last year she has been at the forefront of the campaign to help Syrian refugees and pressurise the Government into accept Britains fair share of asylum seekers.

Founded just five years ago by two former BNP members, Britain First has been highly adept at appealing to the most extreme elements of Britains right wing.

The group even has a vigilante wing called the Britain First Defence Force, which has attracted widespread condemnation for staging marches the group calls Christian Patrols in which members in green uniforms carry white crosses, while shouting anti-Islamic slogans.

They have also been involved in Mosque invasions and have staged protests outside the homes of alleged Islamists.

At one stage its members  in military style uniforms  offered to provide personal protection to the Ukip leader Nigel Farage.

 Jo Cox MP speaks on Aleppo crisis

But the group has also had some success politically with a large online following. On Facebook the groups page has 1.4 million likes, meaning the far-right group has more followers on the social network than any political party in the UK. The Conservatives currently have the second largest following with 550,000 followers, while Labour has 480,000.

The group boasted of reaching a million supporters on its website, claiming the milestone indicated genuine popular support of its ideals, policies and views. However, this has been largely attributed to the frequent populist and sentimental posts on the page, many of which have little to do with the groups core message.

At the 2014 European elections, founder members Dowson and Golding stood as Britain First candidates in Wales and Scotland. The group urged voters in England to vote for Ukip.

During the campaign in Wales, the group used images of murdered soldier Lee Rigby in their campaign, using the phrase remember Lee Rigby on ballot papers. The electoral commission subsequently apologised to the dead soldiers family.

Speaking about the group, Lee Rigbys mother said: Their views are not what Lee believed in and has no support from the family.
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Police investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann did nothing after being made aware of paedophile Sir Clement Freud's connection to the case, one of his victims has claimed.

Vicky Hayes, 64, who was groomed and raped by Mr Freud as a teenager, said she felt very uneasy after discovering that the former politician had befriended the McCann family and cooked for them at his holiday home in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

Ms Hayes told ITV News: "I read Kate McCann's book and was immediately upset and anxious that Clement Freud had invited the McCanns to his home.

"He was a private man, not the type to suddenly befriend a couple who had intense media attention. It really jarred with me, left me feeling very uneasy. He had a home in Praia da Luz, but why invite them and cook for them?

"Nobody else would have thought Freud capable of abuse and rape but he did it to me. He was capable of anything."

Ms Hayes says she reported her concerns to the local police force in Suffolk, and her son wrote to the Metropolitan Police, yet they received no response.

Ms Hayes said: "I'm angry the police were dismissive of my information.

The Madeleine McCann case Show all 25 1 /25 The Madeleine McCann case The Madeleine McCann case Madeleine McCann One of the last photos of Madeleine before her disappearance EPA The Madeleine McCann case Madeleine McCann Madeleine McCann was three when she was abducted during a family holiday in 2007 The Madeleine McCann case Top worn by a man that detectives investigate with connection to disappearance of Madeleine McCann A computer generated image of the distinctive burgundy long sleeve top worn by a man that detectives investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann are looking for The Madeleine McCann case Apartment in Portugal from where Madeleine went missing An aerial view of the Ocean Club apartments and pool where Madeleine McCann went missing Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images The Madeleine McCann case Kate McCann Kate McCann speaks to the press outside the court house in Lisbon on 12 September 2013 following the first audience of the McCann couple's libel proceedings against former inspector Goncalo Amaral for a book written about the case of their missing daughter The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Kate McCann and Gerry McCann before the start of the 'Miles for Missing People' charity run in Regent's Park in London, 2011 The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Kate and Gerry McCann make an appeal at a press conference in the holiday resort of Praia da Luz, Portugal 7 May 2007 The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann The McCann's give an interview with a Spanish television channel at their home in Rothley The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Madeleine McCann was abducted in Portugal in May 2007 AP The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Preliminary forensic analysis on samples recovered from the McCanns' hire car raised the possibility of a match with Madeleine's DNA profile, according to the leaked report Getty Images The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Pope Benedict XVI blesses a photo of four-year-old abducted British girl Madeleine McCann, while meeting her parents Gerry and Kate McCann, after his weekly general audience at the Vatican, 2007 Reuters The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Gerald McCann and Kate McCann speak to the press on 4 May 2007 at the Ocean club appartement hotel in Praia de Luz in Lagos after Madeline vanished while her parents were out to dinner The Madeleine McCann case Portuguese police search for Madeleine Dozens of Portuguese police aided by dogs search for missing three-year old British girl Madelaine McCann in front of the Ocean club appartment hotel in Praia de Luz in Lagos The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann Gerald McCann and Kate McCann walk holding their two other children outside the Ocean club apartment hotel in Praia de Luz in May 2007 The Madeleine McCann case Madeleine McCann Madeleine McCann pictured at the age of three, left, and as she might have looked aged nine PA/Teri Blythe The Madeleine McCann case Kate and Gerry McCann The parents of missing Madeleine McCann have described as "pure speculation" reports in the Portuguese press suggesting that a chief suspect in the disappearance of their daughter was killed in a tractor accident four years ago. PA The Madeleine McCann case Tribute for missing Madeleine in Rothley, Leicesteshire Three year old Cally prepares to add a yellow ribbon to a floral tribute for missing Madeleine McCann in Rothley in Leicesteshire, 2007 The Madeleine McCann case Support for the missing Madeleine Everton captain Lee Carsley (L) leads his team onto the field, followed Mikel Arteta (C) and Manuel Fernandes (R) wearing Tshirts bearing a message of support for the missing British toddler Madeleine McCann, prior to the English Premiership match between Chelsea and Everton, at Stamford Bridge in London, 2007 The Madeleine McCann case Madeleine McCann A poster appealing for information about Madeleine McCann at a Spanish railway station PA The Madeleine McCann case BBC's Crimewatch reconstruction of Madeleine McCann's disappearance Former porn star Mark Sloan (L) was cast in the BBC's Crimewatch reconstruction of Madeleine McCann's disappearance BBC The Madeleine McCann case Clarence Mitchell holds two artist's impression of the new suspect McCann family spokesman Clarence Mitchell holds two artist's impression of the new suspect on 20 January 2008 in London. The description has come from British woman Gail Cooper, who was staying with her family close to the McCann's apartment in Portugal The Madeleine McCann case Image of a woman sought in the case Clarence Mitchell, the press spokesman for the McCann family, releases a photofit image of a woman sought in the search for missing Madeleine McCann Getty Images The Madeleine McCann case Suspect in disappearance of Madeleine McCann Police released two e-fits of suspect in disappearance of Madeleine McCann Getty Images The Madeleine McCann case Raymond Hewlett Convicted paedophile Raymond Hewlett, who is being sought in connection with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann PA The Madeleine McCann case A picture of a suspect An artist's impression of a suspicious man seen by a witness apparently watching the McCann family's apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, the day before Madeleine McCann went missing Channel 4

"I have a six-year-old granddaughter, a young girl like Madeleine. If you have a something you feel needs to be looked at you have to tell someone. That's what I did. That's why I contacted the police, when I read Kate McCanns account, I wanted the detectives to know what I knew about Clement Freud.

"My purpose was for officers to investigate why he invited them. It needs investigating if Freud had any involvement or knew anything."

Ms Freud was in the UK at the time of Ms McCanns disappearance in May 2007.

Kate McCann wrote in her book, Madeleine, of how Mr Freud contacted the family two months after the three-year-old disappeared and invited them for dinner at his villa close by from their Ocean Club apartment. He remained in touch and invited them over a second time weeks later.

Ms Hayes contacted ITV after reading newspaper reports of Mr Freud's paedophilia, which form the subject of an ITV Exposure documentary tonight.

In the documentary, two other women talk of how Mr Freud abused them over a period spanning four decades.

 Sylvia Woosley: "I would like to just return to the child I was, before I was molested physically"

Mr Freud's widow, Jill Freud, 89, said in a statement she was deeply saddened and profoundly sorry for what has happened to these women after the ITV documentary's revelations.

Yesterday it emerged that there could be many more victims of abuse at the hands of Freud.

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, told the Independent he had been contact by several people alleging further instances of abuse.

Mr Murray, who says there must now be serious questions asked over whether senior political figures knew of his behaiour, said: I have had all kinds of people contacting me, telling me that they knew about this behaviour  not victims, but people who were told about it, people who knew victims.

I have been contacted by seven people. I dont have concrete intelligence, but it seems there are a lot of claims that there is more stuff out there.

The same as with Jimmy Savile, he added, This stuff comes pouring out once the gates are opened.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said in a statement: "Following the transmission of the documentary this evening (15 June), the MPS will make an assessment of the allegations to ensure the safeguarding of anyone at risk, and also consider if any criminal investigation is required to bring any living persons to justice."
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The son of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has won an appeal against a multi-million-pound award handed to his father's secret wife. Palestinian-born Janan Harb, won a package of cash and property worth more than 20m last November. Judge Peter Smith, sitting at London's High Court, accepted her assertions that Prince Abdul Aziz, had agreed to the huge payout. But lawyers for the prince later asked Court of Appeal judges to quash the unsustainable award.

On Thursday, Lord John Dyson and Lord Justices Martin Moore-Bick and Andrew McFarlane announced that they were allowing the prince's appeal. They said Ms Harb's claim against the prince would now have to be retried before a different High Court judge. Ms Harb said the prince entered into the agreement to buy her silence over her relationship with his father. She said the agreement was reached when the prince met her at the Dorchester Hotel in London on 20 June 2003, while the king was seriously ill.

Recommended Read more Donald Trump is mocked by Saudi Prince on Twitter

The prince denies her claim. But Judge Smith ruled in November that, although her behaviour was unattractive, Ms Harb was telling the truth about the agreement. He declared she was entitled to 12m, plus interest, and two luxury flats in Chelsea, south-west London, worth around 5m. The appeal judges said Mr Smith's approach to the evidence was unsatisfactory in a number of significant respects. Lord Dyson announced that the court has concluded that the shortcomings in the way in which the judge dealt with the evidential issues in the case were so serious that the appeal must be allowed for that reason. The judges did reject an allegation of bias made against him.

During the hearing of the appeal last month, Lord Anthony Grabiner QC, for the prince, said the judge had failed to analyse the evidence properly. The judge had also written a shocking letter revealing possible bias against Blackstone Chambers, the legal chambers which provided the barristers representing the prince. Lord Grabiner said the letter was prompted by a newspaper article by Lord Philip Pannick QC, a member of the chambers who appeared for the prince at an early stage in the Harb case.

Saudi Arabia struggles to employ its most-educated women Show all 4 1 /4 Saudi Arabia struggles to employ its most-educated women Saudi Arabia struggles to employ its most-educated women SAUDI WOMEN122.jpg SAUDI WOMEN: Tahany Omar, 36, has a Masters of Business Administration from the US but has found the job market challenging in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; she works in an investment firm, but not in management. Washington Post photo by Linda Davidson Saudi Arabia struggles to employ its most-educated women SAUDI WOMEN124.jpg A young Saudi woman in her 20's shops for dresses on the women-only level at Kingdom Centre Mall in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in October. Unless designated as a women's only area, most shopping in Saudi Arabia is staffed by men. Washington Post photo by Linda Davidson Saudi Arabia struggles to employ its most-educated women SAUDI WOMEN123.jpg Saudi men reflected in the mirrors of the Al-Faisaliyah Center viewing level which overlooks the expansive city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Washington Post photo by Linda Davidson Saudi Arabia struggles to employ its most-educated women SAUDI WOMEN121.jpg SAUDI WOMEN: Zainab Al Talib, left, assists legal consultant Tala Al-Hejailan at the law offices of DLA Piper in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on October 8. Hejailan is a lawyer, but cannot practise law in Saudi Arabia, which will not grant licences to women. Washington Post photo by Linda Davidson

Lord Pannick's article criticised the judge's handling of an unrelated case involving British Airways, in which the judge recused himself after demanding to know what had happened to his own luggage on a flight home from Florence. Lord Pannick had written that the case raises serious issues about judicial conduct that need urgent consideration by the lord chief justice. In response, the judge wrote to Anthony Peto QC, one of two heads of Blackstone Chambers, saying: The quite outrageous article of Pannick caused me a lot of grief and a lot of trouble. He added: I will no longer support your chambers, please make that clear to members of your chambers. I do not wish to be associated with chambers that have people like Pannick in it.

Lord Grabiner told the appeal judges that the shocking and indefensible letter was clear evidence of possible bias against the chambers and could have affected the outcome of the Harb case. Lord Dyson said the ground of appeal was that there was an appearance of bias on the part of the judge against the prince's counsel, and thereby against the prince himself. He announced that the court is very critical of the judge for writing the letter, but had concluded that the informed and fair-minded observer would not conclude that there was a real possibility that the judge was biased against the prince.

PA
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Norwegian Prime Minister, Erna Solberg, has said that Britons wishing to leave the European Union next week wont like life on the outskirts of the 28-member state bloc.

It will come as a blow to Eurosceptics and Leave campaigners who often cite Norways relationship with the EU as the model for Britain to emulate. Norway, which rejected joining the bloc at a referendum in 1994, has access to the majority of the continents market and is part of the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement.

In return Norway is obliged to be part of Europes passport-free Schengen travel zone. Norwegians also have no say in EU rules and have no representatives in any of the blocs institutions despite paying a considerable amount each year for its semi-detached relationship with the EU.

peaking to Politico, the Norwegian Prime Minister said that her country acts like a lobbying organisation in Brussels. Asked about Leave campaigners in Britain wishing to imitate Norways model, she replied: They wont like.

Recommended Read more Dutch newspaper writes open letter in response to Sun backing Brexit

Ms Solberg added: That type of connection is going to be difficult for Britain, because then Brussels will decide without the Brits being able to participate in the decision-making.

Just yesterday Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, cited Norway as he joined a flotilla of fishing boasts  brandishing Union Jack and St Georges flags  sailing down the Thames to protest the issues with the fishing industry. He claimed that jobs were being lost in the charter angling fleet due to new EU regulations on recreational sea angling, adding that Norway was able to control stocks up to 200 miles off it shores and had a booming commercial fishing and angling industry.

What has the EU ever done for us? Show all 7 1 /7 What has the EU ever done for us? What has the EU ever done for us? 1. It gives you freedom to live, work and retire anywhere in Europe As a member of the EU, UK citizens benefit from freedom of movement across the continent. Considered one of the so-called four pillars of the European Union, this freedom allows all EU citizens to live, work and travel in other member states. What has the EU ever done for us? 2. It sustains millions of jobs A report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, released in October 2015, suggested 3.1 million British jobs were linked to the UKs exports to the EU. What has the EU ever done for us? 3. Your holiday is much easier - and safer Freedom to travel is one of the most exercised benefits of EU membership, with Britons having made 31 million visits to the EU in 2014 alone. But a lot of the benefits of being an EU citizen are either taken for granted or go unnoticed. What has the EU ever done for us? 4. It means you're less likely to get ripped off Consumer protection is a key benefit of the EUs single market, and ensures members of the British public receive equal consumer rights when shopping anywhere in Europe. What has the EU ever done for us? 5. It offers greater protection from terrorists, paedophiles, people traffickers and cyber-crime Another example of a lesser-known advantage of EU membership is the benefit of cross-country coordination and cooperation in the fight against crime. What has the EU ever done for us? 6. Our businesses depend on it According to 71% of all members of the Confederation of British Influence (CBI), and 67 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the EU has had an overall positive impact on their business. What has the EU ever done for us? 7. We have greater influence Robin Niblett, Director of think-tank Chatham House, stated in a report published last year: For a mid-sized country like the UK, which will never again be economically dominant either globally or regionally, and whose diplomatic and military resources are declining in relative terms, being a major player in a strong regional institution can offer a critical lever for international influence.

According to think tank Open Europe, which has declared itself neutral in the UKs referendum debate, if the UK were to opt for a Norwegian-style relationship there would be greater flexibility over agriculture, fisheries and external trade but it would still be bound by great swathes of the EU regulation that rankles with businesses and the general public, but  and this is the crucial point  without any vote on it."

In April, the Chancellor George Osborne laid out a Treasury report detailing a possible doomsday scenario if Britain voted for Brexit on June 23. In the 200-page report it says that leaving the EU would mean a new relationship based on three models  one included membership of the EEA, like Norway.

 What to believe about the EU referendum

The report goes claiming that Norway has little influence on the EU stage and that Britain would be significantly worse off it was to emulate such a model.
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A Spanish immigrant has told Michael Gove how offended she feels about his immigration proposals, pointing out she is not the enemy.

The Justice Secretary was taking questions in a BBC Question Time referendum special when the woman  who has been living in England for 14 years  grilled him on his stance.

She told Mr Gove: The more you speak the more offended I feel. I have been working in England for 14 years now, paying my taxes day-in, day-out  unlike others that I am not going to mention.

I helped to build this economy in this country, and this is how you treat us. I feel so offended.

What has the EU ever done for us? Show all 7 1 /7 What has the EU ever done for us? What has the EU ever done for us? 1. It gives you freedom to live, work and retire anywhere in Europe As a member of the EU, UK citizens benefit from freedom of movement across the continent. Considered one of the so-called four pillars of the European Union, this freedom allows all EU citizens to live, work and travel in other member states. What has the EU ever done for us? 2. It sustains millions of jobs A report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research, released in October 2015, suggested 3.1 million British jobs were linked to the UKs exports to the EU. What has the EU ever done for us? 3. Your holiday is much easier - and safer Freedom to travel is one of the most exercised benefits of EU membership, with Britons having made 31 million visits to the EU in 2014 alone. But a lot of the benefits of being an EU citizen are either taken for granted or go unnoticed. What has the EU ever done for us? 4. It means you're less likely to get ripped off Consumer protection is a key benefit of the EUs single market, and ensures members of the British public receive equal consumer rights when shopping anywhere in Europe. What has the EU ever done for us? 5. It offers greater protection from terrorists, paedophiles, people traffickers and cyber-crime Another example of a lesser-known advantage of EU membership is the benefit of cross-country coordination and cooperation in the fight against crime. What has the EU ever done for us? 6. Our businesses depend on it According to 71% of all members of the Confederation of British Influence (CBI), and 67 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the EU has had an overall positive impact on their business. What has the EU ever done for us? 7. We have greater influence Robin Niblett, Director of think-tank Chatham House, stated in a report published last year: For a mid-sized country like the UK, which will never again be economically dominant either globally or regionally, and whose diplomatic and military resources are declining in relative terms, being a major player in a strong regional institution can offer a critical lever for international influence.

We are not the enemy, Mr Gove, we are not the enemy  we are your friends, she said.

The Tory politician responded, saying he was in favour of migration, so long as it is controlled, however the woman was not convinced.

I dont believe it. The message you are sending is not the same message you are giving, I dont receive that message.

Unfortunately for you it comes to me like we are not welcome. You used us to your convenience, and when we are no use to you any more you chuck us out, she said, to applause in the studio.

 Corbyn on EU referendum

Immigration was a key topic in the show, and remains a huge issue in the Brexit debate ahead of the referendum on 23 June.

Mr Gove told the woman: I value the fact there are people who come here like you, who contributed so much to our national life.

One thing is undeniable. If we are going to continue to have support for migration, we need to be able to control the numbers.

One of the reasons why Australia and Canada have support for migration is because they control the numbers.

The critical thing is to maintain support for our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, success story. We need to take back control.

On Sunday 19 June David Cameron will take to the Question Time stage to answer questions about the referendum.
As the $5.5-billion Shanghai Disneyland opens on Thursday, The Walt Disney Co has a challenge. The hold of rival Asian characters such as China's homegrown Boonie Bears or Big Big Wolf means seven-year-olds like Li Yixuan have less time for Mickey Mouse and Friends.

A local tourist poses for a photo with figures from animation movie Toy Story at Shanghai Disneyland. [Photo by Gao Erqiang/China Daily]

As Li settles on the living room floor for 15 minutes of cartoons before homework and bed, Disney doesn't get a look-in this time, as his favorite animated hero, Ultraman Ace from the hit Japanese series, does battle with space dinosaurs.

And as the number of competing theme parks in China soars, it will become even harder to win the hearts of Chinese childrenand open the wallets of their parentsto fuel long-term traffic after the turnstiles start clicking from Thursday.

"When we get kids now to write down their favorite cartoon character, very few put down Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck," said Song Lei, Hong Kong-based director at Animation-Comic-Game Group, the organizer of Asia's biggest annual fair for comics, anime and games.

Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.
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A leading Leave campaigner has received an "aggressive" letter from the Bank of England governor in a row over his intervention in the EU campaign.

Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, a director of Vote Leave, wrote to Mark Carney last month claiming he had broken purdah rules by giving a personal endorsement to the Remain campaign.

Mr Carney, who has warned that leaving the EU could spark a recession, has responded by accusing Mr Jenkin of threatening him and misunderstanding the independence of the bank.

The EU referendum campaign is currently in a period of purdah, which bans civil servants from any activity that could be perceived to be biased to one side of the campaign.

Mr Jenkin said Mr Carney's intervention has gone "way beyond what a bank governor would normally do in terms of making statements about rate setting and economic forecasts" .

He told BBC Radio 4's Today show: "He's reacted very, very aggressive towards me.

"He's trying to make a distinction that the Bank of England does not run on public funds, even though it's a publicly owned corporation.

"The advice I have from the Speaker's Counsel is that there appears to be no exemption for the Bank of England."

What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Show all 5 1 /5 What's the European Parliament ever done for us? What's the European Parliament ever done for us? A cap on the amount of hours an employer can make you work The Working Time directive provides legal standards to ensure the health and safety of employees in Europe. Among the many rules are a working week of a maximum 48 hours, including overtime, a daily rest period of 11 hours in every 24, a break if a person works for six hours or more, and one day off in every seven. It also includes provisions for paid annual leave of at least four weeks every year Getty Images What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping the people of Britain to avoid smoking In 2014 MEPs passed the Tobacco Products Directive strengthening existing rules on the manufacture, production and presentation of tobacco products. This includes things like reduced branding, restrictions on products containing flavoured tobacco, health warnings on cigarette packets and provisions for e-cigarettes to ensure they are safe What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Helping you to make the right choices with your food Thanks to the European Parliament, UK consumers have access to more information than ever about their food and drink. This includes amount of fat, and how much of it is saturated, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and so on. It also includes portion sizes and guideline daily amount information so people can make informed choices about their diet. All facts must be clear and easy to understand What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Two year guarantees and 14-day returns policy for all products Consumers across the EU have access to a number of rights, from things which are potentially very useful, to things which used to be annoying. For example, shoppers in the UK receive a two-year guarantee on all products, and a 14-day period to change their minds and return a purchase, these things are useful www.PeopleImages.com-licence restrictions apply What's the European Parliament ever done for us? Keeping your air nice and fresh (and safe) Believe it or not, although the situation is improving, some areas of the UK have appalling air quality. A report by the Royal College of Physicians released on 23 February says 40,000 deaths are caused by outdoor air pollution in the UK every year. Air pollution is linked to a number of illnesses and conditions, from Asthma to diabetes and dementia. The report estimates the costs to British business and the health service add up to 20 billion every year

Mr Carney has insisted his economic warnings were independent of politics and the MP has made "numerous and substantial" misconceptions.

Appearing to back away from his accusations, Mr Jenkin added: "It's for him to judge how political he wants his institution to be perceived as.

"There is no doubt that the appearance he made on the Andrew Marr programme went way beyond what a bank governor would normally do in terms of making statements about rate setting and economic forecasts.

"I obviously misconstrued that because in my letter to him I said he had made his views clear that he wants the United Kingdom to stay in the European Union."

Labour ex-chancellor Alistair Darling condemned the stance of Mr Jenkin.

"This is a blatant attempt to muzzle a respected independent voice. The Bank of England is independent, the Governor is independent and he has a duty to say what he thinks.

"It is very clear the Leave campaign doesn't want people to hear what the Bank has to say on the most critical issue facing our generation because they don't like its conclusions."

Press Association
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A father whose infant son was born 12 weeks early has made an emotional appeal for Britons to vote to stay in the EU  to save the lives of children like his.

Joe and Nicola Jackson's baby boy Jamie was delivered at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in early June at just 28 weeks, after struggling for months with growth restriction in the womb.

Mr Jackson has since posted a powerful message of gratitude on Facebook to the medical team responsible for his son's care, saying that without the attention of European doctors he would not have survived - and urging those who haven't yet decided which way to vote in the EU referendum on 23 June to #voteinforjamie.

In the poignant missive, Mr Jackson wrote: "The fact that he has lived at all is a miracle of both faith and modern medicine. And whether he is with us for a few more days or another century his life is already a testament to the skill and dedication of the NHS, which has been unbelievable throughout."

He also made reference to the ongoing fight between junior doctors and the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has called for a 'seven-day NHS' and imposed a new contract on medics, sparking a bitter dispute over hours, pay, conditions and risk to patients.

"We have been blessed with a fully 7 day NHS with some of the best people and equipment in the world," Mr Jackson wrote.

"We have been seen by foetal care specialists, paediatricians, researchers, doctors, midwives, nurses, counsellors, physios and support staff who have been, without exception, wonderful, talented, caring and outstanding at their jobs. It is undoubtably because of their work that my son, and quite possibly my wife as well, are still alive.

"In fact, in the entire history of the human race the NHS is probably the best idea which any society has ever had."

Mr Jackson decried the actions of the Vote Leave campaign, which he described as "the sight of a stupid red bus claiming that if we left the EU we could pump another 350 million a week into the NHS" - a figure that has since been alleged to be false and which brought about the defection of the senior Tory MP Sarah Wollaston to the Remain camp.

"We've been treated by many people who are as British as they come but also, amongst others, by a Spanish nurse, a Greek midwife and a French paediatric consultant. The hospital has equipment from the UK but also from Germany and the Netherlands and goodness knows where else. And there are many people and much kit here from outside the EU. We live in a big, complicated and interconnected world. Our choice is to whether to embrace that fact or hide from it.

"The thing is, not one of the staff I've seen have given the slightest indication that they care about each other's birthplaces. Neither did they differentiate between Nicola and the Finnish lady in the next bed purely because of their nationality. All I've seen is people working with each other as professionals in order to treat the patients in front of them. Little else matters.

"Now I've no idea how many of these people, or how much of this care would still be available if we left the EU. Much of it presumably would. Some of it might not. But try as I might I can't see any way (dodgy bus maths aside) that leaving would make things better. The point is that a vote to remain is a vote to keep what we have, and what we have is bloody brilliant."

Mr Jackson finished his plea with a reminder for those planning to vote 'out' to consider his son's precarious situation.

"I hope that those who do wish to leave will at least consider the awkward truth that my son is currently in an incubator being kept alive by a French paediatrician," he wrote.

The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit Show all 7 1 /7 The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 22 May 2015 In his regular column in The Express Nigel Farage utilised the concerns over Putin and the EU to deliver a tongue in cheek conclusion. With friends like these, who needs enemies? PA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 13 November 2015 UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire Mike Hookem, was one of several political figures who took no time to harness the toxic atmosphere just moments after Paris attacks to push an agenda. Cameron says were safer in the EU. Well Im in the centre of the EU and it doesnt feel very safe. Getty Images The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 19 April 2016 In an article written for The Guardian, Michael Gove attempts to bolster his argument with a highly charged metaphor in which he likens UK remaining in the EU to a hostage situation. Were voting to be hostages locked in the back of the car and driven headlong towards deeper EU integration. Rex The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 26 April 2016 In a move that is hard to decipher, let alone understand, Mike Hookem stuck it to Obama re-tweeting a UKIP advertisement that utilises a quote from the film: Love Actually to dishonour the US stance on the EU. A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 10 May 2016 During a speech in London former work and pensions secretary Ian Duncan Smith said that EU migration would cause an increasing divide between people who benefit from immigration and people who couldnt not find work because of uncontrolled migration. The European Union is a force for social injustice which backs the haves rather than the have-nots. EPA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 15 May 2016 Cartoon character Boris Johnson made the news again over controversial comments that the EU had the same goal as Hitler in trying to create a political super state. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. PA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 16 May 2016 During a tour of the womens clothing manufacturer David Nieper, Boris had ample time to cook up a new metaphor, arguably eclipsing Goves in which he compares the EU to badly designed undergarments. So I just say to all those who prophecy doom and gloom for the British Business, I say their pants are on fire. Lets say knickers to the pessimists, knickers to all those who talk Britain down. Getty Images

"And do so not only for my family but for the possibility that one day it could be anyone's child on such a ward. In total there are apparently 52,000 NHS staff who had the gall to born elsewhere in the EU. To misguidedly drive out some or all of these wonderful people, or to not let others arrive in the first place, is not a good policy. It's not even a bad policy. It's just plain madness.

"Let's realise instead that we are all humans, we are all in this together and we should celebrate that we have this incredible healthcare system right now. If you want to see the huge benefit to that system of being in the EU then trust me, spend a fortnight in foetal medicine, emergency delivery and a neo-natal intensive care ward. You'll be scoffing at that ridiculous bus by the time you're two days in.

"So if are still wondering which way to vote, or whether to vote at all, and if you're looking for a simple, positive reason to decide, then how about this: #voteinforjamie."
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A newspaper in the Netherlands has issued a plea to Britons not to leave the EU, suggesting the bloc without the UK would be like "tea without milk".

The Dutch daily AD featured an adapted Union Flag on its front page with the words "don't leave me this way", the day after The Sun backed the Leave campaign.

The open letter, published in English, urges the UK to stay with its European neighbours.

Referring to the links between the two countries - both historical and cultural - the editorial suggests the UK and the Netherlands maintain "some common sense on this turbulent continent".

The letter claims the Dutch not only love the UK, but need the country, and says the EU without it would be "bitter" like "tea without milk".

 What to believe about the EU referendum

The letter in full reads:

"Britain Hello, This is your neighbour calling. Please do not leave us.

"Of course, there will always be a Great Britain, anchored only 20 miles from the continent.

"England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we feel at ease in your amazing country.

"Since our King William III (of Orange) married your Queen Mary II (of England), we have been related anyway.

"Nobody in Europe appreciates your culture more than we do. The Beatles, Bridget Jones, One Direction, EastEnders, Brideshead Revisited fame, we love it all. Many of us know Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch by heart.

"We admire your stiff upper lip. And every year we remember, with the greatest respect, all Those Who have fallen to liberate our country.

21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Show all 21 1 /21 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Portugal drinks more wine than France Tindo - Fotolia 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Young Italians, by some distance, are the most likely to live at home with their parents 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Britain is on course to overtake Germany as Europes most populated country 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Greek workers work the longest hours in the EU 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Estonia has, per capita, more drug-related deaths than anyone else 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe The fastest download speeds are to be found in Romania 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Slovenia, Malta and Poland have the smallest gender pay gaps 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe France hates its leader more than other European countries 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Eastern and Western Europe are very divided on the issue of gay marriage 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Germany has the most millionaires 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Everyone likes Christmas, apart from France 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Germany accepts by far the most asylum applications 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe The UK and France have some of the most positive views of Muslim people 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Europe's largest Muslim population is in Germany 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Danes are the most trusting Europeans, and Cypriots the least 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Finland has the worst economy in the EU 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Italy has cut back its military spending more than any other major European Nato member 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Everyone is sad about the refugee crisis 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe People in Spain are also the most likely to live in flats (Brits are most likely to live in houses) 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Spain is the most likely to feel neighbourly 21 maps and charts which will challenge perceptions of Europe Luxembourg is home to the highest proportion of foreign nationals

"Now you are thinking of leaving us. Sailing out your floating country towards distant shores, so says your largest newspaper, The Sun.

"Talking as a Dutch uncle, we have to tell you this is not a good idea. We not only love you, we need you.

"Who else supports us in keeping some common sense on this turbulent continent of ours?

"An EU without the UK would be like tea without milk. Bitter. So please, stay. Stay with us."
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Who would be an MP? They are despised, distrusted and run the risk of violence.

A survey published this year found that one in six MPs who took part reported having been attacked or been subject to attempted attack. More than half of them said they had received threats.

Serious attacks are rare, although that doesnt make them much less frightening. They have been an infrequent, out-of-the-blue shock since the shooting of Spencer Perceval, the only Prime Minister to have been assassinated, in 1812.

He was murdered by John Bellingham, who had a grievance against the Foreign Office for failing to help him when he was wrongly imprisoned for debt in Russia. Bellingham accosted him in the lobby of the House of Commons and shot him at close range.

Bellingham was hanged at Newgate, two days after his victims funeral.

Most recently, Stephen Timms, the Labour MP for East Ham in London was stabbed, but not fatally, at his constituency surgery.

Roshonara Choudhry, a 21-year-old student, said she had attacked him as a punishment for voting for military action in Iraq. She had decided she wanted to be a martyr for the sake of the people of Iraq. Timms said he was alarmed that she seemed to have reached that conclusion simply by spending time on the internet. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Before that Nigel Jones, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham, was attacked by a man with a sword in 2001. His colleague and local councillor, Andrew Pennington, was killed. The assailant, Robert Ashman, was sent to a secure hospital after he was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial. He had been a frequent attender at Jones and Penningtons joint surgeries, most recently to discuss money troubles.

It is hard, and probably unwise, to generalise about the phenomenon. The most deadly source of violence for MPs has been Irish republican terrorism, which killed Airey Neave, blown up by a car bomb at the entrance to the House of Commons underground car park in 1979, and Ian Gow, killed by a car bomb outside his house in Eastbourne in 1990.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

Neave was Margaret Thatchers shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, while Gow was a Treasury minister. And the IRA nearly succeeded in killing Mrs Thatcher herself in the Grand Hotel bombing in Brighton in 1984. Among the five killed by the Brighton bomb, one, Sir Anthony Berry, was also a Conservative MP.

The IRA tried again in 1991, with a mortar attack on 10 Downing Street, from which there were no fatalities.

The IRA apart, the threat to MPs seems to come mostly from disturbed individuals  although Bellingham and Choudhry were both found fit to stand trial. Many MPs now take elementary precautions when holding surgeries, although Timms refused to have a metal-detector arch, because, It isn't the MP I want to be. And it seems as if Jo Cox was killed outside her surgery, where it is difficult to protect an MP.
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The rival EU referendum campaigns have suspended campaigning until at least Saturday following the murder of Jo Cox.

Both Britain Stronger In Europe and Vote Leave confirmed that they were suspending all campaigning activity in the wake of the brutal killing of the Labour MP in her constituency. David Cameron cancelled a campaign visit to Gibraltar, while MPs around the country postponed local events.

The BBC said it would cancel Thursday nights editions of Question Time and This Week.

Tributes to the Batley and Spen MP and expressions of shock poured in from across the political spectrum yesterday.

The Prime Minister said the country had lost a great star.

She had a big heart and people are going to be very, very sad at what has happened, he said. She was a very strong campaigning MP. She had a great track record of caring about refugees and had taken a big interest in how we can look after Syrian refugees and do the right thing in our world. She was a star for her constituents, a star in Parliament and a star right across the House.

Its right that we are suspending campaigning activity in this referendum and everyones thoughts will be with Jos family and her constituents at this terrible time.

This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news and my thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan, their two children and wider family. Weve lost a great star.

Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Show all 7 1 /7 Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Media reports said Jo Cox, 41, who is a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, had been attacked as she prepared to hold an advice surgery for constituents in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene A handbag and shoes lie on the ground as police cordon off an area after Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed by an attacker at her constituency in Birstall Getty Images Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Medical equipment lies on the ground behind a police cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds. A British lawmaker Jo Cox was in critical condition after an incident in her constituency in northern England REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene An eyewitness said the 41-year-old mother of two was left lying in a pool of blood on the pavement after her assailant struck in Birstall PA Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS Jo Cox shooting - pictures of the crime scene Police stand behind a cordon in Birstall near Leeds REUTERS

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the whole country would be in shock.

Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity. She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen  where she was born and grew up.

Jo died doing her public duty at the heart of our democracy, listening to and representing the people she was elected to serve. It is a profoundly important cause for us all, he added.

Jo was universally liked at Westminster, not just by her Labour colleagues, but across Parliament.

 Jo Cox MP speaks on Aleppo crisis

Vote Leave figurehead and former Mayor of London Boris Johnson tweeted: Sad and shocked to hear of Jo Cox's death. Appalling a MP should lose her life simply doing her best for constituents. Thoughts with Jo's family.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose wife Sarah campaigned with Ms Cox, said: Our memories will be for ever scarred by this moment. Our hearts will always be hurt at our countrys loss.

Jo Cox was the most vivacious, personable, dynamic and committed friend you could ever have. Whenever you talked to her, the compassion in her eyes and the commitment in her soul shone through. Years of public service advancing the causes she cared passionately about should have been ahead of her.

People will say that this does not happen in Britain. This should not happen in Britain. And we must resolve that this will never again happen in Britain.

My and Sarahs thoughts and prayers are with Brendan and their two young children Cuillin and Lejla this evening. They will have all our support in the difficult days ahead. For them and for those of us who were Jos friends, this is a devastating day. And it is a devastating blow to our democracy.
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Nearly half of the British public believe Vote Leaves claim that the UK pays 350 million a week to the European Union despite the figure being debunked, a poll shows.

Ipsos MORI found that 47 per cent of the public believe that the claim, which has been repeatedly criticised by the UK Statistics Authority, is true.

Just 39 per cent realise the figure, which has formed the centerpiece of the Leave campaign, is false, while 14 per cent do not know.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said last month he was disappointed that the Brexit campaign continued to make the claim as it was misleading and undermines trust in official statistics.

The figure in fact neither includes Britains rebate, nor money paid back to the UK through the Commons Agricultural Policy, regional development funding, scientific grants, or cultural grants.

It also does not take into account the benefits to the public finances of increased economic activity that comes from being a part of the European Union.

In fact, the independent and respected Institute for Fiscal Studies has said the net effect of leaving the EU would be for a 36 billion black hole in the public finances to open up during the spending period as a result of lower growth and tax revenue.

(Ipsos MORI (Ipsos MORI)

Despite the criticism, the Leave campaign has emblazoned the figure on the side of a bus and continues to use it in campaign literature and in interviews.

Brexiteers have promised to spend the supposed financial haul on the NHS and public services. In a BBC Question Time programme on Wednesday night Michael Gove said he believed around 100 million a week could go to the health service.

The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit Show all 7 1 /7 The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 22 May 2015 In his regular column in The Express Nigel Farage utilised the concerns over Putin and the EU to deliver a tongue in cheek conclusion. With friends like these, who needs enemies? PA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 13 November 2015 UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire Mike Hookem, was one of several political figures who took no time to harness the toxic atmosphere just moments after Paris attacks to push an agenda. Cameron says were safer in the EU. Well Im in the centre of the EU and it doesnt feel very safe. Getty Images The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 19 April 2016 In an article written for The Guardian, Michael Gove attempts to bolster his argument with a highly charged metaphor in which he likens UK remaining in the EU to a hostage situation. Were voting to be hostages locked in the back of the car and driven headlong towards deeper EU integration. Rex The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 26 April 2016 In a move that is hard to decipher, let alone understand, Mike Hookem stuck it to Obama re-tweeting a UKIP advertisement that utilises a quote from the film: Love Actually to dishonour the US stance on the EU. A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 10 May 2016 During a speech in London former work and pensions secretary Ian Duncan Smith said that EU migration would cause an increasing divide between people who benefit from immigration and people who couldnt not find work because of uncontrolled migration. The European Union is a force for social injustice which backs the haves rather than the have-nots. EPA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 15 May 2016 Cartoon character Boris Johnson made the news again over controversial comments that the EU had the same goal as Hitler in trying to create a political super state. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. PA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 16 May 2016 During a tour of the womens clothing manufacturer David Nieper, Boris had ample time to cook up a new metaphor, arguably eclipsing Goves in which he compares the EU to badly designed undergarments. So I just say to all those who prophecy doom and gloom for the British Business, I say their pants are on fire. Lets say knickers to the pessimists, knickers to all those who talk Britain down. Getty Images

The Leave campaign has simultaneously pledged to not cut any of the agricultural, scientific, or cultural grants the EU gives to the UK.

Meanwhile George Osborne has said that his first budget after Brexit would have to involve sharp cuts to the NHS and schools, and a 2 per cent increase in the basic rate of income tax in order to paper over the black hole.

But the public do not believe Treasury forecasts that households would be 4,300 permanently worse off after Brexit, the same poll shows.

 What to believe about the EU referendum

Pollsters found that 70 per cent believe Mr Osborne's flagship claim is a falsehood, with just 17 per cent of people accepting it as fact.

A series of polls in the last week has shown Leave opening up a consistent lead over Remain for the first time.

Sir Andrew said last month: The UK Statistics Authority is disappointed to note that there continue to be suggestions that the UK contributes 350m to the EU each week, and that this full amount could be spent elsewhere.

As we have made clear, the UKs contribution to the EU is paid after the application of the rebate.

We have also pointed out that there are payments received by the UK public and private sectors that are relevant here. The continued use of a gross figure in contexts that imply it is a net figure is misleading and undermines trust in official statistics.
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David Cameron has accused Channel 4 News of making a mountain out of claims of Conservative fraud at the last general election, while admitting that the party tried to get a senior lawyer to stop the investigation in South Thanet.

The Tories have been accused of failing to declare spending on a national battle bus that was partly used to transport activists to key marginal seats  money that would have taken the party over the limit if it had been declared locally.

After a months-long investigation by Channel 4 News, Mr Cameron finally appeared on the channel to face presenter Jon Snow after a judge said the scandal could see election results being declared void.

The allegations raise the extraordinary prospect of a rerun election in the crucial seat where Ukip leader Nigel Farage was beaten by Conservative Craig Mackinlay by just over 2,800 votes.

The Prime Minister said he was confident his party had done nothing untoward in its use of the national bus, and defended his partys attempts to hire a QC to block police from getting an extension to investigate the claims in South Thanet.

Mr Cameron said he was happy for the Electoral Commission to examine all of this. It's very important all these things are investigated, I'm very happy for us to answer all the questions about it, I don't think that there are any questions that anyone is asking that we can't answer and... I think it will put it beyond doubt.

Asked specifically about South Thanet, Mr Cameron dismissed it as just one particular seat. There had been a year and it is perfectly legitimate to argue that is enough time to look at it, he said.

There is no point having a spat about this now, he said.

David Cameron's biggest controversies Show all 8 1 /8 David Cameron's biggest controversies David Cameron's biggest controversies Pig-gate A book released by Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft alleged that an MP and Oxford contemporary of David Cameron had allegedly seen a photograph of Mr Cameron performing a sex act on a pig while at university. Downing Street did not comment on the allegations and the peer said they could have been a case of mistaken identity David Hartley/REX Shutterstock David Cameron's biggest controversies Swarm of migrants In July 2015 David Cameron referred to refugees coming into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa as a swarm. He was criticised for using the language, which critics said was dehumanising Getty David Cameron's biggest controversies Child tax credits In April 2015 David Cameron was asked whether hed cut child tax credits. No, I dont want to do that, he said, saying that he rejected reports that he would. Shortly after the election the Government unveiled cuts to child tax credits EPA David Cameron's biggest controversies Cycling to work As leader of the opposition David Cameron was regularly photographed cycling to work. In early 2006 he was photographed cycling but with a driver in a car carrying his belongings. It was suggested at the time the cycling was just for show and that having two vehicles on the road instead of one was wasteful Rex David Cameron's biggest controversies Andy Coulson David Cameron employed former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as government communications director from 2010. After stepping down from the post due to coverage of the phone hacking affairs, Mr Coulson was later found guilty of conspiracy to intercept voicemails. He served a short prison sentence AFP David Cameron's biggest controversies His personal windmill Early in his leadership of the Conservative David Cameron made an effort to change the partys image by making eco-friendly gesures. As one of these gestures, the future PM put a wind turbine on his house. However, the turbine later had to be removed after neighbours condemned it as an eyesore and the councils planning committee said it had been put in the wrong place Getty David Cameron's biggest controversies Funeral selfie David Cameron was pictured posing for a selfie with Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Barack Obama at Nelson Mandelas funeral. Some in the press criticised the prime minister for showing in an inappropriately low level of respect for the gravity of the occasion AFP/Getty Images David Cameron's biggest controversies Eating a hotdog with a knife and fork The Prime Minister was pictured eating a hotdog with a knife and fork in the run up to the 2015 general election. He was accused of being posh. I had a very privileged upbringing... I've never tried to hide that, he said Reuters

Mr Cameron also disagreed with Snows assertion that the Electoral Commission had to go to court to wring the papers out of you, and responded angrily to the suggestion he was not taking the inquiries seriously.

The Prime Minister said he believed Channel 4 News was making quite

a large mountain out of what I think is a relatively small point.

He said: I think it is a relatively straightforward set of questions that we have to answer.

I'm very confident we're going to answer all of them and put this issue comfortably away. Because at the end of the day, as far as I can see, all parties have national bus tours, that's a national expense.

All parties have associated expenses with those national bus tours, and I'm very confident that the party chairman and all the investigations will be able to answer all of these questions and... I'm taking it seriously because it's a serious issue but I'm confident that there's nothing untoward here.
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The bodies of 34 refugees, including 20 children, have been found in the Sahara Desert, Niger authorities have said.

Bazoum Mohamed, the country's interior minister, said the group appeared to have died of thirst after being abandoned by a people smuggler.

Mr Mohamed said nine of the adults were women and five were men, and that they had died between 6 and 12 June.

A government statement said they were found near the small desert town of Assamakka, near the border with Algeria.

The statement, which was released on Twitter by Mr Mohamed, adds: It draws attention to the risk posed to illegal immigrants by this perilious path, which is carefully maintained by criminal networks.

Leo Dobbs, a spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency, said he was very concerned by the reports.

He told The Independent: In this particular case we need more information before we can comment in detail, but it is very disturbing.

Large numbers of children, often unaccompanied, travel across Africa looking for a safer life, but they put themselves in danger by doing so.

Kirsty McNeill, director of policy, advocacy and campaigns at Save the Children, said it was "tragic" news.

She told The Independent: The majority of children who make it to Italy report harrowing and severely abusive journeys when interviewed by Save the Children. At the mercy of people smugglers and traffickers, they continue to face grave risks on their way to reach safety. We have heard of the horrors children face; many suffer appalling torture, abuse and exploitation as they make their way through sub-Saharan Africa on to Libya.

"The criminals that transport desperate families will continue to flourish as long as there are no safe and legal alternatives.

International leaders are pulling up the drawbridge and prioritising border control over saving lives. We must not rip up the moral rule book. If they continue the current course of inaction, we will continue to see children dying of thirst in the summer heat in the desert or drowning at sea, as they try to seek a better life.

Two of the victims, a man and a 26-year-old woman, have been identified as Nigerian.

Refugee crisis - in pictures Show all 27 1 /27 Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugee crisis - in pictures A child looks through the fence at the Moria detention camp for migrants and refugees at the island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016. AFP/Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Ahmad Zarour, 32, from Syria, reacts after his rescue by MOAS (Migrant Offshore Aid Station) while attempting to reach the Greek island of Agathonisi, Dodecanese, southeastern Agean Sea Refugee crisis - in pictures Syrian migrants holding life vests gather onto a pebble beach in the Yesil liman district of Canakkale, northwestern Turkey, after being stopped by Turkish police in their attempt to reach the Greek island of Lesbos on 29 January 2016. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees flash the 'V for victory' sign during a demonstration as they block the Greek-Macedonian border Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants have been braving sub zero temperatures as they cross the border from Macedonia into Serbia. Refugee crisis - in pictures A sinking boat is seen behind a Turkish gendarme off the coast of Canakkale's Bademli district on January 30, 2016. At least 33 migrants drowned on January 30 when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea while trying to cross from Turkey to Greece. Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A general view of a shelter for migrants inside a hangar of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, Germany Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees protest behind a fence against restrictions limiting passage at the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Since last week, Macedonia has restricted passage to northern Europe to only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans who are considered war refugees. All other nationalities are deemed economic migrants and told to turn back. Macedonia has finished building a fence on its frontier with Greece becoming the latest country in Europe to build a border barrier aimed at checking the flow of refugees Refugee crisis - in pictures A father and his child wait after being caught by Turkish gendarme on 27 January 2016 at Canakkale's Kucukkuyu district Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants make hand signals as they arrive into the southern Spanish port of Malaga on 27 January, 2016 after an inflatable boat carrying 55 Africans, seven of them women and six chidren, was rescued by the Spanish coast guard off the Spanish coast. Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee holds two children as dozens arrive on an overcrowded boat on the Greek island of Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures A child, covered by emergency blankets, reacts as she arrives, with other refugees and migrants, on the Greek island of Lesbos, At least five migrants including three children, died after four boats sank between Turkey and Greece, as rescue workers searched the sea for dozens more, the Greek coastguard said Refugee crisis - in pictures Migrants wait under outside the Moria registration camp on the Lesbos. Over 400,000 people have landed on Greek islands from neighbouring Turkey since the beginning of the year Refugee crisis - in pictures The bodies of Christian refugees are buried separately from Muslim refugees at the Agios Panteleimonas cemetery in Mytilene, Lesbos Refugee crisis - in pictures Macedonian police officers control a crowd of refugees as they prepare to enter a camp after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A refugee tries to force the entry to a camp as Macedonian police officers control a crowd after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees are seen aboard a Turkish fishing boat as they arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast to Lesbos Reuters Refugee crisis - in pictures An elderly woman sings a lullaby to baby on a beach after arriving with other refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A man collapses as refugees make land from an overloaded rubber dinghy after crossing the Aegean see from Turkey, at the island of Lesbos EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures A girl reacts as refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees make a show of hands as they queue after crossing the Greek border into Macedonia near Gevgelija Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures People help a wheelchair user board a train with others, heading towards Serbia, at the transit camp for refugees near the southern Macedonian town of Gevgelija AP Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees board a train, after crossing the Greek-Macedonian border, near Gevgelija. Macedonia is a key transit country in the Balkans migration route into the EU, with thousands of asylum seekers - many of them from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia - entering the country every day Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures An aerial picture shows the "New Jungle" refugee camp where some 3,500 people live while they attempt to enter Britain, near the port of Calais, northern France Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures A Syrian girl reacts as she helped by a volunteer upon her arrival from Turkey on the Greek island of Lesbos, after having crossed the Aegean Sea EPA Refugee crisis - in pictures Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey Getty Images Refugee crisis - in pictures Beds ready for use for migrants and refugees are prepared at a processing center on January 27, 2016 in Passau, Germany. The flow of migrants arriving in Passau has dropped to between 500 and 1,000 per day, down significantly from last November, when in the same region up to 6,000 migrants were arriving daily.

The nationalities of the others are not yet clear.

Around 120,000 people crossed through Niger's arid northern Agadez region last year, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
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An elected official in Alabama said that if Muslims had their way they would kill every homosexual in America.

Speaking on the Matt & Aunie show on WAPI radio in the wake of a mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando, congressman Mo Brooks was asked why progressives are running away from the reality that anti-gay sentiment is mainstream Muslim thought.

He responded that the Democrats are counting votes amongst the Muslim community which is growing in political power.

Recommended Read more This is what Allah would have said about the Orlando shootings

On the one hand, [Democrats are] trying to appeal to the gay community, but, on the other hand, theyre trying to also appeal to the Muslim community, which, if it had its way, would kill every homosexual in the United States of America, he said.

Mr Brooks insisted that Muslims believe they are killing gay people "out of compassion".

Radio host Matt Murphy said that being gay was punishable by death in Saudi Arabia and that while "entire nations" are homophobic, he could not think of any "mainstream Christians" that would wish to kill gay people.

A study found that 42 per cent of American Muslims support same-sex marriage, according to a PRRI poll in April 2015.

In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Show all 44 1 /44 In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Frank Escalante AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Luis Daniel Conde AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Brenda Lee Marquez McCool In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Joel Rayon Paniagua AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Jerald Arthur Wright AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Paul Terrell Henry AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Shane Evan Tomlinson AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Antonio Davon Brown AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Jason Benjamin Josaphat AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Enrique L. Rios, Jr. AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Darryl Roman Burt AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Cory James Connell REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Tevin Eugene Crosby AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Jonathan Antonio Camuy-Vega AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Leroy Valentin Fernandez AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Christopher Andrew Leinonen AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Angel L. Candelario-Padro AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Simon Adrian Carrillo-Fernande AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Javier Jorge-Reyes AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Gilberto Ramon Silva-Menendez AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Juan P. Rivera-Velazquez AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Miguel Angel Honorato AP In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Jean Carlos Mendez Perez REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Mercedez Marisol Flores REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Anthony Luis Laureano Disla REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Franky Jimmy De Jesus Velazquez REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Oscar A. Aracena-Montero REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Martin Benitez Torres REUTERS In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Stanley Almodovar Facebook/Stanley Manolo Almodovar III In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Eddie Justice Faebook/ Eddie Justice In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Luis Vielma Twitter/@jk_rowling In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera Facebook/ Eric Rivera In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Juan Ramon Guerrero Facebook/ Juan Ramon Guerrero In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz Facebook/ Peter Gonzalez Cruz In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Amanda Alvear Facebook/ Amanda Alvear In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Anthony Disla Facebook/ Anthony Disla In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Edward Sotomayor Twitter/@ryanraiche In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo Facebook/Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo In pictures: The victims of the Orlando shooting Kimberley Morris Twitter/ @katiezavadski

Pro-LGBT thought is lower among other religions in the US. Only 28 per cent of white evangelical protestants and 27 per cent of Mormons support the same freedoms, as shown by the study.

Mr Brooks argued that the democrats' wish to ban guns after Orlando was a "distraction" from the root cause - what is prompting lone terrorists to kill people - and that it was a "mind-boggling challenge" to convince Muslims that killing gay people was a "false doctrine".

Nihad Awad, the nation director of the largest advocacy group for American Muslims, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that he strongly condemned the killing by a 29-year-old shooter who pledged his allegiance to Isis.

For years, the LGBTQIA community stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Muslim community as we have faced hate crimes, bigotry, marginalization and discrimination, he wrote in TIME. "Today, we stand firmly and resolutely to declare that this support goes both ways; that we are there for all communities who are the victims of violence and persecution in our country."

His condemnation was joined by many other prominent Muslim leaders in the US.

One ally of Mr Brooks, senator Jeff Sessions, said in a statement post-Orlando that [] we must face the uncomfortable reality that not only are immigrants from Muslim-majority countries coming to the United States, radicalizing, and attempting to engage in acts of terrorism, such as in Boston and Chattanooga; but also, their first-generation American children are susceptible to the toxic radicalization of terrorist organizations.

Mr Books has previously demanded that president Obama withdraw the national directive to let transgender people use the bathroom that assigns with their natural gender.

The congressman is also against proposals to close Cuba-based prison Guantanamo Bay, and has claimed the US needs to reform its immigration program to prevent Americans from being laid off only to be replaced by cheaper foreign labour.
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O Canada!

Canadian politicians have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a bill to change the wording of their national anthem to make it more gender-neutral.

The bill, passed by members of the Canadian parliament 225 to 74, said they wanted to change the wording from true patriot love, in all thy sons command to true patriot love, in all of us command.

Christine Moore, a democratic member of parliament, told MRC-TV that tweaking the wording of the song will have a large and positive impact.

We are in 2016. The Canadian population will understand why we want to make the change. It is not a big change, and there will not be a big difference in the national anthem, but the difference is significant for women all across Canada, she said.

2016 marks the 100th anniversary of womens right to vote in Canada, as pointed out by MP Greg Fergus.

It would be nice if we stopped excluding women from their national anthem, he said.

The bill was introduced by ailing Liberal MP Mauril Belanger who suffers from a particularly aggressive version of ALS.

By January, when he introduced the bill, he had lost his ability to speak. In May, he needed a tube inserted into his throat to help him to breathe, as reported by the Chronicle Herald.

He was present in parliament in a wheelchair when the bill was passed, and it received a standing ovation, as reported by Huffington Post Canada, with MPs breaking out into a spontaneous rendition of O Canada.

Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister Show all 5 1 /5 Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie wave on stage in Montreal, after winning the general elections Getty Images Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: Canada's next Prime Minister

Mr Belanger had argued that the new wording would return the song to its original version of thou dost in us command, which was changed to all thy sons in 1913.

The vote, which still requires approval by the senate before it becomes law, follows a May 2016 study which shows that 62 per cent of Canadians are in favour of re-wording the anthem.

The Canadian public was not given the opportunity to vote on the decision.

In the Toronto Sun, columnist Candice Malcom said the move was a result of political correctness.

We dont need a bunch of self-righteous politicians in Ottawa to make women feel included. Women are already included," she wrote.

She pointed to studies in 2012 and 2013 that show about three-quarters of the Canadian public are opposed to changing the anthem, which is a great source of national pride.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly proved to be a champion of gender diversity, openly calling himself a feminist and making history by appointing a gender-balanced cabinet.
United States-based Uber Technologies Inc unveiled its mid-year development strategy for the Chinese market in Beijing on Wednesday focusing on improving travel experiences both at home and abroad.

The strategy, named "Uber + Travel", is featured with Uber's partnership with well-known Chinese travel brands, such as Hainan Airlines, Qunar.com, Jd.com, Qyer.com and China Telecom, in products and marketing.

"The Chinese market is very important to us. Today we do more trips in China than the United States," said Emil Michael, Uber's chief business officer.

The world's most popular ride-hailing app made its entrance into the Chinese market by establishing an independent entity in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone in February 2015.

"We will launch Uber service in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in July, the 60th city in China," said Liu Zhen, senior vice president of Uber China.

"With our expansion to more third and fourth-tier cities in the first half year and the operation of ride sharing business (UberPool) in 15 cities, we grabbed about one third of the market share in China, much more than the one percent at the beginning," Liu added.

A report released by the China National Tourism Administration said China's booming tourism industry contributes about 10 percent of the country's GDP.

According to Uber statistics, Chinese tourists made 1 million Uber rides in foreign countries in the first five months of the year. While foreign users finished with 3 million Uber orders in 24 Chinese cities in the same period.

In order to better convenience Chinese users, Uber teamed up with Alipay earlier this year to offer yuan payment options in rides outside China.

The US tech company received a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund at the beginning of June. With the completion of G round fundraising, the unicorn startup's valuation will amount to $62.5 billion.
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The CIA has declassified documents about the brutal interrogation techniques it used on terrorist suspects following the 9/11 attacks.

Among the 50 guidelines, disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information request by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), are revelations that medical personnel acknowledged that leaving detainees in boxes only just large enough for their bodies to fit in was not particularly effective.

Abu Zubaydah, who was detained in 2002, spent a total 266 hours, more than 11 days, within such a box, according to one report. A different document concludes Mr Zubaydah would probably have cooperated with interrogators without such aggressive torture.

The report adds: The CIA interrogators told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box.

Precise specifications by The Office of Medical Staff (OMS) detail how to enforce sleep deprivation, limit the caloric intake of food, and the correct positions required for waterboarding.

In a 2004 document called Description of Physical Pressures, a number of physical and psychological techniques are discussed, including a facial slap, use of diapers, "insects," and "mock burial."

"One possibility is to threaten to place stinging insects into the cramped confinement box with the detainee but instead place harmless insects," the document notes, going on to explain a mock burial as "a cramped confinement box that resembles a coffin. The box has hidden air holes to prevent suffocation."

Khalid el-Masri, a German detainee whom the CIA held in 2004 by mistake, lost 50lb (22.6kg) during five months of captivity, according to a different declassified document.

The documents, some of which have redacted content, strictly discourage employees from using "speculative language as to the legality of given activities", noting that it is not helpful.

One CIA official bluntly wrote in an email, released as part of the request, that the interrogation program was a "train (wreck) waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens."

According to a 2006 memo, President George W Bush voiced concerns about the interrogation practices.

The then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Porter Goss, had said Mr Bush "was concerned about the image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper and forced to go to the bathroom on themselves."

It continues: "[The techniques] incorporate physical or psychological pressure beyond standard techniques" but that require medical personnel "shall suspend the interrogation if they determine that significant and prolonged physical or mental injury, pain, or suffering is likely to result if the interrogation is not suspended."

A significant amount of the information contained in the documents has previously been made public, partly during a Senate investigation in 2014.

In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 President Bush was visiting Emma E Brooker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida as news of the attack on the World Trade Center broke In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 The president and his staff, including Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (L) were then brought to a holding room at the school, where he prepared to address the nation In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 President Bush was then rushed onto Air Force One and was flown to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. He watched television coverage of the attacks from his office on the plane In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 President Bush talks on the telephone at the General Dougherty Conference Center at Barksdale Air Force Base In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 President Bush is seen with his senior adviser Karl Rove at Barksdale Air Force Base In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 The president with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card at Barksdale Air Force Base. Before leaving the base, the president held a press conference at which he said, Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 The president was consoled by Lt Col Cindy Wright of the White House Military Office aboard Air Force One. After leaving Louisiana, the president was flown to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska before he headed back to Washington In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 President Bush arrived at the White House Presidential Emergency Operations Center around 7 pm. Here he is shown with his wife, First Lady Laura Bush, Vice President Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 At 8:30 pm, the president addressed the nation from the White House. In his speech, he set the tone for the wars to come in Afghanistan and Iraq In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 Ive directed the full resources for our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice, the president said. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 The presidents speech on the teleprompter In pictures: President Bushs immediate response to 9/11 11 September 2001 Immediately following the speech, the president had a national security meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and others

Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said in a statement: "These newly declassified records add new detail to the public record of the CIA's torture program and underscore the cruelty of the methods the agency used in its secret, overseas black sites."

A spokesperson for the CIA said: The events of 9/11 will be forever seared into the memories of all Americans who bore witness to the single greatest tragedy to befall our homeland in recent history.

The documents released today reflect differing views formed roughly a decade ago within CIA about the Agencys performance prior to 9/11.
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Since Walt Disney World opened in central Florida 45 years ago, Orlando has been synonymous with family fun. But the death of two-year-old Lane Graves from Nebraska in an alligator attack at a Disney resort is a reminder of the natural hazards in the "Sunshine State".

Our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, answers your questions about the risks and the wisdom of travelling to Florida.

How many British people go to Florida, and specifically to Orlando?

Last year 1.72m Brits arrived in Florida. Thats equivalent to a fully-loaded jumbo jet touching down every two hours, every day of the year. Of those around half will spend time in Orlando, and at the current rate of increase British visitors to the city will reach one million annually within two years.

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How many alligators are there in Florida, and how frequently do they attack?

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), there are 1.3 million alligators across the state  thats one for every 15 people. They live in marshes, swamps, rivers, canals and lakes, such as the artificial lake at Walt Disney World where the tragedy took place. Considering the number of alligators, attacks are rare. An eight-year-old boy was attacked at Walt Disney World in 1986, but escaped.

Across the state, so far this century, 13 people have died in alligator attacks, and going back many decade the average number of fatalities is one every three years. In addition in a typical year there are three or four non-fatal attacks that needed medical treatment.

What precautions are taken?

The FWC has an active "Nuisance Alligator Program" that culls about 7,000 creatures a year - if they are considered large enough to cause harm, and live close to human settlements. In addition in many parts of the state there are signs warning of the risks. A particularly frequent alert says At dusk, if it moves, its food, pointing out that any splashing by the waterside could attract an alligator - which might mistake a small child for its normal prey.

 Alligator drags 2-year-old into water at Disney World resort in Florida

What steps have been taken since the attack at the Disney resort - and what can parents do?

Lakeside beaches have been closed and patrols stepped up. After this tragedy both the states tourist industry and visitors to Florida should be more alert to the risks. Alligators are most active from dusk to dawn, so dont let children venture near water after dark.

Orlando has experienced three tragedies in the space of just five days, and some prospective visitors are worried about the dangers. If you have a holiday booked but choose not to travel, can you cancel without penalty?

No, not without losing some or all of your money.

The city has certainly been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. On 10 June, the Voice performer Christina Grimmie was shot dead. The following night, the worst mass shooting in US history took place at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people. And on 14 June, the two-year-old was snatched by an alligator at a Disney resort. But its business as usual for the tourist industry in Florida, theres no Foreign Office warning against travelling to Orlando or the rest of the state - the FCO says simply: Follow the advice of the local authorities in the wake of the gay nightclub attack.

The tourist board insists "Orlando remains a place that welcomes everyone". And the only change at the airport is a higher security presence, with international passenger asked to arrive three hours ahead.

So no flexibility?

Anyone who is concerned can talk to their agent or holiday company. Its possible that some travel firms may allow customers to switch destination away from Florida, perhaps to California or the Caribbean, on payment of a fee, but theres no general entitlement to this. Travel insurers will not recompense for what's called "disinclination to travel".

My assessment is that Orlando and the rest of the US remains a very low-risk destination. The danger from alligators has not increased - but the tragedy has made people, and organisations, more aware of the danger.
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The shooter who killed 49 people at an Orlando LGBT nightclub used Facebook to threaten Islamic State vengeance, critique US attacks in Syria and research the locations of Florida police offices, a US senator has reported.

Omar Mateen, 29, used the social media network before and during the attack on Pulse nightclub, the deadliest mass shooting in US history, posting what is described as terrorism-related content and searching for Pulse Orlando and Shooting, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson revealed.

In a two-page letter addressed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Johnson, the US Senate Homeland Security chairman, requested details of the five accounts associated with Mr Mateen, in order to assist the investigation being carried out by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In a series of posts, Mr Mateen seemingly pledged allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. May Allah accept me, he wrote. The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the West  You kill innocent women and children by doing US airstrikes... now taste the Islamic State vengeance  In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the US.

Mr Johnsons letter also reveals that the attacker used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists, who killed 14 people in California last December, to search for a speech by al-Baghdadi and to check the locations of FBI and law enforcement offices.

The letter was released ahead of President Barack Obamas visit to Orlando to meet survivors of the shooting, and the first pre-funeral wake for one of the victims.

 Orlando Shooting Survivor Recalls Playing Dead to Avoid Gunman

The first-term Wisconsin senator gave Mr Zuckerberg until June 29 to turn over to his Senate committee all activity logs, timeline information, messages, photos and posts.

In a separate letter to FBI Director James Comey, according to reports, Mr Johnson said his committee is conducting an inquiry "to better understand the root causes of homegrown extremism, assess the vulnerabilities of so-called 'soft' targets, and oversee the work of federal law-enforcement entities."

Mr Johnson asked for information about actions taken by the FBI "before, during and after the attack."

In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People gather at a vigil in solidarity for the victims of the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, at Taylor Square in Sydney EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Brett Morian, from Daytona Beach, hugs an attendee during the candlelight vigil at Ember in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People and members of the gay community holding the peace rainbow flag gather for a vigil near the Beaubourg art center in downtown Paris AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man places a hand print on a makeshift memorial in a parking lot near the Pulse nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People attend a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando attack against a gay night club, held in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People place candles by a statue of Abraham Lincoln during a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando attack against a gay night club, held in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Tel-Aviv city hall lit up with rainbow flag colors in solidarity with Florida's shooting attack victims AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Juan Mantilla (L) stands with his partner during a vigil in memory of the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, in Miami Beach AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A couple shares a kiss as they embrace each other under a pride flag while residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area gather to mourn, honor, and remember the victims of a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Austin Ellis, a member of Metropolitan Community Church, carries a cross with a sign in memory of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting as he marches in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade in Philadelphia Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A rainbow flag flies at half mast on the Space Needle in Seattle, in honor of the victims of the nightclub shooting in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People at the LA Pride event in West Hollywood, write signs and light candles showing solidarity with victims of the mass killings in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims In reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida people hug outside the Stonewall Inn near a vigil for the victims in New York AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A woman offers free hugs in Washington, in reaction to the mass shootings at a gay club in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A U.S. flag is flown at half staff at the White House after the Orlando mass shooting Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man lays flowers on a rainbow flag in front of the embassy of the United States in Madrid, to pay tribute to the victims of the shooting of Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The Michael Fowler Centre is lit in rainbow colours by the city council during a candle lit vigil across the road at Frank Kits Park in Wellington, in remembrance of victims after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Participants hold candles during a vigil at Frank Kits Park in Wellington, in remembrance of victims after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Vixon Noir (R) consoles Trashina Cann, both of San Francisco, during a vigil at Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro district of San Francisco AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People gather in the Castro District for a vigil for the victims of the Orlando shooting at a gay nightclub, in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A couple joins residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area to mourn, honor, and remember the victims of a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Mourners pay tribute to the victims of the Orlando shooting during a memorial service in San Diego AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The Orlando Eye observation wheel lights up in rainbow colors, to remember the people killed and injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People sit by the water with candles during a vigil in a park following a mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Members of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence carry a sign of remembrance for mass shooting victims in Orlando, at the 46th annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Former Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra and Shawn Lang of Hartford embrace after Segarra spoke, during a vigil organized by the state's Muslim and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, on the steps of the state Capitol building in reaction to the mass shooting in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The City Hall Building is lit in the rainbow colors in New York, in reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims One World Trade Center is lit in the rainbow colors in New York, in reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People hold a vigil after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, in front of the White House in Washington REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man lays down 50 roses to honor each victim of the gay Orlando night club shooting as people gather outside of the Stonewall Inn as a vigil is held following the massacre Getty Images

A gay couple were this week arrested after attempting to place a sign that read Love Wins outside Moscows US Embassy at a memorial for the victims of the mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando.

Thousands of people across the world have sent messages of defiance against the events in Orlando, and a moving vigil was held in Londons Old Compton Street in Soho, the historic heart of Londons gay scene.
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Republican senator and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain said that President Barack Obama is directly responsible for the mass shooting in Orlando because he failed to quell the rise of the so-called Islamic State militant group.

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Barack Obama is directly responsible [for the Orlando attack], because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaeda went to Syria, became Isis, and Isis is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures, Mr McCain told reporters on Thursday.

The gunman had reportedly claimed allegiance to Isis, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah - groups that have conflicting ideologies - during one of the 911 calls he made during the three-hour standoff inside of Pulse, the LGBTQ nightclub where he killed 49 people.

 Donald Trump attacks John McCain's war record

Mr McCain later backtracked on his comments, issuing a statement explaining that he misspoke.

I did not mean to imply that the President was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the President himself, he said.

As I have said, President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of [Isis]. I and others have long warned that the failure of the Presidents policy to deny [Isis] safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, and now Orlando.

GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump made remarks in the aftermath of the shooting that connected Mr Obama to the attack, suggesting that he was somehow complicit.

Look, were led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or hes got something else in mind, Mr Trump told Fox News. And the something else in mind - you know, people cant believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and cant even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism. Theres something going on. Its inconceivable. Theres something going on.

Mr Obama responded directly.

What exactly would using this label [radical Islamic terrorism] accomplish; what exactly would it change? he asked. Would it make terrorists less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring along more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served to say this? The answer is none of the above.
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Sunday morning brunches are best with a cocktail.

New York lawmakers have rolled back a Prohibition-era law which forbids the sale of alcohol on Sunday mornings in a bid to make the beverage industry more competitive.

Approved by governor Andrew Cuomo, bars, taverns and restaurants will be able to sell alcoholic drinks from 10am.

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The former Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, imposed 80 years ago, stated that alcohol could not be sold until midday on a Sunday.

Governor Cuomo called it an archaic blue law which imposed restrictions on certain activities during what is described as the day of rest.

Senate majority leader John Flanagan said in a statement: There was broad consensus between the Governor and Legislature that New York's blue laws were outdated and in need of reform, specifically the provision which barred those enjoying brunch from purchasing an alcoholic beverage before noon on Sunday.

The law is good news for the nearly 900 wineries, breweries, distilleries and cideries in the state.

There will also be permits up for grabs which will enable certain outlets to sell drinks from 8am in areas outside New York City.

Microbreweries - popular in part thanks to "hipster" neighbourhoods like Williamsburg in Brooklyn - have grown by 263 per cent in the past six years, from 40 in 2010 to 145 in 2016.

New Yorkers purchasing wine as housewarming or dinner party gifts will soon be able to pick up the wrapping paper and cards at the same time, as the agreement will allow liquor stores to sell gift wrapping and gift bags to customers.
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If President Barack Obama found it difficult to speak to the survivors of the Pulse nightclub killing, it was not for lack of experience.

His low-profile visit to Orlando on Thursday, where he was accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, was the 10th occasion he had gone to try and offer solace to a community grieving after a mass shooting. He has previously said it is one of the most difficult aspects of his job, and litttle wonder.

The last two terrorist attacks on our soil - Orlando and San Bernardino - were homegrown, Mr Obama told after his meetings, with people still stunned and officials still reeling. We're going to have to do more to prevent these kinds of events from occurring. It's going to take more than just our military. It's going to take more than just our intelligence community."

He said it was way past time for politicians to do something about gun control. The victims' families had no time for politics over the issue, he said, and neither did he. Those refusing to understand the need for swift action should have "held and hugged" those relatives and survivors he met, he suggested.

Some had said the president may wait a little longer before traveling to Florida, as he did when he visited Charleston, South Carolina, and San Bernadino in California, after similar atrocities.

Yet for some reason, he decided he should come swiftly, as a debate about gun control and tolerance continues to engulf the country.

I think it is good that he comes and shows support, said Jessica Sciacca, who was waiting outside the citys Amway Centre stadium, where the president met privately with families of the 49 victims, with survivors and with local police and other law enforcement officials who had responded to last Sundays shooting.

I think the city has to come together. People have been coming together already.

The day before the president's visit, his spokesman, Josh Earnest, said Mr Obama would focus on the victims, rather than enter, at least publicly, into the discussion over what led Omar Mateen to launch the attack. The 29-year-old, who had previously been investigated for possible links to Islamic extremism but cleared, claimed his attack on a gay night club had been done in the name of Isis.

Mr Obama met with Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer (AP)

But there are also reports that Mateen may have been gay himself, and that he used gay saying applications and had even visited the Pulse night club. His second wife told officials she had tired to talk her husband out of the attack and she is currently under investigation. There is widespread speculation she could be charged.

The presidents visit to Orlando has nothing to do with the individual who perpetrated this terrible attack, said Mr Earnest, according to the Associated Press. He said Mr Obama intended to tell residents that theyre not alone, even as they endure what surely have been several dark nights.

The White House released few details in advance about Mr Obama's trip, which aides said was hurriedly arranged in a fraction of the time usually required to plan a presidential trip. But the president planned to to make clear that the country stands with the people of Orlando, stands with the LGBT community in Orlando, as they grieve for their loss. He travelled with a group of politicians from both parties and Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican frequently at odds with Mr Obama, greeted the president on the tarmac upon his arrival.

The attack, which also left more than 40 people wounded, also quickly found its way into the presidential campaign.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has expanded his call for temporarily barring foreign Muslims from entering the US - even though the attacker was an American born in New York and said the president prioritises Americas enemies over its people.

In a rare display of public anger, Mr Obama denounced both Mr Trump and the Republican leaders who are still supporting him. Many of those Republican leaders also denounced Mr Trump's rhetoric.

Mr Obama travelled with politicians from both parties (AP)

Weve gone through moments in our history before when we acted out of fear and we came to regret it, Mr Obama said.

Weve seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens and it has been a shameful part of our history. This is not the America we want, it does not reflect our democratic ideals. It wont make us more safe, it will make us less safe.

Tamara Murray, who works at the Wells Built Museum of African American History and Culture, said she was also glad the president had come to show his support.

I think it shapes a direction for the rest of the country at large, she said. There are many families who are going to affected for generations because lives were cut short.
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Investigators are said to be gathering evidence against the wife of the Orlando gunman which they will present to a federal grand jury. The grand jury - made up of members of the public - will decide if there is sufficient evidence to charge her.

In the aftermath of the shooting that left that 49 people dead, it was reported that the second wife of gunman Omar Mateen had told investigators she was aware of his plans to launch an attack and tried to stop him.

It emerged federal investigators were looking to decide if she could be charged with failing to tell police about the impending attack, which also left more than 40 people wounded.

People hold a vigil for the Orlando shooting victims. (Mandel Ngan/Getty)

On Wednesday, CNN and other US media said federal prosecutors were now planing to gather evidence and present it to the grand jury to determine if there is a case to be brought against the 30-year-old woman. It was also reported that she had been with him when he bought ammunition and a holster and had once dropped him off at the Pulse night club when he apparently went to scope it out.

On Monday officials said that people than Mateen were being investigated.

There is an investigation of other persons. We are working as diligently as we can on that, US prosecutor Lee Bentley told reporters. If anyone else was involved in this crime, they will be prosecuted.

On Wednesday Mr Bentley again declined to provide specifics but added: We are talking to his friends, family [anyone who came into contact] with the shooter in the months before the attack."

 Orlando's LGBT Community Holds Vigil for Victims of Mass Shooting

As his victims lay bleeding to death at the nightclub, Mateen appaently stopped to make several phone calls. He called a friend to say goodbye and a journalsit at a local television channel, News 13 in Orlando, to proclaim he was carrying out the massacre on behalf of Isis.

Producer Matthew Gentili said he answered the newsroom phone int he early hours of Sunday.

I'm the shooter. Its me. I am the shooter, Mateen said, according to Mr Gentili. I did it for ISIS. I did it for the Islamic State.

The latest revelations on Wednesday emerged as the authorities asked the public for any additional information about Mateen or the attack that so many families devsatated.

This was an act of violence born out of hate that inflicted terror on an entire community, said FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper. I would call it a hate crime, I would call it terrorism. Its both.

The FBI has given intelligence bulletins to gay clubs in the Orlando area to give them a heightened sense of awareness, Mr Hopper said. But he said there was no credible or specific threat of an imminent attack against Orlando or the United States. He also said there was no evidence to suggest Mateen planned to target any gay club other than Pulse that night.


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Republican politician Andy Holt wants everyone to attend his hog fest and turkey shoot fundraiser. For the $30 cost of a ticket, there will be hay rides, a small zoo for the children and live music.

Oh, and Mr Holt is also offering people a chance to win two AR-15 assault rifles - the weapon used at Sandy Hook, San Bernadino and very similar to the one used in Orlando - in a raffle.

In recent days, Mr Holt, a state representative from Tennessee, has been at the centre of a mounting controversy over his decision to offer as the prizes the weapons, which gun control campaigners have described as the gold standard for mass murder of innocent civilians.

The lawsuit claims the AR-15 assault rifle has no legitimate civilian use (Wikipedia)

Mr Holt - who said he added the second weapon in response to the outcry from the media - also made transgender jokes about his event. He said he has since received death threats and police have launched an investigation into an alleged threat against himself and an assistant.

Im sick and tired of the media and liberal politicians attacking our right to keep and bear arms, Mr Holt wrote on Facebook.

Mr Holt told The Independent he stood by his decision to offer the weapon as a prize for his event at his family farm in the town of Dresden.

The giveaway was planned before the shooting. In fact, a month before the shooting. Offensive? Thats like asking if people were offended by receiving a newspaper after the Charlie Hebdo attack, or if people were offended by watching an airliner commercial after the 9/11 attacks, he said in an email

In America, our right to self-defence is protected just the same as the right to free speech.

Asked about AR-15, he said he did not understand why people were obsessing bout the gun. Matinee is reported to have used a weapon very similar to the AR-15, which is produced by Remington. Relatives of those who died in Sandy Hook are suing the company

Media creating a narrative around a specific gun that wasnt even used proves the media has a biased agenda, and doesnt even deserve a response, he said.

Mr Holt also denied that he was deliberately seeking to provoke outcry.

Mr Holt is asking for a minimum of $30 for people to attend his event (Andy Holt)

So, I plan a gun give-away a month before the Orlando terror attack, then the media and liberals come after me like a swarm of bees, yet Im the one that provoked the situation? Okay. Makes perfect sense, he said.

Whats even funnier - you didnt ask a single question regarding the fact that this was a terror attack carried out by a radical Muslim. Instead, youve chosen to focus on a firearm that wasnt even used by the terrorist. In fact, you wont even call him a terrorist in your questions.

Mr Holt has also triggered a response by his comments about transgender people. In the advertisement for his hog fest later this month, he wrote: The Womens division is open to all biological females ages 18 and over.

 Orlando Shooting Survivor Recalls Playing Dead to Avoid Gunman

He added: Sorry fellers, identifying as a female wont get you into this contest; Obama has no control over this event.

He declined to answer a question about his comments about transgender people and accused The Independent of yellow journalism at its finest.

The row comes as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden visit Orlando to meet the survivor of last Sundays attack on a gay night club, which left 49 people dead and more than 40 others wounded. Mr Obama will also meet with members of the emergency services who responded to the attack, carried out by 29-year-old Mateen.

The FBI has said it believes Mateen, who called police to claim he was carrying out the attack in the name of Isis, was radicalised online. Agents are currently questioning his second wife, who reportedly told investigators she tried to talk her husband out of the attack.

It has also been reported that Mateen may have been gay or bisexual, that he used gay dating applications and that he visited the Pulse nightclub many times. The city has held a series of vigils, with people asking that the community come together.

In Washington, Democrats held a 15-hour filibuster to try and force the Republicans to vote on gun control issues.
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The media was quick to name the Orlando attacks, in which a lone gunman burst into a gay nightclub and killed 49 people, as the "worst in US history".

But the public accused the media of "whitewashing history" and was quick to ask: What about the massacre of Wounded Knee at the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation?

Historians have acknowledged that after public access to guns for more than 200 years, the attack last weekend is more accurately described as the worst mass shooting in modern US history.

Congress apologised 100 years later for the killing of up to 300 Native American men, women and children in 1890 in South Dakota, but never rescinded the medals awarded to the cavalry.

Mass violence has a long, ugly history in America, Katherine Grandjean, history professor at Wellesley College, told Fox News. It's a pattern as old as the nation and goes back long before even into the colonial roots.

But what distinguishes more recent attacks from past bloodshed?

Grant Duwe, the director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, told NPR that before 1900, most mass murders were carried out by the haves against the have nots, and after 1900 this turned around. He also said killings carried out by military or quasi-military actors in the mass shooting category anymore.

In 1921, a white mob shot up to 300 people in Tulsa and burnt down the black neighborhood. It became known as the Tulsa race riots.

In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People gather at a vigil in solidarity for the victims of the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, at Taylor Square in Sydney EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Brett Morian, from Daytona Beach, hugs an attendee during the candlelight vigil at Ember in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People and members of the gay community holding the peace rainbow flag gather for a vigil near the Beaubourg art center in downtown Paris AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man places a hand print on a makeshift memorial in a parking lot near the Pulse nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People attend a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando attack against a gay night club, held in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People place candles by a statue of Abraham Lincoln during a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando attack against a gay night club, held in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Tel-Aviv city hall lit up with rainbow flag colors in solidarity with Florida's shooting attack victims AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Juan Mantilla (L) stands with his partner during a vigil in memory of the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, in Miami Beach AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A couple shares a kiss as they embrace each other under a pride flag while residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area gather to mourn, honor, and remember the victims of a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Austin Ellis, a member of Metropolitan Community Church, carries a cross with a sign in memory of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting as he marches in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade in Philadelphia Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A rainbow flag flies at half mast on the Space Needle in Seattle, in honor of the victims of the nightclub shooting in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People at the LA Pride event in West Hollywood, write signs and light candles showing solidarity with victims of the mass killings in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims In reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida people hug outside the Stonewall Inn near a vigil for the victims in New York AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A woman offers free hugs in Washington, in reaction to the mass shootings at a gay club in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A U.S. flag is flown at half staff at the White House after the Orlando mass shooting Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man lays flowers on a rainbow flag in front of the embassy of the United States in Madrid, to pay tribute to the victims of the shooting of Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The Michael Fowler Centre is lit in rainbow colours by the city council during a candle lit vigil across the road at Frank Kits Park in Wellington, in remembrance of victims after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Participants hold candles during a vigil at Frank Kits Park in Wellington, in remembrance of victims after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Vixon Noir (R) consoles Trashina Cann, both of San Francisco, during a vigil at Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro district of San Francisco AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People gather in the Castro District for a vigil for the victims of the Orlando shooting at a gay nightclub, in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A couple joins residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area to mourn, honor, and remember the victims of a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Mourners pay tribute to the victims of the Orlando shooting during a memorial service in San Diego AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The Orlando Eye observation wheel lights up in rainbow colors, to remember the people killed and injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People sit by the water with candles during a vigil in a park following a mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Members of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence carry a sign of remembrance for mass shooting victims in Orlando, at the 46th annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Former Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra and Shawn Lang of Hartford embrace after Segarra spoke, during a vigil organized by the state's Muslim and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, on the steps of the state Capitol building in reaction to the mass shooting in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The City Hall Building is lit in the rainbow colors in New York, in reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims One World Trade Center is lit in the rainbow colors in New York, in reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People hold a vigil after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, in front of the White House in Washington REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man lays down 50 roses to honor each victim of the gay Orlando night club shooting as people gather outside of the Stonewall Inn as a vigil is held following the massacre Getty Images

Before the 20th century, mass murders were usually carried out by a group, like the Mountain Meadows Massacre in the 1800s when a Mormon militia gunned down around 120 people traveling through Utah to California.

In more recent decades, there have been a series of single-shooter killings, including the murder of 12 people in a Colorado cinema in 2012; 32 people shot dead in Virigina Tech in 2007; and 26 people were killed at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012.

A mass shooting is defined by the FBI as four or more shot and/or killed in a single incident.

In the wake of Orlando, Democrats were scrambling to list a series of proposals on gun restrictions, including the ban on assault weapons, and held a monumental filibuster of 15 hours, ending in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Democrat representative Seth Moulton said more stringent gun laws are needed, and that over 90 per cent of the US public support restrictions on weapons.

There is more going on about guns on my Facebook and Twitter feed then there is in congress, he told CNN.

Democrats are planning to walk out of the house during a 10-second moment of silence in honour of the victims in protest at Republicans refusal to budge on gun laws.

Meanwhile the National Rifle Association is holding firm on its pledge to hand out an AR-15 gun - the gold standard of mass murder - as a raffle prize.
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A Baptist pastor has praised the attack on an LGBT nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people, the deadliest mass shooting in US history, during a sermon in Sacramento.

The remarks, made by Roger Jimenez just hours after the shooting, appeared on the Verity Baptist Churchs YouTube account.

Are you sad that 50 paedophiles were killed today? he said in the sermon. Um no, I think thats great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight.

The tragedy is that more of them didnt die. The tragedy is Im kind of upset he didnt finish the job  because these people are predators. They are abusers."

Mr Jimenez went on to say he wished homosexuals would be put in front of a firing squad.

He said: "I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put the firing squad in front of them and blow their brains out.

We dont need to do anything to help. As far as Im concerned, Orlando is a little bit safer tonight.

In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People gather at a vigil in solidarity for the victims of the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, at Taylor Square in Sydney EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Brett Morian, from Daytona Beach, hugs an attendee during the candlelight vigil at Ember in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People and members of the gay community holding the peace rainbow flag gather for a vigil near the Beaubourg art center in downtown Paris AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man places a hand print on a makeshift memorial in a parking lot near the Pulse nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People attend a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando attack against a gay night club, held in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People place candles by a statue of Abraham Lincoln during a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando attack against a gay night club, held in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Tel-Aviv city hall lit up with rainbow flag colors in solidarity with Florida's shooting attack victims AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Juan Mantilla (L) stands with his partner during a vigil in memory of the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, in Miami Beach AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A couple shares a kiss as they embrace each other under a pride flag while residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area gather to mourn, honor, and remember the victims of a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Austin Ellis, a member of Metropolitan Community Church, carries a cross with a sign in memory of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting as he marches in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade in Philadelphia Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A rainbow flag flies at half mast on the Space Needle in Seattle, in honor of the victims of the nightclub shooting in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People at the LA Pride event in West Hollywood, write signs and light candles showing solidarity with victims of the mass killings in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims In reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida people hug outside the Stonewall Inn near a vigil for the victims in New York AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A woman offers free hugs in Washington, in reaction to the mass shootings at a gay club in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A U.S. flag is flown at half staff at the White House after the Orlando mass shooting Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man lays flowers on a rainbow flag in front of the embassy of the United States in Madrid, to pay tribute to the victims of the shooting of Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The Michael Fowler Centre is lit in rainbow colours by the city council during a candle lit vigil across the road at Frank Kits Park in Wellington, in remembrance of victims after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Participants hold candles during a vigil at Frank Kits Park in Wellington, in remembrance of victims after a gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Vixon Noir (R) consoles Trashina Cann, both of San Francisco, during a vigil at Harvey Milk Plaza in the Castro district of San Francisco AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People gather in the Castro District for a vigil for the victims of the Orlando shooting at a gay nightclub, in San Francisco REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A couple joins residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area to mourn, honor, and remember the victims of a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando EPA In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Mourners pay tribute to the victims of the Orlando shooting during a memorial service in San Diego AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The Orlando Eye observation wheel lights up in rainbow colors, to remember the people killed and injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People sit by the water with candles during a vigil in a park following a mass shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Members of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence carry a sign of remembrance for mass shooting victims in Orlando, at the 46th annual Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims Former Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra and Shawn Lang of Hartford embrace after Segarra spoke, during a vigil organized by the state's Muslim and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, on the steps of the state Capitol building in reaction to the mass shooting in Orlando AP In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims The City Hall Building is lit in the rainbow colors in New York, in reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims One World Trade Center is lit in the rainbow colors in New York, in reaction to the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando AFP/Getty Images In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims People hold a vigil after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at a gay nightclub in Orlando, in front of the White House in Washington REUTERS In pictures: The world mourns Orlando shooting victims A man lays down 50 roses to honor each victim of the gay Orlando night club shooting as people gather outside of the Stonewall Inn as a vigil is held following the massacre Getty Images

Sandrea Nelson, the Pride director of the Davis-Phoenix coalition, said in a statement: Hes not a man of God. He is not teaching religion.

Statements like this can cause more harm to our youth and people in the closet; it causes them to feel worthless. Bottom line is to love thy brother as you love thyself."

Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, condemned the remarks.

He said: "The hateful comments made by a preacher in Sacramento do not reflect Christian values and have no place in our society."
The Chinese mainland has set up 6 new cross-straits exchange centers in addition to 43 existing ones, to facilitate greater cooperation with Taiwan.

An Fengshan, spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan affairs office. [File Photo: Taiwan.cn]

An Fengshan, spokesman for the State Council's Taiwan affairs office, says they will promote small-scale trade as part of cross-straits economic exchanges.

"The small-scale trade to Taiwan is a beneficial supplement in the overall cross-Straits trade and it has played an important role in promoting the direct links of cross-Straits trade for a long time. Currently, characterized by rapidness and convenience, small-scale trade is still playing a unique and positive role in promoting the cross-Straits trade of agricultural and fisheries produce, serving production and operations for Taiwan-invested companies on the Chinese mainland and facilitating communication between the two sides."

An Fengshan also says the exchange centers will allow people from both sides to review history, culture, family ties and seek further developments.

According to An, a Kuomintang Party youth-wing delegation will visit the mainland next week to discuss cross-Strait exchanges.

During the tour, the delegation is expected to meet with Zhang Zhijun, head of the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

At the news conference, the spokesman was also asked about the recent sharp drop in the number of mainland tourists to Taiwan.

An said the phenomenon is a normal result of market forces.

"As we all know, the political situation in Taiwan and the relations across the Straits have changed since this year, which increased worries among mainland companies and tourists. That has decreased willingness of mainland tourists to travel to Taiwan. That is mainly a change in market behavior. We have never set any traveling quota to Taiwan on our tourists. The quota, if any, is only set by Taiwan unilaterally."

Some Taiwan media are forecasting there would be even fewer mainland tourists to Taiwan after July.
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A porn site has released a new category of content for its visually impaired users, and does not mince its words when the narrator describes women in cheap-looking power suits and cute teens.

A set of 50 of Pornhub's most-viewed videos - reportedly from straight, gay, bisexual and "female friendly" categories - have been re-released with voice-over description, called Described Video.

The narrators detail what the actors are doing, what they are wearing, the position of their bodies, their location and how the shots are edited.

Recommended Read more Game of Thrones is taking on Pornhub

Each video includes special narration that has been tailored and crafted to give the user full enjoyment of the scene, Pornhub said in a statement.

Cut to a side shot inside the cab ... A girl gets in, black hair, lots of makeup, and squeezing a nice curvy figure into a tight blue dress, the narrator said in the sample work-friendly video on YouTube.

The video continues to run through sample scenes with audio description, emphasizing the h for hot teen.

On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' Show all 15 1 /15 On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' (Photo: Alan Schaller) Info On the set of Erika Lust's 'Vampire' Director Erika Lust with set make-up artist Laila Alsane (Photo: Alan Schaller) (All photos: Alan Schaller)

The new category follows the launch in March of its "virtual reality" porn category with 360-degree content, and celebrated the launch by handing out 10,000 pairs of "virtual reality goggles".

Corey Price, Pornhub's vice president, said in a statement that the goal is to initiate a larger conversation with our user base on how to make Pornhub more accessible to all.

The move is similar to the likes of Netflix which added audio descriptions to some of its popular shows. Twitter and Facebook also added image captioning earlier in 2016.

The porn company has previously launched a campaign to save the sperm whale, has awarded "scholarships" to budding pornographers and has even launched a parody porn video about the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

The move to launch narrated videos comes shortly Pornhub hosted New York City's second annual porn festival, and one month after it launched its equivalent of Wii Fit, called "BangFit".
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Two people have died in an plane crash when it tried to land amid foggy weather conditions at an airport operated by Penn State University.

A dozen firetrucks and ambulances arrived at the University Park Airport, where the plane came down.

It landed in a heavily wooded area of Benner Township near the runway.

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The airports tower crew saw smoke coming out of the plane, according to Penn State spokeswoman Heather Robbins. When the airport tower tried to contact the pilot, there was no response.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the Piper plane had left Washington Countu Airport in southwestern Pennsylvania with two people on board. The airport has been closed and flights have been diverted.

The identity of the pilot and passenger, as well as the cause of the crash, have not yet been released.

The inbound airport had originally anticipated the crash to be a larger plane.

The incident comes days after a second plane crash-landed at the airport. No one was injured but flights had to be diverted while the airport was closed.
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One year and one day ago a man with an exclamation mark after his name delivered the barely shocking news he was running for president, promising to wage war on establishment Washington.

We are not going to clean up the mess in Washington by electing the people who either helped create it or have proven incapable of fixing it, Jeb Bush, the former Florida Governor, declared. But as he spoke, an email was popping up in our phones. The next day Donald Trump would be holding a press conference in New York.

Recommended Read more Former top Bush administration official chooses Clinton over Trump

No one was in much doubt that Mr Trump would be joining the fray also, a prospect we greeted with vague amusement. How long could he last, we wondered? Today on the first anniversary of his campaign, The Independent is still on the trail with Mr Trump, in Dallas, Texas. Jeb! and all the other 16 Republicans who vied with him through the primaries are gone; the nomination is his.

Mr Trump prevailed partly because no one among those other candidates was any good. That it could only muster such a thin and untalented field - including a dreamy ex-surgeon and other dregs who had tried for the nomination before and failed miserably - should have told us something about the parlous state of the Republican Party right there. A hostile takeover was waiting to happen.

The first anniversary of candidate Trump falls in a week of particular tumult for American politics and his campaign. And arguably more risk to the Trump candidacy than we have seen up to this point. His response to the Orlando atrocity, principally one of further enflaming anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, led Barack Obama on Tuesday to declare him a danger to national security, an extraordinary attack by a sitting president against a presidential candidate.

But that he has got even this far is a testament to his most potent quality: bull-headed consistency.

Yes, he is a walking cauldron of contradictions. He wants America to rule the world, yet is to the left of Hillary Clinton when it comes to actually projecting its power. He has said the Orlando night club massacre wouldnt have happened if enough of the patrons had had guns strapped to their ankle or strapped to their waist, but is suddenly interested in supporting legislation to keep those on terror watch lists from buying guns. He berates China on trade and sells Chinese-made ties.

The consistency is in the political branding. The main elements of it were on vivid display the moment he descended that escalator to the lobby of his own Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue - a retail sarcophagus in kingly marble and gold - and started to speak. He, not Bush, would be the one to rip up the rules of party and campaigning and be the politically incorrect boy in the room. He would be the one not just to identify precisely what it was that was making so many Americans angry about their lives but to drive in the surgical drain and tap what flowed out as political fuel.

He started with immigration and his statement that Mexicans are bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. Before he was done he had railed against Americas trade policies and its impact on jobs, about national security and also about terror, all things that large swathes of voters worry about as they at the same time despair of the political leaders they currently have.

The exclamation mark didn't do the trick (Getty)

That his campaign was essentially a one-man show - and chaotic - was in evidence during his first visit to Texas last July. In spite of great danger to himself, he averred, he was visiting the US-Mexican border near Laredo. Those of us there to witness it had been helpfully supplied with GPS coordinates so we wouldnt get lost. Sadly, they were for a tiny hamlet on the China-Tibet border.

He was back in the Lone Star state in February for a debate memorable for its special viciousness. So upset was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida after being repeatedly dismissed as Liddl Marco, he later implied Mr Trump had peed his pants while on the stage.

Since dispatching the last of his rivals six weeks ago, Mr Trump has had the opportunity to shift gears - to moderate that brand, consistency be damned. Republican leaders like House speaker Paul Ryan beseeched him to do so. Stop this nonsense about building the wall, barring Muslim migrants. The time had surely come to begin uniting the Party, they suggested.

To many it seemed he had an additional golden opportunity - just as he was safely home in the nomination race, Ms Clinton would for several more weeks be distracted by Senator Bernie Sanders. More than that, she faced mounting questions about her use of a private email server while Secretary of State. Instead, Mr Trump veered off into public attacks against a judge presiding over a case against his defunct Trump University, suggesting his Mexican heritage made him unfit.

His assailing of the judge drew opprobrium up and down the party. His response to the killings in Orlando have deepened the despair. In return, Mr Trump at a rally in Atlanta on Wednesday essentially told his Republican critics to shut up. Dont talk. Please, be quiet, he said. Just be quiet. And he told them if he has to carry on without their help, he is happy to do so.

But consistency - his firm belief that what has brought him electoral success so far will continue to work in his favour - may now be causing him damage. Mr Trump may eventually discover that the primary period of a presidential run is not the same as the general election. This is when playing only to his already well consolidated base wont be enough. He has to win more people over and he in fact needs the party, and the money it can raise, to make that happen.

But those still willing to help are dwindling in numbers. It is showing up in small ways and big. His rally on Thursday in Texas almost didnt happen because two cities, Irving and Grand Praire, turned the campaign down when it asked to use their venues. The fear was violence. Or maybe they declined out of mere distaste for the candidate.

On Thursday, a former deputy secretary of state under George W. Bush, Richard Armitage, declared his intention to vote for Ms Clinton over Mr Trump, a remarkable indicator that the top echelons of the Republican foreign policy establishment cant find the stomach to support him.

One who was not in Texas to welcome him, meanwhile, was John Cornyn, the states senior US Senator and the second most powerful Republican in Washington. After days of being badgered to say what he thought about Mr Trumps most recent pronouncements he declared a sort of Trump purdah; he will not talk about him between now and the election in November. At all.

After one year of Mr Trump on the loose, this is the pass we have got to. He is the Partys almost certain nominee and yet its top-most lieutenants cant even bring themselves to utter his name.
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Hillary Clinton is actively looking at Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren as running mate and vice president of her possible future administration in January 2017.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Ms Warren is being vetted for the position rather than senator Bernie Sanders, Ms Clintons rival who has vowed to hold a contested party convention next month.

Ms Warrens policies are closely in line with that of Mr Sanders, however, being mostly populist and progressive.

She is known for her strong stance on Wall Street regulation and has not minced her words when attacking Donald Trump.

She called him a small, insecure money grubber who will never be president, in response to his remarks that she was goofy and Pocahontas for lying about her Native American heritage.

Ms Warren endorsed Ms Clinton last week after the latter swept up the majority of the votes in the final round of democratic state primaries, clinching the number of delegates she needed to become the presumptive nominee.

I am ready to get in this fight and work my heart out for Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States  and to make sure that Donald Trump never gets anyplace close to the White House, she told MSNBC.

The partnership would be the first time in history that two women are on the ticket for president and vice president.

The pair met last Friday at Ms Clintons Washington DC home, fueling rumours that Ms Warren will be announced as the running mate.

Ms Warren's latest concern has been to advocate the banning of assault weapons after the mass shooting in Orlando and showing solidarity with the LGBT community.

The vetting process for candidates, which also includes Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, is limited to scrutinizing public information and has not yet asked them to submit their tax returns and other personal information.

Media commentators have suggested Ms Clinton has no plans to include her rival Mr Sanders on the candidate list, although Mr Sanders said last Thursday after meeting president Barack Obama that he looked forward to working with the secretary of state to defeat Mr Trump.
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At least five people have died in Venezuela in recent days, as protests against the countrys socialist government grow amid dire food shortages and prolonged economic turmoil. A 17-year-old boy was the latest to be killed, during a protest on Tuesday in Lagunillas in the western state of Merida. Jean Omana was reportedly shot in the head as soldiers and police clashed with demonstrators demanding food. He died on Wednesday at a local hospital.

The unrest over a drastic lack of food and medicine has seen dozens injured and hundreds arrested across the febrile Latin American oil state, as its leftist President Nicolas Maduro tries to stave off opposition calls for a referendum on his leadership. Tumbling global oil prices have left the government of Mr Maduros PSUV party unable to finance the import of even basic foodstuffs. Most of Venezuela suffers daily, three-hour power cuts.

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Protesters say they are starving and, in many cases, suffering heat exposure after hours spent in line to get food. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence says at least 10 looting incidents occur across the country every day, to which authorities often respond with tear gas and riot police. On Wednesday, at least three separate protests broke out in parts of the capital, Caracas, a day after demonstrators blocked a road close to the presidential palace.

A four-year-old girl was shot dead on Tuesday as she queued for food with her mother at a government-owned grocery shop in Guatire, a Caracas suburb. Eight other people are thought to have been injured in the incident. Meanwhile, police and National Guardsmen responded en masse to violence and looting in the coastal city of Cumuna, arresting more than 400 people. The citys mayor imposed a three-day ban on motorcycles, which looters use to flee.

Opposition congresswoman Milagros Paz said the looters were people desperate for food, telling Venezuelan newspaper El Universal that the government has not admitted the food distribution emergency. But prominent PSUV politician Diosdado Cabello blamed the unrest on fascist opposition groups, telling viewers of his weekly TV programme, Con el Mazo Dando (Hitting with the Sledgehammer), that it was a fairy tale that these are spontaneous protests.

Opposition leaders say the crisis is a result of government mismanagement, but Mr Maduro and his allies claim Venezuela is the victim of an economic war fomented by the US to drive him out of office. This week, Mr Maduro and US Secretary of State John Kerry both announced they would hold talks aimed at restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, which have been without mutual ambassadors since 2008.

Yet Mr Kerry has also urged Venezuela to go ahead with a vote on recalling Mr Maduro, after the Presidents opponents collected more than a million signatures for a petition demanding a referendum. Opinion polls suggest Mr Maduro would be soundly defeated in such a vote, but the government is accused of stalling. If a recall vote were held this year and Mr Maduro lost, a presidential election would be called  but if the vote is delayed until 2017, then the vice president would be allowed to take over and see out his term, which ends in 2019.
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A lesbian woman in China is suing the ministry of education over books that call homosexuality a psychological disorder, in a case accepted by a Beijing court.

The legal bid is the third attempt by a Guangdong student, who uses the pseudonym Qiu Bai, to take action against the ministry.

The 21-year-old turned to academic textbooks after becoming confused about her sexuality in her first year at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. She said she became angry when she discovered homosexuality was referred to as an illness.

Textbooks should at least describe homosexuality with objectivity, she told Chinese website Sixth Tone.

I dont want discrimination permeating the school I live in and the materials I use every day,

Homosexuality has been legal in China since 1997 and was removed from the list of mental illnesses in 2001, yet discrimination against LGBT people remains widespread and same-sex couples cannot marry in China - despite the law being challenged in the courts.

It comes days after a man launched a lawsuit against a Chinese mental hospital where he claims he was tied to a bed, beaten and force-fed drugs as part of conversion therapy.

His wife reportedly took him there in the hope he could be "cured".

Ms Qiu was persuaded to drop her first lawsuit after the ministry told her she could pursue the issue through a complaint process. But letters from more than 80 students did not get a response. Her second lawsuit failed after a court ruled the universitys lack of response had not infringed her rights.

LGBT+ rights around the globe Show all 9 1 /9 LGBT+ rights around the globe LGBT+ rights around the globe Russia Russias antipathy towards homosexuality has been well established following the efforts of human rights campaigners. However, while it is legal to be homosexual, LGBT couples are offered no protections from discrimination. They are also actively discriminated against by a 2013 law criminalising LGBT propaganda allowing the arrest of numerous Russian LGBT activists. AFP/Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Brunei Brunei recently introduced a law to make sodomy punishable by stoning to death. It was already illegal and punishable by up to 10 years in prison AFP/Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Mauritania Men who are found having sex with other men face stoning, while lesbians can be imprisoned, under Sharia law. However, the state has reportedly not executed anyone for this crime since 1987 Alamy LGBT+ rights around the globe Sudan Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is illegal under Sudanese law. Men can be executed on their third offence, women on their fourth Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Saudi Arabia Homosexuality and gender realignment is illegal and punishable by death, imprisonment, whipping and chemical castration Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Yemen The official position within the country is that there are no gays. LGBT inviduals, if discovered by the government, are likely to face intense pressure. Punishments range from flogging to the death penalty Getty LGBT+ rights around the globe Nigeria Both male and female same-sex sexual activity is illegal and in some northern states punishable with death by stoning. This is not a policy enacted across the entire country, although there is a prevalent anti-LGBT agenda pushed by the government. In 2007 a Pew survey established that 97% of the population felt that homosexuality should not be accepted. It is punishable by 14 years in prison Reuters LGBT+ rights around the globe Somalia Homosexuality was established as a crime in 1888 and under new Somali Penal Code established in 1973 homosexual sex can be punishable by three years in prison. A person can be put to death for being a homosexual Reuters LGBT+ rights around the globe Iraq Although same-sex relationships have been decriminalised, much of the population still suffer from intense discrimination. Additionally, in some of the country over-run by the extremist organisation Isis, LGBT individuals can face death by stoning Getty

The current lawsuit makes the case that "as a current university student, the plaintiff has a direct interest in the textbook materials".

Ms Qiu says her parents do not respect her sexuality.

They still cannot accept that Im a lesbian, and what I advocate, she told Sixth Tone.

"They still believe that my sexuality can be changed.
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The head of Pakistans Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) has explained when it is acceptable to beat your wife - and how it should be done.

Last month, the CII submitted a draft womens rights bill which suggested it was acceptable for a husband to lightly beat his wife for reasons such as refusing sex, ignoring demands and not bathing.

Maulana Muhammed Khan Sherani, the head of the Council, has now defended the right to inflict domestic abuse, claiming it was in accordance with Islam.

These recommendations are according to the Quran and Sunnah, the prophets teachings. No one can dispute that, the CII chairman said in an interview with the BBC.

When we draft a bill concerning women we have to consider all possible situations.

If a woman does not fulfil her responsibilities in marriage first you advise her, if that doesnt work, then you consult her relatives. If that doesnt work then you desert her in bed. If all of this doesnt work, then light beating is allowed.

What is the solution to this issue? If a woman doesnt respond to advice, doesnt listen to her relatives, after youve used all the options, what should be done?

The draft bill is a response to a new law  the womens protection act  passed by the Punjab assembly earlier this year, which gives women legal protection from domestic, psychological and sexual violence.

The CII, which advises the government on the compatibility of laws with Islam, declared the Parliaments new act as un-Islamic, saying the whole law is wrong, according to the Express Tribune.

 Anti-women laws that still exist in 2016

Their alternative proposal from the CII - which came in the form of a 163-point draft womens protection bill  bans women from appearing in visual advertisements, and forbids women to visit men who are not relatives.

However, it is the suggestion of domestic violence which has sparked the most outrage, with Pakistans media and human rights activists saying it encourages people to abuse their wives.

According to the draft bill: A husband should be allowed to lightly beat his wife if she defies his commands and refuses to dress up as per his desires; turns down demand of intercourse without any religious excuse or does not take bath after intercourse or menstrual periods.

Mr Sheerani told the Express Tribune what he meant by the term light beating. Hit her with light things like handkerchief, a hat or a turban, but do not hit her on the face or private parts.

The beating should not cause any kind of physical damage or even scratches. Resort to light stuff, nothing serious, he explained.

As for claims the draft bill condones violence, he said: The issue has been blown totally out of proportion. Everyone condemns violence. People need to be educated to stay away from violence.

The proposals faced a considerable backlash on social media, as the hashtag #trybeatingmelightly, which was started by photographer Fahhad Rajper, quickly gained momentum among women in Pakistan.

When asked about whether media response had encouraged him to change his views on the matter, the Mullah told the BBC: Society is not the media, theyre two different things. We will not reconsider the recommendations. This is according to the Quran, you cannot ask someone to reconsider the Quran.
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Police in Islamabad are investigating a senator from Pakistans upper house of parliament, after he allegedly threatened a female rights activist with rape during a live TV debate about violence against women.

Hafiz Hamdullah, a member of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party, appeared alongside Marvi Sirmed, a prominent journalist and human rights activist, and also barrister Masroor Sahib, on a talk show panel.

The panel was discussing a wave of high-profile honour killings of women in Pakistan.

Mr Hamdullah became angry after Mr Sahib criticised Islamic clerics for failing to protect women, and saying the council of Islamic Ideology were sleeping after becoming intoxicated".

When Ms Sirmed joined the discussion, saying she agreed to an extent with the barrister, Mr Hamdullah cut her off mid-sentence, and began to attack the journalist using sexist language.

I wont allow you to speak if you are supporting his words, Mr Hamdullah said, according to Pakistani news outlet ShiiteNews.org.

An edited clip of the event cuts off before the verbal abuse - which allegedly includes a rape threat - concludes.

In a Facebook post following the incident, Ms Sirmed wrote: He started abusing me with worst possible expletives. Called me a whore and said tumhaari shalwaar utaar dooN ga aur tumhaari maaN ki bhi.

This translates to: I will strip off your clothes and will do the same to your mother too.

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I returned this to his own family women, Ms Sirmed added. And then he tried to beat me. All of this recorded on camera. He had to be taken away by the News One security.

Speaking to reporters at Pakistan Today, Mr Hamdullah said: Naturally I lost my temper and a heated exchange took place between me and Marvi Sirmed. I must have said something offensive in anger but Marvi was no less as she had hurled abuses at my deceased mother.

Police said they were investigating the incident, after registering a case against Mr Hamdullah for attempted assault and criminal intimidation.

Writing in the Nation.com following the event, Ms Sirmed described Mr Hamdullahs behaviour as an extremely disturbing show of misogyny and violent masculinity.

"He had to be reminded of the severity of rape threats when he said he would strip my pants down and mothers too," she added.

Senator Hamdullah has become a controversial figure in Pakistan after several violent outbursts on public television.

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. 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After the incident, Dr Arif Alvi, one of the countrys senior parliamentarians said Mr Hamdullah had also threatened him on air, and said he should be banned from TV.

Ms Sirmed called on journalists and media outlets to boycott him, writing I dont think violent and vile people like Hamdullah should be taken on media. (An) opposing viewpoint is welcome, physical assault is not.

Pakistan has escalating problems with female honour killings, with over 1,100 women killed in 2015, according to the countrys independent Human Rights Commission.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised to introduce new legislation to prevent them.
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Very soon we may all be asking ourselves  whether we like it or not  how Britain came to vote to leave the European Union, an institution that we have been part of for almost half a century, and which had seemed an immutable fact of political, cultural and economic life.

How indeed. The short term answers are obvious enough, and can even be explored now. Why was the Remain campaign so dominated by economics and fear? So many bogus, but precise-sounding stats? Why did they have no answer on the immigration issue, a failure tacitly conceded already by Theresa May, looking desperately to promise further moves on movement of people. Why were solidly centrist, moderate, sensible politicians from David Cameron to Harriet Harman to Tim Farron to Nicola Sturgeon ignored, and the mavericks  Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson  heeded so readily? Who were the spin doctors who plotted this audacious coup? There will be an orgy of blame-throwing whatever happens, so close is the result. It is a moment to recall Napoleons remark that success has many parents, but failure is always an orphan.

And yet of course the roots of British euroscepticsm run much, much deeper, though it was once more pronounced on the left of politics than the right. Not so for two decades or more now, though. For Sir John Major, his interventions in the campaign were personal as well as about statesmanship; he more than anyone suffered for the Tory splits on Europe that marred his premiership in the 1990s. We all know about the bastards, some still causing him grief  John Redwood, Iain Duncan Smith, Peter Lilley  but we seem to have forgotten about that other figure from that era, the man who really established euroscepticism as an independent political phenomenon on its own terms, stoked the demand for a referendum on Europe, and campaigned for Britain to get out of the superstate decades before it had much chance of turning into reality. The man who was Nigel Farage before Nigel Farage; Sir James Goldsmith.

For it was Goldsmith's Referendum Party that really got the idea of a popular vote on the map, twenty years ago. Yes, the UK Independence Party had been founded as early as 1991, during the great Maastricht Treaty negotiations by the thoughtful academic Alan Sked, but was for a considerable time merely a slightly eccentric libertarian pressure group. Goldsmiths cash  he was one of the richest men in the land if not the world  turbo-charged the cause of British euroscpeticism, untrammelled by any considerations of loyalty to a conventional party or leader, or many short-term political calculations. It was the beginning of a great peasants revolt against the British establishment, or at least so it has been painted  after all most of its leaders, from Goldsmith through to Boris, have been wealthy and well-connected men.

UKIP protesters during William Hagues Save the Pound campaign visit to Woking in February, 2000 (Rex)

Where did Goldsmith make the money to bankroll an entire political party, albeit a relatively small one? The answer is that he started rich and got richer. His father owned hotels, and was also a Conservative MP, and, so the story goes, James Goldsmith won about a quarter of a million pounds in todays money on a horse racing accumulator that cut short his time at Eton. Apparently he declared to his fellow schoolboys: a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy. Later on, he got into food. According to the official James Goldsmith website, his Cavenham foods company employed at its height some 60,000 people, and with sales of 1.6bn by 1977, it was three times the size of either Sainsbury or Tesco, making it the third-biggest food company in Europe.

Goldsmiths trick, if thats the right word for it, was to buy undervalued and sometimes badly-managed famous brands and try and get the maximum value out of them. Doing this in the 1970s he might qualify for the catchphrases of the time  asset stripping and the unacceptable face of capitalism. It was highly appropriate that one of Cavenham's products, the savoury spread Marmite should play a small but symbolic role in the rise for Goldsmith and the making of his fortune. Like Marmite, this was a man the rest of the world either loved or hated. It didnt seem to matter overmuch to him, as he applied his financial skills in a string of takeovers and restructures, each one adding to personal wealth of some 1.2bn or so. He anticipated the stock market crash of 1987, proving once again his shrewdness. It is fair to say that, domiciled in Mexico, he was also careful about his tax planning.

He had other fun along the way too, though not everyone joined in. Goldsmith, maybe apocryphally, is said to have once quipped: When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy. Without wishing to sound like an apologist, it wasnt such a strange thing to think in those days in those rather louche circles, and Sir Jammy Fishpaste spent many an evening at his great friend John Aspinalls Clermont Club. Champagne, cigars, casinos about sums it up. In any case, Goldsmith married three times, his widow Lady Annabel surviving him, and rumours about his romantic exploits still reverberate. Annabel, daughter of the then Marquess of Londonderry, had an affair with Goldsmith for about a decade before leaving her husband Mark Birley for him: Mad about Jimmy. Loved Mark desperately she later explained. It was Birley who named the London nightclub after her.

Goldsmiths political exploits still reverberate, too. I still possess, among my political nick-nacks, a copy of a Referendum Party video (a VHS cassette as it happens, which I agree dates it and me). Goldsmith paid for a copy to be posted to every household in Britain  about 24 million of them. Presented by a bloke off Thats Life!, I didnt find it especially persuasive at the time, and it seemed a bit irrelevant in those days of Blair-mania and before the single currency euro turned out to be such a disaster. Europe had only just completed its latest round of expansion, allowing in Austria, Finland and Sweden, prosperous and easily digested economies. The accession of Poland and other former communist states with the movement of people across the continent was almost a decade away. The 1992 British-inspired Single Market project had not long been completed, and seemed to be contributing to healthy economic growth. The Maastricht Treaty had been agreed, but Major had negotiated key opt outs that kept Britain aloof from the single currency, the social chapter and retained the UK veto in home affairs and justice matters. There was not, in other words, any compelling feeling that the European project, though irritating and intrusive, was yet a failure or a threat to British living standards as well as democracy.

Goldsmith's Referendum Party played a part in pushing Tony Blair towards a more cautious view on Europe (Rex)

And yet Goldsmith made his mark, not just for the memorable scenes of him jeering David Mellor at the count in Putney in the 97 election  Mellor being one of many senior Tories to end their careers for good that year. In that great rout of the Conservative Party (their worst result since 1832), two trends then emerged. First, the dominant Heathite pro-European wing of the party started to seriously wither away, as the knights of the shires retired and were replaced by younger candidates, the sons and daughters of Thatcher, who of course was then making her opposition to the EU vocal and defiant. Only Ken Clarke was prepared, then as now, to stick up for the ideal Europe with much passion. At that time, not quite a decade after the regicide that had her leave Number 10, her word was gospel to many of those who came into politics to emulate and support her. Her endorsement of William Hague as leader to succeed Major in 1997 was an important one; Hague beat Clarke, and made no secret of his euroscepticism (he has been notably mute more recently) and went on to launch the Tories disastrous Save The Pound campaign at the 2001 General Election.

Still, a combination of Goldsmith's Referendum Party, the Tories admittedly often ineffectual campaigning, public opinion and divisions in his own ranks pushed Blair towards a more cautious view on Europe. He promised a referendum on joining the single currency, the euro, and, in almost open conflict with his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, set out the conditions that would have to be met before we joined. Blairs public reputation, tarnished as it is today, (and maybe more so after the Chilcot Report is published a month from now) would stand still lower had he succeeded in getting us into the euro. He might have managed in his first dizzy days in power, yet he missed his chance, and, even Europhiles would agree, that was just as well.

So the idea of a referendum on Europe began to be part of the common discourse across the parties in the 2000s. Even Nick Clegg soon proposed an In/Out referendum to settle the issue for good, in the mistaken belief that, surly as the British public may be, they would never go that far. When David Cameron tried to get himself out of a tight corner by offering his restless backbenchers a referendum, why did he do so? Simply because Ukip was threatening to take so much support from him that he feared for his own future, yes, but also that of his party. He might have resisted it, and surely would have if he could see how it would turn out; but such was the weight of public opinion behind it, first expressed in that Goldsmith adventure of the 1990s, that he could not resist. If he had, he might have been toppled and replaced by someone who was more enthusiastic about giving the voters their say. We would still be voting next week.

Goldsmiths Referendum Party also got people into the idea of voting for a pure anti-European party, breaking down old party loyalties and paving the way for the Farage-led Ukip insurgency a decade or so on. Goldsmith only garnered about 3 per cent of the vote in 1997, but that was 3 per cent more than any previous effort (Ukip scored just 0.3 per cent that year), and a succession of European elections soon allowed Ukip to scoop the eurosceptic electoral pot. Critically, the Referendum Party, which was disbanded after the 1997 election, though its spirit and above all its purpose lived on, attracted votes from Eurosceptic Labour and uncommitted supporters.

Chatshow host turned politician Robert Kilroy-Silk, once a front runner for UKIP, addresses supporters on the campaign trail in 2004. (Getty)

By that time Labours leadership had moved firmly into the pro-European side of the argument, greatly encouraged to do so by the late 1980s European Commission presidency of Jacques Delors and his championing for the social dimension, i.e. trade union power and protection for workers. That was famously resented by Margaret Thatcher  Socialism by the back Delors  in her Bruges speech as far back as 1987: but was nectar to the Labour establishment. Blair tore up Majors opt out, signed up to the social chapter and today Labour figures such as Jeremy Corbyn, Neil Kinnock and Tom Watson use protection of workers rights as the principal reason they now support something once derided by their forebears (actually including a younger Corbyn and Kinnock) as a capitalistic bosses club. However, as the European adventure turned more and more ugly, and Britain left its legacy as the poor man of Europe far behind, the attractions of the EU started to wane. As China, India, Korea and other emerging economies started to challenge the whole world, EU workers rights looked more like a cause of poor productivity, low growth, unemployment and eurosclerosis  the underlying reasons for the euro crisis from 2010. Had Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand not forced the pace on integration and the euro; had Europes eastern expansion as far as Romania and Bulgaria been better managed, had the 2001 Lisbon agenda of liberalisation and reform been implemented things, might have played out differently.

Goldsmith himself died not long after the 1997 general election that he had played such a prominent role in. Journalists do not often speak well of him, as he was notoriously litigious and almost bankrupted Private Eye, who dubbed him, at their politest, Goldenballs. His son, Zac, made it into parliament as a Conservative MP not far from Putney, but of course failed in his recent bid to succeed Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. A bright and talented figure, he may yet enjoy greater political success, as well as the celebrity status enjoyed by others of his clan, such as sister Jemima, but he is unlikely to emulate his fathers abiding, though neglected, political legacy.

The original Tory eurosceptic  the great grandfather of the current wave  was Enoch Powell. Long ago he characterised the attitude of the British people to the then European community as one of morbid antipathy. Powell was a fanatically devoted parliamentarian, who did not believe that a referendum was a legitimate tool for decision-making (and even believed that no parliament had a right to abolish the powers lent to it by its electorate and send them over to Brussels). It was another Old Testament prophet, this time on the left, Tony Benn, who championed the idea of a referendum, not least as the easiest way to get a Labour government to take Britain out of Europe (membership of the EU being incompatible with a planned socialist economy). But neither had a political vehicle of their own to push their European agenda more powerfully forward. Goldsmith, and later Farage, provided that transport. Thus does the ghost of Goldenballs haunt us all.
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The black box containing the cockpit voice recorder from the crashed EgyptAir flight has been found in the Mediterranean, investigators in Egypt say.

The Egyptian investigation committee said a specialist vessel owned by Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search made the discovery, which is now being transferred to the coastal city of Alexandria where the public prosecution and investigators will receive it

Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation said the box, one of two on the plane, was found 13,000 ft deep into the ocean, partly broken but with its memory storage intact.

An investigative team has been dispatched.

The wreckage of the EgyptAir flight was discovered yesterday.

All 66 people and crew on board flight MS804 were killed when it crashed on 19 May after disappearing from radar en route to Cairo from Paris.

In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 Show all 5 1 /5 In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 EgyptAir wreckage The Egyptian army published photos showing wreckage and debris from EgyptAir flight 804 on 21 May Egyptian army In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 EgyptAir wreckage The Egyptian army published photos showing wreckage and debris from EgyptAir flight 804 on 21 May Egyptian army In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 EgyptAir wreckage The Egyptian army published photos showing wreckage and debris from EgyptAir flight 804 on 21 May Egyptian army In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 EgyptAir wreckage The Egyptian army published photos showing wreckage and debris from EgyptAir flight 804 on 21 May In pictures: Wreckage from EgyptAir flight 804 EgyptAir wreckage The Egyptian army published photos showing wreckage and debris from EgyptAir flight 804 on 21 May

The cause of the disaster remains unknown and no group has claimed an attack.

Automatic messages sent in the minutes before the plane disappeared from radar appeared to indicate problems with the cockpit windows, autopilot and the flight control system, and smoke on board.

Egypts aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, told a news conference that he did not want to draw any conclusions prematurely, but the possibility of having a different action or a terror attack, is higher than the possibility of having a technical failure.

Egypts aviation safety record has been in question following the crash of Metrojet 7K9268, which crashed in the Sinai peninsula in October 2015, killing all 224 people on board. Isiss branch in Sinai later claimed responsibility for the attack, displaying a picture of the drinks can they say was used to smuggle a bomb on board the craft.
The Chinese government on Thursday released a white paper elaborating on the development of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which has been independently developed and operated by China.

According to the document, China has formulated a three-step strategy for developing the BDS, aiming to complete the constellation deployment with 35 satellites around 2020 to provide services to global users, according to the document, which was unveiled by the State Council Information Office.

In the first step, China meant the project to provide services to domestic users, and in the second, the system expanded services to the Asia-Pacific region. The second one was achieved by the end of 2012.

The BDS will provide all-time, all-weather and high-accuracy positioning, navigation and timing services to global users, according to the document.
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Isis members reportedly lashed and crucified three people they accused of breaking their fast during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan.

Two people from the Isis-held town of Mayadin were reportedly tied onto crosses outside the police station in Eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor.

Another person received the same treatment in the nearby town of Bukamal, according to Justice for Life Observatory in Deir EzZor.

All three were held in cages for a number of hours before receiving 70 lashes and being tied to a cross

The extremist group had found them guilty of consuming food and drink during daylight hours.

Confirming this report, Rami Abdelrahman, from the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said they were held up on the crosses as "example".

He said: "We heard of similar instances happening in Raqqa two days ago."

In pictures: Ramadan around the world Show all 27 1 /27 In pictures: Ramadan around the world In pictures: Ramadan around the world In pictures: Ramadan around the world In pictures: Ramadan around the world Russia Russian Muslims pray outside the central mosque in Moscow, during celebrations of Eid al-Fitr marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Ramadan around the world Turkey Turkish Muslims offer Eid al Fitr prayers as they mark the first day of the Eid al-Fitr at Fatih Sultan Mosque in Istanbul Getty Images In pictures: Ramadan around the world Syria A Syrian Dervish dances as part of a traditional event organised by the Syrian Ministry of Tourism under the title 'Music and Dervishes' in the old city of Damascus EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Bosnia and Herzegovina A Bosnian Muslim man, wearing a traditional Bosnian outfit, fires a canon from a vantage point overlooking Sarajevo to mark the end of daily fasting on the final day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Ramadan around the world Pakistan A general view of an illuminated Mosque as Muslims pray during the 27th night of Ramadan, in Peshawar EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Pakistan Muslim women offer prayer of the Jumat-ul-wida, the last Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan at a mosque in Lahore AP In pictures: Ramadan around the world India Muslims offer prayers on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan in Dargah Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti Rex Features In pictures: Ramadan around the world Saudi Arabia The Prophet Mohammed Mosque in the holy city of Medina, during Ramadan EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Malaysia A Malaysian swings around fireworks to celebrate the last day of the Muslims' Holy fasting month of Ramadan, in Shah Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur In pictures: Ramadan around the world Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyz Muslims pray during the Eid al-Fitr Muslim celebration marking the end of Ramadan in Bishkek EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Ivory Coast People pray during the Laylat Al Qadr prayers on the 27th day of the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan in the front of the Aghin mosque in Abidjan AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Ramadan around the world Syria Syrians shop for traditional sweets in Kafr Batna in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta area, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, ahead of Eid al-Fitr which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Ramadan around the world Israel A Palestinian woman prays on the third Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan on the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City REUTERS In pictures: Ramadan around the world Iran Iranian Shiite Muslims pray at the graves of soldiers who were killed during 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, during the holy fasting month of Ramadan, just outside Tehran, Iran AP In pictures: Ramadan around the world Israel A Palestinian man pours water on Muslim worshippers' heads to cool off in the heat, as others pray outside the Dome of the Rock at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem during the last Friday prayers of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Afghanistan Afghan women wait to receive food ration during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Herat EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Pakistan A Pakistani Muslim reads the holy Koran as he observes Itikaf at a Mosque, in Peshawar EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world India Kashmiri Muslim women offer prayers as the head priest (not pictured) displays a holy relic believed to be hair from the beard of the Prophet Mohammed, during special prayers to observe the Martyr Day of Hazrat Ali, cousin of Prophet Mohammed, on the 21st day of Ramadan, at the Hazratbal Shrine in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world India Indian Muslims sit with bowls of porridge(Nombu kanji)as they prepare to break the fast with the Iftar meal during the Islamic month of Ramadan at The Wallajah Big Mosque in Chennai AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Ramadan around the world Lebanon Spectators watch fireworks as a giant Fanous, or Ramadan lantern, is switched on four days before the start of Ramadan month in front of Mohamed al-Amine Mosque in downtown Beirut EPA In pictures: Ramadan around the world Lebanon Lebanese children perform during activities celebrating the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan, in downtown Beirut AP In pictures: Ramadan around the world Palestine Palestinian men drink tea on the promenade of Gaza beach Getty In pictures: Ramadan around the world Indonesia Members of Nahdlatul Ulama, the biggest Muslim organisation in Indonesia, hold a mass prayer session to welcome in Ramadan in Jakarta AFP/Getty In pictures: Ramadan around the world Iraq Iraqis shop for food in a preparation for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Baghdad AP In pictures: Ramadan around the world Indonesia Foods is seen during 'Unggah-unggahan' ceremony to welcome in the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in Pekuncen village Getty

There have been similar reports of cruel punishment for breaking fast across the Deir Ezzor province.

During Ramadan last year, Isis caged and crucified 94 people including five children after they were caught breaking their fast.

In Pakistan, an elderly Hindu man was beaten for allegedly selling and eating food during daylight hours.

The police officer responsible for beating Gokal Das, believed to be in his eighties, has now been taken into custody.
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A university in Sweden has been ordered to refund tuition fees to an American student after she spent two years studying a course deemed almost worthless.

Connie Askenback attended Malardalen University College - also known as MDH - from 2011 to 2013 to study the analytical finance course. However, Vastmanland District Court noted how Swedens higher education authority, UKA, criticised the course.

According to Dutch newspaper, the AD, MDH will pay the student back 172,180 Swedish Krona - around 14,500 - plus interest.

The AD also reports how UKA had rejected the course after it failed on four of five course criteria, rendering it almost worthless. The Guardian also reports the court ruled the degree had no practical value.

MDH, which is one of Swedens largest higher education providers with over 14,000 students, says the course in question is carefully tailored to meet the large demand for mathematicians with expertise in finance and economics.

The course description also highlights how graduates have competitive qualifications to land an attractive job.

Askenback said in a statement: It really feels good. It is an important vindication and now I can finally continue studying as I originally thought.

In a statement of its own, the university said the higher education sector has now received the answer to a question that has existed since the decision in 2011 to require fees from students coming from countries outside the EU, the EEA, or from Switzerland.

University director, Marie Eriksson, added: The court considers higher education institutions enter a mutually binding agreement with these students. This affects the entire sector, and here, at the university, we now have to sit down and consider the implications of this verdict.

Additional reporting by Associated Press
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There are plenty of free goodies you can snag on a flight, if you know to ask for them.

A Reddit thread asked flight attendants about secret perks passengers should be taking advantage of on flights. We consulted that thread and did some of our own research to create the following list.

From free alcoholic drinks to ibuprofen, here are ten things you should ask for on your next flight.

1. The entire can of soda

Flight attendants generally dole out half of a can, which, combined with the quantity of ice they dispense, simply isn't enough to quench our thirst.

Next time, order a whole can. Flight attendants are often happy to oblige, or, if they've run out of cans, they'll be happy to return to refill your cup.

2. Hot chocolate

The milk powder in instant hot chocolate can go out of date after long periods of time (GettyImages)

As an alternative to coffee or tea, most airlines also offer hot chocolate.

Etihad Airways and Southwest Airlines are just some of the airlines that offer hot chocolate in Economy. Qantas even has hot chocolate made with Cadbury chocolates to satisfy your sweet tooth.

3. Temporary babysitting

For parents traveling with children, its great to have a helping hand when you need to step away for a few minutes. Many flight attendants will be happy to briefly assist you with your kids.

Etihad Airways offers Flying Nannies, who can organize everything from arts and crafts to hand puppet games and magic tricks for kids, while Gulf Air has its Sky Nanny, who can assist you with boarding and disembarkation.

Airline food across the classes Show all 6 1 /6 Airline food across the classes Airline food across the classes Virgin Upper Class Clockwise from top right: Salted butter, malted wheat and oat roll, glass of Gardet Brut Premiere Cru Champagne



Thai beef salad, seared sirloin beef, dressed with a sweet chilli, lime and ginger dressing and crumbed roasted cashews. Created for Virgin by Lorraine Pascale



Italian buffalo mozzarella, heritage tomatoes and sweet pepper berries, drizzled with Italian extra virgin olive oil and a balsamic glaze



Brioche and butter pudding, served with Madagascan vanilla syrup and double cream Sam Barnes Airline food across the classes Virgin Premium Economy Clockwise from right: Chicken, sweet potato and coconut curry, with coriander rice



Asian slaw salad of carrots, celeriac, sweet chillies and slaw dressing. As well as Jacob's crackers, Croxton Manor Mature Cheddar, 1/4 bottle of wine



Apple & blackberry pudding Sam Barnes Airline food across the classes Virgin Economy Clockwise from bottom right: Slow-cooked beef bourguignon, with rosemary, roasted root veg and mustard mash



Mediterranean orzo salad, dressed in a sun-blushed tomato and roasted pepper dressing



Gu Chocolate Orange. As well as Jacob's crackers, Boursin Garlic & Herbs, 1/4 bottle of wine Sam Barnes Airline food across the classes All Nippon Airways first class Clockwise from top right: Miso soup



Pickles preserved in vinegar Japanese tea



'Koshihikari' brand rice from Nichinan-cho Hino-gun in Tottori Prefecture



Simmered sablefish in soy-based sauce



Seasonal salad with wasabi



Dressed asparagus and konjac with sweet sesame paste



Marinated salmon in piquant-vinegared sauce



Japanese tea



Clear soup with a steamed prawn cake



Zensai, 'a selection of morsels' including Japanese omelette and sake-steamed abalone Sam Barnes Airline food across the classes All Nippon Airways business class Clockwise from top right: Assorted pickles



Seasonal salad



A selection of morsels including dressed bamboo shoot and simmered octopus



'Koshihikari' rice



Simmered duck and vegetables



Miso soup



Deep-fried sea bream with thick ponzu sauce Sam Barnes Airline food across the classes All Nippon Airways economy Clockwise from top right: A selection of fresh fruit



A selection of traditional appetisers



Seafood curry with steamed rice



Japanese noodle with spring onions, served with soy-based sauce



Miso soup Sam Barnes

4. Sanitizing Wipes

Airplanes are dirty and carry a lot of germs, which is why you want to wipe down surfaces like the tray table in order to avoid getting a cold.

If you forget to pack your own sanitizing wipes, ask a flight attendant since they usually have them on hand.

5. Grooming Kits

On longer flights, some airlines tend to stock items like earplugs, pens, combs, and playing cards that they're happy to give away.

Virgin Atlantic gives away free amenity kits on economy, while Etihad's complimentary amenity kits on longer flights include socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and earplugs.

6. Extra snacks

The man became abusive after being denied nuts and crackers, the court has heard (Getty)

The complimentary snacks offered on flights are tiny and often leave you hungry.

Simply ask for seconds  if there are leftovers after all customers have been served, flight attendants will happily give you an extra snack.

7. Alcohol

Since airlines are basically charging passengers for everything these days, most assume this applies to alcoholic beverages as well. However, many airlines do still offer free booze.

Lufthansa offers a selection of free champagne, wine, and beer on its flights, while Finnair has complimentary beer and wine. Etihad also offers passengers a complimentary bar service, with a range of beers, wines, and spirits to choose from.

8. Basic medications and bandages

While it depends on the airline's regulations, most flights are equipped with basic medications like painkillers and antacids, as well as Band-Aids. These are free if you ask.

9. Wing pins for kids

While wing pins, which are small plastic wings with an airlines logo, seemed like they had become an amenity of the past, some airlines like Delta still offer them on flights.

Forbes recently reported that American Airlines brought kids wings back, starting with flights from Charlotte to Orlando where kids often travel to destinations like Disney World and SeaWorld.

10. Bottles of water

'We want the City of Montreal to reject the proposal to ban water bottles on its territory' (Rex)

Whether you're in need of more water or want to avoid drinking water on an airplane unless it is bottled, airlines will usually have small bottles of water on hand that they can supply to passengers who ask for them.

Read more:

 Analysts question the way Apple describes its data

 Mike Ashley has a plan to save BHS with no job losses

 Investors think central banks have lost their power

Read the original article on Business Insider UK.  2016. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.
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I was, until relatively recently, a Eurosceptic. Why couldn't Britain flourish on its own as a medium-sized bastion of liberal democracy and free market growth?

Like a fun-loving version of Switzerland transplanted onto our North Atlantic archipelago, perhaps. Our soft power  our music, telly, films, literature, newspapers and media  would project our influence around the world. We would blossom, free of the constraints of Europe and its knackered economies and creaking working practices.

But then, two years ago, I went on a business trip to Qatar in the Middle East.

In one of that city-state's few licensed bars, at two in the morning, I looked around me and saw the future. I saw the globalised world on a postage stamp. And it didn't give two hoots about Britain.

 Nigel Farage and Sir Bob Geldof clash over Brexit flotilla

In that bar I spotted a a scattering of European expats, but most of the drinkers were from the new global powers. They were Chinese, Indian, Arab and Russian. They were not listening to UK or US music; they were listening to African beats and South American pop.

In our globalised future, Britain's soft power will be the equivalent of firing a pea-shooter at a panther.

These new powers are not liberal democracies as we would recognise them. Across huge swathes of the world, the ideals of our liberal culture are in retreat. The concepts of the rule of law, freedom of the press, human rights and civil liberties are on the wane.

Recommended Read more Six reasons not to panic in the event of Brexit

Just look at Turkey, Russia, Brazil, South Africa. Thats before we even consider China's utter disdain for democracy and most of the ideals we hold dear. Or, dare I say it, the politics of Donald Trump.

The European Union is not ideal, but what democratic government is? With the new realities of globalisation, we need to be on the right team. We need to hold close those with whom we have most in common.

This referendum should not be about short-term economics or the fear of recession, but there is a very strong argument for the EU in terms of our collective economic history and financial needs.

Much of Europe is dealing with similar long term issues as the UK, of post-industrial malaise and the rise of cheap labour in the developing world. The failure of industrial policy is the same in northern Italy as it is south Yorkshire. Its better to grapple with these issues together.

The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit Show all 7 1 /7 The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 22 May 2015 In his regular column in The Express Nigel Farage utilised the concerns over Putin and the EU to deliver a tongue in cheek conclusion. With friends like these, who needs enemies? PA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 13 November 2015 UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire Mike Hookem, was one of several political figures who took no time to harness the toxic atmosphere just moments after Paris attacks to push an agenda. Cameron says were safer in the EU. Well Im in the centre of the EU and it doesnt feel very safe. Getty Images The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 19 April 2016 In an article written for The Guardian, Michael Gove attempts to bolster his argument with a highly charged metaphor in which he likens UK remaining in the EU to a hostage situation. Were voting to be hostages locked in the back of the car and driven headlong towards deeper EU integration. Rex The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 26 April 2016 In a move that is hard to decipher, let alone understand, Mike Hookem stuck it to Obama re-tweeting a UKIP advertisement that utilises a quote from the film: Love Actually to dishonour the US stance on the EU. A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 10 May 2016 During a speech in London former work and pensions secretary Ian Duncan Smith said that EU migration would cause an increasing divide between people who benefit from immigration and people who couldnt not find work because of uncontrolled migration. The European Union is a force for social injustice which backs the haves rather than the have-nots. EPA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 15 May 2016 Cartoon character Boris Johnson made the news again over controversial comments that the EU had the same goal as Hitler in trying to create a political super state. Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods. PA The most scaremongering arguments for Brexit 16 May 2016 During a tour of the womens clothing manufacturer David Nieper, Boris had ample time to cook up a new metaphor, arguably eclipsing Goves in which he compares the EU to badly designed undergarments. So I just say to all those who prophecy doom and gloom for the British Business, I say their pants are on fire. Lets say knickers to the pessimists, knickers to all those who talk Britain down. Getty Images

Yet this vote is not really about the economy. It is about ideas. With Putin parking his tanks on our European lawn, with Isis throwing gay people off tall buildings within sight of the Mediterranean, with China's economic nationalism threatening everything we believe in, and with Arab sovereign wealth funds buying up any Western assets they can get their hands on, now is the wrong time to divorce ourselves from our closest allies, culturally and geographically.

The Europe we need to embrace next Thursday is the Europe of the shared battle against left-wing and right-wing fascism; of the reformation; of the renaissance; of the enlightenment; of mass secularism; of liberal democracy.

If we really want to protect the values that we in Britain claim to treasure, then we will best do so within a close-knit European family. Thats why I, a long-standing Eurosceptic, will be voting to remain.

Ed Dorrell is head of content at the Times Educational Supplement
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The arrest in Switzerland of the alleged Panama Papers whistle-blower should appal any right-thinking person.

A Mossack Fonseca employee, a computer technician, was taken into custody at the law firms Geneva outpost and accused of the unauthorised access and theft of confidential information, as well as a breach of trust. Confusingly, journalists who were in receipt of the cache of documents that sent shockwaves through the world in April have indicated that the person arrested is not their source. Lawyers for the individual being investigated say their client denies all the accusations against him.

Recommended Read more The Panama Papers could put Bernie Sanders in the White House

But, while the details of the arrest remain murky, it is clear beyond doubt that the risks taken by an insider to lift the lid on the activities of Mossack Fonseca and its clients were very real indeed.

The company, by seeking out the whistle-blower, may wish to discourage other employees from taking the same path. But the role of the Swiss authorities in facilitating the firms desire for revenge is outrageous.

After all, the Panama Papers made it abundantly clear that there is a global elite of wealthy people, aided by lawyers and financial advisers, who use secret shell trusts to shuffle vast quantities of sometimes dirty money away from prying eyes. Tax avoidance is just the half of it.

Ultimately, it is the actions of these people  and their enablers  which prosecutors should be investigating, rather than instilling fear in legitimate whistle-blowers.
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When did Turkey stop being a place for British holidaymakers to visit for a fortnight each summer and transform into the source of everyones worst nightmares?

Turkey is currently the line of attack for every Brexiteer, who would have us believe that nigh on 80 million people are going to flock over the border into your town; a squalid invasion force just waiting to drain public services, radicalise young Muslims and bring crime to our streets.

The concept is deeply flawed.

As a Turk, I am well aware that our country has serious issues which have long hindered its progress towards Europe. It has been 30 years since it began its application and has showed little intention of fulfilling the chapters. Our president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is becoming ever-more autocratic, jailing scores of critical journalists and squeezing out his political opponents. We have been hit hard by terrorism over the last year, with a number of attacks from the Islamic State and Kurdish militants in both Ankara and Istanbul and beyond.

This alone would be enough to prevent Turkeys accession to the EU, ignoring the fact that not only Britain, but the likes of Cyprus, whose government Turkey still refuses to recognise, has a veto over whether it joins.

Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Show all 11 1 /11 Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Turkey's two million Syrian refugees There are already over 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, but their current camps can only hold 200,000 people ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Turkish citizens protest a new deal, also criticised by human rights activists, which will see refugees who arrived in Greece after March 20 be sent back to Turkey AP Photo/Emre Tazegu Turkey's two million Syrian refugees An estimated 80% of Syrian refugee children already in Turkey are unable to attend school BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Refugee children beg for water near the Turkey-Syria border. Turkey has been accused of illegally deporting asylum-seekers back to Syria BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees In Turkey, no-one from outside Europe is legally recognised as a refugee, meaning the 2016 deportations may not meet international legal standards for protecting vulnerable people BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees A refugee child cries as she is searched by police at the Syria-Turkey border, where 16 refugees (including three children) have been shot dead in the last four months BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Many refugees are living rough on the streets of cities such as Istanbul or Ankara (pictured) ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Turkish soldiers use water cannon on Syrian refugees BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Syrian refugees shelter from rain in the streets of Istanbul BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees A derelict building housing Syrian refugees in Istanbul Carl Court/Getty Images Turkey's two million Syrian refugees Turkey houses around half of all the refugees who have currently fled Syria Carl Court/Getty Images

The implication that everyone in Turkey is just desperate to leave is false. Turks are deeply attached to their own language, their own customs and have a strong emotional connection to the rugged planes of their homeland.

En masse migration is incredibly unlikely, not least when you consider that its GDP is higher than that of many EU countries. Only around 10 per cent of Turkish citizens have passports, many of them are part of the nations diaspora in the UK, the Netherlands, the USA and Germany.

Turkish people rarely holiday outside their own country. Turkey has three beautiful major cities; Istanbul is one of the most enchanting places on the planet, with a huge amount of cultural and historical significance. Further south, on the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, legions of tourists visit every year to bask in the beautiful scenery. Among them are two-and-a-half million Brits, who return with happy memories.

 Deadly blast targets Turkey police in Istanbul

The treatment of Turkey has been deeply offensive. Not only is the Leave campaign happy to bandy its name about as if it was the continents dirty secret that can no longer be tolerated, but the Remain camp have done nothing to call out this rhetoric for what it is  xenophobic scaremongering. Sadly correct though it may be, David Camerons claim that Turkey will not join the EU until the year 3000 only legitimises the treatment of its citizens by the Leavers.

To use a false premise to reduce a nation to a pawn in the Leave campaigns political endgame is immoral and the British people should ignore the attempts to impugn almost 80 million people.
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The Middle East is littered with missed opportunities, lost chances and dreams turned to dust. The Iranian nuclear deal is now heading in the same direction. President Hassan Rohani, hero of the hour and Irans new Mr Good Guy in America, even obtained the support of Irans Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, when he signed off on the agreement with six world powers last year to reduce the countrys nuclear activities in return for an end to Western sanctions. But hes beginning to look like a patsy.

And all of the old Iranian revolutionaries, the sons of martyrs and the war veterans and the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the managers of its billion-dollar conglomerates are turning out to have been right all along. The sanctions have been lifted  but they havent been lifted. Western investments are not, despite all the promises, pouring into Iran because banks  especially European banks  are too frightened of breaching the rest of Americas sanctions laws to do business with the Islamic Republic. Washington both giveth and taketh away; its a slogan that every Iranian president should learn.

Mohamed Khatami was the only real statesman the Middle East produced in half a century and he was elected president of Iran in 1997. He wanted a civil society, the nearest you can get to a secular nation ruled by Shiite democracy-necrology-government for and by the dead. But the United States treated Khatami with scorn  and so the crackpot Mahoud Ahmedinejad became the next president, a man with whose ravings Americas right-wing felt far more comfortable.

Hadnt they said all along that Irans leaders were anti-Semitic nuclear crazies, even  this from the Israelis  worse than Hitler? Now Rohani, the man-America-could-do-business-with, may lose next years presidential election because he, too, forgot the slogan which, at its simplest, reads: dont trust America.

 Top Hezbollah commander Mustafa Badreddine killed in Syria  group confirms

Iran has not been reintegrated into the global financial system  and its not going to be  though the Chinese will be happy to do business. Khameneis supporters are now suggesting that the Supreme Leader  not the shrewd but naive president  is the great hero of modern Iranian history (after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, of course). The banks, he says, fear the Americans who have not acted on their promises and [only] removed the sanctions on paper. Worse still, hes right. Khameneis life is the one you should be writing about, one of his believers announced last week. He is the saviour. Yes, thanks to America.

Which countries have nuclear weapons? Show all 14 1 /14 Which countries have nuclear weapons? Which countries have nuclear weapons? USA Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Russia Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? UK Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? France Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? China Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? India Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Pakistan Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? North Korea Say they have nuclear weapons EPA/Rodong Sinmun Which countries have nuclear weapons? Israel Believed to have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Belgium Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Germany Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Italy Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Netherlands Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Turkey Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty

For many of Europes largest banks wont do business with Iran for fear of breaching other US sanctions, which have nothing to do with the nuclear agreement  but a lot to do with US agencies and prosecutors, hunting for evidence of Iranian money laundering, the financing of terrorism and monetary crime. The French BNP Paribas shelled out 6.3bn for its Iranian dealings a couple of years ago  over five years, along with StanChart and HSBC, the figure comes to a whopping 10.7bn.

So why should the UKs Standard Chartered, Societe Generale, Credit Suisse or Deutsche Bank line up to pay more fines just because their governments want to do business in Tehran? Some American bankers  this from the Economist  wont even hand over their business cards to Iranians. Now thats what you call fear.

But lets move, for a moment, to Beirut where the Lebanese Central Bank is caught up in a crisis with Hezbollah, the Shiite militia which drove Israels occupation army out of Lebanon in 2000 and is now fighting and dying to preserve Bashar al-Assads government (also, of course, under sanctions) in Syria. Whether  in Washingtons eyes  the first is a greater crime than the second, the fact is that no Lebanese banks are now allowed to have any dealings, or hold any accounts involving, Hezbollah members or their supporters. Lebanese banks which break these rules will lose their right to deal in US dollars.

The Hezbollah leadership has abused the governor of the Central Bank, Riad Salameh, for bowing to Americas demands, claiming that US sanctions are targeting the entire Shiite community in Lebanon. Poor old Riad is trapped  a brilliant banker who followed several pretty indolent governors, now forced to implement sanctions over which he has no power and which will destroy any Lebanese private bank disobeying the American rules imposed by the Lebanese Central Bank. Since 65 per cent of all their deposits are in dollars  and 70 per cent of all their transactions  breaking US rules means that Lebanese banks would go out of business.

The US Office of Fair Assets Control has named 99 accounts with alleged connections to Hezbollah, including charities, schools, companies and television stations. Even Hezbollah MPs, legally and fairly elected to the Lebanese parliament, two of whom are government ministers, can no longer keep bank accounts. Now you may agree that the West has every right to clip Hezbollahs millions. Terrorists or not, they are more powerful than the Lebanese army, widely blamed for the failure to elect a Lebanese president and dangerously involving Lebanon in Syrias civil war. For that matter, no sane Western banker or government wants to give carte blanche to Irans armies of dodgy businesses linked to secret regime bank accounts or shady military operations.

Recommended Read more The untold story of the deaths at Hajj

But among the Lebanese banks obeying Salamehs US rules is the countrys wealthy Blom bank; and only this weekend a 3-4kg bomb blew up outside its headquarters in the swish Verdun district of Beirut. It was a Sunday night, there were few people around  only two were slightly hurt -- and the police quickly concluded it was more symbolic than military. When the Lebanese want to kill, they do so with Pablo Escobar thoroughness. But the thundering of shattered plate glass windows told its own story. Was this a Hezbollah warning? Unlikely, said some. Hezbollah are not that crude. Well, maybe.

But you can see the picture. While Iran cannot break free of sanctions from which it thought it had been unshackled, its own paid militia in Lebanon  a nation which a Shiite prelate once described as the lung through which Iran breathes  is being caught up in the same financial net. So its not difficult for the Iranians to spot what they call in Persian the dasisa  and what the Hezbollah, in Arabic, refer to as the muamara  which means, quite simply: THE PLOT.

Decide for yourself if its true. But in Iran, the lifting of sanctions is a promise un-kept, the Revolutionary Guards are smiling and the nuclear deal is, surely, going downhill. A dream, in other words, fast turning into dust.
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Bai Enpei, a former senior official with the top legislature, on Thursday stood trial on two counts of corruption-related charges.

Bai, formerly deputy head of the Environment and Resources Protection Committee of the National People's Congress, was accused of taking advantage of his various official posts and other perks associated with his posts from 2000 to 2013 to seek benefits -- in regard of project construction, real estate development, obtaining mining rights and personal promotions -- for 17 companies and individuals.

In exchange, he personally, or through his wife, accepted bribes worth over 246 million yuan (37.4 million U.S. dollars).

Also, prosecutors allege, the assets and expenditure of the Bai family significantly exceeded their legal income and Bai was unable to specify the sources of his assets, which constitutes another suspected criminal violation.

The People's Procuratorate of Anyang City in central China's Henan Province filed the two charges with Anyang Intermediate People's Court.

In his final statement, Bai accepted the charges and showed repentance.

Over 60 people, including legal and political representatives, journalists and members of the public, attended the hearing.

The court ruling will be announced at a later date.
Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin has described the prospect of a hard border being formed with Northern Ireland as "unthinkable".

Mr Howlin, the former Public Expenditure Minister, also expressed doubts over whether the Government is adequately prepared for a possible 'Brexit'.

Speaking as he campaigned in Liverpool, Mr Howlin said 1.2bn worth of weekly trade between the UK and Ireland would be thrown into "turmoil" if British voters opt to leave.

The 'Brexit' vote is due to take place this day week.

Mr Howlin, who was accompanied with local Labour MP Conor McGinn, also warned of the prospect of a new hard border being formed between the Republic and the North.

"We certainly don't want to put up new barriers, or a new hard barrier on the island of Ireland, that would be unthinkable," Mr Howlin said.

Mr Howlin issued the warning ahead of Taoiseach Enda Kenny's visit to Liverpool today.

Read More

Mr Kenny is due to meet members of the Irish community before travelling to Manchester for a business event tonight.

Speaking on the' Anton Savage Show' on 'Today FM' today, UKIP leader Nigel Farage described Mr Kenny's visit to the UK as a "mistake".

"The more people from Goldman Sachs and who lead governments, that tell us we must all stay part of the European Union, the more likely we are to stick two fingers up to them," Mr Farage said.

"This battle is the peoples battle, the people versus the politicians - I dont think the British people like foreign leaders coming and telling them what to do.

"Now its a little bit different with Ireland - if it was any other country in the world, I would say its wrong to interfere. I do see there is a difference, because of the close relationship between Britain and Ireland," he added..

Meanwhile, Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar has written, phoned and sent text messages to hundreds of constituents warning of the importance of the UK remaining in the EU.

"Europe is an increasingly small player in the World and is behind the United States and China in terms of population and economic power. India is growing rapidly and South American countries are coming together to form a strong block," Mr Varadkar wrote.

"Britain makes the EU stronger in negotiations with these superpowers. When it comes to debates on issues within the EU, Britain and Ireland are usually on the same side given our similar cultures. If Britain leaves, we lose an ally and Europe is weakened," he added.
A Brexit will undermine our competitiveness and do 'serious damage' to Irish businesses, according to Enda Kenny. Photo: Simon Graham/PA Wire

A 'Brexit' would undermine our competitiveness and do "serious damage" to Irish businesses, according to Enda Kenny.

The Taoiseach made the warning as he prepared to travel to the UK today for a series of engagements with the Irish community there.

The Fine Gael leader, who said he hopes that British voters choose to remain in the EU, is due to visit Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow.

However, it has emerged that the British prime minister David Cameron has pulled out of a joint engagement in Manchester.

Political sources in Dublin said the tightness of the referendum had led to a profound change of strategy among Mr Cameron's campaign team.

Campaigners believe that the key battle is the English regions, notably the midlands and north.

Read more: Irish rugby captain Rory Best urges voters to back Remain in Brexit referendum

Downing Street and the Remain Campaign have yet to comment on the reasons for Mr Cameron's decision to pull out of the planned event with Mr Kenny.

The Taoiseach addressed the prospect of a Brexit in the Dail yesterday when he again warned of the prospect of the return of a "hard border" with Northern Ireland.

"We are co-guarantors in the Good Friday Agreement, we have a specific vested interest in the Irish communities and the fact that there are 200,000 Irish jobs here and 1.2bn trade across the Irish Sea every week," Mr Kenny said, adding that businesses here would be seriously damaged. His comments on the possible re-introduction of a hard border was echoed by Mr Cameron in Westminster who said a Brexit would mean either "new border controls" between the Republic and the North, or else "some sort of checks on people as they left Belfast or other parts of Northern Ireland to come to the rest of the United Kingdom".

Meanwhile Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar has begun personally texting and phoning constituents in a bid to prevent a Brexit.

Read more: Bizarre scenes as Bob Geldof clashes with Nigel Farage over Brexit flotilla in 'battle for the Thames'

He has also sent out hundreds of letters to constituents in his Dublin West constituency with a British connection urging a vote to remain.

Today and tomorrow, Mr Kenny will address members of the Irish Community at St Michael's Community Centre in Liverpool; a British-Irish Chamber of Commerce Event at Grant Thornton in Manchester; and an Irish Community Event at the Irish World Heritage Centre in Manchester.

He will then attend the British-Irish Council in Glasgow on Friday afternoon.
A Brexit would cause turmoil and radically alter relations between Britain and Ireland, a former Irish president has warned.

Mary McAleese has also claimed Ireland's peace and prosperity would be in danger if Britain votes to leave the European Union next week.

She said: "Reassurances that nothing will change ... are wishful thinking at best and bluffing at worse."

Mrs McAleese, who was president from 1997 until 2011, will throw her weight firmly behind the Remain campaign as she launches a new report from the British Influence think tank at Westminster later.

In her speech she will urge British voters to avoid a choice for "drift" and loss of influence in Europe. She will also call for the 600,000 Irish citizens resident in the UK to vote stay.

She will also say that the benefits in Anglo-Irish relations, now taken for granted, could be put in peril while the future of 400,000 jobs and the open road border between Northern Ireland and the Republic would also be uncertain.

"The concerns of Ireland are legitimate and well-founded," she said.

"They involve the economy, trade, immigration controls, the hardening of the land border, security, the weakening over time of the excellent current relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom, the impact on the peace process and the impact on European development of Britain's voice being absent from the European Union table."

Meanwhile, the British Influence paper, Brexit: The Irish Dimension, outlines the top seven problems that would upset Anglo-Irish relations in the event of Brexit:

They include the impact on Ireland's economy; disruption of the free movement Common Travel Area and the re-introduction of border controls as well as the ending of current extradition arrangements with the Republic of Ireland.

Other potential difficulties would be disruption to the peace process and the ending of EU-funded programmes while the all-Ireland electricity market and the energy relationship with the UK could also be affected, the report claims.

Peter Wilding, director of British Influence, said: "Vote Leave's 'It'll be all right on the night' attitude is playing with fire when it comes to the future of our relations with Ireland.

"Our report demonstrates - and Mary McAleese together with the entire Irish Government knows - that Brexit means trouble ahead for jobs, investment and the peaceful stability of the island of Ireland."

Meanwhile, Anthony Bailey, who sponsored the report, said he did not want to see the progress of the last two decades derailed.
CItyJet will showcase its new Sukhoi SuperJet at the world's biggest airshow in Farnborough next month as both the airline and the manufacturer aim to lure customers for the aircraft.

Dublin-based CiyJet is the first European customer using the SuperJet, and hopes the aircraft will help it secure more wet lease business.

CityJet is hoping to secure so-called wet lease customers, where CityJet would operate flights on their behalf using the aircraft. It already has a substantial wet lease business through its Blue 1 subsidiary in Scandinavia.

CityJet boss Pat Byrne told the Irish Independent that he hopes to have at least one wet lease customer signed for the SuperJet by the end of the year.

The airline will take delivery of another SuperJet next week, and another in October, with more joining its fleet next year.

CityJet has 15 firm orders for the SuperJet, and 10 options. Mr Byrne envisages wet lease agreements with other airlines that would involve the use of three to four SuperJets to service each contract.
4 Clanwilliam Square in Dublin 2 will be auctioned at the upcoming Allsop auction

During the next three weeks an unprecedented four bumper auctions will offer more than 240 properties for sale, as the revival of that market place continues.

O'Donnellan Joyce will offer 50 lots tomorrow in Galway. Ganly Walters GW2 will offer 21 lots in Leopardstown, Dublin on June 28. Allsop will auction 150 lots in the RDS Dublin on June 30 and DTZ Sherry FitzGerald will offer 31 nationwide lots with combined AMV's totalling 6m in Cork on July 6.

The choice includes a number of pubs, industrial units, offices, creches, restaurants, multi-family portfolios, as well as apartments and houses. Interestingly some neighbouring apartments in the same development are being offered in 'bite' size lots instead of bundling them into portfolios for large investors.

For instance DTZ's auction includes seven apartments at Camden Wharf, Cork City to be sold in three lots. One of the lots comprises three apartments and has a 420,000 guide while two other two lots with two flats each have 280,000 guides. Each of the flats measures 65 sq m and is valued at 140,000.

Tomorrow in Galway, O'Donnellan & Joyce will auction three pubs as well as commercial properties with gross yields of over 12pc in addition to a range of residential properties including some with five or more bedrooms and B&B potential.

The most valuable lot is Lohan's Bar and Restaurant, 232 to 234 Upper Salthill, Galway, which comes with five apartments and a 1.2m advised minimum value. Each of its four two bedroom units generates rental income of about 800 per month.

In Tuam EG Canavan's Bar on High Street offers the option of continuing as an investment property or becoming an owner occupier pub. Its 3,330 sq ft floor area includes four overhead offices and it is guiding 260,000.

Two investment properties in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon, offer gross yields of more than 12pc.

One of them at The Square comprises four commercial units and two apartments.

Despite two commercial units being vacant, the property generates annual rents of estimated at 84,950 and with a guide price of 650,000 to 700,000 it offers an initial gross yield of around 12.6pc Its tenants include the Northern, Midland & Western Regional Assembly.

Nearby an investment property at New Street let to Molloy's pharmacies, earns annual rents of 30,000 and its 210,000 AMV suggests a gross yield of 14.3%.

The GW2 lots have combined AMVs of more than 2.49m and include 13 commercial or mixed use lots including six which are generating investment income. The most valuable lot is a 26 acre residential equestrian property known as Park Farm, Mount Charles, Co. Donegal, which has a 525,000 AMV and has tourism potential. It had previously had a 750,000 guide price.

A vacant, 121 sq m own door office, Unit 6 Parklands Office Park, Southern Cross Road, Bray, has a 150,000 AMV, which is a reduction of 25,000 on its previous guide.

An investment industrial property at Bay 1, Corcanree Business Park, Dock Road, Limerick has a 335,000 AMV and with annual rental income of 45,000 could yield 13.5pc gross.

GW2's second highest gross yield of 12.75pc is possible from a mixed use building at 1 and 2 McLynn Terrace, Pearse Road, Sligo, which is generating rent of 1,800 per month from retail units and apartments. Its guide price is 160,000.

A landmark building at the corner of Church Street and Main St, Roscommon town has a 75,000 AMV. Formerly a bookie shop, the three storey property needs refurbishment but offers a high profile.

Allsop is hoping to generate up to 29m from its 150 sales which will include 61 commercial and investment properties. The most valuable is Unit 2, Bailis Village, Johnstown, Navan, Co. Meath, an 879 square metre office let to HSE at 130,000 a year whose AMV is 1.15m.

Opportunities for smaller private investors to buy a slice of Dublin's hottest office market, are offered by two own door offices in Clanwillian Square, in Googleland.

Their guide prices range between 485,000 and 655,000 and gross yields could range between 6.5pc and 9.4pc.

An opportunity to invest in Temple Bar restaurant property 8s offered by 12/13 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, which is generating rental income of 45,000 from The Port House Pintxo. At its reserve range of 580,000 - 610,000 this suggests a gross yield of about 7.5pc.

Allsop's catalogue includes some pubs ranging in price from only 50,000 for The Weekender in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, up to a 420,000 to 470,000 range for The Hub, Windmill Road, Crumlin, Dublin 12.

The most valuable lot at the DTZ Sherry FitzGerald auction is an 80 acre non residential farm at Dunbuig, just 1km from Killenaule, Co. Tipperary. The prime pasture benefits from frontage on two roads and has a 750,000 guide price.

DTZ's next most valuable lot is a house at 509 South Circular Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8. The five bedrooms period semi extends to 1,570 sq ft and it also has separate commercial workshop extending to 750 sq ft at its rear.

Of the seven development properties, the most valuable is an unfinished section of the An Gleann Ull housing estate in Ballyhooly, Co Cork, with five uncompleted houses, one serviced site as well as three acres of partly serviced lands with some foundations in place. Planning permission has expired on these lands. Its AMV is 400,000 AMV.

A similar type of property at Lough Allen Resort, Drumshanbo, Co. Leitrim, comprises four detached holiday homes of which three are completed while the fourth requires internal finishing. They have a 200,000 AMV.

A ground floor restaurant at 107 Irishtown, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary offers a prospective gross yield of 15pc as it generates annual rent of 12,000 and is priced at 80,000. Crazy Noodles restaurant/takeaway extends to 1,024 sq ft.
TWM and DTZ Sherry Fitzgerald are guiding 3.2m for an industrial facility in north Dublin.

The agents are have been retained to find a buyer for units 7 & 8 Airways Industrial Estate in Santry, Dublin 9.

The asking price reflects a net initial yield of 8.97pc after standard purchaser costs of 4.46pc.

Both buildings are let to Essentra Packaging Ireland Limited on a 15 year full repairing and insuring lease with a break option in year 10.

The lease commencement for Unit 7 is 1 July 2015 while Unit 8 is slightly later at 1 February 2016. The rent in the first four years is 300,000 per annum which increases to 320,000 per annum in year five for both properties. There are open market rent reviews every five years with the current passing rent equating to 3.41 per sq ft.

With the current upward pressure on rents there would appear to be obvious reversionary potential when the next rent review comes around in 2020, say the agents.

The buildings are said to be built to a high specification and are of concrete frame construction under a pitched roof with infill concrete block walls.

Both buildings have the benefit of two full height roller shutter doors providing access to the warehouse accommodation with two storey office accommodation to the front. The warehouse accommodation comprises a reinforced concrete floor and internal eaves of 6m.

Brendan Smyth of DTZ Sherry FitzGerald stated "The property represents excellent value with the asking price of 3.2m breaking back to 36 per sq ft and equating to around a third of current build costs for a facility of this standard".

Ollie Lyons of TWM stated that "the investment producing a high yield on a long term lease to an excellent tenant with excellent rental growth potential is likely to be of interest to a broad range of investors".

With the Industrial market the last sector of the property market to recover there is said to have been a rush of funding following Industrial investments in recent months. While the typical lease length in the market is five years with either a break or an option to extend it is unusual for an investment to come to the market with almost 10 years term certain remaining.

A Dun and Bradstreet Report provides a rating for Essentra Packaging Ireland Limited of 1A2 for the Tenant. This represents a lower than average risk of business failure, said the agents.
The premium Ireland would pay to borrow compared with Eurozone benchmark Germany hit its highest level in nearly a year on Tuesday as investors fretted about the economic impact on Dublin of a potential British exit from the European Union.

The gap between Irish and German 10-year bond yields widened to 88 basis points in early trade, the highest since July 2015, according to Tradeweb.

The crucial referendum takes place next week, with recent polls showing a lead for the 'leave' camp, bookmakers slashing the odds on a Brexit and the UK's biggest-selling newspaper urging readers to quit the bloc.

"Ireland in the last few days has been the clear under-performer as markets penalise the country's strong trade links with the UK," ING rates strategist Martin van Vliet said.

Aside from the economic impact of Brexit, Northern Ireland, security of energy supplies and freedom of movement might also fall into doubt. The gap or spread between Irish and German bond yields, which serve as a measure of their likely borrowing costs, has risen 23 bps this week alone. That is more than for any other Eurozone country bar junk-rated Portugal and Greece, which have been shunned as investors take cover in safer assets.

Cantor Fitzgerald, one of Ireland's main bond dealers, said the Irish spread to Germany could widen a further 20 bps in the event of Brexit. Investors have become so concerned Britons will vote to leave that 10-year German yields turned negative on Tuesday, while Berlin yesterday sold 10-year debt at a record low average yield of 0.01pc at auction.

Meanwhile, Greencore chief executive Patrick Coveney thinks Britain will vote to leave the European Union next week.

Mr Coveney said it would be "very very bad" for the Irish, European and world economies if Britons voted for a Brexit.

"My personal judgement is that that's what they're going to do... I don't think it's like Scotland where the simple shock value enabled the Scottish people to come back from the precipice," he said.

Mr Coveney said he thought there would be an outflow of resources from the UK on "a pretty massive scale" if Brexit happens.

He said Brexit would be negative but not catastrophic for Greencore, adding that the company's costs would rise due to probable weakness in sterling and its revenues would probably fall due to reduced British demand.

He said restrictions on the free movement of people would have a modestly negative effect on the business.

Mr Coveney, a brother of Housing Minister Simon Coveney, was speaking at a Dublin Chamber of Commerce event yesterday morning.

"The vast majority of Greencore's business takes place in the UK," said.-

Mr Coveney said he didn't think Brexit would lead to a flow of foreign direct investment into Ireland.

"I just don't think there's any evidence for that. The FDI investment from America that's chosen to come to Ireland to go into Europe is here already. There are not big flows of incremental further investment that I'm aware of." (Additional reporting Reuters)
The Central Bank spent 1.1m on external recruitment last year, as it took on 330 new staff.

The bulk of the money, around 660,000, was used to pay recruitment agencies which were tasked with head-hunting candidates for specific, specialist roles.

Advertising, executive search services and candidate and relocation expenses formed the balance of the fees.

The Central Bank has long argued that it has had problems attracting and retaining top talent. Late last year deputy Central Bank governor Cyril Roux bemoaned public sector pay restrictions, which he said hampered the organisation's ability to keep its supervisory function beefed up.

A spokeswoman for the Central Bank said 330 external hires accepted roles within the organisation last year, facilitating a net increase in staff of more than 150.

"The Central Bank of Ireland is an equal opportunities employer, committed to filing all vacancies in an efficient and flexible manner that combines internal transfers, promotions, secondments and external hiring," the spokeswoman said.

"The vast majority of roles are advertised both internally and externally and roles are advertised through a range of channels , ie internally, Central Bank of Ireland's website, job sites, through relevant professional bodies, national media, social media platforms, such as LinkedIn.

"In addition, the Central Bank engages with recruitment agencies and on occasion executive search bodies to source suitable candidates."

Of the 1.1m, 660,000, or 60pc, was used for agency placement fees. This refers to an agency sourcing and placing candidates for specialist roles.

Approximately 165,000 was spent on assessment tools, and 132,000 was forked out on so-called "executive search support services".

About 77,000 was spent on advertising and around 66,000 was paid to candidates for expenses. including relocation expenses, such as economy class flights.

In November, Mr Roux argued that the bank is losing its supervisory staff to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. He said the staff in Dublin were attracted to the pan-European supervisory unit in part because of the "much better" terms and conditions.

Add public sector pay restrictions in Ireland into the mix and the challenge of replacing those who have left, and it leaves the Central Bank under pressure, Mr Roux said.

However, it also emerged that the Central Bank was allowing its staff to transfer to the ECB, despite claiming it had too few employees.

At the launch of the bank's annual report in April, governor Philip Lane said that the ongoing growth in the scale of the international financial services sector, the expansion of the bank's regulatory mandates, and the shift to a more intrusive supervisory approach had required the bank to undertake a "phased expansion".

He said he expected a net increase of 150 to a total staff number of 1,700 by the end of this year.
The Government has no firm information on when the European Commission will rule on the Apple case, but speculation and "rumour" is that it could be next month, Finance Minister Michael Noonan has said.

Speaking ahead of a meeting of Eurozone finance ministers in Luxembourg, Mr Noonan said the Government has cooperated fully and that the Department of Finance and Revenue Commissioners have provided all requested data.

He said there had been speculation that a decision could come next month.

But he added: "That's speculation and rumour. There may be [a decision] before the summer but we're not sure."

A decision on the Apple case has been expected for some time, initially before the end of last year, and more recently, after the general election.

In April, European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said it was difficult to make predictions as to when the case would be ready for a decision.

In a previous response to a question about the timing, she responded by saying "don't hold your breath".

Brussels has accused Ireland of striking a tax arrangement with Apple that was based on keeping jobs here but which gave the company an advantage that amounted to state aid and went against international guidelines.

In October, the European Commission announced in a separate state aid ruling that tax advantages granted to Fiat in Luxembourg and to Starbucks in The Netherlands were illegal.
A Volvo employee tests out a new model. Volvo Ireland said there is an 'oversight' in financial regulation in Ireland from which some car manufacturers are benefiting.

German, French and other Eurozone car makers can undercut rivals from elsewhere in the EU thanks to the ECB's QE programme and cheap loans, according to industry insiders.

Big Eurozone manufacturers that have their own banks are passing ultra cheap borrowing costs on to car buyers using forecourt finance. Rivals are having to slash margins to compete.

The ECB only started buying coporate bonds a week ago, but the move was well flagged and borrowing costs for Eurozone corporations fell in advance of the official launch. Car makers' bonds have been among the first purchases by the ECB. The ECB cannot buy bank bonds, but companies, mainly car makers including Volkswagen, BMW, and Renault, all own banks based in the Eurozone. They benefit from ultra low borrowing costs, and can pass savings on to customers who use car finance. The ECB also lends to manufacturers' in-house banks.

Companies such as Ford, Suzuki and Land Rover and Nissan, which rely on Irish domestic banks to finance customers, fear they are at a competitive disadvantage.

Volvo Ireland managing director Adrian Yeates said there is an "oversight" in financial regulation in Ireland from which some car manufacturers are benefiting. "It's not a loophole because it's within the EU (rules), there's no suggestion there is anything untoward in what they're doing. The difference is the German banks in particular have access to money at much lower rates than car manufacturers dealing with Irish banks would have."

Sales and marketing director at Honda John Saunders said competing with manufacturer-led financial institutions has introduced a "huge degree of competitiveness", adding: "In response to that we have to look at a cost of competing head-on with some of these rates. We then also have to look at specification upgrades, which introduces a separate line of value but again it gives you something to compete with just a cut rate of finance."

Hyundai Ireland managing director Stephen Gleeson said: "The simple truth of it is you've got the likes of Volkswagen Bank, Renault Bank and BMW offering, anywhere between zero and 3pc or 4pc. Obviously we're up at around 7pc." Some manufacturers claim that without slashing margins their customers would end up paying more to drive a cheaper car.
The head of one of the world's fastest growing technology firms says the Brexit debate shows he was right to set up operation in Dublin rather than London.

HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan told the Irish Independent he is relieved he picked Dublin over London as a place to hire more than 300 people and locate the booming firm's European headquarters.

The Boston-based tech multinational had been mulling over both locations for major investment. But with the Brexit referendum getting too close to call, Ireland looks a whole lot more attractive to US companies now.

"One of the best decisions we've ever made has been to come to Ireland," he says from the firm's just-opened European headquarters on Dublin's north quays which is to house 300 new staff.

"It's awesome. We are the beneficiaries of some inspired policy and some real surprises in terms of people and product-building."

"If we had picked London, I would now be worried, yes," says Halligan, who is also a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Today, if you want to put a headquarters in Europe and you're looking at London or Ireland, it [Brexit referendum] makes Ireland more attractive."

For Halligan, Brexit is just one of a long line of posititve factors associated with the Irish base.

With the EU referendum getting closer, Halligan says that picking London may have given the company cause for concern.

Recruitment, he says, is the lifeblood of the company's success. Ireland, like all booming markets, is now getting competitive when it comes to finding people.

"But EU membership opens things up so enough people from Europe can come in to fill in the gaps," he says. "For us, the first hundred people were Irish and the second hundred were still mostly Irish.

"But now that it's getting really competitive, we're seeing talented people from other countries coming in here. This is really good for Ireland. If Ireland can keep going the way it is, it really can be like Silicon Valley."
Michael O'Keeffe, chief executive, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, Jane Suiter, director of the Institute for Future Media and Journalism (FuJo) at DCU, and Dr Pauric Travers, chairman, BAI

Almost half of Irish people now get much of their news from Facebook.

New research shows 45pc of Irish people use the social networking site as a source of news, but less than a quarter recognise the news brands whose content is displayed on it.

That is according to research by Reuters, Dublin City University and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI). The survey shows the public retains a strong interest in news, with 84pc of people accessing some form of news every day.

Half the population checks the news several times a day.

Smartphones are the main tool for sourcing digital news among those aged under 45.

The survey found strong resistance to paying for news online, in Ireland and elsewhere.

TV is the most popular news source. The number of people buying newspapers remains static at 53pc.

RTE News is the most popular news brand overall.

Independent News & Media brands are the most popular commercial brands among readers, with a combined 44pc market reach in print and online.
Over half the businesses without a website don't intend to build one in the near future.

One in six Irish SMEs have no online presence, a survey has found.

Among those without a website, over half - 55pc - said they had no intention of building one in the near future. Around 60pc of off-liners said there was "no need" to have a website within their industry, 35pc said that they didn't have enough time to build one and 9pc said they lacked the expertise to do it.

The survey quizzed 500 SMEs as part of research, commissioned by IEDR (IE Domain Registry Limited) and undertaken by Ignite Research in April.

EDR also surveyed 1,000 Irish adults and found that 90pc of consumers go online to find out more about a business. The majority said they were annoyed when a business does not have an online presence. About 79pc said it was "frustrating" while 71pc said it was "extremely frustrating".
Here are the main business stories from this morning's papers:

Irish Independent

* Bank of Ireland is facing a 60m-plus claim to compensate British and Irish investors who bought buy-to-let properties.

The bank changed the margin on their tracker mortgages, in a move that more than doubled repayments in many cases.

* The head of one of the world's fastest growing technology firms says the Brexit debate shows he was right to set up operation in Dublin rather than London.

HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan told the Irish Independent he is relieved he picked Dublin over London as a place to hire more than 300 people and locate the booming firm's European headquarters.

* Greencore ceo Patrick Coveney now believes that Britain will quit the European Union, he told a meeting in Dublin yesterday.

He also believes that costs for business will rise and revenues for Greencore will go down in the event of a Brexit.

The Irish Times

* The Irish Government is to engage in a campaign to inform major investors that the country's place in the European Union is here to stay if the UK decide to leave.

According to a report in The Irish Times, Taoiseach Enda Kenny told the Fine Gael party last night that Ireland would not be holding a vote on its membership of the EU regardless of the outcome of the Brexit vote.

* A British exit from the EU could curb Government spending and its ability to implement tax cuts, the minister for public expenditure has warned.

Minister Paschal Donohoe said a Brexit vote would cause huge amounts of uncertainty that would impact Dublin's forecasts for its finances and economic growth.

* The bank guarantee is now down to 2.5bn of lenders' liability, down significantly from the 400bn of bank deposits and bonds that were originally covered by the deal.

Over the course of the guarantee the State had to commit 64bn to the banks in order to help it pay off bondholders and depositers.

Irish Examiner

* Taoiseach Enda Kenny has warned of the serious damage a Brexit vote would do to competitiveness, which would lead to an increase in costs for businesses.

According to a report in the Irish Examiner, Mr Kenny outlined the serious implications a Brexit vote would have for Ireland.

* Plans by developer Johnny Ronan to build a 200m six-storey office block development at Ballsbridge in Dublin have been put on hold.

Last month, Dublin City Council gave the Ronan plan - located opposite the RDS on Merrion Rd - the go-ahead in spite of local opposition.

* Over 80pc of Irish people access news at least once a day, however the way in which we access them is changing.

According to a report in the Irish Examiner, television is the most popular medium for consuming news but consumption in the year has fallen 3pc.
L-R Caroline Keeling, CEO, Keelings; Niamh Townsend, GM, Dell and Dr Leisha Daly, Country Director, Janssen. All three women were named today (June 16th, 2016) in the list of Irelands Most Powerful Women: Top 25, organised by the Womens Executive Network (WXN).

Una Fox, Vice president, The Walt Disney company, Rose Hynes, Chairman Origin Enterprises plc and Shannon Group plc and Bronwyn Brophy, VP, early technologies EMEA Medtronic pictured during a break at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

From l to r are Louise Phelan, VP of global operations EMEA, PayPal, Breege O'Donoghue, Group Director, Business development and new markets, Primark, Rose Hynes, Chairperson, Origin Enterprises plc and Shannon Group plc and Una Fox, Vice president, the Walt Disney Company, 2016 Top 25 Award winners,with Joan McGrath, WXN Advisory board member and Head of Davy at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

From l to r are Louise Phelan, VP of global operations EMEA, PayPal, Breege O'Donoghue, Group Director, Business development and new markets, Primark, Rose Hynes, Chairperson, Origin Enterprises plc and Shannon Group plc and Una Fox, Vice president, the Walt Disney Company, 2016 Top 25 Award winner, and Group Director, Business development and new markets, Primark speaks at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

From l to r are Helen Tynan, Johanna O'Driscoll, Leisa Daly, Geraldine Casey, Bronwyn Brophy, Marguerite Sayers, Mary Sheahan, and Niamh Townsend, 2016 Top 25 Award winner, and Group Director, Business development and new markets, Primark speaks at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

Breege O'Donoghue, 2016 Top 25 Award winner, and Group Director, Business development and new markets, Primark speaks to Louise Kennedy, 2016 Top 25 Award winner and designer at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

From l to r are award winners, Mary Fitzgerald, Susan McKenna Lawlor and Margot Slattery, with Orla Nugent, WXN advisory board member at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

Dearbhail McDonald, Group Business editor of INM presents an award to Lynn Sweetman, who received the award on behalf of Caroline Keeling, CEO Keelings, 2016 Top 25 Award winner, speaks at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

Ellevna Graham, WXN Advisory Board Member presents the 2016 Top 25 award for Arts and Culture to Louise Kennedy at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

From l to r, are Aedin McGowan, Siobhan Kelly, Rebecca McDermott and Louise Corrigan at the 2016 WXN Top 25 Awards. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 16/6/2016

Rrelands leading business women are split over the vexed question of whether to enforce gender quotas in the workplace.

Many of the countrys leading business packed the fifth annual Womens Executive Networks (WXN) A Leadership Summit in Dublin yesterday, followed by a gala awards dinner.

While there was universal support at the event for the need to encourage and promote more women to senior roles, a poll of attendees showed an even split between those in favour and those against gender quotas.

At the event 25 of the most powerful women in Ireland  in the private and public sectors - were honoured. Winners included Rose Hynes of the Shannon Group and Origin Enterprises; Breege ODonoghue of Primark; Dells Niamh Townsend; PayPals Louise Phelan; Disneys Una Fox; Ann Nolan of the Department of Finance; RSA Chief, Liz ODonnell; and Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon.

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Keynote speaker Rose Hynes backed the idea of a formal quota to shake up the status quo.

There is significant inequality right across Irish business, and the only way to address it in any meaningful way is to introduce a series of quotas. We need to unblock the blockages that are currently stopping women progressing, she said.

Googles director of People Operations, Helen Tynan, said ensuring women have a say in the hiring process is an essential means of bridging the gender gap.

Its pity we have to be talking about gender quotas. I have been in business for 20 years and unfortunately the world is not changing as fast as we would like. I do believe in quotas, but not at the appointment stage. I believe in quotas only at the panel stage for making appointments, said Ms Tynan.

However, Bronwyn Brophy of vice president, early technologies EMEA at Medtronics said: I dont believe in playing the female card. I think we need to think of ourselves as equal. It is imperative to have everyone within the organisation cognisant of the gender situation within the company. We have tried forced quotas in the past, and what tends to happen is that you have females who are not the best candidate for the job, or they are not suited to the job, and they tend not to stay in the role.

Marguerite Sayers, managing director at ESB Networks said there was a risk women might find themselves not being given a full level of the respect they deserve if they were appointed on the basis a quota.

In the long term I think it can be quite damaging because people might think that women are only in a particular role because of a quota and thats the only reason that theyre there. Given were we were years ago there was probably no choice other than to have quotas because that meant at least there was a critical mass. But I think that has become less of an issue. I think we definitely have to keep an eye on the overall figures but I wouldnt be in favour of quotas, Ms Sayers stated.

Among those honoured last night were the winners of the Trailblazers Awards: Mary Fitzgerald, foreign correspondent with Independent Newspapers, Susan McKenna-Lawlor, director, Space Technology Ireland and Margot Slattery, president of Sodexo Ireland and LGBTQ Advocate,

WXNs global chief executive Sherri Stevens said This years winners are true leaders in their field. It is essential that we keep promoting and celebrating their success because the sad truth remains that progress is still slow. In Ireland, women only comprise 10pc of board seats on ISEQ companies and the gender pay gap remains at 14.4pc.

Entrepreneurs honoured at the event were: Anne-Marie Caulfield, of Caulfield McCarthy Group, Caroline Keeling, ceo, Keelings, and Sarah Kent, ceo of Kentech International Limited,

The Davy Business Leaders awards went to Una Fox, vice president, The Walt Disney Company, Rose Hynes, Breege ODonoghue of Primark and Louise Phelan of PayPal.

In the Arts and Culture, the work of author Anne Enright, designer Louise Kennedy, and artist Camille Souter was celebrated.

The Public Sector awards were given to Liz ODonnell, chair of the Road Safety Authority, Irish ambassador to the UN Patricia OBrien, Ann Nolan, of the Department of Finance, and Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner.
Mary Robinson's home which is on the market for 2.75m

Former Irish president Mary Robinson and her husband Nick are to sell their 113 acre lakeside home in the west of Ireland with a market price of 2.75m.

The Robinsons are selling Massbrook House, which they purchased in 1994 during Ms Robinson's term as president.

The pair are downsizing from the estate, which sits alongside Lough Conn outside Ballina, Co Mayo for almost a mile.

Speaking about their move, Mary Robinson said We hope that whoever buys Massbrook House will find, as we did, a haven of peace and tranquillity.

Sherry Fitzgerald head of country homes Roseanne de Vere Hunt described the house as a "remarkable property".

"While we expect keen domestic interest in the property, we also anticipate strong international interest as it really is a piece of paradise.

Sherry Fitzgerald is handling the sale alongside Christie's International Real Estate.

Our house prices are 25pc higher than in 2002 whereas UK house prices increased by 115pc in the same period. Purchasers always respond to good property and good value," Ms de Vere hunt said.
'The thing Ireland seems to be missing is that it's a scale-up place rather than a startup place,' says Brian Halligan.

HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan is relieved he picked Dublin over London as a place to hire more than 300 people and locate the booming firm's European headquarters.

The Boston-based tech multinational had been mulling over both locations for major investment. But with the Brexit referendum getting too close to call, Ireland looks a whole lot more attractive to US companies now.

"If we had picked London, I would now be worried, yes," says Halligan, who is also a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Today, if you want to put a headquarters in Europe and you're looking at London or Ireland, it [Brexit referendum] makes Ireland more attractive."

For Halligan, Brexit is just one of a long line of factors he lists off for being satisfied with putting his company's chips into an Irish base.

"One of the best decisions we've ever made has been to come to Ireland," he says from the firm's just-opened north quays European headquarters which is to house 300 new staff. It's awesome. We are the beneficiaries of some inspired policy and some real surprises in terms of people and product-building."

For the unacquainted, HubSpot is the pre-eminent company specialising in 'inbound' marketing software. It basically makes it easier for sales teams to find, pitch, sell to and keep track of customers. And it's going pretty well.

"The thing that's happened to us in Ireland, which we didn't expect, is the product piece," says Halligan.

"Sure, we expected to sell and to service customers from here. But we actually now build lots of our product here. And I mean major pieces of it. For example, all of our mobile CRM apps are now built here. And we have a brand new product that's just out called Lead In that's doing really well. And it's all built here."

Most financial analysts have touted the company as a strong bet for continued growth.

This is partly because HubSpot is one of the few companies that is trying to get over problems that most sales people have when they try to reach new prospects.

"It's almost impossible to reach a human now if you're a sales guy," says Halligan. "Fewer and fewer people have phones on their desk. With caller ID, those that have a phone are unlikely to answer it anyway. Everyone now has spam protection or filters on their email. We've been working on products that help sales people transform the way they sell to match the way people want to buy things or learn about them."

While business types are using HubSpot's services in increasing numbers, the company has received some unflattering attention too.

Earlier this year, it briefly became an object of mockery when veteran US tech writer Dan Lyons published a book about the year he spent working at the firm's Boston headquarters in 2013. Lyons, a former 'Newsweek' journalist and contributor to the satirical television series 'Silicon Valley', is known for lampooning tech companies and figures. In the book ('Disrupted'), he didn't spare HubSpot.

"Nerf-gun battles rage, with people firing weapons from behind giant flat-panel monitors, ducking and rolling under desks," he wrote. "Teams go on outings to play trampoline dodgeball and race go-karts and play laser tag... A group of bros meets in the lobby on the second floor to do push-ups together."

He also wrote about the lack of diversity and a cultish corporatism in language and hiring practices that the tech sector is often accused of.

Halligan says that the episode was "not fun".

"It was very rough," he says. "Some of the stuff he criticised us for is true. And we're trying to deal with it. Diversity is definitely an issue for us, the way it's an issue for a lot of tech companies. And we took it to heart. We are trying to improve it. Other stuff in the book we took with a grain of salt as others should.

"The bit about the push-ups wasn't an exaggeration, though. A group of developers decided they were going to do push-ups in the lobby every day.

"I tried to join them one day but I just couldn't keep up."

Halligan says that while the episode was "distracting" for HubSpot, it hasn't hurt recruitment at the company.

"I wish it never happened, obviously," he says. "Some people say all press is good press but I don't buy that."

However, a walk through HubSpot's gleaming new headquarters at the very east side of the IFSC doesn't show any signs of Nerf gun battles or bros doing push-ups. The building is a fairly airy, modern set-up with conference rooms and some nooks and crannies to bring a laptop when things get a little hectic.

In any case, it may be unlikely that the Dan Lyons book would have impacted too much on the company's Irish recruitment drive, as US tech companies' fripporous tendencies are usually more muted In overseas offices. This is just as well for HubSpot. Getting the best people in the door is one of the reasons that Halligan says the company has doubling down on its Irish venture.

"Other than making new products, another thing we didn't expect to come out of Ireland has been the high number of global roles we're now filling from here," he says. "Recently, we keep giving the big company roles to Irish people to run global functions."

Halligan reels through a list of senior global positions the company has recently filled with Irish staff, including heads of support, conferencing and recruiting.

"We do more of that activity in the US than anywhere else, but we keep giving the top roles to Irish people. My theory on why this is happening goes back to why we're here in Ireland. We keep getting to hire people here who worked at great companies who we admire, like Google and LinkedIn and Salesforce. Those people are very hard for us to attract in Boston, because they're all based in California. But here we can attract them from literally across the street."

EU membership is a key asset here, he says. When HubSpot looked at where to pick its European headquarters, it came down to a choice between Dublin, Amsterdam and London.

With the Brexit referendum getting closer, Halligan says that picking London may have given the company cause for concern.

Recruitment, he says, is the lifeblood of the company's success. Ireland, like all booming trench markets, is now getting competitive when it comes to finding people.

"But EU membership opens things up so enough people from Europe can come in to fill in the gaps," he says.

"For us, the first hundred people were Irish and the second hundred were still mostly Irish. But now that it's getting really competitive, we're seeing talented people from other countries coming in here. This is really good for Ireland. If Ireland can keep going the way it is, it really can be like Silicon Valley."

As enthusiastic as he is about Ireland, Halligan sees the country's current limitations. One of these is that we still lag significantly behind some other European countries when it comes to successful home-grown tech companies.

"The thing Ireland seems to be missing is that it's a scale-up place rather than a startup place," he says. It's great for companies who are getting big and want somewhere to scale.

"But what would be unbelievable would be if one of the big venture capitalists from the US came and put a pile of money here with some folks to invest it. And that would take [Ireland] to the next level."

The cost base is another creeping concern for companies like HubSpot. Natural market forces for hiring the best staff push wages up.

But housing and capacity constraints are also issues expected to become more acute in the coming years.

"I haven't heard too much about [housing problems] but it wouldn't surprise me at all," says Halligan.

"It's like San Francisco. I suspect that will happen here. I think in a couple of years that Dublin will be more expensive than Boston for us."

But it's still worth it, he says.

"It comes back to the people," says Halligan. "The people you can get here are well educated and come from other great companies. When we were deciding between London and Amsterdam and Dublin, it was not clear that Ireland was the right call. But it is absolutely clear. It was a very good call. We are beyond thrilled with Ireland."
As headline-grabbing events go, the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference wasn't the most earth-shattering in recent memory. But it was packed with lots of useful and potentially powerful feature upgrades that could have a profound impact in years to come. Having been hands-on at the San Francisco event, our Technology Editor rates the five key announcements

1 Messages

It may sound peripheral, but messaging is now a really, really important part of a phone's appeal. For some, it heavily influences the choice of tech used, just as messaging activity itself dominates a normal day's phone communication. And while we all talk about Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger as the major texting apps in our lives, Apple's iMessage (Messages) is right up there. It may now even be Apple's most valued iPhone feature.

The upgrades to Messages within iOS 10 (available in the autumn) announced at WWDC suggest that Apple is well aware of this and wants to deepen Messages as a platform in itself that keeps you using an iPhone.

One of the most important upgrades is that Messages will now let you include 'rich links' to photos, videos and songs. This means you don't have to click through a link to see the photo or video someone wants to bring to your attention. Instead, the content will instantly be converted within the message box.

This is a step forward in terms of making Messages a platform in its own right, as it means you're much less likely to leave the app during a conversation.

Other changes are more cosmetic but will still likely prove popular. Messages can now be written 'softly' (smaller text) or 'loudly' (larger text). They can also be written in 'invisible ink', which only reveals the message when the screen is swiped.

Apple is also ramping up on emoji in messages. While older analysts may roll their eyes at this, it is likely to be a hit with younger generations who matter far more in the booming messaging market. If you want to include an emoji in an iMessage, you no longer have to hunt for one manually as the iPhone will suggest some based on the text you're inputting.

In a similar vein, you can draw or sketch in Messages now, too. And Apple is also opening up some parts of Messages to third-party developers to integrate with their own offerings.

Beefing up Messages is a strong way of locking iPhone users down even further into sticking with Apple. Millions use iMessage (and Facetime) as their default communications system. These feature upgrades help Apple to argue that its users will genuinely be missing out if they switch to an Android smartphone and Whatsapp. This may be the reason that Apple didn't take the leap to extend iMessage into Android, as was rumoured before WWDC. While doing this would have expanded its reach deep into non-iPhone territory, it may also have given its own users one less reason not to move to an Android phone.

2 Siri voice control

If you look at advances from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple, it's pretty clear that the tech world sees a Star Trek-style future where we speak out loud to computers, cars and home appliances instead of looking at a screen or tapping on a button.

Apple's main announcement at WWDC was that Siri is coming to Apple Mac desktop and laptop computers. That means you can now use voice commands to search on your computer in the same way you can on your iPhone, iPad or Watch.

Apple is giving Siri a lot more intelligence, enabling it to suggest things to you based on location or text. It's not just Apple that will be rolling out Siri within its services - it will let other companies use the technology to add voice control elements to whatever they offer, too.

Ordinary phone and computer users are taking their time about switching over to voice controls as the primary way of interacting with computers. However, the success that Amazon has had with its Echo voice control box suggests that this might be changing. The overall direction is clear. Soon, instead of manually adjusting settings on cookers or turning on kettles, we will tell them what to do individually or to a centralised home system that controls appliances.

3 Apple Pay

Although Ireland was not one of the countries announced in the next wave of Apple Pay territories, it looks like to come here in the next year and possibly by the end of 2016. This will make a big difference to those who own an Apple Watch or want an iPhone alternative to contactless payment cards.

At WWDC, Apple extended the payment system by making Apple Pay work in the Safari browser with some websites. This means that you can pay for an item online (in the browser) and, instead of filling out long forms, validate the payment with a Touch ID press on your iPhone. It should speed things up, thereby addressing one of the critical issues with online commerce: conversion. It takes far too long to buy things with many online services, meaning we often drop out of the process before the process is completed.

Apple's move means that it is stepping up its competition with other online payment systems.

"We view this as the first concrete step into direct competition with PayPal," said the noted Apple analyst, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray.

Apple Pay, he said, is "a superior point-of-sale mobile payment solution and, with the dawn of availability in online channels, a legitimate threat to PayPal's staying power".

4 A new 'Home' app

If you walk into any Harvey Norman, DID Electrical or Currys store, you'll see that the tellies, washing machines and cookers are all starting to include 'smart' connectivity. They join home heating (Nest), security (Belkin) and home audio (Sonos) in a gradual switch over to making our everyday home surroundings answerable to centralised command from our phones.

In this vein, Apple is launching a new app for the iPhone called 'Home'. This will basically let you control all of your home's 'smart' appliances and systems through one app rather than a hodge-podge or individual apps scattered around different phone screens. It will also be subject to voice control through Siri and will let a user pre-program different appliances or home systems through the app.

While we've been waxing lyrical about 'smart homes' and the 'internet of things' for years, it's happening now.

5 Other developments

There are too many other features launched at WWDC to cover in depth. But here are a few extra ones that caught my eye.

(i) Transcription of voice messages: Many people just don't bother listening to voice messages any more. Apple will soon introduce the tech that gets your voice message and transcribes it into a text message for you.

(ii) You can now delete homescreen apps on the iPhone: Up to now, you couldn't delete Apple's pre-installed apps. With iOS 10 (available this autumn), you can.

(iii) Using your locked iPhone screen for more: In iOS 10, you can reply to messages and do lots of other things without unlocking your screen.

(iv) Photos upgrades: Apple is applying some new advanced computer vision to let you automatically compile photo albums and short videos. It will do this partially through new facial recognition techniques.

(v) Apple Music gets a refresh: Apple Music now looks a lot cleaner and gives better, richer information on songs and artists, including lyrics.
Google has opened a new 150m data centre in west Dublin bringing its total investment in capital assets in Ireland to over 750m.

The tech giant, which employs 3,000 people directly and a further 3,000 indirectly here, has increased its staffing levels by over 20pc in the last 12 months.

The new data centre in Clondalkin is the companys second major data centre investment in Ireland.

Speaking at the opening of the new centre Taoiseach Enda Kenny described it as a new chapter in Googles story in Ireland.

With the number of people employed by Google now surpassing 6,000, the company is a fantastic leader within Irelands digital community.

The new two storey centre houses computers that run services such as the Google search engine, Gmail and Google Maps.

Google benefits from Irelands cool climate by using air condition to keep the computers running at optimum temperature.

Head of Google Ireland Ronan Harris said that the firm has continually invested in Ireland since arriving in 2003.

Todays announcement is part of Googles plan to build the worlds most energy efficient computing network and the work of our engineering team in Dublin is central to this success, he said.
The former RTE broadcaster Mark Little is to become the head of Twitter in Ireland, with current chief Stephen McIntyre moving to join the Irish tech finance firm Frontline Ventures.

Mr Little is to take up the job next month. His appointment is the latest episode in a six year transformation from the world of journalism to global technology.

Mr Little's new role in Twitter means that he will be in charge of the social network's expanding European headquarters in Dublin, which now employs over 200 people and is the company's largest facility outside the US. He will also continue in his current media partnership role across Europe.

However, he will not assume Mr McIntyre's role as Twitter's most senior sales vice president in Europe.

Having served both as RTE's Washington correspondent and its anchor newscaster on the Prime Time television show, Mr Little left the state broadcaster in 2009 to start an online news sourcing company, Storyful, which he sold in 2013 to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for 18m. He joined Twitter last year as head of media partnerships in Europe.

"Mark is a Twitter evangelist through and through," said the outgoing managing director of Twitter in Ireland, Stephen McIntyre. "His leadership experience as founder and CEO of Storyful sets him up perfectly for the role."

Currently based between two offices in Dublin's inner city, Twitter will soon move into a newly refurbished European headquarters adjacent to Merrion Square.

In Ireland, Twitter is the second biggest social network with approximately 900,000 users according to the research organisation Ipsos MRBI. Globally, 300m people regularly use the network. However, it has struggled to live up to market hopes with lower-than-expected revenue growth and no increase on its active user base over the last 12 months. Its advertising model lags behind perceived rivals such as Facebook and Pinterest, despite having 130,000 paying advertisers.

In its most recent annual results, Twitter grew its revenue from $1.4bn to $2.2bn, a 58pc increase. It lost $521m last year, down from $578m the year before.

New initiatives currently being rolled out by the company include an expansion of its advertising products to reach an additional 500m people that visit the site but who are not Twitter account holders. Facebook has just expanded its advertising system to sell ads to non Facebook account holders through use of cookies that attach to people's browsing history when they visit the Facebook.com website through a link from somewhere else like an email or a web page.

Twitter shares have risen this week on foot of hopes that it could be a target for acquisition by a larger company. The market sentiment has been spurred by Microsoft's $26.2bn takeover of Linkedin.

Twitter's Irish boss, Stephen McIntyre, is leaving the social network to become a venture capital financier with the Dublin-based Frontline Venture.

Mr McIntyre, who worked for Google before joining Twitter in 2012, is currently Twitter's most senior sales executive in Europe as well as the company's managing director for its Irish base.

"After four and a half of the best years of my professional life, I have made the very tough decision to leave Twitter," he said. "Ive had a tremendous run at Google and Twitter but after a decade at US multinationals Im ready for something new."

Frontline Ventures focuses on early stage tech investments in Irish startup companies. It lists the anti-ad blocking firm PageFair and the travel software firm Boxever among the startups it is currently backing.

"Theyve made 22 software investments in the UK and Ireland in the past three years and I see a lot of potential in that portfolio," said Mr McIntyre. "I hope my high-growth operating experience will be of benefit to some of these companies as they scale. Having run businesses very large and very small, I enjoy the building phase most of all."

Mr McIntyre is leaving Twitter at a time when it is facing significant challenges in meeting market expectations for its advertising business.

"I continue to believe in the importance of the Twitter service, which is more relevant culturally than it has ever been," he said.

In its most recent annual results, Twitter grew its revenue from $1.4bn to $2.2bn, a 58pc increase. It lost $521m last year, down from $578m the year before.

"Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated," Mr McIntyre told the Irish Independent earlier this year. "58pc year-over-year growth makes Twitter one of the fastest-growing public companies in the world. And we've got 130,000 paying customers delivering more than $2bn in revenue. So there are a lot of customers who are very, very happy with what theyre getting. This is what has enabled this sort of growth."
Medical technology firm Zeltiq is to set up a new manufacturing facility in Galway, creating 60 new jobs over the next year and a half.

The US company, which employs 600 people worldwide, also said it would locate other functions at the Galway base to support its manufacturing. One of the firm's major exploits is CoolSculpting,inset, a non-invasive fat reduction procedure.

Zeltiq chief executive Mark Foley expressed his delight in investing in Galway.

"With millions of CoolSculpting treatments performed in more than 70 countries around the world, Zeltiq is firmly establishing itself as a global leader in the non-invasive fat reduction market, which is the fastest growing segment in the aesthetics space," he said.

Jobs minister Mary Mitchell O'Connor welcomed the addition of the new jobs for the western region.

"Ireland already has a dynamic and vibrant medical technologies sector and we are keen to expand its footprint," the Minister said.

"Zeltiq's new manufacturing facility and the valuable jobs and economic impact to be created will enhance Ireland's attractiveness for further similar investments," she added.
Exports have increased while imports have reduced.

The goods trade surplus expanded by more than a fifth in April as exports increased and imports fell.

Preliminary figures for the month, published by the Central Statistics Office, shows that seasonally adjusted goods exports increased by 254m to 9.24bn in the month.

By contrast, goods imports slipped by 11pc to 4.7bn, dragged down by a fall in machinery imports.

This meant that the trade surplus increased 819m, or 22pc, to 4.53bn.

Yea-on-year, the value of goods exports slipped 2pc in April compared with the same month last year.

The value of goods exports for the period January to April was 36.44bn, an increase of 770 million when compared with the first four months of last year.

The EU accounted for half of total goods exports in April, of which 1.2bn went to Belgium and around 1bn to Britain.

The USA was the main non-EU destination accounting for 2.42bn of total exports.

The EU accounted for 62pc of the value of goods imports in April, with 1.2bn coming from Britain.

Economists fear the fall-out of a potential vote in the UK to withdraw from the European Union on Ireland's crucial export sector.

If a so-called Brexit occcurs, sterling is expected to plummet in value, which would have a knock-on effect for Irish exports into the UK market. There are also wider issues over trade between the two countries.
Former Coronation Street star Charlie Lawson has shared a rousing video clip in celebration of Northern Irelands win over Ukraine at Euro 2016.

The Fermanagh actor, best known for his portrayal of Big Jim McDonald, took to Twitter earlier today to rally the team.

Lads, no more dreaming, weve got to win tonight, he said in the video.

Stiffen up the sinews, summon the blood and come on Northern Ireland. And for all you in the Green and White Army, the best fans in the world, come on Northern Ireland!

Following Northern Irelands win this evening, he returned to Twitter to post another clip, again appearing with the flag for a victory dance.

He can be seen waving the flag and chanting: Come on the Ulster boys, making all the noise!

I told you you could do it boys, absolutely f***ing brilliant, march on, march on!

Next Tuesday, Northern Ireland will take on Germany in Paris, and Lawson finished his video with a warning: Germany, watch your friggin asses!
Coronation Street actor Ryan Thomas has bulked up to impress Strictly Come Dancing bosses.

The actor is being considered for a part in the BBC show, according to the Irish Mirror, and is doing his ample best to impress Strictly bosses.

He achieved a six-pack in just 12 weeks and is hoping that his new bulked up appearance will guarantee him a place in the line-up.

A source told the newspaper that "Ryan is desperate to appear on Strictly".

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"He thinks it's a brilliant programme and has been in talks with the show's producers.

The source revealed that there are plenty of celebrities being considered so Ryan will have to stand out to "prove himself".

Ryan isn't the only one who has been busy working out though. His brother, Emmerdale star Adam Thomas, has also been pictured with a ripped physique.

The two stars have signed up with Manchester's Ultimate Performance Fitness to transform their bodies.

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Jason, who plays Jason Grimshaw in Coronation Street, revealed last October that he would be leaving the cobbles after 15 years on the soap.

He wanted to get in shape as he looked for work post-Coronation Street.

While Adam, Adam Barton in Emmerdale, wanted to get fit before his wedding to the the mother of his child, Caroline Daly.
The shrine on Kittredge Street dedicated to the memory of the six students who died on June 16 a year ago

This time last year it was a scene of horror, tragedy and ultimately loss.

Now, 12 months on, the stark reminder of the loss of six young lives - including five Irish J1 students - is a small shrine on Berkeley's Ketteridge Street.

Tucked into a window frame, a small wooden bench holds six candleholders adorned with the faces of the six victims along with flowers and messages. Two photo frames are placed above, one with an image of those who died, the other listing the names of the survivors.

Read more: Berkeley: One Year On - 'People came from Ireland with just clothes on their backs because they left so quickly' - Irish priest offered support to victims' parents

Read more: Berkeley: One Year On - 'It's the worst thing I've dealt with in 30 years on the job' - emergency responder remembers tragic balcony collapse

No trace remains of the balcony or the French doors at apartment 405 or the apartment below.

New windows have been put in their place and the gaps plastered and painted.

However, for local people, the trauma of the event is still fresh in their memory.

Diana Lion, a teacher and a former resident of Berkeley, now living in nearby Oakland, said it had cast a dark cloud over the community.

"I was completely stunned and shocked by this tragedy.

Enormity

"It actually hurt my heart because there are so many students that come to Berkeley, and they come for a good educational experience, and this is the furthest thing from that. I remember I came here to go to the library a few months after it happened, and I passed by the shrine to the memory of the students, it was very moving.

"I was talking to a friend on the phone at the time and I told her 'I have to call you back'. I needed to stand there and be in silence to honour the enormity of what had happened.

"It was just awful. I'm horrified that the owners of the building would not have the building up to code.

"It really is a stain on the reputation of Berkeley."

Meanwhile the US Ambassador to Ireland, Kevin O'Malley, held a remembrance ceremony for the six students at the embassy in Dublin yesterday at which an apple tree was planted and a memorial plaque unveiled.

"As the tree grows, we will take comfort in the knowledge that the memory of Ashley, Eimear, Eoghan, Lorcan, Niccolai and Olivia will remain with us always," he said. He extended the heartfelt sympathies of the American people to the victims' families.
Fire captain Rick Guzman: Some of them were comforting and holding some of their friends that had just fallen

One of the first responders at Berkeley fire department who rushed to the scene of the balcony collapse that killed six students a year ago remembers the incident as the worst he has dealt with in his 30-year career.

Fire captain Rick Guzman (57) was asleep at the fire house at the Berkeley Fire Department, seven blocks away, when the call came in.

"That got your attention right away. This isn't a type of call that we go on routinely," he said.

The crews believed that they would be dealing with an incident involving up to eight students and a balcony collapse from two or three storeys.

However, when they arrived outside apartment 405, it was clear that the incident was a great deal more serious.

"As we were going down the street, I could see all the cops, a lot of students around - basically a lot of commotion.

"You could see everything that had just happened.

"There were a lot of other students that had come downstairs - I think there were about 25 students in the apartment when the balcony collapsed - they ran downstairs to support their friends. It was pretty chaotic.

"Some of them were comforting and holding some of their friends that had just fallen.

"It was all these people lying still. Nobody was moving, which I'll probably never forget.

"We realised that it was 13 kids that had fallen off the balcony. We knew that we had to get these people out of there as soon as we could.

"Out of 13 people that fell, only one was walking, which surprised me. I even saw some of the police officers vomiting there just because of what they were visualising. There were so many kids involved."

The emergency crews set to work at what they deemed "a multi-casualty incident", which effectively puts local trauma centres on alert that they would be receiving numerous patients.

Students Eoghan Culligan, Lorcan Miller, Nick Schuster, Eimear Walsh, Olivia Burke and Olivia's Irish-American cousin Ashley Donohoe died and seven others were seriously injured.

For the traumatised emergency crews, the debriefing process would last for many months. Part of this healing process was the journey which some first responders made to Dublin last March to take part in the St Patrick's Day parade.

"To me, the request from some of the families, wanting to get together with us and just show a bit of appreciation and gratitude, was (important)," said Mr Guzman.

"However, we didn't have to deal with losing a son or a daughter.

"So I felt it was a good call for us to go there in number and show support for the families who were grieving."
A man who fatally knocked down a cyclist when he drove a car at speed through a red light had been banned from driving at the time, a court has heard.

Eugene Maher (62) died from head injuries hours after being struck by a car driven by 27 year old Christopher Coleman.

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Judge Melanie Greally said she would take a week to consider the evidence before sentencing Coleman.

Coleman of Reuben Street, Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to dangerous driving causing the death of Mr Maher at Clontarf Road, Dublin on June 30, 2015. He also admitted leaving the scene of the crash and to driving without insurance.

Numerous witnesses from the scene described the car coming out of nowhere on the inside bus lane while traffic was stopped at the red lights. Witnesses also saw the car travelling at speed earlier along the Clontarf Road. They also saw a front seat passenger hanging out of the window of the car gesturing towards another car.

There was cheering and roaring coming from the car shortly before the collision. One witness said he then heard screeching of brakes and screaming before the sound of the impact.

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Whatsapp Christopher Coleman (of Reuben Street, Dublin 8, charged with dangerous driving causting death and failure to remain at the scene) leaving CCJ, Parkgate Street, Dublin.

Coleman tried to stop the car by doing a handbrake turn and the car ended up spinning around. He drove off at speed from the crash, dangerously overtaking a number of other cars.

He went to gardai six days after the collision and told them that he took full responsibility. He said he was very sorry for not having the courage to stop at the scene and claimed he was trying to make an amber light at the junction.

He said he knew he was driving too fast but didn't know how fast. The court heard that if he had been driving at the speed limit of 50kph emergency braking would have stopped the car in 15 metres, five metres short of hitting Mr Maher. Skids marks showed that the car stopped in just under 30metres.

Garda Linda Connaughton told the court that Coleman has 15 previous convictions including four for driving without insurance. In November 2012 a court disqualified him from driving for six years. He was also disqualified from driving in January 2012 and in February 2009.

Coleman told gardai that he was so sorry for the family of Mr Maher. He said he panicked after the crash because he had been banned from driving.

During an emotional sentence hearing the victim's daughter, Lisa Maher, read out three impact reports in which the Maher family described the torture of having to wait six days before their father's body was released to them.

The body could not be released because a suspect would have the legal right to carry out an independent autopsy on the body. After Coleman came forward his full admissions of guilty meant the body could be released.

Ms Maher said her father lay on a slab in a morgue for six long, agonising, painful days. She said Mr Maher was her hero, her mentor and her guide and was a generous and selfless man.

Marie Maher said her late husband always said forgive and forget.

My life will never be the same again. Right now I cannot find it in my heart to forgive. she said.

Mr Maher was the father of Drogheda United star, Stephen Maher.

Stephen Maher said that while death is inevitable and that we will all experience the death of a loved one, his father had been left for dead on a busy road.
AN Irish vet who runs a stud farm in Japan has sued the University of Limerick (UL) alleging defamation and reputational damage as a result of how it reacted to allegations by two female students about his behaviour towards them while on placement at the farm.

Dr Harry Sweeney, with addresses at Dunshaughlin, Co Meath and Hokkaido, Japan, and Y K Paca Paca Farm, Hokkaido, Japan, are, in three different cases, suing UL and each of the students over alleged defamation.

The plaintiffs claim there is no basis to claims by the students about the behaviour of Dr Sweeney towards them while on placement there between January and March 2014 as part of their UL courses in equine studies.

The plaintiffs also claim, with no warning to them, two of the three UL students on placement, were collected by taxi and driven away from the farm on March 19, 2014.

That occurred after the two students contacted their parents seeking to go home and the parents in turn contacted UL which sought assistance from the Irish embassy, Luan O Braonain SC, for UL, said.

As a result, Dr Sweeney and the farm claim the Irish Ambassador to Japan decided at short notice to cancel a high-profile visit by the Minister for Children to the farm scheduled for that same day and this, they claim, damaged the reputations and standing of the plaintiffs internationally.

The plaintiffs also claim difficulties had emerged with the two students during their placement and Dr Sweeney had informed one of them, following an incident on March 16th 2014, she should consider herself suspended while her behaviour on the farm was being considered.

The following day, St Patrick's Day 2014, Dr Sweeney says he sent emails to UL notifying it of "extremely serious difficulties" with some students on placement and stating consideration was being given to sending one of them home. He claims he had a long conversation with an agent of Ul on March 18th about difficulties being experienced with the students.

UL has yet to deliver a defence to the case against it.

The High Court heard on Thursday solicitors for one of the students have alleged in correspondence she will claim Dr Sweeney was inappropriate, offensive and bullying towards her and had sexually harassed her.

The solicitors also wrote the student will allege that, some months before the placement started, she was interviewed in Ireland by Dr Sweeney during which she and other interviewees were asked to stand up mid interview and slowly turn around so she might be inspected physically. It also claimed he had engaged in inappropriate conversation, including asking her whether she was in a relationship. The solicitors further alleged no university representative was present.

In correspondence on behalf of Dr Sweeney, all those claims were strongly denied. It is also claimed the students had fabricated claims against Dr Sweeney to avoid repercussions about their alleged behaviour.

The plaintiffs case against UL was before Ms Justice Miriam O'Regan on Thursday via a pre-trial application by UL to have all three cases consolidated.
Pupils at Mulroy College in Milford, Co Donegal, were happy with the range of topics offered in both history papers yesterday, though no-one expected Muhammad Ali to feature on the Ordinary Level paper.

Caolan McLaughlin, who sat that paper, was satisfied with the range of questions on 1916 but opted to tackle the subject of another 20th century icon, Marilyn Monroe.

"There weren't too many surprises and I was lucky enough that everything I had studied for came up," said the 18-year-old from Portsalon.

John Heraghty, who sat the Higher paper, said that the exam "wasn't too bad at all".

"All the 1916 material was there and I took on the questions on the Apprentice Boys of Derry. I also liked the question on who was the more successful US President between Harry Truman and Lyndon B Johnson. Of course, it was Truman," said John.

Louise Lynch (17) sat both Ordinary Level French and Higher Level History on her last day at the college, though her mum Laura, a Special Needs Assistant, will have to return in September.

"I'm so excited. I can't believe it's my last day and I had two good papers to finish with," said Louise, from Rathmullan.

"I was delighted with French. I was only caught out by one word on the whole paper and I had loads of time so that was good," she said.

"As for history, it was grand. I was put off a bit by the Nuremberg Rallies question but happily tackled the economic policies of Fine Gael until 1945."

Careful

Eimear McConigley, also just 17, from Fanad - all the students in this year didn't want to do TY - also sat the Ordinary Level French paper and the Higher history exam.

"French was good enough. I didn't have any problems," said Eimear. "In history everything I had studied all came up in three different sections. They way the questions were worded was different so I had to be careful how I answered."

History teacher Maria Ryan declared both papers "very doable".
Students should have been be very happy with the Leaving Certificate Business Higher Level paper, as it gave them a great opportunity to show their knowledge, said teacher Keith Hannigan

Mr Hannigan of the Institute of Education, Dublin, described it as  very nice and fair with plenty of options for good students.

He said while Part C of the Applied Business Question had a new slant and focused on expansion for the first time, which students may not have been expecting, it was a lovely question which they would have been able to deal with without too much difficulty.

In Section 3 Question 3, Mr Hannigan noted that for the first time the European Union wasnt examined but the question that did appear was manageable.

He described Question 4 as ideal for students who had prepared entrepreneurial skills and the management activities of planning and organising.

Mr Hannigan thought the appearance of human resource management in Question 5 may have caught students out as it also appeared last year, but the remainder of the question focused on new business strategies and technologies, and students would have been expecting this, he said.

While he regarded Question 6 was one of the more challenging on the paper , but it was followed by Question 7,  the nicest.
A Leaving Cert student says he was left shocked but happy after a question about himself and his traditional music group popped up in an exam.

Cathal O Currain from the Gaoth Dobhair Gaeltacht inDonegal is a member of an award-winning group An Crann Og. He plays the banjo.

He was sitting Paper 1 of his Irish Exam when he realised that one question in the aural comprehension was about the group.

"I thought it was very funny," said Cathal.

"I was sitting in the corner of the room, and when we got the paper everyone turned around saying, 'That's ye' - and I was in fits laughing to be honest.

"I knew the answers before we even heard the recording."

Cathal is so proficient with his instrument that most of his friends at school and in traditional music call him 'Banjo'.

The 18-year-old revealed the question soon caused a stir in the exam hall. "Everyone in the room was laughing," he told RTE Raidio na Gaeltachta.

"They were slagging me, saying, 'Fix, fix!' It's great though, 120,000 people did the exam and it's a great thing for An Crann Og that we were mentioned in the exam.

"It's recognition for the whole group that we featured in a national exam."

He said another band member Eimear Ni Coll also sat the same exam.

He is already getting teased by friends who are saying he'd better get 100pc in his Irish exam.

"We'll have to see about that," Cathal laughed.

The student at Pobalscoil Ghaoth Dobhair said: "I am hoping to study Irish and music in the University of Limerick next year."

An Crann Og is a group of young traditional musicians established by Caitlin and PJ Joe Jack in Gaoth Dobhair in 2007 to encourage and promote traditional music.
Superintendent Peter Duff said the new information resulted in 160 fresh lines of inquiry being opened. He appealed for anybody with information to come forward. Picture credit; Damien Eagers

Victims of convicted paedophile Eamon Cooke who were terrified while he was still alive have been urged to come forward with information that might help solve the disappearance of Philip Cairns.

A woman provided a crucial lead in the 30-year-old case last month when she came forward with new information.

But she only did so when notorious paedophile Cooke was on his death bed as she was absolutely terrified of the disc jockey.

Gardai last night would not confirm if Cooke was now the main suspect in the disappearance of the 13-year-old Dublin schoolboy - but they do believe that more people have vital information which could help them solve the horrific case.

Superintendent Peter Duff said the new information resulted in 160 fresh lines of inquiry being opened. He appealed for anybody with information to come forward.

"At this point in time, these new lines of inquiry are ongoing," said Supt Duff. "The investigation is very much active and I would like to thank those people who assisted me in this investigation so far.

"From our inquiries, I believe there are people who were young at the time who may have information in relation to Philip's schoolbag and for whatever reason did not come forward.

"I am conscious that due the passage of time and changing circumstances, these people may now be in a position to assist. This may be playing on their minds. I'd ask these people to now come forward."

Read more: 'Large number of people' come forward about potential leads in missing Philip Cairns case

The detective gave an assurance that people with information would be treated "sensitively and discreetly".

He said gardai believed Philip's schoolbag may hold the key to solving his disappearance.

"From our inquiries, I believe there are people who were young at the time who may have information in relation to Philip's schoolbag and for whatever reason did not come forward.

"We are anxious to hear from anybody who may have knowledge of how the schoolbag came to be in the laneway, who may have seen it being put there or who observed it there at any time. For the sake of Mrs Cairns and her family, who have been suffering for 30 years, it is important we bring this investigation to a conclusion," he added.

Supt Duff could not "confirm or deny" if those who he would like to come forward were connected to Cooke.
The CEO of Children's Hospital Group, Eilish Hardiman, has admitted that they have their work cut out to persuade the public the St James's site is the correct choice.

It came after a new poll published by Red C found that 73pc of those surveyed felt the St James's site was the wrong choice for the new National Children's Hospital.

It showed that 37pc believe that Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown would have been a better option.

Ms Hardiman said: "The poll has told me we need to get out and educate people and debunk some of the myths."

Meanwhile, a presentation was made yesterday at a construction summit in Dublin by Phelim Devine, Design Director of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB).

Mr Devine outlined the proposed development and vowed to make the new hospital "the most outstanding children's hospital in the world".

The new site will be Ireland's first digital hospital, with patient records accessible online, which will also improve monitoring procedures for doctors.

But Dr Roisin Healy of Kids for Connolly said that serious questions needed to be answered before work can start on the St James's site.
Hot drinks such as coffee should be cooled down using milk, says the World Health Organisation. Stock Image

Extremely hot drinks can cause cancer and they should always be left for a few minutes to reduce their temperature, or cooled down with milk, the World Health Organisation has warned.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the WHO, said hot drinks of 65C and over were likely to cause cancer of the oesophagus. However, the panel found there was no evidence that coffee or tea causes cancer.

Dr Christopher Wild, director of IARC, said: "These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of oesophageal cancer, and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible."

Experts said that most people should not be overly alarmed by the findings.

Recent research published in the journal 'Burns' found that a cup of tea with 10ml of milk cooled to less than 65C in under five minutes.

The UK's Royal Society of Chemistry also recommends drinking tea at 60C-65C, while Northumbria University found that the perfect drinking temperature for tea - 60C - is achieved six minutes after brewing begins.

Most coffee experts recommend the drink be served between 40C and 60C.

Casey Dunlop, health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "Most people in the UK don't consume drinks at the temperatures considered in this research. So as long as you let your drink cool down a bit before you drink it, you're unlikely to be much at risk."

In 1991, the IARC linked coffee to bladder cancer, but following the lengthy review, it has now concluded that the evidence has become weaker. In its new evaluation of more than 500 studies, it also found that coffee drinking had no carcinogenic effects for cancers of the pancreas, female breast, and prostate.

For more than 20 other cancers, the evidence was inadequate to enable a conclusion to be made.

Although the IARC said it could not prove that coffee was "safe", it said that current data suggested it was unlikely to cause the majority of cancers.

It may even be protective against womb and liver cancers, the panel concluded.

Kristine Breminer Isgren, chair of the British Coffee Association, added: "Coffee is one of the most heavily researched products in the world. It is great news for the millions of coffee lovers that the World Health Organisation has provided that reassurance.

"This reclassification follows strong evidence that coffee has a protective effect against some cancers. Research has also shown coffee may help reduce the risks of heart disease, strokes (in women), Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease."

Dr Tim Bond, of the British Tea Advisory Panel, said: "This latest announcement has no relevance to the cuppa enjoyed by millions of people daily. Tea has been confirmed by many organisations, such as Public Health England, as a healthy drink, which supports normal hydration.

"Emerging evidence suggests that tea contributes to heart health and may help to reduce the risk of cancer, although this needs to be backed up with further human studies.

"Tea drinkers can continue to enjoy tea in the traditional way with a drop of milk, which ensures that the temperature of tea sits within safe limits." ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
The area of land in the Dublin mountains once owned by Eamon Cooke where gardai will begin a search for the remains of Philip. Photo: Damien Eagers

The isolated field which may hold the secret to Philip Cairns disappearance

A tract of land in the foothills of the Dublin mountains is now at the centre of the garda investigation into the abduction of schoolboy Philip Cairns.

The Irish Independent can reveal that the corner of an isolated field, which overlooks the capital, was once the site used by paedophile Eamon Cooke to transmit a signal for his pirate radio station.

A number of witnesses have told gardai that they saw Cooke using a digger on the property more than 30 years ago when he positioned a radio signal repeater.

It has been claimed that the serial child abuser concealed a container 20ft underground on the site, where he also once kept a caravan.

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Read more: 'This is the strongest lead we've ever had in Philip Cairns' case' - former detective Gerry O'Carroll

Gardai are now expected to focus on the plot of land and will make a decision in the coming days on digging there.

The scenic hillside location has become a potential crime scene after Cooke was linked to the mysterious disappearance of Philip Cairns in October 1986.

A woman, who was aged nine at that time, has told gardai that she saw the schoolboy being beaten to death by Cooke in his radio studio in Inchicore on the day that he went missing.

It is understood that Cooke had arranged to bring Philip Cairns to his radio station.

It is believed that Philip reacted furiously when Cooke made an advance on him and that in the ensuing row the young boy was assaulted and killed.

In the confusion, Philip's schoolbag was left in the car and not discovered by Cooke until some time later.

Cooke persuaded another of his young victims to dump the bag in a laneway the following week, it is now believed.

Schoolbag

Fresh information, which gardai have described as the most credible lead they have received since the abduction, has injected new life into one of the country's longest-running child-abduction mysteries.

The Irish Independent understands that gardai are preparing to carry out a forensic search of the property as part of their effort to locate the remains of the missing boy.

Detectives visited the site yesterday and it has also emerged that they have spoken to the current landowner - who had no connection with Cooke and is not suspected of any involvement with any crime.

One eyewitness has told of seeing Cooke using a JCB to dig a large hole on the property but said the DJ never divulged what he was doing at the time.

While gardai admit that they may be "looking for a needle in a haystack", they are determined to identify and search any lands in the Dublin mountains that was used by the former owner of the illegal Radio Dublin.

A number of sources who contacted the Irish Independent also confirmed that the area of land was once used by Cooke, who died almost two weeks ago.

This is the first potential crime scene associated with the disappearance of Philip Cairns since his schoolbag was mysteriously dumped in a laneway in Rathfarnham, close to the boy's home, six days after he had vanished on October 23, 1986.

Last month, Cooke confirmed to detectives on his deathbed that he knew Philip Cairns and that the boy had been in his radio studio.

Read more: 'Large number of people' come forward about potential leads in missing Philip Cairns case

It is understood that gardai also independently corroborated aspects of the woman's story.

One of the enduring mysteries of the teenage boy's disappearance was how his schoolbag was deliberately placed in a laneway close to his home a week after he had vanished.

Detectives are also understood to have made progress in tracing another former child victim who, it is alleged, was instructed by Cooke to dump the bag.

This separate development in the investigation came to light when another one of Cooke's victims divulged the girl's identity to a community worker who supports sex abuse survivors.

Meanwhile, gardai are also awaiting analysis of three separate DNA samples found on Philip's schoolbag, which will be cross-referenced with Cooke's DNA.

The samples are described as low-level and were left by people touching the satchel.
Jerry Grant is poised to take over at Irish Water

Jerry Grant has been appointed managing director of Irish Water.

The former head of asset management in the utility, he replaces John Tierney who was the companys first boss.

Mr Grant is the former MD of RPS in Ireland, and joined Irish Water in 2013. The company is part of the Ervia group, and his contract runs for two years.

As head of asset management, he has spearheaded the drive to assess the condition and performance of the water network and has directed a 3bn investment programme.

Ervia group chief executive Michael McNicholas said Mr Grant brought 40 years of experience to the role.

The appointment of Jerry provides the strong leadership, detailed knowledge and experience that will guide Irish Water through the transition from establishment to fully operational phase as a state utility, he said.

Ervia also announced the appointed for Cathal Marley as group finance director. He joins the company from ESB.

A chartered accountant, he holds an MBA from the Michael Smurfit Business School.
Gardai at the scene at the Wright Venue in Airside in Swords

Gardai at the scene at the Wright Venue in Airside in Swords where the victim raised the alarm that he had been stabbed

Gardai search Airside Retail Park car park close to the scene at the Wright Venue in Airside in Swords where the victim raised the alarm that he had been stabbed

Gardai search Airside Retail Park car park close to the scene at the Wright Venue in Airside in Swords where the victim raised the alarm that he had been stabbed

Gardai search Airside Retail Park car park close to the scene at the Wright Venue in Airside in Swords where the victim raised the alarm that he had been stabbed

A man has been rushed to hospital after he was stabbed in the torso and back in a car park outside the well-known Wright Venue overnight.

The 25-year-old approached staff who were clearing up after an event with star Chris Brown at the nightspot in Swords, Co Dublin at around 4am.

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Brown had played the 3Arena earlier in the night.

It is understood he told workers he had been stabbed and to call an ambulance.

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He was rushed to Beaumont hospital where it was discovered that he had suffered injuries to his back and torso.

Gardai and emergency services arrived at the scene quickly and the man, who is from the Blanchardstown area, was rushed to Beaumont Hospital where he was due to undergo surgery.

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His injuries have been described as serious.

Sources say the man received "knife wounds to the stomach" in the attack.

Some reports said the victim was partially disembowelled in the attack.

The actual location where the man was stabbed was not known, but Gardai believe that the incident took place in a nearby Airside car park and will examine CCTV of the are to establish the full details. Officers from Swords garda station also hope to speak with the man when his condition improves.

An area of the car park in front of the Wright Venue was sealed off by Gardai this morning, and detectives were seen carrying out an initial assessment of the scene.

A garda spokesman confirmed that they are investigating the alleged assault..

A team of gardai were also spotted searching drains in a car park of the Airside Retail Park.

Gardai also searched under cars in the car park for the location of a potential weapon.
It is understood that the nurse was last seen on duty on Sunday in Our Ladys Childrens Hospital in Crumlin

A Garda investigation is under way into the tragic death of a nurse whose body lay undiscovered in a hospital for nearly two days.

It is understood that the nurse was last seen on duty on Sunday in Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin.

She was found on Tuesday morning in one of the rooms in the hospital which are set aside for parents' accommodation.

When her body was discovered, efforts were made to resuscitate her, but it was too late.

Gardai have launched an investigation into the death of the nurse, who was in her early 30s, but are satisfied that there was no foul play.

A senior officer told the Irish Independent that they were treating the death as a tragedy.

The investigation will include an examination of how a member of staff was in possession of a key for a parents' room.

Accommodation for parents is provided in a special section of the hospital. Some parents, whose child is a patient at the hospital, can be allocated a room to stay - but they often return to their home for a few days.

In such situations, the room is unlikely to be visited by staff.

The nurse's body was found in one of these room that are used occasionally by parents for resting.

The nurse is understood to have completed her shift in the hospital on Sunday and then went into the room, which was unoccupied.

Initial inquiries suggest that she died shortly afterwards. But her body was not discovered by staff until Tuesday.

Staff at the hospital are understood to be devastated by the death of their colleague.

A spokeswoman for the hospital confirmed the death of a staff member. She said: "Our thoughts, prayers and deepest condolences go out to the staff member's family and friends and colleagues here at Our Ladys's Hospital.

"The hospital will be making no further comment as it is the subject of a garda investigation."

The general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, Liam Doran, said the union had no comment.

He said he was aware of the incident and that it was a terrible tragedy.
Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar has raised the prospect of increasing councillors' pay.

The Dublin West TD described as "uniquely fair" the system in which local representatives are reimbursed, because they are no don't qualify for a State pension.

He said said he wants to examine the issue and is considering bringing councillors in line with the self-employed.

"I am going to consult with them on two options. The first is to continue to pay and to get some benefits, and the second is to stop paying and still get no benefits," Mr Varadkar said.

So that would bring them into line with other workers or self-employed, he added.

Within Fine Gael, the decision to raise the prospect of hiking pay is seen as an indication of Mr Varadkar's leadership bid.

Party rules state councillors have a vote in any leadership contest.
Kate OConnell with her sister Therese Newman, who is her parliamentary assistant, at Leinster House yesterday. Photo: Tom Burke

Fine Gael TD Kate O'Connell has said she would like to see a referendum on repealing the Eighth Amendment "tomorrow".

But she conceded that she can't argue with the holding of a citizen's convention to discuss the matter first, saying politicians with more experience "obviously think it's a good idea".

Children's Minister Katherine Zappone, who is in favour of repealing the amendment that gives equal status to the life of a woman and her unborn child, has predicted that a vote on the Eighth Amendment won't happen until the end of 2017.

Read more: Taoiseach warns referendum on Eighth Amendment would fail if held this year

Ms O'Connell believes Ms Zappone is being realistic, and said she is in favour of a "rational and reasonable" discussion, which the citizen's convention could provide. However, she added that it was "small comfort to the 70 a week travelling", referring to women going to Britain for abortions.

Asked if she was disappointed that the referendum isn't happening sooner, she replied: "I wish it could happen tomorrow but that's not possible... These things have to run their course. And if a citizen's convention is what has been decided is the best course of action by the Taoiseach, well, I have to accept that."

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said he doesn't believe a referendum on the Eighth Amendment would pass if it was held as early as October this year.

He said that there first needs to be a debate around what would replace it and pledged to bring a memo to Cabinet next week to establish the citizen's convention.

Read more: 'Abortion drone' to bring pills over the border in 'act of solidarity'

Ms O'Connell said she's not opposed to the idea of the convention debating the issue, adding: "I think those that have more experience than I do obviously think it's a good idea. So I can't really argue with that."

The first-time TD said: "The worst thing we could do is to rush into something because if it's rushed into and it's not done right it'll be a No vote and we will continue exporting the problem."

She said she believes abortion should be a woman's choice albeit with strict term limits. She said her position is it should be "free, safe and legal and, to quote Doctors for Choice, 'as early as possible and as late as necessary'".

Earlier, Independent minister Ms Zappone told Newstalk Radio that the "most optimistic prediction" would be that a referendum could be held by the end of 2017. She said: "It's a red line issue for me that this Government would deal with it."

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said she is in favour of a citizen's convention. "I'm always concerned about the number of women traveling to England for a crisis pregnancy, and for the situations that [these] women find themselves in. It's extremely traumatic."
TAOISEACH Enda Kenny has suspended his campaigning ahead of next week's 'Brexit' referendum following the shooting of a Labour MP.

Mr Kenny delivered a speech at an Irish Centre in Liverpool advocating for Britain to remain within the European Union.

However, news broke during Mr Kenny's speech of the shooting and stabbing of Jo Cox in West Yorkshire.

Speaking to reporters, Mr Kenny described the incident as an "appalling crime".

"i have heard about the shooting and the stabbing of Jo Cox in West Yorkshire. This is an appalling crime on a public representative going about her duty, a mother of two young children." he said.

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"I hope and pray that she will be ok. Although I understand she may be in a critical condition. And I understand that police have arrested a man in respect of this particular atrocity, this outrageous behaviour."

Mr Kenny informed reporters that he would be making no further comment about ''Brexit' in order to respect the decision taken by the 'Leave' and 'Remain' campaigns.

"I also understand that the 'Remain' campaign and 'Leave' campaign have cancelled their campaigns for today. So out of respect for those decisions, I will not make any further reference to the referendum to be held next week during the course of my remaining duties here today."

The Fine Gael leader said the issue will be looked at again tomorrow.

Mr Kenny is attending a business event in Manchester tonight.
Junior Defence Minister Paul Kehoe has secured Government approval to purchase another ship for the Naval Service.

This ensures that the service will continue to have at least eight ships while at the same time replacing older vessels.

Mr Kehoe told the Irish Independent last night that the Government had agreed to provide 54.3m ( 66.8m after Vat) the purchase an additional ship after reaching a contract agreement with Babcock International to build it at their headquarters in Appledore, Devon.

He said: "This is a major benefit to the State and will be a further significant enhancement of defence capability.

"The acquisition of a fourth sister ship of the same class as those recently commissioned will secure crewing, training, logistical and maintenance advantages", he added.

The new ship will be delivered within two years and its purchase is in line with the maritime capability requirements set out in the government white paper on defence last year.

At the moment, the Naval Service has eight ships but the LE Aisling will be decommissioned next week.

It will be replaced by the LE William Butler Yeats, which comes on stream next month.

Following an open tender competition, a contract was placed in 2010 with Babcock International for the provision of two new offshore patrol vessels, with an option for a third.

The first, LE Samuel Beckett was handed over at the end of April 2014, while the LE James Joyce was delivered in July last year.

The LE William Butler Yeats is the third and it will be delivered in July after the completion of sea acceptance trials.

The value of the original contract, including the third ship, is 199.4m, including Vat.

Mr Kehoe, inset, who is minister of state with special responsibility for defence, said the Government was proud of the contribution the Defence Forces made to the State's security.
Aisling O'Loughlin at the IFTAs and (inset) her third son

Irish mums aredemonised because of their decision not to breastfeed, according to TV3s Aisling OLoughlin.

The Xpose presenter, who welcomed her third son last month, admitted that there is a lot of pressure on mothers to breastfeed but women should not be judged if they choose to bottle feed.

The mum of three breastfed her son Joseph for one week last May but said she was in too much pain to continue.

I lasted a week breastfeeding and then had to call it a day, Aisling told The Irish Daily Mail.

Its not something that comes naturally to me and it was torture. Its not easy for everyone. For some women it happens easily, but its each to their own.

In an ideal world youd love to breastfeed but it takes a lot of time and a lot of support, so sometimes its not feasible. Irish women are demonised for not doing it- its easy to mother bash, she said.

The presenter and her partner Nicolas MacInnes welcomed their third son in May in Holles Street Hospital, who joined Patrick (4) and Louis (2) in their busy household.

Aislings proud fiance shared a snap of the newborn moments after his arrival.

"Baby number five has just arrived and embracing life," the new father wrote. "All is good and beautiful."
Renault strike gold with new Kadjar, adding a touch of Gallic class to SUV segment, but can it swipe the crossover crown from sister Qashqai, asks Philip Hedderman

Renaults last foray into SUV territory was a memorable one  for all the wrong reasons.

It was an epic trip to Fez in north Africa (where Tommy Coopers famous hat comes from) for the launch of the Koleos, the French car giants answer to the D4 tractor.

Unfortunately, it was July 2008, the new emissions-based VRT system had just kicked in and the recession was in full swing.

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It didnt help that it was hideous to look at, handled like a combine harvester and was far too expensive.

It proved an unmitigated disaster.

But as they say, if at first you dont succeed, just copy  or in Dublin parlance, cadge.

Ironic then that the all-new SUV from Renault should be called the Kadjar, or as one cheeky wag called it, Cadge-ar.

To the great unwashed, this French fancy is in fact the twin sister of the mighty Nissan Qashqai.

Comprising more than 60pc of the parts bin and the same chassis, one would think its just going to be a watered down version of the award-winning game-changer.

On the contrary, design inside and out brings a touch of much-needed class to an almost jaded format.

Its absolutely stunning to look at, with a striking nose dominated by the massive logo nestled in the grinning grille which is further enhanced by the awesome LED light clusters.

Sweeping lines down the flanks show off every curve of the body, giving this sizeable hulk of metal real grace and elegance.

Thick rubber mouldings running from the foglight housings to the Kim Kardashian-like rear end add a touch of ruggedness, while the 19-inch diamond-cut alloys give the Kadjar real road presence.

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Inside its a similar affair, with a state-of-the-art cockpit and wrap-around dash. Build quality is excellent, with soft touch materials and solid switchgear mixed with brushed aluminium inlays and piano black finish around the centre console.

Its loaded with goodies too.

The entry level Expression + comes with cruise control with speed limiter, LED daytime running lights, foglights, Bluetooth, hill start assist , automatic lights and windscreen wipers, infotainment system controlled through a seven-inch TFT screen, digital speedometer and electric front and rear windows.

Theres oceans of room on board too, with 472 litres of luggage capacity in the boot (42 more than the Qashqai thanks to a longer wheelbase).

With the seats folded flat it expands to 1,478 litres.

Head and legroom in the rear are generous, and overall this is a very comfortable place to be.

The three engines on offer here are the 1.2-litre turbocharged TCe 130bhp direct-injection petrol unit, the 1.5-litre ENERGY dCi 110bhp diesel available in manual and EDC and the 1.6-litre ENERGY dCi 130bhp.

Drive-wise, the Kadjar was an absolute joy thanks to the sublime dual clutch automatic gearbox which really took the pain out of city motoring.

We were also more than pleasantly surprised by the economy and refinement of the oil burner, which is returning an eye-watering 74mpg (3.8l/100km and 200 road tax). We achieved around 55mpg over 1,000km of mainly motorway miles.

Pound for pound we found it hard to fault the Kadjar, and only time will tell if it succumbs to the electrical gremlins that befell the old Megane.

Right now, youll be hard pushed to get a better deal on a mid-sized SUV.

Its cheaper that its twin and comes with three years free servicing and five-year warranty.

Prices start at 24,990.
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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.
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John Downing Opinion New British prime minister Rishi Sunaks succession proves an important milestone in British political inclusivity

There is an old saying in British politics that goes: The right looks for converts while the left seeks out traitors. It comes to mind when one reflects upon the election of Rishi Sunak as the UKs first non-white prime minister in a party traditionally seen as most opposed to mass immigration and the dilution of national identity via multiculturalism.
Simon Harris appears to be taking his role as Leo Varadkar's replacement as Health Minister a little too literally. The previous minister developed an annoying habit of being more of a commentator than a decision-maker on the health service.

Now Harris has taken up the baton. The new Health Minister is wringing his hands ferociously at the row over the plan to move the National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street to the St Vincent's Hospital campus. He says that he is powerless to solve what he describes as an "unedifying spat", warning that there is no "plan B" if the mediation process currently under way fails.

The minister was supposed to provide an 'update' on the plans to the Seanad yesterday. Instead, he prattled off what is already known about the turf war between the two hospitals.

They are at loggerheads because of the proposed governance requirements set down by St Vincent's for the new hospital on its grounds in Elm Park. These will place all services, including tertiary maternity and neonatal services, under the control of the St Vincent's board and shareholders, the Religious Sisters of Charity.

Harris says Holles Street is "an entirely inappropriate and sub-standard building" but he just throws his hands up in despair as they are voluntary independent hospitals and "Therefore, I cannot simply impose a solution".

Of course you can do more, minister. At the very least, you can frogmarch the boards of the two hospitals into your office, reflect the views of the people you represent and warn them about the consequence for future funding, then bounce them back out on to Hawkins Street in no doubt about the Government's intentions.

Do something other than merely commentating.

Remembering the young lives cut short, a year on

A year ago today, the lives of six young people in the prime of their lives were ended and the lives of so many of their friends changed forever.

Fate dealt a cruel blow to that group of students enjoying a J1 summer in the university city of Berkeley, near San Francisco in California.

Like thousands of students before them, the group of friends from south Co Dublin headed off to the US to take a job, experience a different culture, gain their independence and have some fun.

Heartbreakingly, Lorcan Miller, Niccolai Schuster, Eoghan Culligan, Eimear Walsh and Olivia Burke, along with Ashley Donohoe, never came home after that fateful night. Their friends Niall Murray, Aoife Beary, Clodagh Cogley, Sean Fahey, Conor Flynn, Jack Halpin and Hannah Waters continue to recover from their horrific injuries.

The horror of this tragedy and untimely loss of young lives touched the entire country. Now, 12 months on, the balcony at apartment 405 has been removed and life goes on in the university town. Building standards have been improved to ensure no similar tragedy happens again.

A stark reminder of the loss of those six young lives is a small shrine on Berkeley's Ketteridge Street.

The victims' families are now going through a torturous legal battle for compensation for the deaths and injuries sustained. The case is expected to drag on for some time before it is resolved and blame apportioned.

However, no amount of money will ever make up for the tragic loss those families have endured.
US-headquartered company West is expanding its team in Ireland ahead of the opening of a new manufacturing facility in Waterford

West Pharmaceutical Products Ireland Limited, a subsidiary of West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., is establishing a new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Waterford and is currently looking to fill engineering, production and other positions in support of its growing team in Ireland at both of its Waterford and Dublin sites.

West is headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, and supports its customers from locations in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Wests 2015 sales of US$1.4bn reflect the daily use of approximately 110 million of its components and devices, which are designed to improve the delivery of healthcare to patients around the world.

Since 2005, West has had a presence in Ireland through its subsidiary Tech Group Europe, Limited, a process driven, global contract manufacturer.

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This facility is focused on serving the needs of pharmaceutical companies by providing a single-sourced solution from product conceptualisation and rapid prototyping through to high-volume manufacturing and final packaging.

The Tech Groups commitment to excellence in contract manufacturing is the result of a powerful combination of innovation, technology, infrastructure and people. The facility in Dublin is proud to be Gold certified by Investors in People. Additionally a multimillion dollar expansion has just recently been completed.

Emma Kyle took up the position of financial specialist at Wests Waterford operation last October. She is responsible for the day-to-day finance function supporting the project team as well as the European finance team to help ensure that they are on track and compliant.

I wished to relocate back home and Wests job opening came up. The position was exactly what I was looking for and the company credentials and career progression discussions I had during the interview helped me make up my mind, she says.

We have a great team with people from different backgrounds and companies joining in.

Wests vision is to create a healthier world by working alongside its healthcare partners to save lives, eradicate disease and manage wellness.

According to the company, it has a friendly and informal environment that empowers members of its team to make a difference  to enable them to follow a career that will benefit and support them both professionally and personally. In addition, employees get a feeling of a company with local roots and global impact.

More information about West and available opportunities can be found here: http://www.westpharma.com/en/Careers/Pages/default.aspx or email hr.waterford@westpharma.com or HR.Dublin@westpharma.com.
Biopharmaceuticals company BioMarin is in hiring mode in Ireland as global demand continues to rise for its products

Ranked 10th on Forbes magazines 2015 list of the worlds most innovative companies, BioMarin is a global leader in developing and commercialising innovative biopharmaceuticals for rare genetic diseases.

The company opened operations in Ireland in 2011 and has continued to expand its plant in Shanbally, Ringaskiddy, Co Cork since then.

BioMarin initially announced the creation of 100 jobs, but as a result of global demand for its products, announced further hiring plans, including creating new jobs in its Dublin Global Commercial Operations Hub.

Currently employing 260 people in Ireland, BioMarin continues to expand its workforce and fill positions across all departments.

Cork is the hub for BioMarins European manufacturing operations, and Ireland is a strategic location for growth in global operations, specifically in the areas of commercial, manufacturing and supply chain functions, says Michael ODonnell, site leader at BioMarin in Cork.

Ireland provides a highly educated, well trained and experienced workforce and business-friendly climate, along with a strong governmental support model.

This allows us to focus on what we do best, targeting ultra-rare, severely debilitating diseases that lack effective drug therapies, and affect relatively few people worldwide, many of whom are children.

BioMarins reputation for being innovative is driven by providing first-in-class or best-in-class treatments that provide meaningful advances to patients with serious and life-threatening rare genetic orphan diseases.

The company remains steadfast to its original mission to bring new treatments to market that will make a big impact on small patient populations.

Headquartered in San Rafael, California, BioMarin has developed and commercialised five products since 1997, including an enzyme replacement therapy for the treatment of Morquio A Syndrome (MPS IVA), a lysosomal storage disorder.

BioMarin International Limited in Cork is a multi-product drug substance site with packaging and labelling capability for drug product.

Commitment is key to what BioMarin does, according to ODonnell: While the science builds the platform for clinical success, we could not do what we do without a commitment to long-term relationships with patient communities, physicians, academic researchers, our employees, elected officials, regulatory bodies, investors and the communities where we operate, he notes.

One of BioMarins differentiating factors in attracting talent has been its connection with patients. We have had many patients visit and speak to the team about the impact our treatments have made to their lives, ODonnell explains. It gives our employees a compelling reason to come to work and do their best for our patients.

At BioMarin, employees have the opportunity to work in multiple areas of the business. In terms of career progression, hiring managers seek out talent that have the right attitude and approach to fit within the organisational culture.

We invest significantly in the importance of how we work as much as recognising the technical aptitude a person may bring, ODonnell explains.

Performance is rewarded with providing opportunities to get involved cross functionally, or to transition to different areas across the business on an assignment or rotational basis, while developing and growing peoples technical and interpersonal skills.

For information on vacancies at BioMarin, visit www.BMRN.com/careers.
Campo Viejo brings Colour to the Streets of Dublin Campo Viejo brought Spanish street artists Okuda and Remed to Dublin as part of their Streets of Colour urban art project. June 16, 01:41 AM Kicker This is a kicker.

Urban Art has firmly established itself as an important medium for artists and communities to express themselves and to claim the urban space for themselves. It is an empowering form of expression that has gone from subversive to widely accepted as an important art form in just a few short decades. Dublin too can boast its own community of Urban Artists working the streets of Dublin to make their mark on the urban landscape. Dublins low\-rise nature and areas that have seen little or no development in recent years, means theres a lot of blank canvas for artists to express themselves.

A photo posted by valcassidy (@valcassidy) on May 29, 2016 at 9:03am PDT

**Check out the video below for a time\-lapse view of the artists at work:**

These figures are basically part of Remed and Okuda's very own iconography, and of the images that they have been developing for their on\-going collaboration with Campo Viejo, with the branches, flowers and colours representing the vineyards. It's all about love, life and freedom. The faces juxtapose and fuse Remed's and Okuda's lines and styles, and they are a reflection of the people who look at them. They are sexless and ageless, they are universal.

Madrid is one of the major centres for urban art and some of the very best artists apply their paint to the side of buildings in the Spanish capital. Two such renowned artists, Okuda and Remed, have been collaborating with Spanish Rioja winemaker Campo Viejo to bring their distinctive, expressive and very Spanish style of Urban Art to cities around the world. Including Dublin.

nice. A photo posted by Danny (@dkj_3) on May 21, 2016 at 2:48pm PDT

At the launch event of the [2016 Tapas Trail](http://www.campoviejotapastrail.ie/) \(Dublin \- 7th of June to the 3rd of July, Cork 12th \- 27th July and Galway 24th August \- 7th September\), Campo Viejo flew Okuda and Remed over to Dublin to work their magic on Dublins Drury Buildings, one of the participating restaurants on the Tapas Trail. The two artists worked on a limited space on the facade of the restaurant to complete quadriptych design that captures the essence of the Campo Viejo brand. You might wonder why Campo Viejo have such a strong affinity for, and a dedicated support of, urban art. The flagship Rioja brand invite people to Live a Life Uncorked, to live life as the Spanish do with passion and with expressiveness.

Wine making is an art, one that is enjoyed by people the world over and the experts at Bodegas Campo Viejo \- located right in the heart of La Rioja \- bring the same passion to their production of Rioja wines; from the growing of grapes and maintenance of the pristine valleys in which they grow, to the blending of their three grape varieties to produce the distinctive Rioja flavour across their range of wines.

Its a very natural fit for Campo Viejo to work with Okuda and Remed, artists whose styles are inured with a very Spanish flavour. Bold colours complement bold flavours, individual expressiveness complements the wines individual expression of the terroirs and the fact the blends are different every year. Underpinning all is the expert hand of artists, in applying colour to the streets in an act of self\-expression, and in the winemakers expertise and passion in finding the exact right blend of grapes to represent the Rioja region in its purest form.

The collaboration between Okuda and Remed and Campo Viejo started a number of years ago with the [#Streetsofcolour](http://www.liveuncorked.com/ageverification) Urban Art Project. The project has brought the art of Okuda and Remed to the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastian and beyond Spain to London, Oslo, Brussels, Toronto, Miami and, of course, Dublin.

Last years edition saw Okuda working solo on the walls of Busyfeet & Coco Caf on Dublins South William Street, with a characteristic geometric creation.

Meet the artists

**Remed** Urban artist Remed grew up in Lille, France and is now based in Madrid, Spain.

I AM (T)HERE #REMED #remed_art #art #workinprogress #canvas #handmade A photo posted by Alby Guillaume (@remed_art) on May 19, 2016 at 6:12am PDT

Remeds work has a unique, immediately recognizable quality in both its micro and macro manifestations. Working with the principles of maths and calligraphy, his work strikes a balance between harmony and energy. I quickly felt the need to overcome the limits imposed by the framework, thats how I came to the street. As his experience in the urban art scene grew, he started to realise that the viewer does not give as much time to the observation of an artwork as he dared to imagine. This led him to synthesise his creations and simplify them so the viewer could actually feel something without his physical presence being necessary to explain his art. This is the style that we clearly recognise today in all his artworks, whether they are on canvas or on walls in the form of prints, drawings or sculpture.

Urban art is free from the limits imposed by framework and allows you to interact with the environment around you. A lot of my artworks are commissioned but never guided by anyone but my soul. Urban art is important because the street is the only place that you dont need a special invitation to be in. It allows people to openly share emotions, feelings and messages in an unrestricted manner. **Okuda** Born in Santander, Spain, Okuda \(a.k.a Oscar San Miguel Erice\) started his career with a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Complutense University of Madrid and over the years has developed a unique style of artistic expression characterised as pop\-surrealism meets urban art.

He uses geometric, bright\-coloured abstract shapes with interplay of grey bodies and organic forms to depict contradictions about existentialism and the meaning of life.

new canvases in progresss +++ #novo111 #okudasanmiguel #okudart A photo posted by OKUDA SAN MIGUEL (@okudart) on May 29, 2016 at 4:01am PDT

The Street Art Scene in Dublin

**[Crucial333](https://www.flickr.com/photos/crucial333/)** has been taking photographs and archiving the aerosol art movement in Ireland for the last twelve years, as well as being an advocate for the scene, he has been assisting artists promote their work via exhibitions, events, and commissions. **How does the aerosol art scene in Dublin differ to those of other European cities?** It doesnt really, the only difference is that the Dublin scene is a lot smaller and this is in relation to the size of the city of Dublin being smaller. That being said, we have seen in recent years an upsurge in the amount of street art / graffiti art and murals appearing around the city. **Is there a particular style associated with Dublin?** The subject of style relates to the artists individual output in what they produce as the finished article and that is the same for any artist in any medium, it really is the ultimate goal for anyone aspiring to stand out from the crowd to have their own unique style, so there is not a particular type of style that relates to Dublin. **How has the aerosol art scene in Dublin changed in recent years?** The scene itself in recent years has certainly expanded and the demand for places to paint has increased too with the amount of artists that reside here. You have to remember that spray cans and that paint the flies from the nozzle appear in all forms of media today such as music videos, computer games, film, fashion shoots, publications and the list goes on so to me its hardly surprising so many young children, young adults want to learn to paint with a spray can. I have met many international artists visiting Dublin such as Espo, Softles, T\-Kid, Smug, Solo One, Bonzai, Lovepusher and they all have expressed a real genuine passion for the scene here. Dublin certainly has a real buzz about it, which is hard to translate in to words, you have to be here to feel it. **What effect does aerosol art have on the city of Dublin?** Artists love to take a wall that is unloved and create something bright, colourful, but at the same we have seen in recent years artists not taking in to account that certain properties are protected structures and this causes problems when artwork appears on buildings of this nature. It is my belief that the majority of artwork that appears in the city's landscape adds to the city's appeal and does not take away from it. I have managed projects around the city and the response from the general public has been very encouraging, of course you cant please everybody all the time but for me, artists here in Dublin are bringing colour to our lives and that is an important quality for the city of Dublin to have. **What do you see for the future of aerosol art in Dublin?** I would like to see corporate sponsorship getting involved to help fund bigger aerosol art events in the city, similar to the type of events they have in Europe. We have the space, I see plenty of billboards / buildings around that could do with creative flair added to them, and we certainly have a high standard of artists here that are able to match any city in the world. Events like these draw in visitors from overseas and locally, which in turn increases revenue for the city and businesses. Its a win\-win for everyone. You can find **Crucial333** archive of photographs at: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/crucial333/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/crucial333/)
I've never been raped, but...

I thought it was my fault.

I can't even remember.

I should never have got so drunk.

There is a marked difference, stratified neatly along gender lines, between responses, when you talk about feminism, rape culture and casual (or not-so-casual) sexual harassment. Last week, in answer to a (well-meaning, I'm sure) question as to why I often seemed so anti-men, I took to Twitter to set out my stall, in a series of tweets that have reached more than 140,000 people.

The Storify version ( https://storify.com/sineadredmond/not-all-men-but-more-than-en) has been read more than 4,000 times.

The responses came in thick and fast  at first, from women who'd had similar experiences and, later, when the anti-feminists woke up, from men who took umbrage at the fact that I'd dared to implicate them in this idea of rape culture that, apparently, I totally made up.

That's not the only thing I made up, mind you. Apparently, I've never been cat-called, because, who would cat call this face (accompanied by a photograph taken of me at a speaking engagement, when I was, fittingly, telling the audience how important it is to be your authentic self online)? No one's ever groped my bottom, because it's too fat to be grope-able. The story of my rape  by a friend who wouldn't take no for an answer  is a fiction. Wishful thinking, apparently.

There was cold comfort in the fact that proof of my declaration  that rape culture is capitalised upon by some men, and allowed to exist, by others  was in the pudding of latent misogyny contained in my Twitter mentions.

Video of the Day

I'm a c***; I'm a whore; I'm a bitch; I have no right to use my experiences to make grand, sweeping generalisations about men.

The funny thing is, it wasn't about men at all  it was about the fact that, for women, sexual harassment and assault have become as much a part of Irish life as the rain, or waiting 20 minutes for a bus and seeing two come at once.

In a way, it was a theory, based on the fact that, to a certain extent, my new Twitter friends are right. I have never been the most attractive woman in the room, on the street, or in the bar. I haven't been harassed because I am irresistible; I have been harassed because I am female and, by that logic, so has every other human being with breasts, a vagina and an abundance of estrogen.

The emails I have received since have proved that theory. I got one from a 22-year-old, who was first abused at the age of six by an older male cousin. Just last year, she was sexually assaulted by a former boss outside the pub they worked in together.

Another, from a 40-something woman who had been raped by a friend of a friend at a party, 21 years ago. Then there's the 30-something whose great uncle copped a feel at a family gathering when she was 16; the 25-year-old who was punched by a man in a bar when, after he put a hand up her skirt, she pushed him away; a 30-year-old who went out drinking last week and woke up to find a man she knew having painful sex with her (that's rape, then), asking how she should tell her boyfriend  and whether she was at fault.

In the meantime, The Irish Times published an opinion piece by their business correspondent, detailing how the feminists on Twitter  angry chickens who have armed themselves with machine guns  are just approaching this all wrong. You want the word about unwanted harassment to be heard by men? Then do it through other men.

These other men are the nots in the #notallmen trope: the men who baulk at the idea that they have anything to do with the perpetuation of rape culture; the men who would consider themselves feminists, if it wasn't for those angry extremists on Twitter; the men who have never raised a finger to a woman, and know that no means no.

It's all so confusing, right? Because, when you boil it all down, we're on the same team. Rape is wrong. Sexual assault is wrong. Casual sexual harassment is also wrong. But somehow, when you package these facts up in a neat female package, throw in some lived experiences and a little anger (wouldn't you be angry?), you're the feminist equivalent of a cartoon thug.

This outrage  the how very dare they  has its roots in the oldest misogyny of all: the idea that women should be seen and not heard, that an angry woman is an ugly woman and that an ugly woman is a useless woman, our value being, after all, tied up precisely in how attractive we appear to the opposite sex.

Perhaps the biggest upset of all is the fact that, for a certain breed of modern woman  the ones who monopolise the oxygen in debates on Twitter, like Tara Flynn, Louise O'Neill and Sarah Maria Griffin  that's no longer a big concern. We don't particularly care if you think our anger unsightly. We don't particularly care if you think us unattractive.

We don't particularly care if you take offence at the very insinuation that men  innocent men, feminist men  could, y'know, help by speaking up when those other men (not all men) treat us like objects, ignore our obvious discontent, and disregard any notion of consent when considering their entitlement to our bodies.

Instead, just sit back, say nothing and boo-hoo into your hankies about how we're tarring you all with the same angry, feminist brush. Because that's really helpful. Don't mind us; we'll just be out here, calling out the sexism and misogyny to which we are subjected on a daily basis and, as a result, being subjected to more sexism and misogyny.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Former Miss North Dakota Samantha Edwards was found dead in her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Tuesday. Photo: Facebook

Former Miss North Dakota Samantha Edwards was found dead in her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Tuesday.

Police discovered the 37-year-old unresponsive around 7.30am, according to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners Office.

The cause of death has yet to be determined by a medical examination, police said.

A police investigation is underway but no suspects have been charged.

Expand Close Samantha Edwards, Miss North Dakota 2003. Photo: Facebook / Facebook

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Ms Edwards, know as Sami by her friends, was crowned Miss North Dakota USA in 2003.

The former beauty queen went on to become a freelance make-up artist.

The Miss USA organisation paid tribute to her on their official Facebook page.

We are saddened by the sudden loss of Samantha Edwards, Miss North Dakota USA 2003. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family and friends.

She will forever be a part of this organisation, it reads.

A GoFundMe page has been launched to help cover the funeral costs.

Ms Edwards friend Jessica Dereschuk described her as one of the most vibrant, crazy, compassionate, loyal balls of energy you could ever come across in life.

She added: A conversation with her could either leave you full of adrenaline or utterly exhausted. She was a spitfire, and with Sami, you never knew what shes throw your way  but you always knew she would be there for you. She was awesome like that.
A woman places a photograph of one of the victims of the shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub on a memorial in Orlando. REUTERS/Jim Young

Investigators are examining how much the wife of Orlando nightclub gunman Omar Mateen may have known in advance about the attack that left 49 people dead.

The FBI is still gathering evidence at Pulse, the gay club where the massacre occurred, and poring over leads and tips about Mateen and those who knew him.

Expand Close Taoiseach Enda Kenny signs the book of condolence for the victims of the massacre at the Mansion House yesterday .Pic Tom Burke / Facebook

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Authorities believe Mateen's 30-year-old US-born wife Noor Salman knew ahead of time about Sunday's attack, but they are reluctant to charge her on that basis alone, sources said.

Investigators have spoken extensively with her and are working to establish whether she recently accompanied Mateen to the club.

The FBI has also recovered Mateen's phone and will use location data to verify whether he previously visited the club.

Read more: Orlando shooting: How a Marine veterans quick thinking helped save dozens of lives

Expand Close Gunman Omar Mateen. (MySpace via AP, File) / Facebook

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In a news conference, US attorney Lee Bentley repeatedly refused to say whether any charges might be brought against anyone.

He said authorities are talking to hundreds of people and investigating everyone associated with Mateen, including family, friends and business associates.

Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer said Mateen drove around the Orlando area on Saturday evening, going from one place to another, before he opened fire at the gay nightspot at about 2am on Sunday.

The attack ended with the 29-year-old American-born Muslim being killed by a Swat team.

Orlando is nearly a two-hour drive from Mateen's home in Fort Pierce, Florida.

When asked exactly where Mateen visited, and whether the locations included theme parks as reported in news accounts, the mayor said: "I think it's been pretty accurately depicted on the news."

In Fort Pierce, Florida, where Ms Salman and Mateen lived, Ms Salman made a brief visit to their first-floor apartment late on Monday, escorted by police and her brother-in-law. Her father-in-law said she came to retrieve clothing. She did not speak with reporters.

She has otherwise been in seclusion.

Ms Salman and Mateen married in 2011 and have a three-year-old son.

Marriage documents on file in the Contra Costa County Recorder's office list Salman's parents' birthplace as Palestine. Their naturalisation papers allowing them to stay in the country were approved in 1984.

In other developments, a newly unearthed clip from the 2012 documentary The Big Fix about the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shows Mateen - then working as a security guard at a clean-up site in Florida - talking cynically about people who make money off disasters.

Florida documents show that Mateen passed a psychological evaluation in 2007 as part of his application to be a security guard. The records show he took a written psychological test, or was evaluated by a psychologist or psychiatrist.

A survivor of the massacre, 20-year-old Patience Carter, shed more light on Mateen's thinking during the attack, saying he talked about wanting America to "stop bombing my country" - a possible reference to his father Seddique Mateen's native Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama has said that a military campaign against terrorism abroad will not be enough to prevent "lone wolf" attacks like Sunday's nightclub shooting in Orlando, as he offered condolences and support to families of the victims.

"We're going to have to do more to prevent these kinds of events from occurring. It's going to take more than just our military," Mr Obama said, an apparent reference to proposals for stricter gun-control laws. That was after he laid flowers at a makeshift memorial during an afternoon visit to the grieving city.

"We can't wipe away hatred and evil from every heart in the world. But we can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives," he said.

Mr Obama praised the Senate for scheduling votes next Monday on gun control measures, although the legislation is likely to fail.

Mr Obama travelled to Orlando as the city prepared to bury its first victims from the mass shooting. The president and vice president Joe Biden spent hours meeting privately with survivors of the attack, victims' relatives and police officers who responded to the scene on Sunday, when 49 people were killed.

The president later told reporters the families talked to him about their loved ones and their grief over young lives taken.

"Our hearts are broken, too," Mr Obama said he told them.

The low-key visit reflected the challenge for the president to find something meaningful to say about an attack that has stoked a wide mix of fears about terrorism, guns and violence against gay people.

Mr Obama's call for solidarity and empathy stood in contrast to the roiling political debate in Washington and the campaign trail that has sprung up since the attack. Arizona Senator John McCain, a Republican and frequent Mr Obama critic, accused the president of being "directly responsible" for the shooting because, he said, Mr Obama had allowed the growth of the Islamic State group on his watch.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, had made calls during the attack saying he was an IS supporter. But CIA director John Brennan said Thursday that the agency has found no connection between the gunman and any foreign terrorist organisation.

The White House had no immediate response to Mr McCain's comments.

Investigators were working to reconstruct the movements of the 20-year-old shooter before he opened fire at the Pulse dance club, including what his wife may have known about the attack. The Senate Homeland Security Committee's chairman sent a letter to Facebook asking for help with messages denouncing the "filthy ways of the west" left on Facebook accounts believed to be associated with Mateen before and during the attack.

The FBI has been looking into reports that Mateen frequented the nightspot and reached out to men on gay dating apps.

Outside the Amway Centre in downtown Orlando, where Mr Obama met with families, hundreds gathered in punishing heat hoping to get a glimpse of the president - including some who knew victims of the shooting. Brittany Woodrough, 20, was still in shock as she recalled one of the victims, Jason Benjamin, whom she described as a close friend.

"Seeing President Obama here makes it real," Ms Woodrough said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the visit a "solemn responsibility" that had weighed heavily on the president in the days since the attack.

"The president understands that he is a symbol of the country," Mr Earnest said.

Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican frequently at odds with Mr Obama, greeted the president on the airport tarmac upon his arrival. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, also a Republican, travelled with Mr Obama from Washington, along with Representative Corrine Brown, a Democrat who represents parts of the city. Mr Biden and Senator Bill Nelson joined Mr Obama on the tarmac.

The investigation and makeshift memorials in Orlando have seemed a world away from Washington and the presidential campaign, where initial horror has quickly given way to a vicious political brawl.

In Congress, the attack has spurred another bitter fight over gun control, exposing deep frustration among supporters of stricter gun laws that no level of mass casualty seems to be enough to force gun control opponents to reconsider.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, whose state of Connecticut shouldered the killing of 20 children in Newtown in 2012, undertook a roughly 15-hour filibuster that lasted into the early hours of Thursday. As he yielded the floor, Mr Murphy said Republican leaders had committed to hold votes on expanded gun background checks and a ban on gun sales to suspected terrorists.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has expanded his call for temporarily barring foreign Muslims from entering the US - even though the attacker was an American - and said the president "prioritises" America's enemies over its people. Yet in an unexpected twist, Mr Trump said he planned to meet with the National Rifle Association "about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns".

For Mr Obama, the trip to Orlando was an unwelcome return to one of the most difficult roles a president must fulfil: trying to reassure the nation at times when few words seem capable of providing much comfort. Mr Obama has lamented the frequency with which he has had to perform that duty, calling his inability to enact stricter gun laws the biggest frustration of his presidency.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that if Britain leaves the EU "things wouldn't just carry on as 28 minus one the following day" (AP)

Germany's foreign minister says the European Union would be shaken by a British vote to leave and would have to ensure that it did not ultimately lead toward the bloc's disintegration.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that if Britain goes "things wouldn't just carry on as 28 minus one the following day".

He said: "It would shake the European Union (and) we would have to assure each other that the European Union continues to stick together - and that a very successful, decades-long integration process does not in the end turn to disintegration."

Earlier, the German defence minister said she feared the EU's balance could be affected by a Brexit.

Ursula von der Leyen said the EU needs a mixture of grand ideas, passionate defence of European ideals, pragmatic solutions - and doubts.

She was quoted as saying: "The Germans tend toward enthusiasm on European questions, the French toward grand pathos, the Italians impress with their ability to improvise - the British ground all that with their scepticism, understatement and terrific pragmatism."

She added that "if the British leave the EU, lofty ideas would dominate", and the bloc could have trouble staying down to earth.

The minister added that Britain "has in Europe a lever to increase its influence".
US President George Bush was worried about the image of detainees wearing nappies

President George W Bush was worried about the image of shackled detainees at a secret CIA prison wearing adult nappies, declassified documents show.

The papers offer more details about a prisoner who died inside the dark network America's intelligence service ran after 9/11.

Among the documents is a memo about a meeting then-CIA Director Porter Goss had with President Bush on June 7, 2006.

The memo says: "The president was concerned about the image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper."

Human rights advocates said on Wednesday that the papers depict the human suffering caused by the interrogation programme.

Several documents detail the 2002 death of Gul Rahman, who died of hypothermia at a CIA detention facility in Kabul.
Walt Disney World is considering adding alligator warnings to beaches on its Florida resorts after a two-year-old boy was snatched and killed.

No Swimming signs are posted at the Seven Seas Lagoon where Lane Graves was grabbed from shallow water but there are no warnings about the presence of alligators.

A Disney representative, speaking on condition of anonymity because the company had yet to prepare a formal statement, said Disney would "thoroughly review" the sign issue in the future. Beaches that were closed during the search remained off limits to visitors, the company said.

Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said his department and the state wildlife agency would look into the issue of signs around Seven Seas Lagoon.

He told The Associated Press after a news conference on Wednesday it was unlikely the toddler's parents Matt and Melissa Graves of Omaha, Nebraska, would face any charges.

"There's nothing in this case to indicate that there was anything extraordinary" in terms of neglect by the parents.

Divers found the child's body about 16 hours after authorities first got the call that a reptile had taken the boy from the man-made lagoon, which borders the Magic Kingdom theme park.

The park is one of the world's most popular tourist spots, drawing millions of visitors annually.

Mr Demings said it appeared the alligator drowned the child and left the body near the spot where he was last seen. An autopsy was planned.

"Of course the family was distraught, but also I believe somewhat relieved that his body was found intact," Demings told a news conference.

A family friend released a statement on behalf of the Graves thanking well-wishers for their "thoughts and hope-filled prayers."

CEO Michael Iaccarino of Infogroup, a marketing company where Matt Graves is chief data officer, said his family "is the light of his life".

In the family's hometown of Elkhorn, Nebraska, friends and neighbors reacted with disbelief and shock.

The principal of their church parish described the Graves parents as caring and attentive parents.

"The St. Patrick's Parish and school community is just flat out devastated," Norman Hale, principal of St. Patrick's Parish Catholic School, told Omaha station KMTV.

Wildlife officials said the attack was a rarity in a state with an alligator population estimated at one million. But it still shocked visitors in a city built on tourism.

"It's the most magical place on Earth, supposedly," said Michelle Stone, a Detroit-area resident visiting Disney for 10 days with her two children. "To come here with your family and (be) having this great time ... There are no words."

In a statement from Disney World Resort President George A Kalogridis, the company said it was "doing what we can" to help the family.

Authorities said the boy waded into no more than 1 or 2 feet of water in the lagoon around nightfall Tuesday when he was taken from a small beach. The boy's father desperately tried to fight off the gator, suffering cuts on a hand, but he could not save his son. Neither could a nearby lifeguard, officials said.

Nick Wiley, of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said witnesses estimated that the alligator was 4 feet to 7 feet long. One of the five alligators that searchers removed from the water may have been responsible for the attack, he said.

The beach where the reptile grabbed the child is part of the luxury Grand Floridian resort, across the lake from Magic Kingdom. The lake, which stretches over about 200 acres and reaches a depth of 14 feet, feeds into a series of canals that wind through the entire Disney property.

More than 50 law enforcement personnel searched the well-tended lagoon along with an alligator tracker and marine units equipped with sonar to search the lake's sandy, mostly flat bottom. The sheriff said a dive team found the child's remains.

Though Florida has grown to the nation's third-most populous state, fatal alligator attacks remain rare. Before the child's death, 23 people had been killed by wild alligators in Florida since 1973, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission statistics.

The grim news was only the latest for Orlando, a city struck by tragedy in the past few days.

On Sunday, a gunman opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, leaving 49 people dead in the worst mass shooting in modern US history. On Friday night, Christina Grimmie, 22, a contestant on season six of talent show The Voice, was fatally shot as she signed autographs after a show in Orlando.
An Egyptian journalist holds a candle and a poster supporting EgyptAir during a candlelight vigil for the victims of Flight 804 (AP)

The cockpit voice recorder of the doomed EgyptAir plane which crashed last month, killing all 66 people on board, has been pulled from the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt's investigation committee said.

The development raised hopes that investigators would find clues as to the cause of the May 19 crash, which remains unclear.

No terror group has claimed responsibility for bringing the plane down.

The Egyptian committee said the so-called black box - one of the two on board the plane - has been damaged but that the vessel searching for the wreckage managed to safely recover the "memory unit, which is the most important in the recorder".

The recorder was retrieved in "several stages", the committee said, and is currently being transferred to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria.

Once on shore, it will be handed over to the members of the committee who will unload and analyse the data.

The voice recorder should contain a record of the last 30 minutes in the cockpit, and is equipped to detect even loud breathing.

Experts say that it takes nearly 48 hours to retrieve data from the recorder, unless it is damaged.

Thursday's announcement comes a day after the committee said the vessel John Lethbridge, which is operated by the Deep Ocean Search that was contracted by the Egyptian government to join the search for the plane debris and flight recorders, has spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was en route to Cairo from Paris when it crashed between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.

Radar data showed that the aircraft had been cruising normally in clear skies before it turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right as it was plummeting from 38,000ft (11,582 metres) to 15,000 ft (4,572 metres) and then disappearing at about 10,000 feet (3,048 metres).

Leaked flight data indicated a sensor had detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the plane's cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

After the crash, Egypt's civil aviation minister Sherif Fathi said he believed terrorism was a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event.

However, no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet.

Since the crash, ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations have been searching the Mediterranean Sea north of Alexandria.

Only small pieces of wreckage and human remains were eventually recovered in a search that was narrowed down to a five-kilometre (three-mile) area of the Mediterranean.

Signals from the missing plane's black boxes were first detected two weeks ago by the French ship Laplace, which joined the search and which is equipped with three detectors designed to pick up the locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders from deep underwater.

In the case of the EgyptAir plane, its wreckage and black boxes were believed to be at a depth of some 3,000 metres (9,842ft). By comparison, the wreckage of the Titanic is lying at a depth of some 3,800 metres (12,500ft).

On Sunday, Egyptian investigators said time was running out in the search for the black boxes and that nearly two weeks remain before the batteries on them expire and they stop emitting signals.

The breakthrough came on Wednesday, with Egypt saying that John Lethbridge had spotted and obtained images from the wreckage.

The crash shocked Egypt, coming less than a year after a Russian airliner was downed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh in October, killing all 224 people on board.

A local affiliate of Islamic State claimed responsibility for bombing the aircraft and in November, Russia confirmed that an explosive device had brought down the aircraft.

The two disasters have unsettled authorities at the Cairo airport, where false alarms or bomb threats have caused lengthy delays to flights and at least one cancellation last week.

Security has also been considerably tightened at Egypt's 20-plus airports since the Russian plane crash, with passengers now subjected to roughly the same security measures in force at major international airports.
Detectives investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann were alerted two years ago to paedophile Clement Freud's connection to the case, but did nothing, one of his victims has revealed.

Vicky Hayes, who was groomed by Freud for years before he raped her as a teenager, was left with an "uneasy" feeling about Freud's motives after reading that he had befriended the McCann family and cooked for them at his holiday home in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

She said it was "odd" that Freud had sought out the McCanns, because he was a "private person" who did not enjoy the media spotlight when he was not performing. In her book, 'Madeleine', Kate McCann describes how Freud contacted the family two months after the three-year-old disappeared and invited them for dinner at his villa around 600 yards from their Ocean Club apartment. He kept in touch with them and played host a second time weeks later.

Ms Hayes said: "I read Kate McCann's book and was immediately upset and anxious that Clement Freud had invited the McCanns to his home.

"He was a private man, not the type to suddenly befriend a couple who had intense media attention. It really jarred with me, left me feeling very uneasy. He had a home in Praia da Luz, but why invite them and cook for them? Nobody else would have thought Freud capable of abuse and rape but he was capable of anything."

She reported her concerns to her local police force in Suffolk, and her son wrote to the Metropolitan Police to pass on his mother's account and concerns over Freud's connection to the McCanns. They received no response.

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Ms Hayes said: "I'm angry the police were dismissive of my information. I have a six-year-old granddaughter, a young girl like Madeline. If you have something you feel needs to be looked at, you have to tell someone. That's what I did. That's why I contacted the police, when I read Kate McCann's account, I wanted the detectives to know what I knew about Clement Freud.

"My purpose was for officers to investigate why he invited them. It needs investigating if Freud had any involvement or knew anything."

The Freud family say Clement was in the UK at the time of Madeleine's disappearance in May 2007.

Ana Duarte, a psychologist who has lived opposite the house for 20 years, says Freud used to arrive in early spring and would stay for several weeks.

She said: "I would see him come and go, but we didn't talk very much. He was a bit of a snob if I'm being honest.

"What I can't tell you is whether he was here when Madeleine disappeared. That I just can't remember."
Nohemi Gonzalez was among 130 people killed in the Paris attacks in November

The father of a young woman killed in the Paris massacre last November is suing Google, Facebook and Twitter, claiming the companies provided "material support" to extremists in violation of the law.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was among 130 people killed in the attacks, filed the suit in the US District Court in the Northern District of California.

The suit claims the companies "knowingly permitted" the Islamic State group, referred to in the complaint as Isis, to recruit members, raise money and spread "extremist propaganda" through their social media services.

The Gonzalez suit is similar to a case brought against Twitter in January by the widow of a contractor killed in an attack in Jordan. It includes numerous identical passages and screenshots, although the lawyers in the cases are different.

Facebook and Twitter said the Gonzalez lawsuit is without merit, and all three companies cited their policies against extremist material. Twitter said that it has "teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate".

Facebook said that if the company sees "evidence of a threat of imminent harm or a terror attack, we reach out to law enforcement".

Google said it would not comment on pending litigation, but noted that it has "clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users".

Under US law, internet companies are generally exempt from liability for the material users post on their networks. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act provides a legal "safe harbour" for companies like Twitter and Facebook. It says that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider".
Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU needs to engage with Russia

The European Union needs to engage with Russia despite the economic sanctions it has imposed on the country for annexing the Crimean peninsula, Jean-Claude Juncker said.

The European Commission president is the highest ranking EU official to visit Russia since the country grabbed control of Crimea in 2014, triggering US and EU sanctions.

After a two-year break which felt more like a boycott, European leaders and chief executives of top multinational companies are back at Russia's top economic gathering in St Petersburg in a sign of weariness over the sanctions.

Mr Juncker lashed out at his critics in Europe who argued that his visit to Russia could signal that the EU was ready to compromise on sanctions while Russia is still not willing to help advance the peace process in Ukraine.

"I take the view that we must talk with Russia, the leadership, its people: For some it must be a radical idea; for me it's common sense," he said in remarks which triggered applause.

Russia's annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its support for separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine landed President Vladimir Putin in international isolation.

The EU and US imposed economic sanctions and kicked Russia out of the G-8 group of nations.

Mr Juncker said the relationship between Russia and the EU is "not broken beyond repair. We need to mend it and I believe we can."

However, he made a point of confirming the EU's stance that it does not accept Russia's annexation of Crimea because it has "shaken the very principles of European security" and still views the Minsk peace accords for Ukraine as the only conditions for the sanctions to be lifted.

"Russia is party to the Minsk agreement," he said. "The next step is clear: the full implementation of the agreement, no more, not less, this is the only way to lift the economic sanctions."

Once a showcase of Russia's geopolitical weight and economic attractiveness, the St Petersburg Economic Forum - dubbed Russia's Davos - was a sore sight the past two years.

European leaders and heads of major companies who once had lucrative long-term projects in Russia were nowhere to be seen.

This year's gathering, however, signals what could be an emerging movement within the EU to ease the economic sanctions.

The measures did not only affect the Russian economy by closing long-term EU lending to Russian companies but also triggered a Russian import ban on meat, vegetable and dairy products from the European Union, dealing a heavy blow on agriculture-dependent nations such as Greece.
Police officers walk to pay homage to two murdered colleagues during a white march in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris (AP)

A man with links to radical Islam has been detained in southern France suspected of plotting possible attacks on American and Russian tourists and police, authorities said.

A judicial official said on Thursday that the man, detained in the medieval city of Carcassonne on Monday, is suspected of terrorism links and remains under questioning.

The official said the man told investigators he wanted to attack tourists and later police.

A French security official called it a routine matter as police and intelligence services seek to avert a repeat of deadly IS attacks on France last year.

The arrest came on the day an extremist claiming allegiance to IS stabbed two police officials to death in a Paris suburb.

Hundreds of police, friends and neighbours marched silently on Thursday to honour the victims, police commander Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his companion, police administrator Jessica Schneider.

Their faces solemn and lips closed, the crowd marched from Mantes-la-Jolie, where Ms Schneider worked, to Magnanville, where she and Mr Salvaing were stabbed at their home on Monday night.

Their three-year-old son survived the attack, which rattled France's leadership as the country is on high alert for new extremist violence.

Attacker Larossi Abballa was killed in a police raid. Three people with links to Abballa are in custody and being questioned by anti-terrorism investigators.

French police have described growing fear after multiple attacks targeting security officers.
Thai police have entered a sprawling Buddhist temple complex, wading through thousands of devotees camped on the grounds to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzling 14 million US dollars (10 million).

The operation at Wat Dhammakaya, a monastery north of Bangkok, was broadcast live on TV in a dramatic climax to a months-old stand-off.

Phra Dhammachyao, accused of money laundering and links to embezzlement of funds at a now defunct credit union, has rejected police demands to report for questioning. He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three summonses and an arrest warrant. He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he is too ill to report for questioning.

It is the latest in several scandals in recent years that have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand.

Police told reporters at a press conference in front of the temple that the next step was for the country's highest investigative authority to serve search and arrest warrants inside the temple.

"We went inside the temple to negotiate," said police Major Suriya Singhakamol, the deputy director-general of the Department of Special Investigations. "Today's operation must be carried out in an orderly manner, nobody should be injured, and everything should be done according to the law. As you can see, officers are not carrying weapons."

Outside Thailand it may seem odd that a monk should be able to defy law enforcement officials so brazenly, but a law which forbids a monk in his robes from being arrested for fear it would mar the sanctity of the clergy has repeatedly put police in an awkward position. Authorities are also reluctant to force a showdown with his thousands of supporters, fearing violence.

Buddhism, the national religion, is one of three core pillars of Thai society along with the monarchy and nationhood. Monks occupy a privileged position and are granted many concessions, including not paying taxes and being exempt from arrest until they are defrocked.

This was reflected in the police operation - officers paused the raid to allow the monks to eat their once-a-day meal at 11am.

"The temple is happy to co-operate to allow the police to operate inside the temple as it is written in the warrant," Phra Sanitwong Wuttiwangso, a spokesman for the temple, said. "We have been cooperating with the officials."

The main gates to the temple, a futuristic construction resembling a golden UFO-like dome, were blocked with shuttle buses brought in by the monk's followers. Police still managed to go in as thousands of devotees held up signs condemning the police for what the devotees say is a politically motivated investigation.

The leader of the religious sect has a cult-like following, the largest in Thailand. He first got into trouble two years ago when it became known that the former head of the Klongchan Credit Union Co-operative, a Dhammakaya devotee, had donated such large sums to the temple that it sent his business into insolvency.

The official was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Members of the public watch the laying of wreaths at the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto, South Africa (AP)

South Africans have commemorated the 40th anniversary of a pivotal moment in the anti-apartheid struggle - a 1976 black student uprising in the Soweto area of Johannesburg.

The event led to a deadly crackdown but launched a new phase of opposition to white minority rule.

Thousands danced and sang at a stadium in Soweto where President Jacob Zuma later spoke of the students gunned down by apartheid-era security forces.

He listed democratic advances in South Africa since the first all-race elections in 1994 but lamented the violence of some students today who have burned school buildings in protests over high fees and other grievances.

"We should remember that not a single school was burned during the June 16 1976 student uprising," Mr Zuma said.

The uprising started as a student protest in Soweto against being forced to study in Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the white rulers who designed the system of racial oppression known as apartheid.

The protests spread to other areas in South Africa, becoming a flashpoint for anger at a system that denied adequate education, the right to vote and other basic rights to the country's black majority.

Hundreds are estimated to have died in the government crackdown that followed.

The bloodshed is epitomised by a photograph of a dying student, Hector Pieterson.

The image of his limp body being carried by another teenager was seen around the world and galvanised international efforts to end South Africa's racial segregation, though apartheid would linger for nearly two more decades.

June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa.

The country today is a leading economy in Africa and has enjoyed largely peaceful elections in the past two decades.

However, many people are frustrated at the lack of economic opportunities and effective education that they see as necessary to secure the freedom they were promised when Nelson Mandela became the country's first black president in 1994.

Lesedi Mashinini, a niece of a student leader during the 1976 uprising, spoke at the Soweto stadium on Thursday and paid tribute to the activists who died.

She appealed to today's youth to refrain from violence, reported the African News Agency, a South African media outlet.

"The only person who can liberate you is yourself," she said. "No to drugs and burning of schools."
France has sentenced three Russian fans to prison and plans to deport 20 others next week for their role in the violence in Marseille that marred Russia's Euro 2016 opening match against England.

Sporadic violence has since moved to northern France, where Russia played Slovakia on Wednesday and England played Wales on Thursday - but nothing as bad as the violence witnessed last week in the south.

Among the three Russians given prison terms is Alexei Erunov, the director for fan relations at leading Russian club Lokomotiv Moscow. He was sentenced to two years.

Part of the evidence against Erunov was footage filmed by another Russian fan and posted online.

Erunov was seen shouting and gesturing on the video, which also showed acts of violence. He denied playing any role in the violence.

Dynamo Moscow fan Nikolai Morozov received a 12-month sentence and Sergei Gorbachev, the director of a construction company in the central Russian city of Tula, received 18 months.

All three also face a two-year ban from France upon release.

The sentences were passed on the same day that French officials announced 20 more Russian fans would be deported because of what regional prefect Stephane Bouillon called "their participation in skirmishes linked to the England-Russia game".

The 20 were detained alongside the three who were tried on Thursday and included Alexander Shprygin, president of the All-Russian Fans' Union, who has a role in Russian football's governing body and sits on a commission overseeing Moscow's preparations for hosting the 2018 World Cup.

Mr Shprygin said that Russian fans had been unfairly victimised by French authorities.

"We consider (the deportations) a political decision," he said, insisting that none of the 20 had been involved in the violence.

"We've filed an appeal against our removal. We're waiting for the consul and for lawyers," he said, adding that the fans had given phone records to the police indicating that they were not present for the violence around last week's game.

The men were among 43 Russian fans detained on Tuesday after their bus was stopped by French police near the town of Mandelieu in a check for hooligans.

Russian officials have protested against the detention and have criticised French policing.

The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the French ambassador in Moscow on Wednesday and warned that the detentions could damage French-Russian relations.

Uefa has already told Russian football authorities that their team could be kicked out of Euro 2016 if there is a repeat of the violence that surrounded its match last Saturday against England.

Of particular concern to Europe's governing body is that Russian fans stormed a section of English fans inside the stadium.

English football's governing body has also been warned about the behaviour of its fans but the team's participation in the competition was not under immediate threat on Thursday, despite a fresh outbreak of fan violence in the northern French city of Lille that required riot police to deploy tear gas.

Although English fans in Lille were involved in further unrest on Wednesday night, Uefa has said there are no plans for an emergency meeting of its executive committee to discuss any further warning or sanctions against the English Football Association.

Earlier this week, Uefa's leadership ruled that England - along with Russia - faced potential disqualification if there was a repeat of the violence that surrounded their match in Marseille.

"Uefa regrets the skirmishes which occurred in Lille last night," European football's governing body said in a statement on Thursday.

"Police forces made several arrests and were quick to restore order and keep the situation under control."

The trouble in Lille on Wednesday did not reach the levels of Marseille where English fans were involved in three days of occasionally vicious fighting with Russians.

Local authorities said police made 37 arrests and detained 15 people in custody.

The French interior ministry also disclosed details of the policing operation throughout the first week of Euro 2016, saying 323 people had been detained, 196 jailed, eight convicted and 24 expelled from the country.
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After a respected accreditation agency told the Pickens County school board to change the way it conducts business, parents worried the district would lose accreditation. On Monday, they drafted a petition to remove the school board members.

The school board has until April 15 to meet the recommendations AdvancEd set out, and then its accreditation will be reviewed again.

In 2008, the Clayton County School District in Georgia lost its accreditation from the same agency (at the time it was called the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools).

That district received a warning similar to those the Pickens County School District received, but did not meet all of the recommendations the agency made. It was the second time in 40 years an entire district lost accreditation.

An Atlanta Journal Constitution story details what happened after:

"That led thousands of parents to pull their children out of county schools and cost Clayton at least $20 million in state education dollars."

The district was re-accredited in 2009, and received a second warning in 2012.

Read the full story here.

Still wondering what accreditation actually means? The U.S. Education Department explains:

"Schools that possess accreditation and state approval by authorities recognized at the state level are considered to be recognized schools in the U.S. education system." (full document here)

So what's the problem with getting accredited by the state, rather than an independent, approved agency (such as AdvancEd)? According to U.S.ED:

"...state approval is not the same as academic or professional accreditation, and that institutions approved to operate by a state, but that lack accreditation by a recognized agency, may not be recognized in other states and their degrees and credits may not be accepted. Only accreditation by a recognized agency assures national recognition." (full document here)
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By Ray Chandler, Special to Independent Mail

WALHALLA  A third-degree assault and battery charge was dropped for a second time against former Walhalla police officer Zachary Covington on Thursday.

Covington is the son of Seneca Police Chief John Covington and the brother of Adam Covington, a former Seneca police officer who has pleaded guilty to the theft of confiscated narcotics.

Covington was charged in October by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division following allegations that he beat and slammed to the ground a handcuffed suspect, Matthew Lowell, during an arrest following an altercation at a Walhalla apartment complex.

Westminster Magistrate Will Derrick dismissed the charge on the motion of Covington's attorney, Gordon Senerius, after the alleged victim Lowell did not show up for the scheduled 10 a.m. trial.

"(Lowell) didn't show up and his testimony was crucial for my client to get a fair trial," Senarius said.

The 10th Circuit Solicitor's Office has 10 days in which to file any appeal to reinstate the charges.

Assistant Solicitor Blair Stoudemire said he was unsure whether the Solicitor's Office would file to reopen the case.

"We will look into the case and see if there are avenues to appeal," Stoudemire said.

Stoudemire said that the alleged victim Lowell had been informed of the trial date and time.

Senerius said he hoped Thursday's dismissal of the charges would end the case and that the charge should never have been filed.

"I've looked at the video, and based on what I saw, I wouldn't have pursued it," he said.

The video of the incident derived from a dashboard camera was examined by SLED agents during the investigation of the case.

Such cases with charges based on questionable evidence, Senerius said, make law enforcement work tougher on all officers.

"I wouldn't want to be a police officer these days," he said. "You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't."

Should the charges not be reinstated, according to Senerius, all records of the charge will be expunged from Covington's record.

The charge was dismissed by Judge Derrick for the first time in February, when neither Lowell nor anyone from the Solicitor's Office showed up for the scheduled hearing.

The charge was reinstated approximately a week later at the request of the Solicitor's Office.

The SLED investigation that resulted in the charge was requested by Chief Ronald Wilbanks of the Walhalla Police Department after another officer reported the alleged beating incident during Lowell's arrest.

Covington was subsequently fired from the department.
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By Staff Reports, newsroom@independentmail.com

Engineered Plastic Components, a manufacturer of plastic injection molded products, has chosen Anderson County to be the site of its new operations.

The $5.3 million investment is expected to create 43 jobs, according to a South Carolina Department of Commerce statement released Wednesday.

EPC designs, engineers and manufactures thermoplastic products. Founded in 1994, the company has expanded to include more than 200 injection molding machines across 15 manufacturing facilities in the United States and Mexico.

The company will move its new operations into an existing building at 105 Clemson Research Boulevard in Anderson, according to the Commerce Department statement.

Visit epcmfg.com/employment.html for more information about the company or the new positions.
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By Independent Mail

A grand opening for Coca-Cola's new regional sales and distribution center in northern Anderson County is scheduled for next week.

The $13.5 million, 150,000-square-foot facility on Highway 86 near Piedmont will relocate 147 jobs to the county.

It will generate an average of $168,000 a year in property taxes, Anderson County Economic Development Director Burris Nelson said last year when the project was announced.

The company announced in March 2015 that it would close its distribution center in Mauldin and build the new one on a 36-acre campus near Piedmont.

"Coke Consolidated has a rich history in South Carolina and we are excited and proud to expand our commitment to our customers here," said Kimberly Kuo, vice president for public affairs, in a news release.

She described the facility as "state-of-the-art." It includes new audio/visual equipment and a large training room in addition to the administrative and distribution operations.

Charlotte-based Coca-Cola Consolidated is the nation's largest independent Coke bottler. It formally moved operations to the site in late spring.

The new facility will coordinate sales and distribution of Coca-Cola products throughout Anderson, Pickens, Oconee, Greenville, Greenwood, Abbeville, and McCormick counties in South Carolina, as well as the cities of Carnesville, Hartwell and Lavonia in Georgia.

Coke officials plan to operate 40 delivery routes daily, sending an estimated 8.5 million cases each year.

The ribbon-cutting is scheduled for June 23.

Follow Abe Hardesty on Twitter @abe_hardesty
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By Mary Troyan, USA Today Network

WASHINGTON  South Carolina's senators marked the anniversary of last year's Charleston church shooting with stirring speeches Thursday that honored the nine victims and recognized the grace and forgiveness shown by their families.

"We were all in a state of shock," Sen. Lindsey Graham said of the June 17, 2015, tragedy at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. "And what woke us up was the way the families behaved ... when they channeled their grief into something constructive."

Within hours of Dylann Roof's arrest in the shootings, the family members publicly offered the suspect their forgiveness.

"They reminded us of what humanity is all about," Graham said.

Sen. Tim Scott connected the anniversary of the Charleston tragedy with last weekend's shooting in Florida, where a gunman killed 49 people inside a nightclub in Orlando.

"As Orlando mourns and Charleston remembers ... we can show how love overcame hate," Scott said in his remarks on the floor.

Graham and Scott made their comments after the day's final votes. Most other senators were gone, but members of the public lined the gallery, CSPAN broadcast the comments live, and the Republicans' statements will be inserted into the Congressional Record for posterity.

"The world will also see this from Charleston  that you cannot destroy love with hate, you cannot kill the spirit," Scott said.

Roof, 22, of Columbia, S.C., is scheduled for trial in November. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Roof, who is white, is charged with killing nine parishioners of the historic black church during an evening Bible study.

"He said he did it to start a race war," Graham said. "Well, he failed miserably."

Scott, one of two African-American members of the U.S. Senate, said the removal of the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds in Columbia was an important development after the Charleston shooting, but "the actions and the words of the people across Charleston and South Carolina are the most enduring."

Graham commended the people of Charleston for not taking to the streets in anger, and focusing instead on love and forgiveness.

The victims' families "charted a path for the rest of us and we were smart enough to follow their lead," he said.

Scott said that after he heard about the shooting the same night it happened, he texted his friend, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was pastor at the church known as Mother Emmanuel. He sent the text at 10:31 p.m., but Pinckney was already dead.

"It was met with silence. Silence that is still deafening, silence that I will never forget," Scott said.

Contact Mary Troyan at mtroyan@usatoday.com
Kristina Crump is the latest recipient of a Habitat for Humanity Cabarrus County home and received a Bible from Jazmin Caldwell during a dedication ceremony at Crumps new home. Crump is a Habitat for Humanity Cabarrus County participant and with her sweat equity of working on other participants homes, she will be paying a zero percent mortgage on a 30 year loan to pay the $91,000 for her new Habitat for Humanity home. Crumps home has three bedrooms and two bathrooms to accommodate Crump, who is a single mother, with three children.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between India and the U.S. was signed in New Delhi on June 2, 2016 to enhance cooperation in energy security, clean energy, and climate change.

The deal aimed to forge a US$1 billion partnership for the Indian renewable energy sector, boosting global investor interest.

A partnership with the U.S. could be key to Indias efforts in successfully tackling climate change, building sustainable urban infrastructure, and eliminating the countrys power shortages.

The deal enshrined in the MoU will be achieved through two investment channels, namely U.S.-India Clean Energy Finance (USICEF) and the U.S.-India Catalytic Solar Finance Program (USICSFP).

Both the channels primarily target the development of off-grid solar projects and rural electrification.

USICEF will raise about US$20 million, in the initial phase, in coordination with the Indian government, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which is the U.S. governments development finance institution, as well as other agencies.

USICSFP will pump in about US$40 million targeting Indias rooftop solar program under the National Solar Mission.

Sources estimate that through OPICs participation, the Indian solar program could leverage about US$400 million.

Cumulatively, the investment mechanisms will generate capital of US$1 billion from several U.S., Indian, and global agencies for the solar power sector.

These in turn will facilitate flexible and innovative financing solutions to bring down the cost of solar power in India, and promote entrepreneurship in the sector.

Priority areas highlighted in the MoU

The Indian Ministry of Power has explained the pivot behind the MoU as not being a one-time funding strategy but rather an alliance to enable healthy capital flows tackling specific priority areas.

The following priority areas are highlighted in the MoU:

U.S.-India partnership for Smart Cities India Mission;

Greening the grid;

Promoting Energy Access through Clean Energy (PEACE) expansion;

Energy efficiency including space cooling;

Renewable energy;

Energy security;

Clean energy finance;

U.S-India partnership for climate resilience;

Air quality;

Forestry, landscapes, and REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation);

Fellowships; and,

Accelerating innovation on clean energy and climate change.

Implications for Indias solar power sector

The MoU between the U.S. and India comes at an important juncture. The Indian government has set itself an ambitious target of generating 100,000 MW by 2022 even as the total installed solar power capacity stands at a mere 7,564 MW (as of May 31, 2016).

In fact, by 2022, it is proposed that 60,000 MW will be generated through grid-connected projects and 40,000 MW through rooftop and off-grid solar projects.

Nevertheless, Indias pro-renewables mindset is showcased in the UN Environment Programmes (UNEP) Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2016 report.

The report puts India among the top ten countries investing in renewable energy  having increased its commitment by 22 percent to US$10.2 billion in 2015. Indias performance also saw a leap in utility-scale solar financing by 75 percent to US$4.6 billion in 2015.

The increased bilateral engagement with the U.S., therefore, assumes importance as it will facilitate greater innovation through research and development, technology transfer, and the deployment of clean energy technologies.

These hold critical to the implementation of growth targets.

Challenges facing Indias solar power sector

Due to its lower tariffs, the central government earlier made it mandatory for state power utilities to buy a certain amount of solar energy from independent power producers (IPPs).

However, many clean energy firms have recently reported non-payment of bills for as many as 10 months, racking up deficits of US$360 million. This exposes the liability gaps in the sector and lack of oversight.

Further, while India represents a huge market with robust business potential, delays in grid evacuation and land acquisition are major concerns for investors and private players as they can derail returns on a project.

Without addressing these deficiencies, the government cannot hope to sustain investor interest or attract sufficient private sector participation.

Moreover, even as India has embarked upon an ambitious green energy growth strategy, it cannot take root without having the fundamental infrastructure in place. Often, government plans and projections have superseded the rate of implementation on the ground.

Given the solar power capacity target alone, progress has been at best slow and measured. India needs both technology investments and financial viability if it wants to jump growth in its renewable energy sector, develop domestic manufacturing capabilities, and fulfill energy needs.

In this respect, the increased partnership with the U.S. benefits Indias case. However, regulatory oversight, ease of doing business, and transparency remain key deciders.
'Slumdog Millionaire' beauty Freida Pinto is all set to make her voice heard this time in Liberia, Morocco and Spain with none other than the First Lady Michelle Obama!

Freida along with the First Lady, her daughters Sasha and Malia, their grandmother Marian Robinson, will travel to Liberia, Morocco and Spain at the end of June and into early July as part of the "Let Girls Learn initiative".

Starting with Liberia, Pinto and Obama will take part in a discussion which will cover the educational barriers girls face in the country. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will meet with Pinto and the First Lady. Next, in Morocco, Meryl Streep will be seen joining in along with Obama and Pinto to discuss the challenges women in the African country deal with on a regular basis.

For the records, "Let Girls Learn" is a government initiative aimed at helping girls obtain a quality education. The focus of the trip which includes Monrovia, Marrakesh and Madrid - is for them to speak to young girls about the importance of education and staying in school.


Give us an overview on the Financials?

Discuss the business highlights for the quarter?

What is the size and growth rate of air cooler market in India? What is the market share of Symphony Ltd?

Brief us about the launch of World's first air cooler range with multi-stage air purification system?

What will be your focus area, going forward?

Talk about your target growth for FY17?

What percentage of revenues comes from exports?

Can you share your future plans?

over 26 years of experience in finance and accounts. Heads the companys financial and commercial functions and looks after overall corporate affairs, strategy, finance, M.I.S., treasury etc. He has around 26 years of experience in varied corporate functions. He has been with the Company since 1993. He also serves as a Member of the Share Transfer & Investor Grievance Committee and the Audit Committee.focuses on innovative design to create better and eco-friendly products for domestic and industrial customers in 60 countries across the globe. At Symphony, design-driven innovation and green engineering is a sustainable competitive advantage. Company delivers market-leading products with engineering and design innovation, improved energy conservation, distinctive styling and customer-centric design. Established in 1988, Symphony leverages a unique and successful asset-light business model for its residential coolers in India and in-house lean manufacturing for its industrial coolers in Mexico to achieve sustainable and profitable growth. Headquartered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, Symphony is a global company committed to develop sustainable and responsible products.Replying toof, Nrupesh Shah says "Symphony will focus to build on its leadership position in residential coolers through continuous product development and innovations."We have registered a 41% rise in consolidated net profit at Rs. 118.38 crore for the nine months ended on March 31, 2016, as against Rs. 83.73 crore in the corresponding period, last year.Consolidated net sales increased to Rs. 444.36 crore for the nine months ended on March 31, 2016 as against Rs. 374.96 crore in the corresponding period last year, registering 19% growth.The company has paid interim dividend of 1,250% i.e. Rs.25/-(1st interim of Rs. 5/- & 2nd interim of Rs. 20/- including one-time special dividend of Rs. 10/-) per equity share of Rs. 2/- each during the year.EBITDA margin for nine months ended on March 31, 2016 stood at 34% and EPS was at Rs. 33.84.The company has successfully acquired MKE (Munters Keruilai Air Treatment Equipment (Gungdong) Co. Ltd., China, a leading Chinese air cooler company.EBIDTA margin is up from 31.7% to 34.1% and PAT margin is up from 21.0% to 24.7% for the nine months ended on March 31, 2016 v/s corresponding period of 2014-15 on consolidated basis.The EBIDTA and PAT margin have improved further, on account of softening of commodity prices, operational efficiency and continuous value engineering.Air cooler market in India is estimated to be around Rs. 3,000 crore and is growing at 15-20% per annum. Symphony Ltd. is the market leader in the Indian air cooler industry and commands 50% market share in value terms, among organized players. The domestic market for residential air-coolers, both organized and unorganized, is around 6.5 million units. Unorganized segment accounts for 80% of volume with 4.8 million units while organized air-cooler market is around 1.5 million units. There are 160 million plus households in India that have only fans and no other cooling devices.We have launched Worlds first air cooler range with multi-stage air purification system that comes with a set of filters that work together, to keep the air and water pollutants away and deliver cool and pure air. Symphony Ltd has applied to patent this revolutionary technology and will integrate some of its existing and new coolers with i  PURE technology. i  PURE technology coolers are equipped with advanced features, high quality PM2.5 wash filter pads and other filters which remove smell, dust and allergy particles.We are focusing on innovative design to create better and eco-friendly products for domestic and industrial customers in 60 countries, across the globe. At Symphony, design-driven innovation and green engineering is a sustainable competitive advantage.We would like to grow more in each country where we are present and expand to new ones. At Symphony, the strategy has been One Product - Many Markets. Over the years this strategy has paid off well. The company today, is worlds largest air cooler company and a truly Indian multinational, selling its air coolers under its own brand name in over 60 countries.As of now there are no plans to diversify into any other products. Symphony will focus to build on its leadership position in residential coolers, through continuous product development and innovations.In the last 5 years, we have managed strong revenue & PAT CAGR of over 25%. Going forward also, we expect similar growth to continue from domestic air cooler markets as well as exports to over 60 countries.Further business verticals such as industrial coolers and packaged coolers too will contribute significantly to companys growth in the coming years.For the nine months and year ended March 2016, company reported sales of Rs. 75.99 crore (17%) from the overseas business, out of the total sales of Rs. 444.36 crore.The company expects increasing penetration of residential air coolers, shift from unorganized to organized sector, increasing awareness for cooling solutions for industrial & commercial establishments and packaged coolers to drive the growth, in the years to come.Industrial cooling solution is also slowly gaining importance as corporate are looking to create a congenial working environment for their shop floor teams. Large and small factories are the most pertinent examples, as corporate can ill-afford centralized air conditioning due to open-air areas as well as prohibitive capital and operating costs. Further, air conditioning in most of such cases is non-viable obviously because of a very high capital cost and also because of very high recurring cost and in that case, air cooling becomes a viable option.Symphony Ltd is the first and only organised player to enter in to this segment, has robust product portfolio and plans to excel in this segment. Industrial cooling segment has the potential to outpace the residential cooling segment. So, what we did in home air coolers in the past two decades, we plan to do the same in the industrial and commercial air coolers space and create a completely new category here. Affordability and low maintenance cost of industrial air coolers, are also likely to play a big role in coming years.
Non -Life Insurance Sector Buoyant Share in the Insurance Industry Albania : Ken Research

The insurance industry growth is immensely hinged on motor third-party liability insurance in Albania

The Albania insurance industry will support private agriculture insurance

Ken Research announced its latest publication on, The Insurance Industry in Albania, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2019, which provides a detailed analysis of the insurance industry in Albania. Category-wise coverage of different segments in the industry is also included in the report. It analyzes the various distribution channels in Albania. The report enables the reader to interpret future outlook on how the market will shape up by the end of this decade.



The communist era in Albania hindered the growth of the insurance sector for more than 50 years. This led the sector behind and underdeveloped compared with other European countries with gross written premium of near 0.66 percent of GDP. With insurance consumption of Euro 20 per capita, the sector remains small. There were 11 companies in the insurance market by the end of 2012. The real growth of insurance premium was 3.0% from 2009 to 2012, tumbling below the cumulative GDP growth over the same period despite a low market penetration rate. The share of life insurance was very low accounting for one tenth share of the total insurance industry in the country. The largest share of the total non-life premium was of motor third-party liability insurance. The industry showed a CAGR of 7.6% during 2010-2014.



The insurance sector has relatively low importance in the countrys financial system. In 2014, the banking system made approximately 91.7% of the financial system while the insurance industry made only 1.8% of GDP. To assist the Albanian Financial Supervisory Authority (AFSA) in implementing legal and regulatory reforms to enhance the insurance industrys supervision and regulation, the World Bank initiated the Albania Insurance Market Reform in 2014. The private agriculture insurance is expected to be carried by an increase in the number of agriculture and related businesses. The countrys population decreased from 3.06 million in 2001 to 2.88 million in 2016 due to increased emigration and falling fertility rate which further decreases insurance incentive, according to Ken Research Analyst.



Global Insurance Industry



The global insurance industry is forecasted to show growth of 6.3 percent in the coming years. Health insurance sector has shown tremendous growth over past years and continue to remain the major insurance sector at the global market. The macroeconomic environment around the world shows significant improvement in the insurance market i.e. increasing GDP in many countries, expansion of financial resources of middle class and high net worth population. These boost the need for property casualty and life annuity insurance companies. The key challenges for the insurance are increasing competition, tight margin profits and soft pricing conditions. Technological solutions are used by the insurers to improve sales, distribution and customer service ,according to Ken Research Analyst.



Key Topics Covered in the Report:
Birla Cotsyn (India) Limited, BLS International Services Limited, GEI Industrial Systems Limited, Global Offshore Services Limited, Goenka Diamond and Jewels Limited,Impex Ferro Tech Limited, KSS Limited, Malwa Cotton Spg. Mills Limited,MBL Infrastructures Limited, Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals Limited, Paras Petrofils Limited, Pincon Spirit Limited, Prakash Steelage Limited, Rainbow Papers Limited, Raisaheb Reckhchand Mohota Spinning & Weaving Mills Limited, Raj Rayon Industries Limited, Rei Agro Limited, Salona Cotspin Limited, Sanghvi Forging and Engineering Limited, Visesh Infotecnics were some of the notable stocks to record new 52-week low during the day.Finally, the BSE Sensex ended with a loss of 201 points at 26,525. The BSE Sensex opened at 26,686 touched an intra-day high of 26,686.03 and low of 26,315.The NSE Nifty closed with a loss of 66 points at 8,141. The NSE Nifty opened at 8,181 hitting a high of 8,180.65 and low of 8,074.
Bharti Airtel, countrys largest telco, announced a new initiative Open Network under Project Leap, its national network transformation initiative.In another industry first initiative, Airtel has opened up its entire mobile network information to its customers through an interactive online interface. The new interface will display Airtels mobile network coverage/signal strength across India in addition to network site deployment status.Using a simple colour scheme, the interface will allow customers to check if the Airtel mobile network in an area is excellent, good, moderate or non-existent, along with the status of corresponding sites serving the area - existing, required, being upgraded or forcibly shut down. The interface uses geospatial tools and other technologies for accurate reporting of network coverage.The new interface will also allow customers to report their network related issues in an easy fashion.In addition, customers can also contact the Airtel Call Centre or walk into any of the Airtel Flagship Stores across the country to report their network related issues. All Airtel Call Centres and Flagship Stores have been specially equipped with solutions based on the new interface to respond to network related issues.Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel said, Open Network is a paradigm shift in the way we engage with our customers. With this initiative, we are establishing complete transparency with regards to our mobile network and opening ourselves to customer scrutiny and feedback. For us, the network experience is paramount and Airtel customers can now take charge of network issues and be a part of the solution, rather than waiting for it to happen. Today, getting permissions to put up a network site is perhaps the biggest challenge in delivering a seamless experience to customers. We hope customers will actively come forward and help us make our network better.Airtel is also deploying a range of innovative technology solutions including small cells, indoor solutions, wi-fi hotspots and carrier aggregation technologies to improve network experience inside buildings. Over the next three years, the Company plans to deploy over 1, 00,000 such solutions.Airtel is swapping its legacy networks and base stations with smaller, more compact and efficient technologies that will significantly improve customer experience. All these modem base stations will use a single radio access network to manage multiple spectrum bands.The Company is creating more network capacity through acquisition of additional spectrum and deployment of fiber. Airtel plans to cumulatively deploy more than 550,000 Kms of domestic & international fiber in order to drive down latency, improve customer experience and serve the growing demand of data services for years to come.During Financial Year ended March 2016, Airtel invested over INR 15,000 crores across India towards deployment of over 88,000 sites. This is the largest network deployment anywhere in the world outside of China.Recently, in an industry first, Airtel announced a 25% more stringent voluntary benchmark of 1.5% for mobile call drops versus the current TRAI prescribed norm of 2% under the Quality of Service regulations.Based on the calculation of the call drop rate during network busy hour on a monthly average, any amount calculated for exceeding the 1.5% voluntary benchmark, subject to a maximum of INR 100 crores per annum, will be contributed by Airtel towards the education of underprivileged children in rural areas.In November 2015, Airtel commenced the implementation of its network transfo1mation program - Project Leap. With a national investment of Rs. 60,000 crores over the next three years, Airtels Project Leap is a strategic company initiative aimed at perceptibly improving its network quality and delivering the best customer experience.Starting tomorrow, the Company is rolling out a 360 degree advertising campaign around the Open Network initiative. The path-breaking campaign from Taproot-Dentsu takes a bold approach to communicating the initiative with a media-mix of TV, Print, Outdoor and Digital.
State Bank of Mysore hit 20% uppercircuit at Rs.657 after Union Cabinet approved the takeover by State Bank of India (SBI) of several subsidiaries, according to reports.Indian Hotels rallied 2.5% to Rs.130.60 on the BSE amid reports that foreign brokerage house - Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock to overweight from underweight earlier. Morgan Stanley almost doubled the target price for the stock to Rs.160 from Rs.83 earlier.Anjani Portland Cement plunged 7.8% to Rs.150 on BSE. The company said in a notice to BSE that its board approved allotment of 6.9 million shares at Rs.108.75 a shares via rights issue.Maruti Suzuki dropped 3% to Rs.4,077. The stock is top Nifty loser. A strong yen adversely impacts Maruti Suzuki India's operating profit margin. Japanese yen gains beyond 105/$ for first time since Sept 2014 after Bank of Japan kept policy unchanged.Deccan Cements Ltd rose 3.2% to Rs.854 after the company said in a notice to BSE that ICRA has upgraded the rating of the company to A from BBB+ citing improvement in operational and financial performance of the company in fiscal year 2016.TVS Motor trading marginlly lower at Rs.292 on BSE. The company is aiming to increase the share of its best selling scooter model Jupiter to 12% in the highly competitive 110 cc scooter segment in 2016.3I Infotech Ltd surged 12% to Rs.5.04 on BSE. The company said corporate debt restructuring panel approved debt restructuring scheme. The lenders approved converting 40% debt in to equity shares.Jindal Stainless rose 6.9% to Rs.39.50 on the BSE. The company experienced a spurt in volumes by more than 7.76 times.Lux Industries climbed 3.6% after the company said that 15 June 2016 is the commercial operation date (COD) of its Dankuni plant near Kolkata, West Bengal.Crompton Greaves slipped 1% to Rs.74. The company is planning to sell its global automation business, ZIV, at a valuation of $112 million (Rs 754 crore) by September, according to reports.Inox Leisure jumped 2% to Rs.227 on BSE. The company announced an association with Paytm, to sell movie tickets to moviegoers.Pricol gained 2% to Rs.78.55.The company has sold entire shareholding of Integral Investment for a consideration of Rs.27.84 mn.Petrol price was raised by Rs 0.05 a litre at Delhi (including state levies) with corresponding price revision in other states. With this change, the price of Petrol in Delhi will increased to Rs 65.65 a litre. HPCL dipped 1% to Rs.909. BPCL and IOC down 0.5% each.Tata Power Company trading marginally down 0.20% to Rs.76.35 after the company announced that Tata Power Renewable Energy (TPREL), a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, successfully issued and allotted guaranteed, unsecured, non-cumulative, redeemable, taxable, listed, rated non-convertible debentures of Rs 575 crore on private placement basis.Andrew Yule climbed 5.6% to Rs.24. The company has consider the Allotment of 1,24,62,500 Equity Shares of Rs. 2/- each of the Company in favour of Bank of Baroda, against conversion of Working Capital Term Loan availed of by the Company, as approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs.Spice Mobility rallied 5% to Rs. 15.39. The board of directors of the company has approved the proposal for acquisition of 49% stake by Digitone in Spice Online.
Social media has emerged as an important route for hiring fresh talent by the corporates which use the micro-blogging sites for background checks as also judging the overall persona of the candidates with maximum of the HR personnel depending on the LinkedIn as a recruitment tool, an ASSOCHAM survey has noted.

It noted that while 68 per cent of the HR managers looked into LinkedIn and/or Facebook or Twitter to have an idea about the candidates, the social media is also being used by the job hunters who are becoming conscious about their posts, pictures, academic and professional achievements posted online, reveals the ASSOCHAM survey.

According to the survey, LinkedIn is the top dog for social recruitment. The findings of ASSOCHAM survey reveals that a large number of corporates using social media for recruitment based on the responses received from human resource officials representing more than 650 small, medium and large businesses from the cities like Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Pune, Dehradun etc.

The survey majorly focused on broad sectors such as BPO, IT/ITes sector, financial and other services, construction, real estate, hospitality, tourism, FMCG and infrastructure, media & advertising, manufacturing and textiles, logistics, transport operators etc.

About 68% of the human resource officials of various companies are using platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for hiring through social media sites and other digital mediums to find and hire new talent, reveals the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) latest survey. It reveals that social media has also been a valuable tool for recruiters and job seekers.

With employers increasingly using social media to recruit, it is a great medium for people looking for promotion or a new job to enhance their career, reveals the majority of the respondents.

The study found that as many 80-85 per cent among the high level job seekers and 40-45 percent among the low level job hunters are using some online medium for selling their professional and academic achievements in the corporate world, highlights the survey.

The Facebook is used as a tool to judge the behaviour and intellect of the candidate. An experienced HR personnel can make out from the kind of posts on the Facebook the level of intellect of the candidate. Besides, other behaviour traits such as the attitude towards society, women in particular, whether extrovert or introvert are easy to judge by a good review of the Facebook whereas the LinkedIn medium is more organised and cannot be taken as inadvertent", the ASSOCHAM survey observed.

Even though the social medium is a good first reference point, it cannot be fully relied upon by the HR managers, since there are chances of misrepresentation of the facts. There is no alternative to the internal checks and balance tools and further verification. After all, human resource is what makes or breaks the organisation," ASSOCHAM Secretary General Mr. D S Rawat said.

The increased use of technology, especially advances in social media related technologies, has been relentless. Social media, for one thing, helps individuals reach out and build their job search network. They can find people in targeted companies and connect with those who can help, reveals the paper.

One of the best aspects of LinkedIn is that the site gives users the opportunity to highlight their achievements by uploading work samples to their profile pages and adding "rich media" files, such as blog posts, videos and links to websites featuring their work, reveals the majority of the respondents.
Roche Diagnostics India, market leader of the Indian in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) industry and King Georges Medical University, Lucknow came together on the occasion of World Blood Donors Day to advocate the need for Nucleic Acid Amplification Technology (NAT) for safe blood access in UP.Blood transfusion is a significant aspect to patient health. Inadequately screened blood and unsafe blood transfusion process may lead to transfusion transmissible infections (TTIs) like HIV, Hepatitis B & C etc. further risking the life of the patient. Roche NAT solution enables screening of donated blood, to reduce the risk of TTIs in people receiving blood.Dr. Sandeep Sewlikar, Head  Medical and Scientific Affairs, Roche Diagnostics India said, Patient health is our primary focus. Blood may be described as the very foundation to the health of any patient. However, such life-saving blood can prove dangerous either if the transfusion process is not done under stringent quality checks or if the blood that is transfused itself is not completely safe.It is our endeavor to communicate to people that NAT-tested blood is the safest form of blood, as it detects even window period viral infections. Asking for NAT-tested blood will help safeguard their lives should there be any need for a blood transfusion.Dr. Tulika Chandra, Head of Department - Department of Transfusion Medicine, King George's Medical University said, "The Department has come together with Roche Diagnostics India this World Blood Donors Day to spread the message of safe blood to the people of Uttar Pradesh. We installed the Roche NAT solution at King Georges in 2012. We are pleased that we have been instrumental in hundreds of people not contracting deadly infections on account of unsafe blood transfusion. NAT significantly reduces TTI associated morbidity and mortality. Additionally, NAT will also have a positive health economic effect of reduction in State's and personal expenditure on treatment and hospitalisation due to TTIs."Roche Diagnostics India has been at the forefront in taking its NAT solution to various States in India including Delhi, Rajasthan, UP, Kerala, TN, AP, Telangana, Gujarat, Orissa, WB, Manipur, Haryana, Punjab and Maharashtra. The company is looking forward to take this technology to other States in India in the near future.A recent report by National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) revealed that Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number of HIV cases due to blood transfusion  361 cases. Over 2000 people were infected with HIV while getting blood transfusion in the past 17 months in other parts of the country. On the advent of this shocking revelation, Roche Diagnostics India, market leader of the Indian in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) industry and King Georges Medical University, Lucknow came together this World Blood Donors Day to discuss the importance of safe blood transfusion in the State.
After taking a breather in the previous session, the bears were back on Dalal Street. The market managed to pare some losses by closing off days low led by decline in the telecom, banking, capital goods, auto and FMCG index. Only the metals index ended with gains.Among the 51-stocks of Nifty, Hindalco, GAIL, Asian Paints, Eicher Motors, Tata Motors, HUL, Adani Ports and Wipro were among the gainers on NSE, whereas Bharti Infratel, Maruti Suzuki, UltraTech Cement, IndusInd Bank, Tech Mahindra, ICICI Bank, Ambuja Cement, NTPC and ITC were among the losers today.Finally, the BSE Sensex ended with a loss of 201 points at 26,525. The BSE Sensex opened at 26,686 touched an intra-day high of 26,686.03 and low of 26,315.The NSE Nifty closed with a loss of 66 points at 8,141. The NSE Nifty opened at 8,181 hitting a high of 8,180.65 and low of 8,074.On the global front, Asian markets decline. The Shanghai Composite index closed marginally lower. Hong Kongs Hang Seng index dropped 2% and Nikkei 225 cracked 3.2%.European stocks were under pressure too as equity indices declined towards their lowest level in nearly 4-months as concerns lingered over Britains vote on next week. The FTSE 100 was trading down 0.65%. DAX and the CAC 40 were trading down 0.8% each.On the economy front, India's merchandise exports fell 0.79% at US$22.17bn in May 2016 over May 2015. Non-petroleum exports rose 1.01% at US$20.19bn in May 2016 over May 2015. Imports fell 13.16% at US$28.44bn in May 2016 over May 2015.The India VIX (Volatility) index was up 3.76% at 17.0550.Out of 1,380 stocks traded on the NSE, 430 declined and 909 advanced today.The rupee was trading down seven paise at 67.22 per US dollar.Maruti Suzuki dropped 3% to Rs.4,084. The stock was the top Nifty loser today. A strong yen adversely impacts Maruti Suzuki India's operating profit margin. Japanese yen gains beyond 105/$ for first time since Sept 2014 after Bank of Japan kept policy unchanged.Sterlite Tech jumped 5% to Rs.81.40 on Thursday. The company fixed June 16 as record date for determining eligible shareholders for the proposed demerger, as per reports.Indian Hotels rallied 2.2% to Rs.130.25 on the BSE amid reports that foreign brokerage house - Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock to overweight from underweight earlier. Morgan Stanley almost doubled the target price for the stock to Rs.160 from Rs.83 earlier.Deccan Cements Ltd rose 6% to Rs.877 after the company said in a notice to BSE that ICRA upgraded the rating of the company to A from BBB+ citing improvement in operational and financial performance of the company in fiscal year 2016.TVS Motor closed marginally lower at Rs.291 on BSE. The company aims to increase the share of its best selling scooter model Jupiter to 12% in the highly competitive 110 cc scooter segment in 2016.3I Infotech Ltd surged 18% to Rs.5.31 on BSE. The company said corporate debt restructuring panel approved debt restructuring scheme. The lenders approved converting 40% debt in to equity shares.Oil marketing companies such as IOC, BPCL and HPCL shed up to 0.6% after petrol price was marginally hiked by 5 paise a litre and diesel by Rs 1.26 a litre.Jindal Stainless (Hisar) soared 10.4% to Rs.40.80 on the BSE. The company experienced a spurt in volumes by more than 12.28 times.State Bank of Mysore hit 20% upper circuit to Rs.657 after Union Cabinet approved the takeover by State Bank of India (SBI) of several subsidiaries, according to reports.Inox Leisure slipped 0.61% to Rs.221 on BSE. The company announced an association with Paytm, to sell movie tickets to moviegoers.Pricol jumped 9.3% to Rs.84.The company sold entire shareholding of Integral Investment for a consideration of Rs.27.84 mn.Petrol price was raised by Rs 0.05 a litre at Delhi (including state levies) with corresponding price revision in other states. With this change, the price of Petrol in Delhi will increased to Rs 65.65 a litre. HPCL dipped 1% to Rs.909. BPCL and IOC down 0.5% each.Wipro gained 0.5% to Rs.549 after the company launched its analytics solution, Data Discovery Platform.A total of 65 stocks registered a fresh 52-week high in trades today, whereas 20 stocks touched a new 52-week low on the NSE.
 Indias largest Cashback & Coupons site will beThe Summit will be held from June 22-24 at Stanford campus and will host over 1000 global participants (entrepreneurs, foundations and investors). This year GES received more than 5,000 applications from across the world, of which 700 entrepreneurs and more than 300 investors from 170 countries were selected and invited by the US government. The Summit will highlight entrepreneurship as a way to address some of the most ungovernable global challenges.This annual event will be the 7installment and was previously hosted by the United States and the governments of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Morocco, and Kenya. Hosting the Summit this year back in United States, President Obama highlights his commitment to building bridges across borders that help tackle global challenges and address problems with innovation and creativity.The Summit will include workshops, panels, kindle talks, pitch competitions, mentoring, and networking sessions aimed to give participants custom opportunities to gain skill, expertize and relationships that will help their ventures grow. This year GES will enable global entrepreneurs and investors to connect and form lasting relationships; creating newer opportunities for investment, partnership, and collaboration., I am honoured to be invited by President Barack Obama & the White House and feel privileged to be representing India at such a power event. Global Entrepreneurship Summit is a great platform for building synergies, collaborating and interacting across different borders and countries and industries. The Summit represents Innovation and Creativity and orients young minds towards addressing global challenges through entrepreneurship. Im really excited to visit Stanford University which is regarded as one of the worlds greatest innovation laboratories and Im sure it will be indispensable and instrumental for personal growth.Last year in April 2015, Swati represented India at the first Female Founders Edition of Blackbox Connect which was also powered by Google for Entrepreneurs program in Silicon Valley, California.
Sun TV and its group companies can participate in the phase III auctions for FM Radio stations in Chennai, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli and Visakhapatnam. (BL)

Nava Bharat Ventures is all set to commission its first overseas thermal power project of 300MW in Zambia later this month and begin commercial operations in the second quarter of the current financial year. (BL)

Tata Power will purchase 25% of Resurgent Power for USD300mn (around Rs18bn) as part of a consortium to primarily buy both coal-fired and hydro power assets in India. (ET)

NTPC said, BSES Rajdhani and BSES Yamuna, have agreed to pay all their dues to the company by September. (BL)

Vedanta said its shareholders have approved the proposal to raise its limit of inter-corporate loans to Rs800bn. (BL)

TVS Motor has received the patent for a gearshift assembly for semi-automated manual transmission (SMT) vehicle, which could change the way the rider shifts the gear in a motorcycle. (BS)

Promoter of HDIL will infuse up to Rs1.50bn fresh capital in the company. The capital will be infused through a preferential issue of share warrants to promoter Sarang Wadhawan. (ET)

Zydus Cadila and Turkey based healthcare firm, Eczacibasi Ilac Pazarlama have signed a pact to market biotech products in the Turkish market. (ET)

Union Cabinet approved the takeover by State Bank of India (SBI) of several subsidiaries, in a first move to consolidate the country's struggling public sector banks. (ET)

UPL Ltd has acquired 26% stake in Weather Risk Management Services Pvt Ltd for Rs100mn. (ET)
People on a shoe-string budget are humans too, you know. They also have the right to drink till dawn without worrying about selling a kidney to pay the bill. I remember my college days. Getting an allowance of Rs. 2000 a month, I had to make sure I didn't blow the entire thing up on one night of drinking. But that was college, and we had to have a drink or five, at least once a week.

People on a really tight budget who cannot refuse a drink, this one's for you.

Delhi

My Bar - Paharganj

My Bar, at this point in time, has a number of outlets spread all across the hotspots of the city. But My Bar loyalists still consider the Paharganj branch their favourite. Mainly because, even after all these years, it still remains the cheapest of the lot. Here's something that'll have you salivating - a 2ltr. tower of Kingfisher draught is just 290 bucks (excluding taxes). A hub for hippies, don't be surprised if you spot someone rolling a fatty next to you.

Ambience - Average, but always buzzing with people.

Must try - Just stick to basics, which means chilli chicken.

Cheapest drinks - Vodka, Rum and Gin start at Rs 39.

Thugs - Hotel Broadway, Daryaganj

happytrips.com

A legendary hole in the wall that you have to visit. In fact, you must question your love for cheap alcohol if you haven't paid this place a visit. A full bottle of Kingfisher here costs Rs. 160. Their quirky menu card is also unmissable. Must go if you haven't already.

Ambience - Dingy. You wouldn't want to go with female friends and the staff isn't very helpful either.

Must try - Just try and stick to booze.

Cheapest drink - A mug of draught beer for Rs 70.



4s Chinese Restaurant, Defence Colony

burrp

A personal favourite. Seriously, not only will the bar menu put a grin on your face, the food is equally good. The cost for two here is about Rs. 700 bucks excluding taxes and the staff are really warm and hospitable. Also, remember that guy with the legendary moustache manning the door. For he will be your saviour whenever you need a light.

Ambience - Good, warm.

Must try - Chilli chicken.

Cheapest drink - NA.

Beeryani, SDA/GK 2

beeryani.in

The only thing better than cheap alcohol is cheap alcohol with awesome biryani. If you're iffy about the combination, let me tell you, it is surprisingly good. A 3-litre tower of draught beer that costs about Rs. 600 is enough for two people to have a good time. And of course, there's the scrumptious biryani to go with.

Ambience - Good. Not buzzing with excitement.

Must try - The biryani!

Cheapest drink - A mug of beer for Rs 100.

Mumbai

Yacht, Hill Road, Bandra West

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You might find this place a bit shady, but it's cheap booze and amazing food! The perfect place to stop by after work for a drink, or have a solid pre-game session before partying it up. It's super cheap. Most of the food on the menu is under a hundred bucks. That makes it a must try.

Ambience - Shady.

Must try - Really good desi Chinese and Keema.

Cheapest drink - NA.

Bottles, 7 Bungalows, Andheri West

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This place is as basic as it gets. Super cheap booze, cheap food make it a haven for college students. There's no music either, which is a good thing for those complaining about loud music in most pubs. Service is great, food is great, booze is obviously great. So when are you going to check it out?

Ambience - The place is small so it might feel a bit cramped if you're a part of a large group. Average otherwise.

Must try - Food doesn't really stand out. It's best to stick to starters with your alcohol.

Cheapest drink - Rum for Rs 80.



Janata, Bandra

Flickr/ Vikram 2610

Janata is somewhat like the MyBar of Mumbai, but with better food and a better crowd of course. However, you really need to know what to order here so it's best to go with a regular. Great for people who just want to get high.

Ambience - Very average.

Must try - The Prawn Koliwada and Mutton Sukha, apart from the booze.

Cheapest drink - NA.

Gokul, Colaba

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For the youngsters of Colaba, Gokul is the place to be. Booze is super cheap obviously. A 30 ml rum will Old Monk will set you back by not more than 40 bucks. The best thing would be to land up at Gokul for a few or several drinks before devouring some awesome food at Bademiyan.

Ambience - Below average.

Must try - The rolls and the booze.

Cheapest drink - Whiskey for Rs 30.

Kolkata

Olypub, Park Street

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Olypub is the first place I had a drink with my dad so it is pretty iconic for me. For decades now, this place has played host to college going kids on a tight budget looking for a beer and some awesome food. If you've been to Kolkata and haven't been to Oly, shame on you.

Ambience - Pretty much a hole in the hole. Don't be shocked if you spot a rat running around. It's part of the experience.

Must try - Chicken Ala Kiev and the Beef steak (don't worry, it's safe here.)

Cheapest drink - Rum, Gin, Vodka and Brandy start at Rs 64.

Raul's Restaurant, Hazra

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One doesn't go to Raul's for anything but dirt cheap alcohol. Not kidding, the cost for two here including alcohol is approximately 400 bucks! That's cheaper than a movie ticket. Food is below average, but nobody goes here for food anyway.

Ambience - Shady.

Must try - Stick to booze.

Cheapest drink - Whiskey and rum for Rs 60.

Silver Grill, Park Street

zomato

Another classic that's been around for ages. Good wholesome Chinese food coupled with really cheap booze can rarely go wrong. If you're a beer lover, make sure you try Dansberg (Actor Danny Denzongpa's beer) and He Man-9000. They are hardcore and really test your mettle. You might have a bone to pick with the service, though.

Ambience - Average. A very 90s restaurant stuck in a time warp.

Must try - Stick to what you know, the double fried pork and chilli chicken.

Cheapest drinks - Rum and Gin for Rs 60.



Hotel Broadway, Chandi Chowk

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Located opposite the metro rail outlet, Hotel Broadway is one of the oldest bars in the city. Even after so many years, that old school vibe still remains. Probably the biggest seller of the place. Drinks are cheap, obviously. The food is a bit above average. Snacks are delicious, and stand out in the menu.

Ambience - Average. Old school.

Must try - Snacks and Old monk.

Cheapest drink - Rum for Rs 41.

Bengaluru

Filling Station, Koramangala 5th Block

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With really good, cheap liquor and decent kebabs to offer, Filling Station is one of the best poor man's pubs you could find in Bengaluru. You might not like the music, or the fact that it can get pretty smoky (smoking is allowed) inside but the whole place just lights up during the IPL season or other sporting events that are great crowd pullers.

Ambience - Pretty decent, staff is friendly.

Must try - A beer lover's delight, you could get a 3 ltr. pitcher of beer for Rs 590.

Cheapest drink - Rum for Rs 30.

Spiritz Bar & Restaurant, HSR

zomato

Spiritz Bar is a great place if cheap booze is the only thing you're looking for. However, you might be disappointed with the food. With the cheapest bar in its area, Spiritz becomes the perfect place for office-goers and college kids to grab a quick beer.

Ambience - Average. Nothing to write home about.

Must try - Just stick to finger food and booze.

Cheapest drinks - Brandy and Rum for Rs 70.

Pecos, Brigade Road

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Pecos is to Bengaluru what MyBar is to Delhi. It's old, kind of dingy in a good way, has cheap booze and really good finger food. Pecos is the place to visit when you just want to laze around with a beer in your hand. With classic rock numbers playing on loop, this place does provide the perfect cheap pub experience that you so desire every once in a while.

Ambience - Good.

Must try - The cheap booze, the pork and chicken 65 in particular among other things. Super.

Cheapest drink - A mug of draught beer for Rs 70.

Sathya's, Koramangala 3rd Block

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If you stay in or around Koramangala, you'd be spoilt with choices. Sathya's is another cheap pub that everybody likes to visit. Don't expect anything fancy here, you'd be disappointed. It's a perfect place for old friends to catch up and drink themselves silly. The food is okay and the staff, friendly. The entrance might not look very welcoming, but it's really worth giving this place a shot.

Ambience - Decent. Friendly staff makes things better.

Must try - Just stick to starters and booze. You won't be disappointed.

Cheapest drink - Wine for Rs 140 for 90ml.



Special mentions

Gymkhana Club

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If you know someone who's a Gymkhana member, just latch on to that person and check it out once. Not kidding, there's no better place for dirt cheap booze and delicious food than a Gymkhana club (Delhi, Bombay and Kolkata). The staff is friendly and the crowd, even better. If you haven't been to one yet, don't bother applying for a membership. Not only will it cost a bomb, you'd also find yourself on the waiting list that goes on for years. Gymkhana is the reason why us youngsters want the club culture to return.

Ambience - Fantastic.

Must try - Dry chilli chicken. Can't go wrong with that.

Press Club of India

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Very similar to Gymkhana for its vibe, Press Club is exclusively for members of the press and their friends and family. The food might not be as good as Gymkhana's but it is good nonetheless. The booze is dirt cheap which is why spotting members leaving the club absolutely smashed is a common sight.

Ambience - Good.

Must try - Alcohol and finger food.
bollyspice

Akshay Kumar and Rajinikanth are all set to share the screen together for the film 2.0. And looks like Akshay is clearly bowled over by Rajini sir's charm! Both of them were present at a recent event, where Akshay didn't shy away from announcing it on the microphone that what a huge star Rajinikanth is.

He took the stage at the event, and immediately announced, "The lady here announced my name as Superstar. But there is only one Superstar in the country  and that is Rajinikanth sir!" And needless to say, the crowd was really pleased with his statement!

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He even spoke about his experience of working with him in 2.O, a sequel to Enthiran(Robot), "It is an honour working with Rajini sir in a straight Tamil movie  it is like a dream come true! I am very happy about it and eagerly awaiting the response of people here after its release. I want to be part of more south films." He also spoke abut fitness mantras, where he added, "Happiness and good food are the secret of my fit body. I always insist on having dinner before sunset and not eating anything after that. You should work out for an hour daily  if you cannot give even one hour to your body in 24 hours, kill yourself." Ouch! *Heads to gym*
The producer shared an emotional piece calling on the audience to not succumb to piracy and wait till Saturday for the reviews. He said they can decide after that whether they wish to watch the film in theaters or the leaked version. The controversial film suffered another setback when its censor board copy found its way online, two days before its much-anticipated release. Though the makers managed to delete the leaked copy, it is feared the harm has been done!

2. A Sikh group has objected to a song from the film Dishoom due to its Kirpan reference.

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The song titled "Sau Tarah Ke" found itself under fire from Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, after it demanded the CBFC to delete the reference of Kirpan in it. Film's actor Varun Dhawan came out in defence of the song that features Jacqueline Fernandez. He said "That isn't a Kirpan. We have shot this song in Morocco. It is an Arabian dagger. My brother and I are Punjabi's so we wouldn't do anything like that. If someone has to... it is misunderstanding."

3. The Mummy actor Brendan Fraser will make his Bollywood debut as a villain in a film based on Indian Mafia!

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Fraser who played Rick O'Connell in the famous The Mummy series is set to surprise his Indian fans by playing the villain in The Field said to be a mafia-thriller. He will play the role of Charu in the film, an American expat gunrunner whose illicit dealings with the Indian underworld land him in trouble.

4. Bollywood's two of the biggest blockbusters Lagaan and Gadar complete 15 years!

The year of 2001 goes down in Bollywood history as we had both the films releasing together on the same date, and each one going on to become blockbuster hits. While Gadar remains one of the most epic love-stories in the backdrop of India-Pakistan partition, Lagaan got nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Epic year!

5. Designer Masaba Gupta shared a picture of Saif Ali Khan's daughter Sara with a lovely message.

Instagram

Masaba took to Instagram to post an emotional message about how proud she was to see Sara grow up into a stunning girl. Sara, who according to reports will be making her Bollywood debut opposite Shahid Kapoor's brother Ishaan, in the sequel of Karan Johar's Student Of The Year, is already making headlines for her new groomed look.

6. The makers of Mohenjo Daro revealed the first look of lead actress Pooja Hegde in a new poster.

A week after Hrithik Roshan's look gave us enough excitement, now the team of the Ashutosh Gowarikar's film has revealed the first poster of actress Pooja Hegde who also makes her Bollywood debut in the period romantic film. And going by the looks of it, she plays a princess. Trust us when we say, she looks regal!
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You might already know of the new action flick about to hit the screens, Dishoom, starring John Abraham, Jacqueline Fernandez, and Varun Dhawan. Now, a Sikh body has objected to a song in the film. So, in one of the songs of the movie you can actually see Jacqueline Fernandez dancing with a Kirpan tied on her waist belt. The Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) has objected to inappropriate use of Kirpan in that particular song. DSGMCs general secretary Manjinder Singh Sirsa has written a letter to censor board chief Pahlaj Nihalani, requesting that the song Ishq Ka Marz be removed from the film.

The song's teaser was recently shared and you can clearly see the Kirpan being flung between Jacqueline's legs!

In his letter, general secretary Manjinder Singh Sirsa, has even threatened to initiate criminal proceedings if the song was not removed from the film. You can watch the teaser of the song here.

Meanwhile, one of the leads of the film, Varun Dhawan has given a statement explaining that it's not a Kirpan but an Arabian dagger! Recently at an event, Varun Dhawan addressed the issue and explained his side.

He said, "That isn't a Kirpan. We have shot this song in Morocco. It is an Arabian dagger. My brother and I are Punjabi's so we wouldn't do anything like that. If someone has to... it is misunderstanding."

Well, let's see if the Sikh body will buy that!
Wildlife officials in Florida has reportedly killed four alligators in Disney World while searching for a toddler who went missing after being attacked by one of the reptiles. Even though the bodies of the four alligators were examined for the boy's remains authorities couldn't find any trace of it.

charlethedog/ Representative Image

Officials from the Florida Wildlife Commission said its investigators were trained to identify possible culprit alligators, leading to the deaths of the four reptiles.

The body was later found by divers about six feet beneath the surface of the man-made lagoon in Disney World. The body was intact and was found close to where he was attacked by an alligator a day ago.

CNN

The toddler, now identified as Lane Graves, who was at Disney World with his parents was attacked by an alligator on Tuesday night, in front of his parents.

Deepest condolences to the Graves family. Thoughts and prayers are with you during this difficult time. pic.twitter.com/nXaRrgjLhl  OCSO FL News (@OrangeCoSheriff) June 16, 2016

His father desperately fought to rescue his son from the alligator who was taking him deeper into the water. He also suffered injuries while trying to save his son.

Associated Press reported that charges are unlikely against the boys parents because theres nothing in this case to indicate that there was anything extraordinary in terms of parental neglect.

More than a million alligators live throughout Florida, though the species remains listed as an endangered species because it closely resembles the endangered American crocodile. They are also known to grow in enormous size.

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The killing of the alligators also come hardly two weeks after a gorilla was killed in a Cincinnati zoo after a 3-year-old-boy fell into its enclosure.
It was just another day at work for 24-year-old Imran Yousuf who worked as a bouncer at Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida.

But it was not supposed to be. The night turned tragic after gunman Omar Mateen went on a rampage in the gay nightclub killing 49 people before he was finally gunned down by police.

CBS News

The number of fatalities could have been even higher, but the alertness of one man saved the lives of dozens of partygoers in the club.

When Mateen fired his initial shots Yousuf, an ex-american marine instantly recognised it was from a high caliber weapon.

AP

Yousuf, a hindu man along with his brother Ameer had served in the Marines for six years and had fought the war in Afghanistan.

"The initial one was three or four (shots). That was a shock. Three of four shots go off and you could tell it was a high caliber," Yousuf told CBS News.

"Everyone froze. I'm here in the back and I saw people start pouring into the back hallway, and they just sardine pack everyone," he added.

The Afghan war-veteran ended up saving dozens of lives after he opened the doors of a room which the partygoers had locked themselves inside after Mateen began shooting.

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"There was only one choice. Either we all stay there and we all die, or I could take the chance, and I jumped over to open that latch a we got everyone that we can out of there," Yousuf said.

Around 60-70 people managed to get out to safety after the door was opened.

"As soon as people found that door was open they kept pouring out and after that we just ran," he explained.

Despite him being called a hero for his actions, Yousuf says he is no hero and is pained that he couldn't save more people.

"I wish I could have saved more to be honest. There are a lot of people that are dead ...there are a lot of people that are dead,"he said through tears.
Bharatiya Govansh Rakshan Samvardhan Parishad, an affiliate group of the VHP has renewed its demand for a separate ministry in the Narendra Modi government to protect cows.

AFP/ Representative Image

The outfit while reminding the BJP that the party had during the 2014 election campaign promised to protect cows, demanded that a deadline should be set for the formation of the new ministry.

Organizations including RSS and VHP had been pushing for a total ban on cow slaughter in India.

Hindustan Times quoting a senior official of the outfit reported that the creation of a separate ministry is essential to ensure a total ban on cow slaughter, beef consumption and protection of Indian breeds, some of which face the threat of extinction.

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Emphasising on the importance of saving indian cow breeds, HS Savla another official of the outfit said Indian breeds such as Gir, Sahiwal are far superior. (in comparison with the foreign ones like the Jersey or the Swiss cows)

Despite the ban on cow slaughter in many states India ranks the top in beef export, another issue groups including the RSS and VHP are opposed to.

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Currently only BJP ruled Rajasthan has a minister for cow welfare. Otaram Devasi, who calls himself "Gaupalan Mantri" is tasked with overseeing Rajasthan's Gau Seva Commission and Cow Conservation Directorate.
While many may continue to consider it taboo, or 'impure' even, Odisha is heralding a new age by celebrating menstruation. The four-day Raja festival kick-started in Bhubaneswar on Tuesday to celebrate womanhood.

The Raja festival (pronounced as Ro-jo) holds close the belief that our Earth is a woman, and during this time, it is our Mother that menstruates. And during this time, Mother Earth is given ample rest and hence, there is no ploughing.

HT

It is believed that the biological cycle of menstruation lasts for three days and on the fourth day, a ceremonial bath - known as Vasumati Snan - is conducted in honour of goddess Bhudevi.

The first three days of the festival are thus named: Pahili Raja, Mithuna Sankranti and Bhu Daaha.

HT

The four-day festival sees widespread celebrations where girls give up cooking and take to the swings to have a good time. Hanging from the tree branches is the commonest, most fun activity during this time.

This news comes months after the Sabarimala temple hailed its age-long tradition to brand menstruating women as "impure". Social activist Manoj Jena told The Hindustan Times, "Everyone who thinks women are impure during their periods should see how Odisha celebrated Raja. Those who believe the menstrual blood to be impure should know that the same kept a life on for nine months inside the mothers womb."

Odisha Sun Times

During the festival, there's jubilation in the air. Girls and women of all ages participate in the merriment - playing dress up, gorging on sweets, and having a gala time on the swings. They take rest from work, wear new clothes, and play games.
A Gurugram police IT Cell employee was arrested on Tuesday for illegally procuring call detail records (CDR) of influential people, including Bollywood actors, Hindustan Times reported.

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The accused is 30-year-old Pradeep Kumar, who had been promised a job offer in exchange for call details of celebrities, and police said he used IT access to procure call these details.

Kumars Mumbai based aide would be hand delivered call details of 15 personalities during personal meetings at posh hotels of Delhi.

"Kumar himself didnt know the owner of the phone numbers. He would share the details with the Mumbai man and would occasionally take money in return, said inspector Sajjan Kumar, the investigation officer.
The case of an aspiring bureaucrat who attempted suicide a week ago after she was allegedly thrashed by her neighbour in North Bengaluru has taken a curious turn, with relatives accusing police of harassing and assaulting the woman.

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Shwetha Narayan, 23, resident of KG Lakkenahalli in Madanayakanahalli, Bengaluru Rural, is in the ICU at Sparsh Hospital, Yeshwantpur, and doctors said her condition is critical. She had consumed organophosphate (OP) compound, an insecticide.

A graduate, Shwetha was all set to write the KAS examination. Her father Narayana Swamy, an agriculturist, told media that his daughter consumed poison on June 8 following police humiliation.

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"On June 7, Shwetha went to Madanayakanahalli police station to file a complaint against a relative, Prabhu, over a land dispute. She was accompanied by her sister Lalitha and mother Manjula. But police did not accept her complaint. Two male constables, who were friends of Prabhu, assaulted the trio in the station. They finally accepted a petition on the land dispute but did not give any acknowledgement," Lalitha said in another petition submitted to Madanayakanahalli police the same night.

The next evening, Vijayalakshmi, the neighbour, allegedly f ought with Shwetha over drinking water.

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"Cops arrived on the spot and asked Shwetha and Vijayalakshmi to go to the police station. By then, a group of women beat up Shwetha," Narayana Swamy said. The same night she consumed poison.

DySP Rajendra Kumar denied police had manhandled Shwetha.

"Constable Lakshmi Narayan and homeguard Arun Kumar, along with others, tried to intervene when Vijayalakshmi and Shwetha were fighting. None of our staff manhandled Shwetha or anyone," he said.
Online loan sharks in China have found the one collateral that every Chinese girl can afford - their naked photos from cash-strapped female college students who want to borrow money.

Chinese daily Southern Metropolis Daily reported that private lenders are asking the young women to send nude photos of themselves as a form of collateral, along with copies of their ID cards. They warn that the photos will be made public if payments are not made on time. Read more details

These are 5 stories that will interest you to:

1. In Maharashtra, Girls From Villages Without Electricity Are Gearing Up To Be Electricians!

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A bunch of young women, most of them from small towns of the state, have stormed the male bastion of trained electricians. Curiously, most of these women come from impoverished villages which don't even have electricity . Some of them hadn't even seen an oven before and are now confidently repairing them.

This tale of empowerment comes from the state government-run Industrial Training Institute (ITI) in Thane. ITIs are government institutes that provide skill-based training to youth from underprivileged sections of society. This batch of 21 electricians will graduate from the all-girls Thane ITI in August. Read more here

2.India's Second Green International Airport To Become Operational In Vadodara By August

bccl/Represenatational image

Come August and people of Vadodara could fly to near-by international destinations from the city airport itself.

The city will soon get an international airport, which is touted to be the Gujarat's first and country's second 'green' airport after Chandigarh's terminal.

The progress on the new international terminal is being directly monitored by the office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who preferred Varanasi over Vadodara constituency after winning the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.What more to expect? Check out right here

3. Seven Years After He Was Declared Dead, Indian Soldier 'Returns' Alive. Here Is His Unbelievable Story

TOI

For seven years Dharamveer Singh's family was told that the Indian Army soldier was dead. The Army which declared him dead three years after he went missing following an accident in 2009 was paying due compensations to his family for all these years.

But for the family, somewhere deep within they believed Singh will come back one day. And it paid off.

On Monday his father, Retired Subedar Kailash Yadav heard a knock on the door. When he opened the door, to his surprise, found Dharamveer standing in front of him. Here's what really happened to him

4. Police IT Employee Got Busted Leaking Call Record Details Of Bollywood Stars

imore | representative purpose only

A Gurugram police IT Cell employee was arrested on Tuesday for illegally procuring call detail records (CDR) of influential people, including Bollywood actors.

The accused is 30-year-old Pradeep Kumar, who had been promised a job offer in exchange for call details of celebrities, and police said he used IT access to procure call these details.

Kumars Mumbai based aide would be hand delivered call details of 15 personalities during personal meetings at posh hotels of Delhi. Read more details.

5. Four Alligators Killed In Disney World While Searching For 2-Year-Old-Boy Killed By Another Alligator

charlethedog/ Representative Image

Wildlife officials in Florida has reportedly killed four alligators in Disney World while searching for a toddler who went missing after being attacked by one of the reptiles. Even though the bodies of the four alligators were examined for the boy's remains authorities couldn't find any trace of it.

Officials from the Florida Wildlife Commission said its investigators were trained to identify possible culprit alligators, leading to the deaths of the four reptiles. Read more.
The wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at an Orlando gay nightclub knew of his plans for the attack and could soon be charged in connection with the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, a law enforcement source said on Tuesday.

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The source revealed that a federal grand jury had been convened and could charge Omar Mateen 's wife, Noor Salman, as early as Wednesday.

"It appears she had some knowledge of what was going on," said US Senator Angus King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which received a briefing on the attack on Tuesday. "She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information," King told CNN.

Mateen, who was shot dead by police after a three-hour standoff at the Pulse club early on Sunday, called 911 during his shooting spree to profess allegiance to various militant Islamist groups. Federal investigators have said he was likely self-radicalized and there was no evidence that he received any instruction or aid from outside groups such as Islamic State. Mateen, 29, was a US citizen, born in New York of Afghan immigrant parents.

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"He appears to have been an angry, disturbed, unstable young man who became radicalized," President Barack Obama told reporters after a meeting of the White House National Security Council. During his rampage, Mateen systematically made his way through the packed club shooting people who were already down, apparently to ensure they were dead, said Angel Colon, a wounded survivor.

"I look over and he shoots the girl next to me and I was just there laying down and thinking: 'I'm next, I'm dead,'" he said.

Mateen shot him twice more, one bullet apparently aimed for Colon's head striking his hand, and another hitting his hip, Colon said at Orlando Regional Medical Center, where he is one of 27 survivors being treated

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FoxNews.com, citing an FBI source, said prosecutors were seeking to charge Mateen's wife as an accessory to 49 counts of murder and 53 counts of attempted murder and failure to notify law enforcement about the pending attack and lying to federal agents. NBC News said Salman told federal agents she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack. But she also told the FBI she once drove him to the Pulse nightclub because he wanted to scope it out, the network said.

A former wife of Mateen, who was a security guard, has said he was mentally unstable and beat her. The ex-spouse, Sitora Yusufiy, said she fled their home after four months of marriage. Salman's mother, Ekbal Zahi Salman, lives in a middle-class neighborhood of the suburban town of Rodeo, California. A neighbor said Noor Salman only visited her mother once after she married Mateen.

"Noor Salman's mother didn't like him very much. He didn't allow her (Noor) to come here," said neighbor Rajinder Chahal. He said he had spoken to Noor Salman's mother after the Orlando attack. "She was crying, weeping."

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"We could hear him talking to 911 saying that the reason why he's doing this is because he wants America to stop bombing his country. From that conversation from 911 he pledges allegiance to ISIS," said Patience Carter, 20, who was trapped in a bathroom stall at the nightclub as Mateen prowled outside.

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One official said investigators believe Mateen browsed militant Islamist material on the internet for two years or more before the shootings. Soon after the attack, Mateen's father indicated that his son had harbored strong anti-gay feelings. He recounted an incident when his son became angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami while out with his wife and son.
At 24, he weighs 175 kg. Yes, Sajad Gharibi is real, as real as they get. This power lifter from Iran is literally the biggest man you may ever see.

Instagram

Known as the Persian Hercules and Iranian Hulk, Sajad has become an internet sensation since he was first noticed. Not much is known about the young man from the Middle East, except that he loves to lift.

Instagram

Next to him, even relatively large objects appear dwarfed. Well that's obvious, isn't it?

Instagram

While the man does provide an intimidating prospect physically, those close to him maintain that he has a kind heart. So a gentle giant, if you will.

One feels that he will come to the spotlight soon. We can't wait to see what he is up to next!
Were excited to announce that indmin.com is now part of fastmarkets.com.

A new look and an improved experience means you can still stay ahead of this fast-moving market with price data, news and market intelligence right here on Fastmarkets.

Discover more than 2000 prices, news and analysis in primary and secondary metals markets. We cover base metals, industrial minerals, ores and alloys, steel, scrap and steel raw materials.

If you already have a Fastmarkets account, youll still have uninterrupted access to your markets by logging in with your current details.
The organizers of the Congress are: the Ministry for Investment and Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kazakhstani exhibition company Iteca and its international partner ITE Group Plc (UK).

B2B and G2B business meetings will be organized as part of AMM 2015 for the first time. This is a unique opportunity to have effective individual negotiations with the industry leaders such as "Kazzinc", "KAZ Minerals", "Kazakhmys", "ERG", "Tau-Ken Samruk", "Kazgeology".

This year's another innovation of  2015 will be a series of presentations "Made in Kazakhstan for Mining & Metallurgical Industry", where domestic suppliers of equipment, technologies, overalls, petrochemicals, and other goods and services for mining companies will be able to make their presentations.

Prime Minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan Mr. Karim Massimov, Minister of Mines and Mining of Afghanistan Mr. Daud Shah Saba, Vice-President of the Korean National Corporation "Korea Resources Corporation" KOPEC Mr. Shin Ki Hym and others will address at the plenary session of the forum.

About 650 delegates from over 15 countries of the world are expected to attend the forum. The Congress will be visited by official delegations from Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, South Korea and France.

Certain specialized events will be held as a part of the AMM:

Round table "Prospects for development of coal industry of the Republic of Kazakhstan" supported by the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan

Round table "Development of gold mining industry, introduction of new technologies in the refining companies, and consolidation of efforts in the processing of Kazakhstani raw materials containing precious metals" supported by "Tau-Ken Altyn".

Round table "Energy efficiency as a factor of mining and metallurgical industry development" supported by EY, National Center on Complex Processing of Mineral Raw Materials of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

A series of presentations "Made in France: increased productivity with French companies" supported by the French Embassy.

Round table "Human Resources for MMI" supported by AMME

The Congress will conclude with a solemn ceremony of awarding the winners of the National industrial contest "Golden Hephaestus", General Partner of the contest is "ERG" LLC. 109 applications in 12 categories have been filed to participate in the contest.
Remembering the U.S.S. Liberty





The power of the Israel Lobby



By Philip Giraldi



June 15, 2016 "

Information Clearing House

" - "

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Last Wednesday at noon at Arlington National Cemetery I attended the annual commemorative gathering of the survivors and friends of the U.S.S. Liberty. The moving service included the ringing of a ships bell for each one of the thirty-four American sailors, Marines and civilians that were killed in the deliberate Israeli attack that sought to sink the intelligence gathering ship and kill all its crew. Present were a number of surviving crewmembers as well as veterans like myself and other Americans who are committed to ensuring that the story of the Liberty will not die in hopes that someday the United States government will have the courage to acknowledge what actually happened on that fateful day.

It was the forty-ninth anniversary of the attack. In truth the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, has almost faded from memory, with a younger generation completely unaware that a United States naval vessel was once deliberately attacked and nearly sunk by Americas greatest friend and ally Israel. The attack was followed by a cover-up that demonstrated clearly that at least one president of the United States even back nearly fifty years ago valued his relationship with the state of Israel above his loyalty to his own country.

It was in truth the worst attack ever carried out on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time. In addition to the death toll, 171 more of the crew were wounded in the two-hour assault, which was clearly intended to destroy the intelligence gathering vessel operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Israelis, whose planes had their Star of David markings covered up so Egypt could be blamed, attacked the ship repeatedly from the air and with gunboats from the sea.

The incredible courage and determination of the surviving crew was the only thing that kept the Liberty from sinking. The ships commanding officer Captain William McGonagle was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic role in keeping the ship afloat, though President Lyndon Baines Johnson broke with tradition and refused to hold the medal ceremony in the White House, also declining to award it personally, delegating that task to the Secretary of the Navy in a closed to the public presentation made at the Washington Navy Yard. The additional medals given to other crew members in the aftermath of the attack made the U.S.S. Liberty the most decorated ship based on a single engagement with hostile forces in the history of the United States Navy.

The cover-up of the attack began immediately. The Liberty crew was sworn to secrecy over the incident, as were the Naval dockyard workers in Malta and even the men of the U.S.S. Davis, which had assisted the badly damaged Liberty to port. A hastily convened and conducted court of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain acted under orders from Washington to declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquirys senior legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew, also described how President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of mistaken identity despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The courts findings were rewritten and sections relating to Israeli war crimes, to include the machine gunning of life rafts, were excised. Following in his fathers footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona has used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence. Most of the documents relating to the Liberty incident have never been released to the public in spite of the 49 years that have passed since the attack took place.

The faux court of inquiry and the medals awarded in secret were only the first steps in the cover-up, which has persisted to this day, orchestrated by politicians and a media that seem to place Israels interests ahead of those of the United States. Liberty survivors have been finding it difficult even to make their case in public. In early April a billboard that read Help the USS Liberty Survivors  Attacked by Israel was taken down in New Bedford Massachusetts. The billboard had been placed by the Honor Liberty Vets Organization and, as is normal practice, was paid for through a contractual arrangement that would require the billboard company to post the image for a fixed length of time. It was one of a number of billboards placed in different states. Inevitably, Israels well connected friends began to complain. One Jewish businessman threatened to take his business elsewhere, so the advertising company obligingly removed the billboard two weeks early.

After forty-nine years, the dwindling number of survivors of the Liberty are not looking for punishment or revenge. When asked, they will tell you that they only ask for accountability, that an impartial inquiry into the attack be convened and that the true story of what took place finally be revealed to the public.

That Congress is deaf to the pleas of the Liberty crew should surprise no one as the nations legislative body has been for years, as Pat Buchanan once put it, Israeli occupied territory. The Lobbys ability to force Congress and even the presidency to submit to its will has been spelled out in some detail by critics, first by Paul Findley in They Dare to Speak Out, later by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in The Israel Lobby, in Alison Weirs Against Our Better Judgment, and most recently in Kirk Beatties excellent Congress and the Shaping of the Middle East.

Congressional willingness to protect Israel even when it is killing Americans is remarkable, but it is symptom of the legislative bodys willingness to go to bat for Israel reflexively, even when it is damaging to U.S. interests and to the rights that American citizens are supposed to enjoy. I note particularly legislation currently working its way through Congress that will make it illegal for any federal funding to go to any entity that supports the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, better known as BDS. BDS is a way to put pressure on the Israeli government over its human rights abuses that is both non-violent and potentially effective. As the federal government has its hooks all over the economy and at various levels in education as well as state and local government its threat to force the delegitimization of BDS is far from an empty one.

Existing laws in more than twenty states with more on the way, including most recently New York, punishing entities that support the peaceful BDS movement by labeling BDS as anti-Semitic and making it illegal or sanctionable to support it are direct attacks on free speech. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated We want Israel to know we are on its side. And it doesnt stop with BDS. Recently signed trade agreements with Europe were drafted to be conditional on European acceptance of Israels occupation of the Palestinian West Bank while Israel is also pushing to censor the internet to make material that constitutes incitement banned. Incitement would, of course, include anything critical of Israel or its government on the grounds that it is anti-Semitic.

Democratic candidate presumptive Hillary Clinton has explicitly promised to do all in her power to oppose BDS, telling an adoring American Israel Public Affairs Committee audience in March that Many of the young people here today are on the front lines of the battle to oppose the alarming boycott, divestment and sanctions movement known as BDS. Particularly at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people. Ive been sounding the alarm for a while now. As I wrote last year in a letter to the heads of major American Jewish organizations, we have to be united in fighting back against BDS.
Russia And China Have To Step UP Ideological War By Andre Vltchek June 15, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - These days you may get hugs from many common people in the Middle East or Latin America when you say that you are Russian, but such emotional outbursts are mainly intuitive. After being bombarded by extremely effective and negative Western propaganda for years and decades, people of the world still know very little, if anything, about two enormous countries that have been proudly resisting the Western imperialism  Russia and China. I recently spent five weeks in Latin America, where the West openly supports the entire wide spectrum of counter-revolutionary movements, literally overthrowing one progressive government after another. I worked alongside the left-wing intellectuals there, helping to define the way forward, to rescue the Process. But I was shocked by how little is known there about both Russia and China  for decades two natural allies of the patriotic Latin American Left. Are you for Putin or against? And: Is China really as capitalist now as we read? These were two most commonly asked questions. Not in Cuba, of course. Cuba, almost free of most of propaganda media outlets of the Empire is actually one of the best-educated and informed societies on Earth. There, people know all about those long decades and centuries of the epic struggle of the Russian people against Western imperialism. There, it is very well known that China is essentially and once again increasingly a Communist (and successful) nation with clear central planning, which uses some controlled capitalist practices in order to build a prosperous society for its people. But even in such educated countries like Argentina and Chile, even in those centers of progress and revolution like Ecuador and Venezuela, the two world giants are often misunderstood. The majority of people in Latin America may feel sympathy for both Russia and China, but there is no deep knowledge of the realities there. It is truly discouraging, because the Latin American Left is one of the essential components of the front against Western imperialism, standing shoulder to shoulder with Russia and China, but also South Africa, Iran and other proud nations. It is easy to understand the reasons behind all this. Even in some of the most revolutionary nations of Latin America, the Western mass media outlets have been managing to retain their presence, often through the right-wing big business cable TV and satellite distributors. Most of the biggest newspapers are still in the hands of local business interests. And so the negative and misleading messages about Russia and China are spread constantly. People are bombarded with them from the television screens, from the pages of mass-circulation newspapers, and from the imported (Western) films. Many are resisting. They instinctively want to cling to both Russia and China. But they dont have enough ammunition; not enough positive and inspiring information is available to them. In the meantime the critics are armed to the teeth with toxic propaganda that is mass-produced in New York, Los Angeles, London and Madrid. And the situation is much worse in Asia. There, the Empire has truly and fully mobilized all available resources, in order to discredit its two main adversaries. Speaking to my friends and colleagues in such places like Indonesia and Philippines, I was told that most of the people there know little, even close to nothing about Russia. It is still perceived through the Cold War and post-Cold-War stereotypes. The Western propaganda apparatus has been portraying Russians as cold, aggressive, brainwashed and dangerous. Great Russian culture, Russian arts and the exceptional warmth of the Russian people, are something almost totally unknown in most of the Asian nations. Great foreign policy successes of Russia, like those in Syria, are twisted and turned into the crimes, even in Muslim countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where people should definitely know better. In India, which had been for decades very close to the Soviet Union, the situation is somehow brighter, but only among the extremely small and educated group of its citizens. There, like in many other parts of the world, pro-business and pro-Western mass media is skillfully defending the interests of the West, demonizing all that is standing in the way of the Empire. China is being targeted with an even greater and more malicious force than Russia. Successful and Communist China is the worst nightmare for the West and for the local, Asian elites. The entire propaganda apparatus is now in overdrive, spreading ideological attacks and negative messages. The most peaceful major country on Earth is being portrayed as an aggressor and threat to regional and world peace. In the Philippines and elsewhere, the global Western regime is arousing the cheapest and extremely dangerous bellicose forms of nationalism. The local Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia that consists mainly of the anti-Communist elements, descendants of the people who left China after the revolution, are playing an extremely important and destructive role. Nobody seems to notice that the United States/NATO is encircling both Russia and China with its military bases, while deploying new offensive missile systems. Nobody talks about those tens of millions of people who were massacred during the Western invasions of Asia during the 20th century. And the situation is not much different in Africa and elsewhere. * True, both Russia and China have invested some substantial resources in order to counter the Western propaganda. The RT, Sputnik and NEO (New Eastern Outlook), have all become extremely effective global information and intellectual detoxification outlets. But the West is still investing more. The ideological war is even something that is lately being discussed openly in Washington. The more Russia and China resist and the more they defend themselves; the more Western propaganda steps up its indoctrination campaigns. Clearly, both Russia and China have to do more, not only for their own interests, but also for the good of the world. The great achievements of China and Russia have to be explained in detail. Such information should be spread to all corners of the planet. In this field, China should learn from Russia, as the Chinese media outlets now available abroad are still too timid and too reconciliatory. It requires real strength and determination to counter the mighty and centuries-old Western propaganda and brainwashing schemes. It also requires large financial budgets. But the intellectual resistance and the ideological wars should not be fought only in the fields of the politics, news and analyses. The tremendous cultural and intellectual achievements of both China and Russia should be made available to the populations on all continents. China has done so already a lot, mainly through its Confucius Institutes. It should be doing more, and so should Russia. Both countries are in possession of marvelous cultural wealth, overflowing with wisdom and arts. Their humanism is much deeper than that of the West  the West that has been mainly building its wealth, for centuries, by plundering the Planet. For as long as one can remember, both Europe and North America had been committing genocides, while enslaving entire continents. At the same time, they have been engaging in self-glorification, promoting their political, economic and cultural concepts. They claimed cultural superiority. And they have been doing it with such force, such ruthlessness and in the end with such success, that they have managed to fully indoctrinate most of the world into accepting that there is really no alternative, no other way (except the Western way) forward. There are naturally other ways, and needless to say, much better ones! In fact, before European colonialism began ruining and enslaving the planet, almost all parts of the world were living in much more developed and gentler societies than those of the West. Now very little is known about this fact. Alternatives are not discussed in the mainstream, anymore. The search for a better world, for more humanistic concepts, is almost totally abandoned; at least in the West and in its colonies and client states. It as if this horrid nightmare, into which the world had been forced into by the global Western dictatorship, is the only imaginable future for our human race. It is not. And there are two great countries on this planet, Russia and China, which can offer many alternatives. They are strong enough to withstand all the pressure from the West. They have hearts, brains; they have the know-how and resources to offer alternatives and to re-start millennia old, essential discussions about the future of our humanity. But in order for this to happen, the world has to first know about both Russia and China. It has to understand their cultures. The war against imperialism should be fought not only on the battlefields; it should be fought on the airwaves, at the printing presses, in the concert halls and theatres. Kindness, humanism, internationalism and knowledge can often serve as weapons much more powerful than missiles, strategic bombers and submarines. Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are:  Exposing Lies Of The Empire  and  Fighting Against Western Imperialism .Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism . Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania  a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia:  Indonesia  The Archipelago of Fear . Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter .
Only Clinton Can Save Trumps Electoral Victory By James Petras Rational Voters and Irrational Experts June 15, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - Large swaths of the US electorate are voting for rational choices against a system controlled by an economic and political oligarchy. Rational choice is based on experience with political leaders who pursue policies which lead to a trillion dollar financial crises and bailouts which impoverish millions of mortgage holders and working family tax payers. Rational rejection of the established leadership of the major parties is based on an understanding of the futility of relying on their campaign promises. Rational commitments to ending inequality and overseas wars which weaken America, has led to greater emphasis on making America strong and transforming the domestic American economy and security system. A vast array of electoral analysts have ignored the rational socioeconomic and political choices of the American electorate and repeatedly rely on psycho-babble, claiming that contemporary voters are reacting out of anger and irrational emotionalism. Sanders and Trump: Appeals to the New Rationality? The woeful blindness of political experts is in large part a product of their own hostility to the rise of two Presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who challenge the established party and economic leadership. The Sanders campaign proceeded along the lines of a political polarization between big business and the working class; demanding higher taxes for the wealthy and greater social spending for public health and education foe the working class. Sanders sought to unify racial and ethnic minorities and majoritarian workers with progressive gender, religious and environmental movements. The Trump campaign sought to mobilize white American majorities among workers, small businesspeople and professionals, who are downwardly mobile and have been marginalized by globalization. Sanders emphasized a refurbished class identity. Trump promoted a new nationalist symbolism. Yet in many ways the establishment opposition, the parties, mass media and the economic elite, are far more hostile to Trumps nationalist politics than Sanders democratic socialist program and class appeal. It appears that Sanders willingness to come to terms with the Democratic elite and back Clintons candidacy when he lost the nomination, is far more acceptable to the establishment than Trump. According to all known precedents, the Democratic Party allows progressive candidates to post advanced socio-economic campaign platforms to secure working class voters, all the better to tank them in favor of business-warmonger policies once in office. Trumps initial nationalist-anti-globalist rhetoric aroused greater animosity from business, liberal and militarist elites than Sanders occasional critical comment. Trumps nationalism was rooted in popular and reactionary appeals. On the one hand he spoke of relocating multi-nationals from abroad to the US. On the other hand, he demands the expulsion of over ten million Mexicans from the US labor market. His anti-globalization-business relocation strategy lacked several essential ingredients: he did not specify which multi-nationals would be affected; nor what policies he would apply to implement the trillion-dollar return. In contrast, Trump was precise in naming the immigrants to be expelled; the police methods to expel the target population; and the border security system to blockade their entry. Trumps Electoral Victory and Neoliberal Right Turn Trumps successful nomination led to an appeal to big donors for campaign funding and endorsements by Republican neo-liberal Congressional leaders like Paul Ryan.This has led Trump to downgrade his anti- globalization, economic nationalist politics, in favor of his chauvinist ethno-racist appeals. Trumps current electoral strategy seeks to unify the hard neo-liberal elite with the patriotic white working class. Trumps ideological vehicle to the Presidency no longer attacks globalization. Instead he relies on arousing public support by stigmatizing anti-American minorities and targeting Clintons reactionary and corrupt policies. Trumps Make America Strong propaganda follows closely in line with Obamas headline attack on Chinas steel exports to the US markets. Trumps Make America Strong policy follows Obamas systematic assault on the World Trade Organizations for rejecting US agricultural trade subsidies. More recently,in tune with Trumps rhetoric, Obama unilaterally dictated the membership of the WTOs trade settlement process. Obama blocked the reappointment of an independent South Korean lawyer who opposed Washingtons violation of WTO rules. Rather then look upon Trump as an anti-establistment populist his policy would follow Obamas promotion of business lobbies against the WTO. Trump follows Obamas policy of favoring globalization only insofar as Washington controls the international institutions that run it. Trump follows Washingtons imperial policy of packing global institutions with its vassals. Trump in the Footstep of Sanders Trumps embrace of the neo-liberal business elite follows Sanders submission to the Democratic Party bosses. Trump hopes his mass base can be deluded from his right-turn embrace of the economic elite by increasing slanders and provocations,turning them against working class Mexicans by accusing them of stealing jobs, crimes and drugs. Trumps mass meetings of almost exclusively white working and middle class voters in Mexican-American regions of California are designed to provoke violent protests. Trump gains nation-wide nationalist support by circulating videos of NBC, CNN and ABC reports depicting peaceful white Trump supporters being terrorized and beaten up by mobs of (Mexican-American) protesters. Trump appeals to his Americans to denounce and stand strong against demonstrators waving Mexican flags and burning the Stars and Stripes alongside Trumps Make America Great hats. Trumps turn to the neo-liberal Republican elite means he will heighten his repressive and anti-immigrant policies. Trump will be aided by mindless 5 violent protesters and provocations overcoming the police at anti-Trump rallies. Trump effectively engages in the propaganda of the deed; linking disloyal foreign immigrants waving the Mexican, not the US flag. The realignment of the Republican Party brings Trump into the arms of the hardline neo-liberal Congressional-Wall Street elite. This shift means Trumps ideological and mass base needs to be redirected toward greater hostility to domestic enemies  Mexicans, Muslims, women and ecologists. Trump is especially counting on the incorporation of Sanders electoral machine into the Clinton campaign. White workers face to face with Wall Street warmonger Clinton will be less likely to reject Trumps embrace of the rightwing Congressional business alliance. Trump will deflect working class opposition from his turn to the neoliberal Congressional Republicans by targeting Clintons big business and covert, illicit government operations. Clintongross violations of federal laws, her felonious communications and liasons with foreign officials could hand the Presidency to Trump. Trump has gained working class voters in West Virginia, Ohio ,and many other rust-belt states because of Clintons free trade and anti-working class history. Trumps electoral victory will hinge on his capacity to cover-up his neoliberal turn and to focus voters attention on Clintons militarist, Wall Street ,conspiratorial and anti-working class politics. James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.
The Next U.S Foreign/Military Policy



By Jack A. Smith June 15, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - F rom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, October 2011 as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan appeared to be ending: "There are those on the American political scene who are calling for us not to reposition [to Asia], but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage with the world have it exactly backward  we cannot afford not to.... Rather than pull back from the world, we need to press forward and renew our leadership. The Asia-Pacific represents such a real 21st-century opportunity for usto secure and sustain our leadership abroad." President Obama's recent journey to Japan and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, beyond visiting Hiroshima and being welcomed by crowds in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, was primarily aimed at strengthening his administration's most important foreign policy objective  the political, commercial and military encirclement of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Now that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Obama may rest assured that if she defeats Republican Donald Trump in November, as expected, his "rebalance" to Asia will continue apace. Indeed, a Clinton administration may move faster and more decisively. Clinton was a strong advocate of the rebalance and thoroughly agrees with Obama that Beijing must never be allowed to diminish Washington's global hegemony, even within China's ownSouth Asian region, and, like Obama, she always uses the code words "American leadership" in place of "American domination." Obama announced what he first termed a "pivot" to Asia in the fall of 2011 just after a 5,500-word article by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton titled "America's Pacific Century" appeared in Foreign Policy magazine. It began: "As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment  diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise  in the Asia-Pacific region." The "otherwise" meant military. While in Japan, Obama told the newspaper Asahi Shimbun May 26: "Renewing American leadership in the Asia Pacific has been one of my top policy priorities as President, and Im very proud of the progress that weve made. The cornerstone of our rebalance strategy has been bolstering our treaty alliancesincluding with Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines and Australiaand today each of these alliances is stronger than when I came into office. Weve forged new partnerships with countries like Vietnam, which I just visited, and with regional institutions like ASEAN and the East Asia Summit. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the highest-standard trade agreement in history, we have the opportunity to write the rules for regional and global trade for decades to come. I believe that Americas position in the region has never been stronger, and Im confident that the next U.S. President will continue to build on our progress." A week later in San Diego Clinton delivered a foreign policy speech. Its purpose was to show that she would be much better than Republican Donald Trump in furthering America's global interests. Accusing Trump of not understanding that Russia and China "work against us," she declared: If America doesnt lead, we leave a vacuum  and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then theyll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety  and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit. Now Moscow and Beijing are deeply envious of our alliances around the world, because they have nothing to match them. Theyd love for us to elect a president who would jeopardize that source of strength. If Donald gets his way, theyll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen. Instead of defining the November election as a contest between the right/far right Republicans and the center right Democrats, Clinton depicted it as a choice between "a fearful America thats less secure and less engaged in the world [under Trump], and a strong, confident America that leads to keep our country safe and our economy growing. Clinton has thus committed herself to a continuation of Washington's decades-longimperial foreign/military policies, replete with cold war rhetoric, the notion of an indispensible America, the commitment to "lead" the world, and targeting China and Russia as virtual enemies. There was no hint of making any efforts to reduce world tensions peacefully. As a result of Obama-Clinton policies the relationship between Beijing and Moscow has become considerably closer in recent years. Meanwhile the Bush-Obama Middle East wars are expected to continue indefinitely, at least throughout the next administration and maybe much longer. If Clinton gains the White House she is expected to intensify U.S. involvement in these conflicts, particularly in Syria and Libya. Her primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is significantly to Clinton's left in domestic politics but only moderately less hawkish in foreign affairs. Trump is a dangerous enigma, correctly identified by Clinton as temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility. U.S. arms for Vietnam President Obama was warmly received by the Vietnamese Communist Party, the government and it seems by the people as well during his three-day visit starting May 22. A number of U.S. news articles marveled at the fact that Washington appeared to be totally excused for its brutal two-decade intervention to prevent the unification of temporarily divided North and South Vietnam. After all, some to 3.8 million Vietnamese people died from the American air and ground war, as did nearly two million in Cambodia and Laos combined due to U.S. led attacks on suspected North Vietnamese trails and hideouts in these neighboring countries. U.S. war deaths were 58,193 between 1955-1975. Part of the reason Vietnam doesn't hate the U.S. is that it won the long war against the world's most powerful military state following Hanoi's victory against French colonialism and the earlier Japanese invasion and occupation. Vietnam was exhausted and in economic difficulty after 30 years of continual conflict when the Americans finally fled South Vietnam in April 1975. Another reason for cautiously partnering with the U.S. is the existence of China on Vietnam's northern border. Chinese dynasties dominated Vietnam for over 900 years between 111 BCE and 1427 CE. Both Russia and China supported Vietnam in the fight against U.S. aggression but grave tensions and even the possibility of an armed conflict between the two giant nations was an additional worry for Hanoi, which needed their material support to pursue the war. On Dec. 25, 1978,Vietnam invaded and occupied adjacent Cambodia in order to drive out the ultra-left Khmer Rouge government after a number of border clashes between them. In February 1979, China  which had supported the Khmer Rouge  invaded northern Vietnam in a brief but bloody one-month war, with both sides claiming victory. Several short skirmishes took place until 1989 when Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. Since then relations between the two neighboring countries with governments that seem to share the same socialist ideology have been peaceful but distant. During his stay in Vietnam, Obama was publicly critical of what he considered Vietnam's human rights shortcomings, as though killing five million people in Indochina, millions in the contemporary Middle East, and uncritically supporting dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia gave Washington the international standing to wag its finger in Hanoi's face. But Obama'scriticisms of the country wereprimarily for show, paving the way for him to announce the ending of he 41-year ban on lethal arms sales to Vietnam. In Hanoi, Obama told a press conference that "we already have U.S. vessels that have come here to port [at Cam Ranh Bay and] we expect that there will be deepening cooperation between our militaries." According to The Diplomat May 31: "Uncorroborated Vietnamese sources in Hanoi [state that] prior to Obamas visit, U.S. officials proposed to their hosts the possibility of raising their comprehensive partnership to a strategic partnership [an important upgrading]. Vietnamese officials reportedly got cold feet at the last minute and politely left this proposal for future consideration.At the same time, although U.S. officials, including the president, described bilateral relations as entering a new phase, no new adjective was placed in front of comprehensive partnership in the official joint statement issued by the two presidents to indicate that relations had advanced significantly since 2013." China's Global Times, a party daily tabloid that tends to speak directly, argued May 26 in reference to the U.S. decision to sell arms to Vietnam: "This is a new move by the U.S. to advance its rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy, displaying Washington's desire to reinforce military cooperation with China's neighboring countries.... Now, Washington is ironically trying to manipulate Vietnam's nationalism to counter China. U.S. Senator John McCain, a prisoner in the Vietnam War and now Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, plays a key role in rescinding the ban on the sale of lethal arms to Vietnam, believing it will rope in Hanoi to counter China's rise." In the same issue of Global Times, Nguyen Vu Tung, acting president of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam in Hanoi, wrote an op-ed that expressed his "personal" views, stating: "In July 2013, Vietnam and the U.S. agreed to elevate their relationship to a 'comprehensive partnership' designed to further promote bilateral ties in all fields. It is noteworthy that the enhancement of Vietnam-U.S. relations ran parallel with Vietnam's forging its relations with China, a big neighbor that is of increasing importance to Vietnam's peace, stability and prosperity.... Vietnam-U.S. relations are not developing at the expense of the links between Vietnam and China. Instead of choosing sides, Hanoi tries its best to promote relations with both China and the U.S. and sees its relations with them in positive-sum terms..... "The independent posture of Vietnam's foreign policy applies especially to Vietnam's defense policy where Vietnam strictly follows a 'three-no principle.' Vietnam will not enter any military pact and become a military ally of any country, will not allow any country to set up a military base on its soil, and will not rely on any country to oppose any other country. Recently, Hanoi has been under some domestic pressure to review this principle. Yet, adhering to it is still the policy mainstream." With the arms sales Vietnam is now considered an allied member of the informal U.S. coterie of East Asian and Southeast Asian nations, six of which are contending with China's claims to most of the South China Sea, with Washington's backing. Beijing says it is willing to negotiate with the six on a one to one basis but the U.S insists on multilateral talks. In addition to Vietnam the countries involved in the claims include Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Japan. China's claim is based on two points: 1. Implicitly, its long history  about 4,000 years, nearly all of it under Chinese dynastic imperial rule until 104 years ago. 2. Explicitly, the 1947 "nine dash line" map produced by the Chinese Nationalist government in 1947, two years before the success of the Chinese communist revolution replaced the semi-capitalist/semi-feudal Nationalist enterprise called the Republic of China with the People's Republic of China. The Nationalist government, army and many civilians fled to Taiwan, an offshore province of China that still maintains that the nine dash line is absolutely legitimate, as does the PRC. The U.S.  which supported the Nationalists to the extent of keeping Taiwan in China's permanent Security Council seat until 1971  did not question China's claims until fairly recent years. U.S. support for the six claimants is an important political part of the containment of China by increasing the number of regional allies and dependencies that will support Washington's political goals. There are military and commercial aspects of the rebalance to Asia in addition to using allies to strengthen opposition to China. The U.S. has militarily dominated the East Asia region since the end of World War II in 1945 but it has been significantly increasing its military might since launching the pivot to Asia. More Army and Air force units have been ordered to existing bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and other nearby locations, as well as a new base in Australia. Up to 90,000 U.S. military personnel are in the vicinity. Navy aircraft carriers, other warships and submarines have been shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. An aircraft carrier battle group is patrolling the East China Sea. Some U.S. ships navigate extremely close to small Chinese islets that are being upgraded  a practice that could inadvertently spark an armed confrontation. The principle commercial element of the effort to contain China is the corporation-dominated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)  Washington's neoliberal free-trade proposal for 12 Pacific Rim countries that is intended to enlarge U.S. economic influence in the region at the expense of China, which has not been invited to join. The 12 signatories to the TPP agreement in 2010 included Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam. Ratification of the trade pact the may not happen, not least because recent political developments in the U.S. may bury this major Bush-Obama initiative. Hillary Clinton, once a strong advocate as secretary of state, turned against the TPP during the Democratic primary in order to opportunistically convey the impression she was as radical as Sanders in order to attract his constituency. She also wanted to retain the support of the AFL-CIO, which strongly opposes the pact. Trump rejects the TPP because many working class supporters believe that such trade deals take away American jobs, which they do. Some commentators suggest Obama may be able to get it passed after the elections and before the new president assumes office, but it's a long shot. Vietnam supports the TTP because its economy stands to gain from increased trade.It is of interest that China is Vietnam's biggest trading partner and will remain so, as is true of most regional nations aligning with the U.S. superpower. Beijing's rise over the last 20 years has benefitted all these states, not to mention the transfer of reasonably priced reliable goods throughout area. U.S. President visits Hiroshima Obama arrived in Japan May 25 to attend a Group of Seven meeting and to further strengthen Japan's commitment to help in the effort to surround China, but the international media focused entirely on the first American presidential visit to Hiroshima in the 71 years since the United States obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. He didn't apologize to Japan because that would be unpopular with many Americans and alsowith Korea and China, countries that suffered woefully from the vicious and racist Japanese invasion and occupation. They believe Japan hasn't sufficiently atoned for its numerous wartime atrocities. Instead Obama delivered a quite moving speech: "We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are...." His address was hypocritical, particularly when he declared: "We may not be able to eliminate mans capacity to do evil. So nations and the alliances that we formed must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics. And yet, that is not enough, for we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mindset about war itself." In reality Obama is not only slower than his three predecessors in reducing nuclear weapons but he has initiated a trillion dollar effort to upgrade America's entire nuclear arsenal and delivery systems. In his Asahi Shimbun interview Obama also said: "I believe that weve substantially enhanced Americas credibility in the Asia Pacific, which is rooted in our unwavering commitment to the security of our allies. We continue to modernize our defense posture in the region, including positioning more of our most advanced military capabilities in Japan. As Ive said before, our treaty commitment to Japan's security is absolute. With our new defense guidelines, American and Japanese forces will become more flexible and better prepared to cooperate on a range of challenges, from maritime security to disaster response, and our forces will be able to plan, train and operate even more closely. Im very grateful for Prime Minister Abes strong support of our alliance." Abe is a hawk about China. "No one country is more enthusiastic than Japan to advocate containing China," according to a May 19 commentary by Zhang Zhixin, the head of American Political Studies at China's Institute of American Studies. He continued: "The strategic competition between the [U.S. and China] is becoming more apparent. In economic and trade areas, the EU and U.S. denied granting market economy status to China. In the South China Sea, where China is trying to secure its maritime sovereignty and rights, the U.S. believes China is challenging its regional hegemony and military dominance in the area. As deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said, the U.S. is intensely focused on Chinas 'assertive and provocative behavior.' Therefore, the U.S. Navy is pushing for a more aggressive policy of patrolling close to Chinese-fortified islands and caused more dangerous encounters between the U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and Chinese jet planes. "What makes the situation more complicated is that Japan, as an outsider in the South China Sea issue, is trying to insert itself into the conflict. At the end of last year, the Japanese Foreign Minister talked about the possibility of joint patrol with the U.S. Navy in the [South China Sea] area. This year, Japan is becoming increasingly aggressive in charging that China's a threat in the Asia Pacific region. It is understandable for the Prime Minister Abe to do so to the domestic audience to sell his proposal of revising the pacifist Constitution, but when he was selling his viewpoint to the EU countries, thats too much. Japan is allied with the U.S., but the latter never restrained Japans anti-China rhetoric. Furthermore, Japan actively sold advanced weapons to countries around the South China Sea, participated in more multilateral military exercises, and conducted more port calls in the area, which just made the regional situation more tense." Another area of sharp Chinese-Japanese contention is in the East China Sea. Both countries claim rocky, uninhabited protuberances known as Senkaku by Tokyo and Diaoyu by Beijing. China scrambled jets to meet Japanese military aircraft in disputed airspace May 21. Japanese officials said it was the closest Chinese jets had flown to their planes. It came as China was holding air-sea naval exercises with Russia in the region. Tokyo officially protested to Chinese ambassador Cheng Yonghua June 9 about a "Chinese and three Russian warships" that entered what Japan called the "contiguous zones" near the disputed Islands. The Chinese Defense ministry responded June 9 calling the navigation legal and reasonable, insisting "China's naval ships have every right to navigate in waters under its jurisdiction." The reply came a day a before the beginning of a large-scale eight-day joint military drill in the western Pacific involving the U.S., Japan and India. According to Stratfor in a June 10 analysis: "Japan under Abe has upset Beijing by broadening the geographic and functional scope of the operations of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, which Japan's postwar pacifism long limited. Perceptions of Chinese expansionism have prompted Japan to prioritize responding in the South China Sea. In 2015, Japan announced the start of talks with the Philippines on a Visiting Forces Agreement that would permit Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel to rotate through Philippine bases. Later that year, Japan secured an agreement with Vietnam to allow Japanese warships to make port calls at Cam Ranh Bay, which they did in April of this year. Even more ambitiously, Japan has responded that it might be amenable to U.S. calls for regional powers to join freedom of navigation operations in waters far beyond the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force's traditional domain in Japan's near seas. Though these steps are incremental, they represent slow and steady progress toward a clear endpoint most unwelcome in Beijing the routine presence of Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force operations in the South China Sea." The 42ndG7 summit meeting in Japan May 2627 accomplished little. It was "an opportunity lost" according to Montreal Star columnist Thomas Walkom, who wrote June 1: The leaders of seven important countries had a chance to do something that would rekindle the sputtering global economy.Some, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Canadas Justin Trudeauurged their fellow leaders to foreswear austerity and, among other growth-inducing measures, spend money to stimulate the world economy. "They failed. Italys Matteo Renzi was on side with Canada and Japan, as were Frances Francois Hollande and U.S. President Barack Obama. But Germanys Angela Merkel and Britains David Cameron insisted that debt and deficit control were more important than fiscal stimulus.The final communique from the session said essentially that each nation would continue to do what it thought best.So what do we make of the G7? In some ways, its time has passed. It no longer represents the worlds major economies. China is conspicuously absent. Russia, briefly a member of what was then called the G8, was summarily expelled in 2014 for annexing Crimea." The importance of India As soon as President Obama returned home he put aside time to work out plans for ensnaring rising India more deeply into Washington's informal anti-China coalition. He met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the White House June 7. This was their seventh meeting in the two years since the Indian leader was elected in May 2014, which must be some kind of record. Modi addressed Congress the next day and his speech was received with great applause. Earlier Indian governments, while friendly to the U.S. were closer to Russia (and the USSR in earlier days) and nonaligned countries than to America. Modi is campaigning for a much closer relationship with Washington, which is exactly what the Obama administration wants. The Economist noted June 11: "China worries about signs that Western countries are cozying up to its giant neighbor. It fears that Modi will exploit better ties with America as a source of advantage. For years the Pentagon has pursued India as part of an effort to counterbalance growing Chinese strength, but only in recent months have Indian military officials begun to show eagerness for co-operation. This month the two countries will hold their annual naval exercises not in Indian waters, but in the Sea of Japan, with the Japanese navy, near islands claimed by both Japan and China. In a wide-ranging speech before a joint session of Congress on June 8 Modi said that America was Indias indispensable partner. An outright military alliance between India and America remains unlikely, but even the remote prospect of one will concentrate Chinese minds. In her pivot to Asia article referred to earlier, Clinton foresaw intense U.S. involvement in the region "stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western shores of the Americas.... Among key emerging powers with which we will work closely are India and Indonesia, two of the most dynamic and significant democratic powers of Asia, and both countries with which the Obama administration has pursued broader, deeper, and more purposeful relationships." India and Indonesia are second and fourth ranking countries in population. (China is first, U.S. third.) According to the Center for International Studies "Washington has made it clear that Jakarta is central to the U.S. rebalance, toward the Asia Pacific, both in its own right and as a leader in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN.)"It is also the largest Muslim country by far. India, however, is the big prize.As a result of U.S.-Indian talks after the Modi government took power India has been designated a "Major Defense Partner" by Washington, although it is not entirely understood what this unusual title obligates India to do. For its part the U.S. is supplying India with technology, loans,equipment,and other means of enhancing India's economy and military. Commenting on the Obama-Modi meeting June 7 the Associated Press reported "The two governments said they had finalized the text of a defense logistics agreement to make it easier for their militaries to operate together. The U.S. and India share concern about the rise of China, although New Delhi steers clear of a formal alliance with Washington. In an article published by the Cato Institute April 29 and titled Persistent Suitor: Washington Wants India as an Ally to Contain China, Ted Galen Carpenter wrote: "A growing number of policymakers and pundits see India not only as an increasingly important economic and military player generally, but as a crucial potential strategic counterweight to a rising China.... Strategic ties have gradually and substantially deepened. President Barack Obama has characterized the relationship between the United States and India as 'a defining partnership of the 21st century,' and Indian Prime Minister Modi has termed it 'a natural alliance.' Perhaps more significant, India has contracted to receive some $14 billion in supposedly defensive military items from the United States in less than a decade. Washington has now edged out Moscow as Indias principal arms supplier. "Bilateral strategic ties received an additional boost in mid-April 2016 with the visit of U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to Delhi. That trip generated considerable uneasiness in China, where opinion leaders noted not only was it Carters second trip to India during his relatively brief tenure as Pentagon chief, but that he cancelled a previously scheduled trip to Beijing so that he could make this latest journey. That move, they feared, suggested a rather unsubtle tilt against China in favor of one of its potential regional geostrategic competitors. The agreement that came from Carters visit would do nothing to reassure the Chinese.... "Moreover, India maintains an important economic relationship of its own with China. Indeed, according to most calculations, China has now emerged as Indias largest trading partner. Trade between the two Asian giants topped $80 billion in 2015. In addition to the economic stakes, there are bilateral security issues, primarily unresolved border disputes, as well as security issues throughout Central Asia of concern to Delhi that could be exacerbated if relations with Beijing deteriorated.Shrewd Indian policymakers may well conclude that the best position for their country is one of prudent neutrality (perhaps with a slight pro-American tilt) in the growing tensions between the United States and China." U.S.-China Relations The contradiction between Washington's words and deeds is no better exemplified than in its relations with China. U.S. rhetoric rarely includes threats, except occasionally regarding the South China Sea. Most though not all its multitude of discussions with Chinese leaders are soft spoken and civil. From time to time the U.S. speaks of China as a "partner." Never stated openly is the fact that Washington will continue pressuring Beijing until it learns how to behave in a fashion acceptable to the world's only military and economic superpower. Part of that pressure consists of continual exaggerations of China's military power, which is far behind that U.S. The Beijing government never threatens the U.S. It is well aware of the meaning behind Washington's friendly words because it is surrounded by U.S. military power and Washington's obedient allies in the region, by exclusionary trade deals, the rejection of its claims in the South China Sea and innumerable efforts by the White House to undermine China in all the political and economic associations and coalitions in the East Asia region. Beijing rarely mentions this publicly and works to develop a cooperative "win-win" relationship with Washington. China clearly recognizes the U.S. as the world's great power and occasionally appears slightly deferential. The following June 6 report from Xinhua news agency about the annual China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue held in Beijing that day is typical example of the Chinese approach: "President Xi Jinping urged China and the United States to properly manage differences and sensitive issues and deepen strategic mutual trust and cooperation at a high-level bilateral dialogue. The differences between China and the United States are normal, Xi said. "As long as the two sides tackle differences and sensitive issues in the principle of mutual respect and equality, major disturbances in bilateral relations can be avoided, Xi said, adding that China and the United States should strengthen communication and cooperation on Asia-Pacific affairs. "The broad Pacific Ocean, Xi said, 'should not become an arena for rivalry, but a big platform for inclusive cooperation. China and the United States have extensive common interests in the region and should maintain frequent dialogues, cooperate more, tackle challenges, jointly maintain prosperity and stability in the region, and "cultivate common circles of friends' rather than 'cultivate exclusive circles of friends.' "The Chinese president also called on the two sides to expand mutually beneficial cooperation, uphold the win-win principle, and raise the level of bilateral cooperation.... [He] stressed that China will unswervingly pursue the path of peaceful development and promote the building of a new model of international relations with win-win cooperation at its core." At the same time, as we have written at length [1], China openly rejects in principle the existence of a unilateral global hegemon  a position the U.S. has occupied for the last quarter century since the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Beijing advocates a form of shared global leadership. Washington is convinced that it deserves the right to in effect rule the world and has no intention of dismantling its shadow empire. This is the principal contradiction between the U.S. and China. Beijing is doing what it can to avoid a major clash with the United States, short of appearing to kowtow to Washington. The U.S. does not want a clash as well. Both sides fear the possibility of war and each is aware that one may eventually take place. That is certainly one of the reasons the Obama administration has launched its decades-long program costing a trillion dollars to modernize America's nuclear arsenal. China, for all its progress since the 1980s, is still a developing country and behind the U.S. in many ways, but is destined to become a major power in a few decades at most. The U.S. cannot but accept China's inevitable growth. At issue is whether Beijing will eventually subordinate itself to the U.S. as have other powers, such as Germany, UK, France and Japan, have done, or in any other acceptable fashion. There are current and historical reasons why China will not do so. At this point the U.S. is drawing upon all its resources to contain and surround the growing giant. This can only lead to big trouble in time, for both countries and the world. Unfortunately, both U.S. neoliberal capitalist political parties are absolutely dedicated to world domination and ultimately to the use of terrible violence to defend American "leadership." Unless this changes substantially imperialism eventually will lead to global calamity. This is a matter that goes far beyond the Hillary, Donald, and Bernie political preoccupation of the moment. None of them would substantially transform the existing foreign/military policy. Only a genuinely left wing mass movement in the U.S. has a chance of changing direction.  [1] For article "The Hegemony Games  USA v. PRC," click on 5-31-15 Newsletter Hegemony Games Jack A. Smith , editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter at http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/, who may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net.
Its Official: Our World is Governed by Psychopaths By Vanessa Beeley

June 15, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " 21st Century Wire " - The unthinkable has become reality. The global humanitarian and legal entities are now officially in the hands of genocidal psychopaths. Today Israel, illegal state of extremist settlers built upon the bones of an imprisoned, colonized Palestine, has been elected to the chair of the UNGA. The United Nations General Assembly sixth committee or legal committee. This legal committee oversees management of international law. The lawbreaker has become the lawmaker in one fell swoop, ransacking the regulatory halls of justice and laying waste to what remnants of delusion we had left regarding the efficacy of international law.

I am proud to be the first Israeli elected to this position, Israel U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement. Israel is a world leader in international law and in fighting terrorism, he added. We are pleased to have the opportunity to share our knowledge with the countries of the world.

~ Danny Danlon

This report from Reuters:  Israel on Monday won an election to chair the United Nations legal committee, the first time that it will head one of the world bodys six permanent committees since joining the U.N. in 1949. While it is a largely symbolic and procedural role, chairing the committee will give Israel a chance to have a higher profile in routine affairs at the United Nations. The so-called Legal Committee, or Sixth Committee, oversees issues related to international law. The General Assembly has six standing committees that report to it, on: disarmament, economic and financial issues, human rights, decolonization, the U.N. budget, and legal issues. I am proud to be the first Israeli elected to this position, Israel U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement. Israel is a world leader in international law and in fighting terrorism, he added. We are pleased to have the opportunity to share our knowledge with the countries of the world. Israel was a candidate for the regional Western European and Others Group (WEOG) and received a comfortable majority of votes  109 out of 175 valid votes cast in the 193-nation assembly. Sweden was runner-up with 10 votes. Normally committee heads are elected by consensus without a vote. Opponents to the Israeli candidacy called for a vote, prompting a sharp reaction from the deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N., David Pressman. Even a chair from (former leader Muammar) Gaddafis Libya was elected by acclamation, he said in a statement. A vote should not have been called today. We need a United Nations that includes Israel, that brings Israel closer, not one that systematically pushes Israel away, he added. Israel was originally part of the Asia-Pacific Group along with other Middle Eastern and Asian nations, the majority of which are cool or openly hostile toward the Israeli state. Its transfer to WEOG gave it a chance to get elected to leadership posts and play a more active role at the U.N. The chief Palestinian delegate at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, complained about the results of the election, saying Arab and Muslim countries had tried to prevent an Israeli victory. Speaking to reporters, Mansour described Israel as the biggest violator of international law and predicted that Danons election was threatening the work of the Sixth Committee. He said the Arab League and 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation had opposed Israels election. The 71st session of the UNGA Sixth Committee will be held in October 2016. The following is part of the proposed programme: Measures to eliminate international terrorism The rule of law at the national and international levels Criminal accountability of UN officials and experts on mission Responsibility of states for internationally wrongful acts. The ultimate terrorist alongside Saudi Arabia will be taking legal steps to eliminate international terrorism and will be judging the responsibility of States for internationally wrongful acts. The obscene irony of the election of a lawless, illegal and oppressive state such as Israel to this position of power barely needs explanation. The election of Saudi Arabia to a key human rights panel in the UNHRC [UN Human Rights Council] has already ensured that the only absolute monarchy in the world with an appalling human rights record was given the power to choose officials to decide humanitarian standards globally while flouting them domestically and externally in Yemen on a terrifying scale. This appointment ensured that the UNHRC became a weapon against freedom of speech and opposition against extremism. It allowed the despotic Saudi ruling family to crush human rights activists under the UNHRC umbrella and ultimately violates the right to peace and developement in the region. Statement by Dr Ashrawi, PLO Executive Committee Member, prior to Israels election:

Commenting on the Western European and Others Groups (WEOG) decision to nominate Israel for the chairmanship of the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee, PLO Executive Committee Member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi condemned the move and said: It is ironic that Israel, a state that continues to breach international law and conventions, international humanitarian law and countless UN resolutions, is being nominated to head a legal committee that aims to promote international law and protect basic human rights and freedoms. With such a decision, the WEOG is making a mockery of the international legal system and rewarding Israel for its flagrant violations of international law and acts of collective punishment and violence, including Israels continued theft of Palestinian land and resources, the expansion of its illegal settlement enterprise, the demolition and ethnic cleansing of entire Palestinian communities and villages, the use of live ammunition and the extra-judicial killing of innocent Palestinians, the revocation of Jerusalem IDs, and the increasing use of administration detention against Palestinian men, women and children. We call on the WEOG to do what is right, withdraw its nomination of Israel for the chairmanship of the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee, and hold it accountable for its persistent violations of international law and human rights. As a people under occupation, we will remain steadfast and undeterred in our efforts to pursue all diplomatic and legal channels to counter Israeli violations and safeguard our peoples right to self-determination, justice and freedom.
Hillary Clintons Project For A New American Century By Dan Wright June 15, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Off Guardian " - Here we go again. Earlier this year, some were surprised to see Project For The New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and longtime DC fixture Robert Kagan endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president. They shouldnt have been. As is now clear from a policy paper [PDF] published last month, the neoconservatives are going all-in on Hillary Clinton being the best vessel for American power in the years ahead. The paper, titled Expanding American Power, was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party-friendly think tank co-founded and led by former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy. Flournoy served in the Obama Administration under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and is widely considered to be the frontrunner for the next secretary of defense, should Hillary Clinton become president. The introduction to Expanding American Power is written by the aforementioned Robert Kagan and former Clinton Administration State Department official James Rubin. The paper itself was prepared in consultation with various defense and national security intellectuals over the course of six dinners. Among the officials includes those who signed on to PNAC letters calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, such as Elliot Abrams, Robert Zoellick, Craig Kennedy, Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and Flournoy herself, who signed on to a PNAC letter in 2005 calling for more ground troops in Iraq. The substance of the document is about what one would expect from an iteration of PNAC. The paper cites a highly revisionist history of post-World War II American policymaking, complete with a celebration of Americas selfless motives for every action. Left out is any mention of overthrowing democratically elected and popular governments for US business, or the subsequent blowback for such actions in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. For the neocons and liberal interventionists at the Center for a New American Security, the United States has always acted for the benefit of all. The paper primarily focuses on the economy and defense budget, and American security interests in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Supporting the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are considered the highest priority, as they will bind the main drivers of the US-led liberal world orderthe US and Europecloser together. According to the paper, Even in a world of shifting economic and political power, the transatlantic community remains both the foundation and the core of the liberal world order. In other words, the West must maintain control of the planet, for the good of all, of course. Part of the European concerns are a rise in nationalist sentiment in eastern Europe and the United Kingdom, for which the paper blames Russia, even bizarrely claiming that Russian funding is the cause of the disunity within the European Uniona claim without foundation, especially in the UKs case. The revisionist history continues, as the paper makes an astonishingly absurd claim on the US role in Asia, stating, U.S. leadership has been indispensable in ensuring a stable balance of power in Asia the past 70 years. No mention of the calamitous US war in Vietnam or its reciprocal effects in the killing fields of Cambodia. Nor is the US role in the genocide in East Timor dispensed with anywhere. Then we come to the Middle East, where things really get slippery. The paper breezes past the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a sorry, not sorry statement: Despite recent American misjudgments and failures in the Middle East, for which all recent administrations, including the present one, bear some responsibility, and despite the apparent intractability of many of the problems in the region, the United States has no choice but to engage itself fully in a determined, multi-year effort to find an acceptable resolution to the many crises tearing the region apart. And with that, the paper demands regime change in Syria and that Any such political solution must include the departure of Bashar al-Assad (but not necessarily all members of the ruling regime), since it is Assads brutal repression of Syrias majority Sunni population that has created both the massive exodus and the increase in support for jihadist groups like ISIS. Left out is the US role in destabilizing Iraq and arming jihadist rebels in Syria. The paper goes on to regurgitate alarmingly facile claims about regional tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia that could have been written by the government of Saudi Arabia itself, such as, We also reject Irans attempt to blame others for regional tensions it is aggravating, as well as its public campaign to demonize the government of Saudi Arabia. It also states that the United States must adopt as a matter of policy the goal of defeating Irans determined effort to dominate the Greater Middle East. If that appears like a commitment to more reckless regime change in the Middle East, thats because it is. But the overriding concern of the entire paper, with all its declarations about bipartisanship and universal altruism, is a concern with the American people being increasingly apprehensive towards the empire, and that concern leading to further defense budget cuts and unwillingness to support adventurism abroad. The authors of the paper hope an improved economy can help change the current situation. Ensuring that the domestic economy is lifting up the average American is still the best way to ensure support for global engagement and also contribute to a stronger, more influential America, they write, though they see no end in sight, regardless of public support, claiming, the task of preserving a world order is both difficult and never-ending. That this is what a think tank closely associated with Hillary Clinton is openly claiming should be concerning to all. While such analysis and declarations no doubt please the Center for a New American Securitys defense contractor donors, the American people are less-than-enthused with perpetual war for perpetual peace. Former Secretary Clinton already affirmed her belief in regime change during the campaign, but now it looks like those waiting in the wings to staff her government are anxious to wet their bayonets.
More than 160 Nigerians who had been stranded in Libya today arrived Lagos on an Airbus 320 aircraft with registration number 5A-WAT.

The returnees, comprising of 132 males, 27 females and three children, returned voluntarily to the country with the help of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in collaboration with the Swiss Government and the Nigerian Embassy in Libya.

The returning were received by officials of the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and Other Related Matters (NAPTIP) and the Police, who took their details, as well as officials of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN).

Addressing newsmen, Ms Sara Hammon, Assisted Voluntary Return and Re-Integration Consultant, IOM, Lagos, said the returnees had indicated their willingness to go back to Nigeria.

This flight has come from Tripoli in Libya, carrying some Nigerian migrants who were stranded in Libya and have volunteered to return home.

They have been assisted by the Swiss Government and the IOM to come back to their country of origin.

What happens after this is that they will get a stipend from IOM and will be assisted to get to their final destinations, Hammon said.
June 16 is Day of the African Child also known as the International Day of the African Child, celebrated annually since 1991. As INFORMATION NIGERIA joins the rest of the world to celebrate the African child, we bring you 5 things you could do to better the lives of children around you because they are tomorrows leaders.

1.All children have the right to safe water and good hygiene.: Make that your gift to children around you. We do not always have to wait on the government. There is a difference each of us can make.

2.Report cases of Child Abuse : It will interest you to know that there are countless cases of silent molestation & rape cases being done to kids daily. Kids are living in fear in their own homes. Be vigilant and report any case of child abuse and violence to appropriate authorities. And do not molest or abuse any child in your custody.

3.Role model: Make yourself a dignified role model for the African child for the good of Nigeria and the African continent.

4.Education: This is their right. Do not deny them. If you are a teacher be selfless and teach them well. Education is freedom.

5.Peace: Nigeria has failed her children in the troubled Northeast. Many children have had their lives crudely snatched from them, orphaned and starved as a result of insurgence. Lets give them peace not war.

Remember, its easier to build strong children than to fix broken ones. Lets change the way outsiders see Nigerian/African children.

Today we remember all those children who lost their lives in Boko Haram attacks.
The Nigerian Air Force is set to deploy more personnel to the Northeast to swell the ranks of the Nigerian Army in the fight against insurgency in the region, the Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar, has said.

The Air Chief, who made the disclosure Thursday in Kano while commissioning some projects at Kano Air Force Base, said the deployment will commence today.

We are deploying more troops to the northeast to re-enforce army in fighting insurgents in the region. We are committed to this fight and we will remain such until we rid the region of all terrorist elements, he assured.

Mr. Abubakar stressed that it is the mandate of the Air Force and indeed the Nigerian military to protect lives and properties of all Nigerians at all cost.

He noted that much is expected of the Nigerian Air Force as an institution and as individuals in ensuring the protection of the citizenry and other critical assets of the state.

At present, the Nigerian Air Force is deployed in many internal security operations in various parts of the country. Wherever we have deployed, our presence have brought hope and relief to the despaired and source of worry to the criminally minded, he said.

Air Marshal Abubakar also assured that NAF would continue to support Kano state government and other northwestern states in ensuring peace and security in the region through the operation Sharan-Daji that is being carried out in the area.

The CAS added that recently, the NAF has deployed Special Forces to 339 Base in Kano not only to enhance base defense, but also to protect properties at Malam Aminu Kano International Airport (MAKIA).

He stated that projects commissioned in Kano by NAF were Single Officers quarters, Non-Commissioned Officers accommodation, Student Pilots quarters, Two blocks of Married Officers accommodation and Main entrance of the 303 Flying Training School.
The Nigerian Army on Thursday said it has uncovered how Boko Haram terrorists have been evading drones and surveillance aircraft.

It said the terrorists concealed themselves by hiding in makeshift camps covered with shrubs.

The Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Sani Usman, who revealed this new tactic in a statement in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, said the discovery was made during a clearance operation in the North Eastern area of Kumshe in the state.

Troops of 7 Division Strike Group Team B, attached to 21 Brigade have braved harsh climatic conditions to clear seven villages of Boko Haram terrorists presence in the North East of Kumshe village.

The villages are Mulfuta, Baibawa, Jenere, Bembem, Maksamari, Bula Kafie and Bula Bodi.

The troops discovered that the Boko Haram terrorists have evolved new tactics of evading surveillance by drones and aircraft. They now hide in makeshift camps covered with shrubs, said the statement.

It added that the troops recovered some motorcycles, two Dane guns, large quantity of foodstuffs stored in a well-constructed storage facility and solar panels.
Although the Nigerian military and President Muhammadu Buhari say Boko Haram have been technically defeated, the terrorist sect has refused to give up, at least not yet.

Determined to remain relevant and give the authorities a new cause for concern, the sect has reportedly floated a radio FM station.

According to a report monitored by our correspondent yesterday on the Hausa Service of Voice of America, the Boko Haram radio station broadcasts on 96.8 frequency modulation.

Residents in Tolkomari, which is in the far northern part of Cameroon, have confirmed receiving broadcast messages from the sect on that frequency.

The report said the station broadcast mainly propaganda messages to counter media reports of victories by troops from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger Republic against the insurgents.

The report further said the Cameroonian government is worried by the new development and has commenced investigations towards locating the radio station, which is said to be somewhere on the Nigeria-Cameroun border.

The Nigerian government is yet to react to this latest development.
Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr Priscilla Chans Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has announced its first major investment since it was set up in December 2015.

The Chan Zuckerberg Intiative will provide $24 million in funding to New York based startup Andela, a tech company which trains people in Africa on programming. Andela has a strong presence in Nairobi and Lagos and its CEO Jeremy Johnson says the funding will enable Andela move toward its goal of expanding its training programme to even more people.

Andela already provides companies like Facebook and Google with top programmers but the initiative has said that this had nothing to do with why Andela was selected.

Mark Zuckerberg said We live in a world where talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not, Andelas mission is to close that gap.
Former Minister of Transport and Aviation, Chief Ebenezer Babatope has warned Governor Rauf Aregbesola not to plunge Osun state and the South West into unnecessary war which he would not be able to handle by the time it starts.

The Ilesha born septuagenarian politician, gave the warning yesterday when he spoke with Daily Sun on the religion crisis rocking Osun State, and made it clear that bringing religion into politics have done too much havoc in Nigeria.

Babatope said : let the governor not bring religion into politics because South West have always been co-existing as Christians and moslems and we dont need any governor to come and be promoting one religion over another.

Let him have very good dialogue with the Christians community and face the governance that he was elected for, because promotion of Islamic religion over Christianity was not part of his campaign promises.

Let him concentrate on how to pay his workers salaries and work on how he will never owe salary again instead of this distraction he is occupying himself with. he added.

Babatope lamented that a lot of workers are suffering in Osun State, where he now lives, and explained that the governor should be concerned about the suffering of these government workers and the people of Osun who are lamenting daily.

According to the former minister, religious crisis have caused a lot of bloodshed, in Kano, Jos, Kaduna, Bauchi and many other place in the North until it graduated into Boko Haram.

Aregbesola should not sow such seeds of religious competition in the minds of young people in the South West now so that they will not grow up to start promoting religion crisis.

Is it this hijab or uniform wearing that will make them to become brilliant students, promote the standard of education and let them become useful to the society? he asked

He then advised all governors in Nigeria to develop large heart of seeing themselves as governors to all and not for a particular religion, ethnic group or political party, saying good leaders dont lead that way, except such leaders dont want to succeed.

Female muslim and Christian students had started wearing hijab and church garments to school to promote their Islamic and Christian religions in some schools in the state.

This followed the judgement of Osun High Court that female Muslim students in the state are allowed to wear hijab to public schools, which some Christian leaders and owners of missionary schools like Baptist High School, Salvation Army Middle School, felt it was a subtle method to start promoting Islam in their mission schools.

To this end, they urged their Christian students to as well wear their church garments to school, which Governor Aregbesola allegedly kicked against, saying any student caught wearing unapproved uniform to school will be expelled.

The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, in the state have kicked against the governors action, saying if he is encouraging Muslim students to wear Islamic apparel to christian missionary schools he should not stop Christian students from wearing their Christian apparel to the such Christian missionary schools.

Source: Sun News
The family of Roberts Azibaola has denied reports that it blamed the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for orchestrating stringent bail conditions that ensured their son Robert and his wife, Stella, remain in prison remand.

Azibaola, former President Goodluck Jonathans cousin, and his wife, were arraigned by the EFCC before a federal high court in Abuja on a seven-count charge bordering on money laundering, criminal breach of trust and corruption.

The duo are accused of diverting $40 million purportedly meant for the supply of tactical communication kits for Nigerias Special Forces.

The funds were alleged to have been transferred from the account of the Office of the National Security Adviser, ONSA, with the Central Bank of Nigeria to the domiciliary account of the couples company, One Plus Holdings.

On June 8, the former presidents cousin and his wife were granted bail in the sum of N1 billion. They were directed by the trial judge, Justice Nnamdi Dimgba, to deposit N500million each as well as produce two sureties in the like sum.

The judge further directed that the sureties must be owners of landed property in either Maitama or Asokoro districts of Abuja, and must produce evidence that they have paid income tax for the past three years. It stressed that the registry of the court must verify and confirm that all the conditions were perfected, before the defendants could be released from Kuje prison.

However, one week after they were granted bail, Robert and his wife are still being held in Kuje prison as they have been unable to fulfil the bail conditions handed to them by the trial court.

A member of the family was quoted in reports some few days ago accusing the anti-graft agency of influencing the stringent bail conditions given by the court.

Refuting the report, a statement signed by one Faith Robert on behalf of the family said we want to put it on record that at no time did we accuse the EFCC of doing anything to influence the bail conditions outlined by the court.

We have not and could not also therefore accuse the judge of being under the influence of the EFCC, the family said.

We could not have done that knowing well that the judiciary is an independent arm of government and the judge will not succumb to any form of interference in the discharge of his judicial duties.
The Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media to Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State, Mr. Lere Olayinka, has blasted the immediate past Commissioner for Finance in the state, Dapo Kolawole, for saying the state government could afford to pay workers three months salary out of five months salary arrears and several months pension.

Mr. Kolawole, who was finance commissioner in the state between 2010 and 2014, was reacting to the indefinite strike embarked upon by the State chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Trade Union Congress, TUC, and Joint Negotiating Council, JNC.

The former commissioner, who spoke with reporters in Abuja on Tuesday, cited gross incompetence and lack of capacity on the part of Governor Fayose for the lingering economic crisis in the state.

In his response to Kolawole on Thursday, Olayinka said the comment was a feeble attempt to cover up the mismanagement of the State finances under the All Progressives Congress (APC) government of Dr Kayode Fayemi.

It is only in the world of miracle that a State that was plunged into debt and is losing over N1 billion to loan deductions monthly can sustain regular payment of salaries, the governors media aide said.

According to Mr. Olayinka, the APC government of Mr. Fayemi received N46.4 billion from the Excess Crude Account, yet took a N25 billion bond and N31 billion commercial bank loan.

In saner climes, the likes of Dapo Kolawole will be covering their faces in shame, having presided over the unprecedented looting of Ekiti State treasury and plunging of the State into unwarranted debt, he said.

The reality is if Ekiti was not plunged into debt by the Fayemis government, the State would have received N1, 920,027,383.96 for the month of April, 2016; N1, 860,919,359.32 in May, 2016; N2, 151,966,892.79 in March, 2016; N2, 324,677,903.78 in February, 2016; N2, 546,181,882.96 in January, 2016 and N2, 258,837,558.38 in December, 2015!

Therefore, a man like Dapo Kolawole, who as Finance Commissioner ran the State economy aground should just cover his face in shame instead of running from one media house to another to justify the use of borrowed funds to plant flowers, construct uncompleted State Pavilion, Civic Centre, Governors Lodge among others irrelevant projects, Mr. Olayinka said.

He further stated that under the former finance commissioners watch, the sum of N852, 936,713.92 was illegally withdrawn from the State Universal Education Board (SUBEB) account, making the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) to suspend Ekiti State from accessing any further FGN-UBE Intervention Fund.

Above are just two aspects of the financial mismanagement superintended over by Dapo Kolawole and common sense demands that characters like him should just keep mum while the Government of Ayodele Fayose goes about finding solutions to the financial crises caused by the frivolous loans obtained by the Fayemi-led APC government, he said.
The immediate past Governor of Katsina State, Barr. Ibrahim Shema, has denied claims by the Commission of Inquiry set up by the state government that he evaded summons to appear before it.

The Gov. Aminu Masari administration in Katsina set up the panel to probe the tenure of Mr. Shema. There were reports that the former governor and his former Commissioner of Finance, Lawal Jari, were evading summons, prompting the commission to resort to substituted summons by pasting it on their residences and in newspapers.

It was learnt at the resumption of the committees sitting on Tuesday that on the eve of the expiration of the notice, Shemas summons was delivered through a lawyer, Barrister Uyi Ogunma.

In his reaction, the former governor, who spoke through his media aide, Oluwabusola Olawale, said it was mockery of the truth for the commission to say that he was evading summons as no attempt was made to serve him at the time he was being accused of evading service.

It was part of the campaign of calumny. Shema is not afraid of any probe, having served Katsina State creditably well for eight years with outstanding record of performance for anybody to verify, he said.
The fun, the music and the 1950s motif have been woven into Theelkes Gary Ts, Menomonies latest entry into the restaurant field.

Wednesday, June 12, 1991

In late March of 1991, Gary Ts restaurant was opened by Gary Theelke and his wife, Dawn. Besides being a restaurant, Gary Ts also had meeting and banquet facilities and offered a catering service. Since it was a family business, Gary and Dawn both tried to be present at the restaurant as much as they could.

According to Gary, a saying that the Theelkes liked to reiterate was that Gary Ts was created by our family for your family. In addition to burgers, fries and malts (the most popular items on the menu), Gary Ts also offered baked goods and deli items which were made from scratch on site, including the buns for the burgers. The potatoes for the fries were also cut up on site and the restaurant used a special brand of root beer that only came in kegs. Gary Ts was located where Cancun Mexican Grill resides today.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

There is a founding angel in heaven, and her name is Mabel Gunderson. A hundred years ago or so, Mabel was an American Red Cross Gray Lady. The volunteer service program was founded in 1918 by the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. and worked to offer nonmedical help to returning injured, sick and disabled military patients. Soon after, the need arose for first aid skills to be added to the Gray Ladies duties.

Bobbie Peterson of Chippewa Falls talks about her delight in being Mabels daughter: I was in grade school at the time and loved listening to my mothers stories of her experiences. I remember her sense of pride at wearing her gray and white uniform  and about the fact that she was doing important work in our local hospital on a regular basis, over many years.

Wednesday,

June 12, 1991

Gary Theelke says the 1950s was a time synonymous with fun and bubbly music, and that nostalgia for that era remains strong. The fun, the music and the 1950s motif have been woven into Theelkes Gary Ts, Menomonies latest entry into the restaurant field. The juke box inside twinkles from the rear of a pink, 1950s car. The waitresses wear poodle skirts. The soda jerks at the fountain make thick shakes and old-fashioned cherry cokes. Pictures and memorabilia from the 50s adorn the walls of the restaurant/malt shop/deli.

We wanted to create a fun place to eat and a fun place to work, Theelke said. Market research nationwide indicates its (1950s) something almost every age group enjoys. As proof of the 50s appeal, Theelke said it is not unusual to have high school kids at the fountain, college student there on a date, people in business suits there for lunch, and elderly ladies there for pie and coffee.

Wednesday,

June 15, 1966

Marvin Larson, Fosston, Minn., purchases the business and stock of Madsens Jewelry, 301 Main St. The business was established in 1898 by Ole Madsen. Since his death his son, Ove, has operated the store.

Father Joseph Bilgrien, who was ordained May 28, named assistant pastor of St. Josephs Catholic Church here. ... Keith E. Halverson, of Menomonie, receives his law degree from the University of Wisconsin. ... Stout State University faculty members earning outstanding teaching awards are Jack A. Ganzenmiller and Clifford Gauthier.

Lammers Super Market is selling whole fryers for 29 cents a pound; jumbo cantaloupe are four for $1; five 29-ounce cans of Yellow Cling sliced peaches are $1.

Open house on June 19 will honor the Rev. Odean Tieman, associate pastor at Our Saviors Lutheran here, on his 25th anniversary in the ministry. ... Phil Johnson, scoutmaster of Troop 23, presented the Lamb award, sponsored by the National Lutheran Committee on Scouting.

Wednesday,

June 11, 1941

Class of 394 rural students receive eighth grade diplomas at Stout auditorium at annual commencement exercises for rural and state graded schools of Dunn County.

Secretary Paul E. Bailey leaves for Denver, Colo., to represent Menomonie Rotary Club at Rotary International convention. ... Heavy steel beams are being installed for the new bridge across the Red Cedar River here. ... Wheeler Womans Club votes to sponsor girl scout troop.

Menomonies new airport will be dedicated June 29. This is an accredited field and pronounced by government authorities as being one of the finest in the Badger State. Paulding Smith, world war pilot, is owner of the field.

Eighteen of the 20 students who will graduate Friday from the Dunn County Normal School have secured teaching positions. ... Grand Lodge convention of Scandinavian Sisters Association of America is now in session in Pythian Hall here.

Thursday,

June 15, 1916

William Schutte Jr., in charge of the division of floats in the big military, industrial ad preparedness parade on July 4, says the outlook is good for nearly 50 industrial floats in the procession, thus ensuring the greatest spectacle of the kind ever seen here.

The city Tuesday received from the Austin Manufacturing Co., of Chicago, a road oiler which Councilman Johnson has mounted on a truck and which is now ready for use. Its cost was about $400.

Good progress is being made by the farmers who are hauling material for the public highway to the Junction.

For the second time in about five years an upheaval has occurred in the Menomonie Police Department and after tonight there will be an entire change in the force below the chief, all three patrolmen having resigned.

Friday, June 12, 1891

Sidewalks about town are out of repair to a greater extent than ever before in the history of the city. ... Immanuel Baptist church has bought a lot on 12th Street, south of the residence of A.A. Curtis, and expect soon to erect a chapel thereon.

The Wednesday evening band concerts at the park are a great success, hundreds of little and big folks, on foot and in carriages, enjoying the music without stint.

Supt. Seely is enlarging the half-mile race track at Oaklawn Stock Farm to two-thirds of a mile. The flyers go round the old track so fast that it makes the drivers dizzy.

The remodeling of the Methodist church has been decided upon. Radical changes in the auditorium, a new spire, amusement rooms and kitchen, are included in the new plans, involving an expense of $1,200 or $1,500.

Saturday,

June 16, 1866

BOYDEN HOUSE.The Boyden House, Hudson Wis., A. Boyden Proprietor, has been newly furnished and fitted since the late disastrous fire, and is now ready for the reception of guests. The public will find Mr. Boyden always ready to carefully attend to their wants.

S.C. Bigelow, the prince of polite peddlers, has been in town again with his big four horse team and immense load of goods; and he, with our local merchants, will manage to carry off our money as fast as the Lumbermen can bring it up the river.And so they clean us out. Cant do without the goods, however.

ANOTHER SHOW.Swingler & Walkers Grand Panorama, that exhibited here on Thursday evening of last week, was not as much of a Panorama as it was advertised to be. But for a Magic Lantern Show it was very good. The views showed, to good advantage. The opening piece, the Four Crows, by the Menomonie Comic Glee Club, was well rendered and frequently caused tremendous applause.
An All Progressives Congress, APC, chieftain in Kaduna State, Alhaji Sani Mohammed Shaaban, has decried the crisis currently rocking the party.

The Kaduna APC is currently torn between forces loyal to the state governor, Malam Nasir El-Rufai and the senator representing Kaduna Central, Shehu Sani.

The Senator Sani group over a week ago, announced the formation of a splinter group known as APC Akida, in response to the stranglehold of the governor on the party.

Reacting to the development Thursday in Kaduna, Shaaban, a former member of the House of Representatives and governorship candidate of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), respectively, during the 2007 and 2011 general elections, said that he neither belonged to APC Akida or APC Government House faction.

The party stalwart expressed regrets that the APC in Kaduna was enmeshed in a crisis at a time the masses were hoping to reap the dividends of their hard earned victory in the state.

Shaaban said: I have mutual relationship with many politicians in the state. Many of my acquaintances and associates, with whom we struggled together to win this election, are in both camps. Our hope is for this crisis to end.

The two camps should take note that all those foot-soldiers fanning the embers of crisis are doing so out for what they are benefiting and we are now in the Holy month of Ramadan, which has placed emphasis on forgiveness, reconciliation and seeking Gods blessing. Hence, we should utilise this period wisely.
The Lagos State Government on Thursday honoured no fewer than 555 workers in the states public service with the Long Service Merit Award.

The state governor, Mr Akinwumi Ambode, at the event in Ikeja, reiterated his commitment to workers welfare, saying that he would not hesitate to reward exceptional performance and sanction erring workers.

Ambode, who was represented by the Commissioner for Establishment, Training and Pensions, Dr Akintola Oke-Benson, enjoined workers to be more proactive, diligent, responsive, innovative and timely in service delivery.

This is the desired goal of the various reforms and restructuring that we have introduced and implemented in the last one year, Ambode said.

He commended the awardees for their long years of service, saying it had all contributed to the success story of the state.

Spending 30 years or more of ones lifetime contributing to the growth or development of any organisation, particularly the public service, is worthy of commendation, he said.

Earlier, the Head of Service, Mrs Olabowale Ademola, said the objective of the award was to honour public servants who had served the government and people of the state diligently and conscientiously.

Ademola said it was being done with the belief that it would spur both recipients and non-recipients to put in their best.

She advised the recipients not to rest on their oars and continue to exhibit a high sense of responsibility, commitment to duty and unwavering loyalty.

Ademola also encouraged other public servants yet to be honoured to continue discharging their duties to the best of their abilities, so

that at the appropriate time, they would be honoured.

She said that the government would continue to provide the necessary and conducive environment for the attainment of their lofty goals.

Source: NAN
More than 700 repentant Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East have surrendered to the military, the Director of Defence Information, Brig.-Gen. Rabe Abubakar has said.

Abubakar said this when he paid a courtesy visit to the Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Mr Bayo Onanuga, in Abuja on Thursday.

According to him, a camp will be opened where the repentant insurgents will be kept before the government decides on what to do with them.

The defence spokesman said the media had a very important role to play in mitigating the crisis befalling the country. He, therefore, called for synergy between the media and the military in mobilising and informing the citizenry about the crisis.

We have come to understand that the military cannot do it all alone.

It must enter into collaborative efforts and synergy in certain operations with the media, which we believe will go a long way to not just project our activities or operations, but at the same time play a role which nobody can do apart from you.

Mobilising the citizens, informing them about what is happening and equally sensitising them.

The media has a very important role in mitigating the crisis that is befalling our nation.

We have many of the Boko Haram members, who surrendered as a result of our operations in Sambisa.

We have over 700 now and very soon we will open the camp in the North-East where we will be keeping them before the government decides on what to do with them, the defence spokesman said.
The Factional Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, has honored the invitation of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, over 2015 campaign funds.

SEE ALSO: Sheriff, Makarfi Supporters Face Off At Wadata Plaza

The PDP chieftain on Tuesday, was invited at the zonal office of the anti-graft agency in Maiduguri, Borno State, to answer some questions in respect of the N23.29 billion campaign funds allegedly disbursed by the former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke.

SEE ALSO: Diezani Alison-Madueke Fires Back At EFCC

A former Minister of State for Power, Mohammed Wakil, who had earlier been interrogated by the EFCC for receiving N450 million from the N32.29b, to use in funding the PDP presidential election in Borno, allegedly gave the sum of N40m to Sheriff through one Hon. Mohammed Kumalia for what he simply termed Security.

It was learnt that Sheriff, who traveled to Maiduguri yesterday, was grilled at the Damaturu Road zonal office of the EFCC for several hours before he was reportedly allowed to go home on administrative bail.

Responding to enquiry on whether Sheriff was truly invited by the anti-graft agency, his spokesman, Inuwa Bwala, said: You may recall that reports last week indicated that former Minister of State for Power, Mohammed Wakil and former minority leader in the House of Representatives, Mohammed Kumalia, claimed to have earmarked N40million from money given to them by the PDP for elections for security men.

They were said to have claimed to route the money through His Excellency (Sheriff). We did not initially believe they said so until somebody from the EFCC hinted Sheriff.

He (Sheriff) seized the opportunity of his condolence visit to Maiduguri to verify their claims, and was informed that they only claimed to have shared the money to security men in his house, but without his personal involvement whatsoever. This is the truth, Bwala said.
A new secessionist group has surfaced in Nigeria, called the Utorogun Liberation Movement (ULM). The group from Delta State vowed, Thursday, to destroy the Utorogun Gas Plant, Ughelli, which supplies gas to Egbin Power Station, Lagos and other facilities under Oil Mining Lease, OML 34 in Ughelli South Local Government Area of the state.

The agitators operating in alliance with another group identified as Outgas Force, in a message by its leader, General K Omoudu, addressed to the host communities in OML 34, said: My good people of Utorogun community, Otu-Jeremi, Otor-Udu, Iwkrekan, Ekakpamre and all oil and pipeline communities within this region, this is the voice of ULM in collaboration with Outgas Force.

It is a secessionist move. The awareness of things happening in our environment is a means to outline our cause of action. The awareness is an agitation for economic balance. We have a common enemy, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC and ND Western who hate your progress and wish you died in poverty.

They threaten our stability, disregard us. This area is the heart of hydrocarbon industries in Nigeria and other countries responsible for a huge chunk of the nations oil earnings. The question concerning how many barrels of oil and gas this our field produces remain unanswered, our hopes far from what we are witnessing.

If we fail to fight, we will face a precarious future. The door is widely open for anybody within this region to join the exercise, text your names and community to these numbers -08029936321, 08074237107. Do not call; you will receive text of days of meetings few days from now, the notice read.
The Niger Delta Avengers have struck again, this time destroying a pipeline belonging to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).

SEE ALSO: NDelta Avengers List Peace Terms

The NNPC pipeline which the group blew up is located in the Oruk Anam Local Government Area in Akwa Ibom State and the attack occurred around 4am on Friday morning. The group claimed responsibility for the attack via its Twitter page

At 4:00am @NDAvengers blow up NNPC Pipeline in Oruk Anam Local Government Area in Akwa Ibom.  Niger Delta Avengers (@NDAvengers) June 16, 2016

Although the Federal Government is said to be open to avenues for dialogue with the Avengers, the group has continued to mount continuous attacks on oil facilities within the region.
Leadership

Former national secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Prof. Wale Oladipo, and former national auditor, Wole Adeyanju, escaped lynching by youths protesting Sen. Ali Modu Sheriffs re-emergence as chairman, with the Oladipo reportedly hurrying out of the party headquarters without any footwear.

Punch

A Chief Magistrate II in the Ondo State judiciary, Dr. Rebecca Anjola-Ayeni, has dragged the states judicial Service Commission before the National Industrial Court sitting in Akure over the alleged wrongful termination of her employment by the commission.

Vanguard

A 35-year-old housewife, Tomilola Ogundele, yesterday, asked an Ikole Customary Court to dissolve her 16-year-old marriage to Olanrewaju Aluko over alleged threats to her life.

Thisday

Less than two days after he stormed the National Secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) along with his loyalists to imposed himself as National Chairman, of the party aggrieved youths have sacked Senator Ali Modu Sheriff from the national secretariat.

The Sun

FOR over three decades, he has been at the forefront of promoting water transportation business in Lagos. But these are not the best of times for Mr. Tarzan Ganiyu Balogun, Chief Executive Officer of Tarzan Marine Enterprises. Hes also the national president of Association of Tourist Boat Operators and Water Transporters of Nigeria (ATBOWATON).

Daily Times

The Senate and the House of Representatives Joint Committee on Privatization has promised to work with other stakeholders to ensure the quick resuscitation of Ajaokuta Steel Company in Kogi State.

Daily Trust

Kogi State governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, yesterday debunked the allegation of anti-party activities leveled against his government, saying it is a ploy by people who dont mean well for the state.

A statement issued in Lokoja, by his special Adviser on Media and Strategy, Malam Abdulmalik Abdulkarim, described the allegation as spurious, noting that members of the All Progressives Congress (APC), were well represented in the present government.

The Nation

President Muhammadu Buhari has spoken to President John Mahama of Ghana to offer condolences to Mahamas family on the passing away of his mother, Hajia Abiba Nnaba.

Tribune

MEMBERS of vigilante group assisting the military in its clearance operations in the North-East have destroyed terrorists camp located in south of Sabon Garin Bale, Borno State.
The Nigerian senate today, June 16th passed into law the public procurement amendment Bill. According to Senate president Bukola Saraki, the passage of the bill will ensure that it becomes an offence for anyone in government to buy products that are not made in Nigeria.



Saraki,who made this known via his official Twitter handle said the essence of the bill is to help grow Nigeria buy Nigerians regardless of who they are, patronising made in Nigeria products

Delighted we were able to keep our promise to pass the public procurement amendment Bill today. It will mandate Govt agencies to BuyNigeria  Bukola Saraki (@bukolasaraki) June 16, 2016

Saraki also revealed that the bill will help to slash days for processing contracts by half

Public Procurement Amendment Bill we passed today will support 2016Budget implementation by slashing days for processing contracts by half.  Bukola Saraki (@bukolasaraki) June 16, 2016

This according to him is aimed at making the Nigerian public procurement system support the budget to stimulate the Economy and also to encourage those who have chosen to invest in Nigeria. He also noted that with this amendment, a substantial percentage of the N6 Trillion in 2016 Budget will be retained in Nigeria and in the pockets of Nigerians
The erstwhile National Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Prof Wale Oladipo, has denied claims that he was chased out of the national secretariat of the party in Abuja yesterday by irate youth.

Some youths supporting the leadership of the Ahmed Makarfi-led caretaker committee on Wednesday invaded the Wadata Plaza national secretariat of the PDP and chased everyone out.

The building was on Monday taken over by the Ali Modu Sheriff-led faction of the party, of which Oladipo is a member.

Reacting to the speculation that he was chased out of the national secretariat by the pro-Makarfi youths, Oladipo, in a statement he personally signed yesterday, said he actually resumed duty at the party secretariat in the morning alongside the National Auditor of the party, Alhaji Adewole Adeyanju.

According to him, he witnessed the activities of some miscreants, who invaded the party secretariat to cause trouble over nothing.

He, however, insisted that he voluntarily left the office after he was done with his work without being harassed.

The news that I was chased out of office is a lie. No one touched me, nor was I in anyway compelled to vacate office.

I left office when I was through with all I needed to do, same with the National Auditor who came to my office before he took his leave.

I wish to advice all PDP members to discountenance the fake news peddled by the enemies of our Party, surely we shall soon get over the get over the internal schism in our party.

I also want to appeal to all parties to this conflict to sheath their sword and refrain from all acts of lawlessness and embrace the rule of law as the only panacea to moving our Party forward.
Governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, have again rejected Senator Ali Modu Sheriff as national chairman of the party.

They made their position known under the aegis of PDP Governors Forum on Thursday.

Arising from a meeting held at the Ondo State governors lodge in Abuja, with the Board of Trustees of the party, the governors vowed not to recognize the leadership of Mr. Sheriff.

The meeting came on the heels of Wednesdays ugly incident at the National Secretariat of the PDP, where supporters of Mr. Sheriff and the caretaker committee chairman, Senator Ahmed Makarfi, clashed in a battle for supremacy and recognition.

The Makarfi-led caretaker committee is backed by the governors, BoT, National Assembly caucus and major stakeholders but Sheriff, who was sacked at the May 21 national convention of the PDP in Port Harcourt, vowed to remain in office till 2018, citing a court order affirming his leadership.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Governor of Ekiti State and one of the former supporters of the embattled chairman, Ayodele Fayose, explained why the PDP Governors withdrew their support for Sheriff.

According to him, the governors were against anything that will make Sheriff turn such an opportunity (of being national chairman) into telling us that he wants to become President of Nigeria.

After caretaker, we intend to make sure we support you to be substantive chairman and you are promising people everywhere that they should come and be your vice president. I cant be part of it, he added.

Also speaking, Senator Makarfi, who was at the meeting, told journalists that the crisis in the party is fueled by external forces.
A scrap metal drive continues through Saturday in the student parking lot of Chippewa Falls Senior High School, 735 Terrill St.

Donated scrap metal is being accepted from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. daily in the school parking lot near the Cardinal entrance. Proceeds from the drive will benefit Flags 4 the Fallen, a student organization that plans on traveling to Pearl Harbor in June 2017.

The students on that trip will honor three Chi-Hi soldiers who died in World War II and are buried in the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. They include Harry W. Kramer, who was killed in the Pearl Harbor attack, Desmond G. Kurth, who died in the battle for Imo Jima, and Robert E. Baldeschwiler, who died in the Battle of Saipan.

The scrap metal drive will take donations of aluminum cans, microwaves, washers, dryers, extension cords, automobile and boat batteries, computer towers, cell phones, push mowers and snow blowers.

Electronics, furniture and appliances with compressors will not be accepted.

Social Studies teacher John Kinville said 27 students are helping in the scrap metal drive.
Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State has blamed his predecessor, Gabriel Suswam, for the proliferation of arms in the state.

The governor sad Mr. Suswam, who governed the state between 2007 and 2015, believed in violence, and armed youths across the state to help fulfil his political ambition.

The ex-governor is yet to respond to this latest allegation against him by his successor.

Speaking yesterday to State House correspondents shortly after he met with Acting President Yemi Osinbajo at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Gov. Ortom said the government will go after those who have refused to surrender their weapons since an amnesty window he declared has closed.

The amnesty programme succeeded because more than 800 young people came out and surrendered. We have in our possession over 600 assorted weapons and ammunition that we collected from these young men, he said.

The last dispensation believed in violence. My predecessor and his cohorts believed they could take everything by force and they bought these arms and gave to young men. I am appealing to them to still return those arms.

Now that the carrot approach of the amnesty programme is over, we will now adopt the stick approach. We are going to pursue them to their homes. Wherever they are, we are going to arrest them and prosecute them. We are going to go after them fully, said Mr. Ortom.

It would be recalled that the governor last year announced amnesty and monetary reward for those who willingly submit their illegal arms in the state.

I cannot in any way surrender my state to criminals. I am going to fight them headlong. I am the governor of Benue State, I was duly elected and I have the backing of my people to fight criminals so that we can have a free society to build our economy, the governor stated.

Responding to criticisms on his new policy of declaring Fridays as work free in the state, Mr. Ortom said he took the decision because of the farming season, to allow workers ample time on their farms.

They are ignorant people. The programme is well received. Benue State has comparative advantage in agriculture.

Now, we are finding it difficult to pay salaries. We are down by four months at the state level and five months at the local government level.

Coming to a state that is more of civil service, I have said that I have declared Fridays as public holidays because this is cropping period. They should go to the farm between now and the end of July that is cropping period. This can help because no matter how little, whatever they contribute in agriculture will add value to the state economy.

In any case, because there are no salaries, you know the morale of workers is even low. Apart from that, the money to prosecute good projects is not there.

Even when you did not declare Friday, it is as good as they go there and still do nothing, he said.
Beverly J. Cherrier, 89, of Chippewa Falls, passed away peacefully in her sleep Thursday, June 9, 2016, at her residence.

Beverly was born Oct. 27, 1926, in Chippewa Falls, the daughter of Percy and Irene (Cameron) Cherrier.

Beverly graduated in 1946 from McDonell High School and then attended Minnesota School of Business. She worked for a law firm, as a secretary.

Beverly was a member of Notre Dame Church, Catholic Womens Club, Mentor Program, VFW Auxiliary and a blue ribbon baker at the fair.

Beverly is survived by two sisters, Marion Murphy, of California, and Joan Samuelson, of Chippewa Falls; many other relatives and friends; and her faithful dog, Rex.

Beverly was preceded in death by her parents; and five brothers, Robert, Dayton, Ervin, Roland, and Wayne Cherrier.

A Memorial Mass will be held 10:30 a.m. Monday, June 20, at Holy Ghost Church, Chippewa Falls. The Rev. Msgr. Mark Pierce, of Notre Dame Church, will be celebrant of the Memorial Mass. Burial will be in Hope Cemetery, Chippewa Falls. There will be no visitation, per Beverlys wishes.

Beverlys family prefer memorials in her memory to be made to Chippewa County Humane Society, or Irvine Park.

Horan Funeral Home, Chippewa Falls, is in charge of arrangements.

Family and friends may express condolences online at www.horanfuneralhome.com.
It's the issue that won't die: A Senate committee has voted to weaken the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted Wednesday to approve a bill that would exempt small broadband providers from rules requiring them to provide their customers with information about network performance, network management practices, and other issues.

[ Read 'em and weep: 5 ways your ISP is screwing you | Cut to the key news in technology trends and IT breakthroughs with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ]

The rules are intended to give broadband customers data about actual speeds, compared to advertised speeds, and potentially controversial congestion management practices.

The Senate bill, the Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, would still ensure "meaningful transparency for consumers" because older FCC rules requiring some disclosure of network management practices remain in place, said Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican and committee chairman.

The committee's vote on the bill, with strong support from majority Republicans, came just a day after a U.S. appeals court upheld the FCC's net neutrality rules in full. Congress has the power to weaken or kill the rules, however.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a similar bill in March in a 411-0 vote. It's unclear whether President Barack Obama, a strong supporter of the net neutrality rules, would veto the legislation.

The Senate bill "creates a needless loophole" in the net neutrality rules, said Joshua Stager, policy counsel at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

"To weaken that order just one day after it was upheld by a federal court is an affront to the millions of Americans who asked for these rules," he said by email. "The transparency rules help ensure a level playing field for small businesses to compete in the online marketplace -- which is why so many small businesses asked the FCC to create these rules in the first place."

Small ISPs are exempt from the transparency rules until the end of the year, and the FCC can grant an extension, Stager added. "The bills sponsors havent explained why Congressional action is needed," he said. "They also havent demonstrated how being transparent with customers is a burden for any ISP."

Since the FCC passed its net neutrality rules in February 2015, Republican lawmakers have attempted to pass more than a dozen bills or amendments to weaken or kill the regulations. None so far has succeeded.

The FCC's net neutrality rules prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet traffic. Supporters of the rules worry that broadband providers have large incentives to favor their own services or services from partners over competitors.
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not messing around with polio. The foundation has been a major funder of global eradication efforts since the late 1990s, beginning with a $50 million grant to the United Nations Foundation. Over many years, Gates has not strayed from its plan to rid the world of polio, which calls for accelerating targeted vaccination campaigns, community mobilization, and routine immunizations. The foundation is also partnering with like-minded organizations to improve polio surveillance and outbreak response endeavors.

The anti-polio drive by Gates and other funders has often been criticized as a misallocation of resources, given just how few people are actually affected by this disease nowadays. But Bill Gates has seen this goal as something of a holy grail, and stuck with it. As he once explained to a reporter: Polios pretty special because once you get an eradication, you no longer have to spend money on it; its just there as a gift for the rest of time.

Back in 1988, the World Health Assembly launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative or GPEI. At the time, the wild polio virus was present in over 125 countries. The virus paralyzed some 350,000 people each year, most of them young children. (The Gates Foundation is a major supporter of GPEI as is Rotary International, another outfit keen on ridding the world of this dread disease.)

Since GPEIs early days, major progress has been made toward elimination and eventual eradication. The number of polio cases has been reduced by around 99 percent due to increased immunization efforts, with a drumbeat of good news in the past few years. Now, there are only two polio-endemic countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Related: Rotary International, Gates Foundation Reach Polio Milestone in Africa

We're in the endgame here with polio, but Gates is still making big grantsmost recently, a $38 million grant to Takeda Pharmaceutical Company.

Takeda and Gates have entered into a partnership in which Takeda will develop, license, and supply at least 50 million doses per year of Sabin-strain inactivated poliovirus vaccine to more than 70 developing countries. The $38 million grant will leverage Takedas vaccine manufacturing platform to make the doses available and affordable to poor countries that are currently receiving support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

This is some serious cash, but its a mere drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $4 billion Gates has contributed to various polio elimination and eradication causes over time.

We should add that Gates is not the only big private player in this space. Rotary International is also a major force behind the anti-polio drive, and its not unusual for Gates and Rotary to join forces in this regard.

In 2014, Rotary International made a $75 million donation toward polio eradication efforts, focusing its fight in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Gates reinforced and grew Rotarys big give by agreeing to a dollar-for-dollar match Rotary's commitments toward its self-imposed 2018 deadline for polio eradication. Rotary International has had polio eradication in its crosshairs since the late 1980s. Since then, the organization has committed over $1 billion to the fight.

The money, progress, and the commitment from world leaders including the G7 all point to polio elimination and eradication sooner rather than later. One reason that Gates is still pouring so much money into polio is to ensure that these hopes really come true.

Back in 2000, it seemed that the global polio eradication campaign was reaching its conclusion. At the time, wild poliovirus type 2 had all been decimated and the types 1 and 3 of the virus were limited to just a couple of hundred cases worldwide. Then a setback occurreda child in Hispaniola was paralyzed due to the administration of a live virus vaccine. Outbreaks have occurred across 16 countries since then.

Suddenly, eradicating polio became much more complex. Organizations realized the world could not be rid of polio if it did not stop using live virus vaccines, a standard practice for decades.

Which brings me back to Gates $38 million grant to Takeda. That money is being used to manufacture and produce a Sabin-strain inactivated poliovirus vaccine. These efforts speak to the WHOs polio eradication endgame of not only eliminated polio, but polio paralysis due to live virus vaccines as well.

And just to give you an idea of just how big Gates and Rotary are as players in this arena, world governments and their partners have committed some $9 billion over 25 years toward polio eradication according to GPEI. Over that same general time frame, Gates and Rotary have contributed $5 billion toward the cause.
Its been a good year for early childhood education funding around the country, as this grantmaking space keeps heating up. Even more specifically, as we cover grant cycles in a variety of places, we're seeing lots of attention to early math and literacy as top issues for funders.

To be sure, there are some major national funders working on early childhood education, like Kellogg and the PNC Foundation. Overall, though, this is a grantmaking area that tends to be locally focused. Every major metro area has foundations that want to see kids in their community do well in life and put grants behind this goal. Local funders often see the unique needs of the children who grow up in their area and are in close touch with the nonprofits that are positioned to help them.

Take the Southwest, for example. The Helios Education Foundation has been giving a lot of support to Arizona pre-K groups that focus on two-way immersion and English/Spanish literacy. Over 43 percent of children in Arizona are Hispanic, and many of them come from homes where Spanish is the primary language. Dual-language programs are a bit hit in the Southwest these days, significantly more so than in other major metropolitan areas.

Read:Helios' Education Initiatives Still Going Strong with Pre-College and Pre-K Targets

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the William Penn Foundation has really been driving the local early education efforts. Penn recently announced a new $15 million commitment to improve early education facilities in the city for low-income families. Theres been a big push for pre-K access and universal pre-K in Philadelphia lately, so local grantmakers are really playing into these concepts to get more kids into classroom seats. By January 2021, Penn wants to see 1,500 more early childhood education seats in high-quality institutions to make room for low-income families.

Read: Early Childhood Education Is Also Moving in Philly, With Some Funding Muscle

And in Chicago, the McCormick Foundation has long been a big early education leader. Through its fund partner, Chicago Tribune Charities, McCormick recently donated to the Childrens Literacy Initiative to benefit schools in the Little Village neighborhood. Early literacy has been getting perhaps the most attention among funders in Chicago lately, and reading proficiency by third grade is a big cause around town.

Read: McCormick Foundation Partners with the Chicago Tribune for Children's Literacy

In the Bay Area, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation has emerged as a major new player on early childhood funding. In the Northwest, the Gates Foundation is doing more work in this area. In New York, philanthropic dollars played a role in filling some of the funding gaps that emerged amid Mayor Bill de Blasio's pre-K drive. Meanwhile, various funders in the city have long paid attention to this issue.

Read: A Funder Arrives on the Early Childhood Education Scene in a Very Big Way

Of course, this is just a quick sampling of whats going on in the early education scene around the country, but we cant help but notice that even national and global funders tend to stick closer to home when it comes to this funding area. In IP's guide to early childhood funding, we break down the funders locally to reflect thatwhich we don't do with any other grantmaking area.

Related: Funding for Early Childhood Education

An increasing number of community foundations, private family funders, and individual donors are jumping on the early education bandwagon amid growing attention to inequality. If local grantmakers in your community arent paying attention to early education yet, just stay tuned. It might only be a matter of time before funding for three- to five-year olds emerges on the priority list.
By Rick Beal

The 5-O. The fuzz. Johnny Law. Whatever you choose to call the men and women in law enforcement, sometimes it seems you call them more than your delinquent self-storage tenants! If you operate a storage facility, its important to have a positive relationship with police in which both sides benefit. Heres why to establish a valuable partnership with your local department and several ways to build it.

Realize the Benefits

In the mid-90s, there was a shift in law-enforcement agencies nationwide and the term community-oriented policing was coined. It was an initiative through which police attempted to work with members of the communityas a wholein a proactive approach to address public concerns. You can probably think of a few examples in your own area, such as officers on bikes, shop with a cop or other programs. Services that highlight personal interaction between police officers and citizens are cases of community policing.

Often, agencies assign police officers to specific areas to help champion these causes. Theyre designated to a region or neighborhood to improve community relations. These arent the officers you see driving in police cars, making traffic-violation stops, directing traffic after a car crash or other duties. The goal for these officers is to interact with the public, and their assignments are often for an extended period.

If youre in a large city, this can be a big advantage for your self-storage business. These officers often help plan community events. How beneficial would it be to team up with the safety officer in your area to hold a public event at your facilitywith a few rental coupons, of course!

If you havent already, take the time to become an active part of your community and build relationships with local law enforcement. There may be more advantages than you may think. (On a side note, from my experience, I guarantee they know more about whats going on around your facility than you would ever want to know.) Now let's get to how you can build these partnerships.

Create a Relationship

It was about 2 a.m. when I got a call on my cell phone. Rick! Hey, man, I dont know whats going on with your gate, but it just seems to be opening and closing. This was a call I received from a police officer who works in the neighborhood and whom I had gotten to know pretty well. I thanked him, and then asked if he could troubleshoot for me. He agreed, which not only saved me from having to head to the facility in the middle of the night but ensured the property was once again secure.

Think of a customer you really like, one who has been friendly to you. You remember that person, dont you? You would look out for him, wouldnt you? Let me give you a little hint: The same feelings can apply with law enforcement.

If you get to know the officers who work in your neighborhood, youll realize theyre just people, same as you and me. How can you develop a more positive relationship with them? Send bagels or coffee to their morning briefings as a thank you (not donuts!). Deliver a basket filled with cookies, fruit or muffins to your local precinct one afternoon. If theyre involved with a charitable organization or hosting a community event, find out how you can help. You might even request to participate in a ride-along to get to know the officers better.

Over time, youll see your relationship grow. Once they get to know you, they might call you if they see something off at your facility. They may start making more rounds by the property for extra security. If they know and like you, and youve built that relationship with them, youll be surprised by the results!

Cultivate Referrals

In general, Im not a huge fan of discounting. With that said, offering a discount to some professionslaw enforcement, military and teachersis acceptable. At one of our facilities, we offer the local police department a complimentary unit. That one unit has paid dividends. Not only did the department rent another two units from us, so did the citys art and parks departments. All have been tenants for four years! Weve also had at least 10 city employees become tenants after they visited units rented by their departments. They were so impressed with our property, they rented units, too.

Many police departments have newsletters or will periodically put together a list of area businesses that offer discounts to law-enforcement employees. Ask if you can add your facility to the list, or reach out to the human-resources department and let them know about special offers for their employees. Word-of-mouth recommendations can go a long way. Dont be surprised if you see the amount of referrals you receive increase from this activity alone.

Provide a Place for Training

Allowing police, specifically K-9 units, to train at a self-storage facility seems to be a hot-bed issue in our industry. There are many opinions, and I have my own on the subject. If youre an operator who agrees with it, then open up the gates and release the hounds! This is a great chance for you to make a good contact with your K-9 officers. Let them run your halls or driveways every now and again and see what they can find.

There are also other police groups that would benefit from using your facility at a training ground. Drug-enforcement agencies and SWAT teams are always looking for different venues to expand their training. If you have a multi-level facility with elevators, long hallways or stairs, this might be an option for you, as these are some of the physical parameters they find useful.

If you choose to open your facility for police training, notify your customers with a few signs posted strategically around the premises. Not only does this inform tenants for safety purposes, it lets them know youre doing your part to be involved with and better your community. Plus, it might scare off a would-be criminal!

To sum it up, get involved. This article has identified only three ways to connect you with your local law-enforcement agencies. Reach out and see what partnerships you can create with the officers in your area. You want them on your side. After all, the people who serve our community are also our customers.

Rick Beal is the district manager and part owner of Cubes Self Storage, an operation in Salt Lake City. He often takes a different approach to typical storage operation including demand, rates, staff involvement and technology. His professional motto is Storage is a business of inches not miles. To reach him, e-mail [email protected].
This content is from: Corner Office

Four months after bringing in a new CIO, the $6 billion investment office has cut its senior team in half.
Munich Re has announced that it will divest its primary insurance arm Great Lakes Australia (GLA), following a strategic review.



The international firm has said that it will refocus on reinsurance in Australia and New Zealand as GLA will be moved on after nearly a decade on the Australia market.



After a strategic review, Munich Re has come to the conclusion that the capabilities of GLA might be better realised with a change in ownership, Munich Re said in a statement.



Therefore, Munich Re will pursue a divestment of its primary insurance arm in Australia and New Zealand.



GLA, which currently has a gross written premium of around $500 million, could not achieve Munich Res growth ambition and positioning for the specialty niche business in Australia and New Zealand, due to a competitive and consolidated Australian market which requires a critical size, the statement continued.



With the sale of GLA, Munich Re has said that they will now focus on their core reinsurance business in the Australia and New Zealand markets.



Australia remains an important market for Munich Re, which will now have a clear focus on reinsurance, the statement noted.



The company will continue to be a strong partner in property and casualty as well as in Life reinsurance business.



The change announced today allows Munich Re in Australia and New Zealand to refocus on where it can provide the best value to the market and its reinsurance clients.





Related stories:

Asia to drive global insurance growth, Munich Re

First insurance fund against pandemic launched by World Bank

Munich Re appoints new Australasian managing director


American International Group Inc. will consider establishing an operations center within the European Union if the U.K. votes to leave the political bloc, according to Chief Executive Officer Peter Hancock.

If a Brexit occurs, I suspect we will need a hub thats within the EU, and there are some excellent choices, he said at a seminar in London on Wednesday, without specifying locations that the New York-based insurer has considered.

Growing worries that the U.K. will vote in favor of a Brexit have roiled financial markets. Four opinion polls on Monday put the Leave campaign ahead of Remain and Britains best-selling newspaper, The Sun, backed an out vote in next weeks referendum. Remaining within the EU is the best option for the U.K., Hancock said.

AIG Europe, which is based in London, had pretax profit of 408.5 million pounds ($580 million) last year, according to the companys annual report.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Europe London
Dan Loebs Third Point Reinsurance Ltd. said scrutiny of the industrys offshore tax advantage has lessened after hedge fund manager John Paulson closed a venture that stood out as an  outlier for its aggressive use of strategies that were criticized as abuses.

The Paulson reinsurance operation had no employees, they wrote very little business and they had a big amount of capital sitting offshore. And I think that got a lot of attention, Third Point Re Chief Executive Officer John Berger said Wednesday at a conference held by Morgan Stanley. Well, thats off the table now, they shut that down. So I think the pressure to do something about that has diminished.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has urged the Treasury Department since 2014 to crack down on operations that help hedge fund managers minimize taxes on some trading profits when the investments are tied to insurers in locations such as Bermuda. The IRS has never clearly defined how much insurance a company must sell to qualify for the favorable tax treatment. Validus Holdings Ltd., which partnered with Paulson on a reinsurance venture, said in January that his PaCRe Ltd. was shut down.

Berger has long sought to distinguish his company from PaCRe. Bermuda-based Third Point Re, which counts on Loeb to oversee investments through his hedge-fund strategies, takes on underwriting risks from U.S. mortgage guarantors and auto insurers and has added staff to win more contracts.

Reasonable Test

If you take any reasonable test of what is a real insurance company, we pass it, from the amount of business were writing to the amount of reserves we have, Berger said.

The CEO said hes heard nothing new recently from the Internal Revenue Service about the industrys tax treatment and that action may have been stalled amid the presidential race. Representatives for the IRS, Paulson and Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, had no immediate comment.

Berger acknowledged that competition has made it more difficult to find profitable underwriting opportunities. Third Point Re is headed for its third-straight annual decline in New York trading and still trades below its 2013 initial public offering price of $12.50 a share.

With assistance from Sonali Basak.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Reinsurance
Ironshores Pembroke Managing Agency Ltd. has entered into a management agreement with Old Mutual Group to underwrite select specialty lines for African risks.

Pembrokes Lloyds Syndicate 4000 partners with Old Mutual Specialty Insurance, to offer coverage for multiple property, casualty and specialty business lines in Africa.

Insurance products will be delivered throughout the Old Mutual insurance platform, spanning more than 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Pembroke Lloyds Syndicate 4000 can provide additional capacity of up to US$250 million on a portfolio or single project basis.

Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming one of the fastest growing areas of the world, driven by infrastructure investment, urbanization and an emerging youth population, said Justin Wash, managing director, Pembroke Managing Agency.

Wash noted that Pembrokes strategic partnership with Old Mutual will be developed by our Strategic Partnership director, Chris Brown, to enable us to access high quality insurance opportunities in this vibrant region.

Pembroke Lloyds Syndicate 4000 and Old Mutual Specialty Insurance, as a Lloyds coverholder, will initially offer 10 specialty business coverage lines: cargo, commercial property, construction, energy, kidnap and ransom, mining, political risk and trade credit, terrorism, transit and delay in start up, and general aviation.

Working in partnership with Lloyds Pembroke syndicate will enhance in-country capabilities to offer world-class insurance expertise throughout our network of industry specialists, commented Martin Hudson, chief executive officer of Old Mutual Specialty.

About Old Mutual Group

Old Mutual Group operates in 40 countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Old Mutual Specialty Insurance Ltd. is a Lloyds coverholder, licensed by the Financial Services Commission in Mauritius, focusing on complex and large scale risks.

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Excess Surplus Lloyd's Human Resources
Wholesale insurance broker, Burns & Wilcox, has added Mary Mullen as manager, Personal Insurance, in its Chicago office.

Mullen, who most recently served as vice president, regional operations officer at Willis Towers Watson, will lead the Personal Lines practice within Burns & Wilcox Chicago, and will help to expand the offices high net worth footprint.

Mullen joins Burns & Wilcox, the largest in North America, with more than 12 years of personal insurance experience following her tenure at Willis Towers Watson.

Prior to that, she worked as vice president, Private Client Services at Chartwell Insurance Services and personal lines underwriter at Chubb Insurance.

Burns & Wilcox offers personal insurance for high net worth and hard-to-place risks and specializes in providing solutions for the clients of brokers and agents, including personal exposures such as coastal property coverage, course of construction, dwelling fire, vacant dwelling, seasonal and vacation rental, international, high value homeowner, earthquake, recreational marine, high net worth personal accident and personal umbrella.

Source: Burns & Wilcox

Topics Willis Towers Watson
Activist investors Carl Icahn and John Paulson are making American International Group (AIG) more transparent through their representation on its board, the U.S. insurers president and chief executive Peter Hancock said on Wednesday.

Hedge fund manager Paulson and Samuel Merksamer, a managing director at Icahn Capital, joined the AIG board last month after a campaign last year by Icahn, the U.S. insurers fourth largest investor, for AIG to break itself into three parts.

AIG rejected Icahns proposal and outlined its own strategy in January, including spinning off its mortgage insurance unit and selling its broker-dealer network.

Inclusion of the activists has forced us to be a little bit more transparent, Hancock said at a briefing in London, adding that after seeing the company from the inside, the investors were gaining a better understanding of the difficulties of simplifying the company.

There is a lot of common ground, Hancock told Reuters on the sidelines of the briefing.

Hancock said part of the simplification would include cutting motor insurance business in some of the countries in which it operates, following a decision to pull out of motor insurance in China.

AIGs near-collapse in 2008 and its $182 billion bail-out by the U.S. government led to its inclusion in the Federal Reserves list of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).

Icahn has argued a split would help AIG rid itself of the regulatory burden of being a SIFI, which requires higher capital cushions.

AIG also said in January it planned to cut $1.6 billion of costs and return at least $25 billion to shareholders over the next two years.

The strategy is very much on track, Hancock said.

AIGs European headquarters are in London, and the firm may switch that head office status if Britain votes to leave the European Union in a referendum next week, Hancock said.

If a Brexit should occur, I suspect we will need a hub within the EU and there are some excellent choices, some of which we have examined, he told the briefing, declining to give further details.

AIGs restructuring also involves job cuts. Around 100 jobs were recently cut in London, according to a source familiar with the matter.

(Reporting by Carolyn Cohn; Editing by Mark Potter)

Related:

Topics USA Europe London
A federal judge said hell probably dismiss a lawsuit against Twitter Inc. by the widow of a man killed at a police training center in Jordan that accused the social network of knowingly allowing the Islamic State to spread its terrorist message through its service.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco said at a hearing Wednesday he wasnt convinced that the mere action by Islamic State of opening accounts, and not necessarily using them to recruit, was a basis for claiming that Twitter violated the federal Anti-Terrorism Act. The judge said hes inclined to let the widow revise and refile her complaint.

While a lawyer for the widow argued to the judge there was no doubt the social network platform permitted ISIS to spread its lies and plan its attacks, Twitters lawyer contended the allegations dont meet the legal threshold of causation.

Twitter is not providing material support to terrorists, said the companys attorney, Seth Waxman, the former U.S. solicitor general during the Clinton administration.

Orricks comments came a day after another U.S. citizen filed a similar complaint in the same court alleging that Twitter, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. have let Islamic State use their social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits.

The January case is Fields v. Twitter Inc., 16-00213, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). The new case is Gonzalez v. Twitter Inc., 4:16-cv-03282, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters USA Legislation
RiskPro Partners, a privately held insurance brokerage firm headquartered in Dallas, has hired Julie Davis as vice president, Risk Management Services, in RiskPro Partners Austin office.

Davis joins RiskPro Partners following a rich career in insurance and risk management. While based in Silicon Valley, Davis served as executive vice president for Aon Risk Services Technology Practice and led the National Practice for Emerging Technology firms.

She also served a two-year role at a super- regional brokerage firm, where she developed risk management programs for firms that operate in the collaborative sharing industry (P2P ride sharing, car sharing and real estate sharing).

Davis served two years as the executive director of the TechAssure Association, a global association comprised of independent insurance brokers who specialize in technology and innovation products and services.

Source: RiskPro Partners

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Texas Risk Management
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has vetoed a moped safety bill, saying it is government overreach to require reflective vests for nighttime driving and helmets for drivers under 21.

People over 18 should decide for themselves what they should wear for their personal safety, the Republican governor wrote in her veto message, signed June 10.

Sen. Greg Hembree, R-North Myrtle Beach, said he believes mopeds are the most dangerous vehicles for people to drive, partly because there are no regulations. Hes been pushing for safety legislation since his 2012 election.

Theyre slower and you cant see them as well, Hembree said about the need for vests. Thats how they get hit. They get run over at night.

According to the South Carolina Department of Public Safety, 50 people died in moped crashes last year  18 of those in Horry County, which topped the fatality list. The statewide toll was up from 32 moped deaths in 2014 and 24 in 2013. At least 16 moped drivers and/or passengers have died so far this year.

In her veto letter, Haley said the proposed restrictions for mopeds exceed those for motorcycle drivers.

But state law does require anyone under 21 whos driving or riding on a motorcycle to wear a helmet. The motorcycle advocacy group ABATE  which stands for A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactments  has long squashed any effort to require helmets for older riders.

But ABATE spokesman Chad Fuller said the group wanted legislators to add the helmet provision for mopeds.

We supported them having the same regulations that we as motorcyclists have, he said. The group, of which Haley has been a member, took no position on the vest issue.

Rep. Bill Crosby, the main House sponsor, said the bill is not about helmets or vests, but saving peoples lives.

I wish she would reconsider, said Crosby, R-North Charleston. I would think it would sit on her conscience if this doesnt pass.  Well continue having people killed.

He likened the moped restrictions to requiring people in vehicles to wear seat belts.

While a House member, Haley voted against the 2005 law that allowed officers to stop drivers for not wearing a seat belt.

The moped bill would allow officers to charge intoxicated moped drivers with drunken driving.

Literally, you can be stinking drunk on a moped and cant be arrested, said Hembree, formerly the chief prosecutor for Horry and Georgetown counties.

Thats because state law specifically excludes mopeds from the definition of a motor vehicle. Proposals to close that loophole have died repeatedly since 2010. People who lose their license due to a DUI conviction often use a moped to get around. In a state where public transportation is lacking, legislators didnt want to prevent people from getting to work.

To solve that sticking point, the bill creates a special moped license. People who lose their regular license, for whatever reason, can get the separate license, starting the point system over. But a moped license could be suspended too.

If that happens, were starting to lose sympathy for you. Youre going to have to be walking, Hembree said.

The bill would require people to register their mopeds and attach a license plate, which the bill creates as a way to cut down on theft and identify mopeds in crashes. Mopeds would still be exempt from property taxes and insurance.

The bill makes it illegal for mopeds to be driven on highways where the posted speed limit is 55 mph or greater.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Auto South Carolina
A water system that had to tell its 10,000 customers not to drink from their taps has brought chemical contamination down to federally acceptable levels by diluting it with water from another north Alabama utility, officials said Tuesday.

Even so, weeks of testing will continue before water supplied by the West Morgan-East Lawrence Water and Sewer Authority can be declared safe for consumption.

The authority draws from the Tennessee River, where sampling found high concentrations of perfluorooactanoic acid and perfluorooctane sulfonate in the water. These chemicals, commonly called PFOA and PFOS, are commonly used in fabrics, packaging and coatings for cookware.

Studies indicate that exposure to certain levels of PFOA and PFOS may result in problems including low birth weight babies, accelerated puberty, cancer, liver damage and immune-system effects, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The authority is suing 3M Co., a leading manufacturer in the Tennessee Valley, as well as the corporations Dyneon division and Daikin America Inc., which makes fluoropolymers and other chemical products. The authority claims these companies polluted the river; 3M says it has followed regulations and caused no proven harm.

The EPA recently tightened its restrictions, obligating water systems with combined levels of 70 parts per trillion of these chemicals in drinking water to tell customers about potential health risks and work to reduce chemical concentrations.

Authority Director Don Sims said the utility is blending its supply with water from Decatur Utilities. Authority attorney Cary McWhorter told the Decatur Daily recent samples found no detectable level of PFOS and 25 parts per trillion of PFOA.

We will take, over a period of two weeks, numerous samples to see if we can maintain levels below the advisory amount, before determining whether the blended water is safe for consumption, Sims told The Associated Press.

The safety advisory sent customers scrambling for bottled water. Officials have said that a temporary filtration system wont be ready until at least September, and a permanent solution may not be in place for up to three years.

Five Morgan County churches announced plans to distribute bottled water twice a week to affected customers, the Decatur Daily reported, replacing volunteer fire departments as distribution locations.

But supplies are limited, so only people in desperate need should seek water at the churches, said Morgan County Emergency Management Director Eddie Hicks.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Pollution Alabama Chemicals
A wildfire burning in central New Mexico grew to more than three square miles late Wednesday, sending up a towering plume of smoke that swelled as afternoon temperatures soared and eventually blanketed the states largest city in a thick haze.

The blaze burning in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque prompted Gov. Susana Martinez to declare an emergency, clearing the way for state funds to be used.

In addition to the emergency declaration, Martinez directed state agencies to offer all available resources to assist local authorities.

Martinez said the first priority is the health and safety of New Mexicans.

Property can be replaced, but lives cannot, she said. As our coordinated response to the fire continues, I ask New Mexicans to be mindful of this and to not take unnecessary risks.

Fire officials said the blaze was about 7 miles from the community of Chilili, made up of dozens of residents who live in homes scattered through the pinon and juniper dotted hills that abut the Cibola National Forest.

Officials late Wednesday night said evacuations were ordered for Bernalillo County residences from the junction of Highways 217 and 337 south to the Torrance County line. But there was no immediate word on how many people that order encompassed.

Fire officials also announced voluntary evacuations for residences from the Torrance County line south to Highway 55 and from Highway 337 to the west.

Shelters have been set up in Estancia and Tijeras, authorities said.

The fire nearly tripled in size from Wednesday morning, with the growth fueled by dry conditions, hot temperatures and afternoon winds.

Good weather the previous night helped firefighters attack the flames, and officials were hoping for more favorable conditions Wednesday night.

The fire was being fought by ground crews and air tankers.

Cause of the fire is under investigation.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Wildfire Mexico New Mexico
A former top western New Mexico county official fired after her third drunken driving arrest just two days into her new job has filed a lawsuit.

An attorney for former interim Cibola County manager Rheganne (RAY-gun) Vaughn says in court papers she was wrongful terminated since the 2014 drunken driving arrest happened outside of work and didnt affect her duties.

The lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque seeks an unspecified amount in damages from Cibola County.

Court records show Vaughn later was convicted for aggravated drunken driving stemming from her 2014 arrest. Records also say she pleaded no contest for driving under the influence in 2011 in Deming, New Mexico.

A 2006 drunken driving charge against Vaughn was dismissed.

Cibola County manager Tony Boyd declined to comment.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Mexico New Mexico
San Diego, CA, June 16, 2016  Atlas General Insurance Services, LLC (Atlas), has been named one of the Best Places to Work in San Diego, as part of a review process by the San Diego Business Journal, Best Companies Group and sponsors Kaiser Permanente and GreenRope.

The recognition program is dedicated to identifying, recognizing and honoring the best employers in San Diego, benefiting the countys economy, workforce, and businesses. Winners are chosen from 100 companies, split into four categories, from small-sized (15-49 US employees) to mega-sized (2,000 or more US employees). Atlas has been named one of this years Best Places to Work in San Diego in the medium category.

A two-part survey by each nominated company determined the Best Places to Work in San Diego. The first part consisted of an evaluation of each nominated companys workplace policies, practices, philosophy, systems, and demographics. The second part was a survey of employees, measuring their experience. Final rankings were determined by the combined scores.

We are proud to once again be named one of the Best Places to Work in San Diego, said Bill Trzos, president and CEO of Atlas. As Atlas continues to grow, it is paramount that our employees love coming to work every day and enjoy the company and culture weve worked so hard to create together.

The companies that made the list will be honored at an awards ceremony in August, with a special issue of the San Diego Business Journal profiling them later that month.

For more information on the Best Places to Work in San Diego program, visit http://www.BestPlacestoWorkSD.com.

About Atlas General Insurance Services, LLC

Atlas General Insurance Services is a full service program administrator that offers a wide range of insurance solutions. Atlas has expertise in developing and underwriting programs with a variety of insurance carrier partners. Atlas has the primary goal of providing exceptional service and unique options for their clients. For more information, visit atlas.us.com.

Media Contact:

Stephanie Bozzuto

Marketing & Communications Director

(858) 529-6700

stephanieb@atlas.us.com
Plug and Play's Insurance Platform has put out a call to all startups for applications for its new InsurTech accelerator program.

The 12-week program, announced in April is part of a partnership with Munich Re, USAA, Farmers Insurance, Nationwide, State Farm, Travelers, and Compare.com, among others.

"There's been more of a focus on InsurTech in Silicon Valley, and partnering with Plug and Play will keep us and other industry players informed about emerging technologies that could play a role in our sector in the next decade," said Robert Mozeika, executive innovation strategy at Munich Re Silicon Valley, in a statement.

An insurance kickoff event was held at Plug and Play earlier this month, with more than 100 attendees and 20 corporations present, according to the company. Startups had the chance to present on stage and attend a panel discussion with Munich Re, USAA, Deloitte, and AIG, which dove deeper into what types of technologies insurance companies may expect them to innovate.

"We are already working with thousands of startups in our ecosystem, but with this new initiative, we are looking for stage-agnostic InsurTech startups that could facilitate changes in various aspects of the industry," said Ali Safavi, director of Plug and Play Insurance.

Startups accepted into Plug and Plays program will receive office space in its Sunnyvale, California headquarters, expert mentor curricula and a chance to pitch in front of Silicon Valley's biggest investors at EXPO, Plug and Plays quarterly competition event.
L'incidente e avvenuto a Serra de' Conti, il conducente del mezzo e stato portato all'ospedale Torrette di Ancona in gravi condizioni

E morto in un incidente stradale un ragazzo di 16 anni, Giuseppe Lenoci, che era a bordo del furgone, finito fuori strada contro un albero, di una ditta di termo-idraulica presso cui stava facendo uno stage. Il conducente del veicolo, un 37enne, e stato trasportato in gravi condizioni allospedale Torrette di Ancona.

Lincidente

Ladolescente, originario di Monte Urano, in provincia di Fermo, partecipava ad uno stage nellambito di un corso di formazione sulla termoidraulica. Lenoci viaggiava al posto del passeggero, mentre il guidatore e stato invece sbalzato via dallabitacolo. Sul luogo dellincidente sono intervenuti i vigili del fuoco, che hanno estratto il corpo del ragazzo dalle lamiere, la polizia locale, i carabinieri e il 118. Il 37enne e stato trasportato allospedale di Torrette di Ancona in gravi condizioni.

Il direttore dellistituto: Abbiamo per un figlio'

Una disgrazia che ci colpisce profondamente, come comunita e come scuola. Abbiamo perso, in questo tragico incidente stradale un figlio anche noi, mentre si stava preparando a svolgere unattivita formativa di stage, cosi in una nota padre Sante Pessot, direttore dellIstituto degli Artigianelli di Fermo, frequentato da Lenoci. I nostri ragazzi sono impegnati in attivita di stage che li accompagnano nel mondo del lavoro, fanno esperienze dirette con aziende con cui collaboriamo da anni  spiega  nel rispetto delle normative nazionali e regionali. Si tratta di attivita co-progettate con le imprese, nel rispetto delle normative nazionali e regionali  ribadisce padre Sante Pessot -, che preparano ad un inserimento graduale e responsabile nel mondo del lavoro, con il supporto dei nostri docenti e tutor. I momenti di esperienza sul lavoro fanno parte del loro percorso formativo e sono un momento fondamentale per la costruzione del loro futuro, come alunni di un centro di formazione e professionale vivono con entusiasmo gli spazi di stage. Siamo devastati da questa perdita che ci lascia senza parole e siamo vicini alla famiglia in questo momento di dolore  conclude -. Lo viviamo in silenzio, nella vicinanza e nella preghiera, secondo il nostro stile.

Le condoglianze della sindaca

In questo momento bisogna fermarsi e riflettere, dice ad Ansa il sindaco di Monte Urano Moira Canigola, a proposito della morte del giovane concittadino. Prima di parlare bisogna conoscere e attediamo di avere piu elementi a disposizione  aggiunge  intanto mi sento di esprimere le condoglianza ai familiari per questa immane tragedia a nome mio, dellamministrazione e d tutta la cittadinanza.

Bianchi

Mi scuso se sono uscito prima e mi scuso se usciro tra poco, purtroppo ce stato un incidente, un ragazzo che stava facendo un corso di formazione professionale della Regione Marche e rimasto ucciso in un incidente stradale, devo ovviamente andare, ha detto il ministro dellIstruzione Patrizio Bianchi, prendendo la parola alla presentazione del libro Nascere non basta. Bambini invisibili, tratta dei minori e stato civile in Africa, promossa dalla Comunita di SantEgidio nella sede di San Gallicano a Trastevere.

Pesavento (Cnddu): Rimodulare scuola-lavoro

Il Coordinamento Nazionale Docenti della disciplina dei Diritti Umani ritiene episodi come quelli avvenuti oggi nelle Marche e alcune settimane fa in Friuli Venezia GIulia inaccettabili ed esprime alle famiglie la propria vicinanza, associandosi al loro immenso dolore. Il periodo di alternanza scuola  lavoro va sicuramente rimodulato per assicurare ai giovanissimi e ai loro genitori tutta la sicurezza dovuta. A dirlo e il presidente del Cnddu professor Romano Pesavento.
Il Niger e uno dei paesi dove si registra il maggior tasso di matrimoni infantili.

Rapporto Save the Children Infanzia Rubata

Secondo il rapporto Infanzia Rubata, di Save the Children, le bambine che diventano mogli nella fascia di eta compresa tra 15 e 19 anni rappresentano il 60% del totale. Nello specifico, ogni anno circa 15 milioni di bambini in piu si sposano prima dei 18 anni di eta. Quattro milioni si sposano prima di aver compiuto 15 anni. Nel caso del Niger la differenza tra nascere nella capitale o nelle zone piu svantaggiate del Paese segna il futuro delle bambine. Cosi, a Niamey, una bambina su 3 a 18 anni e gia sposata.

Il matrimonio non e un gioco da bambini

Con il programma Il matrimonio non e un gioco da bambini la ong vuole offrire alle bambine di 10 localita nella regione di Maradi, un ambiente nel quale poter decidere quando e con chi desiderano sposarsi, oltre ad avere nozioni igienico sanitarie. Negli ultimi 30 anni sono stati fatti numerosi progressi per la tutela dei diritti e della vita dei bambini in Niger e in tutta lAfrica Occidentale. Dal 1990 il tasso di mortalita infantile si e ridotto della meta anche se resta ancora molto da fare nel settore del matrimonio infantile. Le cause del fenomeno hanno a che vedere con credenze religiose e culturali, oltre che con le condizioni di vita in questo Paese tra i piu poveri del mondo. Fonte: Agenzia Fides.
Technological advances in the computer and electronics industries are moving at a rapid pace. The companies that design and produce the devices that keep people connected are some of the world's most profitable and biggest by market value. These companies produce a broad range of advanced hardware and equipment, ranging from personal computers and mobile phones to printers and networking tools. Some of them manufacture home appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves. In terms of their capabilities, all of these devices can be called tech hardware because they are light years ahead of earlier products and are packed with the latest technology.

Below we look at the 10 biggest hardware companies by 12-month trailing (TTM) revenue. Some companies outside the U.S. report profits semi-annually instead of quarterly, so the 12-month trailing data may be older than it is for companies that report quarterly. Data is courtesy of YCharts.com, unless otherwise specified. All figures are as of September 9, 2020.

Normally, Investopedia limits these 10-biggest-companies lists to ones which are publicly traded in the U.S. or Canada, either directly or through ADRs. However, two Korea-based companies -- Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (005930) and LG Electronics Ltd. (066570) -- are publicly traded neither in the U.S. nor in Canada. They have been included for their importance to the industry and because U.S. investors can still gain exposure to them through Korea-based ETFs. The market caps for both companies are reported below in Korean Won ($1 = 1,185.25 as of September 9, 2020).

Some of the stocks below are only traded over-the-counter (OTC) in the U.S., not on exchanges. Trading OTC stocks often carries higher trading costs than trading stocks on exchanges. This can lower or even outweigh potential returns.

Revenue (TTM): $273.9 billion

Net Income (TTM): $58.4 billion

Market Cap: $2.0 trillion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: 113.7%

Exchange: NASDAQ

Apple designs and manufactures mobile communication devices, personal computers, portable digital music players and digital watches. The company also sells a range of related software, services, accessories, networking solutions, music and entertainment streaming, as well as third-party digital content and applications. Apple is best known for its series of iPhones, iPads, and Mac personal computers.

Revenue (TTM): $192.6 billion

Net Income (TTM): $18.2 billion

Market Cap: 383.8 trillion  

 1-Year Trailing Total Return: 24.5%  

 Exchange: OTC

Samsung is a South Korea-based multinational electronics company that manufactures electronics and computer peripherals through various business segments. It produces semiconductors, personal computers, monitors, televisions, digital cameras, and home appliances such as air conditioners and refrigerators. Samsung also produces Internet access network systems and telecommunications equipment, including mobile phones. Its Galaxy mobile phones are a major rival to Apple's iPhone models.

Revenue (TTM): $170.4 billion

Net Income (TTM): $3.4 billion

Market Cap: $37.9 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: 16.5%

Exchange: OTC

Hon Hai Precision Industry is a Taiwan-based electronics contract manufacturer for many U.S. and global technology companies. The company is also known as Foxconn Technology Group, or just Foxconn. It designs, develops, and manufactures products related to nanotechnology, heat transfer, wireless connectivity, and material sciences. Foxconn also produces cables, connectors, and personal computer components.

Revenue (TTM): $91.5 billion

Net Income (TTM): $2.1 billion

Market Cap: $49.0 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: 20.2%

Exchange: New York Stock Exchange

Dell is a holding company that, through its subsidiaries, provides information technology (IT) hardware, software, and service solutions. It produces laptops, desktops, tablets, workstations, servers, monitors, printers, gateways, software, and storage. Dell also provides cloud management, networking and security, and other end-user computing offerings.

Revenue (TTM): $76.8 billion

Net Income (TTM): $6.1 billion

Market Cap: $94.8 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: 29.3%

Exchange: New York Stock Exchange

Sony is a Japan-based multinational conglomerate that develops, designs, and manufactures electronic equipment, instruments, personal computers, home audio and entertainment systems, devices, game consoles, mobile phones, and software. The company also has a semiconductor solutions segment that produces image sensors and camera modules.

Revenue (TTM): $64.7 billion

Net Income (TTM): $1.5 billion

Market Cap: $21.4 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: 16.5%

Exchange: OTC

Panasonic is a Japan-based multinational electronics manufacturer. The company develops and manufacturers home appliances, such as refrigerators and washing machines, car navigation systems, digital devices, computer peripherals, telecommunications, industrial equipment, lighting fixtures and electric lamps, and various electronic parts.

Revenue (TTM): $56.8 billion

Net Income (TTM): $2.6 billion

Market Cap: $26.9 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: 6.5%

Exchange: New York Stock Exchange

HP is a multinational IT company that provides personal computing and other access devices, imaging and printing products, as well as related technologies, solutions, and services. The company offers commercial and consumer desktop and notebook personal computers, workstations, commercial hardware and mobility devices, printer hardware and supplies, scanning devices, and more.

Revenue (TTM): $49.9 billion

Net Income (TTM): $674.8 million

Market Cap: $7.9 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: -1.9%

Exchange: OTC

Lenovo is a Hong Kong-based multinational technology company that develops and manufactures various technology products and services. It produces personal computers, workstations, servers, storage, smart televisions, and mobile products such as smartphones, tablets, and applications. The company also provides Internet and IT services.

Revenue (TTM): $49.7 billion

Net Income (TTM): $365.8 million

Market Cap: 15.1 trillion  

 1-Year Trailing Total Return: 47.2%  

 Exchange: OTC

LG is a South Korea-based multinational electronics company that manufactures digital display equipment and home appliances. Its products include flat panel televisions, A/V products, personal computers, washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators, LED lighting, and telecommunications equipment such as smart phones and tablets.

Revenue (TTM): $49.3 billion

Net Income (TTM): $11.2 billion

Market Cap: $169.3 billion

1-Year Trailing Total Return: -15.5%

Exchange: NASDAQ

Cisco is a multinational technology company that designs and manufactures products related to the communications and IT industry, and related services. Its products include infrastructure platforms, applications, security, and more. These products are designed for transporting data, voice, and video.
Consider the scenario of buying a used caryou can take a few test drives, carefully examine the exterior and interior, and get the assistance of trained mechanics. Despite all due diligence, the reality of the used carwhether its a good buy or a lemonwill be evident only after you purchase it and ride it for some period.

M&A deals also follow similar challenges. You can examine the existing business based on visible financial numbers, assumptions of potential fit, and leverage advisory assistance from M&A advisors (the experts). But the reality will become evident only when the deal is through and you have to run the business forward.

Key Takeaways Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are deals where two (or more) companies join together as one.

These multi-million or billion-dollar deals require a great deal of due diligence before the deal is closed.

Nevertheless, M&A deals do fail, whether it be due to cultural differences or integration issues, among other things.

The broad purpose of any M&A deal is twofold:

Growth from acquiring new products, markets, and customers.

Increased profitability based on the strategic potential of the deal.

Losing the focus on the desired objectives, failure to devise a concrete plan with suitable control, and lack of establishing necessary integration processes can lead to the failure of any M&A deal. The FT Press book states that "Many research studies conducted over the decades clearly show that the rate of failures is at least 50 percent."

Why M&A Deals Fail

Limited Owner Involvement

Appointing M&A advisors at high costs for various services is almost mandatory for any mid to large size deal. But leaving everything to them just because they get a high fee is a clear sign leading to failure. Advisors usually have a limited role, until the deal is done. Following that, the new entity is the onus of the owner.

Owners should be involved right from the start and rather drive and structure the deal on their own, letting advisors take the assistance role. Among others, the inherent benefit will be a tremendous knowledge-gaining experience for the owner, which will be a lifelong benefit.

Misvaluation

The numbers and assets that look good on paper may not be the real winning factors once the deal is through. The failed case of Bank of Americas acquisition of Countrywide is a typical example.

Poor Integration Process

A major challenge for any M&A deal is the post-merger integration. A careful appraisal can help to identified key employees, crucial projects and products, sensitive processes and matters, impacting bottlenecks, etc. Using these identified critical areas, efficient processes for clear integration should be designed, aided by consulting, automation or even outsourcing options being fully explored.

Cultural Integration Issues

The Daimler Chrysler case is a study of the challenges inherent in cultural and integration issues. This factor is also quite evident in global M&A deals, and a proper strategy should be devised either to go for hard-decision forceful integration setting aside cultural differences or allowing the regional/local businesses to run their respective units, with clear targets and strategy on profit-making.

Large Required Capacity

The deals with the purpose of expansion require an assessment of the current firms capacity to integrate and build upon the larger business. Are your existing firms resources already fully or over-utilized, leaving no bandwidth for the future to make the deal a success?

Have you allocated dedicated resources (including yourself) to fill in the necessary gaps, as per the need? Have you accounted for the time, effort, and money needed for unknown challenges that may be identified in the future?

High Recovery Costs

The Daimler Chrysler case also ran up high costs toward the expected integration attempts, which could not sail through. Keeping bandwidth and resources ready with correct strategies which can surpass the potential costs and challenges of integration could have helped. Investments today in a difficult integration spread over the next few years may be difficult to recover in the long run.

Negotiation Errors

Cases of overpaying for an acquisition (with high advisory fee) are also rampant in executing M&A deals, leading to financial losses and hence failures.

External Factors

The Bank of America/Countrywide failure was also due to the overall financial sector collapsing, with mortgage companies being the worst hit. External factors may not be fully controllable, and the best approach in such situations is to look forward and cut further losses, which may include completely shutting down the business or taking similar hard decisions.

Assessment of Alternatives

Instead of buying to expand with an aim to surpass competitors, is it worth considering being a sale target and exit with better returns to start something new? It helps to consider extreme options which may prove more profitable, instead of holding onto the traditional thoughts.

Backup Plan

With more than 50% of M&A deals failing, its always better to keep a backup plan to disengage in a timely manner (with/without a loss), to avoid further losses. The above-mentioned examples, although failed, they do seem to have executed the de-merger in a timely manner.

The Bottom Line

Businesses (large or small), desirous of potential benefits from merger and acquisition deals, cannot get a 100% guarantee on the deal's success. The majority of the M&A deals result in failure due to the above factors. Business owners, advisors, and associated participants should be vigilant about the possible pitfalls.
As president of the United States, Donald Trump was likely the wealthiest individual to inhabit the White House and his net worth remains a topic for debate.

In 2015, Donald Trump claimed in a press release that he was worth more than $10 billion, however, his net worth as of 2022 is estimated at $3 billion.

Key Takeaways Donald Trump is the founder of The Trump Organization, a private entity.

He is required to submit a financial disclosure document each year, although numbers are self-reported and dont provide an accurate estimate of his net worth.

Forbes estimates Donald Trump's net worth at $3 billion although Trump has claimed the value at $10 billion.

The Trump Organization

Since 1976, Donald Trump grew his wealth through global commercial, resort, and residential real estate development under the umbrella of The Trump Organization. As a private entity, The Trump Organization is not required to publish financial statements in the same manner as a publicly-traded company.

Donald Trump famously refused to publish his tax returns, which would show his annual income and taxes paid or owed. Although The New York Times published abbreviated information from Trump's tax returns on Sept. 27, 2020, the disclosure failed to provide details about his actual net worth.

As a former president, Trump completes a required annual financial disclosure to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Government financial disclosures may list assets and investments but in estimates and broad value ranges. In 2021, many of Trump's properties were valued at "over $50 million," however, these estimates are self-reported, unaudited, and also differ from numbers The Trump Organization has reported to state and local tax officials.

71 The number of properties in the portfolio owned and operated by The Trump Organization. This total includes commercial and residential real estate, golf courses, hotels, and personal estates.

Assets

In May 2022, Forbes estimated Trumps net worth at $3 billion, falling short of the $10 billion estimates that Trump suggested while running for office in 2015.

Forbes' numbers marry with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which placed the former presidents net worth at $2.97 billion in August 2020.Forbes has attempted to break down Trump's net worth by assets.

Net Worth The value of all assets minus liabilities.

Much of Trumps wealth is tied to multi-use buildings in Manhattan, including retail real estate in the busy Midtown district. His highest value asset is a 30% stake in the office and retail space at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, valued at $2.2 billion, with a debt value of $950 million on the property.



The Trump Organization owns several exclusive golf properties estimated at $730 million, including clubs in Scotland and Dubai. Trump's private golf club in Palm Beach, Fla, Mar-a-Lago, is valued at $350 million.

Trump holds approximately $275 million in cash and liquid assets. Other personal assets include three Florida homes and his 11,000-square-foot residence in New York City, the Trump Tower penthouse. Residential units throughout the United States and around the globe have an estimated value of $340 million. This includes hotels and residential locations in Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Europe, Asia, and South America.



Donald Trump announced in October 2021 that he was creating his own social media platform. Truth Social, held through Trump Media, garnered Donald Trump $430 million from investors. The Donald Trump brand, including his licensing and management business, is valued at just over $50 million.

Trump holds roughly $275 million in cash and liquid assets. Other personal assets include three Florida homes and his 11,000-square-foot residence in New York Citythe Trump Tower penthouse.



Trumps vast real estate empire includes approximately residential units throughout the United States. This includes hotels and retail locations in Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.

What Are Donald Trump's Estimated Liablities? Trump has a lengthy financial record which includes corporate bankruptcies and lawsuits. In 2021, Trump Organization owed $590 million in debts due within four years by 2025.



What Prominent Real Estate Locations in New York City Has Donald Trump Owned? Donald Trump has owned and sold many buildings in New York including the Plaza Hotel, the St. Moritz Hotel, now the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South, and the land under the Empire State Building.

What Is Considered One of Trump's Bad Investment Decisions? In 2014, Donald Trump partnered with an Azerbaijani family that U.S. officials called notoriously unethical. The building, a five-star hotel, and residence called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku in Azerbaijan has never opened.

The Bottom Line

Donald Trump's net worth has ranged in estimates from $3 billion to $10 billion. With his private firm, The Trump Organization, and its limited public disclosures, it has been difficult to capture the true net worth of his global commercial, resort, and residential real estate as well as his licensing and social media ventures.
The annual impact of leaving the EU on the UK after 15 years (difference from being in the EU) EEA Negotiated bilateral agreement WTO GDP level  central -3.8% -6.2% -7.5% GDP level -3.4% to -4.3% -4.6% to -7.8% -5.4% to -9.5% GDP per capita  central* -1,100 -1,800 -2,100 GDP per capita* -1,000 to -1,200 -1,300 to -2,200 -1,500 to -2,700 GPD per household  central* -2,600 -4,300 -5,200 GDP per household* -2,400 to -2,900 -3,200 to -5,400 -3,700 to -6,600 Net impact on receipts -20 billion -36 billion -45 billion

*Expressed in terms of 2015 GDP in 2015 prices, rounded to the nearest 100

Adapted from HM Treasury analysis: the long-term economic impact of EU membership and the alternatives, April 2016.

Leave supporters discounted such economic projections under the label "Project Fear." A pro-Brexit outfit associated with the U.K. Independence Party, which was founded to oppose EU membership, responded by saying that the Treasury's "worst-case scenario of 4,300 per household is a bargain-basement price for the restoration of national independence and safe, secure borders."

Although Leavers stressed issues of national pride, safety, and sovereignty, they also mustered economic arguments. For example, Boris Johnson said on the eve of the vote, "EU politicians would be banging down the door for a trade deal" the day after the vote, in light of their "commercial interests." Labor Leave, the pro-Brexit Labour group, co-authored a report with a group of economists in September 2017 that forecasted a 7% boost to annual GDP, with the largest gains going to the lowest earners.

Vote Leave, the official pro-Brexit campaign, topped the "Why Vote Leave" page on its website with the claim that the U.K. could save 350 million per week: "We can spend our money on our priorities like the NHS [National Health Service], schools, and housing."

In May 2016, the U.K. Statistics Authority, an independent public body, said the figure was gross rather than net, which was "misleading and undermines trust in official statistics." A mid-June poll by Ipsos MORI, however, found that 47% of the country believed the claim. The day after the referendum, Nigel Farage, who co-founded UKIP and led it until that November, disavowed the figure and said that he was not closely associated with Vote Leave. May also declined to confirm Vote Leave's NHS promises since taking office.

Brexit Economic Response

Though Britain officially left the EU, 2020 was a transition and implementation period. Trade and customs continued during that time, so there wasn't much on a day-to-day basis that seemed different to U.K. residents. Even so, the decision to leave the EU had an effect on Britain's economy.

The country's GDP growth slowed down to around 1.4% in 2018 from 1.9% in both 2017 and 2016 as business investment slumped. The IMF predicted that the country's economy would grow at 1.3% in 2019 and 1.4% in 2020. The Bank of England cut its growth forecast for 2019 to 1.2%, the lowest since the financial crisis.

The U.K. unemployment rate hit a 44-year low at 3.9% in the three months to January 2019. Experts attribute this to employers preferring to retain workers instead of investing in new major projects.

In 2018, the pound clawed back the losses it suffered after the Brexit vote but reacted negatively as the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit increased. The currency could rally if a soft Brexit deal is passed or Brexit is delayed.

While the fall in the value of the pound helped exporters, the higher price of imports was passed onto consumers and had a significant impact on the annual inflation rate. CPI inflation hit 3.1% in the 12 months leading up to November 2017, a near six-year high that well exceeded the Bank of England's 2% target. Inflation eventually began to fall in 2018 with the decline in oil and gas prices and was at 1.8% in January 2019.

A July 2017 report by the House of Lords cited evidence that U.K. businesses would have to raise wages to attract native-born workers following Brexit, which is "likely to lead to higher prices for consumers."

International trade was expected to fall due to Brexit, even with the possibility of a raft of free trade deals. Dr. Monique Ebell, former associate research director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, forecasted a -22% reduction in total U.K. goods and services trade if EU membership was replaced by a free trade agreement.

Other free trade agreements were not predicted to pick up the slack. In fact, Ebell saw a pact with the BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, and South Africa) boosting total trade by 2.2% while a pact with the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was expected to do slightly better, at 2.6%.

"The single market is a very deep and comprehensive trade agreement aimed at reducing non-tariff barriers," Ebell wrote in January 2017, "while most non-EU [free trade agreements] seem to be quite ineffective at reducing the non-tariff barriers that are important for services trade."

June 2017 General Election

On April 18, May called for a snap election to be held on June 8, despite previous promises not to hold one until 2020. Polling at the time suggested May would expand on her slim Parliamentary majority of 330 seats (there are 650 seats in the Commons). Labor gained rapidly in the polls, however, aided by an embarrassing Tory flip-flop on a proposal for estates to fund end-of-life care.

The Conservatives lost their majority, winning 318 seats to Labor's 262. The Scottish National Party won 35, with other parties taking 35. The resulting hung Parliament cast doubts on May's mandate to negotiate Brexit and led the leaders of Labor and the Liberal Democrats to call on May to resign.

Speaking in front of the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, May batted away calls for her to leave her post, saying, "It is clear that only the Conservative and Unionist Party"the Tories' official name"has the legitimacy and ability to provide that certainty by commanding a majority in the House of Commons." The Conservatives struck a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which won 10 seats, to form a coalition. The party is little known outside of Northern Ireland, judging by a wave of curious Google searches that caused the DUP's site to crash.

May presented the election as a chance for the Conservatives to solidify their mandate and strengthen their negotiating position with Brussels. But this backfired.

"The election served to diffuse, not concentrate political power, especially with regards to Brexit," wrote Sky News political correspondent Lewis Goodall. "Ever since election night, Brussels hasn't just been dealing with Number 10 but in effect, the House of Commons too."

In the wake of the election, many expected the government's Brexit position to soften, and they were right. May released a Brexit white paper in July 2018 that mentioned an "association agreement" and a free-trade area for goods with the EU. David Davis resigned as Brexit secretary and Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest.

But the election also increased the possibility of a no-deal Brexit. The Financial Times predicted that the result made May more vulnerable to pressure from Euroskeptics and her coalition partners. We saw this play out with the Irish backstop tussle.

With her position weakened, May struggled to unite her party behind her deal and keep control of Brexit.

Scotland's Independence Referendum

Politicians in Scotland pushed for a second independence referendum in the wake of the Brexit vote, but the results of the June 8, 2017 election cast a pall over their efforts. The Scottish National Party lost 21 seats in the Westminster Parliament, and on June 27, 2017, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said her government at Holyrood would "reset" its timetable on independence to focus on delivering a "soft Brexit."

Not one Scottish local area voted to leave the EU, according to the U.K.'s Electoral Commission, though Moray came close at 49.9%. The country as a whole rejected the referendum by 62.0% to 38.0%. But because Scotland only contains 8.4% of the U.K.'s population, its vote to Remain (along with that of Northern Ireland, which accounts for just 2.9% of the U.K.'s population) was vastly outweighed by support for Brexit in England and Wales.

Scotland joined England and Wales to form Great Britain in 1707, and the relationship has been tumultuous at times. The SNP, which was founded in the 1930s, had just six of 650 seats in Westminster in 2010. The following year, however, it formed a majority government in the devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, partly owing to its promise to hold a referendum on Scottish independence.

2014 Scottish Independence Referendum

That referendum, held in 2014, saw the pro-independence side lose with 44.7% of the vote; turnout was 84.6%. Far from putting the independence issue to rest, though, the vote fired up nationalist support. The SNP won 56 of 59 Scottish seats at Westminster the following year, overtaking the Lib Dems to become the third-largest party in the U.K. overall. Britain's electoral map suddenly showed a glaring divide between England and Wales, which was dominated by Tory blue with the occasional patch of Labour red, and all-yellow Scotland.

When Britain voted to leave the EU, Scotland fulminated. A combination of rising nationalism and strong support for Europe led almost immediately to calls for a new independence referendum. When the Supreme Court ruled on Nov. 3, 2017, that devolved national assemblies such as Scotland's parliament cannot veto Brexit, the demands grew louder.

On March 13 that year, Sturgeon called for a second referendum to be held in the autumn of 2018 or spring of 2019. Holyrood backed her by a vote of 69 to 59 on March 28, the day before May's government triggered Article 50.

Sturgeon's preferred timing was significant since the two-year countdown initiated by Article 50 ended in the spring of 2019 when the politics surrounding Brexit could be particularly volatile.

What Would Independence Look Like?

Scotland's economic situation also raised questions about its hypothetical future as an independent country. The crash in the oil price has dealt a blow to government finances. In May 2014, it forecast 20152016 tax receipts from North Sea drilling of 3.4 billion to 9 billion but collected 60 million, less than 1% of the forecasts' midpoint.

In reality, these figures were hypothetical, since Scotland's finances are not fully devolved, but the estimates were based on the country's geographical share of North Sea drilling, so they illustrate what it might expect as an independent nation.

The debate over what currency an independent Scotland would use was revived. Former SNP leader Alex Salmond, who was Scotland's First Minister until Nov. 2014, told The Financial Times that the country could abandon the pound and introduce its own currency, allowing it to float freely or pegging it to sterling. He ruled out joining the euro, but others contended that it would be required for Scotland to join the EU. Another possibility would be to use the pound, which would mean forfeiting control over monetary policy.

Upsides for Some

On the other hand, a weak currency that floats on global markets can be a boon to U.K. producers who export goods. Industries that rely heavily on exports could actually see some benefit.

In 2015, the top 10 exports from the U.K. were (in USD):

Machines, engines, pumps: US$63.9 billion (13.9% of total exports) Gems, precious metals: $53 billion (11.5%) Vehicles: $50.7 billion (11%) Pharmaceuticals: $36 billion (7.8%) Oil: $33.2 billion (7.2%) Electronic equipment: $29 billion (6.3%) Aircraft, spacecraft: $18.9 billion (4.1%) Medical and technical equipment: $18.4 billion (4%) Organic chemicals: $14 billion (3%) Plastics: $11.8 billion (2.6%)

Some sectors were prepared to benefit from the exit. Multinationals listed on the FTSE 100 saw earnings rise as a result of a soft pound. A weak currency was also a boon to the tourism, energy, and service industries.

In May 2016, the State Bank of India (SBIN.NS), India's largest commercial bank, suggested that Brexit would benefit India economically. While leaving the Eurozone meant that the U.K. no longer had unfettered access to Europe's single market, it would allow for more focus on trade with India. India would also have more wiggle room if the U.K. was no longer under European trade rules and regulations.

UK-EU Trade After Brexit

May advocated a "hard" Brexit. By that, she meant that Britain should leave the EU's single market and customs union, then negotiate a trade deal to govern their future relationship. These negotiations would have been conducted during a transition period once a divorce deal was ratified.

The Conservatives' poor showing in the June 2017 snap election called popular support for a hard Brexit into question. Many in the press speculated that the government could take a softer line. The Brexit White Paper released in July 2018 revealed plans for a softer Brexit. It was too soft for many MPs belonging to her party and too audacious for the EU.

The White Paper said the government planned to leave the EU single market and customs union. However, it proposed the creation of a free trade area for goods which would "avoid the need for customs and regulatory checks at the border and mean that businesses would not need to complete costly customs declarations. And it would enable products to only undergo one set of approvals and authorizations in either market, before being sold in both." This meant the U.K. would follow EU single market rules when it comes to goods.

The White Paper acknowledged that a borderless customs arrangement with the EUone that allowed the U.K. to negotiate free trade agreements with third countrieswas "broader in scope than any other that exists between the EU and a third country."

The government was correct that there was no example of this kind of relationship in Europe today. The four broad precedents that existed were the EU's relationship with Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and WTO members.

The Norway Model: Join the EEA

The first option was for the U.K. to join Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein in the European Economic Area (EEA), which provides access to the EU's single market for most goods and services (agriculture and fisheries are excluded). At the same time, the EEA is outside the customs union, so Britain could have entered into trade deals with non-EU countries.

But the arrangement was hardly a win-win. The U.K. would be bound by some EU laws while losing its ability to influence those laws through the country's European Council and European Parliament voting rights. In September 2017, May called this arrangement an unacceptable "loss of democratic control."

David Davis expressed interest in the Norway model in response to a question he received at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. "It's something we've thought about but it's not at the top of our list." He was referring specifically to the European Free Trade Association, which like the EEA offers access to the single market, but not the customs union.

EFTA was once a large organization, but most of its members left to join the EU. Today, it comprises Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland; all but Switzerland are also members of the EEA.

The Switzerland Model

Switzerland's relationship with the EU, which is governed by around 20 major bilateral pacts with the bloc, is broadly similar to the EEA arrangement. Along with these three, Switzerland is a member of the European Free Trade Association. Switzerland helped set up the EEA, but its people rejected membership in a 1992 referendum.

The country allows the free movement of people and is a member of the passport-free Schengen Area. It is subject to many single market rules, without having much say in making them. It is outside the customs union, allowing it to negotiate free trade agreements with third countries; usually, but not always, it has negotiated alongside the EEA countries. Switzerland has access to the single market for goods (with the exception of agriculture), but not services (with the exception of insurance). It pays a modest amount into the EU's budget.

Brexit supporters who wanted to "take back control" wouldn't have embraced the concessions the Swiss made on immigration, budget payments, and single market rules. The EU would probably not have wanted a relationship modeled on the Swiss example, either: Switzerland's membership in EFTA but not the EEA, Schengen but not the EU, is a messy product of the complex history of European integration andwhat elsea referendum.

The Canada Model: A Free Trade Agreement

A third option was to negotiate a free trade agreement with the EU along the lines of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, a pact the EU finalized but didn't fully ratify with Canada. The most obvious problem with this approach is that the U.K. had only two years from the triggering of Article 50 to negotiate such a deal. The EU refused to discuss a future trading relationship until December of that year at the earliest.

To give a sense of how tight that timetable is, CETA negotiations began in 2009 and concluded in 2014. But just over half of the EU's 28 national parliaments actually ratified the deal. Persuading the rest could take years. Even subnational legislatures can stand in the way of a deal: the Walloon regional parliament, which represents fewer than four million mainly French-speaking Belgians, single-handedly blocked CETA for a few days in 2016.

In order to extend the two-year deadline for leaving the EU, Britain needed unanimous approval from the EU. Several U.K. politicians, including Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, stressed the need for a transitional deal of a few years so that (among other reasons) Britain could negotiate EU and third-country trade deals. But this notion was met with resistance from hard-line Brexiteers.

Problems with a CETA-Style Agreement

In some ways, comparing Britain's situation to Canada's is misleading. Canada already enjoys free trade with the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was built on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This means that a trade deal with the EU was not as crucial as it is for the U.K. Canada's and Britain's economies are also very different: CETA does not include financial services, one of Britain's biggest exports to the EU.

Speaking in Florence in Sept. 2017, May said the U.K. and EU "can do so much better" than a CETA-style trade agreement, since they were beginning from the "unprecedented position" of sharing a body of rules and regulations. She did not elaborate on what "much better" looked like, besides calling on both parties to be "creative as well as practical."

Monique Ebell, formerly of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research stressed that even with an agreement in place, non-tariff barriers were likely to be a significant drag on Britain's trade with the EU. She expected total U.K. foreign tradenot just flows to and from the EUunder an EU-U.K. trade pact. She reasoned that free-trade deals do not generally handle services trade well. Services are a major component of Britain's international trade; the country enjoys a trade surplus in that segment, which is not the case for goods.

Free trade deals also struggle to rein in non-tariff barriers. Admittedly Britain and the EU started from a unified regulatory scheme, but divergences would only multiply post-Brexit.

WTO: Go It Alone

You want out? You're out. If Britain and the EU weren't able to come to an agreement about their relationship, they would have had to revert to WTO terms. But this default solution wouldn't have been straightforward either. Since Britain is currently a WTO member through the EU, it will have to split tariff schedules with the bloc and divvy out liabilities arising from ongoing trade disputes. This work has already begun.

Trading with the EU on WTO terms was the "no-deal" scenario the Conservative government presented as an acceptable fallback, though most observers see this as a negotiating tactic. In July 2017, U.K. Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said, "People talk about the WTO as if it would be the end of the world. But they forget that is how they currently trade with the United States, with China, with Japan, with India, with the Gulf, and our trading relationship is strong and healthy."

But for certain industries, the EU's external tariff would have hit hard: Britain exports 77% of the cars it manufactures, and 58% of these go to Europe. The EU levies 10% tariffs on imported cars. Monique Ebell of the NIESR estimated that leaving the EU single market would reduce overall U.K. goods and services tradenot just that with the EUby 2230%.

Nor would the U.K. only be giving up its trade arrangements with the EU: under any of the scenarios above, it would probably have lost the trade agreements the bloc struck with 63 third countries, as well as progress in negotiating other deals. Replacing these and adding new ones would have been an uncertain prospect. In a September 2017 interview with Politico, Trade Secretary Liam Fox said his office, which was formed in July 2016, turned away some third countries looking to negotiate free trade deals because it lacked the capacity to negotiate.

Fox wanted to roll the terms of existing EU trade deals over into new agreements, but some countries were unwilling to give Britain (66 million people, $2.6 trillion GDP) the same terms as the EU (excluding Britain, around 440 million people, $13.9 trillion GDP).

Negotiations with third countries are technically not allowed while Britain remains an EU member, but even so informal talks have begun, particularly with the U.S.

Impact on the U.S.

Companies in the U.S. across a wide variety of sectors have made large investments in the U.K. over many years. In fact, American corporations have derived 9% of global foreign affiliate profit from the United Kingdom since 2000. In 2014 alone, U.S. companies invested a total of $588 billion into Britain. The U.S. also hires a lot of Brits, making U.S. companies one of the U.K.'s largest job markets. The output of U.S. affiliates in the United Kingdom was $153 billion in 2013. The United Kingdom plays a vital role in corporate America's global infrastructure from assets under management (AUM), international sales, and research and development (R&D) advancements.

American companies have viewed Britain as a strategic gateway to other countries in the European Union. Brexit will jeopardize the affiliate earnings and stock prices of many companies strategically aligned with the United Kingdom, which may see them reconsider their operations with U.K. and European Union members.

American companies and investors that have exposure to European banks and credit markets may be affected by credit risk. European banks may have to replace $123 billion in securities depending on how the exit unfolds. Furthermore, U.K. debt may not be included in European banks' emergency cash reserves, creating liquidity problems. European asset-backed securities have been in decline since 2007. This decline is likely to intensify now that Britain has chosen to leave.

Who's Next to Leave the EU?

Political wrangling over Europe is not limited to Britain. Most EU members have strong euroskeptic movements that, while they have so far struggled to win power at the national level, heavily influence the tenor of national politics. In a few countries, there is a chance that such movements could secure referendums on EU membership.

In May 2016, global research firm IPSOS released a report showing that a majority of respondents in Italy and France believe their countries should hold a referendum on EU membership.

Italy

The fragile Italian banking sector has driven a wedge between the EU and the Italian government, which provided bailout funds to save mom-and-pop bondholders from being "bailed-in," as EU rules stipulate. The government abandoned its 2019 budget when the EU threatened it with sanctions. It lowered its planned budget deficit from 2.5% of GDP to 2.04%.

Matteo Salvini, the far-right head of Italy's Northern League and the country's deputy prime minister, called for a referendum on EU membership hours after the Brexit vote, saying, "This vote was a slap in the face for all those who say that Europe is their own business and Italians don't have to meddle with that."

The Northern League has an ally in the populist Five Star Movement, whose founder, former comedian Beppe Grillo, called for a referendum on Italy's membership in the eurothough not the EU. The two parties formed a coalition government in 2018 and made Giuseppe Conte prime minister. Conte ruled out the possibility of "Italexit" in 2018 during the budget standoff.

France

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's euroskeptic National Front, hailed the Brexit vote as a win for nationalism and sovereignty across Europe: "Like a lot of French people, I'm very happy that the U.K. people held on and made the right choice. What we thought was impossible yesterday has now become possible." She lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron in May 2017, gaining just 33.9% of votes.

Macron has warned that the demand for "Frexit" will grow if the EU does not see reforms. According to a February 2019 IFOP poll, 40% of French citizens want the country to leave the EU. Frexit is also one of the demands of the yellow vest protesters.

When Did Britain Officially Leave the European Union? Britain officially left the EU on Jan. 31, 2020, at 11 p.m. GMT. The move came after a referendum voted in favor of Brexit on June 23, 2016.

What Were the Reasons Behind Brexit? There were many reasons why Britain voted to leave the European Union. But some of the main issues behind Brexit included a rise in nationalism, immigration, political autonomy, and the economy. The Leave side garnered almost 52% of the votes while the Remain side received about 48% of the vote.

How Many Countries Are Part of the EU Post-Brexit? Britain's departure from the European Union left 27 member states. They are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden,

The Bottom Line

The European Union was established in November 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty. The original members included Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Fifteen other countries would gain membership in the union. Rising nationalist sentiment, coupled with concerns over the economy and British sovereignty led the majority of voters in the U.K. to leave the EU. Britain left the union at the end of January 2020 in what is commonly called Brexit. But the move didn't come without challenges. It required two years of negotiating a deal and a year-long transition period before everything became final.
The Orlando massacre is just the latest twist in an American election season that has defied all logic and comprehension. Unfortunately, the atrocity will likely help Donald Trump far more than Hillary Clinton.

Trump has been shouting fire in this particular theater for some time now, warning that the Muslim hordes are coming to take over America.

This horrific incident, which looks like a hate crime against gays by a deeply conflicted terrorist, will make believers out of more Americans than ever, convinced they are about to be bombarded by terrorist atrocities.

Since 9/11 America has changed. Many feel the open and generous spirit of its immigration policies are being exploited by those intent on doing the country harm.

As in Britain, Europe and elsewhere, these people want a crackdown on immigration, especially from the Arab world. Trump has been their champion.

But America also has to face the fact that like this latest killer, Omar Mateen, born and raised an American, home grown terrorists have also become a reality. There is no easy way to lock down your borders when the enemy is within.

It all leads to a more paranoid existence, a feeling of enemies everywhere, and fuels candidates like Trump who is using such fears to propel himself to the White House, he hopes.

There is a terrible synergy between Trump and the terrorists. The more violence the better for Trump.

The more extreme a President Trump would be, the greater the recruiting tool for ISIS all over the world. The more ISIS, the more an invasion of their hinterlands will be insisted on.

Trump would be only too happy to oblige and likely send tens of thousands of Americans to their death. But we are not there yet.

Clinton still stands between Trumps ambition and Trump gaining power. But it may be a very close run thing, especially if the atrocities continue and Trump benefits.

As David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker wrote this week, if Clinton fails power will be in the hands of a malevolent fraud. And then what? A disaster beyond the imagining of any screenwriter.

So the debate begins, and what a critical one it is.

Can non-existent gun laws continue where killers like Mateen have complete access to assault rifles despite being on an FBI watch list? If so, how?

Of course, when the Orlando killing spree happened Trump, as usual overplayed his hand, almost wetting himself with excitement on Twitter, rushing to say he had predicted this and claiming credit for doing so.

It highlighted his massive ego, as he preferred to claim victory on the issue first rather than display empathy for the loved ones of those killed and injured. His statement was, unsurprisingly, in contrast to Clintons, who reached out to commiserate with the families of those killed and injured. Trumps statement was seen as a juvenile effort to wring political advantage out of personal tragedy.

Sadly, it may work. America is frightened and deeply fearful of such killings occurring in their home towns, given the extremely random nature of the slayings so far.

We need a cool hand on the tiller, not a firebrand ready to launch a war at the first opportunity. Orlando has made America a more dangerous place because it boosts Trump.
Campaigns surrounding the upcoming referendum on the UKs membership of the EU have been suspended following the death of a Labour politician, fatally shot and stabbed after meeting with her constituents.

A Member of Parliament (MP) for the Labour Party, Jo Cox was leaving a drop-in meeting at a library in Leeds when she was shot and stabbed multiple times by a 52-year old suspect named locally as Tommy Mair. Immediately arrested by police, his identity is yet to be confirmed.

Taken to Leeds General Infirmary, 41-year-old Cox was pronounced dead at 1.48pm UK time while police confirmed that another man in his 70s had also sustained injuries in the attack.

Police are currently investigating reports that Mair shouted Britain First as he attacked Cox. At least one witness has claimed Mair shouted the words in reference to the British right-wing party amid conflicting reports that Cox was personally targeted or had become involved in an altercation between two men as she left the library.

MP and humanitarian Jo Cox died today. Her maiden speech passionately defended immigration & Britain's EU membership https://t.co/MCBRcs4GbL  Laura WalkerMcDonald (@techladylaura) June 16, 2016

I heard the shot and I ran outside and saw some ladies from the cafe running out with towels, local resident Graeme Howard told The Guardian.

There was loads of screaming and shouting and the police officers showed up.

He was shouting Britain first when he was doing it and being arrested. He was pinned down by two police officers and she was taken away in an ambulance.

While some witnesses have attested to Cox becoming involved in an altercation, others believe her attacker was waiting outside the library for the MP.

I was inside the shop and all I heard was a scream and then the gunshot, said a local shopkeeper.

I went out and everyone was dispersing. I couldnt see because it happened behind a car.

She walked out of the library with her PA and he was waiting for her. He stabbed her first and this guy tried to stop him and then he shot her, confirmed another local, Terry Flynn-Edwards.

Leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has paid tribute to the young MP, who was elected in 2015, extending his condolences to her husband and two young children.

Jo had a lifelong record of public service and a deep commitment to humanity. She worked both for Oxfam and the anti-slavery charity, the Freedom Fund, before she was elected last year as MP for Batley and Spen  where she was born and grew up, he said.

In the coming days, there will be questions to answer about how and why she died. But for now all our thoughts are with Jos husband Brendan and their two young children. They will grow up without their mum, but can be immensely proud of what she did, what she achieved and what she stood for.

We send them our deepest condolences. We have lost a much loved colleague, a real talent and a dedicated campaigner for social justice and peace. But they have lost a wife and a mother, and our hearts go out to them.

"We have far more in common than that divides us." The words of Labour MP Jo Cox.https://t.co/ekQ3FQ7wFf  Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 16, 2016

Dee Collins, the acting chief constable of West Yorkshire Police, released a statement confirming her death: Im now very sad to have to report that [Jo Cox] has died as a result of her injuries.

Jo was attacked by a man who inflicted serious and, sadly ultimately fatal, injuries.

Subsequently there was a further attack on a 77-year-old man who sustained injuries that are non-life threatening.

Shortly afterwards a man was arrested nearby by local uniformed police officers. Weapons, including a firearm, have also been recovered.

At 1.48pm Jo Cox was was pronounced deceased by a doctor who was working with a paramedic crew that were attending to her serious injuries.

This is a very significant investigation with large numbers of witnesses that have been spoken to by police at this time.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster both paid their respects to Cox whom they described as a hardworking and dedicated politician.

Devastating news about Jo Cox MP. Thoughts and prayers with her family and colleagues at this sad time.  Arlene Foster (@DUPleader) June 16, 2016

PM on Jo Cox: Weve lost a great star. Jo was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion & a big heart. My thoughts are with her family.  UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) June 16, 2016

Described as a loner, local residents have stated that the attack seems out of character for Mair who was known to them for his voluntary work and for living a quiet life.

Both Remain and Leave campaigns have been suspended in the wake of the attack with Prime Minister Cameron tweeting, Its right that all campaigning has been stopped after the terrible attack on Jo Cox. I wont go ahead with tonights rally in Gibraltar.

Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Charlie Flanagan also released a statement standing in solidarity with the campaign suspension.

The fact that Ms Cox was attacked in this vicious way in the course of carrying out her duties for her constituents is deeply shocking, he said.

The suspension of the Remain and Leave campaigns for today is an apt recognition that todays horrific incident was an attack, not just on Ms Cox personally, but on the practice of democratic politics.
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To be a Top Company in Irish Construction Industry Magazines Top Companies listing means far more than just a rank and position in an ordered catalogue of names. To us, it means that your efforts to be the best you can be and to excel in your industry and sector have been effective and have paid dividends. To us, it means that your determination and commitment to develop and instil a positive work culture and environment have brought your business due success plus satisfaction. We see it as you being a supportive and inclusive place in which to work that strives to bring the best out of everyone across every level of the organisation.

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Uber users can now hail a takeaway as well as a taxi as the company introduces its food delivery service to the UK.

The taxi app firm is launching UberEATS in central London, allowing users to have food delivered from nearby restaurants within 30 minutes via a dedicated app and website.

The capital is the second city in Europe to have access to the app, which uses the same tracking features and cashless technology as the original Uber, to choose from the menus of an initial 150 restaurants in central London for delivery by bicycle and scooter messengers between 11am and 11pm.

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The app shows an average of around 20 participating restaurants in the immediate area, their menus and photos of meals, and users can enter any special instructions or allergy notes.

Restaurants include The Good Life Eatery, Hotbox, Chilango, Pho, Comptoir Libanais and the frozen yoghurt cafe Snog.

Uber has promised deliveries will be with customers within 30 minutes of placing the order or the next delivery is free up to a cost of 20 - although it is only committing to the guarantee for the first month.

The delivery fee will be between 2 and 2.50 after an initial month-long free period, and there is no minimum price of an order.

Uber said it would be expanding the delivery area and choice of restaurants over the coming weeks.

Alex Czarnecki, the general manager of UberEATS in London, said the service's point of difference was the choice of "very high quality" restaurants on offer and the lack of a minimum spend - particularly attractive to those eating alone.

He said: "We're really excited to be launching in London, one of the food capitals of the world.

"The UberEATS app has been a huge success in every city we've launched in and we think Londoners will love it too."

Eric Partaker, the co-founder of Mexican restaurant Chilango, said: "We're thrilled to be partnering with UberEATS.

"The really exciting thing is to be able to break free from the constraints of our restaurants, so we can reach new people."

Libby Andrews, head of marketing for the Pho Vietnamese restaurant, said: "Uber has nearly two million users in London alone so we're excited to be partnering with them for UberEATS.

"We're excited to see the impact UberEATS will have on our business."

UberEATS already operates across the US and in Paris, and its London launch will see it competing with Deliveroo, which has grown rapidly with its model of paying drivers to collect food from restaurants that do not run a home delivery service.
More than three quarters of people believe crime is a serious problem in Ireland, according to a new survey.

The Garda Public Attitudes survey of 6,000 people shows crime is seen as a serious problem nationally, but less believe it is an issue in their local area.
MPs reacted with horror after Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and injured in an attack near Leeds.

The 41-year-old mother of two was left lying bleeding on the pavement after the incident in Birstall, West Yorkshire.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: "Very concerned about reports Jo Cox has been injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with Jo and her family."

Neighbouring MP Yvette Cooper said: "Terrible, terrible news. Thoughts and prayers with good friend Jo and with her family."

Labour's Chuka Umunna said: "Utterly awful news about an attack on a superb and wonderful colleague @Jo_Cox1 - hoping and praying for her and her family right now."

Conservative MP Sir Eric Pickles said he was "very shocked" and he is praying for her recovery.

Tory Steve Baker said: "Utterly appalling news - Godspeed for a quick recovery."

Labour's Lucy Powell said: "Dreadful, dreadful news coming in about my good friend Jo Cox. I really hope all ok. Awful."

Conservative Stewart Jackson said: "I do hope that MP @Jo_Cox1 is ok after incident in her constituency. Shocking news."

Tory Stuart Andrew said: "Horrified to hear the reports about Jo Cox. She's a lovely colleague and someone I respect enormously. My prayers and thoughts for all."
Thai police have raided a Buddhist temple complex to arrest a popular abbot accused of embezzlement but were thwarted by thousands of his followers who said he is too ill to be taken into custody.

The operation at Wat Dhammakaya, a monastery north of Bangkok known as one of the wealthiest in Thailand, began at 5am and was broadcast live on TV in a dramatic twist to a months-old stand-off.

However, hours later police could not arrest the abbot, Phra Dhammachayo, after searching all the areas in the complex but one.

"There is a last area we could not enter because the followers would not allow us," said police Major Suriya Singhakamol, the deputy chief of the Department of Special Investigations.

Mr Dhammachayo's case has enthralled the nation with its twists and turns and the conflict between law and religion it has posed.

Several scandals in recent years have cast a shadow over the Buddhist clergy in Thailand.

Although the police withdrew for the day after the fruitless raid, Mr Suriya said "our operation has not ended. The (arrest) warrant is still valid so we will have authority to carry out the operation. According to our information, he is still inside."

Mr Dhammachayo is accused of money laundering and links to embezzling 1.4 billion baht (28 million) from a now-defunct credit union.

He has barricaded himself inside his temple, ignoring three police summonses and an arrest warrant.

He has avoided arrest for over two months, claiming he was too ill to report to police for questioning.

Outside of Thailand it may seem odd that a monk should be able to defy law-enforcement officials so brazenly.

However, a law which forbids arrest of a monk in his robes, for fear it would mar the sanctity of the clergy, has repeatedly put police in an awkward position.

Authorities are also reluctant to force a showdown with the monk's thousands of supporters, fearing violence.

Buddhism is the national religion and one of three core pillars of Thai society along with the monarchy and nationhood.

Monks occupy a privileged position and are granted many concessions, including not paying taxes and being exempt from arrest until they are defrocked.

Their position in Thai society was reflected in the police operation - they paused the raid to allow the monks to eat their once-a-day meal at 11am.

"Since this morning, we have given full co-operation to the police," temple spokesman Phra Sanitwong Wuttiwangso told an afternoon news conference on the temple grounds.

However, he said groups of followers were refusing to let police enter certain areas.

"A number of followers, no matter what we tell them, they will not listen. They are asking (police) for consideration, because the abbot is ill. He has not fled the temple."

The main gates to the temple, a futuristic construction resembling a golden dome, were blocked with shuttle buses brought in by the monk's followers.

Police still managed to enter as thousands of devotees held up signs condemning the police for what the devotees say is a politically motivated investigation.

Mr Dhammachayo leads the largest religious sect in Thailand and has a cult-like following.

He first got into trouble two years ago when it became known that the former head of the Klongchan Credit Union Co-operative had donated such large sums to the temple that it sent his business into insolvency.

The official was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Television remains the most popular platform for accessing news, although there has been a 3% decline since last year.

Radio is the first point of contact for 39% of consumers, although the number of people who log on first thing continues to rise. Just over one in two people (53%) buy a newspaper daily.

Figures released by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism show the 55-plus age group are the heaviest news consumers across television, radio, print, and websites, with 21% using social media to access news.

Those aged 25 to 34 are most likely to use social media to access news, at 27%.

Trust in the news in Ireland increased by 4% over the past year but it remains low  only half of people believe they can trust most news most of the time.

The report found the kind of news we consume varies by age, with those under 35 more interested in sport than politics. Women prefer health, education, and lifestyle news, while men show a preference for sport, politics, and business.

It is the second year that the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has funded the inclusion of Ireland in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

Chief executive Michael OKeeffe said the provision of well-resourced news and current affairs and the facilitation of conversation and debate are important safeguards in a democratic society.

Dolan OHagan, digital editor of www.irishexaminer.com, said the report was a hugely welcome addition to the debate around the future direction of the media landscape and the importance of original journalism as an essential and central plank of our democracy.

He said: It is perhaps not as clear as we would like in the report but the fact is that according to the reports findings, when combined, the two major Landmark digital titles, irishexaminer.com and breakingnews.ie, are now second only to rte.ie and ahead of Independent/Herald online, thejournal.ie, and The Irish Times online when it comes to weekly digital reach.

That is a huge success story for a media company based outside the capital and one all employees should be proud of. We thank our ever-growing audience base in every county of Ireland for granting us that privilege.
He said Irish cattle exports are down 26,000 for the year to date, now at 84,000 head. Turkey imported 380,000 head in 2015, mostly from South America plus up to 120,000 head from France.

Turkey is a high volume live cattle destination, capable of paying very good prices, said Mr Healy. Turkey is a real opportunity for Irish live cattle. This will add much-needed competition to the trade for weanlings and younger stock.
The hearing will now open today by which time lawyers for the employees said they hoped agreement might be achieved.

All senior staff at Petroceltic had voted against the survival proposals put to them by examiner Michael McAteer at creditors meetings which provided they would get just 5% of monies owed under change of control clauses in their contracts. About 30 staff are owed some 3.6m.
EPS Group, which is based in Mallow and specialises in water and wastewater treatment systems, established a home salary incentive in collaboration with Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI).

This was achieved by making energy upgrades more affordable and accessible through the provision of free home energy audits and advice, interest-free loans, as well as grant subsidies.

Under the pilot scheme, EPS Group co-ordinated energy audits which were carried out at employees homes to identify energy upgrades in areas such as insulation, boilers, controls and heating systems, windows and doors, and solar panels.

Through the scheme, EPS employees received works to a value of over 200,000. On average, each employee who participated received approximately 6,000 worth of energy upgrades, of which up to 50% was funded through various subsidies.

To finance the cost of the upgrades, EPS Group provided a tax and interest-free loan to its employees.

The EPS Group pilot scheme involved 94 home surveys, 32 upgraded homes, 26 insulation measure upgrades, 24 boiler and heating control upgrades, and six solar installations.

The companys energy manager, Declan ORiordan, said the scheme can be compared to the Bike to Work scheme, whereby the employer provides the employee with an interest-free loan to purchase the product/service.

However, the scheme goes further by creating long-term cost savings for homeowners while increasing the value of their property, said Mr ORiordan.

An added benefit is that every participant received a BER along with oil monitors to measure and verify the savings achieved.

As a result of the success we achieved having completed this pilot programme a number of companies throughout Ireland are now in the process of implementing similar schemes.

Enprova, which provides energy efficiency services on behalf of the Irish Petroleum Industry Association, helped assist the pilot.
That we remain so is once again confirmed by the announcement, in the last few days, of the creation of 265 jobs in the biopharma and life sciences sector.

This success is testament to the availability of high quality well-trained graduates.

Indeed, one of the companies concerned said that it served 18 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies and opined that its success is attributable mostly to the excellent commitment and technical capability of our people.

The attraction of such potentially high quality jobs is very important if our economy is to grow, to be sustainable, and to provide much need high value added employment.

The attraction of FDI has been good to us.

In 2014, according to a report from the former enterprise advisory board Forfas, there were just over 174,000 people employed in companies that were supported by IDA Ireland.

More than 50% of those work in international and financial services and software.

According to Finfacts, Irish manufacturing is dominated by US firms and accounts for approximately 11% of the total Irish workforce.

On the other hand, according to the European Commission, only 3% of Irish small firms are in manufacturing compared with 10% across the EU.

In addition, up to 75% of our exports are accounted for by the same multinationals.

The fact is that Ireland is one of the most globalised nations in the western world.

The end result is a very high dependency on potentially volatile FDI, or of having too many of our eggs in the one basket.

That volatility was underscored on Tuesday when it was reported that Irelands ability to attract FDI from outside the EU is more vulnerable to changes in corporate tax rates than any other member state.

That data from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) cited as an example that if Irelands 12.5% corporate tax rate was increased to just 13.5%, the move would reduce the countrys chance to attract new FDI projects from non-EU countries by 4.6%.

A second example used was that a more competitive UK corporate tax rate would also reduce Irelands attractiveness.

Its also a time when Irelands tax rate is under threat.

The EUs upcoming assessment on our corporate tax dealings with Apple is one such threat.

We also have to contend with the petty jealousies of our successes in attracting major high value-adding FDI from some of our European competitors and their ongoing attempts to change the structure of tax collection policies.

The omens are not particularly good and it would be a brave man or woman who would bet the house on our future prosperity and our ambition for full employment when slight changes in corporation tax can result in considerably higher changes in attracting FDI.

The ESRI report concluded that in addition to maintaining a competitive corporate tax rate, our attractiveness to FDI would benefit from policies aimed at maintaining cost competitiveness and enabling further R&D investment.

In 2015, Tom Healy  chief economist at the Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI) - made some interesting observations. He noted that there was no guarantee that Facebook, Google or other Silicon Valley companies would still be here in 10 years given the pace of economic change.

Another was that Irelands heavy dependence on FDI, which currently supports 25% of GDP, exposed the fact that Ireland lacked a well-rounded native enterprise sector.

Both de Valera and Lemass had made attempts to develop an indigenous sector in their time in government without much success.

Mr Healy contended that our version of long-term vision is five to ten years, where 30-50 year visions are required.

If our current major focus of attracting FDI continues, without any concerted effort, to build up our own indigenous industry that can compete with the best in the world we will only have ourselves to blame.

We have been warned. We need not throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water but we need to have a parallel programme to ensure we build our own industrial base.
There is equal interest in Teagascs use of DNA sequencing technologies to identify the presence of a bacterium from the genus Thermus. The high tech approach to research into pinking is a big evolution on the traditional use of agar dishes in studies of this kind.

Thermus is a thermophile, or heat-loving microorganism, mostly found in hot environments such as thermal springs and which is known for its production of vivid pigments including carotenoids. The DNA approach had multiple benefits relative to trying to recreate these environments.

The research team was led by Dr Paul Cotter, principal research officer, Teagasc Food Research Centre, Moorepark, and principal investigator, APC Microbiome Institute, UCC, along with Dr Diarmuid Sheehan.

We can now use this research to develop new approaches to stopping the microorganisms from getting into the raw material, said Dr Cotter. The technology we are using with our cheese study can also be used to identify the source of defects in other foods. We are getting a lot of calls from people across Europe to help them with their processes.

Once the researchers found the unexpected presence of Thermus in defective cheese, they used specialised techniques to grow the bacteria on agar plates. Subsequently, they artificially added the microbe back into a cheese, and recreated the pinking defect. Thus, the role of Thermus in this defect was definitively established.

The DNA approach is very useful where key microorganisms are not easily grown, and would previously have been overlooked.

To grow the microorganism on an agar, you need the right temperature, oxygen levels etc, so it can be very difficult to get long enough to study the microbe in a laboratory using the traditional approach, said Dr Cotter.

The use of DNA sequencing allows us to study the microorganisms for a longer period, even if we never grow them at all. This is a significant change, and can be used to improve studies into other food defects of unknown origin in the future.

The findings are on: http://msystems.asm.org/content/1/3/e00023-16
Mr Green was addressing the British parliaments Business and Work and Pensions select committee, which is investigating the demise of the department store chain he sold to Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt with no retail experience.

BHS collapsed into administration in April, little more than a year after Mr Green sold it to Mr Chappells consortium for a nominal sum.

The retailer is now being wound down with the likely loss of 11,000 jobs after administrators failed to find a new buyer. It has a pension deficit of 571m (721m), a figure based on how much it would cost to address the shortfall between assets and future liabilities with either insurance or a buyout.

Mr Green, who owned BHS from 2000 to 2015, sought to reassure BHSs 20,000 pension-holders as he said he was working with financial advisory firm Deloitte on a plan to plug the deficit.

From what Ive seen I would say its resolvable, sortable. We will sort it, we will find a solution, he told the Committee.

Mr Green has been heavily criticised over his management and sale of the 88-year-old store chain, with the affair tarnishing his reputation as a leading player in Britains retail sector. Dubbed the unacceptable face of capitalism by some politicians, Mr Green paid out 423m in dividends, mainly to his family, during his ownership of BHS.

Some lawmakers have called for the tycoon to be stripped of his knighthood if he does not make good the pension deficit. The Topshop owner began yesterdays hearing by apologising for what had happened at BHS.

He said the new plan would offer BHS pensioners a better outcome than compensation available from the UKs Pension Protection Fund.

However, he declined to give further details of his plan.
The report singles out the positive impact of Irish SMEs for particular praise with the 21 named businesses boasting an impressive average revenue of 57m.

Irish companies are represented across a wide range of industries including healthcare, agriculture, marketing, and logistics. The greatest representation was to be found in the manufacturing and engineering sectors where six firms made the cut.

London Stock Exchange Group CEO Xavier Rolet said it was the likes of the Irish SMEs that are driving the European economy.

This research shows high-growth SMEs are the driving force behind the European economy. While the public sector and big blue-chip companies have not been creating jobs for many years now, these companies are growing and employing at an incredible rate. And because by definition these companies are innovators, these jobs tend to be higher skilled and higher paid, helping to give young Europeans the brighter economic future they deserve.

It is critical that we give these firms access to suitable growth finance that will enable them to invest, grow and become the big job providers of tomorrow, Mr Rolet said.

Separately, the Dublin Startup Commissioner Niamh Bushnell urged Jobs Minister Mary Mitchell OConnor to introduce a shift in our economic strategy to better support SMEs looking to scale. Ms Bushnell said she was struck by how few of these companies are managing to scale globally.

She also advocated leveraging the countrys huge pool of talent employed by multinationals.

One approach to filling our knowledge gap is to leverage the hundreds if not thousands of talented people at our FDI based multinationals.

These people have trained to be leaders and theyve learned the mechanics, step by step, of building large sales and product management organisations. They know how to conduct international business development. They compete every day with the biggest and win. And theyre right here in Ireland, within arms reach, Ms Bushnell said.

Elsewhere, the IE Domain Registrys Digital Health Index found one in six Irish SMEs have no online presence. Among those without a website, over 55% said they had no intention of building one in the near future. Some 60% said there was no need to have a website; 35% said that they didnt have enough time to build one; and 9% said they lacked expertise.
How will the commitment to rural Ireland in the new programme for government be looked after by the several departments involved?

This Governments commitment to rural Ireland is very clearly set out in the Programme for a Partnership Government. The rural/regional affairs agenda is central to Minister Humphreys new Department, supported by Ministers Ring and Kyne.

A new Cabinet Committee on Rural Affairs, chaired by the Taoiseach, is helping to co-ordinate and prioritise this work across Government.

A key target is a new Action Plan for Rural Ireland. We have seen from the Action Plan for Jobs, and Food Harvest 2020 to take an agricultural example, the success that can be achieved through such strategic planning.

Therefore it is fair to say this Governments commitment to Rural Ireland will be a collective effort across Cabinet.

The ultimate goal of the new Government is sustainable full employment in all parts of the country, and to ensure working families are supported.

This will mean an extra 200,000 jobs by 2020, of which 135,000 will be outside Dublin.

It is my hope that Food-Wise 2025, and continued emphasis on the agri-food sector as an economic driver, will be central to these efforts.

Broadband in rural areas is as big a challenge today, as rural electrification years ago. This is something we are determined to get right. Ensuring that no town, village or parish will be left behind in the National Broadband Plan is at the top of the priorities.

How big are Agriculture, Food and the Marine in this mix?

Agriculture is at the core of this commitment to rural Ireland. The agri-food sector is the heartbeat of the rural economy, and I am totally committed to the hard-working families and businesses that provide the solid foundations for the industry.

I see this industry as an engine for growth, providing valuable jobs in rural Ireland and contributing enormously to the social fabric.

Foodwise 2025 aims to improve farm profitability through focus on competitiveness, innovation and knowledge transfer, and to continue food industry growth through development of new markets, consumer insights and innovation.

This is all based on a foundation of robust food safety and environmentally sustainable systems.

Foodwise aims to deliver an additional 23,000 jobs and to increase exports to 19bn, providing a stimulus for every town and village.

To put the Governments commitment in context; about 12bn is being invested in rural Ireland across the lifetime of the CAP, 4bn of it directly targeted at enhancing profitability and efficiency through farm-gate schemes.

I am really focused on ensuring this investment delivers farm efficiencies to ensure the family farm structure is maintained for generations.

Will extra funding have to come from the national exchequer rather than the EU?

My Department is proactively engaged with financial institutions and all stakeholders to explore possibilities arising from the limited changes to agriculture State Aid rules recently announced by the Commission.

The changes do not imply additional EU or national sources of funding, but are more in the nature of increased flexibility in State Aid rules.

How important is it to have a former colleague in the agriculture commissioners seat in Brussels?

It is of course very useful to have someone in the Commissioners seat who understands Irish agriculture and appreciates the importance of the industry.

However, I am very conscious that the Commissioner must work in the interests of all farmers across the 28 Member States, and in some instances, the interests of others may not be consistent with our own.

My Department has on-going contacts with the EU Commission, the EIB, and financial institutions in Ireland, with regard to developing alternative sources of finance, and in particular lower cost and more flexible finance, for farmers and the food sector.

My Department is preparing to procure an ex-ante evaluation for introduction of Financial Instruments under the Rural Development Programme, and the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland has developed an Ag Investment Loan product delivered through the main banks, which has had a very good take-up rate.

I will be meeting CEOs of the main Irish banks this week, to discuss their plans to respond to price volatility, and the cost of credit to the sector, in particular.

How hopeful are you about the Commissioners efforts to reduce EU import tariffs on fertilisers?

No stone can be left unturned in pursuing options to alleviate pressure on farmers due to downward pressure on prices. Such options should include measures that help to reduce production costs.

Fertiliser is the third most important expenditure item on EU farms, and prices have increased significantly in recent years.

Appropriate action in this area could be of significant benefit to farmers. I have raised this issue with Commissioner Hogan, most recently at the May Council, and Commissioner Hogan again confirmed he has sought Commissioner Moscovicis support in progressing the issue.

I have also spoken to my French counterpart with a view to getting his support. I hope progress can be made in the short-term, and that Commissioner Moscovici in particular would be in a position to look favourably on this proposal.

Can you help farmers derive a viable income from land designated as habitat for the hen harrier?

As you pointed out, I have been a loud advocate for farmers with hen harrier designated lands, for some time now.

The Hen Harrier Threat Response Plan is looking at the combined effects of agricultural intensification, afforestation and wind farms. It is taking longer than I or Minister Doyle would like.

My Department is working closely with the Dept of Regional Development, Rural Affairs, Arts and Gaeltacht to conclude the work involved.

When the threat response plan is agreed with the EU Commission, we expect to be in a position to allow planting approval in Hen Harrier areas, on a limited basis initially, with the proper safeguards in place.

We believe we can show that forestry and Hen Harriers can co-exist.

The latest survey shows that the bird numbers are declining slightly at national level, but there are some increases in heavily forested areas.

GLAS provides significant support for farmers in Hen Harrier protected areas, and Locally Led Agri Environment Schemes now being developed will also support them, especially those with larger tracts of Hen Harrier land.

Explain the approval delays in the targeted agricultural modernisation scheme?

I addressed this last week in the Dail. I am acutely aware some farmers have been eager to progress their TAMS application and I am glad to say TAMS II approvals have commenced, and 648 full approvals have issued, in addition to over 1,100 part-approvals for urgently required dairy equipment and low emission slurry spreading equipment.

All eligible first tranche applications are with local offices for final approvals, and are being processed as speedily as possible.

In addition, 755 Tranche II applications have gone through ranking and selection, and will be processed by local offices shortly.

Work is underway to finalise the IT payment system, with a view to commencing payments next month.
John McGrotty, aged 65, had been banned from staying in Donegal for the past month after pleading guilty to 35 counts of harassment.

Dungloe District Court had heard McGrotty made rude gestures to the McEniff family, their children, and threw rusty nails under the tyres of the familys car. He had also appeared naked in front of Mrs McEniff.
The study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), entitled Challenges in Achieving Universal Healthcare in Ireland, argues there should be a mechanism to tackle Irelands two-tier acute hospital care system based on either a public or private purchaser pathway.

Referring to other inequities and financial barriers to access in Irish healthcare, the report states that Ireland has a complex system at a time when the international consensus view of the desirability of universality in healthcare is further based on evidence about outcomes for individuals, society, and the economy, with denial of access to care resulting in poorer health outcomes and a diminution in the potential of human capital.
Paula Healys brother, Tony Nation, said the family felt as if her body was held hostage, held to ransom until they paid up.

If we had known this last week, we would have moved heaven and earth to resolve it, he said.

He urged people to check the small print of travel insurance policies after the issue arose on the final leg of her sad journey home.

Mr Nation told The Opinion Line on Corks 96fm yesterday that Paula, a mother-of-three from Cork, spent two years planning a dream holiday with her husband in Greece to celebrate her 50th birthday and their 30th wedding anniversary.

But the dream turned to tragedy last Monday week when she died suddenly, soon after arriving on Mykonos Island.

Her family sent Paulas medical records to the Greek authorities which showed she had high blood pressure and was overweight, but a post mortem proved inconclusive.

As Paulas remains were being flown from Athens to Heathrow on Monday, the travel insurance company contacted her family claiming her weight and blood pressure issues had not been disclosed and, as a result, the policy was void. The family missed a midnight deadline to pay a 6,000 bill and Paulas remains were placed in airport storage overnight.

We thought the whole thing was covered by the insurance. Everything seemed to be in order last week, Mr Nation said.

If we had known this sooner, we could have dealt with it. But it was being handled by an underwriter in Germany. We were just a number on a piece of paper somewhere, and it was just claim denied.

He accepted Paula didnt declare her high blood pressure issue, but said she had been declared medically fit just a few weeks ago.

The money was paid by Tuesday and Paulas body arrived at Cork Airport that night, where her airport work colleagues provided a guard of honour. A post mortem was due to be performed on her remains in Cork yesterday.

The Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust has now stepped in to reimburse the family.
Gerardine Small, prosecuting, told a Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury the fact Garda Donal Maguire harassed the married woman was not disputed, but rather the jurors had to determine if he was suffering from a mental disorder at the time.

Garda Maguire, aged 40, of Rock Rd, Bundoran, Co Donegal, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two counts of harassing the woman at a location in Dublin on dates between February 18 and March 11, 2012, and between August 1, 2012, and February 4, 2013.

Detective Superintendent Walter OSullivan told the jury Garda Maguire first met the sergeant at the Dublin station he was working from in 2011. She believed there was nothing personal in their interaction.

He sent the woman a Valentines card in 2012. She spoke with him privately and told him his attention was inappropriate, unwanted, and unwelcome, the court heard.

She believed this would be the end of the matter but Garda Maguire continued to contact her through email via the Garda Pulse system.

She reported the emails to superior colleagues and Garda Maguire was disciplined and told not to contact her again. The emails continued, which resulted in his access to the Pulse system being revoked.

Garda Maguire then turned up at the station where she worked and specifically asked for her. He was again cautioned not to contact the woman.

Three weeks later, he turned up at a Garda 10km race she was running in; colleagues noticed him staring at her.

Again his superiors met with him and he gave an oral undertaking not to have any further contact with the woman. Two weeks later, she received a friend request from him on Facebook.

This was the final contact before seriousness of the harassment was escalated and investigated as a criminal offence.

Det Supt OSullivan agreed with Ronan Kennedy, defending, that when Garda Maguire was interviewed in June 2013, he said he was infatuated with the woman and this was not reciprocated.

He accepted he had been warned to stop communicating with her but had continued contact despite this.

The trial continues.
PDforra, which represents enlisted men in the navy, made the comments after it was revealed plans for a major clean-up of the former Irish Steel site on Haulbowline Island could be delayed after the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform raised concerns about the scale of expenditure on the project.

It came just months after the Department of Agriculture, which is funding the clean-up of the island, announced details of the timetable for the 61m remediation works on the nine-hectare site which is due for completion in mid-2018.

PDforra vice president Mark Keane, who works in the naval base, said his organisation would have grave concerns regarding any delay or reduction in money needed to clean up the toxic dump at the former steelworks site at East Tip.

Around 1,000 Naval Service personnel are based just yards from the site.

Mr Keane said PDforra told the Government it has a legal and moral obligation to make the site safe.

It voiced its concerns regarding the toxic dump again recently at An Bord Pleanala oral hearings into the proposed Indaver application for an incinerator in the area.

Our members have lived and worked under the shadow of this toxic dump for far too long. This has been of grave concern to our members since 2001 with the closure of the former [Irish Ispat] steel works, Mr Keane said.

We have voiced our concerns since then when the highly carcinogenic Chromium 6 was discovered on this site. We are calling on the Department of Defence and the Government to honour previous assurances given by Simon Coveney, the then Minister for Defence, at our annual delegate conference last October that money would be made available to implement the required works to render this site safe, Mr Keane said.

He said that PDforra is willing to engage with all stakeholders to see clean-up project come to conclusion.

Mr Keane added that any delay in the clean-up could also have an negative impact on plans to redevelop the lower harbour area as a major tourist attraction.

Because of this and possible health implications, we feel the stakes are too high for any watering down of these proposals, or indeed any delay in implementing this much needed clean-up. Time is of the essence and we cant allow a situation to develop where we are playing Russian roulette with our members health, Mr Keane said.
Fianna Fail also managed to pass a separate bill in the Dail yesterday removing powers from the justice minister on deciding who gets parole.

The two Fianna Fail measures in both Houses were accepted by the Government and are another sign of how business in the Oireachtas has changed since the election.

In the Seanad, Fianna Fail senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee called for urgent action to be taken over the number of children living in emergency hotel accommodation. The party called for an emergency building programme.

Ms Clifford-Lee backed the party motion to increase rent support to a level that ensures nobody is made homeless by unaffordable accommodation costs.

Senator David Norris said homeless children in hotels were being treated as second-class citizens. They had no play areas and were not permitted to enter and exit hotels at the main door, he said.

Senator Alice Mary Higgins warned of concerns over tenants renting accommodation owned by vulture funds, and fears of companies withdrawing suddenly from the market.

Senator Jennifer Murnane OConnor said no womens refuge existed in her home county of Carlow, claiming a new 200m fund for local authorities should guarantee such shelters.

Damien English, the junior housing minister, said the Government was accepting Fianna Fails motion.

He said the Government was open to some of the proposals, ahead of deciding on an action plan for housing over the next month. We have a couple of weeks ahead now where we can tease through all these ideas, he said.

In the Dail, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald accepted a Fianna Fail bill removing the power of politicians to grant or refuse parole for prisoners.

Fianna Fail justice spokesman Jim OCallaghan launched the legislation to set up a parole board on a statutory basis. The board at present advises a minister on whether a prisoner should or should not get parole. The system of parole is very unsatisfactory because it is not based in statute and is ultimately controlled by a politician, said Mr OCallaghan.

It is important to have in place an independent, transparent, and statutory-based scheme that sets out how and when a person is granted parole, rather than leaving this decision to the discretion of a politician who may be swayed by factors outside of what is necessary for the good of society and the rehabilitation of the prisoner.

Ms Fitzgerald said it had been the intention of this and previous governments to establish the parole board on a statutory footing. Due to constitutional restrictions, she said further work is needed to clarify whether the power to grant parole can be handed over completely to a board.

There are also outstanding issues around minimum sentencing, specifically related to life sentences, which needs to be resolved if the proposals could be accepted, the Dail was told. There are a number of issues in this bill which will need fuller consideration at a later stage, she said.
Only Finland (172% of the EU average) and Britain (163%) come close to the prices being paid here. By comparison, Bulgaria is paying 36% less than the EU average.

Ireland also has the fourth highest price for food and non-alcoholic drinks at 119% of the EU average. Only Denmark (145%), Sweden (124%), and Austria (120%), are more expensive.
Denis Brennan said the lack of new priests was one of the biggest challenges facing the Catholic Church which had to rethink how to minister to its faithful.

Bishop Brennan said 50 years ago, 441 priests were ordained in a year while now it is 12 or 13 annually.

This sharp decline in numbers studying for the priesthood obviously has huge implications for the future shape of ministry. It also impacts on the present by undermining and sapping our morale, he said.

The effect of this should not be underestimated. I know farmers and business people, who when they realise that none of the family are interested in continuing on the farm or in the business, sell up.

They lose heart, they see no point in continuing when it becomes obvious that nobody is going to carry on the business. This realisation can take its toll in priesthood and religious life too.

Bishop Brennan told diocesan vocations directors in Maynooth that abuse scandals had poisoned the well but that the cultural shift had begun before them. He said, however, they were not the first Catholics to be anxious about what lay ahead and said faith has to believe in the future.

He quoted Pope Francis as saying: None of us should be dour, discontented or dissatisfied, for a gloomy disciple is a disciple of gloom.

The bishops have agreed in principle to set up a National Office for Vocations to promote the call to priesthood and rejuvenate initiatives at diocesan level.
Brian Keane, of no fixed abode, had admitted assault causing serious harm to Kamil Fital, 47, at Woodbrook Lawn on November 11, 2014, at the Fital home.

He had also admitted assault causing harm to Mr Fitals son Hubert, then aged 17, and three counts relating to theft and trespass.

Keane, adopted from a Russian orphanage, has spent most of his life in custody or in institutions. While he behaved as a model prisoner, he could not cope when at large, the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee was told yesterday.

On November 11, 2014, at around 5.25 am, the Fital family were alerted by their dog and found Keane rummaging through their car.

Chased by Mr Fital Snr and his two sons, Keane produced a knife and stabbed Hubert, the younger son, in the forehead; the father intervened and was stabbed multiple times in both legs, his artery was severed and he received a major stab wound to the chest.

Mr Fital can no longer work as a painter and decorator and has been left permanently disabled, the court heard.

Judge Thomas ODonnell imposed a sentence of 10 years. He suspended two and a half years on condition Keane be of good behaviour and under the direction of the Probation Service for two and a half years on his release. The sentence has been backdated to November 2014
A new study also found that many families of people with an intellectual disability have not planned or even discussed future care plans, including in cases where the person may require residential services later in life.

The report, which builds on data collected as part of the continuing longitudinal study on ageing in Ireland, also found that families felt there needed to be flexible services to deal with older people with an intellectual disability, as opposed to the current system which is viewed as one size fits all.

There were also calls for more supports for sibling caregivers who said they felt they were not being properly supported in their role as carers.

Prof Damien Brennan of the School of Nursing and Midwifery in Trinity College Dublin said because people with an intellectual disability are now living longer, including outliving their parents, it raises questions over how the State responds as the care role is passed along the generations.

That has created a new caring dynamic. Often siblings become the primary carer. They do not see their own children taking on the carer role in the future.

He said this could result in a care deficit and the possible need for more residential care places in future.

Prof Brennan said the closure in recent years of older institutions was very welcome and no one was suggesting that that model be revisited, but discussion was now needed as to what measures the State would take to ensure people with an intellectual disability had quality ageing later in life.

The emphasis should be on maintaining people in family home settings, but that requires resources, he said. The key thing is to ensure that the supports are in place.

The desire of older people to remain at home as long as possible was also highlighted yesterday at the Forum on Long-Term Care for Older People in Dublin.

Organised by Sage, the support and advocacy service for older people, the forum heard care in a nursing home or in the home of another family paid to provide care were the least preferred options among the 1,000 adults surveyed in an opinion poll by Amarach Research.

Two thirds listed receiving long-term care in their own home as their highest preference, compared to just 10% favouring nursing homes.

In terms of funding long- term care, the greatest overall preference is through general taxation. Downsizing accommodation to generate additional funds is a much less popular option.

The opinion poll, carried out over five days in May, also found that family and relatives living close are ranked as most important for enabling those with long- term illnesses to remain in the community, but this does not appear to extend to neighbours and friends.

Speaking at the forum, former Law Reform Commissioner Patricia Rickard-Clarke said services that respect and respond to the will and preference of older people must be developed and underpinned by a clear legislative framework.

Ms Rickard-Clarke said older people must be facilitated to live and be cared for in the places of their choice and according to their changing needs.

Where is the Fair Deal in going, or being sent, to where you dont want to go? she asked.
Officers believe the haul comprised cash contributions from a consortium of organised criminal gangs who had clubbed together.

It is understood at least some of the criminals behind the operation have connections with the Kinahan crime cartel, which is linked to six murders in its feud with the Hutch gang.

Sources said this was a rare example of an operation hitting the funding side of the enterprise. Gardai said that a lot of crime would have been carried out to come up with such an amount of cash.

Sources said these gangs hate losing hard cash and that the seizure represented a huge success for gardai.

The operation was part of ongoing investigations targeting criminal activity in the Dublin region by the Garda Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau.

The unit conducted a coordinated operation on a number of vehicles on the M1 motorway, just north of Swords, north Dublin, on Tuesday evening.

A Garda spokesman said that during the operation 350,000 in cash was seized and that three men in their 40s were arrested.

The cash was in vacuum packs in a hold-all bag, said the spokesman.

He said follow-up searches were conducted in a number of areas, with the assistance of gardai from the Dublin region and the Cavan district.

This resulted in the seizure of a vacuum-packing machine and associated equipment at an address in Tallaght, south-west Dublin.

Zopiclone tablets, which are hypnotic drugs, with an estimated value of over 10,000, were also seized.

Sources said the three arrested are up to their eyes in criminal activity and trusted lieutenants in crime gangs.

You dont give 350,000 to runners. You need trusted people, who will keep the cash secure and their mouths shut, said one source.

Gardai said it was unusual to find such an amount of cash in one place and suspect it was going to be moved abroad.

It would be quadrupled in value in the drugs bought with it or it could have been also used to buy firearms, said a source. It wasnt going to be lodged in a bank, thats for sure.

The source said it was not uncommon for major gangs to join forces for large shipments.

Getting people hands-on with large amounts of cash is a huge success for gardai. Criminal gangs hate losing hard cash.

Separately, gardai uncovered a large cannabis factory in south Dublin, and seized 1,100 plants, with an estimated value of 500,000, in a house in Shankill.
Enda Kenny is to meet with Irish communities in Manchester and Liverpool today before travelling to Scotland tomorrow to campaign for a remain vote.

Labour leader Brendan Howlin will also today be in Liverpool in a bid to shore up support for the Remain side.

It comes as Greencore chief executive Patrick Coveney has said he believes the UK will vote to leave the EU, which he said would be very bad for Ireland.

Speaking in the Dail yesterday, Mr Kenny said that there would be clear implications for Ireland if the UK votes to leave on June 23.

No one wants to see a return to a hard boarder, as much as we would not want that to happen, if the British electorate including Northern Ireland were to vote to leave then I think it would be very difficult to continue as it was before, Mr Kenny said. I hope that the people on the 23rd vote in their wisdom to stay in the EU but thats obviously not within our control.

We are co-guarantors in the Good Friday Agreement; we have a specific vested interest in the Irish communities and the fact there are 200,000 Irish jobs there and 1.2bn trade across the Irish Sea every week, he said.

Mr Kenny said Brexit would do serious damage to competitiveness, and cause delays, inefficiencies, and increase costs for Irish business.

The Taoiseach is due to travel to Liverpool this afternoon before moving onto Manchester tonight to meet with the Irish community there ahead of next weeks vote. He had been due to attend a joint event with David Cameron in Manchester tomorrow morning.

However, the British prime minister pulled out of the engagement this week as the Remain campaign came under pressure.

Mr Howlin and Labours Cork East TD Sean Sherlock will also be in Liverpool today to take part in the Remain Campaign with local Labour Party MP Conor McGinn.

Mr Howlin said: I am growing more anxious that this may in fact become a reality. I dont believe that leaving the EU would be in the best interests of the UK, and I certainly dont believe that it would be in the best interests of Ireland. In fact, it could end up disastrous for us.

Meanwhile, speaking at a Dublin Chamber of Commerce event yesterday morning, Mr Coveney said he believes the UK is heading for an exit. It would be very, very, bad for the Irish, European, and world economies if Britain voted for a so-called Brexit. My personal judgement is thats what theyre going to do.
The injured student was admitted to hospital in Kerry last Monday.

The matter is being investigated by gardai.

The school authorities at Causeway Comprehensive in north Kerry said the matter had been investigated and dealt with through the schools code of behaviour.

The student had allegedly been set upon in an incident in a GAA field located within the school grounds.

The teenager was taken by ambulance to Kerry University Hospital in Tralee.

He sustained injuries to his neck and ribs. He was released later on Monday evening, but had missed out on the CSPE exam paper that afternoon.

The students name is being withheld but his mother told Radio Kerry yesterday: He is very distressed and in shock over what happened to him and very upset he missed out on his exam.

She said: Thankfully, his ribs were not broken.

His mother said she has asked both the school and the Department of Education if her son, who has had perfect attendance over the past three years, might be able to sit the paper or be accommodated in some way.

She was told there was no provision to allow him sit the exam.

The woman said she wanted to highlight the anomaly whereby her son, the victim, was unable to sit his exam, while his aggressors could.

She said missing out on the CSPE paper could have serious consequences in the case of the Leaving Cert.

There has to be some way around it but there isnt, she said.

The mother said she received a phone call on Monday from the school, shortly before 2pm, to say her son had passed out and an ambulance was being called.

When she got to the school, she discovered he was after being beaten up and knocked unconscious.

She said her son was anxious to sit the exam and was very upset.

He is the victim of all this and the boys who did this to him are able to sit their exams, she said.

The incident, it emerged, may be linked to an argument on Friday evening last where a friend of her son was allegedly being bullied. Her son had reminded the aggressors on that occasion it was exam time and asked them to forget about it.

All my son did was stick up for his friend, the mother said.

Around 250 of the 560 students at Causeway Comprehensive are sitting exams at the moment.

A statement issued through the school yesterday read: An incident took place on Monday, June 13, at 1.45pm in Causeway GAA pitch which is on the grounds of Causeway Comprehensive School.

The school has investigated this incident and has dealt with this matter as per the Schools Code of Behaviour. A student was unable to sit his CSPE Junior Certificate exam due to this incident.

The Examination Commission under the Department of Education oversees the running of State Exams.
Gardai yesterday made a specific appeal to these people, who were children at the time of the 13-year-olds disappearance on October 23, 1986, from Rathfarnham, Dublin, to come forward.

Officers said the events may be playing on their minds and that for the sake of Philips family, it was important the inquiry be brought to a conclusion.

Gardai suspect that these individuals, who might have been aged as young as eight at the time, were used by Philips abductor to discard the boys schoolbag in a Rathfarnham laneway after he disappeared during the school lunchtime break.

These individuals could corroborate reports from an eyewitness linking the boy to convicted paedophile and Radio Dublin DJ Eamonn Cooke, who died earlier this month, aged 79.

Gardai said if these people confirmed Cooke ordered them to dispose of the bag, it would provide that corroboration and could open up avenues as to where the boys remains might be.

It emerged last Friday that a woman made a statement to gardai a month ago that, when she was a child, Cooke had struck Philip with an implement in the radio station around the time of his disappearance.

Gardai appeal for information on Philip Cairns' schoolbag https://t.co/EDcRIc1L4e pic.twitter.com/2J0BxUa5WP  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) June 15, 2016

She reportedly told gardai she saw Philip bleeding and unconscious on the floor of the stations office, in Inchicore, in the south inner city.

Gardai are awaiting forensic test results as to whether DNA profiles from Philips schoolbag match those of a suspect.

Gardai spoke to Cooke a number of times at the hospice he was in, but it is not clear to what extent he confirmed contact with Philip.

Supt Peter Duff, who is leading the investigation, yesterday said that aspects of the womans statement had been corroborated, leading to fresh interviews and checks on DNA profiles on the schoolbag.

Revelations in Philip Cairns case may encourage other victims to come forward https://t.co/kqWdUHl5ti pic.twitter.com/uNCEqf0NO1  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) June 13, 2016

Supt Duff made a specific appeal: From our inquiries, I believe there are people who were young at the time who may have information in relation to Philips schoolbag and for whatever reason did not come forward. He said with the passage of time and changed circumstances, these people might now be able to assist.

This may be playing on their minds and I would ask these people to now come forward. For the sake of Mrs Cairns and her family, who have been suffering for 30 years, it is important that we bring this investigation to a conclusion.

In response to speculation of possible digs, including in a part of the Dublin mountains linked to Cooke, Supt Duff said they currently had "no possible location for Philip's remains". He said any dig was "a while away" unless they received specific information.

He declined to comment on any individual suspect, saying the Garda team was examining 160 lines of inquiry. Anyone with information can contact the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111 or Rathfarnham Garda Station on 01 6666500.
They spoke out yesterday as Dr Watson, 88, the US scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA, delivered a lecture in Cork to celebrate the naming of the Watson Building on UCCs Brookfield medical campus.

Two elected members of UCCs governing body, Dr Angela Flynn and Dr Piaras Mac Einri, said Dr Watson has been responsible for unfounded, unscientific, and inaccurate statements of a racist and misogynistic nature, and that it was not appropriate to honour him in this way.

Moreover, we believe that such a decision is grossly disrespectful, in particular, to women and ethnic minority members of staff and the student community, they said.

Law lecturer Declan Walsh, a Government-appointed member of the Higher Education Authority, vented his anger on Twitter, and said it was shameful that UCC was hosting Mr Watson.

He may have an eminent academic record but he is also a racist and should not be welcomed, he wrote.

Former Green Party TD and senator Dan Boyle, who graduated from UCC with a masters in 2014, said it was wrong of the university to afford this honour, and threatens its reputation.

The decision opens the university to accusations that it is prepared to either ignore or accept Watsons controversial social views, he said.

I have no problem with him delivering a lecture in UCC  he is obviously a scientific expert  but naming a building like this is giving him recognition beyond what he deserves.

Dr Watson, whose grandmother was from Tipperary, shot to world fame in 1953 when he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. He also led the Human Genome Project.

However Dr Watson has been accused over the decades of racist and sexist comments. In 2007, he told The Sunday Times

that while people like to think all races are born with equal intelligence, those who have to deal with black employees find this not true.

UCC students union president Adam Coffey wrote to UCC president Dr Michael Murphy criticising the naming decision, and questioned the process, which, he said, seemed to have been decided by a relatively small management group, with little consultation or openness.

UCC said Dr Watson is a world-renowned scientist responsible for one of the most profound discoveries of the 20th century. We are acknowledging his scientific prowess. In naming this facility after Dr Watson we are building on his contribution to science and recognising his strong association with UCC as an honorary doctorate alumnus and scientific advisor to many UCC researchers.

The decision to name the building was made within the recognised university processes and the president informed the governing body of this decision.

The Watson Building at the Brookfield campus houses the ASSERT Centre and laboratories for the INFANT research centre.

Watsons controversies

Watson on:

Feminists: The best place for a feminist is in another persons lab. (1968)

Homosexuality: If you could find the gene that determines sexuality, and a woman decides she doesnt want a homosexual child, well, let her. (1997)

The Irish: I always drew a laugh when I say that everyone knows the Irish need improvement. (2003)

Beauty: People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great. (2003)

Obesity: Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know youre not going to hire them. (2007)

Africa: All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours  whereas all the testing says not really. (2007)
The Orlando mass shooting is different from the terrorist attacks in Brussels, Paris, and San Bernardino, California.

Different also from the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, or the multiplex movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, or the Virginia Tech mass shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia.

When Omar Mateen killed at least 49 people and wounded more than 50 others early Sunday at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the victims were not a random group of people sharing the same physical space. They were all part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

With this, the Orlando massacre could prove to be a turning point in the US gun-control debate. Mateen may have cemented an alliance between gun-regulation advocacy groups and the well-organised LGBT social movement. It could catalyse the mobilisation of a united front that expands the political and social reach critical for passing meaningful gun regulations.

As a criminologist, I have reviewed and written many studies on mass shootings, and Orlando stands out because of the convergence of four key characteristics.

First, it is the most deadly mass shooting in US history. Second, the crime was carried out with assault-type weapons (the AR-15). Third, the shooter, law enforcement authorities say, pledged allegiance to Islamic State during the attack. Fourth, and most crucial, the attack singled out a specific community and appears largely motivated by sexual prejudice, which, by definition, becomes a hate crime.

Gay couple 'arrested for Orlando tribute' in Moscow https://t.co/Z0go54WmXt pic.twitter.com/Yofsp3Q3Ux  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) June 15, 2016

These four characteristics have never before combined in any one US mass shooting. The horrific 2015 attack at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, for example, was categorised as a hate crime. But it was not connected to any jihadist ideology. The shooter, Dylan Roof, did not use military-style weapons, and fewer than 10 people were killed.

The mass shooting in Orlando provides a unique opportunity to shift the burden of proof about the necessity for stronger gun-control regulation. First, it is critical to acknowledge that the majority of mass shooters have been marked by mental health issues, social alienation, or work disgruntlement.

They had a variety of motivations, often not aimed at weakening government legitimacy, which is what motivates groups like Islamic State or al- Qaeda. The most frequent motivations are revenge or a quest for power.

Orlando fits the pattern of Islamic State-inspired shootings that seek to spread fear and portray the US governments counterterrorism strategy as ineffective. In addition, Islamic State has pointed out to possible recruits that they should take advantage of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, which a majority of Americans view as a fundamental constitutional pillar.

Yet, this right to bear arms could pose a serious national-security vulnerability because it provides violent extremists the same legal protections that American citizens enjoy.

The result? The lack of tough gun regulations makes it easier for Islamic State recruits to kill Americans at home or stage mass shootings abroad with assault-type weapons bought legally.

After the attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando, the public could press US Congress to acknowledge that weak firearm regulation is a serious breach in the protection of the homeland against domestic and foreign aggressors. After all, this wouldnt be the first time that US national security was used as a reason to restrict constitutional rights. After 9/11, the American people gave up more than a few constitutional rights when the Bush administration, under the USA Patriot Act and various presidential directives, weakened civil liberties for the sake of bolstering US security.

One of the most controversial breaches of fundamental constitutional rights permitted the National Security Agency to turn its signal interception inward and spy on the American people without first obtaining legal warrants.

Public calls to regulate firearms for national-security reasons and possibly save more American lives  despite Second Amendment rights  should not come as a surprise.

To improve homeland security, the argument goes, US citizens would be better protected if more restrictive background checks were performed and if people were required to prove good character. This could include not belonging to any group prohibited from owning firearms  the mentally ill, for example, or criminals or terror suspects (like Mateen). It should also include people deemed high risk for committing violent crime, such as individuals with a police record for threatening the life of another.

Taoiseach signs book of condolence for 'senseless' killings in Orlando https://t.co/RkYOWJFjKP pic.twitter.com/v8DuQe2Tof  Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) June 15, 2016

In attacking the Pulse nightclub, a well-known LGBT gathering spot, Mateen took aim at a community with an estimated nine million members across the US. For more than 20 years, the LGBT community has mobilised into a powerful social movement that has demonstrated its ability to successfully advocate for a broad range of rights.

In previous mass shootings, because the victims and their families were not linked by any specific bond, such as identity or social-movement involvement, a cohesive mobilisation to advocate for stricter gun regulations was often complicated and difficult.

The unique characteristics of the Orlando mass shooting, however, could influence passage of meaningful gun-control reform in Congress.

This was something that even the tragedy of 20 dead first-graders at Sandy Hook could not bring about.

The LGBT community was targeted with unprecedented violence in Orlando. This media-savvy community led the 20-year cultural shift in how Americans view gay people and gay marriage. Combining the LBGT community with national- security demands for stricter control of gun sales well could create the momentum needed to propel Congress to act.

Frederic Lemieux is programme director of the Security & Safety Leadership Masters Programme, as well as cybersecurity strategy and information management masters degree and police and security studies bachelors degree at The George Washington University.
The number is 12% above the 2,780 deaths or disappearances recorded during the same period in 2015. Over the whole of last year, the IOM estimated that 5,400 migrants died or were reported missing worldwide.

Frank Laczko, director of the IOMs Global Migration Data Analysis Centre in Berlin that tracks missing migrants, said the Central Mediterranean route between Northern Africa and Italy has become the worlds most dangerous passage for migrants.
A report by Irans state-run news agency, IRNA, is the first official acknowledgement of the detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the news agency.

IRNA said Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested on April 3, at Tehrans Imam Khomeini International Airport, and later transferred to a prison in the Kerman province. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe joins a growing number of dual Iranian citizens detained in the wake of the countrys nuclear deal with world powers.
He said the McCann detectives had not asked the family about their father, who has been accused of abusing two girls between the late 1940s and the 1970s.

Freud had a villa in Praia da Luz, Portugal, the resort where the three-year-old went missing in 2007. The McCanns are said to be horrified that Freud was a paedophile.

Sylvia Woosley, who first met Freud when she was 10 and later went to live with him when her mothers marriage broke down, claims, in an ITV Exposure documentary, that he molested her over several years.

A second woman, who wants to remain anonymous, alleged that the Liberal politician also abused her when she was a child and raped her when she was 18.

Freud befriended Gerry and Kate McCann, the parents of Madeleine, after she disappeared.

The celebrated broadcaster and former MP, who died in 2009, had a villa in the Algarve resort where Madeleine disappeared nine years ago.

In a statement released in response to the programme, his widow said: This is a very sad day for me. I was married to Clement for 58 years and loved him dearly. I am shocked, deeply saddened, and profoundly sorry for what has happened to these women. I sincerely hope they will now have some peace.

ITV said two of Freuds children had viewed the documentary, before it was broadcast, on their mothers behalf.

In the programme, Ms Woosley, now in her late 70s, said: I just want to clear things up before I die ... I want to die clean.

Having been so hard on myself, trying to destroy myself so many times, you cant bury the truth forever. It needs to be heard.

I dont want to take this to my tomb. I would like to just return to the child I was before I was molested physically, before I was introduced to that side of life too early.

She told the programme she first met Freud, known as Clay, when he was 24 and working at the Martinez hotel in Cannes, in the late 1940s. She was 10 and her family was living in the south of France.

Ms Woosley claims Freud kissed her on the mouth during a bus trip. She said: I was disgusted and helpless. I just didnt react in any way, because I couldnt. I didnt know what to do.

From the age of 14, when she lived with Freud and his wife, in London for five years, she claims he frequently molested her, even playfully touching her breast in front of his wife, although she believes Mrs Freud had no knowledge of the abuse. Later, when she was in her 40s, Ms Woosley said she confronted Freud at the House of Commons and asked why he had abused her. She said he replied: Because I loved you. You were a very sensual little girl.

The second woman said she first met Freud in 1971, at her family home, when she was a lonely, neglected and socially isolated 11-year-old. Then a celebrity, he would call her on the phone and tell her she was special and intelligent, and he was treated as a surrogate father by her parents, she said.

Two years later, after he was elected an MP, he would take her on trips to Parliament and his home, and would kiss her on the mouth and hug her.

She said: I felt sick, but grateful at the same time. Frightened and unable to move or react in any way.

When she was 14, she claims Freud asked her and another friend of the same age: Would you like to get naked and have some fun?

Four years later, in 1978, when she was 18, the woman claims he came over to her parents flat and raped her.

She told the broadcaster: I live in constant terror that Ill be found out, exposed. Ive already suffered across nearly 40 years. Its not simply to be labelled as depression or mental illness  this is disempowerment, self-destructiveness and grief. This is what real suffering looks like.

A celebrated food, sport, and comment print journalist, Freud also enjoyed a long career as a television and radio personality.

He wore so many hats that he was hard to pin down, Kate McCann noted, recalling the time she and her husband were invited to Freuds for lunch, in Portugal, shortly after Madeleine went missing.

He was incredibly warm, funny and instantly likeable, and cheered the couple up with his lugubrious wit, she wrote in her book on her daughters disappearance.
An official said authorities believe that his wife, Noor Salman, about the plans for the attack that left 49 victims dead, but they are reluctant to charge her on that basis alone.

Investigators have spoken extensively with her and are working to establish whether she recently accompanied Mateen to the Pulse club, said a second official.

The official said investigators have not ruled out charging others, including Ms Salman.

The FBI has recovered Mateens phone and will use location data to verify whether he previously visited the club, the official said. Orlando is nearly a two-hour drive from Mateens home in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said Mateen drove around on Saturday night before he opened fire at the gay nightclub at about 2am on Sunday in an attack that ended with the 29-year-old American-born Muslim being killed by a Swat team.

What I know concretely is that he was driving around that evening and visited several locations, Mr Dyer said.

When asked exactly where Mateen visited, and whether the locations included theme parks as reported in news accounts, Mr Dyer said: I think its been pretty accurately depicted on the news.

Ms Salman was with Mateen when he cased possible targets in the past two months, including the Walt Disney World Resort in April, a shopping complex called Disney Springs, and the Pulse nightclub in early June, CNN and NBCs aid.

Massacre survivor, 20-year-old Patience Carter, shed more light on Mateens thinking, saying he talked about wanting America to stop bombing my country  a possible reference to his fathers native Afghanistan.

A number of possible motives and explanations have emerged, with Mateen calling 911 to profess allegiance to Islamic State, his ex-wife saying he was mentally ill, and his father suggesting he hated gay people.

On Tuesday, a US official said the FBI was looking into a flurry of news reports quoting people as saying Mateen frequented the nightspot and reached out to men on gay dating apps. Mateens father, Seddique Mateen, denied his son was gay and said that if he had been in the nightclub before, he may have been scouting the place.

Mateens ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, said earlier in the week that he was mentally ill and abusive. Amid the latest reports about his club-going, she told CNN: Well, when we had gotten married, he confessed to me about his past that was recent at that time and that he very much enjoyed going to clubs and the nightlife and there was a lot of pictures of him.

I feel like its a side of him or a part of him that he lived but probably didnt want everybody to know about.

Ms Salmans mother, Ekbal Zahi Salman, lives in Rodeo, California. A neighbour said Ms Salman visited her mother only once after she married Mateen.

Noor Salmans mother didnt like him very much. He didnt allow her [Noor) to come here, said Rajinder Chahal. He said he had spoken to Ms Salmans mother after the attack and she was crying, weeping.
Defence lawyer Barry Roux asked Pistorius to remove his prostheses, and the former track star and Olympian, who had taken off his suit and put on a T-shirt and running shorts during a recess, then walked in front of Judge Thokozile Masipa.

The demonstration drew gasps from some onlookers in the courtroom and Pistorius became tearful.

I dont want to overplay disability, Mr Roux said ahead of the demonstration, but the time has come that we must just look (at Pistorius) with different eyes.

Judge Masipa will deliver Pistoriuss sentence after hearings end this week. Pistorius is currently under house arrest and awaiting a new sentence after an appeals court overturned an initial manslaughter conviction against him and changed that to murder for shooting Ms Steenkamp at his home in 2013.

South Africa has a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison for murder, although a judge can reduce that in some circumstances.

Walking in court without his prosthetic legs, Pistorius was unsteady at times, holding on to wooden desks and helped by a woman at one point. He then returned to a bench where he sat alone.

When he had his chance to address the judge, chief prosecutor Gerrie Nel asked Judge Masipa not to forget that Pistorius shot four times into a toilet cubicle from close range with no justification when he killed Ms Steenkamp.

He intended to shoot someone in the bathroom. He did, Mr Nel said. Pity will play no role in the sentence.

The defences argument is that Pistorius, a multiple Paralympic champion and a history-making amputee athlete who ran at the 2012 Olympics, was a scared disabled man when he shot Ms Steenkamp through the toilet door.

Pistorius was not wearing his prosthetic legs when he fired the fatal shots; he testified at his murder trial that he felt vulnerable and thought an intruder was in the house.

Mr Roux said yesterdayy: It was not the man winning gold medals that must be judged but rather a man standing on his stumps at 3 oclock in the morning in the dark that must be judged.

Prosecutors charged that Pistorius intentionally killed Ms Steenkamp after a fight.

Mr Nel also addressed the argument that Pistorius is a broken man because of the grief from killing Ms Steenkamp and the trauma that followed as the world focused on his case. Mr Nel referred to the emotional testimony a day earlier of Barry Steenkamp, father of the victim.

If you ever want to talk about a broken man, we saw a broken man there, Mr Nel said of Barry Steenkamp.

Mr Nel repeated Barry Steenkamps request that graphic photographs showing the fatal wounds Pistorius inflicted on his girlfriend - including a severe head injury - should be made public in the hope of deterring people from doing what Pistorius did.

The final witness testimony of the sentencing hearing was given earlier on Wednesday by a cousin of Steenkamp, who accused Pistorius himself of not giving the true version of the shooting.

The cousin, Kim Martin, also criticised Pistorius for not testifying at this weeks hearing but agreeing to a television interview that will be broadcast after the hearing ends.
With just seven days to go before the June 23 referendum, Osborne joined his Labour predecessor Alistair Darling to warn that the government might have to hike the basic rate of income tax by 2p to 22% and raise the higher rate by 3p to 43% to fill the black hole in the public finances which ministers expect if Britain pulls out of the EU.

Furious pro-Brexit Tories branded the idea a punishment budget and warned they would vote to block it. Some 57 Conservative MPs signed a statement saying the chancellors position would be untenable if he tried to push the package through  with one backbencher calling for Osborne to resign now.
ENGLAND: The duke of Cambridge has appeared on the cover of the UKs leading gay magazine, Attitude, as he spoke out against homophobic bullying.

William  the first member of the royal family to be photographed for the cover of a gay publication  told the magazine: No one should be bullied for their sexuality or any other reason.

He revealed he would be appearing in Attitude after signing a book of condolence for victims of the gay nightclub shooting in Orlando which left 49 people dead and dozens of others wounded.

He had invited the magazine to bring members of the LGBT+ community to Kensington Palace in May to listen to their experience of bullying and the mental health affects it can have.

He said: The young gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals I met through Attitude are truly brave to speak out and to give hope to people who are going through terrible bullying right now.

Their sense of strength and optimism should give us all encouragement to stand up to bullying wherever we see it.

What I would say to any young person reading this whos being bullied for their sexuality: Dont put up with it  speak to a trusted adult, a friend, a teacher, Childline, Diana Award, or some other service and get the help you need.

You should be proud of the person you are and you have nothing to be ashamed of.

Cold beans, tasty brew

ENGLAND:

Brewing a more flavoursome cup of coffee could be as simple as chilling the beans before grinding, scientists say.

A team from the University of Bath found that the colder the beans, the finer and more uniform the particles were from the grind. The narrower distribution of particles allowed access to more flavour from the same amount of coffee during the brewing process.

The study was highlighted in Nature and published in Scientific Reports.

Items space out

ENGLAND:

A fake tuxedo, a knitted toy mouse, and an England rugby shirt and ball were some of the weird and wonderful items sent into orbit with British astronaut Tim Peake.

Packing for a six-month stint in space is an unenviable task, but Major Peake has appeared prepared for almost every eventuality on board the International Space Station.

The astronaut sported a tuxedo-style top as he presented Adele with an award at the Brits. He wore an England shirt to launch the BBCs Six Nations coverage, while grappling with a rugby ball in zero gravity, and he was joined on his mission by Miss Mouse, the knitted star of CBeebies programme Show Me Show Me.

Miserable decision

SINGAPORE:

A kiss between two male actors has been removed from a production of Les Miserables in Singapore following complaints from the public.

Singapores Media Development Authority told the shows organiser, Mediacorp VizPro, the General rating it had given the show was based on a script that did not include the same-sex kiss. The shows producers then decided to remove the kiss.

Joke crashes and burns

THAILAND:

An airline has apologised after three friends of a pilot joked in a group chat about crashing the plane he was going to fly with former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra on board.

A screenshot of the chat, conducted on their phones, was leaked on social media, provoking widespread criticism of the airline, Nok Air. In response, chief executive Patee Sarasin said in a tweet that this kind of behaviour is intolerable.
Burma Army Demands Three Ethnic Allies Disarm Before Joining Peace Process

While preparations continue for the upcoming peace conference, it remains unclear if ethnic armed groups that refuse to disarm will be invited to participate.

RANGOON  While preparations for State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyis proposed 21st Century Panglong Conference continue, critics doubt that the conference will be inclusive while the Burma Army insists on the disarmament of three ethnic armed groups.

A government sub-committee tasked with preparing for the upcoming peace conference met with members of the ethnic alliance United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) who were non-signatories to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) earlier this month in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

But the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and Arakan Army (AA), which are engaged in ongoing fighting with the Burma Army, did not send delegates to the meeting.

When asked by The Irrawaddy about their absence, TNLA Brig-Gen Tarr Jode Jar replied that they were not invited.

AA chief Tun Myat Naing spoke of transportation difficulties, and said they were only informally invited.

Hla Maung Shwe, a member of the conference preparatory sub-committee and former advisor to the Myanmar Peace Center, said although the government invited the three groups to the conference and is set to meet with them, he would seek to negotiate in line with the militarys demands for disarmament.

We are not asking them to surrender, but to give up arms. The conference is not shut to them if they want to find ways and means, said Hla Maung Shwe, adding that he had no comment on the militarys disarmament policy, but that he would work toward the best possible outcome.

Lt-Gen Mya Tun Oo at a press conference in Naypyidaw on May 13 said the military would not negotiate peace with the MNDAA, TNLA and AAwhich had rejected the previous governments invitation to join peace talks.

They have no choice but to disarm, said the lieutenant general.

The MNDAA, TNLA and AA said they would not disarm.

The militarys demand for disarmament is a real barrier to peace. That is totally impossible, said AA chief Tun Myat Naing.

He said the three allies would like to discuss equality, power and resource sharing, and constitutional and political changes, but not disarmament.

The groups expect to cooperate with Suu Kyis government, but still dare not trust in the peace process because they do not see the National League for Democracy (NLD) government exerting significant influence over the military, he added.

I dare not say if the peace will be successful. And I dont have much trust, said the AA chief.

Although the three allies want to hold peace talks with the government, they are also simultaneously strengthening their forces in case military tensions arise between them and the Burma Army, Tun Myat Naing told The Irrawaddy.

TNLA Brig-Gen Tarr Jode Jar said, I dont think disarmament will help. The Palaung State Liberation Front (PSLF) gave up their arms in 2005. Then they were bullied.

The Palaung State Liberation Organization (PSLO) signed a cease-fire with the government in 1991. Later, when relations soured, the Palaung (Taang) people took up arms again and formed the TNLA.

The TNLA has ongoing clashes with the Burma Army and will discuss a ceasefire and peace, but will not accept disarmament, said TNLA officials.

The Irrawaddy could not reach the MNDAA, but the stances of the three allies are the same, said AA officials.

The governments peace conference sub-committee is set to meet the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA) next week. After that meeting, the preparatory committee is scheduled to meet the three groups.

Maung Maung Soe, a political analyst based in Rangoon said: The military sticks to the disarmament policy, but this is still not a negative sign because President Htin Kyaw and State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi have not yet shared their views.

Ethnic armed groups in northern Burma are connected politically, geographically and militarily, and other groups might not leave those three groups behind, said Maung Maung Soe.

If those groups are left out, other allies might not attend the conference. Well have to wait and see how Aung San Suu Kyi will negotiate with the army and overcome this, he added.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma Authorities Visit Disputed Coal Power Plant in Mon State

Authorities in Mon State visit a Thai cement factory where a coal power plant was built without informing locals or authorities.

Authorities in Mon State for the first time visited a Thai cement factory where a coal power plant was built without informing locals or authorities, said local sources.

Members of the Mon State local government visited the compound of Mawlamyine Cement Limited (MCL) factory in Kyaikmayaw Townshipwhere the power plant was constructedand spoke with factory officers during the first week in June.

We told them that people were worried for their safety. The factory has a duty to meet locals and explain the dangers to them, said Min Kyi Win, minister of natural resources and environmental conservation.

The factory officers told authorities that they had built the power plant based on an agreement they had with the previous government.

Min Kyi Win said this visit was intended to collect information to send to the Union government about the condition of the plant, adding that it was in a testing phase and not in operation yet.

The factory officers said that they intended to use coal power if the government could not provide adequate electric power for the cement factory, adding that their prior agreement gave them the option to use electric, gas or coal as a power supply.

Min Kyi Win said that it is standard for the local government to perform environmental safety checks on coal power plants every three months.

If we find environmental dangers, we need to take action against the factory, he added. The important thing is to raise awareness about the effects of the plant on the local people.

The minister added that gas from Burma is sold largely to neighboring countries, and that he did not think the government would be able to supply sufficient electric or gas power to the plant. This prompted the cement factory to build their own plant without regard for the risks to local people.

The cement factory is a subsidiary of the Siam Cement Group (SCG), and is situated near the Ataran Riveran important water source for at least five villages in the area. Locals have spoken out against the use of the coal plant after being informed of the associated risks.

The cement factory was planned to be fully functional by March, and would boast a production capacity of 1.8 million tons of cement per year. According to an SCG report, the companyone of Thailands largest cement manufacturersinvested around US$7 billion in expansion over the next five years. Fifty percent of the investment is designated toward the construction of more factories in ASEAN countries, including Burma.
Burma Financial Commission Moves to Reapportion Union Budget

The Financial Commission hopes to reapportion the 2016-17 Union Budget, looking to allocate more funds to the education, health and social welfare sectors.

RANGOON  The Financial Commission hopes to reapportion the 2016-17 Union Budget, looking to allocate more funds to the education, health and social welfare sectors.

The 21-member commission, which was formed in early April, held its first meeting in Naypyidaw on Wednesday. It is chaired by President Htin Kyaw and includes Vice Presidents Myint Swe and Henry Van Thio as vice chairpersons and State Counselor and Minister of Foreign Affairs Aung San Suu Kyi as a member. The commission discussed decreasing government expenditure and amending the budget approved by the previous government, because the number of ministries has been consolidated from 36 to 22.

Zaw Htay, Presidents Office spokesperson, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that Vice President Myint Swe manages the budgets of Union-level ministries and agencies, while Vice President Henry Van Thio oversees the budgets of state and division governments.

Myint Swe was a former Army commander, and regime hardliner, nominated to his current position by the military, exercising its right under the 2008 constitution to select one of Burmas two vice presidents. As Rangoons Chief Minister prior to 2016, he was embroiled in corruption allegations. The now-ruling National League for Democracy nominated Henry Van Thio, an ethnic Chin Christian with a military background.

According to state media, President Htin Kyaw told commission members on Wednesday that, in order to develop human resources in Burma, they will increase spending on education, health and social welfare and that they will focus attention on policies for rural development, electrification, poverty alleviation and infrastructural development.

The budget should be supervised systematically.and how much of the budget is allocated to what, and why, should be transparent, President Htin Kyaw was reported as saying.

Weve spent the 5-percent tax collected from cellphone users in April [and May] on the education sector, Zaw Htay said, referring to the commercial tax on cellphone users that had been postponed under President Thein Seins administration due to widespread unpopularity.

Vice President Myint Swe said that he has drafted a budget for the ministries that reduces the salaries of ministers, their deputies and related expenses because 10 of the previous ministries have been merged into five and 10 other ministries have been removed, state media reported.

He added that expenditures for the two new ministries formed by the present government since Aprilthe Ministry of Ethnic Affairs and the Ministry of the State Counselors Officehave also been added to the Union budget.

The Financial Commission must next submit the revised budget to Parliament for approval.
Commentary Natural Resources Can Pay for Burmas Needs

The government should smooth out year-on-year spending, upgrade tax collection and channel the wealth of state-owned enterprises into social programs.

This is an important year for Burma. With expectations so high, the new government is under enormous pressure to prove that it can transform the more than 20 trillion kyats (US$17 billion) budgeted into tangible benefits for the people of Burma. This will not be easy, yet significant reforms are already underway to help achieve this objective.

For one, the government has adopted a new way of budgeting. It can now allocate money more rationally between ministries and set ministry spending limits based on available resources, thanks in part to three years of revenue projections. The result has been an increase in education, health and social service spending, albeit from very low starting levels, and more money for the state and regional governments.

Increased income and commercial taxes have paid for this reform. So have cuts to general public service spending, including government hiring. However, defense spending has also increased substantially since 2009; social spending might have increased much more had military spending not been such a priority.

While these changes are positive signs of progress, overlooking the specificity of natural resource revenuesmainly from oil, natural gas, minerals and gemstoneshinders public finance reforms in at least three ways.

First, the majority of payments the government collects from the natural resource sector never get spent on social services or infrastructure. Rather, state-owned economic enterprises such as the Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) and the Myanmar Gems Enterprise (MGE) retain significant amounts of natural resource revenue in Other Accounts.

While some Other Accounts are simply payment mechanisms for subcontractors or international donors, others are enormous funds kept at the Myanma Economic Bank, only reviewed by a select few inside the Ministry of Planning and Finance and the Auditor Generals office. Burmas citizens are unable to monitor how the money is being used or whom it is benefiting. In absence of official information, based on our projections, MOGEs Other Accounts could hold as much as 4.6 trillion kyats ($3.9 billion).

In addition to a lack of transparency in Other Accounts, there is a question as to whether MOGE, MGE and other state-owned economic enterprises should retain such large amounts of money. In 2013-14, MOGE transferred more than 1.3 trillion kyats ($1.1 billion) into Other Accountsor 60 percent of all its oil and natural gas revenuesmore than either public health or education spending for the entire country.

Yet, MOGE does not serve as the operator in charge of managing most of Burmas petroleum fields, meaning it does not need to invest significant amounts of cash in unpredictable exploration activity and does not need particularly large levels of cash on hand for sophisticated capital planning.

Currently, the Union Parliament and public interest groups do not have enough information to make informed recommendations on the amount these powerful organizations should retain for reinvestment purposes, or, alternatively, whether the system should change to give the Union Parliament greater power to approve their budgets.

However, the information we do haveincluding indications that the company is being allowed to hold onto significantly more money than it is spendingsuggests that MOGE retains too much given its limited mandate. The people of Burma may be better served if a large portion of this money were spent on social services or infrastructure, or to help cover the budget deficit.

Second, the governments rule currently limiting the budget deficit to 5 percent of GDP is inappropriate for a resource-rich country with low public debt levels, like Burma. While the government is rightly concerned about not overspending, the current rule is what economists call pro-cyclical, meaning that the government can spend more when GDP rises and must cut spending when GDP drops.

Not only does this go counter to the fundamentals of macroeconomic management, it is particularly detrimental in a resource-rich country reliant on volatile oil, gas or mineral revenues. The drop in oil and gas prices led to an approximate 600 billion kyat-drop (US$500 million) in government revenue in 2014-15. However, the rule did not allow for temporary increased borrowing to compensate for this drop.

The current rule is also inappropriate for a country where public spending on infrastructure and social services can generate significant economic growth. According to the World Bank, in 2014 Burma spent approximately US$20 per person on healthcare, compared to $61 in Cambodia, $142 in Vietnam and $360 in Thailand. Instead of focusing on the risks of over-borrowing, the government could focus on smoothing year-to-year spending volatility to prevent boom-bust cycles and increasing spending in areas that will reduce poverty and generate economic growth.

Third, the government does not collect what it should from the resource sector. There are many reasons for this, but one is that the Ministry of Planning and Finances Internal Revenue Department (IRD) is under-resourced and lacks capacity to properly audit petroleum and mining companies. Relative to agencies with similar functions in other countries, the IRD has less than one-eighth of the budget it needs to do its job. According to experts, properly funding the IRD could generate a more than 1,000 percent return on investment for the government.

Furthermore, the IRD has no real way of closely controlling tax rates and tax exemptions, which are decided by MOGE and the Ministry of Mines (now the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation), since contracts are neither transparent to the public nor to many other government ministries.

The IRD has also very little sway over the Myanmar Investment Commission, which plays an important role in investment incentives and is subject to political control. Discretionary tax exemptions seem to cost the government billions of kyat annually. Thus it is unclear whether the government is receiving a fair share of profits generated from the resource sector.

Additionally, smuggling and the underreporting of mineral productionparticularly in the lucrative gems marketmeans that the reported value is sometimes less than 10 percent of the true value of mineral and gem extraction. Even if the small proportion that is declared is taxed at appropriate rates, illegal activities represent a loss of trillions of kyat per year for the government. Undeclared jade production alone could be valued at more than 17.5 trillion kyat ($15 billion) per year. Accurate reporting could generate trillions of kyat in tax revenue per year, enough to cover the entire healthcare and education budgets.

The governments reforms are on the right track and spending on social programs under the National League for Democracy government is expected to increase. However, given the vast amounts of money at stake, the government should pay particular attention to the specificities of the natural resource sector.

With respect to macroeconomic management, the government could implement a rule smoothing volatile year-to-year spending, thereby preventing boom-bust cycles. Other Accounts at MOGE and MGE could be made more transparent. The government could reevaluate whether MOGE and MGE are retaining too much revenue rather than sending more to the budget to finance health, education and infrastructure. Tax collection could be improved by providing the IRD with more resources to audit accounts.

Finally, gem production monitoring could be improved and incentives provided to incorporate illegal mining activities into the formal system, thereby generating much-needed revenue. Together, these policies could improve the quality of public spending decisions and increase the share of natural resource revenues that make their way into the budget, helping pay for what the country needs most.

Andrew Bauer is a Senior Economic Analyst and Matthieu Salomon is the Myanmar Manager with the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI). NRGI conducts international research and advocacy, and provides technical advice, to members of government and civil society on how to promote accountable and effective governance in the extractive industries.
Erasing the General

More than 30 years ago, Ne Wins junta removed Gen Aung Sans name from his own tomb. But the architects who built it still have a card up their sleeves.

RANGOON  Just after North Korean operatives remotely detonated bombs they had hidden in the ceiling of the Martyrs Mausoleum in Rangoon, Sun Oo received a long-distance phone call.

Are they safe? asked the caller in a worrisome tone before telling Sun Oo, who was in Mandalay at the time, about the bloody blast of 1983. The safety in question had nothing to do with people but rather was referring to architectural survey drawings of the site drafted months before.

My professor was calling because he was worried that the drawings had been leaked to the North Koreans. So I told him they were safe at our department in the Rangoon Institute of Technology, Sun Oo, an architect, recalled 33 years after the bombing.

The Oct. 9 blast at the mausoleum where Burmese national independence hero Aung San and his eight colleagues are interred was an attempt to assassinate South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan who was on an official visit to Burma. He was scheduled for a wreath-laying ceremony at the monument on that day. The president narrowly escaped the bombing but 17 other people in his delegation, including four high-ranking ministers, were killed.

Thanks to the explosion, the building that housed the tombs was badly damaged, and needed to be rebuilt for the annual Martyrs Day commemoration which falls on July 19 to mark the 1947 assassination of Gen Aung San, the father of Burmas State Counselor and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and his colleagues. For many Burmese, paying respect to the leaders at the mausoleum has been a ritual repeated for nearly seven decades.

In mid-1984, then-dictator Ne Wins government formed a 12-member Special Task Group led by Sun Oo to work on a new mausoleum design. The reconstruction was completed the following year.

The massive red mausoleum, adorned with a large white star on the upper left hand side, should have been the crowning achievement of his career. But for the last 32 years, Sun Oo, now president of the Association for Myanmar Architects, has felt little pride in the large red mausoleum.

Its nothing more than a structure. It lacks the core spirit it should have conveyed, said the veteran architect.

What they should have there, for example, are inscriptions of extracts from Aung Sans famous quotes. When Martyrs Day comes, his speeches should be played on a PA system while people are paying respect, the 61-year-old said.

What lies inside is of huge sentimental value to the people, he added. But you cant see anything related to the leaders there now.

Sun Oo is not exaggerating.

Until recently, the names of the nine interred were nowhere to be seen on the red mausoleum, which is located near the Shwedagon Pagoda. There are no pictures of the martyrs on the main platform, large enough to hold 600 people. Even the entrance gate lacks a sign which could educate visitors on the significance of the site.

Anything related to Gen Aung San and the other leaders has been intentionally wiped out, said Sun Oo.

Hiding the History

After the conceptual design for the new mausoleum was approved by the cabinet in April 1984, Sun Oo received an order to meet with the governments chief architect.

During the meeting, the official asked him to jot down what he dictated: Firstly, the new design of the mausoleum may not be a dedication to Gen Aung San and his colleagues. Second, if possible, it has to be a memorial site for every martyr.

It was the first time in my life I had ever heard they were trying to wipe out the identity of Gen Aung San and his colleagues, Sun Oo recalled. I had never thought that they could be that ruthless especially to Gen Aung San, who was the founder of the Burmese Army. But on that day I heard it with my own ears.

Maw Lin, the current Vice Chairman of Association for Myanmar Architects, was a member of a Special Task Group that worked on the new design of the mausoleum. He said Ne Wins regime wanted to remove Aung San and the other leaders from history, even in 1984.

They rebuilt it, because they had to, but they tried their best to hide the significant roles of the leaders, he said.

Their attempt to erase the martyrs, especially Aung San, from peoples memories intensified after the rise of Aung Sans daughter as a leader of the Burmese pro-democracy movement following the 1988 students uprising. Everything related to Aung San was pushed from view by the then-military dictatorship.

His portrait at government schools and offices was later replaced with former junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe. On Burmese banknotes, Aung Sans image was replaced with the lion, the insignia of the military regime.

The Martyrs Day ceremony was not an exception. Public access to the mausoleum on July 19 was restricted until 2010 because the military government was afraid of the public gathering there.

Senior military leaders were rarely seen attending the event. In 2008, Rangoons City Development Council, a municipal body, managed the Martyrs Day ceremony, and until 2011, the mayor was the most senior person to attend. Even under the previous government, Thein Sein, a former general-turned-president, never attended.

Yan Myo Thein, a Rangoon-based political commentator, said Ne Win and successive military regimes wanted to remove Aung San from public memory because of his overwhelming political legacy.

Even though he was assassinated in 1947, Gen Aung San still is influential and earned respect from the people. U Ne Win may have been jealous of that, he explained.

The military regime at the time might have felt worried because what they were doing was contrary to what Gen. Aung San planned as the founder of the army, he added, referring to the armys repressive rule over the civilians and wars on ethnic groups in the border areas. The general believed the army should protect the people, not bully them.

Pushing the Envelope

Despite the orders to take out the identities of the martyrs, Sun Oo and his colleagues skillfully concealed additional spaces in their design for museum, inscriptions and plaques for their biographies and speeches to add the spirit to the mausoleum in the future. The authorities who reviewed the design were not aware of these details and approved it.

We added them with a faint expectation that they could be used someday, said Sun Oo.

With the new civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, he is hopeful that his expectations will be met. While State Counselor Suu Kyi goes every year, people are excited at the prospect of the countrys President Htin Kyaw attending this years commemoration on July 19 at the mausoleum. If he does, he will be the first Burmese head of state to celebrate Martyrs Day publicly in many decades.

Currently, renovations are underway at the mausoleum in preparation for this years, 69th Anniversary of Martyrs Day. Sun Oo and the other architects who designed the monument had several meetings with authorities to put the spirit and legacy of Aung San and his colleagues back into the mausoleum. They are now waiting on the final approval from generals daughter.

If she wants us to make it happen, it will not be difficult for us because we have already prepared for it many years ago, he said.
Thursday, June 16th, 2016 (11:11 am) - Score 859

The Conservative peer Lord Lucas has told a House of Lords debate on the new Intellectual Property (Unjustified Threats) Bill that copyright owners who attempt to bully broadband ISP subscribers by demanding money to settle suspected cases of Internet piracy are villains that abuse the system and must be tackled.

A number of organisations send such letters (e.g. GoldenEye, TCYK LLC and Mircom) and they usually do so on behalf of law firms, who themselves are often acting on behalf of the copyright owner. Law firms use to do this themselves, but that was before the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) cracked down on firms like ACS Law (example) and now they prefer to hide behind other companies.

Related firms typically track the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that people use on public P2P (BitTorrent) networks when sharing copyright files and then later submit a Norwich Pharmacal Order (NPO) to a court, which forces the associated broadband ISP to release personal details about related subscribers.

After that the aforementioned organisations will begin sending letters (aka  Speculative Invoicing) that ultimately demand compensation for the alleged abuse, while those who fail to pay up are often threatened with court action.

In reality such cases almost never end up in court because to do so would be expensive and those that have been attempted were failures, not least because IP address based evidence is inherently unreliable (i.e. the data may be wrongful and or fail to reflect that lots of different people can share a single Internet connection, especially if you run an open WiFi network).

Unfortunately many innocent people and businesses have been caught up in some of these situations, such as the recent example of an 83-year-old grandmother, Patricia Drew, who was dubiously accused of sharing copyright pornography over P2P networks and thats despite her struggling to even use a computer in the first place (here).

So far the Governments best response to this on-going issue has been to publish a very basic piece of guidance (here), which has had precious little impact. As such it had been hoped that the new unjustified threats bill might tackle this problem, but so far its focus has been fixed on tackling bigger issues with business patents and trademarks. At least that was the case until Lord Lucas got involved in yesterdays debate.

Lord Lucas said: A few years ago, I had a small role in the demise of ACS Solicitors, which were thankfully sacked by the Law Society after some long delays. They were shaking down internet users for allegedly infringing copyright on pornography and other low-grade media. Their evidence was extremely suspect but was never tested in court. ACS made its money from the threats and never took anyone to court, although it used the courts to target its victims via Norwich Pharmacal orders. Now some careless person has dropped blood on to the ashes of ACS and the same scam is alive again with the same thin evidence. The relevant body has an IP address. It has not revealed how it got it. But, given that IP address, it is going through the same old pharmacal procedure, but this time, to avoid the vulnerability that ACS experienced, the solicitor involved  Wagner & Co  withdraws after obtaining the Norwich Pharmacal order, so it is not involved in the threat processes, which are undertaken by shell companies. There does not seem to be any redress for people threatened or for ISPs which are asked to comply with Norwich Pharmacal orders. If anybody comes across the names of Hatton and Berkeley, Ranger Bay, Golden Eye International, Mircom International, TCYKall of them well known in the correspondence about what is going onI urge them to put this thing in the bin. The current scammers are not pursuing anyone: they are just after threats and extortion and shaking people down. If you really feel you need to talk to a solicitor, there is a firm called Lawdit which has hundreds of these cases on its books and is consolidating them. I applaud the Government for helping our businesses avoid unjustified threats but I would like to know what they intend to do to help the granny in the Clapham nursing home who is being threatened by their smaller, nastier cousins with allegations that she has been downloading pornography illegally. Surely it is not acceptable.

Lucas suggested that one partial remedy could be for citizens and those acting on their behalf to also be allowed to send a sue or desist letter, which would make any further threats short of action liable to penalty. Mind you this will do little to remove the threatening culture of such letters because people may not wish to feel as if theyre encouraging direct legal action to occur.

In the end Lucas encouraged the Government to look at what is happening at a lower level and consider going further than they have in the Bill, although it remains to be seen if such action is taken.

Meanwhile if you know or believe yourself to be innocent of such an allegation then its best to discuss the matter with Citizens Advice before responding (just binning the letter as Lord Lucas suggests may still carry a risk) and read the Speculative Invoicing Handbook. Likewise if you want a solicitors help then Michael Coyle from Lawdit often assists.
2016 Business Communications: Changing the Way We Work

The temptation to sit back and not think that change is occurring can be overpowering, especially if things are going well. In telecommunications, for instance, carriers were in denial about the advantages of carrier Ethernet services because the new approach threatened the T-1 business, which was a cash cow. Likewise, they didnt react quickly against VoIP, since it was a threat to their circuit switched services.

The same thing is now happening with Wi-Fi calling. The ability to use Wi-Fi networks for voice and texting services is attractive to consumers because the quality can be better and such services are cheaper. It does, however, mean that people are using their cellular services less.

It is possible to say that the telephone companies are adopting Wi-Fi calling because they learned from their mistakes. That is not likely the reason, however. The better explanation is that, unlike the earlier examples, it offers them advantages over the older way of doing things.

The advantage is a big one: It frees expensive and crowded bandwidth. RCR Wireless reported today that AT&T Mobility is expanding support from Apple iOS-only to Android. The carrier is offering Wi-Fi calling on the LG G4 device for both voice and text messaging.

The offer seems a bit constrained  those wanting to take advantage must download software, have a postpaid account, and be set up for the HD Voice service. It is, however, a tangible step in expanding Wi-Fi calling. AT&T launched Wi-Fi calling for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s using iOS 9 or later last August.

The Verge reported in March that AT&T had begun offering Wi-Fi calling for international calls. The service at that point was only made available for iPhone 6 or newer devices running iOS 9.3.

It may be that the coming of Android Marshmallow will be the linchpin to making Wi-Fi calling on cellular devices the norm. MobileSyrup reported yesterday that Canadian carrier Rogers is offering the service on the Marshmallow-powered Galaxy Note 5 and will introduce it on the LG G4 on June 22.

Verizon Wireless initially announced support for Wi-Fi calling in March. Its CIO reported that the service was available on the iPhone 6 and subsequent releases.

Clearly, Wi-Fi calling has quickly become an established way to provide voice and text services. It will continue to grow because it is a win for both subscribers and carriers.

Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at [email protected] and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.
The space industry's heavyweights gear up plans for Martian colonization. At least 200,000 volunteer in a cattle call, but Elon Musk warns people some will die trying to reach the red planet.

Elon Musk's goal of establishing a Martian colony is just over the horizon. The SpaceX CEO plans to send its pioneers in 2024, with estimated arrival in 2025. In the meantime, Musk will establish a cargo route, paving the way for other interested investors.

Overwhelming Response To Volunteer Calls

SpaceX is not alone in the space race; Mars One, a Netherlands non-profit company, signed 200,000 hopefuls in bid to colonize Mars, as early as 2026. Mars One will then send a group of pioneers every 26 months; the company confirmed all of its missions are one-way trips.

The mass of volunteers will be whittled down to 40, and then to 26 explorers. Mars One doesn't offer any guarantee these explorers will survive the trip, though.

In a Washington Post report, Musk compared the first Martian colonies to America's English pioneers. Mars' first inhabitants will hit the ground running, establishing pods that provide the basic necessities: food, water and oxygen.

SpaceX Wants To Pave the Way

Musk reveals how SpaceX will pave the way to Mars. Starting with the first spacecraft launched in 2018, SpaceX hopes to establish a cargo route. Succeeding trips will be scheduled every 26 months, when Mars is closest to Earth.

It's "like a train leaving the station," Musk said. "And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it's going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments."

SpaceX and Mars One are best-equipped to realize the Mars endeavor, but these operate without the resources of a government agency. NASA plans to send its own crew in 2030, with its Orion capsule and Space Launch System still in development.

NASA also jumpstarted recruitment for the manned missions, posting concept posters on social media. In contrast to SpaceX and Mars One, an Inquisitr report confirms NASA's missions will include return trips for its astronauts.
In a speech at the 2016 Bloomberg Tech Conference, the former Android chief, Andy Rubin, spoke about the combination of the artificial intelligence (A.I.) and quantum computing into a wildly powerful central A.I. that will power just about everything.

According to Android Headlines, in Andy Rubin's vision, just in case, this A.I. would be subject to some sort of kill switch. Given recent progress in machine learning and neural networking, Rubin's vision may not be too far-fetched.

Depending on who you ask, the concept of the current computers and smartphones being replaced by a massively powerful artificial intelligence sounds either pretty nice or scary. However, not everybody will be able to have direct access to a quantum supercomputer and use its massive A.I. power. Some users will have to depend instead on lesser devices with the ability to access the central A.I. at high speeds.

In Rubin's vision, artificial intelligence and quantum computing are complementary technologies. He also sees robots as having their own place somewhere in the mix, as "walking sensors."

Rubin is not only talking about such future developments, but he also is actively trying to make them happen. He owns a venture capital firm called Playground Global that is investing in quantum computing startups.

Rubin said that one of these companies is working on a quantum computing solution that could set the stage and bring quantum computing to the mainstream. According to Engadget, this firm is looking to find a way to produce quantum computing devices with the manufacturing processes in use today.

According to Rubin, since new computing platforms "happen every 10 to 12 years," it's time already to start building quantum computers for running A.I. systems. By using the power of atoms and molecules, these quantum computers will be able to perform tasks much faster than typical computers. Several organizations, including MIT and Google, have already managed to create simple versions of quantum computers.
Huawei has a lot of reason to smile these days, thanks mainly to their latest models  the P9 and P9 Plus. Arming both phones with features that seem to be a hit with the consumer market has worked wonders and this has translated to a big bump for the company.

According to ZDNet, Huawei finds itself moving up in the global smartphone market with its shares growing by 8.5%. This development came about following the companys sales performance, surpassing 2.6 million of global shipments in just six weeks.

Huawei P9 already Outperforming The P8

The Huawei P9 has already outshone its predecessor (Huawei P8) and this is the case for multiple regions. In France, P9 sales are 1,000 percent higher, the UK showing a 300 percent difference and 400 percent higher in Finland and Poland.

With those figures out in the open, it is no surprise to see Huawei gaining in the global smartphone market with the numbers expected to rise even more.

Premium Devices That Have Spurred Up Demand

Obviously, Huawei has come up with a pair of devices that people find alluring. The specs could be the reason behind it all.

A brief rundown on that would see the Huawei P9 carry a 5.2-inch FHD screen, a 64-bit Huawei Kirin 955 display, an octa-core processor, 3 or 4 GB of RAM, a dual 12 MP main camera and a front-facing 8 MP shooter and a 3,000 mAh battery.

On the other end, the higher P9 Plus offers almost the same specs expect for the screen (5.5-inch) and the battery (3,400 mAh). Both smartphones run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The specs seem nothing out of the ordinary when compared to other smartphones in the market.

Will The Huawei Run Last?

It may be a bit premature but Huawei deserves credit for the record feat that they have pulled. On whether they can sustain or improve is another matter though no. 2 spot holder Apple could be within reach.

According to CNet, Apple did own a 13.9% share back in 2015. However, the Cupertino company did project a first-ever drop in sales back in April and the trend could continue to flounder.

With Apple holding off any major re-design until 2017 for the iPhone 8, the iPhone 7 may be of no help once it launches in September. If so, the shares could dip a bit which may allow Huawei to narrow the gap even more.
HPE will launch in Q4 its first Docker-ready server and infrastructure portfolio, enabling distributed applications (applications that run on multiple networked computers at the same time) to modernise enterprise data centres.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a strategic alliance with Docker, that is a key player in an open platform that enables organisations to build, ship and run distributed applications on any infrastructure.

The joint worldwide enterprise alliance agreement covers sales, go-to-market, engineering, support, services and knowledge sharing with the aim of modernising data centres to benefit from a more agile development environment. HPEs Docker ready server program bundles the Docker Engine and support.

Alan Hyde, vice-president, and general manager, enterprise group, HPE South Pacific, said: To survive and thrive in the idea economy, companies must transform the IT experience so that lines of business and developers can innovate faster, smarter and fearlessly. HPE is innovating across its entire data centre portfolio to help customers with that transformation. Together with Docker, we are making it easier for IT to deploy and manage containers, while giving organisations solutions that optimise their investments and power a new generation of applications that are the business.

HPE state that by 2018, more than 50% of new workloads will be deployed into containers in at least one stage of the application lifecycle. The joint HPE and Docker solutions will help fuel this trend by delivering HPEs Composable Infrastructure combined with Dockers Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) approach to provide the kind of predictability and management enterprise IT expects.

Docker chief executive Ben Golub said, The default availability of Dockers technology on every HPE server and HPEs hyper-converged platform enables enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of containerisation while leveraging their investments in existing systems and process. Having a strategic alliance that starts with Docker Engine but extends to include our commercial end-to-end platform, Docker Datacenter, provides HPE customers with a comprehensive solution that covers all of their requirements over time. Enterprises leveraging this joint solution can achieve immediate efficiencies while focusing on existing applications, which can include a 20X optimisation on their infrastructure while shipping their applications 13X faster.

HPE and Docker will deliver value-added, commercial solutions and services through all major HPE channels, including:

HPE will offer pre-configured server platforms ready for Docker Engine and Docker containers. These pre-tested server models, including HPE ProLiant, HPE Apollo, and HPE Cloudline, will result in greater optimisation of hardware, improved time-to-application performance and greater portability.

HPE Synergy, HPE BladeSystem, and HPE Converged System come ready for Docker deployments across computing environments and are integrated for storage and interconnect for simplified deployment and scalability. Also, customers can deploy Docker in hyper-converged environments to enable DevOps in virtualisation clusters.

Organisations looking to build, ship and run Docker at scale in multiple different environments will be able to do so using Docker Datacenter . HPE and Docker will work together on joint sales and support programs across HPE customers and channel partners, as well as ensuring that Docker Datacenter works seamlessly for containerised applications deployed across public cloud, composable infrastructure, hyper converged infrastructure, converged storage and Docker-ready HPE servers.

. HPE and Docker will work together on joint sales and support programs across HPE customers and channel partners, as well as ensuring that Docker works seamlessly for containerised applications deployed across public cloud, composable infrastructure, hyper converged infrastructure, converged storage and Docker-ready HPE servers. HPE now offer technology assessments, design and implementation services for Docker containers and micro services (platform security, workload modernisation consulting).

HPE will provide a single source of enterprise-grade support for Docker in alignment with HPEs technology solutions with a single point of contact for access to a global network of specialists, 24x7.

In addition, HPE and Docker are collaborating to introduce new HPE container-enabled technologies that are integrated and tested with Docker, including:

Customers can quickly deploy Docker Datacenter in a production environment by leveraging the Hyper-Converged 380s virtual machine vending capabilities. It also describes how to leverage HPE SiteScope and HPE AppDefender to monitor and protect Dockerised applications in production.

in a production environment by leveraging the Hyper-Converged 380s virtual machine vending capabilities. It also describes how to leverage HPE SiteScope and HPE AppDefender to monitor and protect Dockerised applications in production. Provides one consistent management view for adopting private cloud and container environments. Customers can start with a small proof of concept and easily grow to an enterprise-scale production private cloud environment using HPE technologies.

Flash-optimised HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays provide persistent storage for container environments via a new Docker-integrated Native Volume Plugin. This native plug-in adds to customer choice and flexibility by enabling the use of HPE 3PAR StoreServ arrays as the underlying storage for non-VM (or bare-metal) container environments where containerised applications require persistent storage, such as SQL databases.

The addition of Docker container support to the HPE Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) solution enables dynamic programmability of heterogeneous and HPE FlexFabric network infrastructures, reducing the time for application deployment from months to minutes.

HPE SiteScope is an agentless software for monitoring the availability and performance of distributed applications and IT infrastructure. HPE SiteScopes enables monitoring of the health and performance of Docker nodes or clusters in a Dockerised environment  from the cluster manager level to the Docker daemon layer, to the container level, including the applications running inside the containers.

Through the integration of the unified API in HPE OneView, customers can quickly deploy and manage the infrastructure that Docker Engine and Docker containers run on.

The HPE Linux distribution is now a supported operating system by Docker. Dockers support of HPE Linux gives customers more options to use the Linux flavour of their choice with Docker.

Finally, HPE is making investments to Docker-enable its cloud and software portfolio through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs), the Docker plugin framework and Docker Datacenter development licences, including:

HPE AppDefender delivers runtime protection for application security in a Docker environment to prevent security by protecting production applications from the inside, across all levels of a software stack.

HPE Operations Bridge monitoring delivers comprehensive monitoring of Docker containers and as well as the payloads running in the containers.

CMS and Universal Directory configuration management  CMS can discover and display information related to Docker topology, including Docker Application, Docker Container, Docker Image, Docker Image Template, Docker Registry, Docker Volume and more.

HPE Helion Cloud Suite  Provides a full range of hybrid cloud capabilities in a single software offering. HPE Helion Cloud Suite includes full-stack automation to enable rapid delivery of IT services and applications, as well as a complete development environment with HPE Helion Stackato, supporting DevOps processes for traditional and cloud-native applications.

Availability

General availability of the Docker ready HPE Servers, including HPE ProLiant, HPE Apollo and HPE Cloudline and Docker-integrated Converged and Composable HPE Systems, is targeted for Q4, 2016. Docker-integrated solutions spanning HPEs storage, networking and software assets are available today.
What if you could speed up app and software deployment time by a factor of 20 and increase testing efficiency by 25%?

CA Technologies has announced the availability of CA Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition, and several new integrations across its DevOps portfolio and third-party solutions, creating the first integrated, fully automated and open continuous delivery ecosystem.

Organisations can now connect and automate the entire app pipeline progression from development, to test, to production, to accelerate deployment times of applications by as much as 20 times and improve testing efficiency by up to 25%.

Richard Gerdis, vice-president, DevOps, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies, said Continuous delivery is the bedrock of digital transformation and the ability to rapidly and reliably release applications that meet the demands of internal and external customers alike is what makes the difference. However, end-to-end automation of continuous delivery can be very challenging and it is critical to have it seamlessly integrate processes and tools, especially in todays application economy. Without a purpose-built DevOps integration mainstay, its not possible to have the diverse DevOps tools to work together. This results in insufficient visibility in the end-to-end process bottlenecks and wastage of engineering integrations. As such, weve created the industrys first open integration-and-automation backbone for continuous delivery and believe its the best solution for accelerating end-to-end DevOps while ensuring effective end-to-end DevOps governance.

Develop swiftly, test agilely and release reliably

As organisations progress on their digital transformation journey, the volume, velocity and complexity of applications grows. Businesses no longer have the luxury of time. Rising customer expectations, competitive threats, and increased consumer choice have turned rapid delivery and iteration of software applications into a competitive differentiator. Optimising the delivery value chain has become the new means to better business outcomes, according to Forrester Research.

For application owners tasked with rapidly delivering innovative and inspiring applications, but struggling with constraints and dependencies across the software development lifecycle, CA helps eliminate these challenges by providing continuous delivery capabilities that enable organisations to improve release planning and orchestration, use agile testing to test less and cover more, provision data on demand and deploy simulated environments  all with zero-touch workflow.

This is accomplished through:

Matt McComas, AVP critical applications, GM Financial, said With CAs continuous delivery solutions were standardising our application products, achieving consistency between server environment platforms and are able to easily integrate CA Release Automation with other continuous integration applications such as Jenkins. As a result, we are quickly identifying and resolving inconsistencies in our application environments and have been able to cut deployment times down to two and a half minutes for a 98% reduction in deployment time.

Integration between CA API Management, CA Service Virtualization and CA Application Test enables development teams to automatically create the virtual services and API tests needed to support the rapid development of composite applications and microservices. Furthermore, to help organisations leverage existing investments, CAs continuous delivery solutions integrate easily with market tools such as HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Atlassians JIRA Software, Jenkins, Docker, Perfecto, Chef and Puppet for an open and fully integrated continuous delivery solution stack.

Arnold Hoogerwerf, IT strategy adviser at KPN, a leading telecommunications company in the Netherlands, said: "By using different CA tools as part of the software development lifecycle, testing is no longer a gatekeeper, but rather an operational quality door opener that helps simplify the development of new releases. The tools we use from CAs set of continuous delivery solutions have allowed us to reduce our investment and increase our agility in testing and helped us discover defects earlier so we can continually improve the quality of our applications in a shorter timeframe.

Cloud technologies and DevOps principles with highly sophisticated release automation go hand-in-hand to ensure businesses can deliver the apps that can help them better compete easier and faster. The open and flexible architecture of CAs continuous delivery solutions can help organisations deploy applications to modern Cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Skytap as a standard part of their app delivery practices.

A replay of the recently held best practices event for application developers titled "Automation, Speed and Quality: The Keys to Your Continuous Delivery Journey", can be viewed here.
If you are a budding inventor who believes in Dyson's "there must be a better way to do it" philosophy, then this award is for you.

Young Australian engineers and designers are urged to enter the 2016 James Dyson Award  an international design initiative to celebrate and reward ingenuity, creativity, and sustainable engineering. The brief is simple: submit a product or concept which solves a problem and works better.

So if you fall into the following category, and as 19th-century inventor Ralph Waldo Emmerson said Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, go for it.

Any university-level student of product design, industrial design or engineering, or graduate within four years of graduation, who is studying or has studied in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US can enter.

Australian winners and finalists will be announced on 8 September before the international winner is chosen by James Dyson himself on 20 October.

The international (final prize) includes 30,000 (approx. $57,500) for the student and 2000 (approx. $9500) for the students university department  with up to two international runners-up also receiving 5000 (approx. $9500). The national prize winners will receive 2000 (approx. $3800).

Running since 2004, the award celebrates ingenuity, creativity, and sustainable engineering. Entrants are encouraged to do more with less, designing with the environment in mind. The best inventions have a significant and practical purpose, and the potential to be commercially viable.

British inventor James Dyson said, Young people have the power to change the world through engineering. Each year the James Dyson Award sees remarkable solutions to everyday problems, and as the award grows around the world, we are seeing more problems solved from more angles. No problem is too big. The simplest solutions are the best.

From gaining $1 million in funding from tech investors to setting up award-winning businesses, to being hailed as Britains most promising young tech entrepreneur, James Dyson Award winners go on to achieve great things.

Last years international winner was Voltera V-One, a rapid prototyping system developed by a team of four engineering students from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Printed circuit boards are in almost all electronics, but developing prototypes of them can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive for young inventors and hobbyists. Voltera V-One is a desktop device which prints circuit boards within minutes, enabling a wider audience to create electronic devices. The team shipped its first batch of printers in November 2015 and is hoping to ship its second batch soon.

Jesus Zozaya, Voltera V-One co-founder, says, We were at a critical point with Voltera V-One. The technology was there, but we were looking to kick start manufacturing on our assembly line in Canada. The 30,000 we were awarded as winners of the James Dyson Award really helped with that, not to mention the recognition we received as a result.

Last years Australian winner was Jana, a wearable ultrasonic sensor that monitors an expectant mother and babys heartbeat, blood pressure and glucose levels. Aimed at pregnant women located in rural Australia with limited access to medical care, Jana utilises smartphone technology to transmit vital information to doctors to provide early warning signs for potential health risks, including pre-eclampsia.
MYOB celebrated its 25th birthday yesterday with the formal opening of its new innovation centre in Richmond.

As previously reported, MYOB quickly outgrew the Glen Waverley premises it has occupied since 2013.

Since it was proving difficult to attract developers to the eastern suburbs, the company decided to relocate engineering and development to Richmond  close to the city, and home to a number of other tech companies and co-working spaces such as LaunchPad.

The transformation of what was a largely derelict warehouse in December 2015 into today's MYOB innovation centre symbolises what is happening to business in Australia, MYOB chief executive Tim Reed said. Yesterday's industries such as clothing manufacture are giving way to those of today, which are, in turn, forming a basis for the future.

"That transformation is happening," he said, and between 1000 and 2000 of Australia's most talented software engineers already work in the square kilometre surrounding MYOB's new premises.

In 20 or 25 years "Silicon Richmond" will be "one of the most vibrant corners of this industry", Reed predicted, thanks to the cross-pollination resulting from this density of talent generating new ideas and new companies.

MYOB engineering team strategy manager Paul Greenwell told iTWire that the proximity to other companies means it is able to host meet-ups about once a week. "We couldn't really do that in Glen Waverley."

But internal communication is also important, so MYOB made a big investment in technology to support collaboration among staff working in different locations, such as one-button connectivity between meeting rooms at the company's various sites.

The previous proximity of support and development teams at Glen Waverley had proved valuable (for example, it was immediately obvious to developers when a new release resulted in a flood of support calls from users), so measures were put in place before the developers moved to Richmond to ensure that the right conversations were supported by the right technology, he said. Furthermore, key staff from Richmond regularly visit Glen Waverley, and vice versa.

The move is already helping talent attraction and retention, he said.

Greenwell also mentioned the "energy" in the new building, observing that each time MYOB refurbishes premises it does a better job.

"The new office space in Richmond reinforces MYOBs investment to local technology talent," said head of people and performance Alla Keogh.

"The office houses over 200 of the companys engineering and development employees, in a centrally located space amongst other leading creative technology hubs. This has enabled MYOB to attract talent from all areas of Melbourne, and has opened up its talent pool to those living in the CBD and value working closer to home. The location and fitout are both drawcards, in a part of Melbourne that is fast becoming a technology and innovation hub.

"We wanted to create an inspiring, contemporary, technology hub for our people to collaborate, innovate and interact that reflect our values, brand and unique culture."

The office features a mix of open-plan areas, a variety of spaces for quiet work or small meetings, more formal meeting rooms, a wellness/prayer room, a mothers' room, and a "garage inspired" area used for meals, quick coffee meetings, games and down time, team meetings, meetups and hackathons.

While welcoming guests to the formal opening, Reed noted that in 25 years the company has grown from three to 1300 people, and its 1.2 million clients constitute half of all businesses in Australia and New Zealand.

"I feel privileged because I've been lucky enough to have been on half of that journey," he said. Reed joined MYOB in 2003.

Guest of honour, Minister for Small Business and Assistant Treasurer Kelly O'Dwyer, congratulated MYOB on reaching the 25-year milestone, and noted the benefits it has delivered to small businesses. "Australia's story is really the story of small businesses," she observed.
Freestyle Technology is "one of Australia's best kept secrets", according to chief executive Mohan Jesudason.

The company has been in business for 10 years, and currently specialises in applying M2M technology to water, gas and electricity utilities.

Freestyle has contracts with 15 gas companies in Taiwan, which together serve 3.2 million of the country's four million households. The first 21,000 households have been allocated to Freestyle, and that number should reach 500,000 within three or four years, Jesudason told iTWire.

And the company has a 10-year technology deal with China's largest meter manufacturer "that could be very significant", and is involved in proofs of concept with multiple gas retailers.

The Freestyle Microengine can be installed in a wide variety of devices to provide data and take action. Examples include detecting water leaks from a sudden increase in consumption, or shutting down electricity supply to the premises if a gas leak is detected in order to reduce the risk of explosion. It also helps deliver the promise of smart metering by providing a mechanism for suppliers to temporarily and remotely shut down or turn down non-critical uses such as pool pumps and air conditioning during periods of peak demand.

Also in China, Freestyle is about to launch a prepaid gas platform. Prepaid accounts are common in China, he said, but the cards currently used have a tendency to break inside the meter, requiring a service call. There's no warning when a top-up is needed, which entails visiting a local store.

Freestyle's platform combines a chip in the meter with a backend system that allows customers to top up from their mobile phones, receive alerts when their credit drops to a selected threshold, and integrates with the gas company's bank, billing system and CRM system.

The company predicts overseas revenue of between $250 million and $300 million by 2018.

While manufacturing is carried out in-country as that increases the chance of winning contracts and reduces exposure to exchange rates, the hardware and software engineering team are based in Melbourne, which brings us back to the new R&D centre.

Located in Mount Waverley in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, it employs 56 people who speak a total of 20 languages.

"Victoria is the hub of our global ambitions," said Jesudason. "We project adding more than 150 high-tech jobs and generating exports in excess of $200 million in the next few years."

While MYOB recently moved its development teams from nearby Glen Waverley to the inner suburb of Richmond largely for talent attraction and retention reasons, Jesudason told iTWire he was happy in the eastern suburbs.

"If you've got IoT in your label you'll attract attention" from people who want to work in the field, he said. The company actively seeks cultural diversity as well as technical skills, and people offering both are readily available in the Monash University-Dandenong corridor.

"Our platform can be taken to any industry," he added. The company has its eye on the automotive sector, he told iTWire, and is talking to two large insurance companies in Malaysia that are interested in systems that can provide real-time alerts to drivers about their bad habits, and in the longer term add this information to their risk assessment.

While the company's initial success has been in Asia, Freestyle is planning to diversify geographically as well as industrially, and expects "material inroads into the European market," Jesudason said.

Victorian Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis attended the opening of the R&D centre. Observing that "success is never a given... a lot of people will fall along the way", he praised the vision and persistence of Freestyle's founder Andrew Donaghey.
Promapp , an industry-leading provider of cloud-based business process management (BPM) software for creating and managing business processes online has named Ralf Wittgen to be the companys chief customer officer.

In his new role, Wittgen, an industry veteran with extensive experience in building and running professional services organisations worldwide, will focus on helping Promapp customers gain incremental value from their BPM services.



Ivan Seselj, chief executive of Promapp Solutions, said, Ralf is passionate about client services, and will bring that passion and his tremendous experience in building and growing services teams to Promapp and its customers globally. He has a proven track record, thriving in multicultural, worldwide operations, so he will obviously be playing a critically important role in defining our service strategy and ensuring the success of our customers as we continue our global expansion.

Building on successful growth in Australia and New Zealand that earned them a placement in the 2015 Deloitte Asia Pacific Tech Fast 500, Promapp opened its first US office in San Francisco in 2015 in what Seselj termed "the next step in Promapps steady international expansion strategy". The company has solidified its presence in the US with a number of recent client additions, including MorganFranklin Consulting and MSI Global Talent Solutions, and buoyed by its success there, has recently entered the European market.

Wittgen has more than 20 years of experience in managing professional services teams in Germany, the U.S., and in New Zealand, providing consulting, implementation, training, and support services for a wide range of content management systems.

With a solid foundation in project management, software engineering, and release management, combined with experience in pre-sales and product management, Wittgen comes to Promapp after serving as vice-president of professional services and customer support at Author-it, a purpose-built component authoring solution which helps life sciences companies leverage information to meet business needs.

Wittgen also previously served as project manager with two German companies, Untersee and Tanner. He began his career as a technical author with Swiss company INCOS.

With a 12-year history of offering mature and internationally proven business process mapping software to support quality assurance, risk management, business continuity and continuous improvement in line with ISO, Six Sigma, and Lean principles, Promapp already has marquee names as Coca-Cola Amatil, Genesis Energy, Toyota Financial Services, McDonalds, and Ricoh among its clients.
Over the last 12 years since he started the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical, has made many efforts to bring about what he has characterised as unity in the Linux community.

Of course, whenever he has suggested such initiatives  like universal release schedules, for example  he has always had a vested interest in them himself. Nothing wrong with that, if the initiatives were also benefitting the Linux community at large.

But given that he has rubbed up far too many people the wrong way, his initiatives have generally failed to gain acceptance. And his latest move, to have a single packaging format for Linux packages, something he calls snap, has already brought out opposition.

Shuttleworth made the announcement overnight on Tuesday at a well-attended conference call. Unfortunately, his PR people forgot that Australia has a number of people who might be interested in attending as well and did not offer a local number to dial in.

Snap is a package format that has been developed for the Ubuntu mobile operating system, the one that is used on the Ubuntu phones, that have now been out for about a year. (I have been using one for the last three weeks and will have more to say about it sometime in the near future).

So Shuttleworth will benefit to the extent that once developers start packaging things for snap, the number of applications available for the Ubuntu phone will increase. This is something sorely needed, given that Shuttleworth is playing catch up with app stores run by the bigger mobile players where there are too many apps for anyone's good.

Kyle Keen, an Arch Linux maintainer, made the salient point about this kind of packaging format giving developers control over the entire process. "Shuttleworth has explicitly stated that the whole point of their new universal packages is to take control away from the maintainers/users and give it to the ISV," Keen wrote.

"To quote: 'With snappy Ubuntu, Owncloud can publish exactly what they want you to use as a snappy package, and can update that for you directly, in a safe transactional manner with full support for rolling back. I think upstream developers are going to love being in complete control of their app on snappy Ubuntu Core'."

Keen also pointed out that this would lessen the number of people involved in looking after an app; normally, each Linux distribution has a maintainer for each app that is part of the distro. One maintainer may look after dozens of packages, tailoring it to the needs of the distribution.

Once upstream developers package everything, then the maintainer is taken out of the process. And this, Keen says, could well lead to snap packages being repackaged to include a little adware here or there, and offered again under a slightly different name. This process happens with unfailing regularity on the app stores for mobile devices.

"The reality: App Stores have been a nearly unmitigated disaster for users," Keen wrote. "Supposedly one of Linux's failings is that there is too much pointless choice, too many K and G versions of things and it divides developer efforts.

"Why have so many window managers and text editors? App Stores have the same problem. With the traditional FOSS model, there are a hundred different programs and each program is missing a different feature. In the App Store, there are a hundred different programs doing the same thing but each screws the user over in a slightly different way. Spying? Ads? Battery sucking rookie mistakes? Battery sucking bitcoin mining botfarm? Take your pick."

Keen feels that maintainers are the difference. "The maintainer is the primary line of defence and interaction between users and developers. Maintainers also shield users from developers, offering a layer of quality control."



He added: "It is simply not possible for abusive software to exist in Linux today. No maintainer would willingly release it. If a maintainer ever got a reputation for releasing abusive software they would be stripped of their privileges. Someone who cares steps up and becomes a maintainer instead. The system is aggressively self-correcting. It has been like this for 20 years, so much to the point that few Linux ISVs even consider being unethical. And Linux users have a very hard time imagining that any ISV could ever act in bad faith."

While the snap packages may come into being for many distributions, the extent of usage is what will decide whether it becomes popular or not. Distributions can continue using their own package formats and users, who have not had anything adverse to say on this front, will just keep on using them.

Shuttleworth will continue to do what he has to in order to make his company profitable and assure its existence well into the future. Many people will back him in his efforts for, despite his inability to build consensus, he has done a lot to make Linux more usable by Joe Public.

If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how the opposition to snap packages coalesces.
Four-fifths of women and 69% of men are turning to the Internet for answers to medical questions (Googling symptoms/possible treatments). What is scary is that of those 87% are aged between 18 and 24.

No, this is not an advertisement for your local GP, many of whom can now consult online, but a finding from a global Future Health Index conducted for Philips. Tech is overtaking bedside manner.

A total of 40% of patients aged 18-24 admit to not going to a Health Care Professional (HCP) when they needed to, with the main reasons being limited time, denial they need to visit, and fear of their HCP's reaction or negative results. This highlights the fact that younger Australians arent seeking to prevent healthcare issues and delay addressing them when they do appear.

The Index covers a broad range of issues from competency to manage health to electronic health records.

According to Australian patients:

Millennials are more insecure about their health prospects than their elders, indicating a reluctance to rely on available health resources

55% of 18-24-year-olds feel confident managing their own health effectively compared with (76%) of 55+-year-olds;

68% of 18-24-year-olds track key health indicators in their heads as opposed to using technology to monitor their personal health; and

80% of women are turning to the Internet for answers to medical questions (Googling symptoms/possible treatments) vs 69% of men and 87% of 18 -24-year-olds, more than any other generation

Data sharing inefficiencies could highlight an opportunity for reviving e-health records

74% would be comfortable sharing data collected by a connected care technology with an HCP;

70% of patients have had to repeat information regarding their health to multiple healthcare professionals and 41% face difficulty accessing their medical records;

88% of HCPs are willing to, and 86% are already regularly, share information about patients with other HCPs; and

80% of patients are open to sharing their medical history in their medical record.

Rigorous data and privacy protection regulations designed to protect patients in developed countries present challenges to the free flow of information needed in more integrated, technology-driven healthcare systems. In the US, for example, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) laws prevent health care professionals from sharing any medical information without written consent from the patient. In Germany, 50% of healthcare professionals see privacy and security concerns as a top barrier to the adoption of connected care technology.

Patients not getting the most out of connected care technology

52% of patients are using connected care technology to measure their health, but just 32% say they have ever shared information from this technology with a healthcare professional.

Australia is perceived as being in the top three nations when it comes to access to healthcare. However, we're ranked below the UAE, The Netherlands, and China regarding perceived adoption of connected care technology and the current state of health integration.

Philips undertook the original research to understand the perceptions towards connected care and the role it plays in the future of healthcare. The study will be run annually, included both quantitative surveys and in-depth qualitative interviews. These were conducted from February-April, 2016 in 13 countries. In partnership with an independent global market research firm, a survey was fielded from 24 February to 8 April in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, the UAE, the UK and the US in each countrys native language.
Huawei got it right with the new P9 and P9 Plus. It has shipped more than 2.6 million in the six weeks since release  130% higher than the P8 launch last year.

It was first launched on 6 April in the UK, China, France and Finland. In China alone, it has more than five million online pre-orders! Australia is yet to see the P9/Plus  its launch is on 22 June with limited availability shortly after.

While the P9/Plus oozes flagship quality, it is the dual lens Leica camera that is gaining the most attention. International reviewers say it is vastly superior to the present iPhone 6S and just ahead of the universally recognised best smartphone camera, the Samsung S7. That is saying something!

Huawei collaborated with Leica Camera AG to create the P9s and P9 Pluss signature dual-lens camera, resulting in aesthetically-stunning devices that deliver amazing true-to-life colour pictures. The dual-lens camera takes smartphone photography to the next level.

Richard Yu, chief executive, Huawei Consumer Business Group, said: Huawei is focused on creating premium devices that exhibit our dedication to flawless design and technological innovation. These high-end devices are attracting more fans than ever before, who want to use the latest and most innovative smartphone technology. When consumers around the world are lining up to be the first to buy Huaweis flagship smartphones, as they have for the P9 and P9 Plus, it's clear the appeal of our devices is universal.

Huaweis consumer business group (smartphones, PC and tablets, wearables) is chuffed. In Q1, 2016 it sold 28.3 million handsets (mainly the Mate 8, P8, G8, and Nexus 6P, but it does also have a complete range of lower-cost handsets) making it the global number three with 8.5% of phone shipments.

Huawei is playing for high stakes as the other Chinese companies vie for top spots. It has adopted an elevated level of marketing and support for the P9 flagship. In Egypt, it was the major sponsor of the Fashion Festival in Cairo. Branded elements of Huawei and the P9 were seen throughout the event while P9 smartphones were also used by celebrities and models on-stage to take selfies, resulting in massive media attention.

In Hong Kong, Huawei collaborated with renowned photographer Water Poon and celebrity Simon Yam on the P9s photo gallery at an outdoor bus shelter located at a prominent location, maximizing its reach to diverse audience.

In Germany, the P9 has also received significant accolades, including: Technology Award from Hardware Luxx and Recommendation Award from Allround-PC.

iTWire has basic information on this amazing handset here and will be attending the launch and reviewing the phone shortly.
For all the promise surrounding health IT, the adoption of new technologies to improve coordination between patients and care providers remains sluggish, according to new research from Nielsen Strategic Health Perspectives.

In a survey of slightly more than 30,000 consumers and 626 physicians, Nielsen found only modest upticks in the use of technology in the healthcare arena, and also highlighted the stubborn tendency of providers to operate in siloes, rather than embrace the model of coordinated care that many health reform advocates are championing.

This survey is evidence of the failure of American healthcare to provide coordinated, technologically enabled, high-quality healthcare to the majority of people, Robert Pearl, chairman of the Council of Accountable Physician Practices, which sponsored the research, said in a statement.

CAPP promotes broader use of health IT

CAPP is a consortium of medical groups that have embraced a coordinated model of care that brings together specialists of various disciplines in what it bills as a holistic, patient-centric model, a vision that sees the broader and more effective use of health IT as critical.

[ Related: 2016 will be a big year for health IT ]

At a media event announcing the new research, CAPP Executive Director Laura Fegraus explained that the hallmarks of so-called accountable care organizations include coordination among a patients team of care providers, an emphasis on prevention and evidence-based medicine, and around-the-clock access to a provider for the patient.

All of these things are enabled by robust information technology, Fegraus said, beyond having a computer in the office.

In the latest survey, Nielsen describes patients electronic engagement with physicians as increasing but still low, with the proportion of respondents who say they have some type of digital access to their providers hovering between 20 percent and 30 percent. Many of those means of access are rather low-tech, such as email or text reminders for appointments or the ability to submit a medical question through an online channel, with adoption still dragging in part because of the privacy and regulatory restrictions on the flow of sensitive health information. Meanwhile, higher-tech means of delivering care like mobile apps and video consults remain at the margins.

[ Related: Human error biggest risk to health IT ]

We definitely see some progress here, said Jennifer Colamonico, vice president of healthcare insights at Nielsen, referring to the modest uptick in the use of health IT over last years survey.

At the same time, she highlighted the adoption challenge, noting that many patients in the survey said that their care providers offer technology such as online appointment scheduling or text or email reminders, but that they choose not to use them.

Its not just a matter of having the technology, but its actually an issue of using it. Its the sort of the old adage of if you build it they will come may or may not apply in healthcare technology. Colamonico said. Many people are not using the technology that they actually have access to, which creates a different set of barriers to solve.

Interoperability issues limits health IT adoption

The Nielsen report also highlights the limitations of one of the bedrock components of health IT: the electronic medical record (EMR). From the outset, the push for broader use of EMRs has been slowed by challenges of interoperability  the extent to which one record can communicate with another.

But thanks in part to significant federal funding incentives, adoption of EMRs has risen sharply in recent years, though that only tells part of the story, according to Fegraus, who points out that all EMRs do not deliver the same value.

We can track if a healthcare organization has an electronic medical record, she said. What we havent been so good at tracking yet is what does that mean for the patient? Do they have to repeat their medical history every time they see a new provider? Do they receive contact with their healthcare system at any other point in time except when theyre in the room with their own physician?

[ Related: Health IT use lags despite consumer interest ]

In the Nielsen poll, just 49 percent of respondents say that their doctors are able to share health information and know their medical history ahead of an appointment, a modest increase of three percentage points from last year.

Pearl, who in addition to chairing CAPP is also CEO of the Permanente Medical Group and the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group, sees three distinct phases in the evolution of the EMR. First is the basic adoption of a system at a hospital or physicians office, what could simply be a digital version of the paper file. Next comes a base level of interoperability, where distinct EMR systems can connect with one another so that information from outside care providers becomes accessible.

But ultimately, Pearl envisions the barriers coming down entirely, with the distinctions between one vendors product and anothers melting away as developers stitch together the various systems and the EMR becomes a truly holistic record.

The challenge [for] the community is you have a lot of different electronic medical records, and the real question is going to be what its going to take to force the makers of these systems, not to make them interoperable  that means I can go into your system and see it  but actually to allow the APIs to be accessed by third-party developers that are now going to allow the creation of a single system, Pearl said. Its going to be the patients system. And thats going to be, I think, the real holy grail of American medicine.
China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.

This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.

This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.

The U.S. roadmap calls for delivering an exascale system -- capable of 1,000 petaflops -- in 2023.

But it's not clear just what China will deliver in 2020. Theoretically, an exascale computer could be built today but it wouldn't be practical. The power needs may be in excess of what the U.S. believes is possible, power-wise, by 2023: A system that uses 20 to 30 megawatts.

"It's entirely probable that one or more governments will deploy supercomputers with hypothetical peak performance of an exaflop by 2020," said Steve Conway, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC. "An exaflop is an arbitrary milestone, a nice round figure with the kind of symbolic lure the four-minute mile once held."

But what will China be capable of delivering in 2020?

The first stage will likely be peak exaflop performance, and then a Linpack test making make it eligible for ranking on the Top 500 supercomputing list, said Conway.

But the measure "that counts most, but will likely be celebrated least," said Conway, "is sustained exaflop performance on a full, challenging 64-bit application."

That third stage probably won't happen until the 2022 to 2024 timeframe, he said.

That's the timeframe the U.S. has set, and its definition of exascale is sustained performance.

The White House, in an executive order last year, released a plan for coordinating exascale development and defined an exascale system capable of "100 times the performance of current 10-petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs."

The U.S. emphasis is on application performance, not on a peak performance record. Even if China does meet its 2020 goal, the debate will be over the usefulness of the machine. Nonetheless, China will likely use the machine to underscore its science advancement.

China has been leading the Top 500 list with its 34-petaflop Tianhe-2 system, but that list is due to be updated next week at the ISC High Performance Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
Its the catch-22 every new college graduate faces when looking for his or her first job: You need experience or a portfolio of completed work to prove your competency to a potential employer, but its hard to get that tangible proof of your skills without having had a job first.

Thats one of the major benefits of the open source world, says Heidi Ellis, professor and chair of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.

Ten years ago, as a visiting professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., Ellis challenged her computer science students to use technology to solve some of the logistical and administrative problems than can hamper the effectiveness of humanitarian causes.

In 2006 I introduced the concept of humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and my students developed a volunteer registration and management module for Sahana, an open source disaster management IT system developed in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami, so that disaster recovery and humanitarian efforts could easily register and track volunteers, Ellis says. Not only did the module go on to become a standard addition to the software package, but because the project was free and open source, each student had a major, real-world project in their development portfolio that they could freely and easily share with potential employers.

If a student goes through a traditional CS or IT education, they most likely will have an internship or do a work-study with a business, a corporation in their IT or software development department. But most of the time, in those situations, they cant show evidence that theyve worked on those kinds of projects, because all the code is proprietary  not so with open source. Its a marketable, visible, demonstrable portfolio, Ellis says.

[ Related story: 5 open source skills in high demand ]

A hiring bonus

Its one of the most important things employers look for when hiring open source talent, along with a strong, committed presence in the open source community, says Bob Melk, president at Dice.com.

Almost every open source company or client thats looking for open source talent wants to see contributions to the code base, and/or a profile on GitHub, Melk says. That sentiments echoed by Marie Louise van Deutekom, global head of human resources for SUSE Linux, which is currently looking to fill around one hundred open positions within the company.

We definitely want to see some kind of code contributions and an active profile on GitHub. Its a very important part of our recruiting and screening process here, she says.

Having a portfolio of successful projects and an active GitHub profile is a great advantage to have, especially in the midst of an open source hiring boom. The recent Open Source Jobs Report from Dice.com and The Linux Foundation showed that 65 percent of hiring managers say open source hiring will increase more than any other part of their business over the next six months. With even traditional companies tackling digital transformation, theres more code than ever before in areas like home automation and automotive, and much of that code is open source, says Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

[ Related story: Open source job market booming ]

Open source shortage

The reality is that technical talent in open source is tight. This is a huge opportunity for open source professionals and new graduates to grow their skills in this area. Digital transformation means that almost everything now is a digital device, and that means much more code must be written, Zemlin says.

With such a huge emphasis on the IT talent crunch and the business needs of companies looking for open source professionals, Ellis believes her students  both from her Trinity College days and her current position at Western New England University  have a major leg up on the job market.

I have an industry advisory board of people I speak to, all of whom are either CEOs, CIOs and other high-level executives, and they all want to see candidates with evidence of open source contribution. It absolutely answers the question about how classroom skills translate into the job market; it makes that transition seamless, she says.

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A 20-year-old Estonia man has pleaded guilty to stealing data on more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel and providing it to the Islamic State.

Ferizis goal was to incite terrorist attacks, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.

Ferizi once led a hacking group called Kosova Hackers Security, or KHS, which claims to have defaced over 20,000 websites.

Last June he hacked into a U.S. Internet hosting company to steal the personnel data, which included addresses, telephone numbers and email logins.

Ferizi used an online account with the name KHS, which led the FBI to suspect his involvement. He also neglected to cover his tracks. When the FBI examined the hacked server, they found the IP address Ferizi had used to carry out his attack. The same IP address had been used to access his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

He was arrested in Malaysia last year and extradited to the U.S. for trial. He faces a maximum 25 years in prison.

The data he stole was passed to an ISIS member named Junaid Hussain, also a hacker. Hussain was later killed in an airstrike in Syria.

It's not the only time Ferizi supplied information to ISIS. Last April, he provided data on dozens of U.S., British and French citizens, by sending screenshots of their credit card information.

The DOJ called it the first case of its kind. Last year, the U.S. also jailed a 17-year-old from Virginia for using Twitter to provide financial support and recruitment help to ISIS.
Satya Nadella wasn't kidding when he said earlier this year that he believed in using chat as a platform for computing. Microsoft just bought Wand, a chat app for iOS, to further that vision.

The Wand team will be joining Bing's engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The company's team members will be working primarily on Microsoft's push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants.

It's a natural fit for Wand, which had been working since 2013 on apps that let users chat with one another and add outside information from sources like Yelp. Users could share music and let other people access their smart home devices using Wand, too.

The company had conducted private trials of its service but hadn't released it broadly to consumers.

Wand's features fit well with Microsoft's overall vision for conversational interaction between humans and computers. At the Microsoft's Build conference earlier this year, company executives showed off a vision of humans interacting with bots representing businesses in order to complete tasks like booking a hotel room.

Ku called out the Wand team's expertise on a variety of topics, including third-party developer integration, semantics, and conversational interfaces, as reasons for the company to join Microsoft.

The Wand service will be shut down, CEO Vishal Sharma, a Google veteran, said in a blog post announcing the company's acquisition. However, the acquisition means it's likely some of the ideas and technology behind Wand will likely be making the transition to Microsoft.

This is Microsoft's second announced acquisition this week, coming on the heels of plans revealed Monday to buy LinkedIn in a deal worth more than US$26 billion. Under Nadella's leadership, Microsoft has made a slew of acquisitions leading to some significant changes. For example, the purchase of Acompli last year translated into a new Outlook app for iOS and Android.
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Q: I live on a corner lot in a growing subdivision. Almost every Saturday and Sunday a real estate agent places directional signs and open house signs in our yard. Are they required to ask permission before placing these signs in our yard? In all these years I have had only one agent ask permission.

M.M.

Answer: The signs are more than likely not on their property. The signs are more than likely located within the public rights-of-way, said Chris Murphy, deputy director of planning and development services for Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.

There is a City Code and UDO provision that allows for the installation of real estate lead-in signs within the public rights-of-way from 12 noon on Friday through 12 noon on Monday, he said in an email response. If the property owner has some concerns related to the placement of the signs, they should reach out to the real estate company(s) placing the signs and see if they can reach an agreement on how the signs are being placed.

If the signs are actually on the individuals property rather than in the right-of-way, Murphy said the signs can be disposed of, but again, he said the best course of action would be to work with those placing the signs.

Q: A fire hydrant on my street was knocked over by a driver about four months ago, and the water supply to the hydrant was shut off. I contacted CityLink about two months ago and inquired about having the hydrant repaired and the water turned back on. Nothing has occurred. Who handles fire hydrants? Who should I contact?

C.M.

Answer: The city Utilities Division repairs and replaces hydrants as needed. Since you provided your street address in your question, we forwarded it to Ron Hargrove, the utilities director. I will have our field operations group get a replacement scheduled, he said on Wednesday.

Q: In the June 10 Scorecard, a respondent stated that Donald Trump had 3,500 lawsuits pending against him. Is this true? If so, what is the nature of this massive amount of litigation? And how many lawsuits are pending against Mrs. Clinton?

F.N.

Answer: That reader may have been referring to a report from USA Today published earlier this month, which found that Donald Trump and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades, including a mix of cases where he or his businesses were the plaintiff (approximately 1,900) and where they were the defendant (approximately 1,450), plus another 150 that fell into other categories.

According to the report, They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits. The sheer volume of lawsuits is unprecedented for a presidential nominee.

By comparison, During her time as first lady, U.S. senator from New York and secretary of State, Clinton has been named in more than 900 lawsuits, mostly as a defendant, a review of state and federal court records finds. More than a third of the lawsuits were filed by federal prisoners, political activists or other citizens seeking redress from the government by suing a list of high-ranking officials.

We have created a direct link to that USA Today article, which includes more details and graphs that break down the types of cases involved. You can read it at tinyurl.com/jxl9mtv.
The top floors of the Kimpton Cardinal Hotel are the colors of the rainbow this week, a gesture honoring the victims of the nations worst mass shooting in modern times.

Its not a strategy or a business plan. Its the right thing to do, said Tina Fullard, a hotel spokeswoman. We are deeply saddened by the events in Orlando, and (we) show our support by the lighting of the building.

The downtown hotel, at 401 N. Main St. in the former headquarters of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., will be lit with the multicolored lights until sunrise Saturday. The colors on the upper floors of the 29-story building reflect the colors of the gay pride flag.

The memorial is for the 49 people killed and 53 wounded when Omar Mateen, 29, opened fire early Sunday at the Pulse, a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Mateen was killed in a shootout with a police SWAT team.

Several motives and explanations have emerged, with Mateen calling 911 to profess allegiance to the Islamic State group, his former wife saying he was mentally ill and his father suggesting he hated gays. The picture grew more complex when a U.S. official said the FBI was looking into a flurry of news reports quoting people as saying Mateen frequented the nightspot and reached out to men on gay dating apps.

Since the Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group Inc. was founded in San Francisco in 1981, the company has supported the LGBT community, Fullard said.

Kimpton also is a sponsor of Pride Winston Salem, a gay-rights advocacy and support group, which will hold a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Orlando shooting at 7:30 p.m. today at Corpening Plaza on West First Street.

Our light will shine over them in support and pride, Fullard said.

Organizers and supporters of Pride Winston-Salem are pleased with the hotels gesture, said Kandi Villano, the organizations vice president.

Its phenomenal, Villano said.
THE REV. LAURA SPANGLER, Winston-Salem

Loss of life

Everyone feels sadness about the loss of life in Orlando, Fla. We are praying for comfort for the family members, many of whom didnt know where their loved ones were the fateful morning of June 12. We are praying for the teams of believers in Orlando who are helping folks to see Christ in the midst of violence and death.

Who else can we blame, but evil itself, personified in an abusive, deranged man blinded by radical Islam?

This is a wake-up call for each of us. When tragedy struck Israel, Jesus encouraged all sinners to repent, lest we perish as well. (Luke 13:1-5) May we all humble ourselves and come to the truth that only in the Lord Jesus Christ will we find light in our darkness, (John 12:46) life, joy and peace.

Praise to our God who brings good out of evil.

******

CAROL M. MULCOX, Winston-Salem

Society

What kind of society are we? After the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, gun manufacturers stock rises (Tragedy again boosts gun makers share prices, June 14)?

Today, anyone can have an assault rifle. What has happened to common sense?

******

REGGIE BRANSON, Winston-Salem

Stop them

Well  Donald Trump is partly right.

This is no time to be politically correct; were fighting for our survival. Yes, lets stop them. Lets stop manufacturing guns until our countrys representatives can figure out whats going on and get a handle on it.

Makes sense to me.

******

PETER MOSS, Kernersville

Better air?

As we sit here in Winston-Salem steeped in the code orange ozone-alert air (Hot spell to bring heat, humidity and ozone trouble, June 10), one must marvel at The Roll Call listing on June 12 in the Journal.

It seems U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx voted on June 8 to prevent states from implementing ozone emissions rules until at least 2024.

Perhaps the mountain air in Banner Elk is better than the air here in the Piedmont.

******

MARY BILLINGSLEY, Winston-Salem

Trump lawsuit

Donald Trump has insulted and disparaged so many people, I wonder if it would be possible to find anyone whom he thinks is impartial in the lawsuit against Trump University.

Oh, yes, I guess he would  the millions and millions and millions of people who support him and think that he is a really, really great guy.

Sum It Up

On Sunday we asked our readers: Will the unpopularity of the two presidential candidates hurt their parties chances in the North Carolina races for governor and Congress?

The unpopularity of both major presidential candidates will have little to no effect on state and local elections overall  if the voters of North Carolina stay focused on this issues and job performances or the lack there of of all the candidates for local and state offices.

STEVE HENDERSON

******

Perhaps, but thats nothing compared to the potential harm done to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by either of the presidential candidates. Donald Trump has probably never read the Constitution, and Hillary Clinton believes the federal government should regulate the Bill of Rights  including inalienable rights. How comforting.

Thankfully, unlike the presidential race, candidates for North Carolinas races for governor and Congress are not primarily two sides of the same coin. I hope voters will keep that in mind.

DEB PHILLIPS

******

I think voters are disgusted and discouraged in general this presidential election, and come November may think why even bother? when its time to vote.

SUZANNE CARROLL

******

Will the candidates unlike-ability hurt local campaigns? Possibly, if people express their disgust by not voting. I hope that does not happen.

The two candidates do have their detractors. In fact, I believe that the violent demonstrations against Trump are based on pure unadulterated hate. While there has not been any violence, I am sure there are many people who hate Clinton.

My question is whether this discord is a sign of political disagreements or a symptom of the deteriorating view of our government. If we want the anger to dissipate, the politicians had better stick to policy issues and not personal attacks and muck-raking.

KEN HOGLUND

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Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. (left) is a supporter of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

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House Speaker Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker continue to express reservations about what presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says and does on a regular basis.

But there is one conservative Wisconsin official who doesn't appear to share their concerns about the real estate mogul:

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.

Im going to do everything that I can to get Donald Trump elected the next president of the United States of America, Clarke said during a speech in Albany, N.Y., over the weekend.

And he has the platform to try to do so.

Given his frequent guest appearances on a range of Fox News shows, the sheriff regularly excoriates Trumps opponent, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and her former boss, President Barack Obama.

But not so long ago Clarke was bobbing and weaving when asked if he voted for Trump or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on his absentee ballot in the Wisconsin presidential primary.

I don't have to disclose that, he said at a Republican event days before the April contest.

But there was no hedging in his keynote address for the New York Oath Keepers, an anti-government group sometimes dubbed a citizen militia.

In the 36-minute talk, the sheriff said he did not consider Trump to be the savior.

You know who my savior is? Clarke said. God Almighty and his son Jesus Christ. That's who my savior is.

But Clarke  who was greeted with regular applause  said the country needed an outsider who can break up the Washington cartel.

It just starts there because he's got to do some heavy lifting, said Clarke, who has been elected four times in Milwaukee County as a conservative Democrat.

Clarke was in New York to received the leadership award from the Oath Keepers, which gained attention because armed members of the organization showed up in Ferguson, Mo., during the unrest there and to Cliven Bundys Nevada ranch in 2014.

The Milwaukee law enforcement leader has been a popular figure with patriot groups like the Oath Keepers. In 2013, Clarke was named sheriff of the year by a similar anti-government group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

The left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center has dubbed these groups extremist for suggesting that their members represent the last line of defense against federal officials inclined to infringe the U.S. Constitution.

But in his weekend speech, Clarke  who now has earned a lengthy article and video on the law centers website  ripped into the organization that seeks to identify hate groups.

Clarke told the crowd he had breakfast with John Wallace, the founder of the Oath Keepers who said the group had been smeared by the law center.

Branded as a dangerous patriot group, Clarke said. Do yourselves a favor and embrace that as a badge of honor.

The sheriff said the nations founding fathers were also considered members of a dangerous patriot group.

Im still waiting for the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate Black Lives Matter a hate group, Clarke said, taking aim at a regular target of his barbs. He labeled the group, which he calls Black Lies Matter, a dangerous organization with a phantom grievance.

Clarke said he has made it his mission to stand up for American police officers. He said there was a time in the 1950s and 60s when police officers disrupted peaceful civil rights protesters.

But the sheriff said that is no longer the case. We changed  we changed ourselves, he claimed.

Clarke said American cops are now more educated and professional than ever before.

He criticized the U.S. Department of Justices Civil Rights Division for, he said, putting cops in their crosshairs. He labeled federal civil rights officials jackbooted goons.

Theres very few things the government gets right in the United States of America, Clarke said. But one thing it gets right is policing. This works. Its not perfect. But it works.

And that, in short, is the message from Milwaukees man on a mission.
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American Family Mutual Insurance Co. said Thursday it is planning a corporate restructuring, a move that would make it easier for the company to invest in businesses outside the insurance industry and to make acquisitions.

Under the proposal, the Madison-based insurer would create a mutual holding company as the new parent company for American Family, preserving the firm's status as a mutual operation  a company owned by policyholders instead of stockholders.

But as part of the restructuring, American Family Mutual Insurance Co. would become a stock subsidiary of the holding company, with its new shares owned entirely by the holding company. In the future, American Family could sell  if policyholders approved  up to 49% of its stock to raise capital, but there is no need or plan to do that now, company executives said.

David Holman, American Family's chief strategy officer and corporate secretary, stressed that the goal of the new structure would be to offer the company flexibility in a changing industry, but also maintain membership rights for policy holders under the mutual holding company umbrella.

"The first and foremost reason for doing this is really preservation of our mutual structure," he said. "Because of the way our business has evolved, we now have a number of stock subsidiary companies, and the bulk of our new business is being sold through stock subsidiaries."

The restructuring would allow an American Family policyholder to remain within the company's mutual structure even if he or she switched, for instance, to an American Family brand auto policy underwritten by a different subsidiary. In addition, policy owners of some American Family stock company subsidiaries would have the benefits of the mutual structure, including the right to vote for its board.

Coverage, premium rates and claims handling under existing American Family insurance policies wouldn't be affected by the change to a mutual holding company, American Family said. Company and agent operations also would be unaffected.

The new structure would set the stage for American Family to invest bigger amounts in firms that aren't directly in the insurance industry but may be connected  a company making sensors that could help prevent damage to homes insured by the company, for instance.

American Family insures more homes and passenger cars in Wisconsin than any other company.

"One of the things we would be able to do is invest in non-insurance entities," Holman said. "We've been looking at and have had investments in a variety of consumer products that we think are adjacent and closely connected to loss mitigation associated with the home, for example."

With a stock subsidiary created by the restructuring, American Family could raise money by selling stock if needed.

"We have no intention or need at this point for capital, but again, we can't predict what the future might hold and we want to give ourselves the organizational flexibility to secure capital if the need were to arise," Holman said.

A mutual holding company structure also would better position American Family to consider future mergers and acquisitions with other mutual insurance companies.

In addition to its long-standing American Family Insurance property-casualty business, the company owns Boston-based direct insurer Homesite, which it acquired in 2013, and The General, a Nashville, Tenn., direct provider of insurance for higher-risk drivers, which it bought in 2012.

The corporate restructuring needs approval from the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance. If it receives regulatory approval, policyholders then would vote on the restructuring. Eligible policyholders would be mailed information explaining the conversion plan.

"This proposed new structure is about the future and our customers," said Jack Salzwedel, American Family's chairman, chief executive and president.
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The Brookfield Chamber of Commerce has created a new app that will connect businesses to consumers and other businesses.

The "More For You" app will promote chamber businesses. The app is believed to be the first regional chamber app in Wisconsin and will help businesses communicate with consumers more directly, the chamber said.

"Promotions through the app will provide a convenient option to increase regional brand awareness. All businesses in the app and their ads, prices, and locations will be fully searchable," said Carol White, president and chief executive officer of the Brookfield Chamber of Commerce. "Additionally, in-app advertising, as part of the overall app experience, is less obtrusive and more effective than standard banner advertisements. Smartphone technology makes it easier to target ads to the right consumers."

The app was released on June 15 and is available on both Apple and Android devices at no cost.
A scanner that identifies bank or credit union customers by the unique vein pattern on their palm has been introduced by Brookfield-based Fiserv Inc.

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Hands down, Fiserv Inc. has come up with a better way for bank and credit union customers to prove their identity when they visit a branch.

The Brookfield-based provider of technology for the financial industry said Wednesday it now is offering clients "Verifast: Palm Authentication," a product that scans the unique vein pattern on the palm of a customer's hand when he or she steps up to the teller window.

Fiserv said the new biometric technology, which recently was tested in a pilot program at a Washington state credit union, can help financial institutions mitigate fraud, reduce transaction times and improve service in branches.

At banks and credit union branches, consumers have to prove their identity before they can conduct a transaction.

"A lot of times there's a driver's license exchange or some other way the consumer has to convince the teller they are who they say they are," Chris Van Der Stad, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Fiserv's Open Solutions unit, said in an interview. "With this product, what they're able to do is eliminate all that. They're able to walk up to the teller line or the counter, put their hand over this small device, and it authenticates them  identifies them  and pre-fills the teller screen with all their information."

It could even make it unnecessary for a customer to bring a wallet into the branch.

Vein patterns in the human palm, which are read with an infrared sensing device that doesn't need to be touched, are secure identifiers because the patterns are complex, with more than 5 million reference points, Fiserv said. The veins are hidden under the skin so they can't be copied or tampered with, and remain stable throughout a person's life, the company said.

An account linked to the palm scan identification system is established simply by having a customer hold a hand over the device twice for an initial capture of the vein system, Van Der Stad said.

Gesa Credit Union in Richland, Wash., piloted Verifast: Palm Authentication in three of its branches. Results of the pilot have led to plans to offer the service at five additional branches, Fiserv said.

"We benchmarked our traditional process and found that it takes about 15 seconds for a member to authenticate themselves at a teller station. Palm vein authentication takes about one second, so we've shaved 14 seconds off each transaction," Karl Guynn, director of products at Gesa Credit Union, said in a statement. "Palm vein authentication speeds up the transaction so members can be in and out of the branch and on with their lives. It's more secure and our members and our tellers love it."

In testing, the palm scan was accepted across age groups, from seniors to millennials, Van Der Stad said.

Verifast: Palm Authentication integrates Fujitsu's PalmSecure biometric technology with the Fiserv's DNA brand account processing platform. It now is available to financial institutions that use Fiserv's DNA platform.
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Wisconsin's unemployment rate fell again last month, dropping to its lowest point in 15 years, the State Department of Workforce Development said Thursday.

The preliminary 4.2% jobless rate in May was down from 4.4% in April and 4.6% in May 2015, the department said. The figures are adjusted to account for the typical seasonal variations in employment.

Wisconsin's jobless rate again bested the national figure  4.7% in May  and, compared with the country, the state continues to have a significantly larger percentage of its residents in the workforce.

The latest decline in unemployment puts the Wisconsin rate at its lowest level since it was 4.2% in March 2001, just after the U.S. had finished a decade-long period of economic expansion. The rate hit 9.2% in December 2009 and January 2010.

Helping to bring that number down have been firms such as Milwaukee Electric Tool, printer Quad/Graphics Inc. and furniture retailer Steinhafels.

Milwaukee Tool, as the company now calls itself, has added nearly 500 jobs at its Brookfield campus since 2011, and expects to add hundreds more with another expansion.

Sussex-based Quad has bolstered its Wisconsin workforce in part as it has closed plants elsewhere and moved production here.

Steinhafels, benefiting from growth in the once-suffering housing market, will be adding jobs at its Waukesha headquarters with a 100,000-square-foot warehouse expansion.

Nearly 69% of Wisconsin residents in April were either working or looking for work  one of the highest labor force participation rates in the country.

At the same time, said Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, 12,000 manufacturing job openings went unfilled during the first quarter of the year.

That's a sign of problems despite the falling official unemployment rate, he said.

While some employers face challenges filling openings, many people are being left out of the labor market "because they don't have the education and skills to be the lifelong learners that companies are looking for these days," Sheehy said.

That could lead to serious labor shortages in the years to come, he said.

"We've got so many people sitting on the sidelines, ill-equipped, who can't get in the game," said Sheehy, who has stressed the importance of improving education outcomes in Milwaukee schools.

The Workforce Development Department also said Thursday that Wisconsin added 45,900 private-sector jobs from May 2015 to May 2016.

But the gain in private-sector employment for 2015 that the department reported last month  it had said the state added 35,565 jobs from December 2014 to December 2015  turns out to have been not that large.

Without mentioning it in its news release  the announcements typically focus on the most-positive aspects of the month's employment numbers  the department in its statistical tables included a lower December-to-December jobs gain of 31,670.

Department spokesman John Dipko said by email that the original number came from data on which the federal government had signed off. Three weeks later, in early June, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published a revised figure when it released jobs numbers for all states from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

States generally wait for the federal government to release the Quarterly Census results  considered the most reliable source of data on jobs.

But in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker's administration began early releases in May 2012, shortly before the hotly contested recall election, which Walker won.

That first batch of numbers from the Quarterly Census contrasted sharply with the negative picture then being painted by more-widely reported but less-accurate monthly surveys.

Wisconsin has continued to release its Quarterly Census results a few weeks before the federal government ever since.
Polaroid from collection of Andy Krashaar Credit: Courtesy Debra Brehmer

Mary Louise Schumacher Art City An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue. SHARE A cabinet card from the collection of Joe Pabst. Courtesy Debra Brehmer and Joe Pabst Photo booth image from collection of Andy Krashaar. Courtesy Debra Brehmer Post mortem image from the collection of Bryce Clark. Courtesy Debra Brehmer

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A couple sits on a living room couch. His hair is slicked back and he wears a skinny tie. She wears a blonde bouffant. He's resting his hand expectantly on her wrist and she's looking into his eyes, smiling. To the right, only partially in the frame, a matronly figure watches.

Who chose this moment to click a camera's shutter? How did this snapshot end up here? Why does it feel vaguely familiar?

"Between a Portrait and Its Other," on view at Woodland Pattern Book Center, invites us to ask questions like these hundreds of times over, then nudges us further.

It's a multilayered exhibition of vernacular photographs  photos made for personal, not artistic, reasons  stretching from the 19th century through that near-distant time before the digital camera. Debra Brehmer, who runs The Portrait Society Gallery in the Third Ward, has assembled images from three Wisconsin collectors to explore the act of collecting, presenting and viewing.

Joe Pabst, a local LGBT activist and philanthropist, scours junk shops for portraits of gentlemen made by studio photographers in the late 1880s and early 1900s. Bryce Clark, who owns Cempazuchi Restaurant, collects post mortem photographs: images that honor the dead in ways commonplace then, but that make us uncomfortable today. Andy Kraushaar, Visual Materials Curator for the Wisconsin Historical Society, has an eye for captivatingly cryptic family snapshots and photo-booth prints (the couple on the couch is from his collection). This is each collection's public debut.

Most photos are quite small, filling three of the four gallery walls almost top to bottom. Part of the experience is deciding what to look at, then being distracted by something else. Many are difficult, especially the images of children in coffins which, in another century, were gestures of honor and memory, not the gruesome voyeurism we might assume today.

Others are life-affirming statements by the living. Pabst's vintage "cabinet cards" are hung row upon row in an eclectic mix of mustachioed gentlemen posing for portraits. They are adjacent to Kraushaar's collection of photo-booth snapshots -- side-by-side expressions of pride and identity from two centuries.

There's much to ponder about each collection, but they also serve a larger point. The exhibition pays homage to Paul Vanderbilt, curator and photographer for the Wisconsin Historical Society in the '50s, and '60s (Kraushaar's predecessor).

Vanderbilt, who died in 1992, inspired the exhibit's title and organizing principle. He's a fascinating, influential character whose profession was labeling and archiving photographs but who also believed in freeing photographs from labels. Known for his technique of pairing archival photos with his own landscapes and poetic phrasings, he understood the magic of proximity  meanings that emerge when disparate images co-exist.

So, for instance, there are no labels or historical facts in this exhibition. We approach each image as we'd approach a stranger, with little context and no prior knowledge.

Vanderbilt believed in leaving the door open to questions, and he rejected the notion that an image had one fixed meaning. A photograph only started its life, he said, when it was printed. It became something different as it was viewed  and, by extension, unpacked from a shoe box, found in a junk shop, attached to a gallery wall.

I wondered how Vanderbilt might have grouped images from these three collections, which would bring some focus to a pretty dizzying volume of intimate moments. As it is, we're free to imagine our own groupings.

I'm still thinking about the WWII soldier laughing as he adjusts his tie, and the fluid curve of a man dancing at a party probably 30 years later. In one cabinet card, a 19th century man holding a baby looks into the distance with bright optimism. In one post mortem photo, a woman sits with a baby in her lap and a man's open coffin to her left, staring darkly at the camera.

Each image alone is compelling. The idea is to take a step back and consider the relations between them. Or a few more steps back to consider all those Vanderbiltian ideas about juxtaposition, the mutability of meaning, the influence of the collector and, finally, what you bring to a photo in that particular moment.

On the fourth wall Brehmer adds a present-day note with hand portraits she has photographed; they're available for $20 each to raise funds for the Woodland Pattern Book Center. A sound collage by composer and filmmaker Ted Brusubardis lets you hear Vanderbilt's voice, recorded during a lecture and spliced with readings of his poetic phrases -- as if to replace wall text with someone whispering over your shoulder.

"Between a Portrait and Its Other" is on view at the Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St., through Aug. 28. Visit www.woodlandpattern.org for details.

Diane M. Bacha, a longtime journalist and editor, is a regular contributor to the Journal Sentinel's Art City pages.
Timberley Princess Brown, 16, speaks about the death of her cousin during Precious Lives: The Live Show at the Pabst Theater. Credit: Michael Sears

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Unlike in rehearsals, Timberley Princess Brown got down on her hands and knees on stage at the Pabst Theater to share her story about losing her cousin to gun violence.

Fueled by the emotion of the crowd at "Precious Lives: The Live Show," the 16-year old showed how her father jumped into her cousin's grave at the funeral.

"He just wanted to be with him again and see him again," she said on stage under a spotlight crying. "That was the worst death I ever experienced in my life."

Precious Lives: The Live Show on Wednesday night brought faces, not just voices, to Milwaukee's gun violence at the Pabst Theater. Precious Lives is a two-year, 100-part radio series about young people and gun violence produced by 371 productions.

Through spoken word, rap and song in 15-minute segments  home, transformation, change and peace  youth and adults addressed violence in Milwaukee.

Each member of the 10-person cast shared a personal story  a mother's suicide, the loss of a brother, a son in jail  about the effect of gun violence on their life.

"Could their stories evoke someone who says 'this isn't my problem' to reconsider their position?" asked the show's host Reggie Moore, director of Milwaukee's Office of Violence Prevention.

The cast illustrated the realities of living in neighborhoods plagued by violence.

"It seems like the only way to talk is with bullets now," 19-year-old Nicole Newson said in her performance. "Bang, bang, bang."

"In many places, they probably don't see gun violence," Brown said after I show. "I touched as many people as I could tonight. Even though the people I lost are gone, sharing my story gave me a sense of relief."

Zanaria Banks, 13, said she needed to share her story of losing her baby brother. Banks said sharing her story Wednesday night "helped me get my tears out."

"It was powerful to hear young people, who are so articulate, share how (gun violence) changes their lives," Mary Allmon, who lives on the east side, said after the show.

Chelsea Wait, who lives in Riverwest, said, "Even though I haven't experienced violence, it completely shapes my view of the city."

Solana Patterson-Ramos said the emotion captured in each cast member's story helped give a personal connection to the violence in the news.

"We have our issues because of poverty and systematic racism," Patterson-Ramos said. "The only way to change is if people understand that this doesn't happen in a bubble."

The show's director and writer Michelle Lopez-Rios spent four weeks with the cast to create the live show based on their stories. She helped each cast member craft their life experiences into a performance piece.

Khary Penebaker, who works as an advocate for violence prevention, said Lopez-Rios helped him talk about his mom's suicide from a storytelling perspective, rather than policy.

"I can't go back and save her life," he said during the performance. "But what I can do, what I'm going to do, is save someone else's."

He said his mother's voice was heard better this way.

"For me, sharing this pain helps," he said after the show. "It's cathartic. I get it out of me. But as many times as I've done it, it hurts a little bit."

The performance Wednesday launched a series of 15-minute pop-up shows.

Founder of Precious Lives and president of 371 Productions Brad Lichtenstein said the goal is to perform 16 of these short shows in the next nine months to corporations, civic clubs and anywhere people need to hear Precious Lives' message.

The pop-up shows are another extension of Lichtenstein's goal to show the "slow-motion mass shooting" that happens each year in the city.

Last year in Milwaukee, 145 people were killed, more than 80% died by gunfire. The 69% increase in homicides from 2014 was the highest number of victims since 1993, when 160 people died.

"Gun violence affects all of us," Lichtenstein said, "because this is our city. This is our community."
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The West Allis-West Milwaukee School District is delaying $6.6 million in end-of-the-school-year teacher payments because of financial constraints, in what is thought to be a first for the suburban Milwaukee district.

West Allis-West Milwaukee, which has been digging itself out of a $14 million deficit over the past year, alerted teachers in an email last week that those who normally take their summer pay in a lump sum in June would receive just a fourth of their expected paychecks Thursday, with the balance to come a week later.

Business manager Andy Chromy said the district had no choice, given its financial troubles and the resulting limits imposed by auditors on the type of short-term borrowing it would have traditionally done to cover such payments.

But teachers and their union representatives are calling foul, saying the delay will cause a true hardship for some.

"The payment schedule is published the spring before. Everybody counts on it. They expect it," said one teacher who asked not to be identified out of fear of reprisal from the administration.

"I know one couple. They're both teachers. They live paycheck to paycheck and are trying to buy a house. That changes their approach."

She said many teachers were blindsided by the news, which was buried in a "budget update" emailed to district employees June 9, the last day of school.

"By that point, we don't have any recourse. They don't even have to face us," she said.

Steve Cupery, the Wisconsin Education Association Council representative for West Allis-West Milwaukee teachers, said the district has agreed to work with individual teachers who can demonstrate a hardship.

But he blasted the delay as a byproduct of Act 10, the 2011 state law that eroded the bargaining rights of public employee unions.

"It's just one more example of the consequences of Act 10, how it hurts people and will dissuade people from going into the profession," Cupery said.

All staff received their regular payments Thursday, and teachers who are paid on a 12-month cycle are unaffected by delay.

Historically, teacher contracts in Wisconsin have allowed them to spread their payments over 12 months or take their end-of-the-year salary payments in a lump sum in June.

Since the passage of Act 10, he said, at least one district tried to impose a 12-month payment cycle. But the union objected, citing a state law that requires payment for services already rendered to be made within 31 days unless there is a voluntary agreement to do otherwise.

West Allis-West Milwaukee's issues appear to stem from a series of costly financial decisions made under then-Superintendent Kurt Wachholz, who retired unexpectedly in the summer of 2014. Among them, according to Chromy: the purchase and renovation of a new building, cost overruns on staffing and benefits, and several facilities projects.

The largest piece of that  about $5 million  was for a debt payment related to a yearslong lawsuit over a risky investment scheme that cost West Allis-West Milwaukee and four other districts a total of $200 million a decade ago, Chromy said.

"Since the verdict had come, there was some anticipation by our legal team that that payment would come in ... to offset that cost," but that didn't happen, Chromy said.

According to an audit released late last year, the district had overspent its 2013-'14 and 2014-'15 budgets by a total of $14 million, wiping out its entire reserves.

Chromy, who arrived midyear 2014, said the district has made significant cuts to address the shortfalls and expects to begin the next school year $2 million in the black. But cash flow problems persist, he said, forcing the decision to delay the teacher payments.

As of June 9, according to the email to staff, the district had a cash balance of $3.9 million and expected a $1.1 million state payment on the 13th. But that would not have been enough to cover its regular payroll obligations plus the end-of-year payment to teachers.

Chromy said he could see around June 3 or 4 that the district wasn't going to have sufficient cash flow to cover the payments. So the decision was made to delay the final teacher payments until June 21, a day after it is scheduled to receive a $16.7 million check from the state  the final third of its general aid payment for the 2015-'16 school year.

"This was our last option," he said.
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The Milwaukee County Board's finance committee on Thursday unanimously recommended releasing $300,000 to open a county Office on African American Affairs.

The committee's vote followed County Executive Chris Abele's approval last month of a compromise with the board that would create the office as an independent department rather than a unit within the administration reporting to the executive.

The County Board on June 23 will act on Abele's resolution to release $300,000 from a contingency fund so the administration can begin a nationwide search for a department director.

A director appointed by Abele would be subject to confirmation by the board.

The board last November unanimously endorsed establishing a county office to reduce racial inequities in education, housing, jobs, health and imprisonment.

In April, Abele said a priority for his second full term in office would be making significant progress on reducing racial inequities that plague the county.

Abele thanked the finance committee for its support Thursday.

"I appreciate that we continue to have a united front on the mission of the office and I look forward to continuing to work together to tackle Milwaukee's racial inequities with the urgency that this issue requires," Abele said in a statement. "I am hopeful that the office will earn the strong support of the full board at their meeting next week."
The three grown children of Amy and Jose Rivera are all engaged at the same time. From left, Jose holding grandson Ajay; Amy; Jack Rivera and his fiancee Amanda Prinsen; Mike Rivera and his fiancee Justine Lutzen; and Joy Rivera and Herb Raasch, who will marry Saturday. Credit: Michael Sears

Getting engaged has a familiar ring in the Amy and Jose Rivera family. All three of their grown kids are betrothed at once.

"All we have is wedding talk in our house," Amy said when she called to tell me about this unusual confluence of commitment.

In chronological order, here's how it went down:

Daughter Joy, 33, said yes to Herb Raasch's proposal last June. Their engagement ends on Saturday when they exchange wedding vows at the gazebo in the Greendale village center.

Son Jack, 25, popped the question to Amanda Prinsen in April of this year. They plan to marry in spring of 2018. "I was second to get engaged, but I will end up being last to be married," he said.

And a month later, son Mike, 28, asked Justine Lutzen to marry him. That will happen September of next year. "I'm the second of the kids but the third to get engaged," he said.

Need a score card yet? Maybe we could recycle a few of the many bridal magazines lying about at chez Rivera on Milwaukee's southwest side.

"We're a close family so our kids are here all the time," said Amy, a retired MPS teacher, as is husband Jose. "One of the funny things is for the kids not to step on each other's toes. If one wants this kind of dress, the other one can't have that kind of dress. And if one wants this color, the other one can't have that color. One's doing cupcakes, one wants a cake, one is doing pies."

The kids insist they're not feeling cramped by all the engagements or competitive about their weddings. They will be standing up in each other's ceremonies.

"If there is competition, I don't really care," Mike said. "All three of the girls are talking about weddings at the same time. And all three of the guys are just going along for the ride, I guess."

That usually works out for the best. When I asked Amy how involved Jose is in all the planning, she laughed and said, "He's a great dad. He'll look good in a tux that day."

Each wedding will be different, as are the stories of how each couple met and got engaged.

Joy, a systems engineer at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, met Herb, 37, a trauma nurse at Froedtert Hospital, through the online app Tinder. "We both swiped right," she said. Each was married before. Joy has a son, Ajay, 4, and Herb has a daughter, Akayla, 11.

For his proposal at their Greendale home, Herb served a pasta salad to Joy on a plate embossed with "Will you marry me?" The plan sputtered, but Herb  who served three tours in Iraq  soldiered on.

"I didn't eat all of it. Then he finished it for me, and the mayonnaise was still all over the plate. He said, 'Can you wipe off your plate?' and I'm like, 'What?' " Joy said. Finally, she spotted the question and said yes.

Jack, a risk and safety specialist at Potawatomi Casino, and Amanda, 23, a graduate student in psychology, met at a charity volleyball tournament in Whitewater. Jack proposed to Amanda after she walked through a tunnel of love with rose petals and memory cards in a hallway of their home in Franklin.

Mike, who works at an Aurora clinic, and Justine, 28, a special ed assistant at Whitnall High School, met at a restaurant where they were servers. For his engagement scenario, Mike sent Justine on a scavenger hunt to half a dozen locations in the Milwaukee area. A family member met her at each one and handed her a scroll with clues to reach the next stop. Justine finally arrived on Water St. downtown where she found Mike down on one knee at the very spot where they first kissed.

So clearly it's the spring and summer of love for the Rivera family.

"We're all happy for each other," Jack said. "I'm happy for my brother and sister that they're in the same boat as I am." Even if the boat is a little crowded.

Mom Amy said she stands ready to help with the weddings any way she can.

"When Jack and Amanda are married and they say 'I do,' it will be like whew!"

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or email at jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl
The latest poll by Marquette University Law School shows that 74% of Wisconsin independent voters are uncomfortable with the idea of Donald Trump as president. Of that same group, 64% feel the same way about Hillary Clinton. Credit: Getty Images

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The picture that emerges from the latest Marquette University Law School Poll with more than four months to go before election day is of a discouraged, disillusioned electorate  a bunch of voters who don't much like their choices.

This isn't surprising, given that one of the candidates for president has done anything he can to coarsen the tone of politics in the nation. As a result, 74% of independents in the MU poll say they are uncomfortable with the idea of Donald Trump as president. Smart people.

But the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doesn't fare that much better. Of that same group  Wisconsin independents  64% felt the same way about Clinton. In fact, the leader among independents was, essentially, none of the above. The combined 35% of those who said "neither" or "didn't know" outpolls either Trump or Clinton.

As we have written previously, Trump has shown himself unfit for office  his lame attempts at political gain out of the tragedy of the terrorist killings in Orlando is only the latest of his many transgressions. He is proudly uninformed, promising only the shelter of a supposed strong man.

But Clinton has problems of her own. She has a long record of secrecy, going back to the earliest days of her husband President Bill Clinton's administration. And fairly or note, many voters remain wary of her.

Two more polarizing political figures rarely have shared the same political stage.

In the Marquette poll, Clinton leads Trump by seven points among registered voters and by nine points among likely voters. Trump's prospects among Republicans have improved with a bare majority now viewing him favorably, but 35% of state GOP voters do not  an astonishing statistic this deep into the campaign.

The shame in all this, of course, is that voters here and across the country deserve a real discussion with real proposals about the most important issues facing the nation: national security and terrorism, the economy, crumbling infrastructure, trade. They are getting none of that from Trump, whose prescriptions  including deporting all undocumented immigrants and walling off the country from Muslims  border on the absurd. Clinton, at least, offers deep experience and thoughtful ideas for discussion, though whether she will be able to engage Trump is anyone's guess.

The only good news amid all this cynicism is that there remains plenty of time for both candidates to have an authentic discussion. And it still appears that Wisconsin, a longtime battleground state, may still play a key role in determining the winner. President Barack Obama is expected to campaign for Clinton in the state in the coming days as she tries to consolidate support from independents and supporters of her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

It's disheartening to see so many clearly disaffected voters. But given the tenor of the campaign so far  and what's likely to come  it's hardly a surprise.
Dustin Diamond, who played Screech in the 90s television show Saved by the Bell owes the state of Wisconsin $93,768 in taxes. Credit: Dana Ferguson

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The actor who played Screech in Saved by the Bell owes the state of Wisconsin more than $90,000 in back taxes.

Dustin Diamond, 39, has had tax troubles for several years in Wisconsin including delinquent tax warrants filed in 2009 and 2011 as well as a mortgage foreclosure filed in 2010 which was later dropped.

This week Diamonds name showed up on the states list of taxpayers who have repeatedly ignored notices and letters to pay their taxes. According to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, Diamond, who lives in Port Washington, owes $93,768.43 in back taxes.

The notice is the latest in a string of run-ins with the state.

Diamond was convicted in May 2015 of two misdemeanors - he was cleared of a felony charge of second-degree recklessly endangering safety - in the stabbing of a man during a fight. He and his fiancee were ordered to pay about $1,500 in restitution to the man he stabbed in the bar fight on Christmas 2014 at the Grand Avenue Saloon in Port Washington.

Diamond was sentenced to 120 days in jail and 15 months of probation in Ozaukee County and was released a month early for taking a cleaning job in the jail. But he was arrested May 25 and jailed again in Ozaukee County for what corrections officials described as a probation violation after a urine test was positive for oxycodone.
By of the

U.S. Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is asking Facebook to turn over material from five accounts used by Omar Mateen before and during his assault Sunday on a gay night club in Orlando, Fla.

In his Wednesday letter to Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, Johnson said his staff has learned that Mateen was searching out "Pulse Orlando" and "shooting" on Sunday.

"It is my understanding that Omar Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content," Johnson wrote in the two-page letter.

Mateen killed 49 people and injured dozens of others before he was killed by police. It was the worst mass shooting in American history.

On Sunday, Mateen "apparently posted 'America and Russa stop bombing the Islamic state,'" and also pledged his "alliance" with Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Johnson wrote.

"He then posted 'The real muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the west' and 'You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes ... now taste the Islamic state vengeance,'" according to Johnson's letter.

"In a final post, Mateen apparently wrote, 'In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic state in the usa,'" Johnson wrote.

In the letter, Johnson said his staff learned that in May, Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the couple behind the December terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

On June 4, Mateen "apparently searched 'Baghdadi Speech,'" Johnson said. Johnson added that his staff understood that Mateen "apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FBI searches, including searching for specific law enforcement officers."

The first-term Wisconsin senator gave Zuckerberg until June 29 to turn over to his Senate committee all activity logs, timeline information, messages, photos and posts related to the five Facebook accounts associated with Mateen.

In a separate letter to FBI Director James Comey, Johnson said his committee is conducting an inquiry "to better understand the root causes of homegrown extremism, assess the vulnerabilities of so-called 'soft' targets, and oversee the work of federal law-enforcement entities."

Johnson asked for information about actions taken by the FBI "before, during and after the attack."

He asked the FBI about what it knew regarding Mateen's Facebook activity. In addition, Johnson's letter raised specific questions about Mateen's activities. For instance, he asked about all details about an international flight Mateen took in March 2012, and a "device" he was wearing when his body was found in the nightclub. He also asked whether Mateen, his wife or his father were under FBI surveillance in the days prior to the attack or were on a terrorism watch list.

Johnson also asked whether the FBI was contacted by Mateen's employer or co-workers.

Comey was also given until June 29 to produce the requested information.
Wisconsin's U.S. senators Tammy Baldwin (left), a Democrat, and Ron Johnson (right), a Republican. Baldwin supports the nomination Wisconsin lawyer Donald Schott to the federal appeals court. Johnson has not said whether he would vote for Schott, whose nomination a committee advanced to the full Senate on Thursday. Credit: Getty

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Madison The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced the nomination of Wisconsin lawyer Donald Schott to fill the longest judicial vacancy of its kind.

Attention now moves to the Republican-controlled Senate, which has the final say on the appointment to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Whether senators will hold a vote remains unclear.

The seat on the 7th Circuit that traditionally goes to someone from Wisconsin has been vacant since 2010.

The vacancy on the Chicago-based court has resulted in at least one split decision, when the judges there split 5-5 in 2014 on whether Wisconsin's voter ID law was constitutional. The divided vote left in place a ruling by a three-judge panel of the court that upheld the requirement that voters show photo ID at the polls.

Republicans have been reluctant to approve judicial nominees of President Barack Obama, refusing to hold a vote on Merrick Garland, his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court after Justice Antonin Scalia died.

The Judiciary Committee's vote to forward Schott's appointment to the Senate was 13-7, with four Republicans joining nine Democrats in support of Schott. All "no" votes were cast by Republicans.

The vacancy has caused a rift between Wisconsin's senators, Democrat Tammy Baldwin and Republican Ron Johnson, with Baldwin blaming Johnson for the yearslong delay in getting a judge confirmed and Johnson blaming Baldwin for violating the terms of an agreement the two had negotiated over how to vet nominees.

Neither of them sit on the Judiciary Committee. Baldwin has been a vocal supporter of Schott, while Johnson has sent mixed signals on him.

"I am proud to have pushed Don Schott's nomination forward because the people of Wisconsin and the entire Seventh Circuit deserve a fully functioning court," Baldwin said in a statement Thursday. "It is my hope that Senator Johnson will join me in calling on Majority Leader (Mitch) McConnell to schedule a floor vote so the Senate can confirm Don Schott without undue delay."

In a statement, Johnson noted he turned in a "blue slip" for Schott in March, which is a signal from senators that they won't block a confirmation hearing for a home-state nominee. But he did not join Baldwin in her call for a floor vote on Schott.

"I signed the blue slip recommending that the Judiciary Committee consider the nomination of Don Schott, which it reported out favorably today. I congratulate Mr. Schott on his nomination's progress," Johnson's statement said.

Johnson is being challenged this fall by Democrat Russ Feingold, the former senator whom Johnson defeated in 2010.

In a statement, Feingold said Schott would give Wisconsinites "a strong, just and measured voice" on the court. He called on Johnson to "stop playing politics with our court system, and do his jobs to fill the vacancies on both the Seventh Circuit and the Supreme Court."

Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who has been tracking the process, said the committee vote was a "promising sign" for Schott.

"McConnell will decide about allowing a debate and vote," Tobias said by email. "Much will depend on Senator Johnson, who could encourage (McConnell) to hold them."
House Speaker Paul Ryan (right) says he has had no second thoughts about endorsing Donald Trump. Credit: Associated Press

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Washington  House Speaker Paul Ryan says he has had no second thoughts about endorsing Donald Trump for president, despite wishing "he would say and do things differently."

"I don't look back. I don't have second thoughts. Obviously he's said and done things that I don't agree with since I did this," Ryan said in a one-on-one interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In explaining his endorsement of Trump two weeks ago, Ryan talked far less about Trump's merits as a candidate than about his own role as speaker and desire not to exacerbate the fissures in the Republican Party.

"I hope he improves the tone of the campaign," Ryan said of his party's presumptive nominee. "But I made my decision as the speaker of the House and a leader in our party, based upon the belief that I did not want to be a party toward ripping our party in half, and basically denying us the White House and harming us in securing our majority again."

The Janesville Republican now frequently finds himself defending his support for Trump while distancing himself from the candidate's most provocative rhetoric and policies. Asked about Trump's recent comment that Republicans in Congress should "just please be quiet" if they can't be supportive, Ryan said he will continue to speak out when he feels it's necessary.

Since his endorsement, Ryan has criticized Trump for what he termed racist comments about a judge of Mexican heritage, and has reiterated his opposition to Trump's proposal for a Muslim immigration ban.

"If I am asked a question, I am going to give an honest answer," said Ryan. "I have to defend conservative principles and I have to make sure people understand what conservatism is and what Republicans stand for."

Referring to Trump, Ryan said: "Do I wish he would say and do things differently? Of course I do, but that's not in my control. And so that's not something I can spend my time worrying about. ... But I do have a responsibility to make an attempt to unify our party going forward so that we're strong."

Asked if he would have approached the endorsement decision differently if he were still a committee chairman and not the leader of the House, Ryan said, "I'm not doing the hypothetical stuff. Nice try."

Ryan said that in Trump's case, "the public persona and the private person seem to be two different people at times. And I'm hoping that the public person is like the private person, and I do hope that the tone improves and the campaign is one that's a unifying campaign for all Republicans, so that not only can Republicans unify but we can go out and win converts. We can't just win this election by only getting the Republican vote."

Ryan said he did not have a problem with GOP colleagues in Congress who have refused to support Trump. Those colleagues include fellow Wisconsinite Reid Ribble, who says he regards Trump's temperament and demeanor as disqualifying.

"I think people are going to make their own minds up. ... I wouldn't tell a person to do something that they believe violates their conscience," said Ryan. "I'm not going to hold an individual person's decision against them."

Asked about the biting criticism he has received over his Trump endorsement from some anti-Trump conservative activists and commentators, Ryan said: "People feel very strongly about this. And I understand the range of opinions, and I don't know that everybody has one right answer. I think each of us has different roles to play."

In one notable critique, conservative columnist George Will referred to Ryan's decision to back Trump as a "capitulation" and "degradation."

"I've got thick skin. I can take those kinds of criticisms," Ryan said. "I would just simply remind people that as the speaker of the House, I don't think it's ever been done before where the speaker has not supported the party's nominee who was selected by the voters, the Republican voters, to be the nominee. ... I didn't want to be a leader of guaranteeing that our party is disunified in the fall."

Poll numbers

Ryan's public standing in his home state hasn't changed since he endorsed Trump, according to a Wisconsin poll released Wednesday by the Marquette University Law School. He was viewed positively by 49% of registered voters and negatively by 32%  almost identical to his March numbers.

In the same survey, 70% of GOP voters in the state said Ryan made the right decision in endorsing Trump, but a quarter of Republicans and a majority of independents called it a mistake.

The poll also suggested a striking degree of pessimism within the party, with almost half of GOP voters in Wisconsin saying they expected their party to remain divided through the November election.

Ryan agreed that was a striking finding.

"I think people are looking at the moment ... and they see Republicans arguing with each other and so they project that current view going forward," he said.

Asked about the varying degrees of worry, alarm and panic that some Republicans are feeling and expressing about this election cycle, Ryan said, "We've got a long ways to go."

Asked if he shares those concerns, he said:

"Of course I want to win. (And) the last thing I want to do is echo such concerns because I don't want to amplify them. I want to unify and win."
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Maan News Agency |  

BETHLEHEM (Maan)  A controversial new anti-terrorism law passed the Israeli Knesset on Wednesday, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which will grant the Israeli state far-reaching powers in cases of suspected terrorism, in a move a member of the Joint List called draconian and unacceptable.

According to Haaretz, the new Israeli law would apply only within Israel and includes a provision expanding the definition of terrorist organization membership to include passive members who are not actively involved in any group, but can now be indicted by Israeli authorities.

The law also includes a provision that gives the defense minister  currently ultraright Avigdor Lieberman  the power to confiscate property of alleged members of terrorist organizations without getting approval by Israeli courts, Haaretz reported.

All of the Knesset parties voted in favor of the law, with the exception of the left-wing Meretz party and the Joint List.

Haaretz quoted Knesset and Joint List member Ahmad Tibi as saying that the bill was draconian and unacceptable, adding: You can demolish houses, arrest people, deport people, kill them and shoot them when theyre on the ground bleeding But you cant suppress a nations desire to liberate itself from the occupation.
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By Adam Quinn | (The Conversation) |  

Those whove been wondering when Donald Trump would switch from the wild bombast of his primary campaign to the sober mode traditionally demanded by a general election now have their answer: never.

The dreadful gun massacre at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida on June 12 presented Trump with as clear an opportunity as he will ever have to rise above his well-earned reputation for bigotry and divisiveness and to find the presidential voice more becoming of a major party nominee.

Instead, he opted to double down on the traits that most terrify those who regard the prospect of his presidency as a threat to national security.

This is not hyperbole. To get a full sense of just how unmoored Trump is, lets just cast our minds back to September 2001, when George W. Bush was called upon to govern in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in history.

9/11 put conflict with terrorists citing extreme Islam as their ideology at the centre of US security policy, but on one rhetorical point, Bush kept his feet on the ground: Muslims as a group should never be conflated with the tiny sliver engaged in violent extremism. Moderate Muslims, which is to say, the overwhelming majority of Muslims, both in the US and overseas, must be treated as crucial allies.

In his remarks after Orlando, Donald Trump took this standard of discourse, set light to it and stamped on it.

First, he appeared on Twitter, his favoured medium for rash, unreflective pronouncements, to claim the attack as evidence of his correctness in having called for more aggressive policies and to thank all those he claimed had congratulated him for his prescience.

In interviews and most of all in a speech in the hours that followed, he reiterated his pledge to impose a total ban on Muslims entering the US. He blamed political correctness for allowing such attacks to happen. He highlighted the decision to allow the Orlando shooters Afghan parents to enter America as the root cause of the threat.

He warned Muslim Americans of consequences unless they co-operate with us by turning over the terrorist sympathisers in their midst, suggesting that they know where they are. He asserted (inaccurately) that refugees and asylum seekers were admitted to the US without background checks, and that his opponent Hillary Clinton favoured admitting hundreds of thousands more Muslim incomers on this basis.

Most outlandish of all, he mused aloud that President Obama might himself be in sympathy with the terrorists. And when it dared to report and parse his semi-coherent remarks, the Washington Post then had its credentials for access to the Trump campaign revoked.

Combined with Trumps longstanding promises to intensify the bombing of Islamic State-held territory (which could only be done by knowingly bombing civilians), to return to waterboarding and other torture, and to kill terrorists families, and one could not design a platform better designed to alienate Muslims worldwide.

It is no exaggeration to say that implementation of Trumps platform is exactly the Islamic States hope: to present Muslims with a binary choice between itself and an irreconcilably hostile West.

Highway to Hell

Trumps post-Orlando performance has sent a new wave of horror through those senior Republicans who find themselves manacled to him for the rest of the campaign.

Even in the week before the massacre, senior party figures such as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had publicly rebuked their presidential nominee for suggesting that federal judge Gonzalo Curiel could not fairly adjudicate in a case against one of Trumps businesses because he was Mexican and therefore biased against him (Curiel is from Indiana). Ryan, who had said he will vote for Trump only days before, said this fit the textbook definition of a racist comment.

Now these most reluctant supporters find themselves obliged to say whether they endorse their candidates litany of falsehoods regarding Muslim immigration or his plan to abruptly terminate it. Ryan has publicly said that he does not.

[Donald Trump Speech After Orlando Attack 6/13/16:]

There is an argument that Trump is simply the predictable apex of a trajectory the Republican Party has been on for some time. For years its candidates across the country have appealed to their voters fear of the threat presented by non-white others as a way of mobilising support and attacking opponents.

But Trump is far more frightening than any recent Republican candidate of note. He has not stayed within the rules of the insidious dog-whistle playbook; he has expanded them dramatically, both with the explicitness of his appeals and the extremism of his actual proposals.

His persona seems not to be a calculated act, a front behind which lies a cool and balanced actor with rational plans. On the contrary, his intellectual incoherence and erratic emotionalism appear to be his most genuine features.

Perhaps Trump could have shown a new, restrained and responsible self in his response to Orlando, and simply chose not to  or maybe he is actually incapable of modulation and reflection. Perhaps he simply doesnt have another face to show the world. What we can now be sure of is that he isnt going to change.

He is a new departure for modern America: a European-style ethno-nationalist populist of a kind largely alien to either the conservative or liberal camps of American politics. His election would represent a turn away from much of what has hitherto made the US exceptional, and towards the dark side.

Adam Quinn, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Birmingham

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |

American attitudes on refugees from the Middle East: A Public Opinion Poll by Shibley Telhami is just out.

Despite the raft of Republican mayors who have pledged to keep Syrian refugees out of their states (that isnt actually a thing) and the sewage that has spilled from the mouth of Donald Trump, a majority of Americans supports helping Syrian and Iraqi immigrants and letting them into the US, and most Americans recognize that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq contributed to the rise of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), and so to the crisis in Syria.

Key findings:

Of 750,000 refugees admitted since 9/11, only 3 have been arrested on terrorism charges. Most Americans think it is more, and many Americans think it is substantially more.

Nevertheless, 59% of Americans support taking in refugees from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries if the US screens them for security risks (it does it is an 18-month process of scrutiny). 41% are scrooges opposed. The percentage supporting Syrian refugees in particular is a little lower, 53%, probably because of all the bad press.

Some 55% of Americans think refugees would be welcome in their communities.

With regard to Syrian refugees already in the US, 3/4s of Americans want the country to welcome them and help absorb them into American society. But 21% of Americans would like to expel those already here.

From mainstream press coverage of political attitudes this spring, I would have thought that the expulsionists were substantially more than a fifth of the population.

Although the threat of terrorism is usually highlighted in the press as a reason to be afraid of the Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing . . . terrorism, in fact nearly as big a percentage of those who decline to help these refugees say they do so for economic reasons (41%) as for fear of terrorism (45%).

One of the reasons for majority support of taking in Iraqi and Syrian refugees is that Americans feel a moral obligation to do so. 2/3s of Clinton and Sanders supporters feel this to be a moral obligation, while the percentages are reversed among Trump supporters.

The moral obligation stems from guilt over the Bush administrations illegal war of naked aggression on Iraq, which 56% of Americans think had a significant role in creating Syrian refugees, and another 31% said had at least a small role in doing so.

Im actually surprised at these responses, and at how well informed the public is on this matter. Although you could argue that Syria fell apart for indigenous reasons, ISIL wouldnt have existed to take over the countrys east if it hadnt been for Bushs Iraq occupation. ISIL began as the Tawhid of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then became al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then the Islamic State of Iraq, then the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant when its fighters went over to Syria to join in the civil war there. Its fighters honed their skills fighting the American occupation army. Many leaders were former Iraqi Baath Party officers.

Americans think that the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the Obama administration wants to bring in this year is just about the right number.

Millennial youth and Democrats are generally twice as favorable to taking in or otherwise helping refugees from the Syria and Iraq Wars as Republicans, and Trump Republicans are the least charitable toward them of all.

The survey was sponsored by the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution and the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, fielded by Nielsen Scarborough.

Brookings Institution: American attitudes on refugees from the Middle East  Part 1

Brookings Institution:  American attitudes on refugees from the Middle East  Part 2
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - June 16, 2016) - Sabina Gold & Silver Corp. (TSX:SBB) ("Sabina" or the "Company") announces that it has received the report (the "Report") of the Nunavut Impact Review Board ("NIRB" or the "Board") to the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs (the "Minister") in relation to Sabina's proposal (the "Proposal") relating to its Back River Gold Project in Nunavut, Canada (the "Project").

In its Report, the NIRB recommended to the Minister that the Project not proceed to the licensing and permitting regulatory phase at this time but indicated that the proposal could be reconsidered once more information is provided to address uncertainties regarding effects predictions and mitigation measures, particularly with respect to caribou and climate change.

The Report follows a lengthy regulatory process during which the NIRB reviewed Sabina's Environmental Impact Statement, which ran approximately 15,000 pages and included numerous technical studies and reports. The regulatory process included a six-day public hearing in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

During the public hearing, the Project received broad support from the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, Kitikmeot communities and federal and territorial government agencies. In its Report, the NIRB acknowledges the general support for the economic benefits that are expected to accrue to the Kitikmeot region if the Project were to proceed.

"We are studying the Report and reviewing the NIRB's recommendations as we seek to continue to move the Project forward," said Bruce McLeod, President and Chief Executive Officer of Sabina. "The Report is over 300 pages long and it will take some time for us to review and analyze the Report in detail," said McLeod. "We remain confident that the concerns of the Board can be addressed and resolved through further consultation and collaboration with stakeholders."

"We fully appreciate the central importance of caribou in the North," said McLeod. "Obviously, climate change is a matter that impacts everyone - and Northern Canada is more heavily impacted than other places. These are values and concerns we share. Sabina will be considering these issues carefully as it continues its review of the NIRB report."

Under the provisions of the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement, the next step in the Project review process is for the Minister to review the NIRB's report. Sabina is reviewing its options, including a request to the Minister to refer the report back to NIRB for further consideration.

Conference Call

The Company will be holding a conference call on Thursday June 17, 2016 at 6:30am Pacific time.



PARTICIPANT TELEPHONE NUMBERS Canada/USA TF: 1-800-319-4610 Toronto Toll: +1-416-915-3239 International Toll: +1-604-638-5340 Callers should dial in 5 - 10 min prior to the scheduled start time and simply ask to join the Sabina call.

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp

Sabina Gold & Silver Corp. is a well-financed, emerging precious metals company with district scale, world class undeveloped assets in one of the world's newest, politically stable mining jurisdictions: Nunavut, Canada.

Sabina recently released a Feasibility Study on its 100% owned Back River Gold Project which presents a project that has been designed on a fit-for purpose basis, with the potential to produce ~200,000 ounces a year for ~11 years with a rapid payback of 2.9 years. At a US$1,150 gold price and a 0.80 exchange rate, the Study delivers a potential after tax internal rate of return of approximately 24.2% with an initial CAPEX of $415 million.

In addition to Back River, Sabina also owns a significant silver royalty on Glencore's Hackett River Project. The silver royalty on Hackett River's silver production is comprised of 22.5% of the first 190 million ounces produced and 12.5% of all silver produced thereafter.

The Company has approximately $45 million in its treasury and is currently amending the budget and plans for 2016.

Qualified Person

Wes Carson, P.Eng, Vice-President, Project Development for the Company has reviewed and approved the technical disclosure in this news release in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

Forward Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (the "forward-looking statements"), including our belief as to our ability to address and resolve the concerns of the NIRB through further consultation and collaboration with stakeholders. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the future circumstances, outcomes or results anticipated in or implied by such forward-looking statements will occur or that plans, intentions or expectations upon which the forward-looking statements are based will occur. While we have based these forward-looking statements on our expectations about future events as at the date that such statements were prepared, the statements are not a guarantee that such future events will occur and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors which could cause events or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks, uncertainties, assumptions and factors include, among others, the actions by government and regulatory authorities, such as NIRB. In addition, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Known risk factors include risks associated with exploration and project development; the need for additional financing; the calculation of mineral resources and reserves; operational risks associated with mining and mineral processing; fluctuations in metal prices; title matters; government regulation; obtaining and renewing necessary licences and permits; environmental liability and insurance; and other risks and uncertainties, including those relating to the Back River Project and general risks associated with the mineral exploration and development industry described in our Annual Information Form, financial statements and MD&A for the fiscal period ended December 31, 2015 filed with the Canadian Securities Administrators and available at www.sedar.com. Although we have attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results 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, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. We are under no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable securities laws.
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA--(Marketwired - June 16, 2016) - Erdene Resource Development Corp. (TSX:ERD) ("Erdene" or "Company"), is pleased to announce its shareholders voted in favour of all items of business brought before them at the Company's Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders ("AGM") held on June 14, 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Details of the AGM are provided below, and a webcast of the AGM presentation is available here.

Appointment of Board and Executive

At the AGM, shareholders voted in favor of Erdene management's nominees to the board of directors, with details of the vote as follows:

Nominee Votes For % For Votes Withheld % Withheld Peter Akerley 46,528,199 99.99% 2,450 0.01% Dr. Anna Biolik 46,522,409 99.98% 8,240 0.02% William Burton 46,528,199 99.99% 2,450 0.01% John Byrne 46,514,984 99.97% 15,665 0.03% J.C. (Chris) Cowan 46,524,349 99.97% 6,300 0.01% T. Layton Croft 46,515,699 99.97% 14,950 0.03% David Mosher 46,515,699 99.97% 14,950 0.03% Philip Webster 46,513,209 99.96% 17,440 0.04%

"We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Anna Biolik and David Mosher to our Company's board of directors. Their combined experience in business development, government relations, and mining in foreign jurisdictions will add strength as we advance our core gold projects in southwest Mongolia," said Peter Akerley, Erdene's President and CEO. "Anna has over thirty years of public and private sector experience and is one of the foremost Canadian experts on Central Asian business and diplomacy, having acted as Canada's first resident Ambassador in Mongolia, while David is a gold mining executive with over thirty-five years of experience in mine and company building in foreign jurisdictions, including Russia and Burkina Faso."

Following the AGM, Erdene's board of directors appointed its executive officers for the coming year, namely: President and Chief Executive Officer - Peter Akerley; Chairman of the Board - Chris Cowan; Vice President and Chief Financial Officer - Ken MacDonald; and Corporate Secretary - Suzan Frazer.

Auditor Re-Appointed

KPMG LLP was re-appointed Auditor of the Company to hold office until the next AGM or until its successor is duly appointed.

Approval of Unallocated Options under the Company's Incentive Stock Option Plan

At the AGM, shareholders also approved all unallocated options issuable under the Company's incentive stock option plan.

About Erdene

Erdene Resource Development Corp. is a Canada-based resource company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of base and precious metals in underexplored and highly prospective Mongolia. The Company holds four exploration licenses and a mining license in southwest Mongolia. These include: Altan Nar - an extensive, high-grade, near-surface, gold-polymetallic project that the Company is advancing toward a production decision, however the Company has not yet completed a mining study to support the technical feasibility and economic viability of Altan Nar; Bayan Khundii - an earlier-stage, high-grade gold discovery made in Q2-2015; Khuvyn Khar - an early-stage, copper-silver porphyry project with multiple drill targets and significant copper intersections; Zuun Mod - a large molybdenum-copper porphyry deposit; and Altan Arrow - an early-stage, high-grade, gold-silver project. In addition to the above properties, the Company has an Alliance with Teck Resources Limited on regional, copper-gold exploration in the prospective Trans Altay region of southwest Mongolia. For further information on the Company, please visit www.erdene.com. Erdene has 121,040,992 issued and outstanding common shares and a fully diluted position of 134,407,820 common shares.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain information regarding Erdene contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements may include estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, guidance or other statements that are not statements of fact. Although Erdene believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Erdene cautions that actual performance will be affected by a number of factors, most of which are beyond its control, and that future events and results may vary substantially from what Erdene currently foresees. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration results, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. The forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The information contained herein is stated as of the current date and is subject to change after that date. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

NO REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS RELEASE
Vancouver, BC / TheNewswire / Golden Reign Resources Ltd. (the "Company" or "Golden Reign")(TSX-V: GRR) is pleased to announce final assay results from the now completed, combined metallurgical/infill drilling program on its wholly-owned San Albino Gold Deposit, located in Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua (See Figure 1).

Drilling was focused at the proposed San Albino open-pit mine area. In all, 56 diamond drill holes were cored over 2,175.3 metres. A total of 44 holes targeted the San Albino prospect (West Pit), one drill hole was completed on the south slope of San Albino hill (SW Pit) and 11 holes were drilled at the Arras prospect (Central Pit) (see Figure 2). This drill program targeted the shallow dipping, high-grade mineralized zones - starting at surface to an approximate depth of 60 metres. Golden Reign has improved the continuity and confidence of the mineralized zones.

Area of Initial 6 Months of Planned Open-Pit Mining Activity (West Pit)

In the area planned for initial mining activities, Golden Reign completed 9 metallurgical/infill drill holes to test continuity of the mineralization and extend the outer limit of the proposed open-pit mine.

Drill results to date correlate strongly with prior trenching results from the eastern slope of San Albino hill:

Drilling results:

-SA16-MET-40 8.1 metres of 4.30 g/t gold and 12.1 g/t silver

including: 2.7 metres of 10.69 g/t gold and 22.5 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-41 2.2 metres of 4.88 g/t gold and 13.1 g/t silver -SA16-MET-42 1.15 metres of 10.90 g/t gold and 24.4 g/t silver -SA16-MET-43 4.55 metres of 8.57 g/t gold and 14.7 g/t silver -SA16-MET-44 7.05 metres of 5.29 g/t gold and 6.2 g/t silver -SA16-MET-38 & 39 intersected voids, tunnels from historical workings.

Previous Trenching results:

-SA12-TR-01 7.0 metres of 8.80 g/t gold and 24.4 g/t silver (Previously released, see PR June 6, 2012) -SA12-TR-05 10.0 metres of 48.44 g/t gold and 40.1 g/t silver (Previously released, see PR May 24, 2012) -SA12-TR-06 8.0 metres of 9.53 g/t gold and 12.3 g/t silver (Previously released, see PR June 6, 2012)

including: 4.0 metres of 17.49 g/t gold and 22.7 g/t silver

-SA13-TR-18 5.4 metres of 7.72 g/t gold and 9.01 g/t silver

Other High-Grade Results within the West Pit - Initial 12 Months of Planned Open-Pit Mining Activities

Drilling results:

-SA16-MET-31 6.9 metres of 14.45 g/t gold and 40.0 g/t silver

including: 1.6 metres of 49.35 g/t gold and 79.5 g/t silver; and

2.0 metres of 7.87 g/t gold and 42.4 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-32 0.7 metres of 13.50 g/t gold and 15.0 g/t silver -SA16-MET-33 1.15 metres of 10.90 g/t gold and 24.4 g/t silver

Previous Trenching results:

-SA13-TR-17 29.8 metres of 4.32 g/t gold and 11.6m of silver

including 8.0 metres of 8.85 g/t gold and 19.4 g/t silver; and

11.8 metres of 1.16 g/t gold and 5.0 g/t silver; and

7.0 metres of 6.11 g/t gold and 14.6 g/t silver.

SW Pit

One drill hole was cored in the SW Pit (SA16-MET-45), which returned 5.6 metres of 4.04 g/t gold and 12.2 g/t silver, including 1.8 metres of 10.41 g/t gold and 21.9 g/t silver. This mineralized zone was initially intersected during a 2011 drill program and further extended by trenching in 2013. In drill hole AR11-12 the mineralized zone started from surface and reached a depth of 8.0 metres, returning 22.74 g/t gold and 63.4 g/t silver (Previously released, see PR September 19, 2013). Sampling of exploration pit #1, situated within trench SA13-TR-13, returned 2.0 metres of 36.44 g/t gold and 111.0 g/t silver (Previously released, see PR September 19, 2013). Additional work is planned by the Company in order to expand the SW Pit.

Other Significant drilling results include:

-SA16-MET-23 8.0 metres of 8.42 g/t gold and 10.5 g/t silver

including: 0.4 metres of 30.40 g/t gold and 95.8 g/t silver; and

3.6 metres of 12.44 g/t gold and 8.34 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-20 4.8 metres of 16.87 g/t gold and 21.2 g/t silver

including: 0.6 metres of 16.90 g/t gold and 55.8 g/t silver; and

3.45 metres of 19.96 g/t gold and 17.3 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-10 5.3 metres of 13.51 g/t gold and 0.9 g/t silver

including: 2.4 metres of 17.13 g/t gold and 7.7 g/t silver; and

1.65 metres of 14.86 g/t gold and 7.3 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-09 4.4 metres of 10.27 g/t gold and 6.4 g/t silver

including: 2.5 metres of 16.84 g/t gold and 10.5 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-21 3.8 metres of 9.28 g/t gold and 22.7 g/t silver

including: 1.1 metre of 29.60 g/t gold and 72.6 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-22 3.8 metres of 4.15 g/t gold and 14.9 g/t silver

-SA16-MET-35 1.0 metre of 34.00 g/t gold and 56.8 g/t silver -SA16-MET-12 0.9 metres of 10.70 g/t gold and 27.9 g/t silver -SA16-MET-11 0.8 metres of 25.50 g/t gold and 17.9 g/t silver

(intercepted remainder of vein above historical workings)

Note: All grades presented are uncut and all thicknesses are core length. No top cut has been applied.

A complete list of significant results is shown in Table 1.

Previous assay results included other significant high grade drill intercepts for both the San Albino prospect (West Pit) and Arras prospect (Central Pit) (See PR dated May 12, 2016).

Company's Qualified Person

John M. Kowalchuk, P.Geo, a geologist and qualified person (as defined under NI 43-101) has read and approved the technical information contained in this news release.

On behalf of the Board,

"Kevin Bullock"

Kevin Bullock, P.Eng.

CEO

For additional information please visit our website at www.goldenreign.com and SEDAR www.sedar.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: Some of the statements contained herein may be forward-looking statements which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, risks and uncertainties relating to political risks involving the Company's exploration and development of mineral properties interests, the inherent uncertainty of cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses, commodity price fluctuations, the inability or failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and other risks and uncertainties. Such information contained herein represents management's best judgment as of the date hereof, based on information currently available.

The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

Figure 1:



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 2:



Click Image To View Full Size

Table 1: Significant Near-Surface Drill Intersections

Drill Hole From (metres) To (metres) Width (metres) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) SA16-MET-08 43.45 44.05 0.60 7.52 61.7 SA16-MET-09 40.70 42.00 1.30 15.50 11.0 42.00 43.20 1.20 18.30 10.0 43.20 44.10 0.90 0.07 1.1 44.10 45.10 1.00 3.03 0.8 SA16-MET-10 34.90 35.35 0.45 2.31 4.3 35.35 36.5 1.15 26.90 13.4 36.50 37.75 1.25 8.14 2.4 37.75 38.55 0.80 6.16 3.8 38.55 39.55 1.00 4.88 2.8 39.55 40.20 0.65 30.20 14.1 SA16-MET-11 32.50 33.30 0.80 25.50 17.9 SA16-MET-12 24.25 25.15 0.90 10.70 27.9 SA16-MET-17 2.25 2.70 0.45 1.40 1.4 SA16-MET-18 39.00 40.00 1.00 2.27 3.0 SA16-MET-19 42.80 43.80 1.00 9.19 40.6 43.80 44.85 1.05 5.31 43.9 SA16-MET-20 23.30 23.90 0.60 16.90 55.8 23.90 24.65 0.75 2.64 11.7 24.65 26.00 1.35 27.50 15.6 26.00 27.10 1.10 24.20 31.0 27.10 28.10 1.00 5.11 4.4 SA16-MET-21 35.60 36.70 1.10 29.60 72.6 36.70 37.50 0.80 0.35 1.5 37.50 38.50 1.00 0.17 2.0 38.50 39.40 0.90 2.50 3.4 SA16-MET-22 46.90 47.70 0.80 1.30 5.0 47.70 48.70 1.00 7.16 26.3 48.70 49.70 1.00 0.05 1.7 49.70 50.70 1.00 7.52 24.5 SA16-MET 23 36.50 37.40 0.90 1.45 2.2 37.40 37.80 0.40 30.40 95.8 37.80 38.90 1.10 2.27 8.4 38.90 39.90 1.00 6.60 7.0 39.90 40.90 1.00 12.10 11.1 40.90 41.70 0.80 12.60 5.7 41.70 42.50 0.80 20.00 9.2 42.50 43.50 1.00 0.17 0.9 43.50 44.50 1.00 6.42 3.9 SA16-MET-29 7.50 8.50 1.00 4.23 9.6 SA16-MET-30 7.50 8.50 1.00 21.40 46.8 SA16-MET-31 20.30 21.10 0.80 66.70 53.0 21.10 21.90 0.80 32.00 106.0 21.90 23.20 1.30 1.83 14.0 23.20 24.20 1.00 0.74 30.0 24.20 25.20 1.00 10.60 62.0 25.20 26.20 1.00 5.15 22.7 26.20 27.20 1.00 1.86 15.9 SA16-MET-32 16.30 17.00 0.70 13.50 15.0 SA16-MET-33 0.00 1.50 1.50 1.01 3.8 1.50 3.00 1.50 2.90 8.2 6.45 7.50 1.05 7.86 27.7 24.50 25.15 0.65 1.20 5.4 25.15 25.60 0.45 2.23 9.5 SA16-MET-35 7.65 8.65 1.00 34.00 56.8 12.50 13.50 1.00 4.94 16.3 SA16-MET-40 1.20 2.50 1.30 1.31 3.0 2.50 4.20 1.70 2.33 10.2 4.20 5.20 1.00 24.90 43.5 5.20 6.20 1.00 1.31 9.1 6.20 7.20 1.00 1.27 7.5 7.20 8.20 1.00 0.04 5.2 8.20 9.30 1.10 1.46 10.5 SA16-MET-41 0.00 1.00 1.00 8.42 18.8 1.00 2.20 1.20 1.94 8.4 SA16-MET-42 0.35 1.50 1.15 10.90 24.4 SA16-MET-43 0.25 1.50 1.25 14.00 16.2 1.50 3.00 1.50 6.02 10.6 3.00 3.80 0.80 13.10 29.3 3.80 4.80 1.00 1.98 7.1 SA16-MET-44 0.00 1.50 1.50 5.88 8.0 1.50 3.00 1.50 8.65 8.4 3.00 4.50 1.50 1.34 2.3 4.50 5.80 1.30 0.18 1.2 5.80 7.05 1.25 4.80 6.2 SA16-MET-45 6.90 8.00 1.10 1.53 4.6 8.00 9.20 1.20 6.61 15.2 9.20 9.80 0.60 18.00 35.2 9.80 10.70 0.90 0.58 5.1 10.70 11.70 1.00 0.96 10.2 11.70 12.50 0.80 0.89 11.2

Note: All grades presented are uncut and all thicknesses are core length. No top cut has been applied. The results are based upon a 1 g/t cut-off, with no more than 1.3 metres of internal dilution - except for drill hole SA16-MET-45 which was extended at under the cut-off grade.

Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks [official website] reported [text, PDF] Wednesday that Polands legal and institutional framework threatens human rights [press release]. The Commissioner is particularly concerned with the paralysis of the constitutional court. The report also states that the new media laws are unprecedented and urges the government to implement reform. A governmental spokesperson declined to meet with the Commissioner, and the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has stated [press release] that it has adhered to legislative procedures when implementing the current policies.

The PiS has made numerous controversial reforms since taking power last fall. Earlier this month the European Commission adopted a rule of law opinion on Poland, warning that changes to the countrys constitutional court pose a risk to the rule of law [JURIST report]. The EU began examining Polands decision regarding the Constitutional Court [JURIST reports] in January. In February the Polish government passed a controversial surveillance law [JURIST report] that grants the government greater access to digital data and broader use of surveillance for law enforcement. The PiS, a conservative party elected in October, holds an overwhelming majority [BBC report] of positions in the Polish government including the lead in both parliamentary houses and the presidency. In December the leader of the European Parliament [official website] compared PiS rise to power in Poland to a coup [BBC report], leading to Parliament calling for an apology. PiS has rejected [DW report] criticisms that its policies are undermining democracy in Poland. However, there is a larger concern in the EU that new Polish law will erode checks and balances on government powers.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) [official website] on Tuesday rejected [judgment] a challenge to Britains refusal to pay family welfare benefits to unemployed EU migrants who do not have the right to reside in the UK. The judges ruled that such unequal treatment is justified on the basis of protecting a member states finances. The European Commission argued that Britains actions were discriminatory. However, the court disagreed finding nothing preventing the UK from requiring immigrants to be legal residents in order to be eligible for welfare benefits. The right to reside test allows migrant workers to move freely, promoting freedom to work, yet does not grant these individuals a claim to benefits.

The rights of migrant populations has emerged as one of the most significant humanitarian issue around the world, as millions seek asylum from conflict nations. Last week the ECJ ruled that non-EU immigrants who illegally enter the Schengen area across an internal border should not be jailed [JURIST report] solely on that basis. In March the ECJ ruled that Germany may place residence conditions [JURIST report] on refugees. In February the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said that new measures put in place by many European countries are too restrictive and place undue hardships [JURIST report] on refugees and asylum-seekers. Also in February Amnesty International warned Austria that they are violating human rights through their daily cap on asylum applications [JURIST report]. In January Danish lawmakers approved a controversial bill that will allow Danish authorities to seize assets [JURIST report] from immigrants seeking asylum in order to cover their expenses.
[JURIST] Venezuelan government officials on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to deny a referendum to remove President Nicolas Maduro proposed by opposition leaders. Following the declaration by the National Electoral College (CNE) [official website in Spanish] that more than 600,000 signatures found on the petition for the referendum were invalid, those in support of Maduro, such as Jorge Rodriguez, accused opposition leaders of fraud. On Tuesday US Secretary of State John Kerry [official profile] announced his support for the referendum [Washington Times report], according to the Venezuelan government. Hours later, however, Kerry announced talks [Reuters report] between the two nations in an attempt to improve the relationship. It is unlikely that a referendum will take place this year.

There has been considerable legislative tension between the pro-government controlled Supreme Tribunal of Justice and the opposition-majority National Assembly of Venezuela following the December election. In April Venezuelas opposition-led parliament approved [JURIST report] new referendum rules. In March the Supreme Tribunal of Justice ruled that the Venezuelan national assembly may not review the appointment of 13 justices [JURIST report] to the high court by the Socialist Party. The 13 justices were sworn in on December 23, immediately prior to the exit of prior Socialist Party majority. In February the court upheld President Maduros economic emergency decree [JURIST report] as legal and valid despite a rejection by the national assembly. The decree allows the president to control the budget, companies and the currency. In January the Supreme Tribunal of Justice ruled that all decisions from the opposition-led assembly would be void [JURIST report] until three opposition lawmakers were removed from their seats. The courts decision came days after the assembly swore in elected lawmakers that were temporarily barred by the court [JURIST reports]. The ruling had suspended four elected lawmakers for their involvement in alleged election fraud last December [JURIST report].
Vehicle manufacturer purchasing managers have described the challenges facing the UK supply chain and frustrations they face in dealing with suppliers.

Speaking at a recent industry conference (the SMMTs Open Forum event in Birmingham) the purchasing managers from Tata-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and General Motors addressed delegates on their requirements from suppliers and the challenges facing the UK automotive supply chain.

Ian Harnett, Executive Director of HR and Global Purchasing, at JLR, said that his company is now focused on a global growth strategy, with manufacturing operations being set up in places such as China, India, Brazil and Slovakia, as well as contract manufacturing in Austria (with Magna Steyr).

He said that the ownership of Tata has brought JLR the security to develop and implement a strategy of long-term sustainable growth for Jaguar Land Rover and all those that supply us. He said that orders for the Jaguar F-Pace are already at 25,000 and that it will be an outrageous success while orders for the niche Range Rover Evoque Convertible are at 3,500 (half of the first year production plan). The niches we are entering act as disrupters for others and drive further volume growth for us, he said. Analysts forecast that the company could grow its annual output over 1m units in the medium term as new plants come on stream around the world and new models are added to the product portfolio.

Harnett outlined major investments in plant and new models and highlighted the new JLR engine manufacturing facility at Wolverhampton. Its a brand new engine factory, with a brand new engine. We are no longer dependent on other people to supply our power units. We spent around a billion pounds developing the Ingenium engine and the factory.

He also pointed out that the UK produces more engines than it does vehicles, but lacks capability in engine parts. That is a very strange phenomenon, he said. If I look around the country at my supplier base, I dont have that many powertrain factory or suppliers and thats something that we need to look at. Everybody is making engines here, some people just make engines and no cars. If we take the whole number of engines that are made here, there has to be critical mass now to get the powertrain suppliers to look at what makes sense to manufacture here.

On a more positive note for the UK supply chain, Harnett said that JLR is investing, as a strategic partner, some GBP150m in the UKs National Automotive Innovation Centre based at Warwick University. It will open in 2017 and will employ 1,000 people  researchers and engineers  devoted to developing advanced emerging car technologies. That will supplement our existing R&D and engineering activity, he said.

He also told delegates that although JLR is planning rapid growth in overseas markets, the heart of its operations  engineering, manufacturing, purchasing, logistics, finance and all essential support functions  will all stay in the UK.

Raised local content at Jaguar

Harnett said JLR sits on the Supply Chain Working Group of the Automotive Council and that the UK supply chain has considerably strengthened in recent years. The XE, XF and F-Pace at Jaguar have all achieved 55% UK supply sourced content. That is a 5% improvement since 2014 when our average was 50%. We recognise the benefits of having local suppliers where we can; it can reduce cost and increase responsiveness if change our minds about things.

We are a global company, so we will make sure that we have a competitive supply base. The fact that we are shopping globally and have got to 55% is testament to the strength of the UK supply chain. It can compete and it can win.

Harnett also said that some relatively small UK suppliers to JLR are now enjoying rapid growth on the back of increased orders from JLR.

And we are also attracting international companies, he said. Magna International has announced a new world-class aluminium casting facility for Telford; there will be up to 295 new jobs. Its based around JLR business and our growth plans. I remember foundries shutting down over the years and this is the first time I have seen a foundry opening up in the UK with significant investment. Similarly, Plastic Omnium have opened up a new facility in the West Midlands to supply plastic tailgates for JLR. They have also opened up a new paint facility in the northwest to support our Halewood operations.

He also said that human capital is important; Bosch has set up an engineering team in the UK that is dedicated to supporting JLR. They have taken some space at the Warwick manufacturing centre, so now we have the best of everything. The knowledge and the thinking from Warwick; the finest German engineering, matched with the finest British engineers at Coventry and Gaydon. Its a perfect combination.

Harnett said that the UK supply chain is in a positive position, with average local content edging up, despite some gaps in supply capability. However, he warned that the rest of the world will not stand by and stay put. We need more improvements in productivity. And we need more training  people are a vital resource. We need the right skills in the right areas.

His message to suppliers was to offer the best value proposition, ensure that quality is exemplary and please make sure that capacity is available [to meet JLR volume plans].

Talk to us

I recall the days when we over-called volumes, he said. We dont do that anymore; we generally under-call them. And then the risk is parts shortages, gaps on the line. We cannot afford gaps on the line. The factories working by the end of this year will all be in three-shifts, fifteen shifts a week. And if we need to, we will work at weekends to satisfy demand. We need suppliers to deliver on commitments and not disrupt the supply chain. If you have an issue, talk to us. We are not scary. Well, maybe a little, but not too scary. If you tell us, we can fix things, change things, work with you. Please, no surprises  unless they surprise and delight us. Bring us your new ideas, bring us technology, bring us something that is different.

And also when you respond to us, give us some options. Options are good because that gives us a choice on which way to go.

Other speakers at the conference also said that the UKs automotive supply chain needs to focus on being globally competitive  in terms of unit cost and quality. There is also a need to be able to support low volume OEMs as well as high volume ones.

Know your OEM customer

Mick Aiers, Purchase Manager at General Motors (Vauxhall), told the conference that he would like prospective suppliers to know more about his companys operations and the global and regional context to the business. He painted a scenario. What do you know about GM? If its not very much, the conversation becomes difficult after that point. My expectation is that you know something about us, GM. If you are going to be supplying Vauxhall, youre not just going to be supplying Vauxhall. You are likely going to be supplying a number of plants around Europe. You better know where they are. It would be handy if you had someone who could speak the language in those countries. And once you have done that, you need to illustrate, fairly succinctly, why we should do business with you. I am perfectly happy with our supplier base. There is some work to be done, no question, but what is it that you are going to give us? Telling us that your price is great is really not going to tell me to tell my engineering colleagues to start talking to you.

Go out and do some benchmarking. Go to a dealer and buy some of the parts, see if they are competitively priced. Its that kind of thing that you need to be doing before you approach us.

See also:

JLRs internationalisation strategy continues  Analysis

Why raising UK local content wont be easy  Analysis

ANALYSIS: Slovakia plant could lift JLR over 1m a year
Hershey is to close a factory in Canada manufacturing products under its Brookside brand.

The US giant said the plant in Abbotsford in British Columbia would shut by the end of October. Some 180 jobs will be affected.

The majority of production will move to a second facility in Canada, located in St Hyacinthe in Quebec, Hershey said. The remaining production will be transferred to a site in the US in Robinson, Illinois.

Hershey attained the two Canadian facilities when it acquired Abbotsford-based Brookside Foods in 2011.

This decision was part of a comprehensive review of our manufacturing operations to find the most efficient and effective ways to manufacture Brookside products while continuing to meet consumer needs now and into the future, Hershey said.

When Hershey reported its financial results for 2015 in January, the company indicated plans to expand the Brookside portfolio and push on with plans to carve out a foothold for the brand in China.

Some of the things youll see in the marketplace in 2016 to address broader snacking, income bifurcation, and lower trips include a broad-based launch of substantial snacking items, including Brookside Bars, Snack Mix, and Snack Bites canisters, president and CEO John Bilbrey said. He added Hershey would invest in increasing Brookside distribution and trial in China.

However, in April, when Hershey reported its numbers for the first quarter of 2016, the company faced questions on the performance of the Brookside brand in the US. Credit Suisse analyst Robert Moskow said the data had not looked very good for the brand.

Bilbrey replied: As we look at the Brookside brand, weve been really pleased with the growth of the brand. Its done terrific in terms of establishing itself as the number two or three dark chocolate brand in the category. Its got great repeat purchase of somewhere in the range of like 50%, which is really, really high. Its ahead of our acquisition strategy. Now, we have lost some distribution in the club channel. We also believe that as we have expanded it, we need to continue to work on the brand positioning some. And youll see that weve got a whole new advertising effort there.

We also probably would tell you that we have expanded some of the offerings maybe a little bit ahead of ourselves. And we need to make sure that we just continue to work on the base brand proposition. So as we do that, we continue to have a lot of confidence in the brand.
Muller CFO Henrik Bauwens is to leave the German dairy giant and join Intersnack, the German group behind brands including McCoys.

The yoghurt maker said Bauwens had decided to leave the business after a six-month sabbatical.

We wish Henrik all the best for the future and thank him for the contribution he has made since he joined us in 2011, Muller chief executive Ronald Kers said. We have a strong team of more than 50 talented leaders running the group and its business units and we look forward to continuing to develop the organisation to meet our future ambitions.

The exit of Bauwens is the latest management change at Muller this year. In January, the company announced the appointment of former Unilever and Nestle executive Rob Scholte to the post of chief operating officer.

Bauwens is to join Intersnack on 1 September, replacing Stephan Kuhne who will become the CFO at Austria-based packaging group Constantia Flexibles on 22 August.
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Subterfuge can only go so far and it only serves as a delay of the inevitable when everyone knows what is hidden behind it. Episode fifteen of "Master - God of Noodles" is one of revelations and direct confrontations. Congressman So and Gil-do are officially in battle, Kang-sook takes desperate measures and so does Yeo-gyeong. Da-hae feels betrayed by everyone and Myeong's life is in danger, but the episode finally addresses the fact that his morality might be lost first.

The drama has created an interesting dynamic between Congressman So Tae-seop (Kim Byeong-gi) and Gil-do (Jo Jae-hyeon). As Kang-sook (Lee Il-hwa) states, the Congressman is the only one Gil-do fears and this means we get interesting reactions out of him. Gil-do has many enemies who know that he is a walking lie and everyone wants Goongrakwon or its foundation, but as Myeong (Cheon Jeong-myeong) has been saying, it takes a monster to catch one. Congressman So is the monster that shakes Gil-do's nearly unbreakable facade.

It is not surprising that Kang-sook would seek help from him, but as Mi-ja (Seo I-sook) points out, it is a bad idea when one considers how uncertain they are of his intentions. Perhaps Kang-sook assumed the Goongrak Foundation is too small for someone like the Congressman to want. Yeo-gyeong's (Jeong Yoo-mi) decision to keep being his pawn and face Gil-do head on is desperate as well, but less unreasonable. Yeo-gyeong is fully prepared to lose almost all.

The one thing I am sure she cannot let go of is her friends and this becomes evident about all of the members of our makeshift family. Gil-yong (Kim Jae-young) knows he is being kept in the dark, but he still helps. I do wonder what role his debt to Doo-cheol (Park Ji-hwan) will play, however. Tae-ha (Lee Sang-yeob) cannot really fool anyone and he resists Gil-do for now. Da-hae (Gong Seung-yeon) is not from the orphanage, but she also remains innocent and this hurts her, too.

Myeong is the one who has been needing the biggest wake up call and he finally gets it. As a character, he has been one of the least interesting ones until this conflict started growing. A stock good guy can become lost among so many colorful characters. His descent into undeserved cruel behavior is the road to becoming a monster who cannot switch back. This conflict generates sympathy and gives his choices gravity.

I am still trying to wrap my head around everything that is happening and all the subplots we need to see reach their closure, but the creators know how to keep up the pace on the main goals. That would be getting all the pure characters out unscathed and manipulative ones punished. Between Congressman So and Gil-do, everyone and everything is in increasingly grave danger.

"Master - God of Noodles" is directed by Kim Jong-yeon and Lim Se-joon, written by Chae Seung-daeand features Cheon Jeong-myeong, Jo Jae-hyeon, Jeong Yoo-mi and Lee Sang-yeob.

Source: HanCinema
UPDATED 2:30 p.m.: KEARNEY - Much of Kearney's business community was in shock today after learning that longtime real estate broker and civic leader Kim Stevens died Monday night in an all-terrain vehicle accident.Stevens, 49, was killed near his home at 8 Northlake Drive, which is in northwest Kearney.

According to the Buffalo County Attorney's Office, Stevens died after the four-wheeler he was driving struck a pile of gravel about 9:15 p.m. He was transported to Good Samaritan Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Longtime friend and business partner Rocky Geiser said Stevens was working on a landscaping project Monday, hauling rocks to the shoreline of the lake near his home.

"From what I understand, he was riding up the street when he was done working," Geiser said. "He came around the corner and hit a pile of rocks.

"This is a sad day for Kearney. A lot of people are in a big state of shock right now," said Geiser, choking back tears. "Kearney has lost one of its finest men."

Stevens worked as a real estate broker since 1981 and was co-owner of Re/Max Executives in Kearney. He also taught real estate classes at the University of Nebraska at Kearney from 1982 through 1993. During his career, he recorded more than $133 million in sales, his Web site said.

In addition to being an active member of the Kearney Area Chamber of Commerce, Stevens' community and civic involvement included work with the UNK Foundation, United Way of the Kearney Area, the Methodist Church, youth basketball and other sports programs, and the University of Nebraska Alumni Association.

"As much as Kim has given to the community, I certainly hope the community gives back to his family in spades," said friend Matt Meister, who also works in real estate. "Our sons are the same age and have been competing in sports together for years. I've had many conversations with Kim at ballgames, and I cherish every one of them."

Meister said Stevens was an avid sports fan who supported many Kearney teams, including the Tri-City Storm hockey team and all sports at Kearney High, Kearney Catholic and UNK.

"More than anything, he really enjoyed watching his kids participate," said an emotional Meister. "He has a great family. Kim was one of the most generous, kindhearted men I've known. Anybody who knew him will have an empty feeling inside for a long time."

Geiser called Stevens the consummate professional.

"He always was bubbly and very outgoing. He was a one-man welcoming committee for Kearney," said Geiser. "Many times, people made their first impression of the city after meeting Kim. He made people feel welcome and comfortable."

Stevens attended Eustis Public High School before graduating from the UNK with a business administration degree with a double emphasis in marketing and real estate.

Stevens is survived by his wife, Donna, and two children: McKenzie, who will be a senior at Kearney High School, and Nate, who is entering his freshman year.

An autopsy will be conducted at Good Sam today, Buffalo County Attorney Shawn Eatherton said.

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OMAHA -- When police finally caught up with prison escapee Timothy Clausen, whom theyd been pursuing for more than five days, they found him sitting on an upstairs toilet in an apartment in north Omaha Wednesday evening, a revolver beside him.

From the first floor of the unit in the Spencer Apartments complex, police saw Clausen and told him to come down. He did.

And perhaps just in time.

Clausen, who had cut his hair and shaved his beard, told an officer that he intended to commit a robbery later in the evening to get money to fund his time on the lam, a police source said.

On Friday morning he and another inmate hid in a laundry basket, slipping out of a Lincoln prison in a truck.

Clausen, 52, was arrested about 6 p.m. at 3226 N. 26th Ave., Omaha police and the Nebraska State Patrol said.

There were other people in the apartment where Clausen was found, and they knew he was a prison escapee, but his connection to them was not clear, the source said.

A police spokesman declined to say Wednesday night whether any of the people in the apartment had been arrested in connection with the case but said the department was investigating whether anyone had helped him.

Police handcuffed three men at the complex. Two of them were released there, and the third was driven away in the back of a police cruiser.

Leads developed by law enforcement authorities led to his arrest, officials said.

Clausens arrest is the culmination of a lot of hard work and long hours by law enforcement from multiple agencies, said Col. Brad Rice, superintendent of the Nebraska State Patrol. Our citizens were also a valuable resource, and we would like to thank each and every one of them who called to provide a tip or information.

Clausen was taken to the Tecumseh State Prison, the patrol said.

Clausen and Armon Dixon escaped from the Lincoln Correctional Center on Friday after convincing correctional officers that they were on the roster for working in the laundry room. They hid in the laundry baskets and left in a truck headed for the Tecumseh prison, officials have said.

The two cut a hole in the top of the truck and fled, stealing another truck and evading officials in northwest Lincoln.

Dixon was arrested Saturday afternoon after he allegedly assaulted two women, authorities have said.

Wanda T. Minor, who authorities said helped Clausen get from Lincoln to Omaha, has been charged with being an accessory to a felony.

Wednesday morning, Judge Sheryl Lohaus set bail for Minor, 50, at $500,000. That means Minor would have to pay 10 percent, or $50,000, to be released from jail. Lohaus set Minors next court appearance for July 18.

Prosecutor David Wear said Minor initially withheld information about Clausen but later told the Nebraska State Patrol that she picked up the escapee in Lincoln and drove him to Omaha. Minor told Clausen that he couldnt stay at her home, Wear said.

A public defender said Minor has lived in Omaha since 1983. She lives with her 76-year-old mother and her mothers two grandchildren.

Its unclear how Minor and Clausen know each other, but in 2011, Minor posted a photo of Clausen on her Facebook page, and in 2013 she was charged with tampering with a juror and tampering with physical evidence in a sexual assault case involving Clausen.

Minors mother, Lucille Collins, said outside court that she wasnt familiar with Clausen.

How could she be that dumb? Collins said about her daughter helping Clausen. Shes got a masters degree.

She doesnt drink, she doesnt smoke, she doesnt go out, Collins said. I think that (Clausen) put pressure on her.

That just isnt her, Collins said. All she does is go to church, come back home and go to school. Thats it.

On June 4, Minor received her masters of science in clinical counseling degree from Bellevue University, said university spokesman Jim Maxwell.

The 2013 charges against Minor were both felonies and were connected to Clausens trial that year on charges of first-degree sexual assault of a child, to which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

The charge of tampering with a juror was dropped. The charge of tampering with physical evidence was amended to attempt of a felony, which is a misdemeanor. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation, which she completed successfully.

Clausen pleaded guilty to tampering with a witness and received an additional sentence of 20 months in prison.

World-Herald staff writers Kevin Cole and Alia Conley contributed to this report.
In this Sept. 11, 2015 photo, a girl holds a balloon featuring Minnie Mouse at the Hong Kong Disneyland. Hong Kong Disneyland opened in 2005 and has been faulted for a lack of big ticket attractions and its small size, at less than 121 hectares (300 acres). One time, the park shut its gates because it was full, turning away hundreds of mainland Chinese and Taiwanese ticket holders, some of whom tried to force their way in. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
The first real step in exploiting the tourism potential of Kells Priory have been taken.

The Office of Public Works (OPW) will begin daily tours of the largest monastic settlement in Ireland within the next few weeks.

It follows a recent visit to the magnificent site a month ago by Kilkenny County Council members and a commitment made their by new by the new council chief executive, Colette Byrne.

Staff training is being undertaken at the moment and within a few weeks visitors will be able to enjoy tours, with very well informed guides thanks to the OPW.

Tours will be available throughout the day from 9.30am to 3.30pm.

For further information or to make a group booking contact 087-0675783, call Jerpoint Abbey on 056 7724623 or leave a message on the Jerpoint Abbey Facebook page.

Sitting on a site of approximately 3.6 acres, Kells priory is divided in two parts  the nearest to the car park is the Burgess Court, a large open space with four defensive towers along its enclosing walls. These towers led to the site being commonly known as the Castles.

The second part, a cluster of the earlier monastic buildings lies between the Burgess Court and the River. The location by the river was likely chosen because the river was a route for transport of people and goods, but also because the supply of fish was important for the monks. It was a natural barrier to ensure the privacy of the monks.

To enter the site, leave the car park and head down the hill to the Priory. Be mindful of the steep slope as you descend close to the entrance gate.
A French film crew shooting a music video for a song aptly titled The High Road to Kilkenny, randomly found Jerpoint Park and fell in love with the location.

Producer Benjamin Belton was looking for both a shoot location and a place to stay when the crew, lost in local countryside, were sent to Marie Fitzgerald's B&B and she recommended Jerpoint Park as the perfect spot.

And when they arrived, Benjamin could not have agreed more.

The song, The High Road to Kilkenny' is the title track on the album from Le Musicians de St Julien', a traditonal Irish music group extremely popular in Europe. They also played some jigs in the Salmon Pool on Wednesday evening last recording videos for other songs on the CD.

We have filmed the music video in various settings, said Benjamin, enjoying his first trip to Ireland in the glorious sunshine having soaked in the rays from here to Galway and Leehane.

But here is typically Irish. Of course you can go to the west and the sea but this to me is a real view of the country, not just the postcards of the west.

I was just deeply touched by this place, he added of Jerpoint Park - once a thriving Norman town larger than Kilkenny was five centuries ago, which was mysteriously wiped off the map.

This place has a real connection with the past. I feel the place is alive and you know, it's important people come here, to remember it, pay tribute to the people who were here and to remember that it did exist, a place like this needs to be remembered, he added.

With six musicians, and a further crew of seven spending last week in Kilkenny, they will continue shooting the video in areas that offer context to the music, added Benjamin.

As always, the proprietors of Jerpoint Park, Joe and Maeve O'Connell, welcomed the film crew and musicians with open arms.

Jerpoint Park and its story is featuring prominently in Ireland's Ancient East tourism drive and already two film crews have done promotional films of Jerpoint Park, one of which reached an auidence of 40 million viewers.
There are, as every school boy knows, towns called Kells in Counties Kilkenny, Meath and Antrim. At different times in history, all three have advanced claims to be the birthplace of the famous Book of Kells (with varying degrees of credibility).

There are, as every school boy knows, towns called Kells in Counties Kilkenny, Meath and Antrim. At different times in history, all three have advanced claims to be the birthplace of the famous Book of Kells (with varying degrees of credibility).

While Kells (Antrim) has long since conceded defeat in this battle of the towns, there is in Kells (Kilkenny) a small, determined and vociferous view keeps their claim if not triumphant at least never fully negated. They have an arguable case to make.

Local soundings recently suggest that some of that argument will be to the fore next week at a lecture on March 7 in Rothe House when Professor Rodger Stalley will address the theme The Real Book of Kells as part of the Kilkenny Archaeological Societys series for 2012

His fully illustrated lecture grew out of his life-long study of the Book of Kells in Trinity College Dublin, where he was Professor of the History of Art.

He became engaged with the forms and structures of stone sculpture of the 9th and 10th century and in time began to see the correlation between this and the written illustrations in early manuscripts.

He was invited to become a member (and subsequently leader) of a research group exploring art historical issues associated with the Book of Kells.

Research has the tendency to go down avenues not necessarily anticipated when initially undertaken, that is part of its appeal.

Certainly no one anticipated that his research on the Book of Kells would completely overturn the popular belief of how the book was produced.

The image was of learned, endlessly dedicated, scholarly, elderly monks working in silence and solitary dedication for months and years in the scriptorium of a large and tranquil monastery.

After his own lengthy and detailed examination of the book he has completely turned his back on this fondly held image describing it as clearly romanticised rubbish and simply not possible.

So who then did produce this icon of early Irish art, numbered among the most significant creations of the first millennium and surely one of Irelands greatest treasures?

Professor Stalley will reveal all and argue his somewhat unsettling view on the issue next Wednesday (March 7th) in Rothe House at 8pm.

It is sure to be an evening of surprises  and thats even before any thought is given to the contribution of those from Kells (Kilkenny) as they continue to press their claim to be the rightful birthplace of this mediaeval masterpiece.
Girl Scout Kaitlyn Wright, 14, of Troop 40769 in Port Orchard, stands outside the Waterman building. Kaitlyn is promoting a fundraiser and root beer float social to help raise money and awareness for the historic building. (LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN)

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By Christian Vosler, christian.vosler@kitsapsun.com

PORT ORCHARD  To celebrate a local historic location, a Port Orchard Girl Scout is diving into the world of advertising.

In pursuit of her Silver Award  the second-highest award a Girl Scout can receive  eighth-grader Kaitlyn Wright is promoting a social event at the Waterman building, a 104-year-old former schoolhouse in Port Orchard.

The Waterman was built in 1912 and served as a schoolhouse until 1946, when it was closed. The building and its property were leased from the school district for $1 in 1947 by descendants of the original Swedish settlers in the area, according to club member Janet Hane.

Since 1949, the building has been the home of the Associated Clubs of Waterman, as well as an all-purpose venue for weddings, anniversaries and birthdays. The club's goal is to preserve the building. Because it doesn't bring in a lot of annual revenue, Hane said, the club relies on the community to fund projects. Upcoming projects include the installation of front steps in addition to general maintenance.

To show its thanks, the club is hosting a root beer float social Saturday. The club also will be selling secondhand items, with proceeds going toward maintenance.

"We wanted to give back something to the community that didn't cost a lot of money," Hane said.

Wright's family belongs to the Waterman Club. Kaitlyn felt the Waterman wasn't getting the exposure that it should.

"The Waterman club, that building, is a pretty important part of our community that not a lot of people know about," Kaitlyn said. "What I'm doing with the advertising for the root beer social (is) trying to build awareness of the building to more people."

For her Silver Award, Kaitlyn put up fliers and posters, wrote letters and spread the word  with some help  on social media. Kaitlyn used the Facebook page of her mom, Sharee, to advertise the social to friends and family. Posters, fliers and networking was Kaitlyn handiwork, her mother said.

The Silver Award is the highest award a Girl Scout Cadette (between sixth and eighth grade) can earn. It involves planning a project, individually or in a team, that identifies a need and works with members of the community to complete a project, Sharee Wright said. Sharee said her daughter has completed about 20 of 50 hours necessary to receive the award.

Kaitlyn plans to continue with Girl Scouts at least until high school, although she doesn't know whether she will attempt a Gold Award, the highest accolade in the program.

The Waterman club has about 20 members, according to Hane, one of whom was present at the Waterman when it was a schoolhouse.

The root beer social "is just our way of letting the community know we are there," Hane said.

Waterman benefit

What: Ice cream social and secondhand items sale to benefit the Waterman building

When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday

Where: 5785 Hillcrest Drive, Port Orchard
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By Charlee Glock-Jackson, Special to the Kitsap Sun

OLALLA  The Olalla community is mourning the death of Mike Homan, owner of community gathering place Al's Store.

Homan died June 4 after a long battle with cancer.

Homan will be memorialized during a potluck gathering at the store Sunday, which Al's Store cook Tommy Leischner said would have been Homan's 59th birthday.

Homan and Darrell Yates opened the store in 2011, after it had been closed for more than a year following the June 2009 death of John Robbecke. The Robbecke family had owned the store for nearly 50 years.

Homan and Yates had to close the store six months later. After another manager failed to make things work, Homan took over again a couple of years ago.

"Mike turned it into a real gathering place for people from all around the area," Leischner said.

Patricia Sargeson, a former store employee who often stopped by for a visit, called Homan "one of the most accommodating and helpful people you could ever meet. If somebody needed jumper cables or a tire pumped up, Mike was always right there to help."

Store manager Beth Taylor said she wants to keep running the store as long as possible and is trying to figure out how to take over the store.

The lease lasts until the end of October, but the building owner has said he wants to sell the place, not renew the lease.

"Mike did so much for this community, and we all want to see the store stay open and thrive, just like he wanted. It was a huge blessing to have worked with him. He changed so many people's lives. I know he changed my life for the better, and we all will miss him terribly," Taylor said.

Homan's five siblings and two adult children will attend Sunday's memorial, Taylor said. "The whole family is coming from North Dakota to be at the memorial so it will be a pretty big thing."

Northwest Chill, a local band whose members are customers of the store, will provide music.

Taylor said the family is planning to spread Homan's ashes in Colvos Passage that laps right up to the store, so he'll always be right close by.

Homan memorial

What: Al's Store will host a potluck memorial for Mike Homan, who leased and managed the store for several years and turned it into a popular gathering space for the extended Olalla community. The memorial is open to all.

When: 5 p.m. Sunday

Where: 13965 Crescent Valley Road
A detour is set up Wednesday along Bay Street to turn onto Port Orchard Boulevard. Highway 166 is closed for work on culverts.

By Christina Henry of the Kitsap Sun

PORT ORCHARD  When Adam Lovejoy opened the Banana Hammock espresso stand two years ago, he wasn't worried about his slightly off-the-beaten track location on Highway 166, the shoreline state highway connecting downtown Port Orchard to Highway 16 in Gorst.

The stand features an all-male crew decked out in similar style (or lack thereof) to bikini baristas, and Lovejoy figured customers would find their way.

Now with the closure of Highway 166 for a major culvert installation on Anderson Creek, Lovejoy isn't feeling so confident.

"It's really unfortunate," Lovejoy said. "During our busiest few months of the year, this is going to really hurt us and could put us out of business."

Chug-a-Tug Espresso has seen a slight slowdown in business since Tuesday's closure, barista Britney Popplewell said. The family-friendly stand is just inside the "local traffic only" barrier.

"Hopefully people will learn the route and make their way down here," Popplewell said.

The state Department of Transportation's project, triggered by a federal mandate to preserve and restore salmon runs, is expected to affect traffic into the fall. Three large culverts will replace pipes that now carry the stream to Sinclair Inlet. The culverts, under Highway 16, Highway 166 and Anderson Hill Road SW, will be installed in phases.

The Highway 166 culvert is first to go in. The highway is closed in both directions, except to local traffic. It will remain closed entirely at the west end, where the culvert work is taking place, for four to six weeks. The westbound lane will be closed for another four to six weeks. Drivers will have to detour via Tremont Street and Port Orchard Boulevard.

Detours on Highway 16 and Anderson Hill Road will follow in the next phases.

Dave Tagert and Stacy Bronson, owners of the Swimdeck pub in downtown Port Orchard, delayed by a month moving their business to a larger, waterfront location on Highway 166. The couple had hoped to move into the property known to old-timers as "the former Clam Bake" by the end of June. Now they're shooting for early August, hoping to minimize the road closure impact.

Like Lovejoy, the couple have nothing against the Highway 166 location, once the road reopens this fall. They're are banking on the loyalty of fans to seek out the Swimdeck once it moves to the water-view property on Ross Creek that has housed a string of restaurants since the Clam Bake. Shawn Johnson, yard foreman of Yachtfish Marine on Highway 166, thinks his business likely will fare better during the closure than shops and eateries that depend on drive-by traffic. Yachtfish is booked out for months with marine repair jobs.

Matt Murphy, executive director of the Port Orchard Chamber of Commerce, worries because Highway 166 feeds into downtown's Bay Street and is labeled as Bay Street on state detour maps, possibly giving the impression that downtown businesses are inaccessible. He also worries about the detour traffic.

"This will have broad ramifications on a lot of businesses in Port Orchard," Murphy said. "We just want people to know that Port Orchard is still open."

Some businesses have been "blindsided" by the closure, Murphy said. A DOT representative made a presentation May 24 to the City Council, but by then the project was just about ready to begin.

Monique Campos, owner of the Front Porch General Store downtown, only learned of the road closure a week ago. Campos questions the timing of the project. Foot traffic in Port Orchard is weather dependent, she's noticed since opening in October. She was looking forward to a lucrative summer.

"I'm very concerned that our season is very short-lived in Washington. This is right at the beginning of it, and it looks like it's going to go right through it," Campos said. "If they're going to impact someone's livelihood, you think they'd come down and let you know."

DOT's website explains the project must be done during the height of the summer tourist season because of the large scope of work and limits on when crews can do in-water work. Chinook and chum salmon migrate in Anderson Creek. The fish window  an environmentally permitted time of year when work can take place on a stream or other water body where fish are present  is between late summer and Oct. 15. Crews will start work in areas that don't involve in-water construction.

During DOT's presentation to the City Council, project engineer Michele Britton said her agency will monitor traffic patterns and work with local entities to adjust timing of traffic signals on roads affected by the detour.

Councilman Fred Chang asked whether the state offered mitigation funds for businesses affected by the road closure.

"That's just not something the department does," Britton said.

Length of closures and construction timelines are subject to change based on construction progress and potential weather delays, DOT advises.
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Kevin M. Howell

Indianola, WA

Jan. 21, 1951 to June 2, 2016

Kevin M. Howell, long time Kitsap attorney, died June 2 at his home in Indianola. Born January 21, 1951 in Oakland, California, he was the youngest of four children born to Homer and Margaret Howell. He grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains on his beloved Spanish Ranch and attended Los Gatos High School. After graduating from the University of the Pacific and McGeorge Law School, he moved to Kitsap County, where he practiced law, most recently at the Kitsap County Prosecutors office.

Preceded in death by his parents and brother, Ed, Kevin is survived by his sister Pam, and brother Dennis, both of Santa Cruz, numerous nieces and nephews, Patty Ericksen, his companion and life partner of many years, and uncountable friends.

Kevin will be remembered for his generosity, wit, intellect, good humor and will be greatly missed.

A celebration of life is planned at the Poulsbo Yacht Club, July 21, at 4:00 p.m.

Kevin M. Howell

Indianola, WA

Jan. 21, 1951

to June 2, 2016

Kevin M. Howell, long time Kitsap attorney, died June 2 at his home in Indianola. Born January 21, 1951 in Oakland, California, he was the youngest of four children born to Homer and Margaret Howell. He grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains on his beloved Spanish Ranch and attended Los Gatos High School. After graduating from the University of the Pacific and McGeorge Law School, he moved to Kitsap County, where he practiced law, most recently at the Kitsap County Prosecutors office.Preceded in death by his parents and brother, Ed, Kevin is survived by his sister Pam, and brother Dennis, both of Santa Cruz, numerous nieces and nephews, Patty Ericksen, his companion and life partner of many years, and uncountable friends.Kevin will be remembered for his generosity, wit, intellect, good humor and will be greatly missed.A celebration of life is planned at the Poulsbo Yacht Club, July 21, at 4:00 p.m.
The Herald reports:

Donald Trump greeted Twitter on Flag Day with two words in all caps: AMERICA FIRST!

He has made this slogan a theme for his campaign, and he has begun using it to contrast himself with President Obama, whose criticism of Trumps rhetoric on Tuesday was answered with a Trump statement promising: When I am president, it will always be America first.

He wasnt quite promising America uber alles, but it comes close. America First was the motto of Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s, and Trump has more than just a catchphrase in common with them.

During the early 1930s, as the Nazis consolidated control over Germany, the US media baron William Randolph Hearst began touting the slogan America First against President Franklin Roosevelt, whom he saw as dangerously likely to allow the international bankers and the other big influences that have gambled with your prosperity to gamble with your politics. Hearst regarded Roosevelts New Deal as un-American to the core and more communistic than the communists  unlike Nazism, which he believed had won a great victory for liberty-loving people everywhere in defeating communism.

With the beginning of World War II in Europe and the Germans swift conquest of the continent, Roosevelt began to commit his administration more firmly to the aid of the those fighting Nazism. He incurred the ire of various anti-intervention constituencies, ranging from committed religious or principled pacifists to American communists, who supported the Nazi-Soviet pact and therefore the notion that the United States should stay out of the European war.

But the most prominent of his opponents were the founders of the America First Committee, formed in September 1940. The committee opposed fighting Nazism and proposed a well-armed America confined largely to the Western Hemisphere. It soon afterwards adopted the noted aviator and enthusiast of fascism, Charles Lindbergh, as their favoured speaker. Lindbergh accepted a medal from Hermann Goering in the name of the Fuhrer during a visit to Germany in 1938, and proudly wore the decoration, the New York Times reported. He thought democracy was finished in Europe, that the western powers could not effectively resist the Nazi war machine and that the United States had better make terms with Adolf Hitler.
matt ward/special to go knoxville Mandi Cooper, Andy Clem and Payton Cooper, from left, on a recent night at Amigos & Beer Mexican Grill.

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By Matt Ward, Special to Go Knoxville

Every city has sides that have bad reputations. Sometimes they are well deserved, other times they are decades old and completely separated from the current reality. East Knoxville is one of those places.

When I was growing up in Lancaster, Ohio, it was the west side, which people said was dangerous. When I lived in Columbus, Ohio, it was east of OSU campus. When I moved to Wilmington, N.C., it was Creekwood on the north side. In 2010 I moved to Knoxville and bought a house on the east side not far from Knoxville Center mall. Only later did I find out from the locals that this was considered the "bad" side. Six years later I have never witnessed a single crime or even had my car broken into.

The downside of living where I do has been nightlife. In order to go out to have a cocktail, I had to travel at least three or four miles away unless I was cool with being the bar regular at an Applebee's. As much as I loved their "Typhoon Shrimp" I have never really enjoyed the bar atmosphere of chain restaurants.

Just a few months ago I noticed the closed gas station at Mall Road and Washington Pike was being renovated just a mile from my home. Within weeks a sign appeared on the building. Amigos, it read. The old gas station was transforming into a small restaurant and bar. I was elated. My side of town had not long before seen the opening of a new Mexican restaurant called Habaneros. This was the second location for the local chain.

Amigos was started by one of the folks who owns Don Jose's Mexican Grill in Corryton (even further east). Eddie and Francisco Hernandez are two of the others of the new Amigos.

Amigos is located next to another gas station, just a block away from the Home Depot. Guess what else isn't far away? A successful sushi restaurant. Also a craft beer and fine wine store. All relatively new. See, east side is GROWING. OK, you get it; I like where I live.

I parked facing the Home Depot and made my way inside. All I could think about honestly was their queso. There is something about Mexican Restaurant white cheese sauce. If I had unadulterated access to it I would be an obese man. Taking my mind off the cheese for a moment I focused on my surroundings. Upon entering you see all there is to be seen: a small convenience store converted into a small restaurant. The bar is centered in the back of the room. The kitchen is off to the right as is the host station. Seating is booths and a few tables with seating at the bar. There is also a door in the back to the left that leads to the patio, the best feature of this small establishment.

Flat screen TVs hang from the relatively low ceilings above the bar. When the server saw me he asked if I wanted to order food. I ordered a Modelo instead and he struggled a little to understand me as he asked which size I wanted. I didn't know what sizes he had. My response was Spanglish, "The smaller one, pequeno, uhh, muy paquito." Turns out my three years of Spanish in high school had not stuck into my 40s. He proceeded to pull a frozen mug out of the cooler that could hold about five beers. It was so big it was comical.

I took a look at a menu as I continued taking notes. Finally I ventured outside to the patio area. There was a table with four folks having a good time enjoying some beers having clearly just finished eating. They laughed and talked. I greeted them and we had a prolonged conversation about how much they liked the place. The patio area had a fair amount of seating. Despite the road being only a dozen or so yards away it was relatively peaceful and relaxing.

So, for my friends of the east side, there is a new place for you. They carry liquor by the drink, beer, wine and food. You can go there for a late drink or an early dinner. I ended up taking some of that queso home, oh yes. It was everything I had hoped for. My wife was pleased and we certainly will have a drink there in the near future.

---

Amigo's & Beer Mexican Grill

Address: 5020 Washington Pike

Phone: 865-444-1990

Website: www.facebook.com/Amigosandbeerknoxville/

Wifi: yes

Smoking indoors: no

Hours: 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays 11a.m.-11 p.m. Friday-Saturday
Sheryl Hogan, left, head of Feline Friends of East Tennessee's barn cat program, and the Lamberts outside their barn, George, 3, Amanda, Harris, 7, and Cody.

SHARE Tennessee and Miss Mow Mow Miss Mow Mow becomes acclimated to her new surroundings in the Lamberts' barn.

When Cody and Amanda Lambert bought their home in South Knoxville this spring, it came with two barns  and at least three snakeskins.

Amanda knew just what to do: Get a barn cat.

"I had cats growing up, always outside, and I remember them being excellent buddies and critter control," says the mom of two.

She found Feral Feline Friends of East Tennessee through a Google search for barn cats. Four weeks ago, the Lamberts welcomed Miss Mow Mow, named by 3-year-old George, and Tennessee, named by 7-year-old Harris, into their family.

"If you've got snakes, you've got mice," explains Sheryl Hogan of South Knoxville, who heads up the barn cat program for the 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to the care of feral cats. "We hope Miss Mow Mow and Tennessee will be good mousers."

The Feral Feline Friends actually try not to relocate feral cats, Hogan stresses, but instead focus their efforts on trapping, neutering and releasing, returning feral cats that have been spayed or neutered and received their vaccinations to their colonies where they live with other feral cats.

"Feral doesn't mean they're aggressive; it means they are afraid of people because they haven't been socialized," explains Hogan, a nurse who has volunteered with Feral Feline Friends "pretty much full time" since she retired a year and a half ago. "However, sometimes it's not safe for cats to stay where they are, and we look for people who want cats for their barns."

Last year Feral Feline Friends placed 24 feral cats in barns and relocated a whole colony of 12, she notes. This year, to date, the group has placed 13 and has five more pending.

Feral Feline Friends suggests placing at least two cats at a time in its barn cat program, but the feral cats placed with the Lamberts are not from the same colony, Hogan says.

Miss Mow Mow came from Oliver Springs, where a man fed her and two other feral cats for three years, until it was time for him to move. Tennessee, meanwhile, was found elsewhere with his head stuck in a Mason jar.

Although these two cats were not acquainted before they came to live with the Lamberts, they should be "best friends" after four weeks in side-by-side cages in one of the Lamberts' barns, Hogan notes.

The feral cats are kept in large cages  plenty big enough for food, water, litter boxes, cat beds and toys  for four weeks to help them transition to their new home, she explains.

"If you bring a cat and drop them off, they'll just take off," Hogan says. "Now that they've been here four weeks, they've got the smell. They know this is their new home."

Amanda Lambert even went the extra mile by scooping their kitty litter and scattering it around the property, marking their territory for them so that they can use the scent as a homing device.

And yet, there is no guarantee that a feral cat will stick around once released, Hogan admits, though Feral Feline Friends has had "pretty good success" with its barn cat program.

"Cats cannot live on what they catch; they need food and water daily," she explains. "Here they've got guaranteed food, water and shelter. Why would they want to go?"

Indeed, Amanda has tried to sweeten the deal for Miss Mow Mow and Tennessee by giving them treats like tuna and ice cream. Cody also rigged up a "cat camera" so that the family could watch the cats' behavior in the barn without disturbing them.

On Saturday, as Hogan and the Lamberts prepared to release Miss Mow Mow and Tennessee from their cages, Hogan reiterated that Feral Feline Friends always is searching for good barn homes for its feral cats that need to be relocated.

Those interested in getting barn cats should be aware, however, that there is a commitment involved: to provide food and water daily, to provide safe shelter from the elements and predators, and to scoop litter boxes daily during the four-week transition when cats are living in cages.

Hogan does a home visit with interested folks to evaluate the situation and discuss the transition.

"I look for places the cats can get away from predators because we want to give them the safest, best chance," she explains, adding it also helps if the cats will be away from high traffic areas.

Once a family is approved, she brings the cats to the home and sets up everything to get them started.

Feral Feline Friends provides whatever is needed for the cats' transition, from the large cages to food to kitty litter  all at no cost to the family adopting the cats.

"We are really in it for the cats," she says simply. "We really need more barns."

For more information about Feral Feline Friends, visit www.feralfelinefriends.org or find them on Facebook.

For more information specifically about the barn cat program, call Hogan at 865-660-9005.
SHARE Randy Heidle, chief of the Harriman Police Department. (FACEBOOK)

By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel

HARRIMAN  While the city has no recourse against him now that Police Chief Randy Heidle has retired, the state Comptroller's Office has been notified of allegations leveled against him, City Attorney Allison M. Rehn said in a letter Thursday.

Rehn referenced a state law that requires public officials to notify the comptroller within five days if there is information available that an "unlawful taking of public money, property, or service has occurred."

"The state comptroller has the authority to order an outside agency to investigate the matter further," Rehn wrote.

She said it would be an "inherent conflict of interest for (the) Harriman Police Department to conduct an investigation."

City officials recently received an anonymous but detailed letter outlining numerous allegations against Heidle that include accusations he made personal use of city property and removed parts from police department vehicles and put them on his personal vehicles.

The News Sentinel was sent a copy of the anonymous letter, which also alleged that Heidle had "other officers drive him out of town in (Harriman Police Department) vehicles to pick up personally purchased vehicles."

The letter, which included receipts and photos, was received by City Council members and City Manager Kevin Helms last week. Helms decided to place Heidle on paid administrative leave then, and Heidle announced his retirement, effective immediately, on Tuesday.

Heidle's attorney, John McFarland, said Heidle's retirement decision was based "on the tense workplace environment created by the recent allegations," Rehn said in a statement earlier this week.

Heidle had been police chief for about 10 years and was paid $55,500. The city will seek a new police chief, which Helms recently described as a "fairly extensive process."
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By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel

A contractor who drew pay from both TVA and the U.S. Department of Energy is confessing he padded his expense account to the tune of more than $110,000.

Jim L. Calloway has agreed to skip a grand jury review and entered a plea agreement with the U.S. attorney's office to plead guilty to a charge of filing false claims, records filed this week in U.S. District Court show.

According to the plea agreement, Calloway had been living in Houston, Texas, when, in June 2011, he took a contracting job with Bechtel Power Company at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.

Calloway claimed he kept his house in Houston and falsely filed claims with TVA of just more than $109,000 in temporary living expenses through December 2015. Instead, Calloway had sold the Houston home and was living in Knoxville through 2013 and then bought a home in Lenoir City, the plea agreement stated.

In November 2015, Calloway transferred to a job with the Consolidated Nuclear Security firm, which partnered with Bechtel in a contract with the DOE's Y-12 facility.

Calloway claimed just more than $7,300 in expenses for what he said was a move from Houston to Heiskell, Tenn., the plea agreement stated.

Defense attorney Allen Schwartz negotiated the deal with Assistant U.S. Attorney Bart Slabbekorn after Calloway's thievery was discovered. No date for an official entry of plea has yet been set.
Anderson County EMS Director Nathan Sweet gives an overview of EMS and ambulance operations to county commissioners during a presentation Wednesday. A mannequin used in first aid practice is behind him. (BOB FOWLER/NEWS SENTINEL)

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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel

CLINTON  Since it became self-supporting six years ago, the Anderson County EMS has been slammed by "an almost perfect storm of issues" that have hit its bottom line, the director said Thursday, but changes to regain its financing footing are underway.

Nathan Sweet on Wednesday gave an overview to county commissioners of the financial issues that have plagued the ambulance service, from delays in Medicare reimbursements to problems with the service's billing company.

He assured commissioners the EMS intends to repay the $600,000 the county donated to the service last year after its emergency fund is built up, but he provided no timetable for that payback.

"We've always had the mindset that we're going to pay the money back," Sweet told commissioners.

The transition from a county-funded service to a self-supported operation started with only $215,000 from a revenue surplus, he said, while the County Technical Assistance Service of the University of Tennessee had recommended the county provide $1.1 million in startup funds.

Still, the service managed to be self-supporting for several years until the private company that does Medicare reimbursements in Tennessee, Cahaba Government Benefit Administrators, placed the county on a prepayment review audit in April 2014.

That move put some $200,000 in reimbursements on hold, mainly because the company said it didn't receive the required paperwork, Sweet said. A faulty fax machine at the Cahaba office was discovered to be the culprit, he said.

"A lot of it doesn't make sense, what Cahaba does," Sweet said in an interview Thursday, adding that ambulance services in other Tennessee counties have also had problems with the company over Medicare reimbursements.

A change in the outsourced billing company for the ambulance service should also improve the revenue stream, he said. The current company had been sending past-due bills to a collection agency when it was later learned those ambulance customers had medical insurance, he said.

By then, he said, the ambulance bills couldn't be filed on a timely basis, and it was too late to seek payments.

Sweet expressed optimism that a new firm that takes over billing next month, Digitech, will eliminate those problems while charging less for its services.

Even with the hurdles he outlined, Sweet predicted that the EMS will finish this fiscal year "barely in the black" or at least on a break-even status.

The ambulance service operates out of six stations in the county, and its fleet of 23 vehicles includes 17 ambulances. New ambulances that aren't outfitted with medical gear cost between $130,000 and $150,000, according to the overview provided commissioners.

Sweet said the Anderson County EMS increased its fee structure in January 2015, and those charges are about at the midpoint of what comparable ambulance services charge.
University of Tennessee Police Chief Troy Lane addresses the media Thursday, June 16, 2016 about the new gun carry law effecting the UT campus. On July 1, a new state law takes effect that allows Tennessee's public colleges and universities" full-time faculty and staff, who have handgun-carry permits, to carry handguns on campus. (MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

By Hayes Hickman of the Knoxville News Sentinel

A new law will allow state college employees to carry concealed handguns on campus beginning July 1, but University of Tennessee Police Chief Troy Lane said his officers likely won't need their help in the event of a crisis.

UT officials published new policies Wednesday outlining when and where full-time faculty and staff with handgun-carry permits will be allowed to go armed once the state statute takes effect.

The policy also requires them to register with the UT Police Department, which will begin accepting early applications Monday.

On Thursday Lane said he doesn't anticipate any major problems. His department will offer a voluntary class, though, to help campus employees better understand their responsibilities under the new law  including what's expected of them in a worst-case scenario.

"If it's an immediate issue, if the active shooter's in your building, it's time for you to collect those around you, lock your door and protect yourself and protect those with you," Lane said during a news conference Thursday.

"And let us show up and do our job."

The statute establishes Tennessee as one of 10 states with some provision allowing concealed weapons on public college campuses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Those states include Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. Like Tennessee, Arkansas limits access to certain faculty members.

Concealed weapons are banned on college campuses in 18 other states, according to the NCSL website.

And 23 states leave the decision of whether to allow or ban concealed firearms on campus to each college or university individually, including Arkansas.

University of Tennessee President Joe DiPietro and other college leaders across the state opposed the legislation earlier this year. Gov. Bill Haslam also voiced his opposition to the legislation, although he allowed it to become law without his signature.

"Our position has been and continues to be that we do not support, as a general premise, increasing the number of guns on college campuses," DiPietro said in a written statement Thursday.

Anticipating the likelihood of the bill's passage, administrators worked with the Tennessee Association of Chiefs of Police and the Tennessee Board of Regents to draft policies for its implementation while maximizing campus safety.

Under the policy, employees are prohibited from carrying a handgun into meetings about tenure and employee discipline. Nor will firearms be allowed inside any campus stadium, arena or auditorium when university-sponsored events are underway.

Likewise, they will be prohibited from carrying a handgun on campus if they are enrolled in a campus course, unless the course is taught entirely online. The policy also forbids employees from intentionally showing their handgun to another person.

Other prohibited areas include hospitals, and offices where medical and mental health services are the primary services provided, including the student health center, veterinary medical center, early learning center, and the speech and hearing clinics.

Permit-holders also are required to maintain control of their handgun at all times, and never leave their weapon unattended.

The policy will apply to UT campuses in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Martin and Memphis.

State Rep. Andy Holt, R-Dresden, who sponsored the bill in the House, has said he believes the "important next step" is to allow students to go armed on campus as well.

Lane said, in his opinion, that could be a step too far.

"I've been forced to see students make decisions and sometimes they're not always great decisions," the chief said. "Certainly, anyone is capable of making a bad decision, but they just haven't had enough life experience to take on that level of responsibility."

UTPD FIREARMS ON CAMPUS COURSE SCHEDULE

* Friday, July 1, 10 a.m.-11 a.m.

* Tuesday, July 5, 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.

* Thursday, July 21, 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.

* Wednesday, Aug. 3, 5 p.m.-6 p.m.

* Friday, Aug. 19, 9 a.m.-10 a.m.

* Wednesday, Sept. 7, 10 a.m.-11 a.m.

* Monday, Sept. 19, 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.

Source: University of Tennessee
By Michael Collins of The Commercial Appeal

WASHINGTON  Whether they come from an urban center in Memphis, Nashville or Knoxville, or from a rural community as small as Frog Jump, the men and women representing Tennessee in Congress share at least one trait.

All 11 of them are white.

Tennessee is one of just two states in the Deep South that don't have any people of color in their congressional delegations. The other is the state's next-door neighbor, Arkansas, which has never sent an African-American to Congress.

Lack of diversity in Tennessee's congressional delegation isn't surprising, experts say, given the state's demographic makeup.

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African-Americans make up just 17 percent of the state's total population  well below Louisiana (32 percent), Georgia (30 percent), South Carolina (28 percent), Alabama (25 percent) and North Carolina (21 percent).

The percentage of other minorities in Tennessee is even smaller. Just 5 percent of state residents are Hispanic, and fewer than 2 percent are Asian.

In its 220-year history, Tennessee has sent only two African-Americans to Congress  Harold Ford Sr., who represented the Memphis area in the House for 22 years, and his son, Harold Ford Jr., who succeeded his father and served a decade before giving up the seat to run unsuccessfully for the Senate. Both are Democrats.

Harold Ford Sr. said voters aren't concerned as much with a candidate's race as with whether that candidate can do the job.

"People look at the person," he said. "They don't look at it as black or white or whatever. People want representation, and if you can do the job and you fit the bill, you're my person."

If people cared only about the color of a candidate's skin, Ford Sr. said, he probably wouldn't have won his first congressional race in 1974. He was elected to 8th Congressional District, which at the time was centered in Memphis. The district was majority white, even though Memphis and West Tennessee historically have had the state's largest concentrations of African-Americans.

When congressional boundaries were redrawn in the early 1980s, the district where Ford Sr.  and eventually, his son  served was reconfigured to include more African-Americans and renumbered as the 9th District.

Today, African-Americans comprise nearly 65 percent of the district, making it the state's only congressional district with a majority of African-American voters.

Since 2006, the district has been represented by Rep. Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat who defeated 14 other candidates, including a dozen African-Americans, to succeed Ford Jr.

For 24 years, Cohen had been a state senator with a liberal voting record, and his prominence gave him an advantage in the race. The crowded field also split the African-American vote and helped Cohen win the seat. He has faced an African-American challenger in every election since, but has been re-elected four times by large margins.

In Congress, Cohen has championed social justice issues such as poverty and criminal justice reform. His staffs in Washington and in Tennessee include a number of African-Americans.

During the 2006 race, some African-Americans openly questioned whether a Jewish candidate like Cohen could best represent a predominantly African-American, Christian district. But Cohen said he seldom hears that question anymore.

"I never hear it up (in Washington), and I hardly ever hear it at home," he said. "I'm constantly fighting for Memphis, and people know I'm fighting for Memphis."

Ford Sr. also gives Cohen high marks.

"Cohen has been extremely responsive (to the district) in every way," he said.

Still, Tennessee could benefit from having an African-American in Congress, said Sekou Franklin, an associate professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University.

An African-American congressman could give the state a larger role in shaping the national debate on issues such as poverty and criminal justice reform by working through organizations such as the Congressional Black Caucus, Franklin said.

A black congressman from Tennessee also could benefit African-Americans politically, Franklin said, by using the weight of the position to change how the state Democratic Party operates and help organize delegates for the state and national political conventions.

Other than the 9th District, the Nashville-centered 5th Congressional District could offer the best opportunity to elect an African-American to Congress from Tennessee, Franklin said.

Blacks make up one-quarter of the voters in the district, which is currently represented by Rep. Jim Cooper, a Nashville Democrat. A biracial coalition could potentially emerge and help elect an African-American to the seat whenever Cooper decides to step down, Franklin said.

The rest of the state, however, probably will remain a challenge. African-Americans make up less than 11% of the other seven districts.
Architecture graduate student Anthony Traylor, left, landscape architecture graduate student Clint Wayman and nursing graduate student Lauren Oppizzi enter a home in southern Clay County, Ky., Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014. The students are assessing rural homes and will provide recommendations to the Red Bird Mission. (KEVIN MARTIN/NEWS SENTINEL)

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By News Sentinel Staff

Three years of work by University of Tennessee students and staff to bring better access to clean water and improve home safety in a small Southeastern Kentucky community has received national recognition.

UT was one of five schools to receive the C. Peter Magrath/W.K. Kellogg Exemplary Program designation this year, an award that recognizes community outreach. The work, done primarily by nursing, architecture and engineering students, included creating a water kiosk to provide clean water to thousands of families, offering multiple disaster life support courses, and identifying and addressing safety and health hazards in homes across Clay County, Ky.

The project took off after UT, in 2013, won a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration to fund the initiative. UT then partnered with Red Bird Mission in Clay County, the county's emergency management services, local clergy, elected officials, teachers and law enforcement.

In November 2014, students assessed the safety of eight homes over two days to collect information that went into a database on the living conditions of residents in the area. The Red Bird Mission committed to then send volunteers to do repairs for local homeowners who need the help, and the students began analyzing all the data to find trends. They had planned to also find low-cost solutions for these common problems and use the data to bolster grant applications to fund them.

Clay County ranks near the bottom for the Kentucky's major health indicators, including obesity, infant mortality, and disability. In the county's rural hollows, clean water is often hard to find and flooding happens frequently.

"We have worked hard to foster collaboration between our academic departments to provide students opportunities to learn through service and gain hands-on real-world experience," Provost Susan Martin said in a statement.

The other four institutions recognized were Cornell University, University of Missouri Extension, New Mexico State University and University of Nebraska at Omaha.
In this April 14, 2016 photo, activist and Soft Landing founder Mary Poole plays with her dog at home in Missoula, Mont. Haunted by the 2015 photo of a Syrian refugee boy washed ashore in Turkey, she and members of her book group asked: Why not bring a small number of Syrian families to Missoula? "It wasn't even a grain of sand in my brain that people wouldn't want to help starving, drowning families. I didn't do this to be controversial. I didn't do this to stir the pot," she says. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

SHARE Divided America, a series of stories from The Associated Press and the News Sentinel that will focus on the people and places that will decide the next leader of the United States. (AP Photo)

By SHARON COHEN, AP National Writer

MISSOULA, Mont. (AP)  For the world, the photograph of a Syrian 3-year-old in a red T-shirt and black sneakers, his lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach, was a horrific symbol of the desperation of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

For Mary Poole, a young mother haunted by "those little shoes ... the little face," it was an inspiration.

She and members of her book club asked: Why not bring a small number of Syrian families to Missoula?

___

EDITOR'S NOTE  This story is part of Divided America, AP's ongoing exploration of the economic, social and political divisions in American society.

___

She knows now that this was a "romantic" notion. "It wasn't even a grain of sand in my brain that people wouldn't want to help starving, drowning families. I didn't do this to be controversial. I didn't do this to stir the pot."

But it did. And what started as a disagreement over whether to welcome dozens of refugees to this peaceful corner of western Montana soon erupted into something much larger, encompassing wildly divergent views of Islam, big government and whether Americans should "take care of our own" before worrying about newcomers.

Neighboring counties  and in some cases, neighbors  locked horns.

Demonstrators took to the streets: "No Jobs, No Housing, No Free Anything," proclaimed some opponents' signs. Some warned that Islamic State terrorists could infiltrate their communities; others suggested that the federal government, long accused of tyranny in its dealings with the West, was at it again.

The refugees' supporters did not back off. "Rise Above Fear, Refugees Welcome" they declared.

Missoula's mayor, John Engen, was among them. "I think that the war on terror has produced an internal war on compassion," he says. "We have been programmed to be very afraid since 9/11 and to think of people who aren't white Anglo-Saxon Americans as 'other' and we should be afraid of people who are 'other.'"

This did not occur in a vacuum. What's happened here reflects what's happening across the nation in an election year dominated by inflammatory rhetoric over immigration, including calls for building a border wall, the mass deportation of immigrants living in the country illegally, and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the U.S.

And more generally, Montanans are like other Americans who ask: How are we to live together, as one nation, when we are so estranged?

At a time when the public is polarized over issues ranging from gay marriage to guns, the Rev. Joseph Carver, pastor at St. Francis Xavier Parish, sees this as just another "incarnation of the larger divide in the country." His congregation, which gathers in a towering 124-year-old brick structure with frescoes, ornate scroll work, is overwhelmingly in favor of refugees.

Carver, like others here, believes the spark that ignited this conflict is fear. "Refugees," he declares, "are seen as a threat to our way of life."

Montana is a place of great beauty, with its snow-capped mountains, Ponderosa pines, bighorn sheep, bison and elk. Fly fishermen reel in trout from shimmering streams. College kids can be spotted kayaking on the Clark Fork River on cool spring nights. And a bookstore owner can point to the park down the street where a moose is known to frequent.

It is not, however, a diverse place. Though the sparsely populated state is home to seven Indian reservations, nearly nine of 10 residents are white, according to Census figures. Only about 2 percent are foreign-born. Since 2012, the state has welcomed just 13 refugees from Cuba and Iraq, according to officials.

But Missoula, site of a World War II detention center for Japanese-Americans, Italian merchant seamen and others, has a recent history of embracing refugees. The International Rescue Committee resettled the Hmong in the late 1970s and through the 1980s; some remain as farmers. Later, another agency brought Ukrainians and Belarusians here.

With its coffee houses, murals and bike trails, Missoula has a laid-back feel. It is home to the University of Montana, as well as a peace center named for Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist who was the first woman member of Congress  and the only vote against declaring war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack. The center's philosophy is captured on a wall lined with bumper stickers  "Peace is Patriotic," ''Books Not Bombs" and "Practice Nonviolence"  and a stenciled message on a front window: "Refugees Welcome."

When Poole, a jewelry maker, and others formed a group called Soft Landing, they quickly expanded their plan to include not just Syrians but all refugees and turned to the International Rescue Committee to lead the resettlement. Their efforts were endorsed by the mayor, most council members and the three Democratic county commissioners, who sent letters to federal officials.

But Missoula is an island of progressive blue surrounded by a sea of conservative red, and often diverges politically from other communities in Montana.

Just to the south, in rural and Republican Ravalli County, a county commissioners' hearing over the issue was moved to a middle school gym to accommodate the hundreds who showed up for what turned into a raucous meeting. Several pro-refugee speakers were jeered .The commissioners formalized their opposition in their own letter to federal officials and Flathead County, nearly 130 miles north of Missoula, did the same weeks later.

In testimony and letters in Ravalli County, those saying "no" outlined their objections. They argued that Muslims or others from the Middle East could create the kind of chaos seen in Europe, impose an enormous tax burden and wouldn't be able to assimilate because they don't share American values. Many said their biggest fear was the U.S. government couldn't conduct adequate screening. Some spoke of apocalyptic visions of terrorists posing as refugees making their way to the quiet countryside.

"There's no 800 number you can call into Morocco or Libya or any one of those places ... and say, 'Can you check the identity of this person?' Without the ability to properly vet them, it's literally putting Americans' lives at risk," says Eli Anselmi, who felt compelled to write a letter even though he lives three hours away in Bozeman.

The risk may be minimal, he says, but the potential harm is great. "Let's say that you have a bowl of M&Ms ... and there are two that have cyanide. Will you eat from that bowl?"

Ray Hawk, a Ravalli County commissioner, has similar worries. "These are folks that have declared war on the United States," he says. "Their war is terrorism and that's the way they're going to do it. And I don't feel that we need to give them that chance. Now, if the government gets a handle on this thing and has a way to vet these people, I'm all for them. I love to see anybody come into America and succeed."

Supporters of the refugees weighed in with reminders of America's tradition of providing sanctuary to those who've fled war and oppression; some cited their own family history. They spoke of empathy, pointed to a lengthy screening process and noted the other refugees who resettled here successfully in recent decades.

Shawn Wathen, a bookstore owner in Ravalli County, was appalled his 18-year-old son was booed when he testified in support of the refugees and then later cursed by some opponents. Wathen wrote the commissioners, accusing them of "xenophobic grandstanding." One replied that he was "ignorant."

Wathen, who has called the sprawling Bitterroot Valley home for 20 years, sees the rejection of refugees as a blend of misinformation, economic anxiety and fear of the unknown.

"It surpasses any notion of reason ... that kind of idea that they are not us, and therefore they pose a threat," he says. "There's just that sense the horde is out there and if we don't circle the wagons ... we're going to be overrun and poor white America is going to suffer."

America has a long history of wariness of refugees.

Last November, shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks, a Gallup poll found that Americans, by 60 to 37 percent, opposed taking in refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war. In 1978, there was a 57 to 32 percent opposition to accepting Indochinese boat people, and in 1946, after World War II, the public was against welcoming displaced people from Europe, including Jews, by 72 to 16 percent.

Generally, Americans tend to favor refugees with whom they share some connection  political, religious or personal  and the public has little interaction with Muslims, says David Haines, a professor emeritus at George Mason University who has written extensively about refugees.

He says the public doesn't understand the rigorous vetting process. "The risks from refugees are really low because it's an extremely well-screened population," he says. "But it's hard for people to settle down on this issue, especially in a highly politicized context."

In Missoula, academics and religious leaders have expressed alarm about the harsh tone of the presidential campaign, especially comments aimed at Muslims by Donald Trump. In April, they sponsored "Celebrate Islam Week" at the university in hopes of countering the trend.

Among the participants was Samir Bitar, an Arabic studies professor who arrived at the University of Montana in the 1970s as a 16-year-old freshman, raised a family and has spent most of his adult life here.

Bitar has lectured for decades across the state without controversy  until this year, when about a dozen people in the nearby town of Darby objected to his planned talk at the library. The reason: They didn't want a Muslim in their town, according to the librarian. The library board voted. Bitar spoke and received a warm reception.

But the tone and atmosphere are decidedly different now, he says.

"This is the first time I actually look behind me as I walk. I've been here 42 years," he says. "It's like every part of my identity is coming under attack, including my American identity."

Recently, two students accepted Bitar's challenge to walk around wearing Muslim head gear to see how people would react. One young man donned a kufi, or skull cap, and classmates wouldn't sit next to him, Bitar says. While working at a deli, the student was rebuffed by a customer's wife who said: "'We're not going to have a Muslim help us.'"

Bitar, who is Palestinian, finds it all disheartening. People now are "motivated by pure emotion and not really thinking in logical terms," he says. "Fear turns into hatred."

Jameel Chaudhry, the campus architect, a native of Kenya and another member of the small Muslim community, says he, too, senses a new hostility.

"All of a sudden WE are the problem," he says. "We've never had this before, and I've been here 20 years. We didn't have this even after 9/11."

Chaudhry attributes this attitude to Trump, accusing the presumptive Republican nominee of stoking fears for political gain.

"He's become the champion of the anti-Muslim, anti-refugee movement," he says. While that group talks of being tired of political correctness, Chaudhry sees something else: "They don't want the other races coming in here."

But those who've publicly spoken out against refugees bristle at suggestions they're racist. They say they're trying to protect their communities.

"It doesn't make any difference if they're Muslims, Russians, whatever. You have to know who they are, what they've been doing in the past," says Jim Buterbaugh, a construction worker who organized three opposition rallies, including one at the state Capitol. "Are you going to go downtown and take five people off the streets and move them into your house without knowing who they are? Nobody in their right mind would do that."

He and others are upset they have no vote on this issue. State and local governments legally don't have authority to bar refugees, though they can refuse to directly provide local services, according to Haines. Last fall, more than half the nation's governors declared their opposition to accepting Syrian refugees, saying a pause was needed until security concerns are addressed.

That sense of being shut out of decision-making reflects a wider distrust of the government in parts of the West, where federal policies involving land, water and endangered species often clash with energy, timber and grazing interests. Though the refugee debate is different, it exposes the same raw nerves among opponents, who also question the economic and social impact.

In a letter to her commissioners, Ravalli County resident Birte Nellessen said, "to fool ourselves that we are helping 'poor folks driven out of their homeland by war' is ridiculous. They openly and blazingly state that they are coming to destroy us and our culture. ... Why we would spend any of our hard earned money on people like that?"

Nellessen, who moved to the U.S. from Germany 20 years ago, says officials should instead support local folks in need and that a smarter course would be to send supplies or money to help refugees rebuild in their homeland.

"I mean, what's a Syrian or Kenyan going to do in winter in Montana? Seriously."

The answer is coming. The International Rescue Committee has met with Missoula's mayor, police chief and others to prepare for the refugees  about 100 will come over a year's time. The agency plans to reopen a resettlement office here this fall, after a 25-year absence. Those most likely to be relocated include Congolese, Afghans and Syrians who will have no family ties, so they'll have to live within a 50-mile radius of the office.

Mary Poole is looking forward to their arrival.

About 750 people have signed up to help refugees make the transition, she says. One former Missoula resident now living in Mongolia wants to get involved when she returns.

Poole is already thinking ahead, too, about how this could change the life of her 17-month-old son, Jack.

She envisions a day, she says, when he "will be able to sit in a school next to someone of a different color, of a different language, of a different culture  and be able to learn that he lives in a global world. ... I don't think we can be insulated anymore."

Poole knows resistance remains, and still meets with those who don't want refugees here. She says she's even made friends with some vocal opponents, recently inviting them to her house for a barbecue.

"We're asking for compassion," she says, "and must be able to give that ourselves."

And there's always a chance to win some over.

"They are us,' she says of the opponents. "They are part of our community, and in order for this to be as successful as it possibly can be, it's about being in it together."

___

Sharon Cohen, a Chicago-based national writer, can be reached at scohen@ap.org

More Divided America:

Americans still believe, but country crumbling

Can resdistricting reform close minority gaps in capitols?

Tennessee minorities are underrepresented in state Legislature, but are attitudes changing?

Tennessees all-white congressional delegation one of two in Deep South

Minorities missing in many legislatures

Divided America: The National Perspective

Divided America: Diversity of Tennessee Congressional Districts

Divided America: Diversity of Tennessee State Senate Districts

Divided America: Diversity of Tennessee State House Districts

Video: Rep. Joe Armstrong discusses diversity in Tennessee Legislature

Video: Sen. Becky Duncan Massey discusses diversity in Tennessee Legislature

Video: State Rep. G.A. Hardaway on diversity in the Tennessee Legislature

Video: State Sen. Mark Norris on diversity in the Tennessee Legislature

Video: Rep. Harold Love on legislative diversity

Video: Rep. Mike Stewart on legislative diversity

Evangelicals feel alienated, anxious

Rosy economic averages bypass many in US

In Montana, neighbors at odds over refugees
The Bonnaroo arch stands lit on the third night of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival on Saturday, June 11, 2016, in Manchester, Tenn. (CAITIE MCMEKIN/NEWS SENTINEL)

By Natalie Neysa Alund, USA TODAY NETWORK, The Tennessean

Law enforcement overseeing the the 15th annual Bonnaroo Arts and Music Festival arrested and cited more than 300 people during this year's festival, authorities said Wednesday.

Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves said his department wrote 277 citations during the four-day music festival held June 9-12 in Manchester, Tenn., and called the number on par with previous festival years. In all, law enforcement arrested 37 people, a number Graves said is down slightly from previous years.

Last year, there were 76 arrests made by all law enforcement agencies, up from 60 in 2014.

According to booking information at the Coffee County Jail, the Sheriffs Department made 19 arrests, Manchester Police Department and Tennessee Highway Patrol each arrested eight people and Tullahoma Police Department arrested two people.

Continue reading at The Tennessean, a News Sentinel partner.
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For the second year in a row and the fourth time since 2009, Tennessee garnered a Gold Shovel award from Area Development magazine for robust business development. Joining Tennessee in the top six states for attracting business are California, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina and Utah. Tennessee had $5.5 billion in new investment in 2015.

"The states and their communities receiving 2016 Shovel Awards not only have the right combination of factors to attract and retain business, they also display a pro-business attitude and marketing savvy," Geraldine Gamble, editor of Area Development, said in a statement announcing the winners. "They deserve to be recognized for winning high-impact economic development projects."

Indeed, the string of top finishes  Tennessee received Silver Shovel awards in 2010 and 2011  is a testament to the state's commitment to attracting and retaining business.

"This award demonstrates the focus our state places on supporting existing industry growth as well as recruiting new projects which ultimately create high quality jobs for Team Tennessee," said Randy Boyd, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

According to Area Development, a publication focusing on industrial site selection and facilities planning, the year 2015 was Tennessee's best ever for attracting business investment. "The state landed 161 company commitments totaling $5.5 billion in investment capital, calling for more than 25,000 new jobs. About 40 percent of that investment came from foreign countries, led by Japan, Canada, and China," the authors of the report wrote.

The automotive sector, which accounts more than one-third of the state's manufacturing jobs, led the way. Area Development singled out Nissan North America's $160 million expansion in Smyrna, FICOSA's $58 million investment in Cookeville, Gestamp Corp.'s $180 million expansion in Chattanooga and DENSO's $400 million investment in its Maryville complex as key automotive industry projects.

The publication also lauded Oak Ridge National Laboratory for its role in attracting Advanced Munitions International to East Tennessee. Advanced Munitions is building its global headquarters and a new manufacturing plant in Alcoa.

The top job creator in 2015 was Community Health Systems Inc., which is based in Franklin, Tenn. The company is investing $66.2 million in a shared services center for its hospitals in 22 states, adding about 1,500 jobs in Nashville.

The award comes after a glowing report on the state's economy by the University of Tennessee's Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research (which happens to be named for the state's Economic and Community Development commissioner). The state's unemployment rate has fallen below the national average for the first time in two years. The report predicts strong growth in 2016 and 2017.

Boyd and the state's development team, plus their partners in local governments, business associations and the Tennessee Valley Authority, are showing results that point to a brighter economic future for the Volunteer State.
Strategy and Finance Minister Yoo Il-ho, left, speaks during a meeting held at the Government Complex in Seoul, Thursday. / Yonhap



By Lee Hyo-sik

The Korea National Oil Corp. (KNOC), the Korea Resources Corp. (KORES) and two other public companies ranked bottom in a government-led management evaluation, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance said Thursday.

The Korea Coal Corp., the Korea Gas Corp. the Korea Electrical Safety Corp. and six other state-run enterprises were also found to have performed poorly. The heads and executives of these 13 poorly managed entities received administrative warnings that they could face dismissal if they fail to turn their organizations around.

They will also not receive a year-end bonus, according to the finance ministry.

A panel under the finance ministry convened a meeting Thursday, announcing its review of 116 state companies and quasi-government bodies.

No entity received the highest class "S," while Incheon International Airport Corp., the Korea Expressway Corp. and 18 other firms were given an "A."

Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, Korea Rural Community Corp., and 51 other institutions were given a "B," while the Korea National Tourism Organization, Korail and 28 others received a "C."

Heads of KNOC, KORES, the Korea International Broadcasting Foundation and Korea Infrastructure Safety and Technology Corp, which received the lowest grade of "E," are subject to dismissal. But the finance ministry said it will not sack them because their terms all end in less than six months.

The nine entities with the "D" grade will not get their annual bonuses and will see their budgets shrink in 2017.

The 116 public corporations posted a combined net profit of 12.5 trillion won last year, up from 11.3 trillion won a year earlier. Their debt fell to 490.5 trillion won from 507.2 trillion won over the same period, with their debt-to-equity ratio dropping to 191 percent from 212 percent.

"Despite the prolonged global economic downturn, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak and other unfavorable conditions, the 116 public organizations performed better last year than in 2014," a ministry official said.
Chemical firm desperate to normalize operations

By Lee Hyo-sik

Lotte Chemical, which has become Lotte Group's most profitable unit under Chairman Shin Dong-bin's reign, is at the center of the prosecution's widening investigation of the embattled family-controlled conglomerate, according to industry analysts, Thursday.

Prosecutors are investigating whether the chemical unit played a crucial role in creating slush funds for Chairman Shin and other Lotte family members, and helped them accumulate personal wealth through a wide range of allegedly illicit dealings.

For years the chairman has been nurturing Lotte Chemical to make it Lotte's main revenue source. In 1990, he began his career as heir to his father  Lotte founder Shin Kyuk-ho  at the chemical firm, after quitting Nomura Securities in Japan. Through multiple mergers and acquisitions (M&As), the company has become one of Korea's three main chemical product makers.

According to Whois Corp., a market research firm on Korea's top enterprises, Lotte Chemical was the group's most profitable unit in 2015, posting a 1.34 trillion won ($1.15 billion) operating profit. This accounted for 33.1 percent of Lotte Group's total operating profit.

Lotte Shopping, which generated 16.1 trillion won in sales last year, even more than Lotte Chemical's 8.5 trillion won, only had a 715 billion won operating profit.

Emerging as the most profitable Lotte unit, investigators suspect the company was mobilized to raise slush funds and orchestrate a host of illegal corporate activities to bolster the wealth of Chairman Shin and his family.
Hyundai Heavy Industries, an embattled shipyard, is feared to face another stumbling block on its normalization path as its union is threatening to walk out in opposition to the tough restructuring program, industry sources said Thursday.



According to the sources, the union's representatives will decide on Friday whether to propose a general strike. On Thursday, hundreds of unionists at the Ulsan, South Gyeongsang Province shipyard held a massive rally at the company headquarters, denouncing the shipbuilder's latest self-rescue plan which they say will result in massive layoffs.



The union plans to put its representatives' strike proposal to a vote after reporting its decision to a government agency next week.



The Hyundai Heavy union went on strike last year and the year before.



Meanwhile, the labor union and company management have held 11 rounds of negotiations over wage and other benefits since early this month.



The labor union is demanding the right to recommend an outside director, a pay raise and other benefits. Management is asking its union to accept a flexible working system and drop some of what it calls are "excessive benefits."



Among other issues, the two are sparring over the spin-off of a business unit, which the labor union claims will lead to an increase in the number of non-regular workers.



Earlier, Hyundai Heavy mapped out self-rehabilitation measures that would save a 3.5 trillion won, including asset sales and a cut in workforce, in order to stay afloat amid a drop in new orders.



Under the shipbuilder's self-rescue plans, temporarily approved by the financial authorities and its creditors, led by KEB-Hana Bank, it will sell stocks that it invested in, non-core assets and cut its workforce, which will reduce its debt-to-equity ratio to below 100 percent by 2018.



Since September 2014, Hyundai Heavy has already implemented self-rescue measures worth 3.9 trillion won.



The shipbuilder swung to the black in the first quarter for the first time in 10 quarters with an operating income of 325 billion won, aided by its stronger restructuring efforts.



Meanwhile, unionized workers at Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, another struggling shipyard, voted for a strike earlier this week.



Loss-making Daewoo Shipbuilding has proposed self-rescue measures worth 5.3 trillion won in total that include an employee wage cut and asset sales. Last year the shipyard drew up a 1.85-trillion-won self-rehabilitation plan in return for 4 trillion won in financial aid. Recently, the shipyard presented an additional step estimated to save 2 trillion won.



Samsung Heavy Industries also has crafted self-rehabilitation measures, worth 1.5 trillion won, to their creditors. The scheme calls for the sale of non-core assets such as buildings and stocks. It also includes a cut in workforce.



The country's top three shipyards suffered a combined operating loss of 8.5 trillion won last year due largely to increased costs stemming from a delay in the construction of offshore facilities and an industry-wide slump. (Yonhap)




By Kim Rahn



Police have raided the offices of civic groups, including the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, for allegedly violating election laws in campaigning against specific candidates ahead of the April 13 general election.

Investigators from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Thursday raided some 10 locations, confiscating computer hard drives and documents. They also plan to summon officials of the groups being investigated.

The raid followed a complaint filed with the prosecution by the Seoul branch of the National Election Commission (NEC) in late April after the election.

The progressive civic groups held a press conference a week ahead of the poll and announced a list of the "10 Worst Candidates." The NEC concluded it was negative campaigning which is banned according to the Public Official Election Act. Most of the 10 candidates were from the ruling Saenuri Party.

The NEC also said the groups conducted an online survey to select the candidates for the list without giving notice to the commission, which was also in violation of the act.
By Lee Kyung-min

More than 300 representatives from government, business, academia and the public will discuss green technology, efficient use of resources and interdependence between industry and cities at the 4th Green Industry Conference in Ulsan at the end of this month, organizers of the event said Wednesday.

The U.N. Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Ulsan Metropolitan Government (UMG) will host the conference in Ulsan June 28-30.

Under the theme of "Green Industry for Sustainable Cities," participants will talk about ways to promote eco-technology innovation to help improve productivity and job creation thus boosting regional economies.

"Today we face a growing need to integrate industrial and urban policies to achieve sustainable economic development, higher productivity and job creation," the organizer said in a press release.

The conference will showcase Ulsan as an example of a successful eco-industrial hub. Participants will visit the city's manufacturing facilities to see cutting-edge technology in operation.

On the first day, UNIDO Director General Li Yong and other high-level officials will deliver their opening remarks, followed by roundtable discussions and plenary sessions on three themes _ green industry for sustainable cities, Korea's green strategy in urban industrial areas, and low-carbon transport and energy for sustainable cities.

The discussion topics for the second day include policies for green industrial development, the eco-industrial complex, resource efficiency, partnerships between the public and private sectors, green entrepreneurship and technology innovation. The participants will issue a declaration.

On the last day, they will go on field visits to manufacturing sites in Ulsan, including the factories of Hyundai Heavy Industries, SK Energy and Ulsan Hydrogen Town.

The event is sponsored by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, the Small and Medium Business Administration, the National Research Council of Science and Technology and the China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group.
Rep. Yoo Seong-min, an independent lawmaker, speaks to reporters at the National Assembly after he was allowed to rejoin the ruling Saenuri Party, Thursday. / Korea Times photo by Oh Dae-geun



Park loyalists strongly protest reinstatement

By Kim Hyo-jin

The ruling Saenuri Party decided to reinstate seven independent lawmakers who left the party ahead of the April 13 general election amid a factional feud.

Four of the seven  Reps. Yoo Seong-min, Yoon Sang-hyun, Kang Ghil-boo and Ahn Sang-soo  rejoined the party immediately after the announcement. Three others  Reps. Joo Ho-young, Chang Je-won and Lee Chul-gyu  said they may also apply to return to the party soon.

The decision will bring the number of Saenuri lawmakers to 129, making it the largest party in the 300-seat National Assembly. The main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK) now has 122 seats.

All seven were elected in April after quitting the party. They broke off after being excluded from candidate nominations largely controlled by loyalists to President Park Geun-hye.

Many of the pro-Park lawmakers who ran as Saenuri Party candidates lost in the April polls, and the ruling party lost its majority status.

Pro-Park lawmakers strongly protested the decision, saying it was made without enough discussion among party members. Some likened the move to a "coup" led by those who are not affiliated with them.

Kim Hee-ok, who heads the party's emergency planning committee with support from Park loyalists, hinted at quitting the post following the decision, according to Rep. Kim Seon-dong, a pro-Park lawmaker.

This suggests that a factional feud may escalate in the ruling party ahead of a party caucus in August, in which the party will elect a new leader and Supreme Council members.

In April, the MPK won 123 seats while the Saenuri Party secured 122 seats. However, Chung Se-kyun, an MPK member, had to give up his seat after being appointed speaker of the National Assembly according to an Assembly rule banning the speaker from having party membership.

Whether to accept the former members has been a key issue within the ruling party, which is still struggling to overcome its poor election performance.

"We hope their rejoining will help us make a fresh start and accelerate reform," a party spokesman said.

Reps. Yoo, Yoon, Kang and Ahn submitted their applications to rejoin the party immediately after winning in the April election.

But the remaining three lawmakers have yet to apply.

"The three have also expressed their intention to rejoin us," another party official said. "They are expected to submit applications soon, and we will approve them as soon as possible."

The internal feud in the lead-up to the April election was centered on Rep. Yoo Seong-min, a former Park loyalist and floor leader who became estranged from the President.

Yoo has emerged as a potential presidential candidate after winning an election in Daegu, the main political stronghold of the ruling party.

Despite their return, the party still falls short of a parliamentary majority, which means it will need to seek cooperation with the opposition parties to pass bills.
Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon announces the city government's plan to have subway operators directly carry out safety-related duties without outsourcing, during a press conference at Seoul City Hall, Thursday. / Yonhap



By Kim Se-jeong

Seoul's subway operators will directly manage the maintenance of screen doors at subway platforms and will take responsibility for other safety-related duties, putting an end to outsourcing this work altogether, the city government said, Thursday.

This measure is aimed at improving public transportation safety and protecting maintenance workers, according to Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon.

The measure came in response to the May 28 death of a 19-year-old maintenance worker who was assigned to repair screen doors at Guui Station on Line 2 in eastern Seoul. The worker, who worked for a contractor of the subway operator, was killed when a train arrived while he was working on a screen door.

"We cannot compromise safety," Park said in a press briefing at City Hall. "I believe this measure will improve working conditions for the workers who keep the subway system sound for 10 million Seoul residents."

Eight subway lines in Seoul are managed by two companies under the city government _ Seoul Metro for Lines 1-4 and Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit (SMRT) for 5-8. Seoul Metro has five subcontractors performing work including screen door and train maintenance among other tasks. SMRT has one subcontractor. Both companies actively outsourced work between 2008 and 2012 in the name of efficiency.

Park said the two operators will hire 594 workers from the six subcontractors directly.

But direct employment will exclude another 182 workers, mostly former officials of the operators who were hired by the subcontractors for almost the same salary and benefits. It was criticized that because the former officials received high salaries, the subcontractors had to recruit young laborers at low wages, skip safety training and cut corners on safety regulations.

Park said the former officials are "old without proper skills and licenses" and said the city will hire more technicians instead if necessary.

Becoming regular workers under the city government, the 594 subcontractor employees will get pay raises. The deceased worker, surnamed Kim, was paid 1.6 million won per month, but his colleagues will earn 2 million won per month working directly for the city, according to the mayor.

The mayor, however, refuted concerns that the new measure could cost the city more, saying "eventually, it will be more cost-effective" for the city to directly manage them.

In the Guui Station accident, police found that Kim had been sent to the scene alone, against a safety regulation which requires at least two workers to be present for this type of work. Due to the subcontractors being understaffed, Kim and his colleagues faced an excessive workload, and the police concluded these systemic factors contributed to his death. The city is currently conducting its own investigation into the accident.
An appeals court handed down a 12-year prison term to a 56-year-old South Korean man on Thursday for assaulting the top U.S. envoy to South Korea and prison staffers last year.

Kim Ki-jong is currently serving a jail term for attacking Ambassador Mark Lippert with a knife at a breakfast function in Seoul in March 2015, leaving the U.S. ambassador with deep gashes on his face and arm that needed more than 80 stitches.

A lower court had sentenced him to 12 years in prison. Later, an additional 18 months was handed down to Kim for assaulting a prison guard and a doctor.

Reducing the combined jail term, the Seoul High Court said it took into consideration Kim's bad health and the fact that he had been working to contribute to society by protecting traditional Korean culture.

Prosecutors have been arguing that the 56-year-old should be found guilty of violating the National Security Law, of which a lower court had acquitted Kim.

The appeals court, however, said that just because some of the arguments made by Kim coincide with those of the North does not make him a person who engages in activities that can be seen as anti-national.

Current law prohibits South Korean citizens from contacting North Koreans without government approval or engaging in activities benefiting the North. (Yonhap)
By Kang Seung-woo



The ruling party and Cheong Wa Dae seem to be more open to holding talks with the opposition parties on amending the Constitution to change the current five-year, single-term presidential system.



A number of lawmakers from the Saenuri Party, including former Interior Minister Chong Jong-sup, are supporting the idea of revising the Constitution, an issue re-ignited by National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun, Monday.



In addition, a senior presidential secretary also hinted at the presidential office's openness to discussing a revision.



Cheong Wa Dae officially repeated its opposition to amending the Constitution, last revised in 1987, because President Park Geun-hye believes that any discussions may distract the nation from efforts to revive the sluggish economy, describing it as a "black hole.".



With the issue gaining momentum, People's Party floor leader Park Jie-won said Thursday that President Park needs to officially ask the National Assembly to discuss the matter, adding any debate would progress swiftly.



"The discussions should be wrapped up by the end of the year so as to hold next year's presidential election with a new Constitution, or it will be politically swayed by presidential hopefuls," said Chong, regarded as a loyalist to President Park within the ruling party.



"Should parliament begin to discuss a constitutional revision calmly, I think it will not prevent the government from handling state affairs."



Chong added that the current system excessively empowers the president, leading to endless political and social conflict.



Rep. Na Kyung-won, also from the Saenuri Party, said it was not a good idea to put the discussion on the shelf due to the "black hole" assertion.



"The current Constitution is nearing the end of its lifetime. In order to overcome the bad effects of the five-year, single-term presidency, we need to reform the political system by next year's by-elections in April or presidential election in December," she said on her SNS account.



"We cannot delay the discussion anymore, buried in the black hole theory."



Kim Jae-won, a newly appointed senior presidential secretary for political affairs, told reporters Monday that the semi-presidential system  a power-sharing system between the president and a prime minister  was not a good option for the nation to introduce, indicating that Cheong Wa Dae may discuss a four-year, two-term presidency.



"The semi-presidential system cannot resolve possible conflicts between the president and the prime minister," he said.



Bae Jong-chan, the chief director of political pollster Research and Research, said that President Park is expected to eventually agree to amending the Constitution.



"President Park opposes the Constitutional revision out of concerns that the discussion at this point may lead her to becoming an early lame duck. However, amid public support for the idea, she would have to agree to it," he said.



However, Bae added that she would attempt to delay the beginning of the discussion as long as possible to buy time for her to handle state affairs and to prevent her from entering an early lame duck session.



With a constitutional revision resurfacing, it is expected to become one of the key issues en route to the presidential election, with hopefuls already opining on the matter.



Former Saenuri Party Chairman Kim Moo-sung has supported the semi-presidential system, while Moon Jae-in, a former leader of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea, and Seoul Mayor Park Won-soo claims that the nation should introduce the four-year, two-term presidency.



"Which system to choose is expected to affect the next presidential election," Bae said.




By Jun Ji-hye



French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian vowed to encourage African and Middle Eastern countries to join sanctions against North Korea, according to defense officials, Thursday.



Le Drian made the pledge during talks with his South Korean counterpart Han Min-koo in Paris, Wednesday, officials said.



This is part of Seoul's recent efforts to bolster diplomacy with countries that have been friendly with the North to isolate the authoritarian state further in line with the toughest-ever sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) .



The French minister also said that France's position on the North is strong, simple and clear, agreeing with Han on the seriousness of the North's nuclear and missile threats, according to the officials.



Le Drian and Han also agreed to jointly consider additional sanctions against the Kim Jong-un regime.



The UNSC imposed sanctions against Pyongyang early March in response to the North's fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch the following month.



In May, President Park Geun-hye became the first South Korean leader to visit Iran and Uganda, two countries that have maintained close military ties with the North.



Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed to support the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula during his summit with Park, May 2, while Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised to "disengage" from military cooperation with the North, May 29.



Thomas Countryman, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, also recently called on African nations to cut off connections with the North as Uganda did last month to prevent the North's future nuclear threats, according to the U.S.-based Voice of America (VOA), Thursday.



During Wednesday's talks, Le Drian and Han also agreed to increase military exchange and defense technology cooperation between Seoul and Paris.



Toward that end, the two top defense officials agreed to revise a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on defense industry cooperation this month. The revision would call for transferring the duty of carrying out the content of the agreement from Korea's vice defense minister to the head of the Defense Acquisition Program Administration.



Once revised, the two sides would be able to widen and speed up their defense technology cooperation, observers say, noting that the technology cooperation regarding Seoul's KF-X project to develop its own fighter jets could be dealt with afterward.



The two ministers also agreed to expand France's participation in military exercises conducted in South Korea, including exercises with U.S. troops.



Currently, Paris sends two defense officials to the joint Korea-U.S. Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises, and three officials to the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercise as observers.



Le Drian was quoted as saying that his talks with Han have opened a new chapter in strategic defense cooperation between the two countries.




The Gaeseong Industrial Complex, an inter-Korean factory park just two hours from Seoul, had served as a testing ground for unification since operations began there in 2004. / Courtesy of The Korea Times



By Choi Sung-jin





Choi Dong-jin Kim Yong-hwan

In her Memorial Day speech on June 6, President Park Geun-hye said, "It is really pitiable that national division is becoming increasingly rigorous reality." The remark came nearly four months after President Park shut down, abruptly and one-sidedly, the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC), the last remaining symbol of inter-Korean cooperation.

The next day, the Ministry of Unification turned down requests from businesspeople to visit the inter-Korean factory park in North Korea, to check their facilities and equipment.

"The monsoon season will be here soon, rusting and spoiling the machinery there," said Chung Ki-seop, chief of the emergency committee to deal with the operational suspension of the complex. "If the government turns the joint industrial park into worthless junk, so will go the relationship between the two Koreas."

Few might have been in more despair and anger by the sudden shutdown of the GIC than Choi Dong-jin, CEO of Daemyung Withus, a small firm that makes jeans and other casual clothing.

"I started as a sewer worker upon graduating from high school in 1977, and have since done all I could do to start my own company and successfully run it," said Choi, 58. "My four decades of struggle came to nothing almost overnight."

When Choi decided to do business in the GIC, many opposed the move citing political risks. But Choi trusted the government's pledge that it would never close the GIC no matter what happens between the Koreas. "Besides, I took some pride in my contribution, however small, to rebuilding ties between the two Koreas," he said. "I was dead wrong and my friends were right, and my biggest mistake was to trust my own government."

Choi said he suffered financial losses approaching 10 billion won ($8.3 million), including his investment in the plant and equipment, and raw materials  fabrics and half-finished clothing  which he failed to bring back to South Korea because the government made the unilateral move on Feb. 10, the final day of the lunar New Year holiday, with almost no prior notice.

Choi and 122 other owners of businesses that operated in the GIC have decided to refuse to accept the Park Geun-hye administration's policy package announced on May 31, aimed to compensate part of their losses.

The GIC companies reported a combined total of 944.6 billion won ($787 million) in losses but the government confirmed only 777.9 billion won through a separate calculation by accountants it hired. The emergency committee claims the compensation amounts to only 65.3 percent what the government has confirmed and 53.8 percent of the reported amount.

"Our position is that the government should make up for all the losses incurred by its policy change," said Chung, the committee head. "It's a shame the officials have set different compensation ratios by dividing companies into insured and uninsured ones, while none of the firms were operating in the GIC against the government's policy."

Political and economic watchers familiar with the GIC since its launch in 2004 also say the government's compensation package could result in a schism among the 123 businesses and thousands of their suppliers, depending on when they moved into the South-North industrial park.

Choi, the CEO of a jeans company, could not agree more.

"Frankly, the companies that started business in the GIC along with its completion in 2004 have earned money under the full support of the liberal governments," he said. "The situation has become quite different for those which moved into there since the conservative Lee Myung-bak administration took power in 2008."

For instance, he said, the Lee administration supplied barely two-thirds of the North Korean workers requested by the businesses that moved into the GIC after 2008.

"South Korea was supposed to fill the labor shortage by recruiting workers living farther from Gaeseong and building a dormitory to solve their commuting problems. But the Lee administration was reluctant to expand the inter-Korean project and reneged on the construction of the dorm," Choi said. "No sooner had we late starters reached a breakeven point by overcoming all these handicaps than the Park administration shut it down. It was nothing less than a bolt out of the blue sky."

Even more pitiful are their employees.

"Workers at state enterprises who lost their jobs during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis received two years' wages as compensation," said Kim Yong-hwan, chief of the council of the GIC workers. "We, the laborers in Gaeseong, always thought ourselves as little different from state workers hired by private firms, worrying about personal safety according to the ups and downs in the inter-Korean atmosphere and going home once every two weeks at most."

Nevertheless, the workers' council reduced their compensation demands to one year's salary but the government halved it further to six months' salary, Kim said, adding that most of about 1,000 workers are in their 50s and 60s, unable to find jobs elsewhere even if they try.

"And they need money now more than in any phases of their lives with children in college or at marriage age," Kim said. "Six months later, most of them will have almost no income with their livelihoods broken up and scattered by the abrupt government action."

President Park stressed her move was inevitable, saying, "It didn't make sense if South Korea had tried to suffer no losses and done nothing" about the North's nuclear and missile provocations. That meant the move was for demonstrating to other countries, mostly China, that South Korea meant business.

Experts had warned, however, against the "suicidal action," which would give up the final diplomatic leverage in dealing with the North while exerting little if any influence on China. The northeastern Chinese provinces might have been rather pleased that they could relocate some of the North Korean workers to their plants in Sino-Korean border areas.

Some government officials have said North Korea could have diverted the hard cash earned by workers in Gaeseong to help finance its nuclear program. There are at least two logical problems in their assertion, experts point out: first, the cash income, barely 1 percent of the North's GDP, cannot affect the pursuit of the regime's supreme goal. Second, if the officials are right, the Park administration has also helped North Korea over the past three years.

Conservatives, in Korea and America, never welcomed the birth of the South-North industrial park upon its inception 12 years ago, with some U.S. officials taking issue with its products' place of origin rule. Yet there had been no stoppage of its operations, not even during the two naval battles in the West Sea, until North Korea suspended it for nearly six months in 2013 complaining about the South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises.

The Park administration is said to have set this country back decades in many areas, including democracy. If it shuts down the GIC for good, it will have degenerated the inter-Korean relationship to two decades ago.

Business owners and employees who worked in Gaeseong recalled how the South and North Koreans overcame their initial sense of difference to realize that they were all Koreans. "It was a small testing ground of reunification," they said in unison, noting that 54,000 North Korean workers there had come to understand what capitalism was like, and liked it.

"I have left and lost everything in Gaeseong," said CEO Choi. "But our government will have left behind and lost 54,000 new' South Koreans and many more potential South Koreans there."

On Wednesday, the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea issued a statement on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of the 2000 summit between the Koreas, calling for the government to reopen the GIC after talks with North Korea. Rep. Yoon Hu-duk compared the GIC to a child in the Hebrew Bible, claimed by two women and put to the judgment of King Solomon. "In its 21st century version in Korea, the real mother (the South Korean government) is killing her own baby," he said.

Most other Koreans are saying Seoul must save it while there is still time to do so.
South Korean defense manufacturer Hanwha Thales plans to kick off the process to develop an advanced radar system to be fitted onto the country's indigenous fighter jets next month, the company's CEO said Thursday.

In April, the defense unit of conglomerate Hanwha Group was picked as the preferred bidder to build active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars for some 120 fighter jets that South Korea seeks to develop by the mid-2020s.

Chang Si-kwon, chief executive of Hanwha Thales, told reporters in Paris that his company plans to produce a model of the AESA and that this will be used in operational tests with the Agency for Defense Development (ADD).

Hanwha Thales, set to clinch the final contract with ADD, plans to produce the first prototype of the radar by June 2017 and another one by the following year if the radar works as planned.

"The parent group is fully supporting us in our efforts to become a world-class defense manufacturer," Chang said. "The group is stressing that we must succeed in developing the AESA radars."

South Korea is seeking to deploy the new planes to be built under the 18 trillion won ($15.4 billion) Korean Fighter Experimental (KF-X) project in a bid to replace its aging jet fleet of F-4s and F-5s.

Last month, U.S. company General Electric (GE) was selected as the preferred bidder to supply engines for South Korea's next-generation fighter jets.

South Korea had initially planned to secure 25 fighter jet technologies from U.S. aerospace giant Lockheed Martin in an offset deal linked to Seoul's purchase of 40 of the company's F-35 Lightning II fighters in 2014.

But the U.S. government refused last year to approve the export of four core technologies, including those related to the radar, forcing Seoul to find an alternative supplier. (Yonhap)
The South Korean Navy on Thursday kicked off a three-day maritime exercise to defend the western sea border from possible North Korean provocations, the military said.



The exercise came as North Korean fishing and patrol boats often show up near the western maritime border, widely known as the Northern Limit Line (NLL), in June, the peak season for catching blue crabs.



The maritime drill is being conducted amid the possibility that North Korea could provoke a maritime confrontation. The two Koreas fought several bloody sea battles along the NLL in 1999, 2002 and 2009.



Pyongyang does not acknowledge the de facto demarcation line drawn unilaterally by the U.S.-led United Nations Command when the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a cease-fire.



"About 200 North Korean fishing vessels are operating in waters near the NLL," said a military official, adding that the figure is 1.7 times higher than last year.



The drill will involve around 20 warships including the 7,600 ton Aegis-equipped destroyer and other military assets such as the P-3 surveillance plane and Lynx antisubmarine helicopters, according to military officials.



"We are keeping full combat readiness to swiftly respond to the enemy's possible provocations in waters off the west coast," the Navy said in a statement.



During the peak season for crab fishing, Chinese fishing boats often cross into South Korean waters in the Yellow Sea in search of bigger hauls, regularly leading to crackdowns by the South Korean Coast Guard.



Chinese fishermen are presumed to have bought the right to operate in waters on the North Korean side of the border, but they often intruded into the South Korean side.



North Korea has recently raised its combat readiness near the western sea border, according to South Korean military officials.



The communist country is known to have constructed a naval base capable of accommodating about 70 air-cushioned vessels in Goampo, some 60 kilometers north of the NLL.



Early this year, the North built a 20-meter-high steel tower on Ari Island, an uninhabited piece of land, some 12 kilometers north of frontline Yeonpyeong Island and put a monitoring device on it.



Reflecting the tense nature of the NLL and the need for Seoul to stay on guard, North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship in early 2010, killing 46 sailors, and also shelled Yeonpyeong Island near the demarcation line in November of that year. (Yonhap)




By Kim Da-hee

North Korea has banned its citizens from touring China since March, the U.S.-based Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported Thursday.

According to the RFA, citing sources from North Korea, the North's state security department has not granted a visa to enter China since March. The department also tracked down all individual tourists in China and asked them to return before mid-March.

North Koreans expected the restriction to be removed after Ri Su-yong, vice chairman of the North's ruling Workers' Party, visited China in late May. But the restriction has not been lifted until now.

Sources said the restriction affected many North Korean merchants who travelled to China for business.

"Some North Koreans have accumulated a considerable amount of wealth from their business trips to China," said a source from Ryanggang Province in North Korea. "However, the cease of visa issuing has cut off their sources of cash."

North Korean authorities, however, do not block ethnic Chinese from visiting North Korea, a source from North Hamgyeong Province said.

"There is a growing criticism that the department does something only good for ethnic Chinese merchants," the source said. "The department claims it just follows the order from the top, saying nothing can be done about the matter."
North Korea has not allowed its people to make individual trips to China since March, a U.S-based media report said Thursday, citing sources in the reclusive country.

A source from the country's Ryanggang Province told Radio Free Asia (RFA) that the North's State Security Ministry has not permitted travel to the neighboring country, and has even traveled to China to instruct North Koreans there to return to home.

The insider said that most North Koreans make trips to China for trade purposes, but their businesses have gone broke due to the regime's ban.

It is known that quite a large number of North Koreans have become "donju" or an affluent middle class who earn money through trade with China.

Literally meaning "masters of money," donju are people who made cash through business ventures. They have also become a powerful driving force within the regime.

Another source from North Hamgyong Province said, however, ethnic Chinese living in North Korea are free to travel to China.

For that reason, many North Koreans are complaining about the regime's measures, saying that they only benefit Chinese traders. (Yonhap)
North Korea's daily food distribution only met 60 percent of the U.N. recommendation. /Yonhap



By Lee Jin-a

North Korea doled out 360 grams of food daily to each citizen in April and May, 60 percent of the United Nations' recommendation, a U.N.-affiliated organization said Thursday.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the daily distribution in the isolated country was 50 grams less than the same period last year and 10 grams less than the previous quarter.

Because of a poor harvest last year, the state could neither satisfy the U.N.'s daily recommendation of 600 grams nor achieve its daily target of 573 grams.

The FAO said the North Korean government is facing its worst food shortage since 2011 and has to secure an extra 694,000 tons through imports and help from other countries.

Meanwhile, the state's leader, Kim Jong-un, recently visited a renovated confectionary factory in Pyongyang, North Korean state media said Thursday.

According to the Korean Central News Agency, Kim has inspected the factory that produces sweets, including candy, snacks and starch syrup, seven times.

"I am highly satisfied with the ruling party's current policy as it solved the shortage of confectionary products through utilizing corn, which is massively cultivated in the country," Kim told the news agency.

According to the FAO, North Korea's corn production last year dropped 3 percent from the previous year to 2.3 million tons. Rice production was down 26 percent to 1.95 million tons.
The Obama administration moved one step closer Thursday to giving up the last vestige of U.S. control over the Internet. It's not a big step in practical terms, but symbolically it's a big deal.



At issue is a Commerce Department contract that seemingly allows it to manage a crucial Internet function: the global master list of "top level domains," such as .com and .net, that directs traffic online. But the contract with the nonprofit Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers doesn't give the U.S. much discretion; instead, it merely allows the feds to verify that the right procedures and policies were followed before any changes are made to that master list.



Nevertheless, even that minor role has given some repressive regimes a pretext to push for more control by governments over other aspects of the Internet, such as the rules for privacy, security and data storage. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations, meanwhile, led officials in some other countries to oppose any U.S. government involvement in the Internet at all.



Against that backdrop, the Obama administration proposed in 2014 to transfer oversight of the master list of domains to a "multistakeholder" group that could not be controlled by any government and would not diminish the Internet's openness, stability or security. ICANN worked with a broad array of Internet users and other stakeholders to develop a proposal of its own, along with new rules aimed at making ICANN's governing body more accountable to Internet users. On Thursday, the Commerce Department gave ICANN's proposal a conditional thumbs up, with the final details to be worked out over the coming months.



Some conservatives argue that the U.S. involvement in domains is crucial to preserving an open Internet, and the House Appropriations Committee has proposed to maintain the status quo. But keeping the Commerce Department's nominal role in domain names would only encourage other governments to remake the Internet to their liking, either through technological barriers or through intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations. If it truly loves the open Internet, Congress will let it go.



This editorial appeared on the Los Angeles Times and was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.




South Korea's foreign minister said he barely discussed the controversial issue of deploying an advanced U.S. missile defense system on Korean soil during talks with his Russian counterpart earlier this week.



Yun Byung-se told South Korean reporters and foreign ministry officials during a luncheon in St. Petersburg on Tuesday that the topic of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system was raised in his meeting with Sergey Lavrov but only in passing.



"(The Russian side) mentioned a confrontational structure in Asia but barely talked about it," Yun said. "This showed (Moscow's) will to focus more on bilateral relations and the North Korean nuclear issue."



Russia and China have strongly opposed the possible deployment of a THAAD battery to South Korea, claiming it would undermine the strategic balance in the region. Seoul and Washington insist the missile defense system, if placed in the South, would be purely defensive in the face of North Korea's evolving nuclear and missile threats.



Yun highlighted the effort Moscow showed in order to make his Monday meeting with Lavrov a success.



"Because Russia is placing more importance on Asia, it has begun to give more attention to South Korea, and the expression it's begun to use recently is that South Korea is a key partner in Russia's foreign policy," Seoul's top diplomat said.



Analysts say Russia is increasingly looking east for new business opportunities amid an economic crisis caused by low global oil prices and international sanctions against the country.



As both China and Japan are seen as rivals in terms of geopolitics or territory, South Korea could be an optimum partner for Russia with all the necessary technology and resources but almost no source of tension between the two sides.



In a speech at a conference of the Korea-Russia Dialogue forum, Yun said Lavrov agreed with him on the large potential for bilateral cooperation in developing Russia's Far East region.



He also noted the similarity between Russia's new "Look East" policy, which centers on developing the Far East, and South Korea's Eurasia Initiative, which aims to draw countries in Asia and Europe closer by increasing rail, infrastructure and IT links.



Yun is the first South Korean foreign minister to visit Russia in five years. His three-day trip included talks with Lavrov in Moscow on Monday and various events in St. Petersburg on Tuesday.



The visit was seen as part of Seoul's efforts to strengthen the international sanctions regime against Pyongyang following its fourth nuclear test and its long-range rocket launch early this year.



"In the past, Russia was very careful about mentioning North Korea," Yun said during the luncheon. "They disliked criticizing the North even more and never used the word 'condemn' (on North Korea)."



However, in a press conference following Monday's talks, the two ministers said they agreed not to recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state and to strengthen their cooperation for the North's denuclearization.



"Russia has changed a lot in that it's showing its strength regarding the North Korea issue," Yun said.



Moscow is a key stakeholder in efforts to dismantle the North's nuclear weapons program. It is one of five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, which adopted a resolution in March imposing the toughest yet sanctions on Pyongyang, and a member of the now-stalled six-party talks on the North's nuclear program.



Before leaving, Yun visited a cemetery where he laid a wreath in front of a monument honoring Lee Beom-jin, Korea's diplomatic representative to the Russian Empire in the early 1900s. Lee fought for Korea's sovereignty in the face of Japanese aggression but killed himself at his St. Petersburg home in 1911 in protest of Japan's annexation of Korea.



The foreign minister also toured a Hyundai Motor plant located northwest of the city, the only foreign-owned car plant in Russia that handles the entire production process from parts manufacturing to assembly.



The South Korean automaker has expanded its presence in the Russian car market since it began local production in 2011. Last year, its share reached 20 percent of new cars.



The 200 hectare plant produces some 200,000 cars annually for sale in and outside the country and employs more than 7,000 locals.



From Russia, Yun headed to Bulgaria, where he is to hold talks with his Bulgarian counterpart Daniel Mitov later Wednesday. (Yonhap)




An LG Innotek production employee works on the company's smartphone parts manufacturing line in this file photo. The company said Thursday it has adopted a performance-based payment and personnel system for its production line workers. / Courtesy of LG Innotek



By Yoon Sung-won



LG Innotek said Thursday it has adopted a performance-based pay system for production line employees, expanding the system's application beyond office workers.



The company said it has reached an agreement with its labor union to improve not only its payment system but also performance evaluation, promotion review and employee education for all manufacturing workers following joint discussions over the last two years.



The company said the application of the performance-based pay system to production workers is a first for a domestic business with a conglomerate labor union.



"The personnel system reform has been made under a shared perspective between management and labor that the existing seniority-based salary system cannot support the company if it is to survive the rapid changes coming in manufacturing," LG Innotek said in a statement, Thursday. "At factories these days, processes are specialized and product lifecycles have been reduced. Such changes require quick adaptability of changing tasks and the seniority only hampers this."



LG Innotek said management and labor share the view that achievement rather than seniority should be rewarded in order to motivate employees to improve their capabilities.



"In the past, we have been urged to introduce a new payment and inventive system that differentiates employees by their achievements," the company said.



"The seniority-based salary system, which was introduced when the nation was undergoing high economic growth, does not provide flexibility in payment. Thus it is not suitable to meet rapid changes to the market environment and fierce global competition," said Kwon Soon-won, a business administration professor at Sookmyung Women's University. "The new performance-based personnel system will provide momentum to improve employee capabilities and productivity."



With the new personnel system, LG Innotek said it will provide incentives to high performing employees and those who have made significant contributions to the productivity of their teams. Consequently, a production worker can receive bonuses of up to 30 percent of their base pay.



To guarantee objectivity and fairness in personnel evaluation, LG Innotek said it will operate a committee consisting of manufacturing line leaders and executives and charge them with analyzing each employee's performance, ultimately assessing their contributions to the organization. Those employees who do not agree with the results can make their objections to the committee, the company said.



"A performance-based personnel system can actually improve an organization's competitiveness but only if it is based on fair evaluation," the company said.



LG Innotek also said it has recently introduced what it calls the "promotion by selection" system, which allows a manufacturing employee with superior work achievements to be promoted early.



Aiming at boosting the expertise of its manufacturing employees, LG Innotek said it will strengthen training programs to fit the new payment and personnel system. The company said it will operate educational sessions about manufacturing skills, quality control, production processes, foreign languages and career design.



"All production employees should attend at least 48 hours of training a year," the company said.
By Lee Min-hyung



The cable TV association called on the government, Thursday, to finalize its decision over the controversial takeover of CJ HelloVision (CJH) by SK Telecom, putting an end to growing market uncertainties in the industry.



"Interested parties are exchanging false and hostile propaganda, while the government has delayed its screening processes over the deal," the Korea Cable TV Association (KCTA) said in a statement.



Earlier expectations were that the government would make its final decision for the takeover plan, the nation's first in terms of combining a leading mobile carrier and cable TV operator, no later than April when the 120-day legal deadline for the review fell.



The merger, however, still remains unresolved, with the government delaying the process citing the complexity and sensitivity of the issue.



But the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) stressed that the deadline has not passed, as the four-month deadline excludes a document correction period.



In the statement, the KCTA stressed that the delayed processes would only cause growing rancor from the industry, further intensifying conflicts among concerned parties.



"The cable TV industry faces market uncertainties due to the delayed decision, which could cause a backlash from the broadcasting sector as well," said the statement.



The cable TV market shows little sign of rebounding, after losing its competitiveness to Internet protocol television (IPTV).



"The government should make enough efforts for the industry to stand competitive on its own," said the statement. "It is time for the government to make a swift decision through a strict screening process."



SK Telecom's major rivals _ KT and LG Uplus _ remained cautious over the statement.



A KT spokesman said, "It is true that the cable industry is declining, but this cannot justify the merger."



SK Telecom, however, claimed the statement was not aimed at "justifying" the merger, and the company had nothing to do with the statement.



"The merger initiative was announced last year, as this met the needs of both sides," said an SK Telecom official. "We want to generate next-generation growth engines through the merger and offer quality content for viewers."



LG Uplus, which also opposes the deal, stressed that the government should come up with specific measures to help cable TV operators stand on their own feet.



A company official said, "The SK-CJ merger, if allowed, may speed up the decline of the cable TV industry, as expectations are that other companies may expand their presence into the industry."




KT officials inspect undersea cable networks at the Submarine Network Operation Center (SNOC) in Busan, Thursday. The company opened the SNOC in its bid to meet growing demands for a facility to manage cross-border data transfer.

/ Courtesy of KT



By Lee Min-hyung

KT has opened an undersea network control tower in Busan, amid the growing importance of managing cross-border data flow.

The Submarine Network Operation Center (SNOC) will be used as a key facility to control timely and stable bulk data transfers in such areas as ultra-high-definition (UHD) broadcasting, data roaming and the fifth-generation (5G) network systems, according to KT, Thursday.

This came months after the company was named a key operator of the world's largest submarine network cable, New Cross Pacific (NCP) last October. In 2014, KT won another undersea cable contract, the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG), connecting nine Asian nations.

"The SNOC will help us provide turnkey operations for undersea cable networks, from establishing network infrastructure to risk management," Oh Seong-mok, executive vice president of KT's network division, said in a statement.

Expectations are that the center will allow the firm to respond more swiftly to potential data interference, as the SNOC has centralized network systems and control facilities for the APG and NCP, all of which were previously operated separately, according to KT.

The company also stressed that it expects this latest accomplishment to help KT diversify revenue streams, allowing the firm to win more contracts from global information and communication technology (ICT) companies whose demand for stable network connections is growing.

The SNOC will also be a major test bed for the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018 when the company plans to demonstrate the 5G networks across the globe, according to the firm.
Donald Trump



By Ko Dong-hwan





Kim Jong-un

Presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump is prepared to talk with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un "over a hamburger" about giving up his nuclear weapons program.

At a rally in Atlanta on Wednesday, Trump said he would negotiate directly with Kim.

"Who the hell cares? I'll speak to anybody. Who knows?" Trump said, according to United Press International. He said the negotiation would not include formal state relations.

"I wouldn't go there, that I can tell you," Trump said. "If he came here, I'd accept him, but I wouldn't give him a state dinner like we do for China and all these other people that rip us off when we give them these big state dinners.

"We give them state dinners like you've never seen. We shouldn't have dinners at all. We should be eating a hamburger on a conference table, and we should make better deals with China and others."

Trump said the odds of successfully persuading Kim to give up his nuclear weapons and long-range missiles are "low," with a 10 to 20 percent chance.

Trump suggested in an interview in May that South Korea and Japan should build nuclear arsenals so the United States would not have to offer protection on their behalf.

His speech to supporters in Atlanta showed his May stance still holds.
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PRESS RELEASE

Xi Jinping Launches a Week-Long Silk Road Tour

June 15, 2016 (EIRNS)President Xi Jinping will be visiting countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia from June 17 to 24, including state visits to Serbia, Poland, and Uzbekistan from June 17 to 22, and attendance at the 16th meeting of the SCO in Tashkent on June 23 and 24.

Xinhua notes that Serbia was the first CEE country to establish a strategic partnership with China, in 2009, and sent soldiers to march in the Beijing celebration of the 70th anniversary of the victory in WOrld War II last September. Poland is Chinas largest CEE trading partner, and the only CEE country to join the AIIB.

This is the 15th anniversary of the founding of the SCO. It is expected that they will approve Indian and Pakistani membership at the Tashkent Summit.

Xinhua writes:
The Yamashiro restaurant in the Hollywood Hills was set to reopen Wednesday evening under new operators after shutting down for two days.

The prominent tourist destination, located in a replica of a Japanese palace, will now be run by a group that includes Los Angeles nightlife and hospitality company BNG, Sugar Factory restaurants and TCL Chinese Theatres, a spokeswoman said.

The new operators plan to launch a sushi bar and a new lounge at the restaurant, which will still be called Yamashiro. Melissa Edwards, the groups spokeswoman, said the restaurant will continue to serve Asian fusion cuisine, though the menu will be refreshed.

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Edwards said the kitchen will be run by executive chef Christophe Bonnergrace, formerly of Buddha Bar & Little Buddha in Las Vegas.

See the most-read stories this hour 

Hours will be extended. The restaurant will be open from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays, and reservations can be made for as late at midnight on weekends. Edwards said the menu prices would remain the same for now.

The future of Yamashiro came into question this year when Chinese developer JE Group purchased Yamashiros landmark building and swiftly moved to evict the Asian fusion restaurant that Thomas Y. Glover opened in the 1960s.

The Glover family had owned the Yamashiro building and the surrounding 7 acres before selling to JE Group for nearly $40 million. Glover, who opposed the sale, held on to the liquor license and the Yamashiro name.

JE and Glover came to an agreement last month, and his last day operating the restaurant was Sunday.

Edwards said the new operators are looking to bring back a farmers market to the property and said all weddings booked for the site will go on as planned.

Yamashiro will also host after-parties for premieres at Hollywood Boulevards TCL Chinese Theatres, which was formerly known as Graumans Chinese Theatre before a 2013 naming rights deal with Chinese TV maker TCL.

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

Follow me @khouriandrew on Twitter.

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The setting for Big Sky, a new comedy by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros that opened Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, is a Ritz-Carlton condo in a deluxe vacation community in Aspen, Colo., where the rich frolic on the slopes by day and sit by a chic fire in a private Ralph Lauren-styled lodge by night.

Jack (Jon Tenney), an out-of-work alpha male Wall Street type, is up for a big job at the Pederson Fund. His prospective boss, a guy who made a killing on the credit default swaps before it was bad manners to say so, has brought Jack and his family out for a visit while a final offer is still being deliberated.

It becomes immediately apparent that Jacks marriage is not in the best of shape. His wife, Jen (Jennifer Westfeldt), is more interested in her incoming texts than her husbands conversation. When he touches her, she recoils as though a stranger were putting the moves on her. Only a fool or a blinkered narcissist could miss that her heart belongs to another.

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The condo (designed by Derek McLane with glossy travel brochure allure) is barren, symbolically and literally, of food. Jen is too busy with her phone to run errands, though the Pederson Fund has fortunately sent over a case of ludicrously expensive wine that Jack laps up as though it will restore him to full financial strength.

Tessa (Emily Robinson), the couples 17-year-old daughter, is harboring secrets of her own. She confesses to Jonathan (Arnie Burton), Jens gay friend who has tagged along on the trip, that shes sleeping with the Native American porter of her familys New York building.

Although a stellar student, Tessa isnt focusing on college admissions. Shes planning a fugitive cross-country road trip with Catoni, whose name means big sky.

Tessa shares this information after catching Jonathan smoking weed and insisting that he share some with her. Jonathan, the wisecracking character everyone confides in, smokes for medicinal reasons: Still bereaved after the death of his lover from cancer, hes a nervous wreck over whether Jack will invest some more money in his pillow business so he can pull himself out of his economic hole.

Gersten-Vassilaros, who wrote Omnium Gatherum with Theresa Rebeck, works in broad comic strokes that at times evoke the crowd-tickling comedies of Neil Simon. The upside is that there are some memorably witty lines. (Maybe marriage was a better idea when life expectancy was lower, Jack says to Jonathan after opening up about his wifes lack of interest in sex.)

But the downside, as is often the case in Simons plays, is that the desire for steady laughs keeps the comedy stuck on the surface. Jokes spring from stereotypical attitudes and types. At times, the playwright seems to care more about the affluent milieu than her characters, who have a brittleness to them that makes the play a bit of a slog at times.

Divided into two acts, Big Sky is at once breezy and overstretched. The set-up is labored, and the methodical plotting takes some of the spring out of the comedy.

Under the direction of Tony winner John Rando (Urinetown), an expert at both classical and modern farce, the play really takes off midway through the second half when the familys conflicts converge in a delirium of rage, guilt and resentment  when the exposition, in other words, is finally squashed and everyone is going after one another, whitened tooth and manicured nail.

The resolution, it must be said, resorts abruptly to bald symbolism. Tessa, who hit a buffalo while driving under the influence, is urged to perform a rite of atonement by Catoni for killing a sacred animal.

But this ritual becomes even more of a necessity for a family that has bought into the consumerism of an American dream that is starting to resemble a nightmare. Gersten-Vassilaros prescription is the correct one, but the medicine is somewhat awkwardly administered.

The performers are sharp, lively and boldly unconcerned with likability. Tenney is especially brave in his portrayal of smug, superficial, self-involved Jack, whos frighteningly hilarious when on a ballistic tirade and yet still affecting when down for the count.

Westfeldt convincingly captures the outlines of a woman who has pulled out of a marriage that has left her feeling empty and lost, though Jen is not quite defined enough to earn our sympathy.

The vagueness of this wife and mother no doubt accounts for some of the bitterness of Robinsons Tessa, whose natural kindness is at war with her rebellious fury. The psychology adds up, but it can be grating to be in the company of these family members for an extended time.

Burtons Jonathan, in the role occupied by servants of antique comedy who always know more than anyone else about whats going in their topsy-turvy households, fires off quips with flamboyant flair. But the compulsive wit turns him more into a theatrical figure than a fully fleshed out character, even when hes delivering homiletic truths everyone needs to hear.

Thats the problem with Big Sky in a nutshell. The play wants to amuse and instruct, but its approach is a little too shallow to do more than intermittently divert.

-----------

Big Sky

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 17.

Tickets: $43-$82 (subject to change)

Info: (310) 208-5454 or www.geffenplayhouse.org

Running time: 2 hours

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com
Today I am very pleased to present a brand new recording by adventurous American-Canadian saxophonist Colin Stetson Sorrow  A Reimagining of Goreckis 3rd Symphony. This symphony is a very important piece of music for Colin Stetson, clearly it has had the same enormous impact on him as it has for many who have loved this music (myself included). He is joined by a group of 11 fellow musical travellers in essentially an unusual transcription of the complete symphony for various saxophones, guitars, cellos, violin (with Sarah Neufeld), keyboards, synthesizer, drums and his sister Megan Stetson singing. Colin Stetson and musicians will be performing their reimagining of Goreckis 3rd symphony at the Ottawa Jazz Festival on June 27th. This will be incredible live! http://ottawajazzfestival.com/artists/colin-stetson-sorrow-gorecki/ The work is originally for orchestra and solo soprano who sings 3 sorrowful songs in Polish. The first is a 15th-century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus, the second a message written by a Polish teenage girl on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II, and the third a Silesian folk song of a mother searching for her son killed by the Germans in the Silesian uprisings in 1919-1921. For me, the symphony is primarily about the 1st movement, at around 30 minutes it is longer than the other two movements combined and it is overwhelming. The 1st movement is simple in construction but devastating in effect. It is a slowly unfolding 10 part canon, which just repeats the lamenting theme, starting with the double-basses, it slowly grows and climbs from lowest to highest as each new part is added (all repeating the same theme, but starting slightly later-which is a canon, a type of contrapuntal form, Row row row your boat is a simple example, Bach wrote a lot of canons, Pachelbels Canon in D is, well, a canon). As it builds to an enormous texture--an ocean of sound--then the voices start to thin out starting from lowest to highest when the solo soprano enters. She sings her heartrending lament and at the peak of her song, the full 10 parts suddenly come crashing in at full strength. I have always thought of it as the solitary voice is like Moses parting the sea and at that point is when he stops and the sea comes crashing back in. It is one of the most powerful moments in music I know. This 1st movement is a LOT like Bach. It reminds me very much of the opening Kyrie from the Mass in b minor. They are both using very dense counterpoint (one a canon, the other a fugue), and using the lowest bass parts to move the whole heavy structure. And they are both lamenting, but not like a single individual crying out in great distress (like in Schuberts darkest music), but like all of fragile, suffering, humanity crying out (Kyrie eleison  Lord have mercyhave mercy on all of humanity, on all of suffering Earth in this vale of tears). In Colin Stetsons transcription this 1st movement is truly apocalyptic, the ocean of sound threatens to almost drown the listener in noise. The 2nd and 3rd are more song like, and true to Goreckis intention, very sad songs, however the piece does conclude with a feeling of sublime peace. We heard Gorecki's posthumous 4th symphony a couple of weeks ago, still available on-demand: http://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/105/27162.html I am dedicating this show to LGBTQ victims of violence and hate everywhere.
Danny Feldman will succeed Sheldon Epps at the helm of the Pasadena Playhouse, the company announced on Thursday. Feldman will take on the dual roles of artistic and executive director at the official state theater of California and is expected to start his new job in the fall.

Feldman currently serves as executive director of the acclaimed off-Broadway Labyrinth Theater Company in New York and before that headed the Reprise Theatre Company in L.A.

Ever since I left L.A., which was about six years, ago, L.A. theater has been on my radar, Feldman, 36, said in an interview. Its been my hometown. Its where I fell in love with theater.

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Feldman will work closely with Epps during a transitional period, the playhouse said. The company is still working on a specific start date, a spokeswoman said, but it will be sometime in the fall.

Epps has led the playhouse for two decades. His retirement was announced in January, and he will take on the title of artistic director emeritus.

Feldman hopes to bring his leadership experience at Labyrinth, which focuses on edgy, new plays, and Reprise, which produced musicals, to his new job.

Above all, I believe the role of a theater is to be in dialogue with its community, he said.

His dual role as artistic and executive director means that Feldman will oversee the creative and financial aspects of the company  roles that are traditionally divided between two individuals at nonprofit arts organizations.

I believe I am up for it, he said. I enjoy fundraising. People look at it the wrong way. Its about finding like-minded people.

In recent years, the playhouse has been working toward stabilizing its finances after it temporarily closed in 2010 after filing for bankruptcy.

Im not shy about talking about that, said Feldman. People see it as something negative. It was really what enabled the playhouse to emerge ... stronger. Right now, were benefiting from it.

Feldman is a native of West Hills and studied at UCLA. He served as general manager at Reprise, leaving in 2007. (The company shut down in 2013.)

Since then, he has worked at Labyrinth, the New York company whose members have included Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stephen Adly Guirgis and John Ortiz. Hoffman once served as artistic director and regularly acted and directed for the company before his death in 2014.

The Pasadena Playhouse said that Feldman will oversee an annual budget of $6 million to $8 million and lead a staff of 25.

The company said that Feldman will plan its 2017-18 season. The playhouse also will celebrate its centennial anniversary in 2017.

david.ng@latimes.com
As the sun sinks over Old Havana, a row of ramshackle apartment buildings fades from sherbet bright to creamy hues of pale pink, yellow and green. Storm clouds hover above the twisty streets bustling with bike taxis, grocery-carting pedestrians and classic cars. Couples linger at outdoor cafes, stray dogs crisscross the cracked, uneven sidewalks.

Then the lights come on.

First, its the golden neon sign atop the 1950s-era Payret Theater by Central Park. Then, in the shadow of the National Capitol Building, the ice-blue marquee fronting the now-dormant Cine El Megano comes alive.

Es magia!, squeals a little boy, grasping his mothers hand.

Its been decades since Havanas neon signs have infused the city with so much light. But with the public art and urban restoration project Havana Light, neon is glowing again in Cuba.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour >>

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The initiative is the brainchild of Cuban contemporary artist Kadir Lopez Nieves and Cuban-born Angeleno Adolfo Nodal, who was general manager of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for 12 years, starting in the late 1980s. Nodal now lives half the year in Havana. During his tenure at the L.A. agency, he had more than 150 vintage neon signs restored in Hollywood, downtown and along the Wilshire corridor, including the Bendix and Knickerbocker hotel signs.

1 / 6 Havana Light recently brought the Hotel Inglaterra sign back to life. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 6 Restored signs for the now-defunct Hotel Nueva Isla and the Las Americas Ferreteria hardware store hang in artist Kadir Lopez Nieves backyard. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 6 Cuban indie rocker Polito Ibanez performs at a Havana Light fundraiser in artist Kadir Lopez Nieves backyard. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 6 Havana Light co-founder Adolfo Nodal and the projects electrician, Osmany Fernandez, in the neon garage workshop at artist Kadir Lopez Nieves home. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 6 A piece of artist Kadir Lopez Nieves art work, on display in his Havana home. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times) 6 / 6 A piece of artist Kadir Lopez Nieves art work, on display in his Havana home. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times)

Inspired by that project, Nodal and Lopez Nieves, who met in Cubas art scene a decade ago, are now immersed in a self-funded effort to illuminate Havana, one sign at a time.

The neon logos topping hotels, theaters and restaurants  both artfully repaired vintage signs and new commercial ones  are part of the historic preservation of Old Havana during a moment of profound change. They are emblematic of, and meant to inspire, the budding entrepreneurship taking place in Cuba now that citizens may open small businesses and the thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations makes travel to the island easier.

It marks a new era, a return of the light, of hope, Nodal says on a walking tour of the signs in Havana.

In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, Nodal says, thousands of commercial neon signs, then thought of as a symbol of modernism and prosperity, crowded Havanas streets. The city boasted as much neon as Paris and New York. The blur of candy-colored lights lent a moody, noir chic to the islands vibrant jazz scene, sparking the nickname the Paris of Latin America.

Havana was dead ... And now Havana is living again, with the new lights.  Osmany Fernandez, Havana Light project electrician

But after the rise of Fidel Castros socialist government in the 1960s, the signs were seen as grossly commercial. They were also expensive to maintain due to decay from humidity and harsh sunlight. Slowly, they were taken down or turned off. After the fall of communism in the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba faced a so-called special period of dire economic conditions and daily power shortages; nearly all the remaining neon signs went dark. Many were used as scrap metal.

We want to spark an interest in neon, a resurgence, so that new businesses coming in will opt for it, Nodal says. They serve the city in such a beautiful way  theyre public sculptures.

The signs at the Payret and Megano theaters were the first two Nodal and Lopez Nieves restored, working with one of Cubas only neon glassblowers, Guido Hernandez, and his proteges. The signs debuted atop their original locations along with eight others around the city as part of Lopez Nieves art installation Alumbrando el Barrio (Lighting Up the Neighborhood) in conjunction with the May 2015 Havana Biennial.

 Polito Ibanez rocks out at Havana Light backyard fundraiser.

With a third partner, L.A. businessman William Merriken, they have completed 42 signs so far, mostly concentrated along Paseo del Prado in Old Havana, the Malecon waterfront and 23rd street  the route of the light, as they call it. Some signs are attached to still-operating establishments, such as the Hotel Inglaterra and the Hotel; others, like the Megano sign, sit atop abandoned businesses.

The goal, says Nodal, is to light 150 signs in the next two years. The two eventually hope to eventually reach 500 signs and are also exploring the possibility of solar-powered neon.

Its been a long season of darkness, Lopez Nieves says. But Cuba is finally open socially, open to the world. And the world is just opening to Cuba. Whenever we display one sign, theres an immediate impact. People start looking at their environment in a different way.

To restore the signs, neon benders re-shape the glass by hand, spiff up the rusty metal frames, add electrodes and fill the signs tubing with gas, in the same manner they were created in the 1930s. Lopez Nieves sources old photos and newsreel footage for clues as to what the signs looked like in their heyday; he then sketches blueprints for the craftsmen. I have to guess what color they were and what will work best, Lopez Nieves says, since hes working mostly off black-and-white images.

Despite decades of urban decay and a lack of infrastructure development in Havana, Nodal says restoring that citys signs has been easier than in L.A., where it took more than a decade to accomplish, due to what he calls regular bureaucracy. With Cubans now allowed to own property, a legislation change as of 2011, building ownership in the country is slowly shifting from state to private hands. In this murky, transitional landscape, the unlit unlighted signs, he Nodal says, are considered in the public realm.

He and Lopez Nieves simply obtain permission from a building manager, if there is one, and neighbors. When the neon lights go on for the first time, Nodal says, residents typically cheer. The government doesnt really have a role; its happening on the neighborhood level. People are so eager for progress, there are very few naysayers.

Funding is the primary challenge: restoration costs roughly $700 to $3,000 per sign, each of which takes one to three weeks of labor, Lopez Nieves says. Where L.A.s neon project was city-funded, Nodal and Lopez Nieves are paying for Havana Light through online crowd funding, fundraising parties, their own money and paid tours of the signs around Havana. Theyre in the process of building an income-generating museum for neon signs and classic cars  the old bones of Havana, Nodal says. When it debuts in 2017, it will be one of Cubas only nongovernment, artist-run spaces. It will also include a garage workshop where the projects restoration work can be done and new commercial neon signs can be made for Havana businesses willing to pay for the service. The glassblowers and electricians get paid for their work, so the project is creating jobs, as well; but Nodal says he and Lopez Nieves dont take any money.

One hundred percent of the profits go back into restoring the signs, Nodal says. Its a labor of love.

On a recent May evening, dozens of Dallas tourists visited Lopez Nieves home in the Kohly area of Havana for a tour of his gallery works, followed by a backyard pig roast and live concert by local indie pop artist Polito Ibanez. Vintage signs dotted the yard, bathing the party in green, red and yellow neon. The raucous Dallas collectors, some in cowboy hats and faded jeans, mingled beneath leafy palms and mango trees as Ibanezs band rocked out on a small stage by the pool.

The evening was productive: Lopez Nieves sold two large pieces, and in all, the event generated about $10,000 for the project.

Havana was dead, an electrician employed by the project, Osmany Fernandez, said over corn tamales and red wine. And now Havana is living again, with the new lights.

It marks a new era, a return of the light, of hope.  Adolfo Nodal, Havana Light

From a purely practical standpoint, Nodal says, the signs illuminate previously dark and dangerous nooks of the city.

Guns arent easily accessible in Cuba, so you dont see many murders, robberies, Nodal says. But theres petty crime, theres prostitution. Whenever you have light, that stuff goes away.

Nodal makes his living as co-founder of Cuba Tours and Travel. Ive learned how tourism can fuel culture, he says.

He and Lopez Nieves bought a house earlier this year for their neon museum conveniently located across the street from the Hemingway House, in San Francisco de Paula, just outside Havana. The boneyard for neon signs and classic cars will be located in the backyard to tell the story of Havana neon, the history of Havana, Nodal says. When it debuts in 2017, it will be one of Cubas only non-government, artist-run spaces, along with relatively new ventures such as Fabrica de Arte.

We wanted to be where those big buses, that take all the tourists around, go by, Nodal says.

Lopez Nieves earns a living by selling his smaller gallery works internationally. In 2014, he exhibited, painted and photo-collaged non-neon metal signs that hed found around Havana  the focus of his art practice over the last decade  at Santa Monicas William Turner Gallery. Hell exhibit new work at L.A.s Gallery 825 in August, as well as a neon installation, Havana Noir, at the Palos Verdes Art Center this fall.

My work is based in memory and how layers of memory affect the future, Lopez Nieves says. The whole spirit of Cuba today has a lot to do with that.

Soon, they the two will restore Havanas 1940s-era movie theater, the sign on the Los Angeles, a vintage movie theater where Hollywood films premiered in Cuba in the 40s and 50s. The sign restoration is being funded by L.A.'s Project Restore; an L.A. delegation will fly to Havana next in March to light the sign. Its the neon equivalent of planting a tree, Nodal jokes. It represents peace, a relationship.

The project, its breaking ground, its opening doors, says Project Restore President Ed Avila. And for us, its the beginning of a friendship.

Its been a long season of darkness, Lopez Nieves says. But Cuba is finally open socially, open to the world. And the world is just opening to Cuba. Whenever we display one sign, theres an immediate impact. People start looking at their environment in a different way.

It gives people an idea of what they lost, Nodal adds, and what the possibilities could be.

Follow me on Twitter: @debvankin

deborah.vankin@latimes.com

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In a dramatic move that suggests a major shake-up at media company Viacom Inc. may be imminent, Sumner Redstone said Wednesday that he has lost confidence in his hand-picked board members who oversee the media company.

Redstones comments came in response to an open letter sent this week by Viacoms lead independent director, Frederic Salerno, who pleaded for the opportunity to meet with the ailing 93-year-old mogul. Viacom board members say their attempts to get access to Redstone have been thwarted.

Redstone is angry with Viacom Chief Executive Philippe Dauman over his plan to sell a sizeable stake in his treasured movie studio. Redstone also is unhappy that Viacom stock has lost more than 40% of its value in the last two years as its TV channels have struggled to remain relevant.

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I no longer trust Philippe or those who support him, Redstone said in Wednesdays statement, which was addressed to Salerno and distributed by Redstones recently hired spokesperson.

The statement represents the sharpest criticisms to date that Redstone has leveled against Dauman and the board.

As the controlling shareholder of Viacom, Redstone can replace Viacom board members without having to wait for the annual shareholders meeting next spring  or even calling for a special election.

Some observers expect the Redstone family  through its investment vehicle National Amusements -- will take action to shake up Viacoms board by installing new directors, who then would oust Dauman as chief executive. Dauman, who once was Redstones most trusted lieutenant, has held the job since September 2006.

Late last month, Viacom independent board members said they would resist any attempts to overhaul the board. Some Viacom board members believe that Redstones daughter, Shari Redstone, not Sumner Redstone, is behind the moves. However, in Wednesdays missive, Redstone  who has a severe speech impediment  said he was the one directing the legal team.

The ailing mogul and his daughter visited Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles on Friday. On Tuesday, he stopped by CBS West Coast offices in Studio City and met briefly with CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves.

Dauman and Salerno said they have been exploring the Paramount stake sale in an effort to boost Viacoms share price and provide other strategic advantages for Viacom, which also owns Comedy Central, BET, MTV, VH1 and Nickelodeon cable channels.

Dauman has said he and the board are acting in the interests of all shareholders.

We could clear a lot of this up if Sumner would share his thoughts with me face-to-face, Salerno said late Wednesday in a statement.

A Viacom representative declined to comment further.

Although the Redstone family holds nearly 80% of the voting shares, through National Amusements, their economic interest in the company is about 10%.

I am determined to act in the best interests of the company and all of its shareholders, Redstone said in his statement to Salerno. I do not trust you or the current board to do the same.

In late May, Dauman and another Viacom board member, George Abrams, sued Redstone and his family after the two men were removed from their influential positions as board members of National Amusements. They were also stripped of their roles as members of the Sumner Murray Redstone trust, which will oversee Redstones controlling shares after he dies.

I am being sued by my fellow board members and my wishes are being ignored, Redstone said in the one-paragraph note.

National Amusements holds the controlling stake in CBS as well as Viacom. The Redstone family has signaled they are happy with Moonves at CBS.

The simple truth here is that Sumner Redstone is the controlling shareholder of Viacom, activist shareholder Eric Jackson wrote in a report earlier Wednesday. And Delaware law is clear: the controlling shareholder can make changes to management and the board of directors as he or she sees fit.

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meg.james@latimes.com

@MegJamesLAT
In 2005, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi read a New York Times article about a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery, who had spent 18 years in prison for sexual assault, was exonerated in 2003 through DNA evidence, then, three years later, was arrested in connection with the slaying of photographer Teresa Halbach. The two spent the next 10 years collecting news reports, live courtroom feeds, police interrogation footage and jailhouse phone recordings, poring over legal documents and talking to lawyers and family members for a narration-less 10-part Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.

When they started, they were still graduate film students, a bare-bones writer-director-producer team who embedded themselves in Manitowoc, Wis., for 18 months. We were very scrappy, Ricciardi says during a recent interview in Los Angeles. For the most part, our crew was just us. Sometimes wed balloon to four people.

Ricciardi, a lawyer before moving into film, handled the legal research and conducting interviews, while Demos, whod been an electrician for film and TV, was responsible for almost everything else, including shooting verite-style on a borrowed camera -- shakier than usual because the budget didnt allow for a harness -- and controlling the switch box between the two courtroom cameras for the reporters pool.

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Since premiering late last year, Making a Murderers zeitgeist-y popularity has been attributed to the true-crime craze sparked by HBOs The Jinx and the podcast Serial. It could also be Demos and Ricciardis old-school, immersive approach -- teasing out a tale of mystery, legal procedure and questionable justice -- that gives Murderer a hypnotic pull all its own. Theres been talk of a second season but as yet nothing has been announced (Were open to it, Demos says).

When did you realize that people were talking about nothing else?

Moira Demos: It was kind of gradual.

Laura Ricciardi: By early January, we started to get a sense that it was resonating with people all over the place  different age groups. Later we started hearing that celebrities were tweeting about the show. Alec Baldwin. Ricky Gervais. Mia Farrow. Wed think, Really?

Making a Murderer spawned podcasts, speaking tours and endless dinner table discussions.

Ricciardi: The response to the series has taken on a life of its own. But what were really taking on in the series is the role of truth and justice in the American criminal justice system. If theres ambiguity  which we believe there is  about who killed Teresa Halbach, then the question is, what do you do with that ambiguity? We were trying to show the experience of the accused in the criminal justice system. Do we really give any weight to individual rights?

What were really taking on in the series is the role of truth and justice in the American criminal justice system.  Laura Ricciardi

Whats your response to Averys ex-fiancee Jodi Stachowski alleging that she lied to you two?

Demos: You see her in the series as ... vulnerable, under a lot of pressure from the state. I dont expect that any of those dynamics have changed. This is nine years later. This is very high stakes for people like [former Calumet County prosecutor] Ken Kratz or the Manitowoc County Sheriffs department, who can still reach out to Jodi. Who knows why shes saying those things?

And what of Kratzs allegations that the series left out key evidence?

Ricciardi: There were over 900 exhibits in the trial. We didnt include all of them. We werent putting on a trial. Its a 30-year story of Steven Avery starting at one end of the criminal justice system and ending up in another. We made the best choices we could. They didnt change the meaning of anything.

Whats your current relationship to Steven Avery?

Demos: Were still in touch with Steven. I think our role as someone to listen to him, to give him a voice, was very clear all along. If anything, thats the same now. But now he has more support than ever -- people writing him letters, more members of his family visiting him.

He also has a new attorney, correct?

Ricciardi: Steven hadnt been represented by counsel since 2011. He was representing himself for a number of years before the series came out. Now he has a new lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, who has a record of overturning wrongful convictions. Hes feeling very good about that. Steven is very limited and not well educated. To think of him going to the law library and trying to prepare his own motions, do his own legal research. Go from that to Kathleen Zellner? Its a big leap.

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calendar@latimes.com
Jonas Cuaron never thought hed follow in his fathers footsteps.

As the son of Alfonso Cuaron, the Mexican director of such films as Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Children of Men, Jonas grew up watching his dad work on movie sets and hearing him continually rave about this or that cinematic classic  none of which held all that much appeal.

He would pitch me all his scripts to entertain me on car rides, Jonas, 33, recalled one recent afternoon, sitting outside a West Hollywood photo studio beside his father, who is 54. He kept wanting to show me good cinema, but I didnt want to watch black-and-white movies. I never myself wanted to do cinema.

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Well, so much for all of that.

While studying art and English literature at Vassar College in the early 2000s, Jonas became entranced by filmmaking and has since worked to establish himself as a screenwriter and director in his own right.

Jonas made his feature debut with the 2007 drama Ano Una and collaborated with his father on the screenplay for the 2013 sci-fi hit Gravity, which was nominated for best picture and earned the elder Cuaron an Oscar for directing. Now Jonas has directed the upcoming film Desierto, a brutal, stripped-down thriller starring Gael Garcia Bernal as a Mexican migrant being chased by a sadistic American vigilante (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who hunts border-crossers for sport.

With the elder Cuaron on board as a producer, Desierto is set to be released on Oct. 14, just weeks before the climax of a presidential campaign in which the topic of immigration has been, to put it mildly, a hot-button issue. An allegory about xenophobia and intolerance wrapped in the trappings of a survival horror film, the movie, which was given the closing-night slot earlier this month at the L.A. Film Festival, is certain to spark discussion.

In the context of the election, its going to be very interesting, Alfonso said. It seems that speech of hate has been kind of accepted and dialogue has become: Youre stupid! No, youre stupid! This isnt a rhetoric film, but if it can open more of a real dialogue, that is so important.

The elder Cuaron is clearly proud of what his son has accomplished. I wish my first film had the assurance Desierto has, he said. Still, as a young father raising Jonas, the first of his three children, he admits he had actually hoped at first to steer his son away from a career in cinema. He knew firsthand how difficult it was to make ones way as a filmmaker, and trying to do it under the shadow of a successful father promised to be that much harder.

I wish he had been a doctor. The reason I was pushing him away from film was love. I was thinking, Youre a smart guy! You have potential!  Alfonso Cuaron

I kept pushing him into other stuff, Alfonso said. I wish he had been a doctor. A doctor in the family is always a good thing, you know? The reason I was pushing him away from film was love. I was thinking, Youre a smart guy! You have potential! 

For the Cuarons, however, the benefits of cinematic collaboration have flowed both ways. I think an important part in any craft is finding a teacher, said Jonas, and in that sense I was able to skip that whole part because I had such a great mentor right close to me.

For his part, Alfonso believes working with his son has helped to keep his own work vital. When I started working with Jonas on Gravity, I remember him telling me, I like your films. Your films are alright. Its just that you like all this philosophy and stuff  its a bit boring. 

He laughed. My theory is that the older collaborator has to be wise enough to be receptive to what the younger collaborator has to say, he said. If we as artists are not connecting with the times and with the new generations  thats been the doom of amazing master filmmakers.

josh.rottenberg@latimes.com

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Artist Robert Cenedella learned at a young age that he wasnt the son of his blacklisted writer dad. His birth was the result of an affair his alcoholic mother had with a professor. But Art Bastard, Victor Kanefskys chummy documentary about Cenedella, earns its cheeky title as much for the fact that this anti-establishment painter was a trend-fighting, willful troublemaker who never became an art world star.

A child of the 50s and a broken home who got expelled from high school for mocking atomic bomb drills, Cenedella found expression in art. Sardonic therapy, too. It was only halfway through painting two boxers in a ring that he realized hed drawn them as his dads.

Cenedella met the 1960s with brashly hued canvases (The Fight, 42nd Street) that rendered disorderly, comic sprawls of New York street life. Inspired by the political work of German exile George Grosz, his mentor at art school, Cenedella made sincerely raucous satire at a time when dry irony, abstract expressionism and pop art ruled. Taught by Grosz to think with his hand, Cenedella, routinely ignored by tastemakers and gallery and museum heads, considered what Warhol and Pollock did conveniently beyond being criticized, and corruptible by its feed-the-beast popularity. When Cenedella sent up their work with a praised 1965 lampoon show called Yes Art, he refused to build on the shows popularity, declaring hed be just like them if he made what people wanted. Then he stopped painting for 10 years.

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Though Cenedella is a boisterous figure, the biographical elements in the movie are a tad restless, even confusing at certain points, particularly how Yes Art originated and was shown, and the non-painting years when Cenedella worked in advertising and posters. The movie is much sharper when Cenedella is talking directly about Groszs powerful effect on him, or blasting the art world, or illuminating how specific pieces came about: his anarchic scrums of often-warring citizens; the civil rights fury that drove the mid 60s piece Southern Dogs, in which cops harassing African Americans are portrayed as half-canine; the energy crisis-inspired 1980s apocalyptic Battlefield of Energy, in which company logos emblazon tanks.

Movies about artists invariably have a problem to tackle, though  how to show the work. By their chaos-driven nature, many of Cenedellas paintings, like that of his pack-the-frame heroes Grosz and Bruegel, reward tracking gazes, so as not to miss anything. Kanefsky, therefore, deploys his camera that way, too, to savor as many exaggerated faces and juicy details as possible in close-up. Its an energizing technique, but sometimes it feels rushed. Less appealing is Kanefskys use of bombastic classical music and augmented sound, which feels like appreciation overkill.

Though Art Bastard is a zesty, engaging documentary about a veteran outsider, when it comes to his complexities, its not terribly cohesive. Kanefskys (and Cenedellas) questions about the art world  generally centered on the queasy relationship between commerce and integrity, and faddish heat versus longevity  are tossed around more than explored. (The choppily edited inclusion of art-world talking heads providing context feels haphazard rather than focused.) But whenever Art Bastard settles down to let a lively, passionate man go deep on how he sees the world  and how he translates that into personal, sociologically aware, often ignored, art  the documentary feels like the gallery show this scrappy survivor deserves.

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Art Bastard

Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes

Not rated

Playing: Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica
The titillatingly titled Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story, by writer-director Eva Husson, is described by one character as a modern fairy tale. Its an apt label, as fairy tales are often cautionary.

A group of bored French teenagers, fueled by a rivalry of sexual one-upmanship, and empowered by the intoxicating brew of absentee parents, peer pressure, hormones, drugs and pornography, find themselves discovering the wanton pleasures of group sex.

The presence of technology sparks the danger of discovery, but the pleasures of the Internet are already so woven into their identities that its part of their sexuality too. They want to see and be seen  its how they understand the world and who they are in it.

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Husson brings a generosity of perspective to the film  it switches point of view often, between Laetitia (Daisy Broom), the plain but popular girl; her beautiful best friend George (Marilyn Lima); stud Alex (Finnegan Oldfield), whom the girls tussle over; and Gabriel (Lorenzo Lefebvre), the lonely kid next door.

All of these youthful, nubile bodies, objectified by everyone, sensually pulsate to an electronic soundtrack and are a stark contrast to the broken adult bodies in the background. Hussons film details the consequences of such free love, but it celebrates sex too  the kind based on intimacy and love. Teens and sex: its a tale as old as time but this take is surprising, invigorating and sharply frank.

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Bang Gang: A Modern Love Story

In French with English subtitles

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles; Laemmle Playhouse, Pasadena
Timothy Leary and Ram Dass were, at least as far as public images went, the contrasting faces of the 1960s counterculture.

Leary was the LSD advocate, the exuberant popularizer of a turn on, tune in, drop out philosophy. He was called the most dangerous man in America by Richard Nixon and said of himself, I think Ive lived one of the most interesting lives of anyone in the twentieth century.

Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, was a scientist-turned-guru who saw himself as a bridge between East and West and wrote a massively popular spiritual treatise called Be Here Now that went through 43 printings.

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But more important than their apparent differences were their similarities, that they were both fascinating talkers who never stopped getting a kick out of what the other person had to say. In the documentary Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary, the talk often involves death, which doesnt make it any less involving.

An admiring, even loving celebration of these two men by filmmaker Gay Dillingham, Dying to Know had its genesis in 1995, when Leary announced he had the inoperable prostate cancer, which caused his death a year later.

Dillingham arranged for the two to have one final My Dinner With Andre"-type filmed conversation together, and followed up with individual sessions with both men, including several with Ram Dass after he had a serious stroke in 1997. She also added in conversations with people who knew the two men and shared their interests, such as New Age doctor Andrew Weil and Zen Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax.

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Given the circumstances of their final meeting, its inevitable that death and dying, the taboo of all time, according to Leary, should be the starting point of the conversation with Ram Dass. Both men, it turns out, share the notion that death can be a celebration; in Ram Dass words, a time when you engage with the deepest meaning of the universe.

To put these comments into perspective, Dying to Know (improbably narrated by Robert Redford) provides mini-biographies of both men, filling us in on how they met as well as their lives before and after they connected.

Leary, according to Ram Dass and others, was an authority-questioning Irish rebel, an individual of leprechaun-like mischievousness who, someone says, walked between conformity and chaos. For his part, Alpert, in his pre-Ram Dass incarnation, was a high-achieving academic from a wealthy background who hid being gay behind a self-confident facade.

The two met in the 1960s at Harvard, where they both taught psychology and did research involving the use of psychedelic drugs, first psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and then LSD itself.

Both were powerfully influenced by their initial drug experience, with Leary telling Alpert hed learned more about the mind in four hours than in 16 years as a psychologist. When Leary moved on to LSD, whose indiscriminate use he was not an advocate of, he was so affected that he didnt speak for five days.

Dying to Know goes through many of the permutations of their careers (there wouldnt be space to deal with them all), including the reasons for the rift that developed for a time.

Despite periods of what Ram Dass characterizes as both deep friendship and deep enmity, the two ended with a visible mutual respect that made peace with their differences. They both saw themselves, Dying to Know posits, as adventurers exploring alternate realities, and hearing where they ended up is a trip all by itself.

No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. Playing Laemmles Royal, West Los Angeles.

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Show business legend to the contrary, its not every supporting player who can go out there and become a star. Determined Dory, the crowd-pleasing forgetful sidekick in the fish tale Finding Nemo, is now front and center in Finding Dory and the results are only sporadically encouraging.

Because no one compensates for a thin concept like the people at Pixar, there is a lot to admire in the animated Dory, including stunning undersea visuals and an ocean full of eccentric and engaging aquatic creatures. But, as the 13-year gap between Nemo and Dory indicates, this was not a concept that cried out to be made.

As Nemo fanciers will remember, Dory is a blue tang with short-term memory problems. Pixar veteran and Nemo director Andrew Stanton (who co-wrote here with Victoria Strouse) decided to take these issues a bit more seriously, the result being something oddly reminiscent of a kiddie version of Christopher Nolans Memento.

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Unlike that film, however, Finding Dory struggles with making its protagonists memory problems involving. Even Ellen DeGeneres patented likability goes only so far with a character who spends the first part of the film either monotonously repeating Hi, Im Dory, I suffer from short term memory loss or getting hysterical over things unremembered. You are supposed to find this deficiency endearing, but it also might make you, well, crabby.

The filmmakers themselves might have worried about this, because theyve made Dorys plotting and dialogue overly frantic as if to compensate. More than that, theyve arranged things so that Dorys memory gradually comes back. Not surprisingly, the more she remembers, the more involving the film with her name on it gets.

Finding Dory begins with Dorys back story and her two parents, Charlie (Eugene Levy) and Jenny (Diane Keaton), both infinitely caring and loving individuals.

The story proper begins about a year after the events of Finding Nemo, with Dory hanging out at the Great Barrier Reef with young Nemo (12-year-old Hayden Rolence) and his worrywart father, Marlin (a returning Albert Brooks).

Suddenly, without warning, Dory has glimmers of memory of her parents and their past life together in a place called the Marine Life Institute in Morro Bay. Never mind that California means yet another trip across the ocean, nothing will do but that Dory, Nemo and Marlin (aided as before by massive sea turtle Crush, voiced once again by Stanton) brave the journey to follow Dorys vague hunch.

The Institute (modeled on places like the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the California Academy of Science in San Francisco) turns out to be a place specializing in rescue, rehabilitation and release. The establishment uses the voice of Sigourney Weaver for its public service messages, which invariably leads to amusing moments.

Also fun, and the saving grace of the picture in fact, are the other sea creatures Dory encounters as she tries to figure out where in the institute her parents might be.

Easily the most prominent of these is Hank (Modern Familys Ed ONeill), a mimic octopus adroit at blending into the background who wants nothing more than to spend his days in an aquarium in Cleveland, far from the perils of the actual ocean.

Equally entertaining are Rudder and Fluke, a pair of rowdy British-accented sea lions who call everyone mate and are voiced, in an unexpected The Wire reunion, by Dominic West and Idris Elba.

Also key to the plot, which gets unfortunately frenetic with all manner of fishy misadventures as time goes on, are yet two more creatures, near-sighted whale shark Destiny (Kaitlin Olson) and Bailey (Ty Burrell), a beluga whale who needs help with his sonar.

As noted, the computer-generated undersea look of Dory is quite lovely, filled with gorgeous colors and unexpected textures. When someone looks around and says there are a lot of fish here, they are speaking the literal truth.

Yet, try its hardest though it does, Finding Dory remains a mid-range effort, not a game changer like Wall-E (still Stantons best film), Up or Inside Out. No one can be a genius every time out, not even Pixar.

===

MPAA rating: PG for mild thematic elements.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

Playing: In general release.

MORE ON FINDING DORY

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How writer-director Andrew Stanton found Dory 13 years after Finding Nemo

Finding Dory expected to jolt sluggish summer box office
There are fanboys and then there are Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb, a trio of Mississippi buddies who spent the summer of 1982  and their next seven summer vacations  filming a shot-for-shot remake of Steven Spielbergs Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Their obsessed exploits have been affectionately chronicled in Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, a documentary thats just as fixated as the guys slavish adaptation.

Back when the Raiders! boys embarked on their quest, at age 11, in the backyards of their Ocean Springs homes, there was no Netflix or YouTube, but that didnt prevent them from painstakingly re-creating the blockbuster, save for one complex sequence.

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Their story didnt end there. Turns out that videotaped dubs of their unfinished opus had been passed around over the years, with one eventually making it into the hands of filmmaker Eli Roth, who proved instrumental in reuniting the old team.

Overwhelmed by that cult response, Zala and Strompolos, now in their 40s, are determined to finally shoot that one missing sequence  this time relying on a Kickstarter campaign to fund the special-effects-heavy, nine-day-shoot.

Keeping tabs on that rain-plagued production, co-directors Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen incorporate insights from Roth, John Rhys-Davies (Sallah in the Indy movies) and family members suggesting that long-term escapism provided a catharsis for kids dealing with divorced parents and other issues, aligning them more with The Goonies than Indiana Jones.

Though indulgently overlong, Raiders! manages to unearth the inner geek in all of us.

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Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Playing: The Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre, Los Angeles
The scenes will live on.

Larry Sabata says that until he meets again with five Army buddies who died in Vietnam, the images will continue to play out in his mind.

The Vietnam War was hell for everyone involved, he said, and especially for the combat infantry who trudged through the jungles of Vietnam as well as Cambodia.

Sabata served with the 9th Infantry and the 25th Infantry divisions. He was a M60 machine gunner and was trained to set up mechanical ambushes. Faced with death more than a few times, Sabata served his country and is proud to tell his story.

After 46 years of dealing with the images and memories, Sabata, the longtime leader of the local David City Color Guard, now has some closure.

On June 6, along with 500 other Vietnam War vets, Sabata flew to Washington D.C. on the Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Flight to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and sites dedicated to the nation's military veterans.

Joining Sabata on the flight was Larry Urbanek of Dwight, who was a mechanic serving at Long Binh with the 165th Army Aviation Group, and who also served many years in the Army Reserve. He acknowledged that compared to the "ground pounders" his role held a lot less danger. Sabata said that support bases were vital to the combat soldier's success.

The group of veterans left Omaha on three different planes at 4:30 a.m. and returned around 9:30 p.m. They were shuttled across the monuments of the Mall and to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.

"You can see pictures of it. That was the first time I was in DC to see the memorial," Urbanek said, who had seen the traveling Vietnam Memorial, but not the real thing. "It was great to talk to people who were there when you were there. It was great camaraderie for the veterans to get together like that. It was a very moving experience."

Sabata, a David City native, walked up to the wall, found a name of one of his closest Army friends and broke down.

Men arent supposed to cry, he said. But I did. It was closure. It felt like my friends were saying, Thanks for coming to see me. And well see you soon.

In 1970 at the age of 20, Sabata was drafted in the U.S. Army. Still too young to buy a beer legally, Sabata was shipped off to fight the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He spent his 21st birthday in Vietnam, drinking warm beer.

Sabata documented his tour of duty on his Super-8 camera. He was just a kid, showing off the grenade in his pocket, ammo over his shoulder and a smile on his face. These images and more flooded back to Sabata when he put his hands on the memorial. More than 58,000 names line the granite wall and he has long believed his name should have been among them.

He remembers July 17, 1970 like it was yesterday.

Sabata and his partner would place Claymore mines along tree lines in the evening and rig tripwire to detonate the 2 1/2 pounds of explosive and fire 900 ball bearings towards the target. With one at the front, back and side of the trail, the ambush was sure to kill anything in the blast radius.

It was my turn to disarm the ambush. Before I was going to go up, my sergeant wanted to talk to me, he said.

In the morning, Sabata or his partner, a kid from Alabama, would disarm the ambush to allow safe passage for the U.S. or ally troops through the area.

My partner said he would go defuse the ambush. But a little while later we heard an explosion, he said. We went up, locked and loaded, and he was dead.

The Viet Cong had moved the ambush up the trail during the night.

(My friend) walked into his own ambush. Did God say, Well, its not time for you Larry? My name should be on that wall. But Im here, Sabata said.

Of his 13 Army friends, the wall holds the names of five of his closest buddies. Other friends that made it out were on different days and on different flights.

When we went to Vietnam, we landed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, then Long Binh, a processing center north of Saigon, where we were assigned according to our jobs and we went all over. We were all split up. We didnt go as a group and come back as a group, we came home individually, Sabata said.

The Vietnam War drew heavy protests back home, and returning soldiers didnt get the heros welcome that followed World War II. Many returned without much preparation just days after combat. Walking through airports they were jeered, demeaned and disrespected.

The 2016 tour in the nations capital helped to heal the wounds, Sabata said.

Its the welcome home that we never got. And now, we finally got it, Sabata said as he watched the replay of the newscast. When we came home (from Vietnam), we were baby killers. We were spat on. You didnt want be associated. You took your uniform off and you hid it.

Sabata has always been proud of his service. The people in David City never forgot about him during the war. In a segment of old footage, a young Sabata shows off a care package from American Legion Post 125. He was like a boy at Christmas time, checking out the canned goods from his hometown.

Now, Sabata has been a member of the David City Color Guard for 42 years its commander for 18 years. He was the youngest and the first Vietnam veteran to join the guard. He also is commander of the VFW Post and a District 15 service officer.

Only veterans of war understand what it was like in the foxholes or ducking the bullets, he said. And vets almost all feel the same way about their tour.

Ill never forget (what I saw), he said.

Sabata said it took decades to build up the courage to visit the memorial, which opened in 1982, about seven years after American troops left Vietnam. His wife Ann had visited the wall, but he stayed away.

I finally got up enough courage to go there. It was my final goodbye, he said. People will never understand and I dont expect them to. This is something Ill never forget. That chapter is closed in my life now. When I put my hands on that wall, I just had a rush of memories that came back.

Sabata says he may move on, but he cant forget that portion of his youth. Its been 46 years since his tour and six years since compiled his war footage on a DVD.

It makes us appreciate what we have here, Sabata said while watching his old footage. All Ive got to do is look back at this and, well, it is what it is.

An overwhelming sight awaited the veterans back at Eppley Airfield. They were greeted first by their families, then they were stunned to find thousands of supporters had crowded the terminal and cheered the veterans as they filed by. Tears flowed again. Sabata captured the video on his phone, just like he did with his Super-8 back in Vietnam.

A little kid saluted me, Sabata said.

Patriot Productions organized the flight with the help of donations from across Nebraska. The flight sponsors for the three charter jets were The Theodore F. & Claire M. Hubbard Family Foundation and AuctionTime.com and TractorHouse (Sandhills Publishing Company).

Patriotic Productions organized nine previous Honor Flights that has transported 2,100 WW II and Korea veterans to Washington D.C. since 2008. Patriotic Productions has a mission of honoring our military, including the creation, production and touring of Remembering Our Fallen photo memorials. More information: www.PatrioticProductions.org or www.RememberingOurFallen.org.
On Monday night, Stephen Colbert, like each of his late-night colleagues, opened The Late Show with a serious and heartfelt response to the recent mass shooting in Orlando, Fla.

Then he welcomed his first guest, Bill OReilly.

It seemed, at first, a tone-deaf juxtaposition. OReilly is a staunch conservative commentator whose take-no-prisoners approach on Fox News has most certainly helped create the hyperbolic culture war that swirled around the shooting and various reactions to it.

He had been booked as a guest long before the Orlando tragedy, but far from simply making the best of a potentially awkward situation, their conversation quickly built a bridge between ideologies that too often, and on both sides, rely more on interpretation than information, on competitive posturing more than actual dialogue.

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Between the two of them, they achieved something like the old-school gravitas once required of, and revered in, the major network news anchors.

Remember them? The men, and eventually women, who had the star power and the professional stature to help calmly guide a nation through complications and crisis?

Increasingly we have sought a different type of guidance, one that favors brand over reputation, good marketing over due diligence until weve arrived at the point where a civil conversation between a conservative pundit and a liberal satirist stands out for its ability to address complicated issues without whipping anyone into a frenzy.

The dwindling status of the national news anchor in recent years has plagued the networks for myriad reasons, most of them bottom-line adjacent. The faces that deliver the news night after night are called anchors for a reason; teams are assembled around them, networks identified by them and, at least in the past, millions of American viewers relied on them, especially in times of crisis.

There are many fine, hardworking journalists who investigate and deliver the news, but the iconic news anchor is a thing of the past. Figures like Walter Cronkite, Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer (to name a few) no longer roam the television landscape, in part because that landscape doesnt exist any more either.

In recent years, television news, like much of the country and the culture, has been redistricted in all manner of ways, including and especially politically.

The rise and success of Fox News, a network directed specifically at those viewers who felt the media were overwhelmingly liberal, combined with the increased popularity of personal narrative and influence of pop culture to blow up the traditional order of news television.

Increasingly, anchors are no longer personalities defined by their ability to do their job, their job is defined by their ability to cultivate their personalities, which includes, at times, their politics.

For years, many non-fans viewed the conservative bent of Fox News simply as an outrageous distortion of journalistic ethics. Jon Stewarts career, and by extension, the careers of Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee were built by their ability to point that out with a signature hilarious fury.

But when dismissal and outrage didnt work, other cable networks fought back with their own partisan commentators.

Social media, meanwhile, muddied the lines even further. First person, once verboten, became de rigueur for even serious journalists, who were increasingly identified by their non-news personalities and non-news ventures, be they morning or afternoon chat shows or late-night brag sessions. Anderson Cooper went zeitgeist pin-up, Brian Williams took exaggeration to career-maiming lengths and Katie Couric went to Yahoo (her Epix documentary Under the Gun was recently criticized of an anti-gun-owner slant and at least one case of manipulative editing.) Lester Holt is currently on the opposite track, fighting his way back from all those they seemed like the perfect couple Dateline intros.

Meanwhile, as has been reported ad nauseam, a new generation increasingly turned to late night for their news and commentary. The digital revolution made Stewart and The Daily Show, Colbert and The Colbert Report, even David Letterman, with his Midwestern credentials and clear-eyed crankiness, at least as influential as the average news anchor, none of whom ever went viral the way the satirists did.

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So when Americans say they dont trust the media, its difficult to gauge what theyre talking about, but less difficult to realize its a huge problem.

The real dangers of the news anchor vacuum threaten the audience more than any network. As the political rhetoric of the presidential campaign became more heated and bizarre, as Donald Trump makes statements and suggestions that increasingly seem at odds with democracy, the lack of a national news figure whom a majority of Americans like and trust has become painfully obvious.

When a presidential candidate feels he can pull the credentials of news organizations, including the venerable Washington Post, and no national news figure has the clout to explain to Trump supporters why this not in Americas best interest, we have a problem.

Which is why the sight of Bill OReilly and Stephen Colbert engaged in a genuine give and take over gun control, terrorism and political culture offered a bizarre but undeniable flicker of hope.

For years, these two men have sustained one of the odder working relationships in television history. Colberts character on The Colbert Report was, of course, a stinging satire of OReilly, yet OReilly has regularly appeared with Colbert, both on The Colbert Report and The Late Show. On The Colbert Report especially, the men treated each other with mutual, if usually good-humored, disrespect, but still these meetings offered, if only temporarily, a truly crossover audience.

The only way die-hard OReilly fans are going to watch any show with the name Stephen Colbert in the title is if Bill OReilly is a guest and vice versa.

On Monday night, the two were uncharacteristically sober, abstaining from their signature zingers in favor of actual debate  Colbert pushed OReilly on assault weapons, and OReilly conceded that there should be a conversation about banning them, just as OReilly pushed Colbert to acknowledge Trumps post-Orlando shooting tweets as effective politics.

Some of the subdued tenor was due, no doubt, to the horrific nature of the event that sparked the dialogue. But each man also appeared to understand that the fact of this conversation, between two people who have all but defined themselves in opposition to each other, was as important as its content.

It may not have produced the stunning power of Edward R. Murrow taking on the McCarthy hearings or Walter Cronkite denouncing the Vietnam War, but it was something.

If Bill OReilly and Stephen Colbert can find some middle ground, maybe the rest of us can too.

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Last week Sen. John McCain accepted an award  also bestowed on Vice President Joe Biden  for civility in public life. I wondered earlier today if Allegheny College, which honored McCain for arguing passionately but respectfully for his beliefs, might be having second thoughts.

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol, McCain said that President Obama was directly responsible for the murder of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub.

The full quote:

Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq. So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies.

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Perhaps realizing that he sounded a bit like Donald Trump, the presidential candidate he has endorsed, McCain backtracked.

I misspoke, McCain said in a press release. I did not mean to imply that the president was personally responsible. I was referring to President Obamas national security decisions, not the president himself.

In other words: Never mind.

But even the revised version of McCains indictment isnt very persuasive.

In that do-over, the Arizona senator said: President Obamas decision to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of ISIL. I and others have long warned that the failure of the presidents policy to deny ISIL safe haven would allow the terrorist organization to inspire, plan, direct or conduct attacks on the United States and Europe as they have done in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando.

Several problems with this: U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq pursuant to a deal reached with the Iraqi government by the George W. Bush administration (though Obama arguably could have tried harder to persuade the Iraqis to allow a residual U.S. force).

But even if the U.S. withdrawal is the cause of the rise of Islamic State, it doesnt follow that Obamas decision directly caused the shooting rampage in Orlando.

At most Obama can be faulted for what lawyers call but-for causality: But for the decision to withdraw (according to McCain), Al Qaeda in Iraq wouldnt have mutated into Islamic State and that group wouldnt have been in a position to seduce Omar Mateen into pledging allegiance to the group by committing a massacre.

But McCain is on the defensive not because of dodgy causality but because he accused the president of being directly responsible for an atrocity against Americans. Thats a slur of Trumpian dimensions  and McCain didnt even bother hedging by saying, Trump-style, that some people think Obama is directly responsible.

So McCain can keep his civility award, but its looking a little tarnished.

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The marijuana expert was in.

Dale Gieringer, 70, a coauthor of Californias 20-year-old medical marijuana law, was taking questions at a metal desk plopped down in the middle of an unusual new museum exhibit, Altered State: Marijuana in California.

A neatly dressed 77-year-old woman from Walnut Creek took a seat next to him. She seemed hesitant, but determined. Her husband hovered behind her.

Ive never smoked anything, the woman told Gieringer, one of several pot experts invited to answer questions on the occasional Friday evening. And Ive been using Blackberry Kush for sleeping. Will it hurt my lungs? Thats what Im worried about.

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Behind her, as Gieringer explained that vaping was probably less harmful than smoking, the face of a well-known Mendocino grower, Swami Chaitanya, popped onto a video screen. Museum visitors watched as he discussed the spiritual aspects of ganja. Nearby, a bunch of young adults were sprawled on bean bags, watching a history of pot-related public service announcements, which have evolved from war-on-drugs-era scare tactics to Colorados post-legalization pleas for sensible use.

In an area devoted to the medical uses of marijuana, visitors were invited to share their experiences on white clipboards, hung on the wall: It helps with the back pain from serving in the Marine Corps. Cures my anxiety. Helps to control my tremor.

Behind plexiglass in the middle of the room, four beautiful pot plants glowed green under indoor lights.

Theyre not ours, said the exhibits curator, Sarah Seiter, with a giggle. Were holding them for a friend.

Museum visitors are invited to make their own marijuana-related yard signs. (Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times )

::

This is an ambitious undertaking for the Oakland Museum of California, but it comes at the right time and in the right place. The museums mission is to tackle timely and important topics. (Im looking forward to All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, scheduled for October.)

Already, a million or so Californians have medical cards, which let them buy pot legally at dispensaries. An initiative heading for the November ballot will ask voters if they are willing to legalize pot for all adults, making it as accessible as alcohol.

Legalization will have a profound impact on our state, said museum director Lori Fogarty. And yet marijuana is often misunderstood, or people have a very limited perspective based on what they think they know. We are going to put the debate out there.

Her staff spent two years developing the exhibit, which is intensely interactive. They invited the public, including young people, to brainstorming sessions. The museum board signed off on the project with little hesitation. Oakland police signed off as well. Fogarty checked in with U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee to explore whether mounting a marijuana exhibit would put the museum sideways with federal funding groups like the NEA.

In the end, no federal funds were used. Nor did any money come from the marijuana industry. The only group credited with funding the show is the Oakland Museum Womens Board. They are primarily older white women. The average age is 75, Fogarty said. Theyve come a long way, too.

Some staff members had to get medical marijuana cards in order to handle the plants in the exhibit, which also includes a bud-filled box with built-in gloves so visitors can reach in to feel buds and leaves without making skin-to-dope contact. (Judging by the level of pulverization, Id have to guess this was a popular stop.)

Interest in the exhibit, which closes at the end of September, has been high, Fogarty said. It is bringing thousands of new visitors to the museum, many of whom appear to be in the all-cash cannabis business. Behind the counter in the gift shop, where you can pick up a vintage copy of High Times, Eve Kramer told me shed never seen so many people pay with big wads of dollar bills.

::

Renee Landingham, a 40-something Berkeley cultivator, was strolling through the area devoted to marijuana science. Im impressed with the level of detail theyve been able to capture, she said. Its more in-depth than I thought it would be.

A display card asked, Does marijuana cause schizophrenia? Answer: Fourteen studies have shown that smoking marijuana can trigger schizophrenia or cause symptoms to start at a younger age for people genetically predisposed to the disease. Four studies found that some schizophrenic patients actually improved when they used marijuana, but we dont know yet what makes patients respond positively or negatively to the drug.

In another area, visitors were asked to vote with magnets on certain legalization questions: Would they favor an end to prohibition if it meant there would be over 100 dispensaries in their cities? (As of Friday, the yeses were winning.) How about if the marijuana economy damaged the environment? (A resounding no.)

Karl Batten-Bowman, 39, a Google project engineer from Berkeley, was with his wife and two young daughters, who squealed as they stuck their gloved hands in the bud box.

I think its really well done, he said. If anything, its late. The pot industry is huge here in Oakland.

I heard him laugh out loud as he read some unsigned cards that had been tacked to a wall next to the Confessional, a curtained booth where visitors are invited to anonymously share their true feelings about pot.

A booth where pot users can anonymously share their most honest thoughts. (Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times )

Weed has gotten too strong, one said. It was way more fun when 1 puff didnt render me stoopid.

Marijuana makes me desire my husband, said another. Without it I would pursue my love of women.

The single letter of complaint shes received, said Fogarty, came from the notoriously cranky Catholic League, which took exception to the confessional booth.

Fogarty responded that it looks more like a voting booth, and that the confessions are not just serious, but profound.

Indeed. If a hit of pot can save a marriage, maybe marijuana  or at least this exhibit  is something the Catholic League might want to get behind.

robin.abcarian@latimes.com @AbcarianLAT
Cantankerous outlaws and merciless nature are out to kill the arroyo toads of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

Like an ecological John Wayne, Sam Sweet  a big man with a beard and ponytail who at one point in his controversial career packed a .44 magnum  has spent his life trying to protect the warty, buff-colored amphibians.

Now 66, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist hiked recently along Agua Blanca Creek, a seven-mile tributary to Piru Creek in the southern Los Padres National Forest that is home to one of the 22 isolated populations of arroyo toads known to exist in California.

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Theyre getting harder to find, he said, methodically scanning the creek bed for a sign of the creatures that once numbered in the thousands. Theyd be doing a lot better if not for the drought.

This breeding season, which ended in May, and next years, he said, will be critical to the survival of the species with precise breeding requirements: slow-moving currents, periodic flooding, ants to feed on, and sandy shallows from which to belt out mating songs and lay eggs.

Thats because the arroyo toads lifespan is thought to be about five years. If the ongoing 5-year-drought, which included the driest four-year stretch recorded in California history, persists longer than six years, there could be too little water for the toads to reproduce, and their populations from Santa Barbara to Baja California could die out.

If we lose any one of these places, theres no way to bring it back, said Sweet.

Sam Sweet, UC Santa Barbara ecologist and an expert on the arroyo toad, looks to see how the population in Agua Blanca creek in Piru Canyon Wash has survived the drought. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times )

Some in the small world of people trying to save arroyo toads from extinction praise Sweet as the consummate conservation biologist.

Sams field notes on arroyo toads and their habitat documented patterns of decline that supported its listing as an endangered species, Greg Pauly, herpetologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, said. Theyll be useful for years to come because they also provide a rare continuity of data through time.

Others portray him less flatteringly, as an advocate on a mission to save one species at the expense of others.

Travis Longcore, a spatial scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, tangled with Sweet in 2009.

Sweet wanted Pyramid Dam to release water into arroyo toad territory along Piru Creek during the summer months at rates low enough to prevent arroyo toad eggs from being washed away.

Longcore wanted flows that would benefit a variety of species including native trout.

Longcore describes Sweet as a passionate old-school field conservationist who is not inclined to compromise.

When Sam unloads, he unloads with both barrels, and I know that from having been on the receiving end.  Travis Longcore, USC spacial scientist

When Sam unloads, he unloads with both barrels, Longcore said, and I know that from having been on the receiving end.

A native of Connecticut, in 1977 Sweet joined the UC Santa Barbara faculty, where he is a professor of evolution and ecology.

He began exploring the rugged Los Padres National Forest in the late 1970s, creating detailed records of reptile and amphibian distributions in habitat including the Sespe and Piru watersheds. Thats when I discovered that the arroyo toad was in bad shape, and decided to try and make a difference.

By the time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the arroyo toad endangered in 1994, the species had lost more than 76% of its historic turf due to development, mining, agriculture, dam construction, predation by non-native species and drought.

That figure was largely based on Sweets field work in the early 1990s.

A lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity around the same time prompted closures of several campgrounds on U.S. Forest Service land along Sespe Creek, Piru Creek and the Santa Ynez River, where vehicle traffic had killed hundreds of adult arroyo toads.

Off-highway trails into creeks and riverbeds were also closed, and restrictions were imposed on gold mining during toad breeding season.

Kill All Toads  Signs nailed to trees

Some critics expressed their anger over the restrictions by splintering U.S. Forest Service signs with gun fire, cutting through campground and trail head locks and gates with welding torches and decorating trees with posters reading: Kill All Toads.

It was a strange, violent time and I started packing a .44 magnum for protection, Sweet recalled.

Some folks would ask if the gun was for bears. Id say, nope.

Is it for rattlesnakes?

Nope.

Mountain lions?

Nope.

Then whos it for?

Jerks  Sam Sweet, on why he carried a .44 magnum for a spell

Jerks. 

I only had to use it once, he said. A guy kept trying to run me over with a dirt bike. I finally put a shot over his head, which forced him to speed away.

The struggle to secure maximum protection for the arroyo toad was far from over.

In 2014, after determining that conservation efforts had improved habitat and reduced threats, Fish and Wildlife proposed moving the amphibian down on its list, from endangered to threatened.

Environmental organizations led by the Center for Biological Diversity scoffed at the agencys logic, pointing out that its own recovery plan criteria for down listing the species had not been met and that many threats remained.

Arroyo toad (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times )

Fearing that changing the toads status would make it easy to reopen closed roads and campgrounds, Sweet fired off a blunt critique to the agency, suggested its proposal was the product of some political hack throwing the integrity of the USFWS into the sewage.

The agency withdrew its proposal late last year.

As he continued along the creek recently, Sweet suddenly blurted, Wait!

He dropped to his knees at the edge of a shallow pool. A half-dozen pea-sized baby toads hopped along the bank. Sweet plopped one into the palm of his hand and lifted it triumphantly.

Got one, he said. Anaxyrus californicus.

Later, as Sweet emerged from the stream-side willows, a local rancher approached.

See anything interesting out there today, Sam?

Well, arroyo toads arent dead yet, Sweet said. I counted six little guys in the creek  more than Ive seen in recent years. I suspect theyll be here a little while longer.

Louis.Sahagun@latimes.com

Follow me @LouisSahagun
Organizers of a controversial educational reform effort that initially sought a massive expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles now say they will support any effective programs  including traditional public schools  to bring high-quality options to the 160,000 students they identify as attending failing public schools.

Great Public Schools Now, which will name its first grant recipients Thursday, says any top-notch programs may apply for funding  including those within the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose underperforming campuses its organizers have criticized.

This is a wonderful opportunity for them to join us and for us to join them and be partners in this effort, said Maria Casillas, a former L.A. Unified senior administrator who serves on the board of the group.

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The nonprofit has targeted 10 L.A. areas based on poverty and low test scores  in the San Fernando Valley, near downtown, and neighborhoods to the south and to the east. They include Pacoima, Panorama City, Boyle Heights, Westlake-Pico Union, Watts, Vermont Square, and the city of South Gate, which is served by L.A. Unified.

More than 160,000 low-income students and English-language learners are enrolled in schools whose performance is so dismal that 80% of students are learning below grade level, the plan states.

Critics said they believe that  despite the public stance  the reform effort has changed little since The Times last year published leaked details of a draft plan that set goals of opening 260 new charters and moving half of L.A. Unified students into charters within eight years.

This new plan is a public-relations move meant to distract from the original proposal, which was greeted with widespread condemnation, said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the district teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles.

Such a strategy, he and other critics say, could leave thousands of students worse off than before.

The school system already has the nations largest number of students in charters, about 100,000 or 16% of total enrollment.

The nonprofits plan, released Wednesday, says the money raised will go, among other things, to provide classroom space  a key need for charters. It also will give new schools money to operate until state funding, based on a schools full enrollment, is sufficient to carry costs. Other grants could go to training teachers and principals and to expanding enrollment at existing schools.

Follow the Times education initiative to inform parents, educators and students across California >>

The 16-page plan, though thin on details, is the nonprofits first formal framework. The groups early focus will become more clear when the first grant recipients are identified.

Initial debate over the reform effort was shaped by the confidential 44-page draft obtained by The Times. The draft, prepared under the auspices of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, appeared to have been written to attract potential funders.

The Broad Foundation quickly defined that document as something for preliminary discussion and then distanced itself from direct control of the fledgling organization. Glenn Gritzner, spokesman for the nonprofit, said that since then, the mission has genuinely evolved based on input from 50 community groups.

The groups board of directors  announced this week  has a decidedly pro-charter cast, but its members, too, insist that the goal is to support effective schools of any kind.

Charter schools operate outside of direct district control and are exempt from some rules that govern traditional campuses. Most are non-union.

Critics point out that they take revenue generated by students away from the district and worry that unchecked charter growth would leave a diminished L.A. Unified with financially unsustainable pension and retiree health-care obligations. The district also would have fewer resources to help the remaining students, including the more difficult and expensive to educate, such as those with moderate to severe disabilities.

These concerns are not exclusive to partisans.

When youre going to create new choices for families at the scale that this initiative is envisioning, you have to insure there is equity built into the system, said Thomas Toch, a research fellow, specializing in education policy, at Georgetown Universitys McCourt School of Public Policy. You have to make sure that all of these publicly funded schools function not as individual islands but as a system that insures that all students get a good education.

Thats not impossible, Toch added.

The board of Great Public Schools Now includes former New York City schools official Marc Sternberg, who heads the K-12 efforts of the Walton Family Foundation, one of the nations leading incubators of charter schools. Also serving is Gregory McGinity, who sits on the board of the California Charter Schools Assn. and is executive director of the Broad Foundation, which has made growing the number of charters a major focus. Retired banker Bill Siart is chairman.

The L.A. Board of Education is divided on the effort.

Monica Garcia called it an inspiring opportunity to increase achievement, opportunity and learning for students.

To board president Steve Zimmer, the messaging seems very clear: that this is primarily about charter-school expansion.

A better focus, he said, would be to make existing schools  including charters  more effective.

With the release of its plan, the nonprofit is launching a six-figure TV and print campaign, including ads in the L.A. Times.

Lets stop fighting and start fixing, urges one, which then guides readers to the groups website.

While insisting that its focus will be on all schools, not charters alone, the group isnt disclosing some key details. It declined this week to identify its funders or state how much money they are providing.

But some of it could help the district, perhaps in expanding its popular magnet schools, said executive director Myrna Castrejon, who has met with new L.A. schools Supt. Michelle King three times.

Nothing concrete has emerged, said King, but we are always looking for solutions that address the needs of all students. Any plan that looks to replicate high-quality public schools, including district schools, is one we look forward to hearing more about.

howard.blume@latimes.com

Twitter: @howardblume

Editors note: Education Matters receives funding from a number of foundations, including one or more mentioned in this article. The California Community Foundation and United Way of Greater Los Angeles administer grants from the Baxter Family Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the California Endowment and the Wasserman Foundation. Under terms of the grants, The Times retains complete control over editorial content.

howard.blume@latimes.com

Twitter: @howardblume
UC Merced moved forward with a major campus expansion Wednesday, announcing the selection of a developer to build new classrooms, dorms and labs to accommodate 4,000 more students over the next five years.

Plenary Properties Merced (PPM) will oversee the design, construction and maintenance of the $1.14-billion project, which will nearly double the universitys physical capacity. The school, which opened in 2005 and enrolls about 6,600 students, is the youngest and smallest of 10 University of California campuses.

The plan envisions state-of-the-art research facilities arranged around a new tree-lined quad, as well as a dining hall, recreation facilities, a competition pool and 1,700 new beds.

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UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland has said the expansion will help boost college-going rates among students in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the states poorest regions.

PPM, a consortium of design, engineering, construction, maintenance, operations and financial partners, will raise $386 million from developers. That commitment helped persuade UC regents to award the contract to a single private development team, their first such approval for a project of this scope.

Project financing also will include up to $600 million in revenue bonds issued by the UC regents, pending their approval in July. UC Merced will contribute $157 million.

If approved, the project is set for groundbreaking as early as September, with completion expected by 2020.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

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The father of a 23-year-old woman killed in the Paris terror attacks has filed suit against Google, Twitter and Facebook, alleging the companies provided material support to extremists.

Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter Nohemi was one of 130 killed in the attacks, filed the suit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

The suit alleges that the social media giants knowingly permitted the Islamic State group to spread extremist propaganda, raise money and attract new recruits via their social networks.

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The fact of the situation is that while these companies do something to try to curtail terrorist use of the websites, they dont do enough, said Keith Altman, a lawyer who is representing Gonzalez.

In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said the lawsuit is without merit and noted that there are teams around the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, identifying violating conduct, and working with law enforcement entities when appropriate.

Twitter strongly condemns the ongoing acts of violence for which ISIS claims credit, and our sympathies go out to those impacted by these acts of terror, the statement read.

Google said it could not comment on pending litigation but noted that it has clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users.

In a statement, Facebook said the company works aggressively to remove content that promotes or supports terrorism.

This lawsuit is without merit and we will defend ourselves, the statement said.

The lawsuit cites a Brookings Institution report, that looks at the use of Twitter by the Islamic State. According to the report, cited in the lawsuit, the terror group has exploited social media, most notoriously Twitter, to send its propaganda and messaging out to the world and to draw in people vulnerable to radicalization.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

But the suit notes that the claims are based not upon the content of ISIS social media postings, but upon Defendants provision of the infrastructure which provides material support to ISIS.

Theyre going to try and hide behind the  act, Altman said. This is not about the content of the postings. This is about providing an infrastructure by which ISIS can recruit, conduct operations and spread propaganda.

brittny.mejia@latimes.com

For more breaking news, follow me on Twitter @brittny_mejia

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Strong winds push wildfire in Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara to 1,200 acres

UPDATES:

3:45 p.m.: This article was updated with a comment from Facebook.

This article was originally published at 2:15 p.m.
About 25 miles of Highway 101 were closed Wednesday night as a sudden change of winds drove a Santa Barbara County wildfire within 300 feet of the coastal route.

The California Highway Patrol closed the 101 from Goleta north to Buellton at 10:45 p.m. and the ExxonMobil oil processing plant in Las Flores Canyon was evacuated.

Northbound drivers were advised to take Route 154 out of Santa Barbara.

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The winds picked up. It just changed within a minute, a CHP dispatcher said.

The Sherpa fire started about 3:20 p.m. off of Refugio Road, prompting the evacuation of Refugio, Venadito and Las Flores canyons north of Santa Barbara. Winds had died down after nightfall, slowing the fire, but then suddenly gained strength, sending lines of flames snaking down the mountainsides.

About 250 firefighters were battling the blaze, which was at zero containment and had charred more than 200 acres. Air tankers and water-dropping helicopters were called in Wednesday afternoon but flights were suspended for the night.

The fire is burning in steep, chaparral-covered terrain in the Los Padres National Forest.

No injuries or structural damage have been reported, according to the U.S. Forest Service, which is directing the firefight with the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.

An evacuation center has been opened at Wake Center, 300 N. Turnpike Rd., in Santa Barbara. Horses and other large animals can be taken to the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara.

The cause of the blaze is under investigation.

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11:52 p.m.: This article has been updated with information on the closure of Highway 101.

11:01 p.m.: This article has been updated throughout with new details.

This article was originally published at 8:45 p.m.
A 20-year-old man is facing a string of felony charges  including murder, assault and torture  after a break-in at a Del Cerro home where two women were held at knifepoint.

Eduardo Jose Torres is accused of holding the two women hostage, sexually assaulting one of them and fatally stabbing the other in Sundays attack.

The woman who was killed was identified in court documents as Ut Nguyen, who lived in the house and was the mother of the homeowner. She was 74.

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Torres pleaded not guilty Wednesday in San Diego Superior Court. In addition to murder and other felony charges, he faces special-circumstance allegations, including murder during an attempted rape, that make him eligible for the death penalty.

Prosecutors have not determined whether they will seek Torres execution or a sentence of life in prison without parole if he is convicted.

During Torres arraignment, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marisa Di Tillio described what happened to the victims as every citizens worst nightmare. She said the defendant tried to break into another home on Mill Peak Road late that night but was chased away.

He then jumped a fence and entered the house next door, she said.

While the homeowner was at the front of the house speaking to his neighbors, who had just chased away the intruder, Torres entered the house from the rear through a sliding glass door and managed to lock out the homeowner, the prosecutor said.

The two women inside the home had locked themselves inside separate bedrooms. But the intruder kicked in the bedroom door where Nguyen was hiding, grabbed her and dragged her to the door of the other room, where a 50-year-old woman had taken shelter, Di Tillio said.

The younger woman, who was visiting from another state, opened the door to try to calm the intruder, the prosecutor said. Instead, he pushed his way into the room, locked the door behind him and sexually assaulted her.

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Di Tillio said there is no evidence that the woman who was killed was sexually assaulted, but the investigation is not complete.

San Diego police had been called about the first break-in attempt and were on their way to the neighborhood when the intruder broke into the second house. A SWAT team was called in.

During the attack, Torres cut the 50-year-old woman with a knife to get her to scream so the officers would back off, the prosecutor said.

Eventually, Di Tillio said, Torres was found in a bedroom with a knife in his hand. Police described it as a 10-inch hunting knife.

Because of the seriousness of the charges, Judge Frederick Maguire ordered the defendant held in county jail without bail and ordered him to stay away from the surviving victim. The judge appointed the Public Defenders Office to represent Torres.

No details about Torres criminal past were revealed in the courtroom, although San Diego homicide Lt. Manny Del Toro has said Torres has a violent criminal history. San Diego Superior Court records show only that Torres pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor vandalism charge in 2015.

He was placed on probation for three years.

Littlefield writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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The daughter of Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts was arrested and charged Wednesday with arranging an attack for cash on her landlord over an ongoing dispute, prosecutors said.

Ashley Melissa Butts, 30, of Inglewood and her friend, Israel Rios, were taken into custody on an arrest warrant stemming from the April 30 attack, according to a Los Angeles County Superior Court complaint.

Butts and Rios are charged with assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury, conspiracy to commit a crime and first-degree burglary.

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Shortly after Butts moved into her landlords home in the 3300 block of West 78th Street in Hyde Park, they began quarreling, prosecutors said.

According to the criminal complaint, Butts called Rios on her cellphone and instructed Rios to come to their home, so that he could attack the victim in exchange for cash.

Butts allegedly then had an Uber driver pick up Rios, 37, and an unidentified man and drive them to her home.

Butts and Rios texted each other with directions on how to enter the home, according to the complaint.

After Rios arrived at the home, she allegedly texted him that he should knock.

Rios responded, Open it, homie willhe opened it with a knife, according to the complaint.

She then unlocked the door, allowing them to enter, prosecutors said.

When the victim approached the door, Rios attacked him with a metal bat and then one of the men discharged a firearm at him, according to the complaint.

The victim suffered cuts and bruises to his head. He was not struck by gunfire, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorneys office.

If Butts is convicted of the charges, she faces up to seven years in prison. Rios faces up to 22 years in prison.

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

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Plunge closed through today

COLUMBUS  Pawnee Plunge Water Park will be closed today following a "diarrhea accident" Wednesday afternoon.

By law, the water park must remain closed for 30 hours so the chlorine level can be raised to eliminate the contamination. The chlorine level must then be reduced so the pool can reopen.

Pawnee Plunge is scheduled to reopen on Friday.

Alzheimers group meeting June 27

COLUMBUS -- The Columbus Alzheimers Support Group Coffee will meet at 1:30 p.m. June 27 at the Columbus Family Resource Center, 3111 19th St.

The program will be on changes in Medicare, presented by Jim Egr, attorney from David City.

For more information, call Adam Lassen or Martha Davidson at 402-564-1980.

Youth theater program set

DAVID CITY -- The Butler County Arts Council will offer a one-day youth theater on June 30 with final registration at 10 a.m. and sessions starting at 10:30 a.m.

The day will conclude with a 6:30 p.m. performance to be held in the north gym of Aquinas, 3420 MN Rd. The theater is for kids in grades three through nine. Jarod Ockander and his trained assistants will be conducting the theater. Meals and snacks will be provided to those who are registered.

For more information, email ockander@dcscouts.org or call 402-367-6271. Registration forms can be picked up at David City Public Library the week of the camp.

Loup d' Loup bike ride set

COLUMBUS -- The Loup d' Loup End Polio Bike Ride is a one-day biking fundraiser sponsored by the Columbus Morning and Noon Rotary clubs scheduled for Saturday.

Registration begins at 6:30 a.m. and ride begins at 8 a.m. at Izaak Walton. The ride is open to cyclists of all levels.

Distances vary from 14, 34 and 62 miles along the Loup River. The ride begins and ends at Izaak Walton, making stops at Duncan, Silver Creek, Shelby and Osceola. At each stop, ample water and food will be provided.

At the end, riders will be able to enjoy post ride celebratory food and drinks. All who register for the event will be entered in a drawing to win a TREK 8.6 Dual Sport Road Bike valued at $1,000.

Preregister online at www.loupdloup.com or register the day of the event. Cost is $30. Custom End Polio Now Bike Ride T-shirts can be ordered for $15.

For more information, call Vanessa Oceguera at 402-270-0185.
An Indiana man already facing charges in connection with having a car loaded with explosive chemicals, an illegal assault rifle and high capacity magazines  and who told authorities he was headed to the West Hollywood gay pride festival last weekend  has now been charged with molesting a girl in his home state.

James Wesley Howell, 20 was charged Wednesday in Clark County with child molestation of a girl under 14 years old on May 31 in Henryville, Ind. A warrant for his arrest was issued in the case, court records show. The girl was 12 years old, according to the criminal complaint.

If convicted of the Indiana charge, Howell could face 17 years in prison.

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Investigators in Los Angeles say that Howell was aware that he was likely to be arrested. Police said Howell admitted to officers that he fled Indiana due to his concerns over existing or pending criminal charges by the state, according to court records.

The child molestation charges come a day after L.A. County prosecutors charged Howell with felony possession of explosives on a highway, possession of an assault weapon and possession of high-capacity magazines. The misdemeanor charge was possession of a firearm in a car.

Howell appeared at the Airport Courthouse on Tuesday and entered a plea of not guilty. He faces up to nine years and four months in prison if convicted on all charges.

Although Howells arrest early Sunday triggered a local panic when Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline A. Seabrooks mistakenly tweeted that Howell intended to harm the L.A. Pride festival in nearby West Hollywood, authorities later said they did not know his intentions.

They also ruled out the possibility that he was connected to the slaying of 49 clubgoers at a gay nightspot in Orlando, Florida, just hours earlier.

A bail deviation filing obtained by The Times shows that along with the weapons and explosive chemicals in the car, Howell had a black hood, a Taser, handcuffs, a Buck knife, a security badge and additional ammunition for the guns. There was also a 5-gallon container of gasoline.

FULL COVERAGE: Orlando nightclub shooting 

According to court documents, Howell was in possession of a 25-pound container of Shoc-Shot, a commercially sold two-component explosive that detonates when hit by a high-velocity rifle round. Santa Monica police said that the container was three-fifths full and that the explosive chemicals had already been combined.

The assault rifle Howell had in his white Acura was described as an Anderson Manufacturing AM-15 .223-caliber rifle, with two 30-round magazines taped together for quick reloading. This rifle is an AR-style assault weapon, wrote a Santa Monica detective.

The two other rifles in Howells car were a loaded .30-06 caliber bolt-action rifle and a .22 caliber Ruger semiautomatic rifle.

A restraining order against Howell in Indiana prohibits him from possessing firearms, the report states.

Authorities in Kentucky have also revoked Howells bail in a pending felony case in which he is accused of evading police.

Robert Boyd, Howells attorney in the Kentucky criminal case, told The Times on Monday that his clients father and mother are struggling to get details about their sons latest arrest. His family is shocked to learn about the situation, he said.

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richard.winton@latimes.com

For more crime news, follow me @LAcrimes.
In the latest chapter of a decades-long struggle to make the beaches lining Californias affluent communities more accessible to the public, the California Coastal Commission has opened a new stairway along a stretch of Malibu.

The state announced the new steps near Malibu Colony Beach, which allow people to descend a 30-foot bluff into the sands below, on Tuesday.

The opening marks a small victory in the battle to make beaches more accessible to the public that owns them. Homeowners who live by access points have used creative tactics to discourage the public from getting to the beach in the past.

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They post fake no parking signs. They paint the curb red illegally in front of their house. They put cones out in front of their house, said Linda Locklin, coast access program manager for the coastal commission. We have a continual issue where people put signs on the ocean-side of their home that say private beach, which is completely not true.

Although the public has the right to access the sand between the average high-tide line and the water along Californias coast, getting there from the road can be difficult. The California Coastal Commission often negotiates access through private beachfront property when owners apply for permits to build or renovate.

Last year, the commission announced the opening of a new trail at Carbon Beach after a pitched battle with a property owner who fought hard to keep people off the strip in front of her home on a coveted stretch of coast. That fight dated to the 1980s.

The move to open this particular access point also began in the 1980s as part of a coastal commission permit approval that included requiring the dedication of 100 feet of the parcel to public access, Locklin said.

When looking at building on the shoreline, the coastal commission looks at if theres impact to public access, she said. In this case, the mitigation was to provide a parcel where a third party could build access.

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But the process was slowed by two lawsuits. Before the stairs opened, surfers accessed the break by traversing and descending from large boulders.

Its par for the course when were trying to open an access way that theres going to be litigation, Locklin said.

The 100-foot stretch of beach that can be accessed by the steps is not ideal for swimming because of reefs located off shore. However, it will allow people to walk along the beach and more easily approach surfing areas.

There are three parking spots by the stairway, as well as street parking nearby. No barbecuing is allowed on the beach.

sarah.parvini@latimes.com

Twitter: @sarahparvini

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The attorney for a Navy SEAL accused of beating and stabbing a man to death said that his client was innocent and that he had initially confronted the man because he was taking photos of young girls on the Santa Monica Pier.

Attorney Anthony Salerno on Thursday said his client, Theo Andrew Krah, was on the pier Saturday afternoon for a paddleboard competition when he saw the man eyeing young girls and taking pictures of them.

Theo confronted the man and demanded to see his camera, Salerno said. The man refused. Believing that the man was committing a crime, Theo physically restrained the man and asked for a bystander to call for the police.

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Santa Monica police arrived and asked the man to show them the photographs on his camera, Salerno said. The officers saw several inappropriate photographs and asked the man to delete them, Salerno said, but then let the man go.

The scene drew the attention of many onlookers, who Salerno said could have hurt the man.

It seems convenient to say the man who was trying to do the right thing was the man who killed this guy, he said.

Santa Monica police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Krah, 28, was arrested Monday in San Diego in connection with the fatal beating and stabbing of Kris Anderson. Krah, a Coronado-based SEAL, has been charged with murder along with a special allegation that he used a knife.

Krah pleaded not guilty Wednesday and is being held on $2-million bail, his attorney said.

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He is stoic and under control, Salerno said. He is trying to focus on what is going on.

Anderson was a Santa Monica resident, police said.

Officers were called to break up a confrontation between Krah and Anderson on the pier about 4 p.m. Saturday, according to Santa Monica police Lt. Saul Rodriguez. Nobody was arrested or injured in that incident. Police separated the men, who then went their separate ways, Rodriguez said.

Roughly an hour later, Anderson was found lying in the 1300 block of 5th Street  about a half-mile from the pier  suffering from head trauma and stab wounds, police said.

Anderson died of his injuries at 4:40 a.m. Sunday at a hospital.

Krah and Anderson did not know each other before Saturdays fight, Rodriguez said.

Krahs attorney said his client remained at the pier for a short time after the incident, then drove back to his home in San Diego.

Anybody could have done this, Salerno said. The question is who.

On Wednesday, a Navy Personnel Command spokeswoman said she couldnt comment on Krahs arrest because he was a SEAL.

Navy spokesman Zach Keating in San Diego said Krah is a petty officer 2nd class assigned to a West Coast-based special warfare unit.

According to the Naval Special Warfare Command, the group has eight SEAL teams, one SEAL delivery vehicle team, three special boats and supporting units. About 9,200 personnel, including more than 2,700 active duty special warfare operators and 700 special warfare boat operators, make up the unit.

The Navy SEAL website describes the Naval Special Warfare Command as a small, elite force.

Krah, who enlisted in 2012, was awarded a Korean Defense Service medal after serving in South Korea, Keating said. He also earned a sea service deployment ribbon.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is also looking into Krahs arrest.

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

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The comfort of words flowed, as smooth as their spirits.

A vigil for the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, the largest in U.S. history, took place in a gay nightclub in Santa Ana  the seat of famously conservative Orange County.

This is the church of the LGBTQ community, our safe space, Sian Wiltshire of Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church said Wednesday night, standing under rainbow-colored spotlights at the Velvet Lounge.

About 100 people, many of them holding flickering candles, intoned the names of the dead.

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FULL COVERAGE: Orlando nightclub shooting 

The Rev. Bobbi Becker of the InSpirit Center for Spiritual Living in Mission Viejo called the gathering an affirmation of love.

Were not talking about tolerance. Were talking about full affirmation, Becker said. We take responsibility for the past, for those who have been hurt and targeted, and we welcome everyone, for we all have gifts and we should accept each other.

She called the attack at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando a crime against love and introduced Kaleidoscope OC, a group she helped form in January  an alliance of 56 Orange County faith leaders supporting and celebrating the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning community.

Raised Mormon, Becker came out 30 years ago as a lesbian and was ex-communicated.

What I know is we are all divine, and we want to have a greater voice, she said.

The Rev. Bobbi Becker, with InSpirit Center for Spiritual Living, speaks during an OC Faith-Leader Collective vigil for Orlandos victims at the Velvet Lounge, a gay club in Santa Ana. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times )

Wiltshire told those in attendance that Kaleidoscope OC would stand with all our human family who have been hurt by churches, synagogues, spiritual centers, clergy, dogma and a judgmental theology, in direct opposition to the loving message of all great religions.

Zach Moos, co-owner of the Velvet Lounge, said that after the Orlando shooting  in which Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53  I put the word out: Hey, what can we do? 

Wednesdays club-goers sipped wine and cocktails as they shared their feelings about the role that gay nightclubs play as safe havens.

He shattered a veneer of safety that we all had constructed. I feel like we have to go back and reclaim that, said the Rev. Kent Doss of Tapestry Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Mission Viejo. I wouldnt be surprised if this coming weekend those clubs are the most crowded clubs in America.

Amen, voices in the audience shouted back.

Michael Chen, an attorney from Santa Ana, said hes a regular at the Velvet Lounge, stopping by twice a month.

Sometimes, you feel so isolated, he said. But when you see an event like this, it swells your heart.

What happened in Orlando struck a chord with me. It could easily have been me, one of my friends, anyone I care about, Chen said. For me, this is healing, just being able to commune.

Sandy Moore, a founding minister at the InSpirit Center who works with Becker, said she had never been inside a gay club.

This is a community thats been deeply wounded, and we must make amends. Besides the spiritual, we should focus on the physical: We need to actually go to where they are, she urged. Any wall we build will be a wall of oneness. We teach this  and its time to live it.

anh.do@latimes.com

Twitter: @newsterrier

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For the second time in two years, Riverside County prosecutors want to put two men on trial for the deaths of a teenager, her mother and her mothers boyfriend in Pinyon Pines.

Robert Lars Pape, 28, and Cristin Conrad Smith, 27, were charged Wednesday with three counts of murder and a special circumstance of committing multiple murders in the 2006 slayings of Becky Friedli, her mother, Vicki Friedli, and her mothers boyfriend, Jon Hayward, prosecutors said. Their bodies were burned after they were killed.

The pair was charged with the killings in 2014, but prosecutors later dismissed the charges because of a legal issue that arose during the proceedings against Pape. New technology and newly uncovered evidence led to the pairs re-arrest last week. Pape is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday, and Smith, who was arrested in Sacramento, does not yet have a court date.

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According to prosecutors, the pair shot the mother and daughter and Hayward in the Friedlis home, then put Becky Friedlis body in a wheelbarrow and set it on fire about 70 feet from the house in 2006. They then set the home on fire before fleeing, prosecutors claim.

The bodies were discovered by firefighters, who arrived to put out the blaze. For years, the case went unsolved.

After the sheriffs investigation stalled, the victims families hired a team of private investigators and erected a billboard pleading for information on the case. In 2009, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

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FOR THE RECORD

June 20, 11:35 a.m.: This article incorrectly says private investigators were hired by the victims families. The investigators were brought on pro bono by community members, not the family.

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Pape and Smith were arrested in 2013.

Prosecutors said Pape and Becky Friedli, who was 18 at the time, used to be a couple. Friedlis friend told police she was planning to go on a hike with Pape and Smith the night she was killed. In an interview with detectives, Pape said he and Smith decided to exclude Friedli and hiked without her.

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When investigators tested DNA on a business card found on a trail that led to the wheelbarrow and Becky Friedlis body, it was a match for Smith, authorities said.

Because Smith was a juvenile at the time of the killings, he is ineligible for the death penalty. Prosecutors have not decided whether to seek capital punishment against Pape.

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A man arrested on suspicion of making a threat against Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson has filed two legal claims against the city, saying his civil rights were violated.

Encino resident Wayne Spindler was apprehended by Los Angeles Police Department officers a month ago after he turned in a City Hall public comment card featuring a racist epithet and a drawing of a man being lynched.

Spindler has not been charged and police say their investigation into the incident is continuing. In legal claims filed in recent weeks, Spindler said the city violated both his right to free speech and the states open meeting law.

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The two claims, which are the first step before the filing of a lawsuit, seek at least $775,000 in damages. Spindler, 46, also alleges that he was a victim of a false arrest and forced to post an excessive amount of bail.

The city manufactured a false arrest against someone who was engaging in his protected 1st Amendment rights, he said in an interview. Free speech is being able to appear before your government, and criticize your government, without being retaliated against.

Rob Wilcox, spokesman for City Atty. Mike Feuer, said Spindlers claims are currently under review.

Spindler, an attorney and frequent City Hall critic, was arrested May 13 on suspicion of a felony count of making a criminal threat. Two days earlier, he submitted a comment card to Wesson that featured the N-word and several drawings in marker, including one showing a burning cross.

Wesson, the councils first black president, was chairing a council committee at the time. He responded by holding a news conference where he said he viewed Spindlers message as a potential threat to himself, his family and the city workforce.

It is not OK to do that to me, Wesson said at the time. It is not OK to do that to us in the year 2016. And when Im talking about us, Im talking about all of us -- white, yellow, black and brown.

Wesson said the images on Spindlers speaker card rekindled memories of stories told by his grandparents about klansmen running through the South terrorizing black people.

Spindler, in turn, compared his drawings to cartoons in the French publication Charlie Hebdo, and argued that the image of a man hanging from a tree by a noose represented residents being lynched by higher rates at the citys electrical utility.

Wessons office declined to comment Wednesday on the two claims filed by Spindler.

In the wake of the May incident, the citys lawyers obtained a restraining order barring Spindler from coming near Wessons home, vehicle or city office. The order allows Spindler to continue testifying at council meetings, but required him to give up four firearms, including an AK-47, as well as ammunition, according to a court document.

Free speech is one thing, Feuer said. What happened here is something else entirely. Restraining orders protect the public by requiring subjects to turn in their firearms. In this case, that included relinquishing an assault rifle. Thats the safe -- and right -- result.

Federal courts have ruled in recent years that members of the public cannot be removed from council meetings simply for uttering curse words or hateful invective. The city can act, however, when a member of the public disrupts a meeting.

Two years ago, the city paid $215,000 to a Venice resident who sued after he was ejected from a city commission meeting. The man, who is black, had been wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and a T-shirt featuring a racial slur used against African Americans.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

Twitter: @davidzahniser

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Although more than 1.2 million people have signed an online petition to oust a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge, an election official says no effort has been made to launch an official recall.

Judge Aaron Perskys decision to sentence former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner to six months in county jail for sexually assaulting a woman has triggered an angry response from those who say the punishment is too light and sets an ominous precedent for campus sexual assaults elsewhere. Many are now demanding that that California Commission for Judicial Performance remove the jurist.

Persky, who was appointed to the bench by Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, is up for reelection in November.

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So far, however, no one has turned in paperwork to challenge Perskys reelection campaign, according to Anita Torres, spokeswoman for the countys registrar of voters. Similarly, none has yet submitted the 58,634 signatures needed to trigger a special county recall election next year, she said.

Persky has been challenged by prosecutors, though.

This week, the Santa Clara County District Attorney blocked Persky from hearing another sex crime case. Prosecutors cited Turners sentencing as well as the judges decision to dismiss an unrelated theft case just as it was about to go to a jury.

We are disappointed and puzzled at Judge Perskys unusual decision to unilaterally dismiss a case before the jury could deliberate, Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen said. After this and the recent turn of events, we lack confidence that Judge Persky can fairly participate in this upcoming hearing in which a male nurse sexually assaulted an anesthetized female patient. In the future, we will evaluate each case on its own merits and decide if we should use our legal right to ask for another judge in order to protect public safety and pursue justice.

FULL COVERAGE: Stanford rape case 

Turner is serving a six-month sentence in protective custody in a Santa Clara County jail. He likely will serve half of his sentence based on felony sentencing guidelines in California.

When Turner was convicted by a jury in March, he faced a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence him to a six-year prison term for the three felony counts he was found guilty of: assault with the intent to commit rape of an unconscious person; sexual penetration of an unconscious person; and sexual penetration of an intoxicated person.

Later, his chief probation officer, Monica Lassettre, recommended a moderate sentence of county jail, three years of probation and sex offender treatment, according to a probation report.

In making her recommendations, which Persky signed off on before Turners sentencing, Lassettre considered his age, lack of criminal record, the impact of the crime on the victim, the safety of the community and his expressed remorse.

This officer weighed the fact that this 20 year old offender is now a lifetime sex registrant, his future prospects will likely be highly impacted as a result of his convictions, and he surrendered a hard earned swimming scholarship, she wrote in her report. Perhaps, just as importantly, but sometimes overlooked, are the victims wishes as to the potential outcome.

In the weeks following Perskys decision, several jurors refused to serve in the judges courtroom because of his actions in the Turner case.

The woman who was sexually assaulted by Turner read a 12-page letter in open court, calling the lack of a state prison sentence a soft time-out, a mockery of the seriousness of the assaults.

Legal experts have said the sentence was within the law, but lighter than normal for such cases.

But the Santa Clara County Bar Assn. came to the judges defense, saying he is a strong jurist who was within his rights to hand down the sentence.

See the most-read stories this hour 

Judges have a duty to apply the law to the facts and evidence before them, regardless of public opinion or political pressure, the organization said in a statement released this week. In that role, judges provide an important check against other political forces. If judges had to fear direct, personal repercussions as a result of their decisions in individual cases, the rule of law would suffer.

The organization said it opposed any efforts to remove Persky from the bench, saying that it saw no credible assertions that he violated the law or acted in bad faith.

Nor is the SCCBA aware of any other complaints or allegations of impropriety against Judge Persky during his 13 years on the bench, the organization said. Seeking to punish a judge under these circumstances presents the very threat to judicial independence that the SCCBA has resolved to condemn.

For breaking news in California, follow VeronicaRochaLA on Twitter.

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Stickers and posters featuring a rainbow-colored version of the Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack were raising eyebrows in West Hollywood on Thursday morning in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida.

The signage was affixed to electric boxes, light poles, trash cans and other fixtures near West Hollywood City Hall, the Pacific Design Center and along Santa Monica Boulevard. Several were hung near the Abbey Food & Bar, a well-known gay lounge.

The posters featured a coiled, striking rattlesnake, similar to the yellow Gadsden flag that reads Dont Tread On Me and often is used by the Tea Party movement. The West Hollywood signs were rainbow-colored, like the gay pride flag.

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We are disturbed by them, West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister said of the posters. We dont believe in an eye for an eye, and we advocate against gun violence.

Stickers featuring a rainbow-colored version of the Gadsden flag were hanging near the Abbey Food & Bar, a well-known West Hollywood gay bar, on Thursday morning. (Hailey Branson-Potts / Los Angeles Times )

The signs were posted just days after Sundays shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. The 29-year-old gunman, Omar Mateen, had spoken in the past of his hatred for gay people before killing 49 club-goers and wounding 53 more.

Capt. Holly Perez of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department West Hollywood Station said she first noticed one of the rainbow #ShootBack signs Wednesday night as she was running along Santa Monica Boulevard. She was surprised, initially thinking it was just something leftover from Sundays L.A. Pride parade and a fluke.

But then she kept seeing them  in the public right of way and on private property  and alerted others in the Sheriffs Department.

I understand the sentiment behind them and 1st Amendment rights, but its a bad message, Perez said. I hope its just people venting that they could do this, and Im hoping their calmness will take over. Its our job to keep you safe.

FULL COVERAGE: Orlando nightclub shooting 

Perez said the past few days in West Hollywood  which has a famously large lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population  have been tense. The Orlando slayings occurred just hours before the city hosted a massive LGBT Pride parade, and a candlelight vigil for the victims drew hundreds of people on Monday evening.

I understand that people want to fight back after Orlando, she said. But there are ways to do that without a gun.

The mayor said she, too, was surprised by the signs.

At Monday nights vigil at the gay bar Mickys, people spoke of wanting to end gun violence, and many loudly voiced their support for an assault weapons ban, Meister said.

Its been a very emotional and turbulent week for the city and the LGBT community, Meister said. Theres a lot of frustration, a lot of rage, a lot of sadness, but we firmly believe that love conquers hate.

Meister said it was unclear who designed or posted the signs.

Whoever is doing this, this is not the voice of the city, Meister said.

West Hollywood Councilman John Duran, who is gay, said the signs were upsetting and not the right message for the gay community.

Even during our heightened days of civil disobedience and protest, we have only advocated peaceful means, never arming ourselves and retaliating with violence, Duran said.

Oscar Delgado, West Hollywoods director of public works, said city crews would be removing signs within the public right of way, which is standard procedure.

We are looking for them, Delgado said Thursday morning. Ones that are on public property are going to be removed.

Asked what he thought about the signs, David Cooley, owner and founder of the Abbey, said in an email that the best way to shoot back is to enact serious change to our gun policy.

We need an outright ban on all assault weapons and better protections to keep all guns away from bad people, Cooley said.

The Abbey on Sunday upped its security presence and posted armed security guards at its entrances. The bar is considering making armed guards a regular presence, especially during peak times like Pride, said Brian Rosman, a spokesman for the bar.

Two stickers displaying the rainbow #ShootBack image were stuck to a light pole on Fountain Avenue near the public art installation No One is Safe, in which visual artist ChadMichael Morrisette placed 50 mannequins atop the roof of his house to represent the dead in Orlando.

Morrisette said he did not know who put the stickers up and that he was going to rip them down Thursday afternoon.

He said they had a twisted message that doesnt represent what the people in my neighborhood are feeling, not at all.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

Twitter: @haileybranson

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UPDATES:

3:32 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from ChadMichael Morrisette.

1:38 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Councilman John Duran.

This article was originally published at 1:01 p.m.
With orange spray paint, Greenwood Cemetery caretaker Owl Goingback outlined a rectangle under a century-old oak, then stepped aside as a backhoe claw plunged into the spot where Anthony Luis Laureano Dislas body will be buried.

I prefer to not know a lot about who I bury. Its a lot easier that way, said Goingback, 57, who was preparing graves at the city of Orlandos historic cemetery Thursday for 25-year-old Laureano Disla and three other victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting.

But I saw their pictures last night, their names, and read how one was sending a text to his mother saying Im going to die,'' he said. You dont mind [burying] someone whos 90 years old. Theyve lived their life. But all of these people, they were young.

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The city created a special space for Pulse victims in its 100-acre cemetery, where many of Orlandos most famous figures rest among the nearly 70,000 plots.

It plans to establish a memorial to the 49 victims at the northern edge of the cemetery, visible from Anderson Street.

For victims who arent buried here, it will give their friends a place to come and visit, Greenwood Cemetery sexton Don Price said. If they dont want to come into the cemetery, they can just drive by.

Orlando is waiving its usual $1,500 fee for a cemetery plot and $850 in other burial fees. It also arranged for central Florida florists to donate flowers to decorate the graveside and for limousines to provide rides for the victims families.

The families of Cory James Connell, 21; Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25; and Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21, also accepted the city offer of free burials, all scheduled for Saturday.

Juan de Leon, 33, hopped down from the backhoe to inspect a grave.

He pointed out to co-worker Richard Ossorio that a few oak roots needed to be trimmed from the side of the hole.

De Leon said he didnt know any Pulse victims, but his wife knew two. She worked with both at Universal Studios.

Its tough to deal with sorrow every day and, now with this tragedy happening, it makes it even harder, he said.

De Leon and Ossorio, 34, also dug graves for Pulse victims this week at Rose Hill Cemetery in Kissimmee and Oak Hill Cemetery in Clermont.

Its part of life, everybodys got to pass, said Ossorio, peeking out of the hole. Somebodys got to do it.

Many Pulse victims will not be interred in central Florida graveyards, Price said. Some families are taking their sons or daughters back to Puerto Rico, and others to Mexico.

Price, who has worked in the graveyard for 15 years, said services for Pulse victims may pose a challenge.

FULL COVERAGE: Orlando nightclub shooting 

We dont know how many cars to expect, how many non-family members are going to show up because they feel somehow tied to this, or whether there will be protesters or room enough for those people who want to pay respects, he said.

The city has erected a black fence along Anderson Street and will hang U.S. and rainbow flags from the top. Cemetery workers also plan to park service vans and other city vehicles along a chain link fence to obstruct street views of the services.

I dont want the families to feel like theyre in a fishbowl, he said.

When not preparing graves, cemetery worker Goingback writes scary stories, winning top honors in 1996 from the Horror Writers Assn. He describes his books as escape horror.

I dont write about serial killers, child molesters, mass murderers ... I write about big hairy monsters that eat people, he said.

Then he looked at the graves.

What scares me is watching the news, he said.

shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 407-650-6361.

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Jaysean Alexander left his Jacksonville, Fla., home Sunday morning and sped south on Interstate 95.

He needed to get to Orlando. He knew hed have friends funerals to attend and, really, he didnt want to be alone, not after learning one of his favorite gay bars, Pulse, had become the scene of the worst massacre in modern American history.

So he checked into room 207 at Parliament House, Orlandos biggest gay club and hotel, and has spent much of the rest of the week partying with friends at another gay bar in town.

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Alexander, 30, said it was their way of sending a message to Omar Mateen, the man who had turned one of the citys most popular gay nightspots into a killing zone.

Were still dancing, Alexander said. We wont let him win.

Jaysean Alexander, 30, right, and Lucas Cochlin, 21, at the Parliament House, where they feel at home. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times )

Across Orlando, members of the LGBT community gathered in homes and clubs and community centers to mourn and swap stories of suffering. One man recalled the time a customer spit on him for being gay and several sighed as they remembered high school. Some spoke of the historical predecessors of Sundays attacks, mainly the police raid at New Yorks Stonewall Inn in 1969 that touched off a major riot  and also the modern gay rights movement.

Most of all, they spoke about resilience  about moving beyond hate.

Rainbow flags flapped from lampposts across town and signs appeared proclaiming, We are gay and here to stay! Semi trucks full of donated water and clothes arrived at an LGBT center in Orlando.

Inside the center  past the armed guards searching purses and asking for ID  stacks of dried flowers lined the windows. Taped to the window was a picture of a heart drawn in purple crayon by a 3-year-old, which read, Love is love is love is love is love.

As he helped organize donations Thursday morning, Corey Lyons mind raced with images of the 49 victims who died.

Lyons, who leads Impulse, an HIV/AIDS prevention organization, said he didnt know any of the victims personally, but recognized many of them from nights hed spent at Pulse.

The faces, he said, wincing. Thats the really haunting part.

In his conversations since the shooting, Lyons said hes tried to spur other members of the gay community toward activism. Despite recent advances, like the Supreme Courts decision last year to grant gays and lesbians an equal right to marriage nationwide, Lyons said people should focus on what still needs to be done, especially in rural America.

Stop the celebration and integrate back into the communities where people dont have these rights, Lyons said. If youre a lawyer who could be helping out a victim of discrimination in Mississippi, go there.

He peeked down at his phone, which buzzed with emails, and rubbed his eyes, exhausted. He couldnt stop thinking about a call hed gotten earlier in the week. It came in broken English from a victims mother. She wanted to bury her son in something nice, she told him, but couldnt afford a suit. She wondered if someone could help.

You arent prepared for something like this: Loved ones cope with loss in Orlando massacre 

Back at Parliament House Thursday morning, janitors wearing rainbow ribbons scrubbed down the tables and cleaned out rooms. The club was preparing to host an event called Unidos, using the Spanish word for united, to promote a Latin Night fundraiser for employees of Pulse.

Beneath glitter letters reading GAY DAYS, a small sign directed people in need of grief counseling to rooms 101 and 103. The clubs longtime dishwasher sat at a table near the pool staring blankly. He said hed had the word terrible stuck in his head since Sunday.

Ian Miller, a bartender who lives part time in Orlando, dropped off his room key and headed to his car. Hed spent the last few days at the hotel  he picked it, he said, because its a gay-owned business  catching up with friends who escaped from Pulse after being held hostage.

It was a hate crime, definitely, he said. Terror, just terror.

Down the hallway, Alexander, the patron staying in room 207, and his friend, Lucas Cochlin, 21, considered what-if scenarios.

Alexander thought about the things he wouldve liked to have said to two of his friends, Juan Ramon Guerrero and Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon, who both died in the shooting.

He thought, too, of himself and how he had planned to go to the Latin Night that Pulse had been hosting on the night of the attack, but decided against it at the last minute. He fidgeted nervously with the hoop ring in his septum as he explained that he now feels conflicted about skipping the party. He has a concealed-carry permit, he said, and often takes his 9-millimeter handgun with him.

Maybe I couldve he said, trailing off and shifting his thought. Pulse was our haven  our safe space. Where else do we have? What is the world coming to?

Cochlin shifted the conversation  he wanted to talk about happy memories of Pulse, especially Latin Night. The DJ blared salsa music and many of the patrons  like the victims  were immigrants from Puerto Rico and Mexico. Still, Cochlin said everyone felt welcome.

Every time I went, he said, someone would drag me to the dance floor and teach a white boy like me to move like Shakira.

He shimmied his hips a bit to the memory and smiled sadly.

marisa.gerber@latimes.com

Twitter: @marisagerber

See the most-read stories this hour 

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In a month of pride, the gay community becomes a target of terror
As President Obama arrived in central Florida to visit victims families Thursday, investigators were still trying to determine what motivated the deadly nightclub shooter, and whether he had help.

Federal prosecutors are utilizing a grand jury to help gather records and other evidence on Omar Mateen, 29, the gunman who opened fire at Pulse nightclub early Sunday, killing 49 and injuring more than 50.

It is imperative we get this right, and we are committed to staying here for as long as it takes to carefully process this vast crime scene, FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper said Wednesday.

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Hopper said the FBI has given intelligence bulletins to all nightclubs in the Orlando area, including gay clubs, to advise a heightened sense of awareness. But there is no credible or specific threat of an imminent attack against Orlando or the United States, Hopper said.

The owners of other gay nightclubs have vowed to remain open. Parliament House, another nearby club, planned to stage a Latin night benefit Thursday to aid victims of the Pulse shooting. Pulse was attacked during its weekly Latin night, and most of the victims were Latino.

Mateen opened fire at about 2 a.m. Sunday and retreated to the back of the club, where he holed up for several hours with a group of patrons, shooting some before police broke through a wall at about 5 a.m., rescuing the hostages and shooting Mateen.

Police took action because Mateen had threatened to strap bomb vests to the hostages, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said at a news conference Wednesday.

Full Coverage: Orlando nightclub shooting 

During the standoff, Mateen told police negotiators that he planned to put explosive vests on four hostages and place them in corners of the nightclub, Dyer said. People trapped inside using cellphones to contact friends, family and 911 operators also warned that Mateen was talking about bombs, the mayor said.

We had independent verification of that. We had a lot of information from the inside and they independently were saying, Yes, the bomber is about to put on an explosive vest, Dyer said.

Of those wounded in the attack, 28 remained hospitalized Thursday: six in critical condition, three guarded, 14 stable and five reported in fair condition.

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Follow @mollyhf on Twitter

UPDATES:

10:44 a.m.: Updates with Obamas arrival.

This article was originally posted at 8:30 a.m.


6:41 P.M. Orlando

Orlando shooter had been removed from his job as a courthouse security guard Omar Mateen, shown in undated photograph. (AFP/Getty Images) Ken J. Mascara, the sheriff of St. Lucie County in Florida, said Thursday that the man who carried out the massacre at an Orlando nightclub was removed from his job as a security guard at the countys courthouse in 2013 after he made inflammatory comments about women, Jews and the mass shooting at Ft. Hood. Here is Mascaras statement: Omar Mateen was one of multiple contracted security guards that rotated through the St. Lucie County Courthouse as part of a contract with G4S Secure Solutions USA Inc. In early 2013, our staff was made aware of inflammatory comments made by Mateen. Our courthouse supervisor first requested that G4S management transfer him out of the courthouse rotation permanently. That was immediately granted. Our agency then made the appropriate notifications to inform our federal partners. It was at this time that the FBI began an investigation into Mateen that was later deemed inconclusive. Molly Hennessy-Fiske



June 12, 2016, 4:30 p.m. Who they were: The victims of the Orlando terror attack Read more



2:06 P.M. Obama on gun violence President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at a memorial in Orlando, Fla., for the victims of Sundays mass shooting at a gay nightclub. (Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images) The motives of this killer may have been different than mass shooters in Aurora or Newtown, but the instruments of death were so similar. President Obama

1:52 P.M. Watch President Obama speak in Orlando



1:28 P.M. Obama: Notion that being armed would have saved Orlando victims defies common sense President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden place flowers for the shooting victims at a memorial at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Fla., on June 16, 2016. (SAUL LOEBSAUL/AFP/Getty Images) In Orlando, Fla., President Obama referred to Donald Trumps recent claim that more lives could have been saved at Pulse if more patrons were armed themselves. Such a notion defies common sense, he said, without naming Trump. Obama said he was pleased the Senate would hold votes on gun safety measures, one day after Democrats waged a filibuster to force the issue. Earlier, Obama met with the owners and staff of the Pulse nightclub, a place, he said, to be who you truly are. The attack, an act of hate, was an opportunity for Americans to reflect on how we treat one another, Obama said. Hatred toward people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a a betrayal of whats best in us, he said. Christi Parsons

1:26 P.M. Obama: Lone wolves require different approach Obama said the nation would continue to be relentless in its fight against terrorist networks like Al Qaeda and Islamic State. But he noted that attacks in Orlando, Fla., and San Bernardino were perpetrated not by sophisticated cells but so-called lone wolves, requiring a different approach. We cant anticipate or catch every single deranged person who may wish to do harm, he said. But we can do something about the damage they do. As he embraced the victims families, Obama said they pleaded for him to do more. They dont care about the politics, and neither do I, he said. Christi Parsons

1:25 P.M. reporting from orlando, fla.

Most of all, there is love, Obama says in mourning Orlando victims Orlandos response to the Pulse shooting massacre is a reminder of what is good about America, President Obama said in an emotional tribute to the victims Thursday. After hours-long meetings with their families and survivors of the deadly attack, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden traveled to a makeshift memorial to leave bouquets of 49 white roses -- one for each life lost -- among the other flowers, balloons and photos that have collected there. In brief remarks to reporters after, Obama said those lost showed us what is best about humanity. It will carry us through this atrocity and other challenges, he said as a light rain began to fall. Out of this darkest of moments, that gives us hope. Though the city was shaken by an evil, hateful act, the president added, most of all, there is love. Christi Parsons



1:06 P.M. Sen. John McCain: Obama directly responsible for Orlando shooting Sen. John McCain speaks on Capitol Hill in April. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) Republican Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Thursday that President Obama is directly responsible for the mass shooting in Orlando, Fla,, because Obama has allowed the growth of Islamic State group on his watch. McCain  who lost to Obama in the 2008 presidential election  made the comment to reporters while Obama was in Orlando visiting with the families of those killed in Sundays attack and some of the survivors. Barack Obama is directly responsible for it, because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, Al Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, and ISIS is what it is today thanks to Barack Obamas failures, utter failures, by pulling everybody out of Iraq, a visibly angry McCain told reporters in the Capitol as the Senate debated a spending bill. So the responsibility for it lies with President Barack Obama and his failed policies, McCain said. However, McCain later sought to clarify his comments, saying over Twitter: To clarify, I was referring to Pres Obamas national security decisions that have led to rise of #ISIL, not to the President himself. Associated Press This post was updated to reflect McCains clarification of his earlier remarks. The original post was published at 12:06 p.m.

12:04 P.M. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson also meets with victims families



11:09 A.M. Medical examiner kept gunmans body separate from victims The body of one of the Orlando massacre victims arrives at the Orange County, Fla., medical examiners office on June 12, 2016. (Alan Diaz / Associated Press) The medical examiner who oversaw the autopsies of the 49 victims in the Pulse nightclub shooting says he kept their bodies separated from the gunmans body. Dr. Joshua Stephany said in a statement Thursday that the remains of gunman Omar Mateen were being held in a building separate from the victims. He also says the gunmans autopsy was conducted in a separate building from the victims. Stephany says he decided to do that not because of any requirement but because he thought it was the right thing to do. The medical examiner says his staff was able to identify and conduct autopsies on the all victims within 72 hours after Sunday mornings shooting. Associated Press

10:59 A.M. Flags of Puerto Rico and Mexico appear in Orlando memorials Marisa Gerber

10:39 A.M. Obama arrives at the Amway Center

10:36 A.M. An Orlando cops gesture of solidarity with the citys Puerto Rican community

Nearly half of those killed in the Pulse nightclub massacre had ties to Puerto Rico.



10:29 A.M. CIA director predicts more terrorist attacks like those in Orlando, Brussels and Paris John Brennan responds to a senators question during his February 2013 confirmation hearings to be director of the CIA. (Michael Reynolds / European Pressphoto Agency) CIA Director John Brennan warned Thursday that as Islamic State loses ground in Syria and Iraq, it probably will use guerrilla tactics to launch more terrorist attacks like those in Orlando, Fla., Brussels and Paris. The CIA has seen no sign that Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, was in contact with Islamic State or any other terrorist group, Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee. Like the married couple who killed 14 people on Dec. 2 in San Bernardino, Mateen appears to have been self-radicalized online, in part by listening to jihadist sermons and watching videos of beheadings by militants. Brian Bennett Read more



10:26 A.M. Islamic State inspiring DIY terror Crime scene investigators search Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Maliks SUV after a gun battle with the couple in San Bernardino on Dec. 4, 2015. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Islamic State supporters have accounted for 67 homegrown violent jihadist plots in the United States between 2014 and early June 2016, according to an analysis by the Congressional Research Service, although only a handful were carried out. The plots, in which Americans either joined terrorist organizations abroad or committed violent attacks at home or overseas, involved more than 100 individuals, the 18-page report said. A total of 13 homegrown attacks were carried out in the United States since 2001, the CRS found, five of which involved people inspired by the Islamic State. The analysis said these attackers, which include the Orlando shooter and the couple who gunned down 14 people in San Bernardino, often acted alone and did not have sustained, substantive, in-person contact with foreign terrorist organizations, rather they scraped together ideological justification from online and social media sources. In essence, these attacks involved do-it-yourself  DIY  terrorists, the study said. Largely isolated from the operational support of terrorist organizations, they acquired violent skills (however rudimentary) by themselves or relied on abilities that they had developed prior to becoming violent jihadists. W.J. Hennigan



10:07 A.M. Obamas Orlando visit will be different than previous trips following mass shootings (Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press) President Obama has arrived in Orlando, Fla., to meet with the family members of victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. But unlike some of the presidents previous trips for memorial services after mass shootings, this one will be decidedly low-key: no address to a large crowd, but simply a few personal reflections to the press after spending time with mourners. The White House has worked closely with Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer to coordinate the visit, spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters traveling with the president, and did not want to overburden local law enforcement officials strained by the attacks. The quick visit, though, was a way for both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to show that Americans stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of central Florida. Theres no more tangible way to show support than by traveling to the city where this horrific incident occurred, Schultz said. The shooting has quickly become fodder for the presidential campaign, but Obamas visit has a bipartisan note. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida joined Obama aboard Air Force One to travel to Orlando. And among those greeting Obama upon arrival was Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Michael A. Memoli



10:01 A.M. Vigil for Orlando shooting victims held in politically conservative Orange County Sisters Sarah Bryant, left, and Katy Bryant, both from Irvine, listen as the names of the Orlando shooting victims are read during a vigil at the Velvet Lounge, a gay bar and club in Santa Ana. (Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times) The comfort of words flowed, as smooth as their spirits. A vigil for the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, the largest in U.S. history, took place in a gay nightclub in Santa Ana  the seat of famously conservative Orange County. This is the church of the LGBTQ community, our safe space, Sian Wiltshire of Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church said Wednesday night, standing under rainbow-colored spotlights at the Velvet Lounge. About 100 people, many of them holding flickering candles, intoned the names of the dead. He shattered a veneer of safety that we all had constructed. I feel like we have to go back and reclaim that. Rev. Kent Doss of Tapestry Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Mission Viejo Read more Anh Do

9:56 A.M. Obama arrives in Orlando
To her father-in-law, the California native whose husband attacked a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., killing 49 people, is a sweet lady and attentive mother.

Yet as the FBI investigates Noor Zahi Salman, 30, as a suspected accomplice in one of the worst mass shootings in American history, many are wondering whether Omar Mateens mysterious second wife is in fact more sinister.

As Salman moved to the center of attention in the criminal investigation Wednesday, she was pilloried in social media and in print after investigators said they were looking into what role, if any, she played in the shooting rampage. Did she help Mateen plan it or help scout the location, the Pulse nightclub?

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The front page of the New York Post was dominated by a picture of Salman and a headline: She could have saved them all. The paper, never known for subtlety, went on to call Mateen a monster and describe Salman as attuned to his desire for mass bloodshed.

I dont care if she tried to talk him out of it, one Missouri woman, Gloria Beers, railed on Facebook. She knew his intentions.... She is as guilty as the one who did the shootings. She needs to be sent to prison & on murder charges & given life without parole.

Others were more sympathetic. Before you judge Omar Mateens wife, consider his history, one Twitter user wrote, alluding to Mateens first wifes allegations of spousal abuse.

The child of Palestinian immigrants, Salman was born in San Pablo, in the Bay Area, and grew up in Northern California in a hilly neighborhood of tract homes in Rodeo, about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco. She graduated from John Swett High School in 2004.

She had wed once before in an arranged marriage that was organized in the Palestinian territories.

Her relationship with Mateen, a security guard from central Florida, began online, a neighbor said. They were married in Hercules, in Contra Costa County, Calif., on Sept. 29, 2011. The couple have a 3-year-old son.

FULL COVERAGE: Orlando nightclub shooting 

Salman has not spoken publicly since the shooting on Sunday. All day Wednesday, satellite TV trucks surrounded a tan one-story home, with air-conditioning units in the window, where Salman and her son are believed to be hiding.

She has spoken to the FBI, telling investigators that she accompanied Mateen to the Pulse nightclub at least once before the massacre. She also said she drove with him to purchase ammunition, and pleaded with him not to commit the shooting.

Salman has not been arrested, but if she had knowledge of the plot and failed to alert law enforcement, she could face criminal charges, including the intentional concealing of knowledge of a felony, aiding and abetting a crime, or even conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism, depending on her level of culpability. Federal authorities reportedly convened a grand jury in Florida on Wednesday to help investigate the shooting, and that would be a vehicle for filing federal charges against Salman.

Sarah Schall, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorneys office for the Southern District of Florida, said her office and the U.S. attorneys office for the Middle District of Florida would not comment on any grand jury investigations. She declined to confirm or deny the existence of any grand jury proceedings related to the Orlando mass shooting and would not say which district would handle it.

Neighbors at Salmans former home in Rodeo, a small suburb of 9,000 people just east of an oil refinery near San Pablo Bay, said she moved to Florida shortly after celebrating her wedding to Mateen in the neighborhood.

One neighbor who declined to provide her name said that Salman was one of at least four daughters, and that the family was friendly.

As far as Im concerned, they are just a good family, she said. She remembered Salman and her sisters playing outside. They were happy kids. Theyre laughing, teasing.

The neighbor said of Salmans mother: Shes a good mother. Shes a good neighbor.

Of the news, she said: I was really surprised.

After her marriage, Salman rarely visited. One of the few occasions she returned home was around the time of her fathers death in December 2012, neighbors said.

Her mother, Ekbal Salman, has been saddened and depressed since she heard about the Orlando shooting, they said.

You know, some kids after high school, they open up the box and the world is theirs. She was inside the box, just pack it up and get married, a neighbor, Jasbinder Chahal, told the Associated Press.

After moving to Florida, Salman seemed to make few friends. Bedar Bakht, 56, a Pakistani man who knew Mateen and Salman from the local mosque in Fort Pierce, where Bakht volunteered, said she was friendly but mostly kept to herself.

Seddique Mateen, father of Omar Mateen, talks with reporters across the street from a Fort Pierce, Fla., residence owned by the family. (Alan Diaz / Associated Press )

She didnt socialize with the masjid people, Bakht said, using the Urdu word for mosque. She would not mingle with people in the mosque because thats how her husband told her: not to socialize with the mosque women because they were too nosy. I think that was because he was already divorced and people were already talking. There were rumors that he had beaten his wife.

In an interview at his Port Saint Lucie home, the gunmans father, Seddique Mateen, described Salman as a pleasant woman who attended family affairs and took good care of his grandson. He said he had no idea whether Salman had known about his sons plans and referred all questions to the FBI.

I never saw anything wrong, he insisted.

Special correspondent Jarvie reported from Fort Pierce and Times staff writer Lin from Rodeo. Times staff writers Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Orlando, Nina Agrawal in Los Angeles and Del Quentin Wilber in Washington contributed to this report, as did the Associated Press.

MORE ON ORLANDO SHOOTING

A night of terror: How the Orlando nightclub shooting unfolded

A small Florida town is left to wonder: How did 2 terrorists come from here?

At an Orlando hospital, the victims kept coming  but so did an army of nurses
In many ways, Tom and Wendy Box count as what one of Donald Trumps warm-up speakers called the good people of the country  ordinary Americans who are tired of politicians they view as too strong on political correctness, too weak on national security.

The two are Christians, and pleasant company as they chatted while the sun set after a Trump rally here  hes a retired flooring salesmen, she still works at a hospital. The event was pretty cool, she said. And his plans to temporarily halt Muslims from entering the U.S. made sense even before the Orlando shooting, worried as they were that newcomers are arriving too quickly and adding unfamiliarity to a country they no longer always recognize.

It just doesnt seem theres a cohesiveness to our culture any more, said Tom Box, who laments that students no longer pray in school and todays immigrants dont seem to assimilate as did arrivals to Ellis Island.

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Its not so much a nativist sentiment, but we better be watching ourselves, he said. If were not careful, well lose our republic.

Election 2016 | Live coverage on Trail Guide | Sign up for the newsletter

Trump may be more unpopular than ever  new polling shows 70% of American adults view him negatively, and the GOP establishment is having gut-wrenching second thoughts about its presumed nominee. But as the general election battle begins with Democrat Hillary Clinton, many of Trumps core supporters still see the New York businessman as the only leader who can salvage the country as they know it.

Trumps appeal among this group of fewer than 1 in 3 registered voters  not enough to win the White House  goes beyond policy debates about immigration and national security, though those were dominant this week in the aftermath of Orlando. It taps into the deeper social and economic changes disrupting the country.

Talk to these voters in places like Greensboro, in this swing state of North Carolina, and they quickly unload grievances: over President Obama, who many dont believe truly cares for Americans; over Clinton, whom they see as untrustworthy  a shirt commonly for sale outside Trump rallies reads Hillary for Prison 2016; and over the demographic shifts that have remade the country racially and ethnically.

In some ways, the upheaval that voters speak of is reminiscent of the way the Industrial Revolution displaced entire professions and brought waves of Irish, Italian and other immigrants who reshaped America.

Hes hit a chord with people whove lost jobs, whose unemployment has run out, said Michael Prevette, a service repairs manager for a home improvement company at the Trump rally. I dont see him as a racist. Hes connecting with common people  common people want to see a change in America.

For all the hand-wringing in Washington that Trump needs to attract a broader swath of the electorate, Trump and his backers appeared to have little interest in that approach.

After a somber address in the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, Trump quickly returned this week to his unplugged self, rallying thousands in venues across the Southern states.

Ive been getting good reviews when I use the crazy teleprompter, he said in downtown Atlanta. But I like this much better.

In Greensboro he led the now-routine call-and-response over his plans to build a border wall to deter illegal immigration. Whos going to pay for it, he asked? Mexico! the crowd responded, as it always does.

Dont even worry about it, he assured them.

In Atlanta, Trump suggested that Muslims want to bring sharia law to the U.S. and noted that even though the Orlando gunman was born in New York, his parents were immigrants.

He was born in this country, Trump said, but his ideas werent.

Trump, noting that it would be one year Thursday since he rode the escalator at Trump Tower to launch his improbable campaign, marveled at what he has unleashed: voters flocking to the notion espoused by both him and Democrat Bernie Sanders that the political system is rigged against ordinary Americans in favor of special interests  a situation that the Washington establishment has failed to successfully address.

Who knew this was going to happen? he chuckled as he took the stage at Atlantas historic Fox Theater.

Its been an amazing journey. Its been incredible because Ive really gotten to know the people of our country and they are incredible, incredible people, he said. There are a lot of people right now who are not happy and were not going to take it anymore.

As for Republican leaders, he suggested they toughen up and stop complaining. Just please be quiet, he said.

Either stick together or let me just do it by myself, he added.

Miranda Harwell, a stay-at-home mom who had supported Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the primary, now backs Trump, chalking up his often impolitic tough talk to Hollywood bravado.

I dont think hes really talking about banning all Muslims, she said. And nor would she want him to, noting she sees plenty of devout women in headscarves when she shops at Macys, and she welcomes them.

Its OK to worship whatever God you want, but [you have] to realize our country was based on Christian principles, she said. Americans shouldnt have to change for everyone else.

Danna Wagers, a semi-retired retail clerk attending the Trump rally in Atlanta, said she sees no need for Trump to change to have greater voter appeal.

He knows exactly what hes doing  he needs the camera, he needs the space, and yall are helping him very well, she said.

Jim Hoogerwerf, a retired airplane pilot, knows Trump should be more diplomatic, especially on the world stage, but doubts he will change much.

The rhetoric is going to be absolutely terrible for the next five months, he said as he entered the Trump rally in Atlanta. But he accepts that. The issues need to be hashed out.

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

Follow on Twitter: @LisaMascaro

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The death of a 2-year-old boy at a Walt Disney World resort in an alligator attack has brought back some frightening memories for a New Hampshire man who was grabbed by a gator at a Disney campground in Florida in 1986, when he was 8.

Paul Santamaria, of Hebron, N.H., said he was horrified for the family of Lane Graves, who was snatched by an alligator in shallow water Tuesday at a beach at Disneys Grand Floridian resort, 3 miles from where Santamaria was attacked.

I have two little girls the age of the boy that was taken, and it was just something that kind of hit home, Santamaria said.

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Body of 2-year-old boy found after Disney World gator attack, sheriff says 

In 1986, Santamarias family was staying at Disneys Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground when he was attacked while feeding ducks at a pond. The gator knocked him down, grabbed his leg and started to thrash around and try to pull him into the water, Santamaria said.

He yelled for help. His 12-year-old sister grabbed him under the arms, and his 10-year-old brother started hitting the gator. Santamaria kicked the gator with his other leg.

Instead of just freezing, they decided to fight, to help me to fight to get away, and Im here because of it, he said. I was lucky.

Eventually the alligator opened its mouth and let him go.

He suffered gashes and a tooth stuck in his thigh, and he was hospitalized for a week. He still has the scars on his leg.

The alligator that attacked Santamaria was later shot and killed. A Disney spokesman said then that as far as he knew, it was the first such attack at the sprawling theme park.

In Lanes case, five alligators were killed in the search for his body, but authorities have yet to determine which of them, if any, was responsible for the boys death. The Orange County sheriff said it was the first time an alligator had killed someone at Disney World in its 45 years of operations in Orlando.

Santamaria has been back to Disney World since he was attacked, but he said hes been much more cautious.

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If you are concerned about climate change, then you should take note of this: Over the last eight months, utilities from New York to Nebraska have announced plans to shutter six nuclear reactors by 2019. These closures will come on the heels of earlier ones  five reactors have been shuttered in the last three years alone. The latest closure announcement came earlier this month when Exelon Corp., the countrys largest nuclear-energy producer, said it would close three reactors at two sites in Illinois by 2018.

The six targeted reactors have been safely producing about 40 terawatt-hours of zero-carbon-emissions electricity per year (one terawatt-hour equals 1 billion kilowatt-hours). These reactors output exceeds the amount of zero-carbon electricity produced annually by every solar energy installation in the nation. (Last year, American solar output totaled 38.6 terawatt-hours.) Even with solar installations growing at a rapid rate, we wont add enough solar capacity anytime soon to make up for the clean nuclear energy we are about to lose.

Wind power wont easily fill the gap, either. Based on calculations done by the Breakthrough Institute, wind energy requires about 500 times more land than nuclear. To replace the six reactors slated for closure, wed need to cover about 1,400 square miles of land with rows and rows of 500-foot-high turbines. Thats a land area larger than Rhode Island. Such energy sprawl has resulted in a backlash in numerous states, including Maine, Vermont and New York, where proposed wind projects are being opposed by local governments and environmental groups.

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All told, the United States now produces about 20 times as much zero-carbon electricity from nuclear sources as it does from solar, and four times as much as it does from wind. Along with hydropower (which produces more zero-carbon electricity than wind and solar combined), nuclear energy is an essential part of our climate change efforts. Thats why climate scientists and increasing numbers of environmentalists are advocating for it.

In December, four of the worlds top climate scientists  James Hansen, of Columbia University; Kerry Emanuel,of MIT; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia  wrote in the Guardian that nuclear energy will make the difference between the world missing crucial climate targets or achieving them. They added that those who claim we should rely solely on wind and solar to reduce our emissions downplay or ignore the intermittency of those sources and make unrealistic technical assumptions.

Despite the clear need for nuclear energy, Americas nuclear capacity is inexorably coming unplugged. Reactors are the victim of low natural gas prices, aging infrastructure, costly post-Fukushima regulations and heavily subsidized wind and solar power. Many nuclear plants cant make money selling electricity into wholesale markets, where prices are at, or near, 15-year lows. Exelon claims the three reactors it plans to shutter in Illinois have lost $800 million over the last seven years.

Congress should support the nuclear sector in the same way its helping wind and solar.

The states arent stepping in to save nuclear power. In Illinois, a bill drafted by state legislators that could have helped prevent the Exelon reactors from closing didnt even get an up or down vote in the spring legislative session. A similar lack of state-level political support for nuclear energy led Entergy to announce in November that it would close its 838-megawatt FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Oswego County, N.Y.

Congress is the only entity with enough money and clout to keep our nuclear reactors operating. Bailout is a nasty word and Washington politicians wont like providing loads of cash to companies like Exelon (market capitalization: about $30 billion). Nevertheless, if keeping domestic carbon-dioxide emissions in check is really a priority, representatives and senators will have to act.

Congress should support the nuclear sector in the same way its helping wind and solar. Last year, the wind industry got a five-year extension of its production tax credit, which currently gives generators a $23 credit per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. Congress also passed a multi-year extension of the investment tax credit that currently allows solar investors to deduct 30% of the cost of a project from their tax bills. In December, the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that these measures will cost taxpayers about $23.5 billion between now and 2019.

Ed Kee, chief executive of the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group, puts the situation in stark terms: Rescuing Americas nuclear sector will require a big and permanent slug of money, he says. If we are going to meet our carbon goals we have to do it. At the end of May, President Obamas energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, told the New York Times essentially the same thing: Maintaining the nuclear fleet is really important for meeting our near-term and midterm goals for low-carbon energy production.

Congress gives billions of dollars per year to wind and solar providers in the name of climate change. It should do be willing to do the same for the energy source thats already contributing so much toward our carbon-reduction goals.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, which was recently issued in paperback.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook
SCHUYLER  A 15-year-old passenger in a vehicle involved in a Schuyler Police pursuit late Wednesday night was killed when the car slammed into a tree.

According to the Colfax County Attorney's Office, Isabella Brandt was ejected from a 2005 Honda Accord driven by 22-year-old Angel Lopez of Schuyler after the vehicle struck a tree near the intersection of West Sixth and Elk streets in Schuyler shortly after 11 p.m.

The Schuyler girl was transported by ambulance to CHI Health Schuyler then flown by helicopter to Bryan Medical Center West in Lincoln, where she was pronounced dead.

Authorities believe she was a backseat passenger in the vehicle.

Another passenger in the vehicle, 15-year-old Herodes Gutierrez of Schuyler, initially fled the crash scene before being located by law enforcement, according to the county attorney's office. He was transported to the Schuyler hospital. His condition was unavailable.

Lopez, who had to be extracted from the wrecked vehicle by the Schuyler Fire Department, was taken by ambulance to CHI Health Schuyler then flown to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, where he is in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

The county attorney's office says police officers were dispatched to the area near Oak Ballroom around 11:15 p.m. Wednesday after an erratic driver was reported. They attempted to stop the Honda Accord driven by Lopez, who fled north on Adam Street.

Officers ended the pursuit for safety reasons and the accident was reported minutes later.

Lopez's vehicle was traveling west on West Sixth Street when it left the roadway and struck a tree on the south side of the street, according to the county attorney's office.

Authorities believe alcohol may have been a factor in the crash.

Lopez was arrested last week by Schuyler Police in an alcohol-related incident that also involved the teenage boy injured in Wednesday's crash.

He was charged June 8 with second-offense driving under the influence, an interlock permit violation, driving under revocation, open container and procuring alcohol to a minor after his vehicle was stopped by an officer around 10 p.m.

According to a probable cause affidavit, the Schuyler man, who failed to signal a turn and was driving with his vehicles high beams on, had an open bottle of Bud Light in the center console and strong odor of alcohol during the traffic stop.

A preliminary breath test showed his blood alcohol content was .132, well over the legal driving limit of .08.

Gutierrez, who was a passenger in the vehicle, admitted he drank alcohol provided by Lopez, according to the arrest affidavit.

Authorities have not determined whether seat belts were in use at the time of the accident, which is being investigated by the Nebraska State Patrol.

Charges had not been filed as of Thursday morning.
Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign may now be winding down but its influence will certainly be felt at the Democratic convention, and possibly beyond. Sanders managed to appoint two defenders of Palestinian rights  Cornel West and James Zogby  to the committee drafting the Democratic Partys platform.

It is to his credit that the candidate, who declined to criticize Israels conduct in Gaza and the West Bank until recently, took this opportunity. He understood that American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had evolved far past the positions of the political establishment. The party and the country as a whole are ready for an honest conversation about the consequences of Americas unconditional support for Israel.

On a recent trip to the West Bank, I felt the effects of Americas decades of lockstep support for Israels actions everywhere I went.

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I spent time in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, where 21 local youth  no small number in a village of 600  were arrested in raids last fall. Such raids, in which soldiers storm an entire neighborhood, are still a nightly occurrence in the West Bank. The fate of those arrested is almost certain: 99.74% of Palestinians tried in Israels military courts are convicted. Two women in Nabi Saleh, leaders in the local protest movement, are under doctors orders to skip the villages weekly demonstrations. Theyve been exposed to so much tear gas over the years that they risk kidney failure should Israeli troops break up the protests with gas, which they invariably do.

While I was there, protesters were sitting quietly on a hillside, posing no threat to anyone, when soldiers began firing high-velocity tear gas canisters. Disproportionate use of force by Israeli Defense Forces is not an exception but the general rule.

Its been the rule in Hebron, the epicenter of the violence during much of last fall and winter. It was there in March that video captured an Israeli soldier executing 21-year-old Abdel Fattah al-Sharif as he lay prone on the ground. (The soldiers arrest prompted an outpouring of support for his actions from the Israeli public.) For six months, the IDF declared much of the Hebron neighborhood of Tel Rumeida a closed military zone, forbidding all Palestinian non-residents from entering, even as Israeli settlers were free to come and go. Palestinian residents were issued numbers that they had to call out each time they crossed a checkpoint on their way home.

More Palestinians were displaced by home demolitions in the first three months of 2016 than in all of 2015.

That practice ended last month, but the sector of Hebron open to Palestinians contracted. I was with local activist Issa Amro when a soldier stopped him from ascending a staircase that last fall had been accessible to Palestinians and Israelis alike. When Amro asked why he could not pass, the young soldier, seemingly aware of the implications of his orders, hesitated to answer. Eventually he found the courage: Because you are Palestinian.

Ethnic segregation and constant land grabs backed up by overwhelming military might  this is the cost of our refusal to confront the realities of the Israeli occupation. When I visited the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, construction had just wrapped up on new houses in a neighboring Israeli settlement. In Umm al-Kheir, by contrast, six homes that provided shelter for 35 people had been bulldozed by IDF in April, the seventh round of such demolitions there. I arrived expecting foul moods, but instead found proud laughter of a kind that has become achingly familiar in the years Ive been reporting from the West Bank. We have nothing more to lose, said Eid Suleiman al-Hathalin, standing beside the ruins of his brothers home. The wrecking crews could return as many times as they wanted, he said. Were not going anywhere.

Israel is confiscating Palestinian land at a rate not seen since the 1980s. More Palestinians were displaced by home demolitions in the first three months of 2016 than in all of 2015.

It could get much worse. The most right-wing government in Israeli history just appointed Avigdor Lieberman to be defense minister. Lieberman said of Israels Palestinian citizens last year, Those who are against us, theres nothing to be done  we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head.

Such open racial hatred has become the norm in contemporary Israeli politics. Last month, Israels second-highest ranking army officer compared the political situation to the revolting trends that characterized Nazi-era Germany. He backed away from that statement, but two weeks later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, hardly a peacenik, warned that Israel had been infected by the seeds of fascism.

Americans need not be passive observers to this ongoing catastrophe. Real change can come from the United States  if it finally stops propping up Israels military occupation with billions of dollars a year in aid and shielding the Israeli government from international censure.

Some Democrats may be anxious about the electoral costs of open disagreement on the convention floor. But perpetuating the status quo is a far more dangerous prospect. For the first time in decades, a real debate about U.S. policy in Israel threatens to break forth. This should not be a cause for alarm but, finally, for hope.

Journalist and novelist Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the new book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
With concerns about the potential for another recession casting a shadow over this years budget negotiations, California lawmakers approved a new $170.9-billion spending plan on Wednesday that increases some funding for social services but stashes more away in a rainy-day fund.

Although lawmakers are finishing their work on this years budget, some of the most consequential decisions for the states financial future may not be made until the November election. Voters will likely be asked whether to extend higher taxes on the wealthy, increase the levy on cigarettes or borrow billions of dollars to build and renovate schools.

Its a classic example of Californias dual-track system for managing its finances, with some decisions made in the Capitol and others at the ballot box.

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Its ultimately up to the people of California to make their own decision, said Senate leader Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles).

The budget passed swiftly Wednesday on a nearly party-line vote. State Sen. Anthony Cannella of Ceres in Stanislaus County was the only Republican to vote in favor of the plan.

This years budget negotiations followed a similar pattern as the last few annual debates over spending in the Capitol, with Gov. Jerry Brown trying to tamp down calls for more spending while Democratic lawmakers sought new funding for government services.

But Brown issued increasingly stark warnings about the possibility of another economic downturn, and he slashed his projections when releasing his budget proposal last month.

Although California has enjoyed years of financial progress as the economy improved, the surging tide of revenue is beginning to turn, Brown said in May.

The governor successfully convinced lawmakers to stash an extra $2 billion into the rainy-day fund, bringing the total to an estimated $6.7 billion by next summer. The budget includes another $1.75-billion cushion in case revenue runs lower or spending is higher than expected.

Brown, lawmakers strike budget deal that includes more money for housing, child care 

The reserves help ensure that no matter what happens, well be in a good place, said Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood).

In turn, Brown agreed to increase spending on child care and allow families to receive additional welfare benefits.

We pushed hard to make sure we make investments in the most vulnerable communities in California, de Leon said before the Legislature voted on the bills on Wednesday.

Brown tweeted his approval Wednesday evening: Good work from the state legislature: were building reserves and investing in CA.

The budget ramps up payments to state-subsidized child care providers to help them keep pace with Californias higher minimum wage, which is slated to hit $15 by 2022.

The spending plan also ends a policy known as the maximum family grant, which prevented families from receiving extra welfare assistance if they had a new child while already receiving benefits.

It has only driven women and their children into deeper poverty, said Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), who fought to end the policy.

Removing the restriction would help an estimated 130,000 children in 95,000 families with an extra $136 per child, per month.

Republicans were critical of new spending on government programs, echoing Browns concerns about the possibility of another recession.

It doesnt take more than basic arithmetic to show that level of increase is unsustainable, said Assemblyman Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), the vice chairman of the Assembly budget committee.

While lawmakers were working on this years budget, advocates have been circulating petitions to place tax-hike measures on the ballot in November.

One measure, supported by the California Teachers Assn., would extend higher taxes on the wealthy, producing an estimated $5 billion to $11 billion per year. The money would go to public schools, community colleges and government health programs.

The taxes were originally raised by a ballot initiative Brown championed in 2012, which was supposed to be temporary.

Another measure would increase the tax on cigarettes by $2 per pack, raising an estimated $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion in revenue annually. Its supported by labor unions and Tom Steyer, a deep-pocketed Democratic donor and environmentalist, and its intended to boost funding for health care and anti-smoking efforts.

A third budget-related measure already has qualified for the ballot: a proposal to authorize $9 billion in bonds to build and renovate schools and community colleges. The state would incur an estimated $8.6 billion in interest costs over 35 years, and annual payments were estimated at $500 million.

Times staff writers Christine Mai-Duc and John Myers contributed to this report.

chris.megerian@latimes.com

Twitter: @chrismegerian

ALSO:

Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers strike California budget deal that adds money for housing and child care

California Legislature swiftly debates and passes budget

Democrats think this might be the year that Gov. Jerry Brown loosens his grip on state spending

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UPDATES:

5:23 p.m.: This article was updated to include details on the vote and a quote from the governor.

This article was originally published at 5:11 p.m.
Call that killer a radical Islamic terrorist. Call him a hateful homophobic. Or a homicidal wacko. It doesnt matter much.

Words dont kill. Weapons do.

What mattered most Sunday morning in the deadliest mass shooting in American history was that the murderer was an assault weapon owner.

No, not merely a gun owner. Dont get all huffy and defensive, gun zealots. Nobodys tarring all gun owners. Ive long been one myself.

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That Orlando, Fla., nut was the owner of a freshly purchased assault rifle, the modern firearm toy of choice, especially for American mass killers.

Actually, it was just a simple part of the weapon  the large capacity ammunition magazine  that allowed Omar Mateen to fire off all those bullets so quickly.

If mass killers had to pause to reload  to change magazines  thered be a brief opportunity for some victims to flee unharmed. In the Florida gay bar, there undoubtedly would have been fewer than 49 dead and 53 injured.

But denying him that macho magazine would have denied this killer his 2nd Amendment rights, based on gun lobby logic.

Updates on the Orlando shootings 

After all, he was a law abiding citizen  until he wasnt. Until he got the uncontrollable urge to kill. Maybe we cant control these warped peoples minds. But we certainly can control their weapons.

A 2nd Amendment violation? Nonsense.

None other than the late conservative hero, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, put it this way in a 2008 opinion affirming the right of individuals to own firearms:

The right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.... The right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

There is no constitutional right to tote around a military-style assault weapon, and courts have ruled so.

But we know all this, or were in denial.

And here we are again fighting over gun control  we Americans with by far the highest rate of firearms homicides among the free developed nations. (Central and South America are off the chart.)

The debate rages after every mass killing, which unfortunately have become frequent.

After the December 2012 massacre of 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, the California Legislature passed 18 gun bills. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed more than a third. He enjoys playing both sides.

He has planted his feet firmly astride the fence, and like King Solomon, he has split the baby in half, commented gun lobbyist Sam Paredes, who heads Gun Owners of California.

The Legislature was still reacting to last Decembers mass killing by a radical Islamic couple in San Bernardino that left 14 dead and 26 wounded when the Orlando massacre refocused public attention on guns.

Political firefights are being waged all over Sacramento.

A dozen gun bills cleared two legislative committees Tuesday. As usual, Democrats supported the bills, Republicans opposed them.

The two most significant bills would control assault weapons, which ostensibly are banned in California but proliferate because of loopholes.

One proposal would ban semiautomatic rifles with bullet buttons that facilitate the quick exchanging of ammo magazines.

Another measure would outlaw possession  not just the manufacture or purchase  of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Owners would need to sell their large-capacity magazines to dealers, peddle them out of state or turn them in to police.

The cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Sunnyvale already have adopted similar ordinances.

But in the Legislature, this proposal never has come close to passing. Its odds arent good this time either. The bill, by state Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley), has passed the Senate, but faces a tough hurdle in the more moderate Assembly.

Updates from Sacramento 

Heres my suggestion for an amendment: Set aside a tiny fraction of the just-passed $171-billion state budget to finance government purchase of the banned magazines. Show some respect for the affected gun owners.

Speaking of respect, some Democrats didnt show any to gun lobbyists merely doing their job at the Assembly Public Safety Committee hearing. In fact, they sounded downright Donald Trump-like.

Its very difficult for me to sit here and look you in the eye and respect you, Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell) told a National Rifle Assn. lobbyist, blaming his organization for the Orlando slayings.

Blame the policy, but keep it civil and not personal.

State Sen. Isadore Hall (D-Compton)  author of a bullet button bill  called gun lobbyists crazy, vicious, heartless people who need to wash their mouths because they are filthy.

Its fine to tell the gun lobby its positions are full of holes. But that can be done without sounding like the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

Democrats are scrambling to get these bills passed before the Legislature breaks for summer vacation July 1.

Theyre hoping  for various good government and political reasons  to persuade Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom to drop his sweeping gun control initiative that is destined for the November ballot. That measure includes the ban on possession of super magazines.

But Newsom has shown no interest in abandoning his proposal. Its more comprehensive than any package of bills Brown is likely to sign. Moreover, hes using the initiative to help his 2018 gubernatorial bid.

Because of the Orlando butchery, this is an opportune time to tighten up gun ownership and finally ban assault rifles. But if this opportunity is missed, therell be more.

Unfortunately, continued mass shootings are certain until we control the weapons.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on Twitter

ALSO:

Bullets are flying in gun battle between Democrats

Lax gun policies are hitting America where it hurts

Democrat mounts gun control filibuster on Senate floor

Tempers flare as lawmakers move forward with a dozen gun-control bills in wake of Orlando shooting

Congress unlikely to change gun laws after shooting

A shooting back home: Congress reacts to another tragedy
Despite pressures from overfishing and changing ocean conditions, some coral reefs around the world manage to defy expectations.

In a survey of more than 2,500 reefs around the world, scientists identified 15 that were surprisingly healthy, considering their proximity to large human populations or unfavorable environmental conditions, according to a new report in Nature.

These so-called bright spots had far more fish than the researchers could reasonably expect, said Josh Cinner, a professor at James Cook University in Australia who studies how social sciences can improve coral reef management.

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See the most-read stories in Science this hour 

Along with 15 bright spots, Cinner and his colleagues found 35 dark spots, areas with fewer fish than the researchers would have anticipated.

By examining whats going right at these bright spots  and wrong at the dark spots  scientists hope to find new insights for confronting the numerous problems coral reefs face today.

We wanted to know why these reefs could punch above their weight, so to speak, and whether there are lessons we can learn about how to avoid the degradation often associated with overfishing, Cinner, the studys lead author, said in a statement.

RELATED: Weve never seen this before: Explore a hidden, watery world with NOAA 

Coral reefs provide habitat and food for countless species. Many conservation efforts focus on relatively pristine areas under minimal threat. But as pressures from fishing and climate change mount, coral reefs in human-inhabited areas need protection too, the study argues.

Around the world, coral reefs are threatened by population growth, overfishing and destructive fishing practices such as dragging large nets across the ocean floor. On top of that, climate change threatens the reefs with increased coral bleaching and more severe cyclones.

The study found that reefs around wealthier countries tended to be in better condition. The findings also confirmed that marine reserves help sustain fish populations when their protections were enforced.

Surprisingly, the bright spots werent limited to places where people were scarce. They also included areas where humans make high use of their local reefs.

Typically found in the Pacific Ocean, these bright spots included reefs in the Solomon Islands, parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Kiribati. In these countries, people had strong cultural institutions attached to the reefs and were more engaged in management efforts.

The bright spots also tended to have more favorable environmental conditions, such as more deep water where fish could take refuge from dangers.

The exact reasons bright spots have managed to fare better than other reefs in similar conditions still require more detailed investigation. However, the study authors suggested that allowing for property rights and increasing local participation in fisheries could spur more innovation in reef conservation.

If bright spots offer suggestions for how to improve coral reefs, dark spots may help identify practices to avoid.

Dark spots were found in every major ocean basin and even included some uninhabited areas thought to be near-pristine, such as the Northern Hawaiian Islands.

They tended to be places where people were better able to catch large amounts of fish. Dark spots also occurred in areas recently ravaged by cyclones or coral bleaching.

The long-term viability of coral reefs ultimately depends on reducing carbon emissions, the study said. But overfishing still threatens a reefs underlying ecological health  and curbing that will give reefs a chance to cope with environmental change.

Photographs by Tane Sinclair-Taylor.

sean.greene@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter seangreene89 and like Los Angeles Times Science on Facebook.

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A first-time visitor to the New Swan Shakespeare Festival at UC Irvine might be struck by any number of things.

The festivals idyllic location at a college campus surrounded by rolling hills and more than 11,000 trees and shrubs. Or the impressive outdoor mini-Elizabethan theater, where performances will take place five days a week for two months  for a total of 38 shows.

This years festival, marking its fifth season, will open July 7 and will feature a comedy and a tragedy, As You Like It and Hamlet, running alternately through Aug. 28, as well as a series of musical offerings on a select few Monday nights.

Eli Simon, a chancellors professor of acting in UCIs drama department and the festivals artistic director, will direct As You Like It, and Beth Lopes, founding company member and a Los Angeles-based theater director and teacher, will stage Hamlet.

Actor Zac Houston, taking the title role of Hamlet, has appeared in all of the festivals offerings over the past three years, and he and his 13 fellow cast members  a mix of professional Shakespearean actors and graduate students  will play many parts in the two plays.

Its a wonderful challenge for actors to play a tragedy and a comedy, and its exciting for the audience to see how they tackle the scripts, said Simon, who has worked at UCI for 26 years and staged over 100 productions at major Shakespearean festivals and regional and international theaters.

According to Simon, the portable mini-Elizabethan theater  which offers roofless al fresco seating, provides an atmospheric experience for visitors, who can watch Shakespeare plays under the stars.

The 130-seat modular theater, a replica of Shakespeares Old Globe, was designed by festival production manager Keith Bangs.

The seating, constructed by UCI students and professionals using recycled materials, consists of two tiers, allowing guests to sit on groundling, mezzanine and balcony levels. When the summer festival comes to a close, the theater is disassembled and stored in the schools Claire Trevor School of the Arts production studios.

Theres no theater like it in America, Simon said. It renders people speechless and is the centerpiece to our festival. Its as if you are sitting on stage because theres no fourth wall to break. Its like youre sitting around the campfire telling stories.

Theres no theater like it in America ... It renders people speechless and is the centerpiece to our festival.  Eli Simon, chancellors professor of acting at UC Irvine

This years festival will welcome guest artist Martin Kildare, who has appeared on Broadway in The Lion King and A Raisin In The Sun and toured nationally with Mamma Mia! Kildare, who has studied with playwright Mark Rylance at Shakespeares Globe in London, will play the ghost of Hamlets father as well as Duke Frederick and Duke Senior in As You Like It.

The festival of theater will also encompass music in the form of three Music Mondays.

Kicking off the concerts will be Shakespeares Fool, led by entertainer and musician Jason Feddy, who has written melodies for the 10 songs Shakespeare included in his works. Feddy, a morning host on Laguna Beach radio station KX 93.5, will play acoustic guitar and sing the songs with an acoustic guitar trio.

Mariachi Las Colibri, an ensemble of women returning to the all-string instrumentation of the early 20th century mariachi tradition, will present a blend of vocal harmonies and arrangements with a contemporary twist.

And in mid-August, the New Swan String Quartet will return. The popular concert, which sold out last year, will feature Mozart chamber pieces performed by members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and other notable ensembles.

Simon, who noted that the festival attracts over 5,000 visitors, said the company is committed on every level  from hiring skilled actors and directors and reaching out to new audiences to executing sword fighting in scenes with precision and alacrity.

The fencing bout in Hamlet requires regimented choreography, and actors must rehearse and train for months so the scene appears spur of the moment, Simon said.

The audience is very close to the action, allowing us to really show the characters innermost thoughts, Simon said. There isnt a bad seat in the house.

--

What: New Swan Shakespeare Festival

When: July 7 to Aug. 28; performances begin at 8 p.m.

Where: UC Irvine, Gateway Plaza, adjacent to Aldrich Park and Langson Library

Cost: Ticket prices vary

Information: (949) 824-2787 or arts.uci.edu/tickets

--

Kathleen Luppi, kathleen.luppi@latimes.com

Twitter: @KathleenLuppi

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Technically, Buyer & Cellar, the current production at the Laguna Playhouse, is a one-man show. Theatrically, it involves several other people, including one of the most famous women in America, if not the world.

This wildly inventive comedy by Jonathan Tolins imagines a struggling young actor who lands a job as curator of a mini-mall in the basement of Barbra Streisands Malibu estate, which is filled with souvenirs from the actress career. And theres only one shopper  Babs herself.

As Emerson Collins, the stages lone occupant  who serves up bites of this delicious script one by one  explains at the outset, this is a fictional play. The events never transpired. Then he sets to work making his audience believe just the opposite.

Under the imaginative direction of Larry Raben, Collins turns in a terrific performance in this energetic exercise, which clocks in at nearly two hours without intermission. He also manages to project the personas of his envious boyfriend, Streisands snippy assistant and the funny lady herself. Hubby James Brolin also makes a cameo appearance.

Twisting his face and modifying his voice, Collins slips in and out of Barbra effortlessly, presenting her as a benign diva who actually becomes a friend, ultimately inviting him up to the main house, which Collins character imagines as a sort of Valhalla.

Collins maintains his intimate connection with the audience, even while undergoing his characters own personal trauma. He possesses an unquenchable supply of energy, both physical and intellectual, as he spins this fantastic tale of a young gay man on the fringe of heaven.

Tolins based his play on the stars book Barbra Streisand: My Passion for Design and fills it with copious mental images of elaborate possessions. Ironically, the Laguna stage setting, credited to Josh Clabaugh, consists of an easy chair and a piano bench, which Collins moves around to suggest the changing scenic backgrounds.

Buyer & Cellar offers further proof that effective theater production may be achieved with minimal casting, as such performers as Chris Lemmon and Linda Purl have illustrated in the past in the art colony. Its high comedy with an imaginative twist at the Laguna Playhouse.

--

What: Buyer & Cellar

Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays, and 1 p.m. Sundays until June 26

Cost: $48 to $61

Information: (949) 497-2787

--

TOM TITUS reviews local theater.
State officials would use a case-by-case approach to resettle residents of the Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa should the facility close by 2021, as proposed, according to plans awaiting review by the state Legislature.

The closure plan, released Friday by the California Department of Developmental Services, calls for comprehensive assessments of Fairviews estimated 237 residents to learn their choices, preferences and the types of community-based services and supports needed to ensure a successful transition to a community setting.

Such a setting can be a home licensed by the state that has been modified so people with disabilities can receive medical care or be monitored onsite.

Resident Manny Flores waters lemon trees in the communal garden at the Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa. State officials propose to close the center by 2021 as part of a larger effort to transition people with intellectual and developmental disabilities out of institutional-style facilities. (File photo / Daily Pilot)

I think the main takeaway is its an individualized process, department spokeswoman Nancy Lungren said in an interview. Its a very person-centered process, so each individual that will be transitioning to the community has a complete individual program.

That would include a little bit of everything, tailored to a persons specific needs, be they medical, behavioral or social, Lungren said.

No one would be moved until housing and supportive services are in place, she added.

State lawmakers will review the plan in coming months, Lungren said.

Program director Carol Lynn Naylor-Pecson chats with a resident at Fairview Developmental Center. The state-run facility on Harbor Boulevard in Costa Mesa opened in 1959 and currently has about 237 residents. Its population peaked in 1967 at 2,700. (File photo / Daily Pilot)

Fairview, a state-run facility on Harbor Boulevard, opened in 1959. It provides services and housing to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Some of the residents cannot live on their own and require around-the-clock care.

Gov. Jerry Brown called for closing Fairview last year as part of a larger move to transition people out of institutional-style centers and into smaller accommodations that are more integrated into communities.

The action will save taxpayers money in the long run, officials say, especially as the number of patients in the centers has dwindled over the years.

Fairviews population peaked in 1967 with 2,700 residents. The current population is less than one-tenth of that.

The proposal to close Fairview has been praised by some, including Disability Rights California, a Sacramento-based advocacy group.

We have noted many reasons for our support, including global and national trends valuing quality of life and inclusiveness, as well as decades of research showing that people who leave developmental centers are better off, according to a letter from the group that was sent to the Department of Developmental Services.

However, some people with family members or other loved ones at Fairview have questioned whether residents can expect the same level of service elsewhere.

I am begging you to please reconsider your decision to close down Fairview Developmental Center, a woman identified only as Heather wrote to DDS. I understand that our country is low on funds, but the budget should still aim for the greater good and should not harm the countrys people in any way.

In October, the Costa Mesa City Council recommended that 500 homes be built on the 114-acre, state-owned Fairview property should the center close.

Three hundred of those homes would be part of a proposed project nicknamed Shannons Mountain, which would include housing for the developmentally disabled.

Council members also recommended setting aside part of the site as open space and examining development of institutional or recreational facilities.

Those recommendations are in a city general plan update that the council will review this year.
The same day the Newport Beach City Council voted to declare May 26 as John Wayne Day in honor of the late actors birthday, the Orange County Board of Supervisors presented a proclamation to Waynes family commemorating his life and legacy.

Board Vice Chairwoman Michelle Steel and Supervisor Todd Spitzer gave the proclamation to Waynes son Ethan during Tuesday mornings board meeting. The supervisors took no formal vote on the item.

In the world we live in today, filled with reality TV stars and celebrities willing to do anything to gain their 15 minutes of fame, it is imperative that we honor those who exemplified the values and qualities of what it means to be a true American, Steel said in a statement.

The Newport City Council unanimously signed off Tuesday afternoon on a resolution designating May 26 each year as John Wayne Day as a tribute to the legendary movie star known for his rugged cowboy roles. He called Newport Beach home from the 1960s until his death in 1979.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @HannahFryTCN
The Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach will produce its ninth annual Fathers Day car and motorcycle show for the public Sunday on the upper deck of the venues parking structure.

More than 75 cars and motorcycles, provided by members and friends of the club, will be on display.

The event also will feature a hamburger buffet, a DJ, car trivia, a tattoo artist and a clown making balloon animals.

The Balboa Bay Club is at 1221 W. Coast Hwy. For more information, call Laurie Veitch at (949) 630-4517.

Hundreds of art pieces to be displayed in Newport on Saturday

More than 280 pieces of art by 157 artists from across the nation will be on display Saturday during the 52nd annual Newport Beach Art Exhibition.

The free exhibit will be at the Newport Beach Civic Center from 1 to 6 p.m.

The event, presented by the Newport Beach Arts Commission, is a juried exhibition and sale of paintings, mixed media, sculptures and photography.

The public can chat with artists while enjoying food, wine and music. Part of the proceeds from sold artworks will benefit community art programs in Newport Beach.

The artists also will vie for cash awards in various categories.

Newport troop gets 200th Eagle Scout

Newport Beachs Troop 90, which meets at the Newport Sea Base, congratulated its 200th Eagle Scout on June 1, when Christian Craft passed his final board of review.

Christian is the third son of John and Katherine Craft to earn the Eagle rank. His brother Justin was Troop 90s 112th Eagle Scout, and his brother Andrew was the 120th.

Troop 90s first Eagle Scout achieved the rank in November 1991 in the troops third year of existence.

Coastkeeper seeks volunteers to help plant eelgrass in bay

Orange County Coastkeeper, an environmental group based in Costa Mesa, has set a goal to plant 1,280 square meters (about 13,778 square feet) of eelgrass this summer in the diminished eelgrass habitats in Newport Bay.

It plans to have land-based volunteers and certified divers transplant the eelgrass from natural beds nearby.

Eelgrass beds provide habitats for crabs, scallops, fish and other marine species, according to Coastkeeper.

Volunteer shifts are available from 9 a.m. to noon and 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. June 29 through July 2, July 6 through 9 and July 20 through 23.

For more information, visit coastkeeper.org or call (714) 850-1965.

Water district employee raises funds to fight cancer

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) recently recognized an Orange County Water District employees efforts to raise money and awareness to battle childrens cancer.

Beck Mudd of Laguna Beach, a tour coordinator for the district, traveled to Utahs border with Colorado this year, and last year ran from Huntington Beach to Californias border with Arizona.

Rohrabacher read her efforts into the congressional record.

Mudd is raising money for efforts to fight pediatric cancer. Donations can be made in her name via the Irvine-based Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation at pcrf-kids.org or by calling (949) 859-6312.

UCI names vice chancellor for research

UC Irvine has appointed Pramod Khargonekar as vice chancellor for research, effective June 30.

Khargonekar will provide strategic direction for the Office of Research, which supports UCI facultys creative and scholarly activities.

Pramods stellar career as a researcher, educator and national leader makes him an outstanding choice to lead our ambitious efforts to expand the scope and impact of our world-class research, UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman said in a statement.

Khargonekar most recently served as assistant director for engineering at the National Science Foundation, headquartered in Virginia. While there, he headed the Directorate for Engineering, which invests in engineering research and education, according to a news release.

Reid Day School to offer summer programs

Reid Day School in Costa Mesa will provide summer study programs for students of the school and from local school programs.

Summer offerings include the Summer Catalyst Program in July, which will give first- through sixth-graders group instruction in math, reading, critical thinking and writing, and the Reading Workshop in August, which aims to help first- through third-graders with reading comprehension and phonology.

Reid Day School is for students considered twice exceptional, meaning they are gifted and have a learning, emotional or behavioral issue.

The school is at 151 Kalmus Drive.

For more information on the summer programs, visit reidday.org or call (949) 680-9592.
A Syrian-born former Irvine resident has been sentenced to 32 months in prison for smuggling rifle scopes, night-vision goggles and other gear to Syrian militant groups.

Amin al-Baroudi, a 50-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, was sentenced June 10 in federal court in Alexandria, Va.

He pleaded guilty in January to violating U.S. sanctions in Syria by supplying an insurgent group called Ahrar el-Sham, which frequently fights alongside the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria.

Al-Baroudi apologized in court. His defense sought probation, arguing that al-Baroudi is a survivor of then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assads 1982 massacre of civilians in Hama and was motivated by a heartfelt desire to help Syrians shake off the regime of current President Bashar al-Assad.

Prosecutors said al-Baroudi may have wanted to help but that sending weapons into a war zone was the wrong method.

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SCHUYLER  A 15-year-old passenger in a vehicle involved in a Schuyler Police pursuit late Wednesday night was killed when the car slammed into a tree.

According to the Colfax County Attorney's Office, Isabella Brandt was ejected from a 2005 Honda Accord driven by 22-year-old Angel Lopez of Schuyler after the vehicle struck a tree near the intersection of West Sixth and Elk streets in Schuyler shortly after 11 p.m.

The Schuyler girl was transported by ambulance to CHI Health Schuyler then flown by helicopter to Bryan Medical Center West in Lincoln, where she was pronounced dead.

Authorities believe she was a backseat passenger in the vehicle.

Another passenger in the vehicle, 15-year-old Herodes Gutierrez of Schuyler, initially fled the crash scene before being located by law enforcement, according to the county attorney's office. He was transported to the Schuyler hospital, where he was treated and released.

Lopez, who had to be extracted from the wrecked vehicle by the Schuyler Fire Department, was taken by ambulance to CHI Health Schuyler then flown to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha, where he is in critical condition in the intensive care unit.

The county attorney's office says police officers were dispatched to the area near Oak Ballroom around 11:15 p.m. Wednesday after an erratic driver was reported. They attempted to stop the Honda Accord driven by Lopez, who fled north on Adam Street.

Officers ended the pursuit for safety reasons and the accident was reported minutes later.

Lopez's vehicle was traveling west on West Sixth Street when it left the roadway and struck a tree on the south side of the street, according to the county attorney's office.

Authorities believe alcohol may have been a factor in the crash.

Lopez was arrested last week by Schuyler Police in an alcohol-related incident that also involved the teenage boy injured in Wednesday's crash.

He was charged June 8 with second-offense driving under the influence, an interlock permit violation, driving under revocation, open container and procuring alcohol to a minor after his vehicle was stopped by an officer around 10 p.m.

According to a probable cause affidavit, the Schuyler man, who failed to signal a turn and was driving with his vehicles high beams on, had an open bottle of Bud Light in the center console and strong odor of alcohol during the traffic stop.

A preliminary breath test showed his blood alcohol content was .132, well over the legal driving limit of .08.

Gutierrez, who was a passenger in the vehicle, admitted he drank alcohol provided by Lopez, according to the arrest affidavit.

Lopez was sentenced March 2 in Platte County Court for driving under the influence and aiding and abetting a Class I misdemeanor.

He had his driver's license revoked for one year and was ordered to serve two days in jail and pay a $750 fine. Lopez was also ordered to have an ignition interlock device installed in his vehicle, which had not been done prior to Wednesday night's accident, according to the arrest affidavit.

Authorities have not determined whether seat belts were in use at the time of the accident, which is being investigated by the Nebraska State Patrol and Schuyler Police.

Charges had not been filed as of Thursday morning.
Winfred Roberson Jr. was hired Tuesday night as Glendale Unifieds new superintendent, the first black leader of local schools in the districts more than 100-year history, following a unanimous vote by the Glendale Unified School Board.

Shortly after the board took its 5-0 vote, parents, educators and administrators in the district boardroom broke into applause.

Im humbled and honored to be here, and grateful, Roberson said at the podium after he was hired. I know that communities are very proud of their schools  I know this community is very proud.

NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with whats going on in the 818 >>

Roberson will oversee Glendales 30 schools, with 26,200 students enrolled.

He will earn an annual base salary of $255,000 under the terms of his four-year contract, which ends on March 31, 2020.

His first day on the job will be April 1.

Roberson is the 17th superintendent to oversee Glendale schools, whose first superintendent, Richardson D. White, oversaw local schools beginning in 1913.

For school board members, who announced earlier this month that they made an offer to Roberson, the decision to hire him was one they easily agreed upon.

Im sincerely pleased and really optimistic about the future for all of us  employees, students, parents, said school board member Nayiri Nahabedian. Good things are coming.

Winfred Roberson Jr. speaks with Lincoln Elementary students Peter James, 6, and Jobson Kimura, 7. Roberson was hired by the Glendale Unified School District as its new superintendent Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016. (Tim Berger / Staff Photographer)

In addition to his base salary, Roberson, who said he plans to reside in Glendale, will receive a residency incentive of $1,000 for each month he lives within the school districts boundaries, according to his contract.

As superintendent of the Davis Joint Unified School District  a role hes held for the last six years  Roberson currently lives in Woodland, about 15 miles outside of Sacramento.

His contract also allows for a relocation stipend of up to $10,000 to cover the cost of hiring a moving company, as long as he moves to a residence within Glendale Unified.

School board member Greg Krikorian said the proximity with which Glendales superintendent lives to local schools is an important part of his leadership role.

We have such a rich history in Glendale and La Crescenta schools. Its vital that hes part of the community in so many aspects. Not only in the classroom but also after school and [during] evening activities, and to be engaged in that. We appreciate a superintendent living within our community and being close by, Krikorian said.

Roberson fills a role last occupied by Dick Sheehan, who was hired as superintendent of Covina-Valley Unified in May.

In the roughly eight months since Sheehans departure, the school district was overseen by interim superintendents Donald Empey, Marc Winger and Joel Shawn.

Christine Walters, school board president, expressed relief at reaching the end of the search and also said she was confident in Roberson.

We did a long search, and we did a thorough search, and we did a national search, and we think we definitely found the right person for the job. Were very excited, she said, before turning to Roberson. Your passion for public education is exactly what we need here, she added.

--

Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
More than $175,000 was awarded to the Verdugo Workforce Development Board to train people with autism to operate computer-numerical-control, or CNC, machines, as well as help people with disabilities learn other workforce skills, the board announced this week.

The State of California Employment Development Department, in coordination with the California Workforce Development Board and the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, gave the local board $178,571 to provide the training.

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A portion of the funds will help pay for training that is set to begin Monday at Glendale Community College, where 20 adults with autism will learn how to operate CNC machines over 10 weeks, said Judith Velasco, executive director of the development board.

This is an area of focus for us  to help people with [disabilities]. We invest a lot of our grant funds in this area, she said.

The training program for adults with autism is called the Uniquely Abled Academy, and it was brought to Glendale Community College after Jan Swinton, the schools dean of workforce development, met Ivan Rosenburg while the two were serving on the Los Angeles Economic Development Committee.

Rosenburg is a management consultant and father of two children with autism who set out to shift peoples perspectives about placing people with perceived disabilities in high-skilled jobs.

He recognized that adults with autism could succeed working as CNC machine operators because of the repetitive and highly focused work the job requires while earning at least $18 per hour.

An open house to gauge interest in the academy was held last month and attracted dozens of prospective students with autism and their parents.

The new grant is one way to serve the community by putting people on the path to securing high-tech and high-paying jobs, Swinton said.

Its a way to look forward to building more middle-class jobs that serve our workforce-training needs in the Verdugo region, she said. These are really the middle-class jobs that we have lost since the Great Recession.

Velasco said members of the Verdugo Workforce Development Board  which covers the cities of Glendale, Burbank, La Canada Flintridge  are looking forward to using the funds to fulfill locals residents training needs.

Were thrilled to be able to provide additional training opportunities  to fulfill whatever training goal they have, she said.

--

Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com

Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
Lights Up was a fixture on Glendales social scene for many years. Produced by Oakmont League, the fundraiser began in 1955 and quickly became a popular community event.

Some time ago, the late Doris Boyer lent me a program book from the 1956 production. Recently, while looking through the thick book, I realized it was literally a blast from the past.

MORE: Read previous columns about Glendales past >>

The first page set the scene: Lights Up, directed by David C. Jones, of Jerome H. Cargill Productions, on Nov. 16 at Hoover Highs Auditorium. The orchestra, yes, orchestra, was conducted by Lyman Gandee. Lucille Silverstone was credited as rehearsal pianist.

Mrs. Ray Kidd, general chair, was assisted by a committee of nearly 20 women, all listed by their husbands name (remember this was the 1950s). But President Celeste Gages first name was used with her welcome message on the next page.

Next was a full-page ad from Cal Cannon, station manager for KIEV, the choice spot 870 on the dial at 102 N. Glendale Avenue, Glendale 6, California.

Another full-page ad was from Judds, at 234 N. Brand Blvd., where you could buy a short, silk-satin evening dress strapless above and belling skirt below in black, white, pink or ruby for $129. Judds was open until 9 p.m. on Fridays, and even better, had free parking. Its phone number was Citrus 3-1197.

A photo of a cute baby girl named Carol Ann Richard (now Burton) was on a page-six ad sponsored by Electronic Specialty Co. and Shavex Corp.

Chazans Interiors, at 425 Brand, bought a full-page ad, as did Webbs, but it was the many small ads that caught my eye: Ace Vacuum At Your Service at 412 S. Central Ave.; Henrys Restaurant at 520 E. Colorado Blvd.; Crawfords Shopping Centers at 1200 N. Central Ave. and Garlicks Pet Shop at 318 N. Glendale Ave.

George Haney & Son bought an ad to promote their GE and Frigidaire appliances, and Paulines Chicken Pie Shop and Restaurant noted it had free parking at 338 N. Orange.

The Glendale Swimming School displayed a photo of Corrine McGeagh, Mildred Dalany and Cleo Hanssen. Billys Delicatessen, with manager Jack Whitten, was at 216 N. Orange Ave. and H. L. Moe Co., for plumbing, heating and air conditioning, was across from the Gas Co. at 123 N. Maryland Ave.

Reinies, quality merchandise at 238 N. Brand, bought a half-page ad, as did Art Frosts DeSoto and Plymouth dealership at 801 S. Brand. Bistagne Bros Auto Shop, at Chevy Chase Drive and Verdugo Road, offered its services, as did Fayes on Honolulu Avenue.

Lights Up featured singing, dancing and skits and many a husband was roped into appearing on stage, sometimes in less-than-flattering costumes.

After the show, members reconvened at Oakmont Country Club, where chef Johnny Blackwell set out a buffet supper.

Proceeds went to philanthropies such as Glendales Community Chest; the YMCA ($29.75 sent a boy to Camp Fox on Catalina Island for eight days); Los Angeles Orthopaedic Foundation (for the nursery ward) and Hathaway Home for Children.

More 1956 recipients were the March of Dimes and the YWCA pool fund, plus the Hear Foundation.

Now, 60 years later, Oakmont League continues to raise funds for its many philanthropies and for scholarships to local high school and community college students.

--

Readers Write:

Joanne Hedge, president of the Glendale Rancho Neighborhood Assn., emailed a note of appreciation for the June 2 column about the Disney-renovated Grand Central Air Terminal. She noted that the Rancho neighborhood is adjacent to the Grand Central campus and that they are party to the years Disney grew into what it is today.

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Jill Benone, who moved to Las Vegas in March, emailed about a great surprise she received via Facebook. A tile in my name was installed in the Dads Club patio, saying nice things about [my] service to Verdugo Woodlands. I had no idea about this, although I suspect Nina Garguilio-Lopez and Nancy Greene were the instigators. Anyway, just goes to prove what I suspected  I may reside in Las Vegas, but I really live in Glendale  Verdugo Woodlands, to be exact.'

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KATHERINE YAMADA can be reached at katherineyamada@gmail.com or by mail at Verdugo Views, c/o News-Press, 202 W. First St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Please include your name, address and phone number.
Four popular eateries, including breakfast sandwich spot Eggslut and Philz Coffee, will be joining burger chain Shake Shack in a new downtown Glendale development this fall.

Caruso Affiliated officials said last year the company was constructing a retail space solely for restaurants at the corner of Brand Boulevard and Colorado Street. Shake Shack was announced as the first tenant in December.

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Now under construction, the building at 252 S. Brand Blvd. will also be home to Greenleaf Gourmet Chopshop and Mainland Poke Shop as well as the other three eateries.

City officials and some community members on Thursday were invited to taste samples from the incoming restaurants at the new pedestrian paseo next to the Museum of Neon Art and just a few doors down from 252 S. Brand.

Now under construction, the building at 252 S. Brand Blvd. will also be home to Greenleaf Gourmet Chopshop and Mainland Poke Shop as well as the other three eateries. (Raul Roa / Staff Photographer)

All of the restaurants are expected to open around September, said Kloe Colacarro, head of leasing for Caruso Affiliated.

She said the goal was to arrange a lineup of offerings that would also appeal to residents living in nearby neighborhoods such as Silver Lake and Los Feliz.

"[The restaurants are] cult cool brands with intense following and so, to pair them with each other, for us, just makes it more exciting, Colacarro said.

And nearly all of the eateries are new to Southern California. The first Shake Shack in California opened in West Hollywood a few months ago, and Glendale will be the second to offer burgers, crinkle cut fries and frozen custard from the trendy restaurant.

Attendees enjoy food from several restaurants at an event announcing five new eateries opening soon at Brand and Colorado in Glendale on Thursday, May 12, 2016. (Raul Roa / Staff Photographer)

While the burger spot is one of the most popular on the East Coast, Mike Tuiach, Shake Shacks area director, said there wont be a rivalry with West Coast staple In-N-Out Burger, which has a location just down the street on Brand.

"[In-N-Out] pretty much invented the roadside burger stand  They inspired what we do, he said. Its great to be in the same territory as them.

Philz Coffee, founded in San Francisco, has a handful of stores in the Southland.

An employee said one of the ways to enjoy the stores cup of joe is by having it Philzs way  based on a suggestion from owner Phil Jaber  which is medium sweet with medium cream.

Eggsluts most well-known location is at the Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles.

Mayor Paula Devine said the lineup of new restaurants will have something for everyone.

I think these unique eateries are going to add so much of a dynamic to our downtown for young people, older people, for families, she said. Its going to be a real boon for our downtown.

Devine acknowledged, however, that having highly popular spots such as Shake Shack and Eggslut moving into the city may raise a red flag in terms of needing more parking.

The Caruso Affiliated project will offer 32 spaces in the rear, but Devine said the city could be looking into adding more parking in downtown in the future.

It isnt like we havent been considering it or looking into locations currently, she said. Its definitely looming on the horizon because Glendale is becoming a destination.

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Arin Mikailian, arin.mikailian@latimes.com

Twitter: @ArinMikailian
Authorities have identified the man whose body was found in the water at Bolsa Chica State Beach as Andy Guevara, a 20-year-old man from South Gate.

Around 11:20 a.m. Tuesday, Huntington Beach police officers responded to a call regarding a naked body that had been pulled from the water near Pacific Coast Highway and Seapoint Avenue, said Jennifer Marlatt, public information officer for the Police Department.

Bystanders pulled the body out of the water and started CPR, but authorities determined the man was dead, said Kevin Pearsall, public safety superintendent for California State Parks.

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He had been dead for at least an hour by that time, Pearsall said this week.

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The body had no signs of trauma, according to Pearsall, who said the man may have drowned.

Marlatt said the man did not match the description of anyone reported missing in Huntington Beach.

--

Jeremiah Dobruck | Twitter: @jeremiahdobruck

Brittany Woolsey | Twitter: @BrittanyWoolsey

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Long-standing complaints among residents over helicopter noise  refueled last week by aerial coverage of a La Canada bear sighting  seem to reveal a stalemate between federal officials and lawmakers whove sought to reduce non-emergency decibels in Los Angeles County airspace.

Last Wednesday, La Canada was caught in the cross-hairs of regional news outlets when a young female bear was spotted near the Crescenta-Canada YMCA and seen dipping in at least one residential pool before camping atop a Jarvis Avenue tree, where she remained for several hours.

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A spokesman with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said game wardens monitored the bear from roughly 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., waiting for the animal to return to the Angeles National Forest, while nearby homeowners camped on streets hoping to catch a glimpse of the visitor.

Seizing on an opportunity to capture live footage, news helicopters hovered for hours in neighborhoods where the bear had been seen. Several residents took to social media to vent their frustration with the abundance of noise the helicopters created. They complained the noise impeded the young bears retreat into the woods, a view confirmed by California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan.

We literally sat there all day waiting for the bear to come down out of the tree and go back into the forest, Hughan said, explaining a departmental preference for patience over hazing techniques and tranquilization. Frankly, the bear was terrified of the people and the helicopters. So we waited there all day.

La Canada resident Eric Wells, who was working from his Upper Alta Canyada home the day of the sighting, said the intrusive noise continued throughout most of the day.

It was horrible, just helicopters going on for hours, Wells said in a phone interview. They were there on and off, even after the sun went down

In La Canada, complaints about helicopter noise are nothing new. The citys proximity to the Glendale (2) and Foothill (210) freeways already makes residents the unwilling recipients of traffic monitoring and accident response noise. So too, emergency crews airlifting patients to USC-Verdugo Hills Hospital, searching for missing hikers in the Angeles National Forest or scouting for criminal suspects on the run constitute commonplace annoyances.

But its the noisy presence of non-emergency helicopters, such as those employed by TV news stations, touring companies and recreational pilots, that have drawn criticism from lawmakers seeking to take restrictive actions.

In January 2014, the U.S. Congress passed the Los Angeles Residential Helicopter Noise Relief Act. Introduced by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the bill gave the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) one year to evaluate and revise existing helicopter routes and study the potential benefits of mandating higher altitudes for non-emergency helicopters.

Sen. Feinstein and I introduced legislation to require the FAA to examine the problem with helicopter noise in Los Angeles County and to seek to bring about measures to reduce helicopter noise, Schiff said in an interview Tuesday. And if that couldnt be done voluntarily, [the bill] would require the FAA to regulate.

We need to register complaints about helicopter noise when it interferes with our quality of life, so the FAA is aware ... and cant claim theyre making progress when theyre not.  Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank)

The legislation called for the creation of a comprehensive online complaint system that would help the agency identify noisemakers by name and work with helicopter operators to create voluntary regulatory measures. As a result, residents can now lodge complaints by phone at (424) 348-HELI (4354) or online at heli-noise-la.com.

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor says the system, launched in April 2015, is part of a larger, three-year effort undertaken by the agency to respond to increased noise complaints in L.A. County.

The system will complete one year of data on June 30, Gregor said in an email Tuesday. The FAA is reviewing the data for trends and asking [a] collaborative work group to focus on the areas where the highest level of complaints are coming from.

So far, some La Canada residents have taken advantage of the service.

In the week before the bear sighting, between June 1 and 7, La Canada Flintridge residents registered 30 complaints through the Helicopter Noise Initiative  including 14 reports of loudness, 13 instances of helicopters flying too low and three complaints of the choppers circling the area.

On June 8, the day of the bear sighting, the websites tracking service shows an increase in aerial activity above La Canada before and then immediately after the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department first reported the incident at 10:58 a.m. At 10:50, as many as four helicopters were tracked hovering in the area at heights between 200 and 1,500 feet.

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According to the tracking, activity continued intermittently throughout that day until after 6:30 p.m., with at least one to two vehicles seen circling around the area on a fairly consistent basis.

Gregor said helicopters do not have specific altitude restrictions, but must be operated so as not to pose a hazard to people or property on the ground. The spokesman provided an in-house document titled Significant Progress Report on the Los Angeles Helicopter Noise Initiative that maintains the FAA has expended significant resources studying and mitigating the impacts of noise and is working with operators and news organizations to employ noise-reducing practices.

Schiff says voluntary efforts taken so far have failed to significantly impact residents experiences with helicopter noise. He called the FAAs findings to the contrary erroneous, and criticized the complaint system for not doing enough to identify offenders.

The FAA still has a long way to go to adjust flight routes and require higher altitudes in certain areas, the congressman said. Were going to continue to hold the FAAs feet to the fire.

In the meantime, Schiff advised residents like Wells to submit noise complaints when they occur, and do their best to identify the bad actors.

We need to register complaints about helicopter noise when it interferes with our quality of life, so the FAA is aware ... and cant claim theyre making progress when theyre not, he said.

--

Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine
My continuing search for secret hideaways by the sea took me to tiny Two Harbors on Santa Catalina Island last month, where I hiked and biked, explored quiet coves and whiled away time gazing at spectacular views of the Pacific. The rustic village, set on Catalinas West End, is Avalons little sister, home to just 150 residents. Boaters love it, filling the harbors with sloops, catamarans and other craft. But if youre not a yachtie,you must make do with one of 12 rooms in the only hotel, or pitch a tent in a campground. However, a couple of new rental homes have added another option. The tab: Each sleeps eight, so we decided to try the group thing, spending a total of $1,280 for two nights rental. We ate at home, for the most part, saving money on food.

The bed

Our rental, Casa Santa Cruz, sits on a hill with views of both harbors  one that faces the open Pacific, the other that faces the California mainland. There are three bedrooms, two baths and a giant loft, where you could stash a small army of kids to play games, sleep or hunker down in front of the big-screen TV. A bar, outdoor grill and a large kitchen make it easy to cook at home.

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A second rental, Casa Santa Rosa, has four bedrooms and three baths; both rentals have an upscale, beachy feel (Catalina Island Vacation Rentals, [855] 305-2487, www.civr.com. $375 per night, low season, to $975 in summer. The casas also are listed at www.visitcatalinaisland.com).

The only other game in town is historic Banning House Lodge, where rates range from $175 to $347 ([877] 778-8322, www.visitcatalinaisland.com). The lodge provides free breakfast for its guests and those in the casas. Theres also a wine and cheese happy hour on weekends thats open to Two Harbors visitors.

The meal

The Harbor Reef Restaurant, which also has a saloon and snack bar, is the villages only restaurant. Luckily the food is good and theres a surprising variety. My fave was calamari piccata ($24.50) with a nice taste of lemon and garlic. Weekday visitors can score savings at the 3 to 5 p.m. happy hour.

The find

Years of drought have dried up the islands vegetation, but nature dealt the shoreline a winning card, with cliffs and coves and beautiful bays. Rent a small boat or jump in a kayak to explore. At Emerald Bay, for instance, the water was so clear that we could see fish swimming below us, and sunlight reflecting on the floor of the sea.

Lesson learned

Unless you have your own boat, youll probably arrive in Two Harbors on the Catalina Express, which sails there daily from its San Pedro port ([800] 613-1212, www.catalinaexpress.com). There are bike rentals on the island (theyre free with a casa rental), but you may want to bring your own. The ferry company will ship it for $7 round trip.

travel@latimes.com
Police in Bangladesh have arrested more than 14,000 people in the last week and authorities have urged citizens to be vigilant. One district even armed some residents with bamboo sticks and whistles.

Yet police said Thursday that machete-wielding assailants had struck again, wounding a Hindu college teacher at his home in southern Bangladesh.

As a weeklong crackdown against suspected Islamist militants concluded Thursday, the massive numbers of arrests were not sufficient to stop the relentless spread of machete attacks that have claimed at least 49 lives over the last 17 months in Bangladesh.

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Bangladeshi men detained as part of crackdown on extremists look out from a prison van outside a court building in Dhaka on Monday. (AMA RSI/Associated Press )

One suspect in the attempted killing Wednesday night, described as a 20-year-old who had been missing from his home in the capital since earlier this week, was arrested and was being questioned. The teacher, Ripon Chakroborty, remained hospitalized with critical head and hand injuries in the southern town of Barisal.

Increasingly, the assailants targets are Hindus, who are estimated to make up less than 10% of Bangladeshs 160 million people, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. News media reported Thursday that a priest of the Ramkrishna Mission, a Hindu organization in the capital city of Dhaka, received a death threat a day earlier from a group calling itself a member of Islamic State.

The computer-written letter said that if the priest did not stop preaching his religion he would be killed with machetes between the dates 20th and 30th, without specifying the month, according to bdnews24.com, a news website. The report did not name the priest for security reasons.

Authorities in Dhaka confirmed that the priest filed a complaint Wednesday night.

Two Hindus were among four people killed last week in separate machete attacks across the country, including the wife of a senior police official who had been investigating the wave of militant violence.

Islamic State and Al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for many of the killings, which have targeted secular bloggers, activists, foreigners and religious minorities. They have followed a disturbingly similar pattern  a few young men on motorcycles accosting their target, hacking them in the head and fleeing the scene, almost always without being stopped.

Bangladeshi officials have blamed the violence on domestic militants and political opponents, saying they want to destabilize the country.

Following the police officials wifes slaying, authorities announced the weeklong crackdown in which 166 suspected militants have been arrested, according to police. Most are members of Jamaatul Mujahidin Bangladesh and Ansarullah Bangla Team, two homegrown extremist groups, said police official Kamrul Ahsan.

Police in western Bangladesh have armed villagers with bamboo sticks and whistles in an effort to deter Islamist militants from attacking people of minority faiths. (Handout/AFP/Getty Images )

Ahsan said 14,552 people have been arrested since Friday. The majority are suspected of drug crimes and other offenses that are not directly related to militancy and will be interrogated or prosecuted, he said.

Police officials have not said whether any are suspects in the recent slayings. And some police tactics have drawn criticism  particularly the decision by officials in Magura district, an area with a significant Hindu minority 70 miles west of Dhaka, to equip villagers with bamboo sticks and whistles to raise morale.

Critics say the arrests are politically motivated.

Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party that opposes Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, said that many of its members were among those arrested and called the clampdown inhuman and unlawful.

The ongoing arrest drive caused severe resentment among the general masses, the Islamist partys acting secretary-general, Shafiqur Rahman, said in a statement. I am calling upon the countrymen to raise [their] voice against these autocratic steps of the government.

The governments home minister, Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, denied the allegations.

No arrest was made with ill or political motive, Kamal said.

Analysts said the clampdown was needed to try to end impunity for the killings.

We cannot expect militancy would be eliminated in one crackdown, but it would help to stop this ongoing series of murders, said Maj. Gen. Abdur Rashid, a security analyst and retired army officer.

Neem Chandra Bhowmik,a University of Dhaka professor and vice president of the Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a group that advocates for religious minorities, welcomed the police drive. Bhowmik said the group was visiting small towns to reassure fearful minorities and urging them to have confidence in the governments efforts to stop suspected militants.

If they dont detain them, how could they find out the mastermind of these murders? Bhowmik said.

Khan is a special correspondent. Staff writer Bengali reported from Mumbai, India.

ALSO

Black box of missing EgyptAir plane found, pulled out of sea, Egypt says

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The dismissal of a high-profile rape case in Germany has prompted a No Means No campaign with overtones of the outrage that greeted the recent U.S. sexual assault case involving a Stanford University swimmer.

A German model said she was drugged and raped by two men after a night of drinking in a Berlin club. Now she is fighting a court ruling, issued earlier this month, that not only dismissed the charges but also fined her the equivalent of $27,000.

Gina-Lisa Lohfink, a TV celebrity and aspiring model in Germany who said she would rather go to jail than pay the courts fine, has received widespread backing for her No Means No campaign. Among her supporters is a government minister who has said the countrys sex crime laws are too lax and need to be toughened.

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The attorneys representing the two men, who also were charged in court with disseminating videos they made of their actions with Lohfink in June 2012, argued in court that it was consensual sex.

When someone says, Stop it, that ought to be clear enough for anyone.  Manuela Schwesig, Germanys family minister

Theres something wrong with our justice system, Lohfink, 29, was quoted in German magazine Der Spiegel. My impression is that the police and state prosecutors arent taking me seriously.

Despite vastly different circumstances, the case has resonated in Germany in ways similar to that of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner in the United States. Turner was convicted in March of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman he had met at a fraternity party; outrage has stemmed from the judges lenient sentence of six months in county jail.

FULL COVERAGE: Stanford sexual assault case 

Lohfink said she initially had no recollection of what happened on the night of June 2, 2012. She told the Berlin court she was partying with a group that included the two men, one of whom she had had sex with the night before, and she thinks someone put something into her drink. She said she blacked out after that.

The two men had uploaded video to the Internet of their actions with Lohfink, in which she is heard saying, Stop it, stop it and no, according to German media reports. (The video has since been taken down.) When Lohfink found out about the video about two weeks later, she went to the police and filed charges of rape and disseminating the video without her permission.

State prosecutors argued in court against Lohfink, and the judge agreed, fining her 24,000 euros for falsely testifying. She has appealed the lower courts decision; the appeal will be heard June 27.

That Gina has gone from being the victim to the offender is a disastrous signal to every woman out who would one day face the choice of pressing charges [against a rapist] or not, said Lohfinks attorney, Burkhard Benecken. Fewer women are going to end up going to the police for help in the future if theres a risk that their view of the incident could be turned against them and they could face charges.

Germanys family minister, Manuela Schwesig, said that the case showed that Germany needs tougher laws to protect rape victims.

When someone says, No, that has to mean no,  Schwesig told German TV. When someone says, Stop it, that ought to be clear enough for anyone. We need to tighten up the laws on sexual crimes to protect everyones own sexual determination without conditions.

But the judge and state prosecutors have been supported by the justice minister in the state of Berlin, who said the prosecutors were extremely diligent in their study of the case before they concluded that Lohfink had engaged in sex with the two men willingly.

This is a case that is drawing a lot of attention, and its demonstrated that when someone says, No, that means no,  said Christian Pfeiffer, a former justice minister in Lower Saxony state. But its actually not a good case to use as an argument for tightening the laws. The judge in this case took into consideration all the available film and concluded it was not rape. Based on the evidence presented, the judge had no choice but to dismiss the rape charges.

Kirschbaum is a special correspondent.

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British lawmaker Jo Cox killed in shooting, had campaigned against leaving EU
A member of Parliament and rising star in Britains Labor Party was shot and stabbed outside a library Thursday in northern England, an act of gun violence rarely seen in a country where few use  or even own  firearms.

The fatal attack on Jo Cox sent shock waves through a country that has strict gun control laws and where gun-related homicides are infrequent. The last member of Parliament to die violently was Ian Gow, who was killed more than a quarter of a century ago when a pipe bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army blew up his car.

Cox, 41, was a former aid worker with a deep sense of social justice and had spoken in support of the refugees and Syrian people.

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She also had been campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union in next weeks referendum. Both sides of the EU referendum debate immediately suspended campaigning after the attack.

Police did not immediately offer a motive, but one witness told the BBC that he heard the assailant shout, Put Britain first! at least twice before opening fire. Cox was left bleeding on the sidewalk.

A 52-year-old man, who has not been publicly identified, was arrested nearby and a gun and other weapons were recovered. Authorities, who could be seen searching a nearby home, said they do not believe there are other suspects.

Cox, the mother of two young children, had just met with constituents in the small market town of Birstall, outside the northern city of Leeds.

She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, said her husband, Brendan. One, that our precious children are bathed in love. And two that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesnt have a creed, race or religion. It is poisonous.

Prayer vigils and moments of silence were held in Coxs memory in London and Yorkshire.

This has just been so heartbreaking, Sarah Brown, the wife of former Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown, said in an interview with BBC. This is something thats so difficult to understand happening in our own country.

Gun-related homicides  even gun ownership  are exceedingly rare in England compared with the United States. According to 2007 statistics compiled by the Council on Foreign Relations, there were 0.06 gun-related homicides per 100,000 people in England. In contrast, there were 3.54 firearm homicides for every 100,000 people in the United States.

Cox was educated at Cambridge University and had worked at various aid agencies, including Oxfam, before being elected to Parliament during the 2015 general election.

Prime Minister David Cameron described her as a bright star in the party, someone with a huge heart.

She had a great track record of caring about refugees, he said. She had taken a very big interest in how we could look after Syrian refugees and the right thing to do in our world.

Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn praised her for dedicating her life to human rights and social justice.

Violence is not an answer to anything, he said. Weve lost a wonderful woman, weve lost a wonderful member of Parliament, but our democracy will go on. Her work will go on. As we mourn her memory, well work in her memory to achieve that better world she spent her life trying to achieve.

On Thursday afternoon, Coxs husband tweeted a photo of his wife standing on the banks of the Thames, believed to be near a houseboat they lived on in London.

Cox, he said, believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.

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After its own mass shootings, Germany beefed up gun control laws. The number of shootings dropped.

Boyle is a special correspondent. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

UPDATES:

3:22 p.m.: This article was updated with details of the attack.

10:42 a.m.: This article was updated with additional background information and reaction.

9:50 a.m.: This article was updated with information from a police news conference.

9:33 a.m.: This article was updated with the arrest of a man in connection with Coxs death.

9:23 a.m.: This article was updated with the death of Jo Cox.

7:54 a.m.: This article was updated with staff reporting throughout.

This article was originally published at 7:21 a.m.
Detention Center

The inmate count at the Platte County Detention Facility on Wednesday was 66, with 39 from Platte County and 27 from out of county.

Police

May 28

12:06 a.m.  In the 2500 block of 35th Avenue, Andres Arias, 18, 315 Beacon Place, was cited for minor in consumption of alcohol.

June 10

12:21 p.m.  In the 2200 block of 26th Avenue, Alexis Maneely, 18, Silver Creek, was cited for failure to yield right of way and no insurance.

June 14

8:43 a.m.  Theft from a vehicle at 1909 12th St., stereo stolen, $75 loss.

Sheriff

June 2

1:48 p.m.  At the intersection of Highway 22 and 355th Avenue, traffic accident. Drivers were Rodney Laudenklos, 52, Platte Center, and Jared Sprunk, 31, Platte Center.

June 3

3:33 p.m.  On U.S. Highway 30, east of the intersection with East 14th Avenue, traffic accident. Drivers were Adalberto Almeida, 34, 1555 26th Ave., No. 4, and Jorge Ramos, 29, 1257 25th Ave., No. 1.

June 7

12:36 p.m.  At the intersection of Highway 30 and 250th Avenue, traffic accident. Drivers were Edward Krueger, 70, 174 13th Ave., and Chris Schumann, 48, Kiester, Minnesota.

June 10

6:15 a.m.  At the intersection of 23rd Street and 14th Avenue, traffic accident. Drivers were Matthew Schumacher, 39, 2712 30th St., and Laurie Cemper, 62, 812 20th St.

June 14

12:42 p.m.  Traffic violation at the intersection of Eighth Street and 33rd Avenue, Devonta Jones of Mississippi cited for a traffic signal violation and no operators license.

12:57 p.m.  Traffic violation in the 2100 block of 14th Avenue, Kent Carstens of Columbus cited for an expired registration.

Fire

June 13

8:33 a.m.  Silent fire alarm in the 3900 block of 20th Street.

9:45 a.m.  Accident at the intersection of 48th Avenue and Lost Creek Parkway.

12:35 p.m.  In the 2600 block of 14th Street, medical.

12:35 p.m.  Silent alarm at the intersection of 48th Avenue and Lost Creek Parkway, mutual assistance.

5:04 p.m.  In the 2300 block of 39th Avenue, medical.

June 14

4 p.m. - Fire alarm activated at Eye Physicians, 3772 43rd Ave., cancelled en route.

7:40 p.m. - Vehicle and pedestrian accident in the 1300 block of 31st Avenue, one patient transported.

June 15

5:02 a.m. - In the 3500 block of 26th Avenue, medical.
The cockpit voice recorder of the doomed EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board has been found and pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea, Egypts investigation committee said Thursday.

The development raises hopes that investigators would find clues as to the cause of the May 19 crash, which remains unclear. No terror group has claimed responsibility for bringing the plane down.

The Egyptian committee said that the so-called black box  one of the two on board the plane  has been damaged but that the vessel searching for the wreckage managed to safely recover the memory unit, which is the most important in the recorder.

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See the most-read stories this hour >>

The recorder was retrieved in several stages, the committee said, and is being transferred to the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. Once on shore, it will be handed over to the members of the committee, who will unload and analyze the data.

The voice recorder should contain a record of the last 30 minutes in the cockpit and is equipped to detect even loud breathing. Experts say that it takes nearly 48 hours to retrieve data from the recorder, unless its damaged.

Thursdays announcement comes a day after the committee said the vessel John Lethbridge, which is operated by the Deep Ocean Search that was contracted by the Egyptian government to join the search for the plane debris and flight recorders, had spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.

The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was en route to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.

Radar data showed that the aircraft had been cruising normally in clear skies before it turned 90 degrees left, then a full 360 degrees to the right as it was plummeting from 38,000 feet to 15,000 feet and then disappearing at about 10,000 feet.

Leaked flight data indicated a sensor had detected smoke in a lavatory and a fault in two of the planes cockpit windows in the final moments of the flight.

After the crash, Egypts civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathi, said he believed terrorism was a more likely explanation than equipment failure or some other catastrophic event. But no hard evidence has emerged on the cause, and no militant group has claimed to have downed the jet.

Since the crash, ships and planes from Egypt, Greece, France, the United States and other nations have been searching the Mediterranean Sea north of Alexandria. Only small pieces of wreckage and human remains had been recovered in a search that was narrowed to a 3-mile area of the Mediterranean.

Signals from the missing planes black boxes first were detected two weeks ago by the French ship Laplace, which joined the search and which is equipped with three detectors designed to pick up the locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders from deep underwater.

In the case of the EgyptAir plane, its wreckage and black boxes were believed to be at a depth of 9,842 feet. By comparison, the wreckage of the Titanic is lying at a depth of 12,500 feet.

On Sunday, Egyptian investigators said that time was running out in the search for the black boxes and that nearly two weeks remain before the batteries on them expire and they stop emitting signals.

Then the breakthrough came Wednesday, with Egypt saying that John Lethbridge had spotted and obtained images from the wreckage.

The crash shocked Egypt, coming less than a year after a Russian airliner was downed in Egypts Sinai Peninsula shortly after taking off from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh in October, killing all 224 people on board.

A local affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for bombing the aircraft, and in November, Russia confirmed that an explosive device had brought down the plane.

The two disasters have unsettled authorities at the Cairo airport, where false alarms or bomb threats have caused lengthy delays to flights and at least one cancellation last week.

Security also has been considerably tightened at Egypts 20-plus airports since the Russian plane crash, with passengers now subjected to roughly the same security measures in force at major international airports.

MORE WORLD NEWS

After its own mass shootings, Germany beefed up gun control laws. The number of shootings dropped.

In China, feminism is growing  and so is the backlash

In Islamic State-held areas, being gay often means a death sentence

UPDATES:

9:33 a.m.: This article has been updated with more details and background throughout.

This article was originally published at 6:33 a.m.
Hector El Guero Palma, once among Mexicos most notorious drug lords, was returned to Mexico on Wednesday by U.S. authorities and immediately arrested on homicide charges, Mexican authorities said.

His prompt detention averted for now the prospect of Palma going free in Mexico, an outcome that Mexican authorities were keen to avoid.

Palma, a former accomplice of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman in the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, had served almost a decade in U.S. custody on drug-related charges after being extradited to the United States in 2007.

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In a statement, the Mexican federal prosecutors office confirmed the U.S. hand-over of Palma on Wednesday at a border gate in Matamoros, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Texas.

Palma was arrested at the border for his probable responsibility for two murders in the Mexican state of Nayarit, the Mexican prosecutors office said, without providing further details.

Footage on Mexican television showed a tall, slim Palma, wearing a black baseball cap, being escorted by heavily armed Mexican security forces in Matamoros, a border city rife with drug-related violence. A convoy of armed vehicles spirited him away, the video showed.

The ex-drug lord was put on a plane and transported to the Altiplano federal lockup outside of Mexico City, Mexican officials said. It is same high-security prison from which Guzman escaped last July before being recaptured in January.

The recent announcement that Palma would be released from U.S. custody after serving his time had created considerable media speculation in Mexico about his fate. Palma served nine years of a 16-year U.S. sentence for cocaine trafficking and was set to be released for good behavior, according to various reports.

His repatriation presented a considerable dilemma for Mexican authorities, who were clearly dismayed at the prospect that the former drug capo could be a free man  and possibly endeavor to return to his former career.

Mexican officials appeared determined to ensure that Palma remained in custody at a time when his jailed former cartel confederate, Guzman, is fighting U.S. efforts to extradite him to the United States

Earlier this month, the Mexican attorney general, Arely Gomez, told reporters that officials were conducting an exhaustive review to determine what charges, if any, were still pending against Palma. On Wednesday, authorities revealed the pending homicide charges in Nayarit state.

Palma, 55, known as El Guero for his fair hair, was reported to have been the head of the Sinaloa cartel, which specialized in trafficking cocaine from Colombia to the United States. He was arrested in June 1995 after a small plane ferrying him to a party in the northern city of Guadalajara crashed.

He and Guzman are longtime associates. They were co-inmates at the Puente Grande prison in Jalisco state in 2001 when Guzman escaped from the lockup and, as a fugitive from justice, expanded operations of the cartel.

Cecilia Sanchez in The Times Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.

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Though a coalition of Western countries is training Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to more effectively fight Islamic State militants, Kurdish commanders and officers say the effort is moving slowly and not keeping up with the military strength and speed of their enemy.

When U.S.-led airstrikes on Islamic State targets began in early August, they were followed by shipments of advanced weapons and an offer to train the Kurdish fighters, known as peshmerga, who had suffered a series of surprising defeats at the hands of the extremist Sunni Muslim militants.

The aim was to transform the peshmerga, with their vaunted reputation as mountain warriors, into a force better prepared to face the brutal and battle-hardened militants in the largely desert terrain and urban areas they had seized.

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On a recent Sunday, at a training camp high in the mountains of northern Iraq, 17 soldiers began their training on American-made 12.7-millimeter M2HB machine guns. A month before, peshmerga officers had received lessons from French military officers on the use of the guns, at a special-forces training center on the outskirts of Irbil, where much of the Western training is done.

The M2HBs had been sent to the training camp without ammunition, so the Kurdish soldiers sat on short concrete risers in front of a 125-pound weapon, balancing notebooks on their knees as the instructors drew on a dry-erase board.

Though planeloads of rifles and ammunition are regularly shipped to Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, advanced weapons like the M2HB have been in short supply, and have not yet been deployed on the front line, Kurdish commanders said. Even then, the M2HB will not be effective against the tanks and armored vehicles that Islamic State fighters pilfered from the Iraqi army, Brig. Gen. Salah Salih said.

All the military aid that is coming, even when were getting 10 million or 20 million bullets, that might only last a few days in battle, because the battles are ongoing, said Salih, who oversees training at the camp in Atrosh.

Saying the Kurds fighting has been on behalf of Western allies as well as to protect their own region, Salih said, They have to give us better weapons so we can battle them.

In August, after making swift advances through Sunni Arab areas of western and northern Iraq and facing little resistance from residents and tribes, Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway group, began overrunning towns and villages in the semiautonomous Kurdistan region. The peshmerga, estimated to number about 150,000 fighters, proved no match for the militants, some of whom had fought in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Islamic State reached Makhmour, about 35 miles southwest of Irbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region, before the U.S. and its allies decided to intervene with airstrikes and weapons.

Much of the peshmerga training is still in the early assessment phase as coalition partners decide who will oversee which aspects, even as Kurdish forces and the Iraqi army engage in daily battle with Islamic State fighters, who are armed with advanced weaponry.

The Americans are focusing on command and control issues with the peshmerga leadership. The French are based at a center near Irbil where they are training peshmerga regular and special forces on advanced weapons such as the heavy machine guns.

And though Canada is due to provide and train the Kurds to use robots to detect homemade bombs, there hasnt been any training on how to disarm explosives, the most dangerous threat the peshmerga face and which has accounted for more than 60% of those killed, said Lt. Gen. Jabbar Yawar Manda, secretary-general of the Kurdistan Regional Governments Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs.

As a result of coalition airstrikes and weapons, Kurdish fighters have been able to retake many towns. But days and even weeks after Islamic State forces fled, the towns remain empty as the few qualified soldiers comb through them in search of bombs.

Islamic State has lots of experience in warfare, but we dont have experience in urban warfare so we are trying to fill this gap, Manda said. Our experience is in guerrilla warfare because in the 90s we fought Saddam [Husseins Iraqi army] forces through guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Our experience in urban warfare is lacking.

The Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs holds weekly meetings with allies, including the United States, Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Canada and Australia. It has requested additional arms and training.

A peshmerga officer, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said top commanders shared the responsibility for the forces initial defeats. For months, they assumed Islamic State was only girding for a battle between Sunnis and Shiites among the historically volatile Iraqi Arab population.

They said ISIS wont come here, they wont come after the Kurds, he said, using an acronym for Islamic State. They said they will only come after [former Prime Minister Nouri] Maliki and presumed they would only attack Mosul and Baghdad.

The peshmerga did not train for street battles until 2010, Brig. Gen. Salih said. And even then, only a small percentage of the forces received the training.

There are peshmerga who never shot two bullets in training, but the officers arent going to say that because the shortcoming is on their part, said the officer who did not want to be named.

Even with the looming threat of Islamic State, the commanders have yet to fully accept the limits of the peshmerga forces, he said.

You tell the officers that we need this training of the streets and they say, Peshmerga can fight anywhere, he said. Perhaps they can, but they will kill themselves doing it.

Kurdish commanders pin the blame for defeats squarely on the Iraqi government for their lack of advanced weapons, up-to-date training and salaries. Baghdad, they say, has consistently failed to provide the peshmerga with the resources needed to be an effective fighting force. The central government also prevented them from buying weapons from other countries.

Much of their weaponry, commanders say, was purchased on the black market.

For eight years we didnt get one dinar or one bullet from the Iraqi army, said Brig. Gen. Hazhar Ismail, ministry director of coordination and relations. Only after the current situation did they begin sending us resources and only under great pressure from foreign countries.

Even now, Kurds say, the central government is creating obstacles by maintaining tight control over Kurdish airspace, limiting which flights are allowed to land.

Recently, Germany sought to send a transport plane to Irbil to pick up 32 peshmerga officers for training on antitank missiles, but the central government withheld permission for a week, Manda said. When allies began sending planeloads of weapons to the Kurds, the flights flew directly to Irbil. But that lasted only a week before the Baghdad government demanded the planes land first in Baghdad to go through customs.

The peshmerga ministry has asked allied nations to pressure the Iraqi government to ease such requirements, but so far to no avail.

For news from the Middle East, follow @RajaAbdulrahim
Islamic State on Thursday claimed it had killed a 61-year-old American citizen working at a Turkish air base used by U.S. warplanes to stage assaults on the militant group in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

Thaddeus Borowiczs body was discovered Monday morning at the entrance to his apartment building in the southeastern city of Adana, nearly 65 miles from the Syrian frontier. Initial news reports said that the Traverse City, Mich., native had fallen from the 10th floor after locking himself out of his unit and attempting to enter through a window.

His death came to light after he failed to turn up for a shift at Incirlik Air Base, according to reports.

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Borowicz was a contractor with Vectrus, a firm based in Colorado Springs, Colo., and was assistant chief of the fire department at Incirlik Air Base. He had worked there about 20 years.

He was found dead by co-workers near his apartment, according to George Rhynedance, a Vectrus spokesman.

Lt. Col. David Westover, a military spokesman for U.S. European Command, which oversees operations at Incirlik, said the U.S. military had no reports of any Americans killed in Adana by Islamic State.

However, there was a tragic accidental death that occurred earlier this week, when a U.S. contract employee died at his home, he said from Stuttgart, Germany.

The Islamic State-affiliated Amaq News Agency, however, quoted a security source saying that it had assassinated an American officer at his home on Monday and that the claim of responsibility had been delayed to ensure the safety of the team sent to execute Borowicz.

Rita Katz, director of the private SITE Intelligence Group, noted on social media that the killing was likely the second Islamic State attack in Turkey over the last week.

On Sunday, two Islamic State operatives wielding pistols attempted to assassinate the Syrian journalist Ahmed Abd al-Qader in the ancient, southeastern city of Sanliurfa. That city, along with nearby Gaziantep and Kilis, is a hub of militant Islamist activity, primarily for logistics, recruitment and resupply purposes.

Abd al-Qader, who edits the online publication Eye on the Homeland, survived a similar assassination attempt earlier this year. He is reportedly in a stable situation in a Turkish hospital.

See the most-read stories in World News this hour 

U.S. fighter jets have used the strategic Incirlik base, which played a prominent role during the Cold War, since the 1950s, including during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Turkey permitted U.S. warplanes to once again fly attack operations from Incirlik last year  greatly reducing flight times for U.S. bombers pounding Islamic State in Syria and Iraq --after months of tense negotiations. The Pentagon in March ordered military family members to leave Incirlik due to a heightened risk of terror attacks.

Turkeys southern border zones have become a jihadist superhighway over the last five years as extremists flooded Syria to join the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Ankara long turned a blind eye to the radical Islamists using its southern cities and towns for logistics and resupply purposes, critics say. A series of suicide bombings and assassinations over the last year has forced Ankara to recalibrate and take a more forceful approach to extremism.

However, most analysts note that Islamic State -- as well as a profusion of other extremist groups -- has embedded itself in major metropolitan centers throughout the country.

Meantime, Belgian intelligence reportedly warned its police Wednesday that a number of armed Islamic State operatives were preparing to infiltrate Europe via Turkeys Aegean smuggling routes.

Their action is imminent, a memo issued to the security services said, according to Agence France-Presse.

Special correspondents Johnson reported from Diyarbakir, Turkey, and Bulos from Beirut. Staff writer W.J. Hennigan contributed from Washington.

MORE WORLD NEWS

After its own mass shootings, Germany beefed up gun control laws. The number of shootings dropped.

In China, feminism is growing  and so is the backlash

In Islamic State-held areas, being gay often means a death sentence

UPDATES:

3:01 p.m.: This story was updated with comments from Lt. Col. David Westover.

This article originally published at 1:26 p.m.
The first time Noor Salman got married, the wedding celebration was held in an apartment belonging to her fathers family just a few blocks from the Palestinian presidential compound in Ramallah.

In a nod to her roots in this West Bank city, the bride from Rodeo, Calif., wore a dress of traditional Palestinian embroidery for a pre-wedding hinnah ceremony.

This week, Salmans aunt, Mona Salman, was hosting guests for a Ramadan breakfast meal in the same apartment when a neighbor called to tell her that Noors second husband, Omar Mateen, had shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., killing 49 people before being shot dead by police.

I was shocked, said the 72-year-old aunt, the older sister of Noors deceased father, Zahi. I started wailing and screaming. She is our flesh and blood.

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Noor is a simpleton. Things happen around her and she is not aware of it.  Noor Salmans aunt, Mona Salman

Now with Noor suspected by the FBI of knowing of Mateens plans and keeping them to herself, the aunt choked back sobs and said she could hardly believe her niece was aware of such a plot.

Noor is a simpleton. Things happen around her and she is not aware of it, she said. People in the city of Al Birah are very conservative and her mother always kept them at home. This is why Im worried, because Noor doesnt know much. She probably didnt know anything that her husband was planning or thinking because shes a very simple woman.

Her remarks dovetail, in some respects, with those of a neighbor of the Salman family in California, Jasbinder Chahal, who told the Associated Press that Noor Salman was sheltered as a girl and was not the smartest.

Zahi Salman, who emigrated from the West Bank at 16, ran a grocery store in Richmond, Calif., together with two brothers, Bassam and Abdallah. Noors mother, Ekbal, came from a large family, the Qurans, in the Al Birah area on the northern outskirts of Ramallah.

A brother of Ekbal, Mohammed Tayem Quran, refused to discuss Noor Salman or Mateen, whose family came to the United States from Afghanistan. He is Afghani. I live in Al Birah. We denounce such acts and have nothing to do with them, he said.

The paternal aunt said that the family regularly attended services at a mosque in Rodeo and that Noor studied about Muslim traditions at a Sunday school. When Noor was about 12, Ekbal brought her and her sisters to Ramallah and enrolled the children in a school so that they would learn Palestinian traditions and Arabic.

Nour loved Arabic traditions and customs. She loved Arabic foods, Mona Salman said.

Salman said that Noor didnt enroll in college after high school, preferring to focus on caring for children. Her first marriage was arranged by the family with a local man who went back to the United States with her. She said she didnt know why the couple later split

Court records in the United States show that Noor Salman wed Ahmed Abu-Rahma on June 8, 2005. She filed for divorce in 2009, citing irreconcilable differences. The divorce was finalized on Feb. 26, 2010, at Contra Costa County Superior Court in Martinez

Mona Salman said that she only occasionally spoke to her niece and had never met her second husband, but that she believed they were living a good life in Fort Pierce, Fla.

Every time we asked, `How is your husband? She said, Were comfortable. Were happy. She was happy with her husband. On the Facebook, theyre always loving each other, hugging each other.

The aunt said her U.S. sibling described Mateen as a good man from a good family. As long as hes a good man, and he takes care of our daughter, thats what is important.

Mitnick is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Rong-Gong Lin II in Rodeo, Calif., contributed to this report.

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Obama in Orlando, reprises his role as comforter-in-chief and repeats call for tighter control of weapons
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A Mexican soldier assigned to guard notorious drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman has been found murdered with signs of torture to his body.

Mexican police are now investigating in hopes of determining what came of 20-year-old guard Jorge Maurico Melendez Herrera, whose remains were discovered earlier this month.

Guzman is now being held at a maximum security prison in northern Mexico and authorities noted Melendez was part of the security detail assigned to guard the outside of the facility.

Guzman has Escaped Twice Before

Guzman has previously escaped from custody twice before and now faces possible extradition to the U.S. to face an array of drug trafficking related charges.

Guzman's most recent escape was pulled off after he dredged through an underground tunnel leading from his cell at the Altiplano prison. He was recaptured earlier this year and was recently moved from Altiplano to a facility on Ciudad Juarez, reported to be near the U.S. border.

Signs of Torture to the Body

Preliminary reports indicate Melendez died from a hit to the back of the neck. He had also been stabbed numerous times. As many as 300 soldiers have now been assigned to provide security around the prison.

Meanwhile, Mexican authorities are reported to have signed off on Guzman being extradited to the U.S., but attorneys for the reputed leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel are fighting the move.

U.S. authorities have previously expressed reservations about the Mexican government's ability to keep Guzman in custody. Eleven Mexican guards and other officials are now in prison and facing trials on charges they aided Guzman in his escape from Altiplano.

Earlier this month, a lawmaker from Sinaloa was stripped of her authority amid allegations that she was too closely linked to Guzman. Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez reportedly visited Guzman in prison prior to his 2015 escape and provided prison officials with a false identity in doing so.
One year ago today, June 16, 2015, businessman and then-"The Celebrity Apprentice" host Donald Trump announced his bid for president of the United States. On the same day, and numerous campaign events and interviews since, he has been criticized for controversial comments disparaging Latinos, immigrants and other minority and religious communities.

"Year of Hate"

Coinciding with the one-year anniversary of Trump's presidential campaign announcement, civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, and actress Alicia Machado spoke about Trump's year, his statements and effects and urged to increase voter turnout.

Machado, who met Trump when she became Miss Universe in 1996, representing Venezuela, said the New York businessman treated her "rudely."

"I could share a thousand stories, but I will only speak about one episode: 'Miss Housekeeping.' That's how he called me in front of his friends to make fun of me. And it shows that he doesn't understand the value of being a domestic worker," Machado said, who had spoken during a press conference in Washington D.C., organized by CASA in Action and People for the American Way (PFAW), on Wednesday.

"These are the women who work hard, put their kids through college and raised kids to be great citizens. I share this story with you to show you who Mr. Trump is, and how he sees us. We don't need a businessperson who divides our country. We need someone with a good heart," Machado added. "Therefore, I urge you today to vote. To register. To become a citizen."

Huerta, a PFAW board member, recognized that Trump's words and actions demonstrates he's unfit to be a leader for the Latino community and all Americans. Huerta acknowledged the comments Trump used to describe Mexican immigrants.

Back on June 16, 2015, Trump labeled Mexicans as criminals, rapists and drug dealers.

What Trump Said One Year Ago Today

As Latin Post reported, Trump's presidential bid announcement quickly took aim towards immigrants and the southern U.S. border.

"They (Mexico) are not our friend, believe me. ... The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. ... When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best. They are not sending you. They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs and they are bringing crime, and they're rapists."

He continued, "Some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting. They are not sending us the right people. It's coming all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably from the Middle East, but we don't know because we have no protection and we have no competence. We don't know what is happening and it has got to stop and it has to stop fast."

Huerta: Trump "Did It On Purpose"

Back in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Huerta said Trump cannot be elected president and noted that voter turnout will ensure he won't sit in the Oval Office.

"Since the day he announced his candidacy, he's talked about immigrants as 'rapists,' 'killers,' 'criminals,' and 'drug dealers.' Whether it was out of ignorance, insensitivity, or he did it on purpose, he hosted a campaign rally right where a Latino man was killed in a hate crime," Huerta said.

"We can't let Donald Trump be president, and I know that we won't. We won't because we will get out to vote against him, we will talk with our friends and our families and make sure they go out to vote against him as well. This election, we have the power to make our voices heard and we can make the difference in this election. We have the power of the vote, and that can overcome the hate that Donald Trump spews day after day after day," continued Huerta.

Lizet Ocampo, PFAW's manager of political campaigns and director of the organization's "Latinos Vote!" program, said that as soon Trump went down on his Trump Tower escalator on June 15, 2015, he declared his war on Latinos.

"Trump is the most hateful, anti-immigrant presidential candidate that any of us have ever seen," Ocampo said. "His hate harms every one of us and goes against the American values of welcoming immigrants and celebrating diversity. Thankfully, more and more of us are registering to vote every year, and we have the power to decide the outcome of this election."

Further commemorating Trump's year, PFAW released a 30-second Spanish-language advertisement titled "Donald Trump's Year of Hate," highlighting Trump's rhetoric and actions by his supporters.

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For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.
A federation comprising of 56 unions, representing more than 12 million members, have voted to endorse Hillary Clinton for president.

The Support for Clinton -- Explained

The AFL-CIO's General Board -- which comprises of specific members ranging from its Executive Council; affiliated, national, and international union members; and other representatives from allied groups -- voted in favor of endorsing Clinton following a "comprehensive, democratic process" that started a year ago to ensure the interests of its members were represented.

With the endorsement, the AFL-CIO announced it will launch a ground campaign to ensure Clinton's election to the White House.

"Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a statement released on late Thursday morning. "Throughout the campaign, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to the issues that matter to working people, and our members have taken notice. The activism of working people has already been a major force in this election and is now poised to elect Hillary Clinton and move America forward."

Trumka added that the ground campaign will be "sophisticated" and "targeted" and also took a shot at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying the businessman poses "dire consequences" for America's working families.

Recognizing Sanders' Efforts

Trumka did acknowledge fellow Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' campaign and how the independent Vermont senator did manage to promote issues that are critical to the labor movement.

"Senator Bernie Sanders has brought an important voice to this election, and has elevated critical issues and strengthened the foundation of our movement. His impact on American politics cannot be overstated," the AFL-CIO president said.

But the federation's support will be for Clinton. Trumka added that the former secretary of state has proven herself to a champion of the labor movement, and the AFL-CIO "will be the driving force to her president of the United States."

The AFL-CIO's endorsement coincidentally comes on the one-year anniversary since Trump announced his presidential bid.

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For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.
Allentownm shooting June 15, 2016

A 55-year-old woman answered her apartment door about 10:15 p.m. June 15, 2016, at 941 W. Hamilton St. in Allentown and was shot in the torso, city police report. (Mike Nestor | lehighvalleylive.com contributor)

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A 55-year-old Allentown woman answered a knock to her apartment door Wednesday night and was shot in the torso, city police report.

A 55-year-old woman answered her apartment door about 10:15 p.m. June 15, 2016, at 941 W. Hamilton St. in Allentown and was shot in the torso, city police report. (Mike Nester | lehighvalleylive.com contributor)

The woman was in serious condition when she was rushed to Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township, Assistant Chief Gail Struss said. The woman underwent surgery and was stable on Thursday morning, Struss said.

The shooting happened about 10:15 p.m. at 941 W. Hamilton St. -- a large apartment building -- and police are hoping to talk to the victim to get an idea why she was shot, Struss said.

No one was in custody, Struss said.

Police did not identify the victim.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Bethlehem police arrested four men and seized 390 packets of heroin, methamphetamine, prescription pills, cash and drug paraphernalia in a raid Wednesday.

Officers armed with a warrant searched the home of suspected drug dealers Mario Velazquez, 43, and his son, Mario Javier Velazquez-Bermudez, 25, in the 1700 block of Barrett Drive.

Investigators already had set up surveillance outside the home when they saw Ryan William Zaun, 32, of the 2400 block of East Boulevard in Bethlehem, leave after buying heroin at about 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, according to court records.

Police stopped the vehicle and found Zaun in possession of 60 grams of loose heroin -- worth a street value of $18,000 -- and another 55 packets of heroin, worth a street value of $550. Zaun allegedly told police the heroin was bought at the Bethlehem home and also in Catasauqua.

Police then watched as Velazquez-Bermudez and another man, Zavier Camacho, 26, of the 900 block of High Street in Bethlehem, allegedly carried a large safe with a brown comforter over it into a vehicle. The pair drove off and dumped the safe into another vehicle, which was parked a block away from the home, police said.

Police then saw Velazquez leave the home. All three were detained just before officers raided the house at 5:48 p.m.

Seized from the home were cardboard boxes containing hundreds of glassine packing bags, an electric grinder, black rubber bands, a spoon, documents and a cutting device.

Police obtained a warrant to search the vehicle and allegedly found 10 grams of marijuana, one gram of methamphetamine, 390 packets of heroin, 32 Ecstasy tablets and prescription drugs. Police also seized $1,000 in cash found inside the safe.

Two vehicles -- a 2013 Volkswagen GTI and a 2003 Volkswagen Jetta -- also were seized.

Velazquez is charged with possession with intent to deliver drugs, possession of a controlled substance, possession of a small amount of marijuana, possession with intent to use drug paraphernalia, criminal conspiracy possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, and criminal conspiracy possession of a controlled substance.

Velazquez-Bermudez and Camacho both are charged with possession of a small amount of marijuana, possession with intent to use drug paraphernalia, possession with intent to deliver drugs, possession of a controlled substance, criminal conspiracy possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance, and criminal conspiracy possession of a controlled substance.

Zaun is charged with possession with intent to deliver drugs and possession of drug paraphernalia.

All four were arraigned before District Judge Patricia Broscius, who set bail at $100,000 for Velazquez; $100,000 for Velazquez-Bermudez; $100,000 for Camacho; and $10,000 for Zaun.

In lieu of bail, all four were taken to Northampton County Prison.

Wilson Borough police also assisted in the investigation. Bethlehem Police Chief Mark DiLuzio said the arrests were the result of citizens and police working together to combat crime.

"The City of Bethlehem Police Department will continue to target drug dealers in our communities and housing areas," he said. "We will utilize any and all resources available in our efforts to investigate all drug and criminal complaints, and to arrest any and all individuals that sell drugs, and/or possess or use illegal firearms, or commit crimes of violence and other crimes."

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
An Easton man is in Northampton County Prison after police said he downloaded child pornography.

Dale R. Bakos (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Dale R. Bakos, 34, of the 100 block of West Nesquehoning Street, is charged with two counts sexual abuse of children, one count of dissemination of photography and one count criminal use of a communications facility.

On Feb. 18, a special agent with the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office monitored a file-sharing service that alerted authorities when child pornography had been downloaded to its system. It allegedly recorded Bakos' IP address.

Authorities said Bakos downloaded seven videos of child pornography. Videos downloaded depicted four young girls, all under age 11, undressed and standing in a shower, according to court records.

The IP address was tracked to RCN, which identified a different man living at Bakos' house as the subscriber, records say. Bakos later told authorities he was living at his mother's apartment, according to records.

The state Attorney General's Office on Thursday executed a search warrant on the home and seized the alleged files of child pornography on Bakos' computer. Bakos allegedly later admitted to authorities that he downloaded the child pornography and provided a written statement.

He was arraigned Thursday before District Judge Daniel Corpora, who set bail at $75,000. In lieu of bail, Bakos was taken to Northampton County Prison.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The woman accused in multiple shooting incidents Tuesday in Monroe County was on a "day-long drinking binge" and had a crack pipe on her when she was finally arrested, police said.

Mary Lou Check (Courtesy Pocono Mountain Regional police | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Mary Lou Check, 54, of Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, drove first to Burger King in East Stroudsburg and fired a round into the drive-through window during an argument with an employee, according to Stroud Area Regional police.

That was shortly after 11 a.m. By about noon, she had fired her Glock 26 9 mm handgun into the gas tank of a man's car in Mount Pocono and shot at him multiple times, Pocono Mountain Regional police report.

Officers from Pocono Mountain Regional took Check into custody at the Mount Pocono scene: an apartment complex known as Cloudcrest, according to a news release from the department.

She was highly intoxicated when police found her, the release states.

"Check was arrested and while in custody was extremely belligerent, fighting with officers and spitting on them as they attempted to restrain her and maintain her custody and affect their lawful duty in her processing," Pocono Mountain Regional police Chief Chris Wagner says in the release.

No one was reported physically injured at either shooting scene, police said.

Check was arraigned before District Judge Kristina Anzini on seven counts each of attempted homicide, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault in the Burger King incident.

In the Mount Pocono shooting, she was arraigned before Anzini on charges of attempted homicide, aggravated assault, discharge of a firearm into an occupied structure, firearms not to be carried without a license, risking catastrophe, possession of a weapon, terroristic threats, simple assault, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest, tampering with evidence and public drunkenness.

She was sent to the Monroe County prison in lieu of $1 million bail for each incident with preliminary hearings tentatively scheduled next week before Anzini.

Here is how each shooting incident unfolded, according to police.

Check pulled up to the Burger King drive-through window in a green minivan and got into an argument about a past food order, demanding that she be given free food, Stroud Area Regional police said in a news release on their Facebook page, continuing:

"As the employee attempted to rectify Check's complaint, Check continued to yell and became more irate. After several minutes the employee returned to the window to speak with Check and observed Check pull out a black handgun and place it in her lap.

"The employee backed away from the window and yelled to the rest of the employees that Check had a gun. As the employees moved to the back of the building, Check pointed the gun out of the van window and shouted to the employees that she was going to shoot them. Check then fired her gun.

"The bullet went through the drive-thru window glass, shattering it, through the employee service area and struck the wall behind the counter."

Stroud Area Regional police said they were dispatched at 11:09 a.m. to the fast-food restaurant for the report of a female in the drive-through with a gun.

Pocono Mountain Regional police reported being dispatched at 12:17 p.m. for the report of a female firing a gun into a unit at the Cloudcrest apartments.

Officers said they found spent shell casings in the parking lot, a bullet hole in the bas tank of a gray Chevrolet Equinox and bullet holes in the siding and window of apartment No. 105.

Charles Smith told police he was in the apartment when he saw Check firing a gun outside, point it at him and fire into the interior of the unit, according to police.

"Mary Lou Check was found on scene, highly intoxicated, yelling numerous obscenities at Charles Smith like and blaming Smith for numerous problems related to her family and friends," Wagner wrote in the news release.

According to witnesses and video surveillance footage, Check banged on the door of apartment 105 before walking to the Chevy SUV, opening the gas tank and firing into it, police said.

"It should be noted that this apartment complex is heavily populated and numerous people were home and in close proximity to this incident at the time it occurred," Wagner said.

Check fired additional shots into the wall of Smith's apartment before sitting in her green Dodge Caravan and waiting while Smith hid in his bathroom area before he exited the apartment, police said.

"When she saw him open the door, she began firing the gun at him again until the firearm's slide locked back and it appeared that she was out of ammunition," the police chief reported.

Search warrants executed turned up "evidence of her day-long drinking binge" in addition to the crack pipe, holster for the handgun, shell casings and, under a vehicle, the Glock semiautomatic, according to police.

"Officers also recovered the projectiles that Check fired into the apartment where Smith was hiding," Wagner said.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
OMAHA  Gov. Pete Ricketts said the story of two men who escaped from a Lincoln prison Friday morning has villains, to be sure.

It also has heroes, including a mother and daughter who fought off convicted rapist Armon Dixon in Lincoln and law enforcement who helped capture him Saturday and then Timothy Clausen in Omaha on Wednesday evening.

The governor joined Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer and other officials in Omaha Thursday morning to talk about the search for and capture of Clausen.

Schmaderer said more than 60 Omaha homes were searched between Saturday night, when the search for Clausen shifted from Lincoln to Omaha, and his capture just after 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Police investigated each one of the hundreds of tips they got on Clausen's whereabouts, finally catching up with him at 3226 N. 26th St., not far from the North Freeway.

A full payout of $7,500 from Omaha Crime Stoppers and the U.S. Marshal's Service will go to the person who helped lead law enforcement to Clausen, who shaved his beard and cut his hair, and had a handgun nearby when officers arrested him.

"We felt Clausen was hiding in northeast Omaha," Schmaderer said, describing five days of nonstop work that went into finding him.

Omaha police got a Crime Stoppers tip at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday that Clausen was in Spencer East Housing, Schmaderer said.

"Clausen was attempting to leave the city and would have done anything to get out," he said.

Schmaderer wouldn't go into detail about the people who were potentially harboring Clausen, and said part of the investigation will be determining if they knew who he was.

Clausen, 52, was serving a 51- to 55-year sentence at the Lincoln Correctional Center for sexually assaulting a child.

He and Dixon, 37, left the prison near Pioneers Park in Lincoln in the back of a laundry truck Friday morning.

The news conference at Omaha police headquarters marked the second in a week at which the governor and law enforcement talked about capturing a dangerous prison escapee.

On Thursday, Ricketts said he still has confidence in Nebraska Department of Correctional Services Director Scott Frakes, who he brought in from Washington to deal with problems in the Nebraska prison system.

"I still have the utmost confidence in Director Frakes. He is putting things in place to change the culture of corrections. There's work to do."

Meanwhile, the Corrections Department announced from Lincoln that experts from the Virginia Department of Corrections are scheduled to arrive Thursday to lead the Critical Incident Review of the LCC escapes.

Recommendations from the review will be used to ensure the correct actions are taken to prevent further security breaches, the department said in a news release.

The team will be led by Warden Rodney Younce and Assistant Warden Anthony Scott from the Virginia DOC, and will include six staff from the Nebraska Corrections Department.

NDCS will benefit from having a team led by security experts from a different correctional system review the significant incident, Frakes said in a news release. Virginias Director, Harold Clarke, reached out and offered the help of his staff. Im grateful to Director Clarke and his staff for their support in ensuring we fully understand what happened, and what must be fixed to ensure this does not happen again.

Clarke was a longtime Nebraska Corrections employee who ended his career here as director of the department.

Together, Younce and Scott have nearly 50 years of experience working in correctional facilities, the Nebraska department said in the news release.

On Monday, Frakes said staff errors led to the escape of Dixon and Clausen and a critical incident review is underway. To start with, he said, it looks like at least two LCC employees failed to follow procedure.

The first failure was conducting informal counts of the inmates. The second was allowing Dixon and Clausen to talk their way into the laundry room. They told officers they had been put on laundry duty, but weren't yet added to the list. The officers put the pair on the list without asking for permission, Frakes said.

"Last Friday, we failed in our mission to keep the public safe," Frakes said on Monday. "We will make no excuses for our failures. ... Our focus now is to ensure nothing like this happens again."

Ricketts said LCC Warden Mario Peart and two other employees have been moved into administrative roles while the escapes are being investigated.

The two employees have been on the job for one and two years each.

"Clearly, we have work to do," Ricketts said Thursday morning. "This raises awareness that employees need to follow procedures."

An intense manhunt in Lincoln yielded the capture of Dixon on Saturday afternoon, but Clausen eluded authorities.

The search for him had been concentrated in northeast Omaha since the Saturday arrest of Wanda Minor, who is believed to have helped Clausen get out of Lincoln. Minor, 50, was charged Wednesday with being an accessory to a felony and is in the Douglas County Jail on $500,000 bond. She served two years on probation for attempting to tamper with a juror during Clausen's 2013 trial for sexual assault.

Clausens arrest is the culmination of a lot of hard work and long hours by law enforcement from multiple agencies, Col. Brad Rice, superintendent of the Nebraska State Patrol, said in a news release Wednesday evening. Our citizens were also a valuable resource, and we would like to thank each and every one of them who called to provide a tip or information.

The Patrol, Omaha Police, Douglas County Sheriff's Office, U.S. Marshals Service and Metro Fugitive Task Force made the arrest without incident, said Collins.

Clausen was taken to Tecumseh State Correctional Institution, where Dixon was taken after his arrest.

Both men were serving time for sex assault and left LCC at 9:12 Friday morning in a prison laundry truck bound for the Tecumseh prison.

They jumped out of the truck a few minutes and a few miles later, then stole a pickup truck they crashed near downtown Lincoln.

Local, state and federal law enforcement combed the area near the accident at 18th and F streets for much of Friday and into Saturday.

They arrested Dixon at 2 p.m. Saturday when he popped out of a manhole at 49th and Francis streets in northeast Lincoln.

Dixon already was serving 158 to 278 years for sexual assaults and for being a habitual criminal.

Clausen was doing 51 to 58 years for sexual assault of a child and tampering with a witness.
Almost 1,500 people in Leitrim are carers, looking after loved ones at home who are sick, old or have reduced abilities.

As we celebrate the tenth National Carers Week in Ireland, Manorhamilton group 24/7 Carers are raising awareness around caregiving and are calling on all local carers to get in touch.

The group re-affiliated what was the North Leitrim West Cavan Carers in 2013, they have 35 active members, but have over 60 members listed on their Facebook page and they are looking for more!

They meet every Thursday from 11am - 1pm in The Manorhub, Manorhamilton to chat, have fun, unwind and organise events. The group hopes to travel around to villages and towns this year to meet local carers.

The group held their big fundraiser last Friday, June 10. The members had plenty of goodies on offer to give people passing by. The tea morning is their biggest fundraiser of the year and the proceeds go towards the rent of their meeting room.

Marie Eames McGowan told the paper Caring is an isolated job, it is 24/7 and it is lonely.

Marie, an only child takes care of both her elderly parents. Her mother aged 93 has Alzheimers and her 90 year old father is also sick.

She said her mother doesnt sleep much at night, so she is awake all night with her and without the 24/7 group she wouldnt get out of the house much at all.

Carers in the group cover a wide range of patients, they look after elderly parents, sick siblings and children. Some patients have mental illness, others have reduced abilities and many are sick or elderly.

Marie has been ten years caring for her parents, like all the other members she didnt choose the job, it just happened.

She left her career, has now spent all of her savings to stay at home and survive on a small allowance.

She said she loves attending the group meetings as she gets to talk to people who understand her situation, she said the group is also great to get answers and help from.

Many people who are put in this situation dont know where to start to look for help, finance, assistance etc, the group gives you the information and support network you need.

The group organise various events and activities along with days out. They have completed print workshops, yoga, meditation, sculpture, IT, art and calligraphy classes. They organise a day away every year, attend the National Carers Weekend and celebrate Christmas and other events together.

Annie McGuinness, secretary of the group along with a few others have spoken on their plight at the European Union, having been invited over by MEP Marian Harkin.

Carrickeeny Wind Farm and Gilbert's Pharmacy have kindly sponsored activities for the group.

The group receive small specific grants from the HSE and the National Lottery Respite, the rest is from local donations.

The members told the paper, that a life at home caring for others can put you into a routine that doesnt allow much interaction with the outside world, you lose confidence and can feel depressed. Some carers focus so much on their patients, they forget to look after their own health.

Weekends are the worst the members agree. It is almost impossible to get away for a wedding at the weekend or a night out, the weekends bring more of the same.

Unlike mothers of small children, it is not acceptable to bring sick, elderly or incapacitated patients to local events and activities, and the lack of interaction can leave carers very isolated.

Chairperson of the group Olivia Mitchell said during the sunny weather, carers dont get a break to enjoy it. She said she hopes more people will think about the role of the carer during National Carers Week.

Home help and outside help can be scarce for those who need it and the members feel no appreciation from the Government who are saving thousands of euros keeping people out of nursing homes and care facilities.

24/7 Carers have a number of projects in the pipeline, they hope to survey carers to see what services are most needed and they want to see if they can help provide services themselves.

If you know a carer and want to help them, the carers advise you call ahead before visiting or offering to lend a hand.

24/7 carers will have an information stand at Manorhamilton Agricultural Show.

If you have any questions or want to know more call Marie 087-6844269 or email 247familycarers@gmail.com
Next week voters across United Kingdom will go to the polls to decide on our countrys future relationship with our European partners.

This decision could not be more important and I urge you to make sure your voice is heard on Thursday 23rd June. For my part, I wanted to set out why I am passionately in favour of the UK remaining in the European Union.

As an internationalist, I see the European Union as an opportunity for us to punch way above our size on the global stage.

Through our membership of the European Union, businesses in Orkney and across the have access to freely export to the largest common market in the world, a market of some 500 million people. Indeed, in 2014 that market was worth 5.1bn for our Scottish food and drink sector alone.

In other parts of Orkneys economy too we see the vital importance of European Union. The EUs Common Agricultural Policy provides 20 million a year in support for Orkneys farmers. Our renewables sector benefits from key EU funding, keeping us at the forefront of research and development. Meanwhile, over half the value of our vital tourism sector relies on tourists from the EU, travelling without visas.

To leave the European Union and walk away from the single market would be to close the door on these opportunities for Orkney.

Whilst the economic arguments are compelling, for me they do not represent the fundamental purpose and values of a union we helped build. Jo Grimond was right to describe the creation of the European Community as the disappearance of the cloud which has lain over Europe for a thousand years  the plague of Western European wars.it is alone worth any petty tribulations that the EEC may inflict.

The recent commemorations in Orkney for the Battle of Jutland centenary brought home to me how far we have come since war ravaged our continent. As populist, nationalist movements across Europe grow more prominent and shrill, the dignified and moving acts of remembrance and reconciliation should serve as a timely reminder.

As a leader in the European Union we have collectively brought peace and security to our continent. As a leader in the European Union, we have helped shape progress in tackling cross-border crime, protecting the environment and safeguarding the rights of citizens and workers. As a leader in the European Union we are better placed to confront fundamental challenges such as climate change, mass migration and terrorism.

The case for reforming the European Union will always be made. However, we can only influence that by leading, not leaving. Economically, environmentally, socially and in terms of our security we benefit greatly from our membership. The alternative is isolation  taking back control, but control over far less.

On 23rd June, make sure your vote counts and help ensure the UKs voice continues to be heard internationally. Please vote Remain.

* Liam McArthur is the Liberal Democrat Member of the Scottish Parliament for Orkney.
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A BRAZEN thief stole a handbag from a private office at a busy bank minutes after he discharged himself from University Hospital Limerick.

Paul Foran, aged 34, of North Claughan Road pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary relating to an incident at the Dooradoyle branch of Permanent TSB on October 12, last.

Detective Garda Shane Ryan told Limerick Circuit Court the defendant entered the private office at around 3.25pm and placed the handbag into a woven Tesco bag before walking out.

After leaving the bank Foran, who has a large number of previous conviction, entered the nearby MS Ireland premises.

Det Garda Ryan said having been alerted to the theft, staff from the bank confronted the defendant at MS Ireland a short time later

However, he escaped and fled in the direction of the Crescent Shopping Centre before flagging down a taxi.

He was observed getting into the taxi by the bank manager who alerted gardai.

Detective Garda Ryan said Foran was arrested in the taxi near the city centre a short time later.

While the handbag was not recovered a quantity of cash which was in the bag was found when he was arrested.

He told John OSullivan BL, prosecuting, the defendant had a cut on his head and blood on his ear when arrested and that he was deemed unfit for questioning for several hours.

Mr OSullivan said there was an element of brazeness to the offence and he said the incident was upsetting for the woman who owned the bag.

Laurence Goucher BL, defending, said his client, who has a long history of drug and alcohol use, cooperated with gardai and made full and frank admissions following his arrest.

He said the offence was opportunistic and that there was nothing to suggest it had been pre-planned.

He is not a master criminal, he said, adding that Foran was injured in a fall earlier in the day but had voluntarily discharged himself from UHL as he did not want to wait around.

Judge Tom ODonnell indicated he will impose sentence on July 22.
A WELL-KNOWN Glin man who was seriously injured while on holiday in Northern Spain remains in an induced coma with family members at his hospital bedside.

Kieran FitzGerald, who has been a commissioner in the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) since 2011, had sailed with friends from Dublin to Galicia in Northern Spain.

There he was to meet up with his wife Evelyn to walk part of the Camino de Santiago.

But on arrival in Spain, Mr Fitzgerald felt faint and was put sitting down on a low wall by his sailing companions. However, he tipped over on to some rocks and damaged his spine.

He was operated on at a hospital in La Coruna early last week but complications have arisen since.

Mr Fitzgeralds wife and only child, are with him in Spain as is one of his two sisters.

Kieran Fitzgerald comes from a well-known and long-tailed family in Glin. He is the son of retired schoolteacher Kathleen and the late Pat Fitzgerald and has two sisters, Louise and Christina.

He has worked as a producer, reporter and researcher with RTE, working on programmes that included The Late Late Show, Prime Time and Liveline. He was named as News and Current Affairs Journalist of the Year in 1999 and is a former chair of the Dublin Broadcasting Branch of the National Union of Journalists.

In 2007, he was appointed Head of Communications and Research for the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission and in 2011, was appointed to the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission.

He has a Doctorate in Governance from the School of Law at Queens University Belfast and is a Member of the Executive Committee of the British & Irish Ombudsman Association.
THE Corbally-born Bishop of Orlando led an interfaith service in memory of the victims of the worst mass shooting in American history this week.

Bishop John G Noonan, who also has relatives in Abbeyfeale, led the service attended by more than 700 people who prayed for those injured and killed in the worst mass shooting in US history.

Our presence here tonight is a symbol of hope. We come to pray. We come not as different religions but one in the Lord, he said.

At the interfaith service, Bishop Noonan was joined by leaders of different faiths, including the Imam of the Islamic centre of Orlando.

A sword has pierced the heart of the city, he said of the incident which has left 49 people dead and scores more injured.

The attack was carried out by a lone gunman Omar Mateen, 29, who died after being fired on by police.

In Limerick people have gathered in two separate vigils in solidarity with the people of Orlando.

One vigil took place at the Treaty Stone on Monday night, while a second happened this Wednesday evening in Arthurs Quay Park.

Bishop Noonan is a second cousin of Vera Lynch, the late wife of former Cathaoirleach Sean Broderick, Abbeyfeale.

Mr Broderick said: My first reaction was that I hoped it had no effect on Bishop Noonan. It was a terrible thing altogether. One thing which should have been long before now is that guns should have not been allowed to be made available so freely.

Having emigrated to New York at age 18, Bishop Noonan served in Miami before being installed as the fifth Bishop of Orlando in 2010. Born in Corbally, his mother hailed from Mungret and father from Ballingarry.

Meanwhile, more than 100 Limerick people gathered for a vigil in Arthur's Quay Park on Wednesday night to show solidarity with the shooting victims. It was the second vigil to take place in the city this week in response to the incident.

The organiser of the vigil Richard Lynch described the attack as "a hate crime against LGBT people".

The Unity Gospel Choir led the music, each member bearing letters to read the three words 'We are Orlando'.

A moment of silence was observed in memory of the 49 people who lost their lives, and the choir then sang 'Something Inside so strong'.

"We gather in places to share love and camaraderie with people. For someone to come in and destory that and violate it was such a despicable act. But we cannot let the haters win, and we aint going to let the haters win," Richard told the crowd.
COUNCILLORS decision to reject plans for the Northern Distributor Road is being seen as a potential barrier to more foreign direct investment, it was heard at a strategic policy committee meeting in Limerick City Hall this week.

IDA Mid-West regional manager, Niall OCallaghan, gave a presentation at the Economic Development, Enterprise and Planning SPC meeting on Tuesday afternoon, to highlight the progress of foreign direct investment [FDI] in Limerick over the past year.

He told a small number of councillors that, though IDAs strategy for Limerick is working, the lack of a Northern Distributor Route is a significant barrier to further investment for existing companies.

He told the Limerick Leader he would certainly be in favour if the route was to be reconsidered, saying it will be attractive to businesses operating from the National Technology Park, Annacotty and the City East Plaza.

This route will alleviate the amount of traffic congestion, and will help these companies to further their expansion within the future, Mr O'Callaghan told the meeting.

City and county councillors told Mr OCallaghan that the route would only cut 10 minutes from the persons journey.

He replied: You say that it will only take 10 minutes off your journey. We are competing with cities like London, Manchester and Hong Kong, and those 10 minutes would mean a lot to us.

Sinn Fein councillor Seighin OCeallaigh said: A democratic decision was made and we voted against the Northern Distributor Road. Is this going to be another version of the Lisbon Treaty? Are we going to have to keep voting on it?

During his presentation, Mr OCallaghan added that the route would also be a key selling point of easy access to Shannon Airport.

IDA Ireland is hoping that, in the future, there will be more European routes connected to Shannon.

The business case for more European daily routes from Shannon needs to be supported to improve connectivity, he said at the meeting.

It is also important to note, the only boundaries that FDI companies recognise are international  not county specific.

In light of these comments, he said that Limerick City and County Council should be working with other local authorities in the Mid-West on building business cases.

He explained that because Limerick is not a well-known international city due to its comparatively low population, the region has to over-index in other areas, such as infrastructure, transport, education and its cultural scene.

Infrastructure is a key need for foreign direct investment. Access to airports, to rail networks, to road networks, and anything that can be seen as progress is going to help attract or help us as a city or as a region for a foreign direct investment, he commented.

Mayor of Limerick City and County, Cllr Liam Galvin called on IDA Ireland to lobby for an improved road network for the N69, N21 and a new Limerick-Cork motorway.

Labour councillor Joe Leddin said that the proposed motorway should be built in stages due to the high cost.

There are 8,849 staff across 52 IDA client companies in Limerick, with an average of 170 employees in each company.

This represents 8.1% of IDAs total company portfolio outside of Dublin, when we only have 4.4% of the population.

Limerick is over-indexing and punching above its weight when it comes to FDI and this is clear evidence IDAs regional strategy is working for Limerick, Mr OCallaghan said.

He added that 2015 was the most significant year for Limerick, as 1,018 extra jobs were created  33% increase on 2014 and 77% increase on 2013.
AN IRISH stud farm owner in Japan has initiated High Court proceedings against the University of Limerick, after two equine students were pulled from its co-op placement in Japan arising from allegations made to the university against him.

Dr Harry Sweeney, of Paca Paca stud farm, is suing UL for damages for negligence, breach of contract, breach of fair procedures, breach of natural justice and defamation, as a result of actions taken by the defendant in choosing to withdraw two of its students from a placement programme in 2014.

Declaratory and injunctive relief is also sought against UL in relation to its actions in withdrawing the students from the placement.

Dr Sweeney is also seeking an injunction restraining UL from "repeating untrue and defamatory allegations".

In two other sets of proceedings, Dr Sweeney and Paca Paca are seeking damages for defamation and malicious falsehood against the two students concerned.

Ms Justice Miriam O'Regan heard this Thursday afternoon that Dr Sweeney had offered placements to UL students since 2009 as part of its equine science course.

Three students began their placement in Japan in January 2014, but for two students that placement came to an end in March 2014. No UL students were thereafter sent on placement in 2015.

On March 18, 2014, the parents of the students made a complaint to the university regarding Dr Sweeney and asked for their "safe return to Ireland via the Embassy in Tokyo".

Dr Sweeney had a day earlier informed staff in the university of his "difficulties with the students", which his defence claims had been ongoing for some time but only communicated to the university in March.

Allegations by the students against Dr Sweeney have been vehemently denied.

Miriam Reilly, SC, of behalf of Dr Sweeney, argued that there was an onus on UL to assess the credibility of the students' claims. She said matters "came to a head over St Patrick's weekend", following the Emerald Ball in Toyko.

As a result of the actions of one of the students, she was told to consider herself suspended, and Dr Sweeney's concerns were communicated to the equine science department in an email on March 18.

Ms Reilly maintained that her client's position is that the claims by the two UL students were "false, malicious allegations made in concert, and that this fabrication of a story was sold to Professor Paul McCutcheon to avoid other repercussions".

Prof McCutcheon, vice president academic & registrar in UL, liaised with the Embassy in Tokyo, and a taxi was sent to collect the students in Paca Paca.

Senior counsel for Holmes O'Malley Sexton solcitors, on behalf of UL, said that while Prof McCutcheon believed that Paca Paca was a prestigious placement, UL had to act in the best interests of its students.

The relationship between Dr Sweeney and UL is "now fraught to put it mildly".

Ms Reilly said Dr Sweeney has now suffered "loss and damage, including to his reputation", as a result of "UL's failure to observe fair procedures and hear his views".

She added that UL had an "enormous deficit of information" when the decision was made to remove the students from Japan.

While noting that UL has an obligation to its students who are far from home, she said UL has had a contractual obligation to Dr Sweeney as a result of a long-standing relationship.

"No note has been produced by UL based on what it decided to do. UL then unilaterally decided there would be no further placements, as a result of the breakdown in this relationship".

Ms Justice O'Regan will hear the case again on Friday morning and decide how to proceed in respect of dealing with the various proceedings.
Apr 27, 2021, 9 AM

Barbara McClintock was honored on a 37 stamp in the 2005 American Scientists set of four.

By Michael Baadke

American scientist Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize in 1983, was born June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Conn.

She studied botany and genetics at Cornell Universitys College of Agriculture in Ithaca, N.Y., earning her doctorate in 1927.

She began work as a botany instructor and researcher at Cornell, making breakthroughs in the study of chromosomes in corn plants. In 1936, she began working in the Department of Botany at the University of Missouri, and in 1941 she joined the staff at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

In 1983, the renowned geneticist Barbara McClintock received the Nobel Prize in the category of Physiology or Medicine for discovering genetic transposition, the United States Postal Service reported when the 37 stamp honoring McClintock (Scott 3906) was issued May 4, 2005, in the American Scientists set of four.

McClintocks research on Indian corn plants led to her discovery that genetic material can change positions on a chromosome or move from one chromosome to another. Her discovery was confirmed immediately in corn and in the 1960s and 1970s in bacteria and other organisms.

McClintock previously was honored on a 3.60-krone Swedish stamp issued Nov. 24, 1989 (Scott 1775).
The bizarre but in-demand stamps of King Farouks Egypt: Tip of the week

Jun 15, 2016, 8 AM

By Henry Gitner and Rick Miller

King Farouk occupied the throne of Egypt from 1936 until he was deposed by a military coup in 1952. The king was a man of large appetites, and one of those appetites was for stamp collecting.

Harmers held a three-day auction of his stamp collection on behalf of the Egyptian government in 1954. Stamps from Farouks collection often bear identifying back stamps applied by the dealers who bought them.

To quote that great political scientist Mel Brooks, It is good to be the king. Farouk commanded the Egyptian postal authorities to produce bizarrely misperforated stamps for his collection. Much of the Egyptian misperforated material was bought by Canadian stamp dealer Kasimir Bileski. For several years Bileski mailed them out as lagniappe when filling orders for customers.

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Times have changed, and these royally misperforated creations have gone from being almost worthless to being in high demand and relatively valuable.

Definitive issues that only recently were selling for $20 to $40 for a misperforated block are now selling for $75 to $100. Misperforated commemoratives are especially in demand as usually only 100 of each exist.

Complete commemorative sets of two to four misperforated stamps sell for $100 to $150 per stamp. A good example is a misperforated set of three 75th Anniversary of the Universal Postal Union stamps (Scott 281-283) that recently sold for $600.

We suspect that a lot of these intentionally misperforated Egypt stamps are lurking in old collections and accumulations. Keep your eyes open.

Read other recent tips of the week:

Louisiana Purchase stamp features underrated president

1918 Czechoslovakia Scout Post Bohemian Lion set

10-franc Eupodotis Senegalensis stamp
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.
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The Drumbeg shipwreck lies almost 40 feet (12 meters) underwater in Eddrachillis Bay, off the northwest coast of Scotland. This 3D-printed model shows the three cannon, two anchors and partial hull that remain at the shipwreck site.

The seabed holds some fascinating historical secrets, but unlike monuments on land, theyre largely hidden from view. Now, archaeologists in the United Kingdom are using 3D printing to bring two historical shipwrecks to life for history enthusiasts and experts alike.

Using data from photogrammetry (measuring the distance between objects from photographs) and sonar imaging, the researchers have produced scale models of a 17th-century shipwreck near Drumbeg, in Scotland, and the remains of the HMHS Anglia, a steamship that was used as a floating hospital during World War I. The steamship was sunk by a mine off the south coast of England.

"It was a proof of concept for us, trying to establish what could be done using sound and light, but there are so many different applications you could use this for," said maritime archaeologist John McCarthy, a project manager at Wessex Archaeology who carried out dives at the Scottish site and was in charge of producing the 3D models. [Photos: Shipwrecks of the Deep Sea]

"People can engage much more easily with a physical object in front of them. You can bring it to schools and conferences, and we are hoping to donate both models to local museums, once we've finished with them," McCarthy told Live Science.

It was not particularly difficult to create 3D-printed representations of the shipwrecks, McCarthy said. The magic, he said, was in creating the virtual models that were fed into the 3D printer.

McCarthy carried out initial experimental surveys of the Drumbeg wreck in 2012 with his colleague Jonathan Benjamin, who is now a lecturer at Flinders University in Australia. McCarthy recently joined him there to begin Ph.D. studies under Benjamin's supervision.

At the Drumbeg wreck site, the pair found three heavily encrusted cannons with evidence of a preserved wooden hull underneath. The ship's identity is still unknown, but one theory holds that it is a Dutch trading vessel called the Crowned Raven, which is known to have been lost in the bay in the late 1600s.

After realizing the techniques they were using could provide enough data for a 3D model, the archaeologists went back to do a more detailed survey in 2014 and used the lessons they had learned from their first attempt.

The archaeologists used a technique called photogrammetry, which involves taking hundreds of overlapping photographs of a site and then feeding them into a computer program that can stitch them together. The application is able to establish the spatial relationships between photos, which allows it to create a so-called 3D point cloud that maps each image in 3D space.

"Once you have a point cloud, you can turn it into a solid surface," McCarthy said. "Then you have a 3D model of the site that's not subjective or an artist's impression, but entirely objective."

The HMHS Anglia was sunk by a mine off the south coast of England. The steamship was used as a floating hospital during World War I. (Image credit: John McCarthy/Copyright Wessex Archaeology 2016)

The benefits of photogrammetry are that it produces very high-resolution images and it can capture the true color of the site, McCarthy said. The method is easily thwarted, however, by excess marine growth or poor visibility, and it is not well-suited to covering large areas.

Sonar, on the other hand, can see through the murk and can cover much larger areas, McCarthy said. For the 329-foot-long (100 meters) HMHS Anglia, another team from Wessex Archaeology used multibeam sonar  which operates in a similar way to a laser scanner  to do a much larger survey of the shipwreck site.

While multibeam sonar can't match the subcentimeter resolution of photogrammetry, using higher-end equipment and doing many passes can boost accuracy, McCarthy said. The Anglia survey was a particularly high-resolution one, he added, which was part of the reason it was selected for the 3D printing project.

McCarthy pointed out that the Wessex Archaeology team is not the first to create 3D-printed models from underwater imaging data. He said that the field has been booming in recent years, with big advances in both sonar and photographic techniques, and even some novel laser-scanning approaches are beginning to come through.

"All maritime archaeologists are engaging heavily with these techniques now," McCarthy said. "Advances in hardware and software in the last five years has allowed us to do very rapid and cheap surveys, and it has added to the tools we use underwater."

Original article on Live Science.
We're officially living in a new world.

Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There's a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

Carbon dioxide officially crossed the 400 ppm threshold on May 23 at the South Pole Observatory. (Image credit: NOAA)

A little 400 ppm history. Three years ago, the world's gold standard carbon dioxide observatory passed the symbolic threshold of 400 ppm. Other observing stations have steadily reached that threshold as carbon dioxide spreads across the planet's atmosphere at various points since then. Collectively, the world passed the threshold for a month last year.

In the remote reaches of Antarctica, the South Pole Observatory carbon dioxide observing station cleared 400 ppm on May 23, according to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday. Thats the first time it's passed that level in 4 million years (no, thats not a typo).

CO2 Nears Peak: Are We Permanently Above 400 PPM? Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Emissions to Stone The Last Time CO2 Was This High, Humans Didnt Exist

There's a lag in how carbon dioxide moves around the atmosphere. Most carbon pollution originates in the northern hemisphere because that's where most of the world's population lives. Thats in part why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit the 400 ppm milestone earlier in the northern reaches of the world.

But the most remote continent on earth has caught up with its more populated counterparts.

"The increase of carbon dioxide is everywhere, even as far away as you can get from civilization," Pieter Tans, a carbon-monitoring scientist at the Environmental Science Research Laboratory, said. "If you emit carbon dioxide in New York, some fraction of it will be in the South Pole next year."

Tans said it's "practically impossible" for the South Pole Observatory to see readings dip below 400 ppm because the Antarctic lacks a strong carbon dioxide up and down seasonal cycle compared to locations in the mid-latitudes. Even factoring in that seasonal cycle, new research published earlier this week shows that the planet as a whole has likely crossed the 400 ppm threshold permanently (at least in our lifetimes).

Passing the 400 ppm milestone in is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways. We've seen sea levels rise about a foot in the past 120 years and temperatures go up about 1.8F (1C) globally. Arctic sea ice has dwindled 13.4 percent per decade since the 1970s, extreme heat has become more common and oceans are headed for their most acidic levels in millions of years. Recently heat has cooked corals and global warming has contributed in various ways to extreme events around the world.

The Paris Agreement is a good starting point to slow carbon dioxide emissions, but the world will have to have a full about face to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Even slowing down emissions still means we're dumping record-high amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

That's why monitoring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, the South Pole and other locations around the world continues to be an important activity. It can gauge how successful the efforts under the Paris Agreement (and other agreements) have been and if the world is meeting its goals.

"Just because we have an agreement doesn't mean the problem (of climate change) is solved," Tans said.

You May Also Like: Fishing For Bright Spots in a World of Sick Reefs Everything You Need to Know About Wildfires in One Map Climate Impacts From Farming Are Getting Worse The Weird Weather That Entrenched Californias Drought

Originally published on Climate Central.
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An Argentinian woman with strong links to Longford made the long journey from South America to Europe last week in order to visit the county her grandmother's parents emigrated from more than a century ago.

My great grandparents were born in Carrickedmond and they left for Argentina, explained Maria Cecilia Lovisolo Farrell, who lives near Buenos Aires.

My mother travelled here for some of the Farrell rallies. Her photo even appeared in the Longford Leader. She passed away eight years ago.

Ms Lovisolo Farrell, who is a human resources executive with Philip Morris International, revealed that it was her mother's passing, along with the recent death of her sister, which prompted her to make the journey.

That's why I'm here, to see my land and to honour my mother, she said.

It's my first time in Europe and on the way here I also visited Madrid to see my cousins. Before I arrived I made contact with Helen Farrell; my mother had stayed with her during her visits.

However, Ms Lovisolo Farrell admitted it was Ireland, and indeed County Longford, that was the highlight of her holiday.

I'm enjoying Ireland more, she told the Longford Leader. I feel so good here; it's like home. I'd love to stay! Everyone here is so good to me.

Before her departure last Thursday, several Farrells from the Longford town area came together to host a special event for her, to officially welcome her to the clan.

They're having a party for me in the Rugby Club before I go and I'll be meeting some more of the Farrells there, she laughed.
The HSE is coming under fire after latest figures showed revealed large numbers o trolleys in Mullingar Midlands Regional Hospital in the past two weeks.

The figures, collated by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Association (INMO), uncovered 36 patients on trolleys in the hospital's accident and emergency department between last Wednesday and Monday of this week.

A further 30 patients were adjudged to be on trolleys in wards.

As of this Wednesday morning, that number had decreased to 17 in total but is still regarded as significant.

The figures have predictably attracted scepticism from local politicians.

Fine Gael councillor Peggy Nolan said she was very disappointed but not overly surprised by the latest figures.

For one of the top three hospitals in the country to have one of the worst trolley figures in the country since last September is not acceptable and is something I have been raising time and time again, she stormed.

Cllr Nolan said HSE bosses had a ready-made solution within the confines of St Joseph's Care Centre in Longford town.

She said by opening a step-down facility on the Dublin Road campus, at least 20 beds would be freed up almost instantaneously.

Everything is in place down there (St Joseph's) to do just that, she said.

It's not as if we need capital funding either, it's more operational funding that would be needed.

It's a complete no brainer.

Cllr Nolan also revealed she had planned on bringing Mullingar's trolley situation to the attention of HSE chiefs at a meeting scheduled for this week.

However, the Longford town based local representative claimed the meeting had been called off due to holiday commitments.

It was cancelled because of a conflict of differences with people's diaries, she added, stating however the meeting had been pencilled in over the next two to three weeks.

Besides the need to address hospital waiting numbers, Cllr Nolan said she, together with her Fine Gael colleagues, would also be pressing for an acquired brain injury unit to be located at St Joseph's.

It would raise the profile of that campus so much if it came to pass, she said.

We just can't take no for an answer on this one.
Rising insurance costs were firmly on the political agenda last week as finally the message hit home to politicians that this is a major issue for motorists.

The Dail passed a motion on the urgent need to tackle soaring motor insurance premiums.

The move came hot on the heels of confirmation from the CSO that the year-on-year rate of increase in motor insurance has hit a record 35.5% in May of this year.

Local TD Robert Troy said that the motion, which was moved by Fianna Fail, calls for the re-establishment of the Motor Insurance Advisory Board on a time limited basis, greater disclosure around policy renewal notifications, action on the settlement of cases and dealing with false and exaggerated claims.

The passing of this motion is a very significant development for Irish consumers. It sets out a clear path for tackling this significant issue, Robert Troy explained.

Key to this is the establishment of a taskforce to examine all the factors which are contributing to these huge increases. This is a motion which I was very keen to work on and bring forward as this is a measure which will benefit motorists directly and tackle this problem into the future."

Other practical measures included in the motion are the establishment of a motor insurance database; enhanced disclosure around policy renewal notifications; and a plan to ensure greater consistency in court awards in personal injury cases.

There are also plans to take robust action on false and exaggerated claims.

Furthermore there are pla ns to introduce legislation to clearly define the roles of the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland and the Insurance Compensation Fund.

The motion also proposes that action be taken to strengthen road safety enforcement.

The onus is now on the Ministers for Finance and Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation to give effect to the will of the Dail on this issue and ensure that motorists get a well-deserved break from seemingly relentless increases in motor insurance premiums. Action needs to be taken now and we will ensure that the government are not sitting on their hands when it comes to this issue," concluded Deputy Troy.
Family & Parenting, Local News, National & World News, Community, Charity & Cause, Health & Wellness, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Long Island News & PR Published: June 16 2016

NYS Assemblyman Dean Murray introduced a resolution calling for Governor Andrew Cuomo to proclaim June 30th, 2016 as Arthrogryposis Awareness Day.

Albany, NY - June 15, 2016 - On Tuesday June 14th, NYS Assemblyman Dean Murray introduced a resolution calling for Governor Andrew Cuomo to proclaim June 30th, 2016 as Arthrogryposis Awareness Day in the State of New York.

Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita (AMC), is a rare condition that occurs before birth and causes the baby to be born with multiple joint contractures. It is estimated that AMC affects roughly 1 child in every 3,000 births. While there is no known cure for AMC, there are treatments, such as surgeries, various therapies, etc. that can improve a persons independence level and quality of life.

Assemblyman Murray says, The purpose of passing the resolution was to increase awareness about this condition throughout the state. It is our hope that increased awareness will bring about early intervention, which is key to increasing the success rate of treatment.

Several families from across the state joined Assemblyman Murray in the Chamber to witness the passage of the resolution. Among those who made the trip to Albany was Bellport resident, Rebeccah Gomez and her 21-month old son, Matthew, who has AMC. Murray says, Ms Gomez has been an extremely dedicated and active proponent of increasing awareness about AMC and I was so happy that she, and Matthew could join us to see the resolution get passed.

The passage of this resolution makes New York the 25th state to officially recognize June 30th as Arthrogryposis Awareness Day throughout the country. Ms Gomez says, On June 30th, I will be proud to join families across the State of New York and the Nation in wearing the color blue to promote awareness and to honor those affected by Arthrogryposis.
School & Education, Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: June 16 2016

Recipients of the 2016 Nassau County Legislative Student Citizenship Awards were honored.

Bellmore, NY - June 15, 2016 - Presiding Officer Norma Gonsalves and Legislator Steve Rhoads had the privilege to honor seniors Mikayla Dempsey, Christopher Carrano, Haley Morales and Christopher Rattoballi, from W. C. Mepham High School in Bellmore, as the recipients of the 2016 Nassau County Legislative Student Citizenship Awards. They were selected for their achievements both inside and outside of the classroom. While achieving academic excellence at their school they also has spent a great deal of time volunteering throughout their community.

Im proud to see our students working to make our community the best it can be, said Presiding Officer Gonsalves. They are role models for everyone.

Im glad to honor these students today, said Legislator Rhoads. Their excellence inside and out of the classroom is something to be celebrated.
School & Education, Local Experts, Community, Charity & Cause, Press Releases, Seasonal & Current Events

By Legislator Anker's Office Published: June 16 2016

Suffolk County Legislator Sarah Anker joined hundreds of local residents at the 16th Annual Relay for Life of Rocky Point at the Joseph A. Edgar Intermediate School.

This year, Relay for Life of Rocky Point raised over $22,000 for the American Cancer Society.

Rocky Point, NY - June 16, 2016 - On Saturday, June 11th, Suffolk County Legislator Sarah Anker joined hundreds of local residents at the 16th Annual Relay for Life of Rocky Point at the Joseph A. Edgar Intermediate School.

Relay for Life is a community fundraised where teams of 10-15 people participate in a relay-style walk to raise money for the American Cancer Society. In 2001, Rocky Point hosted the first Relay for Life in Suffolk County and has inspired many more community across Long Island to participate.

I would like to thank the volunteers and business sponsors for their dedication to Relay for Life of Rocky Point, said Legislator Anker. This wonderful event raises thousands of dollars every year and is also a wonderful way for the community to show their support for those who have been affected by cancer.

This year, Relay for Life of Rocky Point raised over $22,000 for the American Cancer Society. Marietta Turbane, a survivor of Hodgkins Lymphoma and breast cancer, was the keynote survivor speaker. The event would not have been possible without the following 2016 committee members: Mary Ann Fox, Maria Amoscato, Jim Brown, Michelle Brown, Pat Carr, Cathy Conner, Jeanette Csikortos, Jennifer Hald, Elizabeth Kidney, Jean Lentin, Lisa Mayer, Peggy Meyer, Kari Mygland, Ed Turney, and Erica Wilgeroth.

For more information about Relay for Life, please visit www.relayforlife.org.
Local News, Crime, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: June 16 2016

Suffolk County Police have arrested a Mount Sinai man after a search warrant was executed as his home during which multiple assault rifles, cash and drugs were seized.

Also seized was a notebook containing bomb making instructions, scales, a cell phone, two computers and various Nazi paraphernalia.

Mount Sinai, NY - June 16, 2016 - Suffolk County Police have arrested a Mount Sinai man after a search warrant was executed as his home during which multiple assault rifles, cash and drugs were seized.

Detectives from the Sixth Precinct Special Operations Team, Criminal Intelligence Section, Narcotics Section and officers from the Sixth Precinct Gang Unit, Canine Section and Emergency Service Section executed a search warrant at 22 Miller Place-Middle Island Road at approximately 6 a.m. today.

During the search, a .40-caliber Glock, six assault rifles, four rifles, 25 high-capacity magazines, one shotgun, one stun gun, $42,940 in cash, approximately 4 ounces marijuana, approximately 26 grams of hallucinogen (mushrooms), 14 knives and between 3,000 and 5,000 rounds of ammunition were seized. Also seized was a notebook containing bomb making instructions, scales, a cell phone, two computers and various Nazi paraphernalia.

Resident Edward Perkowski, 29, was charged with six counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon 3rd Degree, two counts of Criminal Possession of a Weapon 4th Degree, Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance 2nd Degree, Criminal Possession of Marijuana 4th Degree.

Perkowskis brother, Sean, 25, who also lives in the home, was charged with an outstanding bench warrant issued by the Town of Babylon.

The Town of Brookhaven condemned the home for safety violations.

The Perkowskis will be arraigned at First District Court in Central Islip on June 17.

A criminal charge is an accusation. A defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.
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Iranian authorities shuttered a news website after it claimed that the Talibans previous emir was inside Iran for two months and strategized with officials to counter the Islamic State.

Mullah Mansour, the Talibans previous emir, was killed in a US drone strike in Baluchistan, Pakistan, on May 21. The US military and the CIA tracked Mansour as he left Iran, where he purportedly was visiting with his family.

Iranian officials shut down the Jahan News website, which is affiliated with a hardline former parliamentarian. According to Iranian news reports, the reason for the outlets suspension, which occurred on June 15, was the publication of two articles, one of which discussed Mansours dealings with Iran.

On June 5, Jahan News published an article that claimed that Mansour stayed in Iran for two months and left the country one week prior to his death. The article claimed that he had discussions with various bodies, likely a reference to Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The talks centered around the Talibans commitment to prevent DAISH, or the Islamic State, from expanding, especially in Afghanistans northeastern border and the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border.

Beneficial negotiations took place with Iranian officials, Jahan News noted.

Jahan News is not the first news service to report that the Taliban and Iran strategized to deal with the expansion of the Islamic State in Afghansitan. On May 26, Foreign Policy quoted Western officials who claimed that the Taliban and Iran had agreed to set up buffer zones by Irans border. Additionally, Iran agreed to supply the Taliban with weapons.

Iranian officials have not commented on reports that it has worked with the Taliban to oppose the Islamic State. But they have denied that Mansour was inside Iran.

Islamic Republic officials reject that such an individual entered Pakistan from Iran on such a date, a foreign ministry spokesman said on May 23 while responding to questions on Akhtars presence in Iran.

However the Taliban admitted that Mansour was indeed in Iran. Zabihullah Mujahid, one of the Talibans top two spokesmen, admitted Mansour entered Iran due to ongoing battle obligations and said he made multiple unofficial trips, according to Dawn.

He held meetings with Afghan businessmen and Islamic nations in the UAE to discuss our Afghan holy war and raise funds for Taliban operations in Western-occupied Afghanistan, Mujahid said.

While the Taliban and Iran are often characterized as bitter enemies, the two have worked together to further their interests in the region for decades. Shortly after 9/11, Taliban officials met with Iranian representatives to discuss an offer to provide arms and other support for the Taliban as well as allow Arabs, or members of al Qaeda, to enter the country after the US invasion of Afghanistan.

The US government, including the Treasury and State departments, have repeatedly noted Irans dealings with the Taliban. Treasury noted in May 2010 that the Ansar Corps, an IRGC command, supports the Taliban, while two commanders provide financial and material support to the Taliban. Other designations and government reports detail Irans ongoing support for the Taliban.

For more information on the Iran-Taliban relationship, see LWJ report, Analysis: Iran has supported the Talibans insurgency since late 2001.

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Luton is a large town, borough and unitary authority area of Bedfordshire. Luton and its near neighbours, Dunstable and Houghton Regis, form the Luton/Dunstable Urban Area with a population of about 258,000. Luton is home to Championship team Luton Town Football Club, London Luton Airport and The University of Bedfordshire. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. For all the latest news from Luton sign up to our newsletter here.
Explore Vermeer and Rembrandt with Your Own Private Art Specialist

Arriving at at 8:59 am with his VIP pass, you are first in front of the museum's four Vermeer paintings. Kaldenbach believes in a question and answer approach in the time-honored style of Socrates, allowing the client to discover the painting step-by-step. After, move on to the Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honour; standing directly before superb Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum. See his brush strokes and imagine yourself standing just in back of the great master. His late style shows wild, expressive brushwork and ability to penetrate the human soul.In the room with early Rembrandts, discover how the painter reached mastery within just a few years after turning 20. In the afternoon, after lunch - or another day - see the Rembrandt House Museum and explore where Rembrandt's masterpieces were painted. There are tables full of paint pigments and canvases of different kinds. You can see how he splurged on art objects as props.A day trip is also possible to the Royal Collection Mauritshuis, in The Hague, preferably arriving there at opening time (10 am) to be able to admire the museum's three superb Vermeers and all Rembrandts.Ricardo N and his wife Francis S. (New York City) are full-time art aficionados, traveling the world and visiting most of the fine art centers of Europe. They toured for three full days with Kaldenbach. Ricardo: "I would rate you as terrific. It is a great treat being with you - You saved my life in showing me the Mauritshuis collection - I thought it was completely closed!" Francis N.: "Kees is outstanding... he has a very rare gift among any of the great number of professional tour guide we met in our lifetime... in presenting a deep and very specific art history knowledge, and in combining this with passion and easy going presentation. My husband and I have spent our lives in the art world of NYC and the West Coast. We have rarely met such a wonderful guide. Kees is an outstanding fountain of visual knowledge and historic insight. He truly is top class within the field of Western art history!"Google: Kaldenbach Menu Art toursEmail: kalden@xs4all.nl Phone: 00316 2868 9775 (Amsterdam time)Rebate: 10% when you mention Luxury Travel Magazine.Millionaires' option: Travel the world to see all 36 Vermeer paintings in museums in Europe and the USA with Drs Kaldenbach. Make it your ultimate bucket list trip!Image: Vermeer Milkmaid
Yellowbag makes it easy to track price drops at online stores, but doesnt work so well for tracking Amazon preorders.

Im an unabashed bargain hunter, always on the lookout for a tantalizing coupon code, flash sale, or steep price drop on the things I need, want, and frequently purchase. Although there are websites like DealNews devoted to bargains, they often distract shoppers with whatever happens to be cheap at the moment, rather than the stuff youve had your eye on.

Price alert

Yellowbag (free on the iTunes store) is a universal app that alerts you to price drops on only the products youre actually interested in purchasing. The service only works for online stores, but thats not much of a limitation considering nearly all brick-and-mortar retailers these days have a web-based equivalent.

As Yellowbag discovers bargains, the app sends a push notification to alert you of a deal and retains a history of whats dropped in price.

Products can be added in two ways: Using the share extension with Mobile Safari or other apps or by copying a link from any product page, which is automatically detected when the app is launched, ready to add with a tap. Once added, shoppers can change the product image or assign it to a category. Theres also a web version of Yellowbag, which offers Chrome and Firefox browser extensions. (Sorry, Safari fans.)

Every day, Yellowbag checks the current price of products youve added, sending a push notification and/or email whenever theres a drop in price. Founded in the Netherlands, the service monitors pricing at 95 percent of online stores worldwide, and its easy to compile a list of your favorites right inside the app.

Shopping blues

Adding a new price alert is easy with a tap on the iOS share extension.

Online shoppers will be happy to hear Yellowbag is absolutely free, with one caveat: Youre limited to only 50 price alerts. After that, users must invite friends to earn more (an additional 50 for each person who signs up); theres unfortunately no in-app purchase option to buy more alerts.

As someone who buys a lot of Blu-ray and DVD movies on Amazon.com, I found Yellowbag to be unreliable for tracking price changes on preorder items. Since the product hasnt been released, the app parses data from older used Marketplace editions or worse yet, the cheaper streaming version, making alerts completely inaccurate.

I had problems with a persistent login when using my Facebook account during testing for this review, but am happy to report this problem appears to be resolved in the latest version 3.4 update. In addition to Facebook, you can also log in with a Google or Twitter account, or register a username with your existing email address instead.

Bottom line

When it works, Yellowbag is extremely convenient, and its easy to add products from just about anywhere. But nagging friends to sign up for additional price alerts is a drag.
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
Thiruvananthapuram: An Assam native suspected to be the killer of Jisha, who was brutally raped and murdered in Perumabavoor has been nabbed by the police from Thrissur-Palakkad border. Meanwhile his DNA sample had been sent for Forensic analysis.

The suspect identified as Amiyoor Islam was taken into custody on the basis of statement of a shoe-mart owner, where he purchased a chappal. The blood stained chappal was found near Jisha's house and the lab test confirmed that the blood stain matched Jisha's blood.

As per the reports, the suspect confessed the crime. Jisha, a law college student was brutally raped and murdered at her residence at Perumbavoor on April 28.
Thiruvananthapuram: Close to 50 days after Jisha was brutally raped and murdered at her home in Perumabavoor, an Assam native identified as Amiyoor Ul Islam was taken into police custody and has reportedly admitted the gruesome murder. As per the reports, the DNA sample of Amiyoor matched with the blood samples found on Jisha's body.

Meanwhile the police is questioning the 23-year-old in an undisclosed location and expected to announce his detention by evening. The investigation team made a major breakthrough in the case after the shoe-shop owner identified Amiyoor who bought a chappel from the shop. And it was the same blood stained chappel which was found at the scene of crime.

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had confirmed that the police have the Assam native and more details will be disclosed after questioning. Lauding the efforts of Kerala police, CM Vijayan added that this is definitely a feather on the cap of Kerala police. Jisha, a law college student was brutally raped and murdered at her residence at Perumbavoor on April 28.
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Jennifer Aniston's publicist dismisses pregnancy rumours

What is it with tabloids obsessing over whether or not a woman is pregnant? Jennifer Aniston, currently on holiday in the Bahamas with husband Justin Theroux, is the latest victim of pregnancy watch, a summer sport in which the paparazzi snap famous women in their bikinis, at angles they just didnt ask to be photographed from.

When Jennifer was spotted yesterday, lounging around and letting her washboard abs breathe for a minute, the internet went into overdrive.

She and Justin are ecstatic, InTouch Magazine in the US reported, saying they had been told the pregnancy news officially by an anonymous source. Jen has wanted to have a baby with Justin for years. Their baby news came at a bad time in her life, too  she just lost her mother, and she and Justin almost broke up. But now this surprise pregnancy has turned the worst of times into the best of times.

The article caused dozens of copycat stories online and became a top-trending topic on Facebook overnight. If it was true, fine. But as a representative for the 47 year-old Friends actress (who married Justin at her LA home last year) (opens in new tab) quickly denied the whole thing, its really not ok, is it?

Said publicist did, however, give the best response to the furore. She is not pregnant. Shame on InTouch for making up the whole story, but this is not the first time they have done so. What you see is her having just enjoyed a delicious big lunch and her feeling safe on private property. So having lunch. As we do.

Speaking in 2014 about the level of interest in her personal life and the pressures she has felt to have a child, Jennifer said; I don't have this sort of checklist of things that have to be done, and if they're not checked, then I've failed some part of my feminism or my value as a woman because I haven't birthed a child.

I've birthed a lot of things and feel like I've mothered many things, and I don't think it's fair to put that pressure on people.

So please, please, can we all just let Jennifer Aniston get back to enjoying her lunch?
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Twenty weeks since walking through the gates of HMAS Creswell to start initial training, 104 naval officers graduated today. Friends and family were on hand to share in the achievements of the 82 men and 22 women.



Honouring a long-standing commitment to the New Entry Officers, the Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, AC, reviewed the parade, hosted by Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, AO, CSC, RAN.



While we celebrate the achievements of the officers on parade today, our thoughts are also with the family and friends of a sailor who died during a port visit in the Middle East region, Air Chief Marshal Binskin said.



Students on the New Entry Officers Course 54 were introduced to the history and ethos of the Royal Australian Navy in the 20 week course. They were also introduced to communications, logistics and naval systems and underwent weapons instruction, qualified in first aid, fire-fighting, ship damage repair and achieved qualifications in small boat handling.



Commanding Officer Creswell, Captain Stephen Hussey, said while there were some standout trainees, he was buoyed by the quality and motivation of the new officers.



The Navys future is bright with this calibre of talent undertaking a service career, he said.



The trainees performed well during the intensive practical and theoretical instruction and they are well prepared for their entry to the Fleet.



Graduate, Lieutenant Alistair Oakes, 26, from Wollstonecraft, New South Wales, is looking forward to joining the Fleet as a Legal Officer.



I am excited about building upon what I have learnt and I have been fortunate to be posted to HMAS Kuttabul, in Sydney, so I will also be returning to my fiancee and family, he said.



HMAS Creswell is the home of naval officer training. Graduates are trained in areas such as leadership, seamanship, communications, naval history, physical fitness and weapons handling. Graduates will now progress to specialised training in aviation, engineering, maritime warfare, maritime logistics, chaplaincy, law, medical and dental disciplines.


Bulgaria's prime minister said on Thursday he would not join a proposed NATO fleet meant to counter Russian forces in the Black Sea as he did not want a war there, a day after Moscow warned against any build-up.

Boiko Borisov said he did not want to see frigates sailing past the tourist resorts, at a joint press conference with President Rosen Plevneliev who described Bulgaria as a peaceful country.

Tensions between Russia and the alliance have risen, particularly since the Ukraine crisis and Turkey's downing of a Russian jet in November. Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014, has its own Black Sea Fleet based at Sevastopol.

Turkey and Romania, the two other NATO members along the Black Sea coast, have called for the NATO fleet and more alliance troops in an area important for both East and West given its energy reserves and closeness to the Middle East.

"I always say that I want the Black Sea to see sailboats, yachts, large boats with tourists and not become an arena of military action ... I do not need a war in the Black Sea," Borisov said.

"Let's stop with the speculations that fleets will be set up against anyone," President Plevneliev added.

"Bulgaria is a peaceful country and its foreign policy is not aimed at anyone."

A senior Russian diplomat on Wednesday warned NATO not to build up its naval forces in the Black Sea, saying such a move would undermine regional security and Moscow's already frayed ties with the alliance.

The issue of the fleet is expected to be raised again at NATO's Warsaw Summit in July as the alliance is considering what more it can do to deter what it sees as growing Russian aggression.

Bulgaria, seen as having the closest relations with Russia out of the former eastern bloc countries, has expressed readiness to take part in a multinational NATO land brigade based in Romania. Sofia said it could deploy up to 400 people for training and joint exercises.

Under the Montreux Convention, countries which don't have a Black Sea coastline cannot keep their warships there for more than 21 days. NATO members Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria are all Black Sea Basin countries.



(Reporting by Angel Krasimirov)
Rates from Australia to fall, Brazil rates to nudge higher.



Freight rates for large capesize dry cargo ships on key Asian routes could diverge next week with rates from Australia to China trending lower on weaker sentiment while prices from Brazil to China could rise on tight vessel supply, ship brokers said.



That comes as freight rates slipped on Wednesday from multi-month highs hit on Monday.



"Sentiment in the Pacific is not good. There is still room for rates from Australia to drop further," a Shanghai capesize broker said on Thursday.



Fortescue Metals Group chartered a capesize ship at a rate of $4.70 per tonne on Thursday to haul around 160,000 tonnes of iron ore from Australia to China, brokers said.



That was down from the Baltic index level of $4.83 per tonne for the route on Wednesday.



"There's no hope for the market from Australia," the broker said.



That was despite the Big Three Australian miners - Rio Tinto , BHP Billiton and FMG - actively chartering ships this week.



"It's the end of their financial half year or full year so they are pushing out as much (iron ore) as they can," said a Singapore capesize broker.



"Next week feels a bit softer," the Singapore broker said.



Capesize charter rates for Western Australia-China slipped to $4.83 per tonne on Wednesday from $4.85 per tonne the same day last week. Rates hit $4.98 on June 13, the highest since Nov. 10.



But freight rates from Brazil to China climbed on Thursday because of the limited number of ships for hire.



"Tonnage is very tight from Brazil," the Singapore broker said.



Freight rates were around $9.40 per tonne for a capesize ship for a voyage from Brazil to China on Thursday, up from $9.26 on Wednesday's close, the Singapore broker said.



That would be the highest since early December and up from $9.13 per tonne last Wednesday.



The capesize market is affected by significant overcapacity which is weighing down on rates, ship broker Banchero Costa (Bancosta) said in a report on Wednesday.



The capesize fleet is forecast to grow 2 percent this year in tonnage terms with only marginal growth in iron ore and coal volumes, the main capesize cargoes, the Bancosta report said.



Charter rates for smaller panamax vessels for a north Pacific round-trip voyage fell to $3,794 per day on Wednesday against $3,864 per day a week earlier in what Norwegian ship broker Fearnley said was an over-tonnaged market.



Freight rates in the Far East for smaller supramax vessels were flat at around $5,500 per day this week on stable cargo volumes, brokers said.



The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index fell to 604 on Wednesday from 610 last week.





Reporting by Keith Wallis
With the implementation date for new container weighing requirements 14-days away, Chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission Mario Cordero said the time has come for ocean carriers to embrace the obvious solution to achieving compliance that Marine Terminal Operators can offer.

Specifically, Cordero asserted the weight of export containers, as determined by terminal operators, can and should be classified as the Verified Gross Mass (VGM) of the container.

Cordero also noted that any VGM compliance regime established under the auspices of a discussion agreement on file at the Federal Maritime Commission that adds burdens to declaring container weights will invite increased scrutiny by the Commission.

There is a course to SOLAS VGM compliance provided by the Coast Guard that is not only not burdensome, it requires no additional action at all. Why anyone would add procedures, requirements and costs to doing business is not only puzzling, it raises the specter of anticompetitive behavior and necessitating Commission action, said Cordero. Using the weight taken at the terminal gate for the purposes of satisfying the need for a verified weight of a container is a simple and efficient solution for assuring the continued smooth flow of export cargoes.

Furthermore, Cordero insisted carriers should not only accept weights determined by terminal operators for complying with the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) amendment that mandates providing verified container weights, but the shipping lines should also streamline the transmission of the information.

In the interest of furthering efficiencies, weights determined at terminal gates for the purposes of SOLAS VGM compliance should be transmitted directly from the terminal operator to the shipping line, not provided to the shipper to then present to the carrier, observed Cordero. The quickest route between two points is a straight line and that applies to data flow as much as it does to navigation. It only makes sense to have a direct reporting of container weights from the terminal operator to the ocean carrier.

Cordero expressed frustration that with the SOLAS VGM implementation date looming, uncertainty remains as to what will be expected of shippers, especially given the Marine Safety Information Bulletin (009/16) issued by the United States Coast Guard on April 28th announced that  existing U.S. laws and regulations for providing verified container weights are equivalent to the requirements in SOLAS Regulation VI/2.

The Coast Guard has made it clear that the existing methods and procedures for tendering export cargo and declaring container weights are already in compliance with what was mandated via the International Maritime Organizations amendment to SOLAS, said Cordero. While I certainly applaud efforts to make the maritime transportation of cargo safer, I am increasingly struggling to fathom why the ocean carrier community has not fully embraced the equivalency declaration as a way to demonstrate flexibility and sensitivity to our U.S.-export shippers. Additionally, such an approach would further the objectives of the Presidents Export Initiative.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be dredging MIlford Harbor over the next two weeks, says a press release from Milford Mayor Ben Blakes office.

Army Corps will be using a 150-foot vessel called the Currituck, which is a special purpose dredge barge.

Over the next two weeks, the crew of the Currituck will remove the silting and shoaling along the federal channel by relocating approximately 14,000 cubic yards of material to a near shore site, off of Bayview Beach.

The dredging will be at no cost to the city and will help ensure that Connecticuts most popular recreational harbor remains safe to navigate, said Mayor Ben Blake.

Built by the Barbour Boat Works from North Carolina in 1974, the Currituck vessel was converted to dredge in 1977 at the US Army Engineer Yard, Eagle Island, North Carolina.

The dredging will be at no cost to the city and will help ensure that Connecticuts most popular recreational harbor remains safe to navigate, he added.
1943 - At Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, Japanese aircraft conduct the largest raid since April 7. Although a large number of enemy planes are shot down, LST-340 and USS Celeno (AK-76) are damaged.



1944 - Marine Gunnery Sgt. Robert H. McCard serves as a platoon sergeant with Company A, Fourth Tank Battalion, Fourth Marine Division as they fight against the Japanese at the Battle of Saipan, Marianas Islands. With his tank destroyed by enemy 77-mm. gun fire, he persists with the attack until he is forced to abandon the tank, exposing himself while covering his evacuating men. Wounded and with the grenade supply diminished, he dismantles a tank machine gun and attacks the enemy positions, killing 16 enemy soldiers before sacrificing his life to save his men. For his "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity" on this occasion, McCard is posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.



1953 - During the Korean War, USS Princeton (CVS 37) launches 184 sorties against enemy front-line positions, a new record for offensive sorties flown from a carrier during the Korean War in a single day.



1959 - A P4M "Mercator" is fired on by two North Korean MiG aircraft while on a routine flight over international waters off Korea. The attack wounds one crewman and damages the plane, forcing an emergency landing at Miho, Japan.



1965 - The US Navy schedules the reactivation of USS Repose (AH 16), which is the first hospital ship active for the Vietnam War.



1990 - USS Monterey (CG 61) is commissioned at Mayport, Fla. The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser is named for the Battle of Monterrey during the Mexican-American War in 1846. She is homeported at Norfolk, Va.



2006 - USNS Arctic (T AOE 8) arrives at Virginia to drop off a rescued Scottish yachtsman after assisting in his rescue in the mid-Atlantic.





(Source: Naval History and Heritage Command, Communication and Outreach Division)
President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) wants to turn his country into a global maritime axis. He urged the Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister to immediately work on a simple but implementable maritime policy.

According to the president, Indonesia should focus its efforts on the maritime industry, which has immense potential to stimulate the country's economy.

"We believe that our future is in the sea," Jokowi said in a statement.

Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung has said the government is set to establish a maritime policy as a reference for Indonesias maritime development. The policy is targeted to be completed in July.

Turning Indonesia into a global maritime shaft is a strategic idea that will ensure inter-island connectivity, says Indonesias Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti.

The Minister said that this will lead to growth in the fisheries sector and an improvement in the means of water transportation besides underlining the importance of maritime security.

Earlier, Jokowi said the maritime development policy should be able to consolidate existing maritime development programs, saying the policy would serve as a guideline for maritime development in the country.

"Indonesia, with 70 percent of its area being maritime territory, has only [managed to derive] less than 30 percent of the national GDP from the maritime sector," the president said. He added that Indonesia's maritime sector has the potential of yielding up to $1.2 trillion annually.
ABS has been selected by the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) as Japans first foreign Recognized Organization (RO) for maritime labor inspection.



Maritime Labor Convention comprises 16 articles, containing general provisions, which consists of five Titles that outline specific provisions grouped by standard. They include minimum requirements for seafarers to work on a ship; conditions of employment; accommodation, recreational facilities, food and catering; health protection, medical care, welfare and social security protection; and compliance and enforcement of ILO Maritime Labor Convention, 2006 (MLC), ratified in August 2013.



We are very pleased to be the first foreign Recognized Organization authorized by MLIT for maritime labor inspection in Japan, said Akira Akiyama, ABS Vice President of Japan, Pacific Division. As an RO, we will be able to offer an even wider range of services to our customers here.



The law requires ships (excluding fishing vessels and noncommercial vessels) of more than 500 gross tons and engaged in international voyages to undergo maritime labor inspection by the State or a Recognized Organization to verify that living and working conditions meet MLC requirements that valid certificates are being carried onboard.
A U.S. warship took its first delivery of Italian-made biofuel on Thursday as part of the Navy's programme to use more alternative energy.

The USS Mason was refuelled alongside an Italian vessel, the Andrea Doria, in the seas off of Italy's southern coast with a mix produced by Italy's Eni that has 5.5 percent palm oil biofuel blended into marine fuel.

The two destroyers travelled at about 5 knots side by side with a supply ship, the Etna, between them pumping the fuel to both ships through large black tubes.

"It's a first today," U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told Reuters aboard the Mason. "But it's the new normal. It's what you're going to see - refuelling after refuelling after refuelling."

Mabus has championed the "Great Green Fleet" initiative since 2009, saying it will give a strategic advantage to the United States by reducing dependence on fluctuating oil prices and producers who may not have America's best interest in mind.

"Fuel can be used as a weapon," Mabus said. "All you have to do is look at what Russia did to Crimea, what Russia did to the Ukraine. Look at what Russia tried to do to Europe before the price of oil went down."

The cost of the fuel was $2.20 per gallon, which Mabus said was "very competitive" for Europe.

Many environmentalists say palm oil production damages the environment as it is often grown in plantations where rainforest has been cleared. Biofuels can also be made from other biomass or from by-products such as waste cooking oils.

The U.S. Navy now has 30 percent of its fleet, the world's biggest, running on alternative energy - which includes nuclear power - and aims to increase that to 50 percent by 2020, Mabus said.

Italy aims to have 50 percent of its fleet using alternative energy by 2020, Italy's Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi, also aboard the USS Mason, told Reuters. About 10 percent of vessels are already running on alternative energy and Italy's submarines should start using biofuel this year, he said.

Italy had eight vessels present during the refuelling, including a submarine, and several ships from the U.S. Sixth Fleet were also there, including the nuclear-powered USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier.





(By Steve Scherer; Additional reporting by Gabriele Pileri; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
The offshore supply ship, MV Malaviya Seven detained, at the Port of Aberdeen, UK, by the International Transport Federation [ITF] with the support of the Port State Control, MCA  was operating under what the shipping union, RMT, has described as a blatant example of modern day slavery.

The Malaviya Seven will stay at port until the workers are paid, according to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA).

The RMT union claimed that 15 Indian crew members in the Mumbai-registered vessel have not been paid for nearly two months, with some having been without pay for longer.

The Malaviya Seven was contracted by oil giant BP between June 1 and June 15.

A second vessel, the supply ship MV Malaviya Twenty, from the same Indian-flagged fleet, faces similar detention in the port of Great Yarmouth, where Port State Control has been alerted to the same crew treatment onboard.
The Dutch company Van der Velden Marine Systems (VDVMS) in conjunction with the U.S. representative Ships Machinery International, Inc. (SMI) has announced the launching of a new Jones Act Articulated Tug Barge (ATB) with BARKE high-lift flap rudders for coastwise service in the U.S. This new design vessel brings increased maneuvering to the fleet of ATB vessels plying U.S. coastal waters.



Tank tests prove that for this type of vessel this is the most effective rudder design. This ATB will have enhanced maneuverability and excellent course keeping stability. The efficiency provided by this high technology rudder solution will result in significant savings over the life of the vessel.



This modern ATB is designed by North American naval architecture firm Guido Perla and Associates, Inc. to the following vessel characteristics: length 43 meters, breadth 14 meters and a draught of 6.75 meters. Power is via two main engines of 4,640 kW and three main generators of 250 kW each with a standby emergency generator of 150 kW. The vessel uses a pin connector system between the tug and the barge and fully complies with ABS Under 90 m Rules, Maltese Cross A1 AMS ACCU Towing Vessel, SOLAS, USCG Subchapter I.



Arthur Dewey, Vice President of SMI, said, We are confident that their faith in Van der Velden rudders will be rewarded. There is no other vessel like this one in the U.S. at present time. It has an exceptional maneuvering system with two independently controlled and operated hydro-dynamic Van der Velden BARKE rudders. Independent Proportional Steering will allow the rudders to be actuated either independently or synchronized.



Van der Velden has done a lot of work to facilitate the installation of these rudders into a hull and works closely with the designer and shipyard to ensure a smooth transition from initial design to final installation. Guido Perla commented, Van der Velden provided excellent technical support and on time delivery of design documents that helped us develop the engineering and design for the installation of their steering system.



The key driver behind the BARKE rudder is its innovative and sophisticated progressive high lift design, offering maneuvering and course keeping performance as well as smooth operational comfort. The progressively operating flap linkage system is contained in a fully enclosed, grease-lubricated BARKE housing. This results in minimum wear on the linkage components and eliminates the problems caused by contact with floating objects.



The complete tug (the future M/V Sea Power), which is under construction at BAE Systems shipyard in Jacksonville, Florida, will be handed over to its owner Sea-Vista ATB I LLC, in the summer of 2016.



Another set of BARKE high-lift rudders will be installed on another ATB before this summer. Van der Velden is happy to make a valuable contribution to the world of ATB tugs.
Solstad Offshore ASA (SOFF) says it has entered into a frame agreement with Technip Norge AS and Technip UK Limited (Technip) to supply vessels for trenching, construction and subsea services.



The deals commercial terms have not been disclosed.



The frame agreement, which is valid for 2016-2018, will enable Technip to utilize Normand Progress, Normand Pioneer, Normand Ranger and Normand Mariner. SOFF will be Technips supplier of tonnage for trenching and subsea construction work.Normand Pioneer (Photo: Solstad Offshore)
CMA CGM and PSA Singapore Terminals (PSA) have confirmed that they will establish form a joint venture company CMA CGM-PSA Lion Terminal Pte. Ltd. (CPLT) to operate and use four mega container berths in Singapore.

CPLT will commence operations from the second half of this year, allowing CMA CGM and its shipping line affiliates to leverage on the port infrastructure and technologies with this latest Pasir Panjang expansion.

There was no disclosed investment amount for the joint venture deal, but CPLT will be providing long-term terminal services to CMA CGM and its shipping line affiliates, both companies said.

Rodolphe Saade, Vice Chairman of CMA CGM Group: CMA CGM is pleased to announce this important partnership with PSA. It is a significant step, demonstrating the ongoing importance of Singapore to our strategy, and delivering on our commitment to making Singapore the Asian hub for the Group.

Tan Chong Meng, Group CEO of PSA International: We are honoured to embark on this win-win partnership. CMA CGM-PSA Lion Terminal will cater to the volume growth of the CMA CGM Group in Asia. PSA looks forward to working alongside CMA CGM to ensure that its hub operations flourish, and enhance Singapores premier status as the worlds busiest transhipment hub.

CMA CGM is in the process of acquiring 100% of Neptune Orient Lines (NOL) for $2.4 billion in its biggest-ever deal. CMA CGM currently controls over 78% of the Singapore-listed company, and has a cash offer on the table for all remaining shares.

CMA CGM will also move its Asian headquarters to Singapore from Hong Kong. CMA CGM is a leading worldwide shipping group. As of June 2016, it has 536 vessels that call at more than 420 ports in the world, on all five continents.

The move has implications for Westports Holdings, the operator of Port Klang's container terminal, which depends on CMA for 30 percent of its volume and the Ocean Alliance members together for more than half.
ABSG Consulting Inc., a subsidiary of ABS Group of Companies, Inc. (ABS Group), has been contracted by Kinder Morgan, Inc. to develop a Maintenance and Integrity Program for the liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification terminal at Elba Island (Elba LNG Project) near Savannah, Georgia.

ABS Group will develop the maintenance and integrity programs for the base plant, balance of plant and the terminal upgrade. The full scope of ABS Group's services cover program development and execution, including project management, strategy development and business processes, asset register, mechanical integrity (MI), preventative maintenance development, spare parts and bill of materials, as well as data asset management services.

The Elba Project will leverage ABS Group's core capabilities providing enterprise asset management (EAM), MI services and proven methodology for asset integrity management within our Asset Performance Optimization and Technical Inspection and Verification service lines. ABS Group has performed more than 330 projects worldwide supporting LNG facilities and maritime assets delivering EAM, MI, project quality management and other process safety programs and services.
Port operator PSA International was named the best global container terminal operating firm for the second year running, in the 2016 Asian Freight, Logistics & Supply Chain Awards held in Shanghai.

PSA also received the Best Container Terminal  Asia (Over 4 million TEUs)" award.

The Port of Singapore clinched the award for its leading performance on a range of criteria including cost competitiveness, container shipping-friendly fee regime, provision of suitable containing shipping-related infrastructure, timely and adequate investment in new infrastructure to meet future demand and the facilitation of ancillary services, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) said in a press release.

Tan Chong Meng, group chief executive officer of PSA International, said its award is an encouraging "shot in the arm for all of us".

Tan Chong said, This show of support by the industry is an encouraging shot in the arm for all of us at PSA. We are honoured to receive the accolades and will continue to invest in new projects and upgrade our portfolio, processes and people to be able to meet our customers growing needs.

Fock Siew Wah, Group Chairman of PSA International, said, I wish to thank our customers and business partners for their tremendous vote of confidence. My gratitude also goes to our management, staff and unions who have worked tirelessly as a team to serve our stakeholders. We remain committed to delivering the high productivity and service standards that the industry has come to expect from the PSA brand.

As one of the leading global port groups, PSA participates in around 40 terminals in 16 countries across Asia, Europe and the Americas with flagship operations in PSA Singapore Terminals and PSA Antwerp.
A Virginia-class attack submarine will be called the USS Arkansas, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced that SSN 800, a Virginia-class attack submarine, will bear the name USS Arkansas.

As we sail deeper into the 21st century it is time for another USS Arkansas; time to keep that storied name alive in our Navy, said Mabus. She will sail the world like those who have gone before her, defending the American people and representing our American values through presence.

Virginia-class subs have enhanced stealth and surveillance capabilities. They can attack targets ashore with Tomahawk cruise missiles and engage in anti-submarine and anti-ship warfare, mine delivery and minefield mapping. They also can deliver special forces.

The last ship to have the name USS Arkansas was a Virginia-class nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1980 and decommissioned in 1998, according to the U.S. Navy.

The 377-foot sub will weigh 7,800 tons, according to a press release from the Navy. It can operate at more than 25 knots submerged and will be powered by a nuclear reactor that will not have to be refueled over the life of the ship.

It will be built by General Dynamics Electric Boat (GDEB) and Newport News Shipbuilding. Construction begins in 2018, with the sub joining the fleet in 2023.
India and Thailand are set to firm up cooperation to combat terrorism, and boost maritime security, defence ties and trade during Thai Prime Minister General Prayuth Chan-ochas maiden visit to India, reports PTI.

Prayut has earlier said that maritime security cooperation in the Indian Ocean would be put on the table for talks with his Indian counterpart. The expected cooperation will include military exercises, information exchange and operations to eradicate terrorism and piracy, he said.

Indias Vice-President Hamid Ansari told the leadership of Thailand that India-Thailand collaboration is necessary to ensure freedom of navigation and connectivity in the Southeast Asian region, says the South Indian news paper Hindu.

As maritime neighbours, we have a shared interest in the security of international sea lanes of communication and commerce. Our resolve to strengthen our bilateral engagement in the areas of security and defence will help the region as a whole and promote regional economic integration and connectivity, Ansari said while addressing the state banquet hosted in his honour by the Thai Prime Minister Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha.

India and Thailand recently held a joint task force meeting in Delhi to deepen maritime and defence cooperation which covers a range of issues, including ocean safety, disaster management and anti-terror drills. The delegations also confirmed that India and Thailand will soon hold naval exercises in the Andaman Seas.
The two newest inland river towboats in Tidewater Transportation and Terminals fleet, Granite Point and Ryan Point, were christened during a late afternoon ceremony Saturday, June 11 at Vancouver Landing in Vancouver, Wash.

After Deacon Tim Dooley from Portlands Holy Family Parish delivered a blessing, Patty Reed, wife of Bruce Reed, Tidewaters Vice President and Chief Operations Officer, and Diane Laya, wife of Marc Schwartz, Tidewaters Maintenance and Engineering Manager, broke champagne bottles over the vessels hull while the City of Vancouvers fire boat sprayed Columbia River water in the background.

This celebration is the culmination of three years of research, design and hard work, expressed Marc Schwartz, Tidewaters Maintenance & Engineering Manager. We began the Point Class project with a visionary belief that we could create a vessel that efficiently serves our customers along the river, is environmentally-friendly, and is outfitted with crew endurance in mind. I believe we accomplished our goal.

Three years ago, Tidewater retained the services of CT Marine, Naval Architects and Marine Engineers of Edgecomb, Maine, to design a towboat that can maneuver barges through the swift-moving currents, high winds, and eight navigation locks along the Columbia Snake River System. Once the plans were developed, Tidewater contracted with Vigors Portland shipyard to construct the series of vessels, returning propulsion-construction to Swan Island, and partnered with Umpqua Banks Equipment Leasing and Finance Division to finance the two tugs.

The crews that operate these boats say that there is no tug that they have ever operated that gives the operability that these boats have. They are absolutely perfect, said Bob Curcio, Tidewater CEO, during the christening ceremony. From the designing it, the building it, the helping buying it, and finally the operating it, thanks to everyone that made it happen. Its one hell of a proud day for all the Tidewater folks.

Its been a great source of pride for the Vigor team to build these three tugs, expressed Corey Yraguen, Executive Vice President of Fabrication. These boats will be on the river after all of us are likely gone from this earth. That is an astounding thought  that they will be creating jobs and will be a part of the economic engine of our community for a very long time. Thank you Tidewater and all of you who are associated with these great companies that make these kinds of cool things happen.

Tracy Kruse, Vigor Production Superintendent, emphasized how very different this project was for him and the Vigor team, This project was local. These tugs are going to be part of the landscape of the northwest for decades to come. Friends and associates who know I worked on the Point Class series will call me up and say, hey, I just saw the Crown Point pushing a barge down the river. The pride is something we, as a community, can all share in.

The first vessel in the series, Crown Point, was christened in June of 2015 and has been in operation for over a year. The Granite Point recently began journeying upriver, and the Ryan Point will follow suit in early July.

All three vessels are built to the same specifications - 104 (length) by 38 feet (beam), with a depth at full load of 11 feet, and a hexagonal wheelhouse with floor-to-ceiling windows on all six sides. An enhanced steering system utilizing four main steering and four flanking rudders, coupled with two Caterpillar 3516C Tier 3 engines, allowed the design team to increase the margins of safety and efficiency. With crew endurance being a priority, Tidewater employed Noise Control Engineers of Billerica MA to develop a sound and vibration control package for the vessel. By incorporating Christie and Grey vibration control mounts and comprehensive acoustic insulation, noise levels register at less than 60 decibels in the accommodations during vessel operation  which is equivalent to an air conditioner.

Tidewater and their collaborative partners spent a great deal of time conceiving and engineering the plans used for all three vessels. The final product has been recognized globally. WorkBoat Magazine and Marine Log, named Crown Point as one of the Best and Most Significant Work Boats of 2015.

The Point Class towboats stand out amongst other towboats along the river, stated Bruce Reed. The vessels are a true testament to the dedication and pride of the entire shipbuilding team at Tidewater and Vigor.

Tidewater has serviced clients from the mouth of the Columbia River to Lewiston, Idaho for nearly 85 years. The names of the tugs reflect this Tidewater tenet  honoring the past, committed to the future. Crown Point was named for the majestic promontory on the Columbia River Gorge, approximately 15 miles east of Portland, Oregon; Granite Point was named for the significant granite cliff in Washington, about 20 miles southwest of Pullman along the Snake River; and Ryan Point was named after the scenic bend in the Columbia River (Washington State side) about one mile upstream from the I-5 Bridge.

At 104 feet in length and with a beam of 38 feet, each Point Class towboat is powered by two Caterpillar 3516C EPA Tier 3 certified diesel engines producing 2,240 BHP, each at 1,600 RPM. The engines drive two 92 x 100 fixed pitch, stainless steel propellers through CT28 Kort Nozzles capable of a service speed of 8 knots. Operating in the Columbia River Gorge high winds, extreme currents and swells can be considered normal piloting conditions. For this reason an enhanced steering system utilizing four steering and four flanking rudders was designed.

Electrical power is provided by two C7.1, Tier 3 generators, rated at 480v, 200KW at 1,800 RPM. The generators are controlled through an automatic transfer system that ensures the vessel will recover from a generator power loss in less than 30 seconds. Deck machinery includes seven Patterson WWP 65E-7.5, 65 ton electric deck winches, with pilot house remote operation and local push button control stations on the main deck. Each winch has Samson 1 3/8 Turbo 75 Synthetic Line.

In order to utilize the newest technology and minimize power usage, variable frequency drives were used in all major rotating machinery applications and LED lighting was employed in both interior and exterior lighting applications. The vessel is fitted with a Kidde NOVEC 1230 fire suppression system and fire detection in both the machinery spaces and accommodations.
Specialist liquefied natural gas (LNG) training and simulation provider GTT Training has been awarded a contract by Teekay Shipping to supply the G-Sim LNG simulator software into its training centers in Glasgow, Manila and Bahrain.

The contract includes the development of a ME-GI propulsion configuration based on the Teekay LNG carriers that have recently entered into service. This new configuration will be in addition to the 16 LNG vessel configurations already available within the G-Sim simulator software.

Used to provide hands-on, real-time training in the processes and procedures that must be followed to undertake and complete any type of LNG cargo related operation, G-Sim provides full simulation of all systems onboard a vessel that are involved in the management and handling of the LNG cargo and maintaining the vessel in a safe condition.

Entirely designed by GTT Training, expert in the behavior of LNG and providing training simulators to the maritime industry, G-Sim is one of the most effective training platforms for training operatives in the handling of LNG.
Bollinger Band Trading Strategy

John Bollinger developed what was to become known as Bollinger Bands as a useful measurement of volatility. It is I think unnecessary to go into the maths of the Bollinger Band as they can be found on every trading platform.



As John Bollinger himself noted low volatility begets high volatility so it is useful to have a graphic representation of low volatility so that we can look for our entry in that area to take advantage of the high volatility that must come.

The standard setting are a 20 look back period and 2 standard deviations apart around a simple moving average. This setting is fine for longer term trades but if you are e day or swing trading then change the look back period to 11 and leave the standard deviation as they are at 2.



Notice the constriction in the bands where the arrows are, like someone has squeezed a sausage!



This is the area of low volatility and you can see the high volatility that follows, that's what we want, we don't want to be waiting for an age for the action to unfold.



Here then we have a simple strategy to trade.



Bollinger Band Strategy

1) Wait for an area of low volatility

2) Wait for the candle to close over the simple moving average. - black line

3) Wait for the price to retrace to the simple moving average. - black line

4) Enter

5) Stop loss for a short trade. The top of the candle that crossed the line.

6) Stop loss for a long trade. The bottom of the candle that crossed the line.

Let's take a look at how it pans out.

At (A) the green candle closes over and then retraces 2 candles later to touch the line.

At (B) There is a tiny candle that closes under the line and the next one opens on the line, that's a touch and so it's a go at that point.

At (C) same thing it opens touching the line.

At (D) This is a very large candle so it's not surprising that is does not retrace, you can't win them all!

I hope you enjoyed this article. the Bollinger Band strategy can be very profitable!

Chris Drinkwater



www.Animusfx.com

I am a successful Day / Swing Trader and Partner in a local business in the South West of the UK.

I have been trading now for 10 years and in that time have accumulated a huge amount of screen time and experience, with many thousands of trades taken in that time.

I am acutely aware how difficult it is for anyone starting out in this trading business and how much information in the public domain is inaccurate, out of date or just plain wrong.

We started our website with the intention of educating newcomers and giving them the tools they need to increase their confidence, consistency and discipline in trading.

We now have over 250 students in 49 countries across the world and we are growing fast!



 2016 Chris Drinkwater - 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.




Debbie Cox, who runs Triple H Farm and Kennel, used her talents on Wednesday to teach children about the responsibilities that come with owning a puppy.

Cox, who breeds and shows corgis and Australian shepherds, offered a puppy training class at the Spencer-Penn Centre in Spencer, where students learned about the general care of pets, their sleeping habits, and their maintenance needs.

She began the class with the history of the dog, which dated back to a relationship between wolves and cavemen.

"They were working pets. They helped with hunting," Cox said.

Over time, canines became domesticated animals. They were used for both practical purposes and companionship.

However, small puppies  who are learning about the world around them do not always know the difference between right and wrong. Sometimes, puppies make mistakes that older dogs understand as unacceptable behavior.

During the class, the puppies bit at the mat they were playing on, which older dogs would know to not do.

"When theyre doing something they shouldnt do, give them something they can do," Cox said.

Coxs helper, Memory Roberts, brought the puppies toys to play with instead.

Cox said that it was not uncommon for puppies to get themselves into mischief. She suggested crate training for when owners are unable to keep a close eye on their mischievous puppy.

"Puppies need to have their own space. Its just like your room at home," Cox said.

Cox said that puppies are playful, and with playfulness comes an abundance of energy.

"You need to teach your dog how to do things so he wont get bored. Dogs can learn to fetch and shake quickly," Cox said.

Sometimes, a puppy can get too playful and they may bite harder than they realize.

"One thing they should never chew on is you," Cox said. "Let the puppy know that you are the boss. You dont need to be mean, just firm."

Cox also covered grooming techniques and encouraged the class to brush their dogs every day.

"The whole time youre messing with them, youre taming them. Youre giving them socialization," Cox said.

Cox said that from a young age, owners should bathe their dogs, trim their toenails, brush their coat, brush their teeth and get them wormed.

Through quick, short lessons, "you can teach them all kinds of fun tricks," Cox said.

Some tricks and commands include: sit, watch me, come here, wait, stand, and off.

Even through the instruction time was necessary to learn about puppy management, the children most enjoyed playing with the puppies and teaching them to walk on a leash.

"I thought it was fun. I thought the puppies were cute. Its so cute when they burry their face in your neck or your arm or your shoulder," Mary Evelyn Quirk said.

"It licked me on my nose, glasses, and forehead!" Gregory Spencer exclaimed. "Every dog seems to love me."

Carson Rhoads liked the Corgi because "its nice."

Anna Haynes also preferred the Corgi "because its soft and warm."

"My favorite part was when it licked me," Jahzara Liverpool said.

Ben Carswells favorite puppy was a mostly-black Australian shepherd.

"He was fluffy and walked pretty," Carswell said.

Karlyn Hall preferred the mostly-white Australian shepherd because "it would lick you in the face."

Sam Thurman said, "I liked getting to hold them. They like attention."

"I liked the black and white dog because it looks like my dogs," Cheyenne Whitlock said.

Samuel Aboytes also preferred the mostly-black puppy because it was "more playful."

Mary Ann Brown liked "petting the yellow one."

Abby Corriher was also fond of the Corgi.

"Its sweet and its tiny," Corriher said. "But if I could have any dog, itd be a Great Dane because theyre huge."

"I liked that they were playful and fluffy," Naomi Rhoads said. "Theyre just so loveable and high maintenance."

Giving them socialization, Cox humorously concluded, "This is a good way to train my puppies."

The next session  an adult dog training and care lesson  will take place Wednesday, June 22 at 1 p.m. at the center in Spencer. Pre-registration is preferred, but walk-ins are welcome.
Greg Preston has been selected to succeed the long-time executive director of Piedmont Community Services, Jim Tobin, who is retiring.

Preston, who has been Piedmonts director of community support services for several years, will begin his position as executive director on July 1, said Tobin, whose last day as executive director will be June 30.

According to Piedmonts website, community support services include case management, supported living/in-home, psychosocial rehabilitation  Horizons, residential services and group homes.

Preston previously worked in emergency services and case management at Piedmont, according to Tobin.

According to Prestons resume, he has been employed at Piedmont since 2000. He worked as a school social worker for Henry County Public Schools from 1995-99 and as a child protective services senior worker for the Social Services Department in Martinsville from 1992-95.

His resume lists this education: Roanoke College from 1985-87, St. Pauls College from 1987-89 and Longwood University from 1998-2000. He earned a bachelors degree in sociology and a masters degree in counseling.

"He is a local person, a Henry County native," Tobin said. Preston lives in the Chestnut Knob area of Henry County,

Preston has been involved in a number of local organizations, Tobin said.

Prestons resume lists these achievements and volunteer experiences: U.S. Army National Guard; president of Tau Omicron Chapter, Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc., and Life Member of that fraternity; past board member of American Red Cross; Citizens Against Family Violence board member; trustee, Moral Hill Missionary Baptist Church; and Acts 4 Ministries board chair.

"He is a logical, great, internal choice," Tobin said of Preston. "He brings a lot of stability to Piedmont. He brings a lot of expertise. Piedmont is in good hands."

Asked to comment further on Prestons strengths, Tobin said, "He is deeply entrenched in this community. He and his family have been part of this community many, many years. He has a depth of experience of what Piedmont does, including emergency services, housing, intellectual disability (services). He is well connected with funding sources Piedmont has in Richmond. He will bring  continuity of history moving forward but with a new set of eyes."

Piedmonts board of directors advertised the position of executive director in January. It was broadly advertised locally, in Virginia and nationally, Tobin said. A recruitment committee narrowed the applicants to two people, one internal (Preston) and one external, whom Tobin did not name.

Piedmonts board of directors also consulted with the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services before recently selecting the new executive director, Tobin said.

Prestons salary as executive director will be about $110,000, Tobin said.

Piedmont provides a wide range of mental health, substance abuse and intellectual disability services and supports for children and adults in Henry, Franklin and Patrick counties and the city of Martinsville, according to its website.

It is governed by a board of directors appointed by those four local governments, Tobin said.

Piedmonts executive director oversees coordination of a network of services, about half of which are provided directly by Piedmont and about half of which are provided through contract or affiliate organizations, according to Tobin.

Piedmont has a direct staff of 350 and annual operating budget of about $22 million. Piedmont directly serves about 6,000 people a year, plus people who receive prevention education and many others served through contract or affiliate organizations, Tobin said.

Tobin has been executive director of Piedmont since 1990. "Its been a great opportunity. I very much appreciate the privilege to have done this work," Tobin said.

From 1974 to 1990, Tobin was executive director of the Patrick-Henry Drug and Alcohol Council.
The first accident happened May 31 in Henry County. Around 1:58 p.m., a 2001 GMC Sierra was heading north on Route 695, having just reached the intersection with Route 58. The Sierras driver failed to yield the right of way, Garletts said, causing the vehicle to be hit by a 2001 Nissan Frontier heading west on Route 58. That Frontier was driven by 48-year-old Stuart resident Tracey Quentin Penn, who Garletts said was not wearing his seatbelt at the time of the crash. At the time, Penn was taken to Roanoke Memorial Hospital. His condition worsened over the last few weeks and Penn died Tuesday at the hospital, as a result of his injuries. The driver of the Sierra, 69-year-old Fieldale resident William Mac Gordon, was also taken to the hospital for injuries sustained in the crash, but later released. The crash remains under investigation, Garletts said and its unclear if any charges will be filed.
Some things just shouldnt happen. It shouldnt be that complicated for a federal or state government to operate within a budget.

It shouldnt be that hard to provide a common sense structure for healthcare, without managing to raise all of our rates in the process. Above all however, it truly should not be that hard to simply provide our military veterans with what theyve earned after years of combat. Why is it then that the U.S. Congress seems to struggle the most with the last one?

According to the National Veterans Legal Services Program, more than 13,800 soldiers have been victimized by their own government, used to save money by being improperly taxed. Its frustrating to even realize this is a problem. Under federal law, any soldier who is injured in combat and discharged as a result receives a disability severance payment. The law requires that they not be taxed on that. That makes sense. They fought for their country and so deserve every penny of that settlement, in order to make the transition to daily life again. Heres the problem: its not happening. "Taxes on combat-related disability severance payments have nonetheless been withheld from qualifying veterans for a number of years, in part due to the limitations of [the Department of Defenses] automated payment system," reads the joint statement from Sen. Mark Warner, Sen. Richard Burr, Sen. John Boozeman and Sen. Michael Bennett, acknowledging the information from the NVLSP. Oh wait, it gets better. "Veterans are typically unaware that their benefits were improperly reduced as a result of [the Department of Defenses] actions."

So, not only did the government take money from veterans, they didnt even let them know the reason why. You have a soldier who lost a hand and is told by his commanding officer that hes getting X amount of dollars in a disability package, as part of his discharge. Then he gets the check and sees a lower figure. He raises the issue and is told sorry, thats the right amount, because of "limitations" in the system. Basically, the system couldnt process the request to not withhold taxes from certain payments. How does this make any sense at all? We can spend millions on furniture for the federal government, but cant afford to update the computer system so that veterans arent screwed over. Nobody in the government even caught the mistake. It took an outside group, the National Veterans Legal Services Program, to notice the problem. According to their own estimates, more than 13,800 soldiers have been taxed on disability payments, including 720 here in Virginia.

This is a bit personal for me. As Ive mentioned before, all four of my grandparents were in the military, along with three cousins and several childhood friends. Some of those are still serving today. I see their faces when I hear garbage like this. I imagine any of them, injured because of a roadside bomb or during a combat mission, cheated by their own government because of "limitations" in the computer system. Anyone who tells you theres no money to fix the programs is just wrong.

The problem, as always, is its not a priority. Nows the time to change that. Mark Warners bill, SB 2712, requires the Department of Defense to identify all soldiers who have been discharged due to combat-related injuries and had tax taken out of their severance payments. Department officials would then calculate how much the soldiers are owed and be required to pay them back in full. The bill is in the Senate Finance Committee and if approved, will go before the full Senate for a vote. For anyone who argues where well get the money, Im fairly certain theres a few extra chairs in the EPA we could sell.

As I mentioned in yesterdays column, we have a problem with loosing focus, getting distracted from real problems by the latest controversy stirred up. This is the result. Things get ignored, bills sit in committee, items that could solve legitimate problems are pushed to the back of the room. At some point, that has to stop.
When people head out to the Covered Bridge Festival this Saturday, they can leave with a bit of local history. Laurel Hill Publishing will have four books on hand, from author and historian Tom Perry. Money from any book sales will go to the Covered Bridge Committee. The first book, "In Memory And Imagination," tells the story of Walter Weaver, who designed four bridges around the Woolwine area. Out of those, only Jacks Creek still survives today. Weavers granddaughter Betty Perry helped put this together. Funny enough, Tom Perrys mother is also named Betty Perry, although theyre two different people. Theres also "Fire On Bull Mountain," which talks about a World War II plane crash in Patrick County that killed 11 men. Retired teacher Clarence Hall researched the crash and those involved, working to organize memorials at the site of the crash and at the Patrick County Courthouse grounds. He shared this research with Tom Perry for the book. The books will be available at the festival, which runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Jacks Creek Covered Bridge and the site of the Bob White Covered Bridge in Woolwine.
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We may combine information you provide to us with information available from external publicly available sources. Depending on your privacy settings for social media services, we may also access information from those accounts or services. We use this information to gain a better understanding of you and to improve our communications and fundraising activities.

(4) When you visit our WEBSITE

We use cookies to identify you when you visit our website. Please refer to our Cookies Policy for details on the way our use of cookies affects your personal data.

What information do we collect?

We may collect, store and use the following kinds of personal data:

(1) We will typically hold your name and contact details, including telephone number, location, and e-mail address. However, we may request other information where it is appropriate and relevant, for example:

Your bank details or debit/credit card details (if making a donation).

(2) any communication preferences you give;

(3) information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website including your IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit and number of page views; and/or

(4) any other information shared with us as per clause 1.

Do we process sensitive personal information?

Applicable law recognises certain categories of personal information as sensitive and therefore requiring more protection, including political opinions and trade union membership. In limited cases, we may collect sensitive personal data about you. We would only collect sensitive personal data if there is a clear reason for doing so; and will only do so with your explicit consent.

How and why will we use your personal data?

Personal data, however provided to us, will be used for the purposes specified in this Policy or in relevant parts of the website.

We may use your personal information to:

(1) Enable you to subscribe to our hard copy publications;

(2) Send you information about our work, campaigns, organisations and any other information, products or services that we provide (this will not be done without your consent);

(3) Provide you with the services, products or information you have requested;

(4) If you request, put you in touch with other supporters in your area (who have also provided such consent);

(5) Handle the administration of any donation or other payment you make via credit/debit card, cheque, standing order or BACS transfer;

(6) Collect payments from you and send statements and/or receipts to you;

(7) Conduct research into the impact of our activity / campaigns;

(8) Deal with enquiries and complaints made by you relating to the website or us in general;

(9) Make petition submissions to third parties, where you have signed a petition and the third party is a target of the campaign to which the petition relates; and/or

(10) Audit and/or administer our accounts.

Supporter Analysis

Google Analytics

We may use some of your personal information to analyse our digital performance, for example to see how our website can be improved to help us achieve the purposes set out in section 9 below, to record how you are using our website or to assess the popularity of different articles / campaigns.

For more information on how we use your personal information in relation to Google Analytics, please view our cookie policy by clicking this link cookies policy



You can opt-out of the collection of information for such purposes here: http://www.aboutads.info/choices

Communications, updates, fundraising

Where you have provided appropriate consent, we will contact you by telephone and e-mail, with targeted communications to let you know about our events and/or activities that we consider may be of particular interest; about the work of In Defence of Marxism; and to ask for donations or other support.

Donations and other payments

All financial transactions carried out on our website are handled through either:

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GoCardless Ltd (GoCardless), a third party payment services provider. We recommend that you read GoCardlesss privacy policy (available at https://www.gocardless.com/legal/privacy) prior to effecting any transactions with us through GoCardless.

We will provide your personal data to PayPal / GoCardless only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing payments for transactions you enter into with us. We do not store your financial details.

Childrens data

We do not knowingly process data of any person under the age of 16. If we come to discover, or have reason to believe, that you are 15 and under and we are holding your personal information, we will delete that information within a reasonable period and withhold our services accordingly.

Security of and access to your personal data

We endeavour to ensure that there are appropriate and proportionate technical and organisational measures to prevent the loss, destruction, misuse, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or of access to your personal information.

Your information is only accessible by appropriately trained staff and volunteers.

We may also use agencies and/or suppliers to process data on our behalf. We may also merge or partner with other organisations and in so doing transfer and/or acquire personal data.

Please note that some countries outside of the EEA have a lower standard of protection for personal data, including lower security requirements and fewer rights for individuals. We may transfer and/or store personal data collected from you to and/or at a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA). Such personal data may be processed by agencies and/or suppliers operating outside the EEA. If we transfer and/or store your personal data outside the EEA we will take reasonable steps to ensure that the recipient implements appropriate measures to protect your personal data.

Otherwise than as set out in this Privacy Policy, we will only ever share your data with your informed consent.

Your rights

Where we rely on your consent to use your personal information, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. This includes the right to ask us to stop using your personal information for direct marketing purposes or to be unsubscribed from our email list at any time. You also have the following rights:

(1) Right to be informed  you have the right to be told how your personal information will be used. This Policy and any other policies and statements used on our website and in our communications are intended to provide you with a clear and transparent description of how your personal information may be used.

(2) Right of access  you can write to us to ask for confirmation of what information we hold on you and to request a copy of that information. Provided we are satisfied that you are entitled to see the information requested and we have successfully confirmed your identity, we have 30 days to comply.

(3) Right of erasure  as from 25 May 2018, you can ask us for your personal information to be deleted from our records.

(4) Right of rectification  if you believe our records of your personal information are inaccurate, you have the right to ask for those records to be updated.

(5) Right to restrict processing  you have the right to ask for processing of your personal data to be restricted if there is disagreement about its accuracy or legitimate usage.

(6) Right to data portability  to the extent required by the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) where we are processing your personal information (i) under your consent, (ii) because such processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are party or to take steps at your request prior to entering into a contact or (iii) by automated means, you may ask us to provide it to you  or another service provider  in a machine-readable format.

To exercise these rights, please send a description of the personal information in question using the contact details in section 15 below. You can also unsubscribe from our email list by sending a blank email to news-unsubscribe@marxist.com

Where we consider that the information with which you have provided us does not enable us to identify the personal information in question, we reserve the right to ask for (i) personal identification and/or (ii) further information.

Lawful processing

We are required to have one or more lawful grounds to process your personal information. Only 4 of these are relevant to us:

Personal information is processed on the basis of a persons consent Personal information is processed on the basis of a contractual relationship Personal information is processed on the basis of legal obligations Personal information is processed on the basis of legitimate interests

(1) Consent

We will ask for your consent to use your information to send you electronic communications such as newsletters and and fundraising emails, and if you ever share sensitive personal information with us.

(2) Contractual relationships

Most of our interactions with supporters are voluntary and not contractual. However, sometimes it will be necessary to process personal information so that we can enter contractual relationships with people. For example, if you subscribe to one of our publications, or purchase merchandise online.

(3) Legal obligations

Sometimes we will be obliged to process your personal information due to legal obligations which are binding on us. We will only ever do so when strictly necessary.

(4) Legitimate interests

Applicable law allows personal information to be collected and used if it is reasonably necessary for our legitimate activities (as long as its use is fair, balanced and does not unduly impact individuals rights).

We will rely on this ground to process your personal data when it is not practical or appropriate to ask for consent.

Achieving our purposes

These include (but are not limited to) promoting socialist policies

Governance

Internal and external audit for financial or regulatory compliance purposes

Statutory reporting

Publicity and income generation

Conventional direct marketing and other forms of marketing, publicity or advertisement

Unsolicited messages, including campaigns, newsletters, and fundraising appeals

Analysis, targeting and segmentation to develop and promote or strategy and improve communication efficiency

Personalisation used to tailor and enhance your experience of our communications

Operational Management

Maintenance of suppression files

Processing for historical, scientific or statistical purpose

Purely administrative purposes

Responding to enquiries

Delivery of requested products or information

Communications designed to administer existing services including subscriptions, administration of petitions and financial transactions

Thank you communications and receipts

Maintaining a supporter database and suppression lists

Financial Management and control

Processing financial transactions and maintaining financial controls

Prevention of fraud, misuse of services, or money laundering

Enforcement of legal claims

Reporting criminal acts and compliance with law enforcement agencies

When we use your personal information, we will consider if it is fair and balanced to do so and if it is within your reasonable expectations. We will balance your rights and our legitimate interests to ensure that we use your personal information in ways that are not unduly intrusive or unfair in other ways.

Data retention

The length of time each category of data will be retained will vary depending on how long we need to process it for, the reason it was collected, and in line with any statutory requirements. After this point the data will either be deleted, or we may retain a secure anonymised record for research and analytical purposes.

In the event that you ask us to stop sending you direct marketing/fundraising/other electronic communications, we will keep your name on our internal suppression list to ensure that you are not contacted again.

Policy amendments

We keep this Privacy Policy under regular review and reserve the right to update from time-to-time by posting an updated version on our website, not least because of changes in applicable law. We recommend that you check this Privacy Policy occasionally to ensure you remain happy with it. We may also notify you of changes to our privacy policy by email.

Third party websites

We link our website directly to other sites. This Privacy Policy does not cover external websites and we are not responsible for the privacy practices or content of those sites. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of any external websites you visit via links on our website.

Updating information

You can check the personal data we hold about you, and ask us to update it where necessary, by emailing us at webmaster@marxist.com

Contact

We are not required by law to have a Data Protection Officer  however we have a Data Protection Manager.

Please let us know if you have any queries or concerns whatsoever about the way in which your data is being processed by emailing the Data Protection Manager at webmaster@marxist.com
Help wanted Sign stock art.jpg

(AP File Photo)

SPRINGFIELD -- The Massachusetts statewide unemployment rate remained at 4.2 percent in May, but statistics released Thursday show the state lost 6,400 jobs during the month.

The Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development blamed the job loss on the Verizon strike. Labor and Workforce Development Secretary Ronald L. Walker, II said:

"The labor force continues to grow, with 7,000 more employed residents and 2,000 fewer unemployed residents in May. Education and health care, and professional, scientific and business services sectors continue to generate the most jobs in the commonwealth."

In the Verizon strike, now settled, nearly 39,000 landline and cable employees walked off the job in April from Virginia north to Massachusetts. In Western Massachusetts, 341 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers were on strike, along with another 50 Communications Workers of America members.

In May, leisure and hospitality was the only sector of the Massachusetts economy to experience job gains.

May jobless numbers for local communities won't be available until later this month. But in April:

Greater Springfield unemployment

Greater Springfield gained

Other numbers from the May estimate:

April jobs:

Year-to-date:

The Commonwealth's May unemployment rate

Labor force participation rate

When discouraged workers are taken into account

Massachusetts residents who were employed:

Massachusetts residents who were unemployed:

The May labor force

Jobless numbers come from a phone survey of households. Jobs numbers come from a phone survey of employers and are adjusted based on payroll data collected through the unemployment insurance system.

Jobs by sector of the economy:
STAFFORD SPRINGS, Conn. -- Johnson Memorial Hospital recently received a $12,000 donation from Big Y supermarkets' "Partners of Hope" initiative to benefit the Johnson Memorial Cancer Center.

The money was raised last October through a month-long campaign to promote breast cancer screenings, education, and treatment. The funds will be used to directly support individualized patient services provided by the cancer program at JMH, according to Maria Frassinelli Sierra, cancer program director. This is the sixth donation to JMH through the Big Y program.

"There are many hidden costs of cancer treatment which cause unnecessary strain for patients during a difficult time and these funds help cover those costs through direct assistance," said Frassinelli Sierra. These types of donations help give JMH the opportunity to offer superior cancer care and treatment to the people of Northern Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, she added.



According to Big Y Chief Executive Officer Donald D'Amour said:

"Big Y is committed to promoting breast cancer awareness to our community. Over the past eight years, we've made tremendous progress thanks to our customers, vendors, and employees. In addition, these funds benefit local programs throughout our region. It is truly a collaborative effort."

Since 2007, the chain has raised over $1,555,000 for this cause.

Johnson Memorial Hospital, Johnson Health Care and Home & Community Health Services provide a continuum of health care services to those living and working in north central Connecticut and western Massachusetts. In 2016, Johnson Memorial Hospital became part of Trinity Health - New England, an integrated health care delivery system that is a member of Trinity Health, Livonia, MI, one of the largest multi-institutional Catholic health care delivery systems in the nation. The 92-bed hospital has been an anchor institution in north central Connecticut for 104 years.
"Breakfast food" is special, a prized classification that qualifies a select few foods to be granted access for pre-noon consumption. Normally, it's the presence of one of a few ingredients -- fried/scrambled eggs, waffles, pancakes, french toast -- that can get foods on the list into the breakfast club. It's a pretty straight forward system that keeps the maple syrup in the morning and the tomato sauce in the evening.

But what happens when a dish emerges that breaks the worlds in which our food classifications reside. What happens when the ruins of our now-broken knowledge are assembled with glutenous masonry that dwarfs even our strongest-held beliefs about food? What happens when there's too much ice cream and candy to even pretend that it's still breakfast food?

What happens when (looks up at the picture) that shows up on a plate?

This is what Double Chin in Boston's Chinatown district has done to me.

Cube Toast

Cube Toast is a curious invention that's the star of Double Chin's eccentric menu (which also features the like of Spam & taro fries, poutine with "kimcheese," and curry fishballs). It's, for lack of a better description, a fortress of bread that's been cooked like French toast stationed with a mighty garrison of crazy foods.

The menu describes the "Taste The Rainbow" Cube Toast as featuring "vanilla ice cream, berries, Pocky, mochi, granola & strawberry sauce." But it is so much more.

The following things are all ingredients I spotted among the vast legions of Candy Land residents living inside the bread barrier: Cubed French toast pieces, chocolate sauce, strawberry sauce, strawberries, blueberries, Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal, M&Ms, chocolate Pocky, strawberry Pocky and what appeared to be some pieces of pineapple and a third (maybe vanilla?) sauce.

And so, I'm at an impasse, lost in food philosophy. Does this qualify as a breakfast food? Is it just a dessert with breakfast ingredients? What qualifies as food? Why do we call it French toast if it's cooked on a griddle? How do they possibly start to cook each side of the cube?

If I've learned anything this week, it's that people feel strongly about breakfast foods, and will bring out the pitchforks and torches when it comes to messing with their breakfast tastes.

Cube Toast, though, is hardly at risk of being mobbed like Frankenstein's monster. It's too transcendent, too wondrous. It flies too high for the slings and arrows of the masses. It's brilliant, faultless, a food hailing from another plane of being.

It is -- and I do not say this often -- a food that makes for a great Instagram post that lives up to the crazy picture.

So what do they taste like?

First thing's first: The Cube Toast is huge, and should be gameplanned against with the same roster you'd use to take down a large pizza. There's that much food here.

The French toast walls are packed dense with multiple scoops of ice cream along with cubed pieces of bread that were hollowed out from the cube. The excess then spills out in what's kind of a gruesome scene. It's like someone accidentally mixed a unicorn with a pinata. Fortunately, the whole thing still tastes like sunshine and rainbows.

The gooey sugar mess is centered around the big bread pieces, but allowed with some mixing and matching of candy and sweets. The pieces of Cinnamon Toast Crunch at some much-needed crunch and dry texture to the plate, which contains a whole lot of sauces and soon-to-be-melting ice cream. This all combines well with the chewy mochi and stray M&Ms. The whole dish sticks to a tasty strawberry/chocolate motif painted upon the bready backdrop of the French toast pieces.

It's super sweet -- that much should be apparent right away -- and may be too much so for some people. But in terms of stretching across different genres of food in a way that's fun to eat and still tasty, there's nothing else like it.

It's like digging through a virtually endless sandbox with your spoon, constantly building new flavor mixtures and discovering new wonderful combinations to play with. You keep digging, and there's still more to discover -- and you're far more likely to have had your fill before hitting the bottom of the bready well.

So is it any good?

Yes. Oh yes.

The final word

So, back to breakfast. (No, I'm not letting this go. We're doing Best of Mass breakfast and I got scrambled eggs on the mind.) It's basically a giant block of bread that's been French toast-ified on all surfaces and comes with Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It's got strong breakfast food credentials.

But at the same time, it's a pile of ice cream and just a dessert now, right? But then again, so is a waffle with whipped cream and ice cream.

I don't know what this thing is, nor do I ever really want to know. It'd be like researching and writing a thesis breaking down all the symbolism and humor analysis of "Space Jam." I saw something beautiful -- and I want to keep it that way.

"I ate it so you don't have to" is a regular food column looking at off-beat eats, both good and bad. It runs every other Thursday at noon-ish (except I missed last week). You can send any praise/food suggestions to nomalley@masslive.com.

Please send all questions about what meal cube toast qualifies as to lmerwin@masslive.com. You can check out the rest of the series here.
HARRISBURG  Mayor Eric Papenfuse shows no signs of backing down on a ban of PennLive reporters to weekly briefings and media requests.

The mayor on Tuesday said the news outlet is nothing more than a gossip blog.

Dave LaTorre, founder of LaTorre Communications, could not believe that a government official of a capital city could make such a public relations blunder.

I call this breaking into jail, LaTorre said. You break into jail and you create a problem that wasnt there.

LaTorre said in full disclosure, he voted and donated to Papenfuses campaign. He was disappointed by Papenfuses decision Monday to limit access to PennLive reporters, no matter the reason.

To pick a fight right now clearly will drown out a lot of the positive vibe that we felt here in the city, he said.

LaTorre pointed out the First Amendment right to free speech and the Freedom of Information Act that allow journalists to tell a story even if a public official does not agree with its content.

All you can expect and hope for is a fair story, LaTorre said, where youre allowed to tell your side of the story and you want an opportunity to tell your side of the story.

Papenfuse said the ban was put in place because he does not believe PennLive is a credible news outlet, therefore it should not be held to the same standard.

I think PennLive is the equivalent to Gawker (a self-proclaimed gossip blog), not the equivalent of the Washington Post, Papenfuse said, and it needs to be understood and treated as such.

Coincidentally, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump revoked credentials of Washington Post reporters for similar reasons.

I dont think anything that PennLive does is good for democracy, is good for engaged citizenry, or is good for the City of Harrisburg, Papenfuse said.

LaTorre believes Papenfuses ban flies in the face of transparency, which was a cornerstone of his bid for mayor.

I would like Mayor Papenfuse to remember that he ran on a platform of transparency, LaTorre said. Were not being transparent if were shutting out the largest newspaper in the coverage area.

Papenfuse maintained that LaTorre does not have a full understanding of the social media landscape.

I dont think what (PennLive is) doing is legitimate journalism, Papenfuse said. I think it is trafficking in hate speech.

When asked if even hate speech should be considered free speech, the mayor said not when it concerns an anonymous post. Papenfuse added that PennLive must better police its public comment sections to be considered a legitimate news source before he will release the ban.

ABC27 asked if writing an op-ed on his views would have been a better avenue to argue his disdain for the outlet and public comments.

Write an op-ed on PennLive, which Im not trying to draw traffic to? No! he said.

LaTorre said that notion backfired since PennLives story on Papenfuse cutting off reporters has generated nearly 500 comments and thousands of page views.

Im looking at other comments. Twenty-six on one story, LaTorre said. Fifteen, 3, 5; this is Penn State story-type numbers.

As a communications specialist, LaTorre advises Papenfuse to rescind his ban and apologize for the sake of the Office of Mayor and Harrisburg as a whole.

Think about this decision. Reverse it, he said, and get back to governing.

Papenfuse, however, offered no signs of backing down and instead doubled down, claiming he would make PennLive reporters jobs harder by denying interviews.

They ought to be looking to alternative news sources to get their news, Papenfuse said of PennLive readers. PennLive is not doing a good job in informing them.
BOSTON -- A former Dorchester man who has been on the run for 23 years after he was accused of raping two young boys he befriended in the Boston area has been caught in North Carolina.

John Joseph Hartin, 46, was captured in Walkertown, North Carolina on Wednesday, according to a news release from the FBIas Boston Office. He had been living there under the assumed name, Jay Matthew Carter.

John Joseph Hartin's wanted poster

Authorities caught Hartin in his home.

The FBI said Hartin is accused of abusing two boys, ages 8 and 9, after he became friends with them in 1993.

"He fled after being charged locally with five counts of statutory rape of a child," authorities said. "As a result, a federal arrest warrant was issued for Hartin on December 18, 1997, in Boston, Massachusetts, and he was charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution."

The FBI Boston Division's Child Exploitation Task Force is working to bring Hartin back to Massachusetts.

"John Hartin thought by changing his name and moving out of state, he could avoid prosecution. However, he underestimated our resolve to track him down," said Harold H. Shaw, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston Office. "The FBI hopes the victims of his alleged crimes will find some comfort in knowing that he will now have to answer for his actions."

Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans thanked the FBI and law enforcement agencies for their work on the case.

"Our commitment to justice has no time limit. This outcome should serve as a reminder that we never give up and we will find you," Evans said.
Editor's Note on June 21, 2017: An original version of this article said fireworks were scheduled for June 17 and June 21. The Coast Guard in Boston said there will be no fireworks on either of those dates.

SEE 2017 Tall Ships Festival schedule: Sail Boston 2017 and the Tall Ships: Schedule of events and best places to watch

BOSTON - Officials behind a six-day event that will bring more than 100 international sailing ships to the city's waterfront laid out the schedule for Sail Boston 2017 and touted an economic impact of roughly $100 million.



Boston will be the only U.S. port for the European, Scandinavian and South American fleets on their way to Quebec City, Canada as part of a trans-Atlantic regatta. Up to 20 flotillas with six ships, lead by a foreign flag ship, are expected to take part.



Boston is hosting the Parade of Sail for the first time in 17 years. The event, which is expected to draw a large crowd, is set to start June 17, 2017.



The Sail Boston Festival and the public boarding of ships will take place between Saturday, June 17, 2017, and Wednesday, June 21, 2017.



The crew and cadet street parade is set for Monday, June 19, 2017.



The Tall Ships leave on Thursday, June 22, 2017.



The race of the Tall Ships starts in Europe in April 2017. The ships depart from Greenwich, United Kingdom in April, heading to Sines, Portugal. The ships arrive in Bermuda in June and then head to Boston before sailing on to Canada. They finish Le Havre, France.



"On the tourism side, there's millions of people that will come into our city that weekend, six nights, six days here," Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said. "The hotels will be full, the restaurants will be full, there will be people walking and shopping in our city."



Seventeen years ago, the last time the Parade of Sail came into Boston Harbor, the waterfront wasn't as accessible. "Seventeen years later, it's a very different waterfront today," Walsh said, noting the building boom that has hit the city, particularly the Seaport District.
ENFIELD, Conn.  The Connecticut Board of Regents on Thursday gave final approval to allow Asnuntuck Community College to begin a two-year pilot program to charge Massachusetts residents the same tuition Connecticut residents pay.

"We at Asnuntuck Community College are excited about this opportunity to eliminate the obstacle of cost-differential for both our current and prospective students from our partner state of Massachusetts," Asnuntuck President James P. Lombella said in a statement. "We have always considered residents of Massachusetts, the border of which is located less than three miles from our campus, to be a part of the region we serve.

"Most importantly, any success derived from this initiative will greatly benefit Connecticut residents, whether they are Asnuntuck students or members of the public at large," Lombella said. "It will mean the potential restoration of painful budget cuts that have impacted academic and student support services, increases to financial aid programs designed to solely benefit Connecticut residents, as well as a boost to the local economy that we know comes with increased enrollment at our college."

Fall classes at Asnuntuck begin Aug. 29, the statement says. Academic advising, on a walk-in basis, is available Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey introduced legislation Thursday to try to prevent a potential terrorist from buying a gun, days after the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Toomey, a Republican in the midst of his first re-election campaign, said the bill is an attempt at a compromise between two dueling pieces of legislation, one sponsored by Democrats and the other by Republicans. Both failed in December, nearly along party lines.

Toomey said the legislation takes the best features from both of the previous proposals and tries to fix their flaws while safeguarding the rights of a person who is mistakenly put on a terrorist watch list.

If my legislation passes, terrorists will be blocked from buying guns, Toomey told reporters Thursday. If my legislation passes, people who cant fly on a plane will be legally forbidden from buying guns. Thats a lot of progress from where we are today.

Toomey also warned that bickering lawmakers need to decide whether they want to get something done, or keep arguing and trying to score political points.

Im tired of the talking, Toomey said. I am trying to get something done.

For Toomey, finding compromise on gun control has become something of a signature issue in his first term. However, he said he did not know whether he would get a vote on the measure, and he noted that he had not seen any senators moving to support it.

Democrats are already rejecting the idea, saying it would create too much of a backlog in the courts. Meanwhile, the campaign of Toomeys Democratic challenger, Katie McGinty, called the bill a political calculation that would do little to close the terror gun loophole or stop shootings from happening.

Instead, it would make it more difficult for law enforcement to stop suspected terrorists from buying guns, the McGinty campaign said Thursday.

The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to co-workers. He was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.

Under Toomeys measure, the U.S. attorney general could assemble a list of people suspected of supporting terrorism.

Names on the list would have to be approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to Toomeys office. People on it would be blocked from immediately buying a firearm, although federal prosecutors would then have seven days to ask for a judges approval to make that block permanent, Toomeys office said.

Federal authorities also would have the ability on an emergency basis to seek a judges approval to add a name to the list, Toomeys office said. That window would be three days following the attempted purchase.

McGintys support for gun control is far broader than Toomeys, including supporting legislation to ban the sale of military-style weapons and prohibit the possession of a gun by anyone convicted of or suspected of a misdemeanor hate crime.

Toomey has backed legislation to require background checks for all gun purchases online and at gun shows. Currently, the checks are only required for transactions from licensed gun dealers. That bill was defeated, most recently in December, a day after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
By Martin Kidston

Ten businesses launched by women and selected from a pool of nearly 400 candidates will participate this week in a startup challenge in San Francisco hosted by a company based in Missoula.

The Audience Awards, founded by Paige Williams of Missoula, will film the sales pitch given by the 10 finalists and host the content on its website for a round of public voting, which opened Tuesday and runs through next Monday.

Martin Kidston

Full Story: http://www.missoulacurrent.com/business/2016/06/missoula-tech-company-hosts-national-womens-business-competition-san-francisco/
In addition to the celebration of Fathers Day, June has always been a month for dads and men in general  think BBQs, Bermuda shorts and dad in the yard trying to get that lawn just right. This month, lets help the men in our lives take an annual inventory of their health.

Whether youre a dad, a granddad or just a busy guy, here are the top 10 health checks every man should complete each year:

1. Height, Weight and BMI. Experts now believe that cardiac health is impacted by even small increases above your ideal weight. If your weight has increased more than 5 or 10 pounds since last year, it may be time to consider some lifestyle changes.

2. Blood Pressure. Blood pressure can uctuate from day-to-day, so its important to use a reliable machine to check it regularly. If your blood pressure is over 140 (top number) or 90 (bottom number), you should schedule an appointment with your primary physician.

3. Cholesterol. There are several schools of thought on cholesterol, so any man with risk factors for heart disease (family history, diabetes, kidney disease) should talk at length with his doctor about individual goals.

4. Prostate Screening. Again, recommendations vary by patient and physician. In general, men age 50 or older should discuss the appropriate level of screening for prostate cancer with their doctor. African American men and those with a family history or prostate cancer should discuss screening at age 45.

5. Lung Cancer Screening. Men aged 55 to 80 with a family history of lung cancer, or who have smoked for a number of years, should talk to their doctor about an annual CT scan of the lungs. Early detection is critical to survival rates for lung cancer, as there are typically no symptoms until the later stages.

6. Blood Sugar and Diabetes. Men should have a fasting blood glucose test at least every three years starting at age 45  more often if they are overweight or have high blood pressure. Another key measurement of healthy blood glucose is an A1C test  talk to your doctor about whether its appropriate for you.

7. Bone Density. Men age 50 to 70 with risk factors such as long-term steroid, tobacco or alcohol use should be screened routinely for possible osteoporosis and overall bone health.

8. Colonoscopy. Screening for colon cancer for most men starts at age 50. If testing reveals no abnormalities, it will typically only need to be redone every 5 or 10 years. Men who suffer with various gut issues can be at higher risk, and may need to screen more aggressively to catch this deadly cancer early.

9. Skin Checks. Approximately 10,000 people each year die from melanoma, and two-thirds of those deaths are men. Add an annual skin check with a dermatologist or qualied practitioner to your health inventory.

10. Dental and Eye Health. Eye health and vision problems are often key indicators of other health problems, and dental problems can signicantly impact the health of several vital organs. See your dentist for a deep cleaning at least once per year, and have your eye health and vision checked annually.

Because these tests are considered preventive, most of them will be covered by insurance plans at least once per year. However, there may be certain diagnostic or timing criteria you have to meet, so always check with your insurance company before making the necessary appointments.

From all of us at Carlisle Regional Medical Center to all the dads and granddads in our Central Pennsylvania region, Happy Fathers Day! Strong and healthy men are at the very center of a strong community, and we honor and celebrate you.
Union Cabinet approves MoU between India and Taiwan for cooperation in field of Agriculture

Published: June 15, 2016

The Union Cabinet has given its ex-post facto approval to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between India and Taiwan for cooperation in the field of Agriculture and Allied Sector.

Decision in this regard was taken at the Union Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi.

Key facts

The MoU will be singed between Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in India and India Taipei Association in Taipei, Taiwan.

in India and in Taipei, Taiwan. It provides for cooperation in the fields of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, Horticulture, Aquaculture, Fisheries and Food Processing, Genetic Resources as well as Environmental Sustainability.

Both signatory parties will encourage the private sector in both countries to enter into cooperation in these areas.

The cooperation between the two sides involves exchange of information, technology, visits and training and also expansion of agricultural trade while reducing trade barriers.

The MoU will be in force for a period of 5 years and shall be automatically renewed for a subsequent periods of 5 years unless either party expresses its desire to terminate it.

Month: Current Affairs - June, 2016

Category: Agriculture Current Affairs

Topics: Agriculture  Cabinet Decisions  India-Taiwan  National

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Union Cabinet approves proposal to raise retirement age of CHS doctors to 65

Published: June 16, 2016

The Union Cabinet has given its approval for enhancement of retirement age of government doctors to 65 years to strengthen the healthcare sector in the country.

In this regard, Union Cabinet has approved proposal forwarded by Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Cabinet has approved the superannuation age of

Public Health and Non-Teaching Specialists of Central Health Service from 62 years to 65 years

from 62 years to 65 years Doctors of General Duty Medical Officers (GDMOs) sub-cadre of Central Health Service (CHS) from 62 years to 65 years.

Implications

This decision of the Union Government would help in better patient care, proper academic activities in Medical colleges. It will also help in effective implementation of National Health Programmes for delivery of health care services.

Month: Current Affairs - June, 2016

Topics: Cabinet Decisions  National  Public health

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ASSANGE DESPISES HILLARY

Julian Assange Interview | Peston On Sunday ITV

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Wikileaks will publish enough evidence to indict Hillary Clinton

RT

Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange warns more information will be published about Hillary Clinton, enough to indict her if the US government is courageous enough to do so, in what he predicts will be a very big year for the whistleblowing website. We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication, Assange told Peston.

Mr Assange said the emails Wikileaks holds about Ms Clinton contain "very strong material", such as the former secretary of state allegedly instructing her staff to remove the "classified" header from a classified document and send it by unclassified fax. About 32,000 emails from her private server have been leaked by Wikileaks so far, but Assange would not confirm the number of new emails to be released or when they are expected to be published.

Assange said the leaked emails revealed that she overrode the Pentagons reluctance to overthrow sovereign Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that they predicted the post-war outcome would be what it is, which is ISIS taking over the country.

WikiLeaks to publish more Hillary Clinton emails

The Guardian

WikiLeaks already launched a searchable archive in March of 30,322 emails and email attachments sent to and from Clintons private email server while she was secretary of state. The 50,547 pages of documents are from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014, and 7,570 of the documents were sent by Clinton, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Assange, a trenchant Clinton critic, said she was receiving constant personal updates on his situation. He also accused Google last week of helping Clinton in her presidential campaign, lumping together two of his bugbears. Google is intensely aligned with US exceptionalism and its employees will likely be rewarded if Clinton wins the presidential election come November, Assange told an international media forum in Moscow.
Request for Applications : Needs Assessment of the Organizational and Financial Management Capacity of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR)

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1.0 Background

1.1. ICGLR Overview

The International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) is a 12-member intergovernmental organization in the African Great Lakes Region. Its establishment was based on the recognition that political instability and conflicts in these countries have a considerable regional dimension and thus require a concerted effort in order to promote sustainable peace and development. As part of the Pact on Security, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes Region, which was signed by the Heads of States in Nairobi on December 15 2006, the Protocol on the Fight against the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources outlines the actions that Member States have agreed to take. The Summit of the Heads of State held in Lusaka on 15 November 2010.

For further details, please visit the ICGLR website: https://www.icglr.org/

1.2. CBRMT Overview

On July 1st 2014, USAID/DRC awarded Tetra Tech the Capacity Building for Responsible Minerals Trade (CBRMT) contract to strengthen the capacity of national and regional actors, including the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) to transparently regulate the trade in strategic minerals (tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold) in order to transform the regions mineral wealth into economic growth and development.

At regional level, CBRMT was initially designed to improve the integrity and implementation of the International Conference of the Great Lakes (ICGLR) Regional Certification Mechanism (RCM) by establishing the office of the Independence Minerals Chain Auditor (IMCA), launching and funding eight independent third party audit process, and conducting an assessment of the RCM to assure its efficacy and sustainability.

On December 18, 2015, USAID expanded the scope of the CBRMT contract to include the assessment and strengthening of the organizational and financial management capacity of the ICGLR as a whole. Tetra Tech CBRMTs approach in achieving this goal includes: (1) a needs assessment of the ICGLR organizational and financial management capacity to identify gaps and make practical recommendations to improve the existing systems, (2) based on the outcome of this assessment a draft terms of reference for two long-term experts (organizational and financial), to implement recommendations and reinforce the capacity of ICGLR staff.

CBRMTs expanded scope of work is intended to support USAIDs Limited Scope Grant Agreement with the ICGLR (originally signed in September 2012), which includes a focus on strengthening of financial and administrative systems to better support ICGLR programs, and project cycle management policies and systems institutionalized and used effectively across ICGLR programs.

2.0. Rationale for the Consultancy:

In line with the above, this consultancy is intended to complete the Organizational and Financial Assessment of the ICGLR Management Capacity.

3.0. Objectives:

The objective of this assessment is to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the ICGLRs organizational and financial management capacity, including (1) its organizational and administrative procedures and structure, and (2) its financial planning, procurement, budgeting system and processes, in order to identify key areas for improvement. The assessment will draw on existing studies (including the previous scoping assessment conducted by USAID/East Africa on the ICGLRs financial and administrative systems), internal manuals, current procedures, processes and practices, as well as interviews with ICGLR staff, partners and consultants at both ICGLR headquarters and major field offices. Based on the findings and structural and functional capacity gaps identified, specific recommendations will be made to upgrade these internal systems. The Assessment will also include terms of reference for two long-term experts to reinforce the institutions organizational and financial management capacity. These Terms of Reference will be based on the conclusions and recommendations identified in the aforementioned assessment.

4.0. Scope of Work:

The primary deliverable will be a needs assessment of the organizational and financial management capacity of the ICGLR. The Needs Assessment will identify core organizational and financial management capacity gaps and contain practical recommendations to address these gaps. The needs assessment will comprise three parts:

1. Organizational Management

The organizational assessment shall encompass the organizational, legal, governance and administrative structures, procedures and processes as well the human resources management and performance systems and controls. More specifically, the consultant will:

Review existing organizational assessments reports of the ICGLR performed to date by technical partners, including USAID;

Assess the ICGLR organizational architecture and develop recommendations to reduce duplicative functions and enhance efficiencies;

Review and assess the legal and human resources performance and control systems

Summarize internal decision-making policies and practices and develop practical recommendations to upgrade decision making and administrative mechanisms to improve the ICGLRs efficacy, efficiency, and sustainability of the institution;

Draft standard operating procedures for routine management tasks;

Identify key skills and training necessary for ICGLR staff to fulfill their mandate;

2. Financial Management

The financial management aims at assessing and improving the financial management system to enhance accountability and transparency of the organization. More specifically, the consultant will:

Review existing financial assessments of the ICGLR performed to date by technical partners;

Review and assess the ICGLRs current financial and accounting management systems including cash management, travel management, banking, funding, and draft recommendations to improve accuracy, efficiency, and sustainability of the institution;

Assess the ICGLR current financial planning systems to improve budgeting and planning mechanisms as well as control systems to ensure greater accountability and sustainability.

3. Terms of Reference for two Long-term Experts:

The above two undertakings will enable the assessment to pinpoint areas of improvement and define the scope of work of two long-term experts who will work with directly with ICGLR staff to strengthen the capacity of the ICGLRs organizational and financial systems, both at the Secretariat and its decentralized offices. More specifically, the assessment will:

Identify core structural and financial management capacity gaps and propose practical recommendations to be addressed by the two experts that will be commissioned to improve the organizational and financial management capacity of the Conference;

Draft terms of reference for the two longterm experts in organizational and financial management.

The assessment will be shared with the ICGLR Executive Secretary and other implementing partners for comments and validation.

5.0. Qualifications and Experience:

Graduate Degree in Public and Finance Administration; Organizational Management, Law or Economics or any other relevant fields is required;

Consultant shall be a reputable and experienced international firm or individual with expertise in both administrative, organizational and financial assessment or public institutions fields;

At least 10 years of experience working with public international organizations in the areas of finances, management and policy;

Proven ability to write clear and concise reports;

Solid analytical skills with ability to assess quickly and provide recommendations

Excellent understanding of political and economic issues in Africa and particularly the Great Lakes Region;

High proficiency, writing and speaking, in the 2 languages of the ICGLR: English and French

Team player

6.0. Methodology:

Literature Review (ICGLR materials, previous studies on organizational and financial assessment of the Conference as well as studies conducted in related fields). Field Based research (including in depth interviews of partners and staff across ICGLRs technical, financial and administrative offices). Drafting of results and recommendations. Assess current system, identify gaps and constraints in the financial and management system and propose recommendations.

7.0. Timeline and Deliverables:

1. The assessment is expected to take 60 working days to complete.

2. The Consultant will provide the following deliverables:

Draft schedule of consultations and stakeholders to be interviewed;

Methodology and Report Outline;

Draft Assessment Report (to be shared with the ICGLR for inputs), including draft terms reference for two embedded experts

Final Report (25 pages excluding annexes) sent to USAID and the ICGLR

Final report should include a comprehensive gap analysis and a practical strategy that identifies the required skills, structures, and systems required for improved organizational and financial performance.

The final report should outline the roles the ICGLR and other partners (stakeholders) can play in ensuring the effective implementation of the Strategy.

Final report should include draft terms reference for two embedded experts

Final report should include an Action Plan for the implementation of the proposed recommendation.

8.0. Level of Effort

Days 1-10 Literature review; telephone, email and skype interviews, update outline

Days 11-26 Fieldwork (visit of the ICGLR Headquarters)

Days 27-37 Data analysis and interview analysis

Days 38-53 Draft and submit first report

Days 54-60 Insert USAID, ICGLR, and Partners inputs and submit final report

9.0. Application Requirements

All applications should respond to the present scope of work described above.

Successful candidates will submit all information requested and meet the requirements as described in section 10.0 of this RfA, Submitting an Application.

Candidates who fail to follow any instructions or include requested information will not be considered for the position.

10.0. Submitting anApplication

Candidates should submit applications in a single document (Word file or PDF) by 17:00 Eastern Daylight Time (GMT-4) on 17:00 Central Africa Time (GMT+2) on 30 June 2016 .

. All applications should be submitted in a single document (Word file or PDF) and include the following:

letter of motivation





updated resume/CV,





Three reliable professional references for correspondence regarding their submission.

Respondents may submit queries in English regarding the application process.

All queries should be directed to Josee-Blandine Ongotto at Josee.Ongotto@tetratech.com with cc to Catherine Picard at Catherine.Picard@tetratech.com.
The Verge, Wednesday, June 15, 2016 3:31 AM

Hackers with links to the Russian government broke into the Democratic National Committees servers and email system last summer. Two separate groups gained illegal access to the servers last year, one of which was able to get in as recently as this April. An investigation into the exposure connected one of the groups to a similar attack on the official State Department email servers last year.

Read the whole story at The Verge 
by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, June 15, 2016

Millennials are leading a trend to get news stories through social media -- and that means that in more than one in two instances, they don't even notice the brand the news come from. In Korea and Japan, where using social for news is more established, the news brand is only recognised in one in four stories consumed.

As social aggregation of news becomes more common, and Facebook is used in one in two cases of news sharing on social, it is clear that news brands will struggle to stand out. In fact, it's the one of the points made clear in the latest research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In a world where Millennials are already saying social is more important a news source than television, it is inevitable that headlines will attract -- as will advice from a friend to read the story -- but the brand name is being pushed way back into the background.

Interestingly, the study confirms that more than half of all respondents of all ages are now receiving news on their mobile device -- way above tablet use, which has waned. In just a couple of years, the tablet has declined in value, and so too has the importance place to tv news. Instead we have a mobile-first world where content is being shared through social.

There is some relatively good news for brands in that the majority of the content being consumed through social is still from the large, well-known news groups. However, you only have to look at the huge rise of sites such as YouTube and BuzzFeed to get an idea of how quickly digital organisations can become news disruptors. For news brands there are several hurdles here. They have to rely on people using their home page as a destination. People, particularly younger consumers, simply don't go to a brand for news nearly as much as older generations did. So news brands are less in control of who comes to them. Instead, it's up to regular readers to share content and for the news brand to have a large enough organic reach on social media to get noticed.

This, of course, coincides with one in seven now having installed an ad blocker -- which puts a very large spanner in the works when it comes to publishers making money -- and that proportion looks to be only set to increase. As for subscriptions, well, the UK in particular is at the bottom of an international league table on willingness to pay for news. Just 7% of the online population in the UK are willing to pay for news -- and when they do, they spend around 82 per year. If you're looking internationally to improve subscription rates, you may find it difficult because no English-speaking country has a proportion of people paying for digital content above 10%. So less than one in ten are willing to pay for content and at least one in seven are blocking ads.

It's a perfect storm for publishers as reach with readers extends into social networks where they exert little control and get little brand recognition at the same time that people are unwilling to pay for content, yet are increasingly reluctant to accept ads as well.

If any publisher reading this has yet to realise that this means the future must be native, they might as well leave the building now.
by Tanya Gazdik , June 16, 2016

The Bermuda Tourism Authority partnered with Uber to whisk a bunch of riders to the destination with less than a days notice, resulting in a plane full of happy visitors to the "Jewel of the Atlantic.

The promotion was announced on June 1. On June 2, Bermuda brand ambassadors were on hand in Uber black cars around the city to personally congratulate winners with true Bermudian hospitality. By early June 3, they were in the air, headed for Bermuda. The #BermudaSummerFridays hashtag campaign generated over 1.5 million impressions across more than 300 social media posts.

The summer-long campaign promotes how, in less than two hours, East Coast visitors from New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., can be on Bermudas beaches, instead of sitting in traffic on their way to the Hamptons or elsewhere.

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Integrating efforts across multiple platforms, from pop-up events to public relations, influencer engagement, and advertising, the campaign provides a 360-degree approach that will bring to life why Summer Fridays should be synonymous with Bermuda, says Victoria Isley, Bermuda Tourism Authority chief sales and marketing officer.

The campaign builds on the momentum of Bermudas growing destination appeal, Isley says. Vacation air arrivals to Bermuda were up 13.7% in the first quarter of 2016 when compared to the same period last year, marking the best arrivals since 2008. More than 80% of the growth was attributed to travelers younger than 45 years old.

Broadcast, print, out-of-home and digital advertising schedule round out the campaign, with touch-points through digital content, taxi-top ads, magazines and email marketing.

A partnership with Daybreaker in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., aims to introduce the island to an active, energetic audience at early morning dance parties. Island-inspired decor, music, entertainers, giveaways, and other exciting elements will weave into these happy events that attract hundreds of influencers in the tech and creative space.

Additional partnerships include branded editorial and social media influencer campaign with the leading lifestyle digital media company, Refinery29, which will present a narrative about Summer Fridays as part of a lifestyle.

The Summer Fridays campaign also has a heads-in-beds element to serve BTAs partners: Seven of Bermudas hotels are offering a 4th Night Free deal for travelers who book their summer travels through Aug. 31.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, June 15, 2016

Millennials are a coveted group for advertisers looking to connect with the next wave of consumers, but where they want to work after graduating from high school and college seems to tell marketers about the brands they admire most.

In this year's National Society of High School Scholars survey, 3M tops the list as the most preferred employer, with Google -- the 2015 No. 1 choice -- moving to No. 2. NSHSS partnered with Hanover Research on the survey of 13,000 high school and college students and young professionals ages 15 to 32 to gain insight into the preferences and attitudes of high-achieving Millennials, now the largest generation in todays workforce.

The technology companies are most popular among respondents, with nine employers in the top 25 list. Apple came in at No. 8, Amazon at No. 10, Microsoft at No. 14 and -- a newcomer to the list, Samsung -- came in at No. 25.

Hospitals or health companies rank No. 2, with six employers in the top 25 list. Those include St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital at No. 3; Local hospitals, No. 5; Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta, No. 11; Mayo Clinic, No. 13; and Blue Cross and Blue Shield, No. 24.

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BuzzFeed at No. 7 -- also new to the top 25 -- and The New York Times, were among the only two media sources. Other newcomers include Nike, No. 15; Universal Studios, No. 17; Netflix, No. 18; and Boeing, No. 21.

Apparently the Apple and FBI difference of opinions -- or Edward Snowden's allegiance to privacy -- has dampened a desire to work at a government agency. Government agencies also made the list with the Federal Bureau of Investigation coming in at No. 6, the Central Intelligence Agency at No. 9; U.S. State Department at No. 16; and National Security Agency, No. 22.
by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 15, 2016

Criteo is preparing to roll out a search platform this year, although the company has been deemed a potential acquisition target.

Pacific Crest Securities Senior Research Analyst Evan Wilson wrote in a research note that he believes "the most likely acquisition would be Criteo, which has a wide number of potential acquirers and a differentiated data set." The prediction was made in a LinkedIn research note in reference to possible future industry acquisitions.

Criteo, however, has its hands full. The company is preparing to launch a search platform as it looks for marketers to join the team.

During Criteo's first-quarter 2016 earnings report in May, JP Morgan Analyst Doug Anmuth asked the company's CEO, Eric Eichmann, for more details around its search strategy. Eichmann said: "In terms of product innovations, as you know, we are still in proof of concept stage," but said he expects to release more information later this year, "either positive or negative."

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Eichmann said the overall concept of bringing performance to search by using people-based data or browsing remains a top priority, and is very real because it has "potential." Criteo made a name for itself in search retargeting, but began working to build out its platform after acquiring DataPop in February 2015.

A report published in May 2016 by RBC Capital Markets suggests that Criteo exceeded $1.5 billion in ad spend in 2015, "providing search-like ROI for display ads by leveraging direct relationships with advertisers/publishers and user/transaction data."

Search-like ROI for display, per the RBC Capital report, but what if Criteo brought that "search-like ROI for display back into search, similar to the way cClearly Founder Oren Netzer did?

And there's more. Criteo also recently filed a lawsuit against U.S.-based performance marketing competitor SteelHouse, claiming that it undercuts its business and steals potential clients by counterfeiting clicks, which often happens seconds after legitimate clicks are attributed to the France-based company.

"SteelHouse exploited its manipulation of these key performance metrics by falsely advertising that it consistently outperformed Criteo in head-to-head comparisons in order to divert business to SteelHouse, per one report, citing the lawsuit.

Perhaps the industry must take a wait-and-see approach. More acquisitions and search technology to come -- and some will come from unexpected participants.
by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, June 15, 2016

Almost as soon the yesterday's net neutrality decision dropped, AT&T vowed to appeal to the highest court in the country.

We have always expected this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court, and we look forward to participating in that appeal," David McAtee, senior executive vice president and general counsel, wrote yesterday on the company's public policy blog.

At the same time as AT&T was publicly promising to appeal, however, it was arguing that the decision boosted its case in a separate battle -- a fight over whether the Federal Trade Commission can proceed with a lawsuit alleging that the company duped consumers by promising them unlimited data and then slowing their broadband connections.

The telecom yesterday sent a letter to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, calling attention to the net neutrality ruling and arguing that it shows that the Federal Communications Commission "has always had plenary jurisdiction over mobile broadband."

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The company adds that the FCC's decision not to classify mobile broadband as a common carrier service before 2015 "was not an invitation to a sister federal agency to second-guess the FCC's expertise."

The net neutrality ruling, issued by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, upheld the FCC's authority to reclassify broadband as a utility service and impose common carrier rules on providers.

AT&T's letter to the court marks its latest argument in a battle over whether it duped consumers by offering them unlimited data, but slowing their broadband connections to a crawl after they exceeded a cap.

From 2011 until 2015, AT&T allegedly throttled more than 3.5 million customers who exceeded monthly allotments of 3GB or 5GB, depending on their phones. (AT&T recently revised its throttling practices and now only slows down customers who exceed 22 GB in a month; the company also now only throttles those users when the network is congested.)

AT&T has asked the 9th Circuit to dismiss the case on the grounds that the FTC lacks authority to bring an enforcement action against common carriers.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen in the Northern District of California rejected AT&T's argument, noting that the case centers on activity that occurred before the FCC's February 2015 decision to reclassify mobile broadband.

But AT&T maintains that the FTC lacks jurisdiction to prosecute mobile broadband providers, regardless of when the allegedly unfair conduct occurred.

The 9th Circuit is expected to grill lawyers for AT&T and the FTC about the case on Friday.

In addition to the FTC's lawsuit, AT&T also is facing a potential $100 million FCC fine for allegedly violating a 2010 rule by failing to adequately notify consumers about the throttling policies.
by Tobi Elkin @tobielkin, June 16, 2016

Ad-tech firm Adform on Thursday said it hired two former Rubicon Project executives to help expand its global reach. It named Jay Stevens its first chief revenue officer, and Oliver Whitten to the new role of chief operating officer to lead global commercial operations.

Stevens will focus on generating revenue in all global markets including Europe, the U.S., Asia-Pacific and Latin America. At Rubicon Project, he served as general manager, international.

Whitten will now lead Adforms business in Europe, along with global client service, operations and development. He was Rubicon Projects EMEA SVP and managing director.

Both Stevens and Whitten will report to Adform CEO Gustav Mellentin.

Both Jay Stevens and Oliver Whitten have a long history of introducing ad-tech companies into new markets and continents, Adform CMO Martin Stockfleth Larsen told Real-Time Daily via email. More importantly, coming from Rubicon Project, both have succeeded in scaling up a business in short time. We look forward to their leadership in growing Adform's footprint.

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Adform recently raised $21.5 million to help fund the expansion of its workforce and to open new offices in Turkey, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Adform says it now has more than 700 employees across 18 countries. In April 2016, it announced the launch of its header bidding platform. Last week, it launched video capabilities on its supply-side platform.
by Thom Forbes @tforbes, June 16, 2016

Volkswagen CEO Matthias Muller unveiled several radical new strategies for the next 10 years and talked about establishing an innovative culture within the sprawling automaker in a live-streamed speech and press conference this morning from company headquarters in Germany.

Among other things, Muller confirmed the reporting in several walk-up articles that the company would aggressively develop electric vehicles  it projects more than 30 new e-vehicles by 2025  and a competitive self-driving system, as well as consolidate its in-house components manufacturing process in order to slash costs.

Calling it a transformative strategy, [Muller] said  that battery-powered vehicles could account for as much as 25% of total sales within a decade. Operating profit would rise to as much as 8% of sales by 2025, he said, a modest increase from 6% in 2015, Jack Ewing reports for the New York Times.

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The new plan also appeared to be an attempt to change the conversation from diesel emissions. Volkswagen is in intense talks with lawyers for its United States customers about how much it must compensate them for manipulating emissions tests to make its diesels seem cleaner than they were, Ewing reminds us.

Our future program Together  Strategy 2025 is geared to sustained profitable growth, according to the companys translation of the speech prepared for Mullers delivery. It has four building blocks:

Firstly, we are transforming our core business. Developing, building and selling vehicles will remain essential for Volkswagen going forward. But the face of this business will change so radically and so irreversibly that a word like evolution just does not cover what we lies ahead of us.

Secondly, we are building a new mobility solutions business  as a cross-brand, autonomous unit. We are doing this to make sure that we can develop this additional new growth driver with the necessary agility and entrepreneurial focus.

Thirdly, we are strengthening Volkswagens innovation power and placing it on an even broader footing than before. To attain this, we are mobilizing in-house resources and harnessing outside impetus.

Fourthly, we are securing the finance for the massive investments that lie ahead. We will adjust all available levers to achieve this.

In spite of the carmakers diesel scandal, a spirit of optimism is spreading through the ranks of Volkswagen, at least in the immediate vicinity of [Muller], Martin Murphy, Christian Schnell and Stefan Menzel report for the global edition of the German financial publication Handelsblatt.

And his goals are ambitious. In the future, the Wolfsburg-based company wants to be more than an automaker, but also a leading mobility provider. The declared rival is no longer only its traditional competitor Toyota or General Motors, but also ride-hailing services like Uber or data octopuses such as Google, which is entering the mobility business, they write.

The company plans to make Israeli ride-hailing app GETT, which it recently invested in, the nucleus of a new mobility-services unit, William Boston reported for the Wall Street Journal before this mornings event kicked off at 6 a.m. EDT. The unit is expected to be based in Berlin, at arms length from headquarters in Wolfsburg and close to the citys thriving tech scene.

It is a small financial step but a leap for Volkswagen, which until the diesel crisis tended to only pay lip service to electric vehicles and technology that is reshaping the auto industry, Boston writes.

Volkswagen is also planning to cut costs by consolidating the way it develops and manufactures parts for its vehicles, two sources told the Financial Times Patrick McGee prior to the announcements this morning.

In stark contrast to many of its rivals, including Toyota, VW makes many of its components, McGee writes. Under the shake-up, the German carmaker is planning to draw together the various component operations that are scattered across the 12-brand group, and combine them in a single unit. Much of the component operations are centered on the underperforming VW brand.

In the speech, Muller confirmed the consolidation, pointing out that the companys components business has 67,000 employees at 26 locations across five continents.

The realignment will give the components business greater entrepreneurial freedom, he said. We anticipate that this will improve transparency while boosting internal competition. It will also contribute substantially to future topics such as electro-mobility.

Muller also distanced the company from the dishonor of its recent emission scandal in his prepared remarks.

We do not just pay lip service to integrity, responsibility and sustainability; they are fundamental to our future. Our most important currency is credibility and trust in our brands, our products and Volkswagen as a whole, he said.
by Larissa Faw , June 16, 2016

Sanpellegrino Sparkling Fruit Beverages (SFB) is introducing Delightways, its new campaign to celebrate the "joy of wandering" while hopefully drinking its beverage.

The project required a team approach led by Ogilvy & Mather New York along with partner agencies Team N, Deep Focus, Epsilon, Revelry and Metavision.

Ogilvy developed the campaign's centerpiece which is a new app that helps users navigate through select cities. However, unlike most mapping apps that direct users to the shortest paths, Delightways recommends unique routes with interesting experiences, such as bold street art or secret parks that have been identified through local influencers and Foursquare.

"Even when we don't know how to get somewhere, we default to mapping apps that send us there in the most straightforward way," says Alfonso Marian, chief creative officer, Ogilvy & Mather New York. "But when you wander, you open yourself up to being surprised, to discovering new things even in familiar places. And thats what the app does: it encourages you to wander. Its called Delightways because thats the emotion that surprise triggers: pure delight."

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Team N created an influencer strategy and program to help raise awareness for the beverage brand, Deep Focus developed the social media program specifically for the app, and Epsilon is introducing a non-conventional shopper marketing component to drive sampling and in-store promotion. As part of this project, the agency developed an SFB vending machine that can only be accessed via a QR code in the Delightways app.

There are also free bike weekends in partnership with bike share programs in NYC, LA and Chicago over the course of the summer to encourage consumers to explore their cities in a new and interesting way. And there will be an Italian-themed sampling truck in key markets and at select retailers.

Revelry will raise awareness for the brand at Outside Lands Music Festival, where a sampling truck will offer SFBs and encourage consumers to download Delightways.

Metavision is managing media negotiations, planning and buying relationships and assessing performance and results.

Lastly, Active Theory is responsible for the technical development of all elements of the app that are visible to the consumer.

The campaign's strategy is aimed at both those living in major cities and online fans. The app launches in markets including New York, San Francisco,Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, L.A., Miami, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Plus, the program will be supported by print and banner advertising, as well as strategic partnerships with local influencers, celebrity talent including actress Shay Mitchell who is using the app on her travels and media companies including New York Magazine, InStyle, Huffington Post, Thrillst, Goop and the Gothamist.

There will also be a launch party, live events, original content as well as support on social channels.

This campaign follow's last years global brand launch of Sanpellegrino's The Life Deliziosa, developed by Ogilvy & Mather New York, with front-end development support from Active Theory.
20 YEARS 1996

Governor Mel Carnahan took part in the Country Days Parade. According to sources he would make his first appearance in St. Francois County, riding the Mineral Area Labor Legislative Club float.

A severe thunderstorm roared through the Mineral Area leaving some citizens without power and some flash flooding.

Farmington resident Kevin Petty had better luck off the track with his sprint car earlier in the day that he did on Saturday night. Petty finished third in Country Days Off the Track Battle Car Show. Later, at the St. Francois County Raceway, Petty experienced drive line problems, putting an end to his evening. Tubby Black was the sprint car champion of the Off the Track Show, followed by Rick Bender and Petty. In the Sportsman Class, Billy Smith was first, Darrell Jarrett second and Tom Worley, Sr. third. In the Hobby Stock class, Kenny Harris was first, John Bohn second and Bruce Pulley third.

The population of horses in St. Francois County was in a growth pattern. One of the people pleased with the continued growth of the interest in horses was Tom Ramsey. He was known for breeding horses, shoeing horses, breaking horses, showing horses and training horses.

30 YEARS 1986

A home was burglarized on College Street and it was determined entry was gained through a side door. Taken in the burglary was guns, video recorder, jewelry and clothing.

The Farmington Police Department and the St. Francois County Sheriffs Department were involved in a chase with a green unlicensed pickup. The truck matched the description of a vehicle that was reported going the wrong way on Liberty Street.

The police and deputies chased the truck up several streets in Farmington until he attempted to turn from College onto Potosi Street and had to stop there for oncoming traffic. One officer tried to block the vehicle by pulling alongside and Sheriff Ken Buckley pulled in front of the vehicle. The subject turned left on Liberty Street and hit the left bumper of Buckleys car causing minor damage.

The suspect was eventually caught, resisting arrest and had to be restrained with leg irons. He refused the breathalyzer test. According to the police report the arrest charges were: resisting arrest, driving while intoxicated, no valid drivers license, failure to register vehicle and no valid inspection of vehicle, possession of alter drivers license, 12 stop sign violations, exceeding the speed limit, careless and imprudent driving charges and leaving the scene of an accident.

40 YEARS 1976

Dr. Thomas H. Hill was named director of the University of Missouris seven-county Southeast Missouri extension area. Dr. Hill succeeded A.D. Arnhart who retired in earlier in the year.

Former Governor Warren Hearnes was the guest at a free breakfast for the public given by Red Bone at the Downtown Cafe in Farmington. The public was invited to attend.

50 YEARS 1966

Boilerman Third Class Kenneth W. Burlbaw, USN, son of Mr. and Mrs. George Burlbaw, and Machinist Mate Second Class Robert D. Mayberry, Jr. USN, son of Mrs. and Mrs. Robert Mayberry both of Farmington returned from Vietnam waters to San Diego, California aboard the attack aircraft carrier, USS Ticonderoga, ending seven months of combat operations as a unit of the Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea.

Aubrey E. Powers, business manager of the Farmington State Hospital, was made Honorary Fire Chief of the hospitals Volunteer Fire Department.

Al Sullivan, Jr., until recently assistant budget director for the State of Missouri was appointed by Governor Warren Hearnes to the three-member Personnel Advisory Board. Sullivan was business manager of Mineral Area College in Flat River, recently assuming that position. His term on the Advisory Board would run through July 31, 1970. Sullivan, along with other members, was responsible to determine regulations governing salary, requirements, etc., for the personnel merit system operated by Personnel Division of the Department of Business and Administration.

60 YEARS 1956

Many people of the community recently wondered what the towers erected at several different locations were all about. An inquiry by The News produced the information that the towers were part of a government geodetic survey. One of the towers was south of the Corral Drive In on U.S. Highway 67. The towers were used for observation purposes and to establish property lines and are located at strategic points. Several were erected in a tri-county area.

The McCarty Store Building and McCarty Ladies Wear Store was sold by Mrs. Meta and L.C. McCarty to Mr. and Mrs. F.X. Stoll under the name of the Stolls Fashion Shoppe. The business operated in the adjoining store room as the Stolls Furniture and Appliance Store will also be continued the same as in the past.

For many years the Morris Brothers operated one of Farmingtons leading mercantile establishments at this location. It was bought by the McCartys several years ago.

70 YEARS AGO 1946

McCartys Store, handling a complete line of ladies and childrens ready-to-wear opened for business. The corner location of the store is the former location of Morris Brothers Store. The room has been completely renovated and is now one of the nicest looking store locations in town. An attractive awning was installed and the front of the building painted. Mr. McCarty was a retired GI and Mrs. McCarty has had several years of experience in the clothing business.

The office supply department of the Press Printing and Publishing Company was moved to separate quarters in the room adjacent to the Ritz Theatre. The printing department of The Press would remain in its same location.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, June 16, 2016

Google will open a Zurich-based research unit focused on machine learning, which is part of artificial intelligence. The project announced Thursday furthers CEO Sundar Pichai's push into AI, which covers projects like driverless cars, Google Now, search, and its Allo chat app.

Pichai has said that Google went from a search-first to a mobile-first -- and now an AI-first -- company. Marketers will need to understand the impact of the technology on search advertising and in other media to better understand how to plan and map campaigns. It will automate applications and platforms, and make them smarter.

Zurich is Googles largest engineering office outside the U.S., and is responsible for developing the engine that powers Knowledge Graph, as well as TensorFlow and the conversation engine that powers the Google Assistant in Allo.

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An engineering team at the new unit called Google Research Europe will focus on three areas -- machine intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and machine perception -- explains Emmanuel Mogenet, head of the unit, in a blog post.

NLP, most commonly used for search, focuses on algorithms that work across languages, and across domains. The technology is used across Google in many ways, impacting user experience in search, mobile, apps, ads, translate and more, with the syntactic systems prediction parts of search for each word in a sentence, as well as morphological features such as gender and number, according to the Web site.

Machine learning and AI can teach machines to reason and give them perception, similar to humans. Frank Chen, partner at investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, calls machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning some of the biggest technology shifts happening in the industry.

While the technology has been around for years, the breakthrough occurred in 2012 when Google set up a 1,000-server neural network and took 10 million YouTube videos, extracted raw 200-by-200 pixel still images from the videos, fed it into the system, and gave it a week for the servers to digest the data. The engineers wanted to know if the network could categorize the pictures in any meaningful way. It did.
Facebook is giving its Messenger app a homepage. Though seemingly small, the change is part of bold effort to establish Messenger as a communication hub of Facebook-like proportions.

Theres lots to experience on Messenger, Facebook notes in a new blog post.

The new homepage will feature the first few most recent messages at the top of users screens, followed by a new Favorites section, which highlights people that users message most frequently. Until now, Messenger has arranged chat threads in chronological order.

Analysts say the move makes perfect sense.

It's a no brainer and a natural evolution to hold more consumers in its [Messenger] environment for longer periods of time, Julie Ask, an analyst at Forrester Research, said on Thursday.

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What Facebook is doing with Messenger is a really big deal, experts at OMMA Boston recently agreed. Marketers should be most excited about the direct lines of communication its creating between themselves and consumers, according to Josh Engroff, chief digital media officer at The Media Kitchen, and managing director of KBS+ Ventures.

To such an immense degree, the industry has never really had direct communication between brands and consumers, Engroff told OMMA Boston attendees. Technology and media are at a tipping point. Already, users can order a car via Uber and share a song via Spotify directly on the popular app.

Rarely do weeks go by without Facebook adding some big new feature to Messenger. Among other additions, Messenger recently added group calling, Dropbox file sharing, and Video Chat Heads, which lets users talk to friends from a smaller chat head instead of using their full phone screen.

Facebook also recently rolled out Links and Codes, which are simple ways for people to begin conversations with other people and businesses by scanning a unique code they have been given. This can be done in-person -- standing side-by-side with someone -- or virtually. No prior connections are needed.

Facebook Messenger recently surpassed 900 million monthly active users, up from 800 million in January.

By the second quarter of the year, the social giant reportedly plans to begin putting ads directly into Facebook Messenger.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, June 16, 2016

Two New York residents who brought a privacy lawsuit against Turn are asking an appeals court to allow them to proceed with their case in court.

In papers filed with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, New York residents Anthony Henson and William Cintron argue that U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White should not have granted Turn's request to send the matter to arbitration. Henson and Cintron are seeking a "writ of mandamus" requiring White to vacate his earlier order.

Henson and Cintron alleged in a potential class-action filed in 2015 that Turn used a controversial technology that enabled it to track consumers for online ad purposes, even when they deleted their cookies. The allegations centered on Verizon's "supercookies" -- headers, called UIDHs, that Verizon previously injected into all unencrypted mobile traffic.

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Those headers -- 50-character alphanumeric strings -- enabled ad companies to compile profiles of users and serve them targeted ads. The UIDHs also are known as zombie cookies, or "supercookies," because they allow ad companies to recreate cookies that users delete.

Turn asked for the case to be sent to arbitration on the grounds that the consumers' allegations were closely connected to their subscriber agreements with Verizon -- which call for arbitration of all disputes.

White agreed with the ad tech company. He ruled that questions raised by the lawsuit "concern substantially interdependent and concerted conduct" by Turn and Verizon.

"Here, Turn contends that it acted in partnership with Verizon to provide services that were disclosed to plaintiffs in their Verizon subscriber agreements," White wrote in his March decision sending the case to arbitration.

Lawyers for Henson and Cintron now argue that White's decision should be reversed for several reasons, including that their arbitration agreements were with Verizon, not Turn.

"Neither plaintiffs complaint nor the relationships between any of the parties warrant a conclusion that plaintiffs agreed to arbitrate anything with Turn," they say in papers filed Friday with the 9th Circuit.

Verizon has used the headers since 2012 to track people's activity online and send them targeted ads, but didn't disclose their existence in its privacy policy until last year.

The company has always allowed people to opt out of receiving targeted ads powered by its own ad programs, but didn't initially allow them to avoid header insertions. Last year, Verizon changed its policies to allow people to opt out of the header injections. In October, Verizon again narrowed the program by deciding to only send the header to Verizon companies, including AOL.

Verizon initially said that outside ad networks weren't likely to draw on the headers in order to compile profiles of Web users. But in January of 2015, researcher Jonathan Mayer -- now with the FCC -- reported that the Turn was using Verizon's headers to collect data and send targeted ads to mobile users who delete their cookies.

Turn initially acknowledged that it used the headers for ad targeting and defended the practice, stating that the company uses the most stable identifier possible.

Several days later, Turn said it had re-evaluated and would stop using Verizon's headers to target ads.

Lawyers for Henson and Cintron say in their latest papers that Turn and Verizon's ad deal "did not contemplate Turn secretly subverting users efforts to protect their privacy and security."

"Verizon assured customers that the UIDH would not be used by advertising partners (like Turn) for tracking and profiling purposes; indeed, it publicly dismissed even the possibility 'that sites and ad entities will attempt to build customer profiles' using its identifiers," the users assert. "Turn proved Verizon wrong."

Turn consistently said it honors the industry's self-regulatory code and doesn't serve targeted ads to users if their cookies reveal that they opted out via links at sites operated by the self-regulatory groups Network Advertising Initiative or Digital Advertising Alliance. But when people clear cookies -- often in order to protect their privacy -- they also delete the opt-out cookies installed by the DAA and NAI.

Turn also says it won't serve targeted ads to people who opt out via its own link, or Verizon's opt-out mechanism. (Verizon's mechanism can persist even when users delete their cookies, according to Turn.)

Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission fined Verizon $1.35 million to settle an investigation surrounding the supercookies. That investigation focused on whether Verizon violated the Communications Act's privacy provisions -- which require carriers to protect customers' "proprietary information" -- and whether the company violated a 2010 net neutrality rule requiring disclosure of broadband management practices.

The FCC currently is considering whether to ban broadband providers from using persistent tracking mechanisms.
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"We can now use our technique to coat the entire surface of an implant, and testing HA-coated implants in an animal model has given us very promising results," says Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work.The first step of the HA-coating technique - which was developed in Rabiei's lab - coats a PEEK implant with a thin film of yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ). The second step applies a coating of HA. The researchers then heat the HA layer using microwaves. The YSZ layer acts as a heat shield, preventing the PEEK from melting. Meanwhile, the heat gives the HA a crystalline structure that makes it more stable in the body, meaning that the calcium phosphate will dissolve more slowly - promoting bonding with surrounding bone.In their new study, researchers tested three types of PEEK implants in a rabbit model: PEEK implants with no coating; PEEK implants with an HA coating treated only with microwaves; and PEEK implants with an HA coating treated with both microwaves and brief exposure to an autoclave in order to enhance the HA's crystalline structure.The researchers used microscopic evaluations of tissue cells and three-dimensional X-ray imaging to assess the performance of all three types of implants. 18 after surgery, the researchers found that both types of HA-coated implants had more than double the bone formation of PEEK alone, with comparable bone density. The HA-treated implants also had higher bone-to-implant contact ratios than PEEK alone."These results indicated an improved implant fixation in the body, decreasing the chances of loosening of the implant after surgery and the need for revision surgery to remove and replace the implant," Rabiei says. "This improvement is due to increased regenerated bone volume around coated implants compared to uncoated PEEK."The researchers also did biomechanical testing on the implants, assessing their 'toughness', or how well the implant bonded to the surrounding bone.To test this, the researchers conducted what is called biomechanical push-out testing, in which force is applied to an implant until it is dislodged. These results are measured in terms of work as Newton millimeters (N-mm).At 18 weeks, it took approximately 299.1 N-mm of work to dislodge implants coated with microwave-treated HA and about 312.5 N-mm to dislodge implants coated with microwave and autoclave-treated HA. This compares to about 183.9 N-mm of work needed to dislodge unmodified PEEK implants."It is notable that these results were achieved on completely smooth surfaces of PEEK, while our subsequent studies have indicated that by slightly increasing the surface roughness of PEEK prior to coating, we can accomplish even higher adhesion strength of two-layer HA/YSZ coatings that would require even higher work to dislodge," Rabiei says."Whether looking at bone growth or toughness, HA-coated samples outperformed uncoated PEEK implants," Rabiei says. "This treatment will probably increase the cost of an implant marginally, but should help minimize the need for follow-up surgeries - which means HA-treated implants will more than pay for themselves over time.""And the extent of the cost increase remains unclear," Rabiei adds. "We are not aware of any health risks associated with HA or YSZ - both of which are used in devices already approved by the FDA for long-term implantation. As a result, we may not need additional clinical trials before HA-coated implants can be used in clinical practice. We're investigating that now, and are looking for industry partners to help us commercialize the technique."Source: Eurekalert
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A&E visits have risen 32 percent over the past decade to 21.8 million a year

Each A&E visit costs the NHS 114

An ambulance call-out adds 220 to the bill

An unplanned hospital admission costs an eye-watering 1489

This compares to just 45 for the average GP visit

The researchers believe this is because A&E doctors take fewer risks with elderly patients they don't know and choose to admit them to a ward to be 'on the safe side', whereas General Practitioners (GPs) have an intimate knowledge of their patients' medical history and can send the less serious cases home after treatment. Essentially, GPs make far more effective 'gatekeepers' to more expensive treatments.Many of the minor cases in A&E are the so-called frequent flyers - people who visit A&E on multiple occasions. Very few of these people took up the option to visit a GP instead. This suggests that a nationwide roll-out of seven-day opening would not only reduce pressure on stretched A&E services as a whole, but that the impact would be biggest among the most costly cases.Professor Peter Dolton and Dr Vikram Pathania of Sussex's School of Business, Management and Economics led the study, which is published online in the. Dr Pathania said: "There is clearly evidence of unmet demand for weekend GP opening."Seven-day opening for GPs appears to make a dent in two major sources of A&E expense - admissions and ambulance usage. The latter alone shows a significant drop of nearly 20 percent on weekends. Costs aside, there is also strong evidence that patient healthcare, in many cases, could be better delivered by a visit to a GP."Patients may automatically equate the size and complexity of a large hospital-based A&E unit with higher quality care. But typically A&E doctors are junior to GPs, who are equivalent to hospital consultants in terms of their medical training and expertise. Plus GP treatment is based on direct past experience with the patient and access to their medical records."The research has potentially large implications for NHS finances, with an unplanned hospital admission costing around 30 times as much as a GP visit:The researchers caution that the long-term impacts are still unknown. People may respond to less crowded A&Es by visiting them more, for example.It is also clear that demand is highest among older people and, as the research also shows, the more affluent.In fact, some practices have already curtailed their weekend opening, citing insufficient demand. It may be, therefore, that seven-day opening should only be implemented in strategically located surgeries and may not be optimal for all surgeries.Professor Dolton said: "These findings suggest the need for a careful rethink about the efficiency of redirecting patients to extended GP surgeries to lighten the load in A&E - although this would need to be accompanied by a redirection of NHS funding to Primary Care."Source: Eurekalert
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It plays an important role in binding of oral micro-organisms to proteins (biofilm formation).

Involvement in substrate metabolism

Inhibiting plaque formation by intervening with bacterial attachments.

Production of chemicals that hampers formation of oral bacteria

Controlling mucosal permeability

Effect on local immune system

Regulating systemic immune function

Production of antimicrobial substances in-response to oral pathogens

Decreasing inflammatory response

Probiotic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probiotic#Immune_function_and_infections Probiotics and Oral Health

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2897872/ Probiotics and Oral Health: A Review

http://www.ispcd.org/userfiles/rishabh/V7I10/V7I10A29.pdf Oral Probiotic Stops Yeast Infections

http://www.realnatural.org/oral-probiotic-stops-yeast-infections/

Initially, probiotics were associated with only gastrointestinal health and the clinical investigations were mainly focused on the prevention and treatment of infections and diseases related to the gut. But recently many investigators have proposed probiotics for oral health also. Clinical studies have demonstrated that probiotics may decrease the occurrence of dental caries in children.For a microorganism to be oral probiotic, it should adhere and colonize teeth surfaces in the oral cavity. Generally, probiotics are strain specific, and the commonly used strains belong to the genera Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus; these genera are a part of the normal human microbiota and are usually found in the oral cavity and in dental caries.Lactobacillus rhamnosus generates a growth inhibitory substance against Streptococcus sobrinus, which reduces the possibility of dental caries . Streptococcus salivarius strains are good oral probiotic, as they are early colonizers of mucosal surfaces and are predominantly found on the tongue surface of healthy individuals.Other oral probiotics strains include, and W. cibaria. Species mainly found in the saliva samples include L. paracasei, L. plantarum, L. rhamnosus, and L. salivarius.Some culture based studies indicate that bifidobacteria are one of the first anaerobes in the mouth. Bifidobacterial species separated from the oral samples comprise B. longum, B. dentium and B. bifidum. Both genera lactobacilli and bifidobacteria are safe and present in breast milk; thus exposing the oral cavity to these bacteria early in the life.In dental caries, both acidogenic and non-acidogenic bacteria increase in number. Probiotic bacteria and genetics can dislodge cariogenic bacteria with non-cariogenic bacteria. Only two probiotic bacterial strains likeandcan prevent dental caries; they can adhere to hydroxyapatite and then enter into biofilm which is similar to dental plaque. These bacteria also possess the capability to bind with microorganisms found in plaque.Probiotic dairy products neutralize acidic conditions in the mouth and inhibit cariogenic bacteriaProbiotics were first used for improving oral health by reducing periodontal inflammation. People with many periodontal diseases such as periodontitis , gingivitis and pregnancy gingivitis showed positive results after being treated with L. acidophilus strain. The probiotic strains used for this purpose include L. salivarius WB21, L. brevis (CD2), L. reuteri strains and Bacillus subtilis.It is observed that orally administered probiotics can benefit chronic periodontitis. Mucosal immune responses can be enhanced by probiotic immunization.Periodontal patients who used chewing gums or lozenges having probiotics noted an improvement in their periodontal disease. Halitosis (bad breath) is due to the formation of unstable sulphur compounds produced by the anaerobic bacteria which degrade the salivary food proteins. S. salivarius generates a specific by-product called as bacteriocins which reduce the overall quantity of unstable sulphide producing species.Oral probiotic lactobacilli improved halitosis and also showed positive effects on gum bleedingGargling solutions containing probiotics retard the production of volatile sulphur compounds that facilitate bad breath Oral hygiene can be affected by fixed orthodontic appliances, as they can cause accumulation of microorganisms resulting in growth of Streptococcus mutans and demineralization of enamel. A clinical study conducted in 2009 by Cildir et al. with probiotics using Bifidobacterium animalis subsp, Lactis DN-173010 showed that this study reduced S. mutans in individuals using fixed orthodontic appliances.Scientists noted that there is a reduction in the prevalence of Candida albicans in elderly people after consumption of probiotic cheese comprising of L. rhamnosus GG and Propionibacterium freudenreichii ssp.A new research from Japan's Teikyo University Institute of Medical Mycology has proposed that an oral probiotic Streptococcus salivarius K12 suppresses the growth and colonization of Candida species.Source: Medindia
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He points for instance to "being able to provide treatment that is banned in many countries."A law that came into force in 2006 allows women aged 18 or over -- be they single, in heterosexual or same-sex couples -- to access assisted reproductive technology such as artificial insemination or in vitro fertilisation (IVF).By contrast, the legislation in neighboring France bans single women or same-sex couples from undergoing such treatment.The identity of sperm and egg donors is also kept secret in Spain.And unlike in other countries such as Britain or France, there is no shortage of eggs in Spain, which already has a strong tradition of organ donation.Last but not least, Spanish clinics accept women wanting to conceive aged up to 50.As such, in the latest figures available, some 15,600 treatments took place in Spain in 2011, compared to 3,300 in the Czech Republic, 2,100 in Britain and 1,100 in Belgium, according to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.Emmanuelle Lino, whose name has been modified as have those of other women who would only talk on condition of anonymity, is one such satisfied customer in Spain.The 45-year-old Frenchwoman has only just given birth to a little boy conceived in a Barcelona clinic thanks to an egg donation.Married, she had tried IVF in Paris, to no avail.And by the time she wanted to try again, she was unable to as she was older than the 43-year-old age limit fixed by the French social security system. Egg donations in France are also rare.She had initially thought about going to Belgium, another prized destination for women with fertility problems, but "I was told there would be a huge wait."So she settled for Spain, where her treatment cost nearly 7,000 euros ($7,800), excluding travel costs.Many of the Spanish clinics' foreign customers are women in their forties, in relationships with men, who come for egg donations and associated IVF treatment.Others ask for their eggs to be frozen -- a technique that allows them to conceive later in life.And Spanish clinics make it as easy as possible for potential foreign customers, with services in their mother tongue."I filled in the contact form online and they called me back the very next day, in German," says Silke Khrause.This 46-year-old single woman who lives near Dusseldorf in Germany had initially thought about going to Denmark for an egg donation, but "everything was in English, it was really complicated."So she chose Barcelona.The clinics are also competitive price-wise.Maria Smith, a 46-year-old British woman, said she had been quoted 7,000 euros for an egg donation in Spain, compared to 13,000 euros in London.But she eventually settled for her home country, where unlike Spain the donors' identity can be revealed to children born from this procedure once they turn 18 -- an option she wanted to have for her future son or daughter.Spain has some 200 gynecological centers, more than any other European nation.According to research firm DBK Informa, the sector is doing well, helped by a general trend of Spanish or foreign women wanting to get pregnant later in life, lenient legislation and foreign demand.The sector earned 365 million euros in 2014 -- a turnover that is expected to increase five to six percent a year, it says.As a result, Spanish fertility clinics have expanded abroad.IVI for instance has clinics in Portugal and Italy as well as Spain.But French gynecologist Joelle Belaisch-Allart warns that allowing pregnancies for older women carries many risks, such as diabetes, premature birth and miscarriages."For me it's 45 years old maximum," she says, pointing out that once a woman gets treated abroad and comes home, she and other doctors are left having to follow their potentially-risky pregnancies.And far from being a walk in the park, such procedures are difficult, and not always successful."For patients, it's an uphill struggle," says fertility expert Jacques de Mouzon.So it was for Sabrina Ferrant, a single French woman who resorted to crowdfunding to collect some of the 5,500 euros she needed for IVF.Suffering from endometriosis, a condition that can lead to difficulties in getting pregnant and even infertility, she did it in Spain as France only allows such treatment for couples.And it was worth it. Now 33, she is pregnant with twins.Source: AFP
Harlequin ichthyosis, also called ichthyosis congenital, is a genetic disorder that mainly affects the skin of newborn babies.

Babies with this condition develop a thick, dry and scaly skin consisting of hard diamond-shaped plates separated by deep cracks.

Harlequin ichthyosis is a very rare disorder with a very few cases reported in literature. The first case was described in 1970 from South Carolina. Severe cases usually do not survive beyond a few days or weeks after birth. With the right treatment, some patients have survived into adulthood, the oldest living case having entered into her 30s.

Harlequin ichthyosis is a genetic disorder that occurs due to a mutation in the ABCA12 gene. The gene plays an important role in the production of a protein that transports fats into the outer layer of the skin and helps in its development. Defect in the gene, therefore, does not allow the proper development of the skin, thereby explaining the appearance of the baby.

The ABCA12 gene is inherited by the baby from its parents in an autosomal recessive pattern. This means that the baby requires a pair of defective genes and should inherit one defective gene from each parent to manifest the condition. The parents may have only one defective gene each and therefore, may be apparently completely normal. If both the parents were close blood relations, the chances that both have the same defective gene are higher, which increases the chances of the baby suffering from the condition.

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Harlequin ichthyosis affects the skin. The baby is born with the following features:

The skin is thick, dry and has a fish-scale pattern. It consists of thick diamond-shaped plates separated by deep cracks or fissures

The eyes appear bulging due to the pulling back of the eyelids

The mouth appears open due to the pulling back of the lips. Feeding may be difficult

The outer part of the ear may be absent, making the ears look like holes

The nose appears flat

The movement of the limbs may be restricted. The development of the limbs may be incomplete

The lack of healthy skin results in complications, which include:

Loss of water, resulting in dehydration

Life-threatening infections. Infection of the blood called sepsis may occur

Inability to regulate body temperature

Breathing difficulties and respiratory failure due to inability of the chest to move properly

Harlequin ichthyosis is diagnosed based on:

The physical examination of the baby, which reveals the typical appearance of the skin

Genetic testing can detect the abnormal genes and confirm the diagnosis

Diagnosis can be made even before birth.

Ultrasound during pregnancy may raise suspicion of the condition.

Fetal cells obtained through a procedure called amniocentesis or chorionic villus biopsy can be subjected to genetic tests. This test can be done early in pregnancy when a similar case was noted earlier in the family

Harlequin ichthyosis is usually treated with supportive care. Complications should be prevented, or diagnosed and treated early. The prognosis improves once the baby survives the first few weeks.

The baby should be kept in humidified incubator to maintain its body temperature and provide humidified air. The environment should be sterile to prevent infection till the babys condition stabilizes

Adequate fluids and electrolytes should be given to prevent dehydration

Drugs like isotretinoin have been used to facilitate healing of the skin in these patients

Lubricants applied to the eyes protect them from damage

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The skin should be moisturized with moisturizers, and soaked for prolonged duration in water during bath

Surgery may be required to relieve skin tightening and improve function of limbs

Regular follow-up of the patient will help to diagnose and treat any problems arising from the condition or its treatment

Health Tips

Harlequin ichthyosis cannot be prevented. However, since the defective gene has to be inherited from both parents, the chances of both parents having the defective gene are higher if the parents were close blood relations before marriage. Therefore consanguineous marriages should be avoided as far as possible.

If a couple already has had a baby with harlequin ichthyosis, genetic counseling may help the couple understand the risk of having another baby with the same condition.
This year, April Showers brought in more than May flowers.

With help from community members and businesses, Girl Scouts throughout eastern Missouri collected more than 1.1 million personal care items through this years April Showers, the organizations annual collection drive and largest community service project. The items, ranging from toothbrushes and shampoo to bandages and diapers, benefit hundreds of food pantries and homeless shelters throughout the region. Girl Scouts spent more than 36,000 hours on the project, with adult volunteers and family members pitching in more than 26,000 hours.

The annual collection began in 1998, and takes place over two weekends. The drive kicks off with Showering the Community, an event where community members are invited to donate items at select Walmart stores. Also during this first weekend, girls go door-to-door distributing recyclable plastic bags in their communities, and return the following weekend to collect the filled bags, which residents have filled with personal care items. Girl Scouts also works with Operation Food Search, Schnucks and Dierbergs to collect items, and receives sponsorships from Ameren Missouri and Macys.

April Showers addresses an important community need: almost a quarter of Missouri households eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which do not apply to the purchase of personal care items. Consequently, thousands of families and individuals count on donations to their local shelters and food pantries for these essentials.

Every year, communities, families and organizations show they stand with girls and support Girl Scouts by contributing to this crucial initiative, and we are grateful for their support, said Bonnie Barczykowski, Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri CEO. The impact of these 1.1 million items will surely improve quality of life for so many children and adults across our region.
In May 2016, the pro-Kremlin Russian think tank Council for Foreign and Defense Policies published a memorandum, titled "Russia's Foreign Policy: From The Late 2010s - To The Early 2020s." The report was written under the guidance of Fyodor Lukyanov, Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, and Research Director of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Sergey Karaganov, Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies, and Dean of the School of World Economics and International Relations at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics. Senior officials in the executive and legislative branches participated in drafting the memorandum's theses.[1]

The memorandum was presented during the XXIV Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies (April 9-10, 2016), which was attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The memorandum analyzes global and regional trends, assesses the achievements and failures of Russian policies, and also offers a few helpful suggestions for future Russian foreign policy.

Following are excerpts from the memorandum:[2]

The Still Existent Risk Of Russia Getting Dragged Into An Arms Race

"1. Introduction

"1.4. ... Despite the escalation of international competition and the fact that it is becoming increasingly ideological in character, foreign policy debates are vitally important. In the world of total propaganda and mythmaking, where the actual is replaced by the virtual, it is even easier than ever to overlook what is really occurring and fall hostage to one's own or others' icons and ideological attitudes. The experience of the American and Western elites of the past two decades, who believed in the myth of ''liberal democracy', as the highest and final stage of human development ('the end of history'), and tried to impose this democracy by force and 'accelerate' the natural course of development, provides an example of this. Not only did this produce a series of defeats; it also spurred the destabilization of enormous regions, and then - the next step - caused a wave of refugees. We remember what the myth of socialism as ''the highest and ultimate stage" did to our country, as well as another idea propounded without any alternative - the ''new political thinking' [of Mikhail Gorbachev], which seriously even included the idea of global nuclear disarmament...

"1.5. Without re-evaluation and disputation, the current policy (hitherto tough but relatively cautious and productive on the whole) may degenerate, become a method of diversion from the broad tasks of national revival and ascent, or bring about a new 're-involvement', capable of undermining the strength of the society and state, as occurred with the USSR. The risk of getting dragged into an arms race still exists; and, for example, exacerbation of the confrontation with Turkey carries the dangerous potential of another ''Crimean war'. To be sure, the latter gave impetus to necessary reforms [most notably the liberation of the serfs] that created the basis for national progress in late 19th century. But it is better to start reforms without an external impetus in the form of yet another military conflict."



The XXIV Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies held on April 9-10, 2016.(Source: Svop.ru)

Economic Competition Can Escalate And Become An Even More Important Part Of Global Rivalry

"2. Global Trends

"2.1.1. Economic competition can escalate and become an even more important part of global rivalry due to a a recently commenced shift in the technological paradigm: the digital revolution, a new wave of robotization, and almost revolutionary changes in medicine, education, and the energy sphere.

"2.2. The technological revolution will most likely accelerate another pivotal trend - an unpredictable, ultra-rapid redistribution of power and, , with a resulting increased potential for world conflict. This time it could be related to the new shift in global GNP away from energy carriers and raw materials producers, the crowding out of mass professions from industries, even in the developing world, and aggravated inequality within and between countries.

"2.3. It is unclear whether the technological revolution will lead to a revival of sustainable economic growth. In the foreseeable future, one should expect it to slow down; a new crisis of the still unstable international financial system should also be expected, as well as economic shocks, in their broad definition.

"2.3.1. The old West will no longer lead development. But the explosive shift of influence towards 'the new' observable over the past 15 years will most probably attenuate. Competition will escalate due to a general slowdown and the accumulated disproportions. New countries will be increasingly vociferous in demanding a place in the world economic system corresponding to their achieved level of economic development . The old ones will desperately try to protect their positions.



Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies Sergey Karaganov, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies Fyodor Lukyanov, at the XXIV Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies. (Source: Svop.ru)

"2.3.3. A process of rapidly re-formatting, and perhaps even destroying the global economic regulation system that was created mostly by the West after the Second World War, has begun. Realizing that the established pattern gives equal benefits to the rising competitors, the old West started to depart from it. The WTO is gradually withdrawing into the shadows, making way for bi- and multilateral trade and economic agreements. The IMF-World Bank system is being supplemented (and gradually pushed out) by regional structures. A slow erosion of the dollar's domination is starting. Alternative payment systems are arising. The almost universal failure of the 'Washington Consensus' policy (that Russia tried and is still partially trying to follow now) has undermined the moral legitimacy of former regulations and institutions.

"2.3.4. The competition has moved to the sphere of technical, ecological and other standards. In addition to regional economic alliances created in the past decade, macro-blocs are being formed. The U.S. and a group of US-oriented countries are launching the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). China and the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries are creating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). At the same time, the USA is trying to keep Europe in its orbit and not allow it to draw closer to Eurasian states by means of forming the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Since use of military force, especially in relations between major states, is extremely dangerous, the application of sanctions and other economic tools without UN Security Council legitimation are becoming a widespread instrument of foreign policy. The situation is reminiscent of past ages, when blockades and embargoes used to be common, and often led to wars.

"2.6. (The decades-long) structural destabilization for many decades) and descent into chaos of the Middle and Near East, parts of Africa, and other surrounding areas, as well as the growth of Islamic extremism, terrorism, and mass migrations have provided a catalyst for conflict in the contemporary and future world.

"2.7. A fundamental tendency of the early 21st century is the Western reaction to the abrupt weakening of its position in the early 2000s - [a weakening that is] military and political (due to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), economic (following the crisis of 2008-2009), and moral - because of the declining efficiency of modern western democracies as a method of government suitable for the modern world (Europe), its diminished legitimacy in the eyes of its own population (the rise of the extreme left and right), the inconsistency between avowed values and reality (Guantanamo, Assange, mass surveillance), the elite schism (U.S.). This weakening causes extreme sensitivity because it followed what appeared to be a decisive and glorious victory at the end of the 20th century.

"2.8. Economic, scientific and technological factors are still dominant in determining the international agenda, and the weight and influence of states. But now they are being pushed aside by politics, including power politics. There are many reasons for that. The key ones are the growth of instability and turbulence, "re-nationalization" of international relations (the return of nation states as major players in global politics and economics instead of the predicted dominance of international institutions , TNCs or NPOs). The rise of Asia - a continent of nation states - played an important role here. And states, especially new ones, operate according to classical rules. They first and foremost seek to ensure their security and sovereignty.

"Undoubtedly, transnational factors (global civil society, giant companies) are very influential. But they influence the conditions in which states exist and operate, they pose challenges for the states; they do not replace states (they are incapable of it) as a fundamental element of the international system.

An increase in the number of unsolvable global problems also contributes to the return of the state to a central position in the world system - old of international administration institutions are incapable of managing these problems.



Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova at the XXIV Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies. (Source: Svop.ru)

"2.8.1. As previously mentioned, the increased relevance of military force in international relations is limited. At the highest, global level - between great powers - the use of direct force is almost impossible. The factor of nuclear deterrence is at work. Most of humanity's changed mentality and values , information transparency, concerns that conflicts may escalate to the nuclear level - all prevent the mass use of military force "at the middle level". And when it happens, it most often leads to political defeat (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya). although contrary examples exist- Russia in Chechnya and Georgia, and so far in Syria. Therefore, the use of force descends to lower levels - destabilization, provoking internal struggles, civil wars and sub-regional conflicts and their subsequent settlement on terms beneficial to the external powers.

"2.8.2. The role of military force may possibly grow due to the long-term destabilization of the Middle and Near East, North and Equatorial Africa. and in any case, because of the increased dynamics and unpredictability of international relations, ultra-rapid and multi-directional changes in the global power balance , between and within regions.

"2.8.4. Military force combined with responsible and skillful diplomacy is becoming a crucial factor in maintaining world peace and preventing accumulated structural, economic and political contradictions from escalating towards a global war. The responsibility, role and influence of countries (including Russia) capable of stopping the slide towards such a war and escalation of conflicts, are growing. It is ever more important because for the last 7-8 years the world has been, in fact, in a pre-war state - because of the accumulated imbalances and contradictions that are not offset by appropriate policies and competent institutions. As the memory of the 20th century horrors fades, the fear of a large-scale war diminishes. Some world elites even exhibit an implicit desire for it - they see no alternative for solving the numerous contradictions that have piled up. The situation in Asia is alarming. Conflict intensity grows, but insufficient experience in preventing clashes exist and a dearth of security agencies. It is quite probable that the "security vacuum" around China creates a demand for creative, responsible and constructive diplomacy on Russia's part.

"2.8.5. In the world of traditional politics, such rapid re-distribution of economic and political powers and of moral influence would almost inevitably trigger a series of large-scale wars or even a new world war. But so far, this has been prevented by the most important structural factor that has determined the world's development for the past seventy years - nuclear weapons, especially super-powerful arsenals in Russia and the US. They only prevented the Cold War from becoming a nuclear war. Had it not been for the sobering threat of a nuclear Armageddon, the "old" world establishment would hardly have agreed to the explosive growth of influence of rising powers, primarily China and India. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons goes on, whereas the level of trust, dialogue, and positive cooperation in the military and strategic sphere is extremely low. Taken together, all this increases the probability of a nuclear war. Sustainable international strategic stability has decreased.



Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies Sergey Karaganov, and Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies Fyodor Lukyanov, at the XXIV Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies. (Source: Svop.ru)

"2.8.7. The top priority task now is preventing another large-scale war as a result of a mistake, escalation of tension, some conflict, or provocation. The likelihood of provocations is growing, especially in the Middle East.

"2.10. Instead of the Cold War model (throughout most of it, it was not bi-polar but tri-polar, when USSR had to oppose both the West and China) and the short "unipolar" moment that followed, the world seems to be moving via multipolarity towards a new (soft) bipolarity. With the help of remaining military and political alliances, TPP, T-TIP, the USA is trying to consolidate the old West around itself and pull a number of new developed states to its side. At the same time, the prerequisites now exist for the emergence of another center - Greater Eurasia. China may play the lead economic role there, but its supremacy will be balanced by other powerful partners - Russia, India, and Iran. Objectively, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization could be a possible center for consolidation.

"2.11. So far, it is unclear what place Europe will occupy in the new configuration. It will hardly be able to play the role of an independent center. Possibly the struggle over it will resume or has already resumed..

"2.11.1. If the current chaotic and unstable multipolarity gives way to bi-polarity, it is important to avoid another severe schism, especially a military and political one - a new round of structural military rivalry.

"2.12.1. A new and relatively unexpected factor of world development is the ideological revival in international relations. About 10-15 years ago, many believed that the world had arrived at a single ideology of liberal democracy. But the growing underperformance of the democratic world countries and the relative success of the authoritarian capitalism states or illiberal democracies with strong leaders, have revived the question of who is winning and whom to follow. In the USA and some European countries that are losing their position in the world, defensive democratic messianism is on the rise. It is opposed by a nascent ideology of new conservatism (although it is not yet conceptually formalized), the rise of nationalism, the cult of sovereignty, and the model of leadership democracy."

The European Union Has Entered Into An Era Of Multi-Level Crisis

"3. Regional Trends

"3.6. After achieving impressive results, becoming an example of the post-historical, non-violent, humane international order, and providing comfortable life for most its citizens, the European Union entered into a period of multi-level crisis in the mid-2000s. The reasons include: a decline of competitive performance for the economies of most EU countries in the world markets; excessive for the modern world, the welfare state orientation" of most countries that undermines their competitive performance; excessively fast and grandiose expansion following the 1990s euphoria, which aggravated cultural and economic differences within the union; politically motivated decision to introduce the euro without [first securing] the common economic management requisite for a common currency; the decision to move towards a common foreign and defense policy that resulted in a lowest common denominator policy that has weakened the EU countries still further vis-a-vis the rest of the world; the de-facto failed model of multiculturalism; the departure by the EU elites from many traditional European values, including Christianity; the deepening political and cultural gap between the masses and the elites; the "democratic deficit" - transfer of authority from states to Brussels, which arouses increased resentment and opposition. At the same time, the level of democracy attained in most EU countries means that the elites are unable to make long-term and difficult decisions, and that leadership is becoming progressively weaker. Finally, the world surrounding Europe went the "non-European" way - towards re-nationalization, military and political destabilization, return to power politics. Europe lacks the tools to influence this world.

"...There is a growing desire by some European elites to hide under the wing of the USA, which is withdrawing from the Old World; this desire even comes at the expense of confrontation with Russia. Even now, one of the major reasons for fomenting tension in relations with Russia is the desire to self-organize against "the foreign enemy" in order to direct the energy obtained inward, to save the Euro-project. Threats to Europe emanate from within and from the South - from the Arab East, and in the longer term - from Africa. But the policy makers are trying to pretend that the true danger is in the East. They have almost achieved confrontation, but not salvation. The turbulence inside the European Union will make it an even more difficult and unreliable partner. Many functions have been delegated to Brussels. And it is losing its ability to perform.

"3.8. The USA remains the world's economic, technological and scientific leader for the foreseeable future. But this supremacy will be eroded by both the structural problems in the American economy, primarily its debt, and - even more so - by the polarization of the political system, and its diminished effectiveness. In foreign policy this polarization is expressed in the dominance of the Neo=Conservatives on the right and the liberal interventionists, in the erosion of the relatively realistic center, in the sharp fall of political competency and responsibility. One can clearly see the departure from the liberal models of a desired world order in favor of the openly neo-imperialistic ones. At the same time, one can see the growing signs of isolationism. So far, this combination has found expression in an [American] attempt to form new blocs around it and continue to dictate rules. Domestic schisms have undermined the quality of American politics. Another explanation for the escapades of the past years - a conscious attempt to destabilize the world, to increase dependence on the US - seems less obvious. Although this objective is also apparently present, for instance, in the American policy in Europe."



Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies Fyodor Lukyanov, at the XXIV Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policies. (Source: Rzlok.ru)

In Comparison With The Former Soviet Union And Early Russia, The Morale Of The Russian Society Has Changed

"4. Russia: Policy Results

"4.1. Russian foreign policy of the last decade was, on the whole, successful; its diplomacy - truly masterful. The weakest link remains domestic economic development. So far, foreign policy has more than compensated for this weakness. But its powers are not infinite. One of the most important indicators of a country's global weight and influence - its share of the global GNP - is dropping again.

"4.1.1.1. The Russian leadership emphasizes that it will not allow Russia to be drawn into an arms race. But the risk persists, especially after 2020, when the U.S. will start a new cycle of renovating its strategic potential. The declared Russian plans - modernization of its strategic nuclear missile potential, tactical capabilities, and ABM systems, and especially the creation and deployment of high-precision long-range non-nuclear systems - each of them makes sense separately. But taken together, they may prove unsustainable. Especially alarming is the risk of being drawn into a race of non-nuclear but effectively strategic weapons, which favors the wealthier side , or is even largely a bluff like Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which plunged the Soviet leadership into panic. There are much more effective, mostly nuclear capabilities to neutralize or even prevent such threats.

"4.1.11. In comparison with the former Soviet Union and early Russia, the makeup of Russian social morale has changed. The irreligion and dying communist ideology of the 1980s and the situation of the 1990s when the revolutionary minority imposed the locally unviable (as it subsequently became clear later) 'liberal 'values on the majority, have been replaced with patriotism, state nationalism and more or less normal traditional values, that are globally widespread . They are generally supported by the vast majority of the population and a large part of the elite; they feel that their country's position is morally right. This is a fundamental change compared to the shame and desire to please of the late 1980s-1990s.

"4.1.14. Russia, in fact, began offering most of the world's people , including even those in the West, a viable set of values. They are, for the most part, inherited from the past, but the past is returning. It is political and cultural pluralism, freedom of choice instead of western universalism, state sovereignty, national dignity, non-interference in internal affairs; reliance on traditional social, individual and family values, support of religions, rejection of militant secularism.

"4.2.1. We keep repeating: our major problem is the economic stagnation, which has been worsening the last 8-9 years, which can undermine the geopolitical successes, and which is provoking external pressure.

"4.2.2. We have not succeeded in building mutually beneficial and hence stable relations in Europe, a viable system of European security. There have been objective reasons -divergent vectors of values systems development, the West's desire to impose its rules and models, its expansionist drive . But Russia too has committed mistakes. The main one is the illusion (until the second half of the 2000s) that one can obtain respect for one's interests by concessions, by desire to "be liked". Russia, when it proposed alternative solutions, practically never insisted on them and was satisfied with promises to consider them or by polite brush-offs. The signing of the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act was a tragic blunder; it de facto legitimized the bloc's [eastward] expansion . This weakness was only partially justified.

"4.2.4. Reliance on the Russian-American 'reset' was mistaken; at its basis was a problem that is considered secondary by all: the reduction of strategic offensive weapons. Moscow did not insist on solving a fundamental issue of stopping the expansion of Western alliances to the territories that Russia considered vital for its security.

"4.2.6. There is danger of Russia's prolonged involvement in the dead-end tangle of problems in the Middle East. External forces will push our country into conflicts, including direct confrontation with Turkey."

One Should Consider The European-Eurasian Prospect An Open Possibility

"5. Future-Oriented Policy

"5.1. Considering the above-described trends in global development and, primarily, the growth of unpredictability and conflict intensity, Russian foreign policy should be guided by the following principles and objectives (in addition to and for further development of the officially declared ones):

"5.1.1. [It is necessary to] prevent another global military confrontation, Russia's deep involvement in conflicts, and their escalation.

"5.1.3. [The policy] [should be] oriented exclusively towards our national interests in their modern and realistic sense. They cannot be secured without active participation in international cooperation. Our rivals want to isolate us. We must not play into their hands. Maximum self-sufficiency, especially in food supplies and a number of technologies, is desirable. But self-isolation will condemn the country to retrogression.

"5.1.5. Consistent commitment to preventing new political and military rifts in the world, and especially regarding a return to structural military confrontation in Europe that some forces in the Euro-Atlantic world are pushing for, as inadmissible. If a Cold War-like confrontation is revived in Europe, but to the east of its former boundary, it will be much more dangerous and unstable than before.

"5.1.6. [It should be] resolutely orientated towards re-establishment and maintaining the supremacy of international law, particularly, the UN Charter. Intervention into internal affairs is possible only by the decision of the UN Security Council (with possible increase in the number of its permanent members). Russia should regain its status as the leading legitimist power.

"5.1.7. Russia is a bulwark of international stability and peace, ensuring free development for all countries and peoples, preventing the imposition of alien practices and values on them, especially if it is done by force or via intervention into their internal affairs. Countries and peoples must have an opportunity for organic, normal development. Imposition of any "-isms" should be relegated to the past. Russia should actively "raise the banner" [which extolls] the value of cultural and civilizational diversity, and aspires towards harmony (rather than unification) as the most important stabilizing factor in a polycentric world.

"5.1.8. Taking into account the relative weakness of economic components of power in the coming years, it is advisable for Russia to use its competitive advantages - restored and upgraded military potential, high-quality and competent diplomacy - and focus on the role of security provider for the international community, especially for our partners and neighbors, in order to increase its global cumulative power. It should also act by means of deterrence, as well as constructive and active participation in conflict resolution (as in Syria) or in their prevention. This role is especially clear in Central Asia, where Russia can create a tandem with China, in which the latter would primarily provide developmental resources, and Russia - security. Of course, [this would be predicated] on the terms of mutual and common benefit.

"5.2. As for specific policies, we propose the following priorities:

"5.2.1. Maintaining a high level of combat readiness and flexibility in armed forces, especially nuclear, to prevent any countries or alliances from harboring illusions that applying military and political pressure on Russia, not to mention [achieving] victory [over Russia] in a military confrontation, is possible. Such forces are necessary to maintain international strategic stability and peace, and regional balances.

"5.2.4. Foreign policy primarily oriented towards the entire post-Soviet area should be gradually consigned to the past. 25 years have passed since the USSR collapsed. It is pointless to remain nostalgic about it.

"5.2.5. Ukraine will, most probably, continue to deteriorate. It is important to restrict the negative and diversionary influence of the Ukrainian factor on Russian politics. The minimum goal has been achieved -stopping the Western alliances' further expansion of to Ukraine, and other countries and territories vital for Russian security. Now it is expedient to disregard Ukraine (as far as possible) in the years ahead, ensure the boundary regime and push for compliance with the Minsk agreements. The Donbass problem is unsolvable for the moment. It is better to have a semi-independent, though formally Ukrainian, territory that Russia helps, i.e., in effect, a 'frozen' conflict.

"5.2.6. Further intensification of the policy of support for the Russian culture and language abroad and establishing connections with the Russian diaspora are sorely needed. This is not only an affair of state, but is also [a duty] of NPOs.

"5.2.7. We need an honestly defined aid program. Not subsidies or often pointless and expensive /symbolic functions, but directly targeted aid to people and NPOs capable of promoting Russia's interests. Not complaints by functionaries about the oppression of the Russian language, but increasing real support for it in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Russian Empire, contributing to maintaining and developing our common cultural heritage, significantly -upscaled preparation of foreign students in Russian universities. If the creation of Slavic universities is desired, they have to be adequately financed. Russian business companies that invest abroad should automatically incorporate humanitarian projects in their business plans- support for schools, hospitals, student scholarships, etc.

"5.2.8. Russian citizens abroad must know for sure that their homeland will, if necessary, fiercely defend them . Punitive measures against Turkey for the murder of Russian military personnel could have been harsher, up to and including using force. But using the slogan of "defending the Russian world", as a rationale for the use of military force outside Russia, is unrealistic and counterproductive. This is not tantamount to an appeal for renouncing the use of military force abroad in case of a clear threat to our vital interests.

"5.2.9. Work with countries that used to be part of the USSR and the Russian Empire should be increasingly conducted on the level of supporting mutual security arrangements, including protection from external interference in domestic political processes, into the sphere of business contacts, student exchange, and establishing connections between organizations and cultural figures. It is also the sphere of work, primarily, of NGOs supported by the state and Russian business.

"5.3. It is advisable to restore and develop good neighborly relations with the European countries. A restoration of the European security system on the old bases is impossible. Now it makes sense to develop a broad pragmatic economic, cultural, scientific, educational, human cooperation to the maximum - as far as possible, without politics or ideology. [Policy should be] oriented towards cooperation with specific countries. Considering the European Union's future situation, an EU - EEU [Eurasian Economic Union] dialogue is hardly productive. Close dialogue with the EU, but not 'integration of integrations. As for NATO, professional discussions between military leaders on the issues of maintaining peace and preventing conflict escalation [should take place], but the previously useless (and even harmful, because it created a false impression of healthy relations) political Russia-NATO Council) should definitely not be restored. The further militarization of European politics, which may result in particular from our Western partners' proposals for renewed armaments reduction negotiations, should be prevented. . At the same time, a professional dialogue between military leaders is useful for preventing accidental mishaps and conflicts, reducing military activity, and preventing the emergence of a new system of military confrontation in Europe.

"5.3.2. In our relations with Europe during the coming decades, we must depart from the realization that it is no longer a model, but neither is it a threat. It is a kindred culture and a partner in economic and human cooperation. For the moment, we have drifted apart, but a new rapprochement is desirable and possible as Russia develops towards a more diversified political and economic system, and the rest of Europe - towards more conservatism and realism and a retreat from democratic messianism.

"5.3.5. The option of creating a single economic and human space with the EU countries over the long term, should not be dropped from the agenda. Of course, [this will] not [be predicated] on the previously suggested Brussels principles, but in a larger Eurasian context. The EU has lost its strategic vision, it does not have any large project. This is one reason for the crisis. One should consider the European-Eurasian prospect an open possibility.

"5.3.7. The goal of our relations with the U.S. is to firmly restrain dangerous activities, especially during the period of its adaptation to the new reality, and stimulate the necessary rejection of revolutionary democratic messianism. But the most important goal is a long-term commitment to cooperation in avoiding and settling crises, and preventing their escalation to a global level. Our major instrument is intensive, including multi-lateral, dialogue on preventing the erosion of international strategic stability. The optimal relations, following the long and difficult period ahead, are constructive, possibly friendly ones. The fact that on certain issues Russia and the U.S. are capable of cooperating productively even today (Syria), provides some bases for optimism.

"It is possible that the U.S.'s already commenced partial retreat from its failed role as the world gendarme will create in the long term a foundation for positive and equal great power cooperation in solving important global, military and political problems.

"Our dialogue should lead to increased transparency and trust, and eliminating the accidental use of military, and especially nuclear, forces. But one must not re-enter the path of arms-reduction negotiations, as in the Cold War years and then, shortly, replayed during the 'reset'. Such negotiations are either practically useless or even serve to justify the arms race, militarizing political relations and exacerbating elements of confrontation and mistrust."

Endnotes:
In an article in the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat, editor-in-chief Ghassan Charbel wrote angrily about the difficulties of a Syrian refugee whose search for a proper burial-place for his mother in the Middle Eastern country hosting them all came to naught. With this story, Charbel describes the sorry situation of Arab citizens impacted by wars in the region, in light of the indifference of the Arab countries and the international community. Enumerating the Arab "Hiroshimas" - for example, the Hiroshima of fanaticism, the Hiroshima of tyranny, and the Hiroshima of backwardness and poverty - he argues that the number of victims of the endless wars in Iraq and Syria, the collapse of Libya, and the schisms in Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia equal that of many Hiroshimas.

The following are excerpts from his article:[1]



Ghassan Charbel (image: Al-Hayat, London)

"Hey you, Arab journalist - do not write about Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima - you have no right to do so. You have more than enough Hiroshimas [of your own]: The Hiroshima of tyranny, the Hiroshima of takfir, the Hiroshima of the militias honed [for battle]... the Hiroshima of minorities, [and] the Hiroshima of fanaticism, backwardness, and poverty.

"I will simply ask: How many Hiroshimas equal the endless wars in Iraq? The open slaughter in Syria? The complete collapse in Libya? The schisms in Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia?

"Leaving Hiroshima aside, here is a story [of a refugee whose mother died] that I was given permission to pass on, provided I do not identify where it took place. The problem was not that his mother died - I don't mean he wasn't bereaved, because it is known that a mother's love is all-encompassing... He felt a little guilty because when his mother died he thought, 'Now she can finally rest,' since death is [sometimes] preferable to a certain kind of life. Not to mention that he had seen her die many times, continually, over her final months, as grief hooded her eyes, and wrinkles appeared rapidly on her face - as though she realized that she would not return to the country that had expelled her. He concealed from her the fact that the [house] key she carried with her now remained a key without a house... He could sense her frustration. She would look at him and then down at his hands, to make sure he had brought something to satiate her grandchildren's hunger.

"Many [refugees] just like her fanned out to Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. They scattered throughout the margins of the Syrian homeland, with hope of returning. The seasons changed, and the homeland only grew more distant. She would ask him: When [will we return]? He would lie to her, and to himself.

"The problem was not that his mother died - it was what to do with his mother's body. Immediately after her death, his brother went to find a plot for her, in the cemetery of the village that hosted some of the refugees. He was told, politely, 'no'. The cemeteries are reserved [for locals] and are not open to foreigners. Moreover, [apparently] mixing the bones [of locals and foreigners] is of great concern, since it is like mixing histories. He does not blame the villagers, who actually welcomed [the refugees]. They thought their ordeals would not last long and that the [refugees] would soon leave. This war, which comprises several local, regional, and international wars, misled them. Perhaps the owners of the land [i.e., the locals] feared that the bodies of foreigners would become roots [in the land for them], and that if there were [too] many foreign bones, identity would become confused. Because we are in the Middle East - in a place that hates the living and fears the dead.

"His brother tried to find a solution, such as to digging a small pit in an isolated location. But a grave is considered a bad omen for the environment, and brings down property values. The only person who showed flexibility offered to hold the body for a limited number of days in return for a [sum of] dollars. [The brother] almost laughed, because he was looking for a pit for burying his mother's bones, not a hotel to house her - and where would the son of a refugee get hold of dollars? What would happen when the deal with the landowner expired? What a terrible thing it is that a refugee is helpless to do anything about his mother's body[!]

"Strange thoughts came to him: What if he were to place her body on a pile of dry branches and set it alight? He immediately banished this thought, since the religion forbids it. What about letting it decompose in the open, in protest against the brutality of this world? This thought he banished [also]. He considered rising at dawn, carrying the body on his back, and charging the [Syrian] border while carrying it. But if his country had mercy for dead bodies, it would have mercy for the living [as well]. There is no recognition of a right of return, not even for the dead.

"[Even] strang[er] thoughts entered his mind. No point sending the body to the White House, because Obama cannot possibly be in charge of stability in the Middle East. It couldn't be shipped to the Kremlin either, because the czar [Putin] doesn't care, and produces dead bodies [on his own] without batting an eyelid. Who knows, maybe [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov would accuse the deceased of conspiring with takfiri [terrorism]?

"How terrible it is to leave a refugee helpless [to bury] his mother's body[!]

"He went on hallucinating: Perhaps he would send the body to the elegant and extremely polite Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, with a recommendation that he should include in his documents a plan for safe passage for dead bodies returning from Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq. But poor de Mistura is quite busy, lost between Kerry's quagmires and Lavrov's lies - this dead body is Arab, and the Arab League, which is expiring due to boredom, should urgently arrange graves for many Arabs.

"He envied [refugees] who had crossed the sea, because if his mother had died in Germany, they would have found a hole for her - and the same goes for Sweden. Those countries are far more merciful than our crooked homelands, which begrudge [us] freedom, honor, and security while we are alive, and then graves [when we are dead].

"He will not send her [body] anywhere, under any circumstance. When night falls, he will bear her far away and look for an abandoned well and hide her there. Such are our countries - we lose our lives there, and our bodies are lost in the margins.

"The terrible Middle East [equals] 1,000 Hiroshimas."

Endnotes:
On May 18, 2016, Ali Akbar Velayati, director of the Iranian Center for Strategic Research and an advisor and associate of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, spoke to Iraqi Shi'ite clerics, accusing the U.S. of plotting to divide Iraq and Syria into a number of entities. Such a move, he said, would damage the entire resistance axis from Iran to Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.



Ali Akbar Velayati (image: Tasnimnews.com)

Velayati praised the actions of the Iraqi pro-Iran Shi'ite Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi militias as "the strongest and most serious religious force" operating in the country, and added that it is these Shi'ite militias that should liberate the Sunni city of Mosul, Iraq.

Stressing that the Iranian model of the rule of the jurisprudent should also be implemented in Iraq, Velayati hinted that that country should come under the authority of Khamenei. It should be noted that Iraq's highest Shi'ite authority, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, opposes the implementation of this political model in Iraq.

Back in March 2015, Ali Younesi, an advisor to Iranian President Rohani and former Iranian intelligence minister, had said: "Iraq is not merely a sphere of cultural influence for us; it is also our identity, our culture, our center, and our capital. This issue is relevant today as it was in the past, because just as there is no way to divide the territory of Iran and Iraq, there is no way to divide our culture either. We must either fight each other or unite. The purpose of such a union would not be the elimination of borders; rather, that all the countries in the Iranian expanse would become closer, since their interests and security are interconnected."[1]

Following are excerpts from Velayati's statements to the Iraqi Shi'ite clerics:

"For the line of resistance, Syria is the gold ring. If Syria is divided, its government will collapse and the takfiris who are connected to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and America will take over. This will certainly have a negative impact on Lebanon and Iraq too.

"The line of resistance begins in Iran and passes through Iraq to Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. This line of resistance stands against the spread of the Zionists and their American supporters and [supporters in] some Western countries.

"Therefore, we, and you, must be sensitive to what is happening in Syria, because if the Syrian government and nation are defeated by the takfiris, their next move will be in Iraq, and even Iran will not remain at peace because of their harassment.

"From the dawn of the history of Islam to this day, the Iranian and Iraqi peoples stood side by side and were inseparable.

"There is no doubt that Iraq is the most important country for the Arabs - both potentially, at this time, and in actuality, in the future. Since the dawn of the history of Islam, Baghdad has been the geographic center of Islam. Iraq's geographic and political conditions, its deeply rooted nation and culture, and the happiness granted it by God have always meant greed in its enemies' eyes...

"A few months ago, a U.S. army commander said that Iraq should be divided into three parts. Dividing Iraq would weaken it and perpetuate the internal enmity among [the various elements of] the Iraqi people. Then Iraq's forces and resources would be squandered on self-destruction.

"How can Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, and Basra be divided? To whom will these important cities in Iraq belong? This is a very important plot desired by America, by backward states, and by America's mercenaries in the region. We must fight this.

"The other issue is Syria and its connection to Iraq. Those who said that Iraq should be divided into three parts are actually the ones who are presenting the Plan B proposed by U.S. Secretary of State [John Kerry], who said that if the current Syrian regime does not leave, there will be no option but to divide this country [that is, Syria] into five parts.

"In Lebanon as well, [the Americans] have sown division and seek to ignite internal strife. These struggles will harm Lebanon, the region, and the entire Arab world. Anything happening to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq will have negative consequences for other countries, including Iran. If the Satanic takfiri group - ISIS and its ilk - is victorious in Syria, its next moves will be in Iraq. Naturally, the reverse is also true. Therefore, the fate of these countries is intertwined.

"The enemies want to change the existing borders of the countries of the Middle East in order to distort the nationalist characteristics of countries like Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine, and to damage the unity that has been created at various points - just as they have done today in Libya. The solution to the regional problems and damage is to preserve [the countries'] internal unity, and to remain vigilant regarding existing plots that are undoubtedly headed by America.

"America's presence in every country does damage. America cannot be allowed to make decisions for Iraq, Syria, and other countries. Why? What have they [i.e. the Americans] done [for these countries]?

"[The pro-Iranian Iraqi] Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi [militia] is the pride of Iraq, Iran, and the Islamic world, like Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. It should be esteemed. No force in Iraq is stronger, more religious, more serious, and more influential than Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi. The [militia members] who are Iraqi say they are loyal to Iraq and that they take care of it. We trust them.

"Mosul should be liberated by Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi. We must suppress all the foreign forces and elements that have caused instability in Iraq.

"We [in Iran] are very optimistic about Iraq's future. Iraq's democracy is similar to Iran's democracy, which is [based] on religious values. Therefore, it should be esteemed. The Iraqi people undoubtedly desires this too.

"Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi comprises people who believe in Islam, who know that if they die in this path they will become martyrs, and [know too] that this is the path of the Imam Hussein. The stronger this force becomes, the better it will be for Iraq's future...

"We must support and maintain the Marja'iyya [supreme Shi'ite religious authority] in Iraq. The fatwa by the Marja'iyya in Najaf [Ayatollah Ali Sistani] caused the people to arrive on the scene and to save Iraq from the Americans and the takfiris.

"Obeying the rule of the jurisprudent can help achieve victories. If it not under the shade of the rule of the jurisprudent, Iraq cannot be saved. This is like how Iran was saved from the evil of the Shah, America, and Israel - thanks to the rule of the jurisprudent - and today [Iran] is in a position to say 'no' to any tyrant."[2]

Endnotes:
In the recent hours, there have been increasing reports in the Arab media and on social networks that intense battles are taking place between Hizbullah forces and Syrian regime forces in the rural area north of Aleppo. Confirmation of the reports can be found in Facebook posts by regime supporters who blamed Hizbullah for the fighting and rebuked the organization, saying it that it had come to help the Syrian army, not control it. Websites proposed several possible reasons for the fighting between the two allies: Hizbullah's insistence on running battles on its own, without coordinating with regime forces; Hizbullah's opposition to the ceasefire in Aleppo, which Russia announced early this morning with the regime's consent; and anger on the part of Hizbullah that regime forces had failed to defend military positions that Hizbullah had won in very costly battles.

The following is a review of reports on the fighting between Syrian regime forces and Hizbullah:



(Alquds.co.uk)

Reports: Intense Fighting Between Hizbullah, Assad Forces

At 02:30 am on June 16, 2016, the Lebanese website Janoubia, which is known for its opposition to Hizbullah, cited "Syrian sources" in a report stating that "real battles are taking place in Tel Al-Maysat and Al-Bureij in the Aleppo area between Assad's army and Hizbullah troops," and that "the Syrian air force bombed Hizbullah positions on three separate occasions." According to the sources, "this is not the first clash [between the sides] in the recent days," and "the reason for the conflict is the Assad's army rapid withdrawal from positions that Hizbullah had won in very costly battles." The report stated further that both sides have sustained dozens of losses in the fighting. Several hours later, the site reported that there had been heavy fighting between the sides since 01:30 that night in the region of the Shi'ite villages Nubl and Al-Zaharaa north of Aleppo, and that seven regime soldiers and officers had been killed. [1]

Syrian Opposition Website: "Yesterday's Friend Is Today's Enemy"; Assad Army Gave Russian Air Force Coordinates Of Hizbullah Positions

The oppositionist Syrian website "Shaam" reported under the heading "Yesterday's Friend Is Today's Enemy" that "intense fighting involving heavy weapons and artillery" had started during the night between Hizbullah and Assad forces along several routes in the rural area north of Aleppo, and that a major road in that area had been blocked. The report added that Russian jets had bombed Hizbullah positions in the area, having received the coordinates from the Assad forces, and that dozens of Hizbullah troops were killed and injured in these air strikes. According to the website, battles also broke out south of Aleppo between the Iraqi Al-Nujaba militia and Hizbullah on the one hand, and regime forces on the other.

The website noted that the clashes started as brawls and escalated into gunfights and eventually into battles involving heavy weapons and even jets, adding that officials from both sides intervened to stop the hostilities.[2]

Syrian Oppositionist Website: Hizbullah Members Insisted On Fighting Independently Of Regime Forces

Several possible reasons for the schism between Hizbullah and the regime forces were proposed. The Syrian website Aletihadpress.com, which describes itself as "neutral," reported that conflict had erupted in the town of Al-Haylan in the northern rural area of Aleppo after Hizbullah members refused to obey the orders of the liaison officer and insisted on running the battle independently of the regime forces. In response, regime forces fired at Hizbullah troops, and the skirmish escalated into an artillery exchange. The website noted that Hizbullah's position in the area had also been bombed from the air, but it was unclear whether by Syrian or Russian jets.[3]

The Syrian oppositionist website Orient News cited sources as saying that the reason for the fighting may be Hizbullah's opposition to the ceasefire in Aleppo that Russia had unexpectedly announced several hours after midnight with the regime's consent.[4] Another speculation pointed to Hizbullah's complaints about incompetence on the part of the Syrian army, namely its claims that regime forces had failed to defend positions that Hizbullah had won with great difficulty north of Aleppo, and had also failed to assist Hizbullah forces south of the city.[5]

Regime Journalist On Facebook: Hizbullah Came To Help Us, Not Control Us

Evidence of the schism between regime and Hizbullah forces could be seen in comments made on Facebook by Syrian journalist and former MP Sharif Shhade. He wrote: "National sovereignty is a red line. The decision always rests with the Syrian [military] brass. We must quickly resolve any disagreement with the assisting forces, since there is no room for conflict at this stage. Sons of Hizbullah, you have come to help us, not to control us. Please rethink your position."[6]

Kinana Allouche, a pro-regime Syrian journalist, held Hizbullah responsible for the incident. She wrote on her Facebook page: "This afternoon, Hizbullah elements attacked the men of resistance in Nubl and Al-Zaharaa as well as officers in the Syrian Arab army. Intense clashes erupted as a result. This is a message from a Syrian citizen to all the forces assisting the Syrian Arab army: The Syrian Arab army is the pride of the ummah. You are here to assist it against terrorism and not to control it. The Syrian Arab army stood by you in your war against Israel. Do not toy with us. Stop doing harm."[7]

Endnotes:
The Cyber & Jihad Lab monitors, tracks, translates, researches, and analyzes cyber jihad originating from the Middle East, Iran, South Asia, and North and West Africa. It innovates and experiments with possible solutions for stopping cyber jihad, advancing legislation and initiatives federally  including with Capitol Hill and attorneys-general  and on the state level, to draft and enforce measures that will serve as precedents for further action. It works with leaders in business, law enforcement, academia, and families of terror victims to craft and support efforts and solutions to combat cyber jihad, and recruits, and works with technology industry leaders to craft and support efforts and solutions.
The St. Francois County BackStoppers chapter will be out at several locations Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Police, fire and EMS workers will be taking up collections roadside and in front of businesses.

Chapter President Marc Mucci said they added a fifth location where they will be collecting this year and they hope to raise even more money.

We are going to be at the Farmington Walmart, Desloge Walmart, Park Hills Rivermart, up in Bonne Terre at the Diamond Park intersection (the four-way intersection at Allen Street) and this year we will be at the four-way stop in Bismarck, said Mucci. Bismarck firefighters and others wanted to collect in their community, so they stepped up to get that organized.

Mucci said truly, this is their biggest fundraiser they do locally for BackStoppers each year and last year they collected $10,624.

The community really comes out to support the boot drive and the BackStoppers, said Mucci, This is our really big event and we are really looking forward to it. Bismarck Fire Captain John Colwell really stepped up and helped with getting us another site.

Mucci said they will be there rain or shine just like their job. Everybody covered by BackStoppers will be out helping to collect.

Usually the fire departments will be bring one of their fire trucks out, so its a good time for not only collecting donations, but gives us time to get out and talk to the people we serve, said Mucci. It also gives the kids a chance to go through the truck and take a look around.

Mucci said if you are going to Walmart or one of the other stores plan an extra 10 minutes to allow the kids to play on the truck.

BackStoppers Annual Boot Drive is not just about collecting money. It is also about raising awareness about what the group does. Founded in 1959, BackStoppers provides financial support to the families of all police officers, firefighters, and publicly-funded EMTs who lose their lives. There are several chapters in Missouri and Illinois.

For more information on BackStoppers or membership visit backstoppers.org
POTOSI  Dean Eugene Warner, 68, of Belgrade, Missouri, passed away May 30, 2016. A memorial gathering will be held 10 a.m. until time of memorial service at 12 p.m. Friday, June 17, 2016, at DeClue Memorial Chapel in Potosi. Interment will be held 2:15 p.m. Friday at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.
DEAR ABBY: My fiance, "Rick," and I have been together for years and recently got engaged. We are over the moon about it, and genuinely in love. However, this exciting time in our lives has been met with some difficulties.

We recently learned Rick's mother has been having an affair, which makes for a very uncomfortable situation. My future mother-in-law doesn't know we know. Rick's father came to us for help because he suspects she's cheating.

She engages with this man publicly by texting, calling, etc. when we spend time with her, so I avoid her because I don't want any part of it. It's hard to ignore because we live with Rick's family.

He believes we should say nothing. I spoke to our priest about it because I am so deeply disturbed by her behavior and was told to "pray for them." I'm worried this will be a negative influence on my fiance and me, and that by remaining quiet we have become part of her lie. What should I do? -- CLEAN CONSCIENCE IN THE EAST

DEAR CLEAN CONSCIENCE: Listen to the advice you received from your priest. Pray for your almost in-laws, but do not involve yourself in their marital problems. If Rick's father approaches you again for help, tell him that he needs to discuss his suspicions with his wife because that's the only way his problems will be resolved.

DEAR ABBY: I lost my favorite cat a year ago to kidney disease. I had noticed she wasn't doing well, but when I told my parents, so we could take her to the veterinarian, they insisted she was fine. They said she didn't need to see the vet because her ailments were just age. They refused to have her examined until it was too late, and by then, the vet's attempts to help her only weakened her. She died in my arms on the way home.

I am devastated. She was my therapy animal and she helped me combat my anxiety disorders for over seven years. When she died, my family seemed to be suddenly struck with grief, even though they ignored her most of the time. This makes me angry because I feel their hesitation to take her to the vet and refusal to listen to me are what killed her.

I've forgiven them for what happened, but I still feel upset and angry toward them whenever I see my cat's picture by her urn on my memory shelf. Am I wrong for feeling this way? -- NOT FEELING PURRFECT

DEAR NOT FEELING PURRFECT: Please accept my sympathy for the loss of your cat. What happened to her is regrettable, but holding a grudge won't help. What might help would be for your parents to get you another therapy cat, and I'm advising you to suggest it.

DEAR ABBY: My daughter recently had her first child (my first grandchild), and I am wondering if there's any protocol regarding the first visit. Should I wait until my daughter invites me, or should I just tell her I want to come? I'm afraid it would be rude to just invite myself before she's ready to show off her newborn. -- BABY STEPS IN VIRGINIA

DEAR BABY STEPS: Give your daughter some time to rest and for her and her husband/partner to establish a routine, and then ask when it would be convenient for you to come and if she'd like you to help out in any way. I'm sure that approach would be better received than an announcement.

DEAR ABBY: I would like your opinion about something that's bothering me. I live in a senior housing complex in Massachusetts. Most of the residents are women in their 80s and 90s. (Some are also in their 60s.) A few men live here also.

One of the men sits on his living room couch with only his jockey shorts on. He leaves his door wide open when he does this. He seems not to care who sees him while walking by his apartment.

Some folks here believe it should be ignored and no one should look in while passing by. They say whatever he does in his own apartment is his own business. I believe that's true, but only when the door is closed. What do you think? By the way, he is in his 60s. -- BEFUDDLED IN MASSACHUSETTS

DEAR BEFUDDLED: What people do in the PRIVACY of their own apartment is no one's business. When the front door is open, it is no longer private. If the man's state of undress bothers some of the residents, they should bring it to the manager of the senior housing complex.

DEAR ABBY: My younger sister lives at home with our parents. She suffers from a learning disability as well as some serious mental health issues that are under control. She is a bright, sweet person who -- with some help -- could become semi-independent. However, my parents have made no serious attempts to encourage this.

She graduated from high school 10 years ago and has sought no further education or employment opportunities. She spends most of her time in her room playing video games. I have tried to offer suggestions like volunteering or joining an organization. While this is met with polite positivity, it has inspired no action.

Our parents are getting older, and if my sister isn't able to live independently, the burden of supporting her will fall on me. I am not permitted to express how frustrating this situation is or how sad it makes me. I am shut out of the conversation, even though my future and the future of my own family is involved. I live far away, but keep in touch regularly. What can I say or do to encourage change? -- THE BAD SISTER

DEAR "BAD" SISTER: Your parents are doing your sister no favors by keeping her isolated and dependent. This is a conversation that needs to take place with them in person, rather than from a distance.

You and your husband should meet with them face to face. It's important that you understand what financial provisions they have made for your sister in the event of their deaths, and you should know exactly what your responsibilities will entail.

Years ago, one of my assistants was in a situation just like yours. His younger brother was mentally disabled and lived with their parents until their deaths. At that point, responsibility for the younger brother was left to the older brother.

The parents had assumed that the same kind of living arrangement would continue. However, the gentleman who worked with me understood that it would not be healthy for either of them, so he arranged for his brother to move to a group home. There he was able to participate in activities and, for the first time in his life, to make friends. If your sister doesn't have the skills to live independently, this may be the solution for her, too.

DEAR ABBY: I'm retired and living full time in my RV. During the summer months, more folks travel as I do, many of them with children. While I think this is a wonderful experience for families, some parents appear to forget that there are others in the campground and allow their children, regardless of age, to roam around unsupervised.

This can be dangerous because large vehicles many not see small children dart into their path. Also, while they might know their neighbors at home, you have no idea who might be parked nearby at a campground. This means that unless invited, children (and adults) should not cut through occupied sites.

Just like at home, common sense and courtesy will make camping a safe and enjoyable experience for everyone. -- MARGARET IN SIOUX FALLS

DEAR MARGARET: Amen! Thank you for the reminder to your fellow travelers.

DEAR ABBY: My friend "Sara" invites herself and her two children over to play with mine from time to time. When it's time to have a snack or eat, she and her kids make themselves at home -- especially with the milk.

Abby, I work 70 hours a week. My children eat cereal often and love milk, but because of my schedule, I don't get a chance to go grocery shopping as often as I should. (I am a single parent.) How do I politely tell my friend that it's fine to make herself at home, but getting both of her children refills of milk without asking me is taking it too far? She knows I can afford it, but I'm uncomfortable asking because I don't know how to draw the line. -- WORKING MOM OUT WEST

DEAR WORKING MOM: I assume you communicate with Sara outside of her drop-in visits to your home? The next time you talk, text or email her, explain that you love her company and she's always welcome, but because of your 70-hour work schedule you don't get to the market as often as she does -- so when she brings her kids, please also bring a quart of milk with her. To do that is stating the facts, it isn't rude and it isn't asking too much. If she's your friend, and not a user, she will comply.

Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 6
The Alternate Foreign Minister for European Affairs, Nikos Xydakis, met at the Foreign Ministry today with the new Serbian Ambassador to Athens, Dusan Spasojevic.



During the discussion, which took place in a friendly atmosphere, Mr. Spasojevic briefed Mr. Xydakis on the process under way, following the recent elections, for forming a new government in Belgrade. The collocutors explored the potential for cooperation and intensification of bilateral meetings on a political level.



Also discussed were the recent political developments in the wider Balkan region. Ambassador Spasojevic briefed Mr. Xydakis on the Serbian views on the refugee/migration issue, the Balkan corridor, and Kosovo, referring a number of times to his previous posting as Serbian Ambassador to Ankara.
Orthodoxy is a part of our countrys history, of the identity of most of our citizens, and the Foreign Ministry and the Greek state are contributing in every way towards the unity and love of, and care for, the people and cooperation of the Orthodox Churches, of all the churches and of the secular.
Murthy's comments came as he toured a substance abuse center in Albuquerque, New Mexico's largest city. New Mexico had one of the highest overdose death rates in 2014, especially among adults 21 to 35, the most recent federal data showed.

Nationally, overdoses from heroin, oxycodone and other opiates killed more than 28,000 Americans in 2014, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

Murthy and others are advocating for more funding because of that figure, along with a "treatment gap" that Murthy says deprives roughly a million Americans from getting the counseling, medication and other services they need to beat addictions.

Social stigma and a lack of treatment centers  especially in communities that need it most  share some of the blame for stifling access to care, he said.

"We need to change how our country thinks about addiction," Murthy said. "There are, in fact, many communities that don't want medication assisted treatment facilities in their neighborhoods because they worry that it's going to bring bad people."

It's time to think of addiction as a chronic illness rather than a moral failure, he said.

The Obama administration has proposed spending a billion dollars in the next budget year to curb the opioid crisis. Of that, the White House said Tuesday, about $8 million over two years could be allocated to New Mexico to expand access to treatment.

West Virginia, the only other state to report a higher opioid-overdose death rate than New Mexico in 2014, could receive about $10 million under the budget proposal.

Opiates primarily consist of heroin and prescription pain pills, such as codeine and morphine. The legal and powerful pharmaceutical opiates are the chemical cousin of heroin.

In New Mexico, Ohio and elsewhere, officials and experts have said the resurgence in heroin abuse coincided with doctors and other medical providers writing an unprecedented number of pain prescriptions.

One patient a the University of New Mexico's Addiction Substance Abuse Program, the Albuquerque treatment center that Murthy visited, said she coped with addiction after getting hooked on pills her doctor prescribed her. The last year of her addiction she was taking up to 30 pills per day, she said.

"I didn't feel high or anything like that," she said. "It's almost easier to keep doing it than it is to get help. But I would really stress coming to a place like this any way you can. Just to get your life back."

That's what she did roughly seven years ago, and has been clean since. She still sees a counselor at the treatment center every two weeks, she said.

"I wish I had people telling me there was a place like this that I could come to and get the help," she said.
PIGEON  A rally is planned for this evening to focus in on public education issues along with the Flint Water Crisis.

The event is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. at Laker High School Auditorium. Speaking at the Rally will be former Representative Terry Brown, 10th congressional district candidate Frank Accivitti, Representative Adam Zemke and Jim Wencel, candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives who will act as moderator of the event.
PIGEON  He was quiet and reserved. But when he did speak, people took notice.

Earlier this month, the community showed its respect in another way, as many gathered to say goodbye to Sen. Alvin James DeGrow, 90, who died on June 2.

DeGrow was born June 1, 1926, in Pigeon, to Russell DeGrow and Vera (Harneck) DeGrow. He graduated from Pigeon High School in May 1944 and joined the U.S. Navy immediately after graduation.

Following an assignment in the Pacific Theatre during World War II and providing assistance during the Chinese Civil War, DeGrow was honorably discharged from the Navy.

He soon married his high school sweetheart, Judith Haist, and the couple had three children  David, Michael and Jane. Judith preceded him in death on Jan. 7, 1995.

Early in his career, DeGrow owned and operated the Ben Franklin Store in Pigeon  from 1951 to 1980. During that time, he was a member of Rotary International and served as the local president and district governor.

We have fond memories of being at the dime store, said son Michael DeGrow, who worked at the store as a kid. That was a time before all the super stores. Really, it was a community. It was the place to shop in the area for all kinds of things.

At DeGrows funeral on June 8, many former workers attended to pay their respects.

It was a nice testimony to him that some of his old employees showed up to honor him, Michael said.

His first venture into politics was his election to the Tri-County Community College Board and he continued his political career in 1968 by winning a special election to the Michigan State Senate. DeGrow was re-elected in 1970, 1974 and 1978, retiring at the end of 1982.

Michael DeGrow said he was told by many people that his father had a talent for boiling issues down to their key points while in the Senate.

He wasnt one to be up there talking a lot. But people waited to hear what he had to say, Michael said. He had a knack for summing up the issue or issues, then spoke to it.

Added Michael: When he spoke, people stopped and listened. Thats what Ive been told. Its a nice testimony that the words that he spoke meant something.

While in the Senate, DeGrows close-knit family stepped up and helped him continue to operate the store.

He was certainly still the guy in charge of the store, but my mother did well in his absence to run it, Michael said. It was a real family operation.

After leaving office, DeGrow joined two former colleagues in a Lansing lobbying firm. After seven years as a lobbyist, he finally retired in 1989.

He will be remembered as a steadfast and caring father, grandfather and husband, with a certain dry wit.

He liked good stories and he had some good stories of his own, Michael said. He certainly was remembered for that. People always enjoyed his sense of humor.

DeGrow was also a highly respected colleague of those who worked with him in the Senate. One of the things he was most proud of during that time was serving when his party was the majority, when they were in the minority, and when there was a split  yet was still able to help make things work.

He was definitely a highly respected man, Michael said. As children, we are very proud of him. He will be dearly missed by us.

DeGrow is survived by his wife, Kay (Floria) DeGrow; three children, David (Debbi) of Freeland, Michael (Katherine) of Eaton Rapids and Jane (Edward Shotwell) of Eaton Rapids; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. He is also survived by two brothers, Douglas of Richardson, Texas, and Terry of Mukilteo, Washington.

His sister, Marjorie Adams, of Dunedin, Florida, preceded him in death in 2013.
The Defense Department on Thursday left open the possibility that Army Reserve Capt. Antonio Davon Brown, who was killed in the attack at the Orlando nightclub early Sunday, might be eligible to receive the Purple Heart.

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said that the Purple Heart for Brown would be considered but the award would "depend on the definition of the event" in which his life was lost, a reference to the criteria for the Purple Heart established by Congress after the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings in 2009. Cook said the decision on the award would be up to the Army.

Brown was at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando frequented by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community when the worst mass shooting in U.S. history occurred. Police say he was among the 49 killed by 29-year-old Omar Mateen, who reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in 911 calls.

Following lobbying by families of the victims, Congress in 2013 added to the criteria for the Purple Heart to make victims of the Fort Hood massacre eligible. At Fort Hood, Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and wounded more than 30 others. Hasan was sentenced to death and is being held at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, during appeals.

Congress in 2015 amended the National Defense Authorization Act to expand eligibility for the Purple Heart to include troops killed in an attack where "the individual or entity was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack," and where "the attack was inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization."

Then-Army Secretary John McHugh later said, "The Purple Heart's strict eligibility criteria has prevented us from awarding it to victims of the horrific attack at Fort Hood. Now that Congress has changed the criteria, we believe here is sufficient reason to allow these men and women to be awarded and recognized with either the Purple Heart or, in the case of civilians, the Defense of Freedom medal."

McHugh's action also applied to an attack on a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting station in 2009 in which Pvt. William Long was killed and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula was wounded. The shooter, Abdulhakim Muhammad, was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Brown, who joined the Army three years before the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy against openly gay service was scrapped, was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 383rd Regiment, 4th Cavalry Brigade, 85th Support Command based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Brown, whose home of record was listed as Orlando, graduated from Florida (A&M) Agricultural and Mechanical University with his undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant on August 8, 2008. In 2010, he received his Master's degree in Business Administration from University of Mary, North Dakota.

In May 2009, he served on active duty with the 1st Special Troop Battalion, Fort Riley, Kansas. It was during that assignment with the battalion that Brown served an 11-month overseas deployment to Kuwait, the Army Reserves said.

In a statement Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that Brown "served his country for nearly a decade, stepping forward to do the noblest thing a young person can do, which is to protect others.

"His service both at home and overseas gave his fellow Americans the security to dream their dreams, and live full lives," Carter said. "The attack in Orlando was a cowardly assault on those freedoms, and a reminder of the importance of the mission to which Capt. Brown devoted his life."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
A provision that would require women to register for the military draft alongside men for the first time in American history was included as part of the massive 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that passed the Senate handily on Tuesday with an 85-13 vote.

The language requiring the draft for women was added in committee and received little debate on the Senate floor, but has created a firestorm of controversy on and off Capitol Hill. It comes as the military services welcome women into previously closed ground combat units in keeping with a mandate from Defense Secretary Ash Carter given late last year.

On Feb. 2, a panel of top military leaders including Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus all told the Senate Armed Services Committee they supported drafting men and women in light of the changes to combat assignments.

"It is my personal view that based on this lifting of restriction for assigning [job specialties], that every American that is physically qualified should register for the draft," Neller said at the time.

In the House, which previously passed its version of the NDAA, an amendment requiring women to register for the draft passed narrowly with a 32-30 vote, even though its author, California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, voted against it.

"I've talked to coffeehouse liberals in San Francisco and conservative families who pray three times a day," Hunter said April 27, as the House Armed Services Committee marked up the bill. "Neither of them want their daughter to be drafted."

The Senate proposal was hotly debated on the floor June 7 by Republicans Ted Cruz, from Texas, and John McCain, from Arizona.

Cruz complained that the provision including women in the draft entered the bill through committee, rather than in public, open debate.

"I'm the father of two daughters. Women can do anything they set their mind to, and I see that each and every day," Cruz said. "The idea that we should forcibly conscript young girls in combat to my mind makes little or no sense. It is at minimum a radical proposition. I could not vote for a bill that did so without public debate."

McCain countered that including women in the draft was a matter of equality.

"Women who I have spoken to in the military overwhelmingly believe that women are not only qualified, but are on the same basis as their male counterparts," McCain said. "Every leader of the United States military seems to have a different opinion from [Cruz], whose military background is not extensive."

Currently, U.S. law requires most male citizens and immigrants between the ages of 18 to 25 to register in the selective service system. The Senate NDAA would require all female citizens and U.S. residents who turn 18 on or after Jan. 1, 2018, to register as well.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah introduced an amendment that would have removed the draft language from the bill, but it was unsuccessful. Another Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, filed an amendment that would have gotten rid of the draft altogether, but it too failed to get traction.

The House and Senate must now reconcile their versions of the NDAA in conference before final passage.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
Despite Flipping in Surf 4 Times in a Year, Marines Say New ACV Is the Future of Amphibious Warfare

Some Marine veterans familiar with the vehicle and its operations have worried about the reliability of the ACV.
Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson was a lone voice for the military at a White House-sponsored event on equal opportunity and expanding career choices for women.

Robinson cited the three women -- Capt. Kristen Griest, Capt. Shaye Haver and Maj. Lisa Jaster -- who recently passed the grueling Army Ranger course as examples for young women who might not have previously considered the military an equal opportunity employer.

The changes in the rules last year lifting restrictions against women in combat positions now means "that your dreams can actually come true," Robinson told the White House United State of Women Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.

"All jobs in the military are now open to women," said Robinson, who was the only featured speaker from the military at the day-long event kicked off by Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama and head of the White House Council on Women and Girls.

Robinson cited herself as an example of the need for women to be more aggressive in pursuing opportunities. She said her father, an Air Force pilot in Vietnam, had to coax her into entering the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) when she didnt think she could make the grade.

Earlier this year, Robinson became the first woman to lead a combatant command when Obama named her to take command of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

Earlier, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke of her efforts through the Joining Forces initiative to get jobs for vets and improve the lives of military families, but she spoke more of how military families had inspired her and her husband.

In a question and answer session with Oprah Winfrey, Mrs. Obama said "We are energized by the people we meet, by the military spouses that I meet out there."

"I picked working with military families because they moved me. I met them out on the campaign trail and I didnt know that there were millions of military families out there serving and sacrificing in ways that we take for granted in this country. And I vowed then and there, just from meeting them, that if I got to be First Lady I would try to be that voice for them," Mrs. Obama said.

--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein appears headed for easy confirmation as the service's next chief, sitting through a confirmation hearing Thursday with no direct challenges to any positions he took.

Not surprisingly, he found himself on the same page as Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, in his criticism of the 2011 Budget Control Act that set across-the-board spending caps known as sequestration.

"Our airmen, when they join, are looking to be the very best they can be," Goldfein said. "Pilots who don't fly, controllers who don't control, cyber warriors who don't operate because they're not given the resources to do so -- [their] morale goes down and they vote with their feet.

"When we were sequestered in 2015, we grounded 13 fighter squadrons and stopped flying," he added. "We're still recovering from that effort. If we're sequestered again, it'll be even worse."

Even under the caps, Goldfein said aircraft flying missions in the Middle East have a 90-percent mission capable rate. Where the "bill is paid" for that high rate, is when the planes return to home station, he said. Many come back in need of significant maintenance that now takes longer than usual because of a shortage of skilled maintainers, he said.

Goldfein also blamed spending caps for the Air Force's decision to retire the A-10 Thunderbolt, the ground attack aircraft now being used in the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Under political pressure to meet current warfighting needs, the Air Force has postponed the mothballing of the A-10, though it still intends to follow through.

In his prepared remarks to Congress, Goldfein said the Air Force's most pressing challenge is "the rise of peer competitors with advanced military capabilities rivaling our own."

Military leaders have regularly made this same argument, arguing that the technological advantage the U.S. has enjoyed for some five decades is vanishing as competitors -- namely China and Russia -- put more resources in technology.

Goldfein said he views directed energy weapons as vital to "the third offset," Pentagon parlance for the U.S.'s strategy for staying ahead of potential enemies. For example, directed energy weapons will enable the U.S. to strike without the enemy knowing where the attack is coming from, he said.

"I describe [directed energy technology] as silent sabotage," he said. "Right now when we want to place firepower on the enemy they and everyone else in the area knows where we are."

The Air Force is also committed to growing an enlisted force of drone pilots, Goldfein said. The first class of RQ-4 Global Hawk pilots will start this fall, and when those airmen graduate the next class will start up, he said in response to a question from Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island.

Goldfein is a 1983 graduate of the Air Force Academy. He is a command pilot who flew combat missions in the Persian Gulf War, the Kosovo Campaign and, most recently, the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon announced his selection to succeed Welsh in April.

-- Bryant Jordan can be reached at Bryant.jordan@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at@BryantJordan.
CIA Director John Brennan predicted Thursday that a resilient ISIS will retain its ability to launch and inspire attacks on the U.S. and the West despite the "accelerated" efforts of the Pentagon to inflict a battlefield defeat on the terror group.

"Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan said, using another acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

"In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda," he said.

Brennan's pessimistic tone in prepared remarks for testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee contrasted with the upbeat assessments from Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and the White House that portrayed ISIS as a hollowed out organization losing ground in Iraq and Syria whose lasting defeat was inevitable.

Despite its losses, "ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West," and the group was improving its ability to smuggle them into the West hidden in refugee flows or by using the legitimate passports of foreign fighters attracted to the group, Brennan told the Committee.

In addition, the organization is making progress in streamlining its network of influence over its various branches in Libya and elsewhere, Brennan said. The branch in Libya is likely the most advanced, he said, and the ISIS offshoot in the Sinai has become the "most active and capable terrorist group in Egypt."

Brennan acknowledged that two years of airstrikes and the billions spent on training local forces for the fight against ISIS were having limited success.

"On the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, the U.S-led coalition has made important progress against ISIL," he said. "The group appears to be a long way from realizing the vision that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi laid out when he declared the "caliphate" two years ago in Mosul."

"Several notable indicators are trending in the right direction. ISIL has lost large stretches of territory in both Syria and Iraq. Its finance and media operations have been squeezed. And it has struggled to replenish its ranks of fighters, in part because fewer foreign fighters are traveling to Syria," Brennan said.

However, ISIS remained a "formidable adversary" for the long term, as evidenced by the "heinous act of wanton violence that was perpetrated against innocents in Orlando, Florida, last weekend," Brennan said.

On the battlefield, "we anticipate that the group will adjust its strategy and tactics in an effort to regain momentum. In the coming months, we can expect ISIL to probe the front lines of its adversaries for weaknesses, to harass the forces that are holding the cities it previously controlled, and to conduct terror attacks against its enemies in Iraq and Syria," Brennan said.

--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
The U.S. cannot confirm Mideast reports that Abu Bakr al-Baghadi, the self-proclaimed ISIS "caliph," was killed or severely wounded in an airstrike Sunday in Syria, a U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday.

"We don't have any confirmation of that," Army Col. Chris Garver said of reports from the Islamic news agency AhlulBayt and others that Baghdadi, believed to be 44 years old, was killed by a U.S. airstrike Sunday in Raqqa, the main stronghold in northeastern Syria of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

However, Garver said "we didn't strike in Raqqa that day (Sunday). We can't confirm one way or the other" the status of Baghdadi, whose death or injury has been reported several times previously. Garver added that "if we get an opportunity to get him, we will take it."

Garver, the chief spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve in Baghdad, made the statements in a briefing to the Pentagon that mainly focused on the siege of Fallujah and the entry this week into the fight against ISIS in Iraq of U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships.

He said the trickle of civilians fleeing Fallujah had now turned into a flood, with 3,000-4,000 refugees pouring out daily since the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) established what they called a safe "exit route" from the city 40 miles west of Baghdad to get past ISIS snipers and rings of improvised explosive devices.

Garver said the total number of refugees now numbered about 40,000, overwhelming the efforts of the United Nations and humanitarian groups to care for them in already overcrowded tent camps in relentless plus-100 degrees heat.

"Clearly, the humanitarian situation is something everybody is looking carefully at," Garver said, while making clear that the U.S. has no role in dealing with the refugees or restraining the Popular Mobilization Forces, the Shiite militia which reportedly has abused or executed civilians fleeing Fallujah who were suspected of being ISIS members or sympathizers.

For the most part, they're being treated with respect," Garver said, but added that the U.S. was well aware of the reports that some of the civilians were "not being treated with respect. It's a big problem."

Garver said that Iraqi counter Terror Services, who have received the most training from the U.S., had succeeded in gaining a foothold in southern Fallujah. The battle plan was likely to be to push to the city center and then fan out to retake the rest of Fallujah, much as the ISF did late last year in retaking Ramadi to the west of Fallujah, Garver said.

To the north, Garver said the ISF was making slow progress against moderate ISIS resistance in advancing towards Mosul, backed for the first time by U.S. Apache ground attack helicopters manned by U.S. aircrews.

The Apaches went into action Monday for the first time in Iraq since October 2014, when they were used to slow an advance by ISIS toward the Baghdad airport as the terror group's fighters swept out of Syria to take over large swaths of territory in Iraq.

The Apaches had remained in Iraq since then but were only used occasionally for overhead security in the capital during visits by dignitaries, according to U.S. military spokesmen. Under U.S. agreements with Baghdad, the attack helicopters can only be used with the approval of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said earlier this week that Abadi had authorized strikes by the Apaches in the north but not for action in the siege of Fallujah.

Garver said that Apaches were based at "several locations" in Iraq, but declined to confirm whether the helicopters were now in the north near Makhmour, about 40 miles south of Mosul, where the U..S. has established an artillery base of 155mm guns that was set up by Marines in March and now is manned by troops of the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

On Monday, a number of Apaches  Garver wouldn't say how many but the Apaches usually go on missions in pairs  went into action near the village al-Qayyarah northwest of Makhmour. One of the Apaches fired a Hellfire missile, destroying an ISIS VBIED, or Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device, Garver said.

--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Authorities in Southern California said Wednesday that a Navy SEAL had been arrested on suspicion of beating and stabbing a man to death about an hour after the two were involved in a fistfight.

Santa Monica police Lt. Saul Rodriguez said Theo Andrew Krah, 28, was arrested in San Diego Monday in connection with the unidentified man's death.

Rodriguez said officials were called to the Santa Monica Pier Saturday to break up a fistfight between Krah and the man at about 4 p.m. Nobody was arrested or injured, he said.

About an hour later, the other man was found dead about a half-mile from the pier, suffering from head trauma and multiple stab wounds, police said. The man died at 4:40 a.m. Sunday at a local hospital.

The Los Angeles Times reported the victim was a Santa Monica resident, but had no further information.

Rodriguez said Krah and the victim didn't know each other prior to Saturday's fistfight. Krah is currently being held on $2 million bail.

Krah enlisted into the military in 2012. Navy spokesman Zach Keating in San Diego told the LA Times that Krah was award a Korean Defense Service medal after his time in South Korea. He also earned a sea service deployment ribbon.

Keating was only able to confirm that Krah is a petty officer 2nd class assigned to a West Coast-based special warfare unit. The Naval Special Warfare Command is described as a "small, elite force."

Keating said the Navy is cooperating with the Santa Monica police in the investigation.

The paper reported that Navy's Crime Investigation Service has also launched a probe into Krah's arrest.
JUNE 22: Perkins himself announced tonight (Twitter link) that he will indeed undergo season-ending surgery tomorrow afternoon. The surgery was a last resort after exhausting his other rehab options, per the left-handers message. Perkins hope, it seems, is that he can be ready to go for Spring Training next season.

JUNE 16: Twins closer Glen Perkins has been diagnosed with a torn labrum that will likely require season-ending surgery, reports La Velle E. Neal of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Neal notes that the extent of the tear, at this point, is not yet clear, though he adds that Perkins also has some problems with his rotator cuff. Per Neal, Perkins could be ready for the beginning of the 2017 season, though its possible hell miss a bit of time at the beginning of the year.

Earlier this week, Perkins said that he was headed to see Dr. Neal ElAttrache for a third opinion on his ailing shoulder after suffering multiple setbacks in his attempts to get back on the mound. Perkins admitted to 1500 ESPNs Phil Mackey at the time that he [didnt] have a good feeling about the meeting but was hoping to be pleasantly surprised. That, unfortunately for both him and the team, was apparently not the outcome from his appointment.

Perkins season, it seems, will come to a close with just two uninspiring appearances under his belt. His absence and a significant decline in the performances of 2015 holdovers Kevin Jepsen and Trevor May has led to disastrous results from the Twins bullpen this season. Minnesota relievers rank 26th in the Majors with a collective 4.58 ERA. The team has recently demoted Jepsen, who had been closing in Perkins stead (a role he filled quite well in 2015), and installed a committee of Brandon Kintzler and trade candidate Fernando Abad as its primary ninth-inning options.

Prior to this season, the 33-year-old Perkins had made three consecutive All-Star teams and carried a 2.84 ERA with 9.8 K/9 and 2.1 BB/9 through 313 1/3 innings dating back to the 2012 season. Hes earning $6.3MM in 2016 and is owed $6.5MM for the 2017 season as well under his current contract. Minnesota also carries a $6.5MM club option on him for the 2018 season (his age-35 campaign), which comes with a $700K buyout.
WIXOM, Mich. - Demand comes from out of state and overseas for the sleek product that was once supposed to save Studebaker.



People still want Avanti cars and parts, and Dan Booth has both at his Nostalgic Motor Cars in Wixom. But he's not in the business of trying to revive a market for the unique vehicle. Not anymore at least.



"I don't need any more business," Booth said on a hot day in June. "This is a hobby shop. I'm almost 73."



Booth said he just likes to work on the Avanti cars, and he has a few dozen of them in various states of disrepair on his lot, and a warehouse full of hundreds of parts and accessories.

"I'm addicted to cars, and I have a lot of cars," he said.

Dan Booth sells Avanti cars and parts from his Nostalgic Motor Cars business in Wixom, Mich.

The Avanti was first built as a luxury sport coupe for Studebaker, a kind of last-ditch effort to revive the struggling South Bend, Indiana-based automaker in the early 1960s.



It was designed by a team led by Raymond Loewy, famous for his work on a variety of mid-20th century locomotives, planes, Studebaker and Lincoln cars, Electrolux appliances and a redesign of the Coca Cola bottle in 1955.

The Studebaker Avanti was designed with a fiberglass body and a built-in roll bar. Its aerodynamic styling and factory V-8 engine helped make it an incredibly fast car for its time, hitting a top speed of nearly 200 miles per hour.

The car was a two-door, but with four bucket seats, and it had advanced safety features with a padded interior and caliper disc brakes.

"The rakish 1963-64 Studebaker Avanti was among the most daring 1960s American cars, a modern masterpiece with totally unique American styling that even top exotic Italian auto stylists wouldn't attempt to do," former Chicago Sun-Times automotive editor and columnist Dan Jedlicka wrote of the car.

Dan Booth sells Avanti cars and parts from his Nostalgic Motor Cars business in Wixom, Mich.

Despite the ambition surrounding the forward-thinking Studebaker Avanti, the car's rushed production schedule did little to turn around the fortune of the failing, 100-year-old car company.



But when Studebaker shut down, Avanti cars would live on as Avanti Motor Corporation, when two Indiana dealers bought the rights, tooling and plant for the cars. That set in motion a series of independent ownerships that would keep meager production of Avanti cars alive into the 2000s.

They used leftover Studebaker parts, but were outfitted with Ford and Chevy chassis and engines.

Booth became a servicer and dealer for Avanti in the early 70s, and was a new car dealer for the small car company by the end of the decade.

"It was one of the best-kept secrets because nobody knew about it. They didn't advertise," he said.

He's since gathered hundreds of parts, signs and accessories like serving trays, which incidentally are for sale for $75.

Dan Booth sells Avanti cars and parts from his Nostalgic Motor Cars business in Wixom, Mich.

Studebaker built 4,647 Avanti cars, and Booth said there were about 3,000 post-Studebaker Avantis built. Today, Avanti cars in good to excellent condition typically sell in the $13,000-$30,000 range.

Booth is about to ship a 1963 Avanti to Florida, where the new owner has bought the car sight-unseen.

"He's saw pictures of it, but he saw pictures of it in bare fiberglass," Booth said.

It's since been painted in its original gold color scheme.

Another Avanti is headed to Indiana. One is destined for Australia. And a third is being restored for a customer in Arizona.

The Arizona-bound Avanti is getting new paint, new interior, new weather seals and chrome bumpers.

"He wanted air conditioning added to it, and that's what's held it up, because I've got to do it between phone calls," Booth said.

Booth said he fields calls from all over the country from potential Avanti owners who are not necessarily looking for parts, but rather just trying to gain intelligence on a purchase they're eyeing. His advice is to buy a restored one in the $20,000-$25,000 range, rather than spending $8,000 or so on a beat-up Avanti that will likely cost more to fix than it's worth.

And Avanti enthusiasts can come to Booth for parts, but he'd rather not be the one to install them.

He has his own hobby keeping him busy.

"I work all by myself, and I just can't keep up," he said.

Further reading on the history of Avanti cars:

David Muller is the automotive and business reporter for MLive Media Group in Detroit. Email him at dmuller@mlive.com, follow him on Twitter or find him on Facebook.
A new business at 7813 Cottonwood Drive in Jenison (formerly the Click Photography studio) is a venue for local artists and, according to owner Amy Lee, a place to also discover the art of tattoo.

Called Gremlin House, the business will exhibit art by local artists for sale on consignment.

"I'm working to bring art to the people, and of the people," said Lee. "We will accept all mediums. I just want to inspire people to do art."

Gremlin House also will provide tattoo services. Lee has been doing tattoos for 20 years and operated a tattoo shop in Wyoming, but body art is only one of her fields. "I really like to do any kind of art, multimedia, 3-D objects, fabric, painting. I like to take things people think are not beautiful and put them in new positions."

Lee said she "does art for a living," and is a mother to four children, two in Grandville schools and two in Jenison. Opening the shop in Jenison, she said, "will force me to take the time to do my own art, and inspire other people who are like me."

Lee said she hopes people will come in to see the variety of visual arts in the shop and learn more about tattooing as an art form. "I hope they will see you don't have to be afraid to visit a tattoo shop," she said.

Lee is a graduate of Jenison High School and went on to study at Kendall School of Art and Design. She now lives in Jenison.

Gremlin House is open from noon to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and closed on Sunday. For information on placing art for exhibit or for sale, call 534-8288 or email gremlingallery@gmail.com.
AAATA_061516_RJS_02.jpg

Riders board a bus at the Blake Transit Center in downtown Ann Arbor on June 15, 2016.

(Ryan Stanton | The Ann Arbor News)

ANN ARBOR, MI -- The Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority rolled out the largest expansion of local transit services in decades on May 1.

That included a reorganization of bus routes in Ypsilanti and on the west side of Ann Arbor, with some new routes and a renumbering of many routes.

Some longer loop routes were broken up into multiple routes with the intention of providing faster and more direct service.

So, how is it working out?

The AAATA is reporting that ridership is up slightly.

However, reviews from riders are mixed.

Some like the new route configurations. Some don't. And some say they personally haven't noticed much change other than having to learn new route numbers.

"To me, it got a little confusing," said Tanya Jones, who lives off Washtenaw Avenue between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

For instance, Jones had to learn that the old Route 22 is now Route 66, which gets her to the Meijer store off Carpenter Road.

"Once you know what buses to get on, it's not as bad," she said, adding the bus service here is a lot better than in Detroit, where she used to live.

"I think it's a pretty good system," she said before catching a bus to go to the Salvation Army on Wednesday.

Information released by the AAATA this week indicates overall ridership was up 4 percent in May -- the first month of the new services -- compared to May 2015.

The new services seem to be well received, said AAATA spokeswoman Mary Stasiak.

"There are so many new places for people to travel and service is much faster and more frequent on many routes," she said.

The AAATA reports average weekday ridership for May actually was down 0.5 percent compared to May 2015, while Saturday ridership was up 8 percent and Sunday ridership was up 28 percent compared to May 2015.

The AAATA rolled out a wave of improvements in August 2015 that included expanded weekend services.

The Ann Arbor News reported in January that the AAATA saw local fixed-route bus ridership go down by 0.8 percent after increasing service hours by 9.1 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2015.

The AAATA's overall ridership dropped off even more after implementing the second wave of service improvements last August.

Year over year, local fixed-route ridership was down 6.3 percent in September and 8 percent in October.

AAATA officials explained those decreases by saying lower gas prices had more commuters hopping in their cars and that was happening nationally.

The agency's newer reports for the first seven months of the current fiscal year, from October through April, show fixed-route ridership still down 2.4 percent from the year before, with 93,000 fewer passenger trips.

Ridership in February actually was up from the year before, but it evened out in March and ticked down again in April.

AAATA bus ridership figures for the first seven months of the fiscal year, from October 2015 through April 2016, with comparison stats for the previous year.

Stasiak said the AAATA is encouraged by the most recent figures showing an increase in May.

"This is much more positive than the national average, which continues to see lower ridership compared to last year," she said.

Stasiak said route-by-route ridership figures for May are not available because the AAATA was in the process of adding new technology to buses last month.

"We will have this information for June, and beginning in July we will begin to have robust information on ridership by route by time of day and day of week," she said.

Some residents who use the bus to get around on the west side of Ann Arbor said they don't like the new route configurations.

For instance, some don't like how the old Miller-Liberty loop routes have been broken up into new routes, saying the service is less convenient now.

"It's pretty confusing with all the changes," said Ann Arbor resident Michael Earle, who was waiting to catch a bus on Wednesday.

"I guess it's pretty great for people over in Ypsilanti," he said of the new services there. "But I don't usually get over there."

Earle said he's had some challenges getting around the west side of Ann Arbor with the new routes, but he's figuring it out.

"What I do is I'll go out to my bank, and then I'll just walk up Stadium to Kroger, but it's getting back that can be a bit of a hassle," he said.

"I usually will wait for the new No. 28 (Pauline), or I'll walk down across Westgate and catch the No. 30 on Jackson Road, so it's not too bad."

Josh Leonardis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan who regularly rides the bus, said his experience has been positive.

"As far as the new service goes, for me the routes that I ride haven't really changed all that much," he said. "They're on time, I very rarely have to wait, everyone's always nice, and I haven't had any problems on the bus itself. It's everything you'd want in a bus, I guess."

Stasiak said a lot of public input went into designing the new routes and the agency is continuing to respond to feedback.

She said the agency is working to address some concerns about travel time on the new Route 32 (Miller-Maple).

In fact, the AAATA implemented a schedule adjustment on Wednesday, June 15, to address one route timing concern, she said.

In August, the AAATA is planning another service change and increasing frequency on Route 6 (Ellsworth) to every 15 minutes on weekdays, with connections to a new Route 61 (Airport-Avis Farms).

A map of the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority's new route system. The system was expanded on May 1, 2016.

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.
021212_NEWS_LGBTQ_Riot_Youth_CA

Members of 'Riot Youth' pose for a portrait at the Neutral Zone in downtown Ann Arbor in 2012. At the time, Riot Youth offered input on Ann Arbor Public Schools' anti-bullying policy. The board of education plans to involve the organization in reviewing the Michigan Department of Education's guidelines on creating a safe and supportive learning environment for LGBTQ youth.

(Chris Asadian | AnnArbor.com)

ANN ARBOR, MI -- Following a moment of silence at the start of its regular meeting to pay tribute to the 49 people killed and 53 injured in the June 12 shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education heard from several people on topics related to LGBTQ students.

The Sexual Health Education Advisory Committee was on the agenda to give a presentation on proposed curriculum to help health teachers educate students on LGBTQ issues. And in what board Secretary Andy Thomas called a "serendipitous" coincidence, eight people also spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting in support of the Michigan Department of Education's guidance for schools on how to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for LGBTQ youth.

"Given the tragic events in Orlando last [Sunday], we believe this partnership and [SHEAC's] continuing critical work to address the following educational objectives is vital to the safety and welfare of not only our students in the district but the Ann Arbor community at large," said Lee Ann Dickinson-Kelley, assistant superintendent overseeing instruction and student support services.

She noted that AAPS established the Sexual Health Education Advisory Committee in 1982.

SHEAC is a group of parents, clergy members, medical professionals, school staff members and students who offer input on how schools should address sexual health. Representatives from the AAPS group outlined a new presentation at Wednesday's board meeting that the committee's peer educators would like to give in high school health classes.

Parents have the option to review sexual education materials and have their students opt out of that portion of the health class if they desire.

The new presentation, titled "LGBTQ 101," focuses on defining various terms associated with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning community and educating students on the difference between attraction, behavior and identity when it comes to sexual orientation.

"The idea for this presentation came out of several conversations I had with local high school teachers in health class about their desire to be more educated and more comfortable addressing LGBTQ issues in sensitive, honest and meaningful ways -- many of which we heard tonight from our public comments," said Ricky Bicknell, a member of SHEAC and the community outreach educator at Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan.

Board members are expected to vote June 29 on whether to include the presentation in its high school health class curriculum, and trustees responded favorably to the proposal on Wednesday.

"It allows people to have a conversation without feeling threatened by the misuse of words," said board Treasurer Donna Lasinksi, adding her appreciation for the attention to defining vocabulary. "I'm actually very surprised that this isn't already in the curriculum ... so I'm excited about this."

The impact of the SHEAC's work was documented in the results of a new pre- and post-test created for the 2014-15 school year. The average score for the 420 students who took the pre-test was 43 percent. That average score improved to 87 percent on the post-test, showing that students gained a better understanding of reproductive anatomy, STDs, consent, HIV and other topics.

Trustee Susan Baskett pointed out that increasing students' technical knowledge of sexual health issues also improves the school climate by promoting better understanding and more inclusion. That dovetailed with suggestions made during public comment about policy that could potentially make school climate more accepting of LGBTQ students.

The Michigan State Board of Education is currently considering proposed guidelines drafted by the MDE for what schools can do to create a safe and supportive learning environment for LGBTQ students.

The guidelines would be voluntary for Michigan schools, and the state board is not expected to take action on the proposal until August.

2016 Skyline High School graduate Evan Murphy, 18, was the first at Wednesday's meeting to voice his support for the MDE's guidelines, recounting his struggles as a transgender male to feel accepted in middle school and high school. He said he couldn't address the issue without bringing up the shooting in Orlando.

"This is the world your students live in. This is the world that they operate in, these are the things that they see," Murphy said. "I've been out of class since the end of May, and I cannot fathom how hard it must have been for queer students to come back to school on Monday after this weekend. ... America is not as safe as it should be for LGBTQ people, especially youth and those who have intersecting marginalized identities."

Adopting the MDE's guidelines would help make more LGBTQ students feel school is a safe space for them, Murphy said. He and the SHEAC representatives pointed out that LGBTQ youth are more likely than their heterosexual, cisgender peers to be bullied, discriminated against and to attempt or commit suicide.

Murphy's father, Jeff Murphy, also spoke at Wednesday's meeting, saying he is "probably the worst person to talk about discrimination" as a white, heterosexual, cisgender male.

"I've never really felt discrimination. ... But I have a transgender son, so I do know some things," Jeff Murphy said, becoming emotional as he talked about how proud he is of his son's efforts to become the person he is. "I know that people fear the unknown. I think that's an instinctive, human emotion. ... Fear often breeds hate because it's a feeling that we don't understand very well. But you have to learn how to hate people that you fear. Without an environment where people can learn to love each other in spite of everything, they're going to learn to hate. That's what we have to prevent, and I think in our schools is the best place to start that."

Jeff and Evan Murphy were joined by another parent, four other students and Jesse Kerstetter, Neutral Zone Riot Youth advisor, in advocating for the importance of policy specifically protecting LGBTQ students.

Board Vice President Christine Stead said the board's governance committee recently began reviewing the MDE guidelines and AAPS' existing anti-bullying policy related to protecting LGBTQ students.

"AAPS has been working closely with each of our buildings to create an atmosphere of safety," Stead said in an email Thursday. "Gender-neutral bathrooms is work that is not new to us. We have been providing this in buildings for years. ... As noted last night in the stories shared with us by our own students, we still have work to do."

Lauren Slagter covers K-12 education for The Ann Arbor News. Contact her at 734-255-1419, lslagter@mlive.com or on Twitter @LaurenSlagter.
BAY CITY, MI -- Johnny Burke and Blondie's former boss testified in federal court this week that the ex-radio star used content segments from the former WHNN morning show, had access to customer contact and pricing information and confused listeners and advertisers about "returning home" to work at the station.

Scott Stine, operations manager at WHNN, an FM radio station owned by Cumulus, testified for more than an hour in U.S. District Court in downtown Bay City Thursday, June 16.

Cumulus Media filed suits in April against Burke and his partner Blondie, whose real name is Bonnie Belger-Holzhei, saying the duo was in violation of non-compete and non-solicitation clauses in their employment agreements they entered into with Cumulus and/or Citadel Broadcasting. Cumulus wants a federal judge to issue an injunction barring the longtime radio personalities from hosting their new internet radio show.

At a May 25 hearing, attorneys for Cumulus said they were no longer pursuing a non-compete against Burke, but were going after him for violating a non-solicitation clause in his contract.

The countersuit comes after Burke, 61, and Belger-Holzhei, 53, filed an age-discrimination lawsuit against their former employer. Burke, who was the voice of the radio station for the past 25 years, and Belger-Holzhei were fired in January when the station underwent a format change. After being fired, they launched a live-streaming show online and on social media called Johnny and Blondie Live.

Birmingham attorney Thomas Paxton, who is representing Cumulus, questioned Stine about content that Burke and Belger-Holzhei used on their internet show and whether they poached WHNN customers to advertise on the show, which broadcasts online at JohnnyAndBlondie.com and on the streaming app Periscope.

Stine testified he heard content that was previously used on WHNN, including segments called "Butthead Bulletins" and "Office Joke of the Day." He said the ideas for those segments or the content for the segments came from a subscription service called Show Prep Services paid for by WHNN.

In cross examination, Saginaw attorney Victor Mastromarco Jr., who is representing Burke and Belger-Holzhei, argued Burke designed the segment "Butthead Bulletins." He also said Burke and Belger-Holzhei each used a three-month free trial for the subscription service, arguing Stine wouldn't know if the radio duo was using content from the service paid for by WHNN or through their free trials.

Stine also testified that Burke and Belger-Holzhei had access to customer contact information and advertisement pricing information through documents used for remote broadcast appearances. Additionally, Stine said Burke and Belger-Holzhei had access to a company "shared drive" that contained information about the radio station's customers.

"They would have information about WHNN prices and customer contact information," Stine said.

Mastromarco argued while Burke and Belger-Holzhei had access to the shared drive, Cumulus had no evidence that they used that access to look at files in the drive.

Paxton's line of questioning in the middle of Stine's testimony was aimed at his argument that Burke and Belger-Holzhei stole WHNN customers and confused them about their affiliation with the radio station.

Stine testified that when Belger-Holzhei was employed by the station in November 2015, she was the on-air personality behind a "shopping bus tour," where advertisers bought a spot on the bus in exchange for being mentioned on the air. He then said he learned that she and Burke were doing a similar promotion as part of their internet show from the duo's website.

Mastromarco, in cross-examination, asked Stine if that type of on-air promotion was common in the radio industry.

"I've heard of similar promotions," Stine said. "But it's unique here in this market."

Near the end of March, Burke and Belger-Holzhei were teasing a segment called "Returning Home," that Stine said was confusing to WHNN customers and employees. The segment, which turned out to be an April Fools Day stunt where Burke and Belger-Holzhei broadcast their internet show from the WHNN parking lot, was teased throughout the week.

"There were people who thought Johnny and Blondie were coming back to work with WHNN," Stine said.

Stine testified it wasn't until "after the fact" that he realized it was an April Fools Day joke.

"Isn't that the point of an April Fools Day joke?" Mastromarco asked him.

Julia Richardson, general sales manager for Cumulus, testified at the end of Thursday's hearing that when she was made aware that Burke and Belger-Holzhei were in the parking lot, she was told "to politely ask them to leave the premises."

"They then said crude things to me," Richardson said.

Paxton asked her to elaborate.

"Blondie called me the B-word... and they referenced me as Caitlyn Jenner on their Periscope show," she said.
BAY CITY, MI -- Blues-rock sextet the Marcus King Band was met with a full-house at a Bay City bar, their lone Michigan gig on their 25-date tour.

The South Carolina group, fronted by vocalist-guitar virtuoso Marcus King, performed at BeMo's Bar, 701 S. Madison Ave., the evening of Wednesday, June 15. They played for more than an hour and a half, with King's sonorous voice and guitar skills turning their songs into extended, improvisational jams with a vintage, juke-joint flavor.

The group played a bevy of songs from their debut LP, "Soul Insight," and a handful from their forthcoming followup record. They also threw in a couple of cover tunes, such as drastically reinterpreted of the Beatles' "Dear Prudence" and the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone."

The band's next stop is in Evanston, Illinois, on Thursday, June 16.

Click here to read an interview MLive conducted with King.
Nick Hussein, Director of Sales at Bay City's Uptown Courtyard Mariott, shows off hotel's "GoBoard" on June 16, 2016.

BAY CITY, MI -- A new hotel featuring a modern design chock-filled with the latest technology that aims to appeal to business travelers, millennials and tourists is the latest operation to open at the Uptown Bay City development.

A 100-room Courtyard by Marriott, located at 2 E. Main St. in the Uptown development, opened its doors to travelers Tuesday, June 14. A handful of business travelers, some who were doing work in the hotel's cafe on Thursday, got the ball rolling on check-ins this week.

"This hotel really offers the best of both worlds," said Nick Hussein, director of sales at the Courtyard. "Every inch of this place was designed to accommodate all types of travelers, offering them the latest technology and conveniences."

When guests walk into the main entrance of the latest-generation hotel, located on the south end of the building, they're greeted by a front desk staff to their left working at two separate pods. A "GoBoard," which Hussein described as an "iPad on steroids," lets guests check flight statuses at Flint Bishop Airport and MBS International Airport and see local restaurant recommendations. And furniture in the lobby, designed with modern gray and plum colors, offers USB- and AC-plugs to charge travelers' devices.

Sales staff say they're busy ramping up by recruiting businesses locally and across the state to bring conferences or groups to the hotel. The four-story hotel offers 2,108-square-feet of meeting space to accommodate functions of more than 160 people.

The hotel, owned by Bloomfield Hills-based Amerilodge Group, is quickly filling up for the 29th annual River Roar, held June 25-26, Hussein said. All rooms are now sold out for the 2016 Tall Ship Celebration next month, when more than 100,000 people are expected to come to town.

Rooms during bigger events, like River Roar and Tall Ships are going to run about $239, Hussein said. On average, rooms will cost between $169-$239.

Today, there are 32 employees working at the hotel.

A guest room inside Bay City's Uptown Courtyard Mariott on June 16, 2016.

All rooms feature a "LoungeAround" sofa and can accommodate up to five people, Hussein said. There are three "extended" double queen rooms on the second, third and fourth floors of the hotel that offer extra leg room for travelers.

Guests have access to a 24-7 fitness center, a saltwater swimming pool and laundry services. As part of Courtyard's latest generation hotel, desks are now on wheels, allowing guests to work anywhere in their room.

A cafe in the lobby offers Starbucks coffee throughout the day and a happy hour selection in the afternoon. The bistro, which opened to guests and the public, offers breakfast in the morning and light evening fare, including snacks, cocktails, wine and beer.

The bistro offers breakfast from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and dinner and drinks from 5-10 p.m. Monday through Friday. Times are from 7-10 a.m. and 5-10 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Hussein said Josh Mackinnon, the hotel's general manager, plans to spend a couple days out of the week working in the lobby in order to greet and interact with guests.

"When you go to a restaurant, you want to see the chef," Hussein said. "It's all about customer service here. Our guests want the GM to be accessible."

A highlight of the hotel is its namesake, the courtyard, which faces the Real Seafood Company on the west side of the building and features a decorative gas fire pit, allowing guests or conference attendees to relax outside.

The Courtyard is the latest business to open at the multi-million dollar Uptown Bay City development. Last month, Michigan Sugar Co. moved its corporate headquarters into "Uptown Place," located next-door to the new hotel. Additional restaurant, retail and commercial businesses are to be announced throughout the year.

"Before this was developed, this area was an eyesore for the community," Hussein said. "We are so excited to be part of the development."
Western International student Mario Zuniga's mother told him to always earn an A and nothing less.

He did just that, and it paid off Thursday for Zuniga and 14 other Detroit students.

Office Depot, Inc. rewarded the group of Detroit high school seniors with $1,000 gift cards for excelling academically and earning straight-A report cards.

Each student was able to use their gift card during an in-store shopping spree at an Office Depot store in Oak Park on Thursday.

Students purchased laptops, tablets, printers and other school supplies as they prepare to move on to college.

For each student, the recognition came as a surprise, but also a confirmation that they were on the right track.

"I never felt like I was really recognized for the hard work that I put in, so this is just a great way to be recognized," said Detroit Renaissance senior Ali Wood, who plans to major in engineering or English at Princeton University.

"Even though I've always strived to have all-A's, it never crossed my mind it would pay off in a way like this."

This is the third year of the shopping spree reward program, which has seen the number of honored student's increase from 10 in 2014 to 13 in 2015 and now 15 this year, totaling $38,000 in awards.

Office Depot-Office Max Education Solutions Manager Akoco Grace said the Detroit Public Schools guidance and counseling office monitors students who are on track to maintain a 4.0 GPA average throughout their four years of high school, and selects those that achieve the accomplishment.

Students were not notified of the achievement until after completing high school.

Dayla Reed paced through the Office Depot aisles with her stepfather, Billie Burress, grateful for the financial benefit the gift card provided.

"It's going to help me and my mom out a lot," said Reed, who is graduating from Osborn Collegiate Academy of Mathematics, Science and Technology and plans to study biomedical engineering at Wayne State University.

It was an extra special moment for Reed, whose biological father died of cancer during her junior year of high school.

"Most people would've fell off, but he would've wanted me to stay on track. So I just continued to go down the right path, and that's what helped me," she said.

Zuniga, who plans to attend the University of Michigan, said he appreciates the uniqueness of the shopping spree opportunity.

"It's only 15 people, and not many are from my school, so it's breathtaking to be honest," he said. "It lets you know you're doing the right thing."

Grace hopes that as the program continues to expand, it will bring more positivity for Detroit and its school district.

"The students in the city of Detroit are beacons of light," Grace said. "I appreciate the fact that these beacons of light get to go to different universities and colleges and share that light. People will know that positive things can happen out of the city of Detroit."

List of honorees: Name, High School, University or College:

Alexis Barker, Ben Carson High School, University of Michigan

Mushtary Chowdhury, Ben Carson High School, University of Michigan

Rumi Deb, Cass Technical High School, University of Michigan

Ki'ya Fulwood, Cass Technical High School, University of Michigan

Raheida Khalique, Cass Technical High School, University of Michigan

Hawa Rahman, Detroit International Academy for Young Women, College for Creative Studies

Dayla Reed, Osborn Collegiate Academy of Mathematics, Science and Technology

Kayla Byrd, Renaissance High School, University of Michigan

Nadira Chowdhury, Renaissance High School, University of Michigan

Paige Sims, Renaissance High School, Michigan State University

Desiree Smith, Renaissance High School, University of Chicago

Alia Wood, Renaissance High School, Princeton University

Fabiola Orozco, Western International High School, Eastern Michigan University

Lucero Perez, Western International High School, Wayne State University

Mario Zuniga, Western International High School, University of Michigan
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Liane Shekter Smith, former chief of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, was terminated from state employment on Feb. 5, 2016.

Fired Michigan Department of Environmental Quality official Liane Shekter Smith is hoping to avoid discussing her role in the Flint water crisis by invoking her 5th Amendment right not to incriminate herself.

Her lawyer Brian P. Morley said Thursday she would plead the Fifth if questioned in court, "not as a suggestion guilt, but more of an abundance of caution."

Smith, the former head of MDEQ's Drinking water and Municipal Assistance unit appeared in Wayne County Circuit Court for a hearing.

Attorney General Bill Schuette's issued an investigative subpoena to compel Smith's on-record testimony as part of his investigation into the Flint water crisis.

"After consultation, a timely objection was filed based on Ms. Shekter Smith's right to not provide testimony or evidence that may incriminate her," Morley told Wayne Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny. "She stands before the court through counsel today asking that that be honored by this court and excusing her from compliance with the investigation."

Assistant Attorney General Tom Dawson, representing Schuette, didn't object and the judge agreed Smith won't immediately be forced to comply with the subpoena.

Kenny said he'll leave it to the parties "to work out next steps."

Morley says both sides have been "cooperating quite well" and have already had meetings.

"I don't know that she'd ever go on record," Morley said.

Michael Glasgow, the city's laboratory and water quality supervisor and an employee of Smith, has already been charged with crimes related to his conduct in connection with the water crisis. He pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of willful neglect of duty in May.

Morley said he doesn't expect Smith to ever go on record with what she knows, but does expect her to cooperate with Schuette's investigation -- once he has a better grasp on what information the office already has.

"She didn't do anything wrong," Morley said. " ... We may end up discussing this with the Attorney General's Office; I don't know that that will ever become on the record."

Wayne Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny allowed Smith to assert her right in light of the ongoing communication between her attorney and investigators.

Smith was removed from her position in October and issued an investigative subpoena to testify regarding events leading to the crisis.

"Putting the well-being of Michiganders first needs to be the top priority for all state employees," Snyder said at the time of her firing. "Anything less than that is unacceptable. The DEQ is working to change this culture and ensure mistakes that endanger our residents don't occur again."

The Flint water crisis emerged when the city switched water sources in April 2014.

More corrosive water caused lead to leach from pipes, exposing an unknown number of children to contaminants and possible health consequences.

DEQ Director Dan Wyant and spokesperson Brad Wurfel also resigned over the crisis on Dec. 29.
FLINT, MI - It could cost the city more than $300,000 to pay for the civil and criminal lawyers it has hired to deal with fallout from the Flint water crisis.

Two contracts obtained by Mlive-The Flint Journal through the Freedom of Information Act show Detroit-based law firm Butzel Long advised the city it should budget $315,000 for its services through June 30.

The contracts, both dated April 5, call for the firm to handle civil litigation facing the city and its employees arising from the water crisis, and to represent the city and its employees in the three subsequent ongoing criminal investigations.

Butzel Long officials could not be reached for comment on their contracts with the city.

City spokeswoman Kristin Moore and City Attorney Stacy Erwin Oakes could not be reached for comment on the contracts.

However, Mayor Karen Weaver said Tuesday, June 14, that the city may look to the state to help pick up the tab of some of the city's legal representation associated with the water crisis.

"We know that so much of this happened under an emergency manager," Weaver said. "The state plays a role and they have some responsibility to helping us with that."

Gov. Rick Snyder's spokeswoman, Anna Heaton, said previously that the state's Department of Treasury agreed in January to reimburse the city up to $225,000 in legal bills associated with the water rates lawsuit filed by resident Larry Shears.

The state has paid $83,000 in legal fees related to lawsuits filed by Shears and Flint City Councilman Scott Kincaid.

Nearly $27,000 was reimbursed by the state for former Emergency Manager Darnell Earley's legal representation when he testified in front of the U.S. Congress, according to Heaton.

The city also requested reimbursement from the state for another $48,000 related to Earley's fees, Heaton said.

Heaton said any future requests would need to be reviewed by Treasury in light of the city's filing of a notice of intent to sue the state over the water crisis.

"If they do receive any requests, it would have to be taken into account that the city has not withdrawn their intent to sue the state, and evaluate those requests accordingly," Heaton said.

Butzel Long's work with the city has drawn some controversy.

Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said previously that attorneys for Butzel Long were creating a "big obstacle" for his criminal investigation.

"My concern is that some of the lawyers who say they represent the city on the civil side are suggesting witnesses don't have to answer our questions," Leyton said. "I disagree with that."

Butzel Long denied any obstruction and says its work has actually assisted the government's criminal investigations.

"In our opinion, Butzel Long's involvement has aided the progress of the governmental investigations being carried out by the U.S. Justice Department, the special prosecutor and special investigator engaged by the Michigan Attorney General and the Genesee County Prosecutor's office," the law firm said in a statement to Mlive-The Flint Journal, adding its actions have been "professional and ethical."
In what appears to be a bid to stimulate the market after last years disappointing results, foreign traders are being encouraged to buy gems and jade lots to be sold at the 53rd Myanmar Gems Emporium. The absence of Chinese buyers at last Decembers emporium was linked to the poor sales, organisers said.





However, the foreign traders will also be asked to stump up bigger deposits, to help ensure that they complete the purchases they say they will make. Goods on sale also include gold and silver, pearls and sculptures.

U Than Zaw Oo, deputy director of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, told The Myanmar Times that local traders would have to deposit the same sum as last year for the emporium, to be held in Nay Pyi Taws Mani Yadana Jade Hall.

Transactions will be conducted in foreign currency, so both local and foreign traders can buy there. Traders can buy gems and jade worth 20 times their deposit, he said. A deposit is required for any trader wishing to buy.

The deposit was set last year at 10,000 euros (US$1120) for gems purchases for both local and foreign merchants. But for jade transactions, the deposit was set at 20,000 euros for local traders and 50,000 euros for international dealers. But traders can submit up to 5 percent of the amount they will spend to buy gems and jade lots, he said.

The 53rd Myanmar Gems Emporium will be held from June 24 to July 6, and the procedures for participation will be handled in an administration office located in the head office of Myanmar Gems Enterprise (Nay Pyi Taw), Myanmar Gems Emporium Central Committee said in a statement.

One reason for the rise in deposit rates is that some foreign traders failed to complete payment on their purchases from last year. They have been blacklisted from the 53rd emporium.





Some offered higher prices, but left without paying, said U Win Htein, director general of the Department of Mines.

That happens every year, said Myanmar Gems and Jewellery Entrepreneurs Associations chair U Yone Mu. This time, we will make sure of every offer. A buyer who fails to complete a purchase will forfeit 5pc of the deposit under our central committees rule to guard against losses.

However, the 1pc sales tax levied last year has been suspended this year, organisers said.

The emporium will open under the shadow of a complex double scandal involving the apparent loss of about $100 million from an account held by the association. Some of the missing money was said to have gone to senior officials in the last government, including former president U Thein Sein, who has denied the allegations. Other association officials say the funds were spent on environmental conservation and regional development projects.

Amid confusion over the conflicting claims, a second investigation has since been opened into the disposition of 10 million euros ($11.3 million) earmarked for holding gems emporia.

Traditionally, most jade is bought by Chinese traders, while gems are snapped up by merchants from Myanmar, Thailand and China.

In the gems emporium held December 7 - 13 last year, 6800 jade lots and nearly 300 gems lots were displayed. The emporium was for local traders only, and all lots were sold in Myanmar kyat. The basic tender price of a gem lot was K300,000 and a jade lot was K1 million.

Sales at last years gems and jade emporium were more than one-third down on 2014, organisers said. They attributed the shortfall  amounting to K40 billion (US$30.86 million)  to the absence of Chinese buyers and the poor quality of the stones.

The emporium brought in a total of K80.84 billion, compared to the K120 billion earned in October 2014. Of the 6826 lots of jade, 5531 were sold, bringing in K79.15 billion, while all 152 lots of gems were sold for K1.69 billion.

Translation by Thiri Min Htun
Myanmar Agribusiness Public Corporation (MAPCO) is in no rush to list its shares on the Yangon Stock Exchange, said the firms managing director, who is keeping a close eye on price movements on the countrys new bourse.





The firm is intending to list its shares in August or September, which will give managing director U Ye Min Aung time to see how the stock market performs in the meantime, he said.

By August the exchange could have some four firms trading. First Myanmar Investments (FMI) listed its shares in March and Myanmar Thilawa SEZ Holdings (MTSH) followed in May. Myanmar Citizens Bank and First Private Bank are hoping to list in July.

The first two firms  FMI and MTSH  enjoyed a sudden jump in share price immediately after listing, but in both cases the shares then started to drop, said U Ye Min Aung.

FMI listed at K26,000 on March 25, peaked at K41,000 a few days later and then started a slow decline. The shares closed at K25,500 yesterday.MTSH is showing a similar trend. The firm listed at K50,000 on May 20, hit a high of K70,000 on May 24 and has since fallen back to K54,000, where the shares finished yesterday. The volume of shares trading daily has fallen from more than 50,000 during the first week to less than 10,000.

Although MAPCO has finished some 90 percent of the preparation required to list on the exchange, given the experience of FMI and MTSH U Ye Min Aung wants to wait and see how other firms fare before his company takes the plunge.

The main point is that there are only retail investors in Myanmar and if the people stop buying then the price will fall, he said. Institutional investors should be encouraged to participate after which preparations could be made to allow foreign investors into the exchange, he added.





Financial industry figures have also identified the lack of institutional investors as a key priority for the new bourse.

The public needs to build trust in the stock exchange and be educated about how equity markets work, said U Ye Min Aung. MAPCO also needs to be cautious in approaching its listing because of the nature of its business, he added.

The company is based on agriculture, U Ye Min Aung said, and there are few investors who want to invest because business for agriculture isnt good all the time, unlike other companies [engaged in more stable businesses].

MTSH was set up to invest in the Thilawa special economic zone and other real estate ventures in Myanmar. It has little in the way of expenditure and derives much of its revenue from marketing and selling land in the Thilawa SEZ, which is in high demand.

FMI focuses on investing in projects across financial services, real estate and health care.

MAPCO was formed in 2012 under the guidance of the Myanmar Rice Federation, and is engaged in a range of businesses including rice exporting, agrochemical importing and building agricultural infrastructure.

Translation by San Layy
The venerable film festival, now in its fourth year, is a highlight of the arts season. Both national and international productions are being shown over five days, all wrapping up on Saturday, with a total of 40 films showing (give or take: see Twilight Over Burma for more on this topic).





The good news is, even if you cant make your top choice you can more or less spin the wheel and wind up having a great theatre experience. Because the films are presented in bundles, feature-length presentations are packaged with challenging short films, a genre currently thriving among talented Myanmar filmmakers. There are too many short films to list here  some funny, some sad, some inspiring, some all three  and HRHDFF is an invaluable venue for local issues to be brought to wider attention.

All films are being shown at Nay Pyi Taw, Junction Square and Junction Maw Tin cinemas. Some are competing for prizes in different categories, but all are competing for your eyes, you thoughts, your heart. Here are just a few to whet your appetite, but remember that the full slate of offerings represents far more diversity in tone and subject matter than we can represent here.

Check the complete film descriptions at hrhdiff.org and check the festivals Facebook page for showtimes.

While They Watched

Saturday, 10am, Junction Maw Tin

South Korean documentary

A documentary set in the future? While They Watchedlooks at the North Korean dictatorship from a different perspective: how the world will see it after it collapses. A powerful provocative take on how the world let it go on for so long.

YanMaGon

Friday, 6:15pm, Nay Pyi Taw Cinema

French documentary

Architects, photographers, activists, journalists, poets, the actors of the change bring us to the heart of their city  a look at the changing face of Yangon in a new era of democracy. Watch the change happen ... and participate in it too.











Unsilent Potato

Saturday, 12:45pm, Junction Maw Tin

Myanmar documentary

A disabled young Kayin woman is unable to speak about her own rape, but expresses herself through drawings. Meanwhile her family fights back against the flawed justice system that is prejudiced against women. One example of the many locally made documentary bringing local stories to national and international prominence.

Siam Burma Death Railway

Saturday, 3:30pm, Junction Square

Singaporean documentary

Siam is now Thailand, and Burma is now Myanmar, but the memory of the Death Railway connecting the two countries in World War II should never fade. Indian Tamils, Burmese and Javanese labourers slaved to build the rail line. You can go see the terminus at Mawlamyine today  right next to the war cemetery.

Twilight Over Burma

Friday 3:30pm, Junction Square

Austrian feature

As Weekend went to print, Twilight had just gone dark. Its an epic love story, based on true events: An Austrian marries a Shan man, only to discover later he is the ruling prince of his people. After the military coup, he is imprisoned  some say killed  and she must flee, leaving her heart behind with him and her adopted homeland.

Twilight Over Burma was scheduled as the centrepiece of Tuesdays opening day, but the motion picture board held it back, due to concerns it portrayed the military in a negative light. (Some scenes reportedly portray soldiers raping Shan women.)

Some would say that it was the rapists who damaged the Tatmadaws reputation, not the films depiction of them. But either way its worrying to see censorship being imposed in 2016, especially at an event like this, in which the whole point is to promote, well, human rights and human dignity.

So go see this film, if this second showing goes ahead (unlikely). If it doesnt, seek out other avenues to see it. Make up your own mind if the film is fair. Or just be swept away by the story: an incredible story of human hope and suffering.
At a beer station on Bogyoke Aung San Road, servers traipse from table to table, handing mugs of Myanmar Beer to cheroot-smoking men in longyis. Another beer station in Sanchaung township looks almost exactly the same, but with Dagon Beer decorations and brew dripping from the taps.





All over Myanmar, domestic brands such as Myanmar and Dagon have dominated the beer market since the early 1990s, when the military regime established the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (UMEHL) conglomerate and founded Myanmar Brewery Limited. At the time, an import ban on foreign beer ensured their hold on Myanmars drinkers. Drinking beer became a de facto toast to the military elite.

But, like everything else in The Golden Land lately, the beer landscape is changing  rapidly. The USDP-led former government loosened restrictions, and in 2013 Carlsberg Group secured one of four foreign beer brewing licences. The Danish company formed a joint venture with U Thein Tuns Myanmar Golden Star (MGS) to build a US$75 million brewery in Bago, where they now brew Carlsberg, Tuborg and a Myanmar-specific brand called Yoma. (U Thein Tun also owns the majority share in Myanmar Consolidated Media, which publishes The Myanmar Times.)

Heinekens Asia Pacific Brewery (APB) scooped up a licence two years later, joining with U Aung Moe Kyaws Alliance Brewing Limited and building its own $60 million plant in Hmawbi, less than 100 kilometres from the Carlsberg facility. Along with the namesake brand, Tiger Beer and ABC Stout, the Dutch company has begun marketing Regal 7 beer, a Myanmar-specific brand that will compete with Yoma and Myanmar.

Despite international reach and clout, however, both companies have struggled to make a dent in the militarys substantial market share, estimated at roughly 60 percent of the market. UMEHL  which saw Japanese giant Kirin buy a 55pc stake for $560 million after former partner Fraser and Neave was booted  brews Myanmar Beer, Black Shield, Andaman Gold and Myanmar Premium out of its Myanmar Brewery Limited. It also wholly owns and operates Mandalay Beer, the countrys oldest brew dating back to the 1850s. The Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC), which functions in a similar fashion as UMEHL and was also founded by the military, claims another 10pc of market share, brewing Dagon, Dagon Light, Dagon Super, Dagon Malta Fresh and Dagon Extra Strong.

FINGERS IN MANY ... GLASSES?

In addition to ABCs joint venture with Heineken, U Aung Moe Kyaw is one of the largest players in another drink market: whisky.

Through his International Beverages Trading Company Ltd (IBTC), founded in 1997, he owns a 50pc stake in the Myanmar Distillery Company (MDC). The company claims to control roughly 80pc of the total whisky market, with its Grand Royal whisky line (plus all of its derivations) being the most popular brand.

The other 50pc stake in MDC has been owned by TPG Capital, an American private equity firm, since 2015.





Among others, MDC also produces Eagle whisky, Golden Island rum and Grand Royal gin.

Grand Royal has also been Chelsea FCs official whisky in Myanmar since 2012.

Beer, whisky and Premier League sponsorships; he certainly has the liquid version of fingers in many pies.

That leaves roughly 30pc of the market up for grabs. Anthony Clark, CEO at Myanmar Carlsberg, said he estimates more than two-thirds of the leftover space is currently occupied by illegal beers smuggled over the Thailand border.

The border states would have a much higher degree of smuggled beer, for which there is little in the way of reliable information, he said, guessing that Chang beer would hold a clear lead in that area.

The stream of illegally imported beer often works its way through ethnic armed groups thirsty for funding, said one industry source who asked to remain anonymous. The source added that the smuggling issue may be factored into upcoming peace talks.

After accounting for these illegal imports, Heineken, Carlsberg and Mandalay brands are left to battle for less than 10pc. And in many instances, they are battling more than each other.

According to notes from a recent Myanmar Carlsberg meeting, the outgoing government made changes to licensing laws in December 2015. Now, breweries are required to obtain distribution credentials by district rather than state or region, effectively quadrupling the number of fees and amount of paperwork needed to pump beer into bellies across the country.

Furthermore, many beer stations and restaurants have five-year contracts with Myanmar Brewery Limited. Those businesses that consider terminating the contract would face a ban on selling competing products for at least one year. Effectively, the only way to get Yoma or Regal 7 into a beer station is to step in as soon as one opens.

The foreign brands are doing just that. Zita Schellekens, the director of corporate relations for Heinekens joint venture in Myanmar, APB Alliance Brewery Company Limited, said that getting into bars and restaurants is often difficult.

Of course we take a proactive approach in going to bars that we believe fit our brands, she said.

So far, premium restaurants have been the main staging ground. New, high-end restaurants in Yangon choose between Carlsbergs three brands or Heinekens four, and territory is staked out business by business. Penthouse? Carlsberg. Hummingbird? Heineken. The next fancy joint? Anyones guess.

But the staging ground is set to grow. Myanmars current beer per capita hovers around 3.7 litres  by comparison, neighbouring Thailand guzzles 33 litres per person, and Vietnam downs more than 40. According to research agency Euromonitor International, the value of Myanmars beer market will double from an estimated $375 million in 2015 to $675 million in 2018. During that time, many of the beer stations five-year contracts with Myanmar Brewery Limited will elapse, creating a potential gold rush as the foreign brands try to bite into UMEHL territory.

The fact that the current market is underdeveloped is a challenge but even more so an opportunity, said Schellekens. In short, we want the pie to get bigger and of course we want to have a bigger part of that pie.
In a former asylum for lepers, a priest offers succor to the ill, giving hope and spiritual sustenance to those who are weak and in need of care.





He is dressed in a white robe and visits a patient in a Yangon Orthopaedic Hospitals ward two days a week. He is neither a doctor nor a nurse.

Father Eugene offers Holy Communion to Christian patients at the hospital if invited by a patients family to help restore their spiritual strength and build endurance to pain and suffering.

He lives in an annex to St Josephs Church, originally situated in the hospital compound.

Every Sunday and Wednesday, I visit patients where families of Christian patients from remote villages invite me to give Holy Communion. I visit the sick at home the other days, says the bearded priest, who is thin but looks fit and younger than his 70 years.

An ethnic Kayin, Father Eugene was ordained in 1975 and worked as a parish priest across the country, including St Lazarus Church in Kawhmu township, Yangon Region, where he worked for 18 years.

Father Eugene retired from his parish duties a year ago to pursue meditation and mysticism for the rest of his life. He was then assigned to St Josephs, where he lives alone, meditating three times a day. Every afternoon at 5pm he says Mass and takes a collection, from which he makes a donation to patients in need.





His inspiration to pursue mysticism arises from the works of British spiritualist and writer Paul Brunton.

He changed my life. Since reading his books, I decided to follow meditation and mysticism, he said. His favourite books by Paul Brunton are The Ego, The Quest of the Overself and The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga. This is not light reading. I have to read each one 10 times, he said.

My goal is to do evangelism, he said, speaking of the necessary respect due to all faiths.

Yangon Orthopaedic Hospital was once the Leper Asylum, built in 1901 in Hantharwaddy Road, Sanchuang township. The asylum was run by Franciscan sisters who took care of people afflicted with leprosy. Daw Myint Myint Aye (60), a retired nurse whose mother worked at the asylum, recalled how the asylum was privatised in 1966 and transformed into Yangon Orthopedic Hospital in 1975.

There were six buildings for male and chronic patients, and a separate two-storey building (now the office where the head of the hospital sits) for the bishop who ran the asylum, Daw Myint Myint Aye said.

But one building was demolished a few months ago. Female patients were housed in a building (now a nurses quarters), located opposite.

When Daw Myint Myint Aye was young, nuns schooled her in English and Christian teachings. As a Catholic, she regularly attends Father Eugenes church in the hospital compound.

She said the children of former staff members and patients were still working as nurses and staff at Yangon Orthopaedic Hospital.

Only nuns treated patients. They were very kind and patient when giving out medicine and nutrition. Every morning, they asked staff at the asylum to join the queue, served tea and fed them vitamin supplements, she said.

Jesuit priest Father Titus Tin Maung SJ, whose niece is in Yangon Orthopaedic Hospital, said receiving Holy Communion was a spiritual Catholic practice.

For those who believe, communion will bring relief and courage when enduring the pain and accepting reality, he said
A major work that was competing for an award at this weeks fourth Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival was abruptly pulled from the screening schedule in an apparent last-minute decision by the censorship board. Twilight over Burma, which is based on the autobiography of the Austrian-born Shan Princess Inge Sargent, contains scenes that allegedly reflect poorly on the dignity of the military forces, including the rape of Shan women by Tatmadaw soldiers.





Audience members at the festivals opening night on June 14 were reportedly informed that the Motion Picture Classification Board, under the Myanmar Motion Picture Enterprise (MMPE), had forbade the screening of the film due to fears it would afflict national reconciliation efforts.

The film is based on a book of the same name by the Austrian author Inge Sargent, the wife of Hsipaw prince Sao Kya Seng and played in the film by actress Maria Ehrich. It depicts her life as a Shan princess in the 1960s, and was filmed by director Sabine Derflinger in 2015 in Thailand.

Daw Thida Tin, deputy chair of the Motion Picture Classification Board that banned the film, said the decision had been made in order to avoid damaging the ethnic unity of the state as preparations were proceeding for the 21st-century Panglong convened by State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to negotiate an end to the countrys decades-old armed conflicts. The board comprises representatives of the ministries of home affairs, religion and culture.

Daw Thida Tin denied that any outside influence or pressure had affected the boards decision over the film.

U Zaw Htay, director of the Presidents Office, told The Myanmar Times yesterday that while he had not been part of the decision-making process about the film, he had checked the censorship boards report. [The board concluded that] Twilight over Burma was based on an insufficient history of Myanmar, he said, clarifying that some aspects of the film have been significantly modified from the source material. As the country is trying to hold the Panglong Conference, to which Shan groups are invited, the board does not want the public to misunderstand the military and destroy any chance at national reconciliation, he said.

U Zaw Htay added that if the board had decided to cut scenes rather than censor the whole film, it would have been nonsense.

Festival organiser and director Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi told The Myanmar Times that the decision to censor the film represented a failure of its mission. No cuts were made last year, when the festival entries were screened under the former Union Solidarity and Development Party government. This years festival is the first to be held under the National League for Democracy government.





Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is a former patron of the festival, and lent her name to the principal awards when the festival was founded some years ago as a mark of her support.

Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi said the book on which the film is based had been translated by former culture minister U Maung Than Swe and two other writers without being subjected to censorship.

Formal pre-publication censorship of newspapers was abolished by the former government in 2012.

[In 2014] we had the same problem with the film Open Sky, which was about the violence that had occurred in Meiktila. The decision to censor destroyed the dignity of the film festival, but we complied with the decision for fear of more violence, said Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi.

We will comply with this decision too, but it represents a failure of our mission to uphold human rights and the dignity of our citizens.

The film board screened two documentary films, Little Son and Vein, on the opening night to fill the gap left by the removal of the banned film, and organisers apologised via social media.

I apologised to the audience who were eagerly waiting to watch this film, but I could not explain the decision of the censorship board, said Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi.

The closing and prize-giving ceremony for the five-day festival will be held on June 19 at Sule Shangri-La Hotel, Yangon.
President U Htin Kyaw has pledged to increase public spending on education, health and social security starting this fiscal year with revisions to the government budget.





At the first meeting of the Financial Commission, held yesterday at the presidential residence, the president said rural development, poverty alleviation and infrastructure development, including electricity, are top priorities.

The Financial Commission comprises the president, the two vice presidents, the Union attorney general, the Union auditor general, all state and region chief ministers, the Nay Pyi Taw Council chair, and the minister for finance and planning.

Although she is not a member, photos from the Presidents Office showed that State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also attended the meeting.

The Union Budget Law and the estimated expenditure for 2016-17 were drafted by then-president U Thein Sein and approved by his governments parliament. The K23.62 trillion (US$18.28 billion) budget formed by the former administration predetermined ready-made spending patterns, constraints and a deficit for the incoming government.

U Htin Kyaw said the financial report and the budget law both need revising and amending, as they were drafted based on the 33 ministries that existed under the previous government, which have since been trimmed to 22.

One of the first changes the president intends to make will funnel more money into the perennially underfunded education sector. A 5 percent commercial tax levied on telephone calls, which collectively amount to about K7.5 billion, will be used for sectors that have a direct impact on the public, such as education, U Htin Kyaw said in a statement released by his office yesterday.





U Htin Kyaw also said budget expenditure requires levels of scrutiny for minimum waste, as public money should be managed effectively.

Budget sharing between the Union and states or regions shall be done in accordance with the constitutional criteria and by systematic calculation in the pursuit of equality, he said in the statement.

The changes to the proposed budget law include a reduction of ministerial expenses for positions that no longer exist and the reduction of 2pc of the ministries normal expenditure, according to Vice President U Myint Swe.

He said other parts of the budget law will be left unchanged, including the K5.54 billion allocated to the Ministry of Home Affairs for building a fence between Myanmar and Bangladesh, and another one between Myanmar and India.

Vice President Henry Van Thio said nearly K1700 billion is estimated to be shared with states and regions from the Union budget, while the debt-to-GDP ratio is expected not to exceed 5pc.

Except for benefits from a tax on imports, the Union government will share 15pc of commercial tax revenue with the states and regions to fill the deficit, the vice president said.

The Financial Commissions secretary and Minister for Finance and Planning U Kyaw Win explained to the members of the commission the nature of the drafting of separate budget laws for states or regions and the Union. He also elaborated on the financial connection between the states or regions and the Union, the proposed budgetary report for the 2016-17 fiscal year, and the bill to amend the Union Budget Law.

The chief ministers presented their plans and priorities for development programs for their states and regions. A comprehensive periodic newsletter concerning the public expenditure, called Citizens Budget by U Htin Kyaw, will be published after the new law is approved.
Rakhine State immigration officials have given out more than 1000 new national verification cards or green cards to stateless Muslims as part of a citizenship verification pilot in the conflict-ridden state.





On top of handing out the green cards to those who are eligible, officials are counting the number of people already holding the cards. Citizenship scrutiny in line with the 1982 Citizenship Law is expected to follow after this initial step, as part of the governments 100-day plan to conduct citizenship scrutiny nationwide.

The project was meant to start in three Muslim-majority townships on June 7, but disagreements over the cards in Ponnagyun township have obstructed verification there thus far. The cards that are handed out do not mention race or religion, and the Rohingya community in the township has reportedly refused to cooperate because they cannot self-identify.

A senior official in the Sittwe Immigration Department, U Aung Myo Min, said the process had not yet begun in Ponnagyun township because the Muslim community there did not allow it.

We are dealing with the [Muslim] residents from Ponnagyun but thus far we have not yet reached an agreement with them, he said.

Use of the word Rohingya is deemed too sensitive by State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi amid the current debate about what term should be used to describe Muslims in Rakhine State who are called Bengalis by nationalists but who mostly self-identify as Rohingya. The government has urged people to avoid both terms, saying it could lead to problems.

A total of 1117 cards have been given out in the first week of the project in Kyaukphyu and Myebon townships.

The verification process is still ongoing, though we could not verify every day, said U Aung Myo Min on June 14.





There are no plans yet to continue the pilot in other townships, according to the Rakhine State Information Department.

Rakhine State Chief Minister U Nyi Pu told The Myanmar Times that all decisions will be made by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is also chair of the new Rakhine State Peace, Stability and Development Committee, which is in charge of handling Rakhine State affairs.

It is not confirmed what the chairs decision will be after the verification process, or which areas will be up for verification next, U Nyi Pu said. He added that the citizenship process would proceed in line with the 1982 Citizenship Law.

Daw Aye Nu Sein, vice chair of the Arakan National Party, said that if conducted in accordance with the 1982 law, the process could benefit development of the state.

We cannot comment about the process at the moment. We are waiting to see what the government is doing. We will have to complain if they do something wrong and we will appreciate them if they do good things, she said.

U Kyaw Min, a parliament member in 1990 and a leader of the Rohingya Muslim community, said he thinks the government does not accept the term Rohingya or the right to self-identify and that, therefore, Rohingya would not be included on the list of ethnic groups that qualify for citizenship.

I think the problem of the name of the Rohingya can be resolved by negotiation because we should not be forbidden to self-identify through the objection of a community that opposes us, he said.

The verification project is mostly a continuation of the program started under the previous government to address the stateless community. After the previous government revoked all temporary identity cards, better known as white cards, its holders were given receipts with which they could obtain a green card that would be valid for two years. Among them were over 300,000 Muslims living in Rakhine State.

But few people applied for the green card, and immigration officials are now handing them out to those who are eligible.

The cards include an identification number, the name of the holder, the name of the holders father, and the holders gender, date of birth and marital status.
Citizens from Myanmar and Mongolia will be able to travel freely between the two countries when a visa exemption agreement signed yesterday comes into effect.





The foreign affairs ministers of both countries discussed the agreement in Nay Pyi Taw on June 15 and signed a memorandum of understanding, Presidents Office spokesperson U Zaw Htay told reporters yesterday. He spoke at a press conference after a meeting between President U Htin Kyaw and Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj.

When the visa exemption begins, normal passport holders will be able to travel easily between Myanmar and Mongolia, U Zaw Htay said. It is unclear when the deal will go into effect.

During his visit to Myanmar on June 15, Mr Elbegdorj invited State Counsellor and Foreign Affairs Minister Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to Mongolia.

The Mongolian president told State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi that people in Mongolia are looking forward to another visit from her to their country after she won the election, U Zaw Htay said. She was also invited to the 11th Asia-Euro meeting to be held in Mongolia in July.

Mr Elbegdorj and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi exchanged views about the democratic transition in Myanmar, rule of law, national reconciliation and peace, natural resources and environmental conservation, as well as other issues. They also discussed accelerating cooperation between the two countries.

Myanmar and Singapore agreed on a 30-day visa exemption scheme earlier this month. The agreement will start on December 1, after a visit by the countrys foreign minister. Myanmar has already signed visa exemption MoUs with Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Brunei and the Philippines within ASEAN.





Translation by Thiri Min Htun
A Taiwanese-owned garment factory of dubious legal standing has gone dark after the owner ran away in the midst of financial trouble, according to Yangon labour officials.





Patrick Yan, owner of the UniPolar factory in Hlaing Tharyar township, was reported to local authorities by his employees who said he had failed to pay overdue wages before disappearing.

The factory owner didnt pay salaries for the month of May and then went back home. So we had to seal off his factory according to the law, U Kyaw Kyaw Tun, head of the Yangon Region factories and labour laws department, said on June 14.

Now we are planning to put it up for auction in order to pay the outstanding salaries and compensate the workers, he said.

A warrant was also issued, calling on the owner to account for the dispute. According to the township department, the factory may not have been officially registered or licenced.

The UniPolar factory, which has been in operation since 2014, was rented from another businessperson, according to township records.

The factory owner ran away, but he still owes a debt of K36 million for renting the factory, said U Chit Paw, head of the township department of factories and labour laws. He added that the factory did not display any sort of registration or certificate.

UniPolar had initially been hit with a dispute when wages from April were not forthcoming on payday. The workers reported Mr Yan, and wages were paid on May 9.





U Myint Soe, chair of the Myanmar Garment Manufacturers Association said UniPolar was not a member of the industry body. He added that the lack of strong registration records indicate a weakness in the garment sector.

The factories need to cooperate with labour committees, labour departments and the MGMA, he said.

U Chit Paw said that the factory will be auctioned on June 29 to make up the unpaid salary and compensate the 178 workers.
Members of the National League for Democracy will be electing a new addition to the partys regional executive committee in Mandalay today to replace U Htin Kyaw, who has since become the countrys president. Regional party president U Tin Tun Oo said, Theres only one vacancy in the regional executive, the position of the former president. Now party headquarters has been informed about the vacant position.





The NLD started electing and replacing executive committee members in the states and regions yesterday, and elections for district/township/village executive committees will take place by August 14, the party has announced.

NLD members qualify as candidates if they have served the party for least one year for the ward or village level, two years for the township level, and three and five years for district and regional levels respectively.

In separate elections in Mandalay, the local election commission chapter has had trouble drumming up interest to take over the poll organising body. Only one applicant has so far applied to fill vacancies for the election chair and members, said U Tin Min Aye, an officer at the Mandalay district election sub-commission.

Just one person, from Patheingyi township, applied to join the district commission, said U Tin Min Aye.

Anyone interested in joining the Mandalay district election sub-commission office has until June 21 to apply.

Translation by Kyawt Darly Lin and Emoon
Workers from a plywood factory in Sagaing Region, students and their supporters yesterday boycotted the second trial since they were arrested on May 18.





A total of 71 people were arrested when the protesters attempted to march to Nay Pyi Taw to demand better labour rights, including an increase in salary according to service years and the reinstatement of colleagues who had been fired for participating in the protest. The workers spent three weeks walking in over 40 degree Celsius heat in order to bring attention to their case.

Currently, 15 protesters, including seven workers and five members of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU), remain imprisoned in Yamethin Prison while the others have been released.

In their second appearance at Tatkone court yesterday, the judge was unable to hear the protesters case for refusal to cooperate and was forced to defer the case to a later date. The next hearing is scheduled for June 29.

They did not collaborate with the court. Therefore, the judge remanded then and set the next date for June 29, Nay Pyi Taw Police Colonel Ko Ko Aung told reporters outside the court.

More than 30 supporters arrived at the courthouse and police posted about 50 officers for security.

Ko Aung Hmaing San, a member of the ABFSU, said he agreed with the accused for not collaborating with the court. I totally second their boycotting of the court. Currently, all courts have been interfered with and are under the influence of the executive sector, he said.

The workers lawyer, U Aung Thurain Tun, had said on June 1 that he was planning to sue five MPs for failing to aid the peaceful protesters.





The workers had said they wanted to meet with representatives of the new government in order to plead their case. Instead they were told to come no closer to the capital than milepost 289 along the Yangon-Mandalay Highway or face arrest. When the workers attempted to walk beyond the police barrier on May 18, they were violently swarmed and rounded up into prison vans.

The protesters have been charged under sections 143, 146 and 505 of the penal code for disturbing public tranquillity, rioting and incitement.

Translation by Thiri Min Htun
A decision on the controversial Letpadaung copper mine is out of our hands, the Sagaing Region chief minister insists.





Despite the overwhelming majority of National League for Democracy representatives in the regional hluttaw and the partys stated policy to address concerns raised by the public and protesters against the mine, the Sagaing chief minister attests he can take no action, his spokesperson told The Myanmar Times on June 14. He said the chief minister had called environmental conservation a battle that was already lost.

The controversial Letpadaung project was restarted on May 5, triggering protests that threatened to come to a head after police phalanxes were deployed around the perimeter of the mine. Protests were temporarily suspended pending further negotiations and the promise of a three-way meeting with the developer, Wanbao Mining Company, the local residents and Chief Minister U Myint Naing.

But since Salingyi township NLD MP U Thein Naing had promised to broker the talks in early May, they have not come to fruition. When pressed on the matter, the chief minister declined to provide a definitive answer on whether he even intends to meet with the affected community.

We have met with NGO and CSOs on Letpadaung, but not with the locals, said U Than Htay, the chief ministers spokesperson.

Locals have demanded the NLD intervene as a parliamentary investigative committee spearheaded by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 2013 had concluded the mine could restart only if it met certain conditions, such as better transparency and an environmental impact plan. The protesters say those demands have not yet been fulfilled, and called on the former opposition lawmakers to make good on their own report.

Last month, the Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability, a civil society group, released the results of a study of copper mines in Sagaings Monywa district. Interviews with villagers revealed incomplete compensation packages, including no funds offered to families who had moved away after their land was confiscated, and unfair discrepancies in rates of pay for locals and Chinese nationals doing the same jobs.

MATA also accused the Chinese mining company Wanbao of failing to properly implement the recommendations of Daw Aung San Suu Kyis committee.





All these matters are the responsibility of the Union government in Nay Pyi Taw, local officials insist.

The regional authority can give permission only for very minor extractions like the salt business, or firewood, U Than Htay, the spokesperson said, adding that some mining companies in the region extended their operations without notice.

We found three illegal gold mining firms in the Zin forest reserve in Kanbalu township. Two of them are small companies. We forced them to stop and ordered them to comply with legal procedures, or face black-listing. But in the case of big companies, we inform the Union government, he said, adding that Chief Minister U Myint Naing had said that fighting for environmental conservation is akin to a lost battle.

But we never give up. We check for unofficial mining, and if we find it we close works and seize machinery, he said.

Daw Amar Cho, a resident of Tone village and protest leader who has expressed a willingness to go to jail for the cause, criticised the chief ministers negative attitude toward fighting the mine.

It is never a loss. If the company can be made to follow and stick to regulations, it will be a win for all, she said.
These are strange times in Myanmar and it is rather difficult to explain why.





The country is at a glorious moment in its history. After more than half a century of largely despotic rule, there is an elected government that is supported by a massive majority of the people.

At the helm of that government is a leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is genuinely loved and respected not only by the people of Myanmar but also by most of the world.

International organisations and companies are flocking here to establish new ties or restore lapsed ones, as they invest in modern infrastructure, open offices, and build factories and hotels. Yet there persists that strange and perplexing mood that, if not exactly pessimistic, is imbued with a sense of trepidation and almost, one might say, an expectation of disappointment.

Why is that? And why are so many people complaining that the political transition is not going as well as theyd hoped? They grumble in vague generalities about a lack of direction, a lack of capacity and administrative competence, a sense that the overture is too long and that its time for the real show to begin.

Their grumbling is annoying and dangerous, but perhaps they can be excused because they have been disappointed so often in the past, most notably in 1948, 1960 and 1990.

Perhaps another reason, aside from their understandable but wildly over-optimistic expectations, is that the real message, the clarion call of the reformations success, has not been getting out.





It would not be the first time. Two years ago, despite evidence to the contrary, there was a barrage of articles in the international media bemoaning the demise of the reform process.

Veteran correspondents and their analytically challenged sycophants claimed that the much-lauded political and economic opening up of then-president U Thein Seins administration had come to a grinding halt.

There were dramatic headlines about backtracking and reforms being stalled, if not reversed.

Even dafter was the view that U Thein Sein had changed his mind and would seek re-election in order to maintain the militarys grip on power.

Another doddery analyst said there was a 75 percent chance the military would prevent last Novembers election being held. The whole reform process and transition to democracy was called a fairy tale.

Well, here we are and the griping naysayers got it wrong. The historic elections went ahead and allowed the people of Myanmar to freely choose their government and new leader.

As the United States assistant secretary of state Danny Russel said, The five years of opening and reform set the stage for Myanmar to emerge from five decades of repression and military rule, and for its citizens to build unity, dignity, opportunity and prosperity.

Yet do you hear emissions of contrition from those who wrongly rabbitted on about backpedalling and the demise of the reform process?

You do not. What you hear is their continued whingeing about how Daw Aung San Suu Kyis new team is languishing and not delivering what it promised.

Give me a break.

These people need reminding that we are still only half-a-dozen years into one of historys most profound political and economic reformations, and that it is happening peaceably in the volatile cauldron of Southeast Asia.

That said, of course, we should not be Pollyannas, for there are certainly matters that disturb us and that could have been handled better by the new government.

One, in particular, comes to mind and it is a paramount issue that falls within Daw Aung San Suu Kyis portfolio as foreign minister  namely, relations with the United States.

It will always be difficult to manage, but in doing so, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi might recall what her forebear, the late U Win Aung, said in 1998 when told that the World Bank had offered Myanmar US$1 billion to open up and reform. U Win Aung, who was foreign minister at the time, said, We welcome any assistance that is offered with sincerity. But giving a banana to the monkey and then asking it to dance is not the way. We are not monkeys. We are principled people.

It behooves Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to keep this in mind in her dealings with the US  and for that matter with China and other major powers  and not to accept bananas in return for dancing to their tune.

In a tepid way, the US tried this tactic on May 17, when, despite maintaining certain economic sanctions, it relaxed others and took several enterprises off the black list.

That was a kind of half-banana of sorts, and while welcome, it would have been far better if it had been a whole one and that the long-outdated and quite unfair sanctions had been removed entirely. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi claimed, not altogether convincingly, that the remaining US sanctions were not a big problem, adding, We have the strength and the means to overcome any obstacles that may be imposed at this time.

Well, yes, but it does not excuse the way the US chose to continue to impose obstacles on Myanmars otherwise bravura transition to democracy.

Bizarrely, at the same time, Washington removed all sanctions on arms sales to Vietnam, a country ruled by an authoritarian communist regime that refuses to consider any peaceful evolution to democracy.

The contrast is staggering, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi should have openly stated that Washingtons decision was unacceptable and would not help counter the naysayers and assure folks that the transition to democracy was going well.

Please remember that you are not a monkey, but the leader of a principled people, and that even when friends toss you half a banana, you are not going to dance to their tune.
16.06.2016 LISTEN

Upon returning to Ghana from her travels, Gospel songstress Niiella performed 'How He Loves' by David Crowder.

Prior to this, Niiella left Ghana to the states, Virginia to be specific, as a music director for International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) Fulfillment Temple for a period of three months. After which she touched down in England for (13) thirteen days to host two concerts at her mother church (EICC London) where it all started. She says

"it was a great experience to be back worshiping with all the people I started my journey with, I've known some of them for over twenty years, and it was an amazing time in Gods presence".

Once she arrived in Ghana she hosted another concert at a her church's sister branch (EICC Ghana) in Sakumono and then right after left to Tesano Baptist Church on Sunday, 12th June to support a dear friend Pastor Negar at her live recording dubbed Grace.

Niiella mounted the stage clad in pink and black looking innocent as she does. I for one quite like the casual look she had going on with the sneakers instead of the usual heels she's known for wearing. Once she started singing the crowd was already stirred up. By the time she had gotten to the second verse screams and applauds rang out. The growth was evident and the audience could see so. The ten minutes she spent on stage were truly a joy to behold!

Watch video below


Grandfather of hiplife and the latest addition of VIP, Reggie Rockstone has debunked allegations that there is confusion in the camp of VVIP in terms of their stage act.

Earlier this week, Flex newspaper reported that there is confusion in the camp of VVIP in their stage act.

According to the story, when the group is on stage, Reggie Rockstone does not contribute in performing songs recorded by Zeal and Prodigal and when Rockstone is performing, the other two do not also contribute to performing Reggies songs. This according to the writer suggests confusion in the camp.

Speaking on AM Pluzz, Reggie Rockstone in a telephone conversation denied the allegation, stating that the story was written just to sell the paper.

He went on to describe the story as needless and sensational. According to the hiplife icon, whatever they do on stage is what they planned to do.

Reggie Rockstone affirmed that the group is still intact and strong. There is no confusion whatsoever in the camp of VVIP.
Addis Ababa (AFP) - More than 400 people have been killed in Ethiopia since November in a crackdown on anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch said Thursday, but the government immediately dismissed the claims.

"Tens of thousands" more were also arrested by security forces in "widespread protests in the Oromia region since November 2015," the US-based HRW said.

The protests were sparked by plans to expand the capital into outlying farmland.

The report, titled "Such a Brutal Crackdown", was based on over 125 interviews with protestors and those caught up in the violence.

It spoke of the "government's use of excessive and unnecessary lethal force and mass arrests, mistreatment in detention, and restrictions on access to information to quash the protest movement."

The demonstrations were triggered by a government plan to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa into Oromia. The project was dropped on January 12 but protests continued for weeks.

But government spokesman Getachew Reda dismissed the report, saying that HRW, "is very generous with numbers when it comes to Ethiopia" and attributed any violence on the part of security forces to "bad apples".

"The government feels regret that people are killed," he said.

- 'Weights tied to testicles' -

Reda said the Human Rights Council of Ethiopia, a non-governmental organisation, had said 103 people died.

"Why couldn't they come up with others' names? Because those names don't exist," Reda said.

HRW however said it along with other organisations had "identified more than 300 of those killed by name and, in some cases, with photos", and it was not a case of isolated pockets of violence.

Some of those arrested and later released told HRW they were "tortured or mistreated" inside prison, with several women alleging they were raped.

"Some said they were hung by their ankles and beaten; others described having electric shocks applied to their feet, or weights tied to their testicles," HRW said.

With at least 27 million people, Oromia is the most populous of the country's federal states and has its own language, Oromo, distinct from Ethiopia's official Amharic language.

"Ethiopian security forces have fired on and killed hundreds of students, farmers, and other peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for human life," HRW's deputy Africa chief Leslie Lefkow said.

"The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation, and hold security force members accountable for abuses."
The mineral and petroleum industry of Africa is one of the largest in the West Africa which is gradually becoming the hub of minning and petroleum industry in Africa. Minerals,oil and gas exploration and subsequent exploitation remain key to the development of most countries in West Africa. With current trend and prices,retrenchment and labour agitation coupled with ever more stringent regulations,the minning and petroleum industry face significant challenges.

The past five years has seen incresaed activity in exploration and expoloitation in countries which otherwise not known for minerals and hydrocarbons resources throughout West Africa. This has increased the number of geologist,mining engineers,petroleum engineers and othrr professionals.

It is on this background that the first edition of the West African Institute of Minning Metallurgy and petroleum(WIAMM) industry annual conference has been held in Accra. The conference also witness the official launch of the West Afria Institute of Metallurgy and petroleum and brought together the sub-regional government dignitries in the sector including the government of Ghana.

The theme for the conference was "setting the standards for the future- The roe of the Natural Resource professionals". The various participants that attended the workshop discussed the various strategies designed to drive the growth of the minning nd petroleum industry in West Africa.

Giving the welcome address to kick start the workshop, the president and the executive secretary of WIAMM Lawrence Omari-Mensah said WIAMM is focused on providing continious professional developmnent, standard code of practice and knowledge transfer for professionals in the minning and petroleum industry and ensuring that members perform their duties to the highest standards that are mutually beneficial to the industry and society.

He said,as professionals WIAMM will provide the opportunity to share experience through such forums and seminars. The chief executive officer of the mineral commission Dr Tony Aubyn who acted as chairman at the workshop said in his address that politicians should be bold and condemn the act of galamsey in Ghana and that there is the need to have an effective talent hunt. He said the minning age is an effective age for industrial revolution.

The conference adopted a WIAMM education fund to be access by all members.
On the occasion of the sixty-seventh anniversary of the founding of the original, great Convention People's Party (CPP), I would like to share with you some thoughts on the founder, the African of the millennium, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Osagyefo is a global asset. Like America's Lincoln, it is time for us Ghanaians to focus on the achievements of this supremely global leader. The CPP is the Ghanaian instrument of destiny and is relit under the command of our dynamic Chairman Professor Edmund Delle and the blessing of our Council of Elders under Mr. Felix Amoah.

We recently made a quiet pilgrimage to some energy centres of CPP spirit and reaffirmed our commitment to the struggle for greater national economic emancipation and opportunity for our citizens. We went to Saltpond, the birthplace of the CPP and Sekondi, the town that hosted Nkrumah on the first night of his return to Ghana to assume the position of full time Secretary of the UGCC. Sekondi is also the birthplace of trade unionism in Ghana and a disproportionately important place in our heroic struggle for independence.

I am, of course, an Nkrumaist and, as I said at the Mausoleum on April 27th 2016, to mark the anniversary of his death, the current CPP will not rest till we wrestle a new independence for Ghana.

In Saltpond, we visited Canaan Lodge, venue of the famous April 1947 conclave of Ghanaian nationalists and where the UGCC was formed. Several landmark Working Committee meetings of the UGCC were held there. Canaan Lodge is also very important in CPP history. It was often at Canaan Lodge that our distinctive radical nationalism was separated from the pedestrian politics of the others. Our New Covenant, Apam Fofor) was blessed in Canaan Lodge.

We also visited the historical palm tree that Kwame Nkrumah planted on the founding of the CPP. The tree is still standing, well marked in CPP colours. Saltpond is a proud town. In our forthcoming interactive people's manifesto we shall address the deliberate sustenance of our smaller towns, which are now being ignored to death under the unbridled, wrong liberalism of the NDC/NPP duopoly. The renewed CPP is bringing back willed development of the Ghanaian people. Our will should prevail. We will continue to fight all colonialisms. We also visited the statue memorial Saltpond built for itself in 2008 to mark the seminal role she played in the founding of modern Ghana. We celebrate the founder and his helpers. 

I am, of course, an Nkrumaist. My belief in the nationalist agenda of our dear Ghana and real Pan Africanism is abolutely non-negotiable and unshakeable.

In Sekondi I was happy to pay homage to the memory of the great CPP hero Alfred Pobee-Biney, 14 January 1914  29 January 1968. His career in politics and the labour movement assures us that with fortitude politics becomes not just the art of the possible but also the art of making the seeming impossible possible. Paraphrasing Mandela, they say it is impossible till it is done. The CPP, the original Showboys of Ghana, go do, apologies to Sekondi Eleven Wise and Sekondi Hasaacas.

We were received in Essikado (British Sekondi) by the Omanhen, Nana Kobina Nketsia V. We were in Essikado to most especially salute the memory of Nkrumah's man Nana Kobina Nketsia IV, the only paramount chief imprisoned by the British colonialists in the struggle for independence. As we all know, he was also Nkrumah's leading advisor on the anthropology of our culture. We are grateful to Nana Kobina Nketsia V for his very warm welcome including, especially, his permission to warm his palace with our comradely CPP songs.

In Saltpond and Sekondi we were most impressed by the fervour of the young in CPP. This has been so everywhere we go. CPP is the party of youth opportunity. Today we offer total support for open opportunities for the young. Our interactive people's manifesto details a real programme for youth engagement in national processes TODAY. In the CPP we do not see the young as leaders of tomorrow. Ghana is a very young country. You, the youth, are our leaders, of TODAY, not of tomorrow.

Osagyefo, ye re fre fre wo. There is a new CPP. There is a New Covenant, Apam Fofor). We know you not to be plastic. We know you to be organically intellectual. We know you to be flexible in thought and firm in action. We are pushing your agenda for the twenty first century. This new progressism reflects the dynamism of your Consciencism and its path-making triple heritage in political thought and action. We solemnly pledge to hold the unquenchable torch you lit aloft. It is a torch of hope and a torch of greater economic justice. Your unfinished work shall be continued and the economic kingdom shall indeed come. We look neither East nor West. WE LOOK FORWARD. Ghana will renew the star of blackness in Walewale, in Bukom, in Dzelukope, in Bekwai, in Akyem Tafo, in Eikwe, in Nkroful, in Ghana, in Africa, in the world. This is a new, confident Blackness.

Your son,

Ivor Kobina Greenstreet.



Story by Ghana|Myjoyonline.com
16.06.2016 LISTEN

Mohammed Tahir, is a Ghanaian and a native of Anyinam , currently living abroad .I am using this medium to bring to fore the circumstances behind his fleeing from Ghana into obscurity and to also appeal to the government of that foreign country where he currently resides not to return him [ Tahir Mohammed] to Ghana.

Mohammed Tahir, who is a first child of my late friend, left Ghana under bizarre circumstances in 2008 when his life came under serious threat by the traditional council of the Anyinam Traditional Council of the Eastern Region of Ghana.

He flee Ghana into unknown location because his people wanted to kill him for his refusal to accept a position given to him as the next Obrafuor of his traditional area. The chiefs and people of the Anyinam area viewed his refusal of the position as disrespectful to their tradition.

Another reason why his life was been sought after was in order not for him[ Mohammed Tahir] to exposed the secret of his people to the outside world because they were of the view that since he had declined to accept that position, he might exposed their outmoded wicked tradition to outsiders.

Mohammed Tahirs late father was chosen to be the next Obrafuor in 2005 after the death of the previous one. Even though their father accepted the offer, he couldnt disclosed it to his children because of the childrens religious beliefs which is Islam.

The role of the Obrafuor literally translated as the  Executioner is to behead people during the death of a chief or a king. The beheaded people are to be buried together with a dead chief

In the history of the Anyinam Tradition, whenever a chief dies, he is supposed to be buried with the chopped heads of other persons believed to be his servants in the other world.

The previous Obrafuor[Executioner] who died in 2002 has no children hence the reason for the chiefs and people to select a new Obrafuor. After some ancestral consultation, my father was chosen as the new executioner for the Anyinam traditional area in 2005.

The father couldnt informed his children of the new position given him even though he had discussed it with his wife until his sudden demise in a car accident in 2005. The reason been that the children are practicing Muslims whose religion goes contrary to the role of the executioner and the practices of the Anyinam people .

After the death of Tahir Mohammeds father in 2005, the Chiefs informed him[Tahir] of the position given to their father before his death and their collective agreement for Tahir to succeed his late father since he is the first child of the father.

Tahir declined to accept that position on two grounds. One , it is against the practice of Islam his religion and two, he himself as a person doesnt believe in the practices of burying a chief with chopped heads of others in the name of serving the late chief in the ancestral world.

Against this background, the chief and his cabinet took offence against Tahir for declining the new Obrafuor[Executioner] position and feared that he [Tahir] will exposed their evil deeds to the outside world and therefore ordered for his arrest and subsequent execution.

Mohammed Tahir, through my help managed to flee the Anyinam area into hiding into unknown location until recently when he called me that he is in abroad.

Just this year 2016, in desperation to appease their gods, the younger brother of Mohammed by name Rashad was captured and appointed as the new Obrafuor since his brother was no way to be found and it has also been a longer period since the Anyinam enclave had an Obrafuor pending the approval of their ancestors.

Rashad was appointed as the new Obrafuor against his will as he was also a Muslim like his elder brother and therefore declined to accept that position

Unfortunately for the chiefs and leaders, Rashads appointment was disapproved by the ancestors based on the reason that his elder brother Tahir is still alive and that it is only Tahir who can occupy that position. Rashad , was subsequently murdered in the evil forest of the Anyinam enclave as a result and his decomposed body was found by a farmer who informed the family later.

I am bringing this story out now for the international community and human rights activists to intervene in saving the life of my friend Tahir who is now in overseas. I am also pleading to remain anonymous because should they [ the Anyinam Traditional Council] get to know I am the one who helped Tahir to escape and also brought this story out, my life would be in great danger.

I decided to use the power of the press to bring this story out because I have hope in the media and since the police have failed to intervene in this situation despite several reports made to them. The police claim that they do not meddle in traditional affairs.

We have petitioned the Eastern Regional Police Command, the Regional Coordination Council[RCC], the Regional Security Council[REGSEC] and other influential bodies within Ghana to intervene in saving the situation but all to no avail, hence the reason for using the media.

We are further calling on other religious bodies, Civil Society Organizations[CSOs], youthful groups and all well meaning Ghanaians from all walks of life who truly understand the principles of human rights and justice to intervene and help us solve this situation

The writer is a native of Anyinam in the Eastern Region of Ghana and a close friend to the parents of Tahir Mohammed
Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman, Bharti Enterprises has been elected as the Chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which is amongst the worlds oldest and most respected global business organisations. He is the third Indian business leader to hold this prestigious position in ICCs near -100 year history.

Sunil Bharti Mittal takes over from Terry McGraw, Chairman Emeritus of S&P Global, who will subsequently become ICCs Honorary Chairman. The ICC World Council elected the new leaders in a voting held today in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

On being elected, Sunil Bharti Mittal, said, I am honoured at being given the opportunity to lead this prestigious global institution and look forward to working with our members to ensure that we continue to play a constructive role as the voice of global business in formulation of economic and trade policies to support inclusive growth. The global economy is facing unprecedented headwinds to growth and there is an urgent need to restore trade and investment as a driver of growth and jobs, particularly in the developing world and this will be a central focus of my tenure.

Founded in 1919, ICC is the worlds largest business organization which represents private-sector views to national governments and intergovernmental bodies around the world. It advocates for free trade and the market economy, working through a network of national committees and direct members in over 130 countries. ICC was awarded the highest level consultative status with the United Nations (UN) in 1946, and since then has represented the private sector by engaging in a broad range of activities with the UN and its specialized agencies.

Sunil Bharti Mittal serves on many international bodies and think-tanks. He is currently the Chair of the World Economic Forums (WEF) Telecommunications Steering Committee, Member: International Business Council-WEF, GSMA Board, Telecom Board of International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Commissioner of the Broadband Commission, International Advisory Panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Prime Minister of Singapores Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council. He is a Trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and on the Board of Qatar Foundation Endowment.

He is closely associated with spearheading the Indian industrys global trade, collaboration and policy- he has served on the Prime Minister of Indias Council on Trade & Industry. He is also a member of the India-US, India-UK and India-Japan CEO Forums. He is Co-Chair of the India-Africa Business Council and India-Sri Lanka CEO Forum. He was the President of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the premier industry body in India in 2007-08.

Sunil Bharti Mittal is a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, one of Indias highest civilian honors, awarded to individuals for demonstrating distinguished services of high order. He has also been awarded Harvard Business Schools Alumni Achievement Honor  the utmost honor accorded by the institute to its alumni. He is the recipient of GSMAs prestigious Chairman award, besides being decorated with numerous industry honors. Sunil has been conferred Honorary Doctorates by several leading universities in India and UK.

About the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) is the worlds largest business organization with a network of over 6.5 million members in more than 130 countries. We work to promote international trade, responsible business conduct and a global approach to regulation through a unique mix of advocacy and standard setting activitiestogether with market-leading dispute resolution services. Our members include many of the worlds largest companies, SMEs, business associations and local chambers of commerce. www.iccwbo.org

About Bharti Airtel

Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 3 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company's product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed DSL broadband, IPTV, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had over 353 million customers across its operations at the end of January 2016. To know more please visit, www.airtel.com

About Airtel in Africa

Airtel is driven by the vision of providing affordable and innovative mobile services to all. Airtel has 17 operations in Africa: Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Airtel International is a Bharti Airtel company. For more information, please visit www.airtel.com , or like the Airtel Ghana Facebook page via www.facebook.com/airtelgh or follow us on Twitter via the handle @airtelghana.
NPP Communications Director, Nana Akomea, says President John Mahama disappointed Ghanaians by accepting a gift from a contractor.

He said the president put himself in an indefensible position when he accepted a Ford Expedition gift from Burkinabe contractor, Djibril Kanazoe.

Government has explained that the vehicle is not being used personally by the president.

The said vehiclewas placed in the vehicle pool at the Presidency as per established convention, said Communications Minister, Dr. Edward Omane Boamah in a statement.

But Nana Akomea argued the explanation is untenable.

How can anybody defend this? Upon all the investments that the people of Ghana make in the vice-president and the president  the fleet of V8 high-performance vehicles that we give to the presidency, the fleet of high-performance saloon [vehicles], the aircrafts, the helicopters, the powerful motorbikes  why will our president put himself in this kind of position? It is just horrible, Nana Akomea said.

He claimed the presidents conduct is in clear breach of his own Code of Conduct for Ministers and Public Servants launched in 2013.

It is such a terrible embarrassment to the whole country, he asserted.

Nana Akomea said attempts to draw parallels between President Mahamas controversial gift and a vehicle given to President John Kufuors government in 2002 by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi are tenuous.

He said diplomatic gifts were very normal and as a minister, whenever he was travelling, he carried boxes of chocolates, Ghanaian dresses amongst other which he gave to his hosts.

The state of Libya made a donation to the state of Ghana in 2002; the presentation was made at the Castle which was then the Office of President; it was made in the full glare of the media; the keys of the car were given the Chief of Staff and everybody knew about it, he told Joy FM's Super Morning Show Thursday.

The NPP Communications Director said it was untenable for anybody to seek to use that gift to justify President Mahamas wrongful acceptance of a gift from a contractor.

It is cheap, it an insult to Ghanaians to even try this kind of trick, he said.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com
File Photo

16.06.2016 LISTEN

Ghana would on June 17, this year, join the global community to mark the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought under the theme, Inclusive Cooperation for Achieving Land Degradation Neutrality. The Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), Mahama Ayariga, is expected to address the function to be held at Bongo District in the Upper East Region.

The day was set aside by the United Nations General Assembly in 1994 to mark this important global event in every calendar year that falls on June 17.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) , established by the United Nations General Assembly, is the sole legal binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. Parties to the Convention which include African countries work together to maintain and restore land and soil productivity, and to mitigate the effects of drought in dry lands.

The objectives of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought" is to promote public awareness of the issue, and the implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in those countries experiencing serious drought and desertification, particularly in Africa of which Ghana is included.

Ghana signed and ratified the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in 1996 to show commitment to combat desertification and mitigate the effects of drought. In Ghana the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is playing a leading role in this direction.

The question one may ask is that what is Desertification? Desertification is a phenomenon that ranks among the greatest environmental challenges of our time. Although desertification can include the encroachment of sand dunes on land, it does not refer solely to the advance of deserts. Rather, it is the persistent degradation of dry land ecosystems by human activities including unsustainable farming practices; Bush burning, indiscriminate felling of tree for charcoal burning, illegal chainsaw operators, mining, overgrazing and clear-cutting of land and by climate change.

The significance of marking the day cannot be overemphasized. Desertification, land degradation and drought and climate change are interconnected. As we marked the day , it is very important to note that Desertification, land degradation and drought and climate change remains a major challenge for Ghana to address .The Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions are the most affected when it comes to the phenomenon. Human induced activities such as the ritual annual bush burning, overgrazing, indiscriminate felling of trees for charcoal burning and sand winning are some of the causes of land degradation and desertification in these Regions .

As a result of land degradation and climate change, the severity and frequency of drought have been increasing along with floods and extreme temperatures. Research shows that this had led to more than 50 per cent of agriculture land becoming severely degraded , leading to the reduction of agricultural productivity as well as the decline in biodiversity. There is no doubt that the spate of the chronic malnourishment of children and pregnant women in the three Northern Regions could be attributed to the land degradation and desertification that often lead to the lower productivity of agriculture..

In other words, it is very pertinent to note that without long term solution, desertification and land degradation would affect food production as well as lead to increase migration and threaten the stability of many nations and regions. The livelihood and well-being of hundreds of millions of people would also be at stake. That is why the decision by World leaders to make land degradation neutrality as one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals is very welcoming. This implies rehabilitating at least twelve million hectares of degraded land globally in every year.

What is more worrisome is the recent upsurge of illegal chain operators in the three Northern Regions who cut down trees indiscriminately, particularly rosewoods for export to China , where it is in high demand and also the indiscriminate cutting down of economic trees such as the Shea tree for charcoal production. Nomadic activities of Fulani herds who enter the country with their cattle is another major cause of desertification as they often overgraze and step the land with their hooves

To help reverse the trend of desertification in the three regions, the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation through the Environmental Protection Agency is implementing the Ghana Environmental Management Project( GEMP ) and the Sustainable Land and Water Management Project( SLWMP) in the three Northern Regions with support from the Global Environment Facility and World Bank which has so far provided vegetation cover on some significant portion of degraded lands across the three Northern Regions.

Speaking to this Writer in Bolgatanga , the National Focal Person in Ghana for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification , who is also the Upper East Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency , Mr Asher Nkegbe, stated that through the Ghana Environmental Management Project and Sustainable Land and Water Management Project , his outfit had empowered many communities in the region to create buffer zone, zai farming, stone bonding , composing, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), establishment of woodlots among others which are key to addressing the issue of land degradation and desertification as well as climate change.

Indiscriminate felling of trees for charcoal burning which is characterized by the Northern Regions which is major cause of desertification problem, the National Focal Person in Ghana for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification , noted, had also been reduced significantly as result of the formation of women groups into Village Saving Loan Association (VSLA) who used to engage in charcoal production activities

The implementation of the greening Ghana Project, an initiative introduced by the MESTI, aimed at increasing the vegetative cover and restoring degraded areas of the region as well as serve as Ghanas contribution towards the reduction of global warming and climate change conditions is also making progress.

The projects in 2015, handed over 16,899 assorted tree seedlings to the Regional Directorate of Ghana Education Service for distribution to 166 selected schools in the Region. A visit to some of the project sites by this Writer, revealed that the tree seedlings which include grafted mangoes, moringa, mahogany, cashew, cassia, Albysia and teak have greater survival rate.

Mr Nkegbe, who disclosed that this year the Greening Ghana Project would be scaled up, said the project would complement the existing landscape approach adopted by the EPA under the GEMP and SLWM Project.

Mr Nkegbe noted that the effective practice of sustainable land and water management were strong tools for achieving some of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly poverty eradication , food and water security, biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation and adaption.

Outlining some of the activities earmarked for the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, Mr Nkegbe , mentioned that about 20,000 people including the staff of the Regional Coordinating Council (RCC) , the District Assemblies, the Regional Environmental Management Committee, Traditional and Religious leaders, local NGOs, opinion leaders and the media would be engaged to take actions to restore and rehabilitate degraded land with the ultimate aim of contributing towards achieving the overall goal of sustainable development.

He stated that the Environmental Protection Agency together with the Ministry of Food and Agricultural (MOFA) and other stakeholders would introduce various Sustainable Land and Water Management(SLWM) interventions in degraded communities in the region particularly Kunkua , a community within the catchment area of the Vea Irrigation Dam to restore 2000ha of degraded lands.

Communities, he noted, would also be empowered and encouraged to undertake enrichment planting of four thousand seedlings including vetiver grasses within the buffer zones of the Vea Irrigation Dam to restore the degraded areas within the riparian vegetation of the Vea Irrigation dam and conserve water in the Vea dam for domestic use in the Bolgatanga Municipality and Bongo District.

He added that the EPA would also sign up to the restoration of forty (40) ha degraded farm lands at Zabogu, Kuka-yakin and Kpalwega in the Bawku Municipality through sustainable land and water management techniques, organise activities including radio discussions on environment, quiz competition, sustainable land and water management practices such as: zai, reinforcement of contour bunds with stones and vetiver grass, composting, tree planting, and creation of protected areas. A durbar will also be organised to climax the Days celebration.

It is also heart warning to note that Ghana has joined the global community to implement Land Degradation Neutrality and the Great Green War which are all aimed at halting land degradation desertification and Climate Change in the three regions .

Whilst commending the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation and the Environmental Protection Agency for initiating interventions to curb land degradation and desertification, what is very important to note is the sustainability of the implementation of the Sustainable Land and Water Management Project. To help ensure the sustainability of the of the implementation of the Sustainable Land and Water Management Project to help curb desertification and drought , there is the urgent need for all stakeholders including the traditional and religious leaders, the District Assemblies, Non-Governmental Organizations to join forces with the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation and the Environmental Protection Agency to fight desertification, land degradation and climate change. The Assemblies, Paramount chiefs must be seen adopting and initiating bylaws to punish offenders who engage in bush burning and cutting down of tree indiscriminately for charcoal production, illegal chain operators and overgrazing.

Additionally , there is also the urgent need for the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation and the Environmental Protection Agency to speed up the process of the revising and formulating the National Action Plan (NAP) it is designing to align with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification 10-year strategic plan, to enable Ghana get more external support to combat desertification in the country.

As we mark this years World day to combat Desertification and Drought, let us be reminded that a healthy and productive land is the key resource for all life on earth The Paramount Chief of the Bongo Traditional area in the Upper East Region, Naba Baba Salifu Aleemyaarum is already implementing the green Bongo initiative which is aimed at curbing land degradation and desertification in the area. This must be emulated by all traditional rulers.

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16.06.2016 LISTEN

Common promises politicians utters during election campaigns year after year are called monoelectoral promises.

Politician in Ghana would usually not promise anything feasible. Even if they are achievable they would never be executed. Their verbal manifestos are not innovative. Year after year, they promise the same promises they could not fulfill.

The BASTIAT INSTITUTE OF LIBERTY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP (BILE  Ghana) a non  profit and research and Policy Think Tank based in Tema has realized that, politicians are repetitive on one thing. Ghanaian politician do not answer HOW? and WHY? Questions, but answers WHAT?

This time let them answer how would you do it? Why are you doing this and a not that?

The president of BILE - Ghana, Mr. Peter Bismark Kwofie has said that political manifestos ought to be innovative; solving economic, security, social and technological issues and not to create one problem after solving another. To the youths, do not sell your power (vote) for 50gh and a mobile phone for a short term, for someone to come into power and create problems in the long term. Democratic voting is not about bidding.

According to the president of BILE  GH, all should vote massively for the best candidates who will set good policies and feasible target policies for a brighter future for our dear country  Ghana. Remember that, it is easier said than done.

The institute has made provision of 100 most common campaign promises for 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections. These promises would run through all campaign messages. All these political promises have been used over and over in all the previous elections and we shall hear them again and again.

Politicians, who would think outside the box and would not state any of our 100 promises, would have a thumb up.

However, those that narrate, compare achievement with regards to political fallacies and state any or our common political messages from town to town then we need to ask, him the HOW and WHY questions.

100 MOST COMMON POLITICAL CAMPAIGN PROMISES FOR 2016 ELECTIONS

Road construction and expansions Removal of schools under tress Reduction of transport fares Putting money in your pocket Reduction of utility tariffs (water and electricity) Increment of basic school enrollment Free basic education Free senior high school (FSHS) Dumsor will END Reinstating of nursing and teacher trainees allowances. Free sandals (FS) Free school uniforms (FSU) Free textbook and chalk (FTC) Free laptops (FL) Free exercise books (FEB) Road expansion (one lane to four lanes) Increasing basic school feeding grants Salary increment for doctors Salary increment for teachers Salary increment for nurses Building of community libraries Building of school libraries Building of classrooms and dormitories Creating of employments for the youth Free health care (FHC) Expanding the basic school feeding programs Provision of portable water Provision of ambulances Provision of hospitals beds Provision of street lights Provision of fishing nets Prevention of ethnic conflict Provision of fish storage facilities (cold stores) Provision of trotro stations Construction of markets Constructs of district hospitals Stop the pilfering of public fund Prevention of floods (how?) Free maternal health care (FMHC) Construction of bore-holes Construction of computer laboratories Construction of science laboratories Building of manufacturing factories Increment of security service personnel intake Tree planting Ghana becoming the most clean country Investigations into deaths of chiefs and other bigwigs Reduction on fuel drastically (crude oil) Tax reduction on raw materials Improving poultry production Building public toilet facilities Continuation / construction of 200 community senior high schools Construction of eastern corridor roads Prevention of child trafficking Community policing Provision of farming fertilizers Premising of a number of cement bags Improving LEAP fund Building university in all the 10 regions Fighting corruption by bringing culprits to books Improving farm mechanization Provision of free cocoa seedlings Construction of fly over-heads Expansion of Tema motorway Easy access to bank loans Rural electrification projects Construction of CHIP compounds Improving export of goods Prevention of inflation Construction of soccer stadia Promises of football jerseys Community football parks Promising of job placements Construction of gutters Poverty reduction Providing good insurance policies for fire victims Taking black stars to the world cup Quick response to flood victims Free mosquito nets Scholarships for brilliant but needy Reduction of duty charges on import goods Fighting drug trade Prevention of armed robbery Increment of teachers and nurses intake Paying school fees for 20 OR more for needy students Development and construction of industries in all the ten regions YES / YEA Training artisans to acquire skills Provision of school sitting desks Promoting technical and vocational education Affordable housing Increment of minimum wage Transforming life Supporting head potters (kayayei) Reduction of child mortality Reduction of road accidents Illegal mining Provision of bed mattresses and blankets No tribal discrimination Improving the living standard of inmates

The above monoelectoral promises would be modified, and used in different contexts yet means the same. Just like close your eyes and eyes close. Though one of the statements is wrong yet means the same action.

Politicians should be able to suggest good policies and how to turn the economy round for a good standard of living. We need innovative and modern ideas to rule the country. In a free and a prosperous economy, the citizens themselves can construct their own roads; build hospitals and schools without government assistance.
Management of Zenith Bank Ghana Limited led by their CEO and managing director, Henry Oroh paid a courtesy call on the Multimedia Group Limited, Tuesday.

The visit according to Mr Henry Oroh was to introduce its new management and to strengthen the ties between the two companies.

Mr Oroh acknowledged the contribution of Multimedia Group in projecting the right image of the bank and also expressed its companys commitment to the brand.

Zenith Bank Ghana Limited, a subsidiary of Zenith Bank PLC is noted for its distinguishing trait; i.e. its cutting edge ICT platform which sets it apart from competitors and its devotion to the development of systems and products to satisfy customer specifications.

Mr Oroh in an interview with JOY BUSINESS disclosed that they will be deploying more of their products and services through ICT to help grow the bank.

According to him, they believe this is one of the surest ways to connect with the unbanked as well as its customers and also emphasised that this approach will help improve service delivery to its customers.

Zenith Bank was incorporated in April 2005 under the Banking Act 2004 (Act 673) as a private limited company and commenced universal banking operation in September 2005.

Story by Ghana| Myjoyonline.com | Sarah Amelley Djosu
The controversial Ford Expedition gift offered President John Mahama by a Burkinabe contractor should be grounds for his impeachment, hopes Dr Richard Amoako Baah, a lecturer in political science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

The present was given to Mr Mahama by Mr Djibril Kanazoe, according to investigations done by Joy FMs Manasseh Azure Awuni. The Burkinabe was, in turn, given a series of contracts by the Government of Ghana, including a $650,000 deal to fence a tract of land around Ghanas mission in Burkina Faso, after he had parted with the SUV to the Ghanaian president.

But the government, in a press statement signed by Communications Minister Dr Edward Omane Boamah Wednesday June 15, denied any underhand dealings necessitating the gift, saying the car in question had been put at the disposal of the state, and not for the presidents use.

But the outspoken academic was not convinced with the official explanation.

It is not a good thing; its left me sad the whole day. I am sad because he is the leader, who preaches against corruption. But he himself has allowed himself to be corrupted because the explanations givendo not wash. We have laws in this country about gifts: GHS200 thats it. Once it is more than that, he should expect that it is not appropriate, that is conflict of interest, Dr Amoako Baah said on Accra100.5FM News in an interview with Nana Agyen Barima on Wednesday June 15.

And if I may ask, did the man bring him the car because he looked handsome or he was his boyfriend or what? Its because: You have helped me and I am happy and I am offering it to you. Because of that thing he has done, next time, the president has taken a motive, he will offer him another one. This guy has got several contracts.

Dr Amoako Baah had said the decision to employ sole-sourcing, rather than putting the contract to tender, awarding the contract to a foreigner when many local contractors had their ventures collapsing due to non-payment of debts owed them from executing contracts for government, as well as the cost of the fencing, raised questions.

$640,000 to build a wall? Why, was the wall a bunker or gold-plated or what? he asked.

He said the argument that Mr Mahama accepted the automobile gift on behalf of the state was even worse and created a perception that Ghanaians were stupid, because if after being awarded a contract and upon completion the person buys a car for the president, it is only a bait for more contracts.

To buttress his point about the immorality of accepting the car gift, Dr Amoako Baah alluded to a case in Australia involving former North South Wales (NSW) Prime Minister Barry OFarrell, who was forced to resign in April 2014, after a corruption inquiry had established that he had accepted a bottle of old wine worth $3,000 from a company, as gift, for his electoral victory in 2011.

Cant the government of Ghana buy its own car? Which car does President Mahama desire that he cannot buy? Even when he was vice president, was he not using a Land Cruiser? Is a Land Cruiser not costlier than a Ford Expedition? What is going on here? I hope they impeach him, I hope they do enough is enough. This is not acceptable.

He admitted, though, that Mr Mahamas impeachment was unlikely given that the presidents party, the NDC, had majority representation in the legislature. But a time comes when you have to do that to show it is not acceptable, so you put other people on notice, so that they do not do that too, he expressed. But now, if you, the president, have done this, how do you tell an appointee, who has done same that you have sacked him? That is why he cannot sack anyone [from his government].
File Photo

16.06.2016 LISTEN

One cannot mention a number of social problems or issues without mentioning one of the most delicate ones which is child labour. Child labour has been a problem or a canker, as people describe it, for a very long time now (probably from its inception till now). Child labour is a social problem because like other social issues or situations, child labour affects a particular group of people in the society (children) and at least some people in a community or society view the condition as being undesirable. There is been a lot of efforts put in place to tackle the situation but it seems the extent of the problem is pretty worse and significantly, progress to tackle the issue has been relatively slow and sometimes ineffective. Child labour has the tendency to affect a country or even the world at large in several ways or practically in all the various social institutions available. Putting the pieces together, one may ask, What is child labour?

According to International Labour Organisation (ILO), not all work done by children should be classified as child labour that is to be targeted for elimination. Childrens or adolescents participation in work that does not affect their health and personal development or interfere with their schooling, is generally regarded as being something positive. This includes activities such as helping their parents around the home, assisting in a family business or earning pocket money outside school hours and during school holidays. These kinds of activities contribute to childrens development and to the welfare of their families; they provide them with skills and experience, and help to prepare them to be productive members of society during their adult life. The term child labour is often defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development. It refers to work that:

is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children; and

interferes with their schooling by:

depriving them of the opportunity to attend school;

obliging them to leave school prematurely; or

Requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.

In its most extreme forms, child labour involves children being enslaved, separated from their families, exposed to serious hazards and illnesses and/or left to fend for themselves on the streets of large cities  often at a very early age. Whether or not particular forms of work can be called child labour depends on the childs age, the type and hours of work performed, the conditions under which it is performed and the objectives pursued by individual countries. Many people are blatantly not aware of or not sensitive to this conundrum, hence its practice.

In this article, I will like to create the awareness that the world needs to help fight the canker (child labour practice) in our societies. I will like to achieve this by examining a few causes and effects of child labour as well as the various solutions or interventions available to curb the situation.

Primarily, poverty is the cause of child labour. International Labour Organisation (ILO) suggests poverty is the greatest single cause behind child labour. For impoverished households, income from a child's work is usually crucial for his or her own survival or for that of the household. Income from working children, even if small, may be between 25 and 40% of the household income. Other scholars such as Harsch on African child labour, and Edmonds and Pavcnik on global child labour have reached the same conclusion. Lack of meaningful alternatives, such as affordable schools and quality education, according to ILO, is another major factor driving children to harmful labour. Children work because they have nothing better to do. Many communities, particularly rural areas where between 6070% of child labour is prevalent, do not possess adequate school facilities. Even when schools are sometimes available, they are too far away, difficult to reach, unaffordable or the quality of education is so poor that parents wonder if going to school is really worth it.

Another cause of child labour in the world is based on culture. In European history when child labour was common, as well as in contemporary child labour of modern world, certain cultural beliefs have rationalised child labour and thereby encouraged it. Some view that work is good for the character-building and skill development of children. In many cultures, particular where the informal economy and small household businesses thrive, the cultural tradition is that children follow in their parents' footsteps; child labour then is a means to learn and practice that trade from a very early age. Similarly, in many cultures the education of girls is less valued or girls are simply not expected to need formal schooling, and these girls pushed into child labour such as providing domestic services.

Biggeri and Mehrotra have studied the macroeconomic factors that encourage child labour. They focus their study on five Asian nations including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines. They suggest that child labour is a serious problem in all five, but it is not a new problem. Macroeconomic causes encouraged widespread child labour across the world, over most of human history. They suggest that the causes for child labour include both the demand and the supply side. While poverty and unavailability of good schools explain the child labour supply side, they suggest that the growth of low-paying informal economy rather than higher paying formal economy is amongst the causes of the demand side. Other scholars too suggest that inflexible labour market, size of informal economy, inability of industries to scale up and lack of modern manufacturing technologies are major macroeconomic factors affecting demand and acceptability of child labour.

Consequently, child labour affects the victim so badly. Some of the effects of child labour include:

Physical injuries and mutilations are caused by badly maintained machinery on farms and in factories, machete accidents in plantations, and any number of hazards encountered in industries such as mining, ceramics and fireworks manufacture

Pesticide poisoning is one of the biggest killers of child labourers. In Sri Lanka, pesticides kill more children than diphtheria, malaria, polio and tetanus combined. The global death toll each year from pesticides is supposed to be approximately 40'000

Long-term health problems, such as respiratory disease, asbestosis and a variety of cancers, are common in countries where children are forced to work with dangerous chemicals

Exhaustion and malnutrition are a result of underdeveloped children performing heavy manual labour, working long hours in unbearable conditions and not earning enough to feed themselves adequately

Child labour in my opinion can be minimized or controlled if not eradicated. As I stated early on, people practice child labour largely because of ignorance, poverty and lack of sensitization. On our way forward I suggest that more efforts should be put in place to communicate the issue to the general public, as well as educate the people on the social situation including the causes and effects. The people must be encouraged to act the right way to control the situation. Also, the people must be involved or engaged in finding solutions to the problem. Secondly, the laws on child protection must be enforced. By this, the situation can be minimized significantly. Social services can also be of help by helping families to survive crises (like poverty), rather than forcing their children into child labour to survive these crises.

To conclude, I will like to say that child labour is not a good thing. Based on the information or discussions above we can determine how disastrous child labour can be to a childs future or even to the world in a bigger picture. I will urge everyone to avoid the practice and not just avoid but also fight it till it becomes a thing of the past.

REFERENCES
The Executive Director of FARA, Dr Yemi Akinbamijo has called for a change in the way Africa does business in agriculture to maximize the benefits of the industry to the continent and its people.

We have to change the way we do business. Agriculture is beyond the farm gate and selling the raw produce which constitutes only 10% of business in agriculture. The profit in agriculture is in the value chain, Dr Akinbamijo said.

In an interview with journalists on the sidelines of the 7TH African Agricultural Science Week and the FARA General Assembly in Kigali Rwanda, Dr Akinbamijo said solving African food security challenges is not just the question of technologies but a combination of factors including biological, social, infrastructure and markets.

African countries must find a common ground where they can partner each other and ensure that the political principals required to ensure food security on the continent are not compromised to weaken efforts to achieve goals set.

Dr. Akinbamijo indicated that FARA remains committed to our unique role to galvanize all from Cairo to Cape Town, bringing all key players together as we are doing at the 7th African Agricultural Science Week to set ourselves a challenge and agree on goals over the next three years and how we intend to achieve those goals, adding that this is the essence of the science week.

He said FARA will have a business session after the science week to discuss issues of governance.

We must understand that the basic principle is that we must keep Africa food-secure and we have to evolve our own means and capacity to achieve this Dr. Akinbamijo stressed.
16.06.2016 LISTEN

When I learned that the motor-mouthed Central Regional Chairman of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) had been picked up at Londons Heathrow Airport by British security officials, the first thought that ran through my mind was highly unlikely. The Akan have a saying that the only ugly person is a dead one. Of course, we say this to abate the acute discomfort that surges up the spine of ugly humans  and I mean it in both senses of the word  like Mr. Allotey Jacobs. Then I laughed myself hoarse and silly and asked my good friend Mr. Kwasi Ohene, from Akyem-Tumfa, What godforsaken person would attempt to arrest gorgon-faced Allotey Jacobs, of all people?

Then that commonly quoted American maxim ran through my mind, to wit, It is only a mother who can love an ugly Kaakaamotobi like Allotey Jacobs. I swore to my friend Kwasi Ohene that whoever effected the arrest of Mr. Jacobs must have done so in some sort of facial and visual mask, one that afforded the wearer the necessary chance not to have his/her vision permanently violated by such a horrible visage as that of the at once pathologically cantankerous and fart-mouthed Central Regional NDC Chairman.

The last thing that I associated with the man was either the toting of contraband of the Nayele Amtefe sort, even though Mr. Jacobs very likely exited the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) via the same VVIP Lounge that Ms. Ametefe had used before boarding that fateful British Airways flight that flew her straight into the arms of the British security personnel at the same Heathrow Airport some two, or so, years ago.

One aspect of my gut reaction was to riposte thus, Serves that old godforsaken greedy bastard right! And it is almost certain that I might have quickly added, It was only a matter of time, except that now I cant remember this part of my phone conversation with Mr. Ohene. Unlike Mr. Ben Ephson , the handsomely paid NDC media hack, I did not envisage the alleged arrest of Mr. Jacobs in terms of any political partys operatives scoring any cheap political points; for I have always been of the opinion that Ghanaians are too discerning and sophisticated enough to make the serious decision of the quadrennial choice of their leadership on the frivolous basis of one persons egregious misbehavior or purported acts of criminality.

It also rang decidedly trite and jaded and definitely oxymoronic to claim that any NDC bigwig had been arrested for what key operatives of the Rawlings-minted political juggernaut have always been known to do better than any of their opponents.

Whatever the real situation on the ground might have been, I concluded in concurrence with that tired old maxim which runs thusly: There is no smoke without fire. It was quite obvious that Mr. Jacobs had been involved in some sort of incident with the British security operatives at Heathrow Airport, the vehement protestations of Mr. Jon Benjamin, the British High Commissioner to Ghana, to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now, it appears that cooler heads have prevailed in the camp of the Mahama Posse. We have just been told that the NDCs Member of Parliament for La-Dadekotopon, in the Greater-Accra Region, Nii Namoale Amasa, has confirmed that, indeed, Mr. Jacobs had been hurried off the plane shortly after British Airways Flight 078 landed at Heathrow Airport and had, in fact, been questioned briefly and allowed to continue his flight connection to his destination somewhere here in the United States (See Allotey Jacobs Was Held And Interrogated  Namoale Confirms Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/8/16). We further learn that the decision to take in Mr. Jacobs for questioning was a random routine.

Well, this is where I am inclined to vehemently disagree with the La-Dadekotopon NDC stalwart. Very likely, as was the case with Ms. Ametefe, somebody must have tipped off the Heathrow authorities a while before the Central Regions NDC chairman boarded BA Flight 078. In other words, Mr. Jacobs alleged interrogation must have been based on some form of personality profiling.

Whatever the real details of this incident may be, it was quite bizarre to learn of High Commissioner Benjamins tweets denying that any form of interrogation, let alone an arrest, involving Mr. Jacobs had occurred at Heathrow. Running this kind of interference for both the confirmed target of interrogation and the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress did not put Mr. Benjamin, a man I admire quite a lot, in a positive light as an evenhanded and a fair-minded diplomat.

But I also do not think that it was savvy on his part for Mr. Maxwell Kofi Jumah to have so cavalierly presumed to impugn the intelligence and integrity of both Mr. Benjamin and Her Royal Majesty. And, of course, I am glad to learn that the former mayor of Kumasi, Ghanas second-largest city, has since apologized for his unguarded use of the Queens language.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
Nairobi (AFP) - A Kenyan court on Thursday threw out a bid to outlaw anal examinations on people suspected to be gay, a practice that has been criticised by rights activists.

The case was brought by two men who challenged police use of rectal inspections after undergoing the procedure when being investigated for homosexuality, which is illegal in Kenya.

Being gay can carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years in the country, although prosecutions are rare.

"There was no other way evidence could have been obtained to ascertain that they are gay without carrying out anal analysis," Judge Anyara Emukule said in a ruling at the High Court in the port city of Mombasa.

The men are expected to appeal the decision.

Eric Gitari, head of the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission in Kenya, called the tests "humiliating".

The ban on homosexuality "has flooded Kenyan society with waters of prejudice, hatred and shame", he wrote in Newsweek ahead of the ruling.

Homophobia is on the rise in Africa, and taking an anti-gay position while espousing evangelical Christian values is a major vote winner in many countries on the continent.

Gay rights activists have warned of rising intolerance in Kenya, including attacks on homosexuals and alleged cases of lesbians being raped to "cure" them.

Human Rights Watch wrote in a recent report that discrimination against homosexuals in Kenya "remains a major problem", and that the authorities' "response to mob attacks and other forms of anti-gay violence has been limited."
Okerenkoko (Nigeria) (AFP) - Two years ago, when Nigeria's former president Goodluck Jonathan held a ceremony breaking the ground for a new university in the Niger delta, the impoverished region rejoiced.

The Nigerian Maritime University -- the first of its kind in the area -- was designed to give young people a chance to escape the dog-eat-dog life in the oil-rich but underdeveloped river lands.

Instead of picking up assault rifles, bombing oil pipelines and fighting soldiers in the humid mangrove creeks, education now seemed possible.

But construction of the university has ground to a standstill.

Yellow bulldozers lie idle at the site in the swamp forest of Okerenkoko, a village 30 minutes by boat from the southern city of Warri in Delta State.

The temporary home of the university -- a diving school in the nearby village of Kurutie -- also stands empty.

Today the Nigeria Maritime University has become a symbol of frustrated dreams, uniting delta fishermen and militants alike in discontent with President Muhammadu Buhari's government.

The "immediate" start of classes at the university is one of the top demands from the Niger Delta Avengers, an armed group which has claimed a recent series of damaging attacks on oil infrastructure.

"The former president (Jonathan) flagged off the university but the new administration said this school should stand still," Chief Antoni Ayebibode, from Kurutie village, told AFP.

"That's the Nigerian problem: when another administration comes, the past one's work will be wasted."

- Robin Hood -

At the diving school campus, complete with high-rise housing for student accommodation and a cavernous 12-metre-deep (40-feet) diving tank, Ayebibode said classes could start tomorrow.

"It's just waiting for the government," he said, passing classrooms furnished with whiteboards, desks and air conditioners. "Everything is ready."

But this week, lawmakers in Abuja squabbled over the cost, arguing it was cheaper to upgrade an existing maritime school.

The reason for the sudden loss of momentum is partially linked to the militant kingpin-turned-businessman, Government "Tompolo" Ekpemupolo.

A decade ago, Tompolo was a leading commander in the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which carried out devastating attacks on the country's oil industry.

But following an amnesty programme brokered by the government to end the violence in 2009, Tompolo became a security contractor, protecting the pipelines he once destroyed.

With his non-profit organisation the Tompolo Foundation, he cemented his reputation as the Niger delta's Robin Hood. It was his idea to build the diving school.

He also operated a hospital in Okerenkoko serving communities in the Gbaramatu Kingdom, a region of snaking waterways stretching from Chevron's Escravos terminal on the Atlantic Ocean coast to Warri.

"Charity begins at home, he started it at home," said the administrator of Tompolo's health project, Agagha Clarkson, showing a picture of an injured man in combat fatigues on a stretcher.

"Even the Nigerian soldiers came to the place."

In 2014, the Nigerian government bought Tompolo's diving school to use it as a temporary site for the planned university.

But by December 2015, Tompolo was charged with money laundering in connection with the diving school deal and his assets were frozen. A court issued a warrant for his arrest.

Tompolo went into hiding and hasn't been seen publicly for months. The hospital is shut down and the university on hold.

- 'Going through hell' -

It's a state of affairs that has fuelled animosity in a region where Buhari's government was perceived as an enemy even before Tompolo's arrest.

The largely Christian south had warned unrest could resume if Buhari, from the predominantly Muslim north, defeated Jonathan at last year's presidential elections.

"If anyone falls sick we have to rush down to Warri," complained Evangelist Maware, a 40-year-old fisherman in Okerenkoko.

Most people can't afford the 30,000-naira ($150, 130-euro) trip to the emergency room, he said.

"You pay the speedboat or you lose the person. The suffering is too much," he added.

In their hunt for the elusive Tompolo the Nigerian military has occupied towns in the region, forcing many to flee their homes.

For some, a university diploma -- one of the only ways to escape poverty -- has never felt so far away.

That has resulted in widespread sympathy towards Tompolo and the militants fighting for the region's interests.

"The military invasion has made our primary schools shut down, our secondary schools shut down, this government has said the Gbaramatu Kingdom doesn't have the right to school," Chief Godspower Gbenekama, of the Gbaramatu Kingdom, said.

"We are going through hell."
President John Dramani Mahama

16.06.2016 LISTEN

Once again, God has vindicated the opposition parties claim that His Excellency the President and the NDC government is practising corruption with impugnity. In the opinion of Alhaji Dr. Mahamud Bawumia, Economist and running mate to Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo, a large chunk of the financial resources that should have been used to deal with the problem of unemployment in Ghana is lost to corruption. Corruption in governance is undoubtedly, the bane of Ghana's development.

Acceptance of a gift from Burkinabe contractor, Mr. Djibril Kanazoe, is in clear violation of the President's own code of ethics and thus constitute an act of corruption.

In fact the contractor himself knew he was offering a bribe even if H. E the president didn't know this. The contractor first denied knowledge of the 'gift' until Manasseh read out a letter he had intercepted.

Two clear years down the line, no body was aware of this 'gift' except perhaps the ministers who are now defending the issue. When late President John Atta Mills rejected Christmas gifts, his reasons were quite obvious; "Some people bring the gifts and their motives are genuine,"

"Others, perhaps, just want to establish a relationship that would, in a sense, influence decisions that you might have to make in the coming year that relate to their interests. "So you cannot really differentiate in terms of the different motives that people bring to this gift-giving exercise."

The gifts would be better enjoyed by the country's underprivileged, such as children at orphanages'. source;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8430267.stm .

When Kufuor received a gift from Libya for Ghana, it was in the open and published in the media. This was not done in secret.

Why did H.E John Mahama choose to hide his from the public only to be exposed by Manasseh's investigative piece? He even thanked the man for the offer through a phone call.

We are made to understand this Kanazoe man has benefited from several government contracts after the 'gift' to president Mahama. How then could any one convince me that it was not meant to win unmerited favours from the president? Perhaps, there are other gifts of the sort that hasn't been uncovered.

Government's defence of the bribery allegation further exposed their heights for corruption since the registration information of the car in question cannot be found with DVLA, according to Manasseh Azure Awuni. This information has either been deleted or the car is not registered and further constitute a violation of law and illegality since the car is under the custody of the president. If the car was indeed for the state, it should have been registered. More so, Kanazoe would have proudly admit that in public when questioned. He had a motive which the president ought to be aware of considering his status as a reknowned contractor.

I therefore call on all civil society organizations, anti corruption bodies and members of Parliament to provoke the necessary constitunal provisions to ensure that the matter is thoroughly dealt with to serve as a guide for posterity.

Manasseh Azure Awuni should equally be commended for his good works in exposing corruption at the high level of governance. He deserves an honour to serve as an incentive for development journalism.

Thank you.

Samuel Abdul-Aziz Nambo

Tel. 0201262187
16.06.2016 LISTEN

Speaking to his congregation on the subject matter of leadership, specifically generational leadership, Pastor Mensah Otabil, the founder of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), had this to say among others:

Good leaders must be accepted, bad leaders must be rejectedWhen you accept a generational leader, you embrace their values and you cannot reject what you have accepted.

Well, this topical homiletic indictment of African leadership from Pastor Otabil is nothing new, really.

As a matter of fact, it is a highly controversial and difficult subject matter he has harped on now and then throughout his long career of political entrepreneurship, public speaking, and clerical shepherdship.

But this one represents an interesting break from his more subtle or nuanced topical homiletics on partisan politics.

And as we said before this subject matter is a familiar terrain for the outspoken juggernaut Pastor Otabil, at least for those of us who have read his litany of books, listened to his cassettes and DVDs, and religiously followed his long clerical shepherdship career with rapt interest and curiosity, given also that among other things some of our most cherished, closest and trusted friends are prominent members of his church who occupy various capacities and roles as counselors, pastors, ushers, system analysts, preachers, and so on.

Even so he, Pastor Otabil, and other well-known Ghanaian Christian clerics such as Dag Heward-Mills, the founding president of the Lighthouse Chapel International, have all used the example of Dr. Nkrumah as a leadership model in their sermons.

However, in this highly topical speaking engagement of Pastor Otabil with his congregation, the latter did make mention of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as a model leader. This is not surprising at all.

Of course, again, this is not the first time he had mentioned Dr. Nkrumah as a model leader. He had on a number of occasions done this. Here is what some web portals attribute to him, Pastor Otabil:

Dr. Otabil cited Ghanas first President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as one of the best generational leaders Africa had, who had a positive impact on many first-generation African leaders

Again, this is hardly surprising because this is also the opinion of the larger world, his [Dr. Nkrumahs] having been ranked amongst the worlds best leaders and greatest Africans, with Africans acknowledging him as Africas Man of the Millennium, etc.

Yet one still wonders why Pastor Otabil has not done this in a long time.

We are not too sure if it is because Ken Ofori Atta, co-founder of Databank Financial Services, a bank on whose Board of Directors Pastor Otabil sat, and lawyer Samuel Atta Akyea, both relatives of Akufo-Addo and J.B. Danquah and both members of Pastor Otabils ICGC, with Akyea reportedly being the latters attorney, have been whispering into his [Pastor Otabils] ears.

Akyea has also reportedly been cited in some media reports as one of Pastor Otabils speech writers.

Notwithstanding all the above, one of Pastor Otabils close and respected colleagues and friends, engineer Robert Woode has written an interesting small book, titled Third World to First: By One Touch: Economic Repercussions of the Overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, to demonstrate how Dr. Nkrumahs policy strategies would have transformed Ghana and placed it amongst the developed nations but for the ominous intervention of the Western-backed coup detat.

Elsewhere, Prof. Lungus four-part series Only Mad 60-Year Olds Fault Kwame Nkrumah for Ghanas Development Quagmire also provides an insightfully indispensable snapshot of this exquisite thesis on where Ghana would have been if all those leaders who succeeded him had vigorously pursued Nkrumahist development economics, political economy and fiscal policy ideas!

It is in this larger context that Kwabena Yeboah, a Ghanaweb commenter and one of our readers, called a Ghanaweb columnist Sydney Casely-Hayford a complete fool when the latter wrote a column, Siding with Our President, to attack Dr. Nkrumah among other uneducated criticisms.

Here is Kwabena Yeboah (we have re-worded some parts for reading clarity, readability):

Any idiot can pick up a pen and spit out buffooneryPeople who lack intelligence and are perfidious in their self-inflated image. This bozo has the temerity to cast absurdity at Dr. Nkrumah with a fit of acknowledgment of the foundation Dr. Nkrumah laid for modern Ghana.

Freedom of speech is like a priceless pearl to swine. Because they do understand its value, they trample over and destroy it.

Ghana, my country would be heaven by now if one-half of all our post-Nkrumah leaders were able to replicate half of Nkrumahs advancements.

How come some Ghanaians are so stupid and mindless?

With Ghanas life expectancy pegged at 61 years, I am hoping Mother Nature does us a favor and rid my country of such idiots and buffoons sooner than later.

Undoubtedly, the third paragraph constitutes one of the direct corollaries of Prof. Lungus recent write-ups on Dr. Nkrumah, the four-part series which we have already referenced.

Evidently Yeboah sees what Pastor Otabil did not see, which is that Dr. Nkrumahs model leadership is both specifically generational but, perhaps also, more generally and importantly, transcends time.

And of course, many of the positive and good things we associate with the African world and the world at large, today, can be traced directly and indirectly to the vision and pragmatic politics of Dr. Nkrumah.

The demise of Apartheid and the decolonization of Africa are just two teachable instances.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Indeed, Dr. Nkrumah was and still is incomparable. Among other commendable accolades he was a leader par excellence. And by every imaginable standard!

And Pastor Otabil was and is also, indeed, right to cite or acknowledge him as one of the best generational leaders Africa had.

Thus, we have no doubt in our minds that Pastor Otabil was in one of his best moments when he pronounced this commendable posthumous citation on the Greatest Son of Africa, Osageyfo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Pastor Otabil himself has learnt a great deal from this Greatest Son of Africa. He should therefore ask his colleague clerics to do the same.

What actually remains to be done, however, is for him, namely Pastor Otabil, to whisper into our presidential candidates including President Mahama, to reach back into our immediate post-colonial political history and learn from Africas Man of the Millennium.

Here is another of his trademark pontifications:

When you accept somebody, you accept his value, I know that no one is perfect, Im not perfect, but a leader must get the major things right, I mean everybody has a problem but your [leader] problem must not be big

And yes, an influential generational leader like Dr. Nkrumah got major things right. This was Prof Lungus (and several others) central thesis also.

Once again, this may be why Pastor Otabil cited him as one of the best generational leaders Africa had.

There is no timely and better advice than this simple fact of our contemporary history.

CONCLUSION

In the final analysis, then, Pastor Otabil is more than right to acknowledge fallibility in the complex character of humanity even while still acknowledging human sainthood and exceptionality among a fallible multitude of outliers.

Thus, it is quite okay or painfully truthful to give the fallible saints in our mist the benefit of the doubt. Here we agree somewhat wholeheartedly with George Orwell who noted as far back as 1949 that:

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocentSainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoidthe average human being is a failed saint.

Dr. Nkrumah with all his faults was, indeed, a saint who lived above Orwells average human being.

REFERENCE

Ghanaweb. Reject Bad Leaders, Accept Good OnesOtabil. June 13, 2016.
Soweto (South Africa) (AFP) - South Africa on Thursday marked 40 years since the Soweto uprising, when security forces fired on black students in a massacre that triggered a new era of anti-apartheid resistance.

The 1976 protests, and the apartheid regime's violent response, fuelled a struggle that eventually led to the fall of white-minority rule with Nelson Mandela's election as president in 1994.

The anniversary has been commemorated by a series of events to honour those who took part in the uprising, which began as a protest against a government order that schools could only teach in the Afrikaans language used by whites.

"(The students) were dreaming about good quality education, they were dreaming about a new democracy," Jeff Radebe, a senior government minister, said at the start of the official ceremony at a stadium in Soweto.

"The youth of 2016 are enjoying the fruit of seed that was laid by those youngsters of 1976 who defied the might of the apartheid state."

At the time at least 170 people were killed, with some estimates putting the death toll at several hundred over the following months as the uprising spread from the township of Soweto, south of Johannesburg.

Images of poor, young black students gunned down by white police brought the injustices of apartheid to the world's attention and spurred the global anti-apartheid movement.

President Jacob Zuma was due to make a national address at the stadium, after Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa placed a wreath at the memorial to Hector Pieterson, who was killed aged 13.

The black-and-white photograph of Pieterson's body being carried away by a student in tears became the iconic image of the uprising.

- Race injustice persists -

Divisions along racial lines remain strong in South Africa, with most black people enduring worse education, housing and unemployment than white people.

Students have again been protesting in recent months over tuition fees that force some poor black youths out of education.

Racist Internet postings have underlined long-standing frictions worsened by the country's dire economic performance and anger at politicians' failure to meet post-apartheid expectations.

Highlighting the country's unhealed wounds, a reconciliation event in Soweto last Saturday was sparsely attended.

The gathering had been intended to bring together black and white people, but it split some black activists, and white former policemen declined to take part.

Dan Montsitsi, a student leader of the uprising, said the 1976 march in Soweto had been planned for months.

The students, most of whom were in their school uniforms, carried placards reading: "Afrikaans stinks", "To hell with Afrikaans" and "Afrikaans needs to be abolished".

"We were amazed with the number of students that we had been able to put in the streets," he told AFP ahead of the 40th anniversary.

He said the police released a dog into the crowd, which was killed.

"The police were very angry obviously and they decided they would use teargas.

"(Soon after) they started to shoot."

June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa marking Youth Day.
16.06.2016 LISTEN

Accra, 16 June 2016 The United Nations has launched the UN Young Leaders Initiative to recognize exceptional young people who are leaders in the effort to end poverty, combat climate change and reduce inequalities.

Under this initiative, 17 young leaders, aged between 18  30 years, who are driving change to help realize the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be recognized on an annual basis. This is the first of its kind to showcase the outstanding leadership that young people are demonstrating to put the world on a more sustainable course.

It is spear-headed by the Office of the UN Secretary-Generals Envoy on Youth.

The first class of Young Leaders will be announced in September, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly. During their term, the Young Leaders will work with the Envoy on Youth and the United Nations to help galvanize other young people around achieving the SDGs.

Nominations are now open via the Young Leaders website. Categories for nomination include Advocacy, the Arts, Business, Entrepreneurship, Finance, Media, Philanthropy, Policy, Science, Sport, Technology and others.

Nominations will be open from June 15th to July 15th 2016 and can be made online at www.SDGYoungLeaders.org
Old students of Achimota Senior High School have indicated that they will seek a court injunction to stop the work of developers who have encroached on the school's land.

The association believes that the action is necessary to protect the school land.

Parts of the schools land have been taken over by land guards and developers who were putting up structures without permits.

At a press conference to address the issue, the President of the Old Achimota Association (OAA), 'Akora' Ernest Aryeetey said: we are going to seek a court injunction. We are already in court, there's been a writ of summons to the parties developing the land, but beyond that, we have taken a decision to seek an injunction to stop the work.

All Achimotans who were present pledged to do that and we have given instructions to our lawyers to pursue that line of action, he added.

According to him, it was imperative for all Ghanaians to join the campaign against the encroachers as the flame of Achimota cannot be separated from Ghana's future.

We agreed to embark on a media campaign to gain the support of all Ghanaians. Our meeting here with the media is part of that strategy. We want many more Ghanaians to understand us, Mr. Aryeetey added.

OAA considering demonstration

The OAA President revealed that the group was considering a demonstration to drive home their concerns and get the public involved.

It's important that we make the public in Ghana feel what is going on. We don't subscribe to poorly organized demonstrations. We believe in a peaceful march and in assembling Achimotans from different generations, from different social structures and professions, holding placards expressing their disgust at the inaction, Ernest Aryeetey said.

No Gov't support

The Achimota Senior High School is one of the oldest in the country and has produced and large number of prominent personalities in Ghana's history, including former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, Joyce Aryee, current Minister of Lands and Resources, Nii Osah Mills and Jerry John Rawlings.

When asked whether the school had reached out to their alumini and why they hadn't received any assistance, Mr. Aryeetey expressed frustration with the lack of action from the relevant authorities.

Everybody is sympathetic to the plight of Achimota school but almost everybody feels incapacitated.

We've made contact with everybody in Gov't; with the Flagstaff House, with Parliament, with Ministers and the AMA, both old Achimotans and non- Achimotans, he added.

Students are safe

In April, the headmistress of Achimota, Beatrice Adom said her students lived in fear following the activities of land guards at the school.

However, the assistant headmistress sought to allay some of those fears, stating that officials of the BNI had come to the school to assess the situation.

I must say the school is secured. National Security and officials of the BNI were at the school. They had about four vehicles with armed men and when they came to the site the people run away, the deadmistress added.

By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Mali's prime minister urged the UN Security Council on Thursday to impose sanctions against anyone blocking a year-old peace deal and to strengthen the peacekeeping mission after a spate of attacks.

Prime Minister Modibo Keita warned of deteriorating security on the ground after 28 peacekeepers were killed in attacks this year in Mali, making it the deadliest UN mission in the world.

"The deterioration of the situation is without a doubt a threat to all of our states" in the region, Keita told the council.

The prime minister recalled that the council had adopted a resolution that provides for sanctions against those who oppose the peace deal signed in June 2015.

"It is timely and urgent for this provision to be implemented," he said.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre said it was time to speed up implementation of the peace deal aimed at ending years of fighting in northern Mali and turn the page on the Islamist takeover of 2012.

"We have seen too many delays on too many fronts," said Delattre, who holds this month's presidency of the council.

France is drafting a resolution to deploy some 2,500 extra peacekeepers to the mission, known as MINUSMA, which currently has about 12,000 police and soldiers.

Delattre said the measure, expected to be adopted by the council on June 29, will strengthen MINUSMA's capacity and "enhance the security of peacekeepers."

- APCs, copters, drones -

The UN envoy for Mali and MINUSMA chief Mahamat Saleh Annadif described the situation in Mali as "worrisome" and said delays in moving ahead with the peace deal were "undermining the entire process."

Annadif said "losses could have been avoided" if the contingents were better-trained and better-equipped, in particular with armored personnel carriers that can withstand attacks from explosive devices planted on roads.

MINUSMA is asking the United Nations to provide surveillance drones and five more helicopters to accompany convoys on the dangerous explosives-laden routes.

A German contingent of 650 troops that will deploy in Mali in the coming months will bring aerial drones and transport planes to bolster MINUSMA.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is not a signatory to the peace deal, has claimed responsibility for two recent attacks on peacekeepers in the northern city of Gao.

Annadif warned that the threat from jihadist groups was shifting further south in Mali and that this should not be "trivialized."

AQIM and one of its affiliates has also claimed responsibility for violence in Bamako: the March 2015 attack on a bar that left five dead and the November assault on the Radisson Blu hotel that killed 20 people.

Under MINUSMA's new robust posture, the deployment would be expanded to cover more territory to the center and south of Mali, Annadif told reporters on Wednesday.

"We need more forces to cover the territory," he said.
A Political Science lecturer wants President John Mahama to demonstrate that he is a human being capable of making a mistake and apologise for accepting a gift from a Burkinabe contractor.

Eric Asare Bossman says an apology from the President a few months to the crucial November 7 elections would seem like a bad idea but it is not.

I think that the President should apologise to the Ghanaian people and I think it is not going to inure to the disadvantage of the President. People will see that you are also a human being," Dr Bossman Joy News' Favor Nunoo, Thursday.

Following revelations that a Burkinabe Contractor, Gibril Kanazoe, presented a Ford Expedition as a gift to the President in 2012, many Ghanaians have sought to suggest that the President may have acted in breach of the law.

Mr Kanazoes gift is valued at $100,000 and he presented it the same year he won a controversial contract to erect a fence wall around the Ghana Embassy in Burkina Faso.

A Public Accounts Committee (PAC) probe into the cost of wall, some $650,000, revealed procurement procedures were breached in the award of the contract. PAC described the contract sum as outrageous.

Mr Kanazoe is also the contractor who won part of the contract on the Eastern Corridor Road Project, one of the biggest road projects to be undertaken in Ghana.

Opinions are divided on whether the President acted in breach of the law that regulates public office holders in accepting gifts. Some have sought to link receipt of the gift to conflict of interest.

The Presidency, through the Minister of Communication, Edward Omane-Boamah, has confirmed that the President received the gift in the name of the State and it had nothing to do with the fence wall or road contracts.

However, Article 284 of the 1992 Constitution states, A public officer shall not put himself in a position where his personal interest conflicts or is likely to conflict with the performance of the functions of his office.

This constitutional provision has informed a new bill, Conduct of Public Officers Bill, 2013, presented by Cabinet to Parliament.

According to Section 21 (b), a public officer may not accept a gift, favour or an advantage that has the potential to influence the proper discharge of the public officers functions or judgment, from a person with whom the public officer comes into contact in relation to the public officers functions.

However, the Political Science lecturer at University of Ghana thinks an apology should have accompanied the response from the President.

Ideally in a well-functioning society where democratic structures are firmly built, you would expect the leader to come out openly and tell Ghanaians that I did not act in an appropriate way; ideally to say sorry to the Ghanaians, but Ghana is an ideal situation, he said.

He said just like South Africas Jacob Zuma came out to apologise publicly following revelations he spent huge sums of Rand in renovating his private home, Mr Mahama should do same.

In a well functioning society, even the people around you [President] are going to tell you that this thing we didnt do it well. But if you are a leader and you are thinking of being a great leader, these are some the things you must admit, Dr Bossman counseled.

He also threw out suggestions that receipt of the gift by President Mahama provides firm grounds for impeachment proceedings to be kick-started against him.

He notes that although constitutional provisions clearly define which actions can cause the President to be impeached, Ghanas political system will not make the process successful.

Impeachment usually falls within the domain of the legislature. But lets look at the composition of our parliament. I dont think Ghana will get to a point where a President who has majority in Parliament will say they will vote to impeach him, he said.

He has recommended that the luxury vehicle that started the whole saga be donated to a charity.

Meanwhile the Burkinabe contractor has since pulled out of another 82million bid to construct a 28-kilometre road.

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | George Nyavor | [email protected]
Ghanaian Beverage producers and stakeholders will have the opportunity to vie for honours as Global Media Alliance announces the opening of nominations for the maiden edition of Ghana Beverage Awards (GBA).

GBA is Ghanas first award scheme designed to honour the beverage industry in Ghana. It is scheduled for September this year and expected to bring together the big names in the industry.

The awards scheme is organized by Global Media Alliance (GMA), an integrated media and communications company in Ghana. The theme for this years edition is  Inspiring excellence in the beverage industry in Ghana.

The Head of Creatives and Production at Global Media Alliance Mr. J.O.T Agyeman said GMA is excited about this initiative because it goes beyond the funfair of an awards event and seeks to raise standards in beverage production in the country.

We are eager to work with our local industries to showcase what Ghana has to offer and to reveal the hardwork of our beverage producers he added.

The nominees would be required to meet certain specific benchmarks to win the awards. Judges would be looking out for quality, adherence to industry best practices, product visibility, product contributions to society, product innovation, product popularity amongst other yardsticks in determining winners.

Nomination forms and other information are can be found online at ghanabeverageawards.com. Alternatively, interested individuals and oragnisations may call the office of Global Media Alliance for all enquiries on GBA.

All beverage producers in Ghana are encouraged to be a part of Ghanas first beverage awards.
The Ghana Armed Forces has denied reports that it is on a manhunt for a soldier, Private Bawa Abdul Rahman for his involvement with terrorist group ISIS.

This follows reports in the media that the 26-year-old soldier escaped when he was being sent to his bosses for military inquisition.

But in a statement signed by the Director of Public Relations of the GAF, Colonel Aggrey Quarshie, the story is untrue.

The statement said The Ghana Armed Forces therefore wishes to notify all media houses that the social media post is not authentic hence the need to desist from further publication and broadcast as the information therein is not correct.

It further stated that it is still investigating the source of the social media post from which the media picked up that information for publication.

Below is a copy of the full statement

The Ghana Armed Forces wishes to state that a report indicating a Ghanaian soldier is under investigations for links with ISIS is UNTRUE.

The soldier, Private Bawa Abdul Rahman was scheduled to appear on an interview at the General Headquarters a few days ago in respect of a disciplinary matter which came up after a field exercise some months ago.

He however absconded and remains Absent Without Leave (AWOL).

His scheduled interview was not in relation to any possible links with ISIS but purely a disciplinary hearing.

Subsequently a social media post went viral claiming the soldier absconded because he was being investigated for possible links with ISIS.

The Ghana Armed Forces wishes to further state that following the social media post, the outcome of background checks and fact finding could not establish any such links.

GAF is however still investigating the source of the social media post from which the media picked up that information for publication.

The Ghana Armed Forces therefore wishes to notify all media houses that the social media post is not authentic hence to desist from further publication and broadcast as the information therein is not correct.

Furthermore, GAF wishes to assure the media and the public of positive collaboration to enhance the security of the state in an atmosphere of circumspection and with due regard for public safety and security.

SIGNED

COLONEL E AGGREY-QUASHIE

Director Public Relations

Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | NSA
Diffa (Niger) (AFP) - Tens of thousands of Nigeriens who fled a deadly Boko Haram attack are in "great distress", with many lacking food and healthcare, Niger's interior minister said during a visit to the displaced Thursday.

Boko Haram attacked a military post in Bosso in Niger's Diffa region on June 3, killing 26 soldiers including two from neighbouring Nigeria, in one of the jihadist group's deadliest attacks in the country.

The UN refugee agency said some 50,000 people have fled since the attack in Bosso, a town in Niger near the border with Nigeria and Chad.

"The people are living in a state of great distress," said Mohamed Bazoum, who led a delegation of several ministers, representatives of UN agencies and NGOs.

But "the situation has improved significantly since one week ago when we reached the peak of the crisis", he told AFP.

The area already hosted tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Boko Haram.

In Diffa, a sea of tents and make-shift shelters housing mostly women, children and old people that are buffeted by winds and sand storms is spread out over a stretch of desert beside a main road.

Alongside the road, rows of cans to collect water are placed every five or six kilometres. Water trucks race back and forth to try and supply the refugees.

"The problem that has been best dealt with is that of water," said the minister.

But he said the health situation is "deplorable", and while food supplies have been consistent the influx of refugees "has not stopped".

"While the people who arrived a few days ago have been fed, those who are arriving now have still not been (fed) and will not be in the coming days," said Mohamed.

- 'We ran, ran, ran' -

Some of the refugees complained to AFP that they had gone without food, sometimes for more than four days.

Arima Mena Bouka waited under the blazing sun in front of a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) tent where she hoped to take her 15-month-old daughter. She has four other children.

"I feel weak. It's the hunger, the thirst, the fatigue," she said, her daughter showing signs of malnutrition.

"You only have to look at me, we are suffering."

"(On June 3) we heard shots, and we fled without taking anything. We ran, ran, ran... We encountered heat and exhaustion. We walked for three days, sleeping outdoors under trees of near houses."

The area already hosted tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Boko Haram before the latest attack.

The interior minister said that while "the worst is behind... the security problem remains to be solved to ensure that the these people (can) return."

Niger's authorities have said 55 insurgents were also killed and many injured in clashes with troops following the June 3 attack.

Some 2,000 Chadian soldiers are set to launch a counter-offensive against the group in the region, in coordination with Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon.

Military powerhouse Chad is a leading member of a multi-national force fighting the Nigeria-based Boko Haram fighters who have extended their attacks to neighbouring countries from their base in northern Nigeria.

The seven-year insurgency has left at least 20,000 people dead in Nigeria and made more than 2.6 million homeless.
Accra, June 16, GNA - Standard Chartered Bank, Ghana has launched a customer loyalty campaign to reward its retail banking clients.

Dubbed: 'Rewards Unlimited,' the promotion would run from June 13 - September 30.

Retail Banking Clients would be awarded an electronic point for every GHa 400 deposited in their local currency current and savings account.

Speaking at the launch, Head Retail Banking, West Africa, Standard Chartered Bank, Henry Baye, reiterated the commitment of the bank to celebrate the success of its clients each year.

'At Standard Chartered Bank, we are committed to our clients and appreciate their loyalty. We make it a point to celebrate our clients each year. The faith and trust in our brand motivates us to always look for ways to improve how we make the banking experience enjoyable for our clients,' he said.

Each client would be assigned a unique number and receive updates on the points accumulated. These points would earn them the opportunity to be entered into the draws to win amazing prizes. The whole process will be seamless and digitized without any human intervention.

Two mini draws would be held in July and August and clients from each of the 26 branches have the opportunity to win prizes.

One lucky winner would win the grand prize of a three-bedroom house from Devtraco and two couples would win an all-expenses paid vacation to Mauritius during the Grand Draw in October.

There are more than 150 prizes to be won in the Rewards Unlimited Promotion.

Standard Chartered has partnered with Devtraco Real Estate to offer the grand prize, of a three-bedroom house.

The promotion is brought to clients by The National Lottery Authority on the Caritas Lottery Platform.

Elvin Nunoo-Larkai, General Manager Marketing and Corporate Affairs, Devtraco said: 'We are proud to be associated with the Standard Chartered Brand and be part of this promotion. The grand prize winner will not only be receiving a house but an investment.'

Ekow Inkoom of the National Lottery Authority, the regulator said: 'We have worked with Standard Chartered Bank over the years. Once again we look forward to an exciting promotion and will be on hand to ensure that all decisions are transparent, fair and credible.'

Standard Chartered Bank has been in Ghana for 120 years and is the only bank that issues the Visa Infinite Debit Card.

GNA
By Morkporkpor Anku, GNA

Accra, June 16, GNA - The Supreme Court has struck out the case in which Prophet Miritaiah Jonah Jehu-Appiah of the Musama Disco Christo Church (MDCC) is seeking a review of the judgment upholding his removal as Head of the Church.

The court disposed off the application without liberty for the defendant applicant to return to court with the same matter.

The court was constituted by a seven-member panel with Justice William Atuguba as its Chairman.

At the last court sitting, the supreme court adjourned the case indefinitely.

The case for the review of the judgment by the Supreme Court was filed after the highest court of the land by a five-zero decision on November 11, 2015, dismissed an appeal filed by Prophet Jehu-Appiah, against his removal as Akaboha III and the Head Prophet of the MDCC.

The former had challenged the lawfulness of his removal from office, questioning the capacity of the persons to remove him in January 2002.

Prophet Jehu-Appiah stated in his affidavit that, 'The appellate court failed to give a consideration to the fact that the respondents had no capacity to have instituted the case against him, and that the act of the respondents was in sharp conflict with the constitution of the Church'.

Prophet Jehu-Appiah was leader of the MDCC until 2002 when the church removed him.

After his dismissal, the Church filed a suit at the High Court in Swedru to affirm its decision. Prophet Jehu-Appiah appealed to the Court of Appeal but the case was dismissed.

He appealed to the Supreme Court, which also dismissed the suit and sought for a review.

GNA
current-affairs-trends TN plans Nokia plant revival to keep Amma's word The Tamil Nadu state government wants the Centre to negotiate to convince Foxconn to revive operations in Tamil Nadu. Even the state government's representatives are currently in Taiwan to hold talks with the company to take over the plant.
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June 16, 2016 The Next "Russian Government Cyber Attack" May Be A Gulf of Tonkin Fake Yesterday the Washington Post published a piece that smelled of bullshit from the first line to the last: Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump. Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

...

The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.

...

Some of the hackers had access to the DNC network for about a year, but all were expelled over the past weekend in a major computer cleanup campaign, the committee officials and experts said. Why the f*** would Russia want to steal oppo research about Trump when it can read such in Politico and the Washington Post every day? Why start A YEAR AGO to hack something for Trump data? Who would have thought A YEAR AGO that Trump would be relevant? This was obvious nonsense. But some snakeoil salesmen convinced the Washington Post know-nothing reporter and the DNC that it all must be true: The DNC said that no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed or taken, suggesting that the breach was traditional espionage, not the work of criminal hackers. If there was a hacker breaking some servers for over a year how the hell would anyone know what s/he accessed? There is no assured way to know what files were touched. And to conclude from what was probably taken to "must thereby have been Russia" is plainly stupid. Its the job of every foreign intelligence service to collect intelligence against their adversaries, said Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm called in to handle the DNC breach and a former head of the FBIs cyber division. He noted that it is extremely difficult for a civilian organization to protect itself from a skilled and determined state such as Russia.

...

The firm identified two separate hacker groups, both working for the Russian government, that had infiltrated the network, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike co-founder and chief technology officer. The firm had analyzed other breaches by both groups over the past two years. All one might see in a breach, if anything, is some pattern of action that may seem typical for one adversary. But anyone else can imitate such a pattern as soon as it is known. That is why there is NEVER a clear attribution in such cases. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying or has no idea what s/he is speaking of. Russia denied to have anything to do with that alleged hack. That did not prevent the Washington Post to come with a listical about Five more hacks the West has tied to Russia none of which is likely to have any Russian origin. Trump for one claims that the DNC "hacked" itself to be able to publish their claims against him. But now for the fun. A hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 just published a blogpost with documents from the hack of the DNC server. Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by sophisticated hacker groups. Im very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy. Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clintons and other Democrats mail servers. But he certainly wasnt the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNCs servers. Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think Ive been in the DNCs networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it? Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNCs network. Not astonishingly the published documents include those with "financial, donor or personal information" which the DNC unconvincingly claimed had not be accessed. Guccifer 2.0 writes that most of the documents will soon be published via Wikileaks. The whole story in the Washington Post was a anti-Russia nonsense based on self-promotion of an obviously incompetent cyber security company. But it is dangerous. I am afraid that such propaganda will one day be used as another Gulf of Tonkin fake to start a war. NATO is already preparing the public for such a move: NATO may react to future cyber attacks by deploying conventional weapons, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview published by Germany's Bild newspaper on Thursday. "A severe cyber attack may be classified as a case for the alliance. Then NATO can and must react," the newspaper quoted Stoltenberg as saying. "How, that will depend on the severity of the attack." One wonders if the Washington Post scaremongering about alleged Russian cyber abilities was coordinated with that NATO announcement. To even think of such conventional retribution for a cyber attack is lunatic. No cyber attack is ever attributable with any certainty. The U.S. National Security Agency, as well as other state sponsored entities, would have no trouble to fake a "Russian cyber attack". If one lone hacker in the U.S., where Guccifer 2.0 seems to reside, can do such how much more convincing would any intentional, government sponsored fake be? Posted by b on June 16, 2016 at 8:03 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
Last Sunday started to bloom as it usually does for the Rev. Robin LaBolt, layer upon layer of her morning ritual gently unfurling.

Pastor Robin, as her parishioners call her, awakened at 5:30 a.m. and headed for the kitchen of her home in Sycamore, Ohio  population 847, by the most recent census count. She made coffee for herself before strolling into the living room and settling into her favorite chair. She reached into the basket on the floor and pulled out her iPad to check the news.

She doesn't remember which news organization's headline she saw first. Doesn't matter. They all said the same thing: Twenty people were dead and dozens more were wounded after a gunman opened fire in a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.

"Dear God," she said aloud in the empty room. "Dear God. No."

Her immediate conclusion: It was a hate crime. "He goes into a gay bar and starts shooting?" she said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "It's a hate crime."

Pastor Robin knew the challenge waiting for her at Sycamore United Church of Christ.

"We're a small town," she said. "It's not exactly an LGBT-friendly area. Not that anyone says bad things about them. They'd just rather not talk about it."

Last fall, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, she approached her church's governing board. "I need to know if I'm going to be able to officiate these weddings," she said.

Permission denied.

"They were worried about backlash in the congregation and in the community," she said. "I was devastated."

After the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, silence at Sycamore United Church of Christ was no longer an option, she decided.

At 8 a.m., Pastor Robin walked out her front door and across the street to the church where she has served as head pastor for seven years. She sat down at her desk to think about how to alter her sermon. She had planned to talk about community. She still would, she decided.

She didn't write down what she wanted to say about the massacre in Orlando. She didn't have to. Her mind was full of thoughts for the people she knew in Sycamore's LGBT community.

Later that day, she would send a text message to a close friend who is gay: How are you? I have been thinking of you. I love you.

I love you, too, her friend responded.

She sent another text to the mother of a gay child: I imagine you may be afraid ... I will continue to work to make this a safe community. The mother forwarded the text to her children.

"Sometimes people don't want to talk," Pastor Robin said. "They just want to know that somebody cares."

At the 10 a.m. service, Pastor Robin talked about the church community, lifting up the good works of the congregation. She celebrated a woman's fifth anniversary of church membership, too.

Then she turned to the tragedy in Orlando.

When she mentioned the 20 dead victims, she could tell by the look of shock on so many faces that most had not heard the news.

"Something took hold of me," she said. "It really was one of those Holy Spirit moments when I suddenly knew what to say."

She told them, "I'm not interested in what your personal feelings are about gay people. But I am interested in what God has to say about all of us. God loves all of us, without exception  period. And that's what we are called to do, too: Love everyone."

Immediately, she felt such relief.

"I felt no fear," she said. "Not being as explicit about this as I've wanted to be has taken a toll on me emotionally and spiritually. I was respecting them at the cost of my theological integrity. It felt like a sin of omission. It felt like a betrayal to my friends and my family."

Pastor Robin and a few members of the congregation are organizing a vigil for the Orlando victims on Friday at 7 p.m. on the Wyandot County Courthouse lawn. She hopes that other pastors in the community will join her. It's a fitting ending for her, as she is leaving the Sycamore church later this month. Long before the Orlando shootings, she had accepted a new position at a more progressive UCC church.

"I took this church as far as I could," she said. "There are wonderful people here, but I am an activist. Our LGBT friends need us, their allies, to stay strong for them, to speak out for them. And right now, they need to know that we support them, that we know they are grieving."

Her new church is in Spring Hill, Florida, only an hour and a half north of Orlando, where 49 innocent people were killed and more than 50 others are injured.

"Yeah, I thought about that," she said. "I am ready."

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University's school of journalism. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com), visit www.creators.com.
With just a week to go to the EU Referendum, there is almost universal agreement amongst global investors that a Brexit vote would cause havoc on stock markets and damage both the UK and European economy.

This consensus among investors seems in stark contrast to the divided views of politicians about the financial consequences of the UK leaving the European Union.

The study, by the Rivel Research Group found that just 3% of UK investors thought the European economy would improve if Britain was to exit the European Union. This negative sentiment was just as strong among continental European investors, with only 2% of respondents expecting the European economy to be better off in a Britain-less future.

This message was echoed by investors in the US and Asia/Pacific with only 1% and 3% respectively seeing Brexit as positive for the European economy. Stock Market Turmoil The study also revealed investors are braced for a shock in both UK and European stock markets if the Referendum results in a Leave vote. More than two-thirds of UK investors expect that a Brexit vote will have negative impact on the UK stock market; a view shared by 76% of Continental European investors. This turmoil could extend beyond the London Stock Exchange: 73% of UK investors and 60% of European investors are expecting a negative impact on Eurozone stocks. Claire Lavery, the vice president at the Rivel Research Group said: A very strong belief has developed amongst both UK and global investors that a Brexit would be bad for the European economy. Virtually no investors see Brexit as having a beneficial impact on the European economy. The message is clear from investors: dont do it. In a world where there is almost always divergent opinion, the opinion over Brexit is overwhelmingly one-sided. Global investors see Brexit as bad for the economy and bad for UK and European stocks. Such a stark consensus may be fuelled by fears over a further destabilisation of the eurozone and a potential weakening of Europes ability to cope with terrorism and deal effectively with the refugee crisis. But ultimately, Brexit is what the market fears most: uncertainty. The Rivel Research Group is a marketing research firm that focuses on analysing date from the investment community. As part of this study it canvassed opinion of 333 global buy-side investors.
India is poised to be a standout among global stock markets over the next five years, outperforming developed markets, according to Newtons head of emerging markets, Rob Marshall-Lee.

Speaking at the press briefing yesterday, Marshall-Lee says India should be able to meet its long term growth potential thanks to positive economic reforms and its attractive demographics.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is making all the right reforms. He is setting the economy up for its long term future, not focusing purely on the short-term. A lot of markets get bored by that, but for us, it is really exciting, he said.

Euan Thompson, head of emerging markets for Neptune agreed, saying earlier this month to Morningstar that that India was his favoured market because it was the most stable opportunity and, the most protected market from the on/off commodity oscillation.

Many emerging markets have been hit by the recent fall in oil prices  and overall emerging market performance if correlated to the performance of this commodity. But India, bucks this trend: as one of the worlds largest importers of oil it has been a net beneficiary of falling commodity prices over the past two years.

Strong Demographics Drive Indian Economic Growth

Indias population is set to grow by up to 8% annually for the next 30 years, thanks to its favourable demographics, according to Paul Sheard, chief economist at S&P Global.

Indias working age population growth is forecast to be above 20% from 2015 to 2035, the third largest growth across 24 countries, according to the United Nations population data provided by Marshall-Lee. Nigeria topped the chart with about 70% growth while Philippines came second with more than 30% growth. However strong population growth does not necessarily trigger growth in economy, depending on how policy markers react.

Strong demographics can be a very positive thing if managed correctly. Modi has put in place all the proper labour reforms, unleashing the productivity potential, Marshall-Lee explained.

Marshall-Lee says this strong demographic is backed by profitability growth and low levels of debt in the Indian economy. With these advantages it is perhaps not surprising that his holdings in India have outperformed by 15% compared to the general MSCI index over the past 12 months.

Marshall-Lee also likes other commodities importing countries including Philippines and China - although he only invests in education, healthcare and e-commerce sector in China thanks to the growth of consumers industries in the country.

Rise of Consumer Class

Marshall-Lee is investing in many consumer-focused stocks, which are benefitting from the growth of an emerging middle class in India.

For example he is overweight in tobacco stocks. When people are getting more money, they are spending them on cigarettes as a luxury item. Bear in mind that in India, probably 90% of tobacco consumption are hand-rolls. So when people are getting cigarettes thats their special treat, he explained.

Private banks are another interesting opportunity that Marhsall-Lee sees a lot of growth potential, with high returns on equities. Private Banks are much smaller than the state-owned banks, but are growing 20-25% year-on-year, as the government has actively been encouraging growth in this sector.

Marshall-Lee also likes other consumer focused sectors, such as jewellery and cinema companies.

Foreign investment in India is also booming. In Mumbai, at the Make in India Week exposition, attended by more than 10,000 government and business delegations from 72 countries, $220 billion of investment was committed, creating jobs and boosting manufacturing, according to Kunal Desai, manager of the Neptune India Fund.

Whilst it is debatable how much investment will materialise, we believe it goes some way to show the intent of policymakers  other emerging markets are not approaching foreign companies with this scale and coordination, says Desai.

Brexit Less Impact on Emerging Markets

In terms of the impact on emerging markets, Marshall-Lee believes that Brexit might trigger short-term volatility in emerging markets, however he says the effect is likely to be far less marked than on developed markets.

If Brexit was to occur, it would basically weaken sterling and euro, leading to them less attractive in their returns. But it wont weaken emerging market currencies, he said.
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Each click of the air conditioner is adding to the price of natural gas these days.

After falling below $1.70 per Mcf earlier this year, prices have rebounded to the $2.50 range.

The sentiment is, this summer is going to be a hot one, said Michael Banschbach, an oil, gas and power marketing consultant in Midland.

As the heat increases, air conditioning runs will increase, electricity demand will increase and demand for natural gas will increase, he said.

But if it doesnt get as hot as expected, prices could well retreat, Banschbach said.

Also threatening gas prices is the amount of fuel in storage, he said. There is an estimated at 3,000 billion cubic feet in storage, up about 20 percent from the typical 2,400 Bcf in storage this time of year, as seen in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The Energy Information Administration reported earlier this month that U.S. production hit a record high 79 billion cubic feet per day in 2015, up 5 percent from 2014 levels. The agency said five states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and North Dakota -- were responsible for most of this growth, offsetting declines in much of the rest of the United States.

A hot summer could deplete that storage in a hurry, Banschbach said. Several months of hot weather and storage could fall below levels seen the last few years, stabilizing prices.

Just as a hot summer could deplete natural gas supplies, a rebounding oil market could restore supplies, he said. Higher oil prices could prompt producers to complete a number of the thousands of oil wells that have drilled but not completed amid low prices, bringing to market the natural gas that is produced alongside the crude.

People look at the storage numbers every week, he said. Its a big driver of futures prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Traders pay a lot of attention to drawdowns and additions.

He said the price of natural gas hasnt increased enough to prompt producers to implement more active drilling programs. In oil basins such as the Permian, natural gas is typically 25 percent of a producers revenue stream, while oil comprises the remaining 75 percent. Oil prices still drive whether or not a new-drilled well is completed, he said. Add another $1 (to gas prices) and it would be a different story, he said.

Still, Banschbach has a bullish outlook for the fuel. He noted that the 18-month futures strip averages about $3 per natural gas, something that hasnt been seen in quite some time.

Prices could be supported by new demand, or demand shifting from coal, for natural gas to fuel electric-generating plants, especially amid growing concern about fossil fuel impact on the environment.

Even though its not the chosen child of the green movement, natural gas is better than coal, he said.

There are also efforts to increase the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel, with compressed natural-gas fueling stations cropping up across the country, including in Midland.

Using more natural gas in transportation wont be rapid or soak up the huge overhang of natural gas but it will be a component of demand, Banschbach said.

The EIA forecasts domestic consumption of natural gas will rise from 28 trillion cubic feet in 2015 to 34 Tcf in 2040, increasing an average 1 percent annually. Demand from the industrial and electric power sectors will comprise 49 percent and 34 percent of this growth, respectively. Demand from the residential commercial and transportation sectors will be far lower.

Most of the natural gas to meet that demand is expected to come from increased development of shale gas and tight oil plays, according to the EIA.

About half of the nations total dry natural gas production already comes from shale gas and tight oil plays, according to the agency in its Annual Energy Outlook 2016 report. Production from those plays is projected to rise from about 14 Tcf last year to 29 Tcf in 2040, when it will contribute 69 percent of the nations total dry natural gas production.

This category includes natural gas produced from shale formations as well as from tight oil plays, which are low-permeability sandstones, carbonates, and shale formations. The specific plays included in this category are the Sanish-Three Forks in the Bakken, Eagle Ford, Woodford, Austin Chalk, Spraberry, Niobrara, Avalon-Bone Springs and Monterey formations.

As a result of this growth, the EIA expects production will outpace consumption, turning the U.S. into a net exporter of natural gas by 2018, the first time since the 1950s. By 2040, net exports of natural gas could reach 7.5 Tcf, 18 percent of total domestic production.
GALVESTON, Texas (AP)  Authorities in Galveston, Texas, say a 5-year-old girl has been taken to a hospital after a shark bit her leg.

Galveston Beach Patrol Chief Peter Davis says the girl was in the water off Pirates Beach around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday with her father and brother when the shark bit her.
SEATTLE (AP)  A student at Seattle Pacific University is shown pepper-spraying a gunman then taking him to the ground during an on-campus attack in video released by authorities.

The King County Prosecutor's Office released the footage Tuesday to satisfy a public records request.

In the video, a man identified by authorities as Aaron Ybarra, then 27, is seen entering a campus building holding a shotgun. He shoots and injures one student before student Jon Meis runs into the lobby, drags him to the ground and takes the shotgun.

Police say Ybarra killed one male student on June 5, 2014, outside the building.

Ybarra has pleaded not guilty to murder and other charges and his trial is scheduled for September. His defense attorney Ramona Brandes has not disputed accounts of the shooting and says her client suffers from mental illness.

The video shows the gunman entering a lobby that appeared to be occupied by one student who initially didn't see him. A gun is pointed toward the student as a female student descends a staircase, also not immediately seeing the gunman.

The gunman fires at her and the other student runs away. The wounded student slowly walks away as the gunman appears to be reloading.

Meis arrives, squirts the gunman in the face with pepper spray and lunges at him, taking him down in a neck hold then removing the gun. The shooter rolls around before Meis returns, grabbing him again in a headlock before another man joins the fight.

At the time of the shooting, Seattle police praised Meis, a student monitor in the building, saying he "heroically intervened."

The state Court of Appeals in December upheld a ruling ordering the footage released under Washington's Public Records Act. It was sought by Seattle TV stations KOMO, KIRO, KING and Q13 Fox, as well as The Seattle Times.

The school said in a statement that it was disappointed with the release of the surveillance videos.

"We, along with others, have pursued legal action to stop the videos' release in order to protect individual privacy and prevent the emotional distress these images will have on our community," the school said.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  Texas can't keep out Syrian refugees, a federal judge has ruled, dismissing concerns state Republican leaders' sounded over hidden extremists following the Paris attacks and revived this week by Donald Trump following the nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida.

Texas was the first state to sue the Obama administration over resettlements, though nearly 30 states vowed to ban Syrian refugees after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris killed 130 people. But U.S. District Judge David Godbey threw out the lawsuit in an order signed Wednesday, ruling that Texas had no authority over resettlements that are handled by the federal government.

Similar challenges by other states have also sputtered: Indiana's attempts to bar state agencies from helping Syrian refugees have been blocked by a federal judge, and the Obama administration is seeking dismissal of an Alabama lawsuit that is nearly identical to the one filed in Texas.

"This ruling is a strong rebuke of unconstitutional efforts to block refugee resettlement. It sends the clear message to other states that such attempts are not only un-American, they are contrary to the law and will fail in court," said Cecilia Wang of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented a nonprofit resettlement organization in the Texas case.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the state is now considering its options.

"I am disappointed with the court's determination that Texas cannot hold the federal government accountable to consult with us before resettling refugees here," Paxton said.

The Obama administration says refugee vetting is rigorous and can take up to two years.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate who has renewed his call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants following the Orlando shooting, supporters at Wednesday in Atlanta that the United States is taking in thousands of refugees when they "don't think like us" and we don't know "who the hell they are."

CIA Director John Brennan told a Senate intelligence committee Thursday that the agency has found no connection between the Orlando gunman, who was an American-raised Muslim and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook and during a 911 call, and any foreign terrorist organization.

Godbey, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, had previously knocked Texas for offering "largely speculative hearsay" about extremists possibly infiltrating Syrian refugees. In Indiana, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt has said Gov. Mike Pence's order denying state help to Syrian refugees "clearly discriminates" against refugees from the war-torn country.

___
One of the sweetest, most tragic stories to come from the worst mass shooting in American history is that of Brenda Lee Marquez McCool.

The 49-year-old mother of 11 was reportedly a two-time cancer survivor who was at Pulse nightclub for a little salsa dancing and quality time with her gay son, Isaiah Henderson.

She supported him that much, CNNs Anderson Cooper noted in an emotional reading of victims names and brief biographical sketches.

Her sister-in-law told the New York Daily News that after McCool saw the gun, she told her son to get down and got in front of him. She was shot to death. He survived.

McCools is a story of love, of acceptance, of family.

Its beauty rising above the blood and broken glass.

As commentators focus on hate and terrorism and gun laws  all vital conversations  Ive been struck by something else.

An inhumane act has forced us to see the humanity in a group thats often ostracized, deprived of civil rights and maligned in political discourse.

Its easy for those who dont have many gay friends or know any transgender or bisexual people to see them as other, as one-dimensional symbols of moral relativism or a churning social order.

Usually, LGBT people make the news because someone is trying to restrict the bathrooms they use or whom they can marry. Contentious debates dont breed empathy.

The attack in Orlando by an ISIS-sympathizing fanatic was intended to deepen these divides.

Instead, in one of the few cracks of light in a gruesome scene of carnage, the shooting has forced us to see gay people outside the sphere of contention.

We see them as survivors in news conferences, surrounded by friends and family.

We see them in cellphone videos as heroes, helping carry victims to safety. We see them in the stories trickling from news outlets:

Luis Vielma was 22 and worked at the Harry Potter ride at Universal Orlando, CNN reported.

Antonio Davon Brown was a 29-year-old captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, served in Kuwait and was the most incredible friend, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Leroy Valentin Fernandez was a 25-year-old apartment leasing agent. And he loved to sing.

He filled our office with music, Yolanda Quinones-Perez, Fernandezs friend and manager told the Sentinel. He sang Adele in the office until we couldnt take it anymore.

Somehow, this horror has given him and the others a voice that is stronger and clearer and, hopefully, more enduring than any skirmish in the cultural war.

There are so many messages, so many lessons in this latest terror attack. Hate, all of it, every kind, corrodes and kills. Love, all of it, every kind, heals.

But, as Stephen Colbert said in an uncharacteristically sober late-night address: We must remember love is a verb. To love means to do something, he told viewers.

Maybe that means calling your congressman and demanding that he or she support reinstating the assault weapons ban or legislation to make it harder for suspected terrorists to obtain firearms. Maybe it means attending a vigil. Or your first gay pride parade.

Or maybe it is the simple act of looking at the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting and seeing them not as gay or straight. But as people. As fellow Americans, with mothers and brothers and jobs and flaws and dreams.

Maybe, finally, this tragedy will bring us together.

Its the last thing the terrorists and other dividers want. Its the only thing that will save us.

Vigil for victims of Orlando shooting

The Universalist Unitarian Church of Midland, 3301 Neely Ave., is planning a vigil at 7 p.m. today for the victims of the Orlando, Florida, nightclub shooting.

Child care will be provided.
The Night Gunter Beat Ronnie & Rocked the Bodybuilding World

Written by Peter McGough

16 June 2016

The Night Gunter Beat Ronnie

And Rocked the Bodybuilding World

In the biggest bodybuilding shock since this scribe put his finger in a backstage light socket at the Poughkeepsie Open, Gunter Schlierkamp defeated reigning Mr. O Ronnie Coleman at the 2002 GNC Show of Strength in New Orleans on November 8 of that year. This was three weeks after Coleman nabbed his fifth Sandow, with crowd favorite Schlierkamp finishing four spots behind.

This was the first time a reigning Mr. Olympia has not been top dog in a contest since Samir Bannout lost his title to Lee Haney in 1984. And the only previous times a reigning Mr. O has lost outside of the Olympia was when Sergio Oliva gave way to Arnold Schwarzenegger at the 1970 Pro World, then a few weeks later lost again to Arnold at that year's Mr. Olympia showdown.

At the announcement of Coleman in second place, Schlierkamp dropped to the stage, mimicking Coleman's usual flat-to-the boards victory reaction. He collapsed in convulsions of joyful sobs as the less than capacity audience went bonkers. As Schlierkamp regained his feet he stood, tears in his eyes, as buddy and fellow pro, the non-competing Kevin Levrone, raced onstage and embraced the big German. Levrone had finished as the runner-up to Coleman in the Mr. O three weeks earlier, and he called Schlierkamps win, One of the highlights of my life". For his part Ronnie wasnt too happy at Levrone onstage actions, feeling it was unsportsmanlike.

OH, WHAT A NIGHT!

Against that historic background, and the seemingly unwritten law that a Mr. Olympia -- like Jay Leno in a chinning contest -- never loses, what were we to make of this stunning result? Over to you Dr. Phil, "What y'all have to understand is that exploiting other peoples' miseries makes me rich and happy." The thoughts of a man starting his own bodybuilding federation, perhaps?

But we digress. As the result thundered around the bodybuilding world, the conspiracy theorists soon began shouting fix, a cry that had others asking what are you smoking, you grassy know-alls? What was beyond doubt was that Gunters win shook up the serial winning monotony of the Olympia scene but claims of skullduggery were about as legitimate as a chocolate squat rack.

The truth is sometimes in bodybuilding, momentum takes hold, and in the latter half of 2002 no one generated more momentum  save Dom DeLuise on a ski slope than 300 pound Gunter Schlierkamp. At the 2002 Olympia he was a revelation; a special invite who had never cracked the top ten, he was overlooked early on before finishing faster than a rookie in a whorehouse.

Simply put, at the 2002 Olympia Ronnie was not at his best, while Gunter was at his all-time best having made major improvements in his upper body while hitting it right on the button, condition and fullnesswise. The recipient of an Olympia standing ovation he took that "man of the moment" momentum to New Orleans, and with everyone mindful of happenings three weeks earlier, he got the first call-out and captivated the judges and audience alike in taking all four rounds against a Coleman who was actually better than at the Olympia. What should not be forgotten is that between the Olympia and the Show of Strength contests Coleman had traveled to Europe and won the Dutch Grand Prix. And while Ronnie was clocking up those frequent flyer miles Gunter was sitting stateside and waiting. Was Schlierkamp four rounds to zip better than Coleman, and if he had not done so well at the Olympia would he have received the first call out in New Orleans? Was Gandhis dying request, Now can I have a friggin' sandwich?

THE AFTERMATH

Ronnie is a great champion, who lost out to the physique of a peak Schlierkamp, but probably more succinctly, lost to the physique he himself fashioned in winning the 2001 Arnold Classic. However as 2003 dawned Ronnie was still Mr. Olympia and having been given a bigger wake-up call than a hobo sleeping under Big Ben he returned to that years Olympia at a huge 287 pounds and crushed the opposition.

The 2002 Show Of Strength was Gunter Schlierkamps shining moment. It was the peak of his career and he was never as good again, and closed out his career with tenth spot at the 2006 Olympia. But oh, what a moment he had that sweltering and sensational night in New Orleans.

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Governor Brown Releases Budget View Photos

Sacramento, CA  Republicans and Democrats have different opinions of the $122.5 billion budget approved Wednesday afternoon.

The spending details were worked out last week by Governor Jerry Brown and Democratic leaders, and formally approved yesterday in the Assembly and Senate. It will increase spending for safety net programs and add $2-billion to the rainy day fund.

Assembly Democratic Speaker Anthony Rendon says, This budget is both responsible and visionary. We make these investments while ensuring our fiscal stability by growing the states Rainy Day Fund. This is a very positive budget  and a very positive step for California.

Mother Lode District Five Republican Assemblyman Frank Bigelow was disappointed with the end result, saying, State spending has increased by $36 billion since the 2011-2012 state budget. This type of increased spending is just not sustainable. The bottom line is our budget continues to grow. We have to get serious about ways we can cut state spending and pay down more debt.

Senate Democratic Leader Kevin DeLeon feels the additional spending is a positive, saying, It makes key investments to fight poverty and homelessness, bolsters education from pre-school to college, and targets critical funding for health care and public safety while setting aside significant savings to hedge against harder times.

Republican Board of Equalization Member George Runner responded, The governor is wise to boost the states rainy day fund by an additional $2 billion, especially with the threat of a recession looming. However, the majority party has produced another budget that breaks spending records and doesnt wisely spend taxpayer dollars.This budget does little to improve our neglected roads, and if budgets are about setting priorities, you have to consider the statement the majority party is making.

Governor Brown is expected to sign the budget sometime in the coming days.
If we had the FDLE as a third party check, then maybe we could have avoided this, began State Representative John Cortes, who represents District 43 in Kissimmee as a Democrat.

State Rep. John Cortes and other Central Florida lawmakers are calling for a special legislative session

Lawmakes want to prevent another Pulse shooting from happening in the state



A group of Central Florida lawmakers are urging Gov. Rick Scott to call for a special legislative session so they can present their idea on how to prevent another Pulse Shooting in the State of Florida.

Several democratic state senators and state representatives attended the news conference on the steps of the Orange County Courthouse Wednesday morning.

Its been narrowly tailored to be something to deal with getting guns out of the hands of terrorists. We believe thats something both parties can get behind, said Democratic State Senator Darren Soto, who represents District 14, which spans Orange, Osceola and Polk counties.



State lawmakers said their idea for narrow gun reform would stop known or suspected terrorists from buying or owning guns in the State of Florida.

Its a proposal they believe could prevent future tragedies.



Im a father. Im a politician, a legislator but Im a father first. When the news came that I almost lost my son, that even struck me even harder, Cortes explained.



Thats because Cortes said his son J.P. Cortes was planning to go to Pulse nightclub Saturday night, with two of the victims, 32-year-old Christopher Andrew Leinonen and 22-year-old Juan Ramon Guerrero.



He was supposed to go to the club with them but then he had to go to a birthday party with a girl. So that girl saved his life because he had to go to that party, Cortes continued.



Meanwhile, the proposal would ban people who are on or have been on the FBI's "Watch List" and "No-Fly List" from buying guns in Florida.

State lawmakers also want to give the Florida Department of Law Enforcement authority to use its own extensive background checks to check out suspected terrorists who are cleared by the FBI, before they're legally able to buy or own a gun in Florida.



I think that will be a plus because then the FDLE will have the final say, whether the guy can buy a gun or not, Cortes said.



Local lawmakers are hoping they will have enough support to convene a special session in Tallahassee in July.
Time stood still.

That's how Dr. Joshua Stephany, the chief medical examiner for Orange and Osceola counties, described walking into the Pulse nightclub after the attack on Sunday morning.

Dr. Joshua Stephany only became chief medical examiner permanently on Tuesday

Asked Mayor Dyer to get Gov. Scott to declare a state of emergency so he could get help

Says calls of support came from all over

"Time stopped. Thats what was happening at the time of the incident, said Stephany. The doctor described, for the first time, what he saw as he walked into Pulse nightclub Sunday morning: broken glasses, bills waiting to be paid.

Thats when he set out a plan.

Getting all the deceased here [to his office], one, getting them all identified two, getting them all autopsied three, he said, checking off on his fingers.

The doctor, just appointed Tuesday, has served as the interim Medical Examiner since last summer. Wednesday, he spoke with only a handful of reporters from the office along East Michigan Street in Orlando.

As he arrived on scene, Dr. Stephany said one of the first conversations he had was with Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer. He told Dyer to ask the governor to declare a state of emergency, so he could activate the Florida Emergency Mortuary Operations Response System, or FEMORS, to help.

He said the office, which covers both Orange and Osceola counties, typically deals with 7-15 autopsies per day. Despite the influx, they were never overwhelmed, thanks to the additional resources they brought in.

Thats one fact Im very proud of, he said. "Normal business did not falter.

That help included Dr. Jason Byrd from FEMORS, and two doctors from Sarasota.

By noon we had our first people on the ground, by 3 oclock we were able to start taking calls and amassing information, said Dr. Byrd.

Eight phone lines were set up for family and friends to share identifying information about their loved ones. Instead of the usual four doctors, seven performed 50 autopsies. Calls of support came in from medical examiners across the state; they even received a call from San Francisco, which subsequently sent pizza to their office. He said that amount of support made their job go more smoothly.

By early Monday afternoon, everyone had been identified.

At that point, our main job was to reunite these individuals with their loved ones, said Dr. Stephany. When youre a family member, any time is too long.

The doctor clarified erroneous reports of there not being ample space, telling us there are four coolers which can hold over 150 individuals. He also shared that they kept the shooters body separate from the victims, from transporting to storing, out of respect.

I dont want to see the victims as the person who took their life, and I dont think any of my staff wanted to see that, he said.

Stephany said hes been so entrenched in his work the last few days, he hasnt watched the news, or felt the full magnitude of the event in the community in which he lives. He knows it will hit them, later.

Ive cut off friends who tried texting me and ask me how Im doing because I cant answer them, he said. I think its the sheer number involved that will probably affect us.
The medical examiners office has wrapped up its duties and the funerals have begun for the victims of Sundays mass shooting.

Katherine's Florist in Clermont is donating flowers to the immediate families of the victims

The families can get a casket piece and two other pieces

As the community continues to offer support for the families of the victims, a local florist is donating free floral arrangements for the funerals.



On Wednesday, Harold Morgan delivered his first batch of free flowers to a family in mourning as they prepared to bury their loved one.

Its the least thing you can do, said Morgan, owner of Katherines Florist in Clermont.

When word of the mass shooting spread on Sunday, Morgan said he was quick to donate blood.

What else can we do? And my daughter straight away, said We can do something. We can give flowers.

So Katherines Florist in Clermont announced that they will give immediate family of all 49 victims a casket piece and two other pieces.

It doesnt matter what it is, it can be a casket piece, a heart, a cross, a wreath, whatever they want, Morgan said. We will donate. It can be roses, carnations, daisies, anything they want. If we can get the flowers well donate them.

He and his florists are working around the clock to deliver on their promise and are partnering with a florist in Jacksonville to complete all of the orders.

Right now 49 wreaths are being made that will be displayed at a memorial during President Obamas visit to Orlando.

So tomorrow morning we got the florist in early and were making them for tomorrow, Morgan said.

Harold said flowers are being shipped overnight to his store so that they can be cut fresh and arranged with care, ready to be delivered to those families that are tragically tasked with planning a funeral.

They dont have to worry about the flowers, Morgan said.
AMARILLO - Xcel Energy has promoted Brooke Trammell to the position of director, Customer and Community Relations, for Xcel Energys New Mexico and Texas service area.

Trammell succeeds Brenda Holland, who retired in April. In her new role, Trammell will lead the teams responsible for business and community relationships and will coordinate business-related projects.
With Unity in the Community, Plainview will mark Juneteenth 2016 with a two-day celebration on Friday and Saturday, June 17-18, with a parade, picnics and other activities.

On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers lead by Major Gen. Gordon Granger landed at Galveston. In addition to bringing news that the Civil War had ended, Granger announced that all blacks in Texas were free.

Grangers General Order No. 3 read, The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with the Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.

In Plainview this year, the celebration begins at 5 p.m. Friday with a free hamburger cookout sponsored by Atmos Energy at Givins Park. The hamburgers will be grilled by Atmos Energy.

On Saturday, the traditional Juneteenth Parade begins 10 a.m. Participants are asked to be at the old Furrs Supermarket parking lot, Second and Broadway, no later than 9 a.m.

The parade will move north on Broadway to the Santa Fe Depot, jog one block west, then continue north on Walter Griffith Street before disbanding at Givens Park.

A program will follow at 11:30 a.m. Saturday in the open-air shelter at Givens Park. After welcomes offered by Mayor Wendell Dunlap and others, Pastor Sandra Gardner be keynote speaker.

A picnic and other activities, including food and activity booths, begin at 1 p.m. in Givens Park.

The public is invited to all events.
For this young mother, it was more than a birthday party. It was a testimony to her faith and to the strength and resiliency of her 1-year-old daughter, Azalea Faith Garcia, who spent the first year of her life overcoming health problems that would knock most adults to their knees.

"She had a real good time," said Jazmin Garcia as she described the recent Minnie Mouse-themed birthday party for Azalea.

As the 1-year-old joyfully played, Jazmin said you couldn't tell Azalea spent the first months of her life in and out of surgeries, and currently lives with the assistance of a dialysis machine in her bedroom.

"I was about six months pregnant when I went to the doctor for a regular check-up," Jazmin said, describing the first day she found out something was wrong with the pregnancy for her third child.

Discovering swelling and what appeared to be a blockage in the fetus' abdomen region, Jazmin was immediately sent to a specialist.

"Dr. Smith was kind of concerned. At first we thought it was her gallbladder that was swollen. But after seeing a specialist they discovered she had renal failure," Jazmin added.

Jazmine said doctors found that Azalea's right kidney had some sort of blockage, while the left was not fully developing and was only functioning at 10 percent.

Jazmine and husband, Max, were sent to Dallas' Medical City Hospital to be monitored.

Doctors considered performing surgery to drain some fluid from Azalea's body, but they abandoned the idea because of the high risk.

Doctors did what they could and were able to keep Azalea alive for the next three months.

On May 27, Azalea was born in the hospital's neonatal intensive-care unit.

Azalea's kidneys were still not functioning, so a few days later doctors ordered the newborn to undergo surgery to place a dialysis catheter on the side of her stomach.

"It was heartbreaking, and overwhelming," Jazmin said.

Shortly after the catheter was put in, Azalea underwent two more surgeries to repair hernias.

Despite the challenges, Jazmin knew her daughter would rise above and survive the trials.

"It was pretty scary, but she did good," Jazmin said. "For the most part, I knew she would survive through it. I had a lot of faith and I knew that she would make it."

The young family spent the next few months in Dallas living with Max's mother while Azalea stayed in NICU.

On July 29, Azalea was finally released from the hospital and the family was able to return to Plainview.

But Azalea wasn't out of the woods yet. She would have to connect to a peritoneal dialysis machine every night in order to cleanse her body of toxins the kidneys would normally clean.

The process is still tough. Azalea must connect and stay in one spot for 12 hours, a challenge for any baby. At one point, Azalea even disconnected the lines and spilled the toxins into her mouth and had to be rushed to the hospital.

But, the family has made it through and has no plans of stopping.

Azalea's first birthday was a milestone to which the family looks forward to adding.

"She's a strong baby," said Jazmin, adding that she gains a lot of inspiration from her daughter.

"I think if she can make it, I can make," Jazmin said.

Jazmin said once Azalea weighs 33 pounds, she can be put on the kidney transplant list.

"At the moment she's about 20 pounds," Jazmin said.
HARTFORD  During a ceremony at Elizabeth Park Wednesday afternoon, Record-Journal reporter Mike Savino received the annual Stephen J. Collins Award from the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information for his continued push for an open and accountable government.



Savino, who started with the Record-Journal in May, has championed several freedom of information issues over the last year. Most notably, he fought to obtain documents from the state Board of Education related to mandatory testing. The board refused to release the data as a courtesy to local school officials, said CCFOI Treasurer Mary Connolly, prompting Savino to file a complaint with the state Freedom of Information Commission. He won the complaint, forcing school officials to release the data.



Stephen would be very happy to have his name associated with Mike, who is a great reporter, Connolly said.



Collins was the longtime editorial director of The News-Times. He and others worked with the late Gov. Ella T. Grasso to pass the state Freedom of Information Act in 1975.



Savino, the incoming president of the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists, said his complaint against the state Board of Education was about the principle quite frankly.



Its really about more than just the press, its about people getting access, he said. If they choose to rely on the press to get that information, thats their choice, but really anybody should be able to get information about the way their government is serving.



Also honored Wednesday was James H. Smith, who served as executive editor of the Record-Journal from 1992 until 2005. He received the organizations Outstanding Service Award for serving as CCFOIs president for the past five years. Dan Klau was elected to succeed him.



Youre not only a tough act to follow, youre an impossible act to follow, Klau told Smith.



Smith, who has championed several freedom of information issues during his long career, told those in attendance that he was motivated to pursue journalism after his English professor in college criticized his writing.



Thats when I decided to learn to write, and thats become my career, Smith said. So for 45 years, Ive been putting one word after the other to make sense.



He added, Nobody should stop anybody from writing what you need to write.






The State Elections Enforcement Commission agreed to drop its lawsuit seeking enforcement of a subpoena for campaign records as part of an agreement that calls for the Democratic State Central Committee to pay $325,000 to the state.



The agreement ends the SEECs investigation into a Republican-filed complaint that Democrats improperly used a federal campaign account to pay for mailers that supported Gov. Dannel P. Malloys 2014 re-election. A judge still needs to accept the stipulated settlement.



As part of the agreement, the Democratic party also agrees to drop a lawsuit that would block the SEEC from trying to enforce state election laws that bar the use of donations from state contractors in state elections.



Parties have state and federal election accounts to ensure contributions and expenditures comply with requirements, including a Connecticut law that bars the use of donations from state contractors.



Senate Minority Leader Leonard A. Fasano was among the Republicans who criticized the agreement Wednesday, saying in a statement that the SEEC can be bought.



Today the SEEC is disregarding their responsibility and moral obligation to protect taxpayers from special interest money creeping its way into elections, Fasano said.



Michael J. Brandi, the general counsel and executive director of the elections commission, talked to reporters before the settlement became available. He said that once you read the terms of the agreement I think youll see were trying to move forward here with stronger campaign finance laws.



The $325,000 is labeled a voluntary payment. Brandi said the commission views it as a penalty of egregious behavior, and that it will deter violations in the future. Its the first six-figure payment ever made to SEEC.



The Democratic party had claimed that the 2014 mailers that prompted the complaint were for get-out-the-vote activity, and that they were required to use their federal account to pay the cost. Federal law deems get-out-the-vote to be federal election activity, even if mailers or other materials benefit statewide candidates.



Additionally, those working in a financial capacity for the party or Malloys campaign cannot hold similar positions until most of the $325,000 payment is made.



Lawmakers approved rules on state contractor donations and the creation of Citizen Election Program after a series of political scandals, including one that prompted Gov. John G. Rowland to resign in 2004.



State Democratic party Executive Director Michael Mandell also praised the settlement, approved by SEEC with a 2-1 vote, calling the agreement a positive step forward.



The voluntary agreement we have entered into will clarify a fundamental legal question that we raised and pursued in order to resolve a conflicting intersection between state and federal law, and it will help ensure the continued viability of the Citizens Election Program going forward, he said in a statement.



msavino@record-journal.com 203-317-2266 Twitter: @reporter_savino






The As have yet to name a starter for Saturdays game against the Angels, but manager Bob Melvin said Thursday that it wont be rehabbing right-hander Henderson Alvarez - even though Alvarez was under consideration.

It has crossed our minds, but at this point, its not going to be the case, Melvin said. Trust me, Id love to do it. ... It would be really exciting and I know hed be excited.

Given the fact that Alvarezs lone setback in his return from shoulder surgery came in the fifth inning of a rehab game last month, however, the decision was made to get him past the 70 pitch mark this time around and make sure there is no further issue. You dont want to go down that road, Melvin said.

That leaves few options for Saturday. Jesse Hahn hasnt spent 10 days in the minor leagues so only can return in the event of an injury. Chris Smith is not on the 40-man roster and the As have little wriggle with the roster; theyd have to take a chance someone such as outfielder Andrew Lambo isnt claimed on waivers to find a spot because they dont have any more 60-day DL candidates.

Its full and over full, with the DLs, Melvin said of the roster.

The likelihood, then, is a bullpen game, especially given the fact that Zach Neal had been starting at Triple-A Nashville; Neal has yet to be effective in his outings with Oakland and his stuff has been unimpressive. And a bullpen game is less than ideal with Eric Surkamp going on Sunday; he hasnt made it out of the third in two of his past three outings, but the As might have to cross their fingers and wait to call up Hahn when he is eligible to return. Hahn is starting Saturday for Nashville, so he is on turn to go, but the As have no potential DL candidates at the moment that would allow him to return early. And Hahn isnt the most worthy option at Nashville - Dillon Overton has been pitching very well for the Sounds, but he started Wednesday (four hits and no earned runs in seven innings) so wouldnt be ready Saturday.

In a just world, Overton gets the next shot, given the fact that Oakland really has two openings in the rotation (Surkamp has not been getting job done), but he isnt on the 40-man. Surkamp would be a potential waiver possibility, though; given his results, the left-hander isnt a huge risk to be claimed. After Sunday, maybe thats a path for the As to consider.

Heres the lineup vs. Texas on Thursday: Crisp LF, Lowrie 2B, Vogt C, Valencia 3B, Davis DH, Alonso 1B, Semien SS, Muncy RF, Burns CF. Its Daniel Mengden on the mound, making his second big-league start and first at the Coliseum.

With the As run of facing left-handed starters over, Jake Smolinski returns to the bench. Melvin said he believes Smolinski could be an everyday big-leaguer at some point, but with Josh Reddick (thumb) returning soon, thats not in the plans right now. Smolinski was 8 for 16 with two homers during his six-game hitting streak.

Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sslusser@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: susanslusser
The day after a 34-year-old San Jose police officer died in a traffic collision while on motorcycle patrol, the community continued to mourn the father of two and fellow officers set up a charitable fund to aid his family.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo lamented the death of Officer Michael Katherman on Wednesday, lauding his 11-years of service on the force.

Heroes inspire and sustain all of us through their sacrifice, Liccardo said in a statement. SJPD Officer Mike Katherman performed his noble duty to serve and protect until his last moments. I ask our residents to join in sending our prayers to Mikes wife, his sons, his family and friends, and the entire SJPD family in this time of mourning.

Katherman was riding his motorcycle north on North 10th Street around 4:20 p.m Tuesday when a man in a silver minivan heading south tried to turn left onto Horning Street and the vehicles collided, police said.

After the crash, a witness rushed to perform CPR on Katherman and used the officers police radio to call for help, said San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia. When police arrived, they continued trying to revive Katherman and took him to Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The mini-van driver was cooperating with authorities, and officials said there was no indication drugs or alcohol played a role.

Kathermans fellow officers will wear black slashes over their badges in his honor, police said.

The San Jose Police Department is mourning, this community is mourning, but we will strive to live up to officer Kathermans sacrifice on a daily basis. Garcia said at a Tuesday night news conference.

The San Jose Police Officers Association announced Wednesday members have created a charitable donation fund on behalf of the wife and children of Katherman.

The men and women who make up the San Jose Police Officers Association are grieving the loss of one of our brothers, Police Officer Michael Katherman, an 11-year veteran, who was killed in an on-duty traffic collision, the association stated. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Officer Kathermans family and friends.

Katherman is the third officer to have died in a motorcycle crash this year and the third officer fatality in California, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

Donors can make contributions online or mail checks payable to SJPOACF at: 1151 N. Fourth St., San Jose, Calif., 95112 with Michael Katherman written in the memo line.

Kevin Schultz and Jenna Lyons are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kschultz@sfchronicle.com, jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: KevinEdSchultz, @JennaJourno
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Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf abruptly fired interim Police Chief Ben Fairow on Wednesday, six days after hiring him to replace a chief who resigned amid a sexual misconduct scandal in the department.

Schaaf said she removed Fairow from the top post after she received information that has caused me to lose confidence in Ben Fairows ability to lead the Oakland Police Department at this particular moment in time. She said it was a mistake to install him.

I own the mistake I made, and the important thing is Im fixing it. Im fixing it quickly, and Im not trying to hide, the mayor said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

The sudden dismissal highlighted the chaos and uncertainty that has seized City Hall and the Police Department as officials grapple with a bizarre internal investigation that centers on an underage sex worker and her interactions with multiple Oakland police officers and sworn personnel from several other law enforcement agencies.

On Wednesday, the San Francisco Police Department became the latest agency to open an internal investigation into whether its officers had relations with the young woman at the center of the scandal. The Richmond Police Department is also conducting an internal inquiry. Also Wednesday, the Alameda County district attorneys office reported that one of its inspectors had been put on administrative leave in connection with the case.

Whent resigns

Schaaf had named Fairow as the interim chief late last Thursday night after announcing that Police Chief Sean Whent had resigned for personal reasons, and the mayor refused to comment on whether Whents resignation was connected to the sex scandal.

With the abrupt resignation of Sean Whent last week, we sought to have seamless leadership of the Oakland Police Department and selected an individual who understood the dynamics in Oakland and who, based on his previous employment with OPD, could hit the ground running, Schaaf said.

On Wednesday, Schaaf said Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa would assume the role of acting chief as the city searches for an outside candidate to lead the department.

Five Oakland police officers were placed on leave as the investigation into the sex workers dealings continues, and two of those officers resigned in May.

The mayor said Wednesday that her administration was doing a background check of Fairow on Monday when certain information was learned that prompted her decision to fire him. She wouldnt disclose what the information was, citing a state law that requires confidentiality for police personnel files.

But later Wednesday, BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey issued a public statement saying he welcomed Fairow back to his job, and that Fairow had informed him that he had an extramarital affair more than a decade ago  none of which precludes him from serving as a sworn law enforcement officer or as one of my deputy chiefs.

Fairow served for 21 years in Oaklands Police Department before moving to become deputy chief at BART police, where he came under fire last year for the death of Sgt. Tom Smith, who was inadvertently shot by a colleague.

In a federal lawsuit filed in May 2015, Smiths widow, Kellie Smith, who was a BART police officer at the time of the shooting, accused Fairow of denigrating his rank and file and even calling them pussies when they asked for additional training.

Fairow could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Schaaf and City Administrator Sabrina Landreth said at the news conference that they are trying to ensure stable leadership over a department that for years has cycled through police chiefs.

We will take our time to make sure that (whoever) is put in has the complete trust of the rank and file, Landreth said.

But critics say the mayor has concealed the reasons behind Whents departure and refused to discuss it even with other city officials.

Her silence has infuriated Councilwoman Desley Brooks, who roundly attacked the mayor during a Public Safety Committee meeting Tuesday at City Hall.

3,000 steps backward

Brooks said that Whents ouster, coupled with a sex workers explosive allegations that she had sex with several Oakland officers while she was underage, showed that its abundantly clear the administration is unable to look out for the best interests of this city.

Councilman Larry Reid on Wednesday expressed his disenchantment and frustration with the latest sudden leadership change.

You take 10 steps forward, and then you take 3,000 steps backward, Reid said. Were going backward, not forward.

The Public Safety Committee is now pondering whether to endorse a November ballot measure that would create a citizen police oversight commission and give it broad powers to discipline officers  and terminate the chief.

News of Fairows removal came just hours after civil rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin held their own news conference, saying they may ask a federal judge to intervene in hiring and recruitment at the struggling department. The department has been operating under a Negotiated Settlement Agreement and federal oversight requiring it to make improvements since 2003. That year, the city settled a major lawsuit after findings that four officers beat West Oakland residents and planted evidence. Chanin and Burris were the plaintiffs attorneys in that case.

Officers should not be involved in consorting with prostitutes and passing a young girl around like shes a rag doll, Burris said at the news conference. Weve come to the conclusion that the supervisors have not done their jobs, that institutional checks and balances were not in place.

Rattled by a spate of disciplinary cases that all involved officers hired after 2013, the city is now conducting an official audit of its recruitment process. Chanin said he wants a non-redacted version of the audit for himself, Burris, the departments independent court monitor, and federal Judge Thelton Henderson, who has overseen the department ever since 2003  the year that Oakland settled the lawsuit

Change in culture

If Oaklands audit is not released soon or if it seems flimsy, then Burris and Chanin say they will push for a court order that would allow Henderson and his appointed monitor and compliance director to steer the hiring of new police.

There is undoubtedly a change in culture of Oakland Police Department which cannot be ignored, Burris said.

He and Chanin believe the departments problems stem at least partly from an aggressive effort to boost its ranks, which began under former Mayor Jean Quan, and picked up when Schaaf promised to have 800 police officers in Oakland by the time she leaves office.

I think theres been a general rush to fill up Oakland with more police officers, Chanin said.

Burris said that one new recruit had been pushed through the academy, even though supervisors knew he had a problem with alcohol abuse.

Schaaf, who has adamantly expressed her disgust over the scandal, said she is determined to weed out people not morally fit to serve as Oakland police officers.

The scandal spread to other departments after the teen, who uses the alias Celeste Guap, told several media outlets that she had sex with two dozen officers from various agencies..

Its not enough to say we are going to prosecute these people to the fullest, Burris said. The real question is how are we going to make sure this does not happen again.

Rachel Swan and Kimberly Veklerov are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com , kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: rachelswan @kveklerov
A repayment program established by the state last year to protect low-income Californians from losing their drivers licenses over unpaid traffic fines is not working in many California counties, according to a coalition of civil rights advocates, who say local courts are failing to take a persons ability to pay into account.

Here's what you need to know about daylight saving this fall

Led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the coalition filed suit Wednesday against Solano County Superior Court  one of dozens, it says, that have been intractable on the issue  and warned 26 others that they could be next.

Christine Sun, ACLU legal director, said the problem stems from the states practice of tacking on pricey administrative fees to simple traffic tickets, which can drive the price of a $100 citation to $500 or more. Failing to make those payments can result in fines that push the price hundreds of dollars higher  and well beyond the reach of many people living on fixed incomes or small paychecks.

State law permits the courts to suspend the licenses of drivers who fail to pay traffic fees and fines, and millions of Californians  4.2 million between 2006 and 2013  have lost their driving privileges. Under the 2015 amnesty program, drivers are permitted to keep their licenses if they arrange a payment schedule that takes into account their incomes. But the coalition says the courts are not doing that.

Traffic fees and fines in California are extremely expensive, and the courts continue to suspend the licenses of people who cant afford to pay exorbitant fines, Sun said.

The coalition filed the suit, she said, because the law disproportionately harms the poor.

Were filing this suit in order to protect a fundamental principle of our justice system  that a person cannot be punished simply for being poor, Sun said. By not taking peoples ability to pay into account, the courts are hurting families, communities and the state as a whole.

The suit alleges that Solano County unconstitutionally fails to determine whether a driver who leaves fines unpaid is doing so willfully or because of an inability to pay. It is the first suit challenging the suspension of drivers licenses as a way to collect traffic fines, the ACLU said.

The ACLU is joined in the suit by Rubicon Programs, Bay Area Legal Aid, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Western Center on Law & Poverty, and the Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman law firm.

The Solano County Superior Court administrator, Brian Taylor, said hes prohibited from commenting on pending litigation.

Sun said Solano County is just one of 27 counties that is violating the constitutional rights of the poor. The others, including Sonoma County, will all be sent warning letters.

Charles Cotton, a former San Franciscan living in Stockton, knows how difficult it can be. A disabled Vietnam War veteran, Cotton receives less than $2,000 a month in Social Security payments. He struggled to arrange a payment schedule under the amnesty law to pay off debts of about $6,000 to San Francisco and $4,000 to Stockton.

After finally doing so, he faithfully makes the payments  right after paying his rent  but worries that if his Social Security check arrives late or a bureaucratic snafu occurs, as it did when his first payment was made but not properly processed, he could lose his license again.

It dont feel like its amnesty. Theyve just turned you over to a collection agency, he said. And the one in Stockton is very aggressive. Im not trying to get out of it. Ill do community service, Ill make payments. But it has to be doable.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: ctuan
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Former Big Brother 15 contestant Aaryn Gries, a controversial player marked as a homophobic racist by some of her peers on the show, gave birth to her first child this week after chronicling the birth on Snapchat.

Her new daughter, Skyla, was born at 6:23 p.m. Tuesday and weighed 8 pounds 4 ounces. Gries' husband is Nick Williams, according to Us Weekly.

RELATED: Texas States Aaryn apologizes for ignorance and insensitivity

It is so surreal that we are actually here! I can't wait to meet our daughter! Gries said in an Instagram post prior to the birth.

Gries also shared several photos and video of the newborn on Instagram, and Skyla looks adorable.

Gries, a former Texas State University student from San Marcos, came under fire in 2013 during her stint on the CBS reality show for racist and homophobic remarks she made to other contestants.

She reportedly made fun of Asians, talked badly about black people and called a gay housemate a queer, according to TMZ.

She was unanimously voted out of the house, according to her exit interview with host Julie Chen.

During her exit interview, she said her statements were taken completely out of context.

RELATED: TV show a lesson for Texas State student

I do not mean to ever come off racist. Thats not me, and I apologize to anyone that Ive offended for that, Gries said in the interview with Chen. "In Texas, like we say things. Sometimes we joke and we don't mean it. I really feel how bad its being seen and how I've come across to people. I don't want to seem like that person."

Some of the controversial statements Gries made on the show included:

Regarding a black contestant: Be careful what you say in the dark, might not be able to see the b***h.

Regarding an Asian contestant: Shut up. Go make some rice.

Regarding a gay contestant: No ones gonna vote for whoever that queer puts up.

RELATED: 'Brother' host Chen to calmly confront Gries, 'shine a light' on Texan's racism

Gries would later apologize to some of her fellow contestants on the show.

Following the broadcast of her hurtful comments, her modeling agency dropped her and a student group at Texas State wanted her punished, according to a previous mySA.com report.

Aaryn Gries has more than 70,000 followers on Instagram and has a popular YouTube channel where shes been sharing videos of her days leading up to the birth of her child.

twhite@mysa.com

Twitter: @tylerlwhite
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Some of the city's elite in sweet and sour treats will gather at PicaPica Plaza for a mangonada battle on Saturday.

RELATED: San Antonio's Barbacoa and Big Red Festival returns for its 6th year

At least 10 vendors from across San Antonio will showcase their recipes at Mangonada Mania from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. The free festival, hosted at 910 Southeast Military Drive, invites families to sample the sweet and savory eats.

The contest will name the "People's Choice Award" as well as the "Foodie Flavor Award," according to the Facebook event page.

RELATED: Rare photo of SAPD with 1927 Miss San Antonio shows how different Alamo City summers were

Mangonada Mania is not the only spot where San Antonians can cool off during a week when the heat index is expected to surpass triple digits.

RELATED: Lake Travis boat parties flood social media as 2016 summer revelers take over

Click through the gallery above to map out areas around the city where you and your family can cool off and fill up during the summer months with mangonadas, raspas and picadillies.

mmendoza@mysa.com

Twitter: @MaddySkye
Albany

Two years ago, an audit found the leadership of New York's affordable housing agency, Homes and Community Renewal, had distributed lucrative grants to projects that its own staff had deemed "infeasible."

That was despite the agency's policy manual stating that choosing such "infeasible" projects was not allowed, according to the audit from Comptroller Tom DiNapoli's office. The audit found little documentation explaining the decisions, which led to delays in building much-needed housing.

But instead of following the recommendations of rank-and-file agency underwriters going forward, sources say Homes and Community Renewal leadership eliminated the terms such as "infeasible" from staff's internal evaluation methods and replaced them with far less descriptive ones, rating projects 1, 2 or 3.

The change has eliminated the chance that an infeasible project could be chosen in the future by HCR leadership  the practice DiNapoli criticized  and may have handed the agency's leadership more discretionary authority over tens of millions of dollars in funds that are in principle competitively bid.

In April, a federal subpoena was issued to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration focused on the "Buffalo Billion" and other upstate development initiatives. It also sought information concerning the actions of Cuomo administration officials on behalf of nearly two dozen companies, including many clients of lobbyist Todd Howe, who is at the center of the probe along with Joe Percoco, Cuomo's former executive deputy secretary.

The Times Union reported May 7 that the subpoena listed three developers whose portfolios include housing developers  Ontario-based Norstar Development, Syracuse-area COR Development and Rochester-based Conifer Realty  that have in several instances jumped competitors for funding that were ranked higher by staff of Homes and Community Renewal. Only COR has been identified as a Howe client.

Like a number of affordable housing developers, all three companies are major campaign contributors to Cuomo.

The full scope of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's probe is unclear, and no one has been charged with wrongdoing.

Homes and Community Renewal, as an executive agency, operates under the purview of the Cuomo administration. An agency spokeswoman didn't respond this week when asked whether the agency or any of its employees had been subpoenaed.

In New York, developers of affordable housing projects can apply for several forms of competitively bid state support or investment.

A major source of support is federal tax credits that are often paired through the same bidding process with dollars from the state Housing Trust Fund, which provides tens of millions of dollars annually for construction. DiNapoli's audit focused on the Housing Trust Fund.

As developers competitively bid for the financial support, agency staff score projects over what can be a rigorous six-month process.

The staff has also provided determinations such as whether a project was "feasible," "infeasible," "feasible with conditions" or "feasible but not recommended," which has weeded out uncompetitive applications.

Through 2013, the Capital Programs Manual for Homes and Community Renewal's Office of Finance and Development  the rule book for the award process  stated that affordable housing applications that are identified as "infeasible" are "not selected for funding."

But DiNapoli's August 2014 audit found of 62 projects examined over a 5-year period ending in December 2013, the agency leadership awarded funding to six projects HCR's staff review had deemed "infeasible." The funding totaled $10 million.

Housing agency staff "confirmed that, if such applications are funded, this deviates from the normal award process," DiNapoli's audit said.

Thirteen projects that got funding were also deemed "feasible but not recommended." Among them were two in Watertown whose developers were Norstar and COR Development  both companies of interest in Bharara's federal subpoena. Homes and Community Renewal has defended the decisions to fund those projects.

The DiNapoli audit said agency management did not adequately document decisions to award funding to projects that scored lower than competitors, a failing that challenged "the integrity of the program."

Since DiNapoli's critical 2014 audit the term "infeasible" has simply been stripped from use by Homes and Community Renewal.

It has been scrubbed from agency's 2014 Capital Programs Manual, which had previously said "infeasible" projects could not be selected for funding.

And according to agency sources, staff underwriters no longer use terms like "infeasible" concerning housing projects, but instead rank projects simply by Categories 1, 2 or 3  a change confirmed by Homes and Community Renewal spokeswoman Stephanie Davis.

"In 2014, the agency changed its underwriting classifications to more accurately communicate review results," said Davis.

According to Davis, a Category 1 project "satisfactorily addresses all HCR underwriting requirements, guidelines, and convention."

A Category 2 project does not address such standards, but they could be satisfactorily addressed "if the applicant implements certain conditions."

And a Category 3 project does not address all Homes and Community Renewal underwriting standards "and it is not certain that all such standards could be satisfactorily addressed."

"HCR's underwriting classifications are not a numerical ranking system. Project reviews are given a number to simply indicate which category they fall under," Davis said via email. "HCR discontinued the use of the term 'infeasible' because it was not an accurate description of our underwriting determination. The purpose of the underwriting review is to determine whether the agency's underwriting standards are being met and whether any deficiencies can be addressed through conditions placed on an award. It is not a project feasibility analysis. One of the goals of the underwriting review is to look for opportunities to move forward with projects that can satisfy our underwriting criteria."

Homes and Community Renewal has also repeatedly delayed fulfillment of a Times Union open records request seeking such determination findings for projects since 2011, which would include results since DiNapoli's audit concluded in 2013.

On May 3, Homes and Community Renewal open records officer Frank Gannon told the Times Union via email that he had a copy of the records, was reviewing them, and hoped to provide them in "far less than" 20 days. On May 7, the Times Union reported that several affordable housing developers were identified in the Bharara subpoena. Since then, Gannon has continued to delay filling the request without explanation. Davis declined to comment..

As Homes and Community Renewal noted in its response to DiNapoli's audit, the agency does in certain instances issue a public explanation when it picks lower-scoring projects for competitive federal tax credits. Explanations were first posted online for the agency's 2012 funding round.

Cuomo's campaign has said that no donation, regardless of its size, has any effect on official actions. Davis has said all decisions are made "solely by DHCR based on the same criteria."

cbragg@timesunion.com  518-454-5303  @chrisbragg1
A Danbury man faces 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty Wednesday to the 2000 murder of Newtown resident Mark Rebong, according to the U.S. District Attorneys office.

U.S. District Attorney Deirdre M. Daly said that 37-year-old Alex Garcia fired two rounds out of an assault rifle into Rebongs jeep while he was was driving westbound on Interstate 84 near Exit 2 on Jan. 17, 2000.

Daley said that Garcia was a member of a gang called the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, which was involved in an ongoing dispute with another gang.

But Rebong, who was driving to the Danbury Hilton where he worked as a night auditor, was not a gang member. He was found with a gunshot wound to the back of his head and died at Danbury hospital the next day, authorities said.

This defendant brutally and senselessly murdered Mark Rebong mistaking him for someone else, Daly said. Mark was a complete innocent gunned down while driving to work, which makes his death all the more tragic.

Garcia, who was charged last October, faced life in prison, but his sentence is limited because of a plea-bargain, officials said.

Daly said that Garcia fired the gun at the instruction of a high ranking member of the Latin Kings.

Garcia was charged with the murder last October while serving an unrelated 40-year sentence, after he was convicted in 2007 of stabbing and shooting attacks at a Danbury public housing complex that seriously wounded three men.

His charges, which included murder in aid of racketeering, assault and a firearms offense, cracked a 15-year cold case. According to Garcias plea agreement, the remainder of his state sentence will be re-imposed after he serves 30 years for Rebongs murder.

But U.S. Attorney Spokesman Tom Carson said he was unsure if Garcia would spend the entire state term in prison.

A call seeking comment from Rebongs father was not immediately returned.

awolff@newstimes.com; 203-731-3333; @awolffster
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WASHINGTON  Sen. Chris Murphys guerrilla-style tactics of filibustering the Senate till the wee hours Thursday succeeded in winning a pledge from Republicans to hold votes on expanded background checks and keeping guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists.

After 14 hours and 50 minutes on his feet along with Democratic colleagues including fellow Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Murphy called it quits at 2:11 a.m.

My legs are a little rubbery but my heart is strong, Murphy told reporters at a midday news conference. I know that we made a difference yesterday, and I know that we galvanized support across this country.

His spokeswoman, Laura Maloney, said Murphys office had received 12,000 individual calls while Murphy commanded the floor, blocking the normal flow of Senate business.

But the momentary exultation over an unlikely Democratic win was tempered by the difficulty of winning Republican votes in both Senate and House, notwithstanding the upsurge in national anguish over the Orlando mass shooting Sunday that cost 49 lives.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., derided Murphys filibuster as a campaign talk-a-thon that did nothing but delay potential votes.

Competing proposals

Twin votes are likely to take place next week, perhaps as early as Tuesday. One, from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would deny gun purchases to anyone on the governments terrorism watch list and give the U.S. attorney general maximum flexibility to keep guns from individuals where there is a reasonable belief of terrorist links.

The Feinstein measure also contains an appeal mechanism for those wrongly on the list to win their gun rights back.

But Republicans and the National Rifle Association are rallying around an alternative measure by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would delay gun sales to those on the list for 72 hours while the FBI conducts an investigation.

The local U.S. attorney could permanently block the sale upon a showing of probable cause before a judge that the individual is involved in terrorism, according to Cornyns office.

Democrats were quick to condemn the Cornyn measure as inadequate in keeping guns away from potential threats.

It will, in effect, tie the process up in a judicial proceeding that lasts longer than 72 hours, Blumenthal said. The suspect then would be able to acquire the gun.

Its a way for them to say theyre doing something when theyre doing nothing, said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., at the news conference. Its a way for them to pay obeisance to the NRA without changing the world as it is.

The NRA reiterated its support for the Cornyn measure.

The NRA believes that terrorists should not be allowed to purchase or possess firearms, period, NRA legislative director Chris Cox said in a statement. At the same time, due process protections should be put in place that allow law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watch list to be removed.

Addressing a loophole

The other vote will be on expanded background checks, proposed by Murphy, Schumer and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. It addresses the so-called gun show loophole that enables private individuals to sell arms at shows and elsewhere without purchasers going through background checks.

A similar measure failed to win enough votes in 2013 to overcome a Senate filibuster. The defeat took place just four months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which took the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.

Murphy, Blumenthal and the others told reporters that the political ground may have shifted sufficiently in the wake of Orlando to bring about victory.

What has changed? Blumenthal asked at the news conference. The answer is Americans have changed.

At one point, Blumenthal held up a box of petitions that had been labeled: Disarm Hate.

Just as we have stopped terrorist extremists abroad from advancing and gaining territory (in Iraq and Syria), we have to stop acts of terror at home, he said.

Well see if Republican members can vote for the NRA (and against) 90 percent of constituents who want terrorists to be kept from buying guns, Murphy said. Well see.

Gun-violence-prevention advocates praised Murphy for his audacity in tying up the Senate over guns.

Sen. Murphy . . . has demanded the attention of the U.S. Senate to be focused on the epidemic of gun violence in America and their responsibility to fix it, said Ron Pinciaro, executive director of CT Against Gun Violence. It is a sign of the sea change in gun politics in America today, as will be evident in November.

Another factor shaking the ground on guns is Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, who has signaled willingness to consider banning guns for those on the watch list. He said Wednesday he would schedule a meeting with the NRA on it.

But it was not clear whether Trump would support the Feinstein version favored by Democrats, or the Cornyn version favored by Republicans.

The NRA wants support of smokescreen proposals, Schumer said. Will Donald Trump realize it?

The only way for Trump to show hes serious about stopping terrorists from buying guns is to support the two Democratic measures, Schumer argued.

Thats it, he said. Thats it.

Schumer added: ``So lets stop this kabuki dance.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

dan@hearstdc.com
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In 1945, when John de Menil returned from a business trip with a Cezanne watercolor in hand, his wife was skeptical.

Dominique de Menil, known for pinching pennies, famously said that $300 was a lot for a canvas with so little paint. Then she relented. A converted Catholic, she focused on the connection between art and faith.

"Through art," she once wrote, "God constantly clears a path to our hearts."

By the time of her death in 1997, Dominique de Menil was the queen of Houston's modern art scene, a major player on the global art stage and a champion for civil rights and social justice.

That was her public face. Privately, she was a woman displaced by the Nazis and World War II, a working mother who juggled her love for her five children and her passion for art, an introvert who surrounded herself with friends so protective they continue to shield her though she's been dead since 1997.

De Menil was born in France. She was the daughter of physicist Conrad Schlumberger, who developed technology to find and chart underground oil deposits and went on to co-found the world's largest oil field services company, Schlumberger Ltd. Before the family was swimming in francs, Dominique earned advanced degrees in math and physics from the Sorbonne.

More Information Milestones 1908Dominique de Menil, daughter of Conrad Schlumberger and his wife, Louise Delpech, is born in Paris. 1931 She and John de Menil marry after a whirlwind romance. 1944The de Menils settle permanently in Houston. 1945John de Menil buys a Cezanne watercolor, starting what will become a massive art collection. 1971The de Menils dedicate the Rothko Chapel, a chapel that also functions as a work of art and a showcase for the paintings of Mark Rothko. 1973John de Menil dies of cancer. 1987The Menil Collection, one of the finest privately owned museums in the world, opens to the public. 1995Dominique de Menil opens the Cy Twombly Gallery, a collection of more than 200 images of the artist's works. 1996De Menil's building campaign continues with the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. 1997The last building project she will personally oversee is the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. De Menil, 89, dies on the last day of the year. 2017The Menil Drawing Institute, a freestanding building dedicated to the exhibition, study and storage of modern and contemporary drawing, is scheduled to open. Nelson Mandela and Dominique de Menil get ready for a news conference at the Rothko Chapel in December 1991. Dominique de Menil and former President Jimmy Carter shared a passionate interest in social justice and human rights. President Ronald Reagan presents Dominique de Menil with the National Medal of the Arts award at the White House in 1986. See More Collapse

The year was 1930 - she was only 22 - when she met John at a dance party at Versailles. Their attraction was instant; they talked all night.

A year later, they married, with plans to start a family and pursue their burgeoning interests in Paris. As their family began to grow, she managed the children and he took an executive position with Schlumberger in 1936.

Then World War II intruded, and the family had to run from Nazi-occupied Paris. John fled first. Dominique packed up and left next, bringing with her their three young children and multiple family members.

The privileged couple learned what it meant to be immigrants, to speak with accents, to feel once or twice removed. Still, they felt welcome in Houston, headquarters for Schlumberger's North American operations.

"My father liked Texas and the entrepreneurial, can-do spirit," said Francois de Menil, the couple's fourth child but the first to be born on American soil. "I think they expanded the cultural scene here. Houston was not Paris. So what they did - they created an environment that was wonderful, that they liked, that was familiar."

The de Menils became students and fans of modern art in the mid-1940s, when John reunited with a French friend, Father Marie-Alain Couturier. Couturier took John de Menil to New York galleries that impressed and amazed them both. By the time the tour was over, the young businessman had purchased the Cezanne watercolor. It was the beginning of the couple's lifelong commitment to art and its sacred, universal truths.

"They sought out art that had spiritual depth," says architectural historian Stephen Fox.

As the de Menils spent increasing amounts on the works of Magritte, Max Ernst, Picasso, and other artists from different centuries, Dominique continued to wrestle with the notion that "purchasing art was a slightly bad action, too pleasure seeking, too hedonistic."

Pamela Smart, quoting de Menil in her book, "Sacred Modern," shows how she resolved her internal debate: "Well, man does not live by bread alone and there is redeeming value in art," de Menil wrote. "Look at great artists. They can be difficult, dissolute but they are never base and in their quest for perfection they come closer to eternal truths than pious goody goodies. So we are collectors without remorse."

The de Menils knew they had a unique opportunity to shape the art community in Houston. They wielded their power and influence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, what is now the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the University of St. Thomas and Rice University.

While all those institutions were enriched and sometimes transformed by de Menil gifts, the couple wanted full control - something they could attain only by developing their own exhibition spaces and museums.

In 1971, they dedicated their Rothko Chapel, filled with 14 abstract paintings by the artist Mark Rothko.

The de Menils were starting their next project - the museum that would provide a home for their vast art collection - when John died of cancer. Dominique suffered another blow when the architect they'd hired for the monumental task, Louis Kahn, died in 1974, just a year later.

It took time and encouragement from friends, but in 1980 she hired architect Renzo Piano to design what would be called The Menil Collection.

The Menil opened with great fanfare in 1987 and became one of the finest privately owned museums in the world. Eight years later, de Menil's Cy Twombly Gallery opened. Next was the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall in 1996. The Byzantine Fresco Chapel opened in 1997. Another jewel in the crown, the Menil Drawing Institute, is slated to open next year.

All these buildings are located within Menil Park and the surrounding campus, affectionately dubbed "Do-ville."

The artists and art lovers who knew de Menil hold tight to their memories.

"She had very strong opinions on things," said Fredericka Hunter, owner of Texas Gallery and a former student and employee. "For example, she built her house on San Felipe facing the wrong direction. What was considered the entry was actually on the service road. She was unpretentious and hilarious sometimes, but she was also very insistent. She never explained anything. You were supposed to keep up."

"She was like my fairy godmother," says Geraldine Aramanda, who works at The Menil Collection and has spent her adult life helping de Menil and protecting her legacy. "But if employees did something stupid, she'd let them know. She hated it when people said, 'Hi Dominique, how are you?' She was not available for small talk, at least not during the day."
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WASHINGTON  The Senate could vote as early as Monday on legislation by Sen. Dianne Feinstein that would ban anyone on terrorist watch lists from buying guns, in a GOP concession to Democrats who waged an emotional 15-hour filibuster demanding action in the wake of the massacre in a gay Orlando nightclub.

The Feinstein legislation would allow the U.S. attorney general to block the sale of guns or explosives to suspected terrorists if authorities have a reasonable belief that the weapons could be used in an attack.

Omar Mateen, the Orlando nightclub gunman, had twice been put on terrorist watch lists, but still was able to legally purchase a military-style semiautomatic rifle to commit the worst single episode of gun violence by a lone gunman in the nations history, which left 49 dead and 53 wounded.

Those stark facts  and the classification of the shooting by President Obama as an act of terror  forced Republicans, who repeatedly have blocked tighter gun restrictions, to concede to a vote, although many in the party have insisted that terror watch lists are too broad to use to restrict gun purchases.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump further muddied his partys position by tweeting that people on terrorist watch lists should not be allowed to buy guns, even though Trump widely touts his endorsement by the National Rifle Association, which has long opposed Feinsteins legislation.

Gun violence just gets worse and worse, Feinstein, D-Calif., said Thursday.

Throughout her career, Feinstein, who became mayor of San Francisco after the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, has been among the leading advocates of tighter gun restrictions. Her 1994 legislation banning assault weapons was passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton, but it expired after 10 years.

She has tried and failed to revive the ban several times, including in 2013 following the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on Dec. 14, 2012.

The weapon Mateen used, a Sig Sauer MCX, was developed for U.S. Special Forces and would have been banned under Feinsteins failed 2013 assault weapons legislation.

I kept thinking after Sandy Hook, what could be more stirring than 20 very young children killed, Feinstein said as she left the Senate floor Thursday. Now we have 50 dead, 54 wounded. Incredible when you think of it, with one gun.

Senators filibuster

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, began the filibuster Wednesday after deciding that he could not come to work and do business as usual without addressing gun violence.

Despite the Senate leaderships decision to allow a vote on Feinsteins bill, many Republican senators remained opposed. This is not a gun control issue, said Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. This is a terrorism issue. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said few senators understand the governments multiple terrorist watch lists and how they are compiled.

The FBI twice listed Mateen on terrorist watch lists for suspicious activity but both times later removed him. Feinstein had tried in the past to restrict gun sales to people on terrorist watch lists but never succeeded. Even if she had, Mateen probably still would have been able to purchase firearms because he had been removed from the lists.

This time, Feinsteins legislation will include language that will automatically flag anyone attempting to purchase a firearm if the buyer has been subject to a terrorism investigation in the previous five years.

Feinstein cited federal statistics showing that 91 percent of individuals who are known or suspected terrorists have passed the background checks required for gun purchases.

60 votes needed

Her legislation, which will be attached as an amendment to an appropriations bill, will require a 60-vote supermajority to pass the Senate.

President Obama weighed in from Orlando, where he went to visit survivors and their families, urging the Senate to tighten gun restrictions.

We cant anticipate or catch every single deranged person that may wish to do harm to his neighbors, or his friends, or his co-workers, or strangers, but we can do something about the amount of damage that they do, he said. Unfortunately, our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist, or just a disturbed individual like those in Aurora and Newtown, to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons  and they can do so legally.

We cant wipe away hatred and evil from every heart in this world. But we can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives. We can reduce the impact of a terrorist attack if were smart. And if we dont act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this, because well be choosing to allow them to happen.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, who has pushed for years to tighten gun restrictions, introduced similar legislation in the House on Thursday. Thompsons bill would require the FBI to be notified when an individual who has been under a terrorism investigation purchases firearms or explosives.

Carolyn Lochhead is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com
SACRAMENTO  California lawmakers approved a state budget Wednesday that boosts funding for safety net programs while socking away billions of dollars to prepare for a recession.

The $122.5 billion spending plan also increases funding for universities under the condition that they admit more California residents. It sets aside $400 million for low-income housing, but only if lawmakers can agree to speed housing developments in some areas.

Gov. Jerry Brown negotiated the agreement with Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount (Los Angeles County), and Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles. Brown is expected to sign it into law.

Democrats have generally praised the budget as a significant investment in alleviating the harmful effects of poverty on children. Republicans warn that expanding long-term spending commitments will lead to deficits down the road.

By law, about half the budget goes to K-12 schools and community colleges.

The budget also includes a big boost in wages for people who provide subsidized child care, helping them keep up with the states minimum wage thats scheduled to rise to $15 over the next six years. About 9,000 additional children will eventually gain access to care.

About 126,000 children in 93,000 families would get a boost in benefits for CalWORKS, the states welfare program, due to the repeal of a 1994 law that prohibits additional state aid for children conceived while a parent is on welfare.

Lawmakers voted to increase funding for both California State University and the University of California, but theyre required to enroll more California residents. The UC system is also required to cap enrollment of out-of-state students or forfeit nearly $19 million.

Brown and legislative leaders agreed to set aside $400 million for low-income housing, assuming lawmakers and Brown can agree on a plan to bypass construction review processes in certain neighborhoods. The policy has drawn strong opposition from neighborhood activists, including in San Francisco, fearful it will allow developments that change the character of their communities.

Brown won a commitment from legislators to pump $2 billion more than required into the states rainy-day fund, which can only be accessed during times of economic distress.
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The bomb threat at Beaumont's ExxonMobil refinery Wednesday that put the facility on lockdown and kept surrounding residents inside their homes was staged by a 23-year-old man who had "a personal connection" to someone who worked at the refinery, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Lance Giovanni Fontenot, of Beaumont, was arrested around 10 p.m. Wednesday night, less than 12 hours after a bomb threat was phoned in at ExxonMobil.

Fontentot made his initial federal court appearance Thursday and is expected to enter a plea at an arraignment hearing on Monday.

Fontenot is accused of burglarizing the home of an employee at the refinery on Tuesday night, according to an arrest affidavit for Fontenot.

More for you 'Suspicious package' at refinery did not contain explosives

ExxonMobil received a call about 10:30 a.m. from a male who said the employee's brother placed boxes around the facility's perimeter that were set to explode 30 minutes later, according to the affidavit.

The caller said he was concerned because the ExxonMobil employee he mentioned "had been talking about ISIS," the affidavit states.

Brit Featherston, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, called the bomb threat an "unfortunate and unnecessary event," adding that authorities believe Fontenot acted alone and there is no future threat.

Investigators did not have a cost estimate on how Wednesday's incident affected the local economy, but Featherston said such an analysis will be done as part of the case against Fontenot.

The bomb threat came just a few days after a mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub killed 49 people and wounded at least 53 others.

Beaumont Police Chief James Singletary said bomb threats are somewhat common, but the recent event in Florida was fresh on the minds of emergency responders.

"It's right on your brain and you say, 'What if this is the real deal?'" Singletary said. "Most of the time, it's not the real deal in this area but it's happening all over the United States. So that was in the back of a lot of our officers' minds when responding to this."

A Houston PD bomb squad and a Port Arthur PD bomb-sniffing dog examined the package left outside the refinery and determined it contained no explosives.

Even though it was a false alarm, the threat brought attention from the FBI, ATF, Coast Guard, and Beaumont and Port Arthur police departments.

Featherston said Wednesday's event was similar to many other bomb threats in which a vendetta, or something personal, motivates the suspect.

ExxonMobil spokesman Patrick Trahan declined to answer specific questions about the bomb threat.

"We have to respect the investigation," Trahan said. "ExxonMobil Beaumont thanks the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department and the other local, state and federal authorities for their quick action and thorough response to the event."

Fontenot was indicted by a Harris County grand jury in 2013 on a felony charge of assault of a family member. He was accused of striking the mother of his child in the face, slamming her head into a wall and choking her after she fell to the floor, according to the charging document. Fontenot was sentenced to 20 days in Harris County jail after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge.

BScott@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/BrandonKScott

EBesson@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/EricBesson_News
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A pair of shootings Thursday morning that wounded three men, two critically, added to a wave of violence that has erupted this week in San Franciscos Mission District and has left one other victim dead, officials said.

Police were looking into whether any of the attacks are connected while investigators sought the suspects, all of whom remained at large.

The latest shooting came in broad daylight at the busy intersection of 16th and Mission streets across from the homeless-focused Navigation Center.

Around 9:45 a.m., witnesses said, two men got into a beef before one pulled a gun and shot the other in the leg. Paramedics took the victim to San Francisco General Hospital, where he was recovering. The gunman ran off.

But identifying the shooter may prove challenging for investigators given that the victim refused to tell police who shot him, officials said.

People hanging around the gritty block, where blood on the sidewalk marked the spot of the shooting, said the victim goes by the street name Hardball.

Earlier Thursday, two men, ages 36 and 39, were shot around 2:20 a.m. as they sat in a parked car at 17th and Mission streets, police said.

A man and woman rolled up in another car before the driver got out and opened fire on the victims, hitting both men, San Francisco police officials said.

The shooters car sped off.

Paramedics took the victims, who were not identified, to San Francisco General Hospital, where both were in critical condition, police said.

While Thursdays shootings happened one block and just hours apart, some who hang out on the block seemed unmoved by the violence.

Ive seen it all, said a man who goes by the street name Bicface. This isnt anything new. Its been happening for years.

Others, though, didnt share his indifference.

Its very concerning. Were closing our office because of that, said a man at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 648 office, pointing to the bloody sidewalk at 16th and Mission.

Thursdays bloodshed came after 32-year-old Alameda resident Robert Lewis was shot and killed early Tuesday near 20th and Shotwell streets.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: EvanSernoffsky
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SAN ANTONIO  Democrats from Texas and beyond will gather at the Alamodome in downtown San Antonio this weekend for the Texas Democratic Convention, which will kick into high-gear at the same time presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump makes a fundraising stop here.

Trump's appearance, which is expected to ruffle opponents' feathers, will come a day after  and about 12 miles away from  the convention kick-off on Thursday with an opening reception at La Villita Assembly Hall at 6 p.m.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, is state convention chairman and his twin brother, U.S. HUD Secretary Julian Castro, a former hometown mayor, will speak Friday night at the Alamodome. The HUD secretary will be introduced by former state Sen. Wendy Davis, who lost the race for governor in 2014.

RELATED: Clinton and Sanders camp seek to avoid another Nevada blowup

Manny Garcia, deputy executive director of the Texas Democratic Party, said Julian Castro will be the "highlight of the night" as he is a "shining star in Texas."

Garcia said, beside the Castro twins, attendees should look forward to hearing from mayors, county judges and officials.

RELATED: Texas not in play as much as Clinton hopes, Dem leaders say

"You're really going to see mayors from several of the largest cities across the state," he said. "They're the ones getting stuff done for folks."

The convention is coming during a controversial moment in American politics, which will make for a more entertaining convention than previous years, said Harold Cook, a Democratic consultant based in Austin.

RELATED: Julian Castro directing HUD effort to reduce lead in public housing

"Well I have been to a lot of state conventions in Texas that were pretty boring," Cook said, adding the lack of excitement typically came from knowing the Democratic candidate, whoever that may be, was not likely to win Texas, a historically red state.

But, with Trump being the presumptive Republican nominee, "Democrats can smell blood in the water," he said.

Despite optimism from state Democrats, Texas will not be a "battleground state," Garry Mauro, a member of Clinton's Texas leadership team, told media Tuesday morning in Austin.

And in light of the recent massacre in Orlando, Garcia said attendees can expect speakers and elected officials to address the shooting that left 49 victims dead, including at least one from South Texas.

On Friday, the second day of the convention, Trump will be making a fundraising stop at Oak Hill Country Club. At the same time, a protest, hosted by Maestranza, a local community outreach group advocating for equality, is planned to "dump" the reality star turned presumptive Republican nominee, outside the same country club.

Garcia said it will be hard to avoid talk of Trump since the Republican has "done everything he can to push away the diversity that makes this state great."

"Donald Trump is an embarrassment of riches," Cook said. "He's kind of made himself a national buffoon and there's a lot to work with. It's going to be impossible to get a lot of enthusiastic Democrats in a room and not laugh at Donald Trump."

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
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A man working with a bridge crew at the Texas 151 to Loop 410 construction site plummeted to his death Wednesday afternoon on the West Side.

Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Josh Donat said the man was working on what will be the eastbound 151 connector to northbound 410 when he fell between 2-2:30 p.m. The site was officially shut down at 3:30 p.m. because of the accident.

Donat said details as to what caused the incident and how far the man fell were not available. OSHA will be on scene to investigate as part of standard procedure Thursday, he said.

RELATED: Passenger dies on U.S. 281 after pulling over for help

This will shut down until their investigation finishes, which usually takes a day or two, Donat said, noting the investigation should not cause major delays in construction.

Based on where the man landed, Donat said the man may have fallen about 30 feet.

For reference, a fall of 6 feet can be potentially lethal, Donat said, referring to OSHAs regulations.

Donat said OSHA will determine if the man was properly latched onto the bridge using a hook, strap and his harness.

If anybody has driven through a construction zone, they can see the cables that run waist-high above the bridge deck. Its so they can tie themselves off of them while theyre doing their work. So if anything happens they don't fall, Donat said, describing the set-up. Were not sure if he was wearing it and it failed to latch.

Donat said the victim was described as a young man who had been with Williams Brothers Construction Company, Inc., currently contracted by TxDOT to construct the bridge, for less than a year.

Even though he's not a TxDOT employee, he's still part of the family as a contractor employed by us, Donat said.

jbeltran@express-news.net

Twitter: @JBfromSA
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A man already serving a 135-year sentence in federal prison on child pornography charges was sentenced to five life terms plus eight 20-year sentences after a Bexar County jury found him guilty Thursday of several charges related to the sex assaults of two minor girls.

The jury found Carl Wade Bailes, 40, of 13 of the 14 state charges he faced. Five of them were aggravated sexual assault counts, the rest were sexual assault charges carrying 20-year prison maximum sentences.

State District Judge Melisa Skinner sentenced him to the maximum life in state prison on each of the five aggravated sexual assault charges, and gave him 20 years on each of the eight sexual assault charges. She then ordered two of the life sentences and one 20-year sentence to run consecutively. The rest will run concurrently with the federal sentence, Bailes attorney said.

Bailes cried upon hearing the sentence as one of his victims and her relatives sighed in satisfaction.

Bailes was convicted in federal court in July 2015. He was indicted October 2012 in the state case, which stemmed from an investigation by the Bexar County Sheriff's Office.

BCSO deputies arrested Bailes, a Marine and Navy veteran, in February 2014 after two girls, then 16 and 6, made an outcry that Bailes repeatedly molested them.

In his closing argument Thursday morning, defense attorney Charles Bunk told the jury that the facts presented by the state are not sufficient to prove the remaining allegations. He disputed testimony given by the oldest accuser because she could not remember specific dates or times of the alleged abuse, and that the prosecution did not submit into evidence medical records that proved the assaults.

I dont know what happened, neither do you. I know you dont like him, Bunk told the jury. I was disgusted by what I heard, but hes not charged with being disgusting.

In her closing argument, prosecutor Kristina Escalona told the jury they heard from the person who experienced the abuse, and also saw pictures from videos allegedly shot by the defendant while he had sex with a child under 17. She also reminded the panel of evidence presented of an extended chat on Facebook between the defendant and the accuser using coded language about the sexual encounters and his request for five minutes of time.

She told you what happened, that five minutes of time ... we have some time.  Escalona told the jury. That disgust can only be cured by one word  that word is guilty.

The oldest accuser, now 19, testified Tuesday that Bailes began molesting her when she was 5, several times a week. She said the abuse evolved to sexual intercourse that continued until she was 16 years old. She also said he videotaped several of the encounters.

The Express-News does not identify victims of sexual abuse.

Bailes was convicted July 15, 2015, by a federal jury on charges that included distributing, receiving and producing child pornography. FBI agents became aware of Bailes in September 2012 during an undercover operation that led them to San Antonio and to him. He was sentenced in November to 135 years in federal prison.

FBI agents and BCSO investigators found Bailes used software to wipe more than 200 files of child pornography from a laptop he used. Some also were recovered. Agents also discovered that Bailes produced images of the two girls  the same ones in the state case  being sexually abused.

Staff Writer Guillermo Contreras contributed to this report.
Mayor Ivy Taylor is set to speak at a vigil honoring the 49 victims of the Orlando massacre Thursday night, and some members of San Antonio's LGBT community are not pleased.

Taylor, who said in 2013 that the City Council's debate and eventual passage of a nondiscrimination ordinance adding protections for sexual orientation was a "waste of time," will not be met warmly at the vigil planned by the Pride Center of San Antonio to be held at 7 p.m. at Crockett Park, according to local activists.

Taylor later clarified her comment, saying she thought the council should be focusing on "critical issues" like streets and roads, police, fire, libraries and parks.

RELATED: San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor apologizes for LGBT comments

Some are planning to silently protest the mayor's attendance, turning their backs to her, but Joedy Yglesias, a Navy chief who was vocal against Taylor during the 2013 nondiscrimination ordinance debate, said he does not plan to stay quiet.

Yglesias believes Taylor is only speaking out in support of the LGBT community for "political expediency" and said he will "certainly let (his) feelings be known" when he sees the mayor.

"I'm sorry that a small group of people at the Pride Center thought it would be a good idea to invite her," Yglesias said. "I also believe that there are mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives that are missing their loved ones today because of people like Ivy Taylor that diminish our existence and our equality."

Leslie Garza, the mayor's director of communications, said the mayor will be attending the vigil because "she believes wholeheartedly that this is not about politics, but this is about prayer."

The Pride Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

RELATED: The Latest: People gather across US to honor Orlando victims

A private Facebook page titled, "You have our backs, Ivy Taylor," went up shortly after it was announced the mayor would speak at the vigil. A post on the page, which is private, reads:

"Mayor Ivy Taylor has NEVER had the backs of the LGBT community. She was one of 3 council members who opposed the non-discrimination ordinance, along with Carlton Soules and Elisa Chan. She said that she could not support us and she also said that we had the wrong sister in the seat for LGBT equality. She has NEVER accepted an invitation to speak or march in previous LGBT Pride events. However, when 49 of our brothers and sisters are slaughtered in Orlando, she finally accepts an invitation to speak (an invitation that many in our community oppose) at a vigil to honor and remember those 49 LGBT souls. To Ivy Taylor we say NO! Not now! This is not the time or place for you to be reaching out to OUR community. You have had your chance. My brothers and sisters, when Ivy Taylor speaks, we encourage you to turn your backs to her; just as she turned her back on us. Attend the Thursday night candlelight vigil at 7:00 p.m. and honor those who perished, but turn your backs on IVY. She should not even be speaking on behalf of our community."

RELATED: Open Carry Texas offers escort for LGBT events, says armed patrons could've stopped Orlando massacre

"We've seen the meanness and the hate filled messages and we're just trying to focus on what this is really about and that is prayer," Garza said, adding the mayor does not plan to politicize the event even though "others are trying to."

Yglesias said Taylor is "welcome to pray on it all she wants to in private" but not at the vigil.

"Mayor Taylor is absolutely, in my eyes, a political opportunist," he said, comparing her to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi who, in a recent CNN interview with Anderson Cooper, was asked why she never supported the LGBT community until the Orlando massacre.

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5
The San Antonio Independent School District is offering an innovative solution for parents struggling to tear their teenagers away from the computer screen  and help them create a bright future in much-needed career fields.

SAISD announced Thursday that it has partnered with advocacy group Tech Bloc to open the first of what will eventually be a network of career-themed high schools throughout the city, which collectively will be called the Centers for Applied Science and Technology.
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A construction worker who fell to his death from a bridge being built to connect two West Side highways has been identified by the Bexar County medical examiners office.

Gerardo Cedillo Lopez, 25 of Brownsville, died from a 50-foot fall at about 2 p.m. Wednesday from the bridge that will connect eastbound Texas 151 to northbound Loop 410, officials said.

This incident is under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the San Antonio area. OSHA investigators could change their estimate of the distance of the fall as they learn more about the incident.

This is the third fatality caused by a fall in four years in San Antonio for this employer, Williams Brothers Construction, OSHA statistics show.

A call to the companys Houston-based headquarters was not returned as of Thursday evening.

Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Josh Donat said Wednesday that a portion of the site where the accident occurred was closed pending the investigation, but could reopen within a day or two.

Lopez was employed with Williams Brothers for less than a year, Donat said Wednesday.

Falls are the leading cause of death in the construction industry, officials said.

In 2013, there were 291 fatal falls to a lower level out of 828 total fatalities in construction, according to OSHAs fall prevention campaign website.

OSHA has up to six months to complete its investigation in the Wednesday accident.

jbeltran@express-news.net

Twitter: @JBfromSA
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With San Antonios temporary ride-hailing regulations set to expire in the coming months, the city council began discussing public feedback on the pilot programs that allow Uber, Lyft and Get Me to operate in the area.

At a meeting Wednesday, the council reviewed the input city staff gathered through online surveys and two ride-hailing roundtable discussions that dozens of residents attended. The questions drew mixed responses, but most respondents approved of the choices available to riders and drivers as a result of the pilot programs.

All of the participants (reported) that they felt the rideshare companies were an integral part of (transportation) in the city, said Steve Baum, assistant director for the San Antonio Police Department.

San Antonio is one of many cities nationwide deciding how best to regulate ride-hailing companies, relatively new services that typically dont operate under the same rules as traditional taxi companies. Much of the debate centers on whether drivers should undergo fingerprint background checks, a measure Uber and Lyft argue would impede the efficiency of their business models.

The city council initially approved rules that would have required the companies drivers to submit to fingerprint background checks like traditional taxi drivers, among other things. The companies, which require their drivers to undergo background checks without fingerprints, left the city when the rules took effect in April 2015.

Uber and Lyft insist their background checks are just as effective as fingerprint checks. Both companies rely on third-party checks that run an applicants Social Security number and other identifying information through several criminal records databases to check for offenses within the last seven years.

After months of debate, the council agreed to make the fingerprint part of background checks optional for drivers through nine-month pilot programs for each ride-hailing company. Uber and Lyft resumed operations in 2015, and Get Me, a ride-hailing newcomer that also allows users to summon a delivery, launched its services in January.

To date, 155 drivers have completed the citys optional check, according to SAPD data.

I believe this has been a great approach, said District 1 Councilman Roberto Trevino, who oversaw the process of creating the programs. The numbers are only increasing of people who want to do the (fingerprint check).

The fingerprint background debate intensified in May when Austin voters opted to retain city regulations that require ride-hailing drivers to submit to such checks. Uber and Lyft left as a result.

But in San Antonio, only 14 percent of survey respondents stated a preference for drivers who have been fingerprinted. Twenty-seven percent said they felt the companies checks are sufficient, and 41 percent said they felt comfortable with either type of check. The remainder said the checks dont matter to them.

District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg said the results indicate that relatively few riders feel the fingerprint checks are necessary and encouraged the council to consider market preferences when deciding how to respond to disruptive technologies like ride-hailing apps.

Im comfortable with the compromise, he said. I just hope we continue to look for ways to respond to the market instead of (express) our discomfort through some sort of regulation.

Riders who prefer the fingerprint check must look for drivers who have uploaded a city-issued ID number to their profiles on the companies mobile apps. District 3 Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran said she thought the indication should be more obvious for riders and asked city staff to discuss the idea with the ride-hailing companies.

City staff will gather more information in the coming months and present it to council in October.

kblunt@express-news.net
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A 59-year-old man was arrested Thursday for allegedly committing the lions share of rock-throwing incidents that have plagued the Interstate 35 corridor in Austin for at least two years, Austin police said in a press conference Thursday.

Patrick Eugene Johnson is charged with a third-degree felony of attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and is being held on a cash bond of $250,000 bond, meaning he would have to pay the entire amount in order to be released from jail. Johnson was arrested at about 4 a.m.

RELATED: Austin police chief warns 'coward' I-35 rock throwers: 'We dont tolerate people trying to kill us'

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said he anticipates the department will be able to charge Johnson with several counts of attempted murder and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He also said Johnson, who has previously been charged with sexually assaulting a minor more than 50 times, was well-known in the community.

Were not happy with just one count, said Acevedo, who called Johnsons alleged crimes vicious and cowardly.

Johnson allegedly admitted to two cases of rock-throwing, and Acevedo said he anticipates they can get him to confess to other incidents.

The chief said three people were significantly injured as a result of the string of rock-throwing incidents, which started in June 2014.

The department is also investigating possible copy cats who have been involved in throwing rocks off the upper deck of I-35, but would not divulge their methods of tracking down suspects.

This case was a priority for the police department, Acevedo said Thursday.

Acevedo said there are about 94 rock-throwing incidents being investigated that occurred in roughly the last two years. Johnson was brought up as a suspect at some point during the investigation Acevedo said.

RELATED: Austin police still searching for suspects after 83 rock-throwing incidents on I-35 last 2 years

KXAN reports that in 2013, Johnson was charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child for allegedly sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy between 50 to 100 times when the boy was between the ages of 13 and 15. The case against Johnson for this charge is ongoing, the TV station reports.

The Austin TV Station also reported a University of Texas at Austin police officer got video footage of one of the rock-throwing incidents with his dash cam at about 2:34 a.m. on May 14, 2016.

The Austin Police Department was able to connect Johnson to the vehicle used by the suspect in the dashcam video.

Johnson reportedly worked as the president of Texas Towing Compliance, an organization that acts as a resource for motorists that have been towed, booted and had their vehicles placed in storage, according to their website.

Acevedo said June 8 the investigation into the cases of rock throwing was moved to the organized crime division.

The chief said whoever they catch will ultimately be charged with the most serious crimes possible for this deadly threat.

I believe this is a sick individual, Acevedo said during a June 8 press conference. We will catch this person, its a matter of time. If we all pay attention, together we will catch this person. We want to catch this person before they kill somebody.

RELATED: Austin police arrest person in I-35 rock-throwing incident

On June 3, APD arrested someone in regards to a rock-throwing incident that occurred in the 3200 block of North I-35 on the northbound service road. But Acevedo said they do not believe this person is connected to the large string of rock-throwing incidents.

APD has put in thousands of hours of investigative work into these incidents, Acevedo said June 8.

We are looking for a needle in a haystack and we will find that needle, he said. We are Austinites. We dont tolerate people trying to kill us.

twhite@mysa.com

Twitter: @tylerlwhite
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SAN ANTONIO  A former assistant superintendent of the Comal Independent School District was arrested on Monday on felony charges of theft, money laundering and misappropriation of fiduciary property involving tens of thousands of dollars.

Thomas Joseph Bloxham, 50, was booked into the Williamson County Jail following an indictment by a grand jury in Comal County on June 8, according to court records from Comal and Williamson counties.

RELATED: Judge nixes defamation suit against Kerr County clerk, allows retaliation claim to proceed

The indictment alleges that Bloxham unlawfully appropriated between $20,000 and $100,000 of district funds and property from April of 2010 through October of 2012 while he served as Comal ISDs assistant superintendent of support services.

Comal ISD spokesman Steve Stanford said Bloxham resigned in 2012 shortly after the investigation began.

"The current district administration has been proactively cooperating with the Texas Attorney General's Office and law enforcement ever since being made aware of possible wrongdoings by former district administrators," Stanford said in a statement on Thursday. "We are confident that the prosecutors and legal system will continue to seek justice for the citizens of Comal ISD."

Bloxham, who joined the Hutto Independent School District as the executive director of facilities and operation on December of 2012, was released on bond shortly after his arrest.

A statement posted on the Hutto ISD website said the district was aware that Bloxham was being investigated by authorities in Comal County when he was hired.

RELATED: Southside ISD pays former interim superintendent one year's salary

Mr. Bloxham was forthcoming and open about the investigation. He came to the district with good references. HE brought a wealth of knowledge and experience in construction and operations management, the statement said, adding that that the current project he is overseeing is currently under budget.

District officials placed Bloxham on administrative leave without pay shortly after his arrest.

mdwilson@express-news.net

Twitter: @MDWilsonSA
SAN ANTONIO  Police searching for three suspects who broke into a home on the West Side on Thursday morning and shot a man as he slept.

According to the San Antonio Police Department, the suspects, believe to be teenagers, wore masks when they entered the victims home in the 1100 block of North Sabinas Street around 4:12 a.m.
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SAN ANTONIO  San Antonio police have arrested a third suspect wanted in connection with the shooting death of a 7-year-old girl on the West Side on June 1.

Manuel Watson, also known as Blame, will face a charge of capital murder for his alleged role in the death of Iris Rodriguez, according to SAPD.

RELATED: Second suspect in shooting death of 7-year-old arrested

Rodriguez was shot in the head while walking with her family near the park in the 500 block of San Fernando Street around 10 p.m., police said.

She was taken to University Hospital and placed on life support after the shooting, but died the next day.

Two other suspects in the case, 28-year-old Frank Gomez and 22-year-old Jonathan Campos, have already been arrested and charged with capital murder, according to police and jail records.

RELATED: SAPD locates suspect in slaying of 7-year-old in West Side shooting

San Antonio Police Department spokesman Sgt. Jesse Salame said investigators were able to track Watson down on Thursday morning, shortly after acquiring a warrant for his arrest.

As he was led out of Public Safety Headquarters in handcuffs to be transferred to the Bexar County Jail, Watson said that he was playing basketball where the child was shot, but denied killing her.

He also said that he did not know the other suspects currently facing charges in the case.

mdwilson@express-news.net

Twitter: @MDWilsonSA
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Two Austin-area teens face several misdemeanor charges for allegedly breaking into a vehicle in the Plum Creek neighborhood.

The two teens were booked into the Hays County Jail on Monday and each took a bizarre mugshot.

Jacob Adam Mendiola, 18, is charged with misdemeanor driving while intoxicated and burglary of a vehicle.

Deric Christenson Munoz, 19, is charged with burglary of a vehicle, according to online court records.

RELATED: Hot Pocket arrest uncovers mugshots tracking evolution of hipster Aryan Brotherhood member in Texas

The two suspects allegedly were caught on video this week taking several items from a vehicle, including a guitar and an iPhone, KVUE reports.

Kyle police said this is a good reason why residents should lock their cars, garage doors and homes, as well as not leave valuables inside vehicles, according to KXAN.

RELATED: 10 mugshots show transformation of Texas man with bizarre face tattoo

These burglars look for easy targets, such as vehicles that are unlocked or where they see items of potential value within easy reach, Police Chief Jeff Barnett said in an interview with the Austin TV station. We will continue to catch those who do wrong, however everyone can play a part in minimizing their opportunity.

In their mugshots, Munoz is smiling and Mendiola looks to be passed out.

Calls to the Kyle Police Department were not immediately returned.

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

If convicted, the two teens could face up to one year in prison for the Class A misdemeanor charge of burglary of a vehicle.

Click through the slideshow to see a collection of photos of dumb criminals.

twhite@mysa.com

Twitter: @tylerlwhite
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A grounded United Airlines pilot pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal stalking charge, admitting he posted nude photos and videos of an ex-girlfriend from San Antonio on the Internet.

Mark Joseph Uhlenbrock, 62, of suburban St. Louis, Missouri, entered the guilty plea during a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge John Primomo in San Antonio. Uhlenbrock faces up to five years in prison when hes sentenced later this year by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez.

Uhlenbrock told FBI agents he has an addiction to posting and removing the photos, so Primomo gave him a stern warning as the victim watched from the court pews.

Youve demonstrated, over the years, an inability to stop your behavior, Primomo said firmly. I dont care what you do for a living. If you fail to follow any directive of (the courts) pretrial services officers, I will put you in jail.

Uhlenbrock and his lawyer, Henry Miller of St. Louis, declined comment afterward.

The victim dated Uhlenbrock for several years beginning in 2002, and allowed him to take nude photos and videos of her, according to Uhlenbrocks plea documents. The court papers said he also took a video of her sunbathing nude without her permission.

He posted the photos and videos to swinger sites, blogs and other sites without her permission and then continued  in apparent acts of revenge porn  even after she got court orders barring him from doing so. She did not find out about the posts until a co-worker told her in 2006 that he found nude images of her on a swingers website, according to the plea documents. She broke off her relationship with Uhlenbrock, but the posts continued, according to the documents.

Charlie Hobart, a spokesman for United, said in May that Uhlenbrock remained an employee of the airline, but he hasnt been actively flying for us for some time.

We are cooperating with authorities on this mattter and we are reviewing it as well, Hobart said.

On his Facebook page, Uhlenbrock said he joined United in 1985 after serving as a pilot in the Navy.

Records show the woman sued Uhlenbrock three times in Bexar County, twice in 2009 and once in 2011, because he would not stop his conduct. The litigation resulted in restraining orders against Uhlenbrock and he agreed to pay the woman more than $110,000 to settle the cases, records show.

Because Uhlenbrock continued posting pictures of the woman after that, she turned to the FBI and it resulted in his criminal case.

gcontreras@express-news.net

Twitter: @gmaninfedland
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On Wednesday, Donald Trump prompted those who attended an Atlanta rally to "ask the gays" which presidential candidate was truly a friend to women and the LGBT community.

RELATED: What to get Donald Trump as he marks his 70th birthday on Tuesday

Not too long after the remarks,"the gays" took to Twitter to respond; mostly with shade.

Trump told the crowd at his presidential campaign stop to consider what happens to women and members of the LGBT community in Saudi Arabia and who was a better friend to the respective communities.

RELATED: San Antonio firm overseeing Donald Trump campaign website to hire up to 100 employees

Some Twitter users used their best gifs to indicate they would not respond to the question, meanwhile others used images to give their thoughts on Trump.

RELATED: Tickets to Donald Trump's fundraising luncheon in San Antonio to top $250,000

Click through the slideshow above to see some of the most scathing and comical remarks dished to the GOP nominee.

MMedina@mySA.com

Twitter: @MariahMedinaaa
Almost two years ago, Councilman Ron Nirenberg proposed an ordinance to ban the manufacture, sale and application of refined coal tar asphalt sealant, or RTS.

Driveways and especially large retail parking lots are capital investments that increase the value and functionality of a property. Proper maintenance can extend the life of asphalt surfaces as much as 300 percent. Sealcoating is the best way to protect pavement.

Nirenberg was relying on a single U.S. Geological Survey study to justify his ban. But that study was (and still is) under fire because it was based on secret data. Even after a multiyear Freedom of Information Act process, the authors refuse to release all the data used in the study. In fact, a lawsuit was filed to make the data public. How can secret findings really be science?

So Nirenberg had the city of San Antonio buy a water policy report of its own. Even while it was being conducted, he said he wanted it to recommend the complete ban of RTS. But the science did not support such a recommendation. The ordinance is to be put to council at the end of this month for a vote.

It is interesting that, even in the face of several actual scientific studies that contradict the ordinance Nirenberg is pushing, the city is relying on a single, still-secret study. This is activism, and it is not right.

But why should the residents and business owners of San Antonio care?

Because if fraudulent data can be used to stop the use of a product purely based upon the political motivations of one council member, then it could happen to anything made by area businesses.

As for the official basis for its proposed ban, the city claims to be concerned that RTS is a source of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, found in sediments of the San Antonio River and its tributaries.

Yet neither the Occupational Safety and Health Administration nor the Environmental Protection Agency classifies RTS as being hazardous. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesnt, either. In fact, TCEQ had one of its own parking lots sealed with refined coal tar. Independent studies have repeatedly concluded RTS poses little risk to health or the environment, particularly because it is insoluble in water.

These sealants are under scrutiny because they contain PAHs. However, PAHs are everywhere. Sources include grilled, roasted, baked and fried foods, and bread, cereal, grain and certain vegetables. Even the Food and Drug Administration allows over-the-counter-sales of shampoos and ointments whose active ingredient is coal tar to treat dandruff, eczema, psoriasis and dermatitis.

Will an activist council ban those items, too? How about coffee, airplanes and compost piles? They are all sources of PAHs.

Bottom line: The citys actions would have a tremendously detrimental effect on business owners, pavement sealant manufacturers and tax revenue.

An average-size commercial property parking lot costs $17,000 to seal every fourth year, for an average yearly cost of $4,250. The same property would cost an average of $34,000, or $8,500 per year, to seal if RTS were banned. The total direct cost to 300 such properties is $2.5 million per year.

Business tenants will also lose revenue because their properties must be closed off twice as many times. This lost revenue would cost each tenant an extra $2,000. With just 20 tenants, the direct revenue loss is $40,000.

When you add up the total costs to 6,000 city businesses (300 properties times 20 tenants), it comes out to $12 million.

Finally, consider the workforce in this industry. RTS can be applied year-round. The alternative products pushed by Nirenberg would restrict contractors to a ninth-month work year, on account of dew point, hours of sunlight and temperature restrictions. Workers would be laid off to the tune of approximately $7,200 in lost wages per contracting company. Factoring in unemployment payments, the estimated direct annual costs to property owners, businesses, employees and contractors would be more than $14 million a year and more than $70 million in only five years.

Public policy should be informed by true science, not advocacy dressed up as science.

Jim Craven, owner of Parking Lot Store in San Antonio, has a combined 35 years of experience as a sealcoating supplier and contractor.
Re: Senator pens Obama prayer, Nation & World, Saturday:

Sen. David Perdue of Georgia called upon his audience to pray for the death of President Barack Obama.

How unprincipled and un-American a statement from a man serving in such a powerful position within our own U.S. government!

Surely this un-American act calls for an ethics investigation and his removal from the U.S. Senate!

Mary E. Romeo

Vivid images

Re: Jennifer Saldana, 3, gets ready to color a paper butterfly, photograph, John Davenport, Metro, June 5:

When I see an eye-catching photo in your paper, like the one of the little girl splashing, I look to the credit below, and it is often John Davenport.

Please pass this on to him, expressing my appreciation for his art.

Clay McGaughy

Losing our country

Re: Congress fights over illegal alien in card catalogs, front page, Saturday:

Rep. Joaquin Castro claims titles used in library card catalogs for those individuals who have entered our country illegally should not be illegal aliens. They should be titled unauthorized immigrants or noncitizens.

How ridiculous is this?

This is as bad as his brother in HUD wanting to spread the poor, unemployed on welfare to the nicer neighborhoods around the country, even though this plan has failed terribly over the past several decades and increased crime and blight. Just because you do not call a criminal a criminal does not mean he is not one.

A noncitizen is not accurate since a legal resident is a noncitizen but is here legally. Unauthorized immigration is against the law. You can call them ice cream vendors, but they will still be illegal aliens. If it has a negative connotation, it is because it is a negative. Entering our country legally has a positive connotation.

Wake up, America. We are losing our country to such nonsense.

Ed Kassof

Low-level bias

It is my opinion that most of us harbor a modicum of prejudice at some level: white against black, black against white, Anglo against Hispanic, Hispanic against Anglo. To deny this would be dishonest.

Perhaps this low level of systemic prejudice has engendered in some Americans a tolerance for Donald Trumps more outrageous remarks when they consider his opponent(s) to be political opportunists whose careers are stained with malfeasance and whose election to the White House would set this nation back on its heels  perhaps forever.

C. Kern Huff, San Marcos

Ignorance not bliss

Now that we have our presumptive nominees for the presidential election, the vetting process kicks into high gear. The primaries have delivered two of the most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history. We must now decide which is the least flawed.

Hillary Clinton is heavily vetted. Consider at least seven witch hunt-style congressional committee hearings on the Benghazi attacks, not to mention other committee and FBI inquires as secretary of state and a 25-year history under the spyglass of Clinton haters. They must feel immeasurable disappointment at this point.

Just when we thought we have seen the worst of the vulgarities of Donald Trump, he manages to top the last with each unscripted speech.

Additionally, there have been reports that the last 30 years of his real estate career have produced at least 3,500 lawsuits. They report that hundreds of workers and contractors were stiffed out of their pay. It is quite ironic that the bulk of his supporters are these very people, but ignorance is bliss, as they say.

Republican leaders have cultivated this type of candidate for decades  think tea party most recently  and are now reaping the returns on their investment.

But, of course, denial is their modus operandi. But ignorance is getting less blissful for these folks.

Jerry Kemp, New Braunfels

Clinton agenda 

Hillary Clinton may not have broken a law with her private server, but that does not matter. The only thing that matters is that Hillary Im fighting for you Clinton puts her own self-interest above those of our country. That alone should disqualify her to be president. She jeopardized the security of the U.S. and put many of our finest men and women in harms way. She has never fought for us, nor will she if we are foolish enough to put her in charge.

Steve Taylor

 and her staff

In case Hillary should somehow be elected president, one would assume Bill would have a staff to assist him in his duties as first gentleman. One cannot help but wonder if Monica would be at the top of the list, and would Hillary approve?

Billy J. Grant

Unworthy of office

I am from here. Being from here, it is rare not to have grown up in the midst of both the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. It starts on the school playground and continues throughout life and into the workplace.

I am so impressed with the degree of unique harmony that glows from this association that I simply cannot still either my voice or my pen in anger over the racial cancer that has spread into the body of the conservative party. Its further tendency to verbally almost deprive women of their very shoes, back to being barefoot and pregnant at the feet of their master, is ridiculous.

The list is long. Hence, I must shout and write to the party to which I refer: By your words and actions, you are totally unworthy to even occupy the office of public dogcatcher in a city as grand as San Antonio, Texas, much less the presidency of the United States of America.

My apologies to the honorable and hardworking people who labor daily to clear our streets of stray animals.

George Cooper, Boerne
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City Council on Thursday decided to rollback tax and other incentives for developers  originally meant to spur new construction downtown  from outlying neighborhoods struggling to accommodate rapid growth.

The changes to the Center City Housing Incentive Policy will shrink the programs coverage area to about 5.2 square miles, including downtown, the near West Side, the near East Side, The Pearl area and part of Southtown. The program originally covered 36 square miles, allocating more money to downtown projects and neighborhoods close to downtown.

Some San Antonio neighborhood associations were concerned that the policy threatened the character of local communities, including those of King William, Lavaca and River Road, officials said at the Thursday council meeting.

I think we need to have more discussion... about that balance between neighborhood desires and policy goals, Mayor Ivy Taylor said at the meeting. My personal opinion is maybe we could strike a better balance.

Developments outside the CCHIP boundaries can still get incentives, but the incentive packages have to be designed and approved on an individual basis. Council approval isnt required for CCHIP incentives.

City Council also voted to make permanent the citys vacant buildings program, which requires owners of vacant buildings in downtown and historic districts to keep the buildings in good shape, register with the city and pay fees. The ordinance has faced legal challenges since it went into effect in January 2015. Next year, council is expected to vote on whether to extend the program city-wide.

The new CCHIP is more focused on downtown itself, where expensive land and high construction costs make it necessary to have a specially-tailored program, city officials told council at its meeting on Thursday. The city has struggled to attract residential housing downtown since declaring the Decade of Downtown in 2010.

Council approved other changes to CCHIP that are intended to give downtown more of a boost. Construction loans for urban core projects will now be forgivable after seven years  in other words, the loans wouldnt have to be paid back if developers met certain conditions.

For more on this story, visit Expressnews.com or read the Friday print edition of the San Antonio Express-News.
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San Antonio has tied with Austin as the most overvalued housing market in the country, according to Fitch Ratings, a global financial services company.

RELATED: San Antonio housing market set for another record year

The list compiled for Forbes is based on home price growth rate compared to local economic indicators such as unemployment, income, population and mortgage rates. In San Antonio and Austin, "home price growth outpaces the rest of the local economy" at a higher rate than any other market, according to the ranking and Forbes.

Ultimately, an overvalued housing market is an indication of high demand and low supply, which benefits sellers but can hurt buyers and owners, who are likely to see a property tax increase.

RELATED: San Antonio home sales soared in May while median home price climbed further above $200K

In 2015, San Antonio home prices were overvalued by 19.8 percent, which was consistent with the appraisal spikes residents saw on their letters from the Bexar County Appraisal District. Now, homes in Austin and San Antonio are overvalued by 19 percent, according to Fitch.

RELATED: San Antonio scales back annexation plans

In contrast, homes in San Antonio were only overvalued by 8.1 percent in 2000, at the beginning of the housing bubble that had home prices skyrocketing across the country.

The median price for a home in San Antonio, through 2015, was $190,400, according to Forbes.

Staff writer Chris Eudaily contributed to this report.

kbradshaw@express-news@net

Twitter: @kbrad5
1 Libya battle: A Libyan hospital spokesman says nine pro-government fighters have been killed and 50 wounded in latest fighting for the Islamic State groups bastion of Sirte. Libyan forces loyal to the unity government have been waging an offensive since last month to dislodge the militants from the coastal city. The spokesman, Abdel-Aziz Essa, said on Wednesday that the fatalities occurred the day before and that the anti-Islamic State militiamen died either from sniper fire, direct gunfire or in road bomb explosions. The fighting in Sirte, the only remaining Islamic State stronghold in the oil-rich North African country, started in early May. The offensive has slowed amid ferocious resistance.

2 Refugee deaths: More than 3,400 refugees died or were recorded as missing as they tried to cross borders around the globe in the first five months of the year  more than 80 percent of them trying to reach Europe by sea, Genevas International Organization for Migration said Wednesday. The number is 12 percent above the 2,780 deaths or disappearances recorded during the same period in 2015. Over the whole of last year, the group estimated that 5,400 refugees died or were reported missing worldwide.
WASHINGTON  This week, retiring U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) introduced legislation that would repeal the Durbin Amendment and the debit swipe fee reforms hailed by NACS and the merchant community. On Wednesday, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) circulated a draft of his Financial CHOICE Act, which includes a provision to repeal debit reforms. These efforts have strong support from credit card and banking industry groups.

Since the Durbin Amendment took effect in late 2011, it has helped consumers save nearly $6 billion a year and supported about 37,000 jobs each year.

Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) responded sharply to the introduction of H.R. 5465, noting in a statement that repealing the debit swipe fee reforms would not only be a windfall for Visa, MasterCard and the nation's biggest banks, but would also "diminish transparency and competition in the debit card system and harm millions of consumers and retailers.

While the big banks and card networks may want to reopen a battle they lost six years ago, Congresss time would be better spent investigating and reining in the new anti-competitive fees that keep popping up in the credit and debit card industries. Just last week I pointed out that Visa and MasterCard had created blatantly anti-competitive fees to penalize small banks and credit unions and deter them from doing business with other card networks. Continued vigilance by Congress and regulators is necessary to help expose these rigged schemes and ensure that the credit and debit card systems operate fairly for all Americans, Durbin added.

Durbins comments were echoed by Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) who stated, For years, Senator Durbin and I have sounded the alarm about unregulated interchange fees and the harm it does to consumers, small businesses, and the economy. The repeal of these reforms would roll back the clock on competition and transparency and allow the credit card industry to return to its practice of ripping off consumers and small businesses unabated.

The Merchants Payments Coalition (MPC), of which NACS is a founding member, issued a statement that H.R. 5465 would promote more price-fixing and detract from the few market forces that were actually created on debit card fees. It is unfortunate that Mr. Neugebauer chose to make one of his final acts in Congress an attempt to undermine the free market and instead support price-fixing that benefits the largest of the largest banks and threatens consumers, merchants and the entire economy, said Doug Kantor, counsel to the MPC and NACS.

Neugebauers legislation comes just one week after Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, announced plans to repeal swipe fee reform and the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, which contains the Durbin Amendment. The Hensarling proposal would promote more price-fixing and detract from the few market forces that were actually created on debit card fees, Kantor said.

In a letter sent to Capitol Hill last month, the MPC and more than 140 national and state trade associations asked Chairman Hensarling to protect the Durbin Amendment. The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump met with Hensarling last week to discuss a Republican alternative to the Dodd-Frank law. Trump said he would dismantle nearly all of Dodd-Frank, without giving specifics.

Last week NACS asked members of the c-store industry to contact their member of Congress to voice opposition to repealing debit swipe fee reform. More than 2,000 letters were sent to Capitol Hill.

NACS is now urging members to take action again and contact their representative and ask them to oppose the Neugebauer and Hensarling bills. To contact your representative, click here.
ALTOONA, Pa.  Sheetz is ready to move its Pennsylvania convenience stores into the 21st century by giving their customers the ability to purchase beer and wine.

Legislation recently passed in the state will change how alcohol is sold in Pennsylvania. It will improve convenience for customers and is good for the state by potentially generating $150 million in new revenue for Pennsylvania, according to the convenience retail chain.

"This bill is the most significant change to Pennsylvania in 80 years. We continue to show our support and gratitude to Governor Wolf, the Senate and House leaders for advancing the issue and driving the change in beer reform in Pennsylvania," said Ryan Sheetz, AVP of brand strategy. "We are thrilled to be able to give our Pennsylvania customers the common right they deserve."

Sheetz has been a driving voice for reforming how beer is sold in Pennsylvania, and is already selling beer responsibly at a handful of stores today. Sheetz stores enforce a 100% proof-of-age policy and employees will ask for ID from any customer wanting to purchase alcohol. Currently, Sheetz sells beer in more than 200 stores across the five other states in the company's footprint, including the successful sale of beer at four other locations in Pennsylvania.

"We are excited to finally be able to give our customers what they have long been asking us to do. Provide them with the convenience of a one-stop shop," said Sheetz. "This law was archaic and nonsensical. The goal for our entire operation is to give our customers what they want, how they want, when they want it, 24/7. Providing convenience to our customers is at the forefront of everything we do and we are committed to this cause until the law is changed for the benefit of our Pennsylvania customers."

To get more information on this issue, visit freemybeer.com.
By Mathew D. Rose, a freelance journalist living in Berlin

The other morning I was astounded by an interview I heard in German state radio. It was in Deutschlandfunk, which specialises in news and current affairs. It is considered by many to be the most serious and objective radio station in Germany.

In this case the moderator was querying the EU parliamentarian Sven Giegold of the Greens concerning the upcoming referendum, also known as Brexit, in Britain to leave the European Union. Giegold is a clever chap, in fact one of the few talents in Brussels. One of the moderators first questions was if it would not be better if Germanys Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, the EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council went to Britain to make the case for Remain in the upcoming referendum.

This question reflects some very basic problems that are plaguing Europes elite and its obsequious media. The first is a specifically German one: Authority should not be questioned. In other words when such powerful figures as the German Finance Minister and the presidents of the European Commission and Council tell you to vote Remain, then there can be no doubt what you should do.

Everyone is supposed to forget the recent records of these three politicians. Schauble has pretty much single-handedly transformed Europes recession into a depression as well as reducing Greece to a perpetual humanitarian crisis. Juncker, as prime minister in Luxemburg, created a tax system there, which permitted large corporations to pay hardly any taxes on their European profits, to the detriment of the member states taxpayers. Instead of being jailed, he was made head of the EU Commission. Tusk rammed a neo-liberal EU policy down the throats of the Poles, resulting in them recently electing an anti-EU, ultra-conservative party with an absolute majority into government. That is the first time since the post-communist era that any party has obtained such a mandate. These are some rather impressive accomplishments.

To make matters worse, Schauble has employed his usual tactic of bullying to influence the British, making it perfectly clear that in the case of Brexit In is in and out is out. There will be no good will, no compromises. Do not think this is simply polemic. It is the same sort of thing he told the Greeks before he crushed them. Britain may not have the Euro, but a nation defying German hegemony by leaving the EU is a dangerous precedent and must be made an example of  see Greece. There is a large arsenal of economic weapons available to the Germans and they have no scruples about using them.

Be it as it may, the radio moderator was gobsmacked when Giegold explained that such menacing rhetoric from Germany; be it from Mr. Schauble or former German leaders has never impressed the British in the past. In his opinion such comments simply add fuel to the Brexit fire and are not in the least helpful in.

Following Schaubles threat, Tusk demonstrated the typical political acumen of the EU elite with his matter of fact analysis of Brexit, claiming that it could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilisation in its entirety. Oh well, we may have some exciting times ahead of us.

Should Britain prosper after Brexit, the EU elite will have some serious problems. Even worse would be the case that Britain prospers and the EU does not. One should also not forget that following Brexit the UK will be governed by a neo-liberal conservative government, whose political agenda is similar to the EUs. What happens when they are eventually voted out of office and a more social labour government (should the Blairites not regain control of the party) introduces a different programme?

What the German radio moderator seems not to comprehend is that Schauble, Juncker and Tusk, like the rest of the EU elite, have become anathema for most Europeans, especially for those with any sense of democracy, justice or solidarity. There is in reality nothing democratic or transparent about the EU. Where else, except in a dictatorship, do you have a parliament that does not have the right to create laws, this being done instead by bodies that have not been elected by the people.

If one looks at the EU today, nothing has changed for years. It is doing its best to push through the trade agreements TTIP and CETA, although there is little popular support for either. Corporate lobbyists still dictate policy. What is illegal concerning nitrogen oxide emissions of diesel cars in the US is permitted in the European Union thanks to loopholes built into the law. Volkswagen will probably not even be punished for its use of a defeat device in its diesel cars. It came as no surprise that this fraud was exposed in the United States and not in the EU. The EUs new emission law concerning petrol powered cars, WLTP, is being made just as ineffective. Despite a raft of tax scandals, including that involving Juncker, no effective legislation to stop this has been created. The list goes on and on.

The EU spends millions every year maintaining the illusion that it is one of the great European achievements. The problem is that it has not been the case for a long time. It has become the enforcer of a now-liberal agenda, converting the particular interests of big business into European law. So we have an anti-democratic EU under German hegemony furthering the interests of large corporations  I doubt this is what the people of Europe want or deserve. The words of the British playwright Dennis Potter apply to the current situation in the EU: They are not interested in our development or emancipation. That is the quality of an occupying force. This is a conclusion the Greeks reached years ago.

It has been interesting to follow the stages of the Brexit campaign. Initially it seemed to be a referendum concerning David Camerons government. Then the role of immigration took centre stage. Now the question of national sovereignty and the lack of democracy in the EU has become an important debating point. There is even a nascent debate among the British left if the EU can be re-democratised, which is rather odd, seeing that it never was a democratic organisation.

There seems to be little hope of the EU being reformed. The EU elite feel too secure and have too much to lose. A democratic EU is completely useless for them, especially for the Germans. Schauble has recently joined those calling for a stop to further EU integration. Germany no longer needs integration, which implies compromise, when it is already calling the shots. As I was recently in Brussels a member of an NGO explained that Germany is very content with the current EU situation. They dictate policy. There may be resistance here and there, but these cases are never existential for Germany and its clients.

Brexit however offers Britain a unique opportunity. Once out of the EU, who are the Tories going to blame when it becomes clear that it is mainly they who are ruining Britain, not the EU or the immigrants?
Yves here. A deep dive into charter schools, using the major shortcomings in Denver as a point of departure, focusing on how resources are diverted from education to administration, marketing, and political consultants.

By Jeff Bryant,s director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for Americas Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He has written extensively about public education policy. Originally published at Alternet

Scott Gilpin works in advertising, so hes used to dealing with people in the promotions business. Hes just not used to seeing them operating a local public school.

Gilpin lives in Denver, where he grew up, graduated from high school and now has two children enrolled in the public school system. Recently, when he decided to get more involved in Denver school politics, he discovered that the most rapidly growing form of school in his community were charter schools. So he determined to check one out.

When he toured his first charter, a school in the Strive Preparatory network, he couldnt help but take note of the schools staffing structure, which could have supported a mid-sized promotional campaign: his guide was the chief of external affairs for the network, and the school boasted a senior director of development and an associate director of recruitment, too.

Gilpinwho sent his children to the local public school they were zoned for, as his parents had donewondered, What kind of local public school needs to recruit its students?

As Gilpin would learn, lots of new Denver schools are that kind of school.

Across the city, Denver has opened 27 charter schools in the last five years, and plans to start up six more in the 2016-17 school year  effectively doubling the number of charter schools in the city in less than six years, according to a recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning research and advocacy organization in Washington, DC. Yet this rush to expand charters is hardly justified by the performance of the ones already in operation.

According to CPD, based on the school performance framework Denver uses to evaluate its own schools, Forty percent of Denver charter schools are performing below expectations. And of those schools, 38 percent are performing significantly below expectations.

Nevertheless, numerous articles and reports in mainstream media outlets and education policy sites enthusiastically tout Denver as the place to see the next important new reform in education policy in action.

Reformers are paying close attention to Denver, notes David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute in an op-ed recently published by U.S. News & World Report. Osborne declares Denvers education reform effort a success based on evidence of gains in academic growth and on-time high school graduation. He says Denver can show the rest of the nation a way to transform  20th-century school systems, built on the principles of bureaucracy, into 21st-century systems, built to deliver continuous improvement.

Recent reports from other Beltway-based think tanks, on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, also hail Denver as a model for advancing school choice and charter schools that have the power to transform the education of low-performing students. Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution named Denver the second-best of the nations 100+ largest school districts that provide parents with options for school choice.

But Gilpin and other Denverites tell a different story about Denver-style urban school reform.

Instead of a glowing example, they point to warning signs. Rather than a narrative of success, their stories reveal disturbing truths about Denvers version of modern urban school reform  how policy direction is often controlled by big money and insiders, why glowing promises of improvement should be regarded with skepticism, and what the movements real impacts are, especially in communities dominated by poor families of color.

Eye Opening Revelations

Gilpins initial foray into Denver school politics began in 2011 when he joined in a campaign in support of a new bond initiative to raise new funding for, school renovations and classroom enrichment programs, as the Denver Post put it.

The proposals passed in the 2012 ballot, but Gilpins plunge into citizen involvement brought him up close to the often-unseen inner workings of contemporary urban education reform in Denver.

What I found was eye-opening, Gilpin tells me in a phone conversation. Among those eye-openers were the intense lobbying and marketing efforts being undertaken to promote charter schools; their powerful and elite corps of backers; and the staggering amount of money, from taxpayers and private donors, that is being funneled to them.

Specifically, Gilpin saw firsthand how bond money intended for renovations and instructional programs was instead used to purchase a 13-story building downtown to house, in part, a new charter school.

Gilpin then learned that the districts chief operations officer, David Suppes, had signed the intent-to-purchase agreement for the new building on August 10, nearly two weeks before the board approved the bond initiative on August 23. Gilpin also saw how school leadership overlapped with the vendors and contractors used by the schools, potentially creating conflicts of interest and cronyism.

As the Colorado Independent reports, two members of the controlling school board majority in 2013, Barbara OBrien and Landri Taylor, headed up organizations that contracted directly with the city school district. The two consistently voted with attorney Mike Johnson, whose law firm earned $3.8 million from the district during his tenure on an advisory committee before stepping up to the board.

Taylor, who was appointed to the board in 2013 and had the advantage of running as an incumbent in 2015, was well known as a key backer of opening new charter schools. After winning the election in 2015, he abruptly resigned earlier this year for family reasons.

To replace Taylor, the board picked MiDian Holmes who, according to Chalkbeat Colorado, is an active member in the school reform advocacy group Stand for Children, a pro-charter organization that has made large donations to school board candidates running on a pro-reform platform. (Holmes eventually resigned when background checks revealed she is a convicted child abuser, and the board seat is, at this date, vacant.)

This tight, sometimes hidden, collusion in Denver school governance has led Gilpin to believe Denver reform is the product of an elite circle of people with little to no input from the public. Other careful observers agree.

Forced on Our Community

They invite the community to look at plans already being put into place, Earleen Brown tells me about the Denver school board in a conversation over the phone.

An African American grandmother from a Northeast Denver community populated predominantly by non-white, poor families, Brown sees the Denver school reform model from a very different vantage point from where Gilpin sees it. (Denver schools are majority Latino and African American, with 70 percent of students classified as low-income and nearly a third non-native English speakers.) But she shares many of his concerns.

Like Gilpin, Browns involvement in Denver school politics began with a bond referendum, this one in 2008. In that effort, Brown contends, there was widespread belief money would go toward paying for either a new traditional comprehensive public high school in Northeast Denver or for a substantial renovation of the existing Montbello High School.

In 2009, after the bond passed, district officials approached parents in the Montbello neighborhood, a mostly African American community, with a set of four options for the struggling high school. The options followed guidelines from the Obama administration, which ranged from changing staffing to closing the school. Parents, Brown recalls, created a petition campaign that gathered over 300 names in favor of the option labeled transformation, the choice generally agreed to be the least disruptive to the school.

But when district officials came back with their decision, they had picked a different option: turnaround, generally regarded as a much more disruptive process. And the next year, Montbello parents learned yet another option had been chosen for their school: closure. The last class to graduate from Montbello was in 2014, and the school is now no more.

Now the community has  instead of the traditional, comprehensive high school parents requested  an array of new charter schools. Housed in what used to be Montbello High are two innovation schools (schools that get much of the flexibility of charter schools but are not privately operated). One school has a very specialized program focused on international studies. The other is an arts-focused school that is already being scaled back due to academic distress.

Some of the new schools serving the Montbbello community are well known for enforcing the harshest forms of school discipline disproportionally on students of color. A 2015 report from a Denver-based education justice and civil and immigrant rights organization tracked Denver school discipline incidents  such as out-of-school suspension, expulsion, or referral to law enforcement  and the correlation of those incidents to race.

What the report shows, according to a review in the Colorado Independent, is that students of color in Denver schools are 219 percent more likely to receive harsher discipline than their white peers. The disparity is particularly acute among charter and innovation schools. According to the report, nine of the ten worst offenders in Denver are charter or innovation schools. The schools that replaced Montbello high are numbers five and two on the 10 worst list, with racial gaps in punishment that are 990.9 and 1,361.4 percent wider. (The worst school, a charter with a racial punishment gap of 2,991.2 percent, is now closed.)

The discriminatory treatment toward her community has led Brown to believe the whole Denver reform model has been forced on our community.

What Big Money Wants

While some parents see the effort to remake Denvers schools as an agenda controlled by a small circle of local actors, others point to big money and influence coming from outside.

When Emily Sirota and her family moved to Denver in 2007, she and her husband quickly became concerned the schools their children would eventually attend were too focused on test scores and competition, and that leadership was divorced from the desires of families, she tells me in a phone call. Her concerns motivated her to run for school board in 2011.

The quick lesson Sirota learned about Denver education politics was that connections to big money had more to do with determining opposing forces than traditional party lines.

Sirota, who is a Democrat, aligns politically with many in Denver who participate in education advocacy and serve on appointed education committees and elected boards. But because she did not align with the reform orthodoxy of school closures and charter school expansions (a wave of reform that many trace to Michael Bennet, a former investment banker who was superintendent of the district from 2005 to 2009 and is now a Democratic U.S. Senator for Colorado), she was not on the side of big money.

As The Nations John Nichols reported at the time, big money lined up with Sirotas opponent Anne Rowe. Rowe, a former owner of a Denver publishing business, has strong ties to the Denver Public Schools political establishment and was founding co-chair of A+ Denver, an influential advocacy group that backs charter schools and the Denver reform model.

Nichols notes that Rowe received strong financial support from donors who, in several cases, have ties to groups that promote charter schools and vouchers across the country, including the Alliance for Choice in Education, Stand for Children, and Democrats for Education Reform.

That funding disadvantage  Rowe out-raised Sirota by more than $90,000  was one of the biggest reasons she lost, Sirota contends. An article for In These Times points out that many of the same donors who funded her opponent also funded two other establishment candidates  Allegra Haynes, who won her race, and Jennifer Draper Carson, who lost hers by just 73 votes.

Denver school board elections are just the latest examples of elections being bought, says Jeannie Kaplan, an eight-year veteran of the Denver school board. Kaplan, who has lived in Denver for over 40 years and raised children in the local public schools, first ran for school board in 2005 in an open seat contest she won. Kaplan was term-limited out in 2013 and could no longer run. Two years later, deep-pocketed privatizers poured money into the school board race and swept the election to take a 7-0 majority. As Kaplan describes on her personal blog, a key to the election sweep was late money coming into the race to preserve the at-large seat held by the pro-reform Haynes.

Campaign funding reports show that Haynes outspent her opponent Robert Speth by more than 2 to 1.

An article in the American Prospect on the increasing role of big money in school board races reports that Democrats for Education Reform, a PAC founded by hedge fund managers that pushes hard to expand charter schools nationwide, contributed a quarter-million dollars to launch the Raising Colorado super PAC, which went on to spend $90,000 running ads and mailing flyers in support of Haynes and Lisa Flores, another pro-reform candidate who also won. (According to the Center for Media and Democracy, DFER has poured millions of dollars of dark money into elections in Colorado and other states to tilt elections to candidates who favor charters and other reform measures.)

As Kaplan writes in a blog post,Public education in Denver, despite what you may have heard or read about in the press, is a system in chaos. It is a system run by a cabal. It is a system where politics, pardon the expression, trumps good policy and the truth.

Highly Politicized

So how did education reform in Denver become mostly about politics and power?

Denver school reform has become highly politicized because the ideas supporting it are highly controversial, Chris Lubienski, an education scholar and a professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois, tells me over the phone.

From 2011 to 2015, Lubienski and a team of other education researchers conducted a study to ascertain how intermediary organizations (IOs) supported by foundations and philanthropists influence public opinion on education in Denver. These organizations, which serve a number of functions in school reform, including advocacy, consultation, policy design, alternative teacher and leadership preparation, and research, tend to promote reforms that are often highly contested by parents, public education advocates, and teachers unions, the report contends. In addition, the research evidence on the efficacy of these reforms is similarly unsettled.

In Denver, reform ideas emerged from a very small handful of people, Lubienski tells me. Reformers who work there may believe the origin of these ideas is in research and is homegrown, but he points to influence centers outside Denver, such as Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., as more likely incubators of these reforms.

Lubienski also questions claims from Denver reform proponents that a democratic process produced their policies. Their origins are not as democratic as is suggested, he shares. Having policy decisions result from more of a consensus-based approach is admirable. But in Denver, that consensus is not as well developed as many people say it is.

In Denver, according to the study, only three foundations  the Daniels, Piton, and Donnell-Kay Foundations  fund most of the IOs driving change in the system. Without this hub of funding, the report concludes, and alignment around the importance of [these] reforms, it is unlikely that such reforms would have moved forward at the size and scope that we witness in Denver.

The study from Lubienski et. al., also cites the influence of a small number of national foundations, principally the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that advocate for expansions of charter schools. Other sources, such as the Denver Post, document the influence of the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic organization created by the wealth of the family that owns the Walmart retail chain. According to the Post, in 2011, WFF awarded Denver with nearly $8 million in grant money, more than many of the nations largest cities, because of the strength and profile of [Denvers] charter-school world.

The Problem With Portfolio Reform

Though the evidence that the reforms these foundations are pushing actually work is nowhere near as convincing reformers would have you believe, efforts to root charters deep within Denvers educational soil continue apace.

The mechanism reformers have used to seed the growth of charters across the city is the portfolio model  an approach that shifts decision-making away from district superintendents and other central-office leaders, according to the National Education Policy Center. Four strategies form the core foundation of such an approach: school-level decentralization of management; the reconstitution or closing of failing schools; the expansion of choice, primarily through charter schools; and performance-based (generally test-based) accountability.

In Denvers case, the portfolio approach has led to the rapid expansion of charters while closing supposedly failed public schools. As Osborne writes in his U.S. News op-ed, Since 2005 [Denver] has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters. Of Denvers 223 schools, 55 are charters and another 38 are innovation schools which Osborne describes as being like charters.

To feed the systems numerous new charter schools, Denver has implemented an enrollment process that gives parents the opportunity to list up to 5 schools for their children to attend rather than simply relying on proximity. To help guide parents in making their school choices, the district uses a school ranking system with color-coded labels for schools  blue at the top (for distinguished), green, yellow, orange, and red (for accredited on probation) at the bottom. The rankings are used not only by parents, but also by the district to determine which schools need interventions and closure.

As Chalkbeat notes, Denver also has enrollment zones where students are given a preference at the schools in the zone and are guaranteed a spot at one of them, though not necessarily their first pick. The zones are set up to encourage  some would say force  families to participate in the choice process.

But research experts are skeptical the portfolio approach alone will yield good results.

In an op-ed for Education Week, Montclair State University professor Katrina Bulkley joins with Columbia Teachers College professors Jeffrey Henig and Henry Levin to caution, The portfolio-management approach to urban education is a work in progress.

NEPC adds further caution, writing, There exists a very limited body of generally accepted research about the effects of portfolio district reform.

NEPC managing director William Mathis, one of the reports authors, tells me that it is, in particular, the combination of reforms that confounds research into portfolio results. There are so many factors at play that describing causality is problematic, Mathis notes. Portfolios mean different things in different places.

If you dont change what happens in the classroom, you dont really change anything, Mathis contends. And he finds little evidence a portfolio approach will necessarily result in improvements in curriculum and instruction.

Former school board member Jeannie Kaplan also questions the success of such reforms. In an op-ed published last year in the Denver Post, Kaplan spotlighted numerous negative outcomes after many years of portfolio-based reform, including growing achievement gaps between white and non-white students, a school system stubbornly segregated along racial lines, and high staff turnover rates in schools.

Her op-ed pointed to a 2015 analysis from the University of Washingtons Center on Reinventing Public Education (an organization that advocates the portfolio approach), which looked at the 50 largest urban school districts in the country that have been actively engaged in education reform. Kaplan noted that, Of them, Denver Public Schools was dead last in both reading and math, with gaps of 38 percent and 30 percent respectively. The average for the other districts was around 14 percent for each subject.

As for graduation rates, Denver ranked 45th out of the 50 districts.

Whose Choice?

So far, less than 27 percent of families have opted to participate in Denvers choice program, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. The remaining 73 percent have chosen to remain in their current local schools.

That same analysis attributes the low participation rate to the extremely small percentage of parents who opt to choice out of their current school when their children are not in a transition year  for instance, moving from an elementary school into a middle school. An older article in the Denver Post reported numerous parents feeling stressed out over the choice process.

That said, some parents do find there are advantages to the choice system. For instance, when Scott Gilpin looked to enroll one of their daughters in a school, they used the enrollment process to choice into an innovation school that offered a dual language program. Similarly, when Emily Sirota looked for a school for her oldest daughter, she found an innovation school that had an expeditionary approach more to her liking.

But theres also evidence Denvers system of choice leads to a lot of outcomes that look more like forced choice. For instance, Gilpin notes that the enrollment zones set up to encourage choice often result in students being placed in charters whether their families indicated that as their top choice or not.

When Sirota visited the neighborhood school her family was zoned for, she noticed extremely large class sizes and the lack of adequate facility space for the students. Upper grades in the elementary school were housed in portable buildings. No doubt, such conditions dis-incentivize parents from choosing that school.

Choice sounds good, says Earleen Brown, but there arent five high performing schools in our area to choose from, she says. Although there are some blue schools in Browns Northeast neighborhood, she argues their high ranking is often mostly due to Denvers methodology that rewards schools for recent growth in test scores, even when the percent of students who are on grade level in the school is still quite low.

Also, many of the traditional public schools in Browns community have been closed or had charter schools co-located in them (an arrangement where a charter takes over a portion of a public schools facility). So for some families in Northeast Denver being able to enroll in a nearby traditional public school is a choice you dont get, she notes. Certainly, for parents who wanted Montbello High School to serve as a traditional, comprehensive high school, that choice was simply overruled by the district.

We really have no choice in our community, Brown maintains.

What Parents Want

Given all of the obvious flaws and questionable results attached to Denvers current reform model, one cant help but wonder why is this approach is being lifted up as a model of excellence to be replicated across the nation.

Of course, weve seen this type of bluster in support of charter schools and education reform before. For years, the New Orleans school system was held up as a reform model for other urban communities to emulate.

NOLA schools, essentially wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, provided reformers with a clean slate to remake an urban public school system based on their own ideas alone, which consisted primarily of converting the district into a nearly all charter school entity and turning school enrollment into a choice process.

Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal claimed NOLA-style reform had laid down a path for schools everywhere else to follow. David Osborne, in another of his laudatory commentaries about education reform, wrote in 2015, New Orleans made charter schools work. Politico reported, Mayors and governors from Nevada to Tennessee were in full throttle campaigns to replicate the New Orleans model.

Except that, for a host of reasons, the New Orleans model turned out to be impossible to replicate. In fact, in Denver today theres little discussion of education reform being patterned after New Orleans. In Osbornes promotion of the Denver model, in fact, he contrasts the Denver approach with New Orleans, and lauds it for being an approach to education reform that hasnt required state intervention or other forms of insulation from local electoral politics.

But its not clear that the form of electoral politics practiced in Denver has yet given parents what they want as much as it has delivered outcomes desired by an elite few.

In Earleen Browns case, what she wants is pretty specific: Shed like to see the district act on her communitys desire to have a comprehensive, public high school.

Jeannie Kaplan advocates the adoption of models she has seen work in the past that provided schools resources to stay open longer hours and provide a fuller range of services including tutoring, health care, and extra-curricular activities. Now we call these community schools,' she explains. What Denver needs most, she believes is the money [to fund] this.

We need more focus on the schools in our neighborhoods, rather than popping up new charter schools here and there, Emily Sirota maintains. And shed like to see smaller class sizes, guaranteed recess for kids, and a more equitable system that ensures a high level of quality curriculum and instruction in all schools, not just the ones the better-off children attend.

As for Scott Gilpin, he wants to see spending on education in Denver going more toward the classroom instead of to administration, consultants, and school board elections. He thinks less emphasis on testing would not only free up more time for instruction; it would make teachers jobs more rewarding  which would, in turn, lower teacher attrition rates.

What Denver parents seem to want most from education policy in their community is for leaders to find a different way to talk about these issues, and to solicit, and honor, parent input before decisions are made.

Whether they will ever get what they want in this regard remains an unsettlingly open question.
Odd you should say that, but one of the sub-contractors I work with, who is a Muslim who's family originally comes from Pakistan, was telling me he was going to vote to leave the EU because of his worries about the large number of Eastern Europeans coming into the country. :unsure:All you could hear after him saying this was the thud of my jaw hitting the floor :wacko:ps: off on my hols today, thought I'd go a spend a week in an Islamic country(Turkey), to see if its true that they really do want to kill or enslave us all
Biological nano-drones can vaccinate against cancer (Nanowerk News) When cancer hits, your immune system shuts down. Over the past 510 years, research into cancer has therefore increasingly focused on helping the immune system start up again. Because if we succeed in that, there is much to indicate that this approach will prove significantly more effective than the aggressive, all encompassing chemotherapy treatments we currently use.

One of the initiatives in this area is the work of Professor Thomas Andresen from DTU Nanotech. He has recently been awarded a grant from Innovation Fund Denmark for a project in which biological nano-drones are used to train the immune system to recognize cancer cells; and kill them; yet another eample that demonstrates a way for nanotechnology to kill cancer cells.

This is something it cannot do on its own, because cancer cells are adept at concealing themselves. It is true that when chemotherapy or radiotherapy is used to kill cancer cells today, the immune system steps in afterwards to clear away the dead cells, but it doesnt learn anything from the process. This is what Thomas Andresen is looking to change.

The strategy is for us to start by using radiation therapy to kill a small number of cancer cells. While the immune system is working to clear up after the attack, we send in our drones, which emit substances that place the immune system in emergency response mode. It then orders the bodys T-cells to attack the cancer cells. And because cancer cells are slightly different to other cells in the body, we can make them react to specific proteins on the surface of these cells, so only the hazardous cells are targeted, explains Thomas Andersen.

Professor Thomas L. Andresen

Mice vaccinated against cancer

The method has initially been tested on mice. The findings from these tests revealed that around 70 per cent that had been infected with cancer were cured. But that was not all. It proved impossible to reintroduce cancer into any of the mice that had been cured. Their immune system had been improved to the extent that the mice were actually vaccinated against cancer.

It is now a question of developing and testing the method so that it can also be used on people. Because even though the mice seemed relatively unaffected by the tests, and many of them were cured of the disease, there is still not enough data available to allow the method to be transferred to human subjects. This is where the grant from Innovation Fund Denmark comes into play, and Thomas Andresen is counting on being ready to start clinical trials when the project expires four years from now.

There are several types of cancer therapy that use the immune system in one way or another, and all kinds of eye-catching results have been presented. That is why Thomas Andresen is much more optimistic on patients behalf than ever before in a career stretching back over 20 years:


Solomonides Solomonides We havent heard from aliens yet, as space is a big place  but that doesnt mean no one is out there, said Cornell student Evan Solomonides 19, who will present A Probabilistic Analysis of the Fermi Paradox at the American Astronomical Societys meeting June 16 in San Diego. Yervant Terzian, Cornells Tisch Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy, is the co-author on the unpublished paper upon which this presentation is based.



Its possible to hear any time at all, but it becomes likely we will have heard around 1,500 years from now, said Solomonides. Until then, it is possible that we appear to be alone  even if we are not. But if we stop listening or looking, we may miss the signals. So we should keep looking.



The Fermi paradox says billions of Earthlike planets exist in our galaxy, yet no aliens have contacted or visited us. Thus the paradox: the cosmos teems with possibility. The mediocrity principle  originated by 16th-century mathematician Copernicus  says Earths physical attributes are not unique, as natural processes are likely common throughout the cosmos, and therefore aliens wont discover us for a while.
Owner Angela Lossia is shown in portrait Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at Angela Fine Furnishings. The business has been opened since May of this year offering unique interior items for home or office. (Corey Perrine/Staff)

SHARE A t-rex decor Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at Angela Fine Furnishings. The business has been opened since May of this year offering unique interior items for home or office. (Corey Perrine/Staff) A room is shown Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at Angela Fine Furnishings. The business has been opened since May of this year offering unique interior items for home or office. (Corey Perrine/Staff) The front is shown Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at Angela Fine Furnishings. The business has been opened since May of this year offering unique interior items for home or office. (Corey Perrine/Staff) Owner Angela Lossia is shown in portrait Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at Angela Fine Furnishings. The business has been opened since May of this year offering unique interior items for home or office. (Corey Perrine/Staff)

By John Osborne, Daily News correspondent

Two years ago on Easter, Angela Lossia's pregnant daughter experienced an emergency blood pressure situation that prompted doctors to induce labor early.

Lossia, who recently moved her store, Angela Fine Furnishings, to 14700 U.S. 41 in North Naples from its longtime home at the Miromar Design Center in Estero, flew up north for the birth, where her son Tom, 33, picked her up at the airport.

That morning, Lossia's daughter gave birth to a son, a healthy, bouncing baby boy. Overcome with joy, Lossia went on to enjoy a festive Easter dinner with her family.

But that night Tom, whom Lossia described as "a healthy and strong and muscular guy," died in his sleep, the victim of an undiagnosed heart defect.

"I really believe that God worked through my daughter to have the baby early," said a still-emotional Lossia, a Michigan native who moved to Southwest Florida in 2006.

"If not for the baby being born, I never would have got to see my son and hug him and eat dinner with him before he passed away. It's a miracle, and it really renewed my faith that God takes care of everything. He let me see my son before he died, and for that I'll forever be thankful."

While searching for her new space, which features separate retail and wholesale areas, Lossia said she believed she received a little heavenly direction.

"I don't know if you believe in these things, but I was driving down U.S. 41 looking at spaces, and there was a rainbow ending over my new building," she said, adding that she hoped sharing her story would help others see that "even in tragedy, people go on."

At 4,000 square feet, Lossia said her new space features 65 brands of medium-priced to upscale furniture and accessories, with every item cataloged for easy reference.

"If you want an 80-inch table, I know it's in this book or this book or that book," she said. "I know everything in every catalog, and I also have designer services available, with independent contractors on site some days. I'm not a designer myself, so if people come in with questions, the designers are right there to consult with them."

Designers Creasha Weglarz, of Weglarz Designs in Fort Myers, and Mary Ann Williams, of Landmark Design of Sanibel, are two of the designers Lossia has worked with for a number of years. Both said Lossia manages to set her store apart from others in a number of ways.

"She's very hands-on with her showroom and the designers," said Weglarz, a client for the past five years. "She's a very sweet person, very caring, and she really wants to help designers find what they're after for specific customers. Above all else, she's very helpful and customer-service oriented."

Williams, a client for the past 15 years, agreed.

"Angela has a really nice, wide variety of manufacturers she represents, so she has furnishings at pretty much every price point, and it's really nice when a showroom covers a lot of price points because it allows a designer to get a lot of work done with a wide range of clientele," she said.

Lossia, the daughter of an immigrant with an eighth-grade education, said she inherited the sort of work ethic needed to succeed in business.

"I saw their entrepreneurship, saw how hard the worked, and I have that gene," she said. "My name is on the door of my store, so I always stand behind everything associated with it."

Angela Fine Furnishings is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. It is closed Sundays. For more information call 239-390-2300 or see www.angelafinefurnishings.com.
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WASHINGTON  We forget, in our over-air-conditioned, too-containerized world, that nature is dangerous.

The heartbreaking tale of the toddler snatched by an alligator as he splashed his feet at the water's edge in the shadow of one of Florida's most luxurious hotels, his parents hovering closely nearby, must remind us to be careful out there. Very careful.

This summer, millions of Americans will head to our magnificent 59 national parks as the National Park Service, one of the most wonderful gifts we citizens have received, celebrates its 100th anniversary.

Millions of those visitors will be unprepared for being in the great outdoors.

In Yellowstone, our first national park, tourists will encounter bears and get too close. Just 10 months ago, a hiker in Yellowstone was killed by a grizzly. (The little cubs may be cute, but the mother bears always nearby are not and will attack in an instant. Personal observation from a Yellowstone visit: Bears are incredibly fast.)

Also in Yellowstone, scalding, boiling, sulfurous hot springs and pools are far more dangerous than they look. There have been deaths and injuries suffered by children and adults who slipped off boardwalks into these springs or, incredibly, thought the waters were safe enough for swimming. They are not.

More often, tourists do not take enough precaution when trekking in the wilderness, assuming that because they're in a park, they will be safe. Last August, two French hikers died at White Sands National Monument. They did not have sufficient water for even one day.

Every year, between 120 and 140 people die (excluding suicides) in national parks. Suicide is the fourth most common cause of death in the parks following drowning, vehicular accident and falling. Other causes are avalanches, pre-existing medical conditions, heat or cold exposure, and wildlife.

On the other hand, at least 282 million people visit the parks each year  last year there were more than 307 million recreation visits  meaning your chances of dying in a national park are infinitesimal. Yet deaths occur. Years ago, a woman unadvisedly walking alone on the Appalachian National Scenic Trail wandered off the trail and died despite an extensive search for her.

A 2008 study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine found that the most fatalities occurred in Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Blue Ridge Parkway, Grand Canyon National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Yosemite National Park. Domestic visitors accounted for 73 percent of the fatalities, and European visitors accounted for 13 percent. Transportation and water-based activities resulted in the highest number of fatalities. Motor vehicle crashes accounted for 20 percent of fatalities and were followed by suicide (17 percent), swimming (11 percent), hiking (10 percent), plane crashes (9 percent), climbing (6 percent) and boating (5 percent).

Not surprisingly, one of the major causes of car crashes is drivers distracted by scenery.

In 2014, Yellowstone historian Lee Whittlesey updated his 1995 book, "Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park." It is a fascinating and sad account of macabre incidents, but, as Whittlesey has said, also an account of how incredibly stupid park visitors can be. In his view, the most terrifying dangers are the hot springs, bears and bison.

In general, the common-sense rules for park visits are don't hike alone, don't ski into blizzards alone, don't climb over guardrails, don't drink too much and don't jump in rivers, especially if you can't swim. And don't get out of your vehicle or get too close to wild animals  even if they seem tame. And be prepared for emergencies.

The tragic alligator attack in a man-made lagoon near Disney's Grand Floridian resort and the frightening incident involving a 3-year-old who fell into the gorilla pit at the Cincinnati Zoo remind parents that vigilance with small children can never be too intense, even in what should be highly safe venues.

With care, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the amazing parks system, let's hope the worst experiences we encounter will be traffic jams and high entrance fees at the most popular parks.
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"Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life."  Frank Sinatra, as Maj. Bennett Marco

"His brain has not only been washed, as they say. ... It has been dry-cleaned."  Khigh Dhiegh, as Dr. Yen Lo

These lines from the 1962 classic film "The Manchurian Candidate" came to mind after I listened to President Barack Obama's endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

The president said, "I don't think there's ever been someone so qualified to hold this office."

Really? She would be equal to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and himself? Notice Obama didn't say she is "more qualified," because that would diminish him and when it comes to narcissism, Obama and the Clintons make Donald Trump look like a shrinking violet.

In his effusive praise of Hillary Clinton, the president did not mention any specific accomplishments that might qualify her for the office. That is because there are none. There is a lot of symbolism, of course, but no substantive results as secretary of state, an unremarkable single term as a senator from New York, and eight years as first lady when, in 1993, she couldn't get the Clintons' health-reform legislation through a majority Democratic Congress. There is, however, a long list of dubious and possibly criminal "achievements."

Besides the questions surrounding Clinton's use of a private server and whether secret government documents were compromised and possibly hacked by America's adversaries, there is another issue the major media have completely ignored.

It involves an institution known as Laureate Education, the parent company of Walden University, an online, for-profit school, which in its practices, critics of Trump University might say, sounds like the allegations made against that school. Several students at Walden claimed to have been repeatedly delayed and given added costs as they tried to obtain their degrees, leaving them in considerable debt. A lawsuit was filed by the students, but a spokesperson for Walden told me the suits were "resolved" and the students have re-enrolled.

Bill Clinton was paid an obscene $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 to serve as an honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities.

With the Clintons, the money tree never ceases bearing fruit. Are people seeking to buy influence with this amount of cash, or do they just like Bill and Hillary?

The major media mainly ignore such things because they function largely as an auxiliary to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

This and many other things from what conservative critics call "the Clinton crime foundation" ought to be red meat for Trump. He should ask why the media are engaging in a near total blackout of Laureate Education and the enormous flow of money to the Clintons and their foundation from governments, institutions and individuals.

Speaking of qualifications, perhaps no president, or presidential candidate, has been bought and paid for more than Hillary Clinton. She comes to this contest not with a long list of accomplishments, but with a trail of "receipts" and IOUs. If she becomes president, donors might reasonably be expected to collect on their investment.
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Splashed all over the news this week is precisely the sort of political crisis many party leaders were terrified about  more than three decades ago. Their solution was to invent a most unconventional convention concept: superdelegates.

These hundreds of uncommitted superdelegates would be free to choose a new, last-minute compromise nominee at the party convention  just in case a presumptive presidential nominee suddenly seemed somehow unacceptable or unelectable. Which, come to think of it, is just how presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has made himself appear to his party's leaders after his contemptible responses to the slaughter inflicted by a Muslim gunman in a gay club in Orlando.

Trump's inability, when under pressure, to stop blurting vile attacks and highly questionable policy pronouncements has caused many leading Republicans to worry that Trump may well lose the presidential election in November and also cause the defeats of many viable party candidates in many states. House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others have condemned Trump's statements in which he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. GOP leaders realize such a ban would be contrary to America's values, principles and constitutional guarantees.

In responding to the Orlando tragedy, Trump repeated the tired GOP attack-mantra of insisting President Barack Obama should use the term "radical Islamic terrorism." And he suggested Obama must have a hidden agenda for not saying the words.

So (except for one slight detail) this summer's Republican convention would appear to be the perfect time for superdelegates to finally rescue a party from disaster by switching from Trump to any compromise candidate. Except this: Republicans don't have superdelegates.

It's only the Democrats who made that oddball superdelegate idea their conventional wisdom. And the Democrats may not have it for long. For their presumptively defeated challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders, has made scrapping the superdelegate concept one of his consolation super-causes. Perhaps because they helped Hillary Clinton clinch the nomination.

But before the Democrats jettison the superdelegate concept (which allows party bigwigs, including every Democratic governor, senator and representative to be an uncommitted delegate) as a sop to Sanders and his still-furious supporters, they may want watch the next few acts of the catastrophe that's playing out in the ranks of the Republicans.

Trump blurted himself into trouble when he telephoned Fox News after gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 and wounded at least 53 in Orlando. Instead of speaking of unity, he attacked Obama: "We're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart or he's got something else in mind. ... People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama ... can't even mention the words 'radical Islamic terrorism.' There's something going on. It's inconceivable."

This was not a one-time accidental blurtation under pressure. Later, Trump (who just weeks ago promised GOP leaders he'd be more presidential) emailed an accusation that Obama "continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies, and for that matter, the American people."

On Monday, reading a speech from a teleprompter, Trump warned that increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants could increase terrorism in America. "If we don't get tough and if we don't get smart, and fast, we're not going to have our country anymore," Trump said. "There will be nothing, absolutely nothing left." That's why America must ban all Muslim immigration temporarily, Trump said: "We have to do it. ... They're pouring in, and we don't know what we're doing."

Republican leaders rushed to condemn their presumptive leader's words. (And his few close allies seemed to have developed political laryngitis.) Ryan said: "I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country's interest. I do not think it is reflective of our principles, not just as a party but as a country."

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who previously praised Trump, said: "Traditionally, it is a time when people rally around our country, and it's obviously not what's occurred, and it's very disappointing."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said: "I don't think he has the judgment or the temperament, the experience to deal with what we are facing." He called Trump's personal attacks on Obama "highly offensive."

And Wednesday afternoon, Maryland's Republican Gov. Larry Hogan announced he won't vote for Trump for president in November. Or Clinton. "I guess when I get behind the curtain I'll have to figure it out," he said.

At this moment, every Republican named above must privately wish he could be rescued by a posse of political superheroes  the superdelegates the Democrats are looking to deep-six.
Currently, Collier County's fertilizer ordinance governs usage. The Marco Island Waterways Advisory Committee held a workshop Wednesday afternoon to consider a fertilizer ordinance for the city. Lance Shearer/Eagle Correspondent

SHARE Fertilizer by the box and the bagful is available at local home improvement stores. The Marco Island Beach Advisory Committee held a workshop Wednesday afternoon to consider a fertilizer ordinance for the city. Lance Shearer/Eagle Correspondent Fertilizer by the box and the bagful is available at local home improvement stores. The Marco Island Beach Advisory Committee held a workshop Wednesday afternoon to consider a fertilizer ordinance for the city. Lance Shearer/Eagle Correspondent David Albers/Staff - Greenscapes employee Francisco Tum spreads granulated fertilizer on lawns in the Champions at Lely Resort neighborhood on Thursday, July 5, 2012, in Naples. With tighter regulations on fertilizer use and pressure from government agencies to be more eco-friendly, Collier County is requiring local landscaping businesses like Greenscapes to train their employees along the guidelines set by Green Industries Best Management Practices.

By Lisa Conley

No one on Marco Island can use fertilizers containing nitrogen or phosphorous from now until Sept. 30. This "blackout period" is part of a new fertilizer ordinance that City Council approved earlier this year.

The ordinance not only restricts the time period in which fertilizers can be used, but also the amount and type of fertilizer that can be used; applicators can use fertilizer a maximum of four times each year and the fertilizer must contain a minimum of 50 percent slow-release nitrogen.

Council based its ordinance on the Model Ordinance for Florida-Friendly Fertilizer Use, a "fill-in-the-blank" fertilizer ordinance template for municipalities and cities. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection created the model ordinance as "a tool  to reduce the impact of nutrients on Florida's surface and groundwaters."

Nitrogen and phosphorous are two fertilizer nutrients that are particularly dangerous, which is why the ordinance addresses them specifically. According to the Marco Island ordinance, "overuse and improper application of these nutrients  pollute our treasured natural waters."

Rhonda Watkins, Collier County's principal environmental specialist, said nitrogen and phosphorous can be especially problematic for the fish population.

"When those nutrients get into the water they can cause algae blooms," Watkins said, "which reduces the amount of oxygen in the water which then can cause fish kills."

Kelly Morgan, Ph.D.  a soil and water scientist with the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences  said Florida's sandy soil only makes the problem worse.

"Unlike clay-based soils, our sandy soil can hold very little nutrients," Morgan said, "so the nutrients that aren't absorbed are washed into bodies of water."

That's part of the reason why the ordinance prohibits fertilizer use during the rainy season. The ordinance also prohibits applicators from applying fertilizer within 10 feet of a watercourse lake, wetland or storm drain. Applicators also have to complete a free Fertilizer Permit Application and submit it to the city.

Councilman Victor Rios was the only City Council member to vote against the ordinance at the March 7 City Council meeting, expressing concern about the permit requirements for single-family homeowners. Rios said cities and counties with similar ordinances do not require permits, and he thought the city was 'insane' for including such a requirement.

"It's overreach by the city and it's not needed," Rios said at the meeting. "You get more with a little bit honey with your homeowners rather than imposing on them [and] having them fill out a form."

The city of Sanibel adopted a similar fertilizer ordinance in 2007. Its blackout period is July through September, and applicators cannot apply fertilizer within 25 feet of waterbodies. The ordinance initially required fertilizers to contain a minimum of 70 percent slow-release nitrogen, but the City Council later reduced it to 50 percent due to a lack of products that met the 70 percent standard.

James Evans, Sanibel's director of natural resources, said the city has conducted a comprehensive nutrient management plan that measures water quality from 2001 to the present. Evans said the study shows that water quality has improved since 2007.

"Inorganic nitrogen and ortho phosphorous were both significantly reduced as a result of the fertilizer ordinance," Evans said.
By Annika Hammerschlag of the Naples Daily News

A yearlong undercover investigation by the Collier County Sheriff's Office culminated in the arrest of 13 people Thursday on charges of cocaine trafficking and state racketeering.

Two kilograms of cocaine were seized, and suspects had conspired to traffic an additional 11.5 kilograms, worth approximately $350,000, Sheriff Kevin Rambosk said. He said the powder cocaine had originated in Mexico and traveled through Texas before reaching the hands of traffickers in Immokalee.

"We keep seeing the link to those areas in everything we do," he said. Small amounts of heroin, marijuana and prescription medication, as well as $180,000 in cash, were also seized.

The arrests were made in Collier and Lee counties and the suspects are being held on bonds ranging from $100,000 to $3.25 million. Five are being held for more than $1 million.

"I significantly doubt they'll be getting out too soon given the bonds they're involved in," Rambosk said.

One suspect is still at large and officials have a warrant for his or her arrest.

Deputies say the bust prevented thousands of doses of cocaine from reaching the streets of Southwest Florida and hundreds of thousands of dollars from reaching the pockets of criminals.

"It hearkens back to the cocaine cowboys," said Capt. Tom Storrar, of the Sheriff's Office, noting that the cocaine powder seized is in extremely pure form. "It's a very high quality product, that's how we know we've disrupted the supply line."

Bags of cocaine were discovered by a drug-sniffing dog in the insulation of a cooler. Further details about the undercover operation are expected to be released in the coming weeks, officials say.

The operation was the second major drug bust by the Sheriff's Office in the last nine months. In September, 18 people were arrested on charges of conspiracy to traffic drugs and $120,000 worth of heroin was seized.

"We're going to continue to do this," said Rambosk.

The Sheriff's Office partnered with the 20th Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office, Lee County Sheriff's Office, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to conduct the investigation.

The following were arrested: Lanette Austile, 34, of Lehigh Acres; Victor Cossio, 23, of Lehigh Acres; Noe DeJesus, 33, of Lehigh Acres; Fredrick Green, 37, of Naples; Fernando Guadarrama, 29, of Immokalee; Michael Jackson III, 37, of Immokalee; Erik Martinez, 25, of Immokale; Florentino Martinez-Jimenez, 43, of Naples; Cordey Taylor, 37, of Immokalee; Cristobel Torres, 23, of Immokalee; William Washington, 47, of Immokalee; Lee Wren, 67, of Immokalee; and Bernardo Fernandez, 45, of Naples.
SHARE The Fort Myers home of David Allen Ralston, 69, a Florida International University professor on Thursday, June 16, 2016. Ralston was arrested Thursday and charged with sexual assault. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) The Fort Myers home of David Allen Ralston, 69, a Florida International University professor on Thursday, June 16, 2016. Ralston was arrested Thursday and charged with sexual assault. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff) The Fort Myers home of David Allen Ralston, 69, a Florida International University professor on Thursday, June 16, 2016. Ralston was arrested Thursday and charged with sexual assault. (Dorothy Edwards/Staff)

By Tim Patterson of the Naples Daily News

A Florida International University business professor was arrested Thursday and charged with drugging and sexually assaulting his housekeeper at his home in Fort Myers.

U.S. Marshals and Lee County deputies arrested David Allen Ralston, 69, at a Days Inn in Fort Lauderdale on a warrant from Lee County, the Marshals Service reported.

Ralston hired the female housekeeper in April after seeing an advertisement on the Craigslist website. On April 29, when the woman arrived at Ralston's address on Gleneagle Court in Fort Myers, Ralston handed her a mixed drink of vodka and orange juice, according to the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

The housekeeper consumed some of the drink, and 30 minutes later, she began to feel disoriented, she told investigators. Ralston sexually assaulted the drugged woman, who tried to push Ralston away from her, the Marshals Service reported.

Hours later, the housekeeper's husband drove to Ralston's house to pick up his wife. The husband found her unconscious on Ralston's driveway. On May 1, the victim notified the Lee County Sheriff's office.

That same day, detectives obtained a search warrant to collect evidence from Ralston's home. They seized a video recorded by Ralston's home security system that the Sheriff's Office reported shows the sexual assault.

On May 6, Lee County detectives spoke to Ralston and his attorney by telephone. Detectives instructed Ralston to surrender himself to the Sheriff's Office, "but Ralston and his attorney refused on numerous occasions to comply," the Marshals Service reported.

Ralston's neighbors said that he lived alone in the single-story ranch house with tiled roof and ivy-covered entrance way. On Thursday the house was locked up, and its hurricane shutters were closed. No one answered the door.

"This news is really, really sad from our perspective," said Mark Trask, a neighbor of Ralston's for the past six or seven years. Trask noticed nothing unusual about his neighbor before the arrest.

"He mostly kept to himself. He used to be polite. He always said hi when you saw him," said Trask. "It's a bizarre situation. Is this the truth? We really don't know."

"We're just praying the truth will come out," said Tracy Trask, Mark's wife.

"We've been very puzzled too, that he didn't turn himself in," she said. "It's kind of odd that you just don't know somebody after years and years."

Ralston's employer, FIU, issued a statement on Thursday confirming that Ralston had been arrested and saying that he was last at the university at the end of the spring semester. He had no summer teaching assignments. FIU referred further questions to the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

A spokesman for the Lee County Sheriff's Office said that Ralston is being detained temporarily by the Broward Sheriff's Office, and he expects Ralston will be transferred to Lee County by Friday.
SHARE Jennifer Perez, 18, of Naples, writes on her patio on June 15, 2016 in Naples, Florida. Jennifer is the runner-up recipient of the 2016 Doris Reynolds Naples Daily News Journalism Scholarship, which has earned her a one-time scholarship award of $5,000 to apply to her college tuition costs. She will enroll this fall at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, where she plans to complete a double major in journalism and public relations. (Nicole Raucheisen/Staff) Katherine Hamilton, 18, of Naples, poses in her home on June 16, 2016 in Naples, Florida. Hamilton is the overall winner of the 2016 Doris Reynolds Naples Daily News Journalism Scholarship, which reduces the financial burdens for aspiring news reporters as they head off to college. "I want to be a well-rounded writer, to write for a magazine, or as a newspaper columnist," Hamilton said. "But my biggest dream is to be a food writer who travels." (Nicole Raucheisen/Staff) Jennifer Perez, 18, of Naples, poses for a portrait on June 15, 2016 in Naples, Florida. Jennifer has earned a one-time scholarship award of $5,000 to apply to her college tuition costs. She will enroll this fall at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, where she plans to complete a double major in journalism and public relations. (Nicole Raucheisen/Staff) Jennifer Perez, 18, of Naples, sits in her room on June 15, 2016 in Naples, Florida. Jennifer is the runner-up recipient of the 2016 Doris Reynolds Naples Daily News Journalism Scholarship, which has earned her a one-time scholarship award of $5,000 to apply to her college tuition costs. She will enroll this fall at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, where she plans to complete a double major in journalism and public relations. (Nicole Raucheisen/Staff) Related Photos PHOTOS: Doris Reynolds Scholarship Winners

By Tim Patterson of the Naples Daily News

Two 2016 Naples High School graduates want to write the news of the future.

Katherine Hamilton and Jennifer Perez have been selected as the 2016 winners of the Doris Reynolds Naples Daily News Journalism Scholarship, which reduces the financial burdens for aspiring news reporters as they head off to college. Doris Reynolds, a longtime Naples Daily News columnist and local historian, endowed the scholarship fund in 2014. Reynolds and a committee of Naples Daily News employees selected this year's winners.

As the overall winner, Hamilton, 18, will receive a renewable scholarship of $12,500 per year, covering up to $50,000 of total tuition costs over four years. She will attend Flagler College in St. Augustine where she plans to major in journalism.

"I want to be a well-rounded writer, to write for a magazine, or as a newspaper columnist," Hamilton said. "But my biggest dream is to be a food writer who travels."

When Hamilton applied for the Doris Reynolds Scholarship, she said, "I read up on Doris's life, and she's an amazing womanalso a food writer! So that's something we have in common, and that's exciting."

"Knowing that there are already people in my field who are encouraging me and trusting me It means a lot to me," she said.

Hamilton was in her third period English class at Naples High when she received an email telling her she had won the scholarship. "I had kind of been panicking. I checked my e-mail for the 15th time that day," she said. When the e-mail arrived, "Tears just started streaming down my face."

Hamilton had to step out of class for a few minutes to compose herself and to call her father Daniel with the good news.

"My dad was so relieved. And I was so happy that I couldn't even see straight," said Hamilton. She asked her father to keep the news a secret so that she could surprise her mom, Sarah, that evening.

"But dad spilled the beans," she said. "I knew he would have a hard time keeping it to himself."

When she applied to colleges, "I didn't realize how much it would cost. My family and I would have been stressing. I would have to be working really hard and long hours," said Hamilton. "But the scholarship will pay for a lot of my college that I couldn't have paid for otherwise. I'll always remember this."

Hamilton recalled how her parents had encouraged her dreams of writing. "I would read them some of my stuff, and I know, they have to say I'm good. But they really helped and encouraged me."

For her scholarship application, Hamilton wrote an 800-word essay on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American author and abolitionist. "What could she do as a woman? She could write," wrote Hamilton. She delivered a message to Americans that "appealed to basic humanity and morality."

Perez, 18, also a Naples High School graduate, has earned a one-time scholarship award of $5,000. Perez will enroll this fall at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, where she plans to complete a double major in journalism and public relations.

If Perez gets what she wants, journalism may take her to Washington, DC.

"I'm really interested in politics," she said.

"My dream has always been to work for The Hill," a news website that covers Capitol Hill, Congress, and the White House. "Right now, a big topic is immigration, and that really sparks my interest," said Perez. "I have grandparents who are Mexican immigrants. Plus there's Trump, so the topic sparks a lot of controversy."

On the day of the scholarship announcement, Perez checked her e-mail "constantly." Around 2 p.m., she was riding in the car with her mother Elisebeth, and she checked the emails on her phone again. When she saw the scholarship notice, "I started just jumping in the car. My mom was super excited."

Later that day, Perez played a joke on her father Juan. "He came home a little early from work that day. I said, 'Dad, I didn't get the scholarship,' and he said, 'It's OK. It's OK,'" said Perez. "That's when I showed him the email, and he was so happy."

Perez's interest in journalism began at a very young age. "My mom jokes that I would always have a notepad with me when I was five or six," said Perez. "I would ask questions. I would do interviews when we visited other peoples' houses."

Perez's uncle Joaquin Perez also took notice of his niece's curiosity. "My uncle, he always said that I was going to end up as a journalist. 'You talk so much, and you love to do interviews,'" she recalled.

"Well, he was right," said Perez.

During her freshman year at Naples High School, Perez's English teacher Kim Swartz pushed her to improve her writing with essay assignments about the book Animal Farm. "She was really nitpicky," said Perez. "She would say, 'You're a good writer, but you can develop your writing even more.'"

In her scholarship application, Perez wrote about Jorge Ramos, the Mexican-American TV journalist who is a hero to immigrants in the United States. "He has been a voice for the voiceless," said Perez. "He's a person I want to emulate."

"Growing up in a Hispanic household, Ramos made a daily appearance on my TV screen. I watched as he rose up for students, the unborn, immigrants, and so many more," wrote Perez. Similarly, "I want to stand up for those that may be in fear, unable to speak for themselves."

The Doris Reynolds Naples Daily News Scholarship is awarded annually and is administered by the Community Foundation of Collier County. Applicants for the scholarship must be graduating seniors from a Collier County public high school who plan to pursue a degree in journalism or English. For more information, visit www.cfcollier.org.
By Laura Gates, Daily News Correspondent

With walking stick in hand and an old laptop in his pack, Naples preservationist Henk Morelisse treks through the brush of the Picayune Strand State Forest. While a novice hiker might easily get lost in this vast swampland, Morelisse knows his way well.

He's on a mission to check images from several motion-sensor cameras he has hidden away in the wilderness to capture the wonder of everglades wildlife in its natural habitat.

"It's always like Christmas  you never know what you're going to get," he says.

Morelisse quickly spots his first camera, but it's not as he left it five weeks earlier, securely strapped to the base of a tree. It's lying on the ground, ripped from its nylon strap, and Morelisse has a suspect in mind.

His suspicions are confirmed after he removes the memory card and views the final video clip. It's an up-close encounter with a black snout and sharp teeth, followed by the sound of the cord ripping.

"Bears are curious," Morelisse says. "I've had two cameras destroyed by bears."

This one, however, is still operational and will be reset for another month. Before the bear ripped it down, the camera captured an amazing array of activity: a Florida panther, two young bucks, a wild piglet, a bobcat and black bears ranging in size from cubs to several-hundred-pound adults.

Morelisse, who has been photographing everglades wildlife for years, says he was dumbfounded when the state opened a black bear hunting season in 2015 after decades of protecting this formerly threatened species. Now he's helping organize a local protest of the proposed hunt for 2016.

"Every big city in Florida is going to have a demonstration," Morelisse said.

The Collier County protest is 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday along the east side of U.S. 41 north of Pine Ridge Road (across from Waterside Shops). It's being organized by Stop the Florida Bear Hunt and is timed to occur days before a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) meeting June 22-23 in Eastpoint in the Panhandle, where "bear management" is on the agenda.

More than 2.4 million Floridians have signed a petition opposing the Florida bear hunt, said Tom Mooney, the group's Southwest Florida Outreach Coordinator. Mooney claims this formerly protected species has little fear of humans now, and their easy kill is evidenced by FWC closing down the 2015 hunt early  in just two days  after harvest objectives were exceeded in two of the four hunting regions.

"We protected these bears for 25 years and now they want to kill them," Mooney said. "Hunting these bears doesn't make you more of a man or woman; it makes you less of a human being."

The 2015 hunt officially resulted in the death of 304 bears, according to a FWC report. This did not exceed the agency's overall harvest objective of 320; however in the East Panhandle, the number of kills (114) was nearly triple the stated goal. In southern Florida, 22 bears were killed, representing about a fourth of the FWC's local harvest objective.

The statewide total of bear kills in 2015 was equal to the entire Florida black bear population in the 1970s, when the species was declared "threatened." The FWC closed all black bear hunting statewide in 1994.

Since then, this protected species has flourished, replenishing its population to about 4,350 bears today, according to a recently released FWC survey. Since 2002, the South region has experienced a 64 percent increase in black bears, reports the 2015 survey.

With this increase in population has come a rise in bear-human conflicts. There were 6,094 bear calls statewide in 2015, with the majority being classified as "general interaction" or "in garbage." Just 1 percent of bear calls over the last 15 years have been classified as "public safety incidents."

Those who advocate the hunt and those who oppose it agree on one thing: Better waste management practices are paramount in reducing human-bear conflicts. The FWC maintains a "Living with Florida Black Bears" page with tips for those residing in bear country.

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida has sent representatives to walk door-to-door in bear hot spots such as Golden Gate Estates, spreading the word about limiting food sources and living "bear wise." The Conservancy also is advocating for legislation requiring "bear-proof" trash cans in black bear habitats, said Amber Crooks, senior natural resources specialist.

The organization has been working with Collier and Lee County waste contractors to develop bear-proof receptacles which will work with automated collection systems, she added. The Conservancy strongly opposes the bear hunt as a conflict management tool.

"The highest priority issue of trash management is being sidelined," Crooks said. "All the scientific evidence suggests hunting does not help deal with the human conflict issue."

Morelisse maintained that the bears he photographs in the Picayune Strand  potential targets of a 2016 hunt  are not the ones rifling through trash in town.

"They are not a nuisance," he said, noting their shy nature. In 30 years of trekking through the Everglades, he said, he has only seen about a dozen black bears in the wild.

One of those rare encounters happened just last week, when Morelisse photographed a 400-pound male from about 30 feet away.

Several municipalities, including the city of Fort Myers and all of Miami-Dade County, have officially opposed the hunt. However, Collier County is not among them.

Mooney says Collier commissioners refuse to put bear management on their agenda, despite his repeated requests that they seek citizen input.

"All we're asking is for a public meeting," Mooney said.

Commissioner Tim Nance, who represents eastern Collier County's bear country, was unavailable for comment.

Commission Chair Donna Fiala shared her opinion via email: " ... the bears are multiplying so rapidly that they soon will have no food and will have to turn to other means to feed themselves. As it is, they are now roaming very close to our civilization, like breaking thru screens seeking garbage cans and other food items. Maybe those who want to prevent a hunt can buy some property, and when bears are caught instead of hunted, it can be taken to their property to care for and feed. My guess is hungry bears can be pretty dangerous when trying to feed their young."

The statewide protests Saturday are intended to raise public awareness and prompt citizens to contact elected officials in opposition of the hunt, Mooney said. Stop the Florida Bear Hunt, the Conservancy of SWFL and The Humane Society are among organizations sending representatives to the Wednesday FWC Commission hearing.

"We are asking for a moratorium," Crooks said, in regards to future black bear hunting.

FWC biologists recently conducted three webinars to answer Floridians' questions about managing the black bear population. The Commission continues to receive input via email sent to: BearComments@MyFWC.com.

---

FWC Bear Management Links:

 Florida Black Bear Page: myfwc.com/Bear

 2015 Florida Black Bear Hunt Summary Report: http://myfwc.com/media/3358561/2015-Florida-Black-Bear-Hunt-Report.pdf

 FWC Bear Hunt Webinar: http://thefloridachannel.org/videos/6216-fish-wildlife-conservation-commission-bear-management-webinar/

 Contact FWC: BearComments@MyFWC.com
Naples resident John Zeliff, 24, was injured by a barracuda Thursday while fishing with friends in the Gulf of Mexico. Zeliff said a friend hooked the fish which immediately jumped over the boat, biting Zeliff's left arm in the process. The bite severed the muscles and tendons in his arm. David Albers/Staff

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By Eric Staats of the Naples Daily News

John Zeliff's says he's caught hundreds of barracuda, but a barracuda had never caught him with its razor-sharp teeth ? until last week.

The rare encounter offshore of North Naples left the 24-year-old Naples native with a bloody arm injury and severed tendons that will require surgery and physical therapy ? and one whopper of a fish tale.

Zeliff was fishing a wreck nine miles off Wiggins Pass last Thursday morning when his friend, John Orban, 25, hooked the 4-foot-long barracuda. It ran away from the boat, taking line out quickly, Zeliff said.

That's when the fish stopped, turned and sped back toward the boat, jumping out of the water and over the boat, knocking Zeliff back and leaving a deep, long gash on the top of his left forearm.

"It came at me so fast I couldn't even move," Zeliff said. "It cut straight through me, it just cut and went."

Zeliff said he didn't realize the extent of his injury until he rolled up his sleeve and saw blood gushing from his arm.

Orban helped him apply a tourniquet, called 911 and raced back to shore, staying in contact with emergency responders on the way. The trip to the beach at the Ritz-Carlton, where an ambulance was waiting, took about 40 minutes, Zeliff said.

"I thought I might bleed out, or at least pass out," he said.

While run-ins with barracuda are rare, the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida hears reports of them once or twice a year, director George Burgess said. Barracuda are renowned jumpers and being in the path of their fang-like teeth can easily inflict serious injury, he said.

"It's more like a buzz saw," Burgess said. "(Even if the fish isn't moving), all you have to do is touch those teeth and you're going to get cut."

Zeliff, who graduated from Barron Collier High School in 2005 and from Florida State University this spring, said he hasn't found anybody who's heard of a Collier County barracuda story quite like his.

While the barracuda got away, Zeliff's friends already are joking about mounting the next one he catches.

"The cuda won this battle, but I'm gonna win the war!" Zeliff posted on his Facebook page last Thursday.

He's not planning any barracuda fishing trips anytime soon though.

"I'll probably stay inshore for a while," he said.

Connect with Eric Staats at www.naplesnews.com/staff/eric_staats
Kenny Torres offers a homemade guacamole sample to Maura Burke at the farmer's market at the Promenade at Bonita Bay in Bonita Springs on Saturday morning, Oct. 18, 2014. (Samuel Wilson/Staff)

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By Patrick Riley of the Naples Daily News

As a competition between two groups wanting to operate farmers and flea markets in Bonita Springs continues, City Council is split on which group to side with.

Local Roots, a farmers market operator run by two Lee County residents, has been holding a successful Saturday farmers market at the Promenade near Bonita Bay for the past three years. The for-profit succeeded the Bonita Springs Lions Club, a local nonprofit, at the open-air shopping center off U.S. 41 after the center's new owner decided not to renew the Lions Club's lease in 2012.

Since then, Lions Club members have lamented a decline in business at their own Saturday market at their club's downtown property and asked council to deny Local Roots' Saturday permit.

Wednesday, two weeks after postponing a vote to allow Local Roots to continue to run its market at the Promenade, council voted 4-3 to temporarily deny the Sanibel-based company's request. Councilors Amy Quaremba, Greg DeWitt and Steven Slachta cast the dissenting votes.

Council asked Local Roots to work with the local nonprofit Lions Club and come back with its request next council meeting to have it reconsidered then.

"I would wish that they would go back and figure out how to make two and two, six," said Deputy Mayor Peter O'Flinn. "As opposed to continuing to argue. They don't have to do anything, but I would like them to consider that."

Though O'Flinn added that council  at its next meeting  would likely approve Local Roots' request to run its market again from October through April of next year, the issue divided council.

Some argued the city should not be telling the Promenade who can or cannot run a farmers market on its property. Others said the city had allowed an "outside company" to push out Bonita Springs' own local nonprofit Lions Club.

"I don't believe in putting off vendors, or Local Roots, or either one of the two, anticipating the Lions coming up with a plan or an application," DeWitt said. "Right now there is not an application in."

Quaremba agreed.

"I think what the Lions Club would like to be is at the Promenade," she said. "It's not within our responsibility to direct a private business how they run their business. The applicant has a contract with the Promenade owners and I think that we really would be in a bad situation to deny the permit at this point."

Others, like Mayor Peter Simmons  himself a member of the Lions Club  asked for more time on the matter, while some  like Councilman Mike Gibson  proposed to change the city's flea and farmers market ordinances to only allow nonprofits to apply for permits. Alternatively, he said, nonprofits could "sponsor" for-profit companies in a partnership.

"I think that would be a fair way of making them work together," Gibson said. "We're basically allowing a company from () outside Bonita to come into Bonita and compete with local businesses."

City Attorney Audrey Vance said she would have to see whether such an ordinance would be allowed.

"I need to do some legal research on it," she said.

Wednesday didn't mark the first time council had asked the two organizations to come together and find a compromise.

Local Roots had offered a booth for the Lions Club and suggested holding a joint fundraising event, but the club declined both. The Lions Club had suggested a 50-50 partnership between the organizations, but the for-profit turned that down.

Jean Baer, one of the co-owners of Local Roots, said she wasn't sure what else she could do.

The Promenade, she said, did not want a flea market  which is what the Lions Club had held there previously. Picking a different day was impossible, because the market needed overflow parking at a nearby church, Baer said.

"We came to you today and said we would work with non-for-profits and that's what we asked and yet you turned us down," she told council after the vote. "So I'm not sure what more to go back and do."
FILE - In this March 14, 2016, file photo, then-Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks during a campaign rally at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Fla. Rubio is facing intense pressure to run for re-election to his Florida Senate seat, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell taking the lead in a campaign to get him to reconsider his plans to retire. Republicans fear that if Rubio doesn't run for a second term they could lose his seat. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

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By Ledyard King, USA TODAY

Marco Rubio may not be leaving the Senate after all.

After pledging last year not to seek reelection because he wanted to focus on his presidential campaign and insisting in recent weeks that nothing has changed, the first-term GOP senator from Florida told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill he'll at least discuss the idea with his wife and kids.

"Obviously, I take very seriously everything that's going on  not just Orlando, but in our country. I enjoy my service here a lot. So I'll go home later this week, and I'll have some time with my family, and then if there's been a change in status, I'll be sure to let everyone know."

Rubio has been under mounting pressure lately both from allies in Florida and GOP leaders in Washington to reconsider his no-reelection pledge. The foreign policy hawk is seen as the best chance to keep the seat in Republican hands come November in a race that could determine whether the GOP maintains control of the Senate.

Even presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, who traded personal insults on the campaign trail with Rubio, recently tweeted that the senator should run for another term.

His willingness to consider reelection comes as Florida Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera said he'd abandon his campaign for Senate if Rubio got in. Lopez-Cantera, who is close to Rubio, has encouraged the senator to reconsider his decision and seek a second term.

"As friends for 20 years, this race is so much bigger than the two of us, and, as you have heard me say on the trail, this race isn't about an individual, this race is about Florida and the future of our country," Lopez-Cantera wrote in an email to supporters Wednesday afternoon

Rubio doesn't have much time to mull. He has to decide by the June 24 filing deadline whether he's getting in the race.

Contact Ledyard King at lking@gannett.com; Twitter: @ledgeking
Jenna Mitchum, 17, center, of Knoxville, Tenn., holds hands with patrons as they pray at a memorial at Orlando Health Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Orlando. The city and nation are still feeling the effects of the June 12 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub. (Corey Perrine/Staff)

SHARE Alexis Behrens, 14, left, is consoled by her mother, Lupe Ruelas, who repeats, "Let it all out, let it all out," both of Miami, at the entrance of Orlando Health where a memorial was made by supporters Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Orlando. The city and nation are still feeling the effects of the June 12 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub. (Corey Perrine/Staff) Florida Department of Law Enforcement, FBI and Orange County Sheriffs continue to investigate the Pulse nightclub Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Orlando. The city and nation are still feeling the effects of the June 12 mass shooting there. (Corey Perrine/Staff) A sign reflects a message of unity Wednesday, June 15, 2016 on Interstate 4 northbound, just south of exit 60, in Orlando. The city and nation are still feeling the effects by of the June 12 mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub " Pulse. (Corey Perrine/Staff) A woman who declined to give her name passes by an LGBT flag-adorned building Wednesday, June 15, 2016 in Orlando. The city and nation are still feeling the effects of the June 12 mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub. (Corey Perrine/Staff)

By Arek Sarkissian of the Naples Daily News

ORLANDO  FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper said Wednesday that there are "no impending charges" against any accomplices in the shooting at an Orlando gay nightclub where 49 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old, self-proclaimed radical jihadist, was killed in a standoff with police as he tried to escape the carnage with other patrons through a hole in a wall.

Hopper, standing with state and local law enforcement about a block from Pulse, dismissed reports that that an ex-wife of Mateen was due to face charges, but he did not rule out of she was involved in planning the mass murder.

"Right now, as we speak, there are no impending charges," Hopper said. "If someone is able to be charged in this incident, we will bring them to justice."

Hopper said the FBI, which is the lead agency on the case, was still investigating whether someone else helped Mateen plan the shooting. He said the FBI also was investigating threats of violence made after the shooting toward the Muslim community.

"I can tell you that we are continuing to pore through voluminous amounts of digital media as well as interviews and other investigative techniques," Hopper said. "And at this time I can tell you there's nothing to suggest any other target other than the Pulse nightclub."

Hopper's comments shed little light on what exactly led up to the night Mateen walked into the club in Orlando on Sunday about 2 a.m., armed with a powerful assault rifle and a semi-automatic handgun. Mateen sprayed bullets into the crowd of roughly 300 people before getting into a gunbattle with an off-duty Orlando police officer who was investigating an underage drinking case outside.

Backup Orlando officers arrived at the club and they chased Mateen into a bathroom, which launched a three hour standoff. A SWAT team armored truck created a hole in a cinder block wall of a bathroom in the club, allowing up to 20 patrons to jump out. Mateen also jumped out and got into another gunbattle with officers outside and was shot dead.

Orlando Police Chief John Mina said the scene inside the nightclub was so graphic that even his most seasoned violent crimes investigators took advantage of counseling services that were offered over the past two days. Hundreds of officers were counseled Tuesday and the agency's SWAT team took part Wednesday.

"These are some of the toughest people I've seen," Mina said. "People who have seen deaths, homicides, dead infants and car crashes, but no one can prepare for what those officers encountered that night."

Gov. Rick Scott, speaking at the same bring with Hopper, called for the state and nation to unify itself in the wake of Sunday's attack.

"This was clearly an attack on our gay community. This was clearly an attack on our Hispanic community. It's a terror attack on our nation," Scott said. "It's a terror attack on our way of life. Our city and our state have come together as a nation."

Related stories:
Florida governor Rick Scott speaks to the media near the Pulse night club in Orlando on Monday. (Andrew West/The News-Press via USA TODAY NETWORK)

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By Arek Sarkissian of the Naples Daily News

Gov. Rick Scott delivered fiery words in advance of meeting President Barack Obama Thursday, four days after 49 people were shot dead at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Scott resurrected a request he made to the White House in November after a mass shooting in Paris. He wanted federal authorities to screen Syrians who are seeking refuge in the U.S. from war in their country. Scott's push to vet the refugees was part of his plan to prevent the Islamic State from attacking Florida.

"When are we going to say enough is enough," Scott said Wednesday. "We're going to destroy ISIS. We're going to destroy radical Islam."

Obama was due to arrive at Orlando International Airport this afternoon in Air Force One, with Vice President Joe Biden not far behind in another aircraft. They will be joined by Florida Sen. Bill Nelson. Scott will meet Obama on the tarmac alongside Orlando's Democratic mayor, Buddy Dyer.

Scott's comments about ISIS matched a plan by the Republican presidential candidate he emphatically endorsed in March. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called for deploying a "pause" on people trying to enter the U.S. from predominately Muslim countries until stronger immigration policies can be set in place.

Scott's plan takes Trump's one step further by requiring federal authorities to share the information with their state counterparts. The governor in November voiced frustration that federal officials told him they refused to share information of people they planned to screen because of personal privacy concerns.

"This is our country," Scott said. "It's a right to come into our country. We've got to vet people and share the information all over the state."

Scott's call for stricter immigration standards does not completely mesh with the circumstances that led up to the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. Omar Mateen, 29, was born in Long Island, New York, and his parents hail from Afghanistan.
In this Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016 photo, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes sit in a petri dish at the Fiocruz institute in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil. The mosquito is a vector for the proliferation of the Zika virus spreading throughout Latin America. New figures from Brazil's Health Ministry show that the Zika virus outbreak has not caused as many confirmed cases of a rare brain defect as first feared. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

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By Ledyard King Usa Today

WASHINGTON  As if the threat of a Zika outbreak in Florida weren't harrowing enough, experts now say the primary insecticide used to kill virus-carrying mosquitoes isn't completely effective.

T. Wayne Gayle, executive director of the Lee County Mosquito Control District, told members of Florida's congressional delegation Wednesday that eradicating the Aedes aegypti mosquito will take time, money and the right combination of insecticides.

"These mosquitoes are very difficult to control, and we're finding right now that we might have a resistance issue to the pesticides we use," he told the lawmakers. "There's active research going right now to determine the extent of the problem, (but) that's a very significant concern right now that needs attention."

The comments from Gayle, who's also president-elect of the American Mosquito Control Association, adds to the alarm over Zika, which has been linked to birth defects and paralysis. He made his comments the same day Senate and House lawmakers began formal negotiations on a spending bill to combat the virus and the mosquitoes spreading it.

Last month, separate anti-Zika funding bills passed the House ($622 million) and the Senate ($1.1 billion). The bills fall far short of the $1.9 billion President Obama requested in February.

"Time is of the essence," House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers said at the start of Wednesday's negotiating session. It could take days to hammer out an agreement.

No state has been affected more by Zika than Florida.

State officials Wednesday reported two new travel-related cases of Zika cases: both in Miami-Dade. The state now has logged 185 cases (including 38 pregnant women), by far the largest tally in the nation. All of the cases in Florida and the rest of the continental U.S. involve people who contracted the case elsewhere before being diagnosed, except for a handful of cases where the virus was sexually transmitted.

That number is expected to grow as warmer, wetter weather brings an expected onslaught of mosquitoes. In addition, Florida is considered especially vulnerable to an outbreak, given its tropical climate, proximity to Latin America (where the virus is rampant), and the volume of travelers constantly moving through its airports and seaports.

Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has urged lawmakers to approve the full $1.9 billion quickly because the CDC needs to attack Zika on a number of fronts: increased monitoring, better treatment, mosquito eradication and vaccine development.

Frieden, responding to a question from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio at Wednesday's delegation meeting, said it's possible  or even likely  that there's already been a mosquito-borne infection in Florida.

Calling the Aedes aegypti the "cockroach of mosquitoes" for its ability to survive, Frieden told lawmakers that the species is difficult to track and eradicate, that it can breed in only a capful of water, and that its eggs can survive over the winter. That kind of resilience means Zika will probably become endemic in the southern U.S., similar to the increasing incidence of dengue fever, which is carried by the same mosquito.

"It is likely we will have isolated cases of local transmission (of Zika). I think it's certainly possible we will have clusters," the CDC director said. "Even if we have a vaccine, and I'm hopeful within a few years we will, we need better ways to control this mosquito."

That helped convince Rep. Tom Jolly, R-Pinellas County, who had voted for the $622 million House bill, to support the president's request for $1.9 billion.

Zika-carrying mosquitoes are especially difficult to root out, Gayle said after the meeting. Unlike many other mosquitoes that can be attacked by spraying over a wide area, Aedes aegypti are found in small groups that require a much more targeted  and expensive  strategy.

That's assuming an effective pesticide is being used, something that turned out to be an issue in the Florida Keys during a recent dengue outbreak, Gayle said

"We're just now starting to test and finding out a lot of areas have resistance that we didn't know about," he said. "So you could be spraying and not really know you're not affecting those mosquitoes."

Contact Ledyard King, at lking@gannett.com; Twitter: @ledgeking
An American alligator suns itself on the banks of a canal along Turner River Road in the Big Cypress National Preserve on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2014, in rural Collier County. (David Albers/Staff)

By Dave Breitenstein, The News-Press

Orlando-area officials confirmed Wednesday afternoon that a body has been recovered in a lake at the Grand Floridian Resort at Disney World.

It would be the 24th fatal alligator attack in Florida during the past 43 years.

Wednesday's discovery ended an exhaustive 17-hour search that began after 2-year-old Lane Graves, whose family was visiting from Nebraska, was dragged into the water Tuesday night by an alligator. The 7- to 8-foot reptile grabbed the boy as he was playing in about a foot of water at the Seven Seas Lagoon at Grand Floridian.

The toddler's death would be Florida's 24th caused by an alligator attack since 1973, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the fourth involving a child under age 5. According to FWC, there were 383 unprovoked alligator attacks between 1948 and 2015, categorized as follows:

- Fatal attacks: 23

- Minor attacks: 126

- Major attacks: 257

There have been fatal alligator attacks in 15 of Florida's 67 counties. With three fatalities each, Lee and Charlotte counties on Florida's southwest coast have the most deaths caused by alligators.

FWC began tracking alligator attacks in 1948, and provides these snapshots of Florida's unprovoked fatal alligator attacks through April 2016:

1. Sharon Holmes, 16, female, was killed by an 11'3" male alligator while swimming at dusk in a lake at Oscar Scherer State Park, Sarasota County, on Aug. 16, 1973. The alligator was killed, and body parts from the victim were found in its stomach. The alligator had recently moved into the lake and was reportedly to have been fed by visitors to the park.

2. George Leonard, 52, male, was seized on the arm by an alligator while swimming in the Peace River Canal, Charlotte County, on Sept. 28, 1977 at 8:35 p.m. A 7 ft. alligator, which had appeared in the canal the day of the bite, severed the victim's arm at the elbow. Leonard died three days later of complications from the bite.

3. Phillip Rastrelli, 14, male, was killed while swimming across the Hidden River Canal off Bessie Creek in Martin County on Sept. 10, 1978 at noon. The alligator was an 11-foot healthy male.

4. Robert Crespo, 11, male, was killed while swimming in a canal in St. Lucie County on Aug. 6, 1984 at 4:30 p.m. The alligator was 12' 4", aged and in poor health.

5. Paul Mirabito, 27, male, disappeared while diving and harassing small alligators in the Wellington C27 canal near West Palm Beach on May 4, 1985. His body was recovered 2 days later with severe injuries to the neck and puncture wounds on the arm. The medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was drowning, but noted evidence of bleeding around the wounds, indicating the bites occurred prior to drowning.

6. George Cummings III, 29, male, was killed while snorkeling in the Wakulla River on July 13, 1987 at 2 p.m. The alligator was an 11-foot healthy male.

7. Erin Glover, 4, female, was seized and killed by an alligator while walking along the shore of Hidden Lake, Charlotte County on June 4, 1988 at 6:10 p.m. The alligator was a 10' 7" male.

8. Bradley Weidenhamer, 10, male, was killed while wading in the Loxahatchee River at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County on June 19, 1993. The alligator was an 11' 4" male.

9. Grace Eberhart, 70, female, was killed at Lake Serenity in Sumter County on Oct. 3, 1993. The circumstances surrounding her death are unknown, but she died of a broken neck caused by an alligator bite to the throat and head. Several alligators may have been involved in the incident. The largest measured 9' '7" long.

10. Adam Binford, 3, male, was killed at Lake Ashby in Volusia County on March 21, 1997. The child strayed outside the roped-off swimming area in a county park to pick some lily pads when an 11-foot alligator attacked him. Splashing dogs in the area may have attracted the alligator. His body was recovered the next day about a mile from the site of the incident.

11. Samuel Wetmore, 70, male, was killed in a pond near his residence in Venice in Sarasota County. He was found on May 4, 2001, and the county medical examiner determined that he died from multiple trauma and loss of blood. An 8' 4" alligator was removed and destroyed.

12. Alexandria Murphy, 2, female, was killed at Lake Cannon in Polk County on June 23, 2001. She wandered 700 feet from her fenced backyard where she had been playing when last seen by her mother. A 6' 6" alligator was removed and destroyed.

13. Robert Steele, 82, was killed near his house on Rabbit Road in Sanibel on Sept. 11, 2001. Steele was walking his terrier on a narrow path that ran between two wetland areas close to J.N. "Ding" Darling National Wildlife Refuge when a 10' 9" gator seized him and dragged him into the water, severing his leg. FWC officers destroyed the alligator. Another six-foot alligator was also removed.

14. Brian Griffin, 12, male, was killed while swimming near a boat ramp in the Dead River in Lake County on June 18, 2003. The male alligator that attacked and drowned Griffin was 10 4 long and weighed 339 lbs. That alligator and several other large alligators were captured destroyed.

15. Janie Melsek, 54, female, was seized by an alligator while landscaping near a pond along Poinciana Circle, Sanibel on July 21, 2004. Melsek survived the attack, but died later of an infection related to the wounds. The alligator that attacked Melsek was a 12 3 male, which was removed and destroyed.

16. Michelle Reeves, 20, female, was killed while swimming after midnight in a retention pond at the Lee Memorial Health Park in Lee County on Sept. 26, 2004. Reeves was visiting the area during a college break. The 7' 11" male alligator that attacked her was removed and destroyed.

17. Donald Ray Owen, 56, was found dead in Six Pound Pond near Lakeland in Polk County with multiple alligator bites and the left arm amputated below the elbow. The medical examiner determined that the victim was bitten prior to dying on March 11, 2005. Circumstances of the incident are uncertain because there were no witnesses. The 9' 8" male alligator responsible for the attack was caught and destroyed.

18. Kevin Murray, 41, male, was killed while swimming in a canal in Port Charlotte on July 15, 2005. The 12' 2" male alligator that attacked him was removed and destroyed.

19. Yovoy Suarez-Jimenez, 28, female, was killed by an alligator at the North New River Canal in Sunrise on May 10, 2006. Circumstances of the attack are uncertain because no witnesses were present. The 9' 6" male alligator that attacked her was caught and destroyed.

20. Judy Cooper, 42, female, was killed by an alligator in a canal in the East Lake Woodlands subdivision in Oldsmar on May 13, 2006. Circumstances of the attack are uncertain because of no witnesses. The 8' 5" female alligator responsible for the attack was caught and destroyed.

21. Annmarie Campbell, 23, female, was seized and drowned by an alligator in Juniper Run in the Ocala National Forest on May 14, 2006 while snorkeling. Campbell had separated from others in her party, and was alone when the attack occurred. Companions found her in the jaws of the alligator less than 30 minutes after the attack and forced the alligator to release her by assaulting its head. The 11' 5" male alligator was captured four days later and destroyed.

22. Justo Antonio Padron, 36, male was seized and drowned by an alligator as he was swimming across a pond at the Miccosukee Indian reservation in west Miami on November 8, 2007. Eyewitnesses watched as Padron disappeared under water, while trying to elude police. His body was later recovered at the bottom of the pond by divers. A 94 alligator and a 76 alligator were removed from the pond, the larger of which was believed to be responsible for the attack.

23. James Okkerse, 61, male, was killed while snorkeling in Blue Spring Run in Orange City on Oct. 19, 2015. The 12  male alligator responsible for the attack was captured and destroyed.
Resident Curtis Lawson, center left, talks about potential future entrance and exit traffic patterns during a meeting Wednesday, June 8, 2016 at River Park Community Center in Naples, Fla. The residents assembled to discuss the city-approved construction of a future 7-Eleven in River Park. The project has been met with controversy as representatives from the convenient store franchise fielded questions. (Corey Perrine/Staff)

By Joseph Cranney of the Naples Daily News

Naples City Council violated the civil rights of a group of low-income residents when it approved a plan for a new 7-Eleven convenience store and gas station in the River Park neighborhood, states a lawsuit residents filed Wednesday.

Twenty-two River Park residents claim the 7-Eleven approved near the intersection of Fifth Avenue North and Goodlette-Frank Road will "adversely and significantly affect all Plaintiffs' life, liberty and property."

Specifically, the proposal will "disparately impact" the low-income neighborhood where most of the city's black residents live, violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act, residents claim in the lawsuit.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled the Fair Housing Act can be used to apply disparate impact claims, or claims that a business practice, intentionally or not, is discriminatory.

The residents seek a permanent injunction against the council's May 18 approval of the 7-Eleven. The council approved the proposal despite protesting residents who said the gas station will cause traffic that could block off the neighborhood and create a safety hazard for children who will walk past the 7-Eleven to and from school.

In Wednesday's filing in Collier County's 20th Circuit Court, the residents argue "no other convenience store/gas station exists in the city of Naples so close to a residential community and so close to actual residences."

The low-income community of more than 60 single-family homes is "more vulnerable" to municipal actions that cause unsafe traffic patterns and exposure to air and water pollutants, the residents claim.

The new 7-Eleven, at about 3,000 square feet, would replace the mostly vacant strip of shops at the property now. A barbershop and Haitian restaurant will close. The strip is the former site of a Kwik Pik convenience store, which also formerly operated a gas station.

Last week, River Park residents met with 7-Eleven officials and asked the convenience store chain to remove the parking lot exit that would send traffic onto their neighborhood street. As an alternative, they suggested building a new exit on the south side of the lot, using city property to connect to Riverside Circle.

The council discussed the issue during its regular meeting Wednesday. Willie Anthony, a longtime neighborhood activist who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, spoke during public comment.

"What you're trying to do is think for the neighborhood instead of listening to the neighborhood," Anthony said. "The neighborhood knows what's best for its kids. You don't seem to think we know anything about our neighborhood."

"Just one time," he added, "Please listen to this neighborhood."

The council directed City Manager Bill Moss to study traffic alternatives that include the city's property.

City Attorney Bob Pritt and Mayor Bill Barnett said they hadn't read the lawsuit, but Barnett had "no issue" with the city looking into a traffic alternative.

"The 'feasibility' is the key word," Barnett said. "And the cost  just the cost alone, it wouldn't be cheap."

Residents criticized Barnett for casting the deciding vote in council's 4-3 approval of the 7-Eleven project. Council members Doug Finlay, Linda Penniman and Ellen Seigel were opposed.

"Mayor Barnett campaigned on the promise he would listen to the community," said Mimi Wolok, the residents' attorney. "Councilman (Sam) Saad said he would champion the community's quality of life. Apparently they meant only that part of the community with wealth and power."

The residents, concerned about the threat of a hurricane, argue the two-lane Fifth Avenue North is also the neighborhood's lone evacuation route.

"The presence of gas pumps, along with increased traffic during evacuation episodes  would create a disaster" for residents trying to evacuate "on a scale not accounted for" by the council," the lawsuit claims.

"Already, this neighborhood is a microcosm of the problem that faced low-income residential areas hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina."

Hurricane Katrina devastated southern Louisiana, especially New Orleans, in August 2005. The hurricane and subsequent flooding killed at least 1,245 people.
Linn County Sheriff's Office detectives arrested a Lebanon man June 9 for first-degree encouraging child sexual abuse.

According to a news release, detectives served a search warrant at about 7:15 a.m. that day at a residence on Ede Road, near Lebanon. There they arrested 48-year-old Ronald Eugene Dial Jr., a registered sex offender, after thousands of digital pictures and movies depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct were found on his digital devices.

The investigation leading to the warrant and arrest began when the Linn County Sheriff's Office received a CyperTip report from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children concerning child pornography being emailed from a Linn County IP address. Google had made the report to NCEMC after one of its automated systems detected the material being emailed from a Gmail account.

Numerous electronic items were seized during the warrant; digital forensic analysis of those items is ongoing. During an interview with detectives, Dial admitted to using his Gmail account to send and receive child pornography.

Dial was lodged at the Linn County Jail and charged with first-degree encouraging child sexual abuse.

The Linn County Sheriff's Office was assisted in this investigation by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, the Lewis County Sheriff's Office (Wash.), the Albany Police Department and the Benton County Sheriff's Office.

Anyone with information related to the investigation is encouraged to call Detective John Trenary at 541-971-6665.
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School Board

The school year has ended, so it's time to turn attention to a summer reading list.

Here are a few titles that come to mind as a result of Tuesday's Collier County School Board meeting. Some titles that seem to be missing from the board's list:

-- "The Spirit of Compromise  Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It" by Amy Gutmann.

-- "How to Talk So People Will Listen" by Steve Brown.

Here are some titles that would seem to be on the board's list, though we can't speculate whether some folks will suggest these contain pornography, manipulated statistics or revisionist history:

-- "No Compromise Leadership" by Neil Ducoff.

-- "My Way or the Highway: The Micromanagement Survival Guide" by Harry Chambers.

-- "The Great Divide" by Joseph Stiglitz.

Board self-evaluation

The board's third self-evaluation in a year exploring how the five members interact was presented Tuesday. It's been done by boards the past seven years and this time, more than a third of the 34 ratings were at a historic low. Written comments referred to distrust, lying, incivility, meddling with staff and dysfunction.

Given the board's "great divide" of 3-2 votes, none of this was surprising.

After back-and-forth mostly between 14-year School Board veteran Kathleen Curatolo and 2014 board addition Erika Donalds regarding some written comments, the room fell silent (reading list addition: "A Field Guide to Awkward Silences" by Alexandra Petri.)

"Where do we go with this?" Curatolo broke the pause. "How do we get there?"

The unspoken answers became clear: "nowhere" and "we don't" before the board accepted the self-evaluation 5-0.

Donalds came in for criticism for regularly communicating with citizens after meetings about what the board did and the rationale for her votes. We wish more public officials would explain votes in such fashion. Board member Kelly Lichter said she'd been asked by citizens to do the same, though we'd suggest she might just simplify it into "I agree with her."

Board member Roy Terry was on target in suggesting it's OK to explain a position but to be careful about what's said about the others in doing so.

Superintendent evaluation

The board also presented Superintendent Kamela Patton with her annual evaluation of 3.76 out of 4 points, better than 3.69 a year ago. Donalds and Lichter, while contributing marks that resulted in this higher score, voted against the evaluation in a 3-2 decision. A mystery? Not considering they don't like the evaluation tool used.

We previously chastised Curatolo for referring to some citizens who speak at board meetings as "extremists." Likewise it came across as a dig when Donalds referred Tuesday to several honorable community leaders who spoke in support of Patton as her "fan club." They included the sheriff and his chief of operations, a member of the state education Board of Governors and dedicated heads of agencies that care for children trapped in domestic violence and substance abuse.

Contract extension

The board voted 3-2 to extend Patton's contract two years beyond its prior expiration date of June 30, 2018. Patton is exceptionally talented at what she does, not just in our view but among respected leadership across Collier County. Locking up top talent for as long as you can just makes good sense.

Some incorrectly compared the action to what happened before the 2014 election, but thankfully Terry addressed efforts at revisionist history by noting the differing, surprise nature of that 2014 contract extension.

This time, the matter was on the agenda and citizens were alerted, as evidenced by a parade of speakers who offered public comment Tuesday.

Final chapter

Curatolo and board Chairwoman Julie Sprague aren't running again.

So the board majority and district's direction hang in the balance in the Aug. 30 primary. A reading title suggestion for voters in light of the abysmal turnout in August 2014 and the resulting discord: "Wake Up!" (by Neil Ducoff).
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Christopher E. Spade, Naples

Classified e-mails

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly claimed that she never received or transmitted any e-mails marked "classified" to or from her private e-mail server.

First, federal messages aren't sent with a marking of "classified." They are marked as "Official Use Only", "Confidential", "Secret", or "Top Secret." There are appropriate higher classified notations, such as "SCI" (Special Compartmentalized Information) as needed. In effect, she is parsing the argument.

Second, by nature of her position, she had to have generated messages that were "classified."

For example, while I was a missile crew commander at Little Rock Air Force Base, I wrote a scenario that described how a small terrorist group could take advantage of a potential weakness in the missile site security system. When I finished writing the scenario, I had to mark it "secret" and handle it accordingly.

That meant that it had to remain on base to be secured. If I had needed to transmit it electronically, I would have needed to format it with the appropriate classification markings, i.e. "Secret." Under no circumstances would I have been authorized to take it home, even though I wrote it.

For Clinton to claim that she never sent any "classified" messages, one of the following has to be true. Either she never generated any work-related messages (which means she never did any U.S. State Department work). Or, she has no clue what constitutes proper handling or protection of "classified" information. If either of these is true, she is definitely not qualified to hold the office of president of the United States. Or, she could just not be telling the truth.
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Steve Campbell, Naples

Great again?

The political slogan: Make America Great Again.

Let's look at some times. Over the last 30 years, government cut the highest income tax rate, "trickle down effect" and the federal budget has been negative ever since  except for one year under President Clinton when the deficit was zero.

We have been in three wars, bombing, killing and wounding how many? Which corporations have made billions off this suffering?

1970s: President Nixon gets U.S. out of Vietnam, last moon landing, corporations start shipping offices and jobs overseas to avoid taxes and increase profits.

1960s: race riots, assassinations, moon landing.

1950s: Korean war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur wants 23 nukes to bomb communist China, gets fired. Where did Doolittle Raiders land?

1940s: WWII, we join world conflict, end it!

1930s: Stock market crash, some make millions, some jump from buildings.

1920s: Prohibition, Roaring Twenties, Al Capone, Elliot Ness.

1910s: MacArthur burns out WWI veterans from D.C. at bayonet point. All they wanted was their bonus for fighting Germans. Joe Hill, union organizer, executed in Utah.

1890s: Wounded Knee, Cripple Creek, Sand Creek massacres by U.S.

1870-80s: Coal mine murders and executions in Pennsylvania because of union formations.

1860s: Civil War. Union officers commit treason by joining Confederacy, Buffalo Soldiers go West to solve Indian problem. Official policy of U.S. Army officers: "only good Indian is a dead Indian."

1830s: Trail of Tears following Indian Removal Act of 1830. 10,000 dead on trail.

1800s: Duels to end arguments. A slap in the face, walk 10 paces, fire! Argument over.

Great again? For whom?
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Sonja Spier, Naples

Hand up

I became a donor and volunteer for Habitat for Humanity of Collier County when I went to a Habitat function where a 10-year-old boy told about the times he missed school because they had alligators just outside of their trailer door.

Now in his Habitat home, he's happy and safe. I was hooked.

Qualifying applicants must submit verification of U.S. citizenship or permanent residency. They must have lived or worked in Collier County for one year. Three years of tax returns, verification of employment, bank statements and background checks are required. Habitat emphasizes helping families with school-age children.

Next, members of the selection team visit their current home to conduct an interview with all members of the family. This ensures that families with the greatest need and strongest determination are selected.

Every homeowner must come to the office monthly with their mortgage payment. This close relationship affords the Habitat staff the opportunity to nip problems in the bud. Habitat regularly inspects each subdivision to make sure all properties are well-maintained and are very strict in enforcement.

Habitat requires every homeowner to put in 500 hours of sweat equity. New homeowners are required to attend a series of homeownership classes. Only 1 in 15 families making inquiries is able to purchase a home due to the competition for the homes that can be built.

Habitat homeowners are your landscaper, restaurant servers, cooks, home cleaners, store clerks, etc.

Through its interest-free mortgage, Habitat's philosophy is to give a hand up and not a handout.
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Michael Dedio, Naples

Their own record

Let's just be honest about the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

The party leaders are blaming Trump for hurting their re-election chances for the Senate and the House of Representatives. These candidates need to run on their own records and not look for an excuse in Trump.

What has the Republican majority of both houses done for you, the voter?

Candidates should stand up and be accountable for their records. Trump should not be their excuse.
Kimberly Mitchell executive director The Everglades Trust

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By Kimberly Mitchell, West Palm Beach Executive director, The Everglades Trust

Guest commentary

We all pay dearly for Florida's sugar industry. It needs to end.

A recent guest commentary in the Naples Daily News from the Florida Sugar Cane League claimed that Florida sugar production is the epitome of family farmers hard at work.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the most recent agricultural census reveals that there are only about 150 sugar "farms" in Florida, two of which account for some 300,000 acres of production  some family enterprise!

To be clear, the Florida Sugar Cane League is speaking for the mammoth Florida sugar barons  U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals. The guest commentary criticizes those working hard to restore America's Everglades by calling them "so-called defenders of the environment."

The commentary fails to mention the fact it is Big Sugar that has played a major role in pushing the Everglades ecosystem to the brink of destruction.

To provide benefits to sugar producers, Washington imposes a hidden tax on every consumer in the nation. The sugar program costs U.S. consumers and businesses an average of $3 billion a year.

Further, according to a 2012 report by RTI International, commissioned by The Everglades Foundation, about 76 percent of the phosphorus entering and polluting the Everglades is from agriculture, including sugar production. Meanwhile, only 24 percent of phosphorus cleanup costs are paid by agriculture  sugar producers included.

The truth is the massive 700,000-acre Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) south of Lake Okeechobee is the very pathway of the water from the lake into the Everglades.

Today, Big Sugar, subsidized by the American taxpayer and consumer, controls some 500,000 acres of the EAA. For too many years, the state has given sugar producers top priority in water allocations and management. In the process, Lake Okeechobee, the St. Lucie Canal and the Caloosahatchee River became Big Sugar's sewer system and has largely contributed to the destruction of three of the most productive estuaries in America.

What is happening today is worse than anything scientists have seen before. Sugar lands obstruct the ability to get the needed quantities of clean freshwater flowing south, starving the Everglades and Florida Bay (the Florida Keys).

Today's system instead forces hundreds of billions of gallons of polluted water through the Caloosahatchee River and St. Lucie Canal, devastating local communities and putting at risk the environmental survival and economic stability of these three vital parts of Florida.

As to their claim that there is no subsidy for sugar production, again, nothing could be further from the truth. The federal sugar program led to the enactment of a tailor-made price-fixing scheme. Congress decided to set up sugar import restrictions and limitations on domestic production to virtually guarantee a profit to sugar producers.

Today, the sugar program requires the secretary of agriculture to keep the domestic price of raw sugar at 21 to 22 cents per pound  often four times higher than the world price. That means hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for Florida sugar producers and higher food prices for the consumer.

Taxpayer costs rose to nearly $300 million in fiscal 2013 alone. The Sugar Cane League claims sugar supports 12,500 jobs in Florida. If that is the case, why does the International Trade Commission report that the entire U.S. cane and beet industry supports only 18,000 jobs?

Yes, Big Sugar has no qualms about distorting the truth.

However, Florida citizens are now grasping the economic and environmental importance of the Everglades, which is the source of the drinking water supply for 8 million (1 out of 3) Floridians. Even in the face of Big Sugar's immoral conduct, we are making progress.

One day soon, the damaging discharges from Lake Okeechobee through the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie will halt and clean water will once again flow southward through the EAA and into Everglades National Park and down to the Florida Keys.

We are confident the public's desire to preserve and protect America's Everglades will prevail against the shameless sugar industry.

The Everglades Trust is a 501(c)(4) organization established in 1994 to focus on saving the Everglades. Offices are in West Palm Beach. Mitchell was a West Palm Beach city commissioner from 2002-15.


After nearly 25 years of recognizing undergraduate teaching excellence at Duke Universitys Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke alumnus and philanthropist Richard Lublin today praised Dr. JoAnne Van Tuyl, Duke Associate Professor of the Practice of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, for being chosen to receive the Richard K. Lublin Teaching Award for 2016.



According to Lublin, "an endowed teaching scholarship can mean the difference between a college professor launching a new program and having to shelve the idea until they find the funding to make it possible. Recognizing teaching excellence should be more than just a handshake, said Lublin. An endowed teaching scholarship provides a meaningful way for a university to recognize its most dedicated professors and their deep commitment to teaching excellence.



Dr. Van Tuyl, recently expressed her gratitude and concurs, The Lublin award indeed means a lot to me as I have committed most of my professional life to teaching. I am dedicated to sharing my love of Russia and the Russian language with the remarkably vibrant, intelligent and ambitious young people at Duke. This distinguished award will allow me to continue to travel to Russia in search of new texts, sounds and images to enrich my students' skills in the Russian language in particular, and in intercultural intelligence in general.



According to Duke Today: Van Tuyl develops innovative technologies and interactive strategies in the classroom. She understands that learning about culture is a key element of learning a language, and has developed collaborations with Russian visitors. During her second year at Duke, Dr. Van Tuyl co-authored a revolutionary textbook that has had an effect at universities teaching Russian across the country.



Regularly engaging with new classroom technologies since Duke Digital Initiative's iPod Program in 2004, she recently participated in a Flipping the Classroom fellowship program, which encourages faculty to implement new classroom techniques to achieve greater student learning. Students have praised her for thought provoking discussions in fast-paced courses, with intensive learning.



The Richard K. Lublin Award is one of four endowed distinguished teaching awards

presented annually within the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University in

Durham, North Carolina. It is the only teaching award at Duke that requires the recipient to be nominated and awarded by the universitys students.



Lublin is a resident of Naples and Avon, CT. He established the award in 1993 to recognize undergraduate teaching excellence across all educational and research programs in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences at Duke University.



The winner receives a $5,000 prize and is recognized during an Arts & Sciences

Awards ceremony in April and again during the universitys annual Founders Day

ceremony held in October.


JEFFERSON  Detectives with the Linn County Sheriff's Office and the Drug Enforcement Administration Eugene Resident Office arrested two Jefferson residents Wednesday, in the culmination of a 10-month, multi-agency investigation.

At about 7 a.m., law enforcement officers served a search warrant in the 100 block of Main Street. John Roger Bauer, 51, and Celia Nash, 49, both live on the property and were home at the time.

Investigators seized more than a quarter of a pound of heroin, two ounces of methamphetamine, three-quarters of a pound of marijuana, unauthorized prescription medication, digital scales, packaging material, drug paraphernalia, surveillance cameras, nearly $3,000 in cash, a rifle, and a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol. The latter was confirmed stolen from the Albany area in February. Investigators also recovered an automotive diagnostic system valued at $4,500, which had been taken during an Oregon City business burglary in April.

Bauer was arrested and charged with delivery of heroin, possession of heroin, unlawful delivery of methamphetamine, possession of methamphetamine, felon in possession of a firearm and two counts of first-degree theft by receiving.

Nash was arrested and charged with unlawful delivery of heroin, unlawful possession of heroin, unlawful possession of methamphetamine and felon in possession of a firearm.

The Lebanon Police Department, Sweet Home Police Department and Marion County Sheriff's Office assisted with the investigation.
Seneca Mortgage Servicing in Elma, N.Y., has chosen Nationstar Mortgage Holdings as the subservicer for its existing mortgage servicing rights portfolio as well as for future acquisitions.

Dallas-based Nationstar will initially handle subservicing for roughly $50 billion in MSRs, mainly made up of Fannie Mae and Freddie residential mortgages. The company will also subservice MSRs that Seneca plans to add to its portfolio via flow and bulk acquisitions, the companies said in a news release Wednesday.

Through the deal, Nationstar will also assume Seneca's existing work site and some of the company's team members who handle the existing portfolio's servicing. The two companies previously announced a $55 billion private label subservicing deal.

Altogether, Nationstar said it expects its total servicing portfolio to include more than $100 billion in subserviced portfolios by the end of 2016.

"Subservicing has become a powerful growth vehicle for Nationstar driven by our focus on the customer and continual investments in technology, process, and compliance," Nationstar President and Chief Executive Jay Bray said in the release.
The Oregon Secretary of States office is just out with its assessment of how the states 36 counties are faring financially. The report makes for fascinating reading for anyone concerned with the states relatively rural counties  and it does include some good news for Linn County.

The Secretary of States office has been issuing these reports on the counties every two years since 2012, when lawmakers and state officials couldnt help but notice that some counties were teetering on the verge of insolvency. (A copy of the full report is attached to the online version of this editorial.)

The office pulls much of the data for the report from each countys audited financial statements for the fiscal years 2006 through 2015. It also includes 10 indicators intended to provide a general assessment of each countys financial condition  factors such as unemployment, per-capita income, per-capita spending on law enforcement and so on. The report adds another factor to the mix: Declining federal timber revenue, which certainly has added to the financial strain facing Oregons most vulnerable counties.

The report also lists those counties that should be monitored for continued signs of trouble, "counties whose financial condition may indicate a higher risk of distress." Two years ago, Linn County was one of nine counties on that list. But the new report drops Linn County from that list. In fact, just four counties remain: Curry, Douglas, Josephine and Polk. (For the record, Polk County officials say they dont think their county belongs on the list, in part because voters there last year passed a local option levy to pay for law enforcement.)

The story in the remaining three counties, however, is a familiar one: In each of those three counties, at least half of the land is owned by the public  either the state or the federal government, limiting the tax base. In Josephine County, in fact, just about two-thirds of the county is publicly owned.

Each of those counties has been particularly hard-hit by the decline in federal timber payments; each of the three has drawn at least 10 percent of their revenue from Bureau of Land Management timber payments. Each of those counties has relatively high unemployment, when compared to the rest of Oregon, and some of the lowest property-tax rates in the state. (The permanent property tax rate in Josephine County is 59 cents for every $1,000 in assessed value; by contrast, Linn Countys rate is $1.27, the fifth-lowest in the state. Benton County assesses $2.21; the state average is $2.82.)

The report offers evidence of Oregons economic recovery over the last few years. It also clearly shows how that recovery has been centered primarily in Oregons urban areas.

Near its end, the report summarizes the steps the state recently has taken to assist counties in financial distress. Its not a particularly long list. Certain counties were allowed to use road funds for sheriff patrols and other public-safety costs. A 2013 measure allows the governor to determine if a public safety fiscal emergency exists within one or more counties; if such an emergency were declared, the state would cover half the cost of public safety and the county would cover the other half. To date, the governor has not been required to declare a fiscal emergency in any Oregon county. The improving economy may have bought us some time, but any sort of economic downturn could wind up propelling some of the states troubled counties over a fiscal cliff. (mm)
Homeschoolers are taking money away from the district

Unconstitutional move

(NaturalNews) Homeschooling is on the rise in Clinton County, Kentucky. Over the recent years, it has seen a 10 to 15 percent increase in homeschool families, and it is believed that this trend will continue in the coming years.According to the, the increase is due to improved access to homeschool programs, personal or religious beliefs, and the increase in the public school age from 16 to 18 years old.To ensure homeschooled children have access to the best education possible, the school district recently decided to conduct random audits of homeschool families during the summer months."As the number of homeschooled children in our county continues to increase, so does the need for the (school) district to ensure that all children in our county are getting a rigorous and effective education," said Julie York, Director of Pupil Personnel for the school district, in theWhile families have a constitutional right to homeschool their kids, Julie York said, "it is still the school district's responsibility to make sure the student is educated."The audits will, randomly, examine both academic and attendance records of homeschool families.Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) opposes any such audits as unconstitutional and is troubled by the underlying reason."We are also troubled by what appears to be the underlying motivation for this proposed meddling by school officials: money," HSLDA said.Speaking at the school board meeting, Mike Reeves, the district's finance director, estimated that the district may lose almost $300,000 in SEEK (Support Education Excellence in Kentucky ) funding because homeschool students are not being taught in public schools.According to the HSLDA, that number would be closer to $435,000 given that there are about 85 homeschool students in Clinton County. Kentucky spends approximately $9,316 of SEEK funds on every student. However, the Kentucky Department of Education estimates that the SEEK funds for the 20162017 school year will drop down to $5,118 per pupil."It is obvious that Clinton County sees the increase of homeschoolers as taking money away from the district, and this is likely a significant reason in officials' desire to increase scrutiny of homeschool families," the HSLDA said.HSLDA Staff Attorney Tj Schmidt wrote a letter to Julie York in which he pointed out that parents who teach their children at home are operating as a private school. As such, they are required to keep attendance and academic records verifying that their children are being educated for the minimum term of 1,062 hours and 170 days.Under the Best Practices Document drawn up by the Kentucky Directors of Pupil Personnel and homeschool leaders, parents who have given notice within the first two weeks of the beginning of each school year are a legitimate private school.However, he notes that there is a difference between a homeschool and private school. Under the state law, "school officials cannot simply show up at a homeschool family's home and demand records as they might of a more traditional private school.""No records should be demanded unless the school district has evidence that parents are not educating their children."Schmidt hopes that Clinton County will respect the Best Practices Document and set aside the intent to audit homeschools randomly in Kentucky.
Operation Paperclip, and the legacy of Nazi scientists in the U.S.

Nazi 'Health Leader' who gave experimental vaccines to prisoners hired by U.S. government

Nazi legacy lives on through GMOs, vaccines and pharmaceuticals

(NaturalNews) The absolutely horrific war crimes that took place during World War II against prisoners both young and old in the Nazi death camps are often relegated to the dustbin of history, with the implication that such inhumane experimentation on human beings could never possibly happen again in today's modern, and supposedly more civilized, world.But the disturbing truth is that the vile acts of Nazi scientists from the past eerily resemble those of biotechnology scientists today, who as you may already know are gradually converting the entire global food supply into intellectual property owned by multinational corporations -- all under the guise of feeding the world, of course.What you may not know, however, is that many Nazi scientists actually came to America after the war and continued their legacies here, creating pharmaceutical, chemical and weapons companies that used many of the technological developments gained through these evil human experimentation endeavors. It is a sickening prospect, but one that is well-documented, though perhaps not widely known by the public.Now-declassified documents reveal that the U.S. military-industrial complex intentionally brought Nazi scientists to the U.S. after the war, in nearly every case concealing their identities in order to protect these war criminals from public scrutiny. The scheme was known as Operation Paperclip, and it served as the foundation for the development of many of today's chemical weapons, aerospace technologies and drug medicines."Of particular interest were scientists specializing in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine," explains, one of many historical records of what took place following the war "These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas."According to this same source, some 500 Nazi scientists were brought over to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip, and their continued work in various parts of the country would eventually lead to the formation of government programs like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or what is more popularly known as NASA.Other Nazi scientists who specialized in the areas of vaccines and pharmaceuticals were also brought over by the U.S. government to work on new projects for the American empire. One such scientist was Kurt Blome, a high-ranking Nazi scientist who served as the Reich Health Leader and Plenipotentiary for Cancer Research in the Reich Research Council.According to one account of Blome's work during the war, the Hitler regime had apparently tasked him with developing biological weapons under the guise of cancer research. The Reich's official Deputy Minister of Health at the time, Blome performed covert experiments on prisoners that included subjecting them to various "extreme situations" in order to gauge their level of resistance.One of Blome's specific tasks was to test experimental vaccines on prisoners, which included vaccines containing the plague. Blome also conducted tests with other biological agents including cholera, anthrax and typhoid, deliberately infecting prisoners with these pathogens in order to evaluate vaccine efficacy."In 1943 Blome was studying bacteriological warfare, although officially he was involved in cancer research, which was however only a camouflage," reads a letter sent by Anglo-American experts during investigations that took place at the end of the war.Rather than hang Blome along with the rest of the Nazi criminals, the U.S. government quietly brought him over to the states and gave him a position with the U.S Army Chemical Corps to continue his work here. And many others like him, as we previously reported, also filled the positions of major drug and chemical corporations like Bayer, BASF and Hoechst.Bayer, of course, is the same company that today manufacturers the pain-reliever drug aspirin. But its origins stem from a German company known as IG Farben that manufactured a chemical called Zyklon B, the chemical gas that was used to exterminate Jews and other "undesirables" at Auschwitz and other extermination camps.And BASF, which today manufacturers genetically modified organisms ( GMOs ) that are distributed via Monsanto and other biotechnology channels, also got its start in Germany during the Nazi era. One of the "Big Six" biotechnology corporations today, BASF is one of the component companies spun off of the IG Farben empire after the war, along with Bayer."Post-war, IG Farben was broken up into separate companies, but those companies were following a common agenda," wrote Jon Rappoport in an in-depth piece about the Nazi roots of modern "medicine" and GMOs."If... you want to know why the endless debate over labeling GMO food rivals the real issue--banning GMO crops altogether--you can look to these Farben allies: Bayer, BASF, and Sanofi," he continued."They are among the leaders in GMO research and production. BASF cooperates with Monsanto on research projects. Sanofi is a leader in GM vaccine research."In other words, the very same research projects that were taking place in the form of gruesome human experimentation during WWII are still taking place today. Only now, they have been institutionalized within the confines of multinational corporations peddling it as food for a starving world (GMOs) and modern medicine (pharmaceuticals and vaccines).Many of today's vaccines, in fact, were developed as an extension of the research conducted on human prisoners during the war. One Nazi scientist by the name of Kurt Heissmeyer, for instance, is cited as injecting tuberculosis bacteria directly into prisoners' lungs at the Neungamme concentration camp in order to later develop a tuberculosis vaccine, which is now widely administered to children.You can learn more about how Nazi scientists were brought over to the U.S. after the war, bringing with them the technological prowess that is now being used to create modern drugs, GMOs and vaccines, by checking out the book
Taking action to stop poisoning of children

Courts doubling down on pesticide companies

(NaturalNews) The southern French town of Saint-Jean, located near the city of Toulouse, has passed a law banning the use of pesticides within 50 meters (160 feet) of homes, in the face of concern over rising rates of childhood cancer in the country's agricultural regions.As the town is surrounded by farms, the ban is more than just a symbolic gesture."Research shows that people living near areas where pesticides are used are more affected by some diseases: endocrinal hormone disruption, diabetes and obesity, hormone-dependent cancers, cancer of the blood, male and female fertility problems and birth defects," said Gerard Bapt, a medical doctor, the deputy mayor of the town, and the major force behind the ban.Saint-Jen has also banned the use of herbicides in any ditches that collect rainwater, as a way of protecting local water supplies.But according to Bapt, legislative bans on their own will not be enough to protect people's health."We must change farming practices and use organic methods and crop rotation," he said.Bapt points to studies showing unusually high rates of cancer in wine growing regions such as Bordeaux. And an abnormally high number of cancers have been found among children who attend a school in Villeneuve-de-Blaye that sits beside a vineyard.Bapt says that farmers in Saint-Jen have not been careful about their practices."Recently pesticides were sprayed next to homes where vulnerable people such as pregnant women or young children might have been exposed," he said. "The pesticides used are found in water, with traces of pesticides in nine out of 10 rivers and streams in France."Some of the farmers affected by the ban have threatened to sue to overturn it.The Saint-Jen ban is part of a larger debate taking place nationwide. France is either Europe's first or second largest user of pesticides, depending on the source. Of the 60,000 tons of poisonous chemicals sprayed on French crops each year, about a fifth is applied to vineyards  although grapes comprise only three percent of the country's agricultural acreage.These figures, and mounting evidence of harm being done to nearby communities, has led to formation of residents associations in Bordeaux that lobby winegrowers to reduce their chemical usage.In response, the Bordeaux Winegrowers' Committee has said it will urge members to use fewer pesticides. The French government has also committed to cut nationwide pesticide use by half between 2008 and 2018. But the government admits that from 2008 to 2010, pesticide use for only four percent  far below the level needed to meet the 2018 target.French citizens are also taking to the courts to challenge the pesticide companies' poisoning of their communities. In fact, it is farmers themselves behind many of these efforts.In February, a French court found Monsanto guilty of poisoning a farmer named Paul Francois by not providing proper use instructions for its Lasso herbicide. Francois therefore did not apply the chemical properly and was exposed to toxic levels causing neurological problems including headaches, stammering and memory loss.Now a French criminal court is investigating whether pesticide producers are guilty of manslaughter in the death of a Bordeaux wine grower, James-Bernard Murat, following 40 years of exposure to pesticides containing sodium arsenate, which was known to be hazardous as far back as 1955.His daughter, Valerie Murat, said that her father's death would set an even more significant precedent than the Francois decision because Francois' death was "an accident, whereas my father's death was due to the chronic use of grape pesticides over 40 years. Yet he only used these three times a year. The companies have always sworn that chronic inhalation in 'homoeopathic doses' posed no danger to human health. The inquiry will determine who was right and who was lying."The court's willingness to take up the case could open the floodgates to hundreds of other prosecutions and lawsuits against pesticide companies, Murat's lawyers have said.
Greed responsible for Halls' solar panel debacle

(NaturalNews) Renewable energy has become something of a holy grail in this modern age of anti-fossil fuels. But a California couple is quickly learning that government efforts to get more people off the old grid are painfully schizophrenic  or at the very least contradictory and dubiously implemented  when doing so means that homeowners might generate more energy than they need, thus cutting into traditional energy grid profits.Ron and Sarah Hall of Lake Elsinore are still in shock over what happened after they tried to take advantage of a solar energy conversion program that promised free solar panels and installation if they allowed a local solar energy company to perform the work and retrieve the costs through state incentive programs on their behalf. Solar City would agree to provide and install the panels in exchange for state-sanctioned rebate reimbursements, a presumable win-win for both parties.But things quickly went south when the panels were finally installed in accordance with the terms and it was realized that the Hall residence would now be producing about 28 percentenergy than it would use, an apparent no-no under state law. According to Southern California Edison, the Halls' local energy provider, any home that produces more solar energy than it can use might turn around and try to sell that energy , making it an energy provider subject to commercial business regulations.The Halls had never intended to turn their home into an energy-producing commercial venture, of course, as it was reasonably assumed that any excess energy production from their panels would simply be an added benefit afforded as part of the conversion agreement. This is the case for thousands of other solar energy households throughout Southern California who, producing more energy than they use, sell some of that energy back to their local utilities.But in the Halls' case, the overabundant capacity of their solar configuration ended up becoming their worst nightmare, and they were eventually forced to have the panels removed  this after having the panels sit atop their house unused for months."They're hooked up, but they're not turned on," Ron Hall told the local media, indicting Southern California Edison as the culprit in their mandatory non-use. "They're saying that the system that I have will generate 128 percent, that's 28 percent over what they estimated."For nearly a year, the Halls were stuck with functioning, but legally inoperable, solar panels as they fought for the green light to have them turned on  to no avail. They were ultimately forced to cut ties with Solar City, which agreed to remove the panels and restore the home back to its former, fossil fuel-dependent state, blaming a "design flaw" for the failed installation.A representative from Southern California Edison later told, the local affiliate that first reported on the saga, that the state of California is to blame for the disaster due to policies governing "commercial" energy production. But this is only partially true, as Solar City is also to blame for an energy leasing clause in the agreement that ultimately landed the Halls in the legal quagmire.Part of the agreement between the Halls and Solar City was that the Halls would pay the company a monthly flat fee to use the energy they generated from their "free" panels . Solar City apparently installed panels that were too large and too powerful for the Halls' home because the more energy the panels produced, the more money Solar City would receive in leasing fees  and the more legal trouble in which the Halls could potentially find themselves mired."You're better off going with a system you own  especially if it comes with a production guarantee that indicates (in advance) how much energy your system will generate," says Sunline Energy , another solar energy provider out of California. "This way, your installation will be small enough to be affordable but large enough to cover your electricity needs."
Dangers of vaccines

Dangers of genetic engineering

(NaturalNews) Oregon Health and Science University is now looking for volunteers to try out a new and apparently "promising" HIV vaccine, as reported byThe novel vaccine could be "a huge step forward in the fight against HIV, as well as give the Oregon school the confidence and research it needs to pursue vaccinations against other deadly infections."In the US, more than 1.2 million people are living with HIV and almost one in eight are completely unaware of their infection. Over the past decade, the number of people living with HIV has increased, and the pace of new infections is far too high, according to theHowever, the vaccine from Oregon University is troubling, as it is based upon a live (but weakened) version of cytomegalovirus (herpes virus)  that has been genetically engineered to appear like HIV to the human immune system. Wait a minute  so not only is it yet another vaccine, but it's a GE vaccine to boot?As reported by, vaccines are not always effective. We have seen outbreaks of infectious disease spread widely amongst fully vaccinated individuals and new viral strains are frequently appearing that escape current immunization.Meanwhile, diseases such as autism have been linked to childhood vaccination. There are rising rates of autism and neurological disorders in large percentages of children that are considered by researchers to be linked to vaccinations. In fact, there is a growing body of research that points to the adverse effects of vaccination on our immune systems, meaning that there needs to be a serious review of official claims over vaccine safety and efficiency, as reported byThe "breakthrough" in Oregon is being reported as curing 50-60% of HIV-infected monkeys, and now the university is calling for human guinea pigs so that the study can be conducted with people. According to the head researcher, scientists "aren't 100% sure why they have been unable to improve upon that cure rate [of 50-60%]." So basically, what they're saying is that they have a vaccine with a 50/50 chance of success, that's been genetically engineered and they want to test it out on humans... right. GE foods have already been declared unsafe and according tothere has not been enough long-term testing as to whether or not GE products are safe for humans. When it comes to GE food, the FDA has stated that "it is the manufacturer's responsibility to ensure that the [GE] food products it offers for sale are safe." That's pretty worrying.The FDA does not require independent pre-market safety testing for GE food and it also does not require the companies to submit full and complete information about these studies. Does that mean that it's up to the vaccine manufacturer and Big Pharma to decide whether or not their GE vaccines are safe?Most of the animal safety testing that takes place with GE food and vaccines is merely short-term, as with the monkeys and the HIV vaccine. This means that no studies have been carried out over the lifespan of a human being. There is no way to determine whether or not the HIV vaccine is safe to humans over the course of 80 or so years  and the vaccine is only 50% effective in monkeys. So who would want to take that chance?Big Pharma is starting to manipulate nature to a whole new level by using GE in conjunction with vaccination  independently those two things have been proven to be dangerous to human health. But combined? The new HIV vaccine could in fact be lethal.
Full force of the Obama administration in play

Fourth Amendment is clear

(NaturalNews) It might have been launched with the best of intentions during the Reagan administration, but the so-called "war on drugs" has been used more times as justification for violating Americans' constitutional rights than it is possible to count.And the governmentpersists in utilizing anti-drug policy to invade our privacy. This latest assault on the Fourth Amendment is being launched by the Obama administration's Drug Enforcement Agency As reported by, the DEA has gone to court to fight for unrestricted access, without a properly issued warrant based on probable cause  as required by the Fourth Amendment  to millions of private medical files , including those of two transgender men who are taking properly prescribed testosterone.Specifically, the agency is battling to get access to databases in Oregon that contain health files of around 1 million state residents. As thereports:The case involves the full force of the Obama administration against the state of Oregon and just five individuals  two of whom are are taking prescription hormone drugs that have to be monitored by state officials, per statute.That said, in 2014, U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty ruled against the DEA, claiming that the kind of warrantless searches of health record databases being sought were textbook privacy invasions."It is difficult to conceive of information that is... more deserving of Fourth Amendment protection," Haggerty wrote in his decision. "By obtaining the prescription records for individuals like John Does 2 and 4, a person would know that they have used testosterone in particular quantities and by extension, that they have gender identity disorder and are treating it through hormone therapy."Although there is not an absolute right to privacy in prescription information... it is more than reasonable for patients to believe that law enforcement agencies will not have unfettered access to their records," he noted further.So, the Obama administration  not one to allow the Constitution to get in the way of policy implementation  disagreed, arguing instead that because health records have already been handed over to a third party  Oregon's Prescription Drug Monitor Program  then of course patients can no longer expect them to remain private.As noted byCritics of the administration's attempt to gain unfettered health record access claim that the Fourth Amendment is clear about its requirements that government needs a good reason, and a court-issued warrant, before it can pry into Americans' personal "papers and effects."
LELO, a Swedish intimate lifestyle company that is dubbed as the "Apple of the pleasure product industry, has released a new revolutionary design for condoms that boasts state-of-the-art structure to bring strength, sensation and intimacy to the next level.

Their new condom LELO HEX addresses the three core issues of the current condoms, discomfort, slippage and breakage.

According to the report from Mashable, there has been no significant technological advance in condoms for 70 years after the reservoir tip was introduced. Engineers from LELO devoted seven years in developing the LELO HEX. After all the years they spent improving condoms, they discovered that materials is not really an issue, but there is a dire need of upgrade in structure.

LELO HEX boasts 350 individual hexagons. HEX also combines 0.055mm HEXTM web with ultra-thin 0.045mm latex panels for thinness and strength combined.

"There's a reason why honeycombs are the shape they are, and why snake scales move the way they do. It's because hexagons are strong, symmetrical, and tessellate perfectly. They're nature's go-to shape for anything needing to be at once lightweight, and incredibly strong. That's why the structure of Graphene - the thinnest, strongest material known to science is ... you guessed it, hexagonal," LELO explained on their website.



The unique hexagonal structure design of LELO HEX provides more strength to avoid unwanted breakage. The condom also features a raised inner structure design to minimize slippage and maximize sensitivity. The ultra-thin panels flex and mold to the uniqueness of each wearers rod providing more intimacy.

One of the most appealing features of LELO HEX, besides its unique structure, is its brand ambassador. LELO chose Hollywood superstar Charlie Sheen, who shook the world when he announced that he is positive for HIV, to back up their product.

"It's stuff people don't want to talk about, and I figured: If I'm involved, maybe they'll talk about it," Sheen told People. "This is a way to prevent a lot of s--t from happening, from disease to unwanted pregnancies. But it's still taboo for some reason."


A new study revealed that the most commonly used antidepressive treatment during pregnancy may have a negative effect on the brain activities of newborn babies.

At present, antidepressive treatments such as Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor or SRI drugs has been approved and is commonly use to treat depression and anxiety during pregnancy. Researchers estimated that about 5 percent of all expecting mothers in the United States are using SRI medications.

However, previous studies have already pointed out possible side effects of SRI exposure to babies. These side-effects, known as "SRI Syndrome," include respiratory problems during the first days of life and increased risk of childhood depression.

Now, a new study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, showed for the first time that fetal SRI exposure can directly affect the brain activity of newborns.

"We found many changes in the brain activity of SRI-exposed newborns," said Professor Sampsa Vanhatalo, head of the BABA center at the Helsinki University Children's Hospital, in a statement. "Since the changes did not correlate with the mother's psychiatric symptoms, we have assumed that they resulted as a side effect of maternal drug treatment."

For the study, researchers enrolled 22 mothers who are taking SRI medications and 62 controls that are not under the medication. The researchers conducted structured behavioral and neurological assessments to determine how fetal SRI drug exposure or maternal psychiatric symptoms affect newborns' neurological development and their brains' electrical activity.

The researchers then discovered that newborns that were exposed to SRI drugs have less-organized communication between brain hemispheres and weaker synchronization between cortical rhythms.

With their findings, the researchers then suggest that the effects of SRI drugs on fetal brain function should be reviewed more carefully. The researchers also recommended critical evaluations for the indications of preventive medications, as well as the consideration of non-pharmacological interventions as the first-line of treatment for depression and anxiety during pregnancy.

"If the mother using an SRI plans a pregnancy, it would be advisable to consider a close follow-up or a therapeutic intervention without SRI medication. Recent experience with group therapy has shown promise in treating depression or anxiety during pregnancy, with effects that extend to the wellbeing of both mother and baby," explained Adjunct Professor Outi Mantere from McGill University, Canada and the psychiatric consultant for the study, in a press release.


Whole Foods has received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday over unsanitary conditions and possible risk of Listeria.

In the letter, the FDA specified its findings from the inspection conducted in February in the company's 70,000-square-foot food preparation facility in Everett, Massachusetts. The facility was said to be packing and preparing food under "insanitary conditions whereby they may have been contaminated with filth or rendered injurious to health."

According to authorities, various food items like pesto pasta, mushroom quesadillas, egg salad and couscous were found in areas where "condensate from ceiling joints was dripping onto the surface below."

In a news report published in Time, FDA laboratory analysis of swabs taken from the surfaces where food was placed confirmed the presence of the bacteria Listeria welshimeri. The bacteria found may be incapable of causing a disease, but its presence still indicates the probable presence of Listeria monocytogens.

Employees have also been seen handling exposed products without washing their hands or changing gloves after cleaning the work surfaces.

Other violations include dirty dishes near food, sinks without hot water for hand washing, and an employee who sprayed ammonium-based sanitizer on "an open colander of salad leafy greens."

According to the FDA, Whole Foods - a company that makes ready-to-eat foods available in 74 stores in Northeastern states - did not offer sufficient documentation about how it plans to address the problems in its facility and ensure compliance with health and safety standards, Boston Globe reported.

Ken Meyer, Whole Foods' global vice president for operations, said in a statement that he was "surprised" at the warning and that the company has taken "thorough and tangible steps" to address the problem.

"We've been in close contact with the FDA, opened our doors to inspectors regularly since February and worked with them to address every issue brought to our attention," Meyer said.

In October last year, Whole Foods dealt with another listeria scare, where the company had recalled blue cheese and various salad bar items.

Despite health concerns, Whole Foods has just recently opened its first 365 by Whole Foods Market store in California, which offers cheaper grocery products aimed at urban Millennials.
Pregnant women who are infected with the Zika virus may give birth to babies with birth defects even if they don't exhibit the symptoms, report said.

The report, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, explored the possibility of babies being born with microcephaly, a condition where babies are born with abnormally small heads and brain development problems.

The report also details the Zika outbreak in Colombia where 65,726 people, including nearly 12,000 pregnant women, were reported to have Zika virus infections from August 2015 to April 2016.

Among cases of microcephaly reported in Colombia from January 1 to April 28 of this year, four infants were born with microcephaly and had been lab-confirmed to be infected by the virus.

However, The Washington Post reported that none of the mothers of the infected infants had exhibited Zika-related symptoms during pregnancy and were not reported to be part of the government's monitoring.

The most common Zika symptoms include fever, rash and joint pains. Only about 1 in 5 people with Zika infections show these symptoms.

"This is really adding weight to existing data that asymptomatic infection is also associated with microcephaly," Margaret Honein, chief of the birth defects branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and one of the authors of the report, said in a statement published in The Washington Post.

The 12,000 pregnant women reported to have Zika are the only the ones who have symptoms, which means that there could be more infected pregnant women, those who don't have symptoms, Honein said.

Researchers also looked at a group of nearly 2,000 of these pregnant women. It was found that although 90 percent were infected during their third trimester, none of these infants had been born with birth defects.

While the Colombia data is still preliminary, Honein said that the report still gave "reassuring news about infection in the third trimester." But researchers still strongly advise mothers to continue monitoring their pregnancies and to do follow up on the infant outcomes.

Over half of all pregnancies in Colombia were unintended and less than half of sexually active women between the ages 15 and 24 are using condoms during sexual intercourse, although 61 percent of women used contraception.
Very hot drinks are likely to cause certain cancers, global health experts said.

The World Health Organization's (WHO) International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published a review saying that drinking coffee, tea or other beverages with a temperature of over 65 degrees Celsius (150F) may cause people to develop cancer of the esophagus.

Extremely hot beverages may scald the lining of the mouth, tongue and throat, leading to an increased cancer risk, researchers said. However, beverages served at temperatures of 65 degrees Celsius or below should be safe.

"We say: be prudent, let hot drinks cool down," Christopher Wild, IARC director, told Reuters.

In the study, international scientists analyzed previous studies about hot drinks like mate - a leaf infusion common in South America - and a range of beverages including coffee and tea.

Previous researches conducted in South America, China, Iran and Turkey where these drinks are popular indicated positive associations between esophagus cancer risk and the temperatures at which these drinks are commonly consumed. These drinks, including the mate, are commonly drunk at a temperature of 70 degrees Celsius (158F) in their specific regions.

"These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of esophageal cancer and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible," said Wild.

Drinking hot beverages is now classified under Group 2A, the same risk group as red meat and nitrogen mustard.

Cancer of the esophagus is the eighth most common type of cancer in the world and one of the main causes of cancer-related deaths, with about 400,000 recorded deaths in 2012 or 5 percent of all cancer deaths.

People in industrialized countries, however, can stay calm as they typically prefer their drinks with less heat.

"This is about 10 degrees [Celsius] higher than people in North America [and Europe] like their coffee," Dana Loomis, deputy head of the monographs section at IARC and part of the review team, said in a statement published on CNN.

However, Gregory Hartl, WHO official spokesman to Geneva told Reuters that smoking and drinking alcohol are among the biggest risk factors for cancer of the esophagus and that people should focus on these factors more.

In 1991, the IARC classified coffee as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." But because of inadequate evidence on the possible link between coffee and cancer, the agency re-evaluated the review and stated that coffee was "not classifiable as to its carcinogenicity to humans."
In April, environment group Nature Conservancy launched the first hawksbill sea turtle satellite tagging program at the Arnavon Community Marine Conservation Area in Solomon Islands, the largest and first community-managed marine protected area in the country.

Along with local conservation officers, satellite tags were placed on 10 hawksbill turtles at the start of their peak nesting season in order to unravel their nesting habitats and migration patterns. The Conservancy used the Argos/GPS Fastloc satellite tracks, the latest in tracking technologies.

As the World Sea Turtle Day is celebrated today, June 16, this effort aims to further protect and conserve turtles. Like other sea turtle species, hawksbills are considered critically endangered, with worldwide populations declining about 80 percent in the past three turtle generations.

What present data reveal

Current findings from Nature Conservancy show that turtles spent most of their time in the protected area in the Arnavons, which kept them safe from poachers. They are also observed to jump from one beach to another for their nesting.

Data also show that six of the tagged turtles have finished nesting and are migrating back to their foraging grounds. As of June 7, three are heading to Australia (back to the Great Barrier Reef), one is currently in Papua New Guinea while the last is at the end of the Isabel Province.

The impact of climate change, however, is very evident in the situation of the hawksbills. The region between Cook town and Cairns where the two turtles migrated to have been severely impacted by climate change, with half of its coral reefs bleached.

Coral reefs are very significant for the hawksbills, as they depend on these reefs for food. Many of them will return to a different situation in their original foraging grounds, from what they left 3 to 4 months ago when they started their migration to Arnavons to nest.

This discovery highlights that while the hawksbill sea turtles survived poaching in the protected area, the sea turtles are going back to severely damaged and bleached foraging grounds, which offers them no security for food.

Threats still persist

Their threats to sea turtles include illegal turtle shell trade, harvesting for meat, egg collection and bycatch in tuna fisheries. Habitat loss caused by climate change and beach development are also major threats to their species.

The threats to these turtles are real and still persisting, as two of the tagged turtle were poached shortly after the tags were put in place.

In the Arnavons, the total nesting population is at 2,000 to 4,000 turtles. While they may be safe in the protected area, more action must be done to stop sea turtle hunting and poaching that take place in their foraging grounds.

Richard Hamilton of Nature Conservancy said turtles are at 10 percent of their numbers from a century ago, and that roughly only one of every 1,000 turtle eggs make it to adulthood.

The group aims to tag 10 more hawksbills per year in 2017 and 2018.

The interactive turtle tracking map can be accessed at www.nature.org/seaturtle.
DANE COUNTY, Wis. (WMTV) -- The Dane County Sheriff's Office said an 83-year-old Stoughton man was flown to UW Hospital with serious injuries after his lawn tractor was hit by a cement truck Thursday morning in Pleasant Springs.

Deputies say John W. Olson of Janesville was mowing along the shoulder of Washington Road when he turned the corner and was hit by a southbound cement truck.

The driver of the cement truck was not injured and no citations were issued.

Copyright 2016: WMTV
Part of a major freeway remained closed Thursday and evacuations remain in effect for homes located in the area of a fire burning in steep, dense terrain in Santa Barbara County.

The Sherpa Fire, named because it sits near the Sherpa Ranch, was reported at 3:21 p.m. at the top of Refugio Road, near Refugio State Beach and Reagan Ranch, according to the Santa Barbara County Fire Department. The location is about 25 miles north of Santa Barbara, near an ExxonMobil processing facility along the Southern California coast.

The fire burned more than two square miles by Thursday night, chewing through brush and other fuel that has not burned in about 70 years, authorities said. The fire burned across the 101 Freeway, which was shut down after an overnight closure Wednesday.

The Sherpa fire burns through more than 1,200 acres in the hills of Santa Barbara County. Toni Guinyard reports for the NBC4 News at 11 a.m. on Thursday June 16, 2016.

Eight air tankers, three heavy heli-tankers, three medium helicopters and more were deployed in fighting the blaze.

"A lot of that area is very dangerous to put crews into, so it's going to be slow going," said fire Capt. Dave Zaniboni.

Zaniboni said he didn't have a specific number of residences or people affected but that the crude processing facility has a cleared buffer zone.

ExxonMobil has evacuated some employees, and those that remain are helping protect the plant against the flames, company spokesman Todd Spitler told The Associated Press.

"Our primary concern is for the safety of our employees, contractors and the environment," Spitler said.

For those who were ordered to leave their homes in the Refugio, Venadito, and Las Flores Canyon areas, city officials said a shelter was set up at the Wake Center at 300 N. Turnpike Road by 9 p.m.

Another Red Cross Shelter was available at Santa Ynez Valley Union High School located at 2975 E. Highway 246. Small animals were welcome at the shelters, but those with large animals were asked to call animal services Susan Klein-Rothschild at (805) 896-1057.

The evacuation orders were expanded to El Capitan Canyon, El Capitan Ranch, El Capitan State Beach and Refugio State Beach later in the evening.

Reverse 911 calls were sent to residents in the evacuation areas, encouraging them to leave as soon as possible.
The Alameda County District Attorney's Office said late Wednesday one of its investigators has been placed on administrative leave in connection to a sex scandal that has rocked multiple agencies in the Bay Area.

The investigator, identified by the DA's Office as Rick Orozco, is also a former Oakland Police Department commander.

The woman at the center of the scandal, 18-year-old Celeste Guap, showed NBC Bay Area a text that she says comes from Orozco that has some sexual innuendo sent to her in December 2015. Guap also said Orozco asked her to dinner when she was 17, but she never went.

Alameda County DA Nancy O'Malley did not specify why an investigator had been placed on leave, but said in a statement that "we do not and will not turn a blind eye to human trafficking or the sexual exploitation of a minor, whether the offender is a civilian or law enforcement officer." O'Malley did not mention Orozco by name.

The late Wednesday announcement comes a day after Richmond police said its department has opened an investigation into the growing sex scandal centered around Guap, who has alleged to NBC Bay Area that she's had sex with 28 police officers across multiple agencies.

Capt. Bisa French said police "recently opened an internal investigation after learning about the connection of the young lady at the center of the Oakland investigation and several of our officers." French said detectives had not yet interviewed the woman known by her fake name as Celeste Guap, but they were hoping to sometime this week.

So far Oakland police, the Alameda County Sheriff and the District Attorney are investigating her claims: That she had sex with officers, sometimes in exchange for money and sometimes in exchange for information related to prostitution sweeps, so that she could avoid arrests.

As of Wednesday, five Oakland officers have been placed on leave stemming from her allegations.

Interim Police Chief Ben Fairow was also immediately removed from his post Wednesday by Mayor Libby Schaaf. The mayor at a news conference did not give any indication Fairow is tied to the sex scandal.

Fairow's removal from the Oakland Police Department comes less than a week after he was tapped to replace Chief Sean Whent, who suddenly resigned over what Schaaf called "personal reasons."

Meanwhile, at least one Contra Costa County sheriff's deputy was also placed on leave following claims he had sex with the teen when she was a minor, the department said.

Guap told NBC Bay Area that she's had sex with officers from the Richmond Police Department, the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office, as well as a Livermore police officer, some in San Francisco, and a law enforcement worker based in Stockton. In all, she said she's had sex with 28 law enforcement officers throughout the Bay Area. Guap also told NBC Bay Area she befriended Whent's wife on Facebook and told her that she was dating an Oakland police officer when she was just 17.

A day after news broke that Oaklands police chief was leaving his post after 19 years in the department, Mayor Libby Schaaf on Friday made it formal: Sean Whent no longer has a job as the citys top cop. Bob Redell reports.
A San Jose family will show us around their favorite park, one of Californias oldest, Alum Rock, where theyve been celebrating important moments together for generations. And well guide them uphill to discover one of California's newest public preserves just above Alum Rock with views of Silicon Valley that go on forever.

HELPFUL LINKS

Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority

http://www.openspaceauthority.org/

Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/openspaceauthority/

Sierra Vista Open Space Preserve Map

http://www.openspaceauthority.org/trails/pdf/SV%20trail%20map%202-10.pdf

Alum Rock Park
San Francisco leaders are revising their plans for the upcoming Pride Parade.

A meeting held Wednesday was attended by nearly 50 people representing businesses, most in the city's Castro District, and discussed safety during the celebrations.

Steve Porter, manager at Harvey's Restaurant, said he certainly feels better coming out of the meeting and that his concerns were addressed.

Safety concerns have been really high since the mass shooting in Orlando.

Though police say there is no known threat in the area, businesses and officers are stepping up their safety measures.

Police will also have additional resources on hand during Pride celebrations, set for June 25-26.
Hayes Mansion, which has become a financially draining property from San Jose City Hall for the past three decades, is set to be sold to hotel developer Asha Companies.

The Washington D.C.-based company offered to buy the lavish private estate on Edenvale Avenue for $47 million, according to city records.

Based on an interview featured in a San Jose Mercury News article, It clearly did not live up to the promise in the time Ive been in office, Councilman Ash Kalra said.

Five year ago, when the property was appraised, its value ranged from $17 million to $20 million. Kim Walesh, the citys economic development director, said a consultant concluded that the $47 million sale price is appropriate at this point in time, according to the Mercury News article.

Hayes Mansion, which was bought in the mid-1980s, remained vacant until the 1990s when the city partnered with Hayes Renaissance to convert the estate into a conference center.

Hoping to turn the mansion into a desired location, the city underwent three costly renovations resulting in a $59 million bond debt.

In the most recent fiscal year, the hotel reported to have a net operating revenue of $1 million  which is not enough to cover the citys debt on previous improvements.

Since 2003, the city has spent over $2 million to pay the debt. Asha Companies' $47 million offer could be a relief to the city.

If the deal is approved, Asha Companies has offered a $1 million cash deposit.
If there is any silver lining for the gay Afghan community, its that the possible sexual preferences of the Orlando gunman might force community members to start addressing the normally taboo subject of homosexuality within the Muslim world.

There are queer Afghans just like everyone else, said Ali Olomi, 30, an Afghan-American and straight LGBTQ community activist who studies and teaches Islam and gender issues at University of California at Irvine. With the old guard, these types of things are kept private. But theres a shift going on."

After Orlando, he said, the overall message was definitely how "Afghans can galvanize and build an inclusive community. In fact, on Monday, Olomi joined an online conversation organized by the San Francisco-based Samovar Network to discuss Orlando, and how Afghans could do more to combat cultural homophobia. The Bay Area is Ground Zero for both the gay rights movement and the Afghan diaspora. And some Afghan Americans around the county are now grappling with issues of homophobia and shock.

The FBI and community members are still exploring whether the now-dead gunman, Omar Mateen, born to Afghan parents, was gay.

His wife, Noor Salman, who grew up in Rodeo, California, told agents she drove him to Pulse nightclub in Orlando before he shot 49 people inside the gay club to death on Latin night. Its unclear though, if Mateen was scoping the place out for his attack, or whether he frequented gay bars. There are also reports he used the gay dating app, Grindr.

His ex-wife Sitora Yusufiy also told TIME that she questioned whether he was totally straight." And his father, Seddique Mir Mateen, told NBC News that his son got angry when he saw two men kissing in Miami a couple of months ago. He thinks that may be related to the shooting.

Until Mateens sexual preferences become known  if they ever do  the issue of homosexuality is not one normally talked about in Muslim, especially Afghan society, said Aisha Wahab, a board member for the Afghan Coalition in Fremont and co-director of the Little Kabul Stories. At 20-something, she knows of only one or possibly two gay Afghan peers - and of those, only one is out.

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A year or two ago, she said, a teen killed himself in Fremont. The reason, community members were told, was general stress, she said. But all the hints were that he was gay, she said.

And its not just sexuality that the Afghans she knows dont talk about. She said many first- and second-generation Afghans dont speak of bodily functions like menstruation, and mental illness, either. Many of those issues simply go ignored, Wahab said. And that repression can be harmful, she said, and must change.

In Wahabs mind, many Afghan families are traditionally conservative on social issues. But in her mind, families are responsible for knowing and accepting their children for who they are, and not being accepted causes a lot of turmoil.

As for Mateen, Wahab can only speculate that he probably had self-hate and self- doubt. Instead of suicide, he turned it outside.

But its not that simple to paint the entire Muslim world  and Afghan society in particular  as so close-minded, said a 26-year-old Oakland anti-violence advocate, who was born to Afghan parents and identifies as queer.

Aisha Wahab

She also said its not that simple to assume that Mateens possible homosexuality led to at least some of the motivations behind his killing spree.

Being queer or gay doesnt necessarily make you angry, she said. Sure, it makes it more difficult, but its not that simple.

She has come out to several, but not all, of her family members, some who have been supportive or semi-supportive, and others who have been outright homophobic. She asked not to use her name in the media for fear of her own safety and hate mail she might receive by outing her sexual identity to the public.

But she said that her issues are no different than the issues any gay, lesbian, trans or queer person might face.

There are repressive tendencies in every community, she said. There is some patriarchy, sexism and oppression in every community. It just depends how it manifests itself. To put one community in such a box is a disservice.
Members of Service Employees International Union Local 521 are holding a candlelight vigil Thursday evening in San Jose for the 49 men and women killed in Orlando last week.

The vigil will be held at 5:30 p.m. at SEIU 521s San Jose union hall, 2302 Zanker Road. Joining the union will be members from Santa Clara Countys LGBT community, leaders of faith and members from the Muslim Community Association.

Contributions can be made to the Equality Florida Donation Fund. Equality Florida is a partner of SEIU and has set up a donation fund, which has raised more than $4.8 million.

To donate, click here.
A San Diego woman who painted and drew on treasured natural rock formations at national parks across the West and shared her work on social media pleaded guilty Monday to defacing government property.

Casey Nocket, 23, pleaded guilty in a federal court in Fresno, California to seven misdemeanors for the autumn 2014 painting spree at seven national parks including Yosemite in California and Zion in Utah.

She also admitted to defacing rocks at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Nocket used Instagram and Tumblr to document her trip and her graffiti-like work, which led to broad outrage on social media.

She was sentenced to two years' probation and 200 hours of community service.

The vandalism in September and October of 2014 caused serious cleanup problems at the national parks. The sandblasting and chemical stripping used to remove paint can cause even more damage to irreplaceable natural features.

At two parks, Crater Lake and Death Valley in California, the cleaning has yet to be completed nearly two years later.

A later hearing will determine how much restitution Nocket must pay to help with the cleanup.
An Illinois political reporter's hairy situation just keeps getting hairier as the state's historic budget impasse continues.

Peoria Journal Star reporter Chris Kaergard has been growing his beard out for more than a year now after vowing to not shave until lawmakers reach a deal.

Unfortunately for him, lawmakers failed to come to an agreement before the end of the spring legislative session last month and the impasse is headed for its second year.

This week we marked the one-year "birthday" of the #BudgetBeard but received no compromise spending plan gifts... pic.twitter.com/5ngCUsVsJC  Chris Kaergard (@ChrisKaergard) June 3, 2016

Kaergard said it started as a bit of a gag last May when lawmakers adjourned in the spring without a budget for the 2016 fiscal year, which started July 1. But now Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and the Democrat-controlled Legislature are still at an impasse, with the one-year mark fast approaching.

The reporter's beard growing journey was posted online last summer alongside a timeline of lawmakers' actions on the budget.

The newspaper said it posted the pictures and timeline on "Day 85" as Kaergard's budget beard symbolizes a "testament to the egos" running the branches of government.
This year's Chicago Pride Parade will honor the victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

The event will feature a moment of silence one minute before the parade steps off and photos of the 49 people killed will be scattered throughout the parade route, organizers said.

For more than 40 years, the Pride Parade has marked a vibrant, national celebration of the contributions by our LGBTQ community. This years parade will take on a special meaning, as we honor the Pulse community, family and friends of those who lost their lives in Orlando, Chicago Commission on Human Relations Chairman Mona Noriega said in a statement. This horrific act of violence offers the LGBTQ and Latino communities an opportunity to stand united in the face of hate, and Mayor Emanuel and I stand committed to the work we do every day in the city to ensure that all people are valued and respected  regardless of who they love."

Chicago police, FBI and city officials gathered Thursday to discuss security preparations for Pride festivities across the city ahead of a two-day festival this weekend and the Pride Parade on June 26.

In the wake of Sundays mass shooting, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk had asked Chicago FBI officials to ensure security at the annual parade.

Kirk sent a letter Wednesday to FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge David W. Paun asking that the bureau's Chicago field office have a plan in place to ensure the safety of the 750,000 expected to be in attendance for the June 26 parade.

FBI officials responded to Kirk's call Wednesday, claiming the bureau was working with the Chicago Police Department to ensure safety at the parade.

"The safety and security of the people of Northern Illinois is our top priority and we work hand-in-hand with our Federal, State and Local law enforcement partners to gather, share and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention," a statement from the FBI read. "In that light, we urge the public to report any and all suspicious activity to the FBI or are any of our partners.

Organizers said they are determined to keep people safe, working with the FBI and Chicago police to establish security measures for the 47th annual event.

Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said "at this point there is no threat here in Chicago."

"This is one of the largest events of teh year," he said. "We all know there is a lot of focus on th event following Orlando's event."

Parade coordinator Richard Pfeiffer said 160 off-duty officers and security personnel will work the parade  an increase from just 70 officers that patrolled the event last year.

Approximately 750,000 people are expected to line the streets on Chicagos North Side for the 4-mile parade route that runs through Uptown and Lakeview.
After nearly three years, a Chicago City Council committee approved a measure Thursday that would offer workers paid sick leave.

Under the proposal, roughly 460,000 employees would be granted paid sick days. In Chicago, 40 percent of private sector workers dont currently have any paid sick leave.

Workers can earn up to five sick days every twelve months, according to the proposal. Half of that time can be carried over to the next year if it goes unused.

Restaurant workers cheered at City Hall Thursday after the City Councils Committee on Workforce Development and Audit approved the measure.

However, some restaurant owners voiced concerns about the measure. Ald. Tom Tunney, who owns Ann Sather restaurants, approved the legislation Thursday but questioned the effect it could have on small businesses.

"Where are the small businesses that used to dot the Southport corridor? Tunney asked during the hearing. They cant afford the rents."

The only industry exempt from the legislation is construction.

According to the Sun-Times, Workforce Committee Chairman Pat O Connor explained Thursday that it was due to the industrys uniqueness and the fact that most workers already have paid sick leave or contracts that would exceed the sick time benefit.

I guess theyre saying, Were doing fine. Leave us alone, OConnor said.

Tanya Triche, vice president and general counsel of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, claimed to not understand why the industry was exempt.

For whatever reason, they are deciding to exempt the construction industry, Triche told NBC Chicago. We dont understand why there are any exemptions, frankly.

In the past ten years, 24 cities, including New York City and Seattle, have enacted similar laws.

The measure now moves for a full City Council vote next week.
Can coffee cause cancer? Only if it's very hot, says WHO agency

There is no conclusive evidence that drinking coffee causes cancer, the World Health Organization's cancer agency will say in a reverse of its previous warning, but it will also say all "very hot" drinks are probably carcinogenic.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) had previously rated coffee as "possibly carcinogenic" but has changed its mind.

On Wednesday it will say its latest review found "no conclusive evidence for a carcinogenic effect" of coffee drinking and will point to some studies showing coffee may actually reduce the risk of developing certain types of cancer.

At the same time, however, it will say other scientific evidence suggests that drinking anything very hot - around 65 degrees Celsius or above - including water, coffee, tea and other beverages, probably does cause cancer of the esophagus.

Lyon-based IARC, which last year prompted headlines worldwide by saying processed meat can cause cancer, reached its conclusions after reviewing more than 1,000 scientific studies in humans and animals. There was inadequate evidence for coffee to be classified as either carcinogenic or not carcinogenic.

IARC had previously put coffee as a "possible carcinogen" in its 2B category alongside chloroform, lead and many other substances.

The U.S. National Coffee Association welcomed the change in IARC's classification as "great news for coffee drinkers".

In its evaluation of very hot beverages, IARC will say animal studies suggest carcinogenic effects probably occur with drinking temperatures of 65 Celsius or above. Several experiments with rats and mice found "very hot" liquids - including water - could promote the development of tumors, it will say.

Oesophageal cancer is the eighth most common cause of cancer worldwide and one of the main causes of cancer death, with around 400,000 deaths recorded in 2012.

The WHO's official spokesman in Geneva, Gregory Hartl, said the evaluation of hot drinks was based on limited evidence in humans and animals, and that more research was needed.

"We say: be prudent, let hot drinks cool down," he told Reuters, adding that the WHO's advice was to "not consume foods or drinks when they are at a very hot - scalding hot - temperature".
The Chicago Cubs have tried to be patient with their biggest prospects, but Willson Contreras has forced the team's hand as his hot bat has earned him a call-up to the big leagues.

According to multiple reports, Contreras will be called up to the Cubs this weekend, with catcher Tim Federowicz being designated for assignment to clear room for him on the 25-man roster.

Contreras has been running roughshod over Triple-A pitching this season, slugging nine home runs and sporting an impressive .350 batting average with the Iowa Cubs. Hes currently in the midst of a 20-game hitting streak in Iowa, but that will be put on hold as hell head to Chicago for this weekends series against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Its unclear how much action Contreras will get behind the plate, but the team plans for him to be mentored by both Miguel Montero and David Ross. Contreras has a strong arm and obviously has an incredible bat, but learning how to catch a big league staff, especially one thats pitching as well as the Cubs staff is, is the next step forward in his development as a player.

Contreras is currently ranked fifth in the Pacific Coast League in batting average, and is 1.030 OPS ranks fourth among players in the minor leagues.
In the wake of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Sen. Mark Kirk introduced new legislation Thursday that would alert the Federal Bureau of Investigation if a terror suspect attempts to buy a gun.

Terrorists should not be able to buy weapons and the FBI should be notified if a suspected terrorist buys a weapon, Kirk said in a statement. "This commonsense legislation equips the FBI with a new tool to stop threats on American lives.

If passed, the legislation would ensure that any individual who is, or has been, investigated for potential ties to terrorism is entered into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

If someone who is, or has been, investigated for possible ties to terrorism, the measure would require the NICS to automatically notify the pertinent division of the FBI.

The FBI currently conducts background checks for every gun purchase using the NICS. The screening checks if a potential buyer has felony commissions, mental illnesses or a history of domestic violence or drug abuse.

The legislation wouldnt automatically bar someone who was investigated for having possible ties to terrorism from buying a gun. It would only require that individuals are entered into the NICS system and that the FBI would be notified if they attempt to buy a firearm.

Kirk, who introduced the bill alongside Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, has broken with Republicans in the past to support gun control.

Following the 2015 San Bernadino shooting, Kirk was the only Republican to cross party lines to vote on a failed Democratic no fly-no buy proposal that would have denied people on the terrorist watch list the ability to buy guns, MSNBC reported.

Kirk continues to express support for no fly-no buy measures.

According to NBC News, Senate Democrats ended a nearly 15-hour filibuster early Thursday after Republican leaders reportedly agreed to vote on two proposed gun control measures, including the bill that fell short in 2015 that looks to prevent terror suspects from buying guns.

The other bill deals with expanding background checks sales at gun shows and online.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who will face Kirk in the November election, chastised the senator for not speaking out during the filibuster in a video released Thursday. She also asked voters to urge Kirk to speak on the Senate floor about gun violence prevention and to vote affirmatively on upcoming legislation.

"While the epidemic of gun violence has touched far too many cities accross our county, here in Illinois, 69 people were shot in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend alone," Duckworth said in the video. "For Mark Kirk to continue representing our state while failing to show leadership on this issue is shameful."

"Illinois deserves a senator who will champion legislation to reduce gun violence," the congresswoman added.

In the video, Duckworth also promised to continue pushing for control measures.

Meanwhile, Kirk released a statement Thursday urging Duckworth to testify in the August 15 workplace retalliation trial that accuses the congresswoman of ethics violations while she led the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs.

"Duckworth should testify at her trial and provide the public with answers and justifications for her actions, but I doubt she will," Kirk said in a statement. "I expect Duckworth to continue to hide from this trial and refuse to answer questions because there simply are no good answers for how she sought to protect former Governor Blagojevich and herself from these failures."

Illinois Rep. Robert Dold, who is also facing a tough reelection bid, broke with fellow Republican lawmakers Tuesday, calling for expanded gun control legislation in the wake of Sundays massacre at an Orlando nightclub.

Thoughts and prayers are not enough and its time for action, Dold said in response to the attack.

Dold joined Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, pushing lawmakers to take votes on bills that would prevent terror suspects from buying guns or explosives, require universal background checks for gun purchases and bolster the system for background checks.
Chicago Police on Thursday arrested a man who was captured on a video getting kicked in the head by an officer as he struggled on the ground with another officer after a foot chase earlier this week.

Shaquille ONeal, 33, faces felony charges in connection with his Thursday arrest and the earlier arrest Monday.

Police used a Taser on ONeal during Thursdays arrest because he allegedly resisted officers, Anthony Guglielmi, chief spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

ONeal, a convicted felon, originally was arrested at about 3:15 p.m. Monday after running from officers on the West Side. Police said he was spotted in a drug deal and he was chased to the 3900 block of West Grenshaw in the Lawndale neighborhood, where an officer struggled on the ground to handcuff him.

Police said ONeal bit the officer and appeared to grab the officers neck.

A cell-phone video taken by a bystander showed another officer walk up and kick ONeal in the head. That officer has been placed on desk duty by police Supt. Eddie Johnson and relieved of his police powers pending an investigation.

Terrance Hobson, who said he took the video, planned to turn it over to the Justice Department on Thursday afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed the video, which was posted on Facebook.

Police said three bags of heroin were recovered from ONeal after he was taken into custody Monday.

ONeal was released late Wednesday without being charged pending further investigation, infuriating Chicagos Fraternal Order of Police.

When ONeal was re-arrested Thursday, he resisted officers and a Taser was used on him, Guglielmi said. He was taken to a hospital where the barbs used to connect the Taser to high-voltage electrical wires were removed from his skin.

ONeal has been charged with aggravated battery on a police officer, aggravated battery by strangulation and possession of a controlled substance in connection with Mondays arrest and aggravated battery on a police officer and resisting arrest in connection with Thursdays arrest, said Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for Cook County States Attorney Anita Alvarez.

All of the charges are felonies, Daly said.

ONeals arrest came after the FOPs president, Dean Angelo, registered his outrage over ONeals release Wednesday. Angelo posted an angry message on the unions website declaring, Enough is enough.

He said the decision to release ONeal on Wednesday allowed police officers to be victimized and subject to criminal behavior without consequence, particularly after the police officer involved was reassigned to desk duty.

Its just another disappointing display of, what we consider to be a consistent, anti-police [attitude]. The police are just wondering what it takes to get considered as a viable part of society, Angelo later told the Chicago Sun-Times.

But Daly said Thursday that the states attorneys office needed to review additional video and other evidence before deciding whether to charge ONeal.

We dont rush to charge, no matter who the victim is, Daly said.
On Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was ordered to testify in a federal trial related to a lawsuit filed by eight Chicago police officers who were allegedly dropped from the mayors security detail for political reasons after he took office in 2011, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The eight officers, who are all white or Hispanic, filed a 2012 lawsuit alleging that Emanuel took part in selecting a new security team that included African-American officers with less seniority and other officers who volunteered on the mayors campaign.

The group alleged that Emanuel directed Terry Hillard, who was serving as CPDs interim superintendent at the time, to select a diverse team and participated in meetings to choose campaign volunteers to reassign to the mayors police protection.

According to U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenwebers Tuesday ruling, Emanuel will have to give answers under oath, however that doesnt mean he will have to take the witness stand during the trial.

Emanuel is required to sit for a deposition that will be taken privately by lawyers in the case. The judge will later consider the depositions transcript as it relates to one of the suits allegations.

The allegation holds that the city violated the so-called Shakman ban on political hiring after officers from Emanuels campaign were assigned to his security team in 2011.

The citys Law Department called the case frivolous and without merit," according to the Tribune.

The judges order for Emanuels deposition after the city fought a subpoena served on the mayor last month calling for his testimony in court.

City attorneys argued that Emanuel had already given written answers regarding his involvement in the selection go his security detail. The attorneys argued the requiring the mayor to testify would take up too much of his time.

This week, a jury began hearing evidence on the lawsuits counts that allege racial discrimination. A bench trial related to the count alleging a violation of the Shakman decree will be held later before Leinenweber.

Cmdr Bryan Thompson, who served as the chief of the mayors security detail under Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley, testified Tuesday, claiming that protecting Emanuel was more difficult due to current events and that the threat level" was higher for the mayor.

A lot more people in the city hate him for various reasons, Thompson told jurors.

Emanuel has faced increased scrutiny and calls for his recognition since dash-cam footage of the police-involved shooting of African-American teen Laquan McDonald was made public last November. McDonald was shot and killed by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke in October of 2014.
When dozens of gunshots rang out on a Chicago block in a matter of seconds, Alderman Raymond Lopez says he feared the worst.

We heard 40 shots ring out from what I believe was a semi-automatic weapon of some caliber, he said.

Lopez had been in the area around 2 p.m. Wednesday in the 4300 block of South Marshfield when he heard the gunfire erupt. While Lopez noted that shootings arent unusual in the South Side neighborhood, coming just days after the mass shooting in Orlando, he said he feared for what he would find when the firing ended.

We could have had our own mini massacre right here in Chicago, he said.

The gunfire sent bullets flying through windows and walls of homes on the block, but miraculously no injuries were reported.

It was like non-stop shooting, said witness Ana Herrera. When the shooting stops I am going to go out there and Im going to find out if somebody is lying dead on the ground."

Augstina Herrera, Ana Herreras mother, told Telemundo Chicago she was sitting on the couch and stood up just second before the gunfire pierced her home.

If I didnt stand up, the bullet would have struck me in the head, she said.

Lopez said authorities are investigating the shooting.

We are looking to see if there are some connections with some of the other gang violence that involve a similar style weapon, he said.
Michele and Eric Penkauskas hired Michael Benjamin, a Bridgeport based contractor, to rebuild their family home in Brooklyn after it burned down on Thanksgiving of 2014.

He seemed like such a nice gentleman, said consumer Michele Penkauskas.

Michele said finding a local contractor was difficult and her public adjuster recommended Benjamin after the fire burned their home down.

He gave us his license, his insurance, said Michele.

Michele said they gave Benjamin $68,000 from the insurance payment, and said he used $30,000 for demolition.

Soon after, she said she learned that his license expired back in 2010. The Department of Consumer Protection confirms that to NBC Connecticut, adding the work would not have been legal.

We almost texted every single day, text or talk every single day and he gave us every bit of hope that the $38,000 would be returned, said Michele.

They've spent 17 months in a 700 square foot trailer. Their insurance company has covered that cost, but it expires in November.

I called Benjamin several times and went to his home with no luck.

After digging through his record, we learned Benjamin has three misdemeanor convictions over the past 20 years for failure to pay wages, bad checks and violating a contract related to home improvement.

He was also arrested in February for suspicion of issuing a bad check. According to an affidavit we obtained, he wrote a $5,000 to a subcontractor that bounced. Benjamins public defender for this case says he has already paid back $4,600.

The Penkauskas family says after NBC Connecticut Responds got involved, they heard from Benjamins attorney and they are working out an agreement for him to pay them back.

The attorney declined to comment to NBC Connecticut. In the meantime, the Department of Consumer Protection continues to investigate the Brooklyn family's complaint.
Paul Cusson has been in the boating industry for nearly three decades.

Fishing, being on the water, he said, thats what drew me into this business.

Six years ago, Paul and his wife Tasha purchased the Westbrook Marine Center next to their dealership, Atlantic Outboard.

It allows us to give the customer a year round service, Cusson said, We can berth them in the summer, take care of the boat for them in the winter.

Since the economic recession in 2008, Connecticut Marine Trades Association Executive Director Kathleen Burns said boat registrations in the state have been on a steady decline.

It was followed by Irene and Sandy which certainly had its impact in the sense a number of boats were destroyed or damaged, Burns said. T

hey were never replaced.

The number of registered boats in the state has dropped from more than 112,000 in 2007 to under 99 thousand in 2015, according to DEEP data.

Due in part to people retiring and getting out of the industry, Tasha Cusson said.

While registrations are down, Governor Malloys press secretary points out boat sales were at their highest level last year since before the recession, according to Department of Revenue Service data.

From gas to insurance to slips, it is expensive to own and maintain a boat.

Now we see its hard for young families and young people to get into boating, Paul Cusson said.

Connecticut should consider polices that are more friendly to the marine industry like in neighboring states, Burns suggested to NBC Connecticut.

Right now we are being squeezed a little bit from other states that have looked to their assist marine industries by providing some tax incentives, she said.

In 2013, the state eliminated a luxury tax on boats.
The rising cost of higher education has some students seeking new ways to pay for college.

According to the Project on Student Debt, college students in Connecticut graduated with an average debt of nearly $30,000 in 2014.

So it's no surprise many are now turning to crowdfunding sites to help pay their tuition.

Bianca Alexis of New London recently walked across the stage at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York.

A double major, Alexis earned degrees in psychology and religious studies. She was allowed to walk at graduation, but her diploma holder is empty. The college is withholding Alexis diploma until she pays the remaining $16,000 balance on her tuition.

"I feel like that diploma is a symbol of everything that I've been through. And not to receive it is very heartbreaking," she said.

Since graduating, Alexis has gotten a job and is working to pay off her balance. When a friend suggested she try to raise the money through the crowdfunding site Go Fund Me, Alexis was skeptical.

"I can't ask people for money. Everybody has their own problems, why would they want to donate to me of all people?"

Ultimately, Alexis decided she had nothing to lose by starting a GoFundMe campaign.

"It's one of those situations that if it's meant to be, it will be. If it's not, then it's not. But I'm going to try my hardest to get there," she said.

Recent high school graduate Wadlet Jean Baptiste is also using GoFundMe to help pay for college. The 18-year-old moved to the U.S. from Haiti six years ago.

"When you're in Haiti all you hear talk about is coming to America. The big dream. Coming to America is what everyone wants. Our dream came true," he said.

His new dream is to study nursing at Southern Connecticut State University, where hes been accepted for fall 2016.

"Imagine going to a nursing home, and you only speak Creole. And nobody else speaks it. So I could help out," he said.

Like Alexis, Baptiste has a job and is saving up for his tuition. One of his high school teachers suggested GoFundMe.

"He told us that there's a lot of people out there that's willing to help so all we have to do is ask for help," he said.

A few friends have donated to his campaign, and hes grateful for each one.

"If you could donate $5, $6, it's as important as $100. Anything possible," he said.

Donations made through GoFundMes website are encrypted. For your own safety, GoFundMe recommends donating only to people you know and trust.

Alexis and Baptiste said people who dont feel comfortable donating to an online campaign can send the money directly to their respective schools.
Dallas County Health says two more cases of Zika virus have been confirmed in the county -- both imported by travelers.

Both cases were confirmed through the testing in the DCHHS lab and are being sent to the Teas Department of State Health Services for review.

The eighth case is a 15-year-old resident of Dallas who was infected with the virus during recent travel to Honduras and El Salvador. The ninth case is a 61-year-old resident of Garland who was infected during travel to Guatemala.



For medical confidentiality and personal privacy reasons, DCHHS does not provide additional identifying information.

Common symptoms of Zika virus include fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis (red eyes). The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting several days to a week.

There is no medication to treat Zika virus and there is no vaccine; the best prevention is to avoid mosquitoes and sexual contact with infected people. The recommendations for avoiding the Zika virus are the same for avoiding West Nile virus.

How to Protect Yourself From Mosquito Bites

Dress in long sleeves, pants when outside: For extra protection, spray thin clothing with repellent.

in long sleeves, pants when outside: For extra protection, spray thin clothing with repellent. DEET : Make sure this ingredient is in your insect repellent.

: Make sure this ingredient is in your insect repellent. Drain standing water in your yard and neighborhood: Mosquitoes can develop in any water stagnant for more than three days.

It has been recommended in the past that to avoid mosquito bites you should avoid being outdoors during Dusk and Dawn (the 4 Ds). While this is true for mosquitoes that commonly carry the West Nile virus, other types of mosquitoes that are more likely to carry Zika, dengue and chikungunya are active during the day. When outdoors, no matter what time of day, adjust your dress accordingly and wear insect repellent containing DEET, picaridin or oil of lemon eucalyptus as your first line of defense against insect bites.
Most of Dallas libraries are providing free lunches this summer to children from low-income families through a partnership with the nonprofit hunger organization Equal Heart.

The program fed 942 kids in the first week and hopes to stretch that number to 1,500 once summer reading programs begin, said Keven Vicknair, executive director of Equal Heart.

The food is causing more people to come into the library, Vicknair said. It isnt just about feeding kids, its also about engaging them.

Summer lunches and snacks will be offered at the following libraries:

Arcadia Park: Monday-Friday, 12:15 p.m.

Audelia Road: Monday-Friday, 1 p.m.

Bachman Lake: Monday-Friday, 12:30 p.m.

Dallas West: Monday-Friday, noon

Fretz Park: Tuesday-Friday, 12:15 p.m.

Grauwyler Park: Tuesday-Friday, 4 p.m.

Hampton-Illinois: Monday-Friday, 1 p.m.

Highland Hills: Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.

Kleberg-Rylie: Tuesday-Friday, noon

Lochwood: Tuesday-Friday, noon

Martin Luther King: Tuesday-Friday, 3 p.m.

North Oak Cliff: Monday-Friday, 12:30 p.m.

Park Forest: Tuesday-Friday, 11:30 a.m.

Paul Laurence Dunbar Lancaster-Kiest: Monday-Friday, noon

Pleasant Grove: Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.

Polk-Wisdom: Tuesday-Thursday, noon

Prairie Creek: Tuesday-Friday, 3:30 p.m.

Skyline: Tuesday-Friday, noon

Timberglen: Tuesday-Friday, noon

White Rock Hills: Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.

Click here for more information from our partners at The Dallas Morning News.
Vietnamese rural migrant workers should be allowed to settle permanently in cities and enjoy the same public facilities and services as those with urban household registrations or 'ho khau' do.

The main reason for the governments reluctance to push forward with the reform of the 'ho khau' system is that policymakers are worried about the burden that new migrants will place on social services funded by the cities, according to joint research carried out by the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences and the World Bank.

Researchers said the Vietnamese government should make it quicker and easier for those who want to change their place of residence to their new urban homes.

The government should also give migrants the same access to job opportunities in the public sector and simplify public services such as registration of motorcycles.

The report, drawing on data from the 2015 Household Registration Survey and qualitative research, says at least 5.6 million migrants in the five surveyed provinces were not registered in their new homes, including 36 percent of the population in Ho Chi Minh City and 18 percent in Hanoi.

About 70 percent of them work in the private sector, especially in manufacturing and for foreign firms, which is twice as many as people with permanent residency.

Their average income is now slightly higher than that of permanent registrants.

However, many of them are not allowed to access healthcare or even education for their children in the cities where they live and work.

Some policymakers have raised concerns that relaxing the system could result in increased migration to urban centers, straining public services and municipal finances. Photo by VnExpress Photo Contest/Trieu Quang

This study shows that the 'ho khau' system has created inequality of opportunity for Vietnamese citizens, said Achim Fock, the World Banks acting country director for Vietnam.

Further reforms could ensure that migrants have the same access to schools, health care and employment in the public sector as everyone else. That will encourage people to move to cities and support Vietnams economic growth and structural transformation, he added.This study shows that the 'ho khau' system has created inequality of opportunity for Vietnamese citizens, said Achim Fock, the World Banks acting country director for Vietnam.

The 'ho khau' system began 50 years ago mainly to control migration to the cities as well as to ensure public security.

The Vietnamese public has mixed views about the household registration system.

Some think it is necessary to assure public safety and limit migration. At the same time, a large majority says the system should be relaxed, because it limits the rights of people without permanent status and that it induces corruption.

The 'ho khau' registration system is no longer relevant for managing and controlling Vietnamese society, which has been undergoing drastic changes toward 'doi moi' (renovation) and international integration, said Dang Nguyen Anh, vice president of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.

The system should be replaced by a more scientific and modern approach to make people's lives easier and inclusive, he added.

The Vietnamese government has taken the initial steps towards an alternative system that could ultimately replace 'ho khau'.

The authorities are developing a national population database which will hold basic information on each individual including gender, ethnicity and marital status.

Each citizen will have an identification card with an identification number linked to the database.

The new system could help reduce the administrative burden and financial costs of household registration on both the government and citizens.
As Garland police investigate the killing of a North Texas freelance journalist, the family of Jacinto Torres Hernandez, also known as Jay Torres, is planning a funeral and wondering if his work had something to do with his murder.

Torres, 57, was a freelance reporter, a real estate agent and a photographer.

His family described him as a humanitarian who loved people, and they don't understand why someone would kill him.

His body was found Monday evening in the backyard of a house on the 4200 block of Mayflower Drive.

The Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office said he died from a gunshot wound, and police said it appeared that his body had been there for days.

Torres frequently contributed to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Spanish-language publication La Estrella.

Karina Ramirez, who works at a competing Spanish-language publication, was a friend.

"We can be friendly and competitive at the same time," Ramirez said.

What friends, and police, don't know is why Torres was killed.

"I hear about people getting killed for the paper in their wallet, (but) they didn't even take that," said son Gibran Torres.

If robbery wasn't the motive, his family wonders if it was something he was writing.

"I would also hope that his colleagues would get to the bottom of the story he was working on, that they would finish his work," Gibran Torres said.

Now his family is finishing funeral arrangements and taking a trip down memory lane, wishing Jay Torres was here to see how much his life meant.

No arrests have been made, and Garland police ask anyone with information to call Garland Crime Stoppers at 972-272-8477.

The memorial service for Jay Torres is Saturday at Greenwood Funeral Home in Arlington.
Hillary Clinton on Thursday won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation, giving her a powerful voter turnout engine against Donald Trump. The Republican businessman swiftly accused labor leaders of selling out members to a candidate he said was aligned with Wall Street.

The exchange underscored Trump's efforts to win over blue-collar workers who typically support Democrats, especially those in Midwest battleground states whose wages have stagnated and have been hurt by a decline in manufacturing jobs.

The AFL-CIO's general board voted to endorse Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a move that had been expected after Clinton secured enough support among delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.

"Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. "Throughout the campaign, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to the issues that matter to working people, and our members have taken notice."

A short time later, Trump fired back with a statement that said the endorsement was a sign the union federation "no longer represents American workers."

"Instead," he added, "they have become part of the rigged system in Washington, D.C., that benefits only the insiders."

For months, Trump has denounced "stupid" trade deals that he says hurt U.S. workers and pledged to penalize companies for sending jobs overseas. For that reason, he predicted Thursday, the AFL-CIO's members would vote for him "in much larger numbers than" Clinton in November's general election.

Trump's statement included a number of falsehoods the billionaire businessman has repeated in recent weeks as he seeks to draw a contrast with Clinton. Among them was the incorrect allegation that Clinton's immigration proposals would "completely open America's borders in her first 100 days in office."

Trump also said that if elected, Clinton would implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. While Clinton promoted the agreement dozens of times as secretary of state, she has since said she cannot support the deal in its current form.

She has said she backs trade deals only if they fulfill a three-pronged test of creating "good" jobs, raising wages and improving national security.

Trump also misleadingly claimed that as secretary of state, Clinton "racked up a $1 trillion trade deficit with China." In her role as the nation's top diplomat, Clinton had no direct control over the difference in the cost of U.S. imports from China versus its exports to the nation.

Trump issued a second statement later Thursday afternoon blaming "Clinton's global trade policies" for the fact that the "nation's current account trade deficit hit its highest mark in 7 years." He was referring to a report from the Commerce Department Thursday saying that the current account trade deficit jumped 9.9 percent in the first quarter to $124.7 billion  its highest level in more than seven years.

He also repeated his false claim that Clinton supports the TPP, saying "there is no doubt she would enact it if given the chance  yet more betrayal of union voters whose jobs would vanish as a result of this deal."

Clinton has won the endorsements of many of the AFL-CIO's largest unions in the past year, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Teachers, paving the way for the AFL-CIO to back her campaign.

The labor federation represents 12.5 million members and is a potent force in Democratic politics and voter turnout. Union leaders have been gearing up for a general election showdown against Trump, whom they portray as a threat to working families even though he fared well among blue-collar voters during the GOP primaries.

"This election offers a stark choice between an unstoppable champion for working families and an unstable charlatan who made his fortune scamming them," said Lee Saunders, the president of AFSCME and the chair of the AFL-CIO political committee.
Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, held a rally in Dallas Thursday night after hosting an invitation-only fundraiser earlier in the evening.

About 3,000 people were in attendance for the rally at Gilley's South Side Ballroom, which was held on the one-year anniversary of his presidential campaign launch.

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addressed supporters at a campaign event at Gilleys South Side Ballroom on Thursday, June 16, 2016.

Trump spent much of the rally recounting his victories during his party's hard-fought primary, offering a state-by-state recap.

"This is the one-year anniversary, and hopefully we're going to make it a worthwhile year," he said.

Donald Trump spoke in Dallas exactly one year after beginning his presidential campaign. His speech Thursday largely looked back at his successful primary year.

Trump did not mention by name one of his former rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz  who won the Texas primary handily and has yet to endorse Trump.

Still, Trump promised a Texas-sized victory in November.

"We're going to win Texas so big, we're going to win Texas so big," he said.

Trump Rally in Dallas

A former Cruz supporter, U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, was among those who spoke at the rally.

"I endorse the man, Donald Trump. I endorse what he stands for and to make America great again!" Burgess said.

Raw video shows protesters and police outside Gilleys Southside Ballroom where presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump spoke at a rally on Thursday, June 16, 2016.

Trump joked about riding a mechanical bull at the rally  but seemed a little confused by the concept.

"I read about this place," Trump told the crowd. "Where's that horse?"

He appeared to be referring to the venue's mechanical bull. The original Gilley's and its bull were featured prominently in the 1980 movie "Urban Cowboy."

Trump predicted his ride would be a smash in the news.

"Hey, you want to hit the papers tomorrow? Let's get that horse. I'll ride that horse," said Trump. "The problem is, even if I make it, they'll say I fell off the horse and it was terrible."

Thousands of Donald Trump supporters arrived to cheer on their candidate at Gilleys South Side Ballroom in Dallas.

Trump was also inspired by a protester's cowboy hat and suggested selling a "Make America Great Again" version.

Trump told the crowd he expects winning the general election against likely rival Hillary Clinton in November to be more difficult than the primary because of what he perceived to be a dishonest press.

"You know, it's funny. I didn't love the press during the primaries, but now it's, like, brutal," Trump said.

During his speech at Gilleys South Side Ballroom on Thursday, presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump mentioned NBC 5s coverage of his campaign.

As the rally ended supporters from inside the venue began to mix with protesters who were gathered outside on South Lamar Street. Dozens of police officers, both on foot and on horseback, formed a line and guided the crowds away from Gilley's and into Downtown Dallas, where they dispersed.

Dallas police worked to keep the peace as protesters mixed with supporters outside the Donald Trump rally at Gilleys South Side Ballroom.

A Dallas Advocate photojournalist was treated for a head injury after he was struck by a rock thrown from the crowd.

NOW: Photographer for Dallas Advocate magazine hit in face with rock. Ambulance on way. #TrumpInTX @NBCDFW pic.twitter.com/cvoqY2yzUT  ScottGordonNBC5 (@ScottGordonNBC5) June 17, 2016

Dallas police reported one arrest for disorderly conduct, and there were seven other people removed from the Trump rally while the candidate spoke.

In all, about 1,500 to 1,800 police officers worked during the Trump visit, either helping block and direct traffic along the motorcade route, or at the rally site.

Raw video shows how Dallas police handled removing Trump supporters from a crowd of protesters outside Gilleys after the presumptive Republican presidential candidates spoke at a Rally Thursday, June 16, 2016. (WARNING: Possible foul language)

Seven people were treated for heat-related illness, Dallas Fire-Rescue reported, with one person transported to a hospital. The temperature Thursday reached the mid-90s, with a heat index above 100 degrees.

After the rally, Trump's motorcade returned to the Hilton Dallas/Park Cities off Northwest Highway and the Dallas North Turnpike, where the candidate was expected to stay the night before traveling to Houston on Friday for a campaign event in The Woodlands.

Protesters gathered Thursday outside Gilleys South Side Ballroom in Dallas, where Donald Trump was due to hold a political rally.

Fundraiser for Trump

Prior to the rally at the South Side Ballroom, Trump attended a fundraiser at The Highland Hotel, at Mockingbird Lane and U.S. Highway 75.

Tickets ranged from $500 to $250,000, and organizers remained tight-lipped about the guest list and wouldn't say how many people were in attendance.

The email invitation urged North Texas Republicans to come together and unite as a party to support Trump as the presumptive nominee so they can take back the White House in November.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump attended a private fundraiser with Dallas County donors prior to Thursdays rally in Dallas.

Dallas Police Prepare to Keep the Peace During Trump Rally

The South Side Ballroom, which is across the street from Dallas police headquarters, holds fewer than 4,000 people. Trump's rally at the American Airlines Center in Dallas last September drew more than 15,000 inside and several thousand protesters outside.

Dallas police have hundreds of officers are working security for Donald Trumps rally.

In anticipation of large crowds converging at the smaller venue, Dallas police closed several blocks of South Lamar Street, from Cadiz Street to Belleview Street, beginning at 2 p.m.

Due to the recent history of clashes taking place at Trump rallies, the Dallas Police Department used Wednesday afternoon to practice crowd control and techniques in riot gear at Fair Park.

Ahead of Donald Trumps rally in Dallas Thursday, the Dallas Police Department practiced crowd control techniques in Fair Park Wednesday, June 15, 2016.
The news that no die-hard "Hamilton" fan  or anyone who hasn't seen the Broadway smash yet  wants to hear has arrived: Lin-Manuel Miranda, its creator and star, is leaving the show this summer. But he promises to return "again and again."

Miranda, who has been in the show since it made its debut off-Broadway in early 2015, said Thursday he will perform his last show July 9. Javier Munoz, the current understudy for Alexander Hamilton, who also took over from Miranda in "In the Heights," will take over July 11.

But Miranda said he will happily return to the show from time to time and RadicalMedia plans to film the original cast performing the show at the end of June and will, at some point, make it available. "We are aware that history has its eyes on us," said Miranda.

"For people who will say, 'But I'll never see Lin as Hamilton!'  yes, you will," Miranda said in an Irish pub in his Washington Heights neighborhood. "I have written this insane part that I can't seem to get tired of, that is new every night... I think this is a role I will be going back to again and again."

Miranda has already lined up plenty of work after he leaves. He has a lead role opposite Emily Blunt in a film sequel of "Mary Poppins" and will help turn his musical "In the Heights" into a movie. He has written music for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and the upcoming animated feature "Moana."

Munoz, who has been with the show since it debuted off-Broadway in 2015, said his taking over won't have too much effect on the show. "If anything, it's personal," he said. "We're losing our guy, right? Our friend, the guy we love, is not going to be in the building as often. It's like camp. You get to the end of summer and you become pen pals."

Miranda also revealed he has launched a merchandise site called Tee-Rico that will sell items inspired by Miranda's work and art. Currently, it is selling a T-shirt printed with part of his sonnet he delivered at the Tony Awards, dedicated to the dead in the Orlando nightclub shooting. All proceeds will benefit Equality Cares in Florida.

"Hamilton," which cast minority actors as Founding Fathers, burst through the Broadway bubble like few shows. It has been praised by politicians and rap stars, influenced the debate over the nation's currency and become a cultural phenomenon.

"It's been the best tsunami in the world, but it's been a crazy thing to be in the middle of this," said Miranda, who has a young child. "I don't walk down the streets in Washington Heights the way I used to."

On Sunday, it won 11 Tony Awards, including best new musical, best book and best score. That capped a stunning year for "Hamilton" that includes Miranda winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for drama, a Grammy, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Miranda lost the best-actor Tony to his co-star Leslie Odom Jr., who plays Aaron Burr to his Alexander Hamilton.

"Hamilton" also won for best direction, orchestration, choreography and best featured actor and actress statuettes for Renee Elise Goldsberry and Daveed Diggs. Even if the show starts to shed stars  and Miranda said he didn't know about anyone else's plans  he said the musical can still be strong.

"I hope the 11 Tonys that we racked up on Sunday are somewhat of a validation to those folks that this is a great piece," Miranda said. "It takes a village to make a show like that."

Plans are already in the works to open a Chicago company of "Hamilton, as well as one for London and a U.S. national tour that starts on the West Coast. Miranda said the talent level is huge at casting: "There are so many unbelievable actors of color who don't get roles like this in the musical theater canon."

Miranda, the New York City son of Puerto Rican parents, came across Alexander Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow's book and was inspired to write a musical. He debuted the first song at the White House.

His book and score for "Hamilton" has sly references to Gilbert and Sullivan, Notorious B.I.G., LL Cool J and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Miranda already has a Tony for creating "In the Heights" and is part of a crew that freestyle raps.

While he steps away from playing Alexander Hamilton, Miranda said he will still push for legislation to stop ticket scalpers and also champion Puerto Rican fiscal strength. He would not be drawn into the 2016 election other than urging a get-out-the-vote push, particularly among Latinos.

"I've got this megaphone. I'm going to pick it up when it needs to be picked up," Miranda said, citing his support for Broadway Cares and the Mariposa DR Foundation, among others. "That's sort of the other part of my life now."
Photography is a vibrant art form that's forever in flux. The sepia-sweet daguerrotypes of yesteryear eventually gave way to Polaroid technology, after a few twists and turns along the way.

But there's a #truefact about the moment we currently occupy at this typing: If there's a contest involving photography at popular attractions, some of the entries will include the photographer in the foreground, in some sort of stylized self-snapped picture.

That's called a "selfie"  that term will probably take off one of these days  and the city of Buena Park is calling for a brief moratorium on the au courant trend. Cheekily so, we'll add, but one that comes with real prizes for going the non-selfie route.

The deal with the Anti-Selfie Instagram Contest? Take a photo, or multiple photos, at a designated Buena Park location, post it on the photo-sharing service through Monday, Aug. 15 with the hashtag #VisitBuenaPark, and find yourself in the running for "several prizes including a $500 Visa Gift Card."

Be sure to make Buena Park your location, too, when you post.

Locations include some of the B.P. biggies: Knott's Berry Farm, Knott's Soak City, Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour, Medieval Times, and the Ralph B. Clark Park and Interpretative Center are all on the list, as well as other attractions and eateries around the town.

Selfies are indeed verboten, but people in the picture are not. In fact, there should be at least one person in your snapshot, so round up your Pirate's Adventure-loving pals and invite them to put on their best "arrrr" face.

Of course, selfies will still reign after the contest wraps, thanks to the ease of reaching for the camera in your pocket. Soon, however, some new photo trend will capture our fancy, as hard as that is to believe at this selfie-laden moment.

What will the shorthand nickname for a virtual reality photograph be? A virtie?
A 54-year-old woman who was attacked with a liquor bottle while standing in line with her daughter at a CVS store in Temecula died of her injuries, and her alleged assailant could face a murder charge, authorities said Wednesday.

Tammy Serrano of Temecula died about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at Inland Valley Medical Center in Wildomar, after being taken off life support, according to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Her alleged attacker, Brian Eldon Saylor, 31, of Temecula, is being held in lieu of $1 million bail at the Southwest Detention Center in Murrieta. The District Attorney's Office is expected to file a criminal complaint by Thursday morning.

According to sheriff's Sgt. Ray Huskey, deputies were called to the CVS/Pharmacy store at 31771 Rancho California Road, in the shopping district just off Meadows Parkway, shortly after 5 p.m. Monday to investigate reports of an assault.

Her family told NBC4 that Serrano was standing in the checkout lane with her daughter when a stranger walked up and struck her in the back of the head with a large liquor bottle.

Pharmacy employees were holding the 6-foot-2, 240-pound Saylor and identified him as the alleged attacker, according to Huskey. The attack was apparently recorded by store surveillance video cameras.

Saylor, who was arrested without incident, has no listed felony or misdemeanor convictions in Riverside County.

An employee of a market in the same shopping center said Saylor was often seen walking around the area. The man, who did not want to be identified, said the suspect sometimes appeared drunk and shoplifted alcohol, but did not seem violent.

Serrano's family and friends were planning a vigil outside the CVS store at 9:30 Wednesday night in memory of the mother and grandmother. They were asking people to wear the color red, which was her favorite.
The daughter of Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts was charged Wednesday with arranging an attack in which her landlord was assaulted with a metal bat and shot at, prosecutors said.

Ashley Melissa Butts, 30, had gotten into disputes with her landlord shortly after moving into his home in the 3300 block of West 78th Street, and allegedly hired a friend to assault him, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said.

On April 30, prosecutors said Butts arranged for an Uber to pick up her friend, 37-year-old Israel Rios, and take him to the home. Butts and Rios exchanged text messages before Rios knocked on the door, assaulted the landlord with a metal bat and fired a revolver at him, prosecutors said.

The landlord was not struck by gunfire, but suffered cuts and bruises to his head, District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Jane Robison said.

Butts was arrested late Wednesday night and held on $100,000 bail, according to Los Angeles County jail records. Rios was arrested earlier in the afternoon. His bail was set at $350,000.

They were charged with one felony count each of assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury, conspiracy to commit assault and first-degree burglary with a person present.

It wasn't immediately known if either defendant has a lawyer.

The complaint accuses Rios of using a firearm and causing great bodily injury.

If convicted, prosecutors said Butts faces up to seven years and Rios up to 22 years in state prison.
Police seized 1,500 pounds of illegal fireworks in an undercover bust stemming from a Craigslist ad, Huntington Beach police said Wednesday.

Three people were arrested in Los Angeles and Santa Ana after the illegal fireworks were sold over the internet, according to police.

"If you're paying for fireworks that explode, rise in the air, shoot flaming balls  any of those effects  those essentially are going to be illegal to possess," said Huntington Beach bomb squad investigator Craig Jensen.

Police say the Craigslist ad featuring the volatile fireworks showed pictures of what the customer would receive -- "Excalibur Canister Shells" and more  and after tracking the purchase from the ad, they busted the buyers.

"The first buy was arranged and the fireworks were located in a residence in Los Angeles. The second buy was done with two brothers and those fireworks were ultimately located in a residence in Santa Ana," Officer Jennifer Marlatt of Huntington Beach police said.

Bomb squad investigators were to examine the "Atom Bombs" and "Roman Candles" to see if the crime would qualify as a felony case.

According to authorities, if the fireworks were made in China, they might not be up to the State Fire Marshal's standard. If the box bears the State Fire Marshal's seal, it is usually safe, police said.

Residents who work with the Huntington Beach Elks Lodge said they were concerned that the sale of illegal fireworks might cut into their Fourth of July business, since they hope to raise thousands at their fireworks stand.

"I'm worried about people getting injured, that's why we sell nothing but safe and sane fireworks authorized by the State Fire Marshal," John Nielsen said.
The slaughter in Florida and an attention-grabbing filibuster in the Senate did little to break the election-year stalemate in Congress over guns Thursday, with both sides unwilling to budge and Republicans standing firm against any new legislation opposed by the National Rifle Association.

Democrats renewed their call to action after Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., held the floor along with colleagues in a nearly 15-hour filibuster that lasted into the early hours Thursday.

"We can't just wait, we have to make something happen," said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., at an emotional news conference where Democrats joined family members of people killed in recent mass shootings. These are people bound by brutality, and their numbers are growing."

But Republicans were coolly dismissive of Democrats' demands. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., derided Murphy's filibuster as a "campaign talk-a-thon" that did nothing but delay potential votes.

Noting that a few Democrats had skipped a classified briefing on the Florida nightclub shooting to participate in the filibuster, McConnell chided: "It's hard to think of a clearer contrast for serious work for solutions on the one hand, and endless partisan campaigning on the other."

Democrats spoke of the need for new gun legislation. Republicans cited the threat posed by the Islamic State group, to which Orlando gunman Omar Mateen swore allegiance while killing 49 people in a gay nightclub early Sunday. But the two sides mostly talked past each other, and efforts to forge consensus quickly sputtered out. As a result, the Senate faced the prospect of taking dueling votes beginning Monday on Democratic and GOP bills, all of which looked destined to fail.

The bills would need 60 votes to pass, which could be a hurdle, since there are more votes than there are Democrats in the Senate, according to NBC News.

The back-and-forth came as President Barack Obama visited the victims' families in Orlando, and called on lawmakers to act.

"Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense," Obama said.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton joined Senate Democrats' call for action. Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump weighed in with a tweet suggesting he would meet with the NRA and support efforts to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists. Exactly what he would support was unclear.

It's the same exercise the Senate has engaged in time and again after mass shootings. Even after the Newtown, Connecticut, shootings of schoolchildren, the Senate could not pass a bipartisan background checks bill. Moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine criticized the state of affairs as "Groundhog Day."

After the shooting in San Bernardino, California, last year, the effort was downgraded to trying to pass a bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to keep people on a government terrorism watch list or other suspected terrorists from buying guns, but that too failed.

This time, Feinstein is seeking a revote on her bill. Republicans will offer an alternative by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that would allow the government to delay a gun sale to a suspected terrorist for 72 hours, but require prosecutors to go to court to show probable cause to block the sale permanently.

Votes were also expected on dueling background check bills. All were expected to fail.

Collins said she was working with other Republicans, as well as talking to Democrats, on a bill that would prevent people on the no-fly list  a smaller universe than targeted by Democrats  from getting guns. But her bill had not been blessed by GOP leaders and it was unclear if it would get a vote.

Polls show large numbers of Americans agree with the need for at least some limited gun measures such as background checks. But Democrats have been unable to turn the tide of public opinion to their purpose because the NRA is able to mobilize and energize voters who will threaten to vote lawmakers out on the gun issue alone.

This past week, the NRA made robo-calls in Pennsylvania urging people to contact their senators and "express their strong opposition to any new gun control laws."

In the GOP-controlled House, Republicans had no plans to act on guns and Democrats were unable to force any action, given House rules less favorable to the minority party than in the Senate. Instead the House passed a bundle of previously approved counterterrorism bills and sent them to the Senate again.

"The question is, is going after the Second Amendment how you stop terrorism? No. That's not how you stop terrorism," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
The Broward Sheriff's Office sergeant accused in a child pornography case was pronounced dead late Wednesday night of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

According to BSO, 43-year-old Sgt. Kreg Costa was transported to Broward Health Medical Center, where he died at 11:27 p.m.

Sunrise Police said they received a 911 from a man who said officers should respond to Sunset Strip in Sunrise.

When officers arrived, they found Costa with a self-inflicted gunshot wound outside the home. No one else was home at the time and no one was else was injured

Costa faced 29 charges including possessing or viewing a depiction of child sexual conduct, sexual assault, lewd or lascivious conduct, using a computer to lure a child and using or allowing a child to engage in sex.

He was taken into custody on June 9 following a two-month investigation by the BSO's public corruption unit, officials said.

The investigation began after staff at the Weston district, where Costa worked as a road patrol supervisor, noticed he was staying in his office during his night shift with the lights off and his uniform belt and gun belt removed, officials said.

When detectives looked at a computer usage report of Costa's work-issued laptop from January through March, they found he was viewing hardcore pornography including incest-related and bondage websites while he was at work, officials said.

Detectives monitored Costa's Internet activity and found he was engaging in sexually explicit exchanges with a 16-year-old California girl through email, Twitter and videos, officials said.

Costa instructed the teen to record herself while engaging in sex acts with herself, officials said. The teen told investigators she told Costa she was 15 years old when she first started communicating with him.

Costa was married with five children and had been with BSO since 1999.
Lu Thi Thanh from the Thai ethnic group in Vietnam, who has lived with HIV for eight years and relies on ARV treatment, stepped onto the podium at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Ending Aids on June 9 to tell her survival story.

I just want to say thank you, thank you so much everybody for giving me back my life, my hope and my future. And please do not forget us [people with HIV], Thanh said at the meeting as reported on the Vietnamese government's portal.

Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam was also in attendance to help Thanh share her story. Thanh comes from the poor mountainous province of Dien Bien. She only found out that she had contracted HIV when her first husband died in 2009. Since then, Thanh has been on antiretroviral drugs (ARV) that help prolong and improve the quality of life for people infected with HIV.

Thanks to international support, HIV patients in Vietnam have had access to ARV drugs since 2004, and at present, between 800 and 1,000 new patients need ARV treatment each year.

However, international funding for Vietnam to buy ARV drugs has been gradually reduced and will end by 2017, posing a major challenge for the country's fight against the epidemic because at present those funds pay for about 95 percent of supplies.

"Should we reduce the support? No, we cannot and we do not have the right to do that," Deputy PM Dam told the conference.

He went on to explain how Thanh has become an active community worker, helping other people like her. She is very much appreciated by the community, he said.

In 2013, Thanh got married again to a man who is also a victim of HIV. In the deputy prime minister's words, a miracle happened a year later when she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

This miracle may never have happened had it not been for international and local efforts that have provided support for Thanh and her husband.

Not only that, Thanh and her husband are now able to work again and live like normal people. "This miracle was only made possible because of an internationally financed project in partnership with the local government and community. Without this, she would probably not be with us today. Many other people, including women and children, would not have been able to go to school, work, have families or even be alive," Dam said.

According to Ministry of Health's Vietnam Administration of HIV/AIDS Control (VAAC), the country has made great strides in HIV/AIDS prevention and control with the number of newly-infected people per year dropping from 18,000 in 2010 to some 10,000 in 2015. By May 2016, the total number of reported HIV-infected patients in the country was nearly 228,000, according to the General Statistics Office.

In 2016, the state budget for ARV has reached VND60 billion ($2.7 million), an increase of VND20 billion ($900,000) from last year, according to the Vietnam Social Insurance Agency. However, Dr. Nguyen Hoang Long, VAAC Director General, said during a roundtable discussion on October 1, 2015: "With the current 100,000 patients, Vietnam needs around VND420 billion for ARV each year."

Vietnam is the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to commit to the global 90-90-90 treatment target of the United Nations, whereby 90 percent of people living with HIV know their status, 90 percent of people who know their HIV-positive status are accessing treatment and 90 percent of people on treatment have a suppressed viral load by 2020.
The U.S. Coast Guard says three college students have been found safe in the Florida Everglades.

On its official Twitter page, the Coast Guard announced that Everglades National Park Service searchers found the three students Thursday morning and that "no medical concerns" were reported.

Earlier Thursday, Petty Officer Mark Barney said a helicopter crew had been searching for the Florida International University students after learning they had not returned from a trip collecting water samples in the Everglades on Wednesday.

The Coast Guard was notified Wednesday night, and a helicopter crew searched for them. The search resumed Thursday morning.

Barney says the students were in an 18-foot to 23-foot Mako boat.

"Just bad luck. Their engine failed and they couldn't get it back started. It happens to boats," said Ranger Tony Terry with Everglades National Park.

When it went out, the boat had two PhD candidates and a visiting researcher on board. They were taking water samples as part of a study involving the carbon cycle and climate change.

The group was in the far west part of Everglades National Park, in the mangroves along the Gulf Coast, when park rangers found them Friday morning.

"They were very well prepared compared to most people. They're not dehydrated, most people would be out of water and dehydrated right now. The communications just weren't there," Terry said.

There was no cellphone service and their VHF radio was useless, but because the researchers filed a float plan with the park, rangers knew there was a problem when they didn't show up where they were supposed to be, sparking the search.

"It's part of the job, but I'm always happy when it comes to a good ending and I feel like I'm doing my job," Terry said.
What to Know Police in North Port, Florida helped a local child celebrate his birthday after no other kids said they would come.

Police in Florida went above and beyond by surprising a boy at his eighth birthday party after no one responded to his invites.

News outlets report Daniel Nicastro's parents say this wasn't the first time no one has called to say they were coming to their son's party in North Port. The Nicastros say making friends is difficult for Daniel, who has autism.

So his parents decided to invite the police officers, who Daniel considers "superheroes," to the party.

They were hoping a few officers would show up, but instead, an assembly of officers arrived, even bringing gifts.

Police Sgt. Paul Neugebauer says they wanted to attend and let Daniel know that he's appreciated.

A photo of Daniel with the officers shared online has drawn attention from around the world.
What to Know A South Florida teen accused of stabbing a classmate 15 times in their school's bathroom is facing adult charges.

The 16-year-old boy has been charged with attempted first-degree murder and possession of a weapon on school property.

A South Florida teen accused of stabbing a classmate 15 times in their school's bathroom is facing adult charges.

The Palm Beach Post reports the 16-year-old boy has been charged with attempted first-degree murder and possession of a weapon on school property. He's scheduled to appear in court Monday.

Officials say two employees at Royal Palm Beach High School pulled the attacker off a bloodied student between classes on May 25. The 16-year-old victim was airlifted to St. Mary's Medical Center and released several days later.

An arrest report says the attacker told police that he stabbed his former friend because the attacker thought the victim was having sex with a girl he liked. The suspect said he put the folding knife in his backpack the night before the attack.
Miami Police detectives are investigating the theft of two assault rifles from a parked car.

On June 12 at approximately 3:25 p.m., police said a male suspect made his way into the staircase of a high-rise condominium located at 1050 Brickell Avenue.

According to detectives, the suspect broke into and stole from the inside of a 2016 Black Mercedes Benz E 400 that was parked in its assigned space on the seventh floor of the building's parking garage.

The high-rise's surveillance equipment captured the burglar's face on camera.

Detectives believe the suspect may be responsible for other recent car break-ins in the area, since his method is similar to other cases.

The suspect is described as a slim built white man, approximately 6'0" and was last seen wearing an orange shirt, hat and carrying a blue Adidas book bag.

Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers at (305) 471-TIPS.
The Miami Marlins ended a long road trip with a 6-3 loss to the San Diego Padres on Wednesday.

Miami had a chance to sweep San Diego, but fell short in the finale. With the defeat, the Marlins ended up going 4-5 on the nine-game trip. It was an unusual stretch of games, that saw the Marlins go from Minnesota to San Diego with a three-day stop in Arizona.

The Marlins are now 34-32 on the year and remain right in the thick of things in the playoff race. Miami is in third place in the National League East, and within striking distance of the second-place New York Mets. With the Mets scheduled to play on Wednesday evening, Miami is only 1.5 games back of the team.

Justin Nicolino was hit hard once again and took the loss. Nicolino allowed ten hits and five runs in 4.2 innings. The right-hander has a 5.17 E.R.A this season to go along with a 2-4 record.

With Giancarlo Stanton receiving another day off, Ichiro Suzuki stepped in and made some history. Suzuki went 2-5 to reach 4,257 hits in his international career. That number passes Pete Rose for the All-Time hits record unofficially. Due to the fact over a thousand of those hits occurred in Japan, Suzuki's total is not recognized as the hits record.

The Marlins will take Thursday off before beginning a homestand on Friday against the Colorado Rockies. Adam Conley will get the ball to begin the series against Colorado.
New information has been revealed in the search for clues in the disappearance of a mother and daughter from Doral.

Detectives made a critical move in the case that could help them figure out what happened to 43-year-old Liliana Moreno and her 8-year-old daughter, Daniela.

The duo has been missing for more than two weeks, agonizing for family members.

The search warrant affidavits are providing more details on the case.

Police refer to Liliana's boyfriend, Gustavo Castano, as the suspect, indicating they are investigating what they believe to be a murder case. Castano has not been charged with a crime, but police said they stopped him from trying to kill himself with a boxcutter inside a rented pickup truck.

According to the documents, Castano "gave conflicting accounts as to the whereabouts of the victims" saying he and Moreno "became involved in a heated argument" inside the truck. He said he dropped her and their daughter off at the Turnpike and Okeechobee Road, and never saw them again.

Police wanted the warrant to examine Castano's security camera and DVR system, but found nothing.

Detectives said Castano called Moreno's sister in Colombia, asking if she knew where Liliana was and "according to Ms. Moreno Ramirez, the suspect has never called her." That raised suspicions, as did the fact that "despite the fact that the suspect is the biological father of victim #02, the suspect did not report victim #01 and victim #02 missing."

In addition, the search warrant also said Castano contacted every member of his family, telling them that he loved them and told them to take care of themselves. He also gave his ex-wife $5,000 in cash. All this as, police believe, he was contemplating suicide.

Castano's lawyer said he's innocent and wants nothing more than to see the safe return of Liliana and Daniela.
Nguyen Tu Nghiem, one of Vietnam's most famous painters, died today, aged 94.

The painter died of natural causes on the morning of June 15, 2016 at a hospital in Hanoi.

Nguyen Tu Nghiem, one of Vietnam's most celebrated painters, was born in 1922 to a Confucian scholar's family in the central province of Nghe An. He is best known for portraying traditional folk themes while not sticking to any one specific material; he created from lacquer, oil and silk to pastels, chalk and pencil.

He studied under Joseph Inguimberty, Nam Son and To Ngoc Van at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts lIndochine (1925-1945). Nghiem, together with his college friends Nguyen Sang, Bui Xuan Phai and Duong Bich Lien formed the famous four Sang-Nghiem-Lien-Phai, who represent the "second generation" of Vietnam's modern art scene. In 1944, Nghiem the student won the first prize at the prestigious Hanoi Salon Unique.

After graduating in 1946, Nghiem joined the resistance movement and moved to Viet Bac revolutionary base in northern Vietnam. He then taught at the Resistance School of Fine Arts in Thai Nguyen Province in 1950.

Four years later, he returned to Hanoi to teach at the Industrial Fine Arts College until 1960, to then gradually go into seclusion to focus more on his work as an independent artist.

Nghiem was a member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association from 1957 to 1983. His works are displayed at the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts and the Moscow State Museum of the Orient.

In 2013, his lacquer painting Thanh Giong (Saint Giong) was exhibited at Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in celebration of 40 years of diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.K.

Influenced by his two respected professors, Jospeh Inguimberty and To Ngoc Van, Nghiem was one of few rare Vietnamese artists whose works were auctioned at Christies' and Sotheby's.

He was awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize in 1996.

Works by Nguyen Tu Nghiem:
The New York State Senate unanimously approved a measure Wednesday to decriminalize most folding knives.

The bill, which has already been approved in the state Assembly, is intended to stop police departments from arresting thousands of New Yorkers who carry folding knives they use for work. It passed by a vote of 61-0.

Last year, the I-Team revealed how the NYPD has arrested tens of thousands of people for illegal "gravity knives." But most of those cases never end up with weapons convictions. Instead, the cases are often dismissed or pleaded down to non-criminal offenses.

Currently, the criminal code says any blade that can be deployed with the use of gravity or centrifugal force is considered illegal. But critics say the current wording of the law allows for a police officer to declare virtually any blade illegal if the officer has the physical skill to open it with the flick of a wrist.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has opposed the bill to decriminalize folding knives on the grounds that it could endanger police officers and the public if more people feel free to carry blades. Rather than legalizing folding knives, Vance has suggested adding language to the law that would allow legitimate craftspeople to obtain a license to carry the blades.

The knife reform bill now goes to the desk of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
A newly released recording of a call placed to 911 when a woman drove her car off a New Jersey bridge and began sinking under water shows how close she came to drowning in the Passaic River before a bystander dove in and rescued her.

The caller named Ricky tells the dispatcher he sees a car in the water just off the bridge connecting Nutley and Lyndhurst, then realizes there is someone in the car.

"I'm pulling up to it right now to see if anybody is inside that car but it's inside the river right now," he says in the harrowing call released by Nutley police Thursday.

Then, as he spots someone in the car, he says, "Yes, yes! There is somebody in the car!"

"Holy s---. Tell them to get here quick. I can't swim or I would jump in there," he says.

He addresses someone else at the scene, telling them, "They're inside the car, I'm looking at them right now, they're trying to keep the face above the water."

The next part of the recording narrates the rescue made by Jason Moss, who was leaving the gym when he saw what was happening and jumped into the river.

"Come on, hold on," Ricky says to himself, then he shouts to Moss: "They're right there, you see? She's going under! Open that! There you go. Can you reach inside?"

"Be careful, bro! Be careful," he shouts.

The dispatcher asks Ricky if someone had gone into the water.

"Yes," Ricky tells her. "There is a gentleman in the water helping them now. He's trying to -- he just got the door open."

The 30-year-old Moss told NBC 4 New York Tuesday he briefly panicked in the water when the door momentarily jammed.

"I think the scariest moment, I turned around at one point to see if there were any rescuers coming because I couldn't get the door open," he said.

Police commended Moss earlier in the week, saying the woman would have drowned if he didn't jump into action.

They were investigating what caused the 50-year-old Cranford woman to jump a small curb on Dock Street and plunge into 10 feet of water just north of the DeJessa Bridge.

Emergency responders treated the woman and her rescuer on the scene, and transported the woman to a local hospital. She's expected to be OK.

Moss, who's from Secaucus, refused a transport to the hospital, and went to an urgent care facility himself to get a tetanus shot, police said.

Moss was humble when he spoke to NBC 4 and said he wouldn't think twice about doing it again.

"It was more about doing the right thing," he said.
The NYPD is calling on the Queens community to help celebrate the life of a retired detective and World War II veteran who died alone.

William Brown died last month at the age of 95. He had no friends or family by his side, and his body was discovered by police officers from the 113th Precinct who befriended him over the winter, the NYPD says.

Those cops from the community affairs division first met him when they heard of an elderly man suffering hypothermia. They visited him and arranged for proper heating in his home and over the next few months, they helped care for him and even escorted him to doctor's appointments, according to the NYPD.

"Ultimately, they were also the ones who arranged for his services and funeral," the NYPD said in a Facebook post. "Mr. Brown passed away alone, but he doesn't have to make his final journey alone."

"We ask the community in the Queens area to please join us if they can for the wake and services," the post said.

"Let's give Mr. Brown the hero send-off he deserves."

The wake will be held at First Church of God in Christ in Jamaica Thursday from 9 to 10 a.m. The service will be held from 10 to 11 a.m.
A second suspect has been arrested after three teens were attacked and stabbed with a machete and knife at a Long Island park last month, a law enforcement source told NBC 4 New York.

An 18-year-old man was arrested in the May 23 attack in Hempstead Lake State Park, the source said. The arrest comes two weeks after authorities arrested a first of six attackers, all thought to be in the MS-13 street gang.

Three teens were walking on a trail along the softball and lacrosse fields at the park that day when they were set on by several attackers. One of the attackers had a machete and another had a knife, sources said at the time.

One of the attackers might've been as young as seven years old, sources said after the attack.

At least one teenage victims was stabbed and left in critical condition in the apparently gang-related attack, according to sources. The other three teens had minor injuries.

The park frequently hosts recreational youth leagues.
UPDATE: Brother Charged in Weapons, Drugs Raid: "You Want Nazi Salute?"

Two brothers were arrested Thursday after authorities said they found bomb-making instructions, drugs, weapons, high-capacity ammunition magazines and $50,000 in cash while executing a search warrant at a Long Island home.

The brothers were arrested after Suffolk County police raided a home in Mount Sinai early Thursday, the department said.

Edward and Sean Perkowski were expected to be arraigned Friday. Messages left with their attorney Thursday have not been returned.

Suffolk County Police Commissioner Timothy Sini says in addition to the weapons cache, police found marijuana and illegal mushrooms.

He added that Nazi paraphernalia was also found in the home, including portraits of Adolf Hitler, as well as a manual with instructions on how to make a bomb.

Neighbors told NBC 4 New York they've always known there was trouble at the house. They're just not sure why police didn't do anything sooner.

"I have a 9-year-old son who gets very nervous around the house. You know there's stuff going on there that's not right," said John Leonard.

"That scares the hell out of me. That takes it to a whole new level," he said. "I live two houses down, so bomb-making materials, instructions, whatever it might be, that just escalated that a lot."

The house had a condemned notice on the front Thursday, but police wouldn't discuss how long they've been investigating the brothers. They also didn't say if they found any evidence of a specific plot.

A third brother, who is not facing charges, stopped by the home Thursday.

"This is all twisted, it's all wrong," he said before walking away without futher explanation.

Another woman outside the home who identified herself as a relative said the brothers are "good kids" and they own a military surplus store. She would not comment on police characterizing the seized items as illegal.

Neighbor Brian Saltzer said, "It's just outrageous and appalling that we have to live next to this. I pay taxes, I'm a veteran, I'm a nursing student. I'm just happy the house is condemned and we can go back to being a peaceful community."
What to Know A man attacked a 33-year-old woman as she walked down a street in Queens, police say.

The man grabbed her by the throat and punched her when she tried to fight him off.

The victim was able to escape by screaming for help. The suspect took off.

A man grabbed, punched and tried to rape a woman as she walked down a Queens street, police say.

The 33-year-old woman was walking in Corona early in the morning late last month when the man grabbed her by the throat near 42nd Avenue and Warren Street.

As the man held onto her throat, he demanded that she take him to her apartment, according to police.

The woman tried to fight the man off, but he punched her in her mouth and stomach repeatedly. He then threw her to the ground and fingered her privates, police said.

She screamed for help and the suspect took off down 42nd Avenue.

Women who live in Corona said they are concerned. One woman said she carries around a bottle of Mace when she's walking by herself in the neighborhood at night.

"Its very dangerous because a lot of people drink, smoke. Its very dangerous after 10 oclock, more people all walk around. I called the police two times  and nothing," the woman said.

Police ask anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.
Two robbers armed with a mysterious liquid and batteries charged into a Brooklyn check-cashing location and threatened to blow it up, police say.

On Tuesday afternoon, one of the men passed a note demanding cash to a 43-year-old employee at the Pay-O-Matic on Bushwick Avenue.

The second man then took out an unknown liquid and started spraying it through a glass partition. He then threw batteries wrapped in tape at the glass, according to police.

Despite the suspects threats to set fire to the shop and then blow it up, the employee refused to hand over any cash and the men took off empty-handed.

Police said the suspects are in their mid-20s or early 30s.
Hundreds of current and former NYPD officers paid tribute Thursday to a retired detective and World War II veteran who died alone, a day after the department asked that the community unite to give him a hero's farewell.

William Brown died last month at the age of 95. He had no friends or family by his side, and his body was discovered by police officers from the 113th Precinct who befriended him over the winter, the NYPD said.

But he was not without friends and family on Thursday. First Church of God in Christ in Jamaica was overflowing with people who joined to celebrate Brown's life; officers in their dress blues packed every pew. Some had to stand.

"Detective Brown embraced life, and he would be touched by the sea of blue here today," Deputy Inspector Frederick Grover of the 113th Precinct said.

It's possible the touching turnout would never have happened had it not been for a call to 311 last winter from a concerned neighbor. Brown hadn't been heard from amid freezing temperatures, and it turned out he was in the hospital with hypothermia after his heater broke.

Officers with the 113th Precinct were assigned the case and quickly found out he was a retired cop, joining the NYPD after serving in the Army with the 369th Infantry Harlem Hellfighters.

They fixed the heat in his home, made weekly visits and took him to the doctor's appointments. The seeds were planted for a beautiful friendship.

Det. Tanya Duhanne said the officers decided to plan his funeral after he died, and police and firefighters responded in force to a Facebook post the NYPD put up Wednesday asking for the community to "give Mr. Brown the hero send-off he deserves."

"We knew he didn't have a children, he did not have a wife," said Duhanne. "He didn't have friends he was close with, so we had to do that."

Rev. William T. Armstead said of Brown after the service, "He was energetic, he was private, he was humble. But he lived a life of service and sacrifice."

"'If you don't use it, you lose it!' That was one saying he would always say to us," said Detective Ferguson, one of the community officers who befriended him. "He was always very humble. Once you meet Mr. Brown, you will never forget him."

After the service, a lone bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" as the NYPD Honor Guard escorted Brown's flag-draped casket from the church.

Police officers and firefighters lined the street, giving Brown one last salute as his casket was placed in the hearse.
Police say a driver was shot in the elbow during an apparent road rage confrontation on a Bronx street Wednesday.

The 54-year-old victim was inside his car when he was shot on Revere Avenue in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx at about 1:30 p.m., according to police.

He was taken to Jacobi Medical Center and is expected to be OK.

Police are searching for two suspects who got away in a red vehicle.
A 21-year-old man has been convicted of murder and attempted rape in the death of Sarah Goode, the young Medford mother who vanished after attending a party in June 2014 and was found in the woods five days later.

Dante Taylor, of Mastic, faces life imprisonment without parole when he is sentenced next month. The jury deliberated three days before convicting him.

Goode, a 21-year-old medical technician with a then-4-year-old daughter, went to a party June 7, 2014, and never came home. Her body was found June 12 less than a mile from her home; she had been stabbed 42 times.

Taylor was initially arrested on an unrelated rape charge from 2011 that was developed during the investigation into Goode's murder, officials said, and then charged with the murder of Goode.

Goode's sister Elizabeth DeMuria says the young mother didn't know her accused attacker. Police have not said whether there is any connection between the two.
More than 1,500 people and 182 vehicles from both military and civilian forces are searching for a missing pilot and his crashed fighter jet off the coast of central Vietnam, according to the Ministry of National Defense.

Lieutenant Colonel Tran Quang Khai, one of the two pilots on board the missing jet, is still unaccounted for. His co-pilot Major Nguyen Huu Cuong was rescued by a fishing boat on June 15, a day after the plane went down.

The search zone has been expanded from the waters off the coast of the central province of Ha Tinh to the northern province of Thai Binh. A special device used to detect the jet's black box has also been deployed.

One of the helicopters involved in the search. Photo by VnExpress/Hai Binh

Search teams are using three military helicopeters, two transport aircraft and dozens of navy, marine police, border guards and fishing vessels.

The teams worked overnight on Wednesday, according to Dinh Viet Hong, vice chairman of Nghe An's Peoples Committee and head of the provincial search and rescue team.

In a meeting on Thursday, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc urged authorities to make every effort to find the missing pilot.

Vietnam People's Air Defense - Air Force lost contact with the fighter jet flying offshore Nghe An on Tuesday morning. The jet departed from Tho Xuan Airport in Thanh Hoa Province for routine training but disappeared from radar at 7:29 a.m the same day.

Related news:

> Vietnamese fighter jet missing, one pilot has returned to the shore

> Missing pilot and fighter jet in action during training exercise

> Vietnamese fighter jet missing, search continues
A judge has dismissed a lawsuit stemming from the death of a New Jersey girl strangled by a teenage boy when she went to a neighbor's house to trade bicycle parts.

Autumn Pasquale was killed in 2012. Her family sued several law enforcement agencies in 2014. The civil litigation said police didn't act properly and if they had there was "a reasonable chance" the 12-year-old Clayton resident would've survived.

Police say the girl already was dead when she was reported missing.

The lawsuit said authorities shouldn't have waited until the next day to implement a child abduction response team.

The Gloucester County prosecutor's office announced Wednesday the lawsuit was dismissed after "an agreement with all parties." Details haven't been disclosed.

The boy pleaded guilty as an adult to aggravated manslaughter and was sentenced to 17 years in prison.




Jury deliberations are underway in the racketeering case against a veteran Pennsylvania congressman largely centered on efforts to repay an illegal $1 million campaign loan.

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Philadelphia Democrat, is charged with racketeering, bribery, money laundering and honest services fraud.

His lawyers have argued that the schemes were engineered without Fattah's knowledge by two political consultants who pleaded guilty in the case.

The 59-year-old Fattah has been in Congress since 1995.

He lost his costly bid to become mayor of Philadelphia in 2007 and lost his congressional seat in the April primary.

Prosecutors say Fattah routed federal grant money and nonprofit funds through his consultants to pay back the illegal loan.

The jury got the case Wednesday. Four associates are also on trial with him.
U.S. & World

Stories that affect your life across the U.S. and around the world.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy launched a talking filibuster before noon Wednesday, saying he intended to give an extended speech to protest inaction on gun violence.

He was still speaking 12 hours later, having received help from many of his Democratic colleagues hoping to offer gun amendments to a spending bill that funds federal law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice, being debated in the Senate.

Murphy is holding up action, saying Democrats and Republicans should "not proceed with debate on amendments to this bill until we have figured out a way to come together on, at the very least, two simple ideas.

"I will remain on the Senate floor until we get some signal, some sign that we can come together," Murphy said as he evoked the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14, 2012.

Murphy began speaking at 11:21 a.m., and by Senate rules, he has to stand at his desk to maintain control of the floor. When asked by another senator how he was feeling just before 7:30 p.m., Murphy said rehabilitation from a back injury in his 20s had helped him build up endurance. The senator didn't make note of hitting the 12-hour mark.

Murphy is seeking a vote on legislation from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would let the government bar sales of guns and explosives to people it suspects of being terrorists. Feinstein offered the amendment in December  a day after an extremist couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California  but the Republican-run Senate rejected the proposal on a near party-line vote.

[NATL] Deadly Nightclub Shooting Leaves Orlando Reeling

Attempts at compromise appeared to collapse within hours of surfacing in the Senate Wednesday, underscoring the extreme difficulty of resolving the divisive issue five months to the election. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who had been involved in talks with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said there was no resolution.

The Orlando shooter was added to a government watch list of individuals known or suspected of being involved in terrorist activities in 2013, when he was investigated for inflammatory statements to co-workers. But he was pulled from that database when that investigation was closed 10 months later.

Murphy also wants a vote to expand background checks.

Joining him on the Senate floor is fellow Conn. Democrat, Sen. Richard Blumenthal. The two senators, galvanized by the 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in their state, urged a ban on assault weapons and better controls on who can buy guns.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker joined Murphy and Blumenthal, stressing the need for such gun control measures, particularly in light of Sunday's shooting in Orlando that left 49 victims dead and 53 injured.

"I've cleared my entire day...so I can stay on this floor and assist Senator Murphy," Booker said.

The former mayor of Newark said many senators who will take to the floor Wednesday in support of Murphy's filibustering effort have the word "enough" in their hearts.

"What we're seeking is not radical. What we're seeking is not something partisan. What we're seeking is common sense," Booker said in an impassioned speech.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer chastised the Senate, calling the legislative chamber a "shameful" body in "it's obedience to the gun lobby and not doing the most reasonable things most Americans support."

In a statement Wednesday, the National Rifle Association said it did not believe terrorists should be allowed to "purchase or posses firearms." But noted that "at the same time, due process protections should be put in place that allow law-abiding Americans who are wrongly put on a watchlist to be removed."

The pro-gun lobbying group has been accused of influencing lawmakers from passing such restrictions on firearm purchases, arguing that using a terror watch list as a basis for barring sales infringes on Second Amendment rights.

The election-year fight over gun control pits strong proponents of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms against lawmakers arguing for greater restrictions on the ability to obtain weapons. Since the Sunday morning shooting in Orlando, Democrats have revived their push for legislation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Whoever wins this years presidential election might want to call this Chicago-area eighth-grader up as a speech writer.

Jack Aiello is a young teen with big dreams ahead of him  and potentially a slot on "Saturday Night Live" or in the White House.

The Arlington Heights middle schooler has quickly garnered Internet praise for his hilarious graduation speech, which included impersonations of the 2016 presidential candidates.

Aiellos entire roughly 350-student graduating class was tasked with writing a graduation speech as part of an English assignment. The speeches were then evaluated by teachers and staff before three finalists were selected.

"He was hands down No. 1 because it was going to speak to the kids," principal Brian Kaye said.

Video of the eight-minute speech was posted to YouTube last week and has since received more than 23,000 views. It was also shared on Twitter by his school, Thomas Middle School.

"Ive decided that since were in the middle of an election year, that I would do my graduation speech in the style of some of the 2016 presidential candidates," Jack begins in the video.

But what unfolds after that is a series of spot-on impersonations that few in the audience could have anticipated from the soon-to-be-high-schooler described by many as "humble."

"Were learning languages from Spain, from France, from Germany and China," he said during his first impersonation of Donald Trump. "You know, people say I dont like China, I love China. I mean, I love China. I mean, I have so many terrific friends in China. But I took Spanish and let me just tell you, by the way, that it was fantastic. Muy fantastico."

Trump is followed in the speech by Ted Cruz, President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and finally, Bernie Sanders.

"Id like to start off by thanking the great hardworking teachers of Thomas Middle School, he said during an impersonation of Clinton. "Theyve been our champions. Theyve given us the skills to get us through sixth grade and through seventh grade and through eighth grade. And now were going to take those skills and apply them to high school."

Each impression was met with laughs and cheers from the crowd.

"As far as schools go, TMS is in the top one half of one half of one percent of schools in the entire country," he said as Bernie Sanders, ending his speech as the hundreds of people in the audience cheered and gave him a standing ovation.

Jacks parents say the teen has been doing impressions since he was a child and they werent surprised by his desire to do the speech as the 14-year-old is very much into politics.

"Hes been doing them since he was very young  family members, teachers, he even makes up his own silly voices and hes been doing that for a very long time," said his mother, Carla Aiello. "And then with the election, he watches the news clips and he just absorbs everything."

Jack, who is as much a fan of Dana Carvey as he is of politics, hopes to have a career in politics or comedy in the future, his parents said, noting that his current dream is to meet Carvey.

"If you were to ask him what he really wants to do, he really truly does want to be president someday. He feels a great desire to be a leader," said his father, John Aiello. "A politician or a comedian, which the lines do sometimes blur."

The family even took the teen to Iowa for the caucuses earlier this year, where they say he met Sanders and former Republican hopefuls Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.

"Hes a unique 14-year-old, but a humble kid," John Aiello said.

And as for the viral fame hes since received for his speech, the family says theyre just trying to take it all in.

"Were enjoying it," John Aiello said. "Were trying to look at it as a blessing, as fun. Be yourself and dont change and smile a lot."
Authorities announced a $50,000 reward Wednesday as they renewed their search for an elusive serial killer they say committed at least 12 homicides, 45 rapes and dozens of burglaries across California in the 1970s and 1980s.

The case has grown cold for the killer known by at least four nicknames over the decades.

He was dubbed the East Area Rapist after his start in Northern California. The Original Night Stalker after a series of Southern California slayings. The Diamond Knot Killer for using the elaborate knot to bind two of his victims. And most recently the Golden State Killer.

[LA GALLERY] Golden State Killer: Evidence, Victims in Decades-Old Case

He's linked through DNA and other evidence to more than 175 crimes between 1976 and 1986, officials said.

Aside from the reward for his arrest and conviction, the FBI also has a new website with maps locating the murders and rapes, sketches created by three witnesses, video interviews with investigators and audio interviews with two survivors. It also made him the number one option on its major crimes tip line, 800-CALL-FBI.

The FBI is launching a nationwide social media campaign and releasing an online mini-documentary and podcast at fbi.gov/sacramento.

FBI

It's the latest of numerous attempts to identify the man who started in 1976 and 1977 by terrorizing suburban bedroom communities east of Sacramento and as far south as Stockton and Modesto in the Central Valley.

The masked rapist, armed with a gun, would break into homes while single women or couples were sleeping. He would tie up the man and pile dishes on his back. He would then rape the woman while threatening to kill them if the dishes tumbled.

Investigators believe the rapes, and dozens of burglaries often used to case neighborhoods, escalated in 1978 when he fatally shot U.S. Air Force Sgt. Brian Maggiore and his wife Katie as they walked their dog.

FBI

They believe he soon moved on to commit several rapes in the San Francisco Bay Area before heading to Southern California.

It wasn't until 2001 that new DNA testing linked him to at least six Southern California homicides between 1979 and 1986. In each case, the killer broke into a house at night and raped the female victim first.

Investigators believe he also committed another four unsolved Southern California homicides because of similarities in evidence or his methods.

The Southern California killer had been called the Original Night Stalker, to distinguish him from the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, who died of cancer in 2013 before he could be executed for committing 13 mutilation murders in 1984 and 1985.

The elaborate diamond knot was used to tie up a Ventura couple before they were beaten to death with a fireplace log in 1980. That killer was later also discovered to be the same man that authorities in recent years have taken to calling the Golden State Killer to reflect his crimes across California.

FBI

The unsolved crimes prompted lawmakers to consider changing state law in 2002 to let jailers use force to take DNA samples from inmates. Investigators wanted to take a sample from Paul "Cornfed" Schneider to see if he was the Original Night Stalker.

Schneider gained notoriety that year as the adopted son of two San Francisco attorneys convicted in a high-profile dog-mauling case who were raising Schneider's dogs while he was in custody. But there was no DNA match between Schneider and the Southern California slayings.

The crimes also helped spur a 2004 ballot initiative expanding California's law requiring felons to provide DNA samples for a state database.

If he's still alive, the killer would likely be in his 60s. He was described at the time as white, between 5 foot-8 inches and 5 foot-11 inches tall and weighing 150 to 175 pounds  a description so broad that it hasn't helped solve the crimes.

Investigators describe the Golden State Killers reign of terror in this video posted by the FBI.

[2016 UPDATED 12/20] 2016 Southern California Year in Photos
A man accused of brutally attacking two women, killing one of them, committed "everyone's worst nightmare," a deputy prosecutor said Wednesday.

Disturbing details came to light during the arraignment of a man implicated in a vicious home invasion in Del Cerro on Sunday night.

A judge set a no-bail hold for Eduardo Torres because of the seriousness of the crimes. He pleaded not guilty to four charges, including murder, forcible oral copulation, assault and torture.

Deputy District Attorney Marisa DiTillio outlined the grisly allegations against the 20-year-old San Diego man.

On Sunday night at about 11:30 p.m., Torres tried to break into a home on Mill Peak Road, but vigilant residents chased him away, DiTillio said.

That's when he smashed a glass door and broke into a different, nearby home. Two women in the home, a 74-year-old and 50-year-old, locked themselves in separate rooms, DiTillio said.

DiTillio alleges that Torres broke down the elder woman's door, held her at knifepoint, put her in a chokehold and then dragged her to the other room where the younger woman was hiding.

Then, Torres is accused of stabbing the 74-year-old to death and then raping the younger woman, DiTillio said.

When officers entered the locked bedroom the suspect dropped a knife and surrendered to police.

Police have not recovered any other weapons, including the gun the suspect claimed he had.

DiTillio credited police with saving the 50-year-old's life.

"Frankly this is everyone's worst nightmare," DiTillio said. "Asleep in your home and you think your safe. And he just came in, busted through a glass door. These women they sheltered in place for their lives. They hid behind locked doors and they thought they were safe."
Two fishermen were rescued in Oceanside Harbor Thursday morning after they encountered huge swells, causing their 16-foot boat to overturn.

"[We] cheated death today," survivor Ted Tielens told NBC 7 after the rescue.

The Oceanside Fire Department and Harbor Police launched rescue efforts in the water near the 1400 block of North Pacific Street just before 8:40 a.m. after Tielens' boat flipped.

Minutes later, crews were able to pull both Tielens and his grandson-in-law, Zach Petite, out of the water. Besides feeling shaken up, the men suffered only minor scrapes and bruises.

Tielens and Petite spoke with NBC 7 and recounted their harrowing boating accident.

The men said they were fishing in the bay and, when they realized they werent catching any fish, they decided to venture out into the harbor.

When they arrived at the mouth of the harbor, they were met with huge waves, including one that crept up behind them that was approximately 10 feet. When the men tried to maneuver their boat to get away from the wave, the vessel was overpowered by the water and overturned.

"We sped up but the break caught up with us, buried the bow and we went over," Tielens recounted.

The men told NBC 7 their vessel was destroyed and they lost everything on board, including clothing, fishing gear and equipment. Harbor Police towed the wrecked vessel out of the water.

Still, Tielens and Petite were grateful it wasnt worse and that they came out alive.

"Neither myself nor my grandson-in-law were injured. Everything's fine," Tielens added.

This rescue came amid a beach hazard warning and high surf at many of San Diego's beaches.

Tielens and Petite said they have been fishing in Oceanside Harbor for about seven years, and have never seen waves like the ones they survived Thursday.
Pacific Beach residents gathered Wednesday night to voice their concerns over heavy alcohol use in their beachside community, and how that could be fueling violence in their neighborhoods.

Many residents feel the prevalence of bars and excessive use of alcohol is to blame for creating crime in the area.

I have two teenage daughters who wont go down Garnet Avenue after 10 oclock, said Pacific Beach resident Brian Curry, who has spent the last decade trying to make his community safer.

Curry was one of at least two dozen locals at a Pacific Beach town council meeting Wednesday night, where alcohol was the hot topic.

What happened here in Pacific Beach is weve had a clash of personalities and a clash of ideologies thats really disjointed, Curry explained. The alcohol problem has been such a hot topic. Lets all come together and come up with a solution.

Rob Hall with the North City Prevention Coalition said Pacific Beach had 192 violent crimes last year, leading to the communitys current ranking as the second most crime-heavy community in San Diego.

The purpose of tonights meeting was to get everyone on the same page, said Hall. This issue isnt new. Its been around a long time, and yet we keep hearing statistics off the police website and someone says, Oh, youre a liar, you just made that up.

Sara Berns, director of Discover Pacific Beach, works closely with bars and restaurants in the area. She attended Wednesdays meeting as well, and argued that local businesses are working with the community to reduce crime.

This conversation always turns into an us versus them or this side versus that side. I dont think anybody wants to be known for crime. I dont think anyone wants there to be a lot of crime. Were also talking about a lot of people who come to Pacific Beach, Berns said.

Curry said its unfortunate that this debate has carried on for long.

Weve been doing this going on 10 years, he lamented. [Were] trying to come up with a solution. Something has to happen; people are visiting and theyre saying theyre never coming back to our beach areas.

And although the theme of the community meeting was to implement solutions that work, neither side seemed to have a clear answer on how to reduce alcohol-related crimes in Pacific Beach  at least for now.
Starting this fall, two local community colleges will be offering new baccalaureate degrees to students through Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU).

Students from Cuyamaca and Grossmont Colleges will have the opportunity to take courses in three new baccalaureate programs taught by PLNU faculty.

Cuyamaca College will be offering Child Development and Organizational Management degrees and Grossmont College will be offering a Computer Information Technology degree.

These new programs will enable students to earn a bachelors degree from PLNU without having to leave East County.

The best thing about it is for some students who may be not able to leave East County, this is a way for them to take the classes in East County, and also these programs are impacted at San Diego State so its another way for students to be able to take those classes who want to go into those fields, said Anne Krueger on Wednesday.

Krueger is the Communications and Public Information Director of the Grossmont and Cuyamaca Community College District.

She said both community colleges want to offer an education for their students in order for them to find jobs that demand a bachelors degree. Tuition for these programs will be similar to the California public college tuition and will include books and computer programs.

This partnership first began in 2015 when Grossmont College offered their students baccalaureate degrees in nursing through PLNU faculty.

Recently, sixteen nursing students graduated from Grossmont College with a bachelors degree in nursing from PLNU.
The Formosa Plastics Group (FPG), one of Taiwan's leading conglomerates, confirmed Wednesday that a scheduled operating date for its steel mill in Vietnam has been postponed and said that no new schedule has been set.

Chang Fu-ning, vice president of Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corp., said that the No. 1 furnace of the steel complex, which is located in the Vung Ang Economic Zone in Ha Tinh Province, central Vietnam, will not become operational on June 25 as scheduled.



The confirmation came after a Taiwanese media reported that FPG has been forced to postpone the start of operations of the furnace in the steel mill, as the Vietnamese authorities have demanded that the group pay $70 million in taxes it has been accused of having failed to pay.



In addition, the media report said that the delay was also because the Vietnamese authorities needed more time to process an application filed by FPG to kick off production.



Chang said that FPG has communicated with Vietnam's Ministry of Finance over the accusation of failure to pay tax and that the management of the Ha Tinh steel mill has been in discussions to iron out a strategy to deal with the delay.

Giant Taiwanese conglomerate, Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corp., that appears to be at the center of an investigation into an environmental catastrophe that has seen thousands of tons of dead fish wash ashore in Vietnam's central provinces. Photo by AFP

The media report cited sources in Vietnam as saying that the postponement could deal a blow to the Taiwanese government's new southbound policy, which is aimed at building closer ties with more business partners in the region, including an ambition to turn the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into an extension of Taiwan's domestic market.

The sources said that the postponement of operations has caught many investors operating in Vietnam off-guard, and hoping that the Taiwan government will step in to resolve the issue.

Formosa has recently come under heavy public criticism after tons of dead fish washed up the shore of central Vietnam last April. A few days before the mass fish deaths, the company had allegedly flushed the pipe for cleaning. About 300 tons of imported chemicals that the company used are believed to be extremely hazardous.

On April 21, Formosa Co. Ltd. denied responsibility for the mass fish deaths while Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Vo Tuan Nhan said at a press conference on April 27: Our test results indicate there is no evidence to conclude that Formosa in Ha Tinh province is behind the mass fish deaths. The environmental indicators do not exceed the regulatory threshold.

However, on May 8, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc ordered wastewater from Taiwan's Formosa steel project to be monitored.

The final conclusion on the cause of mass fish deaths is expected to be announced within this month. Meanwhile, PM Phuc said on June 9 that Vietnam should criminalize "discharge of pollutants [in such quantities and concentration] that cause serious damage to the country."

The $10 billion Formosa Ha Tinh Steel is the first steel furnace investment project by Taiwan in an overseas market.



Currently, FPG's subsidiaries, such as Formosa Plastics Corp., Nan Ya Plastics Corp., Formosa Chemicals & Fiber Corp. and Formosa Petrochemical Corp., hold a 70 percent stake in the Vietnamese project.

China Steel Corp., the largest steel maker in Taiwan, and Japan's JFE Steel Corp., own a 20 percent and a 5 percent stake, respectively.

Construction of the Ha Tinh complex started in December 2013. In addition to the steel production facility, the project will include port and power plant construction, scheduled to be completed by the end of 2020.

Related news:

> Vietnamese subsidiary of Taiwans Formosa suspected of transfer pricing

> Monitoring center set up to keep tabs on suspect Formosa wastewater

> Government: no evidence links Taiwanese Formosa firm to mass fish deaths

> Formosa tries to justify mass fish deaths in central Vietnam
Police are investigating a post on Craiglist that allegedly threatened San Diego by using a reference to the deadly shooting in Orlando, Florida.

On Sunday morning, 49 people killed when a gunman opened fire inside a gay nightclub in Orlando. The gunman was shot and killed by authorities.

More than 50 people were injured in what is being called the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S.

A recent post on Craigslist allegedly threatened a similiar incident in San Diego.

In response to the post, Chief Shelley Zimmerman of the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) released the following statement on Wednesday:

The San Diego Police Department is aware of a recent post on Craigslist that has since been removed. We are investigating it collaboratively with our law enforcement partners. The latest information remains, there are no known credible threats to the San Diego region. As always, we encourage our community if they see something, hear something, or know something, to say something.
A northern Virginia man has been arrested in connection with the death of a man in Falls Church, Virginia, Fairfax County police said.

Bernardo Eugene Ford, 25, of Woodbridge has been charged with use, carry, brandish and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence causing death.

Police say Babtunde Fadahunsi, 35, was found with a gunshot wound on the 23rd floor of Skyline Towers on Feb. 23.

"I don't understand why somebody would want to do this to him," Fadahunsi's longtime friend Abdul Kamara said.

Kamara said he was told a maintenance crew entered his friend's apartment just two hours before his body was found. When the crew returned, Fadahunsi was dead, Kamara said.

"He let them in at 12:30," he said. "They came back later on and found him on the floor."

Fadahunsi was pronounced dead at the scene.

A week after his death, police released surveillance video of two men they believed were responsible for the crime. There's no word on whether investigators are still looking for any other suspects.

Ford remains in police custody.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are running neck-and-neck for the vote in the battleground state of Virginia, according to the results of a poll released Thursday.

Clinton won 42 percent of voters surveyed by Public Policy Polling, the group said. Trump won 39 percent. The results have a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

The poll taken in the days following the shooting massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday surveyed 1,032 registered voters between Monday and Wednesday.

The results suggest that Clinton is having trouble winning the support of Bernie Sanders' supporters. About 68 percent of Sanders' supporters said they would vote for Clinton. Twelve percent of voters were undecided, 8 percent said they would vote for Trump, and 12 percent said they would vote for third-party candidates.

"If Clinton could get even half of those Sanders fans who are currently holding out right now to vote for her, her lead would expand from 3 points to 9," the polling firm said in a statement.

Voters also were surveyed about gun laws. Nearly 90 percent of Virginia voters polled said they support background checks on all gun purchases, compared with 8 percent of voters polled who oppose the checks. That figure includes support from 93 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of Republicans and 87 percent of independents.

PPP also asked voters, "Do you think Barack Obama was involved in the terrorist attack in Orlando on Sunday, or not?"

Eighty percent of people polled said they did not believe Obama was involved. Eight percent said they did believe Obama was involved. Twelve percent of people were not sure.

Of the voters polled who had a favorable opinion of Trump, 59 percent explicitly ruled out Obama's involvement in the Orlando attack that killed 49 people at a gay nightclub. Eighteen percent of people said they did believe Obama was involved. And 23 percent said they were not sure.

Dozens of demonstrators shouting "Love conquers hate" gathered in downtown D.C. Thursday. Trump was in town to give a deposition in a $10 million lawsuit involving the hotel he is building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Liberty University in Virginia has ordered custom textbooks that omit a section on sexual motivation and orientation, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.

Heather Elaine Medvedenko, an instructor at the Christian university in Lynchburg, told students in her psychology course that the content on the books was presented in a way that could be misinterpreted.

The private university said in a statement that custom textbooks are used to create a course designed specifically to meet the predetermined program outcomes.

The statement also said that deleted content is reviewed to ensure that it is covered by other courses that provide more in-depth coverage on the topic.

Medvedenko also told students that Christian scholars should be educated in all areas of psychology and allowed to filter material through a biblical view.
The mother of a young boy who died from a rare neuromuscular disease is carrying on his legacy as she fights for her own life.

Jeni Stepanek is the mother of Mattie Stepanek who became well-known after appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Mattie was a child poet and peace activist who inspired many with his words.

In 2004, he died from a rare disease related to muscular distrophy. He was just shy of his 14th birthday. The same disease took the lives of his three siblings.

"I still cry. A mother never, ever gets used to an empty lap," Stepanek said.

Stepanek suffers from the same disease and is now battling cancer. She said she developed a rare and life threatening complication caused by the cancer treatment.

"I'm at the point where no more bad news is good news," Stepanek said.

Stepanek said she misses her children, but accepts loss is part of life and is choosing to live the rest of her life with purpose.

Part of that purpose is crossing off her bucket list and accomplishing things while she still can.

"Who doesn't want to do one more thing and celebrate one more day?," Stepanek said.

On Saturday, dozens came to Stepanek's 83rd birthday party -- even though Stepanek is turning 57.

She said doctors once told her she wouldn't live past 38, so when she did, Stepanek decided she would live to 83 instead.

"I look good for 83 don't you think?"

Oprah showed up to the party to surprise Stepanek. The two developed a special bond when Mattie was alive.

"It was about bringing together people who were part of my life's journey," Stepanek said.

Stepanek said she doesn't know what the future will bring, but lives by the philosophy that hope is real and peace is possible.

"I wouldn't say it's a sense of absolute urgency and emmenence, but there is a sense that now is the moment I have," she said.
Police in Maryland handing out wanted fliers were in the right place at the right time Tuesday -- the man they were seeking walked right past them.

Willbrod Frank Lukamilwa, 41, was arrested after Montgomery County Police spotted him moments after they finished passing out fliers for his arrest in a theft scheme.

"This is extremely rare, that the guy walks right by and you can almost hand him his own wanted poster," police spokesman Officer Rick Goodale said.

Police say Lukamilwa, of Takoma Park, Maryland, scammed a would-be nursing student out of $13,500 over the course of three years.

Lukamilwa met the man at a business and falsely presented himself as the head of nursing at a hospital, according to police. He allegedly told the man he could get him into a training program at the hospital, if he paid him tuition.

The victim paid him thousands of dollars starting in 2012, police said.

Police issued a warrant for Lukamilwa's arrest in June 2015 and offered a $10,000 reward for tips on his whereabouts.

On Tuesday, two Montgomery County officers handed out fliers with Lukamilwa's photo on them in downtown Silver Spring. The officers were driving away when the man they had been seeking for a year crossed the street right in front of them, at Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road, police said.

One of the officers called out Lukamilwa's name from the patrol car and the suspect responded. He was arrested without incident and charged with theft.

Information on Lukamilwa's lawyer was not available immediately.

The officer who recognized the suspect was in "utter shock" at his good luck, Goodale said.
What to Know Police released a surveillance photo of a suspect who allegedly swung a knife at a Safeway employee Saturday night.

Crime Solvers are offering up to $10,000 for information that leads to an arrest.

Montgomery County Police released surveillance photos of a man who assaulted a Safeway employee the night of May 28.

The man swung a knife at an employee of a Rockville, Maryland, Safeway after threatening the employee, a police report said. He stole about 60 packs of cigarettes after going behind the counter and forcing the cigarette case open.

The man left the Safeway on Rockville Pike riding a tan bike toward the Twinbrook Metro station.

Crime Solvers is offering up to $10,000 for information that leads to an arrest.

Those with information should call 240-773-6084 or 240-773-8477 if they want to stay anonymous. You can also text MCPD with your information to 274637.
Day two of a Vermont lawmaker's sexual assault trial began with a surprise twist. Charges against Sen. Norm McAllister, R-Franklin County, were suddenly dropped.

"Based on some information that came to light last evening, that I've shared with the defense and the court, the state is in a position to have to dismiss," Franklin County Deputy State's Attorney Diane Wheeler told Judge Robert Mello Thursday.

McAllister declined to comment on the dismissals, but his attorney did.

"There were a number of outright false allegations," defense attorney Brooks McArthur said. "My client, Mr. McAllister, from the first time I met him, said to me, 'I didn't do these things.' And he's never wavered from that."

McAllister represented Franklin County in the Vermont State Senate until he was suspended early this year amid sex assault allegations. He protested the suspension, arguing he had not been found guilty of anything. But many peers in the Senate felt the dark cloud of suspicion would be an unwelcome distraction.

Wednesday, McAllister's former employee, a petite young woman, testified the senator forced her into sex several times when she worked at his farm and later as an intern for McAllister at the Vermont Statehouse.

The witness said Wednesday she never asked for help with the alleged assaults because she's an independent type who often doesn't seek assistance. She said she kept working for McAllister because she needed a job and thought it would be good for her career to work for a well-known lawmaker in the county.

"I'm very disappointed," Kris Lukens, who advocates for victims through the non-profit Voices Against Violence, said of the dismissal of charges. "None of this means that the sexual assaults didn't take place. Technicalities happen."

Lukens said her organization would be there to offer support to the young woman who testified Wednesday.

The defense team worked Wednesday to try to poke holes in the woman's testimony. Earlier, in his opening statement, McAllister's lawyer told the jury that dates and descriptions of the alleged crimes simply didn't add up, and said the witness was not to be believed.

However, Lukens said following significant trauma, it is not uncommon for someone to jumble details in their mind.

"It doesn't mean they're lying," Lukens said. "After something like that, victims don't always think linearly."

Lukens added that the stress of sharing intimate personal experiences with many people in the room may have contributed to the woman's struggles on the witness stand recalling dates or certain details.

The prosecutor would only say she dropped the charges for "ethical reasons."

"I can't tell you specifics or details of the ethical dilemma, because we still have charges pending against Mr. McAllister," Franklin County State's Attorney Jim Hughes said. "And we wouldn't want to prejudice the defense or our prosecution of the case."

McAllister also denies those charges, which stem from different sex assault claims from a different woman, to be handled in a separate trial.

Defense attorney McArthur praised the prosecutors for their professionalism for revealing the ethical concerns. The lawyer declined to reveal any details about his strategy approaching the second trial.

McAllister is seeking re-election this fall. The second trial is expected sometime in the fall, possibly while McAllister is campaigning for reelection.
Authorities say police are investigating an apparent murder-suicide after two people were found dead in their Brockton, Massachusetts, apartment.

A spokeswoman for Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz says that 61-year-old Antonio Cordoso and 53-year-old Rosa Goncalves were found dead in their apartment on Wednesday.

The Plymouth County DA's Office says the two were in a long-standing relationship and had children separately, but not together.

Officials say the couple's landlord found them while performing a well-being check around 6 p.m. at the request of Cordoso's brother.

Spokeswoman Beth Stone says Goncalves' body was found in the bedroom. She says Cordoso was found in the kitchen, where he hanged himself.

An autopsy is scheduled for Thursday to determine the exact cause of death.
Delays on the MBTA's Orange Line on Thursday morning ultimately stemmed from an incident involving Muslim prayer.

MBTA General Manager Frank DePaola said in a radio interview that riders called police saying a Middle Eastern couple was acting suspicious.

MBTA Transit Police responded and found the couple was praying for Ramadan.

The incident was resolved peacefully.

Police say people should be aware, but say people should also be sensitive.

Hey so there are 9 police cars at Wellington and they're not letting anyone in the platform  John Prestel (@birdonfire) June 16, 2016

The incident comes as MBTA officials are pulling officers from the money-counting room to patrol station following recent terror attacks in the nation, according to the Boston Herald.

You can track the MBTA's performance and #GradeTheMBTA using necn's online report card.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (3rd R) and foreign ministers from ASEAN-member nations attend a special ASEAN-China foreign ministers' meeting in Yuxi, southwest China's Yunnan Province on June 14, 2016. Countries in Southeast Asia have

Indonesia said Wednesday that a bold statement from Southeast Asian nations raising concern over Beijing's island-building in the South China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea) was issued in error, as a meeting over the issue ended in confusion.

In a statement released late Tuesday by Malaysia's foreign ministry, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) warned that recent actions in the disputed waterway had "the potential to undermine peace".

The statement described "a candid exchange", language that hinted at a diplomatic confrontation, between the bloc's foreign ministers and their Chinese counterpart at a meeting in Kunming, China.

But just hours later a Malaysian foreign ministry spokeswoman said the ASEAN secretariat had retracted the statement headlined "Media statement by the ASEAN foreign ministers", pending "urgent amendments".

The text released by Malaysia was merely a "media guideline" for ASEAN ministers to refer to at a post-meeting press conference, and not an agreed final statement, Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir told AFP.

Analysts gave various theories, with one saying ASEAN had backtracked after coming under pressure from China, while another said Malaysia appeared to have released the statement prematurely by mistake.

Either way, the disarray was another example of the bloc's perennial inability to present a united front toward China, which observers say has allowed Beijing to expand its sway over much of the South China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea) despite overlapping claims.

ASEAN members the Philippines and Vietnam have come into direct confrontation with China over territorial disputes, while non-claimants such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar have maintained closer ties with Beijing.

Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Brunei, meanwhile, have generally walked a delicate line somewhere in the middle.

Nasir said the meeting of Southeast Asian foreign ministers and China had run over schedule, meaning that "the press conference was cancelled and a number of ASEAN foreign ministers had to leave immediately.

"The ASEAN foreign ministers did not have a chance to discuss how they would release the content of the media guideline to the media."

Malaysian officials could not be reached for comment, but the ASEAN secretariat in Jakarta said no official statement was issued after the meeting.

Bridget Welsh, a Southeast Asian politics analyst currently at Turkeys Ipek University, said the affair seemed to stem from a Malaysian misstep.

She said ASEAN countries, several of which are highly dependent on smooth trade relations withChina, have been wary of commenting on the South China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea) issue ahead of a U.N. tribunal's imminent ruling in a case brought by the Philippines against China.

China does not recognise the arbitration and has reacted angrily to Manila's pursuit of legal action over the Beijing-controlled Scarborough Shoal.

"I think they (ASEAN) want to wait until the arbitration decision comes out before making any sort of clear joint statement as a group," Welsh said.

However Southeast Asia expert Carl Thayer said that China appeared to have reacted to reports about the statement.

"China obviously objected to the wording of the joint statement," said Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "This led to the ASEAN secretariats decision to rescind the earlier release."

China claims nearly all of the strategic South China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea) and has bolstered its claim by building artificial islands including airstrips in the area, some of which are suitable for military use.

In 2012, an annual meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers ended in chaos and unprecedented rancour, with the Philippines accusing hosts Cambodia of blocking a strong statement accusing China of raising tensions in the region.

The gathering ended with no joint ministers' communique for the first time in the bloc's 45-year history.

However, in recent years ASEAN has hardened its language amid the Chinese island-building, while taking pains not to mention China by name.

ASEAN operates on a policy of consensus under which all members must agree to any joint statement.

Related news:

> ASEAN retracts "South China Sea" criticism: Malaysia

> "Serious concerns" over disputed waters: ASEAN ministers in China

> In pushback to U.S., China says "has no fear of trouble" in S. China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea)
An MBTA rider posted a photo on Twitter explaining that the door of an MBTA train closed on her arm.

Rachel Chernick posted the photo and said the driver of the train closed the door on her arm.

@MBTA the driver of 3704 shut the door on my arm. pic.twitter.com/Aa5MooXSzZ  Rachel Chernick (@Chernickator) June 16, 2016

"It felt like just a really sudden, quick, sharp pain," Chernick told necn in an exclusive interview.

Chernick tried to exit the trolley on the C branch of the MBTA Green Line at the Tappan Street station in Brookline, Massachusetts, when she was bruised by the door.

"The door did completely shut and reopen," she said.

An MBTA spokesperson says the agency is investigating, but officials would not speak on camera.

"The trolley operator told his supervisor he has no knowledge of the incident reported by the customer," the MBTA said in a statement.

A couple weeks ago, a conductor was put on leave after 8-year-old Faith Felt got her hand trapped in the door of a trolley at the Harvard Avenue station in Boston's Allston neighborhood. She's recovering at home with her grandmother, Marthe Charles.

"It's not broken, but it's torn ligaments," said Felt.

Felt and her grandmother say the MBTA has not contacted them to follow up on her condition.

"They just don't get it," Charles said.

The MBTA said there is a safety mechanism in place that automatically triggers and opens the doors if someone is caught. But Chernick hopes conductors take even more precautions.

"I get that they need to keep the trains running on time, but really, we're talking about a matter of seconds," she said. "It's just not really that hard to be mindful. "

Other riders posted their stories on Twitter.
A funeral was held Thursday for a Boston teenager who was shot and killed near his school.

Raekwon Brown, 17, was killed when gunfire went off right outside Dorchester's Jeremiah Burke High School.

Friends and family packed the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church not just for a somber service, but also for a celebration of his life. Brown was the youngest of nine children.

"It hurts to see him lying there, but we know he's not hurting anymore," Venus Williams, Brown's oldest sister, said.

Brown's cousin and best friend says he was a hero who pushed an elderly woman out of the crossfire. She was one of three others injured in the shooting.

The family said the service brought them some peace, but they will not have closure until his killer his caught. They said police have been by the house daily and are investigating several leads.

"I'm sure people know something and they may be afraid, but they need to speak up or deaths like this are just going to keep continuing," Daryl Lowe, a family friend said.

As they continue to search for suspects, lawmakers said this is another reason why they need to get more guns off the streets. Faith leaders also made a plea at the funeral for the community to come forward and for the violence to stop.
A judge in Concord, New Hampshire, is upholding his decision to disqualify an attorney for a prep school graduate convicted of sexual assault from litigating ineffective counsel claims.

St. Paul's School graduate Owen Labrie was convicted last year for misdemeanor sexual assault and a felony charge of using a computer to lure an underage student for sex as part of a game of sexual conquest.

Labrie is now arguing he had ineffective counsel in the trial court proceedings. But a superior court judge says his chosen attorney can't represent him, as the attorney was part of the trial court team.

The judge on Wednesday denied Labrie's request to reconsider his decision.
A Providence, Rhode Island, man convicted of strangling a mother of three who was working as an escort has been sentenced to life in prison.

Daniel Tejeda on Thursday also received a consecutive sentence of 25 years behind bars for being a habitual offender from a judge who called the killing "one of the most disturbing and inexplicable and violent homicides" he'd seen.

Tejeda was convicted in April of first-degree murder for killing 24-year-old Ashley Masi in March 2015 after arranging to meet her at her apartment through an online classified ad.

Prosecutors say Tejeda's DNA was found on a zip tie around Masi's neck.

The 29-year-old Tejada, a Marine reservist, had a criminal record that included bank robbery, identity fraud and drug possession.
Newtown Police are warning residents about someone claiming to be collecting money for the department's K-9 unit.

Officials believe the suspect is an employee of a legitimate fund raising company that represents the Connecticut Police Work Dog association.

Police launched an investigation following a complaint that said they had gotten a phone call from someone representing themselves as a K-9 officer.

The caller told the resident that he was collecting money for the Newtown Police K-9 Unit and that he would personally come to pick up the cash at a prearranged place and time, police said.

The Newtown Police is currently not engaged in any fundraising effort.

If you were a victim of this fraud please contact Detective McAnaspie (203) 426-5841.
Police are on the scene of a murder-suicide, after two people were found dead Wednesday in an apartment in Brockton, Massachusetts.

A man and a woman were found dead in two seperate rooms in an apartment at 22 Mason St.

"What it appears to be is a tragic muder-suicide that occured here in the city of Brockton between a man and a woman," Plymouth County DA Timothy Cruz said.

According to authorities, 61-year-old Antonio Cardoso killed 53-year-old Rosa Goncalves. They are not married, but have been in a long-time relationship. Both have kids from previous relationships.

At this point it is unclear how the female died, she was found in a bedroom, but they say the man hung himself.

Approximately 100 people gathered in front of the house to mourn the death of the couple.

The investigation is underway.
A construction worker who found a woman's body in an East Boston garage says her face appeared to have been smashed in.

The woman was found on Wednesday morning in a garage on Princeton Street.

Her name has not been released but police say she appeared to be in her 20s.

There was evidence of trauma on her body although police did not provide details.

The contractor told necn a bloody propane tank was by her body and her phone was ringing.

It's unclear how long the body had been in the garage full of construction materials, but the death was defined as "recent."

The garage was on the property of a building that neighbors said has been vacant for some times.

The contractor said someone broke into the house about a week ago. Neighbors said the house had been a source of problems, but that changed when it was sold for redevelopment.

Investigators are asking neighborhood residents to call them if they saw anything suspicious.
Officials in New Hampshire rescued two hikers from New York who became stranded on a difficult trail at the Mt. Washington State Park Wednesday.

New Hampshire Fish and Game said they responded to a 911 call around 3:45 p.m. from Shamin Kahn, of Troy, New York, who reported he was stranded with his companion, Hassan Jamal, of Kingston.

The two told officials they intended to climb to the summit of Mt. Washington on the Tuckerman Ravine trail, but mistakenly took the Huntington Ravine trail. Kahn ultimately reached a steep point where he was not comfortable ascending or descending and called for help.

The hikers told rescue crew they were novices and did not intend to go on a difficult trail.

The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department said rescue officials have responded to the same area of the trail many times for stranded hikers.
A man who owed a restaurant manager $150,000 has plead guilty to orchestrating a murder-for-hire scheme, the U.S. attorney's office announced on Thursday.

Larry Talledo-Torrejon, 29, a citizen of Peru residing in Stamford, attempted to purchase a restaurant for $300,000 but gave the manager $150,000 in personal bank checks with insufficient funds, the attorney's office said in a release.

Talledo-Torrejon directed a person who owed him $5,000 to follow the manager to his New York home and murder him. In exchange for the murder, Talledo-Torrejon said he would absolve the man of the $5,000 debt and pay him an additional $5,000 in cash.

The individual then contacted police to tell them about Talledo-Torrejon scheme. The individual told Talledo-Torrejon that he had kidnapped the restaurant manager and was holding him hostage.

Talledo-Torrejon informed the individual of his debt with the restaurant owner and also suggested that the pair could start a business kidnapping and extorting people for money, the release said.

In early December, Talledo-Torrejon falsely told Stamford police that the restaurant manager had stolen $150,000 from him. He was arrested after he provided the presumed murderer with $500 in partial payment for the murder of the manager, the release said.

The charge for murder for hire carries a maximum prison term of 10 years.

Talledo-Torrejon has been detained since his arrest. It is not clear if he has an attorney.

He is expected to be sentenced on Sept. 7.
Vietnam has lost contact with a CASA maritime reconnaissance aircraft of the Vietnam Coast Guard with nine people on board in the waters off the coast of the northern city of Hai Phong this noon when it was out searching for the missing Su30-MK2 fighter pilot Tran Quang Khai.

Refresh for latest updates

Vietnam currently has 3 CASA-212-40 planes in operation which are produced by Airbus.

Taking into account the latest incident, the country is at the same time struggling to search for two missing aircraft--the CASA-212-40 and the Su-30MK2, and 10 people with 9 on the European-made CASA and pilot Tran Quang Khai on the Russian-made fighter jet.

9:00 p.m.

Hai Phong Border guard forces have not been able to approach the area where the CASA went missing due to big waves and darkness at sea. But they are determined to work overnight.

8:30 p.m.

Statistics from the National Committee for Search and Rescue showed that nearly 2,700 people with 14 airplanes and 183 vessels from both military and civilian forces are searching for the two missing aircraft.

8:00 p.m.

The Office of the National Committee for Search and Rescue said the aircraft departed from Hanois Gia Lam Airport at 9:10 a.m. on Thursday and went missing at 12:30 p.m. in the same day. Colonel Le Kiem Toan, Commander of the Air Force Brigade 918 of the Vietnam Air Force-Air Defense, is the pilot of the missing CASA number 8983.

The Ministry of National Defense has directed the Third Military Region, the Peoples Navy, the Border Guard and Coard Guard to immediately send high-speed boats to the area where the CASA number 8983 went missing. They are also asked to seek help from fishing boats operating in the Gulf of Tonkin for the search.

A source from Hai Phong Border Guard Command said strong winds and waves in the area make the search more difficult. The citys Border Guard Command has dispatched a number of patrol boats with more than 20 people to join with the naval and fishing vessels in the search for the CASA.

General Vu Van Hien, Chief of the Ministry of National Defense's Office, said relevant information about the latest incident remained unclear as of this afternoon.

A CASA plane of the Vietnam Coast Guard. Photo by People's Army Newspaper

On June 14, Vietnam's fighter jet Su30-MK2 crashed offshore the central province of Nghe An. The jet had two pilots on board, one of whom, major Nguyen Huu Cuong, was rescued yesterday.

More than 1,500 people and 182 vehicles from both military and civilian forces are searching for the remaining missing pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Tran Quang Khai, and his crashed fighter jet off the coast of central Vietnam, according to the Ministry of National Defense.

The search zone has been expanded from the waters off the coast of the central province of Ha Tinh to the northern province of Thai Binh. A special device used to detect the jet's black box has also been deployed.

Lieutenant colonel Bui Dinh Hau, Deputy Commander, Regiment 923 of Division 371 said Thursday afternoon the search and rescue forces have identified an object which looks like a life jacket floating in the waters off Thai Binh province. They are on the way to approach the area to find out if it is related to the missing pilot Khai.

Related news:

> Over a thousand people join search for missing Vietnamese fighter pilot

> Vietnamese fighter jet missing, one pilot has returned to the shore

> Vietnamese fighter jet missing, search continues
New England gets all kinds of weather. If you like summertime, but not the sticky weather, this is the finest kind.

The extreme heat in the middle of the nation has pushed northward into Canada, now is traveling east, and then south into New England.

When the air travels in that path, most of the moisture is wrung out in thunderstorms more than 1000 miles away.

The result is fair weather with warm nights, and comfortably cool days for us.

For this afternoon we are on the edge of a weather system sliding by off to our south, so skies are somewhat cloudy in Connecticut, with increasing sunshine as you move north and east. Temperatures this afternoon are 80 to 85 inland, mid-70s by the shore with light variable wind and local seabreeze.

Skies are mostly clear tonight, with a waxing Strawberry Moon, temperatures fall through the 60s after sunset into the 50s and even some 40s by sunrise tomorrow.

The old low-pressure system that has been on the coast of south eastern Canada is backing up a little bit, pushing some cooler air in for our Friday.

We should have more sunshine than clouds, a sprinkle is possible, with high temperatures Friday in the 70s east, 80s west.

The weekend is looking good in New England, but the weather map is most interesting.

Record-breaking heat in the middle of the nation will be pushing toward the Great Lakes states.

A front off the east coast of the United States, south of New England, will generate a powerful ocean storm.

It does not look like a tropical storm initially, but could evolve into something that is tropical off the mid-Atlantic states by Sunday and Monday.

necn

The shape of the jetstream is very interesting, that storm may actually move toward the west, and even northwest, toward our south coast.

Though it looks like the storm should stay well off shore, we will at least see high clouds on our southern horizon by late in the weekend.

There's also an active the storm track across Canada.

Here in New England we are positioned to between that ocean storm, and the next front in northern Ontario.

That means we will have mostly a wind from the west pushing temperatures close to 90 by Sunday and Monday.

The front in Canada pushes into New England on Tuesday, that is when we turn more humid with thunderstorms arriving from north to south.

The temperature is also near 90 on Tuesday, the first full day of summer, will be hot and humid with scattered storms.

What happens the second half of next week looks interesting also, we may have that front stalling in New England with beneficial rains the second half of the week.

We probably stay a little bit warmer than normal, and more humid, with the threat for showers and storms in days 7-10.

We will be fine tuning that forecast as it gets closer.


Transformation of Norwich can happen says Petrie Transformation of Norwich can happen says Petrie

Transforming Norwich has welcomed international speaker Rev Dr Alistair Petrie to the city for a second year, speaking and meeting local Christians at a week of events across Norwich. Biddy Collyer reports.

During one of the busiest weeks in the calendar for Christians in Norwich, the executive committee of Transforming Norwich was privileged to welcome Alistair and his wife Marie to the city. It was their second visit, building on their time in Norwich in May last year.



In Norwich, the couple said that they sensed that a shift had occurred since last year  that the city felt more open and that the atmosphere had changed positively. The whole week was being backed in prayer by their worldwide intercessors team, confirming that Norwich was on Gods agenda as being an important place where transformation of the whole culture could take place. They felt that many indications of coming transformation are already here.



The theme for the week was teaching the local church how to pray for the city in a focussed and intentional way, through prayer walking, personal intimacy with God and corporately as the church in Norwich.



As well as seminars on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday at Alive Church and the House of Prayer, there were evening meetings where Alistair shared his experience of city transformation around the world. He is currently working with churches in Australia, USA, and in the UK. The amazing changes that have taken place across the world can be viewed on YouTube (Transformation).



On Friday night, he spoke at the Full Gospel Businessmens meeting at the Brooke Hotel in Bowthorpe, focussing on how Christians engaged in market-place ministries can impact not just their businesses for God, but whole communities. He gave instances of farmland yielding three and four times their usual crops because farmers had cried out to God for transformation.



Repentance is the key before transformation can come says Alistair. The times are desperate and the church is Gods only answer as it calls out to Him for our land to be healed (2 Chron 7:14). This is much wider than revival. Christians are called to be catalysts of change and this has been born out in the areas where transformation has taken place in businesses, agriculture, education, governance, health and security.



On Sunday June 12, at Sprowston Methodist Church, Transforming Norwich hosted an evening service. Following Alistairs preaching on the need for us to make a choice whether we were prepared to be desperate to see our city and county transformed, minister Rev Nigel Fox called on those present to respond to Gods heart-felt call and there followed a deep time of prayer.



The final part of Alistairs visit to the city was held at Alive Church, when he spoke on the first book of Samuel and Hannahs crying out to God for a child. She was provoked by irritation. He said that God provokes us when He want to do something deep.



In an impassioned call, Alistair repeatedly said that he knows that Gods hand is on Norwich, This is a time of decision and for those that want it, a time to be desperate in prayer.



Recordings of the sessions will be available from the House of Prayer.



Pictured above is Rev Dr Alistair Petrie, preaching at Sprowston Methodist Church in Norwich.


Social dynamics and culture fit are a big reason that female engineers tend to stay in the profession at a lower rate than their male counterparts, according to a study released today by authors at MIT, University of California  Irvine, Michigan, and McGill.

The research was conducted by having more than 40 undergraduate engineering students keep bi-monthly diaries, providing the study with more than 3,000 entries to analyze. The results were published in a paper titled "Persistence is cultural: Professional socialization and the persistence of sex segregation," in the May issue of Work and Occupations.

+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Chefs open source tool lets applications automate infrastructure provisioning + This startup may have built the world's fastest networking switch chip

Particularly in the case of internships, summer work, and team-building exercises, the study found women feel excluded and marginalized with their male counterparts receiving better opportunities.

It turns out gender makes a big difference, said MIT professor Susan Silbey, one of the studys authors. Its a cultural phenomenon.

This phenomenon, the authors say, is why women account for 20% of engineering degrees awarded, but just 13% of the engineering workforce. Outside of formal instruction and classwork, the less-formal atmosphere of these activities can be unwelcoming.

For many women, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways, the paper reads.

The tech world has engaged in several public bouts of soul-searching over its general lack of diversity, particularly along the axis of gender. Major players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and so on have publicly released some of their employment numbers, which demonstrate that theyre substantially more male  roughly 68%, averaged across 12 large companies compiled by GigaOm in 2014.

Yet there have been few concrete steps taken to reduce the gender gap, particularly in the engineering ranks. The tech sectors idealized vision of itself as a meritocracy has been counterproductive in realizing those changes, since many refuse to admit that there is a problem at all.
Way back in February, I wrote a blog about President Obamas proposed Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP). In the plan, the President called for $19 billion for cybersecurity as part of the 2017 fiscal year federal budget, a 35 percent increase over 2016 spending.

While CNAP has a lot of thoughtful and positive proposals, Im troubled by the fact that federal cybersecurity programs seem to have a life of their own with little oversight or ROI benefits. I often cite the Department of Homeland Security's Einstein project as an example of this type of government cybersecurity waste. In my humble opinion, the feds are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on custom research and development for Einstein when commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) network security products could do the same job at a fraction of the cost.

+ Also on Network World: My 2 cents on CNAP +

As a part-time federal cybersecurity spending watchdog, Ive come across another program that deserves public scrutiny: the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP).

The SWAMP was first announced in 2014, supported by a $23 million-plus grant from the DHS Science and Technology Directorate. The program is described as follows:

The SWAMP is a no-cost, high-performance, centralized cloud computing platform that includes an array of open-source and commercial software security testing tools, as well as a comprehensive results viewer to simplify vulnerability remediation.

OKso far, so good, since insecure software is a big and underappreciated problem in the overall cybersecurity spectrum. For example, ESG research indicates that 33 percent of critical industry organizations have experienced a security incident directly related to internally developed software.

So, the SWAMP project was certainly appropriate and well-intended when it was introduced. Since then, however, this federal program has been fraught with numerous problems, such as:

A limited and buggy feature set. The SWAMP hasnt kept up with its original vision and now lags behind in terms of features and code support (for example, support for RHEL is way behind current versions). From what Ive read, users tend to complain about the sites usability and its overall number of software bugs. (Ive seen screen shots that seem to lead to nowhere.)



It seems like the SWAMP was designed for scale rather than usability, which is a real problem when you are trying to build an online service and attract a broad array of users. There have also been a few concerns about security issues related to the site. Ive heard that the VM set-up has some potential for abuse, and it's uncertain whether the SWAMP team has adequately mitigated the risks.





The SWAMP hasnt kept up with its original vision and now lags behind in terms of features and code support (for example, support for RHEL is way behind current versions). From what Ive read, users tend to complain about the sites usability and its overall number of software bugs. (Ive seen screen shots that seem to lead to nowhere.) It seems like the SWAMP was designed for scale rather than usability, which is a real problem when you are trying to build an online service and attract a broad array of users. There have also been a few concerns about security issues related to the site. Ive heard that the VM set-up has some potential for abuse, and it's uncertain whether the SWAMP team has adequately mitigated the risks. Project mismanagement. Ive heard that the project has featured consistent turnover since its inception. Thus the SWAMP now suffers from project team deficiencies in terms of leadership, team coherency, vision and execution.





Ive heard that the project has featured consistent turnover since its inception. Thus the SWAMP now suffers from project team deficiencies in terms of leadership, team coherency, vision and execution. A lack of users. While the SWAMP was announced with lots of fanfare, it failed to attract a significant user base. In the fall of 2015, the SWAMP sent an email to all users that accidentally exposed the entire user population. More than a year into this federally funded project, there were only 600 to 700 users listed, and many of these were either involved with the project itself or those whod registered but werent using the service.



Part of the problem here is that developers dont want to submit their code to a big brother government cloud service. (Note: This may be paranoia on the part of developers, but this viewpoint is a reality that government programs should consider.) For those who dont trust a government-sponsored cloud service, there is an open source version of the SWAMP that can be run on site. Unfortunately, there is no indication that it has gained any market traction.

So, as it stands now, the SWAMP seems to be a buggy mismanaged service that provides infrastructure to run open source software (and a very limited number of commercial offerings) for software assurance on old (and sometimes antiquated) versions of development languages like Java and Ruby. Furthermore, it seems like the SWAMP has very few actual users. Not exactly a demonstration of efficient use of taxpayer money.

I have no doubt that DHSs heart was in the right place when it funded the SWAMP, but its ongoing project management seems to have turned this program into an irreversible failure. Instead of throwing good money after bad, Congress should hold DHS accountable, assess the true ROI and future of the SWAMP, and move on to bigger and better things if necessary. Personally, Id rather see the next $23 million go toward NSF-sponsored cybersecurity scholarships than another mismanaged boondoggle.
Residents of Baltimore who dialed 911 were unable to reach emergency dispatchers for more than two hours Tuesday evening and Verizon is laying the blame on a call-routing error.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Officials at Verizon  the service provider for the city's 911 system  said the phone company received an automated alert at 7:48 p.m. reporting that 911 calls were failing. Verizon spokesman John O'Malley said the company eventually determined that emergency calls were mistakenly routed to an empty back-up call center in the city. "Technically the calls were coming in, but they were getting routed to a location where no one was there to pick up," O'Malley said. Instead, calls to 911 were answered with a recorded message: "Baltimore City emergency center, all operators are busy. Your call will be answered in turn. Please do not hang up."

Obviously, that message was neither accurate nor useful.

While by no means alone as a transgressor, Verizon just last year agreed to pay $3.4 million to settle an FCC investigation into another 911 outage.

Americans must have confidence that they will be able to reach 911 in an emergency, said Chairman Tom Wheeler about that settlement. We take seriously our obligation to ensure the nations 911 systems function reliably. We will continue to work with providers to ensure that advances in 911 technologies lead to improved communications between citizens and first responders.

Right now theyre failing spectacularly, as a search on 911 system failure will show.

While theres nothing funny about needing emergency assistance when 911 isnt working or the dispatcher cannot pinpoint your location, the overall state of the nations 911 system can make for comedic fodder, as HBOs John Oliver proved recently with this enlightening yet hilarious bit.

Welcome regulars and passersby. Here are a few more recent buzzblog items. And, if youd like to receive Buzzblog via e-mail newsletter, heres where to sign up. You can follow me on Twitter here and on Google+ here.
Police in the south central province of Khanh Hoa seized about 100 tons of oil from two ships operating in Cam Ranh Bay today.

Two days ago, police started monitoring two ships anchored 100 meters off the coast of Cam Ranh Bay, and after boarding the vessels on June 16, they found more than 100 tons of oil in the two holds.

Police take oil samples. Photo by VnExpess/N.H

Tran Van Thuan, 47, the owner of the ships, was unable to present any documents or invoices related to the oil.

We think that the owner may have bought the oil from unofficial sources, so we have seized it pending further investigations, one of the policemen said.

Cam Ranh Bay is a deep-water bay on Vietnam's central coast that was used by the U.S. and Russia as a military base. Since 2012, the government has been hiring Russian consultants and purchasing Russian technologies to expand the site into a naval maintenance and logistics facility for domestic and foreign warships.

At the beginning of April, police in the northern province of Hung Yen seized 9,000 liters of jet fuel transported illegally from a military organization, which could have been mixed with gasoline and then sold to customers.
To read the full report, click here.

No other environmental issue today is the subject of more discussion, debate, and media coverage than human-induced climate change, which is supposedly caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from the combustion of fossil fuels. These debates cover everything from basic questions of physical measurementsuch as how the earths climate has changed over time and how the climate may change in the future because of increased CO 2 concentrations in the atmosphereto how increased CO 2 emissions will affect the economic well-being of future generations.

In August 2015 President Obama and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Gina McCarthy announced the EPAs new Clean Power Plan (CPP). This is supposed to reduce U.S. CO 2 emissions from electric generation, particularly those from coal-fired power plants, 32 percent below their 2005 level, or, according to the EPAs calculations, about 870 million short tons per year by 2030.

EPA estimated in its cost-benefit analysis that total benefits of the CPP would range between $34 billion and $54 billion per year by 2030, the year in which EPA assumes that the CPP will be fully implemented. The EPA estimated that the CPP would impose costs of less than $9 billion per year.

Estimates of future CO 2 emissions, along with changes in those emissions, depend on numerous assumptions, especially future economic growth and the carbon intensity of the economy, i.e., the average amount of CO 2 emitted for each dollar of world economic output. Because of the difficulties in forecasting the rate of technological change and future economic growth, long-term forecasts of CO 2 emissions are highly uncertainand that uncertainty increases over time.

Ultimately, however, EPAs estimates of billions of dollars in annual benefits from CO 2 emissions are unsupportable because the CPP will have no physically measurable effect on world climate. The total effect is estimated to be less than 0.01 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, using an EPA-sponsored climate model. Without any measurable effect on world climate, the CPP cannot provide any climate-related benefits.

Perhaps as a consequence of the CPP having no measurable effect on world climate, EPA also couches the benefits of the CPP in strategic terms: specifically, that the U.S. must lead if other countries, especially China and India, are to follow and enact their own CO 2 emissions-reduction policies. This seems doubtful, for two reasons.

First, past experience with the 1998 Kyoto Protocol, which was also an agreement to reduce world CO 2 emissions, suggests that this type of leader-follower strategy is unlikely to work. The greater the actions taken by leaders, the greater are the benefits of free-riding by potential followers. Second, compliance with the multinational climate agreement that was signed in Paris in December 2015 is strictly voluntary. It seems unlikely that developing nations, such as China and India, will restrict their domestic economic growth by imposing higher energy costs for the sake of uncertain climate-related benefits far into the future.

EPA also significantly understates CPP compliance costs for at least four reasons.

First, EPAs modeling framework assumes that generation plant owners and investors have perfect knowledge about the future and will make generation plant investment and operation decisions accordingly. Clearly, that is not true. EPAs assumption of perfect foresight does not reflect how generation plant owners and investors make decisions and likely caused EPA to overestimate investments in operating-efficiency improvements under the CPP.

Second, EPA annualized the actual costs that consumers will pay for energy-efficiency investments over those investments expected lifetimes, rather than accounting for the costs at the time of purchase.

Third, EPA relies on unsupported projections of increasing wind and solar plant output, combined with decreasing capital and operating costs.

Fourth, EPA ignores the additional costs associated with necessary upgrades to the U.S. high-voltage transmission system to accommodate a doubling of wind and solar capacity by 2030, as well as the additional costs of fossil-fuel generation needed to back up uncertain wind and solar generation production.

Finally, EPAs cost-benefit analysis suffers from a fundamental flaw, in that the analysis compares estimates of world economic benefits against a subset of U.S.-only costs. EPA justifies the worldwide scope of benefits, not only because CO 2 emissions affect global climate but also because the U.S. operates in a globally interconnected economy. However, on the cost side, EPA looked only at the change in cost to meet future U.S. electricity demand. EPA ignored the broader effects on the U.S. economynotably, potential reductions in future U.S. GDP growth resulting from higher electric costsand ignored the effect of changes in future U.S. economic growth on the world economy because of those same worldwide economic interconnections. This apples-to-oranges comparison of benefits and costs is a fundamental flaw of EPAs cost-benefit analysis.

Jonathan Lesser is the president of Continental Economics.

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Shaping Elkos early years, the Hesson family contributed to the city through business, politics and history.

Abraham W. Hesson was born in 1852 in Maryland and moved to Pennsylvania, his family once living on what would be the Gettysburg battlefield. Abe moved west and held several occupations including farmer, oxen team driver, cattleman and miner. He settled in Tuscarora, where he was put in charge of one of the gold mining mills.

He met Jessie Yeates, whose family were early settlers in Elko dating back to 1869. Jessie and her sister were also the first graduates of the University of Nevada in Elko. They married in 1882 in Tuscarora, where Jessie gave birth to Robert the following year. At the end of Tuscaroras boom, Margaret and Lois were born in Elko. Abe became a sheriffs deputy and was elected county assessor.

In 1897, Abe opened the A.W. Hesson Company, selling hardware, mining equipment and farming implements. He stayed active in as a member of the Elko County School Board, Henderson Bank board, and Chamber of Commerce and helped build the Elko-South Fork telephone line.

Additionally, Hesson was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected to the state senate and served between 1915 and 1921. Abe was also an elector in the presidential elections of 1904 and in 1932. His involvement in various occupations undoubtedly inspired his son to follow in his footsteps.

Robert W. Hesson grew up in Elko and attended University of Nevadas School of Mines, graduating with a mining engineer degree in 1903. He worked for Southern Pacific Railroad as a civil engineer then joined his fathers business and served as president of the telephone company.

In 1921, he was elected as the citys second mayor and held office for six years. During that time, he successfully purchased the citys water wells and land including the China Ranch that was developed into the Elko City Park and the Elko County Fairgrounds. Popular with Elkoans yet suffering from pernicious anemia, he did not run for a fourth term and died August 1, 1927, at the age of 44.
Jane Pickens to mark anniversary of 'Nosferatu' with live film score

New Hampshire native Jeff Rapsis will be doing the scoring with a digital keyboard right next to the screen as the film is being shown.
Nevada Republican voters spoke loudly Tuesday night. Again.

They spoke loudly in November 2014, voting down a proposed gross receipts tax (GRT) 4-to-1 and sweeping Republicans into control of Nevadas executive and legislative branches for the first time in generations.

That was a mandate to hold the line on taxes, reform collective bargaining, stop the bleeding in the Public Employees Retirement System, improve schools through choice and other reforms, and especially to oppose the kind of tax 79 percent of voters rejected.

Others saw things differently.

Gov. Brian Sandoval and his allies interpreted voters overwhelming rejection of a GRT to mean they really wanted the same tax with just a few minor tweaks. Sandoval sent two versions of the tax to the legislature the following spring and devoted great energy to its eventual passage.

By law, he had to convince two-thirds of the members in each house to vote for a new tax. A GRT has long been a goal of Nevada Democrats, Republicans-in-name-only (RINOs), and large gaming companies. Democrats and RINOs want to spend and gaming wants to shunt the burden of that spending onto retailers, auto mechanics and other small- to medium-sized Nevada businesses  anyone but them. So Sandovals task came down to getting Republicans to support the tax.

Republican resistance was minimal in the Senate, which passed both GRT versions with only a few dissenting votes. The only resistance of consequence was in the Assembly where a cadre of Republicans had worked with us to develop a plan to increase spending on public schools without raising taxes.

Our appeal to principle and the broad public interest, though, was not as alluring for some legislators as the governors promises of future campaign support. So the swing votes went to Sandoval, and the commerce tax version of the GRT passed.

Along the way, Sandoval and legislative leaders killed the most substantive proposals for reforming collective bargaining and pensions, even though several of those proposals came from some of their tax-hiking Republican allies.

All this was a complete betrayal of the voters trust. Last night the voters defeated some of the people who had betrayed them and the public interest.

Sandoval made good on his promises to campaign for Republicans who supported the tax. In spades. Big gaming, which is mostly exempt from GRTs, showered campaign contributions on tax-hiking Republicans  well into six figures in some cases.

Meantime, with the help of the Nevada Supreme Court, the governors allies got our effort to put the commerce tax on the ballot for a referendum thrown out on false grounds.

Sandovals practiced public persona of (false) moderation has kept him popular in some circles despite his extreme statist policies. But he couldnt transfer that teflon to many legislators he supported.

Although voters wont be able to vote directly on the commerce tax this fall, they just held their own referendum by voting down many Sandoval-backed legislative candidates, including some non-incumbents, and turning down key tax architect Michael Roberson for Congress.

This sends a strong message about the priorities of Republican voters and once again delivers a mandate not only to accomplish the key policy objectives Sandoval and company whiffed on last time, but also to repeal the pernicious commerce tax.

Some political insiders claim that candidates who actually govern as conservatives cannot win a general election, despite the obvious national and Nevada retreat from the bi-partisan corrupt establishments. But three of the 14 Assembly Republican tax-hikers refused to face voters by running for re-election, three more were defeated this week, and a Libertarian and a Democrat may take out two others in November.

So in the next legislature, roughly half the Assembly Republicans who joined the governor in betraying the voters wont be back. Thats quite an object lesson. We are especially gratified that Al Kramer, Jim Marchant and Victoria Seaman this week defeated, respectively, Philip ONeill, Glenn Trowbridge and Erv Nelson, three of the most treacherous turncoats.

We see 2014 as the beginning of a long-term shift away from the bi-partisan, corrupt crony-infested Establishment. But we caution the Republicans headed toward November victory: Do what you promised. Voters are showing increasingly they wont put up with being fooled again.
Nevadas caucuses and primary election are history, and they have set the stage for what should be a very contentious showdown in November on multiple fronts.

First of all, congratulations to newly elected Elko County Commissioner Jon Karr. He defeated two Republican opponents and will automatically take the seat because no Democrats or other party members are running.

Karr expressed disappointment at the lack of Democrats in local politics, and we agree.

We dont understand the logic behind making county commission races partisan, while city council and justice of the peace races are nonpartisan. What we do know is that the demographics of lopsided regions can sway people to align with the dominant party just so they have a voice in elections such as this one.

Elko Countys board of commissioners hasnt had a Democrat serving since Mike Nannini retired eight years ago. Meanwhile, all seven commissioners in Clark County are Democrats.

Making county commission races nonpartisan would be a preferable option to having Nevada switch to open primaries, in which anyone can vote for any party.

Tuesdays vote also set the slate for the new Elko justice of the peace position. This will be an interesting race because one of the candidates is not an attorney.

Choch Goicoechea is a highway patrolman who won by a significant margin over Andrew Mierins, the current court master who also serves as justice of the peace when needed.

Nevada law specifies that law degrees are not required for counties the size of Elko, which led to some interesting debate at the recent candidate forum. We cant remember the last time Elkos justice of the peace was not an attorney. It is common, however, for non-attorney rural judges from other parts of the county to fill in for Elkos judge.

In November, voters will decide if experience or a fresh perspective are most needed to serve in the new position, which oddly was created for the very reason that Elko township was too big for a single judge to handle.

Another interesting race that was set up with Tuesdays vote is for the seat currently held by Sen. Harry Reid. There was a lot of drama surrounding the possibility that Gov. Brian Sandoval would challenge Reid this year, which may have played a role in Reids eventual decision to retire.

The longtime senator will be campaigning heavily for former Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto, who faces Republican Rep. Joe Heck in November. Both of these candidates are highly qualified to serve as the next junior senator from Nevada.

And finally, recent developments have solidified the fact that voters will be forced to chose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for president of the United States. This dance card has many people looking for a third-party option, but alas, no viable opponent has surfaced.

Voting in Tuesdays primary was a pretty easy process, but the General Election is shaping up to be a tough one. We anticipate contentious battles and a few surprises as the campaigns fire up into the home stretch.

Voters who did not participate in the primary skipped out on the easy part. Now comes the hard part.

Here at the Free Press we will do our best to cover the campaigns fairly and get out the candidates messages so voters can make educated choices in November.
Reporter

Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk).
Reporter

Debra Pressey is a reporter covering health care at The News-Gazette. Her email is dpressey@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@DLPressey).
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Adaptive Biotechnologies, the leader in combining next-generation sequencing (NGS) and expert bioinformatics to profile T- and B-cell receptors of the adaptive immune system, and collaborators will be presenting five studies demonstrating how Adaptives high-throughput sequencing platform enables diagnosis, detection and assessment of prognosis in hematological malignances and has increased sensitivity over flow cytometry. These data will be presented at the 21st Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 9-12, 2016.

Highlighted data include a study by Ilan Kirsch, MD (Adaptive Biotechnologies), et al., demonstrating the use of immunosequencing of peripheral blood from ALL patients to assess MRD in which bone marrow was hypocellular. In these patients, immunosequencing of peripheral blood was more sensitive than traditional flow cytometric analysis in the bone marrow. Another study by Dr. Kirsch, et al., demonstrated the use of high-throughput sequencing as a measure of early response to therapy in childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). In this study, assessment of MRD using immunosequencing correlated with both outcome and event-free survival. A study by Dr. Hiroyuki Takamatsu (Kanazawa University), et al., compared the prognostic value of MRD using flow cytometry and immunosequencing on autografts of multiple myeloma patients, and revealed that patients who were MRD negative by immunosequencing tended to have better progression-free survival.

These data further demonstrate the breadth of our immunosequencing technologys applicability in hematological malignancies and the potential to provide precise results using non-invasive sampling procedures, said Harlan Robins, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Adaptive Biotechnologies. Providing an ultra-sensitive, standardized method for detection, diagnosis and prognosis for people with lymphoid cancers may also help improve patient outcomes.

Representatives from Adaptive Biotechnologies will be exhibiting at EHA booth #C4.210 to answer questions about its immunosequencing technology.

Oral Presentations:

Abstract #S101: Improved Efficacy after Incorporating Autologous Stem Cell Transplant (ASCT) into KRD Treatment with Carfilzomib (CFZ), Lenalidomide (LEN), and Dexamethasone (DEX) in Newly Diagnosed Multiple Myeloma

Presenter: Dr. Andrzej Jakubowiak

Date/Time: June 10, 11:45-12; Hall A1

Abstract #S496: High Throughput Sequencing as a Measure of Early Response to Therapy in Childhood ALL

Presenter: Dr. Ilan Kirsch

Date/Time: June 11, 16-16:15; Auditorium 2

E-Poster Presentations:

Abstract #E854: Molecular Detection of ALL in the Peripheral Blood is More Sensitive than Flow Cytometric Analysis of the Bone Marrow in Patients with Treatment-Related Hypocellularity

Author: Takamatsu, et al.

Abstract #E1293: Comparison between 8-Color Multiparameter Flow Cytometry and Next-Generation Sequencing to Detect Minimal Residual Disease in Multiple Myeloma Patients who Underwent Auto-SCT

Author: Kirsch, et al.
ELKO  Elko County School District is looking into the possibility of shortening the school day for some of the smaller schoolhouses in the county.

The board on Tuesday approved a design team to examine how a four-day school week would work for Independence Valley Elementary School, Mound Valley Elementary School and Ruby Valley Elementary. The item passed with a 4-0 vote, with Dan Mahlberg and Annette Kerr absent from the meeting.

Elko County School District Superintendent Jeff Zander said the issue made the agenda after parents from the more remote areas in the county raised concerns about the distance they had to travel to take their children to school five days a week.

Weve received concerns from some of our one-room schoolhouses out there in Mountain Valley, Independence Valley and Ruby Valley. We have parents that are transporting their kids long distances on a daily basis, he said. Theyre requesting the opportunity to look into a four-day school week to save on that travel.

If the school district decides to make the change, it is unlikely that other small communities would see a similar change to their schools.

The issues we have with a four-day school week is that it can significantly impact a community based on available day care, Zander said. With the one-room schoolhouses and their agricultural nature you dont have day-care issues. Its a different model for a one-room schoolhouse than it is for a K through 12 school in a small community.

In 2012 the board chose not to implement a four-day week at Wells Combined School.

Since two of the schools now being considered are rated as five-star schools, Zander doesnt want their high performance to be negatively impacted. If approved, the district would take a closer look at the success of the shortened school week before considering shortening the week in other areas.

Im not sure where this can end up at but right now were just looking for a pilot for the small schools, he said.

The day of the week that children would get off from school is undecided.

While discussing the item board member Jonathan Karr suggested the design team should look at the feasibility of giving students a day off in the middle of the week, like Wednesday, instead of Monday or Friday. Fellow board member Teresa Dastrup then suggested it would be easier on families to give students three consecutive days off from the school week.

I would not recommend a Wednesday, she said. Being from Ruby Valley, if theyre going to have four days on and three days off, if you chunk that out in the middle, thats not going to help.

Dastrup continued by giving the example of a family that would have to travel to Salt Lake City for a doctors appointment and would then have to rush back into town to get their child to school on time the next day.

Zander said now that the proposal to develop a plan for a four-day school week has been approved, the design team will have to come up with standards to evaluate the three schools that will then be presented to the board for further review before the plans take affect next school year.

Were going to move into the design phase now and actually develop a calendar and develop some metrics to evaluate the pilot for those three schools so we have a process to evaluate the model, he said. Once that design is completed well bring that back to the board for action.
Drinking piping hot coffee, tea and the caffeine-infused beverage yerba mate probably causes cancer, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday.

Beverages surpassing 149 degrees Fahrenheit (65 degrees Celsius) may increase the risk of tumors in the esophagus, which resides in the chest area below the throat, according to USC's Mariana Stern and 22 other scientists from 10 countries. They met at the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, in May to determine if drinking coffee, mate or other very hot beverages causes cancer. Their results were published in the journal Lancet on June 15.

"Enjoy your coffee or mate, but make sure it's not very hot," said Stern, an associate professor of preventive medicine and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "There is physical evidence that very hot beverages can contribute to cell injury in the esophagus and thus contribute to cancer formation."

The group scoured more than 1,000 studies on over 20 different types of cancer. The scientists concluded drinking any beverage hotter than 149 degrees Fahrenheit is "probably carcinogenetic to humans," placing scalding hot drinks in the same category as DDT, frying food at high temperatures, consumption of red meat and the human papillomavirus.

According to the National Coffee Association, coffee waiting to be served should sit at 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit (82-85 degrees Celsius). That's around the temperature McDonald's restaurants served coffee before a well-known lawsuit prompted the fast food chain to sell coffee at a temperature of 10 degrees lower - still far above what the researchers consider safe.

In the United States, the average coffee drinking temperature is around 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius). The temperature varies between 99-190 degrees Fahrenheit (37-88 degrees Celsius), Stern said.

"We were now able to evaluate more carefully the effect of mate itself from the effect of temperature, and we concluded that the observed links between mate drinking and cancer of the esophagus seem to be largely driven by drinking mate very hot," Stern said. "Similar associations are seen for other very hot beverages, like tea or coffee."

Stern and her colleagues noted that drinking yerba mate at very high temperatures - between 150 and right below the boiling point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit (66-100 degrees Celsius) - is common practice in certain countries in South America, including Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

A cup of coffee a day may keep liver cancer away

The scientists downgraded a cup of joe from "possibly carcinogenic" and hot mate from "probably carcinogenic" to safe for consumption as long as neither are scalding hot.

In 1991, the WHO gave coffee that classification based on a much smaller database of studies. Now, the scientists highlighted some studies that associated coffee with cancer when the real culprit was probably tobacco smoking, which is highly correlated with heavy coffee drinking, according to the report.

Late last year, Stern participated in a WHO group that concluded consuming processed meat - bacon, salami, sausages, hot dogs and deli meats - causes cancer.

However, the news about coffee was not grim. The researchers estimate that a cup of coffee a day decreases the risk of liver cancer by 15 percent. In other words, the scientists are giving coffee lovers a free pass to drink as much coffee as their bladders can handle.

"For many cancer types, we found clear evidence that coffee is not carcinogenic," Stern said. "In fact, we found that coffee protects against some cancers such as liver and uterine endometrium cancer."
On 14 June 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) will convene the 3rd meeting of the Emergency Committee under the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) on Zika and observed increase in neurological disorders and neonatal malformations.

The Committee will consider whether the Zika virus and related complications still constitute a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, review the implementation and impact of earlier recommendations made by the Committee, and determine if new recommendations are needed or existing recommendations require revision.

During the meeting, members of the Emergency Committee will be presented with updates from a number of countries most affected by Zika virus and/or its complications, including information about disease spread, impact of interventions, and rate and scope of complications. They will also review new and updated research and reports on the virus and associated complications (microcephaly and other congenital malformations and neurological effects), as well as progress in related research.

The Committee will review information from technical experts and research on the risk of spread of mosquito-borne diseases, and particularly Zika virus, through international travel and mass gatherings, including the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The Committee will be presented with updates from Brazil on the current status of Zika virus in the country, trends in transmission over time, and the nature and impact of the countrys steps to prevent infections and promote vector control, and other interventions to protect residents and travellers.

Background

WHO Emergency Committees are convened under the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR). The IHR address the exponential increase in international travel and trade, and emergence and re-emergence of international disease threats and other health risks. Their purpose and scope are "to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade. This binding instrument of international law entered into force on 15 June 2007, following adoption by the World Health Assembly on 23 May, 2005. There are currently 196 States Parties to the IHR, including every Member State of the World Health Organization.

Based on the recommendations of the first meeting of the Emergency Committee, on 1 February 2016, WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern for the cluster of microcephaly cases and other neurological disorders associated with Zika virus. As mandated by the IHR, once an outbreak or other health event is judged to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and temporary recommendations are issued under IHR, the Emergency Committee must convene at least once every three months to consider its recommendations to the Director-General, until the emergency is declared to be over. The last meeting of this Emergency Committee occurred on 8 March 2016.

Under IHR, the deliberations of the Emergency Committee are conducted by independent public health experts from a range of backgrounds and geographies. Committee members are drawn from the IHR Experts Roster established by the Director-General under Article 47 of IHR (2005). The roster is composed of international experts in such fields as disease control, virology, vaccine development, risk communication, bioethics, vector control, mass gatherings, and infectious disease epidemiology. Each Emergency Committee includes experts in relevant fields of expertise to the emergency under consideration. The members and advisors of the Emergency Committee related to Zika virus and its complications are listed with their areas of expertise at http://www.who.int/ihr/procedures/zika-ec-members/en/

Under the terms of IHR, the deliberations of the Emergency Committee sessions are confidential to encourage full reports from countries on the spread of disease, associated risks and ongoing interventions, and to promote frankness and dialogue among members as they formulate their recommendations. Some of the background material considered by the Emergency Committee includes preliminary reports and assessments that countries or relevant experts have not cleared for public dissemination or publication, but are important for up-to-date, informed expert deliberation. Following the meeting the views of the Emergency Committee are communicated to all States Parties and the general public.

All advisors and members of the Committee must declare interests that WHO then reviews for potential conflict of interest related to the topic of the Emergency Committee. In addition, participants sign a confidentiality form. These precautions protect the objectivity and neutrality of committees convened under the IHR and are consistent with the provision of IHR itself.
Dr. Crystal Aguh THOUGHT LEADERS SERIES ...insight from the worlds leading experts

Which areas are currently affected by the Zika virus? Should everyone avoid travel to these areas or only pregnant women?

The majority of the countries that are affected by the Zika virus are in the Caribbean. Many of the Caribbean Islands, including large islands such as Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Barbados and US Virgin Islands, as well as Mexico and other countries in Central and South America are affected.

The current Zika virus outbreak that most people are aware of, began in South America, so that's where they're seeing the heaviest burden of cases.

How to Protect Yourself from Zika Virus: What You Need to Know from a Johns Hopkins Expert Play

With regards to travel, I think that everyone should be cautious about traveling to countries where there is current Zika transmission. While certainly pregnant women are the most susceptible to side effects such as brain damage in their children, there's actually another condition called Guillain-Barre Syndrome that a lot of doctors in those countries are also concerned is associated with the Zika Virus.

Guillain-Barre syndrome can affect anyone of any age and, for that reason, I think everyone should be cautious and be aware when they're traveling to countries effected by the Zika virus.

For people that are traveling to Zika-affected areas, what are the best methods of protection?

As far as we know, the best method of protection is using a proven insect repellent. Certainly, DEET is considered to be the most effective type of insect repellent.

Typically, a DEET concentration of 20 to 30% protects against 90% of all mosquito and tick bites, so that's the first line of defense.

For people who are nervous or weary of using DEET, there are other types of insect repellent such as lemon of eucalyptus oil or permethrin, which can also protect against mosquito bites.

What are the main things to consider when choosing an insect repellent?

The main thing that you want to consider is how long you plan on being outdoors in an area where you're at risk of mosquito bites. For instance, a DEET concentration of under 20% will typically give you about 2 to 4 hours of protection, but if you anticipate staying outdoors for 6 hours or more, you may prefer higher concentrations.

The other thing that's really important is that you should only treat areas that are going to be exposed. If you're wearing a shirt with short sleeves, for example, you should only apply the insect repellent to the exposed skin. You don't have to apply it to the chest, back and other covered areas.

Are there any extra considerations for children and pregnant women?

Most insect repellents are safe to use on children and during pregnancy. Since pregnant women are at the highest risk of serious side effects, I would definitely recommend using DEET because it is proven to be the most effective.

For children, insect repellents containing up to 30% DEET are considered safe to use, but you should limit its use to children who are older than 2 months of age.

What do you recommend for children under 2 months?

You should use long sleeve clothing and hats to protect the majority of the skin, thats very important.

Does a higher concentration of DEET mean the repellent is more effective?

No. It's really important to remember that a higher percentage of DEET is not necessarily more effective; it just means that it will last longer.

How long does insect repellent give protection for and how often should it be reapplied?

Most preparations containing at least 30% DEET will give you up 5 or 6 hours of protection; some preparations last even longer. Certainly, if you expect to be outdoors longer than that, you may need to reapply.

Once you are out of an exposed area, then you should wash off the insect repellent because some people notice some skin irritation. Otherwise, if you don't expect to be outside for longer than 6 hours, you don't need to reapply unless you plan to engage in water activity. If you apply DEET and then go swimming, you should reapply after getting out of the pool, to make sure that you're still covered.

Other than insect repellents, are there any other ways you can protect yourself from the Zika virus when traveling to affected areas?

As well as wearing long sleeves and long pants, you can actually also find pre-treated clothing. Permethrin is really the go-to insect repellent used on clothing.

You can buy clothing that's already been treated with insect repellent, but be aware that with each wash a little bit of the insect repellent will come off.

You can also buy permethrin spray to spray directly on clothes. Again, you should make sure you only treat outer layers of clothing and not use the permethrin spray on any bras or underwear because you don't need to treat any areas of the skin that will not be exposed.

What should you do if you are bitten by a mosquito?

If you notice a bite and it's itchy or bothersome, then you can use over-the-counter cortisone cream or an antihistamine cream to help control the itch. You really must try to avoid scratching it, if possible, because scratching the skin can cause it to tear and, in very rare instances, can lead to a skin infection.

Are there any myths about Zika that youd like to dispel?

I'm not sure if I would call them myths, but there are a couple of things that I think are very important to know. At this time, it's unclear how long the virus is present in your system. One thing that I would say is that, if you don't have to travel to a Zika infected area, you should avoid it. If you're a young woman who's thinking about having kids, you may still have the virus in your system, even if it was a month ago that you travelled.

About 80% of people who are affected with the Zika virus won't have any symptoms at all. It's really important to break that into two points: firstly, you can have the Zika virus without having symptoms and, secondly, the Zika virus can potentially stay in your blood stream for an extended period of time. At this point, we don't know how long the virus stays in your system.

What do you think the future holds for the Zika virus?

I think the primary goal from a medical standpoint, is to see whether or not a vaccine can be developed. I think it's very difficult to envision an eradication of mosquitoes. Obviously, a lot of communities are taking very aggressive steps to minimize exposure to mosquitoes, but I think down the line, a Zika vaccine will be really important, especially because the potential side effects are so severe.

We really haven't seen a mosquito-borne illness with such severe symptoms as the Zika virus in a long time, so hopefully a vaccine will be the next step.

Where can readers find more information?

If you want more information about insect repellents, visit EPA.gov

The World Health Organization website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website also have great information about the Zika virus.

You should also visit your local government website to read about updated travel notices, but the CDC and World Health Organization also have travel notices.

About Dr Aguh

Crystal Aguh MD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology at Johns Hopkins hospital. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Duke University and obtained a medical degree with honors from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Her clinical interests include complex medical dermatology, ethnic skin, procedural dermatology, and international health.
News18  Blogs  India

China, India's Eternal Rival

Representative image

If history is any indication, then China's strident opposition to Indias bid for becoming a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is on a predictable course. Notwithstanding all the talks on bonhomie between India and China in recent years, the unpalatable historical truth is that China will do all its best to foil the rise of India as a global power. Chinese opposition to Indian membership in the NSG is not based on any sound principles; it rallies round Chinese aversion to an India, which, to quote the state-run Global Times, will "shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region".



Written by Fu Xiaoqiang, a research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, the article in the paper expresses concerns that "entry into the NSG will make it (India) a 'legitimate nuclear power'." It then adds, "If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use." As a result, the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken" and Pakistan's strategic interests will be threatened, which will in turn shake the strategic balance in South Asia, and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region," it said.



As a matter of fact, Pakistan is also an alibi for China to stall Indias emergence as a global power. It has now become quite routine for China to - through its officials in international meets, armed forces near the line of actual control, spokespersons and state-controlled media - say and do everything possible to humiliate India. China may extol the virtues of a multipolar world, but in the process it is striving for a unipolar Asia, where, true to its theory of Middle Kingdom, China will not allow another pole, whether it is India or Japan, to make the world truly multipolar. Historically speaking, that has been the Chinese tradition. China throughout the ages has done everything possible to halt the growth of Indian influence and dent Indias eminence.



Southeast Asia as a region has always been the battleground for influence b India and China. Many French and Indian scholars once referred to the region as "Farther India" or "Greater India", L'Inde Exterieure and the Hinduized or Indianized states. On the contrary, many Chinese writings identified the region as Kun Lun or Nanyang or "Little China".



Historian KM Panikkar had described the expansion of Indian culture and influence, both in Central Asia and Southeast towards the countries and islands of the Pacific, as one of the momentous factors of the period immediately preceding the Christian era. In fact, other historians often describe the concept of Farther India, a geographic area consisting of the present-day Southeast Asia, save, perhaps, the Philippines, because of the fact that this whole region developed under the Indias cultural influence[the Hindu kingdoms of Sri Vijaya (parts of Malaysia and Indonesia), Funan (Vietnam), Kambuja (Cambodia) and Champa (Thailand)]. No wonder why French historian Coedes was emphatic that but for India this whole region would not have been civilized. As he said, Without India, its past would be almost unknown; we would know scarcely more about it than we know about Australia.



The "Indianised" Mekong valley, Malay Peninsula and Indonesia in general, and Kambuja and Champa in particular, played a very important role in stemming the growing Chinese influence. Both Kambuja and Champa have exceptional claims to the gratitude of Indian people. If the ever-expanding empire of China did not extend its authority to Singapore and if the Indian Ocean remains today what its name indicates, it is due to the resistance, which Kambuja and Champa put up against the constant pressure of China. Between them they still mark the boundary of Chinese culture and expansion. However, the fact still remains that after the Mongols took over China in the 13th century, they consistently tried to establish hegemony over the countries of the southern seas. Their main tactics in this endeavour was to first split up the old Indian states of Farther India into smaller principalities and then make them constantly fight against each other so as to compel some of them to become the Chinese protectorates under the Chinese governors.



In fact, this policy of divide and alienate India was repeated in 1950s by Communist China, even though the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in his zeal for Asian unity, went out of way to espouse the cause of Chinas entry in to the United Nations and then bring the then virtually ostracized Communist Chinas Prime Minister Zhou En-lai to the first ever forum of Asian and African leaders at Bandung in 1955. It was at Bandung that emerging trends of tussle for Asian leadership between the independent India and communist China became clearly discernible. Since then Beijings policy anything that diminishes Indian leadership tends to strengthen the Chinese magnetism has been scrupulously maintained. In fact, Bandung and then the Sino-Indian war in 1962 have been the two most momentous events in eclipsing the Indian influence in Asia



A 1974 poem by Mao Zedong displays the scorn with which China viewed India. The poem is like this:



The tiger avers its head,

The tattered lion grieves,

The bear flaunts its claws,

Riding the back of the cow,

The moon torments the sun,

The pagoda gives forth light,

Disaster comes to birth,

The olive is seen waving.



As John W Garver explains, what Mao meant by this poem was that the tiger was the United states, the lion the Great Britain, the bear the Soviet Union, the moon the Islamic countries of West Asia, the sun the rich countries of the West, the pagoda the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle, and its light the prospect of imminent victory. A pagoda giving forth light is a common Chinese literary simile indicating good fortune. The phrase disaster comes to birth referred to Maos dictum that either revolution would prevent war or war would lead to revolution, while the olive branch referred to the peoples desire for peace. The cow was India, which, according to Mao, has no talents and is only food or for people to ride and for pulling carts. The cow could starve to death if its master did not give it grass to eat. And even though this cow may have great ambitions, they are futile.



In other words, for China, India can never be allowed to become a major power. Just look at the major irritants on Sino-Indian front. We have an unresolved border. Despite many rounds of negotiations, a border settlement acceptable to both the countries eludes. And here, Chinas posture is becoming tougher. The agreed principle  which, incidentally, emerged from then Chinese premier Wens visit to India in 2005 that the settled population in the disputed border areas will not be disturbed in any eventual solution  has been negated by China, which is now claiming Tawang, the holy city of the Buddhists in Arunachal Pradesh, as its own.



Secondly, China continues to encircle India by developing establishments and infrastructures in all the neighbouring countries of India (Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan) that have strong military implications. It is arming Pakistan with nuclear weapons and missiles, not to speak of other India-centric ammunition. Thirdly, of late, China has been perilously interfering in Indias internal affairs by questioning Kashmirs status and controlling water-inflow in rivers like the Brahmaputra. Fourthly, China is far from returning the Indian gesture during the 1950s of backing not only its ordinary membership of the United Nations but also the permanent membership in the UN Security Council. Fifthly, unlike every other country that matters in the world, China overlooks Indias concerns over terrorism that is aided and abetted from Pakistani soil.



Well, there is a theory that all these irritants will evaporate once China and India become economic stakeholders for each other. No doubt, there are strong merits of this theory, but then the facts remain that the growing trade between the two has been not only been strongly in favour of China but also uncomplimentary to India (India essentially exporting precious raw material in general and iron ore in particular and China selling finished products) and that the Chinese foreign direct investment in India has been miniscule.



In sum, China was, is, and will remain Indias competitor, if not enemy. This is the lesson from history.
Embedded with 24-carat gold and specially selected diamonds, a set of four tyres made by an NRI-owned firm has been sold for more than Rs 4 crore, setting the Guinness world record for most expensive set of car tyres. The first and only set of tyres of this kind, the gold-plated tyres were developed by Z Tyres in Dubai.They were decorated by the world's most exclusive jewellers from Italy, and designed in Dubai, the company said on its website. The application of gold leafing was done in the UAE by the same craftsmen who have worked on the new presidential palace in Abu Dhabi. The tyres were included as "World's Most Expensive Set of Car Tyres" in the Guinness Book of Records, the company claimed.They were sold for 2.2 million Dirhams (USD 600,000 or Rs 4.01 crore) at REIFEN trade fair in Dubai. The company will donate the money to the Zenises Foundation."In keeping with the spirit of the holy month of Ramadan, Z Tyres will donate all profits from the USD 600,000 sale to the Zenises Foundation which focuses on improving access to education across the world," Harjeev Kandhari, Founder and CEO of Zenises which ownes Z Tyres said.
Bengaluru: Standard Chartered Bank on Thursday said it did not in any way allege, during Debt Recovery Tribunal proceedings, that there was a collusion of SBI-led consortium of banks with liquor baron Vijay Mallya.



"We wish to clarify that, contrary to the reports published in the media, Standard Chartered did not in any way allege, during Debt Recovery Tribunal proceedings, that there was a collusion of Banks with Mr. Mallya. The reporting in this instance was entirely incorrect," Ananth Venkat, Managing Director and Regional Head for International Corporates, ASEAN and South Asia region, Standard Chartered, said in a statement.



The statement comes in the wake of reports that Standard Charted Bank counsel had in the Tribunal on Wednesday alleged collusion between Mallya and SBI-led consortium of banks during the hearing of its interlocutory application seking vacation of the DRT interim order, preventing it from transacting with British liquor giant Diageo Plc.



The bankers' counsel had, however, said, "If the bankers had colluded with Mallya, we would not have been waging a court battle against the high-profile defendant."
Dearest Ben's Nan.

Hope you're well.

In a world of billions of Searches, yours made us smile.

Oh, and it's 1998.

Thank YOU@Push10Ben  Google UK (@GoogleUK) June 15, 2016

Dear Grandma,



No thanks necessary. 



Sincerely,

Googlehttps://t.co/vedrVek8nb  Google (@google) June 15, 2016

@Push10Ben hahahahaha this is the complete opposite of the abusive shit I type in the search bar  YourAbnormalTwin (@Ashl3shaTweets) June 11, 2016

@Push10Ben Your grandmother is adorable, a big kiss from Argentina   Maira Rueda ABG (@MaiYuRu2) June 15, 2016

@Push10Ben @Tierno158 This world could use more thoughtful people like this  Bonnie Hawkins (@glambertgranny) June 15, 2016

@joan_unweek @Push10Ben this is so beautiful. your nan is a treasure...cheers  squiggles (@jesstemm) June 12, 2016

Manners maketh man. And, in this case, a grand nan.When John, a 25-year-old from Wigan in the northern English town of Tyldesley, tweeted recently about his grandmother's internet manners, everybody on the web went crazy. His post, which has been re-tweeted over 15,000 times, had some etiquette lessons for netizens.His 86-year-old British grandmother, May Ashworth, who proved old-fashioned manners still had a place in the not-so-mannerly digital world, typed 'please' and 'thank you' while trying to translate Roman numerals on Google search. She wrote:"I asked her about it and she just thought it was the norm," John replied to one of the comments on his viral tweet.(Photo: Ben John with his grand mother/Twitter : @Push10Ben)Well, this sweet, innocent gesture from John's grand nan to Google, touched not only people's hearts but even Google's. In response to her search, they gave this reply appreciating her polite request:At a time when the internet is full of abusive comments and rude conversations, such politeness was widely welcomed by social media users.
From the beautiful artwork in mangas, to the weirdly tentacled pornography in hentais, Japan has the ability to make all things childishly surreal and very very weird. They've given us magical creatures than fight each other and they've given us giant robots and they've given us some messed up horror movies that cannot ever be recreated accurately in Hollywood.The point is, you can easily tell if any video is Japanese, when you see it. YouTuber Mike Diva made a Japanese fake ad for Donald Trump and it is hands down the most epic thing there is on the Internet right now. It narrates the story of a young Japanese woman who is in love with Donald Trump and wants to meet him. Donald Trump incidentally gets elected president of the world. The video explores her fantasy to meet this great man. This video is so Japanese, that it might get kicked out America for being an immigrant.Watch, rewatch and feel yourself get sucked into the weird visuals and annoying pop music.
Four Terrorists were killed and a soldier was martyred on Thursday after the Army foiled an infiltration bid in Tangdhar sector near the Line of Control in Kashmir, officials said.



The gun battle between the terrorists and the security forces started on Thursday after the Army intercepted some movement along the LoC.



The operation to flush out the remaining terrorists continues.



This was the second such infiltration bid foiled by the security forces along the LoC in Kashmir in the last three days.







On Tuesday, an infiltration bid was foiled in Machhil sector of Kupwara district.



The Machil operation which left a militant dead and a soldier martyred has entered the third day.



Four other jawans were also injured in the Machil operation.



Meanwhile, a wreath laying ceremony was held in Srinagar to pay final respects to Soldier Ajay Singh Chowdhary who was martyred on Wednesday in the Machil gunbattle with terrorists.


New Delhi: Indian steel companies will export rails worth USD 150 million to Iran in July as part of a pact between the two countries for developing railway and other infrastructure at strategically important Chabahar port.



"The maiden consignment of rail from India worth USD 150 million would be sent to Iran in July," a top official said after Ambassador of Iran to India Gholamreza Ansari called on Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Thursday.



The consignment of rails will be shipped by steel companies, the official said, adding that both Gadkari and Ansari deliberated on taking further the historic pact between the nations on the strategic Chabahar Port in southern Iran which will give India access to Afghanistan and Europe bypassing Pakistan.



The pact to develop the Chabahar port and other infrastructure was inked in May during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Persian Gulf nation.



Gadkari in May said that India would invest billions of dollars in setting up industries -- ranging from aluminium smelter to urea plants -- in Iran's Chabahar free trade zone.



Also, railway PSU IRCON will build a rail line at Chabahar to move goods right up to Afghanistan. The rail links are being built so that the land-locked Afghanistan can get access to the Iranian port as an alternative to the Pakistani port of Karachi.



The official said that a meeting is also "scheduled next month between Shipping Minister and his Iranian counterpart to develop a workplan for industrial needs and investments needed for Chabahar free trade zone". The focus will be setting up industries in the Chabahar free trade zone.



Besides the bilateral pact to develop the Chabahar port for which India will invest USD 500 million, a trilateral agreement on transport and transit corridor has also been signed by India, Afghanistan and Iran, which the Prime Minister said could "alter the course of the history of the region".



Also, Gadkari has been stressing that the distance between Kandla and the Chabahar port is less than the distance between New Delhi and Mumbai and the pact would enable India quick movement of goods first to Iran and then onwards to Afghanistan and Russia through a new rail and road link. "Over Rs 1 lakh crore investment can happen in Chabahar free trade zone," he had said.
Authorities say a couple wanted in connection with murder cases in Arizona and Nevada has been found dead in a desert area southeast of Kingman. Mohave County Sheriffs detectives say the bodies of 26-year-old Hunter McGuire and his girlfriend, 32-year-old Samantha Branek, were found lying next to each other Friday with gunshot wounds to the head. Lake Havasu City police say it appears McGuire shot himself, but its unclear if Braneks wound was self-inflicted. The county medical examiners office will determine an official cause of death. Authorities say the couple was being sought in connection with a double homicide in Kingman on June 28. They say McGuire also was considered a suspect in the fatal shooting of a woman Monday in Las Vegas.
Lahore: The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) leader who gave directions over phone to the terrorists during the attack on the Pathankot airbase has reportedly managed to flee to Afghanistan from Pakistan, an official said.



"The alleged JeM handler who communicated by telephone more than two-dozen times with the terrorists in Pathankot before they carried out the attack on the airbase on January 2 has managed to cross into Afghan border," a member of the Joint Investigation Team probing the attack said.



He said the JeM handler, who is in late 20s, was in the tribal area of Pakistan when he communicated about 18 times with the terrorists.



"The law enforcement agencies tried to trace him (in the tribal belt) but there are reports that he managed to escape to Afghanistan," he said, without disclosing the JeM leader's identity.



Interestingly, during interrogation JeM chief Masood Azhar claimed that the handler of the Pathanokot operation had quit the organisation sometimes ago.



"Azhar disowns the JeM handler (to prove his innocence)," another source privy to the development said.



He said the investigation agencies have been under "immense pressure" from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to thoroughly probe the matter and come up with "true facts" of the Pathankot incident.



Although the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab police had registered an FIR against the alleged attackers of the Pathankot airbase and their abettors, not a single person has been charged in this regard.



The FIR was registered in the CTD police station Gujranwala under sections 302, 324 and 109 of the Pakistan Penal Code, and sections 7 and 21-I of the Anti-Terrorism Act.



The FIR says Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval informed authorities that the four attackers had come from Pakistan and had "probably crossed the border adjacent to the Pathankot general area".



The NSA says the terrorists made phone calls to cell phones and belonged to a proscribed organisation.



Five terrorists and seven Indian army personnel were killed in a gun battle at the Pathankot airbase.



The attack occurred just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a 'surprise' visit to Sharif on his birthday on December 25 and the occasion of his granddaughter's wedding - a move that appeared to promise better ties between the two countries in future.
An incident that shook the conscience of an entire state, the brutal murder and rape of a 30-year-old law student in Kerala's Perumbavoor in April caused a public outcry. In an election month, the hashtag, justice for Jisha, also became the biggest political talking point.



Two governments, three probe teams and forty nine days after the incident, the Kerala Police claim to have cracked the case which saw many twists and turns. Police say a migrant labourer from Assam who is arrested has confessed to the gruesome crime.



"The identification parade, remand report and medical examination of the accused need to be done. We have arrested him. We need cooperation from everyone," B Sandhya, ADGP South Zone said in Kochi.



So how did the investigators reach the breakthrough? In less than a week after the incident, on May 4, the police released the sketch of a suspect. Around the same time, several migrant labourers from the locality were detained for questioning.



As the investigations made little progress and no arrest, the public outcry and pressure from the Opposition forced the then Oommen Chandy government to change the probe team. A new team of 20 officers, headed by DySP KM Jijimon were tasked with nabbing the culprit.



ELECTIONS, RUMOURS AND A CRIME



As the elections drew nearer, almost every leader who campaigned in the state visited Jishas family at the Perumbavoor hospital. The chorus for a CBI probe grew louder. The new team widened the probe and spoke to Jisha's neighbours. Three women in their statements said they heard a scream from Jisha's house on that fateful evening. One of them also admitted that she spotted a man wearing a yellow shirt walk out of Jisha's house



"We heard a loud sound from the house. There was also a thunderstorm at that time. The screaming wasn't 'amme acha (mother, father)'," Nandakumar, a neighbour of Jisha told CNN-News18 on May 6.



Even as the cops were trying to piece together all the information and evidence, various speculations and rumours were floated. One of them said the culprit  a migrant labourer  is a friend of Jisha's sister.



The police meanwhile, in a mammoth task, collected the fingerprints of nearly 800 men from the neighbourhood, hoping at least one would match the fingerprints collected from the scene of crime. They even checked whether the Aadhar database would help with the biometrics.



NEW GOVERNMENT, NEW PROBE TEAM



After elections, Kerala got a new Left Democratic Front government. On the day he was sworn in, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan appointed the third team, an SIT headed by the high-profile police officer, ADGP B Sandhya, after he pointed out lapses by the earlier probe teams. The newly formed police team has close to 80 members - from the ADGP to the inspectors and cyber police.



Senior Kerala police officers told CNN-News18 this is one the largest police teams ever probing one of the most gruesome crimes Kerala has seen. The team released a sketch of a suspect, and a week ago collected the CCTV footage from a shop near Jisha's house. The nabbing of the Assamese labourer, who police claim, has confessed to the crime, is likely to strengthen anti-migrant sentiment in Kerala.




@AshokChoudhaary mahilaon ko 'dear' keh ke kab se sambodhit karne lage Ashokji ?  Smriti Z Irani (@smritiirani) June 14, 2016

Dear @smritiirani ji, I think Asha Bhosle is a "mahila" too.Mind asking the same Q to Modi ji?#Yale @AshokChoudhaary pic.twitter.com/wmF8R0BKXg  Pankaj Mishra (@pankajmishra23) June 14, 2016

@smritiirani setting a bad example ma'am. Anyways women are feeling victimized by just "Hi" and now you trash dear @AshokChoudhaary  Deepika Bhardwaj (@DeepikaBhardwaj) June 14, 2016

Here is another exception to protocol. Own party members can address her as "dear". h/t & image via @scotchism pic.twitter.com/3JAWWl6a7i  SamSays (@samjawed65) June 14, 2016

Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani, known for her epic Twitter replies, proved yet again that she is not someone who can be easily taken down by trolls.It all began when she took offence at Bihar's Education Minister Ashok Choudhary addressing her as 'Dear Smritiji'.After which she got trolled right, left and centre.She finally decided to answer back and took to Facebook to express her anger and say it out loud that she's had enough.In her long piece on Facebook, Irani pointed out that the minister in question offered 'mumbled apologies' and called it her 'near Jerry Maguire-like moment."As the politician mumbled apologies and explained his position regarding the twitter spat to my state leader on the mobile while our contingent drove back from Bhagalpur last night; I watched his supporters trend a hashtag in my name, irrespective of their netas public apology. As those who scream murder and whip themselves up into a feminist frenzy at the drop of a hat tried to endear themselves to me on Twitter, I reflected on the near Jerry Maguire like moment that was upon me."In the post she spoke about her life and career, recalling the struggles and difficulties she has had to face to 'make a mark'. She also spoke about women's rights, and how girls are brought up in a middle-class environment where they are taught to stay mum when humiliated."Dont respond or retort no matter how humiliated you feel. But there would be those rebellious kinds (yours truly included), who would question why? Why not respond? Why zip it? The standard answer such a question begets is It is not worth it. Nuksaan tumhara hoga , ladke ka kuch nahi bigadega."Before she signed off her post as 'Aunty National', the minister listed out her achievements as a TV star, and as a politician who worked 'from the grassroots up'. She mentioned all her credentials, pointing out that she was the youngest woman to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha."You grow up and become a TV star. But while you still struggle to make a mark you are advised that if you go to parties and mingle enough, you shall get work.""And then politics happens. Not when you are a fading star, not when you are unemployed but when you are at the peak of your success. You are given the hard battles to fight, you accept (Chandini Chowk & Amethi were no cakewalk my friends). You work from the grassroots up."The minister also did not forget to slam all the intellectual people who called her anpad when she was made the HRD minister."You represent your Nation in the International Parliamentary Union, get unanimously elected to represent the Asia Pacific region, become part of the drafting committee on the Syrian crisis and yet some intellectual says anpad the minute you are given the opportunity to serve as HRD Minister."Here's Smriti Irani's full post which has been shared over 3,700 times.
Popular TV actress Divyanka Tripathi will marry fiance Vivek Dahiya on July 8. The actress, who hasn't spoken much about her relationship with 'Yeh Hai Mohabbatein' co-star Vivek, made headlines during her engagement that happened earlier this year at a private event.Their wedding - which has been scheduled for July  will see the presence of family members and close friends.Following the family's tradition, Vivek will get the 'baarat' to Bhopal on July 7 to attend sangeet and wedding functions that will happen the next day.On July 10, the couple will jet off to Chandigarh for their wedding reception.If reports are anything to go by, Vivek Dahiya will hire a men designer for his wedding dress. Divyankas lehenga would be sent by Vivek's family.Despite a hectic schedule that she follows, Divyanka was recently spotted shopping for wedding jewellery.As reports suggest, Divyanka and Vivek are trying to finish shoots so that it doesnt affect their leaves for the big day.Since the couple headed to Sri Lanka for their first Valentines Day in Sri Lanka, it could also be their honeymoon destination.Divyanka met Vivek on the sets of their show Yeh Hai Mohabbatein. However, the two didn't speak much to each other on the sets. But with the help of a common friend, they began interacting and after they started dating each other, they realised they were made for each other.(Photos: Instagram)
Mumbai: Veteran actress and social activist Shabana Azmi says the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) should neither censor nor certify films, instead only classify them.



The 65-year-old's comment came after the censorship controversy that surrounded director Abhishek Chaubey's directorial 'Udta Punjab', where the makers got into a battle with the censor board, which first suggested as many as 89 cuts in the movie. Thereafter, its Revising Committee asked for 13 cuts.



The Bombay High Court on Monday cleared the film for release with one cut and three disclaimers.



"CBFC should become a body that does not censor or even certify only classify films. That gives the audience the choice to watch a film or not," Shabana tweeted.



'Udta Punjab', which stars Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh, is expected to release on Friday.
While it was heartening to see several popular names from the film fraternity  including Amitabh Bachchan to express their support for the Udta Punjab during their battle with the censor board after it suggested 89 cuts in the movie, Punjabi superstar Diljit Dosanjh, who plays a key role, kept mum. But when we met Bollywood debutante in the capital, he too joined the debate stating there is no point in killing creativity.The actor supported free speech and freedom of expression and clearly stated that there is no problem in letting people decide whats correct for them.I got to know about CBFC during the Udta Punjab controversy. Please pardon me for my lack of knowledge. But what I have got to know is that the Censor Boards job is to certify films and not censor them. The government has set an age limit (above 18 years) which explains that people know whats good and bad. People are mature enough to make a choice. And we are living in an age where internet is available and the medium doesnt ask for any specific age group. So I think people should be given the chance to know whether they should or shouldnt watch, he stated.For the uninitiated, the Abhishek Chaubey-directed film, stars Kareena Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Diljit Dosanjh, and deals with the drug menace in the state of Punjab. But the film faced issues in getting a certificate by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) until the changes suggested by them were made. But the HC asked the CBFC to give Udta Punjab a certificate and not censor them.Since the film delves deeper into drug trading in the state, many felt the project defamed Punjab. But Diljit doesnt agree.Im a Punjabi myself. I belong to a Punjabi family. My parents stay in Punjab. Honestly, nobody trashes what belongs to them. But yes, issues that need to be highlighted, should be focused upon. There is no harm in discussing such issues, he said.Film Udta Punjab which is slated for its official release on June 17, was leaked online on Wednesday, a couple of days before it hit the theatres. But the team was successful in remove it online which was available on torrent sites for illegal download.
Mumbai: Actor Varun Dhawan will have to promote his next film 'Dishoom' alone till July as his main co-stars John Abraham and Jacqueline Fernandez are busy shooting for their respective films till then.



Present on the sets of the reality show 'Sa Re Ga Ma Pa' to launch the first song 'Sau Tarah Ke' from the film, Varun, asked why he was promoting the film alone, said: "John is shooting for 'Force 2' and Jacqueline is shooting in Miami but she is coming back soon. The song was going to be launched.



"They are going to return in July but I could not hold myself, that is why I have already done the tattoo. My connection is with the audience and I have come here for it. And I can officially announce that the promotion of 'Dishoom' begins today."



Varun had also performed at the show, tattooing the film's name on his forearm for it. He also said that he was a big fan of the celebrities from the music industry on the show like Pritam, Sajid-wajid, Mika and even had favourites from set of contestants.



The song will be out on Thursday.



John's 'Force 2' also starring Sonakshi Sinha and directed by Abhinay Deo, is set in China and Budapest while Jacqueline is shooting with actor Sidharth Malhotra for director duo Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K's film in Miami.



On his 'Student Of The Year' co-star Alia Bhatt's film 'Udta Punjab' managing to clear all obstacles after the filmmakers moving the court, Varun said: "It is a great thing that the verdict has been passed; I think it is great for the film industry. It's our belief in the judiciary system which has been upheld once again."



Varun will also be seen opposite Alia in 'Badrinath Ki Dulhania'.
Aam Aadmi Party on Thursday removed its MLA Alka Lamba as party spokesperson after she openly admitted that minister Gopal Rai was relieved of the transport ministry portfolio because of an ongoing investigation in the Premium Bus Scheme scam.



According to sources, Lambas open admission to reporters about Rai being removed from the transport ministry deviated from the party line which had been that Rai resigned because of health reasons.



This irked the senior party leaders including Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, the source added.



After Gopal Rai gave up the charge of transport ministry citing health reasons, Lamba had said that he has been relieved to ensure a fair probe into the alleged scam which is being investigated by Delhi's anti-corruption bureau.



His replacement should put to rest all doubts about the probe being unfair, Lamba had told reporters earlier.



Earlier, Alka Lamba was warned by the party leadership and asked to remove a tweet where she said party spokesperson Aatishi Marlena would have been made a minister if she had contested polls.



Meanwhile, Gopal Rai met Anti Corruption Bureau chief MK Meena in Delhi on Wednesday along with Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung in connection with the probe over the alleged scam.


The impasse over Goods and Services Tax Bill may finally come to an end. The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) has hinted at a possible resolution over the contentious bill.



"We believe there is a possibility of resolution and the ball is in the Centre's court. We hope Prime Minister intervenes in the matter. Without AIADMK support, GST won't get passed," AIADMK spokesperson K Pandiarajan said.



Tamil Nadu is the only state which has raised objections to the passage of the bill.



"We have raised 6 specifications, 1 has been addressed. A major specification is to compensate states like Tamil Nadu for 5 years. Manufacturing states like Tamil Nadu should not get penalised for doing good. We are not negotiating in a non transparent manner. No one from Union government has said we are unfair or we are not right," he added.



He also claimed that the state government wants to resolve issues but not at the cost of compromising the welfare of Tamil Nadu. "We are not obstructionist, we are proactive in voicing our point of view. We have announced so many schemes and we have made a huge amount of fiscal commitment. If we compromise on everything, where will we find resource. We are asking for the rights of Tamil Nadu," he said.







The statement comes after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa met PM Narendra Modi and urged Centre to address the state's grievances over issues related to the implementation of GST. Jaya had said that the GST, in its proposed format, would affect the autonomy of the state government.



Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had also held a meeting with 22 state Finance Ministers on Tuesday where all other states except Tamil Nadu backed the GST Bill.



"Virtually all the states have supported the idea of GST barring Tamil Nadu which has expressed some reservations. TN has offered a few suggestions which have been noted by the committee," Jaitley said.



The GST Bill is the biggest tax reform in 10 years and the Narendra Modi government is desperate to pass it in Parliament over consecutive sessions. The government hopes to have the Bill cleared by Rajya Sabha in the Monsoon Session of Parliament. It has already been passed by the Lok Sabha.



GST which aims to bring the country under a unified tax regime was proposed by the Congress-led UPA government in 2006.



The government had earlier targeted to roll out the nationwide single tax regime from April 1, 2016 but the Constitutional Amendment Bill on GST has been stuck in the Rajya Sabha due to opposition by the Congress party.


New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Kamal Nath on Thursday said he quit as Punjab poll in-charge in the "interests of the party" and that he was not asked by his party leadership to do so.



In an interview to CNN-News18, Nath claimed that he stepped down as the Shiromani Akali Dal and Aam Aadmi Party were playing politics by dragging his name into the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.



"For 32 years nobody made a charge. In 2005 when the Nanavati Commission was formed, somebody complained and the Commission had cleared it. It also came up in Parliament in an adjournment motion which lasted for 8 hours and 17 minutes and nobody had mentioned it. Nobody every mentioned my name earlier, why all of a sudden my name has come up," Nath said.



He denied that Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked him to quit the post, adding that she understood the reasons he gave in his letter to the party to step down as in-charge of Punjab.



"I called Rahul Gandhi and told him I am sending the letter. I read him the letter. He told me to send it to the Congress President. I called Sonia Gandhi and told her that this is in the interests of the party and we should not let them use this politics," he said.



Kamal Nath said Sonia spoke to him again after she received the letter, and that she told him, "Well if this is your reason, fine."







Responding to a question on a letter reportedly written by his former Cabinet colleague MS Gill, Nath said he never raised the issue of 1984 riots with him when they were cabinet colleagues. Gill had described his appointment as akin to "rubbing salt on wounds".



Kamal Nath rejected suggestions that the Nanavati panel absolved him due to "lack of evidence" saying that the report should be read in its entirety.



When asked what he was doing at the Rakab Ganj gurudwara near Parliament House on the day of the riots, he said he went there after he was told that a crowd had gathered.



He said that policemen at the scene asked him to engage the crowd till reinforcements arrived."I left as soon as I saw the reinforcements arrive," he said.



(With additional information from PTI)
Moto Mods snap onto the Moto Z using integrated magnets.

Chinese technology giant Lenovo, which recently unveiled its first modular phone under the Moto brand, has revealed its plans to introduce the phone in India.Named Moto Z, the phone will be available in India during the September-October time frame. The Moto Z will come to India with a couple of Mods, which are accessories that can be snapped on to the smartphone to increase the phones functionality. For instance, the Moto Insta-Share Projector turns the Moto Z into a 70-inch movie projector.The company currently has three Mods for the Moto Z - a speaker to amplify music, a projector for displaying photos and video from the phone and a power pack that provides 22 hours of additional battery. But it is not known if the Moto Z will come to India with only these three Mods or there would be more at the time of India launch of the Moto Z."The Mods will be priced between $50 to a couple of $100," revealed Aymar de Lencquesaing, senior vice president and co-president mobile business group, Lenovo.While Lencquesaing gave an idea on the price of Mods, he refused to share as to what would be the price of the phone.We asked Amit Boni, Motorola India head, to share the price of the upcoming Moto Z. While he didn't reveal the exact price tag, but hinted at it. "It's not going to be a mid-tier product. And therefore, it won't have mid-tier pricing. The pricing will be easily up for some about $500, I suspect."The Mods won't come bundled with the phone, and will be available to buy separately.Boni further clarified that Mods won't be available only through Motorola, and could be available even on e-commerce platforms as well. This is because the Mods won't be developed only in-house. The company instead has opened that up to outside developers, who will have the liberty to sell Mods the way they want.Having embarked on the modular approach, Lenovo seems to be in the right direction. It's been a couple of years since a great innovation revolutionised the smartphone market the way it happened over a decade with the first iPhone.Innovation is a key element in technology, but what is even more important is that how it is executed. Perhaps, this is why most of the concept devices or prototypes don't see the light of day. But with the Moto Z, the company appears to have successfully managed to bring modular approach to consumers.While different innovations have modernised the smartphone in their own ways, the modular concept is what can be seen as a real game changer - something that is the need of the hour and would break the monotony of the smartphone market. While LG is also in the same game, the Moto approach appears to be more in the right direction.Explaining how the modular phones will bring a change for good, Lencquesaing said, "Consumers want to do a lot of different things with their phone. And this Swiss Army Knife approach (i.e., putting everything in one device) doesn't function. Because then you end up packing into one device a broad set of features and you burden the cost of the device. And it is a set of features some users may like and some may not need.So, the modular concept comes up as a clever play. The device can remain thin, without compromising on additional functions. There are two benefits here. First, a modular handset won't compromise as a phone, and instead could come out as a better looking device given that it won't go overboard with built-in features. Second, with different modules available for it, users would be able to extend its functionalities as per their needs.Therefore, the modular phones don't look gimmicky and are expected evolve into a prominent category in the years to come.It is believed that the modular concept will initially be limited to premium devices, but will soon make its way to the mid-range category as well.Emphasising on smartphone trends, Lencquesaing said, "over time, you will have different product positioning for modular phones, adding, "the story of the industry in general is that if you have a good recipe for success, and it answers customers' needs and demands, then it starts to address different price points as well."Much like innovation in the smartphone space, Lenovo is equally bullish about its expansion plans in India. The company is planning to soon enter the offline space. Lenovo has no plans to set up its own stores to sell mobiles in India and will partner with key retail chains.The company has categorically stated that it will enter the offline space with a comprehensive portfolio. It just won't be selling a handful of device in stores.
Cairo: The black box of the EgyptAir plane which crashed in May killing all 66 on board, was recovered on Thursday from the Mediterranean, a breakthrough towards finding the cause of the tragedy.



The vessel 'John Lethbridge' that is affiliated to the company Deep Ocean Search (DOS) found the cockpit voice recorder of the Airbus A320, according to a statement by the Egyptian committee that investigated the crash of plane.



The statement added that vessel, which joined the search team last week, succeeded in pulling out from the Mediterranean Sea, the memory unit which is the most important part in the recorded although it (the recorder) was damaged.



The vessel which was contracted by the government to join the search for the two black boxes has found and obtained on Wednesday images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane.



EgyptAir flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo carrying 66 people, including crew, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea about 280 kms from the Egyptian seacoast on May 19 with 56 passengers and 10 cabin crew on board.



The passengers included 15 French, 30 Egyptians, a British, a Belgian, two Iraqis, a Kuwaiti, a Saudi, a Sudanese, a Chadian, a Portuguese, an Algerian and a Canadian.



A deep-sea robot has also located pieces of the missing EgyptAir plane at the bottom of the Mediterranean. While the wreckage discovered could offer clues about why the plane went down, Airbus said the flight recorders held the key to unlocking the mystery.



Some wreckage had been pulled out of the sea by search teams last month, along with belongings of passengers. The "pings" emitted by the black boxes were detected on June 1 but the flight recorders' exact location has not yet been established.
Washington: The gunman who killed 49 people at a gay club in the US this week wrote a series of Facebook posts about the "filthy ways of the West" before and during the shooting rampage, a top US Senator has said and asked the founder of the social networking site to assist in the probe.



On June 12, 2016, Mateen apparently searched for 'Pulse Orlando' and 'Shooting'.



Mateen also apparently posted "America and Russia stop bombing the Islamic State. I pledge my alliance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. may Allah accept me."



He then posted "The real Muslims will never accept the filthy ways of the West" and "You kill innocent women and children by doing us airstrikes..now taste the Islamic State vengeance."



In a final post, Mateen apparently wrote, "In the next few days you will see attacks from the Islamic State in the USA."



Such an assertion by Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs came amid reports that Omar Mateen made as many as 16 phone calls, including three to 911 and one to a local television stations during the several hours of early Sunday morning when he carried out the deadliest shooting in American history.



In a letter to the Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Johnson said it is his understanding that Mateen used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content.



"I appreciate Facebooks support of the law-enforcement investigation into this attack and previous attacks. While Facebook is not a target of the Committee's inquiry, I respectfully request your assistance with the Committees inquiry," he said.



Johnson said according to information obtained by his staff, five Facebook accounts were apparently associated with Omar Mateen.



In his letter on Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained and posted by Fox News, Johnson said his staff learned that in May 2016, Mateen used Facebook to search for information on the San Bernardino terrorists. On June 4, 2016, Mateen apparently searched 'Baghdadi Speech'.



"My staff has also learned that Mateen apparently used Facebook to conduct frequent local law enforcement and FBI searches, including searching for specific law enforcement offices," Johnson said asking full support of Zuckerberg in its investigations.



"I ask that you please provide all Facebook data on Mr Mateen's activities on his account and any affiliated Facebook accounts, including but not limited to activity logs, Facebook timeline information, Facebook messages, photos, and posts,"he said.


A Free Clinic of Central Virginia webathon fundraiser with a goal of raising $30,000 is taking place now through June 30.

It would really help us end the [fiscal] year on a high note, Free Clinic of Central Virginia executive director Christina Delzingaro said, adding that this year the clinic served more clients than anticipated.

We could really benefit from having these additional funds, she said.

Pascat Graphics & Marketing Company and the Lynchburg Radio Group are sponsoring the webathon and have challenged other business owners and individuals to match their donation of $3,500.

Any amount helps, but as a suggestion, $250 pays for the full care of a patient for a full year, including comprehensive medical, dental and pharmacy services, Delzingaro said.

The Free Clinic is a nonprofit, and all donations are tax-deductible. According to its annual report, 60 percent of the agencys operating budget comes from individuals, corporations and civic groups, while 11 percent comes from the state and 28 percent from foundations and other grants.

To donate, go online to http://www.freeclinicva.org/donate.
An advert with English words in Madrid. JAIME VILLANUEVA

A glance over television and print advertising in Spain reveals Buenos Aires non-stop (Argentine Airlines); Feel the extraordinary (NH Hotels); Pop it up. Create the unexpected (Jesuso Ortiz x Swatch), The power of dreams (Honda); Age management medicine (Neolife); New thinking. New possibilities (Hyundai); and This is your time (Tissot).

Using English expressions to sell products is a growing trend in Spain, a phenomenon brought up two years ago at a meeting between the Royal Spanish Academy and Spains advertisers. No sooner had the participants sat down than writer and academic Jose Maria Merino opened a small black notebook and began reading out some notes hed take while walking around his neighborhood. All the stores call themselves markets, he pointed out, adding: Except for the Chinese shops, which call themselves bazars.

English is associated with what is desirable and upmarket. Those who advertise in English are projecting a cosmopolitan image or a guarantee of advanced technology or quality

Pilar Varela, psychologist

The linguists and advertising executives decided to organize a seminar in May to study the matter further, during which sociologist Enrique Yarza, secretary-general of the Academy for Advertising, an ad hoc body that represents the industry, presented research showing that while just 30 brands were using English to advertise themselves in 2003, by 2015, this had multiplied tenfold, to 322 companies or 20% of the domestic market.

Cristina Santamarina, a lecturer at Madrids Complutense University, presented related research suggesting that Spains older generation and less-well educated were unmoved by slogans in English. It also suggested that the younger generation did not value Spanish as an international language in the way it did English.

Yarza believes that the trend is due to globalization and international branding, with many advertisements originating in London and New York. He also thinks that as Spanish brands go global, their international identity is highlighted by use of English. English, he says, is seen as modern and aspirational and is often used to make a company appear more innovative.

This belief is reiterated by psychologist Pilar Varela, who says that English is associated with what is desirable and upmarket. Those who advertise in English are projecting a cosmopolitan image or a guarantee of advanced technology or quality. But Yarza also believes it is important to avoid the equation of English usage with prestige. It is true that in the world of luxury goods almost everything is advertised in English. Even Carolina Herrera, who is Venezuelan. That said, there are top of the range cars such as Audi or BMW which are advertised in Spanish and cheaper cars such as Hyundai that use English.

Psychologist Pilar Yarza believes that the trend is due to globalization and international branding, with many advertisements originating in London and New York

The big question is, of course, what effect this style of advertising has on Spanish consumers. Santamarina believes it goes over the heads of people who dont speak the language, while Varela maintains that understanding the actual words is of little importance. The subconscious doesnt understand English, it only understands emotions, she says. The products are portrayed as desirable, mysterious, superior, difficult to attain, but attainable; and these messages can be conveyed simply by using English because we are a bit provincial.

Yarza agrees that theres nothing logical about it, citing the example of French carmaker Renault, but which is practically considered a domestic product because so many of its vehicles are made in Spain: What sense is there in saying Renault, passion for life when you can say Pasion por la vida?. Meanwhile, Peugeot, another French brand, uses the slogan, Motion and emotion. Both Renault and Peugeot use the same English slogans in their advertisements in France. However Mercedes-Benz uses: The best or nothing in Spain and its German equivalent, Das Beste oder nichts in Germany.

The notebook in which writer and academic Jose Maria Merino noted down the ads in English he could see in his neighborhood in 2015.

The Spanish language is considered prestigious in the field of literature, says Varela. This has been demonstrated by our Nobel prizes but thats no longer relevant, especially for young people. Nowadays science and technology carry more prestige than literature. Spanish is the language of the day-to-day, which is why adverts for detergent are in Spanish.

But English slogans are not confined to international brands. Jose Maria Merino recalls an enormous banner covering the entire facade of a roadside building in a remote town in the middle of La Mancha which declared: Show girls. Low cost. English, it seems, is also being used on more unlikely consumers.

Pedro Alvarez de Miranda, an academic, says hes not surprised at the growing use of English to sell things: We send our children or grandchildren to bilingual schools and then they go abroad for a year on an Erasmus program, perhaps to the Netherlands to study English. Like it or not, English is important in our society, and I wouldnt want to do anything about it. Censorship where language is concerned doesn't work. Language is a free zone.

One thing they all agree on is that theres nothing to beat a well-turned phrase in Spanish. Well-written Spanish slogans are very effective, says Merino, while Alvarez de Miranda adds: A message in Spanish can go straight to the heart.

Both Renault and Peugeot use the same English slogans in their advertisements in France

The Academy for Advertising has posted two bogus adverts on social networks and on the internet created by the Grey Espana agency. The first promotes Sunset Style sunglasses with blind effect. The second advertises a perfume called Swine with the slogan: New fragrance, new woman, showing an attractive model enveloped in pink tones.

Should any unsuspecting consumer feel inclined to buy either product they will discover that blind effect means theyll be walking into walls and that Swine is another word for pig, whose fragrance is something of an acquired taste.

English version by Heather Galloway.
Understanding dispute resolution

But what is the value of the Dispute Resolution Centre? Consider that people have differences of opinion and different ways of solving disputes and when nothing else works the State provides a Court system. However, issues often become fights to be fought in Court; the process is drawn out, expensive and stressful and the Court becomes a clogged battleground. An outcome is imposed - only one side wins - often neither is happy. It is further instructive that over the last 6 years, the Court has recorded an average of 5,000 civil High Court filings per year.

Therefore, is there an alternative where individuals or organisations can access justice? Mediation provides such an opportunity. It is a process where a trained neutral assists disputing parties to identify issues and possible solutions and reach their own agreement on an outcome. Participation is voluntary and confidential and it provides a safe area to explore options. With mediation, the focus is on parties concerns and they are very involved in the process. The process contemplates heightened emotions and anger can be filtered out by restating issues so parties feel that they have been heard. Mediation can shorten litigation and reduce the cost associated with it. Agreements reached can stay private or become the basis for a consent court order.

The Judiciary has been a champion of mediation. In 2010 and 2013 they sponsored two court-annexed mediation projects in which over 280 High Court matters were referred to the DRC for mediation. The projects closed a with settlement rate of 70 percent; a 95 percent customer satisfaction rating; and with 100 percent of the participants reporting that they would use or recommend mediation again. Matters filed in the courts for over 10 years were settled in either one or two mediation sessions. There was savings in time, money and relationships and parties were able to finally bring closure to their disputes.

While the DRC focuses primarily on corporate and commercial work, it continues to build a reputation for social responsibility. One example has been the work undertaken with the Citizens Security Programme in training and developing residents in conflict resolution and mediation so they can work toward violence reduction and peace promotion within their communities. It is widely accepted that the integration of community-based mediation services has a preventative and transformative impact on communities with long-ranging social justice benefits. During the DRCs last 10-month project, 80 percent of the participants were recommended to serve as community based mediators. By the end of 2016, the DRC expects to have trained 100 residents from CSP partner communities
What exactly is a zangee?

Some will tell you it is a swamp eel, others insist on calling it a water snake.

More still will reveal that they are not sure what a zangee is exactly, but they are terrified of them nonetheless; perhaps they have heard the rumours about this mysterious creature, which is said to suck on your toes should you happen to tread barefooted into the water.

The truth is that the zangee, more formally known as Synbranchus marmoratus, is actually a type of fish. With their slippery, elongated body (up to 1.5 metres long), the confusion is entirely understandable.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that they lack well-developed fins and their bodies are essentially scaleless. Indeed, it is surprising to discover that they are not closely related to the true eels at all (which may also be found occasionally in Trinidadian waters), and their resemblance to a snake is entirely superficial.

Sometimes spelt janjii or zangie, the origin of the name is actually les anguilles which is French for eel. Like many local French-derived names that begin with the letter a, Trinidadians added a z and, over time, the word morphed into the zangee that we know today.

Outside of Trinidad, the zangee is found throughout Mexico, Central and South America and on a few islands of the Caribbean.

Within TT , it is one of the most widespread fish in the islands waterways, inhabiting a wide range of habitats from muddy swamps and drainage ditches to clear, pristine mountain streams. It is primarily found on the southern slopes of the Northern Range, but has on occasion been found along the north coast at Sans Souci and Yarra.

Like all fish, the zangee absorbs oxygen while underwater via its gills. However, amazingly it is also capable of absorbing atmospheric oxygen via the surfaces of its mouth and throat. This is advantageous in several ways.

Firstly, it grants it the unusual ability to travel overland, between ponds and streams for example, which it takes advantage of mostly after dark when there is less risk of drying out.

Indeed, the zangee is primarily nocturnal, emerging from the edges of the stream at night to feed on small aquatic animals including fish, tadpoles and aquatic insects. It is also regarded as a scavenger and, in the presence of carrion, zangee have even been spotted on open grass areas in daylight.

Secondly, the ability to breathe atmospheric air also allows it to better survive the dry season should it finds itself in a waterway which has dried up. In such a case the zangee might excavate a small burrow in which it can wait in a semi-dormant state until the rains return. Studies have indicated that these fish can survive out of water like this for as long as nine months.

Finally, because it does not have to rely on oxygenated water, the zangee can survive in stagnant waterways in which other fish may not be able to.

However, this doesnt seem to prevent them from also making their home in the clear, well-oxygenated streams of the lower parts of the Northern Range and elsewhere.

The air breathing ability of the zangee is not its only bizarre trait. They are also hermaphroditic, so that while most individuals are born female, some can and will change into functional males as they mature. Eggs are buried in the river bank and tended to by the male before hatching into larvae. These newly-hatched larvae look quite different to their parents, with greatly exaggerated pectoral fins for gas exchange, which are shed after their first couple of weeks.

Both young and adult zangee face predators such as caiman, waterbirds and large fish, and they use their cryptic marbled, reddish-brown colouration to help conceal themselves in muddy environments. While they are also eaten by humans, they are not usually intentionally hunted for food in Trinidad. Rather, specimens may occasionally get caught on the hooks and in the nets of fisherman and are then eaten.

Outside of our region, however, members of the Synbranchidae are widely consumed, especially in China where stir-fried swamp eel is considered a delicacy.

As with much of our flora and fauna, there is much to learn about our zangee. For a start, it is clear that any fear we have for this fish is entirely unfounded  it is completely harmless to humans and an important member of our freshwater ecosystem. We hope that readers will now have a greater appreciation for this odd yet fascinating fish.

For more information on our natural environment, you can contact the Trinidad and Tobago Field Naturalists Club at admin@ttfnc.org or visit our website at www.ttfnc.org and our Facebook or YouTube pages.
I WANT MY MONEY!

Speaking before a small but boisterous crowd of Peoples National Movement (PNM) supporters at a PNM public meeting at the St Joseph Community Centre, Rowley said although the then Peoples Partnership (PP) government succeeded in ejecting him from the House, they cold not displace him as Opposition Leader.

Dr Rowley also said that any denial of his salary would suggest he was not in the post of Opposition Leader and therefore, any appointments which he gave consent to at that time, could be considered null and void, including assent for an Acting Chief Justice appointment. He asked that if he was not Opposition Leader then all of the decisions made by that Acting Chief Justice could also be brought into question. Efforts by Newsday to reach officials from the TT Parliament for a response to the Prime Ministers demands, proved futile.Rowley was suspended last May after a Motion of Censure was passed by the Peoples Partnership government. The Motion alleged recklessness by Rowley in relation to his utterances on a series of emails which alleged the then PP Government had conspired to commit murder. Rowley was suspended just before the Parliament was dissolved to facilitate the September General Election. He returned to the Parliament as Prime Minister. Ive told my lawyer to tell the Parliament, I want my money, Rowley said.

In all, for his suspension, Rowley would have lost salary and perks totalling about $50,000 which Parliamentary officials said last May, that he would not get back. As Prime Minister, according to the Salaries Review Commission (SRC). The Prime Ministers salary is at present $59,680, minus perks.

Later in the meeting Rowley replied to Opposition criticism of the Governments withdrawal of $2.5 billion from the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund (HSF). He read out a 2014 PP Cabinet minute that suggested the former regime had agreed with advice received against breaking down the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund into its two components.

Regarding the countrys economic state, the PM vowed to act fearlessly to do what needs to be done and not to act as if he is fighting a general election every year. Picking up on Finance Minister Colm Imberts earlier account of the travails of having to fund the country, Dr Rowley said it is Governments duty to pay such bills including State workers salaries but not to fill people will terror over the state of the economy. There is light at the end of the tunnel, he said encouragingly.

On economic diversification, Dr Rowley had great hope for a proposal to build a 750-room Sandals hotel in Tobago, so as to lift the local tourism product plus infrastructure such as water and electricity supplies, plus maybe one or two marinas. This hotel, plus the new road from Valencia to Toco and the Toco ferry port to Tobago, will create thousands of jobs in construction and operationalisation, he said.

Weve got to think big and move fast. Crime must be curbed top boost tourism, he added. He seemed to allude to dissatisfaction with Acting Police Commissioner Stephen Williams by recalling that the British Armys fortunes in North Africa in World War Two were boosted by replacing the incumbent by General Montgomery.

He hit the PP on financial highlighting a $35 million contract over five years awarded to a PP government ministers relative, to run the National Lottery draws.

He alleged that the Chaguaramas Development Authority (CDA), under the PP, paid a public relations agency fees of $9 million. Dr Rowley hit the PP for allowing their purchased Chinese warship to sail unarmed, through pirate-infested waters and for buying a Damen vessel which he said was inferior to the PNMs planned Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs).
2 killed in Valencia crash

Grieving father of the female victim Eric Alvarez told Newsday yesterday at the Forensic Science Centre in St James, that he bears no malice to anyone involved in the accident. At the end of the day I dont blame anybody, Alvarez said. If I dont feel hurt, I would not be human. She was my first born. When I saw her on that cold slab inside Forensic, I bawled like a baby. Sometimes accidents happen. Sometimes people take chances and there are fatal consequences. As much as it hurts, we have to move on from here, he added.

According to police, Alvarez and Mitchell were in a white Mazda 3 car proceeding along the Churchill Roosevelt Highway at about 11.15 pm on Monday.

When they reached the Cumuto traffic lights, Mitchell who was driving, attempted to make a sudden right turn. At the same time, a truck was heading in the opposite direction. When Mitchell attempted the right turn, the truck slammed into the left side of the car.

The car then slammed into a light pole, which caused a power outage in several areas including Sangre Grande, Cumuto, Maturita and Valencia. Alvarez, who was in the front passengers seat, died from the impact with the truck while the force of the impact of the car slamming into the electricity pole, killed Mitchell.

Lisa Mitchell-Mc Intosh, Mitchells mother, told Newsday yesterday that he only got the vehicle a month ago. My son was a tattoo artist, that is what he did for a living, said Mitchell-Mc Intosh.

He loved doing tattoos. If you look at his skin, it looks like a colouring book. He got the car to make things a little easier. It is not every day someone would take a tattoo, but with the car he could work a little PH, and still be able to drop his children to school and pick up his wife from work. I dont know why this happened to him. He was the joy of my house.

He would always play the fool and have us laughing. None of us; not his wife, or his children or his brothers can come to terms with this. Alvarez described his daughter as a polite, jovial, and friendly person, who was also very active in the church. She worked as an attendant in the bakery at Massy stores, in Macoya. Her uncle, soca artiste Ian Bunji Garlin Alvarez, also showed up at the Forensic Science Centre with his wife Fay-Ann Alvarez, also a soca star, to lend support to his family.

He however was too emotional to speak to members of the media while at the centre. Police sources have confirmed that the number of road fatalities for the year stands at 63, as compared to 64 for the same period in 2015.
Show compassion for gays

A total of 49 members of the LBGT community were shot and killed and another 53 persons injured when a gunman opened fire on them in the early hours of Sunday morning. The shooter Omar Mateen was subsequently shot and killed. Harris was speaking yesterday during his monthly live Facebook chat Ask the Archbishop Live hosted at the Archbishops House by the communications arm of the local catholic church.

The LGBT community is a community, they are human beings.

The days are long past and I dont know if they will ever come back, where people were ashamed of their sexual identity if they were not straight, or what have you.

So I think it is a reality that is there, it is neither good or bad.

What we have to do, is ensure that in our relationship with the LGBT community, they are treated as human beings, that is the only Christian thing to do. As he made reference to a Bible passage, St Pauls letter to the Romans.

Harris said during the time of Jesus Christ there were gays, there were homosexuals but Jesus never ill-treated them because of their sexual orientation. You never see Jesus treating somebody courting sexual sin, with anything but total compassion. I think we have to be the same way, Harris said as he went on to knock those who celebrated the death of members of the gay community. He called it craziness. Harris said just as the Church does not condone homosexuality as it is against the Law of God, in the same way it does not condone violence committed against anyone as persons are all meant to be respected. While hoping that US levels of gun violence never reaches Trinidad and Tobago, Harris said he hopes the authorities are taking note of the number of murders committed with the gun and warned that something must be done stop the proliferation of guns in the country and also to get them out of the hands of criminals.

Long ago, you know, when somebody was murdered, when somebody was chopped up whether cutlass or something or the fellas chook them with a knife and they die. Now it is firearms. We have to make an effort to get rid of that indiscriminate ownership and use of firearms. Once upon a time, Trinidad was a real kind and gentle place. We seem to have lost that, we seem to be always trying to one up the other person.

That is not what life is about., life is about love and love is abut doing the best that we can for our others and if we can do that, then the country would be a very different country to the one it is today, he said.
Attorney Kamla leads case

Her return to the bar yesterday, saw her seated at the front of the court, reserved for senior counsel. Persad-Bissessar was bestowed with silk (Senior Counsel status) in 2012. She led her former Attorney General Anand Ramlogan SC (who sat at her side at the bar table), Jayanti Lutchmedial, Kent Samlal and Alvin Pariagsingh in the administrative interpretation application being sought by retired Inspector Harridath Maharaj. The ex-officer has filed an administrative interpretation application for a declaration on the constitutional validity of the Commissioner of Police and Deputy Commissioner of Police (Selection Process) Order of 2015, against the Attorney General .

Persad-Bissessar said she was happy to be back as an advocate in the courts. Justice Peter Rajkumar, who is presiding over the case and has reserved his ruling on the application, is being asked to declare whether the two administrative orders are constitutional .

Douglas Mendes and Rishi Dass led a team of attorneys from the Solicitor Generals Department for the AG, while Russell Martineau SC, appears for the Police Service Commission (PSC) which was not named in the action, but was allowed to make submissions in Maharajs application .

Maharaj, in his application, has argued that the notices change the selection process for the top cop and his deputy and would compromise the independence of the PSC, as there is the possibility of direct or indirect political influence in the recruitment firm .

Persad-Bissessar argued that the PSC had exclusive jurisdiction over the appointment process and this must be retained and insulated from political interference .
David Cameron in London on Wednesday. FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA (EFE)

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that he will not be taking part in an anti-Brexit rally in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar after a Labour member of parliament was attacked in the street in a city close to Leeds, England on Thursday.

The Conservative politician was scheduled to travel to Gibraltar to campaign in favor of remaining within the European Union, just one week ahead of Britains pivotal referendum on UKs permanence in the union.

It would mark the first visit to The Rock by a serving prime minister of Britain since 1968.

However, the plans were put on hold after Labour MP Jo Cox suffered a horrific attack in the street in the city of Birstall, where she was also campaigning in favor of the UK staying in the EU. The 41-year-old former aid worker was shot and stabbed by a man on the street who is reported to have shouted Britain first during the attack.

The Gibraltar Stronger In campaign had announced that Cameron was to participate in a public event at 5pm alongside Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, the leader of the Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party. The British PM was also expected to hold a press conference and to be interviewed by a local television station.

But in line with other politicians and campaigners, both for and against Brexit, these events have been put on hold.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy sent a tweet on Thursday afternoon condemning the attack.

I condemn the terrible assault suffered by British MP Jo Cox. Violence has no room in democracy. I wish her a speedy recovery. MR

Spanish displeasure

The Spanish government expressed its displeasure on Wednesday, shortly after Camerons visit was confirmed. Sources within the acting Popular Party (PP) administration said that it was informed by Camerons team that the British prime minister would be in Gibraltar for two hours.

The government does not like Mr Cameron going to Gibraltar, said Spanish acting PM Mariano Rajoy in a radio interview. Whats being debated is whether the UK remains in the EU or leaves the EU, and the campaign for that should be conducted in the UK, not in Gibraltar.

A rerouted flight On May 11, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond paid a visit of his own to the Rock, which Spain described as offensive. Hammond told Gibraltarians that London will not begin any negotiations with Madrid over the Rocks sovereignty status without approval from Gibraltar. The official aircraft that took the foreign secretary to the Rock had to take a detour through Portuguese airspace, as it was denied access over Spanish territory. Spanish diplomatic sources said this is standard procedure for any state flight going to or returning from Gibraltar.

Rajoy added that regardless of whether Brexit wins or loses, Spain continues to think that Gibraltar is part of its own national territory, not Britains.

But Fabian Picardo called the visit historic.

It demonstrates the commitment to Gibraltar that Mr Cameron has displayed since we were first elected, the Chief Minister told the Gibraltar Chronicle.

Gibraltarians are expected to vote massively in favor of remaining within the EU. Picardo has described the referendum as a political meteorite aimed at Gibraltar, and Brexit as potentially disastrous for the local economy.

Nearly 23,000 out of the 32,000 residents are being asked to vote on June 23, even though they do not vote in Britains general elections. Gibraltar is the only overseas territory that joined the European Economic Union in 1973 along with the UK, and the only overseas territory with the right to vote on Brexit.

Spains acting justice minister, Rafael Catala, has admitted that a Brexit would open up a new scenario of redefined European borders, and that this fact would force Spain to completely reconsider its relationship with Gibraltar.

English version by Susana Urra and Simon Hunter.
Jobless 69 to be absorbed in other Food Basket stores

A director of the company yesterday told Newsday that the employees including supervisors, kitchen, bakery and other staff members would be offered employment at the companys other locations which include its accounts department at Fredrick Settlement, Caroni. The director said a shuttle service would be used to transport those workers who opted to work at its Arima location with discussions taking place with the workers regarding the shifts at the facility. Workers are expected to start duties on Friday.

Regarding the cause of the fire, the Director said investigations are ongoing by the fire department while a damage estimate had not yet been calculated.

When Newsday visited the supermarket yesterday, two appliances were observed at the back of the building with fire-fighters saying they had received reports of a reigniting of the blaze. Meanwhile, the Chaguanas Chamber of Industry and Commerce in a statement pledged its commitment to supporting the owners, management and employees of the Supermarket.

And, in light of the loss and its impact on the town of Chaguanas, we are urgently calling for a meeting of stakeholders to put together a disaster management plan for the area, the Chamber stated and observed that Supermarket had been an institution in Chaguanas for many years and is well known to persons travelling along the Butler Highway as a landmark that identifies the area. While the Chamber praised both the Fire Service officers and Central Division police officers for their work in containing the fire as well as ensuring a free flow of traffic, said there was a need for a proper evacuation plan for the town of Chaguanas.
CDA head Hargreaves axed

Hargreaves and CDA Corporate Services Manager Brent Meade, were fired last month. They were all sent on leave in December, pending the outcome of the audit which was conducted by Ernst & Young. Also sent on leave were Hugh Thomas, Divisional Manager (Operations) and Wade Lalsingh Divisional Manager, Operations who have since tendered their resignations.

The minister told Newsday she received the report on Monday and the audit found a number of irregularities including the misuse of Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP) funding of nearly $41 million. Robinson-Regis said she was taken aback when she first read the report. It was clear evidence of misuse of public funds, she said.

The minister said she was going through the report carefully before preparing a note to take to Cabinet.

I would take my direction from the Cabinet because they need to be made aware of what has happened, she said. Robinson-Regis said the CDA will put out advertisements soon for a new Chief Executive Officer.

The audit was conducted after concerns were raised by the CDA Board, which is chaired by Anthony Pierre. In January.
NIB, PSA settle on 14%

The workers will benefit from increases of three percent for January 01, 2011, four percent for January 01, 2012, and seven percent for January 01, 2013.

In a statement issued yesterday, the NIB said the successful conclusion of the negotiations will bring staff salaries up to 2013.

The NIBs Executive Director, Niala Persad-Poliah, expressed pleasure at the conclusion of the negotiations. During the signing ceremony in the NIB boardroom at its headquarters, Cipriani Boulevard, Port-of-Spain, she said now the negotiations for 2011- 2013 had been settled the board intended to immediately start talks for the new period, recognising that our employees are critical to the operations and future development of the organisation, it is our hope to bring their salaries current.
Hulsie calls for more State support for NGOs

Bhaggan, who is now an administrator with the Living Water Community, appealed to JSC members at a public hearing at Tower D of the Port-of-Spain International Waterfront Centre that there needed to be more State support to assist NGOs in doing the important work they do on the ground in dealing with socially displaced persons in this country.

She suggested that the support which the State provides to NGOs could involve some element of financing.

The former MP said NGOs could not spend all their time raising funds when we could be saving lives. Bhaggan explained that in dealing with socially displaced persons, persons who are mentally ill should not be placed in facilities together with persons who are substance abusers. You cant just herd people like sheep, Bhaggan stated.

Expressing the view that socially displaced persons can be rehabilitated, the former MP said what is missing is the necessary institutional support.

Bhaggan called for the establishment of proper detox centers, convalescence and transition centres to address the different types of socially displaced persons on the streets of TT.

Living Waters founder Rhonda Maingot told JSC members that no one in this country has been ever been able to put our finger on the problem of socially displaced persons in this country.

As she outlined the various ways in which Living Waters has attempted to address this issue over the last 30 years and the associated challenges, Maingot referred to an initiative successfully employed in Miami, Florida which has significantly reduced the number of homeless persons in that city and ensured their proper rehabilitation.

She also said the Miami initiative involved partial funding through a homeless tax. Maingot suggested a similar initiative be explored in TT and said each socially displaced person needed to be dealt with on a one on one basis.

In response to a question from JSC chairman Dr Dhanayshar Mahabir about the cost to treat a socially displaced person, Pastor Glen Awong of Transformed Life Ministry said the average cost for his organisation to do so is $6,000. Vision on Mission (VOM) president Wayne Chance said his group has successfully reintegrated 11,000 persons back into society since its genesis
MPs blow kisses at TTMF

At a Parliament committee meeting, MPs remarked that what they saw of the TTMFs performance for the period 2008- 2014 was unlike what they have seen at other State entities thus far during the Eleventh Parliament.

Committee members gushed over the fact that the TTMF had introduced whistle-blower protections, already completed collective wage bargaining up to 2019, made millions of dollars in profits, was self-sustainable, had submitted its financial reports for Parliament on time, and had even drawn up plans to protect 78 people rendered vulnerable to losing their homes in the current economic climate.

It was in stark contrast with scenes at Parliament oversight committees for the last few months where agencies ranging from Petrotrin to the Tobago House of Assembly have provoked many complaints from MPs.

I want to commend you given that we have seen other kinds of behaviour, said Tourism Minister Shamfa Cudjoe.

I want to commend you because I know it is not an easy task to be current with your collective agreements, said Social Development Minister Cherrie-Ann Crichlow- Cockburn. She added, I want to commend the TTMF on that protection for whistle-blowers. UNC Caroni East MP Dr Tim Gopeesingh said, Congratulations on your financial ratios. Independent Senator David Small described the TTMF as a good entity. Its probably because Im a customer, he joked, provoking laughter.

Committee chairman Wade Mark ended the meeting describing TTMF CEO Ingrid Lashley as talented, competent and capable.

I really want to extend our collective thanks to you and the team, Mark said. I thought it was a very wonderful experience. He praised the TTMFs excellence. There was only one major criticism.

Earlier, the committee heard some questions about the TTMFs advertising of mortgage rates at two percent and five percent, with Mark questioning whether the entity was misleading the public as a furniture store might. However, Lashley assured every single applicant is fully informed of the terms of mortgages which are graduated, with later rates sometimes reaching as high as seven percent. The committee also heard that the TTMF made $75.5 million in profit in 2014, had a customer base of 15,012 in that year, was expected to grow by 1,700 customers, has three members on its internal audit team, gives customers time to avoid foreclosure processes which are not normally triggered earlier than two years, had counselled about 78 people who were liable to default given the downturn in the economy, raised $1 billion in its own finances through bonds, was cooperating with the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) to see 6,000 leases issued in relation to licence to occupy arrangements.

In relation to the use of mortgages as securities, Senator Small warned against NINJA mortgages (no income, no job and no assets). However, Lashley said anyone granted a mortgage must meet conditions.
Protest bears fruit for All Trinidad Union

The union members who are employed at Mora valley Farm staged a protest on Tuesday at the Ministry of agriculture head offices in Port-of-Spain .

In a statement yesterday, the union president, Nirvan Maharaj announced that he was contacted by Minister Rambharat and assured that steps will be taken to ensure the continuing survival of the last remaining Buffalypso in Trinidad and Tobago.

Maharaj stated that he was further assured that all outstanding issues such as health and safety, security, and understaffing will be immediately addressed by the Permanent Secretary with a view to resolution and that instructions would be given to the Office of the Chief Personnel Officer in relation to the outstanding negotiations for and on behalf of the employees of the Mora Valley Farm and the Sugarcane Feeds Centre.

Maharaj also noted that the minister further committed that the process for the release of funding for the Sugarcane Feeds Centre would be immediately addressed. Maharaj stated that the union and by extension the employees of the Mora Valley Farm, La Gloria Estate and the Sugarcane Feeds Centre are eagerly awaiting the fulfilment of the guarantees given by Minister Rambharat and fervently hope that the Ministers promises would not be vacuous and create further hardships for the workers.
Mora Valley Farm workers picket Agri Ministry

On Tuesday, along with their union leaders, the workers vociferously picketed the minister and permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture outside the Ministrys St Clair head office.

Speaking on their behalf, branch officer Lalchand Sookoo told the media that since 2007 the workers at Mora Valley and La Gloria have had no wage increase, and since 2006 no gratuity has been paid to workers who have since retired.

He said that the ministry asked employees to work through their vacation in 2010, 2011, and 2012 and they have not been paid for doing so. Health and safety issues, he said, were not being addressed at Mora Valley where the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission disconnected electricity from the premises since 2015.

One watchman is working in the night in total darkness, he said claiming that the ministry is playing games with the workers, and was not serious about farming.

At present, he said that Mora Valley Farm that the lives of 1000 heads of buffalypso were threatened as ten have died for June alone when the average was five deaths a year.

During the dry season, the animals were underfed, as the pastures were dry, he said.

Unlike other workers who enjoy national holidays, Sookoo said the workers at Mora Valley and La Gloria are not holidays because they have no replacement worker.

In 2013, he said, the then previous administration took a decision to regularise the status of workers and to pay all outstanding money. Up to this day, he said, not one cent. Rambharat was aware of the conditions, he said, because he has visited the farm on more than one occasion and letters were written to him about it.

As they were picketing, President of the All Trinidad General Workers Union (ATGWU) President General Nirvan Maharaj was in a meeting as part of the National Trade Union Centres delegation that met with Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley.

Maharaj told the media that the union had made representation on several occasions to the minister who assured them that he would arrange a meeting with them and the Permanent Secretary. To date the Permanent Secretary has not contacted the union.

He said he had wanted to raise the issue with the Prime Minister but the time limit on the meeting did not allow them to go into intimate details on issues. He said he intends to write the Prime Minister on the issues affecting Mora Valley and the other areas.
Recall of Sleep

Apnea Device

Is Not Going Well
Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig hang out off-screen after significant onscreen chemistry of "Tomb Raider." Has Jolie put down Brad Pitt over the "James Bond" star Daniel Craig?

There are many speculations around on their off-screen hang-out. However, neither Angelina Jolie nor Daniel Craig ever came out with any confirmation the buzz remained.

Citing RadarOnline.com, Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig are now possibly building up a heartbreak for Brad Pitt over the amount of time they spend on the phone with each other. According to the media outlet, Angelina Jolie initiated the contact with Daniel Craig to congratulate him on United Nations business.

The Guardian reports, Daniel Craig was chosen as UN's Global Advocate for the Elimination of Mines and Explosive Hazards in 2015 and Angelina Jolie wishes to bank upon this capacity.

"Angelina called him to praise his efforts, and the pair have been blowing up the phones ever since," an alleged source supposedly told Radar Online. "Angie and Daniel always got on well and are thrilled they've reconnected over a worthy cause."

Meanwhile, added the source, "What their respective spouses think about this ancient hookup being revitalized remains to be seen, but for now [Angelina Jolie] and Daniel are talking on the phone a lot."

Gossip Cop spoke with Daniel Craig's rep, who said the allegations are "incorrect." It's also noted in the report that Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig NEVER hooked up, either.

A Metro report doubts on the speculations, as Angelina Jolie will also have a full syllabus to get through as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics' Center for Women, Peace and Security as the New York Times reports.

All the three, Daniel Craig, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are well known humanitarians on both local and global capacity.
Spain's Mariano Rajoy and Britain's David Cameron in September 2015 Claudio Alvarez

The main candidates to the Spanish general election of June 26 all share a desire for Britain to remain within the European Union.

But beyond their generic statements against a Brexit, none of them has made any significant contribution to the public debate over the repercussions that such a move might have for Spain.

Yet the shock to the European project could have clear effects back home, say some Spanish analysts.

Podemos is the only Spanish party that sent a member to Britain to actively campaign for Remain

Spains own country-project has always walked hand-in-hand with European integration ever since the transition to democracy, writes Salvador Llaudes, a researcher at the Real Instituto Elcano think tank. Out of pure logic, any risk to the common project  and Brexit certainly is  would entail a risk to Spain.

To this must be added the fact that trade relations with the UK represent nearly 55 billion for Spain, and that more than 700 companies with British capital are established on Spanish territory (and there are over 300 Spanish companies in the British Isles).

Meanwhile, 15 million British tourists visit Spain each year. It is to be expected that a depreciated pound would make their travel plans more expensive. There are also over 300,000 British expats officially living in Spain, while over 200,000 Spaniards currently reside in Britain. All of these individuals are concerned that a Brexit would affect their eligibility for social services in their host country.

And last but not least, the question of Gibraltar would be more difficult to resolve outside the collaborative framework of the European Union.

Three days before Spanish election

The British will vote on whether to remain in the EU just three days before Spaniards go to the polls in a fresh general election following the inconclusive ballot of December 20.

All the Spanish candidates to the prime ministers office have analyzed the potential effects of a Brexit on Spanish politics, but they have not taken their concerns to the public arena. Instead, they only share their thoughts when specifically asked about the matter.

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Acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party (PP) was crystal clear on Wednesday: A Brexit would be catastrophic for the Spanish stock market and for all stock markets. For the British economy and for all European economies. I think it would be the worst possible news in many years, in economic terms, and I hope that British citizens will finally vote to remain in Europe, among other things because we Europeans want them to stay.

Socialist Party sources say that Pedro Sanchez, their nominee, constantly mentions Brexit in his meetings with his expert committee. This and the refugee crisis are the two issues that confirm the weakness of the European project, understood in its origin as a space for cooperation and shared values.

Sanchez said in a television interview on Wednesday that if the Brexit option wins, we Socialists will team up with other European social democrats to relaunch a European project that will allow us to continue progressing toward a Europe that is stronger, more united, more prosperous and more social.

Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera, the candidate who tends to incorporate more European issues into the public debate, said that we need to make the most of the European crisis to restart Europe.

If we remain stuck and scared to death, there will be a fragile government and fragile institutions, and the exact same thing is happening in Europe, he said in Madrid on Tuesday.

Podemos concerned

But if anyone is showing concern, that is Unidos Podemos, the alliance made up of the anti-austerity Podemos and the hard-left federation Izquierda Unida (United Left). This new coalition includes one member, the Spanish Communist Party, which openly supports a Spanish exit from the EU and recovering economic sovereignty.

But Podemos is making efforts to showcase that it does not agree with this point, and that it opposes Brexit as well. In fact, they are the only Spanish party that sent a member to Britain to actively campaign for Remain.

Although no Spanish party will deny that a Brexit poses a serious threat to the future of the EU, few are paying close attention to a country with a parliamentary monarchy like Spains, with a territorial structure not unlike Spains, with a similar production model based heavily on the financial sector, and with similar problems with breakaway regions. Scotland is already threatening with a second independence vote if Britain exits the EU, and that would give renewed energy to pro-independence movements like the one in Catalonia.

English version by Susana Urra.
The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574.
New Delhi:

The government today increased the size of the buffer stock of pulses by five times to 8 lakh tonnes for this year as it seeks to sell lentils at a cheaper rate to give relief to consumers. A decision in this regard was taken at a high-level meeting chaired by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley here.

Pulses prices in retail markets are ruling over Rs 170 per kg now despite several measures to boost supply in the last couple of months.

Union Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh, Urban Development Minister M Venkaiah Naidu, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitaraman, and secretaries of the ministries were among those present in the meeting that reviewed the prices of pulses and other essential commodities.

In a significant decision, the government has decided to enhance the buffer stock of pulses from 1.5 lakh tonnes to 8 lakh tonnes in a high-level meeting on prices held here today, an official statement by the Food Ministry said. The decision is in line with the recommendation of an inter-panel set up by the ministry.

The buffer stock is being created by procuring pulses directly from farmers at market prices using the Price Stabilisation Fund. The stock is being released to states for retail distribution at highly subsidised rate of Rs 120 per kg.

So far, the government has procured 1.15 lakh tonnes of pulses through state-run agencies like FCI and SFAC. Of which, over 10,000 tonnes has been released to states like Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu for retail distribution.

The buffer stock is being created through domestic procurement as well as through imports in order to address the deficit of 7.6 million tonnes of pulses.

Production of pulses is estimated to have declined to 17.06 million tonnes in 2015-16 crop year (July-June) due to two consecutive years of drought, while the demand for it stands at 23.5 million tonnes.

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Presentation of the CEAR report on Thursday in Madrid. Chema Moya (EFE)

The Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) warned on Thursday that last year just three out of every 10 requests for asylum that were examined were accepted in Spain. Thats 31%, down from 44% the year before.

In other words, Spain rejected seven out of every 10 requests that were accepted for consideration.

By nationality, Spain has received most asylum requests from Syria, with 5,724 people last year

The increased controls at borders and inaction when it comes to offering legal means to request international protection in Europe and Spain has caused a serious setback and has put a human right such as asylum in danger, according to the yearly report from CEAR. In the case of Spain, which in 2015 registered 15,000 requests, the document reveals that just 3,240 were resolved, of which 31% (1,020) were granted. The EU average for granting such requests is 50%.

The percentage has fallen despite a rise in the volume of requests, the report explains. The 15,000 registered in Spain in 2015 is well up on the 6,000 seen the year before. Spain has broken a scrawny record, explained CEAR general secretary Estrella Galan at the presentation of the report, given that it has only received 1% of the total number of requests in the EU, which come in at 1.3 million. Countries such as Germany and Sweden have seen 476,000 and 162,000 requests, respectively.

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By nationality, Spain has received most asylum requests from Syria, with 5,724 people last year. Next is Ukraine, with 3,440, and Palestine, with 809. Of the requests, 63% were from men, and 37% from women.

CEAR warns that European states are putting impediments in the way of refugees exercising their right to asylum, forcing them to seek routes that are more and more dangerous, among which are those that include crossing the Mediterranean, which is the deadliest route in the world, according to the NGO.

Galan explained that one in every 27 people who tries to reach Europe via that sea route ends up dead, a rate that has risen over the months of April and May to one in every 17. CEAR estimates that 3,000 people have died so far in 2016 trying to make the crossing. International agreements have been left to flounder in the Mediterranean, she concluded.

English version by Simon Hunter.
Addis Ababa:

More than 400 people have been killed in Ethiopia since November in a crackdown on anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch said today, but the government immediately dismissed the claims.

Tens of thousands more were also arrested by security forces in widespread protests in the Oromia region since November 2015, the US-based HRW said. The protests were sparked by plans to expand the capital into outlying farmland. The report, titled Such a Brutal Crackdown, was based on over 125 interviews with protestors and those caught up in the violence.

It spoke of the governments use of excessive and unnecessary lethal force and mass arrests, mistreatment in detention, and restrictions on access to information to quash the protest movement.

The demonstrations were triggered by a government plan to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa into Oromia. The project was dropped on January 12 but protests continued for weeks.

But government spokesman Getachew Reda dismissed the report, saying that HRW, is very generous with numbers when it comes to Ethiopia and attributed any violence on the part of security forces to bad apples. The government feels regret that people are killed, he said. Reda said the Human Rights Council of Ethiopia, a non-governmental organisation, had said 103 people died.

Why couldnt they come up with others names? Because those names dont exist, Reda said. HRW however said it along with other organisations had identified more than 300 of those killed by name and, in some cases, with photos, and it was not a case of isolated pockets of violence.

Some of those arrested and later released told HRW they were tortured or mistreated inside prison, with several women alleging they were raped.

Some said they were hung by their ankles and beaten; others described having electric shocks applied to their feet, or weights tied to their testicles, HRW said.

With at least 27 million people, Oromia is the most populous of the countrys federal states and has its own language, Oromo, distinct from Ethiopias official Amharic language.

Ethiopian security forces have fired on and killed hundreds of students, farmers, and other peaceful protesters with blatant disregard for human life, HRWs deputy Africa chief Leslie Lefkow said.

The government should immediately free those wrongfully detained, support a credible, independent investigation, and hold security force members accountable for abuses.

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New Delhi:

Former Maharashtra Revenue Minister Eknath Khadse got a clean chit from the state Anti Terror Squad or ATS which concluded that Khadse exchanged no phone calls with gangster Dawood Ibrahim. Now the ATS may file a case against whistleblower Manish Bangale, who had alleged that Mr Khadse had made several calls to a mobile number in Pakistan belonging to the underworld don, who tops India's most wanted listed for his role in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

ATS reached the conclusion after making extension checks on the period that Mr. Bangale had claimed were made allegedly between Khadse and Dawood. But no such exchange of phone calls was found between the two. Now Bangale has been given a month to respond by the ATS and explain his allegations.

Khadse has been denying the allegations and said that the mobile number in question was not even operational for the past one year. Khadse resigned from Devendra Fadnaviss government after allegations of illicit land swirled around him.

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New Delhi:

Voicing concerns over India's run for NSG membership, China today said If India succeeds in entering the elite grouping, this will strike off the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan. The statement comes after New Zealand also seems to be softening its stance on Indias NSG membership.

It is noteworthy that Turkey continues to back Pakistan insisting that applications of both the countries India and Pakistan be considered simultaneously. Pakistans Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz has thanked Turkey for its principled position on the NSG issue.

If reports from Vienna where the NSG met last week are to be believed Turkey was among those countries which had opposed India's membership on the grounds that it had not signed Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

China has been quite vocal of its opposition to Indias joining of the NSG club. Where it has been against Indias bid, China also makes it clear that it could support India's inclusion in the nuclear club if it played by the rules.

In an article by Fu Xiaoqiang, research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations raised his concerns, "The major goal for India's NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken.

"Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power," said the article.

Though John Kerrys efforts asking NSG member countries not to block Indias consensus for the membership seems to be working out in the right direction. A few days ago, Aziz had also stressed that Pakistans credentials are stronger than Indias for NSG membership.

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New Delhi:

Four to five unidnetified men forcefully entered inside a residence in Chhatarpur with a motive to loot money and valuable items.



While they were executing their desired motive, an encounter with the house owner, a businessman, resulted in a panic situation. In a bid to safeguard money and important valuables the businessman lost his life.



Cops have nabbed five suspect men and have been detained.



Such incidents are not new in the area, several other cases including shootout of famous businessman Ponty Chaddha belong to the area.

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New Delhi:

India today downplayed the US Senate rejecting a key amendment recognising the country as global strategic and defence partner, saying it would be premature to speculate about its final content.

The US had recognised India as a major defence partner in a joint statement issued during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit there last week.

We have seen media reports about non-inclusion of an India-related amendment in the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by the US Senate.

The preparation of NDAA in the US Congress involves approval of different versions in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and their reconciliation to evolve a single consensual text, which is again put to vote in both chambers.

The 2017 NDAA is in the process of its formulation and it would be premature to speculate about its final content, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

He also noted that preparation of NDAA is a process distinct from the decision of the US Government to recognize India as a Major Defense Partner.

This was an executive decision and already announced in the India-US Joint Statement of June 7. A number of Senators and Congressmen have moved proposals that only seek to reinforce this decision of the US Government. It reflects the bipartisan support in the US Congress for stronger defence cooperation between India and the US, he added.

The US Senate failed to recognise India as a global strategic and defence partner of the US after a key amendment necessary to modify its export control regulations could not be passed.

Top Republican senator John McCain had moved an amendment to the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA-17) which if passed would have recognised India as a global strategic and defence partner.

The US had recognised India as a major defence partner in a joint statement issued after Modi held talks with President Barack Obama which supported defence-related trade and technology transfer to the country which would now be treated on par with Americas closest allies.

NDAA was passed by the Senate with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 85-13. But some of the key amendments including the (SA 4618) even though they had bipartisan support.

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Jaipur:

Bigg Boss 5 fame Pooja Mishra on Wednesday alleged molestation charges against an unidentified man in Jaipur. She has also alleged blackmail, theft and involvement of some of his crew members in the incident during a shoot in the city.



A FIR against Pooja Mishra has been filed by the event organizer for not paying due amount and also threatening her.



In her complaint she said a saloon was used by her to address a press conference. The owner, Ritu Deshwal - also the organiser of the event  deliberately delayed the event to increase bill. The model alleged that Deshwal also stole Rs 2 lakh when she was shooting at the saloon.



As per complaint, a reasonable amount was asked by the shop owners and they also refused to give shoot footage before the payment is cleared.



The model also stated that on June 13, she was given food laced with drugs and later molested.



Police said a case under section 376 (rape) and 384 (blackmail) of IPC has been registered and they are investigating the matter.



Deshwal on the other hand has filed a complaint saying Mishra owes 1.5 lakh for the products she used during her shoot.
Srinagar:

Army today foiled an infiltration bid by killing two militants in Tangdhar sector near the Line of Control in Kashmir, officials said here.



This was the second such infiltration bid foiled by the security forces along the LoC in Kashmir in three days.



Army foiled an infiltration bid in Tangdhar sector of Kupwara district near the LoC this morning. Two militants have been killed and the operation is in progress, an army official said.



He said one soldier was also injured in the operation.



On Tuesday, an infiltration bid was foiled in Machhil sector of Kupwara district.



The two-day operation left one militant dead while one soldier laid down his life. Four other jawans were also injured in the operation.

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Mumbai:

Producers of drug-themed drama Udta Punjab, slated for Friday release, lodged a complaint with cyber police alleging that the film was leaked online.



In their compliant lodged with the cyber crime police in Bandra, they stated the film was uploaded before its release by some unidentified persons.



Police are tracing the IP address through which the movie was allegedly uploaded, an official said without elaborating.



Udta Punjab stars Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor and Diljit in the lead roles and had been a part of controversy after CBFC had proposed 90 cuts in the film.



The makers had moved High Court against the decision with plea to release film with no cuts. On Monday, High Court came up with its decision and ruled that film must be released with A certificate and only one cut.



(with inputs from PTI)

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Thiruvananthapuram:

The suspect in the April 28 brutal rape and murder of a 30-year old Dalit woman at Perumbavoor in Kochi is in police custody, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said.



"Investigation team has received full information about the accused. From yesterday onwards, the accused was under police radar," he said reacting to reports that the accused, Amir Ul Islam, a migrant labourer from Assam, had been nabbed by the Special Investigation team probing the murder.



Police have received all information, he said. "The people of Kerala were waiting for such a news", he said to a question. "The development is a feather in the cap of Kerala Police", the Chief Minister said.



A report from Kochi quoting police sources said that a Special Investigation Team probing the murder of the woman was questioning the suspect.



They said the 23-year-old Islam's arrest is expected to be recorded today, only after which his DNA samples will be taken.



The LDF government, after assuming power on May 25 had changed the investigation team and entrusted the probe to ADGP B Sandhya on its first cabinet meeting itself.



The rape and murder was in focus during the Assembly polls campaign with political parties attacking the then UDF regime for tardy progress in the investigation and failure to nab the culprits.



The woman was murdered in her home on April 28.



The attack, which took place at Perumbavoor in Ernakulam district, had been a major campaign plank of the LDF in the run up to the May 16 Assembly elections.

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Chandigarh:

A day after Kamal Nath resigned from his post, Congress has appointed Shiela Dikshit as Punjab in-charge for the party.



Kamal Nath on Wednesday submitted his resignation from the post of the general secretary in-charge of the coming elections in Punjab following a controversy over his alleged role in the 1984 Sikh riots.



He submitted his resignation letter to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and mentioned he had been "hurt by developments in the past few days, where unnecessary controversy has been created around 1984 riots".



Sonia Gandhi had accepted his resignation on Wednesday itself. Now, former Delhi CM Shiela Dikshit will replace him and handle the charge.

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Father Enrique Cabrera, a priest in Collado Villalba.

A Spanish priest has angered local politicians and residents of Collado Villalba, a town northwest of the capital, after criticizing new transgender laws and the use of public funds for sex change procedures.

Father Enrique Cabrera, the parish priest at El Enebral, a Catholic place of worship in this mountain municipality, delivered his controversial homily to a packed church on June 13. The town was observing the Day of Saint Anthony, its patron saint.

Sitting in the pews were the mayor, Mariola Vargas of the conservative Popular Party (PP), and Juan Jose Morales, the Socialist spokesman in the local council. Morales has filed a complaint against the contents of the homily, which prompted some of the congregation to boo and walk out of the church.

Thats just what teenagers needed, further disorientation

Father Enrique Cabrera

In his address, Cabrera said that new regional legislation allows individuals to craft for themselves a tailor-made reality, as though it were bubble gum, without taking God into account, the local daily Voz de la Sierra reported.

He also criticized what he sees as all the attention that the gay community gets from the public health system.

Medicine stops being therapeutic [] and it wastes resources and time on impossible anatomical DIY projects, he said, noting that no matter how often he himself were to undergo surgery, he will never be able to give birth.

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The priest lamented the influence that the Gender Identity and Expression Law, passed on March 17 in the Madrid regional assembly, might have on schoolchildren, confusing them into thinking that personal gender is something they can choose.

Thats just what teenagers needed, further disorientation, he said.

Cabrera considers that this aspiration to self-define oneself outside ones own nature is the result of a sick and decadent society that has lost touch with reality, and believes that transsexuals should accept their God-given body.

Morales, the Socialist councilor, said that the priest also criticized abortion, saying that society shows its most decadent face when it treats children as a threat to our personal comfort.

The clergymans final words were for radical Islamists. If I were one of them, these new laws would make me laugh my head off and rub my hands with glee, thinking: in no time at all, these folks are going to be ours again.

Sources at the local government said that town officials have nothing to say about the matter because they are the opinions of the Church and the Archbishopric.

English version by Susana Urra.
New Delhi:

Firebrand BJP leader Sadhvi Prachi has yet again made a controversial statement saying that Arab countries are funding the Love Jihad wave. This wave of Love Jihad according to Prachi is even rated in Lakhs of Rupees to lure the Hindu girls into their trap.

A few days ago Prachi had stirred controversy by saying that India should be made Muslim free. Sadhvi in Uttarakhand had made this statement after which an FIR was also registered against her in the case.

She is known for courting controversies, Sadhvi was talking about Congress-free India which according to her is already accomplished.

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New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today asked the tax officials to remove fear of harassment from the minds of taxpayers and focus on five pillars of administration -- revenue, accountability, probity, information and digitisation (RAPID).



Inaugurating the two-day Rajasva Gyan Sangam here, Prime Minister asked the officials to move towards digitisation in a bid to make tax administration better and efficient and work towards bridging the trust deficit.



Modi also suggested that officials should endeavour to remove fear of harassment from the minds of assesses and emphasised that their behaviour should be soft and sober, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said while briefing reporters about the meeting.



Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and senior tax administrators of Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) and Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) are participating in the two-day annual conference.



Prime Minister also underlined the need for increasing the number of tax payers to 10 crore from 5.43 crore, at present.

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Washington:

A day after US President Barack Obama criticised him for using the term radical Islam, Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump today vehemently defended his stand arguing that the phraseology makes a big difference in the war against terrorism.

It makes a difference and it makes a big difference because unless youre willing to discuss and talk about the real nature of the problem and the name of the problem, radical Islamic terrorism, youre never going to solve the problem, Trump said at a campaign rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

He was responding to the allegations of Obama that the use of controversial term radical Islam would do more harm than resolving the issue.

Were trying to be nice. We have a President who wants to be so politically correct that he doesnt want to use the term radical Islamic terrorism, doesnt want to use it, said Trump, who is known for his anti-Muslim rhetorics.

He gives a speech yesterday, a long speech that at the end of it, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. Nobody knew. Hes trying to justify why he wont use it and he said radical Islam because he didnt want to use the word terrorism, he said.

Why he wont use that term or why he doesnt use it and how it doesnt make difference, but it does make a difference, Trump argued and alleged that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is blindly following the US President.

Then crooked Hillary Clinton gets up the other day, and she wouldnt use the term. She wouldnt use it. But I was hitting her hard on it. Very hard. And finally, she gets up and she said, I would use it. And by the way, the press didnt report this. They said she used the term. They didnt say about Trump, he said.

Clinton gets up and she sort of acted like, no problem using the term. And she said, I would use the term. But she didnt use it. But she didnt call it radical Islamic terrorism. She said radical Islamism. And Im not saying thats wrong. Lets see how much she uses it, he said.

Shell basically do whatever Obama wants her to do. You understand why, because that whole thing is just ridiculous what is going on there. Thats just ridiculous. How that can happen in our country today is absolutely one of the great insults to law enforcement. And lets see what happens. But shes being totally protected. She is being 100 per cent protected, Trump said.

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New Delhi:

Makers have released First look of upcoming movie Great Grand Masti, which stars Riteish Deshmukh, Aftab Shivdasani and Vivek Oberoi in the lead roles. The trailer for the film is also scheduled to release later in the day.



Riteish shared the poster with fans on the social networking site Twitter and wrote, "this time MASTI becomes GREATER and GRANDER! Let the fun begin. First look #GreatGrandMastiToday."

This time MASTI becomes GREATER and GRANDER! Let the fun begin. First look #GreatGrandMastiToday pic.twitter.com/3uDjMCjI1v  Riteish Deshmukh (@Riteishd) June 16, 2016

He also tweeted another look from the film with a caption, "MASTI ka BHOOT sab pe chadega!!! #GreatGrandMastiToday Trailer Out Tonight."

MASTI ka BHOOT sab pe chadega!!! #GreatGrandMastiToday Trailer Out Tonight. pic.twitter.com/j7VU94wLEK  Riteish Deshmukh (@Riteishd) June 16, 2016

The film is a third installment of Masti, which was released in the year 2004. The film is based on life of three men who indulge themselves into extra marital affair to add some excitement in their married life.



Made under the Balaji Motion Pictures banner, the film will be releases on July 22.
Beijing:

Fearing Indias increasing stronghold for NSG membership bid, China voiced its concerns over the growing consensus among the member countries. Indias entry into the NSG will shake the strategic balance in South Asia and make it a 'legitimate' nuclear power, leaving behind Chinas all-weather ally Pakistan, Chinese official media said today as it kept up its strident stand against Indias inclusion in the grouping.

In another article, state-run Global Times highlighted Chinas vocal opposition to Indias entry into the 48-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and concerns that its all weather-ally Pakistan will be left behind because entry into the NSG will make it (India) a legitimate nuclear power.

Indias entry into the NSG will shake strategic balance in South Asia and even cast a cloud over peace and stability in the entire Asia-Pacific region, the article said. It, however, said China could support Indias inclusion in the nuclear club if it played by the rules.

The major goal for Indias NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities. Once New Delhi gets the membership first, the nuclear balance between India and Pakistan will be broken, said the article written by Fu Xiaoqiang, research fellow with the state-run think tank China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Becoming a member of the NSG, a bloc that governs civilian nuclear trade worldwide, will grant India global acceptance as a legitimate nuclear power, said the article.

At the same time, the article said, New Delhi seems to have inched closer to NSG membership after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gained backing from the US, Swiss and Mexico in its bid to join the elite nuclear club earlier this month.

However, as a country that has signed neither the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), India is not yet qualified for accession into the NSG, it said.

Thats why the bloc is still divided over the case, and countries including New Zealand, Ireland, Turkey, South Africa and Austria have expressed their firm objections to Indias membership, it said.

A commentary in the same daily on June 14 had said that Indias admission into the NSG would jeopardise Chinas national interest and touch a raw nerve in Pakistan.

If it joins the group, New Delhi will be able to import civilian nuclear technology and fuels from the international market more conveniently, while saving its domestic nuclear materials for military use, said the article in the Global Times, a tabloid daily which is part of the ruling Communist Party of China group of publications headed by Peoples Daily.

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Boston:

Drinking a glass of cranberry juice daily may reduce urinary tract infections (UTIs) in women, thus decreasing antibiotic use for the ailment, researchers including one of Indian-origin have found.



Currently the primary approach to reducing symptomatic events of UTI is the use of chronic antibiotics for suppression, an approach associated with side effects and development of antibiotic resistance, said Kalpana Gupta from Boston University in the US.



This study shows that consuming one 8-ounce (240 ml) glass of cranberry juice a day reduces the number of times women suffer from repeat episodes of symptomatic UTI and avoids chronic suppressive antibiotics, said Gupta.



Researchers conducted a 24-week study of 373 women to find whether recurrent (or repeat) UTI sufferers could be protected from repeat infections by drinking cranberry juice.



Participants were all healthy women, with an average age of 40, who had experienced at least two UTIs within the past year.



During the study, participants were randomly chosen to drink a daily dose of 240 millilitres of either cranberry juice or a placebo beverage without cranberries.



The rate of UTIs decreased significantly among the cranberry drinkers, with just 39 diagnoses during the six-month study compared with 67 in the placebo group, researchers said.



The key to cranberrys benefit is consuming a glass daily to help avoid the infection altogether. Most people wait to drink cranberry juice until they have a UTI, but once the symptoms start they will likely need a course of antibiotics, said Gupta.



UTIs are among the most common bacterial infections in women worldwide. Up to 60 per cent of all women suffer a UTI in their lifetime, and up to 25 per cent experience a recurrence within six months, researchers said.



Antibiotics are usually the first line of treatment for urinary tract infections, and women who have frequent UTIs may be prescribed low-dose antibiotics.



However, chronic overuse of these drugs has increased antibiotic resistance at an alarming rate globally. Cranberries contain a unique combination of compounds including Type-A PACs (or proanthocyanidins) that prevent bacteria from sticking and causing infection, researchers said.



In addition to PACs, new studies have shown a new class of compounds, xyloglucan oligosaccharides, which have similar anti-bacterial properties against E coli as PACs. This means there are multiple, unique elements within cranberries which are good for health, they said. The findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Mumbai:

The Bombay High Court on Thursday rejected bail to former Maharashtra minister Chhagan Bhujbal, who has been arrested in alleged money laundering case. Bhujbal had on Tuesday told the Bombay High Court that he is suffering from a critical heart ailment and sought bail for treatment.



Bhujbal approached the HC seeking to be released on bail considering his medical condition after a special PMLA court rejected his bail plea. Senior counsel Amit Desai, appearing for Bhujbal, argued that the 69-year-old NCP leader was suffering from a terminal illness which needs immediate and a specific line of treatment.



He added that since past 25 years Bhujbal has also been suffering from various other ailments like diabetes, bronchal asthma, hyper-tension and has also undergone surgeries for heart ailments.



Bhujbal, who was arrested on March 14 by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for alleged money laundering, was admitted to the St George hospital here on March 18 after he fell sick in Arthur Road prison. He was discharged after a week.

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New Delhi:

Speculations were today rife about Congress planning to make three-time Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit the partys chief ministerial nominee for next years assembly election in politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, once its stronghold.



Election strategist Prashant Kishor had recommended that Dikshit should play a major role in the partys poll campaign in the state as she is a prominent Brahmin face and could help Congress regain support of the electorally sizeable and significant community, whose support determines the poll outcome in several seats.



The community, a traditional vote bank of the Congress, shifted allegiance to BJP in the aftermath of the emergence of Mandir-Mandal politics. A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawatis BSP in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to the community. Dikshit is scheduled to meet Congress President Sonia Gandhi later in the day.



There was a buzz that 78-year-old Dikshit, who ruled Delhi from 1999 to 2014 before being thrown out of power by the AAP could be Congress Chief Ministerial candidate. Sheila Dikshit is the daughter-in-law of prominent Congress leader from UP Uma Shankar Dikshit, who served as Union minister and governor for a long time.



The Congress is trying to regain the lost ground in UP where currently it has just 30 MLAs in the 403-member assembly. Congress could win only two seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls represented by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi respectively.



The Brahmin community plays a significant role in election outcome in central and eastern UP as it is the dominant caste in these areas.

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Ahmedabad:

A fire broke out at an ancillary unit inside Tata Nanos Vendor Park in Sanand taluka of the district today, officials said. The vendor park, having several ancillary units supplying parts for the car, is situated near the Tata Nano plant around 25 km from the city.



It took almost two hours to contain the fire, which broke out this afternoon inside the manufacturing unit of Supreme-Treves, a vendor of Tata, officials said.



The fire broke out in the afternoon. It took almost two hours to contain it using 10 fire tenders. Eight of those were sent by the city fire brigade while two belonged to the company. No casualty has been reported, said Additional Chief Fire Officer of the city Rajesh Bhatt.



Investigation is underway to find out the cause of the fire, he added.

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Srinagar:

Army today paid tributes to Signalman Ajay Singh Choudhary, who laid down his life while foiling an infiltration bid in Machhil sector of Kupwara district in Kashmir. Chinar Corps Commander Lt General Satish Dua led the officers and other ranks of the army in paying tributes to the slain Signalman by laying a floral wreath on his coffin.



Saluting the brave soldier on his final journey, Lt Gen Dua said such exemplary acts always served as an inspiration not only to the uniformed community but to the entire nation.



A militant was also killed in the encounter yesterday with a group of terrorists intercepted by the Army near the LoC when they were trying to infiltrate through Macchil sector of Kupwara district from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.



Five soldiers were injured in the operation that started on Tuesday and the Signalman Choudhary later succumbed to his injuries.



A defence spokesman said Signalman Choudhary was part of his units Quick Reaction Team which was the first to intercept and engage an infiltrating column of terrorists in the highly inhospitable terrain of Machhil area on June 14.

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Donald Trump addresses followers in North Carolina. J. DRAKE (REUTERS)

More information Trump se distancia del lobby de las armas y propone limitar las ventas

Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he was meeting with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to discuss new restrictions on firearms, thus breaking away from his partys line on gun control.

I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no-fly list, to buy guns, Trump said on Twitter. His plan comes four days after the Orlando massacre and veers from the traditional Republican defense of gun ownership. It also shows that he can meet with one of the most powerful gun lobbies even though he is defending a policy that the group has already rejected. The NRA considers such restrictions ineffective, unconstitutional, or both.

In a statement published on Wednesday, the NRA maintained that individuals who are being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation should not be barred from buying firearms, but that their purchases ought to be delayed while an investigation is ongoing so that the FBI may determine whether they pose a threat to others. The NRA supports a ban on gun sales to terrorists but says that it is important to establish protection for Americans who have been included on the no-fly list by mistake.

If Con Man Don can convince the NRA to move forward on this, God bless him

New York Senator Joe Crowley

Trump repeated his proposal to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the United States in a speech he delivered in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday. He said attacks like the Orlando shooting will happen again and again until the countrys enemies start respecting us, and that things will keep getting worse.

While most of his arguments have remained the same, his shift on gun control contradicts what he has said over the last few months, putting him closer to the policy changes that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration have been defending.

After the Paris attacks in November 2015, Trump already seemed to favor these reforms, but they were overshadowed by his campaign against Muslim immigrants. If somebody is on a watch list and... we know theyre an enemy of the state, I would keep them away [from guns], absolutely, he told ABC in an interview last year.

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As the primary race got underway, the real estate magnate also defended gun ownership and accused Clinton of wanting to abolish the Second Amendment, which explicitly protects the right to carry arms.

Most Republican lawmakers are against limits on gun sales, even to people who are under FBI investigation for possible ties to terrorism. They argue, and Trumps rivals in the Republican primary agree, that this kind of ban would violate an individuals constitutional right if he or she ends up on the terrorist watch list or no-fly list by mistake.

Last year, Trump backed a gun-control measure sponsored by several Democratic senators. The initiative, which failed to pass Congress in December, proposed exactly what the Republican candidate is currently defending in his campaign platform: if someone is not allowed to fly on a plane, then he may not purchase a firearm.

If Con Man Don can convince the NRA to move forward on this, God bless him, New York Senator Joe Crowley, a Democrat, said on Wednesday. But again, it just goes to show the power of the NRA, that their presidential nominee will go on hand and knee begging for them to give him a pass on this issue so that it can trickle down to all the other Republican members of the House. Its ludicrous. It is crazy.

English version by Dyane Jean Francois.
New Delhi:

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha arrived in New Delhi on Thursday on a three-day visit with an aim to depeen bilateral cooperation in areas of trade and investment, defence, security and tourism.



Chan-o-Cha will have extensive talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday during which both sides are likely to explore ways to expand maritime security cooperation, deal with threat of terrorism and boost trade. There are indications that both leaders will discuss the situation in the South China Sea.



The Thai Prime Minister is accompanied by his spouse Naraporn Chan-o-cha and a high-level delegation comprising several cabinet ministers, senior officials and a 46-member business delegation.



Chan-o-Chas, who arrived on his first visit here as Prime Minister, was received at the airport by Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju.



Indias excellent relations with Thailand are an important and integral component of Indias strategic partnership with ASEAN. Indias Act East policy is complemented by Thailands Look West policy in bringing the two countries closer, the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.



Modi will host lunch in honour of his Thai counterpart today. The Thai PM will also call on Vice President M Hamid Ansari.



Chan-o-Cha is expected to deliver a speech at the business event hosted by FICCI, CII and ASSOCHAM on 17 June. The India-Thailand Joint Business Forum will hold its first meeting during the visit and make recommendations for boosting trade ties between the two countries. He will visit Bodhgaya on Saturday before returning to Thailand.



India and Thailand have strong economic synergies and the diversifying profile of growing bilateral trade and investment reflects the growth and maturity of the interaction between the two economies, said MEA.



Issues related to the proposed Free Trade Agreement between the two countries are likely to figure in talks. The volume of current annual bilateral trade between the two countries is nearly USD 8 billion and both sides are keen to expand it further.



Earlier Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra had paid a State visit to India in January 2012 and was the Chief Guest for the Republic Day celebrations.



Maritime security cooperation between the two countries countries in the Indian Ocean is already very strong, said Secretary (East) in the Ministry of External Affairs Preeti Saran, adding ways to further enhance it may be explored during the talks.



Thailand has shown interest in joint ventures in defence production and procurement of defence platforms from India.

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El Chapos mother, Consuelo Loera. Univision

Something terrible has happened in the dark world of drug trafficking. A group of 150 armed men broke into the recondite community in La Tuna (Sinaloa), according to first accounts of the events, and looted the mansion of the mother of Joaquin Guzman Loera, El Chapo. The attack on this sacred turf of the most powerful drug dealer in the world left a trail of blood and terror. According to Riodoce, at least three people died of gunshot wounds while other sources say there were eight casualties.

More information Un grupo armado saquea la casa de la madre de El Chapo en Sinaloa

The move was a warning shot. El Chapos devotion to his hometown and his mother is well known. The famed drug lord was abused by his father, and his mother raised him and his 11 brothers in poverty. She stayed in the small town of fewer than 100 residents when her son reached the top ranks of the Sinaloa cartel. You raise your children and in the end they make their own paths. He will always be my son, and I will always be his mother, she said two years ago when she found out her son had been captured.

La Tuna, located in the municipality of Badiraguato, is part of one of the golden triangle, a craggy and inaccessible area between Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa that has become one of the greatest producers of opium in the Americas and a nightmare for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. In this feudal sanctuary where Guzman Loera is known as The Lord, the attack on Saturday could be taken as a declaration of war. Or vengeance for reasons hidden among the shadows in the hills of Sinaloa.

No one has claimed the attack but specialists say the hit was a settling of scores among members of the Sinaloa cartel

Witnesses told local media that the small army of men arrived in mid-morning and broke off into small groups. One ransacked the mansion where Consuelo Loera lives. They stole three cars, three motorcycles and cut the telephone lines. The matriarch, at first, did not sustain any injuries. The other groups attacked other places in town. They dragged a neighbor out of his home and killed him in the street. Many residents have fled for fear of an imminent blood bath.

No one has claimed the attack. Specialists such as Cynthia Valdez say the hit was a settling of scores among members of the Sinaloa cartel. Loeras sons, Ivan and Alfredo, known as Los Menores or Chapitos, may be at odds with the direction the criminal organization has decided to take under the leadership of such legendary capos as Mayo Zambada, an outlaw who has never been detained. Constant scuffles have led to this warning shot straight at the the most precious place in Los Chapitos turf.

The house where El Chapos mother lives. SAUL RUIZ

Other sources say the attack was carried out by the Beltran Leyva cartel, old and fierce rivals of El Chapo. For years, the two groups fought a war that horrified the nation. Guzman Loera had hired them as a paramilitary wing until the Beltran Leyva brothers turned on El Chapo in 2008 after one of their men was killed. They believed he had been betrayed. The brutal attacks and counter-attacks even touched the top boss when one of his sons, Edgar, was killed by 15 hitmen in a shopping mall in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa.

The conflict lasted a while but as Beltran Leyva bosses fell, the organization gradually lost ground. In January, the groups latest leader, Francisco Javier El Panchillo Hernandez Garcia, also known as El 2000, was captured. But the arrest and imminent extradition of El Chapo may have lit their spirits anew.

El Chapo has yet to reply to the authors of that mysterious attack in La Tuna, whomever they may be.

English version by Dyane Jean Francois.
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Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders

PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces

There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan

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Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair

Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan

I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General

I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox

UCOMS SPECIAL OFFER OF THE UNLIMITED INTERNET IS NOW TERMLESS

There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur

EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol  Armenia and Azerbaijan  to do so without delay

An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".

UCOM AND PES-PES CONTINUE COOPERATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022

Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully

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The statement of the Defender on the video of the execution of Armenian PoWs by the Azerbaijani armed forces

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STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan

Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments

Delegation by Nancy Pelosi Accompanied by Alen Simonyan Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi Arrives in Yerevan

Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement

With 120 million drams donated by Mikael Vardanyan, the defenders of the homeland will be treated in a new building

OSCE Chairman-in-Office and OSCE Secretary General call for immediate cessation of hostilities along Armenia-Azerbaijan border

Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh

USA Embassy Message for U.S. Citizens

ANCA Issues National Call to Action to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Aliyevs Aggression
Analysis: Russias strategy with the West is to look scarier than it really is

(NationalSecurity.news) Would Russian President Vladimir Putin really risk starting a nuclear war over Ukraine and Crimea? Is he prepared to start World War III with NATO?

Some analysts think so  and that plays right into Putins hands, according to an analysis by The National Interest. Putin likely isnt willing to do either of those things, but keeping Western military and geopolitical experts guessing means that, in the short term at least, Putin gets to operate freely in his corner of the world.

With its saber-rattling the Kremlin has, over the last months, succeeded in taking large parts of the Western elite under its reflexive control, a Soviet strategy of action designed to trigger desired reactions on the enemys side, says the analysis.

Moscow has impregnated politicians, journalists, soldiers, intellectuals and diplomats around the world with the belief that Russia is posing a serious military threat and is up, if necessary, for a fight against NATO, perhaps even for World War III. As a result, the Wests political and military leaders are busy responding to threats that are, in fact, largely ephemeral. Brussels and Washington are, on the other side, insufficiently attentive and inadequately reacting to really existing new challenges in Europes east, the web site noted further.

Geopolitics is all about calculation  always pushing boundaries when it is in your best national interests, but never pushing too far, lest one miscalculate and trigger an aggressive response that wasnt planned. That is likely what happened a few months ago, when Russian fighter-bombers continued to violate Turkish airspace enroute to bomb targets in Syria; Russia pushed the envelope one too many times, and the Turks made them pay. Being a member of NATO likely saved Ankara from an ugly Russian response; Article V of the NATO treaty requires that all member countries come to the aid of any member nation under attack.

That said, the TNI analysis notes that NATO generals appear to be using an old playbook from the first Cold War when it comes to dealing with Russia, which is wholly inaccurate:

Instead of soberly assessing the the real nature of today Russias challenge and the entire gamut of the Wests new options to respond, a collective deja vu has taken hold of large parts of the Western elites. NATOs and the EUs resulting incomplete and misconceived rebuttals are serving rather than containing the Kremlin. They are increasing rather than decreasing insecurity in eastern Europea situation full of existential risks for humanity, yet beneficial to the stability and sustainability of Putins regime.

NATO and the West in general are guilty of overreacting rhetorically, militarily and politically to Russias aggression, the analysis says, and in doing so are playing Moscows game. What they dont realize is that, for all of Putins blustering and the Russian militarys technological improvements, Putin is not able to wage a new Cold War, let alone a hot one.

The biggest reason for that is the fundamental difference between the old Soviet Union and todays Russian Federation. The latter is not only much weaker than the former, but unlike the USSR and its largely self-contained, planned industry and economy, todays Russia is much more integrated with the West, thanks to its heavy reliance on the petrodollar.

Surveying its major pipeline destinations, its foreign direct investors, its most attractive tourist sites, its private real estate locations, its regular or secret bank accounts, its preferred shopping malls, and its popular foreign educational institutions, a large part of the Russian elites core interests is located in, connected with or related to countries that are members of NATO, the EU or both (or, like Switzerland, closely tied to them), the analysis states.

Though Moscow is trying to create the impression of an aggressive Eurasian hegemon, the Russian Federation is neither a reborn USSR, nor an eastern European China, nor a modern equivalent of Nazi Germany. Russias GDP is smaller than that of Italy or California, and Moscows economic problems are currently accumulating by the month.

That said, Moscow has still managed to impress enough Western military diplomats with a series of carefully orchestrated actions that, taken in sum, seem much more impressive than they really are. It should not have surprised anyone that Russia moved to secure the Crimea, for example, because of Moscows historic ties to the region and its military importance. Also, Russian action in Ukraine, in hindsight, is not so surprising given its location (it essentially borders NATO) and the Wests desire to absorb it into the alliance.

Whats odd about Western action is that it is arming itself against a Russia that is essentially dependent on the West for its existence.

That is even more bizarre in view of the fact that, in contrast to the impression that the Kremlin is projecting abroad, Russia is largely isolated internationally. So far, Russia is succeeding in papering over the grave repercussions of its insufficient international embeddedness with political bombast and diplomatic grandeur, the analysis says.

Read the rest, here.

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Dutch woman who was raped in Qatar convicted of adultery after she reported assault

In a true example of horrific injustice, a 22-year-old Dutch woman was convicted of fornication after being drugged and raped by a Syrian man after a night out at a club in Qatar.

The woman was deported shortly thereafter  for having sex outside of wedlock. She was visiting Qatar on vacation, and surely never expected the terrifying events that took place. After waking up and discovering that she had been raped, the woman went to the authorities to report the crime, but was arrested instead.

Can you imagine being assaulted in a strange land, mustering up the courage to come forward, thinking youve found help, and then being told that you committed a crime by being raped?

Its difficult to imagine a more unjust reality.

The alleged rapist, Omar Abdullah al-Hasan, was also convicted of having sex out of wedlock, and was sentenced to receive 140 lashes. Its shocking how lax the punishment for the rapist seems, while any punishment for the victim seems entirely inappropriate. Its a truly backwards ideology to find a victim of rape guilty of anything, and yet there are still places in the world where this line of thinking exists.

According to a Qatari official, had she been a Muslim woman, she would have received at least five years in jail. No one can get out of such charges here in Qatar. Its absolutely heartbreaking to think about how many Qatari women are being punished despite being the innocent victims in these situations. In this country, women truly are oppressed; being treated like less of a person strictly because of their gender.

This unsettling situation really puts problematic advertisements and off-color jokes in perspective. Someone needs to inform the Regressive Left that this is what rape culture is.

If you want to combat misogyny  here are the people you need to target.

Source:

DailyCaller.com

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Texas, Vermont and New Hampshire testing the waters with secession as the federal government continues to disappoint

In recent years, the concept of states seceding from the union has been brought back to the forefront. With the American people at large growing increasingly frustrated with the federal government, what once seemed like a ludicrous concept has begun to make more and more sense.

Texas has threatened to secede in the past, and many Texans share the belief that the state should go through with it. Daniel Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, stated of their previous threats to secede, We were able to prove conclusively that this is not a fringe political discussion. Texas has a long history of being an independent nation, so whats preventing it from returning to its previous conditions?

While some have argued that the Constitution forbids secession in the 14th Amendment, the language on the issue isnt particularly clear: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Given the fact that the writers of the United States Constitution were men who actively opposed tyrannical governments, its hard to imagine them having an issue with states fighting back against one. They were all about protecting the people  and secession could fit right in with that.

Texas isnt alone, either. Members of the Foundation for New Hampshire Independence and the Second Vermont Republic hope to see their states secede in the future, though it is unlikely to happen any time soon. After all, theres still a heavy stigma surrounding the concept of secession. But if America continues to head in the same direction, and its citizens continue to grow tired of the tyrannical nonsense, its not out of the question. We could be seeing independent republics of Texas, New Hampshire and Vermont before long.

Even if the actual act doesnt come to fruition, the mere threat of secession alone is an attractive concept. Theres perhaps no better way to send a message to the government that were fed up with their corruption than by threatening to leave  and take our states with us.

Sources:

SFGate.com

Freedom.news

Science.NaturalNews.com

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How Haykush became daughter of the Tadevosyans (video)

Haykush, 14, is an aunt of the girls. The girls do not even know that Haykush isnt a relative of theirs. Haykush was only three when the Tadevosyans brought her to their home from an orphanage. Non-biological relationship with the girls is of no importance to Haykush. The eldest sister, Lilia, is more modest, we love her for her modesty, and the youngest sister, Larisa, is more active, I love her the most, she says. The Tadevosyans, who live in Astghadzor community of Gegharkunik marz (province), have thought about adopting a child all their life. Though they have two sons, they have always dreamt of a daughter. The father of the family has done everything for Haykush not to need anything like his other children. There has been no difference between the sons and Haykush. The difference is that one of them is a girl, a child from an orphanage, while others are boys, they are different in that. I have never let her worry, they have been equal. When money was necessary for some needs, my daughter always had it, says Vazgen Tadevosyan, Haykushs non-biological father. The girl is also talking about the attitude of the Tadevosyans towards her: I love my parents very much, as they kept me and brought me up, they did their best when I was a child. I saw their suffering, how they brought me up. I didnt lack anything at school. Haykush is one of the best dancers of the communitys dance group. The certificate can prove it. First that dance was very difficult for me, then I was trying over and over, and now it is my favorite dance. Haykush is not only the joy of the family, but also the right hand of her mother. She always helps her mother in the kitchen and sets a table. There are dishes, which I cannot cook, and in order not to leave all the household chores to mother, she cooks and in the meantime I set a table, we eat and then I clear the table and wash the dishes. The girl considers herself to be lucky, but her everyday joy is not conditioned by her own person. I would be happy to see people around me treat each other kindly without insulting each other, because people will speak to you the same way as you speak to them. Vazgen Tadevosyan is even ready to keep 10 children, if their housing conditions allowed. He says from the experience of their family; the institution of foster family is the best and can fully replace an orphanage. There must be no orphanages, that concept must be eliminated in Armenia, a child always needs parents. Everybody can take and keep a child, saving the childs life in that way. A child must grow up in a family, understanding the concepts mother, parent, sister and brother, says Vazgen Tadevosyan. Still 14 foster families The institution of foster family has operated in Armenia since 2008. The Tadevosyan family is just one of 14 foster families in Armenia. The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs implements this project together with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Work should be carried out to find potential foster families and find out children, who can be placed in foster care. I hope that starting from 2017 it will be possible to find foster families for the children, says Hayk Khemchyan, Head of the Armenian branch of the organization. Our policy is directed towards the reduction in number of children in the institutions and prevention of entrance to those institutions. We mainly aim at returning the child to the biological family, but if it is impossible, we try to find a foster family for the child or a family, which is ready to adopt the child, says Karine Khachatryan, a chief specialist of Family, Women and Children Affairs Department of the Staff of Armenia's Labour and Social Affairs. The state is still not going to close down the six orphanages, but it handles the issue of reduction in number of children at those orphanages. In the near future Vanadzor orphanage and Nubarashen boarding school will change their role. We aim to turn boarding schools and orphanages into day care centres. Here the children, who dont have families, will receive care in up to 6 months period until their fate is decided. In the near future we will have only one orphanage in Armenia, says Karine Khachatryan. Director of Zatik orphanage Ashot Mnatsakanyan is not against replacing the institution of orphanage with foster families, though he has reservations in this regard. Childs entry to a family, where there are already children, causes a difficult situation. Maybe the parents themselves cannot notice that they make their child happy, caress their child, making difference between the children. If we choose a foster family, then they should not have their own children. Ashot Mnatsakanyan, who has 23 years of experience in working with children, thinks that an alternative to orphanages are centres like Zatik. These centers are the best institutions resolving that problem, as people with spiritual consciousness work here, who carry out relevant work with children and children are under appropriate supervision. Waiting for families Three years ago, the former Zatik orphanage was reorganized into a child support centre. The centre works around the clock taking care of children who are sent to biological or foster families in six months. In some cases, childrens stay at the centre can be extended. At the centre, you will also find children living away from home. One of them is Gayane. I feel protected inside [the centre], here I am surrounded by people who love me very much and take care of me. Outside, there are people who love me, too, but I do not find the same care as I find here, in Zatik. For me, life is better here than there, she says. As the most senior member of the permanent group of the centre, Gayane, 16, shares her perceptions of life to the younger ones. I try to explain [to them] that it is not a good thing to envy one another, that we live under the same roof and we should not envy one another for we are sisters and brothers, she says. Gayane always thinks about living with a family, and although she does not attend school, she does not give up on her dream of becoming a teacher and educating children. She already knows what she will do after she enters a classroom as a teacher First of all I would urge and explain to them that it is important to become good and useful people in life. I would tell them that envy and evil will do nothing good to them. I would encourage my boys to become good for our nation, to be fit for our army. I would also advise the girls to be a little understanding and reasonable when they grow up, Gayane says. Varazdat, 14, also spends most of his time at the centre. He has good computer skills and competences. I remember that we had a computer at home. I began to play computer since 4, I played a lot and I know all programmes. I can take apart a computer, disassemble its parts and put them back together again. Varazdat is eager to become more skillful in computer programming and wants to become a computer programmer or a computer repair technician. First of all, I want to finish school and then take a computer science course, he says. Confidence in the future is determined by the faith in his abilities but when it comes to dreams and their realization Varazdat has much to say here. When asked about his dreams, Varazdat said, I have none. In reply to our next question whether he had never thought of his dreams, he said, No, I have not At present, the state does not provide funds for realizing the goals of children living in orphanages or other similar institutions. However, it spends huge amounts of money on orphanages. For example, AMD 2 122 526 000 was allocated from the state budget for keeping 749 children in 6 orphanages in 2015. In other words, AMD 2 856 000 was allocated for each child. As of January 1, 2016, there were over 660 children in six state-run orphanages in Armenia and only 10 percent of them were one- or two-sided parentless. Most parents cited poverty as the main reason for their inability to bring them up. Comparative calculations show that the annual funding allocations to orphanages will be enough to cover annual household expenses of 826 families, each consisting of four members. Alternatively, the same amount can be paid to 1222 foster families who provide nutrition, environment and care for children from orphanages. Foster care is far less expensive than keeping an orphanage open. The state allocates each foster family AMD 147 000 per month. This programme is implemented within the frames of the Media for Informed Civic Engagement project, which was realized with the support of the people of America through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Responsibility for the contents belongs only to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USAID or the US Government.
Q: How do you attract talent when you are pre-revenue and don't have funding?

A: Im not going to sugar coat this response. When youre pre-revenue and dont have funding, you shouldnt be trying to build out a big team. Instead, you need to focus on advancing your startup to the point where you can either start generating revenue, get funded, or both.

With this in mind, its time to get very clear on exactly what needs to happen in order for your startup to get to that funding or revenue milestone. For instance, do you have a business background with a great idea for a product, but lack the expertise to make a working prototype? Or, maybe youve developed an app, but lack the business experience to turn your product into a viable company. Whatever the case might be, write down the tasks that need to happen to move your business forward to the stage of revenue or funding. This stage varies depending on the industry youre in, but at a base level, youll likely want to have a working prototype, and be able to demonstrate that theres a market for the product or service you want to provide.

Related: Why Talent Alone Will Never Be Enough

Once youve identified exactly what needs to happen, cross off any items that you know you can complete yourself. Now that you have a lean list of what you need help with, you can start looking for the talent that can help achieve these tasks. Heres some advice on how to do this:

Take advantage of free startup resources

Before thinking about how you can attract talent to work for your company full-time, Id look for ways to access advisors and other resources for free.

For students, many universities have some type of innovation or entrepreneurship center with staff that can either give you specific advice how to move your business forward, or put you in touch with mentors in your industry who can offer this guidance. If youre not a student, similar resources could be available in your community. For instance, in Boston we have Score Boston, which offers free and low-cost mentoring to help people start and grow businesses.

Also, a quick online search for free startups resources will yield numerous well-organized lists of hundreds of tools that can help you develop, market and sell a variety of products and services.

Related: How to Speed up Your Hiring to Find Valuable Talent Now

Find a co-founder

Bringing on a co-founder with complementary skills can be an incredible asset in moving your business forward, and is also something you can do before your startup is making money or has funding. Last week I went into the details on how to find a co-founder, as well as what qualities you should look for beyond possessing the right skill-set.

When you do bring on a co-founder, make sure the equity split and corporate structure is ironed out very early on. Too often startups that dont have revenue or funding think they can leave these conversations and contracts for a later date. Really, waiting does nothing but leave you open to potentially messy situations involving compensation when you get to the funding or revenue stage.

Consider bringing on part-time talent

If you find that you still need extra help to complete tasks after bringing on a co-founder and taking advantage of free resources, you can start looking into low-cost ways of finding the right people to complete specific projects on a part-time or contractor basis.

Gig marketplaces are one place to start this search. HourlyNerd, one of the startups out of the Harvard Innovation Lab that focuses on MBAs for contract hire, could be helpful. For a site that offers a broad range of contractors, theres always Fiverr.

Another option is partnering with universities that offer co-ops to bring on talented students. In Boston, some universities even offer grants to go along with their co-op programs, where the university will pay for part of a students salary to work at your startup.

In terms of how youll afford these contract or part-time workers without funding or revenue, you might have to dip into your personal savings, take some contract work yourself, or even consider selling items you own. Its always worth noting that Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen to start Apple.

Related: 4 Creative Tactics to Find and Recruit the Best Talent

Related:

Here's How to Attract Talent for Your Pre-Revenue Startup

4 Steps to Ensure Your Business Meetings Aren't Total Flops

It's Your Fault: 5 Steps to Repair A Client Relationship



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Industry leader also introduces FLO Home, a new service for residential charging

MONTREAL, June 15, 2016 /CNW/ - AddEnergie, the Canadian leader in charging solutions for electric vehicles (EVs), today officially launches its cross-Canada FLO network, allowing EV drivers to recharge their vehicles wherever they are - at home, at work, or on the go.

The FLO network connects members to nearly 2,000 charging stations in B.C., Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, along with interoperability capabilities that can extend the network to systems in other provinces. FLO unifies existing networks in Quebec (ReseauVER) and other Canadian provinces (VERnetwork) to offer more than 20,000 Canadian EV drivers a consistent range of charging services on a single reliable network.

The launch of FLO follows the recent investment of $12.8M in AddEnergie by the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and Investissement Quebec to support its deployment plan. Network build-out plans call for an additional 8,000 more stations in Canada over the next five years (excluding home stations).

FLO: a key new partner for EV drivers

The FLO network was designed to provide peace of mind to the growing number of EV drivers across Canada. Membership in FLO offers several advantages:

A smart phone app that enables an EV driver to easily identify the nearest available charging station - then pay for a charging session with a tap of a finger

A proactive platform that automatically notifies drivers when a vehicle's charging session is interrupted or completed

Ability to consult consumption-related data at any time (history, average charging time, etc.)

24/7 live operator support through a 1-800 number backed by a centralized (cloud-based) management system overseen by a dedicated support team that ensures network reliability by detecting and proactively resolving charging issues in real-time at any of the charging stations.

"EV drivers to this point have been pioneers, and we've developed our chargers and customer service offering along with them," says said Louis Tremblay, President and CEO of AddEnergie. "We're building that expertise into the FLO network to create a single, reliable charging ecosystem that equips EV drivers with a consistent, reliable driving experience that is distinctly different to what people have come to expect using conventional combustion engine vehicles."

"The ease of use and access to charging stations regardless of location offered by FLO is a step in the right direction for EV drivers," says Chantal Guimont, President and CEO of Electric Mobility Canada (EMC). "It is also entirely in line with Electric Mobility Canada's mission to support all activities, goods and services encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles in Canada, including those related to the deployment of charging infrastructure."

Unveiling of FLO Home at EVS29

A new FLO Home charging station targeting the residential segment will be introduced to the public at the 29th World Electric Vehicle Symposium and Exhibition (EVS29) taking place June 19th to 22nd in Montreal. Robust and manufactured entirely in Quebec, the new intelligent station has been specifically designed to withstand the rigours of the Canadian winter. Highly secure, it is also equipped with features to protect both itself and a connected EV against fluctuations in the electrical grid. The FLO Home service will be available in early Fall 2016 at an introductory price of $1,195. EV drivers in Ontario will benefit from a government rebate of up to $1,000 for the installation of home-charging stations, while EV drivers in Quebec can obtain a government rebate of $350 for home chargers. Similarly, the BC government offers up to $5,000 in incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

"It is with enthusiasm that we welcome this offer on the part of Canada's undisputed leader in the domain of public charging: a smart home charging solution, sustainable, connected, and scalable, designed to meet both the demanding conditions of the country and the needs of electric vehicle owners," says Simon-Pierre Rioux, president of the Association des vehicules electriques du Quebec (AVEQ).

About AddEnergie

Founded in Quebec in 2009, AddEnergie has quickly distinguished itself with its innovative charging solutions. Supplier and operator of Canada's two largest charging station networks, Electric Circuit in Quebec and VERnetwork (now FLO), the company currently has over 50 employees spread among its headquarters in Quebec City (QC), a manufacturing plant in Shawinigan (QC), and its office in Mississauga (ON).

www.addenergie.ca et www.flo.ca

To access videos, photos and logo, click here.

SOURCE AddEnergie

Image with caption: "AddEnergie launches FLO, the largest and most reliable electric vehicle charging network in Canada. Louis Tremblay, President and CEO of AddEnergie, took the opportunity to introduce FLO Home, a new service for residential charging. (CNW Group/AddEnergie)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160615_C7789_PHOTO_EN_714863.jpg

Image with caption: "AddEnergie launches FLO, the largest and most reliable electric vehicle charging network in Canada (CNW Group/AddEnergie)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160615_C7789_PHOTO_EN_714848.jpg

Image with caption: "FLO (CNW Group/AddEnergie)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160615_C7789_PHOTO_EN_714850.jpg

For further information: Media Inquiries: Irene Poon - 416.274.9839 - [email protected]
The Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould attends Special Call June 15

OTTAWA, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - The Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, was called to the Bar of Ontario today in Ottawa. The Special Call took place during the first of six Call to the Bar ceremonies to be held across the province in June to admit Ontario's newest lawyers to the legal profession.

Minister Wilson-Raybould was called to the Bar of British Columbia in 2000 and began her legal career working as a provincial Crown prosecutor in Vancouver. She was appointed Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November and is the first Indigenous person in Canada's history named to the position. (See full biography.)

Law Society Treasurer Janet E. Minor called Minister Wilson-Raybould to the Bar. The Minister then delivered the keynote address to the soon-to-be lawyers, members of the audience and distinguished guests.

In her remarks to the newly called lawyers, Treasurer Minor said, "We need your innovation and creativity. We are counting on you. You are privileged because you have the capacity to make a difference. You are empowered  you can help to empower others. When you do, in your work and in your life, I think you will find this kind of engagement is the most rewarding and fulfilling and it will give you the kind of happiness you feel today."

The Law Society called 242 new lawyers to the Bar of Ontario at the Ottawa ceremony.

Find @LawsocietyLSUC on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

#lawyered

SOURCE The Law Society of Upper Canada

Image with caption: "The Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (left), is called to the Bar of Ontario by Law Society Treasurer Janet E. Minor at the Ottawa Call to the Bar ceremony June 15. At centre, looking on, is The Honourable George R. Strathy, Chief Justice of Ontario. Call to the Bar ceremonies are held across the province this month to admit Ontarios newest lawyers to the legal profession. Minister Wilson-Raybould delivered the keynote address. (CNW Group/The Law Society of Upper Canada)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160616_C6482_PHOTO_EN_715542.jpg

For further information: Media contact: Susan Tonkin, Communications Advisor, Media Relations, at 416-947-7605 or [email protected]
GATINEAU, QC, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, today announced the New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP) 20162017 Call for Proposals for Community-Based Projects that will help seniors stay active, engaged and informed. The application period begins on June 16, 2016 and will close on July 29, 2016.

Organizations are being invited to apply for funding for projects that help empower seniors to share their knowledge, skills and experience with others and support communities by increasing their capacity to address local issues. More information on how to apply is available at Canada.ca/Seniors.

With more than 6 million Canadians who are aged 65 or older, the Government is committed to promoting the well-being of seniors by ensuring their economic and social security. Budget 2016 delivers on the Government's agenda to empower all Canadians to build better lives for themselves and to enable them to contribute to, and share in, the prosperity of the country. The Government recognizes the remarkable contribution that seniors have made over the years and continues to take measures to ensure they enjoy the dignified and secure life they deserve.

Investing in Canada's communities is not only about creating good jobs and encouraging clean economic growth. It is also about building stronger communities. Partnerships with local governments, institutions and organizations are vital to deliver change and improve the lives of seniors.

Quick Facts

Eligible organizations can receive up to $25,000 in New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP) funding for community-based projects that are led or inspired by seniors.

in New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP) funding for community-based projects that are led or inspired by seniors. The Government of Canada is providing approximately $35 million in NHSP funding for close to 1,850 community-based projects approved through the NHSP 20152016 Call for Proposals.

is providing approximately in NHSP funding for close to 1,850 community-based projects approved through the NHSP 20152016 Call for Proposals. Since 2004, the NHSP has funded close to 17,800 projects in hundreds of communities across Canada , with a total Government of Canada investment of more than $360 million .

Quote

"The Government of Canada continues to focus its efforts on fostering a prosperous future for seniors across Canada. Through the many community-based projects we support each year, our government helps provide seniors with unique opportunities to share their knowledge, skills and experience with others in their community."

 The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development

Associated Links

Backgrounder

New Horizons for Seniors Program

The New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP) is a federal grants and contributions program that supports projects led or inspired by seniors who make a difference in the lives of others and their communities. Through the NHSP, the Government of Canada encourages seniors to share their knowledge, skills and experience to the benefit of others.

The objectives of the NHSP are:

promoting volunteerism among seniors;

engaging seniors in the community through mentoring of others;

expanding awareness of elder abuse, including financial abuse;

supporting social participation and inclusion of seniors; and

providing capital assistance for new and existing community projects and/or programs for seniors.

NHSP funding supports community-based projects and pan-Canadian projects.

Community-based projects

Community-based project funding supports activities that engage seniors and address one or more of the program's five objectives: volunteering, mentoring, expanding awareness of elder abuse, social participation and capital assistance. These projects are eligible to receive up to $25,000 per year per organization in grant funding.

Close to 1,850 projects across Canada were approved through last year's NHSP 20152016 Call for Proposals for Community-Based Projects and these projects are now in progress.

The NHSP 20152016 Call for Proposals for Community-Based Projects closed on July 10, 2015. It invited organizations to apply for funding of up to $25,000 for projects that help empower seniors to share their knowledge, skills and experience with others and support communities by increasing their capacity to address local issues.

For more information on the NHSP, visit Canada.ca/Seniors.

Pan-Canadian projects

Pan-Canadian projects test and share best practices across the country and replicate interventions that have worked well in addressing seniors' issues.

Projects that have received funding through the NHSP 20152016 Call for Proposals for Pan-Canadian Projects submitted an impact plan describing the roles they and their project partners would play in addressing the important issue of social isolation among seniors by using collaborative approaches that place an emphasis on measurable results.

Successful projects are up to three years in duration and are receiving funding between $150,000 and $750,000.

More than $24.3 million (more than $8.1 million per year over the next three years) will be made available for pan-Canadian projects funded through the NHSP 20152016 Call for Proposals.

For more information on the NHSP, visit Canada.ca/Seniors.

Additional Government of Canada commitments to seniors

The Government of Canada is working hard to help improve the lives of seniors on many fronts, such as:

introducing a new Home Accessibility Tax Credit for seniors and people with disabilities to help with the costs of ensuring their homes remain safe, secure and accessible; and

extending compassionate care benefits from 6 to up to a maximum of 26 weeks to eligible individuals who have to be temporarily away from work to provide care or support to a gravely ill family member at risk of dying within 26 weeks.

Budget 2016 proposed the following measures to improve the quality of life of seniors:

increasing the Guaranteed Income Supplement top-up benefit for single seniors by up to $947 annually, starting in July 2016 , to help lift low-income single seniors out of poverty;

annually, starting in , to help lift low-income single seniors out of poverty; improving the retirement income security of working Canadians. The Government has begun discussions with provinces and territories to enhance the Canada Pension Plana portable, low-cost, defined benefit pension plan for all Canadian workers outside Quebec ;

; restoring the eligibility age for Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement benefits to 65;

supporting low-income seniors by introducing legislative changes so that couples who receive Guaranteed Income Supplement and Allowance benefits and have to live apart for reasons beyond their control (such as a requirement for long-term care) will receive higher benefits based on their individual incomes;

supporting the construction, repair and adaptation of affordable housing for seniors through an investment of $200.7 million over two years starting in 201617 to help the many seniors facing challenges in accessing affordable housing; and

over two years starting in 201617 to help the many seniors facing challenges in accessing affordable housing; and developing a coordinated poverty reduction strategy in Canada that will address the issue of poverty among seniors.

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SOURCE Employment and Social Development Canada

For further information: Media Relations Office, Employment and Social Development Canada, 819-994-5559, [email protected]
Political analyst: The authorities didnt come to senses (video)

Political analyst Sergey Shakaryants expresses his concern about the united air defense agreement between Armenia and Russia. He thinks that the agreement should have been discussed several years ago, when the negotiation were still underway, If there were questions, if you had problems, proposals, you should have made them before the negotiations, but it was 2-3 years ago. You shouldnt call into question the document, which seems to be already signed by you and say that it should be discussed again, he noted, adding that the authorities didnt come to senses and didnt understand the interests of Armenia. The political expert thinks that for the economic development Armenia should have resorted to the policy of developing relations with the EU and signing the Association agreement, or should have cooperated with Iran, I, as an Armenian, as the RA citizen, reject any option of getting closer to Turkey, remove from the agenda the option of getting closer to Azerbaijan, and, for example, getting gas from there, he summed up.
CanNor funds strategic plans for future economic development in indigenous communities.

YELLOWKNIFE, June 15, 2016 /CNW/ - Today, the Honourable Minister Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for CanNorannounced an investment of just over $259,000 to diversify and foster future economic opportunities for five Indigenous communities in the Northwest Territories.

Funding from the Northern Aboriginal Economic Opportunities Program is supporting the Norman Wells Land Corporation and the Ticho Government in preparing economic development plans to leverage potential business opportunities in order to create future benefits in their communities.

To compliment a Norman Wells Land Corporation investment of $25,000, CanNor is contributing a total of $202,318 over two years for the creation of an Area Development Plan. The plan will assist with identifying the economic opportunities associated with the development of commercial land and will support the diversification of the economy in Norman Wells.

In addition, CanNor provided a total of $57,362 to the Ticho Region Economic Development Working Group for the development of an economic strategy and implementation plan for four Ticho communities: Behchoko, Whati, Gameti, and Wekweeti. These strategies and plans will enable the four communities to assess and pursue economic and training opportunities that will enhance their business and job prospects in years to come.

Quick Facts

The Government of the Northwest Territories is contributing $85,638 to the Ticho Government and $25,580 to the Norman Wells Land Corporation for these projects.

Quotes

"A strong and self-sufficient economy doesn't happen overnight. It takes time, investments, and forward thinking. Investing in regional economic development plans are a key step to business growth, employment opportunities, and community wellness. The Government of Canada is proud to be a part of the building blocks that are supporting diverse and prosperous local economies in the North."

The Honourable Navdeep Bains

Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, and the Minister responsible for CanNor

"Communities in the Northwest Territories have a lot of economic potential. By supporting economic development planning and growth, these NWT communities will benefit from future business and employment opportunities."

Michael McLeod

Member of Parliament, Northwest Territories

"All progress begins with solid planning, and our government believes investment in these plans could bring exciting new training and employment opportunities to the Ticho region. Our departments of Industry, Tourism and Investment and Education, Culture and Employment are pleased to have contributed funding in support of a strong, skilled workforce and broader economic horizons."

The Honourable Robert R. McLeod

Premier, Northwest Territories

"Creating an area development plan will allow us to have a long-term vision and plan intelligently for the economic development of our lands for future generations."

Sherry Hodgson

President, Norman Wells Land Corporation

SOURCE Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency (CanNor)

For further information: Contacts : Office of the Honourable Navdeep Bains, 343-291-2500; Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, Craig Welsh, Communications Advisor, 867-975-3722; For more information about CanNor, visit cannor.gc.ca; Government of Northwest Territories, Drew Williams, Manager Public Affairs and Communications, 867- 767-9202 ext. 63037; Norman Wells Land Corporation, Sean Rorison, Executive Director, 867-587-2455
Construction at IKEA Edmonton and IKEA Calgary represents a $28 million investment and is scheduled for completion in summer 2017

BURLINGTON, ON, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - Construction begins this July on warehouse expansions at the IKEA Calgary and IKEA Edmonton stores. The projects will add an average of 29,000 square feet of space to each of the existing warehouses, which will mean there will be more products available for customers.

The expansion projects will support approximately 270 construction jobs in the province, create new hires at the Edmonton store and represents a total investment of $28 million Canadian.

"We are working diligently to provide our customers from coast-to-coast with an easier and more convenient shopping experience," said Stefan Sjostrand, IKEA Canada President. "With sales increasing at both locations, there is a need to expand our warehouses to better serve our valued customers in Alberta."

Construction on both stores is expected to be completed by summer 2017. The expansion is part of IKEA Canada's ambition to become more accessible to as many people as possible, with the aim of doubling its presence in Canada by 2025.

"IKEA's expansion in Calgary is a bright light in our economy," said Naheed Nenshi, Mayor of Calgary. "This investment shows confidence in Calgarians while creating jobs and opportunity."

From opening new stores, to expanding existing ones, testing new store formats and strengthening its distribution network, IKEA is committed to putting its customers at the centre of everything it does.

"Customers in Calgary and beyond have been great supporters of IKEA for more than 37 years," said Jacob Brandberg, IKEA Calgary Store Manager. "We are excited that this investment in our store will allow us to deliver an even better shopping experience."

IKEA Edmonton's Store Manager Alan Corbett agrees: "The investment in our stores will allow us to improve on our existing services and having more stock available for our customers."

Several services are available at both stores to make shopping at IKEA more convenient. Customers who wish to take advantage of the in-store Shopping Service can have their furniture picked up and delivered directly to their homes for $79. This is an addition to IKEA's existing offer of delivery, assembly, installation and kitchen services. Free WiFi is also available in every store, allowing customers to surf the mobile version of IKEA's website or download the IKEA Canada Shopping App, which can be used to check stock availability, create shopping lists and locate products in the Self Serve warehouse.

IKEA Canada is also continuing to make investments in renewable energy, products for a sustainable life at home, and is committed to making a difference in the communities where it operates. The purchase of a wind farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta has enabled IKEA Canada to become energy independent five years ahead of its global goal of 2020. It produces more than double IKEA Canada's total energy consumption.

In response to the devastating wildfire in Fort McMurray, IKEA announced a $100,000 donation of furniture and home furnishings products to assist with immediate relief and long term recovery effort. Additionally, in response to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis and Canada's commitment to welcoming 25,000 refugees, IKEA Canada offered $190,000 to registered Canadian charities supporting the resettlement efforts. Specifically $20,000 was given to the Alberta stores, with up to nearly 20 families directly benefiting.

IKEA Calgary has served the local market for 36 years and has been operating in its current location since 2004. It employs 303 people, many who are long standing co-workers. The store's longest serving co-worker has been with the company since 1981. IKEA Edmonton originally open 37 years ago and reopened its current location in 2003and employs 342 co-workers. Its longest serving co-worker has been with the company for more than 30 years.

About IKEA Canada

IKEA is a leading home furnishing retailer with 375 stores in more than 50 countries worldwide, which are visited by 884 million people every year. IKEA Canada has 12 stores, an eCommerce virtual store, and Pick-up and order points in Quebec City, Quebec and London, Whitby, St. Catharines, Kitchener and Windsor, Ontario. The company also recently announced plans to open a 13th store in Halifax, Nova Scotia in late 2017. Last year, IKEA Canada welcomed 25 million visitors to its stores and 75 million visitors to the IKEA.ca website. Founded in 1943, the IKEA business philosophy is to offer a wide range of products of good design and function at prices so low, the majority of people can afford them. For more information on IKEA, please visit: www.IKEA.ca.

SOURCE IKEA Canada

For further information: Stephanie Kerr, Corporate Press Officer, IKEA Canada, 905-637-9440 ext. 6378, [email protected]
KUUJJUARAAPIK, QC, June 15, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - Accompanied by the MNA for Ungava, Mr. Jean Boucher, the Minister responsible for Native Affairs, Geoffrey Kelley, participated in a ground-breaking ceremony yesterday evening to begin the construction of Kuujjuaraapik's new multi-purpose venue, a major new cultural centre in Nunavik. The Government of Quebec is contributing over $3.5 million to this project, with $2.05 million stemming from the Ministry of Culture and Communications' Capital Assistance Program  Quebec Infrastructure Plan.

"This kind of infrastructure is extremely important in ensuring the vitality of a nation's culture, and we believe that the Katittavik hall will quickly become a major gathering place for the region, a venue where all generations can come together to enjoy life's beautiful moments. The concerts, events and activities which will take place in this hall, and the happy moments that will be celebrated here, will greatly improve the quality of life of local residents," stated Minister Kelley.

"In order to flourish, culture must be expressed. This multi-purpose venue will address this need, and will certainly become a focal point for members of the community. I am confident that this venue will be of great use to future generations, as well to those who will inherit Inuit traditions and be responsible for continuing them," said the Minister of Culture and Communications and Minister responsible for the Protection and Promotion of the French Language, Luc Fortin.

"The construction of this multi-purpose venue in Kuujjuaraapik is excellent news for Nunavik. This hall will help revitalize the municipality and the region, and I am delighted to help to begin construction on this site!" added Jean Boucher, MNA for Ungava.

"I am very proud of the work accomplished up to now by the Kativik Regional Government (KRG) in collaboration with the Government of Quebec and the Northern Village of Kuujjuaraapik. The KRG's Municipal Public Works Department has done an outstanding job at each step in this process. Congratulations to Kuujjuaraapimmiut, which will soon enjoy a state-of-the-art venue to celebrate Nunavimmiut's most important richness, their cultural heritage!" declared Jennifer Munick, Chairperson of the Kativik Regional Government (KRG).

This multi-purpose venue will be named Katittavik, which means "gathering place." Located in the heart of the village of Kuujjuaraapik, the building will be easily accessible to the population, and available to local and regional artists for their work. This new facility is a strategic initiative for Inuit cultural development. It will showcase the rich Inuit culture, featuring traditional songs, dance performances, plays, oral history as well as any other form or practice of social and collective arts. This venue may also serve as a temporary exhibition gallery featuring Inuit art and a venue for the organization of conferences.

Ideal for meetings and discussions, this venue will also allow the community to gather for cultural and community events. This will help improve the quality of life of the residents of the village and the personal growth of community members through artistic pursuit. On the economic front, it will create direct and indirect jobs while maintaining others. Hall rentals will also generate revenues for the village.

About the Aboriginal Initiatives Fund II

The main objective of the Aboriginal Initiatives Fund II is to support Aboriginal social, economic and community development. The fund is made up of five different budgets for economic development, loan guarantees, the development of community infrastructures, community action and consultation. Its management has been entrusted to the Secretariat aux affaires autochtones of the Government of Quebec.

Source: Chantal Gauvin Press Secretary Office of the Minister responsible for Native Affairs 418 643-3166 Karl Filion Press Secretary Minister of Culture and Communications and Minister responsible for the Protection

and Promotion of the French Language 418 380-2310



Frederique Brais-Chaput Press Secretary Office of Jean Boucher, MNA for Ungava 581 579-0118 Jean-Philippe Dubois Communications Coordinator Kativik Regional Government 819-964-2961, ext. 2219



SOURCE Cabinet du ministre responsable des Affaires autochtones

For further information: Source: Chantal Gauvin, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister responsible for Native Affairs, 418 643-3166; Karl Filion, Press Secretary, Minister of Culture and Communications and Minister responsible for the Protection and Promotion of the French Language, 418 380-2310; Frederique Brais-Chaput, Press Secretary, Office of Jean Boucher, MNA for Ungava, 581 579-0118; Jean-Philippe Dubois, Communications Coordinator, Kativik Regional Government, 819-964-2961, ext. 2219
CALGARY, June 16, 2016 /CNW/ - Several weeks after the commencement of the Fort McMurray fire and evacuation, residents are now returning to their communities and businesses are resuming operations. Rogers Insurance Ltd. would like to announce that as of Thursday, June 9, 2016, its Franklin Ave office in Fort McMurray resumed operations.

Despite the office remaining short-staffed for the coming weeks due to local staff being personally affected by the fire, several staff members from the Rogers head office in Calgary have stepped forward to ensure the continuation of service for Fort McMurray clients. As the largest permanent insurance broker in the municipality of wood buffalo, the team of insurance experts at Rogers have been dedicated to providing service and assistance to a record number of phone calls and walk-in clients. Since the fire, Rogers Insurance has seen an almost 400% spike in phone calls and has reported more than 3,300 claims.

Rogers' dedication to the human approach to insurance has been a key factor in standing by the community of Fort McMurray and is committed to ensure excellence in quality of service during this difficult time.

Based in Calgary, AB, with nine offices across the country and almost 400 employees, Rogers Insurance Ltd. is one of the largest independent brokerages in Canada, providing commercial insurance, home and auto insurance, life and benefits, and group insurance. Rogers is employee-owned, and proud to be the most award-winning brokerage in Canada. Rogers is a member of the Canadian Broker Network (CBN) and Intersure, giving it affiliated offices across Canada, the US and Mexico.

SOURCE Rogers Insurance Ltd.

Image with caption: "Rogers Insurance (CNW Group/Rogers Insurance Ltd.)". Image available at: http://photos.newswire.ca/images/download/20160616_C6727_PHOTO_EN_715589.jpg

For further information: Lee Rogers, President, Rogers Insurance Ltd., 403.296.2471, [email protected]; Bruce Rabik, Chief Operating Officer, Rogers Insurance Ltd., 403.296.2484, [email protected]
A GREAT WAY TO CELEBRATE INDEPENDENCE DAY



By Chuck Baldwin

June 16, 2016

NewsWithViews.com

A few years ago, I sadly discovered that it was next to impossible to find our nations great historic documents together in one volume, so I decided to fix that problem. It took us a full year to research and compile over 50 of our countrys greatest historical documents, but we did it.

So, in honor of Independence Day, we are again making this great compilation of documents available to my readers. You can have these historic documents at your fingertips in one beautifully bound, easy-to-read format. These are the documents that gave birth to the greatest free nation on earth. Nowhere else that we know of can you find these documents--complete in one volume--under one title. We call this magnificent collection THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS.

Notable freedomists such as Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and former Congressman Ron Paul have copies of this monumental compilation. Even the State Supreme Court of Tennessee ordered several copies. Pastors, teachers, high school and college students, law and history students, and homeschoolers have found THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS immensely valuable to the study of American history and civics.

Included in this remarkable volume are documents such as The Mayflower Compact, The First Thanksgiving Proclamation, the complete text of Patrick Henrys immortal Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech, the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms, The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, George Washingtons Farewell Address, Ronald Reagans First and Second Inaugural Addresses, and so on.

We have also included several letters written between John and Abigail Adams. Do you remember the poem about Paul Reveres ride? Well, it, too, is included in this compilation. Also included is the letter written from within the Alamo by William Barret Travis to the people of Texas. Of course, the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights are also there.

As you read through these documents, you will feel the pride and patriotism swelling in your heart. The Spirit of 76 will again come alive in your soul. And when your children read it, they, too, will experience the feeling of what freedom meant to our forebears--maybe for the first time. Sadly, most schools--even most private and Christian schools--do not require the reading of these wonderful documents.

This giant compilation includes more than 50 documents, over 170 full-sized pages complete with a spiral ring binding for easy copying, and a professionally designed color cover. This volume is a must-read for every American patriot. For the price of a couple of pizzas, you can have the great documents of American history delivered to your door.

No, we have not gone up on the price, in spite of increased postage and shipping costs. The price remains $35 for a single copy, or $25 each if you purchase two or more, plus $5 each for shipping (domestic shipping only--international rates vary). Simply mail your check or money order to:

Chuck Baldwin Live

P.O. Box 10

Kila, MT 59920

We also take credit cards. Obviously, this is the fastest way to obtain your copy of THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS. To order by credit card online or to learn more about THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS, click here.

This is a limited printing, so order now before our supply runs out.

Former Constitution Party Presidential candidate, the late Howard Phillips, said, THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS is must-reading for every American. It is essential that this volume be placed in every home in the country. I read my copy daily. We require our homeschooled children to study THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS.

Do not look for this volume in stores or online; it can only be purchased here. A retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel thought he could find these documents by simply going to the Internet. After searching several days without success, he ordered two copies of THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS. He told my secretary, Tell Chuck hes right. You cant find these anywhere else in one volume. I tried.

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Oscar-nominated actress Kate Hudson took a break from filming a movie Wednesday to visit Niagara Falls.

The actress, known for her roles in "Almost Famous" and "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" among other films, posted videos to her Snapchat account showing her riding the Maid of the Mist, visiting the Cave of the Winds and eating some of the area's trademark wings, WIVB reports.

The Maid of the Mist official Twitter account shared a picture of Hudson aboard the boat ride.

Hudson is currently filming "Marshall" in Western New York, WKBW reports. The movie is a biopic of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice. The cast features Chadwick Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in "42," in the title role. Dan Stevens and Josh Gad are also in the film.

Filming for "Marshall" began May 23 in Western New York at the LaSalle Branch of the Niagara Falls Public Library on Buffalo Avenue, WGRZ reports. Filming will continue to take place in the area until July 4, with scenes mainly centered at the former Dillon Federal Courthouse in downtown Buffalo.
Armenia and Artsakh Ombudsmen on finding driving license of the NKR DA Lieutenant Colonel in Baku

The Human Rights Defenders of Armenia and Artsakh issued a joint statement on finding the drivers license of Armenian citizen, Lieutenant Colonel of the NKR DA Aleksan Arakelyan, in Azerbaijan. On June 14 information was disseminated in the Azerbaijani media that the drivers license given by the RA relevant bodies and belonging to Aleksan Arakelyan was found in Baku. The offices of the RA Ombudsman and Artsakh Ombudsman carried out separate examinations and came to a conclusion that the abovementioned document belongs to the RA citizen, Lieutenant Colonel of the NKR DA Aleksan Arakelyan (born in 1982). The latter was reported missing on April 2, on the first day of the hostilities unleashed by Azerbaijan against the NKR (see full information about the aggression unleashed by Azerbaijan in the interim report of Artsakh Ombudsman following this link http://www.eoi.at//Interim_Public_Report_NKR%20Omb._FINAL) The body of A. Arakelyan was handed over to Artsakh authorities by the Azerbaijani side on April 10. We note in this regard, that the Azerbaijani side is obliged to fulfill its obligation under the International Humanitarian Law, Article 16, of 1949 First Geneva Convention, and ensure the return of the abovementioned document to the family of Lieutenant Colonel Aleksan Arakelyan, preserving all the rules. The Azerbaijani authorities are also obliged to give a detailed public explanation as to how the document belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Arakelyan had appeared in Baku, whats more, in a public area. At the same time, we call on the international organizations that have a human rights mandate and, in particular, operate in Azerbaijan, to closely follow the course of implementation of actions by the Azerbaijani authorities toward eliminating this violation of the international humanitarian law, and conducting an investigation into the causes of this violation. To note, the abovementioned fact will be at the center of attention of the Human Rights Defenders of Armenia and Artsakh. 16 June, 2016
The Director of Defence Information, Brig.-Gen. Rabe Abubakar, has said that more 700 repentant Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East ha...





The Director of Defence Information, Brig.-Gen. Rabe Abubakar, has said that more 700 repentant Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East have surrendered to the military.Abubakar said this when he paid a courtesy call on the Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Mr Bayo Onanuga, in Abuja on Thursday. According to him, a camp will be opened where the repentant insurgents will be kept before the government decides on what to do with them.The defence spokesman said the media had a very important role to play in mitigating the crisis befalling the country. He, therefore, called for synergy between the media and the military in mobilising and informing the citizenry about the crisis.We have come to understand that the military cannot do it all alone.It must enter into collaborative efforts and synergy in certain operations with the media, which we believe will go a long way to not just project our activities or operations, but at the same time play a role which nobody can do apart from you.Mobilising the citizens, informing them about what is happening and equally sensitising them. The media has a very important role in mitigating the crisis that is befalling our nation.We have many of the Boko Haram members, who surrendered as a result of our operations in Sambisa.We have over 700 now and very soon we will open the camp in the North-East where we will be keeping them before the government decides on what to do with them.
Speaking when he led the Senate and House of Representatives Committees on Privatization on tour of the projects, Chairman, Senate Committ...





Speaking when he led the Senate and House of Representatives Committees on Privatization on tour of the projects, Chairman, Senate Committee on Privatization, Senator Ben Murray- Bruce, said the Senate was highly disappointed that successive governments could abandon the projects put in place by former President Shehu Shagari.Senator Bruce, who blamed previous administrations and governments after Shagari, for the rot and abandonment, said the Senate, after a public hearing, would meet with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to find lasting solution to the problem to ensure that the companies worked.Bruce, who was angered by what he saw, said: The presentation has been enlightening. I am deeply depressed as a businessman and as a senator. After spending about $5 billion, it does not make any sense to abandon the plant.The government should have had a plan. We are disappointed that successive governments after Shagari abandoned the projects. There is a public hearing. We will not leave the venue of the public hearing until we find a solution. After everything, we will meet with the vice president who is the head of the economic team. We will fix this problem.Earlier in his remarks, Sole Administrator of Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited, Isah Joseph Onobere, who described the complex as the bedrock of Nigerias development, said the government must be careful about concessioning as any attempt to do so now, would amount to selling out scraps.According to him, $ 513 million is required to complete Ajaokuta project. This place is the bedrock of Nigerias development. The first phase of the project has reached 98 per cent completion.It was abandoned in 1994. For 22 years, no new inputs, N23 trillion worth of steel products imported into Nigeria in 9 years. $513 million needed to complete the project. Total investment is $4.6 billion, he said.
The minister of transport, Chibuike Amaechi, and the minister of state for petroleum, Ibeh Kachikwu, on Monday disagreed on the establis...

The minister of transport, Chibuike Amaechi, and the minister of state for petroleum, Ibeh Kachikwu, on Monday disagreed on the establishment of a Nigerian Maritime University, proposed for Okerenkoko in Delta State.Speaking alongside other ministers at a government town meeting in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Mr. Amaechi defended the decision of the Buhari administration to scrap the project.Mr. Amaechi said the previous administration of Goodluck Jonathan had paid too much to acquire a site for the university.The groundbreaking of the proposed school at Okerenkoko in Warri south-West local government area was done by former President Goodluck Jonathan in 2014.But addressing the senate committee on maritime on January 19, Mr. Amaechi announced the scrapping of the project, which was to be financed by the Nigerian Maritime and Safety Administration Agency, a parastatal under his ministry.He cited insecurity in the area, and said the project was a misplacement of priority because there are transport institutes in Zaria (Kaduna), and Oron (Akwa Ibom), already.On Monday, Mr. Amaechi address the case again, in response to a question at the town hall meeting.The minister said the new government lacked the funds to continue with the university project.Okerenkoko (Maritime University), I am not against, he said. My argument about Okerenkoko is that land alone is 13 billion(naira). If you give me 13 billion, I will buy the half of Lagos. That 13 billion has built the university already.He said the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission should recover the N13 billion already paid for the land, then I will build the university for them.What to do: let EFCC retrieve the money and release the money and we build the university. If they bring the N13 billion, I will build the university for them. Thats for land alone. I believe the Federal Government does not have money. When we have money, we can continue. The minister of petroleum has said he would look for the money. Minister, give me the money and we continue.But Mr. Kachikwu disagreed with Mr. Amaechi, saying he was in support of the project, drawing a loud applause from the audience.First, let me say on Okerenkoko University, I disagree with the Minister of Transport, he said.Any facility that is located in the South-South we should work close to developing it. I dont care the circumstances under which you are placed.Its not in my position to determine whether land was valued at 3 billion or 10 billion.The appropriate institution which is at the cost system will determine that. That has nothing to do with development of infrastructure. And as far as I know, so much has already gone into the university.So much physical of assets are being developed.We are not going to throw away the baby with bath water. We deal with the issues but the university will be developed. If he (Amaechi) does not want it in Maritime, I will take it in petroleum, he said.Mr. Kachikwu later said that he joined the present government without ever meeting President Muhammadu Buhari, but by recommendation and reputation.On the renewed insurgency in the Niger Delta region, Mr. Kachikwu repeated his call for dialogue with Niger Delta Avengers which has vowed to ground Nigerias oil industry, having carried out audacious attacks on oil and gas installations.He said the crisis could not be resolved through counter military attacks by Nigerias Armed Forces, but through dialogue.We must dialogue first; and if that fails, we know what to do next, he said.He said Niger Delta people with skills and finance would benefit from allocation of oil blocs because it would be part of giving back to the chicken that laid the eggs.He said oil blocs would empower Niger Delta people and enable to engage in genuine oil deals, rather than being contractors to oil companies.
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Lagos State has congratulated Governor Akinwunmi Ambode on his 53rd birthday and charged him to use ...

The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Lagos State has congratulated Governor Akinwunmi Ambode on his 53rd birthday and charged him to use his next three years to serve Lagos residents and not the interest of the All Progressives Congress, APC.The PDP claimed that although the governor came into power on a controversial note, he had made serious attempts to fulfil his campaign promises.Ambode who celebrated his 53rd birthday on Tuesday, June 14, was praised for the decision to use his birthday celebration to raise funds for cancer treatment in the state.The congratulatory message was part of a statement issued by the partys state spokesperson, Gani Taofik yesterday.The PDP opines that the governor has attempted to justify his election.Observing these attempts, such as in the area of road rehabilitation with pedestrian bridge construction, we will give the governor the benefit of the doubt that he is serious about serving the general interest and not parochial or APC interest as his predecessor did.We will keep a tab on his governance and commend or condemn same as applicable. In this period of his birthday celebration, we want to commend him and hope that he sees this assessment as a challenge for him to perform better.
Supporters of Senators Ahmed Makarfi and Modu Sheriff again clashed at the national secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party.

Supporters of Senators Ahmed Makarfi and Modu Sheriff again clashed at the national secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party.The Makarfi supporters who arrived as early as 6am at the secretariat and were armed with cutlasses barricaded the entrance into the national secretariat displaying banners with the the inscription, PDP youths support Makarfi, Sheriff is an APC agent.Shortly after, supporters of Sheriff who were fewer in number arrived beating drums and chanting songs in support of Senator Sheriff.A free for all however ensued shortly before the Makarfi group chased away the Sheriff group from the secretariat.Police and DSS officials who were deployed to the secretariat watched the two groups clash without any intervention.More details later, as events unfolds.
Former National Security Adviser (NSA) Col. Mohammed Sambo Dasuki (rtd) is now set to storm the Supreme Court to press for his freedom den...

Former National Security Adviser (NSA) Col. Mohammed Sambo Dasuki (rtd) is now set to storm the Supreme Court to press for his freedom denied him by the federal government after three different High Courts in Abuja had admitted him to bail in the criminal charges filed against him by the government.The ex NSA had on Wednesday at the Court of Appeal in Abuja lost his bid to enforce his freedom after he had secured bails on all the charges against him.Dasukis lawyer, Mr. Ahmed Raji, SAN confirmed that appeal papers have been put together to be filed at the Apex Court to challenge the judgment of the Court of Appeal and the High court that gave judgment to the government on the re-arrest after bail.The SAN said that there are sufficient grounds for his client to approach the Supreme Court to seek the enforcement of his freedom from detention ordered by the federal government after he had been granted bail by three Judges who are prosecuting him on the charges.Dasuki said that he was not afraid of trial in the charges against him as a former National Security Adviser, but added that the proper thing must be done by the government by respecting the bail granted him lawfully by courts.He claimed that since government had approached the court in his matter, the same government must be fully ready to abide by the court decisions in the interest of justice and the rule of law.The ex-NSA had been admitted to bail by three different High Courts in Abuja but he was re-arrested on December 29, 2015 by operatives of the Department of the State Security Service (DSS) on an alleged order of the federal government and had since been held incommunicado.But the government in its defence in a motion on notice filed in court claimed that Dasuki being a Crown Prince of Sokoto Caliphate had large sympathizers across the length and breadth of the country who may jeopardize his trial if allowed on bail.Dasuki had asked the High Court and the Court of Appeal to stop the federal government from further prosecuting the criminal charges until the bail granted him is obeyed and also pleaded that the courts should no longer grant indulgence to the federal government having been in contempt of the courts by the refusal to allow him freedom after the bail.In a unanimous judgment of the full panel of the court delivered by Justice Abdul Aboki, the Appeal Court upheld the submission of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which put Dasuki on trial, that it was not in contempt of any court order because the re-arrest of the appellant (Dasuki) in December last year was not at its (EFCC) instance.Justice Aboki said that from the submissions of the appellant counsel, Mr. Joseph Daudu (SAN) and the EFCC counsel, Mr. Rotimi Jacobs (SAN), the bail condition granted Dasuki was perfected on December 29, last year and that a warrant of released to that effect was served on the Comptroller of Prisons in Kuje, upon which he was released.On his re-arrest by the operatives of the Department of the State Security Service (DSS), the Appeal Court agreed with the Abuja High Court that the re-arrest cannot be turned to a disobedience to its order on bail because the court bail was not targeted at the DSS when it was granted.The appellate court also said that the EFCC which put Dasuki on trial on criminal charges at the FCT High Court cannot be held responsible for the action of the DSS on the ground that the two agencies are different entities established by different Acts and vested with different powers.Besides, the appeal court said there was no existing order against the re-arrest of Dasuki and that since there is no existing order, there cannot be a disobedience to a non-existing court order.The court held that the appellant ought to have established the terms of court order on the bail clearly to indicate in clear terms, the agency that can be held for contempt if the order is violated.In the appeal, the court said that form 48, which deals with contempt of court, was not served on either EFCC or DSS and as such, the two agencies cannot be held liable for the offense of contempt.Justice Aboki, therefore, held that there was no violation of any court order either by DSS or EFCC in respect of the bail granted Dasuki on December 18, 2015 and his subsequent re-arrest on December 29, 2015 by DSS operatives, shortly after he perfected his bail condition and secured freedom.However, the Appeal Court warned that court order must be obeyed and the issue of bail was a right to any person charged to court adding that any act of disobedience to court order by government is injurious to smooth running of the society and it is an invitation to anarchy.Dasuki had approached the Court of Appeal praying it to set aside the ruling of an Abuja High Court which exonerated EFCC from his re-arrest shortly after he perfected his bail conditions.He asked the appellate court to void the ruling of the High Court and set it aside on the ground that DSS and EFCC are both agents of the Federal Government which is the complainant in the charges against him at the High Court.
Riot police on Wednesday armed with tear gas and batons charged at English fans who were yelling 'we hate Russia' after it emerged that Russian fans had reportedly vowed to attack their English counterparts.Police Officers made 36 arrests during violent scenes that unfolded in the hours after Russia were beaten 2-1 by Slovakia at the city's Metropole stadium as hundreds of fans surged from a pub where they had been chanting 'we hate Russia' before running through Lille city centre yesterday.Eyewitnesses say they saw paramedics giving one fan CPR while another fan was reportedly knocked to the ground before his head was stamped as 16 more people were hospitalized.Riot police started firing tear gas to disperse English supporters, many of them apparently drunk, late into the evening as it emerged a 'really violent' fight between up to 15 England and Wales fans had broken out on a train from Calais to Lille - a day before the teams are due to meet in their second game of Euro 2016.
Ex-Niger Delta militant leader, High Chief Ateke Tom, has told the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) that his agitation was devoid of criminalit...

Ex-Niger Delta militant leader, High Chief Ateke Tom, has told the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) that his agitation was devoid of criminality and heartlessness.Tom, who spoke in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, recalled that he never got involved in criminal activities during his peiod of agitation.He said his struggle led to the development of the Niger Delta.Cautioning the NDA to shun violence and avoid dragging him into the renewed crisis in the region, Tom said he was surprised that the new militant group attempted to tarnish his reputation by dropping his name in its activities.The NDA, in a recent statement, accused Tom of supporting the Federal Government, adding that his struggle and that of his close associates was based on criminality.But Tom, who is the leader of Niger Delta Vigilante Force (NDVF), said his agitation increased political participation in the area, adding that former President Goodluck Jonathan was a beneficiary of his agitation.The former militant leader urged NDA to stop the destruction of oil facilities.The NDVF leader said NDAs activities were causing untold hardship among the regions residents.He said his struggle was an agitation for true federalism.Tom added that it paved the way for the emergence of more educated youths from the region through the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP).
The Federal Government has unveiled the 23 conditions state must meet in order to access the new bailout fund. The Statement disclosed t...

The Federal Government has unveiled the 23 conditions state must meet in order to access the new bailout fund. The Statement disclosed that 23-point reform agenda called the Fiscal Sustainability Plan (FSP) was unanimously agreed by state governors during the National Economic Council meeting held on May 19 and it encompasses a framework of reform measures which include:1. Publish audited annual financial statements within nine months of financial year end.2. Comply with the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS)3. Publish state budget online annually4. Publish budget implementation performance report online quarterly5. Develop standard IPSAS compliant software to be offered to states for use by state and local governments6. Set realistic and achievable targets to improve independently generated revenue (from all revenue generating activities of the state in addition to tax collections) and ratio of capital to recurrent expenditure7. Implement targets8. Implement a centralised Treasury Single Account (TSA) in each state9. Have quarterly financial reconciliation meetings with federal government to cover VAT, PAYE remittances, refunds on government projects, Paris Club and other accounts10. Share the database of companies within each state with the Federal Inland Revenue service (FIRS). The objective is to improve VAT and PAYE collection11. Introduce a system to allow for the immediate issue of VAT/WHT certificates on payment of invoices. Review all revenue related laws and update obsolete rates/tariffs12. Set limits on personnel expenditure as a share of total budgeted expenditure13. Biometric capture of all states civil servants will be carried out to eliminate payroll fraud14. Establish efficiency unit15. Federal government online price guide to be made available for use by states16. Introduce a system of continuous audit (internal audit)17. Create a fixed asset and liability register18. Consider privatization or concession of suitable State-owned enterprises to improve efficiency and management19. Establish a capital development fund to ring- fence capital receipts and adopt accounting policies to ensure that capital receipts are strictly applied to capital projects20. Domesticate Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) 21. Attainment and maintenance of a credit rating by each state of the federation22. Federal government to encourage states to access funds from the capital markets for bankable projects through issuance of fast- track Municipal bond guidelines to support smaller issuance and shorter tenures23. Comply with the FRA and reporting obligations, including: No commercial bank loans to be undertaken by States; Routine submission of updated debt profile report to the DMO.Speaking on the loan, Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun said: The amount of the loan is N50billion for three months to be shared across the 36 states, including FCT and then N40billion for nine months.The idea is to tie states over for a year so that they rebalance, which is an average of about N1.3billion per state for the first three months and N1.1billion for the next nine months. It is a loan and it is fully repayable although it has a secured tie against future dividends, revenues and any amount that government might owe the states
Minister: Arrested officials are professionals

The investigation into the case of arrest of officials of Health Ministry is underway; for already two years the Investigative Committee has been engaged in that case, said Minister of Healthcare Armen Muradyan after the Government session and reminded that the case is connected with vacation packages. He reminded that the Ministry suspected violations connected with vacation packages still in 2014. When that issue came to the agenda, we applied to the law enforcement bodies and a relevant case was instituted. At the moment the officials of the Ministry of Healthcare were released with a written cognizance not to leave the country. Armen Muradyan described them as professionals, I am sure that no innocent person will be punished. Still we dont have any mediation to dismiss them or to stop their powers, if we have such a mediation, we will reply to it, said the Minister. The Minister didnt answer for which resort zones those vacation packages were, urging to clarify it from the investigative body. He also had difficulty in answering how much money the Ministry lost as a result of that false deals.
Ijaw People Development Initiative, IPDI, Warri, Delta State, Wednesday, said the Federal Government was not committed to the proposed d...

Ijaw People Development Initiative, IPDI, Warri, Delta State, Wednesday, said the Federal Government was not committed to the proposed dialogue with militants.The group in a statement by the national president, Austin Ozobo, condemning alleged unwarranted arrest and invasion of Tebujuor community by soldiers, yesterday, said: The government of the day is not serious about the proposed negotiation. The frequent invasion of communities and arrest of persons after it announced two-week ceasefire fire show that the government is not ready to negotiate with militants.It has refused to keep to its promise of ceasefire, they seem to talk from both sides of the mouth, and we are disappointed. The government is only looking for an avenue to identify the true face of militants to deal with them if negotiation fails, IPDI said.Its words: Imagine just a day after the ceasefire, last week, they invaded Ogulagha and Oporoza communities. In Ogulagha community, they arrested about four persons, though they have released them. In Oporoza , Tompolo house was ransacked, and money and traditional sacred items were stolen.Another arrested in Sapele and now, another three arrested in Tebujor, followed by unwarranted invasion of Tebujor.There all manner of harassment and intimidation of innocent villagers, with what is playing out, the government has breached its ceasefire promise. We do no longer have confidence on the government commitment to it peace talk. Another thing we found out is that the government wants to induce some of the militants to fight others, it said.
Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti state has been dragged before a Federal High Court in Lagos for joining workers of the states civil service ...

Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti state has been dragged before a Federal High Court in Lagos for joining workers of the states civil service in their industrial action.It was gathered that a lawyer, Kabir Akingbolu, who sued the governor before a Federal High Court in Lagos, argued that Mr. Fayoses decision amounted to abdication of duties.''Considering the provision of Section 176 subsection 1 and 2 of the Constitution whether the abdication of duty by the 1st Defendant in reckless abandonment is not a violation of Oath of office taken by him as Governor of Ekiti, Mr. Akingbolu stated in his originating summons.In his court papers, Mr. Akingbolu sought an order of the court declaring that Mr. Fayose has lost his position as governor having failed to transmit power to his deputy as envisaged by the constitution.
Twenty four hours after students attended class in different religious garbs, there was tight security at Baptist Girls High School, Osogb...

Twenty four hours after students attended class in different religious garbs, there was tight security at Baptist Girls High School, Osogbo, Osun State, yesterday.It was also gathered that security would be beefed up in other public schools as from today, pending when the logjam is resolvedAgainst this backdrop, the state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) held a prayer session and called on God to intervene in the ongoing religious crisis.In recent times, female Muslim students and their Christian classmates attended school adorning hijab and church garments.Yesterday, armed security personnel mounted surveillance at the gate and premises of the CAN secretariat located within the school during the prayer session.The programme was organised by the CAN Chairman, Rev. Elisha Ogundiya and presided over by the Vice Chairman, Pastor Moses Ogundeji.The prayer was directed at rejecting the court ruling on hijab and other alleged Islamisation plots in the state.Pastor Ogundeji told newsmen that the prayer, which was held at the Dominion Hall of Osun Baptist Conference, Gbodofon, Osogbo, was also meant to ask God for peace and to nullify what he described as anti-kingdom laws and dealings with satanic forces tormenting the state for the past few weeks.He added that the prayer was meant to deliver Osun from the power of satanic forces and oppressors, adding that God would destroy all powers set to destroy the state.Ogundeji said CAN will not rescind its directive to pupils to adorn choir robes and church garments to schools, if the court judgment was implemented. The cleric, who also called for the return of mission schools to the original owners, said: We dont want crisis in Osun because of hijab issue.Already, demonic spirit and evils are oppressing the state as well as the country at large.In as much as we are trying to resolve the crisis with prayers, if government should expel any Christian pupil or student, it means all the students in public schools would be sent packing.Ogundeji insisted that CAN will appeal the hijab ruling.This was after Governor Rauf Aregbesola warned, on Tuesday that any student found wearing unauthorised clothes to school would be sanctioned.Aregbesola reietrated that any student flouting school rules will be expelled.He gave the new warning, yesterday, when he commissioned the ultra-modern St Michaels RCM Government Middle School, Ibokun.The governor also cautioned parents and guardians not to capitalise on the current crisis.Aregbesola said parents should complement government in shaping the minds of the pupils to be receptive to knowledge and godly character instead of encouraging them to fan the embers of discord.He, however, distanced his administration from the court judgment which allowed female Muslim students to wear hijab to public schools.The governor said decisions of the judiciary, as an independent arm of government, are not subject to any influence by other arms of government. It is funny for some people to insinuate that government has a hand in the judgment.Government is a democracy, not a theocracy. Any student found disobeying school rules and regulations risks expulsion from our schools, he said.The governor insisted that it was not the business of any government, through the schools, to lead a child in a particular religious direction and added that it was the duty of parents and religious institutions to do so until the child grows up enough to make a decision on religion.Meanwhile, former minister of transport and aviation, Chief Ebenezer Babatope, has warned Aregbesola not to plunge the state and the South- West into unnecessary war.Babatope told Daily Sun that bringing religion into politics has done too much havoc in Nigeria.Let the governor not bring religion into politics because the South-West has always been co-existing as Christians and Muslims and we dont need any governor to come and be promoting one religion over another. Let him have very good dialogue with the Christian community and face the governance he was elected for, because promotion of Islam over Christianity was not part of his campaign promises.Let him concentrate on how to pay his workers salaries and work on how he will never owe salary again instead of this distraction he is occupying himself with, he said.
The embattled National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff, was at the Economic and Financial Crimes...

The embattled National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff, was at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) office in Maiduguri, Borno State, on Wednesday to honor an invitation extended to him by the anti-graft agency.Sherrif, who stormed the EFCC office located behind the Directorate of State Security (DSS) office along the Maiduguri/Damaturu highway, was escorted by a small detachment of mobile policemen.He arrived the commissions office at about 10:15am in a tinted glass bulletproof jeep and dressed in a brown baban riga.An official of the EFCC revealed that the ex-Borno State governor was invited to answer questions concerning money distributed to PDP stalwarts in the state during the 2015 general election.
A secessionist group, Utorogu Liberation Movement, ULM, surfaced, Thursday, in Delta State, vowing to destroy the Utorogu Gas Plant, Ughel...





A secessionist group, Utorogu Liberation Movement, ULM, surfaced, Thursday, in Delta State, vowing to destroy the Utorogu Gas Plant, Ughelli, which supplies gas to Egbin Power Station, Lagos, and other facilities under Oil Mining Lease, OML 34 in Ughelli South Local Government Area of the state.The agitators operating in alliance with another group, Outgas Force, in a proclamation by its leader, Gen K Omoudu, addressed to the host communities in OML 34, said:, My good people of Utorogu community, Otu-Jeremi, Otor-Udu, Iwkrekan, Ekakpamre and all oil and pipeline communities within this region, this is the voice of ULM in collaboration with Outgas Force.It is a secessionist move. The awareness of things happening in our environment is a means to outline our cause of action. The awareness is an agitation for economic balance. We have a common enemy, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC and ND Western who hate your progress and wish you died in poverty.They threaten our stability, disregard us. This area is the heart of hydrocarbon industries in Nigeria and other countries responsible for a huge chunk of the nations oil earnings. The question concerning how many barrels of oil and gas this our field produces remain unanswered, our hopes far from what we are witnessing, it said. It added: If we fail to fight, we will face a precarious future. The door is widely open for anybody within this region to join the exercise, text your names and community to these numbers -08029936321, 08074237107. Do not call; you will receive text of days of meetings few days from now.Residents of Otu-Jeremi, Otor-Udu, Iwkrekan, Ekakpamre and other communities, who woke up to see the streamer notices were seen discussing the development in hushed tone.
The National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, has condemned the Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi, over what it described as h...

The Nigerian Students community reject in totality the unguarded, discourteous and uncultured comments of the minister of transport, Mr Rotimi Amaechi against the helmsman of NANS in the Southeast and South South region, Comrade Pedro Obi.

We find his comments appalling, condescending and highly provocative and as such demand an apology for this.

It is so shameful and sad that those who criticize the new generation forget who raised it!

We recall the many irresponsible and rascally behaviour of the minister including his legendary penchant of throwing tantrums at the person and office of the immediate past President of our great nation  Dr. GOODLUCK EBELE Jonathan while in office.

His refusal to appoint a substantive Chief Judge and the plan to move the hallowed Rivers State House of Assembly to the Government house among other rascally acts are fresh in our memory.

Rt. Hon. Rotimi Amechi carelessly threw the baby away with the bath water. The coordinator only demanded fairness in the allocation of resources for capital expenditures so as to capture his zone wherein the nation gets 70% of its revenue. The lopsidedness in the 2016 budget is visible to the blind, audible to the deaf and tangible to the paralytic. Mr Amaechis totalitarian ideals has robbed him of the basic concept of common law that give property owners the title to all resources located above, below or upon their land. It is only in Nigeria that the butchers children eat bones and the bakers children eat crumbs.

Making a case for true federalism and proper restructuring of the nation is a noble and honourable request. A good leader who has the interest of the nation at heart would listen and pick aptly and not make denigrating comments. At this time when the cords of our nation is losing its strength amidst the various calls for secession and self determination by various ethnic groups, character assassination and immature politicisation of salient matters shouldnt be allowed.

The National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, has condemned the Minister of Transport, Rotimi Amaechi, over what it described as his unguarded, discourteous and uncultured comments against the helmsman of NANS in the Southeast and South South region, Comrade Pedro Obi.We find his comments appalling, condescending and highly provocative and as such demand an apology for this, the association stated in a statement issued on Wednesday by Comrade Jeremiah Olatinwo, former NANS PRO, Zone D.According to NANS, it is so shameful and sad that those who criticize the new generation forget who raised it!Here is the full statement:
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) yesterday threatened to shut the six banks that sacked their workers.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) yesterday threatened to shut the six banks that sacked their workers.The umbrella union gave the affected banks two weeks ultimatum to recall the sacked workers and allow unionisation.The action has pitched the organised labour against employers of labour, with the umbrella body of the employers, the Nigeria Employers Consultative Assembly, saying the government had no right to tell banks not to sack workers.Organised labour also threatened to picket the banks, if they did not halt the mass sack of workers, accusing them of disallowing unionisation and reneging on the principles of collective bargaining.NLC, in a letter to the management of the banks, which was signed by its Deputy General Secretary, Chris Uyot, said it would be forced to close the banks and their branches, if they failed to recall the affected workers.The affected banks are: Fidelity Bank, Diamond Bank, First City Monument Bank, First Bank, Ecobank and Skye Bank.The letter reads: I have been directed to inform you that it has been brought to our notice by our affiliate union  the National Union of Banks, Insurance, and Financial Institutions Employees (NUBIFIE)  that your bank is one of those that arbitrarily sacked workers recentoy, contrary to laid down procedures and the countrys extant labour laws.Also of concern has been that these blatant retrenchments were carried out without recourse to several correspondences, including letters and circulars sent to you by the union to retrace your steps in line with best practices in labour relations and laws of the land
Christian women in Yeghe community of Ogoniland have embarked on huger strike to protest the continual military raid and harassment on the...

Christian women in Yeghe community of Ogoniland have embarked on huger strike to protest the continual military raid and harassment on the community. Numbering over 2000, the women have gathered at the community center, refusing food and embarking on a spiritual exercise to invoke the intervention of God in their predicament.Speaking at the event, community woman leader Leedeesin Daadaan described the recent actions and raids by the Nigerian army in Yeghe and other Ogoni communities as genocide. Mrs Leedensi Daandaan, woman leader in Yeghe, Gokana local government area said the killings, arrests, harassment, poisoning of drinking water sources, the subjection of the innocent women, children and other residents of Yeghe and Ogoni communities to perpetual fear have placed the people under conditions of death.She noted that on Wednesday 8th of June 2016, three youths who have been invited by the amnesty office were arrested at a bank in Port Harcourt where they have gone to process documentation requirements for their monthly pay noting that nothing have been heard of the youths whose names were given as Legborsi Deebom, Liberty Ngbornonee and Endurerance Meakue.Mrs Daadaan called for a thorough probe of the activities of the Nigerian army in Ogoniland insisting that the excuses given for the raids in Ogoniland were not enough to criminalize the entire community and people of Ogoni causing fear and sudden death all over.Mrs Daadaan cited the case of one Mr Zorneebee of Yeghe community who collapsed and died after men of the Nigerian army forcefully gained entrance into his home. Zorneebee was said to be nursing a heart condition. He suddenly died out of fear on citing men of the Nigerian army in his home. She noted that not less than 10 persons have died in the past week from what seem to be heart related conditions as they suddenly slum and die."We are all going to die from fear if the world does not put pressure on Nigeria to respect of right to a dignified life and urge President Buhari to end the seige on Yeghe and Ogoniland by men in Bori camp barrks of the Nigerian army. This is designed to kill all of us. Children are dying, men are dying and so also are the women dying. We need the president to intervene in the situation in Ogoniland and particularly in Yeghe" Mrs Daadan said yesterday.Recall that since February, men of the Nigerian army have raided Ogoniland alleging the killing of its informant in Rivers State and in search of former militant leader, Solomon Ndigbara. The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) has condemned the killing questioning the validity of the army's claims about Yeghe and Ogoniland.ogoni .
The Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose has declared that the leadership crises currently rocking the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, will...

The Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose has declared that the leadership crises currently rocking the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, will soon be over.Fayose said this in Abuja following a meeting held by the partys Board of Trustees, BoT with governors and the Makarfi-led Caretaker Committee which ended at about 1:10am on Thursday.The party members at the meeting resolved among other things, to continue with the ongoing cases on the said leadership tussle with the hope of bringing to an end Sen Ali Modu Sheriffs leadership claim.Fayose lamented the undue interference in the partys internal affairs by the government and security agents.Admitting that he was part of the governors who initially asked Sheriff to take up the leadership role of the party, the governor said he had to bow to superior arguments when he discovered that Sheriff had an ulterior motive.Rising from the meeting, we must put it in the public domain that the PDP, whatever we are going through today is a phase and very soon, the whole issue will be over.But we need to put it very clearly that Nigeria as a country needs an opposition party to make the average Nigerian get the value for their votes. And any attempt to destroy the opposition in Nigeria, is not going to be in the interest of democracy.We stand as a party to condemn interference, scuttle and strategic effort to destroy the PDP in Nigeria, he said.
Syrian Armenians may be target of Bundestag resolution

The adoption of Bundestag resolution, unfortunately, isnt the first impulse, when Turkey, using external events as a pretense, instigates hostile attitude for using force against unarmed Armenian population of Syria, ordering to destroy the Armenian regions through Al-Nusra terrorist group, says political expert Ararat Kostanyan, bringing the following example- during the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide, Nusra carried out large-scale attacks on the Armenian districts, which consistently lasted for several days. Though, he says, this time the situation is more serious, Nusra militant threw about 1000 missiles, destroying not only the residential buildings, but also the Armenian nursing home and the churches. What is happening there is real genocide. The political expert reminds that Turkish President Erdogan has declared for many times about deporting Armenians, who work there, which will be the worst scenario. Dinks wound hasnt healed yet, clashes with Armenians will cause new problems for Erdogan both inside the country and outside. Erdogan should refrain from his famous policy of confrontation, if his understanding hasnt disappeared at all, he says. It isnt a secret that the Armenian issue has always been a matter of manipulation for putting pressure on Turkey, in particular, by the West (France, England), since the times of Hamid. He says this time Germany was angry about the fact, that Turkey showed the way to transfer the Syrian Armenian refugees to Europe, in the case when an agreement had been reached and large amounts of money had been provided to Erdogan for settling Syrian refugees in Turkey. At the same time Europe (Germany, France) disapproves the way leading to Erdogans monopoly, when he dismisses independent officials, especially, Prime Minister Davutoglu, notes the political expert. And in this case, the main threat, he says, is the fact that Erdogan may initiate actions against Armenians in Syria through his undeclared allies.
A police sergeant, Daniel Osaimayu, has been dismissed from the Nigeria Police Force for allegedly collecting N50,000 bribe from motorists...

A police sergeant, Daniel Osaimayu, has been dismissed from the Nigeria Police Force for allegedly collecting N50,000 bribe from motorists in the Oshodi area of Lagos State.Our correspondent gathered that Osaimayu, who was attached to the Lagos State Task Force on Environmental and Special Offences (Enforcement) Unit, Alausa, was arrested on Monday by the X-Squad of the Lagos State Police Command.Our correspondent learnt that the X-Squad operatives had arrested a hoodlum in the area and found the cash on him.The hoodlum, however, fingered the police sergeant, who was posted to the area, as his accomplice.The state Commissioner of Police, Fatai Owoseni, who confirmed the dismissal on Wednesday, said four other policemen were dismissed for extortion and improper dressing.Our correspondent gathered that the four dismissed policemen were Samuel Ando, Michael Adeoya, Richard Ugwu and Sulaiman Muhammed.It was learnt that Adeoya was dismissed for allegedly wearing flip-flops while on duty, while Muhammed was dismissed for allegedly not wearing police uniform while on duty.Speaking with reporters while being paraded, Osaimayu, who was dismissed for bribe, said the money was received from motorists in the area and kept with the hoodlum.The ex-policeman, who denied that the money was collected in his name, begged the CP to reverse the dismissal as he had no means to feed his family.He said, I was at my duty post on Monday in the Oshodi area when the X-Squad operatives came to arrest me. It was around 10am. A hoodlum had earlier been arrested and searched, and the money was found on him. The suspect confessed it was the money obtained from motorists and he said I authorised him to do it.I did not know he collected any money on my behalf. I was whisked off to the command headquarters, Ikeja. They searched me, but no money was found on me. The CP should reconsider me. I have family members to cater to.Adeoya, who was arrested for wearing flip-flops, denied that he was on duty at that time, adding that he went to the Mile 12 Market to buy food supplements for his fowls.He said, I boarded a tricycle to the Mile 12 area. As I alighted, the X-Squad officials swooped on me and said I was improperly dressed. But I was not on duty. I worked as a guard to a chairman of a political party in the Kosofe area.As of the time of my arrest, I was going to the market to buy food supplements for my fowls. I rear fowls in my house. I was surprised that I was arrested. After I was interrogated, they said I would be tried for improper dressing. There is nobody to feed my fowls. They would have all died by now.Another suspect, Muhammed, who was attached to the Idimu Police Division, while pleading for mercy, said he had a health challenge and was going to treat himself when he was arrested.He said, I was on night duty at a politicians house in Idimu. I had an asthmatic attack and I was going to get my inhaler. Someone gave me a ride to Idimu. I was going to the police station when they arrested me for improper dressing. I am not into extortion. I was dealing with my health challenge.Owoseni said the Nigeria Police Force was a professional organisation which would not condone any act of indiscipline.
Prince William will appear on the cover of Britains leading gay magazine to speak out against homophobic bullying, the publication revea...

Prince William will appear on the cover of Britains leading gay magazine to speak out against homophobic bullying, the publication revealed on Wednesday. The prince, second in line to the throne, is the first member of the British royal family to be photographed for the cover of a gay publication.The announcement came just days after 49 people were gunned down in a deadly assault on a gay nightclub in Florida that was claimed by the Islamic State group in the worst mass shooting in US history.In an interview with Attitude magazine, William spoke out about homophobic bullying after meeting members of the gay community at his Kensington Palace home to hear about their experiences of abuse due to their sexuality, and the impact on their mental health.No-one should be bullied for their sexuality or any other reason and no one should have to put up with the kind of hate that these young people have endured in their lives, William said. The young gay, lesbian and transgender individuals I met through Attitude are truly brave to speak out and to give hope to people who are going through terrible bullying right now.Their sense of strength and optimism should give us all encouragement to stand up to bullying wherever we see it. Attitude said gay people suffer disproportionately from mental health issues. William, 33, was told how bullying had led to low self-esteem, suicide attempts, eating disorders, depression and drug addiction.In a message to young people being bullied over their sexuality, the Duke of Cambridge said: Dont put up with it  speak to a trusted adult. You should be proud of the person you are and you have nothing to be ashamed of. The July issue of Attitude is available to download from Wednesday and appears in shops on June 22. On the cover is a smiling picture of William in an open-necked shirt.On Tuesday, the air ambulance pilot and his wife Kate went to the US embassy in London to sign a book of condolence for victims of the Orlando massacre.
Embattled Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff will destroy the party if he is not allowed as the Natio...

Embattled Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff will destroy the party if he is not allowed as the National Chairman of the PDP, a former member of the House of Representatives, Dr Haruna Yerima has said.According to a report on Daily Trust, the former lawmaker warned that, Sheriff will fight to the extent that either PDP allows him to be the chairman or he destroys the party.The Borno-born Yerima stressed that PDP members should be ready to accommodate his former governor since Sheriff is a creation of the party, noting that the embattled chairman identified with the ANPP in Borno while he was a PDP member in Abuja.The former Reps member claimed that Sheriff has worked for 16 years for the PDP, even though he was in ANPP, before he briefly joined the All Progressives Congress, APC.He said, During the 2007 and 2011 presidential elections, Sheriff worked against Muhammadu Buhari and openly campaigned for the PDP candidates.Aso Rock was his second home under former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan.Under a peculiar arrangement, the PDP in Abuja looked the other way while Sheriff dealt with its own members in Borno State.During the third term saga, Sheriff was one of the arrowheads of the movement, even though he was in ANPP and it had a presidential candidate.Sheriffs influence in PDP was never in doubt, having nominated his sister-in-law as minister in PDP administration.
A group of former Niger Delta militants known as the Ekpeye Liberation Group on Thursday issued oil companies operating in Rivers State a ...

A group of former Niger Delta militants known as the Ekpeye Liberation Group on Thursday issued oil companies operating in Rivers State a 14-day ultimatum to vacate the state or face massive vandalisation of their assets over refusal to sign a Memorandum of Understanding.The group which claimed responsibility for attacks on Well 5 in Akara Olu, Ahoada West Local Government Area of Rivers State, said the ultimatum became necessary because the oil companies refused to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Ekpeye communities.In a statement signed by its spokesman, Obodo Obodo, the group said its warning was directed at Nigerian Agip Oil Company, Shell Petroleum Development Company, Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas and Niger Delta Petroleum Resources.The statement reads, The Ekpeye Liberation Group, a forum of ex-militants and freedom agitators from the Ekpeye Ethnic Nationality in Rivers State (Part of the Niger Delta), is utterly disappointed with the conduct of the oil multinational companies operating in the area.In the light of their nonchalant, including lukewarm attitude to the massive killings and kidnappings of our people in recent times, the Ekpeye Liberation Group has been forced to issue a notice of eviction to all oil companies operating in Ekpeye territory and its waters.They (oil companies) are required to pack out of Ekpeyeland within 14 days, from Thursday 16th of June or face massive vandalisation of their assets. A stitch in time saves nine.
Actor Van Vicker was accused of having an affair with his manager, Clarice Ford-Kulah, by the managers husband Bartum Kulah.The husband reportedly said He added that he and his wife have been married for years with children but his wife Clarice Ford-Kulah do not care about the children, all she is interested in is travelling with Van Vicker.In a press release made available to GhanaWeb.com, Clarice Ford-Kulah said:
Ondo State House of Assembly Speaker Jumoke Akindele yesterday said the House has no knowledge of how the states finances are being man...

Ondo State House of Assembly Speaker Jumoke Akindele yesterday said the House has no knowledge of how the states finances are being managed.Mrs. Akindele stated this at a meeting organised by the Assembly to resolve the ongoing industrial action embarked upon by workers.For two weeks, workers have been on strike because they have not been paid for five months.Already, traditional rulers, led by their chairman, the Osemawe of Ondo Kingdom, Oba Victor Kiladejo, last week urged the workers to shelve their action. But the strike persists.Governor Olusegun Mimiko has said the state has no fund to pay the workers.But the Speaker, who was responding to an allegation raised by the labour leaders that the state government has money in its accounts, said she was not aware that the government had many accounts.Mrs. Akindele said: It is not our responsibility to know how many accounts Ondo government operates.Due to this, we dont know the state of Ondo States finance, but you union leaders can help us with the list.She, however, appealed to workers to allow a fresh negotiation to end the two-week-old industrial action.The Speaker noted that the House was aware of the travails the workers were passing through over non-payment of their salaries.We are deeply concerned by situation on ground, but we should look for ways out of the ugly situation and forge ahead, she said.Mrs. Akindele, who asked the labour leaders to purge out their grievances, said the House would come out with resolutions on the strike.According to her, it was the initiative of the House to intervene and find lasting solution to the feud between the workers and the state government.She, therefore, promised to advise the government to gather the money in the banks and see if it would be enough to pay the workers.Chairman of Joint Negotiations Council (JNC), Mr. Sunday Adeleye hailed the assembly leadership for its intervention.But he said the meeting was belated.Adeleye frowned at the protracted delay of salary payment, saying that it was only means of survival for the workers.He added that the non-payment of the salaries had rendered the state redundant because it is a civil service state.The JNC chairman asked the state government to put a stop to all capital projects and pay workers salaries.No matter the capital projects, they will not put food on tables of workers and what we are asking for is reward for service rendered.I must inform you that there is high level of hunger in our society and if we are not careful, there may be civil uprising, which will not be palatable, Adeleye warned.
The Presidency has said that the Government of President Mohammadu Buhari has not forgotten the welfare packages of all staff and securi...

The Presidency has said that the Government of President Mohammadu Buhari has not forgotten the welfare packages of all staff and security operatives working at the presidential villa, Abuja, but working to streamline the payment methodologies. The clarification came against the backdrop of speculations by the staff that the government of the day had refused to pay them for over one year now.Enquiries revealed that President Mohammadu Buhari had directed the office of the National Security Adviser, NSA to evolve a comprehensive welfare package plan that would ensure transparency and accountability.A top presidential source which craved anonymity pleaded with the staff to be patient with the committee set up by the the National Security Adviser (NSA) to the president retired Major General Babagana Munguno on the directives of President Muhammadu Buhari to submit its report.We want to do it and do it well so that those who are supposed to be paid X and X amount of money get what is due. It takes time but we want to do it in such a way that even after President Muhammadu Buharis government, the system will continue.I plead with all staffers to be patient with Mr. President so that the good work been done by the NSA on the directives of the president for a better welfare for staff will soon take effect, the source said.According to the source, the welfare package is designed in such a way that beneficiaries will receive their money without a third party and the NSA is very thorough about this and thats why it is taking this long.It is slow but it will surely come and when it comes everybody will be happy about it. Explaining the delay in the commencement of the welfare package, the source said on coming to office, Mr President discovered that staff of the State House were been paid allowances that were not documented.So when the issue came to the knowledge of the President, he directed the NSA to look into the case and it was discovered that the sources of funding the welfare package was illegal and unsustainable. So Mr. President then directed Munguno to design a more accountable means of paying the allowances.The source stated that under President Buhari you should not expect the NSA to dip his hands into funds that he cannot account for to pay staff welfare .In the first place how will he explain it to the president and secondly how does he sustain it? Under the past administration, the office of the NSA was illegally collecting monies from the Central Bank Nigeria (CBN), the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to share around. That is no longer possible under the Buharis government.Basing his submission on the principles of accountability, the source said that President Buhari instructed Munguno come up with a legitimate means of funding the payment of those allowance as part of the overall effort to clean up that office.The source also lent some credence to the person of the NSA, saying that as a retired soldier, he would not fail the security operatives. As a military commander Munguno is famous for caring for troops under him.If you go to the Guards Brigade today, there is what is called the Munguno Allowance which is owed to him as the name implies. The NSA is a welfare man. So nobody should blame him for the delay because he wants to do a clean and enduring job for staff of the state house, the source added.Reemphasizing the position of the government, the Senior Special Assistant to president Mohammadu Buhari on media and publicity, Mallam Shehu Garba said that all Villa staff would be paid in less than no time.All security staff in the state House are on salary and they are being paid as at when due. On coming to office, this administration found out that allowances were being paid to such staff by the office of the National Security Adviser,NSA without following due process. Under the Muhammadu Buhari administration, you are not going to have the NSA going to the Central Bank or NNPC to fetch money to share around.That is not going to happen. To this extent, the President directed General Munguno, the current National Security Adviser to devise clean, lawful means of paying those allowance as part of the overall effort to clean up that office.The NSA is working through a committee to clean up the office and fashion out modalities for the payment of improved allowances to all such staff. That committee should be finishing its job in about a month. Payments will commence thereafter.My advice to all such staffers is that they should exercise a little more patience, to support the good work that the NSA is doing to better their welfare in a way that conduces to due process.As a military commander, Gen Munguno is famous for caring for troops under him. If you go to the Guards Brigade today, there is what is called the Munguno Allowance which is owed to him as the name implies.The NSA cares. At the end of the ongoing exercise, every security official in the Villa will be happy with the outcome, he said.
Police have arrested the "Count Down Bandit," a law enforcement source told NJ Advance Media Thursday.

The bandit robbed seven banks in northern New Jersey between July and March, the FBI in Newark said.

The agency in March offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. The bandit's modus operandi in each robbery was to approach a bank teller, demand money and begin counting down from 10 or 15 until he received the cash.

The same person was linked to bank robberies in Wayne, Oradell, Lyndhurst, Glen Rock, New Milford, River Edge and Maywood, the FBI said.

In Wayne, the robber approached a teller at M&T Bank and said, "This is a robbery," Wayne Police Capt. Laurence W. Martin said. He threatened to hurt employees if they didn't meet his demands.

The man made off with between $5,000 and $10,000, police said.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
LYNDHURST -- The family of a Lyndhurst man shot and killed by two township police officers in 2015 vowed to continue to press for justice, a day after a Bergen County grand jury voted not to indict the officers.

Jackie Hansford, a second cousin of Kevin Allen, said she hardly slept Wednesday night dealing with her own emotions and the frequent calls from family members. She said the family would proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit against the Lyndhurst Police Department.

Two unnamed Lyndhurst Police Officers shot Allen, 36, nine times on May 29, 2015 in the Lyndhurst Public Library, Gurbir S. Grewal, Acting Bergen County Prosecutor, said Wednesday in a statement on the grand jury decision. The seven-page statement included a summary of the evidence the prosecutor's office presented to the grand jury.

Allen had sold a stolen PlayStation 4 for $180 at a local Game Stop a few days prior, the statement said. The Bergen County Sheriff's Office had also issued a warrant for his arrest for failing to appear at a work release program and for contempt of court. Family members said Allen had missed a child support payment.

A Lyndhurst Police Officer, identified only as "Officer 1," recognized Allen as he walked into the library at about 1:30 p.m. and followed him inside. A second officer, identified only as "Officer 2," responded to a request for backup from police department headquarters, located just next door.

Officer 1 confronted Allen and asked to speak to him in an area near the Young Adult Room on the second floor of the library, the statement said. Allen allegedly gave a false name and address to Officer 1.

Kevin Allen (File photo)

Officer 1 asked Allen to place his hands behind his back. When Officer 1 tried to handcuff Allen, he ran into the Young Adult Room, the statement said.

Officer 1 radioed headquarters, saying, "I need help upstairs. Help upstairs," the statement said. The officer then tackled Allen.

Allen crawled away and got behind a piano in the Young Adult Room, the statement said. He put his hands in his pockets.

Officer 1 and Officer 2 ordered Allen to show his hands. He refused, the statement said.

The officers used pepper spray on Allen, Officer 1 depleting an entire can. It had no effect, the statement said. Officer 2 switched to their gun.

Allen then pulled an orange-colored utility knife out of his pocket, the statement said. His family said it was a box cutter.

The officers told him to drop the knife, but Allen repeated, "You're not going to shoot me. You're not going to shoot me," according to the statement.

Officer 1 pulled out a collapsible baton, intending to strike Allen's hand to knock the knife, but "twisted his body away from Officer 1, concealing the knife slightly behind him," the statement said. The officer "determined that he/she was unable to use his/her baton and dropped it on the floor; he/she then drew his/her firearm, and pointed it at Mr. Allen."

By this time both officers had their guns trained on Allen, the statement said. They both said they would shoot unless he dropped the knife.

Allen then charged Officer 1, according to the statement. Officer 1 fired four times; Officer 2 fired five times.

They stopped when he fell.

Members of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office shared this account with Hansford, Allen's mother Hannah Singletary and the Rev. Robert Walker, another second cousin. They met Walker in person, while Hansford and Singletary, who live in Maryland, called in. The meeting lasted three hours.

"It was just so horrific that it was hard to even bear," Hansford said. "We've waited over a year to know something, to hear something and that was not what we were expecting to hear."

Hansford said the statement was hard to believe. The prosecutor's office said video footage captured Allen entering the library at 1:35 p.m., followed by Officer 1 at 1:36 p.m. Officer 2 entered at 1:38 p.m., when the prosecutor's office says Allen was shot.

"We're talking about three minutes of time that he was approached, talked to, pepper sprayed, handcuffed, thrown around the room," Hansford said.

There was no video footage from the second floor, where the shooting took place, the prosecutor said.

A scene from the shooting in Lyndhurst, May 29, 2015. (Noah Cohen | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Singletary, who was not available to comment, filed a notice of tort claim alleging negligence against the Lyndhurst Police Department in September 2015. The family would proceed with the suit, Walker said.

The family's aim is to bring the truth to light and get justice for Allen, Hansford said. Allen left behind two sons, ages 18 and 15, and a daughter, 12.

"We're still seeking justice and exercising our rights and we feel he should not have lost his life," Walker said.

Hansford's husband, Eric, said he didn't recognize the picture the prosecutor's office painted of Allen. He said the behavior they say Allen exhibited--wielding a knife and running at two police officers with their guns drawn--was not rational.

"I can't imagine Kevin taking a razor to a gun fight because he's not stupid," he said.

The prosecutor's office said Allen's blood tested positive for marijuana. Eric Hansford acknowledged that his cousin enjoyed the drug, but it still didn't explain the alleged behavior.

"It doesn't make you hyper or crazy," he said.

Lyndhurst Police Chief James O'Connor issued a statement after the grand jury decision.

"We are grateful for the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office Major Crimes Unit who investigated the incident, as well as the Bergen County grand jury who rendered this decision," he said. "We are glad, as a department, to be able to finally put this behind us."

The two officers who shot Allen have since returned to regular duty, O'Connor said.

The decision Wednesday was the second time in less than a year that a grand jury declined to indict Lyndhurst police officers in a fatal shooting. A state grand jury voted in September not to indict two Lyndhurst officers, along with a Rutherford officer and a New Jersey State Police trooper in the fatal shooting of a Newark man during a vehicle pursuit.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
PALISADES PARK - A Georgia man masqueraded as a military law officer to defraud a local family seeking permanent resident alien status in the United States, according to Acting Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir S. Grewal.

Sung H. Lee, 31, of Buford, Ga., persuaded members of the family to give him more than $100,000, the prosecutor said.

The money was to be used to assist family members with their immigration status, Grewal said in a statement.

Lee approached the family and identified himself as a military officer who was working on loan to both the FBI and the Palisades Park Police Department, the prosecutor said.

"Mr. Lee presented himself as an individual who could utilize his connections to obtain permanent resident alien status for the (family members)," Grewal said.

Lee created fraudulent documents that indicated he was associated with a United States-based learning center that could legally sponsor the immigration applications, Grewal said.

In order to process the applications, Lee collected more than $100,000 from the family, Grewal said.

"The fees were never returned and there were no applications processed," the prosecutor alleged.

A family member approached Palisades Park police in March to complain about the scam, the prosecutor said.

An investigation ensued and Lee was arrested Tuesday.

Lee was charged with theft by deception, impersonating a law-enforcement officer and unauthorized practice of immigration law, Grewal said.

Lee was held on $75,000 full bail pending a July court hearing.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Topic of Genocide included in curricula in the USA

House Bill 4493, Genocide Education: Governor's Advisory Council & Curriculum and Assessment, was signed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, reported the Armenian Assembly of America (Assembly). "Our next generation of leaders needs to have the wherewithal to recognize and help prevent widespread harm to their fellow men and women," Snyder stated. "Teaching the students of Michigan about genocide is important because we should remember and learn about these terrible events in our past while continuing to work toward creating a more tolerant society." Thanks to the leadership and efforts of the Armenian Genocide Education Committee (AGEC), Assembly Michigan Director John Jamian, and the entire community, HB 4493 Genocide Education bill is now law. Jamian, an active member of the AGEC, was also a former Representative in the Michigan legislature as well as past Executive Director of the Armenian Assembly. Jamian, upon reflecting on this achievement, recalled his colleague and former Assembly Board Member Edgar Hagopian's tireless advocacy in championing genocide affirmation both at the state and federal level. Hagopian, who passed away in 2011, served as a Board Member from 1998 to 2003. "I am elated we finally accomplished making this important genocide educational program into Michigan law," Jamian said. "This success demonstrates that when our community leaders all work together we can accomplish great things. I give special credit to our AGEC Chairman Edward Haratounian for his leadership and all of the members in getting to this important milestone," he added. HB 4493, sponsored by Representative Klint Kesto, amends the Revised School Code and requires that the Michigan's social studies curriculum in high school and state-wide assessment program include instruction and testing about genocides, including the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. In addition, the bill establishes the Governor's Council on Genocide and Holocaust Education as a temporary commission. The 15-member council, set up by Governor Snyder, would be advisory and privately funded. "The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust cannot be forgotten," said State Senator Marty Knollenberg (R-MI), son of former Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues Co-Chair Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-MI). "I'm proud to stand with both Democrats and Republicans to ensure they are remembered by Michigan's next generations." The official legislation states: "Beginning in the 2016-2017 school year, the board of a school district or board of directors of a public school academy shall ensure that the school district's or public school academy's social studies curriculum for grades 8 to 12 includes age- and grade-appropriate instruction about genocide." The state assessment for social studies will "include questions related to the learning objectives in the state board recommended model core academic curriculum standards concerning genocide, including, but not limited to, the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide." According to this bill, a combined total of 6 hours of genocide instruction will be mandatory during grades 8 to 12. Furthermore, the Michigan school board will promote "engendering and coordinating events, activities, and education that will appropriately memorialize the victims of the Armenian Genocide, such as observance of the Michigan Days of Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide." In addition to the legislation in Michigan, this year the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) included the Armenian Genocide in its planned curriculum as part of its mission to develop materials and lesson plans for genocide education in elementary, middle, and high schools. The Assembly reached out to ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in appreciation of the background material regarding the Armenian Genocide and the resources provided in the ADL's Spring 2016 high school lesson plan entitled "The Struggle to Prevent Genocide: Genocide and the Global Response." For other curricula, see the Armenian National Institute's page, "Armenian Genocide and Human Rights Curricula." Michigan follows six other U.S. states that have approved genocide curriculum mandates, including Illinois, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey.
Computer crime concept

A primer on how to know what protections your state or municipal retirement or pension accounts have from hackers.

(ThinkStock.com/scyther5)

City employees in Chicago had an unpleasant surprise earlier this month.

Scammers got access to some retirement accounts and took fraudulent loans worth $2.6 million, reports said.

Initial reports said it was a hack in which the bad guys used the personal information of employees to set up online profiles with the city's deferred compensation plan. They then took out the loans.

But now it's looking more like a different kind of fraud.

"We believe somebody stole the information. It was not hacked," said a spokesman for Nationwide Retirement Solutions, the company that administers the plan for the city.

When asked if it was an inside job, the spokesman wouldn't comment, saying he couldn't give any more detail because of an ongoing investigation.

A spokeswoman for Chicago's comptroller would only say the fraud was "undertaken by an individual or group who fraudulently accessed personal information and established a web profile to take out a loan from the retirement account."

In all, 91 accounts were breached, but only 58 of those had money withdrawn, the spokeswoman said.

Nationwide did say the "suspicious transactions" were noticed on June 1, and customer accounts were made whole by the end of the week. The company is also offering two years of free credit monitoring to affected customers.

It's one thing to be the victim of a credit card hack, but to think a huckster could have enough private information about you to access your retirement accounts?

That's scary business.

And whatever you think of public pensions and retirement systems here in New Jersey, state and municipal employees should know how -- and if -- their accounts are protected.

First, the protections you have depend on what kind of account you have.

(Put on your acronym hat.)

In New Jersey, public workers may have a defined contribution plan such as DCRP (Defined Contribution Retirement Program) or NJSEDCP (New Jersey State Employees Deferred Compensation Plan). Both are managed by Prudential, while other plans are managed by other custodians.

All outside vendors must meet certain security requirements when they bid to manage the programs, said Treasury spokesman Joseph Perone. The vendors also follow their own security procedures, he said.

We asked Prudential what protections it offers customers, and it pointed us to links here and here, but neither offered the specificity we were looking for in time for publication.

Then there are defined benefit plans that are managed by the state. Those include PERS (Public Employees' Retirement System), PFRS (Police and Firemen's Retirement System), TPAF (The Teachers' Pension and Annuity Fund), SPRS (State Police Retirement System) and JRS (The Judicial Retirement System).

"The state employs extensive technology for safeguarding the data stored about the members of these plans, just as it does for all sensitive data under state control," Perone said. "This includes close coordination with the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell, which is designed to assist the private and public sectors in the prevention of hacking."

That all sounds well and good, but what happens, in reality, if one of these accounts is breached?

It depends on the nature of the breach.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) is a federal law that sets minimum protection standards for most voluntarily established pension and health plans in private industry, said Mitch Feather of Creative Associates, a Madison-based cybersecurity and infrastructure consulting firm.

He said ERISA generally does not cover retirement plans established or maintained by governmental entities, churches for their employees, or plans which are maintained solely to comply with applicable workers compensation, unemployment or disability laws. ERISA also does not cover plans maintained outside the United States primarily for the benefit of nonresident aliens or unfunded excess benefit plans, he said.

But, he said, many sections of ERISA do apply to public-sector plans.

"If a pension fund manager's computer systems fall victim to a cyber breach and it is found that the pension fund manager did not exercise due care and/or due diligence, the pension fund manager may found to be in breach of their fiduciary responsibility and may be held liable to restore those losses," Feather said.

Feather said in many cases, pension fund assets are held by a third party known as a custodian. If the custodian is a bank and the funds are in bank accounts, your account may be protected and insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). If the custodian is a brokerage and the assets are held in brokerage accounts, your account may be protected and insured by Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Custodians can also now buy cyber insurance to protect themselves from the financial impact of a cyber breach.

But it's not all on the financial institution.

If you don't take steps to protect your own personal information or you carelessly click on a link or open an attachment on an email that results in your account getting compromised, you may not have any protections.

Feather said some pension fund managers publish their policies regarding cyber fraud (Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity are three examples), and they all have a common point: if you are negligent, it is your fault and you are responsible.

Feather offered these 10 action moves so you don't wait to become a victim.

1. Ask your fiduciary or plan manager if it has a published cyber breach policy. Ask specific questions about what cyber security measures it takes and what kind of coverage is guaranteed in case the firm, its systems or the user's account is breached. Don't be shocked if you don't like what you hear. A 2015 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) study found only 15 percent of broker-dealers and 9 percent of investment advisors offered security guarantees to protect their clients against cyber-related losses.

2. If you have online access to your account, take advantage of two-factor authentication if it's offered.

3. Create a strong password, protect your password and change it regularly. Do not use the same password on multiple accounts.

4. Do not log into your accounts while using public/free WiFi service and/or public computers.

5. Use caution before clicking on links or opening attachments sent to you.

6. Do not reply to emails or inbound phone calls that ask you for your account information or any personal identifiable information (PII).

7. Monitor your account statements, checking asset balances and transaction activity every month -- or even more often.

8. If you have online access to your account, see if the site offers an activity log or "last logged in" information. You want to watch out for any online activity that wasn't yours.

9. Be sure to keep your computer's patches, updates and security software all up-to-date.

10. Finally, these are your assets. Take the time to protect them and to ask questions.

If a computer is involved, take the time to stop and think about what you're about to do, click on or open, Feather said.

"The few minutes you spend may save you from months of grief and losses," he said. "You may never realize it but that small investment today may reap the biggest returns of all."

Have you been Bamboozled? Reach Karin Price Mueller at Bamboozled@NJAdvanceMedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KPMueller. Find Bamboozled on Facebook. Mueller is also the founder of NJMoneyHelp.com.

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CAMDEN -- A Stratford man accused of fatally shooting his wife in their bedroom while her three children were home was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder Thursday.

The Camden County Prosecutor's Office said 33-year-old Mario Flores was indicted by a grand jury nearly four months after his wife, 35-year-old Roxanne Flores, was found dead in her Wright Avenue home at 1:30 a.m. on Feb. 20.

According to a probable cause statement provided by the prosecutor's office after Flores' arraignment in March, a witness who was at at the couple's home that night said Roxanne Flores was crying on a couch while Flores was handling a Glock handgun and said "people were after him and he needed to be ready."

Flores is accused of fatally shooting his wife once in the neck that evening before taking their 8-year-old daughter to Flores' mother's home at about 1 a.m., leaving a 3-year-old and 13-year-old at home with their dead mother. Roxanne Flores' body was found after authorities were called to check on her well being.

Flores -- who told others his wife had shot himself and later asked a witness to take care of his children-- allegedly disposed of the loaded gun at the end of a residential street in Lindenwold.

The Honduran native was apprehended by Alexandria City police in Alexandria, Va. about nine hours after Flores was killed. He was found in possession of a Honduran passport and packed suitcase and extradited back to New Jersey.

Flores remains in Camden County Jail in lieu of $1 million jail. He was also ordered to surrender his passport.

Michelle Caffrey may be reached at mcaffrey@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ShellyCaffrey. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The long awaited Board of Public Utilities public hearing over Verizon and its alleged lack of landline maintenance in rural South Jersey finally has a date, place and time.

The meeting will be held on Aug. 4 at 6:30 p.m. in Estell Manor Elementary School. State Sen. Jeff Van Drew (D-1) helped organize the hearing.

Cumberland County is representing 17 communities who have petitioned Verizon to replace the copper landlines in South Jersey with fiber optics and to better maintain the landlines. Due to the aged copper landlines in rural South Jersey, the residents report static over the phone lines and service interruptions. The areas with copper landlines are also without the high-speed internet that comes with fiber optics.

"I am pleased that, at my request, BPU has agreed to hold a hearing this summer so that state officials and Verizon can hear directly from those who are suffering with inadequate service," Van Drew said Thursday in a statement. "This is a quality of life issue for residents and one that could potentially have a serious impact on the health and safety of those who are living and working in these communities."

A meeting was to be held earlier this year but the strikes by Verizon workers caused the meeting to be postponed, according to officials. Officials reached a deal to end the strike late last month.

As the South Jersey communities have been waiting for the meeting, Cumberland County has continued to collect complaints by residents to bring to Verizon.

"We just look forward to being able to present information about what is occurring here and the need for some action," said Ted Baker, solicitor for Cumberland County.

Verizon has repeatedly stated that there is nothing to be fixed with South Jersey landlines -- arguing that network performance in South Jersey is consistently better than BPU standards and the telecommunications company invested $100 million in South Jersey's network over the past two years.

The following communities are represented on the petition:

- Atlantic County: Estell Manor and Weymouth Township

- Gloucester County: South Harrison Township

- Salem County: Alloway Township, Lower Alloways Creek, Mannington Township, Pilesgrove Township and Upper Pittsgrove Township

- Cumberland County: Commercial Township, Downe Township, Hopewell Township, Lawrence Township, Maurice River Township, Millville, Upper Deerfield Township and Fairfield Township

- Burlington County: Washington Township

In order to submit a complaint about Verizon landlines, residents can visit www.co.cumberland.nj.us/legal.

Don E. Woods may be reached at dwoods@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @donewoods1. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEWARK -- Four years ago this month, Jahleel McLendon went on a rampage, traumatizing the people of Newark.

In the space of a few weeks in June 2012, McLendon committed five armed carjackings and twice led police on high-speed chases that ended up in crashes, prosecutors said.

But after the fifth -- when McLendon seized a vehicle being driven by a 70-year-old woman out to pick up Chinese food -- he was apprehended and sent to jail.

He pleaded guilty in 2014 to five counts of carjacking and one count of brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.

Thursday, he learned the price he will pay for the month-long spree: 20 years in federal prison.

McLendon, now 22, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty, who also ordered McLendon to serve five years of supervised release following his prison term and make restitution to his victims.

"The message has to go out to the community: You do this, you're going to suffer severe consequences," the judge said.

McLendon apologized to the victims of the carjackings and his family.

"I did do wrong," he said.

McNulty and attorneys for the prosecution and defense all agreed about the distressing course of McLendon's "chaotic and unstable" upbringing, marked by family separations and criminal behavior beginning at age 13. "I emphasize that it's tragic when it gets to this point," McNulty said.

But the tragedy extends to the victims too, said Asst. U.S. Attorney Cari Fais. One victim told court officials that being carjacked was "the worst experience of her life," Fais said.

The 70-year-old woman no longer goes out at night, she said.

"He didn't just rob her of her car," she said, "he robbed her of her independence."

Other victims were traumatized by being ordered at gunpoint to lie down on the ground before McLendon took their automobiles, Fais said.

Speeding along in stolen cars, McLendon threatened Newark police, other drivers and pedestrians, she added. One crash damaged several parked cars and toppled two utility poles, with wires falling onto the police vehicle.

Just before he was arrested, McLendon ditched a loaded handgun that could have gotten into the wrong hands had police not been able to recover it, Fais said.

Crimes such as carjackings, McNulty said, have "created fear in this city.

"The public needs to be protected," he said, "and a long sentence will do that."

Even with McLendon incarcerated, the risk remains high, Fais said. In just the first quarter of 2016, Essex County reported 120 carjackings.

Tim Darragh may be reached at tdarragh@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @timdarragh. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
MAPLEWOOD -- A high school sophomore's deliberately provocative gay pride banner, hung from the front of the building on Monday, has not stirred much controversy -- at least not within the district -- but it has raised at least one queston: What does it mean?

The banner, draped vertically from the 7-story Gothic tower of Columbia High School in Maplewood, states simply "Too Gay," in colorful block letters set against the rainbow hues of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning, or LGBTQ, movement.

Columbia High School senior Shanice Peralte had just seen the banner for the first time on Wednesday morning, when she was asked what she thought it meant.



"I'm not really sure," said Peralte, 18, reflecting a combination of uncertainty about the banner's meaning and support for it generally that was expressed by fellow students and others.



The banner was approved by the school's second-year principal, Elizabeth Aaron, who said students were not certain precisely what it was intended to convey, but they sensed, perhaps by its colors, that it was generally supportive of the LGBTQ community. Therefore, Aaron said, students supported the banner itself.



"I had a great conversation with students yesterday," Aaron said outside the school Wednesday morning, fist-pumping students as they headed inside for class. "And they asked me, 'What does it mean?' Students like to be told what things mean instead of asking what things mean."

The website of the School District of South Orange and Maplewood, which includes the 1,860-student Columbia High School, offers an interpretive statement by the banner's young creator, 16-year-old sophomore John Bell, who conceived of and glue-gunned together the banner as a term project for his advanced placement art history class.



"On the surface, society claims to accept gay people. But if we are flamboyant or very open about our gayness, are we 'too gay'?" states Bell, 16. "So, as an artist, I am basically challenging how people may view gay people, and also celebrating Pride month."



While the timing of the banner's unfurling on Monday was intended to coincide with June as LGBT Pride Month, Sunday's shooting massacre that killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando gave it a whole new meaning: one of condolence and support for the LGBTQ community against violent attacks seeking to deprive them of their very right to live.



It was that message Peralte and others took away.



"I think the shooting was a little bit scary for the LGBT community, and this is showing that they're not afraid to be who they are," Peralte said. "This is a statement that we stand behind who they are and we support the rights of all."



A Columbia High School parent, Dan Sukel, said the banner was "great," and that he thought it was meant to show the school community's support for the LGBTQ community. But it wasn't the text that conveyed that meaning, he said.



"It's the colors, I guess," said Sukel, who had just dropped his son off at the school.

The banner did generate some controversy online, with readers posting anonymous comments on a story on nj.com, objecting to the use of school property for what some asserted was a political statement.



"I'm offended! This display should not be allowed on Public property," read one comment. "Taxpayers should be outraged!"

"Would the school hang a 'Too Christian' banner?" read another.



The combined Maplewood-South Orange community, comprised of two West Essex towns that were once part of the same municipality, prides itself on its tolerance and progressive ideals. For example, Maplewood hosts an annual North Jersey Pride Festival at Memorial Park, and in July it flew a rainbow flag in front of Town Hall following the U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating marriage equality.



So it's not entirely surprising that the pride banner would be embraced locally, even if it has been questioned outside the district.



"I have not received any comments one way or another on it," said Maplewood Mayor Victor DeLuca. "Personally, I thnk it's fine. I think it's good."

DeLuca noted that last Sunday's annual pride festival was more somber than usual, and the Orlando shooting was addressed by U.S. Sen. Cory Booker and other attendees. DeLuca said the two communities, like so many others across the state, held a joint vigil for the shooting victims on Tuesday night at the South Orange Train Station.



Likewise, there was no backlash against the banner directed at school officials, said a district spokeswoman, Suzanne Turner.



"We had a couple of questions, like, '"Too Gay," what does that mean?' And then they'd be like, 'Oh, okay,'" Turner said. "But we didn't get any negative feedback."



Aaron, the Columbia High principal, said the attention garnered by the banner from news media had not even prompted a call from her boss, Superintendent John Ramos, or members of the Board of Education, whose next meeting is Monday at 7:30 p.m.



The banner was not the only project from the the art history class displayed at the school. Another involved black paper silhouettes of rats fixed to hallway walls inside the school's main entrance.



The art teacher, Kate Dodd, said many of the class projects were influenced by 21st Century art, which tends to be provocative. She said Bell's banner in particular was influenced by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-American visual artist who died of AIDS in 1996 at age 38.

Dodd, a working artist with an MFA from Columbia University, said other student projects in the past have dealt with controversial themes, though few have drawn the kind of attention that Bell's has.

"What stands out about this one was the timing," Dodd said, referring to Sunday's shooting, and the fact that the banner is in such a visible location. "Most students don't have the wherewithal to get all the fabric and put it together like he did."

Dodd described Bell as an unusually mature young man, very serious and diligent about his work. She acknowledged that a question mark following "Too Gay" might have made the banner less confusing to observers, directly conveying its intention to raise the question, in Bell's words, "If we are flamboyant or very open about our gayness, are we 'too gay'?"

But ultimately, she said, the absence of punctuation made for better art, with the ambiguity of the two-word text forcing viewers to ruminate more deeply on its possible meanings, and to take away their own. Turns out, the lack of a question mark was unintentional.



"We asked him about that," Dodd said. "And he said, 'I ran out of fabric.'"

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
East Orange -- City officials are hoping new murals will stop people from tagging buildings and instead "bring the walls alive through artwork," the municipality's spokeswoman said.

Spray painting a wall on Oraton Parkway behind 40 North Munn, MC Rahem Brown, better know by his stage name Tame One of the trio the Artifacts, created the first mural as a tribute to New Jersey hip-hop. Brown, who was born and raised in Newark but lived in East Orange for about five years, said he and several friends illustrated the red-brick surface for five hours Tuesday and Friday.

"I'm used to the illegal aspect [of spray painting,] where you got to get in and out," Brown said Tuesday of spray painting the wall in just two days.

The artwork displays "New Jeru Hip-Hop" surrounded by stars, and an image of a disc-jockey.

Connie Jackson, the city's public information officer, said East Orange put a call out for artists to be a part of the project in May after the wall had constantly been tagged. She said there is research that shows once a mural is painted onto a structure, people generally stop tagging it.

The city plans to have artists paint eight to 10 walls within the next couple of years, she said. Jackson said they're still looking for artists to submit work to be considered for the project, whether it be students or seasoned artists. But the city is satisfied with the first mural.

"His music has a strong connection to the people here," Jackson said of Brown as he sprayed the wall with blues and purples. "It allows him to show the culture from the '80s and '90s."

Luke Nozicka may be reached at lnozicka@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @lukenozicka. Find NJ.com on Facebook and Twitter.
NEWARK --Weequahic High School students arrive at Nanina's In the Park in style for their 2016 prom held

Dressed in gowns and tuxedos, the prom-goers were ready for a night of dancing, socializing and fun.

Prom season is in full swing and NJ.com is capturing the moments for many New Jersey high schools.

Check back at nj.com/essex for other local high school prom coverage in the coming weeks. And be sure to check out our complete prom coverage at nj.com/prom.

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GLASSBORO-- Lisa Hodson sat on the couch in her two-story Glassboro home, holding her sleeping granddaughter in her arms. She took a deep breath, finding a quick second of relaxation before the whirlwind of noises kicked up.

Her daughter Angelina, in her graduation dress and heels, was loudly singing pop songs as she paced around fixing her necklace.

Two of her sons, Peter and Dominic, were cracking jokes and fixing each other's ties, which would soon be covered by their graduation robes.

Her other son, Jonathan, sat quietly on the couch observing his siblings in action as he counted down the hours until his graduation and ultimately until he could catch some sleep.

All four of these Hodson kids were preparing for their graduation from Glassboro High School. That's right, all four of them.

"It's been a crazy ride," said Lisa. "But we're here. We did it and I couldn't be any prouder as a mother."

Around 18 years ago, Lisa Hodson, who is only 4 feet, 8 inches tall, found out she was pregnant with the quads. Doctors were wary of the discovery, noting that her small frame and a 5-year-old already at home would put a lot of stress on her mentally and physically.

"I was so scared. I was scared and I cried," she said. "The doctors made it seem like keeping all four of my babies was impossible, but I called my mother, who was a nurse at the time, and she told me that if I really wanted to do this we would find a way."

Sure enough, some odd months later in 1998, Lisa had four babies to take of. South Jersey Times -- then the Gloucester County Times -- followed the family the first year if the babies' lives and the story and photo essay was chronicled in the newspaper at the end of the year.

"You know, the first year wasn't so bad, that's always what people ask," she said. "It was a lot of diapers and bottles which was a little overwhelming at times."

By the time the quads turned two, the Hodson family moved to their Glassboro home from a small three-bedroom rancher in Gibbstown.

"That move was such a necessary thing. We needed more room," she said. "But it was scary. Our old house was safer in a way and then we moved here with countless outlets and stairs and it was very nerve-wracking. But it wasn't really ever crazy, it was just constant."

"And that's what it's been up until now," she added. "Constant."

Fast forward to June 15, 2016 and the 'constant' Lisa has lived since the birth of the quads was in full force as they were getting ready for the big day.

"Mom, did you iron my shirt?"

"Hey mom, can I eat?"

"Oh, yeah is the food ready?"

"Mom, what are the odds I can eat this and not wear it?"

"It's 2:30," she said. "You'd think they'd have their stuff ready to go and be all dressed, but whatever."

The house was abuzz as friends and family showed up to mark the occasion. A truckload of booze was unloaded into the home to go with the feast of food Lisa prepared for her guests.

"This is my life, our lives, and I wouldn't have it any other way," Lisa said.

High school graduation marks a significant change for the Hodson family. It's the start of the quads slowly drifting into their own futures on their own separate paths.

"As a mother, I couldn't have been more blessed," Lisa said. "I love my children so much and it'll definitely be different not having them all right here. But I'm so proud of them."

"Angelina has worked so hard," she added. "And it shows. You should see my girl do pull-ups?"

On July 18, Angelina will be packing her things up to start her journey as a U.S. Marine, one that means being separated from her protectors and biggest support system, her brothers.

"We're just like any other family but a lot closer and I don't like being away from them," Angelina said. "But my dad is a Marine and my brother is going to be a Marine but I'm doing this for myself."

However, for graduation night Angelina has other things to be nervous about.

"I have a solo. We're singing Come Sail Away, Go the Distance and Seasons of Love tonight. Seasons of Love is when I have my solo and I'm so nervous."

"I don't even know why she's nervous, she's always singing," Peter chimed in from across the room.

Peter is staying a little bit closer to home and will be attending Rowan University in the fall, where he'll study biology in the hopes of becoming a geneticist

"My gosh, what an academic Peter is," said Lisa. "He really has always worked hard in school and I've never had to worry about him in school."

"Yeah, he's definitely the smart sibling," said Dominic. "I don't even care, I'll say it. He's smarter than the rest of us."

After graduation Dominic will be testing to go into the U.S. Marines.

"He'll be testing and taking his steps to get there," said Lisa. "It's his own journey and I can't wait to see what he makes of it, even though it makes me nervous to have two of my children taking such a big journey. But I am lucky to have two of them staying so close to home."

Jonathan will be attending Rowan College at Gloucester County in the fall to study to become a history teacher.

"I'm so proud of my Jonathan," said Lisa. "He's my Asperger's boy and I marvel at how amazing he's done and how he handles everything. "

As the oldest of the four siblings, Jonathan has had a unique connection to his sister and brothers.

"It's a great feeling having three siblings and being a quad," he said. "I love them all so much. Angelina is one of the best people I've ever known and I'm so close with her. And Dom and Pete, they're the funniest people I know. Peter is always smiling and if you make a joke at him, he'll come back with one even funnier."

"I don't know where exactly we're all going to be after graduation but I know no matter what, we'll always be there with each other," he added.

As the quads take their separate steps into the next phase of their lives, their mom knows that the bond they've shared will carry them through whatever life throws at them.

"It was a whirlwind of emotions the day they were born and today it's the same whirlwind now that they're graduating," said Lisa. "I'm so excited to see their futures and to watch them become their own, but I'm more excited to watch them support each other from wherever they end up."

Caitlyn Stulpin may be reached at cstulpin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitstulpin. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
GOP symbol.jpg

Bayonne's longtime Republican chairman and a recently formed Republican group are accusing each other of voter fraud in the wake of last week's local committee election.

(File Photo)

BAYONNE -- The city's longtime Republican chairman and a recently formed Republican group are accusing each other of voter fraud in the wake of last week's local committee election.

Local GOP chairman Vincent Cuseglio said he has filed a complaint with the county board of elections against Michael Alonso -- who has billed himself the leader of the "Real Republicans" group -- over alleged instances of people voting twice and out-of-city residents casting ballots.

Alonso, a former candidate for state Assembly, freeholder and school board, has likewise accused Cuseglio of voter fraud, among other things, going so far as to call him "corrupt" and "anti-American."

Cuseglio told The Jersey Journal he is well aware of Alonso's allegations.

"If he's making allegations...file a complaint," he said. "Whoever handles the complaint, let them investigate it."

In his statement on Cuseglio, Alonso also tried to paint the chairman and one of his business partners in a negative light for their support of a proposed Muslim community center in Bayonne.

Cuseglio has called Alonso's attacks on him "childish and foolish," adding that they have had the effect of strengthening his resolve to stand up for the local Muslim community.

The chairman said today that the ongoing clash is making the party in Bayonne "look real bad" and could deter new people from joining the Republican party.

"We're supposed to be putting the party together, not ripping it apart," Cuseglio said.

As of May 2016, 2,535 Bayonne voters were registered as Republican compared to 14,262 registered as Democrat. The city has a population of roughly 65,000.

The acting superintendent of the Hudson County Board of Elections could not immediately be reached for comment on whether there is an ongoing investigation into voter fraud.

The Hudson County Prosecutor's Office said earlier this week that it wasn't investigating the matter.

Jonathan Lin may be reached at jlin@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @jlin_jj. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
I dont expect any progress from meeting in Saint Petersburg (video)

On June 20 Serzh Sargsyan-Ilham Aliyev meeting will take place in Saint Petersburg with the mediation of Russia. The NA Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) faction lawmaker, Chairman of the NA Standing Committee on Foreign Relations Artak Zakaryan thinks the core of that meeting for the Armenian side will be the chance to realize the agreements reached in Vienna. Everything will depend on the behavior of Azerbaijan. The Armenian side has always welcomed the meetings, especially high level meetings. We hope that under this important mission of the RF President, it will be possible to make Azerbaijan take into account the simple reality that the NKR issue has no military solution, noted Artak Zakaryan. He says that the most realistic model of keeping the Karabakh issue away from the military solution is the implementation of the investigative mechanisms. It will allow the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to make addressed statements and which will be a restraining factor for the Azerbaijans actions for limiting military aggression, said the lawmaker, at the same time adding that the meeting in Saint Petersburg cannot be called a negotiation, as there is nothing to negotiate, but only simple reality. We must have a sustainable and guaranteed ceasefire on the Karabakh-Azerbaijani border, he highlighted. Vagharshak Harutyunyan, Former Defense Minister of Armenia, stated that during this conflict the Azerbaijan displayed itself as a state, which isnt responsible for its actions. Azerbaijans tactics derive from the current situation; it doesnt want to make any concessions, the negotiations arent a way for it, said Mr Harutyunyan. The latter is also sure that Azerbaijan cannot resolve the conflict through war. Azerbaijan is afraid of starting a large-scale war, as the combat readiness of our army doesnt let it start a war and gain a victory, he highlighted. According to Vagharshak Harutyunyan, under the threat of the resumption of the war, Azerbaijan wants to make the Armenian side make concessions. The Armenian side has brought forward right preconditions that today there cannot be any negotiation and the return of any territory is out of question today. I dont expect any progress in Saint Petersburg, simply pressure must be put on Azerbaijan, so that it agrees with the implementation of the investigative mechanisms. If we take into account any conflict, they arent resolved for 70 or 100 years. The only way is to have strong army and economy, which will ensure also military power, summed up Former Defense Minister.
Getting suspended or expelled in school should not keep people out of college
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.
Currently in New Orleans

58 Sunny 59 / 58
Three Floyds isnt the only Northwest Indiana brewery with a big release of a big Russian Imperial Stout, anymore.

Devils Trumpet will release its barrel-aged Russian Imperial Stout Heavens Court, Make It a Double Cheeseburger Double IPA and wine barrel-aged Raspberry Dee Lite sour ale on June 25.

The 13.50 ABV beer comes out only once a year in wax-sealed 22-ounce bottles and has garnered good reviews online, including from one beer enthusiast who said the taste was a perfect sweet, bourbon balance.

The craft brewery in Hobart will make the limited-edition beers available to the public on its second annual Heavens Court Day from noon to 7 p.m. that Saturday outside the brewery at 8250 Utah St., just south of U.S. 30. Tickets are $15 and include a token for one free beer.

Anyone who buys tickets early and follows Devils Trumpet on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter could win a prize like a pair of tickets to Hobarts Broofest or a private tasting with the head brewer.

Devils Trumpet, which longtime home brewers opened in 2014, will offer 24 different beers on tap that day as well as food from Grindhouse Cafe, Leroys Hot Stuff, South Shore Overworks and Peace Love & Grub food trucks. Instrumental surf rock band The Surfaholics will play.

More than 1,000 people attended the inaugural Heavens Court bottle release party last year.

For more information, visit www.thedevilstrumpet.com/heavencourt.
CEDAR LAKE  The treasurer for a subdivision association is accused of using money from the organization to pay her personal bills, according to court records.

Jennifer L. Schmid, 40, of Cedar Lake, faces two counts of theft. She was arrested and released Sunday from Lake County Jail after posting a $2,000 bond.

During a review earlier this year of the financial books for the Surprise Park Improvement Association, it was discovered that the records weren't adding up. Some of the records were destroyed.

The audit determined that the association lost $39,377.37 while when Schmid was the treasurer. From 2011 to December 2015, Schmid wrote checks to herself that totaled more than $13,000, according to the affidavit. Some of the money was used to make personal payments on bills for a car, mortgage, utilities and a cellphone.

Schmid met with the association's president and estimated she took $14,000, according to the affidavit. She gave him a check for $3,900 and said she had made other repayments totaling $8,100.

Her initial court hearing is scheduled for June 27.
CHESTERTON  A Rensselaer man reported to police on Sunday that he received a $10 bill in change from a local doughnut shop. The man told police he then went to Chicago and when he attempted to spend the $10 bill he learned it was counterfeit.

He asked police to document it so he could try to get his money back from the doughnut shop. Police documented the request, but said in a report that it could not verify where the man got the counterfeit bill. The bill was kept as evidence.

On Monday, a Chesterton woman reported she received a counterfeit $50 bill from a local bank. She told police she cashed a check and used a $50 bill to buy cigarettes at a convenience store on Saturday.

When she returned to the store on Sunday to buy a drink, the owner, who recognized the woman as a regular customer, told her the $50 bill she used on Saturday was counterfeit. She repaid the store and then reported the incident to her bank.

The woman told police bank employees said its nearly impossible for the banks to pass a counterfeit bill because the counting machines verify the legitimacy of the bills.

Police said the bill would be sent to the Secret Service for review.
MUNSTER  Police are asking residents to be aware following reports of a man stealing purses from unlocked vehicles parked at Region gas pumps.

Munster police released an image Wednesday of a light brown or tan Nissan Maxima believed to be used in the thefts.

A man, described as black with a slender build, has been targeting vehicles at gas stations along the Interstate 80/94 corridor in Northwest Indiana and Illinois, Lt. Ed Strbjak said.

The man enters unlocked vehicles parked at gas pumps, removes purses and flees toward the expressway, police said.

About 25 such thefts have been reported in the area since November, Detective Timothy Nosich said.

One theft occurred March 24 at a gas station in the 8300 block of Calumet Avenue. A woman told police she was pumping gas into her vehicle and did not see who may have taken her purse, which contained a cellphone and credit cards. The most recent theft occurred this week, Strbjak said.

Anyone who sees suspicious activity is asked to immediately call 911.

Anyone with information about the man or the vehicle is asked to call Munster police at (219) 836-6630.
CROWN POINT  A special prosecutor is taking over a state police investigation into the suspected concealment of traffic convictions in Lake Station City Court.

LaPorte County Prosecutor John M. Espar has accepted a request by state police to help determine whether a number of drunken driving and other traffic cases were improperly handled between 2008 and 2012, according to the Lake County prosecutors office.

Indiana State Police 1st Sgt. Al Williamson said this is an automatic precaution in cases of potential public corruption to avoid an appearance of a conflict of interest.

A lot of times when we investigate these political type of cases, we ask for a special prosecutor of a different county for transparency reasons, Williamson said. We do this from the start so in case we have a question, we work right with that prosecutor.

Lake Prosecutor Bernard Carter, who brought state police into the probe last month, agreed with them and made the official request for an outside prosecutor. Senior Lake Criminal Court Judge Salvador Vasquez ordered Espars appointment last week.

Williamson said of the investigation, It is still in the infancy stages. We are having preliminary interviews. There is a lot of documentation to gather. We are working with the BMV and other branches to look at this on a case-by-case basis.

The county prosecutes hundreds of local traffic offenders each year. State law requires local courts to submit traffic convictions to the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles to enforce any court-ordered driving restrictions and for inclusion in drivers permanent driving histories.

Carter first requested the investigation last month after looking into why the City Court failed to submit to the BMV a 2011 reckless driving conviction for Randolph L. Randy Palmateer, 37, business manager for the Northwestern Indiana Building and Construction Trades Council.

He said his office discovered the Lake Station City Court hadnt submitted other convictions and notices of driving suspensions downstate.

Mayor Christopher Anderson, who was Lake Station city judge at the time, said earlier that Miranda Brakley was clerk of the citys court from 2008 to 2012 and responsible for transmitting convictions and driving restrictions to the BMV.

Carter said last month it appeared she intentionally refused to do so. Thomas Vanes, a Merrillville attorney representing Brakley, said their suspicion of his client is unwarranted.

He said Anderson and Brakley and former Mayor Keith Soderquist, Brakleys stepfather, were involved in a feud. The Soderquist family had complained of improprieties in Andersons court to the prosecutor and federal authorities four years ago, but authorities showed no interest at that time.

Anderson fired Brakley and triggered a state audit that resulted in her guilty plea in January to embezzling about $16,000 from Lake Station City Court.

Brakley is awaiting sentencing July 7 for the theft, and Keith Soderquist awaits sentencing July 13 for pleading guilty to trying to cover up the theft.
EAST CHICAGO  Following other top Lake County Democrats lead, Sheriff John Buncich on Wednesday condemned Donald Trumps racist remarks against East Chicago native and federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel.

We gather here today to voice our displeasure, and actually, our disgust, over the recent comments made by the presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Buncich said Wednesday, standing beside local Latino elected officials during a news conference.

The event was held outside Casa Santa Toribio, an immigration support and assistance center in East Chicago.

Trump has come under fire recently for branding Judge Curiel as biased and unfair due to his Mexican heritage while presiding over a class-action federal lawsuit against Trump University.

Buncich, chairman of Lake County Democratic Central Committee, also called upon GOP members up to and including Governor [Mike] Pence to apologize to Curiel and the Latino community.

Several national Republican leaders were quick last week to denounce Trump's comments. Pence called Trump's comments "inappropriate."
Lake County's top Democrat won't be among the party faithful competing for a trip to next month's national convention in Philadelphia.

Lake County Sheriff John Buncich, who has been county Democratic chairman for two years, said this week he has withdrawn his delegate bid after learning that building and trades union official Randolph L. Randy Palmateer was among several competing for the same delegate spots.

Local Democrats are preparing to travel this weekend to Indianapolis to attend their party's state convention. State delegates will select the national convention delegates.

Buncich complains it had been the custom for the Lake County Democratic chairman to be automatically invited to the national convention "going back five county chairmen, but I was not selected as party leader."

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr., a former county chairman, and Gary Mayor Karen Freeman Wilson were selected.

"There are six at-large spots statewide the Hillary Clinton campaign had, and I was honored to be one of the six chosen," McDermott said.

McDermott said delegate seats are in short supply this time for party leaders who, like him, were all in the Clinton camp. But presidential candidate Bernie Sanders defeated Clinton statewide May 3, so a majority of the Indiana delegation will be Sanders loyalists.

That left Buncich the choice of competing for other delegate seats allocated to the 1st Congressional District, which includes Lake, Porter and eastern LaPorte counties.

"They said I would have to run against six other individuals, one of them being Randy Palmateer," Buncich said.

"I found that to be very distasteful. It is an embarrassment to have that individual represent our Democratic Party, especially at a national level."

Palmateer, business manager of the 25,000-member Northwestern Indiana Building and Construction Trades Council, has been under fire since his arrest in late March by Hammond police at a sobriety checkpoint.

Palmateer said Buncich's move is "sour grapes" over the building trades' endorsement of Marissa McDermott for Lake Circuit Court judge. Buncich had backed incumbent Judge George Paras, who lost in an upset in the May 3 primary.

Palmateer said he is running because no one else in the race represented labor, and he is excited to be trying to represent Clinton's campaign.

Drew Anderson, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, declined to name other local candidates for the national convention.

McDermott said he has learned they include: East Chicago's state Sen. Lonnie Randolph, chairman of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus; House Minority Leader Scott Pelath, of Michigan City; and Dr. Dr. Jorge A. Benavente, a Munster optometrist.

McDermott said any voter can run as a national delegate. "But John is the chairman, bringing a delegation of Democrats to Indianapolis. If John had put effort into it, he would have easily won. Now that John's out, it's probably made Randy's chances of winning better," McDermott said.

Benavente said he decided to run as a national delegate to support Clinton's election this fall. He said it also is a gesture of support for East Chicago-born U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who has been under attack by Republican presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

Curiel presides over a lawsuit against Trump University. Trump has attacked Curiel as hostile to him because of Curiel's "Mexican heritage." Curiel's parents were born in Mexico.
CROWN POINT  The Plan Commission endorsed two projects Monday that could provide up to five new dining options and a brewery.

Phil Logan's site development plan for a combination restaurant and brewery at 11000 Delaware Parkway in the Crown East Industrial Park and Vincent Cryns' plan to relocate his Pop's Italian Beef at the former Ponderosa site at 1498 N. Main St. were approved. Cryns said the project also will include a Jimmy John's sub shop and could include two more restaurants.

Both plans got unanimous 6-0 votes from the commission with member Dan Rohaley absent. Logan's project calls for a 10,500-square-foot building with a patio. The restaurant/brewery will seat up to 140 people and provide about 25 jobs, he said. He described the restaurant as being a farm-to-table style with pub food that is "a step above hamburgers, but we will offer hamburgers."

"The main focus is the beer," Logan said.

Commission Chairman John Marshall expressed concern about it being in an industrial park when the city is getting low on such sites for industrial development adding, "I think we've lost direction in that park."

Councilwoman Laura Sauerman said the council might have to revisit the tax abatement for the brewery because the project is more restaurant than brewery and the abatement might not meet state law.

After the approval, Logan said he hopes to start construction within a month and be ready to open in March.

The biggest question Cryns faced was over the proposal for three drive-thru windows on the two buildings planned for his project. One drive-thru would be for Pop's, which would occupy all of the northernmost building, and a second for the Jimmy John's at the north end of the second, three-tenant structure.

A third one was proposed for the south end of the second building although no tenant has been found yet. Vehicles going to Pop's or Jimmy John's would go behind the buildings, and Cryns said there would be room to stack up to 16 cars, although he didn't expect to have nearly that many. He was confident in the ability to handle traffic safely.

"We specialize in drive-thru because we know that brings 50 percent of the business or more," he said. "We have three or four people manning the window. It's the future, and we know what we are doing."

For the first few months a kiosk would be set up to take orders and direct traffic outside until people get used to it, he said. Additional signs and striping would also help direct traffic and eliminate confusion. Cryns agreed to a commission request that he put in the third window but not use it until after the first two were operating to see how well they worked.

Angle parking along the lane where vehicles would queue up for the drive-thrus will be restricted to employees only because of commission concerns of people backing into the lane. Marshall said he was concerned about the three drive-thru lanes at first but, the more he thought about it, the more he thought it could work.

"You can't legislate common sense," Marshall said of concerns the drive-thru lanes would be dangerous.

Cryns said Jimmy John's wants the space to be ready to move in by December. Cryns said a Little Italy restaurant, which is owned by his daughter, might take one of the two remaining spaces and he'd like to get a pancake place for the other.
On Wednesday, churches in Crown Point and Hammond hosted vigils to remember the 49 victims from Sunday's mass shooting at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub.

Amanda and Christine Violet didnt personally know any of the 49 victims who lost their lives in the massacre.

But as members of the LGBT community, the married couple from Griffith found themselves on the lawn of First United Methodist Church in Crown Point, where a vigil for peace took place Wednesday night.

For closure. We came here for closure, Christine Violet, 30, said, tears in her eyes.

Moments before, the couple quietly sang We Shall Overcome, with the 50 or more others who attended the vigil, bringing together people from all races, religions and backgrounds.

If only the day came where we didnt have to meet like this, Connie Karras, co-chair of the Faith and Action committee at First Unitarian Church of Hobart, said to the crowd. Yet Im grateful were putting our differences aside and reaching out with love.

What happened in Orlando is what happens when people stay silent out of shame and dont reach out and love, Karras said.

Considered the deadliest in U.S. history, the shooting at the gay nightclub in Orlando left at least 49 victims dead, and dozens more remain in the hospital with injuries.

Federal investigators are digging into the past of the suspect, who has been identified as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American citizen. After holding hostages for hours, Mateen exchanged gunfire that night with several SWAT police officers before being fatally shot.

Mateen said through 911 calls his attack was inspired by Islamic State propaganda, but federal investigators are considering Mateens homophobic tendencies as the cause behind the deadly shooting.

In Hammond, residents and members of the United of Northwest Indiana Church gathered to honor the victims at the U-Nite Honoring and Healing Event.

Forty-nine candles were lit  one for each of the victims.

I want us all to take this time to be still and to be present in our hearts, Geraldine Corvin, minister at Unity of Northwest Indiana, said to those in attendance.

In Crown Point speakers included the Rev. Marie Siroky, United Church of Christ hospital chaplain.

Siroky made a point to say the shooting should not be used to divide the LGBT community and the Muslim community. Instead, politicians and other leaders must own up to the fact this was an act of hatred, not one triggered by religion.

We have to know what fueled this hatred. This was hate towards (the LGBT community) in a place of safety, Siroky said.

Bobby Binford, of Crown Point, said he was inspired to speak Wednesday night to represent the gay community.

Im so sorry this has happened, but allow this to make us better people for the glory of God, Binford said. I think each of us possesses Gods love within us, and when we feel that, and when we allow it to shine through us, from ourselves out to one another, then we are the best we can possibly be.

The names of victims were read aloud Wednesday as those in attendance lit candles in solidarity.

The event in Hammond ended with a community discussion about the Orlando shooting.

Part of the reason why we did this was so all our community members could express themselves and their support for the LGBT community, said Fran Candelaria, chaplain of Unity of Northwest Indiana. I know this didnt happen here, but it could happen here.
Three Porter County delegates to the Indiana Republican Convention have been officially charged by the Marion County prosecutors office in Indianapolis after an allegedly drunken encounter Friday with police at a hotel.

According to court records, Amy Daly, of Valparaiso, elected to the Center Township Board in November 2014, faces a felony charge of battery against a public safety officer and misdemeanor charges of resisting law enforcement and public intoxication.

Her husband, Tim Daly, a former Valparaiso city councilman, faces a misdemeanor charge of public intoxication in connection with his alleged involvement in the incident.

Scott Tuft, a Porter County Tourism Board member, is accused of getting in one officers face as the officer was trying to get another man to leave the hotel Friday night, police told RTV6, a news station based out of Indianapolis.

Tuft has been charged with misdemeanor resisting law enforcement and public intoxication, according to online Indiana court records.

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police were called just after 10 p.m. Friday to the Hyatt Regency downtown in response to reports of a man being aggressive, according to the TV station.

As the officer put Tuft under arrest for not backing down, a woman  later identified as Amy Daly  grabbed the officers arm and tried to pull him away from Tuft, police told RTV6.

Daly was then arrested.

As police were filling out paperwork, Dalys husband, Tim Daly, interfered with officers, according to RTV6. At one point, Tim Daly is accused of grabbing a phone that another person was using to shoot video of the incident and got in the officers face with the camera.
VALPARAISO  The proposed annexation of 33 acres north of the city signals what officials believe is a shift in the economy and renewed interest in the city.

The City Council on Monday had a first reading of an annexation ordinance that if passed would lead to the building of the new Hawthorne North subdivision. East of Calumet Avenue, the subdivision would consist of about 70 single-family lots with homes expected to be of similar value to the existing Hawthorne subdivision.

City services would be provided within a year. Fire service is already provided because the property is located in Center Township.

The anticipated build-out of the subdivision is between five and seven years.

Hawthorne North is one of three annexations in the works in Valparaiso. Another, known as the PATKO III development, is a proposed business park on the northeast corner of Vale Park Road and Ind. 49. This annexation is part of the overall development of that area near the Valparaiso Health Center.

Another annexation in the works is the Washington Park subdivision that consists of 30 acres of land east of the Lakes of Valparaiso on Bartz Road in Washington Township. Planned are 65 lots and 130 units including homes and duplexes in the $175,000 to $225,000 range, according to City Planner Tyler Kent.

"People want to be located in Valparaiso to take advantage of the amenities, the schools and utilities," Kent said. "We work with the developers as projects come into the city."

Mayor Jon Costas said developers bring land into the city so they can get city standards.

"We're not really going out and annexing land, people are bringing projects to us," he said. "And we require annexation. We've got plenty of utility capacity so that's not an issue for us. But that's really what it's about  annexes tied to developments needing utilities and wanting to be developed under city standards."

Costas said including annexations, there are about seven subdivisions in the city in some form of approval or being built.

"Clearly there has been a significant change since the recession, which put an abrupt halt to development," he said. "It's nice to see we've turned the corner and lenders and developers want to invest in and around the city of Valparaiso."

Costas said the new subdivisions do not consist of all high-end homes, that affordable subdivisions are going in that gives residents more options.

"It also adds to the tax base and creates new communities to connect to the city," he said. "I think that's a good sign of a sustainable economy."

A final reading and vote on the Hawthorne North annexation will take place at the next City Council meeting on June 27.
During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan took Indiana by storm. Ninety years later, Hoosiers still struggle to grasp why.

The secretive brotherhood launched its Indiana recruitment efforts in Evansville in 1920. Within four years, Hoosier Klansmen numbered 250,000 and represented every corner of the state.

Members included ministers, mayors, shopkeepers and factory workers, mostly ordinary people from the wide middle of society, says historian James H. Madison in Hoosiers  A New History of Indiana.

These were mainstream Hoosiers, not a fringe group.

This was not the same Klan that arose after the Civil War in opposition to Reconstruction, which was the Republican program to bring opportunity and equal protection of law to newly freed slaves. The first Klan disappeared in the 1870s after President Ulysses Grant persuaded Congress to pass legislation outlawing it as a terrorist group.

The second Klan emerged in the South at the turn of the 20th century and rapidly expanded to Middle America. It proclaimed a message of patriotism, Prohibition enforcement and Christian values. It preached exclusion, too  of immigrants, blacks, Jews and especially Catholics.

Just why any individual joined the Klan remains uncertain, Madison notes.

Some did it because it was the thing to do or because it provided networking, social activity and a sense of belonging. Others were true believers in a moral crusade.

Another factor in Indiana was the charismatic, intimidating leadership of a man named D.C. Stephenson.

A Texas native who briefly flirted with socialism, Stephenson moved to Indiana around 1920 to take a job with a coal company, according to historical accounts. He unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for Congress in 1922 and then became heavily involved in Klan recruitment.

Rising quickly in the ranks, Stephenson moved to Indianapolis to assume the duties of Grand Dragon, a position he accepted publicly on July 4, 1923, at a Kokomo rally attended by 100,000 Klansmen and their families. A few months later, he broke away from the national organization to create a rival Klan group.

In the capital city, Stephenson sought to exert his influence on the affairs of state. Politicians of both parties joined the Klan, but the majority were Republicans looking to curry favor with a large voting bloc.

In the 1924 elections, the Klan published lists of preferred candidates, noting their religious affiliations and positions on key issues.

Stephenson backed Republican Edward L. Jacksons successful candidacy for governor and attended Jacksons inaugural gala where William M. Herschell recited his poem, Aint God Good to Indiana?

Despite its perceived influence, the Klan had little impact on laws passed in the 1925 session of the Indiana General Assembly. That March, Stephenson was charged with the brutal assault and subsequent death of an Indianapolis woman, Madge Oberholtzer, who had accompanied him on a trip to Chicago.

The case was moved to Noblesville in Hamilton County because of concerns that Stephenson could not get a fair trial in Indianapolis. Before and during the trial, Stephenson lived at the Hamilton County Jail, which today is open to the public as a history museum.

On Nov. 14, 1925, a jury convicted Stephenson of second-degree murder. He was sent to Indiana State Prison, where he leaked damaging information about political activities that ruined the careers of Gov. Jackson, Indianapolis Mayor John Duvall and others.

The trial and aftermath discredited the Klan, which overnight lost members by the thousands.
I have been asked many times why there was so little resistance to the draining of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. There was some opposition, but not enough to stop the dredges. In 1882, James Maurice Thompson wrote "On the Kankakee" to challenge the Grand Kankakee Marsh drainage proposal.

Soon after Indiana was granted statehood in 1816, there was a push to increase settlement of the marshy area in the northwest corner of the state. The first group of pioneers to settle in a newly opened land is farmers. For farmers to break ground, they must be assured of a means to get their harvest to market. Indiana officials saw the great success of the Erie Canal that opened in 1825, and thought this may be the solution. If the Kankakee marsh were drained and channelized, it would open new land for cultivation and the resulting canal would provide transportation of produce to market.

Bonds were floated and funding for construction was ordered. Because of corrupt politicians and contractors, the money was squandered with little results seen. Indiana nearly went into bankruptcy.

As time went on, some small scale drainage work was done by landowners, but this work had little impact on the marsh proper. Then in 1882, a state report came out recommending the marsh be drained and the river turned into a ditch. A plan was developed, and Indiana began the process to implement the channelization.

Although it would be another 35 years before the Kankakee marsh would be drained, this proposal started some thinking about the ramifications the project would have on the marsh's wildlife. Thompson's love of nature and the great outdoors led him to submit for publication, on May 8, 1882,"On the Kankakee.

Thompson's first argument was that "the Kankakee itself affords the finest fishing and hunting in the state, and because any successful draining operation of the sort contemplated will not only eliminate the marshes, but also practically dry up the river."

He foretold the impact on the migratory waterfowl that stopped at the marsh. Through Thompson's travels in the South he witnessed that "not even in the Everglades of Florida, so many green herons as live in the dark lagoons in English Lake." Thompson goes into great detail describing the abundance and variety of wildlife in the marsh.

In conclusion, Thompson wrote, "The region was made for the sportsman, the naturalist, the brain-weary statesman, the water-fowl and the fishes, the lilies and cresses. It ought never to be drained."

Thompson's 1882 article is the first scholarly argument opposing the drainage of the Kankakee marsh I have found in my lengthy research. Thompson continued his passionate writings on preserving our great outdoors until his death in 1901.
Decades-old records detailing the NYPD's monitoring of the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords during the 1960s and 1970s have been found in a Queens warehouse. NY1's Dean Meminger filed the following report.



The records documented the NYPD's conduct during the civil rights movement. But somehow, according to the department, hundreds of boxes of files detailing its surveillance of activists from 1955 to 1972 were lost, until now.



"Nation of Islam files, and I am not just talking about a few folders," said civil rights attorney Gideon Oliver. "According to the index, there are several boxes. There are boxes of surveillance of the Black Panther Party. There are boxes of records related to the Columbia University antiwar uprising."

Baruch College Professor Johanna Fernandez fought the NYPD for 10 years for records detailing the surveillance of the Puerto Rican activist group The Young Lords. She ended up seeking the so-called Handshu files documenting surveillance of all activists in the '60s and '70s.

"We are talking about approximately a million documents involving the histories, activities and efforts of New Yorkers," Fernandez said.



A judge actually tossed out a lawsuit Fernandez filed, ruling the city and the NYPD proved they couldn't find the documents, which a federal court had ordered preserved. But this week, the Department of Records and Information services said it found those documents during a routine inventory at a Queens warehouse. There could be more than 500 boxes.



"This is going to be the most complete record of police files, of surveillance of political activities, I would venture to say in existence," Oliver said.



For Felipe Luciano, a co-founder of the Young Lords, this is personal. He says police illegally infiltrated many groups with the help of informants. There were violent and deadly clashes, and still a lot of questions that may have answers in those NYPD records.

"Imagine the person who was next to Malcolm, is the one who said, 'My wallet, somebody took my wallet,' and that's when they shot him. Imagine the Nation of Islam finding out who were the rats," Luciano said.



The city says it could be months before the files are made public and that, of course, some information won't be released because of privacy concerns.


MILAN  The common element to the eclectic group of works that Sam Havadtoy created for his exhibit Only Remember the Future at the Mudima Foundation here is not immediately noticeable to the eye.

Overpainted so it isnt visible, lace envelops his paintings and sculptures like a delicately patterned second skin. It is a subtle reminder that despite a peripatetic life that at one point brought him to New York, where he was Yoko Onos companion for two decades after John Lennons death in 1980, Mr. Havadtoys roots are Hungarian.

In Hungary, Mr. Havadtoy said, you find lace on the top of the TV, on the back of the armchair, on the sofa, everywhere. But once it gets soiled or ripped it gets thrown away because it is seen as something of little value, a bit kitschy, rather than one of the earliest forms of female art and a time-intensive craft that dates back at least to ancient Egypt.

I thought by putting it on canvases or statues, the viewer is confronted with something that they never knew as a source of beauty in their lives, Mr. Havadtoy said during a stroll through the exhibit, which opened June 1 and runs through July 8.
POZNAN, POLAND  The reception area of Grazyna Kulczyks private office looks a bit bare because many items have already been packed away.

But the view is intact: the rooftops of Poznan, a city of brick buildings in west-central Poland.

It is a lovely view, she said, smiling and looking out over the green park.

Ms. Kulczyk, one of Polands richest women and one of its most prominent art collectors and patrons, is moving her private cultural foundation out of the Stary Browar, or Old Brewery, an abandoned factory complex she bought in 1998 and renovated into an art and performance space.

The red-brick buildings, which also house a shopping mall, restaurants and a cinema, now belong to Deutsche Asset and Wealth Management. Ms. Kulczyk sold Stary Browar for 290 million, or $326 million, in November. The dance program she funded there, Stary Browar Nowy Taniec (Old Brewery New Dance), will stay, but the foundation and her art collection  one of the most important in Poland focusing on modern works from the 1960s and 1970s  will be moving out.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA  Outside the walls of the Zoma Contemporary Art Center, the distinct chaotic clatter of Addis Ababa  goats bleating at a nearby market, cars kicking up dust on the dirt road  fills the air.

Yet inside the compound that houses the center is a haven of calm. Birds chirp in the trees that surround the courtyard, which is paved in flagstones decorated with images of turtles and lizards.

Its a space that hugs you, Meskerem Assegued, the centers co-founder and director, said in an interview in late January as she sat at an outdoor table having coffee, and pointing out some of the artworks created by her co-founder, the artist Elias Sime.

The whole place is a sculpture, Ms. Assegued said, describing the architectural space of the center and its programming. It is not a place where one plus one equals two, but where one plus one equals three.
In 1971, the exhibition expanded beyond the boundaries of the park and added public locations throughout the city, as well as the Museum Arnhem, a contemporary art museum, and the Kroller-Muller Museum in nearby Veluwe National Forest.

That same year, the organizational structure of Sonsbeek changed, so that the exhibition was driven by a single independent curator each time, who ran it for one year and then left. Curators mounted shows sporadically up until 2008, and then the event stopped for seven years.

All the recent editions have been one-off productions, which would recur whenever we felt that the art or the society asks for it or demands it, said Tati Vereecken-Suwarganda, the managing director of Sonsbeek. It was one of our long wishes to build a structure to be able to recur every four years.

Today a quarter of the festivals budget of 2.3 million euros, or $2.6 million, comes from the city of Arnhem, and about half is from the independent Foundation for Art in the Public Domain. The rest is made up from regional government support and other sponsors.

This years Sonsbeek, with 45 artworks by artists from 22 countries in the world, is guest curated by the Jakarta-based artist collective Ruangrupa, which chose as this years theme the concept of transACTION.

Members of Ruangrupa, a group of artists who are all concerned with urban spaces and social engagement, arrived in Arnhem in July 2015 and set up an open-door workshop called Ruru house, which allowed them to interact with people from the city and to get to know Arnhem better.
Q. Youve often talked about how inspired youve been by Jean Tinguely, so that this exhibition is held at the museum dedicated to him must be such an accomplishment.

A. This is my first major exhibition outside of the U.K. Obviously people know my work in this country, but not abroad. Itll be interesting to see what people make of it. It really is like a homecoming in a way. When Tinguely did his sculptures, he was in his 30s. I dont think he imagined that 40 years later a museum would have his name. Obviously in 1982, I didnt even know what an artist was. I didnt know you could become an artist. I was just a fan of Tinguely.

Q. How much did Tinguely influence your career?

A. Tinguely is the first artist I had a real visceral reaction to and thought, Wow. I saw people laughing and smiling and it just had a massive effect on me. Later on, after I destroyed all my worldly belongings in 2001, I also became very interested in a work he made called Homage to New York, a piece of work that destroyed itself in 27 minutes. I started a documentary about it, made lots of drawings, fake fragments, because at the end of the exhibition people could take pieces of the sculpture with them. It was one of the first happening pieces.

When I did my show at the National Gallery [Saints Alive, in 2013], some people even mistook my pieces for Tinguely sculptures. I wanted the public to engage in a different way to how they engage with the paintings at the National Gallery. I wanted people to literally participate. But at the National Gallery youre supposed to keep quiet; if you touch a painting, the conservation team are called in. My things were breaking down, bits were falling off. They didnt know what to do with it. The emails between the National Gallery and the people fixing the machines were very funny.
Gregory Rabassa, a distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese who brought the work of luminaries like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to a wide English-speaking public, died on Monday in Branford, Conn. He was 94.

His family confirmed the death.

A longtime faculty member of Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Professor Rabassa was widely considered one of the foremost translators of any kind in the world. He was known in particular for making the wave of dynamic and powerful fiction, much of it magic realist, that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and afterward  a literary phenomenon known there as El Boom  accessible in English.

Foremost among those novels was One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mr. Garcia Marquezs epochal multigenerational saga, first published in the authors native Colombia in 1967. Professor Rabassas critically acclaimed translation, issued in the United States in 1970, marked the inaugural appearance in English of both the novel and its author.

The novel, in Professor Rabassas rendering, became a best seller. Mr. Garcia Marquez, who publicly described Professor Rabassa as the best Latin American writer in the English language, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
One of Chinas internet giants, Tencent, is near a deal to buy control of Supercell, the maker of the popular Clash of Clans game, in a transaction that would value the Finnish game company at more than $9 billion, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday.

If completed, the deal would show the growing might of Chinas online behemoths. Tencent, along with Alibaba and Baidu, has become a sprawling empire of internet businesses. With a market value of about $211 billion, Tencent controls WeChat, the popular messaging service in China, as well as a number of online multiplayer games hosted through its QQ portal.

A deal for Supercell would be the biggest takeover by any of Chinas so-called BAT trio of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, according to data from Standard & Poors Global Market Intelligence.

Buying Supercell, which has produced a string of mobile game hits with Clash of Clans, Hay Day and Clash Royale, would further bolster Tencents presence in the mobile game market. Tencent is already Chinas dominant online game company, accounting for about 32 percent of revenue from the countrys online game market in 2015, according to Niko Partners, a research firm. The company also owns Riot Games, the maker of League of Legends, a blockbuster PC battle game with an estimated 98.4 million players and $150 million a month in revenue, according to SuperData Research.
In the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., 53 people were alive but wounded, many in desperate need of blood. Blood banks in the area put out a call for donors.

Gay men were ready to volunteer. Rumors even went around that blood centers in Orlando had relaxed a ban on donations from sexually active gay men.

But the rumors were false. The ban, imposed by the Food and Drug Administration, remains in place, infuriating some gay rights activists.

The agency does not permit a man who has had sex with another man in the past year to donate blood. Loosening that restriction, officials say, would greatly increase the chances of contaminating the blood supply with H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections.

Many gay rights activists have protested the rule, arguing that demanding a years celibacy is unreasonable and that the ban perpetuates homophobic stigma. Mass murder in a gay nightclub has brought the debate to the fore.

Kelsey Louie, the chief executive officer of GMHC, the Gay Mens Health Crisis, described the restriction as adding insult to this nightmare and called for a blood donation policy that is inclusive and based on science, not stigma.

The F.D.A. says its position is based on science and notes that its one-year waiting period is in line with policies in Britain and Australia. (France dropped its ban on donations from gay men last year.)

The health authorities must balance the demand for blood against the inevitable consequences. Despite elaborate screening criteria and modern blood testing, F.D.A. officials note, every year some of the 3.5 million patients who receive transfusions are infected with various diseases.

For example, after the agency approved a test in 2007 for Chagas disease, which can be lethal, it found more than 5,000 donors with it, not all of them first-time donors. Even with current testing, the agency estimates that about one donation in 1.5 million transmits H.I.V. to the recipient.

Lifting the restriction on sexually active gay men would raise the risk of H.I.V. infection to one per 375,000 donations, which the agency considers unacceptably high, Dr. Peter W. Marks, the deputy director of its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in December.

Donation screening policies are based on a combination of trust in human nature and hard science, both of which are fallible.
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights from The New York Times. In this first in a series of postcards from Texas, our Houston bureau chief muses on the Lone Star States freewheeling, Dont Tread on Me attitude.

HOUSTON  Everything my son needs to know about zoning he learned in kindergarten.

Zoning is an easy subject to grasp in Houston: It doesnt exist here. Houston is the largest city in the country without zoning laws. The significance of this didnt sink in until last year, when my son was in kindergarten and he came up with the idea of turning our house into a public library. Im not quite sure what he envisioned, and whether he wanted bookcases in all our bedrooms or just his, and whether we would be open on Saturdays or just on weekdays.

He was encouraged at school to send his idea to the mayor, and he did. The mayor at the time was Annise D. Parker. She wrote him a letter in response dated June 4, 2015, on Office of the Mayor letterhead.

She told him that converting his home into a library would certainly require his parents approval, and she listed the addresses of three libraries already constructed near your neighborhood. But Ms. Parker  or whomever on her staff drafted the letter  made it a point to clearly state at the top that Houston had no zoning laws.
I was 19 the first time I held an assault rifle. It was on a concrete court inside a National Guard armory in Bloomington, Ind., where Id gathered with fellow R.O.T.C. cadets for weapons training. A sergeant opened an olive-drab arms case and handed out M-16A2s. We each took one apart and reassembled it, learning the sequence, learning how to safely clear it, learning to check its functions. It has been years since I held one, but regardless of the model  an M-16, an M-4 or a civilian variant like the AR-15 or Sig Sauer MCX  Im confident I could disassemble it blindfolded.

That sounds more impressive than it is. In truth, its simple. Ensure the selector lever is on safe. Drop the magazine. Clear the chamber. Find the takedown pin. Lift the upper receiver. The rest is just a series of pushes or pulls on particular parts: the charging handle, the buffer spring, the bolt carrier group, the retainer pin. My brain might forget the names of the pieces, but my hands remember. Even if I just pantomime the act of holding that rifle, my hands know where to rest: index finger over the trigger well  never inside it  thumb on the selector lever, ready to switch and fire.

The massacre in Orlando this week, in which the shooter used a Sig Sauer MCX, has renewed arguments for banning assault weapons, but even talking about these guns in America can become a game of semantics. People obsess over terminology like literary scholars. Ive taught college English for almost two years now, and for all the fulminating against the culture of political correctness, Ive never seen language scrutinized like the language of armaments and gun control. There is a mechanical difference between the M-4 I carried in Afghanistan and a civilian assault rifle, but given the way we trained and shot (using semiautomatic mode), there is almost no distinction. When I look at a photo of myself in Afghanistan  on a combat mission in July 2009  I find myself examining the gun. I could buy that rifle online, including all the accessories, with minimal difficulty. I cant go back to Afghanistan, at least not now. I cant be 25 again. I cant recapture the fear or the wonderment or the grief  for a recently deceased friend  that I felt in that instant. But the weapon I carried could be mine again, with only slight variations. I could once again own a little part of that regrettable era.
On Fathers Day in 2006, a Brooklyn high school student named Chanel Petro-Nixon went for a job interview at an Applebees restaurant just blocks from her apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Chanel, 16, was an avid reader and a straight-A student. She never came back.

Within about a day, her mother, Lucita Petro-Nixon, reported her missing. Three days after that, a woman taking out the trash found Chanels body, strangled and partly clothed, in a garbage bag on the street outside her building on Kingston Avenue in the Crown Heights neighborhood. As the weeks went by, posters offering a reward for information dotted Chanels neighborhood, but nobody came forward. So every year after, Ms. Petro-Nixon and her husband, Garvin Nixon, have joined with friends and relatives to honor Chanel at a memorial march.

But on Wednesday, nearly 10 years to the day that Chanel disappeared, the authorities announced a major break: A man had been indicted in her murder.

Image Chanel Petro-Nixon was murdered a decade ago. Credit... Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Prosecutors said that Chanel had gone to meet the man, Veron Primus, at her interview on the day she vanished and that the two were former classmates who went to the same church. While the police had long considered Mr. Primus, 29, a person of interest, it was only in the last few months that they were able to make a case.
We are his Flint, said Ms. Hackett, holding a photograph of her grandchildren, Corey and Alyssa, both of whom tested at more than 50 times the national average.

Moments after she spoke, Ms. Hackett and others from Hoosick Falls were invited to an hourlong meeting with Jim Malatras, the states director of operations, who has headed much of the states response to the PFOA crisis. Afterward, several residents expressed gratitude for the meeting, which resulted in promises to disclose more results from testing, and bringing staff to Hoosick Falls from Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan to consult with residents.

Left unfulfilled, however, was a wish for legislative hearings on the states reaction to the contamination, even as the Legislature prepares to wrap up its session for the year on Thursday. (Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, was not available to meet with residents, according to his office, because of meetings with legislative leaders.)

The decision not to hold hearings earned the derision of State Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin, whose district includes Hoosick Falls and who has criticized the State Senate majority leader, John J. Flanagan, a fellow Republican. And while Mr. McLaughlin thanked Mr. Cuomos office for the meeting on Wednesday, he did not ease up on Senator Flanagan, who he said was ignoring the plight of children in the village.

How do you look at them and not have hearings? he said.

Scott Reif, a spokesman for Mr. Flanagan, said that our primary focus is on ensuring that the progress that has been made on behalf of the residents of Hoosick Falls continues, and that he had been in almost daily contact with the local state senator, Kathy Marchione, about Hoosick Falls.
On Wednesday, the Brooklyn district attorney, Ken Thompson, accused Mr. Baumblit and Mr. Elie of not having the necessary court orders when they evicted more than 10 residents who had lived in the homes for more than a month. Mr. Baumblit and Mr. Elie were accused of putting residents belongings outside, removing their mattresses, breaking stoves and locking the doors to prevent people from getting inside  actions also documented by The Times.

Image Yury Baumblit was arraigned Wednesday on new charges. Credit... New York State attorney generals office

These defendants are charged with taking advantage of vulnerable New Yorkers who were in need of assistance, Mr. Thompson said. They provided them with the opposite  allegedly evicting these tenants unlawfully.

Mr. Baumblit also required tenants to attend certain outpatient treatment centers to be able to live in his network of homes, according to former residents and employees. In a separate case brought by the New York State attorney generals office, Mr. Baumblit and his wife, Rimma, were indicted in May on money laundering and Medicaid fraud charges, because the outpatient providers were suspected of paying companies run by the Baumblits more than $2 million in Medicaid kickbacks in return for clients. Those charges are punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Mr. Elie was not charged in that case.

Both Mr. Baumblit and Mr. Elie pleaded not guilty on Wednesday. Mr. Baumblit remained in jail on a $500,000 bond, or $300,000 cash, for the attorney generals charges. Mr. Elie was freed on bail.

As for Mr. Elie, the charges against him are baseless, said Howard Tanner, Mr. Elies lawyer. I think the facts when they come out will show that he is not guilty.
The nation hasnt exactly joined hands in a united response to the Orlando massacre. But since this terrible mass shooting happened in one of the most weapons-friendly places in the country, maybe we can at least all agree that having wildly permissive gun laws does not make a city safer.

O.K., probably not.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump took time out from vilifying Muslims and put some of the blame on gun control. If the patrons of Pulse, the gay bar in Orlando, had been carrying concealed weapons, he said, they could have taken control of the situation. The gunman would have been just open target practice.

(This was at the same speech where he congratulated himself for his stupendous relationship with the gay community, suggesting he didnt get enough credit for having a club in Palm Beach that was open to everybody. This is a little off our topic today, but I have to once again point out that Trumps club is open to everybody with $100,000 to cover the membership fee.)

But about guns. Lets follow Trumps thought. Its easy to buy a gun in Florida and supereasy to get a permit to carry around a concealed weapon. Even the Florida Legislature, however, doesnt allow people to carry guns into bars. Trump did not specifically say that we need to uphold Americans freedom to drink while armed. But there doesnt seem to be any other way to interpret his argument.
According to Quinnipiac, Toomey is currently tied with McGinty  not a strong position for an incumbent running against a relatively unknown challenger. Trump poses a key dilemma for Toomey who must decide whether or not to endorse the Republican presidential nominee. In ordinary elections, this is not even a question.

But for Toomey it is a major decision because of two conflicting strategic calculations.

On one hand, Trump has a base of intense, even fanatical, support in much of rural and small town Pennsylvania where Toomey has to win by large margins. Toomey cannot afford to alienate these voters. In 2010, he carried small town voters decisively, 60 to 39 percent.

On the other, Trump threatens to provoke a level of animosity among voters in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regions, both Democratic bastions, that could swamp all statewide Republican candidates.

Initially, Toomey appeared prepared to stand up to Trump in a gamble that the presumptive presidential nominees Pennsylvania voters will cast down-the-line Republican ballots no matter what.

In an op-ed published in May in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Toomey declared:

Trump was not my first, second, or third choice. I object to much in his manner and his policies. His vulgarity, particularly toward women, is appalling. His lack of appreciation for Constitutional limits on executive powers is deeply concerning. I disagree with his proposals to ban Muslims, to give government more eminent domain powers, to be neutral between Israel and its enemies, and several others. In short, I find his candidacy highly problematic.

In order to win his support, Toomey wrote:

It is up to Trump to make the case for himself in a way that reassures the millions of Republicans and non-Republicans who have grave doubts about him.

Since then, however, even as Trump has offered no such reassurance  just the opposite, in fact  Toomey appears to be wavering.

Last week, in the midst of the furor over Trumps attacks on Judge Curiel, Toomey criticized Trumps remarks as deeply offensive. Nonetheless, speaking to reporters on June 7, Toomey pointedly added:

Im hoping that Donald Trump can say and do the things that will make me comfortable supporting him.

Toomey went on: Im not there yet, Im hoping to be able to get there, but its been problematic.

In a phone interview on Tuesday, Toomey asserted that

Pennsylvania voters are entirely capable of ticket splitting and distinguishing between members of the same party. Voters are going to evaluate the Senate race entirely independently of the presidency.

Toomeys hope that he can separate himself from Trump is not widely shared by Republican strategists.

Christopher Nicholas, president of the Republican Eagle Consulting Group in Harrisburg, described Trump as an anchor weighing down Republican candidates. The Democrats key goal is to turn out the base in Philadelphia, Nicholas said. Trump will serve as a lightning rod doing their work for them.
Few public figures have more avidly tended their relationships with the media than Donald Trump. For four decades he has courted the press to promote himself and his enterprises. Yet when the coverage doesnt go his way, he can retaliate with lawsuits and childish fits of pique.

As the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and quite possibly a future leader of the free world, Mr. Trump might reasonably have been expected to seek a more evolved relationship with the fourth estate. Far from it. Beyond his regular Twitter blasts against reporters or commentators or outlets that displease him, he is accumulating a lengthy blacklist of news organizations banned from covering his campaign events. He recently added The Washington Post to a group that already included Foreign Policy, Univision, The New Hampshire Union Leader, The Des Moines Register, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Fusion, BuzzFeed News and Gawker. The Posts sin was a headline suggesting that Mr. Trump had insinuated that President Obama was complicit in the Orlando shooting. Mr. Trump did indeed imply that, many times. But he called The Post dishonest.

In reality, of course, no one would be more miserable than Mr. Trump if these bans actually resulted in less coverage of his campaign  and if he is deluded enough to imagine theyll result in less honest coverage, he will be quickly disabused. As a practical matter, the bans are essentially meaningless, since reporters can enter these events with the public, free from the corral where reporters with credentials are penned up and serve as an occasional target of his mockery.

Mr. Trumps annoyance is not without precedent. Presidents have often sparred with the press, some have found ways to retaliate, and all seek in one way or another to control the political story line or duck cross-examination. Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trumps likely Democratic opponent, has not held a news conference in months.
Over the last two decades, Canada has had eight mass shootings. Just so far this month, the United States has already had 20.

Canada has a much smaller population, of course, and the criteria researchers used for each country are slightly different, but that still says something important about public safety.

Could it be, as Donald Trump suggests, that the peril comes from admitting Muslims? On the contrary, Canadians are safe despite having been far more hospitable to Muslim refugees: Canada has admitted more than 27,000 Syrian refugees since November, some 10 times the number the United States has.

More broadly, Canadas population is 3.2 percent Muslim, while the United States is about 1 percent Muslim  yet Canada doesnt have massacres like the one we just experienced at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., or the one in December in San Bernardino, Calif. So perhaps the problem isnt so much Muslims out of control but guns out of control.
America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms, one spokesman for Al Qaeda said in a 2011 recruitment video. So what are you waiting for?

Few places on earth make it easier than the United States for a terrorist to buy assault weapons to mow down scores of people in a matter of minutes. The horrific massacre in Orlando last weekend is only the latest example. And all this is made vastly easier by a gun lobby that has blocked sensible safety measures at every turn, and by members of Congress who seem to pledge greater allegiance to the firearms industry than to their own constituencies. There is a word for their role in this form of terrorism: complicity.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats began a filibuster to force a vote on gun-control legislation. If Congress is serious about the threat of terrorists using guns, there are several steps it can take right away.

First, support reasonable efforts to close the so-called terror gap, which would make it harder for suspected terrorists to get their hands on a gun. In December, Congress considered legislation by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Representative Peter King, a Republican, that would have given the F.B.I. the ability to prevent gun sales to people it had reason to believe might be connected to terrorism. The bill was based on a Bush administration proposal, and versions of it have been pushed for years, but Republicans on Capitol Hill, beholden to the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights organizations, voted it down.
Lawmakers from both parties have denounced the visa abuse, but it is increasingly widespread, mainly because of loopholes in the law. For example, in most instances, companies that hire H-1B workers are not required to recruit Americans before hiring from overseas. Similarly, companies are able to skirt the rules for using H-1B workers by outsourcing the actual hiring of those workers to Tata, Infosys and other temporary staffing firms, mostly based in India.

Criticism of the visa process has been muted, and reform has moved slowly, partly because laid-off American workers  mostly tech employees replaced by Indian guest workers  have not loudly protested. Their reticence does not mean acceptance or even resignation. As explained in The Times on Sunday by Julia Preston, most of the displaced workers had to sign agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers as a condition of receiving severance pay. The gag orders have largely silenced the laid-off employees, while allowing the employers to publicly defend their actions as legal, which is technically accurate, given the loopholes in the law.

The conversation, however, is changing. Fourteen former tech workers at Abbott, including one who forfeited a chunk of severance pay rather than sign a so-called nondisparagement agreement, have filed federal claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission saying they were discriminated against because of their ages and American citizenship. Tech workers from Disney have filed federal lawsuits accusing the company and two global outsourcing firms of colluding to supplant Americans with H-1B workers. Former employees of Eversource Energy have also begun to challenge their severance-related gag orders by publicly discussing their dismissals and replacement by foreign workers on H-1B and other visas.

Congressional leaders of both parties have questioned the nondisparagement agreements. Bipartisan legislation in the Senate would revise visa laws to allow former employees to protest their layoffs. Beyond that, what Congress really needs to do is close the loopholes that allow H-1B abuses.
CALLS to resist politicizing tragedy have become a standard feature of our political discourse following mass shootings. From Newtown, Conn., to Aurora, Colo., politicians and pundits have urged us to refrain from politics as predictably as they have offered hollow thoughts and prayers as a condolence to victims and their families.

The tragedy in Orlando that claimed the lives of 49 people at a gay nightclub has proved no different. When Senator Bernie Sanders used his time on NBCs Meet the Press Sunday to call for a ban on automatic weapons, the host, Chuck Todd, asked pointedly whether it was possible to discuss the shooting without trying to politicize one version of events over the other? Gary Johnson, the Libertarian presidential candidate, sounded a similar note when he told The Washington Post that the current moment was not a time to either politicize or jump to conclusions.

But it is only the most privileged among us who have the luxury of divorcing politics from everyday life. Those of us in the L.G.B.T. community know better. Politics is how we won the right to be free from discrimination in government jobs, to have sex without fear of criminal prosecution, to serve in the military, to get married and adopt children. In about 28 states, we are still fighting to outlaw discrimination in employment. And transgender Americans are still fighting for the right to pee in peace.
NEW YORK

Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about Joseph Percoco, a former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo who is under federal investigation, quoted incorrectly from comments by Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group. Mr. Horner said that the actions of Mr. Percoco could cause harm if he was gaming the system, not manipulating it.



An article on Saturday about the increasing presence of birds at Westchester County Airport, using information from government officials, misidentified birds that nest above hangar doors there. They are cliff swallows, not barn swallows. The error was repeated in an accompanying picture caption.

BUSINESS DAY

An article on Wednesday about Ubers plans to raise as much as $2 billion through the use of leveraged securities described a leveraged loan incorrectly. It is issued by a company with heavy existing debt, not to that company.

THE ARTS

A dance review on Saturday about the Pennsylvania Ballet, at the Merriam Theater in Philadelphia, misidentified the designer of the lighting of the starlit sky in o zlozony / o composite, one of the works performed. The designer is Colman Rupp, the assistant to the works original lighting designer, Jennifer Tipton  not Ms. Tipton.
WASHINGTON  For a fleeting moment this week, it seemed as if the massacre in Orlando, Fla., was having the unlikely and unintended impact of helping to bridge the chasm between Republicans and many in the gay community.

Mitt Romney offered a special prayer for the L.G.B.T. community after he learned of the attack. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida granted an interview to The Advocate, the gay news magazine, and expressed outrage at the Islamic States persecution of gays. And Donald J. Trump repeatedly expressed solidarity with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, declaring, I will fight for you  an unprecedented show of support from a presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

But the deep divide over gay rights remains one of the most contentious in American politics. And the murder of 49 people in an Orlando gay club has, in many cases, only exacerbated the anger from Democrats and supporters of gay causes, who are insisting that no amount of warm words or reassuring Twitter posts change the fact that Republicans continue to pursue policies that would limit legal protections for gays and lesbians.

In the weeks leading up to the killings, they pointed out, issues involving gays were boiling over in Congress and in Republican-controlled states around the country. More than 150 pieces of legislation were pending in state legislatures that would restrict rights or legal protections for sexual minorities. A Republican congressman read his colleagues a Bible verse from Romans that calls for the execution of gays. Congress was considering a bill that would allow individuals and businesses to refuse service to gay and lesbian couples.

North Carolina is facing a harsh backlash because of a law curtailing antidiscrimination protections for gays and requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that match the gender on their birth certificates. Mississippis governor signed a similar bill.
If shes going to be critical of Trump, then shes got to put it in the context of identifying two or three places where shes been successful with Obama, said David Winston, a Republican strategist. Then the areas where shes similar to or different from him will emerge.

Trade is likely to be the most visible dividing line between them. Mr. Obama is pushing hard for Congress to ratify his ambitious Asian trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, before he leaves office. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton promoted the agreement scores of times. But last fall, facing an unexpectedly robust challenge from Mr. Sanders, she reversed course and came out against it.

On national security, Mrs. Clintons differences with Mr. Obama go back further and are rooted in more than political calculation. In 2012, while still in the administration, she argued for funneling weapons to moderate rebels in Syria. She said later that the failure to do so had opened a security vacuum in Syria that was filled by the militants of the Islamic State.

In October, Mrs. Clinton announced that she favored a no-fly zone to create humanitarian corridors to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air. She has said little about the proposal in recent months, and there is no sign that it has gained any traction in the administration.

Another area where Mrs. Clinton is likely to diverge from Mr. Obama is in how to counter the propaganda of violent extremism. The Obama administration has focused heavily on communications, an approach that critics say has proved disappointing. A former administration official who is advising the Clinton campaign said Mrs. Clinton would place more emphasis on working with teachers, community leaders, imams and others who have direct contact with those at risk of being radicalized.

She will also put new pressure on the United States Arab allies, said this adviser, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak for the Clinton campaign. In Mondays speech, she sounded that theme, saying that it is long past time for the Saudis, the Qataris and the Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist organizations.
SAN FRANCISCO  A California judge who was criticized for handing down a short jail term in a case involving a sexual assault at Stanford University is facing a growing number of impediments both inside and outside the courtroom.

Since Judge Aaron Persky of Santa Clara Superior Court sentenced a former champion swimmer for Stanford, Brock Turner, to what is effectively a three-month jail term, a dozen jurors have objected to serving in his courtroom. He was also the subject of a successful motion on Tuesday by the district attorneys office to stop him from presiding over another sexual assault case.

And since he handed down the sentence, a petition to remove him from the bench has attracted 1.4 million supporters, its organizers say.

Judge Perskys sentence in the Turner case gained national prominence when the victim released a powerful statement that she had made during the sentencing to BuzzFeed. The statement, which has been read millions of times online, describes her personal anguish during the assault and the trial.
Ukraine's Vice Premier Zubko expects UAH 5 bln from international donors for Energy Efficiency Fund in first five years

Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Regional Development, Construction, Housing and Utilities Hennadiy Zubko says that it is possible to raise UAH 5 billion in finance from international donor for the Energy Efficiency Fund in the first five years of its work.

"In the first five years, our Energy Efficiency Fund will be able to raise UAH 16.5 billion, including UAH 5 billion from donors," Zubko told Ekonomichna Pravda economic news portal in an interview.

According to him, Ukraine has preliminary agreements with the European Union and Germany to support this initiative. In particular, the EU and Germany are ready to maintain the Fund's technical office.

As was reported the Regional Development, Construction, Housing and Utilities Ministry plans to launch the Energy Efficiency Fund by January 2017.
WASHINGTON  After the Central Intelligence Agency transferred Abu Zubaydah to the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he was brought before a panel of officers for a hearing in March 2007, he described in broken English how he had been tortured in the agencys black-site prisons.

He said his body had shaken when he stood for hours, naked and shackled in a cold room and unable to shift his weight to an injured leg. He spoke of his humiliation at having to relieve himself in a bucket in front of other people, like an animal. And he described being waterboarded until he stopped breathing and required resuscitation.

Image Abu Zubaydah, who the C.I.A. mistakenly thought was a top official in Al Qaeda. Credit... U.S. Central Command, via Associated Press

They shackle me completely, even my head; I cant do anything, Mr. Zubaydah said. Like this, and they put one cloth in my mouth and they put water, water, water. At the last point before I die, he said, interrogators stood the board back up and make like this  he made breathing noises  again and again they make it with me, and I tell him, If you want to kill me, kill me. 
MADRID  Sham Aldaher came into the world in Jordan last July, safe from the horrors of the Syrian war that her family had fled, but born with a disfigured face and missing an eye. Doctors said she required urgent and complex surgery.



A childrens hospital in Barcelona has offered her free emergency care. But bureaucratic obstacles have left her stranded among other Syrian refugees in Jordan. She has been unable to obtain a Spanish visa, despite the support of a team of international lawyers.

The kind of red tape that risks leaving Sham with permanent disfiguration underlines the shortcomings of the efforts of Western governments to provide a coordinated and efficient response to a mass influx of Syrians and other refugees, according to lawyers.

Im seeing a lot of cases of children with critical needs who cant move anywhere because of political roadblocks, said Jayne Fleming, the pro bono counsel and the leader of the human rights team at Reed Smith, an American law firm. I dont want to demonize Spain, but there is certainly a need for more cooperation between governments.
TEHRAN  A British-Iranian employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, arrested in Iran more than two months ago for unexplained reasons, has been accused of plotting to overthrow the government, Iranian news media reported Wednesday.

The detainee, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 37, is a program coordinator for the foundation, the independent charitable arm of the Thomson Reuters news agency. Both the foundation and Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffes British husband, Richard Ratcliffe, denied the accusations.

Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested on April 3 in Tehran and taken to the provincial city of Kerman in southern Iran, according to a statement by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps provided to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Her 2-year-old daughter, Gabriella, who had accompanied her to Iran for a visit with family, is staying with maternal grandparents. The childs passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities, severely complicating any possibility of reuniting her with Mr. Ratcliffe.
Christo said it was about positively exploiting the incredible chemistry of humans from all walks of life, each member of the team focusing energy on something that does not exist  to the point where it does. He was also relieved that there was never a discussion with officials about installing a safety fence along the sides of the walkway, allowing visitors to walk to the edge of the water. The moment you have a parapet, forget it, he said, the feeling of walking on water is gone.

Other concerns about the ability of a small lake community to deal with the avalanche of visitors that the walkway is expected to draw  an estimated 40,000 people a day  appear to have been muted for now by enthusiasm for the project. Lake Iseo is perhaps northern Italys least famous lake, overshadowed by the neighboring Lake Garda. But hotels and other lodging options here and in nearby towns are nearly booked for the duration of the run.

Lake Iseo wont be the same after this event, said Fiorello Turla, the mayor of Monte Isola. Monte Isola will change skin, as its exposure to the global spotlight puts it on the map, he added. Its a great opportunity that weve been given and that we want to seize and bring forward.

At the close of its 16-day run, the walkway will be dismantled and its parts recycled and resold. The important part of this project is the temporary part, the nomadic quality, Christo said. The work needs to be gone, because I do not own the work, no one does. This is why it is free.
Spike Jeremy, for instance, a bearded dragon, belongs to a species that can change color and shed its skin. Isis, a python, possesses extraordinary strength, and then well use an Eastern box turtle to demonstrate the power of camouflage, Ms. Elwell added. Patches, the turtle, can draw in her legs and head, making her indistinguishable from a rock.

Children can handle these reptiles, as well as the sea stars, urchins and crabs in Aquamans Touch Tank, marine species that all have the ability to regenerate body parts. They can meet a tarantula during Spider-Man Science!, a workshop in which theyll also build string webs. And young fans of Superman may be inspired by Kryptonite and Other Radical Rocks, a program that includes fluorescent geological specimens like uranium. (This sample is protectively encased.)

Well talk about how igneous minerals are born from volcanic eruptions  kind of the superpowers of rocks, Ms. Elwell said.
At school he met the artist Juan Ramos, also Puerto Rican-born, who became his lover and creative partner. A division of labor soon developed. Mr. Lopez, a brilliant draftsman, was responsible for all illustrations and designs. Mr. Ramos did pretty much everything else: researching assignments, setting up studio sessions (Mr. Lopez liked to work from live models rather than photographs) and sometimes adding color to pictures. They considered the one-name signature on all the work, Antonio, to be a joint attribution.

They arrived during a dynamic moment, when the civil rights movement, gay liberation and the womens movement were about to change American culture utterly. Both artists were deeply interested in history. In 1964 in Greenwich Village, where they were living, they met the great couturier Charles James (1906-1978), at that point all but forgotten. They undertook a decade-long project of illustrating, and that way preserving, his designs. It was from him that Mr. Lopez learned to see clothing as an essentially sculptural medium, as is evident in a four-image sequential drawing from the 1970s. On the left stands a model in a streamlined green dress; then in three sequential images she disappears until only the dress, an abstract shell  it could be cast from auto-body steel  remains.
Through it all, Mr. Crawford impresses with his listening skills in what represents this veteran performers largest stage role in years. (People often forget how comparatively little stage time the Phantom actually has.) The actors keenly felt, stricken delivery of the single word Marian reveals in one sung moment a life marked by erotic deprivation ever since.

Image A scene from the musical The Go-Between at the Apollo Theater in London, which is based on L.P. Hartleys 1953 novel. Credit... Helen Maybanks

That the closing passages shift gears to impose a happy ending where none seems possible  I am content, the older Leo says  is in keeping with the emphasis on release (a key word in the lyrics) without remotely ringing true. The Go-Between works better as a requiem than as a parable of rebirth, but Mr. Crawford, newly anchoring a musical at age 74, delivers at every turn.

If this musicals high-mindedness at times veers toward the oppressively arty, the same could never be said of Aladdin, the Disney extravaganza that opened on Wednesday at the Prince Edward Theater. The director-choreographer Casey Nicholaws production looks set to run for at least as long as its signature set piece  a magic carpet ride with no visible means of support  can keep audiences wondering how they do it.

The enduring appeal of the 1992 animated movie of the same name wont hurt either, its Oscar-winning song (A Whole New World) and others from the film buttressed by enough new music to have landed a 2014 Tony nomination for the score  one of five that the Broadway premiere of the show received that season. The London version replicates what went before, notwithstanding a few tweaks  a baffling nod to the British comedian Tommy Cooper among them  to cater to a local public.

As it happens, the London Aladdin, Dean John-Wilson, proves more personable than his Broadway forbear as the prototypically hunky commoner-who-would-be-prince who may have lost his beloved mother but finds his inner hero along the way.

And if our shirtless young suitors love interest, Jade Ewen as the independent-minded and far-from-common Jasmine, seems to be delivering her lines by rote, abundant comic relief comes in the form of the Broadway alumnus Trevor Dion Nicholas, playing the physically and emotionally capacious Genie who acts as narrator, as well. Gifted with the first-act showstopper, Friend Like Me, which packs a weeks work-out into a single bravura number, Mr. Nicholas spreads sufficient bonhomie through the house that even the cellphone-minded young men seated in front of me looked up from their laps when he was on stage.
Its not the technology. Its user acceptance thats holding us up right now, Professor Miller said.

This is not to say experts and consumers dont see potential benefits.

Scott Fischer, 55, the chief executive of a privately held recruiting firm in Chicago, foresees a variety of situations in which autonomous vehicles would be a major advantage. Im not skeptical at all, Mr. Fischer said.

Mr. Fischer, who took part in a study of older drivers conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys AgeLab and the Hartford Center for Mature Market Excellence, part of the insurance company The Hartford, said autonomous cars could give him more peace of mind about his two daughters, who are in their 20s and have limited driving experience. They dont drive as much they take Uber, he said, so I see the safety aspects.

For his father, who is in his early 80s and facing driving challenges because of vision issues, an autonomous vehicle would be a way to get around on his own, Mr. Fischer said. And for his own part, Mr. Fischer would let the car take over when he was tired on a long drive or needed to read email.

But I want to see proof of concept that the technology actually works, he added.

Joseph Coughlin, director of the M.I.T. AgeLab, said that for the studys participants, who ranged in age from 50 to 69, there was no reflexive aversion to technology-assisted driving. If they see it as useful or enhancing safety, he said, theyre willing to pay for it.
Like the Lorax, Annie Proulx speaks for the trees. Her new novel, Barkskins, is a clamorous epic of environmental despoliation. It plays out across 717 pages and more than 300 years, from the arrival of woodcutting French settlers in Canada in 1693 through an eyewitness account of melting glaciers in 2013.

In between, there is clear-cutting and more clear-cutting, with the occasional sidebar about eating or scheming or killing or rutting. This is a jeremiad about the loss of North Americas monstrous pine finery, in the authors resonant phrase, and thus its weird, old pagan soul. This novel is a flood of acid rain.

Slaughter of every variety is on Ms. Proulxs mind. Barkskins  the title refers to woodcutters  is a Baedeker of doom. Characters die from cholera and measles and smallpox, from shipwrecks and scalpings and botched amputations and occult tortures. More often, they perish in grisly logging mishaps. No one ever seems to yell, Timber!

Ms. Proulx is adept at this culling. She has a lesser knack for first bringing her men and women to life. Barkskins rarely warms in your hands. Its ideas are more finely beveled than its people, never a good sign.
A few years ago, it would have been hard to imagine Judge Jed S. Rakoff and Roomy Khan, a government informant, as speakers at the same conference.

But thats exactly what happened this week, when Judge Rakoff kicked off the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners 27th annual global fraud conference in Las Vegas on Monday and Ms. Khan closed it with her talk on Wednesday.

Ms. Khan is known for helping investigators crack open the governments case into insider trading at the Galleon Group hedge fund.

Judge Rakoff is a highly respected judge for the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York and is known for his sharp wit and command of the law. He was also the judge responsible for sending Ms. Khan to a year in prison in 2013 after she was convicted of illegally passing inside information and obstructing justice. Over the course of a decade, Ms. Khan supplied corporate secrets to Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of Galleon, and, in some instances, traded on the information herself.
Poroshenko submits to Rada draft resolution to approve NSDC's decision to lift personal sanctions related to Iran nuclear program

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has submitted to Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada a draft resolution on the approval of the decision of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of May 20, 2016 that lifts personal economic sanctions and other restrictive measures imposed on citizens of Iran to execute the UN Security Council Resolution on Iran's nuclear program.

Draft resolution No. 4825 on approval of the NSDC decision dated May 20, 2016 on the execution of UN Security Council Resolution No. 2231 dated July 20, 2015 endorsing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was registered in the Ukrainian parliament on June 16, 2016.

The initiator of the draft resolution is the Ukrainian president.

On June 15 Poroshenko signed a decree on the NSDC decision dated May 20, 2016 on lifting personal sanctions imposed in respect to Iran's nuclear program.

The NSDC decision says that some sanctions would be extended.

"To apply personal economic sanctions and other restrictive measures to individuals described in attachment 1 to cabinet resolution No. 360-r of April 29, 2016 and companies described in attachment 2 to cabinet resolution No. 360-r of April 29, 2016," reads the document.
A $10 billion American health care merger may not leave shareholders feeling better.

The AmSurg Corporation and Envision Healthcare Holdings are combining in an all-stock deal that will leave each with about half of the merged company. They are keeping two headquarters and still promising $100 million of annual synergies. There is little obvious value being created on the financial operating table.

AmSurgs ambitions precede the announcement on Wednesday. Late last year, the company, which owns walk-in surgery centers and supplies emergency, anesthesiology and radiology services, embarked on an unsolicited $5.3 billion bid for its larger rival TeamHealth, a physician staffing provider. TeamHealth was already buying the national group physician practice IPC, an acquisition that AmSurg supported. TeamHealth was not persuaded by the logic, and AmSurg eventually backed off.

The latest transaction effort is similarly confounding. For starters, the exchange ratio means Envision investors  who will end up with 53 percent of the combined company  are getting less than their closing stock price on Wednesday, though the shares already jumped this month when a possible deal was reported. Moreover, rather than being fully integrated, the newly named Envision Healthcare will be run from both Tennessee and Colorado.

That is one reason cost savings will be limited. The total synergies expected amount to only just over 1 percent of combined sales of $8.5 billion. A meaningful amount is projected to come from new revenue, a dubious prospect in any merger but especially so in medical services. Even giving the companies full credit, though, $100 million of annual benefits translates into little more than $600 million of value today, once capitalized on a multiple of 10 and taxed at Envisions 39 percent effective rate.
Nobody has really come out of the closet, if you will, said Matthew A. Karnes, the founder of Green Wave Advisors, which provides data and analysis of the marijuana business. Its very telling that a company of this caliber is taking the risk of coming out and engaging with a company that is focused on the cannabis business.

David Dinenberg, the founder and chief executive of Kind, said it had taken a long time  and a lot of courting of big-name companies  to persuade the first one to get on board.

Every business that works in the cannabis space, we all clamor for legitimacy, said Mr. Dinenberg, a former real estate developer in Philadelphia who moved to California to start Kind. I would like to think that this is the first of many dominoes to fall.

Image Kind makes A.T.M.-style kiosks that facilitate marijuana sales. Credit... Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

Its hard to know if other corporate giants have provided their services in more quiet ways to cannabis purveyors. New York State, for instance, has said it is working with Oracle to track medicinal marijuana patients. But there appears to be little precedent for a big company advertising its work in the space. It is still possible  though considered unlikely  that the federal government could decide to crack down on the legalization movement in the states.

The partnership with Kind is yet another bold step for Microsoft as its looks to replace the revenue from its fading desktop software business. On Monday, it announced that it was buying LinkedIn.

Microsoft has put a lot of emphasis on its cloud business, Azure. The Kind software will be one of eight pieces of preferred software that Microsoft will offer to users of Azure Government  and the only one related to marijuana.
HONG KONG  With more internet users than any other country and a fast-rising middle class, China is one of the most sought-after markets in the world.

Recent fund-raising rounds in the ride-sharing market show it is also one of the most expensive.

The Chinese car-hailing app Didi Chuxing said on Thursday that it had brought in $7.3 billion in its latest round of fund-raising, which included Apple, Alibaba, and SoftBank as investors. The new funds give the company a total of $10.5 billion in disposable funds, and put its valuation at $28 billion, according to a person familiar with the fund-raising.

That Didis valuation is now almost half that of the $62.5 billion valuation of its main rival in China, Uber, shows how much potential investors see in China. Yet the size of the cash infusions also underscores the markets difficulties.

In part because of Chinas widespread blocking of foreign websites, the competition between Uber and Didi marks the first time in recent history a major foreign tech company has vied so intensely with a local Chinese business.
WOLFSBURG, Germany  Volkswagen on Thursday outlined an ambitious plan to increase profit after an emissions scandal by sharply increasing the production of electric vehicles and reducing costs.

The announcement was an attempt to move the conversation away from the diesel scandal. But it is not that simple.

The carmaker said battery-powered vehicles could account for as much as 25 percent of total sales  three million vehicles a year  within a decade, up from a negligible level now. It then announced cuts to research and development, necessary spending for such a drastic shift.

Cost-cutting is a big piece of the plan. But labor has an unusually powerful voice at Volkswagen, so major cuts to the companys huge work force are taboo.
Macys and the union representing thousands of its workers in the New York City area reached a tentative deal for a new labor contract on Thursday, avoiding what would have been the first strike at the nations largest department store in more than 40 years.

The president of the union hailed the four-year agreement as a major victory that included substantial wage increases, a more affordable health care plan and new scheduling rules that would not require employees to work on holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It raises the bar for what retail jobs can be and should be, said the unions president, Stuart Appelbaum. Its a major step forward for the entire retail industry, and it shows the importance of what our union does to empower retail workers.

A Macys spokeswoman, Elina Kazan, said, We are pleased with the outcome of our overnight negotiations.
For at least some of the all-important (to advertisers) millennial users, that may well be the case. Jacob Shiansky, 24, who was visiting Manhattan from South Carolina, told me this week that he couldnt remember his Twitter password and hasnt visited the site in six months.

Its too much business and political promotions rather than a social media site, he said. If you want to see Trumps ridiculous tweets, you can go on Facebook or CNN. You dont have to bother with Twitter.

He said his friends feel the same way. Its all Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, he said. Theyre quick and theyre fun. You dont have to waste your time typing.

I cant say my own Twitter use has been all that prolific, even though I sometimes use it to comment on my column and to recommend stories by other journalists. But Ive stopped following some people who spew what seems a constant stream of drivel. Days go by when I dont look at the site.

User engagement has become an increasingly important metric for advertisers, because it enhances ad exposure and gives the site more information about its users, enabling it to target ads better.

On that front, Twitter is a clear laggard. Users spent an average of nine minutes a day on all of Yahoos sites, two minutes on LinkedIn and just one minute on Twitter, according to recent data from comScore. Facebook reported last quarter that its users were spending, on average, 50 minutes a day.

We regularly survey advertisers and ask them to rank internet platforms, Mr. Mahaney, of RBC Capital Markets, said. Google ranks first, Facebook second and Twitter is somewhere down the list. Thats been true for every survey, he said.
Need a dermatologist? Today, online tools can show you which doctors are in your plans network as well as rank them by the likely cost of a visit.

Still not sure which one to pick? The tools also show whether you have already met your plans deductible and offer Yelp-like reviews of the doctors.

The idea behind these web tools, which have been available from health insurers and start-ups for several years, is to harness the power of so-called big data. The companies cull medical claims and other sources of information to help people become sophisticated shoppers for medical care  and they promise to curb the overall cost of health care in the process. By some estimates, the savings from this newfound transparency could run in the billions of dollars a year.

Yet the limits of this data are becoming increasingly clear. Even when people have access to the newly available information, they may not use it. And when they do, they may not rely on the insight. It is impossible to know, for example, whether a dermatologist who costs twice as much as another can more successfully diagnose skin cancer.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled that a Thai student who in 2013 won a copyright case involving imported textbooks should have another chance to persuade a lower court that the textbooks publisher should pay his legal fees.

The usual rule in American civil litigation is that each side pays its own lawyers regardless of who wins. But the Copyright Act allows judges to award a reasonable attorneys fee to the prevailing party.

Federal appeals courts have applied different standards in deciding when fee awards in copyright cases are warranted. The judge in the students case, in New York, awarded him nothing, relying on a decision from the federal appeals court there that focused on whether the losing sides position had been objectively reasonable.

The publisher easily met that standard, the judge said, as it had won a $600,000 judgment against the student, won an appeal in 2011 and lost in the Supreme Court by a 6-to-3 vote in 2013.
WASHINGTON  The number of women infected with the Zika virus during their pregnancies in the continental United States has risen to 234, health officials said on Thursday.

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declined to say how many of the women had given birth, citing confidentiality concerns for the women and their families. But they did cite six cases with abnormalities  three babies with birth defects and another three who died before birth with evidence of defects.

The numbers raised more questions than answers. Without knowing the total number of births, officials cannot know if the babies with birth defects represent a tiny fraction of the total, or a large part. The agency said some of the defects were related to microcephaly, a condition linked to Zika that causes brain damage and abnormally small heads. Others, like eye problems, were Zika-related, but not caused by microcephaly.
Cosmos, Andrzej Zulawskis first film since 2000, is both a comeback and a swan song. Mr. Zulawski, 75 when he died in February, was an important figure in the history of Polish cinema and in the emergence of a borderless, cosmopolitan European style of filmmaking during the Cold War and after. His last work pays tribute to his roots and to his subsequent wanderings. Based on a novel of the same name by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, this French-Portuguese co-production is a witty and energetic  if also somewhat labored  melange of languages, tones and ideas.

The protagonist is a sensitive law student  alternately sulky and stormy  named Witold (Jonathan Genet), who explains that his parents gave him the name because they were Gombrowicz fans. Thats far from the only self-referential moment in the film, which chronicles Witolds increasingly bizarre experiences at a Lisbon boardinghouse. He and a fellow student, Fuchs (Johan Libereau), are welcomed by the eccentric and effusive Mme. Woytis (Sabine Azema), who may be the sanest member of the household.

Her husband (Jean-Francois Balmer) is a pompous professorial type who festoons his speech with nonsensical Latin flourishes. Their niece, Catherette (Clementine Pons), lives with them, as does their daughter, Lena (Victoria Guerra), who is married. Catherette, who has a deformed lip, seems to be in love with Witold, who conceives a feverish, possibly reciprocated passion for Lena. Fuchs goes out cruising at night, returning with fresh welts and bruises that dont dampen his exuberance.

The film unfolds with a madcap energy that nonetheless carries a whiff of fatigue. Mr. Zulawski, following Gombrowiczs lead, blithely discards narrative logic, and delights in finding images that will do justice to this writers manic inventiveness. Some images are hauntingly grotesque  like the dead birds hanging across paths in a forest  while others seem to pulse with occult, Bunuelian sexual and religious significance. Sometimes a simpler pictorial whimsy seems to be at work, a desire to shoot something crazy.
Ukraine's Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman during his working visit to the U.S. met with U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz.

"Representatives of the U.S. Secretary of Energy have assured of their readiness to support Ukraine, and to help in Ukraine's achieving energy efficiency," the information and communications department of the office of the Cabinet of Ministers reported on Wednesday.

At the meeting, the two officials discussed the government's plans in achieving energy independence of Ukraine. Groysman said that energy independence is a matter of national security of Ukraine. "Our task is to diversify, to become an energy efficient state, and we are currently working on this. The energy reform is among our priorities," the prime minister said.

He also reported the first steps of the government in achieving this. He spoke about the introduction of a single market price for natural gas by the government. This decision will help overcome corruption in the sector, spur the domestic production of gas and help achieve energy efficiency in the country. At the same time, those who are unable to pay for gas will receive assistance after the market prices for gas will be established.

According to Groysman, the Ukrainian government also focuses on the nuclear power industry and the development of alternative energy. In the near future, the government plans to adopt the strategy of hydropower development. The prime minister said that the share of the hydropower sector may be increased to 15.5% of all the power generated in the country, compared with the current 8.5%.

Groysman also spoke about the need for the modernization and restructuring of Ukrainian coal mines. In addition, the government focuses on the reform of the national oil and gas company Naftogaz Ukrainy.

The prime minister thanked the U.S. government for its support of Ukraine's energy sector.
It is difficult to look at a sugar packet the same way after seeing Land and Shade, which won the Camera dOr (best first feature) at the Cannes Film Festival last year. The writer and director, Cesar Augusto Acevedo, has set his movie among the sugar farmers of the Valle del Cauca region in Colombia. They work long hours in the fields  the cane leaves, were told, cut like razors  and are shortchanged pay.

When it focuses on the workers, the movie resembles the films of John Sayles, who often juxtaposes a family drama with an expansive sociological portrait. In Land and Shade, the setting holds more interest than the plot: a fable-like, elemental story that sketches its characters too faintly to develop much power.

Alfonso (Haimer Leal) returns home after years away to see Gerardo (Edison Raigosa), his son, who is largely bedridden because of a farming-related respiratory ailment. Gerardo would be better off moving away, as his wife (Marleyda Soto) wishes, but he stays because of his aging mother (Hilda Ruiz), who regards Alfonso with disdain.

While Alfonso gets to know his grandson (Jose Felipe Cardenas), Mr. Acevedo emphasizes atmosphere, whether its in the birdcalls on the soundtrack or shots of ash raining down as fields are burned. The opening composition  in which Alfonso, walking down a dirt road, is forced to make way for a giant truck  captures the movies perspective in miniature, and little of the restrained material that follows can match that shots simple power.
The pleasure of the remake, even when viewed piecemeal, is that its a testament to the transporting glories of movie love, to that passion that sweeps you up whether youre sailing over the rainbow with Dorothy or riding shotgun with Ripley into the abyss. Its a fever that can become a kind of madness, send lovers soaring or spiraling, and that sometimes turns fans into directors, writers, scholars, programmers and even critics. Whats especially moving about Raiders!, though  and which is evident in the snippets from the remake and the behind-the-scenes glimpses of the boys and their friends  is that this passion is incredibly pure, its their first love and their greatest.

The documentary, directed by Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, revisits those tender years and what came after with a lot of obvious enthusiasm and not an ounce of critical distance, as if they too were just two more friends playing along. This eagerness toward the adaptation is understandable, given its ungainly charm, but the problem is that the documentary isnt strictly about the remake. Too much of the documentary is dedicated to the adult Mr. Zala and Mr. Strompolos, who when it opens are in the midst of trying to raise money to shoot a complicated, effects-heavy scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark that they didnt pull off when they were teenagers.
A rebellious boy and his foster uncle go on the run in the woods of New Zealand in the new comedy adventure Hunt for the Wilderpeople, opening June 24. The film was written and directed by Taika Waititi, who, in a recent interview, discussed a scene from the film that consists primarily of one shot. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Tell me a bit about the scene.

At this point in the film, Ricky (Julian Dennison) and Hec (Sam Neill) have been on the run for a couple of months. Theyre really feeling the pressure of the mounting search and the government trying to bring them in. At this point we have an in-camera, one-shot montage to show the passing of time and to recap on all the characters that have been involved in the film.

Did you initially plan for a winter setting for the scene?

This was about midway through the shoot and we were down in the middle of the North Island. We didnt expect any snow at all. We were deep in army land and the army really came and helped us out, giving us tanks and equipment for a big car chase. One of the other things they helped out with was giving us access to parts of New Zealand that had never been captured on film before. When we were driving into this area, we were planning to do a bunch of other scenes. But it started snowing really heavily. By the end of the morning we had six inches of snow. So we regrouped to figure out what we were going to do. I quickly rewrote parts of the script to take place in the snow and use it as a seasonal change. And I thought, while were figuring out our next move, why dont we try this big montage shot that I had in my head for a while. I was just lucky enough to have all the actors there on the day.

How did you do it?

We basically put the camera on the tripod and we planted it in the ground and we just slowly turned the camera 780 degrees. We hid all the actors beneath the camera and in the bushes. Each time we passed the camera by an actor, either an actor would pop up into frame or would run around the camera to take their place for another pass. We had a fire that was going on in the beginning. Someone would run in and put that out. We had doubles who were in different costumes. I think in the end we had three Hecs and three Rickys in the shot, the real ones and then two doubles each. So it was a real choreography.
Chief Stack and others hurried to the scene. He wound up in the lobby of the Marriott World Trade Center, which was being evacuated. Wreckage collapsed into the lobby, nearly striking Chief Stack and leaving him momentarily trapped, his coat stuck. He wiggled free and left the coat behind. It would be recovered three months later.

Image Chief Stack

A lieutenant came up to him and said, Can you help me? I was with someone, and I cant find him, Lieutenant Stack said. They go back to this collapsed mess and start calling his name out.

They heard a faint voice in the rubble  the missing man, a firefighter. The lieutenant grabbed his ankles, and Chief Stack grabbed the lieutenants, and they pulled the firefighter out.

My dad is like, Its time to leave, weve got to get out of here, Lieutenant Stack said. They stepped outside. You can see bodies jumping, falling. My dad said, Theres the command post. Go there.

Those firefighters, who lived to tell this to Lieutenant Stack, did so. Chief Stack stopped. He had come across a fallen businessman from Iowa, injured. The firefighters looked back as the north tower fell.

The last thing they remember seeing is my dad on one knee with this man, Lieutenant Stack said. Staying with him.

Lieutenant Stack hurried to the World Trade Center site that day. I came up, and I go, Oh my God, he said. It was just so vast. So big.
A federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday rejected a request that a gold trader from Turkey be granted an unusual form of release pending trial that would have allowed him to sign a $50 million bond, secured by $10 million in cash, and to live in a kind of self-financed gilded cage.

Judge Richard M. Berman, in denying bail to the trader, Reza Zarrab, said his proposal to live in a recently leased apartment under 24-hour armed guard and GPS monitoring, all at his own expense, is unreasonable because it helps to foster inequity and unequal treatment in favor of a very small cohort of criminal defendants who are extremely wealthy, such as Mr. Zarrab.

Judge Berman said prosecutors had shown that Mr. Zarrab, 32, posed a risk of flight and that no conditions, including privately funded armed guards, will reasonably assure his appearance at trial.

Mr. Zarrab, who was born in Iran and moved to Turkey as an infant, was arrested in March during a trip to Florida with his wife and daughter, and sent to Manhattan to face charges that included conspiring to violate the United States sanctions on Iran. Mr. Zarrab has pleaded not guilty.
To the Editor:

We at Emigrant Bank are disappointed at the lack of balance in Jim Dwyers June 8 About New York column regarding a lawsuit involving one of our loan programs.

The program that Mr. Dwyer describes (which ended in 2008) was a small part of Emigrants operations  less than 5 percent of the banks total assets. It was a 100 percent legal loan program developed by Emigrant and intended for borrowers with low credit scores who otherwise would have been shut out of credit markets. The product was available to any borrower, regardless of race or other protected classes.

More than 70 percent of borrowers in this program were thereby able to keep their homes. The plaintiffs own expert, in testimony before the court, described the loans as a lifeline for borrowers.

The plaintiffs all had existing mortgages with other banks or other pending debts, and most were under the imminent threat of foreclosure if they didnt get an Emigrant loan. All borrowers signed a document clearly stating the payment amounts they undertook, and attested that they had the wherewithal to pay their mortgage. If borrowers had problems, Emigrant frequently modified loan terms and waived default interest to help them.
SOFIA, Bulgaria  IN the final days of June 1914, a telegram arrives in a remote garrison town on the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On it is a single sentence in capital letters: Heir to the throne rumored assassinated in Sarajevo.

In a moment of disbelief and anxiety, one of the officers begins speaking Hungarian to his compatriots. The others cant understand a word, but they suspect that the Hungarian is probably not unhappy with the news that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whom Hungarians see as partial to the empires Slavs, cannot now become the next emperor.

Another officer, a Slovene, who has long questioned the loyalty of Hungarians, insists that the conversation be in their common language, German. I will say it in German, replies the Hungarian officer. We are in agreement, my countrymen and I: We can be glad the bastard is gone.

The scene was fictional  depicted in Joseph Roths remarkable novel The Radetzky March  but it captures a pivotal moment in European history: the end of the Hapsburg Empire. What Roths scene suggests is that the end of the empire was the outcome of decades of political decay, but also a moment of paralyzing uncertainty in the wake of disruptive events. The disintegration that until that moment was unimaginable suddenly seemed inevitable.
BARI, Italy  The prospect that Britain might next week commit an act of national folly by voting to leave the European Union has politicians throughout Europe alarmed. Integration has been the Continents leitmotif for more than six decades. Fracture would suddenly be underway. And what would be left?

If a British withdrawal were seen by Germany as opening the way to govern Europe as a Germanic federation, the European Union will fall apart, Michele Emiliano, the president of the southern Puglia region, told me in an interview. Europe can only function as a union of equal states. Under German dominion, it would contain the genes of its dissolution.

Germany has already become what the postwar strategic architecture of Europe was designed to prevent: the Continents most powerful nation. But Britain, through the size of its economy, has played an offsetting role. Absent Britain, Germany would loom larger still, a source of alarm to the economically weaker Mediterranean states.

Postwar Italy was fragile, torn between the West and Communism, between scaling the Alps and succumbing to the Mafia-suffused inertia of the south, or mezzogiorno. European Union membership was the countrys anchor and magnet, securing it in the free and democratic Western family, luring it toward prosperity. Now that role is played most conspicuously for newer members of the union. But its importance persists.
To the Editor:

Contrary to the claim made in your June 6 editorial Brazils Gold Medal for Corruption, Brazilian members of Congress and ministers enjoy no immunity from prosecution under most circumstances, nor against punishment for crimes. They enjoy the prerogative of jurisdiction, by which those authorities are tried by the Federal Supreme Court.

Moreover, the editorial bases its conclusion on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that Brazils state institutions are subject to the whims of politics. This is an outdated view of Brazil.

Brazilian democracy has steadily matured during the last three decades. A proof of that is the fact that we are now in the midst of a second impeachment process of a president in less than 25 years, always under the strictest observance of the constitutional order.

Brazils Public Prosecutors Office, the Federal Police, government agencies and the judicial system itself rely on the wide support of a society that tolerates neither corruption nor complacency in the face of corruption. There is no more room in Brazil to give shelter to the friends of the powerful. The law is the same for all  including presidents and former presidents.
BANGALORE, India  The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is famously obsessed with the cow, which is venerated in Hindu cosmology. Most Indian states have now banned cow slaughter. The government of Punjab wants to tax alcohol to pay for shelters for stray cattle. Last year, after a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh was lynched by a mob for eating beef, a cabinet minister from the B.J.P. demanded to know who else was involved in the crime  meaning the beef eating, not the mans killing.

It should probably come as no surprise, then, that the B.J.P. is also touting the medicinal virtues of consuming cow urine. The therapy is mentioned in the Ayurveda, an ancient healing system described in Hinduisms foundational texts. In the early 2000s, when the B.J.P. led the governing coalition of the day, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, a state-funded network of research laboratories, started promoting cow-urine technology as a treatment for diabetes, infections, cancer and even DNA damage.

Today, the Indian government holds more than a dozen patents related to cow urine and has filed applications for them in nearly 150 countries. Many nations, including the United States, France and South Korea, have recognized these, but not India, which has much stricter standards for patents. For now.

The B.J.P. government released Indias first National Intellectual Property Rights Policy last month, and it is dangerously misguided. Although the paper reaffirms the basic tenets of Indias admirably farsighted patent laws, it also calls for protecting traditional remedies like cow urine. Taken to its logical conclusion, this policy could open the door to many more exceptions, playing into the hands of patent-happy international pharmaceutical companies.
Lufthansa to make Odesa-Munich flight year-round, will not to return to Kharkiv for now

Germanys Lufthansa airline would extend the servicing of its flights on the Odesa-Munich route opened for the summer navigation, to the 2016-2017 winter navigation.

An Interfax-Ukraine correspondent has reported that the airline said in a press release spread at a press conference of the company in Kyiv on Wednesday. The press conference was devoted to the 25 anniversary of Lufthansa Groups operation in Ukraine.

According to the press release, since March 2016 the airline has been servicing two flights a week on the route.

Vice President of Lufthansa German Airlines for Sales and Services in Europe Heike Birlenbach said at the press conference that in Q2 2016 the group seeks to increase the transportation capacity on flights from/to Ukraine by 14%, including for Lufthansas flights by 11% and Austrian Airlines flights by 23% thanks to replacement of planes by more capacious ones.

Fokker planes of Austrian Airlines on flights to Odesa will be replaced by Embraer-195.

The Fokker plane replacement program envisages obtaining 17 Embraer planes by the airline. The program will be finished before 2017. The cost of one plane is EUR 52 million.

Asked about the restoration of flights to Kharkiv, Lufthansa Group Country Manager for Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia and Georgia Rene Koinzack recalled that the flights to the city were terminated in 2014.

Then demand significantly plunged, and it was a commercial decision. We monitor this market, but we do not have the concrete date for restoring flights to Kharkiv. This should be commercially effective, he said.

He said that the Ukrainian aviation market has positive prospects in general.

Lufthansa Group is presented by two airlines in Ukraine - Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines. Their Ukrainian market share is 13%.
After Orlando and San Bernardino and Paris, there is new urgency to understand the signs that can precede acts of terrorism. And with the Islamic States prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants cause.

A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Johnson and Miami colleagues searched for pro-Islamic State posts each day from mid-2014 until August 2015, mining mentions of beheadings and blood baths in multiple languages on Vkontakte, a Russia-based social media service that is the largest European equivalent to Facebook. Ultimately, they devised an equation that tries to explain the activity of Islamic State sympathizers online and might, they say, eventually help predict attacks that are about to happen.

Experts who study terrorism and online communication said that the new research was informative, and that they appreciated that the authors would make their data available to other researchers. But they cautioned that the actions of terrorist groups are extremely difficult to anticipate and said more information was needed, especially to substantiate any predictive potential of the teams equation.
Software is the strangest invention in economic history: a great wealth creator and an industry destroyer. But software is also insubstantial; no one can bring you a bucket of software. Code is a series of propositions about arranging transistors in a computer.

Apple became one of the worlds biggest companies thanks to this paradoxical invention, and now it may also be threatened by where software is headed.

As Brian X. Chen reports, this week Apple held its big meeting for outside software developers, the people who make Apple products essential for many by creating new things that Apples phones, tablets, computers and watch can do. For the rest of us, its a week to imagine what will spring from this Apple-developers pairing a few months from now.

But this session was more about catching up to rivals. Apple offered a new way to send sketches and handwriting, new ways of photo-organizing, and a limited incorporation of Siri, Apples virtual assistant, with third-party software. The watch loads apps faster, and has some more social functions.
Lin-Manuel Miranda confirmed on Thursday morning that he would leave the cast of Hamilton on July 9 and be succeeded by his longtime alternate, Javier Munoz.

Mr. Miranda said he would turn his attention to other projects, including finishing work on the score and songs for Moana, an animated Disney film; completing an album of Hamilton covers and Hamilton-inspired songs called The Hamilton Mixtape; and preparing to begin rehearsals for a live-action sequel to Mary Poppins, which he will star in alongside Emily Blunt.

Im leaving because I have other opportunities that are going to need my mental real estate, he said.

He said he expected to spend much of next year in London, where the movie will be filmed. And he said he planned to cut his hair, which he had grown out for the role of Alexander Hamilton.
Toni Same-day voter registration is another Sanders goal, and it sounds like a laudable one. But the Democratic National Committee cant wave a magic wand to make it happen.

Nate No, the Democrats would probably wave a wand to make it happen if they could. It would help them a lot in the general election. I believe Clinton goes even further, and supports universal automatic registration laws. But voter registration laws are set by state governments, not by the state or national parties. Sanders is barking up the wrong tree.

Toni Weve covered the issue of superdelegates. Lets get back to the question of leverage. Everyone is wondering about the end game for Sanders. But maybe hes on the right track. If he can drive a hard bargain at the convention, maybe he can help smooth the path to unity by showing his supporters that hes won concessions. He may have more credibility with his supporters when he eventually comes around to supporting Clinton. Hes not the typical politician  in many ways. He may never run again (hell be 78 in 2020). So why not drive a hard bargain?

Nate Whats he asking for?

And what could he ask for that he could plausibly get that would have the effect youre imagining?

I think the danger for Sanders is that he loses leverage as the election moves on without him, especially if Clinton leads Trump.

Toni His persona has been as a fighter, and he probably feels this is his last shot on this kind of stage. Im not clear either on how important the specific goals are to him, but it seems important to him not to be seen as rolling over.

But speaking of something specific beyond his policy preferences, he would like changes in the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, especially the removal of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The early debate schedule set by the committee has long been a sore point with Sanders and his supporters: There were fewer debates than Sanders wanted  conspicuously fewer than the Republicans had  and most were on weekends, when fewer people would tune in.
With the Obama administration nearing declassification of the still-secret 28 pages of a congressional report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, new worries have surfaced that the White House might hand Congress the responsibility for releasing the document, which is said to suggest high-level Saudi complicity in the episode.

That possibility has alarmed advocates for disclosing the pages, since there was no clear-cut avenue for Congress to do so. They had always assumed that the White House would act once it had completed its declassification review, and they now fear that involving Congress again is a stalling attack.

Hoping to clarify the situation, sponsors of the initial legislation calling for the release of the 28 pages introduced a separate House resolution on Wednesday urging the House Intelligence Committee to declassify the pages and publish them in the Congressional Record. The resolution, introduced by Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, and others, says that justice and truth must prevail over the embarrassment or protection of enemies of the American people that aided, abetted or materially assisted the gruesome international terrorist murders of 9/11.

The resolution is a long shot, but advocates hope that it helps point a way for handling the pages once the intelligence community finishes its review, which could be in a matter of weeks.
Ms. Sanders: Ive been trying to go. Its not easy. Its a preparation for me. When I go there, I have to not eat at night or drink anything in the morning so that I wont have to go downstairs to the bathroom.

Emanuel is not Emanuel no more. Emanuel is the new Emanuel. The church for some reason thinks its about the church. The fellowship hall, where it all happened at, they didnt give it no respect. I was in line to go into my sons funeral. And I heard somebody say, Oh, you should go downstairs now, it smells like blood. How do you think that made me feel?

Ms. Sheppard: This happened on Wednesday and they were back in church on Sunday, which I thought was terrible.

Ms. Simmons: I dont feel the church should have been opened that soon. Because when I went to the church a couple of days after, I could still sense and smell blood. So it wasnt a good feeling for me. It was one of my weakest moments Ive experienced throughout this whole process.

Ms. Collier: The last time I was there was Aug. 30, 2015, my mothers birthday. And I havent been back since.

Growing up I was on choir at the church. Since this happened, its like, everything, my whole life changed. My mom was assassinated for the church.

My momma when she was not ushering, we got a little seat we sit at, two three rows from the back. Id come around and sit on the side of her. Can you imagine me coming in and sitting in the front? It just freaks me out. Took everything out of my body just to do that on her birthday. I havent been back.
Its difficult, Dr. Ibrahim said, noting that he would not be here if that kind of policy had been in place when his father wanted to leave Cairo. I just have to believe that those people have not met the right individual. There are a lot of people who never meet Muslims who are kind, gentle and giving.

Stephen Miller, a policy adviser to Donald J. Trump, said Mr. Trump  who has spent months condemning immigrants from Mexico and the Muslim world  simply wants to select immigrants who support, defend and uphold our values.

Mr. Miller described Mr. Trumps proposal to stop all immigration from Muslim countries until a broad security assessment could be put in place as about as mainstream and common sense as it gets.

But Dr. Ibrahim said what he heard was mostly an appeal to ignorance and fear. He said he moved to Orlando from Tennessee in part so his twin boys, who are 11, could grow up around different kinds of people. Like their father, whose looks make him hard to place in terms of ethnicity, they represent a mixture of cultures: Their mother is white, Anglo in the lexicon of Orlando, born and raised in Tennessee.

But as a family with Ibrahim for a last name, they are still sometimes seen as outsiders. Dr. Ibrahim said his wife was once denied a loan because her name was confused with someone on a European terror watch list.

He and his wife also struggled with whether to continue the tradition, common in the Middle East, of passing on his second name, Abdellatif, to their oldest son. In the end, they went for it: Abdellatif now links grandfather, father and son, three generations of Egyptian-Americans.

Dr. Ibrahim is hoping that he wont regret it. Hopefully by the time hes of age, he said, people will be even more tolerant.
Unfortunately, nobody connected the dots, and he slipped under the cracks, and this is where were at now, he said.

School records released under public records requests showed that Mr. Mateen, who was born in Queens and grew up in Florida, was frequently in trouble as a child, and struggled to keep pace academically, especially in the early grades. He was disciplined 31 times in elementary and middle school, with one report when he was in third grade including a sweeping list of concerns. He was constantly moving, verbally abusive, rude, aggressive, the report said, often put his hands on other students, disrupted class and engaged in much talk about violence & sex.

In high school, he was repeatedly suspended, for a total of 48 days, in a span of less than two years, and attended three different schools. The last suspension came two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Martin County School District found no detailed records of what prompted the penalty, said Kim Sabol, a lawyer for the district, but former classmates have told news organizations that he celebrated the attacks, sparking conflicts with other students.

In May 2001, when he was 14, he was suspended twice for fighting, and one of those times he was arrested, according to personnel records from his later work for the State Department of Corrections. In a note explaining the incident to the department, he wrote he was not taken to jail, and the charge of battery was adjudicated and the charge of disturbing school function was dropped.

From October 2006 to April 2007, Mr. Mateen worked for the Florida Department of Corrections as a corrections officer trainee, earning $1,123.35 every two weeks, according to state records. He was dismissed but the records do not say why, except that it was not for misconduct. He received middling scores on a performance evaluation.

He worked for a private security company, where, according to law enforcement officials and a former co-worker, he talked of killing people, and claimed to support or belong to Islamist extremist groups. He also expressed hatred of gay people.

The leader of the Orlando police SWAT team added new detail to accounts of the massacre and defended the handling of the siege, saying that a lot of people believe, wrongly, that we werent doing anything for a long period of time.
SOUNDBITE: (English) Tina Meins, Father Killed in San Bernardino Shooting: I know exactly what those families are going through. I know what its like to get the call telling you the worst news you could ever imagine and the pain of knowing that this was happening again in our country to so many families was just too much to bear. Each person in that club was someones child, a sibling, a lover, a friend. I wish I could say that Im surprised that were here again but sadly Im not. And we will continue to be here again and again if our elected officials fail to take action that prevents dangerous and hateful people from getting their hands on a deadly weapon. Its time to disarm hate. // SOUNDBITE: (English) Rev. Sharon Risher, Mother and Cousins Killed in Charleston Emanuel AME Church Shooting: Its hard to believe that tomorrow will be one year since I received the devastating news that my mother and two of my cousins were among nine people who had been shot and killed while praying at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by a man so filled with hate armed with a gun. // SOUNDBITE: (English) Sen. Chris Murphy, (D) Connecticut: How on earth in the face of the largest mass shooting in the history of this nation could the United States Senate ignore it in the week following? That is the question that we all asked ourselves when we got here on Monday and that is the reason why we took the floor yesterday at 11:20 and held it for 15 hours demanding that this week the Senate take up votes on common sense measures to make sure that terrorists and would-be-killers cant get their hands on fire arms, common sense consensus measures that are supported by 90% of the American public.
WASHINGTON  Hoping to dramatize the issue of campus sexual assault, 18 members of the House took turns on Wednesday night reading portions of the 7,200-word letter a woman known as Emily Doe wrote to the former Stanford University student who raped her.

The letter  which the victim read at the sentencing of the former student, Brock Turner  described her anguish after the assault and during Mr. Turners trial, and went viral after it was published on BuzzFeed. It attracted attention to the case and to the light sentence that a California judge gave Mr. Turner, causing national outrage and leading to a petition campaign to remove the judge, Aaron Persky.

Reading the letter in its entirety on the House floor was an attempt to share the voice of sexual assault victims and to build support for legislation that would require the Department of Education to provide a list of institutions under investigation for sexual assault, said Representative Jackie Speier, the California Democrat who organized the reading and is the sponsor of the bill.

We dont sweep murder cases under the rug, but we have for decades been sweeping rape cases under the rug, Ms. Speier said in an interview Wednesday night.